More than 1,000 U.S. Christian pastors and influencers traveled to Israel this month becoming “the largest group of American Christian leaders to visit Israel since its founding.”

At the height of the Christmas season — one of the two most important celebrations for Christians of the year, the birth of Christ, the other being Easter which marks his death — these pastors were on mission paid for by the Israeli government “to provide training and prepare participants to serve as unofficial ambassadors for Israel in their communities,” Fox News reported.

Trip organizer Mike Evans is an author, a top evangelical ally of Donald Trump, longtime confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and founder of the Friends of Zion Heritage Center in Jerusalem. “For Christians, Israel is not just another country on the map. It is the cradle of our faith. The story of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, King David, and Jesus starts here. If you cut Israel out of the Bible, you do not just edit a text, you undermine the foundations of Christian faith itself," the long-time, prominent Christian Zionist said in a press release about the trip.

Rob Reiner, the son of a comedy giant who became one himself as one of the preeminent filmmakers of his generation with movies such as “The Princess Bride,” “When Harry Met Sally …” and “This Is Spinal Tap,” has died. He was 78.

Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer, were found dead Sunday at their home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. A law enforcement official briefed on the investigation confirmed their identities but could not publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Authorities were investigating an “apparent homicide,” said Capt. Mike Bland with the Los Angeles Police Department. The Los Angeles Fire Department said it responded to a medical aid request shortly after 3:30 p.m.

AI-generated podcasts are flooding the market, with studios producing hundreds of thousands of episodes that sound increasingly indistinguishable from human hosts.

The technology offers cost savings and opportunities for creators, but many in the industry worry AI hosts undermine listener trust and devalue premium content.

Some popular podcasters, including Steven Bartlett, are cloning their voices for AI content, while others are pushing back against the technology’s rapid expansion.

In at least half a dozen states, librarians have joined forces with civil rights groups to oppose book bans, often facing personal and professional repercussions

For decades, libraries served as a safe haven for many queer and marginalized youths in eastern Texas, says former county library director Rhea Young. Unlike the school cafeteria, the library was a space where they could explore and find acceptance in who they wanted to be.

“There were books where they can find characters like them, and realize it’s okay to be who they are,” Young said. “There needs to be more places like that, not fewer.”

That all changed two summers ago when, amid a wave of book bans, Montgomery county officials asked Young to move books with LGBTQ+ themes or “sexually explicit” content at the public library into a section restricted to readers 18 years and older, and instructed her to order more titles with conservative Christian content.

Rob Reiner Dead: 'The Princess Bride' Director Found Dead With Wife https://variety.com/2025/film/news/rob-reiner-dead-princess-bride-spinal-tap-1236608541/

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/2-found-dead-at-brentwood-mansion-owned-by-director-rob-reiner/3815886/

The LA Fire Department said a man and a woman were found deceased inside, approximately 78 and 68 years old

It is unknown at this time if the deceased are Rob Reiner and his wife but the ages are approximately correct. Some news sites are referring to it as a homicide.

The Los Angeles Police Department said it is investigating the deaths as “an apparent homicide.”

The secret airport deportation program denies victims any semblance of due process.

The Transportation Security Administration is forwarding passenger lists to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in order to detain and deport travelers while denying them the chance to challenge the process, according to documents obtained by the New York Times.

A Times report Friday revealed that information furnished by TSA provided the basis of ICE’s high-profile detention of university student Any Lucía López Belloza, who was deported following her arrest at Boston’s Logan airport en route to visit her family for Thanksgiving.

On a near-daily basis since March, the agency has been sending files to ICE that include photographs of the person targeted for deportation, and flight information that ICE employs to detain people before they board.

Retired Chinese official Li Chuanliang was recuperating from cancer on a Korean resort island when he got an urgent call: Don’t return to China, a friend warned. You’re now a fugitive.

Days later, a stranger snapped a photo of Li in a cafe. Terrified South Korea would send him back, Li fled, flew to the U.S. on a tourist visa and applied for asylum. But even there — in New York, in California, deep in the Texas desert — the Chinese government continued to hunt him down with the help of surveillance technology.

