Author: Jim Reese

“They were plotting to kill a huge number, tens of thousands of people at this concert, I am sure many Americans,” CIA Deputy Director David S. Cohen said “Tens of thousands” of fans were the target of a thwarted terrorist attempt at Taylor Swift’s recent Vienna shows, a CIA official told reporters on Wednesday, Aug. 28. CIA Deputy Director David S. Cohen shared new details of the thwarted terror plot that canceled all three of the 34-year-old pop star’s planned Eras Tour concerts in Austria earlier this month during the annual Intelligence Summit just outside Washington, D.C., reports The New York Times and NBC News. “They…

Israel is set to send a delegation to Cairo for talks with Hamas on a new ceasefire proposal aimed at securing the release of hostages held in Gaza as the conflict lingers on for nearly seven months now. The delegation, composed of security officials, will depart on Tuesday to discuss the deal with Egyptian brokers, an Israeli government source told Xinhua. A Hamas delegation left Egypt after the talks and will “return with a written response” to the latest truce proposal, according to Egyptian sources quoted by Al-Qahera News, a site also linked to Egyptian intelligence services. Abdul Latif al-Qanou,…

A succession of top U.S. officials have travelled to the West Bank in recent weeks to meet with Mahmoud Abbas in the hope the 88-year-old – a spectator in the war between Israel and Hamas – can overhaul his unpopular Palestinian Authority enough to run Gaza after the conflict. An architect of the 1993 Oslo peace accords with Israel that raised hopes of Palestinian statehood, Abbas has seen his legitimacy steadily undermined by Israeli settlement building in the occupied West Bank, which he oversees. Many Palestinians now regard his administration as corrupt, undemocratic and out of touch. But in the…

A series of deadly attacks on unhoused people in the US has coincided with a spike in American homelessness. US officials released a report on Friday showing that homeless numbers have risen about 12% since 2022. The new survey comes after the recent arrest of a suspected serial killer in Los Angeles who targeted the homeless. Separately, a California man attended court on Friday for manslaughter after allegedly filming himself shooting a sleeping homeless man. The annual Point In Time survey, taken on a single January night each year, found that 653,104 people experiencing homelessness in the US. The Department…

King County Metro intends to use its Eagle Village property for parking after a special-use permit expires. Homelessness in the U.S. is at a record high, according to new data released by the federal government this week. And as in previous years, Indigenous people are overrepresented among Americans experiencing homelessness. Members of Chief Seattle Club, a nonprofit that serves Indigenous people in Seattle, are especially aware of what the homeless people in their community are up against. A 2019 permit granted by the transit authority King County Metro to turn a parking lot into Eagle Village, one of the homeless shelters managed by…

Saudi Arabia may flood the market with more oil supplies, reversing its production curbs, as the world’s top crude exporter tries to regain control of prices, an energy market veteran said. That comes as OPEC+ concluded its latest meeting where members pledged voluntary production cuts without giving firm commitments, prompting oil prices to fall. “We’ve more or less been saying potentially Saudi needs to just flush this thing out,” Paul Sankey from Sankey Research told CNBC on Friday. He estimated that Saudi Arabia has capacity to ramp up its output by an additional 2.5 million barrels a day. For now, OPEC’s…

Members of Mexico’s third-gender community used their annual celebration to push for answers after two prominent LGBTQ deaths Felina Santiago was cutting hair in her salon when she heard that one of her oldest friends, Oscar Cazorla, had been stabbed to death at the age of 62. “I was paralysed with pain,” she recalled. “I knew we had lost a pillar of our community that day.” Santiago and Cazorla both belong to Mexico’s muxe community, pronounced “mu-shay”, made up of people who identify as a third gender, neither male nor female. Traditionally, in Indigenous Zapotec society, muxes have been respected, even…

In our most recent Laudato si’ story, we explore a business in Mexico run by indigenous women that combines care for Creation, empowerment of women, and respect for indigenous traditions. In the Northern Chiapas forest, Mexico, for twenty years, a group of socially-conscious businesses run by indigenous Seltales women and their families have been working for justice and the protection of their land. The group is called ‘Yomol A’Tel’, which means: “Together we work, together we walk, together we dream”. The social innovation coordinator of the company, Erika Lara, is 32 years old, and has a degree in business. Her…

School made global headlines when student group, whose umbrella organization praised Oct. 7 Hamas massacres, screened messages including ‘Glory To Our Martyrs’ on campus George Washington University has suspended Students for Justice in Palestine for at least 90 days, making it the third US college to curtail the group’s operations this month. A new pro-Palestinian student group has already been announced and is staging a rally to support the suspended SJP chapter. George Washington University made international headlines last month when members of the pro-Palestinian student group screened anti-Israel messages including “Glory To Our Martyrs,” “Divestment From Zionist Genocide Now”…

Alphabet’s Google has agreed to invest up to $2 billion in the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, a spokesperson for the startup said on Friday. The company has invested $500 million upfront into the OpenAI rival and agreed to add $1.5 billion more over time, the spokesperson said. Google is already an investor in Anthropic, and the fresh investment would underscore a ramp-up in its efforts to better compete with Microsoft, a major backer of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, as Big Tech companies race to infuse AI into their applications. Amazon.com also said last month it would invest up to $4 billion…