Bigg Boss OTT 2 winner Elvish Yadav receives death threat over Rs 10 crore extortion demand
Elvish Yadav has reportedly received a death threat and an extortion demand of Rs 10 crore allegedly linked to the Lawrence Bishnoi gang. A FIR has also been filed.
Congress continues suspense over Kerala CM choice: Who are the frontrunners?
Even a week after poll results came out on Monday, there remains suspense on who the grand old party will pick to lead the southern state. A Congress committee submitted its report on Friday, with the names of three contenders doing the rounds in media reports. Who are they?
PM Modi speaks to Vijay on call, congratulates him for taking oath as Tamil Nadu chief minister
Vijay, a 51-year-old actor-turned-politician, was sworn in as the southern state’s chief minister at a ceremony held in Chennai on Sunday morning. His two-year-old party swept last month’s assembly election, winning 107 of the 234 assembly seats.
Rand Paul vows to keep pressure on Fauci as statute of limitations on criminal referral expires Monday
The statute of limitations on Dr. Anthony Fauci’s criminal referral for lying to Congress about gain-of-function research expires Monday, but Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is vowing to keep up the pressure on “the COVID coverup” with a Senate hearing this week. “David Morens, Dr. Fauci’s top advisor, was indicted, but Fauci himself still walks free,” Paul, who has long pressed Fauci in heated exchanges in congressional hearings, wrote this week on X, continuing his urging of the Justice Department to pick up charges from his criminal referral despite former President Joe Biden issuing a sweeping preemptive pardon of Fauci on his last night in office Jan. 19, 2025. “The DOJ has 5 days to indict Fauci before the statute of limitations runs out. The clock is ticking. Justice cannot wait.” The Biden pardon and Fauci’s statute of limitations expiration Monday shields the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical advisor to Biden, but Morens was indicted late last month for having “deliberately concealed information and falsified records in an effort to suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of COVID-19.” EX-FAUCI TOP ADVISOR INDICTED OVER ALLEGED COVID COVER-UP, HIDDEN EMAILS “For years, I warned that Fauci and his inner circle buried the truth about Wuhan,” Paul wrote Wednesday on X. “Now his closest adviser has been indicted. “Fauci lied to Congress under oath. The statute of limitations expires in 5 days. Will the DOJ finally indict Fauci?” The Trump Justice Department under former Attorney General Pam Bondi or acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has made no public statements about bringing charges. ANTHONY FAUCI MAY BE DEPOSED AS GOP INTENSIFIES COVID INVESTIGATIONS IN NEW CONGRESS “While we can all have our beefs with Congress, this isn’t in our hands any longer,” Paul wrote Thursday on X. “I DID the work, investigated, and sent multiple CRIMINAL referrals to the DOJ. “Whether he is indicted or not now is not up to Congress. It is up to the DoJ, and no one else.” “He lied to Congress about NIH funding dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan and engaged in the worst cover-up in modern medical history,” Paul added in another X post. “The American people want Fauci behind bars.” BIDEN TEAM REPORTEDLY CONSIDERING PREEMPTIVE PARDONS FOR FAUCI, SCHIFF, OTHER TRUMP ‘TARGETS’ President Donald Trump has publicly rejected the Biden autopen pardons as having no force or “legal effect,” but there is no precedent for a new president nullifying a past president’s pardons, because they would potentially render presidential pardon authority ultimately powerless against a new administration’s agenda. “Anyone receiving ‘Pardons,’ ‘Commutations,’ or any other Legal Document so signed, please be advised that said Document has been fully and completely terminated, and is of no Legal effect,” Trump wrote in December on Truth Social. Just two days after the Fauci clock runs out, Paul is chairing a Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs committee hearing with a “COVID coverup” whistleblower Wednesday. FBI EXAMINING COVID-19 ORIGIN ‘COVER-UP’ AMID NEW STRAIN EMERGENCE: BONGINO “Next week I’m holding a hearing with a whistleblower who will testify publicly about the COVID coverup,” Paul teased in an X post. “Mark your calendars: Wednesday, May 13 at 10 a.m. “The truth is coming.” Paul renewed a criminal referral to the DOJ last July to investigate whether Fauci’s May 2021 statements violated federal false-statements law. In the referral, Paul pointed to Fauci’s testimony that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” DOJ INVESTIGATING ANDREW CUOMO FOR ALLEGEDLY LYING ABOUT COVID DECISIONS, SOURCE CONFIRMS Paul’s referral also noted Fauci later said he had “never lied before the Congress” and did “not retract that statement” after Paul warned him about the criminal implications of