Activist lawyers had successfully petitioned the state to remove Trump’s name, arguing that his alleged encouragement of the Capitol Hill riot in 2021 had made him an “insurrectionist.” The states of Illinois and Maine had also attempted to bar Trump from contesting the election, but both will now be forced to abandon these efforts.The ruling was unanimous, with no written dissents published. However, two different concurrences were filed. In the majority view, conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Brett Kavanaugh argued that “nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure [the] chaos” of an electoral map in which different presidential candidates were offered to voters in different states. “The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand,” they concluded, before arguing that only Congress could enforce the insurrection clause against presidential candidates.
Concurring with the decision, conservative Amy Coney Barrett agreed that “states lack the power to enforce” the clause, but argued that the five justices in the majority should not have ruled that Congress has this power. Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson also concurred with the majority, but argued that the ruling went too far to “insulate” Trump from “future controversy.” In a post on his Truth Social platform immediately after the ruling was announced, Trump described it as a “big win for America.” The court was expected to side with Trump, after all nine justices expressed skepticism at the Colorado Supreme Court’s judgment during a hearing last month. At the time, Kavanaugh pointed out that Trump had not been charged with the crime of insurrection, and all nine justices voiced reservations at allowing an individual state to determine the outcome of a federal election. Having won eight out of nine primary contests so far, Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee to challenge President Joe Biden in November’s election. Recent polls show him with a lead of between one and six points over his Democratic rival.
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Former US President Donald Trump has said that he would “very much consider” Texas Governor Greg Abbott as his running mate for this year’s presidential election. The Republican frontrunner said that Abbott has “done a great job” in securing the US-Mexico border.
Trump and Abbott met in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Thursday, with Trump touring a stretch of the border that has been heavily fortified by Abbott since 2021. Despite the US Supreme Court siding with the White House and permitting federal agents to remove razor wire fencing along the frontier, Abbott has vowed to build more barricades, and the governor snubbed President Joe Biden to meet with his chief political rival instead. Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity later that day, Trump described Abbott as “a spectacular man,” adding that the Republican governor had “done a great job” in fighting to stem the tide of illegal immigration across Texas’ 1,200-mile stretch of the Mexican border. Asked whether he would consider Abbott for vice president, Trump replied: “Yeah, certainly he would be somebody that I would very much consider.” “So he’s on the list?” Hannity asked again. “Absolutely, he is,” Trump confirmed. When asked who else he was considering for the role, Trump named South Carolina Senator and former Republican challenger Tim Scott. However, he was less effusive in his praise for Scott, describing him as an “okay” presidential candidate but an “unbelievable” campaign surrogate. Trump’s list of potential running mates now numbers seven people. Last month, the presidential hopeful confirmed to Fox News’ Laura Ingraham that Scott, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida Representative Byron Donalds, and former Hawaii Rep.Tulsi Gabbard, an ex-Democrat who broke with the party in 2022, were all in contention for the spot. However, Abbott said on Friday that he is not interested in the role. “Obviously, that’s very nice of him to say,” the governor told reporters on Friday. “But I think you know my focus is entirely on the state of Texas. I’ve announced that I’m running for re-election two years from now, and so, my commitment is to Texas and I’m staying in Texas.” DeSantis, who along with Ramaswamy dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination in January, has also said that he wouldn’t consider the job. Trump has won all five Republican primary contests to date, and is the firm favorite to secure his party’s support to take on Biden later this year. However, his last remaining challenger, Nikki Haley, has refused to drop out of the race, despite being soundly beaten by Trump in her home state of South Carolina last month and trailing the former president by 20 delegates to 110. US billionaire Elon Musk has taken OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research company he once helped to found, to court over an alleged breach of its original mission to develop AI technology not for profit but for the benefit of humanity.
OpenAI, founded in 2015 as a non-profit research lab to develop an open-source Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), has now become a “closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world,” Musk’s legal team wrote in the suit filed on Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court. The lawsuit claimed that Musk “has long recognized that AGI poses a grave threat to humanity – perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today.” “But where some like Mr. Musk see an existential threat in AGI, others see AGI as a source of profit and power,” it added. “Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.” Musk left the OpenAI board of directors in 2018 and has since grown critical of the firm, especially after Microsoft invested at least $13 billion to obtain a 49% stake in a for-profit branch of OpenAI. “Contrary to the founding agreement, defendants have chosen to use GPT-4 not for the benefit of humanity, but as proprietary technology to maximize profits for literally the largest company in the world,” the suit read. The lawsuit listed OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman and president Gregory Brockman as co-defendants in the case, and called for an injunction to block Microsoft from commercializing the tech. AI technology has improved at a rapid pace over the last two years, with OpenAI’s GPT language model going from powering a chatbot program in late 2022 to performing in the 90th percentile on SAT exams just four months later. More than 1,100 researchers, tech luminaries and futurists argued last year that the AI race poses “profound risks to society and humanity.” Even Altman himself has previously acknowledged that he is “a little bit scared” of the technology’s potential, and barred customers from using OpenAI to “develop or use weapons.” However, the company ignored its own ban on the use of its technology for “military and warfare” purposes and partnered up with the Pentagon, announcing in January that it was working on several artificial intelligence projects with the US military. US State Department fixture and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, aka “Regime Change Karen,” apparently woke up one day recently, took the safety off her nuclear-grade mouth, and inadvertently blew up the West’s Ukraine narrative.
