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The blackout makes it impossible to assess the full scale of the massacres, but the videos that have trickled out provide a horrifying glimpse. Some were filmed and proudly posted online by RSF fighters, showing them taunting crowds of terrified people before shooting them at close range. Most prominent in the videos is RSF Brigadier General Al-Fateh Abdullah Idris, nicknamed Abu Lulu, who boasted on Monday that he may have killed more than 2,000 people.

An aid worker helping fleeing civilians, speaking on the condition of anonymity for safety reasons, said his organization had heard multiple accounts that men and teenage boys were being separated from their families and beaten, tortured or killed. “Numerous reports emerged of hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians in El Fashir being targeted and killed on ethnic grounds,” the aid worker said. The U.N. Human Rights Office said Monday it was “receiving multiple, alarming reports” that RSF forces were “carrying out atrocities, including summary executions.”

Hurricane Melissa will make landfall in southern Jamaica less than 24 hours from now, and it is likely to be the most catastrophic storm in the Caribbean island’s history.

As it crawled across the northern Caribbean Sea on Monday morning, Melissa officially became a Category 5 hurricane with 160 mph winds, according to the National Hurricane Center.

The hurricane will likely fluctuate in intensity over the next day or so, perhaps undergoing an eyewall replacement cycle. But the background conditions, including very warm Caribbean waters and low wind shear, will support a very powerful hurricane and the potential for further strengthening.

Left unanswered: Why would anyone intentionally swallow one magnet, let alone 100? This is like blaming Temu for someone drinking gasoline.

A 13-year-old boy in New Zealand swallowed up to 100 high-power magnets he bought online, forcing surgeons to remove tissue from his intestines, doctors said on Friday.

After suffering four days of abdominal pain, the unnamed teenager was taken to Tauranga hospital in the North Island. “He disclosed ingesting approximately 80 to 100 5x2mm high-power (neodymium) magnets about one week prior,” said a report by hospital doctors in the New Zealand Medical Journal.

The magnets, which have been banned in New Zealand since January 2013, were bought on the online shopping platform Temu, they said.

An X-ray showed the magnets had clumped together in four straight lines inside the child’s intestines. “These appeared to be in separate parts of bowel adhered together due to magnetic forces,” they said.

I don't have a lot of insight into Irish politics, but I wanted to share this as a reminder of how adults act regarding elections.

The leftwing independent candidate, Catherine Connolly, has won a landslide victory in Ireland’s presidential election.

Her rival, Heather Humphreys, conceded defeat on Saturday afternoon after early vote tallies showed an insurmountable gap between the candidates.

“Catherine will be a president for all of us and she will be my president and I really would like to wish her all the very, very best,” Humphreys said.

What nonsense is this? Conceding a loss and pledging support for the winner?

But wait, there's more sanity here (emphasis mine):

She was a marginal political figure when she declared her candidacy in July, and only small parties – the Social Democrats and People Before Profit – backed her. Labour then endorsed her, and Sinn Féin, which had decided to not run its own candidate, threw its formidable resources and electoral organisation behind Connolly.

Imagine ... a campaign that only lasts three months and then people go back to their lives.

Today on Lifestyles of the Rich and Pedo ...

It is one of the mysteries of the modern monarchy – and one that is under more scrutiny than ever before.

How on earth does Prince Andrew fund his lifestyle?

This is a man who has lived a life of luxury for decades, been an outcast for years because of his association with Jeffrey Epstein, yet has no visible means of financial support.

Even King Charles is said to be unsure about some of the sources of his brother’s income, particularly how he finds the significant sums of money needed to afford the upkeep of his home, the 30-room Royal Lodge.

The disgraced prince has been able to keep his financial affairs from the public for years through a mixture of the traditional secrecy which envelops the Windsors and the confidentiality of his dealings with wealthy, mainly foreign, people.

@news Trump Says He Will Not Seek Authorization for Cartel Strikes

“I don’t think we’re going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war,” Mr. Trump told reporters of his campaign of deadly strikes against vessels in the Caribbean Sea near Colombia and Venezuela. “I think we are going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We are going to kill them, you know? They are going to be like, dead.”

