Quote:President Joe Biden responded to the news that Hersh Goldberg-Polin was one of the bodies that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had discovered in Gaza, and stated “Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.”
Biden issued a statement that it was “now confirmed that one of the hostages” killed by Hamas terrorists was Goldberg-Polin. Biden described Goldberg-Polin’s death as “tragic” and “reprehensible.”
“Earlier today, in a tunnel under the city of Rafah, Israeli forces recovered six bodies of hostages held by Hamas,” Biden said in a statement. “We have now confirmed that one of the hostages killed by these vicious Hamas terrorists was an American citizen, Hersh Goldberg-Polin.”
Biden added that he was “devasted and outraged.”
“Hersh was among the innocents brutally attacked while attending a music festival for peace in Israel on October 7,” Biden added. “He lost his arm helping friends and strangers during Hamas’ savage massacre. He had just turned 23. He planned to travel the world. I have gotten to know his parents, Jon and Rachel. They have been courageous, wise, and steadfast, even as they have endured the unimaginable. They have been relentless and irrepressible champions of their son and of all the hostages held in unconscionable conditions. I admire them and grieve with them more deeply than words can express.”
“I know all Americans tonight will have them in their prayers, just as Jill and I will,” Biden continued. “I have worked tirelessly to bring their beloved Hersh safely to them and am heartbroken by the news of his death. It is as tragic as it is reprehensible. Make no mistake. Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes. And we will keep working around the clock for a deal to secure the release of the remaining hostages.”
As Breitbart News previously reported:
Israel’s Army Radio announced Sunday morning local time that Goldberg-Polin had been identified as one of the dead. The immediate cause of death had not been identified. Army Radio also announced that the family of Israeli hostage Orio Danino, 25, who had been abducted after saving people from the music festival, had also been identified as one of the dead. So, too, had Eden Yerushalmi, 24, an Israeli woman who had spoken with her family before being abducted.
Hersh was one of the more than 250 people who were taken hostage after Hamas terrorists launched a land, sea, and air invasion of Israel, leaving 1,200 people murdered.
Goldberg-Polin and other people who had been attending the Supernova festival sought shelter in a roadside rocket shelter. While they were inside, Hamas terrorists were throwing grenades into the shelter, which resulted in the loss of Goldberg-Polin’s left arm from the elbow down.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin and her husband Jon Polin recently spoke at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago and spoke about how it was “not a political issue” to call for the hostages to be released.
Why do I get the impression that Hamas members are not shaking right now?
Supreme Leader of Los Zetas Released from US Prison
Quote:Speculation is running wild on both sides of the border following the release from prison of a man once known as the supreme leader of the Gulf Cartel and founder of Los Zetas. Some individuals were expecting him to return to his hometown and reclaim the reigns of his criminal organization. Others claimed he would stay in the U.S. under witness protection. The issue caused widespread speculation and rumors to spread like wildfire.
This week, Osiel Cardenas Guillen, the former top leader of the Gulf Cartel, was released from a U.S. prison, sparking widespread speculation about his future. According to a report from NBC, Cardenas Guillen is in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and is facing extradition to Mexico next week, where he has multiple pending criminal charges.
For several months leading up to his release, authorities in Mexico had been hearing rumors about his eventual return to Matamoros and how individuals from the Gulf Cartel were paving the way for him. Other individuals claimed that other leaders within the Gulf Cartel were moving to kill him upon his return to Mexico. Mexican news outlets ran various stories with conflicting versions about the drug lord’s release and potential return to power.
Cardenas became a highly feared figure following his rise to power in the late 1990s when he killed his way to the helm of the Gulf Cartel. Soon after, he consolidated his power by recruiting a group of former soldiers and police officers as his personal guard and hit squad. That group grew in power and became known as Los Zetas.
The U.S. Department of Justice indicted Cardenas on drug trafficking charges in 2000, but it wasn’t until 2003 that Mexican military forces arrested him in Matamoros following a fierce shootout. In 2007, Mexican authorities extradited Cardenas, and he had his initial hearing in Brownsville, where much of the case was kept under seal and out of public view. While Cardenas was facing multiple life sentences if convicted, he pleaded guilty to various charges and, in 2010, received a 25-year prison sentence and was ordered to pay a $50 million fine. While it is believed that he received credit for time served since his extradition, his release this week points to Cardenas having received various sentence reductions due to his cooperation with authorities.
Quote:A reported 10,000 hotel workers in several cities across America are on strike in a push for better wages and a reversal of staffing cuts.
The strike is happening over Labor Day weekend following contract talks with Marriott International, Hilton, and Hyatt, Reuters reported Sunday, citing the Unite Here union.
The outlet continued:
Unite Here, which represents workers in hotels, casinos, and airports across the United States and Canada, said thousands of workers at 25 hotels are on strike in some major travel destinations including San Francisco and San Diego in California, Hawaii’s capital city Honolulu, Boston, Seattle, and Greenwich, Connecticut, with workers from additional cities ready to join the walkout as the Labor Day holiday weekend continues.
The strike is taking place with the industry facing a 9% increase in Labor Day weekend domestic travel compared to last year, according to AAA booking data.
Images show one large group of workers carrying signs that read “Workers Need a Raise” and “Make Them Pay!”:
...
According to Hyatt’s lead of labor relations for the Americas, Michael D’Angelo, its hotels have contingency plans in place to deal with the strikes, the Associated Press (AP) reported Sunday.
He noted that, “We are disappointed that UNITE HERE has chosen to strike while Hyatt remains willing to negotiate.”
There are approximately 1.9 million people working in America’s hotel industry which is about 196,000 fewer than there were in early 2019, per Bureau of Labor Statistics, the AP article noted.
Quote:Enough fentanyl to kill 2.5 million Americans — as well as several pounds of methamphetamine and cocaine — was seized in a South Carolina drug investigation, the FBI announced Monday.
A multi-agency effort focusing on illegal drug distribution in Richland and Lexington Counties unearthed five kilograms (around 11 pounds) of fentanyl, 500 grams (1.1 pounds) of methamphetamine, and 800 grams (1.7 pounds) of cocaine, Special Agent in Charge Steve Jensen with FBI Columbia said:
While he did not name or specify the number of arrests, Jensen said the investigation spanned multiple years and that the fentanyl had the potential to kill 2.5 million people.
“Our work doesn’t end here. We will continue to investigate and hold offenders who are poisoning our communities with illegal drugs accountable,” the agent said in the video statement.
“We will not waver in our commitment to protect citizens of the United States.”
Quote:The California Assembly passed a bill that would ban voter identification requirements from being enacted at local government levels.
Senate Bill 1174, which passed in a 57-16 vote, would “prohibit a local government from enacting or enforcing any charter provision, ordinance, or regulation requiring a person to present identification for the purpose of voting or submitting a ballot at any polling place, voter center, or other location where ballots are cast or submitted, as specified.”
The bill was introduced by California State Sen. David Min (D) and co-sponsored by California state Sen. Josh Newman (D).
“We cannot have 100 different charter cities making up 100 different sets of voting rules, based on fringe conspiracy theories,” Min said in a statement, according to the Daily Pilot. “I have repeatedly told the Huntington Beach City Council members pushing this issue that if they were to produce any evidence of widespread voter fraud, I would lead efforts to change California’s voter eligibility rules. They have not produced any such evidence.”
California Assemblyman Bill Essayli ® reportedly attempted to include an amendment into the legislation that would have prevented illegal migrants from being able to vote in elections, according to the Center Square.
The bill’s passage comes after voters in Huntington Beach voted 53.4 percent in support of a ballot initiative that would require residents to show identification in order to vote in elections starting in 2026, according to Democracy Docket.
In April, California filed a lawsuit against Huntington Beach, and California Attorney General Rob Bonta noted that requiring people to show identification in order to vote was “blatantly and flatly illegal,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
“They have greatly overstated the authority they think they have,” Bonta said in a statement at the time. “They have willfully violated the law, they have brazenly violated the law…. They know exactly what they are doing, and they are doing it anyway.”
Quote:On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” House Speaker Emerita Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said that while she’s not familiar with the details of California’s legislation to allow illegal immigrants to get taxpayer assistance for buying homes, “making the American Dream of home ownership available to all people is something we have to do for people who are here now” and she wants to move illegal immigrants “to documented.” But ultimately, the issue is up to the states.
Host Bill Maher asked, “The California lawmakers just passed a law — it hasn’t been signed by Gov. Newsom (D) — but giving government assistance to undocumented immigrants to buy houses. That’s kind of a different place than the Democratic Party used to be on immigration, is it not? I’m not going to say that’s what the country’s going to do, but that’s certainly where California is.”
Pelosi responded, “Well, let me just say, immigration had always been a bipartisan issue.”
Maher cut in to say, “But not free housing.”
Pelosi responded, “Well, it’s not free housing, it’s the American Dream being available to more people.” After talking about past immigration statements from Republicans, Pelosi said, “California’s always in the lead, maybe others will follow that lead, but that’s up to those states. But we’re very blessed here with beautiful diversity of our –.”
Maher then cut in to follow up, “So, you’d vote for this law?”
Pelosi answered, “I’m not familiar with exactly what that is, but making the American Dream of home ownership available to all people is something we have to do for people who are here now –.”
Maher cut in to say “This is for the undocumented.”
Pelosi answered, “Well, what I would like to do is move them to documented.”
Pelosi kept speaking, but got drowned out by applause from the audience. Once it died down, she stated, “One of the best things that we can do for our economy is to pass comprehensive immigration reform, so that all of these people are participating more fully in our economy, contributing to it, contributing to Social Security, contributing in every way to it. So, the attitude that we have in California of openness is something we share, whether that translates into particular policy one place or another is up to that region.”
Quote:An imam in upstate New York reportedly told supporters to “take out” Columbia University assistant professor Shai Davidai, who has led counter-demonstrators against pro-Palestinian protests, riots, and encampments.
The New York Post reported Saturday:
Vassar-educated, Utica-based imam Tom Facchine made the plea about business school professor Shai Davidai during an Aug. 20 webinar called “Islamic Political Activism” with various Columbia student groups which promoted and broadcast it.
“That Shai Davidai guy: How do we get him in trouble? How do we create a situation in which he’s in jeopardy?” Facchine, 35, asked. “If you’re able to take out somebody like that and make an example, that might shut up a hundred more.”
The Jersey-born Facchine left Christianity to become atheist, found Marx in college and converted to Islam in 2010.
Columbia has reportedly decided not to take further actions to protect Davidai.
As Breitbart News reported earlier this year, Davidai was barred from campus, ostensibly for his own safety, after administrators allowed a pro-Palestinian encampment to become entrenched. The encampment ultimately ended with activists violently occupying a university building before being removed by police — though many charges were later dropped.
Columbia president Minouche Shafik resigned last month, after her perceived mismanagement of the crisis, which threatens to resume this fall.
Quote:Rapper Fatman Scoop, whose real name was Isaac Freeman, died at 53 after collapsing at a concert in Hamden, Connecticut, on Friday.
Video footage that TMZ obtained of the incident, which took place at Town Center Park, shows Fatman Scoop saying, “If you came to party, make some noise” before collapsing onstage. The music then stops, and the crowd falls silent.
Multiple people then rush to the stage to administer CPR to Fatman Scoop. While this transpired, a man onstage appeared to try to distract the crowd by attempting to keep the show going.
“I just wanna say this, Hamden, where y’all at, make some noise for me,” the man said, which failed to elicit an enthusiastic reaction from the crowd.
“How y’all feeling out there?” the individual added as people behind him performed chest compressions on the “Be Faithful” rapper.
A concertgoer then shouted, “We wanna know what happened to Fatman Scoop!”
“They doing CPR? Oh my God,” another concertgoer proclaimed.
Shortly after that, the “All Night Long” rapper was seen being rushed to a local hospital in a stretcher while an emotionally distraught woman declared, “Lord, touch him. Please, Father God! Touch him, Lord, please, Lord. Please, touch him, Father God. Oh my God!”
Authorities told TMZ they were dispatched for a medical emergency at 8:33 p.m.
This was followed up with multiple reports that the rapper had died.
“Fatman Scoop has died after suffering a medical emergency at a show in Connecticut, according to his tour manager,” the radio station KBXX 97.9 The Box revealed in a Facebook post.
The radio station added that Fatman Scoop “was rushed to the hospital after collapsing during a performance. The incident occurred at The Green and Gold Party summer concert at Town Center Park in Hamden, Connecticut.”
“CPR was administered on-site during the medical emergency before he was taken to the hospital,” KBXX 97.9 The Box added. “Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett has asked the public to ‘please keep him in your thoughts and prayers.'”
Fatman Scoop has died after suffering a medical emergency at a show in Connecticut, according to his tour manager.On…
Posted by KBXX 97.9 The Box on Saturday, August 31, 2024
Quote:Police arrested a 32-year-old woman after six people were hurt in a knife attack on a bus headed to a festival in western Germany. Authorities said Saturday that there was no evidence of a political or religious motive.
Three of those attacked are in life-threatening condition, police said on Friday evening.
The knife attack took place in Siegen, east of Cologne. The bus was on its way to a local festival in the town and at least another 40 people were on board when the attack took place at about 7:40 p.m.
Police and prosecutors said the six people wounded were aged between 16 and 30 and all were from the region. By Saturday morning, three of them had left the hospital after outpatient treatment.
Local authorities planned to go ahead with the festival.
The stabbing in Siegen happened a week after a knife attack in Solingen, a city in the same state of North Rhine-Westphalia, in which a suspected Islamic extremist from Syria who had avoided being deported is accused of killing three people and wounding another eight.
The Solingen attack prompted the governing coalition to draw up plans to tighten knife laws and make deportations easier.
Police said the woman arrested in Siegen was a German citizen with no immigrant roots.
Quote:Two people who were critically injured in attacks while attending London’s Notting Hill Carnival earlier this week have died, police said Saturday.
The Metropolitan Police force said 32-year-old Cher Maximen died early Saturday after being stabbed in the street on Aug. 25. She had been visiting the carnival, billed as Europe’s biggest street party, with her child, who was not hurt.
A 20-year-old local man was arrested and charged with attempted murder, and is now likely to face a murder charge.
Police also announced the death of Mussie Imnetu, 41, who was found unconscious in a west London street with a head injury on Monday night. The chef had been visiting Britain from his home in Dubai.
A 31-year-old London man has been charged with causing grievous bodily harm, and police said the charge would be reviewed after Imnetu’s death.
More than 1 million people each year attend the carnival, a two-day celebration of Afro-Caribbean culture that takes place on the streets of the Notting Hill neighborhood in west London.
Quote:In a Black Lives Matter-inspired move, a British university has cancelled the term “Anglo-Saxon” from its curriculum.
The University of Nottingham has removed “Algo-Saxon” from courses on history and literature to push back against “nationalist narratives”.
According to The Telegraph, a masters-level course, Viking and Anglo-Saxon Studies, has been renamed as Viking and Early Medieval English Studies.
Another module, a literature course originally named “A Tale of Seven Kingdoms: Anglo-Saxon and Viking-Age England from Bede to Alfred the Great” has been recast as “Early Mediaeval England from Bede to Alfred the Great”.
While the thrust of the “decolonise the curriculum” agenda — which the university pledged to do amid the Black Lives Matter movement — has typically focussed on attacking British history and identity, the university reportedly said that it will seek to “problematize the term ‘Viking’” as well.
Nottingham academics have also been seeking to dismantle “essentialist ideas” about nationality, namely the very concept of a distinct English identity which has unique and fundamental characteristics.
The school is not alone in attacking the history of the Anglo-Saxons, with the University of Cambridge now teaching students that Anglo-Saxons never actually existed as a distinct ethnic group.
The move, ironically made by Cambridge’s leading Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC) studies, was reportedly done in order to promote “anti-racist” ideology.
“One concern has been to address recent concerns over use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and its perceived connection to ethnic/racial English identity,” the department is reported as saying.
Meanwhile, earlier this year, Cambridge University Press academic publication, the Anglo-Saxon England Journal, said that it would be removing Anglo-Saxon from its name to better represent the “international, interdisciplinary and rapidly evolving nature of research in this field”.
Quote:The British taxpayer is footing the bill for a record number of out-of-work migrants, who are reportedly costing the government up to £8.5 billion per year.
A record 1,689,000 foreigners are currently unemployed or otherwise “economically inactive” in the UK, according to analysis of government figures by the Centre for Immigration Control. The think tank noted that the current level is the highest in British history, surpassing the previous high in 2012 of 1,628,000.
Centre for Migration Control researchers calculated that support for unemployed immigrants could cost the taxpayer as much as £8.5 million per year. However, this estimate did not include the costs of asylum seekers and foreign students to the state, meaning the total financial drain of mass migration policies is likely much higher.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Robert Bates, Centre for Migration Control research director, said: “For all the talk of a fiscal ‘black hole’, the Labour Government seem to be missing the glaringly obvious fact that mass migration is causing economic pandemonium.
“There is no reason for us to continue handing out so many long-term visas when we are currently having to bail out over a million migrants who are already in Britain but not working. This is the very definition of a Ponzi scheme, and we will only compound the problem if we do not change course soon.’
“Our elderly are facing a potentially deadly winter as Keir Starmer cancels the lifeline of the winter fuel allowance, but at the same time he is doing nothing to clamp down on workless migrants.”
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage added: “The economic arguments for mass migration are over.”
Germany: Anti-Mass Migration Policies Favored by People
Quote:Populist anti-mass migration parties made significant gains in state elections in Germany on Sunday, with the right-wing Alternative for Germany projected to have secured a resounding victory in Thuringia.
Exit polls for the east German state of Thuringia have put the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) out on top, with a projected 30.5 per cent of the vote, beating out the neo-liberal centrist Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party formerly led by Chancellor Angela Merkel at 24.5 per cent.
Should the exit polls prove true, it would mark the first time that the AfD was the winner in a state election in Germany.
Separately, in the state of Saxony, the AfD is in a tight race for the top with the CDU, with exit polls projecting the centrist party to have won 31.5 per cent of the vote, compared to 30 per cent for the AfD, broadcaster DW reports.
However, given the slim divide between the two parties, it is still possible that the populist party may yet squeak out a victory in Saxony as well.
Hailing the success of her party, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel said that her party should be involved in the state governments, pushing back against reported plans by other parties to band together to block the populists from entering government.
“Under normal circumstances, in order to stick to the customs in this country, the strongest party is exploring, and that is the AfD,” Weidel said referring to Thuringia. “The voters want the AfD to be involved in a government. We have 30 per cent of the voters in both federal states, and without us, a stable government is no longer possible.”
Quote:Social media influencers, reality stars and TV personalities were among the guests as the Norwegian king’s eldest child, Princess Märtha Louise, married an American self-professed shaman in a wedding ceremony at the culmination of three days of festivities
A Norwegian princess marries an American self-styled shaman in front of a star-studded audienceBy JARI TANNERAssociated PressThe Associated PressHELSINKI
HELSINKI (AP) — Social media influencers, reality stars and TV personalities were among the guests as the Norwegian king’s eldest child, Princess Märtha Louise, married an American self-professed shaman on Saturday in a wedding ceremony following three days of festivities.
The 52-year-old Märtha Louise and Durek Verrett, who claims to be a sixth-generation shaman from California, tied the knot in the picturesque small town of Geiranger, one of Norway’s major tourist attractions located on a fjord with stunning views.
Following festivities that started on Thursday, the actual wedding ceremony took place in a large white tent set up on a lush lawn. Guests told media outlets that Norwegian and U.S. artists performed at the event along with a gospel choir and a singer representing Norway’s indigenous Sámi people.
“It was fantastic! It was Hollywood meets Geiranger,” Norwegian TV personality Harald Rønneberg described the colorful ceremony to public broadcaster NRK. “It was gospel and love. We laughed, we clapped, and we were touched. It was absolutely beautiful.”
The couple has sold the wedding photo rights to British celebrity magazine Hello! and the film rights to Netflix. The deals prompted protests from Norwegian media, which say the arrangement goes against local practices. The couple have often lashed out against the press while promoting themselves on social media.
The 87-year-old King Harald, who has been in fragile health the past few years, attended his daughter’s wedding together with Queen Sonja and other member of the Norwegian royal house. Crown Princess Victoria and her husband Prince Daniel represented the Swedish royal house together with her brother, Prince Carl Philip, and his wife Princess Sofia. No other European royals attended the wedding.
The wedding comes amid widespread criticism of the couple’s actions and waning support for the Norwegian royals, who have also been plagued by negative reports about an unruly family member who faces preliminary domestic violence charges.
Märtha Louise and Verrett, 49, have attracted headlines with their alternative beliefs. She is fourth in line to the Norwegian throne but said in 2022 that she’ll no longer officially represent the Norwegian royal house.
The princess — she has retained the title — has said she can talk with angels, while Verrett claims that he communicates with a broad range of spirits and has a medallion which helps ward off spells and cure diseases.
They became engaged in 2022. Following their marriage, Verrett will not have a royal title or official duties.
MIDDLE EAST
Hamas Killed 6 Hostages Before IDF Could Rescue Them
Quote:The six Israeli hostages whose bodies were found in a Hamas tunnel underneath Gaza Saturday had been shot in the head in the last 48 hours, according to autopsy reports Sunday.
As Breitbart News reported, the Israeli military identified the hostages Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, American-Israeli Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Master Sergeant Ori Danino
Hamas murdered the hostages in the belief that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers were closing in. According to IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the soldiers did not know the hostages’ exact location but had rescued one hostage nearby last week and were fighting above ground at the location.
“According to our initial assessment, they were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists shortly before we reached them,” Hagari said Sunday morning.
Ynetnews.com reported:
All six hostages whose bodies were discovered and recovered from Gaza on Sunday were found with gunshot wounds to their head and other areas, their autopsies showed.
According to the post-mortem, they were executed no more than 48 hours before being found and signs of neglect in captivity were found on their bodies.
Except for one of the hostages, who showed signs of being bound, no evidence of torture was found. However, the condition of their bodies indicated systematic neglect, including a lack of hygiene over a long period. Additionally, indications were present of previous injuries sustained during their abduction, which had been treated over time.
Israel’s Army Radio noted that this is not the first time during the war that Palestinian terrorists have murdered Israeli hostages to prevent their rescue. Notably, in the infamous 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, terrorists murdered Israeli athletes they had taken hostage as West German police attempted a rescue.
Separately, on Sunday, three Israeli police officers were murdered near a checkpoint in the West Bank region of Judea in a drive-by shooting by a Palestinian terrorist.
Quote:Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, the American-Israeli hostage who lost his left hand when being abducted by Hamas from the Nova music festival on October 7, has been found dead in Gaza by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers.
Goldberg-Polin was identified after news broke Saturday that the IDF had discovered a number of unidentified bodies in Gaza. Amid rumors spreading throughout Israel on social media, the IDF asked the public to wait before it had identified the bodies.
In a statement, the IDF said:
The IDF located a number of bodies during combat in the Gaza Strip. At this time, the troops are still operating in the area and are carrying out a process to extract and identify the bodies that will last several hours. We ask to refrain from spreading rumors.
Israel’s Army Radio announced Sunday morning local time that Goldberg-Polin had been identified as one of the dead. The immediate cause of death had not been identified.
Army Radio also announced that the family of Israeli hostage Ori Danino, 25, who had been abducted after saving people from the music festival, had also been identified as one of the dead. So, too, had Eden Yerushalmi, 24, an Israeli woman who had spoken with her family before being abducted from the festival.
Six bodies were found; the other three have not yet been identified as of the time of publication of this article.
Update: In a statement, the IDF and the Israel Security Agency (ISA) declared:
Yesterday (Saturday), the IDF and ISA located and recovered the bodies of the hostages Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Master Sergeant Ori Danino, from an underground tunnel in the Rafah area in the Gaza Strip and returned them to Israeli territory.
They were all taken hostage on October 7th and were murdered by the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip.
Following an identification procedure carried out by the National Institute of Forensic Medicine, the Israel Police, and the IDF Military Rabbinate, the IDF Manpower Directorate’s Hostage team, which is responsible for accompanying the families of the hostages, notified their families. The IDF and ISA send their heartfelt condolences to the families.
The IDF and Israeli security forces are operating with all means to bring home all the hostages as fast as possible.
The voices of Army Radio announcers were heavy and near tears, despite the near-routine nature of military news.
“Our hearts are broken,” the Goldberg-Polin family said, thanking the public for their support and asking for privacy.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:A former top aide to New York Govs. Andrew Cuomo (D) and Kathy Hochul (D) used her high-ranking position in the state’s government to peddle influence for China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) while profiting millions in the process, an unsealed federal indictment alleges.
On Tuesday, federal prosecutors unsealed the indictment against 41-year-old Linda Sun, born in China and a naturalized American citizen, and her husband, 40-year-old Chris Hu. The indictment charges the couple with operating a money laundering and bank fraud scheme thanks in part to Sun’s allegedly acting as an agent of influence for China while working in Cuomo and Hochul’s administrations.
The couple were arrested and arraigned in federal court in Brooklyn on Tuesday.
The 64-page indictment is far-reaching, detailing Sun’s alleged work as an agent for China and her husband’s subsequent illegal business dealings in China. In particular, the indictment lays out how Sun allegedly acted on behalf of the CCP while working for Cuomo, who is called “Politician-1,” and Hochul, who is called “Politician-2.” The indictment states:
The defendant LINDA SUN acted at the order, direction, or request of representatives of the [People’s Republic of China (PRC)] government and the CCP to engage in political activities intended to influence the public, including the [New York State (NYS)] government, with respect to the political or public interests of the PRC government and the CCP.
Sun, in various instances, allegedly prevented Cuomo and Hochul from working, engaging, and speaking with Taiwanese officials. At the same time, Sun allegedly had Cuomo and Hochul make seemingly pro-China statements to appease CCP officials.
During the Chinese coronavirus pandemic in April 2020, for example, the Taiwanese government donated 200,000 masks to New York. When Taiwanese officials pressed why then-Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office had not made any public announcement about the donation, Sun allegedly phoned her contact in the CCP to make them aware that Hochul would be only privately calling to thank such Taiwanese officials for the donation.
“Taipei economic and cultural office donated 200,000 surgical masks. No formal acknowledgment but I will be arranging for [Politician-2] to call their office to thank them. Just wanted to update you,” Sun allegedly wrote to her CCP contact.
That same month, Sun’s CCP contact told her that various China-based organizations would be donating about 1,000 ventilators to New York’s hospital association amid the pandemic. Sun, the indictment alleges, told her CCP contact that she would have then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo call him to thank him for the donation and that she would have him thank China publicly for the donation.
Quote:The Biden-Harris administration said Tuesday that it opposed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to hold onto the Gaza-Egypt border — known as the Philadelphi Corridor — to ensure weapons cannot be smuggled into Gaza.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a briefing with reporters on Tuesday that the U.S. opposed any long-term Israeli presence in Gaza. He also said that Israel had agreed to a U.S. “bridging” proposal last month that would have required the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to withdraw from “densely populated areas,” which Miller said “includes the Philadelphi Corridor.”
From the State Department transcript:
We’ve made very clear what we believe about the possibility of an ongoing Israeli presence in Gaza, and that’s that we are opposed to it.
I will also say that in the bridging proposal that we put forward, that the Government of Israel agreed to, it did include the removal of the IDF from densely populated areas. That includes the Philadelphi Corridor. Now, there – as I said, there are a number of details that require further negotiation to conclude how the parties will live up to their commitments under the agreement. I’m not going to negotiate on those in public, but that’s what we continue to discuss with the parties.
It remains unclear whether Israel agreed to withdraw from some of the Phildelphi Corridor, or all of it.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a length presentation on Monday about why he believed Israel needed to hold onto the Philadelphi corridor to prevent a resurgence of Hamas.
Israeli opposition figures delivered rebuttals on Tuesday in which they largely accepted his argument, but said that Israel could return to the Philadelphi Corridor after withdrawing from it, and questioned his conduct of the war and hostage negotiations generally.
Some of Netanyahu’s critics say that his stance on the Philadelphi Corridor provoked Hamas to murder six hostages last week, though evidence suggests Hamas was primarily motivated by the desire to prevent the hostages’ rescue.
Hamas has accused Israel of changing its demands for a hostage deal but it has never accepted any deal on the table.
Quote:The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) charged Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar with terrorism on Tuesday, together with six other members of the terrorist organization — nearly 11 months after the Hamas attack on Israel on of October 7.
Three of the terrorists listed in the criminal complaint are already dead, having been killed by Israel. The dead include former Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh, Mohammad Al-Masri (also known as Mohammed Deif), and Marwan Issa. The living ones include Sinwar, Hamas external chief Khaled Meshaal, and foreign relations head Ali Baraka.
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The DOJ said in a press release:
The Justice Department announced today the unsealing of terrorism, murder conspiracy, and sanctions-evasion charges against six senior leaders of Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization. The charges relate to the defendants’ central roles in planning, supporting, and perpetrating the terrorist atrocities that Hamas committed in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 (the October 7 Hamas Massacres), involving the murders and kidnappings of countless innocent civilians, including American citizens, which was the culmination of Hamas’s decades-long campaign of terrorism and violence against Israel and its allies, including American citizens. The defendants are either deceased or remain at large.
“The Justice Department has charged Yahya Sinwar and other senior leaders of Hamas for financing, directing, and overseeing a decades-long campaign to murder American citizens and endanger the national security of the United States,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “On October 7th, Hamas terrorists, led by these defendants, murdered nearly 1200 people, including over 40 Americans, and kidnapped hundreds of civilians. This weekend, we learned that Hamas murdered an additional six people they had kidnapped and held captive for nearly a year, including Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23 year old Israeli American. We are investigating Hersh’s murder, and each and every one of Hamas’ brutal murders of Americans, as an act of terrorism. The charges unsealed today are just one part of our effort to target every aspect of Hamas’ operations. These actions will not be our last.”
Quote:United States authorities seized a $13 million luxury plane used by Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro on Monday after authorities determined that its purchase violated U.S. sanctions imposed on the rogue regime.
The aircraft, identified as a Dassault Falcon 900EX bearing tail number T7-ESPRT, was seized in the Dominican Republic and flown to an air base in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The plane reportedly flew to the Dominican Republic earlier this year for maintenance, and remained there until it was seized.
The U.S. Department of Justice said in a press statement that an investigation determined that individuals affiliated with the Maduro regime allegedly used a Caribbean-based shell company to conceal the purchase of the aircraft from a Florida-based company sometime between late 2022 and early 2023.
The aircraft, according to the statement, was illegally exported from the United States to Venezuela through the Caribbean in April 2023. Since May 2023, the plane was used by the socialist regime to transport Maduro and members of his socialist regime. The plane flew “almost exclusively” to and from a military base in Venezuela.
“This morning, the Justice Department seized an aircraft we allege was illegally purchased for $13 million through a shell company and smuggled out of the United States for use by Nicolás Maduro and his cronies,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said.
“The Department will continue to pursue those who violate our sanctions and export controls to prevent them from using American resources to undermine the national security of the United States,” said Garland.
The United States, during the administration of former President Donald Trump, issued an Executive Order in August 2019 that prohibits U.S. persons from engaging in transactions with persons who “have acted or purported to act directly or indirectly” on behalf of the Maduro regime.
“Let this seizure send a clear message: aircraft illegally acquired from the United States for the benefit of sanctioned Venezuelan officials cannot just fly off into the sunset,” Dept. of Commerce Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement Matthew Axelrod said. “It doesn’t matter how fancy the private jet or how powerful the officials – we will work relentlessly with our partners here and across the globe to identify and return any aircraft illegally smuggled outside of the United States.”
In addition to transporting Maduro and senior regime officials in the past, the plane was reportedly used by the Maduro regime in December 2023 to fly a group of unjustly imprisoned Americans to Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to be exchanged for Maduro’s top money launderer and key financial brain Alex Saab, who was released by the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden as part of a prisoner swap deal with the Venezuelan socialist dictator.
The White House claimed shortly after the exchange that Saab’s release was part of the Biden administration’s strategy to curb the flow of Venezuelan migrants that continue to enter the United States.
Dominican President Luis Abinader and Foreign Minister Roberto Álvarez held a press conference on Monday, where they clarified that the now seized Maduro regime-owned aircraft was not registered under Maduro nor the Venezuelan government’s name,
“We must point out that this airplane was not in the name of the Venezuelan government; it was in the name of a private individual,” President Abinader said, pointing out that some 40 airplanes are presently receiving maintenance in the country.
Foreign Minister Álvarez said that the aircraft was retained in May by the Public Prosecutor’s Office at the request of U.S. authorities as part of a criminal investigation process, leading to its seizure on Monday.
Quote:An anti-Israel, pro-terror march in Manhattan on Labor Day brought 5,000 demonstrators into the street, chanting radical slogans, setting off smoke bombs, and overwhelming police who tried to control the illegal demonstration.
The Post added that some New York Police Department (NYPD) officers tried to stop the march, but failed.
The protest was a contrast to the vigil the day before by pro-Israel demonstrators, who had gathered to show solidarity with Israel after Hamas murdered six hostages, including U.S. citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin.
The New York Post reported:
A massive mob of rowdy anti-Israeli protesters — including some proudly waving terrorist flags — stormed through the Big Apple on Labor Day, lighting flares and setting off smoke bombs as they marched toward the heart of the city.
The unruly demonstrators, who police sources said may have reached as many as 5,000, gathered at Union Square in Manhattan in the early afternoon and began their raucous march to Washington Square Park.
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The crowd held Palestinian, Syrian, Iranian and Hezbollah flags, chanting “Free Palestine!” and, “Resistance is justified when people are occupied.” Hezbollah is a Lebanese terror group that has been fighting with the Palestinians against Israel in the Gaza war.
In contrast, a pro-Israel vigil on Sunday had been peaceful, with American and Israeli flags prominently displayed.
The Times of Israel noted:
Some 2,000 people gathered at Columbus Circle in New York on a hot and humid night Sunday for a vigil mourning the six Israeli hostages whose bodies were found in Gaza over the weekend, an impromptu gathering of song, prayer and tears about 24 hours after the news of the captives’ death sent Israel and the Jewish world reeling.
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The crowd waved American and Israeli flags, some of them also featuring the yellow ribbon that symbolizes advocacy for the hostages. Some wore other symbols of the fight for the hostages, such as dog tags or shirts reading “Bring them home now.”
Hamas terrorists shot the six hostages in the head late last week before Israeli soldiers could rescue them. There has been silence from pro-Palestinian groups thus far in condemning what was a brutal, cold-blooded mass murder.
Quote:Pro-Palestinian protesters returned to Columbia University on Tuesday for the start of classes — picketing, calling on students to boycott their classes, and even vandalizing the Alma Mater statue at the center of the New York campus.
The Associated Press reported:
Someone splattered red paint Tuesday on a statue in front of the Low Memorial Library. Outside the gates of the university, a small group of protesters marched on a picket line and urged arriving students and faculty to join them rather than go to class.
“As long as Columbia continues to invest and to benefit from Israeli apartheid, the students will continue to resist,” Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student who represented campus protesters in negotiations with the university, told The Associated Press last week ahead of the start of classes. “Not only protests and encampments, the limit is the sky.”
The vandalism was celebrated by the national parent organization of Students for Justice in Palestine.
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House Republicans, who have led inquiries into antisemitism on college campuses, commented on the renewal of Columbia’s protests.
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Last week, a Columbia task force on antisemitism found that the university had failed to stop antisemitism on campus.
Columbia president Minouche Shafik resigned last month after failing to contain last semester’s protests, which ended with the violent takeover of a university building by anti-Israel rioters.
Quote:Former President Donald Trump told computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman that he would “be inclined” to release the client list of disgraced financier and convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein if reelected president.
“Why do you think so many smart, powerful people allowed him to get so close?” Fridman asked President Trump during Tuesday’s episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast.
“He was a good salesman,” Trump replied. “He had some nice assets that he’d throw around like islands, but a lot of big people went to that island. But fortunately, I was not one of them.”
Fridman noted, “It’s just very strange for a lot of people that the list of clients that went to the island has not been made public,” to which Trump replied, “Yeah, it’s very interesting isn’t it? Probably will be, by the way.”
“So if you are able to, you’ll be–” Fridman said, to which President Trump replied, “I’d certainly take a look at it.”
Trump added that the files on President John F. Kennedy are “Interesting, because it’s so many years ago.”
“You know, they do that for danger too, because you know, it endangers certain people,” the 45th president said. “So Kennedy is very different from the Epstein thing.”
“But yeah, I’d be inclined to do the Epstein — I’d have no problem with it,” President Trump added, to which Fridman replied, “That’s great to hear.”
The podcaster then asked President Trump, “What gives you strength when you’re getting attacked? You are one of the most attacked people in the world.”
“I think you can’t care that much,” Trump said. “I know people that care so much about everything, like what people are saying. You can’t care too much because you end up choking.”
Quote:Hundreds of homes in the coastal Los Angeles suburb of Rancho Palos Verdes have lost power due to a slow landslide that has resulted in several houses being deemed unsafe for occupancy.
NBC Los Angeles reported:
Power was shut off to an additional 105 homes Monday night due to accelerating landslides in a Rancho Palos Verdes neighborhood.
The latest round of shutoffs occurred at 7 p.m. Monday in the Seaview area of the Los Angeles County seaside community overlooking the Pacific. On Sunday, power was shut off in 140 homes in the Portuguese Bend area. Those residents also remain under an evacuation warning.
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Land movement in Ranchos Palos Verdes has increased across 680 acres following rains in spring 2023. The accelerating slides have buckled roads and damaged homes and utilities.
On Tuesday afternoon, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) declared a state of emergency in the community.
Last year, ten local homes fell into a local canyon, and residents of some homes were evacuated after being given just 20 minutes’ notice.
Illinois: Judge Says Concealed Carry Ban Violates 2nd Amendment
Quote:A U.S. District Judge ruled Friday that Illinois’ ban prohibiting concealed carry for self-defense on public transportation violates the Second Amendment.
The judge, Ian D. Johnston, issued his opinion in Schoenthal v. Raoul.
The plaintiffs in the case, Benjamin Schoenthal, Mark Wroblewski, Joseph Vesel, and Douglas Winston, all claimed the ban violated the Second Amendment.
Schoenthal, Wrogblewski, Vesel, and Winston’s case was supported by the Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition.
Judge Johnston noted:
In Illinois, openly carrying firearms is unlawful. Under the Firearm Concealed Carry Act, an individual with a concealed-carry license may generally carry a concealed handgun in public….This general permission, however, does not extend to a list of prohibited areas, including public transportation.
He then pointed to Bruen (2022), noting that it set forward a framework by which gun controls must be analyzed and tested.
Johnston pointed to opinions by Kimberly Foxx, State’s Attorney of Cook County, who argued in support of the ban. He then noted that “Finally, and decisively, whatever is true elsewhere in the law, Ms. Foxx’s proposed framework contradicts Bruen, which rejects the relevance of place to the threshold question of whether certain conduct is covered by the Second Amendment.”
He ultimately ruled that “the Firearm Concealed Carry Act’s ban on carrying concealed firearms on public transportation, as defined in the statute…violates the Second Amendment,” as applied to the plaintiffs.
Second Amendment Foundation founder and executive vice president Alan Gottlieb commented on the ruling, calling it a “significant victory” in which “the court recognized Cook County Attorney Foxx’s argument that the ban was legal because Illinois is acting as a property owner was ‘breathtaking, jaw dropping and eyepopping,’ and that wasn’t a compliment. It demonstrates how far government will reach in an attempt to justify its effort to restrict Second Amendment rights.”
Quote:Today, September 2nd, is a historic day. It is the first time ever that an Islamic cleric will have to stand trial for issuing an assassination fatwa.
In a few weeks, it will be 20 years since policemen wearing bulletproof vests and carrying machine guns arrived at my home. They gave me ten minutes to pack, pushed me into an armoured car and drove me off to an unknown destination. The evening of November 4, 2004, was the last time that my wife and I were in our house. Since that moment, we have been forced to live in various safe houses. We have lost our freedom and privacy. Everywhere I go, I am constantly surrounded by bodyguards.
The same thing happened on that ominous evening to my colleague, fellow member of the Dutch Parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fugitive from Islamic Somalia. We had both been fierce critics of Islam and the Islamization of our country, the Netherlands. As a result of this, Islamic death threats or fatwas ordering the Islamic faithful to kill us had been issued.
Since then, Ayaan has left Dutch politics and emigrated to the United States. I stayed and founded my own party, the Party for Freedom (PVV), which is currently the largest party in the Netherlands and the largest party in the ruling government coalition.
I have always been a firm defender of freedom of speech. It is the bedrock of a free society and a functioning democracy. I will never be silenced. Fatwas, death threats, being on the death list of the Taliban and ISIS, nothing will ever stop me from telling the inconvenient truth.
I realize, however, that the fatwas and death threats against me – rare is the day that I do not receive one in my mailbox – are not just intended to silence me, but also to intimidate everyone else not to be as ‘reckless’ as me in voicing their opinion.
Fatwas are a direct assault on freedom of speech. The Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini has never been taken to court for his 1989 fatwa condemning the British author Salman Rushdie to death, but he should have been.
Today, in Amsterdam, the court case begins against two Pakistani citizens, Muhammed Ashraf Asif Jalali (55) and Saad Hussain Rizvi (29). Although the proceedings will be held in their absence, the trial is hugely significant. Not just for me, the victim, but also for the defence of the freedom of speech of every Dutchman and citizen of the free West.
In May 2015, I was present at a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, where cartoons of the Islamic prophet Muhammed were judged. Islam forbids the depiction of its prophet, but there is no reason why this prohibition should apply to non-Muslims.
The contest in Garland was won by the American illustrator Bosch Fawstin, a former Muslim, for a picture of Muhammed saying “You can’t draw me!” and the artist replying “That’s why I draw you.” As it happened, two Islamic terrorists attacked the Garland cartoon exhibition with semi-automatic rifles and handguns but were shot by police officers before they could cause much havoc, apart from wounding a guard.
Quote:The left-wing Labour Party government in Britain announced Monday that it will be suspending dozens of arms export licences to Israel over concerns of UK weaponry being used to violate human rights in Gaza.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy told the House of Commons that the British government will be suspending 30 of its 350 arms export licences to Israel, including UK-made components used in military drones, helicopters, and aircraft, including fighter jets used by the Israelis.
The move comes after months of protests by left-wing activists and a two-month review conducted by the Foreign Office, The Guardian reports. While the review did not find that British arms exports had contributed to destruction in Gaza, the government found that there was a “clear risk” that they could be used in violations of international humanitarian laws.
Announcing the move, Foreign Secretary Lammy told Parliament: “Facing a conflict such as this, it is this Government’s legal duty to review export licences.
“It is with regret that I inform the House today the assessment I have received leaves me unable to conclude anything other than that for certain UK arms exports to Israel, there does exist a clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”
Lammy claimed, however, that the move to cut around 10 per cent of arms licences to Israel, did not represent an “arms embargo” to the Jewish state.
The move comes in the aftermath of the discovery of the bodies of six dead hostages in a Gaza tunnel over the weekend. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) claimed that the hostages, who were taken captive by Hamas terrorists during the October 7th attacks on Israel, were killed by Hamas as Israeli forces were closing in on their position so as to prevent their rescue.
Quote:Ballistic missiles struck a military academy and a nearby hospital in Ukraine, one of the deadliest single attacks by Russian forces against a Ukrainian city since the invasion started again two and a half years ago.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed his nation on Tuesday, stating educational buildings at the Poltava Military Institute of Communications and a hospital were hit by missiles, with one university building being “partially destroyed”. People were trapped inside the rubble, he said, and at the time of his statement that 41 people were known killed, and 180 injured. Later, Ukraine revised the death count to 47 and 206 wounded.
UPDATE 1610 BST — Death toll rises again
The death roll has risen again to 49, and 219 injured. The Ukrainian government has also denied the claims made on local social media that the strike hit a parade of military cadets. The Defence Ministry said, per the BBC: “teaching was in progress at the institution… There was no parade or any other event at the time of the airstrike.”
The strike is the deadliest of the year, according to Reuters.
The original story continues below
According to Ukrainian state media, 11 people were pulled alive from the rubble. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence said two Russian ballistic missiles hit Poltava and the amount of time between the missiles being detected and an air-raid warning being given and the impact was so short, many of those impacted were caught as they ran to the bomb shelters.
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The strike blew out windows in hundreds of nearby residential buildings, Ukraine stated. When exactly the attack took place has not been confirmed.
President Zelensky responded to the news of the mass-casualty attack by requesting more air defence systems from his Western backers to defend Ukraine against the “Russian scum”. He said, per Ukraine’s own translation of his comments: “once again, we urge everyone in the world who has the power to stop this terror: air defence systems and missiles are needed in Ukraine, not in a warehouse somewhere.”
Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also called on the international community to take action, saying in a statement: “What Russia is doing in Ukraine is pure evil and terror, driven by the objective to eliminate, kill, and ruin. This crime, like others, demands a strong response from the global community. Not just with statements but with decisions and actions that can push this evil back.”
Quote:An Afghanistan-heritage man has been arrested after a car was driven at great speed onto the sidewalk, the suspect allegedly telling police he had acted “on Allah’s orders”.
A man received serious head injuries after a car ran a red light and mounted the pavement in the German city of Darmstadt, colliding with another vehicle before coming to a rest. Pedestrians were able to jump clear, it is stated.
