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… Spry is one of 30 schools in Illinois where not a single student can read at grade level. Twenty-two of those schools are part of the Chicago Public Schools and the other eight are outside Chicago. The failure list in math is even longer. There are 53 schools statewide where not one kid is proficient in math. The failure list in math is even longer. There are 53 schools statewide where not one kid is proficient in math. The absolute failure to teach even a single child to read and do math in so many schools is yet another indictment of the state’s educational system … We could have just as easily looked at the 622 schools where only 1 out of 10 kids or less can read at grade level. That’s a whopping 18 percent of the state’s 3,547 schools that tested students in 2022. And only 1 out of 10 kids or less can do math at grade level in 930 schools …

…The descent of Britain is in many ways more dramatic. By the end of next year, the average British family will be less well off than the average Slovenian one, according to a recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch at The Financial Times; by the end of this decade, the average British family will have a lower standard of living than the average Polish one … Real wages have actually declined, on average, over the last 15 years, making America’s wage stagnation over the same period seem appealing by comparison … The private sector is also behaving shortsightedly, skimping on long-term investments and extracting profits from financial speculation instead: “To put it bluntly, Britain’s capitalist class has effectively given up on the future.” Even the right-wing Daily Telegraph is now lamenting that England is “becoming a poor country.”

As bells rang out at a centuries-old monastery, Ukrainians stepped out into a cold, misty night to light candles in memory of the devastating famine of 1932-33. This annual commemoration was especially poignant this year, marking 90 years since the famine gripped Ukraine. Many here say Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was trying to destroy Ukraine then, and the current Kremlin leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin, is trying to do the same thing now. They call it the Holodomor, which means “death by hunger.” … An estimated four million Ukrainians died within two years, though there’s no precise figure and some historians say the toll may have been significantly higher. Ukraine calls it a genocide, and nearly 20 other countries now agree — though not Russia.

… For eight decades, the greatest mass murder in modern history has been shamefully covered up or ignored … If we keep demanding that Germany and Japan atone for their wartime crimes, is it not time for our governments to finally recognize and atone their alliance with the biggest mass murderer in history, Josef Stalin, a man whose crimes exceeded those of Adolf Hitler by a factor of at least three or four times? Particularly so in the United States, where World War II has become something of a state religion and is endlessly invoked by conservatives and neocons to justify foreign military adventures.

Mark Weber and Fróði Midjord examine and dissect a range of widely accepted myths about the devastating global conflict of 1939-1945. Runtime: 133 mins. They explain how the war’s outcome decisively shaped today’s America and Europe. They show that the conflict was not, as we’re told, a clear-cut battle between Good and Evil. The two also discuss Churchill, Hitler and `The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, by Patrick J. Buchanan. This readable and well researched book by one of America’s most astute and influential public affairs commentators is a bold and persuasive debunking of the “official” story of the origins and trajectory of WW2. It’s also a devastating critique of the “cult” image of Winston Churchill.

China laid out a fresh laundry list of problems it has with how the U.S. uses its power, underscoring how tensions between the two nations have worsened over issues from the alleged spy balloon dispute to Russia’s war in Ukraine. The official Xinhua News Agency published a 4,000-word article on Monday titled “U.S. Hegemony and Its Perils” that lays out Beijing’s sweeping view of how the U.S. misbehaves on the world stage in the political, military, economic, technological and cultural spheres. The article said the U.S. “embeds American values in its products such as movies,” to dominate public opinion. “When Hollywood movies descend on the world, they scream the American values tied to them,” it added.

Since becoming the world’s most powerful country after the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States has acted more boldly to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain and abuse hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and willfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community … This report, by presenting the relevant facts, seeks to expose the US abuse of hegemony in the political, military, economic, financial, technological and cultural fields, and to draw greater international attention to the perils of the US practices to world peace and stability and the well-being of all peoples.

Steven Spielberg’s legendary filmography contains its fair share of movies that deal with dark subjects … With its release in 1993, “Schindler’s List” quickly rose to become one of Spielberg’s most acclaimed works, if not his most … Spielberg believes that the film holds even more relevance for modern-day viewers … Spielberg wasn’t simply trying to shock audiences; he aimed to tackle a disturbingly real-life issue facing Jewish people in the modern day. “The Fabelmans” director recently talked with The Sunday Times (via Deadline) about his intentions with “Schindler’s List” and its moving finale. “Holocaust denial was on the rise again — that was the entire reason I made the movie in 1993,” Spielberg explained.

