Category: World

The Biden administration says there is a significant difference between Israeli actions that have expanded its war against the Iranian-backed militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran’s retaliatory missile attack against Israel, which it condemned as escalatory.

In carefully calibrated remarks, officials across the administration are defending the surge in attacks by Israel against Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon, while still pressing for peace and vowing retribution after Iran fired about 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday.

President Joe Biden praised the U.S. and Israel militaries for defeating the barrage and warned, “Make no mistake, the United States is fully, fully supportive of Israel.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the Iranian missile attack “totally unacceptable, and the entire world should condemn it.”

There was little criticism that Israel may have provoked Iran’s assault. “Obviously, this is a significant escalation by Iran,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said.

Just a week after calling urgently for an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah to avoid the possibility of all-out war in the Middle East, the administration has shifted its message as Israel presses ahead with ground incursions in Lebanon following a massive airstrike Friday in Beirut that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Gen. Abbas Nilforushan.

U.S. officials stress that they have repeatedly come out in support of Israel’s right to defend itself and that any change in their language only reflects evolving conditions on the ground. And, officials say the administration’s goal — a cease-fire — has remained constant.

The U.S. has been quick to praise and defend Israel for a series of recent strikes killing Hezbollah leaders. In contrast to its repeated criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza that has killed civilians, the U.S. has taken a different tack on strikes that targeted Nasrallah and others but also may have killed innocent people.

At the Pentagon, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder made it clear that while the U.S. is still “laser focused” on preventing a wider conflict in the Middle East, he carved out broad leeway for Israel to keep going after Hezbollah to protect itself.

“We understand and support Israel’s right to defend itself against Hezbollah,” Ryder said. “We understand that part of that is dismantling some of the attack infrastructure that Hezbollah has built along the border.”

He said the U.S. is going to consult with Israel as it conducts limited operations against Hezbollah positions along the border “that can be used to threaten Israeli citizens.” The goal, he said, is to allow citizens on both sides of the border to return to their homes.

Part of the ongoing discussions that the U.S. will have with Israel, Ryder said, will focus on making sure there’s an understanding about potential “mission creep” that could lead to tensions to escalate even further.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Tuesday that Israel’s targeting of senior Hamas and Hezbollah leaders as well as its initiation of ground incursions into Lebanon are justified because they were done in self-defense.

Source: https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-israel-hezbollah-united-states-8bed0f7a37b5059ba4c94552ff750f34#

Major US ports will stay shut until pay demands are met, the union boss representing striking dockworkers has said.

Harold Daggett, head of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), made the vow on a picket line in New Jersey on Tuesday, as tens of thousands of dockworkers on the east and gulf coasts walked out in a bid to win a better labour deal.

“We’re going to fight for it and we’re going to win or this port will never open up again,” he said. “I’m not playing games here.”

Businesses are bracing for the possibility of a prolonged ports shut down, which threatens to cause havoc to global trade and the US economy.

President Joe Biden has so far rebuffed calls by some of country’s biggest business groups to use federal power to reopen the ports for 80 days, suspending the strike to provide a cooling-off period for further negotiation.

“It’s only fair that workers, who put themselves at risk during the pandemic to keep ports open, see a meaningful increase in their wages as well,” Biden said.

“Now is not the time for ocean carriers to refuse to negotiate a fair wage for these essential workers while raking in record profits.”

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump also backed the striking port workers.

“American workers should be able to negotiate for better wages, especially since the shipping companies are mostly foreign flag vessels”, he said in a statement.

The strike, the first since 1977 for the ILA, has brought to a halt container traffic across 14 of the country’s busiest ports, including in New York, Georgia and Texas.

The ports are estimated by experts to handle more than a third of the US’s imports and exports. Disruption could lead to delays on goods deliveries for businesses and consumers.

The president said officials would be on the alert for signs of prices being unfairly hiked in the event of potential shortages.

Democrat Tim Walz and Republican JD Vance clashed on Tuesday at a vice presidential debate that was surprisingly civil in the final stretch of an ugly election campaign marred by inflammatory rhetoric and two assassination attempts.

The two rivals, who have forcefully attacked each other on the campaign trail, mostly struck a cordial tone, instead saving their fire for the candidates at the top of their tickets, Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican former President Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is using the destruction of Hurricane Helene to boost his presidential bid against Kamala Harris, political analysts said on Tuesday, after the Republican candidate spread falsehoods about the federal response during a visit to a storm-hit city.
Trump is leveraging the potential political danger of the hurricane to the presidential campaign of Democrat Harris, his 2024 White House rival, the analysts said.

Trump visited the city of Valdosta in the battleground state of Georgia on Monday and falsely stated that Democratic President Joe Biden had been unresponsive to the hurricane’s destruction. Harris is also Biden’s vice president.
Trump said he brought “truckloads of things” to Georgia, including oil, water and equipment, and that he partnered with evangelical Christian leader Franklin Graham’s relief organization to deliver them.

Natural disasters have damaged U.S. administrations in the past and Trump is trying to tie Harris to this hurricane, which tore through the U.S. Southeast including the battleground states of Georgia and North Carolina, said Andrew Reeves, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who has studied how natural disasters affect U.S. politics.
“If there is a massive screw-up in the response, it could come back to bite her,” Reeves said. “Trump is trying to look presidential and trying to create a media story around his attention to the crisis.”

Georgia and North Carolina will play a key role in the outcome of the Nov. 5 election between Trump and Harris. North Carolina’s hardest-hit area, Buncombe County, voted for Biden in 2020, while most of the other counties in the western part of the state went to Trump.
Georgia’s Lowndes County, where Valdosta is located, voted for Trump in 2020. But even a few thousand votes in each state could decide which presidential candidate wins those states and potentially determine the outcome of the White House race.

More than 3,500 federal workers are involved with response efforts in affected states, according to the White House.
Analysts said it was unusual for a presidential candidate who is not in office to visit a disaster area.
Natural disasters, especially hurricanes, have shaped U.S. politics in recent years and could alter the course of the race this year as well, said Stuart Rothenberg, a nonpartisan political analyst.
“It gives Donald Trump an opportunity to ride into the rescue as the savior,” he said.
It is not the first time Trump has sought to use a disaster for political gain. While visiting the site of a toxic train derailment in Ohio in 2023, Trump criticized the Biden administration’s response as a “betrayal.”
Presidents and presidential candidates usually do not visit a storm-hit region immediately because of fears they will distract from rescue efforts and drain resources from local law enforcement officials and emergency responders.
Biden said he would visit North Carolina on Wednesday and Georgia and Florida soon after. He may also ask Congress to return to Washington for a special session to pass supplemental aid funding.
Harris plans a visit to Augusta, Georgia, on Wednesday and a trip to North Carolina in the coming days, the White House said.
She spoke with local leaders by phone and cut short a West Coast campaign swing to participate in a hastily-arranged briefing at Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters on Monday. There, she grimaced and shook her head when a reporter asked whether the crisis was being politicized.
The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
“While Biden and Harris abandon Americans in times of crisis, President Trump leads,” Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
The storm killed more than 100 people across North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia, and the death toll is expected to rise.
Survivors will be eligible for federal disaster aid, but Trump has also authorized a GoFundMe fundraising campaign “as an official response for MAGA supporters.” The campaign has raised over $2 million so far. “MAGA” refers to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan.

Source:https://www.reuters.com/world/us/wake-hurricane-trump-seeks-boost-his-presidential-bid-2024-10-01/

Michael Ancram served as a senior government minister, party chairman and deputy leader.

Michael Ancram, a leading aristocrat who became a Tory MP, senior government minister, party chairman, deputy leader and grandee, has died aged 79

As minister of state for Northern Ireland under John Major, he was an architect in the peace process which eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement signed by Tony Blair.

One of Mr Major’s most trusted allies, he was the first representative of the UK government to take part in negotiations with the IRA, a move that was highly controversial at the time.

Announcing his death, the Conservative Party said Lord Lothian passed away in the early hours of Tuesday, dying peacefully in hospital after a short illness, surrounded by his close family.

“A stalwart of the Conservative Party and a respected figure in British politics, Lord Lothian’s passing marks the end of a distinguished career spanning over five decades,” the party said.

His family said in a statement: “Beyond his political achievements, Lord Lothian was known for his intellectual curiosity and his passion for the arts, particularly country and folk music.

“He was often seen playing the acoustic guitar at Conservative Party conferences, bringing a touch of levity to the often serious world of politics, and on stage performing – on more than once occasion with one or both of his daughters singing alongside him – in the Macmillan Cancer Support Parliamentary Palace of Varieties.

“He was a keen ski racer; captain of both the Oxford University and British Universities ski teams.”

The family’s statement added: “Lord Lothian’s aristocratic heritage, together with his personal humility and geniality, and his modern conservative values made him a unique figure in public life.”

After the Conservatives’ defeat in 1997, Mr Ancram became Tory chairman under William Hague and after standing for the party leadership in 2001 he was deputy leader under Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard until David Cameron became leader in 2005.

Born into an aristocratic Roman Catholic family as the Earl of Ancram, he later became the Marchioness of Lothian in 2004 and after he returned to the House of Lords in 2010 he was known as Lord Kerr of Monteviot until his death.

Lord Lothian is survived by his wife, Lady Jane Fitzalan-Howard, daughter of the 16th Duke of Norfolk, who he married in 1975, two daughters and three grandchildren.

After Ampleforth College and Oxford and Edinburgh universities, Mr Ancram became an advocate at the Scottish Bar and first stood to become an MP, unsuccessfully, in West Lothian in 1970.

He was elected as MP for Berwickshire and East Lothian in the general election in February 1974 but lost the seat in the October election the same year.

He was then elected MP for Edinburgh South in 1979, defeating a young Labour firebrand called Gordon Brown, the future prime minister. His first ministerial job was as a junior Scottish Office minister from 1983 until he lost his seat in the 1987 election.

He returned to the Commons in 1992 as MP for the safe Conservative seat of Devizes in Wiltshire. A year later he became a junior minister at the Northern Ireland Office and was then promoted to minister of state in 1994.

After the 1997 Labour landslide he joined Mr Hague’s shadow cabinet as constitutional affairs spokesman until he became Tory chairman from 1998 until the 2001 election.

Source: https://news.sky.com/story/former-conservative-deputy-leader-michael-ancram-dies-aged-79-13226247

On the evidence of a confident, swaggering performance, Mr Cleverly may be muscling his way into the final two candidates who will contest the leadership in the final ballot of Tory members.

It was round two of the Tory leadership fireside chats.

After “posh boy” Tom Tugendhat and “working class” Kemi Badenoch, it was the turn of “Ozempic man” and “macho man”.

Robert Jenrick, who took the weight loss drug for six weeks, changed his diet, exercised and lost four stone, was taking on the barrel-chested strongman James Cleverly, who does press-ups for fun.

And on the evidence of this confident, swaggering performance, Mr Cleverly may be muscling his way into the final two candidates who will contest the leadership in the final ballot of Tory members.

Without mentioning Mr Jenrick by name, “macho man” made several attacks on “Ozempic man” and boastfully told the audience he was a winner and they couldn’t afford to elect any of the other three candidates to replace Rishi Sunak.

It was Mr Jenrick, all slick, measured and media-trained, who went first and began with the disclosure that the middle name of his second daughter, Sophia, is Thatcher, because she was born the year Mrs Thatcher died.

Yes, really. There were gasps of astonishment from the Thatcher-loving audience. Could this really be true? Yes, apparently.

But Mr Jenrick then had a good joke at Sir Keir Starmer’s expense. His daughter had asked if he’d get free Taylor Swift tickets if he becomes leader. “No, that’s only leaders of the Labour Party,” he said.

Challenged by interviewer Christopher Hope if he’d turn down freebies if he became leader, he looked startled. He’d have to say yes, he conceded. He may live to regret that!

Later, asked the same question, Mr Cleverly was having none of that. “Yes, every now and then!” he said. The man has no shame!

Mr Jenrick had a good gag, too, when asked about a deal with Nigel Farage and Reform UK. “I don’t think the party could afford the bar bill if we allowed Nigel Farage back in,” he said.

And then, when asked which of his Tory colleagues he’d like to see in the BBC reality game show The Traitors, he quipped: “Michael Gove has left Parliament!”

Poor Mr Gove is the butt of a lot of Tory jokes in Birmingham this week. He’ll surely have his revenge in the columns of the Spectator magazine now he’s editor.

Mr Jenrick backed a shorter leadership contest so the winner could oppose the Budget in October and also the return of grammar schools. All the candidates love grammar schools.

Then came a story about Mr Jenrick’s own humble origins, the sort of story we’re also used to from political leaders these days. He grew up in a “working class background”, he claimed. Don’t they all? (Well, not Tom Tugendhat, obviously.)

“Money was quite tight in our household,” Mr Jenrick said. “My mum and dad quit their job and set up a small business, and it didn’t prosper initially. I went to a state primary school, and my granddad died.

Source: https://news.sky.com/story/macho-man-lands-blows-on-ozempic-man-in-round-two-of-tory-leadership-chats-13226020

The Southeastern United States is reeling from Hurricane Helene, a monstrous storm that made landfall in Florida on Thursday before cutting a terrifying path all the way up to Tennessee. How did it get this bad?

The storm has killed more than 100 people, and hundreds more are still missing. Power is out for millions of people. Residents around Asheville, North Carolina — one of the hardest-hit areas — are reportedly struggling to find food, water, and cellphone service. We don’t yet know what the full impact of the storm is; search and rescue missions are still underway, and scientists are finalizing data on how powerful the storm was.

But it’s clear that the storm was disastrous because of its unusual size, intensity, and speed. The perfect conditions were in place to supercharge the storm.

“It had all the different weapons at its disposal that a hurricane [can have],” says John Knox, distinguished teaching professor and undergraduate coordinator of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia. “Everything that we say a hurricane can do, Helene did do.”

While Helene was still churning in the Gulf of Mexico, forecasters were already warning that the storm was going to be “unusually large.” At its maximum, tropical storm-force winds extended nearly 350 miles away from Helene’s center. That enormous reach put Helene in the 90th percentile for storm size, according to the National Hurricane Center. On the ground, that means the effects of the storm — wind, storm surge, and heavy rainfall — were felt across an unusually large area.

Not only was the storm huge but it was also stronger than most. Storm systems this large don’t always develop a small inner core that allows them to quickly strengthen. But Helene was able to form a relatively small eye and then rapidly intensify, a term used to describe tropical storms with sustained wind speeds that rise by at least 30 knots (roughly 35 miles per hour) in a 24-hour period.

It made landfall with winds reaching 140 miles per hour, making it a major storm and a Category 4 out of 5 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale.

Helene packed a punch with water, too. When it hit Florida’s Big Bend region, it brought a massive storm surge, inundating the coastline with up to 15 feet of seawater. The underwater topography off Florida’s west coast, with a more gradual incline, acted like a ramp, making it easier for the storm to bring a taller wall of water with it. The sheer size of the hurricane also meant that the storm surge flooded a wider area.

Heavy rainfall dropped more water onto communities, leading to historic flooding in western North Carolina. Close to 14 inches of rain were recorded at the Asheville airport over three days between September 25th and 27th. The highest preliminary total was more than 31 inches of rain, recorded in Busick, North Carolina.

“It certainly has been a very catastrophic event in portions of Southeast US, especially the southern Appalachians where they’ve seen just tremendous amounts of rainfall and flooding,” says Daniel Brown, branch chief of the hurricane specialist unit at the National Hurricane Center. But with damage and fatality reports still coming in, it’s probably still too soon to know how Helene compares to other storms, he says.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24258295/hurricane-helene-monster-storm-speed-strength-size

Congratulations may be in order for Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara.

Fans online seem to think the “Joker” star is married to his longtime partner after he referred to her as his “wife” on Sunday’s episode of the “Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso” podcast.

As he shared how he crafted his 2020 Oscars speech, the actor revealed he came up with his stirring address while he “was talking with my mom and my wife.”

Later in the episode, Phoenix referred to Mara by name, making it clear she was the “wife” he was speaking about.

“Rooney was like, ‘That’s what you should say!’” he shared.

Throughout the entirety of his conversation with Fragoso, Phoenix refrained from clarifying his marriage status.

A rep for the actor did not immediately respond to Page Six’s request for comment.

The couple met in 2012 while working together on the Spike Jonze film “Her.” Though, they didn’t strike up a relationship until they reunited on the set of “Mary Magdalene” a few years later.

They became engaged in 2019.

“She’s the only girl I ever looked up on the internet,” Phoenix said of Mara in a rare 2019 interview with Vanity Fair.

Source: https://pagesix.com/2024/10/01/celebrity-news/joaquin-phoenix-sparks-marriage-rumors-after-referring-to-rooney-mara-as-his-wife/

Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate between Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz felt like a civil and relatively restrained conversation about the issues at the top of American voters’ minds going into the 5 November election.

In that, it was unlike the two presidential debates earlier this year.

The two men spent much more time attacking the other’s running mate than each other during 90-plus minutes on the CBS News stage in New York.

Walz had a shaky start but hit his stride when talking about abortion and the Capitol riot.

But the even-tempered, policy-focused debate, with few political body blows, probably served Vance – a polished public speaker – best in the end.

If Vance was picked because he puts ideological meat on the bones of Trump’s conservative populism, on Tuesday night he put a polite, humble face on them, as well.

“Something these guys do is they make a lot of claims about if Donald Trump becomes president, all of these terrible consequences are going to ensue,” he said. “But in reality, Donald Trump was president. Inflation was low. Take home pay was higher.”

The UK was eighth among the countries with the highest rates, behind Germany, Portugal, Luxembourg, Norway, Andorra, Denmark and San Marino.

Germany’s teenagers and young people have the highest rates of acne in the world, according to a major study, with the UK in eighth place.

All of the countries with the highest rates of doctor-diagnosed acne have seen increases in the skin condition since 1990, the report by the British Association of Dermatologists (BDA) said.

In the UK, nearly 15% (14.65%) of adolescents and young people were diagnosed with acne in 2021, up from 13.57% in 1990, according to the study which looked at data on diagnosis rates among people aged 10 to 24 in 204 countries.

But almost 16% (15.98%) of Germans had been diagnosed with acne, according to the study, published in the British Journal of Dermatology.

Portugal, Luxembourg, Norway, Andorra, Denmark, and San Marino are the other countries with higher rates than the UK, but the condition is spreading everywhere except New Zealand, researchers warned.

Lead author Dr Zhou Zhu, from the Department of Dermatology at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, pointed to other factors such as diet, stress, obesity rates, and rising pollution to explain the growth in cases.

The ship was supposed to have a brief stop in Northern Ireland for repairs back in May but unexpected problems left both the vessel and its passengers marooned for months.

Cruise ship passengers stranded in Belfast have finally set sail for a round-the-world trip after months marooned in Northern Ireland.

The Villa Vie Odyssey was meant to embark on a three-and-a-half-year cruise on 30 May but engine problems forced the vessel – and its passengers – to stay in Belfast.

After a four-month delay, the ship at last set sail on Monday night at around 11.35pm. It is spending its first night at sea just a short distance from the dock, in Belfast Lough, before continuing its journey on Tuesday.

John Hennessee and wife Melody Thor Hennessee, from Palm Beach, Florida, embraced the delay and shortly before setting sail, they told Sky News there was plenty about Belfast they’d miss.

“The people are amazing,” Mrs Hennessee said. “They’re so kind and generous. It’s just amazing. We’ve made a lot of new friends, it’s been fun.”

She continued: “We’ve done pretty much every tourist thing Belfast has to offer. We just about frequent every restaurant you have in Belfast.

“We now love Guinness, that’s a big thing. We have one every day.”

“American Guinness isn’t quite like it is over here,” her husband added.

The passengers clutched souvenirs – including one model of the Titanic – as they gathered to board the Villa Vie Odyssey on Monday evening.

Andy Garrison, 75, built the replica ship over three or four days after arriving in Belfast for what should have been a three-day stay before setting sail in August.

Asked if he was worried it could be a bad omen, he replied: “No, I’m not. As a matter of fact I’m going to put this on the wall of my room.”

