Author: admin

Exclusive: Incinerator industry tried to delay plans to close ‘loophole’ and force firms to pay for CO2 emissions

On Sunday night, violence broke out in the Century Rio movie theater in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after a dispute over reserved seating quickly escalated. What began as a disagreement between two couples ended in tragedy with the fatal shooting of a 52-year-old man, soon identified as Michael Tenorio.

Witnesses report that the dispute unfolded when Tenorio and his wife were moved into different seats than purchased due to an employee suggesting they sit together. There was apparently pushback from the younger couple, who had also reserved seats for the 8:50 p.m. screening of the R-rated Jennifer Lawrence sex comedy “No Hard Feelings.” Popcorn was reportedly thrown, further escalating the confrontation, leading to Tenorio pushing one of them back up against a wall and, seconds later, shots ringing out.

Enrique Padilla, 19, the man allegedly seen by Tenorio’s wife as having a green laser was apprehended after being found hiding in some nearby bushes. He has been charged with one count each of homicide, shooting at an occupied building, and tampering with evidence.

In response, the Albuquerque Police Department has taken to Twitter, asking anyone with video evidence of the incident to submit the footage to their portal, ensuring all available information is considered in the investigation.

This case is a sobering reminder of the need for respect for others and security measures in public places. Further, it serves as a testament to public information’s power in understanding a situation’s truth and ensuring justice is served.

Mere months ago, the Right looked to have secured a political stranglehold on Canada’s largest city for the foreseeable future. Last night, Olivia Chow beat the odds and proved that a social democratic message can win at the municipal level.

Toronto mayoral elect Olivia Chow delivers a speech after winning the mayoral by-election at the Great Hall in Toronto, Ontario on June 26, 2023. (Mert Alper Dervis / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

From its outset, Toronto’s mayoral election has been full of surprises — the first of them being that it happened at all. Last October, as turnout plummeted to a record low, incumbent mayor John Tory was reelected with a whopping 62 percent of the vote. An ally of conservative premier Doug Ford, who had just gifted him with tailor-made strong mayor powers, Tory looked poised to govern the city for as long as he wanted, effectively consolidating a right-wing stranglehold on Canada’s largest city for the foreseeable future.

When Tory suddenly resigned after admitting to an affair with a younger staffer just four months later, there was no particular reason to think that the underlying dynamic would shift. Both former police chief Mark Saunders and Tory ally Ana Bailão evidently assumed as much and undertook developer-friendly, anti-tax campaigns firmly anchored on the Right. For all the spin that former New Democratic Party MP Olivia Chow’s polling amounted to name recognition and little else, her victory last night represented the triumph of municipal progressivism over these assumptions.

Having finished third in the 2014 mayoral race, Chow began the campaign with numbers in the low twenties and finished with a vote share in the high thirties. Chow’s message, reinforced by personal authenticity and disciplined debate performances, successfully punched through despite a near ceaseless pile-on from virtually every other major candidate. On housing, homelessness, transit, taxes, and crime, right-wing candidates mounted all of the familiar arguments and lost. Even as the local Liberal and Conservative machines went into overdrive with the singular goal of preventing such an outcome, the alternative won.

In a city with crumbling infrastructure and soaring rents, Chow successfully made the case for both a vacant homes and a mansion tax — pledging to direct the revenues into new public housing construction. Her campaign also emphasized the plight of renters and Toronto’s more than ten thousand homeless, promising a rent supplement and new shelter space. Coupled with more funding for libraries, public services, and transit in underserviced areas, her campaign embraced a social democratic message and, against the odds, has broken the pattern of right-wing rule that has predominated since Rob Ford’s election some thirteen years ago. Aside from David Miller (mayor between 2003 and 2010), Chow will be the only nonconservative who has governed Toronto since its amalgamation into a unified city in 1998. Born in Hong Kong and raised from age thirteen in the working-class neighborhood of St James Town, her victory also marks a long-overdue development in one of the world’s most diverse metropoles.

As the old cliche goes, the real battle begins now. Chow, who has pledged not to use strong mayor powers, will need to be bold and aggressive in pursuit of her agenda, and the Right will be no less devious in resisting it than it was in opposing her candidacy. Nonetheless, that conservatives have been handed such a significant and unexpected defeat is worth celebrating in and of itself.

