IndustryStandard

A video obtained by The New York of an Israeli attack in Gaza that killed 15 rescue workers at the end of March shows that contrary to Israel's claims, the clearly-marked ambulances had their lights on when they arrived at a scene in south Gaza and came under Israeli fire.

An IDF spokesman had previously said that soldiers had been suspicious of the vehicles because "they were moving without coordination or emergency lights."

NSFL: The video obtained by The New York Times.

Five years after Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian assured employees that the company was “not working on any projects associated with immigration enforcement at the southern border,” federal contract documents reviewed by The Intercept show that the tech giant is at the center of project to upgrade the so-called virtual wall.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is planning to modernize older video surveillance towers in Arizona that provide the agency an unblinking view of the border.

A key part of the effort is adding machine-learning capabilities to CBP cameras, allowing the agency to automatically detect humans and vehicles as they approach the border without continuous monitoring by humans. CBP is purchasing computer vision powers from two vendors, IBM and Equitus. Google, the documents show, will play a critical role stitching those services together by operating a central repository for video surveillance data.

As Israel continues to unleash utter depravity against the Palestinian people in full view of the world, it equally does nothing to hide its intentions. In Netanyahu's speech, which received almost no coverage of any significance in the Western media, he says the following:

The second claim – that we are unwilling to discuss the final stage. This is also incorrect. We are willing. Hamas will lay down its weapons. Its leaders will be allowed to leave.

We will see to the general security in the Gaza Strip and will allow the realization of the Trump plan for voluntary migration. This is the plan. We are not hiding this and are ready to discuss it at any time.

Ever since Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people began, you’ve heard me say something along these lines - why isn’t this headline news in the Western media? Why is the Western media failing to cover this either properly, or at all?

As Labour imposes poverty on up to 400,000 people through cuts to disability benefits, according to estimates by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, this argument is submerged under a tidal wave of misery. The government has already robbed many pensioners of their winter fuel payments, and not only voted to keep a Tory two-child benefit cap that imposes squalor on hundreds of thousands of children, but suspended those Labour MPs who opposed it. A Labour party that knowingly imposes hardship on disabled people, pensioners and children has filed for moral and political bankruptcy.

Some continue supporting Labour in lieu of an alternative: according to YouGov, more Labour voters than not now disapprove of the government, an astonishing statistic given the party’s support has plummeted to less than a quarter of the electorate. Some stop voting. Some may opt for the Greens, but its four MPs have failed to offer any cut-through leadership, despite uniquely fertile circumstances. Others defect to independent candidates, but their success is based on ad hoc local initiatives. And, bleakly, others may opt for Reform UK, which fills the vacuum as the ultimate protest vote, even though the party backs cutting benefits for disabled people, increasing privatisation of the NHS and slashing taxes for the rich.

The obvious question, then, is: why is the left failing to profit from this mass appeal? A media ecosystem rigged in favour of the right hardly helps, but witness how Citibanker-turned-equality guru Gary Stevenson is reaching millions through YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. Despite the likes of Elon Musk gaming algorithms in favour of the Trumpian right, it is easier for the left to reach the wider electorate than ever. The left has just failed badly to harness social media platforms for its own advantage.

The main hurdle is obvious: an absence of leadership. The left has a theory of change that centres collective struggle. It needs a leader that can bridge a divide. Crudely, that means appealing to older, overwhelmingly white voters who live in towns and hold more socially conservative views, and younger, more diverse citizens in urban communities who tend to be more socially progressive. This can be done: at his best, Bernie Sanders appeals to Trump sympathisers in the rust belt and Brooklyn graduates in precarious jobs who march for Palestine. Jeremy Corbyn, too, won 40% of the vote in 2017 by appealing to these different constituencies.

An obvious candidate is Mick Lynch, the retired general secretary of the RMT union, whose effortless slapdowns of obtuse TV presenters showed his promise as the anti-Farage. His appeal is a combination of working-class experience, authenticity, composure and an ability to make political arguments accessible to the average punter. But he shows no signs of desiring a mantle that, admittedly, involves being hounded by a thuggish media. Yet someone with his qualities could be a focal point for otherwise disparate disillusionment. It would mean striking an arrangement with the Greens, who rode the wave of pre-election distaste with Starmerism to come second in dozens of constituencies, despite their abysmal failure to capitalise since.

Any leader would have to shift the debate from the “culture wars” to economic justice. The former is intended to drive the left into defensive territory and, as Ronald Reagan astutely observed, in politics, “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”. But if the left drew attention to inequality and disintegrating public services, and made the case for taxing the rich, the right would be forced to explain itself instead. This does not mean throwing minorities under a publicly owned bus. It simply means that issues that emphasise the shared, common interests of the majority should be at the forefront.

President Donald Trump’s global trade war is taking on some unlikely adversaries — including remote islands with more penguins than people.

