Best of the Web:


Fire

Best of the Web: Vondelkerk Church in Amsterdam destroyed in fire on New Year's Eve - Media blames migrants setting off fireworks, but was it?

Danielle de Wolfe
LBC
Thu, 01 Jan 2026 14:03 UTC
Celebrations across the country were overshadowed by the huge blaze that destroyed the historic building
fire vondelkerk amsterdam
© AlamyA fire broke out in the tower of the Vondelkerk in Amsterdam on New Year's Eve - as two people died during separate celebrations. Picture:
Two people have died and a historic 19th Century church was burned to the ground following New Year's Eve celebrations in the Netherlands.

A 17-year-old boy from Nijmegen and a 38-year-old man from Aalsmeer were killed in fireworks accidents, authorities have confirmed, with three others seriously injured during celebrations.

One person has since been arrested in connection with the teenager's death, with the police investigation ongoing.

Elsewhere, a historic 19th Century church located in the heart of Amsterdam was burnt to the ground as revellers took to the streets.


Comment: Note how this reporting - with zero evidence - is framing the church incident within broader New Year's Eve clowning around with fireworks...


vondelkerk church amsterdam
© AlamyDamage to the Vondelkerk after fire. The Vondelkerk is not in danger of further collapse; the walls of the burning building remain standing. A structural engineer has determined that there is no further risk of collapse.
Authorities were forced to send a rare country-wide alert on mobile devices just after midnight amid a surge in calls to the emergency services.

The message urged people to only call the already overwhelmed emergency services if their lives were at risk.

Comment: "Members of the public..."

Interesting euphemism for the non-Dutch population of The Netherlands.

It's not just the above report, by the way. Search for reports on this church fire in Amsterdam in all European press and you'll notice they're unanimously suggesting that fireworks (accidentally) burned down the church.

At the same time, everyone in European cities knows that those behaving irresponsibly with fireworks on NYE tend to be migrant youths and/or from majority-Muslim countries.

So, once again, we see that the media is deliberately fanning the flames of 'race war', even as it feigns shock when Europeans 'vote against embracing more diversity' in elections.

'The Network' knows who it wants you to blame:



Was it 'the Muzzies' though? And if so, did they 'have help'?

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Fire

Best of the Web: 'Dozens' feared dead in major fire at New Year's party in Swiss ski resort


RT
Thu, 01 Jan 2026 13:55 UTC
Local hospitals are reportedly overwhelmed with burn victims following a devastating explosion that claimed as many as 40 lives
fire crans montana switzerland
A popular nightlife venue in the ski resort of Crans-Montana was rocked by an explosion shortly after the arrival of the New Year, reportedly killing dozens of people and leaving many others injured, Swiss police have said.

Police have not released exact figures as families are still being notified, but as many as 40 people were killed and many others injured, some of them seriously, local media have reported, citing sources.

Local hospitals are reportedly overwhelmed with burn victims, according to Le Nouvelliste.

"There has been an explosion of unknown origin," Gaetan Lathion, a local police spokesman, told AFP.

Emergency services were dispatched shortly after midnight following reports of a powerful blast and fire at or near a bar and lounge frequented by vacationers.

Eyewitness footage circulating on social media shows flames engulfing part of the venue and thick smoke rising into the night sky.

Comment: Swiss police believe the fire may have started when sparklers in champagne bottles were hoisted too close to decoration fabric hanging from the bar's ceiling.

Video of party-goers just carrying on as flames quickly spread across the ceiling:



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Red Flag

Best of the Web: Protests 'spontaneously erupt' in Tehran over inflation, Israel 'welcomes regime change with open arms'

Akhtar Makoii
The Telegraph, UK
Wed, 31 Dec 2025 14:36 UTC
shopkeepers tehran protest
© Fars News Agency via APProtesters march in downtown Tehran, Iran, December 29, 2025.
Mass protests have erupted across Iran calling for "death to the dictator" over the regime's economic crisis.

Tear gas was used to disperse protesters as shops shuttered in Tehran's Grand Bazaar and main markets.

University students called on their peers to join the demonstrations, while chants echoed from rooftops in several cities and the Iranian rial plunged to record lows, all against the backdrop of ongoing threats from Israel and the US.

Residents in one city near Tehran told The Telegraph that a heavy presence of armed motorcycle-mounted security forces was visible around midnight.

On Monday, security forces fired tear gas to disperse protesters in Tehran while residents in Malard, 28 miles east of the capital, were faced with motorcycle-mounted armed security.

In several cities, people went on to their rooftops and chanted slogans against the Islamic Republic and Ali Khamenei, its supreme leader.

The protests have been cheered on by Israel, whose foreign ministry hoping for Mr Khamenei's overthrow welcomed the action with "open arms".

