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The champions league of continental basketball comes to SA next weekend, with Casper Nyovest as the leading half-time show. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/g8icItr via sinceretalk

Many fashion critics suggest that men and women aligned with President Donald Trump's ideology tend to embrace a distinct style. In a report published Friday , the New York Times noted that Trump along with his close advisers and family members, plunged into the traditionally subdued world of government attire with a bold and unwavering aesthetic. The fashion choices of key Make America Great Again (MAGA) figures: makeup, and even physical appearances have followed a clearly defined and attention-grabbing theme, the report notes. READ MORE: 'Are you afraid of Trump?' Red state residents confront GOP senator at fiery town hall If fashion serves as a form of expression, and politics is deeply rooted in messaging, then the emergence of a distinct "MAGA look" during Trump’s second term is a cultural shift worth paying attention to, the piece argues. Vanessa Friedman, The Times’s fashion critic, weighed in on the MAGA world's style and fashion. When asked...

This week, President Donald Trump granted several notable pardons to former elected officials, wealthy supporters and celebrities. But one former federal prosecutor is zeroing in on one pardon in particular that he argues exposes Trump's populist brand as hollow. During a recent interview with journalist Jim Acosta (formerly of CNN), former assistant U.S. Attorney Glenn Kirschner — who prosecuted cases in the prestigious District of Columbia office during both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations — argued that the near-constant drumbeat of news from Trump's second term has had a discouraging effect on Americans. However, he said that telling Americans one of Trump's recent pardons has the power to severely damage Trump's credibility with mainstream Americans. In the segment, Kirschner made the case that the pardon of former nursing home executive Paul Walczak stands out among Trump's other pardons as perhaps the most egregious. And he said Democ...

One Russian-born journalist is warning that President Donald Trump is consolidating power far quicker than even Russian President Vladimir Putin, but says Americans have one particular advantage that citizens of his home country didn't that can be used strategically. During a Friday interview with MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, New York Times columnist M. Gessen – who authored the book "Surviving Autocracy" — gave a frank assessment of the state of American opposition to the Trump administration. According to Gessen (who uses they/them pronouns) two bright spots in the current American political landscape are the multiple legal defeats Trump has suffered in the federal judiciary, and the prevalence of protests . But they observed that neither the courts nor protests alone can put a stop to the administration's actions, and that Americans can be misled into thinking things aren't as bad as they are amidst the busy nature of their day-to-day lives. "Life goe...

Democratic governors and attorneys general quickly embraced Thursday’s two court decisions against President Donald Trump's sweeping global tariffs as validation of their concerns over the economic impact of escalating prices on everyday goods, Politico reported Thursday. On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York invalidated Trump’s tariffs , ruling that he lacked the legal authority under the emergency economic powers he referenced when issuing four executive orders earlier this year. This decision dealt a significant setback to Trump’s broader strategy of using tariffs as a bargaining tool in international trade negotiations. The following morning, a second federal court — this time a D.C. District Court — delivered a similar verdict, ordering the suspension of tariff collections in a case brought by two toy companies. The tariffs are temporarily back in place after a Thursday ruling by the D.C. Court of Appeals, which issued a stay while litigation pla...

After Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk publicly spoke out against President Donald Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) rushed to defend the embattled legislation to the South African centibillionaire. Politico reported Thursday that Johnson engaged directly with Musk in response to the tech CEO's comments on CBS Sunday Morning. The show published a snippet of an upcoming interview between correspondent David Pogue and Musk set to air June 1, in which Musk said the multitrillion-dollar spending bill was "disappointing and "undermines the work" his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was doing to reduce federal spending. "I think a bill can be big, it can be beautiful, but I don't know if it could be both," Musk said, while laughing. READ MORE: 'Extremely challenging circumstances': Chief Justice Roberts faces a 'serious test' During an interview with Fox News, Johnson admitt...

Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong initially coined the acronym "TACO," which stands for "Trump Always Chickens Out," earlier this month. The acronym caught on and President Donald Trump snapped at a reporter who brought it up during a press conference this week. Now, Armstrong is worried of the implications. During a Thursday panel discussion on MSNBC's "Deadline: White House," conservative journalist Charlie Sykes opined that Trump may end up doubling down on his trade war as a means of proving the "TACO" nickname wrong, thus triggering a global recession in the process. Host Nicolle Wallace then pivoted from Sykes' point to ask Armstrong about whether there's truth to the theory that a "humiliated" Trump could end up permanently damaging the global economy out of spite. She also noted that Trump himself has given weight to the nickname by how frequently he changes his mind from one day to the next. "The...

