Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] An international team of scientists from the United States, France, Australia, and Poland have discovered a new species of invasive flatworms that is spreading in the southern regions of the United States. The corresponding study was published in the scientific journal PeerJ.
The new species of alien worms, named Amaga pseudobama, was first discovered in North Carolina in 2020.
The worm resembles the invasive Obama nungara, which has spread widely across Europe. The name comes from an indigenous language in Brazil and means "leaf-like animal." The new species is a brown flatworm that averages several centimeters in length.
To identify the creature, specialists conducted a molecular study. During the analysis, it was discovered that the new species of worm differs significantly from Obama nungara at the genetic level.
It has been found not only in North Carolina, but also in Florida and Georgia. Scientists believe that the worm may spread to other southern US states.
Earlier, environmentalists warned of a catastrophe amid the invasion of alien worms in the United States. An analysis by experts showed that at least 70 species of worms live on the North American continent, posing a threat to local ecosystems.
[BBC] Just 20 herself and mother of a one-year-old boy, Samantha says that Jan Franco was one of many young people to lose their lives in the streets in recent months:
“So many young people have been killed this year," she explains.
“The violence is getting out of hand. They’re basically gangs, and they fall out with each other as gangs. That’s where it’s all coming from, these killings and deaths of young people.”
They often solve their quarrels with knives and machetes, she says.
“Almost no-one settles an argument with their fists anymore. It’s all knives, machetes, even guns. Things I just don’t understand,” her voice trails off.
The situation has been worsened by a new drug in Cuba called “quimico” – a cheap chemical high with a cannabis base. Samantha says that it’s increasingly popular among Cuban youth in the parks and on the streets.
Previously, even suggesting that Cuba had a problem with opioids and street gangs – especially to a foreign journalist – could land you in difficulties.
The Cuban authorities have always been fiercely protective of their island's reputation as crime-free and quick to point out that the streets are demonstrably safer than those of most cities in the US. Anything that highlights Cuba’s social problems is generally painted as biased criticism of their socialist system or as anti-revolutionary fabrications originating from Miami or Washington.
However, such has been the public perception of a worsening crime rate, a perception shared by many Cubans on social media, that the authorities have openly addressed it on state television.
In August, an edition of nightly talk programme Mesa Redonda – in which Communist Party officials are invited on air to deliver the party line – was titled Cuba Against Drugs.
During the broadcast, Colonel Juan Carlos Poey Guerra, the head of the interior ministry’s anti-drug unit, acknowledged the existence, production and distribution of the new drug, químico, and its impact on Cuba’s youth. He insisted the authorities were tackling the issue.
In another edition, on crime, the government denied the situation was worsening, claiming only 9% of crimes in Cuba were violent and just 3% were murders.
However, critics question the transparency of the government’s statistics and say there’s no independent oversight of the bodies which produce them or the methodologies they use.
For its part, the government largely blames the old enemy, the United States, for both the existence of synthetic opioids in Cuba and for the decades-long US economic embargo on the island which they say is the reason some Cubans have resorted to crime.
In a rare interview, the vice-president of Cuba’s Supreme Court, Maricela Sosa Ravelo, told the BBC the problem was being blown out of proportion on social media. She refuted the suggestion that many crimes go unreported through a lack of public confidence in the police.
“In my 30 years as a judge and magistrate, I don’t think that the Cuban people lack confidence in their authorities," she claimed, speaking inside the ornate Supreme Court building.
“In Cuba, the police have a high success rate in solving crimes. We don’t see people taking the law into their own hands – which happens in other parts of Latin America and elsewhere – which suggests the population trusts in the Cuban justice system,” she argued.
Again, though, that wasn’t the experience of another recent victim of opportunistic theft on Havana’s dimly lit streets.
Shyra is a transgender activist who is used to speaking out about rights in Cuba. She says that her story, of being robbed by a man brandishing a knife one evening, is common.
But it was the police response which disillusioned her the most.
I told them where they could find the attacker, showed them which direction he was headed in, what he was wearing. But they just didn’t pay me any attention.
“Just after I was attacked, I came across two motorcycle police in a side street," Shyra recalls. Despite her obvious distress, the police ignored her pleas for help, she says.
“They openly told me: ‘We’re not here for stuff like that.' It was such a shocking thing to hear because I told them where they could find the attacker, showed them which direction he was headed in, what he was wearing. But they just didn’t pay me any attention.”
#2
Cuba is not doing well (if you can say that Cuba was ever doing well) and is have experiencing one of their worst crisis since their revolution. Huge shortages of food, water, and basic goods. Cuba has seen record-breaking exodus of migrants in the past two years. Crime has soared as well.
