On Thursday, three people were arrested in St. John’s after allegedly assaulting officers with the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary. One of the suspects was said to have used a block of cheese to carry out the attack.
According to the CBC, officers were called to a disturbance at an apartment building in the west end of the city around 1:30 pm. Upon arrival, they allegedly saw a woman assaulting another woman, and moved in to break things up. At that point, one of the women hit an officer in the face.
Later that afternoon, while members of the RNC were responding to a home invasion, an officer was assaulted by the alleged invader.
The third incident took place around 9 pm in the city centre. As Staff Sgt. Justin Soo explained, when officers showed up on scene, they “encountered a very irate male who then assaulted officers with a block of cheese.”
Jazz saxophone icon David Sanborn passed away today at 78 years old. The multiple Grammy-winning musician died from a long bout with prostate cancer.
Sanborn was diagnosed with polio at three years old and explained how the radio and music aided in his recovery.
Playing saxophone was an important part of his recovery, according to his official bio, and by the time he was a teenager he was playing alongside blues legends like Albert King and Little Milton. He released his debut solo album, Taking Off, in 1975, when he turned 30.
Beyond a chain-link fence topped with spiraled barbed wire, swaying coastal grasses conceal a cache of buried radioactive waste and toxic pesticides from a bygone chemical plant.
Warning signs along the Richmond, Calif., site’s perimeter attempt to discourage trespassers from breaching the locked gates, where soil testing has detected cancer-causing gamma radiation more than 60 times higher than background levels in some places.
Aggressive and impactful reporting on climate change, the environment, health and science.
For most of the 20th century, the former Stauffer Chemical Co. disposed of thousands of tons of industrial waste near its factory grounds along Richmond’s southeast shoreline. In the last two decades, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control has overseen the investigation into the extent of contamination, revealing elevated radioactivity underground and at the surface. Testing also found hazardous levels of heavy metals, including brain-damaging lead, and the banned pesticide Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT).
Elon Musk is the CEO of several companies including Space X, Tesla, and xAI, while Mark Zuckerberg owns Meta platforms including, Facebook and Instagram. — AFP/File
Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has criticised Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg for being “excessively greedy”. He said that the Facebook owner takes credits for advertisers’ campaigns on its platforms which he should not, India Today reported.
The dispute unfolded after a user posted on X formerly known as Twitter about the attribution of conversions in advertising campaigns on both X and Meta platforms.
The user shared that despite running ad campaigns on both the platforms, the majority of conversions came from Meta while only some were from X.
Three people, including a 15-year-old schoolboy, are dead following a shooting in East Kingston.
Radio Jamaica News was informed that they were among four persons shot in the attack, which occurred along Wild Street, off Windward Road, sometime after 3 p.m. Monday.
Reports are that a Toyota Mark X motor car drove onto Wild Street, after which the occupants of the vehicle exited and opened fire, hitting all four who were gathered at a complex.
Residents say one of the victims ran but was chased and shot multiple times.
The wounded were rushed hospital where two of the men were pronounced dead.
One of the schoolboys, who was seriously injured, was rushed to surgery, but died while receiving treatment.
The 15-year-old boy – a student of Holy Trinity High – has been identified as Maurice Morgan.
Students often throw up or wet themselves when gunfire erupts outside their school in northern Port-au-Prince.
When they do, school director Roseline Ceragui Louis finds that there is only one way to try to calm them and keep them safe: getting them to lie on the classroom floor while she sings softly.
“You can’t work in that environment,” she said. “It’s catastrophic. They’re traumatised.”
Haiti’s capital is under the onslaught of powerful gangs that control 80 per cent of of the city.
On February 29, gangs launched coordinated attacks targeting key infrastructure. The attacks have left more than 2,500 people dead or wounded in the first three months of the year. Now, in a bid to help save Haiti’s youngest generation, the country is undergoing a wider push to dispel a long-standing taboo on seeking therapy and talking about mental health.
A gathering was held Monday honoring the 11 victims of the 1985 MOVE bombing.