Police are investigating whether the collision may have been deliberate, with the State Criminal Police Office taking over the investigation with amid clashing reports the suspect told police officers he had acted “on Allah’s orders”, or on the instructions of the “almighty”.
A man arrested at the scene is a 24-year-old Afghan heritage male and has been remanded in custody. Alcohol or drug use has been ruled out but a potential mental health history is being investigated, as is a potential extremist terrorism motive, although nothing pertinent has been discovered yet, Welt states.
Nevertheless, the investigations continue “in all directions”. The suspect’s home was raided on Tuesday afternoon, with digital devices and documents seized by investigators.
The Public Prosecutor accuses the suspect of having “at least knowingly accepted the risk of injuring or killing innocent people – in particular the 29-year-old Skoda driver.”
Quote:Right-wingers and populists have devastated legacy left-wing parties in two state elections in Germany, even if a “software error” in one state was blamed for changing the initial official results, taking two seats away from the right.
The right-populist anti-mass migration Alternative for Germany (AfD) has won a state election for the first time, taking 32.8 per cent of the vote in east Germany’s Thuringia. Counts in the AfD’s favour continued to roll in from the evening, building its lead from earlier declarations. The result gives the party 32 seats in the Free State’s 88-seat parliament, the Landtag, far short of an actual majority.
The party almost managed the same feat twice in one night, with a photo-finish in Saxony, also in east Germany, seeing it come just one seat behind the legacy-centre-right party the Christian Democrats. Both right-wing parties come away with fractionally fewer seats than initially stated by the election authorities, however, with a computer error blamed for their share dropping overnight. Apparently, the computers which calculated the number of seats awarded to each party from the vote share percentage had inadvertently been programmed to the wrong electoral system.
This is particularly consequential to the AfD, as it no longer has a blocking minority in the state, which could have allowed it to block certain votes like the appointment of constitutional judges, the state auditors, and even a vote to dissolve the parliament. In such instances, votes need a two-thirds supermajority to pass, and now the AfD is one seat short.
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Also performing well — although little heeded in news reports from outside Germany where a total fixation on the perceived right-wing threat dominates — is a new left-populist political force the BSW, led by former communist Sahra Wagenknecht. The economically hard-left but socially conservative and anti-mass migration party came third place in both states and may potentially become a kingmaker.
In both elections, voter turnout was at historically high levels, and in the case of Saxony, it was the highest state election turnout in modern German history. It was the best state election results yet for the AfD, and absolutely devastating for legacy left-wing and centrist parties, with the Free Democrat liberals and the Social Democrats having their worst election results ever in the race.
In Thuringia, the Green party fell so far that it no longer has any members of Parliament, and the hard-left Linke (left) party tumbled from 29 to 12 seats.
In many cases, responses to the state-level success of the AfD in this election have been dismay in the international press, with the label “far right” routinely applied to the AfD, even as such words lose their power through over-use, and allusions to Nazi-era Germany frequently made. Britain’s The Guardian leads with comments from French liberal politician Valérie Hayer, who reflected on the result: “A dark day for Germany is a dark day for Europe. The election result in Thuringia and Saxony is unprecedented. We shall not let Europe give in to racist, antisemitic, misogynist and homophobic movements.”
Quote:Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a Russian TV interview on Sunday that Moscow would prefer seeing Vice President Kamala Harris in the White House next year because she is more “predictable” than her opponent Donald Trump.
Peskov’s comments were delivered with a dash of sarcasm, as the Russian government insists it has no preferences in foreign elections and never interferes with them.
Peskov therefore treated the question about who the Kremlin favors in the 2024 U.S. presidential election as laughable. His interviewer, regime-friendly TV personality Pavel Zarubin, also made a point of laughing out loud when he asked the question.
“We have no candidate. But, of course, the Democrats are more predictable. And what Putin said about Biden’s predictability applies to almost all Democrats, including Ms. Harris,” Peskov told Zarubin.
Peskov was alluding to Russian President Vladimir Putin saying in a February interview that he preferred now-defunct President Joe Biden to Trump, because he saw Biden as “a more experienced, predictable person, a politician of the old school.”
“But we will work with any U.S. president who the American people have confidence in,” Putin added, with an unmistakable smirk.
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On other occasions, Putin expressed concerns about Biden’s deteriorating mental health, and also denounced the Democrat Party for using the U.S. court system to wage political warfare against Trump.
On all of these occasions, Putin was careful to insist that Russia has no preference in the outcome of the 2024 election and was equally prepared to deal with any U.S. president.
In his Russian TV interview on Sunday, Peskov complained that the United States has “trampled” on Russia’s interests with heavy-handed sanctions over the Ukraine war, and he saw “no prospects” for relations to improve with either a Harris or Trump administration next year.
Peskov also mocked Trump for claiming he could negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war if he wins the election, even before he is formally inaugurated.
“I know both heads of the countries. I know President Putin very well. I want to see the death stopping. There’s death and there’s destruction. They are destroying the whole fabric of a certain part of the world. I want to get it negotiated, and get it done,” Trump told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview in early August.
During a CNN town hall meeting in May 2023, Trump said he could negotiate peace between Russia and Ukraine within 24 hours of being elected.
So what is Garland's DOJ gonna do now? Russia might interfere in the elections to make Harris win! Who am I kidding? the USAG couldn't care less about that.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:Hunter Biden on Thursday entered a guilty plea to all nine federal tax charges brought against him by special counsel David Weiss, his attorney said in court Thursday, shocking federal prosecutors.
The president's son remains free on bond until sentencing on Dec. 16.
Abbe Lowell, the first son's attorney, said earlier Thursday in federal court that Biden intends to switch his plea and intends to plead guilty. He initially pleaded not guilty.
Federal prosecutor Leo Wise said that "this is the first we are hearing about this."
A source familiar with the special counsel's team told Fox News digital that this is not a done deal for Hunter Biden, and that it's currently just an offer the defense put on the table.
The judge had Hunter Biden agree under oath to no longer remain silent and told him that if he pleads guilty he gives up all of his rights to a trial.
Before the court took a 30-minute break, Judge Mark Scarsi said that "the court doesn’t need the government’s agreement to accept an Alford plea."
The development comes after Hunter Biden's lawyers had prepared to argue he was too high or drunk to pay his taxes.
According to the Justice Department manual, DOJ prosecutors cannot take what is called an Alford plea, "except in the most unusual of circumstances…"
Quote:The retailer known as Big Lots is preparing to file for bankruptcy as other companies across the United States have recently done.
Individuals with knowledge of the situation said the discount home goods store may file as early as Sunday, Bloomberg reported on Friday, noting the company is planning to sell its stores through a court-supervised process.
The article continued:
The company will continue to operate under Chapter 11 protection, the people said, and is in the process of lining up a so-called stalking horse bid, meaning it’s subject to better offers should any materialize. The company has been working with advisers from AlixPartners and Guggenheim Partners on the bankruptcy and sale process.
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Big Lots, which has around 1,400 stores and employs over 30,000 people, has suffered from declining sales for years, including in recent quarters as rising inflation squeezed the wallets of its budget-conscious shoppers. Its share price has plunged to around $0.50, after peaking above $72 in 2021.
The news comes after the restaurant chain Red Lobster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy followed by affordable gym chain Blink Fitness, and Rite Aid pharmacy closed all its stores in Michigan and Ohio amid that company’s recent bankruptcy filings.
Inflation has been plaguing Americans struggling to make ends meet in President Joe Biden’s (D) economy, and the middle class is now too poor to shop for their needs at dollar stores, Breitbart News’s John Carney reported on Wednesday.
“Dollar Tree’s latest earnings report offers a grim reflection on the state of the American economy. What we are witnessing is not just a minor fluctuation in retail performance, but a broader indictment of an economy that, under the stewardship of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, has manifestly lost its way,” Carney wrote.
2 CBP Officers Might Have Worked with Mexican Cartel
Quote:Federal prosecutors allege that two officers with U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations spent years working with an unnamed drug cartel. The officers allegedly allowed the criminal organization to move large amounts of fentanyl, methamphetamines, cocaine, and heroin through their inspection lanes, court documents revealed.
Jesse Clark Garcia and Diego Bonillo are two CBP officers named in a criminal indictment out of the U.S. Southern District of California accusing them of drug trafficking and drug trafficking conspiracy; both men have been in custody since May. Alex Riggins first reported the case from the San Diego Union-Tribune.
The two officers allegedly coordinated with smugglers in Mexico so that certain vehicles filled with drugs would go through their inspection lane. Prosecutors allege that they could allow the smugglers to pass freely in exchange for hefty bribes of tens of thousands of dollars. Details listed in Riggins’s story point to the CBP officers spending thousands on luxury fashion items, European vacations, and high-priced boxing seats in Las Vegas.
The criminal indictment states that in April 2021, a woman drove a Kia Soul to Garcia’s lane at the Tecate port of entry. The woman had several cars in front of her when a lane opened. CBP officers directed her to that lane where authorities found 140 pounds of cocaine and fentanyl and 25 pounds of methamphetamine. As part of the investigation, authorities learned that the woman constantly crossed through Garcia’s Lane, and when he was not in service, she would not cross. Court documents list several other crossings that appear to show both Garcia and Bonillo worked with smugglers so they could wave them through their inspection lanes.
Quote:Canada’s left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) on Wednesday announced it was withdrawing from the coalition keeping Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in power, a blow that could seriously threaten the already-embattled Trudeau’s grip on power.
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh announced the breakup in a campaign-style video released by his party.
“Today, I have notified the prime minister that I have ripped up the supply-and-confidence agreement. Big corporations and wealthy CEOs have had their government. It’s the people’s time,” Singh said in the video.
A supply-and-confidence agreement is essentially a promise by a minority party to unconditionally support a larger party, without demanding the powers of a coalition government. In exchange for a few policy concessions, NDP has been keeping Trudeau’s Liberals in power since March 2022 by pledging to support them in no-confidence votes that might otherwise bring the government down.
“The NDP is ready for an election,” Singh declared, presenting his own party as a better choice to carry the left-wing standard because Trudeau is “too weak” and “too selfish” to oppose the Conservatives’ plans to cut government spending.
NDP officials later admitted the video was recorded weeks ago, and the decision to break with Trudeau’s Liberal Party was made months ago. Trudeau’s alleged concessions to “corporate greed” were cited by these officials as the reason for the crack-up.
The BBC spoke to other NDP officials who pointed to Canada’s railroad crisis as a major reason for giving up on Trudeau. The Trudeau administration eventually caved to enormous pressure to order binding arbitration between the railroad companies and labor unions, which NDP saw as a betrayal of the unions.
A more cynical interpretation could be NDP leaping over the rails as Trudeau’s ship sinks. Battered by public disapproval over high inflation and an assortment of policy disasters and scandals, the Liberals are currently running about 18 points behind the Conservatives in the polls. NDP might not be able to do any better, but Singh had very little to lose by boldly insisting that he could.
A badly rattled Trudeau robotically told reporters covering a school lunch event on Wednesday that he hoped NDP “stays focused on how we can deliver for Canadians, as we have over the past years, rather than focusing on politics.”
“An election will come in the coming year, hopefully not until next fall, because in the meantime, we’re going to deliver for Canadians,” he intoned.
The point of all this drama is that the next election might be coming a lot sooner than Trudeau wants. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre immediately called for an early election to break up the moribund Liberal-NDP coalition and give Canadians a chance to recover from left-wing policies. Canadians could find themselves choosing a new prime minister at right around the same time their American neighbors are voting for president.
Quote:Thousands of leftists took to the streets of France Saturday over President Emmanuel Macron’s installation of centrist Michelle Barnier as prime minister.
Protesters poured through Paris and cities across France to back the leftist New Popular Front (NFP), a coalition of social democrats, greens and communists, which with the help from President Macron won the most seats in last month’s legislative elections, despite not winning the most votes, with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally gaining millions more votes than the NFP.
The protests were called for after Macron appointed centre-right Michel Barnier, who previously served as the EU’s Brexit negotiator, as his new prime minister, enraging the far-left, who accused the president of a “coup” and of going against democracy.
Despite claiming the mantle of democratic legitimacy, the New Popular Front had demanded that Macron install Lucie Castets as his next prime minister, a deep state bureaucrat and socialist economist who did not stand in the election.
“If we didn’t get Lucie Castets from the authorities, we will get Lucie Castets from the street,” a student protester said in Marseilles according to Le Figaro. “We are coming to march against Emmanuel Macron’s coup. Today, Emmanuel Macron is trampling on the democratic result and the demands of the students.”
In Paris, the protesters were joined by former presidential candidate and leader of the far-left La France Insoumise party Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who vowed that his supporters in the National Assembly would vote to take down the new Barnier government.
“Emmanuel Macron could have named Lucie Castets prime minister. He didn’t… Because we intended to carry out our program… You guys are used to cheating! Not us! Whatever happens, we will vote to censure such a government,” Mélenchon declared.
According to organisers, some 160,000 joined the demonstration in Paris on Saturday.
Quote:Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky used a meeting Friday with top United States military leaders and 50 partner nations to call for yet more weaponry even as the Biden administration confirmed it would rush another $250 million in security assistance to Kyiv.
Zelensky added systems that were promised already have been too slow to arrive as he again stated his desire to directly strike at Russia deep behind its borders.
AP reports U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the meeting of the leaders at the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in Germany was taking place during a dynamic moment in Ukraine’s fight against Russia, as it conducts its first offensive operations of the war while facing a significant threat from Russian forces near a key hub in the Donbas.
Zelensky used the public appearance to repeat his view that what’s needed most now is for the U.S. and the West to allow him to use the weapons they provided to reach inside Russia.
The U.S. has not supported this previously out of concern it would further escalate the war.
“We need to have this long-range capability, not only on the divided territory of Ukraine, but also on the Russian territory, so that Russia is motivated to seek peace,” Zelensky argued to the members.
“We need to make Russian cities and even Russian soldiers think about what they need: peace or Putin.”
Quote:Ukraine´s parliament approved the appointment of a new foreign minister Thursday, two lawmakers said, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sought to breathe fresh life into his administration with the war against Russia poised for what could be a pivotal phase.
Andrii Sybiha, a former ambassador to Turkey, is the country´s new chief diplomat. He replaced Dmytro Kuleba, who became one of Ukraine´s most recognizable faces on the international stage as he petitioned and pleaded with Western countries to support Ukraine´s war effort.
Sybiha, 49, has been working as Kuleba´s deputy since April.
Zelenskyy wants to replace almost a dozen top officials in his biggest government shake-up since Russia´s full-scale invasion started on Feb. 24, 2022. Other changes included the heads of strategic industries, justice, natural resources and farming.
Parliament´s approval is required for the changes. Ukrainian lawmakers Yaroslav Zhelezniak and Oleksii Honcharenko confirmed the vote to The Associated Press.
Zelenskyy said Wednesday of the reshuffle that Ukraine needs “new energy.”
The war, more than 900 days long, is on the cusp of what could be a key period.
A likely hard winter lies ahead, testing the country´s resolve. Ukraine´s power grid is under severe strain after Russian missiles and drones knocked out around 70% of the country´s generation capacity. That could mean going without heat and water.
On the battlefield, Ukraine is waiting to see whether the military´s gamble with its surprise thrust into Russia´s Kursk border region a month ago pays dividends. Meanwhile, outgunned Ukrainian soldiers are gradually being pushed backward by Russia´s monthslong drive deeper into eastern Ukraine, and Ukrainian civilians are at the mercy of Russia´s deadly long-range aerial strikes.
The casualty list from a Russian missile strike Tuesday on a military training school in the Ukrainian city of Poltava grew to 55 dead and 328 wounded, Ukraine´s Interior Ministry said Thursday. A search and rescue operation was continuing.
Quote:Germany’s army rushed an Iris-T air-defence system into service on its own soil for the first time Wednesday having delivered several of the sophisticated systems to war-torn Ukraine to take down Russian rockets, drones and missiles mid-flight.
AFP reports Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the surface-to-air system was part of a long term build-up of German and European defences initiated in the wake of Russian President Vladimir Putin launching the Ukraine invasion in 2022.
“Russia has been massively rearming for many years, especially in the field of rockets and cruise missiles,” Scholz said at the inauguration ceremony at a base in Todendorf near the northern city of Hamburg.
Putin had broken disarmament treaties and “deployed missiles as far as Kaliningrad”, a Russian exclave located some 330 miles from Berlin, he added.
“It would be negligent not to respond to this appropriately,” the chancellor warned. “A failure to act would put peace at risk. I will not allow that.”
The AFP report notes Scholz, who was joined by Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, said the system was part of the European Sky Shield Initiative, which also includes long-range defences against ballistic missiles.
The German military has ordered six of the Iris-T SLM systems from manufacturer Diehl Defence, to be delivered by May 2027.
Scholz warned Europe, aside from defensive systems, would also need more precision missiles of its own “so that there is no dangerous gap with Russia in this strategically important field”.
Quote:Specialist police have taken over the investigation after a migrant knifeman shouting “Allahu Akbar” raided a police station, declaring he had come to kill police officers.
An Islamist apparently botched an attempted terror attack in the German city of Linz, in the Rhineland-Palatinate on Friday after he rushed a police station with a machete. He attempted to get inside but was foiled by the security door, and was locked in — alone — in the compound by officers, who then tasered him into submission.
The suspect, said to be a 29-year-old Albanian migrant, is reported to have shouted the now-familiar “Allahu Akhbar” as he attempted to strike, and investigating officers searching his apartment found an Islamic State flag hanging on the wall. Police have conceded there was likely an Islamist terror motive, but Welt states he was not on the radar of the intelligence services before today.
He has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder and is awaiting trial, with the investigation into the attack being handed by counter-terror officers.
The attempted attack is the second such encounter between German police and suspected radicalised Islamists in two days. On Thursday in Munich a gunman was shot dead by police near the Israeli consulate.
The man, a “Bosnian heritage” Austrian citizen who was armed with a Second World War-era rifle and bayonet was killed after opening fire in a city square that was also adjacent to the former headquarters of the Nazi Party. It is reported the gunman had previously been known to police for possessing Islamic State propaganda.
Quote:A shooting that led to the death of the gunman saw the perpetrator roam and fire a rifle for ten minutes, with police initially unsure whether the rifle was a prop or the real thing.
Bullets struck the Israeli consulate general in Munich, Germany this week in a shooting which ended, as reported at the time, with the gunman being shot dead by responding police officers. The consulate was closed on Thursday morning during the shooting because its staff were attending a memorial for the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre terror attack, where Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israelis, the timing leading police to suspect the Islamist-sympathising perpetrator may have struck because of that anniversary.
The suspect, 18-year-old Emrah I., is said to have arrived with a Swiss military surplus “repeating rifle” with bayonet — possibly the K31 carbine of 1933 — on Thursday morning and was quickly spotted by police officers. Yet, reports Die Welt, those police were initially unsure whether the out-of-time rifle was real or a prop and lost sight of the Austrian citizen, Bosnian-heritage migrant.
Emrah I. fired first at the National Socialism Documentation Centre (‘NS-Dokumentationszentrum München’), a new museum and educational centre built on the site of the former ‘Brown House’ national headquarters of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party, which itself was destroyed in Second World War bombing. According to German media, he shot at the building twice. Footage allegedly of the incident shared on German social media shows a gunman being visibly thrown back by the recoil from his rifle.
The migrant gunman then attempted to climb the outer wall of the Israeli consulate general and found he was unable to, and so he opened fire on the building itself. This was also two shots, one of which struck a window. Five other rounds were let off by the teen, including when he ran into a pair of police officers who ordered him to surrender the rifle, when he fired on the lawmen.
Even after now-deceased suspect Emrah I. was gunned down by officers, he still attempted to attack the police from a prone position. In all, he was on the move and firing for around ten minutes, it is stated.
The attack on the Israeli consulate, not just at a time of heightened tensions, but also on the anniversary of a major anti-Israel Palestinian terror attack, has led to discussion of rising antisemitism in Germany, as well as a growing acknowledgement that after a few quieter years, the country could be returning to an era of terror attacks.
That the perpetrator is reported to have been born to an otherwise well-integrated, stable, middle-class family of migrants in neighbouring Austria also underlines the continued risk European nations face from managing diverse populations, where some second and third generation migrants can become vulnerable to online radicalisation.
Emrah I. was known to Austrian police for potential radicalisation, but this information was not passed onto the German authorities. Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung reports he was investigated in Spring 2023 for membership of a terrorist organisation after Islamic State propaganda was found on his cell phone. This investigation was not ultimately followed up on, and this has sparked a minor scandal in Austria, where whether the government should have more power to snoop on private conversations to catch more future terrorists is being discussed.
Quote:A former Labour councillor has denied encouraging violent disorder in a speech where he called for political opponents to have their throats cut.
Ricky Jones, 57, has again appeared in court to face one count of encouraging violent disorder over an August speech at a ‘peace rally’ held in response to days of disorder across England and Wales. A recording of the event showed Jones shouting through a microphone “they are disgusting, Nazi fascists. We need to cut all their throats, and get rid of them all”, while making a gesture of drawing his finger across his throat.
Court reporting by The Independent notes Jones, who was a Labour councillor and trade unionist at the time of the speech, accepted through his defence barrister Hossein Zahir KC that the words had indeed been spoken, but that he didn’t realise saying them would be illegal.
Jones, who appeared in court by video link from His Majesty’s Prison Wormwood Scrubs where he has been held since his arrest spoke to confirm his identity and plead not guilty to the charge.
The judge set the trial date as January 20th 2025.
Quote:The Iran-backed Houthi terrorists of Yemen stepped up the tempo of their attacks on international shipping over the weekend, firing two missiles at a Liberian-flagged container ship on Friday night and then striking Saudi and Panamanian-flagged tankers on Monday.
In the Friday night attack, two missiles fired from Yemen detonated near the Liberian-flagged cargo ship MV Groton. The ship reported no injuries nor significant damage from the attack and continued to its next port of call.
Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree on Saturday claimed responsibility for the attack, which he said was “carried out by the naval, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), and missile forces.”
“This is the second targeting of the ship since it was previously targeted on Aug. 3,” Saree added.
MV Groton was targeted by two Houthi missiles on August 3 in the first Red Sea terrorism incident after an Israeli counter-strike on the Houthi-controlled port city of Hodeidah apparently forced a two-week pause in their assaults on shipping. The missiles fired by the Houthis at the Groton on August 3 also missed their target.
On Monday, a Saudi-flagged crude oil tanker named Amjad and the Panama-flagged tanker Blue Lagoon I were both attacked by the Houthis while sailing fairly close to each other in the Red Sea.
The international Joint Maritime Information Center (JMIC) said three ballistic missiles struck the Blue Lagoon I as it sailed 70 miles northwest of Yemen’s port city of Saleef.
“All crew on board are safe. The vessel sustained minimal damage but does not require assistance,” JMIC reported.
The U.K. Maritime Trade Operations center (UKMTO) said two projectiles struck the Blue Lagoon I, and a third explosion was detected near the ship.
“Damage control is underway. There are no casualties onboard and the vessel is proceeding to its next port of call,” UKMTO said.
UKMTO reported a second attack near Hodeidah. The Ambrey private security firm said this incident involved a UAV striking a ship, without causing any major damage or casualties.
The second target appears to have been the Saudi-flagged tanker Amjad. The ship is owned by a Saudi state enterprise called Bahri, which did not respond to media requests for comment on the attack, although a source told Reuters on Monday that the Saudi ship was “unlikely to have been directly targeted” by the Houthis.
The Saudis led a military intervention in Yemen against the Houthi insurgents from 2015 to 2023, and have since been trying to disengage themselves from the Yemeni civil war, so a Houthi attack on an oil tanker owned by a Saudi national shipping group would be a provocative action.
Both of the tanker attacks were also highly provocative because the Houthis created the conditions for a major environmental catastrophe by disabling and sabotaging a third oil tanker, the Greek-flagged Sounion, on August 21.
Quote:Shipping giant Maersk said on Thursday that ongoing disruptions to global shipping that attacks from the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists of Yemen have caused are making shipping increasingly expensive.
Maersk’s update confirmed that its predictions in July of a “cascading impact” from the Houthi attacks, affecting far more than shipping lines that run through the Red Sea, have come true.
As for the Red Sea shipping lane, Maersk cited data that conclude transits of the Suez Canal are down by 66 percent since Houthi attacks began prompting shippers to reroute their vessels around Africa.
“These disruptions have led to service reconfigurations and volume shifts, straining infrastructure and resulting in port congestion, delays, and shortages in capacity and equipment,” Maersk said.
“The timeline for easing these disruptions and returning to ‘normal’ remains uncertain,” the company added.
The Red Sea situation is a disaster for the Biden-Harris administration, which promised in December to lead a multi-national military operation to protect the shipping lanes. Shipping companies never had much faith in President Joe Biden’s “Operation Prosperity Guardian,” and their skepticism has been justified.
Another humiliation was delivered on Tuesday, as the European Union (EU) naval force in the Red Sea admitted that a salvage operation to recover the burning oil tanker MV Sounion — potentially an environmental catastrophe of fearsome proportions — had to be abandoned because Western forces could not protect the salvage teams from Houthi attacks.
“The private companies responsible for the salvage operation have concluded that the conditions were not met to conduct the towing operation and that it was not safe to proceed. Alternative solutions are now being explored by the private companies,” said a statement from ASPIDES, the EU naval command in the Red Sea.
ASPIDES refused to answer questions about its statement or provide further details. The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) likewise failed to explain why an environmental disaster that could be four times the size of the notorious Exxon Valdez incident can only be prevented if the Houthis decide to allow it.
A U.S. defense official confided to the Associated Press (AP) on Tuesday that the U.S. military “has not been asked and has no role in the cleanup or towing of the Sounion.”
“There are no American vessels known to be in the Red Sea at the moment, as the EU mission has taken charge after the Sounion attack,” the AP reported.
Quote:The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) revealed Tuesday that soldiers had discovered a railway track inside a Hamas tunnel underneath northern Gaza.
In a statement, the IDF said:
Since the beginning of the war, the IDF has been working to dismantle and neutralize the underground infrastructure of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Troops from the Engineering Unit of the Gaza Division and the Northern Gaza Brigade, in collaboration with the Yahalom Unit, uncovered and destroyed, based on prior intelligence information, an attack underground tunnel route of Hamas in the Beit Lahia area. The length of the destroyed tunnel route exceeds one kilometer.
The tunnel route that was destroyed was located and investigated over the past few weeks. The troops identified weapons, electrical infrastructure, and a transportation rail within the tunnel route.
Israel is slowly destroying Hamas’s tunnel network, which is thought to extend for hundreds of miles underneath the small territory.
Some tunnels have been large enough to drive vehicles through, including at least one smuggling tunnel underneath Rafah, near the Gaza-Egypt border.
At least some of the remaining Israeli hostages are thought to be held in the tunnels.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign tried to blame her and President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan on former President Donald Trump — even though it happened seven months after he left office.
The Harris-Walz campaign released a statement Friday that claimed, “Trump left the Biden-Harris Administration with zero plans for an orderly withdrawal — only a dangerous, costly mess.”
Trump had begun negotiations with the Taliban and reached a deal, but it had not been completed by the time he left office in January 2020. Biden — against the advice of his military advisers — decided to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan in September 2021, which prompted the Taliban to sweep into Kabul at the end of August 2021 and topple the U.S.-backed government in a surprise rout. The sudden takeover prompted mass panic and chaos as hundreds of thousands of Americans, foreign civilians, and desperate Afghans scrambled to depart.
The remaining U.S. troops in Kabul at the time, as well as hundreds more who were flown in, were ordered to carry out the withdrawal — as well undertake a massive civilian evacuation effort — under extremely stressful and dangerous conditions from a makeshift fortress at the Kabul International Airport while surrounded by the Taliban.
A suicide bomber infiltrated the crowd surrounding the airport on the final days of the evacuation, and killed 13 American service members. Before departing, U.S. military commanders ordered a drone strike that accidentally killed a humanitarian aid worker and members of his family, including children.
The Biden administration has never held anyone accountable for the bungled withdrawal that played out on television screens across the world, and President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin have said they have no regrets.
After Trump recently participated in a ceremony to honor the 13 Americans who were killed, as well as those wounded, the Harris-Walz campaign claimed that Trump was trying to politicize the disastrous withdrawal — even though the families had invited Trump to be there and had given him permission to film the event. The family members of the fallen then released angry statements slamming the Harris-Walz campaign for their criticism.
Despite this, the Harris-Walz 2024 National Security Spokesperson Morgan Finkelstein said in a statement, “Trump shamelessly attacks the Vice President because he hopes he can trick the country into forgetting that his own actions undermined U.S. strategy and put our troops and allies in harm’s way.”
An Axios reporter noted that while some Republicans also thought Trump had cut a “bad deal” with the Taliban, the Biden-Harris administration had “debated options on trying to change the deal and went [with] Biden’s plan.”
...
National security expert Rebeccah Heinrichs posted on X about Harris’s attempt to gaslight the public, “This is crazy. Biden and Harris have defended their decision and process for the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Campaign staff are not going to get Americans to buy this.”
...
Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller reminded the public that Harris has previously bragged about being the “last person in the room” when Biden decided to withdraw the U.S. troops.
Quote:Texas Rep. Mike McCaul, the Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, released a scathing report that took a fine-toothed comb to the military's botched 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal and highlighted areas of serious mismanagement.
The Republican-led report opens by harkening back to President Joe Biden’s urgency to withdraw from the Vietnam War as a senator in the 1970s. That, along with the Afghanistan withdrawal, demonstrates a "pattern of callous foreign policy positions and readiness to abandon strategic partners," according to the report.
The report also disputed Biden's assertion that his hands were tied to the Doha agreement former President Trump had made with the Taliban establishing a deadline for U.S. withdrawal for the summer of 2021, and it revealed how state officials had no plan for getting Americans and allies out while there were still troops there to protect them.
Biden was not bound by deadlines in Trump's Doha agreement with Taliban
The report found that Biden and Vice President Harris were advised by top leaders that the Taliban were already in violation of the conditions of the Doha agreement and, therefore, the U.S. was not obligated to leave.
The committee also found NATO allies had expressed their vehement opposition to the U.S. decision to withdraw. The British Chief of the Defense staff warned that "withdrawal under these circumstances would be perceived as a strategic victory for the Taliban."
Biden kept on Zalmay Khalilzad, a Trump appointee who negotiated the agreement, as special representative to Afghanistan – a signal that the new administration endorsed the deal.
At the Taliban’s demand, Khalilzad had shut out the Afghan government from the talks – a major blow to President Ashraf Ghani’s government.
When Trump left office, some 2,500 U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan. Biden himself was determined to draw that number to zero no matter what, according to Col. Seth Krummrich, chief of staff for Special Operations Command, who told the committee, "The president decided we’re going to leave, and he’s not listening to anybody."
Then-State Dept. spokesperson Ned Price admitted in testimony the Doha agreement was "immaterial" to Biden’s decision to withdraw.
The withdrawal: State Department built up personnel, failed to hatch escape plan as it became clear Kabul would fall
The report also details numerous warning signs the State Department received to draw down its embassy footprint as it became clear Afghanistan would quickly fall to the Taliban. It refused to do so. At the time of the withdrawal, it was one of the largest embassies in the world.
In the end, Americans and U.S. allies were left stranded as the military was ordered to withdraw before the embassy had shuttered.
In one meeting, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Brian McKeon rejected military officials’ warnings, saying "we at the State Department have a much higher risk tolerance than you guys."
Gen. Austin Miler, the longest-serving commander in Afghanistan, confirmed McKeon’s comments and explained that the State Department did not have a higher risk tolerance but instead exhibited "a lack of understanding of the risk" in Afghanistan.
Asked why McKeon would make such statements, the officer explained, "The State Department and the president were saying it. Consequently, [Wilson] and others start saying it, thinking that they will make it work."
The report lays blame on former Afghanistan Ambassador Ross Wilson, who instead of shrinking, grew the embassy’s presence as the security situation deteriorated.
Revealing little sense of urgency, Wilson was on a two-week vacation on the last week of July and the first week of August 2021.
An NEO, a noncombatant evacuation operation to get personnel out, was not ordered until Aug. 15 as the Taliban marched into Kabul.
There weren’t enough troops present to begin the NEO until Aug. 19, and the first public message from the embassy in Kabul urging Americans to evacuate wasn’t sent until Aug. 7.
And while there weren't enough military planes to handle the evacuations, it took the Transportation Department until Aug. 20 to allow foreign planes to assist.
Wilson fled the embassy ahead of his entire embassy staff, the report found. He reportedly had COVID-19 at the time but got a foreign service officer to take his test for him so that he could flee the country.
Acting Under Secretary Carol Perez told the committee the embassy’s evacuation plan was "still in the works" when the Taliban took over, despite months of warning.
Quote:Vice President Kamala Harris published a policy page on her official website Sunday promising she is “ready to be Commander in Chief on day one,” but she cited one of her most notorious foreign policy gaffes — claiming the United States has a “strong alliance” with North Korea — as evidence.
Harris’s presidential campaign debuted a slightly more detailed page of her stances on policy issues seven weeks after she replaced outgoing President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic Party ticket. The page focuses heavily on her experience as a prosecutor and attorney general in California but also features a more limited explanation of her stances on international issues.
“Vice President Harris is ready to be Commander in Chief on day one,” her campaign states. “Vice President Harris has been a tireless and effective diplomat on the world stage.”
A prime example listed on the “issues” page is her visit to the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in September 2022 in which she attempted to reassure the nascent government of conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol of Biden’s commitment to supporting it against the persistent threat of a nuclear North Korea. Biden has not treated the Korean Peninsula as a foreign policy priority during his tenure. During his time in office, communist dictator Kim Jong-un has significantly expanded his influence internationally through broadening alliances with Russia and Iran.
Harris, her policy page states, “has met with China’s Xi Jinping, making clear she will always stand up for American interests in the face of China’s threats, and traveled to the Indo-Pacific four times to advance our economic and security partnerships.”
“She visited the Korean Demilitarized Zone to affirm our unwavering commitment to South Korea in the face of North Korean threats,” it continues, later referring to President Donald Trump as too “dangerous” on foreign policy to return to the White House.
“From advising on tough decisions in the Oval Office and the Situation Room, to serving on the Senate Select Committee on the Intelligence,” the page concludes, “to going after transnational criminal organizations as California’s Attorney General, Vice President Harris brings extensive national security experience.”
The page offers no details on Harris’s visit to the DMZ. Harris visited the inter-Korean border in 2022 and delivered a speech in which her goal was to reiterate how “ironclad” Biden considered Washington’s ties to Seoul. Harris opened the speech, however, by erroneously referring to North Korea as an American partner.
“So, the United States shares a very important relationship, which is an alliance with the Republic of North Korea. And it is an alliance that is strong and enduring,” Harris declared.
Harris appears to have misspoken, as the “Republic of North Korea” does not exist. The official name of South Korea is the Republic of Korea, while North Korea refers to itself as the “Democratic Republic of Korea.” Later in her remarks, Harris referred to the “Republic of Korea.”
“I cannot state enough that the commitment of the United States to the defense of the Republic of Korea is ironclad and that we will do everything in our power to ensure that it has meaning in every way that the words suggest,” Harris said at the time.
“Our shared goal — the United States and the Republic of Korea — is a complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” the vice president said. The Democratic Party removed “denuclearizing the Korean peninsula” from its official policy platform in August.
OK, either she's as lunatic and senile as Mr. is or she truly cares about Kim Jong-un.
But you know people. They'd love to find a strange explanation on why she just made a slip and how normal it is not to care about South Korea.
Quote:Former first lady Melania Trump raised questions surrounding the assassination attempt on her husband, former President Donald Trump, stating that they “need to uncover the truth.”
In a video posted to X, promoting her upcoming book, Melania, the former first lady spoke about how the assassination attempt on her husband during his rally in Butler, Pennslyvania, on July 13, “was a horrible, distressing experience.”
“The attempt to end my husband’s life was a horrible, distressing experience,” Melania said. “Now, the silence around it feels heavy. I can’t help but wonder, why didn’t law enforcement officials arrest the shooter before the speech? There is definitely more to the story, and we need to uncover the truth.”
The former president was “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part” of his right ear after Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, opened fire from the rooftop of a nearby building, where he had a direct line of sight of Trump.
Corey Comperatore, a former Pennsylvania fire chief, was shot and killed after Crooks opened fire at the rally. Comperatore threw himself over his daughter and wife as gunshots were heard. Two other men, James Copenhaver, and David Dutch, were also injured.
In the aftermath of the assassination, reports have revealed that a local law enforcement officer encountered Crooks prior to him opening fire.
Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle also revealed that the agency had not placed agents on the roof that Crooks was on because there was a “safety factor” associated with a “sloped roof.” However, prior to the rally, the Secret Service had reportedly deemed the rooftop as a security risk.
As Breitbart News has previously reported, there were multiple security failings during the rally, such as the Secret Service reportedly seeing Crooks on the rooftop around 5:52 p.m., 20 minutes before Trump took the stage, yet nothing was done to prevent Trump from going on stage.
Other reports have revealed that Crooks was reportedly “photographed twice by security officers,” law enforcement officers reported him as being a suspicious person, and other law enforcement officers reportedly radioed that Crooks was acting suspiciously.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) recently revealed that whistleblowers alleged that the majority of Secret Service agents who were assigned to protect Trump at the Butler rally were actually from the Department of Homeland Security and that they had gone through a “two-hour online webinar.”
Quote:A loophole in Wisconsin election laws poses a significant risk to election integrity, a report finds.
More than 140,000 Wisconsinites can vote in the 2024 election without proving their identify by self-identifying as “Indefinitely Confined,” a new report by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty reveals. Through the loophole, voters can receive an absentee ballot indefinitely without ever showing an ID.
The “Indefinitely Confined” exception has skyrocketed since 2016, when approximately 66,000 voters registered under the status. In 2020 amid the pandemic, 265,979 registered under the exemption, when clerks in Democratic strongholds encouraged voters to exploit the loophole to circumvent Wisconsin’s voter ID requirements in 2020 – a practice later rebuked unanimously by the Supreme Court.
Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the state by just over 20,000 votes, in a swing of around 48,000 votes to Democrats from the 2016 election when Trump carried the state.
“Confidence in our elections continues to be dangerously low in Wisconsin and across the country,” WILL Research Director Will Flanders said in a statement. “Voter ID is a popular and well-executed way to keep our elections secure and free of fraud. While the Governor refused to fix this loophole in the years since 2020, efforts must be made by local election clerks to resolve it as much as possible.”
Wisconsin voter ID laws require citizens to show ID to vote in most circumstances. However, ID is not required simply to register to vote.
The “Indefinitely Confined” exception provides a loophole for potential voters to avoid ever showing an ID.
“The indefinitely confined status was designed to provide those who are elderly, sick, or physically unable to get to the polls with an opportunity to vote,” WILL Policy Director Kyle Koenen added. “Although designed with good intentions, as our report shows, the system has a few key flaws that should be resolved.”
State laws require the removal of voters from the indefinitely confined list under specified circumstances. According to WILL, “if a voter does not return an absentee ballot after receiving one, the municipal clerk must notify them that they will be removed from the absentee mailing list unless they renew their application within 30 days. Voters can also be removed upon their request or if reliable information indicates they are no longer eligible, such as when a voter casts a ballot in person.”
However, not all counties comply with state law, WILL alleges. The number of voters using the exemption remains about 144,347.
Quote:Hungary said that it will bus illegal migrants to the European Union capital of Brussels if the bloc attempts to force Budapest into accepting supposed asylum seekers who broke into other EU nations.
In a move reminiscent of Texas Governor Gregg Abbott’s scheme to send illegals to liberal-run cities throughout the United States, Hungarian Parliamentary State Secretary of the Ministry of the Interior Bence Rétvári promised to provide migrants with one-way tickets to Brussels.
Standing before a fleet of busses in Budapest on Friday, the Hungarian politician said per Magyarnemzet: “If the European Union forces Hungary to let in illegal immigrants, Hungary will offer the migrants to transport them to Brussels for free after completing the European procedure.”
“The mayor of Brussels reacted to the proposal in such a way that it would turn the everyday lives of the people of Brussels upside down. And Hungary protects the southern border so that the everyday lives of Hungarians are not turned upside down,” he added.
The declaration from Hungary comes as the EU is attempting to impose heavy fines, starting with €200 million due on September 17th, for Budapest’s refusal to acquiesce to accepting in alleged asylum seekers from other European Union countries in a mass redistribution scheme.
Rétvári noted that while other EU nations have left their borders open to waves of illegals, Hungary has been diligent in preventing illegal crossings of its border, including the building of a fence along its southern border.
Rétvári said that the border wall has not only protected Hungary but also protected the EU as whole from further illegal immigration, and therefore, Budapest is looking to counter sue the bloc for services rendered in protecting the EU border. He claimed that since 2015, Hungary has prevented around one million illegal migrants from entering.
“It is outrageous that the European Union does not recognize and financially compensate the Hungarians’ activities, but instead attacks them,” he said.
Speaking at the Cernobbio Forum in Italy earlier this week, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán warned that if Brussels forces countries such as his own to adopt the pro-mass migration policies favoured by elites in Western Europe, it could result in the collapse of the EU as a whole.
“Why do we need it?” Mr Orbán questioned. “It would be much better if the countries which do not wish to follow the common migration policy were granted an opt-out. It would be much better to offer them the possibility of an opt-out than forcing them to combine forces with others, leading to conflicts which would cause the entire European structure to disintegrate.”
Quote:A Russian drone violated Romania’s airspace during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, the NATO member reported Sunday, urging Moscow to stop what it described as an escalation.
The incident occurred as Russia carried out attacks on “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube River in Ukraine, Romania’s Ministry of National Defense said.
Romania deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace, and NATO allies were kept informed, the ministry said. Romanian emergency authorities also issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions.
Preliminary data indicates there may be an “impact zone” in an uninhabited area near the Romanian village of Periprava, the ministry said. It added that an investigation is underway.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Romania has confirmed drone fragments on its territory on several occasions and as recently as July this year.
The Romanian Defense Ministry strongly condemned the Russian attacks on Ukraine, calling them “unjustified and in serious contradiction with the norms of international law.”
Mircea Geoana, NATO’s outgoing deputy secretary-general and Romania’s former top diplomat, said the military alliance also condemned Russia’s violation of Romanian airspace. “While we have no information indicating an intentional attack by Russia against Allies, these acts are irresponsible and potentially dangerous,” he wrote on X.
In Ukraine, two civilians died and four more suffered wounds in a nighttime Russian airstrike on the northern city of Sumy, the regional military administration reported. Two children were among those wounded, the administration said. In the Kharkiv region farther east, overnight shelling killed two elderly women, according to local Gov. Oleh Syniehubov.
Quote:The US, UK, France and Germany have imposed fresh sanctions on Iran for supplying Russia with ballistic missiles for use in Ukraine.
The measures include restrictions on national carrier Iran Air's ability to fly to the UK and Europe, and travel bans and asset freezes on a number of Iranians accused of facilitating military support for Russia.
Visiting London, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Russians had been trained by Iranian forces to use short-range ballistic missiles and that they could be deployed against Ukrainians within weeks.
Iran has repeatedly denied supplying such self-guided weapons to Russia.
At a joint news conference with UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy on Tuesday, Blinken asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin was "increasingly relying on support" for Iran and North Korea to help "wage his war of aggression on Ukraine" in violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions.
He said the US had recently shared intelligence with its partners showing that dozens of military personnel had been trained in Iran to use the Fath-360 ballistic missile system, which has a maximum range of 75 miles (120km).
Lammy said the move was "a significant and dangerous escalation”.
The missiles are likely to boost Russia's arsenal, enabling it to hit Ukrainian cities close to Russia's borders or areas it already controls at the same time as it deploys its longer-range missiles deeper into Ukrainian territory.
The UK Foreign Office said the US and UK sanctions targeted several key individuals heavily involved in the ballistic missile and drone supply chains.
They included Brig Gen Seyed Hamzeh Ghalandari, who it said was director general for international relations at Iran’s defence ministry and was linked to its exports of defence products to its partners.
Sanctions have also been imposed on five Russian cargo ships for transporting the military supplies from Iran, despite what the UK said were repeated warnings not to do so.
Additionally, several organisations, including some allegedly involved in the production of Iran's kamikaze-style Shahed drones - which Russia has used consistently in attacks on Ukrainian cities - have been sanctioned.
In a statement, the UK, France and Germany - known as the E3 - said Iran's supply of missiles represented a "a direct threat to European security".
But Iran called the Western statements "false and misleading".
Quote:The international world order is “under threat in a way we haven’t seen since the Cold War”, the U.K. and U.S. spy chiefs together warned Saturday.
Sir Richard Moore and William Burns – head of the UK Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) respectively – delivered their cautionary tale in a Financial Times opinion piece, adding they saw the war in Ukraine coming “and were able to warn the international community”, in part by declassifying secrets to help Kyiv.
Further work is already being done to “disrupt the reckless campaign of sabotage” across Europe by Moscow, push for de-escalation in the Israel-Gaza war, and counterterrorism to thwart the resurgent Islamic State. The two further wrote:
There is no question that the international world order – the balanced system that has led to relative peace and stability and delivered rising living standards, opportunities and prosperity – is under threat in a way we haven’t seen since the Cold War.
