Amnesty International’s online multimedia project, Tear Gas: An Investigation, has won a prestigious Webby Award today for the best activism website worldwide.

Hailed as the “internet’s highest honour” by The New York Times, the 25^th annual Webby Awards, presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), is the leading international award honouring excellence on the internet.

“We are delighted to achieve this distinction, which reflects the hard work our team and our partners put into ensuring that Tear Gas: An Investigation was as informative, relevant, user-friendly and visually striking as possible,” said Sam Dubberley, Head of the Crisis Evidence Lab at Amnesty International.

“It is a great honour for the site to be held in such high regard by The Webby Awards judges and the public, and we hope this attention will raise awareness of the serious topic it covers. When misused by police forces, tear gas and other less-lethal weapons can actually maim and kill, in violation of international human rights law and norms. The transfer and use of tear gas must be better regulated globally.”

The Biden administration says it wants to de-escalate the violence between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza, but the White House is resisting calls to demand a cease-fire in a conflict that has cost at least 200 lives.

Pressed on why President Joe Biden and other top officials aren’t publicly calling for a cease-fire, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that “every statement we make is with the objective of reducing the violence and bringing an end to the conflict on the ground.”

“There are times in diplomacy where we’ll need to keep those conversations quieter, where we won’t read out every component of it,” Psaki told reporters. “But that is our objective and that is the prism through which every action and every comment is being made.”

Psaki said she wasn’t sure if Biden had seen the latest statement by a group of Senate Democrats calling for a cease-fire. She emphasized dozens of calls made by the president and top officials seeking to resolve the crisis, calling it “quiet, intensive” diplomacy, and said Biden was aware of the views held by members of Congress.

The statement signed by 29 Senate Democrats on Sunday said it’s time for the violence to stop.

Former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Dannon told Breitbart News on Monday that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) notified people within a building in Gaza holding Associated Press (AP) offices prior to striking it with warplanes.

Danon discussed the IDF’s destruction of the Jala Tower in Gaza, which also housed the AP, Al Jazeera, and other news media outlets’ offices on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.

“This building was an office building in the center of Gaza, and in that  building there were a few headquarters of Hamas intelligence units, and you had some media offices — AP and Al-Jazeera — and we decided to target this building because of information we gathered,” he said. “We notified everybody to evacuate the building. We allowed them to take out all their instruments, their computers, and then we attacked the building, making sure there would be no casualties, so no one can blame Israel for that.”

DALLAS—An 18-year-old man has been arrested after the body of a 4-year-old boy was found lying on a neighborhood street in Dallas, police said Sunday.

Police said that Darriynn Brown has been charged with kidnapping and theft. Police say they also anticipate additional charges pending the results of a forensic analysis.

Brown was being held Sunday in Dallas County jail on a $750,000 bond. Jail records did not list an attorney for him.

Police received a call that there was a child dead in the street at about 6:50 a.m. Saturday.

Assistant Police Chief Albert Martinez has said it appeared the child suffered a violent death and that “an edged weapon” was used. He said it’s believed the child was killed at about 5 a.m.

The child’s name hasn’t been released, but he’s believed to have lived in the southwest Dallas neighborhood where he was found, Martinez said.

Antwainese Square, 39, told The Dallas Morning News she alerted authorities after seeing the boy’s body while she was jogging. She said the boy’s face and upper half of his body were covered in blood and that he didn’t have shoes or a shirt.

“It breaks my heart,” Square told the newspaper. “And now I’m afraid. Now I’m paranoid. Because I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what’s going on.”

Former Texas Rep. Matt Rinaldi told National File that a group of Texas Republican legislators – reportedly acting on orders from Gov. Greg Abbott – worked together to kill a bill that would have effectively banned child transgender surgeries and chemical castrations in the state.

Family activists in Texas are reeling after H.B. 1399, which would have stripped doctors of their ability to acquire liability insurance if they engaged in child transgender surgeries or chemical castrations at their practices, was almost certainly doomed by Texas Reps. Dustin Burrows and Jared Patterson, both on the Calendars Committee responsible for assigning the legislation a date for a full House vote. Burrows and Patterson scheduled the bill for last Wednesday after extreme pressure from activists, but placed hundreds of other legislative items on the agenda ahead of the vote, all but ensuring the bill would not receive a vote before the end of the legislative session and effectively killing it.

