The Israeli Mossad agent who died in a boat capsizing in northern Italy’s Lake Maggiore last Sunday (May 28) was there as part of "an operation against Iranian activity," Haaretz newspaper revealed, citing a report by Hebrew media outlet Channel 12.

"The boat full of Israeli and Italian intelligence agents was actually a dinner celebrating the mission’s success," Haaretz wrote. The dead agent "was working in the area as part of an operation targeting Iranian non-conventional weapons capabilities."

The drownings took place on May 28. The boat reportedly capsized due to bad weather, with authorities investigating whether it may have been carrying too many people.

Israel initially only acknowledged that the man was a retired security forces member, and kept his identity secret. His role in the Mossad was soon made clear.

On June 1st, a former Israeli spy chief revealed in an interview that the man was "not there for vacation" but was instead on the job.

The United States faces significant questions regarding the Arctic Circle and its commitments to northern security. Just as the Arctic has experienced rapidly rising temperatures, regional competition will intensify because of the region’s strategic importance. The buildup of Russian military assets along the country’s Northern coast, China’s polar trade investments, and the alliance between these nations threaten America’s Arctic interests. The security of the Arctic is inextricably linked to the safety of the United States and its allies.

Historically, the nations with claims to the Arctic have utilized collaboration and cooperation to solve competing interests in the region. However, Russia’s recent military actions have changed the dynamic of international dialogue and have forced American leaders to reevaluate their future strategy. The United States Army has taken specific steps in identifying the foundations of its Arctic Strategy and continues to revise its lines of effort. However, the organization must continue adapting its strategic approach to ensure the safety of the nation and its allies.

The head of a facility that carries out so-called “gender-affirming care” has published a study confirming that transgender surgeries do not improve mental health and make people feel lonelier than those who avoided surgical intervention altogether.

“In our study, the level of life satisfaction in transgender people was not increased in transgender people who had undergone gender-affirming surgery as compared to those who were unoperated,” says a study published Tuesday in BMC Public Health, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

“[O]ur data indicate that transgender and gender-diverse people, who have undergone gender reassignment surgery feel lonelier” than transgender-identified people who have not elected to have surgery, finds a separate study by the same four researchers, originally published online May 11 in the journal Healthcare (Basel).

The researchers also reveal that people who identify as members of the opposite sex experienced greater isolation if they played sports. “[H]igher loneliness levels were significantly associated with … already having a gender-reassignment surgery [and] more than 4 [hours] a week of sports activities,” as “compared to no sports activity.”

Did Ukraine forces just attempt to kick off their much anticipated major counteroffensive, only to have it put down immediately after it began? 

That's what the Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) suggested early Monday in announcing that Ukraine began a "large-scale offensive" in mounting attacks along five sections of the frontlines in the eastern Donbas region. But Russia said it thwarted the major attack and that some 250 Ukrainian troops were killed, which included Ukraine sending six mechanized and two tank battalions to Russian-controlled southern Donetsk.

"On the morning of June 4, the enemy launched a large-scale offensive in five sectors of the front in the South Donetsk direction," the MoD statement began. "The enemy has failed to reach its goals and was unsuccessful."

It added that in total the attacking forces lost six tanks, three infantry vehicles, and 21 armored vehicles in what would mark a significant defeat if confirmed. "The enemy’s goal was to breach our defenses in what they assumed was the most vulnerable section of the frontline," the Russian military statement continued. 

American Airlines, a leading carrier based in Fort Worth, is currently grappling with a significant challenge. The airline is unable to operate approximately 150 of its regional aircraft due to a persistent shortage of pilots, as revealed by CEO Robert Isom.

Speaking at the Bernstein 39th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference, Isom stated, “We would deploy properly to markets that aren’t being served. We would do that today. It’s just we don’t have the pilots.”

This issue arises at a time when the airline industry is witnessing a record demand for travel, particularly during the summer season. However, the capacity to meet this demand is constrained by the lack of pilots, leading to grounded planes and missed opportunities to capitalize on high ticket prices. Isom noted that the situation is more severe than the previous year when the pilot shortage began to significantly affect regional airlines as demand rebounded following the downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Looking ahead, Isom shared that American Airlines expects to acquire more pilots for its regional network over the next 18 to 24 months. Once these pilots are onboard, the grounded aircraft will be reintroduced into service in a manner that is expected to generate favorable unit revenues. He stated, “American anticipates getting more pilots over the next 18 to 24 months for the regional network, and those aircraft would be put back into service in a fashion that is going to produce unit revenues that are very favorable.”

Students at the University of Texas at Austin were found to be responsible for a censorship project that targeted conservative news outlets.

