LONDON, May 20 (Reuters) - Tesla is working to appease some European leasing companies after the automaker’s repeated retail price cuts tanked their fleets’ value and its slow service and expensive repairs alienated their corporate customers.

The efforts include unofficial discounts on purchases of new cars if they are in stock and efforts to address widespread service, repair and ordering complaints after years in which fleet managers and leasing firms say Tesla has ignored those problems, according to Reuters interviews with nine executives from major leasing and rental-car firms, along with about a dozen corporate fleet managers.

WASHINGTON, May 18 (Reuters) - Several top White House aides say they are confident protests across U.S. college campuses against Israel's offensive in Gaza will not translate into significantly fewer votes for Joe Biden in November's election, despite polls showing many Democrats are deeply unhappy about the president's policy on the war.

The White House optimism on the issue, which is shared by many in the Biden campaign, runs contrary to dire warnings from some Democratic strategists and youth organizers who warn misjudging the situation could cost Biden votes in a tight race with Republican rival Donald Trump.

Between April 25 and May 2, UCLA experienced the worst episode of both anti-Semitic and anti-Palestinian/Islamophobic/racist violence in the university’s century-long history. White nationalists and neo-Nazis joined forces with Zionists (including some saying they were Israelis) to attack UCLA’s Palestine Solidarity Encampment, whose residents included a large number of Jewish students. The assailants were not affiliated with the university. One neo-Nazi was heard shouting, “we’re here to finish what Hitler started,” without any apparent protest from the self-identified Zionists. At least one person present has been identified as an associate of the Proud Boys. Using metal pipes, wooden planks, fists, knives, bricks, noise, chemical weapons, and incendiary fireworks, the mob sent at least twenty-five students to the hospital for broken bones, head trauma, and severe lacerations, while police stood by and watched for hours, electing to neither detain nor interrogate the perpetrators. No arrests took place that night. The following day, only students and faculty defending the encampment were arrested.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s super PAC has launched its first ads attacking Rep. Jamaal Bowman in the Democratic primary in New York’s 16th Congressional District. The ads claim that Bowman “has his own agenda” and refuses to work with President Joe Biden.

United Democracy Project, the AIPAC super PAC, bought its first set of ads this week for $1.9 million, disclosing that it planned to spend the money in a week, to oppose Bowman in the race against Westchester County executive George Latimer. The primary election takes place June 25.

Latimer, who was recruited to run by AIPAC and has received huge contributions directly from the group, has had nearly a million dollars of support from outside groups before AIPAC weighed in. Bowman also has outside support, but it’s a fraction of AIPAC’s spending so far for Latimer. Known as “independent expenditures,” outside groups can weigh in on elections but not in coordination with campaigns.

With the new AIPAC money to attack Bowman, outside groups in the race are spending nearly 10 times more in Latimer’s favor — with roughly $3 million total for Latimer and against Bowman, and Bowman supporters spending only about $285,000.

Created by the Israeli company High Lander, Orion allows users to direct hundreds of drones at once by automating them to navigate and perform actions without user input. The software system turns drones into “next-generation security guards,” according to an Orion brochure.

The East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office has long been accused of mistreating and harassing people of color — including using acoustic weapons on protesters without proper training — raising concerns among local advocates about its use of Orion.

When Israeli security tech is exported to the United States, it is “used to surveil and criminalize, mostly, young Black boys,” said Blumberg. Pointing to other types of surveillance technology, including facial recognition, Blumberg added, “There’s actually no statistical evidence that it helps prevent crimes” or “that it helps make people safer.”

In a blow to the conservative legal movement, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is not, in fact, an unconstitutional abomination.

The independent agency — which oversees payday lenders, credit card companies, and student loans — has long been a partisan target. And as it turns out, its funding mechanism is perfectly constitutional, the court ruled Thursday in a 7-2 decision.

Its conclusion was straightforward: When it created the CFPB, Congress passed a law that authorized expenditures from specific sources to fund the agency. This satisfies the Appropriations Clause of the Constitution, the court ruled.

The attack on the CFPB is not the only challenge brought this term by conservative opponents of modern regulatory agencies. In as-yet-undecided cases, the Supreme Court will consider whether to curtail the powers of the Securities Exchange Commission and whether to gut a landmark standard for all regulatory oversight. Challenges to the National Labor Relations Board are working their way through lower courts.

