Politics Unfiltered

Last time Donald Trump was president, Israel’s prime minister was so pleased, he named a community after him.

Trump Heights is an isolated cluster of pre-fabricated houses in the rocky, mine-strewn landscape of the Golan Heights, a soaring eagle-and-menorah statue guarding the entrance gate. Mauve mountain peaks jut into the azure sky at the horizon. This was Trump’s reward for upending half a century of US policy – and wide international consensus – by recognising Israel’s territorial claims to the Golan, captured from Syria in the 1967 war, and later unilaterally annexed.

The question for residents there – two dozen families and a few billeted soldiers – is what impact Republican candidate Trump or his Democratic rival Kamala Harris might have on Israel’s interests in the region now.

As America prepares to vote, the Israeli leader has not hidden his appreciation for the Republican candidate - and polls suggest he’s not alone. Around two-thirds of Israelis would prefer to see Trump back in the White House, according to recent surveys. Less than 20% appear to want Kamala Harris to win. According to one poll, that drops to just 1% among Mr Netanyahu’s own supporters.

Some 8,000 North Korean soldiers are now in Russia near Ukraine’s border and are preparing to help the Kremlin fight against Ukrainian troops in the coming days, the Biden administration said Thursday.

The new figure from is a dramatic increase from a day earlier, when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would only say “some” of the troops had moved toward Ukraine’s border in the Kursk region, where Moscow’s forces have struggled to push back a Ukrainian incursion

That also would mean most of the North Korean troops that the U.S. and its allies say have been sent to Russia are now on the Russia-Ukraine border.

The U.S. has estimated there are about 10,000 North Korean troops in Russia. Seoul and its allies assess that the number has increased to 11,000, while Ukraine has put the figure higher, at up to 12,000.

Of the 8,000 in Kursk, “we’ve not yet seen these troops deploy into combat against Ukrainian forces but we would expect that to happen in the coming days,” Blinken said at a news conference with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and their South Korean counterparts.

Kamala Harris called Wednesday for Americans to “stop pointing fingers at each other” as she tried to push past comments made by President Joe Biden about Donald Trump’s supporters and “garbage " and keep the focus on her Republican opponent in the closing days of the race.

“We know we have an opportunity in this election to turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump, who has been trying to keep us divided and afraid of each other,” the Democratic nominee said.

Harris was holding rallies in a trio of battleground states as part of a blitz in the closing week of the election, with stops Wednesday in Raleigh, North Carolina; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and Madison, Wisconsin.

She stressed unity and common ground, expanding on her capstone speech Tuesday in Washington, where she laid out what her team called the “closing argument” of her campaign.

As Spain grapples with the fallout from the flash floods which struck on Tuesday, the blame game has already begun, with disaster relief services accused of being slow to react.

Much of the country has been badly hit by heavy rain and hailstorms, triggering rapid flooding in many areas which has already claimed at least 95 lives.

But the civil protection agency, which is deployed during natural disasters, did not issue an alert until 20:15 local time on Tuesday, when the flooding had already caused a great deal of damage.

"The magnitude of the tragedy raises doubts about whether the population was warned too late: Civil Protection sent out alerts when there were already flooded towns," read a headline on the website of El Mundo newspaper.

As the paper goes on to point out, "hundreds of people were trapped throughout the night from Tuesday to Wednesday in industrial estates and on roads because the roads were already cut off and access was cut off."

Recriminations have been flying on social media as people ask why local governments and politicians were not better prepared.

I noticed [email protected] removed someone's post on this video so I figured I'd put it here.

Republican and Democratic leaders alike and Puerto Rican celebrities bashed comments made at a major Donald Trump event in New York by a comedian who called Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage."

Speaking before the Republican presidential candidate at a rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, comedian and podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe added that Latinos "love making babies" and that they do not "pull out," comments that leaned into a racist trope that Latinos are preoccupied with childbearing and averse to birth control.

"There's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now," Hinchcliffe said. "I think it's called Puerto Rico."

The presidential campaign of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats, several prominent Puerto Rican celebrities and some congressional Republicans denounced the comments, which were widely panned as racist.

Whether the NDP will have a majority or minority government is still not decided

Donald Trump took the stage Sunday night at New York’s Madison Square Garden to deliver his campaign’s closing argument with the election nine days away after several of his allies used crude and racist insults toward Vice President Kamala Harris and other critics of the former president.

The Republican nominee began by asking the same questions he’s asked at the start of every recent rally: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The crowd responded with a resounding “No!”

