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Volunteer James Free was sorting through items in the Portland Rescue Mission's donation bin when something shiny caught his eye.

Amid all the usual hand-me-downs was a pair of bright gold men's sneakers without so much as a scuff on them.

He didn't yet know it, but he'd stumbled upon a pair of extremely rare Nike Air Jordan 3s, custom made for director Spike Lee ahead of the 2019 Academy Awards.

The shoes are now up for auction by Sotheby's, which estimates they will fetch as much as $20,000 US (about $26,750 Cdn) for the mission. The organization has helped people struggling with homelessness, hunger and addiction since 1949.

"Those shoes are going to provide thousands of meals for people that we serve," Erin Holcomb, the mission's director of staff ministry, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

"It's just a really beautiful picture of generosity."

“We were treated like cattle, they even wrote numbers on our hands,” said Ibrahim Lubbad, a 30-year-old computer engineer arrested in Beit Lahiya on Dec. 7 with a dozen other family members and held overnight. “We could feel their hatred.”

The 33-year-old Watts, who had not shared the news of her pregnancy even with her family, made her first prenatal visit to a doctor’s office behind Mercy Health-St. Joseph’s Hospital in Warren, a working-class city about 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of Cleveland.

The doctor said that, while a fetal heartbeat was still present, Watts’ water had broken prematurely and the fetus she was carrying would not survive. He advised heading to the hospital to have her labor induced, so she could have what amounted to an abortion to deliver the nonviable fetus. Otherwise, she would face “significant risk” of death, according to records of her case.

That was a Tuesday in September. What followed was a harrowing three days entailing: multiple trips to the hospital; Watts miscarrying into, and then flushing and plunging, a toilet at her home; a police investigation of those actions; and Watts, who is Black, being charged with abuse of a corpse. That’s a fifth-degree felony punishable by up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine.

Last Saturday, 9 December, a joint World Health Organisation (WHO)/UN/Palestine Red Crescent Society convoy of six ambulances and a truck set off from southern Gaza to deliver desperately-needed medical supplies to the al-Ahli Hospital in the north, and to transfer critically-injured patients from there to a hospital in the south.

To get to al-Ahli, the convoy had to pass through the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) checkpoint at Wadi Gaza.

"The one thing we expect when we go through a checkpoint in any military setting is free access for humanitarian personnel and goods", says Mr Morland, who has been a UN aid worker for 20 years.

But this time, he says, "we approached huge sand dunes with Israeli soldiers standing on the top with their machine guns squarely aimed at the Palestinian paramedics, at the UN vehicles, and at the UN trucks carrying medical supplies".

As they were held there for over an hour, two of the Palestinian paramedics were led away for questioning. "We understand one was put on his knees, stripped and detained for some time until we were able to negotiate his release and carry on to Gaza," says Mr Morland.

"These moves (of aid) are clearly co-ordinated with the IDF," he says. "We provide all the details of what's on the convoy, what it's going to do, and indeed the names of all the members of the convoy… So what was really a dehumanising treatment of Palestinian colleagues was unacceptable."

The new survey comes after the recent arrest of a suspected serial killer in Los Angeles who targeted the homeless.

Separately, a California man attended court on Friday for manslaughter after allegedly filming himself shooting a sleeping homeless man.

The annual Point In Time survey, taken on a single January night each year, found that 653,104 people experiencing homelessness in the US. The Department of Housing and Urban Development report says that this is the highest number of people since the count began in 2007.

Nearly a quarter of the victims in Los Angeles homicide cases in 2022 were homeless, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Unhoused people only account for 1.2% of the city's population.

Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, sought to force debate under a provision in U.S. foreign assistance law prohibiting security assistance to any government that "engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights" and lets Congress vote to demand a report on a country's human rights practices.

If a resolution requesting the information passes, the Department of State must submit a report within 30 days, or all security assistance to the country in question is cut off.

However, it was not clear how much support any such resolution might receive, as U.S. lawmakers - both Democrats and Republicans - have for years approved huge amounts of military assistance for Israel with very few restrictions.

Sanders' resolution acknowledged Israel's right to respond to the Oct. 7 attack on Israelis by Islamist Hamas militants. However, he deplored the extent of the suffering in Gaza.

