People describing themselves as Foxconn workers pulled down barriers and argued with hazmat-suited authorities at a COVID-hit plant in the industrial Chinese city of Zhengzhou that belongs to the Apple Inc (AAPL.O) supplier, scenes broadcast live on the Kuaishou short video platform showed on Wednesday.

The videos showed more than a hundred people clustered outside and coming face to face with dozens of hazmat-suited officials, who they said were police. Some videos showed workers complaining about the food they had been provided while others said they had not been paid bonuses as promised.

Reuters was not immediately able to verify the authenticity of the videos. Foxconn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Zhengzhou plant is the world’s largest iPhone factory with some 200,000 workers.

Since late Ocober, many workers have fled – their escapes captured on social media – as frustration mounted over how COVID cases were handled and over the treatment of employees, including what they said were insufficient provisions of food.

In a bid to restore production, the manufacturer began a drive to convince workers to stay and to recruit more staff, promising higher per-hour salaries and bonuses.

It has maintained so-called closed-loop operations at the plant – a system in which staff live and work on-site isolated from the wider world – due to the COVID situation in Zhengzhou.

The curbs and discontent have hit production, prompting Apple Inc to say earlier this month that it expected lower shipments of premium iPhone 14 models.

An earthquake of magnitude 6.0 struck western Turkey on Wednesday, the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) said, while the interior minister said there were no immediate reports of deaths or significant damage.

The quake was at a depth of 2 km (1.2 miles), EMSC said.

Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), which measured the quake at 5.9 magnitude, said the epicenter of the tremor had been in Golyaka, a district in the northwestern province of Duzce.

“We almost completed our checks in the villages around Golyaka. There is no severe damage reported; only some barns were wrecked in these places … There was a power cut during the quake but authorities are reinstating power now,” Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said on broadcaster TRT Haber.

Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said on Twitter that 35 people in Duzce and nearby provinces had been injured.

Turkish media said the earthquake was also felt in Istanbul and the capital, Ankara.

Elon Musk’s Twitter failed to stop the circulation of an antisemitic cartoon posted on the network by Russian diplomats drawing on a trope of Nazi propaganda by depicting Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with a huge nose.

Despite pleas from Twitter users who objected to the anti-Jewish racism of the cartoon, the tweet had not been deleted, contextualized or restricted in any visible way when this article was published, 17 hours after the image was first posted on the official account of the Russian embassy in London.

Before Musk took control of the social network, tweets containing images that used racist tropes to attack individuals or groups based on their ethnic identity were routinely removed from the platform or made impossible to share.

Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and the co-author of the book “Meme Wars,” posted a screenshot of the Russian embassy tweet and noted that the diplomats were using “open antisemitism” to drum up support for the Russian war on Ukraine.

Russian Embassy trying to win the meme war with open antisemitism. pic.twitter.com/vc9V7xrEdP

— Joan Donovan BOOK: Meme Wars (@BostonJoan) November 22, 2022

The cartoon is a version of an old internet meme, in which an image of Bart Simpson writing on a chalkboard during after-school detention — from the opening sequence of “The Simpsons” — is reworked by inserting topical new text on the board. In the image shared by the Russian officials, the character of Bart was also replaced with a crude depiction of Zelenskyy in which his nose was altered to evoke Nazi imagery of Jews.

The text on the board, and the tweeted Russian caption for the cartoon, makes reference to speculation encouraged by Russia, but unsupported by evidence, that Ukraine had intentionally fired a defensive missile into Poland during a recent Russian attack as part of a false flag operation intended to draw NATO into the conflict.

Twitter’s failure to immediately remove the image or restrict the Russian government account that posted it appeared to be in keeping with Musk’s previously stated sympathy with Russia’s war aims and his active embrace of right-wing talking points about the need to make the social network a forum for “free speech,” even if that means allowing hate speech to flourish.

