WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — On a visit to New Zealand, FBI Director Kash Patel gave the country’s police and spy bosses gifts of inoperable pistols that were illegal to possess under local gun laws and had to be destroyed, New Zealand law enforcement agencies told The Associated Press.

The plastic 3D-printed replica pistols formed part of display stands Patel presented to at least four senior New Zealand security officials in July. Patel, the most senior Trump administration official to visit the country so far, was in Wellington to open the FBI’s first standalone office in New Zealand.

Pistols are tightly restricted weapons under New Zealand law and possessing one requires an additional permit beyond a regular gun license. Law enforcement agencies didn’t specify whether the officials who met with Patel held such permits, but they couldn’t have legally kept the gifts if they didn’t.

It wasn’t clear what permissions Patel had sought to bring the weapons into the country. A spokesperson for Patel told the AP Tuesday that the FBI would not comment.

US FBI Director Kash Patel visits New Zealand, immediately provides local officials with 3d printed, potentially operable firearms...

... which is a crime, that could carry up to a 3 year prison/jail sentence in NZ...

... and would also potentially be somewhere between a misdemeanor and a felony depending on where you are in the US, as 3d printed firearms are generally without serial numbers and are thus 'ghost guns', which are often illegal if unregistered, if not outright banned, though this differs from state to state and city to city.

(Oh also, I guess he is so concerned about properly investigating the death of Charlie Kirk that he is uh, personally looking for leads in New Zealand, or something.)

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — An offshore earthquake of magnitude 6.9 collapsed walls of houses and buildings late Tuesday in a central Philippine province, killing at least 20 people, injuring many others and sending residents scrambling out of homes into darkness as the intense shaking cut off power, officials said.

The epicenter of the earthquake, which was set off by a local fault, was about 17 kilometers (10 miles) northeast of Bogo, a coastal city of about 90,000 people in Cebu province where at least 14 residents died, disaster-mitigation officer Rex Ygot told The Associated Press by telephone.

The death toll in Bogo was expected to rise. Workers were trying to transport a backhoe to hasten search and rescue efforts in a cluster of shanties in a mountain village hit by a landslide and boulders, he said.

“It’s hard to move in the area because there are hazards,” Glenn Ursal, another disaster-mitigation officer told The AP, adding some survivors were brought to a hospital.

Six people, including three coast guard personnel, a firefighter and a child, were killed separately in San Remigio town, south of Bogo, the town’s vice mayor, Alfie Reynes, told the DZMM radio network without elaborating how the victims died.

[...]

Big surprise, Not. But this was all before the new discussions in the USA about censorship. On the other hand, most users are still using tweeter, so why should they leave now?

Any thoughts on this?

In 2021 one of the team had been reading an article about the concept of doughnut economics – a circular way of thinking about the way we use resources – and he brought it up. “I just mentioned it casually at a meeting, as a tool to evaluate our new quality of life programme, and it grew from there,” says Stefan Persson, Tomelilla’s organisational development manager.

The concept, developed by British economist Kate Raworth is fairly straightforward. The outer ring or ecological ceiling of the doughnut consists of the nine planetary boundaries. These are the environmental limits that humans are at risk of passing – we’ve already crossed the safety thresholds on climate change, ocean acidification and biogeochemical flows, for example, but remain within safe limits on our atmospheric aerosol loading. The inner ring forms a social foundation of life’s essentials, and the “dough” in between corresponds to a safe and just space for humanity, which meets the needs of people and planet. The model also includes principles such as systems thinking and seeing the economy as a tool, not a goal in itself.

“Doughnut economics is like running a farm. Using an excess of resources, like nutrients, on your crops is a mistake. Not using enough is a mistake too,” says Persson’s colleague Per-Martin Svensson, who is a farmer when he is not doing council work.

Putting the schema into action is challenging, but doughnut economics is being used in Tomelilla, in Sweden’s southern Skåne region, in several ways. It has been integrated into financial planning and decision support, so that rather than building a new ice rink, the plan is now to revamp an existing building.

The local government produces an annual portrait of how well it is doing at meeting doughnut economics targets. The best results in the latest diagram were on air quality, housing and social equality. Air quality in the area was good to begin with, but in order to keep improving it, young people at lower and upper secondary school have been given a free travel card for public transport. It is hoped the measure will also improve social equality in terms of access to education and health. Overcrowding and income disparities have both decreased, but it’s hard to link that directly to any of the council’s work.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/36561434

Israeli forces kill at least 29 people across Gaza since dawn, including 25 in Gaza City, according to Al Jazeera, while 38 killed and 190 injured Palestinians arrive at Gaza's hospitals over the past 24 hours. Israel continues its assault on Gaza City, as health services collapse after bombing destroys the Jordanian field hospital and the only remaining children’s hospital. Both President Donald Trump and Hamas leadership indicate that they have drafted plans for an end to the genocide. Trump bails out Argentina’s economy after its peso collapses under the leadership of Javier Milei. France, Belgium, Monaco, Luxembourg, Malta, and Andorra recognized Palestine as a state on Monday at the United Nations, bringing the number of member states to recognize Palestine to 156 out of 193. Iran warns it may scrap its International Atomic Energy Agency cooperation deal if snapback sanctions are put in place.

ROME (AP) — Thousands of protesters and strikers calling for solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza took to the streets in Italy on Monday, with some storming Milan’s central train station and clashing violently with police.

