Latest news with #Johnathan
New York Post
27-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
US Marine and Iraq War vet who volunteered to fight for Ukraine killed by a Russian drone strike
A US Marine who fought in Iraq and voluntarily deployed to Ukraine was killed in a Russian drone strike during a dangerous mission near the frontlines in the Eastern European country, his father said. Johnathan A. Pebley, 39, was killed during Russia's relentless bombardment of Ukraine over the last week. In just three days, Kremlin forces launched 900 drones at Ukraine — including 355 drones and nine cruise missiles overnight Sunday for the biggest aerial bombardment in the war to date. 'I'm heartbroken,' his father, Mark Pebley, told The Post. 'I'm crushed, his mother is crushed. His brothers are crushed. Everybody that ever knew him is crushed.' Advertisement Johnathan, whose call sign was Mayhem, had joined Ukrainian troops last August and was a recently assigned team leader of the Delta Knights, a Foreign Legion squad made up of a mix of Americans, Poles, Brits and natives of Scandinavian countries, his dad said. Mark, 63, said Russia's largest-ever drone attack that killed his son mostly targeted civilians — an assault that led President Trump to lash out at Russian President Vladimir Putin. Johnathan A. Pebley, an Iraq War vet and US Marine, was killed by a Russian drone strike while fighting Russians on the frontlines. Task & Purpose/YouTube 'The Ukrainians have been getting pummeled by drones, bombs and missile strikes and it's mostly civilians,' Mark, who served in the Air Force, said. 'What's going on over there is evil and atrocious and the rest of the world really needs to step up to the plate and stop what's really going on.' Advertisement Mark said he did not want to reveal the precise date his son was killed to avoid jeopardizing surviving members of his son's team who remain in active combat. Johnathan was born in a German Air Force base, but grew up in Wakefield, Mass., playing sports and listening to music. He joined the Marines a year after graduating from Wakefield High School and did two combat tours in 2008 and 2009, his father said. After his first tour, Mark said his son still believed in the mission, but he soured on it after his second tour. 'They saw things,' he said. 'They had orders that they didn't particularly agree with.' Advertisement Johnathan alluded to that change of heart in a February interview with Task & Purpose, where he talked about his renewed sense of purpose fighting for the Ukrainian people. Johnathan A. Pebley is interviewed by Chris Capelluto, the host of Task & Purpose, for a segment on trench warfare in Ukraine. cappyarmy/Instagram 'My theologies changed, my politics changed a bit, and I started to have quite a bit of guilt about my role in Iraq,' he said. 'I didn't believe that I should have been there – that we should have been there. And I kind of feel like in a karmic way, this kind of cancels that out. I'm fighting a just cause, defending a people rather than encroaching on them.' Since he left active duty, Johnathan said he had jobs as a corrections officer, a garbage collector, a restaurant owner, and lived in four different countries, but none of it ever felt right. Advertisement That all changed when he arrived in Ukraine last August after being recruited by the Foreign Legion, he said. 'This is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. I feel at home again, everything makes a lot more sense,' the Marine told Task & Purpose. 'Somehow life makes a lot more sense here than it did anytime since I got out in 2009.' The last time Mark talked to his son was May 7, while he was training for the mission that killed him. 'He's always a sticking-up-for-the-underdog type of person. He didn't like bullies,' Mark said. 'And he felt Russia was bullying Ukraine and he felt he could do some good over there. And he did.' Mark said that a brief text conversation he had with Johnathan in January sums up why his son gave up a safe life in America, where he was training to become a firefighter and EMT, to go halfway around the world to defend a people whose language he can't even speak. 'By all accounts, we are considering this a suicide mission,' Johnathan had texted his dad, seemingly knowing his fate. 'And we all agreed to f–king do it anyways. All of us, that CAN say no. Part of it is because 'F–k em' but a lot is a sense of duty. One that didn't exist in the Marines. Because it wasn't a choice. 'So if I get f–king smoked today. Just want to say that this is the best thing I've ever done with my life.'
