https://www.waterstones.com/author/robert-cook/435753

November 20th 2024

If you want it, here it is, come and get it – R.J Cook

Russia and US battle for advantage in Ukraine war ahead of Trump’s return

Paul Kirby

Europe digital editor

• Published1 hour ago

In a matter of days US President Joe Biden’s administration and Russia have made separate – but significant – moves aimed at influencing the outcome of the war in Ukraine, two months ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

There is a sense of Moscow maximising its gains and of Biden abandoning long-held red lines before Trump seeks to deliver on his claim to end the war in 24 hours.

Ukraine has already acted on Biden’s decision to let Kyiv fire first long-range ATACMS missiles deep into Russian territory. As Kyiv struggles to hold on to its territory in the east, Biden has promised to send anti-personnel landmines, too.

What prompted Biden’s change of heart appears to have been the arrival of thousands of North Koreans deployed to the front line, which the US sees as a “massive escalation”.

But Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has ratcheted up the tension still further by loosening the conditions of use for Russia’s nuclear weapons. That “effectively eliminates” defeat on the battlefield, claims Moscow.

One Russia commentator suggested Putin might view the current situation as an “in-between” moment that gives him the sense he has the upper hand in Ukraine.

At the start of this week, Russia launched its biggest aerial attack on Ukraine for almost three months. Amid fears of a renewed strike on Wednesday, several Western embassies closed their doors.

“It’s all connected,” says Mykhaylo Samus, head of the New Geopolitics Research Network in Ukraine. He argues Russia has been stockpiling hundreds of Iskander and Kinzhal missiles for weeks to enable it to carry out strikes and thus send a psychological message ahead of the transfer of power in Washington DC.

Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, may have been spared on Wednesday, but the message got through.

“Everything is about preparing for a strong position for talks with Trump, to understand Russia is not going to make compromise and everything depends on [Ukraine’s President Volodymyr] Zelensky.”

“There’s clearly an effort ahead of Trump to maximise their standings,” agrees Jade McGlynn, from the war studies department at King’s College London. She is highly sceptical that a deal with Vladimir Putin is possible – and that ultimately his aim is to subjugate Russia’s southern neighbour.

• Biden agrees to give Ukraine anti-personnel mines
  • Published6 hours ago
• Ukraine front could ‘collapse’ as Russia gains accelerate, experts warn
  • Published9 hours ago

Ukraine marked 1,000 days since Russia’s full-scale invasion on Tuesday with Russian forces waging relentless attacks in a bid to seize key hubs in the east of Ukraine.

The mood in Moscow appears to be that it is only a matter of time before Ukraine is in its hands, says Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

From January, however, Putin will have to consider other factors, she says: “He will have to deal with the fact that Trump now is responsible for the situation. If Putin escalates, it can worsen the chances for a deal. He will have to be more flexible, more open to different options.”

Biden’s decision to allow Kyiv to begin firing ATACMS into Russian territory was clearly directed at helping Kyiv, but it was felt by the Trump entourage, too.

Although Trump has so far said nothing, his pick for National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz, spoke of “another step up the escalation ladder and nobody knows where this is going”.

He did not go as far as some on the Trump team. Donald Trump Jr complained Biden was trying to “get World War Three” going before his father could even return to the White House.

“There’s one president at a time,” said State Department spokesman Matthew Miller “When the next president takes office, he can make his own decisions.”

Some Republicans have backed Biden’s move, although Sen Lindsay Graham said he should have done it “to help Ukraine and he’s playing politics with it”.

Russia’s reaction may or may not be an empty threat.

Under its revised nuclear doctrine, Moscow will now be able to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries that are backed by nuclear powers, and if it comes under “massive” air attack, too.

Alexander Ermakov from the Russian International Affairs Council says the change is not so much as an operational manual for using nuclear weapons, but “primarily it serves as a declaration to potential adversaries, outlining the scenarios in which such measures could be considered”.

Another message from Putin to the West, then.

• Atacms: What we know about missile system Ukraine has used to strike Russia
  • Published4 hours ago
• Fury in Rus

November 19th 2024

World Socialist Web AttUkraine fires UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles at Russia for first time

Jonathan Beale

Defence correspondent

Amy Walker

BBC News

• Published20 November 2024, 19:08 GMT

Updated 1 hour ago

Ukraine has fired UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles at targets inside Russia for the first time, the BBC understands.

The war-torn country was previously restricted to using the long-range missiles within its own borders.

Reports of the strikes come after Ukraine was given permission from Washington to fire US-supplied missiles at Russian territory.

The government has refused to comment on the reports for operational reasons, but officials confirmed Defence Secretary John Healey spoke to his Ukrainian counterpart on Tuesday night.

Ministers are likely to exercise caution in their response to the reports due to concerns over Russia’s reaction, as well as to ensure the move is not seen as being led by the UK.

In the Commons earlier, Healey said: “Ukraine’s action on the battlefield speaks for itself.”

Ukraine’s Defence Minister Rustem Umerov has also declined to confirm that his country has used the Storm Shadow missiles within Russian territory, but said it was “using all the means to defend our country”.

Matthew Miller, the US State Department’s spokesman, would also not comment on the use of the UK-supplied missile or whether the US was providing navigational assistance for their use.

When asked by the BBC if Ukraine was consulting with or informing the US about the use of missiles provided by the UK, Mr Miller said he would not “speak publicly to the use of another country’s weapons”.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly called on Kyiv’s western allies to authorise the use of long-range missiles against targets inside Russia, saying it is the only way to bring about an end to the war.

Storm Shadow is considered an ideal weapon for penetrating hardened bunkers and ammunition stores, such as those used by Russia in its war against Ukraine.

The US and UK had previously not given permission, with suggestions this was related to not wanting to escalate the war.

• What are Storm Shadow missiles and why are they crucial for Ukraine?
• LIVE: Ukraine fires UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles into Russia for first time
• How could striking deep inside Russia change the war?

But at the weekend, US President Joe Biden gave the green light for Ukraine to use the Army Tactical Missile System (Atacms) supplied by the US to strike Russia.

On Sunday Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky reacted to the news – which came via briefings from US officials – saying “such things are not announced, missiles speak for themselves”.

The Atacms was then used by Ukraine to target the Bryansk region bordering Ukraine on Tuesday.

The US has also approved sending landmines to Ukraine, in an attempt to slow down Russian troops.

Speaking at the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday, UK Prime Minister Sir Starmer said the UK would “ensure Ukraine has what is needed for as long as needed”.

Storm Shadow is an Anglo-French cruise missile with a maximum range of around 250km (155 miles). The French call it Scalp.

It is launched from aircraft then flies at close to the speed of sound, hugging the terrain, before dropping down and detonating its high explosive warhead.

BBC Verify showed images on Telegram claiming to show fragments of a Storm Shadow missile in Kursk to weapons experts.

Amael Kotlarski, Weapons Team manager at Janes, said: “We can confirm that the large, rectangular piece of debris, featuring a hole in the centre, does indeed match part of the mounting interface of the Storm Shadow / SCALP EG missile.”

Another expert could not reach a judgement based on the images.

Additional reporting by Rebecca Hartmann in Washington and Rupert Carey in London.acks Trump.

Trump’s selections for leading positions over the past week are a gallery of reactionaries, multi-millionaires and outright fascists, tasked with implementing a program of dictatorship at home and war abroad.The appointments include:

Matt Gaetz as attorney general, along with Trump’s personal lawyers Todd Blanche and D. John Sauer as deputy attorney general and solicitor general, respectively. Gaetz, one of the most fascistic figures in Congress before his resignation, represents the consolidation of the Justice Department as a weapon of political persecution.  Thomas Homan as “border czar” and Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy, together orchestrating a massive assault on immigrant workers, along with Trump’s designated Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, Marco Rubio as secretary of state, Elise Stefanik as UN ambassador, and Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel. This war cabinet is engineered to escalate US militarism, particularly against China, and to deepen support for Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians. Hegseth, a Christian fascist and former Fox News commentator, has built his career defending war crimes, while Huckabee has openly called for the extermination of Palestinians. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services and Jay Bhattacharya, whom the Washington Post reported Saturday is a frontrunner to head the National Institutes of Health. Both are proponents of unrestrained “herd immunity” policies in relation to COVID-19 and other pathogens, guaranteeing the prioritization of profit over public health, with catastrophic consequences for the population. Elon Musk, the wealthiest individual in the world, and biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the “Department of Government Efficiency.” This new agency will spearhead a $2 trillion assault on government spending, targeting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and public education. Musk, who has personally profited to the tune of $50 billion since Trump’s election, embodies the fusion of political power, economic self-interest and personal corruption at the heart of the new regime.

To implement these deeply unpopular policies, Trump and his advisers are moving rapidly to consolidate unlimited power in the hands of the White House. A central component of this strategy is the plan to bypass the Senate through recess appointments, effectively overriding its constitutional role to “advise and consent.”More than 800 billionaires in the United States now control a staggering $6.2 trillion in wealth. The top 10 percent of the population possesses more than two-thirds of all wealth, while the bottom half possesses only 2.5 percent. Individual oligarchs function almost as economic ecosystems, controlling vast sections of economic life and profiting off of the exploitation of millions of workers in the US and internationally. A social system characterized by such vast social inequality is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. The structures of political life are being brought into alignment with this social reality. Our online event on Wednesday will provide a Marxist analysis of Trump’s cabinet and the subservient response of the Democratic Party, and will outline the necessary program and strategy for the working class to fight back.I encourage you to register now, donate to help us hold more events like these, and invite your friends and coworkers to this critical discussion.

Comment So what are the self serving Democrats, like Biden whose family have already made a fortune out of Ukraine, all about ? They take working class blacks, whites and women for fools. In the U.K 10% of the population owns 90% of the land and 90% of the population lives on 10% of the land.. Meanwhile, 3% of the world’s population own 62% of the world’s wealth.

The U.S, U.K and EU elite make a fortune from Africa, Middle East and Latin America, but that’s another story. The Democrat and their elite media backlash, eagerly supported by the U.K and BBC, is all because the wrong rich people won this time. Demicracy is a lot of hypocrisy and nonsens. But one suspects Trump can see beyond the end of his nose, which is why the Deep State hasm’t killed him yet. R J Cook

U.K Media Desperate Fight To Disrupt & Discredit Incoming Trump Administration

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/elon-musk-trump-fight-epshteyn-magaworld-b2649321.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-gb

Democrats Eager To Start Nuclear World War Three Before Trump Gets In The Way – R.J Cook

Ministry of DefenceGOV.UKhttps://www.gov.uk › Organisations

Development of battle-winning hypersonic technology accelerated under new AUKUS deal.

Ukraine fires US-made missile into Russia: WW3 fears as …

Development of battle-winning hypersonic technology …GOV.UKhttps://www.gov.uk › government › news › developme…

19 hours ago — New arrangement to accelerate battle–winning capabilities of the future and bolster collective security of UK, US and Australia. Hypersonic …

AUKUS pact enters agreement to collaborate on …Yahoohttps://www.yahoo.com › news › aukus-pact-enters-agr…

5 hours ago — US and UK unveil plans for ‘battle-winning’ new hypersonic missiles. The UK, US and Australia have reached a deal to accelerate the delivery …

UK accelerates hypersonic missile development with £1bn …UK Defence Journalhttps://ukdefencejournal.org.uk › Air

14 Aug 2024 — The goal is to have the missile operational by 2030 as part of a broader strategy to bolster the country’s defence capabilities.

In major escalation, Biden authorizes long-range strikes inside Russia

With less than two months remaining in his term, US President Joe Biden has authorized Ukraine to use US long-range ATACMS missiles to strike deep inside Russia, crossing a “red line” that Russian President Vladimir Putin said could lead to direct war between Russia and NATO.

Read more

Democrats seek “common ground,” as Trump prepares government of, by and for the oligarchs

The re-election of Donald Trump signifies the violent realignment of American politics with its underlying social reality: a society dominated by staggering inequality and ruled by a capitalist oligarchy.

Read more

Joe Biden’s last-gasp missile decision is momentous for …The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com › commentisfree › nov

16 hours ago — Zelenskyy must now show that missiles will change this war, and his European allies must unify ahead of the Trump presidency, …

Putin warns US over using long-range missiles by signing …The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com › world › nov › putin-wa…

10 hours ago — Kremlin ups rhetoric over decision to allow Kyiv to use US long-range missiles for strikes inside Russia.

Fury in Russia at missile move but Putin so far silentBBChttps://www.bbc.co.uk › news › articles

1 day ago — What really counts is what President Putin does next, writes the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg.

Russia vows ‘tangible’ response if US missiles used …BBChttps://www.bbc.com › news › articles

11 hours ago — US approval for Ukraine to strike inside Russia is a key move in the war as it reaches its 1000th day.

November 18th 2024

Just like when he was a baby – By R J Cook

As I expected, the Democrats, their politically correct supporters and reliable alleged victim classes of all blacks and all women are protesting Trump’s victory, demanding recounts, because who could possibly have resisted bouncy smirking Kamala Harris, a woman of colour, which should have secured her resounding victory ?

So we had the woke and black women supported by modern white men, marching against Trump in cities from Seattle to New York, We had it with Hilary Clinton’s upset young feminist being organised on marches backed by George Soros. Clinton et al were adamant that the election had been stolen. She was the victim and wrote it all down in her memoirs in 2017

Mainstream Anglo U.S media are still very angry, with the Orwellian ‘Guardian’ pledging to hold Trump and his government to account for the entirety of his term. This media problem bedevilled Trump’s first term, along with ceaseless efforts to impeach him for sex crimes and spying for Russia. That media is very quiet about Hilary Clinton’s past or her husband Bill’s appalling record with vulnerable young intern Monica Lewinsky and many more interesting sexual allegations.

So, already Democrats, exploiting their symbiotic relationship with tame BBC State media and corporate journalism from the likes of CNN and Sky, are attacking Trump’s choices for government. Their real attitude to women is exposed when he has picked women outside of the consensus ruling opinion. Here in the U.K, the BBC has its mantra :’Broadcasting to the world and across the U.K.’

Alongside them, Sky News claims to be ‘The Home of Independent News.’ These comfortable people accept no contradiction. News anchors are predominantly female, with a rising non white ethnic contingent, but they are all what people from my background used to call posh. That is because the Anglo U.S Ruling elite presents itself as championing diversity.

Hilary Clinton showed her true colours when she called Trump supporters ‘the deplorables’. Her Democrat successor cuddly Uncle Joe Biden, followed a similar lines, declaring that Trump supporters are ‘morons.’ Saint Obama chose his words more carefully when he admonished working class black men for not showing interest in electing a fellow black. This is such a patronising attitude that blacks are beginning to see for what it is.

The reality of social class disadvantage has been kicked into the long grass since the get rich quick days, with the end of the cold war in the late 1980s and 90s. The fact that elites get rich quick at the expense of their masses because there is only so much wealth to go around if the elites are to remain so supreme, is ignored by the likes of U.S Democrats and U.K Labour.

So increasing national wealth, paradoxically means more debt and poverty for the masses, This paradox is never more obvious than across Africa, where the noble mythical image of every black emanating from black slaves, owed reparations from all whites except the super rich Royalty and aristocracy, who made a fortune from empire and slavery, is a sign of their ultimate hypocrisy. Rich blacks are still making a fortune from black slavery when it comes to mining diamonds and rare earth minerals for sale to the planet eating western pleasure bent capitalist economies.

Anglo U.S Ruling elites know that their masses are poorly educated, divided and fooled. Their Ukraine proxy war on Russia cannot stop without destroying some very big egos and crashing their banking and financial systems because so much money is invested in it. Investors and arms industries must continue to profit from the mass slaughter of young white men.

So why are Democrats making such a big deal of the abortion issue, which after so many years of Obama and Biden, they have done nothing to resolve this issue to their liking ? Why are the Democrats so pro abortion when they will need as much young male cannon fodder for the foreseeable future? Here in this nuclear illuminated future, one imagines the recruiting sergeant walking up to Ms Jones who cradles an infant, then saying with relish “What a beautiful baby. You can enlist him now, then rear him for a wonderful life and death in the U.S Army. Your country needs him, so why don’t you go and make a few more ? He can die a glorious death or end up as an inspiration as a legless, armless, blind cripple being pushed around by you in his wheelchair, just like when he was a baby.”

