The Israeli Knesset has approved the 'nation-state bill' that promotes Jewish-only settlements, downgrades Arab language status and limits the right to self-determination to Jews. Arab MPs chided the law as racist.

The bill, which has the status of a basic law (approximately the same as a constitutional law in countries with a written constitution), was passed overnight to Thursday with 62 votes in favor and 55 against after hours of fierce argument and debate. It will now come into force as soon as it's published in the Knesset's Official Gazette.

The law, which had been in the works since 2011, has sparked a wave of protests, which spilled over the Israeli border and angered the influential Jewish diaspora in the US.

The bill formally defines the main principles that should stand at the core of the Israeli state and its symbols, such as the flag, the anthem, its capital and language. In a clause that set Arab lawmakers off, the bill explicitly states that "the right to exercises national determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people."

Twitter suspended at least 58 million user accounts in the final three months of 2017, according to data obtained by The Associated Press. The figure highlights the company's newly aggressive stance against malicious or suspicious accounts in the wake of Russian disinformation efforts during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

Last week, Twitter confirmed a Washington Post report that it had suspended 70 million accounts in May and June. The cavalcade of suspensions has raised questions as to whether the crackdown could affect Twitter's user growth and whether the company should have warned investors earlier. The company has been struggling with user growth compared to rivals like Instagram and Facebook.

The number of suspended accounts originated with Twitter's "firehose," a data stream it makes available to academics, companies and others willing to pay for it.

The new figure sheds light on Twitter's attempt to improve "information quality" on its service, its term for countering fake accounts, bots, disinformation and other malicious occurrences. Such activity was rampant on Twitter and other social-media networks during the 2016 campaign, much of it originating with the Internet Research Agency, a since-shuttered Russian "troll farm" implicated in election-disruption efforts by the U.S. special counsel and congressional investigations.

The Israel Defense Force's "modesty rules" which ban female soldiers from wearing white shirts, removing their bras and smoking near men to prevent "womanly temptation" for religious soldiers is infuriating its targets.

Israel's Women's Network has reported that female recruits are being restricted by rules that dictate their dress and behavior because of the rising number of Ultra-Orthodox religious soldiers in the army.

"The dozens of testimonies that have reached us at the hotline for female soldiers in the past year and a half attest to what we've known for a long time. Commanders in the field deviate from the army's orders and enforce bizarre modesty rules on the female soldiers, and prevent them from doing their jobs," Managing Director of the Israel Women's Network, Michal Gera Margaliot told Haaretz.

Russia's Defense Ministry has released a new batch of videos of cutting-edge weapons, first unveiled by President Vladimir Putin back in March. The footage shows new tests, as well as gives a grasp of the development process.

The impressive set of new weapons was unveiled by Putin during his annual speech before the Federation Council back in March. The futuristic armaments, some of which are already in service, are designed to give Russia a strong deterrence against any aggression against the country.

Despite breathless reports insisting that President Donald Trump betrayed America by meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, a vast majority of Republicans approve of his dealings with Moscow, according to a new poll.

The Reuters/Ipsos survey, which was conducted after the headline-grabbing summit, found that 71 percent of the president's Republican base thinks that Trump is doing a good job with his handling of Russia - compared to only 14 percent of Democrats.

"Trump still enjoys broad support among Republican voters despite criticism from party leaders" about the outcome of his meeting with Putin, according to Reuters.

It's always the perfect temperature inside the Amazon Spheres. More than 40,000 plants sourced from tropical forests in 30 countries populate the four-story glass edifice, which doubles as a workspace and lounge for company employees. During the day, the lush vegetation is kept healthy at a temperate 72 degrees and 60 percent humidity, mimicking Costa Rica's Central Valley, a haven for expats who have left their home countries for paradise. The cavernous structure also includes waterfalls, winding canopy walkways, and fish from the actual Amazon River. Heat is piped in using recycled energy from a nearby data center, ensuring that downtown Seattle's warmest respite isn't a drag on the power grid.

Outside the spheres, the city is a colder place. In the nearby neighborhood of Wallingford, a newly erected outpost of small wooden shacks offer shelter for 22 of Seattle's homeless residents. This is a "tiny house village," sanctioned by the city as a kind of middle ground between living at a street address and on the street. The buildings sit in the corner of a parking lot across from a seafood restaurant, shielded from view by a metal fence. Each shack, painted with one of the bold colors of a Crayola starter pack, offers electricity and a roof sturdier than the tents in Seattle's increasingly common homeless encampments. Every resident is issued a window fan for the occasional hot day, and the people here hope to receive heaters before winter. But the small collections of potted petunias and pothos that sit in front of their temporary homes are unlikely to survive the city's harshest months.

The last few days have been truly amazing. I didn't even write an article yesterday; I've just been staring transfixed by my social media feeds watching liberal Americans completely lose their minds. I can't look away. It's like watching a slow motion train wreck, and everyone on the train is being really homophobic.

I've been writing about Russiagate since it started, and I can honestly say this is the worst it's ever been, by far. The most hysterical, the most shrill, the most emotional, the most cartoonishly over-the-top and hyperbolic. The fact that Trump met with Putin in private and then publicly expressed doubt about the establishment Russia narrative has sent some political factions of America into an emotional state that is indistinguishable from what you'd expect if Russia had bombed New York City. This despite the fact that the establishment Russia narrative consists of no actual, visible events whatsoever. It is made of pure narrative.

It was AncestryDNA's customer-service rep who had to break the news to Catherine St Clair.

For her part, St Clair thought she was inquiring about a technical glitch. Her brother - the brother who along with three other siblings had gifted her the DNA test for her birthday - wasn't showing up right in her family tree. It was not a glitch, the woman on the line had to explain gently, if this news can ever land gently: The man St Clair thought of as her brother only shared enough DNA with her to be a half-sibling. In fact, she didn't match any family members on her father's side. Her biological father must be someone else.

"I looked into a mirror and started crying," says St Clair, now 56. "I've taken for granted my whole life that what I was looking at in the mirror was part my mother and part my dad. And now that half of that person I was looking at in the mirror, I didn't know who that was."

Spain's socialist government has vowed to introduce a new 'only yes means yes' sexual consent law to remove any ambiguities in rape cases following outrage over the verdict in the recent 'La Manada' gang rape case.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told parliament that under the new measure sex without explicit consent would constitute rape. "To be clear, ladies and gentlemen, if they say no it means no, and if they don't say yes, it means no," Sanchez said.

The proposed legislation follows the notorious sex attack on a young woman during a bull-running festival in Pamplona by a group of five men dubbed 'La Manada,' meaning wolf pack, after the name given to their group chat on WhatsApp.

Undercover animal rights activists recorded a sow being eaten alive at Hogwood pig farm earlier this month.

The Viva group's footage shows a pig slumped on the floor as three others, their snouts smeared with blood, gnaw at her hind legs.

Viva, which campaigns for veganism, revisited the site after originally reporting on conditions at the farm in Oxhill, Warks, last year.

Officials who investigated alleged breaches in 2017 found no wrongdoing and Tesco continued using it as a supplier.

This prompted the campaign group to revisit the site and record conditions at the 16,000-pig farm.