Twelve jurors have been seated in the murder trial of Derek Chauvin as the potential for the proceeding to be postponed or relocated because of last week's record $27 million settlement between the City of Minneapolis and George Floyd's family looms overhead. However, some legal scholars and lawyers said they don't expect Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill to grant defense attorney ...
Nan meets 007 in one of the sketches to be shown during this year's Comic Relief fundraiser.
The U.S. government has stopped taking immigrant teenagers to a converted camp for oil field workers in West Texas as it faces questions about the safety of emergency sites it is quickly setting up to hold children crossing the southern border. The Associated Press has learned that the converted camp has faced multiple issues in the four days since the Biden administration opened it amid a scramble to find space for immigrant children. An official working at the Midland, Texas, facility said most of the Red Cross volunteers staffing the site don’t speak Spanish, even though the teenagers they care for are overwhelmingly from Central America.
The new policy showcases Beijing's determination to set its own standards for "vaccine passports." But will it help travel?
The AstraZeneca-Oxford University vaccine is not available in the U.S., where a large-scale trial has been completed but not yet made public.
Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds issued a statement on Thursday saying the department regrets "any heartache" caused by the remarks of a spokesman, Capt. Jay Baker, who said the suspect in three shootings at Asian spas in Georgia was having "a bad day." The shootings left eight people dead, including four victims at Young's Asian Massage in Cherokee County. During a Wednesday press conference, Baker said the suspect, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, told officers he had a "sex addiction," and was "fed up, at the end of his rope." Long, he continued, was "having a bad day, and this is what he did." Baker's remarks were immediately criticized for being insensitive. Reynolds said there are "simply no words to describe the degree of human suffering experienced on Tuesday," and Baker's comments were "not intended to disrespect any of the victims, the gravity of this tragedy, or express empathy or sympathy for the suspect." Reynolds added that he has "known and served with Capt. Baker for many years, and his personal ties to the Asian community and his unwavering support and commitment to the citizens of Cherokee County are well known to many." On Wednesday, The Associated Press reported that a Facebook page that appeared to belong to Baker posted a picture last year of a T-shirt with a racist message about China and COVID-19. The account was deleted on Wednesday night. After Reynolds issued his statement, an official said Baker is no longer the spokesman for the spa shooting case. More stories from theweek.comMichael Cohen says Trump is in for a 'proctological exam of the highest order' by New York prosecutorsHouse passes bill opening a path to citizenship for DREAMersLet informed people be jurors
An attorney for Hammer has denied the allegations.
Britain said more than one million rural homes and businesses would get gigabit broadband in the first phase of a 5 billion pound ($7 billion) programme to connect places that commercial roll-outs by BT and its rivals would not reach. Up to 510,000 premises in Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Dorset, Durham, Essex, Northumberland, South Tyneside and Tees Valley will be the first to benefit, it said on Friday, with building due to start in the first half of 2022. Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants Britain to catch up with European rivals that have full-fibre networks.
Nord Stream 2 will bypass Western ally Ukraine, potentially depriving it of valuable transit fees. The U.S. State Department is tracking efforts to complete the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and evaluating information regarding entities that appear to be involved, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday. "Any entity involved in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline risks U.S. sanctions and should immediately abandon work on the pipeline," Blinken said in a statement.
North Korea on Friday said it was cutting diplomatic ties with Malaysia to protest a court ruling that allowed a North Korean to be extradited to the United States to face money laundering charges. The ministry said that it was announcing “total severance of the diplomatic relations with Malaysia, which committed super-large hostile act against (North Korea) in subservience to the U.S. pressure.” Earlier this month, Malaysia’s top court rejected an assertion by North Korean Mun Chol Myong that the U.S. charge was politically motivated, ruling that he could be extradited.
The Sun hired a famous private investigator to get information on Meghan Markle. He says he accessed her phone and Social Security numbers.