For both agencies, “the rise of China is the principal intelligence and geopolitical challenge of the 21st century, and we have reorganised our services to reflect that priority.”
On Russia, the heads of MI6 and the CIA said Russian intelligence was waging a “reckless campaign of sabotage across Europe.”
They did not list examples but there has been a spate of mysterious sabotage and arson attacks on infrastructure in the UK, Germany and in the Baltics.
U.S. intelligence also reportedly foiled an alleged Russian plot to assassinate the chief executive of Germany’s leading arms manufacturer.
As well as physical sabotage, the two pinpointed threats posed to Western democracies by Russian information operations.
Both men set out staying the course in resisting Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine “is more vital than ever”, saying Russia “will not succeed in extinguishing Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence”.
“In the 21st century, crises don’t come sequentially,” they wrote. “While significant attention and resources are being deployed against Russia, we are acting together in other places and spaces to counter the risk of global instability.”
UK: Thousands of Prisoners Now Released, More Waiting in the Line
Quote:The UK’s new left-wing government released the first of thousands of prisoners early on Tuesday morning, with convicts saying they had been convinced to vote for the Labour Party for life after gaining their liberty.
Over 1,700 extra convicts are being released from UK prisons today, considerably more than would normally be let out in a typical day and nearly double as many who would end their sentences in a week in normal times, it is stated. If the government’s plan continues as advertised, the number of extra prisoners turned out onto the streets early, having served less than half of the court-ordered sentences, will rise to 5,000 in the coming weeks.
The new left-wing Labour government has spent much of its first months in power arresting people — most notably over the anti-child-stabbing and anti-mass-migration protests and riots — and with the already poor inherited state of the prison system, it is running out of space for new inmates. Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood says the mass release of prisoners is a sign the government is “tackling the crisis head-on” and necessary to prevent a “total collapse of our criminal justice system that would leave the public less safe”.
Yet justice experts question the wisdom of the move. Speaking to the UK state broadcaster the BBC on Tuesday morning Martin Jones, chief inspector of probation, said offenders released are “almost bound” to be back in jail “within days or weeks” because “things will go wrong in the community”.
He remarked further: “Around about a third of people released from prison each year will be proven to have committed a further offence within a year… And then, of course, there’s a small risk that some of those offences will be serious, and whilst rare, that risk cannot be eliminated.” Meanwhile, chief inspector of prisons Charlie Taylor said that it is “inevitable” some of these ex-convicts would use their new-found freedom to commit more crimes, reports The Times.
Quote:Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice has questioned why the left-wing Labour Party government is releasing criminals back onto the streets early rather than deporting the thousands of foreign criminals clogging up space in British jails.
In a question posed in the House of Commons, Tice, who serves as Nigel Farage’s second-in-command questioned: “Why, when there are some 10,000 foreign criminals blocking up space in our jails, why aren’t they being removed and deported, simultaneously saving the British taxpayer billions of pounds every year and having the support of millions of British voters?”
This call was seconded by Mark Fairhurst, the national chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, who told TalkTV on Tuesday that while there are some difficulties surrounding deportations, such as the need to identify a foreign criminal’s country of origin and for those countries to actually accept returns of their nationals, there is “absolutely no reason why we couldn’t repatriate and create an additional 10,000 spaces.”
“Over the last couple of years, ridiculous as it sounds, we’ve been offering financial incentives for prisoners to go back to their country of origin,” Fairhurst said, noting that this has often happened with Albanian criminals, who still represent the largest foreign cohort in British prisons. The POA chairman pointed out that the UK does have a returns policy with Albania and therefore the government could easily start to remove more Albanian criminals from the country.
Fairhurst also argued that the £4 billion earmarked by the Labour government to invest in building more prisons could be better spent on modernising the current prison system, which he described as “crumbling”, as well as putting money into funding more mental health spaces as there are a “lot of people in prisons with acute mental health disorders because it’s the only place” to put them.
As of the end of March, there were 10,422 foreign criminals in jails in England and Wales, an increase from 10,148 at the same time last year. Foreign offenders make up around 12 per cent of the total prison population, costing the UK taxpayer £47,000 per head to feed, house, and rehabilitate, or around £500 million per year, according to The Telegraph.
UK: Millionaires Wanna Leave Because of Labour Tax Raids
Quote:Nearly ten thousand millionaires are predicted to flee the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom this year amid expected tax raids from the left-wing Labour Party government of Sir Keir Starmer.
While the previous Tory government of Rishi Sunak ushered in the highest tax burden since the Second World War, in large part to pay for the debts accrued during the coronavirus lockdowns, it is widely predicted that the fall budget of the Labour government will see further money grabs by the British state, with likely targets including capital gains and inheritance taxes.
According to a report from The Times of London, a firm which helps wealthy people relocate abroad said that in August — the month after Prime Minsiter Starmer came to power — they had seen a 69 per cent increase in inquiries from wealthier people seeking to leave the UK.
Another similar company, Henley & Partners, estimated that a record 9,500 millionaires will likely leave Britain this year, the highest of any country besides Communist China.
It found a net loss of 4,200 millionaires in the first five months of the year — during which time Labour was widely predicted to come to power — and that a further 5,300 are expected to flee by the end of the year. Popular landing spots for the wealthy and entrepreneurs include low-tax destinations such as Dubai, Singapore, and Switzerland.
The likely flight among the innovative and investor classes has sparked concerns that the looming tax hikes may fall foul of the Laffer Curve and fail to raise the intended funds for the treasury.
Quote:The UK government has refused to reveal the cost of kitting out flats for alleged asylum seekers over concerns of a backlash against migrants.
The independent Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has ruled in favour of the Home Office in refusing to abide by Freedom of Information requests about the cost of furnishing an apartment bloc in Hampshire to house some 346 supposed asylum seekers. According to The Telegraph, the flats were said to have been equipped with flat-screen televisions and satellite tv.
John Edwards, the head of the watchdog, said that refusing the FOI request was justified given the potential threat posed to migrants if the public was made aware of how much they were spending on migrant flats.
“While the commissioner appreciates the public interest in the cost of providing accommodation used to accommodate asylum seekers, in his view this is outweighed by the Home Office neither confirming nor denying whether it holds any information falling within the scope of this request,” his ruling stated.
In its arguments to the ICO, the Home Office said that the information was “highly emotive and sensitive” and that previous reports on migrant housing had resulted in public disorder.
“It is common knowledge that vulnerable asylum seekers are targets of reprisals or reactions, and asylum-seeking individuals or groups of asylum-seeking individuals have been threatened and harassed in the past,” the government department said.
Germany to Take Advantage of Sunak's Failed Plan for Migrants
Quote:Germany is looking at taking advantage of the hundreds of millions spent by the British on the now scrapped Rwanda migrant scheme to send its own illegals to the East African nation.
In one of his first acts after coming into office in July, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced an end to the plan to send illegal boat migrants to asylum processing centres in Rwanda rather than allowing them to remain in Britain.
Although the previous Conservative governments had failed to get the scheme off the ground, after the plan was mired in legal challenges kicked off by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) after it sensationally stepped in to block a migrant removal flight in the summer of 2022, the UK taxpayer had already sent £318 million to Kigali to construct asylum centres and economic development in the country.
This week, German migration commissioner Joachim Stamp proposed that Berlin take advantage of the investment by the British to send its own illegals to Rwanda as Germany seeks to increase removals in the wake of recent Islamist terror attacks in Solingen and Mannheim and growing anger among the public over the open borders agenda imposed upon the country.
Stamp suggested that the government use “the capacities available there that were originally prepared for this deal with the British,” broadcaster NTV reports.
The neo-liberal Free Democrat politician said that the scheme could be used to deter the use of “hybrid warfare” tactics by Russia and Belarus to send migrants towards the EU’s eastern border to destabilise the bloc. Stamp said that this could amount to removing around 10,000 migrants to Rwanda per year.
“This would mean that Putin and Lukashenko’s propaganda would no longer catch Iraqis, Syrians and Afghans saying: Come here to Minsk or to Moscow and we will take you to Europe,” he said.
“If we could find a third country in this place, that would be excellent. We currently don’t have anyone who has come forward, with the exception of Rwanda.”
Although the policy has not been agreed upon by the other parties of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ‘traffic light’ coalition government, namely the Social Democrats and the Greens, should Germany take advantage of hundreds of millions spent by the British taxpayer, it would likely represent a major political blow for the new left-wing Starmer government in London.
Former Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman told The Telegraph: “Germany’s decision to adopt the Conservatives’ Rwanda scheme is more evidence of support within the EU of the need for a meaningful deterrence.
“That Starmer ditched the plan makes the UK look like a soft touch for illegal migrants, makes us now an outlier from other EU states grappling with the migration crisis, and is a waste of the vital work done to get the scheme up and running. A big mistake that Starmer will come to regret.”
Conservative Party leadership candidate Robert Jenrick added: “Labour’s decision to scrap, not strengthen, the Rwanda plan looks more foolish by the day. Across Europe, leaders can see that you need a deterrent to stop illegal migration. Sir Keir has squandered such a highly-prized partnership and is now completely powerless to stop the boats.”
The Labour government has argued that scrapping the Rwanda scheme allowed for investment into targeting the criminal people smuggling gangs operating on both sides of the English Channel, notably the creation of a new Border Security Command task force.
However, more than 7,000 illegals have crossed the Channel since Labour came into power in July, taking the total for the year to over 21,000, compared to 29,437 for the entirety of last year.
Quote:A refugee may have been gang-raped by his fellow countrymen over a disagreement on the regime in Tehran, in an attack in a derelict brewery in a German state.
An Iranian male seeking refuge in Germany was found tied up injured by police responding to reports of screams coming from abandoned buildings in Iserlohn, Sauerland, North Rhine-Westphalia on Saturday night. It is stated the man had been subjected to a gang-rape.
A police helicopter scoured nearby woods leading to four individuals being arrested. The 30-year-old victim was taken by ambulance to hospital for treatment, but the severity of his injuries has not been announced.
Earlier reports discussed the possibility the man-on-man gang rape of a refugee may have been an act of xenophobia by the “right-wing scene”, yet new developments reveal the four arrested men who faced a judge on Monday are also migrants of Iranian heritage. The suspects aged 24, 34, 42 and 46-years-old are residents of the Netherlands and Denmark, but are not natives of Europe.
With xenophobia now “ruled out”, police are investigating a potential political motive, with the Berliner Morgenpost reporting the attackers may have been loyalists to the regime in Tehran and the victim a critic.
Broadcaster NTV cites senior public prosecutor Michael Burggräf who said of the alleged crime: “According to investigations so far, the crime was primarily aimed at sexual humiliation”.
Police are still seeking two more suspects. The investigation is ongoing.
Quote:Germany enacted strict new land border controls Monday in what has been described as a response to irregular migration and growing extremist threats.
“We are strengthening our internal security through concrete action and we are continuing our tough stance against irregular migration,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said at a news conference.
AP reports the ministry said it notified the European Union of the order to set up border controls at the land borders with France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark for a period of six months.
They will begin next week on Sept. 16 and comes after a deadly knife attack in Soligen last month killed three people. The perpetrator was a Syrian asylum-seeker who claimed to be inspired by the Islamic State group.
Even more recently, police in Munich exchanged fire with a gunman near the Israeli Consulate last week, fatally wounding him. Authorities said they believe he was planning to attack the consulate on the 52nd anniversary of the attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics.
The latest restrictions enhance those already in place on the land borders with Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland.
Dutch politician Geert Wilders praised Germany’s move and said the Netherlands should do the same.
“Until we achieve strong protection of the EU’s external borders with the new Common European Asylum System, we must increase controls at our national borders even more,” Faeser said.
She noted Germany already has had more than 30,000 rejections of people seeking to cross its borders since last October, with the rush to enter going all the way back to 2015 when then Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the country to all and sundry migrant arrivals.
Quote:Reports published in the past week indicate that Ukraine is struggling to conscript enough soldiers to replace its staggering battlefield losses against Russia.
The Russians have taken horrific casualties as well, but their vastly larger population could be the key to eventually winning a war of attrition.
Fears of a manpower shortage led Ukraine to modify its conscription law in April, removing demobilization limits that formerly rotated soldiers out of service after 36 months on the battlefield. The draft age was also lowered from 27 to 25.
“The enemy outnumbers us seven to ten times,” Joint Forces commander Yurii Sodol told Ukrainian lawmakers when he urged them to remove the demobilization provision.
In July, a 60-day grace period for conscription registration expired. Ukrainian officials estimated the tougher registration laws could make up to four million more conscripts available.
The latest news from the front lines renewed concerns that Ukraine simply cannot keep up with the casualties is has sustained.
Channel News Asia (CNA) noted on Monday that between battlefield losses and people fleeing the country – including men fleeing the country to avoid conscription – Ukraine has lost 10 million people out of a prewar population of 45 million.
Worse still, Ukraine’s population of men under 30 has dwindled from 6 million in 2022 to less than 5 million today, reducing both the pool of potential conscripts and the manpower that would be available for postwar reconstruction. Ukraine’s economic output has dropped by about 25 percent since the war began, with a manpower shortage as one of several factors dragging it down.
“We are now in a war of attrition. It is very difficult to choose between butter and guns,” Ukrainian Deputy Central Bank Governor Sergiy Nikolaychuk told Bloomberg News in a June interview.
Ukraine is trying to compensate for this demographic loss by allowing some 3,000 prisoners to fight on the front lines, and men below the reduced draft age of 25 are finding ways to enlist.
“They can erase all violations you had and pardon you. That means you can start all over again. Such a chance has never been given to anyone before,” an enlisted prisoner told CNA.
Ukrainian women are stepping up to fill jobs that are normally held by men so more men will be free to fight in the war, but Ukraine is still suffering from a significant labor shortage – and that could get worse even if the war ends soon as a fair number of Ukrainian men could leave the country to be with wives and children who emigrated after hostilities began.
Ukraine was already an “old” country with demographics skewing toward 55 and older, which means the loss of so many young people to combat and emigration will make it even more difficult to provide medical and support benefits to an aging population. Elderly Ukrainians forced to relocate by Russian advances are losing their homes and possessions, which will make caring for them even more expensive – and there will be fewer young workers to do it.
Quote:Ukraine launched a major drone attack against Moscow and several other Russian cities on Monday night — possibly the largest Ukrainian offensive involving unmanned aerial vehicles since the war began in 2022.
The Russian military claimed it destroyed 144 of Ukraine’s drones, but some damage and fatalities were still reported.
The governor of the Moscow region, Andrey Vorobyov, said 20 Ukrainian drones were shot down in his area, but others were able to damage apartment buildings and houses in the towns of Lyubertsy and Ramenskoye. Local media photographed fires burning in a few high-rise buildings after the drone strikes.
“A woman was killed, and three more people sustained injuries. Five residential buildings near one of those damaged have been evacuated as emergency services were handling drone debris,” Vorobyov said. If his account is accurate, it would mark the first civilian death in the Moscow region since the war began.
Russian civil and military officials said more drones were intercepted over Tula, Belgorod, Kaluga, Voronezh, Lipetsk, Oryol, and Kursk, the province Ukrainian ground forces invaded in August.
Three airports outside Moscow were shut down temporarily during the attack, causing 48 flights to be diverted. The mayor of Moscow said debris from an intercepted drone damaged a house on the edge of the city, but no other Ukrainian drones were able to reach the Russian capital.
“There is no way that nighttime strikes on residential neighborhoods can be associated with military action,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday, condemning the attack.
“The Kyiv regime continues to demonstrate its nature. They are our enemies, and we must continue the special military operation to protect ourselves from such actions,” Peskov said.
Russia has attacked Ukrainian civilian neighborhoods many times during the invasion, including attacks on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. Ukrainian military chief Serhiy Popko said Russia attacked Kyiv again on Monday night with a swarm of 46 drones, 38 of which Ukraine’s air force allegedly shot down.
Drone warfare has figured prominently in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with both sides innovating offensive and defensive tactics. Drone swarms — like those both sides reportedly launched on Monday — usually cause minimal damage because the drones are easily intercepted, but Ukraine does not have permission to use U.S. and European-supplied missiles to hit targets deep in Russia, so it must employ drones for long-range attacks. Russian oil facilities are frequent targets for these drone strikes.
Ukraine’s latest innovation, spotlighted in social media videos that the Ukrainian Defense Ministry released, is the “dragon drones” — low-altitude drones that drop extremely hot payloads of thermite on their targets.
These thermite charges, which burn at temperatures of up to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, have proven extremely effective at burning away soft cover to expose Russian soldiers to follow-up attacks.
Quote:In a landmark case, the Netherlands has sentenced two Pakistanis to prison for calling on their followers to murder Dutch populist leader Geert Wilders.
The court in The Hague sentenced 56-year-old Imam Muhammad Ashraf Asif Jalali to 14 years in prison over his issuing of a fatwa death warrant on the head of Party for Freedom (PVV) leader Geert Wilders, who now serves as the main power broker behind the Dutch government, for his role in promoting cartoon contests featuring caricatures of Mohammed.
The court found that Jalali had issued demands for the killing of the populist politician in the English language to increase the chances of the fatwa being taken up by an international audience. It ruled that the calls were made with terrorist intent and that it is likely that Jilali’s followers took the demands seriously, Dutch broadcaster NOS reports.
Meanwhile, the court also sentenced 29-year-old Saad Hussain Rizvi to four years in prison for making death threats against Wilders. Rizvi is the leader of the radical Islamist Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan (TLP) group. While the Public Prosecution Service had demanded a six-year sentence for the TLP leader, Rizvi was partially acquitted as it was not determined that he had terrorist intent behind his statements.
Despite the rulings, it is unclear if the two men will actually face justice, given that both reside in Pakistan, a country which the Netherlands does not have an extradition treaty with. However, Wilders called for an international arrest warrant against the two Islamists.
Nevertheless, the politician described the ruling as a “pure win”, adding: “I now hope that the Dutch government will also do everything in its power to ensure that those involved will serve their sentences.”
Regardless of whether Jilali or Rizvi serve time behind bars, Wilders said that the decision is “an important signal, also internationally, that pronouncing a fatwa on a parliamentarian does not go unpunished.”
Quote:A Swiss appeals court on Tuesday found Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan guilty of rape and sexual coercion in a Geneva hotel 15 years ago, overturning last year’s lower court acquittal.
AFP reports the court said it “annuls the judgement of 24 May 2023” and sentenced the former Oxford professor to three years in prison, two of them suspended.
Swiss-born Ramadan, 62, is the grandson of the founder of the Islamist movement the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and wrote his doctoral thesis on his ancestor.
Named by Time Magazine in 2004 among the 100 most influential people in the world for his influence on European Muslims, Ramadan has stirred controversy throughout his intellectual career.
Alongside the now concluded Swiss case, a Paris appeals court ruled in June this year Ramadan should be tried for raping three women between 2009 and 2016, a decision his lawyers have challenged.
The scholar spent more than nine months in pre-trial detention in 2018, but was released in November that year.
Ramadan said he had not carried out “a single act, behaviour or sex act that was not discussed beforehand” with the women despite allegations of slapping, choking, and non-consensual penetration by his many accusers.
Ramadan was a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University.
He was banned from entering the United States by the George W. Bush administration in 2004 after it was alleged he donated to the Association de Secours Palestinien (ASP/ Palestinian Relief Organisation) from 1998 to 2002.
The U.S. government considered the ASP a group that funded terrorism by giving some of their donations to the anti-Israel terrorist organisation Hamas which is proscribed in the U.S.
Ramadan’s supporters previously used social media networks to claim the sexual assault allegations were all part of a global “Zionist plot,” as Breitbart News reported.
A global plot that makes criminals serve their sentences in prison is definitely a plot I would love to support.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:The cause of death for Chad McQueen, an actor known for his performances in the Karate Kid movies and the son of the late actor and race car driver Steve McQueen, has been revealed.
The actor passed away on Wednesday at the age of 63 in Palm Springs, California.
According to the New York Times, the actor died of organ failure, his longtime attorney and friend, Arthur Barens, confirmed.
“It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of our father, Chad McQueen,” Chad’s wife, Jeanie Galbraith and their two children, Chase and Madison, wrote in the statement shared on Thursday, September 12.
In addition to describing Chad as a loving father and committed husband, the family penned, “His passion for racing not only highlighted his exceptional talent but also served as a way to honour his father’s legacy, a testament to the values instilled in him.”
The actor’s health complications were a result of a racing injury he sustained years ago, which led to progressive organ failure and ultimately his death.
AP reports McQueen followed in his father’s footsteps, pursuing both acting and race car driving.
Chad McQueen was involved in more than 25 movies and television shows, as an actor, producer and other roles, but he is most widely recognized for his role as Dutch in the 1984 teen classic The Karate Kid.
While he starred in several films after the hit action franchise, including New York Cop, Squanderers and Red Line, he ultimately engaged more in racing than acting, and he eventually founded McQueen Racing, a company that creates custom cars, motorcycles, and accessories, AP sets out in its report.
His son Chase, who also races, and his daughter Madison now run the company.
Quote:Fulton County, Georgia, Judge Scott McAfee dismissed two of the counts against former President Donald Trump in a RICO prosecution there, ruling that District Attorney Fani Willis lacked standing to bring the charges against him.
Reuters reported:
Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee found that state prosecutors did not have the authority to bring those charges, which related to the alleged filing of false documents in federal court.
McAfee allowed the remainder of the case to move forward, including eight charges against Trump. Trump and 14 co-defendants have pleaded not guilty to racketeering and other charges stemming from what prosecutors allege was a scheme to overturn Trump’s narrow defeat in Georgia in the 2020 election.
…
The ruling means that five of the original 13 criminal counts against Trump in the indictment obtained last year have now been tossed out. McAfee in March dismissed six other counts, including three against Trump.
Last month, Trump’s lawyers asked a state appeals court to remove Willis from the case over “racial animus,” after she gave a speech claiming that ethics complaints against her had been filed because of racism.
The ethical complaints were later found to have merit, exposing an inappropriate relationship between Willis and fellow prosecutor Nathan Wade, who was forced to resign from the case.
The news of two charges being dropped against Trump is the latest legal victory for the former president in what he says is a pattern of political prosecutions against him, at both the federal and state levels.
Vice President Kamala Harris tried to use those prosecutions against him in the presidential debate September 10.
NYT Poll: People Blame Kamala for Immigration Crisis
Quote:The majority of likely voters say they blame Vice President Kamala Harris for record levels of illegal immigration at the United States-Mexico over the last three and a half years, a New York Times/Siena College poll reveals.
The poll asked likely voters “How much blame, if any, do you think Kamala Harris as sitting vice president should receive for … problems at the border” — record illegal immigration, in other words — to which 63 percent said they place “a lot of blame” or “some blame” on Harris.
In April of 2021, President Joe Biden asked Harris to lead the administration’s effort in “stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.” As a result, many media outlets and lawmakers began referring to Harris as the “border czar.”
Harris has since tried to distance herself from the issue of illegal immigration.
The poll shows the majority of likely voters are not convinced by Harris’s attempt to distance herself from the border. Only 16 percent of likely voters said Harris bears “no blame at all” for record illegal immigration over the last few years.
Meanwhile, of the majority that do blame Harris, 74 percent are white non-college-educated voters, 51 percent are non-white non-college-educated voters, and 62 percent are white college-educated voters.
Most significantly, perhaps, 63 percent of swing voters said they blame Harris.
Regarding who likely voters trust more on immigration, the poll found that 53 percent favor former President Donald Trump on the issue while a minority of 43 percent favor Harris. Among swing voters, 53 percent favor Trump over Harris.
Trump has long campaigned on mass deportations, a crackdown on illegal immigration at the border, and tightening the labor market by stemming the flow of foreign workers into American jobs.
Harris, on the other hand, has vowed to continue Biden’s legacy on immigration, which has welcomed nearly 7 million migrants to the United States since he took office and ensured that the majority of job growth in the labor market goes to foreign workers.
The poll surveyed nearly 1,700 likely voters from September 3 to September 6. The margin of error is +/- 2.8 percentage points.
Quote:A record number of illegal alien sex offenders have been arrested in Maryland, home to several sanctuary jurisdictions, over the last 12 months.
On Friday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced its 153rd arrest of illegal alien sex offenders in Maryland with 36-year-old illegal alien Madai Gamaliel Amaya of Honduras being arrested in Montgomery Village in August.
Amaya was convicted of second-degree rape in Montgomery County in August 2009 and subsequently deported from the United States in July 2013 by ICE agents. Amaya illegally crossed the southern border, and he was deported from the U.S. again in November 2018.
Amaya then illegally crossed the border for a third time as a got-away and traveled back to Maryland. ICE agents arrested Amaya in August, and he remains in their custody pending deportation from the U.S.
ICE’s arrest of Amaya marks a record number of arrests of illegal alien sex offenders that the federal agency has made in Maryland.
This alarming statistic comes as a FOX45 News investigation discovered that, in Baltimore County, almost ten percent of child sex crime cases involved illegal aliens from Central America who were handed down more lenient sentences by circuit court judges.
In the case of 19-year-old illegal alien Henry Argueta-Tobar of Guatemala, convicted of second-degree rape in July, a circuit court judge in Charles County sentenced him to 20 years in prison and five years of supervised release.
The circuit court, though, suspended all but 190 days of Argueta-Tobar’s sentence.
EUROPE
Russia Grows Tired of 6 British Diplomats aka Spies
Quote:Russia on Friday accused six British diplomats of spying and said it decided to expel them. The U.K. said the “completely baseless” move came weeks ago and was linked to its action in May to revoke the credentials of an attaché at the Russian Embassy and limit Moscow´s diplomatic activities in London.
The latest East-West tensions unfolded as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visits Washington for talks that will include Ukraine´s request to use Western-supplied weapons to strike targets inside Russia. President Vladimir Putin has warned that Kyiv´s use of long-range weapons would put NATO at war with Moscow.
Russia´s Federal Security Service said in an online statement that the Foreign Ministry withdrew the British envoys’ accreditations, and Russian TV quoted an FSB official as saying it was decided to expel them.
The FSB said it received documents indicating the diplomats were sent to Russia by a division of the U.K.’s Foreign Office “whose main task is to inflict a strategic defeat on our country,” and that they were involved in “intelligence-gathering and subversive activities.” It did not identify the six diplomats.
The FSB warned that if other diplomats are found to be carrying out “similar actions,” it “will demand early termination of their missions” to Russia.
Russian TV said the six diplomats had met with independent media and rights groups that have been declared “foreign agents” – a label Russian authorities have actively used against organizations and individuals critical of the Kremlin.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in a statement that the diplomats were carrying out “subversive actions aimed at causing harm to our people.”
“We fully agree with the assessments of the activities of the British so-called diplomats expressed by the Russian FSB,” she added in an online statement. “The British Embassy has gone far beyond the limits outlined by the Vienna Conventions.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said breaking off diplomatic relations with the U.K. was not on the table right now.
In calling the Russian allegations “completely baseless,” the U.K. Foreign Office said the expulsions happened weeks ago, linking them to Britain´s decision in May to revoke the credentials of an attaché at Moscow´s London embassy and to impose a five-year time limit on all Russian diplomats in Britain.
“The Russian authorities revoked the diplomatic accreditation of six U.K. diplomats in Russia last month, following action taken by the U.K. government in response to Russian state-directed activity across Europe and in the U.K.,” the Foreign Office said in a statement. “We are unapologetic about protecting our national interests.”
In May, the U.K. expelled Russia´s defense attaché in London, alleging he was an undeclared intelligence officer, and it closed several Russian diplomatic properties in Britain that it said were being used for spying. About a week later, Russia reciprocated and expelled Britain´s defense attaché.
Quote:Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov on Wednesday urged China to take a leading role in mediation on the Ukraine war.
“We welcome the Brazil-China consensus – a well-known initiative consisting of six points,” Ryabkov said.
“I think this initiative has ever more support in the Global South. And this meeting of high representatives is the latest example of how the Global South and people who really want to consistently move toward a political settlement are finding good reasons to actively consider this idea,” he said.
“I will tell you that Russia has always expressed its readiness to resume negotiations,” he claimed.
The latter statement is flatly untrue, as Russia often refuses to engage in negotiations, but Russian officials always dismiss the proposals they do not like as unserious and treat them like they never happened.
The “Brazil-China consensus” is a joint statement released on May 23, 2024, after Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Brazilian presidential adviser Celso Amorim. Chinese officials incessantly refer to the “six-point plan” but rarely bother to explain what the six points are.
The first point is a call for all parties in the Ukraine conflict to “de-escalate” by not expanding the battlefield, increasing the intensity of the fighting, or provoking the other side. Since Russia created the battlefield in the first place, and has “expanded” it without remorse at every opportunity, this point mostly translates to Russia complaining about effective Ukrainian counterattacks like the invasion of Kursk.
The second point states that “all sides believe that dialogue and negotiation are the only viable solution to the Ukraine crisis.” China and Brazil called for an international peace conference that would be equally recognized by both Moscow and Kyiv.
The third point calls for more humanitarian assistance to civilians affected by the conflict and encourages all parties to avoid civilian casualties. The fourth rules out nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, while the fifth calls for all parties to avoid attacking nuclear power plants.
The sixth point is a vague call for more international cooperation on issues like energy and food security, relevant to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine only because it urges protection of “critical infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines.” Oil and gas pipelines have been in peril throughout the Ukraine conflict.
Quote:A railway behind the front lines of the Ukraine war was bombed and taken out of service this week with a freight train destroyed, Ukraine claims credit while Russia says it is launching a criminal terrorism investigation.
A freight train was derailed with serious damage to the locomotive and 11 boxcars thrown off the track on Tuesday night, closing the rail line leading to Valuyki, Belgorod from the Russian interior. The railhead is just 50 miles away from the frontline fighting at the Vovchansk ‘meatgrinder’ on the Kharkiv front.
Ukrainian state media asserts the derailment was in fact an attack by their partisans, saying the line was blocked by a joint operation of their defence intelligence establishment and Ukrainian special forces. Kyiv claimed the freight train was giving logistical support to the Russian army and it was derailed by means of explosives, “paralysing” a main transport artery.
The Russians, for their part, insisted the train wagons damaged in the strike were empty, and said there were no casualties. Moscow confirmed the track had been blocked and local trains were replaced with buses, while long-distance services were directed to other routes. Two recovery trains had been sent to the scene to clear the tracks.
The Western Region Investigative Department for Transport of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation said they had opened a criminal investigation under the Russian criminal code dealing with terrorist attacks, saying they believed the explosion had been caused by the “interference of an outsider”. Russian state media said one track on the two-track line was re-opened the following day, but no update has been given on the other, suggesting logistical supply in a region with bad roads so close to some of the hardest fighting of the war today remains disrupted by the partisan attack.
While the military application of railways lapsed in the minds of many Western military planners with the end of the Cold War era, they have made a considerable comeback in the course of the Ukraine war, where both sides rely heavily on railway infrastructure to move men and supplies in areas where roads have long been of poor quality and were air transport is next to impossible.
With this return to prominence has some an increased strategic focus, with the railways themselves coming under heavy attack. The early days of the war saw concentrated Russian strikes on Ukrainian railway infrastructure — likely to slow the country receiving external aid — and this continues today. Ukraine in turn have repeatedly used partisan saboteur teams to blow up Russian trains inside Russia and Russian-occupied Ukraine.
Russia operates a series of well armed military trains to deter saboteurs but it has been met with limited success, the distances involved making effectively guarding the railways a near impossible task.
Quote:China said Friday it would gradually raise its statutory retirement age, as the country grapples with a looming demographic crisis and an ageing population.
Hundreds of millions of people in China are set to enter old age in the coming decades while the birth rate dwindles dramatically.
The national population fell in 2023 for the second year in a row, with policymakers and experts warning of severe impacts on the economy, healthcare and social welfare systems if action is not taken.
China’s retirement age had not been raised for decades and had been among the lowest in the world.
State news agency Xinhua said top officials in Beijing had decided that “the statutory retirement age for male workers will be gradually extended from the original 60 years to 63 years”.
For women workers the retirement age will be extended “from the original 50 or 55 years to 55 and 58 years, respectively”, depending on the type of job, Xinhua reported.
It said the retirement age would be gradually raised over 15 years from 2025, adding that from 2030, workers would need to make a minimum of 20 years of basic pension contributions instead of the current 15.
The new rules will allow Chinese people “to postpone retirement to an even later date if they reach an agreement with employers”, Xinhua said.
Quote:The Chinese government on Friday announced that it will no longer allow foreign families to adopt Chinese children, ending a program that has found homes overseas for more than 160,000 children since 1992. While Beijing refused to clearly explain its decision, most observers suspected it was a response to declining birth rates in China.
The cutoff of foreign adoptions was so abrupt that families with pending cases had no idea if their adoptions would go forward. When the U.S. State Department sought clarification, Chinese officials said they “will not continue to process cases at any stage.”
“We understand there are hundreds of families still pending completion of their adoption, and we sympathize with their situation,” the State Department said.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry mumbled something about bringing foreign adoptions into line with “the spirit of relevant international conventions.”
This might have been a vague reference to Denmark and the Netherlands saying earlier this year that they will no longer allow overseas adoptions. Both of those decisions were prompted by bureaucratic irregularities and allegations of fraudulent paperwork, after a sharp decline in foreign adoptions during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
China is probably more worried that it no longer has children to spare. Overseas adoptions of Chinese children became commonplace during the last years of China’s hideous One Child Policy, which sought to control overpopulation by forcing families to have only one child apiece.
The One Child Policy was notoriously biased against female children in its implementation, as families saw girls as a luxury they could no longer afford. According to China’s Children International, a nonprofit group founded in 2011 to support Chinese adoptees around the world, about 82,000 Chinese children were adopted by American families over the past 30 years, and most of them were girls.
China rather abruptly went from worrying about overpopulation to worrying about demographic collapse after the One Child Policy ended in 2016. Panic is growing in the Chinese Communist Party that it cannot reverse its collapsing birth rates. In the space of a few years, Beijing went from forcing women to abort excess babies to offering a plethora of financial incentives for motherhood, practically begging young families to have children, and even suggesting people who don’t reproduce quickly enough might be traitors. None of these measures has worked terribly well.
University of California at Irvine sociology professor Wang Feng said China’s ban on foreign adoptions marked “the end of an era, and the closing of one of the most shameful chapters of the three and a half decades of social engineering known as one-child policy.”
“The Chinese government created the problem and then they couldn’t deal with the financial constraints and that is why they allowed foreign adoption as a last resort,” Wang told the New York Times (NYT) on Friday.
Guo Wu, an associate professor of Chinese studies at Allegheny College, suggested rising Chinese nationalism could also be a factor in shutting down foreign adoptions.
Guo said China’s nationalists may find the notion that China cannot raise its own children insulting, especially since half of the foreign adoptions have gone to the United States, whose relations with the Chinese government are growing more tense.
“This policy might fulfill that feeling that ‘we don’t need to send our kids to America,’” he said.
Hopeful adoptive families in the U.S. told the NYT they were devastated by China’s sudden halt to the process.
“It’s really hard that there are hundreds of families that are waiting, that have a place prepared and we sit here hopeless, with our hands tied. We loved the country, we love the people and part of my grief is for the connection with China,” said would-be adoptive mother Courtney Moore.
Quote:Former Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang, who disappeared in June 2023 with no clear explanation and has not been seen in public since, is reportedly working a “low-level job” in Beijing and has no future career prospects, the Washington Post reported this week.
Qin was one of the most extraordinary diplomats on genocidal dictator Xi Jinping’s roster, rising to become the youngest foreign minister in decades after a brief but memorable stint as the Chinese ambassador to the United States.
In that role, Qin earned a reputation as both a belligerent “wolf warrior”-style Chinese diplomat – weaponizing rudeness to berate American counterparts – and as a lover of American culture, seen attending NBA games and visiting U.S. colleges.
Then, suddenly, Qin Gang disappeared. His last public appearance was on June 25, 2023, and he has not been seen. Xi finally fired him from the foreign minister post in July and he lost several other Communist Party positions, but has not publicly faced criminal charges or accusations of corruption. He notably remains a “comrade” of the Party, despite disappearing during an era of purges that took down two defense ministers and several other high-ranking communists in a hail of corruption charges.
The most prevalent theory – in international media and on Chinese social media sites – is that Qin lost his job after having an extramarital affair. The woman implicated, former Phoenix TV journalist Fu Xiaotian, also disappeared from public life in early 2023. Her last social media posts before vanishing show her with an infant son, whose father’s identity remains unknown.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Qin “is alive but … in a position very diminished from his once-lofty perch.” The report, citing anonymous American officials, is the first such detailed report on Qin’s whereabouts currently.
According to the newspaper, Qin is working at “World Affairs Press,” a state-run publisher. The Post sent a journalist to the offices of the publisher, “in an alley in central Beijing,” where no one could confirm if Qin was, in fact, working for the company. None, however, reportedly denied it.
Quote:The Chinese Foreign Ministry bristled on Wednesday at being asked about the presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, which took place Tuesday, insisting it does not want China to be “an issue” in the election.
Harris and Trump squared off in a debate hosted by ABC News. Despite the debate featuring a significant amount of foreign policy content and China presenting America’s most dangerous geopolitical threat, moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis did not ask a single question about China. The Communist Party regime only surfaced as a topic in isolated parts of the conversation when Trump or Harris mentioned it.
Trump and Harris engaged in a small exchange on Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on Chinese imports, which the Agence France-Presse (AFP) raised during the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s regular press briefing on Wednesday. Spokeswoman Mao Ning refused to address the exchange, insisting, “The presidential elections are the United States’ own affairs. We have no comment on that.”
“That said, we are opposed to making China an issue in US elections,” she added.
The Global Times, China’s top state-run English propaganda newspaper, complained on Thursday – in a different context, the Congressional “China Week” event to discuss Beijing’s threat – that Washington’s relationship to the genocidal Chinese regime was causing so much concern in America. Rather than threat China’s belligerence towards American and the free world generally as a legitimate political issue, the Times dismissed it as a perennial distraction American politicians use to keep the focus away from domestic U.S. issues.
“When it comes to China, politicians from both parties line up one after another to affirm their contention that China is dangerous and poses a real threat to the US and to the world. Dubious legislation follows,” the Times huffed.
“The political discourse in the US when it comes to China lacks common sense, and the more mainstream media attention it gets, the more damage it does to public opinion across the country,” the state newspaper complained. “Regardless of who wins the presidential election in November, there is no reason to expect a change in the rhetoric or its vicious tone.”
Despite the outsized threat communist China presents to American interests – and its long record of human rights abuses, its ongoing colonization of Africa, and its close ties to American enemies such as Russia and Iran – Trump and Harris did not have to answer any questions about China on Tuesday. Indicating the extent to which China looms over so many other political issues in America, Washington’s policies towards China came up, anyway, particularly during a segment on economic policy.
Harris used her time to attack Trump’s approach to China, accusing him of inviting “trade wars” and empowering the Chinese military.
“He invited trade wars — you want to talk about his deal with China?” Harris said. “What he ended up doing is, under Donald Trump’s presidency, he ended up selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military — basically sold us out when a policy about China should be in making sure the United States of America wins the competition for the 21st century.”
In reality, the Trump administration significantly limited American exports of chips and semiconductors to China and more fervently targeted Chinese companies known to be a national security risk, such as the telecommunications corporation Huawei, in its limitations. In 2021, Reuters reported that the Biden-Harris administration “has granted licenses authorizing suppliers to sell chips to Huawei for such vehicle components as video screens and sensors.”
China & Russia to Hold Drills close to Japan & South Korea
Quote:The Chinese Foreign Ministry confirmed on Tuesday that military units had arrived in Vladivostok, Russia, to participate in joint military exercises with Moscow, part of a greater plan to for China to also host the Russian military in exercises in the Sea of Japan.
The Sea of Japan, or East Sea, lies between the Korean Peninsula and Japan, placing the Russian military within close proximity of a nation with which it remains technically at war. As Japan and the Soviet Union never signed a peace treaty following World War II, and the Russian Federation has also failed to formally end the war, the two nations remain the last two parties to World War II with unresolved hostilities. The major obstacle to signing a peace treaty has been a decades-long disagreement on which country should have sovereignty over the Kuril Islands, which lie between Russia and Japan and are currently occupied by Russia.
Russia and South Korea have also seen relations deteriorate dramatically in the past year over both the Russian government’s flourishing ties to North Korea and South Korea’s support for Ukraine in the ongoing invasion of that country. Russia signed a mutual defense agreement with communist North Korea in July that would, in theory, require Russian forces to enter the battle theater if North Korea were attack. North and South Korea, while not in active hostilities since 1953, are also technically in a state of war.
China is North Korea’s greatest ally and an active opponent to the Japanese government on the world stage, making the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) presence in the East Sea of high concern to both Seoul and Tokyo.
The Chinese state-run outlet Global Times reported on Monday that the PLA would send naval and air assets to both the East Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk to “conduct a series of joint drills and patrols in moves to deepen pragmatic military cooperation.”
Russia forces will also reportedly travel south to participate in Chinese-led exercises.
“China routinely organizes the Interaction series of exercises with Russia and joins strategic exercises organized by Russia, while the two countries also routinely hold joint naval and air patrols,” the Global Times explained. “It highlights China and Russia’s close military ties, and the two militaries’ efforts to further deepen pragmatic cooperation, a Beijing-based military expert who requested anonymity told the Global Times.”
The Chinese Defense Ministry confirmed on Tuesday that PLA forces are in Vladivostok to participate in the exercises.
“During the force projection stage, the Chinese troops successfully accomplished multiple batches of materials loading and transfer, personnel movement and ferry flights,” the Defense Ministry narrated. “As for maritime force, the Chinese participating naval taskforce reached the designated sea area at around 4:00 p.m. on Monday, and joined their Russian counterparts to prepare for the following planned exercise.”
The Ministry described the objective of the currently ongoing war games to “deepen the strategic collaboration between the two militaries, and enhance their capabilities in jointly responding to security threats.” It noted that those exercises are separate from a Russian-led exercise known as “Ocean-2024,” which is expected to take place this month.
Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. confirmed on Tuesday that Chinese forces were participating in “Ocean-2024.”
“Ships and aircraft of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army are taking parts in the drills,” Putin said, according to the Russian news agency Tass. “We focus special attention on strengthening military cooperation with friendly countries. It is especially important today, amid the growing geopolitical tension in the world.”
In remarks to the military forces participating in “Ocean-2024,” Putin emphasized that Russia “must be ready for any developments” in the defense of Russia’s “sovereignty and national interests.” The strongman added that Russian forces must be prepared to expect “any military aggression in all directions.”
Quote:Chinese dictator Xi Jinping sent a message to North Korean counterpart Kim Jong-un on Monday congratulating his country on its anniversary, a note international observers described as relatively cold and a potential sign of discord between the two countries.
China is communist North Korea’s closest ally, but has refrained from major displays of support towards the Kim regime in the past year, particularly after Pyongyang published an excoriating screed against Beijing in May for backing a statement vaguely supporting the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. North Korean diplomacy has since trended towards Russia, signing a mutual defense treaty with Moscow in July during strongman Vladimir Putin’s first visit to North Korea in decades.
China and North Korea nonetheless rely on each other significantly for ideological and economic support. Xi’s message hoping to “strengthen communication” with Kim arrives as North Korea escalates belligerent behavior against South Korea, flooding the country with a wave of trash-filled balloons over the weekend. China, in turn, faces growing economic challenges and resistance to its geopolitical agenda from the West.
The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), North Korea’s flagship state propaganda outlet, described Xi’s message as a “heartfelt congratulations” on the anniversary of the founding of communist North Korea.
“I am sure that the Korean people will certainly win a victory, steadily fresh and greater, in the course of promoting the socialist cause of Korean style under the leadership of the WPK headed by you,” Xi reportedly told Kim. WPK is short for the “Workers’ Party of Korea,” the ruling communist party.
Xi promised to “continue to view and deal with the China-DPRK [North Korea] relations at a strategic level and from a long-term angle,” KCNA reported, “and is ready to provide the peoples of the two countries with more welfare and make greater contribution to peace, stability, development and prosperity.”
The Chinese dictator added that Beijing would pursue “developing the traditional China-DPRK friendly and cooperative relations by deepening the strategic communication and boosting coordination.”
The South Korean news agency Yonhap described Beijing and Pyongyang as “relatively estranged” in the context of the founding anniversary message and the upcoming anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two countries. South Korean sources have reportedly not seen any indication that the two countries will plan any “grand celebrations” together to mark the occasion.
Similarly, Radio Free Asia (RFA) observed that Xi’s message “appeared slightly less effusive” than in prior years and was only the second such message to Kim in the past year, the first being a New Year’s greeting.
While still close allies, North Korea and China have kept a diplomatic distance this year compared to those prior, which appeared to expand following China participating in a summit in Seoul alongside the governments of that country and Japan in May. The trilateral summit, the ninth of its kind in modern history, united the conservative governments of South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio with the Communist Party and resulted in a joint statement that outraged North Korea.
“We reiterated positions on regional peace and stability, denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and the abductions issue, respectively,” the three countries said in their statement. “We agree to continue to make positive efforts for the political settlement of the Korean Peninsula issue.”
The North Korean regime described the statement as a “grave political provocation” and a “declaration of war,” notably failing to exclude ally China in its condemnation.
