Federal government workers from the State Department to NASA are circulating open letters demanding that President Joe Biden pursue a cease-fire in Israel’s war against Hamas. Congressional staffers are picking up microphones in front of the Capitol, speaking out to condemn what they say is the silence of lawmakers about the toll on Palestinian civilians.

As the deaths soar in Gaza, Biden and Congress are facing unusually public challenges from the inside over their support for Israel’s offensive. Hundreds of staffers in the administration and on Capitol Hill are signing on to open letters, speaking to reporters and holding vigils, all in an effort to shift U.S. policy toward more urgent action to stem Palestinian casualties.

The captives held in the Gaza Strip are now the most sensitive issue in Israel.

It has been more than a month since around 240 people were taken captive by Palestinian fighters during the Hamas-led attack on Israeli communities near the Gaza Strip.

Yet no one really knows what is going on in the negotiations to free them. There have been various media reports, including by Middle East Eye, suggesting that swaps for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel have been close.

Hamas has been relatively open about the issue. It has suggested freeing a handful of civilian captives in exchange for a cessation of hostilities, followed by around 100 more in exchange for Palestinian women and minors being held in Israeli prisons.

In the weeks since the Israel-Hamas war erupted on Oct. 7, people across the globe have taken to the streets en masse — some in support of Israel and some in support of Palestinians.

In Tel Aviv, Israel, friends and family of some 240 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza call for their return as they participate in a five-day “March for the Hostages” from Tel Aviv to the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem.

In Manila, capital of the Philippines, activists scuffle with police while marching toward the United States Embassy in solidarity with the Palestinians. In Washington, D.C., a river of people fills the National Mall in support of Israel — a sea of Israeli and U.S. flags.

In front of Columbia University’s Low Memorial Library, seven infant-sized bundles of white cloth rested on the steps, splattered with red paint. Behind the swaddles, plywood boards read “10,600 lives slaughtered,” “4,412 children,” and “let Gaza live,” alongside images of Palestinian flags and olive trees.

This was the scene where Columbia students gathered last Thursday for a “peaceful protest art installation” and demonstration organized by the campus chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. Hundreds of students demanded that Columbia publicly call for a ceasefire in Gaza, divest its endowment from corporations complicit in Israeli apartheid, and end its academic programs in Tel Aviv.

The next day, Gerald Rosberg, chair of the Special Committee on Campus Safety, announced Columbia had suspended its chapters of JVP and SJP through the end of the semester, citing an “unauthorized event” that “included threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” The announcement quickly drew widespread criticism, including from hundreds of Jewish faculty who denounced the “vague allegations” that served as grounds for the suspensions.

Two and a half weeks after sending tanks and ground troops into northern Gaza, Israeli forces have raided al-Shifa Hospital, where thousands of patients and displaced Palestinians are sheltering.

Mohammed Zaqout, the director of hospitals in Gaza, said Israeli tanks were inside the medical compound on Wednesday and that soldiers had entered buildings, including the emergency and surgery departments.

The Israeli army claims that Hamas uses hospitals as cover for its fighters and has set up a command centre in and beneath al-Shifa, the largest medical facility in the besieged territory. Both Hamas and hospital staff deny the Israeli allegations.

A group of 15 Palestinians, including eight children and their families, arrived in Abu Dhabi, UAE, by plane for treatment after being evacuated from Gaza through the Rafah border crossing to Egypt, according to the Reuters news agency.

A few of the seats on the plane were removed to make room for the most critically wounded children, who needed to lie on stretchers. Some children had bandaged arms and legs. Some sat quietly next to their parents or relatives, while others travelled alone.

Mohammed Abu Tabikh, 14, was one of the more seriously wounded children on the flight. He suffered injuries to his neck and spine when a car he was travelling in was hit in an attack.

There have been two official investigations. One concluded Oswald acted alone, the other that there was a conspiracy. After forty years, many of the key documents which could tell the whole story remain classified. Why, if it is an open and shut case? Why the secrecy, if Oswald was just a "crazed lone gunman"?

Russian military sources shared the first footage of the mass use of the RBC-500 cluster bombs in Ukraine. The video was reportedly filmed in the area of Staromayorskoe in the south of the DPR.

The RBC-500 bomb is a powerful munition capable of destroying a column of armored vehicles or a large manpower cluster bombs. One cassette includes 15 Motiv-3 anti-tank submunitions. The bomb explodes in air and the combat elements are scattered over the area. Each of them has a parachute that slows down the fall. Meanwhile, infrared sensors allow submunitions to search for targets within 100 meters. As soon as it positions a target, a charge shoots, creating a cumulative jet of gases and molten copper. It is capable of burning through tank armor of 70 to 150 mm.

Assassination of John F. Kennedy, mortal shooting of John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, as he rode in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. His accused killer was Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine who had embraced Marxism and defected for a time to the Soviet Union.

A US official said Sunday that Israel has the “right” to expand its military operations in southern Gaza but said the Biden administration is looking for a delay in the plan to account for the hundreds of thousands of civilians who have fled fighting from the north.

“In the event that we believe that Israel is likely to embark on combat operations, including in the south, we believe both that they have the right to do that, but that there is a real concern, because hundreds of thousands of residents of Gaza have fled now from the north to the south at Israel’s request,” US Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer told CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”

“We think that their operations should not go forward until those people – those additional civilians – have been accounted for in their military planning. And so, we will be conveying that directly to them and have been conveying that directly to them,” Finer added.