R J Cook November 18^th 2024

John Brown Went Off To War – Bob Dylan

John Brown went off to war to fight on a foreign shore
His mama sure was proud of him
He stood straight and tall in his uniform and all
His mama’s face broke out all in a grin

“Oh son, you look so fine, I’m glad you’re a son of mine
Make me proud to know you hold a gun
Do what the captain says, lots of medals you will get
We’ll put them on the wall when you come home”

That old train pulled out, John’s ma began to shout
Tellin’ ev’ryone in the neighborhood
“That’s my son that’s about to go, he’s a soldier now, you know”
She made well sure her neighbors understood

She got a letter once in a while, her face broke into a smile
She showed them to the people from next door
They bragged about her son with his uniform and gun
And these things she called a good old-fashioned war

Then the letters ceased to come, for a long time they did not come
Ceased to come for about ten months or more
When a letter finally came saying, “Go down and meet the train
Your son is coming back from the war”

She smiled, and she went right down, she looked up and all around
She didn’t not see her soldier son in sight
When all the people passed, she saw her son at last
When she did, she could not believe her eyes

Oh, his face was all shot off and his hand was all blown away
And he wore a metal brace around his waist
He whispered kind of slow, in a voice she didn’t know
While she couldn’t even recognize his face

“Oh tell me, my darling son, tell me what they done
How is it you come to be this way?”
He tried his best to talk, but his mouth could hardly move
And his mother had to turn her face away

“Don’t you remember, Ma, when I went off to war
You thought it was the best thing I could do?
I was on the battleground, you were home acting proud
You wasn’t there standing in my shoes”

“Well, and I thought when I was there, Lord, what am I doing here?
I’m tryin’ to kill somebody or die tryin’
But the thing that scared me most was when my enemy came close
I could see that his face looked just like mine”

“And I couldn’t help to think, through the thunder rolling and stink
That I was just a puppet in a play
And through the roar and smoke, this string it finally broke
And a cannonball blew my eyes away”

As he turned away to go, his Ma was acting slow
Seein’ the metal brace that helped him stand
But as he turned to leave, he called his mother close
And he dropped his medals down into her hand

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Bob Dylan

Transition of Power

Trump Responds to Claims of Mass Deportation

Congress

Senate Leader-elect Warns International Criminal Court

What should Biden do with his remaining time? Get a …The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com › commentisfree › nov

5 days ago — The end to this bloody stalemate must come with negotiation, and Putin should not wait until Trump is in the White House, says Guardian …

Ukraine is forced to confront a brutal Trump reality that it …CNNhttps://www.cnn.com › 2024/11/07 › europe › analysis-…

7 Nov 2024 — Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky at a meeting with US Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington on September 26, 2024. Kevin Lamarque/ …

Biden ‘rushing’ billions in aid to Ukraine as Trump win fuels …Al Jazeerahttps://www.aljazeera.com › news › 2024/11 › biden-ru…

7 Nov 2024 — Zelenskyy was among the first leaders to congratulate Trump, who has criticised the scale of US support for Ukraine.

Fury in Russia at ‘serious escalation’ of missile move

Steve Rosenberg

Russia editor, BBC News

@BBCSteveR

Reporting from

Moscow

• Published18 November 2024, 07:43 GMT

• 5275 Comments

Updated 8 hours ago

President Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to strike inside Russia with long-range missiles supplied by the US has sparked a furious response in Russia.

“Departing US president Joe Biden… has taken one of the most provocative, uncalculated decisions of his administration, which risks catastrophic consequences,” declared the website of the Russian government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta on Monday morning.

Russian MP Leonid Slutsky, head of the pro-Kremlin Liberal-Democratic Party, predicted that the decision would “inevitably lead to a serious escalation, threatening serious consequences”.

Russian senator Vladimir Dzhabarov called it “an unprecedented step towards World War Three”.

Anger, yes. But no real surprise.

Komsomolskaya Pravda, the pro-Kremlin tabloid, called it “a predictable escalation”.

What really counts, though, is what Vladimir Putin calls it and how the Kremlin leader responds.

So far he’s stayed silent.

But on Monday President Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists that “if such a decision has been taken it means a whole new spiral of tension and a whole new situation with regard to US involvement in this conflict”.

Mr Peskov accused the Biden administration of “adding fuel to the fire and continuing to stoke tension around this conflict”.

• Follow live: Biden allows Ukraine to strike inside Russia with US missiles

Western leaders would argue that it’s Russia that is ‘adding the fuel’ by recently deploying North Korean troops to the war zone to fight alongside Russian forces and by continuing to attack Ukraine.

President Putin himself may have yet to comment. But Russia’s president has said plenty before.

In recent months, the Kremlin has made its message to the West crystal clear: do not do this, do not remove restrictions on the use of your long-range weapons, do not allow Kyiv to strike deep into Russian territory with these missiles.

In September President Putin warned that if this were allowed to happen, Moscow would view it as the “direct participation” of Nato countries in the Ukraine war.

“This would mean that Nato countries… are fighting with Russia,” he continued.

The following month, the Kremlin leader announced imminent changes to the Russian nuclear doctrine, the document setting out the preconditions under which Moscow might decide to use a nuclear weapon.

This was widely interpreted as another less-than-subtle hint to America and Europe not to allow Ukraine to strike Russian territory with long-range missiles.

Guessing Vladimir Putin’s next moves is never easy.

But he has dropped hints.

Back in June, at a meeting with the heads of international news agencies, Putin was asked: how would Russia react if Ukraine was given the opportunity to hit targets on Russian territory with weapons supplied by Europe?

“First, we will, of course, improve our air defence systems. We will be destroying their missiles,” President Putin replied.

“Second, we believe that if someone is thinking it is possible to supply such weapons to a war zone to strike our territory and create problems for us, why can’t we supply our weapons of the same class to those regions around the world where they will target sensitive facilities of the countries that are doing this to Russia?”

In other words, arming Western adversaries to strike Western targets abroad is something Moscow has been considering.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg5l1220zxo?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-gb

November 17th 2024

Old Joe Biden Not Leaving Office, Senile Or Not, Wants World War Three And Maybe The Legacy Of Being The Last Ever U.S President – R.J Cook

Like two not so young lovers Zelensky and Biden cuddle up, like Rasputin and the Tsarina. Biden and his swamp dwelling Washington Mafia, backed by the BBC, don’t want Trump getting in the way of their Nuclear War. Both have made a lot of money out of Ukraine, but for these and all the other planet eaters. They have to light the fire before Trump gets in their way. U.K and European masses will believe every word lackey media tell them ,but there will be some more thoughtful in the United States. If this nasty old mad was not fit to stand for re election, why is he still front man for the despicable Democrats ? R J Cook

Biden allows Ukraine to strike inside Russia with US missiles

The big question now is how will Putin respondpublished at 22:4222:42

Steve Rosenberg
Russia editor, reporting from Moscow

There doesn’t seem to be a sense of surprise here in Russia at reports of US President Joe Biden giving Ukraine the green light to use America’s long-range missiles to strike Russia.

So far, the only reaction in Russia is from senior Russian politicians, who are expressing a lot of anger.

The head of a pro-Kremlin party has warned of serious escalation and serious consequences, and a senior Russian senator has described this as a step towards a world war.

But what counts in Russia is what President Vladimir Putin says – and he’s not said anything yet.

Over the last few months, Moscow has been sending signal after signal to the West: don’t remove your restrictions on the use of your long-range weapons, don’t allow Ukraine to strike deep into Russian territory with those weapons.

In September, Putin said if that was allowed to happen, he would view it as the “direct participation” of Nato countries in the war in Ukraine and that it would change the “nature of the conflict”.

Putin announced imminent changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine – which is the document that sets the conditions under which Russia may use a nuclear weapon. This was interpreted as sending a message to the West to not let Ukraine use the West’s long-range weapons to strike Russia.

It was Biden who made this decision but President-elect Donald Trump will take his place in the White House in January – it may play into Putin’s calculations as he tries to decide how he will respond.

Comment Much depends on what Zelensky does next and what he chooses to hit. There is likely to be even more trouble in the Middle East as Putin’s allies rally to the cause.. There will be huge environmental consequences as corrupt old Biden ramps up U.S involvement.There will be all sorts of shotages and widening conflict zones. Patriotic youth better get ready for conscription to the rich man’s cause.

If I were Vladimir Putin, I would step up my conventional war while having my finger on the button. Biden and the Democrats are the ultimate rock busting group. The fireworks and the war tunes will be literally mind blowing.

As a college lecturer in political history back in the early 1980s, it was my job to know about and understand Russia. I know why U.S, U.K and EU are after Russia and then China. I know the people and the history. The western ruling elite get ever richer, and have never forgotten the Russian Revolution. Getting so rich at the expense of the gloabal masses means they get poorer.They want more than a rubber boat ride to the U.K and a career in crime.

So the elite need to keep their growing masses at bay, distracted and culled if necessary. War is a tried and tested perfect solution. Britain’s elite and their lackeys are arrogant,stupid and lead the world on moral hypocrisy. The latter will march to any stirring war tune, no doubt all in touch with their feminine side, full of ersatz feminist fervour and ready to kill with their high heeled shoes or be killed trying, for the greater good of the super rich,

R J Cook

Freedom’s Just Another Name For Nothing Left To Lose.

BBC Religion Editor Comments on Trump and his Christian supporters. How typically condescending – R J Cook.

Aleem Maqbool

BBC Religion editor

Standing on a podium in a Florida convention centre on the night of the election, a row of American flags behind him and a jubilant crowd looking on, Donald Trump declared: “Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason, and that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness.”

This was one of the most striking themes of his election campaign – that he had been chosen by God. Yet even before the attempt on his life on 13 July in Butler, Pennsylvania, millions of Americans already felt guided by their faith to support the former, and now future, president.

Some cast the election in an apocalyptic light and likened Trump to a Biblical figure.

Last year, on the Christian show FlashPoint, TV evangelist Hank Kunneman described “a battle between good and evil”, adding: “There’s something on President Trump that the enemy fears: it’s called the anointing.”

Jim Caviezel, an actor who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, proclaimed, albeit jokingly, that Trump was “the new Moses”. Then, in the months leading up to the election, many of his supporters referred to him as a “saviour”.

The question is why. What makes so many see this man, who isn’t known to have an especially strong faith, as sent from God?

And what does that say about Christianity more broadly in a country where the numbers of churchgoers is in rapid decline?

‘All of us have sinned’

Reverend Franklin Graham is one of America’s best-known evangelists and the son of Billy Graham, arguably its most famous preacher. He is one of the Trump believers, convinced there is no doubt that the president-elect was chosen for this mission by God.

“The bullet that went through his ear missed his brain by a millimetre, and his head turned just at the last second when the gun was fired,” he says. “I believe that God turned his head and saved his life.”

The questions asked about Trump’s character – including accusations of sexual misconduct, and his alleged affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels and associated hush-money trial – don’t dim Mr Graham’s view.

“Remember when Jesus told the crowd, ‘Let the one without sin cast the first stone’ and that slowly, the entire audience began to disappear? All of us have sinned.”

In the early 1990s, about 90% of US adults identified as Christians – a figure that had fallen to 64% earlier this decade, with a large increase in the number of those unaffiliated to any faith, according to data from Pew Research Center.

This, says Dr Jones, was something Trump was able to draw upon.

“Trump’s message was: ‘I know you’re in decline, I know your numbers are waning. I know your children and grandchildren aren’t affiliated with your Churches anymore, but if you elect me, I’m going to restore power to the Christian Churches”,’ he says.

Not all Christians in the US were won over, however. For some, their faith has guided them to precisely the opposite impression of Trump.

‘Trump has demeaned and debased’

In recent months, from the pulpit of Bible Ways Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia, Reverend Monte Norwood has been sharing a very different message to that of Franklin Graham.

He, for one, was dismayed at last week’s election result.

“Trump has demeaned and debased just about anybody he could, from immigrants to minorities to women to those who are disabled,” he says.

“White conservative Republican Christianity that ignores character is just hypocritical.”

He has long been opposed to the idea of a second Trump presidency, and he has voiced this on social media and through activism encouraging voter turnout – such as by helping other black voters to register to vote and access free rides to the polls.

“I am a Matthew chapter 25 kind of Christian – where Jesus said: ‘When I was hungry you fed me, when I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink.’”

Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20g1zvgj4do

Overnight strikes hit region across Ukraine published at 11:0511:05

Russia’s drone and missile attacks on Ukraine overnight targeted several regions across the country.

In Kyiv, residents sought refuge in the city’s underground train stations as air strikes hit the Ukrainian capital and caused power outages.

Blackouts were also reported in the central region of Dnipropetrovsk, where two rail workers were killed and three injured after attacks on railways and rail depots.

Russian air strikes also caused power cuts in the eastern region of Donetsk and in the western region of Lviv, a woman was killed by rocket fragments.

In southern Ukraine in the city of Mykolaiv, two women were killed by drone strikes, with six injured including two children. The port city of Odesa was also targeted and power cuts were imposed in the wider region.

Critical infrastructure was hit in the Vinnytsia and Volyn regions and explosions were also heard in the cities of Kropyvnytskyi, Rivne, Ivano-Frankivsk, Cherkasy, Kryvyi Rih and Zaporizhzhia, according to local media,

Clean-up underway in Kyiv after overnight strikes published at 10:3610:36

Fresh images from Kyiv show local authorities cleaning up the debris after Russian air strikes struck the Ukrainian capital.

Early this morning, workers used heavy machinery to remove parts of Russian missiles from an apartment block.

Another terrifying night, Ukrainian MP tells BBCpublished at 10:0010:00

Ukrainian MP and leader of opposition party Golos, Kira Rudik, has been speaking to BBC 5 Live Breakfast.

She describes last night’s attack as “dreadful” and “terrifying”, saying there is currently no electricity where she is and does not know when it will be restored.

“Russia’s attacks continue over and over and we spend most nights in the bomb shelter when air raid sirens are on.

“Every night we come out of our homes and what we witness is another home was hit, another hospital was hit, another energy infrastructure system was hit,” she says.

Rudik also suggests Ukraine needs more support, saying: “You cannot win the war getting 10% of the military support you were promised.”

Quote Message

The world is watching and saying ‘this is upsetting and concerning’, and we still do not have enough of the air defence systems to protect us from this and we still do not have enough weapons for this to stop.

Ukrainian MP Kira Rudik

In pictures: Kyiv residents seek shelter undergroundpublished at 09:2609:26

We’ve now getting pictures of residents in Kyiv seeking shelter in the capital’s underground train stations as Russia’s air strikes on Ukraine unfolded.

Platforms, stairs and waiting areas are filled with people wrapped up in blankets, winter jackets and beanies, with many bringing their pet dogs and cats.

November 16th 2025

Fact-checking RFK Jr’s views on health policy

By BBC Verify team

BBC News

• Published15 November 2024

Robert F Kennedy Jr has been nominated by Donald Trump to be the next US health secretary, a post that oversees everything from medical research to food safety and public welfare programmes.

Speaking in an NPR interview, external this week, Kennedy said Trump had given him three “instructions”: to remove “corruption” from health agencies, to return these bodies to “evidence-based science and medicine”, and “to end the chronic disease epidemic”.

Some of Kennedy’s own stated aims for government are bound up with misinformation – and many medical experts have expressed serious concerns about his nomination, citing his views on vaccines and other health matters.

On other matters he has more support, for example in scrutinising the processing of food and the use of additives.

What does RFK Jr say about vaccine safety?

Kennedy said in his NPR interview that vaccines were “not going to be taken away from anybody”.

He says he wants to improve the science on vaccine safety which he believes has “huge deficits” and that he wants good information so people “can make informed choices“.

But his critique of the vaccine safety regime has been roundly dismissed by experts.

While Kennedy has denied, external on several occasions that he is anti-vaccination and said he and his children are vaccinated, he has repeatedly stated widely debunked claims about vaccine harm.

One of his main false claims – repeated in a 2023 interview with Fox News, external, was that “autism comes from vaccines”.

This theory was popularised by discredited UK doctor Andrew Wakefield.

But Wakefield’s 1998 study was later retracted by the Lancet medical journal. Multiple studies since, across many countries, have concluded there is no link between vaccines and autism, external.

Dr David Elliman, a consultant in community child health at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, said RFK Jr has perpetuated myths around vaccination with “an utter disregard for the evidence”.

“If he is appointed and continues in the same mode, I fear not just for the vaccination programme in the US, but similar programmes around the world, and for healthcare in general,” says Dr Elliman.

“Vaccination has probably saved more lives and is better researched than most, if not all, aspects of healthcare. RFK Jr could set this back and be responsible for the death and disability of myriads of people, particularly children.”

• What RFK could do on vaccines, fluoride and drugs

Misleading claims on fluoride in drinking water

Fluoride – a naturally occurring mineral recognised to protect teeth against decay, external – is added to water supplies in many countries, including the US, where around 63% of the population have fluoridated water, external.

Kennedy has long campaigned against the practice, and claimed in a recent post on X, external that Trump, as president, would be advising ”all US water systems to remove fluoride from public water”.

The president-elect told the NBC network, external: “Well, I haven’t talked to [Kennedy] about it yet, but it sounds OK to me. You know, it’s possible.”

In his post on X, Kennedy said fluoride was “associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease”.

But Prof Avijit Banerjee, chair of cariology and operative dentistry at King’s College London, said “the potential harmful effects of fluoride cited have not been associated with the very low levels of fluoride used in water fluoridation programmes”.

Kennedy cited a September 2024 ruling by a judge in California recommending further investigation into potential harms following the publication of a report suggesting possible links between exposure to higher levels of fluoride to lower IQ in children.

But that report has proved highly controversial. Dr Ray Lowry of the British Fluoridation Society notes that the ruling “was not an outright condemnation of fluoride; rather, it suggested that the EPA could investigate further to ensure an adequate safety margin.”

Listen: Should fluoride be added to drinking water?

Comment It is pity that someone doesn’t fact check BBC and all the other official fact checkers. The BBC is full of upper middle class people, black, white, male and female all new left leaning. They have an institutional bias. Of course there are some relics of pre 1990s vintage, but their mindset or culture is the same patronising cultural imperialism.

Britain’s ruling elite control mainstream media, either as owners or deep state plutocrats. They have new ways of selling their obsessive right to rule mentality. Donald Trump, his cabinet and supporters are in for a tough time from these self righteous self serving people whose version of democracy is all that they agree with and believe. People like Trump and Kennedy are therefore a threat to democracy. Their war on Russia is all part of their con trick.

