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A year ago, Franky Dean, a 24-year-old documentary film-making master’s student, decided to make a phone call she’d been avoiding nearly half her life. She was sitting in a dark computer room in New York University’s journalism institute in Manhattan when she FaceTimed her parents. They were in the living room at her home in the UK, where she grew up. Franky told them she’d just filed a police report about something that had happened more than a decade earlier. When Franky was 12, she had been sexually abused by a close friend’s dad.

And then her mum said two words that would change her life, again, for ever: “We know.”

It was meant to be a climactic moment – a revelation that Franky had been building up to for years. Instead, it was the beginning of another story – the unravelling of a shadow narrative that spanned half of Franky’s life. It’s a story about what happens when police assume survivors of sexual abuse to be “unknowing victims” – a series of misinterpretations and missteps that amounted to Franky spending 12 years hiding her abuse from her parents while they spent 12 years hiding it from her.

In a devastating letter sent to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris this week, 99 health workers who have volunteered in Gaza amid the genocide wrote that Israel has likely already killed over 118,908 Palestinians in Gaza. This is approximately 5.4 percent of Gaza’s population, meaning Israel has killed 1 of every 20 Palestinians in the Strip in less than a year, according to this estimate.

Not only is this figure horrific, it is also the “most conservative estimate” possible of the true death toll in Gaza, the health workers wrote in an appendix to the letter. The workers calculated this based on estimates from food insecurity researchers on the death toll caused by famine; rough estimates of deaths by disease; and other estimates of deaths that Gaza health officials are unable to count.

The workers, who spent a combined 254 weeks in Gaza, specifically emphasize the impact that Israel’s genocide has had on children. For instance, they point out that, according to officially reported figures, Israel has killed at least 2,100 babies and toddlers since October 7 — a toll that is higher than the combined Israeli death toll from the First Intifada, the Second Intifada and October 7 attack.

Ukraine could potentially join NATO even if parts of its territory remained occupied by Russia, the alliance's former Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview on Oct. 4.

One of the main arguments against granting Ukraine membership at the current time is that NATO's Article 5 mutual defense clause would immediately draw the alliance into a direct war with Russia.

But speaking to the Financial Times, Stoltenberg suggested there could be ways to get around this if the Ukrainian territory considered part of NATO was "not necessarily the internationally recognized border."

With the region on edge about a possible Israeli retaliatory strike on Iran, U.S. Central Command hit targets in Yemen and Israel ordered evacuations in Gaza.

As Israel escalated its fight against Hezbollah in Lebanon on Saturday, much of the Middle East was on edge, with many expecting an Israeli retaliatory strike on Iran as payback for its missile barrage on Israel earlier this week.

Fighting expanded across the region, with the United States Central Command striking Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen and Israeli forces warning residents in two areas in the central Gaza Strip to evacuate, presumably in preparation for stepped up military action there.

. . .

Israeli strikes appeared to hit the Dahiya, an area south of Beirut, where Hezbollah holds sway and where the Israeli military late on Friday again issued evacuation warnings for civilians. At least four hospitals across southern Lebanon are now out of service as a result of Israel’s bombardment, according to Lebanon’s state-run news agency. The Saint Therese Medical Center near the Dahiya has also suspended services, saying that Israeli strikes inflicted “huge damage.”

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Researchers have used commercial satellite imagery to identify more than 30 points where Iranian missiles appear to have impacted an air base in southern Israel.

Based on preliminary calculations of what happened at Nevatim, Lewis believes a substantial number of Iranian missiles may have reached their targets.

Lewis notes that although over 30 missiles landed inside the base perimeter, the damage caused was still somewhat limited. That's notable because Iran is believed to have used some of its most advanced Fattah missiles.

Over the past 10 years, rates of colorectal cancer among 25 to 49 year olds have increased in 24 different countries, including the UK, US, France, Australia, Canada, Norway and Argentina.

The investigation's early findings, presented by an international team at the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) congress in Geneva in September 2024, were as eye-catching as they are concerning.

The researchers, from the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the World Health Organization's (WHO's) International Agency for Research on Cancer, surveyed data from 50 countries to understand the trend. In 14 of these countries, the rising trend was only seen in younger adults, with older adult rates remaining stable.

Based on epidemiological investigations, it seems that this trend first began in the 1990s. One study found that the global incidence of early-onset cancer had increased by 79% between 1990 and 2019, with the number of cancer-related deaths in younger people rising by 29%. Another report in The Lancet Public Health described how cancer incidence rates in the US have steadily risen between the generations across 17 different cancers, particularly in Generation Xers and Millennials.

