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By: AP and Toi Staff

Internet access across the war-torn nation of Yemen collapsed early Friday without explanation, web monitors said.

The outage began early Friday around 0000 GMT and saw all traffic halt at YemenNet, the country’s main provider to some 10 million users, which is now controlled by Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.

Both NetBlocks, a group tracking internet outages, and the internet services company CloudFlare reported the outage. Neither offered a cause for the collapse.

“Data shows that the issue has impacted connectivity at a national level as well,” CloudFlare said.

Several hours later, some service was restored, though access remained troubled. In a statement to the Houthi-controlled SABA state news agency, Yemen’s Public Telecom Corp. blamed the outage on maintenance.

“Internet service will return after the completion of the maintenance work,” the statement quotes an unidentified official as saying.

A previous outage occurred in January 2022 when the Saudi-led coalition battling the Houthis in Yemen bombed a telecommunications building in the Red City port city of Hodeida. There was no immediate word of a similar attack in this case.

The undersea FALCON cable carries internet into Yemen through the Hodeida port along the Red Sea for TeleYemen. The FALCON cable has another landing in Yemen’s far eastern port of Ghaydah as well, but the majority of Yemen’s population lives in its west along the Red Sea.

The outage came after a series of recent drone and missile attacks by the Houthis targeting Israel amid its campaign of airstrikes and a ground offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. That includes a claimed missile strike Thursday again targeting the Israeli port city of Eilat on the Red Sea. Israel said its long-range Arrow air defense system intercepted the missile.

In recent weeks, the Houthis have attPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

By: Staff

The incident happened during a Philippine mission to deliver provisions to a tiny garrison on Second Thomas Shoal, which is part of the Spratly Islands and a longstanding flashpoint between the countries.

China deploys coast guard and other vessels to patrol the hotly contested region and asserts its claim to almost the entire South China Sea.

Manila said the Chinese coast guard and other vessels "recklessly harassed, blocked, executed dangerous maneuvers" as they tried to "illegally impede or obstruct" Friday's mission.

A Chinese coast guard vessel fired a water cannon against one of two supply boats, according to the Philippines' National Task Force for the West Philippine Sea.

The supply mission was also the target of "extremely reckless and dangerous harassment at close proximity" by Chinese boats inside the shoal, it said in a statement, adding that the Philippine vessels still managed to deliver their cargo.

China, however, said it "took control measures" against two Philippine transport boats and three coast guard vessels it insisted were in Chinese waters.

"The Philippines' actions infringe on China's territorial sovereignty," China Coast Guard spokesperson Gan Yu said.

"We urge the Philippines to immediately stop its infringing actions."

Second Thomas Shoal is about 200 kilometres (124 miles) from the western Philippine island of Palawan, and more than 1,000 kilometres from China's nearest major landmass, Hainan island.

A handful of Filipino troops are stationed on the crumbling BRP Sierra Madre, which the Philippine Navy grounded on the reef in 1999 to check China's advance in the waters.

The troops depend on the resupply missions for their survival.

The task force said the Philippine embassy Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

By: Michael Lee

The Air Force and Space Force are raising the maximum age applicants can enlist as the services continue to search for ways to alleviate ongoing recruiting struggles.

Those interested in joining the Air Force or Space Force will have until they are 42-years-old to sign up, a three-year rise in the age limit that was previously set at 39, according to a report from Military.com. The change means that the two branches will now be accepting the oldest recruits of any Department of Defense military branch

"Air Force Recruiting is glad to see a change in the age component of the accessions process," Brig. Gen. Chris Amrhein, the Air Force Recruiting Service commander, said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital. "This change, which aligns us with DOD accessions policy, is about identifying opportunity for talent out there. But make no mistake, we are not lowering any of our standards; someone who is 42 still has to meet the same accession requirements as younger applicants."

The change comes after the Air Force announced last month that it had missed its active duty recruiting goals by 11%, falling nearly 3,000 recruits short of the 26,877 that the service said it needed, according to Military.com.

The failure to meet recruiting goals extended to other branches as well, the report noted, with the Army and Navy also falling short of this year's goal. Only the Marine Corps was able to meet its recruiting goals this year, though the report notes that the branch "squeaked by" and has also struggled to meet National Guard and officer goals.

