Authored by Felicity Bradstock via OilPrice.com,

• Africa is experiencing a surge in energy development, with both fossil fuel and renewable energy projects on the rise.

• Significant oil and gas discoveries have been made in recent years, while renewable energy investments are increasing rapidly.

• The continent aims to diversify its energy mix, but challenges remain in ensuring equitable access to energy and achieving sustainable development goals.

Several countries across the African continent are rapidly expanding their energy industries thanks to several factors. Firstly, many oil and gas giants are investing heavily in untapped fossil fuel regions across Africa as they strive to diversify their portfolios and produce more ‘low-carbon’ oil. Secondly, several high-income countries and multinational energy players are now investing in Africa’s renewable energy market, with multiple hydropower, wind and solar power, and hydrogen projects emerging across the continent. Thirdly, several African countries are seeing economic growth that is supporting greater energy security. 

Oil, Gas, and Coal 

Several oil and gas discoveries were made in 2024. Portuguese multinational energy corporation Galp, the National Petroleum Corporation of Namibia (NAMCOR), and the energy company Custos made a light oil discovery at the Mopane-1X well in Namibia in January. In April, Galp’s appraisal activities showed a potential oil reserve of at least 10 billion barrels. Shell also saw success in Namibia, confirming the presence of oil deposits at the offshore Enigma-1X well in April, the firm’s fifth oil discovery in Namibia’s Orange Basin.

Italy’s Eni confirmed the discovery of light oil, gas, and condensates in Block CI-205 offshore Ivory Coast in March 2024. E&P companies BW Energy and Panoro announced the discovery of oil at the DHBSM-2P pilot well offshore Gabon in May, which holds an estimated 5 to 6 million barrels of recoverable oil. Meanwhile, Chevron made a significant near-field oil discovery in PML 49, in the shallow offshore region of the Western Niger Delta in Nigeria, with an estimated production potential of up to 17,000 bpd.

The African region is gradually moving away from new coal- and gas-fired power plants, with new fossil-fuel capacity additions falling by more than 70 percent over the last half a decade. However, coal and gas continue to contribute around two-thirds of the continent’s annual power generation, and one-third of Africa’s fossil-fuel capacity is less than a decade old, with much of it having been built in response to the region’s rising electricity demand. 

Renewables 

In terms of renewable energy, the African Union aims to bring 300 GW of renewables online by the end of the decade, to more than quadruple the estimated 72 GW of installed capacity in 2024. Africa saw a record year for renewable energy investment in 2023, at around $15

billion, which represents 2.3 percent of the global total. This was over double the investment seen in renewables in Africa in 2022. Renewable energy deployments across the continent totaled 7.9 GW in 2023. However, to achieve the African Union’s 2030 target, annual deployments must increase to 32.5 GW a year for the rest of the decade.

The renewable energy capacity growth was driven by the development of utility-scale wind, solar, and geothermal projects in Egypt, Morocco, Kenya, and South Africa. Two-thirds of Africa’s installed wind and solar is currently situated in South Africa, Morocco, and Egypt suggesting the need for greater investment in renewables in other parts of the region. The growth of South Africa’s solar energy industry has helped the country tackle its energy crisis and regular power outages. The increased investment shows promise for greater funding in the renewable energy sector in the coming years, as well as the creation of a more diversified energy mix in several African countries.

External Funding 

In addition to the private funding of projects, several regional funding initiatives were announced in 2024. There has been a rise in the number of Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) – multilateral platforms between developed and emerging economies that are designed to provide climate finance.

In 2023, the Presidential Climate Commission released the JET Investment Plan for South Africa, setting a funding target of $98.7 billion between 2023 and 2027 to support its energy security goals. Financing will contribute primarily to the growth of South Africa’s electricity, electric vehicle, and green hydrogen industries. 

Senegal and the International Partners Group (IPG), comprising France, Germany, the EU, the U.K., and Canada, also announced a JETP in December, agreeing upon funding of $2.7 billion to support Senegal’s energy transition and develop its low-carbon economy.

At the recent COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, member states agreed to triple finance to developing countries, from the previous goal of $100 billion a year to $300 billion a year by 2035. This funding will help countries develop their renewable energy industries, as well as boost climate resilience. Although many developing countries and climate groups criticized the funding decision for being too low. 

Outlook

Several African countries are seeing the rapid development of their fossil fuels and renewable energy industries, thanks to increased public and private investment. Although the continent continues to rely heavily on fossil fuels for power, multiple countries are now developing alternative sources to diversify their energy mix and boost energy security. The region has seen immense growth in its energy market in recent years, but some countries are vastly overshadowing others, with significantly more investment required in many countries to ensure greater energy security and support a global green transition.

Authored by Amir Taheri via The Gatestone Institute,

As 2024 draws to a close, one thing is certain across the globe: the pendulum of history is swinging away from the direction it had taken since the 1990s.

For almost three decades, it had swung towards what one might call soft-left, in its latest epiphanies as globalism, political correctness and multiculturalism — all versions of collectivism.

By collectivism, we mean ideologies that see humanity in terms of groups or herds rather than individuals, and nation-states as pawns for self-perpetuating global elites to move on their imaginary chessboard.

The first institution to get hit was the United Nations that, as its name suggests, was supposed to be a nonpartisan grouping of sovereign nation states working together within a commonly accepted framework of rules and traditions in the service of peace and international cooperation.

In the past few years, however, the UN has morphed into a partisan club for soft-left ideologues.

In those years, one of the UN Security Council’s veto-holding members, Russia, has invaded two countries, while another, the United States, tried to prop-up Iran’s moribund Islamist regime in the vain hope of bringing it in from the cold.

A third veto-holding member, China, has acted like a neighborhood bully wielding a knife and threatening everyone from the Strait of Malacca to the South China Sea.

The nadir came when UN Secretary-General António Guterres cast himself as an apologist-cum-advocate for Hamas in the name of “Palestinian rights.”

Another major institution of globalism, the European Union, has also been hit by corruption scandals, political skulduggery, bureaucracy and its members pulling in opposite directions even on key issues such as support for Ukraine.

Elsewhere, the Organization of American States, another collectivist outfit, has ceased to exist in a meaningful way. Its African version, the African Union, is also paralyzed, unable even to mediate among its members. On a smaller scale, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) split when three members left after military coups.

