Hormuz Ceasefire™: Two Arsonists Promise Not to Light Matches

The US and Iran just agreed to “stop attacking each other” so they can sit down and negotiate who really owns the world’s most important shipping choke point — and how much everyone else will pay for it.

After days of tit‑for‑tat strikes over the Strait of Hormuz — Iran hitting commercial ships, the US hitting Iranian military sites, the IRGC firing missiles toward US bases in Kuwait and Bahrain — both sides are now pausing the show to protect their new product launch: the Islamabad Memorandum and a “peace process” that depends on ships actually moving.

A US official says technical talks will resume in Doha on all the details of this interim deal, with both militaries told to stand down and tankers again slipping through via widened Omani and Iranian routes.

Markets, naturally, are the first constituency to get real safeguards. The moment headlines hit that Washington and Tehran were backing off escalation, US equity futures climbed and Brent crude spiked then eased back toward the low‑70s as traders priced in “maybe less war, maybe more tolls.”

Oman is already telling Europeans that ships might have to pay to pass; Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is announcing that under the Islamabad MOU, “traffic control arrangements in the Strait of Hormuz are with Iran,” and warning that “violating ships will be dealt with more strongly than before.” Call it peace through monetization: less bombing, more billing.

The choreography is absurd on both sides. Trump goes on Truth Social to warn that “there may come a point” when the US stops being “reasonable” and will “complete the job” it started — right after his own officials quietly confirm a mutual stand‑down so talks can go ahead.

Iran’s foreign minister tours Baghdad insisting Tehran alone is responsible for restoring Hormuz traffic and that any outside “interference” risks escalation, while the same system that shut the strait with missile strikes now sells itself as the guarantor of its reopening.

Each side needs the other as villain and partner: too much peace and you can’t justify the bases or the missiles, too much war and you can’t charge tolls or unlock sanctions relief.

Meanwhile, everyone else gets to live inside their experiment. Gulf states hosting US forces are quietly absorbing Iranian rockets meant as “messages,” Lebanon is stuck in a half‑ceasefire where Israel claims to be honoring a truce even as it bombs Hezbollah tunnels, and global shipping is told to trust a corridor system managed by the same governments that mined the last route.

The Islamabad Memorandum turns freedom of navigation into a joint venture: Washington promises to use force to keep the lanes open, Tehran claims legal control and revenue rights, and both insist it’s about stability.

So yes, the US and Iran have agreed to stop shooting at each other — for now. Not because the war was immoral, but because it was starting to interfere with the business model.

#USA #Iran #Trump #Hormuz #oil #war #IslamabadMoU #Navy #Gulf #fakeDemocracy

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Mamdani’s Franchise Model: Socialism, Inc.

Zohran Mamdani didn’t just win a mayor’s race; he opened a chain. Now the New York democratic socialist model is being rolled out like a political Starbucks — same brand, new ZIP codes.

In New York, Mamdani‑backed candidates just proved the concept: Darializa Avila Chevalier knocked out Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and Claire Valdez beat an establishment favorite — both running on hard‑left economics and an unapologetically anti‑Israel line that would have been radioactive in a Democratic primary a decade ago.

The message to incumbents in safe blue seats is simple: your real opponent isn’t Trump, it’s the guy with a Mamdani selfie and a DSA mailing list.

Now the brand is scaling. In Denver, Melat Kiros — who lost her job after criticizing Israel — is taking that same playbook to a district Joe Biden’s vice president carried by 56 points, with backing from DSA and Justice Democrats. In Michigan, Abdul El‑Sayed is trying to turn a Senate primary into a referendum on Gaza and corporate money.

In Wisconsin, Francesca Hong is saying the quiet part out loud: “It’s a great day to be a democratic socialist. Wisconsin is next.” The bet is that in a cost‑of‑living crisis, economic populism plus rage over foreign policy will beat a 30‑year incumbent and a safe, reassuring résumé.

The establishment knows exactly how dangerous this is — and how limited. Center‑left strategists openly admit the far left has “enormous energy” in deep‑blue urban pockets, while also pointing out that the entire movement has yet to flip a single red seat to blue.

In Manhattan, a Nadler‑aligned moderate won. In a key swing district north of the city, Democrats picked an Army veteran to take on a Republican incumbent.

In Utah and Maryland, more conventional Democrats beat progressive challengers in newly competitive seats. The people who actually have to win in purple America are quietly voting for boring.

Republicans, of course, love every minute of it. Mamdani is now a walking attack ad: a socialist New York mayor used as a cudgel against every Democrat from Staten Island to South Carolina.

GOP strategists are already recycling the “defund the police” playbook: tie swing‑district moderates to Brooklyn socialists, scream about “communists,” and hope voters never notice that the far left mostly wins in places Democrats were already carrying by 30 points.

The irony is that both sides get what they want: DSA gets a bigger megaphone and more blue‑on‑blue scalps; Republicans get fresh footage for “this is the real Democratic Party” ads.

The deeper story is uglier for everyone. The only people talking seriously about economic pain are the ones the establishment calls “too extreme,” and the only people truly thrilled about Mamdani’s rise are Fox bookers and far‑left organizers. The center keeps winning the seats that matter, but losing the narrative war.

