Day: October 19, 2023

A researcher at the Anti-Defamation League resigned Thursday, apparently in reaction to the group’s chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, publicly condemning American Jews who are protesting Israel’s war in Gaza.

The researcher, Stephen C. Rea, said in a post on the BlueSky social media platform that he could not square his “morals and politics” with the direction he sees the organization going in. 

“I think the ADL does a lot of great work, and trust me, there are some AMAZING people there (many of whom agree with me …),” wrote Rea, 40, who has been at the organization for about a year and earned his Ph.D. in 2015 in anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. “But there are times when you have to stand up and say ‘enough.’”

A spokesman for ADL declined to comment on Rea’s post, citing a policy of not discussing personnel matters with the media.

Greenblatt has been extremely critical of the Jewish left’s protests in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 assault in which Hamas terrorists killed 1,400 Israelis and abducted 200. At a Monday rally in Washington organized by the anti-occupation groups Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, some 1,500 activists accused Israel of genocide in Gaza and called for a cease-fire. 

“Who in their right mind can watch Hamas terrorists commit atrocities, brutally murder civilians, kidnap children, & elderly, & then protest Israel’s right to defend itself???” Greenblatt tweeted in response.

Rea, in his post on BlueSky, an invite-only social network, pointed to a comment by another user who said posts like Greenblatt’s “demonize everyone pushing back against the genocide this way” and “help white supremacists and fascists.”

“This right here is why I resigned from ADL this morning,” Rea wrote, suggesting that language like Greenblatt’s plays to “the people who want to do the *most* harm. And I couldn’t be part of it any longer.”

Rea’s LinkedIn profile says that he joined ADL as a fellow in September 2022 and was promoted in April to be a senior researcher at the group’s Center for Technology and Society, focusing on online hate and harassment.

In an email interview, Rea said that he thinks “the ADL does more good than harm in the world on balance,” and that he has “colleagues doing incredible work right now under difficult circumstances.”

On BlueSky, Rea said he “would never begrudge anyone for staying or going to work for ADL” but that the statements regarding Israel were “just a personal red line for me, and some things are more important than a job.”

The post ADL researcher quits over Greenblatt blasting of Jewish left on Israel and Hamas appeared first on The Forward.

Over the course of her decades-long career in the public eye, Britney Spears has been married three times: once to her onetime music video costar Sam Asghari (who she is currently divorcing), once to the father of her two sons, Kevin Federline, and once, for just 55 hours, to her childhood friend Jason Alexander.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

In her new memoir, The Woman in Me, which will be published Oct. 24, Spears reveals how her marriage to Alexander began—and quickly ended—during a New Year’s trip to Las Vegas in 2004. She writes that, after partying for a few days with a group of friends that included Paris Hilton, she and Alexander ended up spending the night together.

“He and I got sh-tfaced,” she writes. “I don’t even remember that night at all, but from what I’ve pieced together, he and I lounged around the hotel room and stayed up late watching movies—Mona Lisa Smile and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—then had the brilliant idea of going to A Little White Chapel at three thirty in the morning.”

She goes to explain that she wasn’t in love with Alexander, she was simply drunk and bored.

“People have asked me if I loved him. To be clear: he and I were not in love,” she writes. “I was just honestly very drunk—and probably, in a more general sense at that time in my life, very bored.”

More From TIME

Spears writes that her family showed up the next day in a fury to confront her about what she had done, and she ended up having the marriage annulled a mere 55 hours later. But her family’s anger over the situation gave her pause.

“They made way too big a deal out of innocent fun,” she writes. “Everybody has a different perspective on it, but I didn’t take it that seriously. I thought a goof-around Vegas wedding was something people might do as a joke. Then my family came and acted like I’d started World War III. I cried the whole rest of the time I was in Las Vegas.”

Spears remembers the incident as one of the first times she realized how much her family wanted to have control over her life.

Read More:

• What’s Changed for Britney Spears Since Her Conservatorship Ended
• Britney Spears on Her Unplanned, Iconic Kiss With Madonna at the VMAs
• What Britney Spears Reveals About Her Conservatorship in ‘The Woman in Me‘

“My family was so against the wedding that I started to think maybe I’d accidentally committed a brilliant act,” she writes. “Because I realized: something about me being under their control and not having a stronger connection to someone else had become very, very important to them… Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that, by this point, I was supporting them financially.”

