December 20, 2024

DADEVILLE, Ala. (AP) — A storm was looming when the inmate serving 20 years for armed robbery was assigned to transport fellow prisoners to their jobs at private manufacturers supplying goods to companies like Home Depot and Wayfair. It didn’t matter that Jake Jones once had escaped or that he had failed two drug and alcohol tests while in lockup — he was unsupervised and technically in charge.

By the time Jones was driving back to the work release center with six other incarcerated workers, it was pelting rain. 

Jones had a reputation for driving fast and some of his passengers said he was racing along the country road, jamming to music in his earbuds. Suddenly, the transport van hit a dip and swerved on the wet pavement, slamming into a tree.

Two men died after being thrown out of the van. And Jones, who was critically hurt and slumped over the blaring horn, had to be cut out of the vehicle. As the other men staggered into the storm to flag down help, they wondered: Why would the Alabama Department of Corrections place their lives in Jones’ hands?

The head of Louisville Metro Police Department’s Downtown Area Patrol approached a pregnant woman standing beside a bare mattress beneath an overpass in downtown Louisville at 9 a.m. on a rainy day in late September.

Body camera footage obtained by Kentucky Public Radio shows that as Lt. Caleb Stewart walked closer, the woman yelled, “I might be going into labor, is that okay?”

Her water had broken, she said. “I’m leaking out,” she told him. She grabbed a blanket and a few personal effects as a bright orange city dump truck pulled up to remove the makeshift bed.

The woman had no phone. She said her husband went to call an ambulance, so Stewart called one for her. But as she walked toward the street to wait for help, Stewart yelled at her to stop.

“Am I being detained?” she asked.

“Yes, you’re being detained,” he shouted. “You’re being detained because you’re unlawfully camping.”

Stewart was enforcing a new state law that bans street camping — essentially, a person may not sleep, intend to sleep, or set up camp on undesignated public property like sidewalks or underneath overpasses. He has issued the majority of the citations for unlawful camping in Louisville.

MAMOUDZOU, Dec 20 (Reuters) - Angry residents of a Mayotte neighbourhood damaged by Cyclone Chido heckled French President Emmanuel Macron, who replied they would be in "deeper shit" without France as he toured the Indian Ocean archipelago.

Nearly a week after the storm hit, the lack of potable water was testing nerves in France's poorest overseas territory.

"Seven days and you're not able to give water to the population!" one man shouted at Macron.

"Don't set people against each other. If you set people against each other, we're screwed," Macron told the crowd in the Pamandzi neighbourhood on Thursday night.

"You are happy to be in France. If it wasn't for France, you would be in way deeper shit, 10,000 times more, there is no place in the Indian Ocean where people receive more help."

In the past, Macron has often got in trouble with off-the-cuff remarks in public that he says are meant to "tell it like it is" but have often come across as insensitive or condescending to many French people and contributed to his sharp drop in popularity over his seven years as president.

Back home, opposition lawmakers pounced on the comments on Friday.

"I don't think the president is exactly finding the right words of comfort for our Mayotte compatriots, who, with this kind of expression, always have the feeling of being treated differently," Sebastien Chenu, a lawmaker from the far-right National Rally (RN), said.

Hard-left lawmaker Eric Coquerel said Macron's comment was "completely undignified".

President-elect Donald Trump hasn't been sworn in yet but he's already running Washington again in his familiar style of upheaval and intraparty drama, which has Congress careening towards a government shutdown at midnight Friday.

House Republicans were unable to pass a stop-gap funding measure Thursday that they crafted in response to Trump's demands. That proposal replaced an original, bipartisan deal that died Wednesday after Trump and his top advisors came out against it.

The bill, which was drafted without consultation with Democrats, failed with 235 members voting against the bill, including 38 Republicans. The measure needed a two-thirds majority to pass under expedited procedures.

North Korean forces in Russia have sustained their first casualties, according to Kyiv and Washington.

At least 100 North Korean soldiers have been killed since entering combat early this month, South Korean MP Lee Sung-kwon said, citing Seoul's spy agency.

Ukraine intelligence said 30 North Korean soldiers died or were injured while fighting in Kursk in mid-December. Pentagon officials also confirmed there had been casualties but did not provide a figure.