Despite having majorities in both chambers of Congress and having more than three years left in his second term, President Donald Trump has never been more "politically vulnerable," according to one analyst. On Wednesday, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace interviewed New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof , who argued in his latest essay that Trump's policies are having a direct impact on his base, which is slowly growing more resentful. Kristof pointed out that he lives in a small Oregon town that voted for Trump by a two-to-one margin, and that he's hearing firsthand from Trump supporters that his pattern of corrupt behavior and recent actions have left a bad taste in the mouths of even his most loyal backers. "A lot of the issues the Democrats have talked about just seem kind of distant. But what does matter? Well, for example, one friend of mine, they're in a pro-Trump household, but the woman recently tried to sign up for Social Security, and she has had...

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President Donald Trump announced Tuesday his intention to pardon Todd and Julie Chrisley, the reality TV personalities convicted of bank fraud and tax evasion, which resulted in multi-year prison sentences. “It’s a terrible thing, but it’s a great thing because your parents are going to be free and clean,” Trump told their daughter, Savannah Chrisley, during a phone call. “I hope we can do it by tomorrow,” he added, in a video shared on the social platform X by Margo Martin, a communications advisor and special assistant to the president. READ MORE: 'Covering for him': MAGA ignites new 'scandal' as it ignores Trump’s 'bizarre' behavior The "Chrisley Knows Best" stars were convicted in 2022 of orchestrating a scheme to obtain over $36 million in fraudulent loans from banks around the Atlanta area, according to federal prosecutors in Georgia’s Northern District. During the Republican National Convention last summer, the couple's daughter mad...

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., nullified on Tuesday President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at the prominent law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP (WilmerHale), labeling it “unconstitutional." U.S. District Judge Richard Leon — who was appointed to the bench by former President George W. Bush — handed down his decision on Tuesday afternoon , effectively dismantling the administration’s attempt to sanction WilmerHale. The administration's move to go after the firm was widely seen as part of Trump's broader campaign against influential legal firms that have drawn criticism from him and his allies. READ MORE: 'Covering for him': MAGA ignites new 'scandal' as it ignores Trump’s 'bizarre' behavior “For the reasons set forth below, I have concluded that this order must be struck down in its entirety as unconstitutional,” Leon stated in his ruling. “Indeed, to rule otherwise would be unfaithful to the judgment and vision of...

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One Pentagon expert is arguing that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's focus on "warfighting" and a "lethal" U.S. military is actually making military service less safe for service members. In a Monday column for Politico , Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Thomas Ricks — who specializes in military and national security matters — broke down why he found Hegseth's promises to focus on combat so alarming. He opined that while the defense secretary's rhetoric "plays well on Fox News," it has a darker meaning to enlisted men and women. "he more you know about military operations, the more you understand that you don’t want to focus on fighting," Ricks wrote. "That gets people killed — like your kids or grandkids." READ MORE: (Opinion) Struggles to 'even finish a sentence': Behind the obvious signs of Trump's growing dementia "The worst way to go to war is by flinging your people into combat — ...

President Donald Trump granted a pardon to Scott Jenkins, a former sheriff from Culpeper County, Virginia, who had been convicted on federal bribery charges and sentenced to a decade in prison. Jenkins had been scheduled to begin serving his sentence on Tuesday. In a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday, announcing his decision, Trump wrote: "Sheriff Scott Jenkins, his wife Patricia, and their family have been dragged through HELL by a Corrupt and Weaponized Biden DOJ. READ MORE: ' Graceless soulless ghoul': JD Vance buried over comment about Biden’s cancer diagnosis "In fact, during his trial, when Sheriff Jenkins tried to offer exculpatory evidence to support himself, the Biden Judge, Robert Ballou, refused to allow it, shut him down, and then went on a tirade," the president added. Social media users reacted to the development, saying the decision does not bode well for the rule of law. A Richmond-based journalist posted on the social platform X...