Asked about the timing of the policy change, an Air Force spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the move was made to better "align with current DOD policy."

"This opens the aperture to allow more otherwise qualified Americans the opportunity to serve. The accession age of 42 allows an Airman or Guardian, officer or enlisted, to serve a full 20 years," the spokesperson said.

The Air Force also brushed ofPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

By: Maroosha Muzaffar

Israel’s communications minister accused Gaza-based journalists of four western media outlets of having “prior knowledge” of the Hamas attacks on 7 October.

The accusations were levelled against journalists of the New York Times, Reuters, CNN, and the Associated Press. All of the four organisations have categorically denied the allegations.

In a letter to these organisations, Shlomo Karhi claimed that the journalists, including photojournalists, “may have maintained a troubling connection with the perpetrators”. He added: “It is alleged that some of your employees were present, documenting these horrors, effectively becoming participants in this horrifying event”.

The New York Times in its statement said there was “no evidence” to support such claims about its freelancer in Gaza. “The accusation that anyone at The New York Times had advance knowledge of the Hamas attacks or accompanied Hamas terrorists during the attacks is untrue and outrageous. It is reckless to make such allegations, putting our journalists on the ground in Israel and Gaza at risk.”

Reuters said it “categorically denies that it had prior knowledge of the attack or that we embedded journalists with Hamas on Oct 7”.

The Israeli government demanded clarifications from the four media outlets after an article titled “Broken Borders: AP & Reuters Pictures of Hamas Atrocities Raise Ethical Questions” was published by Honest Reporting. This website claims to expose “anti-Israel media bias”.

The article claims that “on October 7, Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel. Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working for the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies whose early morning presence at the breached border area raises serious ethical questions”.

Mr Karhi wrote on X: “Terrorists disguised as journalists? I demand immediate clarPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

By: Arthi Nachiappan

Three years ago in Detroit, Robert Williams arrived home from work to find the police waiting at his front door, ready to arrest him for a crime he hadn't committed.

Facial recognition technology used by officers had mistaken Williams for a suspect who had stolen thousands of dollars worth of watches.

The system linked a blurry CCTV image of the suspect with Williams in what is considered to be the first known case of wrongful arrest owing to the use of the AI-based technology.

The experience was "infuriating", Mr Williams said.

"Imagine knowing you didn't do anything wrong… And they show up to your home and arrest you in your driveway before you can really even get out the car and hug and kiss your wife or see your kids."

Mr Williams, 45, was released after 30 hours in custody, and has filed a lawsuit, which is ongoing, against Detroit's police department asking for compensation and a ban on the use of facial recognition software to identify suspects.

There are six known instances of wrongful arrest in the US, and the victims in all cases were black people.

Artificial intelligence reflects racial bias in society, because it is trained on real-world data.

A US government study published in 2019 found that facial recognition technology was between 10 and 100 times more likely to misidentify black people than white people.

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This is because the technology is trained on predominantly white datasets. This is because it doesn't have as much information on what people of other races look like, so it's more likely to make mistakes.

There are growing calls for that bias to be addressed if companies and policymakers want to use it for future decision-making.

Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

By: Timothy Jankowski

This week, former president Donald Trump made news when he suggested that he would be open to having Tucker Carlson as his vice president. In a previous late September speech to Michigan auto workers, Mr. Trump indicated that he did not see a potential vice presidential candidate among the current crop of rivals running against him in the GOP primary. With all due deference to Mr. Trump, I believe there is one clear choice who stands out above not just the primary candidates, but also any other candidates, and that person is Vivek Ramaswamy.

Is it because Mr. Ramaswamy is young, energetic, and charismatic and has a number of new ideas? Well, that certainly helps, but the real reason for choosing him comes down to, at the risk of sounding racist…math.

Donald Trump will enter the general election season with a lock on 233 electoral votes. He will win a supermajority of states in the South, the Mountain West, and the agricultural Midwest. This means that in order to achieve the 270 votes necessary to win the presidency, he will need to win just three additional swing states: Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. This is where Vivek comes into play.

