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Troubled UN Plaza to get family-friendly makeover

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:32:35 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) – San Francisco’s downtown UN Plaza is about to undergo a major transformation. The historic site is named after the signing of the 1945 United Nations charter in the nearby veterans building, but it has turned into a hot spot for drug use and violence. The city now plans to turn the area into a skateboard area and recreation site.  Just last week, San Francisco police released a video showing an 83-year-old man pushed to the ground at UN Plaza. An ambulance rushed the man to the hospital.   TikTok trend in which thieves steal Kias and Hyundais getting worse, officials say While police are still searching for the suspect, the city has a new plan to transform the area.“We want this to be a safe space and fun for all,” said SF Parks and Recreation Communications Manager Daniel Montes.Montes says the mayor's office asked the department to take over and transform the area, similar to the metamorphosis in front of city hall. For years, camps and loitering...

Las polémicas municiones de racimo de EE.UU. ya están en Ucrania, dicen un general ucraniano y el Pentágono. ¿Qué sigue ahora?

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:32:35 GMT

(CNN) — Las muy anticipadas y controvertidas municiones de racimo de fabricación estadounidense que Washington acordó suministrar a Kyiv ya están en Ucrania, según un general ucraniano y el Pentágono.“Acabamos de recibirlas, aún no las hemos utilizado, pero pueden cambiar radicalmente (el campo de batalla)”, dijo el general de brigada Oleksandr Tarnavsky a CNN en una entrevista en el centro de Ucrania el jueves por la mañana.El jueves por la tarde, el Pentágono confirmó la presencia de las municiones en el país, diciendo: “Hay municiones de racimo en Ucrania en este momento”.Tarnavsky es comandante de la Operación de Fuerzas Conjuntas “Tavria”, que está operando en una amplia sección del frente del sur de Ucrania.El militar ucraniano Igor Ovcharruck sostiene una bomba de racimo desactivada de un misil MSLR, entre una exhibición de piezas de cohetes utilizados por el ejército ruso, que un experto en municiones ucraniano dijo que no explotaron...

Chopped finger was mailed to Macron’s home, prosecutor says

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:32:35 GMT

A police probe has been opened after a package containing a chopped human fingertip was sent to the Elysée Palace, the official residence of French President Emmanuel Macron, according to media reports.“A piece of a finger, a fingertip it seems,” was mailed to the Elysée, the Paris prosecutor’s office told CNN on Thursday, adding the police on Monday had opened an investigation into a “threat of a crime or offense against an elected official.”According to French newswire AFP, the fingertip belonged to the package’s sender, who has a psychiatric condition.After winning reelection last year but failing to secure a parliamentary majority, Macron has faced a tumultuous start to his second term. His approval ratings have plummeted in recent months after he pushed through a controversial pensions reform which raised the retirement age from 62 to 64.

How DOJ made different death penalty decisions in the Pittsburgh synagogue and Texas mall massacres

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:32:35 GMT

CHICAGO (AP) — Two separate shootings 2,000 miles (3,218 kilometers) apart. One killed 11 at a Pittsburgh synagogue. The other killed 23 at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Both were motivated by racial hate. Both involved gunmen who later claimed mental illness.But earlier this year, the Justice Department authorized the death penalty only for the case in Pittsburgh, where jurors will soon answer the weightiest of questions: Should Robert Bowers be put to death?Bowers’ trial is in the penalty phase after his June conviction for the 2018 antisemitic attack. A federal judge last Friday gave Patrick Crusius the maximum available sentence for the 2019 Walmart attack on Hispanics: life in prison. He pleaded guilty after the department took a death sentence off the table.Contrasting decisions in such similar cases illustrates the department’s murky, often baffling and seemingly inconsistent death penalty policies. Department decision-making and the criteria it favors are also shrouded ...

US military chief praises Japan’s defense funding boost as a buttress against China and North Korea

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:32:35 GMT

TOKYO (AP) — The highest-ranking U.S. military officer on Friday encouraged Japan’s commitment to doubling its defense spending over the next five years, calling Tokyo’s controversial push for a stronger military crucial to confront rising threats from North Korea and China. Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, mentioned Japan’s need for improvements in cruise missile defense, early warning missile systems and air capabilities, all of which would help the United States as it looks to counter North Korea’s push for a nuclear missile program capable of pinpoint-targeting the U.S. mainland and China’s increasing aggression against Taiwan, the democratic island that Beijing claims as its own. China has “invested enormously in their military, and aspire to be the regional power in the next 10 to 15 years,” Milley said.That “could be very unstable; it could be very dangerous, and I think having a powerful Japan, a militarily capa...

