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EU plans to add carbon credits to new climate goal, document shows

The European Commission is set to propose counting carbon credits bought from other countries towards the European Union’s 2040 climate target, a Commission document seen by Reuters showed.

The Commission is due to propose a legally binding EU climate target for 2040 on July 2.

The EU executive had initially planned a 90% net emissions cut, against 1990 levels, but in recent months has sought to make this goal more flexible, in response to pushback from governments including Italy, Poland and the Czech Republic, concerned about the cost.

An internal Commission summary of the upcoming proposal, seen by Reuters, said the EU would be able to use “high-quality international credits” from a U.N.-backed carbon credits market to meet 3% of the emissions cuts towards the 2040 goal.

The document said the credits would be phased in from 2036, and that additional EU legislation would later set out the origin and quality criteria that the credits must meet, and details of how they would be purchased.

The move would in effect ease the emissions cuts – and the investments required – from European industries needed to hit the 90% emissions-cutting target. For the share of the target met by credits, the EU would buy “credits” from projects that reduce CO2 emissions abroad – for example, forest restoration in Brazil – rather than reducing emissions in Europe.

Proponents say these credits are a crucial way to raise funds for CO2-cutting projects in developing nations. But recent scandals have shown some credit-generating projects did not deliver the climate benefits they claimed.

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Not Parody: Socialist NYC Mayoral Candidate Lectures Billionaire About How DEI Is Good for Business

As if the Democrat Party — which still hasn’t recovered from the decisive beatdown it suffered at the hands of President Donald Trump in the 2024 election — wasn’t already in a self-inflicted free fall, recent events have only accelerated the decline.

First, Trump’s successful attack on key Iranian nuclear sites, which Democrats frantically continue to downplay (lie about), was a “yuuge,” (as Trump might say) setback for the TDS-riddled among us. 

Then, Zohran Mamdani, the so-called “Democratic Socialist” candidate for mayor of New York City, bested former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in Tuesday’s Democrat primary. Given the demographics of NYC, Mamdani is the hands-down favorite to become the Big Apple’s next mayor. 

Incidentally, I wonder if Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson might soon become the second-worst mayor in America, but I digress.

Anyway, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman is among those who fear for the future of NYC, often dubbed “the financial center of the world,” given Mamdani’s socialist positions. Ackman posted an extensive missive on X (formerly, Twitter) on Thursday, in which he shared his concerns about Mamdani. Ackman wrote, in part (emphasis, mine):

I awoke this morning gravely concerned about New York City. I thought “What has NYC become that an avowed socialist who has supported defunding the police, whose solution to lowering food prices is city-owned supermarkets, who doesn’t understand that freezing rents will only reduce the supply of housing, who has no experience managing an organization — let alone a city with a $100+ billion budget and a $2 trillion economy — and who believes chants for ‘Globalizing the Intifada’ are acceptable, wins the Democratic Primary.

After speaking with those supported @ZohranKMamdani, I believe that he won the primary largely not due to his policies, but rather because he is a superb politician who ran a remarkable and inspiring campaign. He is intelligent and articulate. He is young and charming, and he successfully played down incriminating @X posts and statements from his past, pitching a joyful campaign of unity.

Isn’t that — the bolded passage — always what wins elections for Democrats? Think about it. 

For example, Barack Obama soared into the presidency on January 20, 2009, after having declared at the 2004 Democratic National Convention: “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America.” Yet, when Obama became president, he set about dividing America on class and racial bases for eight years — and then some. 

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Eco-Hypocrites Take Hundreds Of Private Jets To Bezos Wedding

Around a hundred private jets carrying celebrities have descended on Italy to deliver eco-hypocrites including Leonardo DiCaprio, Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates to the wedding of tech billionaire Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez.

Bezos is holding a three day event, yes three days, in Venice at a cost of somewhere in the region of $50-100 million.

While the exact same people lecture you about taking the occasional economy flight for a family getaway, they’re literally chartering their own carbon spewing flights just for themselves to attend a piss up.

Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez are getting married in Venice, and the three-day wedding celebration will bring in nearly 100 private jets and a guest list full of billionaires and celebrities, including Oprah and Leonardo DiCaprio, Mercury News reports.

Streets have been closed, boats rerouted, and security teams stationed across the city for the event, taking place from June 26-28. Now, people who live there — and plenty of others online — are calling the whole thing over-the-top and extremely out of touch.

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Chelsea Clinton Goes On Bizarre Rant About U.S. Health Secretary RFK Jr. 

United States Secretary of HHS Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been one of the hardest-working cabinet members appointed to the Trump administration in the last several months.

In his first months in office, Kennedy fired the entire CDC Vaccine Advisory Panel and has worked nonstop to eliminate harmful chemicals from America’s food supply.

While most Americans approve of Kennedy’s efforts, Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of Hillary and Bill Clinton, is not happy with Kennedy.

In her recent appearance on the Hysteria podcast, she criticized Kennedy’s latest moves as the U.S. Secretary of HHS.

She stated, “We have a health and human services secretary, RFK Jr, who actively lies about vaccines.”

“Facts don’t matter to him, and certainly public health doesn’t seem to matter to him,” added Clinton.

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New CDC Vaccine Panel Recommends Merck’s RSV Shot for All Newborns

Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) this morning voted to recommend all newborns receive Merck’s new monoclonal antibody shot, designed to protect against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

Two of the seven committee members, Retsef Levi, Ph.D., and Vicky Pebsworth, Ph.D., opposed the recommendation, citing safety concerns. The remaining five members supported it.

The vote marked the first — and closely watched — decision by the new members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), appointed early this month by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He replaced all 17 sitting members, citing long-standing conflicts of interest that he said had plagued the committee for years.

