Less than a half of those asked in the NATO country want an increase in military aid to Kiev, a new survey has shown

The vast majority of Germans do not believe that Ukraine can prevail against Russia, even with Western arms at its disposal, a new poll conducted on behalf of the broadcaster ZDF has suggested. Only one in ten Germans thinks that Kiev can win, the survey, published on Friday, found.

The number of skeptics in Germany continues to grow, according to the survey results from Politbarometer. While in August, 70% of respondents said they did not see Kiev winning, currently as many as 82% of those surveyed do not believe it can prevail.

Less than half of Germans want their government to send more military aid to Ukraine, the poll showed. According to the data, 42% of respondents are in favor of stronger support, while 31% want it to remain at the same level and 22% believe that it should be reduced.

There's been a drastic drop in the registration of new electric cars in Germany as sales of the "clean" electric cars have slumped nearly 30% compared to a year earlier, reports Germany's online Blackout News here.
The massive sales drop is bad news for the current German socialist-green government, which aims to have 15 million vehicles on the road by 2030. Currently there are just 1.4 million!

The dismal trend underscores the unpopularity of electric cars and consumers' hesitancy when it comes to purchasing them. Electric vehicles are plagued by limited range, sparse charging infrastructure, steep upfront purchase price and their huge environmental impact, which involves the largescale mining of rare earths.

"Their market share has fallen to just 11.9%. This casts a harsh light on the mismatch between Germany's political goals and the reality of the automotive market. It is clear that political incentives and measures are inadequate," reports Blackout News. "The abolition of the electric bonus at the end of 2023 has revealed another problem. The sector's dependence on state subsidies became apparent. This has further exacerbated the crisis of confidence in the electric car market."

The era of online censorship was fueled by media-driven panics about "fake news" and "disinformation." The focus of fear switched many times, from the spy-thriller narrative of Russian agents spreading disinformation intended to undermine U.S. elections, to "conspiracy theorists" questioning the official response to COVID-19 and undermining "election integrity" by raising concerns about mail-in ballot fraud.

Eventually, these narratives led to the censorship of true information. The Foundation for Freedom Online has compiled some of the top examples:

1. Targeting of Domestic "Malinformation."

There are three categories used by the censorship industry and its government partners to distinguish between speech violations on social media: dis- mis- and mal- information (MDM). The DHS's Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) has been at the forefront of popularizing the MDM framework. They maintain an entire website for MDM resources (as documented by FFO, it was later scrubbed to remove all mentions of targeting domestic speech).

They define disinformation as speech that is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate. Misinformation is information that is factually incorrect, but not on purpose. The third level of bannable speech - "malinformation" - is defined as factually accurate, true speech that is deemed to be taken out of or lacking context. In other words, malinformation is information that is completely true or accurate, but used in the wrong way.

Eyewitnesses have described scenes of chaos as they fled a busy Sydney shopping mall where a knifeman killed six people and wounded several others.

"It was carnage," said a witness, who was in a cafe nearby with his two young children as the attack began.

The man, who did not want to be named, told ABC News he saw a man suddenly "stabbing people indiscriminately".

Crowds poured from Westfield shopping centre in Bondi when the terrifying incident began just after 3pm.

"It was insanity," a visibly upset woman said, as she described seeing a wounded woman lying on the floor.

Renowned Palestinian-British doctor Ghassan Abu Sittah was barred from entering Germany on Friday where he is due to speak at a now cancelled pro-Palestine conference in Berlin about the challenges faced by medics in Gaza.

The New Arab correspondent Rabeea Eid, who is covering the conference, spoke to Abu Sittah who confirmed "they didn't let him in and he cannot now make a statement until the evening".

Abu Sittah, who was recently appointed rector of Glasgow University, is currently being held at a Berlin airport and will not be able to make the conference.

Interview with Les Leopold, author of "Wall Street's War on Workers," the book neither party wants you to read

In late February a new book by journalist Paul Waldman and University of Maryland professor Thomas Schaller called White Rural Rage hit the bookshelves. The book was a compendium of Hee Haw! caricatures of hayseed America mixed with a blunt diagnosis: rural Americans are disproportionately racist, conspiratorial, authoritarian, and supportive of political violence, key culprits in the rise of Donald Trump. "Rural Americans," Waldman and Waller wrote, "are overrepresented among those with insurrectionist tendencies."

