Jump to content

Social Media

Global Moderator
  • Posts

    7,421
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Social Media

  1. US President Joe Biden tripped and fell while handing out diplomas at a graduation ceremony for the US Air Force Academy in Colorado on Thursday. Mr Biden, who is the nation's oldest serving president at 80, was seen being helped up by Air Force officials and walking back to his seat unassisted. The president had been standing for about an hour and half to shake hands with each of the 921 graduating cadets. The White House communications director said "he's fine". "There was a sandbag on stage while he was shaking hands," Ben LaBolt wrote on Twitter.
  2. The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to pass a bill to suspend the nation’s debt limit through January 1, 2025, as lawmakers race to prevent a catastrophic default. The bill will next need to be passed by the Senate before it can be sent to President Joe Biden to be signed into law. In the Senate, any one lawmaker can delay a swift vote and it is not yet clear when a final vote will take place. The timeframe to pass the bill through Congress is extremely tight and there is little room for error, putting enormous pressure on leadership in both parties.
  3. The UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague has increased prison sentences on two top former Serbian security officials. Jovica Stanišic and Franko Simatovic were convicted of training death squads accused of ethnic cleansing during the break-up of Yugoslavia. They will serve 15 years instead of the 12 they were originally given in 2021. The court's final verdict on the former Yugoslavia is also the first to prove a direct link between the Serbian state and a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Mr Stanisic, a former head of Serbia's State Security Service, and his deputy, Franko Simatovic, a senior intelligence operative, were key allies of Serbia's late ex-President Slobodan Milosevic. The court found the spymasters guilty of establishing training camps and deploying infamous death squads, the paramilitary units called the Red Berets.
  4. The race for the 2024 Republican White House nomination is about to heat up as two long-tipped contenders enter the fray. Former US Vice-President Mike Pence and ex-New Jersey Governor Chris Christie are poised next week to join the increasingly crowded field. It places a big political target on the back of the current front-runner, former President Donald Trump, setting the stage for what promises to be an acrimonious contest. The eventual winner looks likely to challenge President Joe Biden, a Democrat, in the election of November next year.
  5. Evidence of potential human rights abuses may be lost after being deleted by tech companies, the BBC has found. Platforms remove graphic videos, often using artificial intelligence - but footage that may help prosecutions can be taken down without being archived. Meta and YouTube say they aim to balance their duties to bear witness and protect users from harmful content. But Alan Rusbridger, who sits on Meta's Oversight Board, says the industry has been "overcautious" in its moderation. The platforms say they do have exemptions for graphic material when it is in the public interest - but when the BBC attempted to upload footage documenting attacks on civilians in Ukraine, it was swiftly deleted.
  6. Steaks and cheese are being fitted with security tags and coffee replaced with dummy jars, as supermarkets battle to curb a rise in shoplifting. Some stores are also limiting the number of items on shelves in an attempt to reduce theft. It comes as data analysed by the BBC showed shoplifting offences had now returned to pre-pandemic levels as the cost of living rises. Retailers say they are spending heavily on anti-crime measures. In March, police forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland recorded nearly 33,000 incidents of shoplifting according to data analysed by the BBC. That is a significant 30.9% increase compared with March last year. The BBC has contacted all the main supermarkets in the UK to ask whether they have put in place extra security measures. Coffee and chocolate drive supermarket prices up Food price cap will not make a difference - retailers Food prices 'worryingly high' as sugar and milk soar Some, including Waitrose, were unable to comment on matters of security. Others insisted the measures are not being taken nationwide, but have been implemented at individual stores facing high rates of theft.
  7. Summary Nasa is holding its first public meeting on its study of UFOs, before a report on its findings is released The panel set up last year has been looking at data on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) UAP is defined by Nasa as "observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective" Nasa's study is separate from the Pentagon's investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena, which has been studied by US intelligence officials
  8. The museum at Auschwitz concentration camp has denounced Poland's governing party for using an image of the camp in a political campaign. The ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) posted the video on social media aiming to stop people from attending an opposition march on Sunday. It was in response to an opposition-supporting journalist who tweeted that the president belonged in a "chamber". The journalist, Tomasz Lis, insists that he meant a prison cell. But the ruling party claimed Mr Lis was saying PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and President Andrzej Duda, a PiS ally, should be sent to a gas chamber. The video features a background image of the Auschwitz camp's notorious "Arbeit macht frei" (Work sets you free) front gate and one of Mr Lis's tweet, before asking: "Do you really want to march under this slogan?" The Auschwitz Museum has condemned the video.