Few people in history can say they have seen as much as Myron Sugerman. Born into the dramatic underworld of the Jewish mob, his life has seen him become the king of the illegal slot machines, spend time in prison, do business around the world and secretly raise funds for the world’s most preeminent Nazi hunter. The 84-year-old’s life story has recently been immortalized in the documentary The Last Man Standing: The Chronicles of Myron Sugerman, made by British-Israeli entrepreneur Jonny Caplan and is available on Amazon Prime and is set to roll out on other platforms later this year. Despite being born into the underworld amid the golden age of United States organized crime, Sugerman never lost his Jewish pride. That, in fact, was actually the point behind the Jewish mafia as a whole.

… Meet the family whose close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz,” a memoir just published by Alan Geik … In addition to diving deep into Workman’s story, the book also explores how Jewish mobsters and their hangers-on fought antisemitism, beat up Nazis and helped a fledgling Israel acquire arms for its War of Independence … Geik’s book joins a crowded shelf of histories and memoirs of the Jewish mob … For decades, beginning at a casino and speakeasy near the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan, Gordon had a big hand in organized crime’s gambling operations, supervising enterprises in Florida, the Midwest, Las Vegas and Havana.

A federal watchdog reported that Congress continues to spend more money than it collects in taxes. The U.S. Government Accountability Office’s audit of the federal government’s financial statements found it “continues to face an unsustainable long-term fiscal path.” In fiscal year 2022, the federal government spent $6.27 trillion and collected $4.9 trillion in revenue, resulting in $1.38 trillion deficit, according to the U.S. Treasury … Daniel Smith, an economics professor at Middle Tennessee State University, said overspending at the federal level is no surprise. “It has been known by economists and politicians for a while that our current level of spending is unsustainable,” he said …

Russia clashed with the United States and other Western nations Tuesday over the Kremlin’s call for a U.N. investigation of last September’s sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines from Russia to Western Europe. Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told the U.N. Security Council that Moscow has “no trust” in the separate investigations being carried out by Denmark, Sweden and Germany, but it does “fully trust” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to establish an independent international investigation of the explosions … Ahead of the meeting, the ambassadors of Denmark, Sweden and Germany sent a letter to council members saying their investigations have established the pipelines were extensively damaged “by powerful explosions due to sabotage.”

“To defend civilization, defeat Russia.” Writing in the unfailingly bellicose Atlantic, an American academic of my acquaintance recently issued that dramatic call to arms. And lest there be any confusion about the stakes involved, the image accompanying his essay depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin with a Hitler mustache and haircut. Cast Putin as the latest manifestation of the Führer and the resurrection of Winston Churchill can’t be far behind. And, lo, more than a few observers have already begun depicting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as the latest reincarnation of America’s favorite British prime minister … Americans have long found comfort in such simplified narratives. Reducing history to a morality play washes away annoying complexities.

Support among the American public for providing Ukraine weaponry and direct economic assistance has softened as the Russian invasion nears a grim one-year milestone, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Forty-eight percent say they favor the U.S. providing weapons to Ukraine, with 29% opposed and 22% saying they’re neither in favor nor opposed. In May 2022, less than three months into the war, 60% of U.S. adults said they were in favor of sending Ukraine weapons. Americans are about evenly divided on sending government funds directly to Ukraine … A majority of Americans, 63%, still favor imposing economic sanctions on Russia, the poll shows, though that too has decreased …

Introduced Monday at California’s Capitol: AB-742, the Use of Force: Police Canines legislation. “This bill seeks to end a deeply racialized traumatic and harmful practice by prohibiting the use of police K-9s,” Assemblymember Corey Jackson (D-Perris) said at a news conference. His bill takes aim at the use of law enforcement K-9s. Specifically, the bill would prohibit those dogs from being used to make arrests, apprehensions, or from being part of crowd control measures, according to the bill’s wording. “Police K-9s remain a gross misuse of force, victimizing Black and Brown people disproportionately,” said Jackson.

Members of a neo-Nazi group rallied Tuesday night outside the Broadway theater that is hosting “Parade,” a play about the 1915 lynching of a Jewish man in Georgia … Platt stars as Leo Frank, the Jewish manager of an Atlanta pencil factory who was accused of murdering a girl whose body was found there in 1913. Despite little evidence, Frank was found guilty of killing Mary Phagan, who had worked at the factory, and was sentenced to death … The case spurred both the creation of the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil rights group whose activities include monitoring neo-Nazi activity, and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan white supremacist hate group.