lying to Congress. The referral cites a February 2020 email released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, in which Fauci wrote that “scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments” involving bat viruses and human infection. Paul argued that the email contradicted Fauci’s sworn testimony. COVID ‘MOST LIKELY’ LEAKED FROM WUHAN LAB, SOCIAL DISTANCING ‘NOT BASED ON SCIENCE,’ SELECT COMMITTEE FINDS Paul also cited research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) that he said was funded under a NIAID award and involved combining spike genes from bat SARS-related coronaviruses with another coronavirus backbone to create chimeric viruses capable of infecting human cells. “This research, conducted at the WIV and funded under NIAID Award R01AI110964, fits the definition of gain-of-function research,” the referral stated. The criminal referral further cites a 2023 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that found the WIV and Wuhan University received NIH funding. According to Paul’s referral, the GAO said NIH funded a project that included “genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized coronavirus strains.” SCIENTISTS EXPECT MAJOR ‘MEDICAL BREAKTHROUGHS’ DESPITE TRUMP’S CAP ON NIH RESEARCH FUNDING Anyone who makes a materially false statement in a congressional investigation or review can face fines and up to five years in prison. Paul’s July referral also challenged the legal effect of a preemptive pardon Fauci received from Biden’s autopen. “New information has revealed that these pardons were executed via autopen, with no documented confirmation that the President personally reviewed or approved each individual grant of clemency,” Paul wrote. “According to reports, White House staff authorized the use of the autopen to issue the clemency documents. “This raises serious constitutional and legal concerns about the legitimacy of Dr. Fauci’s pardon.” GREGG JARRETT: BIDEN, THE ‘MARIONETTE PRESIDENT; AND THE CASE OF THE RUNAWAY AUTOPEN Fauci has repeatedly denied lying to Congress, including forcefully to Paul himself in multiple congressional hearings. “Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11 [2021], where you claimed at the NIH never funded gain-of-function research and move on?” Paul asked in a July 2021 Senate hearing. “Sen. Paul,
Supreme Court’s junior justice goes on solo tear as Trump fights put her at odds with the bench
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stood out from her colleagues this week when she broke with them to rail against the high court’s decision to fast-track its landmark order dismantling a key provision in the Voting Rights Act. But Jackson’s solo dissent was far from the first time the Biden-appointed justice has been on an island, as she has routinely blasted the court for not asserting more judicial authority over President Donald Trump’s executive actions and drawn rebukes from her colleagues for taking what they have viewed as flawed positions. Ideological divides over high-profile cases have been common. The trio of liberals has remained unified against the Trump administration by opposing decisions, including on the interim docket, to curb universal injunctions, allow states to ban transgender medical treatments for minors, permit Trump to fire members of independent agencies, authorize the government to cancel immigrants’ temporary protected status and more. But even in some of those cases, Jackson goes on solo diatribes, highlighting a deeper internal divide within the liberal bloc. WHY JUSTICE JACKSON IS A FISH OUT OF WATER ON THE SUPREME COURT Below are five recent times Jackson gave lone opinions. The Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s map last month, finding 6-3 it contained an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Upon request, the Supreme Court also decided 8-1 to fast-track the landmark decision — handing it down immediately rather than in roughly a month like it usually does — allowing several red states to more quickly attempt to implement new congressional lines after the high court weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by limiting the role race may play in congressional redistricting. Jackson, the bench’s most junior justice, broke with her eight colleagues in that decision, saying the court improperly “[dove] into the fray” of active elections by handing its judgment down immediately. “Not content to have decided the law, it now takes steps to influence its implementation,” Jackson wrote. LATEST SCOTUS LEAK A GIFT TO LIBERALS ‘SALIVATING’ OVER CONTROL OF HIGH COURT NARRATIVE: EXPERTS Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, wrote a scathing concurrence for the sole purpose of ripping apart Jackson’s dissent, saying her claims were “groundless and utterly irresponsible.” The Supreme Court is still weighing Trump’s signature plan to severely limit birthright citizenship, but it first entertained the subject