Forbes
26-04-2025
- General
- Forbes
Global Reach, Local Impact: UNICEF Delivering For Every Child
UNICEF's Supply Division is a great example of how UNICEF is continuously innovating to increase efficiency and maximize impact for children. More flexible funding from donors is required to sustain this important work. Learn more. Four-year-old Johnathan holds items included in an emergency kit distributed by UNICEF and partners in December 2024 to assist earthquake-affected families in the Erakor Bridge community in south Efate, Vanuatu. UNICEF is continuously innovating to ensure a targeted, effective humanitarian response in emergencies. UNICEF operates the world's largest humanitarian logistics and supply center in the world. That supply powerhouse enables UNICEF to respond to emergencies quickly and effectively — saving lives. A big part of this operation means strengthening and leveraging the power of public supply chains, and leaning into partnerships to ensure the response is appropriate and that children's specific needs are being met. Defining those needs is a critical step toward creating lasting change. In 2023, UNICEF procured over $5.2 billion in supplies and services for children in 162 countries and areas — including more than $893 million in emergency supplies to children in 81 countries, including many hard-to-reach locations. The organization's humanitarian action plan for 2025 aims to support 109 million children living through complex humanitarian crises. UNICEF is funded entirely through voluntary contributions from both public and private sector donors, including governments, civil society organizations, corporations and private individuals. As competition for humanitarian financing grows — fueled by drastic cuts in foreign aid — private sector supporters can help fill funding gaps. Young Yosha'a receives warm clothes distributed by UNICEF at a school-turned-shelter in Naher Al Bared village, rural Hama, Syria, established for families displaced by the 2023 earthquake. 'When I opened the bag, I was surprised that all of the clothes were my size,' he said. UNICEF-supported partners registered the information and age categories of earthquake-affected children staying in collective shelters to ensure that the clothing provided to them fits them. Small acts such as this mean that children receive what they need in a dignified way and aid doesn't go to waste. Addressing humanitarian needs requires more than the logistics of delivering aid. It demands innovative, people-centered solutions that uphold dignity. It means partnering at every level, and investing in local organizations and economies as part of the response. UNICEF's interconnected network of global, regional and local supply chains is what enables UNICEF to go the extra mile — even in hard-to-reach places — to ensure vulnerable children have access to safe water and nutrition, vaccines and other essential medicines, education and protection. Fragility is one of the greatest challenges to children's rights. To safeguard those rights, UNICEF works to strengthen national supply chains to ensure equitable and timely access to those essential services and supplies. UNICEF's technical expertise and comparative advantage touch upon many fields, driving long-term local ownership and sustainability. Today, 65 countries across five regions are currently engaged in supply chain strengthening activities with the support of UNICEF. This innovative work creates the critical local capacity needed to enable a faster, more efficient and targeted humanitarian response in emergencies, leading to children receiving a higher quality of care and support. When it comes to the emergency supplies received, acceptability, appropriateness and choice are key. It's an issue when something is perceived to be ineffective. It's also a problem when social and cultural factors discourage people from asking for what they need. But when there is an opportunity to choose specific items, when there are channels of communication for sharing preferences, then people are more likely to step forward to seek — and accept — the help they need. This in turn improves the effectiveness of the response and translates into better outcomes for the community overall. The UNICEF Kits That Fit initiative, launched in 2023, is helping to ensure that the emergency kits that are distributed to communities are context appropriate and tailored to recipients' needs and wants. To achieve this, UNICEF and partners created mechanisms that empower people to communicate those needs and preferences at the start of their road to recovery. Kits are designed accordingly, with items sourced locally as much as possible. UNICEF and partners collect feedback data directly from children, families and communities through accessible and child-friendly digital and face-to-face platforms, including mobile apps. The feedback is then used to make improvements and ensure kits are fit for purpose. Related: UNICEF Kits That Fit The Kits That Fit feedback loop is an extension of UNICARE, a broader initiative by UNICEF to listen to — and act upon — the voices of people UNICEF serves, and to help other decision makers take appropriate action, by adapting their own programs or making organizational improvements, to drive better results for children. Focus groups, mobile phone text surveys, telephone hotlines and other channels are also used to ensure broad engagement. The end result is higher accountability — not just to the children and families receiving the assistance, but to the partners supporting UNICEF's lifesaving work. Armed with an improved understanding of people's