The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Monday that six men from around the Pittsburgh-area have been charged after it says they attacked a Jewish student from the University of Pittsburgh in 2024. The six were charged by a federal grand jury with violating the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, obstructing justice and conspiring to obstruct justice. … Source link
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned Tuesday that it plans to begin attacking more than a dozen American companies across the Middle East on Wednesday in retaliation for the killing of Iranian citizens in the ongoing war with the US and Israel. The list of companies includes Apple, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Tesla, and Boeing, which the IRGC accused of enabling United States military targeting operations. The IRGC urged employees of the US firms to evacuate and civilians in the region to stay away. Tuesday’s warning, posted to the IRGC’s Telegram channel, extends a campaign of threats by Iran against American commercial infrastructure since the US and Israel launched their first attack on Tehran on February 28. Iranian drones struck two Amazon Web Services data centers and damaged another in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on March 1, in the first publicly confirmed attack on American-owned hyperscale cloud infrastructure. Banking sites, payment processors, and consumer services across the region crashed as redundancies meant to prevent outages were taken offline. Earlier this month, the IRGC-affiliated …
A serial abuser who throttled women during a campaign of violence that spanned more than three decades has been sentenced to an order for lifelong restriction. Bruce Buchanan, 61, subjected one woman to rape three times, and during an attack squeezed her throat and forced his hand into her mouth. He also verbally and physically abused the victim at addresses in the Scottish Highlands. A court heard how Buchanan threatened the woman while armed with a knife and also sat on her and pressed his thumbs into her eyes during his abuse. Jurors were also told of how he grabbed a second woman by the nose, compressed it while threatening her, and forced her to the ground during an attack. During an assault on a third woman, Buchanan pinned her arms behind her back and gripped her by the throat, restricting her breathing. The abuser, formerly of Croy in the Highlands, denied any wrongdoing but was convicted of seven offences following a trial. His crimes included four assaults, two rapes, and a single count of …
President Donald Trump on Thursday said he was extending an ongoing brief pause in attacking Iran’s energy facilities by 10 days, to April 6, at the request of the government of the Islamic Republic. Trump’s move avoids escalating the war with Iran at a time the United States has signaled it wants a negotiated end to the conflict and as the key Strait of Hormuz remains almost completely closed to oil shipments. His announcement came as key U.S. stock market indexes fell and oil prices rose. “As per Iranian Government request, please let this statement serve to represent that I am pausing the period of Energy Plant destruction,” Trump said in a Truth Social post. “Talks are ongoing and, despite erroneous statements to the contrary by the Fake News Media, and others, they are going very well. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” The original five-day pause on U.S. attacks on Iran’s power plants and energy infrastructure was due to end Friday. Trump had announced the first pause on Monday on Truth Social. …
Chinese Special Envoy to the Middle East Zhai Jun has said at a briefing after his shuttle-diplomacy trip that included recent stops in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait that the US-Israeli operation against Iran must immediately cease or else a “vicious cycle” toward destabilizing the region and disrupt global trade would persist. “Should hostilities continue to escalate and the situation deteriorate further, the entire region will be plunged into chaos. The use of force will only lead to a vicious cycle… the war should not have begun in the first place,” Zhai declared. via AFP Washington’s latest war of choice in the Middle East has been focus of growing condemnation from Beijing, with Zhai having added: “The one who tied the bell must be the one to untie it.” Or this is another way of saying whatever the US broke it must quickly fix. Separately, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian reiterated at the start of this week that continued military action risks deepening instability, and reminded Washington that its past wars in the …
Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com, Legendary financial and geopolitical cycle analyst Martin Armstrong warned in February, “This is where the volatility starts kicking in.” What do we have? Oil, gold and silver spiking in price, and violent exchanges between Iran, the United States and many other countries in the Middle East. Now, water assets like desalination plants in Bahrain and Iran are being blown up. Add the worst water shortage in decades in Iran as a backdrop to constant bombing, and you have a situation that could turn very ugly, very fast. The water shortage is so bad that there has been water rationing in Tehran for months. This water rationing was part of the reason there were huge protests in Iran a few months ago. Armstrong explains: “Part of the protests (in Iran) were about water rationing. The Islamic Republic Guard were called the ‘water mafia.’ They control the water. It’s kind of like North Korea. If you want to be fed, you join the army. All food goes to the army first, and water will also go to the military first.” Remember, …
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. No one could accuse Representative Andy Ogles of using dog whistles. The Tennessee Republican prefers a bullhorn. “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Ogles wrote on X on Monday. “Pluralism is a lie.” The statement’s open bigotry is jarring. Where American Islamophobes in the past two decades have tended to demand that Muslims assimilate or denounce particular people or views, Ogles is taking a categorial approach. (In the past, Ogles has demanded the denaturalization of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom he called “little muhammad”— whatever that means—and told an activist that his attitude toward Gazan children was that “we should kill them all.”) His denunciation of pluralism is un-American—not in the sense that it’s reprehensible, though it is, but that it is directly in conflict with the founding principles of the United States. Ironically, it has more in …
Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, popular entertainment has struggled with how to reflect the resulting upheaval in American politics and culture. Many Hollywood projects have taken a heavy-handed approach: Think of how often you’ve been told that a certain movie or TV show is “exactly what we need right now.” During Trump’s first term, these direct, if unsubtle, approaches felt like honest reactions to the moment. Now nearly 10 years later—and one year into Trump’s second term—audiences are savvier and more suspicious about such transparent messaging. Perhaps sensing this wariness, the creators of some of the more politically compelling movies and TV shows of the past year have instead explored how being alive feels during a tumultuous period. They capture the atmosphere, the mood, the ambient existence of everyday people who are living through a transformative time in history, whether or not they recognize that they are doing so. Consider James Blaine “J.B.” Mooney, the museum-robbing protagonist of Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, which is set in suburban Massachusetts in 1970. Played as both a …
In striking Iran, the United States isn’t responding to an attack, as when the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor drew the country into World War II. It’s not coming to the aid of an ally, as when it led a coalition to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in the Gulf War. The Trump administration hasn’t presented a formal case for war, as the George W. Bush administration did before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Source link
Smoke rises on the skyline after an explosion in Tehran, Iran, Saturday. AP hide caption toggle caption AP The U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday after weeks of threats from President Trump over Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in Israeli strikes carried out with U.S. support. Iranian state media confirmed Khamenei’s death. State outlets also said his daughter and grandchild were killed. Israel’s military said that top Iranian security officials were among those killed, including the country’s defense minister, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the secretary of the Iranian Security Council, a close adviser to Khamenei. Here’s what else you need to know about the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran: Israel and the U.S. launched military strikes against Iran Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the goal of the joint U.S. Israeli strikes is to quote “remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran.” Netanyahu said in a video: “Our joint action will create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to …
