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USA

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Herschel Walker on Obama

Herschel Walker to Barack Obama: ‘Telling Us to Vote Based on Color Is a Step Backward’

Former Georgia candidate for U.S. Senate Herschel Walker blasted Barack Obama for sending black people backward in equality by demanding they vote based on skin color.

Walker’s slam against Obama came after the former president warned that not enough black people — especially black men — are supporting Harris, according to the current polls.

“Barack Obama, you forgot how hard we fought for our right to vote! Telling us how to vote based on color is a step backward. The bad policies of Biden/Harris have hurt us all. We need unity brother, not division!” Walker wrote, adding #Togetherwestand.
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Obama’s comments followed a September 30 Pew Research poll that found only 84 percent of black people said they were planning to vote for Kamala Harris for president, while 13 percent said they were backing Trump. By contrast, Joe Biden won 92 percent of the black vote in 2020.

Harris’s declining support among black people has a lot of Democrat insiders worried, and Obama voiced that worry when he visited the important swing state of Pennsylvania this week.

“We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities, as we saw when I was running,” Obama told Harris supporters in Pittsburgh.

“Now, I also want to say that seems to be more pronounced with the brothers,” Obama exclaimed. “So if you don’t mind, just for a second, I’m going to speak to y’all and say that when you have a choice that is this clear, when, on the one hand, you have somebody who grew up like you, knows you, went to college with you, understands the struggles and pain and joy that comes from those experiences.”

“She’s had to work harder and do more and overcome and achieve the second highest office in the land,” Obama insisted.

Harris on the Border

Harris on How She’d Differ from Biden on Border: I Have a Record, Will Push Path to Citizenship ‘for Hardworking People’

During a town hall with Univision on Thursday, 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris responded to a question on what she’d do differently on the border than President Joe Biden by stating she “was the top law enforcement officer of the biggest state in this country, California.” And “will put my record up against anyone in terms of the work I have always done and will always do to ensure we have a secure border” and saying that she has done work on trafficking. Harris also stated that she’ll “do the work of focusing on what we must do to have an orderly and humane pathway to earn citizenship for hardworking people.”

Harris said, “Perhaps what distinguishes me from at least a couple of people, I was the top law enforcement officer of the biggest state in this country, California. That is also a border state. I have taken on transnational criminal organizations. I have taken on transnational criminal organizations that traffic in guns, drugs, and human beings and I have prosecuted them. I led a bipartisan group of attorneys general…to Mexico City to work with Mexican attorneys general to combine intelligence and resources to prosecute those cases, including what was going south, as well as what was coming north. So, I will put my record up against anyone in terms of the work I have always done and will always do to ensure we have a secure border.”

She then turned to the Senate border bill, which Biden also supported, and stated that she has done work on trafficking.

Harris added, “I will bring back that border security bill and I will sign it into law, and do the work of focusing on what we must do to have an orderly and humane pathway to earn citizenship for hardworking people.”

Disbarment for Future Trump Lawyers?

‘Dark Money’ Group Threatens Future Trump Lawyers with Disbarment

Project 65, a “dark money” left-wing group that has targeted lawyers that represented former President Donald Trump in 2020, is now warning potential Trump attorneys that they could be disbarred for working for him.

In an ad posted on Instagram, and apparently targeted at lawyers, Project 65 warns: “Don’t let partisan politics endanger your standing with the bar. The Porter Wright Partners face ethics complaints over Trump campaign post-election work. Don’t risk your law license by joining an effort to subvert democracy. We – and the public – are watching.”

Porter Wright is a firm that represented Trump in Pennsylvania in 2020. Its lawyers withdrew from representing Trump mere days after the November election after coming under intense pressure.

The “ethics complaints” referred to in the Project 65 ad were brought in 2022 by Project 65 itself against Ronald Hicks and Carolyn McGee, who were partners at Porter Wright at the time. Both now work for another firm, Nelson Mullins; they withdrew from representing Trump before the first hearing in his election challenges even took place. The Pennsylvania Office of Disciplinary Counsel does not appear to have taken any action against either of them.

As Breitbart News reported in 2022, Project 65 was launched with help from David Brock, the Hillary Clinton ally behind such groups as Media Matters. It does not disclose its donors, but has “ties to Democratic Party heavyweights,” Axios reported.

As Breitbart News later reported, Project 65’s “ongoing efforts to prosecute, disbar, and smear attorneys who served as election lawyers for President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign could leave Republicans short of legal talent for the election fight in November 2024.” Some 100 attorneys have reportedly been targeted.

