Congress at the urging of the Biden administration agreed in 2021 to spend $7.5 billion to build tens of thousands of electric vehicle chargers across the country, aiming to appease anxious drivers while tackling climate change.

Two years later, the program has yet to install a single charger.

States and the charger industry blame the delays mostly on the labyrinth of new contracting and performance requirements they have to navigate to receive federal funds. While federal officials have authorized more than $2 billion of the funds to be sent to states, fewer than half of states have even started to take bids from contractors to build the chargers — let alone begin construction.

Sir, you have been convicted of a crime and are sentenced to 75 years is jail.

What was my crime?

We don’t need to tell you that.

Credit card spending has taken a nosedive, officially entering contraction territory, despite a reported 35% surge in retail sales above pre-pandemic levels. The discrepancy between retail sales growth and the significant decline in credit card transactions reveals a stark contrast in consumer behavior.

 A House Democrat running to become the next mayor of Houston, Texas, appeared in a campaign advertisement showing the wrong date.

 Hundreds of bodega workers in New York City are applying for concealed-carry gun permits as the city struggles with ongoing violent theft.

Former Central Kentucky FBI agent, Michael Van Aelstyn, pleaded guilty on Monday to federal charges related to illegally taking guns from an FBI storage office, according to court records.

Van Aelstyn, 45, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and possessing an unregistered firearm. He was initially charged with possession of a firearm made in violation of the National Firearms Act, possession of an unregistered firearm, and unlawful transfer of a firearm to an out-of-state resident.

The charges stem from an incident where Van Aelstyn allegedly removed two illegal firearms from a suspect's home, transported them to an FBI office for storage, and later took them to his residence.

Terrified civilians are trapped inside the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza as Israeli forces have encircled the medical facility, a senior official at the Ministry of Health tells Al Jazeera.

More than 100 people have been killed in strikes close to the facility, the ministry said on Tuesday.

“The Israeli occupation forces have laid siege to the hospital from all sides … We are targeted by gunfire and artillery shells,” said Munir al-Bursh, director-general of the Health Ministry in Gaza, speaking from inside Kamal Adwan.

“Patients, injured and those who took shelter in the hospital are gripped with fear; overwhelmed by horror,” he said.

One of the most deeply disturbing aspects of Israel’s war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip which haunts me and gives ammunition to the right-wing media is the proliferation of rape stories emerging from the 7 October attacks. As a feminist, it has always been my initial instinct to believe every single woman who’s ever said she’s been raped or abused by a man. I suppose it was inevitable that friends in the media berated me for not condemning Hamas after the militarily-spectacular attacks launched on the occupation state of Israel from Gaza.

When news began to emerge a week later that Israeli women at the music festival and nearby kibbutzim had been raped, I admit I hunkered down and tried to write this article. I hated myself for even questioning the harrowing narratives that emerged and cussed the Zionist spin doctors and odious mouthpieces of the Israeli military who blatantly lied about various aspects of the Hamas operation.

Israel has a very long history of deceit

However, in my defence, Israel has a very long history of deceit and, in a rare moment of clarity, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke the truth when he admitted lying without a hint of irony at such honesty. Justifying his blatant lies to the world, he quoted the Bible: “As has been said, ‘by way of deception, thou shalt do war”, and that’s how we operate.”

Can you see my dilemma? It’s rather difficult not to question anything and everything that the Israeli prime minister says, especially because he is responsible for many atrocities and war crimes committed against the Palestinians which provide some context to what Hamas did. Netanyahu was quoting a verse from Proverbs, which is also said to be the motto of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad; he makes America’s own serial liar, the late Colin Powell, look positively angelic.

The Biden administration has tried hard to conceal the nature and quantity of the weapons it’s provided Israel for its war on Hamas, as I’ve reported for The Intercept. So it’s with a heavy heart that I must now report that an internal Defense Department list of the weapons has leaked (reproduced below).

The West has pledged to do whatever it takes to support Ukraine while also returning militaries to a war-ready status, but it is defense contractors in South Korea, Turkey and Israel which are reaping many of the early deals.

Arms makers in those countries, where governments sustain military investment and production pipelines to maintain their own security, made early gains in the months following the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, according to the latest analysis of weapon sales and military services revenue from the world’s top 100 contractors carried out by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

 Former President Donald Trump claimed on Monday that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was to blame for Florida State being left out of the College Football Playoff.

 At least four gold bars that federal investigators recovered during their search of Sen. Bob Menendez’s (D-NJ) home are directly linked to one of the men accused of bribing Menendez.

 A house in Arlington, Virginia, blew up on Monday night just minutes after police posted on social media that they were investigating the home over reports of someone shooting off a flare gun.

 Federal agents interviewed a priest and a choir director as part of an investigation into so-called Radical-Traditional Catholics as potential domestic terrorists, according to a new report from the House Weaponization Committee.

 A man was arrested late last week for planning a “mass casualty event” at Tesla’s headquarters in Texas during an event to celebrate the much anticipated release of the electric car company’s new Cybertruck, according to law enforcement officials.

 A federal court on Monday halted the prison sentence for Douglas Mackey, who was convicted earlier this year of election interference for posting memes that mocked Hillary Clinton voters to cast their ballot via text during the 2016 presidential election.

Israel is literally doing Battleship against Palestinian kids.

They created a grid, and they have an app telling people where to go on the grid.

Then when the people go there, they bomb them.

The post Covid boom is over for discretionary items.

When people were locked at home, and flush with stimulus cash, they all bought new furniture and redid their homes.

Furniture has insane markup. A table that costs $20 to make sells for $200 retail.

Different outlets have different definitions of Mass Shooting. For example, Gun Violence Archive and the New York Times study of every mass shooting in 2015 use four or more killed or wounded, not including the shooter. These fill up with a lot of “One Dead, Four Wounded in Shooting Outside Hip-Hop Concert.” The NYT found for 2015 that almost 3 out of 4 mass shooters and victims of mass shooters were black.

Over the weekend Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin explained to the American people what’s really wrong with US foreign policy. Some might find his conclusions surprising.

The US standing in the world is damaged not because we spent 20 years fighting an Afghan government that had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11. The problem has nothing to do with neocon lies about Iraq’s WMDs that led untold civilian deaths in another failed “democratization” mission. It’s not because over the past nearly two years Washington has taken more than $150 billion from the American people to fight a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine.

It’s not the military-industrial complex or its massive lobbying power that extends throughout Congress, the think tanks, and the media.

Speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California’s Simi Valley, Austin finally explained the real danger to the US global military empire.

It’s us.

According to Secretary Austin, non-interventionists who advocate “an American retreat from responsibility” are the ones destabilizing the world, not endless neocon wars.

The owners of Cup Foods and several other businesses near George Floyd Square are suing the city of Minneapolis, saying that concrete barricades and the lawlessness that flourished within those barriers cut their income and crushed their property values.

The lawsuit accuses Mayor Jacob Frey and other city officials of essentially abandoning the businesses and offering little more than lip service and weak financial help following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in front of Cup Foods, now known as Unity Foods.

The lawsuit underscores lingering acrimony over the city’s response to the unrest that followed Floyd’s murder; more than three years later, proposed changes to the area around 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, from infrastructure to some form of permanent memorial, are still years off.