Until now, Americans have been told that all the US taxpayer cash being earmarked for Ukrainian aid is to help actual Ukrainians. Anyone notice that the $75 billion American contribution isn’t getting the job done on the battlefield? Victory in military conflict isn’t supposed to look like defeat. Winning also isn’t defined as, “Well, on a long enough time axis, like infinity, our chance of defeat will eventually approach zero.” And the $178 billion in total from all allies combined doesn’t seem to be doing the trick, either. Short of starting a global war with weapons capable of extending the conflict beyond a regional one, it’s not like they’ve been holding back. The West is breaking the bank. All for some vague, future Ukrainian “victory” that they don’t seem to want to clearly define. We keep hearing that the support will last “as long as it takes.” For what exactly? By not clearly defining it, they can keep moving the goal posts. But now here comes Regime Change Karen, dropping some truth bombs on CNN about Ukrainian aid. She started off with the usual talking point of doing “what we have always done, which is defend democracy and freedom around the world.” Conveniently, in places where they have controlling interests and want to keep them – or knock them out of a global competitor’s roster and into their own. “And by the way, we have to remember that the bulk of this money is going right back into the US to make those weapons,” Nuland said, pleading in favor of the latest Ukraine aid package that’s been getting the side eye from Republicans in Congress. So there you have it, folks. Ukrainians are a convenient pretext to keep the tax cash flowing in the direction of the US military industrial complex. This gives a whole new perspective on “as long as it takes.” It’s just the usual endless war and profits repackaged as benevolence. But we’ve seen this before. It explains why war in Afghanistan was little more than a gateway to Iraq. And why the Global War on Terrorism never seems to end, and only ever mutates. Arguably the best one they’ve come up with so far is the need for military-grade panopticon-style surveillance, so the state can shadow-box permanently with ghosts while bamboozling the general public with murky cyber concepts that it can’t understand or conceptualize. When one conflict or threat dials down, another ramps up, boosted by fearmongering rhetoric couched in white-knighting. There’s never any endgame or exit ramp to any of these conflicts. And there clearly isn’t one for Ukraine, either. Still, there’s a sense that the realities on the ground in Ukraine, which favor Russia, now likely mean that the conflict is closer to its end than to its beginning. Acknowledgements abound in the Western press. And that means there isn’t much time left for Europe to get aboard the tax cash laundering bandwagon and stuff its own military industrial complexes’ coffers like Washington has been doing from the get-go. Which would explain why a bunch of countries now seem to be rushing to give Ukraine years-long bilateral security “guarantees,” requiring more weapons for everyone. France, Germany, Canada, and Italy have all made the pledge. Plus Denmark, which also flat-out said that it would send all its artillery to Ukraine. If security for Europe is the goal, that sounds kind of like the opposite. Particularly when Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba told the EU that “Russia has gotten closer to your home” in the wake of the most recent defeat in Avdeevka. He sounds like one of those guys in TV ads trying to peddle burglar alarms. Seems like Russia only exists in the minds of the West these days to justify sending weapons to Ukraine to get blown up, while also justifying to taxpayers why they should continue funding this whole charade. Meanwhile, the West’s drive towards peace seems to be taking the scenic route. “As we move forward, we continue our support to Ukraine in further developing President Zelensky’s Peace Formula,” G7 leaders said after a recent meeting with Zelensky in Kiev. Nice to see that he’s devoting all his time to this magic peace formula instead of running around extorting his friends for cash by threatening them with Putin. It was already a pretty big hint of what’s really been going on when the EU decided to use the taxpayer-funded European Peace Facility to reimburse EU countries for the unloading of their mothballed, second-hand weapons into Ukraine, where Russia can then dispose of them before anyone could be accused of overcharging for clunkers. Now, with the clunker supply running dry, they just have to make more weapons. Maybe funneling cash into weapons for themselves will be the Hail Mary pass that saves their economies that they’ve tanked “for Ukraine”? Thanks to Nuland’s nuking of any plausible deniability on Ukrainian “aid” not going to Washington, it’s now clear that Ukrainians continue to die so poor weapons makers don’t end up shaking tin cans on street corners. She has also removed any doubt about the ultimate US goal being Russian regime change, calling Putin’s leadership “not the Russia we wanted,” and sounding like someone who chronically sends back a meal to kitchens of a dining establishment. “We wanted a partner that was going to be Westernizing, that was going to be European. But that’s not what Putin has done,” she told CNN. That’s exactly what Putin has done, actually. It’s the West that’s moved away from itself and is becoming increasingly unrecognizable by its own citizens. Pretty sure that it goes beyond just wanting a country to be “European,” too. Because Germany’s European, and an ally, and Nuland wouldn’t shut up about how much she hated its Nord Stream gas supply — until it mysteriously went kaboom. Regime Change Karen saying the quiet part out loud has decimated the Western establishment’s narrative so badly that it’s a miracle no one has yet accused her thermonuclear mouth of being an asset of Russia’s weapons program. Tucker Carlson said on Tuesday that US spies had monitored him while he was in Russia earlier this month, and leaked to a ‘friendly’ outlet that he had met with Edward Snowden. This is despite the American journalist’s claim that he had tried to keep his meeting with the NSA whistle-blower a secret.
