Category: Uncategorized

GENEVA — The U.N. Human Rights Council voted on Monday to renew the mandate of an LGBTQ rights expert, a move welcomed by advocates amid the absence of the United States, a former key supporter that is now rolling back such protections.

Western diplomats had previously voiced concerns about the renewal of the mandate of South African scholar Graeme Reid who helps to boost protections by documenting abuses and through dialogue with countries.

The motion for a three-year renewal passed with 29 votes in favor, 15 against and three abstentions. Supporters included Chile, Germany, Kenya and South Africa while several African nations and Qatar opposed it.

“The renewal of this mandate is a spark of hope in a time when reactionary powers worldwide are trying to dismantle progress that our communities fought so hard to achieve,” said Julia Ehrt, executive director of campaign group ILGA World.

The United States, which has disengaged from the council under President Donald Trump, citing an alleged antisemitic bias, was previously a supporter of the mandate under the Biden administration.

Since taking office in January, Trump has signed executive orders to curb transgender rights and dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion practices in the government and private sector.

His administration says such steps restore fairness, but civil rights and LGBTQ advocates say they make marginalized groups more vulnerable.

In negotiations before the vote, Pakistan voiced opposition to the mandate on behalf of Muslim group OIC, calling it a tool to advocate “controversial views.”

On Friday, Hamas said it had responded to a U.S.-backed Gaza ceasefire proposal in a “positive spirit,” a few days after Trump said Israel had agreed “to the necessary conditions to finalize” a 60-day truce. It has also said it will free all the hostages in exchange for an end to the war and the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.

But Netanyahu has called for the full elimination of Hamas and asked the group to surrender, disarm, and go into exile — something it refuses to do.

While he travels to Washington, a separate Israeli negotiating team traveled to Qatar on Sunday for indirect talks with Hamas and Netanyahu said they had clear instructions to achieve a ceasefire agreement under conditions that Israel has accepted.

Inside Gaza, at least 80 were killed in Israeli strikes, Dr. Marwan Al-Hams, the Director of the enclave’s field hospitals, told NBC News on Sunday. He added that the number was likely to increase due to the ongoing shelling and airstrikes on the Gaza Strip.

More than 56,000 people have been killed and thousands more seriously injured since Israel launched its offensive in Gaza following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 terror attacks, according to health officials in the enclave. Some 1,200 people were killed and around 250 taken hostages that day.

Elsewhere, Israel on Sunday launched fresh strikes in areas of Yemen controlled by the Houthi militant group, targeting ports in Hodeida, Ras Isa, and Saif, along with the commercial ship Galaxy Leader that they hijacked in 2023.

“These ports are used by the Houthi terrorist regime to transfer weapons of the Iranian regime that are used to carry out terrorist plots against the State of Israel and its allies,” an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson said in a statement Sunday.

In a separate post on X, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said the strikes were part of “Operation Black Flag,” adding that the Iran-backed militant group would “continue to pay a heavy price for their actions.”

“The fate of Yemen is the same as the fate of Tehran,” Katz added, referring to the Iranian regime.

But a Houthi spokesperson downplayed the Israeli attack in a statement Monday, saying that the militant group’s air defenses had “successfully countered” it by “using locally manufactured surface-to-air missiles.”

The attacks on the Iran-backed Houthis came after Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made his first public appearance since the 12-day war with Israel. Iranian state television showed the Supreme Leader greeting worshippers at a mosque on Saturday.

LONDON — King Charles III led commemorations Monday on the 20th anniversary of the 2005 London transit bombings, the deadliest attack on the British capital since World War II.

Fifty-two people died and more than 700 were wounded when four British men inspired by al-Qaida blew themselves up on three subway trains and a bus during the morning rush hour on July 7, 2005. They were the first suicide bombings on European soil.

Two weeks later, four other bombers attempted a similar attack, but their devices failed to explode. No one was hurt.

The bombings remain seared into London’s collective memory, and the anniversary will be marked with a ceremony at the 7/7 memorial in Hyde Park and a service of commemoration at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

In a message, the king said his “heartfelt thoughts and special prayers remain with all those whose lives were forever changed on that terrible summer’s day.”

He said the country could take heart from the bravery of the emergency services and others who responded to the attack, and “the countless stories of extraordinary courage and compassion that emerged from the darkness of that day.”