priorities, UNICEF leverages its agile approach to procurement and supply chain management to deliver faster, more targeted aid. By procuring items from local manufacturers and other businesses, UNICEF is also helping to strengthen and revitalize local economies. Local vendors enjoy greater visibility, and UNICEF gains knowledge of local markets. Local businesses and organizations become part of the solution for people affected by crisis. UNICEF's ability to scale up supplies and garner support from partners was fundamental to the success of an emergency immunization campaign where children in Jabalia in the north of the Gaza Strip received the polio vaccination in a bid to halt an outbreak and close immunity gaps. UNICEF's ability to scale up supplies at any given moment is another factor that sets it apart as a leader uniquely capable of meeting the emergency needs of children in crisis. It is this capacity that enabled UNICEF to send 350 trucks of aid into the Gaza Strip in one week — after 15 months of bombardment and a long-awaited ceasefire — to reach the needs of over 1 million children. UNICEF's robust cold chain supply system and partnership with the World Health Organization halted a serious outbreak of polio in the Gaza Strip in late 2024, when over half a million children under 10 years received vaccinations as part of UNICEF'S emergency polio vaccination campaign. In South Sudan, UNICEF was able to overcome supply bottlenecks to scale the nutrition response by prepositioning supplies during the dry season and managing the supply pipeline for ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF), ensuring it would be continuously available. That coupled with the implementation of a community-based approach to managing acute malnutrition has supported the broader national strategy to prevent and treat malnutrition, significantly increasing recovery rates. In Somalia, UNICEF worked to digitalize the nutrition supply chain to reach more children suffering from malnutrition with effective aid. Digital solutions help prevent the diversion of aid, reducing risks and losses. UNICEF's plans to digitalize the severe wasting registry in Somalia mean that data can be directly linked to the supply chain, creating stronger reporting on consumption and stock data, leading to more timely availability of supplies to prevent severe wasting in children and save lives. For more than seventy years, UNICEF has been the trusted partner for those who seek to save and change children's lives. Voluntary contributions from donors don't just fund programs; they also help drive innovation and overall system strengthening. The support creates ripple effects that positively impact today's generation of children and many generations to come; children receiving humanitarian aid today are the leaders, innovators, and change makers of tomorrow. On average, 50 percent of contributions to UNICEF are restricted to a handful of crises. Flexible funding — donor support that is unearmarked to any specific country or program — helps UNICEF close gaps between identified needs and the resources required to meet them. It's how UNICEF stays nimble, able to direct resources strategically, wherever and whenever they are needed most, for maximum impact. Help UNICEF reach more children with urgently needed support. Please donate today. Right now, the lives of the most vulnerable children hang in the balance as conflicts and crises jeopardize the care and protection that they deserve. Dependable, uninterrupted and effective foreign aid is critical to the well-being of millions of children. Please contact your members of Congress and urge them to support ongoing U.S. investments in foreign assistance. This article is based on a report written by the UNICEF Humanitarian Funding Unit. Part of the Division of Private Fundraising and Partnerships (PFP), based in Geneva, HFU steers global efforts to maximize fundraising for humanitarian crises and sudden onset disasters.
Scottish Sun
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Who is Jonathan Ross' wife Jane Goldman & how many kids does she share with the Traitors star and presenter?
JANE Goldman is an award-winning script writer behind some of the most famous films in recent memory. The star's husband, Jonathan Ross, will be joining the cast of the Celebrity Traitors as he goes head-to-head with the UK's favourite celebrities. 3 Jane Goldman is the wife of TV presenter Johnathan Ross Credit: Getty Images 3 Jane shares three children with Johnathan including Honey (pictured) Credit: Getty Images Jane's incredible life Jane was born on June 11, 1970, and was raised in North London. Her father, Stuart, was Jewish and her mother, Amanda, was a devout buddhist. She studied at King Alfred School before moving to the US at the age of 15 to follow Boy George on tour. When she returned to the UK, she took a job as an entertainment reporter with the Daily Star and met Johnathan Ross. They married in 1988, when Jane was just 18-years-old. She launched a career as a screenwriter and often writes with fellow award-winning script writer Matthew Vaughhn. Jane co-wrote Kingsman: The Secret Service, X-Men: First Class, Kick-Ass, Stardust with Matthew and is also credited on Netflix's Rebecca and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Building a life with Johnathan Jane and Johnathan have been open about their marital troubles and split after 10 years of marriage, due to Jane's mental health. They later reconciled and Johnathan has said that their relationship has gone from strength to strength. On Loose Women, Jonathan said that he initially acted like a parental figure when they first began dating. Popular chat show axed from ITV's autumn schedules in as bosses reveal future He said: "I think we are much more of an equal partnership than we have ever been before in our lives. "When we first got together, she was very young. 