Category: World

Delta Air Lines is offering US$30,000 (£23,792) to each person on board a plane that crash-landed in Toronto on Monday – all of whom survived.

As it landed in the Canadian city, the plane skidded along the runway in flames before flipping over and coming to a halt upside down. Passengers described their amazement as most of them walked away without injuries.

It remains unclear what caused the incident, which is under investigation.

There were 76 passengers and four crew on the flight, which had travelled from the US city of Minneapolis before making its crash-landing in Canada.

A spokesperson for Delta said the money offer had no strings attached and did not affect customers’ rights.

Toronto law firm Rochon Genova says it has been retained by certain passengers and their families over the crash-landing.

Lawyer Vincent Genova said the group expected a “timely and fair resolution”, highlighting that his clients “suffered personal injuries of a serious nature that required hospital attention”.

In an email to the BBC, Mr Genova said the $30,000 compensation is an “advance” payment meant to assist plane crash victims with short-term financial challenges, and the airline will seek to deduct it from any later settled claims.

There is precedent to these types of payments, like in 2013, when Asiana Airlines offered passengers of a San Francisco plane crash $10,000 in initial compensation.

Last year, Alaska Airlines offered a $1,500 cash payment to passengers after mid-air door-plug blowout on a flight from Portland.

Following this week’s incident in Toronto, the plane crew and emergency responders were praised for their quick work in removing people from the wrecked vehicle. The plane’s various safety features have also been credited for ensuring no loss of life.

All of the 21 passengers who were taken to hospital had been released by Thursday morning, the airline said.

Delta’s chief told the BBC’s US partner CBS News that the flight crew were experienced and trained for any condition.

The airline’s head Ed Bastian told CBS the plane crew had “performed heroically, but also as expected”, given that “safety is embedded into our system”. He said Delta was continuing to support those affected.

Several theories about what caused the crash have been suggested to the BBC by experts who reviewed footage, including that harsh winter weather and a rapid rate of descent played a role.

One passenger recalled “a very forceful event”, and the sound of “concrete and metal” at the moment of impact. Another said passengers were left hanging upside down in their seats “like bats”.

The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder have been recovered from the wreckage. The investigation is being led by Canada’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB), supported by US officials.

On Wednesday evening, the wreckage was removed from the airport runway.

The accident was the fourth major air incident in North America in a space of three weeks – and was followed on Wednesday by a crash in Arizona in which two people lost their lives when their small planes collided.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5d6dq44e7o

Pope Francis’ overall clinical condition is “improving slightly” and his heart is working well as he battles pneumonia, the Vatican said Thursday, as some of his cardinals cheered him on and insisted that the Catholic Church was very much alive and well even in his absence.

In a late update, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said Francis has no fever and that his key heart parameters “continue to be stable.”

The 88-year-old pope was admitted to the hospital on Feb. 14 after a case of bronchitis worsened; doctors later diagnosed the onset of pneumonia in both lungs on top of asthmatic bronchitis and prescribed “absolute rest.”

“If you really want him to rest, you have to hospitalize him,” quipped Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline, the archbishop of Marseille, France, referring to Francis’ work ethic.

Aveline was speaking at a Vatican news conference about a Mediterranean youth peace initiative alongside his counterpart from Barcelona, Cardinal Juan Josè Omella. But given the limited amount of information about Francis’ condition, they were peppered with questions about the pope’s health and whether he might decide to resign if he doesn’t recover fully.

Regardless, Omella insisted that the life of the church continued even with Francis in the hospital.

“Popes change, we bishops change, priests in parishes change, communities change. But the train continues being on the move,” Omella said.

Another cardinal, Gianfranco Ravasi, had commented earlier in the day on the possibility of resignation when asked if Francis might decide to follow in the footsteps of Pope Benedict XVI and step down if he becomes too ill. Benedict became the first pope in 600 years to retire when he concluded in 2013 that he didn’t have the physical strength to carry on the rigors of the globe-trotting papacy.

“There is no question that if he (Francis) was in a situation where his ability to have direct contact (with people) as he likes to do … was compromised, then I think he might decide to resign,” Ravasi was quoted as telling RTL 102.5 radio.

Francis has already confirmed that shortly after being elected pontiff he wrote a resignation letter in case medical problems impeded him from carrying out his duties. There is no provision in canon law for what to do if a pope becomes incapacitated.

There is no indication Francis is in anyway incapacitated. Bruni said he woke up Thursday, got out of bed and had breakfast in an armchair, and worked from his hospital room with his aides. Blood tests have showed a “slight improvement” in some inflammation indices but it will still be some time before doctors will know if the various therapies are working.

The pope had an acute case of pneumonia in 2023 and is prone to respiratory infections in winter.

Doctors say pneumonia in such a fragile, elderly patient makes him particularly prone to complications given the difficulty in being able to effectively expel fluid from his lungs. While his heart is strong, Francis isn’t a particularly healthy 88-year-old. He is overweight, isn’t physically active, uses a wheelchair because of bad knees, had part of one lung removed as a young man, and has admitted to being a not-terribly-cooperative patient in the past.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/pope-francis-recovers-pneumonia-hospital-e489cc4f7f4e0d43b7c9079667953e9d

THIS is the terrifying moment buses burn in a suspected “terror attack” in Israel after bombs exploded.

Three coaches erupted into flames near Tel Aviv while two more explosives were found on public transport luckily having not gone off.

There have been no casualties or injuries reported as the bombs went off while the buses were empty and at the depot.

The Israeli Defence Minister accused “Palestinian terrorist organisations” of carrying out terror blasts and instructed the IDF to increase the “intensity of activity” in the West Bank in response.

Shocking footage showed the buses burning as thick black smoke billowed into the sky.

The dramatic explosions occurred late Thursday night Israeli time in three buses parked in a lot in Bat Yam.

Two other explosives were defused when they were also found on buses.

They say the “identical” devices which came with “a timer” failed to explode.

The police said in a statement: “Preliminary report – Suspected terror attack.

“Multiple reports have been received of explosions involving several buses at different locations in Bat Yam.”

A security service source claimed the bombs weighed “between four and five kilograms” and were “intended to detonate tomorrow morning and kill hundreds of civilians,” according to the Jerusalem Post.

Israeli defence minister Israel Katz ordered the IDF to step up counter-terror operations.

He said: “We will hunt down the terrorists to the bitter end and destroy the terror infrastructure in the camps used as frontline posts of the Iranian evil axis.

“Residents who give shelter to terror will pay a heavy price”.

Cop commander Haim Sargarof said in a televised briefing that the devices used to set off the terrifying blasts were similar to those found in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

A large number of police were deployed to search for suspects, a police statement said, adding that “police bomb disposal units are scanning for additional suspicious objects”.

Cops also “urge the public to avoid the areas and remain alert for any suspicious items”.

Searches are being conducted on additional buses in Dan Bloc – where the two unexploded devices were found.

Initial investigations suggest the explosions occurred within a mere few minutes of each other, with the final being 10 minutes after.

Police spokesperson Aryeh Doron said the “event is ongoing” as officers scramble to locate more bombs in the Tel Aviv area.

He added to Channel 12 that the public must be alert for “every suspected bag or object” which “could make the difference”

The spokesperson said: “We may be lucky if indeed the terrorists set these timers to the wrong hour. But it’s too early to determine.”

Channel 12 also claims that one of the undetonated devices was discovered by a passenger who notified the drive of the suspicious bag.

Terrified local residents have described their fear and confusion over the incident.

Ayala, who lives near to one of the sites where a bus was on fire, recalled to the Jerusalem Post: “We heard an explosion, and then another one.

“At first, we didn’t understand what was happening. We knew there was a ceasefire, so we realized it wasn’t a rocket.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/13590572/buses-explode-israel-terror-attack/

A professor and former Department of Labor economist is warning that unelected White House advisor and multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk is sending the United States headlong into a huge recession.

In a post on Bluesky, Jesse Rothstein, a University of California, Berkeley public policy professor who was the DOL’s chief economist at the start of the Obama administration, addressed the dire situation we could soon be facing.

“It seems almost unavoidable at this point,” Rothstein wrote, “that we are headed for a deep, deep recession.”

Between the hundreds of thousands of government jobs on the chopping block and the cancellations of countless federal contracts, the economist noted that upcoming employment reports are looking quite scary indeed.

“The March employment report (to be released April 4) seems certain to show bigger job losses than any month ever outside of a few in 2008-9 and 2020,” the professor wrote in his multi-post thread. “Add on to that enormous private market uncertainty — how could you hire in these conditions? — and this is going to be very, very bad.”

The basic idea is that higher unemployment leads to drops in consumer spending, which can slow economic activity and growth, which in turn leads to fewer hires, closing the recession circle.

But there remains some uncertainty when it comes to what Musk’s newfound role as federal spending slasher might mean for the economy. That’s in large part due to the chaos Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has wrought.

As Rothstein points out, “I worry that [the US Office of Personnel Management] itself doesn’t yet know how many workers were fired. It may be some time before it can report accurately to the [Bureau of Labor Statistics].”

But the ripple effects of major hiring freezes could be “very large,” he argued. “Universities and others are already instituting hiring freezes.”

Where the major job losses will leave the fate of the US economy in the short term remains to be seen. But chances are, it won’t be pretty, even according to Musk himself.

The billionaire said during a campaign stop for Trump just ahead of the election that America would likely be in for some financial “hardship” the exact should he begin trimming the fat, as he saw it.

“We have to reduce spending to live within our means,” Musk said, seemingly using the royal we to refer to the hoi polloi despite being a billionaire himself. “And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.”

Source : https://futurism.com/economist-elon-musk-recession

Kanye West is back huffing laughing gas again, multiple concerned sources tell The Post.

“When he [West] got back to LA he got dental work again and I think that’s when he relapsed,” a friend said, referencing his return to the city after six months away at the end of January.

The 47-year-old rapper and clothing designer’s recently erratic behavior has worsened by using nitrous oxide – commonly known as laughing gas, an anesthetic.

A second source told The Post West’s nitrous use has been a major pain point in his relationship with wife Bianca Censori.

“The nitrous took over in Los Angeles. After the Grammy party [on Feb. 2], he met people and it kind of escalated to things that he never does anymore when he’s in Japan,” the source claimed, referencing Kanye’s most recent destination before heading back to the US.

A third source told The Post how West uses nitrous oxide as “medication.”

“There is an issue with nitrous and his dentist, and the medication leads to this meltdown. When he comes off the nitrous he’s crazy, he just wants to be able to do anything he wants,” the third source told The Post.

“It’s as if thoughts are coming to him and he speaks his mind. It’s like a cultural Tourettes experience, his entire life is a video game.”

A source who previously worked at Yeezy claimed he is “very easily influenced,” but still made the decision to previously fire an employee “over not wanting to put the swastika on a T-shirt,” referring to West selling a Nazi symbol emblazoned on a T-shirt online last week.

Shopify took down the rapper’s website over the shirt last Tuesday.

The stunt capped a four-day blitz of tweets where he claimed “Hitler was sooooo fresh,” “I’m a Nazi,” said antisemitism is “just some bulls – – t Jewish people made up,” and “Any Jewish person that does business with me needs to know I don’t like or trust any Jewish.”

“His memory is so messed up this point,” the former employee told The Post, explaining that Kanye would forget conversations and even people he worked closely with within a few days span.

“You can kind of just convince [West] of things and he doesn’t really fact check them. You can just say something that is not true, but if you say it with enough conviction at the right time he’ll believe it.”

However, the ex-employee was also clear to add it doesn’t excuse his behavior and “no one forced him to tweet.”

West, who has officially changed his name to Ye, also recently re-enlisted far right radical Milo Yiannopoulos, 40, as his manager after previously firing him last year.

Last August Yiannopoulos accused dentist Thomas Connelly of getting the rapper addicted to nitrous oxide – which is not an illegal substance, although in California it is an offense to buy it “with the intent to inhale” – in a sworn affidavit filed with the California Dental Board.

“Connelly got Ye hooked on nitrous – laughing gas. It is my belief that Connelly sought to diminish Ye’s mental faculties so that Connelly and his business associates could extract millions of dollars from him,” Yiannopoulos claimed in a series of posts on X last August, which included the affidavit.

The Post has reached out to Connelly for comment. It is unknown if he was behind the rapper’s most recent dental work.

A source close to West’s camp declined to comment on his nitrous oxide use.

Meanwhile, reports swirled last Thursday Censori and West are going their separate ways after two years of marriage, but sources feel that is unlikely.

“Ye is a pretty stubborn person. I do believe that he loves her [Censori]. We were doing music dedicated to her as of the last six months. He’s becoming more of a family man it seems. He’s his own person,” a source close to Ye told The Post.

Source : https://nypost.com/2025/02/20/entertainment/kanye-west-relapsed-and-is-inhaling-nitrous-oxide-sources/

“When is the last time the country was able to solve any of its problems?” ambitious congresswoman Alexandra Mullen (Lizzy Caplan) screams at her father and former POTUS George Mullen (Robert De Niro) in Netflix’s just-launched Zero Day.

It is a fair question for the six-episode political thriller, and for America 2025.

Certainly, in a week that has seen a sitting U.S. president parroting Kremlin bullet points while his manic billionaire buddy takes a blowtorch to the federal government, the political thriller created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim and Michael S. Schmidt and starring De Niro, Caplan, Angela Bassett, Joan Allen, Jesse Plemons, Bill Camp, Connie Britton, Dan Stevens, McKinley Belcher III and Matthew Modine, may provide a much needed sugar high of hope — fictional or not. At the same time, ripped right out of the toxic underbelly of modern America as much as the headlines, Zero Day will show it can happen here, non-fiction or not.

Without going into a spoiler-rich chapter and verse of Zero Day, here’s the gist: Out of the chaos of a crippling minute-long cyber attack that exposes the nation’s vulnerabilities and kills more than 3,400, President Evelyn Mitchell (Bassett) tasks revered ex-President Mullen to lead an investigation into what happened, and who was behind it.

That task is strategically easier said than done, with deep divisions in the country, and now the Zero Day Commission having the ability to suspend of the rule of law fuels the already blazing extremists on all sides. Add to that, a cunning House Speaker (Modine), tech overlords, Wall Street power brokers and some White House secrets from Mullen’s single term in office. The show is also full of real-life talking heads including Savannah Guthrie, Wolf Blitzer and Nicolle Wallace, with Fox News and ABC banners popping up frequently to further suspend disbelief at the best and worst times in the Lesli Linka Glatter-directed series.

With all that, Zero Day is at its core not about attacks foreign and domestic. It’s about regrets.

The regrets of a nearly forgotten and sometimes confused old man who reached the height of power, but, like many a Greek myth and Shakespearean tragedy, lost that which was most important to him. The regrets of a nation and a world that is watching in real time as the most powerful nation in history stumbles backwards and downwards. Drawn out over an almost one-month period after the initial attack, the lines between fact and fiction blur pretty fast in Zero Day, just like in our echo chamber America.

Now, for you tea-leaf readers, Zero Day was written and filmed before Kamala Harris ran for President last year and before the Project 2025-juiced Donald Trump was voted back in. For you trivia fans, it’s also De Niro’s first small-screen lead role. Sadly, perhaps much of what the Oscar winner is doing here will be lost in the blowback the unsweetened Trump critic will undoubtedly be subjected to from the MAGA minions and their kingpin in the days to come. Perhaps, but what does De Niro really care? George Mullen is a role the 81-year-old Great American Actor has likely been waiting to play as he goes into the almost sixth decade of his career, and he certainly chews up the screen.

Having said that, while Zero Day is on Netflix, the show is no House of Cards. Yes, Zero Day tries to make your chest rise with patriotic pride at times, and settles a few geopolitical scores, but it’s no West Wing either. There are as many leaps of faith in Zero Day as at an Olympic qualifying meet.

To that, in the short attention span and anecdotal America we live in, just surf the Zero Day wave.

Where you’ll end up at is a very watchable yarn that plays with some big ideas and holds together as a bruised and jaded 21st century version of The American President. In its struggle of the soul, national and personal, with a swig or two of liberal cosplay, Zero Day is maybe even a spiritual sequel to the 1995 Michael Douglas flick. Certainly George Mullen could be Douglas’ Andrew Shepherd 30 years later with a few tweaks here and there and some thick glasses — and that’s just dandy, actually.

Again, not to give anything away among the multitude of twists and turns Zero Day takes, but while De Niro is in almost every scene, damn it is sure great to see Joan Allen back on screen too. Here, as former First Lady and federal bench nominee Sheila Mullen, the three-time Oscar nominee emerges deftly as the series’ secret weapon.

Source : https://deadline.com/2025/02/zero-day-review-robert-de-niro-netflix-1236295639/

 

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Thursday accused Donald Trump of wanting to “become an emperor of the world”, calling on the US president to respect other countries’ sovereignty.

Post-World War II democracy has been an example of the best governance of the last 70 years, said Lula in an interview with a local radio station, “but the way (Trump) acts, he is trying to become an emperor of the world”.

“He is trying to chime in on all countries and in all public policies,” he added.

Lula’s comments come after Trump lashed out at Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky, branding him a “dictator” and blaming him for Russia’s invasion of his country.

Washington has irritated Kyiv by entering into direct talks with Russia in a bid to end the war.

Lula did not give specific examples, but urged Trump to “realize that the sovereignty of each country must be respected.”

Lula, who has not spoken with Trump since he took office in January, reiterated that the United States was an important commercial partner to Brazil and asked for greater gestures of “friendship.”

Source : https://www.barrons.com/news/brazil-s-lula-says-trump-wants-to-be-emperor-of-the-world-498f1c26

The James Bond movie franchise has gotten a shake-up, with Amazon MGM Studios and Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli forming a new joint venture to house the movie property’s intellectual property rights.

Under the terms of the agreement, Amazon MGM Studios will gain creative control of the James Bond franchise, while Wilson and Broccoli will remain co-owners of the 60-year-old property. In 2022, Amazon acquired MGM, including a vast catalog with more than 4,000 films and 17,000 TV shows.

Since the MGM acquisition, Amazon has held rights to distribute all of the James Bond films, and following completion of the joint venture transaction will control the creative on future productions.

“We are grateful to the late Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman for bringing James Bond to movie theatres around the world, and to Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli for their unyielding dedication and their role in continuing the legacy of the franchise that is cherished by legions of fans worldwide. We are honored to continue this treasured heritage, and look forward to ushering in the next phase of the legendary 007 for audiences around the world,” Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said in a statement on Thursday.

Wilson added he was stepping back from producing James Bond movies to focus on art and charitable projects. “Therefore, Barbara and I agree, it is time for our trusted partner, Amazon MGM Studios, to lead James Bond into the future,” Wilson said in his own statement.

News of the joint venture comes amid continuing speculation about Bond 26, the next iteration of the 007 franchise, after Daniel Craig hung up the tuxedo for good in 2021’s No Time to Die. Barbara Broccoli echoed that it was time for her to step aside and allow Amazon MGM Studios to take over the creative reins.

Source : https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/amazon-mgm-studios-james-bond-franchise-1236141794/

In February 2023, I published an article in The New Republic about Americans, particularly from marginalized communities, who were looking to exit the country amid the rise of gun violence and far-right politics. It had been some time since I’d thought about that piece. But almost exactly one year to the day after it was published, it garnered the attention of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher, in which the show’s titular host featured it in a segment that ridiculed the notion of people fretting about their safety in this country, imploring us instead to stay here and make it a better place. Maher took great pains to condescendingly wonder if I knew that being gay is criminalized in dozens of countries—well, duh—and about capital punishment in China. (Unlike, Maher, I actually lived there for three years, so—once again—duh.)

Still, I was more or less flattered by the attention, despite the maladroit purposes to which my original piece was put. But if Maher is reading this, then I’d like to invite him over for a delicious slice of crow pie. Because now that Donald Trump and unelected sidekick Elon Musk are taking a wrecking ball to our country and its democracy, my prediction of two years ago is coming true amid a rise in worrying signs that many people in this country indeed have their eyes on the exits, including those with skill sets we can ill afford to lose.

On February 8, German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported that the Max Planck Society—one of the world’s top scientific research institutions—is experiencing an uptick in applications from American scientists. Its president said the society regards the U.S. as “a new talent pool” at a time when the Trump administration seeks to cut billions in funding to the National Institutes of Health. There’s a deep historical irony in these recent developments: During the Third Reich, it was the Max Planck Society—then known as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society—that lost its best and brightest to the U.S. and other countries, including Albert Einstein.

A day prior, Irish broadcaster RTÉ reported that Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs has seen a 50 percent increase in the number of Americans seeking Irish passports, with some people specifically citing the new administration as a reason. Searches for terms like “dual citizenship” and “jus sanguinis” likewise saw significant spikes on Election Day and Inauguration Day, according to Google Trends. And a representative of Polaron, an Australian company that helps people obtain European citizenship by descent, told me that her firm has also “seen a steep increase in Americans wishing to leave their country, with many more keen to use their EU passport as a plan B.”

Some of the people who worked so hard to establish a new home in the U.S. as refugees are now desperate to get back out: The Guardian reported that Canadian police apprehended more than a dozen people from Venezuela, the Middle East, and Africa trying to cross the border in dangerously cold temperatures without proper clothing, as the Trump administration revoked humanitarian parole for Venezuelans, Haitians, and others, but threw open the door for white South African “refugees.”

These are small statistics and anecdotes. Moreover, most of the initial wave of American emigration will likely feature those with the means to leave—those who possess foreign passports, job opportunities abroad, or lots of disposable income. But this all points in the same direction: With Trump back in office and faithfully executing the blueprint for wrecking the country known as Project 2025 while collaborating with the world’s richest man to trash democracy and wage a war on brain cells in the federal government, a growing number of people in this country see the writing on the wall, and they’re looking for their bug-out plan. According to a Gallup poll released before the election, the 17 percent of Americans who said they wanted to leave the country in 2023 rose to 21 percent in 2024.

One user on TikTok posted a video of herself waiting in the car as her Mexican-American husband applied for dual citizenship at the Mexican consulate in Houston, noting that she plans to as well. “For me, I don’t think it’s going to stop with Mexicans,” she said in the video. “It’s going to keep going on down the list, and at some point, Black folks here in the U.S., we’re going to feel what’s happening—we’re already seeing what’s happening, so I don’t feel exempt.”

That she, her husband and others would want to take such precautions should come as no surprise. As conditions in the U.S. worsen and the country becomes increasingly poorer, increasingly authoritarian, and increasingly violent, there is a good chance that more will consider leaving. It’s not as if the Trump administration has gone out of its way to remind people that all are welcome in his America.

With executive orders, Trump has abolished official recognition of transgender and non-binary people, erasing references to trans people from the official website of the Stonewall National Monument. He has rolled back diversity, equity, and inclusion programs—and even discarded the 60-year-old Executive Order 11246, which bans discrimination based on race and other categories. We’re now careening toward a constitutional crisis as Trump threatens to simply ignore court decisions overturning his executive orders—including a decision that barred Musk and his army of mini-me flunkies from accessing sensitive information on millions of Americans and controlling payment systems at the Treasury Department—a move that would basically end the rule of law.

And as he fired hundreds of Federal Aviation Administration employees weeks after a fatal plane crash in Washington, Trump posted a quote on social media, “He who saves his country does not violate any law”—a quote apocryphally attributed to Napoleon but more recently made famous by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian white supremacist terrorist who murdered 77 people in 2011—in what could be interpreted as a proclamation that he’s above the law, a signal to his followers to commit violence on his behalf, or both.

No less dispiriting has been the cavalcade of mainstream media organizations normalizing the new regime, or the corporations kissing Trump’s ring and doing a 180 on support for DEI and LGBTQ people—not to mention the weak responses from many elected Democrats. It’s things like this that have convinced some people that the shining city on a hill is experiencing severe urban decay.

Brett, a San Diego-based TikTok user who did not disclose his last name, started a channel, Escape the USA, making videos that provide practical advice to Americans hoping to leave the country. While the channel is only a little more than a month old, it already has close to 11,000 followers. Having previously lived in Paris for nearly a year in 2014 following a health scare, he hopes to return to Europe and either find a job or publish his fantasy novel. But he specifically cited the Trump administration as his main reason for wanting to leave and said he began researching how to leave the country after the January 6 Capitol insurrection, and then saving money when Trump announced his candidacy. Now, he sees the potential for history to repeat itself.

“Hitler went after those who were not the same as others: disabled, LGBTQ individuals and clearly Jews,” said Brett, who is also gay and from a Jewish family, in an interview. “[Trump is] already categorizing subsets of individuals. It may not be tomorrow, but it’s definitely bound to happen soon.”

Naturally, descent into full-blown genocidal tyranny is not yet inevitable, particularly as Trump and Musk’s actions have encountered resistance, especially from the courts. And with many Western countries, especially in Europe, experiencing their own problems with far-right politics, the number of safe havens from autocracy is depressingly low, particularly as figures like Musk and Vice President JD Vance openly interfere in German elections by endorsing the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, as Vance did in a February 14 speech at the Munich Security Conference that left European leaders stunned. Nevertheless, Trump and his cronies have clearly spent their four years out of power carefully studying the authoritarian playbook of leaders like Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán. Now, Hungarians are warning us that if we don’t stop Trump, we could suffer their country’s fate. And lest anyone think far-right authoritarians are better at economic management, Hungary is a sign of what’s to come: Their economy is teetering while it hemorrhages people who no longer see a future there for themselves.

I hope we do stop Trump and Musk’s takeover of this country. But we have to be honest and acknowledge that if we fail—and fail we might—it could be a long and difficult time before democracy returns. It took 17 years for that to happen in Chile and 36 years in Spain. The Third Reich lasted “only” 12 years, but Hitler’s spell over Germany didn’t break until after the world’s deadliest war and genocide.

Even if the Democrats retake both houses of Congress and the White House, they will preside over a profoundly broken nation, where Trump distilled centuries’ worth of American poison into a fascist movement that will remain a threat for decades to come, with a best-case scenario being a whiplash cycle every four to eight years of decency and horror.

Obviously, emigrating won’t solve this country’s problems. But many of those problems will take a lot more than an election to solve because they stem from deep structural flaws in our system of government rooted in an antiquated constitution and a political culture contaminated by selfishness, ignorance, cruelty, violence, and authoritarian white, Christian supremacy. This is why it’s seemingly impossible to meaningfully address even serious problems like gun violence, let alone have nice things like universal health care, while other industrialized nations have accomplished both feats and more with little to no fuss. It’s why this country rejected a highly qualified presidential candidate who happened to be a Black woman, in favor of a psychopathic fascist who all but promised to ruin it.

If people wish to stay here and fight for a better country, then all power to them. But it’s also important to understand that many Americans have spent their lives fighting just to exist, and they have now watched 77.2 million fellow citizens spit in their faces by voting for Trump and countless more recklessly enable Trump’s victory by voting third-party, or abstaining from voting altogether. Thus, they may conclude that leaving for the sake of their well-being and sanity is a better choice than struggling in vain to save a country that apparently doesn’t value them from itself.

It’s a very personal choice, whether to stay and fight or go into exile, as New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat illustrated in a January 3 Substack post, after receiving frequent queries from Americans about the possibility of leaving. Most, she wrote, will neither stay and fight nor flee: “You stay put, keep your head down and your criticism of the government private. That way you and your loved ones can minimize any adverse consequences while you ‘wait it out.’” And life in exile is hardly romantic–it’s filled with longing for home and a lot of guilt.

But if people decide it’s better to bug out, that’s really none of Bill Maher’s business, and it’s certainly not his place to scold those who are not straight, white, male multi-millionaires like him. So why get all worked up about it?

The reason it stings some people is because the entire notion of the U.S. being a country people flee from rather than fleeing to turns American exceptionalism on its head. Much like right-wing superpatriots’ reflexive defensiveness when someone points out how far we lag other industrialized nations in areas like health care access or public transportation, it’s a reminder of the hollowness of the refrain that we are “The Greatest Nation in the World”—a pin popping the balloon that is the American ego. Maher inadvertently reinforced this when he correctly pointed out that the U.S. is a nicer place to live than China or Uganda, but had to resort to jokes about bland Dutch food and elderly Italians playing bocce when comparing us to other industrialized democracies. It shows how full of ourselves we remain as a country, even as our political conditions have degraded to the point that some of us see a better life abroad than at home.

Source : https://newrepublic.com/article/191421/trump-emigration-wave-brain-drain

 

Shares of Walmart Inc. were hit hard Thursday after the retail behemoth provided a disappointing earnings outlook, including a warning for the first year-over-year decline in quarterly profit in three years.

“The company’s guidance assumes a generally stable consumer and continued pressure from its mix of products and formats globally,” Walmart said in a statement.

The downbeat guidance offset beats in profit, sales and same-store sales for the fiscal fourth quarter through January, and a 13% hike to the company’s dividend.

The stock
WMT

-6.53%
dropped 6.5% on Thursday. The selloff came four days after the stock closed at a record high, and was its worst day since it lost 8.1% on Nov. 16, 2023.

The weakness was also weighing on shares of some of Walmart’s rivals, as Costco Wholesale Corp.’s stock
COST

-2.61%
fell 2.6% and Target Corp. shares
TGT

-2.00%
shed 2%, to underperform the S&P 500 index’s
SPX

-0.43%
0.4% decline.

Chief Executive Doug McMillon said on the post-earnings call with analysts that the mix pressure the company has been seeing is from the continued shift in demand toward products that are less profitable (lower margin) — particularly groceries and health and wellness, which includes the pharmacy business — and away from higher-margin general merchandise items.

In the U.S., Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said, grocery was a “standout” in the latest quarter, with sales growth in the mid-single-digit percentage range, compared with overall comparable sales growth of 4.6%.

For health and wellness, Rainey said growth was even faster, in the mid-teens percentage range, “due largely to GLP-1 sales.” GLP-1 refers to the class of diabetes and obesity drugs that includes Novo Nordisk’s
NVO

+0.41%
Ozempic and Wegovy and Eli Lilly & Co.’s
LLY

+0.70%
Mounjaro and Zepbound.