Now, Project 65 is threatening attorneys who simply might be considering working for Trump, suggesting in the ad that merely representing him could “endanger” their “standing with the bar.”

The American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct declare: “A lawyer should use the law’s procedures only for legitimate purposes and not to harass or intimidate others.”

The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right “to have the Assistance of Counsel” in criminal proceedings, of which Trump faces several.

ICE Contractor Smuggling Immigrants

ICE Contractor Used Charter Bus to Smuggle Migrants, Says Prosecutor

Prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas allege that a contractor for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement used a charter bus to move a large group of illegal migrants north. The defendants allegedly claimed they were transporting legal unaccompanied minors that her company was hired to move.

U.S. Border Patrol agents arrested 35-year-old Nancy Berenice Fernandez Luna last week during a smuggling attempt, court records revealed. Luna was riding in a bus with 39 adult illegal migrants and Jose Torres Ayala, who is also facing human smuggling charges. Dave Hendricks first reported the case for CBS4.

During the encounter with agents, Fernandez Luna reportedly presented her work (ICE contractor) ID, identifying her as an employee of MVM Inc.. This company contracts for ICE and the Office of Refugee Resettlement. The court documents revealed that she told the agent that the bus was moving a group of unaccompanied minors who were COVID-19 positive.

The agents told her to wait while they contacted a local processing center to verify the information, and that is when Fernandez and Torres allegedly closed the bus doors and tried to flee. Agents stopped the bus shortly after and had the driver return to a secondary inspection area. There, authorities learned that the migrants were not unaccompanied minors with status but adult illegal migrants being moved by a human smuggling group.

Border Patrol agents arrested Fernandez, Torres, and 39 adult migrants that were inside the bus. Torres Ayala told authorities he was being paid $1,800 for the trip.

According to CBS4, during a hearing in McAllen on Wednesday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Nadia Medrano set Fernandez’s bond at $50,000 and ordered that if she can post the bond, she must be subject to GPS monitoring.

Educating Immigrant Children is Too Expensive

Catering to Non-English Speaking Kids Sends Education Costs Skyrocketing

The education budgets for America’s small towns and states are skyrocketing as the huge wave of of the Biden-Harris administration’s migrant children are diverted into American primary schools.

As these migrants flood into public schools, administrators are shifting more budget dollars towards dealing with children who speak a dozen different languages, and some who have had little or no education in their home countries before they came to the U.S., and this shift of budget dollars necessarily takes resources away from native students.

The surge began in 2021 when Biden’s ill-fated border policies kicked into high gear and caused a continually growing influx of English Language Learners (ELL) who have to be taught English before being taught the rest of a school’s curriculum. Swing state Pennsylvania, for instance, saw a 40 percent rise in the number of EEL students, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The huge number of non-English speaking students has caused schools to rush to hire staffers who can speak more than just English and Spanish. And the problem is not merely the huge amount of money these new resources cost, but it has raised the issue of where to actually find the potential employees to fill that role.

Again, looking at Pennsylvania’s experience, in 2020 the state reported that there were 71,766 ELL students. By this year, though, that number had blown up to 99,889 such students, a 40 percent rise.

Another contrast was seen in these numbers, as well, in that the number of native-born American students declined during that same time period.

The situation is redounding negatively for American students, the DNCF noted. One parent said that her daughter lost the opportunity to enroll in Head Start in her small Pennsylvania town of Charleroi because the district had to shift resources to cater to a large increase in Haitian children who had entered school.

The Charleroi school budget is telling. In 2020, the school had spent $105,000 on ELL students. But by this year that cost had skyrocketed to $505,000 as the city’s school district saw a 1,100 percent increase in ELL students, most of who are Haitian.

EUROPE

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UK: New Tax for Traveling Around the Country

A Tax on Everything: Prepare For ‘Big Brother’ Road Pricing, Says UK Infrastructure Advisor

The British government is set to miss out on billions in tax on gasoline and diesel after it pushed drivers to adopt electric cars instead, and will want to make up the shortfall by taxing road users per mile instead, a senior government advisor says.

Britain faces a future of “Big Brother is watching you” style cameras tracking drivers so they can be billed for using roads as the government’s policy decisions to incentivise electric vehicles (EVs) means it stands to miss out on billions of pounds of tax money from drivers a year.

