“Video clips purporting to show torture of Palestinian civilians by the Hamas militia in the Gaza Strip during the years 2018 to 2020 were published by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Sunday.
The IDF said the material had been found during its operations in the area and proved “severe abuse perpetrated by the Hamas terrorist organization against the civilian population,” along with human rights violations and oppression of those opposed to its rule.
The videos are reported to show torture carried out by Hamas operatives in so-called “Outpost 17″ in Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of the Gaza Strip.
The material shows people with bags over their heads, tied up, sometimes into twisted and painful positions. One of the men is suspended by his feet from the ceiling and beaten on the soles of his feet with a stick.
The victims are reported to include political opponents of Hamas, suspected collaborators with Israel, suspected adulterers and homosexuals.”
“Japan’s destroyer-turned-aircraft carrier just completed sea trials off the coast of California on Friday, the country’s navy said.
The JS Kaga was refitted with a flight deck that allowed crews “to conduct fixed-wing aircraft operations,” the US Defense Department said in a statement last month.
The Kaga is the first aircraft carrier to be operated by the Japanese navy since World War II as the country overhauls its maritime forces amid tensions in the Indo-Pacific. Central to the light carrier’s power is the short take-off and landing version of the F-35 stealth fighter.”
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“Converting the ship to accommodate fighter jets goes against post-war Japan’s pacifist beliefs, so its navy designated the Kaga as a “multi-purpose destroyer” rather than an aircraft carrier. Nonetheless, the Kaga is not expected to be deployed like a traditional carrier.
“Given its history, it’s significant that Japan has come this far, and they have the capability now that looks like an aircraft carrier … once it’s reconfigured,” Jeffrey Hornung, a political scientist specializing in Japanese security and foreign policy, told Time in 2019.
He added: “But, then again, they’re not [aircraft carriers]. They don’t have any of the infrastructure for it to be deployed as such. They don’t have the strike capability. They don’t have any sort of intention to go further than what it is right now.””
Undersea cables that support much of the internet and services are vulnerable to Russian attack. Russia uses mostly a land based internet network, so is not similarly vulnerable. Russia can attack such cables with civilian vessels and then pretend like they had nothing to do with it.
“European countries take a much more precautionary approach to additives in their food, Benesh says. “If there are doubts about whether a chemical is safe or if there’s no data to back up safety, the EU is much more likely to put a restriction on that chemical or just not allow it into the food supply at all.”
In the US, we’re more likely to see action at the state level. California banned four chemicals in 2023: brominated vegetable oil, Red Dye No. 3, propylparaben, and potassium bromate. This year, lawmakers in about a dozen states have introduced legislation banning those same chemicals and, in some states, additional chemicals as well. But federal oversight has been limited, constrained by priorities, authority, and by a lack of resources.”
“Since buying the platform in 2022, Musk has helped turn X into an epicenter of election misinformation. With 203 million followers, Musk has the biggest reach on X and is the platform’s most prominent pusher of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda. At Musk’s request last year, X changed the site’s algorithm to put his posts in more people’s feeds — posts that increasingly urged people not to trust the outcome of the election. The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that Musk’s misleading posts about the election have been viewed more than 2 billion times this year.”
“Were Trump to implement Musk’s vision while simultaneously honoring his promise to avoid cutting entitlements and the GOP’s commitment to avoiding defense spending cuts, then he would need to slash all other government programs by 80 percent. That would involve gutting all social services for low-income Americans, food inspections, air safety, health insurance subsidies, and infrastructure investments, among countless other things.
This would abruptly and massively reduce demand in the US economy, potentially triggering a recession.
There is little reason to expect such severe and haphazard spending cuts to benefit the economy in the long term. After all, government investments in education and infrastructure often increase the economy’s growth potential — slashing funding for such programs could impair America’s economic performance in the coming decades.”
“Kamala Harris lost the presidential election and Democrats lost control of the Senate.
But when you zoom in on the details of that result, there’s a striking pattern: Democratic Senate candidates are outperforming Harris. Or, put another way, Republican Senate candidates are doing worse than Trump.
In recent years, the outcome of a state’s US Senate race has increasingly matched the outcome of its simultaneous presidential race. Ticket-splitting has decreased in our era of polarization and partisanship. The vast majority of people voting for a presidential candidate also vote for their party’s Senate candidate.
But not everyone does that. And there’s still some variation in how much better or worse Senate candidates do compared to the top of the ticket. Looking at that variation can provide clues about what sorts of candidates overperform (even if they don’t actually win).”
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“Some might argue for racism or sexism explaining Harris’s struggles, but I’d note that several of the Democratic candidates who overperformed Harris were nonwhite or female. Others might argue that she was a uniquely flawed candidate or campaigner, but President Joe Biden was on track to do much worse if he’d stayed in the race.
My suspicion is that Harris’s electoral struggles were more about Biden’s unpopularity and her association with his administration than any newfound love of the American public for the Republican Party generally.”
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“Call them the “I don’t like Republicans much, but the economy was better under Trump” voters. Biden lost them, and Harris failed to get them back.”
“there are two main reasons Americans tend to overestimate the extent to which crime happens: Media coverage of crime can often overstate trends and sometimes sensationalizes incidents that grab people’s attention. And law-and-order campaigns — the kind of campaigns that Trump ran, for example — are a mainstay of American politics and appear in virtually every election cycle in local, state, and national races.”
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“The United States is, after all, a relatively violent country and has a higher homicide rate than its peers. But while crime is a problem, lawmakers tend to react too quickly to crime trends, often by passing shortsighted tough-on-crime laws that bolster the perception of public safety by, say, putting more cops on the streets, but end up exacerbating the existing flaws of the criminal justice system, including sending poorer and more marginalized people to prison.”
“Lutnick is right that autism diagnoses have risen substantially. If not childhood vaccinations, what accounts for this increase? First, greater awareness means that many people with autism spectrum disorder who in the past would have been missed by clinicians are now being identified. However, a 2020 review article in Molecular Psychiatry reports that changes in diagnostic criteria “has been accompanied by a 20-fold increase in the reported prevalence of ASD over the last 30 years, reaching a current prevalence of more than 2% in the United States.” This contributes to the likelihood of over-diagnosis and a shift toward autism diagnoses in place of other mental health conditions.”
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“the liability system was unable to properly balance the public benefits of vaccines against their private harms. The result of this imbalance was killing off vaccine innovation and production. So Congress a year later chose to change the liability system with respect to vaccines in 1986 with the adoption of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which provides compensation to people who are injured by certain vaccines.
And the benefits of vaccines are enormous. A 2024 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention review finds that “among children born during 1994–2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1,129,000 deaths, resulting in direct savings of $540 billion and societal savings of $2.7 trillion.””