Trump lost Georgia in 2020 by approximately 12,000 votes, so he needs to…ahem…find those votes among the population in 2024. Now, it just so happens that the city of Atlanta is home to approximately 140,000 people of Indian descent, of which almost 70% vote Democrat. This means that poaching just 10% of the votes from that population would result in a Trump win in one of his three critical states.

So, were I Donald Trump, I would name Vivek Ramaswamy my V.P. pick and immediately send him to live in North Atlanta for the next eight months, where his entire job would be to stop in at every Indian restaurant, temple, clothing store, wedding, and social event and press the flesh in an Iowa-style campaign to win over that 10% (or more) population that was planning on voting Democrat.

With a personal fortune of over $600 million, Mr. Ramasway could be exceptioPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

By: Joe Fisher

Nov. 10 (UPI) The Israel-Hamas war has provoked large-scale divisions on U.S. college campuses, where students lining up behind Israel and Palestine call on their universities for support of their views and in some cases to condemn the other side.

Dueling demonstrations have veered into accusations of hate speech, with students on both sides saying they feel unsupported, or even unsafe walking around campus.

The situation has left administrators walking a fine line between maintaining the academic freedom of giving space to diverse viewpoints and keeping students from harm, while facing public pressure to stake a position.

Scholars say universities risk their moral authority when they take sides, as some have learned since the war started with Hamas' invasion of Israel on Oct. 7.

"Universities should just stay quiet and as neutral as possible," Steve Sanders, associate dean of academic affairs at Indiana University, told UPI. "Faculty and scholars – those are the people who can stay engaged."

Indiana faculty have worked to emphasize the humanity of the situation.

"We are conditioned to think in tribal terms. A much more healthy way to look at this is from a humanistic perspective," said Abdulkader Sinno, an associate professor of political science who is of Muslim heritage. "Those who see the humanity in each other come from all groups. They are natural allies of each other."

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2023/11/10/college-campus-israel-palestine-debate-indiana-cornell/4431699565767/

By: Greg Norman

Iran’s foreign minister is warning that an expansion of the Israel-Hamas war has now "become inevitable" as military activity is escalating inside the Gaza Strip, a report says.

Hossein Amirabdollahian made the comment during a telephone conversation with his Qatari counterpart Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al Thani last night, according to Reuters, citing a report on Iranian state television.

"Due to the expansion of the intensity of the war against Gaza's civilian residents, expansion of the scope of the war has become inevitable," Amirabdollahian reportedly said.

Israel continued to bombard Hamas inside Gaza on Friday, the 34th day of the war. Overnight, the Israel Defense Forces said it killed a handful of Hamas terrorists, including two commanders who participated in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

The IDF also reported that 37 of its soldiers have been killed since the ground portion of the fight against Hamas began, according to Fox News’ Trey Yingst.

American troops in Iraq and Syria have been repeatedly attacked by groups likely backed by Iran since the war started.

In response to one of the recent incidents in Syria, U.S. military forces conducted an airstrike against a weapons facility in the country on Wednesday.

"U.S. military forces conducted a self-defense strike on a facility in eastern Syria used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and affiliated groups," Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said in a statement. "This strike was conducted by two U.S. F-15s against a weapons storage facility. This precision self-defense strike is a response to a series of attacks against U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria by IRGC-Quds Force affiliates."

A U.S. defense official also confirmed to Fox News on Wednesday that the Iranian-backed Houthis shot down a US MQ-9 Reaper drone near the Yemeni coast.

By: Associated Press

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The leaders of Polish opposition parties signed a coalition agreement on Friday that lays out a roadmap for governing the nation over the next four years.

The parties collectively won a majority of votes in last month’s national election. Their candidate to be the next prime minister is Donald Tusk, a former prime minister who leads the largest of the opposition parties, the centrist Civic Platform.

Tusk said the parties worked to seal their agreement before the Independence Day holiday on Saturday, adding that, “We wanted to show that we are ready to take responsibility for our homeland.”

Speaking ahead of the signing ceremony in the Polish parliament, Tusk said the agreement would offer a set of “signposts and recommendations” for the government he hopes to lead.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/nov/10/polands-opposition-party-leaders-sign-coalition-de/

By: Mat Nashed

Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) besieged a camp for displaced people on November 2 after attacking a nearby army base in West Darfur. Over the next three days, the paramilitary group committed what may amount to the single largest mass killing since the civil war erupted in April.

