Headlines

… A recent survey found that the majority of Americans have fewer friends than they did three decades ago. “Signs suggest that the role of friends in American social life is experiencing a pronounced decline,” according to a May study published by the Survey Center on American Life. Study authors revealed that “Americans report having fewer close friendships than they once did, talking to their friends less often, and relying less on their friends for personal support.” The alarming findings were based on interviews with 2,019 Americans, aged 18 and up, from all 50 states as well as Washington, DC … Nearly half of all Americans — 49% — reported having fewer than three close friends … A mind-boggling 12% of interviewees claimed to have zero friends today, four times as many as 30 years ago, per the survey.

The Ukraine war documents leak is a very big deal. Among other things, the documents reveal that the Biden administration has been misleading the public about its upbeat assessment of the Ukrainian war effort … Rather than the jaw-dropping disclosures, which this brief list only scratches the surface of and which have major implications for US security, the political establishment has instead fixated on the leaker, his motives, his personal faults, and what the government is doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again … The more time you spend talking about whether the leaker is a good person, the less you’re devoting to the official deception and misbehavior the leaks have shed light on.

… As the world’s reserve currency, the US dollar is essentially the default currency in international trade and a global unit of account … The dollar, in some shape or form, will likely be around for a long time. Perhaps very long. But by weaponizing dollar dominance and permitting expanding mandates to disorient US monetary policy, the dollar’s fate as the lingua franca of world commerce over the long haul may already be sealed … Slower or more quickly, the dollar will lose ground abroad.

As the Australian Federal government contemplates the prohibition of the Swastika, it is crucial to address the inherent tension between upholding free speech and curbing repugnant ideologies … The Swastika ban forms part of the left’s strategy to demonise all non-compliant ideologies. Anyone who may disagree with such bans on free-speech or similar grounds can be labelled a Nazi sympathiser by power-hungry leftists, meaning non-leftists can either conform or be tagged with the worst possible label in modern society. And while conformity is the left’s preference, character assassination is their speciality. So assuming we are to ban the Swastika, then the hammer and sickle must also be prohibited. Marxist regimes have caused millions more deaths than Hitler …

Shakespeare has long been dismissed, with others in the Western canon, as a dead white male. Now, there’s another, worse charge against the bard — he created the concept of whiteness … The authors of “White People” are particularly interested in the word “fair,” which they count more than 900 times in Shakespeare. “Fair” often refers to a woman and her beauty, but it had a rich variety of meanings … But it makes as much sense to try to argue the literary racialists out of their take on Shakespeare as trying to convince a Marxist of the usefulness of capital markets. For them, to be white or not be white is the only question.

In 2019, and for a couple of years after, we all heard about the “Holocaust-denying” high-school principal William Latson. Most who heard about that of course never checked whether the characterization was accurate. Even some politicians who stated forceful opinions on the matter, it turns out, apparently never bothered to check what they were saying. On the whole it seems that most people who had anything to say about the matter had an oversimplified and distorted picture of the dispute. The instigation of the public controversy was a story that appeared in the Palm Beach Post on 5 July 2019. It was based on information supplied to journalist Andrew Marra by a perpetually unidentified Jewish woman … The complaint about Latson himself however was his refusal to confront parents who did not believe in the Holocaust …

Gift. Bunny. Female. America. Christmas tree. Do any of these words offend you? They should — at least according to Michigan State University. If you’re confused as to why these deceptively innocent terms are actually very offensive, the school’s Inclusive Guide is here to help get your vocabulary into “alignment with strategic efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion.” … Evidently, the word female is a “pejorative term [that] reduces women to their assumed biological anatomy.” … This list of “offensive” words, which MSU has published on its website “to inform general communications” at the school, is just the latest symptom of the war on free speech that’s being waged on campuses.

“Bilingual road signs are a symbolic expression of social inclusion. They show that people identify with their district and diversity.” Thus Samy Charchira, councilor of the Greens in Düsseldorf, where for the first time in Germany road signs in Arabic have been inaugurated … Multiculturalism is the end of nation state and Europe seems determined to go down that road all the way … Since 2020, four mosques in the city (out of a total of eight) invoke the muezzin’s prayer over loudspeakers … According to the FAZ, 18.9 million people, or 23 percent of the German population, have immigrated to the country since 1950 or are children of immigrants, said the German Federal Statistical Office.

In a move that shocked many, Fox News announced on Monday that it had “parted ways” with Tucker Carlson, the US network’s most-watched host … The channel did not give a reason for Carlson’s departure in its press release … The Los Angeles Times reported that Carlson had been fired and that the decision to fire him had come from Fox Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch himself … To the Anti-Defamation League, the firing was long overdue. The group’s leader Jonathan Greenblatt called for Fox to fire Carlson in 2021, after the host first promoted the white-supremacist Great Replacement theory on air … For years, Carlson had evaded any discipline from Fox over his airing of such views. But the Dominion case exposed how he had been openly lying to viewers about other news issues, as well.

In the closing address at last month’s Summit for Democracy, Secretary of State Antony Blinken piously proclaimed, “As President Biden has said, democracy doesn’t happen by accident. “It requires constant effort.” Or in the case of the 2020 election, it required deceiving American voters. The House Judiciary Committee revealed that Blinken, then a top Biden adviser, orchestrated the letter from 51 top intelligence officials claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was nothing but a Russian disinformation campaign. Blinken contacted former acting CIA chief Mike Morell, who swayed scores of other former top officials — including three ex-CIA chiefs — to sign that letter to debunk the biggest threat to the Biden presidential campaign … Polls show that Biden would have lost the election if the media had accurately reported the contents of that laptop.

