HellsBelle

The Trump administration continues to insist that Venezuela’s leftist government poses a serious national security threat. United States officials especially assert that Nicolas Maduro’s regime is deeply involved in the illegal drug trade coming into the United States, including the surge in fentanyl in recent years. Indeed, Trump and his associates maintain that Venezuela’s government is little more than a disguised drug cartel. Washington has invoked the argument to justify an escalating series of attacks on small boats, including fishing vessels, in waters near that country.

Contending that illegal drug trafficking constitutes a national security threat sufficiently serious enough to warrant using the US military against a sovereign country is a dubious argument. Moreover, Venezuela is not a major player in the fentanyl trade.

Unfortunately, threat inflation is nothing new. Three pro-war administrations managed to obtain sufficient support from Congress and the public for military action against tiny, distant North Vietnam, based on the absurd notion that it posed a security threat to the United States. Several recent White House occupants have engaged in similar threat inflation, with respect, to justify wars against designated US adversaries.

WHEN OREGON MUSIC teacher Susan Lewis logged onto a Zoom meeting with her boss one afternoon in August 2024, she thought she would be preparing for a sixth year teaching at Valley Catholic School. Instead, she lost her job.

Lewis was shocked, she recalled in an interview with The Intercept, as were her colleagues and students. The school did not give any explanation for why they did not renew her contract. Unbeknownst to Lewis, the pro-Israel blacklist organization StopAntisemitism had recently launched an online campaign against her, framing her social media posts about the genocide in Gaza as “using her platform to spread vile antisemitic hate online.”

She sued StopAntisemitism for defamation in an Oregon state court over the summer, and the case was elevated to federal court last month. Her suit faces long odds, legal experts told The Intercept, but serves as a rare chance to register public dissent in the courts against the group’s targeting.

The destruction of food supplies by crop pests is being supercharged by the climate crisis, with losses expected to surge, an analysis has concluded.

Researchers said the world was lucky to have so far avoided a major shock and was living on borrowed time, with action needed to diversify crops and boost natural predators of pests.

The key global crops, wheat, rice and maize, are expected to see the losses to pests increase by about 46%, 19% and 31% respectively when global heating reaches 2C, the scientists said.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has begun to lay out publicly what he sees as boundaries when dealing with China, as his government wades into a new relationship with the economic giant.

Carney, who earlier this year called China one of Canada's biggest security threats, has more recently spoken openly about resetting the relationship with Beijing as the Liberal government seeks more trading partners in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump's trade war.

"The question is how deep is the relationship and how clear are the guardrails around that relationship," he said.

"There are areas, artificial intelligence, critical minerals, defence, where clearly the security threats are such that we would not have a deep relationship with China in those areas."

World Cup 2026 ticket holders are owed thousands of pounds by Fifa for tickets they resold on the tournament's official marketplace, BBC Sport has found.

Fifa's terms indicate payment should be made within 60 calendar days of a transaction, but some people who sold tickets on the website in early October have still not received their money.

Fifa, which has come under criticism for its World Cup ticket pricing, declined to provide a statement explaining the delays.

“The justice department’s document dump this afternoon does not comply with Thomas Massie and my Epstein Transparency Act,” Ro Khanna, the California Democratic congressman who co-wrote the law requiring full disclosure of all of the government’s investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein by Friday, said in a video statement posted on social media.

By way of example, Khanna noted: “They released one document from a New York grand jury of a 119 pages totally blacked out! This despite a New York judge ordering them to release that document, and our law requires them to explain redactions. There’s not a single explanation for why that entire document was redacted.”

“We have not seen the draft indictment,” Khanna added, “that implicates other rich and powerful men who were on Epstein’s rape island, who either watched the abuse of young girls or participated in the abuse of young girls.”

“It is an incomplete release, with too many redactions. Thomas Massie and I are exploring all options,” Khanna said, including the impeachment of justice department officials, finding them in contempt of Congress, “or referring for prosecution those who are obstructing justice.”

Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican congressman who co-wrote the legislation, shared Khanna’s video statement on social media, with the comment that the document release by Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general who previously served as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law” that Trump signed, “just 30 days ago”.