Local monitors told Al Jazeera that about 1,300 people were killed, 2,000 injured and 310 remain missing.

“They went house to house to search for men and killed each one they found,” said Montesser Saddam*, who barely escaped the killing and arrived in Chad on Sunday. “There were so many corpses in the streets.”

The latest atrocities are part of a wider campaign by the RSF and its allied militias to eradicate the non-Arab Masalit tribe from West Darfur, according to activists and survivors.

Since the start of Sudan’s civil war, the United Nations and Western governments have condemned the systematic killing and displacement of the Masalit from their land. But the criticism and concern have not deterred the RSF from carrying out more atrocities.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/10/corpses-on-streets-sudans-rsf-kills-1300-in-darfur-monitors-say

By: Justin Spike

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary‘s prime minister said Friday he does not support moving forward on negotiations on Ukraine‘s future membership in the European Union, signaling again that his country could pose a major roadblock to Kyiv’s ambitions to join the bloc.

EU leaders are to decide in mid-December whether Ukraine should be formally invited to begin talks to join the 27-member union, with Hungary seen as a potential obstacle. Unanimity among all member states is required to admit a new country into the bloc, giving Hungary‘s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a powerful veto.

The EU’s executive branch on Wednesday recommended that Ukraine should be permitted to open membership talks once it has addressed some shortfalls. But in an interview with state radio on Friday, Orbán said the embattled country is nowhere near gaining membership in the world’s largest trading bloc.

“Ukraine is in no way ready to negotiate on its ambitions to join the European Union,” Orbán said. “The clear Hungarian position is that the negotiations must not begin.”

Orbán’s government has refused to supply Ukraine with weapons in its war against Russia and has threatened to veto EU financial aid packages to Kyiv. It also accuses Ukraine of violating the rights of an ethnic Hungarian minority in western Ukraine by restricting its use of the Hungarian language in schools.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/nov/10/hungarys-orban-says-negotiations-on-ukraines-futur/

By: Staff

A sharp rise in the number of asylum seekers arriving in Germany has contributed to a more-than-50% rise in homelessness in the EU state in the past 12 months, according to a report by an emergency housing assistance organization.

Increased rents, a lack of social housing and soaring costs of living have limited accommodation options for about one million refugees fleeing the conflict in Ukraine, The Times newspaper reported, citing new data from the Federal Association for Aid to the Homeless (Bag W). Additionally, about 148,000 non-Ukrainians applied for asylum in the EU state in 2022, further compounding the country’s scarcity of available housing.

“Inflation, elevated costs and rising rents are bearing down heavily on households in Germany with weak incomes,” Bag W’s director Werena Rosenke told The Times. The most vulnerable, Rosenke added, are “low-income single-person households, single parents and couples with many children.”

Last year, about 607,000 people were at least temporarily homeless in Germany, Bag W said, compared to 383,000 in 2021. This was the highest count since 2018, with asylum seekers making up 411,000 of the figure (71%). While the homeless statistics were not broken down by nationality, January data from the country’s Federal Statistics Office said that Ukrainian nationals accounted for just under a third of the homeless population.

About 50,000 of Germany’s homeless were forced to sleep on the streets, according to Bag W’s analysis. The rest were able to find temporary accommodation, such as shelters or at the residences of friends or acquaintances.

Last weekend, a poll conducted by Der Spiegel concluded that about 40% of 125 local authorities in the ‘safe haven towns’ alliance –sometimes known as ‘Sanctuary Cities’– are close to reaching their immigrant-reception limits. Another survey, this one by Hildesheim University, found that about 40% of the 600 districts polled were “overwhelmed” or “in emergency mode.”

Bag W’s report also noted that a large drop in the social housiPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

By: Hannah Grossman

A former Christian student at a Chicago public school reacted to winning $150K after she alleged in a lawsuit that while on campus she was forced into participating in Hindu rituals, according to the original complaint.

"I'm a very strong Christian," Mariyah Green said in an interview with Fox News Digital. She said a woman who was teaching her meditation in mandated "Quiet Time" asked her to bow to an image of a foreign deity she did not recognize. The woman teaching the meditation said it would help her internalize the mantras and bring her to "Zen."