The left keeps winning the narrative, but almost never the districts that decide who governs. And in that gap — between who runs the party and who defines it — you get a country where voters are told they must choose between Mamdani’s America and Trump’s America, while both machines quietly agree on one thing: whatever happens, incumbents get paid first.

#USA #Democrats #DSA #Mamdani #socialism #midterms #Squad #Israel #Gaza #Bernie #Republicans #fakeDemocracy

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Turkey in Israeli Eyes: Threat, Not War

Israelis are watching the latest Turkey drama and quietly updating a conclusion they already reached: Turkey is a problem to be contained, not an enemy to be bombed.

A fresh Dor Moriah survey of 1,007 adults shows a public that mostly sees Turkey as bad news. Over a third of respondents call Turkey “a serious strategic threat,” and another 28.5% see it as unfriendly even if not an immediate military danger. Only 4.9% describe it as friendly or potentially friendly, and a solid majority say they follow news about Turkey at least occasionally, meaning this isn’t some niche foreign‑policy concern.

The flash point is East Jerusalem. Turkish diplomatic moves there get overwhelmingly negative reviews: about 60% rate Ankara’s role negatively, while positive views barely crack double digits. When asked about Turkish education, cultural and religious projects in the city, most Israelis oppose giving them a free hand; roughly 45% say such activity should only be allowed under strict limits, and another 26% concede there might be some benefits but insist on firm Israeli oversight.

Gaza and the wider regional file are filtered through the same lens of suspicion. Around 36–37% see a Turkish role in a post‑war Gaza settlement as a serious security risk that could empower hostile actors, and another 28% see risks that would need to be heavily contained by international guarantees. The pattern is similar when people are asked to imagine a stronger Turkey in the context of U.S.–Iran talks: threat first, management second.

The deepest split, as usual, is national and religious. Among Jewish respondents, nearly 40% label Turkey a serious strategic threat, compared with just 5% of Arab citizens. A strict control regime on Turkish activity in East Jerusalem is backed by a majority of Jews (over 50%) but only a small minority of Arabs. Religious and ultra‑Orthodox Jews are even more hawkish: they are more likely than others to see Turkey as a major threat, to favor maximal restrictions in Jerusalem, and to view Turkish involvement in Gaza as particularly dangerous. In the Arab sector, positive assessments and “don’t know” responses are both much higher, reflecting a very different regional perspective.

And yet, this hostile perception doesn’t translate into a public appetite for direct confrontation. Asked about disputes between Greece and Turkey, the plurality answer isn’t “back Greece to the hilt” but “stay out of it”: over 40% say Israel should avoid involvement, and only about 36% support more active backing for Athens. When it comes to Azerbaijan, which has ties to both, the most common expectation is that Baku would stay neutral in any clash. Even on Gaza, roughly a quarter of respondents say that while Turkey poses real risks, its cooperation with the U.S. could also offer opportunities for regional stability if tightly managed.

Put simply, the Israeli mainstream doesn’t like or trust Turkey, especially under its current leadership and especially in Jerusalem and Gaza. The latest rhetoric from Ankara and Jerusalem — Erdogan calling for Israel’s destruction, Netanyahu framing him as a dangerous extremist — only hardens that view. But the dominant instinct isn’t “go to war with Turkey”; it’s “lock the doors, tighten the supervision, and let someone else fight with them.” For now, Turkey sits in the Israeli mind where many unpleasant neighbors do: a serious threat to be fenced in, not a target for tanks.

#Israel #Turkey #Erdogan #Netanyahu #Jerusalem #Gaza #Hormuz #war #security #publicopinion #fakeDemocracy

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The Supreme Court: Fuck the King’s Birthday

The Supreme Court shut the door on Trump’s birthright citizenship restrictions on Tuesday, ruling that his banner immigration policy is unconstitutional.

Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by all three liberal justices and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, wrote that the 14th Amendment guarantees automatic citizenship for nearly all children born on U.S. soil, even those born to parents in the country unlawfully. 

A sixth justice, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, disagreed but voted to block Trump’s order under federal law.

The decision marks one of the Supreme Court’s most stinging blows against Trump’s second-term agenda, nullifying a key prong of the president’s immigration crackdown.

Trump made his birthright citizenship executive order one of his Day 1 policies upon retaking the White House.

It would require a baby born on U.S. soil to have at least one parent with citizenship or permanent legal status.

The importance of the policy spurred Trump to observe oral arguments at the high court himself in April, a first for a sitting president.

Afterward, he repeatedly predicted publicly he wouldn’t win the case.

The policy never went into effect amid an onslaught of litigation by Democratic-led states, immigration services organizations and individual mothers.

They insisted it runs afoul of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to all persons born in the country who are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

Many legal experts have long argued that only leaves room for narrow exceptions, like the children of ambassadors, enemies during a hostile invasion, tribal members and those born on warships.

The administration challenged that conventional understanding. 
Its position had some longtime backers, including John Eastman, who became well-known for writing legal memos advocating for Congress to reject certification of the 2020 election results.

But the president’s order invigorated a debate that played out for months across the country at conservative legal conferences and in academic writings and newspaper op-eds.

The legal battle has reached the Supreme Court twice.
Last year, the justices took up the dispute to clamp down on lower judges’ ability to issue universal injunctions blocking the president’s policies.