In their effort to “exert total control” over religion and to “sinicise” Catholic and Protestant Christianity, the authorities have “ordered the removal of crosses from churches [and] replaced images of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary with pictures of President Xi Jinping,” the report said.

The report concluded that “every facet of religious life for Buddhists, Catholics and Protestant Christians, Muslims, and Taoists” was facing pressure to incorporate CCP ideology, and religious elements considered contradictory to the state’s political agenda were being eradicated.

Populist leader alleged to have ‘copied word for word’ a monologue by TV show’s fictional president Jed Bartlet

Argentina’s rightwing populist president, Javier Milei, has been accused of plagiarising a chunk of his recent speech to the United Nations general assembly from the political drama The West Wing.

“It seems like fiction, but it isn’t,” the left-leaning Buenos Aires newspaper Página 12 reported on Friday, claiming Milei had “copied, word for word, a monologue” by the television show’s fictional president, Josiah “Jed” Bartlet.

Suspicions over Milei’s address surfaced this week when the political columnist Carlos Pagni flagged the “extraordinary” similarities between part of the president’s speech and words uttered by Martin Sheen’s Bartlet 21 years earlier. “Didn’t anyone else notice?” Pagni wrote in the newspaper La Nación, before transcribing the words of both men.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3616486

Maskwacis, Alberta, Canada - Nadalie Lightning stares out of her living room window praying to wake up from what she describes as a nightmare. In the early hours of August 30, her 15-year-old grandson Hoss Lightning Saddleback was shot and killed by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers after what the RCMP describe as a “confrontation” in the nearby city of Wetaskiwin.

Nadalie is devastated by the loss and struggling to understand how a call for help turned fatal. On the night of his death, Hoss had initially reached out to his grandmother in desperation.

"He was calling me that night. I missed 18 calls," Nadalie revealed, her voice breaking with emotion as the screen on her phone showed her grandson’s attempts to contact her. "He texted me right here at 1:01am, 'Can you come pick me up?' And then it's just, 'I called the police.'"

She had been the one who had always told her grandson to call the police if he was ever in trouble. According to an RCMP release, it was Hoss who had called them, believing people were following him and trying to kill him.

That afternoon members of the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT) showed up at her doorstep asking Nadalie to identify her grandson, one of a string of Indigenous people to have died during interactions with police in Canada since late August.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, the former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations RoseAnne Archibald, expressed her frustration at what she emphasised was a longrunning issue.

"[The First Nations have] been sounding the alarm bell for a long time - for many, many years,” Archibald said. “This has happened time and time again. They’re just trying to kill us off, it’s maddening. Is that the first way they deal with us, is violence towards us?”

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Elon Musk merging Twitter into X didn't absolve X from child safety fine.

Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) remains on the hook for an approximately $400,000 fine after failing to respond to an Australia eSafety Commission 2023 inquiry, which largely sought to probe measures X is currently taking to combat an alleged proliferation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on its platform.

To void the fine, X tried to persuade Australian Judge Michael Wheelahan that X had no obligation to comply with an Online Safety Act notice issued to Twitter because Twitter "ceased to exist" a few weeks after receiving the notice—when Musk merged the app into his company X Corp.

Lobbyists for Britain’s biggest food brands successfully pushed for a £1.7bn packaging tax to be deferred, new documents reveal.

The fees for a new scheme to improve recycling rates and tackle plastic pollution were due to be imposed this month, but were delayed for a year by the last Tory government after the industry complained about the costs in a series of private meetings.

The extended producer responsibility (EPR) scheme aims to shift the costs of collecting and recycling waste on to the companies that make packaging for soft drinks, confectionery and other consumer goods. They would pay fees based on the amount of packaging they use, with lower fees for more sustainable options.

Several people, including a small child, died when overcrowded boats were trying to cross the Channel to the UK, French authorities said. The interior minister said the child was trampled to death on board.

France's interior minister said that several people, including a small child, died on Saturday trying to cross the English Channel in overcrowded boats.

"Today several people died trying to cross the English Channel," Bruno Retailleau said. "A child was trampled to death in a small boat." 

Retailleau said the "tragedy" again highlighted the need to crack down on people smuggling groups organizing the dangerous crossings. 

"The people smugglers have the blood of these people on their hands and our government will intensify the fight against these mafias who are getting rich by organizing these crossings of death," he wrote.