When asked on the call how President Donald Trump’s tariffs and their potential effects on consumer spending might impact results, Rainey said, according to a FactSet transcript: “We don’t have any explicit assumption in our guidance around tariffs. We feel like we’ll be able to navigate that.”

Walmart said it expects first-quarter adjusted earnings per share of 57 cents to 58 cents, down from 60 cents a year ago and below the FactSet consensus of 64 cents.

That would be the first year-over-year decline in quarterly adjusted EPS since the results for the quarter that ended in April 2022.

For the full year of fiscal 2026, adjusted EPS is projected to be $2.50 to $2.60, which surrounds fiscal 2025 EPS of $2.51 but misses the current FactSet consensus for 2026 of $2.77.

Rainey said the outlook assumes a “relatively stable” economic environment but also acknowledges there are still uncertainties related to consumer behavior and the political landscape.

Also included in the sales-growth outlook were the negative effects of an extra day of sales last year resulting from the leap year and a strengthening of the U.S. dollar, as well as the positive effect of sales from Vizio, whose acquisition was completed on Feb. 20, 2024.

Jefferies analyst Corey Tarlowe said investors shouldn’t be discouraged by Walmart’s outlook, and he recommended buying the stock on the pullback. He believes management is setting 2025 up to be “a year of beats and raises.”

D.A. Davidson’s Michael Baker reiterated his buy rating on the stock, saying investors shouldn’t worry about the outlook given Walmart’s recent history of basically underpromising so it can overdeliver.

“[Walmart] has a recent track record of beating, then guiding the next quarter low, then beating that, and giving initial full-year guidance that ends up being beatable,” Baker wrote in a note to clients. “Thus, we are not overly concerned with the guidance, and to us, the bottom line is that [Walmart’s] business trends remain strong.”

Still, the stock was the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s
DJIA

-1.01%
biggest decliner on the day.

Earnings for the past quarter beat expectations, and the dividend was raised

In the fiscal fourth quarter to Jan. 31, net sales rose 4% to $178.83 billion, while total revenue, which includes membership and other income, increased 4.1% to $180.55 billion. The FactSet consensus was for net sales of $178.71 billion and for total revenue of $180.19 billion.

Walmart’s U.S. sales grew 5% to $123.5 billion, to beat expectations for $122.95 billion. And comparable-store sales, or sales of stores open at least a year, rose 4.6% to beat expectations for a 4.4% rise.

For Walmart’s membership-based warehouse retailer Sam’s Club, comparable sales increased 6.8%, well above expectations for 5% growth, as the number of transactions rose by 5.4% and the average ticket was up 1.3%.

Net income for the quarter slipped to $5.25 billion, or 65 cents a share, from $5.49 billion, or 68 cents a share, in the same period a year ago.

Source :https://www.marketwatch.com/story/walmarts-stock-dives-as-disappointing-outlook-offsets-an-earnings-beat-3215a1e8

U.S. President Donald Trump denounced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as a “dictator” on Wednesday and warned he had to move quickly to secure peace or risk losing his country, deepening a feud between the two leaders that has alarmed European officials.
The extraordinary attacks – a day after Trump claimed Ukraine was to blame for Russia’s 2022 invasion – heightened concerns among U.S. allies in Europe that Trump’s approach to ending the Russia-Ukraine conflict could benefit Moscow.

Less than a month into his presidency, Trump has upended U.S. policy on the war, ending a campaign to isolate Russia with a Trump-Putin phone call and talks between senior U.S. and Russian officials that have sidelined Ukraine.
“A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left,” Trump wrote on social media, using an alternate spelling for the Ukrainian president’s name.
In response, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said no one could force his country to give in.

“We will defend our right to exist,” Sybiha said on X.
Later in the day while speaking to investors and executives in Miami, Trump doubled down on his comments, again calling Zelenskiy a “dictator” and suggesting the Ukrainian president wanted to prolong the war to “keep the gravy train going,” a reference to U.S. military aid.
Zelenskiy’s five-year term was supposed to end in 2024, but elections cannot be held under martial law, which Ukraine imposed in February 2022 in response to Russia’s invasion.
Trump’s outburst followed Zelenskiy’s comments on Tuesday that the U.S. president was parroting Russian disinformation when he asserted that Ukraine “should never have started” the war, which began with Russia’s full-scale invasion three years ago.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday warned Zelenskiy against “badmouthing” Trump.

“Everyone who knows the president will tell you that is an atrocious way to deal with this administration,” Vance said in his West Wing office, the Daily Mail reported.
Russia has seized some 20% of Ukraine and is slowly but steadily gaining territory in the east. Moscow said its “special military operation” responded to an existential threat posed by Kyiv’s pursuit of NATO membership. Ukraine and the West call Russia’s action an imperialist land grab.
The Ukrainian leader said Trump’s assertion that his approval rating was just 4% was Russian disinformation and that any attempt to replace him would fail.
“We have evidence that these figures are being discussed between America and Russia. That is, President Trump … unfortunately lives in this disinformation space,” Zelenskiy told Ukrainian TV.
The latest poll from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, from early February, found 57% of Ukrainians trust Zelenskiy.
Following Trump’s latest remarks, U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Zelenskiy “sits in office after duly-held elections.” When asked who started the war, Dujarric responded that Russia had invaded Ukraine.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said it was “false and dangerous” for Trump to call Zelenskiy a dictator, German newspaper Spiegel reported.
U.S. security ally Australia, which has provided A$1.5 billion in support to Ukraine in its war with Russia, rejected Trump’s assertions about Ukraine.

Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles said “the war in Ukraine must be resolved on Ukraine’s terms, because the aggressor here is Russia”. The country’s opposition leader Peter Dutton said bluntly: “I think President Trump has got it wrong”.
“Australia should stand strong and proud with the people of Ukraine. It’s a democracy, and this is a fight for civilisation. Vladimir Putin is a murderous dictator, and we shouldn’t be giving him an inch,” said Dutton.
A few of Trump’s fellow Republicans in Congress said they disagreed that Zelenskiy was a dictator and that Ukraine bore responsibility for Russia’s invasion. But they stopped short of criticizing Trump directly, with Senate Majority Leader John Thune – a longtime supporter of Ukraine – saying Trump needed “space” to work on a peace deal.

EUROPE LEFT SCRAMBLING

Zelenskiy has suggested giving U.S. companies the right to extract valuable minerals in Ukraine in return for U.S. security guarantees.
He rejected a U.S. proposal last week that would have seen Washington receiving 50% of Ukraine’s critical minerals, including lithium, a key component in electric car batteries. Zelenskiy told reporters on Wednesday that the deal was too focused on U.S. interests, saying “I can’t sell our country.”
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Wednesday, Trump claimed that Ukraine had “more or less” agreed to the proposal and complained that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was treated “rather rudely” while visiting Kyiv. He said he would seek to resurrect the minerals deal.
European officials have been left shocked and flat-footed by the Trump administration’s Ukraine moves in recent days.
At a second meeting of European leaders in Paris, hastily arranged by French President Emmanuel Macron earlier in the day, there were more calls for immediate action to support Ukraine and bolster Europe’s defense capabilities, but few concrete decisions.
Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will visit Washington next week, according to White House national security adviser Mike Waltz.
Following Trump’s latest attacks, Zelenskiy discussed approaches to a peace settlement with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Macron and Starmer, including the importance of security guarantees.
Starmer expressed support for Zelenskiy as Ukraine’s democratically elected leader, Starmer’s office said on Wednesday.
Keith Kellogg, the U.S. Ukraine envoy, traveled to Kyiv on Wednesday to meet with Zelenskiy and said as he arrived that he understood “the need for security guarantees,” adding that part of his mission would be “to sit and listen.”
The 27-member European Union on Wednesday agreed on a 16th package of sanctions against Russia, including on aluminium and vessels believed to be carrying sanctioned Russian oil.
Trump said he may meet Putin this month. In Moscow, Putin said that Ukraine would not be barred from peace negotiations, but success would depend on raising the level of trust between Moscow and Washington.
Putin, speaking a day after Russia and the U.S. met in Riyadh to hold their first talks on how to end the conflict, also said it would take time to set up a summit with Trump, which both men have said they want.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/zelenskiy-says-trump-is-disinformation-bubble-ukraine-2025-02-19/

A $1.4 billion counterfeit luxury market thrives in the United States, with fake designer bags, watches, and accessories sold on street corners from New York to Los Angeles. While most shoppers know these items aren’t authentic, new research reveals surprising insights about who’s most likely to buy them.

Research published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research shows that people who know less about fashion and luxury brands are actually more drawn to counterfeit items than those who consider themselves fashion experts. This finding helps explain why the counterfeit market continues to grow despite widespread awareness that buying fake goods is illegal.

The study discovered that when people don’t know much about luxury brands’ history, craftsmanship, and heritage, they’re more likely to convince themselves that buying counterfeits is acceptable. They often justify their purchases by saying the authentic items are overpriced, or that buying fakes doesn’t really harm anyone.

‘Moral disengagement’ drives counterfeit purchases

Led by Ludovica Cesareo, an assistant professor of marketing at Lehigh University, and Silvia Bellezza, an associate professor of business at Columbia University, the study focused on how different levels of fashion knowledge affect people’s attitudes toward counterfeits. The researchers worked with nearly 1,000 participants — including both everyday consumers and members of university fashion clubs — across a series of four studies. They found that fashion expertise dramatically changed how people viewed fake luxury goods.

At the heart of this research is a psychological concept called moral disengagement — the mental gymnastics people use to justify actions they know aren’t entirely right. The researchers found that shoppers with less fashion knowledge were more likely to morally disengage when it came to counterfeit goods. They’d tell themselves things like “I’ll buy the real thing someday” or “Everyone else does it” to make their interest in fakes feel more acceptable.

Cesareo tells StudyFinds Editor-in-Chief Steve Fink that people may be more prone to moral disengagement when it comes to spending money. “People may find it easier to morally disengage in financial transactions because they can rationalize their actions through justifications like affordability, perceived harmlessness, or social norms,” she explains. “Additionally, when products like counterfeits are widely available, consumers may feel a diffusion of responsibility, making it easier to ignore ethical considerations.”

Knowledge is power

This moral disengagement showed up in the study in three main ways. First, people would justify buying counterfeits by pointing to situational factors, like being a student with limited money. Second, they’d spread out the responsibility by saying that since lots of people buy fakes, it couldn’t be that bad. Third, they’d downplay the consequences, convincing themselves that buying counterfeits doesn’t really harm the luxury brands.

Fashion experts, on the other hand, were far less likely to use these mental shortcuts. Their deeper knowledge of the industry made them more aware of how counterfeiting affects everything from brand heritage to worker conditions. They understood that fake goods often fund criminal enterprises and exploit workers in unsafe conditions. This knowledge made it harder for them to morally disengage from the real impacts of counterfeiting.

During one experiment, researchers gave participants a scenario about owning an authentic luxury item and then encountering a counterfeit version being sold on the street. Those with less fashion knowledge often expressed interest in the fake items, reasoning that they could get the same status symbol for a fraction of the price. More knowledgeable participants, however, showed strong negative reactions to the counterfeits, viewing them as cheapening the authentic brand’s value.

The study also revealed interesting patterns in how people talk about luxury brands on social media. Less knowledgeable consumers who encountered counterfeits were actually more likely to post about the authentic brands online. This suggests they might be using social media to validate their connection to luxury brands, even when considering fake versions.

How brands can win the counterfeit war

For luxury brands, these findings point to a new strategy in fighting counterfeits. Instead of focusing solely on legal enforcement or anti-counterfeiting technology, brands might be more successful by targeting consumer knowledge. Local governments should also invest more effort into bringing the reality behind counterfeiting to light.

“Both brands and governments have roles to play,” says Cesareo. “Brands should educate consumers through targeted campaigns that highlight the authenticity and craftsmanship of their products, while governments should strengthen regulations and enforcement against counterfeiting. Public awareness campaigns, such as those run by crime prevention agencies, can also help reduce consumer demand for counterfeit goods.”

Many luxury houses are already moving in this direction, creating museums, exhibitions, and educational programs that showcase their history and expertise.

Louis Vuitton, for example, recently launched a traveling exhibition featuring 200 versions of their iconic trunk, demonstrating the evolution of their craftsmanship over two centuries. Gucci has opened a museum in Florence that traces the brand’s history from its founding as a leather goods shop to its current status as a global fashion powerhouse. These initiatives help consumers understand the value behind authentic luxury goods.

The research suggests this educational approach might be particularly effective with younger consumers who are just beginning to develop their fashion knowledge. By helping them understand the artistry and tradition behind luxury brands, companies might prevent them from viewing counterfeits as acceptable alternatives.

The connection between knowledge and moral reasoning can certainly be applied to to fashion. The researchers suggest that expertise in any field might make people more attuned to ethical issues in that area. Just as fashion experts see the problems with counterfeits more clearly, music aficionados might be more concerned about pirated content, or food experts more troubled by fake ingredients.

As online shopping makes luxury goods more accessible than ever, brands face new challenges in communicating their value to consumers who might never visit a physical store or interact with knowledgeable sales staff. Digital platforms might need to find new ways to convey the heritage and craftsmanship that justify luxury prices.

“We hope consumers can become more aware of their own moral disengagement when purchasing counterfeit goods,” says Cesareo. “Consumers can actively question their justifications for purchasing counterfeits and educate themselves on the negative consequences, such as links to organized crime, poor labor conditions, and economic harm to original brands.”

Source : https://studyfinds.org/why-counterfeit-luxury-goods-appeal-to-consumers/

Ever wondered how much money it would take for someone to quit their job and travel the world? According to new research, the magic number is $287,731. That’s the average amount Americans say they need in the bank before they’d feel comfortable leaving their current life behind to explore the globe.

A nationwide survey by Talker Research on behalf of Travelbinger.com asked 2,000 Americans about what it would take to make their travel dreams a reality. The results show that different generations have very different ideas about the cost of freedom.

Young adults from Generation Z would take the leap for around $211,000, while Baby Boomers want a more substantial cushion of $335,000 before they’d consider trading their current lifestyle for a world of adventure. This difference isn’t too surprising when you consider that older adults often have more financial responsibilities and established careers they’d need to leave behind.

The survey revealed some interesting extremes in people’s attitudes toward travel. About a third of Americans (32%) say they’d need more than $500,000 before they’d even consider such a dramatic life change. On the flip side, some people are ready to embrace adventure on a much tighter budget – one in six Americans (18%) would pack their bags for less than $50,000.

Money isn’t everything, though. The survey found that 17% of Americans wouldn’t leave their current life behind for any amount of money. For these folks, the comforts of home and their established routines matter more than the allure of far-off destinations.

The researchers also asked people how they’d spend a million dollars if they had to use it all on travel. The responses showed that Americans are a generous bunch – the most popular choice (37%) was taking family and friends along for the ride on a dream vacation. Who wouldn’t want to share an amazing experience with their loved ones?

Road trips remain a classic American dream, with 24% saying they’d use their million dollars to explore the U.S. or another country by car. Many would seek out the world’s most famous sights, with 21% wanting to visit landmarks and 19% hoping to explore historical wonders like the Great Pyramids, the Colosseum, and the Taj Mahal.

Some people prefer to take their time and really get to know a place. About 18% said they’d try “slow traveling” – spending months in each location instead of rushing from one tourist spot to the next. The same percentage would rather take frequent weekend trips to new places or work through a travel bucket list filled with adventures like African safaris, Northern Lights viewing, or diving the Great Barrier Reef.

Luxury isn’t off the table either. Many respondents dreamed of high-end experiences, with 17% wanting to splurge on fancy hotels and resorts. But it’s not all about comfort – 12% said they’d use their travel budget to volunteer or give back to the communities they visit.

The survey uncovered plenty of other travel dreams too. Some people want to experience different cultures (11%) or visit every continent (11%). Others would splash out on luxury cruises (13%), private jets (8%), or around-the-world plane tickets (8%). A small group (8%) would use their budget to attend major global events like the Olympics or World Cup.

Not everyone shares these wanderlust dreams, though. A small but notable 4% of people said they’d give back a million-dollar travel budget, saying they have zero interest in exploring the world. This matches up with the earlier finding that some Americans just prefer to stay put, regardless of the financial incentives.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/money-give-up-life-travel-world/

Egyptologists have discovered the first tomb of a pharaoh since Tutankhamun’s was uncovered over a century ago.

King Thutmose II’s tomb was the last undiscovered royal tomb of the 18th Egyptian dynasty.

A British-Egyptian team has located it in the Western Valleys of the Theban Necropolis near the city of Luxor. Researchers had thought the burial chambers of the 18th dynasty pharaohs were more than 2km away, closer to the Valley of the Kings.

The crew found it in an area associated with the resting places of royal women, but when they got into the burial chamber they found it decorated – the sign of a pharaoh.

“Part of the ceiling was still intact: a blue-painted ceiling with yellow stars on it. And blue-painted ceilings with yellow stars are only found in kings’ tombs,” said the field director of the mission Dr Piers Litherland.

He told the BBC’s Newshour programme he felt overwhelmed in the moment.

“The emotion of getting into these things is just one of extraordinary bewilderment because when you come across something you’re not expecting to find, it’s emotionally extremely turbulent really,” he said.

“And when I came out, my wife was waiting outside and the only thing I could do was burst into tears.”

Dr Litherland said the discovery solved the mystery of where the tombs of early 18th dynasty kings are located.

Researchers found Thutmose II’s mummified remains two centuries ago but its original burial site had never been located.

Thutmose II was an ancestor of Tutankhamun, whose reign is believed to have been from about 1493 to 1479 BC. Tutankhamun’s tomb was found by British archaeologists in 1922.

Thutmose II is best known for being the husband of Queen Hatshepsut, regarded as one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs and one of the few female pharaohs who ruled in her own right.

Dr Litherland said the “large staircase and a very large descending corridor” of the tomb suggested grandeur.

“It took us a very long time to get through all that,” he said, noting it was blocked by flood debris and the ceilings had collapsed.

“It was only after crawling through a 10m (32ft) passageway that had a small 40cm gap at the top that we got into the burial chamber.”

There they discovered the blue ceiling and decorations of scenes from the Amduat, a religious text which was reserved for kings. That was another key sign they had found a king’s tomb, Dr Litherland said.

They set to work clearing the debris – expecting that they would find the crushed remains of a burial underneath.

But “the tomb turned out to be completely empty”, said Dr Litherland. “Not because it was robbed but because it had been deliberately emptied.”

They then worked out that the tomb had been flooded – “it had been built underneath a waterfall” – just a few years after the king’s burial and the contents moved to another location in ancient times.

It was through sifting through tonnes of limestone in the chamber that they found fragments of alabaster jars, which bore the inscriptions of the names of Thutmose II and Hatshepsut.

These fragments of alabaster “had probably broken when the tomb was being moved,” said Dr Litherland.

“And thank goodness they actually did break one or two things because that’s how we found out whose tomb it was.”

The artefacts are the first objects to be found associated with Thutmose II’s burial.

Dr Litherland’s said his team had a rough idea of where the second tomb was, and it could still be intact with treasures.

The discovery of the pharaoh’s tomb caps off more than 12 years of work by the joint team from Dr Litherland’s New Kingdom Research Foundation and Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ym30v356po

On a cold January afternoon, a young pharmacy student, Shin Jeong-min, waited restlessly outside South Korea’s Constitutional Court, as the country’s suspended president arrived to fight his impeachment.

While Yoon Suk Yeol testified, she chanted along with hundreds of his incensed and worried supporters, who have rallied around him ever since his failed attempt to impose martial law. “Release him now. Cancel his impeachment,” they shouted.

“If the president is impeached and the opposition leader is elected, our country will become one with North Korea and Kim Jong Un,” Jeong-min said, citing a theory popular among President Yoon’s most fanatical followers: that the left-leaning opposition party wants to unify with the North and turn South Korea into a communist country.

At 22 years old, Jeong-min stands out from the legion of elderly Koreans who have always feared and despised the North, and make up the bulk of those who hold these far-right conspiratorial beliefs.

That generation of Koreans, now in its 60s and 70s, lived through the Cold War and remembers bitterly the devastating aftermath of North Korea’s invasion in the 1950s.

When Yoon declared martial law in early December, he played on these fears to justify his power grab.

Without citing evidence, he claimed that “North Korean communist forces” had infiltrated the opposition party and were trying to overthrow the country. They needed to be “eradicated”, he said, as he moved swiftly to ban political activity and put the army in charge.

Two months on from his failed coup, an anti-communist frenzy is gripping Yoon’s supporters, young and old.

Even some who had never given North Korea or communism much thought are now convinced their dynamic democracy is on the brink of being turned into a leftist dictatorship – and that their leader had no choice but to remove people’s democratic rights in order to protect them from both Pyongyang and Beijing.

“This a war between communism and democracy,” said one office worker in his 40s, who had slipped out of work to join the protest at the court.

Another man, in his 30s, adamantly argued the president had to be returned to office as soon as possible. “He’s going to arrest all the North Korean spies,” he said.

Such threats were once very real. During the 1960s and 70s, spies would regularly attempt to infiltrate the government.

In 1968, a group of North Korean commandos crawled across the border and tried to assassinate then President Park Chung-hee. A tree atop Seoul’s Bugak mountain still bears the bullet marks from the intense gun battles that raged for nearly two weeks.

In the 1980s, during the final years of South Korea’s violent military dictatorship, a radical far-left student movement began to praise Pyongyang for its “superior” political system. They were labelled regime “sympathisers”.

It was also common for authoritarian leaders to accuse their political adversaries of being North Korean conspirators.

“Anti-communism became the dominant ideology of South Korea’s military dictators, who used it to control society and justify restricting people’s freedom,” said Shin Jin-wook, a sociology professor at Chungang University.

Today, these threats have dissipated. Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and advanced cyber-hacking abilities pose the greater risk, and you would struggle to find anyone in South Korea who wants to emulate life in the North. The political left and right are merely divided over how to deal with their troublesome neighbour.

While the approach of Yoon’s conservative People Power Party has been to try to threaten the North into submission with military superiority, the left-leaning Democratic Party prefers to engage with Pyongyang, believing the two countries can peacefully co-exist.

The president has been accused of exploiting people’s historic fears. “Yoon’s rhetoric almost completely matches that of past dictators, and he is the first president to use this anti-communist ideology so blatantly since Korea became a democracy in 1987,” said Mr Shin.

Not only has Yoon accused the parliament, led by the opposition Democratic Party, of being riddled with Pyongyang sympathisers, but he has dangled the idea that North Korea, with help from China, rigged last year’s parliamentary election.

“This is fake news cooked up by Yoon to demonise the opposition and justify his completely undemocratic move,” one Democratic Party lawmaker, Wi Sung-lac, told the BBC.

“We have a long history of fighting for democracy and freedom in Korea. We are the ones who managed to thwart Yoon’s attempt to destroy Korea’s democracy,” he said, referring to the opposition politicians who pushed past troops and climbed over the parliament’s walls during martial law to vote down the motion.

Such ideas were previously pedalled by extreme conservative groups, said Lee Sangsin, a polling expert at the Korea Institute for National Unification.

“These groups were isolated. People didn’t take much notice,” he explained. “But because Yoon is the president, his words carry weight, and many people have accepted what he said.”

This was evident at one of the pro-Yoon weekend rallies we attended last month. Far from being die-hard conspiracy theorists, nearly everyone we spoke to said Yoon had changed their thinking.

“At first I didn’t support Yoon, but martial law opened my eyes,” said Oh Jung-hyuk, a 57-year-old musician, there with his wife. “We can see how deeply embedded leftist forces are in our society.” One woman in her 40s told us she previously had doubts about Chinese vote rigging but had researched the issue after martial law and “realised it was true”.

Yoon’s supporters often point to real events – how the previous Democratic Party President, Moon Jae-in, met Kim Jong Un to try to orchestrate a peace deal; that the current Democratic leader, Lee Jae-myung, is being investigated for helping to send millions of dollars to North Korea – then use these as evidence of a greater plot.

“This far-fetched conspiracy theory that China rigged the election is becoming more and more accepted,” said the sociology professor Mr Shin. “One of the most basic consensuses in a democracy is the premise of fair and free elections, and now we have people distrusting that. This is very extreme.”

As Yoon’s unsubstantiated claims have taken root, his support seems to have grown. Although the majority of people in South Korea still want him permanently removed from office, the number has fallen. Last week it stood at 57%, compared to 75% in the week after the martial law declaration.

Through his anti-communist rhetoric, Yoon has also effectively tapped into a simmering distrust of China. To fear North Korea now means to be wary of China too.

At a recent weekend rally in Seoul, many supporters had swapped their trademark “Stop the Steal” election fraud placards for ones that read “Chinese Communist Party OUT”.

“I believe China is interfering in all South Korea’s political affairs. It’s pulling the strings behind the scenes,” said 66-year-old Jo Yeon-deok, who was holding one of the signs.

According to the polling expert, Mr Lee, “a growing portion of the public now believes China wants to turn South Korea into some kind of vassal state”.

For those in their 20s and 30s who have never experienced real danger from North Korea, China is a more believable threat. Last year the Pew Research Centre found that South Korea and Hungary were the only two countries where the young had a more negative view of China than the old.

But contrary to the information they are being fed, young people’s fears have nothing to do with communism, said Cho Jin-man, a political scientist at Duksung Women’s University.

Until recently South Koreans felt their country was superior to China, Mr Cho explained – but as Beijing has become stronger and more assertive they have started to see it as a threat, especially since the US started treating it as such.

On top of that, young people have a lot of grievances: they’re struggling to find work or afford a home, and feel resentful when they see their universities catering to Chinese students.

Communism, Mr Cho believes, is being used as a convenient catch-all bogeyman to stir up fear and hate. This message is amplified by far-right YouTube channels, particularly popular with young men.

“North Korea and China are my biggest concerns,” said Kim Gyung-joo, a 30-year-old IT developer, who came alone to one of the rallies. He used to be left-wing like his friends, he said, and was initially very critical of the president’s martial law order. But after researching the issue on YouTube he realised martial law was “unavoidable”.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1lv3g51n9yo

Last spring, when tens of thousands of Georgians were protesting against what they saw as a clear sign of Russian influence on the country’s politics, Georgia’s parliament rushed through amendments to the nation’s tax code.

Transparency International (TI) Georgia, the anti-corruption watchdog, wrote at the time that the change – which allows tax-free transfer of assets from offshore accounts to Georgia – may have been introduced to serve the interests of the country’s richest person and former prime minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili.

He is the founder and honorary chairman of the country’s ruling party, Georgian Dream.

“Now it is clear, those changes were made for him,” says senior economics analyst at TI Georgia, Beso Namchavadze.

With an estimated wealth of $4.9bn (£3.9bn), Mr Ivanishvili made his money in 1990s Russia, in computing, metals and banking. Most of his wealth is believed to be tucked away in offshore companies.

Georgia was plunged into political crisis and daily street protests last May when the country’s MPs passed the contentious “transparency on foreign influence bill”, often dubbed the “foreign agents law”.

Under this legislation, media and non-governmental organisations that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad have to register as “organisations acting in the interest of a foreign power”, submit themselves to stringent audits, or face punitive fines. It was widely seen as a move to prevent US and other Western influence on the country.

Protests then continued when the Georgian Dream-led government won disputed parliamentary elections in October. Protests were spurred again at the start of December when it said it would be putting EU accession talks on hold.

Hundreds of peaceful protests were arrested and severely beaten up by the police.

In response to this crackdown, the US government announced sanctions against Mr Ivanishvili at the end of last year.

There is also the possibility of sanctions from the UK. Last month James MacClearly, a Liberal Democrat MP, introduced an Early Day Motion in the UK parliament calling on the government to impose sanctions on Mr Ivanishvili.

The motion expressed “deep concern at the suspension of Georgia’s EU accession process and the increasing use of excessive force against peaceful protesters”.

TI Georgia estimates that if the UK imposed sanctions on Mr Ivanishvili his entire business empire would be affected, because he has holding companies registered in two British Overseas Territories – British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands.

“All his big business, which he has in Georgia, in the hospitality sector, in the energy sector, all the parent companies of these Georgian companies, the last beneficiaries are registered in these so-called offshore territories,” says Beso Namchavadze.

He adds that TI Georgia believes that Mr Ivanishvili and other family members are continuing to transfer ownership of companies they previously controlled through offshore entities to newly established firms in Georgia.

In January of this year, paintings and other artwork worth nearly $500m were imported into Georgia, according to data published by the Ministry of Finance.

Many believe the artwork was from Mr Ivanishvili’s valuable collection.

“For everybody who knows him it’s pretty clear that this is something that he values the most out of all the assets, and all the wealth, that he has,” says Tina Khidasheli, Georgia’s ex-defence minister and the head of the non-governmental organisation Civic Idea.

“He is going to bring paintings back and he does not want to pay tax on it.”

The head of Georgia’s parliamentary committee on finance and budget, Paata Kvijinadze, recently defended the tax-free transfer of assets from offshore accounts to Georgia.

“If anyone benefited from this law, I am happy about it,” he said in a post on social media. “This is exactly what the law was meant to be: to bring companies from offshore zones and attract more investments into the country”.

In response to the proposed UK sanctions, Georgia’s ruling party issued a statement defending Mr Ivanishvili, saying that a threat of sanctions was “without any foundation” against the party founder who brought “democratic breakthrough to the country”.

Separately, Mr Ivanishvili’s lawyer announced last month that his client is suing Swiss bank Julius Baer for, among other reasons, misinterpreting “the so-called” American sanctions, which the lawyer described as “political blackmail”.

The US sanctions on Mr Ivanishvili call for his assets to be frozen, and place restrictions on US citizens and companies from doing business personally with him, but they do not affect his companies or family members.

For more than a decade Mr Ivanishvili has been involved in legal battles with another Swiss bank, Credit Suisse, over fraud and mismanagement of his money.

Some believe that the billionaire’s mistrust of the West and increased use of conspiracy theories at home, such as accusing adversaries of being part of the “global war party”, or “deep state”, originate in his long-standing financial grievances.

