HellsBelle

The US military will stop its practice of shooting pigs and goats to help prepare medics for treating wounded troops in a combat zone, ending an exercise made obsolete by simulators that mimic battlefield injuries.

The prohibition on “live fire” training that includes animals is part of this year’s annual defense bill, although other uses of animals for wartime training will continue. The ban was championed by Vern Buchanan, a Republican congressman from Florida who often focuses on animal rights issues.

Buchanan’s office said the defense department will continue to allow training that involves stabbing, burning and using blunt instruments on animals, while also allowing “weapon wounding”, which is when the military tests weapons on animals. Animal rights groups say the animals are supposed to be anesthetized during such training and testing.

On the scrubby banks of the rural swathes of the Venice lagoon, an evening chorus of cicadas underscores the distant whine of farmers’ three-wheeled minivans. Dotted along the brackish fringes of the cultivated plots are scatterings of silvery-green bushes – sea fennel.

This plant is a member of a group of remarkable organisms known as halophytes – plant species that thrive in saltwater. Long overlooked and found growing in the in-between spaces – saltmarshes, coastlines, the fringes of lagoons – halophytes straddle boundaries in both ecosystems and cuisines. But with shifting agricultural futures, this may be about to change.

From Sant’Erasmo, the spires of Venice, majestic – and unavoidably sinking – are just visible across the water. The Tidal Garden’s task is to unite these two worlds.

They work with six or seven species, including marsh samphire, monk’s beard and purslane. For a long time, these crops have been foraged by coastal communities in Venice and beyond – a Tudor record lists three accidental deaths in England linked to samphire foraging in the late 1500s – but never taken seriously as a commercial crop.

Israel's security cabinet approved the establishment of 19 new settlements in the occupied West Bank, a move the country's far-right finance minister said on Sunday, January 21, was aimed at preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. The decision brings the total number of settlements approved over the past three years to 69, according to a statement from the office of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

The latest approvals come days after the United Nations said the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank – all of which are considered illegal under international law – had reached its highest level since at least 2017.

"The proposal by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Defence Minister Israel Katz to declare and formalise 19 new settlements in Judea and Samaria has been approved by the cabinet," the statement said, without specifying when the decision was taken. Smotrich is a vocal proponent of settlement expansion and a settler himself.

"On the ground, we are blocking the establishment of a Palestinian terror state," he said in the statement. "We will continue to develop, build, and settle the land of our ancestral heritage, with faith in the justice of our path."

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.