About 160,000 people demonstrated in Tel Aviv Saturday night against the Israeli government's plans to weaken the country's judicial system, crowd expert Ofer Grinboim Liron told CNN. That would make it one of the biggest single demonstrations yet against the legislation.
Grinboim Liron, the CEO of Crowd Solutions, which specializes in crowd dynamics at events and venues, based his estimate on drone photos at 8 p.m. local time (1 p.m. ET).
Organizers of the protests said an additional 130,000 people protested in other demonstrations across the country Saturday night. Numbers from organizers have been higher than estimates from independent experts such as Grinboim Liron.
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About two out of three (66%) Israelis believe the Supreme Court should have the power to strike down laws incompatible with Israel's Basic Laws, and about the same proportion (63%) say they support the current system of nominating judges, a poll for the Israel Democracy Institute found last week.
People who say they voted for opposition parties were far more likely than voters for the parties in the coalition to oppose the changes. Nearly nine out of 10 (87%) people who voted for the opposition said the Supreme Court should have the power to strike down laws incompatible with Basic Laws, while only 44% of coalition voters said it should. The percentage was slightly higher among people who voted for Netanyahu's Likud party, with nearly half (47%) saying the Supreme Court should have that power.
Israel does not have a written constitution, but a set of what are called Basic Laws.
The survey, which was released February 21, found that about half (53%) of Israelis believed that removing the political independence of the judiciary would harm Israel's economy - as Israeli economists and businesspeople have been warning. About a third (35%) do not believe the changes would harm the economy.
The online and telephone survey of 756 adults in Israel was carried out between February 9 to 13, 2023, and has a margin of error of 3.56 points.
A blaze that left nearly half of Argentina without power was probably sabotage, the government said.One recalls the blackouts from 2019 in Argentina, Uruguay, and Venezuela, that were also suspected sabotage: Entire cities in darkness after massive, first-of-its-kind blackout sweeps Argentina and Uruguay
More than 20 million people in the South American nation of 46 million had no electricity for hours on Wednesday evening after a high-tension transmission line outside the Buenos Aires metropolitan area caught fire, shutting off swaths of the grid.
Burn patterns at the scene imply saboteurs set fire to land right beneath the power line, according to a top government official.
"It's not the type of fire line you see when pastures get burned," Ricardo Casal, legal secretary to the Economy Ministry, told local news outlets. "Instead, there are precise focal points that, curiously, are under the transmission line."
The government has asked a judge to investigate.
Electricity was fully restored on Wednesday night, the Energy Secretariat said. A live state tracker of power generation and on-grid demand showed both were back to normal levels on Thursday, though nuclear power plants remained offline.
The fire came amid a heat wave and drought in Argentina, with Buenos Aires enduring its hottest summer in more than a century of record-keeping and the country's key soybean crop wilting across the Pampas farm belt.
In the US, grids have seen an unusual uptick of attacks in recent months. As of December, law enforcement agencies were investigating at least eight recent incidents in four states.
"Ben & Jerry's is opposed to child labor of any kind whatsoever. The company has an established track record standing for justice and equity for all including five plus years with Milk with Dignity supporting migrant workers. The Milk with Dignity Standards Council ensures that farmworkers are fairly compensated for their labor, work in healthy conditions, and builds in additional safeguards for those who are 16 and 17."
Comment: It's one thing to resist taking an experimental vaccine being forced on one with no proof of its efficacy. It's entirely another for a person with a confirmed diagnosis of a highly communicable disease to deliberately avoid getting treatment AND continue to expose the local community to it. It speaks to some sort of character disorder.