“Conservative activist Ed Martin, who echoed Donald Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen 2020 election and defended Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol rioters, was nominated by the president on Monday to be the top federal prosecutor in Washington on a permanent basis. Martin had been serving as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia on an interim basis since just after Trump, a Republican, was sworn in for his second term on Jan. 20. His appointment must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. … Martin supervised legal clinics for low-income residents as director of the human rights office for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis and, for two decades before becoming U.S. attorney, ran his own law practice and was active in Republican politics, including as the head of the Missouri Republican Party.” (02/17/25)
“A Delta Air Lines passenger jet crash landed at Toronto’s airport on Monday, the airport authority said, flipping upside down and leaving at least eight people injured, according to local media. The Endeavor Flight 4819 was landing in Canada’s biggest city from Minneapolis in the US state of Minnesota when it crashed, the airline said. Public broadcaster CBC said up to eight people were injured, including three critically. One of those three was a child, it said, adding they had been taken to hospital.” (02/17/25)
“Pope Francis is sick with a polymicrobial infection of the respiratory tract, the Vatican said Monday. The 88-year-old Argentine pontiff was diagnosed following testing ‘carried out over the past few days,’ the Vatican’s press office said. With the results, he’ll have a change in drug therapy. He had initially been admitted to Policlinico Agostino Gemelli in Rome on Friday for bronchitis treatment, and preliminary tests showed he had a respiratory tract infection and slight fever. Testing over the past days paints a ‘complex clinical picture,’ the Vatican said Monday, and he’ll need to remain in the hospital for an ‘appropriate’ amount of time. Polymicrobial diseases are caused by combinations of viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites, according to the National Library of Medicine.” (02/17/25)
“The ‘steroid Olympics’ has clinched a ‘double-digit’ million-dollar cash infusion from investors led by Donald Trump Jr. as the controversial sporting event pursues an American debut, The Post has learned. The funding round closed last week, Australian businessman Aron D’Souza, president of the Enhanced Games, told The Post during a Monday interview. He declined to provide additional details on the fundraising. ‘Getting the Trump name behind the Enhanced Games was a monumental effort,’ D’Souza told The Post. ‘This is now a very American project.’ The first Enhanced Games will include events in track, swimming, weight lifting, ‘combat’ and gymnastics, and will likely take place later this year in a ‘warm’ US city ‘conducive to winter months,’ D’Souza said. ‘We wouldn’t have hosted the games in the United States if Biden was elected,’ he said, noting the company was previously considering host cities overseas.” (02/17/25)
“The South Korean government said on Monday that it had temporarily suspended new downloads of an artificial intelligence chatbot made by DeepSeek, the Chinese company that has sent shock waves through the tech world. On Monday night, the app was not available in the Apple or Google app stores in South Korea, although DeepSeek was still accessible via a web browser. Regulators said the app service would resume after they had ensured it complied with South Korea’s laws on protecting personal information.” (02/17/25)
“The Trump administration has begun firing hundreds of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, according to the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (PASS) union, weeks after a fatal mid-air plane collision in Washington DC. Several hundreds of the agency’s probationary workers — who have generally been in their positions for less than a year — received the news via email late on Friday night, a statement from PASS’s head, Alex Spero said. It is a part of a cost-cutting drive, driven by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), that aims to drastically cut the federal workforce. Spero called the firings ‘shameful’ and said they ‘will increase the workload and place new responsibilities on a workforce that is already stretched thin.’ The BBC has contacted the FAA and department of transport for comment. ” (02/17/25)
“The sky is awash with radio-frequency interference (RFI), but thanks to two astronomers who tracked down a stray TV broadcast reflected off a passing airplane, there may be a new way to wipe out some of the rogue signals that plague our radio telescopes. … [Jonathan Pober and Jade Ducharme] were able to track a television signal back to an airplane traveling at 38,400 feet (11.7 kilometers) in altitude and at a velocity of 492 mile per hour (792 kilometers per hour). They even found that the television signal was on the frequency band used by Australian digital TV channel 7. This signal was being broadcast somewhere outside the radio quiet zone and being reflected off the hull of the airplane. Identifying the source of the RFI opens the door to the interference being modeled so that its pattern can be recognized and ultimately filtered out, keeping the data usable to astronomers.” (02/17/25)
“Newly appointed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claims his family was targeted by the outgoing Biden administration with an audit from the IRS. ‘Of course the outgoing Biden IRS rushed an ‘audit’ of the incoming SecDef. Total sham,’ Hegseth wrote on his official X account Monday, including a photo of an IRS document addressed to him and his wife. The document said the couple owes [sic] the government $33,558.16, which needs to be paid immediately to avoid further penalties. It’s unclear what year or years the document is addressing. ‘The party of ‘norms’ and ‘decency’ strikes again. We will never back down,’ Hegseth added in his tweet. He is not the first cabinet appointee to receive a letter from the IRS. In 2009, it was famously revealed that President Obama’s Treasury Secretary appointee, Timothy Geithner, owed [sic] the IRS about $35,000 in unpaid Social Security and Medicaid taxes.” (02/17/25)
“Argentine lawyers filed fraud complaints against President Javier Milei in criminal court on Sunday for promoting a cryptocurrency on his social media, one of the lawyers told The Associated Press. On Friday, Milei posted on X about $LIBRA, a coin that he said was aimed at ‘encouraging economic growth by funding small businesses and startups.’ He deleted the post a few hours later and the value of the currency collapsed, causing millions of dollars in losses to its brief investors, according to financial site Dexscreener. … The President’s Office said in a Saturday statement that Milei was not involved in any stage of the cryptocurrency’s development and decided to remove the post to avoid speculation and limit further exposure, following the public reaction to the project’s launch.” (02/17/25)
“Israel issued a tender for the construction of nearly 1,000 additional [squatter] homes in the occupied West Bank, an anti-[squat] watchdog said Monday. Peace Now says the development of 974 new housing units would allow the population of the Efrat [squat] to expand by 40% and further block the development of the nearby Palestinian city of Bethlehem. Hagit Ofran, who leads the group’s [squat] monitoring, said construction can begin after the contracting process and issuing of permits, which could take another year at least.” (02/17/25)
