Lovstuhagen

n an investigative report, the Washington Post found that last month a group of billionaires and business leaders secretly urged New York City’s mayor to send police to disperse pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.

The Washington Post obtained communications showing that on April 26, business figures such as Daniel Lubetzky, Daniel Loeb, Len Blavatnik, and Joseph Sitt held a Zoom call with Mayor Eric Adams. This call occurred about a week after police were first sent to Columbia’s campus. Some participants discussed political donations to Adams and exerting pressure on Columbia’s leadership to allow police intervention.

One group member told The Post he donated the maximum legal limit of $2,100 to Adams that month. Some members also offered to fund private investigators to assist the police, an offer reportedly accepted by Adams. However, City Hall stated that the NYPD has not used private investigators for this purpose.

American citizens appear to be among a group detained in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for their alleged involvement in a failed coup attempt, authorities in the African nation said Sunday.

The arrests were made after a deadly shootout near a government official’s home in the capital Kinshasa, which killed three people. Congolese army spokesperson Brig. Gen. Sylvain Ekenge said the coup, which was enacted by both Congolese and foreigners, had been quickly thwarted by national security forces.

The U.S. ambassador to the country, Lucy Tamlyn, said on X that she had been informed of the alleged involvement of American citizens and said the embassy was cooperating with the Congolese government.

“I am shocked by the events of this morning and very concerned by reports of American citizens allegedly involved,” she wrote in French. “We will cooperate with DRC authorities to the fullest extent as they investigate these criminal acts and hold accountable any U.S. citizen involved.”

Footage of two men under arrest quickly made the rounds on social media. One of the men in the video was identified as the American son of the coup’s Congolese ringleader, Christian Malanga. Also in circulation were pictures of a U.S. passport apparently belonging to Benjamin Zalman-Polun, a 36-year-old born in Maryland. Zalman-Polun is reportedly a cannabis entrepreneur who has been linked to the suspected leader Malanga. Malanga is the founder of a political organization for Congolese people in the U.S., and he posted a livestream Sunday afternoon that appeared to show him leading the charge.

The coup reportedly began around 4:30 a.m. Sunday morning near the residence of Vital Kamerhe, who is running to be speaker of the national legislature. The attackers were met with gunfire, an exchange that killed a coup member and two police officers, a spokesman for Kamerhe wrote on X.

The attackers then moved on to the presidential palace, Congolese media said, which is just a mile away. But they were arrested by security forces there, and the coup was shut down. Ekenge, the Congolese army spokesman, told the Associated Press that the likely ringleader Malanga had been killed during the clash.

The target of the coup was believed to be President Felix Tshisekedi, who won a second term in a chaotic December vote. Tshisekedi was unharmed, and multiple U.S. news outlets characterized the plot as a poorly organized scheme that relied on amateur tactics.

The former top Democrat on the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee badly botched elementary lunar facts while speaking during the gathering at Booker T. Washington High School in Houston.

“You’ve heard the word ‘full moon.’ Sometimes you need to take the opportunity just to come out and see a full moon is that complete rounded circle, which is made up mostly of gases,” Jackson Lee, 74, told teenage pupils who gathered on a sports field ahead of the rare celestial event.

Is her mind going?

A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi , the country's foreign minister and other officials apparently crashed in the mountainous northwest reaches of Iran on Sunday, sparking a massive rescue operation in a fog-shrouded forest as the public was urged to pray.

The likely crash came as Iran under Raisi and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei launched an unprecedented drone-and-missile attack on Israel last month and has enriched uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels.

Iran has also faced years of mass protests against its Shiite theocracy over an ailing economy and women’s rights — making the moment that much more sensitive for Tehran and the future of the country as the Israel-Hamas war inflames the wider Middle East.

Raisi was traveling in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province . State TV said what it called a “hard landing” happened near Jolfa, a city on the border with the nation of Azerbaijan, some 600 kilometers (375 miles) northwest of the Iranian capital, Tehran. Later, state TV put it farther east near the village of Uzi, but details remained contradictory.

Traveling with Raisi were Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, the governor of Iran's East Azerbaijan province and other officials and bodyguards, the state-run IRNA news agency reported. One local government official used the word “crash," but others referred to either a “hard landing” or an “incident.”

Neither IRNA nor state TV offered any information on Raisi’s condition in the hours afterward. However, hard-liners urged the public to pray for him. State TV aired images of hundreds of the faithful, some with their hands outstretched in supplication, praying at Imam Reza Shrine in the city of Mashhad, one of Shiite Islam's holiest sites, as well as in Qom and other locations across the country. State television's main channel aired the prayers nonstop.

In Tehran, a group of men kneeling on the side of the street clasped strands of prayer beads and watched a video of Raisi praying, some of them visibly weeping.

“If anything happens to him we’ll be heartbroken,” said one of the men, Mehdi Seyedi. ”May the prayers work and may he return to the arms of the nation safe and sound.”

Prominent Israeli academic Ilan Pappe said he was interrogated by the Department of Homeland Security after arriving in the US on Monday.

Arriving at Detroit airport, the academic - known for his stridently anti-Zionist views and research - said he was subjected to two hours of questioning.

Amongst the questions, he was asked whether he was a Hamas supporter and whether he regarded the Israeli assault on Gaza as a "genocide".

"The two man team were not abusive or rude, I should say, but their questions were really out of the world!" Pappe wrote on Facebook.

"They had long phone conversation with someone, (the Israelis?) and after copying everything on my phone allowed me to enter."

Pappe published the book 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine' in 2006.

Recent news shows that the French publisher that was printing it ceased printing the book despite a surge in sales.

A recent statement from Ilan Pappe:

I think what we are seeing now, what unfolds in front of our eyes, is a genocidal situation, by which people are targeted, whether they are children, babies, in hospital or in schools. And this is a massive operation of killing, of ethnic cleansing, of depopulation. The pretext for that kind of savagery is revenge for what the Hamas did on the 7th of October, but I think the real intention here is not just revenge but trying to exploit what happened on the 7th of October to create new realities in historical Palestine. You called it a new Nakba. I think that this is — the Nakba has never really ended for the Palestinians, so it’s a new horrific chapter in the ongoing Nakba that the Palestinians are suffering here. So, this is a really horrific situation that can only be stopped from the outside, because there is no motivation inside Israel to stop the operations, nor to care more about the lives of innocent people, despite what the Israeli army claims to do in the field itself.

Over at Democracy Now.

Ukraine has pulled back its troops from several villages in the border region of Kharkiv following continued pressure from Russian forces.

Soldiers had come under heavy fire and moved to "more advantageous positions" in two areas of the north-eastern region, a military spokesman said.

Throughout the course of the two-year war, Ukraine has typically used this type of language to signify a retreat.

A tragic incident occurred in Belgorod, a city on the Russian border, where part of an apartment building collapsed on Sunday killing at least 13 people, with 20 others sustaining injuries. The officials in Russia blamed Ukrainian shelling for the building's destruction. Videos circulating online depict rescue teams combing through the debris in search of survivors, only to hastily retreat as a section of the roof collapsed.

The Russian Emergency Situations Ministry reported the recovery of 13 bodies from the rubble thus far. The Investigative Committee of Russia, the nation's primary law enforcement body, issued a statement affirming that the 10-story structure had indeed been struck by Ukrainian shelling.

The Russian Defence Ministry later wrote on social media that the building had been damaged by fragments of a downed Tochka-U TRC missile.

It also said that air defences had shot down several more rockets over the Belgorod region, as well as two drones that were destroyed in a separate incident later Sunday.