Mr and Mrs Hennessee made the most of their time stranded on UK shores by also visiting Tenerife and Paris, as well as enjoying a shorter voyage on a Norwegian ship.

While they were “ecstatic” to finally receive a departure date, Mrs Hennessee added: “But this [delay] allowed us to finish the renovations on our cabin. Now we can cruise in style, it’s ready.”

Source: https://news.sky.com/story/villa-vie-odyssey-passengers-leave-belfast-after-waiting-months-for-round-the-world-cruise-13225537

China’s sputtering economy has its worried leaders pulling out all the stops.

They have unveiled stimulus measures, offered rare cash handouts, held a surprise meeting to kickstart growth and tried to shake up an ailing property market with a raft of decisions – they did all of this in the last week.

On Monday, Xi himself spoke of “potential dangers” and being “well-prepared” to overcome grave challenges, which many believe was a reference to the economy.

What is less clear is how the slowdown has affected ordinary Chinese people, whose expectations and frustrations are often heavily censored.

But two new pieces of research offer some insight. The first, a survey of Chinese attitudes towards the economy, found that people were growing pessimistic and disillusioned about their prospects. The second is a record of protests, both physical and online, that noted a rise in incidents driven by economic grievances.

Although far from complete, the picture neverthless provides a rare glimpse into the current economic climate, and how Chinese people feel about their future.

Beyond the crisis in real estate, steep public debt and rising unemployment have hit savings and spending. The world’s second-largest economy may miss its own growth target – 5% – this year.

That is sobering for the Chinese Communist Party. Explosive growth turned China into a global power, and stable prosperity was the carrot offered by a repressive regime that would never loosen its grip on the stick.

For Daniel Guerra, an aspiring Brazilian sailor keen to travel the world, the job ad was a dream come true.

A British yacht owner was seeking two deck-hands to help sail his boat from Brazil across the Atlantic, one of the great ocean journeys.

There would be no salary, but all expenses paid – and, crucially, Mr Guerra would gain some of the sailing experience he needed to qualify as a sea captain.

“My dream was to become a captain and go work in Europe,” remembers the 43-year-old, who saw the advert from an online sailing recruitment agency.

“So I was super happy, knowing that my path to my dream was beginning.”

Things looked even better when Mr Guerra and his fellow recruit, Rodrigo Dantas, 32, met their new British employer.

They had feared he might be some snobbish yachtie or posing Instagrammer, who would make sure they knew who was boss.

But no. George Saul was a smiling, friendly figure, who did not insist on formalities. The sailors, he said, could even call him by his nickname – “Fox”.

“I used to work on some boats and the owners were old, super demanding, super rude and talked down to me,” adds Mr Dantas. “He was like, very cool, very friendly.”

An 81-year-old model fell short in her bid to become the oldest Miss Universe contestant after competing in the South Korean pageant against much younger rivals.

Dressed in a beaded white gown, the silver-haired Choi Soon-hwa strutted across the stage and performed in a singing contest at the Miss Universe Korea pageant held Monday at a hotel in South Korea’s capital, Seoul.

She missed out on the crown but did take home the “best dresser” award.

Han Ariel, a 22-year-old fashion school student, won the contest and will head to Mexico City for the Miss Universe pageant in November.

Choi, a former hospital care worker who began her modeling career in her 70s, was announced as a Miss Universe Korea finalist earlier this month along with 31 other contestants.

“Even at this age, I had the courage to grab onto an opportunity and take on a challenge,” Choi told The Associated Press hours before Monday’s pageant.

“I want people to look at me and realize that you can live healthier and find joy in life when you find things you want to do and challenge yourself to achieve that dream.”

It would have been impossible for Choi to compete in the pageant a year ago as Miss Universe had limited the participation to women between 18 and 28. The age limit, which had long drawn criticism, was lifted this year ato make the competition more modern and diverse.

Organizers of the Korean pageant also removed the swimsuit competition and eligibility requirements related to education, height and foreign language abilities to open the contest to more women.

Source: https://apnews.com/article/korea-beauty-contestant-81-years-miss-universe-c7da720e54e8b006e2c48359ad7f3e44#

A colossal naked statue of former president Donald Trump emerged alongside a Las Vegas interstate just weeks ahead of the presidential election.

Alongside major highway Interstate 15 in Las Vegas, a massive statue of a naked Donald Trump has been turning heads and raising eyebrows.

The 43-foot-tall statue, named “Crooked and Obscene,” was assembled over the weekend and has quickly become a hotbed for controversy as the 2024 Presidential Election quickly approaches.

The gigantic figure found in Nevada, made of foam and rebar, weighs a staggering 6,000 pounds and features movable arms in a marionette-style design.

Alongside major highway Interstate 15 in Las Vegas, a massive statue of a naked Donald Trump has been turning heads and raising eyebrows.

The 43-foot-tall statue, named “Crooked and Obscene,” was assembled over the weekend and has quickly become a hotbed for controversy as the 2024 Presidential Election quickly approaches.

The gigantic figure found in Nevada, made of foam and rebar, weighs a staggering 6,000 pounds and features movable arms in a marionette-style design.

While some have called the statue “disgusting and un-American,” others are finding humor in the depiction, particularly Trump’s unclothed state.

One social media user commented: “It’s funny to see, but I’m not sure it’s appropriate.”

Russian soldiers are desperate to protect themselves from Ukrainian drones that are sowing panic among the ranks.

Vladimir Putin’s army is turning to wild animals in a desperate bid to try and counter the threat from Ukrainian drones.

Army chiefs are pondering using wolves to help detect the approach of the deadly UAVS.

Troops say the animals have a good sense of smell, are sociable and active, and can warn of danger in advance.

Russian commanders have decided to run an experiment to see if wolves can make a difference.

Two tamed wolves have been dispatched to Ukraine to serve with a unit that is fighting there.

A Russian news agency reported: “The predators can hear the approach of drones and warn of danger in advance.

“They will help Russian soldiers carry out combat missions in the [war] zone.”

The two females were rescued from the Siberian region of Khakassia and raised by wolf-tamer Aleksandr Konchakov.

In a video, he can be seen feeding ice cream to one of the wolves, called Vysota.

Source: https://www.the-express.com/news/world-news/150072/russia-army-wolves-drones-ukraine

Global investors are preparing to stake bets on China again, in a major sentiment shift sparked by Beijing’s drive to reverse its economic slowdown and revive long term interest in its stock markets.
It is early days and few money managers expect a Chinese growth boom anytime soon. But government moves to entice more cash into equities and jolt consumer spending have boosted the appeal of still-low Chinese company valuations, said investors at groups overseeing more than $1.5 trillion of client funds between them.

“We’re going to be very disciplined but in aggregate we feel there’s more upside than downside,” said Gabriel Sacks, emerging market portfolio manager at Abrdn (ABDN.L), opens new tab, which manages 506 billion pounds ($677 billion) of assets.
He said the group had bought China stocks “selectively” last week and would wait for more detailed policy plans from Beijing following some unusually candid economic support pledges that generated a sharp stock market rally in recent days.

China’s factory activity shrank for a fifth straight month and the services sector slowed sharply in September, suggesting Beijing may need to move urgently to meet its 5% 2024 growth target.

PAST PEAK PESSIMISM?
Long term institutional investors mostly stayed on the sidelines last week as hedge funds sent Chinese stocks surging to cheer a stimulus bonanza, data sent to clients by Goldman Sachs strategist Scott Rubner showed.

Mutual funds’ China equity holdings dwindled to 5.1% of portfolios, a decade low, in late August, Rubner said.
Chinese consumer confidence has taken hard knocks from a property crisis rooted in President Xi Jinping’s moves to stop a pile of risky real estate debt estimated at more than $1 trillion from growing. Meanwhile, U.S.-China tensions have escalated.
But investors reckoned the tide was turning after Beijing authorities promised to spend as necessary to hit the 5% growth target. They also eased some home-buying restrictions, cut bank lending rates and offered brokers cheap funds to buy stocks.

“There’s too much of a disconnect between what (Chinese stock) valuations are pricing in and that improving policy narrative,” said Natasha Ebtehadj at Artemis Fund Managers.
She added that she had topped up her Chinese equity holdings in the last few days and taken some new positions.

RALLY ON?
Chinese stocks had their best daily gain since 2008 on Monday but investors cautioned against expecting more such blistering short term moves.
“This is a technical, liquidity driven rally,” said George Efstathopoulos, a Singapore-based portfolio manager at Fidelity International, adding it was likely caused in part by short sellers unwinding bets on share price declines.
“There probably is a lot of short covering, there’s probably a lot of hedge funds jumping in for short term returns,” Abrdn’s Sacks said.
Investors pulled a net $1.4 billion out of greater China equity funds tracked by Lipper so far in 2024, reversing all of the inflows from 2023, a year marked by un-met hopes for a consumer spending surge after strict COVID-19 lockdowns ended.
Efstathopoulos said he would wait for Chinese consumer confidence to rise before buying more Chinese stocks.
Mark Tinker, chief investment officer at Toscafund Hong Kong, a hedge fund, said Beijing’s latest measures showed China might build sustainable household demand rather than chase quick growth with another property or infrastructure boom.
“Growth at 5% is not worth it if all you are doing is encouraging (more) destabilizing leverage,” he said.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/global-investors-call-time-their-exodus-china-2024-09-30/

Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the conscription of 133,000 new servicemen in Russia’s autumn draft that starts Oct. 1 and goes until the end of the year, according to a Kremlin decree published on Monday.
The decree, published in Russian state-run newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, calls to carry out the draft of citizens “aged 18 to 30 years, who are not in the reserve and are subject to conscription in accordance with the Federal Law … in the amount of 133,000 people.”

The head of Russia’s conscription office, Vice-Admiral Vladimir Tsimlyansky said that the terms for the conscript remain the same: 12-month service in military units in Russia.
“I would like to note that conscripts will not be called up to participate in the special military operation in the new regions,” Rossiyskaya Gazeta cited Tsimlyansky as saying.
Russia calls its war in Ukraine, which it started with a full-scale invasion in February 2022, a special military operation. Kyiv and its allies call it an unprovoked, imperialistic attempt to grab land.

In a move condemned by most of the Western world, Russia annexed parts of southeastern Ukraine in late 2022, calling the land ‘new regions.’
Citing growing threats on Russia’s western borders, Putin in September ordered the Russian army to be increased by 180,000 troops to 1.5 million active servicemen, a move that would make it the second largest in the world after China’s.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-orders-conscription-133000-servicemen-russias-autumn-draft-2024-09-30/

Crews on Monday airlifted emergency food and water into remote North Carolina towns that were cut off and devastated by tropical storm Helene that turned the western part of the state into a “post apocalyptic” landscape.
Helene was a hurricane when it slammed into the Florida Gulf coast on Thursday, tearing a destructive path through southeastern states for days on end, ripping up roads, tossing homes about and severing lines of communication. In its wake, hundreds of people were unaccounted for and many feared dead.

Among the demolished towns was the tiny hamlet of Bat Cave, about 100 miles (160 km) west of Charlotte, where in what climate scientists are describing as a 1,000-year event the Broad River rose to unprecedented levels, washed away homes and broke through the town’s bridge.

In the aftermath of the storm, people gingerly crossed a gap in the bridge on a wobbly plank.

Aaron Smith, 31, his wife and two young sons sat in front of the Bat Cave fire station with one suitcase among them.

It was all they could save after the Hickory Creek rose into a torrent, demolishing three of the four walls of their home and sending a boulder through a bedroom wall.
“There’s no roads, there’s no evidence of roads, there’s no trees, it’s just water and stuff,” Smith said. “When it comes to where we going to go from here, I guess anywhere but here. I don’t see anything to go back to.”
Private helicopters tried to land in Bat Cave to evacuate people, but locals waved them away from a bridge that appeared ready to collapse. Firefighters spray-painted “DON’T LAND” on the structure.
Bat Cave is just upstream from the village of Chimney Rock which was largely destroyed by the wall of water surging down the Broad River, according to emergency responders.
The river flows into Lake Lure, which was full of the remains of homes, trees and other debris.

Charlotte City Councilman Tariq Bokhari posted a video on X showing the devastation at Lake Lure, calling it “post-apocalyptic.”

“It’s so overwhelming. You don’t even know how to fathom what recovery looks like, let alone where to start,” Bokhari wrote.

‘BEYOND BELIEF’

The U.S. government, states and localities were engaged in a massive recovery effort throughout the southeast. People were stranded without running water and 1.8 million homes and businesses remained without power on Monday, according to the website Poweroutage.us.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp said on Monday at least 25 people in his state had died, including a firefighter responding to emergency calls during the storm and a mother and her 1-month-old twins who were killed by a falling tree. South Carolina reported at least 29 dead.

CNN put the national death toll at 128, citing state and local officials, including 56 in North Carolina.

In North Carolina’s mountainous Buncombe County, which includes the tourist destination of Asheville, 40 people have died, the county manager said at a news briefing.

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper took an aerial tour of the damage and said “significant resources” would be needed in the short and long term.

“The devastation was beyond belief, and even when you prepare for something like this, this is something that’s never happened before in western North Carolina. Search and rescue teams are continuing to work,” Cooper told a news briefing.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hurricane-helene-leaves-dozens-dead-many-missing-across-us-southeast-2024-09-30/

Israel’s widely expected ground invasion of Lebanon appeared to be getting underway early on Tuesday as its military said troops had begun “limited” raids against Hezbollah targets in the border area.
The military said in a statement that it had begun “limited, localised, and targeted ground raids based on precise intelligence” against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon villages close to the border that posed “an immediate threat to Israeli communities in northern Israel”.
It said the air force and artillery were supporting the ground forces with “precise strikes.”
Local residents in the Lebanese border town of Aita al-Shaab reported heavy shelling and the sound of helicopters and drones overhead. Flares were repeatedly launched over the Lebanese border town of Rmeish, lighting up the night sky.
On Monday, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant had told local council heads in northern Israel that the next phase of the war along Lebanon’s southern border would begin soon, and would support the aim of bringing home Israelis who have fled Hezbollah rockets during nearly a year of border warfare.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-military-has-begun-limited-raids-against-hezbollah-targets-border-area-2024-09-30/

Earth’s moon will soon have some company — a “mini moon.”

The mini moon is actually an asteroid about the size of a school bus at 33 feet (10 meters). When it whizzes by Earth on Sunday, it will be temporarily trapped by our planet’s gravity and orbit the globe — but only for about two months.

The space rock — 2024 PT5 — was first spotted in August by astronomers at Complutense University of Madrid using a powerful telescope located in Sutherland, South Africa.

These short-lived mini moons are likely more common than we realize, said Richard Binzel, an astronomer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The last known one was detected in 2020.

“This happens with some frequency, but we rarely see them because they’re very small and very hard to detect,” he said. “Only recently has our survey capability reached the point of spotting them routinely.”

The discovery by Carlos de la Fuente Marcos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos was published by the American Astronomical Society.

This one won’t be visible to the naked eye or through amateur telescopes, but it “can be observed with relatively large, research-grade telescopes,” Carlos de la Fuente Marcos said in an email.

Binzel, who was not involved in the research, said it’s not clear whether the space rock originated as an asteroid or as “a chunk of the moon that got blasted out.”

The mini moon will circle the globe for almost 57 days but won’t complete a full orbit. On Nov. 25, it will part ways with the Earth and continue its solo trajectory through the cosmos. It’s expected to pass by again in 2055.

Source: https://apnews.com/article/mini-moon-earth-asteroid-astronomy-d68656845bd2762095bb39ce9d619e6b

She was not back in the bleachers.

Taylor Swift was notably absent as the Kansas City Chiefs took on the Los Angeles Chargers at SoFi Stadium on Sunday. The “You Belong With Me” singer, 34, also skipped the team’s match-up against the Atlanta Falcons last weekend.

The pop star’s second straight no-show comes amid ongoing criticism of her boyfriend Travis Kelce’s performance on the field this season.

However, Chiefs wide receivers Rashee Rice, JuJu Smith-Schuster and Mecole Hardman showed their solidarity before Sunday’s game by wearing custom T-shirts with different images of Kelce, 34, playing football.

Although Swift attended Kelce’s first two games, she was not in the crowd for his win against Atlanta — in which he tallied four receptions for 30 yards.

The tight end’s stats have been a major talking point over the last couple of weeks, with some analysts blaming his busy private life on his lackluster performance.

The three-time Super Bowl champion addressed his slow start to the season during Wednesday’s episode of his “New Heights” podcast.

“We’re finding ways to win games, but we’re not playing our best football,” Kelce, 34, admitted.

“Everybody can clean it up,” he added, noting that he dropped a pass during a “crucial” moment last weekend.

However, Kelce noted that he is doing his best to “help the team out” in every way possible and is focused on getting better as the season progresses.

Source: https://pagesix.com/2024/09/29/entertainment/taylor-swift-skips-travis-kelce-second-straight-chiefs-game/

Austrian voters handed a first-ever general election victory to the far-right Freedom Party on Sunday, preliminary results showed, illustrating rising support for hard-right parties in Europe fueled by concern over immigration levels.
The Eurosceptic, Russia-friendly FPO held a slim lead in opinion polls for months over Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s ruling conservative Austrian People’s Party (OVP) in a campaign dominated by immigration and worries about the economy.

Led by the 55-year-old Herbert Kickl, the FPO won 28.8% of the vote, ahead of the OVP on 26.3%, and the centre-left Social Democrats (SPO) on 21.1%, according to a projection based on nearly all the vote by pollster Foresight for broadcaster ORF, a slightly bigger victory margin than final polls had indicated.
“We’ve made Austrian history because it’s the first time the Freedom Party is Number 1 in a parliamentary election, and you have to think how far we’ve come,” Kickl said after the party’s record showing, which came seven decades after its foundation in the 1950s under the leadership of a former Nazi lawmaker.

Only the OVP has offered any indication it could work with the FPO, but it has ruled out doing so with Kickl, who has given no hint he could step aside to let someone else take charge.
Seat projections suggested the OVP and SPO, which ruled Austria for decades together, could just muster a majority without a third party, which had long looked unlikely.
Kickl’s win was hailed by hard-right parties across Europe, where the far-right has made gains in countries including the Netherlands, France and Germany. That growing support could stoke the risk of divisions inside the European Union over key policy areas like the defence of Ukraine against Russia.
Analysts said irrespective of whether Kickl captured the chancellery, Austria was now in uncharted territory.
“This is, of course, a big moment,” said political analyst Thomas Hofer. “This is a turning point in the Second Republic,” he added, referring to the postwar history of Austria.

Kathrin Stainer-Haemmerle, a political science professor at the Carinthia University of Applied Sciences, said if Kickl did manage to become chancellor, Austria’s role in the European Union would be “significantly different.”

“Kickl has often said that (Hungarian Prime Minister) Viktor Orban is a role model for him and he will stand by him.”

Kickl, who this year forged an alliance with Orban, opposes providing aid to Ukraine and wants sanctions against Russia withdrawn, arguing they hurt Austria more than Moscow.

‘FORTRESS AUSTRIA’

On Sunday, Kickl said he was ready to talk with all parties over forming a coalition, and President Alexander Van der Bellen, who oversees the formation of governments, urged parties to find common ground in negotiations in the coming weeks.

Van der Bellen, a former Greens leader, has voiced reservations about the FPO because of its criticism of the EU and its failure to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Late on Sunday, a few dozen anti-FPO protesters assembled outside the party’s election celebrations, one holding a placard reading “Kickl is a Nazi” as police kept them at bay.

The Islam-critical FPO wants to stop granting asylum altogether and build a “fortress Austria” preventing migrants from entering.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/austria-holds-tight-election-with-far-right-bidding-historic-win-2024-09-28/

The Southeastern U.S. began a huge cleanup and recovery effort on Sunday and the death toll climbed towards 100 after Hurricane Helene knocked out power for millions, destroyed roads and bridges and caused dramatic flooding from Florida to Virginia.
The storm’s winds, rain and storm surge killed at least 90 people in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia, according to a Reuters tally of state and local officials.

In North Carolina, nearly all the deaths were in Buncombe County, where 30 people died, Sheriff Quentin Miller told a video conference call with reporters.

County Manager Avril Pinder said she was asking the state for emergency food and drinking water. Streets in the picturesque city of Asheville were submerged in floodwater.