'I wasn't that old but I was considerably older and she came straight from home with her parents. "And I think the relationship carried on, I was sort of a parent figure as well as a husband. "Now that we're both getting older, she has an incredible career of her own and I think she got a bit tired a few years ago of me making decisions without telling her which I would do." The pair have three children, with one of them following her parents into show-business. Honey Kinney, Jane and Johnathan's youngest daughter, is a plus-sized model, podcast host and body positivity campaigner. The pair have two other children named Harvey Kirby and Betty Kitten. 3 Johnathan will be entering the celebrity version of the Traitors Credit: Getty Images Jonathan has joined The Traitors Jonathan will be appearing on the BBC's hit reality series The Traitors in its special celebrity edition, which will air in the autumn. He will be joined by fellow broadcasters Kate Garraway, Clare Balding and Stephen Fry, as well as Olympian Tom Daley, Bridget Jones actress Celia Imrie and singer Paloma Faith. Comedians Alan Carr, Lucy Beaumont, Nick Mohammed, Niko Omilana and Joe Wilkinson have signed onto the show too, alongside Mark Bonnar, Charlotte Church, Cat Burns and Tameka Empson. Historian David Olusoga and rugby player Joe Marler are the final pair making up the cast of the star-studded show. Claudia Winkleman revealed that, although she would like to take part in the show herself, she feels she would be a terrible player. She said: "I would love to play that game. "I would not be very good at it but I would love to play." Her friend Mika insisted that she would be a great player, though she disagreed.
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Why Are We Fighting?
Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week's newsletter is a response to a recent essay in The Federalist that makes a conservative case against New Urbanism and its "assault" on property rights and the single-family zoning restrictions that protect them. Contradictory as it may seem, the argument that choice and property rights are best protected by regulations that limit choice and property rights is not uncommon in housing policy discussions. It's a byproduct of lots of varying ideologies and urban planning approaches trying to foist a particular vision on everyone else, all with partial success. The result is a lot of unnecessary arguments about the type of housing people actually want and the regulations necessary to ensure they don't voluntarily buy or rent something they don't want. Over at The Federalist yesterday, former first-term Trump administration officials Johnathan and Paige Bronitsky have a broadside attack on the "New Urbanist" plot to "bulldoze the suburban American dream" and the conservatives who've been hoodwinked into supporting it. There are "two faces" of this ideology, they write: On one end, you have high-density urbanism, where developers — in cahoots with machine politicians — cram as many people as possible into apartment blocks, eliminating cars and personal space under the guise of environmentalism and a sense of community. On the other, you have the faux-traditional, highly regulated enclaves of Seaside and Celebration, Florida, prohibitively expensive and ironically more artificial than the suburban developments they criticize. Despite their aesthetic differences, both forms of New Urbanism share a common goal: reengineering American life by discouraging homeownership. Conservatives, the authors continue, have been bamboozled into thinking this dystopia would be a positive improvement by an oddball collection of profit-hungry developers, leftists, and "crony capitalist" libertarians interested only in control and creating a permanent rentier class. Right-thinking right-wingers need to reject this "high-density, corporatist nightmare" in favor of "spacious, family-friendly suburbs where liberty thrives." You can read the whole thing here. There are plenty of critiques one could make of New Urbanism on free market and property rights grounds. It's a movement that does indeed have a highly particular vision for how communities should look that is highly critical of post-war suburban sprawl. They're more than willing to use regulation to set everything right. Yet, the authors of The Federalist essay can't decide if they want to criticize New Urbanism for constraining people's choices or for giving people choices beyond the standard post-war single-family neighborhood. The result is a contradictory tangle of critiques. The authors attack New Urbanists for discouraging homeownership. They also attack the New Urbanist–planned community of Seaside, which the Census Bureau reports has a 97 percent homeownership rate—well above Florida's overall homeownership rate of 67 percent. To be sure, the authors support affordable communities of single-family owner-occupiers, whereas overregulation in tiny Seaside (which covers less than half a census tract) has made it prohibitively expensive. One might say the same of many non–New Urbanist single-family-zoned neighborhoods of equal size across the country. We're told that New Urbanists are engaged in an "assault" on property rights. Through federal fair housing rules, they've also eroded "local control over zoning law" that happens to restrict people's property rights