News
- www-nbcnews-com.cdn.ampproject.org Israeli airstrike hits a school sheltering people in Gaza, killing at least 30
The planned strike comes a day before officials from the U.S., Egypt, Qatar and Israel are scheduled to meet in Italy to discuss the ongoing hostage and cease-fire negotiations.
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Last Year 25,000 Houses were Built By Israel in Illegal Settlements in the West Bank
YouTube Video
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- news.sky.com Gunshots reportedly fired at Donald Trump rally - as former president rushed off stage
Donald Trump was giving a speech in Pennsylvania when he appeared to fall to the ground - at which point he was surrounded by armed security staff.
- www.bizpacreview.com ‘Sweeping changes’ at CNN — layoffs hit 100, network ‘quietly’ disbands ‘Race and Equality’ team
“For all intents and purposes, the team is not a team anymore,” a CNN spokesperson explained of this week's move.
- www.theguardian.com Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties. FTX wants its $5m back
The Guardian reveals FTX trustees, in charge after the CEO’s downfall, allege payments were made with looted funds
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More than 200 factory farms set up in UK in five years ‘creating living hell for animals’
www.independent.co.uk Hundreds of factory farms set up in UK in 5 years ‘creating living hell for animals’Charity calls on government to stop approving systems that are ‘living hell’ for millions more animals as ‘cruelty hits all-time high’
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Russia Officially Becomes World's 4th Largest Economy, Passing Japan
substack.com MAJOR: Russia Officially Becomes World's 4th Largest Economy, Passing JapanMany will recall last year’s news that Russia had overtaken Germany for the 5th spot in GDP PPP. At the SPIEF, Putin announced that Russia has now officially surpassed Japan for the 4th spot, according to the World Bank: But first a little background:
- spectrumlocalnews.com Thomas acknowledges more travel paid for by Harlan Crow. Colleagues report six-figure book payments
Justice Clarence Thomas is belatedly acknowledging more travel paid for by Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, while several colleagues reported six-figure payments as part of book deals
- spectrumlocalnews.com Jones seeks permission to convert his personal bankruptcy into a liquidation
That would lead to a sell-off of a large portion of the Infowars host's assets to help pay some of the $1.5 billion he owes relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
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Inside the Medicare Advantage sham
www.rawstory.com It’s obscene: Inside the Medicare Advantage shamThey’re competing unfairly with Medicare, and you and I are paying for it. It’s obscene.When George W. Bush and congressional Republicans (and a handful of bought-off Democrats) created Medicare Advantage in 2003, it was the fulfillment of half of Bush’s goal of privatizing Social Security and M...
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Historic $35M fine announced against company that surrendered 4,000 beagles - ABC News
abcnews.go.com Historic $35M fine announced against company that surrendered 4,000 beaglesAfter surrendering 4,000 beagles in 2022, the parent company of a Virginia dog breeding facility will pay tens of millions of dollars in fines.
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Bill Makes Gaza Genocide Protests Illegal
apnews.com House passes bill to expand definition of antisemitism amid growing campus protests over Gaza warThe House has passed legislation that would establish a broader definition of antisemitism for the Department of Education to enforce anti-discrimination laws.
hr-6090 will make criticizing isreal illegal including the protests. it’s already passed the the house and biden has signaled his support for it. i wonder why this isn’t on lemmy already since it’s been a thing for a month so far.
- www.ctvnews.ca Italian teenage computer wizard set to become the first saint of the millennial generation
Pope Francis paved the way for the canonization of the first saint of the millennial generation on Thursday, attributing a second miracle to a 15-year-old Italian computer whiz who died of leukemia in 2006.
- www.bbc.co.uk Slovakia PM shooting live: Robert Fico in hospital after being shot - BBC News
Robert Fico has been shot a number of times as he was leaving a government meeting in the central town of Handlova.
cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/15208513
- www.theguardian.com Gina Rinehart demands National Gallery of Australia remove her portrait
NGA rebuffs efforts by billionaire to take down painting by award-winning artist Vincent Namatjira
- www.aljazeera.com UCLA clashes: Pro-Palestinian protesters attacked by Israel supporters
Police delay intervention into ‘shocking’ attack, featuring masked vigilantes armed with pepper spray and fireworks.