The Global Disinformation Index’s (GDI) report, which called for the blacklisting of conservative news organizations, was written up by students under the direction of academics working at the University of Texas at Austin’s Global Disinformation Lab (GDIL), The Federalist reported.

In the disinformation index, the group labeled several conservative media companies as the riskiest.

The academics in charge of the lab allegedly held an anti-conservative bias in readings of internal communications, along with several other accusations found in the over 1,000 pages of documents reviewed by The Federalist.

Publicly Funded Organization Involved in News Blacklist

The Washington Examiner investigative reporter, Gabe Kaminsky, published a Feb. 9 exclusive multi-part series: “Disinformation Inc.”

Kaminsky revealed that “self-styled ‘disinformation’ tracking organizations,” such as the GDI’s review of the top ten “riskiest American news organizations, were heavily biased against conservative outlets.

Some years ago Kenneth Anger wrote a book called “Hollywood Babylon” to expose the dark secrets of the nation’s debauched film capital. It’s about time for an ambitious insider with a strong stomach for deceit and hypocrisy to write a tome called “D.C. Babylon.” One whole chapter could be dedicated to the modern FBI and its labyrinth of corruption and calumny.

Or perhaps it will take more than one chapter considering the record of the FBI under the direction of James Comey and Christopher Wray. Both men oversaw blatant exercises in election interference on behalf of Democrats, and then either lied about it or pretended it never happened. It’s almost as though they consider themselves to be above the law.

The refusal of FBI Director Wray last week to honor a congressional subpoena and turn over an unclassified document to the House Oversight Committee should therefore come as no surprise to anyone, even more so since the document in question could potentially end the presidency of Joe Biden.

The FD-1023 form submitted by a confidential informant contains allegations that Biden, while vice president, accepted bribes from a foreign national in exchange for favorable policy decisions. You would think that the FBI, which spent years chasing down imaginary pee tapes involving President Trump, would have a few minutes to confer with Congress about allegations that the sitting president had engaged in potentially treasonous behavior.

But no.

The debt ceiling fracas is mercifully behind us (at least until 2025), so today we turn our focus away from the USA’s dwindling treasury and towards the more immediate issue of its dwindling dominance of the Western Pacific. Over the weekend US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin urged China to re-engage with the United States to “help avoid misunderstandings or miscalculations that may lead to crisis or conflict.” The plea was timely, because there have been a few near-misses in recent days that might have caused more concern in markets in years gone by. The first was the interception of a US surveillance plane by a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea in late May. The Chinese jet crossed in front of the US plane, thereby forcing it to fly through the unstable jet wash (just like Maverick and Goose). A further incident occurred on Saturday when a Chinese warship cut directly in front of a US destroyer, passing within 140 meters of colliding with the US ship.

If you’re sensing a theme here, you’re not alone. Western leaders have been promising a “de-risking”, rather than a “de-coupling” of the China relationship in recent months, but the geopolitical risks seem to be increasing, rather than diminishing. When Christine Lagarde warned in April that “we are witnessing the fragmentation of the global economy into competing blocs” she was effectively articulating our long-held house view, which my colleague Michael Every has written about many times.

So, when Western leaders talk about “de-risking”, what they mean is that they want to ensure that unfriendly powers don’t have them over an economic barrel in the same way that Vladimir Putin did with Europe in early 2022. The goal is to restructure trade and production so that it cannot be used as a weapon in this new era of Great Power competition. This is easier said than done. Especially when we are accustomed to a world where one bloc does most of the producing and another does most of the consuming.

As Target’s stock price has taken a beating amid conservative backlash over the company’s decision to sell LGBT-themed items and clothing, Twitter CEO Elon Musk said Friday that it’s just a matter of time before Target faces lawsuits for “destruction of shareholder value.”

Musk made the remarks in response to a tweet by conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who posted about JPMorgan downgrading Target’s stock after suffering its longest losing streak in decades.

Over the past month or so, Target’s stock dropped by double digits amid conservative calls for a boycott against the chain in connection to its decision to sell LGBT-themed apparel, including onesies for children and books instructing kids about the use of transgender pronouns.

Several days ago, JPMorgan downgraded Target Corporation’s stock from overweight to neutral, with the Wall Street bank citing “too many concerns” with the retail giant.

Ukraine has accused Russian forces of blowing up a major dam and hydroelectric power station, causing a 'catastrophic' flood that could displace hundreds of thousands of people and cause a nuclear disaster by cutting off cooling to a nuclear power plant.

