A volcano in the southwestern region of Iceland erupted on Monday, sending geysers of hot lava as high as 330 feet. The eruption was located near the Svartsengi geothermal power plant near the town of Grindavík, which was evacuated last month over an increase in seismic activity, the NY Times reports.

“We are looking at a worst-case scenario,” said Icelanding volcanologist, Thorvaldur Thordarson, adding “The eruption appears big, and only about two kilometers from major infrastructure.“

Over the past two months, thousands of earthquakes have been detected in Iceland, leading to the November evacuations as homes and roads were damaged by the events. The situation deteriorated so rapidly that authorities declared a state of emergency, evacuating Grindavík – home to more than 3,000 people who live near the volcano.

Recently, the Meteorological office warned of a “significant likelihood of a volcanic eruption in coming days.”

In just the past two years, there have been three eruptions on the Reykjanes Peninsula, Iceland’s most populated corner and home to its capital. When Grindavik was ordered evacuated on Nov. 11, the authorities said in a statement that the country was “highly prepared for such events.” -NYT

“Iceland has one of the world’s most effective volcanic preparedness measures,” reads the local website.

Authorities also raised the aviation alert to orange due to dangers posed by the volcano to passing aircraft flying in the North Atlantic in the event ash is spewed in the sky.

In 2010, Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted after being dormant for nearly two centuries. While nobody died, the impact was significant as the resultant ash cloud grounded much of Europe’s air travel for over a week.

Iceland has around 400,000 residents and 130 or so volcanoes. In fact, since the 19th century, there hasn’t been a single decade without one erupting. According to the tourist website, eruptions are “entirely random.”

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Smoking cigarettes shrinks the size of the brain, and stopping doesn’t reverse the damage, a new study shows. The findings help explain why smokers have a higher risk of developing age-related cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease.

But there is good news: As soon as someone stops smoking, the shrinking stops.

The study, published in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, looked at data from 32,094 individuals of European descent who smoked daily. The data came from the UK Biobank, a biomedical database available to the public that contains genetic, health, and behavioral information on approximately 500,000 people.

The research team from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that total brain volume, including gray and white matter, decreased when a person smoked daily. Gray brain matter decreased more than white brain matter did, according to the analysis. Gray matter houses neural cell bodies, axon terminals, and dendrites; much of it is found in the cerebellum, cerebrum, and brain stem. It is responsible for the central nervous system, which enables a person to control movement, memory, and emotions. White matter is filled with bundles of axons coated with myelin. Its job is to send signals up and down the spinal cord when the brain receives a stimulus.

The analysis of the UK Biobank data showed that the more a person smoked, the more brain mass they lost. The realization that smoking affects the brain isn’t entirely new information, the research team admitted. “The adverse effect of smoking extends into the brain, and this is shown by the association between smoking and dementia,” they wrote.

The research team noted that areas like the hippocampal area, which is affected by Alzheimer’s disease, are particularly impacted by daily smoking. “This finding is consistent with smoking, which has been identified as a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, accelerating the development of this illness,” the research team wrote. In fact, the researchers suggested that 14 percent of Alzheimer’s cases across the world could be attributed to smoking.

Alcohol Also Reduces Brain Volume

In addition to smoking, the team found that drinking alcohol also has adverse effects on the brain. Like smoking, heavy alcohol use can reduce brain size, specifically subcortical brain volume. The subcortex is involved in overseeing emotions, memory, and hormone production. Subcortical structures also help people maintain their posture, gait, and other movements.

The risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or dementia occurs even after someone stops smoking or drinking alcohol, researchers noted, because the brain damage is permanent.

Scientists believe Alzheimer’s disease is caused when proteins build up in and around brain cells, sort of like plaque on teeth. One of these proteins is called amyloid, and another is called tau. Tau tangles can interfere with the way the brain receives signals. Researchers admit they’re uncertain about the mechanisms that kickstart this process but know it can take years. Over time, however, the brain begins to shrink, which can lead to Alzheimer’s.

The Washington University team noted that some people have a genetic predisposition that leads them to smoke. In other words, part of the population is born with an increased risk of picking up the habit. As such, these people have a higher risk of reduced brain volume and of developing dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2020, 22.3 percent of the world population used tobacco. Tobacco use kills over 8 million each year, including 1.3 million nonsmokers exposed to secondhand smoke.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

The abject narcissism of the insular Left is startling.

