NightOwl

"For years, former war and crisis regions have been a source of firearms and the illegal trade in them," the BKA report said.

"The countries of the Western Balkans in particular are still in the spotlight due to the high availability of firearms there, even more than 30 years after the end of the wars," it noted.

Most of these weapons are smuggled via land routes. Organized, illegal smuggling of firearms from Ukraine into Germany has not yet been detected, according to the BKA.

Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, said it was ironic the new prime minister was suggesting a greater use of facial matching on the same day that an EU-wide law largely banning real-time surveillance technology came into force.

“Expanding live facial recognition means millions of innocent Britons being subjected to automated ID checks,” said Carlo. “These are the surveillance tactics of China and Russia and Starmer seems ignorant of the civil liberties implications.”

Lawyers for relatives of 9/11 victims say that a group of extremist religious leaders in Saudi Arabia gained influence in the Saudi government and aided the 9/11 hijackers who flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Fifteen of the 19 Sept. 11 attackers were Saudis.

In lawsuits, hundreds of victims’ relatives and injured survivors, along with insurance companies and businesses, claim that employees of the Saudi government directly and knowingly assisted the attack’s airplane hijackers and plotters and fueled al-Qaida’s development into a terrorist organization by funding charities that supported them.

Archive: [ https://archive.is/1FpoD ]

The very public spat between the province and West Vancouver is over an extremely small number of properties, almost all of them in the parts of the Ambleside and Dundarave neighbourhoods close to Marine Drive and the city’s major bus route. Most of West Vancouver, which extends out to Horseshoe Bay in the west and up Cypress Mountain in the north, is unaffected by the ministry’s requirements.

West Vancouver, with a population of about 45,000, is routinely listed in real-estate profiles and media reports as one of the wealthiest communities in Canada, with high household net worth and high employment income overall. It has also been identified as one of the slowest-growing areas of Metro Vancouver of the past quarter century. About 80 per cent of West Vancouver employees commute from outside the city.

Councillor Christine Cassidy and other councillors said West Vancouver has been working hard to add housing, rezoning the city several years ago to allow the basement suites and coach houses on most lots as well as approving big new projects and areas for development.

“I’m not somebody who likes to be dictated to,” said Ms. Cassidy, calling the current government “now quite frankly bordering on communism.”

On 22 July, Iraqi Defense Minister Thabet Muhammad al-Abbasi led a delegation to Washington for meetings at the Pentagon to resume talks on the withdrawal of about 2,500 US combat troops that remain in Iraq.

US officials claim a US troop presence is still necessary to counter a threat from ISIS. But Sudani has stated that Iraqi forces no longer require US help to contain the terror group, which was largely defeated in Iraq and Syria in 2019.

“The justifications for the existence of the international coalition were to confront ISIS, and today, the organization does not represent a threat to the Iraqi state,” Sudani said in January.

EDF said that result was an emissions-rate about four times what the Environmental Protection Agency estimates. EPA derives its estimates mainly from industry reports to a database.

MethaneAIR also showed that the observed emissions rate was eight times higher the target adopted by 50 companies at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai to limit their methane emissions intensity to no more than 0.2% by 2030.