While elite consolidation around Bailão succeeded in giving her a last minute boost, other right-wing candidates — notably Toronto’s onetime police chief Saunders — got rinsed. Anthony Furey, best known as a columnist for the Toronto Sun tabloid, went all-in on anti-homeless rhetoric and placed a distant fourth with less than 5 percent of the vote — despite the endorsements of Jordan Peterson and two senior former federal cabinet ministers. Brad Bradford, a sitting city councilor who incessantly averred against public sector “bureaucracy” and was initially viewed as a serious contender, received less than ten thousand votes out of the more than seven hundred thousand cast (1.28 percent).

In light of all this, Chow’s victory, much like Brandon Johnson’s in Chicago, points to a wider shift in North America’s municipal political terrain. The Right’s standard political arsenal was deployed in the usual, nakedly cynical form, and a social democrat was elected instead. However conservatives may attempt to spin this result, it represents both a mandate for change and a welcome repudiation of the austerity politics that have dominated Toronto since 2010. Who knows? Perhaps the fever of neoliberalism is finally beginning to break.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post Enough of the Ukrainian Clown Show! Ukraine and the “Borderlands”. Historical Analysis appeared first on Global Research.

This past weekend’s attempted insurrection in Russia is a reminder of the self-defeating stupidity of Vladimir Putin’s invasion. It should also be a reminder of the profound dangers of attempting to carry out regime change.

Members of Wagner Group stand on the balcony of the circus building in the city of Rostov-on-Don, on June 24, 2023. (Roman Romokhov / AFP via Getty Images)

In a war that’s continually confounded expectations and brought us to the brink of World War III more than once, you’d think by now we would have lost the ability to be surprised by developments in Ukraine. And yet, life finds a way, as this past weekend saw the most serious challenge to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s rule and the stability of the Russian state more generally in his nearly two decades in power.

Last Friday, mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched what was, depending on who you ask, either a mutiny, a coup attempt, or a protest against the Russian government, after months of bubbling resentment at what he viewed as his soldiers’ mistreatment at the hands of an incompetent military leadership. Some commentators have expressed suspicion that Prigozhin’s real motivation was the Kremlin’s June announcement that his private military company, the Wagner Group, would be coming directly under the control of the Russian Ministry of Defense, leading Prigozhin to make a play to try and secure his moneymaker.

Whatever the exact truth, the result was alarming scenes of Wagner troops and tanks rolling unopposed into Russian cities, seizing military headquarters, shooting down Russian military helicopters, and announcing that they were making a beeline toward Moscow, with Prigozhin calling for the removal of Russia’s top military leaders. Though short-lived in the end, the Kremlin clearly took the threat seriously, barricading roads into the capital, mobilizing Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s troops to meet the rebellion, and putting out videotaped statements from military and other officials calling on Prigozhin to stop what he was doing and for Wagner troops not to follow.

The most obvious takeaway from all this is the self-defeating folly of war as a means to resolve national and geopolitical problems. Russian security, let alone the stability of Putin’s rule, would undoubtedly be in a better place today had he listened to his foreign minister and continued diplomatic efforts in late February 2022 — or even if he had simply done nothing at all. As it is, Putin has brought upon the Russian population — whose interests he’s meant to be serving — painful sanctions, global stigma, a stream of terrorist attacks, the possibility of nuclear annihilation, and now, the threat of civil war and the possible violent overthrow of the government. A war supposedly launched for the sake of Russian national security has ended up the most damaging thing to it.

Ironically, Putin himself had once upon a time understood this, watching the unfolding US-made disaster in Iraq, which was born from the same arrogance and shortsightedness that drove his own war of choice last year, and at one point warning that “the use of force rarely brings the hoped-for results, and its consequences at times are more terrible than the original threat.” Yet he evidently failed to learn from this and is now trapped in his own self-made quagmire, one that, even if and when this war is mercifully over, will continue to be a festering problem for himself and whichever Russian leader follows. There’s a lesson here, too, for US elites, who continue to inch toward their own war with Iran while simultaneously threatening, absurdly, to attack Mexico — if they would dare to learn it.