They apparently believe the American public is amnesiac enough to forget what leftists once did, now that they’re doing the utter opposite.

And they assume we are to discount their hypocrisy and self-absorption simply because they self-identify as erudite and moral and assume their opponents are irredeemable and deplorable.

Impeachment

The Left is saturating the airwaves with outrage over the current House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry. They allege that formally investigating Joe Biden’s role in the family grifting operation is somehow a poor constitutional precedent, if not out-of-bounds entirely.

So we hear further arguments that it will be unwise to impeach a first-term president when he loses his House majority, that there is no reason to “waste” congressional time and effort when Biden will be automatically acquitted in the Democratically controlled Senate, and that the impeachment is cynically timed to synchronize with president’s reelection efforts.

All of these are the precise arguments many of us cited when Donald Trump was impeached in December 2019 (as his reelection campaign began, and immediately after being cleared of the 22-month, $40-million-special-counsel Russian-collusion hoax).

The Democrats tried to remove an elected president over a phone call without a special counsel’s report. So Trump was impeached only after the 2018 election led to a Democratic House majority, which went from eating up nearly two years of his administration in the Russian-collusion hoax straight into the impeachment farce. There was no concern about the cost to the nation of putting an elected government into a continual state of siege.

There is one difference, though, between the Trump impeachment and the Biden impeachment inquiry. Donald Trump was impeached because he accurately accused the members of the Ukrainian government of paying Hunter Biden, with his zero fossil fuel expertise, an astronomical sum to serve on the Burisma board—as the costly quid that earned the lucrative quo from his dad Vice President Joe Biden.

No one now denies that Joe Biden got prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired by threatening to cancel legislatively-approved U.S. aid. Shokin knew about the skullduggery through which the Biden family eventually received $6.5 million from Ukraine—and so Biden ensured his firing, and publicly bragged about it in performance-art fashion.

In sum, Trump had a perfect right as commander in chief to delay (he did not cancel) aid to Ukraine, to ensure that its government was not still paying off the Bidens for their lobbying efforts on its behalf.

It is also now clear that Biden serially lied about his ignorance of Hunter’s shake-down operation. In fact, he was, as Devon Archer emphasized, “the brand” central to Hunter’s scheme to coerce money from foreign governments. Joe was proverbially, in Hunter’s words “the man sitting next to me” and thus able to either punish or reward foreign interests, depending on the size of the checks they wrote to his various fronting family members.

Offspring subpoenas

The left is now furious that Hunter has been subpoenaed by the House to testify in private about how he earned his multimillion-dollar income, whether he fully paid taxes on it, and to whom he distributed his winnings.

Hunter has refused to testify. He is now being held in contempt of the U.S. Congress—to the silence of the usually self-righteous former senator Joe “pay your fair share” Biden.

We hear sanctimonious harangues that Joe is guilty of loving “his only son” Hunter too much, or that it is way out of bounds for a Department of Justice prosecutor to hound Joe Biden by going “after his family,” or that Republican congressional subpoenas and contempt findings should be summarily ignored.

Ask Peter Navarro or Steve Bannon whether one can simply ignore a House subpoena. Ask Ivanka Trump whether she was, or was not, subpoenaed to appear before the January 6 committee. Ask the Trump sons whether they could breezily say “no” to Letitia James’s subpoenas in her farcical real-estate-valuation suit against Trump.

Whistleblowers

Do we remember when, not long ago, whistleblowers were noble?

The alleged whistleblower Eric Ciaramella, an Obama holdover who had burrowed inside the Trump administration, had zero firsthand knowledge of the Trump phone call to Ukrainian president Zelensky. Ukrainian expatriate Lt. Col Alexander Vindman was on the call, as a member of the Trump national security team. He broke the law and apparently disclosed the classified call—in outrage that Trump was apparently too hard on his native Ukraine— to Ciaramella, and then hid the latter’s identity. Both met privately with Rep. Adam Schiff (D—CA) to engineer an impeachment writ. 

This impeachment gambit was well-known to the media and the Democratic House. Both Vindman and Ciaramella were canonized as invaluable tools in wearing down Trump in a way that the failed Mueller prosecution had never done. 

And whistleblowers now? 

IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and 13-year Special IRS Agent Joe Ziegler never violated any statute or disclosed classified information. They did not leak a presidential phone call to a foreign leader.

