“NASA is already ordering landers, rovers and drones for a sprawling moon base, less than two months after the Artemis II’s record-breaking lunar flyaround. The space agency outlined the first phase of its moon base plans on Tuesday, awarding hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to four U.S. companies. Jeff Bezos’[s] Blue Origin will provide a pair of landers to deliver moon buggies to the lunar surface, at a spot near the moon’s south pole. These so-called lunar terrain vehicles will be built by Astrolab and Lunar Outpost. Firefly Aerospace, which landed successfully on the moon last year, will deliver the first drones to the moon. All this hardware is ideally supposed to arrive before the first Artemis astronauts land on the moon, planned for as early as 2028.” (05/27/26)
“A former member of the German militant group Red Army Faction (RAF) has been jailed for 13 years for carrying out a string of armed robberies between 1999 and 2016. Daniela Klette, 67, was finally caught in a flat in Berlin in 2024 after more than 30 years on the run. She went on trial last year. Her defence had called for her acquittal but the court in Verden in Lower Saxony found her guilty on Wednesday of aggravated robbery, violating weapons laws and other offences over a 17-year period. The RAF, a violent anti-capitalist group also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, was eventually disbanded after a campaign of murder, kidnapping and bombing from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. ” (05/27/26)
“‘The Republicans go for the jugular; the Democrats go for the capillaries’ — Kevin Phillips … With the recent release of the long-withheld, but little anticipated Democratic National Committee ‘autopsy’ of the 2024 presidential electoral loss, we’re back to the perennial questions of which issues should receive priority; how should messaging and narrative around those issues be crafted; which wing(s) of the party should be amputated before their rot infects the entire organism, suburban soccer moms or inner city youth; and on and on. All good questions, but ultimately, in present circumstances, unanswerable except in the most platitudinous, hand-waving ways. The most fundamental dilemma resides in the Faustian bargain the party entered beginning in the 1970s, and the result of that bargain is neatly captured in Sheldon Wolin’s 2010 coinage ‘the inauthentic opposition.'” (05/27/26)
“Masses of pilgrims in Saudi Arabia threw pebbles at a large pillar in a symbolic ritual on Wednesday, one of the final days of the Hajj as Muslims around the world started celebrating the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha. Pilgrims in Mina, Saudi Arabia, chanted ‘Allahu akbar’ (God is great) while throwing pebbles in a ritual seen as a symbolic stoning of the devil. The act is also seen as a symbol of rejecting evil and a commemoration of the Prophet Ibrahim’s rejection of temptation when the devil tried to dissuade him from submitting to God’s will. Large crowds of pilgrims moved through the sprawling Jamarat complex after arriving from Muzdalifah, where they collected pebbles overnight following a day of worship and prayer at Arafat on Tuesday.” (05/27/26)
“In the heart of the Santa Cruz Mountains, just off Highway 9, there is a restaurant that has become a community icon. It has a redwood-paneled dining room with exposed roof timbers that was built in 1912 and a historic bar with a wood-burning fireplace. For over a century, the people in this isolated town have treasured this gathering place. Near downtown Los Angeles, along a busy commercial boulevard, a family-owned Mexican restaurant has thrived since 1925 …. Countless independent businesses in California remain prosperous despite a regulatory environment that throws at them rules that are often unreasonable, even in conflict with each other, from agencies at the local, county, regional, and state levels. These agencies are staffed with bureaucrats who are not merely indifferent to the challenges small businesses face while attempting to comply with their edicts; many of them are actively hostile.” (05/27/26)
“Italy’s highest court has ruled a five-star Dolomites hotel was acting lawfully when it refused to provide tap water to a tourist. The woman from Rome unsuccessfully argued that ‘water is a natural resource and a universal human right’ after a waiter only offered her €7 (£6) bottled mineral water at the restaurant of the five-star Hotel Sassongher in Corvara during the 2019 ski season. The Italian Supreme Court denied her request for €2,700 to compensate her for emotional distress and economic damage, Italian media reports. Silvio Belardi, the lawyer representing the hotel, told the Corriere Alto Adige newspaper that the court held that ‘there is no obligation to supply tap water.’ The lawyer later told the BBC the case had been rejected first by a court in Rome, then by an appeals court and now the Court of Cassation, where the judges ruled in the hotel’s favour.” (05/27/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“They are building a UFC arena on the White House lawn, / because the world has gone insane, / and there are chatbots in our skulls, / and our eyes have been crossed out with black ink. / They are building a UFC arena on the White House lawn / so the president can watch men fight in a cage / while the Paramount Plus audience watches military recruitment ads that are marketed to teenagers / and a podcast plutocrat interviews men with bloody hands / as shame-soaked survivors sleep on the sidewalk in Washington DC, / as Cuban parents light a candle and skip another meal, / as Lebanese medics die in double-tap airstrikes, / as billionaires cackle about stripping all human knowledge / and selling it back to us as a subscription service, / as we shovel fistfuls of mood stabilizers down our gullets / to keep us functional enough to turn the gears of industry …” (05/27/26)
“Puerto Rico’s governor announced a state of emergency Wednesday to fight a surge in coastal erosion along the U.S. territory ’s north coast. Gov. Jenniffer González said the executive order would allow her administration to accelerate projects to protect natural resources and vulnerable coastal communities. The government said in a statement that rising sea levels, storm surges and other factors have intensified coastal erosion in Puerto Rico. González pledged to help northern towns including Loiza, where people have been evacuated and chunks of asphalt from coastal roads have tumbled into the ocean following heavy swells. The order was signed just days before the start of the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30. The cost of the projects has not yet been determined.” (05/27/26)
“The Justice Department’s $1.776 billion ‘anti-weaponization’ fund, which would pay out public money in compensation for alleged overreach in federal prosecutions, including for the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has been accurately described as one of the most nakedly corrupt actions in American history. It would give a tacit endorsement from every American taxpayer to the notion that the Capitol Riot’s only transgression, for example, came from those who tried to punish its perpetrators for attempting to halt the outcome of an election. News of the fund has triggered massive political backlash and at least temporarily derailed a party-line reconciliation bill funding immigration enforcement operations for the next three years. Senate Republicans didn’t want to go on the record siding with Donald Trump’s crony slush fund, and left Washington rather than being confronted with such a question in a reconciliation ‘vote-a-rama.'” (05/27/26)
“Since October 7, we have been lectured nonstop about the supposedly singular sins of Israel. The campuses, the left-wing media, and the new Democratic Socialist officials, both federal and state, following the cue of student activists and professors from the Middle East, have painted Israel and their Jewish supporters as Nazis, fascists, and among the worst murderers in today’s bloody world. This is nonsensical. The medieval-style massacre of 1,200 Jews in their homes on October 7, during a time of peace, should have increased awareness of the existential dangers Israel faced. Instead, it spawned a gathering storm of antisemitism.” (05/26/26)
