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The Trump administration has doubled down on its position that Hamas is to blame for Israeli troops executing 15 Palestinian medical workers in Gaza, even after a video showed that the Israeli military was lying about the incident.

The Israeli soldiers tried to cover up the crime by burying the 15 medics and their ambulances in a shallow grave. The army has since changed its story, acknowledging the lights were flashing and that they opened fire on unarmed men but claiming six of them were linked to Hamas while offering no evidence.

Despite the clear evidence of a war crime, the US is still backing the Israeli army’s conduct. “Hamas uses ambulances and more broadly human shields for terrorism,” White House National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes told Reuters. “President Trump understands the impossible situation this tactic creates for Israel and holds Hamas entirely responsible.”

Only now, having reached the age of 80, is Tom Segev ready to admit that he was brought up on a lie. In recent years, the longtime historian and journalist who published numerous books and articles about the lives of others, has reexamined his own biography and discovered a few intriguing details. Ever since his father was killed, during the War of Independence, Segev believed that he was the son of one of the fallen in Israel's wars – Pvt. Heinz Schwerin, who was "struck by a murderers' bullet while on guard duty" in Jerusalem's Arnona neighborhood. That's the text that appears on the Defense Ministry's Izkor commemoration site.

One person knew the truth all those years but kept it to herself: his older sister, Jutta, who left Israel in 1960 and moved to Germany – the country from which their communist parents had fled the Nazis, in 1935. Jutta, who went on to become a member of the Bundestag in The Greens party, was 7 during the 1948 war. On February 3, 1948, her father was assigned guard duty on the roof of a residential building not far from their home. Jutta accompanied him.

When they reached the building they found the front door locked. Jutta related that her father, 38 at the time, decided to climb up the drainpipe. When he had almost reached the third floor he lost his grip and fell to his death. Schwerin was laid to rest on the Mount of Olives. His name is inscribed on the monuments commemorating those who fell in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and the fighters who were killed in the battle for Jerusalem.

France has awarded a top human rights prize to two broadcasters who have been accused of anti-Muslim racism and discrediting critics of Israel by labelling them as antisemites.

Sophia Aram and Jacques Essebag, who is better known by his stage name "Arthur", received the Jean Pierre-Bloch Prize from President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace on Wednesday.

In recent years, Aram has increasingly hit back at "woke" and branded leftists and pro-Palestinian campaigners as antisemites or Hamas supporters.

Florida has been working for years to crack down on employers that hire undocumented immigrants. But that presented a problem for businesses in the state that are desperate for workers to fill low-wage and often undesirable jobs.

A senior White House official has hinted at the possibility of the U.S. utilizing its gold reserves to acquire more Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC).

"If we actually realize the gains on the U.S. gold holdings, that would be a budget-neutral way to acquire more bitcoin," Hines said adding that there's been "countless ideas" and the “best ideas" will be enacted by President Donald Trump.

Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, was apparently included in a Trump administration group chat on Signal in which top officials debated and then discussed details of attacks against Houthi rebels in Yemen.

In the stunning report, Goldberg claimed Waltz connected with him on Signal on March 11 and, two days later, he was invited to join a chain called the “Houthi PC small group,” in which they discussed strikes against the Houthi militant group in Yemen — seemingly unaware of the journalist’s presence in the group.

He wrote that he initially had strong doubts the text group was real, “because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans.”

Today, we’re excited to announce AI Labyrinth, a new mitigation approach that uses AI-generated content to slow down, confuse, and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and other bots that don’t respect “no crawl” directives. When you opt in, Cloudflare will automatically deploy an AI-generated set of linked pages when we detect inappropriate bot activity, without the need for customers to create any custom rules.

And it's "free"! (visibility in to all of that traffic is more than sufficient payment for them 🤑)

Here are some perhaps-contradictory highlights from their blog post (emphasis mine), which I'm pretty sure was itself written with LLM assistance:

No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense.

When these links are followed, we know with high confidence that it's automated crawler activity, as human visitors and legitimate browsers would never see or click them. This provides us with a powerful identification mechanism, generating valuable data that feeds into our machine learning models. By analyzing which crawlers are following these hidden pathways, we can identify new bot patterns and signatures that might otherwise go undetected.

But as bots have evolved, they now proactively look for honeypot techniques like hidden links, making this approach less effective.

AI Labyrinth won’t simply add invisible links, but will eventually create whole networks of linked URLs that are much more realistic, and not trivial for automated programs to spot. The content on the pages is obviously content no human would spend time-consuming, but AI bots are programmed to crawl rather deeply to harvest as much data as possible. When bots hit these URLs, we can be confident they aren’t actual humans, and this information is recorded and automatically fed to our machine learning models to help improve our bot identification. This creates a beneficial feedback loop where each scraping attempt helps protect all Cloudflare customers.

This is only the first iteration of using generative AI to thwart bots for us. Currently, while the content we generate is convincingly human, it won’t conform to the existing structure of every website. In the future, we’ll continue to work to make these links harder to spot and make them fit seamlessly into the existing structure of the website they’re embedded in. You can help us by opting in now.

