Israeli supporters showed up in force when news broke of a planned pro-Palestine protest outside the Synagogue in Melbourne.A man was arrested during a rally outside a synagogue in Caulfield North on…

Vancouver Police Board vice-chair Comfort Sakoma-Fadugba was asked to resign following comments she made on social media stating that “woke culture” and the sidelining of religions such as Christianity…

Everyone is leaning into this one accusation...and honestly, I'm kind of here for it because, if true, it has to be one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. I have bad news for you; this is another article about Zach Bryan and Brianna Chickenfry's breakup. I know that some of our country music readers are over the pop-culture headlines surrounding the Barstool Sports personality, Brianna Chickenfry. However, for those readers (like myself) who love being in the know about drama and all things related to this very public split, welcome back. After Zach and Bri parted ways, Brianna sat down for an episode of the BFFs Podcast, where she disclosed to Dave Portnoy, Josh Richards, and the hundreds of thousands of viewers what Zach Bryan did throughout their relationship. Some of those allegations included ZB asking her to sign an NDA in exchange for $12 million (which is obviously turned down given what she's shared), how he shamed her for her outfit choice at the Golden Globes, and much more. However, one allegation that folks are running with is related to Morgan Wallen. When together, Brianna allegedly humming the lyrics to "Last Night" when walking around their New York apartment, and Bri singing another man's song in their house sent him into a tizzy. “One morning, we were out the night before, and one morning I woke up, and I was scrolling TikTok, and ‘Last night, we let the liquor talk’ was stuck in my head. And I walk up the stairs in the New York apartment, and I’m singing, I’m about to make breakfast or something like that… he freaked the f*** out. Like, freaked the f*** out. He could not believe, ‘You’re singing another man’s song under my roof, in this house, that I own.’ It was a fight for, I think, a week. It’s a Morgan Wallen song. I don’t know…” After Bri told the story, Dave Portnoy was confused about why Zach was bothered about that song in particular. He wondered if there was beef between the two country singers that he was unaware of, but Josh Richards summed it up perfectly, explaining: “I think he really doesn’t like Morgan Wallen. I think he hates Morgan Wallen. I think he feels inferior to Morgan Wallen.” While I am sure this moment was traumatizing for Bri, for those of us who have not lived through the abuse she is claiming ZB put her through, it's a hilarious story. Like, it's not that deep? Now that the story is public, though, and Brianna is single, country fans and other artists are having too much fun with it, constantly playing "Last Night" after a ZB song or when they know Bri is in the building. Example A: @whiskeyriff Well played. @Brianna @Brianna LaPaglia // whiskeyriff.com #whiskeyriff #zachbryan #morganwallen ♬ original sound - Whiskey Riff More recently, Brianna appeared behind the DJ booth at a Loud Luxury show, and the DJs (The Chainsmokers) made sure to play the Wallen song with her in the spotlight with them. Brianna honestly looks like she is living her best life, belting out the words to the song, knowing there will be no repercussions. Brianna looks so happy and carefree in the video clip, dancing around as the beat drops. Power to you, Bri, we love the unhinged behavior. @thechainsmokerslast night ♬ original sound - The Chainsmokers Fans also loved the clip lifting up Bri in the comments. "Yesssss we love this." "Living her ABSOLUTE best life." "Wow." "Bri!!! This is iconic. Love it!" "ICONIC." "I love this."  "Y'all are icons for this."  "Team Bri all the way."