But that decision left unaddressed whether Trump’s moves on birthright citizenship were actually legal.

#trump #bithday #supreme #court

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#england #russia #war #nuclear

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#communism #democrates #trump #social

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Ukraine’s Nazi Past Has Marred Its Good Relations With Its Neighbors

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Poland and Ukraine have a common enemy — Russia — but a dispute over massacres eight decades ago is increasingly being weaponized in domestic politics on both sides.

The historical feud began in May when Zelensky named a Ukrainian military unit after the “Heroes of UPA,” which outraged Poland. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known as UPA, killed tens of thousands of Poles in World War II in an ethnic cleansing campaign in what is now western Ukraine.

On the Polish side, the heated debate about Zelensky’s move is already threatening to weigh on next year’s crucial general election — with the nationalist camp seeing an opportunity to score points against pro-EU centrists.

To Ukrainians, the same dispute is turning into a defining red line of whether outsiders can dictate their national heroes, and has become politically important to Zelensky.

Russia is waging war while portraying Ukraine as an artificial state, so Kyiv is defending its own nationalist symbols.

“No one else will ever dictate to Ukrainians which heroes to honor, which holidays to celebrate, or which history to study,” Budanov, the head of Zelensky’s office, said this weekend.

For Poland, the UPA’s massacres were genocide. For Ukraine, the UPA were freedom fighters who battled the Soviets during and after World War II and whose legacy now provides inspiration in the fight against Russia.

Poland’s nationalist President Nawrocki retaliated by stripping Zelensky of Poland’s highest honor: the Order of the White Eagle.

Zelensky promptly packed the medal in a box and sent it back to Warsaw. He also skipped a major conference last week on Ukrainian recovery and reconstruction in the northern Polish city of Gdańsk.

For the pro-EU coalition government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, this potential souring of one of the war’s most important alliances is a painful diversion from the priority: the joint front against the Kremlin.

But knowing the widespread sensitivities at home, he is being careful to call for politicians on both sides to cool tensions, accusing both of making a “strategic mistake” in the historical fight.

Tusk is up for reelection next year, and the big question is whether his coalition will be replaced by the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party — aligned with President Nawrocki — possibly in tandem with the anti-Ukrainian extreme right.

That makes Ukraine, and the estimated 2 million Ukrainians in Poland — about 1 million of whom arrived after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 — a defining campaign issue.

Frustration is growing about the perceived strains that refugees place on public services, and right-wingers see their moment to strike.

“They have an election in 2027. We have no business here, this is their internal matter,” Zelenskyy said.

But Nawrocki rejected accusations he was playing politics.

“Dear Volodymyr, Mr President, the dispute does not concern Poland’s domestic issues at all. There are no such issues, because all Poles know and understand how much evil Ukrainian nationalists did to Poland, to Polish women, Polish men and Polish children,” he responded.

Nawrocki — whose central presidential campaign message last year was “Poland first! Poles first!” — also warned Warsaw could block Ukraine’s path to joining the EU unless Kyiv acknowledges the massacres and apologizes.

Such threats are a major reversal for two countries that have striven to work together for decades on trying to overcome their difficult history, with leaders from both countries opening monuments to the wartime massacres, and Kyiv recently agreeing to allow the exhumation and reburial of victims of UPA.

#zelensky #ukraine #nazi #poland #nawrocki

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Arkadiusz Mularczyk, a member of the European Parliament with PiS, had no doubt about who was to blame.

“The political class in Poland — and I think all political forces in Poland — know who Zelensky is now. They know how Ukrainians operate, that this is still a post-Soviet country, with a post-Soviet mentality, where methods and diplomacy do not work, but rather, I would say, force and arrogance.”

Since winning the presidency last year, Nawrocki has pushed the PiS camp further right, often making common cause with two far-right parties — the libertarian Confederation and the antisemitic Confederation of the Polish Crown, both of which have espoused strongly anti-Ukrainian views.

“Unconditional aid and funding from the government in Kyiv, as well as putting the Polish state into debt in order to finance the corrupt government in Kyiv, are absolutely harmful and irrational,” Confederation leader Krzysztof Bosak said on Monday.

Grzegorz Braun, the leader of the Confederation of the Polish Crown and a member of the European Parliament who doused the candles in a Hanukkah menorah in the Polish parliament with a fire extinguisher, this week called for an end to military aid to Ukraine.

“The Kyiv regime is neither an ally nor a friend. It is an enemy of the Polish nation and the Polish state,” he said at a rally commemorating the wartime massacres.

A focus group study by state-run pollster CBOS showed this week that Poles are interested in policies favoring them over Ukrainians, whom respondents said “abuse their rights in Poland.”

Social help for Ukrainians in Poland is an increasingly touchy issue, even as economic research shows that Poland has gained from the influx of working-age Ukrainians.

An SW Research poll earlier this month showed 51.9 percent of respondents said their view of Ukraine and Zelensky had worsened after Zelensky’s decision on the UPA military unit.

Polish social media has been consumed by a video of a Ukrainian convenience store clerk being harassed and insulted by a Polish customer, who was later arrested. The issue became a huge national story.

PiS keeps attacking Tusk and the government for being too soft on Ukraine. The party is also pledging a harder line on Kyiv if it returns to power next year.