Instead, both came forward as whistleblowers to testify before Congress about how the Biden Justice Department deliberately and carefully ensured that the mountain of evidence for the prosecution of Hunter Biden that they had presented had simply been ignored—at least long enough for the statute of limitations to run out on his most egregious crimes.

When they both made their case that facts proved the Biden family received huge sums for selling access to or action from Joe Biden, they were roundly trashed by Democrats in congress and pilloried as disgruntled politicos by a toady press.

Dictators

Never-Trumpers and leftists vie to predict the most nightmarish consequence of a 2024 Trump election win. Supposedly, he will commit every imaginable sin, from ending habeas corpus to jailing his enemies.

This fearmongering has no basis in fact, especially given that the nation has already experienced a Trump administration for four years. And it saw none of the weaponization of the CIA, FBI, DOJ, and IRS that we have seen under the Biden and earlier Obama administrations. There was no concerted effort to destroy the 2020 Biden campaign in the manner of the 2016 Russian-collusion caper, no FBI suppression of evidence as we saw in the case of the Hunter laptop, no warping of a FISA court, no paying social media corporations FBI money to suppress news unfavorable to Trump. And so on.

The Burden of Familial Indictments? 

Suddenly yet another new narrative emerges: Joe Biden is unduly preoccupied, bearing the enormous burden of Hunter’s indictments. Apparently, we have never appreciated the supposedly unnecessary and cruel encumbrance on a president when his son is indicted.

So, we are told that a son’s legal exposure is an unfair weight on a president.

Have we again forgotten the subpoenaed Trump children, much less the four weaponized indictments of Trump himself? Does anyone wish to compare the drug-addicted, prostitute-hiring, gun-losing, pornographic-photo-taking, shake-down grifting of Hunter with the conduct of the five Trump children?

What would Biden think if the next Republican Secretary of State had once tried to ruin him by rounding up “51 intelligence authorities” to blatantly lie that a Trump son’s incriminating laptop was not his own, in order to affect the 2024 election —all in the manner of the Antony Blinken 2020 ruse? Or imagine a future National Security advisor who had once tried, in Jake Sullivan’s 2016 way, to concoct a malicious yarn that Hunter was engineering a computer ping correspondence from Biden headquarters to Moscow. Would those be burdens on Biden? Were they on Trump?

It may well be unwise to impeach a president in his first term when he loses his House majority. It may certainly set a bad precedent to subpoena the children of presidents. It may be regrettable that whistleblowers are either unduly demonized or sanctified. And it is of course wrong to smear a president as a veritable Hitlerian dictator.

But the left does not see such absolutes. Instead, once a supposedly morally-superior agenda is enunciated, then any means necessary are justified to obtain it.

And that alternate reality ensures that impeaching a president, indicting him, subpoenaing his kids, praising or libeling whistleblowers, or smearing a president as a dictator become good or bad things only by determining whether they prove useful to the progressive project.

Israeli National Security Advisor Tzachi Hangebi has said that Israel may have to go to war against Hezbollah, as he now fears a potential future attack by the Shia paramilitary group backed by Iran that would be worse than Oct. 7. “We can no longer accept (Hezbollah’s elite) Radwan force sitting on the border,” he said recently.

Commentary on his words in The New Arab concluded, “The Israelis are anticipating within the next six weeks to two months that if the diplomatic track isn’t working, they’re going to have to opt for some kind of military solution.”

On Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant estimated that over 80,000 Israeli citizens are still displaced from their homes, after border regions had to be evacuated en masse as a result of Hezbollah attacks, which have been daily since Oct.7.

The two sides have been engaged in a running tit-for-tat, but which has yet to spiral into full blown war:

“Over 80,000 citizens have been displaced, living as refugees in their own country… We will bring back the residents of the north to their homes in the border after full security will be restored,” Gallant told a  news briefing.

The defense chief further said that literally “hundreds” of Hezbollah attacks had been conducted, resulting in five Israeli civilians killed. Likely many more IDF troops have been killed in these cross-border attacks too. Israel has responded by regularly bombing various locations across south Lebanon, sometimes dropping bombs and mortars on residential areas and civilian homes, resulting in Lebanese killed and wounded.

Israel has also launched attacks on Hezbollah ally Syria, including several attacks and missiles launched on sites in Damascus and in the south in the last 24 hours. Israel frequently attacks Syria from Lebanese airspace, as Lebanon doesn’t have an air force to speak of.

