Day: June 28, 2024

ICC issues arrest warrants for Russian defence minister and leading Russian general, Sergei Shoigu and Valery …  theSun

Infant among six injured, with at least one dead and more trapped in building in central Ukraine; 10 Ukrainian civilians freed from Russia and Belarus jails in Vatican-mediated deal. What we know on day 857

• See all our Ukraine war coverage

A Russian missile strike hit a nine-storey residential building in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Friday, killing at least one person and injuring six others, officials said. The death toll would likely rise as more people remained trapped in the building, where four upper storeys collapsed as a result of the attack, said the interior minister, Ihor Klymenko. A photo posted on Telegram by the governor, Serhiy Lysak, and other images on social media showed a badly damaged building that had smoke rising from a gaping hole in its upper storeys. A seven-month-old infant was among the injured, Lysak said. Three people were in severe condition.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy said 10 civilians including a politician and two priests taken prisoner in Russia and Belarus had been freed in a deal mediated by the Vatican. Russia and Ukraine have exchanged hundreds of prisoners throughout their two-year conflict but the release of civilian prisoners is rarer. “We managed to return 10 more of our people from Russian captivity,” the Ukrainian president said on Telegram. It was not immediately clear if the release was part of an exchange deal involving Russian prisoners held in Ukraine. Some of those released had been in prison since 2017, he said, arrested in Russian-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine that at the time were run by Moscow-backed separatists.

Russia’s defence ministry claimed its forces had taken control of the settlement of Rozdolivka in eastern Ukraine, but the Ukrainian military said heavy fighting was raging in areas around the settlement. The Russian ministry said on Friday that Russia’s “southern” military grouping had taken up what it called more favourable positions after pushing Ukrainian forces out of the settlement. Rozdolivka is in the Donetsk region, the focal point of Russia’s slow advance across eastern Ukraine. It lies north of Bakhmut and Soledar, two localities brought under Russian control last year.

The Ukrainian military’s general staff said Russian forces had launched 19 attacks in a broad sector that included Rozdolivka. “Our soldiers resolutely held their defences and repelled 15 of the assaults,” the evening report on Friday said. “Four armed confrontations are continuing.” The battlefield accounts from either side could not be verified.

The Biden administration will provide Ukraine with $150m worth of weapons and ammunition, including Hawk air defence interceptors and 155mm artillery munitions, two US officials said. The weapons aid package was expected be unveiled on Monday, they said on Friday, declining to be named. The administration is responding to Ukraine’s desperate requests for air defence support as Russia has pounded Ukrainian energy facilities in recent weeks via aerial attacks.

Vladimir Putin said Russia should start producing short- and intermediate-range missiles that were previously banned under a now-defunct arms treaty with the US. The Russian president was referring to missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500km (300-3,400 miles) that were banned under the cold war-era intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) treaty. Washington withdrew from the deal in 2019, citing Russia’s failure to comply. The Kremlin said at the time that it would abide by a moratorium on production if the US did not deploy missiles within striking distance of Russia. In a televised address to his top security officials on Friday, Putin said the US had started using such missiles in training exercises in Denmark and “we need to react to this”.

Russia’s defence minister has ordered officials to prepare a “response” to US drone flights over the Black Sea, the ministry said, in an apparent warning that Moscow may take forceful action to ward off the American reconnaissance aircraft. The Russian defence ministry noted a recent “increased intensity” of US drones over the Black Sea, saying they “conduct intelligence and targeting for precision weapons supplied to the Ukrainian military by western countries for strikes on Russian facilities”.

The International Monetary Fund’s executive board has voted to approve a $2.2bn payout for Ukraine under an existing loan programme, and lowered its growth outlook following “devastating” Russian attacks against the country’s energy infrastructure. The much-needed funds would be used for “budget support” and bring the total amount disbursed under the 48-month loan agreement to about $7.6b, the IMF said on Friday.

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Под залпы фейерверков выпускники загадывали желания, которые, как считается, должны обязательно сбыться.