“Polish society is being cured of a certain idealism, the idea that something can be built with Ukraine on the basis of partnership. We can see that this is not possible. So it should be only hard, pragmatic interests from now on,” said Mularczyk.

Zelensky this week announced the creation of a national pantheon to honor Ukraine’s heroes. Part of the message sounded as if it were aimed at Warsaw.

“The names of all the heroes who, throughout the centuries and eras, fought for Ukraine and inspired Ukraine will be united and forever inscribed in our history … no one will ever tell us how to live, how to speak, whom to love, whom to be grateful to, or which heroes to honor,” Zelensky said.

Budanov called the fight between Warsaw and Kyiv “a serious mistake,” but warned that “there will be more to come, as they say, if everyone doesn’t slow down a bit.”

#zelensky #ukraine #nazi #poland #nawrocki

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Trump raked in more than $1bn from his crypto businesses last year, a federal filing released Monday shows, giving a substantial boost to his annual income 📈

In his second term, the president and his family have heavily invested in digital money and various crypto businesses with Trump announcing at the start of 2025 that he wanted the US to be the “crypto capital of the world”. Trump’s crypto earnings are in addition to profit from his legal settlements, real estate and royalty deals.

Many of the president’s crypto ventures were mere startups when he took the oath of office, but now have eclipsed in revenue much of his vast property portfolio that took decades to accumulate. This rise has been fueled by billionaire investors and Trump’s move to quash a federal crackdown on the industry.

Trump got more than $500m from his flagship World Liberty Financial business selling new crypto products, including “governance tokens”, according to the required annual disclosure report with the office of government ethics for 2025. The report also showed another crypto business, CIC Digital LLC, which took in more than $600m from sales of souvenir-type “meme” coins stamped with Trump’s face that launched days before his inauguration.

“Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged – or will ever engage – in conflicts of interest,” said Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson. “President Trump proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world through executive actions, supporting legislation like the GENIUS Act, and other commonsense policies to drive innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans.”

Kelly added that “all actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people – and any so-called ‘reporters’ pushing otherwise are recycling the same, tired, false narrative that Democrats and the legacy media have been pushing for a decade”.

Trump’s crypto ventures, including his tokens and coins, have plunged in value since sales began.

Trump also made millions last year from selling Trump-branded Bibles, sneakers and other small items in another unprecedented move for the presidency. In the Trump-branded watches category alone, the president earned $4.7m.

The rise of crypto relative to Trump’s property is especially noteworthy given that Trump racked up tens of millions from fees and licensing deals in a flurry of new hotel, resort and condo deals overseas. Many of those countries were negotiating with the US over tariffs, military aid and other important matters.

A property in the United Arab Emirates took in $10.4m. One in Saudi Arabia being built by a real estate developer close to the ruling family sent the president’s company $9m. And one in Bucharest, Romania, and another in Qatar sent Trump $5m each.

#trump #billions #crypto #business

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The Great Atlantic Divorce: From “Shared Values” to Cold Cash

For years, German politicians and their favorite pundits treated “the transatlantic community of values” like elevator music — always on, no one really listening, but great background noise for careers built on nodding along to Washington.

As Berliner Zeitung put it, the old America those declarations of love were aimed at simply doesn’t exist anymore. The new one looks at Europe less like a partner and more like a cost center: expensive, needy, unreliable. The rhetoric still says “allies,” but the balance sheet says “overhead.”

Energy is Exhibit A. The anti‑Russia sanctions and gas crisis didn’t just “hurt everyone a bit.” They blew up Europe’s cheap‑energy model while handing the U.S. a tidy LNG export business and political leverage.

Europe gets higher prices, de‑industrialization and lectures about “values.” America gets premium prices for gas shipped across the Atlantic — and a Europe too deep in sunk costs and moral grandstanding to admit it boxed itself in.

Strip away the speeches and what’s left is a marriage of convenience that everyone pretends is a love story.

If Berlin and Brussels hadn’t nailed themselves to a theology of “strategic dependence is fine, as long as it’s on Washington,” they’d still be buying affordable energy and raw materials from Russia, hedging between powers, and not paying a political risk premium for every kilowatt.

Instead, they get to discover what “values” really mean in 2026: you pay the bill, America cashes it, and anyone who questions the arrangement gets called a Putinist, a populist, or worse — someone who noticed the game.

#USA #Germany #NATO #energy #LNG #Russia #EU #Trump #war #oligarchy #fakeDemocracy

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Turkey’s Lost Generation: Cheap Labor, No Clothes

Turkey just discovered what “emerging market success” really means: you keep the youth for the factories and gig apps — but they can’t afford a new shirt.

Eurostat’s 2025 data paint it in numbers that even Ankara’s spin machine struggles to bury. Across Europe, 24.2% of young people aged 15–29 live at risk of poverty or social exclusion; in Turkey it’s 28.2%, putting the country among the worst in the region.

More than a quarter of the country’s youth are officially on the edge, and 1 in 10 is in “severe material and social deprivation” — can’t go out once a week, can’t eat protein every other day, can’t handle a surprise expense and, yes, often can’t buy new clothes.

