In a heartwarming display of innovation and quick thinking, a group of students recently found themselves in a predicament when one of their cellphones slipped out of their hands and landed in a storm drain. With the device out of reach and facing the risk of being lost forever, a nearby firefighter stepped in with an ingenious solution that not only rescued the phone but also garnered praise and admiration from onlookers.
Yue Yunpeng and Sun Yue, two well-known comedians in China, made a notable appearance at the review panel, further adding to the excitement surrounding the gala. Known for their wit and humor, the duo's presence at the review reflects the gala's emphasis on entertaining and engaging performances. Their participation in the review process is expected to inject a fresh and comedic element into the gala, setting the stage for a memorable evening of laughter and entertainment.The departure of the 32-year-old veteran, whose name is now eclipsed by the glories of Liverpool's future, serves as a stark reminder of the fleeting nature of success in the football industry. This veteran, once hailed as a key figure in the squad, has seen his value plummet from a staggering 1.5 billion to a mere 6 million, symbolizing a sharp decline in both his on-field performance and market desirability.
To anyone out there facing obstacles on their own path to success, the couple has a simple message: never give up. Believe in yourself, trust in your abilities, and keep pushing forward no matter what stands in your way. For it is through perseverance and determination that dreams are realized, and lives are forever changed.Georgia loses QB Carson Beck (arm) during SEC title game
The screen fills with images of migrants dodging highway traffic. "They keep coming," says a narrator. "The federal government won't stop them yet requires us to pay billions to take care of them. ... Enough is enough." This message might sound familiar, but it isn't new. It's a 1994 campaign ad in support of Republican politician Pete Wilson's run for reelection as California governor. At the time, California was experiencing its worst recession in decades. Although immigrants living in the state illegally did not cause California's economic crisis, they were a convenient scapegoat. By blaming immigrants for California's financial woes, Wilson turned his faltering campaign around and won reelection in November 1994. Thirty years later, the United States is in a similar political moment, with many Americans worried about the cost of living and immigration. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly – and misleadingly – blamed immigrants for crime, high housing costs and other problems. He is promising to quickly close the U.S. southern border and deport the nearly 12 million immigrants without legal authorization to remain in the country. As a scholar of migration in the Americas, my research shows that Trump's approach is unlikely to stop migrants from trying to enter the U.S. but very likely to enrich criminals. Migrants will keep fleeing desperate circumstances under even more treacherous conditions that leave them vulnerable to exploitation by criminal groups. Prevention through deterrence A few months after Wilson's campaign ad hit the airwaves, the U.S. Border Patrol issued its strategic plan for 1994 and beyond. In this plan, the Border Patrol proposed a strategy called "prevention through deterrence" that was designed to make illegal entry across the southwest land border so risky that potential migrants would decide to stay home. By concentrating border enforcement in the urban areas where most migrants were trying to cross, the plan aimed to force them "over more hostile terrain" in the desert and to increase the cost of hiring a smuggler. Today, illegal migration to the U.S. is far more deadly and expensive than it was 30 years ago, just as the authors of the 1994 Border Patrol plan anticipated. But the report's authors believed that potential migrants would forgo the dangers of migrating to the U.S. without authorization, as well as the high costs of getting there. They thought potential migrants would simply stay in their home countries. They were wrong. Fortified borders The strategy of discouraging migrants from coming to the U.S. by making it more difficult required a large federal investment in border enforcement and cooperation from other countries, especially Mexico. Over the past 30 years, the Border Patrol's budget has grown more than sevenfold, and the number of agents stationed along the southwest border has quadrupled. The U.S. government has also built physical infrastructure to stop migrants from entering the country, including massive walls that extend into the Pacific Ocean. In more remote areas, drones, surveillance towers and extreme temperatures do the work of border control, often with deadly consequences for migrants. The U.S. also provided more than US$176 million in funding between October 2014 and Sept. 30, 2023, to support Mexico's immigration control efforts. There is some evidence that stricter border enforcement deterred Mexicans from crossing illegally into the United States after the 1990s. The number of migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol along the southwest border plummeted from 1.6 million between October 1999 through the end of September 2000, to 327,577 between October 2010 and the end of September 2011. But the deterrent effect of increased enforcement did not last. Migrant apprehensions at the southwest border began to rise again in 2012 and spiked to 851,508 between October 2018 and Sept. 