A number of other pseudo-collectivist outfits that had never been anything but expensive ghosts have continued to fade away, among them the Association of South East Asian Nations, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, BRICS+, the Russian-led Eurasia phantom, various pan-Islamic money-spenders and time-wasters, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Arab League.

All that not to mention the so-called Axis of Resistance that the Islamic Republic of Iran had created at huge expense to “export revolution” to the four corners of the world.

The pendulum is swinging towards the old model of the nation-state that, first shaped in the 17th century, developed into the standard concept for organizing human societies within geopolitical borders set by historical processes.

Even a few years ago, mentioning the word “border” was tantamount sacrilege.

Borderlessness was à la mode: Doctors Without Borders, Reporters Without Borders, Lawyers Without Borders and, even Border Guards Without Borders, the latter in Europe.

In 2024, many borders that had disappeared have been re-installed, even between European nation-states.

In general, in elections held in Germany, Britain, France, Poland, and Austria, and the US presidential election, a key word was: border. In 2024, Turkey completed a 320-kilometer wall to seal off its border with Iran which, in turn, unveiled a plan for a 925-kilometer-long wall on its border with Pakistan.

The year’s big surprise was Donald J. Trump who, against all predictions by the global glitterati, won a rare victory by not only returning to the White House with a majority both of votes and of the Electoral College, but also with the Republican Party gaining control of both chambers of Congress plus a majority of state governorships.

The big loser of the year was Iran, which saw its 30-year investment in its imaginary Axis of Resistance buried under Syrian rubble.

The year’s revenant was Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who before the October 7, 2023, invasion by Hamas, seemed to be on his way into oblivion via a possible stint in the can. Within a few months, however, the world discovered a brand-new Netanyahu casting himself as an international statesman. British historian Andrew Roberts even compared him to Sir Winston Churchill, who was branded a sad failure in 1939 but praised as a hero a year later.

The year’s gambler was Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who got his nation involved in Syria’s dicey destiny, a gamble that could produce big winnings for him but might also end up serving him the same cup of poison that Iran had to imbibe.

The year’s yellowest of yellows was the Syrian despot, Bashar al-Assad, who took his family and money and fled without telling his entourage, let alone his Iranian allies, to also run for cover, leaving them exposed to humiliation, revenge and death.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy remained the romantic figure of the year, to collect air-miles by flying all over the world to seek assistance from mostly cynical techno-bureaucrats masquerading as political leaders, and ending with little more than photo-ops for them.

The title cynic of the year could be shared by French President Emmanuel Macron and the outgoing German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz. Both have refined the affliction into an art to help them hang on to power a bit longer.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Argentine President Javier Milei, of Italian origin, might share the title of the pragmatist of the year by adding water to their respective ideological wines and practice politics as the art of the possible.

Russian President Vladimir Putin may get the title of hard-to-boil figure of the year. His war in Ukraine isn’t proceeding as he imagined, and the ultimate outcome of his ill-advised involvement in the Syrian imbroglio remains uncertain. His call for help to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is humiliating by all accounts, and his growing dependence on Xi Jinping’s China is a matter of concern in Moscow.

Yet most polls show that almost 70 percent of Russians still trust Putin, even if they disagree with his invasion of Ukraine.

The title comedian of the year must go to South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who declared martial law and sent the army to close the parliament, but quickly changed tone by saying sorry, I didn’t mean it.

All in all, not a bad year, and if the pendulum swings in the current direction, the best may be yet to come.

Authored by Joshua Stylman via substack,

A Century of Cultural Control From Edison’s Monopolies to Algorithmic Manipulation

Author’s Note: For years, I understood advertising was designed to manipulate behavior. As someone who studied the mechanics of marketing, I considered myself an educated consumer who could navigate rational market choices. What I didn’t grasp was how this same psychological architecture shaped every aspect of our cultural landscape. This investigation began as curiosity about the music industry’s ties to intelligence agencies. It evolved into a comprehensive examination of how power structures systematically mold public consciousness.

What I discovered showed me that even my most cynical assumptions about manufactured culture barely scratched the surface. This revelation has fundamentally altered not just my worldview, but my relationships with those who either cannot or choose not to examine these mechanisms of control. This piece aims to make visible what many sense but cannot fully articulate – to help others see these hidden systems of influence. Because recognizing manipulation is the first step toward resisting it.

This investigation unfolds in three parts: First, we’ll examine the foundational systems of control established in the early 20th century. Next, we’ll explore how these methods evolved through popular culture and counterculture movements. Finally, we’ll see how these techniques have been automated and perfected through digital systems.

Introduction: The Architecture of Control

In 2012, Facebook conducted a secret experiment on 689,000 users, manipulating their news feeds to study how changes in content affected their emotions. This crude test was just a glimpse of what was coming. By 2024, algorithms would not be used to simply shape what we feel, but what we believe it is even possible to think.

Social media platforms are now able to predict and modify behavior in real-time, while streaming services automatically and continuously curate our cultural consumption, and digital payment systems track every single transaction. What began as simple emotional manipulation has become comprehensive consciousness control.

This power to mold human perception didn’t emerge overnight. The mechanisms of cultural control we see today were built over more than a century, evolving from Edison’s physical monopolies to today’s invisible digital chains. To understand how we arrived at this point of algorithmic consciousness control – and more importantly, how to resist it – we must first trace the historical foundations of these systems and the deliberate architecture of control that shaped them.

The psychological manipulation revealed by the Facebook experiment may seem like a modern phenomenon, but its roots stretch back to the earliest days of mass communication. One of the first architects of cultural control was Thomas Edison, whose establishment of the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908 laid the groundwork for a century of systematic influence.

Part One: Laying the Foundation

When Thomas Edison established the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908, he created more than a monopoly – he demonstrated how five key mechanisms could systematically control information and shape consciousness: infrastructure control (film production equipment), distribution control (theaters), legal framework (patents), financial pressure (blacklisting), and legitimacy definition (“authorized” vs “unauthorized” content). These same mechanisms would evolve and reappear across industries and eras, becoming increasingly sophisticated tools for engineering public consciousness and controlling the boundaries of possible thought and expression.

The Rise of Institutional Control

While Edison was establishing control over visual media, a broader system of institutional power was rapidly taking shape. The early 20th century would witness an unprecedented convergence of concentrated control across multiple domains.