Science is a methodology, not vested interests or professsional ego,establsihed bigotry. It is about questions, theories and testing paradigms to destructionm Physics would never have moved on if Newton had his way. Religion accounted for 80% of his work. It took Einstein to challenge Newton’s nasty bigotry and plagiarism. Then came others to challenge him. But the new left, with their ever growing wounded entourage of BLM, Antifa and Trans Exclusionary feminists are equal to the best of all Medieval religious bigots and inquisitors. R J Cook

Queen Bees? Why Women Don’t Support Other Women | CCL

CCLhttps://www.ccl.org

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A brighter future begins with the people who lead us there. Leadership Development Brings.

November 15th 2025

Russian Spy Ship Spotted Near US Aircraft Carrier by …Newsweekhttps://www.newsweek.com › russia-yantar-norway-nat…

8 days ago — Norwegian media have previously reported that the ship has been seen near critical seabed infrastructure such as oil and gas pipelines and …

Royal Navy monitors Russian seabed spy ship Yantar …Navy Lookouthttps://www.navylookout.com › royal-navy-monitors-r…

November 14th 2024

It’s becoming clear that Donald Trump never plans to leave …inews.co.uk·https://inews.co.uk › opinion › donald-trump-no-plan-le…

6 hours ago — … never wanted to leave the White House (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP). Donald Trump has won the democratic power to rule as an autocrat. With Congress …

NEW YORK TIMES

Opinion

Bret Stephens

A Party of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat

Nov. 6, 2024

A story in chess lore involves the great Danish-Jewish player Aron Nimzowitsch, who, at a tournament in the mid-1920s, found himself struggling against the German master Friedrich Sämisch. Infuriated at the thought of losing to an opponent he considered inferior, Nimzowitsch jumped on the table and shouted, “To this idiot I must lose?”

It’s a thought that must have crossed the minds of more than a few liberal pundits and Democratic eminences late Tuesday night, as Kamala Harris’s hopes for winning the presidency began suddenly to fade.

How, indeed, did Democrats lose so badly, considering how they saw Donald Trump — a twice-impeached former president, a felon, a fascist, a bigot, a buffoon, a demented old man, an object of nonstop late-night mockery and incessant moral condemnation? The theory that many Democrats will be tempted to adopt is that a nation prone to racism, sexism, xenophobia and rank stupidity fell prey to the type of demagoguery that once beguiled Germany into electing Adolf Hitler.

It’s a theory that has a lot of explanatory power — though only of an unwitting sort. The broad inability of liberals to understand Trump’s political appeal except in terms flattering to their beliefs is itself part of the explanation for his historic, and entirely avoidable, comeback.

Why did Harris lose? There were many tactical missteps: her choice of a progressive running mate who would not help deliver a must-win state like Pennsylvania or Michigan; her inability to separate herself from President Biden; her foolish designation of Trump as a fascist, which, by implication, suggested his supporters were themselves quasi-fascist; her overreliance on celebrity surrogates as she struggled to articulate a compelling rationale for her candidacy; her failure to forthrightly repudiate some of the more radical positions she took as a candidate in 2019, other than by relying on stock expressions like “My values haven’t changed.”

There was also the larger error of anointing Harris without political competition — an insult to the democratic process that handed the nomination to a candidate who, as some of us warned at the time, was exceptionally weak. That, in turn, came about because Democrats failed to take Biden’s obvious mental decline seriously until June’s debate debacle (and then allowed him to cling to the nomination for a few weeks more), making it difficult to hold even a truncated mini-primary.

But these mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview. First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe. Second, the refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America. Third, the insistence that the only appropriate form of politics when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance — capital R.

Regarding the first, I’ve lost track of the number of times liberal pundits have attempted to steer readers to arcane data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve to explain why Americans should stop freaking out over sharply higher prices of consumer goods or the rising financing costs on their homes and cars. Or insisted there was no migration crisis at the southern border. Or averred that Biden was sharp as a tack and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a jerk.

Yet when Americans saw and experienced things otherwise (as extensive survey data showed they did) the characteristic liberal response was to treat the complaints not only as baseless but also as immoral. The effect was to insult voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues. You could see this every time Harris mentioned, in answer to questions about the border, that she had prosecuted transnational criminal gangs: Her answer was nonresponsive to the central complaint that there was a migration crisis straining hundreds of communities, irrespective of whether the migrants committed crimes.

The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.

The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency.

Last, liberals thought that the best way to stop Trump was to treat him not as a normal, if obnoxious, political figure with bad policy ideas but as a mortal threat to democracy itself. Whether or not he is such a threat, this style of opposition led Democrats astray. It goaded them into their own form of antidemocratic politics — using the courts to try to get Trump’s name struck from the ballot in Colorado or trying to put him in prison on hard-to-follow charges. It distracted them from the task of developing and articulating superior policy responses to the valid public concerns he was addressing. And it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly since the country had already survived one Trump presidency more or less intact.

Today, the Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but how’s that ever going to be a winning electoral look?

I voted reluctantly for Harris because of my fears for what a second Trump term might bring — in Ukraine, our trade policy, civic life, the moral health of the conservative movement writ large. Right now, my larger fear is that liberals lack the introspection to see where they went wrong, the discipline to do better next time and the humility to change.

Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues.

The challenge of the next four years was clear to see at Trump’s victory party

David Smith Washington DC bureau chief

Is Kamala Harris preparing for a recount against Trump? …The Economic Times·https://m.economictimes.com › … › US News

2 days ago — A fundraising initiative linked to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has allocated part of the contributions to a “recount fund.”

Election recount? Harris fundraiser donations to be used …USA Today·https://www.usatoday.com › news › elections › 2024/11/11

3 days ago — A portion of donations made to the Harris Victory Fund will be directed towards a recount effort, according to its fundraising page.

Behind the Scenes of Kamala Harris’s Recount EffortsLAmag·https://lamag.com › news-and-politics › harris-campaign…

3 days ago — Harris Campaign Quietly Opens Door for Potential Recounts Despite Concession. While the Vice President has publicly accepted the election …

Harris Campaign Quietly Opens Door for Potential …Yahoo·https://www.yahoo.com › news › harris-campaign-quietl…

3 days ago — While the Vice President has publicly accepted the election results, her campaign’s fundraising apparatus tells a different story.

Harris’ failed campaign rakes in cash for ‘recount account’New York Post·https://nypost.com › 2024/11/11 › us-news › harris-faile…

3 days ago — Veep Kamala Harris conceded to President-elect Donald Trump last week, but that hasn’t stopped her from trying to beef up her “recount …

Kamala Harris Fundraising Going Towards ‘Recount’Newsweek·https://www.newsweek.com › kamala-harris-fundraising…

3 days ago — Donations to the vice president’s campaign on ActBlue are now being partially rerouted towards a vote recount effort.

Kamala Harris Fundraising Going Towards ‘Recount’Newsweek·https://www.newsweek.com › kamala-harris-fundraising…

3 days ago — Donations to the vice president’s campaign on ActBlue are now being partially rerouted towards a vote recount effort.

Harris fundraising committee allocated donations to ‘ …WPMI·https://mynbc15.com › news › nation-world › harris-fund…

3 days ago — WASHINGTON (TNND) — The Harris Victory Fund, a fundraising committee authorized by Vice President Kamala Harris’s election campaign, …

Post-election, liberal moms are not OK — and it’s hurting kidsNew York Post·https://nypost.com › 2024/11/08 › opinion › post-electi…

6 days ago — Donald Trump’s victory in Tuesday’s presidential election is giving liberal moms conniptions, stressing them out — as well as their kids.

Kids are being impacted by Trump’s win too. Here’s how to …

San Francisco Chronicle

·https://www.sfchronicle.com › Opinion › Open Forum

6 days ago — Leading up to the 2024 presidential election, my daughters — ages 7 and 10 — asked many questions. “How can Trump run for president if he’s …

How moms are navigating Kamala Harris’ loss for themselvesThe 19th News·https://19thnews.org › 2024/11 › moms-navigating-harr…

6 days ago — Many moms took their kids to vote with them hoping to have them be part of a historic election. Now, those same parents are having to talk …

Why Women Won’t Have Kids After Trump Won The ElectionBuzzFeed·https://www.buzzfeed.com › morgansloss1 › why-wome…

19 hours ago — “I lost my sister due to pregnancy complications when our state didn’t let her have an abortion. I’m scared of that happening to me.”

Trump win triggers women to rethink having childrenAxios·https://www.axios.com › Politics & Policy

3 days ago — “I don’t want to risk having another woman under Trump’s presidency,” one mother told Axios.

How parents can help disappointed kids cope with …The Washington Post·https://www.washingtonpost.com › Lifestyle › Parenting

9 Nov 2016 — Long after Tuesday-night bedtimes, when the results were rapidly leaning toward a President Trump, the texts, tweets, calls and emails from …

Comment No wonder we have so many trans girls in the west. This is real left wing liberal protest, not some FBI approved white underclass desperados and agents on Capitol Hill. There is going to be a lot more trouble. R J Cook

November 12th 2024

The challenge of the next four years was clear to see at Trump’s victory party

David Smith Washington DC bureau chief

Dear reader, As a famous baseball player once said, it’s deja vu all over again. Eight years ago I stood in a hot and crowded hotel ballroom in New York, surrounded by Donald Trump supporters whose low expectations turned into disbelief and unbridled joy when their man won the US presidential election. Last week I was back among the Make America Great Again (Maga) faithful at a convention centre in West Palm Beach, Florida, watching the election results roll in. This time the prevailing emotion in the crowd was not so much surprise as vindication. They felt they had just witnessed the rightful restoration of their Caesar. But even as I witnessed young “bros” in Maga caps embracing and chanting “USA! USA!”, and even as I saw middle aged Trump fans dancing euphorically to Y.M.C.A., I was aware that millions of hearts were sinking across America and the world. In a triumph of fear over hope, a former president branded a fascist by people who worked for him had defeated Kamala Harris, bidding to become the first woman in America’s 248-year political history to occupy the Oval Office. In 2016 voters had rolled the dice on a relatively unknown quantity. In 2024 they knew exactly what they were getting: a man who was twice impeached and who tried to overturn an election. In choosing Trump they seemed to make a mockery of Harris’s closing assertion: “That is not who we are.” Washington is now bracing for a second Trump term likely to be even more extreme and divisive than the first. Undocumented immigrants face the prospect of arrest and deportation. The rights of LGBTQ+ people are in jeopardy. Reproductive freedom is under siege. Military aid to Ukraine could soon be terminated. And with climate deniers back at the controls, environmental regulations will be slashed in the name of “drill, baby, drill”. Democracy itself has rarely looked more fragile. “Imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Harris warned during the campaign. “If re-elected, he will claim unchecked and extreme power.” Now there is no need to imagine. Trump, who has said he would be a “dictator” only on “day one”, will return to a White House surrounded by lackeys and loyalists eager to indulge his dark impulses. That includes retribution against his enemies, including the media. At a campaign rally Trump said he wouldn’t mind if someone tried to shoot through the media to assassinate him. As I stood among the crowd at his victory speech in the early hours of Wednesday morning, he referred to my trade as “the enemy camp”. The imperial president will be aided by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of the X social media platform, which increasingly resembles a rightwing propaganda machine. Robert Kennedy Jr, a vaccine conspiracy theorist, will apparently be working on health care, including women’s health. The level of disinformation could therefore surpass even Trump’s first term, which began with the lie that his inauguration crowd was the biggest ever and culminated in the claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. We will hold the powerful to account and refuse to sanewash chaos or normalise authoritarianism. Importantly, we will also tell the stories of the men, women and children whose lives will be impacted by the potentially the most powerful US president of modern times.

Trump ally says Ukraine focus must be peace, not territory

Sofia Ferreira Santos

BBC News

• Published9 November 2024

A former adviser to President-elect Donald Trump says the incoming administration will focus on achieving peace in Ukraine rather than enabling the country to gain back territory occupied by Russia.

Bryan Lanza, who worked on Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, told the BBC the incoming administration would ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for his version of a “realistic vision for peace”.

“And if President Zelensky comes to the table and says, well we can only have peace if we have Crimea, he shows to us that he’s not serious,” he said. “Crimea is gone.”

A spokesperson for Trump distanced the incoming president from the remarks, saying Mr Lanza “does not speak for him”.

Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014. Eight years later, it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and has occupied territory in the country’s east.

The president-elect has consistently said his priority is to end the war and stem what he characterises as a drain on US resources, in the form of military aid to Ukraine.

But he has yet to divulge how he intends to do so – and will likely be hearing competing visions for Ukraine’s future from his various advisers.

Mr Lanza, a Trump political adviser during his 2016 and 2024 campaigns, did not mention areas of eastern Ukraine, but he said regaining Crimea from Russia was unrealistic and “not the goal of the United States”.

“When Zelensky says we will only stop this fighting, there will only be peace once Crimea is returned, we’ve got news for President Zelensky: Crimea is gone,” he told the BBC World Service’s Weekend programme.

“And if that is your priority of getting Crimea back and having American soldiers fight to get Crimea back, you’re on your own.”

The US has never deployed American soldiers to fight in Ukraine, nor has Kyiv requested American troops fight on its behalf. Ukraine has only requested American military aid to arm its own soldiers.

Mr Lanza said he had tremendous respect for the Ukrainian people, whose “hearts are made of lions”. But he said the US priority was “peace and to stop the killing”.

“What we’re going to say to Ukraine is, you know what you see? What do you see as a realistic vision for peace. It’s not a vision for winning, but it’s a vision for peace. And let’s start having the honest conversation,” he said.

In response, Zelensky’s adviser Dmytro Lytvyn characterised Mr Lanza’s remarks as placing the pressure for peace on Ukraine when it was “Putin who wants more war”.

“Putin loses most of his people in assaults at the front. What does this indicate? It is obvious that he wants to fight on,” he said.

“Ukraine has been offering peace since 2022 – there are quite realistic proposals. And it is Russia that must be made to hear that peace is needed and that peace must be reliable, so that there is simply no repetition of Russian strikes.”

A spokesperson for Trump’s transition team – which prepares the incoming administration for office – said Mr Lanza was “a contractor for the campaign”, but “does not work for President Trump and does not speak for him”.

Trump is expected to handle peace talks with a close circle of aides once in office.

An unnamed National Security Council aide who previously served under Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday: “Anyone – no matter how senior in Trump’s circle – who claims to have a different view or more detailed window into his plans on Ukraine simply doesn’t know what he or she is talking about.”

Stockpile for war, Norwegians told — water, fuel, iodine …The Timeshttps://www.thetimes.com › World › Europe

Inside, it included a checklist for keeping an emergency supply, which included bottled water, food, candles, a DAB radio and hard cash. For …

November 11th 2024

What Trump’s win means for immigration So, as we all now know, Donald Trump is again going to be the US President – only the second US President ever to be elected for two non-consecutive terms. . That’s quite an achievement, and pub quizmasters here in the UK will no doubt have to update one of their favourite obscure questions about American politics. Among the chattering classes and the (repeatedly wrong) pollsters, there’s been much debate and gnashing of teeth, about why Kamala Harris lost in a landslide, including the popular vote, to the man so viscerally despised by the left and liberal elite. How could someone as supposedly “mature” as Harris end up losing to someone her followers called “a fascist” and “convicted felon,” who they saw as the antithesis of all that the Left holds dear? The US election is a strong reminder that, despite all the theatrics, politics is still about policies. The US people rejected the politics of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). They firmly said no to climate absolutism and embraced Trump’s vision of a better future – more in their pocket, a fairer share of the spoils, getting on top of crime and plugging the holes at the southern border, as well as dealing with the bloated, inefficient bureaucracy. Will he succeed? Time will tell but as important to note is that these are the issues the people want him to tackle.

Let Trump’s victory be a salutary warning to our politicians For us, the lessons of the US election result, which we at MW expected all along, are straightforward. Politicians ignore the wishes and concerns of the people at their peril. Do it and the backlash will inevitably come, as it has in Europe and Canada – and now America has added its own example. Sir Keir Starmer should take heed: the Labour Party’s current approach to immigration is among the weakest in Europe. Starmer opposes capping legal migration and has no robust plan to deal with the majority of illegal arrivals from places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. His policies on asylum, where he will in essence provide unofficial amnesties, are not a deterrent and repeat mistakes of the past, here and in neighbouring states – like Spain, Italy and France. Each time amnesties were declared, the number exceeded the previous one. Sir Keir’s cancellation of the Rwanda plan was a blunder that removed the one potential deterrent. His flailing about to find alternatives are pitiful. The announcement a few days ago of an agreement with Serbia, Kosovo and North Macedonia to exchange intelligence is little more than admission of failure. It will contribute little to stopping the boats. The new Border Security Command, even with some increased funding, will prove as ineffectual as the previous attempts at drawing together agencies under a former senior military man. The underlying problem? The government’s commitment to border control and tackling runaway legal migration is flimsy at best. They won’t cap legal migration, nor will they amend the Human Rights Act to enable a swift policy of detention and removal. Labour understands that immigration is a flashpoint for voters, so they’ve assembled a set of token policies to create headline appeal without meaningful change. The plan seems to be to keep the public distracted with surface-level moves rather than full commitment to tackling both legal and illegal immigration. This is a major reason for the distrust in both the major parties today, especially on immigration. As The Who’s Roger Daltrey famously sang, “We won’t get fooled again.” And if America’s latest election is any indication, the British public will be just as unwilling to be “fooled again” come the next election.