Mary Phagan was just thirteen years old. She was a sweatshop laborer for Atlanta, Georgia’s National Pencil Company. On Saturday, April 26, 1913 … she had just come to collect her $1.20 pay from National Pencil Company superintendent Leo M. Frank at his office when she was attacked by an assailant who struck her down, ripped her undergarments, likely attempted to sexually abuse her, and then strangled her to death. Her body was dumped in the factory basement. Leo Frank, who was the head of Atlanta’s B’nai B’rith, a Jewish fraternal order, was eventually convicted of the murder and sentenced to hang … One result of Frank’s trial and death was the founding of the still-powerful Anti-Defamation League. Today Leo Frank’s innocence, and his status as a victim of anti-Semitism, are almost taken for granted … Let’s look at the facts.

A covert team of Israeli contractors who claim to have manipulated more than 30 elections around the world using hacking, sabotage and automated disinformation on social media have been exposed in a new Guardian investigation. The unit is run by Tal Hanan, a former Israeli special forces operative who now works privately using the pseudonym “Jorge”. In more than six hours of secretly recorded meetings, Hanan and his team spoke of how they could gather intelligence on rivals, including by hacking Gmail and Telegram accounts. Runtime: 5:18 mins.

Some of Britain’s most popular sitcoms and greatest works of literature were flagged as potential signs of far-Right extremism by a counter-terror programme. The flagship Prevent scheme … said the works of fiction were ‘key texts’ for ‘white nationalists/ supremacists’. A report by Prevent’s Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU) described how far-Right extremists promoted ‘reading lists’ on online bulletin boards … The taxpayer-funded document included references to The Lord Of The Rings by JRR Tolkien, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, 1984 by George Orwell, and the poems of GK Chesterton. It also referenced films including The Bridge On The River Kwai, The Great Escape, and Zulu.

Some of the UK’s most beloved TV shows have been flagged by counter terror programme Prevent. Hit shows like Yes Minister and The Thick Of It and even Michael Portillo’s Great British Railway Journeys were bizarrely described as “encouraging far-right sympathies”. Meanwhile, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare were placed on a list of “key texts” for white supremacists. A report by the programme’s Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU) said that extremists posted “reading lists” on online chat boards … Works from BBC’s 1990s political thriller House of Cards to classic film The Dambusters to John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy made the rankings.

Roald Dahl’s children’s books are being rewritten to remove language deemed offensive by the publisher Puffin. Puffin has hired sensitivity readers to rewrite chunks of the author’s text to make sure the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, resulting in extensive changes across Dahl’s work. Edits have been made to descriptions of characters’ physical appearances. The word “fat” has been cut from every new edition of relevant books, while the word “ugly” has also been culled, the Daily Telegraph reported. Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now described as “enormous”. In The Twits, Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”. Hundreds of changes were made to the original text – and some passages not written by Dahl have been added.

An expert on military affairs and international relations speaks with Andrew Napolitano about how US officials and virtually the entire mainstream news media have been giving the American public a very distorted view of the Ukraine war. Douglas Macgregor is a retired US Army colonel and government official, and an author, consultant, and television commentator. He played an important role on the battlefield in the 1990-91 Gulf War and the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Runtime: 30 mins.

The suspension of a senior journalist at France’s leading TV news channel has uncovered what appears to be a well-organised system of corruption and influence buying in the international media. It was reported in January that 54-year-old Rachid M’Barki, a respected BFM veteran, had been summarily removed from his duties as overnight presenter pending an internal enquiry … According to the investigation, M’Barki ran reports on a variety of subjects … that had all one thing in common: they were planted by an Israel-based outfit specialising in ‘news for hire’. … The investigators say they have evidence that the origin of the stories lies in the shadowy Team Jorge, an operation based in Tel Aviv and run by a former Israeli special forces officer whose real name is Tal Hanan.

Several thousand people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, Feb. 19, to protest U.S. support for the war in Ukraine around the time of its one-year anniversary. The protest was organized by the People’s Party and Libertarian Party. It brought together groups on the left and libertarian right which were unified in their demand that the U.S. government should not spend one more penny on the war in Ukraine. Nick Branna, the founder of the People’s Party and a main organizer of the event, told CovertAction Magazine that the rally was “the biggest anti-war demonstration since the Iraq War, and it was sorely needed.” … Pat Ford, a member of the Libertarian Party national committee, echoed Branna when he told CovertAction Magazine that the “rally was a complete success as an exercise in coalition building.”