When antitrust action broke up the Edison Trust in 1915, control simply shifted from Edison’s patent monopoly to a small group of studios. While presented as creating competition, this “breakup” actually consolidated power in an oligarchy of studios that could more effectively and subversively coordinate content control and messaging – a pattern that would repeat in future antitrust actions.

While the Trust’s breakup appeared to create competition, new forms of control quickly emerged. The Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code) established in 1934 demonstrated how moral panic could justify systematic content control. Just as Edison had controlled film distribution, the Hays Code controlled what could be depicted on screen, establishing templates for narrative manipulation that would persist into the digital age.

Edison’s template for controlling visual media would soon be replicated across other domains. As I detailed in ‘The Information Factory’, Rockefeller deployed an identical template in medicine: infrastructure control (medical schools), distribution control (hospitals and clinics), legal framework (licensing), financial pressure (strategic funding), and legitimacy definition (“scientific” vs “alternative” medicine). This wasn’t just about eliminating competition – it was about controlling what constituted legitimate knowledge itself.

This wasn’t a coincidence. The early 20th century witnessed unprecedented bureaucratic convergence, as formerly separate domains – medicine, media, education, finance, entertainment, and scientific research – began operating with remarkable coordination. The walls between public institutions, private industry, and government agencies became increasingly permeable. Major foundations played a crucial role in this convergence. The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, while presenting themselves as philanthropic organizations, effectively shaped academic research priorities and social science methodologies. Through strategic grant-making and institutional support, they helped establish and maintain approved frameworks for understanding society itself. By determining what research got funded and which ideas received institutional backing, these foundations became powerful gatekeepers of acceptable knowledge—extending Rockefeller’s medical model into the broader intellectual sphere.

This unprecedented administrative alignment represented more than coordination – it established interlocking systems for controlling both physical reality and public consciousness. From Edison’s control of visual media to Rockefeller’s definition of medical knowledge to the Federal Reserve’s monetary control, each piece contributed to a comprehensive architecture of social control. What made this system so subtly pervasive was its masterful packaging – each erosion of autonomy was presented as progress, each restriction as protection, each form of control as convenience. The public not only accepted but eagerly embraced these changes, never recognizing that their choices, beliefs, and very understanding of reality were being carefully engineered through institutions they trusted.

The power of this converged system was first demonstrated at scale in profoundly reshaping America’s global role. The narrative of American ‘isolationism’ emerged as one of the most influential shapers of public consciousness. While America had long projected power through banking networks, corporate expansion, and gunboat diplomacy, this reality was gradually reframed and cunningly marketed to an unsuspecting public By establishing a story of American withdrawal from world affairs, advocates for military intervention could position themselves as reluctant modernizers guiding a hesitant nation toward global responsibility. J.P. Morgan’s simultaneous acquisition of major newspapers, controlling 25% of American papers by 1917, helped establish this narrative framework. It wasn’t just about profit – it was about establishing the machinery of public consciousness management in preparation for coming conflicts desired by the ruling class.

By the 1950s, Operation Mockingbird formalized this influence as the CIA systematically infiltrated major media organizations. The program demonstrated how thoroughly intelligence agencies understood the need to shape public perception through seemingly independent channels. Building on methods refined during wartime propaganda efforts, Mockingbird’s techniques would influence everything from news coverage to entertainment programming, establishing templates for information manipulation that continue to evolve today.

What Operation Mockingbird achieved through human editors and planted stories, today’s platforms accomplish automatically through content moderation algorithms and recommendation systems. The same principles of narrative control persist, but the human intermediaries have been replaced by automated systems operating at breathtaking speed on a global scale.

This media-intelligence nexus was exemplified by William S. Paley, who transformed CBS from a small radio network into a broadcasting empire. During World War II, Paley served as supervisor of the Office of War Information (OWI) in the Mediterranean theater before becoming chief of radio in the OWI’s Psychological Warfare Division. His wartime experience in psychological operations directly informed CBS’s postwar programming strategy, where entertainment began to serve as an effective vehicle for social engineering. Under Paley’s leadership, CBS became known as the ‘Tiffany Network,’ masterfully blending entertainment with subtle manipulation techniques refined during his psychological warfare service. This fusion of entertainment and social control would become the template for modern media operations.

This machinery of mass influence would adapt to emerging technologies. By the 1950s, the payola scandal revealed how record companies shaped public consciousness through controlled exposure. Presented as a controversy about DJ bribes, payola actually represented an evolved system for shaping popular taste. The companies controlling these cultural channels maintained deep institutional ties – Paley’s CBS Records continued its military contractor relationships, while RCA’s role in shaping mass culture traced back to its 1919 formation as a Navy-coordinated communications monopoly. Created to maintain domestic control of strategic communications, RCA’s expansion into broadcasting, records and consumer electronics preserved these foundational connections to military and intelligence networks. These methods of cultural control didn’t develop in isolation – they were part of a broader system of social engineering that expanded dramatically during periods of global conflict.

While historians typically treat the World Wars as discrete conflicts, they are better understood as phases in a continuous expansion of social control mechanisms. The infrastructure and methods developed between these conflicts reveals this continuity – the wars provided both the justification and testing grounds for increasingly sophisticated systems of mass psychological manipulation. Military installations like Lookout Mountain Air Force Station in Laurel Canyon weren’t just bases – they were centers for psychological warfare operations, perfectly positioned near the heart of the entertainment industry. Lookout Mountain alone produced over 19,000 classified films, while maintaining high-level connections to Hollywood production

By 1943, this system was so well established that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) explicitly outlined its strategy in a now-declassified document. Their assessment was unequivocal: motion pictures represented ‘an unparalleled instructional medium’ and ‘a patent force in attitude formation’ that could ‘stimulate or inhibit action.’ The document further stated that the US must ‘exploit the potentialities of the motion picture as a weapon of psychological warfare.’ This wasn’t just about controlling information—it was about fundamentally altering how people understood and experienced reality itself.

While Edison and Rockefeller were establishing physical control systems in America, the entertainment industry was already being integrated into intelligence operations. This pattern stretched back to the industry’s earliest days – Harry Houdini is rumored to have collaborated with British intelligence during World War I, using his performances as cover to gather information in German enclaves. From Charlie Chaplin’s films being analyzed for propaganda potential to Mary Pickford’s war bond drives setting the precedent for celebrity messaging, World War I marked the birth of systematic coordination between Hollywood and intelligence agencies. During World War II, these connections were formalized through the OSS, evolving into today’s Entertainment Liaison Office, through which agencies like the Department of Defense actively shape desired military-themed film narratives.