Carlson went to Russia to interview President Vladimir Putin. During his eight days in Moscow, he also met with Snowden – and US spies found out about it, he told podcaser Lex Fridman in the course of a three-hour conversation. “I was being intensely surveilled by the US government,” Carlson told Fridman, noting that US spies had thwarted his plans to interview Putin in 2021 and that he received confirmation that he was being intensely monitored ahead of his Moscow trip. “Then, I’m over there, and of course I want to see Snowden, whom I admire.”Snowden allegedly accepted Carlson’s invitation to have dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel, but declined the interview as well as a photo request, saying that it would be better to tell no one. “I didn’t tell anybody,” Carlson told Fridman, however the meeting was leaked. “Semafor runs this piece – reporting information they got from the US intel agencies, leaking against me, using my money, in my name, in a supposedly free country – they run this piece saying I met with Snowden, like it was a crime or something.” “If you have a media establishment that acts as employees of the national security state, you don’t have a free country. And that’s where we are,” Carlson added. Carlson revealed that he did not fear getting arrested in Russia at any point, but was warned by his lawyers that the US might arrest him depending on the content of the Putin interview. “I felt not one twinge of concern for the 8 days that I was there,” he told Fridman about being in Moscow. Before he left for Russia, his team of attorneys counseled him to “not do this… A lot will depend on the questions you ask of Putin. If you’re seen as too nice to him you could be arrested when you come back,” Carlson quoted the lead lawyer as saying, to which he said he replied, “You’re describing a fascist country, OK?” In 2013, Snowden revealed that the NSA was systematically engaged in mass illegal spying on American citizens. Fearing for his safety, he fled to Hong Kong with the intent to reach Ecuador, which did not have an extradition treaty with the US, but was stopped during a layover in Moscow after Washington canceled his passport. Russia ended up granting him asylum and reportedly, eventual citizenship. One of the founders of Semafor, the outlet to which Carlson claims US spies leaked his dinner with Snowden, is Ben Smith, a former editor-in-chief of the now defunct BuzzFeed newsroom. In 2017, Smith notoriously published the ‘Steele Dossier,’ a sham document leaked by US spies to discredit incoming President Donald Trump. The early delivery of US fighter jets would not have changed the course of Ukraine’s failed summer counteroffensive because there were not enough trained pilots to fly them, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has said.