Green believes that she was nearly forced into idol worship. "Like, I'm in school right now, why is we learning how to meditate in this way? I just knew it wasn't right. So that's what made me take the initiative and go home to tell my parent and my auntie, who was my pastor at the time, that I didn't feel comfortable with what they was enforcing on me at school."

"The only time I kneel was when I was at the altar at church when I'm praying and I'm kneeling down for God because that was a way that we was taught, but not the kneeling to that idol. It was inappropriate," she said.

The complaint, originally filed by law firm Mauck & Baker, in February, alleged that the compelled rituals violated her deeply-held religious beliefs during the "Quiet Time" program implemented at Chicago Public Schools. The district said it terminated the program in 2020 and denied that it at any time violated any of its students' constitutional rights.

"CPS used was Quiet Time — a meditation-based social-emotional learning tool… which develops programs to serve populations dealing with violence and trauma," the district said in a statement.

The program encompassed the practice of "Transcendental Meditation" and the repetition of "mantras," which were "fundamentally religious in nature," according to the complaint. The students were informed the mantras were "meaningless words," but after Green did some research she found they were actually "the names of HindPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

By: Staff

French oil and gas major TotalEnergies is facing pressure to halt the construction of a pipeline from oil fields in Uganda to a port in Tanzania, after a report found that it had damaged hundreds of graves along the project route.

Released on Thursday by the New York-based climate watchdog GreenFaith, the report claimed that TotalEnergies “has consistently failed to respect local customs and traditions related to the treatment of graves.”

“The company has routinely disregarded the pleas of local families to respect graves, ignored information which families or community members shared about the location of unmarked graves, and provided inadequate, delayed, or no compensation for the harm caused,” it stated.

TotalEnergies has been planning to construct the world's largest heated crude oil pipeline, the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), in partnership with the China National Offshore Oil Corporation and governments of Ugandan and Tanzanian, since 2017.

If completed, the 1,443-kilometer pipeline project, which is expected to displace more than 100,000 people, will result in dozens of wellsites, hundreds of kilometers of roads, camps, and other infrastructure.

However, TotalEnergies, the project's largest shareholder with a 62% stake, has long faced legal action from activists for alleged human rights and climate violations.

In June, five French and Ugandan NGOs sued the oil giant for a second time in a Paris civil court after an earlier fast-track attempt was dismissed. The groups accused TotalEnergies of causing “serious harm” to locals, particularly with regard to their rights to land and food, as well as undermining the Paris climate accord through its EACOP and Tilenga oil development project operations.

The “As if nothing is sacred” report by GreenFaith found that the construction is a “spiritual assault” on local communities, aside from environmental and human rights concerns. The findings are based on field surveys in three districtPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

By: Maroosha Muzaffar

An Australian police officer who threatened to shoot his colleague over Top Gun: Maverick spoilers has been sentenced, the local media reported.

Dominic Francis Gaynor took his weapon out of the holster and pointed it at 26-year-old probationary constable Morgan Royston after he told Mr Gaynor that he had already watched the Tom Cruise-starrer and would give out a spoiler.

Constable Gaynor, 30, responded by saying “Don’t spoil the movie, c***. I’ll shoot you”, according to the court documents cited by Australian media outlets.

The incident took place in May. After this episode, Mr Royston left the police force and reportedly struggled with depression.

On Thursday, a court handed Mr Gaynor a two-year good behaviour bond and a conviction, ABC News reported.

The court documents said Mr Gaynor “pointed his firearm at the vicinity of the complainant and held it stationary for five seconds”.

“The offender’s finger was on the receiver and not the trigger. The offender was laughing throughout this incident.”

Mr Gaynor has pleaded guilty to carrying a firearm with disregard for the complainant’s safety.

Mr Royston told the court that he would never forget the “overwhelming shock and fear” he felt when Mr Gaynor took out his gun.

“I have completely lost the trust I had and my admiration for the NSW Police Force,” he said.

“When I see a police officer now, I feel compelled to watch them and check their hand is not on their firearm.”

Chris Micali, Mr Gaynor’s lawyer, said his client made an awful mistake. “This is a case where the skylarking and tomfoolery in an employment context has gone awry,” he told the court.

Post too long. Click here to view the full text.