Lok Sabha Elections Phase 3: From Amit Shah to Dimple Yadav, here are the bigwigs in fray tomorrow
Some of the notable figures vying for victory in this phase of the elections include Union Home Minister Amit Shah, rebel BJP leader KS Eshwarappa, Union Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia, Dimple Yadav, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Supriya Sule.
Tamil Nadu TNDGE +2 Result 2024 declared: 94.56% pass TN HSC 12th, direct link here
Students to access their TN HSC scorecards via the official websites – dge.tn.gov.in and tnresults.nic.in. The Tamil Nadu 12th grade results for 2024 were declared on Monday.
Weather update: IMD predicts rainfall, thunderstorms in several states this week; check full forecast
Scattered light to moderate rainfall is also predicted in east Uttar Pradesh, Haryana-Chandigarh-Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, and Vidarbha.
No arrests as Los Angeles police clear USC pro-Palestinian encampment
Students and other protesters have called for universities to divest their financial ties to Israel. Protests against Israel’s war on Gaza continue across university campuses in the United States as graduation season gets under way, with police in Los Angeles making no arrests as they cleared a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of Southern California (USC). After USC requested assistance, police entered the encampment about 5am local time (12:00 GMT) on Sunday and worked with campus police to remove tents as students peacefully left the area, police said. The move comes a day after at least 25 pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested as police cleared an encampment at the University of Virginia (UVA). Tensions flared at UVA’s campus in Charlottesville, where protests had been largely peaceful until Saturday morning, when police officers in riot gear were seen in a video moving on an encampment on the campus’s lawn and cuffing some demonstrators with zip ties. Campus protests have emerged as a political flashpoint during a US election year as Democratic President Joe Biden seeks a second term in office. Police have arrested more than 2,000 people during protests at dozens of campuses around the country. Students and other protesters have called for universities to divest their financial ties to Israel and push for a ceasefire. Under mounting political pressure, Biden on Thursday broke his silence on the campus unrest, saying Americans have the right to demonstrate but not to unleash violence. Many colleges, including Columbia University in New York City, have called in police to quell protests. At the University of Texas in Austin on Sunday, drones deployed by police circled overhead as about 200 pro-Palestinian demonstrators rallied, with about 50 onlookers, local media reported. The speakers advised fellow demonstrators to remain peaceful and not engage the police. Adam, a Palestine Solidarity Committee organiser protesting at the University of Texas at Austin, told Al Jazeera that Palestinian students recognise that American students support Palestine. “We will no longer deal in the blood of Palestinians,” he said. Al Jazeera’s Phil Lavelle, reporting from the University of California Irvine, said the situation there was relatively calm and talks between the protesters and the university administration were ongoing. “We understand there is a protest in San Francisco. Here at UC Irvine, things are very calm,” he said. Separately, there have been at least four bomb threats at New York area synagogues over the weekend, police said, but none have proven credible. New York Governor Kathy Hochul said on X late Saturday: “We will not tolerate individuals sowing fear & antisemitism. Those responsible must be held accountable for their despicable actions.” At least 34,683 people have been killed, mostly women and children, and 78,018 wounded in Israel’s war on Gaza since October, according to Palestinian authorities. Israel launched the assault on Gaza after Hamas led an attack on southern Israel, killing at least 1,139 people, mostly civilians, according to an Al Jazeera tally based on Israeli statistics. Adblock test (Why?)