Quote:North Korea published photos on Friday of communist dictator Kim Jong-un touring a national “Nuclear Weapons Institute,” where the regime is allegedly enriching uranium to fulfill Kim’s call for an “exponential” increase in the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
Kim toured the enrichment facility and “acquainted himself with the production of nuclear warheads and current nuclear materials and set forth important tasks for long-term plan for increasing the production of weapon-grade nuclear materials,” according to the regime’s flagship propaganda outlet the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
The report featured photos of Kim, accompanied by military officials with their faces blurred out, walking amid rows of machines that appeared to be uranium centrifuges, used to enrich uranium for use in the manufacture of nuclear bombs. KCNA’s documenting of Kim’s tour is an unprecedented report, South Korean media noted – the regime had never before revealed any details of its uranium enrichment program.
The report concluded a week that began with Kim proclaiming he had ordered his military to engage in an “exponential” increase in the number of nuclear weapons North Korea possesses. Kim had first made that call in January 2023, following moves to outlaw denuclearization talks and increase the number of belligerent threats against South Korea and America. Kim has also recently claimed to implement a program to develop indigenously made suicide drones and some sort of “underwater nuclear weapon system” and signed a mutual defense agreement with Russia that would require Moscow to defend Pyongyang in the event of an attack.
KCNA’s article on Kim’s visit to the alleged uranium enrichment facility claimed the dictator offered a glowing review of the complex.
“He highly praised the scientists, technicians and officials in the field of nuclear weapons production for having carried out without fail the plan for producing weapon-grade nuclear materials needed for manufacturing nuclear warheads,” KCNA relayed, “cherishing the firm and steadfast revolutionary spirit and faith to firmly defend the victorious advance of the revolutionary cause of Juche with the strongest nuclear force.”
Juche, or “self-reliance,” is the official philosophy of North Korea under the communist Kim family cult.
KCNA claimed that the facility was “dynamically producing nuclear materials by studying, developing and introducing all the system elements,” granting Kim “great satisfaction.” The report relayed that Kim repeated his call to “exponentially increase the nuclear weapons for self-defence true to the Party’s line of building up nuclear armed forces.”
“He stressed the need to set a higher long-term goal in producing nuclear materials necessary for the manufacture of tactical nuclear weapons,” the report continued, “and concentrate all efforts on bringing about fresh leap forward, setting forth important tasks and orientation.”
Quote:A South Korean military official told Yonhap News on Friday that over 1,300 Chinese-made surveillance cameras have been removed from military bases, including bases near the North Korean border, after the South Koreans belatedly discovered the cameras were capable of transmitting information back to China.
The official added assurances that “no data has actually been leaked” from the compromised cameras, and they were primarily employed for monitoring training fields and base perimeters, rather than highly sensitive tasks such as monitoring the North Korean border.
According to Yonhap, the South Korean company that sold these 1,300 cameras to the military is suspected of falsifying their country of origin. The military is contemplating a lawsuit against the company over this misrepresentation.
Sometime in late July, South Korean military and intelligence officials realized they had littered their military bases with potentially compromised Chinese equipment. Upon closer inspection, they discovered the cameras were “designed to be able to transmit recorded footage externally by connecting to a specific Chinese server.”
Something similar happened in Australia last year, when the Defense and Foreign Ministries discovered their Chinese-made cameras posed a security risk.
In March, the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security completed an investigation that found some Chinese-built cranes installed at American ports contained mysterious cellular modems that were not part of their original design specification or installation contract.
Quote:Brazilian socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said on Wednesday that his government will continue receiving Venezuelan migrants (who are fleeing from the regime of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro), but hopes that its neighbor “returns to normal” so the migrants can go back “as soon as possible.”
Brazil is experiencing a new surge of Venezuelan migrants in the wake of the July 28 sham presidential election, which Maduro and the Venezuelan authorities — all under his control — fraudulently insist that he “won.”
“The Minister for Foreign Affairs [Mauro Vieira] has been instructed and determined by the Presidency of the Republic that we should treat people who are coming to Brazil out of a need to survive with great respect,” Lula said during an interview given to Rádio Norte FM. “You know that human beings are kind of nomadic, when they don’t have a place to eat, when they don’t have a place to work, they look for other places.”
“These people who are coming here will have to be treated well and the federal government has an obligation to help the state of Roraima take care of the education of these people, to take care of the maintenance of these people,” he continued, “because we don’t want these people to come here and spend even more time in need than they already did in Venezuela.”
Lula stated that he will visit Brazil’s northernmost state of Roraima — which neighbors Venezuela — at an unspecified date and discuss the issue of Venezuelan migrants with the state’s governor Antonio Denarium “so that we can definitely treat these thousands of Venezuelans who are in Brazil with great responsibility and respect.”
The Brazilian socialist president added that he hopes Venezuela “returns to normal” so that “these people can return to Venezuela as soon as possible.”
Over the past decade — and as a result of the collapse of socialism in Venezuela, led by the authoritarian socialist Maduro regime — Venezuela is undergoing what has been described as the worst migrant crisis in the Western Hemisphere, matched only in size by the Syrian and Ukrainian migrant crises.
Quote:A growing number of Cubans are forced to scavenge through garbage to find something to eat and survive, the independent outlet Cubanet reported on Wednesday.
Cuba is enduring an extremely dire humanitarian crisis stemming from more than six decades of communism under the authoritarian Castro regime. The communist-caused humanitarian crisis and the Castro regime’s gross mismanagement have caused the decline of the country’s population and the worst migrant crisis in Cuba’s history.
Nearly 90 percent of the remaining population now lives in conditions of extreme poverty in addition to other inhumane living conditions fueled by the collapse of Cuba’s infrastructure. Power blackouts and shortages of water, food, medicine, and other supplies are common, and Cubans have no access to adequate healthcare.
The collapse of Cuban infrastructure also affects the country’s garbage and disposal services — now barely functional — leading to an overflowing accumulation of garbage on the streets of the capital city of Havana.
The mounting garbage dumps, extreme poverty conditions, food shortages, and hunger prompted a surge in the popularity of buzos, or “divers”: individuals who desperately rummage through piles of garbage to find something to eat or sell for their sustenance. In a “good” month, divers reportedly earn only $17 at most.
Quote:Venezuelan Interior Minister and long-suspected drug lord Diosdado Cabello claimed on Wednesday evening that a U.S. Navy sailor recently detained by Venezuelan law enforcement officials was part of a “plot” to infiltrate the country and attack socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro and his regime.
U.S. authorities confirmed this week that a Navy sailor visiting Caracas was detained on August 30 by Maduro regime security officials. The enlisted sailor was reportedly not on official travel or approved leave when he traveled to Venezuela and is presently in the custody of the Maduro regime’s Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN).
White House spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday that they’re “in touch” with Maduro regime officials to “try and get more knowledge and information about this.”
Cabello, widely considered one of the most powerful members of Venezuela’s socialist regime — and actively wanted by U.S. authorities on narco-terrorism and other related charges — claimed during the latest broadcast of his weekly state-media show, Con el Mazo Dando (Hitting with the Mallet), that the detained U.S. Navy sailor sought to “collect the reward” that the United States presently offers for Maduro:
“The news came out from a gringo military officer. A few months ago we alerted our viewers about the plans of extremist groups that will try to infiltrate Venezuela to attempt against President Nicolás Maduro and leaders of Chavismo, all this to collect the famous U.S. bounty,” Cabello said as he read from a letter.
Since 2020, the United States offers a $15 million bounty for any information that can lead to the arrest and/or conviction of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. The United States also offers $10 million bounty for any information that can lead to Diosdado Cabello’s arrest and/or conviction.
Cabello, whom Maduro recently appointed as Interior Minister to “bring peace” to Venezuela as the authoritarian socialist regime continues its brutal crackdown on dissidents following the July 28 sham presidential election, asserted that he finds “striking” that the White House claimed to be in communication with the Venezuelan authorities.
“Well, it will be with [former interim President Juan Guaidó] that they are talking, or with [opposition presidential candidate] Edmundo González,” Cabello said.
Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek William Saab claimed on Thursday that the U.S. Navy sailor was detained in Venezuela after local authorities determined that he “entered without any kind of documentation or support” for his visit.
“He entered without any kind of documentation, without any kind of support for what, what he was coming to the country to do and he is in that process at the moment, that is what I can reveal, I can’t say anything more,” Saab told reporters.
The Venezuelan attorney general further claimed that the detained U.S. sailor “has dual nationality” and that his “main nationality” is Mexican. Saab stated that he cannot give more details about the case until “due process is completed.”
Deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh stated during a Thursday press briefing that she did not confirm that the sailor was detained in Venezuela at the end of August while on a personal travel.
Quote:Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González, who claims to have defeated dictator Nicolás Maduro in a sham presidential election in July, left Venezuela and arrived in Spain on Sunday, seeking political asylum.
Spain’s Foreign Ministry announced in a statement that González and his wife were flown from Venezuela on a Spanish Air Force plane, arriving at the Torrejón Air Base in Madrid in the afternoon hours of Sunday local time.
“From now on, the process for requesting asylum will begin, the resolution of which will be favorable in the interest of Spain’s commitment to the political rights and physical integrity of all Venezuelans, especially political leaders,” the statement read.
González, a 75-year-old former diplomat, was the only legitimate opposition candidate the socialist Maduro regime allowed on the ballot of the July 28 sham presidential election. His appearance on the ballot was initially intended to be of a placeholder nature in the event the Maduro regime allowed opposition leader María Corina Machado to participate. The Maduro regime ultimately upheld the ban on Machado, preventing her from running.
Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp stated on Sunday that the embassy of the Netherlands in Caracas hosted González from July 28, the day of the sham presidential election, to September 5, when he requested asylum to Spain.
Socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro and the Venezuelan authorities — all subservient to him — insist the dictator was the “winner” of the sham election despite the authorities’ continued refusal to publish voter data to corroborate the claimed results.
The Venezuelan opposition published its own voter data, collected from local voting stations directly rather than from the national electoral authority, indicating that González defeated Maduro in a landslide. The international community has widely rejected Maduro’s “victory,” as have many Venezuelans nationwide in protests the socialists responded to with a brutal persecution campaign that left more than 25 dead and roughly 200 injured. Independent human rights groups have documented the arbitrary detention of more than 2,400 individuals — including 129 children, of whom 86 were reportedly released in recent days.
Machado issued a statement on social media after González arrived in Spain, explaining that the opposition candidate’s life was in danger due to the growing threats from the Maduro regime that “demonstrate that the regime has no scruples and no limits in its obsession with silencing him and trying to subdue him.”
“Faced with this brutal reality, it is necessary for our cause to preserve his freedom, his integrity and his life,” Machado said.
The opposition leader stated that González will be “sworn in as Constitutional President of Venezuela and Commander-in-Chief of the National Armed Forces” on January 10, 2025, the date when a new presidential term is slated to begin in Venezuela.
Brazilian Fire Reaches Argentina
If this ever sounds like a copycat trying to recreate the same disaster that has plagued Canada now in South America, it's because you're reading too many conspiracy novels.
Quote:A “smoke screen” caused by the out-of-control fires in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil hit southern neighbors Argentina and Uruguay this week, local Argentine and Uruguayan media reported on Monday morning.
Annual fires are a recurring problem for the Amazon rainforest, nearly 60 percent of which lies within Brazil. In 2024, under the administration of radical leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Amazon rainforest is experiencing the most severe fires in over a decade.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) stated last week that it documented over 53,600 fires there between January 1 and August 27, 2024 — representing an 80-percent increase from that same period in 2023, when 29,826 were recorded. The number of fires registered by WWF during the first eight months of 2024 is the highest for that period of time since 2010. Lula was also president then, serving his second presidential term from 2007 to 2011.
The currently burning Amazon fires spread into Bolivia this week, burning nearly 4 million hectares’ worth of land, according to local environmentalist organizations. The situation prompted Bolivian authorities to declare a state of national emergency over the weekend, issuing health warnings over the smoke affecting the quality of the air and requesting international aid to help fight the fires.
Argentina’s National Weather Service (SMN) issued a warning on Monday of the arrival of the fires’ smoke to the country’s skies. The warning covers the metropolitan area of the capital city of Buenos Aires, municipalities located north of Buenos Aires, and 13 other provinces and regions where “a significant reduction in visibility” could be experienced.
SMN stressed that “phenomena are expected that may represent inconveniences or difficulties in the normal development of social life.” As a result of the smoke, the weather service suggested that citizens in the affected areas avoid outdoor activities and take respiratory and eye protection measures.
The Argentine weather service explained that the smoke is expected to arrive in the country on Monday but added that the arrival of a front of Patagonian winds could dissipate the smoke sometime between Tuesday and Wednesday.
SMN meteorologist Cindy Fernandez told the local newspaper La Nación that those who could be the most affected by the smoke cloud are people with respiratory problems.
“It is very possible that the smoke will be felt in the city and its surroundings. Especially because it will not only move up high but will also go to the surface and this is what would be harmful to health,” Fernandez said.
The smoke from the Amazon rainforest fires also reached neighboring Uruguay. Uruguayan meteorologist Mario Bidegain told the local newspaper El País on Monday that the smoke cloud will affect Uruguay through at least Tuesday and warned that it could cover “practically the whole country.”
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with an ABC affiliate for her first solo interview Friday, choosing the same network that got her through this week’s slanted presidential debate — but still managed to stumble through softball questions.
She answered five questions from Action News 6 ABC, a local affiliate of ABC News, in the interview that came just days after the moderators in the ABC debate with Donald Trump assisted her by providing fact checks on the former president but not her.
One of the ABC moderators for the debate, Linsey Davis, is a member of Harris’ sorority and Dana Walden, a Disney executive whose portfolio includes ABC, is one of the vice president’s close friends.
Action News 6 ABC anchor Brian Taff asked Harris, 59, what she would specifically do to bring down prices as president.
“Well, I’ll start with this. I grew up as a middle class kid. My mother raised my sister and me. She worked very hard,” she began, before going on about her neighborhood where people “were proud of their lawn.”
“We as Americans have beautiful character. We have ambitions and aspirations and dreams. But not everyone necessarily has access to the resources that can help them fuel those dreams and ambitions,” Harris went on.
She did not say how she would bring prices down but did highlight her proposed policy to give a $25,000 handout to new homeowners and giving tax breaks to new small businesses.
Harris also said she is “obviously not Joe Biden” because she offers an “opportunity economy” and “a new generation of leadership.”
“So, for example, thinking about developing and creating an opportunity economy where it’s about investing in areas that really need a lot of work,” she said, seemingly looking to find words.
The veep said she was not going take “anyone’s guns away” and that she supports the Second Amendment, but will ban “assault weapons” and “universal background checks.”
“They’re literally tools of war,” Harris said.
On what she thinks Trump’s appeal is to voters, Harris again took a few sentences to get to the core of the question.
“I, uh, based on experience and, uh, and, a lived experience know in my heart, I know in my soul, I know that the vast majority of Americans have in common so much more than what separates us,” she said.
“And I also believe that I am accurate in knowing that most Americans want a leader who brings us together as Americans and not someone who professes to be a leader who is trying to have us point our fingers at each other,” she said of Trump, arguing voters want someone with “common sense.”
“I think people are more willing now in light of the hate and division that we see coming out of Donald Trump to say, ‘Hey, let’s put country first.'”
Taff finally asked Harris if there was anything she wanted voters to know about her.
“I don’t know. I mean, probably it’s not very different from anybody watching right now. I love my family, um, one of my favorite things that I lately have not been able to do is Sunday family dinner. I love to cook. I have incredible friends,” Harris said.
“I have a career that really, and I said it the other day, you know, as a career prosecutor, I never asked a victim of crime where they were a Republican or a Democrat. The only thing I ever asked them was, ‘Are you OK?'” she said, arguing she thinks most Americans want that approach.
Quote:The sanctuary state of California may soon offer discounted cellphone service to low-income foreign nationals who do not have Social Security Numbers (SSNs), including illegal aliens.
A proposal before the California Public Utilities Commission would open up the state’s “LifeLine” program, which subsidizes phone bills for low-income Californians, to residents who do not have SSNs, including illegal aliens.
“… the California Universal LifeLine Telephone Service Program (California LifeLine) should extend eligibility to Californians without a Social Security Number (SSN). This decision establishes a process for Californians without an SSN to enroll in California LifeLine,” the proposal reads.
The move would come just after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) vetoed legislation that would have used state taxpayer money to help illegal aliens buy homes in California.
Last year, though, Newsom expanded state taxpayer-funded health insurance policies to illegal aliens residing in California — becoming the first state in the nation to do so. About 1.2 million illegal aliens are expected to eventually be using subsidized health insurance.
Today, about 4.7 million illegal aliens and their United States-born children reside in California.
Quote:An illegal alien is accused of murdering a family of four in Irondequoit, New York, on August 31 as citizens suffer under President Joe Biden’s open border policies.
A native of the Dominican Republic, 34-year-old Julio Cesar Pimentel Soriano, was taken into custody on Saturday and charged with four counts of first-degree murder, the Democrat and Chronicle reported on Friday.
The outlet continued:
Fraime Ubaldo, 30, Marangely Moreno-Santiago, 26, and the pair’s two children — Evangeline Ubaldo-Moreno, 4, and Sebastian Ubaldo-Moreno, 2 — were all killed inside the family’s home at 329 Knapp St. Emergency responders were called to the home around 5:20 a.m. on Aug. 31 to battle a fire. Multiple fires were set around the home, which were extinguished by Irondequoit firefighters who then found the four bodies inside. Police said the fires were an apparent attempt to cover up the killings.
Authorities who are still investigating the case have not disclosed the family’s manner of death but said the individuals did not die as a result of the blaze:
In a social media post on Friday, the Irondequoit Police Department announced the arrest and detailed the suspect’s background.
Soriano is allegedly also wanted in the Dominican Republic for another murder in 2019. “It appears Mr. Soriano entered the island of Puerto Rico illegally and obtained fraudulent New York identification. With that identification, he was free to travel from Puerto Rico to the United States mainland,” the agency said:
Please see the update included on our homicide investigation.
Posted by Irondequoit Police Department on Friday, September 13, 2024
After the bodies were found, Irondequoit Police Chief Scott Peters said, “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I’ll remember it for life,” WXXI reported on September 2.
Peters offered more information during a press conference:
Officials are reportedly holding Soriano at the Monroe County Jail without bail, according to the Chronicle.
During his speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July, former President Donald Trump, who is running against Vice President Kamala Harris for the White House in 2024, spotlighted the plight of Angel Families and their loved ones who have allegedly been killed by illegal aliens flooding over the border on Biden’s watch, according to Breitbart News.
Trump stated, “This is my vow: I will not let these killers and criminals into our country.”
Pennsylvania Town Has Way Too Many Haitian Immigrants
Quote:Charleroi, Pennsylvania, like Springfield, Ohio, is also experiencing a growing number of problems from a tidal wave of Haitian migrants flooding into their small town.
While the media focuses on the woes of Springfield, Ohio, and its recent flood of Haitian migrants putting pressure on the small town, other small towns are experiencing similar problems. One of them is Charleroi, Pennsylvania, nestled on the banks of the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh in the western part of the state.
According to the activist group America-2100, the rural town has suffered a 2,000-percent increase in its population of Haitian migrants — and crime and traffic altercations have soared as a result.
Residents have been flooding social media with reports that migrants are attacking people on the street and mugging them, stealing cars, and ending up in traffic accidents throughout the area.
WPXI-TV reported in March that the rising number of immigrant children has stretched the local schools to the breaking point as administrators and teachers toil to educate migrant children, many of whom do not speak English, and some of whom have never gone to school in their entire young lives.
One 11th-grade student told the station that a big problem is that many of these migrant students are really not learning anything despite being enrolled in free schools because they don’t understand what is being said in class.
“The biggest challenge that every Haitian has is they don’t know what you are saying. For you, it’s like blah blah blah, you don’t say nothing you are just sitting in the class listening and you just don’t understand,” the child, who is also a Haitian migrant, said.
Charleroi schools superintendent Dr. Ed Zelich noted that the new students are costing his school hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to accommodate them.
“Just in the last year we had over $400,000, we had to add two ELL [English language learner] teachers, an ELL coach for our teachers, a registrar, an interpreter,” Zelich told WPIX.
Zelich added that the school is expecting another $300,000 to be spent next year and that they need even more from the state.
Star Asks People to Welcome More and More Haitians
Quote:Pop star John Legend is facing mounting public backlash after he lectured Springfield, Ohio, residents on the need to accept the invasion of Haitians who have overwhelmed the working-class town.
John Legend — whose net worth is estimated to exceed $100 million and is a supporter of Kamala Harris — posted a video to Instagram this week urging Springfield residents to “love one another” — specifically, the nearly 20,000 Haitians who have moved into their town in recent months thanks to the Biden-Harris administration’s resettlement of illegal aliens who are given protected status.
“I think all of us need to have the same kind of grace that we would want [for] our ancestors” with “our Haitian brothers and sisters,” he said.
The singer repeatedly emphasized that he grew up in Springfield and even referred to himself in the video using his real name — John R. Stevens. (He even put “John R. Stevens — Springfield, Ohio” in his Instagram bio.)
But his bid for authenticity didn’t ring true to many.
“He lives in a multimillion dollar mansion in Beverly Hills,” one online commenter observed.
“I just love when rich celebrities try to tell us how we should feel about certain situations,” another wrote.
“Maybe they should drop 15,000 immigrants into your neighborhood you live in now and you could experience the hardship yourself,” yet another wrote.
Some are posting a video of Legend and his wife, Chrissy Teigen, giving a virtual tour of their palatial abode.
In his Instagram post, John Legend made no reference to the horror stories Springfield residents have been forced to endure thanks to the Biden-Harris administration’s policies favoring illegal aliens.
In August 2023, a local child was killed when a Haitian driver without a license hit a school bus and forced it off the road.
Biden Doesn't Care About Nippon Steel Taking Over US Steel
Quote:President Joe Biden has voiced his opposition to Nippon Steel buying U.S. Steel, but the federal government appears to be in no hurry to block the deal
Biden administration appears to be in no rush to stop U.S. Steel takeover by Nippon Steel
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden has voiced his opposition to Nippon Steel buying U.S. Steel, but the federal government appears to be in no hurry to block the deal.
White House officials earlier this month did not deny that the president would formally block the acquisition. But the necessary report from the government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has yet to be submitted to the White House.
“It’s their process — it’s independent,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Friday. “We have to see the recommendation from CFIUS. That’s the process.”
The proposed takeover carries some heavy political weight in Pennsylvania, a state that both Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump view as a must-win in November’s presidential election. U.S. Steel is headquartered in Pittsburgh.
Biden, Harris and Trump have all come out against the deal. Biden is close with the United Steelworkers, the labor union whose members work for U.S. Steel and worry about the loss of job protections. Supporters of the merger note that U.S. Steel’s older mills could be shuttered without the improved corporate balance sheet that a merger could produce.
The Washington Post initially reported on Sept. 4 that the deal would be blocked by the federal government, only to then report on Friday that any ruling on the merger would be delayed.
Quote:Per Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), a whistleblower claims that the lead Secret Service agent on the day that former President Donald Trump was shot in the head had been promoted even after she failed at least one key training exam.
Despite this exam failure, former and disgraced Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle promoted the agent. The whistleblower says the agent in question is from the Pittsburgh office and was the advance agent that fateful day.
Hawley appeared on Fox News with Jesse Watters on Thursday. Here’s the clip:
HAWLEY: The lead advance agent that day in Pennsylvania, the agent in charge of Trump’s entire trip in Pennsylvania — this agent actually failed one or more of her training exams when she first joined the Secret Service. I mean, the pattern that is emerging here, Jesse, from whistleblowers who come to me over and over again is that the Trump rally was undermanned … they did not have people who had experience … and, now, this advance agent, I’m told, may have failed one or more of her training exams and was known not to be a top quality agent. This is absurd, and the fact that the director will not level with the American people about what’s going on here is just totally unacceptable.
Watters then connected the dots by reminding people that Cheatle had made it a priority “to make 30 percent of the Secret Service women.” So, if the whistleblower is correct, even after this woman failed at least one training exam, Cheatle put her in charge of protecting Trump during his entire Pennsylvania trip.
Hawley went on to say that he is being told that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “is leaning on the Secret Service not to comply with [our] document requests.”
“There’s a cover-up going on,” Watters said, “now, that’s definitive.”
Yes, it is.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), one of the most partisan leftists on Capitol Hill, told reporters that he believes “the American people are going to be shocked, astonished, and appalled by what we will report to them about the failures by the Secret Service in this assassination attempt on the former president.”
“I think they also ought to be appalled and astonished by the failure of the Department of Homeland Security to be more forthcoming,” he continued.
Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) told Fox News that an “interim report” will be “coming out shortly,” but there is still “a lot more information that we need to find.”
That is two Democrats expressing their frustration with the DHS and Secret Service in an era where anything involving Trump becomes insanely partisan.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said both parties are working together to release a bipartisan report. He also expressed frustration with acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe for slow-walking promised information.
“So, he’s making the commitment to, you know, provide more information,” Johnson said of Rowe. “But we’re hoping to get this preliminary report out before this work period.”
Trump was shot in the face on July 13, exactly two months ago, and we know no more about these unforgivable security failures today than we did then.
Biden & Starmer on Ukraine Launching Long-Range Missiles
Quote:British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and US President Joe Biden on Friday delayed a decision to let Ukraine fire long-range Western-supplied missiles into Russia, a plan that sparked dire threats from Moscow of a war with NATO.
Starmer told reporters at the White House that he had a “wide-ranging discussion about strategy” with Biden but that it “wasn’t a meeting about a particular capability.”
Before the meeting officials had said Starmer would press Biden to back his plan to send British Storm Shadow missiles to Ukraine to hit deeper inside Russia as allies become increasingly concerned about the battlefield situation.
But the Labour leader indicated that he and Biden would now discuss the plan at the UN General Assembly in New York the week after next “with a wider group of individuals.”
As they met with their teams across a long table in the White House, backed by US and British flags, Biden played down a warning by Russian President Vladimir Putin that allowing Ukraine to fire the weapons would mean the West was “at war” with Russia.
“I don’t think much about Vladimir Putin,” Biden told reporters when asked about the comments.
But while Biden said it was “clear that Putin will not prevail in this war,” he is understood to be reluctant to grant Ukraine’s insistent demand to be able to use long-range US-made ATACMS missiles against Russian territory.
US officials believe the missiles would make a limited difference to Ukraine’s campaign and also want to ensure that Washington’s own stocks of the munitions are not depleted.
The two leaders said they also discussed the war in Gaza, with Britain having recently suspended arms deliveries to Israel over concerns that they could be used to violate international humanitarian law.
The US, Israel’s main military and diplomatic backer, has held off such a step.
Biden and Starmer agreed on their “ironclad commitment” to Israel — but stressed the “urgent need” for a ceasefire deal and a “need for Israel to do more to protect civilians” in Gaza, the White House said in a readout.
The White House had earlier played down the chances of a Ukraine decision coming from Friday’s visit by Starmer, the Labour leader’s second to the White House since he took office in July.
“I wouldn’t expect any major announcement in that regard coming out of the discussions, certainly not from our side,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky however pushed Kyiv’s Western allies to do more.
Hochul's Chinese Aid Turned Spy in the White House
Quote:A former aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) who is allegedly a Chinese spy reportedly toured the White House in May.
Linda Sun was reportedly under federal investigation at the time, the New York Post reported on Friday, noting, “The May 8 visit was facilitated by Sun’s former boss, Queens Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY), the congresswoman’s office confirmed Friday.”
Sun previously worked as a high-ranking aide for Hochul and disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D).
The Post article continued:
Last week, Sun, 41, and her husband, Christopher Hu, 40, who also is listed on White House visitor logs, were slapped with sprawling charges of violating and conspiring to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, visa fraud, alien smuggling and money laundering conspiracy. They have pleaded not guilty.
Brooklyn federal prosecutors allege Sun used her position under Hochul and Cuomo to turn the governor’s office into a virtual mouthpiece for the People’s Republic of China and Chinese Community Party.
In exchange, she allegedly received gifts and millions of dollars in bribes — which she and her hubby used to buy real estate, including their Manhasset mansion, and luxury cars like a 2024 Ferrari Roma.
Before the FBI arrested Sun and Hu, the agency raided their home in July, according to Breitbart News:
The outlet also reported that the couple was eventually arraigned in federal court in Brooklyn. The outlet then detailed some of the accusations against Sun:
Sun, in various instances, allegedly prevented Cuomo and Hochul from working, engaging, and speaking with Taiwanese officials. At the same time, Sun allegedly had Cuomo and Hochul make seemingly pro-China statements to appease CCP officials.
During the Chinese coronavirus pandemic in April 2020, for example, the Taiwanese government donated 200,000 masks to New York. When Taiwanese officials pressed why then-Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office had not made any public announcement about the donation, Sun allegedly phoned her contact in the CCP to make them aware that Hochul would be only privately calling to thank such Taiwanese officials for the donation.
Several New York Republicans are now calling for an investigation into Hochul after Sun, a naturalized American citizen who was born in China, was arrested, according to Breitbart News.
Quote:Mexico’s National Institute of Migration (INM) announced the arrival of the first bus of migrants under its new “Secure Emerging Mobility Corridor” program. The program offers migrants free transportation, including meals and security from the Mexico/Guatemala border to ports of entry in the United States, where they will be admitted under the Biden-Harris CBP One app.
The first bus arrived early Wednesday morning in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, located just across from McAllen, Texas. The bus carryied migrants from several Central and South American countries.
The government of Mexico provided the migrant’s travel under a program announced after a series of meetings between the Biden-Harris administration and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The binational immigration meetings, held in August, expanded the geographic region in Mexico where migrants could access the CBP-One smartphone application to schedule admission into the United States to claim asylum and secure release into the country.
The new corresponding transportation program allows authorities in Mexico to better manage the timing of the flow of migrants traveling into the country’s interior by scheduling the free travel service with the migrant’s appointment enter the United States under the CBP One program. Up to 1,450 migrants are released into the United States daily under the Biden/Harris CBP One asylum application. The migrants are not required to pass a credible fear interview, which is usually the first hurdle to a successful asylum claim. Congress never authorized this immigration program.
The buses depart from two southern Mexico cities, Villahermosa, Tabasco, and Tapachula, Chiapas, and arrive at one of eight designated U.S. land ports of entry that allow for the entry of more than 500,000 migrants to enter under the CBP-One smartphone application yearly.
The government of Mexico’s National Institute of Migration (INM) first announced the new program in a Spanish-language notice issued in early September, referring to the initiative as the “Secure Emerging Mobility Corridor.” Before the geographic expansion of service under the CBP-One smartphone application and the coordinated free bus program in Mexico, appointments could only be made in central and northern Mexico. The new coordinated appointment and bus program will allow the Biden-Harris administration to regulate the flow of migrant travel through Mexico.
The CBP One smartphone application is separate from the recently reinstituted Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan program, which allows up to 1,000 migrants to fly into the United States daily. Between the two Biden-Harris programs, more than 800,000 migrants are released into the United States yearly to pursue asylum claims.
Quote:New York’s highest court threw out former President Donald Trump’s request to lift his gag order in his business records case.
The New York Court of Appeals dismissed Trump’s appeal to lift the gag order that limits him from making public remarks against his prosecutors or their families.
Trump’s attorneys requested Judge Juan Merchan lift the order after his conviction, arguing the gag order limits his First Amendment rights and that lifting the order would be in the public’s interest before the presidential election.
Yet, the court’s ruling said that “no constitutional question is directly involved” in dismissing Trump’s appeal.
Despite Thursday’s dismissal, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s successful conviction of Trump may be in jeopardy.
Merchan recently delayed Trump’s sentencing until November 26, 2024 — after Election Day. After a previous delay, Trump’s sentencing had been set for September 18.
Trump requested Merchan throw out his conviction after a Supreme Court ruling in July that said that presidents enjoy presidential immunity for official acts. That request prompted the initial sentencing delay.
The former president also has accused Merchan of profiting financially from his prosecution. The House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed his daughter, Loren Merchan, for all documents related to her company’s work for Democrat campaigns that fundraised on the trial over which Merchan sat.
The case is Trump v. Merchan, No. 2024-521, in the New York Court of Appeals.
Quote:Tiffany Henyard, the Dolton, Illinois, Democrat dubbed as “America’s worst mayor,” is again under fire for throwing an $85,000 taxpayer-funded party featuring performances from R&B singer Keke Wyatt and rapper J. Holiday — with barely anyone attending.
Henyard, who has labeled herself as “Supermayor” of the Chicago suburb, is also a supervisor of Thornton Township, which encompasses Dolton.
At her “Taste of Thornton Township” party that took place in August, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted by WGN Investigates revealed that Henyard paid Wyatt $30,000 to sing for 30 minutes and gave J. Holiday $20,000 for a set of the same length.
The township also rented inflatable bounce houses for $6,600 and paid for comedians, a sound system, event staff, and more — bringing the total bill for taxpayers to at least $85,769.
There have been unconfirmed claims circulating on social media that only 70 people attended the party, meaning that Henyard allegedly spent more than $1,200 per person:
Former Dolton Trustee Valeria Stubbs was one of the attendees and called it a “flop.”
Jennifer Robertz, a resident of the township’s village of Lansing, told WGN she was “flabbergasted” at the cost of the event.
“I was pissed off. That’s my money. That’s the people’s money.”
“This is all for the babies,” Henyard said in a Facebook video viewed by the outlet. “They don’t show you this side of Tiffany Henyard: The productivity.”
Henyard is currently the subject of a “special investigation” conducted by former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who was hired by the Village of Dolton to look into her outlandish spending habits and alleged abuse of office, Fox News reported.
Lightfoot revealed at an August village board meeting that the town’s general fund balance dropped from $5.61 million to a deficit of $3.65 million in just two years under the mayor:
The “special investigator” also shared that Henyard made many expensive purchases at retailers like Amazon, Target, Walgreens, and Wayfair with the village credit card, Breitbart News reported.
One credit card statement Lightfoot shared revealed a whopping $33,000 Amazon order made on January 5, 2023.
“These are somebody using the credit card and charging these amounts using your tax dollars,” Lightfoot told the angered people of Dolton, which has around 20,000 residents.
In a town where 20.2 percent of residents live in poverty according to U.S. Census records, Henyard has a salary of nearly $300,000 with her mayor and supervisor jobs.
Quote:White House national security spokesman John Kirby trashed a group of veterans in an email sent in error to Fox News on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
As Fox News reported on Wednesday, Kirby responded to an email query from Fox about criticisms by a veterans’ group about the Biden administration’s disastrous 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan by accidentally hitting “reply all” before disparaging the veterans.
Fox reported:
“Obviously no use in responding. A ‘handful’ of vets indeed and all of one stripe,” Kirby said in a “reply all” email chain Wednesday afternoon that appeared to be intended for White House staffers, but which also included Fox News Digital.
Fox News Digital had reached out to the White House earlier Wednesday afternoon regarding critical comments from four veterans, including Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla., who blasted Kirby for his Monday press conference that they said provided “cover” for the Biden administration’s 2021 withdrawal.
…
Kirby’s message was sent in error, with him following up with a Fox News Digital reporter, “Clearly, I didn’t realize you were on the chain.” Kirby sent the email while traveling with President Biden on the anniversary of 9/11.
On Monday, Kirby pushed back against a House Republican report on the Afghanistan withdrawal by blaming former President Donald Trump for, among other things, negotiating with the Taliban — ignoring the fact that talks with the Taliban actually began under the Obama administration, via Qatar, in 2013, in Obama’s second term in office.
Kirby retired from the U.S. Navy as a Rear Admiral. He served as Pentagon spokesman during the Afghanistan pullout, including the murder of 13 U.S. service members in the ISIS-K terror attack at Abbey Gate in August 2021.
Quote:Federal agents arrested two top border city officials who are accused of demanding cash bribes from a business owner.
Information provided to Breitbart Texas by the U.S. Attorney’s Office revealed that on Thursday morning in Edcouch, Texas, agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested City Manager Victor Hugo De La Cruz and City Councilman Rene Flores. The arrest came after a Federal Grand Jury handed down a four-count indictment accusing them of various bribery charges on September 2. The two city officials are expected to go before U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Scott Hacker on Friday morning.
According to federal prosecutors, from June to September 2019, the two city officials demanded bribe payments from the owner of a marketing company in Brownsville. Prosecutors claim that the business owner collected two separate $3,000 payments for marketing work from the City of Edcouch, and he allegedly made two kickback payments of $1,000 to the city officials.
The arrests come almost a year after federal authorities raided the Edcouch City Hall in October 2023. In that same operation, authorities also raided the city hall of the neighboring city of Elsa. Details of the raids remain unclear; however, local news outlets claimed the case was tied to 8-liner businesses in the area.
Quote:A freight train crashed into an 18-wheeler hauling a military artillery vehicle that became stuck on the tracks in South Carolina, video shows.
The semi-truck, which appeared to be carrying an M109 Paladin Howitzer, was crossing the train tracks in Goose Creek on Thursday afternoon when it was struck, Fox News reported.
Video captured by eyewitness Jennifer Clinton and her son shows the train blaring its horn at the obstacle before violently plowing through it, damaging the street crossing in the process:
“My son’s a little shook up, but yeah, we’re okay,” Clinton said, adding that “it was devastating to see.”
The outlet reported that a man seen running out of the semi-truck declined medical treatment.
Goose Creek Police said that no injuries were reported.
It is unclear where the Howitzer, a mobile weapon that is typically manned by a four-person crew, was heading or to what unit it belonged.
The extent of the damage to all vehicles involved is also not immediately known.
Quote:Popular grocery store chain Aldi announced on September 4 that it is raising its minimum wage to $18 and $23 an hour due to the company’s growth.
Aldi’s press release further noted that it is looking to hire more than 13,000 store and warehouse workers nationwide as the holidays approach and the company opens additional stores.
The announcement continued:
Known for its commitment to competitive compensation, the new national average starting wages for open ALDI store and warehouse positions will be $18 and $23 per hour, respectively, based on market and position.
At ALDI, those working more than 30 hours a week have access to healthcare insurance, paid time off and more. In 2023, the retailer also introduced new perks in response to employee feedback, including flexible scheduling and 100% paid parental and caregiver leave.
It is important to note that California’s mandate that fast food workers receive a minimum wage of $20 an hour took effect in April, and Breitbart News pointed out, “Minimum wage hikes tend to eliminate jobs for the most vulnerable, least-skilled workers in jobs that do not produce enough revenue to support the high-wage level.”
Aldi is planning to add 800 stores across the United States in the next five years, the Associated Press (AP) reported in March. The news comes as people are grappling with inflation and trying to save money in President Joe Biden’s America.
“Inflation has led many consumers to change the way they shop. Tired of prices that remain about 19%, on average, above where they were before the pandemic, consumers are seeking new avenues to cut down on spending,” the AP article said, noting that shoppers are choosing store-brand items, buying at discount stores, or purchasing fewer items.
Quote:A new wave of intense cartel fighting forced government officials to order the shutdown of school activities as locals locked themselves indoors in the state of Sinaloa. The measures follow several days of fighting as two factions of the Sinaloa Cartel clashed with minimal interference from federal police and military forces.
The Sinaloa Governor Ruben Rocha Moya sent multiple alerts and a video asking the public to remain calm and take precautions. In the video, Rocha Moya claimed that government police and military forces were working to minimize the effect of the cartel battles on the local public.
The violence began this week and followed weeks of tension as a faction loyal to recently captured Sinaloa Cartel boss Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada seeks revenge from the Chapitos faction for the betrayal and arrest of their leader. The Chapitos faction comprises the sons of jailed Sinaloa Cartel kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. It is believed that Los Chapitos blamed El Mayo for their father’s capture.
As Breitbart Texas reported, Joaquin Guzman Lopez allegedly called a secret meeting with El Mayo and some top politicians in late July. It was during that meeting that Guzman and his gunmen kidnapped El Mayo and put him on a plane that landed near El Paso, Texas, where U.S. authorities were waiting for them. Since then, both Guzman and El Mayo have been in U.S. custody awaiting trial.
The capture led to weeks of tension as locals awaited for war to break out between two of Mexico’s most powerful drug families. It is believed that the family of El Mayo had been quietly building up their forces before striking.
Quote:The Free Trade Agreement (FTA) signed between Nicaragua’s communist regime and China has had little to no effect on improving the Nicaraguan economy, the local newspaper La Prensa reported on Friday.
China has reportedly only bought roughly one percent of Nicaragua’s exports since the start of the agreement, much less than expected.
Nicaragua and China signed an FTA last year that came into effect at the start of January 2024. Communist dictator Daniel Ortega described the agreement last year as a “lifeboat” for his Sandinista regime and “the best Christmas gift,” claiming that the deal with China was a “strategic” step to overcome U.S. sanctions.
Nicaraguan authorities offered very sparse details of what the FTA with China entails to local media weeks before its start, with little to no transparency on the information provided beyond listing textiles, meat, coal, paper, wood, and cardboard as some of the materials that Nicaragua would export to China through the agreement.
La Prensa, after reviewing official reports from the Nicaraguan Commerce and Trade Ministry, found that China only purchased 1.2 percent of Nicaragua’s total exports during the first eight months of the FTA, worth a total of $62.8 million.
The Nicaraguan newspaper pointed out that, despite tensions between the U.S. and Nicaragua due to Ortega’s “weaponization” of migrants against America, the United States represented 48 percent of Nicaragua’s total exports during the first eight months of 2024, paying the country a total of $2.45 billion.
Quote:Environmentalists in the western Venezuelan state of Zulia denounced on Thursday that several marine animals were found dead and covered in oil in Lake Maracaibo — highly polluted by the constant oil spills that the socialist regime causes.
Lake Maracaibo is Venezuela’s largest lake and one of the oldest in the world, home to the Catatumbo lightning, a unique atmospheric phenomenon over the mouth of the Catatumbo River where it empties into Lake Maracaibo that causes a near-perpetual lightning storm in the lake.
The constant oil and chemical spills that the socialist regime has caused — which leftist activists and/or environmentalist organizations often fail to report and condemn — have heavily polluted the lake, leaving 70 percent of its roughly 5,200-square-mile-wide surface contaminated with oil, chemicals, and a highly toxic, foul-smelling, and potential carcinogenic bacteria locally referred to as verdín (“greenery”).
Venezuela’s Union Radio reported on Thursday that locals found a dolphin, a sea turtle, and a manatee dead and covered in oil in the vicinity of the Vereda del Lago, a park in Zulia’s capital city Maracaibo.
“We had never seen this scenario. The putrid smell that spreads throughout the city, the degraded scenery of Lake Maracaibo, the oil spills, the dead animals of … incredible biodiversity,” environmental biologist Adelso Pineda said. “We are talking about a manatee, a species that is on the verge of extinction.”
The heavily polluted state of Lake Maracaibo has dramatically affected the local fishermen, who depend on their trade to sustain themselves and their families. Union Radio reported that cleanup works in Lake Maracaibo have been “paralyzed” for two months.
“We cannot go out because the oil damages our nets, and there is no one to compensate us because this is a problem for everyone, for the oil company that is not aware of this and does not pick it up, as in previous times,” Edinson Araujo, a local fisherman, told Union Radio.
Araujo further asserted to the local outlet Caraota Digital that the Venezuelan state-owned oil company PDVSA “is not concerned” about the situation and does not seek to deal with oil spills in the lake, stating that “they do not clean it [oil], as in previous times.”
The Maduro regime has not publicly commented on the discovery of the dead and oil-covered animals at press time. Instead, officials from the Institute for the Control and Conservation of Lake Maracaibo Basin (ICLAM) — an entity under the Maduro regime’s “Ecosocialism” Ministry — announced on Thursday that they held an “environmental monitoring day” at the lake and allegedly collected samples to be used on “physical-chemical analyses to determine the amount of nutrients in the water.”
Cuban Dissidents Claim EU is Supporting Cuban Regime
Quote:The Assembly of the Cuban Resistance (ARC) called this week for the European Union to cease its financial support of Cuba’s communist regime, denouncing the regime’s support of Russia in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Since 1988, the European Union has maintained direct relations with Cuba that have resulted in the communist regime receiving hundreds of millions of euros in financing, ARC leaders noted at an event in Lithuania.
The EU’s multi-million-euro financial assistance deal with Cuba appears to have had no effect on the improvement of living conditions of Cuba’s citizens, who are forced to live in conditions of extreme poverty and other inhumane conditions as a direct result of more than six decades of communist mismanagement.
Cubans are currently experiencing the collapse of their population and the worst migrant crisis in its history. The communist regime’s politics have forced Cubans to endure severe shortages of food, medicine, and other basic supplies in addition to constant power blackouts of up to 12 hours at a time, severe water shortages, rampant inflation, and a derelict healthcare infrastructure.
“We are in Spain raising our voices for a free Cuba and to demand the end of the European Community’s subsidy to the Castro dictatorship,” ARC secretary-general Orlando Gutiérrez Boronat told the independent outlet ADN Cuba on Tuesday.
Gutiérrez Boronat; Julián Obiglio, the president of the Union of Latin American Parties; former Cuban political prisoner Jorge Luis García “Antúnez,” and other activists held an encounter on Monday with Spanish senators in which they expressed their calls to end the European financing of the Castro regime. The Cuban activists also urged effective support from Western democracies to Cuban opposition and resistance.
