Chinese stocks erased all the gains seen during their massive reopening rally that took off late last year,

By Josh Ye (Reuters) -TikTok plans to launch a program in August to help Chinese merchants sell goods globally, and

Oil and US equity futures edged higher Monday while major currencies traded within narrow ranges versus the dollar

Many women who work at McMurdo Station, the main United States research base in Antarctica, say the isolated environment and macho culture have allowed sexual harassment and assault to flourish

More than 50 million people across the Southeast face the threat of severe storms on Monday as widespread power outages have left nearly half a million across the South in the dark, including some sweltering under record-breaking temperatures.

Mexican transgender rights activists Kenya Cuevas and Andrea Luna sat in front of their longtime friend Paola Buenrostro’s pink grave in Mexico City

A missile strike on a mail depot in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv has killed six people and injured 16 others, officials said on Sunday. The blast was caused by a Russian S-300 rocket, Kharkiv governor Oleh Syniehubov said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. All of the victims were employees of private Ukrainian postal and courier service Nova Poshta. In a statement, the company said the air raid siren had sounded just moments before the attack, leaving those inside the depot with no time to reach shelter. It announced that Sunday would be a day of mourning for the firm. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky posted a video showing the building with destroyed windows and construction materials strewn across the floor. He described the strike as an attack on an “ordinary civilian object”. “We need to respond to Russian terror every day with results on the front line. And, even more so, we need to strengthen global unity in order to fight against this terror,” he wrote on social media. “Russia will not be able to achieve anything through terror and murder. The end result for all terrorists is the same: the need to face responsibility for what they have done.” Elsewhere in the Kharkiv region, three people were injured in Russian shelling on the city of Kupiansk, Mr Syniehubov said. The Ukrainian-held frontline city has been at the heart of fierce fighting as both Moscow and Kyiv push for battlefield breakthroughs amid the looming onset of wintry conditions. Officials in southern Ukraine said on Sunday that the Russian military had used a record number of aerial bombs over the country’s Kherson region in the past 24 hours. Natalia Humeniuk, a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian military’s Operational Command South, said 36 missiles had been recorded over the area, with some villages being hit by several strikes. It comes as further south in the east, Ukraine has been trying to stop a new push by Russian forces to gain more territory there, amid Kyiv’s gruelling counteroffensive that has continued for months. Moscow’s drive to capture the town of Avdiivka encountered fierce resistance on Saturday, Ukraine’s military said, with defences bolstered by fortifications erected nearly a decade ago. “The enemy is becoming more active, but is incurring heavy losses,” General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, commander of Ukraine’s troops in the south, said on Telegram. Russia’s Defence Ministry, in its evening report, made no mention of Avdiivka, but reported strikes on areas outside Bakhmut, a town seized by Moscow’s forces in May after months of battles. Both towns are in the eastern Donetsk region. Avdiivka has withstood enemy attacks for months. Video footage shows buildings in ruins and streets barely distinguishable. The town was briefly captured in 2014 by Russian-backed separatists who seized large swathes of eastern Ukraine, but was retaken by Ukrainian forces who built solid fortifications. The Institute for the Study of War, a US think-tank, said Russian troops had “marginally advanced” near Avdiivka. Additional reporting by agencies Read More Aftermath of Russian missile strike on Ukraine mail depot that killed six Ukrainian officials say civilians were killed and wounded in Russian overnight attacks Russian attacks kill six in Ukraine as Kyiv ramps up drone counterstrikes NATO member Romania finds more drone fragments on its soil after Russian again hits southern Ukraine Russia claims `neo-Nazis' were at wake for Ukrainian soldier in village struck by missile killing 52 ‘Six killed in Kharkiv strike’ as Kherson sees ‘record’ bomb attacks - live

Sebastian Steudtner already holds the world record for the largest wave ever surfed, but as the giant wave season begins, the German is looking to science and...