Mike Morrell, the former acting CIA director, revealed to the House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan, that he played a key role in rallying former intelligence officials to sign a letter which sought to discredit reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal during the 2020 presidential campaign … Morell explained that his role in the suppression of the key story was done on behalf of the Joe Biden campaign and at the behest of now Secretary of State Antony Blinken who was then a senior campaign official … Twitter, Facebook, and other major platforms outright censored or took actions to suppress the reach of the story immediately … Echoing statements made by the Biden campaign, the letter claimed the Post’s reporting “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

The remains of a fascist leader whose movement supported Gen. Francisco Franco’s dictatorship were dug up and reburied Monday, reigniting Spain’s debate over its complex past and enraging far-right activists. The Spanish government ordered the exhumation of the body of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who founded the fascist Falange movement, from its resting place in an enormous mountainside mausoleum 40 miles from the capital, Madrid. He was then reburied at a city cemetery in a private family ceremony. The move — carried out as a small group of sympathizers chanted and gave fascist salutes — is part of an effort to prevent the glorification of the country’s totalitarian past as the far right seeks political breakthroughs across Europe.

… In October 1933 Primo de Rivera established the Falange Española (Spanish Falange [Phalanx]). In its manifesto published later that year the Falange condemned socialism, Marxism, republicanism and capitalism and proposed that Spain should become a Fascist state similar to the one established by Benito Mussolini in Italy … [Falange Manifesto] … 11. The National-Syndicalist State will not stand cruelly aloof from economic conflicts between men, nor will it look on impassively as the strongest class subjugates the weakest … 12. The primary purpose of wealth is to improve the standard of living of all the people – and this will be the declared policy of our State. It is intolerable that great masses of people live in poverty while a few enjoy every luxury … 15. All Spanish citizens have the right to work.

If those leaked documents from the Pentagon are to be believed — and I think they are — the United States needs a plan B for Ukraine … What Ukraine needs is peace, not a protracted war of attrition against a more populous adversary whose leader does not much care about how many lives are sacrificed in the maelstrom. I suspect most top officials in the Biden administration understand this cruel reality, whatever they may say in public … So here’s a wild idea: Given that both Beijing and Washington have an interest in ending the war, the Biden administration should invite China to join it in a joint effort to bring the two sides to the bargaining table.

The U.S. corporate media’s first response to the leaking of secret documents about the war in Ukraine was to throw some mud in the water, declare “nothing to see here,” and cover it as a depoliticized crime story about a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman who published secret documents to impress his friends. President Biden dismissed the leaks as revealing nothing of “great consequence.” What these documents reveal, however, is that the war is going worse for Ukraine than our political leaders have admitted to us, while going badly for Russia too, so that neither side is likely to break the stalemate this year, and this will lead to “a protracted war beyond 2023,” as one of the documents says.

U.S. Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, journalist Evan Gershkovich, author Judy Blume and more than a half-dozen other prominent Jews are on Time magazine’s list of “The 100 Most Influential People of 2023.” Others on the list include comedian Nathan Fielder, rapper Doja Cat, author Neil Gaiman, economist Janet Yellen, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Disney CEO Bob Iger and actress Natasha Lyonne … The tribute to Lipstadt, a Holocaust scholar and U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, is written by Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt. He calls Lipstadt an eshet chayil, a Hebrew term from the Book of Proverbs for a woman of valor.

On April 7, after three days and several hours of meetings, Chinese President Xi Jinping and French President Emmanuel Macron issued a joint declaration between France and China … The most important line … appears early in the document. In a section on “promoting global security and stability,” China and France declared that “They seek to strengthen the multilateral international system under the aegis of the United Nations, in a multipolar world.” … This potentially seminal statement suggests a fundamental divide between France and the U.S. The U.S. seeks to maintain a unipolar world with America at its head, with no “potential future global competitors” — in the language of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance — and Europe as its subordinate partner. The joint declaration suggests that France seeks to break from that project.

Zero asylum. Send them back to Syria. Claims should be sorted somewhere else. It may sound like the rhetoric of the far right, but in this wealthy, Scandinavian welfare state, it has become the political center. Denmark, polite and progressive, is profoundly skeptical of asylum seekers. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, of the center-left Social Democrats, has touted a vision of “zero” people arriving to Denmark outside the United Nations resettlement system. A key priority for her government: working with European Union allies to set up claims-processing centers far away … The Danish case offers a vivid example of how far-right ideas are flourishing, even where the far right has struggled to gain power.

… One of the first moves when Russia intervened in Ukraine was to block and eventually confiscate Russia’s 300 billion dollars-worth of foreign reserves in banks in the US and Europe. That sent a shock wave across currency markets all around the world. Biden and Yellen had weaponized the US’s own national currency, which hitherto had been an untouchable step in international relations for nations that were not actually at war. Countries like China and India with large economies then realized that the US Treasury Department and the dominance of the dollar as an exchange currency had now become a weapon of war and a serious threat to the economies of all other nations. As a consequence, the US Dollar is right now being rejected by many nations as the world’s reserve currency.

… For the past 25 years, administrations of both parties have caved to the “crazies” at every turn. Albright and the neocons’ exceptionalist rhetoric, now standard fare across the U.S. political spectrum, leads the United States into conflicts all over the world, in an unequivocal, Manichean way that defines the side it supports as the side of good and the other side as evil, foreclosing any chance that the United States can later play the role of an impartial or credible mediator … It also applies, most notoriously, to the U.S. blank check for endless Israeli aggression against the Palestinians, which doom its mediation efforts to failure. For China, however, it is precisely its policy of neutrality that has enabled it to mediate a peace agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia … The tragedy of American diplomacy today is that it is diplomacy for war, not for peace.

