Latest news with #C.I.A.
Indianapolis Star
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Indianapolis Star
Indiana woman joins 'Bachelor in Paradise.' What to know about Nancy Hulkower
An Indiana native came to help shake things up on this season of "Bachelor in Paradise." Nancy Hulkower, 62, arrived late in the episode, sparking interest from senior men in the group at the Costa Rica beach resort. The reality dating show, in its 10th season, brings together former contenders from 'The Bachelor' franchise to explore new relationships. Hulkower, who grew up in Warsaw, Indiana, was a cast member of the first season of "The Golden Bachelor," when Indiana resident Gerry Turner was the lead. She was eliminated in week four of that show. The bio for Hulkower on ABC's website describes her as a retired interior designer from Alexandria, Virginia, who 'loves playing golf, walking her goldendoodle, Max, and watching college basketball.' Fun facts about her: She loves a good rom-com; is a dancing machine, but only at weddings; and is a Bruce Springsteen fan. 'The mother of three is loyal, faithful and funny, and is looking for a self-assured, trustworthy man with whom to share her life,' according to the ABC bio. 'She is a self-described hopeless romantic and says, 'I believe in love stories. And even having a great one, I believe I can have another.'" Golden Bachelor no more: Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist get hitched. Huklower was born in Fort Wayne and grew up in Warsaw, leaving for college in 1982. She's lived in Alexandria, Virginia, since 1988. Hulkower is the widow of lawyer Mark J. Hulkower, who prosecuted C.I.A. traitor and Soviet spy Aldrich Ames for treason and defended high-profile executives accused of white collar crimes. He died in 2011. Her parents, David and Carole Delp, live in Winona Lake, Indiana. This is the first 'Bachelor in Paradise' season to include alumni cast members from 'The Golden Bachelor' and 'The Golden Bachelorette' shows. Ten members from the senior spinoffs arrived at the resort in week three of the season, which aired July 15. Gary Levingston, 66, from the first season of 'The Golden Bachelorette,' and Faith Martin, 62, who finished third on the first season of "The Golden Bachelor," also joined the resort early on the July 21 episode. Lea Cayanan, 25, a contestant on the 28th season of 'The Bachelor,' arrived with Hulkower. 'Bachelor in Paradise' airs on ABC on Mondays at 8 p.m. and streams starting the next day on Hulu.
New York Times
27-06-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
‘Done Waiting My Turn': Younger Democrats Are Eager to Seize the Car Keys
One is a democratic socialist and immigrant from New York City's most diverse borough, a state lawmaker who inspired an army of volunteers and proved to be a social-media star. Another is a former C.I.A. officer from a purple state who offered outspoken criticism of efforts to pull her party to the left in Congress. A third is a suburban mother and former Navy helicopter pilot who presented herself as ready to run 'toward the fight.' As different as these politicians are, these winners of the three most important Democratic primary elections of 2025 have something important in common: For a party that is desperate for fresh leadership, they promise it. In New York, a 33-year-old assemblyman from Queens, Zohran Mamdani, outpolled former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Tuesday to all but officially win the Democratic nomination for mayor. In Virginia, former Representative Abigail Spanberger, 45, cruised unopposed on June 17 to capture the party's nomination for governor. And in New Jersey, Representative Mikie Sherrill, 53, defeated six prominent and well-funded candidates on June 10 to become the Democratic nominee for governor. As Democrats grapple with how to rebuild a party demoralized after the victories by President Trump and Republicans last year, the results of the campaigns this month suggest a party reorienting itself not so much along ideological lines as toward a fundamental desire for generational change. Democratic strategists, lawmakers and officials say their party's voters are seeking leaders who were forged by the Trump era and can chart a path for their party in a political environment remade by the president. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Ya Libnan
20-06-2025
- Politics
- Ya Libnan
Iran may produce a nuclear bomb if the US attacks it or Khamanei is killed, NYT
File : Fordów uranium enrichment facility which is embedded in a mountain inside Iran and which Israel wants the US to bomb but president Trump is not convinced it can be done and decided to take 2 weeks to make the decision on whether to join Israel in the war 'The US should let Israel finish the job it started. PM Netanyahu says Israel is capable of finishing the job. President Trump claims to be a peacemaker not a warmonger . The last thing the US should do is join Israel in the war . This will be much worse than the war on Iraq in 2003', analysts say and the US never won any war since WWII A missile on display in Tehran in February. American spy agencies believe that it could take several months, and up to a year, for Iran to make a nuclear weapon. U.S. intelligence agencies continue to believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to make a nuclear bomb even though it has developed a large stockpile of the enriched uranium necessary for it to do so, according to intelligence and other American officials. That assessment has not changed since the intelligence agencies last addressed the question of Iran's intentions in March, the officials said, even as Israel has attacked Iranian nuclear facilities. Senior U.S. intelligence officials said that Iranian leaders were likely to shift toward producing a bomb if the American military attacked the Iranian uranium enrichment site Fordo or if Israel killed Iran's supreme leader. The question of whether Iran has decided to complete the work of building a bomb is irrelevant in the eyes of many Iran hawks in the United States and Israel, who say Tehran is close enough to represent an existential danger to Israel. But it has long been a flashpoint in the debate over policy toward Iran and has flared again as President Trump weighs whether to bomb Fordo. White House officials held an intelligence briefing on Thursday and announced that Mr. Trump would make his decision within the next two weeks. At the White House meeting, John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, told officials that Iran was very close to having a nuclear weapon. Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokeswoman, said later at a news briefing that Iran had the material it needed to make a bomb. 'Let's be very clear: Iran has all that it needs to achieve a nuclear weapon,' she said. 'All they need is a decision from the supreme leader to do that and it would take a couple weeks to complete the production of that weapon.' Some American officials said those new assessments echoed material provided by Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, which believes that Iran can achieve a nuclear weapon in 15 days. While some American officials find the Israeli estimate credible, others emphasized that the U.S. intelligence assessment remained unchanged, and American spy agencies believe that it could take several months, and up to a year, for Iran to make a weapon. Intelligence assessments are often drafted in a way that allows policymakers to draw different conclusions. And many intelligence officials believe that the reason Iran has accumulated such a large arsenal of uranium is to have the ability to move toward making a bomb quickly. Some officials believe Israeli assessments have been colored by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's desire to gain American support for his military campaign against Iran. Mr. Netanyahu said on Thursday, however, that Israel could achieve its goals alone when it came to Iran's nuclear facilities. None of the new assessments on the timeline to get a bomb are based on newly collected intelligence, according to multiple officials. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a religious ruling, or fatwa, in 2003 that has prevented the country from developing nuclear weapons. That is 'right now holding,' a senior intelligence official said, adding that the Israeli assessment that Iran was 15 days away was alarmist. Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly warned over the years that Iran is close to a nuclear weapon. And since Israel began its attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities, Israeli officials have warned that Iran was weeks away from having the components for a bomb. Mr. Netanyahu has not been specific on the time frame. 'In recent months, Iran has taken steps that it has never taken before, steps to weaponize this enriched uranium, and if not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time,' Mr. Netanyahu said. 'It could be a year. It could be within a few months, less than a year. This is a clear and present danger to Israel's very survival.' Still, American officials acknowledge that the large stockpile poses a threat. Testifying before Congress on June 10, Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, the head of Central Command, said Iran's nuclear stockpile and available centrifuges could allow it to produce weapons-grade material in a week, and were enough to make 10 weapons in three weeks if the government decided 'to sprint to a nuclear weapon.' In testimony in March, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, noted that the Iranian stockpile was at a high, a level that she said was unprecedented for a nonnuclear state. Officials said Ms. Gabbard's comments remained accurate and were in line with the idea that Iran is gathering the components of a weapon. Iran's stockpile is enriched to 60 percent. To make a bomb, it would need to be enriched further, to 90 percent. Enriching uranium means reducing the percentage of naturally occurring uranium, U-238, and increasing the percentage of a lighter isotope, U-235, that can sustain a nuclear reaction. But producing a weapon requires more than uranium. Iran would also have to make a bomb, and potentially miniaturize it to place on a warhead. While the United States and Israel believe that Iran has the expertise to build a bomb, there is no intelligence that it has set out to do that. U.S. intelligence believes that Iran could potentially shorten the timeline if it pursued a cruder weapon that might not be able to be miniaturized and put on a missile. Such a cruder weapon might be more akin to the bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima, which was nearly 10,000 pounds and 10 feet long and had to be dropped from a plane, rather than delivered on a missile. Senior officials, including Vice President JD Vance, have said that new information has come in since the U.S. intelligence position was made public in March. But officials said that information from Israel and other sources was not new intelligence about the program or Iranian intent to build a bomb, but rather new analysis of existing work. THE NEW YORK TIMES
New York Times
18-06-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Kennedy's Purge Is a ‘Code Red' for Vaccines in America