Comment: What's interesting here is that these protests began the day Netanyahu landed in the USA for the 6th (SIXTH!) time this year, and where he began working Trump for the next Israeli aggression against Iran: to knock out its missile development sites. If Iran gets accurate delivery systems for its nukes (which it almost certainly already has, and in large numbers), it's curtains for 'the Greater Israel protect'.

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Airplane

Best of the Web: CIA carried out drone strike on port facility on Venezuelan coast - CNN sources

Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, Jim Sciutto
CNN
Wed, 31 Dec 2025 14:12 UTC

Comment: And so it begins. Kind of...


reaper drone
© Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo / AFP via Getty ImagesA U.S. military MQ-9 Reaper drone sits on a tarmac at Rafael Hernandez Airport in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, on Dec. 27, 2025.
The CIA carried out a drone strike earlier this month on a port facility on the coast of Venezuela, sources familiar with the matter told CNN, marking the first known US attack on a target inside that country.

The drone strike, the details of which have not been previously reported, targeted a remote dock on the Venezuelan coast that the US government believed was being used by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to store drugs and move them onto boats for shipping, the sources said. No one was present at the facility at the time it was struck, so there were no casualties, according to the sources.

Two sources said US Special Operations Forces provided intelligence support to the operation, underscoring their continued involvement in the region. But Col. Allie Weiskopf, a spokesperson for US Special Operations Command, denied that, saying, "Special Operations did not support this operation to include intel support."

President Donald Trump appeared to first acknowledge the attack in an interview last week that initially attracted little notice, though he offered few specifics, including when reporters asked directly about it on Monday.


Comment: So, "largely symbolic," and "barely noticed" even in Venezuela.

In the meantime, oil tankers are still operational in and out of Venezuela, including Chevron ones, and one Chinese source claims that one of their tankers just this week departed Venezuela loaded with oil, and by-passed the US fleet with a Chinese Navy escort on its journey back through the Panama Canal:



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Bizarro Earth

Best of the Web: The Somali patronage system has infiltrated Minnesota politics

Alexander Muse
@amuse on X
Mon, 29 Dec 2025 17:20 UTC
somali politics minnesota
Tim Walz, Ilhan Omar, Hodan Hassan, Mohamud Noor, Omar Fateh
The United States has long comforted itself with a story about immigration. People arrive poor and traumatized, they struggle, and over time they assimilate. Languages fade, loyalties widen, and civic norms take root. That story has been true often enough to feel like a law of nature. But it is not a law. It is a wager. And in the case of Somali immigration, particularly in Minnesota, the wager is failing in plain sight.

The failure is not mysterious. It has a name, a structure, and a logic. What is routinely described as fraud, mismanagement, or isolated criminal behavior is more accurately understood as the Somali patronage system. This is not a rhetorical invention. It is the standard term in academic and policy literature for a deeply entrenched social and political order organized around clans, sub clans, and binding kinship obligations. It predates the modern Somali state by centuries and survived because it had to. In Somalia, it replaced the state. In the West, it is colonizing one.

The system arose in conditions of chronic insecurity. When there is no reliable government, survival depends on who you know and who owes you. The clan, or qabiil, became the primary unit of power. It was identity, insurance, enforcement, and politics rolled into one. Loyalty moved inward, never outward. The individual served the family, the family served the sub clan, the sub clan served the clan. The state was, at best, incidental.

Comment: The poster child of the patronage system:





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Vader

Best of the Web: New Year, new MSM Ukraine spin: Russia faces "exhaustion" in 2026

Simplicius
Simplicius the Thinker
Sun, 28 Dec 2025 18:59 UTC
russian recruits
Do these guys look exhausted? Russia beat its 2024 recruitment goal and did so again in 2025.
We examine media claims and crunch some numbers to evaluate Russia's prospects for 2026.

The next media narrative is slowly taking shape that Russia is starting to get "exhausted", which will — naturally — culminate in some kind of breakdown in 2026. This is of course an old narrative repurposed anew now that Ukraine itself is in its least enviable shape ever, with no prospects at all of improvement.

Interestingly, for up to two years now, we have heard from top figures and publications that 2026 would be the "key year" beyond which Russia would no longer be able to sustain itself, and this from several different perspectives. Economically, Russia's so-called 'headwinds' would finally prevail, and its "overheating" economy would begin to see widespread 'structural breakdowns' or outright collapse.

Militarily, Russia would have run out of all armor by 2026 and would no longer be able to carry out "maneuver attacks", while troop recruitment capacity would dwindle, requiring Putin to finally launch that large-scale 'mobilization' he's been putting off for so long, resulting in mass social upheavals and even a coup.