Thousands protest the US involvement in Ukraine and demand NATO’s dissolution during the Rage Against War Machine rally in Washington D.C. Protesters against the war in Ukraine descended on Washington, DC on Sunday, demanding that the US stop sending weapons to Kiev, disband NATO, and join China and Russia in creating a multi-polar world, among other things. A thousand people attended the Rage Against the War Machine rally, which included former State Department speakers, politicians, journalists, and activists. Former Senators Ron Paul (R-TX) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), as well as former Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), headlined the event, calling for anti-war unity.

When the Nord Stream pipelines carrying natural gas from Russia to Germany were damaged last September, U.S. officials were quick to suggest Russia had bombed its own pipelines. But according to a new report by the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, it was the U.S. Navy that carried out the sabotage, with help from Norway … Hersh joins us for an in-depth interview to discuss his report and says the U.S. decision to bomb the pipelines was meant to lock allies into support for Ukraine at a time when some were wavering. … Runtime: 50 mins.

A descendant of a major donor to a law school demanded that the institution pay back $3.6 billion after a decision was made to change the school name. Virginia lawyer Robert C. Smith is the great-great-grandson of T.C. Williams, the name behind the University of Richmond’s T.C. Williams School of Law … Williams’ family donated $25,000 to fund the law school following his death. However … the T.C. Williams School of Law was stripped of its name. The University of Richmond School of Law voted to adopt a policy that prohibits the university from naming any building, program, professorship or entity “for a person who directly engaged in the trafficking and/or enslavement of others or openly advocated for the enslavement of people.” The university had found that Williams was a slave owner.

Visitors at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, [in 1993] will find on display a casting of a door of a supposed extermination gas chamber. This artifact is presented as graphic evidence of the chemical slaughterhouses supposedly used by the Germans to systematically exterminate masses of Jews during the Second World War. According to the March 1990 issue of the Museum’s official Newsletter, this is “a casting of the door that sealed one of the gas chambers at the Majdanek killing center in Poland.” … This door did indeed close on a gas chamber at Majdanek. However, as he concedes (on pages 555 and 557 of his book), this was a delousing chamber used to disinfest clothing. The only living things killed in this gas chamber were lice.

An Israeli firm sought to influence more than 30 elections around the world for clients by hacking, sabotage and spreading disinformation, according to an undercover media investigation published Wednesday. The firm was dubbed ‘Team Jorge’ by investigating journalists who posed as potential clients in order to gather information on its methods and capabilities. Its boss, Tal Hanan, is a former Israeli special forces operative who boasted of being able to control supposedly secure Telegram accounts and thousands of fake social media profiles, as well as planting news stories, the reports say … It adds to a growing body of evidence that shadowy private firms across the world are profiting from invasive hacking tools and the power of social media platforms to manipulate public opinion and to sway voters. 

… The Western democracies were responsible for the most senseless single act of mass murder committed in the whole course of World War II. The devastation of Dresden in February, 1945, was one of those crimes against humanity whose authors would have been arraigned at Nuremberg if that Court had not been perverted into the instrument of Allied justice … No one knows how many women and children were actually killed by those dive-bombing attacks. But in the legend of Dresden destruction, they have become the symbol of Yankee sadism and brutality … A fire storm was deliberately created in order to kill as many people as possible, and that the survivors were machine-gunned as they lay helpless in the open — all this has been established without a shadow of a doubt.

… On February 13, 14, and 15, 1945, more than 1,200 British and American heavy bombers dropped nearly 4,000 tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the city. The intensity of the bombing devastated the city’s historic center. The fire that raged during the bombing made superheated air rise with such force that it created a vacuum on the ground, ripping trees out of the ground, sucking people into the fires, and suffocating those spared the flames. Roughly 25,000 people, many of them civilians and refugees, were killed, and more than 75,000 buildings were destroyed .. Below, you can see some of the devastation wrought by Allied forces …

Mass killing and terrorism were the sole objectives of the horrific World War II air attack on Dresden, which British diplomat and author Harold Nicolson called “the single greatest holocaust by war.” On February 13-14, 1945, some 2,000 British and American bombers took part in the devastating raid on an undefended city packed with women and children fleeing ad­vancing Soviet forces. One of Europe’s great cultural and ar­chitectural treasures, this beautiful German city had no importance as a military target. Here is the full story — from the perspectives of both per­petrators and victims — of the horrific firestorm raid that took the lives of tens of thousands of civilians, who were burned alive, suffocated or succumbed to poisonous fumes. Hardcover book, with dust jacket, photos, maps, source and reference notes, and index.