30, 2019. After falling briefly during the pandemic, total apprehensions averaged 1.9 million per year between October 2020 and Sept. 30, 2024. These numbers exceed the historic peaks in 1986 and 2000 – despite the much greater costs and dangers of migrating illegally today. Illusory deterrence In 2023, my research team and I interviewed over 130 migrants in Colombia, Costa Rica and Mexico to understand why they were taking such enormous risks to get to the United States. What we found is that deterrence isn't working because of shifts in who is migrating and why they are leaving home. Until 2011, the vast majority of illegal border crossers were Mexicans, mostly young men seeking higher incomes to support their families. As the Mexican economy recovered and fewer young people entered the labor market, Mexican workers had less need to migrate. Those who made it to the United States stayed put instead of going back and forth. Today, more than 60% of the migrants who cross the U.S. border without legal authorization are from places other than Mexico, including Central America, Venezuela, Ecuador and Haiti. Forty percent of them are parents traveling with children. Many of these migrants are fleeing chronic violence, rampant corruption, natural disasters or economic collapse. For these migrants, it is worth the risk of being kidnapped, dying in the desert or being deported to escape a desperate situation. "If they deport me, sister, I will come back," a Honduran mother of three told us in Tijuana in June 2023. "If you go back, you die. So you have to go forward, forward, forward all the time." Increased criminality While prevention through deterrence has not stopped migrants, it has enriched smugglers, corrupt government officials and other criminals who take advantage of vulnerable migrants on their way to the U.S. border. "Before I would charge you $6,000," explained a Salvadoran smuggler to an Associated Press reporter in December 2019. "Now I am charging you double. And depending on the obstacles on the way, the price can go up." This doesn't include the fee to cross the heavily fortified U.S.-Mexico border, which increased from a few hundred dollars in the 1990s to between $2,000 and $15,000 today. According to one estimate, smuggling revenues in the Americas grew from $500 million in 2018 to $13 billion in 2022. "Criminals have shifted from their primary business, which was drug trafficking," the director of an anti-kidnapping unit at an attorney general's office in Chihuahua, Mexico, told a journalist in June 2024. "Now 60 to 70% of their focus is migrant smuggling." It's not just smuggling that is lucrative. As Mexico's own immigration policy has become more restrictive, migrants have fallen into the clutches of an extensive extortion racket that involves kidnapping migrants once they set foot in Mexico. Prevention through deterrence is a failed policy with a tragic human cost. It doesn't stop migrants who are fleeing dire conditions, and it fuels violence and criminality. Drug cartels, armed groups and corrupt officials get rich while insecurity spreads, fueling more migration. It is a vicious cycle that will likely only get worse with stricter enforcement and mass deportations. (The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)Disneyland 'Gangs' Struggling to Afford the Theme Park
Trump will ‘most likely' pardon Capitol rioters on day one and says Jan. 6 committee members should be jailedVideo Telematics Market Growing Popularity and Emerging Trends in the IndustryWalmart shopper boycotts store and begs to ‘bring back cashiers’ after fuming over ‘frozen products’
WASHINGTON (AP) — A lead organization monitoring for food crises around the world withdrew a new report this week warning of imminent famine in north Gaza under what it called Israel's “near-total blockade,” after the U.S. asked for its retraction, U.S. officials told the Associated Press. The move follows public criticism of the report from the U.S. ambassador to Israel. The rare public dispute drew accusations from prominent aid and human-rights figures that the work of the U.S.-funded Famine Early Warning System Network , meant to reflect the opinion of unbiased international experts, has been tainted by politics. A declaration of famine would be a great embarrassment for Israel, which has insisted that its 15-month war in Gaza is aimed against the Hamas militant group and not against its civilian population. U.S. ambassador to Israel Jacob Lew earlier this week called the warning by the internationally recognized group inaccurate and “irresponsible ." Lew and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which funds the monitoring group, both said the findings failed to properly account for rapidly changing circumstances in north Gaza. Humanitarian and human rights officials expressed fear of U.S. political interference in the world's monitoring system for famines. The U.S. Embassy in Israel and the State Department declined comment. FEWS officials did not respond to questions. “We work day and night with the U.N. and our Israeli partners to meet humanitarian needs — which are great — and relying on inaccurate data is irresponsible,” Lew said Tuesday. USAID confirmed to the AP that it had asked the famine-monitoring organization to withdraw its stepped-up warning issued in a report dated Monday. The report did not appear among the top updates on the group's website Thursday, but the link to it remained active . The dispute points in part to the difficulty of assessing the extent of starvation in largely isolated northern Gaza. Thousands in recent weeks