World, US, Culture, Market, and Sci-Tech News Aggregation from MSM and Independent News
As a wave of protests swept across Iran last night, the internet was completely shut down.
I have no idea what is happening to my friends, my family, or anyone else.
My best friend Champ was at the demonstration.
I desperately hope he is safe.
Iran is a nation wanting its soul back.
The exiled son of Iran’s last shah, who has emerged as a prominent voice in the fragmented opposition, made his strongest call yet for the protests to broaden into a revolt to topple the clerical rulers.
State media said a municipal building was set on fire in Karaj, west of Tehran, and blamed “rioters”. State TV broadcast footage of funerals of members of the security forces it said were killed in protests in the cities of Shiraz, Qom and Hamedan.
Footage posted on Friday on social media showed large crowds gathered in Tehran and fires lit in the street. In one video verified by Reuters showing a nighttime protest in Tehran’s Saadatabad district, a man is heard saying the crowd had taken over the area.
“The crowd is coming. ‘Death to the dictator’, ‘Death to Khamenei’,” he said, referring to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Protests have spread across Iran since Dec 28, beginning in response to soaring inflation, and quickly turning political with protesters demanding an end to clerical rule. Authorities accuse the US and Israel of fomenting unrest.
Trump Shares Lindsey Graham’s Post on Truth Social Warning Iran as It Enforces Crackdown on Protests International Business Times UK
from news.google.com
VLADIMIR Putin has lost at least 19 generals since launching Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
This staggering toll has ripped through the upper ranks of his military and laid bare the brutal cost of war at the very top.
The unprecedented losses have hollowed out Russia’s senior command, exposing a leadership crisis rarely seen in any modern conflict.
US Vice President JD Vance has launched a scathing attack on Europe’s handling of “critical” Greenland as its locals reject both Danish and US rule.
Vance told Fox News that Europe and Denmark have “not done a good job” in securing the area, claiming they underinvested in defences and failed to engage with Trump on the matter.
from news.google.com
Keir Starmer backs London victims in row with mayor over grooming gangs The Times
from news.google.com
Reform chairman likens Starmer’s digital ID scheme to Nazi laws The Telegraph
from news.google.com
Starmer’s Corbyn smear accusations FINALLY go global with US coverage thecanary.co
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Prime Minister Keir Starmer denounced the US president’s intention to acquire Greenland
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has denounced US President Donald Trump’s renewed interest in acquiring Denmark’s self-governing island of Greenland.
Elon Musk rips apart Keir Starmer’s Government in rant branding UK ‘fascist’ Daily Express
from news.google.com
Washington’s military intervention in Venezuela has reignited fears about Trump’s designs on the autonomous Danish territory, which has untapped rare earth deposits and could be a vital player as polar ice melts, opening up new shipping routes.
“We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it,” the US leader said Sunday.
In response, Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen told Trump to back off, while several European countries and the European Union rushed to back Denmark, which has urged Washington to stop threatening a NATO ally.
Indonesia suspends Musk’s Grok AI over porn New Age
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Somaliland Condemns Somalia’s Calls for What It Describes as “Foreign Military Intervention” Dawan Africa
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The UK government says X limiting Grok AI image edits to users who pay a monthly fee is “insulting” to victims of misogyny and sexual violence.
It follows backlash after Elon Musk’s AI engine digitally changed images of people by undressing them – something it says it now can only do for those who pay a monthly instalment.
The BBC’s technology editor Zoe Kleinman explains what’s happened and why.
The UK government “wants any excuse for censorship”, Elon Musk has said, amid a growing backlash over deepfake sexual images produced by his social media site X’s artificial intelligence tool.
Earlier this week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said X needed “to get a grip of” its AI chatbot Grok, and he had asked media regulator Ofcom for “all options to be on the table”.
Musk Calls UK ‘Fascist’ as Row Over Grok AI Images Escalates Bloomberg.com
from news.google.com
The problem with the left is that they don’t actually stand for anything. This is why they would rather support a narco-terrorist dictator while protesting a fake dictator, a.k.a. the leader of the free world. They hate Trump so much that they would rather have Venezuelans continue to live in poverty and famine in an effort not give him a win. This is because, to them, this is a third-world problem—something their first-world brains could not even begin to understand if their lives depended on it. This is wrong, which is why one Venezuelan woman broke down in tears while speaking to KATV, calling out liberals for saying, “This is not a reason for celebration.”
The people who have a problem with what happened in Venezuela cannot even begin to understand anything this woman is saying. They don’t know what it’s like to not have a shower. In the U.S., something like Walmart is often frequented by lower-income individuals. But to this woman, she couldn’t even believe such a selection of food existed.
Many of her friends just disappeared. Many of her loved ones were forced to eat trash. The people were living in fear. This is not something the left can even begin to comprehend. They don’t even care, as they would rather these people suffer than give Trump a win.
Normal people are breathing a sigh of relief that narco-terrorist leader Nicolás Maduro is finally getting his just desserts for getting fat off of the torture of his citizens and funneling drugs into the U.S. for years. For MRC Business, it’s a moment worth recalling when the idiotas at The New York Times made their readers dumber by blaming anything but communism and socialism for Venezuela’s destruction.