Sculpting Consciousness of the Masses

While American industries were perfecting control of physical infrastructure and entertainment, British intelligence was developing something even more fundamental – methods to control consciousness itself. Understanding that territorial control was temporary but the power to shape beliefs, desires, and worldviews could be permanent, their innovations would transform social engineering forever. In 1914, they established what began as an innocuous sounding entity called ‘Wellington House,’ which would evolve into increasingly bold bureaucratic iterations – the ‘Department of Information,’ and finally the explicitly Orwellian sounding ‘Ministry of Information.’ Through this organization, they systematized mass psychological manipulation based on new principles – that indirect influence through trusted voices works better than direct propaganda, that emotional resonance matters more than facts, that people trust peer sharing over authority. These psychological principles would become the foundational algorithms of social media platforms a century later. These insights didn’t fade with time – they evolved. When Facebook conducts A/B testing on emotional contagion or social media algorithms promote peer-to-peer sharing over institutional sources, they’re deploying Tavistock’s psychological principles in real-time.

This work evolved through the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers at the Tavistock Clinic (later the Tavistock Institute), where Dr. John Rawlings Rees and his colleagues discovered how psychological trauma could be used to reshape not just individual consciousness, but entire social systems. Through systematic study of trauma and group psychology, they developed methods to shape not just what people could see, but how they would interpret reality itself. The Institute’s work revealed how psychological vulnerability could be used to reshape both individual and group behavior – insights that would prove invaluable as mechanisms of influence evolved from overt censorship to subtle manipulation of perception.

Though largely unknown to the public, Tavistock would become one of the most influential organizations in shaping modern social control methods. While most people today know Tavistock only through recent controversies over gender-affirming care, the institute’s influence extends back generations, shaping cultural narratives and social transformation since its inception. Their current work represents not an anomaly but a continuation of its long-standing mission to reshape human consciousness.

Former MI6 intelligence officer John Coleman’s seminal work The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations provided an insider’s view of its operations. More recently, researchers like Daniel Estulin, Courtenay Turner and Jay Dyer have further examined its profound impact.

The Institute’s most refined achievement was transforming psychological theories into practical tools for cultural engineering, particularly through popular music and youth culture. By embedding their principles into seemingly spontaneous cultural trends, they created a template for social programming invisible to its subjects.

These methods would first be tested through music. The State Department’s jazz diplomacy program of the 1950s-60s revealed how power centers understood music’s potential for cultural design. While Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie toured as ‘jazz ambassadors,’ another powerful influence was shaping the jazz scene from within. The Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter – born into the Rothschild banking dynasty – became a crucial patron of bebop artists like Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, both of whom would die in her homes years apart. While her passion for jazz may have been genuine, her deep involvement in the scene coincided with the era when the U.S. State Department and CIA were actively using jazz as a tool of cultural diplomacy. This patronage, whether intentional or not, foreshadowed a pattern of European banking aristocracy’s involvement in supposedly revolutionary musical movements.

In Part Two, we’ll explore the next phase of consciousness control which operated through culture itself. The early experiments in jazz would evolve into an invisible and systematic program of cultural engineering. Institutions would design and ignite cultural movements that appeared organic and by doing so, governing bodies would shape not just what people thought, but their entire framework for understanding anything and everything.

Authored by Dorothy Li via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A Chinese man who killed at least 35 people last month by driving his car into a crowd was sentenced to death on Dec. 27, amid growing concerns over a recent wave of deadly attacks across the country.

The driver, identified as Fan Weiqiu, acted out of anger stemming from “a broken marriage, personal frustrations, and dissatisfaction with the way financial assets were divided during his divorce,” according to a statement from the intermediate court in Zhuhai, a city in southern China.

Fan pleaded guilty to endangering public safety through dangerous methods, according to the court’s announcement.

The incident occurred on the evening of Nov. 11, when Fan drove his SUV into a group of people exercising at the Zhuhai Sports Centre.

It took nearly 24 hours for Chinese authorities to report on the casualties from the violent attack. According to local police, at least 35 people have died, with 43 others suffering severe injuries as a result of the incident. At the time, the authorities said Fan, who was in a coma and had injuries consistent with self-harm, was apprehended at the scene.

Swift Censorship

On China’s internet, censors responded quickly, suppressing eyewitness accounts and videos related to the incident. By the evening of Nov. 12, searches on the popular microblogging platform Weibo yielded mostly official statements, with little presence of videos or photos of the incident.

The sports complex was closed on the day of the attack. On the morning of Nov. 13, members of the public left bouquets at one of the gates, only to see them removed within minutes. Some cleaning staff told AFP that they were following an “order from the top.”

Meanwhile, BBC China correspondent Stephen McDonell was shoved by a man while reporting outside the complex on Nov. 12. While the man’s identity remains unclear, the BBC pointed out that such incidents are not uncommon in China, where local Communist Party officials often recruit groups of individuals to act as outraged locals, tasked with obstructing foreign reporters from covering sensitive events.

Recent Deadly Incidents

The incident, described by some Western media outlets as the deadliest in a decade, was one of a spate of tragic events that have occurred across China in recent months.

On Oct. 28, at least five people, including three children, were severely injured in a stabbing incident, according to local police, who identified the suspect as a 50-year-old man surnamed Tang.

On Nov. 16, eight people were killed and 17 others injured during a mass stabbing rampage at a vocational college in eastern China. Arrested at the scene was a 21-year-old male, identified only as Xu—a former student at the Wuxi Vocational College of Arts and Technology in Yixing in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province. Police said he later confessed to the killings.

On Nov. 19, a driver rammed his vehicle into a crowd outside a primary school in Changde, central Hunan Province, injuring an unspecified number of people.

Recent waves of random attacks have sparked concerns among outside observers, with some highlighting a growing desperation under the tight grip of the Chinese Communist Party.

“Logically, if someone has a grievance, they should target the person responsible. But he may not even be able to find that person,” Li Yingzhi, an exiled rights activist, previously told The Epoch Times. “Why resort to killing innocent people? Because he has reached complete despair and no longer wants to live.”