Six weeks ago, Jack Posobiec asked me to comment on whether I have a “creepy fetish for Asian women.”

That was one of several false and wildly personal allegations that the far-right pundit and newly minted member of the Pentagon press corps said that he planned to include in “a story that I’m writing about you.”

I immediately understood his October 28 email to be a threat, though it was not made explicit. The day before, I had sent the Pentagon press office a series of questions concerning Eric Geressy, a senior Pentagon adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Geressy, who served with Hegseth during a tour in Iraq in the mid-2000s, is part of the Pentagon effort to instill a “warrior ethos” within the US military. He now leads a team reviewing the role of women in the armed forces.

Calling Geressy “my toughest critic and my best mentor,” Hegseth in March presented him with the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for valor, for Geressy’s conduct following an ambush in Baghdad in 2007.

I had discovered that Geressy’s email address was linked to a public Goodreads page with a “currently reading” list that included various books featuring stories about “Asian wife sharing.” These pornographic works, with titles such as “Asian Wife Went With Her Dad’s Friend: A Cuckold Story,” appeared on the list alongside two books by Hegseth and a handful of military histories. They contain detailed descriptions of cuckolding, group sex, and scenes involving “ladyboys”—a term used to refer to Thai transgender women. The page, active since 2021, was taken down the day after I contacted the Pentagon and Geressy about it.

I also asked about a 1997 domestic violence allegation against Geressy, about his dating habits, and past relationships with foreign women. I inquired if the Pentagon had assessed those relationships as part of Geressy’s security clearance process, and, more broadly, if his personal life might create concerns about his susceptibility to foreign influence operations.

The Pentagon repeatedly asked for more time to address those questions. Eventually chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell responded, in part: “Geressy has served for 38 years in the government, has been vetted numerous times by the relevant agencies, and has never posed a security risk or engaged in improper behavior as this piece tries to suggest. Mother Jones has stooped to a new low with this shoddy hit piece and should be ashamed of itself.”

Posobiec’s email arrived the day after my initial inquiries. The false claims he asked about, particularly the Asian fetish thing, seemed to mirror my questions. Posobiec, who in 2016 promoted the bogus Pizzagate conspiracy theory, gave me a deadline, 5 p.m. on October 29, that was the same as the one I had given the Pentagon press office. A Pentagon spokesperson and Posobiec both denied coordination. Geressy declined to comment. But considering the questions, timing, and Posobiec’s links to Defense Department officials, the situation seemed clear. This was either an incredible coincidence or a deliberate message: Publish your article and get smeared.

Osman said armed ICE agents went to East African restaurants in the neighborhood Tuesday, closed the doors and demanded people's IDs. They found only U.S. citizens and made no arrests, Osman said.

In short, they're harassing people based on what kind of cuisine they have a hankering for

At least 15 people were killed, and more than three dozen hospitalized, in a shooting at Australia’s famous Bondi Beach in Sydney on Sunday in what the authorities are calling a terrorist attack at a Jewish holiday celebration.

One gunman has been killed and a second suspect is in custody and in critical condition, police said.

The attack comes amid a surge in antisemitic violence in Australia, home to the largest proportion of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel. It is Australia’s worst mass shooting in three decades, a rare occurrence in a country with one of the lowest rates of gun-related deaths in the developed world.

“This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia said, adding, “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian.”

At about 6:45 p.m. on Sunday, police began receiving reports that multiple people had been shot. “The gunmen emerged from a small silver hatchback parked by a footbridge near the beach and began firing into the crowd celebrating Hanukkah,” according to the New York Times.

A video showing a bystander—identified by Australian media reports as Ahmed al Ahmed, a 43-year-old Sydney man—tackling and disarming an assailant has gone viral. “That man is a genuine hero,” said Chris Minns, the premier of the state of New South Wales, “and I’ve got no doubt there are many many people alive tonight as a result of his bravery.”

Police departments around the world, from New York to London, said they would increase security presences in their cities following the attack. “We are deploying additional resources to public Hanukkah celebrations and synagogues out of an abundance of caution,” the NYPD said in a statement, adding that they “see no nexus to NYC.”

