British energy giant BP and arms firm BAE Systems are set to profit from Israel amid its ongoing destruction of Gaza, Declassified has found.

While Israel's military has killed over 11,000 Palestinians in Gaza, its government has announced the award to BP of a lucrative contract to explore for natural gas in the eastern Mediterranean. Meanwhile, arms firm BAE Systems, which manufactures key parts of the F-35 jets being used to support strikes on Gaza, has seen its share price rise in recent weeks.

A number of British Conservative MPs who rejected last week's parliamentary motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza have shares in BP and BAE, which are both strongly linked to the UK government.

BP's new licences

On 29 October, Israel's Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure announced that it had awarded new licences to six energy companies for offshore natural gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean.

The announcement came a week after Israel bombed the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, killing dozens of people. The camp was bombed again two days later.

One of the bids was won by a joint consortium of British energy giant BP, Azeri national oil company SOCAR, and Israeli corporation NewMed Energy.

While the bids were made earlier this year, the timing of the announcement was designed to foster investor confidence in Israel amid its brutal war on Gaza.

Columbia University's recent suspension of its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) chapters was just the latest examples of the unfolding attacks on free speech when it comes to Palestine in the United States. Among the troubling aspects of this trend is the role outside groups are playing in university actions since October 7, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which has been leading the charge against SJP chapters nationally.

Despite being widely understood as a mainstream civil rights organization, the ADL has a long history of surveilling and infiltrating social justice and human rights organizations, silencing advocacy for Palestine, and particularly working to silence any and all criticism of Israel.

Students for Justice in Palestine, in particular, has been in the crosshairs of the ADL's repression campaign for at least a decade. One of the main avenues for doing so has been to equate anti-Zionism, and really any form of criticism of Israel, with antisemitism. Such conflations lay the groundwork for the ADL to make its oft-repeated claim that SJP and JVP are the "photo inverse of the extreme right" and even to implicate them in the rise of antisemitic hate crimes.

In the shadows of the blaring headlines and geopolitical maneuvers lies a harrowing saga of silent suffering - the plight of Ukrainian women, a tale steeped in the horrors of state-sanctioned torture and systemic abuse. This narrative, mostly sidelined in mainstream media, reveals a disturbing pattern of violence and discrimination, now brutally magnified since NATO's provoked war with Russia. Alongside the stark realities outlined in the US State Department's 2019 Human Rights Report emerge new chilling allegations of abuse by nationalist battalions like Azov, and a surge in human trafficking that has ensnared countless women in a nightmarish web of oppression and torture.

In the chaotic wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, Ukraine plunged into a dark era marked by an alarming surge in crimes against women's honour and dignity. Long before Volodymyr Zelensky's ascent to power, a sinister trend had emerged: Ukraine led the grim tally in the number of women violated by state security forces, with the police often implicated. Starkly, these perpetrators roamed free, shielded by gaps in the legal system that allowed such heinous acts to go unpunished. Despite the UN's 2013 report highlighting over 20 million Ukrainians suffering violence, and 40% of women facing sexual aggression, accountability remained nonexistent. Yet, in a twist of bitter irony, the assumption of power by Zelensky in 2019 marked a disturbing turn: the international community's already faint outcry against these brutal crimes against women seemed to mute entirely. This chilling silence served as an implicit sanction, emboldening those who perpetrate such violations with an air of invincibility.

That's the difficulty with nonlinear, mutually reinforcing crises: our over-confidence, hubris and refusal to consider sacrifices will be our undoing.

Back in 2017 when I composed this graphic of overlapping crises, the word polycrisis was not yet in common use. Polycrisis has various definitions for example: "the simultaneous occurrence of several catastrophic events."

But this doesn't explain the truly dangerous dynamic in polycrisis, which is the nonlinear, mutually reinforcing potential of disparate crises to generate effects much larger than the initial causes. This definition is closer to the mark: "Many different problems happening at the same time so that they together have a very big effect."

Put another way: 1 + 1 + 1 doesn't generate an effect of 3, it generates an effect of 9.

You'll notice the crises on my graphic are internal socio-economic dynamics: state-cartel centralization, demographics, soaring debts, Imperial over-reach, technological disruption, disunity in elites and diminishing returns on financial predation. Many don't see these as crises; they're seen as factors, not as potentially catastrophic dynamics. This is the linear analysis: none of these dynamics is actually threatening to the stability of the US.

The only lessons the Old World offers to America these days are cautionary.

Ever since the earliest days of the Republic, American intellectuals, artists, and statesmen looked to Europe for models. Conservatives felt attracted to the continent's sense of continuity and tradition, and as the base for Christianity. More recently, progressives saw in European social democracy and globalist pacifism a role model to be embraced.