The Pentagon said that it appeared the soldiers were being used in infantry roles around the Kursk border region, which Moscow has been trying to recapture from Ukraine - meaning it's possible that North Korean troops have not been deployed across the border in Ukraine.

This news comes nearly two months after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and South Korean officials accused Pyongyang of deploying troops to support Russia’s invasion.

But little information has emerged since then, and Moscow and Pyongyang have not responded directly to these reports.

Estimates of troop numbers have ranged from about 11,000 - a Pentagon calculation - to as many as 100,000, according to unnamed sources quoted in Bloomberg news.

At first, their lack of battlefield experience was given as a key reason why they might be assigned non-combat roles. But that assumption was re-evaluated after the US and Ukraine said that North Korean troops had engaged in combat with Ukrainian soldiers.

So what do we know about the role of North Korean troops in Russia's war?

Mogadishu, Somalia – Hinda Aden and her fellow rebel fighters were trekking through the grasslands of Ethiopia’s Ogaden region under the cover of night, to avoid the enemy’s gaze, when they saw headlights approaching in the distance.

“We knew who it was – that’s when we started running,” Hinda says about that fateful August 2006 night – the first time she found herself on the front lines of a decades-long war that had raged in Ethiopia’s far east.

With each step, the then-22-year-old ventured deeper into the bush, as Ethiopian military vehicles pursued her team of Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) rebels through the dark.

The ONLF, which formed in 1984, was a social and political movement that transitioned into an armed group in the 1990s, as it battled against the Ethiopian army with the goal of achieving self-determination for ethnic Somalis living in Ogaden.

Hinda joined the rebellion in 2002 at age 18. Four years later she was pushing through the grassland, gun in hand, while the Ethiopian army pursued the ONLF by land and air.

“I saw flashes coming from the [military] planes, that’s when I knew they were taking [surveillance] pictures of us and likely feeding it back to the ground forces trying to capture us,” Hinda says.

The rebels tried hiding among the trees, but knew they’d soon be found. “All I could do was clutch my AK-47 tighter and keep moving.”

Her company, which numbered about 100 that night, including Hinda and four other female fighters, evaded their enemy. By sunrise, they had lost their pursuers – or so they thought.

As they walked in the scorching sun through the rural countryside of Qorahay province – sparsely populated as many civilians had fled the ongoing conflict – they came face to face with soldiers.

“We encountered Ethiopian troops but this time there was no cover. So we had no choice but to fight them head-on right there in the open,” Hinda says. “They even had tanks but it didn’t deter me. I was ready to be martyred that day.”

As the two sides clashed, gunfire and blasts gripped the air and shells struck the soil around them. Once the smoke cleared, several of Hinda’s comrades lay dead, including three fellow female rebels.

When the African Methodist Episcopal Church, arguably the world’s largest independent Black Protestant denomination, held its quadrennial General Conference in Ohio in August, among the agenda items was an issue that the Rev. Jennifer S. Leath had labored over for two decades: same-sex marriage.

Leath, 43, self-identifies as “quare” — terminology designed to capture both her same-sex attraction and intellectual heritage as a “blackqueer womanist” thinker. She was a 23-year-old future seminarian when a voice vote was taken in 2004, making participation in same-sex marriages or unions punishable according to official AME church law.

The move was widely seen as a response to the Episcopal Church’s election of the Rev. V. Gene Robinson as its first openly gay bishop the year prior.

Since then, marriage equality has become the law of the land. And now Leath is at the forefront of a fight within her own denomination on whether it should moderate its stance.

New YorkCNN — 

President-elect Donald Trump says Americans not being able to afford groceries will be a relic of the past. 

“They’re going to be affording their groceries very soon,” he said Thursday before ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, where he was honored as Time’s “Person of the Year.”

Americans paid 22% more for groceries last month compared to when Trump left office in January 2021, per November Consumer Price Index data released earlier this week. And, compared to February 2020, before the pandemic, Americans paid 27% more for groceries in November.

Trump mentioned “an old woman” who went to a grocery store intending to buy three apples. “She put them down on the counter, and she looked and she saw the price, and she said, ‘Would you excuse me?’ And she walked one of the apples back to the refrigerator,” he said.