“It is inconceivable that with more than a thousand political prisoners in Cuba, among them my brother Loreto Hernandez, that Europe continues to finance the dictatorship and repression on the island,” Garcia said.
The founder of the outlet ADN America, Gelet Martinez Fragela, emphasized that “every euro that the Cuban regime receives from the European community is an open letter for the continuation of repression in Cuba and an economic incentive for the Castro elite not to leave power.”
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:Donald Trump is safe after “gunshots in his vicinity,” the Trump campaign said Sunday.
“President Trump is safe following gunshots in his vicinity,” Trump campaign Communications Director Steven Cheung said in a statement. “No further details at this time.”
According to one report, the gunshots were fired while Trump was at Trump National Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he was golfing today.
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., said a suspect has been apprehended and an AK-47 rifle was found in the bushes at Trump National, citing law enforcement officials.
Trump was shot in the ear on July 13, 2024, at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, narrowly avoiding death. The Secret Service has been blamed for security failures that day, with the director stepping down under pressure soon after.
Later on the FBI had to make a public statement on the issue.
Quote:The FBI said on Sunday that former President Donald Trump was targeted in a suspected second assassination attempt in as many months after his campaign confirmed that shots were reported in his vicinity.
“The FBI has responded to West Palm Beach Florida and is investigating what appears to be an attempted assassination of former President Trump,” the FBI told The Epoch Times in a statement.
A representative of U.S. Secret Service separately told a news conference Sunday that a Secret Service personnel opened fire on a suspected gunman “located near the property line,” adding it’s under investigation, while the Palm Beach sheriff said that officials recovered an AK-47-style rifle with a scope, two backpacks that had “ceramic tile” inside, and a GoPro camera.
A Secret Service agent that is stationed near of Trump while he was golfing “was able to spot this rifle barrel” and “immediately [engaged] that individual, at which time the individual took off,” Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said.
Photos shared by law enforcement Sunday showed what appeared to be two black bags hanging from a fence near the golf course. A firearm was seen between them and pointed through a gap in the fence, while the GoPro was hanging to the side.
The suspect, who was between 400 and 500 yards from the former president, was also intent on “filming what was going on,” Bradshaw told the news conference. The individual was near the fourth or fifth hole of the course, which was one or two holes ahead of where the former president was located, he added.
Prosecutors are now working to secure a warrant and pretrial detention paperwork, Palm Beach County state attorney Dave Aronberg said. The suspect will likely be initially be charged at the state level but federal counts could be filed.
“Our filing of the warrant and charges at the state level does not preclude the federal charges that could be coming,” Aronberg said. “But in the meantime, it looks like the warrants and a pretrial detention motion will happen first.”
Earlier Sunday, the Martin County Sheriff’s Office in Florida said it has taken a suspect into custody that is believed to be connected to reports of shots fired in the vicinity of Trump. The identity of the individual has not been disclosed.
Martin County Sheriff William Snyder said that the person of interest in the incident, who was not identified, “was relatively calm” during the arrest. “He was not displaying a lot of emotions. Never asked, ‘What is this about?’” the sheriff told reporters of the suspect as he was being detained.
The former president’s campaign said in a statement earlier Sunday that he is safe, which was later echoed by the U.S. Secret Service. No injures were reported, law enforcement officials said.
An email sent out by Trump said that he is “safe and well” after the reports of shots being fired.
Quote:Governor Wes Moore (D-MD) said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that a quarter of black men under 50 said they would support the Republican candidate in this year’s election because of “frustration of the pace of progress in America.”
Partial transcript as follows:
MARGARET BRENNAN: I want to ask you about the Harris campaign, because you are out campaigning for them, and there’s a big push in the coming days to focus in on black voters in particular. The NAACP released a poll on Friday that showed while black Americans overwhelmingly identify as Democrats, over one quarter of black men under 50 said they would support the Republican candidate in this year’s election. Why do you think that younger male black voters are changing their association like this?
MOORE: You know, I think there is a, you know, especially for younger black men, there is a frustration. But it’s not necessarily frustration with Vice President Harris, and it’s not even frustration with the Democratic Party. Frankly, it’s a frustration of the pace of progress in America. You know, I think about my state, in my state, when I was inaugurated, we had an 8 to 1 racial wealth gap in the state of Maryland, and that’s not because one group was working eight times harder. That’s because of historical policies and circumstances. When I’m I’m the third African American ever elected governor in the history of the United States. That’s not because I’m only the third African American ever qualified to be a governor. And so I think the thing that we continue to see, and frankly, I think that debate was actually a perfect illustration. Where for many of us, we grew up being told by our family members, you’ve got to work 10 times as hard in order to get ahead, in order to get an opportunity. We saw Donald Trump walk on that debate stage uniquely and historically unprepared. And because he thinks he can win on a whim. And so I think the frustration that people feel is real, but I think the thing that we’re continuing to push to a lot of voters, particularly African American voters, is that Donald Trump is a vessel to the skepticism, but what he is not is actually a vehicle for the solution.
Quote:San Diego Sector Border Patrol agents are reporting an increase in migrant apprehensions over the past couple of weeks. The near 25 percent increase from two weeks ago comes as the 2024 presidential election nears.
San Diego Sector Chief Patrol Agent Patricia McGurk-Daniel published a weekly update on social media detailing the arrest of at least 4,000 migrants. The migrants reportedly came to the U.S. from 53 separate nations.
This is up by more than 12 percent from one week earlier when the chief reported the apprehension of 3557 migrants.
One week earlier, McGurk-Daniel posted the apprehension of 3,063 migrants from 53 countries. This week’s report of 4,000 migrant apprehensions represents an increase of more than 30 percent from the August 28 report. It is the highest weekly recap since mid-June when the sector reported nearly 7,700 apprehensions from 71 countries.
The San Diego Sector led the nation in migrants apprehensions in August after agents arrested just over approximately 14,000 migrants, according to unofficial Border Patrol reports reviewed by Breitbart Texas. This was down slightly from the 15,000 arrested in July.
The July encounters report of approximately 56,000 and the August report of approximately 58,000 reveal the lowest number of apprehensions during the Biden-Harris administration. In contrast, the lowest number of migrant encounters during the Trump era came in April 2020, when agents apprehended only 16,182 migrants.
A CBP official told Breitbart Texas in February that Mexico’s efforts are not a long-term fix to the problem. “The migrants are just being delayed from reaching the U.S. border,” the source stated. The migrants are being moved further south, delaying their efforts to reach their goal of seeking asylum in the U.S.”
Quote:ABC News’ Linsey Davis, one of two moderators for last week’s presidential debate, admitted to the Los Angeles Times that the plan was only to fact-check former President Donald Trump, and not Vice President Kamala Harris.
As Breitbart News noted, Davis and co-moderator David Muir fact-checked Trump seven times — often incorrectly — while never fact-checking Harris once, even when she used hoaxes, such as the Charlottesville “very fine people” hoax.
Davis told the Times that ABC had deliberately targeted Trump — and only Trump — because of perceptions that he had been allowed to get away with false statements in the CNN debate against President Joe Biden in late June.
As the New York Post noted:
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Davis said she wanted to address concerns that Trump’s statements could be allowed to “hang” there unchallenged by his opponent or the moderators, as they were when Trump and Biden debate on CNN in June.
“Davis, wearing pink glasses while speaking to The Times over breakfast at the Ritz Carlton in Philadelphia, said the decision to attempt to correct the candidates was in response to the June 27 CNN debate between Trump and President Biden, whose poor performance led to his exit from the race,” the Times reported.
“People were concerned that statements were allowed to just hang and not [be] disputed by the candidate Biden, at the time, or the moderators,” Davis told the outlet on Wednesday morning.
Davis admitted that the moderators studied past statements — “Politicians tend to say the same things again and again” — but somehow did not prepare to check Harris’s repeated use of hoaxes. (Harris used the “very fine people” hoax in 2020 during the vice presidential debate with Mike Pence, who fact-checked her onstage at the time.)
Biden also used the “fine people hoax” and other lies in the June debate, and CNN did not fact-check him, either.
Quote:Jose Ibarra, the Venezuelan illegal immigrant accused of murdering Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, is trying to bar certain evidence from being used in court, as prosecutors allege that a bloody jacket, a fingerprint, and other discoveries tie him to the victim.
The defense is arguing that authorities “unlawfully collected” those items without search warrants, the outlet reported.
Ibarra, 26, was living with his two brothers — also illegal immigrants from Venezuela — in an apartment near the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Athens campus when he allegedly killed Riley, a 22-year-old Augusta University student, while she was out for a run on February 22.
The body of Riley, a UGA graduate who had recently started the nursing program at Augusta, was found hours later in a wooded area near Lake Herrick with injuries consistent with blunt-force trauma to her head and asphyxiation, Breitbart News reported.
Prosecutors have pushed back against Ibarra’s argument that the way police gathered evidence violated the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine, saying that law enforcement entered his apartment less than 12 hours after Riley’s murder without a warrant because they feared that its inhabitants might “destroy evidence,” court documents that Fox News obtained reveal.
“The State anticipates that the evidence will show that shortly after the murder of Laken Riley, local law enforcement officers were looking for a person or persons depicted in two different videos,” prosecutors said. “One video was taken from near and around University Village housing building ‘S’ that was associated with the peeping Tom incident.”
On the same day of Riley’s murder, Ibarra also allegedly spied on a different UGA student through an apartment window and was hit with a separate “peeping tom” charge as a result, Breitbart News reported in May.
Quote:The New York Times removed a controversial headline of a column critical of Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s running mate.
The original headline – “JD Vance’s Blood-and-Soil Nationalism Finds Its Target” – used a term closely associated with the Nazi Party during Adolf Hitler’s reign of Germany.
The use of “blood and soil” generated an immediate backlash of accusations that the paper tied Vance’s America First policies with German nationalism espoused by the Nazi party.
The heat appears to have spurred the paper to edit its headline to “Shouldn’t JD Vance Represent All of Ohio?”
But screenshots of the original headline live on.
The New York Times and other establishment media outlets have overwhelmingly given Trump and Vance negative coverage, while praising Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN).
The outlet praised Harris for her supposed decisive debate night victory Tuesday, despite polls conducted after the debate showing Trump continued to rise.
Quote:Senator JD Vance (R-OH) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the media and the Harris-Walz campaign are calling the residents of Springfield, OH racists.
Host Kristen Welker said, “On former President Trump’s baseless claims about migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, claims you first shared online, Senator, earlier this week. Local authorities now say there have been no credible reports of migrants hurting pets or animals and in fact, neo-Nazis are now taking credit, frankly, for pushing these rumors mainstream. Why are you continuing to double and triple down on these baseless claims?”
Vance said, “I have heard first-hand from multiple constituents, people when made 911 calls a month ago, a year ago, who are making these complaints. I trust the constituents more than I do the American media that have shown no interest in what happened in Springfield until we started sharing cat memes which is disgraceful.”
He added, “We condemn all acts of violence and all threats of violence, but Kristen, the reason they changed my mind on Donald Trump is actually perfectly highlighted by what’s going on in Springfield because the media and the Kamala Harris campaign, they’ve been calling the residents of Springfield racists. They’ve been lying about them and they’ve been saying that they make up these reports of migrants eating geese. They completely ignored the public health disaster that is unfolding in Springfield at this very minute.”
Quote:The head of NATO’s military committee said Saturday that Ukraine has the solid legal and military right to strike deep inside Russia to gain combat advantage – reflecting the beliefs of a number of U.S. allies – even as the Biden administration balks at allowing Kyiv to do so using American-made weapons.
“Every nation that is attacked has the right to defend itself. And that right doesn´t stop at the border of your own nation,” said Adm. Rob Bauer, speaking at the close of the committee’s annual meeting, also attended by U.S. Gen. CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Bauer, of Netherlands, also added that nations have the sovereign right to put limits on the weapons they send to Ukraine. But, standing next to him at a press briefing, Lt. Gen. Karel Rehka, chief of the General Staff of the Czech Armed Forces, made it clear his nation places no such weapons restrictions on Kyiv.
“We believe that the Ukrainians should decide themselves how to use it,” Rehka said.
Their comments came as U.S. President Joe Biden is weighing whether to allow Ukraine to use American-provided long-range weapons to hit deep into Russia. And they hint at the divisions over the issue.
Biden met with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Friday, after this week´s visit to Kyiv by their top diplomats, who came under fresh pressure to loosen weapons restrictions. U.S. officials familiar with discussions said they believed Starmer was seeking Biden’s approval to allow Ukraine to use British Storm Shadow missiles for expanded strikes in Russia.
Biden’s approval may be needed because Storm Shadow components are made in the U.S. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to share the status of private conversations, said they believed Biden would be amenable, but there has been no decision announced yet.
Providing additional support and training for Ukraine was a key topic at the NATO chiefs’ meeting, but it wasn’t clear Saturday if the debate over the U.S. restrictions was discussed.
Quote:Russia has massed large numbers of troops back on its own territory in a bid to control and reverse Ukraine’s gains into Russian Kursk, the counter offensive to the counter offensive now reportedly underway.
Ukraine threw Russia a curved ball earlier this year when it pivoted from occasional point-scoring incursions into Russian territory to a full-on bid to capture and occupy Russian territory, a tit-for-tat for Ukrainian land occupied by Moscow, and quite probably a bargaining chip for peace negotiations, should they come. While fighting grinds on, Russia now appears to be making a serious bid to retake its United Nations-recognised borders in Kursk, what might be called a counter-counter-attack.
Russian and Ukrainian sources, as well as analysis of battlefield footage by groups like the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) suggests Russia is retaking some of its own territory. While the Ukrainian government has been silent on these events so far, several senior Russian state figures have made bold claims about the speed with which it is damaging Ukrainian forces in Russia.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said this morning that the country is “confidently pushing the Ukrainian Armed Forces out of Kursk”, while Moscow state media TASS cites special forces commander Major General Apty Alaudinov who claims 10 villages have been taken back by Russian forces. He said: “The situation is favorable. Our units have launched an offensive on the right flank of the Kursk direction. As of yesterday and today, around 10 settlements in the Kursk region have been liberated in this direction.”
General Alaudinov made some large claims about the Ukrainian forces themselves, alleging that Kyiv was executing large numbers of its own soldiers. While such claims in wartime should always be taken with a pinch of salt, nevertheless the officer asserted: “the number of prisoners killed by their own comrades to prevent them from being brought here must be in the hundreds… I have even noticed that Ukrainian formations seem to be focusing less on destroying their enemy, i.e. us, than they are on destroying their own fighters who have decided to surrender”.
Official Russian claims about the casualties inflicted on Ukrainian forces during the fighting to push them back out of Kursk are equally hair-raising, but impossible to prove. Moscow alleges they have taken out in the counter-counter-offensive:
…over 12,200 personnel, 96 tanks, 42 infantry fighting vehicles, 77 armored personnel carriers, 656 armored combat vehicles, 401 motor vehicles, 90 artillery guns, 26 multiple launch rocket systems, including seven HIMARS rocket launchers and five M270 MLRS, eight surface-to-air missile systems, two transporter-loader vehicles, 22 electronic warfare stations and seven counter-battery radar stations, two air-defense radar systems, eight engineering vehicles, among them two obstacle-clearing vehicles and one UR-77 mine-clearing vehicle.
Quote:The key eastern Ukraine city of Pokrovsk is without a drinking water supply or natural gas for cooking and heating, authorities said Thursday, as the Russian army´s attritional slog across the Donetsk region lays waste to public infrastructure and forces civilians to flee their homes.
A water filtration station in Pokrovsk was damaged in recent fighting, and more than 300 hastily drilled water wells are the city´s last source of drinking water, Donetsk regional Gov. Vadym Filashkin said.
The previous day, Russians destroyed a natural gas distribution station near Pokrovsk, Filashkin said. Some 18,000 people remain in the city, including 522 children, he said. More than 20,000 people have left in the past six weeks as Russian forces creep closer to residential areas, Filashkin said.
“Evacuation is the only … choice for civilians,” he added.
Pokrovsk is one of Ukraine´s main defensive strongholds and a key logistics hub in the Donetsk region, which lies on part of the 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line. Its capture would compromise Ukraine´s defensive abilities and supply routes and would bring Russia closer to its stated goal of capturing the entire Donetsk region, which it partially occupies.
Russian troops backed by artillery and powerful glide bombs have turned Donetsk cities and towns such as Bakhmut and Avdiivka into bombed-out shells, though the push has cost Russia heavily in troops and armor.
Ukrainian forces have held out as long as possible, even when strongholds such as Chasiv Yar appeared to be in danger of imminent collapse. Ukraine has also launched a daring incursion into Russia´s Kursk region, partly in the hope that Russia will divert its troops there from Donetsk.
But Russian Maj. Gen. Apti Alaudinov said troops had recaptured 10 settlements in Kursk and caused the Ukrainian army heavy losses, Russian state news agency Tass reported Thursday. It was not possible to independently verify the claim.
Russia has fired missile and drone barrages at Ukraine just about every day since the war began in February 2022, aiming especially at the power grid and potentially dooming Ukrainians to a bitterly cold winter this year.
Quote:Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that his government’s support for Ukraine’s “territorial integrity, sovereignty, and independence” is “unwavering.”
Erdogan added that Russia should return occupied Crimea to Ukrainian control, in accordance with international law.
Erdogan’s support for Ukraine was blended with his support of the Crimean Tartars, whose leader Mustafa Abulcemil helped organize Wednesday’s summit. The Turkish leader noted that Wednesday marked the 80th anniversary of the expulsion of the Tartars from Crimea, a brutal ethnic cleansing ordered by Russian dictator Josef Stalin.
Erdogan said the Crimean Tartars have a right to live “freely, securely, and peacefully in their homeland.” They are unlikely to exercise this right so long as Russia occupies the Crimean peninsula, as they have done since 2014.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea, accomplished with a quiet infiltration of troops followed by a rigged “vote” at gunpoint, has been ruled illegal by the United Nations and European Union. The U.N. has documented serious human rights violations by occupying Russian forces, including aggressive persecution of the remaining Crimean Tartars.
“Our sincere wish is for the war to end with a fair and lasting peace based on Ukraine’s territorial integrity, sovereignty, and independence,” he said.
Erdogan made his remarks in a video address to the Fourth Summit of the International Crimea Platform, hosted by Ukraine with over 60 nations and international organizations participating.
One of those participating organizations was NATO, whose Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg submitted a video address promising continued military support for Ukraine.
Stoltenberg said the courage of Ukraine’s defenders was an inspiration “to the world and to me personally.” He said Ukraine is on an “irreversible path to membership in NATO,” which also counts Turkey as a member.
Turkey occupies a singular position in the Ukrainian conflict, a balancing act in which it maintains good relations with Russia while remaining a NATO member and openly supporting Ukraine. Turkish companies have provided Ukraine’s defenders with some of their most effective drone weapons against the Russian invaders.
Erdogan has pitched himself as a potential mediator for cease-fire negotiations and it seems likely he would be more acceptable to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky than the other major aspirant for that role, China.
On Thursday, Zelensky trashed China’s much-touted “six-point plan,” rolled out after a May meeting between Chinese and Brazilian officials.
“You either support the war, or you don’t support the war. If you don’t support it, then help us stop Russia,” Zelensky truculently informed the Chinese.
Quote:Two people died in a missile attack on the Ukrainian Black Sea port city of Odesa, local officials said, as Moscow and Kyiv exchanged drone and missile attacks.
The Ukrainian air force said Sunday it shot down 10 of the 14 drones and one of the three missiles Russia launched overnight.
Oleh Kiper, Odesa’s regional governor, said the two who died in the suburbs of Odesa on Saturday night were a married couple, and that another person was wounded in the attack.
At least 33 people were wounded Sunday afternoon when a Russian aerial bomb struck a multi-story residential building in Kharkiv, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said, adding that the guided bomb hit the 10th floor of the building, with the fire spreading across four stories.
Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry said it downed 29 Ukrainian drones overnight into Sunday over western and southwestern regions, with no damage caused by the falling debris. It also said another Ukrainian drone was shot down Sunday morning over the western Ryazan region.
While Ukraine and Russia regularly launch overnight drone raids on each other’s territory, Ukrainian officials generally do not confirm or deny attacks within Russia’s borders.
The latest attacks came after Ukraine made a new call Saturday on the West to allow it to use the long-range missiles they have provided to strike targets deep inside Russia, as Ukrainian forces struggle to hold back Russian advances in eastern Ukraine.
So far, the U.S. has allowed Kyiv to use American-provided weapons only in a limited area inside Russia’s border with Ukraine.
Kyiv officials argue the weapons are vital to weaken Russia’s ability to strike Ukraine and force it to move its strike capabilities further from the border.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy took to social media on Sunday to again appeal for a shift in the West’s policy on the use of long-range weapons, noting that Russia had launched “around 30 missiles of various types, more than 800 guided aerial bombs, and nearly 300 strike drones against Ukraine” this week.
“Ukraine needs strong support from our partners to defend lives against Russian terror-air defense, long-range capabilities, support for our warriors. Everything that will help force Russia to end this war,” Zelenskyy wrote on X.
Quote:The populist-led government in The Netherlands has announced it will use emergency powers to declare an asylum crisis and will formally request to “opt-out” from European Union migration diktats.
Dutch Asylum Minister Marjolein Faber, a member of populist Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) said this week that the government will enact a “legal asylum crisis” to stem the tide of mass migration into the country, which is one of the most densely populated in the EU and is suffering under a housing crisis.
“People are experiencing nuisance, the entire chain is stuck, there are no more houses… We have to do something about the influx – and very quickly. This can be done by declaring a legal asylum crisis,” Faber said according to De Telegraaf.
Faber, who echoed the promise from Wilders to enact the strictest ever asylum system, said that the measure will not require the government to go through the Dutch House of Representatives of Senate as it has the powers to declare such an emergency under the Aliens Act, much to the consternation of pro-mass migration parties of the previous government.
The government has the power to enact emergency asylum restrictions, including pausing all new decisions on refugee status, for a period of up to two years. The asylum minister also said that The Netherlands will also seek an “opt-out” from EU asylum and migration rules, as was previously afforded to Denmark in the 1990s before Brussels formalised the current system.
The restrictions on asylum will represent the fulfilment of the coalition agreement negotiated by PVV leader Geert Wilders, whose party became the largest in the country in last year’s elections and now serves as the main power broker in The Hague.
Commenting on the move, Wilders wrote on X: “A new wind is blowing in the Netherlands. 2.5 million people voted for the PVV and we make it happen.”
“If things continue like this, by 2050 there will be between 21 and 23 million inhabitants in the Netherlands. Far, far too much, on this very small piece of earth,” added MP Claudia van Zanten of the government coalition partner, pro-farmer BBB party. “Fortunately, this cabinet’s main agreement has a strong migration section.”
While the full scope of the plan has yet to be laid out, Germany’s Welt reports that the government will also seek to vastly reduce chain migration, with recognised refugees only being permitted to bring in their relatives if they have been in the country for at least two years, have their own accommodation and a stable income.
Plans to modify the asylum system also reportedly include scrapping the automatic residency for refugees who have lived in the country for five years. Meanwhile, the government is also seeking to reduce legal immigration by reducing the number of foreign student visas and work visas for migrants.
Quote:English actor Hugh Grant has questioned who is to blame for the decline of London, a city run by the same left-wing Labour Party he has personally campaigned on behalf of.
Taking to the X social media platform on Sunday, the Love Actually luvvie wrote: “Who exactly fucked London? Dug up, coned, paralysed, miserable. I need someone to hate.”
Responding to Grant, the account for the youth political organisation Turning Point UK quipped: “Your Labour mates.”
Indeed, the Labour Party has controlled the British capital for the past eight years under leftist Mayor Sadiq Khan.
While the Four Weddings and a Funeral star has often aligned himself with the anti-Brexit Liberal Democrat party, Grant has personally campaigned for the left-wing Labour Party as well, including in London.
For example, during the 2019 general election in Britain, while advocating for tactical voting to prevent Boris Johnson’s Tories from gaining a majority to implement Brexit, Grant joined then-Labour Party candidate Faiza Shaheen on the trail in the Chingford and Woodford Green constituency of London.
Since coming taking power in 2016, life in the capital has declined in many regards under the Labour Party, most notably on the issue of safety.
According to the Office for National Statistics, there were 14,626 recorded knife crimes last year, an increase of 2,481 over 2022 and equating to around 40 offences per day.
Since coming into office in 2016, the Labour Party Mayor has presided over a 38 per cent spike in knife crimes.
Italy: Prosecutors Demand 6 Years in Prison for Deputy PM
Quote:Italian prosecutors have been accused of conducting a political witch hunt as they seek to jail Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini for six years over blocking an NGO migrant taxi ship from disembarking illegals into the country in 2019.
Prosecutor Geri Ferrara has demanded that populist League party leader Matteo Salvini should be imprisoned for six years, charging the current deputy PM and transport minister with kidnapping and refusal of official documents over his blocking of the Spanish ‘Open Arms’ ship from unloading 147 illegals into Italy in 2019 when Salvini served as Interior Minister.
Ferrara argued that the action to protect the nation’s borders was not an inherently political act but rather a failure to carry out administrative duties mandated by European Union and international regulation, broadcaster RAI reports.
“The person at sea needs to be saved, and his classification is irrelevant; migrant, member of a crew, passenger. According to the international law of the SAR convention, even a human trafficker or a terrorist must be saved and then, if necessary, justice takes its course,” the prosecutor said on Saturday in Palermo.
“It was argued that Open Arms should return the migrants to the Libyan Coast Guard… The rescue operation does not end with the mere intervention in a dangerous situation, but with the disembarkation phase: the states have the obligation to intervene and respect European regulations in terms of immigration,” Ferrara added.
In rebuttal, Giulia Bongiorno, defence attorney for the Deputy PM, asserted that the the trial is inherently political, and that it was “contradictory” to only prosecute Salvini for a policy adopted by the entire government, arguing that “there is no Salvini conduct in the dock, but a political line in the dock.”
The prosecution of Salvini has drawn condemnation from both home and abroad, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose government is in coalition with the populist politician’s League party, saying: “It is incredible that a Minister of the Italian Republic risks six years in prison for having done his job defending the borders of the nation, as required by the mandate received from the citizens.
“Transforming into a crime the duty to protect the Italian borders from illegal immigration is a very serious precedent. My total solidarity with Minister Salvini.”
Salvini’s populist allies across Europe have also raised their voice in support, including French National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, who said: “The trial and the 6-year sentence requested against him [Salvini] are extremely serious at a time when the migratory submersion is increasing everywhere in Europe. We are in solidarity and more than ever at your side, Matteo.”
Geert Wilders, the main power broker behind the Dutch government, which is preparing for a showdown with the EU over asylum and migration rules, described the trial as a “total disgrace” and said that Salvini “deserves a medal” for “defending his country”.
For his part, Salvini, who was not in attendance at the trial on Saturday, said on social media that his move to block the migrant taxi ship from unloading illegals into the country was merely about fulfilling the promises the government made to the voters of Italy.
“I would do everything again: the defence of the borders from illegal immigrants is not a crime,” he declared.
Quote:Another night of torrential rains pounding Central Europe forced massive evacuations in the hardest hit areas in the Czech Republic, where floods reached extreme levels on Sunday.
Meteorologists have warned the situation still might get worse as waters in most rivers are rising, the flood wave made its way through the country and more heavy rains could return overnight.
Authorities declared the highest flood warnings in almost 90 places across the country and in two northeastern regions that recorded the biggest rainfall in recent days, including the Jeseniky mountains near the Polish border.
In the city of Opava, up to 10,000 people out of a population of around 56,000 have been asked to leave their homes for higher ground. Rescuers used boats to transport people to safety in a neighborhood flooded by the raging Opava River.
“There’s no reason to wait,” Mayor Tomáš Navrátil told Czech public radio. He said that the situation was worse than during the last devastating floods in 1997, known as the “flood of the century.”
“We have to focus on saving lives,” Prime Minister Petr Fiala told Czech public television on Sunday. His government was to possibly meet Monday to assess the damages.
The worst “is not behind us yet,” the prime minister warned.
At least 4 missing and villages cut off
Thousands of others also were evacuated in the towns of Krnov, which was almost completely flooded, and Cesky Tesin. The Oder River that flows to Poland was reaching extreme levels in the city of Ostrava and in Bohumin, prompting mass evacuations.
Ostrava, the regional capital is the third-largest Czech city. Its mayor, Jan Dohnal, said the city is facing major traffic disruptions in the days to come. Almost no trains were operating in the region.
Towns and villages in the Jeseniky mountains, including the local center of Jesenik, were inundated and isolated by raging waters that turned roads into rivers. The military sent a helicopter to help with evacuations.
Jesenik mayor Zdenka Blistanova told Czech public television that several houses in her and other nearby towns have been destroyed by the floods. A number of bridges and roads have been also badly damaged.
Four people who were swept away by waters were missing, police said.
About 260,000 households were without power Sunday morning in the entire country, while traffic was halted on many roads, including the major D1 highway.
A firefighter dies as Lower Austria declared a disaster zone
Quote:German terror police are investigating after an alleged Islamic extremist was arrested, said to be plotting to kill soldiers with a machete while they were off-base buying lunch.
A 27-year-old Syrian man was arrested on Thursday after buying two 16-inch machetes — heavy curved knives adapted for clearing undergrowth and now well known on the European criminal scene — which the security services claim he intended to use to launch a terrorist attack.
The man, who was in Germany on a humanitarian visa but who had no previous criminal record or outstanding deportation orders, is alleged to have been plotting to launch an attack against groups of soldiers who travel into Hof, Upper Franconia, Bavaria to buy lunch from their barracks.
The Bavarian Central Office for Combating Extremism and Terrorism at the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office are leading the investigation, and prosecutors say, per Germany’s Die Welt, that the man intended to kill as many lunching soldiers as possible.
The purpose of this was to propagate the alleged cause of Islamic extremism and to unsettle the German people, they claimed.
Quote:Austrian security forces carried out raids against 72 alleged Islamic extremists this week ahead of the 23th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the United States, citing the potential for copycat violence on the date of the plane hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people.
The raids occurred across the European country on Tuesday, before Wednesday’s anniversary, because the 2001 tragedy remains symbolic for extremists and has inspired copycat attempts, the Directorate of State Security and Intelligence said Thursday in a statement.
Authorities thwarted an attempted attack last year on anniversary at the Vienna central station, and the risk remains high on the date around the world, it said.
Tuesday’s raids came a month after authorities foiled a plot to attack planned Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna which were then canceled. Austrian officials said the main suspect, a 19-year-old Austrian man, was inspired by the Islamic State group and sought to kill tens of thousands of fans.
The 19-year-old had allegedly uploaded to the internet an oath of allegiance to the current leader of the Islamic State group. Authorities said they also found Islamic State group and al-Qaida material at the home of a second suspect, who is 17.
The actions on Tuesday included raids on several prisons in Austria, as well as interrogations of suspects and seizures of digital devices such as cellphones to look for evidence of radical Islamic propaganda.
Franz Ruf, Austria’s director general for public security, appeared to reference the Taylor Swift plot in the statement, saying the last few weeks have shown the importance of cooperation between security agencies to counter extremism.
Interior Minister Gerhard Karner also called for stronger powers for investigators to be able to root out such plots. Currently, Austrian officials often rely on other countries – such as for the Swift concerts, where the CIA discovered the information – because unlike some foreign intelligence services, Austria can´t legally monitor text messages.
Quote:A left-green politician uploaded a video of herself using a print of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus for handgun target practice to Instagram, later claiming she had no idea that the image had religious significance.
32 year old Sanija Ameti, until this week a Green Liberal Party (GLP) city councillor of Zurich in Switzerland is being ejected from her political party and has even lost her job at a public relations consulting firm after courting outrage. The left-wing activist, whose recent publicity stunts have including distributing condoms to fight “xenophobia” had published footage of herself on Instagram using a print of a 14th century painting of Mary and Jesus for pistol shooting target practice.
It is claimed the politician, who migrated to Switzerland as a child with her family, has received threats after the act and is now in receipt of police protection. Even so, many quarters of Swiss society have called for forgiveness, including Swiss Catholics and conservatives.
The Swiss Catholic Women’s Association, which describes migrant politician and activist Ameti as a “media-savvy lawyer, who is known for her provocative demeanour… Ameti’s Muslim family fled from Bosnia to Switzerland in 1995 with Sanija, who was three years old at the time and who now describes herself as an agnostic” reminded its members that “As Christians, we are called upon to forgive”. The body blamed tabloid media for any terse words about the Ameti shooting.
Swiss conservative magazine Die Weltwoche was also pretty gentle in its response, saying while Ameti’s act was “unnecessary and tasteless” and that it “hurt the feelings of religious people”, nevertheless “there is no right not to be insulted” in an open and free society. There has to be room to be disrespectful and stupid, the paper notes, and “Anyone who is against cancel culture stands by Ameti – even and especially if you do not share her views and actions”.
In all, the paper says, her disrespect is far less dangerous to Switzerland than her political views on dragging the long-neutral country into the embrace of the European Union.
The gentle reaction of such sections of Swiss Christian society may reflect on the nation well, especially in the light of other communities in Europe taking rather less understanding paths of reaction to perceived slights against their own prophets, gods, and idols.
For Ameti’s own part, she has issued an apology and written to Swiss Bishops to ask for forgiveness even if, somewhat incredibly, she clings to the line that she didn’t realise the religious significance of the Mary and Jesus print before she started shooting at it, saying: “I deleted it immediately when I realized its religious content. I didn’t think about it”. She has resigned from her position as leader of the Liberal Green Party faction in Zurich.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old alleged attempted assassin who tried to kill former President Donald Trump on Sunday, is avowedly pro-Ukraine — but appears, from his social media history, to also be anti-Israel.
In one post, preserved by the Israeli media service Abu Ali Express, Routh showed a Biblical map of “Palestine” (the name did not exist in Biblical times) and asked: “I am unclear what part of Isreal [sic] the Jews owned based on this historic map; Judea perhaps? It seems to historically be all palestinian [sic].”
The term “Palestine” was not used until the second century A.D., when the Romans reacted to a rebellion by Jewish residents of the area then-known as Judea by renaming the territory “Palestine,” to sever the Jewish connection to the land. The name was apparently derived from the Biblical people known as the Philistines, a foreign enemy group from the Mediterranean who settled near present-day Gaza but have no connection to the people who refer to themselves today as Palestinians.
Routh was so passionate about the Ukrainian cause that he traveled to Ukraine in an effort to join the war, and the to recruit soldiers, as Breitbart News reported Monday.
The combination of being avowedly pro-Ukraine, but skeptical of Israel, is a fair approximation of the current foreign policy consensus within the Democratic Party, as well as the media. The ABC News moderators at last Tuesday’s debate asked the two presidential candidates about pursuing victory in Ukraine, but a ceasefire in Gaza — despite the fact that Ukraine is fighting a nuclear-armed power, and that Israel is near victory against Hamas terrorists.
Quote:The FBI, Interpol, and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) were warned about former President Donald Trump’s second alleged assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh, months before Sunday, when the Secret Service spotted Routh with a rifle about 400 yards away from the former president.
The lack of preventive measures against Routh caused some political pundits to speculate that the federal government engaged in willful negligence while protecting the president.
Chelsea Walsh, a nurse who had several encounters with Routh in Kyiv, Ukraine, alerted authorities to Routh’s threats of violence multiple times, she told the Wall Street Journal on Monday. In June 2022, she conveyed her concerns to a Customs and Border Protection officer in an hour-long interview at Washington’s Dulles airport, noting that “Routh was among the most dangerous Americans she met during her month-and-a-half-long stint in Ukraine.”
Again, in 2023, Walsh alerted the FBI and Interpol about Routh, but she did not hear back from the FBI, the Journal reported:
When she heard in 2023 that Routh was attempting to recruit Syrian refugees to fight in Ukraine, she filed an online report with the FBI and Interpol outlining her concerns about Routh and others, she said. Neither Customs nor the FBI followed up with her, she said. The FBI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
…
Routh’s behavior had been flagged to the FBI in the past, though not in connection to Ukraine. A tipster told the FBI in 2019 that Routh had a firearm despite being a felon, but when questioned further wouldn’t verify providing the information, an FBI official said Monday. The bureau passed the information onto authorities in Honolulu, where Routh was living at the time, and closed the investigation.
…
After being alerted to these messages in early June, other aid groups banned him from their Signal groups, and reported his activities to the State Department, noting their concerns that he might be engaging in human trafficking or immigration fraud, according to Adams. “Beware of American Ryan Routh,” Adams warned Ukraine aid groups in a June 2, 2023, message.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ® launched his own investigation into the attempted assassination on Tuesday, following the FBI and Customs and Border Protection’s failure to take action against Routh.
Quote:Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old man who is suspected of an assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, had connections in Iran that are leading some security experts to question if there was Iranian involvement.
A New York Times reporter who had interviewed Routh last year wrote on Sunday that Routh was working to recruit former Afghan special operations soldiers who had fled to Iran to go fight in Ukraine.
The reporter, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, wrote that when he was writing an article on volunteer fighters in Ukraine last year, his former Afghan colleague and friend Najim Rahim had put him in touch with Routh, who he had learned about from a source of his in Iran, a former Afghan special operations soldier.
A number of U.S.-trained Afghan special operations forces had fled to Iran after the disastrous Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Since those forces were trained by U.S. special operations forces, the Afghan commandos’ escape into Iran potentially delivered “closely guarded secrets on U.S. special operators” to Iran, according to Foreign Policy.
Neff suggested that Afghan commandos were interested in fighting in Ukraine because “anything, even war, was better than the conditions in Iran for Afghans after the Taliban retook Kabul in August of 2021.”
However, other outlets reported that Iran and Russia were actually recruiting those Afghan commandos to go fight for them in Yemen and Ukraine.
According a November 7, 2022, Voice of America report, the former Afghan army chief, General Haibatullah Alizai, said, “When former Afghan military members go to immigration bureaus in Iran to extend their visas, they are told to go to Yemen to fight in support of the Houthis.”
Mohammad Farid Ahmadi, the former commander of Afghanistan’s elite National Army Commando Corps, also told VOA that former Afghan special forces now are engaged in “six critical areas” of the world: Nagorno-Karabakh, Ukraine, Yemen, Iran, Syria and Russia, but “in small groups.”
And according to the report, Russia was offering them $1,500-a-month payments and promises of safe havens for themselves and their families.
Routh’s efforts to recruit former Afghan special operations forces in Iran to go fight in Ukraine would have likely — at the least — put him on the radar of the Iranian and Russian governments, and possibly have exposed him to Iranian and Russian exploitation or manipulation, and even cooperation.
While Routh expressed hostility towards Russia, he had a record of sympathizing with Iran.
In 2023, he self-published an e-book that apologized to Iran for personally having voted for Trump, who he said “ended up being brainless” for dismantling the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal.
“I am man enough to say that I misjudged and made a terrible mistake,” he wrote, according to Time. “You are free to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error in judgment.”
Quote:Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old man who allegedly attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump on Sunday, told the New York Times in 2023 about his efforts to help Ukraine fight against Russia’s invasion.
On Sunday, after Routh’s identity was confirmed as the suspected assassin, the New York Times published an interview from 2023 profiling his Ukraine activism. Following Russia’s invasion in 2022, Routh wrote on social media, “I AM WILLING TO FLY TO KRAKOW AND GO TO THE BORDER OF UKRAINE TO VOLUNTEER AND FIGHT AND DIE.”
The New York Times revealed that Routh’s activism on Ukraine ran deep to the point that he met with the Helsinki Commission in Washington, DC, a bipartisan commission that includes high-profile names like Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Thom Tillis (R-NC). Per the report:
In a telephone interview with The New York Times in 2023, when Mr. Routh was in Washington, he spoke with a self-assuredness of a seasoned diplomat who thought his plans to support Ukraine’s war effort were sure to succeed. But he appeared to have little patience for anyone who got in his way. When an American foreign fighter seemed to talk down to him in a Facebook message he shared with The New York Times, Mr. Routh said, “he needs to be shot.”
In the interview, Mr. Routh said he was in Washington to meet with the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, known as the Helsinki Commission “for two hours” to help push for more support for Ukraine. The commission is led by members of Congress and staffed by congressional aides. It is influential on matters of democracy and security and has been vocal in supporting Ukraine.
Sean Davis, CEO and co-founder of The Federalist, said on Sunday that there should be a full investigation on Routh’s access in Washington.
“There needs to be a full investigation of all the Washington officials and reporters the second would-be Trump assassin has interacted with over the last four years, including Malcom Nance, the entire Vindman clan, and everyone associated with the Helsinki Commission,” said Davis.
During his interview with the Times, Routh talked about some of the more extreme measures he entertained on transporting soldiers to Ukraine, even illegally from Pakistan and Iran. As part of his profile bio on the messaging app Signal, Routh wrote, “Civilians must change this war and prevent future wars.” His WhatsApp bio read, “Each one of us must do our part daily in the smallest steps help support human rights, freedom and democracy; we each must help the chinese.”
Quote:On Monday’s broadcast of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” NPR Political Correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben said that “we have weeks until Election Day, and violence can have terrifying knock-on effects.” And cited as an example, “after the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, the crowd briefly turned on the press and yelled that the shooting was journalists’ fault. It was very tense and very frightening for a short while there.”
Co-host Steve Inskeep asked, [relevant exchange begins around 2:00] “Well, now, police have a suspect in custody, as we heard from Greg Allen. He has his own political views, apparently, as expressed over the years on social media. I should note, these kinds of attacks are most commonly traced to individuals who act out of their own, often very strange or inexplicable motives, but what, if anything, does this incident say about American politics generally?”
Kurtzleben responded, “Well, unsurprisingly, I’m going to say it doesn’t say anything good. But, to expound, there was a clip you played earlier where the Secret Service spokesman yesterday said, we live in dangerous times. And, yeah, that’s the blatant truth. Consider that another major storyline right now is that Trump and his running mate’s hateful rhetoric towards immigrants in Springfield, Ohio was followed by bomb threats in schools there. And we’ve seen this kind of disturbing incident growing for years, especially since Trump came to power or even got into politics. There was January 6. There was the attack on Paul Pelosi, former Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) husband. There have been threats to election workers.”
She concluded, “I just keep thinking about, after the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, the crowd briefly turned on the press and yelled that the shooting was journalists’ fault. It was very tense and very frightening for a short while there. My point is that we have weeks until Election Day, and violence can have terrifying knock-on effects.”
Quote:Figures including a senior UK government spokesman, Trump ally Nigel Farage, and former British Prime Minister Liz Truss have expressed thanks President Trump is uninjured after another apparent attempt on his life.
Former president and current Republican Party candidate for the presidency Donald Trump survived another alleged attempt on his life while golfing at his course in West Palm Beach on Sunday, with the FBI saying that it is investigating the incident as an “attempted assassination“.
It comes just over eight weeks after Mr Trump narrowly survived another attempt on his life during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania when he was shot in his upper right ear.
Responding to the incident on Sunday, former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss said: “Thank God Donald Trump is safe. But what is happening in the US?”
“These attempts to subvert democracy must be stopped,” the former British leader urged.
The UK Home Secretary — the government post rolling together the nation’s interior minister and homeland security — Yvette Cooper also responded on Monday morning to this latest act of violence against President Trump, saying on television that it is “appalling to see political violence taking place”, and asserting that political violence has no place in a democracy.
Cooper, who could not by any means be said to be sympathetic towards former President Trump politically, continued to remark: “We’re all glad that the former president is safe, and that this attempt, whatever it was that happened, was not successful.”
Perhaps Trump’s strongest supporter and ally in the United Kingdom, if not all of Europe, is Brexit boss and now Member of Parliament and leader of the Reform UK party Nigel Farage. Mr Farage himself has suffered several physical attacks for his political career. He reflected on “another attempt on Trump’s life”, calling the shooting “truly appalling”.
Since leaving office, Liz Truss has become one of Mr Trump’s most outspoken supporters in Europe, arguing earlier this year that the very fate of the Western world depends on the former American president returning to power in November.
“I believe for the West to be saved, it is vitally important to get Republicans back in the White House,” Truss said at the Future of Europe Forum in Warsaw in March.
Similarly to Trump in the United States, Truss has accused the political establishment in the United Kingdom of subverting the democratic will of the British people, claiming that the Westminster civil service deep state bureaucracy and the City of London sought to undermine her government’s agenda.
Truss has also asserted that her removal from office in a Downing Street Tory Party palace coup in October of 2022 resulted from pressure exerted by political and financial elites, including by the Bank of England after she attempted to roll back high taxes and spending.
After just 50 days in power — the shortest tenure of any British PM — she stepped down. Truss was replaced by former Goldman Sachs banker Rishi Sunak, despite Conservative Party voters expressly rejecting him in the preceding leadership contest.
Quote:Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Monday responded to the second assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump by suggesting it was a natural consequence of the United States supporting Ukraine against the Russian invasion.
When asked what the Kremlin thought about the incident, Peskov snapped, “It is not us who should be thinking, it is the U.S. intelligence services who should be thinking.”
“In any case, playing with fire has its consequences,” he added.
Peskov was alluding to evidence that Ryan Wesley Routh, widely identified as the suspect in the second assassination attempt against Trump, is an energetic supporter of Ukraine and may have plotted to kill Trump because he believes U.S. support for Ukraine would diminish under a second Trump administration.