The day marked 39 years since Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on the home of the Black liberation group MOVE at 6221 Osage Ave. The fire that followed was left to burn by the fire department. It resulted in the deaths of five children and the destruction of 61 homes across two blocks of the predominantly Black neighborhood.
Multiple speakers, including family member Mike Africa Jr., read the names of the victims in the middle of Cobbs Creek Parkway on Monday, down the block from where the bombing happened. Africa Jr. said he didn’t want those who perished to be “faceless victims.”
Gabriel Bryant, YahNé Ndgo, Mike Africa Jr. and Krystal Strong gave remarks on May 13, 2024, down the street from where the MOVE bombing occurred in 1985. (Cory Sharber/WHYY)
Dubai’s Burj Khalifa is officially recognized as the world’s tallest building, measuring 2,716.5 feet and consisting of 163 stories.
However, various architecture firms are consistently striving to come up with innovative concepts and secure investments to beat Burj Khalifa.
Some of these concepts are so impressive that it is hard to imagine them being feasible.
One such example was proposed by Clouds Architecture Office, a New York-based firm, in 2017.
They presented a design for a tower named the Analemma Tower that would hang upside from an asteroid 31,068 miles above Earth, according to a 2017 report by CNN.
The huge structure would levitate above the ground and hold pricey apartments and would be accessible by drone.
Analemma Tower reaches for the heavens. — CNN via Clouds Architecture Office
WINNIPEG — The Winnipeg trial of admitted serial killer Jeremy Skibicki is expected to continue today with testimony from a DNA expert.
Court has heard DNA from three of the four victims was found in Skibicki’s home after police searched it in May 2022.
Skibicki has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder for the slayings of Rebecca Contois, Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran and an unidentified women Indigenous leaders have named Buffalo Woman.
His lawyers have said he killed the four Indigenous women but is not criminally responsible due to mental illness.
Screenshot of the false post, taken on May 3, 2024
The same video was shared alongside similar claims and viewed more than 680,000 times across YouTube, SnackVideo and TikTok.
Although some social media users expressed doubt about the authenticity of the video, many others left comments indicating they believed it was genuine.
“It’s terrifying,” one wrote.
Another said: “Imagine if it hits Kalimantan island, maybe the entire Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore could disappear from the earth.”
Edited video
A reverse image search on Google found the same video uploaded to Instagram on September 21, 2023, credited to a user called diego.sinclair (archived link).
The video is captioned “Asteroid Hitting The Moon (CGI)”.
Further keyword searches on YouTube found the original video uploaded by a channel called Diego Sinclair on Feb 25, 2023 (archived link).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the false posts (left) and Diego Sinclair’s video (right), which shows the circulating clip has been mirrored:
Screenshot comparison of the video in the false posts (left) and Diego Sinclair’s video (right)
In comments on the video, the user said it was created using video effects and that it was “just an edit”, adding: “… the actual explosions don’t look anything like this one. They’re just bright flashes.”
A 3D computer graphics software tool called Blender was used to create the dramatic video, the user told AFP.
According to NASA, the Moon has little or no atmosphere so space rocks have nothing to stop them from striking the surface (archived link).
Scientists at the space agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center at the Automated Lunar and Meteor Observatory (ALaMO) in Huntsville, Alabama capture video of meteoroid strikes on the Moon several times a month (archived link).
In a video uploaded by the Marshall Space Flight Center, the lunar impact can be seen as small, bright flashes — nothing like the mushroom cloud explosion in the edited video (archived link).
AFP has previously debunked edited videos shared as genuine celestial events here and here.
Two prison guards were shot dead in an attack on a vehicle transporting an inmate in Incarville, France, after it stopped at a toll both, with more reported to be injured
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Manhattan prosecutors turned Monday to star witness Michael Cohen to describe the crux of their alleged criminal evidence against former President Trump stemming from his bid for the White House in 2016.