“This is a devastating catastrophe of historic proportions,” Governor Roy Cooper told CNN. “People that I talk to in western North Carolina say they have never seen anything like this.”

Search and rescue teams from 19 states and the U.S. government have converged on the state, Cooper said, adding that some roads could take months to repair.
In Flat Rock, North Carolina, there were widespread blackouts, and people waited hours in line for gas.
“Grocery stores are closed, cellphone service is out,” Chip Frank, 62, said as he entered his third hour waiting in line. “It all depends on these gas stations. You’re not going to be able to go nowhere, and it’s just a scary feeling.”
Roughly 2.7 million customers throughout the South were without power on Sunday, a U.S. Energy Department official said, down 40% from Friday after unprecedented storm surges, ferocious winds and perilous conditions extended hundreds of miles inland.
South Carolina reported 25 dead, Georgia 17 and Florida 11, according to the governors of those states.

CNN reported a total of 93 dead across the South, citing state and local officials.
President Joe Biden plans to visit affected areas this week, once he can do so without disrupting emergency services, the White House said.
“It’s tragic,” Biden told reporters on Sunday, pledging recovery assistance after declaring major disasters in Florida and North Carolina and emergencies for Florida, North Carolina Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, and Alabama. “You saw the photographs. It’s stunning.”
Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris planned to cut short a campaign trip in Nevada on Monday to take part in briefings in Washington on the hurricane response and will visit the region when doing so won’t impede the response, a White House official said.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will visit Valdosta, Georgia, on Monday to receive a briefing on storm damage and “facilitate the distribution of relief supplies,” his campaign said.
Helene slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast on Thursday night, triggering days of driving rain and destroying homes that had stood for decades.
In Horseshoe Beach, on Florida’s Gulf Coast about 70 miles (120 km) west of Gainesville, Charlene Huggins surveyed the debris of her blown-out house, pulling a jacket out of the rubble on Saturday.
“Five generations lived in this house, from my grandmother, my father, myself, my daughter, son and my granddaughter,” Huggins said, holding a chipped glass cake stand. “So there’s a lot of memories here. It just breaks your heart.”
Not far away, James Ellenburg stood on the property where his own family has lived for four generations. “I took my first step right here in this yard.”
The roof of one home sat flat in the dirt, its walls blown away.
In coastal Steinhatchee, a storm surge – a wall of seawater pushed ashore by winds – of eight to 10 feet (2.4 to 3 meters) moved mobile homes, the weather service said.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hurricane-helene-wreaks-havoc-us-southeast-death-toll-rises-2024-09-29/

Diego Garcia, a remote island in the Indian Ocean, is a paradise of lush vegetation and white-sand beaches, surrounded by crystal blue waters.

But this is no tourist destination. It is strictly out of bounds to most civilians – the site of a highly secretive UK-US military base shrouded for decades in rumour and mystery.

The island, which is administered from London, is at the centre of a long-running territorial dispute between the UK and Mauritius, and negotiations have ramped up in recent weeks.

The BBC gained unprecedented access to the island earlier this month.

“It’s the enemy,” a private security officer jokes as I return to my room one night on Diego Garcia, my name highlighted in yellow on a list he is holding.

For months, the BBC had fought for access to the island – the largest of the Chagos Archipelago.

We wanted to cover a historic court case being held over the treatment of Sri Lankan Tamils, the first people ever to file asylum claims on the island, who have been stranded there for three years. Complex legal battles have been waged over their fate and a judgement will soon determine if they have been unlawfully detained.

Up until this point, we could only cover the story remotely.

Diego Garcia, which is about 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from the nearest landmass, features on lists of the world’s most remote islands. There are no commercial flights and getting there by sea is no easier – permits for boats are only granted for the archipelago’s outer islands and to allow safe passage through the Indian Ocean.

To enter the island you need a permit, only granted to people with connections to the military facility or the British authority that runs the territory. Journalists have historically been barred.

UK government lawyers brought a legal challenge to try to block the BBC from attending the hearing, and even when permission was granted following a ruling by the territory’s Supreme Court, the US later objected, saying it would not provide food, transport or accommodation to all those attempting to reach the island for the case – including the judge and barristers.

Notes exchanged between the two governments this summer, seen by the BBC, suggested both were extremely concerned about admitting any media to Diego Garcia.

“As discussed previously, the United States agrees with the position of HMG [His Majesty’s Government] that it would be preferable for members of the press to observe the hearing virtually from London, to minimize risks to security of the Facility,” one note sent from the US government to British officials said.

When permission was finally granted for me to spend five days on the island, it came with stringent restrictions. These did not just cover the court reporting. They also extended to my movements on the island and even a ban on reporting what the actual restrictions were.

Requests for minor changes to the permit were denied by British and US officials.

Personnel from the security company G4S were flown to the territory to guard the BBC and lawyers who had flown out for the hearing.

But despite the constraints, I was still able to observe illuminating details, all of which helped to paint a picture of one of the most restricted locations in the world.

Approaching by plane, coconut trees and thick foliage are visible across the 44 sq km footprint-shaped atoll, the greenery punctuated by white military structures.

Diego Garcia is one of about 60 islands that make up the Chagos Archipelago or British Indian Ocean Territory (Biot) – the last colony established by the UK by separating it from Mauritius in 1965. It is located about halfway between East Africa and Indonesia.

Pulling on to the runway alongside grey military aircraft, a sign on a hangar greets you: “Diego Garcia. Footprint of Freedom,” above images of the US and British flags.

This is the first of many references to freedom on the island’s signage, a nod to the UK-US military base that has been there since the early 1970s.

Agreements signed in 1966 leased the island to the US for 50 years initially, with a possible extension for a further 20 years. The arrangement was rolled over and is set to expire in 2036.

As I make my way through airport security and beyond, US and UK influences jostle for predominance.

In the terminal, there is a door decorated with a union jack print and walls hung with photos of significant British figures, including Winston Churchill.

On the island itself, I spot British police cars and a nightclub called the Brit Club with a bulldog logo. We pass roads named Britannia Way and Churchill Road.

But cars drive on the right, as they do in the US. We are driven around in a bright yellow bus reminiscent of an American school bus.

The US dollar is the accepted currency and the electricity sockets are American. The food offered to us for the five days includes “tater tots” – a popular American fried-potato side dish – and American biscuits, similar to British scones.

While the territory is administered from London, most personnel and resources there are under the control of the US.

In the BBC’s bid to access the island, UK officials referred questions up to US staff. When the US blocked the court hearing from taking place on Diego Garcia this summer, a senior official at the Ministry of Defence said the UK “did not have the ability to grant access”.

“The US security assessment is classified… [they] have demonstrated that they have strict controls in place,” he wrote in an email to a Foreign Office colleague.

Biot’s acting commissioner has said it is not possible for him to “compel the US authorities” to grant access to any part of the military facility constructed by the US under the terms of the UK-US agreement, despite it being a British territory.

In recent years, the territory has been costing the UK tens of millions of pounds, with the bulk of this categorised under “migrant costs”. Communications obtained by the BBC between foreign office officials in July regarding the Sri Lankan Tamils warn that “the costs are increasing and the latest forecast is that these will be £50 million per annum”.

The atmosphere on the island feels relaxed. Troops and contractors ride past me on bikes, and I see people playing tennis and windsurfing in the late afternoon sun.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckdg7jjlx2go

Kris Kristofferson, Country Music Legend and ‘A Star Is Born’ Leading Man, Dies at 88

Kris Kristofferson, who attained success as both a groundbreaking country music singer-songwriter and a Hollywood film and TV star, died Saturday at home in Maui, Hawaii. No cause of death was given, but he was described as passing away peacefully while surrounded by family. He was 88.

Said his family in a statement, “It is with a heavy heart that we share the news our husband/father/grandfather, Kris Kristofferson, passed away peacefully on Saturday, Sept. 28 at home. We’re all so blessed for our time with him. Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he’s smiling down at us all.” The statement was offered on behalf of Kristofferson’s wife, Lisa; his eight children, Tracy, Kris Jr., Casey, Jesse, Jody, John, Kelly and Blake; and his seven grandchildren.

Kyle Young, the CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, said, “Kris Kristofferson believed to his core that creativity is God-given, and that those who ignore or deflect such a holy gift are doomed to failure and unhappiness. He preached that a life of the mind gives voice to the soul, and then he created a body of work that gave voice not only to his soul but to ours. Kris’s heroes included the prize fighter Muhammad Ali, the great poet William Blake, and the ‘Hillbilly Shakespeare,’ Hank Williams. He lived his life in a way that honored and exemplified the values of each of those men, and he leaves a righteous, courageous and resounding legacy that rings with theirs.”

Kristofferson had already spent several modestly successful years in Music City’s song mills by the time he broke through as the author of such No. 1 country hits as “For the Good Times” (Ray Price, 1970), “Sunday Morning Coming Down” (Johnny Cash, 1970) and “Help Me Make It Through the Night” (Sammi Smith, 1971). His song “Me and Bobby McGee” became a posthumous No. 1 pop hit for his former paramour Janis Joplin in 1971.

His first four albums for Monument Records, which showcased his rough, unmannered singing and poetically crafted, proto-outlaw country songs, all reached the country top 10, and 1972’s “Jesus Was a Capricorn,” which contained his No. 1 country hit “Why Me,” topped the country LP chart. He won three Grammys: for best country song (“Help Me Make It Through the Night”) and a pair of duets with Rita Coolidge, to whom he was married from 1973-80.

Bill C. Malone noted in “Country Music, U.S.A.,” the standard history of the genre, “Kristofferson’s lyrics spoke often of loneliness, alienation and pain, but they also celebrated freedom and honest relationships, and in intimate, sensuous language that had been rare to country music.”

Kristofferson could be the first to knock his own voice. “I don’t think I’m that good a singer,” he said in a 2016 Rolling Stone interview. “I can’t think of a song that I’ve written that I don’t like the way somebody else sings it better.” But with many of his signature songs, fans would not have wanted them channeled through any other voice, least of all one that smoothed out their raw sentiments.

The musician’s lean good looks and laid-back persona made him a natural for pictures. He made his first mark on screen in Bill L. Norton’s 1972 feature “Cisco Pike,” in which he played the titular character, an L.A. musician and drug dealer under the thumb of a corrupt narcotics cop (Gene Hackman); the feature also employed several Kristofferson songs on its soundtrack.

Through the ‘70s, he enjoyed a rising movie profile, playing the romantic lead opposite Susan Anspach in Paul Mazursky’s “Blume in Love” (1973) and Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn in Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974). In 1977, co-billed with Barbra Streisand, he won a Golden Globe Award as a dissolute rock star in the third version of “A Star is Born.”

However, he hit hard bumps in Hollywood in a couple of legendarily troubled productions. He co-starred with James Coburn in Sam Peckinpah’s ambitious 1973 Western “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” appearing as the notorious outlaw; the film became a notorious cause célebre after it was taken out of the director’s hands and recut by MGM. (Kristofferson went on to star in Peckinpah’s “Convoy” (1978), based on C.W. McCall’s CB radio-themed hit; while the film made money, the actor’s notices were dismal.)

Kristofferson’s acting career never completely recovered after he starred in Michael Cimino’s 1980 Western epic “Heaven’s Gate.” Dogged by pre-release chatter about cost overruns and Cimino’s on-set perfectionism, the film received devastating reviews, and was almost immediately withdrawn from release and drastically re-edited; United Artists – which was sold to MGM by Transamerica in the wake of the debacle — wrote off the picture’s entire $44 million cost a week after its premiere. Its title became virtually synonymous with Tinseltown excess and hubris.

In the face of withering criticism, Kristofferson always maintained a staunch defense of “Heaven’s Gate,” which later gained critical respect. In a 2012 video interview included in the Criterion Collection’s home video release of the film, he said, “Both Michael and his movie deserved better… [it] deserved being treated like a work of art, and not as some failed economic venture.”

Source: https://variety.com/2024/film/obituaries-people-news/kris-kristofferson-dead-country-music-legend-actor-1236159472/

A lot of us have been there, locked in a metal cylinder flying at more than 500mph (804km/h), gritting our teeth about the armrest the person to the left is hogging.

Or the person next to the window who keeps getting up to go to the toilet, or the person in front who has suddenly put their seat back, squashing your knees.

With roughly half of the UK’s households flying once a year, how people behave on planes is an ongoing bugbear.

And this week a Hong Kong couple were banned by Cathay Pacific after tensions flared over a reclined seat.

So how can we avoid getting in our fellow travellers’ bad books?

To recline or not?
Someone putting their seat back on a long-haul flight can be frustrating – but it seems to trigger Britons and Americans to different degrees.

A 2023 survey by Skyscanner into the issue indicated that 40% of people in the UK find it annoying, but a YouGov survey earlier this year suggested that only a quarter of Americans view it as unacceptable.

Whatever the percentage, reclining seats “really are a problem”, according to Charmaine Davies, a former flight attendant.

She says cabin crew sometimes have to step in to stop anger boiling over between passengers.

The basic problem is how airlines cram seats onto planes, with passengers having less space than they did in the past, according to Prof Jim Salzman of University of California, Los Angeles.

“[The airlines] are able to pass on the anger and frustration of cramped seating to passengers who blame each other for bad behaviour instead of the airlines who created the problem in the first place.”

William Hanson, an etiquette coach and author, says it’s a matter of choosing your time to recline your seat, which you shouldn’t do during a meal. Check whether the person behind is leaning on the table, or using a laptop – and recline slowly.

If in doubt just talk to your fellow passenger, he says. Don’t expect them to be a mind reader.

Armrest hogging

Another gripe linked to the amount of space people have on planes is double armrest hogging.

Mary, a flight attendant for a major US airline, says she is often given a middle seat between “two guys with both their arms on armrests” when she’s being transferred for work and doesn’t have a choice of seat.

Nearly a third of UK airline passengers found this annoying in 2023, the Skyscanner survey suggested.

Mary has had “a tussle with elbows”, she says, but has a strategy for reclaiming the space.

“I wait until they reach for a drink and take the armrest. One [guy] kept trying to push my arm, and I just had to give him a look: ‘We’re not doing that today.'”

To resolve any tension, Mr Hanson says people should get used to the idea of having “elbow rests” rather than armrests, and share them.

Toilet etiquette
Many of us will be familiar with the dilemma of being in a window seat and needing to go to the toilet, but the person next to you has fallen asleep.

Do you nudge them to wake them up, or climb over them?

More than half of Americans responding to the YouGov survey said climbing over someone to go to the toilet was unacceptable.

Mr Hanson says he normally has an aisle seat, and before going to sleep he tells the passenger next to him it’s fine to wake him up or hop over if they need to.

If sat in the middle or window seat, you should just gently let the passenger in the aisle seat know you need to get past them – but be aware you might not speak the same language, he advises.

If a passenger has been drinking alcohol, it can make them need to go to the toilet more often too.

Zoe, a former flight attendant with Virgin Atlantic, was on a flight to Ibiza on a different carrier where many of the passengers had been drinking in the airport bar beforehand, she says.

As soon as the flight took off and the seatbelt light went off, “everybody stood up” and started queuing for the toilet. Some got “quite aggressive”, she says, leading to the cabin crew turning the seatbelt signs back on, forcing everybody to sit down.

Unfortunately, one passenger really couldn’t wait so had to “have a wee in a carrier bag”.

“He put some swimming shorts in there first to soak it up,” says Zoe.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c869178wqzno

Two U.S. airstrikes in Syria killed 37 militants affiliated with the Islamic State group and an al-Qaeda-linked group, the U.S. military said Sunday. It said two of the dead were senior militants.

U.S. Central Command said it struck northwestern Syria on Tuesday, targeting a senior militant from the al-Qaeda-linked Hurras al-Deen group and eight others. They say he was responsible for overseeing military operations.

On Sept. 16, a “large-scale airstrike” on an IS training camp in an undisclosed location in central Syria killed 28 militants, including “at least four Syrian leaders,” Central Command said.

“The airstrike will disrupt ISIS’ capability to conduct operations against U.S. interests, as well as our allies and partners,” the statement read.

Source: https://apnews.com/article/syria-militants-killed-airstrike-us-central-command-8921f045b25d621143778730d78bd4e4

If you were in India and had 900,000 rupees ($10,800; £8,000), what would you buy? A car? A trip around the world? Diamond jewellery? Or a Coldplay concert ticket?

The British rock band is set to perform three shows of their Music of the Spheres world tour in Mumbai next year and the tickets are being sold for obscene amounts on reselling platforms, after being sold out in minutes on BookMyShow (BMS) – the concert’s official ticketing platform.

The tickets went on sale last Sunday and were priced from 2,500 rupees to 12,000 rupees. More than 10 million people competed to buy some 180,000 tickets.

Fans complained about hours-long digital queues and site crashes, but many also alleged that the sales were rigged as resellers had begun selling tickets for five times the price – touching even 900,000 rupees – before they were released on the official site.

Earlier this month, something similar happened with tickets for Oasis’ concert in the UK, where resellers charged more than £350 for tickets that cost £135. But even then, the inflated prices of Coldplay tickets stand out. To put this in perspective, Madonna charged £1,306.75 for VIP passes to her Celebration tour and the best tickets for Beyoncé’s Renaissance concerts sold for £2,400.

The events have sparked a conversation around ticket scalping in India, where people use bots or automation tools to bypass queues and purchase multiple tickets to sell on reselling platforms. Fans are questioning whether the official site had taken adequate steps to prevent this, or whether it chose to look the other way.

BMS has denied any association with resellers and urged fans to avoid tickets from “unauthorised sources” as they could be fake, but this hasn’t stopped people from viewing the site suspiciously.

Fans have complained about having a similar experience while buying tickets for Punjabi singer Diljit Dosanjh’s upcoming concerts. Tickets were released on Zomato Live, the concert promoter, earlier this month and after getting sold out, they began popping up on reselling platforms for several times the original price.

Ticket scalping is illegal in India, and experts say that while it’s possible that it’s happening anyway, it’s also likely that legitimate ticket-holders are selling theirs through resellers to make a profit due to the massive demand.

Graphic designer Dwayne Dias was among the few lucky ones who managed to buy tickets for the Coldplay concert from the official site. He bought four tickets for 6,450 rupees each.

Since then, he’s been approached by people who are willing to pay up to 60,000 rupees for a ticket. “If I wanted to, I could sell all the tickets and watch the concert in South Korea [Coldplay’s upcoming touring destination]. The amount will cover my travel expenses and I’ll be able to experience a new city,” he says.

While the inflated prices of Coldplay tickets are shocking, the huge demand for tickets to see popular international artists perform is not uncommon. In fact, the live music business in India has been growing in leaps and bounds over the past couple of years.

According to a report, music concerts generated about 8,000m rupees in revenue last year and by 2025, this figure is set to increase by 25%. Brian Tellis, a veteran in the music business and one of the founders of the Mahindra Blues music festival, says concerts have become a part of an individual’s – and the country’s – cultural currency.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c99v12e3yj4o

Lebanon is a country that knows war all too well. And it is not eager for more.

It still bears the scars of 15 years of civil war between 1975 and 1990, and of the last war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006.

But for some, including Beirut’s Governor Marwan Abboud, Israel’s recent escalation already feels worse.

In the past 10 days, the country has endured mass casualties from exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, a wave of assassinations of Hezbollah military commanders, devastating air strikes – and the use of bunker-busting bombs in Beirut, which killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday.

“It’s the worst moment that the country passed through,” said Abboud, who has no connection with Hezbollah.

“I feel sad. I am shocked by the large number of civilian casualties. I am also shocked by the silence of the international community – as if what’s happening here does not mean anything.”

• US and allies call for 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon
• What might Hezbollah, Israel and Iran do next?
• Follow live: Nasrallah’s killing is ‘historic turning point’, Netanyahu says
• We spoke at the edge of Beirut’s Martyrs Square, where many families slept in the open last night after fleeing Israel’s strikes in the southern suburb of Dahieh – Hezbollah’s heartland.

They remain in the square today – unsure where to turn for safety, like many in Lebanon.

Asked what he thought Israel’s plan was, the governor replied: “I don’t know but Israel wants to kill and to kill and to kill. May god protect this country.”