'Some people believe that the term anti-vaxxer is a pejorative,' the physician Robert Malone wrote on June 9. 'I do not — I view it as high praise.' Early in the pandemic, Malone campaigned for treatment with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and against mRNA vaccines, which he described as 'causing a form of' AIDS, though he later admitted he received the Moderna vaccine to treat his own long Covid. In 2021, Malone circulated a 2013 video of a high school athlete collapsing on the football field, blaming coronavirus vaccination for the death before he was served with a cease-and-desist letter from the family. More recently, he dismissed as 'misinformation' news reports attributing the deaths of two girls in Texas to measles, blaming not vaccine refusal but 'medical errors,' and last fall published a book, 'PsyWar,' claiming that between the C.I.A. and Department of Defense, the United States maintains 'reality-bending information control capabilities' and that much of federal government's business is conducted via sexual favor. 'The term 'anti-vaxxer,'' he repeated June 9, 'it is not a slur, but a compliment.' Two days later, he was appointed to the advisory board that steers America's vaccine policy. Richard Nixon conducted his 'Saturday night massacre,' back in 1973, when one after another federal prosecutor refused to withdraw a subpoena of the White House tapes. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, staged his night of the long knives a week ago Monday, firing all 17 members of the vaccine advisory board, called the A.C.I.P., in one fell swoop — a historically unprecedented action and one that broke an explicit promise he made to Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and a physician, as a condition of his confirmation as secretary. The epidemiologist and immunologist Michael Mina called Kennedy's move a 'code red' for vaccines in America. None of the A.C.I.P. advisers were warned or had their firings explained; they had to read the news in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that accused them of 'malevolent malpractice.' Cassidy, who dodged questions from reporters on the subject, was left sputtering on X: 'Of course, now the fear is that the A.C.I.P. will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion.' Malone, whose appointment to the board hadn't yet been announced, posted proudly, 'Promises made, promises kept.' The new appointees are not all fully committed skeptics — though, beyond Malone, they include several people who have testified in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, as well as a longstanding board member for an anti-vaccine nonprofit and an M.I.T. business-school professor who has been publicly describing mRNA vaccines as mass killers since 2023. (The choices also include a nutritional scientist focused on fatty acids in the brain and a founder of a biotech company without a single piece of published research to his name.) The new group fails to include experts on any diseases that vaccines prevent. Or experts on vaccines themselves. Or experts on infectious-disease epidemiology. Or experts on clinical trials. 'We've taken people who had expertise and fired them for a bogus reason,' says the University of Pennsylvania vaccinologist Paul Offit, a former member of the A.C.I.P. and the creator of the rotavirus vaccine. In their place have been installed what the bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, also of the University of Pennsylvania, described to me as 'vaccine skeptics.' Offit calls them, more pointedly, 'purveyors of disinformation.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Intercept
28-05-2025
- Politics
- The Intercept
The Rising Death Toll of the U.S.-Israel Aid Distribution Plan in Gaza
When the Trump administration unveiled its plan to put a fledgling nonprofit with no humanitarian track record in charge of distributing aid to Palestinians in Gaza earlier this month, the outcry among aid groups was widespread. Under the plan, which has the backing of the U.S. and Israeli governments, civilians would be concentrated into southern Gaza in so-called 'sterile zones' controlled by the Israeli military. The new nonprofit, led by a former U.S. Marine, would be the sole distributor of aid from a handful of locations. American contractors would provide security, including one group run by a former senior C.I.A. officer. The humanitarian community worried the Israeli government would use the new aid plan as a weapon against Palestinians, who are currently facing mass starvation under Israel's 11-week blockade. Some aid experts likened the zones to a 'concentration camp' or an 'internment camp,' saying the plan would further displace Palestinians. Some Israeli officials said they hoped the plan would permanently expel Palestinians from Gaza. Such fears proved prescient Tuesday, when the aid plan, led by the Gaza Humanitarian Aid Foundation, went forward in the Tel Al-Sultan neighborhood of Al-Mawasi, Rafah. Thousands of Palestinians were forced to walk miles to the site, where the large crowds packed into fenced-off corridors as private American security contractors, armed with assault rifles, guarded boxes of aid. During the distribution, guards initially subjected recipients to intense searches, but later loosened security, two sources monitoring the distribution told The Intercept. At that point, the crowd began to storm the distribution site, attempting to receive the aid. Gunfire rang out at the site, prompting crowds to flee. At least three people were killed and 47 others were injured amid the gunfire and overcrowding conditions, according to reports citing Gaza officials. An additional six people were killed and 15 others were wounded by gunfire on Wednesday while attempting to receive aid at a site north of Rafah, according to officials. Elsewhere in the strip, in the Qizan Rashwan area, airstrikes killed six who were headed further south to receive aid, officials also said on Wednesday. 'Aid in Gaza should not be political, it should not be conditional.' Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor confirmed on Tuesday the death of one individual and said the 47 injured were wounded by bullets fired by both Israeli military and the U.S.-based private security firms. The group said Israeli military soldiers had entered the site to fire on the crowd. The monitor relied on its field researchers who confirmed the wounded had been seen at Al-Najjar Hospital and a Red Cross hospital. The group also received reports from three families who said their loved ones had left to get aid at the distribution hub but never returned. Videos posted to social media showed thousands of people rushing toward the distribution site. The crowds scrambled away for safety along dirt trenches and downed fences as gunfire rang out, footage shows. In one video, a man dragging a box of aid behind him said he had walked more than six miles to the distribution site, where he watched a young man killed in front of him. 