Nearly 180 gravestones at two Jewish cemeteries in Cincinnati have been vandalized, according to the Jewish Cemeteries of Greater Cincinnati and the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati.

Many of the gravestones – some dating back to the late 1800s – have been knocked face-down, with some cracked in half, at the Tifereth Israel and the Beth Hamedrash Hagadol cemeteries in the Covedale Cemetery complex.

State-owned power company China Three Gorges Renewables Group will build an 8 GW solar farm as part of a nearly $11 billion integrated energy project.

About 30,000 police will be deployed across France on Sunday night amid fears of violence after the final results of a snap election in which the far right hopes to gain a majority in parliament.

Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister, said 5,000 police would be on duty in Paris and its surrounding areas to “ensure that the radical right and radical left do not take advantage of the situation to cause mayhem”.

Four people, including one under 18, were arrested after the government spokesperson, Prisca Thevenot, said she and her team had been attacked on Wednesday evening while putting up campaign posters in Meudon, outside Paris.

“Let’s reject the climate of violence and hatred that is taking hold,” prime minister Gabriel Attal wrote on Thursday on X, adding that violence and intimidation had “no place in our democracy.”

Sunday’s decisive second round is expected to result in the far-right, anti-immigration RN becoming the biggest party in parliament, whether or not it reaches the 289 seats needed for an absolute majority to form the next government.

Both the centrist grouping of the president, Emmanuel Macron, and a broadleftwing coalition, have withdrawn more than 200 candidates from the final runoff in a joint effort to limit the far right’s seats. The exact number of seats the far right RN and its allies could win in the 577-seat national assembly is hard to predict, but Harris Interactive polling for Challenges magazine on Wednesday suggested they could take up to 220.

“I'm the nominee of the Democratic Party. No one's pushing me out. I'm not leaving," he said in a call to the broader campaign

Archive link: https://archive.is/PCpMN

This is not being reported in the U.S. news media. Maybe you can argue it's because it's July 4th, but if this doesn't come out in a major way tomorrow, I guess the fix is in.

"Trump’s name appears over and over again on Jeffrey Epstein’s message logs in the grand jury docs released this week. It is also undisputed: Trump’s name appears 7 times on Epstein’s private jet flight logs, that Epstein flew on Trump’s jet with a young girl of indeterminate age, girls who Epstein trafficked worked at Mar-A-Lago, a girl Epstein trafficked mentioned visiting Trump’s casino in a recently released deposition transcript. Trump said Epstein is a great guy who likes girls on the younger side, Trump frequently “partied” with Epstein, Trump wished Ghislaine Maxwell well at her criminal trial, and someone who testified under the pseudonym JANE DOE at the Ghislaine Maxwell criminal trial stated that she was introduced to Trump by Epstein when she was 14 years old," a user posted on X.

New research aimed at identifying foods that contain higher levels of PFAS found people who eat more white rice, coffee, eggs and seafood typically showed more of the toxic chemicals in their plasma and breast milk.

The study checked samples from 3,000 pregnant mothers, and is among the first research to suggest coffee and white rice may be contaminated at higher rates than other foods. It also identified an association between red meat consumption and levels of PFOS, one of the most common and dangerous PFAS compounds.

“The results definitely point toward the need for environmental stewardship, and keeping PFAS out of the environment and food chain,” said Megan Romano, a Dartmouth researcher and lead author. “Now we’re in a situation where they’re everywhere and are going to stick around even if we do aggressive remediation.”

Embattled aerospace giant Boeing faces a monumental choice: Plead guilty to a felony fraud charge for its role in past deadly plane crashes, or roll the dice on a high-profile trial against the Justice Department.

The company has until Friday to decide.

Both options are potentially fraught. Accepting a plea deal for violating the terms of a 2021 agreement with DOJ would be a black mark for one of the United States’ most important manufacturers and defense contractors, whose factories support thousands of U.S. jobs and whose political arm gives heavily to candidates of both parties.

It would bring hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and could complicate the company’s ability to continue winning contracts with the federal government.

But a trial would spark a potentially damaging discovery process, perpetuate Boeing’s ordeal in the news headlines and produce made-for-TV moments of victims’ families calling for justice. The legal process would drag out well into next year — potentially bringing an unpredictable face-off against a Trump administration DOJ.

Thursday’s presidential debate debacle — widely regarded as a low point for President Joe Biden, who appeared feeble and sometimes confused — many Democratic elites and nonpartisan pundits are suggesting a break-the-glass-in-case-of-emergency move that resided on the margins of conventional political thought just a week ago: The incumbent president, they argue, should step aside in the interest of the country, and delegates should name his replacement at the upcoming Democratic National Convention.

Any move to replace Biden just four months before the election carries considerable risk. The party can ill afford to pass over its sitting vice president, Kamala Harris, who represents a core Democratic constituency as a Black woman — but Harris consistently underperforms in polling. And allowing delegates to make such a momentous decision, negating the will of millions of primary voters and turning a nomination process that has been the norm for decades upside-down, is surely a recipe for division and rancor.

But it’s not like we haven’t been here before. On March 31, 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson stunned the nation when he announced that he was pulling out of that year’s presidential election. The Democratic National Convention that followed several months later devolved into chaos and violence and left the party’s eventual nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, hobbled at the start of the fall campaign season. He ultimately lost a painfully close election to Richard Nixon, in no small part because of the unruly convention in Chicago.