The rise in antisemitic attacks in the country began after the October 7, 2023 massacre and Israel’s offensive in Gaza. In May 2024, one of Australia’s largest and oldest Jewish schools in Melbourne was spray-painted with the phrase “Jew die.” In a series of incidents in October 2024, a Jewish‑owned bakery in Sydney was defaced with antisemitic graffiti, two men set fire to a brewery near Bondi Beach, and a kosher deli was deliberately set on fire.

One of the most serious incidents occurred this past July, when about 20 worshipers attending a Shabbat dinner at the East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation “were forced to evacuate through a rear exit after a man poured flammable liquid on the front door and set it alight,” as reported by Time.

Sunday’s shooting is also the worst in Australia since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, which claimed the lives of 35 people and wounded 23 more. As the New York Times detailed, following that shooting—in which a gunman killed 12 of the victims in just 15 seconds—the country essentially banned assault rifles, many other semiautomatic rifles, and shotguns. Authorities also imposed mandatory gun buybacks, melted down as many as 1 million guns, and imposed new registration requirements and restrictions on gun purchases.

Over the next two decades, there were no mass shootings in Australia.

In an investigation published this past August, the Guardian warned that the gun landscape in Australia was shifting. “Gun numbers are on the rise,” the investigation noted, and, while the number of gun-license holders per capita has gone down, “there is now a larger number of guns in the community per capita than there was in the immediate aftermath of the [Port Arthur] crackdown.”

Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, said on X that one of the people killed in the attack, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, had deep ties to the neighborhood of Crown Heights. Mamdani called the attack a “vile act of antisemitic terror” and said it was “merely the latest, most horrifying iteration in a growing pattern of violence targeted at Jewish people across the world.” Schlanger organized the Sydney celebration.

The Hanukkah celebrations at Bondi Beach on Sunday were being hosted by a local chapter of Chabad, a global organization based in Brooklyn. An invitation to the event highlighted free donuts, crafts, face-painting, a “Grand Menorah Lighting,” music, games, and ice cream.

A billionaire investor keen on buying TikTok's US operations has told the BBC he has been left in limbo as the latest deadline for the app's sale looms.

The US has repeatedly delayed the date by which the platform's Chinese owner, Bytedance, must sell or be blocked for American users.

Donald Trump appears poised to extend the deadline for a fifth time on Tuesday.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/51609818

Thousands of contracts and documents outline the contours of DHS’s surveillance capabilities: geolocation, facial recognition, DNA testing, eye scans, spyware, licence plate cameras, credit reports and more. AI tools cross-reference datasets, while mobile apps give field agents information at their fingertips.

At the same time, the proliferation of data brokers and digital, “open-source” intelligence has made surveillance easier than ever. Unlike the government programmes revealed by Edward Snowden over a decade ago, DHS has not needed to build extensive in-house capabilities — vendors now offer sweeping tools at relatively low cost.

A wide array of private corporations, from global powerhouses to niche start-ups, have secured hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts, including AT&T, Thomson Reuters, Palantir and Clearview AI. Some have hired lobbyists with ties to the White House to capitalise on ICE’s growing ambitions.

Individual surveillance technologies should be understood within the “mass surveillance context”, says Emily Tucker, a professor at Georgetown Law School. “All this stuff is being used together.”

Former officials say internal safeguards have been sidelined. “There’s less oversight and more willingness to break the rules,” says Deborah Fleischaker, who served as DHS’s privacy officer and ICE chief of staff under Biden.

“Things are just unbound,” she adds. “People are doing things that have never been done before, in ways that have never been done before, with fewer safeguards in place.”

More than a dozen former senior government officials familiar with Trump’s deportation push spoke with the FT, most on the condition of anonymity fearing retribution.

They hold a range of views about the administration’s policies and left the department for a variety of reasons, but all shared concerns about the volume of data collection, the lack of oversight, and the shift from criminal to immigration work. Many raised fears that surveillance tools may soon be used on left-wing groups and protestors who ICE claims are threats to its agents.