His parting words were bleak. “It’s the saddest day of my life,” he said, his voice heavy with emotion.

A few steps away we met an extended family, sitting on bare concrete, under the harsh morning sun.

Madina Mustafa Ali was rocking her seven-month-old baby Amir in her lap and reliving the trauma of Friday night.

“There was an explosion, and we got scared, especially for the children. So we ran away and came here. This is where we slept,” she said.

She told me the family will stay in the square for now because they have nowhere else to go.

Others are fleeing, some heading to the north of Lebanon. The south of the country is not an option – it’s being hit hard.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20jpyzgq8qo

SpaceX launched a rescue mission for the two stuck astronauts at the International Space Station on Saturday, sending up a downsized crew to bring them home but not until next year.

The capsule rocketed into orbit to fetch the test pilots whose Boeing spacecraft returned to Earth empty earlier this month because of safety concerns. The switch in rides left it to NASA’s Nick Hague and Russia’s Alexander Gorbunov to retrieve Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.

Because NASA rotates space station crews approximately every six months, this newly launched flight with two empty seats reserved for Wilmore and Williams won’t return until late February. Officials said there wasn’t a way to bring them back earlier on SpaceX without interrupting other scheduled missions.

By the time they return, the pair will have logged more than eight months in space. They expected to be gone just a week when they signed up for Boeing’s first astronaut flight that launched in June.

NASA ultimately decided that Boeing’s Starliner was too risky after a cascade of thruster troubles and helium leaks marred its trip to the orbiting complex. The space agency cut two astronauts from this SpaceX launch to make room on the Dragon capsule’s return leg for Wilmore and Williams.

Wilmore and Williams watched the liftoff via a live link sent to the space station, prompting a cheer of “Go Dragon!” from Williams, NASA deputy program manager Dina Contella said.

Williams has been promoted to commander of the space station, which will soon be back to its normal population of seven. Once Hague and Gorbunov arrive on Sunday, four astronauts living there since March can leave in their own SpaceX capsule. Their homecoming was delayed a month by Starliner’s turmoil.

Hague noted before the flight that change is the one constant in human spaceflight.

“There’s always something that is changing. Maybe this time it’s been a little more visible to the public,” he said.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/spacex-launch-boeing-nasa-stuck-astronauts-e179d0dc6c77d224278fd0430148ff8b

Emergency crews are racing to rescue people trapped in flooded homes after Hurricane Helene struck the coast of Florida as a highly destructive Category 4 storm.

At least 52 people have been killed after Hurricane Helene barrelled its way across the southeastern US, causing billions of dollars of destruction.

Emergency crews raced to rescue people trapped in flooded homes after Helene struck the coast of Florida as a highly destructive Category 4 storm.

It generated a massive storm surge, wreaking a trail of destruction extending hundreds of miles north.

Millions are without power in Florida and neighbouring states, while some face a continued threat of floods.

Meanwhile, dozens of patients and staff have been rescued from the roof of a flooded Tennessee hospital following a “dangerous rescue operation”.

Tennessee Senator Bill Hagerty said more than 50 people are now safe after becoming stranded on the Unicoi County Hospital.

The hospital was engulfed in “extremely dangerous and rapidly moving water”, according to Tennessee’s Ballad Health, making a boat rescue too treacherous.

A police helicopter was ultimately able to land on the roof after other helicopters failed to reach the hospital due to the storm’s winds.

Local official Michael Baker told Sky News the flooding was “unprecedented”.

“We’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.

Helene struck late on Thursday night with maximum sustained winds of 140 mph (225 kph) in the rural Big Bend area, the northwestern part of Florida.

The National Hurricane Center said preliminary information shows water levels reached more than 15ft above ground in that region.

US President Joe Biden approved emergency declaration requests from the governors of several southern states affected by Helene.

Georgia, Florida, Alabama, North Carolina and South Carolina are being supported by emergency response personnel including search and rescue teams, medical support staff and engineering experts.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp said dozens of people were trapped in buildings damaged by the storm, with multiple hospitals in southern Georgia without power.

In western North Carolina, Rutherford County emergency officials told residents near the Lake Lure Dam to immediately evacuate to higher ground, warning “Dam failure imminent”.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/hurricane-helene-at-least-30-dead-as-us-president-approves-emergency-support-13223131

Jerri MacDonald tells how her dream job on the former Harrods owner’s private jet turned into a nightmare.

A former flight attendant for Mohamed al Fayed’s private airline has claimed he sexually assaulted her and had her sacked for refusing to sleep with him.

Jerri MacDonald was 28 when she moved from Cheshire to the South East for what she thought was her dream job as a stewardess for Fayair, now Harrods Aviation.

But in her first broadcast interview, she told Sky News how it quickly became a nightmare.

After her very first flight from London to Paris on al Fayed’s private jet, Ms MacDonald said the billionaire quickly singled her out, and left her “like a deer in headlights” as he insisted she accompany him to the Ritz hotel.

To begin with, she said he wasn’t overly forward. He would hug her, kiss her on the cheek, and give her money. But on her third such trip, she claims he went further.

“I remember sitting on a chair and not having any idea that he suddenly just appeared behind me, and he just placed his hand straight into my blouse,” she said.

“Luckily I managed to grab and lift his hand back out.”

From there, Ms MacDonald said al Fayed’s behaviour got worse.

On yet another occasion, she said al Fayed called her himself one evening at her home in Essex, to ask her to come to London on the pretext of doing some “office work”. After working late, she spent the night in one of his suites.

“I noticed there were just no locks on the doors at all. So you feel very vulnerable,” she said.

“And I was sat on the settee, and then the next minute, he just let himself in and came over to me. I was kind of startled. And then he just stood there and said, ‘Stand up, stand up’.

“So I stood up and then he just grabbed my hand and said, ‘Come on, we’ll go to the bedroom. We have sex.'”

Finally, after just five months in the job, Ms MacDonald said her refusal to give into al Fayed’s advances led to her dismissal.

Having once again been invited alone to his London offices, to find he had laid out champagne and strawberries, she said, “he sat next to me. Uncomfortably close”.

She added: “And then he just pushed himself on me, started to kiss me. And I just instinctively kind of pushed his shoulder to get away.

“And he just completely turned on me, just started swearing and just told me, you know, ‘You’re a stupid girl. What did you think I invited you here for? I want to have sex with you’.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/former-flight-attendant-says-mohamed-al-fayed-had-her-sacked-after-she-refused-to-sleep-with-him-13224342

At least 66 people have been killed in Nepal since early on Friday as persistent downpours triggered flooding and landslides, closing major roads and disrupting domestic air travel, officials said on Saturday.

The death toll could rise, they added, with another 69 people reported missing, and 60 injured since Friday morning, home ministry official Dil Kumar Tamang told Reuters.

Most of the deaths took place in the Kathmandu valley, which is home to 4 million people and the country’s capital, where the flooding brought traffic and normal activity to a standstill.

Rescue workers used helicopters and rubber boats to help people stranded on rooftops or elevated ground as some parts of Kathmandu reported up to 322.2 mm (12.68 inches) of rain over the last day.

Most rivers in the Himalayan nation have swollen, spilling over roads and bridges, authorities said, after nearly a week’s delay in the retreat of South Asia’s annual monsoon rains brought torrential downpours across the region.

Police were working to clear debris and reopen roads after landslides blocked highways in 28 places, said police spokesperson Dan Bahadur Karki.

The earliest let-up in the rains might not come until Sunday, said Binu Maharjan, a weather forecasting official in Kathmandu, who said a low pressure system over parts of neighbouring India had caused this year’s extended rains.

“Heavy rains are likely to continue until Sunday morning and weather is likely to clear after that,” Maharjan told Reuters.

Most central and eastern areas had received moderate to extremely heavy rainfall, ranging from 50 mm (2 inches) to more than 200 mm (8 inches), she added, with moderate levels recorded elsewhere.

International flights are operating, but many domestic flights have been disrupted, said Rinji Sherpa, a spokesperson for Kathmandu airport.

The Koshi River in the southeast, which causes deadly floods in India’s eastern neighbouring state of Bihar almost every year, was running above the danger level at 450,000 cusecs, versus the normal figure of 150,000 cusecs, one official said.

A cusec is a measurement of water flow equivalent to one cubic foot a second.

The river level is still rising, added Ram Chandra Tiwari, the area’s top bureaucrat.

Hundreds of people die in the monsoon season every year in the landslides and flash floods common in the mountainous nation.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/nepal-rains-bring-floods-landslides-that-kill-10-with-seven-missing-2024-09-28

At six people were killed and 10 injured on Saturday by bomb explosions in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu and a town in the country’s Middle Shabelle region, police and witnesses said.

It was not immediately clear who had carried out the attacks, although Islamist militant group al Shabaab frequently orchestrates bombings and gun attacks in Mogadishu and elsewhere in the Horn of Africa country.

The blast in Mogadishu involved a bomb-rigged car that was parked on a road near the National Theatre in Mogadishu, about one kilometre away from the president’s office.

It detonated, killing five people and injuring seven, a policeman at the scene, who asked not to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the press, told Reuters. The casualty figures were confirmed by another policeman in the area.

A police spokesperson did not pick up a Reuters’ call seeking comment.

In a separate incident, a bomb planted in a livestock market in Jowhar city in Somalia’s Middle Shabelle region killed one person and injured three other civilians, Jowhar police commander Bashir Hassan told a press conference.

Al Shabaab has been fighting for years to topple Somalia’s central government and establish its own rule based on its strict interpretation of Islamic sharia law.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/least-six-killed-by-bomb-blasts-somalia-2024-09-28

Russia attacked a hospital in Sumy in northeastern Ukraine early on Saturday, killing 10 people and injuring at least 22 others, Ukrainian officials said.

Danielle Bell, head of the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, said “loitering munitions” – or suicide drones – hit the Saint Panteleimon Clinical Hospital in two attacks 45 minutes apart.

“Most of the fatalities occurred during the second strike, which hit as first responders arrived at the site and patients attempted to evacuate,” she said.

Sumy’s regional administration said late on Saturday that 10 people had been killed and 22 injured, including 15 who were in hospital, five of them in serious condition. All the hospital’s patients were evacuated to other facilities, it added.

Sumy City Council said on its website that nine high-rise buildings were damaged in addition to the hospital.

Bell said she had been in Sumy last week following up on a deadly Sept. 19 attack on a geriatric centre in which at least one civilian had been killed and 13 injured, and recalled an Aug. 13 attack on another hospital complex in the city.

“Medical facilities are protected under international humanitarian law and are entitled to special protection. They must not be the object of attack,” she said, adding that 33 civilians had been killed and 132 injured in Sumy city and the surrounding region since Aug. 6.

Ukrainian prosecutors said that at the time of the Saturday morning attacks 86 patients and 38 staff members were in the hospital.

DRONE ATTACKS

The hospital shared a photograph on its Facebook page it said showed one of those killed, a nurse and mother of two daughters named Tatiana Tikhonova.

“The first attack killed one person and damaged the ceilings of several floors of the hospital,” Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said on Telegram.

“Everyone in the world who talks about this war should pay attention to where Russia is hitting. They are fighting hospitals, civilian objects and people’s lives,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Telegram.
“Only force can force Russia to peace. Peace through force is the only right way.”

Klymenko did not specify what weapons were used in Saturday’s attacks. The regional administration and air forces said the strike was carried out by drones, which Bell identified as loitering munitions.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-attacks-medical-centre-kill-6-people-ukraines-sumy-minister-says-2024-09-28

In the wake of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s killing, Hezbollah faces the enormous challenge of plugging the infiltration in its ranks that allowed its arch enemy Israel to destroy weapons sites, booby-trap its communications and assassinate the veteran leader, whose whereabouts had been a closely guarded secret for years.

Nasrallah’s killing in a command HQ on Friday came barely a week after Israel’s deadly detonation of hundreds of booby-trapped pagers and radios. It was the culmination of a rapid succession of strikes that have eliminated half of Hezbollah’s leadership council and decimated its top military command.

In the days before and hours after Nasrallah’s killing, Reuters spoke to more than a dozen sources in Lebanon, Israel, Iran and Syria who provided details of the damage Israel has wrought on the powerful Shi’ite paramilitary group, including to its supply lines and command structure. All asked for anonymity to speak about sensitive matters.

One source familiar with Israeli thinking told Reuters, less than 24 hours before the strike, that Israel has spent 20 years focusing intelligence efforts on Hezbollah and could hit Nasrallah when it wanted, including in the headquarters.

The person called the intelligence “brilliant,” without providing details.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his close circle of ministers authorized the attack on Wednesday, two Israeli officials told Reuters. The attack took place while Netanyahu was in New York to speak at the U.N. General Assembly.

Nasrallah had avoided public appearances since a previous 2006 war. He had long been vigilant, his movements were restricted and the circle of people he saw was very small, according to a source familiar with Nasrallah’s security arrangements. The assassination suggested his group had been infiltrated by informants for Israel, the source said.

The Hezbollah leader had been even more cautious than usual since the Sept. 17 pager blasts, out of concern Israel would try to kill him, a security source familiar with the group’s thinking told Reuters a week ago, citing his absence from a commanders’ funeral and his pre-recording of a speech broadcast a few days before.

Hezbollah’s media office did not respond to a request for comment for this story. U.S. President Joe Biden on Saturday called Nasrallah’s killing “a measure of justice” for his many victims, and said the United States fully supported Israel’s right to defend itself against Iranian-backed groups.

Israel says it carried out the hit on Nasrallah by dropping bombs on the underground headquarters below a residential building in southern Beirut.

“This is a massive blow and intelligence failure for Hezbollah,” Magnus Ranstorp, a veteran Hezbollah expert at the Swedish Defence University. “They knew that he was meeting. He was meeting with other commanders. And they just went for him.”

Including Nasrallah, Israel’s military says it has killed eight of Hezbollah’s nine most senior military commanders this year, mostly in the past week. These commanders led units ranging from the rocket division to the elite Radwan force.

Around 1,500 Hezbollah fighters were maimed by the exploding pagers and walkie talkies on Sept. 17 and Sept. 18.
On Saturday, Israel’s military spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani told reporters in a briefing that the military had “real-time” knowledge that Nasrallah and other leaders were gathering. Shoshani did not say how they knew, but said the leaders were meeting to plan attacks on Israel.

Brigadier General Amichai Levin, commander of Israel’s Hatzerim Airbase, told reporters that dozens of munitions hit the target within seconds.

“The operation was complex and was planned for a long time,” according to Levin.

DEPLETED

Hezbollah has shown the ability to replace commanders quickly, and Nasrallah’s cousin Hashem Safieddine, also a cleric who wears the black turban denoting descent from Islam’s Prophet Mohammed, has long been tipped as his successor.

“You kill one, they get a new one,” said a European diplomat of the group’s approach.

The group, whose name means Party of God, will fight on: by U.S. and Israeli estimates it had some 40,000 fighters ahead of the current escalation, along with large weapons stockpiles and an extensive tunnel network near Israel’s border.

Founded in Tehran in 1982, the Shi’ite paramilitary outfit is the most formidable member of Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance of anti-Israel allied irregular forces, and a significant regional player in its own right.

But it has been materially and psychologically weakened over the past 10 days.

Thanks to decades of backing from Iran, prior to the current conflict Hezbollah was among the world’s most well-armed non-conventional armies, with an arsenal of 150,000 rockets, missiles and drones, according to U.S. estimates.

That is ten times the size of the armoury the group had in 2006, during its last war with Israel, according to Israeli estimates.

Over the past year, even more weapons have flowed into Lebanon from Iran, along with significant amounts of financial aid, a source familiar with Hezbollah’s thinking said.

There have been few detailed public assessments of how much this arsenal has been damaged by Israel’s offensive over the past week, which has hit Hezbollah strongholds in Bekka Valley, far from Lebanon’s border with Israel.

One Western diplomat in the Middle East told Reuters prior to Friday’s attack that Hezbollah had lost 20%-25% of its missile capacity in the ongoing conflict, including in hundreds of Israeli strikes this week. The diplomat did not provide evidence or details of their assessment.

An Israeli security official said “a very respectable portion” of Hezbollah’s missile stocks had been destroyed, without giving further specifics.

In recent days, Israel has struck more than 1,000 Hezbollah targets. The security official, when asked about the military’s extensive target lists, said Israel had matched Hezbollah’s two-decade build up with preparations to prevent it launching its rockets in the first place – a complement to the Iron Dome air defence system that often downs missiles fired at the Jewish state.

Israeli officials say the fact that Hezbollah has only been able to launch a couple of hundred missiles a day in the past week was evidence its capabilities had been diminished.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/nasrallahs-killing-reveals-depth-israels-penetration-hezbollah-2024-09-28

Saudi Arabia has carried out its highest number of executions in over three decades after three executions announced Saturday took the 2024 figure to 198, according to an AFP tally.

The Gulf monarchy executed the third highest number of prisoners in the world after China and Iran in 2023, according to Amnesty International. This surpassed its previous highs of 196 in 2022 and 192 in 1995, said the London-based human rights group, which began recording the annual data in 1990.

The Barron’s news department was not involved in the creation of the content above. This article was produced by AFP. For more information go to AFP.com.

Source : https://www.barrons.com/articles/saudi-executes-198-in-2024-highest-in-over-30-years-afp-tally-89562142

Already the longest-lived of the 45 men to serve as U.S. president, Jimmy Carter is about to reach the century mark.

The 39th president, who remains under home hospice care, will turn 100 on Tuesday, Oct. 1, celebrating in the same south Georgia town where he was born in 1924.

Here are some notable markers for Carter, the nation and the world over his long life.

Booms most everywhere — but not Plains

Carter has seen the U.S. population nearly triple. The U.S. has about 330 million residents; there were about 114 million in 1924 and 220 million when Carter was inaugurated in 1977. The global population has more than quadrupled, from 1.9 billion to more than 8.1 billion. It already had more than doubled to 4.36 billion by the time he became president.

That boom has not reached Plains, where Carter has lived more than 80 of his 100 years. His wife Rosalynn, who died in 2023 at age 96, also was born in Plains.

Their town comprised fewer than 500 people in the 1920s and has about 700 today; much of the local economy revolves around its most famous residents.

When James Earl Carter Jr. was born, life expectancy for American males was 58. It’s now 75.

TV, radio and presidential maps

NBC first debuted a red-and-blue electoral map in the 1976 election between then-President Gerald Ford, a Republican, and Carter, the Democratic challenger. But NBC’s John Chancellor made Carter’s states red and Ford’s blue. Some other early versions of color electoral maps used yellow and blue because red was associated with Soviet and Chinese communism.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that networks settled on blue for Democratic-won states and red for GOP-won states. “Red state” and “blue state” did not become a permanent part of the American political lexicon until after the disputed 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush.

Carter was 14 when Franklin D. Roosevelt made the first presidential television appearance. Warren Harding became the first radio president two years before Carter’s birth.

Attention shoppers

There was no Amazon Prime in 1924, but you could order a build-it-yourself house from a catalog. Sears Roebuck Gladstone’s three-bedroom model went for $2,025, which was slightly less than the average worker’s annual income.

Walmart didn’t exist, but local general stores served the same purpose. Ballpark prices: loaf of bread, 9 cents; gallon of milk, 54 cents; gallon of gas, 11 cents.

Inflation helped drive Carter from office, as it has dogged President Joe Biden. The average gallon in 1980, Carter’s last full year in office, was about $3.25 when adjusted for inflation. That’s just 3 cents more than AAA’s current national average.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/jimmy-carter-100-birthday-then-now-34ceff0c3bb527863dae1c6788095c81

Former president warns he’ll retaliate against internet giant over his baseless accusations

Donald Trump on Friday accused Google of revealing only “bad stories” about him and vowed to prosecute the tech giant if he gets back in the White House.

Trump provided no support for his accusation in a post on Truth Social, in which he also claimed that Google searches only turn up positive articles about his Democratic rival Vice President Kamala Harris.

“This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections,” he said in the post.

“If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the election,” he added.

Trump posted the message after a conservative group reported on what it said it found when doing a search on “Donald Trump presidential race 2024.”

“Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of search for relevant and common search queries,” Google said in response to an AFP inquiry.