Donald Trump Should Not Have Been on That Stage  The Bulwark

Presidential debate live updates: the Biden-Trump faceoff is over, but the wider debate is just beginning  NPR

LAJAS BLANCAS, Panama — Panama’s President-elect Jose Raul Mulino announced Friday that he wanted an agreement with the United States on deporting migrants who cross into the world’s busiest migration route, the perilous Darien Gap, along his country’s border with Colombia.

In a visit to the jungle region, Mulino said he would discuss the possible deal with a U.S. delegation, led by U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, that’s expected to attend his inauguration next week.

The 65-year-old lawyer, who will take the reins of Panama on Monday, promised during his campaign to shut down the Darien Gap, calling the daily crossings “an odyssey that does not have a reason to exist.”

More than half a million people traversed the corridor last year, and 186,000 people are estimated to have crossed so far in 2024, with most of the migrants hailing from Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia and China.

Until now, Panama has helped speedily bus the migrants across its territory so they can continue their journey north — and reports of abuses, human rights violations and testimonies of deaths along the route have persisted.

“I hope to sign a respectful and dignified agreement with the United States so the two countries can begin the repatriation processes of all these people who are accumulated here,” Mulino said during the visit Friday. 

He did not elaborate on the details of such an agreement or say how the migrants would be deported to their home countries.

“I’ve seen other crises in the Darien, but this is the worst I’ve seen. It breaks my heart to see children my grandchildren’s age ask me for a bottle of water,” he told a news conference at the migrant camp of Lajas Blancas. 

The migrant route through the narrow isthmus grew exponentially in popularity in recent years with the help of criminal gangs and migrant smugglers who made it an affordable, if dangerous, pathway for hundreds of thousands of people.

The popularity of the Darien also grew after countries, under pressure from the U.S. government, imposed visa restrictions on various nationalities, including Venezuelans and Peruvians, to stop migrants flying into the country just to continue toward the U.S. border.

Still, masses of people took the challenge and set out on foot through the jungle spanning the Colombia-Panama border. A crossing that initially could take a week or more was whittled to two or three days as the path became more established and entrepreneurial locals set up a range of support services.

Mulino, who was accompanied by members of his future Cabinet, visited a temporary reception center where thousands of migrants arrive every week, including pregnant women and children.

On Thursday night, migrants staying in the camp of Lajas Blancas after crossing the Darien recounted their economic and security difficulties, and several expressed their support of Mulino’s plans to close the migration route.

Mulino “will have to close it,” said Pedro Monte, a Venezuelan migrant who lost his wife on the way to the Darien Gap. “It’s the most dangerous thing … there are thieves, there are deaths. It’s a pity that people lose their lives there.”

Mulino has said he will deport migrants who continue crossing the Darien, but experts caution it will be a difficult and expensive task. 

“With the government we have [in Venezuela], we never had a life,” another migrant, Jorbys Ocampo, told The Associated Press.

He left his family and 8-year-old daughter in Venezuela’s coastal city of Maracaibo.

“My daughter was born with a heart problem,” he said. “There are no supplies, there is no money, there is not enough for anything.

“It would be good if they gave more legal ways for people to migrate and to not have to make this terrible journey,” Ocampo said.

Asked what would happen if the Darien Gap was closed, he said, “If they close it on one side, it will open on another.”

Imagine it yourselves. The situation will almost certainly be predictably mundane. The convicted felon Donald Trump is, say, on his way to one of his Nuremberg-style sieg heil rallies. He steps out of his limo, waves to an imaginary crowd of idolaters, then suddenly clutches his chest and collapses. An ambulance is quickly summoned, arriving in record time. He’s spirited off to the nearest hospital where he is pronounced dead on arrival. One third of the nation mourns, one third celebrates, the remaining third shrugs its collective shoulders. Finis. The end.

At the speed of light, in the publishing sense anyway, the following month, the following week, conceivably even the following day, a book is hustled into print. It’s called something like “The Assassination of Donald Trump.” It’s promoted relentlessly by Fox News, OAN, Newsmax and the MAGA cult on social media. Trump, the book insists, was murdered by elements of the Deep State, possibly on the order of Joe Biden himself, and herein lies the “proof.” It takes the publishing world by storm and becomes an overnight best seller.