"This is a humanitarian cataclysm, and it is being done with American bombs and money. We need to face up to that fact – and then we need to end our complicity in those actions," Sanders said in a statement.

** I've posted this because of the UK's media, not because of any royal involved.

The judge's conclusion that the editors of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People knew about the wrongdoing vindicates Harry's vociferous arguments that senior press figures had known about, and covered up, wrongdoing.

The prince called for authorities to take action against those identified as having broken the law.

The ruling said among the editors who knew about the "widespread" unlawful behaviour was high-profile broadcaster Piers Morgan, the Daily Mirror editor from 1996 to 2004, who has become a leading critic of Harry and Meghan.

Morgan hit back with a defiant statement of his own, saying Harry's mission was not to reform the press but to destroy the monarchy with Meghan.

This year, The Store is offering that same dignity of choice to parents looking for gifts for the holiday season. During a two-day event starting Friday, selected families will shop at a free toy store, stocked with brand new toys, video games, stuffed animals, scooters, clothes, makeup and musical instruments.

“The emotional aspect of being able to give your child something your child wanted versus just something to sort of get you through the holidays, that’s such a load off the minds of somebody who maybe didn’t think they were going to be able to do that,” Paisley said.

The Paisleys got a sneak peak on Thursday before the free toy store opened, marveling over the stacks of gifts, wrapping station, Christmas trees and holiday decorations. Volunteers and staff from Belmont University and The Store spent hours unpacking and organizing all the donated toys into sections and decorating while listening to Christmas music.

The celebrity couple brought the idea of a free grocery store to Nashville after seeing the concept years ago at the Unity Shoppe in Santa Barbara, California. When The Store launched in early 2020, it was just weeks after a tornado hit the city and before the global pandemic made food access an immediate problem.

The US representative at the UN, Robert Wood, has said that they wouldn’t support an immediate ceasefire.

"While the United States strongly supports a durable peace, in which both Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace and security, we do not support calls for an immediate ceasefire."

"This would only plant the seeds for the next war because Hamas has no desire to see a durable peace," he told the UN Security Council.

The US is one of the permanent members which has the right to veto resolution.

PYNQ alleged that FedEx violates laws governing contractors by exercising the same level of control over those service providers as it would over employees.

Using contractors enables Ground to shift employee and other expenses to those service providers. It also helps FedEx control labor costs by thwarting union organizing efforts, which are more complex at many small companies than at one large company.

PYNQ, owned by former airline pilot Tara Wright, in 2021 spent $1.13 million to buy two FedEx Ground delivery areas with routes serving northern California's McKinleyville and Crescent City. FedEx sent termination letters on both service areas in May and sold one of them without her consent and without compensation. There was not time to sell the second area, leading to a loss, PYNQ's attorney Possinger said.

The gambit by the former U.S. president and frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination may succeed, legal experts said -- not necessarily by persuading higher courts of the merits of his case, but simply by bogging down the system and keeping him free to campaign against Democratic President Joe Biden.

Trump's lawyers on Thursday said they'd appeal a ruling by the federal judge overseeing his upcoming Washington, D.C., trial on federal election subversion charges denying Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution related to official actions he took as president.

That ruling may be the last one Trump will be able to appeal before the start of his trial, currently scheduled to begin in March.

Petryshen, who works for the conservation group Wildsight, is on a detective mission of sorts. He’s about to bushwhack into the Nagle Creek Valley, 150 kilometres north of Revelstoke, B.C., to ground-truth provincial government logging maps he obtained in May. The maps outline the government’s plans for new clearcuts in the disappearing inland temperate rainforest, in core habitat for an endangered caribou herd.

According to BC Timber Sales, the provincial government agency responsible for planning and auctioning off the cutblocks, the cedar and hemlock trees slated for logging are between 224 and 336 years old. Petryshen, who’s been scrolling through forest inventory data and cross-matching maps, isn’t so sure. “We question whether this is a reliable estimate,” he says. Forests above 400 years old are classified as ancient, meaning this forest would automatically meet provincial government criteria for old-growth logging deferrals.