Italy’s grassroots unions, which represent hundreds of thousands of people ranging from schoolteachers to metalworkers, called for a 24-hour general strike in both public and private sectors, including public transportation, trains, schools and ports.

The strike caused disruptions across the country, with long delays for national trains and limited public transport in major cities, including Rome.

The jets just keep on comin'!

Two German Eurofighter jets were scrambled on Sunday to intercept a Russian military aircraft above the Baltic Sea, as Estonia said it would call an emergency meeting of the UN security council after Russian planes violated its airspace.

Germany’s air force said the Russian Il-20M reconnaissance plane had switched off its transponders and ignored requests to make contact. The Eurofighters took off from the Rostock-Laage airbase to head off the aircraft as it flew in international airspace.

Tensions between Nato and Russia have been dramatically rising after a series of what European governments say are deliberate, provocative acts by the Kremlin. On Friday, three Russian MiG-31 fighters violated Estonian airspace in the Gulf of Finland. Moscow denies this.

My position on this is obvious, but in the interest of keeping things civil, I'll just provide an excerpt.

Thirty one journalists and media staff were killed by Israeli strikes on newspaper offices in Yemen last week in what the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said on Friday was the deadliest attack on journalists in the last 16 years.

Israel struck a newspaper complex in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, which housed three Houthi-connected media outlets on 10 September. At the time, members of the Yemeni army’s press arm were finishing the weekly print edition, according to the publication’s editor-in-chief, which increased the number of journalists present during the strike.

At least 35 people were killed in the attack, including one child who accompanied a journalist to the office, and 131 were wounded, according to the Houthi ministry of health. All of the journalists worked for either the Houthi-affiliated 26 September newspaper or Yemen newspaper.

The attack was the second-deadliest against journalists that the CPJ had ever recorded, after the Maguindanao massacre in the Philippines in 2009.

I cannot imagine living 85 years in the same home, only to be told by the government that it's illegal because it's inconvenient for tourism.

By noon, the sun is high over Petra, bleaching the coloured sandstone cliffs and temporarily emptying its celebrated ruins of tourists. Vines and a canopy keep the terrace of Mohammed Feras's cave home cool despite the searing summer heat rising from the rocky valley.

“I have lived here all my life. I’ve never been anywhere else and I cannot imagine not living here. This area is part of who I am and I cannot leave it,” the 44-year-old farmer and sometime tourist guide said.

Within months, Feras and dozens of other Bedouin from the Bdoul community are likely to have left the caves they call home. There is little place for them in Petra as it is transformed by a major development programme that aims to build new facilities, regulate an anarchic tourist trade and provide a better experience for the hundreds of thousands of visitors drawn to the ancient site.

Feras’s home, which he shares with his wife and nine children, comprises four connected 2,400-year-old caves and an adjoining tent. Just a 10-minute walk away are the remains of Petra’s grand temple and its colonnaded main street. It is also just a short hike from the monument known as the Treasury, made more famous by the 1989 blockbuster Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Irish rap group Kneecap says it’s initiating legal action against Toronto MP Vince Gasparro, who said Canada would not allow them to enter the country.

Earlier on Friday, Toronto MP Vince Gasparro revealed the federal government had deemed Kneecap “ineligible” to come to Canada. The trio was scheduled to perform two shows in Toronto, and another two in Vancouver, in October.

“Our government will not tolerate the advocating of political violence, terrorism or Anti-Semitism and hate more broadly,” Gasparro wrote on X Friday.

“The group have amplified political violence and publicly displayed support for terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” said Gasparro, who serves as the parliamentary secretary to the secretary of state for combatting crime.

Kneecap responded on Instagram with a letter addressed directly to Gasparro, calling his comments “wholly untrue and deeply malicious.”

“We have today instructed our lawyers to initiate legal action against you. We will be relentless in defending ourselves against baseless accusations to silence our opposition to a genocide being committed by Israel,” reads the letter.

“When we beat you in court, which we will, we will donate every cent to assist some of the thousands of child amputees in Gaza.”

Israel’s minister of culture has vowed to cut funding for the country’s film academy and its annual awards show after a movie about a Palestinian boy’s dream of seeing the ocean won big.

On Tuesday night in Tel Aviv, the Israeli Academy of Film and Television awarded the 2025 Best Picture award to “The Sea” at the Ophir Awards, known as the “Israeli Oscars.”

The film, directed and written by Shai Carmeli Pollak and produced by Baher Agbariya, follows a young boy’s road trip from his home of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank to the coastal city of Tel Aviv.

It is now slated to represent Israel at the Oscars in the International Feature Film category.

The day after the Israeli ceremony, the Israeli Ministry of Culture announced it would withdraw state funding for “the disgraceful ceremony” starting next year. The winning film “presents the Palestinian perspective and depicts IDF (Israel Defense Forces) soldiers and the State of Israel in a negative way,” the ministry said.

Culture minister Miki Zohar described the ceremony and the award as a “spit in the face of Israeli citizens,” adding: “The fact that the winning film depicts our heroic soldiers in a defamatory and false way while they fight and risk their lives to protect us no longer surprises anyone.”

Later Wednesday, Zohar announced the establishment of the “Israeli State Oscar,” a new government-sponsored alternative film awards ceremony to honor Israeli creators and films that “reflect the nation’s values and spirit.”

Subtle, they were not. But that's fucking brilliant!

I'm not posting an excerpt here because it's your typical "officials tout censorship" boilerplate.