US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday said Russia had to choose between dialogue and confrontation, ahead of talks in Geneva on soaring tensions over Ukraine.
“There’s a path of dialogue and diplomacy to try to resolve some of these differences and avoid a confrontation,” Blinken told CNN’s “State of the Union” show.
“The other path is confrontation and massive consequences for Russia if it renews its aggression on Ukraine. We are about to test the proposition about which path President Putin is prepared to take.”
Vladimir Putin’s government has reportedly massed tens of thousands of military troops along Russia’s border with Ukraine, drawing Washington into a Cold War-style stand-off.
Thousands of rocket launchers, machine guns, sniper rifles and other weapons seized in the Arabian Sea by the U.S. Navy in recent months likely originated from a single port in Iran, according to a confidential United Nations report that provides some of the most detailed evidence that Tehran is exporting arms to Yemen and elsewhere.
The draft report prepared by a U.N. Security Council panel of experts on Yemen said small wooden boats and overland transport were used in attempts to smuggle weapons made in Russia, China and Iran along routes to Yemen that the U.S. has tried for years to shut down. The boats left from the Iranian port of Jask on the Sea of Oman, the U.N. report said, citing interviews with the boat’s Yemeni crews and data from navigational instruments found on board.
Iran has diplomatically supported the Houthis in their conflict in Yemen and abroad against targets in Saudi Arabia and the Red Sea, but has long denied providing the group with arms….
As Democrats face increasingly bleak projections in 2022 and 2024, a group of Democratic lawmakers is reportedly plotting to stop former President Donald Trump from ever holding office again.
What are the details?
About one dozen Democratic lawmakers have been quietly speaking about using a constitutional mechanism to prevent Trump from ever becoming president again, according to The Hill.
Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, a left-leaning constitutional scholar, told The Hill that some members of Congress and their staffs have quietly sought his advice on how the Constitution could be used to thwart Trump from holding office.
Some of those lawmakers include Reps. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the report noted.
The effort is focused on using a provision in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment against Trump and others who they claim participated in the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
The legislative process was one of the most brutal, nondemocratic, politicized processes in Knesset history and the consequences for the State of Israel will be irrevocable…..
What does this new law do that the old law didn’t? Even before Ra’am used its political leverage to pass this law, infrastructure hookups could be expedited for neighborhoods or individual structures that lacked permits but which the government actively sought to regulate or legalize.
The new law takes what was an exception and makes it the rule. It takes a clause that was applicable to select outlier cases and applies it in wholesale fashion and virtually indiscriminately. How indiscriminately? No one – not even the members of Knesset who voted for it – actually knows, and that’s part of the problem…..
The legislative process was one of the most brutal, nondemocratic, politicized processes in Knesset history – and like other highly questionable pieces of legislation in the recent and not-so-recent past, the consequences for the State of Israel will be irrevocable.
From www.cbc.ca
2022-01-09 15:01:26
The Associated Press Excerpt:
Kazakhstan’s Health Ministry said Sunday that 164 people have been killed in protests that have rocked the country over the past week.
The figures reported on the state news channel Khabar-24 are a significant rise from previous tallies. It is not clear if the deaths refer only to civilians or if law-enforcement deaths are included. Kazakh authorities said earlier Sunday that 16 police or national guard had been killed. Authorities previously gave the civilian death toll as 26.
Most of the deaths — 103 — were in Almaty, the country’s largest city, where demonstrators seized government buildings and set some afire, according to the ministry. The country’s ombudsperson for children’s rights said three of those killed were minors, including a four-year-old girl.
The ministry earlier reported more than 2,200 people sought treatment for injuries from the protests, and the Interior Ministry said about 1,300 security officers were injured.
Ten people died when a cliff collapsed onto tourist boats on a lake in Brazil, officials said Sunday after the bodies of two missing people were found. On Saturday a large rock fragment broke free of a ravine and plunged onto four boats in Furnas Lake in Brazil’s eastern Minas Gerais state, as panicked tourists watched helplessly from other vessels.
Dramatic videos shared on social networks captured the moment the cliff collapsed.
New York Mayor Eric Adams has tapped his brother for a high-level job in the New York City Police Department (NYPD), raising questions regarding potential conflicts of interest, according to reports.
Bernard Adams, a retired police officer, will oversee governmental affairs in his role as a deputy police commissioner with the NYPD, the New York Post reported. The job comes with a salary of around $240,000, The Daily Beast said.
He most recently worked as assistant director of operations for parking at the medical campus of Virginia Commonwealth University, according to his LinkedIn, after retiring from the NYPD in 2006. He left the police department after 20 years of service, the Daily Mail reported.
Republican leaders slammed President Joe Biden after December’s jobs report released Friday reported numbers well below economists’ projections, highlighting the report as another example of how the president mishandled the post-pandemic recovery.
The U.S. economy added only 199,000 jobs in December while unemployment dipped to 3.9%, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced Friday. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal projected that the economy would add 422,000 jobs in December and that unemployment to fall to 4.1%.
“Our economy should be soaring right now, but the policies of this administration continue to stifle growth and hold back American businesses and workers,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said in a statement.
“Today’s jobs report is another massive miss, falling two hundred thousand jobs short of expectations. The labor participation rate should be climbing; instead the world’s greatest economy is…
MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP) — Members of Nicaragua’s new congress have taken office, one day before President Daniel Ortega is to be sworn following highly questionable elections.
Of the 90 legislators sworn in Sunday, 75 belong to Ortega’s Sandinista party and the other 15 are from tiny parties considered collaborators with the regime.
The legislators elected Gustavo Porras, a long-time Sandinista and congress member, as leader of the unicameral legislature.
The congressional members, like Ortega, were elected in Nov. 7 elections that drew condemnation internationally.
Ortega was elected to a fourth consecutive term in the elections, which were broadly criticized as a farce after seven likely challengers to Ortega were arrested and jailed in the months prior to the vote.
Nicaragua’s government announced in November it will withdraw from the Organization…
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