An FT analysis of federal procurement data shows ICE has spent at least $353mn on surveillance contracts this year, up 27 per cent from 2024. In July, Trump’s spending bill gave ICE $29bn for operations on top of its existing annual budgets for the next four years, empowering the agency to buy more tools.

ICE is hiring staff to monitor social media, seeking contractors in Vermont and California to gather “information obtained from commercial and law enforcement databases as well as publicly accessible, open-source and social media platforms.”

ICE is also hiring old-fashioned private investigators. A tender posted last month seeks contractors to “use all technology systems available” to find addresses for persons of interest, including “physical observation”. The agency says it has approximately 1.5mn names it will divide among these vendors, who can earn between $7.5mn and $281mn based on the number of people they locate.

ICE and Customs and Border Protection also collect DNA from detainees and asylum applicants, according to a privacy disclosure. One attorney says he was representing a US citizen who was given a cheek swab while incorrectly detained. Samples are stored in an FBI database where they are queryable by a range of law enforcement agencies.

ICE has also signed a contract with BI² Technologies, a vendor selling handheld eye scanners. Former officials questioned the need for the devices, noting that the agency held few, if any, iris scans to search. “My first question is why?” a former privacy official says. “What do you expect to get out of this? If they’re just out there collecting irises and biometrics, that’s a problem for me.”

“They’re spending a lot of money on things they might not even use, to benefit people who are maybe close to the administration,” says Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy nonprofit monitoring ICE’s surveillance purchases. “They’re moving very fast.”

Procurement records also show that ICE has obtained tools previous administrations found problematic.

In August, ICE removed a hold on a $2mn contract with the Israeli spyware firm Paragon Solutions, which sells a phone-hacking tool called Graphite. It has been used by the Italian government to target European journalists with iMessage and WhatsApp attacks, according to researchers at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

The contract was paused by the Biden White House, which had banned the use of spyware sold by foreign companies with human rights concerns. Paragon was subsequently acquired by US-based private equity firm AE Industrial Partners, which also controls Department of Defense contractor REDLattice.

Kourtney Stevenson was allegedly caught on camera spraying meal with chemical that later sickened customers

A driver for the popular food delivery platform DoorDash has been arrested after allegations that she showered an order with pepper spray in plain view of a doorbell camera, sickening a customer and his wife, according to authorities in Indiana.

Kourtney Stevenson faces counts of felony battery and consumer product tampering, the Vanderburgh county sheriff’s office said in a statement on Friday, addressing a case that is bound to be of significant interest to DoorDash’s 42 million or so users.

Stevenson, 29, allegedly told investigators that she used the pepper spray in question to try to kill a spider that had frightened her, but they did not believe her, saying it was too cold at the time of the delivery for that kind of creature to be out.

Rural departments have long relied on cheap software solutions to keep their operations running. But fire chiefs report sharp price increases as investors have entered the market.

The judge ruled that federal prosecutors had handled material seized from law professor Daniel Richman with "callous disregard" for his constitutional rights.

A federal judge on Friday ordered the Justice Department to return data it seized in 2017 from a close friend of former FBI Director James Comey’s, concluding that the agency violated the constitutional rights of law professor Daniel Richman and had improperly used the material to indict Comey.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly heavily criticized Justice Department prosecutors, ruling that the data and material, an image of Richman’s hard drive along with emails from his iCloud and Columbia University email accounts, was handled with “callous disregard” for Richman’s rights.

The order is another blow to the Justice Department and prosecutors from the Eastern District of Virginia, after U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie ruled last month that former Trump attorney Lindsey Halligan was not lawfully appointed as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia when she single-handedly presented the Comey case to a grand jury.

This holiday season isn't quite so merry for American shoppers as large shares are dipping into savings, scouring for bargains and feeling like the overall economy is stuck in a rut under President Donald Trump, a new AP-NORC poll finds.

The vast majority of U.S. adults say they've noticed higher than usual prices for groceries, electricity and holiday gifts in recent months, according to the survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Roughly half of Americans say it's harder than usual to afford the things they want to give as holiday gifts, and similar numbers are delaying big purchases or cutting back on nonessential purchases more than they would normally.

cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/131675

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