Meanwhile, population growth is out of control and immigration is driving it. An increase in our population of over 600,000 in just the past year is simply unsustainable. The latest official birth statistics have also been published. They show that one third of children born in the UK in 2023 were to non-UK born mothers. That is almost twice what it was in 2001, while in London two thirds of births were to foreign born mothers. The nature of our country is being fundamentally changed contrary to the wishes of the majority of the public. We are now rapidly heading towards a situation in which the historic population of the UK will very likely become the minority within the next forty years or so. The future of our country is at stake, that is why we strongly believe that the scale of immigration must be drastically reduced as a matter of urgency.

Donate to Migration Watch  Migration Watch relies entirely on the generosity of our supporters who fund our work. If you would like to help us with our efforts, pleaseclick here to donate.

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK

Matthew Goodwin, Substack – Trump’s ‘Great Realignment’ “[On] a much deeper level, as I’ve been pointing out since the early 2010s, this election was always about something much bigger –a political ‘realignment’ that is still sweeping through and completely transforming Western democracies. What we’re living through, in short, is a historic reconfiguration of people’s political loyalties which has been brought about by two things; the rise of new cultural issues like mass immigration, broken borders, worries about identity and belonging, and the glaring failure of the old parties to navigate and respond to this new reality.” We also liked this one in The Critic by Tom Jones:

MIGRATION WATCH IN THE MEDIA

This week, Migration Watch Executive Director Dr. Mike Jones appeared on Sky News to discuss Keir Starmer’s plan to ‘smash the gangs’. Mike covered a range of issues, including the Border Security Command, the Rwanda plan, and the proposed use of anti-terror laws to target smuggling gangs:

Mike also joined Tom Harwood and Emily Carver on GB News to discuss Sir Keir Starmer’s recent Europol speech, arguing that the weather currently has more influence over illegal migration than the Home Office. Ultimately, Mike insisted, real change demands a radical overhaul of the legal system to ensure that people are detained and deported swiftly:

Alp Mehmet, Chairman of Migration Watch UK, spoke with Patrick Christys on GB News, calling out the futility of ‘smashing the gangs’ and predicting Keir Starmer’s migration policies will ultimately fail:

Alp hit the headlines on GB News again, weighing in on the controversial plan to ‘fast track’ migrants from places like Afghanistan, Iran, and Syria to the UK. On Monday, Sir Keir Starmer announced he wants to push ‘all cases through the system much more quickly’ to tackle the massive asylum backlog. But Alp wasn’t impressed: “It’s an open invitation for anyone claiming to be from these countries to make their way here,” he said. “Starmer’s speech today… effectively gives up on border control. Full of platitudinous waffle. “He called on the world ‘to wake up to the challenge of people smuggling’ – if only he would wake up from his pipe-dream of smashing the gangs.” Mehmet called the £75million boost “peanuts”, telling GB News: “While additional resources on tackling illegal Channel crossings is welcome, there’s still no sign that the Government means business on small boats. “Only making clear that illegal arrivals will not be permitted to stay will send the right message to traffickers and migrants.” Alp was also quoted in the Daily Express on Sir Keir’s latest crackdown on migrant small boat Channel crossings: “One of the problems we’ve got is that the last Government didn’t process the claims. That left us in the worst of all worlds, which was unprocessed claims. “More and more people being added to the list of people who need to be processed, all of them being housed in hotels, and you got into this complete fundamental problem. “We do need to process claims. Obviously, we can triage them in terms of what can be done when we’ve got to get claims sorted out. “We’ve got to get appeals sorted out, and we need to get removing people.”

MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD

Like us, you are doubtless feeling as disillusioned with the state of immigration policy in the UK as we are. But Trump’s victory in the US – against overwhelming odds – is more light at the end of a long dark tunnel. And don’t forget the odds against Brexit happening. That is why we will keep fighting for sensible immigration policies. Change will come, because it has to, but it needs to come quickly, before it’s too late. Contact your MP today Contact your MP today and tell them how you feel. And do please support us with whatever you can manage, our work is needed more than ever.

We wouldn’t be able to continue this work without the help of our supporters. If you would like to donate, please click the button below. Our supporters are all as concerned about the future of our country as we are. Some have been kind enough to remember us in their will. If you wish to consider leaving a bequest to Migration Watch UK, or wish to discuss anything else, do please get in touch. Our email is: admin@migrationwatchuk.org

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November 10th 2024

Liberal Lefties, and feminists are the ones who need to stop hating anything or anyone that gets in their way. R J Cook

Those posters reveal the ignorance of the know all arrogant student classes. Hate, violence, and Indian genocide built and sustained the U.S Empire from the moment the British moved in and long before the violent Americam War of independence and Civil War. These people are the new haters, arrogant, ignorant, selfish, self obsessed, intolerant and bigoted. They are dragging the U.S into the Third World, exactly as the same types are doing to the U.K. Trump will be assassinated if these ghastly people have their way.

R J Cook

The Guardian

Anti-Trump protests erupt across US from New York City to Seattle

Harris called for her people to fight. That is a call to violence and to repudiate the Presidential Result just as Hilary Clinton did in 2016. It is a call to violence and an attack on democracy. R J Cook

Anti-Trump protests erupt across US from New York City to …The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com › world › nov › donald-tr…

21 hours ago — Others held signs that read: “We won’t back down” while chanting: “Here we are and we‘re not leaving!” Similar protests took place in …

Trump’s 2024 Victory: A Rejection Of Left Liberal Ideology | …YouTube · India Today1.8K+ views · 3 days ago

Donald Trump’s 2024 victory is seen as a rejection of left liberal ideology, with voters choosing practical solutions over moral policing.

Did sexism hand Trump victory?Socialist Workerhttps://socialistworker.co.uk › us-elections-2024 › did-s…

6 hours ago — Democrat-supporting feminists think a combination of sexism and ‘weak sisters’ are to blame for Kamala Harris’ defeat and Trump’s victory.

Comment These people believe that they and their ideology have a God given right to rule. The ‘weak sisters’, as with the Obama lecturing blacks for not voting Harris, makes a mockery of any claim to freedom and democracy. Women and blacks of the masses are supposed to vote en masse. Simple as that. So now we have the outrage.

These elite new left so called liberals will be far more subtle about wrecking Trump’s government than the red necks ( aka Hilary Clinton’s deplorables ) and FBI agents on Capitol Hill. The U.K Guardian has pledged to monitor Trump’s four year term throughout. Guardian management has set up counselling for those staff traumatised by the Republican’s surprise victory.

These types are fighting a moral crusade. Only those on message across the Western and hopefully all across the eastern world, soon can be bona fide candidates, preferably women of colour, white women and blacks. Trump knows what four years of impeachment feels like along with being called a rapist, racist, Russian Spy and fraudster.

So far they haven’t missed a trick. Now military chiefs are meeting to discuss resisting any orders they consider illegal. The NATO Ukraine proxy war must not be stopped until Westerm banking, obscene profits and imperialism has been saved. Donald Trump, who may never even get back in power, with all these elite conspiracies in place, has much worse to come. Whatever, I find Donald Trump highly inspirational.

R J Cook

Germany’s political upheaval, explained

There are economic reasons behind the ruling coalition’s collapse on Wednesday.

by Ellen Ioanes

Nov 8, 2024, 6:10 PM GMT

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz departs after the appointment of a new finance minister and dismissal of the old one, on November 7, 2024, in Berlin, Germany.Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Ellen Ioanescovers breaking and general assignment news as the weekend reporter at Vox. She previously worked at Business Insider covering the military and global conflicts.

Germany appears headed toward an unexpected election — and complete political upheaval — after its deeply unpopular ruling coalition collapsed this week.

Until Wednesday, Germany, which operates under a parliamentary system in which multiple parties compete for power, was governed by a fragile coalition of three parties with very different aims. That arrangement changed after Chancellor Olaf Scholz (who belongs to the party that led the coalition, the center-left Social Democratic Party) fired his finance minister, who belongs to the fiscally conservative Free Democratic Party, over a budget dispute.

In response, the Free Democratic Party pulled out of the coalition, leaving the Social Democratic Party and its other coalition partner, the climate change-focused Green Party, without a majority in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament. For the time being, the two parties will still govern the country, but it will be difficult to pass legislation.

As a result, Germany faces political gridlock. Scholz has said he would call a vote of confidence in his government in January. He and the Greens are expected to lose, which would trigger an early election and likely elevate different parties and politicians to leadership positions, significantly shifting the course of German politics.

How did things get so chaotic in Germany?

The three-party coalition was troubled nearly from the beginning.

Scholz has never been particularly popular, and his party has been steadily losing ground to the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), as well as to other minority parties in both European Parliament and state elections.

The other issue the coalition faced was that German economic growth has been slow for years, struggling to rebound from the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s primarily because the German auto industry is threatened by Chinese electric imports and decreased demand. German energy costs have skyrocketed following sanctions on the cheap Russian fuel the country relied on prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Related:

• Why Europe is lurching to the right

After no party won a majority back in 2021, the coalition members — each with a very different approach to spending — agreed to work together “based on the assumption that they had a pretty generous budget from leftover coronavirus funds,” credit secured to finance the country’s pandemic response, Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Vox.

The plan was for “Social Democrats to give social welfare to their constituencies, for the Liberals to reduce taxes for business owners, and for the Greens to do climate projects,” in line with their parties’ priorities, Fix said.

But the German constitutional court ruled earlier this year that the emergency Covid-19 funds couldn’t be used for other priorities, leaving a multibillion-euro hole in Germany’s budget.

Adding to this problem is that Germany has a constitutionally set level of debt it isn’t supposed to exceed. Scholz wanted to raise that debt level, in part, to surge aid to Ukraine during its war with Russia. Christian Lindner, the fired finance minister, said that to do so would be tantamount to “violating my oath of office.”

Opposition parties have called for rapid action to form a new government, particularly given that US President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January. He has threatened tariffs that could further damage Germany’s economy. Scholz’s proposed timetable for elections wouldn’t allow a new government to be formed before June. Once it is formed, he and the Social Democratic Party will likely find themselves voted out of power.

The global risks of a Trump presidency will be much higher this time

The world is more chaotic and dangerous than it was in 2016.

by Joshua Keating

Updated Nov 6, 2024, 12:52 PM GMT

Donald Trump speaks to the media before boarding Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base on January 12, 2021.Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Joshua Keatingis a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood, an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map.

No less an authority than Russian President Vladimir Putin has predicted that the coming years in global affairs will be a “revolutionary situation”: a reference to a line of Vladimir Lenin’s from 1913, just prior to World War I. Putin’s counterpart in China, Xi Jinping, concurs, foreseeing “changes the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years.”

This doesn’t mean World War III is inevitable or even likely. But it does mean we are in an era when the decisions of major leaders in moments of crisis could have an outsize impact on global security and the lives of millions.

Related:

• It’s not your imagination. There has been more war lately.

This also is the moment, after a stunning win, when Donald Trump will return to the presidency.

The year 2016, when Trump was elected the first time, didn’t exactly feel like a very peaceful or stable moment in world history. The Syrian civil war and the US-led campaign against ISIS were raging. In June, one of the terror group’s sympathizers killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Russian-backed forces were occupying much of Eastern Ukraine.

About a month before the election, North Korea conducted its most powerful nuclear test to date. Europe was still in the midst of an unprecedented influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, which would end up having dramatic political consequences in several countries. Sen. Ted Cruz was terrifying 3-year-olds on the campaign trail by telling them the world was “on fire.”

And yet, viewed from the vantage point of this year, 2016 feels like a simpler time. Wars of all types have gotten more common and deadlier around the world in the years since, and superpower conflict — a concern that had largely receded in the post-Cold War era — is back on the agenda.

In short, the global situation Trump will inherit this time around will be far more dangerous and unpredictable. And that in turn raises the risks of his erratic and transactional approach to foreign policy.

What was, eight years ago, a localized “gray zone” conflict in Eastern Ukraine is now the first major land war in Europe in decades, one in which Russia’s president has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons. Israel’s war in Gaza, already one of the deadliest conflicts for civilians of the 20th century, is fast spiraling into a regional conflict that could involve direct combat between Israel and Iran and could yet drag in the US military.

Further east, potentially even more dangerous conflicts loom. Many North Korea watchers believe the country is preparing for war, and that the risk of all-out conflict on the Korean peninsula — which could potentially kill more than a million people, even if North Korea doesn’t use its nuclear arsenal — has never been higher.

Then there’s Taiwan. Even putting aside a death toll on both sides that could dwarf the war in Ukraine, a war in Taiwan would be a body blow to the global economy. If the US came to Taiwan’s aid, it could lose as many troops in a matter of weeks as it did in 20 years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some analysts believe China could even preemptively attack US bases in the Pacific if it believed US intervention was inevitable, something the US military has not experienced since WWII. And the threat of nuclear weapons use would loom over the conflict: China has the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, one that is growing fast.

China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran — a group some have dubbed the “axis of upheaval” — may not have much in common in terms of ideology of overall interests, but they are increasingly collaborating: The reported presence of North Korean troops fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine is just the latest example.

None of this is to downplay the wars and security threats that existed in 2016 and continued through Trump’s first term, nor the obviously massive disruptive effect of the Covid-19 pandemic. But state versus state conflict, and even superpower versus superpower conflict, is an entirely different matter than war against terrorist groups. Gray zone conflict is a different matter than open warfare. Recent rapid advances in drone technology and artificial intelligence are likely to make the wars of the future all the more unpredictable, and potentially more destructive.

Related:

• Why the Pentagon wants to build thousands of easily replaceable, AI-enabled drones

All of which makes the idea of putting back in the Oval Office a president who proudly calls his foreign policy approach “crazy” so dangerous.

A world on fire

Even putting aside the issues of Trump’s temperament, mental acuity, or the warnings from multiple senior national security officials from his own past administration that they believe he is dangerously unqualified for the presidency, there are several reasons to believe a new Trump presidency would amplify this “revolutionary situation” rather than moderate it.

First, Trump does not put much value on the idea of territorial integrity. It may sound like a wonky academic point, but we tend to take for granted that in our current era, countries rarely conquer each other and borders are rarely changed by force. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has obviously challenged this taboo against what the UN Charter calls the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity” of other countries.

As president, Trump reportedly told other world leaders that the Crimean peninsula, which was illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014, is rightfully Russian because everyone there speaks Russian. Figures close to the Trump campaign like Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk have openly endorsed the view that Crimea is rightfully Russian.

Trump overturned decades of US policy and international consensus by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which he has described as a snap decision made after a quick history lesson from his ambassador to Israel and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. He did the same for Morocco’s claims over the disputed region of Western Sahara, in return for Morocco recognizing Israel. (In fairness, the Biden administration hasn’t reversed either of these moves — once the taboo is broken, it’s hard to reestablish.) For Trump, the president who, after all, mused about buying Greenland, sovereignty and territorial integrity are like anything else in a deal: negotiable.

Second, Trump doesn’t value alliances. One reason Russia has not attacked any of the countries bordering Ukraine, even as weapons flow into Ukraine from those countries, is that they are members of NATO, meaning that an attack on them could bring a military response from the alliance as a whole. It’s proof of concept for the most powerful military alliance in history.

Related:

• American allies have gone from denial to bargaining on Trump’s return

Trump tends to take a narrowly transactional view of alliances. His antipathy to NATO and threats to pull the US out of the alliance have been well-documented, as have his comments that treat the US defense of Asian partners like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan as a protection racket.

The third related point is Trump’s attitude toward nuclear weapons. Defying many predictions made at the dawn of the nuclear age, no nuclear weapon has been used in war since 1945, a record that likely involves both a bit of luck as well as the power of nuclear deterrence and the very justified fear these weapons cause. Trump, though, seems a bit more blasé on the topic.

According to former aides, Trump discussed using a nuclear weapon against North Korea as president during the period he was publicly threatening Kim Jong Un’s regime with “fire and fury.” As president, he withdrew from, or let lapse, a number of key arms control treaties, most famously the Iran nuclear deal, instead preferring an approach where the US would build up its own nuclear arsenal to spend its rivals into oblivion. Recently on the campaign trail, he suggested that a reason presidents need legal immunity is so they could use nuclear weapons without fear of legal repercussions.

The issue is not just Trump’s own attitude toward nuclear weapons. In a number of US allies in Europe and Asia, there is now an active debate over whether they need nuclear deterrents of their own, driven in part by concerns over whether they could actually count on the US nuclear umbrella. Even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently suggested that without effective security guarantees from allies, his country might need nuclear weapons for protection.

The international community’s success at limiting the number of nuclear powers is one of the biggest reasons why the nuclear taboo has remained intact. But a world with more nuclear powers is a world where the use of nuclear weapons is more likely, and that world becomes more likely if allies don’t believe security guarantees are worth the paper they’re printed on.

An agent of chaos in the Oval Office

During the campaign, Trump countered that the very fact that the world has become so dangerous is the reason he should be returned to the presidency. He repeatedly made the unprovable claims that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s October 7 attacks would not have happened had he been president. He also falsely claimed that there were no terrorist attacks and no wars during his presidency.