last year by addressing how lower courts across the country uniformly issued nationwide injunctions against the plan. The high court decided 6-3 to ban such injunctions but left room for judges and plaintiffs to deploy other methods when seeking widespread relief. Jackson gave a rogue, separate dissent in the case, drawing eyebrow-raising jabs from Justice Amy Coney Barrett. “We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Barrett wrote in the court’s opinion in 2025. “We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.” Jackson wrote that nationwide injunctions should be permissible because the courts should not allow the president to “violate the Constitution.” Barrett disagreed. “She offers a vision of the judicial role that would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush,” Barrett wrote. The high court fractured last August in dual 5–4 decisions that allowed the National Institutes of Health to cancel nearly $800 million in research grants. Jackson, in one of her most memorable one-person dissents, appeared to boil over with frustration, observing that the majority “bends over backward to accommodate” the Trump administration. “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules,” Jackson wrote. “We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.” Some of the canceled grants were geared toward research on diversity, equity and inclusion; COVID-19; and gender identity. Jackson argued the grants went further and that “life-saving biomedical research” was at stake. When the Supreme Court sided 8-1 with a Christian counselor who challenged Colorado’s ban on counseling minors about sexual orientation and gender identity — which the state barred as conversion therapy — Jackson was the lone dissenter, warning that “to be completely frank, no one knows what will happen now.” Jackson said the key free speech decision defied “treatment standards” and bucked the medical profession, leading an unlikely colleague, Justice Elena Kagan, to openly reject her dissent. Kagan, an Obama appointee, said Jackson’s view “rests on reimagining—and in that way collapsing—the well-settled distinction between viewpoint-based and other content-based speech restrictions.” In a lower profile case about police stops, Jackson conspicuously found in April that the high court overstepped its authority by improperly meddling in a lower court’s assessment of how Washington, D.C., police decided to stop a man in a suspicious vehicle. The Supreme Court reversed the decision by the lower court, saying it should have weighed the “totality of the circumstances” surrounding the vehicle and approved of an officer’s decision to briefly detain the man. The decision was 7-2, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor opposed the ruling while also opting against joining Jackson’s dissent. Jackson accused the majority of trying to “wordsmith” and interfere with a typically routine evaluation of a police stop. “I cannot fathom why that kind of factbound determination warranted correction by this Court,” Jackson wrote. Jonathan Turley, George Washington University law professor and Fox News contributor, said in an op-ed this month that Jackson has “quickly developed a radical and chilling jurisprudence.” Despite establishing herself as an outlier, Jackson also has a swathe of supporters from civil rights groups to celebrities. She has been showered with praise on “The View,” nominated for a Grammy for her audiobook and drawn encouragement from Democratic lawmakers. Jackson said during her appearance this year on “The View” that “criticism is part of the job.” “Dissents are an opportunity for the justices who disagree with the majority to really describe their view of the law but also their concerns,” Jackson said, adding that “you hope that your
AOC, asked about running for president, says her ambition is ‘way bigger than that’
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is not quite ready to announce a run in the 2028 Democratic primary, because she said her ambition is far greater than that. “They assume that my ambition is positional; they assume that my ambition is a title or a seat,” Ocasio-Cortez told Democratic strategist David Axelrod at an event Friday in Chicago. “And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.” “Presidents come and go; Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever,” she continued. “A living wage is forever. Workers’ rights are forever. Women’s rights, all of that.” Ocasio-Cortez was responding to criticism of her comments that billionaires like Elon Musk cannot truly “earn” a billion dollars without the work of others, calling the blowback “a veiled threat” against her running for president. AOC CALLED OUT FOR CLAIM THAT BILLIONAIRES ‘CAN’T EARN’ THEIR WEALTH AS SHE DOUBLES DOWN ON REMARKS “This was the elite saying, if you want this job, you just stepped out of line,” she said. “And we want you to know where the real power is, and it’s in the