Ever since he became convinced that Credit Suisse was part of a grand conspiracy against him, says Tina Khdasheli. “Bidzina Ivanishvili held Georgia hostage to his personal financial issues.”

Experts say that even though Mr Ivanishvili’s current official position is the honorary chairman of the ruling party, there is a clear understanding that he remains the number one person in Georgian politics. Sanctions against him are therefore seen as sanctions against the entire government.

Nika Gilauri was prime minister of Georgia from 2009 to 2012. He now leads a private company called Reformatics, which advises governments around the world on economic reform.

Mr Gilauri says that Georgia’s continuing political instability and international isolation is negatively impacting the economy. “We are seeing a very negative effect on FDI, foreign direct investment, if you take nine months of 2024 compared to nine months of 2023, we have a 40% drop. So going forward this is going to continue to get worse.”

But the Georgian government paints a different picture.

Last month Georgia’s Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze signed a $6bn inward investment agreement with UAE property group Emaar.

Levan Davitashvili, the Minister of Economy described it as the “largest foreign investment deal” in decades, which was expected to contribute 1.5% growth to the economy.

Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has even suggested that 10% growth was now “absolutely realistic” for the Georgian economy.

But recently published research by Policy and Management Consulting Group (PMCG), a Georgian research firm, said that the prospect for the next six months was “extremely negative”.

It highlighted the impact of the continuing political turmoil, and said that the suspension of EU membership talks “was negatively viewed by all surveyed economists”.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj91xgylkwlo

Actress Kim Sae-ron’s death in an apparent suicide has renewed criticism of South Korea’s entertainment industry, which churns out stars but also subjects them to immense pressure and scrutiny.

Kim – who was found dead aged 24 at her home in Seoul on Sunday – had been bombarded with negative press coverage and hate online after a drink-driving conviction in 2022. Police have not provided further details about her death.

Experts found the circumstances leading to it depressingly familiar. Other celebrities also ended up taking their lives after careers upended by cyberbullying.

As Kim was laid to rest on Wednesday, analysts say they are not optimistic her death will lead to meaningful change.

South Korea’s entertainment industry is enjoying massive popularity. Today, there are more than an estimated 220 million fans of Korean entertainment around the world – that’s four times the population of South Korea.

But there is also increasing spotlight on the less glamorous side of the entertainment industry.

South Korea is known for its hyper-competitive culture in most spheres of life – from education to careers. It has one of the highest suicide rates among developed countries. While its overall suicide rate is falling, deaths of those in their 20s are rising.

This pressure is heightened in the case of celebrities. They face immense pressure to be perfect, and are subjected to the demands of obsessive “super fans” who can make or break careers.

That is why even the slightest perceived misstep can be career ending. Kim Sae-ron became so unpopular, scenes featuring her were edited out of shows such as Netflix’s 2023 drama Bloodhounds.

“It is not enough that the celebrities be punished by the law. They become targets of relentless criticism,” Korean culture critic Kim Hern-sik told the BBC.

He referred to K-pop artists Sulli and Goo Hara, who died by suicide in 2019 after long battles with internet trolls, even though they did not have known brushes with the law.

Sulli had offended fans for not conforming to the K-pop mould, while an internet mob had targeted Goo Hara over her relationship with an ex-boyfriend.

Trials are under way to see if “comedy on prescription” can help improve people’s mental health and reduce NHS costs by being an alternative to antidepressants.

Craic Health has secured funding for a scheme which uses stand-up shows and workshops to help people who are isolated, lonely and vulnerable.

Its project is aimed at helping the government work with the comedy industry, communities and organisations on comedy-based social prescriptions, in the hope the health service can use them more widely.

The work is being supported by Stroud MP Dr Simon Opher, who helped pioneer social prescriptions in Gloucestershire.

Speaking in parliament, he has warned of “the pandemic of over-prescription” and outlined how “making people laugh can avoid the need for medication” in parliament.

He said: “I’ve particularly specialised in using the arts to make people better so that could be poetry, visual arts or sometimes even drama, and I’ve also used things like gardening, I’ve prescribed allotments to people and that sort of thing.

“But this is the first time that we’ve tried comedy and that’s what’s exciting about this.”

A total of 8.7 million people in England took antidepressants in 2023/24, according to NHS figures – an increase of 2.1% compared to the previous year.

The drugs should not be routinely offered as the first treatment for less severe depression unless it is the person’s preference, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines state.

“One in five adults are on antidepressants and that’s partly because there’s no other treatment really often available,” Dr Opher said.

Craic founder Lu Jackson said comedy is a “cortisol decreaser, dopamine producer, potent releaser of serotonin, endorphins and good neuropeptides”.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/comedy-on-prescription-trials-start-to-see-if-stand-up-can-be-an-anti-depressants-alternative-13312989

The father of a British journalist who is missing in Brazil has said her disappearance is “very worrying” and he is “very concerned”.

Derek Peet told Sky News his daughter Charlotte Alice Peet, 32, flew to the South American country, where she had worked as a freelance correspondent, without telling her family.

“I wouldn’t say that it was normal, there was something on her mind obviously otherwise she would have let us know,” he said.

Ms Peet told a friend she was in Sao Paulo on 8 February but was planning to go to Rio de Janeiro before she disappeared.

Days later her family contacted the friend saying they had lost contact with the journalist and her mother reported her missing to police.

“She was then traced to Gatwick Airport and was found to have boarded a plane to Sao Paulo and then the trail went cold,” said Mr Peet.

“It’s very worrying but I don’t have any more to say, I’m very concerned but I just don’t know what’s going on, we’re just trying to pick up the pieces really.”

Ms Peet has worked as a foreign correspondent in Brazil, for organisations including broadcaster Al Jazeera and The Times newspaper, according to her LinkedIn profile.

The ACIE, the association of foreign press correspondents in Brazil, has issued a statement expressing concern about her disappearance, and to express sympathy for her family and friends.

It said the case was initially registered with police in Rio on Monday but referred to Sao Paulo, the last place she was known to have been before disappearing.

The Sao Paulo Public Security Secretariat said that the state department of homicide and protection of the person would assist in the case, according to the statement.

Charlotte worked in Rio more than two years ago as a freelance correspondent, then went back to London before returning to Brazil in November last year.

She is said to have contacted a friend in Rio on WhatsApp saying she needed a place to stay but was told the friend could not host her.

Ms Peet’s family have provided information about her flight to Brazil and a photo of her passport to help with the search.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/very-worrying-female-british-journalist-32-missing-in-brazil-13312420

An 11-year-old girl in Texas died by suicide after allegedly being bullied by her classmates over her family’s immigration status—who reportedly went so far as to threaten to call the authorities on her parents.

Jocelynn Rojo Carranza, who played the French Horn, loved to swim, and enjoyed Friday movie nights with her family, died in hospital at the Medical City of Dallas on Feb. 8 according to an online obituary. Her mother, Marbella Carranza, found her unresponsive in their home in Gainesville, Texas five days prior.

“All week I’ve been waiting for a miracle; waiting for my daughter to get better,” Marbella told CNN affiliate KUVN. “But unfortunately there was nothing that could be done.” Jocelynn’s funeral was held Wednesday morning.

A student of Gainesville Intermediate School, Jocelynn was allegedly bullied by her classmates who said “they were going to call immigration so they could take her parents away and she would be left alone,” according to her mother. She did not comment on the family’s immigration status during her interview with KUVN.

“It appears the school was aware of it all, but they never, they never told me what was happening with my daughter,” Marbella continued, noting that she learned Jocelynn was attending counseling sessions at the school after investigators informed her. “It appears she would go once or twice a week to counseling to report what was happening.”

“[I want] justice because it’s not fair,” she added. “The school was negligent for not keeping me informed of what was going on with my daughter.”

Gainesville Intermediate School did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.

The Gainesville Independent School District Police is currently investigating the bullying allegations, according to CNN.

The area’s Independent School District also told the outlet in a statement: “Whenever we receive a report of bullying, we respond swiftly to ensure all students are safe physically and emotionally. While we cannot release any information about specific students or incidents, our schools have several policies in place to combat bullying and resolve conflicts.”

Source : https://www.thedailybeast.com/11-year-old-girl-dies-by-suicide-after-bullies-threaten-to-call-ice-on-family/

Volodymyr Zelensky is a “cornered rat”, according to one of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, ex-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

After Donald Trump turned against the Kyiv president, the Ukrainian leader could set off a nuclear dirty bomb, baselessly claimed Medvedev, who is now a top Kremlin security official.

His rant came as Russian propaganda went into overdrive capitalising on links between Trump and Putin by demanding a “military coalition” of Washington and Moscow to “divide Europe to hell”.

Gloating Medvedev’s onslaught on Zelensky suggests that Putin believes he is on the brink of winning the war – or at least major Ukrainian concessions – and that the Ukrainian leader is floundering.

“The rat is cornered,” he said. “Its behaviour can be completely unpredictable. It scurries around, squeaks frantically and, as a rule, in such cases, eventually rushes into a counterattack.

“Therefore, any provocation can be expected from a shaking rodent with running eyes in order to disrupt the settlement and to continue the war to the last Ukrainian.

“He urgently needs to turn the tables…and for this purpose all means are good. Up to strikes on their cities, on their civilian population or even the use of weapons of mass destruction like ‘dirty bomb’.”

Medvedev, Kremlin president from 2008-2012, who heads the Putin-obedient United Russia party and is deputy head of the powerful security council, called Zelensky a “puppet pretending to be the president of a disintegrated country” who is now “in an extremely unpleasant situation”.

His main patron – the US – is “really angry with him, which is to be expected after being bitten by the rabid Kyiv critter”.

Trump wants to know what happened to the “plundered” American money, said Medvedev, and was demanding compensation in the form of rare metals.

Separately, leading Putin TV propagandist Vladimir Solovyov has switched from loathing to loving America after witnessing the Trump administration’s handling of attempts to end the war, which include brushing aside Europe.

He told his viewers across 11 time zones on Russian state TV: “Why not create a military coalition of Russia and America and divide Europe to hell?

“Well, who needs it? It’s possible – I think it’s a great idea, right?

Source : https://www.the-express.com/news/world-news/164106/putin-believes-winning-war-ukraine-trump-us

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s peace talks send a chilling ripple of déjà vu, a historian has warned, sending Europe “back to 1938”.

A top history expert has accused the two leaders of “land grabbing”, with events in recent days bearing a chilling echo of when dictators Hitler and Mussolini signed away territory which the UK and France agreed to as to not exacerbate tensions. The US and Russia leaders have already appeared to have charged ahead with Ukraine peace talks, effectively locking out Kyiv and other European leaders.

The Trump administration has said the UK and Europe would not play a part in any negotiations as they looked set to plough ahead with talks in Riyadh this week, prompting fierce criticism and concerns. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is set to visit Washington DC next week after urging America to provide a “backstop” to any settlement brokered between Kyiv and Moscow. On Tuesday, Mr Trump said the US does not “need” to deploy peacekeeping troops and suggested Ukraine “should never have started” the war.

A British historian has already issued an urgent warning about history repeating itself, and has also likened the current situation to Hitler and Mussolini’s “land-grabbing” of the Sudetenland territory in September 1938. Professor Anthony Glees is an expert in European affairs and security who has previously spoken far and wide about the lessons taught by Hitler’s dictatorship.

He told The Mirror: “I believe most sensible people the length and breadth of Europe are viewing these preparatory talks with a foreboding not experienced since 1938 when the UK & France met Hitler and Mussolini at Munich to sign away lands belonging to free Czechoslovakia to try to appease the fascist dictators. It was sold as ‘peace with honour’ and a ‘peace in our time’.

“But within months Hitler swallowed all of Czechoslovakia and within a year Europe was at war and millions died. Even Neville Chamberlain doubted his own deal because he began rapid rearmament programmes on his return to the UK.”

Prof Glees added: “That’s the picture Europe has before its eyes right now. A small but brave free democracy fighting for its life is forced to be a bystander as its sovereignty is destroyed by Trump and Putin, both land grabbers, both megalomaniacs, brothers in bullying others.

“It’s outrageous that Trump has humiliated Zelensky in the past and now, literally, tramples over him. Whilst we know Putin is fully aware of the history of the last century, Trump, Hegseth and JD Vance are either clueless about what happens when free nations are sacrificed to war lords or (more likely) they couldn’t care less.”

Source : https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/land-grabbers-donald-trump-vladimir-34706009

 

NATO members continued their largest combat exercises of 2025 on Wednesday, testing their ability to rapidly deploy large-scale forces on the 32-nation alliance’s eastern border as worries grow over its most powerful member, the United States.

The drills in Romania, which borders Ukraine, come as a shaken Europe grapples with a new U.S. course under President Donald Trump. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has demanded that allies dramatically ramp up military spending and said U.S. security priorities lie elsewhere — casting doubts on Washington’s longstanding security guarantees provided to Europe.

Days before the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Steadfast Dart 2025 drills comprise about 10,000 military personnel from nine nations as part of NATO’s new Allied Reaction Force. They are taking place over six weeks in Romania, Bulgaria and Greece.

Although the Trump administration has not announced plans to pull U.S. forces from the region, Hegseth’s remark that “European allies must lead from the front” left NATO partners contemplating a potential new reality in which the U.S. is no longer the powerful, nuclear-armed backstop for the continent’s security.

Radu Tudor, a defense analyst in Bucharest, said a U.S. rollback of its military presence in Romania would be “a gift” to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“The whole eastern flank of NATO (would) become weaker in front of Russia’s aggressive behavior,” he said, adding that it would push Romania to ask NATO allies to contribute troops and weapons to plug the gap left by several thousand American troops.

Adm. Stuart B. Munsch, commander of the Allied Joint Force Command, said threats to NATO “have become increasingly complex and unpredictable” over the past decade.

“To address this complex security environment, NATO has undergone a significant war-fighting transformation. We have taken our defensive plans from concept to reality,” Munsch told reporters at the training base on Wednesday. “This exercise … represents the culmination of our efforts and the beginning of our new force that will defend every inch of alliance territory.”

European allies have also expressed concern over being sidelined from talks between Washington and Moscow’s top diplomats on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia on working towards ending the war in Ukraine.

The fast-moving developments prompted France’s president to convene select EU countries and the U.K. for talks this week in Paris.

NATO has bolstered Europe’s eastern flank

Wednesday’s combat exercises in Romania saw live-fire training and trench warfare drills. Greek and Spanish marines led exercises last week in Greece, including a mock amphibious assault.

NATO’s new Allied Reaction Force, established last July, is designed to deploy at scale within 10 days and combines conventional forces with cyber and space-based technologies. Britain leads the operation with 2,600 military personnel and 730 vehicles.

The drills also include Romania, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Spain and Turkey and involve 1,500 military vehicles, more than 20 aircraft and more than a dozen naval assets.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/romania-nato-europe-russia-ukraine-us-f192b88b03f56d81fed0770fca445ba9

Two single-engine fixed-wing planes collided midair at the Marana Regional Airport Wednesday morning around 8:30 a.m., according to the Town of Marana. A press release from the town says four people total were on the two planes.

Two people in a Lancair 3600 were killed in the crash. The two in a Cessna 172 were uninjured, according to the town of Marana. KGUN 9 was on-scene following the story throughout the day.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and FAA are investigating.

KGUN 9’s Craig Smith provides insight into the type of plane involved in the crash, and the investigation that will take place:

New York City health officials ruled out a health scare after two patients were rushed to a Manhattan facility suspected of having Ebola.

Two patients were rushed to a Manhattan CityMD urgent care facility around 11:15 a.m. on Sunday. Reports circulated that one of the patients was potentially exposed to Ebola, a highly infectious disease, according to the New York Fire Department.

The Ebola scare comes after health officials warn of a “quad-demic” ravaging the country this winter in addition to the continual spread of the bird flu, which has impacted poultry and cattle farms and contributed to rising egg costs.

The two suspected ebola patients were transported to a hospital by first responders in hazmat suits, prompting fears among locals.

However, New York City’s health department officials concluded after conducting tests that neither patient had or was exposed to the Ebola virus.

See more

The two patients that sought services at CityMD today DO NOT have Ebola. My statement ⬇ pic.twitter.com/a40pnUkwnW

— Dr. Michelle Morse (@NYCHealthCommr) February 16, 2025

NYC Health Department Acting Commissioner Dr. Michelle Morse addressed the incident in a statement released Sunday afternoon.

“The two patients that sought services at CityMD on February 16 at 153 East 125th Street do not have Ebola,” she wrote.

“Neither patient had exposure to Ebola or other factors that would indicate risk.

Source : https://www.the-express.com/news/health/163861/ebola-norovirus-nyc-cases

 

Brazil’s prosecutor-general on Tuesday formally charged former President Jair Bolsonaro with attempting a coup to stay in office after his 2022 election defeat, in a plot that included a plan to poison his successor and current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and kill a Supreme Court judge.

Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet alleges that Bolsonaro and 33 others participated in a plan to remain in power. The alleged plot, he wrote, included a plan to poison Lula and shoot dead Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a foe of the former president.

“The members of the criminal organization structured a plan at the presidential palace to attack institutions, aiming to bring down the system of the powers and the democratic order, which received the sinister name of ‘Green and Yellow Dagger,’” Gonet wrote in a 272-page indictment. “The plan was conceived and taken to the knowledge of the president, and he agreed to it.”

Bolsonaro is often seen in Brazil’s yellow-and-green national soccer jersey and the colors have become associated with his political movement.

Bolsonaro’s defense team said it met the accusations with “dismay and indignation,” adding in a statement that the former “President has never agreed to any movement aimed at deconstructing the democratic rule of law or the institutions that underpin it.”

Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio Bolsonaro, who is a senator, said on the social platform X that the indictment was “empty” and there was no evidence of wrongdoing. He accused the Prosecutor-General’s Office of serving “the nefarious interests of Lula.”

In November, Brazil’s Federal Police filed a 884-page report with Gonet detailing the scheme. They allege a systematic effort to sow distrust in the electoral system, drafting a decree to provide legal cover for the plot, pressuring top military brass to go along with the plan and inciting a riot in the capital.

In the indictment, Gonet described the alleged crimes as part of a chain of events articulated with an overarching objective of stopping Bolsonaro from leaving office, “contrary to the result of the popular will at the polls.”

The Supreme Court will analyze the charges and, if accepted, Bolsonaro will stand trial.

The far-right leader denies wrongdoing. “I have no concerns about the accusations, zero,” Bolsonaro told journalists earlier on Tuesday during a visit to the Senate in Brasilia.

“Have you seen the coup decree, by any chance? You haven’t. Neither have I,” he added.

As well as participating in a coup d’état, the 34 defendants are accused of participating in an armed criminal organization, attempted violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, damage qualified by violence and serious threat against the state’s assets, and deterioration of listed heritage, according to a statement from the Prosecutor General’s press office.

Gonet said the criminal organization he charged “had as leaders the (then) president himself and his running mate, Gen. Braga Netto.”

“Both accepted, stimulated, and performed acts that are described in our criminal legislation as attacking the existence and the Independence of (the branches) of power and of the democratic rule,” Gonet wrote in his report.

The crimes have varying penalties. If Bolsonaro is convicted of attempting a coup and the violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, he could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison, according to the country’s criminal code.

The indictments, based on manuscripts, digital files, spreadsheets, and message exchanges, expose a scheme to disrupt democratic order, according to the prosecutor-general’s office.

The charges are “historic,” said Luis Henrique Machado, a criminal attorney and professor at the IDP university in Brasilia, adding that he expects the Supreme Court to accept the charges and put Bolsonaro on trial sometime before the end of next year.

“The charges show Brazil’s institutions are robust, independent and agile,” Machado said. “They are a role model for other countries where democracy is at risk.”

Source : https://apnews.com/article/bolsonaro-charges-formal-accusations-1751e6b6060ccfcc92d0e6d453650e0d

Lois Shafier dropped her mobile phone into a deposit box, happy in the knowledge that for the next two hours she would be completely offline. No pings, beeps or distractions.

“I’m bad at switching off. I have a proper addiction to my phone,” she told AFP, as she headed into an evening out organised by the “Offline Club” in London.

Tickets were snatched up when they went on sale for the two-hour “digital detox” night, with more than 150 young adults aged mostly between 20 and 35 eager to ditch their screens for an IRL evening — meeting up in real life.

They each paid £9.50 ($11.97) for the chance to switch off their phones and make in-person human connections.

“We are the technology generation, but we’re tired of it. We want to reconnect with the real world,” said Bianca Bolum.

The 25-year-old jeweller had come on her own and was hoping to meet new people.

According to the UK’s telecoms regulator Ofcom, young Brits aged between 25 and 34 spend an average of four hours and three minutes a day glued to their smartphones.

But Liliann Delacruz, 22, said she spent about 10 hours a day texting with her family and friends, surfing the net and checking her socials.

The evening was a chance to “get outside my bubble.”

Scattered around the room in a local London church were tables stacked with board games, as an excited hum echoed around the walls.

Engineer Harry Stead, 25, said he found leaving his phone at the door “freeing”.

“I don’t realise the addiction and then too often I feel the urge to look at my phone and scroll,” he told AFP, adding he suffered from “FOMO” (“Fear of missing out”).

Shafier, 35, had come with a friend and they sat chatting together as they sewed.

If she had been at home, her phone would have been next to her. “I hate I use my phone so much. I’m angry at myself,” she said.

As soon as the evening was over though, she switched her phone back on, scanning her screen.

Ironically the participants found out about the club via social media, often Instagram posts.

Organiser Ben Hounsell, 23, said he was not against technology or calling for everyone to get rid of their phones.

“A lot of people are realising that just getting away from your phone for a few hours can be super beneficial in a number of ways,” he said.

Since the club launched at the end of October, more than 2,000 people have taken part.

“It’s really just growing super rapidly in London. Every event seems to sell out instantly,” he said.

The club has also opened branches in Paris, Barcelona and Dubai. The first Offline Club was launched in Amsterdam by Ilya Kneppelhout and two friends.

“The loneliness epidemic and the mental health epidemics are on the rise. So people really seek connection, genuine connection with others away from screens,” said Kneppelhout.

“A lot of us have social media and phone addictions because we’re using it even though we don’t want to… and we’re using it even though we know it doesn’t make us feel better.”

Kneppelhout has been inspired by book clubs such as Reading Rhythms in New York or the Silent Book Club where people gather to read together.

Those seeking a longer detox can even join retreats in several countries lasting days.

Some influencers, ever present on social media, are leading the way. French woman Lena Mahfouf announced to her millions of followers in November that she was taking a month-long break.

Venetia La Manna, an online activist for sustainable fashion, disconnects from her phone every weekend, and lets her followers know with the hashtag #offline48.

“I’m able to be more present with my loved ones, I sleep better, I have more time to be creative, to be in nature and to be with my community.”

For most people, “the real issue isn’t necessarily harm to mental health; it’s missed opportunities. What didn’t you do because you were scrolling?” said Anna Cox, a professor of human-computer interaction at University College London.

Source : https://www.barrons.com/news/digital-detox-young-adults-flock-to-london-offline-nights-195a3751

 

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration said on Tuesday it had agreed to hold more talks with Russia on ending the war in Ukraine after an initial meeting that excluded Kyiv, a departure from Washington’s previous approach that rallied U.S. allies to isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As the 4-1/2-hour meeting in the Saudi capital was underway, Russia hardened its demands, notably insisting it would not tolerate the NATO alliance granting membership to Ukraine.

Later on Tuesday, Trump said he was more confident after the talks and he would probably meet with Putin before the end of the month.
“Russia wants to do something,” Trump told reporters in Palm Beach, Florida. He brushed aside Ukraine’s concern about being left out of the meeting and said Kyiv should have entered talks much earlier.
“I think I have the power to end this war,” said Trump.
The talks in Riyadh were the first time U.S. and Russian officials met to discuss ways to halt the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two. Ukraine has said it will not accept any deal imposed without its consent, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reiterated “there must be no decision over the heads of Ukraine.”

Even before the talks took place, some European politicians accused Trump’s administration of handing free concessions to Moscow last week by ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine and saying it was an illusion for Kyiv to believe it could win back the 20% of its territory now under Russian control.
U.S. National Security Adviser Mike Waltz told reporters in Riyadh that the war must come to a permanent end, and this would involve negotiations over territory.
“Just a practical reality is that there is going to be some discussion of territory and there’s going to be discussion of security guarantees,” he said.
High-level teams would begin talks on ending the conflict and would separately work to restore the countries’ respective diplomatic missions in Washington and Moscow to ease the talks going forward, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.

Rubio said he came away from the initial talks convinced that Russia was “willing to begin to engage in a serious process” but that reaching peace would involve concessions from all sides.

RUSSIA OFFERS NO CONCESSIONS

Russian officials did not mention offering any concessions and U.S. officials did not claim to have scored any in Tuesday’s meeting, leading observers to doubt whether the talks would turn into serious peace negotiations.
Addressing Ukrainian and European concerns, Rubio said no one was being sidelined and any solution must be acceptable to all parties.
Rubio later spoke to the top diplomats of France, Germany, Italy, Britain and the EU to brief them on the talks, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said.

Both sides said no date had been set for a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which both men say they want.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he had postponed a visit to Saudi Arabia planned for Wednesday until next month. Sources familiar with the matter said the decision was made to avoid giving “legitimacy” to the U.S.-Russia talks.
Kyiv says talks on how to end the war should not be held behind Ukraine’s back.
Ukraine ultimately will have a vote on whether to accept a deal negotiated between Washington and Moscow, and could reject a bad one, cautioned Evelyn Farkas, executive director of the McCain Institute and a former senior Pentagon official.
“In the worst case scenario, Ukraine will keep fighting. If their defences crumble, I don’t think that the American people want to see those pictures on television and to be held responsible,” Farkas said.
As European countries discuss the possibility of contributing peacekeepers to back any Ukraine peace deal, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in Riyadh that Moscow would not accept deployment of NATO troops there, whatever flag they were operating under.
“Of course, this is unacceptable to us,” he said.
The comments by Lavrov signalled that Russia will keep pressing for further concessions in the negotiations. The opening encounter on Tuesday saw Lavrov and Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov – two veterans who have spent a combined 34 years in their current roles – negotiate with three Trump administration officials in their first month on the job.
“So far I have seen zero evidence that Putin is willing to give one inch in order to negotiate a peace deal,” Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia under former President Barack Obama, wrote on X.

POTENTIAL ‘ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIPS’

Lavrov said there was “high interest” in lifting economic barriers between the two countries. After the invasion, the U.S. and other Western countries imposed waves of sanctions on Moscow.
Rubio said European countries have also imposed sanctions, so they would have to be involved in talks on lifting the measures. If the conflict ultimately ended, he added, it would “unlock” opportunities for U.S.-Russian cooperation, including “some pretty unique, potentially historic economic partnerships.”
The fast-moving diplomacy, beginning with a Putin-Trump phone call only six days ago, has triggered alarm in Ukraine and European capitals that the two leaders could cut a quick deal that ignores their security interests, rewards Moscow for its invasion and leaves Putin free to threaten Ukraine or other countries in the future.
Tuesday’s talks also sparked concern in Washington, which has backed Ukraine’s defence with billions of dollars of military aid approved by the U.S. Congress on a bipartisan basis.
“Russia has won Round One,” U.S. Representative Jake Auchincloss, a Massachusetts Democrat who is a co-chair of the bipartisan House Ukraine caucus, told Reuters.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/europe-says-it-is-committed-ukraine-ahead-russia-us-talks-2025-02-18/

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy postponed his visit to Saudi Arabia in order to not give “legitimacy” to Tuesday’s meeting between U.S. and Russian officials in Riyadh, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Speaking earlier on Tuesday in Turkey, Zelenskiy said he had postponed his visit to the kingdom, which was originally planned for Wednesday, until March 10, saying he did not want “any coincidences”.

“(Ukraine) didn’t want to appear to give anything that happened in Riyadh any legitimacy,” one of the sources said.
Zelenskiy said in Ankara that he had not been invited to Tuesday’s meeting between delegations of top U.S. and Russian officials, which included the foreign ministers of both countries. The United States and Russia said after the talks they had agreed to press ahead with efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
“We want no one to decide anything behind our backs… No decision can be made without Ukraine on how to end the war in Ukraine,” Zelenskiy said.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who took office on January 20, has repeatedly vowed to swiftly end the war. He has pushed for an immediate start to peace talks, but comments from his top officials have raised questions over what he has planned.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told NATO allies last week that it was unrealistic for Ukraine to join the NATO alliance as part of a negotiated settlement with Russia and that Kyiv’s hopes of restoring its internationally recognised borders were an “illusionary goal”.
Hegseth appeared to backtrack on those remarks the day after making them, but his comments left some Ukrainians worried that the U.S. could decide their country’s fate behind its back.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/zelenskiy-postponed-saudi-arabia-visit-not-give-legitimacy-us-russia-meeting-2025-02-18/

A judge on Tuesday declined to immediately block Elon Musk’s government efficiency department from directing firings of federal workers or accessing databases, but said the case raises questions about Musk’s apparent unchecked authority as a top deputy to President Donald Trump.
Washington-based U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan denied – for now – a request by more than a dozen states for a judicial order barring the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, from accessing computer systems at seven federal agencies or purging government workers while litigation plays out.

Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, spearheads DOGE, which has taken the lead role in carrying out the Republican president’s plans for downsizing and overhauling the federal government.
In her decision, Chutkan wrote that the states “legitimately call into question what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight.” But the judge said the states had not shown why they were entitled to an immediate restraining order.