But Musk’s definition of who should be allowed to speak freely appears to be influenced by the right-wing ideologues and trolls he frequently encourages and agrees with on Twitter. The social network’s decision to allow the Russian government’s racist attack on Zelenskyy came at the same time that some antifascist accounts were being suspended and just after Musk reinstated the accounts of both Donald Trump — who used his tweets to foment the failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021 — and Kanye West, who recently tweeted a threat to unleash punishment on “Jewish people.”

Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, a news organization that began with collaborative, open-source investigations on Twitter, was among those who drew Musk’s attention to the image and asked if the social network’s new owner is “okay with state run Twitter accounts using anti-Semitic tropes?” Higgins suggested that Musk could even poll his followers on the platform to see if they “are cool with casual anti-Semitism.”

Elizabeth Tsurkov, a research fellow at the Forum for Regional Thinking, an Israeli-Palestinian think-tank based in Jerusalem, noted that the tweet came from diplomats working for the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, who had defended Russia’s wild claims that Ukraine is run by Nazis by endorsing a conspiracy theory that Adolf Hitler was Jewish.

“So what if Zelensky is Jewish?” Lavrov told Italian television in May, when he was asked about the Russian claim that Ukraine was run by Nazis. “I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood.” The foreign minister went on to claim that “wise Jewish people” have said that “some of the worst antisemites are Jews.”

In her comment on the cartoon posted on Twitter by Russian diplomats, Tsurkov wrote: “The people who brought you ‘Hitler was a Jew’ decided to depict Ukraine’s Jewish president this way.”

Lavrov’s remarks caused outrage and were condemned by his Israeli counterpart, Yair Lapid, as “an unforgivable and outrageous statement as well as a terrible historical error. Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust. The lowest level of racism against Jews is to accuse Jews themselves of antisemitism.”

Three days later, the hawkish Russian state television host Vladimir Solovyov, who is himself Jewish, told viewers that it was perfectly possible for Zelensky to be both Jewish and a Nazi, at least according to the definition used by those around Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Nazism, Solovyov insisted, was a form of extreme nationalism that could target any national group, not just Jews. “Nazism doesn’t have to be antisemitic,” he said, “it can be anti-Slavic, anti-Russian.”

After Lavrov’s hideous antisemitic Nazi remarks, for which Putin had to apologize to Israel, new directives apparently landed at the state TV studios. Now they claim that Nazism doesn’t have to be antisemitic and in its new iteration it is [drumroll] anti-Slavic and anti-Russian. pic.twitter.com/BesGtjzjWm

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) May 6, 2022

The idea that Russians, not Jews, were the main victims of Nazi Germany has a long pedigree in Russia. As the historian Timothy Snyder explained in his book “Bloodlands,” the official Soviet history of the nation’s “Great Patriotic War” against Nazi Germany was written to downplay the suffering of the Jews — influenced by Josef Stalin’s antisemitism.

“If the Stalinist notion of the war was to prevail, the fact that the Jews were its main victims had to be forgotten,” Snyder wrote. “Also to be forgotten was that the Soviet Union had been allied to Nazi Germany when the war began in 1939, and that the Soviet Union had been unprepared for the German attack in 1941. The murder of the Jews was not only an undesirable memory in and of itself; it called forth other undesirable memories. It had to be forgotten.”

“Putin’s Russian regime talks of ‘Nazis’ not because it opposes the extreme right, which it most certainly does not, but as a rhetorical device to justify unprovoked war and genocidal policies,” Snyder wrote on Substack in April. “[T]he Russian policy of ‘denazification’ is not directed against Nazis in the sense that the word is normally used,” Snyder added, but “operates within the special Russian definition of ‘Nazi’: a Nazi is a Ukrainian who refuses to admit being a Russian.”