Speaking to ABC News on Sunday, Sullivan disagreed with the narrative that the White House did not provide enough “war-fighting equipment” for Ukraine to succeed on the front line. “The idea that we did not mobilize a massive quantity of resources and capabilities to deliver to Ukrainians simply doesn’t wash,” Sullivan said in response to a question on whether Washington’s incremental approach to deliveries of advanced weaponry was to blame for Ukraine’s lack of progress on the battlefield. “If you look at some total of what the United States provided to Ukraine in this fight it is an incredible quantity of material delivered at speed, at scale outpacing the expectation,” he argued. “There are additional capabilities that Ukrainians have looked for, F-16 being one of them,” he continued, explaining that while the US is prepared to provide the jets, the real challenge Ukraine faces is that “there aren’t many pilots to be able to pilot those aircraft.” Kiev has repeatedly asked for Western fighter jets, saying they are needed to repel Russian air attacks. In August, the US allowed Denmark and the Netherlands to donate F-16s to Ukraine, with the first deliveries expected this year. NATO member states also agreed to form a coalition to help train Ukrainians to fly the Western-made aircraft. Moscow has warned that the move would be a dangerous escalation, given that some F-16 modifications can carry nuclear bombs, and vowed to destroy the jets in Ukraine if they arrive. Political scientist Ivan Katchanovski – of the University of Ottawa – revealed last year, in a paper, that the February 2014 massacre of Ukrainian protesters by sniper fire, a defining moment of the Western-backed Maidan coup, was not published by an academic journal for “political reasons.” In a lengthy Twitter thread, Katchanovski first laid out the circumstances behind the rejection of his article, and the bombshell evidence included in it. The paper was initially accepted with minor revisions after peer review, and the journal's editor offered a glowing appraisal of his work, writing: “There is no doubt that this paper is exceptional in many ways. It offers evidence against the mainstream narrative of the regime change in Ukraine in 2014… It seems to me that the evidence the study produces in favour of its interpretation on who was behind the massacre of the protesters and the police during the ‘Euromaidan’ mass protests on February 18-20, 2014, in Ukraine, is solid. On this there is also consensus among the two reviewers.” As the editor noted, the massacre was a “politically crucial development,” which led to the “transition of powers in the country” from the freely elected Viktor Yanukovich to the illegitimate and rabidly nationalistic administration of Aleksandr Turchinov, a former security services chief. It was endlessly cited in Western media as a symbol of the brutality of Ukraine’s government and an unprovoked attack on innocent pro-WesternMaidan protesters, who allegedly sought nothing more than democracy and freedom. Rumors that the killings were a false flag intended to inflame tensions among the vast crowds filling Maidan, and provoke violence against the authorities, began circulating immediately. No serious investigation into what happened was ever conducted by the Western media, with all claims that the sniper attacks were an inside job dismissed as Kremlin “disinformation.” However, even NATO’s Atlantic Council adjunct admitted in 2020 that the massacre was unsolved and that this “cast a shadow over Ukraine.” It may not remain unsolved for much longer though, due to an ongoing trial of policemen at the scene on the fateful day. The legal action has been unfolding for well over a year and has received no mainstream news attention at all outside Ukraine. Katchanovski drew heavily on witness testimony and video evidence that has emerged over the course of the trial in his suppressed paper. For example, 51 protesters wounded during the incident testified at the trial that they were shot by snipers from Maidan-controlled buildings, and/or witnessed snipers there. Many spoke of snipers in buildings controlled by Maidan protesters shooting at police. This is consistent with other evidence collected by Katchanovski, such as 14 separate videos of snipers in protester-controlled buildings, 10 of which clearly feature far-right gunmen in the Hotel Ukraina aiming at crowds below. In all, 300 witnesses have told much the same story. Synchronized videos show that the specific time and direction of shots fired by the police not only didn’t coincide with the killings of specific Maidan protesters, but that authorities aimed at walls, trees, lampposts, and even the ground, simply to disperse crowds. Among those targeted by apparently Maidan-aligned snipers were journalists at Germany’s ARD. They weren’t the only Western news station in town at the time – so too were Belgian reporters, who not only filmed Maidan protesters screaming towards Hotel Ukraina for snipers not to shoot them, but also participants being actively lured to the killing zone. This incendiary footage was never broadcast.
CNN likewise filmed far-right elements firing at police from behind Maidan barricades, then hunting for positions to shoot from the 11th floor of the Hotel Ukraina, minutes before the BBC filmed snipers shooting protesters from a room where a far-right MP was staying. The network opted not to report this at the time. We needn’t rely purely on video footage. Over the course of the trial, no fewer than 14 self-confessed members of Maidan sniper groups testified they had explicitly received massacre orders, Katchanovski claims. By contrast, no police officer at the scene has said they were directed to kill unarmed protesters, no minister has come forward to blow the whistle on such a scheme, and no evidence Yanukovich approved of the killings has ever emerged. CNN likewise filmed far-right elements firing at police from behind Maidan barricades, then hunting for positions to shoot from the 11th floor of the Hotel Ukraina, minutes before the BBC filmed snipers shooting protesters from a room where a far-right MP was staying. The network opted not to report this at the time. We needn’t rely purely on video footage. Over the course of the trial, no fewer than 14 self-confessed members of Maidan sniper groups testified they had explicitly received massacre orders, Katchanovski claims. By contrast, no police officer at the scene has said they were directed to kill unarmed protesters, no minister has come forward to blow the whistle on such a scheme, and no evidence Yanukovich approved of the killings has ever emerged. Scared of being abandoned by the US under Trump, European officials are floating the idea of the bloc’s own nuclear force.