The conservative group’s report “looked at a single rare search term on a single day a few weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google,” the company added.

Google has been adamant that it does not manipulate search results to favor any political candidate.

The company does not disclose the inner workings of the software that powers its search engine.

Source : https://www.ibtimes.com/donald-trump-google-bad-stories-3744740

Iran’s supreme leader has said the death of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah “will not go unavenged”, a day after he was killed in an Israeli air strike in Lebanon.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced five days of mourning in Iran in response to what he called the “martyrdom of the great Nasrallah”, describing him as “a path and a school of thought” that would continue.

Iranian media reported that a Iranian Revolutionary Guards general was also killed in the Israeli strikes in Beirut on Friday.

Israel’s military said Nasrallah had “the blood of thousands… on his hands”, and that it targeted him while he was “commanding more imminent attacks”.

There are fears that the strike could plunge the wider region into war, after nearly a year of cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah sparked by the 7 October attacks and war in the Gaza Strip.

Key to what happens next in the Middle East is what Ayatollah Khamenei decides.

So far, he and other senior Iranian figures have refrained from vowing to retaliate for the series of severe and humiliating blows that Israel has dealt Hezbollah in recent weeks, seemingly because Iran does not want a war with its arch-enemy.

Iran also has not carried out its threat to avenge the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July, which Iran and Hamas blamed on Israel.

Both Hezbollah and Hamas are designated as terrorist organisations by Israel, the US, UK and other countries.

Earlier on Saturday, Ayatollah Khamenei urged Muslims to stand by Hezbollah “with their resources and help” but did not promise to retaliate for the strike that killed Nasrallah.

“The fate of this region will be determined by the forces of resistance, with Hezbollah at the forefront,” he said.

Reuters news agency meanwhile cited two regional officials as saying that the supreme leader had been transferred to a secure location inside Iran with heightened security measures. They also said Iran was in constant contact with Hezbollah and other allies to determine their next steps, according to the report.

Friday’s Israeli strike levelled several buildings in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahieh, underneath which the Israeli military said Hezbollah’s central headquarters was located.

Hezbollah confirmed Nasrallah’s death on Saturday. But it did not comment on the Israeli military’s claim that Ali Karaki, the head of the group’s Southern Front, and other commanders were killed alongside Nasrallah.

Gen Abbas Nilforoushan, deputy commander of operations for Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC), was also “martyred” in Dahiyeh on Friday, according to the IRGC-linked Saberin News outlet.

It provided nor further details, although the moderate Didban news website said he was “assassinated along with” Nasrallah.

However, there has been no official confirmation from Iranian authorities.

Iran uses the IRGC to provide Hezbollah with most of its funding, training and weapons, which have allowed the Shia Islamist group to build a military wing stronger than the Lebanese army.

The US says the IRGC also oversees the co-ordination of Iran’s network of allied armed groups across the Middle East, which are all opposed to the US and Israel and sometimes refer to themselves as the “Axis of Resistance”. Besides Hezbollah, they include Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen and Shia militias in Iraq and Syria.

On Saturday, there were air raid sirens in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv after the Houthis launched a missile in support of Hezbollah. The Israeli military said the missile was intercepted.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj31rgz511no

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been taken to a secure location inside Iran amid heightened security, sources told Reuters, a day after Israel killed the head of Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah in a strike on Beirut.

The move to safeguard Iran’s top decision-maker is the latest show of nervousness by the Iranian authorities as Israel launched a series of devastating attacks on Hezbollah, Iran’s best armed and most well-equipped ally in the region.

Reuters reported this month that Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards Corps, the ideological guardians of the Islamic Republic, had ordered all of members to stop using any type of communication devices after thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah blew up.

Lebanon and Hezbollah say Israel was behind the pager and walkie-talkie attacks. Israel neither denied nor confirmed involvement.

The two regional officials briefed by Tehran and who told Reuters that Khamenei had been moved to a safe location also said Iran was in contact with Hezbollah and other regional proxy groups to determine the next step after Nasrallah’s killing.

The sources declined to be identified further due to the sensitivity of the matter.

As well as killing Nasrallah, Friday’s strikes by Israel on Beirut killed Revolutionary Guards’ deputy commander Abbas Nilforoushan, Iranian media reported on Saturday. Other Revolutionary Guard’s commanders have also been killed since the Gaza War erupted last year and violence flared elsewhere.

Khamenei issued a statement later on Saturday, following Israel’s announcement that Nasrallah had been killed, saying: “The fate of this region will be determined by the forces of resistance, with Hezbollah at the forefront.”

“The blood of the martyr shall not go unavenged,” he said in a separate statement, in which he announced five days of mourning to mark Nasrallah’s death.

Nasrallah’s death is a major blow to Iran, removing an influential ally who helped build Hezbollah into the linchpin of Tehran’s constellation of allied groups in the Arab world.

Iran’s network of regional allies, known as the ‘Axis of Resistance’, stretch from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hamas in Gaza, Iran-backed militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen.

Hamas has been fighting a war with Israel for almost a year, since its fighters stormed into Israel on Oct. 7. The Houthis, meanwhile, have launched missiles at Israel and at ships sailing in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea along the Yemeni coast.

Hezbollah has been engaged in exchanges of fire across the Lebanese border throughout the Gaza War and has repeatedly said it would not stop until there was a ceasefire in Gaza.

After the pager and walkie-talkies strikes, one Iranian security official told Reuters that a large-scale operation was underway by the Revolutionary Guards to inspect all communications devices. He said most of these devices were either homemade or imported from China and Russia.

The official said Iran was concerned about infiltration by Israeli agents, including Iranians on Israel’s payroll and a thorough investigation of personnel has already begun, targeting mid and high-ranking members of the Revolutionary Guards.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iranian-leader-khamenei-calls-muslims-confront-israel-2024-09-28

Following days of questions over whether the pair would sit down together, Mr Trump praised the Ukrainian president, saying he had a “very good relationship” with him, but added he also had a “very good relationship” with Vladimir Putin.

Donald Trump has met Volodymyr Zelenskyy face to face after the former US president complained this week the Ukrainian leader was “refusing” to do a deal to end the war with Russia.

As he stood next to Mr Zelenskyy at Trump Tower in New York, the Republican presidential candidate said on Friday he would work with both countries to end the conflict.

Following days of questions over whether the pair would sit down together, Mr Trump praised the Ukrainian president, saying he had a “very good relationship” with him, but added he also had a “very good relationship” with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

During their first meeting since 2019, Mr Zelenskyy said he hoped they would continue to have a good relationship. “It takes two to tango, and we will,” Mr Trump responded.

Mr Trump was asked by a reporter if Ukraine could win the war, to which he replied: “Sure. They could.”

He also said “if we win [the election], I think we’re going to get it [the war] resolved very quickly”.

“We’re going to work very much with both parties to try and get this settled and get it worked out.”

Mr Zelenskyy said: “I think we have a common view that the war in Ukraine has to be stopped and Putin can’t win.”

The meeting comes as Mr Trump has been pushing for Ukraine to make a deal to end the full-scale conflict which began in February 2022.

‘Little nasty aspersions’

On Wednesday, Mr Trump complained at an event in Charlotte, North Carolina, that “we continue to give billions of dollars to a man [Mr Zelenskyy] who refuses to make a deal” to end the fighting.

Also this week, Mr Trump said the Ukrainian president was “making little nasty aspersions toward your favourite president, me”, and described Mr Zelenskyy as “the greatest salesman on Earth” for securing US support.

Mr Trump also referred to Ukraine as “demolished” and its people as “dead”.

Justice for Harrods Survivors say they have received more than 200 calls and messages from around the world about the late billionaire.

Lawyers acting for alleged victims of Mohamed al Fayed have said more than 60 “survivors” have now come forward.

The Justice for Harrods Survivors group – planning legal action against the luxury department store – also said they expected there were “more to come”.

The group said they have fielded more than 200 calls and messages from around the world about their proposed legal claim.

A string of allegations against the billionaire former Harrods and Fulham FC owner, who died last year aged 94, have emerged in recent days following an investigation by the BBC.

The claims include five accusations of rape and multiple allegations of sexual abuse.

A former Harrods employee told Sky News Fayed would “cherry pick” women from the shop floor and once they were called to his office they “couldn’t say no”.

In a new statement on Friday, the survivors group, which is headed by lawyers including Dean Armstrong KC, Bruce Drummond, Maria Mulla and Gloria Allred, described the response as “simply enormous”.

They also said “credible evidence” of abuse had emerged from those working at al Fayed’s other businesses, including Fulham FC, which he owned between 1997 and 2013.

Mohamed al Fayed: Timeline of sex abuse claims

The lawyers said in a statement: “We can confirm that we now represent 60 survivors as part of our claim, with more to come. To reiterate, our claim is becoming increasingly global in scope.

“We thank each of these brave women for placing their trust in us as we now move forward together.”

“As we said last week, given our prolonged experience in dealing with the women impacted by this case, we expected that anywhere Mohamed al Fayed went, abuse would follow,” they said.

“Sadly, this has proven to be true. We are now in possession of credible evidence of abuse at other al Fayed properties and businesses, including Fulham Football Club.”

They added: “Once again, we stress the need for an independent and transparent process to evaluate and adjudicate these claims.”

The group said they have fielded more than 200 calls and messages from around the world about their proposed legal claim.

A string of allegations against the billionaire former Harrods and Fulham FC owner, who died last year aged 94, have emerged in recent days following an investigation by the BBC.

The claims include five accusations of rape and multiple allegations of sexual abuse.

A former Harrods employee told Sky News Fayed would “cherry pick” women from the shop floor and once they were called to his office they “couldn’t say no”.

In a new statement on Friday, the survivors group, which is headed by lawyers including Dean Armstrong KC, Bruce Drummond, Maria Mulla and Gloria Allred, described the response as “simply enormous”.

They also said “credible evidence” of abuse had emerged from those working at al Fayed’s other businesses, including Fulham FC, which he owned between 1997 and 2013.

The lawyers said in a statement: “We can confirm that we now represent 60 survivors as part of our claim, with more to come. To reiterate, our claim is becoming increasingly global in scope.

“We thank each of these brave women for placing their trust in us as we now move forward together.”

“As we said last week, given our prolonged experience in dealing with the women impacted by this case, we expected that anywhere Mohamed al Fayed went, abuse would follow,” they said.

“Sadly, this has proven to be true. We are now in possession of credible evidence of abuse at other al Fayed properties and businesses, including Fulham Football Club.”

They added: “Once again, we stress the need for an independent and transparent process to evaluate and adjudicate these claims.”

Source: https://news.sky.com/story/dozens-more-alleged-victims-of-mohamed-al-fayed-come-forward-13222894

King Charles paid tribute to her “warmth and wit”, Harry Potter co-star Daniel Radcliffe called her a “legend”, while Whoopi Goldberg said she was “one of a kind”.

Dame Maggie Smith, known for her roles in Harry Potter and Downton Abbey, has died at the age of 89, her sons have said.

Her children Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens said in a statement she died in hospital on Friday and they were “devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother”.

The King and Queen have paid tribute calling her a “national treasure” adding they would remember “with the fondest admiration and affection her many great performances, and her warmth and wit”.

Born in Essex in 1934, Dame Maggie became an internationally recognised actress and one of the most versatile, accomplished and meticulous performers of her generation – winning two acting Oscars, several BAFTAs and numerous other awards.

More recently she won a new generation of fans as Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, in Downton Abbey and playing Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter movies.

But she later told ES Magazine: “I am deeply grateful for the work in [Harry] Potter and indeed Downton [Abbey] but it wasn’t what you’d call satisfying. I didn’t really feel I was acting in those things.”

Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe said she was “a fierce intellect, a gloriously sharp tongue, could intimidate and charm in the same instant and was, as everyone will tell you, extremely funny”.

JK Rowling simply tweeted: “Somehow I thought she’d live forever. RIP Dame Maggie Smith.”

While Emma Watson, who played Hermione Granger throughout the franchise, posted a picture of Dame Maggie holding her face while on the set of one of the films.

She wrote: “When I was younger I had no idea of Maggie’s legend… it is only as I’ve become an adult that I’ve come to appreciate that I shared the screen with a true definition of greatness… Maggie, there were a lot of male professors and by God you held your own.”

Gary Oldman, who also shared the screen with Dame Maggie in several Potter films, described her as the kind of talent that “comes along about every other generation”.

The Downton Abbey TV series won her a series of awards – three Emmys, a Golden Globe, and four Screen Actors Guild Awards.

In a statement, her co-star Hugh Bonneville, who played Violet’s son Lord Grantham, said: “Anyone who ever shared a scene with Maggie will attest to her sharp eye, sharp wit and formidable talent.”

On Instagram Dan Stevens, who played Matthew Crawley, wrote simply: “Truly one of The Greats. RIP” alongside two pictures of his former co-star.

Downton creator Julian Fellowes – who also worked with Dame Maggie on the movie Gosford Park – told Sky News she was “always very kind, very professional, very funny, both in her acting and off the screen. And you never had to explain a line”.

Whoopi Goldberg said she felt “lucky” to have worked alongside her in Sister Act, adding she was “one of a kind”.

Meanwhile, a message on X from BAFTA said: “Dame Maggie was a legend of British stage and screen, winning five BAFTAs as well as a BAFTA Special Award and BAFTA Fellowship during her highly acclaimed career.”

Source: https://news.sky.com/story/maggie-smith-known-for-her-roles-in-harry-potter-and-downton-abbey-has-died-13223024

What will happen to Earth when our Sun burns out? A newly discovered planetary system 4,000 light-years away might hold the answer, showing an Earth-like world orbiting the remnant of a star like our Sun.

Imagine Earth not as the vibrant, life-sustaining oasis we know but as a frozen, desolate world orbiting the faint ember of what was once a star like our Sun. This is the scene set by the newly discovered system, where an Earth-mass planet circles a white dwarf at a distance roughly twice that of Earth’s current orbit around the Sun. It’s a cosmic déjà vu, a preview of one possible fate awaiting our planet in the distant future.

The story of this remarkable find begins with a celestial magic trick known as gravitational microlensing. In 2020, astronomers detected a brief brightening of a distant star, magnified a thousandfold by the gravity of an intervening planetary system. This cosmic lens, dubbed KMT-2020-BLG-0414, revealed not just one but three bodies: a star about half the mass of our Sun, an Earth-sized planet, and a much larger object about 17 times the mass of Jupiter — likely a brown dwarf (a failed star).

However, the true nature of this system remained shrouded in mystery until Keming Zhang, a former doctoral student at the University of California-Berkeley, and his colleagues took a closer look using the powerful Keck II telescope in Hawaii. What they found—or rather, didn’t find—was the key to unlocking the system’s secrets. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

“Our conclusions are based on ruling out the alternative scenarios, since a normal star would have been easily seen,” Zhang explains in a media release. “Because the lens is both dark and low mass, we concluded that it can only be a white dwarf.”

This absence of light told a compelling story: the star at the heart of this system had already lived out its main sequence life, ballooned into a red giant, and finally settled into its current state as a white dwarf — a dense, Earth-sized stellar remnant.

The implications of this discovery ripple far beyond the boundaries of astronomy. It offers a cosmic crystal ball, showing one possible outcome for Earth as our own Sun ages. In about a billion years, our star will begin to swell, potentially engulfing the inner planets and forcing the outer ones, including Earth if it survives, into wider orbits.

“We do not currently have a consensus whether Earth could avoid being engulfed by the red giant sun in 6 billion years,” Zhang notes. “In any case, planet Earth will only be habitable for around another billion years, at which point Earth’s oceans would be vaporized by runaway greenhouse effect — long before the risk of getting swallowed by the red giant.”

While the fate of our planet remains uncertain, the KMT-2020-BLG-0414 system provides evidence that Earth-like worlds can indeed survive their stars’ tumultuous final acts. It’s a testament to the resilience of planets and a reminder of the vast timescales on which cosmic dramas unfold.

Source: https://studyfinds.org/chilling-vision-earths-future/?nab=0

Imagine being able to see right through your skin to watch your muscles or organs in action. It sounds like science fiction, but a group of scientists at Stanford University were recently able to make the skin of live mice appear transparent – at least under certain light conditions.

This breakthrough has unquestionably opened up new possibilities in biological research and medical imaging. So how did they do it, and could it ever lead to humans becoming invisible?

When we look at objects, light reflects off them, allowing our eyes to see shapes and colors. However, living tissue such as skin behaves differently because it is comprised of things such as water, proteins, and lipids (fats), which all bend light at different angles. This means that light is scattered by skin which limits how deeply we can see into the body without invasive surgery.

To try and get around this problem, scientists have developed more sophisticated imaging techniques over the years, such as two-photon microscopy and near-infrared fluorescence. But they often require harmful chemicals or only work on dead tissue. Instead, the goal has been to find a way to achieve transparency in living organisms safely and reversibly.

In the Stanford study, the researchers turned to a surprising tool: food dye. Tartrazine (also known as E102), a common yellow food dye found in crisps and soft drinks, has a unique property. When dissolved in water and applied to skin tissues, it alters how light interacts with biological matter.

The key to this lies in the physics of light absorption and refraction, specifically something called the “Kramers-Kronig relations”, which describe how materials interact with light across different wavelengths. Tartrazine has been used in microscopy for years as a way of staining certain parts of the anatomy to make them more visible, but it has never been used on the whole tissue of living animals.

By adding tartrazine to water and applying it to the tissues of anesthetized live mice, the researchers were able to change the refractive index of water in the tissue, meaning the extent to which it bends light. This brought its refractive index closer to that of lipids, which enabled the light to pass through the skin of the mice more easily, making them appear transparent.

Astoundingly, the researchers were able to see in unprecedented detail deep structures inside the mice such as blood vessels and even muscle fibers. In one example, they could see the movements of the intestines in real-time through the transparent abdomen. This level of visibility was achieved without any apparent harmful effects to the mice, including being able to return their skin to its normal, opaque state once the dye was washed off.

This discovery could be revolutionary. Imagine being able to monitor organ function without invasive procedures or see precisely where a vein is to draw blood. It could also pave the way for breakthroughs in understanding how diseases affect the body at a microscopic level.

Next stop, invisibility?

Here’s the thing about asking investors for money: they want to see returns.

OpenAI launched with a famously altruistic mission: to help humanity by developing artificial general intelligence. But along the way, it became one of the best-funded companies in Silicon Valley. Now, the tension between those two facts is coming to a head.

Weeks after releasing a new model it claims can “reason,” OpenAI is barreling toward dropping its nonprofit status, some of its most senior employees are leaving, and CEO Sam Altman — who was once briefly ousted over apparent trust concerns — is solidifying his position as one of the most powerful people in tech.

On Wednesday, OpenAI’s longtime chief technology officer, Mira Murati, announced she’s leaving “to create the time and space to do my own exploration.” The same day, chief research officer Bob McGrew and VP of post training Barret Zoph said they would depart as well. Altman called the leadership changes “a natural part of companies” in an X post following Murati’s announcement.

Pop star Lana Del Ray has ended weeks of speculation by reportedly marrying her alligator tour guide boyfriend, Jeremy Dufrene, in Louisiana.

The couple applied for a marriage licence on Monday in the Lafourche parish of the state, south of New Orleans.

The star used her legal name Elizabeth Woodridge Grant on the document, according to records seen by the BBC.

Court records show the application was valid for a month and was signed off by a clerk at the court.

Reports in US media said Del Rey and Mr Dufrene did not wait that long and tied the knot on Thursday in Des Allemandes, Louisiana, near where Mr Dufrene works as a boat tour operator.

“The wedding ceremony and reception were both held in the same bayou where Jeremy operates his swamp boats tours,” People magazine reported on Friday, citing a source.

Del Rey has not commented publicly on the reported wedding.

The pair met back in 2019, when the singer posted photos from one such tour and wrote on her Facebook page: “Jeremy lemme be captain at Arthur’s Air Boat Tours x”.

The couple were spotted together this summer at the Reading and Leeds festivals, where Del Rey was a headliner, and in London.

The 39-year-old singer was propelled to fame in 2011 with the success of her self-titled debut album and its breakout single Video Games, and has cultivated a glamorous and somewhat mysterious image while releasing nine albums in total.