An adjunct professor at St. John’s University has allegedly been fired for reading a passage from Mark Twain’s anti-slavery novel “Pudd’nhead Wilson” during a class on satirical literature, The New York Post reported.

Hannah Berliner Fischthal, an adjunct at St. Johns for 20 years, used the word once during a remote class on February 10 after teaching her students the word’s history and context, and said she hoped the usage of the word would not offend anyone in the class, the Post reported.

“Mark Twain was one of the first American writers to use actual dialect. His use of the ‘N-word’ is used only in dialogues as it could have actually been spoken in the south before the Civil War, when the story takes place,” Fischthal said, referring to the book.

“It satirizes the entire evil institution of slavery,” she added in a statement after her firing, according to the Post.

U.S. Space Force officer who published a book saying that Neo-Marxism is influencing the military has been relieved of command due to remarks he made on a podcast.

“Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, Space Operations Command commander, relieved Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier of command of the 11th Space Warning Squadron, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado, May 14, due to loss of trust and confidence in his ability to lead,” the Space Force said in a statement, according to the Washington Examiner. “This decision was based on public comments made by Lt. Col. Lohmeier in a recent podcast. Lt. Gen. Whiting has initiated a Command Directed Investigation (CDI) on whether these comments constituted prohibited partisan political activity.”

He made the remarks while promoting a book on a podcast, where he decried leftist practices in U.S. institutions, including the  military. . .

A top official within the U.S. Marshals Service said that some 387 missing children were recovered by the agency in 2020, a record high number. Speaking to journalist Sharyl Attkisson, Chief Inspector Floriano Whitwell, who heads the U.S. Marshals’ sex offender investigations, said, “Last year, we recovered 387 missing children, and that was the most we’ve ever recovered, almost 100 more than the previous year. “But I would also emphasize that in my opinion, we’re barely scratching the surface,” he added. According to the FBI, the number of reported missing children was 421,394 in 2019 and 365,348 in 2020, while the majority of cases are considered “endangered runaways.” “I personally was extremely concerned by the lack of spotlight, the lack of resources, and just simply the lack of children being recovered across our country, knowing now how big of an epidemic it was,” Whitwell also said. “And so I decided to make that my focus” …

In previous articles, I’ve discussed the central role false advertising played in the creation of the opioid crisis.¹

To recap, a single paragraph in a 1980 letter to the editor^2,3 (not a study) in The New England Journal of Medicine — which stated that narcotic addiction in patients with no history of addiction was very rare — became the basis of a drug marketing campaign that has since led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, or four times the number of Americans killed in Vietnam.

Between September 2019 and September 2020 alone, opioid overdoses killed a staggering 87,000 Americans — a new record-high.⁴

Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, used this letter to the editor as the basis for its claim that opioid addiction affects fewer than 1% of patients treated with the drugs. In reality, opioids have a very high rate of addiction, have not been proven effective for long-term use⁵ and, in fact, fail to control moderate to severe pain any better than over-the-counter pain relievers.⁶

Various court cases have demonstrated how Purdue systematically misled doctors about OxyContin’s addictiveness to drive up sales, resulting in an avalanche of opioid addiction and subsequent deaths.⁷

Unethical to the core, Purdue also cashed in on the addiction trend it manufactured by secretly founding Rhodes Pharma to manufacture generic opioids,⁸ and getting into the business of creating overdose treatments.^9,10

Facing an estimated 2,600 lawsuits^11,12 relating to its role in the opioid epidemic, Purdue filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2019,¹³ as a way to avoid litigation losses. Just over a year later they pleaded guilty to three federal criminal charges, including violating a federal anti-kickback law, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government and violating the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.^14,15

The company agreed to pay $8.3 billion in fines, forfeiture of past profits and civil liability payments to settle the charges,¹⁶ but short on cash — having transferred more than $10 billion of the company’s funds into family trusts and offshore accounts¹⁷ — the company was dissolved and its remaining assets used to erect a “public benefit company” owned and controlled by the U.S. government.¹⁸ Future earnings will supposedly be used to combat the opioid crisis. . . .