Hezbollah remains Israel’s most formidable foe, which has resulted in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issuing severe warnings of late. “If Hezbollah decides to open an all-out war, then with its own hands it will turn Beirut and southern Lebanon, which are not far from here, into Gaza and Khan Younis,” he said earlier this month while addressing IDF troops at base near the Lebanese border. 

For now, it’s unlikely that Hezbollah will withdraw from the border anytime soon, and tens of thousands of Israelis won’t be able to return to their homes, as the following analysis also suggests:

Joshua Landis, Director of the Centre of Middle East Studies and the Farzaneh Family Center for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies at the University of Oklahoma, doubts Hezbollah will withdraw from the border.

The group, and the broader Iran-backed regional ‘Resistance Front’, also dubbed the ‘Axis of Resistance’, against Israel, has been given “new relevance and popularity” due to the Gaza war.

“With Syria in pieces, Lebanon facing both political and economic crisis, and Hezbollah’s reputation in the Sunni world badly damaged by its engagement on the side of Assad in the Syrian Civil War, the Resistance Front’s reputation was in below zero,” Landis told The New Arab.

“Now that the Arab world realizes the Palestinian issue is not going away, resistance is again on everyone’s lips,” he said. “Hezbollah will not want to appear cowed by Israel, nor will Iran.”

Hezbollah published a video of targeting a number of sites belonging to the Israeli army on the Lebanese border. pic.twitter.com/cfDvPDO2mu

— War Intel (@warintel4u) December 18, 2023

The consensus among regional analysts is that Hezbollah is far superior to Hamas’ capability in terms of numbers of fighters, missiles, and weaponry such as laser-guided anti-tank missiles. An all-out war scenario would be severe, but likely Lebanon would be devastated and come under Israeli bombs. For now it seems, neither side wants this.

It’s a fact of life that vehicles depreciate – some say by almost 50% as soon they’re driven out of the lot. Some depreciate less, but which cars depreciate the fastest?

In the graphic below, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu and Pallavi Rao show the top 10 vehicles with the highest depreciation rates over five years, based on data from iSeeCars.

They analyzed over 1.1 million used cars from model year 2018, sold between November 2022 to October 2023. Models no longer in production as of the 2022 model year were excluded.

Luxury Cars Struggle to Hold Their Value

At the top of the list, the Maserati Quattroporte loses nearly two-thirds of its value after five years. First introduced in 1963, the car is Maserati’s flagship, and is on its sixth iteration as a four-door luxury sedan, with a high performance Ferrari–made V6 or V8 engine.

The 2018 version of the car retailed anywhere between $109,000–$140,000, depending on the model.

Here’s a look at the full list of fastest depreciating cars in the U.S.

Note: MSRP stands for Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price, the price recommended by a product’s producer to retailers. Furthermore, MSRPs from 2018 were inflation-adjusted to 2023 dollars.

BMW’s 7-series and 5-series also lose value quickly (nearly 60% of their retail price), ranking second and fourth respectively.

Another Maserati car, the Ghibli comes in third (-61%), and the Cadillac Escalade ESV (-59%) rounds out the top five fastest depreciating vehicles.

From a quick glance through the ranks, the cars that depreciate the fastest are luxury vehicles, specifically luxury sedans. These types of cars are often leased, and supply increases dramatically once the lease period expires. Meanwhile, most owners who can afford a luxury car would prefer to buy a new model, while used-car owners would prefer not to pay a high premium on an already outdated model.

However, there’s another segment of the market that also drops in value quickly—electric vehicles. Analysis found that EVs lose roughly 49% of their value on the resale market, the worst amongst the categories specified.

A lack of larger demand appetite, as well as a plethora of government incentives pushing people to buying new electric vehicles could explain their faster than average depreciation rate. Trucks on the other hand are the slowest depreciating segment of all vehicles in the U.S.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

Elon Musk is the world’s richest man but also the number one target of the world’s richest governments and their associated industrialists. The reason traces entirely to his independence of mind and the actions that follow from that. 

In times of censorship, he bought and now protects a free-speech platform, the only one remaining with any real reach into the public mind. Countless millions of people are deeply grateful, even if the platform is a long way from profitability. 