Charles also hailed the “spirit of unity that has helped London, and our nation, to heal.”

“As we remember those we lost, let us, therefore, use this 20th anniversary to reaffirm our commitment to building a society where people of all faiths and backgrounds can live together with mutual respect and understanding, always standing firm against those who would seek to divide us,” he said.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said July 7, 2005 was one of Britain’s “darkest days.”

She said that 20 years on, “Islamist extremist terrorism remains the greatest threat” to national security “followed by extreme right-wing terrorism.”

“But we also face hybrid threats to our national security from hostile states, serious organized crime, cyber criminals, those threatening our border security and a troubling rise in violence-fixated individuals radicalized online,” she wrote in the Sunday Mirror newspaper, adding that the government would “relentlessly confront and counter threats to our national security.”

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesia’s rumbling Mount Lewotobi Laki Laki erupted Monday, sending a column of volcanic materials as high as 18 kilometers (11 miles) into the sky and depositing ash on villages.

The volcano has been at the highest alert level since last month and no casualties were immediately reported.

Indonesia’s Geology Agency recorded an avalanche of searing gas clouds mixed with rocks and lava traveling up to 5 kilometers (3 miles) down the volcano’s slopes during the eruption. Observations from drones showed lava filling the crater, indicating deep movement of magma that set off volcanic earthquakes.

The column of hot clouds that rose into the sky was the volcano’s highest since the major eruption in November 2024 that killed nine people and injured dozens, said Muhammad Wafid, the Geology Agency chief. It also erupted in March.

“An eruption of that size certainly carries a higher potential for danger, including its impact on aviation,” Wafid told The Associated Press from Switzerland where he was attending a seminar. “We shall reevaluate to enlarge its danger zone that must be cleared of villagers and tourist activities.”

The volcano monitoring agency had increased the alert status for Mount Lewotobi Laki Laki to the highest level after an eruption on June 18, and more than doubled an exclusion zone to a 7-kilometer (4.3-mile) radius since then as eruptions became more frequent.

After an eruption early last year, about 6,500 people evacuated and the island’s Frans Seda Airport was closed. The airport has remained closed since then due to the continuing seismic activity.

The 1,584-meter (5,197-foot) mountain is a twin volcano with Mount Lewotobi Perempuan in the district of Flores Timur.

Monday’s eruption was one of Indonesia’s largest volcano eruptions since 2010 when Mount Merapi, the country’s most volatile volcano erupted on the densely populated island of Java. That eruption killed 353 people and forced over 350,000 people to evacuate affected areas.

Indonesia is an archipelago of more than 280 million people with frequent seismic activity. It has 120 active volcanoes and sits along the “Ring of Fire,” a horseshoe-shaped series of seismic fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.

Mandy Funk, 37, remembers when her body began to betray her.

As a college junior, she began to have episodes in which her body would act as if it were aroused for no reason. Sometimes, she says, it felt like hot sauce had been slathered over her genital area. She had to give up tight-fitting clothes and horseback riding, her lifelong love. Often the pain was so intense that she couldn’t sit down.

Funk struggled for years to find a doctor who understood her symptoms.

She eventually learned she had developed a condition called persistent genital arousal disorder (PGAD), which led to treatment. Funk, who, with her husband, owns an electrical contracting company in Goessel, Kansas, did eventually get her life, at least partly, back on track. She’s especially happy she can ride horses again with her children, although she still sometimes experiences flare-ups.

Funk is fortunate to have gotten a diagnosis and help, experts say. Many doctors are unaware of the disorder, although there is some growing research.

The condition started to come to light only in 2001, when researchers at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, New Jersey, described the experiences of five women with bouts of arousal symptoms that seemed to arise out of nothing. In the report, published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, the authors, Sandra Leiblum and Sharon Nathan, identified the key feature of the disorder as “persistent physiological arousal in the absence of conscious feelings of sexual desire.”

The condition was initially called “persistent sexual arousal syndrome,” but then “sexual” was replaced with “genital” because it really had nothing to do with sex, said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, a urologist and director of San Diego Sexual Medicine.