A quotation by Wernher von Braun, a NASA scientist who had worked for the Nazis during World War II, was removed from a Smithsonian-affiliated museum in Huntsville, Alabama, months after the Forward reported that it was displayed there. The quote — “The rocket will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven” — had been prominently displayed on a large panel overlooking a hall in the U.S. Space & Rocket Center museum … The museum had removed a bust of von Braun several days after a Forward reporter inquired about it. Von Braun, widely seen as the “father of space travel,” was among a group of Nazi scientists brought to the U.S. in a secret federal program after the war.

Baltimore City is facing a devastating reality as the latest round of state test scores are released. Project Baltimore analyzed the results and found a shocking number of Baltimore City schools where not a single student is doing math at grade level … Baltimore City’s math scores were the lowest in the state. Just 7 percent of third through eighth graders tested proficient in math, which means 93 percent could not do math at grade level. But that’s not all; Project Baltimore combed through the scores at all 150 City Schools where the state math test was given. Project Baltimore found, in 23 Baltimore City schools, there were zero students who tested proficient in math. Not a single student … Exactly 2,000 students, in total, took the state math test at these schools. Not one could do math at grade level.

Legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claimed on Saturday that his latest bombshell report, which suggests the CIA was responsible for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in September, was not a hard story to find. It was obvious that there was more to the issue than was being reported by most media outlets, Hersh said … He also noted that major news outlets are failing to report a lot of things about the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev. “The war I know about is not the war you’re reading about,” Hersh observed.

It’s been two years since the Forward published my initial investigation of streets and statues honoring Nazi collaborators around the world. On that International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2021, we documented 320 such monuments in 16 countries on three continents. They honored dictators like Hungary’s Miklós Horthy and Slovakia’s Josef Tiso, who deported hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths … Most shockingly, the project exposed a monument to Latvian SS soldiers in the heart of Belgium … The project now has more than 1,652 instances of honoring collaborators in 30 countries across five continents. This includes some three dozen in 16 U.S. states …

House Democrats proposed legislation Wednesday to remove the Emancipation Memorial from Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C., which they said portrays a racially insensitive image of President Abraham Lincoln freeing an enslaved man. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., reintroduced legislation to remove the statue Wednesday – the first day of Black History Month. She first announced her plan to propose the bill in the House in 2020. The delegate noted that the statue was initially paid for by freed slaves, but said the design was not representative of their struggles.

… Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning. Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade … Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.

Russia is looking for answers from Washington after a report from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh said the US blew up the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines that connect Russia and Germany. “The White House must now comment on all these facts,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram in response to the report. For their part, the White House has denied the reporting, calling Hersh’s work “complete fiction.” Hersh cited one source “with direct knowledge of the operational planning” who said US Navy divers planted C4 explosives on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines last June during widely publicized NATO drills in the Baltic Sea, known as BALTOPS 22 … The explosives were detonated by a sonar buoy that was dropped by a Norwegian spy plane on September 26, 2022.

A recent New York Times article, “Powerful Lobbyist Behind Kevin McCarthy,” reports: “Jeff Miller is the new House speaker’s top fund-raiser and closest confidant. He is also one of Washington’s most prominent corporate lobbyists.” … Miller, McCarthy’s “lifelong friend,” is both a political advisor and a top lobbyist for an array of Fortune 500 companies and others who want governmental policies that benefit them … Rarely mentioned is that Miller is also an advocate for a foreign country. It turns out that Israel is “a major priority for Miller,” and he has sometimes used his influence on its behalf. Miller is involved with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of the most powerful Israel advocacy organizations in the U.S, and is also on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition, which similarly advocates for Israel.

Jews made up nearly half of America’s biggest philanthropic donors last year, according to a calculation by Forbes of who gave the most money away in 2022. In a year that saw their fortunes take a hit amid declines in the stock market, America’s 25 “most generous givers” donated a collective $27 billion, up from $20 billion in 2021, for a lifetime total of $196 billion, according to Forbes. They included 12 billionaires with Jewish backgrounds — a dramatic overrepresentation when compared to the proportion of Jews in the overall US population. The Jews on the list include financier George Soros, who gave away at least $300 million to racial justice and humanitarian work in Ukraine and other causes …

The US State Department refused to describe Palestinians in the West Bank as living under a military occupation during a heated exchange between journalists last week. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel brushed aside questions about Washington’s view on the status of the occupied West Bank in the wake of an Israeli military raid that killed ten Palestinians in Jenin. “What is the status of the Palestinian people in the West Bank, including Jenin … and everywhere else in the West Bank?” Said Arikat of Al-Quds newspaper asked Vedant. “It’s a simple question. Are they under occupation?” Patel refused to answer the question despite being asked repeatedly to clarify the position of the US regarding the status of the West Bank … Under International law the West Bank and Gaza is Israeli occupied territory.

