Half of Americans are struggling to afford their rising housing costs, and the financial squeeze is so severe for many that over one in five skip meals to get by, a new poll has revealed.

The survey, commissioned by Seattle-based real estate brokerage Redfin and released on Friday, showed that 50% of US homeowners and renters have had difficulties making their housing payments. Many respondents said they had to make sacrifices to cope with inflationary pressures. For instance, 22% reported that they had skipped meals, 21% sold some of their belongings, and a combined 37% either worked extra hours or took on additional jobs.

 

Is there now a moral void at the heart of Western societies?  That question haunts us as governments in the United States and Europe act as accomplices in Israeli’s atrocious crimes against the Palestinians. The Jewish state’s conduct meets the standard of genocide as stated in the United Nations Convention on Genocide of which they all are signatories. Confirmation is likely to come soon in a conclusive determination by the International Court of Justice.

 

Michael Brenner explores the moral conundrum of the U.S. backing of Israeli atrocities in Gaza.

 

I had a funny dream by 2:22 AM... Weird. The producer of this show — Ms Gus Leonisky — my feminine side — had gone to buy a couple of bananas, still wearing the director’s headphones, to illustrate how the president of Australia would be a Minogue, either Dannii or Kylie, depending on which banana would rot first. The day was April 9th 2028, tomorrow.

By 2028, at the end of the second Trump tenure, due to his crafty deal between all the illegals in the USA and vacuum-cleaners, the UK Crown had gone to Harry the first, and decrepitude had set in the general media, by Royal decree.

King Charlie III had to give up the throne, due to a something which shall remain obscure and William the fourth had to also give up due to a hunting accident — as King Williams always do. 

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has threatened Chinese companies with “consequences” if they supply parts or equipment to the Russian military. During a multi-day trip to Beijing, Yellen also accused China of saturating global markets with cheap goods.

“Secretary Yellen emphasized that companies, including those in the PRC, must not provide material support for Russia’s war against Ukraine, including support to the Russian defense industrial base,” the US Treasury said in a statement released after Yellen met her Chinese counterpart, He Lifeng, in Guangzhou on Friday.

Yellen warned that these firms would face “significant consequences if they do so,” the statement continued.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHJKKsOHtAk

Why were climate models so wrong about 2023? Neil deGrasse Tyson learns about why 2023 was hotter than we expected it to be and what effects need to be factored into future climate modeling with climatologist at NASA Goddard Institute, Gavin Schmidt.

How 2023 Broke Our Climate Models with Neil deGrasse Tyson & Gavin Schmidt

 

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Australia is conducting its first climate risk assessment and developing an adaptation plan. Not only humans experience heat stress, so do other animals and plants. If you must feed wild birds, listen to the experts’ tips. 

 

Assessing Australia’s climate risks

"It's a pain you can't describe," Raylene Nixon says quietly.

"It's something that you feel deeper than a broken heart - it's pain in your soul."

In 2021, she sat in a sterile room and watched Australian police footage of her son's death in real time, as he gasped for air and pleaded for help.

"Choke him out," one officer can be heard yelling in the body camera video, before another places Steven Nixon-McKellar in a chokehold. 

Moments later, the 27-year-old Aboriginal man lost consciousness. Paramedics failed to resuscitate him, as his throat was obstructed by vomit.

On our own behalf: Why journalism is not a conspiracy theory and Multipolar is not a “right-wing” magazine

The RKI protocols that Multipolar sued for have triggered a broad political debate about coming to terms with the Corona period. Some media are now trying to attack our credibility. Multipolar is “right-wing” or “conspiracy-theoretical,” according to SPIEGEL and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. A reply.

PAUL SCHREYER, April 4, 2024, 18 comments, PDF

The Long Lineage of Russophobia

Why is it possible for Western politicians and journalists to repeatedly make extremely derogatory statements about Russia without an immediate public outcry? Rhetorically, any taboo may apparently be broken. This negative treatment, hardly imaginable in relation to other countries, goes well beyond factually justified criticism of the Russian leadership, and is equally observable in times of war as in times of peace. Those responsible resort to stereotypes and insinuations about Russia that have been recurrent over the centuries and have become deeply ingrained in the Western subconscious.

Hey, what if the next time Joe Biden visits the House of Representatives, Marjorie Taylor Greene is wearing a pin that says: “Donald Trump Lucks Out.” Because he so often seems to, doesn’t he?

NATO nations can only forestall an inevitable loss to Russian forces in Ukraine by deploying their troops to the former Soviet republic, a former adviser to the US military has claimed.

“The arithmetic of this is inescapable: NATO countries will soon have to send soldiers to Ukraine, or else accept catastrophic defeat,” military strategist Edward Luttwak wrote in an oped published on Thursday by the British online media outlet UnHerd. “The British and French, along with the Nordic countries, are already quietly preparing to send troops – both small elite units and logistics and support personnel – who can remain far from the front.”

Pampered hernia patient Netanyahu is ultimately responsible for the destruction of more of the planet’s hospitals than anyone since the bombing of Hamburg during the Second World War.

Normally, one would feel at least some, if not in fact quite a lot, of sympathy, for a gentleman of a certain age who has to go to hospital to have a hernia operation.

 

Shattered wards, ill-timed hernias, and the moral bankruptcy of a nation     By Peter O'Keeffe

 

A rumbling hernia can be very annoying, sometimes to the point of public irascibility and irrationality in the victim who feels that hot poker protruding where it should not be.

Twenty-five years ago, NATO was bombing Serbia as the first performance in its new role. The collapse of the Soviet Union had deprived the military alliance of its initial official role of defending its member states from a theoretical communist threat. Under no threat and devoid of UN Security Council approval, NATO assumed the self-ordained role of virtuous defender of allegedly oppressed minorities by bombing what was left of largely dismantled Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 on behalf of Albanian rebels in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

 

A pledge by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Ukraine will become a member of NATO looks like a scene from a movie about a nuclear apocalypse, entrepreneur Elon Musk believes.

The top US diplomat reiterated the “rock solid” determination of his country and other members to eventually include Ukraine in the military bloc at a NATO summit in Brussels this week. Speaking alongside Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba, he said the purpose of the event was to “help build a bridge to membership.”

At last year’s Conservative party conference, prime minister Rishi Sunak declared the UK government planned to increase, year by year, the legal age of smoking to achieve a “smoke-free generation”.

The announcement gave the impression the prime minister was taking on Big Tobacco. 

However, the UK has consistently failed to rein in the activities of Britain’s biggest tobacco company, British American Tobacco (BAT), which predominantly operates overseas.

BAT is a blue-chip company, one of the few genuinely transnational British businesses. Operating in some 180 countries, BAT says it is “one of the world’s most international businesses”. 

BRUSSELS — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's top team is piling the pressure on her to explain the selection of an EU business envoy from the German political group of which she's a member.

MEP Markus Pieper's recent appointment as the bloc's "Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Envoy" has sparked unrest among von der Leyen's most senior colleagues in the European Commission, who are now demanding answers about how Pieper — a German Christian Democrat — was appointed.