“The actual history of actual Nazis and their actual crimes in the 1930s and 1940s is thus totally irrelevant and completely cast aside,” Snyder observed. “This is perfectly consistent with Russian war fighting in Ukraine. No tears are shed in the Kremlin over Russian killing of Holocaust survivors or Russian destruction of Holocaust memorials, because Jews and the Holocaust have nothing to do with the Russian definition of ‘Nazi.’ This explains why Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, although a democratically-elected president, and a Jew with family members who fought in the Red Army and died in the Holocaust, can be called a Nazi. Zelens’kyi is a Ukrainian, and that is all that ‘Nazi’ means.”

The post Twitter Allows Russian Officials to Share Antisemitic Cartoon of Zelenskyy appeared first on The Intercept.

Manchester United (MANU.N) said on Tuesday it was commencing a process to explore strategic alternatives, including a new investment or a potential sale, 17 years after the American Glazer family bought the English Premier League soccer club.

The Glazer family is working with financial advisers on the process, which could lead to a partial sale of the Old Trafford club or investments including stadium and infrastructure redevelopment, the club said in a statement.

Manchester United fans have been clamouring for a change of ownership and the Glazers have been the target of intense criticism as the team have gone five years without winning a trophy. The last silverware they won was the Europa League and League Cup back in 2017.

“As we seek to continue building on the club’s history of success, the board has authorized a thorough evaluation of strategic alternatives,” Avram Glazer and Joel Glazer, executive co-chairmen and directors of United, said in the statement.

“We will evaluate all options to ensure that we best serve our fans and that Manchester United maximizes the significant growth opportunities available to the club today and in the future,” the statement said.

In August, British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe had expressed interest in buying United, Reuters reported. At the time, Elon Musk had also joked about planning to buy the club.

Wealthy Asian tycoons, especially those from China, have been buying European teams in recent years including Premier League side Wolverhampton Wanderers and Italy’s Inter Milan.

However, football clubs have since been deemed unfavorable assets by China and any major overseas purchase would seem unlikely at the moment, said Mark Dreyer, Beijing-based author of “Sporting Superpower”, a book about China’s sports ambitions.

“It’s almost impossible to see how any Chinese-related entity could justify a purchase of this magnitude in the current climate,” he said. “… with China only just now facing up to the realities of COVID-19, which makes the entire economic environment that much more uncertain, no state body would approve this kind of deal.”

The owners are under pressure with United sitting fifth in the Premier League halfway through the season, which has been suspended because of the current Qatar World Cup.

Manchester United shares jumped as much as 20% after Sky News first reported on the sale process, giving the club a market capitalisation of $2.6 billion.

The company was worth $2.5 billion at the close of U.S. trading on Tuesday. At its peak as a public company, it had a market capitalisation of $4.3 billion in 2018.

Also on Tuesday, the club said that star striker Cristiano Ronaldo will leave with immediate effect, marking a bitter end to the Portugal captain’s second spell at Old Trafford after he said he felt betrayed by the club.

The Glazers bought the club for 790 million pounds ($939.07 million) in 2005 in a highly leveraged deal which has been criticised for loading debt onto the club.

United has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange since 2012, when the Glazers sold 10% of their holding via the listing and have sold more shares since.

The Raine Group is acting as financial adviser and Latham & Watkins LLP is the legal adviser to Manchester United.

Rothschild and Co. is acting as financial adviser to the Glazer family shareholders.

Among the fan protests against the Glazers was one in May 2021 that forced the postponement of a home match against Liverpool, one of the club’s biggest rivals. It was the first Premier League match to be postponed because of a protest.

United and Liverpool were among a group of big clubs that said they wanted to establish a European Super League in April 2021 but then withdrew, partly because of objections from many fans in England.

Liverpool are also “exploring a sale” according to club chairman Tom Werner. In May 2022, Chelsea Football Club was sold to a consortium led by an investment group fronted by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital for $3.2 billion (2.5 billion pounds).

United finished sixth last season in their worst Premier League campaign in terms of points earned, failing to qualify for the lucrative European Champions League competition.

They won the last of their record 20 top-flight league titles in 2013, the year the great Alex Ferguson stepped down as manager after more than 26 years in charge.

