​ No Kings protests across the US rally against Donald Trump. 3 hours ago. Sakshi Venkatraman. Large protests against the Trump administration are taking place in cities across the US, marking the third iteration of No Kings rallies that have previously drawn crowds into the millions.. Organisers say they are protesting against policies imposed by US President Donald Trump, including the war in Iran, federal immigration enforcement and the rising cost of living.. “Trump wants to rule over us as a tyrant. But this is America, and power belongs to the people – not to wannabe kings or their billionaire cronies,” organisers said.. A White House spokesperson called the protests “Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions” and said the only people who care “are the reporters who are paid to cover them”.. Getty Images. Throughout the day on Saturday, demonstrations took place in nearly every major US city, including New York, Washington DC, and Los Angeles.. Rallies took over the streets of downtown Washington DC throughout the afternoon, with throngs of people marching through the nation’s capital. Protestors lined the steps of the the Lincoln Memorial and packed the National Mall.. Like in previous iterations of No Kings, protesters held up effigies of Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other officials in the administration, calling for their ousting and arrest.. Getty Images. Getty Images. One of the flagship No Kings protests on Saturday took place in Minnesota, where two American citizens – Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti – were killed by federal immigration agents in January. Their deaths sparked outrage and nationwide protests against the Trump administration’s immigration tactics.. Thousands on Saturday filled the streets with signs and a plethora of high-profile Democrats also took a stage outside the State Capitol building in St Paul.. Bruce Springsteen also took the stage and performed his anti-immigration enforcement song titled, “Streets of Minneapolis”.. Getty Images. Getty Images. Thousands also crowded New York City’s Times Square, marching through Manhattan’s Midtown neighbourhood. Police had to shut down the normally busy streets to make way for crowds. In October, the New York Police Department said more than 100,000 people had gathered across all five of the city’s boroughs.. The protests weren’t without incident. In Los Angeles, two people were arrested for assaulting federal law enforcement, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).. In a statement to X, it said that two officers had been hit with the cement blocks and were receiving medical care, after a group of what it described as “1,000 rioters” surrounded the Roybal Federal Building and began throwing things at DHS agents.. Elsewhere in the city, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) said “multiple arrests” had been made after protestors did not obey dispersal orders in an area near a federal prison.. Police confirmed that federal authorities has used “non-lethal mea  

​ Trump is waging war based on instinct and it isn’t working. 6 hours ago. Jeremy BowenInternational Editor. BBC. Some old truths about warfare have been knocking on the door of the Oval Office in the month since US President Donald Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent US and Israeli warplanes to bomb Iran.. The failure to learn from the past means that Donald Trump now faces a stark choice. If he can not get a deal with Iran, he can either try to declare a victory that will fool no-one, or escalate the war.. The oldest of the old truths comes from the Prussian military strategist Helmuth von Moltke the Elder: “no plan survives first contact with the enemy.” He was writing in 1871, the year Germany was unified as an empire, a moment that was as consequential for the security of Europe as this war might be for the security of the Middle East.. Maybe Trump prefers the boxer Mike Tyson’s modern version: “everyone has a plan until they get hit.” Even more relevant for Trump are the words of one of his predecessors, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the American general who commanded the D-Day landings in 1944 and went on to serve two terms as a Republican president of the United States in the 1950s.. Eisenhower’s version was “plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” He meant that the discipline and process of making plans to fight a war make it possible to change course when the unexpected happens.. For Trump, the unexpected item has been the resilience of the regime in Iran. It seems that he was hoping for a repeat of the US military’s lightning-fast kidnap in January of the President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. They are now in prison in New York, facing trial. Maduro’s deputy Delcy Rodríguez replaced him as president and is taking orders from Washington.. Hoping for a repeat of the victory over Maduro suggests a yawning lack of comprehension of the differences between Venezuela and Iran.. Anadolu via Getty Images. Eisenhower’s adage on thinking ahead came in a speech in 1957. He had been the man in charge of planning and commanding the largest amphibious military operation in history, the invasion of western Europe on D-Day, so he knew what he was talking about.. He went on to explain that when an unexpected emergency arises “the first thing you do is to take all the plans off the top shelf and throw them out the window and start once more. But if you haven’t been planning you can’t start to work, intelligently at least.”