With its farmers rebelling, its economy declining, and its traditional parties decaying, you’d think the European Union has enough to worry about at home. Yet its thoroughly detached elites love to think big. And what’s bigger than nuclear weapons? That’s how they have ended up falling for one of Donald Trump’s typically blunt provocations. The former – and likely future – American president has warned that NATO members not spending enough on defence won’t be able to count on US protection on his watch. Eminently sensible – why do declining but still comparatively wealthy EU states keep behaving like defence beggars? – Trump’s threat has triggered various predictable meltdowns. The White House archly tut-tutted about the “appalling and unhinged” rhetoric of a man who is not, unlike the current president Joe Biden, overseeing a genocide together with Israel. Go figure, as they say in the US. On the other hand, many Republicans have displayed demonstrative insouciance, if not outright agreement. And that is certain to reflect what many ordinary Americans think as well; that is, if they think about Europe at all. And as if the Big Scary Orange Man hadn’t done enough damage yet, next came the Pentagon, which (sort of) revealed that Russia – that famous gas station sending out its shovel-wielding soldiers to capture German washing machines – is building, if not a Death Star, then at least something equally sinister out there in space: Sputnik déjà vu all over again, as America’s greatest philosopher might have said. All of that, of course, against a background of incessant NATO scaremongering, which, it seems, has succeeded in spooking NATO most of all. No wonder then that inside EU-Europe, reactions to Trump’s taunting sally have been marked by serious abandonment anxiety. One of its symptoms has been a call for the bloc – or Europe’s NATO members; the issue is fuzzy – to acquire its own nuclear force. One way or the other, Christian Lindner, Germany’s minister of finance, made time from razing the state budget in an economy that his cabinet colleague, the children’s book author and minister of the economy, Robert Habeck, has just labelled “dramatically bad,” in order to pen an article calling for France (not subordinating its nukes to NATO) and Britain (not even in the EU anymore) – two small nuclear powers – to step in as the new security sugar daddies by expanding their nuclear umbrellas over everyone else. Katarina Barley, eternally fresh-eyed vice president of the European Parliament and the top EU election candidate of the German Social-Democrats – a party leading a deeply unpopular government while approaching extinction in the polls – and Manfred Weber, head of the conservative faction in the European Parliament, have kept things more general: They simply suggest that the EU should get its own doomsday weapons, somehow. Donald Tusk, freshly re-established as Poland’s EU-subservient viceroy, has made similar noises. Well, who cares about details, right? That attitude of “on s’engage et puis on voit” has, after all, proven a smashing success in Ukraine. In reality, this is not a problem caused by Trump: That, in a world of more than one nuclear power, the US nuclear umbrella over any place other than the US itself is – and can only be – fundamentally unreliable is, of course, a perennial, structural problem. Those who prefer realism to wishful thinking have always understood this. Henry Kissinger, for instance, a sinister yet sometimes brutally frank practitioner of realpolitik, explained as much as early as the 1950s – perhaps most succinctly in a television interview in 1958 – just a little over a decade after the dawn of the nuclear age. If any clients abroad were to be attacked so severely or successfully that only a US nuclear strike would be left to respond, any American president – whatever treaties are in place or promises have been made – would always face an impossible choice: Drop the client or suffer a retaliatory strike on America itself. It is true that various policies have been devised to mitigate this dilemma (“limited” nuclear war, nuclear sharing, or the NATO medium-range missiles of the 1980s), but, in reality, it cannot be resolved. Yet here we are. An EU that seems to suffer from historical amnesia produces chatter about a search for nukes of its own. Not the nukes that are already in US-aligned Europe anyhow, in the national arsenals of France, Britain, and at American bases in five NATO countries, so that, at least, we are already used to them, but different nukes, new nukes. Nukes the acquisition, politics, and rules of which are all still to be figured out. What could go wrong? Everything, really. But let’s be a little more detailed. First of all, the elites of EU-Europe have, expectably, immediately displayed disunity and confusion. In essence, while no one meant the call for nuclear weapons as a challenge to the US, it was still too much for hard-core Atlanticism compradors: Germany’s minister of defence, Boris Pistorius, NATO’s figurehead General-Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, and the head of the German parliament’s defence committee – and “jokingly” “Volkssturm”-nostalgic (no kidding) – uber-hawk Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann all scrambled to contain the inadvertently mildly subversive idea that Europe could possibly try to do anything significant on its own. Perish the thought! A house so divided against itself is not a safe place to own nukes. Secondly, nuclear weapons are, of course, meant for extreme emergencies, means of last resort either to serve deterrence by the threat of we-will-take-you-with-us retaliation when all is lost anyhow (the purpose of Britain’s and France’s arsenals) or, at best, in a situation of imminent, catastrophic defeat. One implication of this fact is that the decision to use them would end up with either one person or a very compact group hunkered down in a bunker. Who would that be in the case of the EU? The head of the commission, for instance? Someone like Ursula von der Leyen, a self-promoting, short-sighted, and reckless power-grabber, free of any electoral legitimacy, who is really serving the US and not Europe? Good luck! And how would the EU overcome the fact that any such ultimate decider