A former beauty pageant queen has made new allegations in a federal lawsuit claiming she was sex trafficked and raped on the orders of an infamous pornography producer. Kirsty Althaus was the runner-up in the Miss Teen Colorado USA Pageant in 2013, but was forced to give up the title when she was found to be in online pornography videos, with her name in the title. A copy of the lawsuit, filed on 8 September, was obtained by The Daily Beast, which said she made allegations against a series of inter-related companies, such as Aylo (formerly known as MindGeek, the parent company of sites like PornHub), and Ethical Capital Partners, a private equity firm that acquired Aylo back in March. She is suing Aylo and Ethical Capital Partners for aiding and abetting sex trafficking, profiting from sex trafficking and advertising a victim of sex trafficking. Ms Althaus is setting her claims against Michael Pratt, the owner of Girls Do Porn, a shut-down company, who was arrested back in December 2022 for allegedly coercing hundreds of women into making sex tapes and then distributing them without their consent, the Daily Beast reports. Girls Do Porn was set up in 2006 by Mr Pratt, from New Zealand, which specialised in producing pornography of only younger women between 18 and 22. Ms Althaus, from Colorado, wanted to have a professional modelling career. She posed for companies such as Kohl’s and Champion, as well as competing and being runner-up in the Miss Teen Colorado pageant in 2012, reports Daily Beast. A year later, she left school at 18, wanting to focus on her modelling career. She saw an advertisement on Craigslist offering a paid modelling opportunity, with expenses paid such as flying her out to San Diego. "Rather than the mere headshots and clothing photoshoot (sic) that she had agreed to fly to San Diego to do, Pratt began demanding that Plaintiff film nude and sexually explicit videos. When Plaintiff refused, Pratt, now 41, and his conspirators immediately pressured her and plied her with booze and pills to soften her reluctance," the lawsuit states. The lawsuit stated she endured “protracted filming”, where Ms Althaus had to endure approximately nine hours of non-consensual sex, to the point she started to bleed. In one shoot, Mr Pratt was so infuriated with Ms Althaus and her pleas to stop that he broke a hotel lamp and got out his gun, according to the lawsuit. Ms Althaus describes in the lawsuit as being harassed over text by Mr Pratt, after she returned to college, to make more videos and threatened to make her original video public if she refused, as screenshots obtained by Fox News show. “You better be here by noon shoot 2tomorrow or your graveyard,” one text included in the lawsuit read. The lawsuit stated that in January 2014 a text from an anonymous number came up on Ms Althaus’ phone while she was sitting in class, it said: “Told you b****.” Ms Atlhuas then saw that all her videos became live on Twitter, PornHub and other pornography websites, Daily Beast reports. In the lawsuit, she said that she started to suffer “severe distress and anxiety;” she found it hard to keep strong relationships, people would recognise her on the street and students at her college would harass her. She goes on to say that she would lose jobs once her employers discovered she had appeared in a pornography video. She claimed she tried to report how she was sex trafficked and raped to MindGeek, where the video was being distributed, but said she was ignored due to their focus on making “millions of dollars” off the content, the lawsuit reads. Although she changed her name, and the video is now ten years old, she is still harassed due to what happened in her past, Ms Althaus said in the lawsuit. “Unidentified men continue to approach Plaintiff’s home at all hours of the day and night,” her lawsuit reads, “As recently as May-June 2023, Plaintiff was assaulted at her home by a self-described PornHub subscriber who confronted her about the recent removal of the subject videos from Defendants’ websites.” Mr Pratt was included on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in 2022 for three months until he was captured in Spain. Pratt was charged in a 19-count indictment with sex trafficking, production of child pornography, sex trafficking of a minor, and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments in connection with the operation of the GirlsDoPorn adult website, according to the FBI. He was on the run for years, fleeing in 2019 after 22 women filed a lawsuit in 2017 claiming he and his co-conspirators for conning the women into making pornography videos and then lying about distributing the footage. He said the videos would only be sold to private collectors solely on DVDs and small video stores not located in the US, but the videos ended up on famous pornography websites, sometimes putting their names in the title. Ms Althaus’ lawsuit also names GirlsDoPorn co-conspirators, Michael Isaac Wolfe and Andre Garcia. Garcia is currently serving a 20-year sentence after pleading guilty to two counts of sex trafficking in November 2020, according to the United States Attorney’s Office. Wolfe was sentenced in October 2022 for admitting to coercing prospective models into filming videos for Girls Do Porn, then lying to them saying the videos would not be distributed in the United States, says the Attorney’s Office. According to the Daily Beast, Ms Althaus is now another woman coming forward to relay the alleged abhorrent crimes committed against her. She claims she was deceived into filming nonconsensual sex scenes by Mr Pratt, saying she was raped, drugged, physically abused and blackmailed by both Pratt and his associates. The lawsuit that was brought forward by the 22 women in 2017 included similar harrowing stories, such as being “assaulted”. This previous lawsuit resulted in Girls Do Porn being ordered to pay $12.8m in damages as well as ownership rights to the videos they featured in. Between October and November 2019, six people were charged on counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion, with a further two people charged in December with obstruction of sex trafficking enforcement. MindGeek, now Aylo, was also under fire in 2021 when 40 women sued the company for knowingly profiting from Girls Do Porn content. The judge ordered a “discovery into its corporate structure, finances, operations, and ownership to determine which entities and persons should remain in the case,” says law firm Brown Rudnick LLP. In a statement to The Daily Beast, Aylo declined to comment on the lawsuit but said they looked forward to “the facts being fully and fairly aired” in court. “The safety of our community is our number one priority, so we are proud to have instituted Trust and Safety policies that surpass those of any other major user-generated platform on the internet,” Aylo said in a statement. “Our compliance program has helped us set the standard for the tech industry, and we are committed to remaining at the forefront of this important area.” The Independent has contacted both Aylo and Ethical Capital Partners for comment. We have also asked if they have filed a position statement or defences, as it is not clear at this time. Read More Reddit users post pornography and switch forums to ‘NSFW’ in latest protest against site’s management We’re not being taught enough about sex ed and porn in class, say children Rise of the post-truth sex tape: Deepfake pornography is making women’s online lives even more frightening