[BBC] China says it carried out a rare test-firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) into international waters, sparking protests from neighbouring countries.
The launch on Wednesday – its first in more than 40 years - was “routine” and not aimed at any country or target, according to Beijing. Chinese media reported the government also gave “relevant countries” notice.
But Japan said it had not received a warning and expressed concerns, along with Australia and New Zealand.
The launch contributes to tensions across the Indo-Pacific region, with analysts saying it highlights China's increased long-range nuclear capabilities.
The US warned last year that China has built up its nuclear arsenal as part of a defence upgrade. An intercontinental ballistic missile can travel more 5,500km - putting China within striking range of the US mainland and Hawaii.
But Beijing’s arsenal is still estimated at less than a fifth of the size of the US's and Russia’s, and China has long maintained that its nuclear maintainance is only about deterrence.
On Wednesday, Beijing announced that the long-range missile was fired at 08:44 local time (04:44 GMT). It carried a dummy warhead and landed in the designated area - believed to be in the South Pacific.
Beijing's defence ministry added the test launch was "routine" and part of its "annual training".
But analysts said China was last known to have test-fired an ICBM internationally in the 1980s. Typically, it tests internally - having previously fired ICBMs west into the Taklamakan Desert in the Xinjiang region.
“This sort of testing is not unusual for other countries, including the United States, but is for China,” nuclear missile analyst Ankit Panda told the BBC.
China’s “ongoing nuclear modernisation” already has resulted in substantial changes, he said. This launch now appears to also show a change in its approach.
It has sparked immediate reaction from other countries. Japan said it had received “no notice” and expressed “serious concern” about Beijing’s military build-up.
Meanwhile, Australia said the action was "destabilising and raises the risk of miscalculation in the region” and that it had sought “an explanation” from Beijing. New Zealand called it “an unwelcome and concerning development”.
Mr Panda said he doesn't believe China’s actions were primarily designed to send a political message - “but no doubt this will be a stark reminder to the region and to the US that nuclear dynamics in Asia are quickly changing”.
Other analysts went further, saying it was another wake-up call for the US and its allies in the region.
“To Washington, the message is that direct intervention in a conflict across the Taiwan Strait would involve the American homeland being vulnerable to attack,” said Leif-Eric Easley, an international relations professor at Ewha Women's University in South Korea.
For US allies in Asia, the “provocative test… demonstrates China’s capabilities to fight on multiple fronts simultaneously," he added.
"Timing is everything," Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, wrote on X.
"[China's] statement claims the launch does not target any country, but there are high-levels of tension between China and Japan, Philippines, and of course perpetual tension with Taiwan."
While the relationship between Beijing and Washington has improved in the past year, China's increasing assertiveness in the region remains a sticking point. Tensions have ramped up between China and the Philippines as their ships have repeatedly collided in disputed waters.
Last month, Japan scrambled fighter jets after it accused a Chinese spy plane of breaching its air space, a move that it called "utterly unacceptable".
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Gregor Spitzen
[REGNUM] The entire leadership of the German Greens is resigning. Which is quite natural: after all, the party showed a simply disastrous result in the recent elections to the East German Landtags
The Greens failed to overcome the 5% threshold in Brandenburg, Saxony or Thuringia. And it is not surprising that the electorate in the former GDR territory gave the political adventurers a firm "no!"
What is surprising is how a party that has repeatedly demonstrated its hypocrisy and, at times, outright disregard for the opinions of its own voters in recent years has been able to play such an important role in German political life for so long.
"GREEN TRANSITION"
The Green Party was founded in 1980 in West Germany amid demonstrations for peace, nuclear disarmament and environmental protection, and initially did indeed champion the ideals of humanism and universal values. But in less than twenty years, it took a sharp turn toward militarism, taking an active part in organizing NATO's invasion of Yugoslavia with the total bombing of its civilian infrastructure.
With the start of the SVO in Ukraine, the ugly metamorphoses of the German "greens" received a new impetus: it got to the point that even the mainstream magazine Spiegel called the party leaders "olive-green" militarists, placing their images in camouflage uniforms on the cover of one of its issues.
But the icing on the cake, perhaps, was the transformation of one of the party’s founding fathers, Yoschka Fischer, who in his youth belonged to a group of radical pro-Palestinian activists, into one of the main apologists of Israel, consistently defending the right of the Jewish state to cannibalistic military operations with catastrophic losses for the civilian population.
However, let's not judge the "greens" too harshly, because for European politicians, "changing their shoes in mid-air" is more the norm than a deviation.
It is enough to recall Sir Winston Churchill, who at one time correctly assessed the political situation and switched from the Whigs to the Tories with the words: "Whoever was not a liberal in his youth is a heartless person. Whoever has not become a conservative in his maturity is simply a fool."