have fled an intensified Israeli military crackdown that aid groups say has allowed delivery of only a dozen trucks of food and water since roughly October. FEWS Net said in its withdrawn report that unless Israel changes its policy, it expects the number of people dying of starvation and related ailments in north Gaza to reach between two and 15 per day sometime between January and March. The internationally recognized mortality threshold for famine is two or more deaths a day per 10,000 people. FEWS was created by the U.S. development agency in the 1980s and is still funded by it. But it is intended to provide independent, neutral and data-driven assessments of hunger crises, including in war zones. Its findings help guide decisions on aid by the U.S. and other governments and agencies around the world. A spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry, Oren Marmorstein, welcomed the U.S. ambassador's public challenge of the famine warning. “FEWS NET - Stop spreading these lies!” Marmorstein said on X . In challenging the findings publicly, the U.S. ambassador "leveraged his political power to undermine the work of this expert agency,” said Scott Paul, a senior manager at the Oxfam America humanitarian nonprofit. Paul stressed that he was not weighing in on the accuracy of the data or methodology of the report. “The whole point of creating FEWS is to have a group of experts make assessments about imminent famine that are untainted by political considerations,” said Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch and now a visiting professor in international affairs at Princeton University . “It sure looks like USAID is allowing political considerations -- the Biden administration’s worry about funding Israel’s starvation strategy -- to interfere." Israel says it has been operating in recent months against Hamas militants still active in northern Gaza. It says the vast majority of the area’s residents have fled and relocated to Gaza City, where most aid destined for the north is delivered. But some critics, including a former defense minister, have accused Israel of carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza’s far north, near the Israeli border. North Gaza has been one of the areas hardest-hit by fighting and Israel’s restrictions on aid throughout its war with Hamas militants. Global famine monitors and U.N. and U.S. officials have warned repeatedly of the imminent risk of malnutrition and deaths from starvation hitting famine levels. International officials say Israel last summer increased the amount of aid it was admitting there, under U.S. pressure. The U.S. and U.N. have said Gaza’s people as a whole need between 350 and 500 trucks a day of food and other vital needs. But the U.N. and aid groups say Israel recently has again blocked almost all aid to that part of Gaza. Cindy McCain , the American head of the U.N. World Food Program, previously called for political pressure to get food flowing to Palestinians there. Israel says it places no restrictions on aid entering Gaza and that hundreds of truckloads of goods are piled up at Gaza’s crossings and accused international aid agencies of failing to deliver the supplies. The U.N. and other aid groups say ongoing combat, looting and insufficient security by Israeli troops make it impossible to deliver aid effectively. Lew, the U.S. ambassador, said the famine warning was based on “outdated and inaccurate” data. He pointed to uncertainty over how many of the 65,000-75,000 people remaining in northern Gaza had fled in recent weeks, saying that skewed the findings. FEWS said in its report that its famine assessment holds even if as few as 10,000 people remain. USAID in its statement to AP said it had reviewed the report before it became public, and noted “discrepancies” in population estimates and some other data. The U.S. agency had asked the famine warning group to address those uncertainties and be clear in its final report to reflect how those uncertainties affected its predictions of famine, it said. “This was relayed before Ambassador Lew’s statement,” USAID said in a statement. “FEWS NET did not resolve any of these concerns and published in spite of these technical comments and a request for substantive engagement before publication. As such, USAID asked to retract the report.” Roth criticized the U.S. challenge of the report in light of the gravity of the crisis there. “This quibbling over the number of people desperate for food seems a politicized diversion from the fact that the Israeli government is blocking virtually all food from getting in,” he said, adding that “the Biden administration seems to be closing its eyes to that reality, but putting its head in the sand won’t feed anyone.” The U.S., Israel’s main backer, provided a record amount of military support in the first year of the war. At the same time, the Biden administration repeatedly urged Israel to allow more access to aid deliveries in Gaza overall, and warned that failing to do so could trigger U.S. restrictions on military support. The administration recently said Israel was making improvements and declined to carry out its threat of restrictions. Military support for Israel’s war in Gaza is politically charged in the U.S., with Republicans and some Democrats staunchly opposed any effort to limit U.S. support over the suffering of Palestinian civilians trapped in the conflict. The Biden administration’s reluctance to do more to press Israel for improved treatment of civilians undercut support for Democrats in last month’s elections. Sam Mednick and Josef Federman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