… For the political Left, the narrative of white supremacy must be maintained. What’s more, shocking examples of that narrative must be found … The truth is far more troubling: In America, while most violent crime is intra-racial (white on white or black on black, for example), in cases in which blacks and whites have violent interaction, blacks are overwhelmingly the perpetrators, not the victims. In 2019, for example, 3,299 white Americans were murdered; 566, or 17%, were killed by black perpetrators. That same year, 2,906 black Americans were murdered; 246, or 8%, were killed by white perpetrators … The media routinely ignore these facts, since they don’t fit the narrative. In fact, the media have a general tendency not to even mention the race of perpetrators of crimes if those perpetrators are black.

… In the last ten days, Washington has been rocked by leaks of top secret information on Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and a few other topics … The Washington press corps showed vastly more enthusiasm for tracking down the leaker than for discovering who bombed the Nord Stream pipeline. At a Pentagon press conference, journalists showed far more indignation about the breach of federal secrecy than about the lies that the documents exposed … Almost no one who condemns leaks of confidential information offers any alternative for Americans learning what “their” government is doing … If democracy is now little more than a system where insiders deceive people for their own good, how is it different than all the other regimes that oppressed people throughout history?

Blazoned in huge black letters across page one of the December 4, 1941, issue of the Chicago Tribune was the headline: F.D.R.’S WAR PLANS! … Chesly Manly, the Tribune’s Washington correspondent, revealed what President Franklin D. Roosevelt had repeatedly denied: that he was planning to lead the United States into war against Germany. The source of the reporter’s information was no less than a verbatim copy of Rainbow Five, the top-secret war plan drawn up at FDR’s order by the Joint Board of the Army and Navy … Rainbow Five called for the creation of a ten-million-man army, including an expeditionary force of five million men that would invade Europe to defeat Hitler.

Fifty years ago, in the wake of the October War of 1973, the United States emerged as the principal outside actor in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf … Fast forward to the present, and it is the United States that is on the outside looking in. Russia was central to keeping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power, and China boldly orchestrated the restoration of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Arab states are reaching out to improve relations with both Russia and China, ignoring U.S. pressure to back away from Moscow and Beijing … Beijing realizes that Washington’s one-sided support for Israel as well as its policy of non-recognition of Iran provided an opening to negotiate a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

… It has just become almost impossible for a country to have a nice, home-talent little revolution among themselves, without us butting into it. But here we go again. If we ever pass out as a great nation, we ought to put on our tombstone: “America died from a delusion that she had moral leadership.”; … America has a great habit of always talking about protecting American interests in some foreign country. Protect them here at home. There are more American interests right here than anywhere. What would we say if the Chinese was to send a gunboat up the Mississippi?; … Seven thousand miles is a long way to go to shoot somebody, especially if you are not right sure they need shooting, and you are not sure whether you are shooting the right side or not. You see, it’s their war and they have a right to fight it as they see fit, without any advice from us.

Bryn Mawr College will remove the inscribed name of former president M. Carey Thomas from the campus building known as Old Library, the Board of Trustees announced Tuesday in an email to the community. Thomas, who served as president from 1894 to 1922, was a staunch supporter of women’s education but also promulgated racist and antisemitic views. “Even as M. Carey Thomas was steadfast in her drive to build a first-rate academic institution for the education of women, the limitation of her vision to the education of wealthy white women, her embrace of eugenics, and her outspoken racist and antisemitic beliefs have caused pain for generations of students, staff and faculty,” read the letter from the board.

The city council in Kyiv, Ukraine supported and planned to vote in favor of naming a street after a notorious Nazi collaborator last week, but the mayor, Vitali Klitschko, stopped the vote after an unscheduled meeting with Israel’s ambassador to Ukraine, Michael Brodsky, reported The New York Sun. Kyiv is the capital of Ukraine. It is the most populous city in the country and is the seat of government. The Kyiv City Council passed a motion on April 11 to name a street after Volodymyr Kubiyovych, “who during the Holocaust was heavily involved in the formation of the Waffen-SS Galizien, a Nazi military force made up of Ukrainian volunteers” … After the mayor met with the Israeli ambassador, though, the situation changed.

All Danish schoolchildren will know about the Holocaust. The topic will become a mandatory part of the history lessons starting next school year. If the rule comes into force, all teachers in primary schools must dedicate part of their history lessons to the infamous genocide of the Second World War, Kristeligt Dagblad reports. Currently, a draft for an executive order from the Norwegian Agency for Education is out for consultation. On April 24, all responses must be in so the order can enter into force on July 1. That means that Holocaust education must be incorporated into the curriculum next school year.

The dollar is losing its reserve status at a faster pace than generally accepted as many analysts have failed to account for last year’s wild exchange rate moves, according to Stephen Jen. The greenback’s share in global reserves slid last year at 10 times the average speed of the past two decades as a number of countries looked for alternatives after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered sanctions, Jen and his Eurizon SLJ Capital Ltd. colleague Joana Freire wrote in a note. Adjusting for exchange rate movements, the dollar has lost about 11% of its market share since 2016, and double that amount since 2008, they said.