“This election is a choice between whether we’ll have four more years of gross incompetence and failure, or whether we’ll begin the greatest years in the history of our country,” he said after being introduced by his wife, Melania Trump, whose rare surprise appearance comes after she has been largely absent on the campaign trail.

Several speakers earlier on Sunday crudely insulted Harris, who is vying to become the first woman and Black woman to win the presidency. And a stand-up comedian made lewd and racist comments about Latinos, Jews and Black people, all key constituencies in the election just nine days away.

Georgia's prime minister has hailed a "landslide" election result, rejecting allegations of vote-rigging and violence.

"Irregularities happen everywhere," Irakli Kobakhidze of the Georgian Dream party 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 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.

Donald Trump sat down Friday with prominent podcast host Joe Rogan for a conversational interview that ran for nearly three hours — and the former president delivered his standard bombardment of false claims, at least 32 in all.

Many of those false claims are lies that were debunked months or even years ago. The claims spanned a variety of topics, including immigration policy, environmental and energy policy, the legitimacy of the 2020 election, Trump’s record in office, Vice President Kamala Harris, crowd sizes, and how schools deal with transgender children.

The world’s richest man promises big spending cuts if Trump gives him a job, says people “taking advantage of government are going to be upset”

Sometimes Donald Trump really is a G.O.A.T. — the “greatest of all time” — among American presidents, at least. Of course, “greatest” in this instance refers to quantity or bulk, not quality.

Greatest liar, given media tracking of unparalleled numbers of repeated lies and gross exaggerations (upwards of 30,000 during his presidency — and 40 during just one recent campaign rally in Reading, Pa.)

Greatest flyer above the law — from his infamous declaration “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” to the Jan. 6, 2021 incitement of an insurrection against the American government, and his ensuing denials of any wrongdoing.

Greatest narcissist — as in “I alone can fix it”, with “it” encompassing the economy, the border, the well-being of women (“I will protect you”), the supposed “poisoning” of American “blood,” the war in Ukraine, and so on and so forth.

With his third straight U.S. presidential campaign coming down to the wire, Donald Trump mused at a rally about hydrogen-powered cars exploding, lamented how difficult it is to get spray paint off limestone and marveled at how billionaire backer Elon Musk’s rocket had returned to Earth in one piece.

He complained Democratic rival Kamala Harris wasn’t working as hard as he was, praised Chinese President Xi Jinping as "fierce" and called former President Barack Obama "a real jerk."

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump‘s three-hour interview with America’s number one podcaster, Joe Rogan, has been released.

In the wide-ranging sit-down, the former president discusses everything from the “biggest mistake” of his White House tenure, what he told North Korea’s leader and whether extraterrestrial life exists.

Two years ago Rogan described Trump as “an existential threat to democracy” and refused to have him on his show. But the pair seemed friendly on Friday as they chatted about their shared interest in Ultimate Fighting Championship and mutual friends like Elon Musk.

The Republican’s campaign hopes the interview will consolidate his influence with male voters, who make up the core of listeners to the Joe Rogan Experience, which has 14.5 million Spotify followers and 17.5 million YouTube subscribers.

"Every vote for Dr. Jill Stein or Cornel West instead of Kamala Harris makes it more likely that Donald Trump will win," wrote a coalition of leading environmental groups.

An inconvenient truth for Jill Stein, the Green Party protest candidate for president, is that there are only two candidates who can win the presidency on Nov. 5, and she isn’t one of them.

The other inconvenient truth for her and her avowed progressive supporters is that every protest vote from the left against Vice President Kamala Harris is a vote for former President Donald Trump.

In early September 2020, wildfires tore through eastern Washington state, obliterating tens of millions of dollars of property, displacing hundreds of rural residents and killing a 1-year-old boy.

But then-President Donald Trump refused to act on Gov. Jay Inslee’s request for $37 million in federal disaster aid because of a bitter personal dispute with the Democratic governor, an investigation by POLITICO’s E&E News shows.

Trump sat on Inslee’s request for the final four months of his presidency, delaying recovery and leaving communities unsure about rebuilding because nobody knew if they would get federal help.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20890027

# Israel jails Grayzone’s Jeremy Loffredo, releases him pending investigation

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20681163

Hamzah Saadah

No reason, just asking.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20644320

On Saturday, Palestinian organizers were joined by several prominent community leaders and activists for a protest commemorating the struggle for liberation in the first year of the Siege on Gaza. As Israeli leadership has succeeded in sparking a greater conflict in the Middle East with recent missile strikes against Lebanon and Syria, Americans of conscience seek options in sending a message to government leaders – while elections are just around the corner.