IndustryStandard

Video: Palestinian journalist Bayan Abu Sultan reports from the scene after Israel's airstrike on Al-Baqa Café, located on Gaza City’s beach.

Michelle Taylor sat at the defense table during her sentencing hearing in St. Augustine, Florida, listening to a trio of forensic chemists lay out the scientific evidence to prove what she’d sworn for years: She had not set the fire that burned down her house and killed her own son.

It was the last Friday in May, and the St. Johns County courthouse was mostly empty.

The expert witnesses each testified via Zoom, their faces appearing on a pair of large monitors inside the wood-paneled courtroom. None of the experts knew Taylor personally. But they knew chemistry. And each made clear that the case against Taylor had been based on junk science: faulty analysis by a state lab worker who detected gasoline in fire debris samples where there was none.

Police in southern California arrested a man suspected of posing as a federal immigration officer this week, the latest in a series of such arrests, as masked, plainclothes immigration agents are deployed nationwide to meet the Trump administration’s mass deportation targets.

The man, Fernando Diaz, was arrested by Huntington Park police after officers said they found a loaded gun and official-looking documents with Department of Homeland Security headings in his SUV, according to NBC Los Angeles. Officers were impounding his vehicle for parking in a handicapped zone when Diaz asked to retrieve items inside, the police said. Among the items seen by officers in the car were “multiple copies of passports not registered under the individual’s name”, NBC reports.

Diaz was arrested for possession of the allegedly unregistered firearm and released on bail.

In a Friday evening vote, the U.S. Senate rejected a war powers resolution that would have blocked President Donald Trump from making further attacks on Iran, despite widespread disapproval of last week’s strikes.

Senators voted 47-53, largely along party lines, on a measure offered by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., that would have prohibited Trump from offensive measures while preserving his ability to defend U.S. forces.

Kaine’s resolution drew near-unanimous support from Democrats, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Israeli attacks on southern Lebanon on multiple vehicles have killed three people as attacks continue despite a November ceasefire with the armed group Hezbollah.

The latest Israeli attacks came a day after Israel killed a woman and wounded 25 people in attacks across southern Lebanon. Lebanon’s National News Agency reported that the woman was killed in an Israeli drone strike on an apartment in the city of Nabatieh.

Israel, which retains troops in five locations in south Lebanon, has repeatedly bombed its neighbour despite a ceasefire which halted more than a year of fire exchanges and nearly two months of an all-out war.

The U.S. Army has been estimated to have consumed 15-20 of all munitions for its globally deployed arsenal of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) long range anti-missile systems, after deployment to support Israeli air defences during the country’s 11 days of hostilities with Iran.

A highly specialised asset designed to intercept medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles, the U.S. Army fields seven systems across five air defence regiments, and is set to operationalise an eighth by the end of the year.

The systems are depended on to counter the arsenals of five potential adversaries including North Korea, China, Russia and Belarus, as well as Iran. Video footage has shown the launch of 39 interceptors to intercept Iranian missiles from June 13-24, although only a small portion of launches were captured on film partly due to the strict wartime censorship that was put in place in Israel.

Presuming at a conservative estimate that the filmed launches from THAAD batteries accounted for 50-66 percent of total launches, total expenditure of interceptors amounted to approximately 60-80 interceptors during the 11 day conflict.

Five elected members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the UK’s largest Jewish representative body, have been suspended for two years after publicly criticising Israel’s military assault on Gaza, an act they described as incompatible with Jewish values and morally indefensible.

The suspensions follow an open letter signed by 36 deputies and published in the Financial Times on 16 April. “Israel’s soul is being ripped out” said the signatories expressing their opposition to the genocidal war in Gaza. The letter, which came amid mounting civilian deaths and growing global calls for accountability, urged Jewish leaders to break their silence in the face of war crimes and mass suffering.

The US supreme court has paved the way for South Carolina to kick Planned Parenthood out of its Medicaid program over its status as an abortion provider, a decision that could embolden red states across the country to effectively “defund” the reproductive healthcare organization.

The case, Medina v Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, centers around a 2018 executive order from South Carolina’s governor, Henry McMaster, that blocked clinics that provide abortions from receiving Medicaid reimbursements. Medicaid is the US government’s main health insurance program for low-income people. About 80 million people rely on it.