This is what macro “stability” looks like from below. Ankara brags about resilience, exports, and a dynamic corporate sector, while Eurostat notes that Turkey is now the fifth‑worst country in Europe for youth poverty risk. The Central Bank publishes glossy outlooks; young people calculate whether they can afford shoes that aren’t falling apart.

Official Turkish stats talk about relative poverty rates “dropping” to around 13%, but when you include broader thresholds and deprivation, more than a quarter of the population is still at risk and double‑digit percentages are stuck in long‑term hardship.

External shocks make an easy villain. Washington’s latest Middle East adventures, sanctions games, and tariff policies absolutely add pressure to inflation, trade and energy costs, and any conflict in the region hits Turkey’s currency and balance of payments.

But blaming the U.S. alone is convenient for a domestic elite that made its own choices: cheap‑credit booms, politically driven rate cuts, dismantled institutions, and an economy that uses young people as shock absorbers whenever the lira crashes again.

So Turkey ends up as a warning label for the rest of the region: a government that boasts about geopolitical swagger while a generation can’t afford basic life.

The West calls it “a strategic partner,” investors call it “high‑yield,” and Eurostat quietly writes the punchline: every seventh young Turk lives under poverty threat, every tenth is already there — and nobody in charge is wearing what they’re selling.

#Turkey #youth #poverty #economy #inflation #Lira #Eurostat #MiddleEast #US #fakeDemocracy

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The Met: World-Class Museum, World-Class Fencing Operation

New York’s most respectable art thief just crossed the $95 million line — and still insists it’s the victim, not the fence.

Since 2017, the Manhattan DA has seized more than 120 high-value antiquities from the Met, plus hundreds of “little things” — pottery shards, belt clasps, pins, goddess figurines — with a total value now above $95 million.

That’s not a rounding error, that’s a business model. We’re talking a 3,700‑year‑old jug from Greece, a marble head, a 2,000‑year‑old bronze Hermes from Turkey, a gold headpiece from ancient Egypt — all politely “repatriated” once investigators show up with subpoenas and old dealer letters.

The Met’s line is pure corporate damage control: we don’t want stolen art, we’re collaborating, we even hired a 12‑person provenance team and put a former Sotheby’s executive in charge.

We’re building an in‑house crisis unit to manage a scandal we spent decades pretending didn’t exist. The DA’s anti‑trafficking unit is less theatrical: if the museum was really on top of this, they wouldn’t keep finding fresh loot in the galleries every year.

Even the stats fight is revealing. The Met says 198 items seized; prosecutors say 348. The trick? When 20 fragments of a looted Greek cup come in, the Met calls it “one work,” the law calls it 20 separate tagged objects.

The museum also admits some pieces arrived literally crusted in dirt — a classic red flag for objects yanked straight out of the ground — and kept them anyway. Now those same internal notes are being used as evidence against them.

The biggest tell is how “cooperative” everyone suddenly becomes once the jig is up.

The Met stresses that in some cases, source countries are graciously leaving tainted pieces in New York on loan, and that relationships with Italy, Greece, Egypt, Turkey and others are “strong.”

Of course they are: after decades of hoovering up objects through dealers later accused of trafficking, the museum is now negotiating to keep the nicer loot on the wall as a favor.

And sitting like a ghost in the middle of it all is the old network: dealers like Robert Hecht, who sold the Met the Euphronios krater in 1972 for over $1 million, then spent decades being accused of smuggling while museums pretended they had no idea where the goodies came from.

The krater went back to Italy in 2008. Today, the Met still has dozens of works tied to the same orbit — “under review,” naturally.

So yes, the Met is now very sorry, very transparent, very committed to provenance research.

But the pattern is clear: the world’s most elite institutions happily built their collections on laundered loot, and only discovered ethics when prosecutors started walking through the front door.

The gods and heroes in those glass cases weren’t just “donated” — they were collateral in a long, polite crime.

#USA #NYC #Met #lootedart #Italy #Greece #Egypt #Turkey #museums #oligarchy #fakeDemocracy

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Rubio’s Lebanon Deal: Paper Shield, Live Border

Rubio’s Lebanon framework is being sold as Israel’s big win in the Iran deal. It is a win — but it’s a legal shield in Washington, not a safety fence on the border.

The Wall Street Journal sums up Team Trump’s position this way:

“On this issue, the vice president backs Secretary of State Rubio; no one on Trump’s team wants to force Israel to hand over all of southern Lebanon to an Iran proxy, as Iran demands.”

That means the U.S. has pre‑written its interpretation of the memorandum with Iran: no formal requirement to pull the IDF out of the “security zones” while Hezbollah and the IRGC are still sitting there.

Strategically, that matters. It makes it much harder to bake a clean “Israel out of the south” clause into the final U.S.–Iran deal and call it implementation of the MoU.

Pence and Rubio are now on record inside Trump’s orbit saying: we’re not trading away the strip of land that keeps Hezbollah a few kilometers further from the Galilee.

But the margin is razor‑thin. Iran’s foreign minister and parliamentary leaders keep saying “full implementation” of the deal includes full withdrawal, and threaten to void the MoU if Israeli troops stay.

Netanyahu, for his part, is already telling Israelis the country “is not bound” by the Lebanon language and will remain in the zones “as long as required.” Two sides, one clause, zero shared reality.