As 2,000-pound bombs crash down on crowded refugee camps in Gaza, the seismic reverberations are increasingly being felt on campuses throughout the United States. “When a 2,000-pound bomb hits the ground, the earth turns to liquid,” Marc Garlasco, a military expert, told The Washington Post. “It’s like an earthquake.”

On October 11, a boxy white truck pulled up in front of the main entrance to Harvard University, a black wrought iron gate adorned with a stylish Georgian Revival wreath. Attached to the truck’s sides and back were three garish billboard-style LED screens displaying the images of dozens of students. Beneath their faces were the words “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites” and the putative URL “HarvardHatesJews.com.”

The doxxing truck was sponsored by the right-wing group Accuracy in Media and its targets were students who had signed a letter sponsored by the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee. “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” it said. “For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to ‘open the gates of hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced.” Leaving Harvard, the truck began a McCarthyite search and destroy mission, driving to the homes of each of the students to out their locations and ruin their future job prospects. Some of those targeted would later receive death threats while others worried about what might come next, with at least one losing a job offer. “I have my career on the line,” said one concerned student. Many other forms of harassment targeting pro-Palestinian students have been taking place across the country. The question is whether Israeli intelligence is behind some of it.

The wreckage goes on for block after devastated block. The smell is sickening. Every day, hundreds of people claw through tons of rubble with shovels and iron bars and their bare hands.

They are looking for the bodies of their children. Their parents. Their neighbors. All of them killed in Israeli missile strikes. The corpses are there, somewhere in the endless acres of destruction.

More than five weeks into Israel’s war against Hamas, some streets are more like graveyards. Officials in Gaza say they don’t have the equipment, manpower or fuel to search properly for the living, let alone the dead.

Israel says its strikes target fighters and the infrastructure of Hamas, the militant group behind the deadly Oct. 7 attack that killed about 1,200 people in Israel. Hamas often operates in residential areas, and Israel accuses it of using the civilian population as human shields, though it does not explain specific targeting reasons for most strikes.

Since Israel began its war on Gaza on October 7, attempts to discern the veracity of many of the claims it made about its conduct in the war have been difficult.

One of the main reasons for this is that Israel uses a propaganda function known in Hebrew as "Hasbara" in an attempt to control, shape and distort the narrative of every face of its actions.

What is Hasbara?

The word Hasbara roughly translates to "explaining" in English and was popularised in the early 20th century by the Polish Zionist activist and journalist Nahum Sokolow.

Hasbara shares much in common with other forms of modern propaganda, but it is often considered a description of the more granular, event-by-event distortions and fabrications utilised by the Israeli state to justify its controversial actions and policies.

In the modern era, it often takes the form of videos, infographics and viral social media posts and hashtags released and promoted by the Israeli state.

A massive US naval deployment in a wide arc of the so-called Greater Middle East is under way — stretching from Crete in the Eastern Mediterranean, into the Red Sea and  the Bab el Mandeb and into the Gulf of Aden and all the way into the Gulf of Oman. This deterrent display may transform as large scale offensive operations and aims to rework the geopolitical alignments and bring them back to the traditional grooves of intra-regional rivalries in the Gulf region. 

Ship spotters first said that as of Thursday, the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and its escorts were sailing just outside the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf of Oman, and were approaching the Persian Gulf. A Pentagon official confirmed the location but would not say whether the carrier will enter the Persian Gulf passing through the Strait of Hormuz. 

The US naval build-up in the region consists of another carrier strike group as well — USS Ford and its escorts — which last week moved away from Israeli coast and is now re-positioned to the south of Crete, according to ship spotters, apparently beyond the missile reach of Lebanon’s Hezbollah.  

Instead of a film, Haverstick ended up writing a book, A Woman I Know: Female Spies, Double Identities and a New Story of the Kennedy Assassination. It reveals Cobb to be an infinitely more remarkable and complex character than the daredevil pilot she allowed the world to see, and takes the reader on a journey that leads to Dallas on November 22, 1963.

“A number of people fell down the JFK assassination rabbit hole never to return,” she writes, “and I wasn’t in a hurry to become one of them.”

Like so many before her though, she found herself in the irresistible tractor beam of the Kennedy assassination, and the unanswered questions about what happened on that sunny day in Dealey Plaza that still affect attitudes to government to this day.

What Haverstick found out was that Cobb flew a light aircraft in and out of a private airport in Dallas on the day of the assassination, in such peculiar circumstances that she became convinced she played a role in the murder, possibly as an intended getaway pilot for assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

Javier Milei, Argentina's new President, brings a fresh perspective by vehemently opposing leftist ideologies, embracing budget cuts, and rejecting woke ideology and socialism.

“It just sickens me to the core that someone can come to
this country, be fully supported in terms of social housing,
social welfare, and free medical care for over 10 years 

In a stunning move, President Biden has declared a national emergency and invoked Cold War-era wartime powers to restrict access to heating and cooling technology.

President Biden reminds me of Cousin Eddie, the dimwitted cousin of Clark Griswold’s wife in the Vacation movies. Except that Cousin Eddie is a nice dimwit while Biden is a nasty dimwit. And politcal stooge.

The heavy concentration of the seven largest stocks in the S&P 500 raises concerns about diversification and market stability, especially if these stocks face underperformance.

Doctors who tried to save the life of President John F Kennedy after he was shot in 1963 said they believed there was 'more than one shooter' in interviews that are set to air for the first time.

The medics spoke out in 2013 but the footage was kept under wraps for a decade.

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JFK Assassination: What Happened in the Trauma Room? airs on Sunday at 9pm and will be available to stream on My5.