… Jews wield immense power and influence in the United States. The “Jewish lobby” is a decisive factor in US support for Israel. Jewish-Zionist interests are not identical to American in­terests. In fact, they often conflict. As long as the “very powerful” Jewish lobby remains entrenched, there will be no end to the Jewish-Zionist grip on the US polit­ical system and the American media, the Zionist oppression of Palestinians, and the Israeli threat to peace.

… Modern Israel has a thing or two to learn from 2,000-year-old Roman tech. Through earthquakes, severe weather, and even after being submerged underwater, ancient Roman concrete structures have survived millennia without the spiderwebs of cracks that plague Israel’s brutalist architecture after just a few decades. That’s because Roman concrete has the unique ability to “heal” its own cracks after being exposed to water, according to a group of Italian and American scientists who were able to shed more light on the chemical reaction that helps concrete make cracks disappear. … “Romans were very savvy in how to formulate concrete for different applications,” Dr. Linda Seymour, the lead author of the study published Friday in the prestigious journal Science Advances, told The Times of Israel …

State lawmakers of both parties are pushing a bill to counter the rising number of anti-Semitic incidents in Florida. “Enough is enough, said Rep. Mike Caruso … “If we don’t do something now,” Caruso said Thursday at a Tallahassee press conference, “then soon we might have 1933 Nazi Germany here all over again.” … The bill — House Bill 269 — would raise offenses from a misdemeanor to a third degree felony to litter a yard with a flier, harass people, disrupt schools or religious services, deface graves and certain buildings, or project images on someone else’s property — if the act shows ethnic or religious animus … The particulars of the bill address increasingly common anti-Semitic fliers that are distributed in neighborhoods, as well as racist graffiti and vandalism, and anti-Semitic messages projected onto buildings.

Republicans have ousted Democrat Ilhan Omar from her committee post in a sign of escalating tensions in the US Congress. They voted to remove Ms Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee over her past comments about Israel. Republicans said the move sent a strong statement against antisemitism. But Democrats and Ms Omar said it was revenge after two Republicans were ousted from committees in 2020 when Democrats held a House majority. Ms Omar also suggested she was being removed due to her being a Muslim woman who immigrated to the US as a refugee.

A Church of England priest who shared “virulently antisemitic” material has been barred from ministry for 12 years. The Reverend Dr Stephen Sizer, 69, was found by a church tribunal to have engaged in conduct “unbecoming to the office and work of a clerk in Holy Orders”. The Archbishop of Canterbury said Dr Sizer’s behaviour had given “encouragement to conspiracy theories and tropes”. Dr Sizer declined to comment. He previously told the tribunal he strongly denied the allegation he was antisemitic, and said any distress he had caused was unintentional and he had been misquoted … The Bishop’s Disciplinary Tribunal for the Diocese of Winchester ruled in December that he had “provoked and offended the Jewish community” and “engaged in antisemitic activity”.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in an interview posted to his YouTube channel on Saturday that the US and its Western allies “blocked” his efforts of mediating between Russia and Ukraine to bring an end to the war in its early days. On March 4, 2022, Bennett traveled to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin. In the interview, he detailed his mediation at the time between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which he said he coordinated with the US, France, Germany, and the UK. Bennett said that both sides agreed to major concessions during his mediation effort.

Nearly a year in, the war in Ukraine has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and brought the world to the brink of, in President Joe Biden’s own words, “Armageddon.” Alongside the literal battlefield, there has been a similarly bitter intellectual battle over the war’s causes … Yet a review of the public record and dozens of diplomatic cables made publicly available via WikiLeaks show that U.S. officials were aware, or were directly told over the span of years that expanding NATO was viewed by Russian officials well beyond Putin as a major threat and provocation; that expanding it to Ukraine was a particularly bright red line for Moscow; that such action would inflame and empower hawkish, nationalist parts of the Russian political spectrum; and that it could ultimately lead to war.

… It’s the emergence of a whole subculture of violence, unwittingly incubated by Sweden’s liberal immigration and criminal justice system …The phrase “no-go” area is deeply controversial in Sweden but certainly applies to neighbourhoods where authorities – even ambulance workers – cannot go for fear of attack. Sweden has long seen itself as a “humanitarian superpower” … There are plenty of calls for laws to change – but must a whole country abandon its liberal values to adjust for a new criminal minority? Then again, Sweden is running out of options … So the compassion for which Sweden is famous – which so many members of my own extended family owe so much – has started to incubate the worst kind of criminality.