Cohen’s account of doing Trump’s bidding to hide extramarital sex as Trump sought the presidency eventually angered the defendant. Trump exited the courtroom to say he chafed at being off the campaign trail and he read at length from articles written by legal allies. Trump also blasted the presiding justice after hours of listening, sometimes with his eyes closed, to his former “fixer” retell a story now internationally familiar.
The Hill: Angry Trump blasts Justice Juan Merchan following Cohen’s testimony.
Michael Cohen offered the strongest evidence to date linking former President Donald Trump to the charges he is facing in New York, serving as either a blessing or a curse to prosecutors, depending on whether the jury finds their troubled star witness credible.
Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, testified Monday during Trump’s trial that the former president knew every step of the way how Cohen was working to prevent porn star Stormy Daniels from going public right before the 2016 election with a claim that she had a sexual encounter with Trump.
Prosecutors presented evidence that Cohen had two phone calls with Trump right before Cohen went to the bank to use a shell company to wire Daniels’s attorney $130,000 as part of a settlement agreement.
“I wanted to ensure that, once again, he approved what I was doing because I require approval from him on all of this,” Cohen said of the two calls.
Michael Cohen testifies on the witness stand in Manhattan criminal court about the calculations that Alan Weisselberg made to determine how to pay back Cohen for the money he paid to Stormy Daniels, Monday, May 13, 2024, in New York. (Elizabeth Williams via AP)
Trump’s former lawyer described in court how the former president demands total sycophancy from his underlings.
Michael Cohen, former president Donald Trump’s former attorney, arrives at his home after leaving Manhattan Criminal Court on May 13, 2024, in New York City.
(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)
The third week of Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan kicked off with the testimony of a familiar Trumpworld figure: former Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen. Cohen’s turn on the stand has been hotly anticipated since the trial got underway last month, since he’s able to directly confirm key details in the prosecution’s case, chiefly concerning the logistics of the payoff to former porn star Stormy Daniels in order to suppress her story of an alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006.
Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson joined fellow GOP members of Congress to announce the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require those registering to vote in federal elections to show proof of US citizenship.
Nor are Republicans entirely ignoring the lack of data to support their claims. “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number,” Johnson said during the press conference. “This legislation will allow us to do exactly that — it will prevent that from happening. And if someone tries to do it, it will now be unlawful within the states.”
How convenient and unoriginal it is to use intuition to ignore facts. “The speaker said that this question is unanswerable and relied on his intuition, but in fact, the question is very answerable,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, a senior counsel in the Voting Rights & Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said in an interview. “And it’s been answered many times, in that there is not a serious problem with noncitizen voting in the United States.”
(Bloomberg) — Using Facebook in the lead-up to the US 2020 presidential election might have increased the chances of someone voting for Donald Trump, university researchers said in a study published Monday in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
As part of the study, the researchers asked nearly 19,900 Facebook and 15,600 Instagram users to stop using the platforms ahead of the 2020 election. The authors, led by Stanford University professors Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, found some evidence suggesting that people who used Facebook might have been more likely to vote for Trump. They noted that their finding fell “just short” of being statistically significant.
“So we need to take it with a grain of salt,” Gentzkow said in a statement. “But if it’s real, it’s big enough that it could impact the outcome of a close election.”
President Biden is taking action to protect American jobs from Chinese cheating in markets like steel and semiconductors.
The White House announced via a fact sheet:
Today’s actions to counter China’s unfair trade practices are carefully targeted at strategic sectors—the same sectors where the United States is making historic investments under President Biden to create and sustain good-paying jobs—unlike recent proposals by Congressional Republicans that would threaten jobs and raise costs across the board. The previous administration’s trade deal with China failed to increase American exports or boost American manufacturing as it had promised.
Under President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs have been created and new factory construction has doubled after both fell under the previous administration, and the trade deficit with China is the lowest in a decade—lower than any year under the last administration. We will continue to work with our partners around the world to strengthen cooperation to address shared concerns about China’s unfair practices—rather than undermining our alliances or applying indiscriminate 10 percent tariffs that raise prices on all imports from all countries, regardless whether they are engaged in unfair trade. The Biden-Harris Administration recognizes the benefits for our workers and businesses from strong alliances and a rules-based international trade system based on fair competition.