Further, he is innovating in a time of stagnation with Tesla, Starlink, and SpaceX. He is outspoken against the many forms of despotism of our time. This is the whole reason he is fending off attacks from every angle. 

In the latest assault, the European Union’s Digital commissioner Thierry Breton has posted on X (formerly Twitter) that he believes Elon has infringed on the EU’s rules.

He set out the alleged infringements in a post on the social media platform.

• Suspected breach of obligations to counter #IllegalContent and #Disinformation 

• Suspected breach of #Transparency obligations 

• Suspected #DeceptiveDesign of user interface

Elon has been very clear that he works to respect the laws of every country, even those with which he strongly disagrees. This pertains to the EU’s aggressive censorship, which was deployed through the Covid era at the expense of scientific freedom and in defense of governments that locked down their citizenry, forced medical treatments on citizens that they did not want or need, and then covered up behind-the-scenes machinations. 

It’s rich to have Breton go after Elon for a lack of transparency when the whole point of the EU’s regime is to force a lack of transparency. Adding to the irony, Breton knew that Musk would not censor the note on the world’s largest platform for free speech. He is thereby deploying the use of freedom in opposition to its existence. 

And before we sniff at the censorial Europeans and their intolerance toward free speech, consider that the same thing – or some version of it – is happening to Elon in the US. After March 2020, there was a concerted effort led by deep-state actors to gain full control of social media to squelch any dissent. It affected every platform, including Twitter. Amazon and all app stores even banned Parler because it was becoming too popular. 

As things died down, Musk bought the Twitter platform and purged 4 out of 5 employees, including the many government agents who had been hired to turn Twitter into a government propaganda machine. Since then he has upheld the First Amendment and innovated a series of tools that allow for internal and crowd-source fact-checking to make his renamed platform the most reliable source of news and opinion in the world. 

Since he took over, he has faced a barrage of state-generated attacks. 

The SEC has sued Musk over the purchase of the platform. 

According to the New York Times, “his takeover has been the subject of several lawsuits and investigations by the federal authorities. The Federal Trade Commission has probed whether X had the resources to protect users’ privacy after he laid off much of its staff and several senior executives responsible for privacy and security resigned. The agency has also sought to depose Mr. Musk. Former Twitter shareholders have also sued Mr. Musk for fraud in a case related to his belated disclosure of his stake in the company.”

The FTC has demanded internal X documents. 

Says The Hill: “the FTC has sent more than a dozen letters to Twitter since Musk completed his acquisition in October. It states that the agency has demanded Twitter provide internal communications “relating to Elon Musk” from any Twitter employee, information about the platform’s Twitter Blue verification subscription service and the names of journalists who were granted access to Twitter records.”

The Biden Department of Justice has sued SpaceX…get this…for not hiring refugees for secret rocket technology.

CNN says: “The suit claims that ‘from at least September 2018 to May 2022, SpaceX routinely discouraged asylees and refugees from applying and refused to hire or consider them, because of their citizenship status, in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA),’ according to an August 24 DOJ news release.”

The Biden Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have sued Tesla over improper perks. 

Forbes says: “The widened investigation comes after federal prosecutors and the SEC began probing a secret Tesla project known as Project 42 that employees described as a glass house for Musk in the Austin, Texas, area near Tesla’s factory, the Journal reported in August.”

The Biden Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation against Tesla over self-driving cars.

Reuters reports: “The U.S. Department of Justice launched the previously undisclosed probe last year following more than a dozen crashes, some of them fatal, involving Tesla’s driver assistance system Autopilot, which was activated during the accidents, the people said.” The presumption here is preposterous: that Elon doesn’t care if his product is flawed and doesn’t desire improvement. 

There is a federal investigation of Neuralink.

Reuters again: “Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a medical device company, is under federal investigation for potential animal-welfare violations amid internal staff complaints that its animal testing is being rushed, causing needless suffering and deaths, according to documents reviewed by Reuters and sources familiar with the investigation and company operations.”

Then there is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation over harassment at Tesla.

The EEOC says: “Since at least 2015 to the present, Black employees at Tesla’s Fremont, California manufacturing facilities have routinely endured racial abuse, pervasive stereotyping, and hostility as well as epithets… Slurs were used casually and openly in high-traffic areas and at worker hubs. Black employees regularly encountered graffiti, including variations of the N-word, swastikas, threats, and nooses, on desks and other equipment, in bathroom stalls, within elevators, and even on new vehicles rolling off the production line.”