Joe Scarborough says former attorney general should be held accountable
FOX News correspondent David Lee Miller has the latest developments on 'Special Report'
WASHINGTON — Earlier this week, Biden administration officials passed around with bemusement some words of praise from an unexpected source: Jared Kushner. In an opinion essay for The Wall Street Journal, Kushner, former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser on Middle East issues, said that President Joe Biden “did the right thing” and had “called Iran’s bluff” by refusing to make new concessions to lure Iran into talks about restoring a nuclear deal abandoned by the Trump administration. Kushner may have meant well, but his seal of approval compounded a problem for Biden by inflaming liberal allies already disappointed that his nuclear diplomacy with Iran had not made swifter progress. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times “I would take this in the Biden White House as a giant, blinking red light that maybe what I’m doing is not right because Jared Kushner is finding ways to praise it,” said Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser under former President Barack Obama who worked closely on the 2015 nuclear agreement, speaking Wednesday on the “Pod Save the World” podcast. Iran is just one of several foreign policy issues frustrating Biden’s base two months into his presidency. Although Biden delighted them with several swift actions — among them rejoining the Paris climate accord and withdrawing support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen — he triggered frustration by ordering an airstrike in Syria and declining to punish the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, over the brutal murder of a dissident journalist and U.S. resident, Jamal Khashoggi. On Wednesday, Biden fueled the discontent when he conceded in an interview with ABC News that it would be “tough” to meet a May 1 deadline, set under the Trump administration, to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, a high priority for liberals impatient to end what they call “endless” American wars. And more conflict may lie ahead on military spending, with Biden expected to propose few if any cuts to a Pentagon budget that swelled under Trump. Fifty House Democrats sent Biden a letter this week calling for a “significant” reduction. After seeing Biden deliver a transformational $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, progressives are asking why his foreign policy feels so conventional. They worry that Biden and his largely centrist team of national security officials will disappoint the liberal wing’s desires for a new U.S. foreign policy that relies far less on military power, de-escalates tensions with rivals like Iran and China, and places greater pressure — under threat of cooler relations — on allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel. Biden administration officials dispute the criticism as unfair and premature. One senior administration official said the Trump era created an unrealistic appetite for finger-snap action on complex issues and that the longer arc of Biden’s policies would satisfy many frustrated liberals. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss unofficial political considerations. The official also pointed to several early actions by Biden welcomed by the left, including his returning to the climate deal, the World Health Organization and the United Nations Human Rights Council. Biden also reversed visa restrictions widely known as Trump’s “Muslim Ban,” announced an end to U.S. support for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen and has placed temporary new limits on drone strikes outside combat zones. Some prominent liberals call those moves welcome, but also low-hanging fruit, and say that on matters requiring harder trade-offs and political courage, Biden is too risk-averse. They worry that a 78-year-old president may recall too keenly the days when Republicans routinely enjoyed a political advantage on national security issues and Democrats gravitated to more conservative, militaristic policies to defend their right flank. “I think that there is a lack of belief that the politics around some of these issues have actually shifted,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the Israel-focused, liberal advocacy group J Street. “There is a lot more political space open to this administration to pursue progressive policy than they think.” The Middle East, which Biden officials hope to de-emphasize as they turn America’s attention to China, is the source of many complaints. Topping the list is Biden’s decision not to unilaterally rejoin the Iran nuclear deal by reversing harsh sanctions imposed on Iran by Trump after he abandoned the agreement in 2018. Iran says it will not talk, much less scale back its advancing nuclear program and comply with the deal’s limits, until Biden acts. Supporters of the original deal, including Obama administration officials who helped to design it, say the passage of time only allows for political opposition to build at home and for events in the dangerous region to trigger an escalation. They also complain that Biden is maintaining the sanctions Trump applied on Iran when he exited the nuclear deal, even though Iran had been in compliance at the time. Kushner referred to this approvingly as a “strong hand” that Biden had inherited. “The Biden administration has bought the Trump analysis that these sanctions give America leverage, even though the sanctions didn’t give Trump any leverage on Iran,” said Joseph Cirincione, a longtime arms control expert who consulted closely with Obama administration officials over the nuclear deal. Further complicating the prospects for nuclear talks was Biden’s Feb. 25 airstrike targeting Iranian-backed militia fighters in Syria, a retaliation for militia rocket attacks on U.S. forces in neighboring Iraq. Although the strike was limited, it derailed nascent nuclear diplomacy and risked escalation, Cirincione said. The strike also angered liberals determined to end what they call America’s “endless” or “forever” wars — its military and counterterrorism campaigns across the Middle East and parts of Africa that began after the Sept. 11 attacks. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said the strike “puts our country on the path of continuing the Forever War instead of ending it,” and he questioned its legal justification. (The White House says it supports congressional action to repeal and replace Bush-era laws that provide presidents with broad authority to use force.) Compounding the frustration is a sense among liberals that Biden’s national security team is stocked with centrists who have supported past U.S. military interventions, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and the president’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. Critics of Biden’s early Middle East policy have focused their attention on Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s coordinator for the region. McGurk entered government as an aide in former President George W. Bush’s White House but stayed on through the Obama and Trump presidencies. He has strong relationships with leaders in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — oil-rich states labeled repressive by human rights activists and that liberals see as exerting an unwelcome influence over U.S. policy. McGurk helped shape Biden’s decision, decried on the left, not to directly punish Crown Prince Mohammed even after the White House declassified an intelligence report that found that he, the de facto Saudi leader, approved the operation that led to the murder of Khashoggi in 2018. Many liberals said the moral imperative of barring Crown Prince Mohammed from future visits to the United States, at a minimum, should outweigh the familiar realpolitik of preserving relations with the Saudi kingdom. Some were encouraged by the prospect that Sanders’ foreign policy adviser, Matthew Duss, another Middle East specialist, would join the administration. But after job discussions with the State Department, Duss recently decided to remain on Sanders’ staff, telling the publication Jewish Currents that it was “the best place to keep working to support a progressive agenda.” Even before that disclosure, many liberals complained that “the Biden foreign policy team includes no one who has been a clear and consistent opponent of our disastrous interventions across the world,” as Katrina vanden Heuvel, former editor of the leftist Nation magazine, wrote in a Washington Post opinion column. And as Blinken and Sullivan meet Thursday and Friday with senior Chinese diplomats, some liberals also chafe at the Biden team’s hawkish stance toward Beijing, again warning that it has Trump-inflected confrontational tones and noting that Chinese cooperation is essential to fighting climate change. Among other things, Biden has not rolled back the stiff tariffs Trump placed on Chinese imports. “I’ve been incredibly disappointed, though not shocked, that the Biden administration has leaned into the confrontational posture advocated by the foreign policy establishment,” said Kate Kizer, policy director for an anti-interventionist group, Win Without War. “More militarization and demonization is not the answer. Making deep investments in diplomacy and in building resiliency here at home is.” Some Democrats are pressing the case for a huge diplomatic infusion. On Tuesday, a group of Democratic Senate and House members called for a $12 billion increase to the U.S. international affairs budget to fund diplomacy. And even more congressional Democrats are simultaneously calling for deep cuts to a Pentagon budget that grew by 20% under Trump, to $740 billion. “We have so many domestic needs here at home,” said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif. Lee is also among those weary of extended deadlines for withdrawals from Afghanistan like the one Biden hinted at Wednesday. “We’ve got to bring our troops home,” she said, “and we’ve got to do that quickly.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company
The BBB has reported a rise in scams related to the COVID vaccines.
Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said on Thursday he would support a new Lebanese cabinet if one is announced on Monday, but said that a government formed solely of specialists would not last. President Michel Aoun is scheduled to meet with Prime Minister-designate Saad al-Hariri next week. The two politicians have been wrangling for months as the country sinks deeper into financial crisis.
The Congresswoman says war has been declared on ‘strong Republican women’
A woman, identified as Effie, said in a press conference Thursday that she thought the "Social Network" actor "was going to kill me."
Alexi McCammond, the newly hired Teen Vogue editor-in-chief, has resigned following backlash over her decade-old racist tweets that recently resurfaced. McCammond, 27, who was set to begin her new job on 24 March, announced the decision in a statement shared to Twitter, where she said her “past tweets have overshadowed the work I’ve done”. “My past tweets have overshadowed the work I’ve done to highlight the people and issues that I care about - issues that Teen Vogue has worked tirelessly to share with the world - and so Condé Nast and I have decided to part ways,” McCammond wrote.
Charged with illegal entry into the U.S. Capitol, the cadet was kicked out of the Republican Club, but remains enrolled at the school.