would also have national allegiances: An Estonian or a Pole perhaps, from states, that is, that have their own risky agendas and, to be frank, national(ist) complexes? Or someone from Spain or Greece perhaps, from, that is, countries that may well largely escape the direct effects of a large-scale fight in central Europe, and therefore would have no sane incentive to have Madrid or Athens incinerated to make a last point about Latvia or, indeed, Germany? Set up a committee (unanimity rules or majority voting on when to push the very last red button?), and all you will get is a multiplication of clashing and divided loyalties. Thirdly, more generally, can you imagine today’s EU – or anything growing out of it – in possession of weapons of mass destruction? That is, a club of states most of which are now stubbornly complicit (International Court of Justice be damned) in an ongoing genocide in the Middle East (committed by Israel against the Palestinians), many of which have a pathological obsession with crusading against Russia, and none of which can even grasp that the greatest threat to their sovereignty comes from their “allies” in Washington. And that leads us to the final and most fundamental problem: This whole debate about nukes for Europe is based on bizarrely blinkered premises that betray that EU-Europe is by far not politically mature enough to have such weapons (if any state ever is). Because if it were, then its strategists and politicians would honestly acknowledge and discuss one simple fact: A nuclear force would have to deter every possible vitally dangerous opponent, that is, of course, including the US. Yet these are the same leaders that have simply ignored that the greatest act of war, eco-terrorism, and vital-infrastructure demolition against the EU – the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines – was launched by Washington, whether hands-on or via proxies. The EU is a large bloc of countries in an increasingly unstable and lawless world where the ever-wider proliferation of nuclear weapons will be inevitable. Hypothetically, such an entity would be a candidate for owning such weapons. Yet, in reality, the EU lacks three essential qualities to even consider acquiring them: It is far too fractious, it has no serious concept of its own interests as apart from and, indeed, opposed to the US, and it lacks an elite that could remotely be trusted with weapons capable of ending the world. There, it is of course, not alone. But isn’t one US on planet Earth bad enough already?
It is not a secret that Julian Assange can divide opinion. But now is a time to put all such issues firmly to one side. Now is a time to stand by Mr Assange, and to do so on principle, for the sake of his freedom – and ours.
There can be no divide over the attempt by the United States to have the WikiLeaks founder extradited from Britain to face charges under the US Espionage Act, which reaches a critical stage in London this week. The application embodies not just a threat to Mr Assange personally. It is also, as this newspaper has consistently argued over many years, an iniquitous threat to journalism, with global implications. It poses the most fundamental of questions about free speech. On these grounds alone, Mr Assange’s extradition should be unhesitatingly opposed. In 2010, WikiLeaks published revelatory US government documents exposing diplomatic and military policy in the Afghan and Iraq wars. Four years ago, during the Trump presidency, the US justice department issued a WikiLeaks-related indictment of 18 counts against Mr Assange. It charged him with multiple breaches of the 1917 Espionage Act, a statute that originally clamped down on opposition to America’s entry into the first world war. In recent years, though, the act has mainly been invoked against leakers. Earlier targets included the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who passed documents to the New York Times exposing US government lies about the Vietnam war. Those charges were eventually dismissed, but it was a close-run thing. The Espionage Act contains no public interest defence. A person charged under it cannot present evidence about the content of the material leaked, cannot say why they did what they did and cannot argue that the public had a right to know about the issues. Those restrictions are no more acceptable in Mr Assange’s case than in Mr Ellsberg’s time. The free press still matters. Journalists sometimes depend on whistle blowers. The relationship between them is particularly delicate and important in cases where national security is invoked. When the unequalled global power of the US is involved, the stakes are especially large. But even national security, and certainly the national security of a global superpower, cannot in every single circumstance invariably override the public interest in publication and the right to know. That was the core issue in the Ellsberg case, as it also was in the WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden cases. In Espionage Act prosecutions, however, that public interest argument is always muzzled. This week, Mr Assange’s lawyers will seek leave to appeal against the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then home secretary Priti Patel. If he is extradited, and unless the UK relents or President Biden intervenes, he faces a criminal trial in which his arguments will be silenced, and a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison for each of the Espionage Act charges. If convicted, he could be locked away for his lifetime. The implications for journalism are every bit as serious. This newspaper’s journalism, and that of potentially every newspaper based in the US or an allied country, would be at risk too. If the prosecution succeeds, the New York Times lawyer in the Pentagon Papers case has said, “investigative reporting based on classified information will be given a near death blow”. That prospect is on the line in the courts this week. A society that claims to uphold freedom of the press cannot possibly remain indifferent. Yemen’s Houthi rebels have attempted to use a submersible drone for the first time, but it was destroyed in yet another wave of US-led coalition attacks over the weekend, the US Central Command has claimed.