modern-day barons who own The [Washington] Post and own the algorithms, and we’re going to — we’ll make an example out of you.” She said critics misunderstand what drives her political decisions: “What use is a gavel, what use is a seat if it doesn’t result in anyone’s life changing for the better. She does not aim for the top, but from it. “When you haven’t been fantasizing about being this or that since you were seven years old, it is tremendously liberating,” she said. “Because I get to wake up every day and say, how am I going to meet the moment? YOUNG PROGRESSIVES LOOK TO ZOHRAN MAMDANI, AOC AS FUTURE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY – UNDER ONE CONDITION “And conditions change radically all the time. So I make my response less to an attachment to some positional, like, you know, title or position and working backwards from there. “But I make decisions by waking up in the morning, looking out the window, and observing the conditions of this country. And saying, ‘What move or decision can I make today that’s going to get us closer to that future, stronger, faster, and better than yesterday?’” The New York Democrat made an early realization of the competition in America, walking onto the Senate floor as a freshman House member and thinking, “Wow, everyone here thinks they’re going to be president.” WATCH: AOC LEAVES DOOR OPEN FOR 2028 PRESIDENTIAL BID AS CAMPAIGN BUZZ SOARS “And they are making decisions from that place,” she said. “And I don’t want to make decisions from a place of, what’s in it for me? I want to make decisions from a place of, how are we going to change the country?” Ocasio-Cortez did not rule out any future office, saying she could pursue her goals from multiple places, regardless of big media’s attempts to spin her away from her ambitions. “No billionaire can stop that: No concentrated level of power and no elite, no gatekeeper, can prevent me from doing everything I can, waking up every day in service of the working class,” she said. “I can do that in the House, in the Senate. I can do that in the White House. “I can do it from a shack in upstate New York chopping wood and being a burnout. I can do it from anywhere.”
Where Trump, GOP vs Democrats redistricting battle heads next in wake of key court rulings
President Donald Trump and Republicans are hailing the blockbuster ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court to strike down the state’s congressional redistricting ballot measure, which was a major setback for Democrats in the battle for the U.S. House majority. “Huge win for the Republican Party,” the president proclaimed in a social media post on Friday minutes after Virginia’s highest court struck down the referendum passed by voters last month. The new map drawn by the Virginia legislature would have given Democrats four more left-leaning House districts in the Commonwealth ahead of this year’s midterm elections, when Republicans will be defending their razor-thin majority in the chamber. The Virginia ruling, along with the recent opinion by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court to slash a key Voting Rights Act protection, is giving Trump and the GOP a major boost in their ongoing political fight with Democrats to redraw congressional district maps ahead of the midterms. At stake in this nationwide redistricting showdown is which party will control the House during the final two years of Trump’s second term in the White House. BLOCKBUSTER RULING: VIRGINIA SUPREME COURT STRIKES DOWN DEMOCRAT-BACKED CONGRESSIONAL MAP In Virginia, the decision means the map used in the 2024 elections will stay in place for the 2026 ballot box showdowns. Democrats currently control the state’s U.S. House delegation by a 6-5 margin. The now overturned map could have resulted in a 10-1 advantage for Democrats in the blue-leaning but competitive state. In the wake of their latest legal setback, House Democratic Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York said, “We are exploring all options to overturn this shocking decision.” And the House minority leader vowed, “No matter what it takes, House Democrats will win in November so we can help rescue this nation from the extremism being unleashed by Donald Trump and Republicans.” But the 2026 redistricting wars are far from over, and the political landscape may get even rougher for Democrats going forward. Here’s where things stand. The Supreme Court’s decision reshaped the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act by ruling that race should not dictate the redrawing of legislative district maps. And the opinion specifically ruled that Louisiana’s congressional district map was unconstitutional. Last week, the Supreme Court said that its decision declaring Louisiana’s map unconstitutional should go into effect immediately, breaking with its usual procedure of waiting roughly a month before its opinions become official. That cleared the way for the GOP-controlled state legislature to begin the process of redrawing the map, and hearings got underway on Friday. Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, a top Trump ally, took swift action in the immediate aftermath of the high court’s ruling, when he delayed the May 16 U.S. House primary elections in Louisiana. Louisiana Republicans are aiming to erase one or both of the two Black-majority House seats, which are represented by Democrats. Republicans in Tennessee moved even faster. The GOP-dominated Tennessee legislature on Thursday quickly adopted a new map that would eliminate the only Democrat-controlled congressional district in the state, and would likely give Republicans control of all nine districts. TENN GOV LEE CALLS SPECIAL SESSION TO REDRAW HOUSE MAP IN GOP’S FAVOR 9-0 GOP Gov. Bill Lee quickly signed the new maps into law. Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen, who represents the majority Black district that’s being carved up, vowed legal action. “Trump knows he HAS TO rig the game to keep his majority in November. And the TN GOP was willing to go along with it. It’s shameful,” Cohen wrote on social media. “Next stop is the courts.” Lawmakers in the Alabama legislature, where the GOP holds a supermajority in both chambers, are advancing legislation as they met this past week in a special session focused on redistricting. The new maps may result in eliminating one or both of the state’s two blue-leaning U.S. House districts. The special session was called by Republican Gov. Kay Ivey. But any new map passed by Alabama lawmakers will need to be greenlit by the Supreme Court. That’s because Alabama is currently prohibited by the high court from redistricting until 2030. It’s unclear if the court will lift its injunction. Protests rocked both the Alabama and Tennessee legislatures as Republican lawmakers pushed forward the new maps. In South Carolina, the GOP-controlled legislature returns in special session on Monday, as Republican lawmakers consider a new map that could put longtime Rep. Jim Clyburn, the only Democrat in the state’s seven-person House delegation, out of a job. Republicans in Georgia are divided over GOP Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia’s decision not to call state lawmakers back into a special session on redistricting. The state’s primary is on May 19 and early voting is already underway in Georgia. Meanwhile, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday signed a bill passed last week by the GOP-dominated state legislature that redraws the red-leaning state’s congressional districts, adding four more right-leaning seats by eliminating districts currently controlled by Democrats. Republicans currently control Florida’s U.S. House delegation by a 20-8 margin. The battle over the maps ignited last spring when Trump, aiming to prevent what happened during his first term in the White House when Democrats reclaimed the House majority in the 2018 midterms, first floated the idea of rare, but not unheard of, mid-decade congressional redistricting. The mission was simple: redraw congressional district maps in red states to pad the GOP’s fragile House majority to keep control of the chamber in the midterms, when the party in power traditionally faces political headwinds and loses seats. When asked by reporters last summer about his plan to add Republican-leaning House seats across the country, the president said, “Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five.” Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas called a special session of the GOP-dominated state legislature to pass the new map. But Democratic state lawmakers, who broke quorum for two weeks as they fled Texas in a bid to delay the passage of the redistricting bill, energized Democrats across the country.
Iran war live: IRGC warns US against attacks on ships; Israel bombs Lebanon
blinking-dotLive updatesLive updates, US-Iran ceasefire holds as Tehran warns Washington against attacks on tankers and Israel kills 24 people in Lebanon. Published On 10 May 202610 May 2026 Click here to share on social media share-nodes Share googleAdd Al Jazeera on Googleinfo Adblock test (Why?)
Satellite images show likely oil slick off Iran’s Kharg Island
NewsFeed Satellite images have captured a suspected oil slick spanning dozens of square kilometres near Iran’s Kharg Island, the country’s main oil export hub. Despite fears of a disaster, environmental observers say the slick is shrinking. Published On 10 May 202610 May 2026 Click here to share on social media share-nodes Share googleAdd Al Jazeera on Googleinfo Adblock test (Why?)
‘No Kings’ protest outside Buckingham Palace
NewsFeed British anti-royals have staged a ‘No Kings’ protest outside Buckingham Palace in London, chanting “Down with the Crown” and calling for an elected head of state. Published On 10 May 202610 May 2026 Click here to share on social media share-nodes Share googleAdd Al Jazeera on Googleinfo Adblock test (Why?)