Since breaking ground on a multi-billion dollar luxury resort in Albania, the Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump-led project has done more to reveal a corrupt Zionist pay-for-play scheme than it has to shed light on one of the jewels of the Earth that had gone unnoticed until it fell into the hands of the pair of real estate scions, at least as their recounting of the tale of how it came into their purview would have others believe. After protests initially overran the construction sites of the development across Albania's Adriatic coast, that civil unrest against the project amplified to such an extent that over 100,000 Albanians took to the streets of their nation's capital, Tirana, as part of a civilian-initiated referendum against the resort. The movement, which has become known as the "Flamingo Revolution" due to the protected wildlife on Sazan Island and the adjacent Albanian mainland coast jeopardized by the Kushner-backed project, has led the country's largest protests since the fall of communism in Albania during the early 1990s. After that civil unrest proved to be enough to effectuate an investigation led by Albania's anti-corruption task force; the early revelations from that inquiry have already put the project's future into doubt, a development that threatens to turn the development from a luxury resort idealized as a city upon a hill into a castle made of sand being swept into the sea.

Albania's anti-corruption investigators have turned their attention to Miami-based businessman Artur Shehu as their probe has gone underway. Investigators have zeroed in on Shehu, who sold property that he owned on Albania's Adriatic coast to the Kushner-led company Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC, and his associates due to links they allege exist between them and an international drug trafficking ring and suspicions that the real estate empire Shehu amassed that he was able to profit from through his sale to Kushner was built through forged property records. Although Shehu's lawyer, Kujtim Cakrani, issued a statement on behalf of his client denying all of the accusations made against him by Albania's Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime ("SPAK"), Cakrani also acknowledged that the country's anti-corruption agency has issued a warrant for Shehu's arrest on charges that he has laundered money for drug gangs.

"That was a Beria operation in Stalin's time. It was deactivated twenty years ago." - The Living Daylights

How did KGB agents commit suicide? Two shots to the back of the head.

Remember Lavrentiy Beria's cheerful advice: "Show me the man, and I will find the crime"? Back in the Soviet Union they had so many laws on the books that everybody broke at least one before lunch, I mean, when lunch was available. And if they didn't, they could make up something. Beria just needed enough spies and informants to spot the right violation.

Beria would have loved modern America. We've upgraded his whole operation with better cameras, faster computers, and added actual profit margins.

New York City's socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and his radical-left lieutenants in City Hall promised voters free bus rides, government-run grocery stores, cheap housing, and much more. Yet the dream of a left-wing utopia has not materialized. In fact, rents in the NYC metro area just hit a record high.

New data from The Corcoran Group, a major residential real estate brokerage founded in NYC, shows that rents in the metro area have climbed to a new record high.

Manhattan's median rent rose 8% from a year earlier to $5,295, while Brooklyn reached $4,350, also up 8%, according to the report. Manhattan's vacancy rate narrowed to 1.49%. In Queens, Rego Park posted particularly sharp increases, with one-bedroom rents up 12% and studio rents up more than 20%.

"Manhattan renters are chasing a shrinking pool of available apartments, and the result has become predictable — record rents. Available listings dropped 16% year-over-year in June, while the borough's median rent climbed to a new high of $5,295. Leasing activity clocked in 7% below last year's pace due to the lack of inventory, causing competition to remain fierce. Additionally, June marked one year since implementation of the FARE Act, a milestone that may still be influencing pricing trends, particularly within the non-doorman market. Across the board, quality apartments are commanding a premium, and renters have little room to negotiate," Corcoran COO Gary Malin wrote in the report.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said he was detained by Israeli settlers armed with U.S.-made rifles during a West Bank visit this week that he cast as an unfiltered look at the human toll of Israeli occupation as he weighs a 2028 presidential run.

Speaking with Reuters on Thursday in a Palestinian village, Khanna said his ⁠group's van was surrounded by settlers wielding M4 rifles a day earlier while touring a part of the southern West Bank where residents face frequent settler attacks.

"We were at a village that Israeli settlers had destroyed, they had destroyed the school, they had destroyed that village, and we were just looking at it," he said.

As the high-stakes criminal investigation into Telegram nears its second year with no resolution in sight, French authorities have again summoned Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov for questioning. Durov spent around six hours being questioned at the Paris Judicial Tribunal on Wednesday, local media reported, citing law enforcement sources. He's allowed to travel internationally, and to live at his home in Dubai - though he's agreed specific judicial supervision rules, part of which is to periodically return to France when summoned.