Those claims elide the major military escalations in Iraq, Syria, and Somalia that took place under his tenure, as well as risky actions like the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, which prompted an Iranian missile strike on US troops in Iraq. Thankfully, no one was killed in those strikes, but commanders say up to 150 troops could have been. As president, he reportedly considered missile strikes into Mexico and the idea of sending troops into America’s neighbor — and No. 1 trading partner — has evolved into a mainstream Republican position.

The Trump case, essentially, is that he was able to rule the world through fear. In his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, he cited his ideological ally Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán: “Why is the whole world blowing up? [Orbán] said, ‘Because you need Trump back as president. They were afraid of him. China was afraid.’ And I don’t like to use the word afraid, but I’m just quoting him. ‘China was afraid of him. North Korea was afraid of him.’ Look at what’s going on with North Korea, by the way. He said ‘Russia was afraid of him.’”

Trump also claimed he threatened to strike Moscow if Putin attacked Ukraine, though it’s not quite clear when this was since Russian troops were in Ukrainian territory throughout the entirety of Trump’s presidency.

It’s also not clear that US adversaries were deterred by Trump’s tough-guy posturing. Trump has maintained that the punishing sanctions he put on Iran after withdrawing from the nuclear deal stopped it from orchestrating attacks in the region, but he had little response after Iran attacked Saudi oil infrastructure in 2019.

The killing of Soleimani did not stop Iran’s proxies from attacking US troops in Iraq. When it comes to Taiwan, he has suggested that the island is simply too small and insignificant to be worth defending — the kind of rhetoric that might influence China’s calculations over a possible invasion.

Once more unto the breach

In recent weeks, world affairs have seemed to be in a bit of a holding pattern, with leaders not making major decisions until they see the results of November 5. Trump may have soured a bit on his onetime good friend Benjamin Netanyahu, but in all likelihood — based on his past record — he will apply even less pressure than the Biden administration has to get Israel to reach a ceasefire in Gaza or allow in more humanitarian aid. A Trump win will likely embolden annexationists within the Israeli government, including the once-fringe but increasingly vocal movement in favor of reoccupying Gaza with Israeli settlers.

On Ukraine, Trump promised to end the conflict immediately. Judging by comments made by his running mate Sen. JD Vance, though, this would likely involve pressuring Ukraine to both cede territory to Russia and accept neutrality, without security guarantees — not far from Putin’s desired outcome. When it comes to China, the outlook is more unpredictable. Trump portrays himself as the ultimate China hawk, except when he believes doing so is bad for business.

Ultimately, the question is not whether Trump is a hawk or a dove. It’s what a return of the chaos and unpredictability that marked his first tenure will mean in a world where the risk of cataclysm is now so much higher.

Update, November 6, 7:50 am ET: This story, originally published October 28, has been updated to reflect the results of the 2024 presidential election.

Correction, October 28, 10 am ET: A previous version of this story misstated the year that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down. It was in 2014.

Democrats’ bet on a generation of liberal voters has backfired badly

BBC North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher

Donald Trump swept to victory on Tuesday by chipping away at groups of voters which Democrats once believed would help them win the White House for a generation.

After Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, many triumphantly claimed that the liberal voting coalition which had elected the first black president was growing more powerful, as the makeup of America changed.

Older, white conservatives were dying off, and non-white Americans were projected to be in the majority by 2044. College-educated professionals, younger people, blacks, Latinos and other ethnic minorities, and blue-collar workers were part of a “coalition of the ascendant”.

These voters were left-leaning on cultural issues and supportive of an active federal government and a strong social safety net. And they constituted a majority in enough states to ensure a Democratic lock on the Electoral College – and the presidency.

“Demography,” these left-wing optimists liked to say, “is destiny.” Sixteen years later, however, that destiny appears to have turned to dust.

Cracks began forming when non-college educated voters slipped away from the Democrats in midterm elections in 2010 and 2014. They then broke en masse to Trump in 2016. While Joe Biden, with his working-class-friendly reputation built over half a century, won enough back to take the White House in 2020, his success proved to be only a temporary reprieve.

This year, Trump supplemented his gains with the blue-collar workers by also cutting into the Democratic margins among young, Latino and black voters. He has carved up the coalition of the ascendant.

According to exit polls, Trump won:

– 13% of the black vote in 2024 compared to Republican John McCain’s 4% against Obama

– 46% of the Latino vote this time, while McCain got 31% in 2008

– 43% of voters under 30 against the 32% for McCain

– 56% of those without a college degree – back in 2008, it was Obama who won a majority

November 8th 2024

Comment on Amsterdam & Absurdity of Multi Culture – R J Cook

British media are playing down the terrifying reality of Islamic hostility to Jews and the reality that these peoples cannot live together peacefully. The current Palestinian Crisis is worse than 1948. It will escalate. Wherever there is religious absolutism and proselytising there will be bloodshed.

The solution will never come from wishy washy white liberal multi culture. The impossibility of this approach is already proven by political mainstream retreating from protection and respect for transsexuals. J K Rowling and TERF bigots have made their point.

The hideous sadistic murder of 16 year old trans girl Brianna Ghey said it all. British authorities have ducked the issue by blaming social media. These problems are massive across Europe, politicians fobbing us off with palliatives and severe punishments for anyone speculating and saying the wrong thing. The NATO proxy war on Russia has much to do with the eruption of war in Palestine and renewed grievances among worldwide Islamic communities.

R J Cook

Israeli football fans attacked in Amsterdam, officials say

Attackers shouted ‘Jewish, IDF’ says man who had nose brokenpublished at 11:0311:03

Gabriela Pomeroy
Live reporter

Adi Reuben, a 24-year-old Maccabi Tel Aviv fan who was visiting Amsterdam, tells me about the moment he was attacked and kicked on the floor by a group of young men.

“Last night we got off the metro station and started walking towards the Mozart hotel where we were staying,” he says.

“More than 10 men who looked Arab or Turkish just came up to me and my friends and asked us ‘where are you from’. They shouted ‘Jewish, Jewish, IDF, IDF’.

“They started to mess with me and I realised I had to run, but it was dark and I didn’t know where to go.

“I fell to the floor and ten people were kicking me. They were shouting ‘Falestin’ [Palestine]. They were kicking me on the floor for about a minute, then they walked off, they weren’t afraid of anything.

“I realised I had full blood on my nose and my nose was broken and it is very painful. I also couldn’t see well for about 30 minutes after it happened.

“I am getting on an Israeli plane which came to rescue us this afternoon and will get medical treatment back home.”

He adds: “This was a specific attack that was organised beforehand.”

‘We have nothing to do with the war’ – Israeli fanspublished at 10:5710:57

Two Israeli fans, who were in Amsterdam for the match, say the violence was “really terrifying”.

Standing in Dam Square, Joni Pogrebetsy, tells Reuters news agency that he saw attacks in the square while walking back to his hotel.

He says they were warned of the violence by a restaurant owner, who offered to book them a cab or hide them in the restaurant until it was over.

Pogrebetsy says the police “came really late” and after “a lot of people were already hurt, injured”.

Dutch officials say there was a heavy police presence across the city ahead of the game and afterwards.

Michael Asuss, who lives in the Netherlands and was at the match, says the attacked fans had nothing to do with the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

“We have nothing to do with the war, we come to support Maccabi Tel Aviv and we got [expletive].”

How does the House of Representatives work?published at 11:1511:15

With all this attention on the House of Representatives, let’s briefly recap what it is and how it folds into to the wider US government.

The US Congress is made up of two bodies – the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The House is made up of elected representatives from across the country. Each state is allocated a different number of representatives based on their population.

Representatives serve a two-year term and the entire chamber goes up for re-election every November in even-numbered years.

For new legislation to become law, it has to pass a vote in both the House and the Senate.

• As a reminder, the Republican Party have now won a majority in the Senate, and are ahead in the House of Representatives.

November 7th 2024

Bernie Sanders explains why Kamala Harris lost to Donald …livemint.comhttps://www.livemint.com › News › Us News

19 hours ago — Following Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders criticized the Democratic Party for failing to connect with working–class …

Kamala Harris, at all black Howard University in Washington, failing to hide her shock, bitterness and condescension in her concession speech. British media are pumping out their anger at misogyny and white male racism for her defeat. Worse still, these self righteous elite well paid liberals can’t understand why Black Men, Latinos and Puorto Ricans did not vote for this black female messiah. Women’s reproductive rights were supposed to be their top priority, followed by open door illegal immigration. The U.K’s Guardian newspaper staff are apparently so shocked by what should have been a foregone conslusion that they have called in an election trauma councillor.

R J Cook

“You only support Trump because you are a man” by R J Cook

Comment Bernie Sanders is painfully out of touch with the modern Democrats and what they and their project is about. I have spelt it out in very few words below.

I foolsihly raised the issue of Trump’s victory to my frightfully posh white colonial Kenyan born female neighbour..I have lived in this frightfully posh rather exckusive neighbourhood since 1993 – in spite of police criminalising and near bankrupting me. I worked very hard in all sorts of jobs to get what I have, including construction. It took lots of risks to get what I have, but none bigger and more costly than when I got married in 1977. Beforehand my ex father in law ruefully commented that “Every man is entitled to one big mistake.”

It is becoming increasingly clear that serious relationships with women are potentiatlly very dangerous which is why so many men out themselves as gay or transsexial. I have done much research into the latter.

However, my book, ‘Man Maid Woman‘ offered the then politically incorrect view of a young man changing sex in response to a bossy feminised society and a sense of failure as a young man. He had no idea what he was supposed to be or do. Worse still, I insulted black virility and heterosexuality because the trans girl married a black male friend. Already an established writer, I was able to imagine that story due to my nightmare home life and a wife who admitted hitting me on four occasions that she could remember.

The year was 2003 and married life had set me on a journey to attempt suicide, All my years of hard work and caring for my widowed mother were rubbished as police re wrote my life story, telling my doctor that I had been mentally ill for many years, and a long term alcoholic. For rather nasty reasons police think I am not allowed to talk about, my life. They claim the right to define it. They are very interested in it for reasons I cannot divulge at the moment, but one cannot live without help.

Now we have a plethora of female writers allowed to disparage men for not voting Kamala Harris into power. That is how Democrats see women and black men. They are supposed to vote for women and or fellow blacks. Issues of class and deprivation don’t count. Women are born virtuous and only do bad things because men make them, like voting Trump. So called journalists are lining up reprising the sex and fraud allegations against Trump, ignoring how conveniently they and Steele’s Russian agent allegations were timed to block Trump’s Republican canditature. They and their megastars from Holluwood and elite music industry thought they had it in the bag..

Fresh impeachment processes can’t be far away. Planet eating plutocrats are very concerned that Trump is a threat to the NATO Proxy Ukraine proxy war on Russia. Apart from their land and resource grabbing greed, the whole western banking system will be at risk, if Trump cuts of the funding. That is at root of U.S inflation and interest rate rises. As it stands, the industrial military madmen are getting ever more hideously rich and powerful. Nothing must get in their way.

Back to my privileged white female neighbour, she became very angry when I declared my pleasure at Trump’s success. She responded ” So you support Russia and Putin’s authoritarianism ?. Trump is going to create an authoritarain state and ruin the climate. He is going to open lots of coal mines and abuse more women. You only support him because you are a man.”

R J Cook

Spelt out in detail – by R J Cook

I followed a lot of news on Donald Trump’s victory yesterday. For me his victory was wonderful news. Had I been a U.S voter, he would have had my vote even though I do not agree with him on every detail of declared policy. As for war in Ukraine, I just hope for the best. However, the moralising hypocritical self styled left are waiting for any excuse to call him a Russian agent.

Virtue signalling Democrats, like the U.K Labour Party, need underdogs, who unlike Marx’s lumpenproletariat must never lose their chains. So the BBC and Sky News are all on the Democrat Elite band wagon. More migrants means more underclass to patronise, voting fodder and cheap labour. Every third world country has a pampered ruling class. Like its U.K parent state, equality and democracy means a unified global under class for a system where 3% of the population own 62% of the wealth. The masses have to accept this consensus or pay the price. Encouraging ignorance and religious bigotry is the essence of this process. This consensus is the definition of westers style democracy.

These people are so arrogant and self righteous that they could not help reveal the reality of the Harris massively expensive election campaign. Their refined patter brooks no doubt, underpinned by face acting, rampant hand gestures and well practised cliches. This was spelt out in detail by agonising six figure salaried glamorous but diverse news anchors. Most of the presentation was down to righteous intoning females because their global news corporations had decided that the key issues were black and female liberation. There is never any mention of class, the downside of feminism,broken home,poverty and black violent criminals.

So the big questions were, why didn’t all the blacks and Latinos vote for Kamala Harris as the media ordered, along with all the guilty privileged white men who should know better to vote Trump. The U.K Foreign Secretary David Lammy, had already declared Donald to be a “ sociopath, racist, sexist and threat to all women.” U.K Media and Labour luvies already declared that Harris deserved the crown. Former head of the corrupt CPS turned U.K PM Sir Keir Starmer had already seen 100 of his party staff despatched to help the Harris cause.

All day we had whinging about stupid Americans putting the economy, inflation and jobs above and before women’s automatic right to free abortions. They call it women’s reproductive rights. The fact is, that if this state sanctioned murder is such a good idea, why didn’t VP Harris with Roman Catholic and world famous Irish American President Joe Biden push it through before dementia appeared to get the better of him ? Other questions includes; what about condoms, the pill and abstaining from sex if men are as horrible as feminist opinion dictators say they are ​? Why on earth have sex with them in the first place ​?

As the six figure salaried media mouths pontificated on the sheer stupidity of voting for Trump, cameras swept the all black college campus where Harris was due to make her concession speech. There were lingering painful shots of overweight petulant black female students. They had been offered supreme validation and redemption by Kamala Harris. All was going to media and opinion poll plan, so what went wrong ? There may not be the Republican Rage facilitated by the FBI and low level security in January 2020, but the Harris, media et al anger and resentment in defeat was palpable from the smattering of an audience, amplified by several decibels when courageous Kamala stepped out on to the stage.

She condescended to say that there would be no protests as there had been from disgruntled Republicans and FBI agent provocateurs et al. However, she raised some hearty female cheers when she declared that she would continue the fight. That will be the preface to yet another round of media wars, reminders of Trumps convictions for impeachment, including the curious case of E Jean Carroll and a 30 plus year delayed civil conviction for an hearsay assault. This was after she agreed to model lingerie in a Macy’s fitting room. Although a top New York gossip columnist, Democrat Carroll could not even remember the year, or date. In that case, the judge halted Trump’s lawyer because his questions were upsetting the complainant. We will hear more as media searches for more ‘evidence’ that Trump is unfit for office.

The media mentality, their state and big business employer’s mentality is all the more horrifying given that we have a world at war, devastating global corporate greed, massive environmental problems, elite driven wars to divide and rule people along race and gender lies. The latter was the well established principle by which elitist Democrats planned and expected to defeat President Elect Donald Trump. These people are like the U.K police, they never give up once they have a victim in sight.

R J Cook November 7^th 2024

November 6th 2024

Nothing is ever a woman’s fault – unless she voted Trump !

The sad truth is that anti-feminist backlash helped propel …The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com › commentisfree › nov

Most American men have nothing in common with a billionaire – but he spoke to their resentment and anxiety, says the writer Malaika Jabali.

The sad truth is that anti-feminist backlash helped propel …X · guardian130+ likes · 5 hours ago

The sad truth is that anti–feminist backlash helped propel Trump to victory | Malaika Jabali https://t.co/XuVgTOiz9R.

Why did Trump win, and what comes next? Our panel reactsThe Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com › trump-win-election-panel

Trump and the Republicans have swept the US election. What does this mean for the country, and the Democratic party?

Emotions high as America reacts to Trump’s victoryBBChttps://www.bbc.co.uk › news › resources

Donald Trump will be the next US president after beating Kamala Harris by some distance to cap a stunning political comeback.

US dollar soars as Donald Trump closes in on victoryBBChttps://www.bbc.co.uk › news › articles

Investors are also focused on a US central bank rate decision and a key announcement on the Chinese economy.

Chris Mason: Trump win is more complicated outcome for UKBBChttps://www.bbc.co.uk › news › videos

The BBC’s political editor Chris Mason explains that Westminster have been preparing for a second Trump presidency.

Don’t blame Russia for Trump win – Embassy Networkembassymagazine.comhttps://embassymagazine.com › Corps News

Donald Trump’s election victory was not due to Russian hackers or fake news but the “epic failure” of the mainstream politics and media to connect with …

Elon Musk flags Google search results favouring Kamala …India Todayhttps://www.indiatoday.in › World › US Election 2024

21 hours ago — US Election 2024: Elon Musk raised the issue of Google’s “where to vote” search engine result, suggesting it may favour Kamala Harris.

BBC Panel discuss the shock horror of Donald Trump’s unexpected victory.

Comment I am ecstatic over Trump’s victory. As I write, I am monitoring the BBC news elite licking theirs and establishment wounds. The economy is being discussed as a major issue, without any mention of the insane Anglo U.S led proxy war on Russia. That and deindustrialisation has been the major influence on almost hyper inflation. Like the U.K under Starmer, the U.S has been heading for third world living standards under a militaristic plutocracy, their crazy war mongering ‘full spectrum dominance’ being their new religion.