Another lesson: the danger of private military outfits, another issue that’s hardly foreign to the US political landscape, where Blackwater’s Erik Prince has turned his hand in recent years to domestic political spying, alongside the increasingly common political meddling by a host of other former intelligence officials. It turns out that there’s a good reason for governments to have a monopoly on the use of violence, particularly if part of giving up that monopoly means letting the competition stockpile weapons and ammunition without check. But Wagner’s very existence in the first place can’t be separated from Moscow’s geopolitical hubris, since it was a way for the Russian elite to fulfill their great power pretensions, intervening way beyond Russian borders without leaving the Kremlin’s fingerprints on the scene or incurring the political costs of too many dead Russian troops.

Yet Putin is not the only one here dealing with a deadly case of buyer’s remorse, driven by a failure to think through the risks of foreign policy gambles and to consider the laws of unintended consequences. Since the start of the invasion, there’s been an outpouring of hopes and prayers from the US and European foreign policy establishments that Putin’s faltering war effort would mean the end of his rule — whether by triggering a palace coup, a popular uprising, or the collapse of the Russian state — and even the disintegration of Russia. Meanwhile, US defense secretary Lloyd Austin has said that the goal of US policy toward the war was “to see Russian weakened,” US officials have openly modeled their strategy on the US response to the USSR’s Afghanistan invasion (which helped trigger the Soviet Union’s collapse), and senior officials have both privately and publicly expressed hopes that the war would lead to regime change in Russia.

Prigozhin’s coup attempt seems to have violently shaken awake at least some of those pining for this outcome, as the reality of what serious Russian destabilization would mean came frighteningly close to fruition. In the wake of the episode, Edgars Rinkevics — current foreign minister and incoming president of Latvia, one of the collection of Eastern European states that had reportedly been most resistant to an early ceasefire if it meant inflicting less damage to Russia — told the Washington Post that “if there is chaos in Moscow,” it brings up “the same question people were asking back in 1991” when the Soviet Union dissolved: “Who controls the nuclear football?”

A senior NATO official likewise told the outlet that the country’s massive nuclear stockpile means that “we don’t want a Russia that is too weak” or “a failed state.” At G7 talks, while members discussed the possible disastrous scenarios ahead, officials stated that “we are not in the business of regime change,” that “the message to those getting carried away is that nobody wins from civil war in Russia,” and that someone more hardline than Putin could take power in Russia, with one concluding that “we are not in agreement on the outcomes of what will happen if Ukraine wins this war and what that will do to Russia.” Since the weekend, US intelligence analysts, officials, and commentators all registered alarm at the Russian nuclear arsenal falling under the control of rogue actors or extremists, including some who had just days earlier appeared to cheer the coup on.

What’s particularly striking about all this is that not long ago, to express any of these concerns and suggest that the highest priority should be to avoid such disaster was deemed unacceptable, appeasement, and giving in to nuclear blackmail.

But special mention is owed to the commentariat, which, with notable exceptions, has performed abysmally throughout this war, scraping what might be new lows over the weekend. A dearth of reliable information and an event unfolding in real time didn’t stop the usual pundits from scrambling to make sweeping pronouncements that didn’t come to pass, from declaring the imminent collapse of the Russian government and Putin’s presidency, to the all but certain turning of the tide in the war and even its end, sprinkled with the usual amateur Kremlinology and premature declarations of who won and who lost.

Maybe most shameful was the sight of numerous prominent voices actively cheering on the prospect of Wagner succeeding in their coup — even though, as we’ve been told throughout the war, they’re not just vicious war criminals who have been demanding that Putin escalate the war and domestic repression, but are comprised partly of Nazis and other extremists.

As Prigozhin and his men advanced on Moscow, former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul criticized these “better-the-devil-you-know hot takes I’m seeing” as he shared an earlier post he’d written asserting that even if a right-wing coup came to Russia, “I’m not convinced that it would be worse than having Putin in the Kremlin,” but that “things eventually might get better.” Financier and prominent Putin critic Bill Browder assured people that “there’s a chance if [Prigozhin] wins, the war would end,” while that would be “impossible” with Putin. The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, who just last month told her readers that “even the worst successor imaginable, even the bloodiest general or most rabid propagandist, will immediately be preferable to Putin,” giddily floated the prospect of revolution. A variety of liberal commentators openly celebrated what was at minimum the possibility of violent, destabilizing conflict in a country with the world’s largest nuclear stockpile.

