Communick News

A law firm that represented multiple women who accused former Jeffrey Epstein associate Leon Black of sexual misconduct alleged in a Manhattan civil suit on Monday that the powerful financier deployed “multiple frivolous and malicious lawsuits” as retaliation for representing these accusers.

Wigdor LLP claimed Black, who co-founded and formerly chaired Apollo Global Management, tried “to use his billions to buy his own form of justice” and “to weaponize the civil justice system to silence and destroy those who seek to hold him to account for alleged sexual assault”. Black has emphatically denied all wrongdoing.

Lawyers for Black also strongly disputed the claims made in Wigdor’s suit. “This lawsuit is another bogus attempt by Wigdor to attack Mr Black under false pretenses,” said Black’s attorney, Susan Estrich of Estrich Goldin.

A Supreme Leader has been killed. A son has been chosen. And the Revolutionary Guards are driving the process.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on Saturday morning in US and Israeli air strikes. On Tuesday, according to exclusive information obtained by Iran International, Iran’s Assembly of Experts, under pressure from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), chose his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as the next Supreme Leader. The decision has not been made public and is expected to be announced after Ali Khamenei is buried.

This is not a routine succession. It is a wartime decision shaped by the security state, and it raises serious questions about constitutional procedure. The priority appears to be speed and control, as the Islamic Republic faces attacks from outside and a leadership vacuum at the top.

The Supreme Court on Monday evening overturned a New York state court ruling that found that the Staten Island-based district of Republican US House Rep. Nicole Malliotakis discriminated against Black and Latino voters and needed to be redrawn. The Supreme Court’s intervention preserves a GOP-led seat that would have been likely to shift to Democrats this November.

The court’s ruling sets a disturbing precedent for voting rights in several ways. Federal courts are supposed to defer to state courts on matters of state law. And the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that courts should not change election laws in the middle of an election season, and in this instance the filing deadline for candidates in New York has already passed.

In her dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the court’s conservative majority for using one set of rules to uphold redistricting maps that benefit white voters and Republicans in states like Texas while using a completely different set of rules to strike down maps that benefit racial minorities and Democrats in places like New York.

“Time and again, this Court has said that federal courts should not interfere with state-court litigation,” Sotomayor wrote. “Time and again, this Court has said that federal courts should not meddle with state election laws ahead of an election. Today, the Court says: except for this one, except for this one, and except for this one.”

histv - Honey, I Shrunk The Vids

An overengineered PowerShell frontend for FFMPEG

I was doing a lot of manual re-encoding down from insane source bitrates with FFMPEG, and I wondered if I could put it into a nice GUI. Then I wondered if I could make it hardware-agnostic. Then I wondered if I could give it a dark theme... and on and on and on... until finally I had it working how I wanted and I wondered if I could put it into a single executable file.

So all up I spent a little while on this today and I think I finally have something worth shipping. The executable will probably trigger your antivirus because it boostraps the powershell script, and the script will always throw a warning asking if you're sure you want to run it. But it works and it's safe, read the full source and readme in the codeberg if you want to be sure.

I hope this might be helpful for anyone else transcoding videos on Windows! I'd love feedback, but please be gentle, it's my first project like this and I have no idea what I'm actually doing.

Kristi Noem faced frustration from some Republicans during a Senate oversight hearing Tuesday over how she’s handling her job as secretary of homeland security.

During the nearly five-hour hearing, Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and John Kennedy (R-La.) criticized Noem for refusing to take responsibility for the killings of two U.S. citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, by federal agents in Minnesota, and for allegedly stalling investigations into the Department of Homeland Security while spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on agency ads.

“We’re beginning to get the American people to think that deporting people is wrong,” Tillis said about Noem’s job as DHS secretary. “It’s the exact opposite. The way you’re going about deporting them is wrong.”

i think they will. or worse yet they can make it without bios at all just device tree and all that garbage that phones do. then make it subsction based,filled with ai,cloud streamed only. no apps outside store. but thats too much orwellian stuff for now,i think what will happen is the locking bios thing for now.

what do you think?

A bitter primary contest between the four-term Republican US senator John Cornyn and the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, ended in a runoff on Tuesday.

In Texas, a primary runoff is declared if neither candidate are able to capture 50% of the vote. Paxton and Cornyn will now face that election on 26 May.

Speaking to reporters in Austin, Cornyn said he had “worked for decades to build the Republican party, both here in Texas and nationally” and refused to allow a “flawed, self centered and shameless candidate” like the scandal-scarred Paxton to “risk everything we’ve worked so hard to build over these many years”.

“Judgment day is coming for Ken Paxton,” Cornyn said.

In particular, Iran is claiming to have taken out the radar used for two THAAD batteries and there is some evidence that they may have done so.

A class action lawsuit alleging Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program exploits the labour and Charter rights of agricultural workers can proceed, a judge decided last week.

The lawsuit, filed in Ontario's Superior Court of Justice, alleges that the federal government "enriched" itself by collecting employment insurance premiums (EI) from workers in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) despite not allowing them to collect EI. It also argues the program is inherently discriminatory to Mexican and Caribbean workers and has been since its inception.

"It's about trying to change the conditions where workers can actually get access to these benefits, change the conditions where workers have labour and social mobility and they have some ability for dignity and respect in the workplace," said Chris Ramsaroop, an organizer with Justice for Migrant Workers, a group supportive of the lawsuit filed by Goldblatt Partners.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/32481

Four months after a historic 92.3% vote in favour of strike action, the bargaining association representing 26,000 community health workers reached a tentative agreement with their employer last week. Community…

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