Absurd, you say? Think again. In fact, I’m pretty sure this book has already been written — in outline form. Possibly by several different writers working independently of one another. Once Trump is dead their only concern will be getting their book into print faster than the other guy. Only the relevant details need to be filled in.

Given Trump’s age and stupid eating habits it’s a fair gamble that he will die soon. It’s a fifty-fifty gamble. He already looks like he’s just one porkchop shy of a fatal heart attack, as the saying goes. There’s already a frenetic appetite in the world of the supremely stupid for nonsense just like this. In fact, I cannot imagine a scenario in which Donald Trump dies and a conspiracy isn’t almost instantaneously launched.

Don’t believe me? Just wait. Most people reading these words will outlive Trump, so most of you will get to see it for yourselves.

Many people who read the book will quickly fall under its spell. It will be full of the little coincidences that happen every day in banal circumstances that few notice. It will be written by experts who know how to connect nonexistent dots and accumulate them into staggeringly stupid arguments sufficient to convince the gullible. The book’s success will depend largely on the cleverness of the writers. However well or poorly the book fairs in the open market, there will be more of them to follow, each succeeding book trying to outdo the last. Then will come the documentaries, YouTube videos, online debates in social media and on and on and on and bloody on.

Welcome to the paranoid, irrational, evidence-free and silly world we live in today. As MTG might put it, it’s a peach tree dish of roiling stupidity. It’s where only “sheeple” subscribe to the obvious narrative of Occam’s razor, where the world is flat, UFOs are extraterrestrial, vaccines contain microchips and chemtrails are slowly poisoning us. This is what happens when critical thinking takes a backseat.

So if you’re among the many who hopes Trump dies soon, be careful what you wish for. Satisfying as that might feel right now, it will almost certainly open a can of worms that could be worse even than Trump himself. For my part, I hope he lives a long life, long enough to miserably contemplate his many evil deeds from inside a prison cell. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.

The post The martyrdom of Donald Trump appeared first on Palmer Report.

Detroit — The city of Detroit has agreed to pay $300,000 to a man who was wrongly accused of shoplifting and also change how police use facial recognition technology to solve crimes.

The conditions are part of a lawsuit settlement with Robert Williams. His driver’s license photo was incorrectly flagged as a likely match to a man seen on security video at a Shinola watch store in 2018.

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“We are extremely excited that going forward there will be more safeguards on the use of this technology with our hope being to live in a better world because of it,” Williams told reporters, “even though what we would like for them to do is not use it at all.”

The agreement was announced Friday by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative at University of Michigan law school. They argue that the technology is flawed and racially biased. Williams is Black.

Detroit police will be prohibited from arresting people based solely on facial recognition results and won’t make arrests based on photo lineups generated from a facial recognition search, the ACLU said.

“They can get a facial recognition lead and then they can go out and do old-fashioned police work and see if there’s actually any reason to believe that the person who was identified … might have committed a crime,” said Phil Mayor, an ACLU attorney.

There was no immediate comment from Detroit police on the settlement. Last August, while the litigation was still active, Chief James White announced new policies about the technology. The move came after a woman who was eight months pregnant said she was wrongly charged with carjacking.

White at that time said there must be other evidence, outside the technology, for police to believe a suspect had the “means, ability and opportunity to commit the crime.”

The agreement with Williams says Detroit police will go back and look at cases from 2017 to 2023 in which facial recognition was used. A prosecutor will be notified if police learn that an arrest was made without independent evidence.

“When someone is arrested and charged based on a facial recognition scan and a lineup result, they often face significant pressure to plead guilty,” Mayor said. “That is all the more true if the individual — unlike Mr. Williams — has a criminal record and thus faces longer sentences and more suspicious police and prosecutors.”

The post Panama’s Mulino wants US deal to deport migrants crossing Darien Gap first appeared on The News And Times.

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