It vividly illustrated one of the problems of this war on the Western side. Engulfed in a war fever that went into overdrive last year, US and European discourse has become dominated by a single-minded fixation on schadenfreude and vengeance toward the figure of Putin, at the expense of just about any other consideration, including the risks of nuclear disaster and destabilization. In the process, one of the chief lessons of Iraq and other US misadventures — that no matter how vile, authoritarian, and prone to foreign aggression a leader is, the consequences of toppling them from power are dangerously unpredictable — seems to have been lost in a jingoistic amnesia.

It’s an amnesia that’s shared, ironically, by both Putin and his fiercest adversaries in the West as they each point the finger at the other. The hope is that, together with a robust peace movement making demands of our political leadership to finally bring this war to a close, this episode might trigger a jolt of remembering for them all. But don’t get too complacent: if there’s one thing this conflict has taught us, it’s how fast, easy, and comforting it is to forget.

The Christian missionaries operate not only among assimilated Jews, but also within the religious communities, King said. “This is something that was revealed to us for the first time.”

By World Israel News Staff

In an interview with Israel National News (INN), Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem Arieh King discussed Christian missionaries’ claims of success in converting tens of thousands of Jewish Israelis to believers in Christ, including from the religious Zionist community.

King said that at the Pentecost 2023 event that took place outside the Temple Mount on May 28, he and some others who were with him spoke to a man named Chad Holland, a Messiance Jew in Jerusalem, who said that there are approximately 20-30,000 others like him in Israel.

“He added that there are many more who have not revealed that they accepted Jesus as their leader and as their idol, and they do it in hiding,” King told INN.

“He also said that they operate within the religious communities in Jerusalem. This is something that was revealed to us for the first time.”

King continued: “Another woman who was interviewed there said that they send children with missionary material to kindergartens, and through them they attract the Jewish children to stories about ‘that man.’”

According to King, it has become clear that missionaries succeed not only with assimilated Jews or those with no religious education; all Jews, even the religious – whether haredi or Modern Orthodox – are targets.

“It could very well be that he [Holland] was merely boasting to raise funds, but I can testify, as someone who walks the streets of Jerusalem a lot, that the number is much greater than before the coronavirus,” King said. “I hear about materials in mailboxes in every neighborhood in the city…

“When you can reach so many people, you would have to be well- connected. He may be from Paris, but there is no doubt that there is a much larger number of Messianic Jews and missionaries on the streets of Jerusalem.”

The post Missionaries target Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem and meet success, says deputy mayor appeared first on World Israel News.

The “extensive and precedent-setting” effort confiscated millions of dollars earmarked for terrorism.

By JNS

Israel has for the first time seized cryptocurrency wallets tied to Iran’s Quds Force and Lebanon-based Hezbollah terror proxy, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant revealed on Tuesday.

The “extensive and precedent-setting” effort over the past week resulted in the confiscation of millions of dollars worth of digital currency earmarked for terrorism, Gallant said.

The Quds Force is the branch of Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible for external operations.

“Whoever finances terror or maintains economic ties to terror groups are targets, just like those directing terrorism,” Gallant said.

“There is a clear connection to terror that originates in Iran, which is the financier and purveyor of terrorism against Israel and many countries around the world, both directly and through its proxies,” he added.

The Quds Force, Hezbollah and Syrian groups have since the beginning of the year used cryptocurrency supplied by third parties to fund their activities, according to Gallant.

In April, Palestinian terrorist group Hamas announced it would stop receiving fundraising via the bitcoin cryptocurrency, citing “hostile” activity against donors, following Jerusalem’s seizure months earlier of numerous digital wallets linked to terrorism funding.

Although cryptocurrency is seen as providing anonymity, developments in technology have enabled authorities to identify those behind crypto transfers.

In December 2022, the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court issued a ruling approving the Israeli government’s seizure of any and all cryptocurrency assets from digital wallets that have funded terrorism.

Israeli authorities had previously been allowed to seize only those digital assets used to directly finance terrorist activity, but not additional funds in the same wallets.

The post In first, Israel seizes crypto wallets tied to Iran’s Quds Force, Hezbollah appeared first on World Israel News.

Tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have been training for a much-publicized match in a cage for charity, scheduled for July 4, but the event was reportedly cancelled because Zuckerberg’s mother said no.

The post MOM SAID NO: Elon Musk’s cage fight with Mark Zuckerberg called off appeared first on World Israel News.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post Documentary: Behind Closed Doors. “How West Encourages Global Corruption” appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post Sea Monsters Threaten the World with Their Tridents. Eduard Curtin appeared first on Global Research.