It was the party of the year, perhaps even the party of the century. Expensive and exclusive, it came at an inopportune time and received plenty of press coverage—much of it negative. If Barack Obama’s birthday party was a monumental display of nouveau riche vulgarity, it also resembled the Bradley–Martin Ball, a party held in 1897 as the nation recovered from the deep depression that had begun in 1893.
German police have arrested a British man who worked at the British embassy in Berlin on suspicion of spying for Russian intelligence in exchange for cash, according to prosecutors.
Germany’s highest public prosecutor said the man, identified only as David S, was arrested at his Potsdam apartment at 2.20pm on Tuesday, and his home and embassy workplace were searched.
China has tested the mettle of all recent US presidents, usually early in their terms of office, and China’s Communist Party (CCP) has already certainly been testing President Joe Biden. Just four days into the Biden presidency, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fighter aircraft violated Taiwan’s Air Defense Zone. The provocation was a clear message to remind the new president of China’s “Red Line”: not to build upon the Trump administration’s increased military cooperation with Taiwan.
The Indonesian army will no longer conduct virginity tests on women applying to join the forces, the chief of staff announced on Wednesday. The practice was long condemned by rights groups who called it degrading and traumatic.
“Whether the hymen was ruptured or partially ruptured was part of the examination … now there’s no more of that,” Andika Perkasa, the Indonesian army chief of staff, told reporters, referring to the invasive two-finger examination that was conducted to determine whether female applicants’ hymens were intact.
In the past, the military used the tests to determine recruits’ morality.
When is a climate czar not a climate czar? When it’s John Kerry.
The former Secretary of State and Democratic senator from Massachusetts was tapped to handle climate issues by President Joe Biden. But a new report says he might be doing more harm than good.
Hunter Biden claimed Russians stole another one of his laptops for blackmail while he was close to overdosing in a Las Vegas hotel room, DailyMail.com can reveal.
The alleged incident would mean Hunter lost a total of three computers – the first abandoned at a Delaware computer store and the second seized by federal agents – each likely to hold sensitive information on President Joe Biden and the embarrassing pictures, videos and communications of his son.
The third laptop still appears to be missing – and was taken by Russian drug dealers after they partied with Hunter in Vegas, he told a prostitute in a conversation caught on camera.
“The legal process in Iraq is not transparent. Survivors don’t even know if it’s happening, and they’re not involved,” says Abid Shamdeen, the director of Nadia’s Initiative, the NGO founded by the Nobel prize winner Nadia Murad that advocates for survivors of sexual violence.
“There were also many European and US nationals who participated to a certain degree in the attacks against the Yazidi people,” notes Shamdeen, “and there are no ways that the Iraqi courts will be able to prosecute them.”
I wonder how many slavers made it Canada.
Federal elections in Canada don’t happen on a schedule. More often than not, they happen when someone in a position of power thinks it would be a good idea to have one.
Justin Trudeau seems to be the leader who thinks so right now. There’s at least some chance he’d end up regretting the decision to trigger an early election. But there’s an equal (perhaps even greater) chance that he’d regret passing up the opportunity.
The June sham election of Ebrahim Raisi as president of Iran is likely to bring even more political instability to the Middle East partly because the nation’s militant clerics have now moved the country further towards a one-party state.
On Iran’s own official count, voter turnout in a population of 82 million was 48.8 %, a quarter lower than in 2017. “It was a protest vote … against the political system,” says Sanam Vakil, Iran expert at Chatham House, “… frustration that (Iranians) are no longer … considered … important to this process.”
Andrew Cuomo is gone. But his lawless legacy will live on
The amazing thing about Andrew Cuomo’s announcement this week that he is stepping down as governor of New York is not that he left office, it is that it took this long for him to resign. And among the most troubling parts of the interminable saga is how many crimes he and New York politicians normalized in the process – because so many of these officials were complicit, too.
An Ontario pastor who was fired from a Baptist church after coming out as transgender has filed a lawsuit for wrongful dismissal, alleging her termination was spurred by discrimination.
Rev. Junia Joplin presented as male when she first took on the job of lead pastor at Lorne Park Baptist Church in 2014, and continued to do so until she came out to the congregation in a live-streamed sermon in June of last year.
Forced conversion to Islam of young Christian and Hindu girls, some under the age of 12, seems to be an everyday occurrence. To those who are in a position to stop this practice, it appears not to matter. Almost no day goes by without news of these events.
This major and growing problem in Pakistan affects religious minorities. Human rights organisations working on this issue estimate that every year 1,000 Hindu and Christian girls are forced to convert to Islam — an estimate that could be far higher as many cases remain unreported. Most of the time, these girls are lured by much older men by the promise of a better life and sometimes are pushed into prostitution or even sold.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. diplomat who negotiated a withdrawal deal with the Taliban last year, is back in Doha, Qatar, desperately trying to cobble together some kind of face-saving agreement for the Afghan government that would allow them to leave the country alive.
Joe Biden urges Afghans to ‘fight for their nation’ as Taliban advance continues
Joe Biden has urged the Afghan government to “fight for their nation” even as a Taliban offensive continued to make rapid gains, taking yet another provincial capital.
Faizabad, the provincial capital of the northern Badakhshan province, fell overnight to the Taliban, which control 65% of the country and nine out of 34 provincial capitals as the US and Nato finalise their withdrawal after a decades-long war.
Yea, Joe will rally them.
A new BBC investigation has revealed the scale of operations by a shadowy Russian mercenary group in Libya’s civil war, which includes links to war crimes and the Russian military.
A Samsung tablet left by a fighter for the Wagner group exposes its key role – as well as traceable fighter codenames.
And the BBC has a “shopping list” for state-of-the-art military equipment which expert witnesses say could only have come from Russian army supplies.
Russia denies any links to Wagner.
American Express, which made a $2.3 billion profit last quarter, invited the great-grandson of the Nation of Islam’s founder to tell its employees that capitalism is evil.
It was part of the credit-card giant’s critical-race-theory training program, which asks workers to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, then rank themselves on a hierarchy of “privilege.”