Finally, we have the aggressive advertising boycott on the part of major corporations, including Disney, CNBC, Comcast, Warner Bros, IBM, and the Financial Times, among many others. Musk has refused to be intimidated by these people. He has said that he refuses to be blackmailed by money and instead told the companies to “Go f*** yourself.” Which is rather remarkable and really does speak to a major problem in social media today, which is the extent to which so many platforms are willing to do the bidding of the corporatist system in order to serve the bottom line. 

That is fully nine direct lines of attack, but probably the company and Elon could list another several dozen such cases like this once you consider all levels of government everywhere Musk’s companies are operating.

And yes, it all sounds like something straight out of a novel by Ayn Rand. The successful and innovative entrepreneur is attacked on all sides by institutions and people who live off the system rather than innovate around and beyond it. 

We truly do live in a new age of envy, powered by states and their industrial allies more wedded to their own profitability lines and plans rather than what the people want and what great entrepreneurs can create.

This is very clearly a crony attack.

What’s striking is that everyone knows that and yet it is tolerated in any case.

It’s a great recipe for killing off the wealth-generating machine for a generation or two.

In the Middle East region, Israel has for decades been the biggest recipient of US foreign aid, but less commonly known is that Egypt has long held the number two spot. 

This ultimately goes back to the Camp David Accords signed in 1978 which led to the formalizing of a permanent state of peace between Egypt and Israel. Since then, the $1.3 billion given to Egypt annually at American taxpayers’ expense largely goes towards maintaining the military and national security bureaucracy. 

Bottom line is that it all goes toward securing the regional order on Washington’s terms, with Israel’s security as the number one priority.

While Washington might talk about “spreading democracy” – any such talk is largely an illusion in Egypt, which has long been known for violently suppressing protests, horrendous political prisons, and torture. People regularly get “disappeared” in Egypt and the US hardly bats an eye.

US politicians and media pundits like to mock as “banana republics” nations it doesn’t like (or those targeted for regime change: Libya, Syria, Russia, etc.), but the reality is that America long ago purchased its own banana republic in Egypt, and ever since it’s been a Western media game of pretending there’s a true “Egyptian democracy”. 

Below, are details of President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s having just won nearly 90% of the vote, via The Cradle [emphasis ZH]…

* * *

Egypt’s election authority announced on Monday that President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has secured a third six-year term leading the North African nation.  

Sisi won another term with 89.6 percent of the vote, the National Elections Authority said. Over 39 million Egyptians voted for the former army chief, who has ruled the nation for over a decade.  

This will be Sisi’s final term in office as the Egyptian constitution only allows a president to sit for three terms. He was first sworn into office in 2014 after the overthrow of the country’s first popularly elected president, Mohammed Morsi, and was reelected in 2018, both times winning with over 90 percent of the vote.  

Egypt’s election took place as the nation is struggling with a slow-burning economic crisis and keeping a long-standing position as a mediator between Palestine and Israel. 

Furthermore, the Egyptian economy has worsened to the point where the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said they’re “seriously considering” increasing its loans to Egypt.  

“The conflict is devastating Gaza’s population and economy and has severe impacts on the West Bank’s economy and is also posing difficulties for neighboring countries Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan through the loss of tourism and higher energy costs,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva had previously said. 

Egypt’s economic struggles can only potentially worsen amid Yemen’s Ansarallah attacks on the Red Sea, forcing ships to take the long route around Africa instead of the Suez Canal – a significant source of income for Egypt. Cairo has also been dealing with Israel’s plan of displacing Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai desert, with Sisi threatening Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of rupturing diplomatic ties.  

Amazing.

Dictator Sisi wins… election. https://t.co/xN2nog2RpC pic.twitter.com/h38KJtOWvY

— J.M. Hamilton (@jmhamiltonblog) December 18, 2023

Israeli sources told Axios, “The Egyptians expressed anxiety that a crisis on their border with Gaza would result in thousands of Palestinian refugees crossing the border barrier and trying to find shelter in the Sinai.” 

“Displacing Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Sinai means transferring the conflict and the killings from Gaza to Sinai, where Sinai becomes a base for launching operations against Israel, and in this case, Israel will have the right to defend itself, so it directs its strikes against Egyptian territory,” Sisi previously said. 

