Hayli Gubbi, Ethiopia's long-dormant volcano, located in the Erta Ale Range, has erupted for the first time in 10,000 years, spewing towering ash columns that drifted across the Red Sea toward Oman and Yemen. Scientists say the eruption marks one of the most extraordinary volcanic awakenings in the region's recorded history.

The explosive eruption began around 8:30 a.m. UTC on Sunday, according to VolcanoDiscovery, citing an advisory from the Toulouse Volcanic Ash Advisory Center (VAAC). Satellite data later confirmed the presence of a massive ash cloud rising an estimated 10 - 15 km into the atmosphere.

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee is under fire and in the headlines after it was revealed he met with notorious traitor and spy Jonathan Pollard at the US Embassy in July. The former American intelligence analyst was convicted of espionage for Israel and sentenced to life in prison in 1987.

Pollard's is widely viewed as one of the single most damaging spy cases in US intelligence history, as he passed along extensive classified information, including the NSA's ten-volume guide to US signals-intelligence collection methods. He also directly put American intelligence agents and officials in danger, as he revealed the identities of thousands of individuals who had assisted US intelligence services.


The CIA still considers Pollard a dangerous traitor to the nation. He had passed thousands of secret documents - enough to fill a large room-full, to Israeli intelligence in exchange for money and gifts. His defense after getting caught red-handed, which included video footage showing him stealing documents, was that the US government was withholding crucial information from its close Mideast ally.

MAGA embraced the "tech right," the network of right-wing, anti-woke Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists, in the 2024 election because they shared a common foe: the left. The tech right now has an outsized influence on the U.S. government and the second Trump administration. And, day by day, their power grows, to the detriment of not only the American people, but our very system of constitutional government.

Conservatives seemed enthusiastic to welcome Silicon Valley elites into the fold, including Elon Musk, namely because they promised to use their cutthroat management skills and startup expertise to trim the fat of the federal bureaucracy and make the government more efficient and cost-effective. It was a compelling argument: the federal government was, and still is, despite the efforts of DOGE, woefully sclerotic, incompetent, and wasteful.

I argue that this tradeoff might not be worth it in the long run; it might have actually been detrimental to the health of our republic and our constitutional rights. In the name of fighting wokeness and bloated government bureaucracy, MAGA opened up their arms to a vast, powerful network of elites. The short term deal was a reduction of waste; the long term outcome seems increasingly like mass surveillance, and government policy not by the people, but by ruthlessly efficient private contractors.

One company, in particular, seems to capture the toxicness of this implicit deal: Palantir.

A Swiss parliamentary investigation into the detention and expulsion of journalist Ali Abunimah in January has concluded there was a series of irregularities and evidence of political interference.

The new federal report indicates abuse of power by a senior Swiss official with financial ties to Israel.

The ban "deviated from standard practice" and was "unsatisfactory" the report concludes.

In a statement posted to X this week, Abunimah called the report a major new development.

"These grave violations of democratic and human rights were carried out to prevent me from speaking at lawful public events — organized by Swiss citizens and residents — calling for an end to Israel's genocide in Gaza," he wrote.

In 2019, I read an article about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the world. The author, writing under the pseudonym "J. Stone," argued that the day Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University marked a turning point in our culture. The entire "woke" era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women.

The basic facts of the Summers case were familiar to me. On January 14, 2005, at a conference on "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce," Larry Summers gave a talk that was supposed to be off the record. In it, he said that female underrepresentation in hard sciences was partly due to "different availability of aptitude at the high end" as well as taste differences between men and women "not attributable to socialization." Some female professors in attendance were offended and sent his remarks to a reporter, in defiance of the off-the-record rule. The ensuing scandal led to a no-confidence vote by the Harvard faculty and, eventually, Summers's resignation.

The essay argued that it wasn't just that women had cancelled the president of Harvard; it was that they'd cancelled him in a very feminine way. They made emotional appeals rather than logical arguments. "When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT. Summers made a public statement clarifying his remarks, and then another, and then a third, with the apology more insistent each time. Experts chimed in to declare that everything Summers had said about sex differences was within the scientific mainstream. These rational appeals had no effect on the mob hysteria.

In an interview with The Grayzone, author Andrew Lownie details shocking findings of his research into Prince Andrew's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Describing Andrew as his "Super Bowl trophy," Epstein used the prince for intel, which he passed to foreign spy agencies. Lownie says further revelations threaten to "bury" the Royal Family.

Prince Andrew's decades-long relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was "earlier, longer, and far more intimate than anyone has previously admitted," historian Andrew Lownie told The Grayzone. Their friendship was so depraved that even Epstein, the self-proclaimed "king of kink," was shocked by the Prince's sexual appetites, according to Lownie's new book, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York.

Based on years of research in BBC archives, interviews, and leaked emails, Lownie's investigation provides a chilling portrait of a man shielded by royal privilege, addicted to sex from childhood, and ultimately undone by his alliance with the world's most notorious pedophile. The historian reveals that Epstein not only supplied Andrew with a steady stream of underage girls, but also gathered intelligence from the prince, and dutifully passed it along to Mossad and other spy agencies.

"The Prince was a useful idiot who gave Epstein respectability and access to political leaders and business opportunities," Lownie explained to The Grayzone. "Meanwhile, Epstein offered Andrew an opportunity to join the super rich and enjoy a lifestyle to which he had long aspired, an endless supply of women, a chance to make lots of money, and someone who would bankroll his lavish lifestyle as well as settle Sarah Ferguson's debts."

We deserve the truth

We are all owed a better explanation from the FBI and Secret Service about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump 16 months ago at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa.

The president himself remains unsatisfied with the answers he's been given about the circumstances leading to 20-year-old Thomas Crooks climbing on a rooftop with an AR-15-style rifle and firing eight times at Trump, narrowly missing his head but hitting his ear.

The clips are one of the limited insights into Crooks and his possible motives in trying to assassinate Trump.

Crooks was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper, but not before he killed rallygoer Corey Comperatore, 50, and seriously wounded David Dutch, 58, and James Copenhaver, 75, who were sitting in the bleachers behind Trump.

There is something very wrong with the official story and that invites conspiracy theories.

The only way to know what to do

People are talking endlessly not only about morality and moral rules in general, but about what they think you should do specifically.

Date? Not date? Get married or not? Have children or not? Hustle hard and get rich — or lay low and get out of the hamster wheel? Do the responsible corporate job or quit and open your weird startup? Escape to the countryside or create a futuristic metropolitan enclave? Everybody seems to have their answers, trying to impose them on the rest of us. We are surrounded by a shrill new Heideggerian "they" that never shuts up, forever tugging us here and there, and once we have regained balance, again comes at us with the worst advice at the worst possible moment.

In dealing with Venezuela, the second Trump administration for months oscillated between dealmaking and regime change. More recently, however, an unprecedented military buildup in the Caribbean appears to be aimed at toppling Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. The regime-change faction, in other words, has got the upper hand. But how? Blame the regime-change capital of the Americas, Miami, and its native son, Marco Rubio.

Early on, there was some hope that the White House would forgo the first term's amateur coup attempts and moralistic posturing against Maduro. Among his first acts in 2025, President Trump dispatched special envoy Richard "Ric" Grenell to broker an America First understanding with the Caracas regime.