At one point in the wide-ranging, nearly two-hour conversation, Lutnick also said that if Social Security “didn’t send out their checks this month,” his “mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain.”

“She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining,” the billionaire businessman said.

“Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the processes, who knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen, because whoever screams is the one stealing,” he said. “Because my mother-in-law’s not calling, come on, your mother, 80-year-olds, 90-year-olds, they trust the government.”

Lithuanian prosecutors have blamed the Russian military intelligence service for being behind an arson attack on an Ikea store in Vilnius last year, calling it “an act of terrorism”.

Lithuania, a Nato member, has been a staunch ally of Ukraine since Moscow invaded in February 2022, and has frequently warned of Russian sabotage attempts.

On Monday, the Lithuanian prosecutor general’s office attributed the arson attack in Vilnius in May 2024 to Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU.

There were no casualties, but the prosecutor Arturas Urbelis told reporters: “We regard this act as an act of terrorism with serious consequences.”

Two Ukrainian citizens were suspects in the Ikea arson case, with one being detained in Lithuania and the other in Poland, he added.

“It has been established that through a series of intermediaries … the organisers of these crimes are in Russia and this is connected to military intelligence and security forces,” Urbelis said.

WASHINGTON - Radio Free Asia (RFA) was informed today by the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) that its federal grant agreement, which makes possible RFA’s operations in Asia and globally, has been terminated. RFA’s President and CEO Bay Fang issued the following statement:

The termination of RFA’s grant is a reward to dictators and despots, including the Chinese Communist Party, who would like nothing better than to have their influence go unchecked in the information space. RFA has been foundational in helping U.S. policymakers understand the reality of what’s happening in China and other closed countries, bringing transparency and accountability where there is none. RFA’s breakthrough reporting in Xinjiang led the first Trump Administration to make its declaration of genocide against the Chinese government.

Today’s notice not only disenfranchises the nearly 60 million people who turn to RFA’s reporting on a weekly basis to learn the truth, but it also benefits America’s adversaries at our own expense. We plan to challenge this short-sighted order and pursue whatever means necessary to continue our work and protect our courageous journalists.

Images of "Enola Gay," the aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan are among those targeted by the U.S. military in an initiative to eliminate content related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

They are among a number of photos unrelated to DEI that have been mistakenly flagged, including those from an Army Corps of Engineers dredging project in California, seemingly because an engineer in the image had the last name "Gay."

For some, the adverts that precede the start of a film are the bane of a trip to the cinema; for others, they are a useful buffer as you stand in the popcorn queue.

But for one man in India, the lengthy marathon of cinema advertising was so infuriating that he took the matter to the courts – and won.

Abhishek MR, a 30-year-old man from the southern city of Bangalore, had booked a trip to the cinema with friends in December last year to watch wartime drama Sam Bahadur.

But while the scheduled time he had booked the ticket for was 4.05pm, he had to sit through 25 minutes of adverts for upcoming features and commercial items such as homewares, mobile phones and cars before the film actually began.

Having planned to return to work straight after the film, Abhishek MR was angered by what he felt was a costly disruption to his life. He filed a lawsuit against PVR Inox, India’s largest cinema multiplex chain, stating that: “The complainant could not attend other arrangements and appointments which were scheduled for the day and has faced losses that cannot be calculated in terms of money as compensation.”

An Israeli man attacked an Israeli woman with an axe in Jerusalem on Wednesday, mistakenly believing she was Christian, Anadolu reported yesterday, citing Israel’s Channel 13.

According to the media reports, police suspect that the attack, which took place in Jerusalem’s Old City, was motivated by “hatred of Christians”.

Eyewitnesses told the channel that the suspect shouted “Christian” at the victim before violently attacking her inside her home, leaving her with severe injuries. The suspect then fled the scene.

Florida police arrested a 27-year-old Jewish man, Mordechai Brafman, on suspicion of attempting to murder two men he believed were Palestinian. The victims were an Israeli father and son visiting from Israel.

According to investigators, Brafman overtook their car in Miami Beach, made a U-turn, exited his vehicle and fired 17 shots at them. Local authorities said Brafman didn’t know the victims and there was no prior confrontation between the sides.

Brafman drove home after the shooting and was arrested shortly after. He is charged with attempted murder. While police have not officially determined a motive, they said: “It should be noted that, while in custody in our interview room, the defendant spontaneously stated that while he was driving his truck, he saw two Palestinians and shot and killed both. The victims and the defendant do not know each other,” Police added that he told investigators he had killed them.

Brafman, a married plumber, was interviewed last year by Florida media after vandals targeted a Miami Beach bagel shop displaying an Israeli flag. "It's just horrifying," he said at the time. "I’d like to see more unity, for people to fight less with each other and be more together."

The Onion actually predicted this in 2019:

Netanyahu Defends New Alliance With Israel’s Far-Right Aryan Supremacy Party