The U.K Ruling Lanour Party have their most dreaded outcome. Fearing U.S withdrawing from support for the insane Ukraine NATO proxy war, U.K ruling Labour have said that the U.K will have to rejoin the corrupt EU pseudo democratic dictatorship. The true definition of Western Style Democracy is ‘consensus.’ That elite patronising elite consensus has brought us to the edge of a nuclear world war. U.K freedom loving Labour Government view the situation so serious that there is talk of urgent return to EU membership.

Harris was an appalling candidate chosen to court the black and female vote, divisive in the extreme with nothing better than racism and sexism for hopefully mindless simplistic frightened voting fodder. The comfortable upper middle class female guests on the BBC are this moment reprising Trumps alleged racism and sexism, along with his spurious orchestrated Democrat biased court convictions. Let’s hope they can deliver the world from the hell the Democrats were bound for. Here in smutty small minded U.K, where 90% of the population are crowded on 10% of the land that 10% of the land, the BBC panel are now talking about Trump’s election violations.

How long before impeachment starts all over again, harping on him being a convicted criminal ? As I have already stated, the real definition of western style democracy is ‘consenus’. Trump and Vance have done real jobs in the real world.They are a serious threat to a consensus that has humanity on the edge of a second nuclear war.. People need reminding about Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It will be much worse when it happens again.

Just a moment ago, the BBC panel of 4 women and one man have started on Trump’s election violation. Women’s reproductive rights were a key Harris issue and were being ponded as a reason why Harris should have won, more so than the economy. What they never mention is why Biden’s administration never resolved the abortion issue under Obama and Biden.

Why should abortion be a number one election issue ? This is because the real issues here are the needs of profiteering industrialising industrial military madmen, corporate global capitalists and keeping war on Russia. Then its about marching on to China. Smug virtue signalling white liberals and feminists might hope for a ‘third time lucky’ assassonation attempt. Then they will have to cope with the younger, determined and dynamic Vance. R J Cook

November 5th2024

Labour is preparing for its worst nightmare: A Trump-Musk …inews.co.ukhttps://inews.co.uk › opinion › labour-preparing-worst-…

1 day ago — Labour is preparing for its worst nightmare: A Trump–Musk administration. If the Democrats are victorious, the British will be angling for …

Comment U.K mainstream media has excelled at election tampering. I would have commented sooner but BT admitted that my site was temporarily inaccessible while they took outside instructions to block access while it was being checked. Hopefully my regular readers will understand when and why it is unavailable in the future. It is subject to regular police scrutiny. Obviously western style democracy needs 24/7 ‘protection from unacceptabls posts and comments. R J Cook

Democrat and Republican voters’ worlds are about to collidepublished at 08:3208:32

Sarah Smith
North America editor

One of the things I’ve learned travelling around this country and talking to voters is that America doesn’t just seem remarkably divided, it feels as though two separate nations are awkwardly cohabiting on the same land mass.

Democrats mainly live in the cities and suburbs, with Republicans mostly living in rural areas.

Americans are increasingly moving to places where their neighbours share their political outlook. And it’s not hard to identify these areas at the moment, given the yard signs and placards that so often mark out Trump and Harris territory.

But it is not possible to live in these separate political worlds forever. These two sides are about to collide with the harsh reality of an election.

Kemi Badenoch’s victory as the new leader of the Conservative Party was marred by hateful comments from those on the extreme right and left. Yes, shockingly the right were as unhappy as the left about a black woman becoming the leader of Britain’s oldest political party. One particular person on the left who stood out was Dawn Butler.

Butler, who is the Labour MP for Brent East, took home the most outrageous and gross award on social media, when she shared (before deleting) a tweet saying Kemi Badenoch represents a “white supremacy in blackface”. I can’t tell you how disgusting and dangerous it was for Butler to share this tweet (which the original author, the British-Nigerian writer Nels Abbey, says was satire), especially when she knows the violence black female MPs face.

But criticise her I will and I will also like to point out that the view she shared legitimised white so-called progressives who spent the weekend targeting Kemi. Her retweet also sets the tone for those on the Right who believe that black women have no place in leadership of countries they consider “theirs”. Yes, her views echo that of Donald Trump and his followers who seemingly object to Kamala Harris becoming President based on her gender and race. Those views legitimise those dehumanising Michelle Obama for being strong and out spoken.

Dawn Butler’s racist slur on Kemi Badenoch was disgusting …London Evening Standardhttps://www.standard.co.uk › comment › dawn-butler-rac…

Kemi Badenoch represents a “white supremacy in blackface”. I can’t … race. Those views legitimise those dehumanising Michelle Obama …

November 3rd 2024

Voter fraud claims flood social media before US election

Mike Wendling

BBC News

Rumours, misleading allegations and outright lies about voting and fraud are flooding online spaces in unprecedented numbers in advance of the US election.

Hundreds of incidents involving purported voting irregularities are being collected and spread by individuals, as well as both independent and Republican-affiliated groups. A small number of posts are also coming from Democrats.

The whirlwind of claims spreading online poses a challenge to election officials who are having to debunk rumours and reassure voters, while preparing to administer election day on Tuesday.

In nearly every case, the posts support the Trump campaign’s false claim that the former president won the 2020 election and suggestions that he will potentially be cheated out of victory again on 5 November.

When asked whether he will accept the 2024 election result, Donald Trump said during the presidential debate in September that he would if it was a “fair and legal and good election”.

A majority of Americans – 70% – expect him to reject the result if he loses, according to a CNN/SSRS poll released Monday.

Just this week, Trump himself claimed widespread fraud in a key swing state.

“Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before,” Trump posted on his Truth Social network. “REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!”

The allegation followed officials in three Pennsylvania counties saying they were working with local law enforcement to investigate some voter registration applications for potential fraud.

While Trump and allies seized on the announcements, the state’s top election official, Republican Al Schmidt, has urged caution and warned voters to be aware of “half-truths” and disinformation circulating on social media.

“This is a sign that the built-in safeguards in our voter registration process are working,” he said.

Flood of misleading content

The BBC has seen hundreds of allegations of election fraud online, on social networks and on message boards and in chat groups. Some of these posts have been viewed millions of times each.

The posts have implied it’s easy for non-citizens to vote, made false claims about voting machines and sowed distrust in the ballot-counting process.

One video claimed to show recently-arrived Haitians voting in Georgia.

The BBC has found clear indications, including false addresses and stock photos, which indicate the video is a fake. On Friday US security officials said it was made by “Russian influence actors”.

Another person on X claiming they were Canadian posted a picture of a ballot and said: “Figured I would drive across the border and vote.”

It, too, is a fake, and part of an effort co-ordinated on the fringe message board 4chan. The ballot shown is from Florida, a state that requires identification to vote in person and is about a 20-hour drive from the Canadian border.

Meanwhile in Northhampton County, Pennsylvania, a video was posted on X showing a man dropping off a container of ballots at a courthouse, alleging suspicious activity. It turned out he was a postal worker delivering mail-in ballots, but the video was seen more than five million times.

Echoes of 2020

Experts worry the burst of misinformation just before election day could undermine people’s trust in the results – or lead to threats and violence in the lead-up to the election and beyond.

It’s happened before.

In the hours and days that followed the 2020 presidential election, while votes were still being counted, then-President Trump turned to social media to allege fraud and falsely claim that he was the real winner of the election. “Stop the steal” became a slogan of his supporters’ movement to overturn the results.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?

On social media, chatrooms and during street protests, conspiracy theorists alleged widespread voter fraud, culminating with a riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

Meanwhile, in battleground states like Georgia, election officials – civil servants whose job it is to oversee the election – faced death threats.

While false claims about voting ramped up after the 2020 vote, groups that monitor this kind of activity say this year it has started well before election day.

Wendy Via, founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), said some far-right and right-wing activists “are preparing themselves for the election to be stolen in a way they weren’t in 2020”.

“We cannot overstate the role of conspiracy theories in all of this,” she said.

These doubts have already reached Trump supporters on the ground. At a rally this week in Wisconsin, another key swing state, a number of people said they believed only illegal activity would prevent the Republican nominee from winning.

“I feel very confident about Trump, as long as there’s no cheating,” said Brad Miller of Green Bay, who mentioned that he’d already heard rumours about fraud. “Our only hope is that it’s not big enough to change the result.”

After the 2020 election, dozens of court cases alleging election fraud were lodged by Trump’s team across multiple states, but none succeeded.

Isolated fraud incidents blown out of proportion

Experts say that isolated incidents of ballot fraud and administrative errors always happen in US presidential elections, which run across all 50 states and in 2020 involved more than 150 million voters.

But real incidents are now being catalogued and shared online to an unprecedented degree and being used, alongside fake posts, as evidence of widespread cheating.

In southern California, dozens of ballots were found in a storm drain. Despite the unknown circumstances around the event, online partisans immediately suspected deliberate fraud.

“They WILL cheat,” says one of the thousands of comments posted.

Groups behind the deluge

The mass of election fraud claims spreading on social media have been aided by a network of groups that crowdsource allegations.

Groups like Texas-based True The Vote, founded in 2009, have long been on the forefront of questioning election security.

On an app developed by True the Vote called VoteAlert, supporters post examples of alleged election irregularities.

They have collected a wide range of claims, from minor security oversights to allegations of deliberate vote tampering. The organisation also has people monitoring live-streamed cameras that have been pointed on ballot drop boxes in a number of states. Many local officials have repeatedly outlined the steps they have taken to make the boxes secure.

“Our hope is we see exactly nothing at these drop boxes,” said True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht during one of her recent regular online meetings for supporters.

But she also hinted that Democratic-aligned groups were aiming to commit election fraud on a vast scale.

“If they want to try to pull the kinds of things that we saw being pulled in 2020, they’re highly unlikely to get away with it because we have, literally, eyes everywhere,” she added.

The BBC contacted True the Vote for comment.

A number of other groups are asking supporters to report alleged irregularities.

Elon Musk’s America political action committee has started a community – akin to a message board – on X, filled with rumours and allegations about voting. With 50,000 members, several posts go up every minute, almost around the clock.

Other efforts include the Election Integrity Network, a group founded by a former Trump lawyer who is challenging voter registrations and recruiting poll watchers – partisan observers who attend polling places.

The volume of messages on these platforms – along with the vagueness of some of the claims, with often anonymous sources – makes it nearly impossible to verify each allegation.

The groups, and the Trump campaign, say that these efforts are solely meant to ensure the integrity of the vote. The BBC contacted the Trump campaign for comment.

Bad information will continue to spread

The effect of this is unpredictable.

The Department of Homeland Security, in a memo reported on by US outlets including the BBC’s partner CBS, said on Monday that election conspiracy theories could spark action by domestic extremists.

And observers expect the wave of misinformation to continue well beyond election day. Polls suggest the election will be among the closest in modern US history. It may take days to count all the votes and determine the winner.

Luis Lozada of Democracy Works says the election is being conducted in an “ecosystem of distrust”.

But despite the doubts being sown, he says, “accurate information is getting out there”.

“Election officials work very hard to ensure that elections are run properly, as they were in 2020,” Mr Lozada said. “That’s not going to stop folks from taking anecdotes, and trying to punch holes.”

With reporting by BBC Verify

Ignorant Lackeys by R J Cook

Comment It is significant that Hilary Clinton was the first to claim that her election victory had been stolen in 2016, leading to mass protests and four years of Democarts aided by mainstream media, like the BBC and CNN, to have Trump impeached.

In the years running up to 2024, this media and the New York Democrat DA et al have gone to extremes to criminalise Donald Trump. In this New World Order, elite global elite ruling class consensus is the very essence of permitted democracy. That is why they are so angry with Elon Musk, the super brain who refuses to fit in with this combnation of planet eating war mongering lunatics, the politically correct virtue signallers and ignorant lackeys.

R J Cook

From courtroom to candidate: What Harris’s years as a prosecutor tell us about her

Lily Jamali

BBC San Francisco correspondent

Just over three months ago, Vice-President Kamala Harris walked up to a microphone to make a speech that would define both her past and her future.

A day before, President Joe Biden had dropped out of the election race and endorsed her to succeed him as Democratic candidate. With only a short period of campaigning ahead of her, Harris had no time to waste.

There is a saying in politics: define yourself or be defined by your opponent. And in that moment, when Harris made her first pitch to the American people, she defined herself not just in terms of her record in the White House or as a US senator, but the years she spent as a California prosecutor.

“I took on perpetrators of all kinds – predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said of her Republican challenger.

The line has been repeated often at her campaign rallies and stump speeches, as the 60-year-old has sought to frame this election as a contest between a hard-bitten prosecutor and a convicted felon, constantly reminding voters of Trump’s legal troubles.

• How Donald Trump came back from the political abyss

But a look back at Harris’s time in and out of California’s courtrooms reveals her enduring struggle to define herself, what her opponents say is a history of pivoting on issues depending on the political weather, as well as her uncanny ability to seize the moment when others have counted her out.

Street murders and rough San Francisco politics

Harris’s time in law enforcement began just out of law school in Alameda County, California – which includes the cities of Berkeley and her hometown of Oakland.

During the 1990s, in the midst of the government’s “war on drugs”, Oakland struggled with violent crime.

For a junior prosecutor, the job was daunting. But the severity of the cases you had to deal with meant it was considered a top job for a young and ambitious attorney, said Teresa Drenick, who worked with Harris at the time.

“It was like a potboiler of an atmosphere. The amount of grief and agony you ingested every day was hard to process. For us, it was intense. The stakes being high, the crimes being so serious,” she told the BBC.

“It was near the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic. There were gang murders, street corner murders taking place. There was a lot going on in Oakland that enabled you as a prosecutor to handle some of the most serious cases that a prosecutor is ever going to handle.”

Ms Drenick and Harris were on the same trial team together. She admired Harris’s confidence in front of a jury, and her respect for her colleague only grew when Harris was transferred to a different team in the same courthouse focused on child sexual assault.

“She was very, very caring of victims of child abuse. She was able to speak to them in a way that allowed them to open up to her,” she said.

It was at this time that Harris dated Willie Brown, a local political kingmaker and speaker of the California State Assembly who helped launch the careers of some of the state’s other most prominent political leaders, including Gavin Newsom, the current governor, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed.

Brown appointed her to two state boards and introduced her to some of San Francisco’s highest-profile Democratic donors. The short-lived romance ended by the time Brown was elected as the city’s mayor in 1995. Three years later, Harris took a job at the San Francisco district attorney’s office.

During her relationship with Brown, who was 30 years her senior, Harris had begun mingling with some of the city’s political heavyweights.

San Francisco’s political machine, which Harris has described as “a bare-knuckled sport”, has launched the careers of some of the nation’s biggest political stalwarts including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the late Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Harris forged relationships with both of them, rising alongside contemporaries like Newsom, as she found her feet in the political world.

Her swift rise through San Francisco’s rough-and-tumble politics were defined by days in courtrooms representing victims and nights at glitzy political galas.

This was also around the time that Harris met one of her closest friends – and most significant donors – Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Jobs donated $500 to Harris’s 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney, which she won, toppling the man who had hired her. Twenty years later, the billionaire philanthropist donated nearly $1m to the Biden-Harris re-election campaign, according to Fortune Magazine. It’s not known how much she has directly contributed to Harris’s bid for the presidency, but the amount is considered substantial.

‘No exception to principle’

On the day before Easter in 2004, just four months into Kamala Harris’s tenure as the district attorney of San Francisco, a gang member brandishing an AK-47 rifle fatally shot a 29-year old police officer named Isaac Espinoza.

The slaying stunned the city, with many politicians and prominent members of the police calling for the death penalty.

But Harris, who had made opposition to capital punishment a key part of her political campaign to become the city’s top prosecutor, instead decided to pursue a life sentence without parole. She made her decision public just 48 hours after the murder, without informing the widow first.

“She did not call me,” Espinoza told CNN in 2019. “I don’t understand why she went on camera to say that without talking to the family. It’s like, you can’t even wait till he’s buried?”

The backlash was swift. Speaking at the officer’s funeral, Senator Feinstein demanded his killer “pay the ultimate price”. While walking out of the church service, she told reporters that had she known Harris, external was against the death penalty, she probably wouldn’t have endorsed her.

“[T]here can be no exception to principle,” Harris later wrote in an opinion piece, external in the San Francisco Chronicle, defending her decision.

Long-time civil rights attorney John Burris, who supported Harris’s decision at the time, said he thought it was “politically was not wise for her, but it was a philosophical position she took”.

“She was pretty bold in her position and she did take a lot of heat for it,” he told the BBC. “That was a pretty progressive stand.”

The incident could have been the end of her political ambitions, but Harris, who had grown up with a single mother in the working-class city of Oakland, carried on.

“Is she a political animal? Absolutely not. Is she naturally skilled? Yes,” said Brian Brokaw, who managed Harris’s two successful campaigns for California attorney general in 2010 and 2014. “For her, politics is the means to the end. She is focused on the end result and the impact she can have on people’s lives less than the process.”

It was at this time that Harris dated Willie Brown, a local political kingmaker and speaker of the California State Assembly who helped launch the careers of some of the state’s other most prominent political leaders, including Gavin Newsom, the current governor, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed.

Brown appointed her to two state boards and introduced her to some of San Francisco’s highest-profile Democratic donors. The short-lived romance ended by the time Brown was elected as the city’s mayor in 1995. Three years later, Harris took a job at the San Francisco district attorney’s office.

During her relationship with Brown, who was 30 years her senior, Harris had begun mingling with some of the city’s political heavyweights.