Not long after the 2001 report, Leiblum, then a professor of psychiatry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, concluded that psychology alone wouldn’t explain all the symptoms the five women were experiencing. Leiblum began sending patients to Goldstein, who at the time was a specialist in sexual dysfunction at Boston University.

It’s estimated that 1% to 4% of women may have symptoms of the disorder, although incidence could be significantly higher, said Caroline Pukall, a professor of psychology at Queens University in Canada. Many women aren’t comfortable discussing a topic they see as private, even with their doctors, she said. Another issue could be people’s difficulty imagining arousal could be a bad thing.

“Maybe it’s all the assumptions about how arousal is supposed to feel,” Pukall said. “Most experience body and mind working together in a really pleasurable way. So they have no framework to understand this in.”

Pukall said that may help explain why so few in the medical community are aware of PGAD, adding, “Certainly, most primary care providers have not heard of it at all.”

To raise awareness, Goldstein and other experts — including doctors who focus on sexual dysfunction, psychologists and physical therapists — formed a panel to share what they had learned about PGAD.

In 2021, the panel published a report in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, offering a road map to determining possible causes and treatments for the “extremely distressing sexual health condition,” which “may be more prevalent than previously recognized,” the authors wrote.

They noted that symptoms might first appear in the vaginal region, the pelvic area or the spinal cord.

According to Goldstein and colleagues, diagnosis of PGAD, at a minimum, would require that a woman had:

• Persistent or recurrent, unwanted or intrusive, distressing sensations of genital arousal.
• Symptoms that had lasted for three or more months.
• Sensations that couldn’t be associated with any sexual interest, thoughts or fantasies.
• Buzzing, tingling, burning, twitching, itching or pain, along with a sensation of arousal. While the sensations would most commonly be felt in the clitoris, they could also be felt in the vulva, the vagina, the urethra, the bladder and other locations in the vicinity of the pelvis.

The 2021 report included findings from a small functional MRI study that analyzed brain scans of three women with PGAD and 12 healthy volunteers. The healthy volunteers were asked to think about sex while in the machine, and those with PGAD were scanned when they were feeling symptoms of the condition.

The area of the brain that lit up when the healthy volunteers were thinking about sex, the paracentral lobule, also shone much more brightly when the women with PGAD were symptomatic.

PGAD is primarily a problem of too much unwanted, unrelenting sensation going to the brain, Goldstein said. While the paracentral lobule has other functions, in the context of PGAD, it’s a key sensory region of the brain involved in processing information from the urogenital areas, such as the clitoris, vulva and perineum; the pelvic organs, including the bladder, urethra, vagina, cervix and rectum; and the lower limbs, especially the toes, he said.

More recently, a small study by German researchers using brain scans was published in Scientific Reports in February, with 26 patients diagnosed with PGAD and 26 healthy volunteers. Areas of the brain associated with the disorder were activated as expected, but the researchers said it was unclear whether specific symptoms were connected to the different pattern of brain activity. The findings gave potential areas of focus for future research, they wrote.

Ultimately, the earlier scanning study may have been more telling.

“We know that irritated sensory nerves and nerve roots are associated with PGAD and excess brain activity in the paracentral lobule,” Goldstein said.

But that’s still not enough, he said.

“Nerve irritation or nerve root irritation can be caused by a variety of factors, including injuries, compression, infections and inflammation,” he said, adding that if the message from irritated nerves gets to the paracentral lobule, a woman might experience unwanted genital arousal.

If doctors could better identify the exact pathway that led to unwanted arousal, more women could be helped, Goldstein said.

“That’s our job as sex detectives,” he said. “The good news is that we can now really help improve quality of life in about two-thirds of women.”

In general, specialists will treat the underlying problem that triggered the disorder to see whether the arousals resolve.

What causes the disorder?

PGAD can result from many conditions that irritate the nerves, from back injuries to changes in dosing of certain antidepressants.

Dr. Sharon Parish, a professor of clinical medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, points to the first case she ever saw: that of a woman who had tripped at work and injured her hip a year earlier. By the time the patient was referred to Parish by her OB-GYN, she was struggling to find a position that didn’t cause her pain.

For Shari Stewart, 63, of Colorado Springs, Colorado, the bottom came when she went to a doctor for help with the pain she was experiencing. She had searched for her symptoms online for years and finally determined she must have PGAD.