The lawsuit sought to bar DOGE from accessing information systems or firing employees at the departments of Labor, Education, Health and Human Services, Energy, Transportation and Commerce, and at the Office of Personnel Management.
Chutkan could eventually rule in favor of the states but said in her ruling that their request for an emergency court order was too broad and speculative.
Representatives for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, one of the officials who brought the case, said in a statement that her office will “continue to fight in court to protect the rights of all Arizonans from unconstitutional executive overreach.”
Representatives for the other attorneys general did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

DOGE has swept through federal agencies, slashing thousands of jobs and dismantling various programs, since Trump returned to office last month and put Musk in charge of rooting out what they see as wasteful spending as part of the president’s dramatic overhaul of government.
The states argued that Musk wields the kind of power that can be exercised only by an officer of the government who has been nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate under language in the U.S. Constitution called the Appointments Clause. They said DOGE itself has not been authorized by Congress and that its actions put the states’ ability to carry out educational and other programs at risk.
The lawsuit accused Musk’s team of unlawfully accessing data at federal agencies and directing a purge of some of the country’s 2.3 million federal workers. It was filed by more than a dozen states and announced by state attorneys general from New Mexico, Michigan and Arizona.
“The court is aware that DOGE’s unpredictable actions have resulted in considerable uncertainty and confusion for Plaintiffs and many of their agencies and residents. But the ‘possibility’ that defendants may take actions that irreparably harm plaintiffs is not enough,” Chutkan said.
Chutkan, who was appointed by Democratic former President Barack Obama, also oversaw a criminal case against Trump over his efforts to reverse his loss in the 2020 U.S. election, which the Justice Department dropped after he won in November.
Around 20 lawsuits have been filed in various federal courts challenging Musk’s authority, which have led to mixed results.
U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas in New York extended a temporary block on DOGE on Friday that prevented Musk’s team from accessing Treasury systems responsible for trillions of dollars of payments.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-scores-win-suit-challenging-elon-musks-cost-cutting-powers-2025-02-18/

Pope Francis has the onset of double pneumonia, the Vatican said on Tuesday, complicating treatment for the 88-year pontiff and indicating a further deterioration in his fragile health.
Francis has been suffering from a respiratory infection for more than a week and was admitted to Rome’s Gemelli Hospital on February 14.
The Vatican said in a statement that the pope had undergone a chest CAT scan on Tuesday afternoon which had revealed “the onset of bilateral pneumonia that requires further pharmacological therapy”.

Bilateral pneumonia is a serious infection that can inflame and scar both lungs, and makes breathing more difficult.
“Laboratory tests, chest X-ray, and the clinical condition of the Holy Father continue to present a complex picture,” the Vatican said.
It reiterated that the pope was suffering from a “polymicrobial infection”, saying this required corticosteroid and antibiotic therapy, which was “making treatment more challenging”.
“Nevertheless, Pope Francis remains in good spirits,” the Vatican statement added.

The pope is especially prone to lung infections because as a young adult he developed pleurisy and had part of one lung removed.

A Vatican official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, said earlier in the day that the pontiff had not been put on a ventilator and was breathing on his own.
Ahead of the latest statement, the Vatican announced that all public engagements on the pope’s calendar had been cancelled through Sunday.
The pope had been due to lead several events over the weekend for the 2025 Catholic Holy Year, which runs through to next January.
The Vatican said on Monday that doctors had changed the pope’s drug therapy for the second time during his hospital stay to tackle a “complex clinical situation”.
Doctors say a polymicrobial infection occurs when two or more micro-organisms are involved, and can be caused by bacteria, viruses, or fungi.

The Vatican has said Francis will stay in hospital for as long as necessary.
The pope has been plagued by ill health in recent years, including regular bouts of flu, sciatica nerve pain and an abdominal hernia that required surgery in 2023.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/vatican-cancels-popes-weekend-engagements-he-battles-complex-infection-2025-02-18/

Former Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro was charged on Tuesday with leading a plot to overthrow the government and undermine the country’s 40-year-old democracy after his 2022 election loss, complicating his narrow chances of a political comeback.
The charges come after a two-year police investigation into the election-denying movement that culminated in riots by Bolsonaro supporters in the capital in early 2023, a week after President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took office.

Prosecutor General Paulo Gonet charged the far-right firebrand and his running mate, General Walter Braga Netto, with leading a “criminal organization” that wanted to create a new order in the country, including with plans to poison Lula.
A total of 34 people were charged in the plot, including several military officials, such as Bolsonaro’s former national security adviser, retired General Augusto Heleno, and former Navy Commander Almir Garnier Santos, according to the charge sheet.
“The responsibility for acts harmful to the democratic order falls upon a criminal organization led by Jair Messias Bolsonaro, based on an authoritarian project of power,” it added.

Lawyers representing Bolsonaro said in a Tuesday statement that he never supported any movement aimed at dismantling Brazil’s democratic rule of law or the institutions that uphold it.
Analysts consider it unlikely Bolsonaro will be arrested before his trial, unless Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is overseeing the case, deems him a flight risk.
The case echoes the criminal charges faced by U.S. President Donald Trump that accused him of seeking to overturn his own re-election loss in 2020. That case was repeatedly delayed and ultimately dropped after Trump was returned to power in last November’s U.S. election.

The charges against Bolsonaro come just months after Brazil’s federal police concluded a two-year investigation into his role in the election-denying movement that culminated in the riots by his supporters that swept the capital, Brasilia, in early 2023, a week after President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took office.
At the time, many protesters admitted that they wanted to create chaos to justify a military coup that they considered imminent. Late last year, police arrested five alleged conspirators suspected of planning to assassinate the leftist Lula before he took office.
Prosecutors have said the Bolsonaro-led plot included plans to poison Lula, a one-time union leader who previously served two terms as president.
Lula narrowly defeated the right-wing standard-bearer in the late 2022 presidential election.

A PLOT TO TAKE CONTROL

“They sought total control over the three branches of government; they outlined a central office that would serve the purpose of organizing the new order they intended to establish,” the charging document noted, referring to those who allegedly pushed the coup plot.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has repeatedly denied breaking any laws, and calls allegations against him a witch hunt by his political opponents.
Meanwhile, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, a son of the former president, in a post on X on Tuesday night derided the charges as an “unconstitutional and immoral mission to attend to Alexandre de Moraes’ whims and Lula’s nefarious interest.”
Tuesday’s indictment marks the first time Bolsonaro has been charged with a crime, though he has faced several legal challenges to his conduct as president since he lost his reelection bid.
Two previous decisions by Brazil’s Federal Electoral Court have already blocked him from running for president until 2030.
Bolsonaro’s lawyers have two weeks to respond to the charges before the Supreme Court decides whether it will accept the charges and potentially hold a dramatic, televised trial.
If convicted, Bolsonaro faces at least a dozen years behind bars.

DIMMING COMEBACK HOPES

“There’s a 99% chance that the Supreme Court will accept the charges,” said Vera Chemim, a constitutional lawyer in Sao Paulo. “But to convict Bolsonaro, the Supreme Court will need robust evidence.”
Bolsonaro’s former running mate, General Braga Netto, was arrested two months ago after police accused him of interfering in the investigations. In a statement late Tuesday, his lawyers called the charges a “fantasy” that will not erase his “unblemished history” over four decades of service in the Brazilian Army.
A lawyer for former Navy chief Garnier Santos said he will comment once he had fully reviewed the charges, while a lawyer for General Heleno, Bolsonaro’s national security adviser, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A Supreme Court conviction could mark an insurmountable obstacle to Bolsonaro’s hopes to run in the 2026 presidential election, in a potential rematch against Lula.
A 2010 law that Bolsonaro himself voted to pass when he was a member of Congress bars anyone convicted by an appeals court from running for office.
Two sources close to Bolsonaro said the former president has little hope the courts will rule in his favor. Instead, his allies hope to mobilize political support to increase the pressure on courts and lawmakers to clear a path for a comeback.
On Tuesday, hours before prosecutors presented the charges against him, Bolsonaro met with opposition senators to discuss a bill that would lower the length of time politicians are barred from elections if they commit irregularities.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-general-prosecutor-charges-bolsonaro-alleged-coup-plot-2025-02-19/

Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) faces a critical test on Tuesday over its $10 billion proposal to end litigation alleging that its baby powder caused ovarian cancer, as it tries to convince a judge to sign off on its third attempt to resolve thousands of lawsuits through a subsidiary’s bankruptcy.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston will decide the fate of the company’s latest Chapter 11 after a weeks-long court hearing weighing competing demands to approve the settlement or end the bankruptcy altogether.

J&J is attempting to use a subsidiary’s bankruptcy to resolve lawsuits from more than 62,000 plaintiffs alleging its baby powder and other talc products were contaminated with asbestos and caused ovarian and other cancers, a claim that J&J denies.
Courts have rejected J&J’s two previous efforts to resolve the talc litigation through a subsidiary’s bankruptcy, but the company is trying again in a different bankruptcy court. It says the third effort can succeed where the others faltered because its subsidiary, Red River Talc, now has votes showing a broad level of support for its settlement proposal.

“We have the vote,” Red River Talc’s attorney Allison Brown said in court on Tuesday. “There is enormous support for a historic and unprecedented plan.”
Opponents of the deal say the vote was rigged to ensure J&J’s preferred outcome.
Adam Silverstein, an attorney representing plaintiffs who oppose the bankruptcy deal, said on Tuesday that J&J challenged every vote against its plan, while blindly accepting votes in its favor.
J&J allowed votes to be changed from “no” to “yes” but ignored an attorney who sought to change his votes from “yes” to “no,” Silverstein said. The company also violated its own voting rules to accept “yes” votes from attorneys who could not produce medical records or could not show that they had authority to vote on their clients’ behalf, he added.

“It’s a blatant double standard,” Silverstein told Lopez.

Lopez will consider evidence on a wide range of topics, including the validity of the votes that J&J gathered last year and whether such a wealthy company should be able to use a subsidiary’s bankruptcy to protect itself from lawsuits.
The current court hearing will last until the end of February, and Lopez has indicated he will issue a written opinion after the hearing concludes.
J&J argues that bankruptcy offers a faster and fairer way to put money into the hands of cancer victims, who would otherwise face lengthy legal battles in a “lottery-like” court system that results in large verdicts for some plaintiffs and nothing for others.
Erik Haas, J&J’s vice president for litigation, said in a statement that the bankruptcy proposal has “overwhelming support” from cancer victims and “affords claimants a far better recovery than they stand to recover at trial.”
Opponents of the deal argue that the bankruptcy settlement should not bind those who do not like the terms and would prefer to take their chances in court.
By pushing the deal through a subsidiary’s bankruptcy, J&J is trying to force women with ovarian cancer to accept lower settlement payments based on a deeply flawed vote, according to opponents.
The key witnesses in the hearing will include plaintiffs’ lawyers who support and oppose the deal.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/legal/jj-begins-crucial-battle-over-10-billion-baby-powder-settlement-2025-02-18/

The British couple detained in Iran have been charged with espionage, according to the Iranian judiciary news agency.

The pair, named by their family on Monday as Craig and Lindsay Foreman, are accused of “cooperating with covert institutions linked to the intelligence services of hostile and Western countries”.

Iranian state media said last week that the couple were in custody in the southeastern city of Kerman on security-related charges.

The UK’s Foreign Office said it was “deeply concerned” by reports of the espionage charge.

“We continue to raise this case directly with the Iranian authorities,” it said in a statement. “We are providing them with consular assistance and remain in close contact with their family members.”

According to Ms Foreman’s social media, the couple were on a motorbiking trip across the globe to Australia as part of a positive psychology mission.

On Tuesday the Mizan news agency quoted a spokesperson for the judiciary who said the couple “were monitored with the cooperation of security agencies and arrested”.

The statement, translated from Persian, claimed that “the individuals entered Iran under the guise of tourists and, under the guise of investigative and research work, have collected information in several provinces of the country”.

Without revealing sources, officials also allege that “these individuals were cooperating with covert institutions linked to the intelligence services of hostile and Western countries”.

“The connection of these individuals with several institutions affiliated with intelligence services has been confirmed,” the statement added.

State media published a photograph reportedly showing the couple meeting the UK’s ambassador to Iran Hugo Shorter last Wednesday.

Two people sitting across a table, opposite to Mr Shorter, could not be identified as their faces were blurred.

In December, Ms Foreman posted about how they were about to face “one of the most challenging” parts of their trip: Iran and Pakistan and issued an update in January about her visit to Isfahan, a city in central Iran.

The couple had planned to travel to the Balochistan province of Pakistan, but had been warned by Khalid Mehmood, 30, about the potential dangers.

The Foreign Office is currently warning people not to travel to Iran, because of the risk of “arrest, detention and a death sentence”. It also advises against all travel to Balochistan, except the province’s southern coast.

A Foreign Office spokesperson previously said: “We are providing consular assistance to two British nationals detained in Iran and are in contact with the local authorities.”

Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards have arrested dozens of foreign visitors and dual nationals in recent years, mostly on espionage and security-related charges.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/british-couple-detained-in-iran-charged-with-espionage-13311789

THE FAMILY of a mum and her two sons held captive by Hamas in Gaza are in “turmoil” as the terror group claimed they are dead and their bodies will be sent back to Israel.

Ariel Bibas, five, and his baby brother Kfir, two, were snatched with their mother Shiri, 33, during the terrorist group’s bloody rampage on October 7.

Their father Yarden, 35, was also taken after Hamas brutes smashed him over the head with a hammer.

Shiri’s despairing face as she was kidnapped clutching her two children became a symbol for the horror of Oct 7.

And meanwhile Kfir’s adorable smile gave hope as the whole world pleaded for their safe return.

But now Hamas appear to have confirmed the worst – saying the trio’s dead bodies will be released along with six living hostages on Thursday.

Israel have yet to confirm the identities of those to be released.

The Bibas family released a statement shortly after Hamas’ claim saying they are “in turmoil”.

“Until we receive definitive confirmation, our journey is not over,” the family said.

Yarden Bibas, Shiri’s husband and the boys’ father, was freed earlier on February 1.

He spent 484 days in Gaza’s terror tunnels on his own, as he was quickly separated from his family.

Relatives had not had proof of life for months even for Shiri and the boys.

And they had been fearing the worst when the terror group claimed that she and the children had been killed in an Israeli air strike and all other child hostages were released.

But there was no proof that they were dead so the family clung to the slim hope that they were alive as they campaigned for their freedom.

That hope was extinguished with confirmation that the mother and boys – who had been on the list for release in the first six-week phase of the ceasefire – were dead.

The family sheltered inside their home on Kibbutz Nir Oz when Hamas fiends rampaged through southern Israel on October 7.

They kept anxious relatives elsewhere in Israel updated by text message as gunmen stormed through neighbours’ homes.

At 9.43am accountant Yarden messaged his sister, occupational therapist Ofri Bibas Levy, 38, to say: “They’re coming in.”

She never heard from him again.

A short time later a horrific video emerged of Shiri looking utterly terrified and crying as she clung to her two sons while Hamas gunmen led them away from the family home.

Moments later Yarden was smashed over the head with a hammer and with blood streaming down his face was hauled to Gaza, also captured on camera and posted online.

On the one year anniversary of the massacre – when relatives were still praying for the family’s safe return – Ofri told The Sun: “The last year has been a nightmare.

“I could never imagine something like that would happen to me and my family.

“We live every day with a constant feeling of fear – and uncertainty.

“It’s the not knowing which is the worst – are they alive? Are they dead? Are they being tortured?

“Did they get to eat today, something to drink? When was the last time they even saw sunlight?”

After the terror group claimed that Shiri and the boys were dead, she said: “It was a real shock to hear that but after a few days we thought okay, they say that, but we don’t know for sure.

“And even if there is a 1% chance of that not being true, we decided as a family that we’re going to keep fighting and keep demanding and keep shouting for them.

“That keeps us able to still hope in some way.”

Photos from brighter times before October 7 show a typical, happy family, the young boys laughing and smiling as they play with each other and their parents.

In one cute snap, the parents and their sons cuddle up on a sofa all wearing Batman outfits.

Before they received the tragic news, Ofri said: “Ariel is a fully energetic boy who loves tractors and vehicles and superheroes and playing with any kind of water.

“His red head gets a lot of attention everywhere he goes. But he’s also very shy.

“Kfir was a sweet baby, very cuddly and he loved to be tickled. He was very cute.

“Yarden and Shiri are the most amazing parents.”

Heartbreakingly, two-year-old Kfir never celebrated a birthday outside of Gaza.

The family had urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for months to strike a ceasefire deal which would see the hostages return home.

They were delighted when it was finally signed but had mixed emotions because they still had no idea if the family was alive.

Israel announced it will receive the bodies of four hostages from Hamas on 20 February.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/13569979/israeli-child-hostages-confirmed-dead-hamas/

Two years after ChatGPT took the world by storm, China’s DeepSeek has sent ripples through the tech industry by collapsing the cost for developing generative artificial intelligence applications.

But as the global race for AI supremacy heats up, India appears to have fallen behind, especially in creating its own foundational language model that’s used to power things like chatbots.

The government claims a homegrown equivalent to DeepSeek isn’t far away. It is supplying startups, universities and researchers with thousands of high-end chips needed to develop it in under 10 months.

A flurry of global AI leaders have also been talking up India’s capabilities recently.

After being initially dismissive, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this month said India should be playing a leading role in the AI revolution. The country is now OpenAI’s second largest market by users.

Others like Microsoft have put serious money on the table – committing $3bn (£2.4bn) for cloud and AI infrastructure. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang also spoke of India’s “unmatched” technical talent as a key to unlocking its future potential.

With 200 startups working on generative AI, there’s enough entrepreneurial activity under way too.

But despite having key ingredients for success in place, India risks lagging behind without basic structural fixes to education, research and state policy, experts say.

China and the US already have a “four to five year head-start”, having invested heavily in research and academia and developed AI for military applications, law enforcement and now large language models, technology analyst Prasanto Roy told the BBC.

Though in the top five globally on Stanford’s AI Vibrancy Index – which ranks countries on metrics such as patents, funding, policy and research – India is still far behind the two superpowers in many key areas.

China and the US were granted 60% and 20% of the world’s total AI patents between 2010 and 2022 respectively. India got less than half a percent.

India’s AI startups also received a fraction of the private investment that US and Chinese companies got in 2023.

India’s state-funded AI mission, meanwhile, is worth a trifling $1bn compared with the staggering $500bn the US has earmarked for Stargate – a plan to build massive AI infrastructure in the US – or China’s reported $137bn initiative to become an AI hub by 2030.

While DeepSeek’s success has demonstrated that AI models can be built on older, less expensive chips – something India can take solace from – lack of “patient” or long-term capital from either industry or government is a major problem, says Jaspreet Bindra, founder of a consultancy that builds AI literacy in organisations.

“Despite what has been heard about DeepSeek developing a model with $5.6m, there was much more capital behind it.”

Lack of high-quality India-specific datasets required for training AI models in regional languages such as Hindi, Marathi or Tamil is another problem, especially given India’s language diversity.

But for all its issues, India punches far above its weight on talent – with 15% of the world’s AI workers coming from the country.

The issue though, as Stanford’s AI talent migration research shows, is that more and more of them are choosing to leave the country.

This is partly because “foundational AI innovations typically come from deep R&D in universities and corporate research labs”, Mr Bindra says.

And India lacks a supporting research environment, with few deep-tech breakthroughs emerging from its academic and corporate sectors.

The enormous success of India’s payments revolution was due to strong government-industry-academia collaboration – a similar model, he says, needs to be replicated for the AI push.

The Unified Payment Interface (UPI), a digital payment system developed by a government organisation, has revolutionised digital payments in India, allowing millions to transact at the click of a button or by scanning a QR code.

Bengaluru’s $200bn outsourcing industry, home to millions of coders, should have ideally been at the forefront of India’s AI ambitions. But the IT companies have never really shifted their focus from cheap service-based work to developing foundational consumer AI technologies.

“It’s a huge gap which they left to the startups to fill,” says Mr Roy.

He’s unsure though whether startups and government missions can do this heavy lifting quickly enough, adding that the 10-month timeline set by the minster was a knee-jerk reaction to DeepSeek’s sudden emergence.

“I don’t think India will be able to produce anything like DeepSeek at least for the next few years,” he adds. It is a view many others share.

India can, however, continue to build and tweak applications upon existing open source platforms like DeepSeek “to leapfrog our own AI progress”, Bhavish Agarwal, founder of one of India’s earliest AI startups Krutrim, recently wrote on X.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8qglr9r74o

Asha Roy, 17, was excited to take part in a women’s football tournament, but her hopes were dashed as Islamists forced the organisers to cancel the match in northern Bangladesh.

Shortly before the game began earlier this month, the Islami Andolan Bangladesh group announced a protest rally against the event in Rangpur region, saying it was un-Islamic.

Fearing trouble, local police stepped in and the women’s team members were asked to return to their home for their safety.

“I was frustrated and frightened. We had never faced such a situation before. It was disappointing that we came back without playing,” Ms Roy told the BBC.

Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority nation, is currently undergoing a political transition after widespread protests ousted its authoritarian government last year.

An interim administration is currently in charge but there are concerns that Islamist groups, which had been pushed to the fringes, have become emboldened again.

The women’s football match was the third to be cancelled in northern Bangladesh in less than two weeks due to the objections of religious hardliners.

In the Dinajpur area, roughly 70km (43 miles) west of Rangpur, Islamists protesting against a game clashed with locals who supported it, leaving four people injured.

For girls such as Asha Roy, who come from rural areas, football and other sports are a source of female empowerment and a way out of poverty. Those who shine can be selected to play for sponsored teams and some go on to represent Bangladesh internationally.

Many girls have been inspired to take up football thanks to the success of the national women’s team, who are considered heroes after winning two consecutive South Asia Football Championships in recent years.

Ms Roy’s teammate, Musammat Tara Moni, said she would not stop playing despite the threats.

“It’s my dream to represent our national team. My family supports me, so I am not losing hope,” the 16-year-old said.

For their coach Nurul Islam, the objections came as a surprise. “I have taken the team to many tournaments for the past seven years, but it’s the first time we have faced a situation like this,” he said.

The Islamists insist that the match they stopped was against their religious values and say that they are determined to prevent any future football games.

“If women want to play football, they should cover their entire body, and they can play only in front of female spectators. Men cannot watch them play,” Maulana Ashraf Ali, the leader of the Islami Andolan Bangladesh in the Taraganj area of Rangpur, told the BBC.

Mr Ali also insisted that the group “definitely” want hard-line Islamic Sharia law in Bangladesh.

The cancellation of the women’s football matches caused an uproar on social media, leading the authorities to reorganise one of them. They have also launched an investigation into the incidents but say the fear of radicalism is exaggerated.

“There is no truth in the allegations that the government is pandering to Islamists,” Shafiqul Alam, press secretary to interim leader Muhammad Yunus, told the BBC.

Mr Alam pointed out that hundreds of women’s sports matches were held as part of a national youth festival in January, and that they were played across the country without any trouble.

Some people are not reassured. Samina Luthfa, assistant professor of sociology in the University of Dhaka, told the BBC the cancellation of the women’s football matches was “definitely alarming”.

“The women of Bangladesh will not stop playing football and will not stop from going to work or doing their things,” she said, adding that “everyone will fight” efforts to remove women from public spaces.

Other decisions made by the interim government since it assumed power in August in relation to Islamist extremism have also raised concerns.

They include revoking a ban on the country’s largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, which was introduced in the last days of former prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s government.

Jashimuddin Rahmani, the leader of banned Islamist militant group Ansarullah Bangladesh (ABT) – now known as Ansar al Islam – was released in August after a court granted him bail. He was sentenced to five years in prison in connection with the killing of a secular blogger in 2013, but had been kept behind bars because of other pending cases.

According to local media reports, several other people accused of having links with extremist groups have also been given bail in the past few months.

“Though security forces say they will monitor those released, it will be difficult for them to put everybody under surveillance given the limitations,” says Dr Tawohidul Haque, a crime analyst from the University of Dhaka.

While most Bangladeshis practise moderate Islam and secular values dominate society, Islamic extremism is not a new phenomenon in the country. A decade ago, religious zealots targeted secular bloggers, atheists, minorities, foreigners and others in a spate of attacks – killing dozens and sending others fleeing abroad.

In one such incident, a group of Islamist gunmen stormed the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka in 2016, killing 20 people.

It is not just women’s football games that have been targeted recently either. Last week, dozens of Islamist students vandalised a book stall at Dhaka’s famous Ekushey Book Fair.

The protesters were angry over the display a book by the exiled feminist author Taslima Nasrin, who has in the past received death threats from Islamist groups for what they say are her blasphemous writings.

Muhammad Yunus condemned the incident saying the attack “shows contempt for both the rights of Bangladeshi citizens and for the laws of our country.” The police are investigating.

Meanwhile, one of the country’s best-known actors, Pori Moni said she was stopped from inaugurating a department store in the northern town of Tangail after reported objections from religious groups.

“Now I’m really feeling helpless, as well as insecure. It’s part of my job to take part in opening a showroom or a similar event. No one has stopped me all these years,” Ms Moni told the BBC Bengali service.

Similar events involving two other actors, Apu Biswas and Mehazabien Chowdhury, have also been cancelled following threats by Islamists.

Minority groups like the Sufi Muslims say they are also witnessing increasing attacks on their places of worship. Islamist extremists view Sufism as heretical.

“About a hundred of our shrines [mazars] and centres have been attacked in the past six months,” Anisur Rahman Jafri, Secretary General of the Sufism Universal Foundation, told the BBC.

“We have not seen this kind of sudden extremist attack on us since the country’s independence in 1971,” he added, warning that the country was at risk of “Talibanisation” if the situation continued.

Police said only 40 shrines were damaged and that they had stepped up security around religious sites.

The authorities have also been struggling to maintain law and order in the wake of Sheikh Hasina’s departure. Earlier this month, thousands of protesters vandalised homes and buildings connected to Hasina and senior leaders of her Awami League party.

People from other groups and parties, including Islamists, joined in other demonstrations in the capital, Dhaka, and across the country.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxnwnye7wko

A couple in north-east Pakistan has been detained on suspicion of murdering a 13-year-old girl who worked for them as a maid, for allegedly stealing chocolates.

The girl who goes only by one name, Iqra, succumbed to multiple injuries in hospital last Wednesday. A preliminary police investigation said she had been tortured.

The case in Rawalpindi has sparked widespread outrage and posts with the hashtag #JusticeforIqra having garnered tens of thousands of views, and reignited a debate over child labour and the mistreatment of domestic workers.

Laws pertaining to child labour can vary across the country, but children under the age of 15 cannot be employed as domestic workers in the province of Punjab.

“I felt completely shattered inside when she died,” Iqra’s father, Sana Ullah, told the BBC.

He said that he had received a call from the police about Iqra last Wednesday. When he rushed to the hospital, he saw Iqra lying on a bed, unconscious. She died minutes later.

Iqra began working as a maid from the age of eight. Her father, a 45-year-old farmer, said he had sent her to work because he was in debt.

After working for a few employers, she went to work for the couple two years ago, who have eight children of their own. She was earning about £23 ($28) per month.

Police said Iqra had been accused of stealing chocolates from her employers, adding that a preliminary investigation showed that Iqra had been tortured.

Police also say there was evidence of frequent abuse. Pictures and videos obtained by the BBC showed multiple fractures in her legs and arms, as well as a serious injury to her head.

An autopsy is being conducted to assess the full extent of her injuries, and the police has told the BBC that they were still awaiting the final medical report.

“My heart cries tears of blood. How many… are subjected to violence in their homes every day for a trivial job of a few thousand?” activist Shehr Bano wrote on X. “How long will the poor continue to lower their daughters into graves in this way?”

Others have pointed out that her murder was allegedly triggered by something so minor.

“She died over chocolate?” asked one Pakistani user on X.

“This is not just a crime, it’s a reflection of [a] system that enables [the] rich to treat [the] poor as disposable,” another said.

Iqra’s employers, Rashid Shafiq and his wife Sana, have been arrested, along with a Quran teacher, who worked for the family. The teacher had brought Iqra to the hospital and left after telling hospital staff that the girl’s father had died and her mother was not around.

Police told the BBC it was unclear if she believed this to be the truth.

Iqra’s father says he wants to see “those responsible for my daughter’s death punished”.

Despite the public outrage such cases usually garner, they are typically settled out of court and it’s rare for suspects to be successfully prosecuted.

In 2018, a judge and his wife were sentenced to three years in jail for torturing their then 10-year-old maid in what had been a highly publicised case that sparked outrage across the country. But they later had their sentences reduced to one year.

Tayyaba was found with severe injuries, which the Pakistan Institute of Medical Science said included burns to her hands and feet. Pictures of the girl also showed cuts and bruising to her face, along with a swollen left eye. She told prosecutors she was beaten for losing a broom.

Under Pakistani law, victims or their families have the right to forgive suspects in a number of serious crimes. To do so, they have to state in court that they forgive a suspect “in the name of God”.

In reality, legal observers say that the primary motive for that “forgiveness” is normally financial, and paying victims is not illegal.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2k2ly8j75o

Depending on how you read it, New Zealand’s latest tourism tagline can be a well-meaning plea for people to visit – or a threat to kick Kiwis out.

“Everyone Must Go!” reads a slogan printed across posters of people in New Zealand’s majestic landscapes – part of a NZ$500,000 ($285,000; £227,000) campaign unveiled on Sunday.

But what was meant as a catchy call to action aimed at Australian tourists has been accused of being tone-deaf, as New Zealand deals with record emigration rates and unemployment.

The government has defended the campaign, with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon saying he “[appreciates] there’s lots of chat about whether everyone loves the slogan or not”.

“The fact that we’re talking about it is a good thing. It’s a great thing,” he added.

Cushla Tangaere-Manuel, tourism spokesperson for the opposition Labour Party, told local news outlet Radio New Zealand (RNZ) that the new slogan “makes New Zealand sound like we’re in a clearance bin at a sale”.

“The irony of that messaging is, that’s how Aotearoa New Zealanders are feeling right now,” she said, pointing to the “many cuts” that residents have experienced.

Job cuts to the public sector over the past year, as part of the government’s austerity push, have affected thousands of people.

Meanwhile, people are moving out of the country in record numbers. Official figures show that there were nearly 130,000 departures last year – though that was offset by the arrival of nearly 160,000 immigrants.