Neighbours congregated in shock in Massapequa Park on Friday after the arrest of long-time resident Rex Heuermann in connection with the Gilgo Beach murders, looking on as police loaded and hauled away a black pickup truck and another large, tarped-over piece of evidence on flatbeds. One woman, whose property backs up to that of Mr Heuermann and his wife, told The Independent on Friday: “I really have no comment ... I mean, we’ll all watch it unfold.” Mr Heuermann’s street, First Avenue, is one block from the now-closed Nassau County Police Academy and a stone’s throw from a nature preserve that borders main Long Island thoroughfare Sunrise Highway. One long-time neighbor of the Heuermanns, who has lived a few doors down from the family for more than two decades, told The Independent on Friday that the suspect, his wife and two children were “a very quiet family” who made “no imprint at all” on the local community. “Basically, we never had any contact with him ... living here 22 years and never said two words to him,” she said – while quick to point out that “one bad apple doesn’t spoil the bunch” in a “great neighbourhood.” Mr Heuermann was charged Friday with three counts of murder in connection with the infamous Gilgo Beach killings, which were believed to be the work of a serial killer after the first bodies were found in 2010 along remote stretches of Long Island shoreline. The killer is believed to have claimed at least 10 victims. A 59-year-old architect with an office in Manhattan, Mr Heuermann is married with children and graduated from high school on Long Island. He faces three counts of murder in the first degreee and three in the second degree over the deaths of Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy and Amber Costello. It is not clear what led to the sudden breakthrough in the case over a decade after bodies began being dumped along remote beaches. The Gilgo Beach murders have long stumped law enforcement officials in Suffolk County who believed it could be the work of one or more serial killers who targeted sex workers and dumped their bodies along the remote beaches on Ocean Parkway. The purported serial killer has been linked to up to 11 victims, though authorities have never been able to confirm if the same person was responsible for all. Mr Heuermann was first linked to the cold case in March of 2022 after investigators discovered that a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche registered to Mr Heuermann was possibly the one spotted by a witness in Costello’s disappearance. As law enforcement closed in on Mr Heuermann, they served more than 300 subpoenas and search warrants that uncovered cellphone records for burner phones used to arrange meetings with three of the “Gilgo Four” victims before they went missing. Further analysis also allegedly link Mr Heuermann to taunting calls made to family members of the victims. A bail application released by the Suffolk County District Attorney revealed that Mr Heuermann was linked to the serial killings through cellphone evidence and surveillance. Prosecutors argued in the application that no bail should be set for Mr Heuermann due to his recent searches for “sadistic materials, child pornography, images of the victims and their relatives.” Read More Rex Heuermann charged with three Gilgo Beach murders as burner phones and truck tie him to serial killings Gilgo Beach murders – live: Long Island serial killer suspect Rex Heuermann charged with killing three Manhattan architect, family man and accused serial killer: Who is Gilgo Beach suspect Rex Heuermann?

As per reports, Rite Aid is currently reeling from a debt of 3.3 billion dollars and a Chapter 11 filing can help the company stay afloat

By Jason Lange and Rodrigo Campos WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Argentina's president-elect Javier Milei met on Tuesday with top U.S. officials in