Routh, 58, gave an interview about his Ukraine activism to the New York Times (NYT) last year. In the interview, Routh said he was in Washington to meet with the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a.k.a. The Helsinki Commission, to press the U.S. Congress for more financing for Ukraine’s war effort.
Routh appears to have written social media posts in which he volunteered to fight for Ukraine and he has threatened violent reprisals against those who disagree with him.
“I am coming to Ukraine from Hawaii to fight for your kids and families and democracy … I will come and die for you,” he allegedly said in one social media post. Later in 2022, he allegedly said he presented himself to the Ukrainian military as a volunteer but was turned down due to his age and lack of military experience.
“A lot of the other conflicts are gray but this conflict is definitely black and white. This is about good versus evil,” he said in a June 2022 interview with Newsweek Romania, when he was ostensibly in Kyiv trying to round up other foreign volunteers for the Ukrainian military.
The Ukrainian Defense Intelligence Unit International Legion, which is composed of foreign volunteers, issued a statement on Monday insisting that Routh has “no relation to the unit” and rumors to the contrary “disseminated in certain media are not true.”
Ukraine’s Azov Brigade, which has long been identified as having Nazi sympathies, also disavowed any links to Routh in response to a social media video that claimed the presumed would-be shooter participated in a 2022 public event to support the brigade.
“We believe that the spread of the narrative about the possible connection between Azov and Ryan Wesley Routh is playing along with Russian propaganda,” the Azov Brigade said.
Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation on Monday also said the attempt on Trump’s life has become a “topic for Russian propaganda.”
Dmitri Peskov said on Monday that Russia is “monitoring” the situation in the United States.
“We see how tense the situation is there, including between political competitors. The political struggle is escalating, and a variety of methods are being used,” he said.
Quote:Former President Donald Trump said that he wanted to end the was between Russia and Ukraine as President-elect — even before he takes office — though he did not say how he intended to do so, given laws barring private diplomacy.
Trump made the comment during an interview on X (formerly Twitter) “Spaces” with cryptocurrency enthusiast Farokh Sarmad — the first interview the former president has granted since escaping a second assassination attempt the day before at his Florida golf club.
Democrats smeared Trump as a Russian puppet, yet Russian President Vladimir Putin did not invade any countries while Trump was president. Upon taking office, President Joe Biden adopted a posture of appeasement, canceling Trump’s sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and holding a summit with Putin in Geneva before ever meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Russia invaded Ukraine, which held out — against the expectations of the Biden administration — but then Biden, who came to office declaring “diplomacy is back,” pushed for victory, which has been elusive after nearly three years of war. Biden has yet to call any kind of joint peace conference.
Trump’s comments appear at 27:18 below:
I want to get Russia to settle up with Ukraine and stop this — millions of people being killed, far greater than the number you read about. But I want to get that done before I even take office, I want to get that done as president-elect, because it has to be solved — too many people dying, too many cities are just in rubble right now, you look at the cultures just being destroyed. We’ve got to get that done, and I’ll get it done. There wouldn’t have been an October 7th, there wouldn’t have been Russia attacking Ukraine, there wouldn’t be inflation, all this inflation which has hurt people so badly. You wouldn’t have had that horrible type of withdrawal — we were getting out of Afghanistan, but with dignity and strength — that was the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country. And frankly Russia would have never gone into Ukraine if it weren’t for that. They looked at that and they said, “This country is no longer run by Trump. This country is run by stupid people.”
Trump did not explain how he would forge peace as a private citizen. The Logan Act prevents private citizens from conducting formal diplomacy on behalf of the U.S.; it was used by the Department of Justice as a pretext to eavesdrop on then-incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn during the presidential transition of 2016-2017.
Quote:Self-professed “progressive” Chicago Democrat Mayor Brandon Johnson got an earful over his failed migrant policies from an elderly black resident at a recent town hall.
The woman, who said she was 80 years old and grew up in the Jim Crow South, said that Johnson’s pro-migrant policies are literally destroying the Windy City’s black communities.
“All I can say to you is that you are a disgrace,” the distraught woman said at the outset of her comments.
“I’m an 80-year-old woman, and I’ve never seen anything like this. I grew up in the Jim Crow South, and the policies that you’re passing in this city remind me of the Jim Crow South,” she continued.
“I had to drink out of a colored water fountain, or the whites would drink out of a white water fountain,” she explained. “But you know what I didn’t have to worry about? Going back to my community and it would be destroyed. And everybody else is in my community, but black people. And this is what you’ve done with this immigration.”
The woman then spoke about how Johnson’s wave after wave of migrants has torn Chicago’s black communities to shreds.
“You have allowed all these people. You’ve brought all these people into this city. You are destroying this city. And the black community is flooded with all these immigrants, violent ones, prostitution, gangs. You did that! You are doing this to your people. You are an absolute disgrace to me,” she said angrily.
“Like I said, I drank out of that colored water fountain, but I could go back to that black community that was intact,” she said, before contrasting that with what is happening today: “Women are crying, taxes are going up. What am I going to do with my children? Where are we going to go and live? This is because of you, Brandon Johnson! You’re destroying the black Southside of Chicago with your policies. All under the Democratic Party,” she said.
“You are a disgrace,” the resident concluded.
This is far from the first time that Mayor Johnson and his allies in Chicago have faced severe criticism from local black residents.
Quote:Texas Governor Greg Abbott designated the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang as a foreign terrorist organization on Monday. The move gives Texas law enforcement officials additional tools and resources to attack the gang and “disrupt their criminal operations and deny their foothold in the state,” the governor stated.
During a press conference on Monday, Governor Abbott said he was “designating Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization. Our goal is to defend Texas from the growing threat of the gang.”
“The recent entry and expansion of the vicious Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, is a dangerous and deadly problem facing our state and nation,” Abbott explained. “Our top focus is the safety and security of all Texans.”
The governor also designated the TdA gang as a Tier 1 gang and ordered the creation of a TdA Strike Team to identify and arrest TdA gang members.
The move by Governor Abbott follows news of violent activity by alleged TdA gang members that forced a Texas district court judge to order the closing of a hotel in El Paso, Breitbart Texas reported. City officials complained in a lawsuit against the owners of the Gateway Hotel after responding to nearly 700 calls for service to the address
Texas Department of Public Safety Director, Colonel Steve McCraw, likened the spread of TdA gang violence to an infestation of cockroaches.
“They multiply quickly; small intrusions into communities become infestations if not aggressively pursued,” Colonel McCraw told reporters at the press conference. “These Venezuelan thugs are highly combative, violent, and certainly adaptable.”
McCraw explained that gang members are involved in human smuggling, extortion, kidnapping, rape, assault, and sex trafficking.
“Governor Abbott has made it very clear: We will not allow any of these gangsters to gain a foothold in Texas,” McCraw stated.
Texas Border Czar Mike Banks placed the blame for the influx of Venezuelan gang members directly at the feet of the Biden-Harris open border policies.
“I want to be very clear: the Tren de Aragua problem in Texas and the rest of the United States is a direct result of open border policies,” Banks stated. “So there is no surprise that we have a criminal illegal gang problem in the United States, and thankfully, we’re addressing that.”
Family Wants Commanders to Use Redskins's Old Logo
Quote:The family of the Blackfeet chief who served as the face of the Washington Redskins for 48 years want his image back on the fields of the NFL, relatives told Fox News Digital.
The descendants of John Two Guns White Calf also want his incredible life story retold, too, to a new generation of Americans who seek unity and value multiculturalism.
The White Calf family has support in Washington, D.C. from one of their Montana senators, while the NFL franchise itself, now known as the Washington Commanders, is making new efforts to honor the team's heritage.
"The fans want him back and we want him back," Thomas White Calf, a great nephew of the celebrated early-20th-century native, said this week by phone, hours after the family met with Sen. Steve Daines, R-Montana.
Two Guns White Calf’s proud portrait adorned Redskins helmets, T-shirts, playing fields and marketing materials from 1972 until 2020.
"Our ancestor was the most famous and most photographed native in history," said White Calf, who was joined on the call by his mother, Delphine White Calf, a niece of the late Blackfeet chief.
"Two Guns was also the face on the Indian head nickel. I’m proud of him. The Blackfeet are proud of him."
Quote:Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered the Russian Army to add 180,000 more troops, which would bring its total to 1.5 million active-duty soldiers — the second largest army in the world after China.
The order, which goes into effect on December 1, is the third major increase to the size of Russia’s military Putin has ordered since he invaded Ukraine in February 2022. He added 137,000 active-duty soldiers in August 2022 and 170,000 in December 2023.
With reserves and other personnel included, the Russian military will have 2.38 million members after Putin’s order goes into effect, increasing from 2.2 million.
“This is due to the number of threats that exist to our country along the perimeter of our borders. It is caused by the extremely hostile environment on our western borders and instability on our eastern borders. This demands appropriate measures to be taken,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Putin’s decree for more troops was a response to NATO putting more troops and advanced weapons along Russia’s border.
Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said last Friday that NATO is “making plans of sending their troops to Ukraine.”
“This is a dangerous game, which may lead to a direct military confrontation of nuclear powers,” Fomin said.
On the same day, Putin warned that if Western powers lift their restrictions on Ukraine using their long-range missiles to strike targets deep in Russian territory, it would mean “NATO countries,” including the United States, “are at war with Russia.”
Putin said the Ukrainian military “is not capable of using cutting-edge high-precision long-range systems supplied by the West” to hit targets in Russia without direct Western assistance.
The chairman of the defense committee in Russia’s Duma, Andrei Kartapolov, said on Monday that Russia needs to expand its military to deal with the growing security threat posed by NATO after Finland joined the alliance in April.
Foreign military analysts believe that a severe Russian manpower shortage is one reason the Ukrainians were able to counter-attack and seize territory in the Kursk region last month. Russia has about 700,000 troops involved in the Ukraine invasion, and has been reluctant to call up more reserves to bolster its forces, fearing civil unrest.
Quote:The campaign to impeach and remove President Emmanuel Macron over his refusal to install the preferred pick of the far-left for prime minister after July’s snap legislative elections is officially underway after the move cleared its first legal hurdle in the French parliament.
On Tuesday morning, the office of the National Assembly voted by a margin of 12 to 10 to deem impeachment proceedings against President Macron “admissible” for debate in the wider parliament at the Palais Bourbon, marking the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic a measure to remove a president has passed such a threshold, Le Figaro reports.
The vote was passed purely on partisan lines, with the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) party of former presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon having enough seats in the committee to override neo-liberal lawmakers loyal to Macron and the populist National Rally of Marine Le Pen by two votes.
“The Macronists had to refamiliarize themselves with democracy,” said LFI president Mathilde Panot following the vote, adding joyously: “It is an unprecedented event in the history of the Fifth Republic which has just occurred.”
The move, which was first threatened by Mélonchon and Panot last month, came in response to President Macron’s refusal to select a member of the New Popular Front (NFP) coalition of various leftist parties, including the LFI, which was hastily cobbled together ahead of July’s elections.
Macron’s decision to install Brexit villain Michel Barnier of the centre-right Les Republicains sparked accusations against the Élysée Palace of conducting a “coup against democracy” given that the NFP won the most seats in the National Assembly after joining forces with Macron in a strategic voting alliance to prevent the ascendant National Rally from taking power.
However, despite attempts from the far-left to claim the mantle of a democratic mandate, the NFP fell well short of the seats needed to hold a majority in the National Assembly and secured millions fewer votes than Le Pen’s National Rally, which now sits as the largest single party in the parliament.
Further undermining the NFP’s attempt to brand itself as the defender of French democracy, the leftist group had nominated Lucie Castets, a socialist deep-stater civil servant for prime minister, despite her never being elected by the French people.
While the impeachment proceedings clearing the first hurdle does mark a historic event, it is doubtful that the far-left will be successful in their aims of ousting the president. In a few weeks, the measure will be put before the Law Committee of the National Assembly and then likely before the entire parliament.
First, La France Insoumise will need to submit a resolution to convene a “High Court” in the Senate and National Assembly. This measure would only require one-tenth of the 577 parliamentarians, meaning that the LFI could pass it alone on a party-line basis. However, for the resolution to be approved, a vote of two-thirds in both houses would be required. A further two-thirds vote would then be needed to impeach the president.
Given that the Socialist Party (PS) — a member of the New Popular Front — has refused to back the move, the NFP would at most only be able to muster 151 votes, far fewer than the 384 needed for impeachment. The far-left has also failed in recruiting the populist National Rally to their cause, meaning that the measure was likely doomed from the start due to the current breakdown of seats in the parliament.
Commenting on the start of impeachment proceedings, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen said on Tuesday: “In an attempt to make people forget its multiple compromises with Macron, the far-left is defending a procedure for impeaching the President of the Republic that has no chance of succeeding given the divisions on the left.
Quote:During his first trip to Italy since taking office British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that the UK will seek to replicate Giorgia Meloni’s success in stemming the tide of illegal boat migrants, sparking a wave of criticism from leftist Labour Party lawmakers back in London.
In the wake of eight more migrants drowning to death attempting to illegally cross the English Channel from France, Prime Minister Starmer met with his counterpart in Rome to “study” the methods used by the conservative Meloni government, which have seen over a 60 per cent decrease in illegal migration to Italy over last year, broadcaster RAI reports.
“Italy has shown that we can. You’ve made remarkable progress working with countries along migration routes as equals to address the drivers of migration, of source and to tackle the gangs,” Sir Keir said.
Meloni’s government has adopted a “360 strategy” to tackle illegal immigration, including brokering EU-level and bilateral deals with migrant hot spot countries such as Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt as well as cracking down on NGO migrant taxis, increasing restrictions on asylum seekers being allowed to work, and levying heavier penalties against people smugglers and migrant boat captains.
While the scheme has yet to come into action, Meloni also inked a deal with Albania to house asylum seekers while they await their claims to be processed rather than allowing them to remain in Italy during the interim. Although Prime Minister Starmer scrapped a similar agreement with Rwanda on his first day in office, the Labour Party leader is “very interested” in the Albania scheme, according to Meloni.
She said: “The model that the Italian government has imagined, of centres to process asylum requests under Italian and European jurisdiction in a foreign country, has not been tested. If it works, and I believe it will work, everyone understands that it will be a keystone for the element of deterrence.”
The meeting of the two leaders comes as over 1,000 illegals crossed the English Channel in small people smuggler-operated boats launched from the beaches of France over the weekend. French authorities reported Sunday that eight migrants lost their lives in the busy waterway attempting to reach Britain.
The latest crossings take the total of illegal arrivals by boat into the country to around 10,000 since Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party came into power in July and nearly 24,000 since the start of the year.
In addition to scrapping the Rwanda scheme, leaving hundreds of millions of British taxpayer investments behind, the new left-wing PM has also refused to enact a ‘push-back the boats’ approach as has been advocated by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and was successfully implemented in Australia under former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who’s Operation Sovereign Borders all but eliminated illegal boat migration to the former British Dominion.
Quote:Exceptionally heavy rainfall pounding Central Europe has prompted deadly flooding in the region, with four new deaths reported Monday in Poland, three in the Czech Republic and one in Romania.
The flooding has swamped parts of Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania as a low-pressure system crossing the region has unleashed record-high rains for days, and it was expected to affect Slovakia and Hungary later in the week. So far 16 people have been reported killed – seven people in Romania, five in Poland, three in the Czech Republic and one in Austria.
In Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk held an emergency meeting and later declared a disaster in flooded areas, a government measure to facilitate evacuation and rescues. He also said the government would provide 1 billion zlotys ($260 million) in immediate payouts to victims.
The flooding in Poland has burst dams and embankments while receding waters left streets covered in piles of debris and mud. It prompted a hospital in the southwestern Polish city of Nysa to evacuate about 40 patients.
Schools and offices in the affected areas were closed Monday and drinking water and food were being delivered by trucks. Many Polish cities, including Warsaw, have called for food donations for flood survivors.
Experts warned of flood threats due to the cresting Oder River in Opole, a city of some 130,000 residents, and Wroclaw, home to about 640,000 residents and where disastrous flooding happened in 1997.
Firefighters in southwestern Poland said flood victims included a surgeon whose body was found Monday morning in Nysa after he returned from hospital duty. The bodies of two women and two other men have been found in other communities in the region.
Police in the Czech Republic said that a woman and two men drowned in the northeast, which has been pounded by record rainfall since Thursday. The woman was found in the water in the town of Krasov and the men were found dead at different locations after water receded in the town of Krnov which was almost completely submerged on Sunday
Romanian authorities said Monday that another person died in the eastern county of Galati, bringing the total number of deaths there to seven.
One death previously was reported in Austria.
Authorities in the Czech Republic declared an emergency in two northeastern regions, including in the Jeseniky mountains near the Polish border.
Quote:Iranian tyrant Ayatollah Ali Khamenei named India in a statement condemning “enemies of Islam” on Monday, equating the situation of Indian Muslims to that of Palestinian Muslims in Hamas-occupied Gaza.
The statement, published on the social media site Twitter (X), called for Muslims not to be “oblivious to the suffering that a Muslim is enduring” in India, as well as Gaza and Myanmar, currently governed by a military junta that has attempted to garner public support by aligning itself with prominent Buddhists.
The Indian government responded to Khamenei by calling his statement “misinformed and unacceptable” and alluding to Iran’s atrocious human rights record, including widespread abuses against Muslims living under the Islamic theocracy.
The spat is notable as Iran and India elevated their diplomatic relations thanks to Tehran joining the BRICS coalition, of which India is a founding member. Brazil, Russia, China, and South Africa joined India among the original members of the anti-American coalition; Iran became a member in January alongside the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Ethiopia. Saudi Arabia, Iran’s top geopolitical rival, appeared to have accepted the invite to join BRICS but its official membership status is unclear at press time.
BRICS membership opens both economic and diplomatic doors for new members. India and Iran recently cemented a lucrative port development deal and appeared interested in increasing the trade volume between themselves prior to Khamenei attacking India’s Hindu nationalist government. The countries have struggled to find points of mutual agreement, however, given Iran’s support for radical Islamist terrorism throughout the Middle East and India’s longstanding friendly relationship with the United States, which Tehran regularly refers to as the “Great Satan,” and with Israel, which Iran has threatened to destroy.
Khamenei made the remark against India in a post to Twitter in the greater context of encouraging Muslims to oppose Israel’s self-defense operations against the Iran-backed terror group Hamas in Gaza. Iranian officials claim the self-defense operation is a “genocide” against Muslims in the territory.
“The enemies of Islam have always tried to make us indifferent with regard to our shared identity as an Islamic Ummah [community],” Khamenei’s account posted. “We cannot consider ourselves to be Muslims if we are oblivious to the suffering that a Muslim is enduring in #Myanmar, #Gaza, #India, or any other place.”
Quote:Update: The Lebanese government has lowered the estimate of wounded to 2,750 people, denying speculation that as many as 4,000 people had been wounded, according to the Times of Israel. Nine people are confirmed dead.
A Lebanese minister reported Tuesday that eight people had been killed and 2,800 injured in an apparent attack on Hezbollah members and fighters that targeted the pagers that the organization has been using for communications.
The Times of Israel reported:
Lebanon’s health minister says eight were killed and some 2,800 were wounded, including 200 seriously, in the pager blasts in Lebanon.
Hezbollah has said that two members are among the dead. A young girl, the daughter of a Hezbollah member, was also reported killed after a pager exploded in her parents’ home.
Images and videos on social media showed men with wounds to their abdomens and chests, presumably as a result of the exploding pagers, which detonated at roughly the same time on Tuesday.
Reports speculated that Hezbollah may have discarded their other, more sophisticated mobile devices after Israel killed Hezbollah’s second-in-command, Fuad Shukr, in July. It is not clear how the pagers were hacked, and it has not been confirmed that Israel hacked them, but there was speculation that malware may have caused the devices’ lithium batteries to overheat and to explode.
The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was also injured in the attack. The son of a Hezbollah member of the Lebanese parliament was killed.
According to reports, pagers also exploded in Syria as well, where Hezbollah and Iran conduct military operations.
Quote:Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani told Bloomberg News in an interview published Tuesday that he believes there “is no need” for troops from America or other members of the coalition against the Islamic State to remain in the country, suggesting he will soon expel them.
Sudani gave the interview to Bloomberg on Sunday, shortly before Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian departed the country. Pezeshkian, inaugurated into the office on July 30 after the death of predecessor Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash, made a tour of Iraq his first international trip as president. Pezeshkian made sure to spend time in Baghdad, where he signed 14 agreements with Sudani, and in the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), where he wowed officials by speaking fluent Kurdish.
Tehran has transparently pursued increased political influence over the Iraqi government, bankrolling and advising a variety of Shiite terrorist organizations that have become close to Baghdad. Iran has notoriously supported the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a coalition of mostly Shiite militias that became a formal part of the Iraqi military during the war on the Islamic State, and reportedly recently aided with the establishment of offices for the Yemeni Houthi terrorist movement and the Sunni terrorists of Hamas in the country.
The prime minister did not appear to include Iran in his call to end the international military presence in his country meant to combat the threat of the Islamic State.
“Today, Iraq in 2024 is not the same as Iraq of 2014. We have defeated Daesh [ISIS] with our sacrifices and the Iraqi people’s position from all its components and factions and with the support of the international community and friends,” Sudani said in a video of the interview published by Bloomberg on Tuesday. “And we appreciate that.”
“We found that the justifications have ended. There is no longer a need for a coalition of 86 countries. We moved from a period of wars to a period of stability. Daesh doesn’t pose a threat to the state,” he insisted.
Guys, let's find out why they're so interested in getting rid of US forces for months.
Quote:Iran is bolstering its influence in Iraq by moving in leaders of its proxy terrorist organizations Hamas and the Yemeni Houthi movement, the left-wing New York Times reported on Sunday — days after Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian concluded a visit to the neighboring country.
Pezeshkian, elected in a special election following the death of predecessor Ebrahim Raisi in a mysterious helicopter crash in May, made a tour of Iraq his first international visit while in office. Pezeshkian departed the country on Friday after visiting Baghdad, meeting with Kurdish leadership in Erbil, and concluding with a stop in Basra. He emphasized unity and cooperation among Muslim political entities during his conversations there and reportedly signed 14 memoranda of understanding with the Iraqi government in Baghdad.
The Iraqi government has not openly boasted of helping its proxies expand their influence in Baghdad. The New York Times noted that it only confirmed the official presence of Hamas and the Houthis in the Iraqi capital via unnamed officials and that both terrorist organizations are attempting to keep a low profile in the country. The Houthis, as a Shiite terrorist organization, has reportedly received an especially “warm” welcome from the Shiite terrorist coalition known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), which became an official arm of the Iraqi armed forces during the war against the Sunni Islamic State “caliphate.”
“Iraqi government officials quietly allowed both Iranian-backed armed groups [Hamas and the Houthis] to establish a more permanent presence in Baghdad early this summer,” the Times reported, claiming that “Iraqi officials deny publicly” this has occurred.
The erosion of American influence in the country under currently President Joe Biden appears to have played a role in the terrorists moving in, as the Times sources indicated Baghdad would rather not have Iran’s proxies grow roots there.
“Some Iraqi government officials, according to two of the people who spoke to The New York Times, say privately they are not thrilled about their new guests, but did not have the power to block them,” the leftist newspaper asserted, “given the sway of the Iraqi political parties with ties to Iran.”
The PMF are reportedly deeply involved in ensuring that Hamas and the Houthis can successfully operate in the country. According to the Times, Kata’ib Hezbollah, one of the most prominent Shiite terrorist groups in the PMF, has helped Hamas with security, while fellow PMF terror squad Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq have helped the Houthis.
While the Iraqi government has formally avoided loudly discussing the invasion of foreign terrorist organizations, radical Islamist lawmakers in Iraq have embraced it; the Times noted the Houthis found in Iraq an “especially warm” welcome.
“The presence of a representative of the Houthis in Iraq is welcomed by all political parties in Iraq,” it quoted one Shiite lawmaker, Saad Al-Saadi, as saying.
Adding to the Times‘ reporting, the news outlet Israel Hayom reported on Sunday that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — a U.S.-designated terrorist organization and formal arm of the Iranian government — presided over an oversight “operations committee” in Iraq in March to help its terrorist proxies coordinate with each other. The committee reportedly brought together several PMF groups and the Houthis.
“Subsequently, in May, the Houthi leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, announced the beginning of coordination of military operations between his militia, Ansar Allah, and pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq,” Israel Hayom added.
Quote:The Houthis fired a surface-to-surface missile that reached Israel at 6:32 a.m. on Sunday morning, local time, triggering sirens all over the area near Tel Aviv, but exploding in an open area without causing any damage.
The missile was detected in the midst of the morning news broadcast on Army Radio, taking the announcer by surprise. At first, it was unclear whether the sirens had been caused because of rockets fired from the south (Hamas) or the north (Hezbollah); then a report came that it had actually entered Israeli airspace from the east, sparking speculation that it had been fired by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq; then confirmation came that it had actually been fired by the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen, taking a circuitous route to enter Israel from an unexpected direction.
The missile was very large, according to Army Radio, and had been difficult to hit because it entered Israeli airspace at a low altitude. The missile was capable of carrying a payload of hundreds of kilograms’ worth of explosives.
It was unclear whether Israel’s Arrow missile defense system had hit the missile. Army Radio reported that the Iron Dome system, which deals with smaller, shorter-range rockets, deployed to hit shrapnel and missile fragments.
Israel struck the Houthis in July, after a drone fired from Yemen reached Tel Aviv without being intercepted.
Update: Israeli media reported that the Arrow system had intercepted the missile, but that there were concerns that the system had not intercepted the missile outside of Israeli airspace. “IDF sources accepted that the Arrow 3 defense system may have missed the missile outside of Israeli airspace, with the Arrow 2 system shooting it down over Israeli airspace on the second try,” the Jerusalem Post reported. Five Israelis were wounded while running for shelter.
Quote:Saudi diplomat and former intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal recently lamented the weak response by the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden and the greater West to Yemen’s Houthi terrorists disrupting commercial shipping in the Red Sea, the Guardian reported on Sunday, dismissing “pinprick bombings” as insufficient.
The British Guardian newspaper was relaying comments that al-Faisal made during an appearance at London’s Chatham House to discuss the current turmoil in the Middle East. The Houthi terrorist movement, which relies heavily on support from Saudi Arabia’s longtime geopolitical rival Iran, has dramatically expanded its international profile in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas massacre of hundreds of civilians in Israel.
Following the attack, the Houthis declared war on Israel and proclaimed they would attack all commercial ships transiting through the Red Sea that they deemed to be affiliated with Israel. The result has been dozens of attacks, including some deadly ones and two ship sinkings, on a seemingly random assortment of ships that has included some affiliated with Houthi allies such as China and Iran.
Global shipping companies have loudly complained that the international community should do more to protect global commerce as the Houthi campaign has caused shipping and insurance rates to skyrocket. The main response to that call has been “Operation Prosperity Guardian,” a Pentagon-led global operation allegedly intended to protect civilian ships attempting to transit through the Red Sea. Debuting in December, the operation had few named partners relevant to the Red Sea, and it is unclear if any meaningful defense work has been conducted under its banner, leaving shipping industry leaders feeling largely abandoned to the Houthi threat.
Outside of “Operation Prosperity Guardian,” Biden has greenlit some limited attacks on Houthi military targets — strikes that al-Faisal reportedly dismissed as making little difference in the security situation of the region.
“We have seen the deployment of European and US fleets along the Red Sea coast and more can be done there to interdict the supply of weaponry that comes to the Houthis from Iran,” the Guardian quoted al-Faisal as saying. “Putting pressure on Iran by the world community can have a positive impact on what the Houthis can do in launching these missiles and drones to hit international commerce.”
The Saudi diplomat lamented that “pinprick bombings” by American and British forces have had a minimal effect on the situation in the Red Sea. He also condemned Iran, however, for doing nothing to stop the Houthis from disrupting global trade. The Houthis, known formally as Ansarallah, could find their operations severely limited if resources from Tehran dried up.
Quote:Israel’s security cabinet, which is responsible for setting military policy, decided early Tuesday morning to adopt the return of the residents of northern Israel’s border towns to their homes as an official war goal.
The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement:
The Security Cabinet has updated the objectives of the war to include the following: Returning the residents of the north securely to their homes.
Israel will continue to act to implement this objective.
The decision does not formally commit Israel to a war against the Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hezbollah, which occupies southern Lebanon illegally and has been firing rockets, missiles, and drones at Israel since October.
However, it means that Israel is committing to pursue such a war in the event that ongoing diplomatic efforts, led by U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein, fail to resolve the conflict.
Some 60,500 residents of northern Israel, from a total of 74 towns, have been evacuated since October.
Israelis have been demanding action from their government to resolve the crisis. The Biden administration has tried to link a peace deal in Lebanon with a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
The other three war objectives are: destroying Hamas’s military and governing capacities; freeing the hostages; and making sure that Gaza can never threaten Israel again.
Quote:Israelis are awaiting a possible change at the top of the defense ministry, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering replacing incumbent Yoav Gallant with former rival Gideon Sa’ar, who is conservative but combative.
Gallant has repeatedly irked Netanyahu by opposing his government from within — and from without. It was Gallant who inflamed the public debate over judicial reform in 2023 by calling on Netanyahu to drop the reforms — while the prime minister was traveling out of the country. It was a gesture of open insubordination, stoking left-wing protests, and led Netanyahu to fire Gallant. Netanyahu later relented, but the tension between the two leaders has never ended.
In the wake of the October 7 terror attack, Netanyahu and Gallant presented a united front. (Both are facing possible charges from the International Criminal Court, which Israel and the U.S. have described as unjust.) But Gallant has spoken out publicly in favor of a hostage deal on terms favorable to Hamas, while also leaking that he supported an early attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon that Netanyahu, fearing opposition from the Biden administration, opposed.
Sa’ar has been a thorn in Netanyahu’s side for years. A former member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, Sa’ar left and refused to join any government led by Netanyahu, contributing to instability that lasted for several election cycles. Ultimately, Sa’ar did join the emergency national unity government that lasted for several months after October 7. Sa’ar left a coalition with the main opposition party of Benny Gantz, which itself later left the unity government.
Reports suggest that Sa’ar would back a more aggressive posture in both Gaza and Lebanon, while putting the brakes on judicial reform domestically. Details have yet to be hammered out — and no agreement exists until the ink is dry.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:Reports of explosives ahead of former President Donald Trump’s rally on Long Island are unfounded, according to local authorities.
The Nassau County Police Department told Nexstar’s WPIX on Wednesday that a person was near the rally with a self-trained bomb-detecting dog. That person has been accused of falsely reporting a threat and detained for questioning.
No additional details about the person or their dog were immediately available.
Thousands of people were expected to attend Trump’s rally at Nassau Coliseum, one of his first public appearances since another apparent assassination attempt over the weekend.
Trump was not harmed after the Secret Service noticed the muzzle of an AK-style rifle sticking through the shrubbery that lines his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday. An agent fired at the alleged gunman, who dropped the rifle and fled the scene. The suspect was later arrested in a neighboring county.
While Trump’s Long Island rally is not scheduled to begin until 7 p.m. ET, supporters have already gathered for the event.
Law enforcement is prepared for counter-demonstrations near the Nassau Coliseum, WPIX reports. Members of Nassau County’s Haitian community were already rallying outside a Haitian restaurant near the Coliseum on Tuesday.
“You are not only retraumatizing this community that’s going through a lot in Haiti right now, but then you come to a place where you know there’s a lot of us and you just think we are going to be quiet, and that’s why it’s so important for us to speak up now,” Nassau County resident Mimi Pierre Johnson told WPIX.
Trump has falsely accused members of the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, of abducting and eating cats and dogs. As of Tuesday, more than 30 bomb threats had been made against schools, government buildings, and the homes of local officials in the small city. Celebrations have been canceled and state police have been deployed to city schools in response to those threats.
Quote:The U.S. military has moved about 130 soldiers to Shemya Island in Alaska's Aleutian chain.
The deployment comes in response to a recent surge in Russian military activity near U.S. territory. Russian planes and vessels have been approaching Alaska, though none breached U.S. airspace.
In the past week, eight Russian military aircraft and four naval vessels, including two submarines, were detected near Alaska. The increased activity is linked to joint military exercises between Russia and China, known as Ocean-24, which began on September 10.
Despite the uptick, Pentagon spokesperson Major General Pat Ryder said there is no immediate cause for concern.
"It's not the first time that we've seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity," Ryder said. "That's something that we obviously closely monitor, and it's also something that we're prepared to respond to."
On September 12, the U.S. Army sent soldiers to Shemya Island as part of a "force projection operation." The troops brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to the island, which is 1,200 miles southwest of Anchorage. Shemya Island is home to a U.S. Air Force station, established during World War II, and is considered a key strategic point.
Senator Dan Sullivan, an Alaska Republican, said the military also deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to western Alaska. The move coincides with the Russian-Chinese military drills in the Pacific and Arctic regions.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) reported that Russian military planes were detected in the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) on September 11, 13, 14 and 15. The ADIZ is outside U.S. airspace but requires aircraft to identify themselves.
These types of incursions have been monitored for years. NORAD said that, on average, there are six to seven intercepts per year. In 2022, 26 Russian planes were detected in the Alaska zone. So far this year, the number has already reached 25.
The U.S. Coast Guard also tracked four Russian naval vessels near Alaska. The ships crossed into U.S. waters to avoid sea ice, which is allowed under international rules. Encounters like this have become more frequent in recent years.
Two years ago, a U.S. Coast Guard ship came across three Chinese and four Russian naval vessels near Alaska's Kiska Island. Such incidents reflect growing Russian and Chinese military activity in the region.
Sullivan has called for a stronger U.S. military presence in the Aleutian Islands. He said the recent increase in activity highlights the Arctic's role in the power competition between the U.S., Russia and China. He also urged the reopening of the Naval Air Facility Adak, which was closed in 1997.
While the rise in Russian and Chinese activity is being watched closely, Ryder said it does not currently pose a direct threat to the U.S.
Quote:The U.S. Department of Justice has launched a probe into a Mississippi sheriff's office's "despicable" torture of two Black men.
On Thursday, the DOJ announced that it was investigating the Rankin County Sheriff's Department after their officers were accused of torturing two Black men in an attack that included beatings, assault with a sex toy and the use of stun guns.
The Justice Department will investigate the Rankin County Sheriff's Department for potential patterns of excessive force, unlawful stops, searches, arrests, and racially biased policing, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said.
In 2023, five Rankin County sheriff's deputies admitted to breaking into a home without a warrant and assaulting Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker for hours. A sixth officer from the Richland Police Department was also convicted for his role in the attack.
Several of the officers belonged to a group notorious for excessive force, which they called the "Goon Squad." In March, all six were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 10 to 40 years.
U.S. District Judge Tom Lee said the officers' actions were "egregious and despicable." He imposed prison sentences close to the top of the guidelines for almost all of the former officers.
"The concerns about the Rankin County Sheriff's Department did not end with the demise of the Goon Squad," Clarke said Thursday.
Clarke said the Justice Department has also received reports of deputies repeatedly misusing stun guns, unlawfully entering homes, using "shocking racial slurs," and deploying "dangerous, cruel tactics" to assault individuals in custody.
Federal prosecutors say the attacks on Jenkins and Parker were set in motion on January 24, 2023, after a racist call for vigilante violence. Deputy Brett McAlpin, who is white, called to complain that two Black men were staying with a white woman at a home in Braxton.
After breaking into the home, officers handcuffed Jenkins and Parker, dousing their faces with milk, alcohol and chocolate syrup while hurling racial slurs. They forced the men to strip naked and shower together to hide the evidence of the attack, continuing to mock them with racist taunts and assaulting them with sex objects.
Along with McAlpin, those convicted include ex-deputies Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward, Jeffrey Middleton, Daniel Opdyke, and former Richland police officer Joshua Hartfield.
"The depravity of the crimes committed by these defendants cannot be overstated," Attorney General Merrick Garland said after the sentencing.
Quote:A nationwide recall has been issued for hundreds of bottles of Dynacare baby powder due to potential asbestos contamination.
The recall, which was announced Thursday, includes 62 cases of the baby powder produced by Dynarex Corporation. The affected items were produced under batch number B051 and were sent to distributors on or after March 11 in 12 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Washington and Wisconsin. The baby powder was also sold online at Amazon.com.
Asbestos, according to a news release about the recall that was published by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is a naturally occurring mineral often found near talc, which is used in several cosmetic products. When mining talc, if the sites are "not selected carefully or steps [are] taken to purify the talc ore sufficiently," Dynarex said, the talc could become contaminated with asbestos.
"The recall was the result of a routine sampling program by the FDA which revealed that the finished products contained asbestos," read the news release. "The company has ceased the distribution of the product as an investigation is proceeding to determine what caused the contamination of the talc."
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According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), long-term exposure to asbestos minerals can lead to diseases, including asbestosis, pleural disease, lung cancer and mesothelioma—a type of lung cancer that can emerge decades after asbestos exposure.
In addition to occasionally being found in minerals like talc, asbestos is still present in some old homes and buildings, according to the ATSDR. People are exposed to asbestos by breathing in tiny asbestos fibers in the air, which are too small to see with the naked eye.
The recalled baby powder was sold in 14-ounce plastic bottles and have an expiration date of December 28, 2026, which will be listed on the bottom of the bottle. There have been no illnesses or adverse events related to the recalled items.
Any consumers who have purchased the recalled items should discontinue use immediately and return them for a full refund, per the company's release. Questions about the recall can be directed to Dynarex Corporation at 888-396-2739 or 845-365-8200 from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST. Questions can also be sent to recall@dynarex.com.
The company added in its release that "health care professionals and consumers are encouraged to report any adverse events to FDA's MedWatch Adverse Event Reporting program." Forms can be submitted to the program online through this link.
Quote:Tupperware Brands, a household name synonymous with food storage innovation, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Facing mounting competition and years of financial strain, the brand filed just before midnight on Tuesday.
The Orlando, Florida-based operation, known for its airtight containers, plans continue activity while seeking court approval for a sale.
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A domesticity boom during COVID-19 lockdowns promised a period of brief respite—for around 18 months business looked brighter for the 86-year-old institution.
Since 2018, however, Tupperware has faced a steady drop in revenue, struggling to maintain its foothold in a market increasingly dominated by other players and lifestyle changes like dining out.
"Over the last several years, the Company's financial position has been severely impacted by the challenging macroeconomic environment," said Laurie Ann Goldman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Tupperware.
"As a result, we explored numerous strategic options and determined this is the best path forward."
Tupperware's troubles have not gone unnoticed by industry observers.
Last year, the company sought additional financing to keep afloat, warning investors that it risked being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.
The warning proved prophetic—Tupperware's stock has plummeted 75% this year, closing at around 50 cents per share on Tuesday, a sharp contrast to its former standing as an international powerhouse.
Despite the challenges, Tupperware remains committed to keeping the business alive. The company stated its intention to restructure and find a potential buyer to help it navigate through the bankruptcy process.
"We plan to continue serving our valued customers with the high-quality products they love and trust throughout this process," said Goldman.
Quote:In late August, a tense exchange was caught on camera between Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a local steel worker in northern Ontario.
As Trudeau reached out for a handshake, the worker refused it, confronting the prime minister instead about his struggle to make ends meet despite having a steady job.
Trudeau responded by listing things his Liberal government has done to help working families, including a national dental care programme and a tariff on Chinese steel that is designed to protect Canadian workers.
“I don’t believe you for a second,” the steel worker replied, after telling the prime minister: “I think you are only here for another year.”
The clip, viewed millions of times on the internet, and has been described by the Toronto Globe and Mail as “a perfect miniature of the moment” in Canadian politics, encapsulating the fatigue and frustration that Trudeau is facing from the public.
In his ninth year as prime minister, Trudeau’s approval rate has plummeted from 63% when he was first elected to 28% in June of this year, according to one poll tracker.
This sinking popularity has already brought consequences to Trudeau’s governing Liberal Party. In a recent by-election, the party lost a Toronto federal seat that it had held for 30 years to the opposition Conservative Party - a major sign of trouble.
On Monday, Trudeau and the Liberals face another set of tests - a crucial by-election in a Liberal stronghold in Montreal, Quebec, and the resumption of parliament, where Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has vowed to table a motion of no-confidence as early as possible in an attempt to bring down the minority government.
If Poilievre is successful, Canadians could head to the ballot box.
And if current polls are any indication on how they might vote, the next federal election may mark the end of the Trudeau era.
EUROPE
Russia Brags About Its Atomic Submarines & Missiles
Quote:The head of Russia's navy confirmed that its most powerful weapons—nuclear-tipped cruise missiles—are online and on high alert.
Acting Navy Commander-in-Chief Admiral Aleksandr Moiseyev presided over a ceremony Wednesday at the headquarters of the Russian Pacific Fleet's nuclear submarines in Vilyuchinsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
During the event, Moiseyev awarded the 25th Submarine Division the Order of Nakhimov, as directed by President Vladimir Putin in May, in recognition of their importance to the country's defense, Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported on Thursday.
In his remarks, the admiral said that for a half-century, the division has utilized "the most complex systems created by mankind," including the "most powerful and devastating weapons" safeguarding Russia's security. He further boasted of the readiness to deploy the weapons, emphasizing the "extremely high level" of preparedness, according to RIA Novosti.
The Order of Nakhimov, established by the Soviet Union during World War II, honors exceptional naval leadership and courage.
The ceremony took place at Kamchatka's submarine base, where two nuclear-powered attack subs were transferred this week. They completed the 4,000-mile journey under Arctic ice from Russia's Northern Fleet base in Murmansk.
One of the boats, the Imperator Aleksandr III, is a 24,000-ton Borei-class submarine armed with up to 16 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, each of which can be mounted with as many as six nuclear warheads.
The commemoration followed Russia's announcement of the submarines' Arctic journey, amid rising U.S.-Russia tensions. Both nations have deployed nuclear-capable bombers to Northern Europe and Northeast Asia, with the military rivalry also intensifying in the thawing Arctic.
Quote:Russia has issued a new warning against Ukraine's allies, following recent calls to loosen restrictions on Kyiv's Western-supplied weaponry.
Now over 900-days into the Russia-Ukraine war, the ominous threat comes amid increasing geopolitical frictions between Moscow and Ukraine's global allies, and growing concerns over the conflict's potential for escalation.
"The flight time of the Sarmat missile to Strasbourg is 3 minutes 20 seconds," Russian politician Vyacheslav Volodin posted to Telegram on Thursday.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Russian Sarmat has a range of between 6,214 and 11,184 miles, putting the French city well within its reach.
Volodin, who has served as the Chair of Russia's State Duma since 2016, was writing in response to the recent calls from the European Parliament to lift limitations on Ukraine's use of Western-supplied weaponry within Russian territory and to speed up the delivery of arms to Kyiv.
On Thursday, the European Parliament passed a resolution urging European Union (E.U.) member nations to allow Ukraine to employ "Western weapons systems against legitimate military targets in Russia."
The resolution, which was adopted with 425 votes in favor, 131 against and 63 abstentions, stated that, "without lifting current restrictions, Ukraine cannot fully exercise its right to self-defense and remains exposed to attacks on its population and infrastructure."
It also called for E.U. countries to fulfil previous promises of further deliveries of weapons, air defense systems and ammunition, "including TAURUS missiles," German- and Swedish-made cruise missiles which carry a range of over 300 miles.
"If something like this happens, Russia will give a tough response using more powerful weapons," Volodin's post continued. "What the European Parliament is calling for leads to a world war using nuclear weapons."
While Ukraine has been sent long-range missiles from the U.S., U.K. and France— including Storm Shadow cruise missiles and Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS —it has so-far been barred from using these for strikes deep inside Russia over fears that this could escalate the conflict.
The E.U. resolution follows numerous appeals from Kyiv to use Western weaponry for long-range strikes, which Zelensky called the "one decision" that could prevent the advances of the Russian Army, allowing it to target air bases used by Putin to launch bombardments against Ukrainian cities.
"If our partners lifted all restrictions on long-range capabilities, Ukraine would not need to physically enter the Kursk region to protect Ukrainian citizens in the border area and destroy Russia's potential for aggression," the president said on August 19.
Quote:Ukrainian drones hit a military depot in Russia on September 18 and destroyed North Korean missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and air defenses, according to reports.
More than 100 Ukrainian UAVs were used to strike the missile depot in Toropets, a town in Russia about 300 miles from the border with Ukraine, and reportedly destroyed "significant stocks of North Korean KN23 ballistic missiles" as well as S-300 air defense systems, and Iskanders, according to the Telegram channel Astra.
The attack, carried out by Ukraine's Security Service and Ukraine's Intelligence and Special Operations Forces, also caused fires to break out, residents were forced to evacuate, and at least 13 people were injured, according to The Associated Press.
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A Ukrainian official told the AP that the fire burned four miles wide, and the military depot housed Iskander, Tochka-U missiles, glide bombs, and artillery shells.
Russia and North Korea signed a new agreement in June in which North Korean leader Kim Jong Un pledged his "full support" for Russia's war in Ukraine, and the two countries pledged to provide each other with military assistance in the event of an attack on either country.
Pyongyang and Moscow have previously denied that North Korea has provided Russia with weapons for the war in Ukraine, though Western intelligence has confirmed this.
Ukraine has recently had success in strikes inside Russia utilizing drones as drone technology improves.