Disney+ animated kids series The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder is pushing reparations for slavery, claiming in its latest episode that America was founded on “white supremacy” and “still has not atoned” for its racism. In the episode titled “Juneteenth,” which began streaming last week … the students stage a musical performance where they demand reparations and smear the U.S. as a racist country … At one point, they chant: “And we the descendants of slaves in America have earned reparations for their suffering and continue to earn reparations every moment we spend submerged in a systemic prejudice, racism, and white supremacy that America was founded with and still has not atoned for.”

Public schools across the country are beginning Black History Month with Black Lives Matter week in schools, which includes a national panel on “celebrating globalism” and a discussion on disrupting the nuclear family in one Washington school district. The organization National Black Lives Matter at School’s BLM Week of Action runs from Feb. 6-10 and encourages schools, educators, and students to “organiz[e] for racial justice in education” during the annual week. The national group’s Week of Action 2023 events include a panel on “Celebrating Globalism and Collective Value” … Several national education organizations, including the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, and the American School Counselor Association, have publicly endorsed the week.

Beyond the beating, kicking, cursing and pepper spraying, the video of Tyre Nichols’ deadly arrest at the hands of young Memphis police officers is just as notable for what’s missing — any experienced supervisors showing up to stop them. That points to a dangerous confluence of trends that Memphis’ police chief acknowledged have dogged the department as the city became one of the nation’s murder hotspots: a chronic shortage of officers, especially supervisors, increasing numbers of police quitting and a struggle to bring in qualified recruits. Former Memphis police recruiters told The Associated Press of a growing desperation to fill hundreds of slots in recent years that drove the department to increase incentives and lower its standards. “They would allow just pretty much anybody to be a police officer because they just want these numbers” ..

Jews are vastly overrepresented in positions of power and authority in the US government. While that’s been a reality of American political life for many years, Joe Biden may have appointed more Jews to high-level posts than any previous president. Among the high-level US government positions currently held by Jews are: White House Chief of Staff, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Homeland Security, Secretary of State, Attorney General, and Director of National Intelligence. Less surprising, perhaps, is that these “Jewish-focused” positions of authority and influence are held by Jews: Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, U.S. Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues, and White House liaison to the Jewish community.

Thanks to the latest release of the “Twitter Files,” we now know without a doubt that the entire “Russia disinformation” racket was a massive disinformation campaign to undermine US elections and perhaps even push “regime change” inside the United States after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 … The whole “Russia disinformation” hoax was a shocking return to the McCarthyism of the 1950s and in some ways even worse. Making lists of American individuals and non-profits to be targeted and “cancelled” as being in the pay of foreigners is despicable. Such fraudulent actions have caused real-life damages that need to be addressed.

Douglas Macgregor, an expert on military affairs and international relations, speaks knowledgeably and bluntly with Judge Andrew Napolitano. Russia is slowly but steadily winning the war in Ukraine, Macgregor says. He also says that Ukraine is nearing military and economic collapse, and that US officials have been misleading Americans for the past year about the reality of the conflict. European leaders in the NATO countries, he also says, have grave and growing misgivings about US policy regarding Russia and Ukraine. Macgregor is a retired US Army colonel and government official, and an author, consultant, and television commentator. He played an important role on the battlefield in the 1990-91 Gulf War and the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Runtime: 26 mins.

… Contrary to early Beltway hopes and expectations, Russia neither collapsed internally nor capitulated to the collective West’s demands for regime change in Moscow. Washington underestimated Russia’s societal cohesion, its latent military potential, and its relative immunity to Western economic sanctions. As a result, Washington’s proxy war against Russia is failing … NATO’s members were never strongly united behind Washington’s crusade to fatally weaken Russia. The governments of Hungary and Croatia are simply acknowledging the wider European public’s opposition to war with Russia and lack of support for Washington’s desire to postpone Ukraine’s foreseeable defeat. Though sympathetic to the Ukrainian people, Berlin did not support all-out war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf.