Her latest effort, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, received mostly positive reviews and was nominated for an Album of the Year Grammy Award.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz6wg15nxvvo  

A pair of paintings by Dutch master Vincent van Gogh at London’s National Gallery were vandalized Friday when a group of climate activists splattered what appeared to be tomato soup on them, shortly after two other activists were sentenced over a similar attack two years ago.

The paintings from Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” series, which the artist painted in Arles in the south of France, were not damaged thanks to protective glass coverings. The gallery identified the two as its own Sunflowers (1888) and Sunflowers (1889) on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The three activists from the Just Stop Oil environmental group involved in the attack were arrested while the paintings were removed, examined, and then returned to their location. The exhibition reopened later Friday, the gallery said.

The group posted a video of the attack on social media, showing three people pouring soup over the paintings. The action was apparently in protests against the sentencing earlier Friday of two other activists from the group, Phoebe Plummer, 23, and Anna Holland, 22.

Plummer was sentenced to two years while Holland received a 20-month sentence for their October 2022 attack on a “Sunflowers” painting. The two women threw tins of tomato soup at the artwork, then knelt down in front of it and glued their hands to the wall beneath it. They were found guilty of criminal damage by a jury in July.

Members of Pakistan’s chess contingent held India’s flag at 2024 Olympiad. The video of the incident has gone viral.

India’s victorious campaign at the Chess Olympiad 2024 went down in history as one of the country’s biggest sporting achievements. Both the men’s women’s teams claimed the top podium spots in their respective categories, earning a rare double for the nation. As Team India’s celebratory videos surfaced on social media, one specific clip went viral. In the viral video, the members of Pakistan’s team were seen holding India’s flag, while standing with the members of the Indian team. The gesture from Pakistan’s chess player has taken the social media by storm, with reactions coming in from both sides of the border.

Sporting encounters between the two countries often get extreme attention from fans. Be it cricket, hockey, tennis or other sports, fans get glued whenever the two countries square off on the sporting field. While affairs between the two countries aren’t the healthiest, sport continues to transcend boundaries.

Source: https://sports.ndtv.com/chess/pakistan-teams-india-flag-gesture-during-chess-olympiad-2024-goes-viral-on-internet-6655799

The clash began when security forces, acting on intelligence about terrorist activity, launched an operation in Adigam village. During a house-to-house search, the terrorists opened fire, prompting security forces to retaliate. The exchange of gunfire continued as the forces attempted to neutralise the threat.

Three Army personnel and one police officer were reportedly injured in a gunbattle with terrorists in the Kulgam district of Jammu and Kashmir on Saturday. The injured were immediately taken to the hospital, and the encounter remains ongoing, with two terrorists believed to be trapped in the area.

The clash began when security forces, acting on intelligence about terrorist activity, launched an operation in Adigam village. During a house-to-house search, the terrorists opened fire, prompting security forces to retaliate. The exchange of gunfire continued as the forces attempted to neutralise the threat.

Kashmir Police Zone Shares Update On Gunfight

The Kashmir Police Zone confirmed the ongoing encounter via a tweet, stating, “Encounter has started at Adigam Devsar area of Kulgam. Police and security forces are on the job. Further details shall follow.”

The 89-year-old won her first Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969 and went on to win several Golden Globes and BAFTAs throughout her long career.

Dame Maggie Smith was a highly versatile actress whose repertoire ranged from Shakespeare to Harry Potter and Downton Abbey.

She won her first Oscar for The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969 and went on to garner several Golden Globes and BAFTAs throughout her long career.

Dame Maggie, who has died at the age of 89, was part of a generation of female performers that included Judi Dench and Vanessa Redgrave.

Born Margaret Natalie Smith in Ilford, east London, on 28 December 1934, she once offered a brief summary of her life: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, one’s still acting.”

She studied at Oxford High School for Girls and later at the Oxford Playhouse School, which led to a busy apprenticeship.

She used Maggie as her stage name because another Margaret Smith was active in the theatre.

Dame Maggie first appeared on stage at the age of 18 in Twelfth Night and made a name for herself starring in revues as a singer and dancer.

There and at the Old Vic she demonstrated her abilities in both tragedy and comedy and listed directors Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill as important influences.

Success in the film industry

Dame Maggie’s abilities were quickly recognised by the film industry and she was initially given several supporting roles.

But she later emerged as a leading star with her performance as the fanatical teacher Jean Brodie in The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969, for which she won a best actress Oscar and a BAFTA.

She earned a second Oscar for her role in California Suite in 1978, which won her a best supporting actress trophy, as well as a Golden Globe.

She was made a dame by the late Queen in 1990.

A new generation of fans from Harry Potter and Downton Abbey

Dame Maggie went on to star in Love, Pain And The Whole Damn Thing, The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne and Gosford Park, which earned her a sixth Oscar nomination.

But she was introduced to a whole new generation of fans when she played Professor McGonagall in the Harry Potter films and Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, in Downton Abbey.

“I am deeply grateful for the work in [Harry] Potter and indeed Downton [Abbey] but it wasn’t what you’d call satisfying,” she told ES Magazine.

“I didn’t really feel I was acting in those things.”

Source: https://news.sky.com/story/from-shakespeare-to-harry-potter-how-dame-maggie-smith-garnered-a-new-generation-of-fans-13223040

Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris visited the U.S.-Mexico border for the first time in her 2024 presidential campaign on Friday, calling for tighter asylum restrictions and vowing to make stopping fentanyl from entering the U.S. a “top priority.”
Harris outlined her plans to fix “our broken immigration system” in Douglas, Arizona, a border town of fewer than 17,000 people, while accusing her Republican rival Donald Trump of “fanning the flames of fear and division” over the impact of immigrants on American life.

Some 7 million migrants have been arrested crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally during President Joe Biden’s administration, according to government data, a record high number that has fueled criticism of Biden and Harris from Trump and his fellow Republicans.
Immigration is a top issue for voters. Arizona is a closely contested election state, with a high population of Latino voters sought by both parties. The nation’s porous southern border remains a source of fentanyl, a leading cause of drug overdoses in the United States.

Some 7 million migrants have been arrested crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally during President Joe Biden’s administration, according to government data, a record high number that has fueled criticism of Biden and Harris from Trump and his fellow Republicans.
Immigration is a top issue for voters. Arizona is a closely contested election state, with a high population of Latino voters sought by both parties. The nation’s porous southern border remains a source of fentanyl, a leading cause of drug overdoses in the United States.

The U.S. Justice Department on Friday unsealed criminal charges accusing three members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps of hacking Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and trying to disrupt the Nov. 5 election.
The indictment is the latest effort by the Biden administration to counter foreign efforts to interfere in the election between former President Trump, a Republican, and his Democratic rival Vice President Kamala Harris.

Authorities in Russia have said that Kyiv has fired drones into Russian regions bordering Ukraine in attacks that follow Vladimir Putin’s suggestion he wants to change the criteria for Moscow to use nuclear weapons.

Often without claiming direct responsibility, Ukraine has increased its drone strikes on Russian military facilities to hurt Moscow’s war machine.

The latest incidents on Wednesday night follow Putin upping the ante on the Kremlin’s nuclear rhetoric after he announced that Moscow may consider the use of nuclear weapons in response to a massive launch of missiles or drones crossing its state border.

The governor of Russia’s Oryol, Andrei Klychkov, said that a Ukrainian drone had been shot down over the region overnight Wednesday, without providing further details, according to the Astra Telegram channel.

Russia’s Defense Ministry reported that seven drones had been destroyed over the Belgorod, Kursk and Bryansk regions that border Ukraine, although there were no reports of damage.

Newsweek has not been able to verify this claim and has contacted the Ukrainian Defense Ministry for comment.

Russia in turn has continued with its drone strikes targeting Ukrainian infrastructure, with authorities in Kyiv saying that debris from an intercepted drone had damaged a gas pipeline in a residential building overnight Wednesday.

A former staffer of the Duchess of Sussex says ‘Every ten minutes, I had to go outside to be screamed at by her and Harry, and it went on for a couple of hours’

Meghan Markle is described as a generous boss who gives gifts like dog leashes and skincare products, making her staff feel valued, according to claims made in Us Weekly.

Former staffers praised the couple. Josh Kettler, Harry’s former chief of staff, said he was “warmly welcomed,” and Catherine St-Laurent called her time working with them “incredibly meaningful.” Ben Browning, who worked on the Netflix documentary, described his experience as “positive and supportive.”
Current staff members were even more complimentary. Ashley Hansen, the couple’s global press secretary, shared Meghan’s personal concern during her surgery which left a lasting impression. “You don’t realize how much that kind of kindness and thought means until you need it.”

Current and former staffers have anonymously offered the highest praise for Meghan Markle. “Harry and Meghan picked the best of the best from every field and watered the seeds for them to flourish,” one said. , “We’re planning a karaoke night because we have two people getting married on the team,” another staffer said.

Acts of kindness seem to define the couple’s leadership. Meghan and Harry reportedly gift fresh eggs from their own chickens, flowers, and fruit to staff during house calls. One former staffer recalled receiving a luxury dog leash and collar after adopting a pet. Another said Meghan would surprise people by responding to things that they said “You mentioned on the call your skin is bothering you, I put together a kit for you.”

These accounts contrast sharply with claims made by Jason Knauf, who was Meghan’s press secretary during her time as a royal. In a 2018 letter to Simon Case, then Prince William’s private secretary, Knauf wrote, “I am very concerned that the duchess was able to bully two PAs out of the household in the past year. The treatment of X was totally unacceptable.” He also stated, “The duchess seems intent on having someone in her sights. She is bullying Y and seeking to undermine her confidence. We have had report after report from people who have witnessed unacceptable behavior towards Y.”

Meghan denied the bullying accusations, claiming The Times of London was smearing her. The allegations surfaced just days before her much-anticipated interview with Oprah Winfrey aired.

Source: https://www.ynetnews.com/culture/article/bjlaq17a0

Naomi Campbell has been disqualified from being a trustee after the Charity Commission found serious mismanagement of finances at charity Fashion for Relief.

The supermodel, 54, was one of the charity’s three trustees who have been disqualified following a regulator’s probe. The disqualification will be effective for five years.

During the inquiry, the charity Commission discovered that between April 2016 and July 2022, 8.5% of the charity’s overall expenditure was on charitable grants.

There was also evidence discovered that showed unreasonable fundraising expenditure. Among the findings was 9,400 euros (£7,800) being spent on a three-night stay at a five-star hotel in Cannes, France, for Campbell. Other mismanagements included a 14,800 euro (£12,300) flight from London to Nice in 2018 for transferring art and jewellery.

In addition, the regulator found that charity money had been held on its behalf by solicitors and accountants instead of being run through a dedicated bank account in the charity’s name. According to the regulator, it recovered over £344,000 and protected a further £98,000 of charitable funds.

Fashion for Relief has been dissolved and was removed from the register of charities earlier this year. It was initially set up as a way to provide poverty relief and advance health and education. It was supposed to do so by making grants to charities or other organisations and by providing resources directly to those affected.

Lawyer Bianka Hellmich and businesswoman Veronica Chou were also disqualified from being trustee, for nine years and four years respectively.

Source: https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/breaking-naomi-campbell-banned-charity-33746865

The Indian government has slashed its goal to create thousands of new tribunals to try sex crimes speedily after states like West Bengal, where the recent brutal rape-homicide of a doctor shook the nation, fell far short of targets, according to three federal government officials and an internal document seen by Reuters.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government moved to establish fast-track special courts (FTSC) in 2019 to try exclusively sex crimes, after the Supreme Court that year criticised state governments for being slow to deliver justice to victims. The court singled out Bengal and Uttar Pradesh for taking too long to reach judgment on cases involving child victims.

Alabama executed convicted murderer Alan Miller on Thursday in the second-ever nitrogen-asphyxiation execution since the state pioneered the method which it says is less painful than lethal injections but human rights experts say may amount to torture.
The 65-year-old shook, pulled against restraints and gasped for breath for several minutes before dying, journalists who witnessed the execution said.

Elon Musk hit back at Britain on Thursday after reports that he had not been invited to the country’s upcoming investment summit, alleging the government was releasing convicted paedophiles while imprisoning people over social media posts.
The BBC reported that the U.S. billionaire had not been invited to the summit next month after his posts on his X platform regarding the violent, racist anti-immigration riots in Britain last month.

The UK prime minister spoke to the United Nations General Assembly and called for Israel and Hezbollah to “step back from the brink”. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier said news of a potential ceasefire deal were “not true”.

Sir Keir Starmer has called for Israel and Hezbollah to agree to a ceasefire, saying “escalation serves no one”.

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, the prime minister implored the two sides to “step back from the brink”.

It comes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his nation’s troops would keep “fighting at full force” and that news of a potential ceasefire deal was “not true”.

Addressing the nations of the world in New York, Sir Keir said: “I call on Israel and Hezbollah: Stop the violence, step back from the brink.”

Israel-Hezbollah latest: Follow live updates here

The UK prime minister added: “We need to see an immediate ceasefire to provide space for a diplomatic settlement, and we are working with all partners to that end.

“Because further escalation serves no one.”

In his speech, Sir Keir said the UN needs to “work together for peace, progress and equality” – including “preventing a regional war in the Middle East”.

More criticism of Russia

Earlier in his trip to the UN, Sir Keir criticised Russia for invading Ukraine in a meeting of the security council.
Both the UK and Russia are permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Addressing the general assembly, Sir Keir hinted at wanting to take further action against Russia for its invasion.

He said: “We must put new energy and creativity, into conflict resolution and conflict prevention, reverse the trend towards ever-greater violence, make the institutions of peace fit for purpose, and hold members to their commitments under the UN Charter.”

Addressing the security council previously, Sir Keir said: “The greatest violation of the charter in a generation has been committed by one of this council’s permanent members.”

Source: https://news.sky.com/story/escalation-serves-no-one-sir-keir-starmer-calls-on-israel-and-hezbollah-to-agree-ceasefire-in-address-to-un-13222599

A 3,600-year-old coffin was opened in the Xiaohe Cemetery in Xinjiang, China, during an excavation in 2003 – 21 years later, a team found a substance identified as kefir cheese.

The world’s oldest piece of cheese has been discovered – found laid across a mummy’s neck.

A 3,600-year-old coffin was opened in the Xiaohe Cemetery in Xinjiang, China, during an excavation in 2003, where a substance was draped across the neck of a mummified young woman.

Despite seeming like a piece of jewellery at the time, scientists have now said they have identified the sample as the oldest piece of cheese in the world.

Qiaomei Fu, a paleogeneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, told Sky’s partner network NBC News: “Regular cheese is soft. This is not. It has now become really dry, dense and hard dust.”

She explained that when the woman’s coffin was exhumed, it was found to be well preserved because of the Tarim Basin desert’s dry climate.

While the production of cheese has been long depicted in history, the researchers wrote in a study – published in the journal Cell – that the “history of fermented dairy is largely lost in antiquity”.

Speaking to NBC News, Ms Fu said that she and her team took samples from three tombs in the Xiaohe Cemetery and processed the DNA to trace the evolution of the bacteria across thousands of years.

The samples were then identified as kefir cheese, made by fermenting milk using kefir grains, and there was also evidence of goat and cow’s milk being used.

Source: https://news.sky.com/story/cheese-dating-back-3600-years-found-in-chinese-tomb-researchers-say-13222530

Naomi Cambell founded Fashion For Relief in 2005, with the aim of relieving poverty, but only a small proportion of the charity’s overall expenditure went to good causes. Some of the funds were spent on spa treatments and cigarettes.

Supermodel Naomi Campbell has said she was “not in control” of her charity, following her disqualification from being a trustee for five years after the Charity Commission found serious mismanagement of funds.

The 54-year-old model founded Fashion For Relief, a charity merging fashion and philanthropy, in 2005, but an investigation found that just a small proportion of the money went to actual good causes.

Fashion For Relief was dissolved and removed from the register of charities earlier this year.

Misconduct included using charity funds to pay for Campbell’s stay at a five-star hotel in Cannes, France, as well as spa treatments, room service and cigarettes.

Campbell is one of three of the charity’s trustees to be disqualified as a result of the probe.

The Charity Commission, which registers and regulates charities in England and Wales, opened an inquiry into Fashion For Relief in 2021.

The charity’s mission was to make grants to other organisations and give resources towards global disasters in a bid to relieve poverty and advance health and education.

It hosted fundraising events to generate income, including in Cannes and London.

However, the inquiry found that between April 2016 and July 2022, just 8.5% of the charity’s overall expenditure was on charitable grants.

Campbell said she was “extremely concerned” by the findings and an investigation on her part was under way.

“I was not in control of my charity, I put the control in the hands of a legal employer,” she said after being named a knight in France’s Order of Arts and Letters at the country’s culture ministry for her contribution to French culture.

“We are investigating to find out what and how, and everything I do and every penny I ever raised goes to charity.”

The Charity Commission says it has recovered £344,000, as well as protecting a further £98,000 of charitable funds.

Three nights at a five-star hotel

They say they saw no evidence that trustees took action to ensure fundraising methods were in the charity’s best interests, or that the money it spent was reasonable relative to the income it generated.

It also said it found some fundraising expenditure to be misconduct or mismanagement by the charity’s trustees.

This included a €14,800 (£12,300) flight from London to Nice for transferring art and jewellery to a fundraising event in Cannes in 2018.

It also looked into the decision to spend €9,400 (£7,800) of charity funds on a three-night stay at a five-star hotel for Campbell.

In these cases, the trustees “failed to show how these were cost-effective and an appropriate use of the charity’s resources”, the Charity Commission said.

Sean “Diddy” Combs’ past came back to haunt him in TMZ’s documentary, “The Downfall of Diddy: The Indictment.”

Several people spoke out against and in support of the disgraced rapper in the bombshell hour-long special released Thursday, following his arrest in New York City on Sept. 16.

Combs, 54, currently sits behind bars on charges of sex trafficking, transportation to engage in prostitution and racketeering after the feds raided his Miami and Los Angeles mansions in March.

According to an unsealed indictment, findings alleged the “I’ll Be Missing You” rapper — who pleaded not guilty and has denied all charges against him — “coerced women and others around him to fulfill his sexual desires.”

He also allegedly “[created] a criminal enterprise whose members and associates engaged in … sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice.”

Page Six highlighted all the takeaways from the documentary. Scroll to see more.

Combs’ lawyer explains the 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lube

Combs’ lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, told the outlet why the feds found a ton of lubricant and baby oil at the Bad Boys Records founder’s home during the March raids.

“I don’t know where the number a thousand came [from] … I can’t imagine it’s thousands. I’m not really sure what the baby oil has to do with anything,” he said.

TMZ founder Harvey Levin explained the prosecutors assumed Combs used the product as “lubricant for an orgy.”

“I guess. I don’t know what you need a thousand — one bottle of baby oil goes a long way,” Agnifilo said in response.

The attorney speculated the “Act Bad” rapper may have purchased the products from Costco or another wholesale corporation.

“I mean, he has a big house. He buys in bulk, you know,” Agnifilo added.

Costco slammed the allegations in a statement to TMZ, saying they don’t carry baby oil.

Combs plans on testifying

According to Combs’ attorney, the Bad Boy Records founder will testify and is “very eager to tell his story.”

Agnifilo shared that Combs also wants to tell his side of the story about the 2016 hotel security video of him attacking his ex-girlfriend of nearly a decade Cassie Ventura.

“He has his story and he has a story that I think only he can tell in the way he can tell it in real-time,” he said. “And it’s a human story. It’s a story of love. It’s a story of hurt. It’s a story of heartbreak.”

Source: https://pagesix.com/2024/09/26/entertainment/all-the-bombshells-from-the-downfall-of-diddy-the-indictment-documentary/

Al Pacino, 84, helped his girlfriend, Noor Alfallah, 30, ring in her birthday by blowing out candles on a three-tier birthday cake in a new video shared on Wednesday.

The Oscar winner flashed a huge grin while celebrating his much-younger partner in the clip posted to Instagram by Noor’s sister Sophia Alfallah, which was captioned, “Noor’s bday 2024.”