The Ukrainian Interior Ministry confirmed this morning that the Kakhovka dam over the Dnieper river in the south of the country was damaged by several explosions and called for residents of 10 villages on the river's right bank, as well as parts Kherson city downriver, to evacuate their homes. 

Terrifying footage from the scene showed how village streets and fields near to the dam have already been swamped by the deluge as a Russian-installed local mayor warned that the water level would continue to rise for another 72 hours and claimed he expected 40ft high floods in some places.  

Ukrainian authorities have previously warned that the dam's failure could unleash 18 million cubic meters (4.8 billion gallons) of water and flood Kherson and dozens of other towns and settlements, home to hundreds of thousands of people. 

President Joe Biden on Monday thanked the Danish prime minister for her country's role in the alliance helping Ukraine resist Russia, as speculation grows that Mette Frederiksen is in line to be N.A.T.O. secretary general.

'There's a shared commitment to the core values and that gives us our strength — at least that's what I believe,' Biden said as they met in the Oval Office. 

'Together we're working to protect those values — including standing up for the people of Ukraine against the brutal aggression of the Russians.'

It was the first of two meetings with key allies this week, allies who come with N.A.T.O. aspirations.

The death toll from the heavy floods that hit Haiti over the weekend has risen to 42, with another 11 people missing, authorities said Monday.

At least 85 people are injured, and more than 13,600 homes were flooded, forcing people to evacuate leaving 19,000 people homeless, according to Haiti's Civil Protection Agency.

The rains pelted Haiti's western, northwestern, southeastern and central regions, officials said.

The weather has since improved, but many crops were damaged amid a spike in starvation, and people are trying to find temporary shelters after the rain turned roads into rushing rivers of brown water.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg is traveling the country, giving local speeches celebrating federal spending in the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill while another major slowdown is hampering cargo at West Coast ports.

This time, the cause is not a backup of cargo ships, but a labor dispute between the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) that has continued from last week.

During a Monday conversation with Elon Musk, Democrat presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the Second Amendment is settled and that a Kennedy administration will not be trying to take away guns.

Dr. Benjamin Braddock quoted RFK Jr. saying, “My position on gun control is that I’m not going to take away anybody’s guns. I’m a constitutional maximalist and the issue has been settled by the Supreme Court.”

Hong Kong police detained at least 24 people on Sunday, the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre, for violating the Communist government’s ban on vigils and commemorations.

Hong Kong was the site of the largest Tiananmen vigils among Chinese-speaking people in the world until 2020, when the massive annual rally in Victoria Park was banned first under the rubric of coronavirus pandemic safety and then under the draconian “national security law” imposed by Beijing to crush the 2019 pro-democracy movement.

The “national security law” criminalized almost all criticism of the Chinese Communist Party as “sedition” or “treason,” and those were among the excuses Hong Kong officials cited for arresting people as they strove to remember the Tiananmen Square massacre on Sunday.

Among those detained were several veteran pro-democracy activists and journalists.

Chinese National Defense Minister Li Shangfu, making his debut on the international stage, told attendees at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on Sunday that the communist nation’s military would attack “without any hesitation” against any allies of Taiwan seeking to support the nation’s independence from Beijing.

Li spent most of his address at the event, an annual platform for the world’s most powerful military leaders to discuss the future of national defense, promoting the Communist Party’s “Global Security Initiative,” a proposal by genocidal dictator Xi Jinping discouraging countries from acting in the interest of their own defense and instead proposing undefined “win-win cooperation.”

Li insisted China was a pioneer in world peace, repeatedly condemning the United States – without naming America – as a force for “hegemony” and “self-serving” clique-forming. Li also pressured America to no longer maintain a presence in the South China Sea, where China illegally claims territory belonging to Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, and regularly attacks non-Chinese ships legally present in their own domestic waters.

“Today, what Asia-Pacific needs are big pies of open and inclusive cooperation, not small cliques that are self-serving and exclusive,” China’s state-run CGTN broadcaster quoted Li as saying.

The breach could result in devastating flooding, potentially killing thousands of civilians as well as disrupting the cooling systems for the nearby Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.

The Kakhovskaya hydroelectric dam in Russia’s Kherson Region, located on the Dnepr River upstream from the city of Kherson, suffered significant damage on Tuesday morning, according to a local official and several videos shared on social media. 

The upper part of the key infrastructure was “destroyed as a result of a strike,” the mayor of Novaya Kakhovka, Vladimir Leontyev, confirmed to RIA Novosti. While several of the dam’s floodgates were damaged and unleashed an uncontrolled stream of water, the underwater structure itself withstood the attack, the official claimed. 