. “That is the reason it is so important to plan, to keep yourselves steeped in the character of the problem that you may one day be called upon to solve – or to help to solve.”. Far from capitulating or collapsing after Israel and the US killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first air strike of the war, the regime in Tehran is functioning and fighting back. It is playing a weak hand well.. In contrast, Trump has given the impression that he is making it up as he  

​ Prison phone call recordings raise questions over ex-Abercrombie boss’ fitness for trial. 7 hours ago. Rianna CroxfordInvestigations correspondent. Reuters. Former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries was recorded telling his British partner “we’re screwed” and in “big trouble” if he was found fit to stand trial on sex trafficking charges later this year, a New York federal court has heard.. The audio was part of more than 100 phone calls between the ex-fashion boss and Matthew Smith referred to during a four-day mental competency hearing this week on Long Island.. Jeffries’ lawyers argue that he is suffering with dementia and late onset of Alzheimer’s disease and is unfit to face trial alongside his partner and their alleged middleman in October.. However, prosecutors say their medical experts found his condition has improved and that the calls reveal he is “incredibly focused” on being found incompetent.. In further recordings, Jeffries says he is “hoping for a good outcome”, describing being found fit as a “disaster”, and tells a doctor: “you better find me incompetent”, Central Islip court heard.. The calls were recorded last year while he was being treated for four months in a mental health unit at a federal prison in North Carolina to see if he could regain competency.. The 81-year-old had previously been found mentally incompetent last May but prison officials then declared in December that he was fit for trial following his hospital stay.. Prosecutors told the court Jeffries frequently complained about prison conditions and was caught on tape describing to Smith how “horrible jail was”, adding: “that’s why we got to pull this off”.. Ex-Abercrombie boss now facing abuse claims from 40 men. Jeffries, his partner Smith, 62, and their alleged middleman James Jacobson, 73, were charged with running a global sex trafficking and prostitution business in October 2024.. They have pleaded not guilty to the charges, which carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.. Their arrests followed an October 2023 BBC investigation and ongoing podcast series that revealed the trio had been at the centre of a sophisticated operation scouting young men for sex around the world while Jeffries was CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch.. Judge Nusrat J. Choudhury will decide in May whether Jeffries will stand trial after considering the testimony of six experts – forensic psychologists, psychiatrists and neurologists, including prison doctors – who were cross-examined in court this week.. ‘Disinhibited’ behaviour. Three defence experts, Dr Jacqueline C. Valdes, Dr Alexander Bardey and Dr Miranda Rosenberg, maintain that Jeffries is mentally incompetent due to the residual effects of a traumatic brain injury, probable Lewy body dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.. They testified that Jeffries demonstrates “disinhibited” and socially “inappropriate” behaviour, which is part of a range of dementia symptoms, the court heard.. Examples include Jeffries calling the prosecutor’s pro  

​ One ant for $220: the new frontier of wildlife trafficking. 8 hours ago. Wycliffe MuiaNairobi. Dino Martins. The ants are flying in Kenya at the moment.. During this rainy season, swarms can be seen leaving the thousands of anthills in and around Gilgil, a quiet agricultural town in Kenya’s Rift Valley that has emerged as the centre of a booming illegal trade.. The mating ritual sees winged males leave the nest to impregnate queens, who also take flight at this time. This makes it the perfect time to chase down queen ants to sell on to smugglers who are at the heart of a growing global black market, that taps into the pet craze for keeping ants in transparent enclosures designed to observe the insects as they busily build a colony.. It is the giant African harvester ant queens, which are large and coloured red, that are most prized by international ant collectors – one can fetch up to £170 ($220) on the black market, which tends to operate online.. A