Democrats have lost ground with the working class for a simple reason: They became “globalist shills.” Under Bill Clinton’s leadership, the party enacted the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and normalized trade relations with China, policies that had devastating consequences for the American worker. Barack Obama had a chance to chart a different course, but sought the Trans-Pacific Partnership and failed to renegotiate NAFTA. Such betrayals — and a wrenching experience of economic decline — pushed many working-class voters toward a Republican Party that gave voice to their contempt for liberal elites.

Or so goes one prominent explanation of the Democrats’ difficulties with working-class voters. This narrative has been in wide circulation for years, if not decades, but it attracted renewed attention after Donald Trump won a second term on the back of a multiracial, working-class coalition. (There’s no universal definition of who counts as a “working-class voter,” but for this piece, voters without college degrees serve as a reasonable proxy, even as the demographic includes a tiny minority of wealthy individuals.)

In a recent post on X, the labor economist Arin Dube argued that “30 years of evidence” showed that “free trade policy” had led “many working class voters to abandon Democratic Party.” The political writer John Ganz endorsed a similar perspective, suggesting that Clinton’s free trade policies had caused “the industrial base of the United States” to disappear and that this inevitably cost the party in the Midwest.

Luigi Mangione, the suspect charged in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was carrying a "ghost gun" at the time of his arrest, authorities said.

The 26-year-old was "in possession of a ghost gun that had the capability of firing a 9 millimeter round" when he was arrested in Altoona, Penn., on Monday, New York Police Department (NYPD) Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said at a press briefing.

The NYPD said the gun, which is "consistent with the weapon used in the murder," may have been made on a 3D printer.

"I have no tolerance, nor should anyone, for one man using an illegal ghost gun to murder someone because he thinks his opinion matters most," Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said on Monday.

NEW YORK (AP) — Nikki Giovanni, the poet, author, educator and public speaker who went from borrowing money to release her first book to spending decades as a literary celebrity who shared blunt and conversational takes on everything from racism and love to space travel and mortality, has died. She was 81.

Giovanni, subject of the prize-winning 2023 documentary “Going to Mars,” died Monday with her lifelong partner, Virginia “Ginney” Fowler, by her side, according to a statement from friend and author Renée Watson.

“We will forever feel blessed to have shared a legacy and love with our dear cousin,” said Allison (Pat) Ragan, Giovanni’s cousin, in a statement on behalf of the family.

The author of more than 25 books, Giovanni was a born confessor and performer whom fans came to know well from her work, readings and other live appearances and her years on the faculty of Virginia Tech, among other schools. Poetry collections such as “Black Judgement” and “Black Feeling Black Talk” sold thousands of copies, led to invitations from “The Tonight Show” and other television programs and made her popular enough to fill a 3,000-seat concert hall at Lincoln Center for a celebration of her 30th birthday.

The world now knows the colors of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s parachute: the Russian tricolor.

Assad’s flight to Moscow following the swift collapse of his regime means more than just the loss of a client state for the Kremlin.

The fall of the House of Assad deals a major blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aspirations as a Middle East power broker – and raises new questions about the fragility of his own regime.

Putin’s opponents are already cheering.

“Minus one dictator and ally of Putin,” wrote prominent Russian opposition activist Ilya Yashin on X, posting a photo of an Assad banner in flames.

“Putin has thrown Assad under the bus to prolong his war in Ukraine,” commented former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. “His resources are scarce, and he is not as strong as he pretends.”

For observers of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Assad’s departure raises some striking historical parallels.

Assad now joins a onetime Ukrainian counterpart in exile: Former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled Ukraine for Russia in 2014 after weeks of street protests that culminated in a bloody crackdown.

The District of Columbia sued Amazon on Wednesday, alleging the company secretly stopped providing its fastest delivery service to residents of two predominantly Black neighborhoods while still charging millions of dollars for a membership that promises the benefit.

The complaint filed in District of Columbia Superior Court revolves around Amazon’s Prime membership, which costs consumers $139 per year or $14.99 per month for fast deliveries — including one-day, two-day and same-day shipments — along with other enhancements.

In mid-2022, the lawsuit alleges, the Seattle-based online retailer imposed what it called a delivery “exclusion” on two low-income ZIP codes in the district — 20019 and 20020 — and began relying exclusively on third-party delivery services such as UPS and the U.S. Postal Service, rather than its own delivery systems.

Amazon says it made the change based on concerns about driver safety.

“There have been specific and targeted acts against drivers delivering Amazon packages” in the two ZIP codes and the company made the change to “put the safety of delivery drivers first,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a prepared statement.