A series of videos showing ultra-Orthodox youths spitting at Christians in Jerusalem’s Old City is making the rounds through Israeli social media, calling attention to a phenomenon Christian clergy have been speaking out against for years with little result. The clips, aired Sunday on Channel 12, show groups of young men in the Old City, dressed in suits and black hats, some wearing or carrying prayer shawls. In one video, as six boys and young men walk by two Catholic nuns at the Church of the Flagellation on Via Dolorosa, one turns and spits in the direction of the nuns. In another, a lone young man spits as pilgrims walk up the Via Dolorosa carrying a wooden cross. A third clip shows three ultra-Orthodox youths walking by a church in the Muslim quarter. One of the men, smoking a cigarette, spits at the door of the church.

Along with high rates of crime relative to other developed nations, the United States’ crime clearance rates — the rates at which crimes are solved — are alarmingly low … A new study examined the effect of diversification of police departments on clearance of aggravated assaults in U.S. police agencies. None of the measures of representation studied were significantly associated with clearance of victims’ assaults. The study, by researchers at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (UWM), appears in Criminology & Public Policy … “Less than half of crimes in the United States are cleared,” explains Aki Roberts, associate professor of sociology at UWM, who led the study … The study found that none of the diversity measures examined vis a vis Black officers were significantly associated with the clearance of aggravated assaults of Black victims.

When asked “if we should stop non-European immigration to France,” more than six out of ten French people (64%) answer “yes,” according to a poll for CNEWS by Consumer Science & Analytics (CSA) published on Wednesday, April 12. According to the same survey, 36% of respondents answered “no,” thus opposing this idea. The latest poll generally aligns with previous polls on the topic of immigration in France, which show the French are overwhelmingly opposed to mass immigration. However, this poll also shows that women are slightly more in favor of the idea of stopping non-European migration flows than men (61 percent), a finding that generally contrasts with polls from other countries like the United States, Germany, Sweden and Finland.

… I have recently returned from a three-week trip that included stops in seven countries in Eastern Europe. In preparation for the journey, I arranged for contact with a number of local journalists, politicians and academics in the various countries. … While there were some variations in the responses of my interlocutors, I quickly learned that the war in Ukraine, if not popular, was considered to be a necessary step to limit what was described repeatedly as an allegedly autocratic if not kleptocratic Putin’s desire to recreate the old Soviet Union, using military force as necessary … The anti-Russian sentiment surprised me … Several contacts provided a more plausible reason for the tilt towards Ukraine: they wanted to prevent any return to Russian dominance of the region …

Israeli actor Topol was an international film star celebrated for roles including milkman Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof and Bond villain-turned-collaborator Milos Columbo in For Your Eyes Only. Now, his family have said that, between acting gigs, he worked as a secret Mossad agent, living a secret double life of “adventure and courage.” The actor died last month aged 87, and his family have spoken to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, saying Topol used his London home as a base from where he targeted embassies, airports and airlines of his country’s Arab enemies.

Sirens wailed, church bells rang and the presidents of Germany, Israel and Poland bowed their heads Wednesday before a memorial to Jewish insurgents who fought a mismatched, desperate battle against Nazi German forces in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Celebrations of the uprising’s 80th anniversary honored the hundreds of young Jews who took up arms in the Polish capital in 1943, choosing to fight and die at a time and place not dictated by the Nazis … “I stand before you today and ask for forgiveness,” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said at the site of the former ghetto.

Like many Holocaust survivors, I’ve always felt uncomfortable about the way the memory of the Holocaust has been shaped. The myth of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is an excellent example. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – the very name is deceptive. The Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto never revolted … Only a small group of young people revolted, whose size and efforts were inflated to mythic proportions in Israel after the state was established in 1948. More importantly, the uprising, which started on April 19, 1943, contradicted the survival strategy of the masses of Jews who remained in the ghetto … The figures on the length of the real fighting were also inflated.

Young women fighters rounded up during the 1943 German action against the Warsaw ghetto are shown in this widely-reproduced photograph. Like the famous “ghetto boy” photo, this was included in the 1943 “Stroop report.” The original caption read: “Women of the He-halutz movement, captured with weapons.” … The young woman at the right is Malka Zdrojewicz. Years later, she recalled the circumstance behind the taking of this photograph.

… Events are piling up that point to at least a gradual decline in the dollar’s preeminence in the global economy and that this could lead to serious economic trouble for Washington. Events are not moving as quickly as the pundits are predicting, but they are moving, and if current trends continue, the United States will find itself facing a new and enduring era of stubborn price inflation and weakening US geopolitical power … None of this threatens to immediately send the dollar into a tailspin or “collapse.” The dollar’s role in the world economy is still huge, and the dollar remains the most used currency by far … Washington is addicted to deficit spending, monetary inflation, and international meddling in the name of US primacy and war.

In the latest censorious assault on English literature, PG Wodehouse’s celebrated comic ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ novels have reportedly been rewritten by publishers to remove “unacceptable” passages and prose. Following the international row over the decision to issue censored copies of the children’s books of Roald Dahl to conform with modern woke sensibilities, it has emerged that the whimsical novels of English novelist PG Wodehouse have become the next target for failing to align with the politically correct code of current publishers … In addition, the comedic novel had a racial phrase to describe a “minstrel of the old school” purged from the book. According to the British broadsheet, racial terms have been removed from multiple Wodehouse novels.