- www.csoonline.com Marriott admits it falsely claimed for five years it was using encryption during 2018 breach
Marriot revealed in a court case around a massive 2018 data breach that it had been using secure hash algorithm 1 and not the much more secure AES-1 encryption as it had earlier maintained.
- www.bbc.com Andrew Tate and brother Tristan to be tried in Romania on rape and trafficking charges
Controversial influencer Andrew Tate and his brother deny allegations of rape and human trafficking.
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Over 30 pro-Palestine protesters arrested at Ohio State: what we know
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/9854180
> COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – Ohio State University police and the Ohio State Highway Patrol arrested about three dozen people Thursday night for staging a pro-Palestine encampment on campus – carrying out what is likely the highest number of protest-related arrests there since the Vietnam War. > > After hours of peaceful protest on the South Oval behind the Ohio Union, dozens of officers clad in riot gear descended on the crowd, handcuffing protesters and carrying them to Franklin County sheriff’s buses parked nearby. Several protesters were arrested earlier in the day for pitching tents on campus, but police watched for hours – occasionally issuing threats of arrest – when hundreds of protesters returned in the evening.
- www.kut.org Charges dropped against all 57 pro-Palestinian demonstrators arrested on UT campus
The county attorney said there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute the people arrested during Wednesday's protest.
- abcnews.go.com Oklahoma police say 10-year-old boy awoke to find his parents and 3 brothers shot to death
Police say a 10-year-old boy awoke to find his parents and three brothers shot to death in their southwest Oklahoma City home
- www.nbcnews.com Hyundai pauses X ads over pro-Nazi content on the platform
The move came after a Hyundai ad appeared next to antisemitic posts from a user who has posted pro-Hitler content.
- apnews.com Members of self-proclaimed anti-government group ‘God’s Misfits’ held in killings of Kansas women
Two Kansas women who vanished two weeks ago were killed over a custody dispute involving a group of anti-government Oklahomans, authorities said.
- www.nbcnews.com Ex-Trump CFO Allen Weisselberg sentenced to 5 months for perjury in Trump civil fraud trial
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg recommended a five-month jail sentence for Weisselberg after he pleaded guilty to two counts of perjury in former President Donald Trump's civil fraud trial.
- www.nbcnews.com Florida pre-med student stabs mother more than 70 times, killing her during visit, authorities say
“He really loved her, but she irritated him and he made up his mind ... that he would murder her, and that’s exactly what he did,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said.
- www.cnn.com 6 ex-officers who pleaded guilty in ‘Goon Squad’ torture of 2 Black men sentenced in state court | CNN
Six former Mississippi law enforcement officers who tortured two Black men for hours were sentenced in state court Wednesday to 15 to 45 years in prison.
- apnews.com With famine looming, Israeli strike kills 7 aid workers and halts food charity's operations in Gaza
The strike led World Central Kitchen to suspend delivery of vital aid to Gaza, where Israel’s offensive has pushed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to the brink of starvation.
- www.rawstory.com Neo-Nazi leader charged with child abuse, domestic violence
Police allege Sean Kauffmann repeatedly punched his female partner in the head as she held their infant son
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U.S. signs off on more bombs, warplanes for Israel
Washington Post copypasta:
The Biden administration in recent days quietly authorized the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel despite Washington’s concerns about an anticipated military offensive in southern Gaza that could threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
The new arms packages include more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs, according to Pentagon and State Department officials familiar with the matter. The 2,000 pound bombs have been linked to previous mass-casualty events throughout Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. These officials, like some others, spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because recent authorizations have not been disclosed publicly.