Governor Greg Abbott of Texas issued a full pardon on Thursday to a former US army sergeant convicted of murder for fatally shooting an armed demonstrator in 2020 during nationwide protests against police violence and racial injustice.

Abbott announced the pardon just minutes after the Texas board of pardons and paroles disclosed it had made a unanimous recommendation that Daniel Perry be pardoned and have his firearms rights restored. Perry has been held in state prison on a 25-year sentence since his conviction in 2023.

‘Magic David called’: David Copperfield repeatedly contacted Jeffrey Epstein

Phone messages and meetings suggest a friendship between Copperfield and the disgraced financier. His lawyers deny it

The message pads appear a little faded, but the handwriting on the spiral-bound notebooks is clear enough.

Staff at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion in Florida’s Palm Beach used the pads to jot down the names of the people who had called the financier, and between 2004 and 2005, one well-known person appeared to be calling persistently.

Not Prince Andrew or Bill Gates, or even Bill Clinton, the former US president, though all of them have come under a spotlight over their relationships with the disgraced billionaire.

BEIRUT (AP) — The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah this week struck a military post in northern Israel using a drone that fired two missiles. The attack wounded three soldiers, one of them seriously, according to the Israeli military.

Hezbollah has regularly fired missiles across the border with Israel over the past seven months, but the one on Thursday appears to have been the first successful missile airstrike it has launched from within Israeli airspace.

The group has stepped up its attacks on Israel in recent weeks, particularly since the Israeli incursion into the southern city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. It has struck deeper inside Israel and introduced new and more advanced weaponry.

Many scholars committed to Palestinian liberation can no longer do their jobs. That’s because many of the professors most supportive of Palestine don’t have jobs anymore.

Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, academics in fields including politics, sociology, Japanese literature, public health, Latin American and Caribbean studies, Middle East and African studies, mathematics, education, and more have been fired, suspended, or removed from the classroom for pro-Palestine, anti-Israel speech.

The Intercept spoke with more than a dozen professors, both adjuncts and those with tenure, whose employment has been imperiled by their pro-Palestine speech. Of the professors I talked to, all were at one point under investigation since October 7; some of the probes closed without findings of wrongdoing. Several faced varying degrees of suspensions, and four of the professors lost their jobs or expect to lose them next week when the semester ends without the renewal of their contracts.

The interviews, including those with campus labor activists and academic associations, revealed a pattern of politically motivated repression where campaigns by pro-Israel advocates can mar the careers of academics because of comments that express outrage at Israel’s ongoing occupation and its war in Gaza.

Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh was the head of the orthopedic wing at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. During the war, he had to wander from one hospital to the next, as they were all destroyed by the IDF. He has not been back to his home in Jabalya since the start of the war, and last December all trace of him disappeared. Recently, it transpired that he had died in an Israeli jail, apparently due to the torture of beatings during interrogation.

The last people to see him were other doctors and detainees who have been released. They told Haaretz correspondents Jack Khoury and Bar Peleg that they had barely recognized him. "It was clear he had been through hell, torture, humiliation, and sleep deprivation. He wasn't the person we knew; he was a shadow of himself."

On top of the doctor's death came another heinous act: the response of the authorities. The Shin Bet was silent as usual. Ex-Shin Bet officers are now star commentators on television, asked to show us the way, to give us their opinion, but the Shin Bet never talks about those it has interrogated and tortured.

The IDF shirked responsibility; the doctor was only "processed" at an army detention facility, and was immediately transferred to the Shin Bet interrogation facility in Kishon, and from there to Ofer Prison, which is under the charge of the Israel Prison Service. The IPS response was pure audacity: "The service does not address the circumstances of the deaths of detainees who are not Israeli citizens."

President Joe Biden and his administration have been accused of being complicit in enabling a famine in Gaza by failing to sufficiently act on repeated warnings from their own experts and aid agencies.

The former officials say the US also provided diplomatic cover for Israel to create the conditions for famine by blocking international efforts to bring about a ceasefire or alleviate the crisis, making the delivery of aid almost impossible.

“This is not just turning a blind eye to the man-made starvation of an entire population, it is direct complicity,” former State Department official Josh Paul, who resigned over US support for the war, told The Independent.