The US Navy conducted a series of five strikes, hitting three Houthi cruise missiles, an unmanned surface vessel (USV), and one unmanned underwater vessel (UUV) on Saturday, CENTCOM announced on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday. “This is the first observed Houthi employment of a UUV since attacks began in Oct. 23,” the US military wrote, claiming it presented an “imminent threat” to US Navy ships and commercial vessels in the area. Since the beginning of the Israeli military operation in Gaza, the Houthi militants, who are in control of a large portion of Yemen, have harassed multiple vessels sailing the Red Sea. In solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, the Houthis vowed to attack any ships they find to be linked to Israel until the siege of Gaza stops. In response, the US launched an international maritime coalition to patrol the Red Sea called ‘Prosperity Guardian’, with the stated goal of protecting shipping lanes. Since mid-January, the US and UK have carried out air- and sea-launched attacks against “multiple underground storage facilities, command and control, missile systems, UAV storage and operations sites, radars, and helicopters” in Yemen in an attempt to “degrade Houthi capabilities” to attack military vessels and merchant ships. The Houthis vowed to “meet escalation with escalation” and expanded their list of potential targets to include US- and UK-owned merchant vessels. While no Houthi missiles have hit a US Navy vessel thus far, the group has launched scores of missiles and drones against the US-led coalition ships in the Red Sea. The attacks on Suez Canal freight – a route which normally accounts for around 15% of the world’s commercial shipping – have forced major companies to avoid the Red Sea altogether and sail around the coast of Africa, facing increased costs and spiking insurance premiums. On Sunday, another vessel sailing off the coast of Yemen was hit, according to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations. The master of the ship reported an “explosion in close proximity of the vessel resulting in damage,” adding that all crew members were safe. Eighteen NATO member states plan to meet the alliance’s target of spending the equivalent of 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defence in 2024, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said. Speaking in Brussels before a meeting of defence officials from NATO’s 31 members on Wednesday, Stoltenberg noted that the number of states meeting the threshold has risen rapidly amid Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory and ultimately its full-scale invasion in 2022. Concern that the return of former United States President Donald Trump to the White House has also encouraged a rise in spending. “That is another record number and a sixfold increase from 2014 when only three allies met the target,” Stoltenberg said at a news conference. Stating that US partners in NATO have raised spending by $600bn over the past decade, the alliance’s political chief also warned that Trump was undermining their security by calling into question Washington’s commitment to its allies. Trump has long complained over the spending levels of NATO states. Over the weekend, the likely Republican candidate in November’s US election called into question the country’s willingness to support “delinquent” members of the alliance if they were attacked by Russia. “We should leave no room for miscalculation or misunderstanding in Moscow, about our readiness and our commitment, our resolve to protect allies,” Stoltenberg said. “NATO has the capabilities, we have the resolve to protect and defend all allies,” he continued. “We don’t see any imminent threat against any NATO ally.” Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz also criticised Trump’s comments. His Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said the Republican hopeful risked damaging transatlantic relations and could “ultimately saw off the branch on which America is sitting”. The government in Berlin has boosted defence spending since 2022 and is allocating the equivalent of 71.8 billion euros ($76.8bn) on defence this year through regular and special budget outlays. The total defence spending sum is classified. That will see Germany meet the 2 percent of GDP target for the first time since the end of the Cold War.
Chinese migrants are flocking to the southern border of the USA and some have Chinese TikTok guides on how to enter the USA.