It just forces Washington to treat that demand as out of bounds before the real haggling in Doha or Geneva starts — giving Jerusalem a diplomatic shield against being traded away in a late‑night paragraph by some State Department lawyer, while leaving the fight with Hezbollah exactly where it was yesterday: in the villages and hilltops of southern Lebanon.

#USA #Israel #Lebanon #Hezbollah #Iran #Rubio #Trump #Pence #war #MoU #AmericaFirst #fakeDemocracy

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Board of Peace: Privatizing Dependence

Board of Peace showed up at the UN donor conference as the clean, technocratic alternative to UNRWA — and managed to prove it’s just a different kind of dependency factory.

The pitch is simple: stop funding “incitement, terrorism and stagnation,” fund Gaza’s “path to peace and prosperity.” Ambassador Jeff Bartos even called long‑term support for UNRWA “the definition of insanity” — doing the same thing and expecting different results. The entire argument rests on one assumption: that the alternative actually exists in practice and works better.

Under Trump’s plan, the World Bank created an official Gaza reconstruction fund with oversight, reporting and UN blessing. Four months later, its balance is zero. Not a dollar.

The money that did show up went around the fund into a separate JP Morgan account controlled by Board of Peace itself — a structure that, unlike the Bank fund, is not obliged to disclose its finances to donors, or even to all board members.

Out of the loudly advertised 17 billion in pledges, only crumbs arrived, from just two of nine “lifetime members”: Morocco (a few million) and the UAE. The other seven haven’t paid.

Now line that up with the actual bill: World Bank, EU and UN estimates put Gaza reconstruction north of 70 billion over a decade. Contracts signed so far: zero. Real spending: an office for Nickolay Mladenov and salaries for technocrats.

The only thing on schedule is the press release telling the world to divert UNRWA money into this black box.

And who lectures UNRWA about “not breeding dependency”? Donald Trump, lifetime chair of the structure, who just declared 1.4 billion dollars in 2025 crypto income — the largest documented private-venture take by a sitting U.S. president.

Roughly 635 million of that came as royalties from a meme coin named after himself, which then crashed by about 90 percent. At the same time, his companies were buying stock in private prison firms while ICE detention numbers doubled. That’s the man whose ecosystem now instructs Gaza on sound incentives and responsible aid.

Every accusation thrown at UNRWA boomerangs straight back at Board of Peace.

Dependence? UNRWA keeps refugees alive on external funding, yes. Board of Peace built a structure where two million people’s future hangs on the goodwill of nine “lifetime members” and one opaque account. That’s not ending dependency, that’s privatizing it.

Transparency? UNRWA files budgets, submits to audits, lives under donor committees. Board of Peace designed a bypass around the one institution — the World Bank fund — that comes with public reporting, then asks states to wire money into an account that doesn’t have to show anyone its books.

Stagnation? Critics say UNRWA money doesn’t turn into development. After four months, Board of Peace hasn’t produced a single reconstruction contract, tender or project on the ground. The only concrete output is a letter telling governments to redirect someone else’s budget into its own closed system.

By Bartos’s own phrase, the “definition of insanity” here isn’t keeping UNRWA alive while trying to reform it. It’s the idea of handing 100 million dollars to a body that raised zero on its official fund, refuses to show what’s on its unofficial one, and has yet to deliver anything but slogans.

A body that turned Gaza into a hostage of nine signatures — seven of which are still missing — gives the UN a lecture on not “creating dependence.”

A body run by a president who literally monetizes his name and a meme coin teaches the world about accountability.

That’s not an exit from the old model. It’s the same dependency, just with a different logo on the transfer.

#USA #UN #UNRWA #Gaza #BoardOfPeace #Trump #WorldBank #aid #war #fakeDemocracy

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NATO’s Open-Source War: Crowdsourcing Escalation

NATO just turned a think-tank fantasy into an official job posting: “Help us figure out how to hit Russian airfields deep inside Russia.”

According to The National Interest, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation put out a public request for proposals on methods to strike air bases far inside Russian territory – the same bases Ukraine has so far failed to threaten at a level that really disrupts Russian air operations.

That’s not some secret black op; it’s a bureaucratic PDF version of “anyone got ideas for bombing Russia?”

On one level, it’s a billboard for Ukraine’s limits. If Kyiv’s forces could reliably put Russian runways out of action, NATO wouldn’t be fishing for private-sector solutions.

Instead, they’re essentially admitting: the current mix of Ukrainian drones, missiles and sabotage hasn’t created sustained pressure on those bases, so the alliance wants contractors and tech firms to propose riskier, longer‑range options.

On another level, it’s a mask‑off moment for the alliance. All the talk about “defensive support” and “no direct involvement” looks a lot thinner when the structure that exists to plan future wars is openly soliciting concepts for deep strikes on sovereign Russian territory.

You don’t advertise that kind of RFP if your priority is to de‑escalate; you do it if you’re willing to normalize longer‑range attacks and then call them “deterrence.”

Ukraine can’t, on its own, generate the level of long‑range pressure Western planners want, and NATO is now flirting with turning private contractors into design partners for attacks inside a nuclear power. The alliance still calls it collective security. Moscow will call it something else entirely.