At least 75 killed, more than 100 others missing in Brazil floods
More than 88,000 people are displaced as floods hit Brazil’s southern Rio Grande do Sul state. Massive floods in Brazil’s southern Rio Grande do Sul state have killed at least 75 people over the last seven days, and another 103 were reported missing, local authorities have said. Damage from the rains also forced more than 88,000 people from their homes, state civil defence authorities said on Sunday. Approximately 16,000 took refuge in schools, gymnasiums and other temporary shelters. The floods left a wake of devastation, including landslides, washed-out roads and collapsed bridges across the state. Operators reported electricity and communications cuts. More than 800,000 people are without a water supply, according to the civil defence, which cited figures from water company Corsan. “I repeat and insist: the devastation to which we are being subjected is unprecedented,” state Governor Eduardo Leite said on Sunday morning. He had previously said that the state will need a “kind of ‘Marshall Plan’ to be rebuilt”. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva visited Rio Grande do Sul for a second time on Sunday, accompanied by Defence Minister Jose Mucio, Finance Minister Fernando Haddad and Environment Minister Marina Silva, among others. The leader and his team surveyed the flooded streets of the state capital, Porto Alegre, from a helicopter. “We need to stop running behind disasters. We need to see in advance what calamities might happen and we need to work,” President Lula told journalists afterwards. A man walks by a farm destroyed by the currents of the flash floods caused by heavy rains in Jacarezinho, Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil [Diego Vara/Reuters] The Guaiba River reached a record level of 5.33m (17.5 feet) on Sunday morning, surpassing levels seen during a historic 1941 deluge, when the river reached 4.76m (15.6 feet). During Sunday mass at the Vatican, Pope Francis said he was praying for the state’s population. “May the Lord welcome the dead and comfort their families and those who had to abandon their homes,” he said. The downpour started on Monday and was expected to last through Sunday. In some areas, such as valleys, mountain slopes and cities, more than 300mm (11.8 inches) of rain fell in less than a week, according to Brazil’s National Institute of Meteorology, known by the Portuguese acronym INMET, on Thursday. Rescue workers evacuate a flood victim in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil [Renan Mattos/Reuters] The heavy rains were the fourth such environmental disaster in the state in a year, following floods in July, September and November 2023 that killed 75 people. Weather across South America is affected by the climate phenomenon El Nino, a periodic, naturally occurring event that warms surface waters in the Equatorial Pacific region. In Brazil, El Nino has historically caused droughts in the north and intense rainfall in the south. This year, the impacts of El Nino have been particularly dramatic, with a historic drought in the Amazon. Scientists say extreme weather is happening more frequently due to human-caused climate change. “These tragedies will continue to happen, increasingly worse and more frequent,” said Suely Araujo, a public policy coordinator at the Climate Observatory, a network of dozens of environmental and social groups. Brazil needs to adjust to the effects of climate change, she said in a Friday statement, referring to a process known as adaptation. Adblock test (Why?)
Al Jazeera vows to continue coverage of Gaza war despite Israeli ban
NewsFeed Al Jazeera has condemned Israel’s closure of the network that has seen its offices raided and the channel go dark. The Qatar-based media outlet ‘affirms its right to continue to provide news and information to its global audiences’. Published On 5 May 20245 May 2024 Adblock test (Why?)
New revelations in Florida documents trial put Trump on offense against ‘deranged’ special counsel
Former President Trump is calling for Special Counsel Jack Smith’s arrest after the prosecutors handling the 45th president’s classified documents case admitted seized documents are no longer in their original order and sequence. “Now, Deranged Jack has admitted in a filing in front of Judge Cannon to what I have been saying happened since the Illegal RAID on my home, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida – That he and his team committed blatant Evidence Tampering by mishandling the very Boxes they used as a pretext to bring this Fake Case,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Friday. “These deeply Illegal actions by the Politicized ‘Persecutors’ mandate that this whole Witch Hunt be DROPPED IMMEDIATELY. END THE ‘BOXES HOAXES.’ MAGA2024!” “ARREST DERANGED JACK SMITH. HE IS A CRIMINAL!” Trump added in a follow-up post. Prosecutors admitted in a court filing on Friday that “there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.” The prosecutors had previously told the court that the documents were “in their original, intact form as seized.” JUDGE UNSEALS FBI FILES IN TRUMP CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS CASE, INCLUDING DETAILED TIMELINE OF MAR-A-LAGO RAID “The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” a footnote in the filing reads. The filing comes after one of Trump’s co-defendants in the case asked for a delay as lawyers were having trouble figuring out the origin of some of the documents in the evidence boxes. The FBI agents seized 33 boxes of documents in August 2022 from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, spurring another legal battle that Trump has called a “scam.” The investigation is overseen by special prosecutor Smith, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed to the job, and has charged Trump with 40 felony counts, including allegedly violating the Espionage Act, making false statements to investigators and conspiracy to obstruct justice. GOP SLAMS ‘WEAPONIZATION’ OF DOJ AFTER TRUMP’S MAR-A-LAGO RAIDED BY FBI; DEMS CALL IT ‘ACCOUNTABILITY’ Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and slammed the case as an “Election Inference