Li links these violent attacks to systemic issues in China, where people were left with little recourse to seek justice or voice dissent.

“First, there is suppression of free speech and a lack of press freedom. Second, the petitioning system is ineffective. Third, the judiciary fails to function properly. These are all systemic issues,” he said.

“If there were effective channels to resolve problems, it wouldn’t have come to this.”

Katabella Roberts and Cindy Li contributed to this report.

Authored by Alexander Langlois via American Greatness,

On December 19, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that there are roughly 2,000 troops stationed in Syria – 1,100 more than previously shared with the public. Pentagon spokesperson Major General Patrick Ryder disclosed the new number almost off-handedly, without explanation for the shock news as Syria experiences a generational moment following former President Bashar al-Assad’s regime collapse on December 8. The announcement personifies the ongoing and widespread disdain of American political and military leaders for transparency on military operations abroad.

Indeed, the laxness with which Ryder announced the new deployment numbers is unacceptable. These forces are not, as the spokesperson claimed, simply “temporary rotational forces” but reflect the worst excesses of mission creep that have come to define U.S. military operations in the post-9/11 era. Ryder’s follow-on statements, in the same breath as his claims of the temporary nature of the deployment, highlight this bleak reality: “Right now, there are no plans to cease the defeat-ISIS mission.”

Rather, the Biden administration feels empowered to expand that mission and lie to the American people about what exactly it is doing in Syria. Such an outcome results from unchecked executive power in the U.S. government and Congressional reluctance to question support for anything labeled as counterterrorism (CT) operations. Worse, the announcement comes as news surfaces that U.S. President Joe Biden experienced “good days and bad days” as early as 2021 concerning his mental acuity – another inconvenient fact hidden from U.S. citizens, raising questions regarding who has actually been steering policy in the White House.

The inconvenient truth for Biden’s advisors is simple: U.S. forces continue to operate in a country that has not invited them to establish a presence and without any constitutionally mandated Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) required to make such military operations legal under U.S. law. Only Congress can pass an AUMF – the president cannot unilaterally declare one. Flimsy arguments connecting the Islamic State to Al-Qaeda – arguing that the former grew out of the latter – are another ugly expansion of unchecked executive power aimed at limiting U.S. citizen input on the critical decisions of their elected officials.

Such a pass must be rejected. For two decades, U.S. officials have worked to expand global military power in a resource-draining deluge of unsustainable overextension. On the same day as Ryder’s announcement, the U.S. Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – the primary defense appropriations package – to the tune of $895 billion. As U.S. debt approaches $37 trillion, the government should be more transparent on such issues – not less. Yet rather than taking that approach, the Pentagon failed its seventh straight audit in 2024.

This unacceptable situation is why expanding the defeat-ISIS mission should be rejected, especially given the facts on the ground. To be sure, while the Islamic State has expanded its operations in Syria in 2024, the number of attacks pales in comparison to the height of the group when ISIS actually held and governed territory. With less than 20 attacks in September, compared to hundreds in April 2022, the Islamic State is no longer a serious threat to U.S. interests—and its reach is extremely limited. It has long been unable to conduct international attacks from either Syria or Iraq.

Most of its fighters in these two countries remain in prisons operated by local U.S. partners – namely the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria. While some cite the presence of roughly 10,000 fighters in these prisons as an army-in-waiting for the group, the reality is alternative policy options exist for both securing these prisons and limiting the wider supposed threat while ending – not expanding – the defeat-ISIS mission.

Those options include regional partnerships, not limited to Turkey or the plethora of armed groups operating in Syria today. Given the Islamic State’s inherent weakness, it should not be difficult to establish a sustainable agreement – namely one that ends the U.S. presence in the country by allowing those capable local actors with more of an interest in ending the threat from re-appearing in their communities. An open-ended U.S. presence will not fully resolve this problem, as personified by never-ending CT operations across Africa and Asia with no end in sight.

Ultimately, the issue of U.S. military overreach is bigger than Syria, even if the country is central to debates on U.S. forces abroad. Officials must recognize that U.S. primacy on the regional and global stage does not come from doing everything, everywhere, all at once. Rather, it is achieved through strategic honesty and military restraint that right-sizes efforts abroad based on necessity as the world is – not how unelected officials wish it to be.

Misleading the American public cannot remain the U.S. foreign policy norm, which already discounts the will of the average American citizen in a smugness that has long pervaded the space. As announcements like the one on Syria indicate, the time is now to shift away from this unsustainable and anti-democratic approach.

Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The White House has identified a ninth U.S. telecom network that Chinese state hackers have compromised in a sweeping intrusion, a senior official said on Dec. 27, as authorities take steps to prevent similar cases of cyberespionage and hold the cyberattackers liable for their actions.

Anne Neuberger, deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, revealed the new information in a press briefing as officials continue to assess the scope of the cybersecurity breach from China’s state-backed Salt Typhoon hacking group, which has carried out a wide-ranging espionage campaign since 2022.

The hacking operation has affected major telecommunications companies and dozens of nations, with Verizon, AT&T, and CenturyLink among the targets. Officials said in early December that these hackers are still embedded in U.S. infrastructure.

Neuberger said in an earlier conference that the hackers had focused on “very senior” American political figures and stolen vast troves of American data. She said on Friday that they still don’t have a good sense of the total scope of the breach.

“Our understanding is that a large number of individuals were geolocated in the Washington DC, Virginia area,” she said.

Only a fraction of them had their communications affected, Neuberger said, as the hackers are more interested in eavesdropping on U.S. government officials.

“The scale we’re talking about is far larger on the geolocation, probably less than 100 on the actual individuals,” she said.

As officials scramble to understand the impact of the Chinese cyber intrusion, they also began a multi-agency effort to fortify U.S. infrastructure against such operations.

Shortly after the briefing, the Justice Department issued a final rule naming China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela as countries of concern over their ambitions to exploit sensitive U.S. personal and government-related data by bulk. Under the rule, certain individuals and groups whom authorities deemed as threat actors are barred from transactions involving six types of U.S. data, including certain personal identifiers such as social security numbers or government identification numbers, precise geolocation data, biometric identifiers, human genetic or molecular data, personal health data, and personal financial data.