The carousel also included snapshots from the birthday bash, which was attended by Noor and Sophia’s sister Remi, Julia Fox, Selena Gomez’s bestie Raquelle Stevens and Bruce Willis and Demi Moore’s daughter Scout LaRue Willis.

Though Sophia just posted the inside glimpse at her sister’s birthday celebration this week, Noor turned 30 in December 2023.

However, Noor seemingly prefers to celebrate early. Last year, she posted a snapshot in November with a similar birthday cake and captioned it, “Almost 30…”

Page Six reached out to reps for Pacino and Noor for clarification on the recent birthday celebration, but did not immediately hear back.

Pacino and Noor have been linked since the coronavirus pandemic, and they welcomed their first child together in June 2023.

In September 2023, the Sony producer filed for full physical custody of their son, Roman, but said she was willing to give “reasonable visitation” to the actor.

They reached a custody agreement in October 2023.

Documents later obtained by Page Six confirmed that they agreed on joint legal custody while Noor was granted primary physical custody.

The “Scarface” star was ordered to pay a lump sum of $110,000, plus more than $30,000 a month in child support. He also agreed to pay $13,000 for a night nurse and cover any medical bills not covered by health insurance.

He was also ordered to make a yearly $15,000 deposit into an education fund for Roman.

Source: https://pagesix.com/2024/09/26/celebrity-news/al-pacino-84-helps-girlfriend-noor-alfallah-30-blow-out-her-birthday-candles/

Google took a page out of a familiar playbook in court this week, defending itself from claims of anticompetitive conduct by raising security concerns. While the government argues it locked up the ad tech market to make more money, Google’s witnesses say that a more closed ecosystem is often safer for users — echoing a defense both it and Apple have made of their mobile app stores.

Google’s attorneys have spent the last few days mounting its defense against the Department of Justice. The company argues that conduct the Department of Justice paints as anticompetitive — like locking customers into its services and exerting control over the rules of the industry through its dominance — actually has justifiable business purposes. The point was emphasized by two Google executive witnesses: Per Bjorke, director of product management for ad traffic quality, and Alejandro Borgia, director of product management for ad safety. Combined, the teams work to ensure Google’s ads are bought and sold by trustworthy parties and that they’re seen by real people, not bots.

Bjorke, whose team focuses on publishers, described Google’s extensive work to combat click fraud by shady websites. Each day, 15,000 to 20,000 publishers attempt to sign up to use Google’s tools, Bjorke said. Each one needs to be vetted with a multistep verification process, including mailing a physical letter to make it harder for fraudsters to use fake addresses. On the advertiser side, millions of signups are blocked each year based on signals of malicious intent, Borgia said. Bjorke and Borgia both said their teams don’t have revenue goals, and Google views the protection as a service that’s part of working with its products. It’s all meant to make sure bad actors don’t get into Google’s advertising ecosystem and spoil it for everyone, Bjorke said.

When Google had opportunities to open up its ecosystem, the company had to weigh the security costs, Bjorke said. In the early 2010s, for instance, the Google Ads advertising network was considering a way to let its massive advertiser base bid on different exchanges than Google’s own AdX. The project, called AWBid, would “fundamentally change” the foundation of Google’s fraud defenses. Keeping out bad actors got much harder when Google didn’t have full control of how publishers got access to ad auctions. There are “very clear, significant benefits of being closed,” Bjorke said. While the DOJ has pointed to AWBid as an example of how Google is capable of allowing more competition, Bjorke countered that it required a huge amount of work and a lot of risk.

And any security failures could be costly. Bjorke related how, between about 2015 and 2018, the 3ve botnet ran a massive online advertising scam to siphon ad dollars. Google has said the scheme compromised about 1 million IP addresses to help its faked websites look like they were generating real traffic. Bjorke said advertisers didn’t lose money, but only because Google compensated them — and Google itself lost around $30 to $40 million.

Bjorke insists that far from locking out competitors, Google has attempted to help them. After 3ve, he says, Google realized it could take one of two paths: focus inward to protect advertisers on its own platform (growing its “slice” of the industry) or help clean up ad fraud across the industry (growing the “pie”). It chose the latter, working with other companies on a code snippet dubbed ads.txt, which relayed information that made 3ve-style attacks far more difficult. Going this route meant more work for Google, Bjorke said, but it addressed a potentially catastrophic loss of confidence in digital ads compared to older forms of advertising like TV.

The underlying argument here is that when Google gains power and makes decisions for advertisers and publishers, it’s good for everyone. Without a large scale of operations, Borgia said, “we would be unable to do our jobs.” And because Google owns ad tools across the entire ecosystem, he added, Google has more visibility into the system to make sure it’s running safe ads that won’t load viruses on users’ computers or show a brand next to inappropriate content. He says Google also lets people limit how their data is used within Google’s ads ecosystem — but when an outside tool is involved, that company could have its own set of rules around privacy.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24253523/google-closed-ad-ecosystem-awbid-ad-fraud-3ve

The US and China are the two largest economies in the world. They have the two most powerful militaries in the world. The US-China rivalry, in the view of many international analysts, will be the defining global theme of the 21st Century.

But at the moment, only one of the two major party presidential candidates is regularly talking about US-China policy – as he has done consistently for years.

According to a review by BBC Verify, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has mentioned China 40 times in his five rallies since the presidential debate earlier this month. In just one hour at a town hall forum last week in Michigan, he brought up the country 27 times.

And when he talks about China, Trump focuses on matters of tension between the two global powers, painting the country and the world’s second-largest economy, as a kind of economic predator.

Who is ahead – Harris or Trump?
He has talked about the new tariffs he plans to impose on imports from Chinese companies – and those from other nations – should he return to the White House.

He has said he wants to prevent Chinese-made cars from being sold because he believes they will destroy the American auto industry. He has warned China not to attempt to replace the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. And he has blamed the Chinese government for the Covid pandemic.

Many economists question the effectiveness of Trump’s tariff plans and warn that they would ultimately be harmful to US consumers. But Trump’s message is tailored to blue-collar voters in the key industrial Midwest battleground states who have felt the impact of increased competition from Chinese manufacturers.

Meanwhile, BBC Verify finds, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris did not mention China at all in her six rallies since the 10 September debate. Although, in a speech on the economy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday afternoon, she made a handful of references to the country.

“I will never hesitate to take swift and strong measures when China undermines the rules of the road at the expense of our workers, communities, and companies,” she said at that event.

Asked for comment, an aide to the vice-president told the BBC that even if Harris does not talk about China regularly, she has a record of working to counter what they described as China’s efforts to undermine global stability and prosperity.

But when it comes to discussing China, the contrast between Trump and Harris on the campaign trail is unmistakable.

On Monday afternoon, at a barn in Smithton, a small town in rural western Pennsylvania, Trump sat down with a group of local farmers and ranchers for a roundtable discussion specifically about China.

The town may be just an hour outside of Pittsburgh, a Democratic Party urban stronghold, but this was decidedly Republican territory. Cows grazed peacefully on grasslands lined with dozens of “Trump for President signs”, while Trump supporters decorated two donkeys in “Make America Great Again” gear.

The topic of the event, hosted by the Protecting America Initiative, a conservative think-tank, was “the Chinese Communist Party’s growing threat to the US food supply”.

The forum ended up being a more open-ended conversation about the threat of China, full stop. The farmers, ranchers and business executives on the panel complained about having to compete with heavily subsidised Chinese imports and about the low quality of Chinese goods.

While the former president didn’t spend much time discussing the perceived dangers of Chinese ownership of US farmland – he instead promised that he would convince Chinese President Xi Jinping to buy more US agriculture exports – he again emphasised that he would use tariffs to shield the American economy from China.

At one point, he spoke of the need to protect the US steel industry – in order to prepare for a hypothetical war with China.

“If we’re in a war, and we need army tanks and we need ships and we need other things that happen to be made of steel, what are we going to do, go to China and get the steel?” he asked. “We’re fighting China, but would you mind selling us some steel?”

Some of the heavier lifting on China during the forum was left to Richard Grenell, a roundtable panelist and senior advisor for the Protecting America Initiative.

He warned the country has “quietly but strategically” worked against the US – particularly when Americans were distracted by other global issues.

“They go after our local and state politicians; they go after our manufacturing,” he said. “There is no question they are looking to, at some point, leverage that investment and activity.”

Grenell, who served as US ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence while Trump was in office, is considered a possible secretary of state – America’s top diplomat – if Trump wins another term in November.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgvr9kgkqyo

Sudan is at breaking point.

After 17 months of a brutal civil war which has devastated the country, the army has launched a major offensive in the capital Khartoum, targeting areas in the hands of its bitter rival, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

The RSF seized most of Khartoum at the start of the conflict, while the army controls the twin city of Omdurman, just across the River Nile.

But there are still places where people can, and do, cross between the two sides.

At one such point, I met a group of women who had walked four hours to a market in army-controlled territory at the edge of Omdurman, where food is cheaper.

The women had come from Dar es Salaam, an area held by the RSF.

Their husbands were no longer leaving the house, they told me, because RSF fighters beat them, took any money they earned, or detained them and demanded payment for their release.

“We endure this hardship because we want to feed our children. We’re hungry, we need food,” said one.

Warning: Some of the details in the story may be upsetting.

And the women, I asked, were they safer than the men? What about rape?

The chorus of voices died down.

Then one erupted.

“Where is the world? Why don’t you help us?” she said, her words coming out in torrents as tears ran down her cheeks.

“There are so many women here who’ve been violated, but they don’t talk about it. What difference would it make anyway?”

“Some girls, the RSF make them lie in the streets at night,” she went on. “If they come back late from this market, the RSF keeps them for five or six days.”

As she spoke her mother sat with her head in her hand, sobbing. Other women around her also started crying.

“You in your world, if your child went out, would you leave her?” she demanded. “Wouldn’t you go look for her? But tell us, what can we do? Nothing is in our hands, no one cares for us. Where is the world? Why don’t you help us!”

The crossing point was a window into a world of desperation and despair.

Travellers described being subjected to lawlessness, looting and brutality in a conflict that the UN says has forced more than 10.5 million people to flee their homes.

But it is sexual violence that has become a defining characteristic of the protracted conflict, which started as a power struggle between the army and the RSF but has since drawn in local armed groups and fighters from neighbouring countries.

The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, has said rape is being used as “a weapon of war”.

A recent UN fact-finding mission documented several cases of rape and rape threats from members of the army, but found that large-scale sexual violence was committed by the RSF and its allied militias, and amounted to violations of international law.

One woman the BBC spoke to blamed the RSF for raping her.

We met her in the market at the crossing, aptly named Souk al-Har – the Heat Market.

Since the war began the market has expanded across the barren land on a desert road out of Omdurman, attracting the poorest of the poor with its low prices.

Miriam, not her real name, had fled her home in Dar es Salaam to take refuge with her brother.

She now works in a tea stall. But early in the war, she said, two armed men entered her house and tried to rape her daughters – one 17 years old and the other 10.

“I told the girls to stay behind me and I said to the RSF: ‘If you want to rape anyone it has to be me,’” she said.

“They hit me and ordered me to take off my clothes. Before I took them off, I told my girls to leave. They took the other children and jumped over the fence. Then one of the men laid on me.”

The RSF has told international investigators that it has taken all the necessary measures to prevent sexual violence and other forms of violence that constitute human rights violations.

But the accounts of sexual assault are numerous and consistent, and the damage has a lasting impact.

Sitting on a low stool in the shade of a row of trees, Fatima, not her real name, told me she had come to Omdurman to deliver twins, and planned to stay.

One of her neighbours, she said, a 15-year-old girl, had also become pregnant, after she and her 17-year-old sister were raped by four RSF soldiers.

People were awakened by screams and came out to see what was going on, she said, but the armed men told them they would be shot if they did not go back into their houses.

The next morning, they found the two girls with signs of abuse on their bodies, and their elder brother locked in one of the rooms.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3zq40qq25o

Dangerous Hurricane Helene will strike the Florida coastline around Apalachee Bay Thursday night with life-threatening storm surge, destructive winds and flooding rainfall.

Hurricane Helene is nearing landfall, which is forecast to occur close to the cities of St. Marks and Perry in northern Florida Thursday night around 11:00 p.m. ET with life-threatening conditions and the potential for catastrophic property damage.

Helene intensified into a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph at 6:30 p.m. EDT. By 9:00 p.m., winds were up to 140 mph and could still increase a bit more, according to AccuWeather meteorologists. Depending on the integrity of the eye wall, Helene should maintain at least Category 4 intensity up to the time of landfall.

Hurricane warnings were in effect for the Florida Big Bend area to just north of Tampa, while tropical storm warnings were in effect for much of the rest of the Florida coastline, except for the western part of the Florida Panhandle. Tropical storm warnings were also in effect for the Georgia and South Carolina coasts.

“A landfall Thursday night near the city of St. Mark is anticipated. St. Mark is in the Big Bend area of the Florida Gulf Coast, which is the zone from the eastern part of the Florida Panhandle to the northwestern part of the Florida Peninsula,” AccuWeather Chief On-Air Meteorologist Bernie Rayno said, “At the time of landfall, Helene is expected to be a dangerous Category 4 hurricane.”

There is still some risk the storm may drift a bit to the west or east, but steering breezes are more deliberate with this storm over the Gulf of Mexico compared to some in the past that have shifted their tracks considerably in the final hours before landfall. A landfall along the shores of Apalachee Bay is a certainty at this point.

At landfall Thursday evening – between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. EDT – Helene will have maximum sustained winds of 130-135 mph, with much stronger gusts to at least 150 mph and an AccuWeather Local StormMax™ of 160 mph.

The StormMax gust is a Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale of at least 157 mph. At this intensity, many trees will be uprooted, roofs will be removed and some structures may totally fail.

The impacts of a hurricane go well beyond its potentially destructive winds. The AccuWeather RealImpact™ Scale for Hurricanes incorporates storm surge, flooding, rainfall, population density and economic impacts in addition to maximum winds. Due to complications from torrential rainfall, these impacts occur not only along the coast but hundreds of miles inland.

By far, the most dangerous part of a hurricane, as it approaches the coast and makes landfall, is the storm surge. This potentially life-threatening aspect of a hurricane is the height of the water “above” astronomical tides. In a matter of minutes, water can surge with depth and force and lead to drowning.

Because of the shape of the coast around Apalachee Bay, Florida, which can trap excess water, and the forecast intensity and track of Helene, AccuWeather meteorologists anticipate a storm surge up to the height of a two-story building, or 15-20 feet, Thursday night. At this height, some single-story buildings along the coast may be completely underwater. In the most extreme surge locations, water levels may reach 22 or 23 feet.

A significant and dangerous storm surge will extend well to the south and east of where the eye comes ashore. For example, a storm surge of 6 to perhaps 10 feet can occur Thursday evening in portions of Tampa Bay, when winds flip to the west and cause the water to pile up on the eastern parts of the bay.

Because of strong easterly winds off the Atlantic Ocean, a significant storm surge and coastal flooding are expected from northeastern Florida to Georgia and South Carolina. Portions of Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, could be inundated from Thursday night to Friday.

A tremendous amount of rain will fall in northern Florida, with rain heavy enough to cause travel problems and lead to minor flooding in southern and eastern Florida and the potential for catastrophic flooding in northern Florida, especially the eastern part of the panhandle, with a general 8-12 inches of rain forecast.

Source: https://www.accuweather.com/en/hurricane/hurricane-helene-to-roar-ashore-in-floridas-big-bend-as-a-category-4/1694728

Not only does Elon Musk’s X often bow to government pressure, it complies with censorship requests far more often than not.

Elon Musk is a man who bends the knee to government censors.

While the Donald Trump-supporting billionaire and X owner publicly professes to be a free speech proponent, his actions tell an entirely different story. Not only does Musk often bow to government pressure, he complies with removal requests far more often than not.

That’s according to a transparency report that X published on Wednesday. The report indicated that, under Musk’s supposedly pro-free speech leadership, X obeyed government demands in more than 70% of cases to remove content during the first half of 2024. That figure represents a staggering 20% increase from the last time the social media company published a transparency report, which was in 2021 when it was governed by leadership Musk has portrayed as pro-censorship.

When I reached out to X for comment about the delta between Musk’s public comments and his actions, an unnamed spokesperson sent me a statement that said, “We have seen an increase in government removal requests since 2021, and the majority have been driven by a single country who has been reporting lawful and accurate requests. X may file or serve objections for requests that are legally defective, overly broad, and/or appear to impermissibly burden free expression.”

The troublesome government that the X spokesperson was referring to is Japan, which sent the company nearly 47,000 takedown requests (X complied 79% of the time). In any case, the statement from X did not address the crux of the issue: Why is Musk’s social media platform complying with government censorship orders at a far higher rate than the previous company leadership? When I followed up and asked, my email to X predictably went unanswered.

Regardless, anyone paying attention should not be surprised by that fact that Musk is a hypocrite on the issue of free speech. He has very publicly suspended journalists and filed lawsuits aimed at chilling the speech of his critics. Even recently, while he touted X’s defiance of Brazil’s takedown directives, the company ultimately — and quietly — complied with the country’s orders.

Source: https://www.status.news/p/elon-musk-government-censorship

An American Airlines flight from Dallas, Texas to Incheon International Airport in Seoul, South Korea turned around 5 hours into its journey, returning all passengers from the airport it initially took off from. Passengers were provided with no explanation as to why their journey was altered when the incident occurred on Sept. 7.

One passenger, 41-year-old Jimin Lee, took to Instagram to voice her complaints. In a now viral video, Lee films her predicament as she enjoys refreshments on her flight.

“New fear unlocked: Your flight to Korea may go five hours and come back with zero explanation,” wrote Lee in the caption.

According to Lee, airline staff explained the incident as having been caused by an issue with the toilets. The pilot also reportedly asked if any passengers were carrying a screwdriver which could have helped fix the issue.

“American Airlines needs a lesson in effective communication,” Lee concluded.

In a statement provided to UNILAD, an American Airlines spokesperson explained that a maintenance issue caused the sudden re-routing of the plane.

Source: https://www.latintimes.com/problem-toilet-forces-american-airlines-plane-turn-around-after-nine-hours-air-return-560361

She came through drippin’!

Cardi B dazzled in a gold metal dress complete with fringe and a plunging neckline at Paris Fashion Week.

The Grammy winner dressed to impress in her figure-hugging ensemble at the Paco Rabanne show on Wednesday.

Although the 31-year-old rapper gave birth to her third child with less than three weeks ago, Cardi made sure to go above and beyond with her fashion week looks.

At the Rabanne show, Cardi sat front row and put her metallic look on full display. The “Up” singer swapped her raven-hued tresses for a copper blond look that featured chic beach waves.

Cardi paired the gown with gold open-toed heels and even accessorized her look with face piercings just above both of her cheek bones.

Source: https://pagesix.com/2024/09/25/style/cardi-b-goes-for-gold-at-paris-fashion-week-in-metal-and-fringe-gown/

A U.S. Secret Service agent has been accused of groping and sexually harassing a member of Vice President Kamala Harris’ official staff during a trip last week, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The Secret Service office of professional responsibility is investigating a misconduct allegation involving an employee, according to the law enforcement agency that is tasked with protecting the president, vice president, candidates and some members of Congress. “The Secret Service holds its personnel to the highest standards,” according to the statement released Wednesday.

Harris’ office said in a statement that “we have zero tolerance for sexual misconduct,” and that the office takes “safety of staff seriously.”

The agent was on a trip with Harris staff members last week in Wisconsin to scout possible locations for a visit from the Democratic presidential nominee when the group went out for dinner and drinks. The agent, who appeared to be drunk, is accused of groping the woman in the presence of others after they went back to the hotel, according to the people who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to talk about an ongoing investigation.

The employee was taken off his detail and placed on administrative leave pending the results of the investigation, the Secret Service said.

Source: https://apnews.com/article/secret-service-groping-allegations-harris-staff-963cd8142157c838e622a66d2c13f902#

Mira Murati in a written statement posted on X said she has made the difficult decision to leave the ChatGPT maker after much reflection.

Open AI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati announced on social platform X that she is leaving the company “to create time and space” to do her own exploration. The company’s CEO Sam Altman also announced that chief research officer Bob McGrew and another research leader Barret Zoph are also leaving the company.