Authored by John Stossel via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry says it will take trillions of dollars to “solve” climate change. Then he says, “There is not enough money in any country in the world to actually solve this problem.”

Kerry has little understanding of money or how it’s created. He’s a multimillionaire because he married a rich woman. Now he wants to take more of your money to pretend to affect climate change.

Bjorn Lomborg points out that there are better things society should spend money on.

Lomborg acknowledges that a warmer climate brings problems. “As temperatures get higher, sea water, like everything else, expands. So we’re going to maybe see three feet of sea level rise. Then they say, ‘So everybody who lives within three feet of sea level, they’ll have to move!’ Well, no. If you actually look at what people do, they built dikes and so they don’t have to move.”

People in Holland did that years ago. A third of the Netherlands is below sea level. In some areas, it’s 22 feet below. Yet the country thrives. That’s the way to deal with climate change: adjust to it.

“Fewer people are going to get flooded every year, despite the fact that you have much higher sea level rise. The total cost for Holland over the last half-century is about $10 billion,” says Lomborg. “Not nothing, but very little for an advanced economy over 50 years.”

For saying things like that, Lomborg is labeled “the devil.”

“The problem here is unmitigated scaremongering,” he replies. “A new survey shows that 60 percent of all people in rich countries now believe it’s likely or very likely that unmitigated climate change will lead to the end of mankind. This is what you get when you have constant fearmongering in the media.”

Some people now say they will not have children because they’re convinced that climate change will destroy the world. Lomborg points out how counterproductive that would be: “We need your kids to make sure the future is better.”

He acknowledges that climate warming will kill people.

“As temperatures go up, we’re likely to see more people die from heat. That’s absolutely true. You hear this all the time. But what is underreported is the fact that nine times as many people die from cold. … As temperatures go up, you’re going to see fewer people die from cold. Over the last 20 years, because of temperature rises, we have seen about 116,000 more people die from heat. But 283,000 fewer people die from cold.”

That’s rarely reported in the news.

When the media doesn’t fret over deaths from heat, they grab at other possible threats.

CNN claims, “Climate Change is Fueling Extremism.”

The BBC says, “A Shifting Climate is Catalysing Infectious Disease.”

U.S. News and World Report says, “Climate Change will Harm Children’s Mental Health.”

Lomborg replies, “It’s very, very easy to make this argument that everything is caused by climate change if you don’t have the full picture.”

He points out that we rarely hear about positive effects of climate change, like global greening.

“That’s good! We get more green stuff on the planet. My argument is not that climate change is great or overall positive. It’s simply that, just like every other thing, it has pluses and minuses. … Only reporting on the minuses, and only emphasizing worst-case outcomes, is not a good way to inform people.”

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

Gaza’s ‘terror tunnels’ are in some instances literally big enough to drive a truck through, as several social media clips to emerge over the weekend show.

Israel’s military has been releasing more information on the tunnels, even recently giving Western reporters a tour of a pacified wing of the tunnel network, to show the world what it’s up against. Currently the IDF is still seeking to flood the tunnels, or at least significant sections of them, by pumping in seawater. 

Reporters with the NY Times have seen some of the tunnels, and write: “The tunnel in the northern Gaza Strip is wide enough for a large car to pass through, reinforced with concrete and fitted with electrical wiring.” 

“And at least one section of the tunnel — which Israel says is the largest it has discovered in Gaza so far — is within walking distance of an Israeli border crossing.”

This adds further context to help understand how Hamas terrorists were able to be so successful in rapidly infiltrating Israeli military bases and kibbutz communities during the events of Oct.7.

Another new to emerge video clip purports to show a senior Hamas commander having a casual drive inside a very wide and tall tunnel.

The IDF reveals footage obtained from the Gaza Strip showing senior Hamas commander Muhammed Sinwar, the brother of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, in a car driving through the major tunnel revealed earlier today by the military. pic.twitter.com/PPr0jOSKSp

— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) December 17, 2023

Hamas says top engineers have worked on these tunnels, and that they can sustain anticipated Israeli actions such as flooding with seawater from the Mediterranean.

The IDF’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, was quoted in the NYT as saying, “This tunnel had been built for years.”

“Millions of dollars have been spent on this tunnel, hundreds of tons of cement, a lot of electricity. Instead of spending all of them — the money, the cement, the electricity — on hospitals, schools, housing and other needs of the Gazans,” he added.