San Francisco’s political machine, which Harris has described as “a bare-knuckled sport”, has launched the careers of some of the nation’s biggest political stalwarts including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the late Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Harris forged relationships with both of them, rising alongside contemporaries like Newsom, as she found her feet in the political world.

Her swift rise through San Francisco’s rough-and-tumble politics were defined by days in courtrooms representing victims and nights at glitzy political galas.

This was also around the time that Harris met one of her closest friends – and most significant donors – Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Jobs donated $500 to Harris’s 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney, which she won, toppling the man who had hired her. Twenty years later, the billionaire philanthropist donated nearly $1m to the Biden-Harris re-election campaign, according to Fortune Magazine. It’s not known how much she has directly contributed to Harris’s bid for the presidency, but the amount is considered substantial.

‘No exception to principle’

On the day before Easter in 2004, just four months into Kamala Harris’s tenure as the district attorney of San Francisco, a gang member brandishing an AK-47 rifle fatally shot a 29-year old police officer named Isaac Espinoza.

The slaying stunned the city, with many politicians and prominent members of the police calling for the death penalty.

But Harris, who had made opposition to capital punishment a key part of her political campaign to become the city’s top prosecutor, instead decided to pursue a life sentence without parole. She made her decision public just 48 hours after the murder, without informing the widow first.

“She did not call me,” Espinoza told CNN in 2019. “I don’t understand why she went on camera to say that without talking to the family. It’s like, you can’t even wait till he’s buried?”

The backlash was swift. Speaking at the officer’s funeral, Senator Feinstein demanded his killer “pay the ultimate price”. While walking out of the church service, she told reporters that had she known Harris, external was against the death penalty, she probably wouldn’t have endorsed her.

“[T]here can be no exception to principle,” Harris later wrote in an opinion piece, external in the San Francisco Chronicle, defending her decision.

Long-time civil rights attorney John Burris, who supported Harris’s decision at the time, said he thought it was “politically was not wise for her, but it was a philosophical position she took”.

“She was pretty bold in her position and she did take a lot of heat for it,” he told the BBC. “That was a pretty progressive stand.”

The incident could have been the end of her political ambitions, but Harris, who had grown up with a single mother in the working-class city of Oakland, carried on.

“Is she a political animal? Absolutely not. Is she naturally skilled? Yes,” said Brian Brokaw, who managed Harris’s two successful campaigns for California attorney general in 2010 and 2014. “For her, politics is the means to the end. She is focused on the end result and the impact she can have on people’s lives less than the process.”

Over the span of her law enforcement career, Harris’s allies sought to paint her as a “progressive prosecutor” committed to criminal justice reform but also tough on crime.

It was a fine line to walk in a liberal city in the country’s largest left-leaning state, and one that critics on both sides of the political aisle say she did not stick to.

As district attorney, she adopted a so-called “smart-on-crime” philosophy, which included initiatives to keep non-violent offenders out of prison by steering them into job training programs and ensuring young offenders remained in school.

Niki Solis, an attorney in the San Francisco public defender’s office who worked opposite Harris in the early 2000s, said she had been receptive to her concerns about how young victims of sex trafficking were being charged with prostitution, as opposed to being treated as victims.

“I realised that she understood issues that a lot of her predecessors and a lot of [district attorneys] up and down the state failed to understand or even acknowledge,” said Ms Solis.

Trump and his allies on the right have sought to play up this time in her career, depicting her as part of a “San Francisco liberal elite”. But on the left of politics, she has been accused of not being reform-minded enough, with some on social media nicknaming her “Kamala the cop”.

But by the time Harris was elected as California’s attorney general, in 2010, her progressive tendencies appeared to have given way to political pragmatism.

“She was seeking more of a national profile. She wanted to make a mark. There was definitely an expectation of an interesting future to come,” said Gil Duran, who worked for Harris in the attorney general’s office for a few months.

“The attorney general – usually a sleepy backwater of an office – was now home to a rising star.”

On the national stage, Harris began to make her mark. In 2012, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, Harris threatened to walk away from negotiations on a financial settlement between state attorneys general and five US banks. California was set to receive around $4 billion in the initial deal, and Harris eventually secured $18 billion for the state.

The Harris campaign has highlighted this case on the campaign trail as more proof she’s willing to stand up to powerful interests.

But more recent reporting shows that only $4.5 billion of the settlement ended up going towards California homeowners who had been ripped off by lenders.

In moves that angered some liberals, she implemented a school truancy program state-wide, which some county prosecutors used to arrest parents. And she defied a Supreme Court order to reduce overcrowding in the state’s prisons.

She also reversed her previous position on the death penalty in 2014 when, as attorney general, she appealed a lower court’s ruling that found it was unconstitutional. Now, the prosecutor who once refused to sentence violent murderers to death was defending the state’s right to do just that.

Hadar Aviram, a criminal justice and civil rights professor who petitioned Harris to leave the decision in place, was one of many critics of her stance.

“You are not under any obligation to defend things that are morally unjust,” she told CNN in 2019 of the episode. “If you truly believe that they’re morally unjust and you have an opportunity to take a stand, I think it’s an imperative to do so.”

Former San Francisco city attorney Louise Renne, who worked with Harris when she first left Oakland, said the torrent of criticism she faced over her support for the death penalty was unfair.

“The thing is when you’re state attorney general, you have to defend the law. That’s your obligation,” she told the BBC. “ I don’t regard that as a weakness or a valid criticism at all.”

But Harris was selective about which laws she enforced. In 2004, when Gavin Newsom, then San Francisco’s mayor, decided to allow same-sex weddings, in violation of state law, Harris helped officiate a few of the ceremonies, calling it “one of the most joyful” moments of her career.

Her long record as a prosecutor would prove tricky when, after being elected to the US Senate in 2016, Harris decided to run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

She chose to kick off her 2020 presidential run just blocks away from the Alameda County Courthouse, the same place where she first uttered the words, “for the people” – which would become part of her campaign slogan.

But in the midst of her campaign, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was murdered by a police officer during an arrest, igniting a nationwide racial reckoning and demand for criminal justice reform. Her past defence of the death penalty, and resistance to prison reform, earned her criticism from her party’s left-flank.

She dropped out of the presidential race before the primary contests to choose a Democratic contender had even begun.

Reinvented again

Now, as Harris campaigns for president against Donald Trump, she is again calling attention to her prosecutorial bona-fides, but reframed in a new political atmosphere.

While many cities, including San Francisco, experimented with progressive police reform after Floyd’s murder, a spike in crime and homelessness during the pandemic has triggered a public backlash against so-called “soft on crime” policies. Republicans have also heavily focused on political messaging around crime and public safety in recent years.

Harris’s past as a prosecutor is no longer such a liability, and in a race against the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes, the narrative aligns with the political moment.

Notably, at the Democratic National Convention this summer, abolishing the death penalty was dropped from the party platform.

And while in 2020, Harris was trying to win over left-leaning Democrats, she is now explicitly making a pitch for moderate Republicans who may be fed up with Trump. To do that, she has shifted a number of her positions – from border security to single-payer health care – to the centre.

This has led to accusations from her opponents that she is a flip-flopper.

She’s “a chameleon”, Trump’s running mate and Ohio Senator JD Vance told CNN in August. “She pretends to be one thing in front of one audience and she pretends to be something different in front of another audience.”

But Mr Duran, Harris’s former colleague in the attorney general’s office, sees it less as a matter of political scrupulousness and more simply a sign of her political pragmatism.

“I think she does have conviction but it’s really hard to run a campaign on your convictions alone, for the most part,” he said. “The Kamala Harris we’re seeing now is very much poll and focus-group driven.”

What Harris really stands for has been a question that has dogged her throughout her career – and continues to follow her on her bid for the Oval Office. But to Mr Brokaw, her former campaign manager, she has always operated on her own terms.

“She has carved her own path and left a whole bunch of people behind who counted her out and underestimated her,” he said.

October 30th 2024

From Epoch Times

Massive Trump Rally—5 Takeaways Former President Donald Trump delivered a campaign speech at New York City’s Madison Square Garden for the first time in his political career on Sunday. Speaking before tens of thousands of supporters, Trump covered a range of topics, promising to end inflation, secure the southern border, and end the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East, among other issues. A roster of big names delivered speeches before Trump took the stage: Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, “Dr. Phil” McGraw, former Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), radio host Sid Rosenberg, and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. New York has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 40 years, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from saying he believes he can win. Trump has repeatedly stated that he is making “a big play” for his home state. SHARE*     READ MORE >

More Americans Hinging on Government Support Payments from the government have become the fastest-growing source of income for Americans, according to a new study. A report by the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), a public policy research organization, titled “The Great Transfer-mation,” states that Americans have become substantially more dependent on government support, with the share of national income coming from transfer payments more than doubling over the past 50 years. One factor driving much of the shift from private income to government dependence is that the U.S. population is, on average, getting older. Of all government assistance payments in 2022, 56 percent went to the elderly, mostly for Medicare, the EIG report stated. The growth in transfer payments have taken their toll on state and federal budgets, with public pensions increasingly falling behind on their ability to pay, according to a 2024 report by Reason Foundation’s Pension Integrity Project. Continue reading…

Unvaccinated Workers Granted Big Compensation Rail transit officials in California’s Bay Area have been ordered to pay more than $7 million to transit workers who were fired because they refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine years ago. On Oct. 23, a federal jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California sided with six former San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) workers who had refused to get the vaccine for religious purposes. BART was ordered to pay the group more than $7.8 million, with each individual receiving between $1.2 million and $1.5 million, the Pacific Justice Institute, which represented the transit workers in the trial, said in a statement on Oct. 24. The institute, a law firm representing the six former employees since 2022, said the eight-person jury deliberated for two days this week before returning the verdict that awarded the employees the compensation. Continue reading… How did you enjoy today’s Morning Brief? Tell us what you think here.

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October 27th 2024

Georgia PM rejects vote-rigging claims as president calls mass rally

Paul Kirby

Europe digital editor

Reporting from

Tbilisi, Georgia

• Published27 October 2024, 17:24 GMT

Updated 1 hour ago

Georgia’s prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, has rejected allegations of vote-rigging and violence in Saturday’s election, and spoken of the disputed result as a “landslide” and a crucial victory for this country, which has Russia as a northern neighbour.

“Irregularities happen everywhere,” the Georgian Dream PM told the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg in an exclusive interview.

Official preliminary results from Georgia’s election commission gave the ruling Georgian Dream an outright majority of 54%, despite exit polls for opposition TV channels suggesting four opposition parties had won.

Georgia’s pro-Western president, Salome Zourabichvili, has condemned the “total falsification” of the vote and called for opposition supporters to rally outside parliament on Monday.

Election observers have suggested that the number of variety of vote violations may have affected the result. However, the prime minister insisted that out of 3,111 polling stations, there had been incidents in “just a couple of precincts”.

Georgian Dream has become increasingly authoritarian, passing Russian-style laws targeting media and non-government groups who receive foreign funding and the LGBT community. The European Union has responded by freezing Georgia’s bid to join the EU, accusing it of “democratic backsliding”.

However, one EU leader, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, has been especially quick to congratulate the party on its fourth term and is due to travel to Georgia on Monday.

Georgian Dream says it is keen to kickstart talks on reviving its EU bid, but the sight of Orban arriving in Tbilisi two days after a contested election is unlikely to go down well in Brussels.

In an initial statement on Sunday night, the head of the European Council of EU leaders, Charles Michel, said “alleged irregularities must be seriously clarified and addressed”, external and called for a swift, transparent and independent investigation.

“Of course we have to address these irregularities happening on the day of the election or before,” the Georgian prime minister told the BBC. “But the general content of the elections was in line with legal principles and the principle of democratic elections.”

The four opposition groups have refused to recognise the election result, condemning it as falsified, and they have accused the ruling Georgian Dream party of stealing the vote.

https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/19977268/embed?auto=1

They will now hold 61 seats in the 150-seat parliament, while Georgian Dream will have 89 – a majority but not big enough to enact the kind of constitutional change it wanted, to carry out its threat to ban opposition parties.

Two of the four opposition groups, Coalition for Change and United National Movement, have said they will boycott parliament.

Surrounded by leaders of the opposition, Georgia’s president said the vote could not be recognised and accused Russia of interfering in the election.

In his BBC interview, Kobakhidze accused the opposition of lying, arguing that they had also said the vote had been falsified in 2016, 2020 and 2021.

“Of course they have now no other way, so they have to tell their supporters that either they were lying or the government rigged the elections.”

An electronic vote-counting system was used for the first time on Saturday, and the prime minister said that made the election impossible to rig: “There is zero space for manipulation.”

The chairman of Georgia’s election commission who oversaw the new system hailed the vote as largely peaceful and free, but a very different picture has emerged from monitoring groups that have presented their initial findings.

Georgia’s Isfed group reported a litany of violations, including bribery, intimidation and ballot-stuffing, and said the result “cannot be seen as truly reflecting the preferences of Georgian voters”, external.

Per Eklund, a former EU ambassador who was part of the National Democratic Institute delegation, said it was clear the pre-election period in particular had failed to meet democratic standards.

“Voter intimidation… up to and on election day severely undermined the process,” he said.

Kobakhidze also used his BBC interview to deny the opposition’s accusation that the government was pro-Russian and “pro-Putinist”. He said they had been trying to damage the government’s reputation with Georgia’s 3.7 million population, which is overwhelmingly pro-European.

Russian commentators have widely welcomed Georgian Dream’s victory as an indication that Georgia will begin to pivot back to Moscow.

However, the prime minister said that Georgia was the only country in its region with no diplomatic relations with Russia, because of Russia’s occupation of 20% of Georgian territory since the five-day war in 2008.

Comment Why is it OK to shout and sneer vote rigging when they don’t like what is going on in Georgia, Russia or Hungary, but it is alright to criminalise Donald Trump for making the same claims about the U.S. Recent elections in France and Germany have been very suspicious, but as long as the consensus candidate wins the elite, their mainstream media, lackeys and other vested interests are happy, then the call it democracy.

Vote for smug or vote for a man who will do his best to save the world while the reptiles do their best to drag him down into the Washington Swamp.

R J Cook

How Come Harris Didn’t Do Anything About Abortion During Four Years When Biden Was President ? Harris Is Certainly Not The Peace Candidate At Home Or Abroad. Comment By R J Cook.

In a wide-ranging interview with CBS on Sunday, Kamala Harris repeats her pledge to restore abortion rights nationwide

• “My first priority is to put back in place those protections and to stop this pain,” the vice-president tells Norah O’Donnell
• JD Vance is defending Donald Trump from attacks made by former officials, saying his running mate is a “candidate of peace”
• Harris will later be in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, while Trump will speak at a rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden in the evening
• The polls: Trump and Harris remain neck-and-neck

October 25th 2024

Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Harris packs in the star power

Kamala Harris held a rally with former President Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen in Atlanta yesterday.

She painted Donald Trump as a child, saying that during his administration he had “people who could control him.” But she also made the case that a second Trump administration would be dangerous, pointing out that many of the aides who were able to rein him in, including John Kelly, have spoken out against him. Earlier this week, Kelly called Trump a “fascist,” remarks that Harris is highlighting in two stark new ads.

Harris also addressed young people, who will be integral to her turnout in November. She acknowledged that they were “rightly impatient for change,” having grown up amid a climate crisis and active-shooter drills, watching as the rights that their grandparents had enjoyed were taken away from them. Harris closed the event by telling the crowd, “Your vote is your voice, and your voice is your power.”

Beyoncé is headlining Harris’s next rally, today in Houston. The event will be focused on abortion rights. The country music legend Willie Nelson will also be in attendance.

More on the U.S. electionElection Day is Nov. 5.Elon Musk has grown more frenzied in his efforts to help elect Trump.Trump raised the possibility of eliminating income taxes and replacing the lost revenue with money received from tariffs.On “The Daily,” Times journalists discuss both campaigns’ strategies.Do you have questions about the election? Send them to us, and we’ll find the answers.

Comment With this level of media bias playing on the masses fear and prejudices, why bother with an ekection ? Its all in the stars, so let them decide. R J Cook

LifeNews.com Pro-Life News Report
Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Having problems reading this email? To read the news, visit LifeNews.com.

Top Stories
• JD Vance Says Kamala Harris is Part of the Most Anti-Christian Administration in American History
• Kamala Harris Will Force Christians to Fund Abortions
• 10 States Have Ballot Measures for Abortions Up to Birth. Please Vote No
• Kamala Harris Apparently Wants to Force Christian Doctors to Kill Babies in Abortions

More Pro-Life News• Big Abortion is Spending Millions Trying to Elect Kamala Harris
• Kamala Harris Said Jesus Doesn’t Belong at Her Rallies. What Else Do You Need to Know?
• 16,000 More Babies Were Born in Texas Thanks to Its Abortion Ban
• New Hidden Camera Video Shows Abortionist Advising the Best Way to Kill an 8-Month Baby in Abortion
• Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories

10 States Have Ballot Measures for Abortions Up to Birth. Please Vote No

Sellout contract at Boeing aimed at securing supply chains for world war

The fight at Boeing requires a new strategy, based on connecting a rebellion against the union bureaucracy with a global struggle of the working class against war.