Country music stars banding together to make dreams come true. A boy in Central Texas who is currently battling leukemia recently got to meet some of his country music heroes, and it was all thanks to a state trooper that had a connection with Cody Johnson. Hudson Swinnea has been fighting cancer for almost a year, and often uses music as an escape. His mother, Krystal Swinnea, told KWTX10 that they listen to a lot of country music to help pass the time during long car rides to and from his cancer treatments. Some of his favorite artists to listen to are Cody Johnson, Jelly Roll, Ernest and Shaboozey. The state trooper that is friends with the Swinnea family also happens to be friends with CoJo (they're both from Huntsville, TX), and reached out to see if the country music star would be willing to FaceTime the young boy battling with pediatric cancer. That call turned into a FaceTime with both Johnson and Jelly Roll, who both invited Hudson and his family to join them at their respective Houston concerts. Krystal told the Texas news station that Johnson was gracious when the Swinneas got to meet him, and luckily for Hudson, Jelly Roll is currently touring with Ernest and Shaboozey as openers, so they were able to meet them all at once when Jelly Roll played at the Toyota Center in Houston on November 17th: "He shook Cody Johnson’s hand when we got to meet Cody, and he talked to him. Then, there was lots of fist bumps with Jelly Roll, and he did talk to him as well. Ernest and Shaboozey, he did talk to them." While meeting all of the country stars was a phenomenal experience for the Central Texas family, Jelly Roll apparently went above and beyond in the time that he spent with Hudson. The "Need A Favor" singer included the young boy in his pre-concert-prayer, and even shouted out Hudson ahead of the last song of the night. As Hudson's mom explained: "He said this amazing prayer before he went out on stage. We got to stand in their circle and pray with them. He prayed for us, and he prayed for Hudson. The whole experience was very touching. The last song is when he gave Hudson a shout out and said that he was fighting and to keep fighting." As you might imagine, the visits with Jelly Roll, Cody Johnson, Ernest and Shaboozey have lifted the spirits of the young kid that very much deserves all of the experiences that have come his way thanks to the family friend's connection. The Swinnea family feels very grateful that Hudson got to meet so many of his favorite artists, and the meetings went over so well that the young boy fighting cancer has told anyone and everyone he can about it: "He has not quit talking about it. He’s told everybody, and he has definitely said over and over that they’re the best nights ever, so I definitely think he had a great time, and it’s really boosted his spirit." Hudson still has a long road ahead of him. His mother Krystal told KWTX 10 that he has over a year's worth of treatments and hospital stays remaining, which is why these spirit-lifting moments are so important in the young man's fight against cancer. You can hear more on the story - and see some of the videos and pictures of Hudson meeting various country music stars - in the video below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RceRVx42Sw

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Lebanon's first responders say Israeli strikes target them as they work to save lives BEIRUT — It is Jad Deeb's job to run toward the screams. Ever since Israel started carrying out airstrikes in southern Beirut in September as part of its intensified campaign to dismantle Hezbollah, the 31-year-old IT specialist turned paramedic has spent day after day racing toward bombed out buildings to help pull people from the rubble of their homes. The wreckage from Israeli airstrikes is often so vast...

Plane clips another plane while being towed at Logan Airport A plane was clipped by another plane at Boston's Logan International Airport on Monday evening.Massport said a tug vehicle towing an empty JetBlue plane struck a Cape Air plane at slow speed near Terminal C around 6:30 p.m. Monday.There were no injuries and Massport said the incident was "minor".The incident comes the same day an American Airlines plane clipped the wing tip of a Frontier Airlines plane at Terminal E earlier Monday....