Scam” promoted by the Biden administration and “Deranged Jack Smith.” The case is slated to head to trial on May 20, though the date may change, with presiding Judge Aileen Cannon underacting a trove of documents in the lead-up to the trial that have provided notable updates to the case. Judge Cannon recently unredacted more than 300 pages of evidence in the case, including emails and conversations related to the Biden administration’s contact with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) the year prior to the documents’ seizure from Trump’s home, Real Clear Investigations recently reported. Biden has previously publicly said he was not involved in the case, though the filings show other White House officials were involved in the early stages of the investigation. TRUMP SAYS MAR-A-LAGO HOME IN FLORIDA ‘UNDER SIEGE’ BY FBI AGENTS The unredacted documents allege that just weeks after Trump left office in 2021, the White House Office of Records Management under the Biden administration began working with NARA “on exaggerated claims related to records handling under the Presidential Records Act,” Trump’s attorney wrote in a court filing to compel discovery. The Archives’ general counsel, Gary Stern, sent a letter to Trump’s Presidential Records Act representatives in May 2021 asking the whereabouts of “roughly two dozen boxes of original Presidential records [that] have not been transferred to NARA.” Stern explained that he “had several conversations” with White House Office of Records Management officials where they discussed “concerns” regarding Trump’s possession of the documents, according to Real Clear Investigations. Stern’s letter detailed that the team was looking for “original correspondence between President Trump and North Korean Leader Kim Jung-un” and “the letter that President Obama left for President Trump on his first day in office,” Real Clear reported. TRUMP’S LAWYERS PUSH FOR DISMISSAL OF CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS CASE, ARGUING ‘PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY’ He added that he understood that transitioning administrations was “very chaotic” and it could take “several more months” to transfer the documents, the Federalist reported. By June of that year, a national archivist appointed by former President Barack Obama, David Ferriero, told the Trump team he was running “out of patience,” unredacted filings show. The filing states that Ferriero dismissed “good-faith efforts by President Trump’s PRA representatives to address issues raised by NARA.” The filing continued that Ferriero allegedly “threatened” a PRA representative for Trump in August 2021, saying he presumed 24 boxes of “alleged – and non-existent” documents were “destroyed,” and that he was taking the issue to the DOJ. Ferriero and Stern contacted DOJ officials and Deputy White House Counsel Jonathan Su. Stern met with Su at the White House, according to White House logs reported by Real Clear Investigations. “At this point, I am assuming [the boxes] have been destroyed. In which case, I am obligated to report it to the Hill, the DOJ, and the White House,” Ferriero wrote in a warning to Trump’s team in August 2021, according to the documents. “To my knowledge, nothing has been destroyed,” a Trump representative responded. TRUMP DEMANDS JUSTICE DEPARTMENT ‘IMMEDIATELY’ DROP CHARGES AGAINST HIM IN CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS CASE AFTER BIDEN DECISION The unredacted filing states that in September, Stern emailed Ferriero and a deputy archivist that he had “reached out to DOJ counsel about this issue,” and that “WH Counsel is now aware of the issue.” Another email, sent on Sept. 15, details that Stern reportedly spoke with Su to “get him up to speed on the issue and the dispute whether there are 12 or 24 missing boxes,” which was followed by another email that “[White House counsel] is ready to set up a call to discuss the Trump boxes.” Fox News Digital reached out to the White House for comment Sunday, but did not immediately receive a reply. Trump’s team delivered 15 boxes of documents to NARA in January 2022, with the Archives’ White House liaison director reporting back
Biden campaign co-chair brushes off Sanders’ comparison of campus chaos to Vietnam: ‘Over-exaggeration’
President Biden’s co-chair for the 2024 campaign brushed off Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ comparison of the rampant anti-Israel protests on college campuses to the 1968 election, arguing Biden could be handling his own Vietnam situation. The national co-chair of Biden’s campaign shut down Sanders’ comparison in comment to CNN on Sunday, calling it an “over-exaggeration.” “This is a very different circumstance,” Mitch Landrieu told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday. “I think that people who actually lived through that very difficult time, they would say that this isn’t comparable. However, that is not to say that this is not a very serious matter.” Last week, Sanders joined CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and reflected on the 1960s, when President Lydon B. Johnson did not run for re-election in 1968, and made a comparison between Biden’s handling of college protests to Johnson’s lack of support for the Vietnam War ahead of the general election. BIDEN RIPPED FOR DECRYING ‘ISLAMOPHOBIA’ AMID ANTISEMITIC CAMPUS PROTESTS: ‘YET ANOTHER EQUIVOCATION’ “I am thinking back and other people are making this reference that this may be Biden’s Vietnam,” Sanders said. PRESIDENT BIDEN CONDEMNS VIOLENT ANTI-ISRAEL PROTESTS, WON’T CALL UP NATIONAL GUARD “[Former President] Lyndon Johnson in many respects was a very, very good president. Domestically he brought forth some major pieces of legislation. He chose not to run in ’68 because of opposition to his views on Vietnam, and I worry very much that President Biden is putting himself in a position where he has alienated, not just young people, but a lot of the Democratic base, in terms of his views on Israel and this war,” Sanders continued. College protesters and outside agitators have descended on college campuses from coast to coast since last month, establishing encampments, such as