HellsBelle

In mid-March, Google announced that it was paying the staggering sum of $32 billion for the acquisition of the Israeli cloud-computing security company Wiz. The acquisition, pending regulatory approval, will be the largest ever of an Israeli firm.

What was left unsaid in Google’s announcement, however, were the personal backgrounds of its four founders. The co-founders of Wiz—Yinon Costica, Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, and Roy Reznik—are all veterans of Unit 8200, the signals intelligence division of the Israeli military, which is playing a key role in helping to carry out Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

Unit 8200 is an elite unit in the Israeli military tasked with intelligence gathering, surveillance, codebreaking, as well as cybersecurity operations and hacking. In addition to its role collecting information for intelligence reports, the unit has also been accused by former veterans of carrying out mass surveillance of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories for the purpose of “political persecution,” as well as providing information used for targeted killings, sometimes based on over-broad interpretations of surveillance data.

Myanmar's military government has said it's not allowing foreign journalists into the country after the quake, so we went in undercover. We had to operate carefully, because the country is riddled with informers and secret police who spy on their own people for the ruling military junta.

What we witnessed was a people who had very little help coming their way in the face of this massive disaster.

"I have hope that he's alive, even if it's a small chance," said Nan Sin Hein, 41, who's been waiting on the street opposite a collapsed five-storey building, day and night for five days.

As the de facto head of the Department of Governmental Efficiency, Musk has deployed this brand of tactical callousness to maximal effect. He has boasted about throwing the United States Agency for International Development into a “woodchipper” and stumbled around the stage at CPAC with a chainsaw. He has presided over the dismantling of the administrative state and the harassment and mass-termination of federal workers—all while flaunting his lack of concern for the lives he has upended. Fired government employees, he announced last Thursday, with the laughing/crying emoji that’s become his calling card, will now have to “get a real job.”

This kind of depravity is a prerequisite for Musk’s new line of work. Dancing on the graves of lifesaving programs for kids is not something you can easily do with a conscience. But there is one set of feelings Musk is uniquely attuned to: his own. On Friday, the same day foreign service officers around the world received notices from a DOGE flunky alerting them that they would soon be out of a job, Musk—sans sunglasses—sat down with Fox News’ Brett Baier to ask for a little sympathy.

“I mean, you have Tim Walz, who is a huge jerk, running on stage with the Tesla stock price, where the stock price has gone in half—and he is overjoyed,” he said. “What an evil thing to do. What a creep, what a jerk. Like, who derives joy from that?”

A pair of top Democratic lawmakers asked the U.S. securities regulator on Wednesday to preserve records related to President Donald Trump’s crypto venture World Liberty Financial and posed questions about potential conflicts of interest.

In a letter sent to acting Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mark Uyeda, seen by Reuters, the lawmakers requested information to “help us better understand the extent to which the Trump family’s financial interest in World Liberty Financial may be influencing your and the Commission’s activities.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren, the ranking member of the U.S. Senate’s banking committee, and Representative Maxine Waters, the ranking member of the U.S. House of Representatives’ financial services committee, signed the letter, which cited a Reuters report this week about the crypto project.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith would like to have a tête-à-tête with Quebec Premier François Legault about asserting their provincial sovereignty, according to a letter Smith wrote last month.

"I see an opportunity before us, as the democratically elected leaders of Alberta and Quebec, to chart a path toward a new era in Canadian federalism," Smith said in a March 21 letter penned to her Quebec counterpart, in which she asked for a meeting.

Smith was responding to recommendations contained in a report prepared last year for the Quebec government suggesting ways that province could assert its provincial authority.

In a written decision Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz in Newark said jurisdiction over the case should remain in New Jersey since Khalil was being held there at the time his lawyers filed their habeas corpus petition demanding his release.

“The Court’s jurisdiction is not defeated by the Petitioner having been moved to Louisiana,” the judge wrote, describing the government’s argument otherwise as “unpersuasive.”

The ruling does not guarantee that Khalil will be moved out of a detention facility in Louisiana, where he is being held as the government seeks his deportation for his role in campus protests against Israel. But it will allow his attorneys to make their arguments for his release before a judge in New Jersey.

U.S. District Court Judge Anne Traum in Nevada said in a written decision that the 40-year-old law can take effect on April 30, but the judge also left open the possibility for abortion rights advocates to seek a court order blocking its reinstatement while they challenge the law’s constitutionality.

The requirement has never before been enforced in Nevada because of a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that found it was unconstitutional based on Roe v. Wade. But after the Supreme Court reversed the landmark decision in 2022, stripping away constitutional protections for abortion, a group of district attorneys mostly in rural Nevada sued to restore the 1985 law.

Planned Parenthood argued that the 1985 law, despite the reversal of Roe, remains “unconstitutionally vague” and that it violates minors’ rights to due process and equal protection.

The plea supports a recent onslaught of reports that depict a rampant culture of abuse among the local sheriff’s department in Walker County, in a rural region of northern Alabama.

Carl Lofton Carpenter, 55, agreed to plead guilty to two counts of deprivation of rights, according to the plea. Carpenter and fellow Walker County Sheriff’s Deputy James Handley arrested Tony Mitchell in 2023. Mitchell died in the Walker County jail just two weeks later after he was detained in a concrete cell covered in feces with no toilet or access to medical attention.

Carpenter stepped on Mitchell’s genitals while he was handcuffed, saying, “This is how we treat seizures in Walker County,” according to the plea document. Carpenter then dragged Mitchell on the ground, kicked him and threw him roughly into the police car.

“Following our thorough internal evaluation, we can confirm that Gary Colliander and Eileen Carey are no longer affiliated with the USOPC,” spokesman Jon Mason told the AP. He refused to provide a reason, saying only that Colliander was put on administrative leave from the Paralympic team in December — days after the AP report on the alleged misconduct. The two were fired on March 14.

Colliander was accused of sexually abusing Grace Boutot, a biathlete he coached at the Maine Winter Sports Center over four years beginning in 2006 when she was 15, the AP reported. Colliander quit the job after Boutot’s October 2010 suicide attempt and was later hired by the U.S. Paralympic Nordic team.

Paraguay’s decision came after Brazil’s foreign ministry revealed that the administration of Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing predecessor of current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had conducted espionage against the small South American nation.

Lula’s government insisted that it had halted the surveillance against Paraguay immediately after becoming aware of it, without elaborating on the nature of the operation or whom it targeted.

Brazilian news site UOL reported that the country’s intelligence agents had infiltrated Paraguayan computer systems to obtain intel on sensitive tariff negotiations related to the Itaipu dam on their shared border.

President Claudia Sheinbaum had already shown a willingness early in her presidency to move away from former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s oft-criticized “hugs, not bullets” strategy. It focused on addressing the social roots of crime rather than directly confronting Mexico’s powerful cartels.

Sheinbaum’s security chief, Omar García Harfuch, is drawing on his law enforcement contacts — mostly from the former ranks of the Federal Police — to claw back security capabilities from the armed forces with a civilian force under his direct command.

The government has yet to formally announce the new National Operations Unit, known by its Spanish initials UNO, but its existence is an open secret among former members of the Federal Police, where García Harfuch started his career.

At least one tornado was observed Tuesday night around Salina, Kansas, about 90 miles (145 kilometers) north of Wichita, according to the National Weather Service.

The potent storm system was expected to bring the threat of “significant, life-threatening flash flooding” starting Wednesday, according to the Weather Prediction Center, a part of the National Weather Service.

The new flood threat came as residents in parts of Michigan continued to dig out from a weekend ice storm.