For many movie fans, and also for the Meme Smart-ass community, the famous scene in the Tom Hanks movie Captain Phillips in which the lead character is faced with the dismal reality that Somali pirates have taken over the Maersk Alabama is one of the most iconic of all time. Maybe Jim VandeHei, the head honcho at Axios, would like Tom Hanks to play him in a movie with a similar plot, at least from his perspective. VandeHei is very, very displeased at the disruptive influence Elon Musk is having in American society, particularly with respect to the current challenging environment for the news media. So much so that he publicly melted down over Musk’s statement that “you are the media now” to users of X, the formerly-constipated social media platform known as Twitter where Propaganda Press institutions used to compete for status as the most Orwellian practitioners of woke newspeak. X is no longer that platform: It is now a place where free speech is supported, and its user base is split almost exactly down the middle between left-leaners and right-leaners. This is a shift that the former cool kids of Twitter do not like. And the Propaganda Press crowd who used to use Twitter as a tidy little echo chamber largely free from participation by shadow-banned, fact-checked, and de-platformed dissident voices are very unhappy with their frequent ratios at the hands of the deplorables. The pirates are taking the bridge, and the Jim VandeHeis are no longer the captains. Tom Hanks’s character bore the news a bit better than did VandeHei at a confab put on by the National Press Club… Go and whine a little. The funny thing about VandeHei’s anti-X rant is that a whole bunch of it is true — but that’s even more damaging to his cause than were he coming completely out of left field. Is being a reporter hard? Well, being a good reporter is hard. That much is true. But Propaganda Press institutions have generally run off all their good reporters. Most of those today are independent journalists who’ve been sacked from the legacy media organizations they used to work for. Why? Because, to do that work means exposing corruption, waste, idiocy, incompetence, and criminality on both sides of the political aisle, and there are scant few reporters encouraged or even allowed to do such work anymore. Those who do? They very often find a far friendlier and more inviting — and even sometimes more lucrative — existence basing their operations on X or other platforms for independent journalism (Substack, Rumble, Patreon, etc.) than they ever did in legacy corporate media newsrooms. That’s what Musk meant when he told X users that they were the media now. That and the fact that crowdsourcing stories on a platform like X will, over time, yield a larger body of information — much of it potentially false, to be sure — than will entrusting those stories to gatekeepers like Jim VandeHei with no backstop behind him. VandeHei can rail against Musk and the other chatterers on X all he wants, but X and Musk aren’t the problem of the legacy corporate media for which he’s shilling. X is simply gasoline being poured on a fire that already existed. That fire is the immolation of their own credibility. When the idiot Kamala Harris was instantly transformed from a shamefully incompetent and charisma-free vice president to a “brat” and “joyful” presidential nominee by institutions like Axios, the Washington Post, and MSNBC, it wasn’t even the worst example of propaganda taking the place of journalism we’ve seen. That award goes, even today, to the attempt to dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation. It even places behind the legacy corporate press’ participation in the politicized public health bureaucracy’s efforts to weaponize COVID against both Donald Trump and the American public. But Harris’s media elevation, which was repaid with a contemptuous denial of legitimate interviews and a total failure to provide candid campaign communication of any real stripe, was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. Mr. VandeHei, if you were truly reporters, your plaintive wails might serve your doomed cause. But nobody believes that about you anymore. When your industry slandered Trump as Hitler while giving the tyrannical Biden–Harris regime a free pass for the countless abuses they’ve perpetrated over the past four years, you deserve all of the opprobrium and diminution you’re receiving. Nobody cares about your problems, and in fact, most relish in them. I go back a while in this debate, as I’ve been doing The Hayride in Louisiana for a decade and a half. In fact, on Friday it’ll be exactly 15 years since the site first made its debut on the internet. And in all of that time, I’ve had a running battle with the local Propaganda Press, and particularly the Baton Rouge Advocate — a formerly somewhat respectable newspaper that has devolved into, essentially, a small tabloid supported by a web publication that survives on funding from left-wing NGO’s like the Ford and Kellogg Foundations. I remember being part of a panel discussion that included one of the Advocate’s reporters, and I made a point about the legacy media’s totally inaccurate coverage of a particular issue, only to have the ink-stained wretch screech at me that “you’re in the media, too!” I asked him if that was the case, why the Advocate had a policy of never including a link to anything posted at The Hayride when the site was referenced in the paper’s articles. He had nothing to say to that, and so I was able to proudly distance myself from the Propaganda Press. We don’t have any NGO’s funding us at The Hayride. We have advertisers and readers who buy tickets and sponsorships to our events. Meaning that our audience keeps us afloat, which is something the Advocate can’t say. And legacy corporate media newsrooms know that the same is true for them. They know it. They might deny it. You can test that by asking them what they think of the idea of banning pharmaceutical ads on television, like every country on earth other than the U.S. and New Zealand do. That’s one of the things Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is talking about doing should he be confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services, and you can bet your bottom dollar these sanctimonious scribes will fight him tooth and nail at his confirmation hearings. They aren’t fooling a soul. The game is over. The pirates have stormed the bridge, and Jim VandeHei and the rest of the “Fourth Estate” are no longer the captains. The difference is that this isn’t Somalia. It’s actually a good thing that we are the media now. Maybe some truth will come out as a result. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Isn’t It Time for Jasmine Crockett to Shut Up? Saving The Country With Russ Vought Five Quick Things: Trump’s Cabinet Picks Are a Political Sea Change The post Jim VandeHei’s Captain Phillips Moment appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