US President Donald Trump called his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin “crazy” after Moscow launched a deadly barrage of drones against Ukraine, even as the warring countries completed a large-scale prisoner exchange. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/G05uzwE via sinceretalk

Palestinian rescuers said an Israeli strike at dawn on Monday killed 13 people at a Gaza City school, as Israel presses ahead with what it has described as a renewed push to destroy Hamas. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/q5SM6oI via sinceretalk

A “trawl of genealogy records” has called into question Vice President JD Vance’s self-declared status as a “Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart,” the Times reports. Vance, in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, declared, “To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish ­hillbilly at heart.” But, according to a report commissioned by a Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) minister, Vance lacks “‘a conclusive family link’ to Northern Ireland.” The research was detailed in a “24-page dossier titled ‘The Family Footsteps of JD Vance,’” The Times reports. READ MORE: GOP senator threatens House megabill: 'You don’t defeat the deep state by funding it' As the Times notes, “Gordon Lyons, the Northern Ireland minister for communities, had been ­hoping to present a copy of the report personally to Vance over the St Patrick’s Day period in Washington DC.” According to the Times, "as Scots-Irish, or Ulster-Scots, [Vance’s] ­family history would be tied directly to plantat...

As smartphones continue to evolve, AI features are becoming an integral part of the user experience. Brands are constantly striving to stand out by introducing new technology and meaningful upgrades. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/dzVyTpZ via sinceretalk

Witnesses say the child was driving too fast when the car crashed into a water canal. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/ly64bvx via sinceretalk

This week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) informed North Carolina Governor Josh Stein (D) that the federal government was rejecting his appeal of a prior rejection for federal disaster aid. Stein has used that rejection as a moment to educate local taxpayers about the financial implications of that rejection. In a video posted to his official X account , Stein — a Democrat who won election last year in a state that President Donald Trump also won — explained that because FEMA had rejected his appeal to continue covering 100% of debris removal costs from Hurricane Helene , that cost would now have to be shouldered by taxpayers. He observed that while there had already been 12 million cubic yards of debris removed, there was still a lot more debris to remove from the affected areas. "Helene created an amount of wreckage that is hard to wrap your head around. It is so immense," Stein said. "We have so much more work to do. And it's going to cost a l...

President Donald Trump has signed more than 150 executive orders , often with cameras rolling and staff looking on. The ritual rarely varies: seated at the desk in the Oval Office , the President listens as someone—typically the White House Staff Secretary—reads a brief summary of the order. On occasion, Trump interjects with a question, prompting speculation that he may not be fully familiar with the contents. He is seldom seen fully reading the orders themselves, which can span anywhere from a few pages to nearly 70 . On Friday, President Trump signed several executive orders, but according to The Daily Beast , one particularly revealing moment suggested he may not have known what he was signing—describing it as “a telling moment” that implied the president hadn’t read the order. “Are we doing something about the regulatory in here?” Trump asked a business person attending the event. READ MORE: ‘There Is No Tariff’: Trump Denies Policy Shift After Calling for 50% EU Tariff “Se...

CNN business journalist Allison Morrow said President Donald Trump's exclusive dinner for buyers of his meme coin , scheduled for Thursday night, is shrouded in mystery. "So there's just a lot of mystery about who it is and really what they want; who are these people and what do they hope to get out of the evening," Morrow said during an appearance on CNN Thursday. What is confirmed is that 200 or so crypto investors are slated to attend the dinner. "They all paid a lot of money to get there, and they paid a lot of money through a functionally worthless meme coin," Morrow said. READ MORE: 'Really irresponsible': Outrage as White House has disappeared almost every Trump transcript "Its only function is to make money for the Trump family crypto empire," she said of the meme coin. "We don't know their identities. And that's partly because crypto is anonymous by design. You can't quite track crypto wallets all the way b...

On Thursday, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace spoke to author and retired four-star Gen. Stanley McChrystal about his new bestselling book, "On Character." And she pointed out that politicians like President Donald Trump routinely take advantage of an electorate that currently doesn't value character in the same way it did in the recent past. Wallace began the conversation by playing a clip of McChrystal endorsing then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 in an interview, saying that he felt the issue of "character" was most paramount. He then told Wallace he hoped his book could help spark a "national conversation on character," arguing that it was too important of an issue for both voters and elected officials to cast aside. "A military leader learns early on that you get the performance out of your unit that you demand. O think we get the character out of ourselves and out of our nation that we demand of ourselves," he said. "If we los...

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division announced Wednesday it will close its investigation into the Memphis Police Department and retract a December 2024 report addressing constitutional violations by police. The DOJ found police in Memphis used excessive force, engaged in unlawful traffic stops and routinely discriminated against Black residents after a 2023 investigation spurred by the death of 23-year-old Tyre Nichols when he was beaten by police officers during a traffic stop. In addition to ending the Memphis case, the DOJ said in a press release it will close investigations into local law enforcement agencies in Phoenix; Oklahoma City; Trenton, New Jersey; Mt. Vernon, New York; and into the Louisiana State Police. The agency also will dismiss lawsuits against the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments, accusing the Biden administration — which filed the suits — of using flawed data to impose orders on the two departments to stop discrimination. Depar...