Walking in the footsteps of Jesus, huge crowds of Christian pilgrims have this month thronged Jerusalem’s ancient streets where the Easter story unfolded … In recent months, Christians living in the occupied East of the city say they have seen increased harassment and violence. The Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III has warned of “unprecedented attacks on the Christian presence by radical Israeli groups” … Two ultra-Orthodox teenagers were caught on security cameras desecrating graves in the Anglican cemetery … An extremist Jewish mob hurled chairs and damaged property in violent scenes at an Armenian-owned restaurant by New Gate in the Old City. There were cries of “Death to Arabs, Death to Christians”. … Over the years, cases of spitting, cursing and pushing priests in the Old City have become routine.

The head of the Roman Catholic Church in the Holy Land has warned in an interview that the rise of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government has made life worse for Christians in the birthplace of Christianity. The influential Vatican-appointed Latin Patriarch, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, told The Associated Press that the region’s 2,000-year-old Christian community has come under increasing attack, with the most right-wing government in Israel’s history emboldening extremists who have harassed clergy and vandalized religious property at a quickening pace. The uptick in anti-Christian incidents comes as the Israeli settler movement, galvanized by its allies in government, appears to have seized the moment to expand its enterprise in the contested capital.

Emmaus is a profoundly important place in Christianity … In 1967, after Israel launched its Six Day War, Israel expelled the inhabitants of Emmaus and obliterated almost all traces of the village, along with two other Palestinian villages nearby. This was part of the Israeli strategy … Israel then “brought in the bulldozers and destroyed and detonated and trampled. Not for the first time, not for the last … The villages’ inhabitants then “trekked for days through the mountains to Ramallah, leaving their belongings behind. Four seniors and a one-year-old baby died along the way. The elderly and disabled residents who were unable to leave their homes had their houses demolished on top of them. Eighteen were killed, buried underneath the rubble.”

The government’s refusal to deal with the ongoing migrant crisis is a “dangerous cocktail” that now threatens Germany, the head of one police union has warned. Heiko Teggatz, the head of Germany’s Federal Police Union, has expressed outrage at the government’s refusal to clamp down on mass migration to the country, saying that the combination of open borders policies and mass migration poses a significant threat to the nation. It comes as mass migration in the country once again rises to near-record highs, with over 200,000 first-time applicants claiming asylum in the European nation in 2022 alone. This rise now only appears to be continuing, with Bild reporting that nearly 55,000 asylum applications being made within the first two months of 2023, an 85 per cent rise on this time last year.

It is not the first time former [French foreign intelligence agency] DGSE director and former ambassador Pierre Brochand has made public calls for a complete change to immigration policies while warning against France becoming poorer and possibly descending into civil war … Brochand characterized the kind of immigration France has been experiencing for the last 50 years as “endured” and not chosen, “massive,” “on the rise,” … “conflictual,” “economically dysfunctional,” “costly for public finances,” “unpopular according to polls,” and “mostly irreversible.” As a matter of fact, Brochand insisted, such massive immigration of low-qualified people from failed states has been pulling France down, making it poorer and causing a sharp degradation in the quality of its public services.

Liberal Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson put the blame on violence and poverty in the Windy City on big corporations. “We have large corporations. Seventy percent of large corporations in the city of Chicago — in the state of Illinois, did not pay a corporate tax,” Johnson said during a Thursday appearance on CBS Mornings. He argued that low investment in Chicago has led to poverty, which in turn caused violence. “And it’s that type of restraint on our budget that has caused the type of disinvestment that has led to poverty, of course that has led to violence.” Chicago has been suffering through a crime wave … Johnson, a progressive activist and political organizer, has promised to support immigration to Chicago and double down on “sanctuary city” policies in the city.

Twelve years after Syrian President Bashar Assad was shunned, Arab countries have gradually welcomed his regime back into the fold — as victor of a war that has yet to end. Despite Assad not yet controlling all of Syria, the Arab acceptance serves to legitimize his rule over the impoverished and war-wrecked country … Saudi Arabia and several other Arab countries severed ties with Assad more than a decade ago, and the Cairo-based Arab League suspended Damascus’s membership in 2011 as several powers bet on Assad’s demise. But on Wednesday, Syria’s Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad visited regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia for the first time since civil war erupted in 2011, ahead of nine Arab states meeting in Jeddah on Friday to discuss letting Damascus back in.

Greek lawmakers are set to vote on urgent legislation introduced by the government in Athens to ban neo-Nazi parties from competing in upcoming national elections in May. The move comes after an imprisoned neo-Nazi set up – from behind bars – a political party that is gaining popular support ahead of the polls … The move comes just weeks after Greek lawmakers voted to ban Ilias Kasidiaris, a leading member of the now defunct Golden Dawn party, from competing in the May 21 polls. Kasidiaris is among 60 neo-Nazi members and politicians serving stiff sentences for targeting migrants, homosexuals, and left-wing political activists at the height of Golden Dawn’s activities from 2012 to 2019 … From prison, he has set up a political party called The Greeks, and a YouTube channel with over 120,000 followers.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and his senior officials are skimming American taxpayer dollars by the hundreds of millions, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claimed on Wednesday. The alleged grift even includes schemes involving trade with Russia itself. Zelensky and his entourage embezzled at least $400 million from US funds meant for diesel procurement last year, Hersh claimed in a new article on Substack, citing a CIA estimate. Kiev has allegedly been buying diesel fuel, which is essential for the war effort, from Russia itself – and in the process skimming large sums of US funds earmarked for diesel payments. Reports had earlier surfaced about how oil products originating in Russia had made their way to Ukraine through Bulgaria and Latvia.

The Ukraine government, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, has been using American taxpayers’ funds to pay dearly for the vitally needed diesel fuel that is keeping the Ukrainian army on the move in its war with Russia … Zelensky has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments. One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least … The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president, because “he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.” 

A Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that has been leaked online says that the US expects the war in Ukraine to go into 2024 without any peace talks between the warring sides, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. “Negotiations to end the conflict are unlikely during 2023 in all considered scenarios,” the DIA analysis reads. The document says even if Ukraine regains a “significant” amount of territory from Russia and “unsustainable losses on Russian forces,” it would not lead to peace talks. Another leak that was also reported by the Post says the US thinks it’s unlikely Ukraine will regain any significant territory in its expected counteroffensive, a stark difference from what the Biden administration has been saying publicly. Both documents, the Post said, could bolster the argument that the US should be pushing for negotiations.

The number of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the United States shows “no signs of slowing,” new federal data shows. A total of 2.53 million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis were recorded in 2021, according to a new report published Tuesday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s a 5.8% increase from the 2.39 million cases reported in 2020, and a 7% increase from five years ago when 2.37 million STIs were recorded in 2017 … While certain STIs did not reach pre-pandemic levels, others — such as syphilis — are recording the highest numbers seen in more than 70 years.

The détente between Saudi Arabia and Iran — with China playing a facilitating role — is … a pretty big deal. Most importantly, it is a wake-up call for the Biden administration and the rest of the United States’ foreign-policy establishment, because it exposes the self-imposed handicaps that have long crippled U.S. Middle East policy. It also highlights how China is attempting to present itself as a force for peace in the world, a mantle that the United States has largely abandoned in recent years … The United States, by contrast, has “special relationships” with some countries in the Middle East, and no relationship at all with others, most notably Iran. The result is that client states such as Egypt, Israel, or Saudi Arabia take U.S. support for granted and treat its concerns with ill-disguised contempt …

The publishers of “Gone with the Wind” will amend the latest printing of the classic American novel to include a trigger warning over racism and a new introduction that addresses “white supremacy.” The London-based publishing house, Pan Macmillan, determined that a cautionary note was necessary to include with Margaret Mitchell’s detailed depiction of slavery in America during the Civil War. The warning claims the epic 1936 Civil War drama contains “shocking elements” that were of its time, the Telegraph reports. “The novel includes the representation of unacceptable practices, racist and stereotypical depictions and troubling themes, characterization, language and imagery,” the message reads.

Church leaders in Jerusalem say Israeli police are imposing “heavy-handed and unnecessary restrictions” on access to an important Orthodox Easter ritual. They say numbers who can attend Saturday’s Holy Fire ceremony at the Holy Sepulchre Church are being limited to 1,800, down from 10,000 last year. The police, who control security in occupied East Jerusalem, say they are ensuring safety and freedom of worship. Church officials are now urging Christians to ignore the restrictions … The call to local Christians and foreign pilgrims could lead to chaotic scenes in the Old City, where police have set up extra security checkpoints. Last year, videos shared on social media showed scuffles with worshippers as officers turned them away from the church.

… Ironically, the French are doing far more damage to Paris than did the retreating Germans in 1944. The government of President Emmanuel Macron is wobbly … Students feature prominently in the violent demonstrations … The Paris street has fastened on to President Macron’s necessary pension reforms as a wonderful excuse to riot and break things … France is a nation awash with unemployed 60-something retirees. Women tend to stay home and bake; men shuffle around and look for things to do … What a giant waste of talent and manpower. Vital, capable, educated men killing time because of France’s absurdly low retirement age … President Emmanuel Macron was right, if heavy-handed, to ram the retirement legislation through government. The spoiled French need a kick in their ‘derriere’ to revive their fighting spirit.

The City Council of Kyiv, capital of Ukraine, wanted to name a street after Volodymyr Kubiyovych, a Nazi collaborator and SS official, but the city’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko intervened to prevent it. During the Holocaust, Kubiyovych was involved in the formation of the Waffen-SS Galizien, a Nazi military force made up of Ukrainian volunteers. Kubiyovych died in Paris in 1985 and, to this day, he is recognized by many as an important Ukrainian scholar, and his works continue to be widely circulated despite his Nazi past.

Contemporary film report on a mass rally in Lviv (Lemberg), Ukraine, July 18, 1943, for the newly formed SS Division “Galicia.” Ukrainian-language narration. Runtime: 2:27 mins. Ceremonies begin with an outdoor religious service. Ukrainians greet the German Governor, Otto Wächter, who then addresses the large, joyful crowd. Taking part in the parade are many young men who have volunteered for service in the new military formation, as well as young women in traditional dress. Many carry the symbol of the “Galicia” Division, a yellow stylized lion on a blue background – the Ukrainian national colors.

… Tremendous developments in the Middle East have all but ended decades of US meddling in the region. Peace is breaking out in the Middle East and Washington is not at all happy about it! Take, for example, the recent mending of relations between Saudi Arabia and formerly bitter adversaries Iran and Syria … Washington is angry that Saudi Arabia will start trading with Syria and Iran because those two countries are still under “crippling” US sanctions. One by one, as these countries begin ignoring US-demanded sanctions, the entirety of US foreign policy is being exposed as a paper tiger … China seeks business partners, not to manipulate the internal politics of the Middle East. They may be ruthless in their own way, but it is suddenly clear that the countries of this region are tired of US meddling and are looking for new partners.

Europe must reduce its dependency on the United States and avoid getting dragged into a confrontation between China and the U.S. over Taiwan, French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview on his plane back from a three-day state visit to China … Macron emphasized his pet theory of “strategic autonomy” for Europe, presumably led by France, to become a “third superpower.” He said “the great risk” Europe faces is that it “gets caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevents it from building its strategic autonomy,” while flying from Beijing to Guangzhou … “The paradox would be that, overcome with panic, we believe we are just America’s followers,” Macron said in the interview.