Over four days, journalists observed nearly 600 migrants, some of whom were Chinese, crossing the border through a gap at the end of a border fence near San Diego. Chinese migrants who spoke to 60 Minutes said they learned about the gap via the video application Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. The Chinesehad reviewed several Douyin posts, which gave detailed instructions on how migrants could hire smugglers to get to the border. And the journey is no walk in the park either. Chinese migrants hoping to start a new life in the US have to trek through multiple countries before they arrive stateside. Some have had to crisscross through Turkey, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama and then Mexico, per CNN. There has been a surge in the number of Chinese migrants entering the US through its borders. According to data from the US Customs and Border Protection, the number of encounters the agency has had with Chinese nationals at the Southwest land border has increased more than 50-fold, from 450 people in 2021 to 24,314 in 2023. Chinese social media platforms have been a boon for migrants hoping to enter the US. In April, Reuters interviewed more than two dozen Chinese migrants entering the US via southeastern Texas. All the migrants that Reuters spoke to said that social media had helped them to plan their journey. It's not just China. Content creators from Venezuela and India have been producing similar videos as well. "Migration sells. My public is a public that wants a dream," Venezuelan Manuel Monterrosa, 35, told The New York Times in a story published in December. A representative for the Department of Homeland Security told BI that the department was "experiencing historical global migration." "DHS is working with our partners throughout the hemisphere and around the world to disrupt the criminal networks who take advantage of and profit from vulnerable migrants," the representative said. Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that defeating Russia in Ukraine is “impossible by definition”, but insisted he does not seek to expand the war to neighbouring countries such as Poland and Latvia.
In a high-profile interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Putin repeated his claim that invading Ukraine was necessary to stop the country from threatening Russia by joining NATO, denied that he had territorial ambitions across Europe, and insisted he would only send troops into neighbouring countries if attacked first. Russian President Vladimir Putin has defended his war in Ukraine in a two-hour interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that defeating Russia in Ukraine is “impossible by definition”, but insisted he does not seek to expand the war to neighbouring countries such as Poland and Latvia. In a high-profile interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Putin repeated his claim that invading Ukraine was necessary to stop the country from threatening Russia by joining NATO, denied that he had territorial ambitions across Europe, and insisted he would only send troops into neighbouring countries if attacked first. It is absolutely out of the question. You just don’t have to be any kind of analyst, it goes against common sense to get involved in some kind of a global war,” Putin said in the interview posted on social media and Carlson’s personal website on Thursday. “And a global war will bring all of humanity to the brink of devastation. It’s obvious.” During a two-hour interview that saw Putin talk at length about the history of Eastern Europe and Russia, the Russian leader said that his government was in contact with the United States and that a peaceful resolution to the war would only be possible if Washington stopped supplying weapons to Ukraine. “I will tell you what we are saying on this matter and what we are conveying to the US leadership,” Putin said. “If you really want to stop fighting, you need to stop supplying weapons. It will be over within a few weeks, that’s it, and then we can agree on some terms. Before you do that, stop.” Putin said he has “never refused” to negotiate peace with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy but Moscow has not yet achieved its goals in Ukraine, including “de-Nazification”, referring to his claim that Kyiv is committing genocide against ethnic Russians. Asked by Carlson whether he would be willing to release imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich as a “sign of your decency”, the Russian leader said a deal is possible and there is “no taboo” on resolving the issue. “We have done so many gestures of goodwill out of decency that I think we have run out of them. No, we have never seen anyone reciprocate to us in a similar manner. However, in theory, we can say that we do not rule out that we can do that if our partners take reciprocal steps,” Putin said. Gershkovich has been detained in Russia since March 2023 on spying charges that Washington has described as “baseless”. The Kremlin said Putin agreed to sit down with Carlson because he presented a less one-sided view of the war in Ukraine. Carlson has repeatedly questioned the rationale for US support for Kyiv, and in a video posted on social media this week, he criticised US media outlets for their “fawning” coverage of Zelenskyy. After his interview with Putin aired, Carlson said in a video posted on his website that anyone who believed Putin would give up Crimea for peace is a “lunatic” and “they want a weak leadership in Russia”. Before the interview, Carlson attracted criticism for travelling to Moscow to interview the Russian leader, with former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accusing the former TV host of being a “useful idiot”. Conservative American journalist Tucker Carlson has said on Instagram that his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin will be aired at 6pm EST on Thursday.
Carlson, who launched his own network on X (formerly Twitter) in June 2023, traveled to Moscow for a sit-down with Putin. The Kremlin confirmed the meeting on Tuesday. The Russian president rarely grants one-on-one interviews to foreign press. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said that Putin has “no desire” to speak to Western media outlets that have “completely one-sided” opinions and “aren’t even trying to be impartial.” Carlson said he wanted to talk to the Russian leader because many Western news outlets “lie to their readers and viewers” and are biased in their coverage of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. “That’s wrong. Americans have the right to know all they can about a war they are implicated in,” he said in a video on X on Tuesday. Carlson has been criticized by some politicians and media figures at home and abroad who say his interview with Putin will only amplify Russian “propaganda.” “He parrots Vladimir Putin’s pack of lies about Ukraine,” former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told MSNBC. Newsweek quoted one former and two current members of the European Parliament as saying that Carlson could be banned from visiting the EU for providing “a platform” for Putin. |
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