It was just a little over four years later that Spears was placed under a conservatorship that gave her father, Jamie Spears, and an attorney control over her finances and many facets of her personal life.

Nearly 20 years after Spears and Alexander’s shotgun wedding, once the pop star’s conservatorship had been officially terminated, Alexander attempted to crash the 2022 wedding ceremony of Spears and Asghari while livestreaming on Instagram.

“I’m here to crash the wedding because nobody is here except Sam,” he was overheard telling a worker at the venue, according to screen recordings. “Where the f-ck is the family?”

Alexander was later convicted of aggravated trespassing and battery for the incident.

Drones and rockets targeted on Thursday evening the Ain al-Asad air base, which hosts U.S. and other international forces in western Iraq, and multiple blasts were heard inside the base, two security sources said.

The Iraqi military said it closed the area around the base and started a search operation. It was not clear yet whether the attacks caused casualties or damages, said the sources.

Thursday’s attack is the third in less than 24 hours against airbases which house U.S. troops in Iraq.

U.S. military forces in Iraq were targeted on Wednesday in two separate drone attacks, with one causing minor injuries to a small number of troops even though the U.S. military managed to intercept the armed drone.

Last week, Iraqi armed groups aligned with Iran threatened to target U.S. interests with missiles and drones if Washington intervened to support Israel against Hamas in Gaza.

The United States has 2,500 troops in Iraq, and 900 more in neighbouring Syria, on a mission to advise and assist local forces in combating Islamic State, which in 2014 seized swathes of territory in both countries.

Ain al-Asad air base is located in the western Anbar province.

---

Israel-Hamas war rages as Gaza humanitarian crisis continues: Live updates  CNN

Israel-Hamas war live updates: Violence erupts in the West Bank …  NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth

Captagon pills were found in the pockets of Hamas terrorists.

Ex-FBI agent, DC real estate developer sentenced to prison for bribery scheme  Fox News

Give us 5 minutes, and we’ll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Lawyer Sidney Powell pleaded guilty to reduced charges Thursday over efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election in Georgia, becoming the second defendant in the sprawling case to reach a deal with prosecutors. 

Powell, who was charged alongside Trump and 17 others with violating the state’s anti-racketeering law, entered the plea just a day before jury selection was set to start in her trial. She pleaded guilty to six misdemeanors related to intentionally interfering with the performance of election duties. 

As part of the deal, she will serve six years of probation, will be fined $6,000 and will have to write an apology letter to Georgia and its residents. She also agreed to testify truthfully against her co-defendants at future trials. 

Powell, 68, was initially charged with racketeering and six other counts as part of a wide-ranging scheme to keep the Republican president in power after he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden. Prosecutors say she also participated in an unauthorized breach of elections equipment in a rural Georgia county elections office. 

The acceptance of a plea deal is a remarkable about-face for a lawyer who, perhaps more than anyone else, strenuously pushed baseless conspiracy theories about a stolen election in the face of extensive evidence to the contrary. If prosecutors compel her to testify, she could provide insight on a news conference she participated in on behalf of Trump and his campaign shortly after the election and on a White House meeting she attended in mid-December of that year during which strategies and theories to influence the outcome of the election were discussed. 

Powell was scheduled to go on trial on Monday with lawyer Kenneth Chesebro after each filed a demand for a speedy trial. Jury selection was set to start Friday. The development means that Chesebro will go on trial by himself, though prosecutors said earlier that they also planned to look into the possibility of offering him a plea deal. 

Barry Coburn, a Washington-based lawyer for Powell, declined to comment on Thursday. 

A lower-profile defendant in the case, bail bondsman Scott Graham Hall, last month pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor charges. He was sentenced to five years of probation and agreed to testify in further proceedings. 

Prosecutors allege that Powell conspired with Hall and others to access election equipment without authorization and hired computer forensics firm SullivanStrickler to send a team to Coffee County, in south Georgia, to copy software and data from voting machines and computers there. The indictment says a person who is not named sent an email to a top SullivanStrickler executive and instructed him to send all data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Coffee County to an unidentified lawyer associated with Powell and the Trump campaign.