The list of 185 places hit Wednesday with a minimum 10 percent tariff include Heard Island and the McDonald Islands, Australian territories in the vast Indian Ocean between Africa and Antarctica.

Also on the list are tiny Norfolk Island in the South Pacific and an uninhabited spot in the Arctic Ocean called Jan Mayen, part of a Norwegian territory with the islands of Svalbard near the North Pole.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. offered no new details Wednesday about his massive restructuring of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the day after thousands of layoffs ricocheted through its agencies, hollowing out entire offices around the country in some cases.

Kennedy’s silence is prompting questions from Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike, with a bipartisan request for President Donald Trump’s health secretary to appear before a Senate committee next week to explain the cuts.

As many as 10,000 notices were sent to scientists, senior leaders, doctors, inspectors and others across the department in an effort to cut a quarter of its workforce. The agency itself has offered no specifics on which jobs have been eliminated, with the information instead coming largely from employees who have been dismissed.

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary said Thursday it will begin the procedure of withdrawing from the world’s only permanent global tribunal for war crimes and genocide.

“Hungary will withdraw from the International Criminal Court,” Gergely Gulyás, who is Prime Minister Viktor Orbán chief of staff wrote in a brief statement. “The government will initiate the withdrawal procedure on Thursday, in accordance with the constitutional and international legal framework.”

The announcement came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, despite an international arrest warrant against him over his conduct of the war in the Gaza Strip.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced a sweeping new tariff policy, imposing a baseline duty of at least 10% on nearly all imported goods and significantly higher reciprocal tariffs on countries with large trade deficits with the United States—including Israel.

Under the plan, Israeli exports will face a 17% tariff, raising concerns about the potential impact on Israel’s economy and trade relations with its largest single-country export market.

Dr. Ron Tomer, president of the Manufacturers Association of Israel, expressed serious concern over the decision. “The Israeli industry is deeply worried by President Trump’s decision to impose new tariffs on Israel,” Tomer said. “We’re trying to understand the rationale behind this move. The claim that Israel imposes 33% tariffs on American goods is unclear, and the 17% response seems unjustified.”

Tomer warned the tariffs could harm Israeli exporters, cost jobs and reduce business activity in the American market. “This decision threatens Israel’s economic stability, could deter foreign investment and weaken the competitiveness of Israeli firms in the U.S.,” he said.

Elon Musk’s polarizing stint slashing and bashing federal bureaucracy will probably soon end, with the world’s richest person’s government service hitting its legal limit in the coming weeks.

“He’s got a big company to run … at some point he’s going to be going back,” Donald Trump told reporters on Monday.

“I’d keep him as long as I could keep him,” the president added.

As a special government employee, Musk faces a strict 130-day cap on his service – probably expiring in late May if counted from the day of inauguration, despite earlier White House claims Musk was “here to stay”.

Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on some of its largest trading partners on Wednesday, upending decades of US trade policy and threatening to unleash a global trade war on what he has dubbed “liberation day”.

“This is one of the most important days, in my opinion, in American history,” Trump said, speaking on the White House lawn. For decades America had been “looted, pillaged and raped” by its trading partners, he said. “In many cases, the friend is worse than the foe.”

Trump said he intends to impose “reciprocal tariffs” on foreign imports, charging US trading partners the same duties imposed by the country of origin on the same goods. Among other examples, Trump criticized European bans on imported chicken, Canada’s tariffs on dairy, and Japan’s levies on rice.

Trump said the US would charge half of the fees he feels trading partners unfairly impose on the US because the US people are “very kind”.

A forensic doctor who examined the bodies of some of the 15 paramedics and Palestinian rescue workers shot dead by Israeli forces and buried in a mass grave in southern Gaza has said there is evidence of execution-style killing, based on the “specific and intentional” location of shots at close range.

Ahmad Dhaher, a forensic consultant who examined five of the dead at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis after they had been exhumed, said all of them had died from bullet wounds. “All cases had been shot with multiple bullets, except for one, which could not be determined due to the body being mutilated by animals like dogs, leaving it almost as just a skeleton,” Dhaher told the Guardian.

“Preliminary analysis suggests they were executed, not from a distant range, since the locations of the bullet wounds were specific and intentional,” he said. “One observation is that the bullets were aimed at one person’s head, another at their heart, and a third person had been shot with six or seven bullets in the torso.”

Where were you when they took the economy down with tariffs, when they took the economy down by threatening it so consumer confidence drops. Where were you?”

“How many things are going on before we answer the question, as it says in Hebrew, hineni. Hineni. Behold, Lord, here I am,” he said.

Shortly afterward, Booker invited a comment from Sen. Jacky Rosen, who is Jewish and represents Nevada, where his mother lives. Booker praised Rosen as having had “one of the hardest jobs in all of the United States, which is to be president of a shul,” before listening to her comment.

After hearing from her, he added a yellow ribbon pin symbolizing the plight of the Israeli hostages in Gaza to his lapel.