the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that was on Columbia’s campus before police removed it, where they demand schools cut all financial ties to Israel. Amid the college chaos, agitators and radicals have also called for the deaths of Israel, the U.S., and pledged support for Hamas’ attacks on Israel. Biden has condemned the violence and antisemitism on campus, but took days to publicly address the nation last week as campus protests intensified. BIDEN ONCE RIPPED ‘ANTISEMITIC BILE’ BUT NOW FACES OWN ‘CHARLOTTESVILLE MOMENT’ “There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab-Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American,” Biden said last week. His comment was ripped for denouncing Islamophobia and antisemitism in the same breath, with critics comparing it to former President Donald Trump’s comments denouncing the Charlottesville riots in 2017, when the 45th president said there were “very fine people on both sides.” IVY LEAGUE ANTI-ISRAEL AGITATORS’ PROTESTS SPIRAL INTO ‘ACTUAL TERROR ORGANIZATION,’ PROFESSOR WARNS Landrieu continued in his comments that Biden has shown “very strong” leadership amid the protests. “First of all, the First Amendment is critically important. The president has always believed that people want to have the opportunity to redress their grievances against the government. This is not something new,” Landrieu said. DEARBORN ACTIVISTS’ PUSH TO BAIL ON BIDEN SPREADS TO OTHER KEY BATTLEGROUND STATES “The president has been very strong about this from the beginning, and the president came out the other day, and as he said, as he has always said, he understands that people have a right to protest, but they have to do so peacefully,” he continued. “But when it turns violent, that’s when things have to end.” Critics of the president’s handling, however, have condemned Biden for taking nine days to address the anti-Israel campus agitators on camera. The White House had condemned the hate and violence in various comments to the media, but the president did not address the nation on-camera until Thursday last week. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP “Very passionate opinions on both sides of this issue,” Landrieu continued. “The president has been handling it very, very well and he’s going to continue to do so.”
Fetterman says anti-Israel campus protests ‘working against peace’ in Middle East, not putting hostages first
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., on Sunday slammed the anti-Israel protests that have taken over college campuses nationwide as working against peace in the Middle East, adding that he’s frustrated that those taken hostage by Hamas during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel have not been put first. Fetterman, who has been outspoken against the protesters, wondered why they are demonstrating against Israel and not Hamas, which he says has refused a recent cease-fire deal during his appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “These kinds of protests haven’t been helpful, and ironically, they are actually working against peace in the Middle East as well,” Fetterman said. “And it’s also very strange to me that they’re not actually protesting for a cease-fire now. There’s been a very valid cease-fire that’s been on the table now and Hamas has refused to take that on.” “And I don’t know why if we’re going to protest, why aren’t we protesting that, demanding Hamas to take that kind of a cease-fire,” the senator continued. “And that would end all of the trauma and chaos going on there in Gaza.” BIDEN ADMINISTRATION PUTS HOLD ON US AMMUNITION SHIPMENT TO ISRAEL: REPORT Fetterman went on to say that he does not support any kind of conditions being placed on Israel, and instead he put responsibility for the current situation entirely on Hamas. HAMAS KINGPIN HOLED UP DEEP BELOW GAZA, SURROUNDED BY HOSTAGES USED AS HUMAN SHIELDS, SAYS EXPERT “The situation could end right now if Hamas just surrendered and they just sent all of those hostages home again,” the senator said. “That’s also a thing that I’ve been frustrated, too, is that those hostages should really be in front of the conversations about the situation in Gaza. Sending them home would really, again, end all of this immediately.” The war in Gaza began after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel in which the terrorist organization killed 1,200 people and took about 250 people hostage.
Biden administration puts hold on US ammunition shipment to Israel: report
The Biden administration has put a hold on a shipment of U.S.-manufactured ammunition to Israel for the first time since the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack, according to a report. Two Israeli officials told Axios that the weapons shipment was stopped last week, leaving officials within the Israeli government scrambling to understand why. Fox News Digital reached out to the White House for comment but did not immediately receive a response. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to carry out a military operation in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza where some 1.5 million Palestinians have taken shelter, and where Hamas maintains its last remaining stronghold. BIDEN ADMIN ACCUSES ISRAELI MILITARY OF HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN STUNNING CONDEMNATION The potential Rafah operation to root out Hamas terrorists comes despite warnings from President Biden and other Western officials that doing so would result in more civilian deaths and worsen an already dire humanitarian crisis. The Biden administration has said there could be consequences for Israel should it move forward with the operation without a credible plan to safeguard civilians. HAMAS KINGPIN HOLED UP DEEP BELOW GAZA, SURROUNDED BY HOSTAGES USED AS HUMAN SHIELDS, SAYS EXPERT Biden has also faced criticism from Americans who are against his support of Israel, most recently seen in protests that have erupted across college campuses nationwide. The current war in Gaza began after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, in which the terrorist organization killed 1,200 people, and took about 250 people hostage. The Associated Press contributed to this report.