Lily Greenberg Call, a special assistant to the chief of staff in the Interior Department, accused President Joe Biden of using Jews to justify U.S. policy in the conflict.

Her resignation letter described her excitement at joining an administration that she believed shared much of her vision for the country. “However, I can no longer in good conscience continue to represent this administration,” she wrote

“He is making Jews the face of the American war machine. And that is so deeply wrong,” she said, noting that ancestors of hers were killed by “state-sponsored violence.” .

The intensification of the onslaught by Israeli forces on Rafah, in Gaza, Palestine, has forced MSF to stop providing lifesaving care at Rafah Indonesian Field hospital as of 12 May. The 22 patients who remained in the hospital have been referred to other facilities, as we can no longer guarantee their safety.

“We have had to leave 12 different health structures and have endured 26 violent incidents, which include airstrikes damaging hospitals, tanks being fired at agreed deconflicted shelters, ground offensives into medical centres, and convoys fired upon,” says Michel-Olivier Lacharité, MSF head of emergency operations.

The United States did not offer compensation to the family of a woman and her 4-year-old daughter who were killed in a 2018 drone strike in Somalia, according to a new Pentagon report on civilian casualties resulting from U.S. military operations.

The analysis, issued almost a year after its congressionally mandated deadline, shows that the Pentagon made no ex gratia payments during 2022, despite setting aside millions in funds for making amends.

The April 1, 2018 attack in Somalia killed at least three — and possibly five — civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. A U.S. military investigation acknowledged the deaths of a woman and child but concluded their identities might never be known.

For more than five years, the family has tried to contact the U.S. government, including through U.S. Africa Command’s online civilian casualty reporting portal, but never received a response. Last year, I traveled to Somalia and spoke with seven of their relatives.

“They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized,” Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers, told me last year. “No one has been held accountable.”

Among world’s top 60 banks those in US are biggest fossil fuel financiers, while Barclays leads way in Europe

The world’s big banks have handed nearly $7tn (£5.6tn) in funding to the fossil fuel industry since the Paris agreement to limit carbon emissions, according to research.

In 2016, after talks in Paris, 196 countries signed an agreement to limit global heating as a result of carbon emissions to at most 2C above preindustrial levels, with an ideal limit of 1.5C to prevent the worst impacts of a drastically changed climate.

Hundreds of protesters opposed to the expansion of a Tesla plant in Grünheide, near Berlin, clashed with police on Friday as some of them attempted to storm the electric vehicle manufacturing facility.

About 800 people took part in the protest, according to the organizing group Disrupt Tesla, which claims the expansion would damage the environment. Tesla has attracted intense backlash since the company opened the factory in March 2022, and later announced plans to expand into a nearby forest to increase its production capability.

In February, the town where the factory is located voted against the plans in a referendum that was not legally binding. Since then, protesters have been stationed in an encampment nearby in protest. The same facility was shut down for a week in March after suspected arson disabled its power. A separate protest collective called Volcano Group claimed responsibility for the fire, calling for the “complete destruction of the gigafactory”.

In a long-awaited report, the State Department lays out numerous suspected international humanitarian violations by Israel in its war on Gaza, yet suggests no changes in policy or consequences.

The Biden administration concludes it is likely that Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons in “incidents that raise concerns” about the country’s legal compliance, while crediting Israel for investigating them.

The report also concludes Israel is not currently blocking humanitarian aid, despite “deep concerns” about “action and inaction” by the government resulting in aid delivery to Gaza that “remains insufficient.”

It doesn’t take much to be accused of supporting terrorism these days. And that doesn’t just go for student activists. In recent months, dozens of lawmakers and public officials have, without evidence, insinuated that U.S. news outlets provide material support for Hamas. Some even issued thinly veiled threats to prosecute news organizations over those bogus allegations.

Their letters were political stunts. Prosecutors would never have been able to carry their burden of proof under anti-terrorism laws, and all the pandering politicians who signed the letters knew that. But next time might be different, especially if nonprofit news outlets, such as The Intercept, manage to offend the government.

There’s no reason to believe the press is exempt from overreach. In their recent letters, elected officials called for terrorism investigations of the New York Times, Reuters, CNN, and the Associated Press, relying on allegations that those outlets bought photographs from Palestinian freelancers who covered Hamas’s October 7 attacks.