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The Democratic Unionist party (DUP) is on track to lose three of its eight seats, which would leave Sinn Féin as the Northern Ireland party with most MPs.

The DUP lost the Lagan Valley seat vacated by its former leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, who faces sexual offence charges, and suffered a stunning defeat in North Antrim where Ian Paisley lost a seat held by his family since 1970. It also lost South Antrim and had reduced majorities elsewhere.

The Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), Ulster Unionists and Alliance were poised to take the DUP seats but the symbolic winner will be Sinn Féin which retained its seven seats and is on course to complete a hat-trick as the biggest party in local government, the Stormont assembly and Westminster.

The DUP leader, Gavin Robinson, fended off a challenge from Alliance’s Naomi Long in East Belfast but that could not conceal a devastating election for unionism’s biggest party.

Its record on Brexit and other missteps left it squeezed between moderate and hardline rivals.

In an astonishing reversal in North Antrim, Paisley, the son and namesake of the DUP’s late founder, came second to Jim Allister of the TUV, who blamed the DUP for post-Brexit checks on goods coming from Great Britain, which he said weakened Northern Ireland’s place in the UK.

He's done.

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• An exit poll carried out by polling company Ipsos, and paid for by the BBC, ITV and Sky says Starmer’s Labour Party will win the general election with 410 seats. The final outcome of the election should be clear by early on Friday.
• The exit poll put the Conservatives on 131 seats – its worst-ever performance – and the Liberal Democrats on 61. Support for the Scottish National Party (SNP) was predicted to have slumped to just 10 seats, compared with 48 at the last election.
• Polls closed at 10pm (21:00 GMT) after millions of voters cast their ballots across the UK in a snap general election called by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
• Voters were deciding whether the Conservative Party leader would remain in the top job or if Keir Starmer, head of the main opposition Labour Party, would become prime minister.
• Issues such as the cost of living, healthcare and housing have dominated voters’ concerns.

It's worth reading the whole article because there's many amazing quotes. But the best part comes at the end:

In the basement, I smiled and said hello. She (Jill Biden looked back at me with a confused, panicked expression. It was as if she had just received horrible news and was about to run out of the room and into some kind of a family emergency. “Uh, hi,” she said. Then she glanced over to her right. Oh …

I had not seen the president up close in some time. I had skipped this season’s holiday parties, and, preoccupied with covering Trump’s legal and political dramas, I hadn’t been showing up at his White House. Unlike Trump, he wasn’t very accessible to the press, anyway. Why bother? Biden had done few interviews. He wasn’t prone to interrupting his schedule with a surprise media circus in the Oval Office. He kept a tight circle of the same close advisers who had been advising him for more than 30 years, so unlike with his predecessor, you didn’t need to hang around in West Wing hallways to figure out who was speaking to him. It was all pretty locked down and predictable in terms of the reality you could access as a member of the press with a White House hard pass.

I followed the First Lady’s gaze and found the president. Now I understood her panicked expression.

Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth.

This was true even in 2020. His face had then an uncanny valley quality that injectable aficionados call “low trust” — if only by millimeters, his cosmetically altered proportions knocked his overall facial harmony into the realm of the improbable. His thin skin, long a figurative problem and now a literal one, was pulled tightly over cheeks that seemed to vary month to month in volume. Under artificial light and in the sunshine, he took on an unnatural gleam. He looked, well, inflated. His eyes were half-shut or open very wide. They appeared darker than they once had, his pupils dilated. He did not blink at regular intervals. The White House often did not engage when questioned about the president’s stare, which sometimes raised alarm on social media when documented in official videos produced by the White House. The administration was above conspiratorial chitchat that entertained seriously scenarios in which the president was suffering from a shocking decline most Americans were not seeing. If the president was being portrayed that way, it was by his political enemies on the right, who promoted through what the press office termed “cheap fakes” a caricature of an addled creature unfit to serve. They would not dignify those people, or people doing the bidding of those people, with a response.

