Author: Roland Rice

Members of the Muslim community in the US have declined the White House’s iftar dinner invitation this week, protesting the Biden administration’s continued support for Israel amid humanitarian concerns in Palestine, according to multiple media reports. “Many of the invitees, distressed over President (Joe) Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza, said they would not attend an iftar meal with the president on Tuesday evening while so many Palestinians were under siege,” The New York Times newspaper reported on Wednesday. The White House held a pared-down meal just for staffers. “How can we talk to you about famine and starvation…

LONDON/SYDNEY :World stocks slipped on Monday, while the dollar steadied ahead of a week including a Bank of Japan policy announcement and a key reading on U.S. inflation. Iranian-backed Houthi militants have stepped up attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, which on Monday pushed up shares in big shipping companies, particularly in Europe, on the view that they may push up their rates in response, while crude oil eased modestly. MSCI’s broadest index of world shares dipped 0.1 per cent. European shares opened on a slide led by a decline in real estate stocks but then remained flat after…

Evidence continues to mount that Covid isn’t the only viral illness that can lead to persistent and sometimes debilitating symptoms.  Research published Thursday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases finds that the flu virus may also have long-lasting effects on health. With the arrival of the pandemic and the resulting rash of long Covid cases, doctors had to rethink their ideas about viral infections, said senior study author Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of research and development at the VA St. Louis Health Care System and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “Our conception of these illnesses as acute events that you deal…

London (15/11 – 67) The streets in Colombo, Sri Lanka, erupted into celebration on July 13, 2022 after weeks of peaceful protests forced then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country. Rajapaksa, long implicated in war crimes when he was defense secretary, had presided over an economic catastrophe amid allegations of widespread corruption and impunity. But a year later, despite some superficial changes, there is no sustained improvement in the country’s economic situation that impinges many people’s human rights. The acute shortage of fuel that was the most visible feature of the economic crisis has eased. But more than six million people – nearly 30…

The attack on the motor transport STRINDA took place about 60 nautical miles north of Bab al-Mandab Strait, one of the officials said. Washington: A land-based cruise missile launched from Houthi-controlled Yemen has struck a commercial tanker vessel, causing a fire and damage but no casualties, two U.S. defense officials told Reuters on Monday. The attack on the motor transport STRINDA took place about 60 nautical miles north of Bab al-Mandab Strait, one of the officials said. U.S. Navy destroyer Mason was on scene and rendering aid, the officials said. Yemen’s Houthi movement has been targeting international shipping amid regional tensions…

Sam Bankman-Fried used stolen customer funds to make more than $100m in political campaign contributions ahead of the 2022 United States midterm elections, federal US prosecutors said on Monday in a new indictment filed against the FTX cryptocurrency exchange’s founder. The indictment charges the 31-year-old former billionaire with seven counts of conspiracy and fraud over the collapse of the exchange. He has previously pleaded not guilty to charges of stealing billions in FTX customer funds to plug losses at Alameda Research, his crypto-focused hedge fund. Mark Botnick, a spokesman for Bankman-Fried, declined to comment. Bankman-Fried rode a boom in cryptocurrency values to…

Six former Mississippi law enforcement officers, all of whom are white, have pleaded guilty to state charges for torturing two Black men in a racist assault in the United States. All six had also recently admitted their guilt in a connected federal civil rights case. They appeared in a Rankin County courtroom in Brandon, Mississippi, on Monday. The men include five former Rankin County sheriff’s deputies — Brett McAlpin, Hunter Elward, Christian Dedmon, Jeffrey Middleton and Daniel Opdyke — and a former police officer from the city of Richland, Joshua Hartfield. Some of them nicknamed themselves the “Good Squad”. In their crimes, federal…

The feel-good story behind the 2009 blockbuster film The Blind Side was all a lie, retired NFL offensive lineman Michael Oher has alleged in a lawsuit filed in Shelby County, Tennessee. Oher, now 37, was the subject of the movie, about a well-to-do white family that adopted a Black teenager and gave him the stable home he craved. The lawsuit filed on Monday said he never was legally adopted by Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, and, in fact, was tricked into agreeing to making them his conservators. As a result, he said, the Tuohys made business deals that put money…

Former United States President Donald Trump has been indicted for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election result in the state of Georgia, which current President Joe Biden won. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis began her investigation into the case shortly after the release of a recording on January 2, 2021, of Trump and Georgia’s top election official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump suggests Raffensperger should “find 11,780 votes” so he cold overtake Biden and win the state. The indictment delivered on Monday by Willis’s office states, “Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused…

An Oklahoma judge has thrown out a lawsuit seeking reparations for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, dashing an effort to obtain some measure of legal justice by survivors of the deadly racist rampage. Judge Caroline Wall dismissed with prejudice Friday the lawsuit trying to force the city and others to make recompense for the destruction of the once-thriving Black district known as Greenwood. The order comes in a case by three survivors of the attack, who are all now over 100 years old and sued in 2020 with the hope of seeing what their attorney called “justice in their lifetime.”…