Israeli officials are being criticized for not detecting a newly uncovered tunnel in Gaza before the October 7 attack by Hamas. pic.twitter.com/GINRsoph60

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) December 18, 2023

Israel has sought to underscore that Hamas steals and diverts international humanitarian aid for the sake of its tunnels, which serve a military and terroristic purpose.

This is part of Israel’s PR campaign to explain to the world why it has long limited and restricted aid trucks passing through the Rafah crossing from Egypt.

The Israel Defense Forces have publicized more footage of the tunnels in the following…

EXPOSED: The biggest Hamas terrorist tunnel discovered.

This massive tunnel system branches out and spans well over four kilometers (2.5 miles). Its entrance is located only 400 meters (1,310 feet) from the Erez Crossing—used by Gazans on a daily basis to enter Israel for work… pic.twitter.com/RcjK5LbvGL

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) December 17, 2023

Given not only the immense size of the tunnels, but the fact that the underground network stretches for miles, Israel will have an extremely tough time fully destroying Hamas, which Netanyahu has vowed to do. Israel has said it will not send ground forces into the tunnels, but will disable them by other means.

Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Space Command, the Pentagon’s newest and 11th combatant command, has reached full operating capability, according to its commander, Army Gen. James Dickinson.

Gen. Dickinson made the declaration during a headquarters town hall on Dec. 15, according to a statement. The U.S. Space Command (USSPACECOM) was created in 2019 at the direction of former President Donald Trump.

“Since its establishment in 2019, USSPACECOM has been singularly focused on delivering exquisite capability to the joint force to deter conflict, defend our vital interests, and, if necessary, defeat aggression,” Gen. Dickinson said.

“Thanks to the disciplined initiative of our people and the support of our joint, combined, and partnered team, I can confidently say we have reached full operational capability.”

He explained that the announcement followed an “in-depth evaluation of the command’s capabilities,” including the ability to execute its mission on “our worst day, when we are needed the most.”

The declaration of full operating capability met certain criteria, including having the appropriate numbers of skills across the human capital and having the necessary command processes and functions in place, according to Gen. Dickinson.

He named China and Russia both as key adversaries whose space capabilities pose a threat to the United States.

“As the command has matured, challenges to a safe, secure, stable, and sustainable space domain have significantly increased,” Gen. Dickinson said. “Both the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation are fielding counter space capabilities designed to hold U.S., Allied, and partner space assets at risk.”

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has said that it’ll become a “major space power” sometime around 2030 and that it’s planning to double the size of its space station in the next few years.

Rick Fischer, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, in a commentary published by The Epoch Times last month, warned that “China has no hesitation to arm its space stations and other large manned space platforms, including its bases on the moon and beyond,” no matter what China’s state-run media have stated.

“Until the CCP expires or abandons its ambitions for hegemony on Earth, the United States and its partners in space will need to achieve security, meaning they will require military capabilities in space to use against Beijing’s manned and unmanned space systems intended to attack the democracies,” Mr. Fischer added.

The command had completed its first training exercise with the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, which “served as a major step in validating the headquarters staff as a ready, joint force,” Gen. Dickinson said.

“Our work continues,” he said. “As the complexity of the domain grows, so must our capability to deliver operational and strategic effects to our nation and preserve the safety and stability of the domain.”

In July, President Joe Biden said the U.S. Space Command’s headquarters would remain at Peterson Air Force in Colorado Springs, Colorado, reversing President Trump’s plans to move it to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama.

Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) both released statements on Dec. 15 welcoming the command’s news.

“Colorado was selected as the rightful home for U.S. Space Command because of our state’s extensive space and national security assets and robust aerospace economy,” Mr. Bennet said. “In the face of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s saber-rattling worldwide, U.S. leadership in space is more critical than ever. Space Command is now at Full Operational Capability in Colorado Springs, and our national security is stronger as a result.”

Mr. Hickenlooper said, “The dedication of the service members and civilians at USSPACECOM made it happen and our country and the world will be safer for it.”

Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), chairman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, also applauded the command’s achievement.

“This achievement continues to show that Colorado Springs is the right location for USSPACECOM for our nation’s readiness,” Mr. Lamborn said in a statement. “I am confident our Guardians will do what is necessary to maintain the highest levels of readiness to counter our adversaries’ malign ambitions in space. Our nation and its Allies are counting on it.”