Given that we're at the end of 2025, it is a fitting time to look ahead at some of these projections, and see where things truly stand for both sides leading into 2026.
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Handcuffs

Best of the Web: Criminally-convicted immigrant under deportation order stabs 3 women on Paris metro - Deportation failed 'because he had no travel document'


France 24
Sat, 27 Dec 2025 07:07 UTC
paris metro stabbing police
The suspect in the stabbing of three women on the Paris metro has been moved to a psychiatric hospital after being released from custody, prosecutors announced Saturday. The 25-year-old man is accused of attacking the victims at separate locations along the Line 3 metro track. The victims' injuries are not life-threatening.

The suspect in the stabbing of three women in the Paris metro was released from custody and moved to a psychiatric hospital, prosecutors said on Saturday.

The man was arrested suspected of stabbing three women in the Paris metro on Friday as the capital's end-of-year festivities were in full swing.

The three victims were attacked at three different locations along the Line 3 metro track that runs across central Paris. They were injured, but not critically.

Continued police custody was not appropriate for the suspect because it is "considered incompatible with the state of his health", the prosecutors' office said.
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Stormtrooper

Best of the Web: Millions of children and teens lose access to accounts as Australia's world-first social media ban begins

Josh Taylor
The Guardian
Sun, 28 Dec 2025 19:49 UTC

Comment: These things begin, as they always do, "for the children..."


australia digital id
Australia has enacted a world-first ban on social media for users aged under 16, causing millions of children and teenagers to lose access to their accounts.

Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Kick, Twitch and TikTok are expected to have taken steps from Wednesday to remove accounts held by users under 16 years of age in Australia, and prevent those teens from registering new accounts.

Platforms that do not comply risk fines of up to $49.5m.

There have been some teething problems with the ban's implementation. Guardian Australia has received several reports of those under 16 passing the facial age assurance tests, but the government has flagged it is not expecting the ban will be perfect from day one.

All listed platforms apart from X had confirmed by Tuesday they would comply with the ban. The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, said it had recently had a conversation with X about how it would comply, but the company had not communicated its policy to users.

Bluesky, an X alternative, announced on Tuesday it would also ban under-16s, despite eSafety assessing the platform as "low risk" due to its small user base of 50,000 in Australia.

Comment: Sounds reasonable on the face of it. But not because 'social media is bad'. Rather, bad actors are all over social media, manipulating anyone and everyone. And rarely being punished despite leaving enormous trails of evidence of their criminality. So this 'solution' is totalitarian rather than evidence-based and targeted.

Also, meanwhile, the kids they claim they're trying to protect are subject to ideological indoctrination in schools - and which they cannot opt out of. Who's going to 'protect' them there??

And we're also hearing that, what this new law means in practice, is that Australian adults will need to prove their age on an ongoing basis... every time they go online?

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Star of David

Best of the Web: Epstein, Israel, and the CIA: How the Iran-Contra Planes landed at Les Wexner's Base

Ryan Grim, Murtaza Hussain, and Harrison Berger
Drop Site News
Thu, 18 Dec 2025 16:44 UTC
Les Wexner Jeffrey Epstein
Les Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein
Jeffrey Epstein helped Leslie Wexner repurpose the CIA's Iran-Contra planes from arms smuggling to shipping lingerie.

This week, the New York Times awoke from its slumber to publish an extensive investigation on Jeffrey Epstein that purported to put to rest the question of how the man made his money early in his career. In it, the Times dismisses the possibility that Epstein could have worked for or adjacent to intelligence agencies. "Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune," the paper wrote.

To the paper's credit, their journalists have put into the record some details that took an impressive effort to track down. For instance, the paper reported about Epstein's business associates in the early 1980s:
Epstein had been spending extravagantly, and despite his lofty compensation at Bear Stearns and his work for [Douglas] Leese, he found himself strapped, even occasionally bouncing rent checks. Back in New York, he joined forces with John Stanley Pottinger, a lawyer who had recently left a senior post in the Justice Department. Epstein, Pottinger and Pottinger's brother rented a penthouse office in the Hotel St. Moritz on Central Park South. (The broker, Joanna Cutler, told us that Epstein initially stiffed her on the commission.)
The Times deserves credit, we suppose, for digging up that nugget from his one-time broker — but had the paper decided to look up rather than look down, they may have noticed something a bit more revelatory in their own reporting.
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Snowflake Cold

Best of the Web: Canada records its coldest December temperature in 50 years of -56.7°C


The Weather Network
Tue, 23 Dec 2025 15:33 UTC
mmmmm
Extreme cold persists in Northern Canada, with temperatures ranging from -20°C to -40°C for several weeks. On Dec. 23, the region recorded its coldest December temperature since 1975.

You have heard of a summer heat wave, but what about a winter cold wave?

Parts of Yukon are experiencing prolonged, extreme cold--with temperatures ranging from -20°C to -40°C--lasting for weeks!


The extended cold spell includes:
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