In the United Kingdom, two of the major ways in which drivers are taxed is through Vehicle excise duty (‘car tax’), paid once a year and scaling on the type of car, and fuel duty paid at the pump when refuelling. But EVs don’t pay either of these taxes, and while electricity is not tax free — some tax and levies are charged on domestic electric use — the government is congenitally unable to cut its cloth according to its means and will look to other sources, says the chair of the National Infrastructure Commission Sir John Armitt.

Speaking at a conference on transport infrastructure on Thursday, Sir John said the government could either fund roads in future through general taxation, or find a way to tax electric vehicles, states The Guardian. He spoke particularly of what is called road pricing, where cars are taxed depending on how far they drive. In some cases this already exists, such as toll roads — although these are very rare in the UK now — or with London’s congestion charge.

A simple approach is to use the annual mileage of cars, as already recorded in the annual government mandated roadworthiness tests (MOTs), to see how far a car has been driven in any given 12-month to issue a bill based on that. But as expressed by Sir John, the government may wish to go for a more intrusive system. He said: “People would probably not like this in terms of ‘Big Brother is watching you,’ [but] you could pay a different rate, per time of day, per type of road you were driving on, anywhere in the country, and you just get a bill.”

On the government seeking to make up the money it lost on the push for electric, he said: “It’s politically a very difficult issue isn’t it? But many people will say road pricing is inevitable. Personally, I don’t see why it should be any different to anything else… We pay for all our other infrastructure services as we use them, and we pay for driving on the road, as we use it, via petrol tax. And if you’re going to lose the petrol tax, at [more than] £30bn a year, what is government going to replace it with?”.

The Guardian notes the government believes close to 100-per-cent of cars on British roads will be electric by 2045 assuming ban on new internal combustion engine cars in 2035 goes ahead. This is by no means certain of course, given it is easy for governments to announce such grand plans when they are so far in the future, when most of those involved will have retired by the time the tough decision comes. As it is, such decisions have been walked back several times in European nations including Britain already as the harsh reality bites, and may again in years to come.

NATO on Trump

New Head of NATO Hails Good Working Relationship With Donald Trump

A top globalist politician once hailed as the “Trump whisperer” who is now the Secretary General of NATO says he foresees a good relationship with whoever wins the U.S. Presidential elections next month, disarming some legacy criticism that Donald Trump is somehow a danger to the Western alliance.

Former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has been the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) for 11 days, a position he secured to some extent on his strength as a rare internationalist-globalist who publicly made nice with President Trump while he was in office. He visited London on Thursday for talks with the British Prime Minister and with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and while there appeared to lay groundwork to continue his working relationship with Trump should he be President again.

Rutte told The Times of London that: “I’ve worked very well with him for four years … it will work out [whoever becomes president] because in the end they both want to keep the US safe and to keep the US safe they need Nato.” He said he’s had a “good relationship” with Trump in the past, and said: “I respect him a lot and I think if he gets elected I can work with him”.

Trump having a good attitude to NATO is not just a matter of personal relationships, Rutte claimed, saying in an increasingly unstable world the alliance would simply become even more important to Washington. He told the paper: “For all allies in Nato, big or small, you cannot do it alone. You have to be a member of strong alliances and organisations like Nato … This goes back to Trump, I know that he knows it…. In a harsh, uncompromising world, he needs the alliance”.

While the former Dutch Prime Minister said he was confident things would go well whoever won the White House, he also showed he was onboard with Trump talking points on NATO, signalling he was fully conversant with the former President’s long-stated position that the two-per-cent spend on defence for each alliance member should be consigned to history. It is “not enough”, Rutte stated, saying a discussion had to happen where NATO members decide whether that means the new spending floor should be two-and-a-half or three per cent.

“I think it has to go up … we have more to do and we have to make sure that there is no capability gap”, Rutte is reported to have said.

France: A New Political Party is Born

Populist Firebrand Marion Maréchal Launches ‘Identity-Liberties’ Political Party in Paris and Brussels

Scion to the Le Pen family political dynasty Marion Maréchal launched a new political party this week entitled “Identity-Liberties” as she vows to confront the spread of wokism, mass migration, and the Islamisation of her homeland of France and at the EU level.

Fresh off a victory in the recent European Elections earning herself a seat in the EU Parliament, Maréchal announced the formation of a new political party with the express purpose of helping nationalists take power in France, notably including her aunt, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen.