“We made the deliberate choice to adjust our operations, including delivery routes and times, for the sole reason of protecting the safety of drivers,” Nantel said. “The claims made by the attorney general, that our business practices are somehow discriminatory or deceptive, are categorically false.”

The District of Columbia’s attorney general’s office alleged the company never told Prime members in the two ZIP codes about the change even though they experienced slower deliveries as a result. Amazon also did not tell new customers about the exclusions when they signed up for Prime memberships, the lawsuit says.

CAIRO — Amnesty International accused Israel of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip during its war with Hamas, saying it has sought to deliberately destroy Palestinians by mounting deadly attacks, demolishing vital infrastructure and preventing the delivery of food, medicine and other aid.

The human rights group released a report Thursday in the Middle East that said such actions could not be justified by Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack into Israel, which ignited the war, or the presence of militants in civilian areas. Amnesty said the United States and other allies of Israel could be complicit in genocide, and called on them to halt arms shipments.

"Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now," Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, said in the report.

Israel, which was founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust, has adamantly rejected genocide allegations against it as an antisemitic "blood libel." It is challenging such allegations at the International Court of Justice, and it has rejected the International Criminal Court's accusations that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister committed war crimes in Gaza.

Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s pick to direct the Federal Bureau of Intelligence, has never served in the FBI. But he has hosted Steve Bannon’s podcast.

Patel is a contributor at Real America’s Voice, the right-wing news network that produces Bannon’s show War Room, and has long appeared as a guest on the show. After top Trump adviser Bannon was imprisoned for four months earlier this year — on charges of contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with a January 6 Committee subpoena — Patel stepped up to serve as an occasional guest host.

To try and understand Patel better, I listened to every episode and clip tagged with “Kash Patel” on the War Room website — and a few others that Bannon’s team missed. The overwhelming impression is that Patel is a man whose entire worldview revolves around paranoid conspiracy theories — specifically, conspiracies against both America and Trump, which for him are one and the same. It’s a specific kind of obsession that reminds me of the FBI’s first director: J. Edgar Hoover, a man who infamously abused his power to persecute political enemies.

Since it started as a hashtag in 2012, GivingTuesday, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, has become one of the biggest fundraising days of the year for nonprofits in the U.S.

In 2022 and 2023, GivingTuesday raised $3.1 billion for chartitable organizations, according to estimates from GivingTuesday.

This year, GivingTuesday is on Dec. 3. Melinda French Gates announced plans to match up to $1 million in gifts to two nonprofit organizations to help spur more gifts on the day.

The #GivingTuesday hashtag started as a project of the 92nd Street Y in New York in 2012 and became an independent organization in 2020. It’s grown into a worldwide network of local organizations that promote giving in their communities, often on different dates that have local relevance, like holidays.

Now, GivingTuesday, the nonprofit, also convenes researchers working on topics about everyday giving. It also collects data from a wide range of sources like payment processors, crowdfunding sites, employee giving software and institutions that offer donor-advised funds, a kind of charitable giving account.

Throughout the 2024 campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised mass deportations as part of his immigration policy, a strategy he says will include declaring a national emergency and deploying the U.S. military. While these promises have received significant media attention, immigration analysts say that Trump is actually more likely to lean on local police and sheriffs.

Since the Nov. 5 election, California officials have vowed to push back against the Trump administration. “I can promise to the undocumented community in California that I and my team have been thinking about you for months and the harm that might come from a Trump administration 2.0,” state Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a press conference in San Francisco two days after the election. “We have planned for you. We have prepared for you.”

Multiple cities in California, including San Francisco, Oakland and San José, have in place what are commonly called “sanctuary laws”: policies designed to protect immigrants from deportation by limiting law enforcement cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). And other cities are bolstering local protections in anticipation of Trump’s pledge of mass deportations. In Los Angeles, city officials unanimously passed a sanctuary ordinance on Nov. 19, and in the Bay Area, Redwood City is currently debating a similar move.

As the clock ticks down to a second Trump term, what do we know about existing sanctuary laws in cities like San Francisco, along with policies at the state level? And what are some ways these policies do — and do not — protect immigrants from deportation?

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

Publicly, Joe Biden never wavered. Privately, those close to him believed that the President would eventually intervene and end the federal prosecutions against his son.