Media response was instantaneous and ecstatic. Morning Joe hyped White Rural Rage as if it were a cross of What Happened and The Grapes of Wrath; Mika Brzezinski sat rapt as Schaller described rural voters as "the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country." Echoing one of the book's constant refrains, Paul Krugman at the New York Times wrote about "The Mystery of Rural White Rage," complaining about the illogic of rural white disdain for Democrats, while Salon's Amanda Marcotte after reading it felt emboldened to take off the "kid gloves" and pop rural America's "racist, sexist, homophobic bubble."

Last month, everybody's favourite intergovernmental agency, the World Health Organisation (WHO), published a "new toolkit empowering health professionals to tackle climate change". The toolkit is the latest attempt to enlist one of the most trusted professions into the climate war. But not only is this transparently ideological and condescending 'toolkit' lacking in fact, it requires 'healthcare professionals' to use their authority to eschew science and lie to their patients and politicians. The climate war is, after all, political.

The problem for climate warriors of all kinds since the climate scare story emerged in the 1980s and became orthodoxy in the 1990s and 2000s has been the rapid improvement of all human welfare metrics the world over. On the one hand, all life on Earth and the collapse of civilisation hangs in the balance - that is supposedly the implication of data that shows the atmosphere has got warmer. But on the other hand, people living in economies at all levels of development are today living longer, healthier, wealthier and safer lives than any preceding generation. The era of 'global boiling', as UN Secretary General António Guterres put it, also happens to be the era in which unprecedented social development has occurred.

That is a paradox if you accept the green premise that economic development comes at the expense of the climate. The UN, which has staked its authority on being able to address 'global' issues such as environmental degradation, is committed to defending the 'global boiling' narrative. But, at the same time, actively trying to retard the development of low-income countries risks undermining its authority in the developing world.

Why was the prescription of puberty blockers to distressed children allowed to continue for so long?

Three and a half years after it began, we finally have the findings of Dr Hilary Cass's review into NHS youth gender identity services. It is a damning indictment of how badly we, as a society, have let down a group of vulnerable and highly distressed children.

"Some practitioners abandoned normal clinical approaches" to the assessment of young people with complex lives, Cass concludes. "They deserve very much better."

Commissioned by NHS England in 2020, the review's interim findings led to the closure of the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) last month, and the ending of the routine prescribing of puberty blockers to children with gender-related distress. For those who have closely observed the care provided to this group of youngsters, there are few surprises in the report. But it is devastating to see it all laid out in one place.

Texas' attorney general filed a lawsuit on Tuesday seeking to stop a guaranteed income program set to start this month for Houston-area residents.

The program by Harris County, where Houston is located, is set to provide "no-strings-attached" $500 monthly cash payments to 1,928 county residents for 18 months. Those who qualified for the program must have a household income below 200% of the federal poverty line and need to live in one of the identified high-poverty zip codes.

The program is funded by $20.5 million from the American Rescue Plan, the pandemic relief law signed by President Joe Biden in 2021.

Federal pandemic funding has prompted dozens of cities and counties across the country to implement guaranteed income programs as ways to reduce poverty, lessen inequality and get people working.

In his lawsuit filed in civil court in Houston, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton dubbed the program the "Harris Handout" and described it as a "socialist experiment" by county officials that violates the Texas Constitution and is "an illegal and illegitimate government overreach."

"This scheme is plainly unconstitutional," Paxton said in a statement. "Taxpayer money must be spent lawfully and used to advance the public interest, not merely redistributed with no accountability or reasonable expectation of a general benefit."

The competitors will also be discouraged from taking photos with them, giving joint interviews, shaking hands, and more...

Ukraine's National Olympics Committee (NOC) is set to roll out conduct guidelines for the country's athletes, explicitly warning them against making any contact with Russians during the upcoming Paris Games.

The governing sporting body has prepared a new protocol of conduct for the country's athletes, NOC boss Vadim Gutzeit revealed on Monday, while speaking live on Ukrainian TV. The official stated:

"These recommendations are already there, yet they have not been approved, because we need to discuss these recommendations with the NOC Athletes Commission. We're ironing out the last few issues, and it will be approved."

The conduct guidelines effectively boil down to discouraging athletes from any contact with Russians during the Games, Gutzeit explained:

"Do not congratulate each other, of course, do not stand up for any mass photos, do not give joint interviews, of course, do not shake hands."