“I am 34 years old and have two little girls, I live in a ruined country, fractured and infected by insecurity: my obsession is that the national camp wins. This is the only objective of the movement Identity-Liberties that I am launching!” the populist politician said.

Maréchal explained that identity and freedom are the “two major markers of our fight”, warning that “massive immigration, the Islamization of our society continues to progress; wokism is spreading in our schools and universities, and deconstructors are attacking all the load-bearing walls of our civilization.”

Noting that another dissolution of the French National Assembly is “likely” coming next year and that there is the possibility of an early presidential election to replace Emmanuel Macron, Maréchal said that “it is necessary to strengthen and expand the national camp coalition that emerged during the June 2024 legislative elections.”

Because of her alliances made within the pre-existing Reconquête party, Maréchal’s party will hit the ground running with members already placed in both the French and EU parliaments.

In Strasbourg, the Identity-Liberties party will have four MEPs under its banner, including Maréchal as well as Guillaume Peltier, Nicolas Bay, and Laurence Trochu. They will continue to sit with the Giorgia Meloni-led European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in the EU Parliament.

Russia Attacks Odesa Again

Russia Launched Fresh Strikes Against Ukraine’s Odesa, Fourth in a Week

A nighttime Russian missile strike on Odesa killed at least four people including a 16-year-old girl, regional authorities said Friday, in the latest in a series of attacks this week on the southern Ukrainian region that are likely intended to disrupt the country´s grain exports.

Four Russian missile and drone attacks on the Odesa region this week have killed 14 people and wounded around 20, according to local officials. The strikes have hit merchant ships and damaged port infrastructure in the region, which is a vital hub for Ukraine´s agricultural exports through the Black Sea.

An attack on Odesa late Wednesday killed nine people and hit a container ship sailing under the Panamanian flag – the third attack on a merchant vessel in four days, according to regional Gov. Oleh Kiper.

The apparent Russian effort to frustrate Ukraine´s exports, which bring vital revenue for a national economy battered by more than two years of war, coincided with a renewed push by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to ensure continuing military and financial support from his country´s Western partners.

Ukraine´s stretched and short-handed army is currently under heavy pressure in the country´s eastern Donetsk region. Russian forces recently pushed it out of the Donetsk town of Vuhledar and are now in control of about half of nearby Toretsk, local administration chief Vasyl Chynchyk said Friday. To stop the losses, Zelenskyy needs to secure more help.

Russia last year tore up an agreement that allowed Ukraine – one of the world´s biggest suppliers of grain and other food staples, especially to developing nations – to export produce safely through the Black Sea.

Months later, and amid successful Ukrainian attacks on Russia´s Black Sea fleet which forced its navy to back away from the coast, Ukraine established a shipping corridor that hugs the coast down to Turkey and opens a way to the Mediterranean Sea.

A special insurance program has provided affordable coverage to shippers who have carried millions of tons of cargo out of Ukraine, but the latest attacks could jeopardize that arrangement.

ASIA

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Taiwanese Don't Expect US to Help Them Fight the CCP

Poll: Most Taiwanese Would Fight Chinese Invasion, but Only Half Expect America to Help

Nearly 70 percent of Taiwanese people would be “very willing or somewhat willing” to personally take up arms in the event of a Chinese communist invasion, a poll released Wednesday revealed, while a much smaller percentage expect the United States to use its navy to fight an attempted Chinese blockade of the island.

The poll, conducted by the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, found that 64 percent of Taiwanese respondents considered Chinese “territorial ambition” a “serious threat.” Only 23.6 percent of respondents said they would not be open to fighting in a war to prevent Chinese conquest.

While most, 67.8 percent, said they would willing to fight to defend Taiwan from China, over half, 61 percent, of Taiwanese respondents said they believed it unlikely that the Communist Party would invade in the next five years. They also did not appear overwhelmingly confident in their friendly relations with the United States. Over 52 percent of respondents told the think tank that they believed America would send troops to help defend against China, but only about 40 percent said Washington would deploy the navy to help stop a Taiwanese blockade.

Taiwan is a sovereign island country off the coast of China, formally known as the Republic of China. It maintains an independent, democratic political leadership, as well as other core government institutions such as its military, healthcare system, and social safety net. The island has never in its history been governed by a regime based in Beijing.