“New Zealanders are voting with their feet, leaving in record high numbers,” Labour MP Barbara Edmonds wrote on X on Monday. “Is their real tourism plan ‘Everyone Must Go’ – for Kiwis?”

Others associated the slogan with demand for lavatories.

“I think ‘Everyone Must Go’ might refer to the need for toilets in some of our high-tourist spots. I mean, the queues are ridiculous,” Green Party MP Celia Wade-Brown told RNZ.

“They don’t go kayaking, they don’t go diving, but, my goodness, they queue at the toilets.”

Tourism minister Louise Upston said in a statement on Sunday that “the campaign tagline of ‘Everyone must go’ lets Australia know that New Zealand is a ‘must visit’ destination, and that we’re ready and waiting to welcome them now”.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8j88gym3ro

The United States and Russia agreed in high-level talks Tuesday to re-establish embassy staffing in a reversal of American policy by President Donald Trump, fueling fears in Kyiv and building up Moscow’s hopes of re-entering the international mainstream.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that both countries had agreed to re-establish “the functionality of our respective missions in Washington and Moscow” and that Washington would create a high-level team to work on a path to ending the war in Ukraine.

Rubio said negotiators has also agreed to “begin to discuss and think about and examine both the geopolitical and economic cooperation that could result from an end to the conflict in Ukraine,” which he said could only happen once the war came to an end.

His comments came after he led a U.S. delegation in a four-and-a-half hour meeting attended by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other Kremlin officials in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Lavrov told reporters the meeting was “very useful” as he confirmed efforts to “remove obstacles” to diplomatic efforts that he blamed on the Biden administration.

Under the Trump administration, he had “reason to believe that the American side has begun to better understand our position.”

Separately, Yuri Ushakov, President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy adviser, said the talks had paved a way for a possible meeting between Trump and Putin, although he did not say when that might take place, according to the Russian state news agency TASS.

Trump announced last week that he and Putin had held a 90-minute phone conversation. The meeting Tuesday in Riyadh is a major turning point in Washington’s relationship with Moscow, which has been diplomatically and financially isolated since it invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Attention in Europe is still focused on the war in Ukraine, the deadliest conflict on the continent since World War II.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders expressed alarm and dismay at being shut out of the talks Riyadh. One of Kyiv’s main concerns is that Russia will be given the go-ahead to keep some of the 20% of Ukraine it has occupied.

“Ukraine did not know anything about it,” Zelenskyy warned ahead of the meeting.

Kyiv “regards any negotiations on Ukraine without Ukraine as ones that have no result, and we cannot recognize … any agreements about us without us,” he said.

Zelenskyy said Tuesday that he would delay a trip scheduled for Wednesday that was arranged in advance and not related to the U.S.-Russia talks.

“I will not go to Saudi Arabia,” he said. “We contacted our partners in Arabia — I have a good relationship with them. We just contacted each other and agreed that I would be there on an official visit on March 10. And we expect the USA in Kyiv.”

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned that Russia could use the pause to remobilize and mount a fresh attack on Ukraine or target other countries in Europe.

“Russia is threatening all of Europe now, unfortunately,” Frederiksen said, reflecting the view of many in Europe that Putin would seek to dominate, if not outright occupy, more countries.

In Kherson, a port city in southern Ukraine that has come under heavy Russian shelling throughout the war, residents balanced their hopes for an end to the fighting with fears about Trump’s decision to leave Kyiv out of negotiations.

“It’s confusing. It’s going quickly and we don’t see where it’s going,” Yulia Ishuk, who worked at a restaurant in the port city of Odesa before the war and now runs a rehab center for soldiers, told an NBC News crew on the ground.

“Without our president, Zelenskyy … it’s kind of like games behind our backs and we don’t like it because we don’t understand that,” Ishuk, 47, said. “We don’t understand what’s going on.”

As negotiators had discussions in Riyadh, Washington’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, was in Brussels on Tuesday, where he was meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ahead of a trip to Ukraine.

Zelenskyy, in Abu Dhabi on Monday, said he wanted to take Kellogg “to the front line” and have him meet with intelligence officials and diplomats so he could “bring more information back to America.”

Kellogg’s visit comes after France on Monday hosted an emergency meeting of European Union countries and Britain to decide how to respond after the Trump administration said they would not be part of the talks with Russia.

French President Emmanuel Macron said he had spoken with both Trump and Zelenskyy following an emergency meeting of European leaders Monday.

“We seek a strong and lasting peace in Ukraine,” Macron said in a post on X. “To achieve this, Russia must end its aggression, and this must be accompanied by strong and credible security guarantees for the Ukrainians.”

Noting his conversation with Macron, Zelenskyy said in a post on X on Monday that the two shared a “common vision” of “robust and reliable” security guarantees for Ukrainians.

“Any other decision without such guarantees — such as a fragile ceasefire — would only serve as another deception by Russia and a prelude to a new Russian war against Ukraine or other European nations,” he warned.

The high-level talks in Riyadh came after Russia released American Kalob Byers, a Trump administration official confirmed to NBC News on Tuesday. Byers had been detained in the country on suspicion of drug smuggling since early February.

Source : https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/us-russia-talks-ukraine-europe-invasion-rcna192544

Elon Musk has no power to put anyone in jail, but his fantasy about a “long prison sentence” for “60 Minutes” reporters is dangerous nonetheless.

If you want to know why, just ask Elon Musk.

He has repeatedly (and correctly) posted that “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy.” In fact, those were among his first words when he took control of Twitter, now X.

Musk has described himself as a “free speech absolutist.” He has decried speech restrictions in other countries. Yet his recent statements about the American media contradict his self-image.

In a few short weeks, Musk has become the most vicious media-basher of the Trump administration, sometimes going even further than President Trump has.

He has attacked a Wall Street Journal journalist who broke news about a DOGE staffer’s racist and eugenic remarks, saying the journalist should be “fired immediately.” He has argued that taxpayer-funded media outlets like Radio Free Europe should be shut down, disparaging the workers as “radical left crazy people.” And he has pushed conspiracy theories about media outlets committing “crimes” without any specifics.

Musk’s posts matter because he has the attention and affection of millions. When he makes statements that are antithetical to American values, some of his fans feel emboldened to do the same.

Notably, though, when he assailed “60 Minutes” in an anti-democratic tirade Sunday night, scores of usually Musk-friendly followers replied to him with criticism, pointing out his past promotion of “free speech” and accusing him of hypocrisy.

A representative for Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk vs. “60 Minutes”

A production of CBS News, “60 Minutes” is the most-watched newsmagazine on American TV. Trump is currently suing CBS and its parent company Paramount Global over the program’s interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris last fall. Trump claims CBS doctored the interview to help Harris beat him in the election; CBS denies the charge, and legal experts interviewed by CNN say the suit is a frivolous attempt to intimidate the network and the wider news media.

On Sunday night “60 Minutes” led off its broadcast with correspondent Scott Pelley’s report about Trump’s first four weeks, with a focus on USAID and the human impact of DOGE’s dismantling of the department.

The newsmagazine said Musk and DOGE did not respond to requests for interviews.

But after the report aired, Musk replied to a “60 Minutes” tweet, seemingly in a bid to discredit the reporting.

“60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election,” Musk wrote, alluding to that Harris interview. “They deserve a long prison sentence.”

Musk didn’t back up his assertions. He can’t, because there is no evidence that CBS ran interference for Harris. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that CBS asked her tough questions; engaged in standard editing practices; and aired a hard-hitting interview.

Musk has first-hand experience with “60 Minutes.” In a 2018 interview with correspondent Lesley Stahl, years before he actually acquired Twitter, Musk said “I use my tweets to express myself. Some people use their hair. I use Twitter.”

So do many others – but Musk is now in a unique position, not only as the richest man in the world, but as a special government employee in the Trump administration.

Musk vs. free speech

By positioning himself as Mr. Free Speech, but then proclaiming that disfavored journalists “deserve” to be jailed, Musk is lending credence to those who say he doesn’t truly care about democracy, he values only oligarchy.

His prison post prompted Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, to write to Musk, “Throwing journalists in jail over their reporting is what authoritarian governments do in countries like China, Russia, and Iran. Here in the US, you’ll have to settle for using your enormous public platform to criticize the media. As you’ve been doing. You know, counterspeech.”

This is not the first time Musk has encouraged prosecutions of people he dislikes. He has publicly hoped for criminal action against companies that “boycotted” X and asserted that a nonprofit group “should be prosecuted for interference in US elections by a foreign entity.”

Those posts last year led to an initial round of criticism that he wasn’t living up to his “free speech absolutist” posture.

President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have come under similar scrutiny. Last month Trump signed several executive orders policing language at the same time he signed one titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.”

“Conservatives who just moments ago abhorred any form of censorship are now 100% chill with the government banning words,” USA Today national columnist Rex Huppke wrote last weekend.

In a high-profile speech in Munich, Germany last week, Vance accused European allies of censoring free speech at roughly the same time the Trump administration was banning The Associated Press from attending Trump Q&As and photo ops.

When progressive commentator Mehdi Hasan pointed this out on Monday, Vance replied on X; called Hasan a “dummy”; and said “I think there’s a difference between not giving a reporter a seat in the WH press briefing room and jailing people for dissenting views. The latter is a threat to free speech, the former is not. Hope that helps!”

Hasan pointed out that Musk “just called for a ‘long prison sentence’ for CBS journalists, for edits he didn’t like. Did you not get the memo?” Vance did not engage further.

A CBS spokesperson declined to comment on Musk’s provocation.

Musk arguably gets a pass, much of the time, because he posts so darn much. On Monday he tweeted more than 94 times and retweeted others at least another 36 times.

Source : https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/18/media/elon-musk-60-minutes-prison/index.html

An Italian court has ordered a journalist to pay €5,000 in damages to the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, for mocking her height over social media in what was defined as “body shaming”.

Giulia Cortese, a journalist based in Milan, was also given a suspended fine of €1,200 over the jibe, which dated back to October 2021, a year before Meloni’s far-right coalition government came to power.

The pair clashed after Cortese, 36, published a mocked-up photo of Meloni with the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in the background on Twitter, now X. In reaction, Meloni wrote on Facebook that the “falsified photo” was of “unique gravity” and that she had instructed her lawyer to pursue legal action against the journalist.

In two further tweets on the same day, Cortese wrote messages that translate as: “The media pillory you created on your Facebook page qualifies you for what you are: a little woman,” and “You don’t scare me, Giorgia Meloni. After all, you’re only 1.2 metres (4 ft) tall. I can’t even see you.”

Cortese was acquitted over the tweet comparing Meloni to Mussolini, but convicted of defamation over the latter two, which the Milan judge said amounted to “body shaming”.

Cortese said that being convicted over a “joke phrase” was “scandalous”. “There’s [a] climate of persecution. I don’t feel I have the freedom any more to write about this government, because once you are identified as an inconvenient journalist for this government, they don’t let anything pass,” Cortese told the Guardian.

Cortese can appeal but is undecided about whether to do so. “Going ahead with it risks costing me a lot, and I don’t know how it would end,” she said.

Meloni’s lawyer said she would donate the €5,000 to charity when a definitive sentence was confirmed and the money was paid.

According to various Italian news outlets, Meloni is 1.63 metres (5ft 3in) tall.

It is not the first time she has taken legal action against a journalist or someone who has criticised her publicly. Since coming to power, her government has been accused of making strategic use of defamation suits to silence journalists and public intellectuals.

In a high-profile case last autumn, the anti-mafia writer Roberto Saviano was found guilty of libelling Meloni and fined €1,000 for calling her “a bastard” over her migration policies. The case dated back to a TV interview in December 2020 in which Saviano, author of the bestselling book Gomorrah, castigated Meloni and her fellow far-right leader Matteo Salvini on TV over their vitriol towards charity-run ships rescuing people in the Mediterranean.

Meloni is also suing the Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal, who has Italian and Israeli citizenship, over a tweet dating from September 2022. In addition, Jebreal is being sued by Fabio Rampelli, a politician from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, and vice-president of the lower house of parliament, over a tweet in January.

Source : https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/18/italian-journalist-ordered-pay-damages-mocking-giorgia-meloni-height

In Tulsi, a village in central India, social media has sparked an economic and social revolution. It’s a microcosm of YouTube’s effect on the world.

As villagers head into the fields of Tulsi, a village outside Raipur in central India, on a muggy September morning, 32-year-old YouTuber Jai Varma asks a group of women to join him for his latest video. They gather around him – adjusting their sarees and sharing a quick word and a smile.

Varma places an elderly woman on a plastic chair, asks another to touch her feet and a third to serve water, staging a scene of a rural village festival for fans who will enjoy his content from cities and countries thousands of kilometres away. The women, familiar with this kind of work, are happy to oblige. Varma captures the moment, and they return to their farmwork.

A few hundred metres away, another group is busy setting up their own production. One holds up a mobile phone, filming as 26-year-old Rajesh Diwar moves to the rhythm of a hip-hop track, his hands and body animated in the expressive style of a seasoned performer.

Tulsi is like any other Indian village. The small outpost in the central state of Chhattisgarh is home to one-storey houses and partially paved roads. A water storage tank peers out above the buildings, overseeing the town. Banyan trees with concrete bases serve as gathering spots. But what sets Tulsi apart is its distinction as India’s “YouTube Village”.

Some 4,000 people live in Tulsi, and reports suggest more than 1,000 of them work on YouTube in some capacity. Walk around the village itself and it’s hard to find someone who hasn’t appeared in one of the many videos being filmed there.

The money that YouTube brings has transformed the local economy, locals say, and beyond financial benefits, the social media platform has become an instrument for equality and social change. The residents who’ve launched successful YouTube channels and found new streams of income include a number of women who previously had few opportunities for advancement in this rural setting. Under the banyan trees, conversations have turned to technology and the internet.

February 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of YouTube. Approximately 2.5 billion people use the platform per month by some estimates, and India is one of YouTube’s biggest markets by far. Over the decades, YouTube has changed not only the web but the entire way we think about creating and consuming human culture. In a way, Tulsi village is a microcosm of YouTube’s effect on the world itself, where for some, their entire lives revolve around online videos.

“It is keeping the children away from bad habits and crime,” says Netram Yadav, 49, a farmer in Tulsi and one of the many admirers of the village’s burgeoning social media scene. “These content creators have made everyone in the village proud for what they have been able to achieve and do.”

THE BBC was accused of being a propaganda tool for Hamas yesterday in a furious row over a documentary.

Its prime-time Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone featured children living in the strip since the October 7 attack on Israel.

But the main narrator — 13-year-old Abdulla Eliyazouri — is reportedly the son of Hamas deputy minister of agriculture Dr Ayman Al-Yazouri.

And one of the cameramen is said to have previously posted messages saluting the October 7 massacre and videos showing off Hamas weapons.

The hour-long documentary was broadcast on Monday on BBC2 and is available for the next year on iPlayer.

Investigative journalist David Collier, who revealed the identities of those involved, said: “How did the BBC let a son of a Hamas minister walk around looking for sympathy and demonising Israel for an hour in a documentary?

“The BBC is publishing Hamas propaganda.

“The current hierarchy at the BBC has turned a once respected state broadcaster into a propaganda outlet for a radical Islamic terror group.”

Tory peer Baroness Foster also blasted the Beeb, saying: “A total lack of accurate research resulted in an hour of propaganda and lies.”

Abdulla previously featured in a Channel 4 report in November 2023, soon after Israel’s bombardment of Gaza began.

He appeared under a different name with a man called Khalil Abushammala, who was said to be his father.

But Abushammala is actually his uncle and director of a group which campaigns for Palestinian prisoners.

Source : https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/33445084/bbc-hamas-gaza-doc-bias-fury/

Pop star Shakira will perform in Peru on Monday after cancelling a Sunday show due to being hospitalized, the singer announced on social media.
After being hospitalized for most of Sunday due to an “abdominal issue,” Shakira said that the doors of the stadium will open at 1600 local time (1900 GMT) and the concert will begin at 2025 Lima time.
She was scheduled to perform in Lima on Sunday and Monday as part of her “Las mujeres ya no lloran world tour.”

Shakira said in a social media post that she went to the emergency room on Saturday night but did not give any details about the abdominal issues.
“People who had tickets have already gotten their spirits back, as they feel happy to be able to enjoy this show today,” said Isabela Torres, a fan outside the National Stadium in Lima.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/shakira-perform-peru-monday-after-sunday-cancellation-due-hospitalization-2025-02-17/

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is clashing with the country’s judiciary in the same way her old political ally and mentor Silvio Berlusconi used to, promising a once-in-a-lifetime overhaul of the legal system.
But whereas Berlusconi failed to impose his will on Italy’s fiercely independent magistrates and prosecutors, Meloni could yet come out on top, unburdened by the crushing conflict of interest that pegged back her billionaire predecessor.

The judiciary is resisting pressure to change, calling a rare strike later this month over the planned reform.
Separately, courts are challenging a flagship government initiative to redirect migrants away from Italy to Albania.
Meloni’s rightist government has cried foul, accusing the powerful judges of playing politics, and has said it will not back down, drawing comfort from opinion polls that show many voters support its uncompromising stance.
“Basically, they want to govern themselves. But there’s a problem. If I make a mistake, the Italians can vote me out of office. If they make a mistake, no one can say or do anything. No power in a democratic state works like that,” Meloni told a TV channel owned by the Berlusconi family in late January.

Italy’s justice system is one of the most dysfunctional in Europe, where, despite recent improvements, it still takes four times the European average to reach a final ruling in civil cases and 3.5 times the average to secure a definitive verdict in criminal trials, according to 2022 data.
While centre-left governments have tended to focus on improving the efficiency of the courts, Berlusconi, who faced dozens of trials largely tied to his media empire up to his death in 2023, repeatedly pushed to curb prosecution powers.
Opponents denounced these efforts as an attempt to curtail his legal woes, and while he succeeded in making it harder to convict white-collar criminals, he failed in his effort to break the links that bind prosecutors and judges.

Unlike in the United States or Britain, judges and prosecutors in Italy share the same career track and are overseen by the same self-governing body, which will not stand for government interference.

IMPARTIALITY

Meloni, who took power in 2022 at the head of a coalition that includes Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, has revisited the old plan of splitting up the judiciary, saying it will make judges more impartial by cutting their ties with prosecutors.
“This is the reform of all reforms,” said Francesco Paolo Sisto, the deputy justice minister and Forza Italia politician.
“You would never see a soccer referee coming from the same city as one of the two teams on the field. They must be from a different city. Likewise, a judge must be third-party and impartial,” he told Reuters.
In a sign of their discontent, the judiciary has called a one-day strike on Feb. 27, accusing the government of seeking to gain power over prosecutors and dictate what crimes they want to investigate, or steer clear of.

“This will only be harmful. The separation of careers will turn the public prosecutor into a super-police officer, and they will lose the culture of impartiality,” said Nicola Gratteri, the chief prosecutor in Naples who is famed for his battles against the ‘Ndrangheta mafia.
The government has accused some prosecutors and judges of flexing their judicial powers to force a retreat and the battle looks set to dominate domestic politics for months.
A court in January blocked for the third time a government initiative to detain migrants in camps in Albania, frustrating Meloni’s plans to deter people from seeking refuge in Italy and leaving the project in legal limbo.
That same week, a prosecutor stunned Meloni by placing her and three cabinet colleagues under investigation following a government decision to release a Libyan police chief wanted by the International Criminal Court.

HURDLES

Andrea Delmastro Delle Vedove, an undersecretary at the Justice Ministry and member of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, said the magistrates wanted to sabotage the reform. “It seems blatantly obvious to me that this is the case,” he told Reuters.
Magistrates deny this and say they are only applying the law.
Supreme Court prosecutor Marco Patarnello wrote to colleagues last October warning them that Meloni was a “far more dangerous” adversary than Berlusconi because she was not mired in legal investigations and was acting out of “political vision”.
The message, which was leaked to the media and confirmed by Patarnello, acknowledged that public opinion was no longer behind the magistrates, unlike in the 1990s.
The bill has already been approved by the lower house of parliament, and now goes before the Senate. Because it involves changing the constitution, it needs two readings in both chambers and will then almost certainly be put to a referendum.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/italys-meloni-takes-judiciary-echo-berlusconi-2025-02-17/

When police in western France searched surgeon Joel Le Scouarnec’s home after he raped his 6-year-old neighbour in 2017, they found a cache of sex dolls, wigs and child pornography.
They said they also discovered electronic diaries that appeared to detail nearly three decades of rapes and sexual assaults on hundreds of his young patients in hospitals across the region.
In 2020, Le Scouarnec was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the rape and sexual assault of his child neighbour, as well as his two nieces and a 4-year-old patient.

However, the investigation continued into the alleged victims logged on his files. Prosecutors eventually charged him with the aggravated rape and sexual assault of 299 people, many of whom were children, and some of whom were anesthetized when the abuse allegedly took place.
On February 24, Le Scouarnec, 74, will face trial on those charges in the Breton town of Vannes, in France’s largest ever child sexual abuse case.
Prosecutors say Le Scouarnec has admitted to investigators many of the accusations he faces. His lawyers declined to comment ahead of the trial.

The trial comes at a time of reckoning around sex crimes in France after the conviction of Dominique Pelicot, who was found guilty in December of drugging his wife and inviting dozens of men over to their home to rape her. Fifty other men were also convicted of rape in a case that shocked the world.
Le Scouarnec’s case will raise tough questions for France’s publicly run healthcare system, victims and rights groups say. Despite a conviction for child pornography in 2005, Le Scouarnec continued to work in public hospitals until his arrest in 2017.
The Health Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Francois, a plaintiff in the case who was 12 when Le Scouarnec allegedly abused him, said he hoped the case would provide some answers from a system that he said failed him.
“I realize I shouldn’t have been operated on by this surgeon,” said Francois, who asked to be identified only by this name. “I feel betrayed by authorities … Why did nobody forbid this surgeon from working with children?”

After discovering Le Scouarnec’s logs in 2017, investigators began tracking down potential victims by matching diary descriptions with hospital records. Although many of the anesthetized patients had no recollection of the alleged abuse, psychiatrists have documented symptoms of post-traumatic stress in victims, according to court documents.
Mathis Vinet was 10 in 2007 when his father and grandfather drove him to the Quimperle hospital with stomach pain.
The grandfather, Roland Vinet, 78, remembers meeting Le Scouarnec, and thinking nothing of the surgeon’s order that Mathis spend the night alone in the hospital, he told Reuters.
In his diary, Le Scouarnec recalled sexually assaulting a little boy that same day and the following one, inappropriately touching his genitals each time, according to a court document.
Mathis was never the same after the hospital visit, Vinet said, eventually falling into a life of alcohol and drugs. He died of an overdose at 24 in 2021, three years after learning from the police about the abuse he allegedly had suffered, and having flashbacks.
Vinet and his wife, who are plaintiffs in the case, said they believed Mathis took his own life. They blame Le Scouarnec for their grandson’s death.
Reuters couldn’t establish the role the surgeon’s alleged actions played in Mathis’ death.

CHILD PORN CONVICTION

Le Scouarnec was given a suspended four-month jail sentence when he was convicted in 2005 for possessing child pornography. He secured a job as a surgeon at the Quimperle public hospital the following year.
A psychiatrist at the hospital alerted management to his concerns about Le Scouarnec’s behaviour in 2006, a court document said, but the surgeon continued to work with children.
The Quimperle hospital didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The prosecutor in Lorient, Stephane Kellenberger, whose office led the investigation into Le Scouarnec’s alleged crimes, said he has opened a separate preliminary probe to ascertain if there was any criminal liability by agencies or individuals who could have prevented the abuse.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/after-shocking-pelicot-crimes-french-surgeon-face-trial-child-sex-abuse-case-2025-02-17/

At least 31 people have died after a bus crash in Bolivia, police have said.

An officer said the driver appeared to have lost control of the vehicle, causing it to drop more than 2,600 ft (800m) off a precipice in the southwestern area of Yocalla.

Among the injured, 10 adults and four children were taken to hospital, with several in intensive care, a healthcare official said.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/at-least-31-dead-after-bus-crash-in-bolivia-13311649

 

Costa Rica said on Monday it was willing to receive migrants from the US who are nationals of other countries. Previously, Panama and Guatemala also offered to do the same.

The country’s presidential office said in a statement that 200 migrants from central Asia and India would be arriving in a commercial flight from the US on Wednesday.

What is the Costa Rica plan?

They will then be moved to the countries of their origin.

“The Government of Costa Rica agreed to collaborate with the US in the repatriation of 200 illegal immigrants to their country. These are people originating from Central Asia and India,” the statement said.

The first set of deportees arriving on Wednesday will be put up in a temporary migrant center, close to the border with Panama.

The operation will be funded by the US government under the supervision of the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

What about Guatemala and Panama?

During US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s tour of Latin America, Panama and Guatemala had agreed a similar arrangement.

No migrants have arrived yet in Guatemala, but Panama received 119 migrants last week, originating from China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and so on.

Throughout his political career, US President Donald Trump has taken a hard stance against migrants. After taking office this January, he vowed to deport “millions and millions” of migrants.

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/costa-rica-to-take-india-central-asia-deportees-from-us/a-71645143

Nepalese Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli said Monday evening his government dispatched two officers to counsel Nepali students after the death of a young woman at an Indian university campus sparked protests.

The Nepalese student, Prakriti Lamsal, was found dead in her dorm room at a well-known private university, the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT), in the eastern Indian city of Bhubaneshwar, on Sunday evening.

Students at the university took to protesting against the incident overnight, asking management for a thorough investigation into the matter, but said they were met with “suppression,” according to the Nepal Students’ Union (NSU).

Turmoil after KIIT asks Nepalese students to ‘vacate’ premises

The university issued a bulletin following protests, asking Nepalese students to “vacate the university campus immediately on February 17,” before rescinding the order Monday evening.

Indian media outlets reported that Nepalese students at the university were asked to board buses so they could be taken to various railway stations and then travel home.

The university administration later issued another appeal on X, writing that it had taken steps to restore normalcy on the campus, adding: “An appeal is made to all our Nepali students who have or plan to leave the campus to return and resume the classes.”

The NSU union told DW that they were “positive about the reversal of the order” but still had concerns about the safety of the students, adding that university authorities had assured the union the people involved in the incident had been suspended.

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/kiit-nepalese-students-death-sparks-anger-at-india-college/a-71642337

A man believed to be the world’s first openly gay Muslim imam has been shot dead while sitting in a car in South Africa, in what many are calling an assassination due to his teachings.

Muhsin Hendricks was killed on Saturday in the southern city of Gqeberha after being ambushed by two men in a pick-up truck. Police said the attackers had their faces covered.

Security footage of the shooting shows one of them jumping out of the vehicle, running up to the car Hendricks was in, and firing multiple times through a side window.

Police have not determined a motive, but political parties and LGBTQ+ organisations claim Hendricks was targeted because he founded a mosque in Cape Town for gay people and campaigned for LGBTQ+ inclusion in Islam. Homosexuality is forbidden in the Islamic faith.

South Africa’s Justice Ministry said it was investigating claims that Hendricks was assassinated.

Hendricks was internationally known and spoke at the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association’s (ILGA) conference in South Africa last year.

Julia Ehrt, executive director of ILGA, said the organisation was “in deep shock at the news of the murder of Muhsin Hendricks and calls on authorities to thoroughly investigate what we fear may be a hate crime.

“He supported and mentored so many people in South Africa and around the world in their journey to reconcile with their faith.”

The ILGA said Hendricks had spoken about how some people were demanding his mosque be shut down, calling it the “gay temple”.

The Democratic Alliance, South Africa’s second-largest political party, said: “The nature of the killing strongly suggests a professional hit.”

Hendricks came out as a gay imam in the mid-1990s, later founding a support network and a mosque for gay Muslims.

Through his Al-Ghurbaab Foundation, he campaigned for their inclusion, referring to himself as “the world’s first openly queer imam”.

Explaining his decision, he said: “When I was looking at the way queer Muslims were negotiating this dilemma between Islam and their sexual orientation and identity, I felt compelled to do something about it.

“And I thought, for me to help would probably be for me to be authentic with myself and come out. I think it’s possible to be queer and Muslim or queer and Christian.”

Source : https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2015557/muhsin-hendricks-openly-gay-imam-shot-dead-south-africa

Japan’s government approved on Tuesday (Feb 18) new targets to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions through 2040, alongside a revised energy plan and an updated industrial policy for the same period.

The measures, which seek to bolster long-term policy stability for businesses, focus on promoting decarbonisation, ensuring a stable energy supply and strengthening industrial capacity to drive economic growth.

Under the new climate policy, Japan aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent from 2013 levels by 2035 and by 73 per cent by 2040, extending its 2030 goal of a 46 per cent cut.

The emissions-cutting target sparked calls for deeper reductions from experts and ruling coalition members when it was first proposed, as the world’s fifth-biggest carbon emitter struggles to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.

Despite more than 80 per cent of 3,000 public comments supporting a more ambitious target, the environment and industry ministries finalised the goal without changes, citing prior deliberations by climate experts.

As part of global efforts to combat climate change, Japan plans to submit its new target, known as a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement, to the United Nations this month.

The revised energy policy aims for renewables to account for up to 50 per cent of Japan’s electricity mix by fiscal year 2040, with nuclear power contributing another 20 per cent as the country pushes for clean energy while meeting rising power demand.

Japanese utilities have struggled to restart nuclear reactors since the 2011 Fukushima disaster, limiting nuclear power to just 8.5 per cent of Japan’s electricity supply in 2023.

The new energy plan removes the previous goal of minimizing reliance on nuclear and calls for building next-generation reactors.

A new national strategy integrating decarbonisation and industrial policy through 2040, aligned with the emission target and energy plan, was also approved by the cabinet.

It aims to develop industrial clusters in areas rich in renewable energy, nuclear power, and other low-carbon power sources.

Source : https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/japan-approves-new-climate-energy-industry-policies-2040-4943891

Top US and Russian diplomats will meet in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday for talks on resetting their countries’ fractured relations and making a tentative start on trying to end the Ukraine war.

Both sides played down the chances that the first high-level meeting between the countries since US President Donald Trump took office would result in a breakthrough.

