Today we released two videos in Mandarin aimed at recruiting Chinese officials. @CIADirector John Ratcliffe: "One of the primary roles of the CIA is to collect intelligence…by recruiting assets that can help us steal secrets."
View the videos here:https://t.co/mhQbzet5X2 https://t.co/CzEsvnAp0n
— CIA (@CIA) May 1, 2025
Comments are scary
h/t Mauser
The House voted Thursday to block California from enforcing a rule that would ban sales of new gasoline-powered cars in the state by 2035.
Lawmakers voted 246-164 to pass a resolution targeting the rule, which ranks as one of the nation’s most ambitious policies aimed at combating climate change and promoting electric vehicles. However, it is unclear whether the Senate will follow suit and send the measure to President Donald Trump’s desk.
In forging ahead with the vote, House Republicans sidestepped legal opinions from two nonpartisan watchdogs. The Senate parliamentarian and the Government Accountability Office have concluded that Congress lacks the legal authority to prevent states from enforcing such climate rules.
Jasmine Crockett: "It is not a criminal violation to enter the country illegally."pic.twitter.com/7TvsgsgbIn
— Community Notes & Violations (@CNviolations) May 1, 2025
h/t XC
Mark Carney and the Liberals won another minority on Monday while the Conservatives overperformed expectations. But beyond the seat count, the real story might be the deep changes in the coalition of voters for both parties, both in terms of regional strength, but especially with respect to some demographics—age and ethnicity in particular.
OK, Boomers pic.twitter.com/0aSbpoBtw5
— Robyn Urback (@RobynUrback) May 1, 2025
The parliament of the state of Lower Austria has approved a set of new measures aimed at tackling radical Islam and handing out stricter penalties for families deemed “unwilling to integrate.”
Parents of kindergarten children who are unwilling to comply with certain obligations, such as attending parent-teacher meetings, could face a fine of up to €2,500 or up to six weeks in prison.
On the surface, Canada’s election on April 28th seemed to preserve the political status quo. As in the last election, in 2021, the ruling Liberal Party will form a minority government. The Conservatives, the main opposition party, slightly narrowed their deficit in Parliament—the Liberals now hold 25 more ridings (as constituencies are called in Canada) than the Conservatives do, down from a 41-seat gap. The Conservatives fared a bit worse in the popular vote, losing it by two percentage points after winning by one in 2021.
Underneath this apparent stasis, however, lies a striking political upheaval. On average, the margin between the two big parties in individual ridings changed by nine percentage points from 2021 to 2025, twice as much as the shift in the average American county between the presidential elections of 2020 and 2024. Some ridings swung by more than 30 points. These yawning gaps added up to modest differences in nationwide results only because for each riding that moved right, another one slid leftwards by a similar amount.
It’s now almost impossible to tell the Economist from the Guardian.
That didn’t take long.
Just 24 hours after Prime Minister Mark Carney’s election victory, the contradiction at the heart of his political and economic agenda came crashing into view.
That’s because Canada’s largest bank, RBC, quietly announced it is abandoning its signature $500 billion sustainable finance commitment — one of the very pledges Carney championed as head of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ).
Hey, MSNBC, are you hiring? I ask because I can write your story on this for you. Here you go, this one’s on the house: “The Trump White House’s shameful removal of 4,000 foreign students from the country is yet another blot on the record of this administration, which in just 100 days has proven to be a legal, political and moral disaster. Selfless and hard-working intellectuals of color from non-racist countries potentially sacrificed their future to grace this systemically racist, xenophobic, paranoid nation with their presence, only to be unceremoniously expelled by a white supremacist megalomaniac who is threatening our democracy today even more severely than he did last week. Now who will commit the crimes for us that Americans do not want to commit?”
It’s a verdict that’s rapidly embedding itself as the answer to the riddle of the Liberal party’s revival from its vegetative state as recently as last December to this week’s election-day comeback, only a handful of seats shy of a majority in the House of Commons: Party standard-bearer Mark Carney owes his triumph to Donald Trump.
The notion is particularly popular in the United States. In Democratic party circles, especially, Canadians have lately become celebrated as plucky allies in the gallant resistance to their daft president’s jingoistic threats to break all the rules of global neoliberalism, annexing Canada along with Greenland in the bargain.
The sound of gunfire echoes across the ocean. We’re the only boat out on this patch of the Arctic, which is roiling with waves in the lunchtime heat; and we are not under attack. But a thunderous crack, eerily like a gunshot, is what you hear when an iceberg breaks.
It’s just over an hour and a half since I set sail from Colonial Harbour, in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, and my boat is slaloming through blocks of ice that have calved off the territory’s ice sheet. There are massive bergs, larger than our 25-foot Targa 25 boat; floes the size of breeze blocks, and fist-sized clumps that Christian, the boat’s first mate, scoops out and dumps into a bucket with the fish he’s caught that are piled up inside it.
An abuser will spook his victim, then prey on her fears to manipulate and control her. Having been stripped of any sense of individual confidence and self-worth, the victim may see her abuser as her protector. Here we have something akin to mass formation psychosis or Stockholm Syndrome.
Losing any sense of self-worth and worn down to the point of submission, many of the abused will then do and say what meets with the abuser’s approval. Critical thinking skills are erased and the victim will blindly conform to authority. They will do what they are told when they are told without question.
If there’s one lesson to be learnt from this month’s Supreme Court ruling on what a woman is, it is surely this: never again should we trust the wisdom and authority of our supposed betters and superiors. The paradox of the stupidity of clever people may be age-old, but it’s come to the fore with a gruesome absurdity in recent years.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford clearly doesn’t like federal Conservatives, but did he really sabotage their campaign in the province, as one re-elected Ontario MP recently suggested? Not likely, if you stick to the facts.
The unseemly infighting between the leaderships of Ontario Progressive Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre’s federal Conservatives boiled over this week, to the credit of neither. Ontario Conservative MP Jamil Jivani took quite a run at Ford after the federal party’s election loss Monday. “ When it was our turn to run an election, h e couldn’t stay out of our business, always getting his criticisms and all his opinions out, distracting our campaign, trying to make it about him, trying to position himself as some kind of political genius that we needed to be taking cues from,” Jivani said. He added that Ford was a “hype man” for the federal Liberals.
In late 2022, well before Sean “Diddy” Combs got into real trouble, a man in Los Angeles approached Tanea Wallace with an offer.
The man was a scout for Soft White Underbelly, photographer Mark Laita’s YouTube channel about people struggling with issues such as abuse or addiction. Wallace, an aspiring singer who sometimes made money doing sex work, took Laita up on it, for $300, sitting for his camera and talking about her life.
In the interview, she recounted an alleged incident from 2018 — a crown prince of Brunei flew her from Los Angeles to Miami with a promise to help her singing career. Once there, he took her to a party on Star Island, an uber-exclusive, man-made enclave home to celebrities such as rapper Rick Ross, retired basketball star Shaquille O’Neal and Combs. The music mogul was throwing the party. Security guards took her phone before she could wander through the property.
After progressives and greens for years pushed for a transition away from internal combustion engines to (allegedly) more ‘environmentally friendly’ EVs, suddenly ideological purity has become more important than air quality.
Tesla owners in Vienna have started finding threatening notes on their cars, Remix reports, telling them to sell their cars—or they will be vandalized.