Despite this, communist China insists that the Taiwanese government does not exist and the island is legitimate a province of China. The Communist Party refers to this as the “One-China principle,” insisting that the “Republic of China” is a dangerous separatist organization and claiming it rightfully controls the island. Chinese dictator Xi Jinping regularly hints at planning to invade and colonize the Island, and the Chinese Coast Guard routinely harasses Taiwanese in the South China Sea. While Xi has toned down some of Beijing’s anti-Taiwan rhetoric in more recent years, the genocidal tyrant promised in 2019 that anyone recognizing the reality of Taiwan’s independence would have their “bones ground to powder.”

The vast majority of world powers, including the United States, refuse to recognize Taiwan’s sovereignty as doing so would automatically result in severed diplomatic and economic ties with China. Washington’s official stance is slightly less severe than Beijing’s, however – the United States follows the “One-China policy,” which states that there is only one China in the world but does not specify whether its capital is Beijing or Taipei. America sells military gear to Taiwan and allows its government limited diplomatic representation in America.

This week’s poll revealing that many Taiwanese do not expect full backing from the United States in the event of the invasion follows a confusing and turbulent four years under President Joe Biden. Biden has repeatedly claimed, falsely, that the United States has a formal commitment to defend Taiwan militarily in the event of a Chinese invasion, forcing the State Department to rapidly issue clarifications that no such mutual defense treaty exists. While Biden’s comments have been defensive of Taiwan, his administration has on occasion hurt Taiwan’s defenses. In September, the U.S. Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General (DoD OIG) revealed, for example, that the DOD sent Taiwan shipments of military equipment that were “unserviceable,” in some cases covered in mold.

Taiwanese Travelers Missing in China

Dozens of Taiwanese Travelers Missing in China

The Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), a semi-official organization created by the government of Taiwan, reported last week that at least 40 Taiwanese travelers went missing in communist China over the past year and remain unreachable.

SEF Secretary-General Luo Wen-jia said there were about 30 additional cases in which missing Taiwanese had been contacted by his agency. Most of those people had arranged their own “disappearances” for “personal reasons,” or because they were fleeing from the law. Luo gave the example of a 22-year-old Taiwanese man who traveled to China and “disappeared” because he was fleeing from a fraud investigation.

Luo suggested many of the 40-plus unexplained and unresolved disappearances involved young Taiwanese who traveled to China seeking job opportunities. China was making a big push to lure Taiwanese workers and entrepreneurs to the mainland before the Chinese economy turned sour during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

The SEF chief tartly advised young Taiwanese to remember that China’s unemployment rate is stratospheric these days, especially for young people.

“Youth unemployment has risen so high that no more high-paying jobs would be left for Taiwanese,” he said. “People should have some common sense.”

Luo advised young Taiwanese to be suspicious of “highly profitable” job offers from the mainland, and cautioned his audience that the Chinese Communist government could arrest them and make them disappear at any moment, since it has nothing resembling Western or Taiwanese standards for the rule of law.

China has sidelined its effort to pull Taiwanese ashore with dubious job offers, and instead is trying to lure them with easy tourist visas known as “Taiwan Compatriot Permits.”

However, Beijing is also cracking down on anyone it views as a “Taiwan independence separatist,” a very vague charge that could get almost anyone from Taiwan tossed in jail without due process.

In fact, the “22 guidelines” published by the Chinese Communist government in June for dealing with “Taiwanese separatists” include the death penalty. Members of the U.S. Congressional Taiwan Caucus promptly condemned these guidelines as a “significant threat to peace and stability in the region.”

Shortly after the 22 guidelines were announced, the Taiwanese Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) upgraded its travel alert warning for China, Hong Kong, and Macau, and advised Taiwanese citizens to avoid traveling to Chinese territory unless absolutely necessary.

MIDDLE EAST

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IDF Denounces Village Full of Hezbollah's Weapons

WATCH: IDF Shows Village Where ‘Every House’ Is a Hezbollah Terror Base

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) released photographs and videos Thursday from a village in southern Lebanon where “every house” was turned into a Hezbollah terrorist facility, preparing for a future attack on Israel’s Galilee region.

IDF Spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari published a video, in English, in which he toured the ruins of a home raided by Israeli soldiers — a home where a vast arsenal of Hezbollah weapons had been stored, he said, as part of “Operation: Conquer the Galilee.”

The IDF exposed that plan earlier this month, noting that Hezbollah had used Iranian weapons to prepare for an attack on Israel’s civilian towns far bigger than the Hamas attack of October 7.
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Israel’s northern border communities have been evacuated since October 2023 due to Hezbollah fire, which began without provocation after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. More than 60,000 Israelis have been displaced.

