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Could Trump and Musk be seeking to end our time on Earth? By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 5th March 2025 In thinking about the war being waged against life on Earth by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their minions, I keep bumping into a horrible suspicion. Could it be that this is not […]

The Chinese Embassy in the US underlines the country’s differences with the US. Marco Rubio and Boris Johnson refer to the war in Ukraine as a proxy war, while Rubio also reaffirms Trump’s warning to Hamas. Ohad Kozminsky of the Jewish Council of Australia shares his views on Western colonialism and Gaza. The U.S. needs Continue reading »

“Martin O’Malley, the former commissioner of the Social Security Administration, said the recent cuts made by tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency at the agency could result in the ‘collapse’ of the Social Security system ‘within the next 30 to 90 days.’” — The Hill

Internal memo from the Department of Government Efficiency

FACT 1: People pay into Social Security over their working lifetime and then withdraw from it when they hit their sixties, like an IRA that holds value even when the stock market crashes. This works as long as the number of people paying in is greater than the number of retired people. Stupidly, the forefathers assumed there would always be more working people (sixteen to sixty-seven years old) than there are retirees. This assumption is called a Ponzi scheme.

The racist AfD doubled its vote in the German election in February, finishing second with 20.8 per cent in the latest advance for the far right.

The post Germany—mainstream parties fuel the rise of fascist AfD first appeared on Solidarity Online.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

If you think that they aren’t going after Social Security, think again: he newly installed caretaker at the Social Security Administration acknowledged this week that Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is calling the shots as the agency races to slash thousands of jobs and shrink its budget, telling a group of advocates, “Things are currently operating in a way I have never seen in government before.” In a meeting Tuesday with his senior staff and about 50 legal-aid attorneys and other advocates for the disabled and elderly, acting SSA commissioner Leland Dudek referred to the tech billionaire’s cost-cutting team as “outsiders who are unfamiliar with nuances of SSA programs,” according to a meeting participant’s detailed notes that were obtained by The Washington Post. “DOGE people are learning and they will make mistakes, but we have to let them see what is going on at SSA,” Dudek told the group, according to the notes. “I am relying on longtime career people to inform my work, but I am receiving decisions that are made without my input.

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An environmental chemist investigates the origins of her leukemia

The post When Did I Start Getting Cancer? appeared first on Nautilus.

A scientist floats a new idea for exploring Earth’s twin

The post Ballooning Around Venus appeared first on Nautilus.

Trump is going to make Ukrainians pay and pay hard for failing to immediately surrender to his “brilliant”, “savvy” friend Vladimir Putin three years ago: U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is planning to revoke temporary legal status for some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the conflict with Russia, a senior Trump official and three sources familiar with the matter said, potentially putting them on a fast-track to deportation. The move, expected as soon as April, would be a stunning reversal of the welcome Ukrainians received under President Joe Biden’s administration. He’ll be deporting everyone under temporary immigration statuses including Afghans, Cubans, Haitians, etc. But I think the deportation of Ukrainians in the middle of the war is a Trump bully tactic to try to force Zelensky to lick his boots. It’s just cruel. The Trump administration last month paused processing immigration-related applications for people who entered the U.S. under certain Biden parole programs – placing Ukrainian Liana Avetisian, her husband and her 14-year-old daughter, in limbo.

Banks just raked in $250 billion by charging borrowers more than they pay depositors. Trump moves could make the scam worse.

Here’s a fascinating look at the DOGE actions by Harvard political scientists Ryan Enos and Sam Fuller. I urge you to read the whole post which but here’s the essence of their findings and it should give us some heart: Trump’s actions, matters of complex questions relating to civic and constitutional norms, are incredibly unpopular: they are not supported by an overwhelming majority of Democrats (unsurprising), a significant majority of Independents (more surprising), and nearly half(!) of Republicans (extremely surprising). And, particularly among Republicans, if you cut through the partisan blinders and remind people these actions are illegal and unconstitutional, people are even more likely to disapprove of his actions. We see this in data that comes from questions we asked about Trump’s actions on the most recent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll.1 In particular, we asked people how much they support the following authoritarian actions (full questions can be seen at the end of the post): Responses were on a five-point scale from “strongly support” to “strongly oppose”.

The past fourteen days, like all epochs reduced to memes and cable news chyrons, have revealed the cyclical farce of power—a pantomime of bullies, billionaires, and eggs priced like bullion. We chronicle here the struggles of the recently unemployed, the begrudging representatives of the people, along with their staff who really just want to drop the R and F word without repercussions… but now that woke is dead, they still won’t say it.

In the children’s theater of democracy, world leaders—continually summoned to the asphalt hinterlands of a metaphorical middle school called the White House—find themselves cornered in the empty government halls by the administration. Recently, in a taxpayer-funded episode of Mean Girls, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was reprimanded by hall monitor JD Vance, who demanded fealty to join the country’s kickball team, further proving he was most definitely not invited to the cool kids’ parties.

In its response to AUKUS with its objective of militarily confronting China in the South China Sea, we should not be surprised by Chinese naval vessels sailing around Australia to pick up some intelligence or at least showing us their growing naval power. For China, it would be a good training experience in new waters. Continue reading »

The Australian labels Albanese a “jellyfish” in the face of Chinese naval vessels, ironically the barbs came from a faceless columnist. Kudos to The Australian for keeping tabs on a US nuclear submarine in our waters, but the headline act for the Murdoch masthead was hosting its own event for weapons makers and China hawks. Continue reading »

We need to tell a new/old story. Humans are social creatures of a shared story. We tell ourselves into being who we are by the stories we share. From First Peoples’ Songlines, rhythmically repeated and updated to incorporate the latest world developments, to Harry Potter novels and The Matrix movies, we remember and become the Continue reading »

News out of the US on the firing of public servants by the Trump administration has consequences worldwide. Downsizing of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will potentially impact many nations including our capacity to forecast extreme weather events and understand the consequences of climate change. The Trump administration has it in for NOAA. Continue reading »

Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognise others as persons – not by those who are oppressed, exploited and unrecognised. Paulo Freire (1921-1997) was a Brazilian philosopher and educator. His Pedagogy of the Oppressed, originally published in Spanish in 1968. The text below was translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. Continue reading »

There is a certain cadence to decline, a rhythm of arrogance and desperation, of miscalculation and delusion. The late-stage empire, unmoored from reality yet clinging to myths of its own indispensability, lashes out at perceived threats not because they are real, but because it cannot conceive of a world in which it is no longer Continue reading »

Donald Trump has resorted to tariffs, imposed against friend and foe alike. There are no compromises or special deals because it’s not about favours for friends, or compliance, or punishment. Tariffs are part of a desperate bid to stave off insolvency. Presidential adviser Elon Musk has provided an important insight into the slew of seemingly Continue reading »