The July 28, 2024, story that Times Venezuela reporter Anatoly Kurmanaev, international correspondent Frances Robles and Andes Bureau Chief Julie Turkewitz ran was so bad it was enough to make people lose IQ points:
[I]n recent years, the socialist model has given way to brutal capitalism, economists say, with a small state-connected minority controlling much of the nation’s wealth.
Yes, the journos actually attempted to make Maduro and Venezuela’s bread lines synonymous with — *checks notes* — “capitalism.”
Kaine is fresh off the victory of his war powers resolution passing in the Senate last week on Venezuela operations. However, Trump is now teasing an invasion of Greenland, suggesting he would take the Danish territory “the hard way” if necessary.
“We are going to do something in Greenland, whether they like it or not, because if we don’t do it, Russia or China will take over Greenland, and we’re not going to have Russia or China as a neighbor,” Trump told reporters Friday at the White House.
In a Sunday appearance on CBS News’s Face the Nation, Kaine responded to what he referred to as the “disastrous” announcement with a threat of his own.
President Trump was briefed on new options for military strikes in Iran, a senior U.S. official confirmed Sunday.
Mr. Trump appeared to lay out his red line for action on Friday when he warned that if the Iranian government began “killing people like they have in the past, we would get involved.”
“We’ll be hitting them very hard where it hurts,” he said at the White House. “And that doesn’t mean boots on the ground, but it means hitting them very, very hard where it hurts.”
On social media, Mr. Trump offered his support for the protesters, saying that “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!!”
Mr. Trump’s warnings come as nationwide unrest challenging Iran’s theocracy crossed the two-week mark. At least 538 people have died in violence surrounding the demonstrations, U.S.-based activists said, with fears the death toll is far higher. More than 10,600 people have been arrested, the Human Rights Activists News Agency said.
The situation on the ground in Venezuela is a mixed bag right now, which is to be expected. One doesn’t just pluck the lead narco-terrorist from a “government” that’s basically organized crime and expect sunshine and roses within a week. It’s going to take time for Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and the United States team to pull all the weeds, and I have no doubt that, if anyone can do it, those two men can.
It’s also changing so quickly that it’s hard to keep up with everything.
That said, I’m seeing a lot of misinformation, speculation, confusion, and biased reporting out there — surprise, surprise — and I want to set the record straight on what’s happening in Venezuela right this minute. Everything I’m going to say comes from our State Department, credible human rights groups, sources on the ground, and people with whom I’ve connected who are from that country. None of them are anonymous.
Colombia’s socialist leader Gustavo Petro has claimed he’s prepared to “take up arms” to fight against President Donald Trump.
Petro published a lengthy, early-morning social media post on Monday, in which he also accused Trump of issuing “illegitimate threats” toward Bogotá.
The Colombian president is a self-described socialist and former member of the now-defunct M19 guerrilla organization.
He invoked his past involvement with the group while warning that detaining him would “unleash the jaguar of the people.”
A team of researchers in China has just pulled the curtain back on a new sodium-sulfur battery design that could fundamentally change the math on energy storage. By leaning into the very chemistry that has historically made sulfur a headache for engineers, they have managed to build a cell that is incredibly cheap to make but still packs a massive energy punch.
The design, which is currently being tested in the lab, uses dirt-cheap ingredients: sulfur, sodium, aluminum, and a chlorine-based electrolyte. In early trials, the battery hit energy densities over 2,000 watt-hours per kilogram – a figure that blows today’s sodium-ion batteries out of the water and even gives top-tier lithium cells a run for their money.
Donald Trump repeated his interest in acquring Greenland, issuing a new thinly-veiled threat at the territory, the kingdom it is part of and the wider NATO alliance. As he chaired a meeting involving oil and gas industry leaders discussing their possible future work in Venezuela, Mr Trump also discussed other key issues, including the war in Ukraine and his desire to acquire Greenland.
He said: “Right now, we are going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not because if we don’t do it Russia or China will take over Greenland, and we’re not going to have Russia or China as a neighbour. Okay? I would like to make a deal, you know, the easy way. But if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.”
The response came after the US President was asked about the territory and how much money he would offer Denmark for it. Mr Trump said he isn’t talking about money “yet”, but he “might talk about that”.
Many of those at today’s march, including Enrique Tarrio – the former Proud Boys leader who was convicted and later pardoned for his role in the January 6 insurrection – said that they were there to protest against the death of Ashli Babbitt, a rioter who was killed by Capitol police on the day of the attack.
Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has urged US President Donald Trump to stop threatening to take over Greenland, after the latter reiterated his wish to do so following Washington’s abduction of the leader of Venezuela.
“It makes absolutely no sense to talk about the US needing to take over Greenland. The US has no right to annex any of the three countries in the Danish Kingdom,” Frederiksen said in a statement on Sunday.
The comments followed an interview published by The Atlantic magazine, in which Trump said: “We do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defence.”
On Saturday, the United States bombed Venezuela and toppled President Nicolas Maduro, raising concerns in Denmark that the same could happen with Greenland, a Danish territory.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday he had appointed former Liberal cabinet minister Chrystia Freeland as an economic development adviser, citing her experience in attracting investment.
“Right now, Ukraine needs to strengthen its internal resilience — both for the sake of Ukraine’s recovery if diplomacy delivers results as swiftly as possible, and to reinforce our defense if, because of delays by our partners, it takes longer to bring this war to an end,” Zelenskyy wrote on X.