Under the ceasefire deal cemented in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the Second Lebanon War in 2006, Hezbollah was supposed to have left southern Lebanon, and the only armed forces in the area were supposed to be the Lebanese military and United Nations peacekeeping troops.

Instead, Hezbollah continued to stockpile weapons in the border region, often building dual-purpose civilian homes and settlements in the area.

The IDF is conducting what it calls limited and targeted operations in southern Lebanon to remove Hezbollah outposts near the Israeli border. It is also launching airstrikes on Hezbollah leaders and bases elsewhere in Lebanon.

LATIN AMERICA

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Milei Blocks Irresponsible University Spending Bill

Milei Blocks ‘Irresponsible’ University Spending Bonanza, Prompting Leftist Riots

Argentine lawmakers voted on Wednesday to uphold President Javier Milei’s veto of a controversial university financing bill that the government denounced as jeopardizing its fiscal balance and economic recovery goals.

Milei’s veto was upheld after the motion failed to obtain the two-thirds of votes required to overturn it in the lower house, with 85 yays and 159 nays. Milei’s party, Liberty Advances, does not have a majority in Congress. Argentine leftists responded to the president’s veto with violent protests, calling to strike and take over universities.

The bill, initially passed by opposition lawmakers in both chambers of the Argentine Congress in September, sought to dramatically increase funding for Argentina’s 60 public universities, and included provisions to update the universities’ budgets on a monthly basis based on inflation, retroactive to December 1, 2023.

The proposal appeared to be a gesture of defiance against Milei, who took office on December 13 promising a series of “shock therapy” economic measures to overturn years of difficulties that dramatically worsened during the administration of socialist former President Alberto Fernández (2019-2023). Milei’s policies have resulted in a reduction of inflation in Argentina, going from 25 percent in December to four percent in August. Milei has fiercely maintained that his “zero deficit” goal is non-negotiable.

Milei formally vetoed the bill last week. The Argentine president explained in an official statement that the “irresponsible” proposal did not specify where the resources to increase the universities’ budgets would come from. The statement further asserted that Milei will veto any bill that infringes on fiscal balance.

Colombia: Probe into Petro's Campaign Finance

Colombia: Election Officials Open Campaign Finance Probe into Socialist President

Colombia’s National Electoral Council (CNE) opened an investigation and filed charges on Tuesday against the nation’s far-left President Gustavo Petro and members of his 2022 presidential campaign for alleged violations of spending limits.

According to the electoral authority, Petro’s campaign stands accused of exceeding the established campaign spending limits and receiving prohibited funding from legal entities in accordance with Colombian law. Petro responded to the accusations by claiming that the investigation is part of a purported “coup” plot to overthrow his leftist government.

Petro, a former member of the Marxist M19 guerilla, took office as Colombia’s first-ever leftist president in August 2022 after defeating outsider businessman Rodolfo Hernández in the June 2022 runoff election with 50.44 percent of the votes. Petro ran as the candidate of the “Historic Pact for Colombia,” a coalition of leftist parties and organizations that includes Humane Colombia, a party founded by Petro.

Following five-month-long proceedings that reportedly included multiple postponements and a four-hour long deliberation period on Tuesday, seven out of CNE’s nine total magistrates voted in favor of presenting charges against Petro, his campaign manager and current CEO of the state-owned oil company Ecopetrol Ricardo Roa, and three other individuals that worked in the president’s 2022 campaign. The charges involved the “alleged violation of the financing regime of electoral campaigns” across both rounds of the election.

In addition to Petro and the four former top members of his campaign, the Humane Colombia party and Patriotic Union — a party founded by members of the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) terrorist organization — are also part of the investigation. According to CNE’s statement, both parties were designated by the Historic Pact for Colombia coalition as responsible for the audit and presentation of income and expense reports of the Colombian President’s campaign to the corresponding authorities.

During the first round of the election, CNE detailed through its press release, Petro’s campaign allegedly overspent some 3.7 billion Colombian pesos (roughly $876,750) by omitting to properly report several contributions, loans, and payments made by the campaign at the time.

The alleged overspending of Petro’s campaign during the second round of the election, CNE further explained, totaled some $1.64 billion pesos (roughly $389,100) and stems from the campaign’s omission in payment and contributions reports.

In addition, the electoral authority accused Petro’s campaign of having engaged in prohibited financing by receiving several contributions from legal entities in violation of the law — accusing the Humane Colombia and Patriotic Union parties of allegedly allowing said prohibited financing.