news

https://www.ft.com/content/1803e03d-9996-46cd-beef-a6694edaf68e

What a stupid idea, trying to do capital controls on a freely convertible currency. That's what this is btw, capital control, western institutions whine about third world countries imposing such controls to prevent rich people from running out on domestic currency. US is trying to impose the similar controls on underpaid migrants.

Is it tax evasion to send your money to a US citizen friend who then sends it to your relative in India? I don't think anywhere in the bill it is mentioned to be the case. How can this even be enforced? Capital controls must apply universally to be effective, but any universal tax on outflows undermines the Dollar's international value itself.

Allegedly the terms the SDF has presented to the Jolani government

https://t.me/Alomhoar/62726

https://t.me/ASSYRIA11/48593

Al-Qaeda-linked Syrian regime to take over ISIS detention centers – the cradle

A Syrian official said Damascus will assume control over the camp, which houses thousands of ISIS prisoners and their families

Skulls of 19 Black people once subject to racist study in Germany are laid to rest in New Orleans. (Hexbear link)

The skulls of those 19 patients have now been repatriated to Louisiana after more than a century abroad. On Saturday, they were honored in a multi-faith memorial and laid to rest in a jazz funeral rooted in New Orleans tradition.

The remains were returned by the University of Leipzig, which in 2023 contacted the city archeologist in New Orleans, acknowledging the skulls had been acquired in a "colonial context and unethically." The two-year return process involved city, state and academic institutions. It culminated in a notable international restitution, a return of African American remains from Europe — with many remains still lingering in archival collections across the U.S. and abroad, at museums and universities.

In Canada, a daughter’s fight to bring her murdered Indigenous mother home. Hexbear Link

Winnipeg police were first alerted to the then 35-year-old self-proclaimed white supremacist on May 16, 2022, when the partial remains of Rebecca Contois were found in a rubbish bin. Skibicki was charged two days later, and the following month, police began searching the Brady Road Landfill, a municipal landfill on the outskirts of the city, where they found more of her remains.

Morgan and Marcedes’s families were told that their relatives' remains were likely in the privately operated Prairie Green Landfill, a sprawling waste disposal site north of Winnipeg.

To their dismay, police refused to search the landfill, believing they had enough evidence to convict Skibicki without the remains of his victims.

Utah lawmakers said gender-affirming care is harmful to kids. Their own study contradicts that claim. Hexbear post

SALT LAKE CITY — When Utah Republicans passed a ban on gender-affirming health care for children and teens in 2023, they argued it was needed to protect vulnerable kids from treatments that could cause long-term harm.

Years later, the results of a study commissioned under the same law contradict that claim, and the Republican-led Legislature is facing pressure to reconsider the restrictions.

Exclusive footage obtained by Al-Jazeera from a security operation carried out by Saraya Al-Quds in the Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza city, where they seized approximately 170 kilograms of highly explosive material dropped by IOF drones.

https://streamable.com/guuun9

https://t.me/PalestineTunes/441

UAE’s sub-imperial project: Erecting a covert empire across the Red Sea – the cradle

From Sudan to Socotra, the UAE fuses soft power with militarized control to dominate trade routes, fuel proxy wars, and entrench Israeli–Emirati security interests across the Horn of Africa and Yemen.

Israel Bombs Gaza Refugee School, Killing Over 30 Palestinians - Telesur English

seems like new isntreal-adjusted (from permanent to allegedly 60 days) proposal is circulating (screenshot from al jazeera):

doesn't seem like it's permanent tho

upd from https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/trump-gaza-ceasefire-proposal-hamas-israel-witkoff

Most concerning to Hamas, according to officials who spoke to Drop Site, is that the proposal contains substantive amendments to an “understanding” Hamas announced it had reached with the U.S. on Monday. On Tuesday, Hamas issued a statement it had reached “an agreement with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff on a general framework that achieves a permanent ceasefire, a complete withdrawal of occupation forces from the Gaza Strip, the flow of aid, and the appointment of a professional committee to manage the Gaza Strip's affairs immediately after the agreement is announced.”

The new Witkoff proposal, however, includes only vague language on whether the agreement would lead to a complete end to the genocide and a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. “The President is serious about the parties’ adherence to the ceasefire agreement and insists that the negotiations during the temporary ceasefire period, if successfully concluded with an agreement between the parties, would lead to a permanent resolution of the conflict,” the document states. “The United States and President Trump are committed to working to ensure that good faith negotiations continue until a final agreement is reached.”

“There are a lot of reservations on this paper as a framework. There are a lot of loopholes. There are a lot of ambiguities,” a Palestinian source close to the negotiating team told Drop Site. “Israel will never agree to end the war under this framework. The number of aid trucks are not mentioned. There are no specifics about where the Israeli forces will withdraw to. All of these are problems which will probably impede this. Witkoff tried to accommodate Israel much more than what was in the earlier paper. It’s going to take some time before a deal gets approved by the movement.”