A leading House Democrat is preparing a constitutional amendment in response to the Supreme Court’s landmark immunity ruling, seeking to reverse the decision “and ensure that no president is above the law.”

Rep. Joseph Morelle of New York, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, sent a letter to colleagues informing them of his intent to file the resolution, which would kickstart what’s traditionally a cumbersome amendment process.

“This amendment will do what SCOTUS failed to do — prioritize our democracy,” Morelle said in a statement to AP.

It’s the most significant legislative response yet to the decision this week from the court’s conservative majority, which stunned Washington and drew a sharp dissent from the court’s liberal justices warning of the perils to democracy, particularly as Trump seeks a return to the White House. Still, the effort stands almost no chance of succeeding in this Congress.

General Motors will pay nearly $146 million in penalties to the federal government because 5.9 million of its older vehicles do not comply with emissions and fuel economy standards.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a statement Wednesday that certain GM vehicles from the 2012 through 2018 model years did not comply with federal fuel economy requirements.

The penalty comes after the Environmental Protection Agency said its testing showed the GM pickup trucks and SUVs emit over 10% more carbon dioxide on average than GM’s initial compliance testing claimed.

The EPA says the vehicles will remain on the road and cannot be repaired. The GM vehicles on average consume at least 10% more fuel than the window sticker numbers say, but the company won’t be required to reduce the miles per gallon on the stickers, the EPA said.

Archived link

“What [authoritarian] regimes have in common is their fear of a well-informed public,” Christoph Jumpelt, the head of the international relations unit at Germany’s public broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, said this week in Taiwan.

International media groups like AP, Reuters and PA Media Group cooperate with China's state-controlled agency Xinhua for being able to operate within the country. It should be obvious that such a conditionality has no place in what they say is a “purely commercial” arrangement, not in the least as this does a huge injustice to the thousands of journalists who struggle each day to report the facts.

• Last month Fu Hua, President of China’s official Xinhua News Agency, which sits directly under the country’s State Council, made a whirlwind tour from New York to London, meeting with top executives from AP, Reuters, and PA Media Group, to foster long-standing business relationships.

• Such deals with Xinhua should invite tougher questions about how international media companies with a stated commitment to professional standards should deal with Chinese media giants whose sole commitment — crystal clear in the country’s domestic political discourse— is to strengthen the global impact of Party-state propaganda.

• Xinhua's Fu is not a champion of independent media values, or a partner in tackling the information challenges of the future. Prior to his role at Xinhua, Fu served as a deputy minister of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department. His agenda is that of China’s ruling Chinese Communist Party, the CCP. Plain and simple.

• The partnerships with Western media are part of a broader effort by Xinhua to deepen its global media influence, curtailing criticism of the Chinese government and shaping international discourse that portrays the CCP in a positive light. And yet, year in and year out, Western media executives insist, even against the substance of their own statements, that this type of cooperation is just normal business.

• If it is true, for example, that AP “publishes none of the stories" by Xinhua as it claims, what then is the point of such empty formalities? “Like most major news agencies,” said a former agency head, “AP has an agreement with state-run media in China that allows AP to operate inside the country.”

• And there we have the crux. AP’s relationship with Xinhua, in place since 1972, forms the political foundation on which AP and other major news agencies, including Reuters, are able to operate in China.

• It should be obvious such conditionality has no place in any “purely commercial” arrangement. And as they obscure the true nature of the arrangement, news outlets do a huge injustice to the thousands of journalists who struggle each day to report the facts.

• Western outlets that claim to uphold professional values need to decide where they stand while insisting on the charade of standing with Xinhua, shaking hands and signing on the dotted line.

Public health officials in Colorado on Wednesday announced an adult man had tested positive for avian flu after reporting mild symptoms, including conjunctivitis, or pink eye.

The man is an employee at a dairy farm who had exposure to infected cattle and recovered after antiviral treatment, officials said.

It was the fourth human case of bird flu reported in the U.S. since avian flu was confirmed in cows in March. The prior three people to test positive were also dairy farm workers who recovered.

The first two workers to contract the virus had mild pink eye. In the third case, the worker had mild respiratory symptoms.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the case in a statement and said the risk to the general public from bird flu remains low, although people with exposure to infected animals are at greater risk.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/461080

Germany's economy ministry will look "very closely" into a deal to supply Chinese-made wind turbines for an offshore project in Germany's North Sea, saying on Wednesday questions of critical infrastructure and competition must be addressed.

Under the deal between German asset manager Luxcara and Ming Yang, the Chinese group would supply 16 turbines, each with a capacity of up to 18.5 MW, set for installation in 2028.

The ministry comments come amid broader trade tensions between Europe and China, recently focused on electric cars where the EU has proposed tariffs on Chinese imports.

Earlier on Wednesday, Europe's wind industry lobby criticized the deal, saying it gave China access to critical infrastructure in Germany and that Europe's supply chain had been ready to deliver turbines for this project.

[Edit for introducing the link.]

Neil Gaiman — the best-selling author whose work includes comic book series *The Sandman *and the novels Good Omens and American Gods — has denied sexual assault allegations made against him by two women with whom he had relationships with at the time, Tortoise Media reports.

The allegations were made during Tortoise’s four-part podcast Master: the Allegations Against Neil Gaiman, which was released Wednesday. In it, the women allege “rough and degrading sex” with the author, which the women claim was not always consensual.

One of the women, a 23-year-old named Scarlett, worked as a nanny to his child.