The attack on the military depot in Toropets may be the single largest event of the war, with a Ukrainian official reporting that the explosion was the equivalent of between 1.3 and 1.8 kilotons of TNT.
As of September 18, the fire is still ongoing, but Tver regional Governor Igor Rudenya has told evacuees that everyone could return home.
A Ukrainian source from the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) told the Kyiv Independent that there are other similar attacks planned on other Russian military facilities as the country "continues to methodically reduce the missile potential of the enemy."
Experts believe that a senior Russian official visited Iran on September 17 in order to secure more weapons to fund the war in Ukraine, according to Business Insider.
The senior official, Sergei Shoigu, the Secretary of the Security Council, also met with Kim and Syrian leader Bashar Assad earlier this week, the outlet said.
Quote:Satellite imagery has revealed the extent of the destruction caused by a drone attack on a Russian missile and ammunition facility which is believed to store rockets capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
Drone operators from Ukraine's Security Service (SBU), Ukraine's Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR), and Ukraine's Special Operations Forces (SSO) attacked the facility in Toropets, Tver oblast around 3.30 a.m. Wednesday, according to Ukrainian outlet Suspilne, citing a Kyiv intelligence source.
Wednesday's attack could have been the biggest of the war so far, and the blast registered as a small earthquake on monitoring systems, according to Reuters. Also, drone attacks on military facilities in Russia are degrading Putin's long-range missile options, according to Kyiv.
Video widely shared on social media showed a huge ball of flame and numerous detonations following the strike on the 107th Main Missile and Artillery Directorate (GRAU) arsenal, located 240 miles west of Moscow.
Without directly claiming responsibility, Ukraine has stepped up its drone strikes on military sites across Russia which are aimed at choking Moscow's war machine powering its full-scale invasion.
Satellite images taken before and after the attacks show the destruction. Radio Liberty's "Schemes" project published satellite images from Planet Labs taken at 11.30 a.m. Wednesday which showed smoke billowing into the sky.
NASA satellite images recorded thermal signatures over almost the entire territory of the site which Suspilne said contained Iskander missiles, Tochka-U ballistic missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, and artillery ammunition. Social media users shared other before and after satellite images which showed the destruction of the facility.
The head of Ukraine's Center for Combatting Disinformation, Andriy Kovalenko, said the site may have also stored Grad multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS), S-300 and S-400 air defense missiles, and North Korean KN-23 ballistic missiles, Euromaidan press reported.
Russia has repeatedly used Iskanders to strike at Ukrainian infrastructure, while the Tochka-U was reportedly used in an attack on Kramatorsk railway station in April 2022. The North Korean KN-23 is tactical ballistic missile which resembles the Russian Iskander-M. All three are capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
Suspilne's sources said the Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian military facilities are undermining Moscow's ability to conduct long-range missile strikes against Ukraine.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said Wednesday that continued Ukrainian strikes on logistics sites within Russia "will generate wider operational pressures on the Russian military beyond the individual destruction of ammunition stockpiles and logistics facilities."
The think tank said Ukrainian HMARS strikes against depots in 2022 had forced Russian forces to disperse ammunition storage facilities which had degraded its operations. Further attacks as big as the one at Toropets could lead to a similar move, the think tank added.
Meanwhile, Russian military bloggers have blamed Russian authorities for poorly constructing the Tver facility and accused Russian forces of possibly mishandling missiles and artillery ammunition stockpiles there.
The milbloggers took aim at officials such as former Deputy Minister of Defense, Army General Dmitry Bulgakov who oversaw the facility's construction and was arrested in July on fraud charges.
Quote:European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen arrived in Ukraine on Friday focused on helping the country to repair and reconnect its war-damaged electricity grid and boost its heating capacity as winter approaches.
Around half of Ukraine´s energy infrastructure has been destroyed during its war with Russia, and rolling electricity blackouts leave parts of the east in darkness for four hours at a time. Von der Leyden said it was as though all of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia had lost electricity.
Meanwhile, winter is approaching.
“Heating season starts in two weeks and Russia´s relentless attacks on Ukraine´s civilian energy infrastructure aims to inflict maximum damage,” von der Leyen said as she arrived in Kyiv for talks with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “We will help Ukraine in its brave efforts to overcome this.”
The main aim is to help Ukraine decentralize its power grid, and to become less reliant on the big power stations that make easier targets for Russian forces. Around 260 missiles rained down in a major attack on energy infrastructure late last month.
The Europeans have already sent more 10,000 generators and transformers, and they’re supplying small and more mobile gas turbines too. These types of electricity-providing equipment is harder to hit and easier to repair.
Ukraine´s winter runs from late October through March, with January and February the toughest months. The Europeans hope to help supply around 25% of the 17 gigawatts of power that the country is likely to need this winter.
One aim of the EU assistance is to provide an incentive for people to stay in Ukraine. Some 4 million people have fled since the war began in February 2022, often to Poland and other neighboring countries.
The EU is providing assistance, such as short-term help to find a place to stay, jobs or education. But recently the number of people leaving has climbed. The commission, the EU´s powerful executive branch, estimates that 10,000 more people are applying for help each week.
On Thursday, the commission announced that it would provide an extra 160 million euros ($180 million) to help fortify Ukraine´s energy network. Of that, 100 million euros ($112 million) come from the windfall profits the EU has earned from interest on frozen Russian assets.
Von der Leyen said the plan is to make “Russia pay for it through the revenue generated by their frozen assets.” Denmark is also leading the charge on using the money to place orders for weapons and military equipment directly with Ukraine´s defense industry.
She and Zelenskyy will also discuss the use of loans organized by the Group of Seven major industrial powers to help bolster Ukraine´s conflict-ravaged economy, and weigh progress in Kyiv´s efforts to join the EU.
Quote:The European Union is getting a defence commissioner for the first time and he joins several European military leaders in warning war with Russia is just years away, calling for “quick decisions” to “properly prepare”.
Andrius Kubilius, a Member of the European Parliament and two-time former Prime Minister of Lithuania was nominated as the European Union’s Commissioner-designate for Defence and Space by Ursula von der Leyen this week. The veteran politician from one of Europe’s Russia-bordering, former Soviet states is charged with boosting the continent’s arms industry, if the nominations are confirmed in a forthcoming vote.
Extremely alarming warnings on the likelihood of European states, from Poland in the east to the United Kingdom in the west, having to go to actual war with Russia in the coming years have become common in recent years. Several top figures including military leaders, senior NATO figures, and strategy experts say Europe must prepare for conflict soon, or at least considerably re-arm immediately to deter future conflict.
Apparently joining that chorus, Kubilius told wires service Reuters shortly after his nomination that: “Defence ministers and NATO generals agree that Vladimir Putin could be ready for confrontation with NATO and the EU in 6-8 years… If we take these assessments seriously, then that is the time for us to properly prepare, and it is a short one. This means we have to take quick decisions, and ambitious decisions.”
The eight-year mark is at the conservative end of the scale, amid the war-is-coming community in Europe. Poland military thinkers, given their nation’s very strong support for Ukraine and their land border with both Russia and Belarus, seem to be the most alarmed, and as reported in 2023 their National Security Bureau said Europe had three years to prepare.
Estonia was on the same wavelength earlier this year, with their then-Prime Minister Kaja Kallas saying NATO has “three to five years” to prepare for Russian forces to have reconstituted themselves post-Ukraine. Coincidentally, that same Kaja Kallas is also now nominated to be a European Commissioner, taking the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President job.
NATO’s Admiral Rob Bauer — undoubtably one of the military leaders EU man Kubilius referred to — said earlier this year “not everything is plannable, not everything is going to be hunky-dory for the next 20 years” and declared any coming struggle would be a matter for the whole of society, not just the military. He said in January:
…we need to understand as a society that war and fighting is not only something of the military. The nation needs to understand that when it comes to a war such as we see in Ukraine, it is a whole of society event. For many many decades we had this idea that we had the professional military and they would solve the security issues that we have, in Afghanistan, in Iraq. But if you talk collective defence, it is a whole of society event.
It will not be enough to have the present military, you will need more people from society to sustain the military in terms of people. You need the industry to have enough ammunition, to produce new tanks, new ships, new aircraft, new artillery pieces… the big difference with a year ago is a lot of things have happened in the armed forces and defence organisations. What hasn’t happened is in our societies, the understanding that it is more than the military that has to be able to operate in a conflict or in a war. It is the whole of a society that will get involved whether we like it or not.
The European Union has never had a defence commissioner before. Despite the decades-long dreams of several Eurocrats it has no army of its own and military matters remain the sole preserve of national governments. But von der Leyen’s re-election pitch as leader of the bloc promised a defence portfolio for the first time, blaming rising threats — Russia — for the bloc needing to “take the next step on defence”.
Rather than coordinating militaries themselves, then, Kubilius’s job will be more akin to an armaments minister, at least for now. Von der Leyen said in her mission statement for the Defence and Space commissioner role that “there is a lot that Europe can do to support… industry, procurement, research, innovation and much more. At the heart of this work must be one simple principle: Europe must spend more, spend better, spend European.”
They are words that will certainly cause concern in Washington and London, the traditional NATO allies of European states, who will eye any European insularism in defence procurement with concern, given the importance of the American and British defence industry’s export contracts.
Nevertheless, the weakness of the European — and broadly Western — defence industry in the wake of the Ukraine War has been brutally illustrated, with Great War-style shell starvation emerging as no supplier can make new artillery ammunition fast enough. As reported in 2023:
Quote:India refused to stop supplying munitions to Ukraine despite the Kremlin raising the issue on two occasions, according to Reuters.
Russia's top trade ally has been sending ammunition, notably artillery shells sold by Indian arms makers, for Ukraine's war against Russia for more than a year, though India's foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal denied this during a news conference in January.
The two countries have had a strong trade relationship since India declared independence in 1947, trading arms, oil, electronic machinery and equipment, pharmaceutical products, nuclear reactors, and more, according to the Indian Embassy in Moscow, and this continued support of Ukraine could jeopardize that relationship.
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In providing Ukraine with artillery shells, India has been fulfilling its dire shell shortage, according to the Reuters report.
Customs records obtained by the outlet indicated that in 2020 and 2021, three Indian ammunition makers—Yantra, Munitions India, and Kalyani Strategic Systems—were primarily responsible for exporting $2.8 million in munitions components to several European countries, all of which have defense contractors investing in Ukraine.
During a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Indian counterpart, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, in July, three Indian officials told Reuters that Lavrov reportedly confronted him about India's supplying Ukraine with munitions in this way.
Russia has previously supplied India with military arms, including four warships armed with supersonic missiles for the Indian Navy this month.
Moreover, from 2019 to 2023, India received 36 percent of Russia's arms exports, though new reports indicate that India is moving away from using Russian weapons.
Russia is India's second-largest import source, and from 2023 to 2024 purchased goods amounted to $55.6 billion.
An expert previously told Newsweek that Russia is a key source of oil for India, and that is not likely to change in the near future, even though local reports indicated that India stopped paying for Russian premium crude oil in January.
Quote:Russian forces have repelled Ukrainian troops in Kursk, it has been reported, as a map shows the latest state of play in the Russian region six weeks on from the start of Kyiv's surprise incursion.
Moscow has responded slowly to the push by Ukraine into Russian territory which started on August 6 in which Kyiv said it had captured 500 square miles and dozens of settlements.
Over the last week, Russian troops have counterattacked with some initial success, but there have not been other significant gains in recent days.
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Pro-Russian military bloggers said Tuesday that Ukrainian troops were trying to encircle Veseloye by attacking along its western and eastern flanks. However, Russia's Ministry of Defense (MOD) said that its forces had managed to push back Kyiv's attacks southwest and southeast of the village.
Ukraine's troops have "continued ground attacks" in the Glushkovsky district in the west of the Kursk region "but did not make any confirmed advances," the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said on Tuesday.
The latest map by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank marked the extent of Kyiv's claims of advances which included the town of Sudzha and neighboring settlements just inside the border with Ukraine's Sumy region.
It also showed Russian advances in Kursk which included the recapture of the village of Snagost.
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The U.S. has said that Russia would require at least 50,000 troops to retake the territory lost to Kyiv. Ukraine has warned of a growing Russian military presence, with one Ukrainian intelligence official telling the Financial Times Moscow had committed 38,000 men to the Kursk region, including assault brigades redeployed from southern Ukraine.
John Hardie, deputy director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies' (FDD) Russia Program said reports of Russian personnel numbers showed Moscow had a "significant force" compared to Ukraine's estimated 10 to 15,000 troops in the Kursk region. "The Russians would have a manpower advantage assuming all those forces for Russia are concentrated around the Ukrainian pocket," he told Newsweek.
"At this point, the Russians are currently taking a more patient approach. So far they have cordoned off the area and are hitting Ukrainian positions with artillery and glide bomb strikes and they are taking some territory," said Hardie.
"We will see whether this this initial small scale offensive will lead to a larger scale one. It's possible that the Russian forces cannot command and control enough forces at scale to launch a major operation across the entire salient," he added.
Quote:A U.S. Air Force drone faced issues due to Russian signal interference during a flight on August 29-30, according to the Estonian Ministry of Defense.
During a reconnaissance flight in Estonian airspace, the RQ-4B Global Hawk, a U.S. strategic surveillance drone, flew erratically and suffered from signal failure after Russian forces were able to attack electronically.
The Estonian Ministry of Defense said that Russian signal interference has larger ramifications in terms of military and civilian aviation in the Baltic region.
Before flying to the Black Sea, the RQ-4B Global Hawk took off from its base in Fairford, England.
After its chaotic flightpath activity, the drone managed to land at the Sigonella base in Italy, according to specialist outlet Defense Mirror.
During the reconnaissance mission, the RQ-4B Global Hawk transmitted squawking codes including 7400, which indicated that control between the aircraft and the pilot was lost.
Newsweek reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry and the Estonian Defense Ministry for comment via email outside of business hours.
The aim of the electronic interference was to drive out reconnaissance missions from the northwestern border of Russia, according to Defense Mirror.
"The spy drone tirelessly looped along the Russian Federation's border from the Leningrad region to Pskov. Then, it suddenly signaled that it had lost contact with the operator and maneuvered chaotically for a while," according to the Baltic Sentinel.
The RQ-4B Global Hawk's mission is to "provide a broad spectrum of ISR collection capability to support joint combatant forces in worldwide peacetime, contingency and wartime operations."
The spy drone has been "deployed operationally to support overseas contingency operations since November 2001," according to the U.S. Air Force.
The remotely piloted drones have been used to monitor Russia's borders through flights over the Black Sea since February 2022, and have also been used in the U.S., Australia, Germany, and South Korea.
Quote:A Swedish woman was recently charged with war crimes after she was accused of treating Yazidi women and children as "slaves."
On Thursday, authorities in Sweden announced charges against 52-year-old Lina Laina Ishaq, a Swedish citizen associated with the Islamic State, for crimes that occurred between August 2014 and December 2016.
Ishaq has been charged with serious war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against Yazidi women and children. The incidents allegedly occurred in Raqqa, the former de facto capital of the self-proclaimed Islamic State caliphate in Syria, which was home to around 300,000 people.
In a statement, Swedish senior prosecutor Reena Devgun said that the crimes "took place under IS rule in Raqqa, and this is the first time that IS attacks against the Yazidi minority have been tried in Sweden."
"Women, children and men were regarded as property and subjected to being traded as slaves, sexual slavery, forced labor, deprivation of liberty and extrajudicial executions," Devgun said in the statement.
During a press conference, Devgun announced the charges, stating that the woman was identified with the help of information provided by UNITAD, the U.N. team investigating atrocities in Iraq.
"IS tried to annihilate the Yazidi ethnic group on an industrial scale," Devgun said during the press conference.
Quote:The Dutch government has formally requested an “opt-out” clause from European Union pro-mass migration policies, marking a dramatic turnaround for one of the founding members of the bloc.
Asylum and Migration Minister Marjolein Faber wrote to the European Commission on Wednesday to demand that the Netherlands be granted the ability to set its own migration and asylum policies and therefore an “opt-out” from diktats from Brussels.
“This government aims to drastically reduce the volume of migration to the Netherlands, in order to continue to fulfil our constitutional duties – providing for public housing, healthcare and education,” Faber wrote in her letter according to Euronews.
“With this letter I wish to inform you that in order to ensure that the Netherlands can achieve this aim, the Dutch government will call for an opt-out from the European asylum and migration acquis in case of Treaty amendment.”
The request fulfils a campaign pledge from populist Party for Freedom (PVV) leader Geert Wilders, who won a decisive victory at the last election and now serves as the main power broker behind the Dutch government.
Wilders has vowed to introduce the “strictest” asylum policy in the history of the country to confront the issues of mass migration, which the government has blamed for exacerbating the problems facing the Dutch public in areas of health care, housing, and education, among others.
Commenting on the move on Wednesday, Wilders declared on social media “Faber makes history” by expressing the Dutch desire to limit immigration.
In addition to the demand of an opt-out clause from Brussels migration diktats, the Netherlands is planning on unilaterally increasing funding for border security, from €45 million in 2025 to €151 million by 2029.
The populist led government is also set to introduce “strict conditions” on family reunification schemes for migrants, otherwise known as chain migration. Going forward, migrants will only be permitted to bring in members of their direct nuclear family and will only apply for those who have been residents for at least two years and has a permanent private residence and meets an income threshold.
While the letter from Faber to the EU does represent a historic moment and reflects the broader wish among European peoples to take back control of their national borders, it is unclear how feasible acquiring an “opt-out” clause will be for The Hague.
Indeed, in order for The Netherlands to reclaim authority over its immigration policies, with even Faber admitting that it would likely need to come as a part of a new European Union-level treaty, a difficult and lengthy process, the last of which was passed in 2009.
An EU Commission spokesman said that “there’s no Treaty change upcoming,” adding: “We do not expect any immediate changes on the EU rules on asylum and migration, which continue to be binding in the Netherlands.”
Quote:The Netherlands notified the European Union it intends to get an “opt out” from the bloc’s migration and asylum rules this week, prompting central Europe’s Hungary to say it wanted the same thing.
Hungarian Minister for EU Affairs János Bóka spoke in Strasbourg this week in the wake of the Dutch declaration that it wishes to “opt-out” from European Union diktats on border control. The minister said while the country remains “a committed member of the Schengen Area, and it will continue to be so in the future”, nevertheless it wanted to take back control on migration and asylum.
New European Union rules on migration and asylum are to come into force in 2026 after being agreed in 2024. Hungary voted against the proposals but was ultimately unable to block them. Bóka said of getting an opt-out, Hungary would “take the necessary legal and administrative steps”.
The politician followed up his spoken remarks with a statement published online, where he expressed the Hungarian position that “Drastic action is needed to stem illegal migration” and to achieve this Hungary would be standing with the Netherlands to get an exception through a treaty amendment.
Hungarian state media states that while the country will abide by European law, nevertheless its government would “pursue migration policies that safeguard national interests”. Hungary believes EU border rules undermine the nation state and “stronger national control over migration is essential to maintain public services and protect sovereignty”, it was stated.
While the declaration by the Netherlands, an influential founder-member of the European Union, that it wishes to opt-out from some European rules is consequential and potentially — as populist leader and power-behind-the-throne in the Hague Geert Wilders points out — a historic development, nevertheless it will be a massive effort to achieve any such change. As Politico notes in its review of the situation, “changes to EU treaties are a long and complicated process requiring unanimity of all member countries. The Commission said in its Wednesday press briefing that it does not expect to embark on such a change any time soon”.
Quote:Populist leader Marine Le Pen has demanded a national audit of France’s finances to determine how Paris plunged the nation into a budgetary crisis which threatens to take down the new government before it even gets off the ground.
In the wake of massive spending hikes amid the coronavirus lockdowns and the European energy crisis, France’s debt has climbed to over 110 per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or over €3 trillion. The debt to GDP ratio now stands as the third worst in Europe, only trailing the terminally in-debt nations Greece and Italy.
Meanwhile, the budget deficit has risen to €154 billion, or around 5.5 per cent of national economic output. This has put Paris at odds with Brussels for contravening the bloc’s 3 per cent limit, potentially putting France on course to face EU financial penalties, which could include cuts to further coronavirus recovery funds or quality of life subsidies distributed among member states.
Commenting on the sorry state of the treasury, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen said this week: “When we demanded an audit of state finances during the legislative elections, aware that France’s budgetary situation was worrying, we were told that everything was under control.
“Today, everyone is pretending to discover a catastrophic situation. A major commission to audit the nation’s accounts must now be set up.”
The budget crisis represents a major challenge for the incoming government of former Brexit villain Michel Barnier, a centre-right former Eurocrat who was installed as prime minister by President Emmanuel Macron earlier this month. Barnier will have to submit a budget to the National Assembly next month, the passage of which is by no means assured given the deeply divided French parliament.
After meeting with the head of state at the Élysée Palace on Wednesday, Barnier said that the fiscal state of the nation was “very serious” and he is reported to be considering tax hikes to address the mounting debt and deficit, Le Monde reports.
However, the new PM’s desire to increase taxes threatens to disrupt his ability to form a government, which is being finalised now and he hopes to have in place within days. To do so, Barnier will need the full backing of Macron’s neo-liberal centrist bloc, which is united around a pro-corporate low-tax philosophy.
The head of Macron’s faction in the National Assembly, former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, openly came out against the idea, saying that raising taxes “would be terrible for the French” and that the country could risk losing its “economic attractiveness” gained by Macron’s tax cuts.
Going even further, top Macron ally and current Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said that it was “out of the question” for him to join the incoming government, or even support it in general, if it were to raise taxes.
Quote:Security has tightened at Oktoberfest in the wake of last month´s deadly knife attack in Solingen in western Germany, and officials warned revelers to expect longer lines at entry points as metal detectors will be deployed for the first time in the Bavarian beer festival’s 189-year history.
Authorities say there are no specific threats to the world’s largest folk festival, which begins Saturday with the traditional keg-tapping in Munich and runs through Oct. 6. Some 6 million participants, many wearing traditional lederhosen and dirndl dresses, are expected over the course of the event.
The stepped-up security comes after an Aug. 23 attack in Solingen that left three dead and eight wounded. A 26-year-old Syrian suspect was arrested. He was an asylum-seeker who was supposed to be deported to Bulgaria last year but reportedly disappeared for a time and avoided deportation. The Islamic State militant group has claimed responsibility for the violence, without providing evidence.
The violence left Germany shaken and pushed immigration back to the top of the country´s political agenda. In response, the Interior Ministry extended temporary border controls to all nine of its frontiers this week. The closures are set to last six months and are threatening to test European unity.
The effects of the Solingen attack – and other recent violence across Germany – will also be felt at Oktoberfest. Hand-held metal detectors will be used for the first time, with police and security staff using them on a random basis or following suspicious activity.
“We have had to react to the fact that attacks with knives have increased in recent weeks and months,” Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter told The Associated Press during a media tour of the festival grounds to highlight the new security measures. “We will do everything we can to ensure that nobody comes to Oktoberfest with a knife or other dangerous weapons.”
In addition to some 600 police officers and 2,000 security staff, more than 50 cameras will be spread across the grounds of the festival – which will be fenced off as well. Festival-goers also are prohibited from bringing knives, glass bottles and backpacks.
Oktoberfest is no stranger to increased security throughout its history. In 2016, authorities implemented tighter measures in response to a series of attacks, including when a German teenager fatally shot nine people at a Munich mall before killing himself.
The festival’s organizer, Clemens Baumgärtner, promised a safe public space, possibly “the safest place in Germany” during the 16 days of Oktoberfest.
Quote:Jerusalem’s Old City, in addition to Judea and Samaria, must be Judenrein within a year, according to a Palestinian-drafted resolution, which the U.N. General Assembly passed on Wednesday.
The resolution, which passed by a 124-14 margin with 43 abstentions, is meant to give force to a July advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice, which declared Israeli presence to be illegal in any area over the 1949 armistice line.
More than 40 countries sponsored the resolution, which was the first that Palestinians filed after being granted unprecedented privileges, for a non-U.N. member, earlier this year.
The resolution calls on the Israel Defense Forces to withdraw completely from Judea and Samaria, eastern Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip within 12 months, which means evacuating all Jewish communities beyond the armistice line, including Jerusalem’s Old City.
It also bans arms sales to the IDF of any equipment that would be expected reasonably to be used in the territory over the 1949 lines and calls for a boycott of all products produced by Jews in those areas.
The resolution text lacks any mention of Israeli security concerns, historic ties to the lands or Hamas’s terror attacks in Israel on Oct. 7.
The vote came after a day of debate on Tuesday.
Argentina, Czechia, Fiji, Hungary, Malawi, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Tonga, Tuvalu and the United States joined Israel in opposing the resolution.
Notably, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, Ukraine and Australia were among those who abstained.
General Assembly resolutions have no legal force, but the resolution’s passage on Wednesday is expected to be used in international courts and other fora to seek additional action against the Jewish state.
It is widely expected that the Palestinians will request that the U.N. Security Council take up the issue. Security Council resolutions are binding, but the United States would be expected to thwart such an effort, including with its veto power.
Quote:North and South Korea have adopted different approaches to confronting their falling birth rates and looming population decline.
North Korea's fertility rate, or the number of babies expected per woman's lifetime, stands at 1.78 births per woman, according to projections by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). South Korea's stands at 0.72, the lowest in the world.
During a speech at the communist country's annual National Congress of Mothers in December, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un appealed to women to stop the trend and raise children to "carry forward our revolution."
North Korea does not regularly publish such figures, so analysts rely on estimates based on past official birth records, censuses and indirect surveys. These include data from household births, age-specific fertility rates, and birth histories from the 1993-2014 period.
"In the absence of additional, more recent empirical data, figures afterward included in World Population Prospects 2024 are projections based on levels and trends for previous years," Patrick Gerland, chief of the Population Estimates and Projection Section of the UN Population Division, told Newsweek.
A survey of more than 13,000 households conducted by North Korea's statistics bureau in 2014 revealed a fertility rate of 1.78, continuing the downward trend that has been ongoing since about 2008, when the country's fertility rate was estimated to be 2.1—the minimum needed to sustain a population.
Earlier this month, Radio Free Asia (RFA) cited anonymous North Korean sources who shared examples of authorities punishing doctors for performing secret abortions in Ryanggang, a northern province bordering China.
Merchants selling contraceptives have also reportedly been swept up in a crackdown, with those discovered dealing birth control drugs facing heavy fines and lifetime bans from the marketplace.
North Korea, with a population of 26 million, is not alone as it faces shifting demographics, and its fertility rate is higher than Russia (1.4), Japan (1.2), China (1.0), and South Korea, and much of the developed world for that matter.
Yet international sanctions have deprived North Korea of much advanced machinery, so the country depends more on physical labor and is less prepared to offset a dwindling workforce through automation, East Asia analyst Khang Vu wrote in a May article for the Lowy Institute.
Instead of implementing the sweeping economic reforms necessary to improve living conditions and encourage larger families, Kim's regime has "increasingly cracked down on the black market and tightened state control to root out 'anti-socialist' behavior."
Quote:North Korean state media has released images of the latest of Pyongyang's steady stream of missile tests Wednesday, which drew condemnation from the South.
In the images, released Thursday by the state-run Korean Central News Agency, North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un can be seen observing the launches from a launch site and the rockets' impact on what appears to be a target island off the country's east coast. He was said to have expressed "great satisfaction" with the results.
One of the test firings involved ballistic missile, the Hwasongpo-11Da-4.5, with the aim of gauging its accuracy from a range of 200 miles as well as the "explosive power" of its "supersized" 4.5-ton warhead, KCNA wrote.
The other weapon being tested was an upgraded strategic cruise missile "with advanced performance for combat use."
Kim was quoted as citing serious threats posed by external forces as a driver of the his continued missile tests. He added that only by possessing "strong power" can the regime "deter and crush the enemy's strategic miscalculation and willingness to use force."
During his visit, the 40-year-old leader also tested and inspected an assault rifle and sniper rifle developed by the country's Academy of Defense Science, the report said.
Newsweek reached out to the North Korean embassy in China outside office hours via emailed request for comment.
Seoul on Wednesday again condemned the North's launches, the second round in less than a week, as "clear acts of provocation seriously threatening peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula."
The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command also issued a rebuke over the tests and called on Pyongyang to "refrain from further unlawful and destabilizing acts" while affirming Washington's "ironclad" support for its South Korean and Japanese allies.
Under Kim's 13-year rule, North Korea has conducted over 236 missile tests, all of which involving weapons with a range of at least 300 kilometers (186 miles) and the capability to carry payloads of at least 500 kilograms (1,102 pounds), according to the Center for Nonproliferation Studies North Korea Missile Test Database.
This marks a 13-fold increase from the number of launches overseen by his father, Kim Jong Il, who ruled from 1994 until his death in 2011.
Quote:wo Russian military aircraft on Thursday circumnavigated around Japan and entered South Korea's air defense zone, resulting in the two allies of the United States scrambling fighter jets.
The Joint Staff Office under Japan's defense ministry reported the movement of a pair of Tu-142 maritime reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare aircraft, also known as "Bear F" under NATO reporting names, inside the Japanese air defense identification zone, or ADIZ.
The "Bear F" entered South Korea's ADIZ during the encirclement flight around Japan, local media cited the country's military as saying. In response, Japanese and South Korean fighter jets were deployed. Both Tokyo and Seoul are Washington's security treaty allies in Asia.
An ADIZ is an area of international airspace where the tracking and identification of aircraft is required for national security purposes. On Wednesday, the North American Aerospace Defense Command detected and tracked two Russian military aircraft in the Alaska ADIZ.
The long-range flight comes as Russia is conducting two air and naval exercises in its Far East region with China. One of the exercises, China-led Northern/Interaction-2024, is underway in the Sea of Japan, which is situated west of Japan, and the Sea of Okhotsk.
The other military maneuver is the Ocean-2024, where exercise areas include the Pacific Ocean. This strategic exercise has been taking place since Tuesday and is scheduled for a week. The Chinese military has announced that its forces participated in this Russian military drill.
The "Bear F" is derived from the Tu-95 "Bear" turboprop strategic bomber, specializing in hunting submarines and patrolling vast ocean areas. It has a reported range of 7,456 miles and is equipped with specialized equipment for anti-submarine warfare and surveillance.
The Japanese military said the "Bear F" flew from the Sea of Japan to the East China Sea via the Tsushima Strait, a waterway that separates Japan to the east and South Korea to the west. The aircraft then continued southward and flew west of Japan's Ryukyu Islands.
Quote:Israeli warplanes shattered the calm over Beirut on Thursday as Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah delivered a fiery televised speech from an undisclosed location.
Nasrallah accused Israel of crossing a "red line" following the remote detonation of rigged communication devices that killed 37 and injured over 3,000.
"The enemy will face a severe and fair punishment from where they expect and don't expect," he said.
As Nasrallah spoke, Israeli jets flew low over Lebanon's capital, breaking the sound barrier and sending birds scattering. People in homes and offices rushed to open windows to prevent them from shattering.
Simultaneously, Hezbollah and the Israeli military exchanged fresh strikes.
Hezbollah drones targeted Israeli military positions along the border, while Israeli forces responded with airstrikes on militant sites in southern Lebanon.
The explosions, reportedly part of an Israeli effort to cripple Hezbollah's communication network, occurred across multiple locations in Beirut, southern Lebanon, and parts of Damascus.
Nasrallah described the attack as a "severe blow" but vowed to retaliate into Northern Israel.
"The enemy crossed all boundaries and red lines," he said.
Lebanese Health Minister Firas Abiad confirmed that many of the injured were civilians hit by device explosions in homes, businesses, and public spaces.
Tuesday's blasts killed 12 people, including two children, while Wednesday's explosions claimed 25 more lives.
The walkie-talkie devices that detonated on Wednesday caused more severe injuries than the pagers used in the first day's attack, due to their increased size.
Many suffered gaping wounds on their legs, abdomens and faces or were maimed in the hand.
Hezbollah has framed its near-daily strikes on northern Israel as a show of support for Hamas.
In response, Israel has intensified its military actions in southern Lebanon, targeting Hezbollah positions and senior members in the capital, Beirut.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant signaled a shift in Israel's military strategy on Wednesday, describing the ongoing conflict as entering a "new phase" and hinting at a potential escalation against Hezbollah.
He praised Israel's military and security agencies, describing their work as "impressive," but did not directly reference the attacks on Hezbollah's communications devices.
Quote:The electronic device explosions in Lebanon will be met with "just retribution," Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has said.
Pager blasts killed 12 and injured more than 2,000 on Tuesday, before walkie-talkies detonated on Wednesday, killing 20 and injuring at least 450. The attacks targeted members of Hezbollah, the Islamist group linked to Tehran, and they have been blamed on Israel.
Israel hasn't yet commented on the blasts, which have been linked to its Mossad spy agency, but the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, declared on Wednesday "a new phase in the war" in the Middle East.
Without mentioning Israel by name, Pezeshkian posted on X that he condemned "the treacherous mass assassination carried out by the terrorist entity through the bombing of communication devices."
"God is almighty and avenging, and the criminal will surely receive just retribution," the post added, according to a translation.
He added that Tehran "condemns this heinous crime that targeted the Lebanese and affirms its support for Lebanon, its government and people, and we call on international organizations to assume their responsibilities."
Former Israeli Intelligence official and regional analyst Avi Melamed told Newsweek that Hezbollah had been using pagers because they thought they would be safer than phones, which could be GPS targeted.
"While Hezbollah still has the fallback wired system it created in 2008, the loss of wireless communications capabilities severely compromises its flexibility, connectivity, and maneuverability," he said.
Melamed added that the strike on Tuesday may have been tied to the announcement about Israel's security services foiling a Hezbollah attempted assassination in Tel Aviv of former Israeli defense minister and IDF chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon.
The attack, along with Israel's military posture and Secretary of State Antony Blinken's visit to Egypt to discuss a peace deal for the war in Gaza, shows that the U.S. and Israel "are signaling Iran directly" to pressure Hamas into a compromise, Melamed said.
Israeli threats to strike Hezbollah at a time when the group is vulnerable could undermine Iran's control over Lebanon and mean "weakening its most significant proxy," Melamed added.
Israel and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed faction that controls swaths of Lebanon, have been trading attacks across a shared border.
Amid concern that the attacks could lead to an all-out conflict, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for restraint from both sides and said it could be a "pre-emptive strike before a major military operation," and that the UN security council is due to meet on Friday to discuss the issue.
Traitor Wanted to Kill Netanyahu, Bennett & Gallant
Quote:An Israeli man has been charged over an alleged Iran-backed assassination plot against several senior government officials including the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
A statement by Israeli police say the nation’s domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet and the country’s FBI equivalent Lahav 433 had worked together to expose an plot revolving around an Israeli Jewish businessman recruited by Iranian intelligence. It is alleged the plots looked to assassinate targets including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former PM Naftali Bennett, Israel’s defence minister, and the head of the Shin Bet agency.
The man, who was arrested in August, was formally charged this morning and police went public, revealing the details they said they had discovered of the plot, shortly afterwards. He was not formally named by the police statement but The Times of Israel names him as 73-year-old Moti Maman, of Ashkelon, Southern District Israel.
A police spokesman said on Thursday morning: “an Israeli citizen smuggled himself into Iran on two different occasions to meet with Iranian intelligence agents. He expressed a willingness to commit serious acts of terrorism on Israeli soil, including plotting the assassination of high-level officials… The suspect, who has since been apprehended sought large sums of money in exchange for providing intelligence and additional support to Iranian intelligence officials.”
ToI claims Maman demanded a million dollars from Iranian intelligence for work on the assassination plot and received cash for meetings. Beyond the killing plot, it is alleged he was also instructed to deliver money and weapons to other agents in Iran, perform reconnaissance, and to intimidate other Israelis who had been recruited by Iranian intelligence if they failed to carry out their assigned missions. The suspect is said to be a businessman whose work took him to Turkey, where he us alleged to have met with Turkish and Iranian figures who arranged for him to be smuggled to Iran for meetings.
It is asserted the plot to kill Netanyahu was “seen by the Iranian officials as revenge for the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Teheran”.
The allegations against Maman, who is reported to be cooperating with authorities, come at a time where Israel steps up operations against Iranian proxy Hezbollah, and as executive assassinations repeatedly make headlines. U.S. former President and again candidate Donald Trump has been the subject of two apparent assassination attempts just this year, and NATO member state Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot at close range in May.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:The House unanimously passed a bill on Sept. 20 to give former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris the same level of Secret Service protection that President Joe Biden gets.
The Enhanced Presidential Security Act, introduced by Reps. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), would afford major presidential candidates the same level of security that the president gets. The vote was 405–0.
Additionally, the bill would require the Secret Service director to conduct a review of the protection the president, vice president and major candidates get from the 150-year-old agency. The report would be submitted the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.
The Secret Service has come under scrutiny since the July 13 attempted assassination of Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the second apparent assassination attempt at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sept. 15.
The Butler shooting resulted in Kimberly Cheatle resigning as Secret Service director. Following the July assassination attempt, Biden directed the agency to increase assets in the protection of Trump, Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe said at a press conference on Sept. 16.
Rowe said the increased assets included countersnipers, countersurveillance agents, counterassault teams, and drones, which were deployed at the golf course on Sunday. He called the Secret Services measures on the day effective, crediting the swift action of the agent who noticed a rifle sticking through the fence and opened fire.
Lawler said on the House floor on Sept. 20, “Elections are determined at the ballot box, not by an assassin’s bullet,” adding that the assassination attempts “undermines the confidence that Americans have in their government and in the electoral process.”
Torres said that the fact that Trump was not assassinated in Butler was due to “luck,” not the Secret Service’s efforts.
“Hoping for the best or lucking out is not a policy prescription for protecting a president or presidential candidate,” the Democratic lawmaker said on the House floor on Friday.
The Senate would need to pass this measure before it could be sent to Biden’s desk. Republican senators have introduced a version of this measure, but it is unclear whether it will advance in the upper chamber.
Separately, lawmakers are considering providing additional funding for the agency.
Biden said earlier this week that the Secret Service “needs more help,” suggesting that Congress act to provide it with more resources.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) sounded receptive to giving the agency increased funding.
“Congress has a responsibility to ensure the Secret Service and all law enforcement have the resources they need to do their jobs,” he said on the Senate floor on Sept. 16.
“So as we continue the appropriations process, if the Secret Service is in need of more resources, we are prepared to providing it for them, possibly in the upcoming funding agreement.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said earlier this week that he’s skeptical that funding is the best response, though he said he was “looking into” the further funding.
“I think it’s a matter of manpower allocation. We don’t want to just throw more money at a broken system,” Johnson said.
Quote:Americans who had contact with the suspect in an alleged failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, Ryan Wesley Routh, were so alarmed by his erratic behavior in Ukraine that they alerted U.S. officials, who apparently did very little with the warnings.
Routh, 58, was taken into custody on Sunday while lurking in the trees of Trump National Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, with a rifle while former President Donald Trump was playing a round of golf. Routh was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm in federal court on Monday.
Routh’s record was festooned with an astonishing number of the proverbial “red flags,” including a self-published book in which he urged the terrorist-supporting government of Iran to assassinate Donald Trump. His lengthy record of criminal offenses included possessing a “weapon of mass destruction” – a gun illegally modified for fully automatic fire – in 2002.
Routh was an ardent and active supporter of Ukraine. He traveled there soon after the Russian invasion began in February 2022, at first to offer himself as a foreign recruit for the Ukrainian military and then to recruit others after Ukraine declined his offer of service.
A nurse named Chelsea Walsh told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Monday she bumped into Routh a few times in Kyiv and concluded he was “among the most dangerous Americans she met during her month-and-a-half-long stint in Ukraine.”
Walsh was so alarmed by Routh’s conduct that she says she warned Customs and Border Protection (CBP) about him when she returned to the United States. She gave CPB a notebook in which she described over a dozen foreigners who exhibited disturbing behavior in Ukraine, and Routh was at the top of the list, flagged for “predatory behavior.”
Walsh said she initially regarded Routh as “eccentric, but not dangerous,” an assessment she revised after having sustained contact with him, especially since he kept talking about assassinating world leaders.
Another American with experience in Ukraine, former CIA officer Sarah Adams, said Routh developed a reputation among aid groups as a “fraudster” and “whack job.”
Among other disturbing behaviors, Routh frequently claimed to be recruiting foreign fighters as an agent of the Ukrainian government, when he was not. One of his big obsessions in Kyiv was importing U.S.-trained Afghan soldiers to fight for the Ukrainians.
When Routh falsely claimed he had persuaded the Ukrainian military to accept some of these Afghan volunteers, aid groups began blacklisting him and reporting him to the State Department. Adams herself warned humanitarian organizations in Ukraine to stay away from him and claimed the State Department was worried about Routh perpetrating human trafficking and/or immigration fraud.
“A lot of people were trying to get him to stop his activities, or at least prevent people from falling for his scams,” she said.
Later in 2023, Walsh filed reports with the FBI and Interpol because she learned Routh was once again presenting himself as a recruiter for the Ukrainian foreign legion, this time trying to recruit Syrian refugees. He also claimed he had Iraqis lined up and ready to fight.
“No recruitment from Syria or Iraq! I told you this before! Those countries are banned and for good reason,” an irritated Ukrainian International Legion official snapped at Routh in a November 2022 message.
Routh’s response was: “How about Afghanistan???” His exchanges with Ukrainian officials grew more surly and sarcastic as they continued to reject his offers of assistance.
A large number of Afghan soldiers really did try to volunteer for the Ukrainian foreign legion, including some with impressive military credentials, but the Ukrainians were very reluctant to accept them, in part because they were worried about spies and saboteurs. Language and cultural barriers were also an issue. A few Afghans did make their way into the foreign legion, but they did not earn high marks from their Ukrainian commanders.
A March 2023 article at Semafor about the would-be Afghan volunteers quoted none other than Ryan Routh as an “expert” on the topic. He told Semafor he was head of the International Volunteer Center in Ukraine (IVC), a real organization that later said Routh was not a member, much less its leader or founder. The IVC said it has never “collaborated or communicated with him in any way.”
Quote:Convicted serial rapist Andrew Luster, 60, is set to be released early from prison thanks to his crimes being classified as “non-violent” thanks to Proposition 57, crafted by then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris in 2016.
As the UK Daily Mail notes, Luster was “was convicted of 86 counts of drugging and raping unconscious women in 2003,” and “infamously fled to Mexico during his rape trial – only to be tracked down by Dog the Bounty Hunter. … Initially handed 124 years in prison, depraved Luster’s sentence was revised down to 50 years in 2013 on appeal.”
He was granted parole in August, roughly 20 years after his conviction and less than halfway through his sentence.
The reason: a ballot initiative whose language was approved by Harris when she was California Attorney General.
Proposition 57 is less well-known than Proposition 47, which Harris backed in 2014. Proposition 47 reduced several felonies to misdemeanors, and critics say it is directly responsible for the wave of retail theft across California.
(Proposition 36, which aims to amend Proposition 47, and which is opposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, is extremely popular, with a recent poll showing 71% of voters in California plan to vote for the anti-crime ballot initiative.)
Proposition 57 sought to reduce overcrowding in prisons by offering early release to non-violent criminals. But it left out a definition of “non-violent” crime, meaning that any crime not on the state’s list of major felonies would qualify.
The Pacific Research Institute warned in 2016:
Voters will find Proposition 57 on their ballots this fall and many will support it as they’ve been led to believe that it is simply a vehicle, according to the ballot language, for “increasing parole and good behavior opportunities for felons convicted of nonviolent crimes.” Supporters include Gov. Jerry Brown, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Kamala Harris. The Democratic machine, the ruling party in what is essentially a one-party state, is also behind the measure.
…
It’s likely there would be little opposition to the initiative if it were to actually achieve what its proponents say it will. But instead of allowing for the release of truly nonviolent inmates only, the Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act of 2016 would permit release of inmates who have been convicted of brutal acts.
…
As written, the measure expressly blocks early release of those convicted of 23 specific violent crimes. Its weakness – a gaping loophole, in reality – is that there is a long list of violent crimes that aren’t a part of that 23. Felons convicted of arson causing great bodily harm, a drive-by shooting, hostage taking, assault with a deadly weapon, attempting to bomb a school or hospital, and several other violent offenses will be eligible for early release, opponents say. A catalog of sexual-assault related crimes, gang-related crimes and crimes against children qualify as “nonviolent” offenses under the early-release program, as well.
Dan Walters recently noted in the Santa Maria Times that attempts to use regulations to broaden the definition of violent crimes were unsuccessful:
Prop. 57 opponents, noting that rape of an unconscious person was among the serious crimes excluded from Brown’s list, argued that the measure could benefit violent sex offenders.
…
[A]ttorneys for the 4,400 felons who had been excluded from early parole challenged their legality, arguing that the state could not, by regulation, modify the wording of a voter-approved ballot measure. Eventually the issue wound up in the state Supreme Court, which set aside the regulations in 2020.
…
In effect the decision gave date rapists and other sex offenders access to the lenient parole provisions of Prop. 57. They didn’t hesitate to use it, which brings us to Luster, an heir to the Max Factor makeup fortune.
Harris likes to tout her record as a prosecutor, both as District Attorney for San Francisco, and as California Attorney General, but the truth is that her record was one of leniency toward major violent crimes, and diligence in pursuing low-level offenders, such as marijuana users or the parents of truant schoolchildren.