Still, the very fact the talks were taking place has triggered concern in Ukraine and Europe following the United States’ recent overtures towards the Kremlin.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv was not invited to the discussions in Riyadh, while European leaders were gathering in Paris for emergency talks on how to respond to the radical pivot by the new US administration.

Preparations for a possible summit between presidents Trump and Vladimir Putin are also expected to be on the agenda.

Trump is pushing for a swift resolution to the three-year conflict in Ukraine, while Russia sees his outreach as a chance to win concessions.

Zelensky said Kyiv “did not know anything about” the talks in Riyadh, according to Ukrainian news agencies, and that it “cannot recognise any things or any agreements about us without us”.

He said on social media that any peace deal would need to include “robust and reliable” security guarantees, which France and Britain have called for but not all European powers support.

Russia said ahead of the meeting that Putin and Trump wanted to move on from “abnormal relations” and that it saw no place for Europeans to be at any negotiating table.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and senior Putin aide Yuri Ushakov will meet with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters the talks would be “primarily devoted to restoring the whole complex of Russian-American relations”, alongside discussions on “possible negotiations on a Ukrainian resolution, and organising a meeting between the two presidents”.

Moscow, which for years has sought to roll back NATO’s presence in Europe, has made clear it wants to hold bilateral talks with the United States on a plethora of broad security issues, not just a possible Ukraine ceasefire.

Before invading in February 2022, Putin was demanding the military alliance pull its troops, equipment and bases out of several eastern members that were under Moscow’s sphere of influence during the Cold War.

The prospects of any talks leading to an agreement to halt the Ukraine fighting are unclear.

Both Russia and the United States have cast the meeting as the beginning of a potentially lengthy process.

“I don’t think that people should view this as something that is about details or moving forward in some kind of a negotiation,” US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said.

Russia’s Ushakov told state media the talks would discuss “how to start negotiations on Ukraine.”

Both Ukraine and Russia have ruled out territorial concessions and Putin last year demanded Kyiv withdraw its troops from even more territory.

Zelensky will travel to Turkey on Tuesday to discuss the conflict with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and then Saudi Arabia a day later.

He does not plan to hold talks with either the US or Russian delegations, his spokesman said Monday.

Zelensky said last week he was prepared to meet Putin, but only after Kyiv and its allies had a common position on ending the war.

As European leaders gathered in Paris for an emergency security summit, Russia’s Lavrov said Monday he saw no point in them taking part in any Ukraine talks.

The significance of the talks taking place in Riyadh was not lost on analysts.

A diplomatic pariah under the former US administration, it has been brought back into the fold with Trump’s return.

“Europe’s the traditional meeting place for the Americans and the Russians, but that’s not an option in the current environment,” said James Dorsey of the National University of Singapore.

Source : https://www.ibtimes.com/saudi-arabia-hosts-us-russia-talks-no-seat-ukraine-3764053

Protestors across the nation gathered outside Tesla showrooms on Saturday to protest CEO Elon Musk’s leadership of President Donald Trump’s government cost-cutting initiative.

Demonstrators in cities like New York, Seattle, and Los Angeles carried signs with the phrase “Stop Musk,” signaling concerns over his close ties to Trump’s agenda, reported the Guardian.

Protests against DOGE have been taking place in Washington, D.C. since February 3. Critics argue that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is illegally dismantling agencies and firing federal workers.

“We’re under attack by billionaires,” said one ex-federal worker, Hanna Hickman, who was recently fired under DOGE’s unwavering purge.

Musk’s $200 million campaign contribution to Trump’s election campaign has raised alarms among Tesla investors, fearing sales declines in liberal strongholds like California.

The Financial Times said Tesla’s stock value has declined by 12% since the beginning of this year. Tesla experienced its first annual sales decline last year.

Meanwhile, Tesla sales in Germany dropped nearly 60% after Musk inserted himself into the nation’s elections and aligned himself with far-right politics.

Musk even drew the ire of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who gave a rather dismissive take on Musk’s scrutiny on German politics, “Don’t feed the troll.”

Celebrities joined the backlash–Sheryl Crow sold her Tesla, saying, “You are who you hang out with.”

Musk’s political stance could reshape Tesla’s customer base–potentially trading liberal buyers for conservative ones.

Trump signed an order to kill the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), which was initially investigating Tesla for workplace discrimination.

Time Magazine mocked Trump’s administration by putting a photo of “President Elon Musk” on the cover of the publication in response to his growing presence in American politics.

Musk’s bid to buy Sam Altman’s OpenAI, which a lawsuit revealed he left after a failed attempt to merge the company with Tesla, has led to Altman publicly speaking about the spat.

Trump’s staff said the president was “furious” at Musk for panning his $500 billion artificial intelligence (AI) deal dubbed the Stargate project involving OpenAI.

“They don’t actually have the money,” Musk said in an X post referencing the project that includes Soft Bank acting as chair and OpenAI as a key initial tech partner.

Source : https://www.latintimes.com/protestors-gather-outside-tesla-showrooms-across-nation-stop-musk-575841

Argentine President Javier Milei is facing impeachment calls – and legal action accusing him of fraud – over his promotion of cryptocurrency on social media.

Milei posted on X, formerly Twitter, about the $LIBRA coin on Friday, which he said would help fund small businesses and start-ups.

He shared a link to buy it, causing its price to shoot up. But within a few hours, he deleted his post and the cryptocurrency nosedived in value, losing investors most of their money.

Some opposition members of Congress say they plan to start proceedings to impeach Milei. Meanwhile, lawyers filed complaints of fraud in Argentina’s criminal court on Sunday.

Some people online have accused Milei of what is known as a “rug pull” – where promoters of a cryptocurrency draw in buyers, only to stop trading activity and make off with the money raised from sales. They pointed out that the link used to buy the coins referenced a phrase the president uses in his speeches.

But Argentina’s presidential office said on Saturday that the decision to remove the post was to avoid “speculation” following public reaction to the launch of the cryptocurrency.

It said Milei was not involved in the cryptocurrency’s development, and that the government’s Anti-Corruption Office would investigate and determine whether anyone had acted improperly, including the president himself.

Jonatan Baldiviezo, one of the plaintiffs who filed the legal action, told Associated Press “the crime of fraud was committed, in which the president’s actions were essential”.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp9x9j89evxo

Olympic shooter Manu Bhaker has been named BBC Indian Sportswoman of the Year for 2024 after a global public vote.

The 22-year-old was recognised for her historic achievement in becoming the first Indian woman to win two medals at a single Olympic Games.

Bhaker became the first Indian woman to win an OIympic medal in shooting when she won bronze in the women’s 10m air pistol in Paris.

Two days later she won a second bronze – alongside Sarabjot Singh in the mixed 10m air pistol.

Bhaker has previously won the BBC’s ISWOTY Emerging Athlete of the Year award.

On accepting her latest award, Bhaker said: “I have had a journey of ups and downs. I hope I can inspire women, all athletes and people with big dreams.

“Your journey doesn’t end if you are struggling. You write your own story.”

Her fellow shooter Avani Lekhara was presented with the BBC ISWOTY Para-sportswoman of the Year award.

The 23-year-old is the first Indian woman to win three Paralympic medals, with gold in Paris following a gold and bronze at Tokyo 2020.

Indian President Droupadi Murmu said: “I appreciate the entire team of the BBC for the praiseworthy initiative of organising BBC Indian Sportswoman of the Year.

“The extraordinary athletes who have been recognised through this initiative have not only excelled in their sports but have also inspired young women to pursue their dreams fearlessly.”

BBC director general Tim Davie, who hosted the awards ceremony, said: “Manu Bhaker’s historic Olympic performance is a defining moment for Indian sports. Her journey from a promising young shooter to a record-breaking Olympian inspires athletes across the country and beyond.

“We are also honoured to celebrate Avani Lekhara as the Para-sportswoman of the Year. Her resilience and record-breaking success continue to pave the way for greater inclusion and excellence in Para-sports.

“The BBC’s commitment to audiences in India makes our relationship here a special one, and we are proud to celebrate the achievements of India’s incredible sportswomen.”

Archer Sheetal Devi won the Emerging Athlete Award after becoming India’s youngest Paralympic medallist.

The 18-year-old added a bronze medal at the Paris Games to two golds and one silver at the 2022 Asian Para Games, and a silver at the World Para Archery Championships.

Mithali Raj was given the Lifetime Achievement Award for her record 18-year captaincy of the Indian women’s cricket team.

Raj, 42, led the team from 2004 to 2022 and is the longest-serving captain in international cricket history.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/sport/articles/cj656x4le9ro

The choice by the Trump administration of Saudi Arabia as the location for key talks on Ukraine underscores how far the Kingdom has come diplomatically from the near pariah state it became after the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

The shadow that cast over the country and its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in particular, appears to have lifted, although there are still concerns occasionally raised at international forums over Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.

On many fronts – in entertainment and sport in particular – the country has spent huge amounts of money to further its ambitions to be a major player on the world stage.

Diplomatically, the Saudi leadership has also been enhancing its role. During the Biden years, the Kingdom increased its pivot away from reliance on the US as its key international ally.

The Saudis made clear that they would follow what they perceive as their interests first and foremost – striking up closer relationships with countries viewed as key rivals to the US, such as Russia and China.

The return of Donald Trump to the White House will have been welcomed by the Saudis.

His first foreign visit in his first term was to Saudi Arabia – and the transactional nature of his foreign policy is more conducive to the current Saudi leadership.

One of the possible achievements that Mr Trump would most like to chalk up on his record would be a peace deal between the Saudis and Israel – which would be the culmination of the Abraham Accords that he initiated in his first term.

But the war in Gaza has subsequently got in the way and may well raise the price that Saudi Arabia will demand for a peace agreement.

The Saudis were very quick to announce their definitive rejection of Mr Trump’s plan for Gaza – to remove all the Palestinians and rebuild it as a resort.

It has spurred the Kingdom to try to come up with a workable alternative plan with other Arab states – which would see Gazans remain in place as the enclave is rebuilt and would lead to a two state solution of the conflict.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp9x97yvjp4o

Novak Djokovic says a majority of tennis players have lost faith in the anti-doping authorities following Jannik Sinner’s three-month ban, and there’s a widespread feeling that “favoritism” is being shown to the sport’s biggest stars.

The 24-time major winner called on the World Anti-Doping Agency and the International Tennis Integrity Agency to overhaul their processes for dealing with doping cases “because the system and the structure obviously doesn’t work.”

“Right now there is a lack of trust generally from the tennis players, both male and female, toward WADA and ITIA and the whole process,” Djokovic said at the Qatar Open.

Top-ranked Sinner reached a deal with WADA on Saturday to accept a ban that will have him back playing in time for the French Open in May without having to miss a single Grand Slam tournament. That came after the International Tennis Integrity Agency had decided not to suspend Sinner for what it judged was accidental contamination by a banned anabolic steroid last March.

The short ban for Sinner came after five-time Grand Slam champion Iga Swiatek accepted a one-month suspension in November after testing positive for a banned substance that she said was accidentally consumed because of a contaminated nonprescription medication. Both bans are much shorter than what other athletes in tennis and in other sports have normally received in similar cases.

“It’s not a good image for our sport, that’s for sure,” Djokovic, the long-time No. 1 in men’s tennis, said. “There’s a majority of the players that I’ve talked to in the locker room, not just in the last few days, but also last few months, that are not happy with the way this whole process (for Sinner) has been handled.

“A majority of the players don’t feel that it’s fair. A majority of the players feel like there is favoritism happening. It appears that you can almost affect the outcome if you are a top player, if you have access to the top lawyers and whatnot.”

Sinner had been scheduled to play in Qatar before accepting the ban.

The handling of Sinner’s case had already raised questions about double standards, and when the ban was announced it was widely criticized by other players. The positive tests weren’t publicly revealed until August because Sinner successfully appealed against being provisionally banned from playing. He then won the U.S. Open in September and the Australian Open in January.

Sinner’s explanation for the positive test was that trace amounts of Clostebol in his doping sample was due to a massage from a trainer who used the substance after cutting his own finger, which WADA accepted.

Djokovic said he didn’t question Sinner’s and Swiatek’s innocence but that he and other players are frustrated about the inconsistent handling of doping cases.

He pointed to the case of former women’s No. 1 Simona Halep — who was given a four-year ban by the ITIA in 2022 after a positive test before it was later reduced to nine months — and British player Tara Moore, who was suspended in May 2022 while an investigation lasted 18 months before an independent tribunal determined that her positive test for a banned substance was caused by contaminated meat.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/novak-djokovic-jannik-sinner-doping-3407d7dc8b961ae3962fec4f5055a864

AT least 11 people are dead as brutal ice, harsh wind, and dangerously cold temperatures have wracked the country in an arctic blast.

A week-long arctic outbreak is bringing the coldest weather this winter has seen from the North Pole down to multiple states across the country.

More than 65 million Americans have been issued cold weather alerts in 13 states from Texas to Minnesota.

The extreme weather has brought freezing rain to states including Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia.

The flash floods in Kentucky have killed at least 11 people, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear confirmed on Monday.

“All of Kentucky still has standing water in different areas,” Beshear said in a storm briefing.

“Over 300 roads still impacted and closed, so everyone, be careful.”

The flooding was so extreme in Detroit, Michigan, that people had to be rescued from their homes, according to ABC affiliate WXYZ.

Frozen cars in Detroit were stuck in icy flood water standing at least two feet high, a terrifying video posted on X showed.

The chilly rain will be followed by snow flurries before record-low temperatures are expected to hit the US in the coming polar vortex.

A polar vortex is swirling cold air around the North and South Poles that can be pushed down into the South.

In a normal winter, the polar vortex is stretched into the US maybe two or three times, according to the Associated Press.

However, this is the tenth icy event so far this winter – and it’s set to be the coldest.

“Everything, all the stars align, all the wind directions in the atmosphere are dragging the cold polar air out of the Canadian Arctic,” Meteorologist Ryan Maue said, according to the AP.

“It’s the depths of winter. Everything signals extreme biting, winter cold.

“Obviously this isn’t the first polar vortex episode of the winter, but it looks to be the most severe.”

The polar vortex will move temperatures well below zero for states across the Midwest and East Coast.

Temperatures are expected to plunge to -45 degrees Fahrenheit with wind chill in areas including northeastern Montana and North Dakota.

Your face will fall off at these temperatures.”

The wind chill is expected to make the temperatures even lower.

Areas in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota face an “extreme cold warning,” according to the National Weather Service.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/13561817/arctic-outbreak-cold-temperatures-dead-flood-waters-weather/

The Washington Post has rejected a provocative “Fire Elon Musk” ad campaign, planned by the advocacy group Common Cause. The campaign was scheduled to appear in the Tuesday edition of the paper.

What Happened: Common Cause had entered into a $115,000 deal with the Washington Post to feature the ad. The campaign, co-developed with the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund, was set to cover the front and back page of the Tuesday paper, along with a full-page ad inside the paper, reported The Hill.

The ad featured a large image of Musk laughing, with the White House in the background and the text: “Who’s running this country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?”. It also contained a call to action for readers to urge their senators to have Trump dismiss Musk.

Virginia Kase Solomón, President of Common Cause, stated that the Post’s advertising sales representative had been informed about the ad’s content and had initially shown no issues with running it. However, the Post later declined to run the wrap ad without providing an explanation.

The Post’s decision has sparked questions among the advocacy group, with Kase Solomón questioning if the rejection was due to the ad’s criticism of Musk or potential backlash from the president.

The Post’s advertising guidelines state that advertisers must comply with laws and regulations for political ads and that the publication may require proof of factual claims. The Post declined to comment to The Hill on the decision, citing its policy against discussing internal matters related to specific ad campaigns.

Why It Matters: Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, had previously dismissed concerns about Musk’s influence on the Trump administration. Furthermore, Bezos had expressed optimism about Trump’s second term and pledged to assist in cutting regulations.

Source : https://www.benzinga.com/25/02/43760885/jeff-bezos-owned-washington-post-turns-down-ad-campaign-that-asked-whos-running-this-country-donald-trump-or-elon-musk

 

SEMINOLE, Texas — When Aganetha Unger pulled up her large, white van to the emergency measles testing site, several of her eight children were coughing.

“We had some sickness in the house, not very bad, but some fever, some cough,” said Unger, who is Mennonite. One child, she said, had a fever of 103 degrees.

Her youngest getting tested was a 2-month-old, wrapped tightly in a pink blanket on her mom’s lap. When the EMS team swabbed her nose, she didn’t cry.

It was Thursday, eight days after the Texas Department of State Health Services first reported a measles outbreak on the rural, western edge of the state.

On Friday, the number of confirmed cases rose to 49, up from 24 earlier in the week, the state health department said. The majority of those cases are in Gaines County, which borders New Mexico.

Most cases are in school-age kids, and 13 have been hospitalized. All are unvaccinated against measles, which is one of the most contagious viruses in the world.

The latest measles case count likely represents a fraction of the true number of infections. Health officials — who are scrambling to get a handle on the vaccine-preventable outbreak — suspect 200 to 300 people in West Texas are infected but untested, and therefore not part of the state’s official tally so far.

The fast-moving outbreak comes as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. takes the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, has long sown distrust about childhood vaccines, and in particular, the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, falsely linking it to autism.

During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy said he was not anti-vaccine. “I am pro-safety,” he said. “All of my kids are vaccinated, and I believe vaccines have a critical role in health care.”

HHS did not respond to a request for comment from Kennedy about the outbreak.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can send in its experts to assist only if the state requests help. So far, Texas has not done so, the CDC said.

The CDC has sent about 2,000 doses of the MMR vaccine to Texas health officials at their request. However, most doses so far are being accepted by partially vaccinated kids to boost their immunity, rather than the unvaccinated.

Without widespread vaccination, experts say, the outbreak could go on for months.

Measles epicenter

The city of Seminole is the seat of Gaines County, Texas, and the epicenter of the current measles outbreak. It’s located in a vast, flat region filled with ranchers and peanut and cotton farmers.

There’s also a large Mennonite population, a religious sect that believes in “total separation from the outside world,” according to the Texas State Historical Association. These Mennonites chose to settle in Gaines County, in part, for its lack of regulation on private schools. This includes vaccine mandates.

As of the 2023-24 school year, Gaines County had one of the state’s highest vaccine exemption rates, at nearly 18%, according to health department data.

“We have a high, high number of unvaccinated,” said Tonya Guffey, the chief nursing officer at Seminole District Hospital. “It’s not that they’re not educated. It’s just what their belief is.”

Guffey noted that many of the unvaccinated people in the area were Mennonite. “We educate, we encourage, we do what we can for the community, but it’s their choice,” she said.

The pandemic also appears to have driven down vaccination rates.

“We have some outside of that group of people that are unvaccinated, and the Covid vaccine did play a part in that,” Guffey said.

Guffey, who was born and raised in Gaines County, has been in health care for over 30 years and said she’s never seen a measles outbreak before. Still, she wasn’t surprised by the size of the outbreak currently spreading across the county.

“With the large population of unvaccinated that we have,” Guffey said, “it’s not out of the numbers that you would expect.”

‘Hub’ city concerns

Measles cases were limited to rural areas surrounding Lubbock, Texas, the largest city in the region, until Friday afternoon, when Lubbock Public Health confirmed its first case.

The “hub” city, as it’s nicknamed, is where all of the big grocery and big box stores are.

People who live in Gaines County regularly head into Lubbock to shop and do other business. That includes a large number of unvaccinated people who may have been exposed to measles.

“Communities who don’t vaccinate are not necessarily isolated to their area. They commute to Lubbock,” said Dr. Ana Montanez, a pediatrician at Texas Tech Physicians in Lubbock. “By doing that, they’re taking the disease with them.”

Several of Montanez’s young patients were exposed recently, she said, one just by sitting in the same clinic waiting room with another child who was later confirmed to have measles. That child had traveled from another county for care.

Two doses of the MMR vaccine are needed for virtually full protection against the virus. The first is given at around age 1, but the second isn’t given until around age 5. That leaves kids slightly vulnerable for the several years that they are in between doses.

Doctors have the option of giving the second dose early, however, if a child has been exposed to the virus. That’s what Montanez has done for a few of her vulnerable patients. She also continues to counsel families who aren’t vaccinating their children about the benefits of the shots.

Source : https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/measles-outbreak-west-texas-grows-unvaccinated-rcna192163

The Trump administration has urged Romanian authorities to lift travel restrictions on influencer Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan Tate, as they await trial on charges including human trafficking, sexual misconduct, and money laundering, according to a report by the Financial Times.

The 37-year-old is currently under house arrest in Romania and is awaiting trial on human trafficking charges. His brother, 36, and two Romanian women are also awaiting trial.

Newsweek reached out to the U.S. State Department and Tate’s publicist for comment via email on Monday.

Why It Matters

The brothers, who hold dual United States and United Kingdom citizenship, were arrested alongside two Romanian women in December 2022 on charges of human trafficking, sexual misconduct, and money laundering, all of which they deny. Andrew Tate also faces an additional rape charge.

Their case has garnered significant attention within right-wing social media circles, where they are portrayed as martyrs of political persecution. With a strong following in the “manosphere”—an online movement that promotes male dominance and opposes feminism—the brothers have become influential figures among conservative social media users.

What To Know

U.S. officials initially broached the subject during a phone call with the Romanian government, advocating for the return of the Tates’ passports and permission for them to travel while awaiting court proceedings, the FT reported.

This diplomatic effort was further amplified when Richard Grenell, President Donald Trump’s U.S. envoy for special missions, met with Romanian Foreign Minister Emil Hurezeanu at the Munich Security Conference last week.

While Hurezeanu declined to comment on the specifics of their discussion, his spokesperson emphasized the independence of the Romanian judiciary, stating that courts operate based on the law and due process.

Grenell, acknowledging his support for the Tates to the FT, has publicly criticized the role of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funds in Romania, suggesting they have been “weaponized against people and politicians who weren’t woke.”

Andrew Tate has previously said he would move back to the U.S. following Trump’s election victory in November.

Vice President JD Vance recently criticized Romanian authorities for annulling a presidential election in December, calling it an example of Europe’s alleged crackdown on right-wing figures.

Source : https://www.newsweek.com/trump-administration-pressuring-romania-over-andrew-tate-reports-2032237

European leaders insisted Monday they must have a say in international talks to end the war in Ukraine despite the clear message from both Washington and Moscow that there was no role for them as yet in negotiations that could shape the future of the continent.

Three hours of emergency talks at the Elysee Palace in Paris left leaders of Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, NATO and the European Union without a common view on possible peacekeeping troops after a U.S. diplomatic blitz on Ukraine last week threw a once-solid trans-Atlantic alliance into turmoil.

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer called for U.S. backing while reaffirming he’s ready to consider sending British forces on the Ukrainian ground alongside others “if there is a lasting peace agreement.”

There was a rift though with some EU nations, like Poland, which have said they don’t want their military imprint on Ukraine soil. Macron was non-committal.

Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof acknowledged the Europeans “need to come to a common conclusion about what we can contribute. And that way we will eventually get a seat at the table,” adding that “just sitting at the table without contributing is pointless.”

Starmer said a trans-Atlantic bond remained essential. “There must be a U.S. backstop, because a U.S. security guarantee is the only way to effectively deter Russia from attacking Ukraine again,” he said.

Top U.S. officials from the Trump administration, on their first visit to Europe last week, left the impression that Washington was ready to embrace the Kremlin while it cold-shouldered many of its age-old European allies.

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Gen. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, said Monday he didn’t think it was “reasonable and feasible to have everybody sitting at the table.”

“We know how that can turn out and that has been our point, is keeping it clean and fast as we can,” he told reporters in Brussels, where he briefed the 31 U.S. allies in NATO, along with EU officials, before heading to Kyiv for talks on Wednesday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

His remarks were echoed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who was equally dismissive about a role for Europe. “I don’t know what they have to do at the negotiations table,” he said as he arrived in Saudi Arabia for talks with U.S. officials.

Last week, Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a flurry of speeches questioned both Europe’s security commitments and its fundamental democratic principles.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who has long championed a stronger European defense, said their stinging rebukes and threats of non-cooperation in the face of military danger felt like a shock to the system.

The tipping point came when Trump decided to upend years of U.S. policy by holding talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in hopes of ending the Russia-Ukraine war.

Shortly before the meeting in Paris Monday, Macron spoke with Trump, but Macron’s office would not disclose details about the 20-minute discussion.

Europeans stand by their support to Ukraine

Starmer, who said he will travel to Washington next week to discuss with President Trump “what we see as the key elements of a lasting peace,” appears to be charting a “third way” in Europe’s shifting geopolitical landscape — aligning strategically with the U.S. administration while maintaining EU ties. Some analysts suggest this positioning could allow him to act as a bridge between Trump and Europe, potentially serving as a key messenger to the White House.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told reporters a possible peace agreement with Russia cannot be forced on Ukraine. “For us, it must and is clear: This does not mean that peace can be dictated and that Ukraine must accept what is presented to it,” he insisted.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that any peace agreement would need to have the active involvement of the EU and Ukraine, so as to not be a false end to the war “as has happened in the past.”

He went on: “What cannot be is that the aggressor is rewarded.”

A strong U.S. component, though, will remain essential for the foreseeable future since it will take many years before many European nations can ratchet up defense production and integrate it into an effective force.

Sending troops after a peace deal?

Highlighting the inconsistencies among many nations about potential troop contributions, Scholz said talk of boots on the ground was “premature.”

“This is highly inappropriate, to put it bluntly, and honestly: we don’t even know what the outcome will be” of any peace negotiation, he added.

European nations are bent though on boosting their armed forces where they can after years of U.S. complaints, and most have increased defense spending to 2% of gross domestic product, but the path to reaching 3% is unclear.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/eu-europe-ukraine-nato-security-summit-trump-060c8661c59f8f75b96711d3889ce559

 

China on Monday urged the United States to “correct its mistakes” after the U.S. State Department removed previous wording on its website about not supporting Taiwan independence, which it said was part of a routine update.
The fact sheet on Taiwan, updated last week, retains Washington’s opposition to unilateral change from either Taiwan or from China, which claims the democratically governed island as its own.

But as well as dropping the phrase “we do not support Taiwan independence”, the page added a reference to Taiwan’s cooperation with a Pentagon technology and semiconductor development project and says the U.S. will support Taiwan’s membership in international organisations “where applicable”.
Beijing regularly denounces any international recognition of Taiwan or contact between Taiwanese and foreign officials, viewing it as encouraging Taiwan’s separate status from China.
The update to the website came roughly three weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump was sworn in to his second term in the White House.

Speaking in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said the revisions for Taiwan on the U.S. State Department’s website were a big step backwards and “sends a seriously wrong message to Taiwan independence separatist forces”.
“This is yet another example of the United States’ stubborn adherence to the erroneous policy of ‘using Taiwan to suppress China’. We urge the United States side to immediately rectify its mistakes,” Guo said.
The United States, like most countries, has no formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan but is its strongest international backer, bound by law to provide the island with the means to defend itself.

“As is routine, the fact sheet was updated to inform the general public about our unofficial relationship with Taiwan,” a State Department spokesperson said in an email sent late Sunday Taiwan time responding to questions on the updated website wording.
“The United States remains committed to its one China policy,” the spokesperson said, referring to Washington officially taking no position on Taiwan’s sovereignty and only acknowledging China’s position on the subject.
“The United States is committed to preserving peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait,” the spokesperson said.
“We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side. We support cross-Strait dialogue, and we expect cross-Strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means, free from coercion, in a manner acceptable to people on both sides of the Strait.”

On Sunday, Taiwan Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung expressed his appreciation for what he called the “support and positive stance on U.S.-Taiwan relations”.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/us-says-website-update-routine-after-removal-reference-taiwan-independence-2025-02-17/

Elon Musk’s estranged daughter, Vivian Wilson, claimed she found out about her dad’s possible 13th child via social media.

“Wow, if I had a nickel for every time I found out I had half-siblings through Reddit, I’d have two nickels… which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it’s happened twice, right?” the 21-year-old wrote atop her TikTok video Saturday.

Wilson’s post comes one day after conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair claimed to have given birth to the Tesla CEO’s 13th child.

Musk’s transgender daughter — whom he welcomed with his first wife, Justine Wilson — returned to TikTok Sunday to also share the story of when she found out about Grimes and Musk’s youngest son, Techno Mechanicus, via Reddit.

“I found out about the existence of my half brother through Reddit.com/r/rupaulsdragrace,” she said in the clip.

“This is a real thing that actually happened to me.”

Vivian claimed that the incident occurred in 2022 when she and Grimes, 36, were “not talking.” Vivian clarified that they “were not on bad terms,” but were simply not speaking at the time.

In March 2022, Vivian came across a post that read, “Not grimes poppin out another axolotl.”

“I had no idea of this at the time because no one thought to let me know!” she shouted in the clip. Vivian then stated that she was in “complete shock” and was in disbelief.

Although Vivian claimed she was the “last one to find out” about Techno’s birth, she noted that it “makes sense.”

“I just think it’s funny because. . . choices,” she concluded.

Meanwhile, St. Clair claimed that she gave birth to what is possibly the billionaire’s 13th child sometime last year.

“Five months ago, I welcomed a new baby into the world. Elon Musk is the father,” she wrote on X Friday.

The internet personality claimed that she chose to keep the birth private to “protect” her and Musk’s alleged child.

A representative for St. Clair shared a statement on X, stating that she and Musk had been “privately working towards the creation of an agreement about raising their child for some time.”

“It is disappointing that a tabloid reporter, who repeatedly ambushed Ashley and her family, made it impossible to complete that process confidentially,” Brian Glicklich wrote.

“We are waiting for Elon to publicly acknowledge his parental role with Ashley, to end unwarranted speculation, and Ashley trusts that Elon intends to finish their agreement quickly, in the best interests of the wellbeing and security of the child they share.”

Source : https://pagesix.com/2025/02/16/parents/elon-musks-estranged-daughter-vivian-says-she-learned-about-her-dads-possible-13th-child-online/

Another luxe resort, another batch of troubled travelers.