'This is what happens when you try to replace the humanitarian system with a political agenda,' said Abdalwahab Hamad, Gaza office manager for the Palestinian humanitarian group Juhoud. 'Those thousands of Palestinians, starving and desperate, stormed the distribution center, not because they're violent, not because that people are hungry, but because aid is being used as a weapon, not a lifeline.' In a statement to The Intercept the Israeli military disputed field reports and downplayed any mention of violence, saying its soldiers had 'fired warning shots in the area outside the compound' before gaining control of the site. The Gaza Humanitarian Aid Foundation did not immediately respond to The Intercept's requests for comment. The foundation told other outlets its armed security did not fire on the crowd but 'fell back' when the crowd ran toward the aid before returning to the site. Oren Marmorstein, spokesperson for Israel's foreign ministry, minimized Tuesday's chaos, claiming the foundation had delivered 8,000 packages of aid to Palestinians, posting images of cardboard boxes filled with flour, pasta grain and oil. 'Humanitarian aid to people in Gaza, not to Hamas,' he captioned the photo posted on social media. The pretext for this new aid distribution regime is the theory, espoused by Israel and the American government, that Hamas has been stealing aid to enrich itself and control the people of Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated the unsubstantiated claim on Tuesday during the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Conference, saying that he needed to move Gaza's population to the south 'for its own protection' from Hamas. Neither Israel or the U.S. has provided evidence to support such claims. Israel, however, has weaponized access to aid throughout the current war on Gaza, and the practice stretches back to at least the 1990s, but intensified in 2007 once Hamas was elected to control the strip. The practice continued throughout Israel's latest invasion into the strip after Hamas' October 7 attacks. Since Israel imposed its latest total blockade on Gaza on March 2, famine risk has spread across the region, with one in five Palestinians in Gaza facing starvation. More than 9,000 children have already been treated for acute malnutrition this year. Over the past week, 29 children and elderly people have suffered starvation-related deaths, Gaza health officials said. During the first week of Israel's latest offensive, Operation Gideon's Chariots, more than 180,000 Palestinians have been displaced, the United Nations said. More than 600 Palestinians have also been killed in ongoing Israeli airstrikes. Just as the new assault launched, Netanyahu announced the government would allow 'minimal' or a 'basic amount' of aid into Gaza to avoid further international backlash. After UN-led groups were able to deliver small amounts of aid to Palestinians, some World Food Program bakeries in southern Gaza reopened last week, only to close again after three days due to a shortage of flour. Ramy Abdu, chairman of Euro-Med, a human rights watchdog that has tracked and opposed Israel's targeting of civilians in Gaza, said the recent restrictions on aid evoked a 2008 Israeli military study which calculated the precise minimum number of calories a Palestinian needed to avoid malnutrition, which critics said was proof the government had been illegally limiting aid into the territory. 'We are talking about starvation or hunger management and or hunger engineering,' Abdu said, 'which in the end serves the Israeli agenda and purposes.' The aid plan sidesteps the United Nations, which has a staff of more than 13,000 workers in Gaza and has been largely responsible for delivering supplies to Palestinians throughout Israel's war in Gaza. Aid groups criticized the plan, saying they did not want to be complicit in the displacement of thousands of Palestinians. The Gaza Humanitarian Aid Foundation, or GHF, had been headed by a former U.S. Marine sniper Jake Wood, who led aid missions to Haiti and other disaster sites around the world with his other organization, Team Rubicon. Wood resigned earlier this week before the new plan went into effect, saying the foundation would not be able to adhere 'to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.' GHF, which is operating on $100 million in funding, pressed forward on Monday without Wood, loading up its aid hubs for distribution on Tuesday. Armed contractors with private security firms, Safe Reach Solutions, based in Wyoming, and UG Solutions, based in North Carolina, manned the aid sites. Safe Reach Solutions is led by Philip F. Reilly, a former C.I.A. officer who trained right-wing Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s and deployed early to Afghanistan in 2001, eventually becoming station chief in Kabul before moving to the private sector, according to a New York Times investigation. Hamad called Tuesday's incident 'a punishment dressed as a charity' and called on the Israeli government to allow the UN re-take control of the aid distribution process. 'Aid in Gaza should not be political, it should not be conditional, it only works when it is protected, when it is neutral, and is being led by organizations such as the United Nations,' Hamad said, adding that Palestinians in Gaza have built trust with UN-backed groups and that the UN already has the infrastructure to clearly identify and address needs. 'You cannot replace a humanitarian system with a checkpoint and expect peace,' he said, 'because this is a military controlled charity and people have been there just out of desperation.'