Her role in Proposition 57 was raised by her opponent in the U.S. Senate race in 2016, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA):
At a news conference in downtown Los Angeles Tuesday, Sanchez criticized the ballot measure and Harris’ role in crafting the language for its summary paragraph while serving as the state’s Attorney General. Harris has chosen not to take a position on any ballot measure.
“The ballot title and summary, written by Attorney General Kamala Harris, calls serious violent crimes ‘non-violent,’ including crimes such as rape by intoxication of an unconscious person, human trafficking involving a sex act with minors,” Sanchez said in a statement. “Proposition 57 is the misleading and dangerous ballot initiative that would allow serious, violent criminals out on early release without completing their sentences.”
Proposition 57 was so harmful that even Harris’s successor, Attorney General Rob Bonta, has said that it went too far.
Quote:The Biden administration signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the government of Kenya on Tuesday to help it develop “safe and secure” nuclear power technology.
On the same day, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Bonnie Jenkins said she was “delighted to talk about nuclear energy with El Salvador.”
Both of these nuclear dialogues took place on the sidelines of the annual International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) conference in Vienna, Austria. The IAEA encourages the “safe, secure, and peaceful use of nuclear energy” by developing countries, in part because it recognizes nuclear power as a clean source of power.
Kenya Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi gave a speech at the conference on Monday in which he detailed his government’s plans to develop nuclear power over the next decade, a plan the Biden administration’s MOU endorsed the next day.
Mudavadi explained that while Kenya currently employs the full panoply of “green” energy technologies — thermal, hydro, wind, solar, biomass — the country is experiencing a major shortfall in energy generation, and there is no way to fill that gap without nuclear power.
Kenya Nuclear Regulatory Authority (KNRA) Director James Keter thanked the U.S. for its offer of assistance on Tuesday.
“We have a lot in our hands. This MoU could not have come at a better time. We will work with industry leaders and every stakeholder to fortify our regulatory framework to ensure the responsible and effective development of our nuclear programme,” Keter said.
Kenya does not actually have a nuclear power plant yet. The first such facility is scheduled to be constructed in coastal Kilifi County in 2027, over the strenuous objections of environmentalists and locals who fear the project will disrupt the tourism and fishing industries.
The Kilifi nuclear project has been stalled by an environmental lawsuit filed in 2023, which claims the “rushed” and “illegal” process of approving the plant was conducted through “clandestine” meetings. Even if these legal hurdles are overcome, Kenya’s first nuclear plant will not go online until 2034 at the earliest.
El Salvador began its push for nuclear power in 2023, seeking to diversify a grid that heavily depends on hydro and geothermal power. Well over half of the country’s electrical generation currently comes from those two sources.
An Illinois-based nonprofit group called the Thorium Alliance signed an MOU with the Salvadoran government in March 2023 to develop thorium-based nuclear power plants, a newer design whose fuel is easier to obtain than uranium, although extensive processing is required to create useful isotopes from raw thorium.
The IAEA met with representatives from El Salvador in March 2024 to discuss plans for nuclear energy, including “the terminology of nuclear law, key elements of comprehensive national nuclear legislation, and El Salvador’s international obligations as a party to the treaties adopted under IAEA auspices.”
“El Salvador will go nuclear because we have a firm commitment to energy transition, environmental protection, and the economic development of our citizens,” Salvadoran energy and mining director Daniel Alvarez said at that meeting.
El Salvador considered its first-ever participation in the IAEA conference in September to be a “historic moment for the nation” and a “significant stride in its energy future.”
U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk said at the conference that America remains fully committed to the peaceful development of nuclear power around the world.
Illegal US Immigration Court Located in... Venezuela!?
Quote:A group of criminals set up a fake U.S. “immigration court” inside a Venezuelan prison to scam migrants in New York out of thousands of dollars through false court proceedings and “legal” fees, Univisión reported Monday.
A man who identified himself as Gustavo Cortez Osco reportedly ran the scam. He personally claimed to the news channel that he is a member of the Tren de Aragua transnational criminal organization that has now spread to the United States.
Univisión, describing the scam as an “unprecedented scheme in the history of U.S. immigration fraud,” stated that it discovered in an investigation that the scammers pretended to be U.S. lawyers and judges for a fictional immigration court that operated from Tocuyito, a once-overcrowded maximum security prison in Venezuela that the socialist Maduro regime “raided” in October and which now houses one of the two “reeducation camps” for dissidents of dictator Nicolás Maduro.
The scammers allegedly presented their victims with false documents featuring the logos of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of Justice (DOJ). Some of the false documents, Univisión explained, featured poor translations from Spanish to English and used legal terminology common in Latin America, but not the United States.
The victims were “ordered” to make payments ranging from $300 to $1,000 before proceeding with the false “immigration court hearing.” Rumors of a lawyer “who offered solutions to all kinds of immigration problems,” Univisión said, spread this year among immigrant parishioners of evangelical churches in New York.
According to Univisión, the fake immigration lawyer offered “quicker and cheaper solutions” to asylum, residence, work permits, and other migrant-related legal issues in New York.
Cortez Osco, pretending to be an immigration attorney, reportedly utilized a “western New York” phone number and claimed that he worked in an office building in New Jersey to fool several Hispanic migrant women in the United States. The women reportedly “liked” that Cortez Osco spoke “Spanish with an English accent” and that he was “interested in the hardships they went through” to arrive in the United States.
Univisión explained that one of its reporters verified that the purported office does not exist. Two people who work on the floor where the law firm supposedly operated said they had never heard of it.
Univisión explained that the scammers did not collect the money directly from the victims but used intermediaries with U.S. bank accounts running the Zelle payment system. The victims claimed they were strictly warned not to mention the reason for the payment in the transaction’s description.
The television network stated that it began contacting the recipients of the transactions using payment receipts provided by the scammed victims, but only managed to reach two of the individuals, who “nervously denied” having borrowed their accounts for the transactions. One of the individuals, Univisión explained, identified himself as a Colombian national who worked parking cars in New York. The man said that he would report the situation to the authorities.
Unvisión stated that Cortez Osco himself called the director of Univisión’s investigative team hours after they had finished reaching out to the individuals that received the scammed money. Cortez Osco reportedly used the same number he employed to deceive the victims and “coldly admitted that the whole thing was a scam.”
“I was in this extortion thing for many years,” Cortez Osco reportedly said in the same English accent used for his fake lawyer fraud persona.
Quote:U.S. Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced a bill on Thursday that seeks to increase the bounty on Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro from $15 million to $100 million.
Maduro, presently leading efforts to illegitimately cling to power following the July 28 sham presidential election, is actively wanted by U.S. authorities on multiple narcoterrorism charges alongside other top brass figures in his authoritarian regime.
Since 2020, the United States has a $15-million bounty active for any information that can lead to the arrest and/or conviction of Nicolás Maduro.
The bill, titled “Securing Timely Opportunities for Payment and Maximizing Awards for Detaining Unlawful Regime Officials (STOP MADURO) Act,” states that the increased reward funding would not come from American taxpayer money but from assets already seized from Maduro, his regime’s officials, and co-conspirators. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Florida estimates that Washington has seized approximately $450 million in such assets.
“The time has come for Venezuela to be liberated from the illegitimate regime of dictator Nicolás Maduro,” Sen. Scott said.
“For years, I have urged the Biden-Harris administration to put the full weight of the federal government to put an end to the Maduro regime,” he continued, “but it has refused and continued its failed appeasement that has only enriched and emboldened Maduro and his puppet masters in Cuba at the expense of the Venezuelan people.”
Sen. Scott added that former President Donald Trump “did the right thing” by offering the $15 million bounty on Maduro but that it is “time to up the ante,” citing the recent events of the July 28 sham presidential election, which Maduro fraudulently insists he “won”:
...
Sen. Rubio stated that the United States “must do more” to arrest Maduro. The senator added that he has called for Interpol to issue a red notice for Maduro – a request for member states to arrest him – and pointed out that the bill “builds on that call by increasing the reward for his arrest to $100 million.”
“Maduro is one of the Venezuelan regime’s most corrupt schemers and it’s past time he is held accountable for his crimes,” Sen. Rubio said.
Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-FL), responding to the recent violence in Venezuela, said that Maduro and his regime have escalated their brutal repression of dissidents in the two months following the July 28 sham presidential election. Maduro unleashed a brutal repressive campaign following the sham election that has left at least 25 dead, hundreds injured, and resulted in more than 2,400 arbitrary detentions — including nearly 60 children who remain imprisoned at press time, according to recent reports.
“Maduro’s regime is a criminal enterprise that fuels narco-terrorism, suppresses independent media, and violates human rights with impunity. Last year, I warned that the Biden-Harris Administration’s appeasement of this dictatorship would only embolden Maduro,” Rep. Díaz-Balart said. “Lifting sanctions has endangered our national security, aiding a regime closely allied with dangerous adversaries like Russia, Iran, Cuba, and the PRC [China].”
“Instead of easing sanctions, the Biden-Harris Administration should stand in solidarity with the Venezuelan people in their fight for freedom by increasing this bounty and strengthening sanctions,” he continued.
U.S. authorities have long accused Maduro of being one of the leading figures of the Cartel of the Suns, an intercontinental cocaine trafficking operation run by high-ranking members of the Venezuelan military and leaders of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).
The Cartel of the Suns, which operates a diffuse “network of networks” ingrained deep within the Venezuelan Armed Forces, stands accused of plotting to “flood” the United States with cocaine.
Quote:Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu met with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran on Tuesday to reportedly discuss “continuous and lasting” cooperation, days after Shoigu made a similar stop in North Korea.
Shoigu, the former defense minister now transferred to serve strongman Vladimir Putin in security capacity, is among the most beloved Russian officials in Pyongyang. Shoigu and his delegation became the first foreign officials allowed in North Korea since the onset of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic in 2023, regaled with a tour of some of North Korea’s most advanced weaponry. The visit, in July of that year, was pivotal for Shoigu’s career as Russia had just thwarted an apparent failed coup by Wagner paramilitary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who insisted he was not interested in overthrowing Putin but ousting Shoigu.
Now working in a less high-profile role, Shoigu made stops to meet the leaders of two of the world’s most anti-American regimes, clearly seeking to bolster geopolitical support.
In Tehran on Tuesday, Pezeshkian – a self-described “moderate” who assumed power after a special election in July – assured Shoigu that his administration was eager to expand ties to Russia. His administration “will seriously pursue the ongoing cooperation and efforts aimed at enhancing the level of relations between the two countries,” the president said, according to the Iranian state propaganda outlet PressTV.
PressTV noted that high on the agenda of discussion was the upcoming October BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia. BRICS – originally named after members Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – officially accepted Iran as a member in January. Ethiopia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates also became members this year, while Saudi Arabia claimed to have accepted an invite to join but reportedly never finalized its presence in the anti-American bloc.
Shoigu reportedly relayed enthusiasm on Putin’s part to welcome the new Iranian president.
“Mr. Putin is eagerly looking forward to meeting with you on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia,” Shoigu was quoted as saying.
Reuters, quoting other Iranian media, stated that Pezeshkian said he was interested in expanding Russia-Iran ties in “a continuous and lasting way.”
The visit appeared similar in form to Shoigu’s stop in Pyongyang on Friday, though North Korea is not a BRICS member. On that occasion, Shoigu met communist dictator Kim Jong-un to discuss “steadily deepening the strategic dialogue between the two countries,” the North Korean flagship media outlet, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), claimed.
Kim also addressed “strengthening cooperation to defend the mutual security interests” specifically and, generally, the “international situation.”
“At the talk, there was a wide exchange of views on the issues of Kim Jong Un affirmed that the DPRK [North Korean] government would further expand cooperation,” KCNA continued, “and collaboration with the Russian Federation in the spirit of the Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in the future, too.”
The Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty is an agreement Putin signed during a visit to Pyongyang – his first in two decades – in June. The document requires both countries to defend the other in the event of an attack, a mutual defense provision that alarmed international experts, who suggested that Russia may use the agreement to entangle North Korea in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, or may result in Russian forces clashing with South Korea.
Some international observers, including multiple Western governments and that of Ukraine, believe that both Iran and North Korea are already implicated in Putin’s “special operation” to oust Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In August, while demanding that Western nations lift limits on the use of their weapons by Ukraine to attack Russian territory, Zelensky claimed that Russia was attacking Ukrainian territory with impunity from its weapons providers, naming Iran and North Korea.
“Defenders of life should face no restrictions on weapons, while Russia uses all kinds of its own weapons, as well as [Iranian] ‘Shahed’ drones and ballistic missiles from North Korea,” Zelensky demanded.
The governments of Britain, France, and Germany announced fresh sanctions on Iran on September 10 for allegedly providing Russia with short-range missiles used in Ukraine. The sanctions followed a wave of dozens of attacks on Ukraine in early September that included a flurry of Shahed suicide drone strikes, according to the Ukrainian Air Force.
Like Iran, North Korea has faced accusations of providing weapons used in Ukraine. In August, the South Korean Defense Intelligence Agency claimed that it had documented proof that the Kim regime had deployed over 13,000 shipping containers to Russia that could “hold more than 6 million 152-millimeter artillery shells.”
Quote:Over one million applications for asylum will be made in Europe this year, extrapolations from the last figures suggest, as Syrians and Afghans continue to overwhelmingly dominate arrivals.
Statistics and analysis by the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA), a body which strives to “bringing greater convergence to asylum and reception practices across the EU”, clearly show the bloc and its ‘EU+’ area neighbours Norway and Switzerland will welcome over one million asylum applications for the second year running.
Applications in the first six months of 2024 are nearly identical to 2023 at 512,989, the latest figures show. Trends for the past nine years clearly show applications for asylum show a bias towards the second six months of the year, making 2024 a million-plus year all but certain, in line with the 1,143,437 received in 2023.
While the vast majority of applications will pertain to new arrivals in Europe, a fraction — around nine per cent, according to EUAA — are from repeat-applicants, trying again after a previous unsuccessful bid.
In all, the level of arrivals of 2024 and 2023 are the highest since the Europe migrant crisis of 2015-16, when Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany unilaterally declared the continent open. While that migrant crisis was urgent news daily as European nations struggled to handle the sheet volume of arrivals, the Union has become more adept to papering over those cracks in the years since, making the massive numbers of arrivals today something more akin to a silent migrant crisis, often hidden from the front pages.
This is a situation that has been rumbling on for some years, now. Breitbart News reported in 2022 when Europe saw the largest number of arrivals that year since the 2016 crisis, which was also the first year Ukrainian refugees started to arrive in significant numbers. That continues to impact today, and as stated by the EUAA: “the surge in asylum applications and the number of displaced persons from Ukraine – are exerting immense strain on the EU+ asylum and reception systems. National authorities are being pushed to their limits as they strive to accommodate and safeguard those in need.”
“Syrians continued to lodge by far the most applications”, the EUAA noted, making up for 14 per cent of all applications. “Afghans continued to be the second largest nationality group” they stated. As for where migrants go — as reflected by where applications are made — Germany continues to keep its position at the head of the pack. It took 124,000 applications int he first six months of the year, around a quarter of all received in Europe.
Netherlands: Islamic Extremist Stopped by Martial Artist & Another Guy
Quote:An Arabic-speaking knifeman who killed one person and seriously injured another was taken down by members of the public, including a martial arts practitioner, who beat him unconscious in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Police say it’s too early to say what the motive for a stabbing attack in Rotterdam, the Netherlands’ second city on Wednesday night that saw a 32-year-old resident of the city killed, and another hospitalised with serious injuries, reports de Volkskrant. The suspect, a 22-year-old associated with the historic Dutch city of Amersfoort was beaten unconscious during the attack and is now under arrest and receiving treatment in hospital.
Witnesses say the knifeman shouted “Allahu akhbar” as he struck, the now well-known saying that has become so associated with terrorist attacks in Europe, and Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-mass-migration politician who is now the power behind the country’s governing coalition reflected the emergence again of the phrase underlined “the Islamisation of the Netherlands”.
Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf states the attack started around 2000 local time in a parking garage under the approach to Rotterdam’s landmark Erasmus bridge (pictured, above), where a knifeman stabbed the individual who was evacuated to hospital alive, but with unspecified serious injuries. From the garage, the attacker when stabbed a man who was rollerskating on the Willemsplein, a popular public square by the bridge.
Members of the public rushed to try and revive the 32-year-old male roller-skater, but he died from his injuries. A personal trainer who witnessed the attack told the paper: “I looked up and saw a light-skinned man, in a dark jacket with a hood, stabbing him. He must have stabbed him at least twenty times”.
The knifeman then attempted to storm a waterfront restaurant but was chased off by diners who fought him with chairs and tables from the establishment. He then tried to gain access to a nearby museum, but had been chased by the chair-wielding diners and was subdued. The personal trainer, who had joined the fight by this time and was using some of his exercise equipment as a weapon against the knifeman, continued in his statement: “I gave him a few taps. I did Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art, on him.
“He was shouting and swearing in Arabic. I didn’t do it alone, but with the people from [the museum] who threw chairs and tables at him. He was unconscious”.
Police say they are aware of witness accounts saying the attacker shouted “Allahu akhbar” during the assault but say they won’t be calling a motive yet. They said in a statement: “We will include that in the investigation, but it is too early to label it at this time”.
The suspect, who is alleged to have carried two “large knives” into Rotterdam before launching an attack, is in police custody.
Quote:A British judge reportedly blocked the victim of a child rape gang victim from telling the court she wanted to see her abusers deported back to Pakistan.
During the latest trial involving historic child sex crimes in Rotherham, the Sheffield Crown Court is said to have ordered that the unnamed female victim remove her pleas for the government to send the convicted grooming gang members back to their native Pakistan.
According to a report from GB News, Barrister Matthew Bean said that “whether they [the abusers] remain in this country or not” is something that should be decided by the Home Office and should not be influenced by what “the victim should say one way or another.”
In her original uncensored victim statement, the woman, who began to suffer sexual abuse from grooming gang at the age of 11, had planned to tell the court: “I’d like to request that after sentencing and upon Rudy [Mohammed Amar] and Showabe’s [Mohammed Siyab] release, that they should be deported back to Pakistan as this is where they originated from and came here to exploit children. Thank you.”
Mohammed Amar, 42, was sentenced to 14 years in prison after being convicted of two counts of indecent assault, while Mohammed Siyab, 49, was sentenced to 25 years behind bars after being convicted of two counts of rape, one count of trafficking, and one count of having sexual intercourse with a child under the age of 13. They were among six men sentenced last week.
Responding to the decision to curtail her remarks to the court, the woman told GB News: “If someone’s not born here and they’re here to exploit children, after the sentences they should be deported. There’s nothing to say that they’ll stop exploiting children. We can deport them and let their own country deal with them.
“The Foreign Office should absolutely give Pakistan full punishment if they refuse to accept grooming gang rapists,” she added. “Those men need to be deported or Pakistan should have its visas restricted.”
Quote:Since the left-wing Labour Party government of Sir Kier Starmer came into power in July, more than 10,000 illegal migrants have reached British shores after crossing the English Channel from France.
Despite promises from Prime Minister Starmer to put an end to the boat migrant crisis in the Channel, 10,024 illegals have been recorded as successfully reaching the UK in people smuggler-operated boats launched from the French coastline since Labour’s victory at the July 4th general election.
The milestone was surpassed as 65 more aliens crossed the busy waterway on Monday, taking the total for the year to an estimated 23,598, according to calculations from the PA News agency, putting this year roughly on par with 2023 when 23,940 crossed the Channel at this point of the year.
The latest illegal crossings come in the wake of yet another tragedy, in which eight migrants drowned to death over the weekend after their flimsy rubber dinghy was ripped apart mid-Channel. A further six, including a 10-month-old baby, were hospitalised as a result of the incident.
This was less than two weeks after another migrant boat capsized, leaving 12 people, including six children and a pregnant woman dead.
The new left-wing government has pinned its hopes of confronting the crisis on further investment in policing operations targeted at human trafficking networks operating on both sides of the Channel.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced over the weekend that £75 million would be redirected from the scrapped Tory scheme to send illegals to Rwanda to invest in the number of border security officers.
Despite abandoning the Rwanda plan, and the hundreds of millions sent to Kigali along with it, during a diplomatic and fact-finding mission to Rome this week, Prime Minsiter Keir Starmer was said to be “very interested” in a similar scheme set to be enacted by the conservative government of Giorgia Meloni to send illegals to Albania to have their asylum claims processed.
The suggestion that the UK could follow Italy in sending boat migrants to Albania has ruffled feathers pro-mass migration elements of Starmer’s back bench, with MPs lambasting the government for seeking advice from what they termed as the “far-right” government of Meloni. This year, the Italian leader’s efforts to reduce illegal migration have resulted in over a sixty per cent decline in illegal alien arrivals.
Whether or not London will seek to join the Albania scheme remains to be seen and critics on the populist right have argued that the only way to meaningfully confront the crisis would be to leave the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and immediately return boat migrants back to the beaches of France, rather than having the British Border Force ferry them onto UK soil, as is the case now.
Commenting on the issue, Reform UK Member of Parliament Rupert Lowe told TalkTv on Monday: “The quickest way to save lives is to
have a zero-tolerance policy as the Australians did, to return people immediately, to make it quite clear that if you come illegally you will never ever settle here legally.”
As we know most of these are young men, 87 per cent of them I think by the Home Office’s own figures are young men, it’s not as if it’s families or you know people that are fleeing war-torn areas. They’re not, they’re coming through safe countries, so these are economic migrants and we are a soft touch. I think it is solvable, but we need the will to solve it
Quote:Canadian and Italian dignitaries on Thursday marked the successful recovery of a photo portrait of Winston Churchill known as “The Roaring Lion,” stolen in Canada and recovered in Italy after a two-year search by police.
At a ceremony at the Canadian Embassy in Rome, Italian carabinieri police handed over the portrait to the Canadian ambassador to Italy, Elissa Goldberg, who praised the cooperation between Italian and Canadian investigators that led to the recovery.
The 1941 portrait of the British leader taken by Ottawa photographer Yousuf Karsh is now ready for the last step of its journey home to the Fairmont Château Laurier, the hotel in Ottawa where it was stolen and will once again be displayed as a notable historic portrait.
Canadian police said the portrait was stolen from the hotel sometime between Christmas 2021 and Jan. 6, 2022, and replaced with a forgery. The swap was only uncovered months later, in August, when a hotel worker noticed the frame was not hung properly and looked different than the others.
Nicola Cassinelli, a lawyer in Genoa, Italy, purchased the portrait in May 2022 at an online Sotheby´s auction for 5,292 British pounds. He says he got a phone call from the auction house that October advising him not to sell or otherwise transfer the portrait due to an investigation into the Ottawa theft.
Cassinelli, who attended Thursday´s ceremony, said he thought he was buying a regular print and quickly agreed to send the iconic Churchill photograph home when he learned its true story.
“I immediately decided to return it to the Chateau Laurier, because I think that if Karsh donated it to the hotel, it means he really wanted it to stay there, for the particular significance this hotel had for him, and for his wife too,” Cassinelli told The Associated Press.
The famous image was taken by Karsh during Churchill´s wartime visit to the Canadian Parliament in December 1941. It helped launch Karsh´s career, who photographed some of the 20th century´s most famed icons, including Nelson Mandela, Albert Einstein and Queen Elizabeth.
Karsh and his wife Estrellita gifted an original signed print to the Fairmont Chateau Laurier in 1998. The couple had lived and operated a studio inside the hotel for nearly two decades.
Geneviève Dumas, general manager of the Fairmont Château Laurier, said on Thursday she felt immensely grateful.
“I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to everybody involved in solving this case, and ensuring the safe return of this priceless piece of history.”
Police arrested a 43-year-old man from Powassan, Ontario, in April and have charged him with stealing and trafficking the portrait. The man, whose name is protected by a publication ban, faces charges that include forgery, theft over $5,000 and trafficking in property obtained by crime exceeding $5,000.
Quote:The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has told residents of northern Israel and the Golan Heights to remain near bomb shelters as Israel intensified its airstrikes against Hezbollah and the terror group fired hundreds of rockets Friday.
The escalation occurred as Hezbollah reeled from attacks on its officials and operatives through pagers and walkie-talkie devices, and as the Iranian-backed terror group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, gave a speech vowing revenge.
Even as he did so, Israeli warplanes buzzed Beirut and carried out airstrikes against Hezbollah positions.
On Thursday, Israel targeted hundreds of Hezbollah rocket launchers in southern Lebanon. The IDF said in a statement:
Over the last two hours, directed by IDF intelligence, the IAF struck hundreds of rocket launcher barrels that were ready to be used immediately to fire toward Israeli territory.
Since this afternoon, the IAF has struck approximately 100 launchers and additional terrorist infrastructure sites, consisting of approximately 1000 barrels that were ready to be used in the immediate future to fire toward Israeli territory.
The IDF will continue to operate to degrade the Hezbollah terrorist organization’s infrastructure and capabilities in order to defend the State of Israel.
The IDF instructed residents of northern Israel to stay near shelters, anticipating retaliation by Hezbollah. It removed that warning, then reinstated it Friday, as Hezbollah fired 150 rockets at northern Israel.
The Times of Israel noted that the rockets were fired in waves, and that no injuries had yet been reported.
The conflict on Israel’s northern border began in October with unprovoked rocket, missile, and drone attacks by Hezbollah. Israel evacuated over 60,000 civilians from the area, whom it has vowed will return home safely.
The U.S. insists that there be no escalation, and President Joe Biden warned Hezbollah and its Iranian patron, “Don’t.” However, the Biden administration’s efforts to forge a diplomatic solution appear to have failed.
Israel now faces a major war on a second front — with the advantage, however, of having nearly completed the war against Hamas in Gaza, though it has yet to rescue the 101 Israeli hostages who still remain in Hamas captivity.
Israel Kills Terrorist Wanted for 1983 US Marines Barracks Bombing
Quote:Israel killed Ibrahim Aqil, a senior Hezbollah terrorist partly responsible for the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, on Friday as he gathered underground with fellow terrorists in southern Beirut.
In a statement, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said:
Today (Friday), September 20, 2024, IAF aircraft conducted a targeted, intelligence-based strike in the area of Beirut, and eliminated Ibrahim Aqil, the Head of Hezbollah’s Operations Unit and the Commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Forces, who was also in charge of Hezbollah’s “Conquer the Galilee” attack plan.
During the strike, senior operatives in Hezbollah’s Operations Staff and commanders from the Radwan Unit were eliminated alongside Aqil. Ibrahim Aqil and the Radwan commanders who were eliminated today were planning Hezbollah’s “Conquer the Galilee” attack plan, in which Hezbollah intended to infiltrate Israeli communities and murder innocent civilians.
Aqil’s began his involvement with Hezbollah in the 1980’s, as an operative in its ‘Islamic Jihad Organization’ terror cell, which is responsible for Hezbollah’s terror attacks outside of Lebanon, and was part of many of Hezbollah’s terror attacks in multiple countries against innocent civilians.
Since 2004, he has served as the Head of Hezbollah’s Operations Unit, in which he was responsible for Hezbollah’s bombing attacks, anti-tank missile attacks, air defense, and other military fields.
Additionally, he operated as Commander of the Radwan Forces, the elite unit of the Hezbollah terrorist organization, whose main goal is to conquer the communities of the Galilee and kill innocent civilians and IDF soldiers.
Ibrahim Aqil directed and took part in many terror attacks against innocent Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers.
Aqil was responsible for the anti-tank missile attack toward the Avivim post in 2019 in northern Israel, the terror attack at the Megiddo Junction in 2023, and the infiltration attempts of Hezbollah terrorists into Israeli territory to murder and kill civilians and IDF soldiers during the “Swords of Iron” War.
Aqil directed the terror attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983. He was a wanted suspect in the United States.
The IDF will continue to act to degrade Hezbollah’s capabilities and will continue to operate in all arenas to protect the civilians of the State of Israel.
The U.S. State Department announced a $7 million bounty last year for Aqil, further explaining in a statement:
Ibrahim Aqil, also known as Tahsin, serves on Hizballah’s highest military body, the Jihad Council.
During the 1980s, Aqil was a principal member of Hizballah’s terrorist cell the Islamic Jihad Organization, which claimed responsibility for the bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983, which killed 63 people, and the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in October 1983, which killed 241 U.S. personnel.
Also in the 1980s, Aqil directed the taking of American and German hostages in Lebanon and held them there.
On Pagers & Weaknesses in China-Dominated Supply Chains
Quote:The explosions of pagers and walkie-talkies that Lebanon’s Hezbollah terrorists obtained from foreign suppliers are prompting a good deal of worldwide anxiety about complex technology supply chains, many of which run through China, an authoritarian communist country with a proven track record of weaponizing both technology and international trade.
Hezbollah’s pagers were purchased under the label of a Taiwanese company, which, in turn, said the actual units that exploded in the hands and pockets of the terrorists were made by a shadowy Hungarian firm under a paid licensing agreement. The handheld radios that blew up the next day were discontinued models designed by a Japanese firm that believes the sabotaged units were unauthorized knockoffs.
In both cases, murky supply chains left Hezbollah with technology that did not come from the companies it believed were supplying it. The exact provenance of the nominally Japanese walkie-talkies remained uncertain as of Friday.
Reuters noted on Friday that there is a thriving market for older technology from Asia, where customers are happy to buy still-useful equipment from the early 2010s at discount prices — and those markets are rife with “counterfeiting, surplus inventories and complex contract manufacturing deals” that can make it nearly impossible to track the true source of an item.
Analysts said that slipping some sort of undetectable explosive into Hezbollah’s pagers was an impressive feat, but compromising its supply chains was a relatively simple matter. This is especially true with smaller companies since they lack the resources to police supply chains or comb discount retail websites in search of fake products.
China has dozens of online shops selling walkie-talkies branded by Hezbollah’s chosen brand of Icom, for example, and most of them sell the very same 2014-era discontinued models that literally blew up in Hezbollah’s faces on Wednesday. Icom insists it has not produced that model in years, but Chinese warehouses are full of them and only reluctantly will the dealers admit some of the units are “Chinese-made imitations.”
The Washington Examiner, on Thursday, took Hezbollah’s pagers of doom as a sign that Americans “should be wary of continuing to rely on Chinese supply chains for critical goods in our economy.”
The situation with many popular consumer electronics items in the U.S. is not all that much different from Hezbollah discovering that its “Taiwanese pagers” were actually made by a fishy outfit in Budapest:
Take the ubiquitous iPhone. Despite Apple being an American company, key components of almost every iPhone, including the battery, processor, and camera, are made in China. While China does not have access to Apple’s source code, or at least so it is believed, the Chinese Communist Party’s dominance over the country’s private sector affords it great latitude of action.
Secretly sabotaging tens of millions of iPhone batteries so they overheat on command may seem far-fetched, but it is doable. The risk of malevolent Chinese action with these devices or other technical goods must be considered a real possibility.
China is also a major supplier of broadcasting equipment, computers, and office machine parts. All these products are sabotage threats. Huawei offers an instructive example. Riven with technical “backdoors” that allow vast espionage and sabotage activities, Huawei’s telecommunications network has fortunately been restricted from access to the U.S. market. But the same cannot be said of U.S. allies, such as Hungary.
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) analyst and former Commerce Department official Bill Reinsch told Politico that the Hezbollah blasts would “create some degree of panic in the private sector” over supply chain vulnerabilities.
Warehouses around the world are filled with products whose components would be difficult to trace even in carefully regulated shipping chains, let alone the discount knockoff pipeline. Paranoid terrorists are probably pickier about their equipment purchases than most consumers, but Hezbollah wound up with bombs in its radios, and no one is quite certain where those radios were sitting on their long supply chain when the explosives were introduced.
Quote:Venezuelan Interior Minister and long-suspected drug lord Diosdado Cabello announced on Saturday that the socialist regime arrested three U.S. citizens for their alleged involvement in a plot to assassinate socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro.
As is customary for the Venezuelan regime, Cabello accused the CIA of being behind the alleged plot, offering no evidence to back up the claim. He further accused Spain’s National Intelligence Centre (CNI) of being “neck-deep” in the purported CIA plan.
Cabello — a socialist strongman whom Maduro recently appointed to lead his authoritarian regime’s brutal repressive apparatus and whom U.S. authorities actively want on multiple narcoterrorism charges — stated in a press conference on Sunday that the three American citizens were apprehended in the southern Venezuelan city of Puerto Ayacucho, Amazonas. He identified them as Estrella David, Aaron Darren Logan, and U.S. Navy Seal member Wilmer José Castañeda.
The three U.S. citizens, Cabello claimed, are part of a larger group of 14 arrested individuals involved in the purported plot against Maduro. Cabello also accused Castañeda of being a member of a “mercenary group.”
“Castañeda is the head of the operation put in place by the CIA and that is why the White House felt almost as if it had been hit by the capture of this citizen,” Cabello claimed. “The CIA is in charge of this operation.
“And the other, which does not surprise us either, is the National Intelligence Center of Spain,” he continued. “These two captured, they even speak of a group of mercenaries that they are looking for to bring them to Venezuela, with different objectives.”
According to Cabello, in addition to Maduro, the plot also allegedly sought to target Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez and himself. The plot, according to Cabello, also called for an “attack” on the Argentine Embassy in Caracas, computer attacks against government systems, and “terrorist attacks” against Venezuela’s water, power, and transportation infrastructure. Venezuela’s infrastructure is presently in a rundown state as a result of more than two decades of socialist mismanagement.
“Imagine a bomb, an explosive. What the Argentine Embassy was going to do, who would they point the finger at in the world? Venezuela,” Cabello said.
For the past several months, the Argentine embassy has housed six Venezuelan dissidents whom Maduro also accused of trying to kill him in 2024. Maduro cut diplomatic ties with Argentina and six other countries in late July after the nation questioned the July 28 sham election, which Maduro fraudulently insists he “won.”
In accordance with international law, Brazil took custody of the Argentine embassy and the dissidents through September, when the Maduro regime abruptly revoked the permission. While the six dissidents remain inside the Argentine embassy, the diplomatic situation remains unresolved at press time.
Cabello also claimed, providing no evidence, that contact information for members of Vente Venezuela, a center-right party led by opposition member María Corina Machado, was allegedly found on the detainees’ phones.
The socialist strongman presented a stockpile of 400 firearms police allegedly seized that Cabello claimed were smuggled into the country to be used in “conspiratorial acts” against the ruling socialist regime.
“This impressive amount of weaponry is just a sample of what has been seized, of what has been captured, of what has been recovered in intelligence operations in our country,” Cabello said. “We have a group of people arrested who are part of this network.”
Cabello claimed that the allegedly seized firearms originated in the United States and further asserted that they arrived in Venezuela in containers with products such as dog food.
In addition to the three U.S. citizens, Cabello announced, two Spanish citizens — identified as José María Basoa Valdovinos and Andrés Martínez Adasme — and a Czech national — identified as Jan Darmovrzal — were arrested. Cabello accused the two Spanish nationals of being members of Spain’s CNI.
The Spanish government denied that the two nationals were intelligence officials. Martínez Adasme’s father told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo that his son was on vacation in Venezuela. Czech Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mariana Wernerova announced on Monday that the Czech government requested explanations for the arrest of Darmovrzal in an official diplomatic note.
U.S. Department of State officials confirmed the arrest of “one member of the U.S. military” and said it was aware of unconfirmed reports regarding the other U.S. citizens to the Spanish EFE news agency on Saturday, describing the Maduro regime’s plot accusations as “categorically false.”
Quote:President of Panama José Raúl Mulino announced on Thursday that local authorities have detected an increase in U.S.-bound Chinese migrants crossing the Darién Gap jungle trail.
The Darién Gap is a 30-mile-wide, 100-mile-long jungle trail that Panama shares with neighboring Colombia and is the only land bridge between South and Central America. In recent years, a dramatic and unprecedented number of migrants have passed through the dangerous jungle trail en route to the United States.
Panama’s Migrant Authority documented 520,085 migrants who crossed the Darién Gap in 2023 — a record-breaking number that doubles the 248,284 logged in 2022. In 2021, authorities documented a total of 133,726 migrants who passed through the trail.
While Venezuelans fleeing the socialist regime in their country amply lead the statistics, Panama’s migration authority documented a notable surge in the number of U.S.-bound Chinese nationals passing through the jungle trail in recent years, going from a total of 296 in the entirety of 2010-2019 to 12,070 during the first eight months of 2024. China is now the fourth-largest group by nationality on the list.
In 2023, local authorities documented 25,565 Chinese migrants who passed through the jungle trail, up from the 2,005 logged in 2022.
“We have gone down in terms of [total migrant flow through the Darién Gap], but citizens from Nepal and China appeared in greater numbers in the last few entries,” Mulino said during a press conference.
Mulino, who took office on July 1, vowed to curb illegal immigration through the Darién Gap throughout his presidential campaign. Shortly after taking office, the new Panamanian government began installing barbed wire fences across some of the jungle trail’s routes and signed an agreement with the United States to establish U.S.-funded deportation flights that reportedly started in August. In that same month, the Panamanian government announced that it would launch deportation flight programs to China, India, Ecuador, and Colombia.
Mulino reportedly said during his Thursday press conference that his government is seeking to reach an agreement with Beijing to deport Chinese nationals passing through the Darién Gap but did not provide further details.
In August, Panamanian authorities announced that officers from the Senafront National Border Service dismantled a “VIP” route that Chinese migrants used to pass through the Darién Gap, arresting 15 individuals who managed it.
The “VIP” route, according to local prosecutors, saw its organizers offer Chinese migrants packages ranging from $2,600 to $8,000 per person for a faster, safer passage through the dangerous jungle trail. Passage through the “VIP” route allowed migrants to cross the jungle trail through a different route than the typical paths migrants take, which can take between five and eight days to complete.
According to Panamanian Prosecutor Emeldo Marquez, at least 700 migrants are believed to have paid for the exclusive route.
The Panamanian government reportedly foresees a considerable reduction of migrants passing through the Darién Gap by the end of 2024 compared to 2023 due to the closure of some trails and repatriation flights.
In addition to Panama, Ecuador began cracking down on illegal Chinese migrants passing through its territory by reinstating entry visa requirements for Chinese nationals in July, suspending a visa waiver agreement signed in January 2015 during the pro-China administration of socialist former President Rafael Correa.
While Panama vowed to curb the migrant flow passing through the Darién Gap, migrants can avoid the dangerous jungle trail altogether by flying to Nicaragua, where communist dictator Daniel Ortega maintains a policy of “weaponization” of migrants against the United States, granting U.S.-bound migrants safe passage through Nicaraguan territory in exchange for several fees and “fines” that have resulted in record-breaking profits for the communist regime.
Quote:The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) handed out 37 death sentences in connection to the May coup attempt against President Felix Tshisekedi. Six of the defendants sentenced to death are foreign nationals, and three of them are Americans.
The coup attempt on May 19, 2024, was masterminded by an eccentric opposition leader and businessman named Christian Malanga, whom security forces killed during the attempt. Malanga was a naturalized U.S. citizen who lived in Utah for more than 20 years. He was able to rope a few U.S. citizens into his coup plot, which they claimed he misrepresented as a lucrative security contract or a luxury vacation to Africa.
Some of the people Malanga tried to recruit were high school football teammates of his son, Marcel Malanga. One of those teammates, Daniel Gonzalez, said Malanga offered to pay him up to $100,000 for working four months in the DRC as a security guard. Gonzalez declined the offer because the details sounded sketchy to him.
Marcel Malanga, now 21, was one of the three American citizens sentenced to death on Friday. The other two were Tyler Thompson Jr., 21, a classmate of Marcel’s who reportedly thought he was joining the Malanga family on an African vacation, and Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun, 36, a business associate of Christian Malanga.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on Friday that the Biden administration was aware three Americans have been sentenced to death but has not yet attempted to intervene in the case or accuse the DRC of wrongfully detaining the U.S. citizens.
“We understand that the legal process in the DRC allows for defendants to appeal the court’s decision,” said Miller, referring to the five-day appeal window that DRC law permits.
“Embassy staff have been attending these proceedings as they’ve gone through the process. We continue to attend the proceedings and follow the developments closely,” Miller said.
Lawyers for the six foreigners sentenced to death sounded far less sanguine about the situation than the Biden State Department. Lawyer Richard Bondo said his clients were not given adequate interpreter services when they were investigated, so they might not have fully understood their jeopardy.
Marcel Malanga said during his trial that he does not speak the languages used in the DRC and claimed he participated in the alleged coup attempt because his father threatened to kill him.
The other three foreign nationals were a Belgian, a Canadian, and a citizen of the United Kingdom. All three were reportedly naturalized citizens of the DRC.
The Belgian, Jean-Jacques Wondo, is a military expert who claimed the Tshisekedi government asked him to consult on reforming its intelligence services. Wondo said he had nothing to do with the coup attempt but was instead framed by adversaries within the DRC intelligence apparatus. Prosecutors insisted Wondo was a key member of the coup, using his contacts within the intelligence services to keep Malanga’s operation secret until he was ready to strike.
Wondo’s wife begged Tshisekedi to grant him leniency because his health is “deteriorating” in prison, and he “urgently needs medical attention.”
Morocco: 152 Arrested for Inciting Mass Illegal Immigration
Quote:The government of Morocco announced on Friday that it arrested 152 people on charges of using social media to incite mass illegal immigration to Ceuta, a Spanish territory on the Mediterranean coast, adjacent to Morocco.
The Moroccan city of Fnideq reported that about three thousand Moroccans, mostly military-age men, attempted to rush the border fence to Ceuta. They were met by a strong deployment of both Spanish and Moroccan security forces. According to both governments, all attempts to cross the border were “foiled.”
The Spanish Interior Ministry said that none of the aspiring illegal immigrants made it into Ceuta, and the situation has been “brought under control.”
Ceuta is part of a smattering of Spanish territories along the North African coast and is an ancient city that was controlled by every empire that rolled through the region until Spain took its turn in the late 16th Century. A similar Spanish “enclave” called Melilla lies on the northern border of Morocco.
Ceuta’s long and colorful history left it with a mixed population of Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus, all of which have influenced everything from the city’s architecture to its food. The first sight that greets most visitors is a gigantic bronze statue of the Greek demigod Hercules. The beaches of Ceuta and the nearby scenic mountain of Hacho have made it a popular tourist destination.
Spain declared Ceuta autonomous in 1995 and decided to keep it that way by building an impressive double-layered border fence in 2006. Moroccans periodically try to jump the fences into both Ceuta and Melilla, hoping to get their feet on European soil that lies only a few tantalizing yards away. Some of the aspiring migrants attempt to bypass the fences by swimming around the coast.
Moroccan security officials say there have been at least 45,000 illegal immigration attempts so far in 2024, with 14,000 in August alone. One of the largest successful border penetrations occurred in May 2021, when at least 6,000 Moroccans made it into Ceuta in a single day, mostly by swimming or boating around the fences. Spain accused Moroccan officials of not doing enough to stop that particular invasion.
Morocco is not happy about the Spanish enclaves on its borders, believing those territories should rightfully belong to Morocco. Another point of simmering tension is Morocco’s accusation that Spain coddles the Polisario Front, a separatist movement of the indigenous Sahrawi people who think that a good deal of Morocco rightfully belongs to them.
Spain smoothed some ruffled Moroccan feathers by backing Morocco’s autonomy plan for Western Sahara in 2022, and the two governments share a mutual interest in not allowing thousands of Morocco’s young men to decamp to Spanish territory, so when social media influences began putting together a new border rush, both Spain and Morocco took decisive actions to thwart it.
Morocco’s intelligence agency, the DGSN, spotlighted posts on Facebook that allegedly used false information to lure Moroccan youth into swarming the border fence. Some of the migrants were reportedly sub-Saharan Africans who were hoping to push through Morocco en route to Europe.
Clashes with police broke out after the first Moroccan migrants were arrested while trying to reach Ceuta on Sunday and continued until Fnideq city officials said order had been restored on Friday. The police deployed water cannon when protesters threw stones at them.
Quote:An ancient sword that may have belonged to the army of the Egyptian pharaoh whom Moses liberated the Israelites from in the Old Testament was unearthed by archaeologists, officials say.
The bronze weapon was found in an excavation site in the Hosh Issa district of Beheira Governorate, in the northern part of the country, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a September 4 press release.
The recent archaeological mission, led by Dr. Ahmed Said El-Kharadly of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, uncovered a “series of mudbrick architectural units, including military barracks for soldiers and storage rooms for weapons, food, and provisions from the New Kingdom era.”
Numerous historical artifacts belonging to the soldiers once housed in the barracks were also found, including the sword.
The civilization’s New Kingdom era, which spanned nearly 500 years from 1550 BC to 1070 BC, was defined in part by the massive influence and power of Ramses II, the pharaoh who is thought by some scholars to be the one referenced in the Bible’s Book of Exodus.
A photo of the sword shows a hieroglyphic symbol of the pharaoh:
The Calvin Coolidge Project Wrote:Report: Egyptian archaeologists have announced that they recently discovered a bronze sword bearing the symbol of King Ramesses II, the pharaoh that scholars believe was referenced in the Book of Exodus.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
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Russia might interfere in the elections to make Harris win! 
Who am I kidding? the USAG couldn't care less about that. 
lunatic and senile as Mr. 
is or she truly cares about Kim Jong-un. 
conspiracy novels. 