In June, a staff walkout over overcrowding and chronic understaffing delayed opening. Unions argue that mass tourism leaves too few eyes on too many rooms and creates pressure points where construction zones, freight access and visitor flows intersect.

themoscowtimes.com/2025/10/22/…

japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/10/…

themoscowtimes.com/2025/10/22/…

NICOSIA, Oct 19 (Reuters) - A moderate candidate won Turkish Cypriot presidential elections on Sunday, defeating a hardliner in a pivotal vote that could help revive stalled U.N. talks on reunifying Cyprus.

Centre-left politician Tufan Erhurman sailed to victory with 62.8% of the vote from just over 218,000 registered voters, defeating incumbent Ersin Tatar on a platform of reinvigorating talks with estranged Greek Cypriots on the future of Cyprus.

Erhurman, a lawyer, has pledged to explore a federal solution — long supported by the United Nations — to end the island's nearly 50-year division.

If you want to read coverage about a whole bunch of bullshit being spat out by the junta, perhaps this is a fun story to read.

Here, I'll quote the only graf you need to read to get what's going on.

Treasury secretary Scott Bessent told an event on Wednesday that China’s dramatic new restrictions on rare earth minerals and magnets demonstrated the need for the US to be self-sufficient in critical materials or rely more on trusted allies.

Um, what trusted allies?

I mean, at least we're finally placing some burden on the elderly who fucked the rest of us over.

Germans who continue in the labour market beyond retirement age will be able to earn up to €2,000 (£1,750) a month tax-free on top of their pension under a scheme aimed at boosting economic growth and labour force participation rates.

The “Aktivrente”, or active pension scheme, due to come into force in January, was promised on the campaign trail by the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, before he came into office five months ago.

The government, a coalition of Merz’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and junior partners the Social Democrats (SPD), hopes the plan will incentivise post-retirement working.

A draft law is expected to be approved by the cabinet on Wednesday – after Merz won over his Social Democrat sceptics earlier this month – then debated in the Bundestag.

Pete Hegseth‘s Defense Department has threatened to revoke press credentials of news organization that do not agree to restrictive new coverage rules — and says it may bar journalists who don’t agree to abide by the rules from physical access to the Pentagon’s grounds. But more than three dozen news orgs have said they are refusing to sign on to the requirements.

On Tuesday, in a joint statement five major TV news outlets — ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News — said they were not agreeing to the new rules. The Pentagon has told reporters they must sign an agreement for the new rules by Tuesday or turn in their press passes by Wednesday.

According to the Defense Department’s press office, which outlined the new rules last month, reporters covering the Pentagon must sign a pledge not to obtain or use unauthorized material (even if the information is unclassified). If they do not, they will potentially be barred from the Pentagon.

“Today, we join virtually every other news organization in declining to agree to the Pentagon’s new requirements, which would restrict journalists’ ability to keep the nation and the world informed of important national security issues,” the networks said in the statement. “The policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections. We will continue to cover the U.S. military as each of our organizations has done for many decades, upholding the principles of a free and independent press.”

The five networks join a number of other news orgs that have already said they won’t agree to the new rules being imposed by Hegseth, a former Fox News host. Those include the New York Times, AP, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, NewsNation and the Hill, along with conservative-leaning outlets like Newsmax and the Washington Examiner.

At press time, only one outlet has said it plans to sign on to the new rules announced by the Pentagon, which the Trump administration now calls the “U.S. Department of War”: pro-Trump network One America News Network (OANN).

...

Here’s the current full list of news outlets that have refused to sign the Pentagon’s new rules, as compiled by the Washington Post:

ABC News
AL-Monitor
Associated Press
The Atlantic
Aviation Week
Axios
Bloomberg News
Breaking Defense
C4ISRNET
CBS News
CNN
Defense Daily
Defense News
Defense One
The Economist
Federal Times
The Financial Times
Fox News
The Guardian
The Hill
HuffPost
Military Times
MSNBC
NBC News
The New York Times
Newsmax
NewsNation
NPR
PBS NewsHour
Politico
RealClearPolitics
Reuters
Task & Purpose
The Wall Street Journal
The Washington Examiner
The Washington Post
The Washington Times
WTOP