The state of the United States' economy is much shakier than previously thought under President Donald Trump's leadership, according to one major international bank. The New Republic reported Tuesday that Deutsche Bank managing director Jim Reid, who is the bank's global head of macro research and thematic strategy, is now expressing increasing worry that Trump's policies are gradually wrecking the economy. In a memo obtained by Fortune , Reid remarked that the recent decision by Moody's to downgrade the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA1 for the first time in history could be a harbinger of tougher economic times in the near future. “Yesterday felt like we were somewhere along the line of a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ with regards to the U.S. fiscal situation,” Reid wrote. “Hard to know where in that thousand we are but probably much nearer a thousand than at zero even as yesterday saw an initial sell-off reverse as the session went on." READ MORE: ...

After Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blamed a lone lawmaker for what he described as the nation’s public health crisis, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) struck back. “You’ve presided here, I think, for 32 years,” Secretary Kennedy told Senator Murray, the Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, on Tuesday. “You presided over the destruction of the health of the American people. Our people are now the sickest people in the world,” he alleged in his sweeping indictment. Senator Murray had asked Kennedy, “whose decision was it to withhold Child Care and Development Block Grant funding?” but he attacked the Washington Democrat in a heated back-and-forth. “You came here to argue with me,” Murray said at the end of the exchange. “I came here to ask you questions about your budget request. Your budget request is asking us to cut dramatically, but I am also making the point that Senator Baldwin made that what you are doing right now is enacting you...

Rolling Stone reports House Democrats can’t wait for U.S. voters to see Republican lawmakers’ “big, beautiful bill” slash[ing] taxes for the rich” and “gut[ting]” the nation’s safety net for the poor. “It’s pretty clear that the goal here is to make an ugly bill … even uglier, and to accelerate the rate at which this ugliness occurs,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) told Rolling Stone. He said Republicans’ new Medicaid work requirements, for example, will cause “more bureaucracy, more red tape, more excuses to deny people coverage.” Even one conservative advisor told Rolling Stone the bill will come back to smack Republicans whose constituents heavily rely on Medicaid. READ MORE: 'Not one peep from Trump': Tornado-ravaged city’s mayor pleads for federal assistance “Going after fraud in Medicaid is politically popular and worth doing, but going after benefits is an attack on our own voters,” said the anonymous source, who called the bill “the height of stupidity from a poli...

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is bragging that President Donald Trump has submitted the largest budget ever for the Pentagon: one trillion dollars , about $150 billion more than President Joe Biden’s final budget request. Critics are blasting the White House for insisting that the Republicans’ new budget—which guts Medicaid, reduces taxes ( primarily for the wealthy ), and eliminates the Department of Education, does not increase the deficit. “He’s gonna be the first president to introduce a trillion-dollar budget,” Secretary Hegseth told Fox News’ Will Cain on Monday (video below). “That’s not just spending more. It’s also being serious about an audit. It’s also finding cuts where we pull out the Biden garbage and put in President Trump’s priorities. So we’re going to invest a generational investment in those capabilities.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked on Monday if President Trump is “okay with this bill adding to the deficit?” READ MORE: No Trump, N...

The first week of testimony in the sex trafficking trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs included a witness core to the case: Casandra Ventura. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/8HcdtTF via sinceretalk

Nicole Johnson, the wife of alleged organised crime boss Ralph Stanfield, and herself accused of racketeering and helping run a violent criminal enterprise, bought an unbonded R5-million flat on the Atlantic Seaboard from a renowned Cape Town property developer. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/cZ27NAb via sinceretalk

Former US president Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an “aggressive” form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, and is reviewing treatment options, his office said from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/Iaw0yVf via sinceretalk

“The passion for football here is incredible,” Schweinsteiger said during an exclusive sit-down in Johannesburg. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/coGvLkn via sinceretalk

A Mexican Navy training ship slammed into the Brooklyn Bridge, snapping all three of its masts as it collided with the iconic New York City landmark, injuring at least 22 people. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/ib0EgqW via sinceretalk

Family and the sense of belonging are very important and much needed. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/vyF72Db via sinceretalk