“I told him I think I have PGAD,” Stewart remembered. “I have all these symptoms, and before I could show him the list, he said, ‘God, I wish my wife had that.’ And then he chuckled.”

Stewart doesn’t think the doctor ever took her seriously.

Even after the 2021 consensus report, a very small percentage of doctors know about the disorder, especially in primary care or internal medicine, Goldstein said. “I estimate only about 5% to 10% of all providers are aware of PGAD.”

Parish recommends that women who suspect they’ve developed PGAD search the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health website for a list of providers who are familiar with the condition and can offer treatments.

Knowing just what went wrong is what helped April Patterson, 45, get her life back.

Patterson, a physical therapist from Los Angeles, started having pain during intercourse when she was 21. “It was like sciatic pain,” she says. “It would just shoot down my leg, during intercourse only.”

Then the pain started to arise more often and in more places. “Everything felt like it was tingling, burning, buzzing,” she said.

After years of pain, one day, Patterson saw a flyer advertising a presentation on pelvic pain related to nerve issues. “I thought, this is what I have,” she said. “I need to go to this meeting.”

That was when Patterson first heard Goldstein talk.

After several X-rays and a brain scan, Patterson’s symptoms and pain were traced to herniated discs in her lower spine. After she was treated with a nerve block, her pelvic symptoms were relieved.

A spine surgeon repaired the damaged discs and widened the opening in the spinal canal where it was too narrow. The procedure completely fixed Patterson’s PGAD and most of her pain.

The experience made Patterson more aware of how much women keep to themselves. In questionnaires, she now asks her patients about unwanted persistent arousal, as well as pelvic pain and other related symptoms.

“And then we can get into the conversation,” she said.

SYDNEY — An Australian woman on Monday was convicted of murdering three elderly relatives of her estranged husband with a meal laced with poisonous mushrooms, in a case that has gripped the country.

Erin Patterson, 50, was charged with the murders of her mother-in-law Gail Patterson, father-in-law Donald Patterson and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, along with the attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson, Heather’s husband.

The four gathered at Erin Patterson‘s home in Leongatha, a town of about 6,000 people some 84 miles southeast of Melbourne, where the mother of two served them a meal of individual Beef Wellingtons accompanied by mashed potato and green beans, which were later found to contain death cap mushrooms.

On Monday, the jury in the case found her guilty of all four charges, the court heard in Morwell, a town around two hours east of Melbourne where the trial was being held.

Patterson, who had pleaded not guilty to all charges, saying the deaths were accidental, will be sentenced at a later date.

The 10-week trial attracted huge global interest, with local and international media descending on Court 4 at the Latrobe Valley Magistrates’ Court in Morwell, the nearest court to Patterson‘s home where she had requested to be tried, despite being warned of lengthy delays.

State broadcaster ABC’s daily podcast on proceedings was consistently among the most popular in Australia during the trial, while several documentaries on the case are already in production.

The price of avocados from Mexico, a mainstay at both restaurants, has doubled from about $45 to $50 per box to about $90 to $100, he said. That price has trickled down to customers, now costing them $2 per scoop, up from $1. It’s now cheaper to buy the popular topping from local markets than from wholesalers. Many local grocers now limit the number of avocados each customer can purchase, he said, because of high demand.

“Those signs are because of people like me,” Hammer joked, referring to the quantity restrictions. He said customers are beginning to “tighten their belts” and visit his restaurants less frequently.

They’re also ordering fewer extras like avocado and guacamole. Even mainstay are becoming more expensive. The price of ground beef has increased due to the rising costs of cow feed, Hammer’s suppliers have told him.

Looking ahead

In an attempt to keep things afloat during these uncertain times, Hammer, whose family owned a pub when he was growing up, has stopped taking a salary from the restaurants. Instead, he relies on his digital marketing business for income. He acquired Twisted Root just six months ago, while Joe Biden was president, and Mauka Poke about a year and a half ago, he said.

The seafood restaurant brings in about $350,000 a year with a 5% profit margin, but Twisted Root has a negative 10% profit margin despite its $450,000 yearly revenue. The staff is larger there and the rent higher, plus Twisted Root offers vegan alternatives that are more expensive than meat and dairy products, Hammer said. He tries to keep the menu prices reasonable for customers, which sometimes means taking on more cost.