For many inclined to support the president, this was good enough. They did not need to monitor the president’s public appearances, because under his leadership the country had returned to the kind of normal state in which members of a First World democratic society had the privilege to forget about the president for hours or days or even weeks at a time. Trump required constant observation. What did he just do? What would he do next? Oh God, what was he doing right at that moment? Biden could be trusted to perform the duties of his office out of sight. Many people were content to look away.

My heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on. His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile. It made me sad in a way I can’t fully convey. I always thought — and I wrote — that he was a decent man. If ambition was his only sin, and it seemed to be, he had committed no sin at all by the standards of most politicians I had covered. He took my hand in his, and I was startled by how it felt. Not cold but cool. The basement was so warm that people were sweating and complaining that they were sweating. This was a silly black-tie affair. I said “hello.” His sweet smile stayed frozen. He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. “And what’s your name?” he asked.

Exiting the room after the photo, the group of reporters — not instigated by me, I should note — made guesses about how dead he appeared to be, percentage wise. “Forty percent?” one of them asked.

“It was a bad night.” That’s the spin from the White House and its allies about Thursday’s debate. But when I watched the president amble stiffly across the stage, my first thought was: He doesn’t look so bad. For months, everything I had heard, plus some of what I had seen, led me to brace for something much more dire.

We're sooooooo fucked lmao

In Capitalist USA, the government makes fake scam universities then arrests the students who paid money to attend

The land seizure, which was approved late last month but only publicized on Wednesday, comes after the seizure of 8 square kilometers (roughly 3 square miles) of land in the West Bank in March and 2.6 square kilometers (1 square mile) in February.

Smotrich was granted expanded powers over Israel’s administration of the occupied territory under Netanyahu’s governing coalition. Smotrich laid out his plans for the West Bank at a conference for his ultranationalist Religious Zionism Party last month, a recording of which was obtained by Peace Now. He said he intended to appropriate up to 15 square kilometers (nearly 6 square miles) of land in the West Bank this year.

“We came to settle the land, to build it, and to prevent its division and the establishment of a Palestinian state, God forbid,” he said during the conference. He vowed to “change the map dramatically” by claiming more West Bank land than ever before as state land.

fucking settlers

ap tone is curiously extremely "neutral" here

Hamas cited the expansion of West Bank settlements as one of its justifications for the Oct. 7 attack into southern Israel, in which Palestinian militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took around 250 hostage. Israel has launched a massive offensive in response that has killed over 37,900 Palestinians, according to local health officials, who do not say how many were fighters.

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Maybe don't have ceremonial religion mixed with government? But I critically support the lawsuit and it just survived a dismissal challenge

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Link to the article

The Chinese government has introduced a slew of new measures designed to tighten its grip on lucrative natural resources used in everything from electric cars to wind turbines. In a list released by the country's State Council on Saturday, Beijing declared that rare earth metals are the property of the state and warned "no organization or person may encroach on or destroy rare-earth resources." From Oct. 1, when the rules come into force, the government will operate a rare earth traceability database to ensure it can control the extraction, use and export of the metals. China currently produces around 60 percent of the world's rare earth metals, and is the origin of around 90 percent of refined rare earths on the market. Advertisement

Beijing has already prohibited exports of rare earth refining and magnet manufacturing technologies. In January, it banned the export of gallium and germanium, both highly sought after by the computer-chip industry. Fears that China is looking to exert control over the industry, and could disrupt critical technology, automotive and renewable energy supply chains, have sparked a race to shore up supplies from alternative suppliers. Both the U.S. and the EU have launched efforts to procure rare earths at home and abroad, including in Vietnam, Brazil and Australia. A year ago, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced construction of the first large-scale rare earth refinery outside of Asia, located in Estonia. She said the move would "bolster European resilience and security of supply."