NEW YORK , Dec. 9, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Halper Sadeh LLC, an investor rights law firm, is investigating the following companies for potential violations of the federal securities laws and/or breaches of fiduciary duties to shareholders relating to: Altair Engineering Inc. (NASDAQ: ALTR)'s sale to Siemens for $113.00 per share in cash. If you are an Altair shareholder, click here to learn more about your legal rights and options . Mid Penn Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ: MPB)'s merger with William Penn Bancorporation. If you are a Mid Penn shareholder, click here to learn more about your rights and options . Avid Bioservices, Inc. (NASDAQ: CDMO)'s sale to funds managed by GHO Capital Partners LLP and Ampersand Capital Partners for $12.50 per share in cash. If you are an Avid shareholder, click here to learn more about your rights and options . AeroVironment, Inc. (NASDAQ: AVAV)'s merger with BlueHalo LLC. Per the terms of the proposed transaction, AeroVironment will issue approximately 18.5 million shares of AeroVironment common stock to BlueHalo. Upon closing of the proposed transaction, AeroVironment shareholders will own approximately 60.5% of the combined company. If you are an AeroVironment shareholder, click here to learn more about your legal rights and options . Halper Sadeh LLC may seek increased consideration for shareholders, additional disclosures and information concerning the proposed transaction, or other relief and benefits on behalf of shareholders. We would handle the action on a contingent fee basis, whereby you would not be responsible for out-of-pocket payment of our legal fees or expenses. Shareholders are encouraged to contact the firm free of charge to discuss their legal rights and options. Please call Daniel Sadeh or Zachary Halper at (212) 763-0060 or email sadeh@halpersadeh.com or zhalper@halpersadeh.com . Halper Sadeh LLC represents investors all over the world who have fallen victim to securities fraud and corporate misconduct. Our attorneys have been instrumental in implementing corporate reforms and recovering millions of dollars on behalf of defrauded investors. Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Contact Information: Halper Sadeh LLC Daniel Sadeh, Esq. Zachary Halper, Esq. (212) 763-0060 sadeh@halpersadeh.com zhalper@halpersadeh.com https://www.halpersadeh.com View original content to download multimedia: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/shareholder-investigation-halper-sadeh-llc-investigates-altr-mpb-cdmo-avav-on-behalf-of-shareholders-302326334.html SOURCE Halper Sadeh LLPHowever, the road ahead remains uncertain for Wang Sicong’s shareholding company, as it navigates a complex landscape of legal, financial, and reputational challenges. The recent seizure of assets is a stark reminder of the risks faced by businesses in today’s fast-paced and competitive environment, and serves as a cautionary tale for investors and entrepreneurs alike.
BERLIN (AP) — Harry Kane scored a hat trick including two penalties for Bayern Munich to beat Augsburg 3-0 in the Bundesliga on Friday. The win stretched Bayern’s lead to eight points ahead of the rest of the 11th round, and Kane took his goals tally to a league-leading 14. The England forward is the fastest player to reach 50 goals in the Bundesliga in what was his 43rd game. However, coach Vincent Kompany should be concerned by his team’s ongoing difficulty of scoring in matches it dominates. Bayern previously defeated St. Pauli and Benfica only 1-0. Kompany’s team had to wait until stoppage time before Kane sealed the result with his second penalty. Two minutes later, Kane scored with a header after controlling Leon Goretzka's cross with his first touch for a flattering scoreline. “We had to be patient,” Kane said. “And at halftime that’s what we said, to keep doing what we’re doing. We had a few chances in the first half and we just had to be a bit more clinical and obviously, thankfully, we got the penalty to kind of open the game up.” Mads Pedersen was penalized for handball following a VAR review and Kane duly broke the deadlock in the 63rd. Bayern continued as before with 80% possession, but had to wait for Keven Schlotterbeck to be penalized through VAR for a foul on Kane. Kane sealed the result in the third minute of stoppage time and there was still time for him to grab another. It’s Bayern’s seventh consecutive win without conceding a goal since it conceded four at Barcelona (4-1) on Oct. 23 in the Champions League. “You can see now that we have a solid defense and that's the basis, also in games like today's,” Bayern midfielder Joshua Kimmich said. “When it's a game of patience, then it's important for us to know that sometimes one goal will have to do. Like today we added two more before the finish, but in the end you only need to score one more than the opponent.” Bayern next hosts Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League on Tuesday, then Borussia Dortmund away in the Bundesliga next weekend, before defending champion Bayer Leverkusen visits in the third round of the German Cup. AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccerNone
Xiaomi, a leading technology company known for its innovative products, made a groundbreaking entry into the automotive industry with the unveiling of the highly anticipated YU7 SUV at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). Priced starting at 300,000 RMB, the YU7 is set to redefine the concept of smart mobility with its cutting-edge features and futuristic design.