Soon after the Witkoff draft was circulated, Israeli officials told several Hebrew language news outlets that the vague language in the draft would allow Netanyahu to resume the war after 60 days. A senior Israeli official, according to Ha’aretz, suggested that “U.S. officials deliberately crafted ambiguous language around the issue of ending the war to make the deal acceptable to both sides,” pointing out that the proposal “does not include a demand for Israel to end the war or withdraw from Gaza.”

As start treaty demands the bombers to be parked in the Open ---> invest in big Copecages futures!

mr. hezbollah, this could have been you

The resistance detonates an explosive on a force of what I believe are collaborators, although the text calls them “undercover,” I’m not sure if they’re actually Israeli due to the Yasser Abu Shabab reference

Cw gore in the last 15 seconds, a guy gets his head blown off

“ Martyr Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades:

Scenes of targeting a number of musta'ribeen (undercover) of the occupation army east of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

https://streamable.com/myhpr2

COVID-19 cases rising as new variant circulates in some parts of the world, WHO says

The new variant is called NB.1.8.1. It arrives as the United States’ official stance on COVID-19 vaccination is changing. On Tuesday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that COVID-19 shots are no longer recommended for healthy children and pregnant women – a move immediately questioned by several public health experts.

The new variant, increasing globally, had by mid-May reached nearly 11% of sequenced samples reported. The WHO has designated it a “variant under monitoring” and considers the public health risk low at the global level with current vaccines expected to remain effective.

I smell regime change brewing in Nepal. Look at that. The based juche party should just take over, the left wing party in nepal got voted out and the sucdems have been trying to undo a lot of the left's work.

Starting to become one of those Russian doomers but outside of Russia. Harden your heart, o Putin!

@xiaohongshu@hexbear.net, in last week's thread you mentioned the need to reduce wealth inequality in China, but I don't remember if you've previously discussed a specific mechanism for this? Is a wealth tax feasible in China? Income taxes seem pretty ineffective at this. I don't really know much about their current tax structure. Expropriation would also work, but that seems hard to scale (as well as disruptive).

Today is the 61st anniversary of the Creation of the Organization for the Liberation of Palestine/Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)

A new coalition challenges Suriname's president after a close election - ABC News

Suriname could soon have its first female president after a party led by a medical doctor formed a coalition aimed at ousting the South American country’s current leader following a weekend election with no clear winner

I guess the Left-Wing Pro-Military SocDems won against the Right-Wing SocDems.

Ford is trying to get SEZs, previously a tool of imperial extraction in the Global South, in Ontario. (They will still be tools of imperial extraction, but from treaty lands within Canada)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/special-economic-zones-ontario-government-bill-5-analysis-1.7547438

Great engineering breakdown of why SpaceX’s new rocket engineer, Raptor 3, is likely more of an explosive dud than the engine it is replacing. And why SpaceX is trapped in an engineering Catch-22 that probably makes the entire Starship project a flop that simply cannot succeed:

https://www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/spacex-has-finally-figured-out-why-63b

At the time of writing, SpaceX has already spent approximately $10 billion on Starship and hasn’t even managed to reach proper orbit, let alone deliver any payload to space. For comparison, NASA’s Saturn V rocket, which was designed and built using more expensive and less accurate old-school analogue technology, cost roughly $6.4 billion to develop, and the launch costs were approximately $1.4 billion in today’s dollars. In other words, for the same amount of cash that Musk has splashed on creating a rocket that doesn’t work, NASA was able to send astronauts to lunar orbit using technology from the 1960s. And, even more embarrassingly for Musk, this sorry saga is only going to get worse.

… how did test flight 7 fail? Well, excessive harmonic vibrations ruptured the fuel lines, creating a gigantic fire that destroyed the entire upper stage mid-flight. This occurred despite the reduced stress placed on the engines and structure itself. Even worse, test flights 7 and 8 were launched using an improved version of Starship, featuring redesigned and strengthened fuel lines to prevent these failures from occurring.

So, why did this solution not work? Well, Starship has a huge thrust problem. Musk and his engineers overestimated the amount of thrust their Raptor engine could produce while designing the Starship. Even Musk himself has publicly stated that Starship can only take less than 50% of its promised payload to orbit, which is likely an overestimate. This means they are forced to cut down on as much of the craft’s weight as possible and push the engines to the limit during launches. Unfortunately, this makes the rocket more fragile and means the engines generate excessive heat and vibrations — which is a perfect recipe for guaranteed failure.

At the time, the cause of this failure was apparent to me and many others. It’s obvious SpaceX can’t make Starship robust enough to survive the thrust required for a fraction of its payload without dramatically increasing its weight and, therefore, reducing its payload to nothing.