A 2022 analysis from the European Parliament warned that over-reliance on monopolistic suppliers was a major risk for Europe. "The EU imports 93 percent of its magnesium from China, 98 percent of its borate from Turkey, and 85 percent of its niobium from Brazil. Russia produces 40 percent of the world's palladium," it said. "The latter is a reminder of the strategic implications of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the need for the EU to prepare for an increasingly uncertain world."

The EU has launched a probe into anti-competitive trading allegations against the Chinese electric vehicle market, which benefits from heavy government subsidies and preferential access to essential rare earth metals. Earlier this month, the two sides agreed they would host consultations in order to try and resolve the standoff.

That last paragraph really is so damning. It is admitting the superiority of China’s central planning and how it is being used to actually improve society. ”But at what cost?”

Well, apparently the cost is that shares of China’s largest rare earth mineral mining firm have gone up 5% since the announcement. China proving socialists right every single day and absolutely crushing the capitalist development speedrun challenge. It’s genuinely hilarious that the development plan of China runs basically like what I’ll describe below, and capitalist nations are just completely incapable of stopping it from happening because the power of capital is greater than the power of their states.

“hmmm yes, today I will invest in the Chinese rare earth mineral market. Since China controls 90% of global production and all of the infrastructure is in place, all I have to do is bring my money, tech, and expertise with me and I’ll carve myself some serious profit! Easy money!”

“Ahh yes thank you for the help developing our mining industry/technology Mr. Foreign Capital. We appreciate your business and you had a great run, but unfortunately for you we have nationalized your mineral resources. The extractive capitalism will now stop. Feel free to reinvest elsewhere or compete with us on the global market tho :)”

”China is nationalizing its rare earth minerals, but at what cost? We need to ban China from–“

”Wait omg is that another investment opportunity in China where I can bring in my capital/technology/expertise to make some money? Hell yeah, where do I sign?”

Rinse and repeat

As Steward Health Care struggled to provide services and pay vendors in many of its three dozen or so hospitals in Massachusetts and across the country, its executives spent millions on intelligence firms, according to corporate records, videos, and other files obtained by the global journalism outlet the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and shared with the Boston Globe Spotlight Team.

In all, senior Steward executives authorized and spent over $7 million from 2018 to 2023 on firms that provide research, intelligence-gathering, and surveillance services, according to emails, encrypted messages, and financial records reviewed by the Spotlight Team.

In the US, Steward is currently mired in bankruptcy, the fate of its network hazy, while its Massachusetts properties head for the auction block. In recent years, crippling staff shortages at Steward hospitals have put patients at risk, records show. Dozens of lawsuits from unpaid vendors — from elevator companies to orthopedic suppliers — have piled up in court.

Records show that Steward executives prioritized intelligence-gathering over most everything else. Monthly bills ran as high as $440,000. They were to be paid on time and in full.

While much of this investigative intelligence work was taking place across the globe, Steward’s hospitals in the United States were struggling under the weight of the coronavirus. From 2020 to 2021, Steward hired hundreds of temporary staff to meet the need. But by March 2021, Steward was disputing 3,400 invoices and withholding over $42 million from one staffing agency, who eventually pulled their staff from Steward hospitals, court documents show.

On one night in fall 2021, there were 101 patients in the emergency department with only six nurses to care for them, creating a 14-hour wait for some patients in the waiting room, the memo noted. On another, seven full ambulances idled outside the hospital as 11 nurses juggled 71 patients in the emergency room.

A day after Thanksgiving, 11 nurses were assigned to 95 patients and a patient with acute renal failure was left unattended.

That patient was later found dead in the hallway.

University of Toronto's People's Circle for Palestine Student Encampment will be attempted to be cleared/brutalized by Toronto Police at any time past

6pm tomorrow, Wednesday July 3, 2024 after single judge grants injunction for administration

University of Toronto encampment ruling fails to uphold the right of peaceful assembly

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