geneva_convenience

Google Play has delisted UpScrolled, the "censorship-resistant" social media app founded by Issam Hijazi, following its rapid growth to over 2.5 million users and its brief stint as a top-ranked alternative to TikTok.

While the app remains available for existing users, Google has not provided a specific reason for the removal; UpScrolled's team confirmed they are working with the Play Store for reinstatement while maintaining their commitment to unfiltered content.

This development follows the app's rapid ascent in popularity, particularly amid concerns over content moderation on competing platforms like TikTok.

US Attorney General Pam Bondi said her office would seek the death penalty for Elias Rodriguez, who is accused of ~~murdering~~ neutralizing Israeli ~~embassy staffers~~ operatives Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim in Washington in May, the Miami Herald, reported Friday.

United States Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has said that the Department of Justice (DOJ) will not be investigating the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who killed Renee Nicole Macklin Good, while also confirming reports that it is looking into charges against top Minnesota officials for encouraging protests.

Speaking to Fox News on Sunday night, Blanche said the civil rights unit of the Justice Department would not bow to pressure to investigate the shooting death of Minneapolis resident and mother Good, 37, earlier this month.

New York City’s pension funds could resume investing in Israeli government bonds, a move that would funnel public money directly into Israel’s treasury despite the ongoing genocide in Gaza and its apartheid system in the occupied West Bank.

“The Israel bonds have performed very well and they continue to be investment grade rated,” Mark Levine, New York City’s chief financial officer, told the FT. “My fiduciary responsibility is to make investment decisions based on that record of performance.”

Israeli government bonds function as direct loans to the state, providing steady interest payments to investors while channelling cash straight into government coffers.

The Israel lobby is exposed these days as it has never been before. Or AIPAC is. AIPAC is a dirty word among Democrats because it refuses to criticize the Netanyahu government.

California Governor Gavin Newsom and Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner are both refusing AIPAC donations. In New York City, progressive Democratic candidates are primarying two sitting congressmen, Ritchie Torres and Dan Goldman, and making the incumbent’s donations from AIPAC an issue.

The liberal Zionist organization J Street looks to be the beneficiary of this shift. J Street used to represent a left/liberal fringe of the Democratic establishment. Now it represents the center/right.

And J Street is lobbying hard for Israel. It doesn’t want the U.S. to cut military aid to Israel. It says it wants young Jews to “fall in love with Israel” all over again.

US officials said Ratcliffe conveyed the Trump administration’s support for the interim government as a path to short-term stability in Venezuela.

At Trump’s direction, Ratcliffe delivered a message that Washington seeks an improved working relationship, they said. Talks included intelligence cooperation, economic stability, and efforts to keep Venezuela from serving as a haven for “US adversaries, particularly narcotics traffickers,” one official said on condition of anonymity.

According to the report, American officials view Rodriguez, who assumed the interim presidency after Maduro’s removal, as a stabilizing figure capable of maintaining control of security forces and key infrastructure during the transition. US intelligence assessments have described her as pragmatic and open to engagement.

From the classrooms of Birmingham to the pages of Britain’s most powerful newspapers, one word has taken on extraordinary political weight: Islamist.

It is routinely presented as a neutral descriptor; a technical term separating religion from politics. But in practice, it functions less as analysis and more as accusation.

Once deployed, it renders Muslim political agency inherently suspect, irrational or dangerous. The term does not merely describe; it condemns.

British news is now firmly in the grip of what can only be described as an Islamism conspiracy theory: the idea that Muslims, imagined as a monolith, are hell-bent on undermining the state and “western civilisation” itself.

This same assumption now underpins the Prevent programme, where opposition to British foreign policy, anger over Gaza, or even robust expressions of Muslim identity are routinely framed as indicators of “Islamism”. Muslim political consciousness itself becomes the danger.

That assumption was on full display in the political mobilisation around the banning of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from a football match in Birmingham, amid well-documented concerns over racist chanting and public disorder. What should have been a routine policing decision was rapidly transformed into a national scandal.

Rather than confronting its own actions, the government has sought to divert attention from the central issue: the UK’s role in the Gaza genocide. Throughout Israel’s assault on Gaza, the UK has provided sustained political and diplomatic support, supplied vital components for F-35 fighter jets, and conducted R1 surveillance flights over Gaza. Taken together, these actions render the British government not merely complicit, but materially involved in the violence itself.

The British government is complicit in Israel’s systematic unmaking of Palestine, including its illegal occupation, its system of apartheid, and its role in the Gaza genocide, and Palestine Action has directly challenged this complicity. Where public order and civil disobedience laws once failed to suppress this activism, the state escalated to the use of exceptional anti-terror legislation.

The government has since resorted to the Terrorism Act to preemptively criminalise activists and expose them to sentences of up to 14 years’ imprisonment, a level of punishment grossly disproportionate to non-violent direct action. This disproportionality and choice of legislation signal a political motive.

The application of the Terrorism Act 2000 to non-violent direct action strips activists of ordinary legal protections and subjects them to an exceptional penal regime, including extended pre-charge detention, heightened surveillance powers, restrictions on association and expression, and dramatically increased sentencing exposure. Such measures are ordinarily reserved for acts involving mass violence, not protest aimed at preventing harm.

The use of anti-terror law in this context does not merely criminalise conduct; it redefines dissent itself as a security threat, preempting fair adjudication and conditioning the public to accept extraordinary punishment for ordinary political opposition.