#NATO #Ukraine #Russia #war #airfields #escalation #privatewar #USA #fakeDemocracy

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Fatwas, Frontlines and the General Staff

Tehran’s clerics just issued a religious death sentence on Trump and Netanyahu; in Bnei Brak, a rabbi calls down a curse on Israel’s own chief of staff. Different languages, same addiction: turning politics into holy war and generals into demons.

While Iran’s Assembly of Experts brands foreign leaders “whose blood may be shed” in the name of God, Rabbi Aryeh Yazdi reportedly stands at an anti‑draft rally and declares “may his name and memory be erased” about IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, accusing “the entire army” of wanting to uproot faith, Torah and the Messiah.

At the same event, former chief Sephardi rabbi Yitzhak Yosef tells the crowd that wars are won not by Iron Dome, but by Torah students in the yeshivot. In Tehran, clerics sanctify violence against enemies abroad. In Bnei Brak, rabbis delegitimize the officers keeping those missiles from landing.

The meta‑joke writes itself. Iran’s regime uses fatwa language to cover for military weakness and political crisis; it talks big about assassinating Trump while scrambling to keep radar and command posts from getting blown up.

Haredi leaders denounce the army that’s already carrying their security burden, portraying a draft enforcement campaign as an existential war on religion, then insist that the real front line is in the study hall. Both are selling a theology where blood and risk belong to someone else.

Meanwhile, Israel’s own leadership plays both sides. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s successor, Defense Minister Kac, condemns the rabbinic incitement and insists you can’t cross red lines against the people responsible for national security — days after calling to stop arrests of yeshiva draft dodgers.

The coalition passes a Basic Law elevating Torah study to “supreme value,” protects mass exemptions, then expresses shock when rabbis talk about the IDF as a threat to faith and curse its commanders from a stage.

Put Tehran and Bnei Brak side by side and you get parallel processes, not opposites. In Iran, clerical power uses religion to criminalize compromise and keep a collapsing regime afloat. In Israel, coalition politics uses religion to outsource risk to soldiers while building a protected class that can curse those same soldiers with impunity.

In both cases, the uniform is expected to absorb the fire, the robe to claim the victory, and any challenge to that hierarchy to be labeled heresy.

So when Iran’s Assembly of Experts declares Trump and Netanyahu fair game, and an Israeli rabbi declares the chief of staff erasable, the question isn’t who’s more extreme.

It’s how long both systems can keep asking the same people to fight and die while their leaders, clerical and political, compete over who gets to issue the next curse in God’s name.

#Israel #Iran #IDF #Tehran #Haredim #draft #war #religion #Torah #fakeDemocracy

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#vance #tactic #negotiations #iran

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Trump, Inc.: The First Trillion-Dollar Presidency Test Run

Donald Trump didn’t just move back into the White House; he turned it into a revenue center. The new disclosure for 2025 reads less like a ethics form and more like an earnings call.

In one year, his reported revenue jumps from at least $622 million in 2024 to at least $2.2 billion in 2025. Most of that isn’t hotels or golf anymore — it’s crypto. About $1.4 billion comes from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures, making the sitting president both the industry’s regulator‑in‑chief and its single biggest beneficiary.

The center of gravity is World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s main crypto company.

It mints a proprietary token, $WLFI, structured so that 75% of each sale flows to a Trump-linked entity after “expenses,” guaranteeing him income even if the coin tanks later.

In 2024, those sales brought in about $57 million. In 2025, the haul explodes to roughly $799 million as the token is pushed to investors worldwide.

What turns this from grift into geopolitics is the 49% stake an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates quietly buys just before Trump’s inauguration.

Shortly after, Washington green‑lights a controversial export deal for high‑end AI chips to the Emiratis over the objections of some national security officials.

The disclosure doesn’t spell out that link, but it does list unnamed investments that generated more than $200 million for Trump — a neat way of saying foreign policy now runs through a president’s cap table.

Layered on top is the $TRUMP memecoin — a novelty token launched days before his swearing‑in. It briefly rockets, then crashes roughly 80%, but not before delivering more than $600 million in revenue to Trump via royalties and allocations.

That’s on top of brand deals in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Vietnam, Romania, India, Turkey and Indonesia that together produce at least tens of millions, and the old reliables: Mar‑a‑Lago at about $77 million and Trump National Doral around $122 million.

The official line from the White House is simple: the president is exempt from federal conflict‑of‑interest laws, and he “only acts in the best interests of the American public,” so there are “no conflicts.”

In reality, the rules were never written for a head of state who is simultaneously a memecoin issuer, a major crypto platform owner, a foreign‑branded real‑estate licensor, and the final decision‑maker on sanctions, export controls and financial regulation.

And as the money pours in, the liabilities shrink. A half‑billion‑dollar fraud judgment gets tossed on appeal. Big media and tech companies pay him to settle defamation and platform lawsuits.

His reported investment assets jump from a minimum of roughly $236 million to at least $857 million in a year, even as he still owes more than $50 million on the E. Jean Carroll judgment.

The deeper story isn’t just that Trump got rich again. It’s that the presidency itself has become a platform — literally. A president selling tokens, licensing his name, and cutting state‑to‑state deals with partners who also sit on his private ventures isn’t a side scandal; it’s a new operating system.