single fertilised queen is able to create a whole colony and can live for decades – and can be easily posted as scanners do not tend to detect organic material.. “At first, I did not even know it was illegal,” a man, who asked not to be named, told the BBC about how he had once acted as a broker, linking foreign buyers with local collection networks.. Also known as Messor cephalotes, these ants are native to East Africa and known for their distinctive seed-gathering behaviour making them popular with ant collectors.. “A friend told me a foreigner was paying good money for queen ants – the big red ones which are easily seen around here,” the former broker said.. “You look for the mounds near open fields, usually early morning before the heat. The foreigners never came to the fields themselves – they would wait in town, in a guest house or a car, and we would bring the ants to them packed in small tubes or syringes they supplied us with.”. Getty Images. The scale of the illicit trade in Kenya became apparent last year when 5,000 giant harvester ant queens – mainly collected around Gilgil – were found alive at a guest house in Naivasha, a nearby lakeside town popular with tourists.. The suspects – from Belgium, Vietnam and Kenya – had packed the test tubes and syringes with moist cotton wool, which would enable each ant to survive for two months, according to the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS).. The plan was to take them to Europe and Asia and put them up for sale.. This trade in ants has caught scientists and the authorities by surprise.. The East African nation is more accustomed to high-profile wildlife crimes involving elephant tusks and rhino horns.. UK-based retailer Ants R Us describes the giant African harvester ant as “many people’s dream species” – though the queens are currently out of stock, with the site explaining that it is very hard for retailers to source them.. “Even I, as an entomologist, have been surprised at the extent of the apparent trade,” Dino Martins, a biologist based in K  

​ How deepfake porn scandal surrounding TV star rocked Germany. 5 hours ago. Jessica Parker,Berlin correspondentand. Kristina Völk. Morris MacMatzen/Getty Images. It is a story that is gripping Germany and has led to one of its best known TV stars tearfully telling thousands of protesters from a stage in Hamburg how she had to wear a bulletproof vest, due to death threats.. A week ago Collien Fernandes, 44, accused her ex-husband of spreading pornographic deepfakes of her online, in bombshell allegations published by German news magazine Der Spiegel.. Her claims have triggered demonstrations, promises to tighten the law and criticism that Chancellor Friedrich Merz has bungled his response.. Fernandes’ ex-husband, Christian Ulmen, denies the allegations and has not been charged. He is also taking legal action against the magazine that broke the story.. His high-profile media lawyers, Christian Schertz and Simon Bergmann, have told the BBC that Ulmen has never “produced and/or distributed deepfake videos of Ms Fernandes or any other individuals. Any such claims are false”.. They argue that what happened between Fernandes and Ulmen is completely unrelated to the German debate surrounding legal loopholes in criminal law over deepfake pornography.. Isa Foltin/Getty Images. Ulmen and Fernandes were for years known as a prominent, celebrity couple chalking up extensive TV, presenting, production, writing and acting roles between them.. The pair’s status as public figures partly explains why the case has captivated Germany.. But, regardless of the outcome of this case, it has also exposed anger about what campaigners say are glaring gaps in criminal law.. A group of 250 women from politics, business and culture has released 10 “demands” including the clear criminalisation of producing and distributing non-consensual sexualised deepfakes.. The group includes Labour minister Bärbel Bas from the centre-left SPD party, rapper Ikkimel and climate activist Luisa Neubauer.. Maryam Majd/Getty Images. Federal Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig has announced plans to change the law so that the creation and distribution of pornographic deepfakes would become an explicit offence.. The crime would be punishable by up to two years in prison – according to draft plans seen by German media.. Currently under German law, only the dissemination of such pictures is potentially punishable if it is found to have breached someone’s right to their own image.. Fernandes told thousands of protesters gathered in her native Hamburg on Thursday night of the abuse she has experienced since going public with her allegations.. German outcry over deep fake porn targeting actress prompts bid to change law. “I’m standing here with a bulletproof vest under police protection… because men want to kill me.”. She has claimed that her ex-husband confessed to her on Christmas Day 2024 that he had been spreading fake, sexualised images of her online.. “It was like receiving news of a death,” she t