Read more

new world order

Will the Brics inherit the earth? America can’t stop multipolarity

THOMAS FAZI    5 MINS

What the Data Reveals About U.S. Immigration Ahead of the 2024 Election

This week, ProPublica began publishing a series of stories that we hope will be of use to voters, especially those focused on immigration as a key issue. We aim to provide a more complete picture of what’s happening on the border and in cities and towns across the United States. Amid the misleading bombast of the campaigns, our reporting on the ground and analysis of government datawill explain the real challenges — as opposed to the ones being made up to scare you — posed by immigration trends at the Southwest border over the past decade.    We’ve found that what’s changed most about the border isn’t just the number of migrants coming across. It’s who’s coming and how. Many of today’s migrants are coming from new places and in new ways that make their arrivals more visible and, at times, more costly to the communities where they settle. And those changes are coinciding with, if not helping drive, a hardening in public opinion.

Read more

After rejection of sellout deal, working class must mobilize behind the Boeing strike

Workers must organize a broad campaign involving mass actions, beginning with pickets and protests and culminating in a general strike.

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October 24th 2024

Harris admits Trump seeks dictatorial rule

The Democratic nominee’s comment followed interviews by former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired major general, describing Trump as a fascist who wanted to use the military against the American population.

Read more

Same throughout history – by R J Cook

Comment The above informs me just how desperate and banal the Democrats are. U.S citizens and the rest of the so called free world should be more concerned that the Democrats are already using the U.S military and arms industry against Russia and Harris will make this very much worse. How on earth can it be credible journalism, politics or linguistic logic to state that Trump’s sneering patronising rival Harris can admit something on Trump’s behalf ? But it would be too obvious to say that she alleges Trump would use the military on the natives because that would require evidence. It is not up to her to admit anything on Trump’s behalf unless he asks her to. But mass education in the totalitarian English speaking world can be relied on for making it so easy to mesmerise the masses with nonsense.

There can be no doubt that liberal lefties will use extreme force and dire punishment if they ever face an uprising. We saw signs of that with Harris’s fellow former State Prosecutor Starmer’s response to the U.K Southport protests. We saw it at the Capitol Riots when innocent protestor and former soldier Ashley Babbit was gratuitously shot dead. Armed riot police or military, it makes no difference, We saw innocent Ian Tomlinson killed by a riot thug cop, Steven Harwood, at the G7, London, 2008. We saw it with Macron’s response to the Yellow Vests in Paris. Power purveys privileges which elites will kill to protect. It has been the same throughout history.

R J Cook

Two weeks until election day, Trump’s coup plot is far advanced

Having fertilized the soil with the Big Lie, Trump, his network of lawyers and his allies in Congress and state legislatures are preparing to delay and block the certification of votes at the local, state and federal levels. The plan is based on violence,

Read more

All it takes to run the world – by R J Cook

Comment No smear must be left unused in the righteous liberal left’s plan to pull off their own very advanced coup. They know what they are doing and going to do. Talk of Trump planning a coup is a significant part of their back story to criminally discredit any legitimate objections to a rigged result from the Trump camp.

There is circumstantial evidence of voter fraud and of suspicious agencies opening doors to the 2020 Capitol Hill rioters. There is no evidence that Trump was involved. The U.S and U.K are highly sophisticated totalitarian states with a common history of deception, cruelty, injustice, genocide and extreme violence that is ongoing. They share imperialistic roots, present and future time joint interests, united by class and wealth which guides their leadership and NATO.

That is why the U.K left the EU which is so easily mesemerised by the English speaking world aristpcracy and their aspirational lackeys, looking down on Russians and Chinese as if they are inferior beings, while patronising blacks and Muslims, as we saw with a very untypical black man, Obama, lecturing all black men on why they should be ashamed of themelves if they don’t vote for ‘woman of colour’ Kamala Harris – who gives hope to all young women and girls of colour that they too have all it takes to run the world.

R J Cook

October 23rd 2024

The Once Great United States of America by R J Cook

The degree and extent of the U.K BBC efforts to brainwash U.S voters into voting for Kamala Harris is extreme, because she sells herself as a woman of colour. That is supposed to be enough. Just being anti Trump is expected to be sufficient. We are told Trump shouldn’t and can’t win. Saint Obama has weighed in with the racist patronising encouragement that black men have a duty to support Harris. How patronising is that? But she is the right type of black woman. The BBC, like all white liberals, love Harris and Obama, U.K newsreaders cannot mention Donald Trump without describing him as a fascist, liar, rapist and fraudster. The corrupt Democrat legal system has tried everything short of lynching him. They have even blamed the two assassination attempts as initiated by him.

There is a very serious problem with promoting women into positions of power when they cannot move beyond their gender. In arrogant Harris’s case, her fixation on gender makes matters far more dangerous.

The BBC takes swaying the U.S Presidential Election very seriously. It has a dedicated BBC Americast, fronted by seasoned and well paid staff with a young female to appeal to the United States young females who, apparently just love Kamala Harris who will be there to get them better lives.

Anglo U.S Elite and State media advances an exceptionalist right to condemn their perceived enemies, notably Russia, China and Iran. So automatically they assert the right to condemn any election results they don’t approve of. When Hilary Clinton et al alleged election fraud in 2016, these media guardians of elite and vested interest freedoms, like feminism, oozed their sympathy. Trump struggled to achieve anything over the next four years, assailed by all manner of hearsay sex allegations and name calling, including the vile Christopher Steele Russian spy routine.

The fact is that, across the western world, elections are wide open to abuse and manipulation in favour of the virtue signalling hypocritical white liberals. It is very easy to abuse this voting technology, but the BBC wants nothing left to chance

Russia, which played a key role in the recent BRICS summit, is a big threat to the planet eating NATO war machine. Regime change in Russia is also about creating an open road to China as the U.S prepare moves around Taiwan where resources and full spectrum dominance is Anglo U.S led NATO foreign policy. A lot of money has been invested in this project. The western banking and financial system will fail if they lose the war. It doesn’t matter how many lower class lives are sacrificed for western ruling elite gain. Former State prosecutor Starmer wants a like minded former State Prosecutor Harris on the team. He has already started clearing out women’s prisons because his government says they do women no good. He et al anticipate more riots like Southport. He needs the space for male protestors and dissidents. Nothing must get in the way of the Labour policies for ‘change.’

War in Ukraine is important to that project and his posturing alongside world leaders. He was doing this yesterday with the German defence minister who will be basing his hunter killer submarines in the U.K. This is because of the Russia threat they have created. It is a step up from Covid 19 and will keep the masses in their place for many years.. Meanwhile Russia is about to conquer four more Ukraine towns. Ukraine has lost 25% of its population since the war started. This war is good stuff for bankrupt western political systems and arms manufacturers.

The wild card is Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. Conflicts there are an increasing distraction as the United States wants to dismiss Putin and get on with the China project. Donald Trump’s opponents, who saw no problem with the signs of Puppet President Biden’s dementia, are now questioning his mental health because he is off consensus and wants a working peace with Putin. Harris must be media protected from talking about this because she is too simplistic and light weight. A Trump victory cannot be allowed to happen. That is why Starmer’s Labour Party has despatched 100 party troops to help guide voters in the swing states. That is what our lovely consensus politicians call ‘western style democracy.’ The ruling elite need Harris in power. That is why the Democrats and their media on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean have not missed a trick. In this context, all Harris needs to do is keep on smirking, sneering, playing the race card with super wealthy ‘I’m just a normal black guy’ Saint Obama’s help preaching her cause and avoid talking about the terrible mess that has become of the once great United States of America.

R J Cook October 23^rd 2024.

October 22nd 2024

The oligarchs’ election

The million-dollar payoff from Musk is an example of how billionaires are literally buying the US presidential election.

Read more

Comment Nobody does this more than Democrats.

R J Cook

Israel escalates bombing of Gaza, Lebanon as NATO covers up war plans against Iran

Biden and European heads of state have confirmed their knowledge of plans for an Israeli strike that would unleash war with Iran, but refused to discuss them publicly.

Read more

Comment Russia’s allies know that this is World War III whatever Global Media HQ have to say from U.S, U.K and EU.

R J Cook

John Deere lays off another 287 workers as Bernie Sanders seeks to place blame on foreign workers

Deere is once again placing the burden of declining sales on workers by slashing jobs.

Read more

Sellout contract at Boeing aimed at securing supply chains for world war

The fight at Boeing requires a new strategy, based on connecting a rebellion against the union bureaucracy with a global struggle of the working class against war.

Read more

IMF runs into deepening debt crisis and contradictions of global capitalism

In a curtain raiser address in advance of the IMF-World Bank meeting this week the IMF chief drew attention to rising levels of government debt.

Read more

October 17th 2024

Kamala Harris pledges break from Biden presidency in testy Fox News interview

Nominee says presidency would ‘not be a continuation’ of Biden’s and condemns Trump for ‘enemy within’ comments

Adam Gabbatt in New YorkThu 17 Oct 2024 00.51 BSTLast modified on Thu 17 Oct 2024 02.37 BST

Kamala Harris said her presidency “would not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency” in a testy interview with the rightwing Fox News channel on Wednesday night as she criticized Donald Trump over his continuing threats against “the enemy within”.

The 25-minute interview, conducted after Harris held a rally with more than 100 Republican officials in Pennsylvania, was the first time Harris had sat for a conversation with Fox News, which has been a consistent supporter of Trump.

Comment It is amusing and significant that Harris condemned Donald Trump for enemy within comments when she and her party have gone to enormous lengths to smear him in prejudged politicised court hearings and trials. Inevitably Britain’s former MI6 Russia desk boss Christopher Steele is back on the scene reprising his Russian Spy theory in a new book, with maximum media coverage. It is interesting that Britain’s government is run by Starmer, a former State Prosecutor, while the BBC advocates another former State Prosecutor, Harris, for President of The United States of America. An obsession with more laws and law makers is essential to the operation of a Global Elite Police State where women and non white ethnic lower classes must be terrified into voting for these types. Those threatening this ruling elite consensus must be demonised and mariginalised as far right or Russian agents. For the sake of Anglo U.S full spectrum dominance, the rule of fear must never abate.

R J Cook

October 15th 2024

National Rally’s Marine Le Pen investigated for illicit 2022 …Euronews.comhttps://www.euronews.com › my-europe › 2024/07/09

9 Jul 2024 — The judicial probe, which began last week, will investigate allegations of accepting a financial loan, misappropriation of property, fraud …

France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen goes on trial in …France 24https://www.france24.com › france › 20240930-france-s…

30 Sept 2024 — EU fraud agency accuses Marine Le Pen of misusing public funds … Marine Le Pen placed under formal investigation over EU funding scandal.

Comment The liberal elite and global elite media will never leave Le Pen and her supporters alone. Their democracies are all about their elite consensus. That is why Donald Trump must never win the U.S Presidency under any circumstances. It is very easy to rig elections these days, with the penalty of protest being extreme. The Anglo U.S led NATO elite will take victory over Russia, and then China, at any price. That is New World Order Full Spectrum Dominance.

R J Cook

October 14th 2024

Obama urges black men to mobilise behind HarrisBBChttps://www.bbc.co.uk › news › articles

The former president also made his debut on the campaign trail on behalf of the Democratic nominee.

Comment Obama and Harris have very interesting business records. Check out his rise to power in Chicago. Now he is selling Harris to the black population on the grounds that ‘she grew up just like you.’

How much more patronising does this one time lawyer and latter day saint have to be before the black masses see him for what he is ?

There will be some who might see Obama’s words as rallying black tribalism under the leadership of a saintly Kamala Harris, someone for their allegiance. I see it as good old tried and tested imperialist divide and rule. One hopes there may be enough good sense to see that Donald Trump built the platform for black improvement in 2016- 2020 and is eager to do much more. It is up to black and white working classes to see that their common interest is one of class and not allegiance to Harris’s colour or womanhood – neither of which are virtues in their own right. She will make the world a much more dangerous place.

Meanwhile the U.K Ruling Elite works hard to denigrate Donald Trump. This evening saw revival of Christopher Steele’s Russian spy smeer campaign that Trump was and still is a Russian Spy who will give victory to Russia in Ukraine. BBC’s posh boy Christian, was all over his prize guest on the BBC Context session tonight. Earlier in the day, with perfect anti Russia and pro Harris timing, the Official Government Inquiry into the Skripal affair and the poor beggar alcoholic woman who sprayed herself with a dose of Novochock, which she mistook for perfume she had found in a rubbish bin. She died, the Skripals haven’t been seen since.

R J Cook

Which race is the poorest in the US ?

38% Black or African American. 43% Hispanic or Latino. 34% Middle Eastern. 40% Multiracial.

Black poverty, unemployment set record lows on Trump’s …Poynterhttps://www.poynter.org › fact-checking › black-poverty…

25 Jun 2024 — Trump was president when Black poverty and unemployment reached record lows. Biden saw both of those record lows surpassed on his watch.

Is the EU a fading power ?

Balance of Power, bringing you the latest in global politics. If you haven’t yet, sign up here.

It was the evening of June 9 when things really started going awry.

Initial returns for the European parliamentary elections were reassuring for investors, with mainstream parties set to retain control, despite gains for populist forces.

Then Emmanuel Macron weighed in.

The French president’s party had been soundly beaten by Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally and so, in an attempt to regain the initiative, Macron called a snap election.

That decision plunged the European Union’s second-biggest economy into months of market turmoil and political uncertainty from which it has only partially emerged.

Since then, the bad news has been piling up across the region.

Macron warns that the EU could die if it doesn’t boost its competitiveness with China and the US. Source: BloombergGermany, the EU’s traditional powerhouse, is mired in recession, its car industry is fumbling the transition to electric vehicles and suffering from the slowdown in China, while a €30 billion ($33 billion) semiconductor plan based on troubled Intel is unraveling.

US tech giants are turning their backs on the 27-nation bloc because of restrictions on AI. Even Spain, traditionally one of the most pro-EU members, is taking potshots at its trade policy.

Europe’s politicians have been slow to catch on to the scale of the problems, and now they are bitterly divided over what to do.

It looks like a tipping point for the European project. The world is changing quickly and if the EU fails to catch up, it risks being permanently relegated to a second tier of global powers.

To be sure, living standards aren’t about to collapse. The EU has surmounted existential crises before. But the longer the current trends persist, the greater Europe’s vulnerability will become. — Ben Sills

October 13th 2024

Chicago prosecutor declines to charge ‘dangerous … – Fox NewsFox Newshttps://www.foxnews.com › chicago-prosecutor-decline…

‘Dangerous’ migrant is person of interest in shooting death …Fox Newshttps://www.foxnews.com › dangerous-migrant-person-…

3 Oct 2024 — A 19-year–old male migrant described as “dangerous” is in custody in connection with the shooting death of a 17–year–old female migrant in …

Official Hypocrisy & No Worthwhile Comment from the BBC – R J Cook

Democrats have been on the attack about the 78-year-old Trump’s age and mental fitness, after months of Republicans directing similar criticisms at President Joe Biden before he exited the race.

If elected president again in November, Trump would end his second term as the oldest serving president in US history at 82 – albeit a record that would be shared with Biden, who will be the same age when he leaves office in January.

In response to the pressure from the Harris camp, the Trump’s campaign’s communications director Steven Cheung said he had “voluntarily released” updates from his personal physician and the doctor who treated him after the assassination attempt against him this summer in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“All have concluded he is in perfect and excellent health to be Commander in Chief,” Cheung added.

He also cited a November 2023 medical letter that said Trump’s “physical exams were well within the normal range and his cognitive exams were exceptional”.

National polls suggest Harris remains slightly ahead of Trump but the numbers in battleground states are extremely close.

Comment – If the Democrats think Trump too old, why is Biden still fit for office with full blown World War Three close at hand . The moment Biden was judged unfit to run for a second term, why was he not immersdiately forced out of office as he should have been long ago following his son’s involvement in corrupt Ukraine and all the pay outs. These people have no problem with Trump’s age, it is all about his policy platform and threat to their class.

Democrat and their mainstream media saw no problem with offering their candidate for the oldest ever President in Joe Biden, until he started falling over things and sounding off in public as if he had dementia. That was when they brought on their famous ‘woman of colour’ who all black people must adore and supply their votes, so she can send more young black men to war, like the Democrats did in Vietnam.

The blacks are vital to the pleasure bent hypocritiacal Democrat Ruling Elite. Their virtue signalling for blacks and women is crucial to their campaign, hence the absurd E Jean Carroll and Stormy Daniels muck raking. By the way, Trump has never been convicted of rape in a criminal court and there is no evidence of crime here. He was found guilty of sexual assault in a prejudged civil court because of Carroll’s 30 year old allegations of sexual assault in a Macey’s ladies fitting room where she had agreed to model lingerie for Trump. It is a peculiar story as is the ‘Stormy Daniels’ hush money affair. All has been well timed, being presented to a New York Democrat Court and filtered out to Democrat Mass Media for mass consumption. That is fake news in fake Democracy.

R J Cook

October 12th 2024

The Ugly and Simple Truth

The ugly and simple truth about the NATO Anglo U.S led proxy war on Russia derives from the fabulous wealth and power opportunities created by globalisation. Russia was offered a seat at the Planet Eaters table, but Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin wanted equality with the United States. That was and still is an impossible demand for the Anglo U.S Global Ruling Elite. They want ‘full spectrum dominance.”

That is why the war has extended to the Middle East via the United States Achilles heel, Israel. To me it seems incredible that religion still has such a key role to play in global affairs. But as U.K Prime Minister put it, rather cynically, “I am an atheist but believe in religion because it brings people together.” Together for the west’s new age of World War, no doubt.

R J Cook