On Tuesday, Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak acknowledged that Israel ha nuclear weapons in a now-deleted tweet about concerns over the current Israeli government’s judicial overhaul plans. Barak wrote: “In conversations between Israelis and Western diplomatic officials, there are deep concerns raised of the possibility that if the coup in Israel succeeds, a messianic dictatorship — that possesses nuclear weapons and fanatically wishes for a confrontation with Islam centered on the Temple Mount — will be established in the heart of the Middle East.” Israel’s nuclear arsenal is an open secret, but Israeli officials and their US counterparts do not acknowledge its existence … Every US president since Richard Nixon agreed not to press Israel to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in exchange for Israel not declaring its stockpile.

Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany and an avid supporter of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels was full of enthusiastic love for Russia in his youth. And he wrote about it in his personal diary. “Reading. Dostoyevsky – for the first time. Astounding. ‘Crime and Punishment’. Reading it at night.” That’s what Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary at the beginning of 1919. It seems, his passion for Russia started then … In Winter 1919-1920, a young Goebbels read Leo Tolstoy’s novel ‘War and Peace’ and left a note: “I read diligently. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, the revolution within me.”

The HarperCollins publishing company has revised multiple novels by the famed British mystery writer Agatha Christie to remove references to Jews and other minorities deemed offensive by sensitivity readers. The edits, which the British Telegraph first reported on Sunday, add Christie to a growing list of authors whose work is getting tweaked for contemporary audiences … Christie, whose mid-century detective novels featuring the characters Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple made her one of the best-selling fiction writers of all time, included references to Jews in several of her books that prominent critics found antisemitic.

… It’s a moment to recall just how antisemitic the early detective novels of Agatha Christie were … Some previously published content, long suppressed in the USA, might cause eyebrows to be raised today. After World War II, Christie’s literary agent authorized her US publisher to silently delete anti-Semitic references in reprints of her pre-war novels … For some Christie fans, the subject remains taboo … Forward cited the novel “Three Act Tragedy” (1935), a Poirot mystery in which “barbed language about Jews appears,” in addition to “many more of her works…The point is not that [Christie] was a particularly virulent exponent of anti-Jewishness or even consciously anti-Jewish. Worse in a way, her casual comments illustrate the stereotypes and caricatures widespread in British society of her day.”

… Those who maintain that there is nothing in the character, habits, or disposition of the Jew to provoke antipathy have to bring the charge of fanatical prejudice not only against the Russians or against Christendom, but against mankind … Critics of Judaism are accused of bigotry of race, as well as of bigotry of religion. The accusation comes strangely from those who style themselves the Chosen People, make race a religion, and treat all races except their own as Gentiles and unclean … We have given up the fancy that the Jew is accursed. We must cease to believe that he is sacred.

Ukraine’s challenges in massing troops, ammunition and equipment could cause its military to fall “well short” of Kyiv’s original goals for an anticipated counteroffensive aimed at retaking Russian-occupied areas this spring, according to U.S. intelligence assessments contained in a growing leak of classified documents revealing Washington’s misgivings about the state of the war. Labeled “top secret,” the bleak assessment from early February warns of significant “force generation and sustainment shortfalls,” and the likelihood that such an operation will result in only “modest territorial gains.” It’s a marked departure from the Biden administration’s public statements about the vitality of Ukraine’s military …

Ukraine could run out of missiles for its Soviet-made air defense systems by early May, giving Russia the chance to achieve air superiority in the country, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The Journal cited some of the leaked US government documents that have appeared online. According to a Pentagon slide dated February 28, Ukraine could deplete its missiles for the Buk air defense system by April 13 and the S-300 system by May 3 … According to a map from another Pentagon slide, if Ukraine depletes the systems, most of Ukraine’s infrastructure outside of Kyiv won’t have air defense protection … The document said Ukraine was also on track to run out of ammunition for some Western-provided air defense systems …

America’s Central Intelligence Agency is constantly running covert operations around the world, and all must have a cover story in case things go badly, as they often do. It is just as important to have an explanation when things go well, as they did in the Baltic Sea last fall. Within weeks of my report that Joe Biden ordered the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, the agency produced a cover story and found willing takers in the New York Times and two major German publications. By creating a story of deep sea divers and a crew who did not exist, the agency was following protocol, and the story would have been part of the first days of secret planning to destroy the pipelines.

Speaking to German reporter Marc Friedrich, veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh called the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline Sept. 26, 2022 “a major operation to blow up 4 pipelines“ run by the CIA. The United States was the first country to return to the scene of the crime, Hersh said, and removed the unexploded charge along the fourth pipeline, which failed to detonate. Hersh scoffed at reports in the New York Times and German weekly Die Zeit that 6 unidentified “pro-Ukrainians“ in a yacht blew up the Nord Stream pipeline … Hersh knows “a lot more than I’ve written”, he said, including the fact “the story about a yacht is a complete hoax.” … The German federal police was involved in concocting a cover story, Hersh noted. … He also said he has a lot more information than what he has released so far.

Patriotism, religious faith, having children and other priorities that helped define the national character for generations are receding in importance to Americans, a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll finds. The survey, conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization, also finds the country sharply divided by political party over social trends such as the push for racial diversity in businesses and the use of gender-neutral pronouns. Some 38% of respondents said patriotism was very important to them, and 39% said religion was very important. That was down sharply from when the Journal first asked the question in 1998, when 70% deemed patriotism to be very important, and 62% said so of religion.