Welcome to “The White Lotus” Season 3, which takes Mike White’s vacation dramedy to the Thai island of Koh Samui. This season is farther from America (the first two seasons took place in Hawaii and Italy) and also bigger, with more characters and eight episodes. (Plus, a different theme song, much to the chagrin of those excited to sing along in their living rooms.)

There’s the Southern family with uncomfortable sibling dynamics. The three middle-aged women on a reunion trip fraught with tiny points of tension. The bubbly girlfriend and the miserable boyfriend. Plus, Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) is back from Season 1, and there’s a wide ensemble of hotel staffers like Mook (Lisa, from the band Blackpink) and Valentin (an often shirtless Arnas Fedaravičius).

It’s a lot to keep track of — especially with vacation brain — so use this guide to freshen up on all the main characters in “The White Lotus” Season 3.

Happy travels!

Singapore’s opposition leader Pritam Singh has been found guilty of lying under oath to a parliamentary committee.

The charges against Singh relate to his handling of Raeesah Khan, a former lawmaker from his party, who lied to parliament in a separate case.

The verdict in this high-profile trial comes as Singapore is gearing up for its next general election, which must be held by November. Singh’s Workers’ Party holds nine out of 87 elected seats in parliament.

In Singapore, any MP can lose their seat or be barred from running for office for five years if they are fined at least S$10,000 ($7,440; £5,925) or jailed for more than a year.

The verdict on Monday, which lasted more than two hours, was delivered to a packed courtroom. Members of the press who could not fit into the courtroom, including the BBC, viewed a livestream of the verdict from a separate room.

District Judge Luke Tan, who delivered the verdict, said several pieces of evidence showed that Singh “never wanted Ms Khan to clarify [her] lie” and had “direct and intimate involvement” in guiding Khan to continue her narrative.

Prosecutors are seeking the maximum fine of S$7,000 ($5,200; £4,200) for each of Singh’s two charges, while the defence are asking for S$4,000 ($3,000; £2,400).

Singh, 48, maintained his innocence throughout the trial, arguing that he had wanted to give Khan time to deal with what was a sensitive issue.

Singh’s case has gripped the city-state, where a usually uneventful political scene – dominated by the ruling People’s Action Party – has in recent years seen a rare string of scandals.

The saga started in August 2021 when Khan claimed in parliament that she had witnessed the police misbehave towards a sexual assault victim. She later admitted that her anecdote was not true.

Khan was fined S$35,000 ($26,000; £21,000) for lying and abusing her parliamentary privilege. She has since resigned from the party and parliament.

During a parliamentary committee investigation into the incident later that year, Khan testified that the party’s leaders, including Singh, had told her to “continue with the narrative” despite finding out that it was not true. This was prior to her eventual admission.

Singh denied this, but also said that he had given Khan “too much time to settle herself before closing this issue with her”.

The parliamentary committee concluded that Singh was not being truthful and referred the case to the public prosecutor.

Judge Tan said on Monday that Singh’s actions after learning of Khan’s lie were “strongly indicative that the accused did not want Ms Khan to clarify the untruth at some point”.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20g0dxkv3mo

Donald Trump has made the mass deportation of undocumented foreign nationals a key policy, with the US said to have identified about 18,000 Indian nationals it believes entered illegally.

Last week Narendra Modi said India would take back its nationals who were in the US illegally, and also crack down on the “human trafficking ecosystem”.

“These are children of very ordinary families, and they are lured by big dreams and promises,” he said during his visit to Washington.

Now a new paper by Abby Budiman and Devesh Kapur from Johns Hopkins University has shed light on the numbers, demographics, entry methods, locations and trends relating to undocumented Indians over time.

Here are some of the more striking findings.

It has been dubbed one of the world’s rarest treasure troves of art but few people outside its host country know about it.

For decades, masterpieces by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock have been kept in the basement of a museum in Iran’s capital Tehran, shrouded in mystery.

According to estimates in 2018, the collection is worth as much as $3bn.

Only a small portion of the work has been exhibited since the 1979 Iranian Revolution but in recent years, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art has been showcasing some of its most captivating pieces.

The Eye to Eye exhibition at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in October 2024, was extended twice due to overwhelming public demand, running until January 2025.

The display was widely regarded as one of the most significant exhibitions in the history of the museum, and it also became its most visited.

The showcase featured more than 15 works unveiled for the first time, including a sculpture by Jean Dubuffet – marking its first-ever appearance in an Iranian exhibition.

From abstract expressionism to pop art, the collection at the museum serves as a time capsule of pivotal artistic movements.

Among the artwork is Warhol’s portrait of Farah Pahlavi – Iran’s last queen – a rare piece blending his pop art flair with Iranian cultural history.

Elsewhere, Francis Bacon’s work called Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants shows figures appearing to spy on two naked men lying on a bed.

On the opposite wall in the basement of the museum, a portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is on display in juxtaposition.

The museum was built in 1977 under the patronage of Pahlavi, the exiled widow of the last Shah of Iran who was overthrown during the revolution.

Pahlavi was a passionate art advocate and her cousin, architect Kamran Diba, designed the museum.

It was established to introduce modern art to Iranians and to bridge Iran closer to the international art scene.

The museum soon became home to a stunning array of works by luminaries including Picasso, Warhol and Salvador Dali, alongside pieces by leading Iranian modernists, and quickly established itself as a beacon of cultural exchange and artistic ambition.

But then came the 1979 revolution. Iran became an Islamic republic as the monarchy was overthrown and clerics assumed political control under Ayatollah Khomeini.

Many artworks were deemed inappropriate for public display because of nudity, religious sensitivities or political implications.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Gabrielle with Open Blouse was deemed too scandalous. And Warhol’s portrait of the former queen of Iran was too political. In fact, Pahlavi’s portrait was vandalised and torn apart with a knife during the revolutionary turmoil.

After the revolution, many of the artworks were locked away, collecting dust in a basement that became the stuff of art world legend.

It was only in the late 1990s that the museum reclaimed its cultural significance during the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami.

Suddenly the world remembered what it had been missing. Art lovers could not believe their eyes. Van Gogh, Dali, even Monet – all in Tehran.

Some pieces were loaned to major exhibitions in Europe and the United States, briefly reconnecting the collection with the global art world.

Hamid Keshmirshekan, an art historian based in London, has studied the collection and calls it “one of the rarest treasure troves of modern art outside the West”.

The collection includes Henry’s Moore’s Reclining Figure series – an iconic piece by one of Britain’s most celebrated sculptors – and Jackson Pollock’s Mural on Indian Red Ground, a vibrant example of the American’s painting technique pulsing with energy and emotion.

Picasso’s The Painter and His Model – his largest canvas from 1927 – also features, a strong example of his abstract works from the post-cubism period.

And there is Van Gogh’s At Eternity’s Gate – one of the very rare survivals of his first printmaking campaign during which he produced six lithographs in November 1882.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clye46n565xo

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned the dye known as Red 3 from the nation’s food supply in January, setting deadlines for stripping the brightly hued additive from candies and cough syrup, baked goods and frozen treats.

The agency said it was taking the action because studies found that the dye, also known as erythrosine, caused cancer in lab rats. A federal statute requires FDA to ban any additive found to cause cancer in animals, though officials stressed that the way Red 3 leads to cancer in rats doesn’t happen in people.

But the dye is only one of several synthetic colors widely found in common foods and other products.

As their use is questioned by experts and consumers, here’s what you need to know:

What are artificial colors?

Synthetic dyes are petroleum-based chemicals that don’t occur in nature. They’re widely used in foods to “enhance the visual appeal” of products, according to Sensient Food Colors, a St. Louis-based supplier of food colors and flavorings.

Nine dyes, including Red 3, have been allowed in U.S. food. The other common color additives in food are Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, Red 40, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6. Two permitted colors are used more rarely: Citrus Red 2 and Orange B.

The FDA certifies synthetic color additives and regulates their use.

With the FDA’s recent order on Red 3, manufacturers have until January 2027 to remove the dye from their products. Makers of ingested drugs like cough syrups have until January 2028.

Who is concerned about these dyes and why?

Consumer advocates, including the Center for Science in the Public Interest, had long lobbied to ban Red 3 from food because of the rat-cancer link. The dye was prohibited for decades in cosmetics, but not in food or ingested medications.

Other research has tied artificial colors to behavioral problems in some children, including hyperactivity and impulsivity, particularly for those at risk for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

“Artificial colors are not the main cause of ADHD, but they may contribute significantly to some cases,” said Dr. L. Eugene Arnold, an emeritus psychiatry professor at Ohio State University who studied dyes and their effect on behavior and now advises CHADD, a support group for people with ADHD.

The FDA says it has reviewed and evaluated the effects of color additives on children’s behavior. It says its scientists believe that most children suffer no adverse effects when consuming them, though it acknowledges some children may be sensitive to them.

About two-thirds of Americans favor restricting or reformulating processed foods to remove ingredients like added sugar or dyes, according to a recent AP-NORC poll.

Will other colors be banned?

Momentum is building for the removal of synthetic dyes in foods.

Last year, California became the first state to ban six artificial food dyes from food served in public schools. More than a dozen state legislatures may take up bills this year that would ban synthetic dyes in foods, either for school lunches or in any setting. In October, protesters demanded that WK Kellogg Co. remove artificial dyes from cereals such as Apple Jacks and Froot Loops.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., recently confirmed as the U.S. secretary of health and human services, campaigned on a promise to “Make America Healthy Again,” including a focus on artificial dyes and other chemicals in food. His support has been buoyed by “MAHA moms,” women on social media calling for an end to artificial ingredients and ultraprocessing in the U.S. food supply, among other concerns.

“I was called a conspiracy theorist because I said that red dye caused cancer,” Kennedy said during his confirmation hearing. “Now, FDA has acknowledged that and banned it.”

What about natural colors?

It is possible to add color to foods with natural ingredients. Some manufacturers have already reformulated products to remove Red 3. In its place they use beet juice; carmine, a dye made from insects; or pigments from foods such as purple sweet potato, radish and red cabbage.

But it’s tricky, said Meghan Skidmore, a Sensient spokesperson. Natural dyes may be less stable than synthetic dyes and may be affected by factors including heat and acid levels.

“It’s not impossible to replace, but there’s not a single solution,” she said.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/synthetic-dyes-red-3-artificial-colors-ef5af10b3aca66d0033d3f239546f1aa

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy traveled to the United Arab Emirates late Sunday as momentum grows for potential peace talks ending Moscow’s war on the country.

U.S. President Donald Trump last week suggested he would be meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in Saudi Arabia. The UAE, home to Abu Dhabi and Dubai, long has been floated as a possible site for peace talks as well given the large population of Russian and Ukrainian expatriates who have flooded the country since the war began, and due to the Emirates’ work on prisoner exchanges in the past.

Zelenskyy arrived in Abu Dhabi after attending the Munich Security Conference in Germany. Footage released by his office showed him and his wife, Olena Zelenska, being greeted by an Emirati official and honor guard at the airport late Sunday night.

Zelenska has traveled to the UAE since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, but this trip is Zelenskyy’s first to the UAE since the war began.

“Our top priority is bringing even more of our people home from captivity,” Zelenskyy’s office said in messages online. “We will also focus on investments and economic partnership, as well as a large-scale humanitarian program.”

The United Arab Emirates’ state-run WAM news agency did not immediately report on Zelenskyy’s arrival, which was unusual.

It wasn’t immediately clear what his agenda would be while he was in the country, though Abu Dhabi is hosting its biennial International Defense Exhibition and Conference arms show this week, where both Ukraine and Russia have displayed arms — even as Moscow faces Western sanctions over the war.

Russian money continues to flood into Dubai’s red-hot real estate market. Daily flights between the Emirates and Moscow provide a lifeline for both those fleeing conscription and the Russian elite. The U.S. Treasury under former President Joe Biden also expressed concerns about the amount of Russian cash flowing into the Arabian Peninsula country.

Zelenskyy’s visit comes as Denis Manturov, Russia’s first deputy prime minister, visited earlier Sunday with UAE leader Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the country’s president and ruler of Abu Dhabi. A readout from WAM described the talks as focusing on “growing UAE-Russia ties and ways to advance shared interests, benefiting both nations and their peoples.”

Source : https://apnews.com/article/uae-russia-ukraine-war-a09b2fc2d81276551f40d89383a348c2

Here is the full list of winners from this year’s BAFTA Awards.

There were 42 films up for awards at this year’s ceremony, from blockbusters to indie breakthroughs.

Conclave and The Brutalist were the big winners, taking home four awards each.

Scroll through for all the winners here, as well as the nominees they were up against.

BEST FILM
Conclave
Anora
The Brutalist
A Complete Unknown
Emilia Perez

OUTSTANDING BRITISH FILM
Conclave
Bird
Blitz
Gladiator II
Hard Truths
Kneecap
Lee
Love Lies Bleeding
The Outrun
Wallace And Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

The widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny says she has thought about him every day since his death exactly a year ago.

Writing on Instagram, Yulia Navalnaya said: “Love you so much, miss you so much.”

Staunch Putin critic Mr Navalny, 47, died mysteriously in an Arctic penal colony on 16 February 2024. His body is buried at Borisovskoye cemetery in Moscow.

The politician, who campaigned against official corruption and led major anti-Kremlin protests, was serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism. Russia’s federal prison service said he had become unwell after a walk and lost consciousness.

It comes as supporters have been helping to choose a new design for a “memorial” to Navalny in the cemetery on the anniversary of his death. His mother Lyudmila Navalnaya visited his grave on Sunday.

The winning design

Called “Titan and Stone”, the tombstone is made up of three blocks of black granite and a metal inscription with his name in capital letters and no other text.

The first block will be placed at the base, covering the burial site. The vertical part will be installed on a horizontal plate. And the third granite block, slightly more than half the height of the second block, will be placed on the text insert.

It was the winner from a shortlist of three which were chosen by the family, and has been designed by someone who wants to remain anonymous. It received 40% of the online votes.

The Navalny memorial website said: “Despite the fact that the letters are part of the power structure for the upper block, they are not located along the entire length and width of the lower stone, but stand in the middle, retreating from the edges on all sides, which creates a feeling of fragility and at the same time unbreakability.”

“And despite the fact that this tombstone contains nothing but smooth stone and metal letters, it is symbolic and suggests reflection on the meaning contained in it,” it added.

The statement also said: “We need to complete the design project, produce the monument and have it installed. This may take several months and will require financing.”

It has appealed to people to donate to make the memorial a reality.

Widow’s tribute to Navalny

On the anniversary of his death, Yulia Navalnaya, 48, wrote on Instagram: “I used to think that the phrase ‘a year has passed and there hasn’t been a day I didn’t remember’ was total nonsense. And it turned out that this is not nonsense.

“A year. The whole year. And there was not a single day that I didn’t think about Alexei. I didn’t laugh with him, didn’t consult him, didn’t argue with him.”

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/navalnys-widow-pays-tribute-on-anniversary-of-his-death-as-supporters-help-choose-design-for-tombstone-13310586

PRESIDENT Donald Trump has made a flying visit to the Daytona 500 – where his armoured car ‘The Beast’ did laps of the circuit.

In the latest visit by Trump to a high-profile sporting event, Air Force One performed a flyover of the Daytona International Speedway before the race.

Trump, who last week became the first sitting president ever to attend the Super Bowl, was subsequently ferried to the circuit in Florida in a presidential motorcade.

The US leader’s limousine then led drivers around the race circuit while Trump addressed the participants via a radio message.

“This is your favorite president,” Trump could be heard telling the drivers.

“I’m a big fan. I am a really big fan of you people. How you do this I don’t know, but I just want you to be safe.

“You’re talented people and you’re great people and great Americans. Have a good day, have a lot of fun and I’ll see you later.”

Not every driver is excited to see Trump in the stands this weekend though.

Bubba Wallace was previously criticized by Trump after an incident where a noose was found in his garage.

It was deemed not to be a hate crime, and Trump called Wallace out for what he called a “hoax.”

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/sport/13548935/donald-trump-daytona-500-nascar-arrival/

Turkey is one of the key players in the global honey market. With annual production of 115,000 tons of honey, the country is the world’s second-largest supplier after China, followed by Ethiopia, Iran and India.

The Turkish honey sector has an annual volume of about €270 million ($283.4 million), according to estimates, with Germany and the United States being the biggest importers of honey from Turkey.

Adulterated honey

But the sector faces a crisis because of counterfeit Turkish honey, although the actual extent of counterfeit honey production in the country remains unclear.

Police have confiscating several tons of the adulterated product in recent months for a total value of about €25 million.

One raid in the capital Ankara in September 2024 found 8,150 tons of glucose, fructose and sugar, along with 100,000 labels for different brands of honey.

Honey is often adulterated with sugar syrup. But if a product contains artificial flavors, colors, sweeteners, glucose, corn syrup or artificial honeycomb, it can’t legally be sold as honey.

If it is, it’s referred to as counterfeit or adulterated honey — which is a violation of labeling laws.

In the last quarter of 2024, the Turkish ministry of agriculture released lists indicating that 43 producers in Turkey had adulterated honey.

Ankara is seen as the center of this industry; the majority of production facilities are located there. The ministry says two of the manufacturers distribute their products through big supermarket chains.

Damage to Turkey’s image

The industry is alarmed. Producers fear that Turkey’s reputation on the international market will suffer significant damage or has already been harmed. They are calling for state intervention, stricter regulations and deterrent penalties for producers of counterfeit honey.

Ziya Sahin, the president of the Turkish Beekeepers’ Association, holds the Ministry of Agriculture responsible. He wants to see more inspections and higher penalties.

“The problem is the lack of regulation. Our beekeepers are angry, and they ask why we’re not doing something to stop it. But we have no authority to inspect,” Sahin told DW. “I’m not even allowed to ask street sellers whether their honey is real or not.”

A meeting of the International Federation of Beekeepers’ Associations is due to be held in Turkey this year. Sahin says they are in close contact with their international partners.

“As in other parts of the world, there is counterfeit honey in Turkey. We can’t deny that. But we don’t want Turkey to be known as a paradise for fake honey. We won’t accept that,” Sahin insisted.

‘There’s fake honey in China and Europe, too’

Counterfeit honey isn’t just a Turkish problem, though, those involved in the industry emphasize.

“There’s fake honey in China and Europe, too,” said Can Sezen, the managing director of Anavarza Bal, one of the country’s leading honey producers. “It would be unfair to claim that it only affects Turkey. That said, Turks are particularly inventive about such matters.”

Manufacturers of counterfeit honey closely monitor when the state authorities are ordering inspections, Sezen said, and then they scale back production in a targeted way.

“You can find these products in every supermarket. The revelations must continue — like the lists released by the ministry. Our population needs to be aware of these fake products,” Sezen said.

One significant reason for the increase in counterfeit honey is Turkey’s economic situation. Fake honey costs only a fifth as much as the real thing, selling in Turkey for about €1.60 per kilogram.

The price for real honey can be as high as €8 a kilo.

The adulterated product is more affordable for many consumers — an important consideration in times of high inflation.

Counterfeit honey in Europe?

And as for exports, experts say customs checks aren’t sufficient for detecting counterfeit honey meaning that fake Turkish honey could already be in supermarkets abroad.

“It may be that counterfeit honey is first exported illegally to Arab countries then shipped on to other parts of the world,” Ziya Sahin said.

There are already indications that counterfeit honey has found its way to Europe. In January 2024, French authorities confiscated 13 tons of honey laced with Viagra, also known as “erectile honey.” According to official reports, it originated with illegal supply chains in Turkey, Tunisia and Thailand.

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/turkey-is-making-fake-honey-on-an-alarming-scale/a-71626685

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke about Iran’s terror axis this week, stating that, with the support of the U.S. and President Donald Trump, he would “finish the job”.

“Over the last 16 months, Israel has dealt a mighty blow to Iran’s terror axis. Under the strong leadership of President Trump… I have no doubt that we can and will finish the job,” Netanyahu said on Sunday, speaking alongside U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who made his first official trip to Israel this week.

“It’s important to constantly point that whether we talk about Hamas or we talk about Hezbollah, we talk about violence in the West Bank, or we talk about destabilization in Syria, or we talk about any of these issues the militias in Iraq, they all have behind them one common theme – Iran,” Rubio added, emphasizing that there “could never be a nuclear Iran.”

The Trump and Biden administrations were both warned by U.S. intelligence agencies that Israel would likely attempt to weaken Iran’s nuclear program by attacking important facilities, reported CNN.

Earlier this month, Trump took to Truth Social to share his desire for a peace deal between the U.S. and Iran, stating that he sought a “Verified Nuclear Peace Agreement, which will let Iran peacefully grow and prosper.”

“I would love to be able to make a great deal [with Iran], a deal where you can get on with your lives, and you’ll do wonderfully,” Trump had said to journalists while visiting Netanyahu in Israel.

Netanyahu stated that Israel was pursuing an overarching goal of regime change within Iran, indicating that Israel’s goals regarding both Iran and Gaza aligned with those of the Trump administration.

Source : https://www.latintimes.com/netanyahu-vows-finish-job-against-iran-trump-help-575826

 

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday said Ukraine and Europe would be part of any “real negotiations” to end Moscow’s war, signaling that U.S. talks with Russia this week were a chance to see how serious Russian President Vladimir Putin is about peace.
America’s top diplomat played down European concerns of being cut out of the initial talks between Russia and the United States set to take place in Saudi Arabia in the coming days. In an interview with CBS, Rubio said a negotiation process had not yet begun in earnest, and if talks advanced, the Ukrainians and other Europeans would be brought into the fold.

Earlier on Sunday, Reuters reported that U.S. officials had handed European officials a questionnaire asking, among other things, how many troops they could contribute to enforcing a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia.
“President Trump spoke to Vladimir Putin last week, and in it, Vladimir Putin expressed his interest in peace, and the president expressed his desire to see an end to this conflict in a way that was enduring and that protected Ukrainian sovereignty,” Rubio said on CBS’s “Meet the Press.”

“Now, obviously it has to be followed up by action, so the next few weeks and days will determine whether it’s serious or not. Ultimately, one phone call does not make peace.”
U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and national security adviser Mike Waltz were due to leave for Saudi Arabia on Sunday evening, Witkoff said in a Fox News interview.
Rubio noted he was due to be in Saudi Arabia anyway due to previously arranged official travel. The composition of the Russian delegation had not yet been finalized, he said.
The planned talks in Saudi Arabia coincide with a U.S. bid to cut a deal with Kyiv to open up Ukraine’s natural resources wealth to U.S. investment. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in an NBC interview broadcast on Sunday, questioned if minerals in areas held by Russia would be given to Putin.

Trump, who held a call with Putin on Wednesday and said the Russian leader wants peace, said Sunday he was confident Putin would not want to try and take control of the entirety of Ukraine.
“That would have caused me a big problem, because you just can’t let that happen. I think he wants to end it,” Trump told reporters in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump added that Zelinskiy would be involved in the conversations to end the conflict.

EUROPEAN ROLE IN PEACE TALKS, OR NOT?

Rubio and Witkoff rejected concerns that Ukraine and other European leaders would have no place at peace negotiations, despite Trump’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, suggesting precisely that at this weekend’s Munich Security Conference.
Witkoff noted in an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” that Ukrainian officials had met several U.S. officials in recent days at the conference, while Trump had talked with Zelenskiy last week.

Rubio, for his part, said that Ukrainians and other Europeans would be included in any meaningful negotiations.
“Ultimately, it will reach a point – if it’s real negotiations, and we’re not there yet – but if that were to happen, Ukraine will have to be involved because they’re the ones that were invaded, and the Europeans will have to be involved because they have sanctions on Putin and Russia as well,” Rubio said.
“We’re just not there yet.”
French President Emmanuel Macron will host European leaders on Monday for an emergency summit on the Ukraine war, Macron’s office said, in the wake of Kellogg’s remarks.
European officials have been left shocked and flat-footed by the Trump administration’s moves on Ukraine, Russia and European defense in recent days.
Chief among their fears is that they can no longer count on U.S. military protection and that Trump will attempt to ink a Ukraine peace deal with Putin that undermines Kyiv and broader European continental security.
Asked if he had discussed lifting sanctions on Russia during a Saturday phone call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Rubio declined to provide confirmation, saying only that they “did not go into any details.”
After the call, Moscow said that the two had discussed the removal of “unilateral barriers” set by the previous U.S. administration in relations with Russia.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/rubio-says-coming-days-will-show-if-putin-serious-about-ukraine-peace-2025-02-16/

(This Feb.15 story has been refiled to correct the spelling of the crypto coin to $LIBRA, not $LIBRE, in paragraph 2)
Argentine President Javier Milei could face an impeachment trial in Congress, opposition lawmakers said on Saturday, after the libertarian leader touted a cryptocurrency which crashed soon after.
Milei late on Friday posted on X recommending the little-known crypto coin $LIBRA, which soon after shot up to nearly $5 apiece.

Just hours later, the cryptocurrency plummeted to under $1.
Argentina’s fintech chamber acknowledged that the case could potentially be a “rug pull,” in which the developers of a crypto token draw legitimate investments, pumping up the value, only to later dump their stake.
“This scandal, which embarrasses us on an international scale, requires us to launch an impeachment request against the president,” said lawmaker Leandro Santoro, a member of the opposition coalition.
Milei deleted the post on X, with local media saying the post had been up for a few hours on Friday night. He later said he took down his post after becoming aware of the circumstances, and that he had no relation to the cryptocurrency.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentinas-opposition-threatens-impeachment-trial-after-milei-touts-crypto-coin-2025-02-16/

Papal selection thriller “Conclave” and period drama “The Brutalist” were the big winners at the BAFTA Film Awards on Sunday, winning four prizes each.
“Conclave”, which had led nominations with 12 nods, won the night’s most coveted award, best film, as well as outstanding British film, best adapted screenplay and best editing.
“We live in a time of a crisis of democracy and institutions that are usually used to bring us together are used to pull us apart,” “Conclave” director Edward Berger said in his acceptance speech for the outstanding British film award.

“And sometimes it’s hard to keep the faith in that situation but that’s why we make movies and that’s why we made this movie.”
“The Brutalist”, a three-and-a-half hour tale about a Hungarian immigrant architect trying to rebuild his life in the United States post-World War Two, had also been considered a frontrunner for best film. It won best director for Brady Corbet and best actor for its star, Adrien Brody.
“This film is really about this pursuit of leaving something meaningful and I think that is something we can all relate to,” Brody said in his acceptance speech.

“The Brutalist” also won original score and cinematography.
In one of the big surprises of the night, Mikey Madison won the leading actress category for portraying an exotic dancer who gets involved with a Russian oligarch’s son in “Anora”.
Many had considered the frontrunners to be Demi Moore, who has received multiple honours for her performance in body horror “The Substance”, and Briton Marianne Jean-Baptiste, for her critically acclaimed portrayal of a woman struggling with depression in “Hard Truths”.

“I really wasn’t expecting this,” Madison said.
“I want to take to a moment to recognise the sex worker community … you deserve respect and human decency. I will always be your friend.”
“Anora”, considered a strong awards season contender after it and director Sean Baker triumphed at the Critics Choice Awards, as well as the Producers and Directors Guild of America Awards ahead of next month’s Academy Awards, was also up for best film, as was Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown”.

SALDANA, CULKIN WIN

Fellow best film nominee “Emilia Perez”, which mixes the diverse genres of musical and crime, triumphed in the film not in the English language category.
“This is too nice, you shouldn’t have done that,” director Jacques Audiard said, accepting his award. “This award is not just for me but everyone who worked tirelessly on this film.”
He thanked the film’s cast members, including an absent Karla Sofia Gascon, who had been nominated for leading actress.
Zoe Saldana won supporting actress for her portrayal of a lawyer who helps a Mexican cartel leader, played by Gascon, fake his death and transition from a man to a woman.
“Emilia Perez”, had been an early awards frontrunner but its campaign lost steam following controversy surrounding Gascon, who has apologised for past social media posts denigrating Muslims and other groups and said she would go silent to help the movie ahead of the Oscars.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/conclave-the-brutalist-anora-battle-best-film-baftas-2025-02-16/

 

Donald Trump appeared to quote Napoleon Bonaparte by way of Rod Steiger on Saturday afternoon after his blitzkrieg of executive actions and threats to federal agencies under Elon Musk were challenged in courts across the country, raising alarms that his administration is preparing to shred court orders and ignite a constitutional crisis.

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” the president wrote on Truth Social and X.

The official White House account on X also shared the message, endorsing his apparent belief that the president of the United States is incapable of breaking any law.

The president — whose efforts to gut federal funding, fire thousands of aid workers and unilaterally redefine the 14th Amendment were blocked in federal courts across the country in recent days — invoked a quote often attributed to Napoleon, who justified his despotic regime as the will of the people of France.

The quote from a president with his own imperial ambitions appeared to come from the 1970 film Waterloo, in which Steiger’s Napoleon states that he “did not ‘usurp’ the crown.”

“I found it in the gutter, and I picked it up with my sword, and it was the people … who put it on my head,” he says. “He who saves a nation violates no law.”

Within his first month in office, Trump’s allies have baselessly argued Trump’s supreme authority as president, immune from checks and balances, as his executive orders and Musk’s access to the levers of government face an avalanche of lawsuits and restraining orders.

Musk and other members of the Trump administration have smeared the judges who have ruled against them as “corrupt” and “evil” and threatened to impeach and remove them from the bench.

The world’s wealthiest man and his allies have repeated false and inflated claims about how the three branches of government operate, and how a system of checks and balances is designed to prevent the presidency from accumulating supreme authority.

Their comments are raising alarms among constitutional scholars and legal analysts for an impending constitutional crisis — which the White House blames on the judges, not the president’s spurious legal actions and the administration’s baseless insistence that he should not be subject to checks and balances in the courts.

Trump, now seemingly invoking his own “l’etat, c’est moi” maxim, routinely conflated the criminal and civil cases against him with an attack on the American people and rule of law itself during his campaign.

The Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling affirming a president’s “immunity” from criminal prosecution for actions tied to official duties while in office has only fueled what he perceives is a permanent shield from oversight.

The New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie called Trump’s latest statement “the single most un-American and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an American president.”

“We’re getting into real Führerprinzip territory here,” added conservative Trump critic Bill Kristol, referencing executive authority under Nazi Germany, granting the word of the führer above all.

Musk’s ongoing campaign to delegitimize the courts followed Vice President JD Vance’s claim that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

This week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accused the “media” of “fear mongering” about an impending constitutional crisis.

“The real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch where district court judges in liberal districts are abusing their power,” she told reporters on Wednesday.

Source : https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-napoleon-saves-country-quote-rod-steiger-b2699102.html

At least nine people have died in the most recent round of harsh weather to pummel the U.S., including eight people in Kentucky who died as creeks swelled from heavy rain and water covered roads.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said Sunday that hundreds of people stranded by flooding had to be rescued. President Donald Trump approved the state’s request for a disaster declaration, authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate relief efforts throughout the state.

Beshear said most of the deaths, including a mother and 7-year-old child, were caused by cars getting stuck in high water.

“So folks, stay off the roads right now and stay alive,” he said. “This is the search and rescue phase, and I am very proud of all the Kentuckians that are out there responding, putting their lives on the line.”

Beshear said there have been 1,000 rescues across the state since the storms began Saturday. The storms knocked out power to about 39,000 homes, but Beshear warned that harsh winds in some areas could increase outages.

Parts of Kentucky and Tennessee received up to 6 inches (15 centimeters) of rain, said Bob Oravec, a senior forecaster with the National Weather Service.

“The effects will continue for awhile, a lot of swollen streams and a lot of flooding going on,” Oravec said Sunday.

In Alabama, the weather service in Birmingham said it had confirmed an EF-1 tornado touched down overnight in Hale County. Storms there and elsewhere in the state destroyed or damaged a handful of mobile homes, downed trees and toppled power lines, but no injuries were immediately reported. Extensive damage to downtown roofs and buildings was reported in the northern city of Tuscumbia, with authorities asking people to avoid the area, according to WAFF-TV and other local media.

A state of emergency was declared for parts of Obion County, Tennessee, after a levee failed on Saturday, flooding the small community of Rives, home to around 300 people in the western part of the state. “There will be mandatory evacuations in effect for the residents in Rives due to the rising water, no electricity, and freezing temperatures creating a life-threatening situation,” Mayor Steve Carr said in a statement Sunday.

In Atlanta, a person was killed when a large tree fell on a home early Sunday, according to Atlanta Fire Rescue Capt. Scott Powell.

Dangerously cold wind chill temperatures as low as 50 degrees below zero (minus 45.6) were expected in most of North Dakota, which remained under an “extreme cold warning” along with parts of Montana and large swaths of South Dakota and Minnesota, according to the National Weather Service.

Kentucky faces severe flooding

Water submerged cars and buildings in Kentucky and mudslides blocked roads in Virginia late Saturday into Sunday. Both states were under flood warnings, along with Tennessee and Arkansas.

The mother and child were swept away Saturday night in Kentucky’s Bonnieville community, Hart County Coroner Tony Roberts said. In southeastern Kentucky, a 73-year-old man was found dead in floodwaters in Clay County, county Emergency Management Deputy Director Revelle Berry said. There were a total of four deaths in Hart County, Beshear said.

The Kentucky River Medical Center in the city of Jackson said it had closed its emergency department and transferred all patients to two other hospitals in the region due to a nearby river flooding.

Photos posted by authorities and residents on social media showed cars and buildings underwater in south-central and eastern Kentucky. In Buchanan County, Virginia, the sheriff’s office said multiple roads were blocked by mudslides.

High winds brought down trees and power poles across Albermarle County, Virginia. The Charlottesville Police Department said Sunday on social media that officers’ response times could be delayed due to “an overwhelming number of weather-related calls for service.” Police urged residents to stay off the roads.

Power outages were reported along much of the Eastern Seaboard, from New York south to Georgia.

In West Virginia, 13 southern counties were under a state of emergency for flooding and some areas were cut off to vehicle traffic Sunday. Several volunteer fire departments dealt with flooding in their own buildings while answering rescue and evacuation calls.

Rockies, Midwest, Northeast hit with snow storms, Polar Vortex on the way

Ice and snow made road travel treacherous in large swaths of Michigan, which remained under a winter weather advisory until Monday afternoon. Michigan State Police reported 114 crashes Sunday around the Detroit area since snow started falling Saturday.

“Fortunately, most were one-car spin outs and there were no serious injuries,” Michigan State Police said on X. “A majority of them were caused by drivers just going too fast or following too close.”

Authorities in Colorado reported eight people were killed in fatal vehicle crashes since Valentine’s Day and warned drivers to be cautious as the weather made driving more difficult. The causes of the fatal crashes weren’t immediately known.

Also in Colorado, three state patrol cruisers that had pulled over along roadsides were struck by other vehicles, including one on Sunday where a trooper had stopped as officials prepared to close a road because of ice. In each case the troopers were out of their cruisers at the time and were uninjured.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/rain-snow-flooding-0c4ddcf08eba65e62f9c070f59947457

Zhang Yazhou was sitting in the passenger seat of her Tesla Model 3 when she said she heard her father’s panicked voice: The brakes don’t work! Approaching a red light, her father swerved around two cars before plowing into an SUV and a sedan and crashing into a large concrete barrier.

Stunned, Zhang gazed at the deflating airbag in front of her. She could never have imagined what was to come: Tesla sued her for defamation for complaining publicly about the car’s brakes — and won. A Chinese court ordered Zhang to pay more than $23,000 in damages and publicly apologize to the $1.1 trillion company.

Zhang is not the only one to find herself in the crosshairs of Tesla, which is led by Elon Musk, among the richest men in the world and a self-described “ free speech absolutist.” Over the last four years, Tesla has sued at least six car owners in China who had sudden vehicle malfunctions, quality complaints or accidents they claimed were caused by mechanical failures.

The company has also sued at least six bloggers and two Chinese media outlets that wrote critically about the company, according to a review of public court documents and Chinese media reports by The Associated Press. Tesla won all 11 cases for which AP could determine the verdicts. Two judgments, including Zhang’s, are on appeal. One case was settled out of court.

It is not common practice for automakers — in China or elsewhere — to sue their customers. But Tesla has pioneered an aggressive legal strategy and leveraged the patronage of powerful leaders in China’s ruling Communist Party to silence critics, reap financial rewards and limit its accountability.

The AP review of Tesla’s record in China comes as Musk is wielding significant influence in President Donald Trump’s new administration, leading an effort to rapidly shrink the size of the federal government and oust employees deemed disloyal to the president. His actions have raised concerns that Musk is weakening the U.S. system of checks and balances, in part, to benefit Tesla and his other companies.

In the United States, Musk has found a powerful ally in Trump. Together, they have launched an assault on the federal government, freezing spending, suspending programs and dismissing prosecutors, government watchdogs and others that have traditionally acted as guardrails.

Tesla officials in China and the United States did not reply to requests for comment.

Tesla’s record in China shows how Musk has thrived in a system in which regulators, the media and the courts — which must all ultimately answer to the ruling Communist Party — are, by design, somewhat intertwined.

Tesla has profited from the largesse of the Chinese state, winning unprecedented regulatory benefits, below-market rate loans and large tax breaks. With a few pointed exceptions, Tesla has enjoyed ingratiating coverage in the Chinese press, and journalists told AP they have been instructed to avoid negative coverage of the automaker.

Tesla’s windfall has extended to the courts — and not just in legal actions Tesla has brought against customers. In a review of public court documents, AP found that Tesla won nearly 90% of civil cases over safety, quality or contract disputes brought by customers.

“The government gave Tesla a super status that put consumers in a very vulnerable position,” said Qiao Yudong, a former lawyer for American sports car company Saleen Automotive in China. “That’s why some consumers had to resort to extreme actions.”

One of those desperate customers was Zhang.

‘Burning with anger’

The February 2021 crash in central China’s Henan province sent Zhang’s mother and father, who had a concussion, to the hospital for four days, medical records show. Zhang — who was unharmed in the accident, as was her baby niece — wanted to understand what had happened: How could her dream car have turned into such a nightmare?

Traffic police determined that the crash was her dad’s fault because he hadn’t maintained a safe following distance. Zhang, however, insisted that the brakes had malfunctioned, sending the car out of control. She filed a complaint with a local market regulator, requesting a refund and compensation. Teslas are among the most computerized cars on the market, so Zhang asked the automaker to turn over the full pre-crash data from her car, hoping it might help explain what went wrong. Tesla refused.

“Tesla’s employees were very arrogant and tough in dealing with my complaints,” Zhang said in an interview. “I was burning with anger.”

After weeks of stewing, she draped her damaged car with a banner proclaiming “Tesla brake failure” in front of the Tesla dealership in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province, some 200 km (124 miles) from her home. She sat on the Tesla’s roof and blared her protest through a bullhorn: “Tesla Model 3 brakes failed,” she said. “A family of four almost died.” The next month, she parked her damaged car outside an auto show in Zhengzhou. It was all to no avail — Tesla refused to turn over the full data and mediation went nowhere.

Figuring that top Tesla officials would attend an April auto show in Shanghai, she and a friend — who had also had a problem with her Tesla — donned matching T-shirts with the phrase “Brakes fail” and headed for Tesla’s booth, determined to buttonhole executives. The automaker’s officials avoided them, Zhang said, and they couldn’t get anyone to hear them out.

Her friend, who was six months pregnant, started shouting, “Tesla brakes fail!”

Zhang clambered on top of a shiny red display model and started hollering, too.

“Things escalated,” said Zhang.

The moment — captured on cellphone videos shot by onlookers — went viral on Chinese social media. Burly security guards hauled Zhang out, and she was detained for five days.

Some observers speculated that Zhang’s protest had been orchestrated — perhaps by a competitor or by the Chinese government itself to pressure Tesla to conform with Chinese regulations. Tesla alleged that Zhang hadn’t acted on her own. A top executive speculated to Chinese media that she “had someone behind her” and said Zhang was making a fuss because she just wanted higher compensation.

Zhang insisted she acted on her own — and out of anguish. Outraged, she sued Tesla for defamation, arguing that the executive’s comments unjustly cast her as a troublemaker to deflect attention from the company’s own shortcomings.

And then she found herself on the receiving end of a lawsuit filed by Tesla.

‘The odds are stacked against you’

Tesla said Zhang had deliberately spread false information that damaged the brand and asked for 5 million yuan ($684,000) in damages.

The case, which a court took up in October 2021, came as Tesla faced a barrage of criticism in China.

Dozens of Tesla owners had been publicly complaining about alleged brake failures, battery fires, unintended acceleration and other defects, as well as what they claimed were misleading sales practices. The same month as Zhang’s crash, Chinese regulators summoned Tesla to respond to quality concerns raised by such reports.

Zhang’s emotional protest sparked a rare burst of criticism of Tesla in Chinese media. Under pressure from regulators, Tesla finally released the data from her car, which the company said showed her father had been driving nearly 120 km per hour (75 mph) and that the brakes had functioned to reduce the magnitude of the collision.

Tesla had finally given Zhang what she’d been asking for, but they’d published the data publicly and included her vehicle identification number. She said she and her family started getting threatened and doxed online. Besides, she wondered, how could she be sure Tesla hadn’t modified or redacted the data from her car? It was less than the victory she’d hoped for. Feeling besieged, she sued Tesla a second time, in March 2022, for invading her privacy.

Zhang lost both cases she brought against Tesla.

Meanwhile, the defamation case against her was grinding along. Back in court as a defendant, Zhang was unable to prove that the brakes on her Tesla had indeed failed. In a closed trial, a Shanghai court ruled in May 2024 that Zhang’s public complaints went beyond what magistrates considered reasonable, factual criticism and ordered her to publicly apologize and pay 170,000 RMB ($23,000) to cover damages and the legal costs of the world’s most valuable car company.

Zhang appealed the ruling. She maintains that her lawsuit is a cry for transparency and accountability and that a company as rich and powerful as Tesla should be able to tolerate legitimate criticism from its customers.

“I refuse to accept it,” Zhang told The Associated Press, “As a consumer, even if I said something wrong, I have the right to comment and criticize. I spoke about my feelings as a user of the car. It has nothing to do with damaging their reputation.”

Her odds of winning the appeal against Tesla do not look good. Tesla has not only won the defamation cases it brought against unhappy car owners and critical journalists, it’s also prevailed in lawsuits customers have filed against it.

An AP review of a Chinese government database of court filings published online found 81 civil judgments in which car owners sued Tesla over safety and quality issues or contract disputes. Car owners won in only nine of those cases.

In a statement to AP, the Shanghai High People’s Court said that judgments are the result of a “fair trial” based on “the objective facts of the case.”

“It cannot be assumed that the party has received ‘special protection’ or ‘special treatment’ because of their victory,” the court wrote.

While some auto industry experts in China say it’s generally difficult for customers to win cases against car companies, others say it’s remarkable for a foreign company to enjoy such success in Chinese courts.

“For Tesla to win that percentage of the time is an anomaly,” said Bill Russo, founder of Automobility Ltd., an advisory firm based in Shanghai, who also used to be regional head of Chrysler in northeast Asia. “The odds are stacked against you. It’s like going to the casino and winning every hand.”

The power of patronage

Tesla’s commercial and political success in China has hinged on the support of a powerful patron: Li Qiang, the former party boss of Shanghai who is now China’s premier, second in rank only to President Xi Jinping. It was under his watch, in 2019, that Tesla built its first overseas factory on the outskirts of China’s financial capital.

With Li’s support, Tesla became the first foreign automaker allowed to retain complete control over its China venture and got low-interest loans and generous tax breaks. China also adopted an emissions credit scheme modeled after a U.S. program that has generated billions in income for Tesla.

In January 2020, one year after breaking ground, Elon Musk unveiled the first Chinese-made Teslas on a stage in Shanghai. Tesla turned an annual profit for the first time in its history that year, and Musk was declared the world’s richest person in January 2021.

China got what it wanted, too: Tesla was a potent catalyst for domestic production and consumption. Before Tesla’s arrival, new energy vehicles accounted for around 5% of China’s auto market. Today, analysts say, more than half of passenger vehicles sold retail in China are powered by an electric motor. Chinese battery maker CATL, a key Tesla supplier, has embedded itself in global supply chains to become the world’s largest EV-battery maker. China’s BYD is now the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer and a growing competitive threat to legacy carmakers in the West.

“Tesla had a large part to play in that,” said Tu Le, the managing director of Sino Auto Insights, a consulting firm. Tu said the way the government smoothed the way for Musk’s factory was critical. “It was a swampy field on the outskirts of Shanghai. A year later they’re rolling cars off the line,” he said. “I don’t know if that happens anywhere else in the world.”

Requests for comment to the State Council, which is run by Li Qiang and oversees China’s government ministries, went unanswered.

Musk still swings by to meet Li when he goes to China. Their encounters underscore the complexity of Musk’s overlapping interests as a businessman and the most China-friendly member of Trump’s inner circle.

Musk’s “greater objective was winning influence over the people that mattered for him, that enabled him to get things done,” said Russo, the auto strategist in Shanghai. “He’s done a good job of it in China and he’s done it now with the influence he purchased with his relationship with Trump.”

‘A chilling effect’

Safety advocates worry about the implications of Musk’s proximity to power in the United States. Federal investigations and safety initiatives Musk has long railed against could be easily snuffed out by the new administration.

In the U.S., Tesla also has been subject to a raft of customer safety complaints and lawsuits over autopilot function, battery charging, alleged suspension defects, sudden braking or acceleration, faulty airbags and allegedly monopolistic practices on repairs and parts. Judges have dismissed some cases. In others, Tesla settled out of court or paid hefty settlements.

Tesla has not publicly sued any of its U.S. customers for speaking out, though in January, Musk said on X that “maybe it is time” to sue media outlets for coverage that could stain Tesla’s brand. His post has been viewed more than 22 million times.

Tesla has already successfully done that in China.

Two Chinese journalists based in Shanghai told AP there is an unwritten rule to avoid critical coverage of Tesla. Both spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation.

“We were told by our editor that we should not write negatively about Tesla because it is a key company that was introduced and protected by the Shanghai government,” a tech reporter told AP.

Those who have strayed have found themselves in court. Musk’s company sued media outlets PingWest and ifeng.com over negative coverage. It was unhappy about PingWest’s report that claimed Tesla’s Shanghai factory was a “sweatshop.” The news website ifeng.com drew Tesla’s ire over a story that explored the tribulations of car owners who fought Tesla. PingWest had to apologize and pay Tesla 100,000 yuan ($13,700). AP could not determine the outcome of the case against ifeng.com.

Tesla is not the only company in its industry to sue its critics. BYD has also aggressively pursued media in court, including an unsuccessful lawsuit against Vice Media in the United States. More recently, electric vehicle makers Nio and Li Auto have stepped up defamation cases against bloggers in China who allegedly spread false information about their companies.

Tesla, however, stands out even among its cut-throat Chinese competitors — in going after car owners who suffered crashes.

“Tesla used their legal advantages to bully Chinese car owners and people who speak up for them,” said Feng Shiming, an auto blogger and Tesla owner who was ordered by a Shanghai court last year to pay Tesla 250,000 yuan ($34,200) after he wrote about Tesla’s alleged brake failures. He has appealed the verdict. “Tesla wants to have a chilling effect on society and terrify people so they will be scared to say anything negative about Tesla.”

Chen Junyi got the message. He lost control of his Model 3 and plowed into a dozen cars in a parking lot at high speed in August 2020. He claimed the brakes had failed. He told Chinese media at the time that he broke his back and four ribs and had to have 30 centimeters (12 inches) of his small intestine removed. Chen took to social media and warned people not to buy Teslas, raising his shirt to reveal the long, gnarled scar that runs up his abdomen.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/tesla-china-lawsuits-musk-investigation-58b10ccace488784fcc63646ab78b410

Sir Keir Starmer has said he is prepared to put “our own troops on the ground if necessary” in Ukraine if there is a deal to end the war with Russia.

Ahead of an “emergency meeting” of European leaders on Monday, the prime minister said he was “ready and willing” to put British troops into a peacekeeping force in Ukraine.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, the prime minister also said the UK was “ready to play a leading role” in Ukraine’s defence and security, by committing £3bn a year until 2030.

It comes as Emmanuel Macron rallies the likes of Sir Keir and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at a hastily-arranged Paris summit to discuss Ukraine’s next steps.

The French president will look to recapture Ukraine’s future at the informal meeting, which has been swiftly put together following announcements from the United States.

It will take place as the US sends senior officials to Saudi Arabia for peace talks with Russia – which representatives from Europe have not been invited to. It is unclear if Ukraine will take part.

A delegation from Ukraine is in Saudi Arabia to pave the way for a possible visit from Volodymyr Zelenskyy, one Ukrainian official said on Sunday.

However, less than 24 hours prior, a top Zelenskyy adviser had denied Ukraine would take part in the discussions.

“There is nothing on the negotiating table that would be worth discussing,” Mykhailo Podolyak said in a TV interview.

Speaking in Florida on Sunday, Donald Trump said of Mr Putin: “I think he wants to stop fighting.

“They [Russia] have a big powerful machine, you understand that. They defeated Hitler and they defeated Napoleon. They’ve been fighting a long time.”

Mr Macron’s meeting is expected to be attended by British Prime Minister Sir Keir, Germany’s Mr Scholz, Danish PM Mette Frederiksen and Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, alongside other European leaders.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and NATO chief Mark Rutte are also expected at the Paris summit.

The goal of the discussions is to “bring together all partners interested in peace and security in Europe”, a French statement said.

Meanwhile, representatives from the Trump administration are travelling to Saudi Arabia for peace talks with Russia. The discussions are expected to begin in Riyadh on Tuesday, according to Russian newspaper Kommersant.

Mr Trump’s push for a quick way out of Russia’s war on Ukraine has stirred concern and uncertainty from European leaders.

After a recent phone call with Mr Putin, Mr Trump has – on multiple occasions – said he and the Russian president will meet soon to discuss a peace deal over Ukraine.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/pm-prepared-to-send-troops-to-ukraine-if-peace-deal-reached-as-european-leaders-gear-up-for-crisis-talks-13311176

US secretary of state Marco Rubio has fully endorsed Israel’s war aims in the Gaza Strip – throwing the region’s fragile ceasefire into further doubt.

Mr Rubio met with top Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on Sunday as he started a tour of the Middle East which will likely see him face pushback from Arab leaders over Donald Trump’s plan to “take over” and redevelop Gaza.

The Israel-Hamas ceasefire began on 19 January and the first phase comes to an end in two weeks’ time. The second phase is yet to be negotiated.

Mr Rubio said Hamas cannot continue as either a military or government force – using language which could complicate the talks.

“As long as it stands as a force that can govern or as a force that can administer or as a force that can threaten by use of violence, peace becomes impossible,” he said.

“It must be eradicated.”

Hamas reasserted control over Gaza when the ceasefire began and has been releasing hostages taken during its attack on 7 October 2023 in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Mr Rubio’s comments came as the Israel military said it carried out an airstrike on Sunday on people who had approached its forces in southern Gaza.

Gaza’s Hamas-run Interior Ministry had said three of its police officers were killed while they secured the entry of aid trucks on the Egyptian border. Hamas said the attack was a “serious violation” of the ceasefire agreement.

Mr Netanyahu – who has welcomed Mr Trump’s plan for Gaza – has signalled a readiness to war after the current phase of the ceasefire.

He has offered Hamas a chance to surrender and send its top leaders into exile – which has been rejected by the group.

While each of the phase one hostage releases have so far taken place as planned, they haven’t been without their issues.

Earlier this week, Hamas threatened to delay a release because Mr Netanyahu was yet to approve the entry of mobile homes and heavy machinery into Gaza, as required by the ceasefire agreement.

In response, Israel – with the backing of Mr Trump – threatened to renew its offensive if the hostages were not freed.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/israel-hamas-ceasefire-thrown-into-further-doubt-as-rubio-backs-netanyahus-war-aims-13311022

 

Pop star Shakira has been taken to hospital in Peru after experiencing “an abdominal issue”, forcing her to cancel one of her concerts.

The Hips Don’t Lie singer had been due to perform in Lima for the first time in over a decade.

“I’m sorry to let you all know that last night I had to go to the emergency room for an abdominal issue and I’m currently hospitalized,” Shakira wrote in a post on Instagram.

“The doctors taking care of me have let me know that I’m not well enough to perform tonight.”

On Saturday, the Colombian singer posted videos showing hundreds of fans greeting her at the airport as she arrived in Peru.

“I am very sad that I will not be able to take the stage today,” she wrote in her post. “I have been deeply emotional and excited about reuniting with my beloved Peruvian audience.”

“I hope to be better by tomorrow and that they release me from the hospital as soon as possible to be able to put on the show that I’ve prepared for you all,” she wrote.

Shakira has been a trailblazer for Latin artists crossing over into the English-speaking market although she faced controversy in recent years.

In 2023, the singer settled a tax fraud case with the Spanish authorities where she eventually ended up paying a €7.5m (£6.5m) fine and accusing tax authorities of draining her “energy, time, and tranquillity”.

The singer’s next show in Lima is booked for Monday after starting her tour in Brazil last week. Her tour is in support of her Grammy-winning album, Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran, centred around her highly-publicised split from Spanish footballer Gerard Piqué.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/shakira-taken-to-hospital-as-shes-forced-to-cancel-concert-13311142

U.S. and Russian officials will meet in Saudi Arabia in the coming days to start talks aimed at ending Moscow’s nearly three-year war in Ukraine, a U.S. lawmaker and a source familiar with the planning said on Saturday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who met with U.S. Vice President JD Vance in Germany on Friday, said Ukraine was not invited to the talks in Saudi Arabia and Kyiv would not engage with Russia before consulting with strategic partners.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz and White House Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff will travel to Saudi Arabia, U.S. Representative Michael McCaul told Reuters. It was not immediately clear who they would meet from Russia.
On the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, McCaul said the aim of the talks was to arrange a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Zelenskiy “to finally bring peace and end this conflict.”

A source with knowledge of the plans confirmed the planned talks in Saudi Arabia between U.S. and Russian officials. The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump, who took office on January 20, has repeatedly vowed to swiftly end the Ukraine war. He made separate phone calls to Putin and Zelenskiy on Wednesday, leaving Washington’s European allies alarmed that they will be cut out of any peace process.
Those fears were largely confirmed on Saturday when Trump’s Ukraine envoy said Europe won’t have a seat at the table, after Washington sent a questionnaire to European capitals to ask what they could contribute to security guarantees for Kyiv.

MINERALS DEAL
Earlier on Saturday Rubio spoke with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. They agreed on regular contacts to prepare for a meeting between Putin and Trump, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said.
Zelenskiy said on Friday he would visit the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, but did not say when. However, the Ukrainian leader said he had no plans to meet with U.S. or Russian officials during those visits.
Moscow controls a fifth of Ukraine and has been slowly advancing in the east for months, while Kyiv’s smaller army grapples with manpower shortages and tries to hold a chunk of territory in western Russia.
Russia has demanded Kyiv cede territory and become permanently neutral under any peace deal. Ukraine demands Russia withdraw from captured land and wants NATO membership or equivalent security guarantees to prevent attack by Moscow.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-team-start-russia-ukraine-peace-talks-saudi-arabia-coming-days-politico-2025-02-15/

Billionaire Elon Musk said on Saturday that his xAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot and ChatGPT challenger Grok 3 would be released with a live demo at 8 p.m. Pacific time on Monday (0400 GMT on Tuesday).

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/elon-musk-says-xais-grok-3-chatbot-be-unveiled-monday-2025-02-16/

Hamas released Israeli hostages Iair Horn, Sagui Dekel Chen and Sasha (Alexander) Troufanov in Gaza on Saturday and Israel freed some 369 Palestinian prisoners and detainees in exchange, after mediators helped avert a collapse of the fragile ceasefire.

The three Israelis were led onto a stage with Palestinian Hamas militants armed with automatic rifles standing on each side of them at the site in Khan Younis, live footage showed, before they were taken back into Israel by Israeli forces.

Shortly afterwards, buses carrying freed Palestinian prisoners and detainees departed Israel’s Ofer jail in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The first bus arrived in Ramallah to a cheering crowd, some waving Palestinian flags.
“We didn’t expect to be freed, but God is great, God set us free,” said Musa Nawarwa, 70, from the West Bank town of Bethlehem, who was serving two life terms for killings of Israeli soldiers in the West Bank.
Buses carrying some of the hundreds of Palestinian freed prisoners and detainees, some flashing victory signs as they hung from the windows, arrived later at the European Hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

Some of the Palestinians were serving long prison terms for involvement in suicide bombings and other attacks that killed dozens of Israelis during the second Palestinian uprising in 2000. Others were jailed for killing Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank.
Some, like Hassan Ewis, will be allowed to return to their homes. Others, such as his brother, are expected to be deported to Egypt.
Ewis’ charge sheet in the Israeli Justice Ministry records include the planting of explosives and attempted murder and intentional homicide. He said prison conditions were difficult and Palestinians were deprived of sufficient food.
Some of the Israeli hostages who have returned since January 19 have reported being deprived of food, held in tunnels for months and not seeing daylight, and being subjected to physical and psychological abuse.

Some freed Palestinians are returning to an enclave they have not seen for years, before it was blasted into rubble by Israeli airstrikes and shelling in 15 months of war. But most were rounded up after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
‘NOW WE CAN BREATHE A LITTLE’
The ceasefire’s second phase is meant to usher in negotiations to return the remaining living hostages among the 251 seized that day, and complete an Israeli military withdrawal before a final end to the war and the reconstruction of Gaza.

Netanyahu thanked U.S. President Donald Trump for putting pressure on Hamas, which he said led to the release of the three hostages and said he would convene a cabinet meeting to discuss next steps, the Israeli prime minister’s office said in a statement.
Argentina-born Iair Horn, 46, was taken captive together with his younger brother Eitan. Horn appeared to have lost considerable weight in captivity.
“Now, we can breathe a little. Our Iair is home after surviving hell in Gaza. Now, we need to bring Eitan back so our family can truly breathe,” Horn’s family said in a statement.
The swap of the three Israelis for the 369 Palestinians allayed growing alarm that the ceasefire agreement could unravel before the end of the 42-day first stage of the truce pact in effect since January 19.
In what has become known as Hostage Square in Tel Aviv, people broke into cheers and tears after hearing the Red Cross was on its way to deliver the three to Israeli military forces.
Dekel Chen, a U.S.-Israeli, Troufanov, a Russian Israeli, and Horn along with his brother Eitan were seized in Kibbutz Nir Oz, one of the communities near Gaza’s border that were overrun by Hamas gunmen on October 7, 2023.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/three-israeli-hostages-set-return-gaza-ceasefire-holds-2025-02-15/

Why does an mRNA-based vaccine hold promise? What have pre-clinical trials shown?

In December last year, Russia announced that it had developed a new, mRNA-based personalised ‘vaccine’ for cancer which would be available free for patients by early 2025. Media reports state that Andrey Kaprin, General Director of the Radiology Medical Research Center of the Russian Ministry of Health, spoke to Radio Rossiya about the vaccine. Reports also say that Alexander Gintsburg, Director of the Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology, said the vaccine’s pre-clinical trials had shown that it suppresses tumour development and potential metastases.

Source: https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/health/what-is-the-cancer-vaccine-russia-is-offering-explained/article69222820.ece

Privacy campaigners have called Google’s new rules on tracking people online “a blatant disregard for user privacy.”

Changes which come in on Sunday permit so-called “fingerprinting”, which allows online advertisers to collect more data about users including their IP addresses and information about their devices.

Google says this data is already widely used by other companies, and it continues to encourage responsible data use.

However the company had previously come out strongly against this kind of data collection, saying in a 2019 blog that fingerprinting “subverts user choice and is wrong.”