The club have hired Dutch manager Erik ten Hag from Ajax Amsterdam in a bid to turn around their fortunes.

($1 = 0.8413 pounds)

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The Trump years taught us (and taught us well) about the dark side of human nature. We have seen in the years since Trump rode down the escalator — many people literally signing their souls away on the dotted line — to Donald Trump.

And it has become a shockingly familiar spectacle. Time and again, we have watched as willing supplicants have abandoned their good names, reputations, and humanity — to go through the hotness of the inferno, shedding their honorable skins as they move forward through the flames.

And nobody — absolutely today — is more of a divine comedy than JD Vance. As you know, Vance won his race to be Ohio’s next senator. And many people wondered. They spoke, and I heard much of what they had to say.

Perhaps, many whispered, NOW that he’s won — JD will come back. Maybe he only said what he said and did what he did to get INTO office. Oh, people, people — why do you keep falling for it? These willing supplicants like Vance cannot come back. Once one steps through the doors leading to hell, there IS no way back.

Their souls undergo a sort of metamorphosis you see. The horrors they experience they bring on themselves — for they no longer have humanity. And once that happens, salvation becomes difficult.

So in the spirit of one whose soul smolders in purgatory, Vance has written a sycophantic, beseeching,fake, shallow op-ed begging people NOT to BLAME TRUMP!

It isn’t his fault, Vance writes rather frantically. In his op-ed, Vance, says that money is to blame! Money is the REAL culprit in the disappointing midterms of the GOP. He blames ActBlue. He blames small democratic donors. He blames everything and everyone — except Trump.

Such an argument is so utterly ridiculous I will go on about it no more. The amount of dark money republicans get is well-known. What ISN’T well-known is why Vance wrote this op-ed in the first place. He won his race. Why the continuing servitude?

It is because, like many who walked the hot halls of hell before him, he cannot stop. That’s what happens when one sells their soul. The character of Vance is doomed. The broken morality, however, lingers on.

The post JD Vance is making a fool of himself already appeared first on Palmer Report.

אין דעם נומער פֿונעם „פֿאָרווערטס־וואָכנבלאַט“, וואָס איר קענט אַליין אָפּדרוקן און לייענען אין אַ פּאַפּירענעם נוסח דורכן געבן אַ קוועטש דאָ, געפֿינען זיך די ווײַטערדיקע אַרטיקלען:

• חבֿרה, „ביאַלי‟ איז נישט קיין ייִדיש וואָרט! דאָס געבעקס האָבן ייִדן אין מיזרח־אייראָפּע טאַקע געגעסן אָבער דער טערמין „ביאַלי‟ איז, אין תּוך אַרײַן, אַן ענגלישער.

• די שפּורן פֿון שאַמאַניזם בײַם דערציילן חסידישע מעשׂיות. ווען מע דערציילט אַ מעשׂה בײַם רבינס טיש, באַגלייט מיט ריטמישע ניגונים און טענץ, ווערט זי אויפֿגעלעבט אין דער נשמה פֿון די באַטייליקטע.

• אַלט–ייִדישע פּאָעזיע אױף תּנ״כישע טעמעס. די איבערטײַטשונגען פֿון ספֿר יהושע און ספֿר שופֿטים דערצײלן די מעשׂיות אין דער פֿאָרם פֿון דער דײַטשישער עפּישער דיכטונג.

The post The Forverts printout edition for November 23, 2022 appeared first on The Forward.

(NewsNation) — Authorities announced Tuesday that there is no evidence related to Idaho murder victim Kaylee Goncalves having a stalker.

After looking through “hundreds of pieces of information related to this topic,” authorities said in a news release that they have not been able to verify or identify a stalker.

Authorities also clarified in the news release that the type of knife used in the attacks is believed to be a fix-blade knife. However, detectives continue to look for the weapon.

All four victims were members of fraternities and sororities: seniors Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, junior Xana Kernodle, and freshman Ethan Chapin. The women were roommates and Chapin was dating Kernodle.