FBS, which promotes an extreme version of free birth in which women abandon any form of prenatal care and give birth without doctors or midwives present, is estimated to have generated more than $13m in revenues since 2018. A recent Guardian investigation identified 48 cases of late-term stillbirths or neonatal deaths or other forms of serious harm involving mothers or birth attendants who appear to be linked to FBS.

(Yolande) Norris-Clark has not responded to repeated requests for comment about the Guardian’s investigation, which is told through The Birth Keepers podcast series. She has previously defended her partnership with Saldaya, saying FBS is “the most ethical kind of business you can run”. Critics of FBS, she has said, fail to understand the commitment to women taking “radical responsibility” for their births. And she has said it is unfair to hold her responsible for the choices of a mother who consumes her content.

Many of the women who follow Norris-Clark on social media, seeking advice in their pregnancies, are unaware of her more extreme views, which she sometimes revealed to FBS students. “I actually don’t believe that gravity is true,” she told FBS students in 2024, adding: “Maybe that just makes me crazy and that’s totally OK.” In another class, she told students they could cut a baby’s umbilical cord with an “old rusty fork”. “I don’t believe in germ theory,” she said, “I don’t believe in contagion,” adding: “But even if contagion were real … there would be a pretty much 0% chance of anything happening.”

A US army reserve lawyer detailed as a federal immigration judge has been fired barely a month into the job after granting asylum at a high rate out of step with the Trump administration’s mass deportation goals, the Associated Press has learned.

Christopher Day began hearing cases in late October as a temporary judge at the immigration court in Annandale, Virginia. He was fired around 2 December, the National Association of Immigration Judges confirmed.

It is unclear why Day was fired. He did not comment when contacted by the AP, and a justice department spokesperson declined to discuss personnel matters.

But federal data from November shows he ruled on asylum cases in ways at odds with the Trump administration’s stated goals.

Of the 11 cases he concluded in November, he granted asylum or some other type of relief allowing the migrant to remain in the United States a total of six times, according to federal data analyzed by Mobile Pathways, a San Francisco-based non-profit.

It is a daily onslaught. Every morning, teenage Israeli settlers drive a herd of goats from their outpost in the hills down into the valley towards the Palestinian village of Ras Ein al-Auja.

The local men, women and children retreat inside their huts and tents. Any hint of resistance from a Palestinian is likely to bring in the Israeli army or the border police, confiscation of property and disappearance into the maw of “administrative” detention without trial, for months or years.

Instead, a small group of volunteers step forward each morning to face the descending settlers whose stated aim is to overrun and trample the village with their livestock, and drive Palestinians out.

On this particular Saturday, the defenders of Ras Ein al-Auja are four Israeli Jews, a Hungarian and an American, who make a screen around Palestinian homes to shoo away the encroaching animals.

The disappointment was palpable. In February, a group of 15 rightwing influencers visited the White House and paraded binders labelled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1”, only to discover that they contained precious little that was new.

Ten months later, it was the world’s turn. Amid huge global anticipation on Friday, the US justice department released hundreds of thousands of pages of documents related to the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

But it soon became apparent that, once again, Donald Trump had over-promised and under-delivered. Many of the documents in the data dump were heavily redacted, with text blacked out so it was impossible to read. Norm Eisen, executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund, said: “What they have released is clearly incomplete and appears to be over-redacted to boot.”

Photos of a wooden box, allegedly used for student "time outs" at an elementary school in Akwesasne, drew shock and anger from parents this week and have prompted an investigation by the school district.

Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, near Cornwall, Ont., straddles the Ontario, Quebec and New York state border. St. Regis Mohawk School is a kindergarten to Grade 5 school on the U.S. side, and is one of four schools in the Salmon River Central School District.

Chrissy Jacobs, a resident of Akwesasne and a former Salmon River Central School District board member, posted the photos to Facebook Monday after they were sent to her by a teacher who’d recently resigned from the school.

A Delaware appeals court cleared the way Friday, December 19, for tech CEO Elon Musk to receive a long-contested $56 billion Tesla pay package, reversing an earlier judgment in the long-running case.

The decision by the Delaware Supreme Court rejects a pair of judgments by Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of Delaware's Court of Chancery and sets the stage for another windfall for the world's richest person.

In a pair of 2024 rulings, McCormick invalidated the 2018 package, which once loomed as historically large but has since been eclipsed by the billionaire's most recent Tesla package.