The development underscores that while rifts have emerged between the United States and Israel over the war’s conduct, the Biden administration views weapons transfers as off-limits when considering how to influence the actions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“We have continued to support Israel’s right to defend itself,” said a White House official. “Conditioning aid has not been our policy.” Some Democrats, including allies of President Biden, say the U.S. government has a responsibility to withhold weapons in the absence of an Israeli commitment to limit civilian casualties during a planned operation in Rafah, a final Hamas stronghold, and ease restrictions on humanitarian aid into the enclave, which is on the brink of famine.
“The Biden administration needs to use their leverage effectively and, in my view, they should receive these basic commitments before greenlighting more bombs for Gaza,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said in an interview. “We need to back up what we say with what we do.”
The Israeli government declined to comment on the authorizations.
Four Hamas battalions remain in Rafah, say U.S. and Israeli officials. More than 1.2 million Palestinians have sought shelter there after being forced from their homes during Israel’s extensive bombing campaign over the past five months. Biden suggested that a scorched-earth invasion of the city along Gaza’s border with Egypt would cross a “red line” for him.
Biden requested that Netanyahu send a team of security officials to Washington this week to listen to U.S. proposals for limiting the bloodshed. Netanyahu canceled the visit after the United States refused to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution that called for a temporary cease-fire in Gaza and the release of hostages, but which did not condemn Hamas.
Israeli officials have not allayed U.S. concerns about the impending operation in Rafah, but they agreed to reschedule the meeting in Washington, the White House said.
The increasingly public spat has not dissuaded Biden from rushing weapons and military equipment into the conflict. Last week, the State Department authorized the transfer of 25 F-35A fighter jets and engines worth roughly $2.5 billion, U.S. officials said. The case was approved by Congress in 2008, so the department was not required to provide a new notification to lawmakers. The MK84 and MK82 bombs authorized this week for transfer also were approved by Congress years ago but had not yet been fulfilled.
Washington’s marginalization on the world stage over its support for Israel has rankled some Democrats in Congress, some of whom have called for more transparency in arms transfers and raised questions about whether the authorization of older unfilled cases is an effort to avoid new notifications to Congress, which could face scrutiny. When asked about the transfers, a State Department official said that “fulfilling an authorization from one notification to Congress can result in dozens of individual Foreign Military Sales cases across the decades-long life-cycle of the congressional notification.”
“As a matter of practicality, major procurements, like Israel’s F-35 program for example, are often broken out into several cases over many years,” the official added. The 2,000 pound bombs, capable of leveling city blocks and leaving craters in the earth 40 feet across and larger, are almost never used anymore by Western militaries in densely populated locations due to the risk of civilian casualties.
Israel has used them extensively in Gaza, according to several reports, most notably in the bombing of Gaza’s Jabalya refugee camp Oct. 31. U.N. officials decried the strike, which killed more than 100 people, as a “disproportionate attack that could amount to war crimes.” Israel defended the bombing, saying it resulted in the death of a Hamas leader.
Israeli officials deny that their military campaign has been indiscriminate and say civilian casualties are the fault of Hamas for embedding its fighters among the population in Gaza.
Biden’s decision to continue the flow of weapons to Israel has been strongly supported by powerful pro-Israel interest groups in Washington, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is spending tens of millions of dollars this election cycle to unseat Democrats it views as insufficiently pro-Israel.
AIPAC, alongside congressional Republicans and several Democrats, oppose any conditions on U.S. military assistance to Israel. “The U.S. can protect civilians, on both sides of the conflict, by continuing to ensure Israel receives as much U.S. assistance as is needed, as expeditiously as possible, to keep its stockpiles full of lifesaving munitions,” Reps. August Pfluger (R-Tex.) and Don Davis (D-N.C.), and Michael Makovsky, a fellow at the pro-Israel Washington Institute think tank, wrote in a recent column. “Doing so is also morally right and in the U.S. interest.”
Biden’s recurring approvals of weapons transfers are an “abrogation of moral responsibility, and an assault on the rule of law as we know it, at both the domestic and international levels,” said Josh Paul, a former State Department official involved in arms transfers who resigned in protest of Biden’s Gaza policy.