An Australian federal court sided with Elon Musk on Monday, rejecting an Australian safety regulator’s request to extend a temporary order blocking a terrorist attack video from spreading on Musk’s platform X (formerly Twitter).
The video showed a teen stabbing an Assyrian bishop, Mar Mari Emmanuel—whose popular, sometimes controversial TikTok sermons often garner millions of views—during a church livestream that rapidly spread online.
Police later determined it was a religiously motivated terrorist act after linking the 16-year-old charged in the stabbing to a group of seven teens “accused of following a violent extremist ideology in raids across Sydney,” AP News reported. Bishop Emmanuel has since reassured his followers that he recovered quickly and forgave the teen, Al Jazeera reported.
In April, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, had cited Australia’s Online Safety Act and asked X to remove 65 posts showing footage from the attack, Reuters reported, but X refused to remove the posts.
Minutes after it became clear that Javier Milei had been elected president of South America’s second-largest nation in November, Elon Musk posted on X: “Prosperity is ahead for Argentina.”
Since then, Mr. Musk has continued to use X, the social network he owns, to boost Mr. Milei. The billionaire has shared videos of the Argentine president attacking “social justice” with his 182 million followers. One doctored image, which implied that watching a speech by Mr. Milei was better than having sex, is among Mr. Musk’s most viewed posts ever.
Mr. Musk has helped turn the pugnacious libertarian into one of the new faces of the modern right. But offline, he has used the relationship to press for benefits to his other businesses, the electric carmaker Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX.
“Elon Musk called me,” Mr. Milei said in a television interview weeks after taking office. “He is extremely interested in the lithium.”
(CNN) — Rudy Giuliani was suspended from New York City radio station WABC and his talk show canceled after he flagrantly ignored orders not to discuss false 2020 election conspiracy theories, the station’s owner said Monday.
Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Donald Trump lawyer who has hosted a daily talk show on the AM station for three years, was pulled from the airwaves Friday after he repeated bogus claims of vote rigging in the 2020 presidential election.
In recent months, Giuliani was repeatedly directed to not make claims of electronic voting manipulation surrounding the 2020 election, John Catsimatidis, the billionaire GOP donor and owner of the radio station, said in a statement.
Catsimatidis said the station received a letter in January 2021 from election technology company Dominion Voting Systems, which has been the target of baseless vote rigging claims by right-wing media figures, including Giuliani. WABC instructed its on-air hosts, including Giuliani, to avoid the subject, Catsimatidis said.
Washington, DC – In a report released on Friday, the United States concluded that it is “reasonable to assess” that the weapons it provided to Israel during its war on Gaza have been used in violation of international humanitarian law.
However, the same report said that Israel’s assurances that it is not using US arms to commit abuses are “credible and reliable” — and that the US can therefore continue to provide those weapons.
Advocates say the apparent contradiction shows that the US is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to continue arming Israel, even at the expense of Washington’s own laws.
“What those inconsistencies show you is that the administration does know what is happening,” said Annie Shiel, the US advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC).
“They absolutely can see that there is devastating civilian harm, that there are apparent violations, that aid is being restricted. And they do not have the political will to do what that means — and end US support and US arms transfers to Israel.”
Oh, I love “Silence of the Lamb.” It’s one of my favorite movie, right up there with “Star War,” “Dance with Wolf,” and “Jaw.”Â
Colbert played Trump saying:
“Silence of the lambs”? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’s a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. But Hannibal Lecter, congratulations, the late, great Hannibal Lecter.
Colbert responded, “Late, great? In none of the stories does Hannibal Lecter die, and Sir Anthony Hopkins is very much still alive. Does Trump just think a character dies when he turns off the TV? “Well, another great episode of Wheel. Rest in peace. The late, great Pat Sajak. We’ll always remember how much you loved the alphabet. Congratulations. You are dead.”
