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@ISIDEWITH asked…13yrs13Y
The death penalty or capital punishment is the punishment by death for a crime. Currently 58 countries worldwide allow the death penalty (including the U.S.) while 97 countries have outlawed it. Since the 1970s executions in the U.S. have declined every year. In 2021 five states and the federal government…
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@ISIDEWITH submitted…5mos5MO
Irish President Michael D Higgins slammed what he called “outrageous” threats against the peacekeepers from the Israel Defense Forces that “sought to have them evacuate the villages that they are defending”. His intervention came days before Ireland’s premier was due to visit the White House.Ireland has 347 peacekeeping troops stationed in southern Lebanon as part of a joint battalion with Polish soldiers. Two of the 25 outposts on the Blue Line in effect dividing Lebanon from Israel and the Golan Heights are under Irish command.Irish troops have been serving as peacekeepers in Lebanon since 1978 and government and military officials insist morale among Irish troops is good.Capt Kenny said Irish troops had not come under fire directly but “on occasion, and when appropriate, they take cover in protective installations [bunkers]”.“We view our presence there as essential. We are the eyes and ears of the international community. Our aim is to provide the space for diplomacy to happen and the delivery of humanitarian aid as necessary,” he added.Higgins, in his statement on Saturday, called Israel’s demand that Irish peacekeepers leave “an insult” both to the UN and to the soldiers risking their lives. An Irish peacekeeper, Private Seán Rooney, was killed in an attack on a convoy in Lebanon in December 2022.
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@ISIDEWITH submitted…4mos4MO
Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, under extraordinary pressure from friends and fellow billionaires to do more to help Vice President Kamala Harris, recently donated about $50 million to a nonprofit organization that is supporting her presidential run, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.The donation followed months of arm-twisting from associates such as Bill Gates, investor Ron Conway and Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn. Mr. Bloomberg recently spoke with Ms. Harris in a private phone call, according to two people briefed on the conversation.Mr. Bloomberg’s decision conforms to a strategy that has become his trademark: Confounding Democratic operatives by refusing to make early investments — only to come in hot and heavy in the homestretch. But unlike his previous big gifts, this one was intended to be kept under wraps, and that secrecy has made unaware Democrats more anxious than they have been most autumns.His contribution was made to Future Forward USA Action, the dark-money vehicle of Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s main super PAC.Mr. Bloomberg, who is 82 years old and has an estimated net worth of $105 billion, is the second largest disclosed individual donor to Democrats in this election cycle, after the investor and philanthropist George Soros. But publicly, Democrats observed that Mr. Bloomberg was donating nowhere close to what he had spent during the presidency of Donald J. Trump.The $47 million he had given in federally disclosed political contributions during this election cycle, before his new nonprofit donation, was less than half of the $95 million he disclosed to help Democrats retake Congress in the 2018 midterms.And so in recent months, frustrated Democrats in his close orbit had urged him to consider a large donation to help Ms. Harris in an election expected to be decided by razor-thin margins. Mr. Bloomberg’s advisers, to say nothing of the man himself, have fielded jittery queries for months about what Democrats saw as his relatively conspicuous absence.
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U.S. Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly wasn’t sure what to make of reports that a suspicious fleet of unidentified aircraft had been flying over Langley Air Force Base on Virginia’s shoreline.Kelly, a decorated senior commander at the base, got on a squadron rooftop to see for himself. He joined a handful of other officers responsible for a clutch of the nation’s most advanced jet fighters, including F-22 Raptors. For several nights, military personnel had reported a mysterious breach of restricted airspace over a stretch of land that has one of the largest concentrations of national-security facilities in the U.S. The show usually starts 45 minutes to an hour after sunset, another senior leader told Kelly.Officials didn’t know if the drone fleet, which numbered as many as a dozen or more over the following nights, belonged to clever hobbyists or hostile forces. Some suspected that Russia or China deployed them to test the response of American forces.Federal law prohibits the military from shooting down drones near military bases in the U.S. unless they pose an imminent threat. Aerial snooping doesn’t qualify, though some lawmakers hope to give the military greater leeway.Reports of the drones reached President Biden and set off two weeks of White House meetings after the aircraft first appeared in December last year. Officials from agencies including the Defense Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Pentagon’s UFO office joined outside experts to throw out possible explanations as well as ideas about how to respond.The first drone arrived shortly. Kelly, a career fighter pilot, estimated it was roughly 20 feet long and flying at more than 100 miles an hour, at an altitude of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 feet. Other drones followed, one by one, sounding in the distance like a parade of lawn mowers.The drones headed south, across Chesapeake Bay, toward Norfolk, Va., and over an area that includes the home base for the Navy’s SEAL Team Six and Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval port.
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@ISIDEWITH asked…4yrs4Y
In April 2021 the legislature of the U.S. State of Arkansas introduced a bill that prohibited doctors from providing gender-transition treatments to people under 18 years old. The bill would make it a felony for doctors to administer puberty blockers, hormones and gender-reaffirming surgery to anyone…
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On June 26, 2015 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the denial of marriage licenses violated the Due Process and the Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. The ruling made same sex marriage legal in all 50 U.S. States.
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