“This is a policymaking process that is fundamentally broken, and which makes everyone from policymaking officials to defense manufacturers to the U.S. taxpayer complicit in Israel’s war crimes,” he said. The Post’s reporting on the new weapons authorizations follows a visit to Washington by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant this week in which he requested that the Biden administration expedite a range of weaponry.
Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Thursday that Israeli officials have been asking for weapons they consider important “in pretty much every meeting” he has been in with them.
Israel has “not received everything they’ve asked for,” Brown said. The United States has withheld some, he said, either due to capacity limits or because U.S. officials were not willing at the time. Brown did not identify the weapons.
Hours later, the Pentagon clarified Brown’s remarks, highlighting the issue’s sensitivity. Navy Capt. Jereal Dorsey, a spokesman for the general, said there has been no change in policy and that the United States assesses its stockpiles as it provides aid to partners. “The United States continues to provide security assistance to our ally Israel as they defend themselves from Hamas,” Dorsey said.
Advocates of the policy inside the administration say behind-the-scenes discussions with the Israelis have succeeded in delaying the country’s Rafah operation, which they now don’t expect to happen until May. But at least part of that delay is due to Israel’s military operations in Khan Younis taking longer than anticipated. More than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, since the war began in response to the Oct. 7 cross-border attack in which Hamas militants killed 1,200 people in Israel and took at least 250 hostage.
Any increase in fighting in Rafah, a key transit point for humanitarian aid, risks exacerbating conditions across the enclave that the United Nations and aid groups say is suffering from chronic shortages of food, water and medicine. A massive influx of aid trucks is required to remedy the situation, but U.S. officials say Israel has imposed onerous restrictions on deliveries, which are deeply unpopular inside Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government.
The Biden administration does not see that its words and actions are in conflict with respect to weapons transfers, Van Hollen said.
“They do not see the contradiction between sending more bombs to the Netanyahu government even as it is ignoring their demands with respect to Rafah and getting more humanitarian assistance to starving people,” he said. “If this is a partnership it needs to be a two-way street.”
- www.nbcnews.com North Carolina moves to revoke license of a wilderness camp where a 12-year-old died
State officials cited Trails Carolina for violating several regulations, including one requiring mental health facilities to protect clients from abuse.
- www.cbsnews.com Mike Lindell's MyPillow evicted from Minnesota warehouse after lawsuit claimed it was $200K behind on rent
A judge evicted the Minnesota-based MyPillow from a facility in Shakopee after the landlord filed a lawsuit claiming that the company, owned by Mike Lindell, was at least $200,000 behind on rent payments.
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What is your news search engine?
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13657574
> Over the years news search engine of Google and Bing has become increasingly useless, where even quoting specific keywords of news I know exists yields no result and I am choked with unrelated trendy local news. > So, I am looking for a better news search engine (bonus if it also searches blogs and is able to differentiate as well).
- www.ocregister.com Baltimore bridge collapses after ship strikes it, sending vehicles into water
A large vessel crashed into the bridge, catching on fire before sinking and causing multiple vehicles to fall into the Patapsco River.
- variety.com Elon Musk’s X Loses Lawsuit Against Research Group That Reported Rise in Hate Speech, Racist Content on Social Network
A federal judge dismissed Elon Musk's X lawsuit against a research group, ruling it was "evident" the litigation was intended "to punish" the group.
- apnews.com Court agrees to block collection of Trump's $454 million civil fraud judgment if he puts up $175M
If former President Donald Trump posts the money, it will prevent the state from seizing his assets while he appeals.
Rules for thee, not for me.
- www.vanityfair.com Donald Trump Should Probably File for Bankruptcy, but Likely Won’t Because He’s Worried It Would Make Him Look Like a Loser: Report
He’d apparently rather have his assets seized by the New York attorney general.
- www.cnn.com New York Attorney General takes initial step to prepare to seize Trump assets | CNN Politics
The New York attorney general’s office has filed judgments in Westchester County, the first indication that the state is preparing to try to seize Donald Trump’s golf course and private estate north of Manhattan, known as Seven Springs.