Mira Murati, in a statement posted on X, said she has made the difficult decision to leave the ChatGPT maker after much reflection. “I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration. For now, my primary focus is doing everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition, maintaining the momentum we’ve built,” read her statement.

Speaking positively of the company, Mira Murati described it as being “at the pinnacle of AI innovation” and added that it’s hard to leave the company she will always cherish.

Mira Murati said her six-and-a-half years in the company has been an “extraordinary privilege” and thanked CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman for their support over the years.

“I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to build and work alongside this remarkable team. Together, we’ve pushed the boundaries of scientific understanding in our quest to improve human well-being. While I may no longer be in the trenches with you, I will still be rooting for you all. With deep gratitude for the friendships forged, the triumphs achieved, and most importantly, the challenges overcome together,” her statement read.

Altman expressed this gratitude and thanked Murati for her service to the company. Noting that leadership changes are ‘natural’ for a fast-growing organisation, he promised to announce transition plans ‘soon’.

Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/open-ai-cto-mira-murati-2-others-resign-ceo-sam-altman-reacts-101727313329730.html

Hello, Harley Quinn.

Lady Gaga fully transformed into her “Joker: Folie à Deux” character at the movie’s UK premiere in London on Wednesday.

The “Chromatica” singer, 38, matched the red carpet in a scarlet satin faille Celine gown paired with a matching bold-shouldered bolero jacket.

She further channeled Lee Quinzel — the love interest of Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck — with her blunt red bob and dramatic beauty look that included a single, sparkling tear accented with crystals.

Makeup artist Sarah Tanno painted Gaga’s face with teal eyeshadow, winged liner and red lipstick for the film premiere.

In addition to black nail polish, Gaga completed the look with plenty of Tiffany & Co. jewelry, including a spectacular Jean Schlumberger by Tiffany “Bird on a Rock” brooch set with a spessartine of over 20 carats.

She also wore a Jean Schlumberger by Tiffany vine ring and two dazzling yellow diamond pieces from the 2024 Tiffany Blue Book Collection.

Gaga’s fiancé, Michael Polanski, matched the star in a Celine Homme suit, while co-star Phoenix went casual in a bomber jacket, black jeans and Converse.

Source: https://pagesix.com/2024/09/25/style/lady-gaga-joker-folie-a-deux-uk-premiere-red-carpet-outfit/

Get ready for a cosmic surprise this autumn – Earth is about to get a second moon, according to scientists.

A small asteroid is going to be captured by Earth’s gravitational pull and temporarily become a “mini-moon”.

This space visitor will be around from September 29 for a couple of months before escaping from Earth’s gravity again.

Sadly the second moon is going to be too small and dim to be seen, unless you have a professional telescope.

The asteroid was first spotted by NASA’s Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) on 7 August.

Scientists worked out its trajectory in a study published in Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.

The asteroid, which scientists refer to as 2024 PT5, hails from the Arjuna asteroid belt, which contains rocks that follow an orbit quite similar to Earth’s.

Occasionally, some of these asteroids get relatively close, getting as near as 2.8 million miles (4.5 million km) from our planet.

According to the researchers involved in the study, if an asteroid like this is moving at a relatively slow speed of around 2,200mph (3,540km/h), Earth’s gravitational field can exert a strong influence, enough to trap it temporarily.

Which is exactly what’s about to happen – starting this weekend, this small asteroid will spend about two months orbiting Earth.

Dr Jennifer Millard, astronomer and host of the Awesome Astronomy podcast, told the BBC’s Today programme that the asteroid would enter orbit on the 29th of September and then was predicted to leave on 25 November.

“It’s not going to complete a full revolution of our planet, it’s just going to kind of have its orbit altered, just twisted slightly by our own planet and then it’ll continue on its merry way,” she said.

The asteroid is approximately 32ft (10m) long, which is tiny in comparison to Earth’s moon, which has a diameter of approximately 3,474km.

Because it is small and made of dull rock it will not be visible to people on earth even if they use binoculars or a home telescope.

“Professional telescopes, they’ll be able to pick it up. So you’ll be able to look out for lots of wonderful pictures online of this little dot kind of moving past the stars at great speed,” said Dr Millard.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3dvxgrmk95o

Thailand’s king has signed a marriage equality bill into law, making the country the first in South East Asia to recognise same-sex unions.

The bill cleared the Senate in June but required royal endorsement to become law. It was published in the Royal Gazette on Tuesday and will come into effect on 22 January next year.

Activists hailed the move as historic – it marks the culmination of years of campaigning for marriage equality.

Thailand has long been seen as a relative haven for the LGBTQ+ community in a region where such attitudes are rare.

The new law uses gender-neutral terms in place of “husbands”, “wives”, “men” and “women”. And it grants same-sex couples adoption and inheritance rights.

“Today we’re not only getting to write our names in marriage certificates, but we are also writing a page in history… that tells us that love never set a condition of who we were born to be,” Ann Chumaporn, a longtime LGBTQ+ activist and co-founder of the Bangkok Pride movement, told the BBC.

“It’s a triumph of equality and human dignity.”

She said she plans to organise a mass wedding for more than 1,000 LGBTQ+ couples on 22 January.

“[The legal recognition] means we are fully accepted and can live our lives without conditions or compromises,” said advertising strategist Kwankaow Koosakulnirund.

“Thailand’s LGBTQ+ community can now look toward a future beyond relationships, embracing the sense of pride that this law brings,” he said.

“We are all delighted and excited. We’ve been fighting for our rights for over 10 years, and now it’s finally happening,” another activist, Siritata Ninlapruek, told AFP news agency.

Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra posted on X: “Congratulations on everyone’s love. #LoveWins.”

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn03we6zpk1o

Often called “white gold” and the key component in rechargeable batteries, the metal lithium is so light that it floats on water, but its price has sunk like a stone over the past year.

Due to a combination of falling global sales of electric vehicles, and a world oversupply of lithium ore, the cost of the main lithium compound has fallen by more than three quarters since June 2023.

This decline has had a particularly hard impact on Australia, because it is the world’s largest producer of lithium ore, accounting for 52% of the global total last year.

Australia also has the second-largest reserves of the mineral after Chile, with the vast majority in Western Australia, and a smaller amount in the Northern Territory.

The sharp decline in lithium prices has led to mine shutdowns. Adelaide-based Core Lithium announced back in January that due to “weak market conditions” it was suspending mining at its Finniss site near Darwin, with the loss of 150 jobs.

Then in August, US firm Albemarle said it would be scaling back production at its Kemerton lithium processing plant, located some 170km (100 miles) south of Perth. This is expected to lead to more than 300 redundancies.

Arcadium Lithium followed suit this month, announcing that it would be mothballing its Mt Cattlin mine in Western Australia, blaming low prices. The firm’s shares are listed in both the US and Australia.

Yet as some producers are putting work on hold, others are expanding theirs, confident that global demand for lithium – and prices – will bounce back.

Pilbara Minerals is one such firm. The Perth-based miner aims to boost its lithium ore production by an additional 50% over the next year.

“What we’ve learned historically from lithium pricing is that it can change, and it can change rapidly,” managing director Dale Henderson recently told ABC News. “It doesn’t faze us that much because we know the long-term outlook is fantastic.”

This confidence is echoed by Kingsley Jones, founder, and chief investment officer at Canberra-based investment firm Jevons Global, which monitors the mining and metals sectors. “Lithium remains very strategic to the energy transition,” he tells the BBC.

“Storage batteries for electricity is a big growth area,” he adds, pointing to the increased need for batteries to store the power generated by solar and wind power.

But some analysts have warned that oversupply will keep the market under pressure until at least 2028.

Another company moving ahead with increased lithium ore production in Australia is Perth-based Liontown Resources. In July, it started production at its Kathleen Valley mine, located 420 miles (680km) north-east of Western Australia’s capital.

The facility gets 60% of its energy from its own solar panel farm.

Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, has praised the site’s green approach, and his government has invested $A230m ($156m; £118m) in the facility.

This move towards the use of renewables is also good news in financial terms for producers in Australia, as it reduces their dependence on buying expensive diesel, which is currently the main fuel that they use to generate electricity.

Extracting lithium ore in the country requires three times more energy than in other big producing nations such as Chile and Argentina, says Prof Rick Valenta, the director of the Sustainable Minerals Institute at the University of Queensland.

Extraction in Australia requires additional energy because the lithium ore, also known as spodumene, has to be mined and removed from solid rock. Whereas in Chile and Argentina the ore is produced by evaporating it from brine collected from under the countries’ vast salt plains.

“As Australia has hard-rock mining operations, they use more energy and produce more emissions than brine operations,” Prof Valenta adds.

The form of lithium that Australia exports – almost all of which goes to China – is partially processed ore, called spodumene concentrate.

Prices of this have mirrored the sharp fall of refined lithium. One report this month said that the price of spodumene had hit its lowest level since August 2021.

Chinese companies refine the spodumene into solid lithium, and into the two lithium compounds used in batteries – lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate.

This is where the real money is to be made, because a tonne of lithium carbonate is currently around 72,500 yuan ($10,280; £7,720) compared with just $747 (£630) for the same weight of spodumene concentrate.

Given that price differential, Australian mining firms have unsurprisingly been moving to build their own lithium refineries instead of just exporting almost all spodumene, as is the case currently. In 2022-23, 98% was exported as spodumene concentrate.

The first refined lithium to be commercially produced in Australia happened back in 2022, when Perth-based IGO announced that it was making battery-grade lithium hydroxide at its Kwinana Refinery in Western Australia. It co-owns the facility with Chinese firm Tianqi Lithium.

Meanwhile, another Australian miner, Covalent Lithium, is building its own lithium refinery, also in Western Australia. And Albemarle has its refinery, albeit one currently reducing its output.

Some commentators welcome the development of lithium refining in Australia, saying it will help to reduce China’s dominance of the global market for the metal. China currently accounts for 60% of all lithium refining.

However, Kingsley Jones says that Australia needs to be more open to embracing Chinese investment in the lithium sector. He points out that the Australian government has, in his view, “adopted a strategy, we think unwisely, to preference investment from countries other than China” in the lithium sector in recent years.

This has come as relations between the two countries have cooled since 2020. Last year, Canberra even blocked the sale of an Australian lithium miner to a Chinese firm.

The government said at the time that it was simply following the advice of the country’s Foreign Investment Review Board.

Mr Jones adds: “It’s an excellent example of how to shoot yourself in the foot as a producer. You tell the biggest buyer to go away. So, they do.”

Australia’s Department of Industry, Science and Resources did not respond to a request for a comment.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8mvmmpmvro

Netflix is producing a docuseries from Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson about charges of sex trafficking and racketeering as well as sexual assault and violent abuse allegations against Sean “Diddy” Combs. Alexandria Stapleton directs the project, which is currently in production.

“This is a story with significant human impact. It is a complex narrative spanning decades, not just the headlines or clips seen so far,” 50 Cent and Stapleton said in an exclusive statement to Variety. “We remain steadfast in our commitment to give a voice to the voiceless and to present authentic and nuanced perspectives. While the allegations are disturbing, we urge all to remember that Sean Combs’ story is not the full story of hip-hop and its culture. We aim to ensure that individual actions do not overshadow the culture’s broader contributions.”

50 Cent executive produces through his G-Unit Film & Television banner, while Stapleton executive produces for House of Nonfiction, with Texas Crew Productions also producing.

Tech billionaire had said Italy’s PM was “even more beautiful inside than outside.” She hailed him as a “precious genius.”

Elon Musk denied any romance between him and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Wednesday, after he called her “beautiful” at an awards ceremony in New York on Monday.

“I was there with my Mom. There is no romantic relationship whatsoever with PM Meloni,” American tech billionaire Musk wrote on X under a picture of him and Meloni looking at each other during a gala dinner.

Musk presented the Italian prime minister with the Global Citizen Award from the Atlantic Council think tank on Monday, during which he described her as “someone who is even more beautiful inside than outside” and “authentic, honest and thoughtful.”

The Italian leader responded by praising Musk’s “precious genius.” She then delivered a passionate speech in defense of Western values, at the end of which Musk — who was sitting next to his mother — stood up and applauded.

The American entrepreneur and the Italian leader have met several times in recent years and bonded over their concern for the West’s declining birth rates and interest in the potential of artificial intelligence.

Musk, who traveled to Rome several times and participated in Meloni’s political party festival in December, has also praised the Italian government for its tough immigration policy.

Source: https://www.politico.eu/article/elon-musk-denies-romantic-relationship-giorgia-meloni-new-york-lovefest/

Speaking to Sky News at the UK premiere of Joker: Folie à Deux, Lady Gaga shared “I’ve made a whole record about” her character Harley Quinn.

Lady Gaga has admitted she has struggled to let go of playing her version of the infamous comic book character Harley Quinn in the new Joker sequel.

Speaking to Sky News at the UK premiere of Joker: Folie à Deux, she admitted: “I don’t really know if I did because I’ve made a whole record about her.”

As cinemagoers prepare to see the Oscar-winning actress star as the “true love” to Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, the Poker Face singer announced she’s releasing a 13-song companion album to the film.

“I think the whole experience inspired me through and through,” Lady Gaga admitted.

“It was so amazing to get to know this character through music, through the script, through dance, through all this tremendous collaboration.”

After 2019’s Joker won two Oscars and made over $1bn worldwide at the box office, filmmaker Todd Phillips and his leading man set out – in reprising the troubled dual personality of Arthur Fleck/Joker – to take a different approach.

While the character is institutionalised as he awaits trial, incorporating his fantasy life involved Phoenix mastering singing and tap dancing this time around.

“We asked each other for tips all the time,” Gaga said about Phoenix having to sing live on set.

“We were constantly like ‘what do you think of this?’ back and forth… I loved working with Joaquin.

“There was never a dull day at the office. It was always super interesting, it was fun.

“As dark as the world of Joker is, we laughed a lot on set and we were always being as organic as possible.”

Source: https://news.sky.com/story/ive-made-a-whole-record-about-her-lady-gaga-still-thinking-about-harley-quinn-at-joker-sequel-premiere-13222078

Speaking at the UN, the Ukrainian president warns radiation “will not respect state borders” as he calls on world leaders to put pressure on Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is planning attacks on Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said.

Speaking at the UN General Assembly in New York, the Ukrainian president addressed Russia’s 2022 attack on the nuclear facility in the city of Zaporizhzhia, which Moscow’s forces now control.

Describing initial reports of Russia’s attack on that plant as “one of the most horrifying moments of the war”, he warned the world must pressure Moscow to prevent “nuclear disaster”.

“Recently, I received yet another alarming report from our intelligence – now Putin does seem to be planning attacks on our nuclear power plants,” Mr Zelenskyy said.

“Any missile or drone strike, any critical incident in the energy system could lead to a nuclear disaster.

Mr Zelenskyy claimed Russia is getting detailed images and information on the infrastructure of Ukraine’s nuclear plants with the “help” of “satellites of other countries”.

“If, God forbid, Russia causes a nuclear disaster at one of our nuclear power plants, radiation will not respect state borders,” he added.

Russia has already targeted large parts of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Mr Zelenskyy said, with all thermal power plants destroyed as well as “a large part” of its hydroelectric capacity.

Mr Putin is trying to keep “millions” of Ukrainians in the cold and dark this winter, the Ukrainian leader warned.

“Since Russia can’t defeat our people’s resistance on the battlefield, Putin is looking for other ways to break the Ukrainian spirit,” he added.

Mr Zelenskyy urged leaders at the UN to stand with his country and pursue “real, just peace”.

Source: https://news.sky.com/story/putin-planning-attacks-on-ukraines-nuclear-plants-zelenskyy-says-13221872

Mahasen al-Dada tells Sky News that bombs appeared to be getting “closer and closer” to her home and she now faces the prospect of fleeing the country with her children but without her husband.

A British woman trying to flee Lebanon with her children has told Sky News she feels “torn” as her husband has to stay behind – and claimed the UK has “no plan of action” to help its citizens in the Middle Eastern country.

Mahasen al-Dada, from Manchester, said she was told to book commercial flights home but discovered there are none available until the second week of October.

The 28-year-old is trying to follow the UK government’s advice for British nationals to leave Lebanon “immediately” amid a drastic escalation in Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah.

Ms al-Dada, who has two sons aged five and six, said she had spoken to the UK embassy in Lebanon on Wednesday and was told she would have to book flights herself as there were no repatriation ones set up.

Ms al-Dada said she has tried to find a direct flight from Lebanon’s capital Beirut to Manchester through a travel agent, but there is nothing until 8 October, and prices have soared.

“I’ve been trying all day to find tickets and there’s no commercial flights,” she said.

“Everything has gone. Middle East (Airlines) is still flying, but the earliest flight is 8 October, and the tickets have gone up to £2,000. It’s crazy.”

Ms al-Dada said “things are escalating within hours, even minutes”, adding she would be “stuck” in the country if the airport were to get bombed.

Sir Keir Starmer has told Britons in Lebanon to “leave immediately”, as around 700 UK troops are deployed to Cyprus in case an emergency evacuation is needed.

The prime minister said “we are ramping up the contingency plans… in light of the escalation”, with fears growing of all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Lebanon says Israeli strikes which have intensified this week have killed more than 700 people and injured 5,000 others, including women, children and a “large number” of care workers.

‘Bombs getting closer and closer’

Ms al-Dada moved to Lebanon in July so she could be reunited with her Lebanese husband Jad Eltahra, the father of her two children.

She said she had been intent on staying in the “beautiful” country as her spouse’s visa has been repeatedly rejected.

But she said the atmosphere over the past few days has been “surreal” as bombs could be heard “day and night” and appeared to be getting “closer and closer” to her home in Mount Lebanon.

Ms al-Dada said she spent all of last night awake, on the brink of a panic attack while fearing her home may be targeted.

“I was up until the morning and I moved my children from their bedroom and I put them in my bed… I thought just in case something happens, at least they’re in the same room as me,” she said.

“It was really scary, it was something I’ve never been through before until now. It’s really surreal, it feels like I’m awake but I’m dreaming.”

She said she felt “torn” and “selfish” for leaving her partner in a country on the brink of war but their sons – Sultan aged six and five-year-old Saif – must be the priority.

“My children are still young and I can’t be selfish and leave them in this situation because they don’t deserve to hear things or see things that could potentially destroy them,” she said.

Ms al-Dada has been calling the UK Foreign Office’s travel advice line, but the experience has not left her feeling reassured.

She said: “I am basically stuck, and I was hoping that they would be a bit more help, like asking (me) for my address so I feel, like the movies, they’d come and pick you up.

“But it’s not that way at all. They just say there’s nothing that they can do.”

The psychology and criminology graduate said she has been talking to the British embassy over the past month to find a way to get her husband to return to the UK with her, amid ever-increasing fears of an all-out war in the region.

Ms al-Dada said authorities keep telling her she should leave Lebanon and all her spouse can do is apply for a visa – but he has been putting in unsuccessful applications for years.

The last application was sent in November 2023 when he applied for a visitor visa to stay 10 days.

The refusal letter seen by Sky News states Mr Eltahra hadn’t demonstrated he received an income or that he would not overstay his leave to remain in the UK.

Ms al-Dada insists the couple have never had any desire to relocate permanently to the UK.

She said all the rejections, along with recent calls held with the British embassy, have made her lose hope her husband will ever be let into the UK, even when he faces war at home.

“Every time they’ve basically made it clear that they don’t really care about my husband’s safety, they just disregard it,” she said.

“They don’t care, they only care about British citizens leaving Lebanon, that’s it.”

Source: https://news.sky.com/story/british-mum-of-two-told-to-flee-lebanon-immediately-faces-near-two-week-wait-for-flight-13221381

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau easily survived a vote of confidence on Wednesday after his main political rival failed to muster enough support to end nine years of Liberal Party rule.
Legislators in the House of Commons voted 211-120 to defeat a motion by the official opposition Conservative party declaring a lack of confidence in Trudeau’s minority Liberal government.
Trudeau, whose popularity has slumped amid unhappiness over rising prices and a housing crisis, became more politically vulnerable this month when the smaller New Democratic Party tore up a 2022 deal to keep him in power until an election scheduled for end-October 2025.