Yet today Europe seems not much of a model for much of anything outside of museums, charming cathedral towns, and terrific food. The notion that Europe represents the future, nurtured by the likes of Mitterrand advisor Jacques Attali, Jeremy Rifkind's utopian European Dream, and the American journalist T.R. Reid's 2005 The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy, seem utterly delusional.

A common theme in the early years of the millennium was that Europe was on the verge of global resurgence while America was in decline. Europe's eventual stagnation, as many conservatives point out, can be in part traced to an ever expanding high-tax welfare state that generally absorbs roughly ten more percentage points of GDP than in the U.S. But this is not the only explanation. Some of the moderately better off European economies, like Denmark and Sweden, are welfare states but manage to outperform the rest.

Bronx-raised rapper Cardi B turned on Democrats and New York City Mayor Eric Adams for controversial budgets last week that would affect schools, libraries, firefighters, police, and much more.

Cardi B, whose real name is Belcalis Almánzar, was once a mega supporter of the Biden administration. Now she's going through the 'angry' regret phrase as New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced 5% across-the-board budget cuts that will impact all residents. The cuts are primarily driven by the Democrat's open southern border policy that has flooded the metro area with more than 100,000 illegals.

During a live stream, which was reposted on social media, she started off with, "I'm an angry a$$ b**ch right now ... I'm an angry b**ch ... I'm about to go off right now."

A former Army soldier is blaming the Biden administration after he says he was ordered to pay for gear he brought home from his last deployed mission in Afghanistan.

President Joe Biden has made "no apologies" for the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan following two decades of American involvement there. A few months after he was sworn in, Biden announced that U.S. troops would exit the country by September 11, 2021, saying, "It's time to end America's longest war."

His administration met a self-imposed August 31, 2021, deadline with evacuations of between 13,000 and 18,000 people per day. The withdrawal, described by some as a scramble and mad dash to meet the deadline, led to 13 U.S. service members being killed — the first service members killed in action since February 2020 — and at least 18 others were injured during an attack at a checkpoint outside Kabul's airport.

In addition, 170 Afghans were killed. In total, more than 120,000 people were eventually evacuated before September 2021.

On Monday, the former U.S. soldier wrote on TikTok that it was his gear turn-in day following approximately four years of active duty in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division. The experience of leaving the service, he said, made him want to "holler, scream, yell."

They say the Pentagon is the government's favorite money laundering tool for a reason. It is comical that they even attempt to audit the Pentagon when they know the agency will fail miserably. The government spent $187 million to conduct the meaningless audit at 700 locations. This year, as with the year prior, only 7 of the 29 sub-audits passed. HALF of the claimed assets were nowhere to be found by the 1,600 hired auditors. How does trillions of dollars disappear?

Trillions have gone missing since pre-9/11. There is no ongoing investigation into finding the whereabouts of these funds that belong to taxpaying citizens. The September 11, 2001, attack occurred one day after former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sounded the alarm bells and notified the public that $2.3 trillion in transactions could not be traced. The WTC7 demolition on 9/11 destroyed the room where the Pentagon audit was taking place and also happened to be the location of my computer system. I received from the SEC explaining that everything had simply been destroyed and no further questions were permitted.

Western currencies have been almost completely phased out in Russia-China trade, as nearly all payments between the countries are now carried out in rubles and yuan, Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov announced on Monday.

Since the introduction of Western sanctions on Moscow, Russia and China have accelerated the use of their own currencies in trade. According to Belousov, 95% of all transactions between Russia and China are now carried out in one of the countries' national currencies, and given the rapid expansion of mutual trade and cooperation, this percentage is likely to grow.

Speaking at a meeting of the Russia-China intergovernmental commission in Beijing, the deputy prime minister said bilateral trade between the two countries will exceed the target of $200 billion this year, and may reach $300 billion by 2030.

He noted that China has long been among Russia's major trade partners and that the scope of investment opportunities for the two countries is expanding.

The former editor of a left-leaning political news site reportedly has been charged with possessing and distributing child pornography, according to authorities in Massachusetts.

Slade Sohmer, 44, who until last month was editor-in-chief of the video-driven news site The Recount, was released on $100,000 bail on Monday after he was charged in Massachusetts court with possessing and disseminating "hundreds of child pornography images and videos," according to The Berkshire Eagle.

Sohmer — who also has worked as a camp counselor for a New York City-based nonprofit — was arrested at his home in Otis, Mass. on Friday, weeks after law enforcement officials confiscated his electronic devices after obtaining a search warrant, the newspaper reported.

He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of possession of child pornography and two counts of dissemination of child pornography.