As a result of what Leontyev described as a major “terrorist act,” the water level downstream has risen by up to 2.5 meters, according to Leontyev, who added there was no need for evacuations thus far. He noted that the area has seen higher water levels during previous floods caused by heavy rainfall, but emphasized that local officials were focused on helping citizens as they prepare for a worst-case scenario.

House Republicans say that the FBI is violating a subpoena to turn over an alleged Biden 'bribery' document because the original informant's life could be in danger if they are 'unmasked' - despite the names being redacted.

According to a 'highly credible' whistleblower, an internal FD-1023 memo created in 2020 based off information from a highly-paid FBI informant apparently details a $5 million 'arrangement' for an exchange of money for policy decisions between then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national.

The leaders of the House Oversight Committee were granted access by the FBI Monday to view the redacted FD-1023 form in a secure facility within the Capitol. But it did not satisfy Republicans who are moving forward with contempt of Congress charges against FBI Director Chris Wray for failing to turn over the document in its entirety.

The family of 24-year-old George Watts of Lockwood has filed a lawsuit accusing the U.S Dept. of Defense of “willful misconduct” in the death of their son, by deceiving millions of Americans into taking Covid-19 vaccines that were unsafe and “experimental.” The lawsuit accuses the DOD of orchestrating the largest medical experiment without consent in modern history.

Watts died in October of 2021 after taking two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine. His family says he was a homebody who loved video games, and had no prior medical history.

Because he wanted to take his classes in person, George needed to be fully vaccinated. He received his first shot of Pfizer in August and his second in September. His parents said he chose that vaccine because it was recently fully approved by the Food & Drug Administration.

After his first dose, George Jr. experienced complications, which he chose to keep to himself. According to his parents, blood was in his urine after the first shot. He then received his second dose in mid-September, where he experienced flu-like symptoms that did not resolve.

Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed a new bill that would have made it illegal to facilitate or record sexually-explicit conduct in public places, like classrooms and government buildings.

This veto decision comes months after an Arizona teacher was fired after being caught recording pornography of herself and another individual in her classroom and posting it to the website OnlyFans.

“No 12-year-old child should ever have to worry that their middle school desk was the location of a porn shoot, yet because of Hobbs’ actions, this is precisely the case,” said Arizona State Senator Jake Hoffman.

SB1696 was supported by Republicans and made it through the House and Senate. However, Democrats ended up voting against the proposal, as expected.

In November of last year, another teacher was discovered recording porn in her 8th-grade class, before uploading the videos to social media platforms, OnlyFans, and other risqué websites.

Instagram immediately slapped a six-month suspension on the campaign accounts for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK Jr.) as soon as they were created.

The Democratic presidential candidate took to Twitter to lament the immediate ban. Tagging the official Twitter account for the social media platform, he asked: “When we use our Team Kennedy email address to set up Instagram accounts, we get an automatic 180-day ban. Can anyone guess why that’s happening?”

RFK Jr. also lamented how Instagram – owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta – hasn’t reinstated his account, “which was banned years ago with more than 900,000 followers.”

In order to stop so-called global warming and climate change, the Irish government has proposed culling 200,000 dairy cows to meet the country’s climate targets.

The Irish government’s report came from an internal briefing paper from the Department of Agriculture looking for strategies to bridge the emissions gap in the sector. This particular plan calls for culling around 65,000 dairy cows annually until the target of 200,000 cows slaughtered is reached in order for the country’s agriculture sector to align with overall climate targets. 

It turns out that more than 80 percent of Cooper’s $12 million annual salary, or about $10 million, comes directly from Pfizer. This would explain why Cooper has never once told the truth about Pfizer’s mRNA Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) “vaccines,” choosing instead to push them on his viewers.

 It has been one month since Apple launched its new savings account service with Goldman Sachs, and customers everywhere are reporting that they are having trouble accessing their cash.

After attracting more than $1 billion worth of deposits in the first four days of launch, Apple has apparently restricted withdrawals and transfers. 

Fox News has experienced a massive decline in ratings year-over-year following Tucker Carlson's sudden departure from the network approximately six weeks ago.

According to Nielsen, Fox News has experienced a 37% YoY decline of 1.42 million primetime viewers, according to Deadline Hollywood. Competing network MSNBC, meanwhile, saw an increase in viewers, bringing the network to 1.16 million during primetime, a 14% YoY gain in May.

In third place was CNN, which saw its primetime ratings shrink to 494,000 viewers last month, a 25% decline YoY vs. May 2022.

New study looking at 20,000 papers on the global impact of the lockdowns says the benefits were "negligible", whereas the collateral costs were "staggering". “Biggest policy mistake in our lifetime," the authors conclude.