Moscow Police Chief James Fry said authorities have received nearly 650 tips and conducted 90 interviews so far. Police have also requested businesses and residences in specific parts of the city to share with them footage recorded between 3 and 6 a.m. on the day of the killings.

Additionally, the city of Moscow has set up a new webpage with information on resources related to the investigation. There will be a news conference at 1 p.m. Wednesday.

KYIV (Reuters) -Ukraine’s government promised to create shelters to provide heat and water and encouraged citizens to conserve energy as a harsh winter loomed amid relentless Russian strikes that have left its power structure in tatters.

Special “invincibility centres” will be set up around Ukraine to provide electricity, heat, water, internet, mobile phone connections and a pharmacy, free of charge and around the clock, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address on Tuesday.

Russian attacks have knocked out power for long periods for up to 10 million consumers at a time. Ukraine’s national power grid operator said on Tuesday the damage had been colossal.

“If massive Russian strikes happen again and it’s clear power will not be restored for hours, the ‘invincibility centres’ will go into action with all key services,” Zelenskiy said.

Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said this week that some 8,500 power generator sets are being imported to Ukraine daily.

The first snow of the winter has fallen in much of the country over the past week.

Authorities have warned of power cuts that could affect millions of people to the end of March – the latest impact from Russia’s nine-month invasion that has already killed tens of thousands, uprooted millions and pummelled the global economy.

Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities follow a series of battlefield setbacks that have included a retreat of its forces from the southern city of Kherson to the east bank of the Dnipro River that bisects the country.

A week after being retaken by Ukrainian forces, residents in Kherson were tearing down Russian propaganda billboards and replacing them with pro-Ukrainian signs.

“The moment our soldiers entered, these posters were printed and handed over to us. We found workers to install the posters, and we clean up the advertisement off as quickly as possible,” said Antonina Dobrozhenska, who works at the government’s communications department.

Battles raged in the east, where Russia is pressing an offensive along a stretch of front line west of the city of Donetsk, which has been held by its proxies since 2014. The Donetsk region was the scene of fierce attacks and constant shelling over the past 24 hours, Zelenskiy said.

In Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, Russian air defences were activated and two drone attacks were repelled on Tuesday, including one targeting a power station near Sevastopol, the regional governor said. Sevastopol is the home port of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

Russian-installed Governor Mikhail Razvozhaev called for calm and said no damage had been caused.

‘STOCK UP ON WARM CLOTHES’

The World Health Organization warned this week that hundreds of Ukrainian hospitals and healthcare facilities lacked fuel, water and electricity.

“Ukraine’s health system is facing its darkest days in the war so far. Having endured more than 700 attacks, it is now also a victim of the energy crisis,” Hans Kluge, the WHO regional director for Europe, said in a statement after visiting Ukraine.

Sergey Kovalenko, the head of YASNO, which provides energy for Kyiv, advised citizens to “stock up on warm clothes, blankets … think about options that will help you get through a long outage.”

Russia’s strikes on energy infrastructure are a consequence of Kyiv being unwilling to negotiate, Russia’s state news agency TASS quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying last week.

Russia says it is carrying out a “special military operation” to rid Ukraine of nationalists and protect Russian-speaking communities.

Ukraine and the West describe Russia’s actions as an unprovoked, imperialist land grab in the neighbouring state it once dominated within the former Soviet Union.

Western responses have included financial and military aid for Kyiv – it received 2.5 billion euros ($2.57 billion) from the EU on Tuesday and is expecting $4.5 billion in U.S. aid in coming weeks – and waves of sanctions on Russia.

The West has also sought to cap Russian energy export prices, with the aim of reducing the petroleum revenues that fund Moscow’s war machine while maintaining flows of oil to global markets to prevent price spikes.

The Group of Seven nations should soon announce the price cap and will probably adjust the level a few times a year, a senior U.S. Treasury official said on Tuesday.