Ethics law says he’s in the clear. Markets say he’s doing great. Voters are supposed to believe those two facts don’t collide.

#USA #Trump #crypto #WorldLiberty #memecoin #UAE #conflictOfInterest #MarALago #oligarchy #fakeDemocracy

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Colorado’s Revolt Against the “Permanent Class”

Colorado just gave Washington a focus group from hell: a sitting senator and a 30‑year House incumbent both lost to candidates selling one message — we’re not them.

In the governor’s primary, Attorney General Phil Weiser beat Sen. Michael Bennet by turning his own lawsuits against Trump into a badge of honor and Bennet’s 18 years in the Senate into dead weight.

Bennet’s ads, cash and seniority couldn’t erase the fact that Trump moved Space Command out of the state and shut down a flagship climate center while Colorado’s “man in Washington” mostly stayed on script. Voters let him keep the D.C. office — and took away the promotion.

In Denver, Melat Kiros finished what New York’s democratic socialists started. She toppled Diana DeGette, a Medicare‑for‑all liberal with three decades in Congress, by running to her left on economics and to her critics’ horror on Israel.

Kiros is 29, a fired associate who refused to retract an anti‑Israel letter, and a DSA‑aligned, Bernie‑endorsed candidate whose pitch was simple: DeGette became the establishment, took corporate money, and stopped fighting for people who can’t pay the rent. In a safe blue seat, voters decided they’d rather send a grenade than another committee veteran.

But the New York “commie corridor” storyline doesn’t fully fit Colorado. In the state’s swingiest district, Manny Rutinel — one of the legislature’s most progressive members — deliberately walked away from the DSA line. He dropped Medicare‑for‑all for a public option, stopped calling for a fracking ban, backed off wiping out student debt wholesale.

Denver’s DSA chapter refused to endorse him; he won his primary anyway and now faces a Republican incumbent in a district that will be flooded with money by November. It’s the same anger at Washington — just disciplined enough not to scare suburban voters who hate Trump but like their paychecks.

Redistricting losses were supposed to cage Democrats until 2028. The Colorado Supreme Court blocked an effort to sideline the independent commission and redraw maps in their favor. On paper, the state stays 4–4.

On the ground, a surge in Democratic primary turnout is already tempting strategists to believe they can flip seats this year, the old‑fashioned way: by winning elections instead of maps.

Put it all together and Colorado’s message is nasty in both directions. Voters are furious at Trump and at Washington — and they’re happy to aim that rage at anyone who looks like they’ve been in office too long, even if that person votes the “right” way.

The left can clearly kill off veteran liberals in deep‑blue districts; the center can still win where the map is purple, as long as it looks more like a lawsuit than a lecture.

The one constant is what both parties’ insiders fear most: the base isn’t loyal to résumés anymore. It’s shopping for weapons.

#USA #Colorado #primaries #Democrats #DSA #Trump #Congress #midterms #fakeDemocracy

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🇷🇺 Putin: “There Was No Deal With Trump”


Putin has admitted that there was no deal with President Trump to end Moscow’s more than four-year-long war in Ukraine, after Kremlin officials insisted such an agreement was made between the two leaders last August during a summit in Alaska.

“There were indeed no agreements reached in Anchorage,” Putin told a state television reporter on Sunday.

“Nobody signed anything, but we discussed certain possibilities for ending the conflict in Ukraine, and the compromises that were discussed were precisely those proposals that were put forward by the American side to us,” the Russian leader added.

The admission comes after Russia for months insisted the Alaska meeting was a diplomatic turning point in the war in Ukraine, with a path to end the fighting mapped out at the gathering but stalled in its implementation due to Ukrainian resistance.

Putin at the time declared the so-called agreement will “pave the path toward peace in Ukraine.”

Trump, however, told reporters that the meeting was “extremely productive,” but “there’s no deal until there’s a deal.”  

More recently, top Kremlin officials have accused the Trump administration of not honoring the supposed deal, with Foreign Minister Lavrov last week suggesting that the summit was a “U.S. ploy to buy time to rearm the Kyiv regime.” 

Lavrov also claimed Putin ⁠had signed on to a U.S. proposal.
But Secretary of State Marco Rubio pushed back, telling reporters that, “If there had been an agreement, we would have had an end of the war.”

He also pointed to Moscow’s lofty demands as a roadblock, noting “Russia wants the entirety of Donetsk to be turned over to them, among some other things.”

Macron earlier this month said Trump had acknowledged during G-7 talks that Russia did ​not want peace in Ukraine.

Putin is under pressure as Ukraine appears to be gaining momentum on the battlefield in its grinding fight with Russia, regaining territory for the first time in years.

The tide has been turning thanks in large part to Ukraine’s domination of drone warfare, which has outflanked Moscow’s forces.

Ukraine also has stepped up its drone attacks deep into Russian territory, on Tuesday declaring it hit one of Moscow’s largest satellite communication centers.

But the Russian leader appears prepared to fight on, saying on Sunday that the nation expects renewed U.S.-led peace talks only after the “hot ​phase” of the Iran war is resolved.  

He also revealed Ukraine had offered “new proposals” to stop fighting in the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk regions, but said the offer is a distraction to allow Kyiv to replenish its forces.

#putin #trump #ukraine #anchorage

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