On the eve of Starship’s 9th test flight, SpaceX finally revealed what happened during flight 8. A “flash” event occurred in one of the rocket’s engines, causing it to fail (or, more accurately, explode) and take out the other engines in the process. This led to the rocket tumbling uncontrollably and disintegrating in the atmosphere.

A flash is when a rocket’s propellant ignites when it shouldn’t, creating a sudden explosion. This can be caused by many things: a fuel leak igniting; an incomplete fuel and oxidiser mix that removed the engine; rapid pressure changes that disrupt the correct flow of fuel and propellant; or even overheating, causing combustion in the wrong places. However, SpaceX has stated that “the most probable root cause for the loss of Starship was identified as a hardware failure in one of the upper stage’s center Raptor engines.” This heavily suggests a fuel leak or an overheating problem, which can be caused by building these engines too light and fragile or pushing them too hard — which all but confirms my and many others’ speculations.

Flight 8 is damning evidence that these engines are being exerted beyond their natural limits and are still incapable of producing enough thrust, as well as that Starship is simultaneously far too heavy and far too fragile to actually function. This is a fatal catch-22 that is baked into the core design of Starship.

So, how does SpaceX address this issue? Well, with an updated engine: the Raptor 3. This engine is simpler, 7% lighter and has 21% more thrust than the current Raptor 2. Surely, that should solve all these problems, right?

Well, no. First of all, Musk has lied about Raptor’s thrust before, meaning that his claim of “21% more thrust” is seriously dubious. But also, the engine being 7% lighter and having a 21% increase in thrust isn’t nearly enough to increase Starship’s payload to usable levels.

What is more concerning is the method SpaceX used to made this engine so light and powerful. By modifying how the fuel flows, they have improved the engine’s internal cooling needs and supposedly eliminated the requirement for external heat shields and a fire suppression system. As a result, they have elected to remove these components, which has made it possible to save this amount of weight. Furthermore, the improved cooling will supposedly enable them to push the engine harder, creating the aforementioned 21% increase in thrust.

In other words, the current engines are being pushed too hard, causing them to fail from fuel leak fires and excessive heat, which has happened so consistently that no Starship has even survived a trip to space with a fraction of its proposed payload onboard. Yet somehow, the natural solution is to ditch the engine’s heat shields and fire suppression systems? That decision alone would be silly, but to then also push these engines 21% harder makes this entire proposal utterly moronic.

More thrust will create more vibrations and stress, causing fuel leaks (especially if the lines aren’t further enforced), incorrect fuel mixing, and unstable internal pressure. All of these factors can then create flashes, which overheat the engines and quickly develop into huge explosive fires, which will be even more catastrophic than before, as these engines have no heat shields or fire suppression systems.

An update on the F-15E Strike Eagles conducting Combat Air Patrols (CAP) and Defensive Counter Air (DCA) at Diego Garcia and also in the Middle East and West Asia in general, called the CENTCOM area of responsibility by the United States.

A few days ago, the US Air Force trialed a new anti drone and cruise missile loadout on one of their testbed F-15Es, equipping it with 42 APKWS laser guided rockets. The APKWS laser guided rockets offer a cheap and high magazine capacity firing solution to drone and cruise missile swarms (they cost 20K USD each and work by equipping a guidance kit to unguided Hydra rockets, kind of like equipping a JDAM kit to an unguided bomb), as seen by equipping 42 of them on one aircraft, with three seven shot pods on each wing. I did a more detailed post on APKWS here. What's interesting is that the positioning of the rocket pots still leaves eight hardpoints open (that can be used by missiles or bombs), four on the conformal fuel tanks and four next to the rocket pods.

Now this similar loadout appeared on an F-15E at Muwaffaq Salti Airbase in Jordan, in active service. In addition to the 42 APKWS laser guided rockets, 4 AIM-9 Sidewinder infrared guided air to air missiles are mounted on hardpoints next to the rocket pods, and 4 AIM-120 radar guided air to air missiles are mounted on the hardpoints on the conformal fuel tanks. This allows for a potential of 50 engagements per aircraft.

With this capability going from testing to active use in a matter of days, with it being publicly posted on social media platforms, it suggests that the US is signalling towards Iran, that they're making preparations to defend from a large scale drone attack from Iran should that occur in response to an Israeli/US attack on Iran, or as a pre-emptive strike.

for the Polish presidential elections with 99% of the votes counted, the right winger (who visited Trump recently to do a photo op) has 51.08% and the lib (who seems to be losing for the second time in a row) has 48.92%, the right winger is like a more aggressive version of the current right wing president Duda

Population Growth in 2024 ie "no one wants to be born in europe lol"

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2025/05/25/donald-trumps-big-beautiful-tax-bill/

feel like rising profits do be saying nothing ever happens. credit card debt you are only hope

Where should I start looking for news? I kinda just lurked here for news for a long time, looking to be more proactive now that I'm not addicted to weed and liquor