Those transactions “pose an unacceptable risk to the national security,” a Justice Department statement said, noting that those adversarial nations could use the data to conduct cyber espionage, malign foreign influence, bolster military capabilities, and “track and build profiles on U.S. persons,” including military and intelligence officers for blackmail, coercion, and espionage. These data could also become tools for these states to spy on its targets, such as dissidents, political opponents, or marginalized communities, to intimidate them and curtail freedoms, the department said.

The regulation applies to entities over which China has an ownership of 50 percent or more, those that principally conduct business in China or are organized under Chinese law, their contractors and employees, and foreign individuals who primarily reside in China.

Violators could face a civil fine of up to $368,136 or twice the amount of the transaction involved, whichever is greater. Criminal penalties include up to $1,000,000 in fines and up to 20 years in prison.

The Department of Health and Human Services on Dec. 27 also proposed a rule to protect the U.S. health care system from cyberattacks.

The proposed measure would modify the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, making the first change to the act’s security rule in 11 years, according to a statement. It would mandate stepped-up protection for personal health information by health plans and health care clearinghouses, as well as most health care providers and their business associates.

The department’s Office for Civil Rights said the number of individuals impacted by large health care breaches soared more than tenfold between 2018 and 2023, and is likely to grow.

In the wake of the Salt Typhoon hacking campaign, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has urged “individuals who are in senior government or senior political positions” to “immediately” stop using regular phone calls and text messages. They should only use end-to-end encrypted communications and “assume that all communications between mobile devices—including government and personal devices—and internet services are at risk of interception or manipulation,” the agency warned.

The hacking group has targeted now-Vice President-elect JD Vance and now-president-elect Donald Trump, as well as Vice President Kamala Harris.

To deter Chinese hacking attempts, Neuberger said, the first step is to build a “defensible infrastructure.”

“We wouldn’t leave our homes, our offices unlocked, and yet our critical infrastructure, the private companies owning and operating our critical infrastructure often do not have the basic cybersecurity practices in place,” she said in the press call.

Authorities are also scrutinizing government contracts to enforce stricter cybersecurity practices, Neuberger said. In doing so, she said, the United States is following in the footsteps of Australia and the UK.

“The nation’s secrets, the nation’s economy, lies on our telecommunications sector,” she said.

“When I talked with our UK colleagues and I asked, ‘Do you believe your regulations would have prevented the Salt Typhoon attack?’ their comment to me was, we would have found it faster, we would have contained it faster.”

Neuberger said it was a “powerful message.”

In early December, the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the National Security Agency collectively published a guide instructing telecom companies to mitigate cyber intrusions.

“Those networks are not as defensible as they need to be to defend against a well resourced, capable offensive cyber actor like China,” Neuberger said.

In assessing the Salt Typhoon breach, she said, authorities have found one administrator account that had access to more than 100,000 routers.

“So when the Chinese compromised that account, they gained that kind of broad access across the network,” she said.

Neuberger said officials are looking to segment the telecom networks so that in the event of a cyber attack, the potential damage could be contained.

The Federal Communications Commission on Dec. 5 proposed cybersecurity rules requiring communications service providers to certify annually that they have a plan to protect against cyberattacks.

The rule is waiting for a vote by Jan. 15, Neuberger said, noting that they are eager to see bipartisan support across the commission to see it through.

The Chinese were “very careful about their techniques. They erased logs,” she said. And as “we will never know regarding the scope and scale of this,” she said, the United States is “looking forward.”

An appeals court on Tuesday upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to bar China Unicom Americas, the U.S. operation of a top Chinese state wireless carrier, from accessing the U.S. telecom market.

Neuberger said more actions will be coming out in the next few months.

“Let’s lock down this infrastructure. And frankly, let’s hold the Chinese accountable for this,” she said.

Authored by Austin ALonzo via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Spirit Airlines’ financial failure could mean fewer options and higher ticket prices for Americans flying on a tight budget.

On Nov. 18, the Dania Beach, Florida-based ultra-low-cost carrier famous for its cheap base fares, announced it was seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Spirit is currently attempting a reorganization in bankruptcy court so it can pay back its creditors and return to business. Ahead of its Chapter 11 filing, the company had already announced a new vision designed to make the airline more like America’s other low-cost carriers.

Spirit Airlines spokeswoman Nicole Aguiar told The Epoch Times via email that the airline will continue to operate as usual during its restructuring process.

Still, others in the industry—notably United Airlines Holdings Inc. CEO J. Scott Kirby—say the reorganization process is merely a milestone on the road to Chapter 7 liquidation.

“I think the current business plan is not going to work,” Kirby told reporters in early December. “Chapter 11 will be a brief pit stop on the way to Chapter 7.”

Whether the company can keep flying is yet to be determined, but it seems inevitable that Spirit’s ultra-low-cost version will fade into memory. If Spirit disappears completely or abandons its ultra-low-cost business model, its pricing pressure, which forces competing carriers to lower their prices, may disappear forever.

A Perfect Storm

Ryan Ewing, a longtime industry observer and the editor of airline trade publication AirlineGeeks, told The Epoch Times that Spirit found itself in a tempest created by competition from other airlines, a rapidly increasing cost of doing business, a massive shift in airline demand that began during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, and finally, a failed acquisition by JetBlue Airways Corp.

Ewing said that Spirit, founded in 1992, was profitable for much of its existence, despite consumer criticism of its business practices. In May, consumer insights firm J.D. Power ranked Spirit as the second-worst economy or basic economy airline in terms of consumer satisfaction. Only its ultra-low-cost rival Frontier Airlines fared worse.

Joseph Smith, director of aviation services at Miami-based investment banking firm Cassel Salpeter & Co., told The Epoch Times the company was able to make money because it attracted a younger clientele, vacationers looking to travel on a budget, and served routes other airlines may avoid due to a lack of profitability.

It was successful in its niche.

Everything changed in 2020 when pandemic panic ground both international and domestic flights to a halt or kept planes nearly empty for months. While demand recovered by 2024, financially, Spirit never has.

Shortly after Spirit announced it was beginning the process of reorganizing its business to pay back its creditors, the company released a third-quarter earnings report with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That report, published on Nov. 25, said the company’s collective liabilities were almost twice as great as its assets.

It said Spirit’s assets on Sept. 30 totaled about $1.21 billion. Meanwhile, its liabilities were $2.54 billion. Those liabilities included more than $1.25 billion in “long-term debt, net, and finance leases.”

The report was released without an earnings call as the company has been delisted from the New York Stock Exchange as part of the bankruptcy process.