Croatian President Zoran Milanovic on Monday offered more criticism of the policy of arming Ukraine, saying that by providing tanks and other heavy weapons, his fellow NATO members are prolonging the war. “I am against sending any lethal arms there. It prolongs the war,” Milanovic said. “What is the goal? Disintegration of Russia, change of the government? There is also talk of tearing Russia apart. This is mad.” Milanovic said the war was provoked by the US and NATO … “What is the goal of this war? A war against a nuclear power that is at war in another country? Is there a conventional way to defeat such a country? Who pays the price? Europe. America pays the least,” he added. Milanovic said what the Western powers are doing in Ukraine is “deeply immoral” and said that Crimea will never be taken from Russia.

A new survey of the European public’s attitude about the war in Ukraine conducted by the Századvég Foundation’s Project Europe shows that the policies of most European political leaders are ignoring the desires of their own populations as they escalate the conflict in Ukraine … Overall, 82 percent of respondents across the European Union agree that Russia and Ukraine should be compelled into peace talks to end the war. In the Balkans and Central Europe, the population is overwhelmingly in favor of peace, while their governments, compelled by Brussels and Washington, continue to escalate the conflict by providing arms to Kiev even against their own national interests … The survey revealed that only one tenth of Europeans believe that sanctions primarily harm Russia. This is again in stark contrast to the policies pursued by their political leaders.

… Of all the bad places I’ve been to in the United States, I don’t know if I’ve ever been to a city that’s as vastly rundown, abandoned and out of control as Oakland, California. It’s a very ugly, rough, littered, dangerous place where the laws aren’t enforced and the crime is staggering … Oakland is drug filled. It’s a graffiti covered shell of its former self where you can’t let your guard down for a minute … At least in the greater downtown area … Other large areas just outside of downtown are home to hundreds of people camped out in makeshift shanties among piles of trash with rats … Oakland is hell on earth. It’s lawless, it’s rundown, it’s ugly it’s dangerous, it’s woke … Oakland’s problems don’t just go block after block. it’s mile after mile. And very few people I talked to who live here think there’s a chance it can be saved.

In his proclamation marking February as National Black History Month, President Biden said part of celebrating the legacy of Black Americans means acknowledging that America has never lived up to its promise that all people should be treated equal … Black students are also more likely to face disciplinary action than their white counterparts … Black Americans also face disparities in employment; the typical white worker earns more than 24 percent per hour more than the typical Black worker … “During National Black History Month, we honor and continue the work of Black Americans who have created a more fair and inclusive democracy, helping our Nation move closer to the realization of its full promise for everyone,” said Biden. 

London’s Metropolitan Police recruited officers who are “functionally illiterate” in English in order to increase diversity, according a member of His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. The diversity and inclusion push from the woke leadership of the largest police force in Britain has seen the Met accept applicants who can barely write in English, HMI Matt Parr said. .. The HMI said that there is a “risk of recruiting the wrong people,” saying that he has heard of trainee officers “who are, on paper at least, functionally illiterate in English”. Par noted that this has already had a trickle-down impact on the force’s ability to function, saying that “just writing up crime reports has become quite difficult in some areas.” “So in that drive there is at least anecdotal evidence that they have lowered standards,” he said.

A major Kentucky newspaper published an op-ed on National Holocaust Remembrance Day telling Jewish people that they “do not have a monopoly on persecution and atrocities.” Even though the January 27 memorial focuses on the monumental tragedy of six million Jews killed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, the Courier-Journal – part of the USA Today Network owned by parent company Gannet – lectured that the day be used to memorialize “every genocide” for the sake of inclusivity. The op-ed, titled “Holocaust Remembrance Day is a time to remember more than one atrocity,” warned that fixating specifically on the Holocaust during such a memorial results in people “negating and trivializing the horrors of the past and the injustices of today.” It also made a point to remind readers “Hitler was just one of many dictators.”

A Jewish group that commissioned a survey on Holocaust awareness in the Netherlands said Wednesday that the results show “a disturbing lack of awareness of key historical facts about the Holocaust,” prompting calls for better education in the nation that was home to diarist Anne Frank and her family. The survey commissioned by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found that the number of respondents who believe the Holocaust is a myth was higher than in any of the other five nations previously surveyed, with 23 percent of adults under 40 and 12 percent of all respondents believing the Holocaust is a myth or the number of Jews killed has been greatly exaggerated.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers introduced a bill on Friday that would order a study on Holocaust education in U.S. public schools to help ensure that future generations are taught about the genocide as the number of Holocaust survivors decreases. Lawmakers introduced the bill — titled the Holocaust Education and Antisemitism Lessons (HEAL) Act — on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. During a press conference in the Capitol, co-sponsors of the bill raised concerns about the lack of Holocaust education in the U.S. and the future of such education as the number of survivors decreases, in addition to the rise of antisemitism across the country.