I couldn’t even get through this piece by Thomas Friedman. For a man who is supposedly a soothsayer on international affairs, made famous by his 2005 “The World Is Flat” bestseller, he falls into logical fallacies about the conflict. You don’t need to be an expert to know that Hamas is a genocidal terror group that does not wish for a peaceful co-existence with Israel. Hamas is immensely popular among Palestinian civilians, who also supported the heinous October 7 attacks in near-equal numbers. Given what we know, how can this man say Israel needs a Palestinian partner to achieve what he thinks is a legitimate victory in this conflict?
It is unfortunate that President Biden chose to announce his pause of some weapons sales to Israel while on a political campaign swing through Wisconsin. I use that word — “unfortunate” — not because I don’t understand why Biden did so, but because the move has enabled Benjamin Netanyahu to deflect attention from the fact that the most dangerous leader threatening Israel today is not Biden but Bibi.
Netanyahu’s policies have not and will not produce a sustainable victory in Gaza, cannot secure Israel against its greatest existential threat — Iran — and are endangering world Jewry and undermining America’s broader Middle East strategic needs and goals.
The world’s big banks have handed nearly $7 trillion in funding to the fossil fuel industry since the Paris agreement on carbon emissions, according to research.
In 2016, after talks in Paris, 196 countries signed an agreement to limit global heating as a result of carbon emissions to at most 2°C above preindustrial levels, with an ideal limit of 1.5°C to prevent the worst impacts of a drastically changed climate.
Many countries have since promised to reduce carbon emissions, but the latest research shows private interests continued to funnel money to oil, gas, and coal companies, which have used it to expand their operations.
Eight in 10 of the world’s most eminent climate scientists now foresee at least 2.5°C of global heating, according to the results of a Guardian survey published last week—an outcome expected to lead to devastating consequences for civilization.
A batch of new polls from the New York Times, Siena College and the Philadelphia Inquirer has very bad news for President Biden: He’s losing. Among registered voters, he’s significantly behind in five of the six battleground states that are most likely to decide the election. He does slightly better among likely voters but remains behind in five key states.
It’s a snapshot, but it’s consistent with the overall trend of this campaign — which is, again, he’s losing.
Biden and many of his supporters seem to think the solution is to get right with the issues — the economy, the Israel-Hamas war, student loans, pot legalization, the threat to democracy and so on. If he can just find the sweet spot on policy, they believe, voters will come home.
That might be true to some extent. But I think focusing on the issues misses Biden’s real weakness: vibes.
“Vibes” is just a trendy word for “mood” or “feelings.” Whatever you call them, the relationship between attitudes and issues is not always as rational as some think.
For almost a decade, Mar-a-Lago has been the destination for Republicans aligning themselves with former President Donald Trump.
From House speakers to congressional candidates, politicians have made the pilgrimage with the goal of currying favor with the man who will lead the party for a third presidential cycle in a row.
But with Trump stuck in New York City for his hush money trial, Republicans have found a new place to flock: the courtroom where the former president, charged with falsifying business records, will be cooped up for the next several weeks.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who led a lawsuit challenging the 2020 election results, appeared there two weeks ago, closer to the start of his trial, while Trump has been joined by congressional allies from Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) to Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) over the last few days.
A recurring theme in The New York Times’ 2024 campaign coverage in recent weeks is that President Biden’s poll numbers suck relative to Donald Trump’s because voters clearly don’t remember the “chaos” of the Trump years.
The paper’s most recent attempt at making “fetch” happen was in an article published Friday, with reference to a new Times survey showing Trump with a substantial lead in all but one of the six swing states that will decide the election.
“Two of the biggest U.S. news events in decades, the Covid pandemic and the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, are seldom the first thing on people’s minds when it comes to their memories of the Trump administration, for example…,” the Times said. “When asked to describe the one thing they remembered most from Donald J. Trump’s presidency, only 5 percent of respondents referred to Jan. 6, and only 4 percent to Covid.”