President Trump rightly points out that America did not engage in new wars during his first term in office. The world was indeed a more stable place before the Biden administration engineered a disastrous exit from Afghanistan. That catastrophe signaled weakness and incentivized the Russian invasion of Ukraine as well as the Hamas attack on Israel. When America is weak, our adversaries grow bold. The incoming Trump administration will certainly not be interventionist; gone are the days of neoconservative visions of world transformation. Yet neither is it likely to succumb to the capitulationist voices of isolationism that have cropped up on the right and the left. No one knows better than President Trump that making America great again means making America strong again. We need strength to dissuade our adversaries from destabilizing aggressions. Ukraine will be the first theater in which the Trump administration will be tested. In the wake of the poor performance of the Russian military and the depletion of its manpower Moscow has resorted to bringing in North Korean mercenaries. This internationalization of the conflict represents a significant escalation. The Biden administration has countered this escalation by giving Ukraine authorization to use American missiles that can target sites far inside Russia. For years the Biden team was fearful of provoking Russia and therefore capped supplies to Ukraine, providing enough for Zelensky to keep fighting but never enough to win. That has changed. The prospect for ever greater conflict is therefore growing. This is the stage that President Trump, committed to pursuing peace, will enter on January 20. (READ MORE: North Korea Is in the Fight) But what kind of peace will it be? A narrative is circulating among Democrats, never Trumpers, and Europeans that Trump will pull the plug on Kyiv and hand Putin an easy victory. While this vision conforms with the “Russiagate” narrative that the Democratic National Committee has been hawking for eight years, it is deeply counterintuitive. Trump saw the disastrous consequences of Biden’s version of the Afghanistan wind-down. He surely does not want Ukraine to become his Afghanistan or for a gloating press to report from Kyiv as if it were the fall of Kabul. Surrender is not going to be the Trump path to peace. What then are his options? There are two variables at stake in Ukraine: geography and legality, or the question of territory and the question of guarantees. Concerning geography, the maxim of the inviolability of international borders points to Ukraine regaining control over its full territory. This is the principled position (and one endorsed by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Ukraine’s Black Sea neighbor). On the other hand, the Russian position, variously expressed by President Vladimir Putin, other political leaders, or the ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, involves the complete occupation of Ukraine, and the eradication of any Ukrainian independent sovereignty (and probably executing Zelensky). Surely Russia wants at the very least to control the Black Sea coast to maximize its own maritime access but also to render any left-over rump Ukraine a landlocked and subordinate vassal state, even less independent than Belarus. In any case, before analysts in the West start to negotiate with ourselves over how much Ukraine to surrender, it should not be forgotten that Russia still pretty much wants it all. Whether in some settlement Ukraine regains all its territory or is forced to make some concessions, international guarantees will be needed to safeguard against future Russian aggression, a second attempt to gobble up the rest. The strongest version of such a guarantee could be seen as NATO membership for Ukraine. Putin will resist this — this may be his redline. Alternatively, Ukraine might remain out of NATO, but international forces could be stationed at its border with Russia as tripwires to ward off another invasion. Such a solution would be analogous to the NATO troop contingents in the Baltics. A weaker version might just be an international memorandum endorsing Ukrainian independence, but this is what Ukraine already had, the so-called Budapest Accord, which ultimately did it no good at all. President Barack Obama did not feel obligated to offer genuine assistance to Ukraine when Russia invaded Crimea. The worst solution would be a complete Russian occupation of Ukraine or, short of that, major territorial concessions with only weak international security agreements. It would be out of character for Trump to embrace a defeat. While he is not an interventionist, neither is he an appeasement politician or a fool at deal-making. One can surely try to reach a compromise in terms of territory and guarantees, but it is also useful to look beyond the narrow Ukraine issue and keep an eye on the bigger game. Russia is the most direct threat to Europe and hence the Atlantic Alliance, but Russia is not America’s main global adversary; its economy is weak and its population is small. Its geostrategic significance is largely a function of its collaboration with China, while China is now recognized as the primary challenge to American power in the world. It is therefore in long-term U.S. interest to peel Russia off from China, a kind of reversal of President Richard Nixon’s driving a wedge between China and the Soviet Union half a century ago. The challenge of the moment then is for America to be firm with Russia over Ukraine, while at the same time winning Russia over to the American side in the current great power rivalry. This will require tact and agility, but also some outside-the-box thinking. Some analysts believe security for a post-war Ukraine is greatest if it enters NATO, but Moscow would regard that NATO expansion as a threat. What is needed then is a solution that protects Ukraine’s legitimate interests without alienating Russia — in the competition with China, it is important that the U.S. find ways to build bridges to Moscow, not to burn them. Whatever the precise formula that the Trump administration agrees to, it is vital to uphold the principle of Ukrainian national sovereignty while simultaneously working to pull Russia into the Western security architecture. We gain nothing if we push Russia further into the arms of Beijing. We win a lot if we pull Russia toward us and leave China out in the cold where it belongs, as long as it continues its expansionist ambitions in the western Pacific. This project will hardly be easy to carry out, but for the incoming peace president, this could be a legacy goal for the century. Russell A. Berman is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and formerly a senior advisor at the State Department. Kiron K. Skinner is the Taube Family Chair professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, the W. Glenn Campbell research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and the former director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Department of State. READ MORE: Biden Is Trump-Proofing the World Is Biden Trying to Start World War III Before Trump Takes Office? North Korea Is in the Fight The post Ukraine Policy: the Big Win appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.