“Two purported Russian mobsters were each sentenced to 25 years behind bars Wednesday for hiring a hitman to kill Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad at her Brooklyn home three years ago on behalf of the Iranian government. ‘I crossed an ocean to come to America and have a normal life and I don’t have a normal life,’ Alinejad said just before Judge Colleen McMahon announced the sentences in Manhattan federal court for Rafat Amirov, 46, and Polad Omarov, 41. ‘I’m a brave woman. I’m a strong woman. They couldn’t break me. But they brought fear to my life. These criminals turned my life upside down,’ Alinejad said as she spoke at a lectern near the men, who sat in prison uniforms with their hands folded before them. McMahon said the men had committed ‘a terrible, terrible crime.’ Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael D. Lockard had urged McMahon to dispense 55-year prison terms to the men.” (10/29/25)
“For years, Americans have been told that ‘compassion’ for the homeless meant writing ever-larger checks – more money, more programs and far less accountability. Now, at last, we have some answers for why homelessness has exploded even amid a tripling of public spending. A groundbreaking investigation, ‘Infiltrated’ (backed by more than 50 pages of documentation from the Capital Research Center in cooperation with Discovery Institute), pulls back the curtain on a vast system of corruption. It reveals how billions in taxpayer funds intended to lift people out of homelessness have instead bankrolled radical activism and anti-American political agendas, betraying both the taxpayers who fund it and the homeless they were meant to help. Despite unprecedented resources, homelessness in the United States now stands at its highest level in U.S. history.” (10/29/25)
“Saudi Arabia is preparing to shift its $925 billion sovereign wealth fund away from a focus on real estate gigaprojects that have dominated its development goals for the last decade, a source with direct knowledge of the plans told Reuters. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, known as MbS, introduced his Vision 2030 plan in 2016 to transform the economy with a focus on large real-state projects.” (10/29/25)
“The conservative city council in Huntington Beach, Orange County’s deep-red MAGA stronghold, has been unrelenting in its yearslong battle over so-called pornographic children’s books at its public libraries. Now, after seemingly endless legal battles, the council is gearing up for another round in court. In a crusade to keep certain books out of the public library’s children’s section, the conservative-majority political body voted Tuesday, Oct. 21, to appeal a judge’s court order from earlier in the month that found the city had wrongfully banned books at its public libraries, the Los Angeles Times reported. The Huntington Beach City Council, whose members refer to themselves as the ‘MAGA-nificent Seven’, pushed back after an Orange County Superior Court mandated that the city drop its 2023 order to censor children’s books. Instead, Huntington Beach has to eliminate its newly created youth-restricted zone and return the books to the regular children’s section.” (10/29/25)
“Has this ever worked? Kind of famously, yes — at least for a while. In the 1930s, as fascist movements stomped across Europe, popular fronts emerged to block the spread. In France and Spain, leftists, centrists and anti-fascist liberals joined forces to beat back the far right, sometimes literally. In the United States, the Communist Party helped bring broad, anti-fascist politics into public life, forming coalitions among Black writers, labor organizers and progressive cultural workers. As historian Bill Mullen writes in Popular Fronts, the period saw ‘an extraordinary rapprochement’ between Black and white members of the U.S. Left — not just in protest, but in culture, art and publishing. ” (10/29/25)
“More than 90 Palestinians were killed in a wave of Israeli strikes in Gaza on Tuesday night, the Hamas-run Civil Defence agency and hospitals say. The Israeli military said it struck ‘dozens of terror targets and terrorists’ in response to violations by Hamas of the US-brokered ceasefire deal. Israel’s defence minister accused Hamas of an attack in Gaza that killed an Israeli soldier, and of breaching the terms on returning deceased hostages’ bodies. Hamas said it had ‘no connection’ to the attack and was committed to the deal.” (10/29/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“The ultimate expression of ‘everyone is twelve now’ theory is in the mainstream worldview promoted by western pundits and politicians which holds that the world is full of evil villains doing evil things simply because they are evil, and that these Bad Guys are opposed by the virtuous Good Guys of the US-led world order. You think Hamas killed Israelis because they’re a bunch of monsters who hate Jews? Of course you do, you’re twelve. You think Trump is trying to get rid of Maduro because Maduro is an evil dictator who wants to poison Americans with fentanyl? Hell yeah homie, you’re twelve. You think Putin invaded Ukraine because he hates freedom and democracy and wants to conquer the world? Bless your heart my twelve year-old buddy.” (10/28/25)
“I first heard the expression ‘strategic incompetence’ in El Salvador in December 1993. Along with my partner and two friends, I’d been recruited to do some electoral training there. We were working with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, a coalition of leftist parties that had led a long-running guerrilla war against a series of U.S.-backed autocratic governments. I’d visited El Salvador once before, during the 1989 elections, when armed troops were overseeing the voting. I remembered watching as people deposited their ballots into transparent plastic bags, their choices clearly visible to the world — and to the soldiers. (Not exactly what you’d call a ‘free and fair’ election.) A new round of national elections was scheduled for early 1994, and, for the first time, instead of boycotting it, the FMLN was running its own candidates.” (10/28/25)
“Politicians in Washington have the shortest memories. Maybe that’s why they so seldom learn from their sometimes catastrophic mistakes. It was less than 20 years ago that the U.S. economy was flattened by the mortgage and banking crisis. Anyone remember? The experts said that the odds were tiny that the housing market could crash; that the federal housing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would never need a bailout; that mortgage-backed securities were as good as gold. Then they crashed overnight spectacularly and devastatingly. Banks made riskier and riskier housing loans to subprime borrowers — and the government covered the bets with essentially 100% loan guarantees. … One reason depositors and investors were paying no attention to the big banks’ high-risk lending strategy is that everything was guaranteed.” (10/28/25)
“It’s understandable that Trump’s team likes to pretend that his random ramblings and angry acts of revenge are all part of some grand strategy, but why would anyone not on his payroll play along with this obvious absurdity? To anyone paying attention, it should be pretty clear that Donald Trump is clueless about the economy. Just to take an obvious example to make the point: Trump has repeatedly promised to lower drug prices by 800, 900, or even 1,500%. As he rightly says, no one thought it was possible. It wouldn’t be a big deal that he got confused once or twice and forgot that you can’t lower prices by more than 100%, unless you envision drug companies paying people to use their drugs. But Trump has done this repeatedly, over many months.” (10/28/25)