It marked the fourth time the tech entrepreneur has been interrogated as part of the ongoing investigation, stretching back to his initial arrest in August 2024 at a Paris airport. He was soon after indicted on a dozen assorted charges ranging from complicity in illicit platform activity to non-cooperation with state authorities.

Durov's legal team confirmed the questioning to AFP, slamming the lack of progress by French prosecutors, decrying that "almost two years after the indictment of Pavel Durov, there is still no evidence to establish the validity of the charges."

A new analysis by Always On Energy Research and the Institute for Energy Research concludes that renewable energy mandates and net-zero policies have contributed to higher electricity prices in states that adopted them, while states with fewer climate-related mandates generally have lower electricity costs.

The analysis examined electricity pricing data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration and found that most states with electricity rates above the national average voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in the 2020 and 2024 elections.

According to the report, 86 percent of states with above-average electricity prices supported the Democratic nominee in both elections. By comparison, 80 percent of the 10 states with the lowest electricity prices voted for the Republican nominee.

Researchers said the study focused on identifying policy differences between states with higher and lower electricity rates.

In October 2023, Israel found an excuse to breathe new life into an old story of slaughter and expulsion. The chief differences this time have been of scale and duration

The truth slowly comes to light: Israel's genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.

Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza.

Soldier 1: "Human lives didn't matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it's not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity."

Soldier 2: "At first I wasn't willing to execute Arabs who weren't resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings."

Soldier 3: "We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder."

Soldier 4: "We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges... Every soldier who was there created a 'concentration camp', and they didn't hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance."

No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline "We were ordered to kill".

In the last few weeks, we have seen self-described democratic socialists winning primary elections across the country. Most were closely associated with Zohran Mamdani, the socialist who became mayor of New York City this year, who is seen by many on the left as a figure who is finally able to enact the kind of agenda that had made Bernie Sanders and AOC popular in previous election cycles.

The growing popularity of this kind of explicit, full-on socialism and the indisputable electoral success it's having in some primaries has predictably caused establishment liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to panic. Centrist commentators across the country have been sharing the most extreme policy positions and previous statements from the socialist candidates who won their races, seemingly under the assumption that the radicalism alone will be sufficiently off-putting to enough people. That is, at best, a dangerous misreading of the situation.

Despite the surface-level rhetoric used by all sides, the growing popularity of "socialism" or "populism" is primarily a non-ideological phenomenon.

Lindsey Graham had come to define the United States over the course of the past quarter century. This was not a good thing.
Lindsey Olin Graham is dead.

He served the State of South Carolina in one form or another for 36 years, the last 23 of which were as a United States Senator.

Lindsey Graham postured himself as a man of integrity and honor, a patriot's patriot, who put service to country above all else.

A Christian.

But the reality is he was anything but.

Lindsey Graham was a servant of sin, and his life embodied at its core at least five of the cardinal sins of mankind: pride, greed, wrath, envy, and lust.

Lindsey Graham had an excessive belief in his abilities, and that of the causes he purported to support. Pride is considered the original and most serious sin, leading to a sense of superiority over all others.

Lindsey Graham was a proud man, in the most negative and damnable sense of the word.

Lindsey Graham was a greedy man, in so far as he possessed an insatiable desire for wealth or possessions, often at the expense of others. This was true when it came to the wealth and resources of other nations, which Graham sought to acquire through coercion and violence. Greed leads to unethical behavior and exploitation, concepts which literally defined the causes Graham espoused.

Lindsey Graham was a very greedy man.

From damaged roads to soaring power prices, scorching summer weather is exacting a heavy economic toll on the EU.

Western Europe has been enduring another record-breaking heat wave, with temperatures topping 40C in several countries. France, the UK, Germany and Switzerland have all seen their hottest June temperatures on record, while the extreme weather has disrupted transport, power generation and industrial output.

The scorching temperatures are burning a multi-billion-euro hole in the EU's already fragile economy. From parched fields to idle factories, the bloc is feeling the heat beyond what thermometers may indicate. Economists, meanwhile, warn that climate-driven heat waves are no longer temporary events but a structural macroeconomic risk.

Productivity is the first casualty

The most immediate economic cost of extreme heat is lost productivity. According to German insurer Allianz Trade, every additional degree between 30C and 35C cuts labor productivity by roughly $1.30 per hour - equivalent to nearly 3% of average hourly output. Construction, agriculture, logistics and other labor-intensive sectors bear the brunt as workers struggle in extreme temperatures.

As another heat wave swept the region, Patrick Martin, head of France's main employers' federation Medef, summed up the impact: "France is working in slow mode."