too. "Machine politicians" are trying to force everyone into family-unfriendly high-density housing. Instead, we need "policies that encourage more single-family homes." That would also seem to involve politicians putting their thumbs on the scales of how people live. Profit-seeking multifamily developers cynically pushed for the erosion of local zoning rules just to squeeze a buck. Do the builders of single-family homes operate their businesses as charities? New Urbanist–planned communities are allegedly secular wastelands bereft of houses of worship. That would seem to ignore the pious urbanist planned communities like Florida's Ave Maria. Standard single-family zoning rules, it should be said, are often not particularly friendly to churches trying to operate soup kitchens and cold-weather shelters. The list goes on. The Federalist essay is just one entry into an ongoing back-and-forth on the larger fight between free marketeers who support liberalizing zoning rules and zoning defenders who use the language of freedom and localism to support keeping those limits on property rights in place. These two factions were very much at war within the first Trump White House, when administration policy and rhetoric swung wildly between the pro- and anti-zoning poles. More broadly, the Federalist essay is part of a blinkered discourse that's deployed by suburban partisans and urbanist advocates of all political persuasions. Each side criticizes regulations that limit their preferred type of development and subsidies to development they consider second-best. (Typically, some weird constellation of partisan political foes and cynical capitalists are behind these nefarious regulations and subsidies.) Each side also either ignores, or outright advocates for, regulations that limit the type of housing they think is second-best and subsidizes their preferred option. The Bronitskys' essay is a good example of this hypocrisy being deployed in favor of the suburbs and standard zoning regulations. But their New Urbanist targets do this all the time too. New Urbanist "middle housing" reforms are pitched (correctly) as a way of expanding choice for buyers and renters. Often those reforms are paired with "McMansion bans" that restrict large single-family home development. Transit-oriented zoning can allow new apartments and shops near bus and train lines. The same zoning reforms can also ban new drive-thrus, gas stations, and low-density development. Odds are that in any decent-sized American city, you can find zoning districts that offend the sensibilities of both urbanists and suburbanists. With everyone trying to impose their prescriptive vision on society as a whole, everyone has some basis to claim that land-use regulations are threatening their preferred community and lifestyle. Truly, it does not need to be this way. Despite the Bronitskys' pot-shot at "doctrinaire libertarians"(a pot-shot plenty of New Urbanists might nod along to), a libertarian approach to land use would allow both sides of the land use wars to disarm. Free markets give people want they want at the price they're willing and able to pay. It's a setup that respects people's freedom while sorting out their preferences in the aggregate. Odds are free markets in housing would produce lots of single-family homes in low-density suburbs, lots of walkable communities full of middle housing that's missing no more, and lots of urban blocks where apartments and ground-floor retail go together like milk and coffee. None of these neighborhood types are bad things to want. None inherently conflict with each other. If one type of housing ends up predominating in this new free market in land use, so be it. By overregulating what people can build and where, we have put ourselves in a position of trying to reverse engineer people's housing preferences with white papers, charter documents, and confused, contentious opinion essays. It's exhausting and inefficient. There's a better way. Gothamist reports on the odd phenomenon of affordable apartments in New York City sitting empty for months. This isn't the result of landlords holding units off the market to drive up prices. Instead, it's the product of city regulations that put absurd limits on subsidized unit owners' ability to market to tenants. A zoning fight is getting personal in the community of Campton Hills, Illinois, where Village Trustee Janet Burson has been cited for operating a prohibited home-based massage business. The village's administrator says that Burson flipped him off when he confronted her about taking down language on her business website offering home-based appointments. Burson does not deny the accusation, telling the Daily Herald, "I do not deny I was uncouth. The ask was inappropriate. They had no business asking me to do anything with it." Portland, Oregon's citywide fourplex legalization is starting to take off. Michael Andersen of the Sightline Institute shared new data on Bluesky showing middle housing units enabled by the city's reform accounted for a quarter of new development last year. Donald Shoup, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles Luskin School of Public Affairs and popularizing crusader against the high cost of free parking, has died. Former Texas legislator and first-term Trump administration official Scott Turner has been confirmed as the next secretary for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Cambridge, Massachusetts, also voted to legalize four-story housing citywide. The Federal Emergency Management Agency halts federal grants for migrant housing in New York. The post Why Are We Fighting? appeared first on