However, God bless it, politics. After all, as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin said, it is only a concentrated expression of economics. And we can now observe the main "achievements" of the "green" party precisely on the economic front.
The economic decisions of the Vice Chancellor and Minister of Economics of Germany Robert Habeck to dismantle German nuclear power, to abandon cheap Russian energy sources and replace them with super-expensive North American and Qatari LNG, as well as the notorious “green transition”, which cost Germany €180 billion, have put the country on the brink of economic collapse.
The abstract fight for ecology and climate protection is, of course, wonderful. However, when such ill-conceived initiatives plunge the country into recession and provoke deindustrialization with the subsequent loss of jobs and dismantling of entire industries, even the most narrow-minded voters are able to put 2+2 together and draw the right conclusions.
Moreover, even the most liberal Germans have recently begun to be openly annoyed by the green messianism and disregard for the opinions of their own citizens, the best illustration of which is the words of the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Annalena Baerbock : “ I don’t care what my voters think about German aid to Ukraine.”
HYDRA HEADS
But does the failure in the regional elections and the resignation of the party leadership mean that the Greens will now play a significantly smaller role in German politics, and their ability to drive the German economy into depression with Green bills and anti-Russian initiatives will be significantly reduced?
Unfortunately no.
The fact is that the personnel changes in the leadership of the party, which was just practically spat in the face by voters in three German regions - Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg - are in some sense just the obligatory sacrifice on the altar of the "green" idea.
If the Greens had acted differently, neither the voters, nor their political partners, nor their sponsors from among the “fat cats” of German business, who are profiting from the “green transition” thanks to generous state subsidies, would have understood them.
However, the Green Party has not actually lost anything from the resignation of its leaders Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour. Quite the contrary.
The enormous 32-year-old Lang, who has neither a college degree nor any work experience in any kind of clear specialty, but who loves to talk about lofty matters with the aplomb of an ignoramus, has long been the object of pan-German hatred and caustic ridicule.
Nor did 49-year-old Nuripur manage to get a university degree: we have no doubt that this was not due to incomplete professional suitability or a significant lack of intelligence. It is simply the custom among German Greens: if studying is detrimental to political activism, so much the worse for studying.
The Greens could have painlessly sacrificed the empty and worthless talking heads in the post of formal party leaders, blaming them for all the failures and setbacks in party building. After all, there will always be talking heads willing to take up vacant positions in the party areopagus.
According to rumors, the vacancies of party leaders could be filled as early as November by Franziska Brantner, State Secretary for Economic Affairs and a close confidant of Economy Minister Robert Habeck, as well as Felix Banaschak, a member of the Bundestag who was previously the party leader in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
However, the real culprits of Germany's plunge into the abyss of economic crisis - the Minister of Economics and author of children's books Robert Habeck, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and a prominent intellectual Annalena Baerbock, the Minister of Agriculture Cem Özdemir, who is closely connected to American foundations, as well as Anton Hofreiter - the chairman of the Green faction in the Bundestag, a notorious Russophobe and one of the main warmongers in the German parliament - are clearly not going to resign. Moreover, Habeck clearly intends to fight for the post of Bundeskanzler next year.
Therefore, it is clearly premature to say that the Greens have sincerely realized that their policy is disastrous for Germany and its economy. The country will definitely suffer hardships with this company.
[RedState] We've been seeing some big polls over the past few days that have had good news for former President Donald Trump: the NYT/Siena, Emerson, and even the Quinnipiac poll (which tends to lean left). NYT and Emerson were looking at swing states with Trump ahead. Quinnipiac looked at the national vote and had Trump up by 1 point with likely voters.
There was also the Gallup poll that found Trump was more popular than Kamala Harris, the Teamster polls, and the other unions' members also showing support for Trump.
I think the more people see of Harris and the more she talks, the more people realize that they don't want to sign aboard that train — that she's basically a vacuous pantsuit. She talks about being a "middle-class kid" and "dreams and aspirations." But what she doesn't talk about is specifics that make any sense. I think more and more people are starting to realize that about her if they didn't know it before. The Stephanie Ruhle interview proved it; even with a softball interviewer, Kamala still couldn't cut it.
Plus, this is one of those rare times when you can judge what both have done in office. That comparison does not go well for Kamala Harris. People remember they had it better under Trump. They don't like what has happened under Biden-Harris, so it's pretty hard to paint herself as a "change agent" or a "new way forward" when she's the one there now who has messed everything up. There's the ever-present question: Why didn't you do it now, while you've been in office?
When you're running away from yourself and your own record, it tends not to come across well.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