Sunday evening’s surprise announcement of a sweeping pardon for Hunter Biden sent Washington ablaze with outrage. Talk turned to what this about-face would mean for the President’s legacy, the impact it might have on the Justice Department’s already battered credibility, and whether President-elect Donald Trump, himself a convicted felon, would accept the pardon as the final word. It all felt very loud, very urgent—and, to some, very predictable.

Yet, when you take a look at Biden’s choice—making use of a power guaranteed in the Constitution with very few limits—it starts to make some sense. 

Yes, Biden flip-flopped on a pretty absolute pledge not to exercise the right to spare his son. Yes, it flies in the face of Democrats’ long-standing criticism about Trump, that no one should be above the law regardless of ties to the Oval Office. 

And, yes, this is going to dog Biden’s final weeks in office in ways that could distract from his urgent work to build a legacy after a half-century in public life.

How Our Llama Grant Recipients Are Tackling Global Issues

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The surprise assault on the Syrian city of Aleppo by opposition forces on Wednesday appears to have caught the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and his allies, as well as much of the world, off guard.

Currently, as the Syrian and Russian air forces pound opposition forces in northwest Syria, the brutal conflict that many had hoped had frozen since a ceasefire deal in 2020 is showing every sign of reigniting.

Yes.

Syria’s revolution of 2011 failed to topple the country’s leader, Bashar al-Assad.

He leaned on the support of his allies, Russia, Iran and the Lebanese group Hezbollah, who joined his forces in trying to put down the uprising.

The fighting drew in both existing regional armed groups, such as ISIL (ISIS) and al-Qaeda – who established linkages to groups in Syria –  and created new factions such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), who led last week’s attack on Aleppo.

CHICAGO (AP) — In the days after the presidential election, Sadie Perez began carrying pepper spray with her around campus. Her mom also ordered her and her sister a self-defense kit that included keychain spikes, a hidden knife key and a personal alarm.

It’s a response to an emboldened fringe of right-wing “manosphere” influencers who have seized on Republican Donald Trump ’s presidential win to justify and amplify misogynistic derision and threats online. Many have appropriated a 1960s abortion rights rallying cry, declaring “Your body, my choice” at women online and on college campuses.

For many women, the words represent a worrying harbinger of what might lie ahead as some men perceive the election results as a rebuke of reproductive rights and women’s rights.

“The fact that I feel like I have to carry around pepper spray like this is sad,” said Perez, a 19-year-old political science student in Wisconsin. “Women want and deserve to feel safe.”

In the days since the sweeping Republican victory in the US election, which gave the party control of the presidency, the Senate and the House, commentators have analysed and dissected the relative merits of the main protagonists – Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – in minute detail. Much has been said about their personalities and the words they have spoken; little about the impersonal social forces that push complex human societies to the brink of collapse – and sometimes beyond. That’s a mistake: in order to understand the roots of our current crisis, and possible ways out of it, it’s precisely these tectonic forces we need to focus on.

The research team I lead studies cycles of political integration and disintegration over the past 5,000 years. We have found that societies, organised as states, can experience significant periods of peace and stability lasting, roughly, a century or so. Inevitably, though, they then enter periods of social unrest and political breakdown. Think of the end of the Roman empire, the English civil war or the Russian Revolution. To date, we have amassed data on hundreds of historical states as they slid into crisis, and then emerged from it.

So we’re in a good position to identify just those impersonal social forces that foment unrest and fragmentation, and we’ve found three common factors: popular immiseration, elite overproduction and state breakdown.

Retailers small and large are urging their customers to buy their merchandise before President-elect Trump's tariff plans become a reality.

Why it matters: As Americans gear up for the holiday shopping season, the looming threat of tariffs has imbued their to-buy lists with a sense of urgency. Higher tariffs typically mean higher prices for consumers.

Driving the news: Trump announced a slate of forthcoming tariffs earlier this week targeting the U.S.' top three trading partners — China, Mexico and Canada.

• Trump promised to impose a a 25% tariff on all goods coming from Canada and Mexico, as well as a 10% tariff on imports from China "above any additional Tariffs."
• Tariffs were one of Trump's cornerstone campaign pledges. He previously floated the possibility of imposing 10% or 20% tariffs on all imports, as well as a 60% tariff on all Chinese imports.