  9. Air New Zealand is weighing passengers before they board international flights, as part of a survey to determine average passenger weight. The weight will be anonymously recorded in a database but not be visible to airline staff or other passengers, the firm said. Air New Zealand said knowing average passenger weight would improve fuel efficiency in the future. Participation in the survey is voluntary, the airline added. The airline previously weighed domestic passengers in New Zealand in 2021. "Now that international travel is back up and running, it's time for international flyers to weigh in," the airline said in a press statement. Before the pandemic, the airline flew more than 17 million passengers every year, with 3,400 flights per week.
  10. would seem that the phrase “you’re never too old to ...” comes with an expiration date. Al Pacino is said to be expecting his fourth child with girlfriend Noor Alfallah – he is 83, to her 29. The shockwaves in reaction to the news are palpable: and mostly centre around the couple’s age gap relationship. We also had the recent news that Robert De Niro has become a father for the seventh time, at the age of 79. Both men are famous, both actors, both presumably well-off – but criticism of their life choices makes me uncomfortable.
  11. The "Blacks for Trump" founder, who said during a recent interview that he wants to "destroy" Republican presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis, has a decades-long past of run-ins with the law and is a devoted follower of the late cult leader Hulon Mitchell Jr. Maurice Symonette, formerly Maurice Woodside, was interviewed by Laura Loomer, a former President Trump devotee and twice-failed GOP candidate, during a protest outside of DeSantis’ presidential campaign announcement at the Miami Four Seasons hotel last Wednesday. In a blog post accompanying her video, Loomer described Symonette as one of the "real grassroots voters" who wants to "make it clear that DeSantis is a fraud." "I’m here to destroy DeSantis, because he’s a bastard from Hell," Symonette told Loomer. "What I'm going to do is make sure that you don't win, and that everybody knows that you're a RINO Republican racist."
  12. North Korea has said an accident happened as it planned to send up its first space satellite, causing it to crash into the sea. Pyongyang announced earlier it planned to launch a satellite by 11 June to monitor US military activities. It now says it will attempt a second launch as soon as possible. The launch sparked a false alarm in the South Korean capital Seoul, while in Japan a warning was issued to residents of Okinawa, in the south. There was chaos and confusion in Seoul as people awoke to the sound of an air raid siren and an emergency message telling them to prepare for an evacuation - only to be told 20 minutes later it had been sent in error. The stakes are high on the Korean Peninsula, where tensions have existed between the two countries for 70 years, and this false alarm could seriously damage people's trust in the alert system. North Korea poses a threat to South Korea, and if there is an alert in the future one question being asked is whether it will be taken seriously, or brushed off as another mistake.
  13. For months on end, Australia's most-decorated living soldier sat stoically in a Sydney courtroom as dozens of witnesses accused him of war crimes, bullying peers, and assaulting his mistress. But Ben Roberts-Smith was not the one on trial. The 44-year-old had brought the case, suing three Australian newspapers over a series of articles in 2018 which he says defamed him. He argues they ruined his life by painting him as a callous man who had broken the moral and legal rules of war, disgracing his country in the process. But the media outlets say they reported the truth, and have set out to prove it. It is the first time in history any court has been tasked with assessing allegations of war crimes by Australian forces. Warning: This article contains descriptions of violence which readers may find upsetting.
  14. The Myanmar military is suffering defections from its forces and is finding it hard to recruit. In exclusive interviews, newly-defected soldiers tell the BBC that the junta, who seized power in a coup two years ago, is struggling to suppress the armed pro-democracy uprising. "No-one wants to join the military. People hate their cruelty and unjust practices," says Nay Aung. The first time he tried to leave his base he was badly beaten with a rifle butt and called a "traitor". He managed to escape the second time and flee across the border to Thailand with the support of opposition groups. "One of my friends is in the resistance," he says. "I called him and he told people here in Thailand about me. I arrived here with their help." He's now living in a safehouse along with 100 other newly-defected soldiers and their families. These men, who refused to fight their own people, are now in hiding so we are not using their real names. They're being housed and protected by the very resistance movement they were ordered to fight.
×
×
  • Create New...