India is set to launch a lander and rover to explore the moon’s south pole

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:32:35 GMT

SRIHARIKOTA, India (AP) — India was set to send a spacecraft to the far side of the moon Friday in a follow-up mission to its failed effort nearly four years ago to land a rover softly on the lunar surface.Chandrayaan-3, the word for “moon craft” in Sanskrit, will take off from a launch pad in Sriharikota in southern India with an orbiter, a lander and a rover. It will embark on a journey lasting slightly over a month before landing on the moon’s surface later in August.A successful landing would make India the fourth country — after the United States, the Soviet Union, and China — to achieve the feat.The six-wheeled lander and rover module of Chandrayaan-3 is configured with payloads that would provide data to the scientific community on the properties of lunar soil and rocks, including chemical and elemental compositions, said Dr. Jitendra Singh, junior minister for Science and Technology.India’s previous attempt to land a robotic spacecraft near the moon’s little-explored south p...

Moves at a small border village hike Israel-Hezbollah tensions at a time of regional jitters

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:32:35 GMT

KFAR CHOUBA, Lebanon (AP) — The little village of Ghajar has been a sore point between Israel and Lebanon for years, split in two by the border between Lebanon and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. But after a long period of calm, the dispute has begun to heat up again.Israel has been building a wall around the half of the village in Lebanese territory, triggering condemnation from the Lebanese militiant force Hezbollah, accusing Israel of moving to annex the site. A recent exchange of fire in the area raised alarm that the dispute could trigger violence.The growing tensions over Ghajar add to the jitters along the Lebanese-Israeli border, where Israel and Iranian-backed Hezbollah fought a destructive 34-day war in the summer of 2006. The two sides have studiously avoided outright battle ever since, despite frequent flare-ups of tension — but each constantly says a new conflict could erupt at any time.The dispute over a small village in the green hills where Lebanon, Israel ...

Striking actors to begin picketing alongside writers in fight over the future of Hollywood

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:32:35 GMT

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Striking screen actors will begin picketing alongside writers in New York and Los Angeles on Friday in what has become the biggest Hollywood labor fight in decades.The double-barreled strike will shut down the small number of productions that continued shooting in the two months since screenwriters stopped working. Many actors made a show of solidarity on the writers’ picket lines, including Fran Drescher, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists president and former star of “The Nanny.” The union’s 65,000-member actors’ branch will now formally join them as fellow strikers.The two guilds have similar issues with studios and streaming services. They are concerned about contracts keeping up with inflation, residual payments in the streaming era and putting up guardrails against the use of artificial intelligence mimicking their work on film and television shows. The famous faces of Oscar and Emmy winners will lik...

For a group of Ukrainian women, painting is a form of therapy to help them cope with loss

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:32:35 GMT

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — In a sunlit art studio in Kyiv filled with easels and canvases, Iryna Farion puts the finishing touches on an oil painting with a predominantly dark color palette in shades of blue and brown.The artwork depicts two intertwined trees held together by their roots, as though in embrace, and a radiant yellow sun shining against a moody blue background.“I feel like it’s me and my husband, who was killed in the war,” Farion says of the trees. “They are like two souls, like two hearts, like one body.”Farion is among thousands of Ukrainian women who have lost their partners in the war Russia launched against their homeland nearly 17 months ago. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed on the battlefield – most of them men who once led ordinary lives before dropping everything to join the fight for their country.Farion’s husband, Oleksandr Alimov, died in December after being shot on the Donetsk front line. Overwhelmed with grief, she says she has found some cons...

Brussels conference reviews developing role of renewable energy sources in Central Asia

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:32:35 GMT

Organized by the Brussels Energy Club, an international conference titled A Clean Energy Future for Central Asia: Building New Partnerships for the Energy Transition in a Rapidly Growing Region was held in the European Union’s capital city.The event, held in a hybrid format, was attended by the heads of diplomatic missions of the five Central Asian states, representatives of their state agencies, leading EU institutions, major energy companies, industry associations, think-tanks and the media.In his welcoming remarks, Head of the Mission of Kazakhstan in the EU Margulan Baimukhan emphasised our country’s commitment to the implementation of the Paris Agreement and the commitment voiced by President of Kazakhstan to achieve decarbonisation by 2060. The Ambassador highlighted the need for greater investments both from the region’s countries and also international donor organizations towards the structural transformation of the energy sector in the region.Recalling the agreement on stra...