The number of Americans who consider patriotism, religion, and other key “American values” important has fallen since the late 1990s and plummeted in the last four years, if a new Wall Street Journal poll is to be believed. Published on Monday, the poll found that the percentage of Americans who say that “patriotism” is very important to them has fallen to 38%, down from 61% in 2019 and 70% in 1998. “Religion” has fallen in importance, with 39% listing it as very important, down from 48% in 2019 and 62% in 1998. Just 30% of Americans now consider “having children” very important, down from 43% in 2019 and 59% in 1998 … Only “money” has consistently increased in importance, with 43% of Americans ranking it as very important, up from 41% in 2019 and 31% in 1998.

… The picture of safe coexistence painted by Israeli officials is starkly at odds with the experiences Jerusalem’s Christian leaders themselves describe. While they readily acknowledge that there is no organized or governmental effort against them, Christian clergy in the Old City tell of a deteriorating atmosphere of harassment, apathy from authorities, and a growing fear that incidents of spitting and vandalism could turn into something far darker. And with Netanyahu already under scrutiny from Western allies over policies toward the Palestinians and attempts at sweeping judicial reform, deteriorating safety for Christians — or at least Church leaders disseminating that narrative — could become another serious diplomatic problem for Israel’s embattled government.

Churches in Jerusalem appealed to the government Friday to ensure that Christians are able to worship freely during Easter and its run-up, expressing concern at mounting violence and acts of desecration over the past year … Church leaders denounced the fact that “over the past year, some of our churches, funeral processions and places of public gathering have become targets of attack,” with some ceremonies “closed off to thousands of worshippers” … Christian places of worship in Jerusalem have seen a wave of attacks in recent months, some of them blamed on Jewish extremists.

The story was a blockbuster: A former Texas voting official was on the record detailing how nearly three decades earlier, votes were falsified to give then-congressman Lyndon B. Johnson a win that propelled the future president into the U.S. Senate. The audio recordings from Associated Press reporter James W. Mangan’s interviews for the 1977 story were posted this week on the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum’s archival website, Discover LBJ … Luis Salas, the former South Texas election judge, told Mangan for the story: “Johnson did not win that election; It was stolen for him. And I know exactly how it was done.” The story, which made front pages across the country, pulled back the curtain on the razor-thin victory …

Saudi Arabia’s cabinet approved on Wednesday a decision to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as Riyadh builds a long-term partnership with China despite U.S. security concerns. Saudi Arabia has approved a memorandum on granting the kingdom the status of a dialogue partner in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), state news agency SPA said. The SCO is a political and security union of countries spanning much of Eurasia, including China, India and Russia. Formed in 2001 by Russia, China and former Soviet states in Central Asia, the body has been expanded to include India and Pakistan, with a view to playing a bigger role as counterweight to Western influence in the region.

It is nearly impossible to dig into any chapter of Jewish history without uncovering lessons for our own age. Spain during the 15th and 16th centuries is a particularly striking example. Even today, our view of this period, and particularly of the Spanish Inquisition, colors our attitudes regarding relations between Jews and non-Jews. The Inquisition is considered one of Jewish history’s darkest chapters — and one of Christian history’s most shameful.

Much of the sinister reputation of the Spanish Inquisition, promoted even in major motion pictures, is undeserved. Oxford University lecturer Reginald Trevor Davies, a specialist of Spanish history, confirms this in an article published in the 1957 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica … Edward Peters, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Pennsylvania, has detailed the development and impact of the Inquisition as historical myth.

Agatha Christie’s detective novels have been censored by “sensitivity readers” ahead of their reissue, The Telegraph reported on Saturday. Christie is the latest author after Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming to have their works posthumously cleaned up for a modern audience. The changes were made to new editions of Christie’s Poirot and Miss Marple detective novels, which are set to be released or have been released since 2020 … Publisher HarperCollins hired a team of “sensitivity readers” to pore over Christie’s 1927-1976 catalog in search of outdated terms. Most of the changes reportedly concern descriptions of non-British characters and insults based on characters’ appearance. The word “n***er” has been completely cut from Christie’s books …

Roger Waters has said he will take legal action against city authorities in Germany over the threatened cancellation of concerts there, after the former Pink Floyd frontman was accused of antisemitism, which he denies. In February, magistrates in Frankfurt instructed the venue for Waters’ 28 May concert in the city to cancel it, arguing that Waters was “one of the most widely known antisemites” in the world. Waters has long been an opponent of Israel over its activity in Palestine, describing it as an “apartheid state” that is guilty of “ethnic cleansing”, and supports a cultural boycott of the country. He has long denied antisemitism and claimed that his enmity is with Israel rather than Judaism, and has accused Israel of “abusing the term antisemitism to intimidate people, like me, into silence”.

… American public opinion appears to be following the downward trajectory that marked previous U.S. war campaigns since World War II … The growth of war weariness barely one year into the Ukraine conflict should be a warning signal to the administration that public support for Washington’s policy may be very fragile … The repeated – and sometimes rapid – onset of war weariness with respect to Washington’s wars of choice should be flashing a bright caution light to the Biden administration. The American people do not exhibit much patience regarding overseas crusades that produce inconclusive results, much less undeniable failure. Biden’s pledge that the United States will assist Ukraine “for as long as it takes” to repel Russia’s aggression may be issuing a promissory note that the American public is not willing to back.