Spirit’s third-quarter report also disclosed that the company recorded a quarterly net loss of $308.2 million and had lost $643.8 million through the first nine months of 2024. In the same nine-month period the year before, the company had lost $263.8 million.

The report revealed the company had seen its total operating revenue fall to about $3.67 billion in the first nine months of 2024 from about $3.97 billion in the same period of the prior year.

These were not new problems for Spirit, however. It has not turned an annual profit since 2019. Its annual report from 2023 said the company recorded a net loss of $447.4 million in 2023, $554.1 million in 2022, and $472.5 million in 2021. The 2021 annual report said the company recorded a net loss of $428.7 million in 2020. The 2020 yearly statement indicated it was profitable from 2016 to 2019.

From an operational standpoint, Ewing said Spirit was saddled with elevated labor, fuel, and airplane maintenance costs driven by inflation, new labor agreements with union employees, and unreliable jet engines. The pain was exacerbated by growing, costly service interruptions caused by cancellations and delays related to air traffic controller shortages near its base of operations in Southern Florida.

“That business model that Spirit pioneered requires that the structural costs remain lower,” Ewing said.

James Gellert, the founder and executive chairman of financial analytics firm RapidRatings International Inc., told The Epoch Times that Spirit also became a victim of its own success. The company was so good at undercutting so-called legacy carriers that it inspired companies such as Chicago-based United Airlines Inc. to expand their basic economy offerings.

Additionally, as a publicly traded company always seeking quarter-to-quarter profits and growth, Spirit started entering into markets where it could not profitably operate, Gellert said.

Both Gellert and Smith said Spirit was dealt a significant blow when an attempted $3.8 billion acquisition by JetBlue fell through in January.

The deal called for the Long Island City, New York-based airline to acquire Spirit but was blocked by a federal judge’s decision that was made on antitrust grounds. Originally, Spirit was looking to merge with Frontier, but JetBlue made an unsolicited offer to purchase Spirit during the courtship.

In his decision, U.S. District Judge William Young said JetBlue’s acquisition would have taken away a critical, ultra-low-cost option for American consumers. In effect, Young’s decision likely sealed Spirit’s fate.

Turnaround or Shut Down?

In its second-quarter earnings release published on Aug. 1, Spirit president and CEO Ted Christie acknowledged the company’s struggle to generate income. The company said Spirit was launching a turnaround plan focused on “low-fare travel with new, high-value travel options that will allow guests to choose an elevated experience at an affordable price.”

Read the rest here…

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

After World War II, a major priority for U.S. policymakers was to push home ownership for as broad a swath of the population as possible. In many ways, the agenda was a success. Happy families living in fine homes all over the United States, one income from a stable job, and two cars became the mark of prosperity, and a point of advertising for the American experiment the world over.

Every TV show featured exactly this.

Two decades into the 21st century, that dream is broken, as most people cannot even think about home ownership even with two incomes. The latest trends show skyrocketing prices and, unlike 2008, this seems less like a bubble than pure inflation with little hope of falling prices. Existing owners, of course, do not want price declines in any case.

Already, the taxes and costs of insurance have grown equal to the mortgage payment itself, which means that in terms of overall expenditure, the sticker price might be only a quarter of what you will spend over 30 years, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Many people look at this situation and wonder what the point is. There are ways to use whatever liquid assets you have to earn money rather than spend it this way.

In the past few months, I’ve heard many suggestions for fixing this problem. None of them is promising.

Some make matters worse.

First, people suggest more Federal Reserve interventions. Keep in mind, however, that the Fed can control only one rate—that which is charged to member banks. That rate will influence others down the line within the yield curve structure. The influence is not always predictable. In fact, it can sometimes result in a steeper curve, presenting a bitter problem: lower short-term rates combined with higher rates. This result reflects expectations of the future.

This is precisely what is happening right now. The Fed keeps lowering the federal funds rate even as mortgage rates increase.

(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)

The other problem is that lower rates feed inflation and thus threaten to increase housing prices, insurance costs, and therefore also property taxes. Therefore, Fed intervention will not fix any existing problem and contributes to making the situation worse rather than better.

Second, people are suggesting restrictions on institutions buying with cash offers. This is designed to address what intuitively strikes everyone as unfair and unjust. You are negotiating on a house, lining up your borrowing, selling assets for a down payment, and out of nowhere some cash buyer comes along and snatches it away.

No question that this is happening, with the largest financial firms buying the asset that they believe to be the most lucrative on the market right now, which is housing. But how in the world would one restrict such purchases? Owners want to sell to the best buyer regardless. It seems strange to intervene in property rights in ways that would make that impossible.

It’s also not clear how that would affect home prices. Whether a home is purchased with cash or borrowed money does not affect housing prices overall. Such interventions would likely create unanticipated problems. For example, it would certainly reduce the number of rental units available and thus make the housing problem worse, not better.

Third, people are suggesting that the federal government make special mortgage rates available for borrowers of a certain sort, perhaps families with children or teachers or some other class. I’ve heard numbers such as 3 percent being thrown around. This is not a good idea. It would end up subsidizing the most risky borrowers and recreate the very conditions that led to the housing crisis of 2008. It would also increase demand for housing and apply upward rather than downward pressure on prices.

The same can be said of the idea of granting tax write-offs or outright subsidies for down payments. That would worsen the deficit and only drive up prices to the point of the subsidy itself.

Fourth, we hear talk of dramatically increasing the supply of housing in underdeveloped areas. Trump administration teams have floated the idea of freedom cities, for example, with huge development subsidies. Again, this amounts to yet another public expenditure that adds to the fiscal problem and does not address the real problem, which is that people want housing close to their places of work. It achieves nothing to build huge developments in places without enterprise infrastructure, as China has learned over several decades of boondoggles.

Fifth, people suggest public housing and outright price control, both truly terrible options. In the 1930s, there was a great deal of optimism about the idea of government-provided housing for everyone, but those dreams died by the 1970s. Government can neither build nor manage housing, and even existing units reveal the problem. Every major city has a blighted area filled with public housing that everyone despises. No one wants more of that in their area.

If none of these solutions is right, what can be done?

We need to fix the problem of inflation above all else, because that is what is driving insurance costs so high. Insurance is a pricing of risk, and the rising prices in every area of repair, including labor costs, has made it unaffordable in many locations. In fact, this is a major reason why cash purchases are so popular: You don’t have to pay for broad insurance coverage. Fixing inflation will require restraint on money printing. Nothing else gets to the heart of the problem.

Property taxes should be reduced or abolished, but that is a matter for states and localities, not the federal government. And many cities and states are faced with impossible fiscal cages: Lowering property taxes means less revenue for schooling and crime control, the result of which is to drive residents out rather than attract them. There is no easy solution to this, though state-level vouchers for private forms of schooling are promising. But there again, we have a solution that is several stages removed from the problem we are trying to address.

Regulations on development at the federal level have become a terrible cost that has inhibited building and expansion of the housing stock. These days, it is nearly impossible even for an individual to build without fitting the new home to green-energy-compliant standards, for example. All of this needs to go. If it were my choice, I would completely defund the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It has been a very long menace and serves no other function than to feed tax dollars to large developers—a classic example of a captured agency.

All of these solutions can help, but there is no magic answer to restoring the 1950s-era dream of universal housing ownership. It’s not even clear that it makes much sense anymore, as most young people prefer the flexibility of renting. They can find better uses for liquid funds than tying them up in property that carries huge liabilities in taxes, interest, and insurance.

Meanwhile, focusing reform efforts on regulatory costs, inflation, and schooling options could end up doing more to repair the housing problem than any direct interventions in the market as it currently functions.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Authored by George Citroner via The Epoch Times,

Americans are dying from cold weather at more than twice the rate they did two decades ago.

A total of 40,079 deaths were recorded from 1999 to 2022, with cold temperatures as either an underlying or contributing cause of death, according to a research letter published Dec. 19 in JAMA Network.

The authors of the letter, affiliated with Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, used data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to analyze death certificates.

The letter highlights a long-term trend of increase in the rate of cold-related deaths, more than doubling from 0.44 per 100,000 people in 1999 to 0.92 per 100,000 people in 2022.

Cold-related deaths were highest among U.S. adults aged 75 years and older. Older people are more susceptible to cold weather due to their limited ability to regulate their body temperature and a greater prevalence of chronic health conditions.

While the elderly experience the most deaths overall, the middle-aged group is seeing the fastest rate of increase in cold-related fatalities. Men were more likely to die from cold-related causes than women.

These findings are “striking” because these deaths are preventable, Michael Liu, a doctor of medicine student at Harvard Medical School and the study’s first author, told The Epoch Times.

Reasons for the Increase

Data from the research letter also indicated that while American Indian, Alaska Native, and black people were more likely to die from cold-related deaths each year than any other racial or ethnic groups, Hispanic and white populations saw the most significant increases in the annual mortality rate attributed to cold weather.

“There is also increasing evidence that social risk factors that predispose to cold-related deaths are rising in the U.S., including higher rates of social isolation and unsheltered homelessness,” Liu added.

Liu noted that although he and his team cannot accurately predict trends going forward, “it is possible that deaths due to cold may increase over time.”

“There is evidence that climate change has been associated with more extreme winter weather events,” he said.

Another factor that may contribute to increasing deaths from cold in the United States over time is the aging population.

“This population has a more limited thermoregulation capacity and a greater burden of underlying health conditions,” Liu said.

Structural risk factors like not having sufficient home insulation or heating may also be contributing to cold-related deaths.

American Indian, Alaska Native, and black populations, are particularly at risk due to living in homes with inadequate home insulation or heating. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, from July 2021 to May 2023, 36.4 percent of households facing energy insecurity were black.

Additionally, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that winter months have seen death rates 8 to 12 percent higher than those in non-winter months across the United States for several years.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Western mainstream has been celebrating the overthrow of Assad at the hands of the jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani (who has reverted to his given name of Ahmed al-Sharaa).

Mainstream media has also been busy reporting every statement of his supposed ‘moderate’ and reform agenda. Generally these reports haven’t been critical of his words, or cared to delve into the long history of killings, kidnappings, and human rights abuses of HTS (previously known as Nusrah Front, or al-Qaeda in Syria). 

But Jolani has given a fresh interview interview with Al-Arabiya on Sunday in which he made clear that he doesn’t expect elections to be held for up to four years. He also stated that writing a constitution for the new Syria will take three years.

Every one of his appointed transitional government ministers is from the al-Qaeda linked organization, some of them designated terrorists. For example, we reported previously:

On Thursday, Syria’s de facto authorities appointed former Al-Qaeda commander and Nusra Front co-founder Anas Hassan Khattab as the head of the country’s general intelligence agency.

Khattab, also known as Abu Ahmed Hudood, was blacklisted as a “terrorist” by the UN Security Council in September 2014 for his close association with Al-Qaeda.

“Organizing elections may take four years; any valid elections will require a comprehensive population census,” Jolani told the Saudi-based outlet.

He claimed that this lengthy delay and preparations would happen as “preparatory to a longer interim government.” In essence he’s admitting that despite some hailing the dramatic events of this month as a “revolution” which brought “freedom” to Syria, the reality is that he as an unappointed ruler will control the country for many years to come.

Still, he’s running a PR campaign, trying to attract Western support and investment – and the dropping of US sanctions – and so his key line has been that all Syrians will have a home in the future Syria. But Alawites, Christians, and Druze are reporting attacks and vandalism against their religious sites by unchecked foreign jihadists and intimidation by HTS members. 

“The Idlib experience is not suitable for all of Syria, but it is a nucleus,” Jolani said when the interviewer asked about Idlib being governed by strict Sharia law.

“I am proud of everything Saudi Arabia has done for Syria, and Saudi Arabia has major investment opportunities in Syria,” Jolani also said about his relations with Saudi Arabia.

The de facto Islamist leader of Syria is anything but a champion of democracy. Elections were held within a year after collapse of Soviet Union, East Germany etc. Jolani wants 4 years to turn the Syrian state into an apparatus of Muslim Brotherhood & affiliates power https://t.co/oZiWo5LBH0

— Ghanem Nuseibeh (@gnuseibeh) December 29, 2024

“Liberating Syria guarantees the security of the region and the Gulf for the next 50 years,” he added. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Saudi Arabia and Qatar heavily weaponized and funded the radical Islamic insurgency against Assad and the Syrian people over much of the last decade, also with deep CIA involvement.

…So much for the revolution of ‘freedom’.