Kennedy’s decision outraged the mainstream public health industry, which feared the new committee would be more critical of vaccines. It even prompted a move by vaccine manufacturers, insurers and the professional medical organizations they support to bypass government health agencies’ recommendations by creating a nongovernmental system for recommending and purchasing vaccines.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration earlier this month approved Merck’s RSV shot, clesrovimab, which will be marketed as Enflonsia. It joins two other recently approved RSV drugs. One is Sanofi and AstraZeneca’s monoclonal antibody shot for infants, Beyfortus (nirsevimab). The other is Pfizer’s RSV vaccine, Abrysvo, for pregnant mothers.

Data presented by the CDC during Wednesday’s ACIP meeting reassured committee members that the recently approved RSV interventions were safe and effective.

However, an analysis of the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink for the 2023-2024 respiratory season revealed an association between Abrysvo and an increased risk for hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, which include gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, eclampsia and HELLP syndrome, a life-threatening pregnancy complication.

Presenters repeatedly emphasized that RSV — a common respiratory virus that usually causes mild cold-like symptoms but can be serious in infants — is the leading cause of hospitalization for infants in the U.S. There are fewer than 100 deaths per year from RSV in the U.S., according to data presented at the meeting.

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Cato Institute VP Dismisses Mass Fentanyl Deaths: Voluntary Overdoses ‘Are Not Homicides’

The open-borders Cato Institute is on the defensive after one of its top pro-migration advocates dismissed the overdose deaths of many young Americans as “voluntary” transactions.

The statement came a day after Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI) grilled Alex Nowrasteh — Cato’s vice president for economic and social policy studies — about his support for President Joe Biden’s mass migration.

Tiffany asked Nowrasteh during the Wednesday hearing if his calculations about migrant crimes included drug deaths.

Nowrasteh dismissed drug overdoses as commercial accidents: “Do you mean the people who voluntarily took fentanyl and overdosed under that tragic situation? No, those are not homicides, sir.”

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The Burgeoning Fight Between MAHA and the Tech Right

President Donald Trump proclaimed victory in 2024 thanks in part due to his success at forging a broad coalition across both the country and political spectrum. Trump’s traditional MAGA base was joined by economic moderates, business opportunists, foreign favor-seekers, and anti-interventionists. Perhaps most notably, the Democrat-turned-independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement rallied around Trump to help push him over the victory line against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Health-conscious and “expert”-skeptical, the Make America Healthy Again movement, or MAHA for short, was the result of an ideological split in the left-wing, environmentalist green movement. 

Once upon a time, activists of the tree-hugging, organic food–purchasing, anti-establishment, hippie variety who had nothing but distrust for Big Pharma and the institutional status quo were widely considered to be as far from the Republican Party as humanly possible.

But in the early 2000s, activists in the green and alternative movement found themselves joined—and soon essentially replaced—by a new breed of suit-and-tie, Trust the Science environmentalist. Epitomized by Al Gore and his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, these new activists were men and women of white coats, bar charts, and peer-reviewed studies with an almost religious devotion to “Science,” “Institutions,” and “The Data.”

When Covid-19 hit in 2020, their mantra “trust the science” quickly morphed into “trust Big Pharma” and “do as you’re told,” and it became apparent that a split with the anti-authoritarian, pharma-skeptics who built the movement was inevitable.

This group (for the most part) rallied around Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign, and many of them stood by his side when, in August, Kennedy dropped out of the race to endorse Trump, attaching MAHA to the Republican MAGA coalition. With Trump’s electoral victory, and Kennedy’s elevation to the position of secretary of health, it is clear who won the battle in the end—the Trust the Science faction having been effectively decimated in the backlash which took place against the illogical authoritarianism of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Nevertheless, as old opponents lick their wounds, a new one looms on the horizon—an faction that has wormed its way, and continues to worm its way, into the Trump administration at an alarming rate: the ever-opportunistic tech-right.

Fresh off Trump’s 2024 election victory (which was in part made possible thanks to donations from Silicon Valley allies, including Elon Musk), former adversaries of the America First movement were given passage into the new administration. Musk was appointed head of DOGE, giving him considerable power in government despite the fact this his “department” was officially nothing more than an advisory committee; senior executives from Facebook parent company Meta, OpenAI, and Palantir were appointed lieutenant colonels in the U.S. Army as part of a new detachment specifically formed for Big Tech; and Silicon Valley–backed health startups were also able to take advantage of the new political environment.

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NYC Mayoral Candidate Mamdani: Tax Whites and the Rich

Socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is not shy about playing race and class cards in his campaign platform proposal to hike property taxes for “richer and whiter neighborhoods.”

Calling it a “soak-the-rich” proposal, the New York Post described the platform as an effort to fix the city’s “notoriously skewed property tax system,” where high-end brownstones are assessed at lower rates than homes and rentals in lower-income neighborhoods.

The race-based language is contained in Mamdani’s extensive “Stop the Squeeze on NYC Homeowners” campaign material.

It promises that a Mamdani administration will:

Shift the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods: The property tax system is unbalanced because assessment levels are artificially capped, so homeowners in expensive neighborhoods pay less than their fair share. The Mayor can fix this by pushing class assessment percentages down for everyone and adjusting rates up, effectively lowering tax payments for homeowners in neighborhoods like Jamaica and Brownsville while raising the amount paid in the most expensive Brooklyn brownstones.

The Post account acknowledged that “Democrats and many Republicans have long pushed to fix the out-of-whack system that ends up hitting poorer, often largely black and brown neighborhoods, with higher property taxes than their neighbors in swanky areas that tend to be majority Caucasian.”

But the candidate’s language drew fire from conservative critics.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon threatened to investigate Zohran Mamdani over his proposal to tax ‘whiter neighborhoods’  if he becomes the mayor, calling race-based policies “illegal.”

One former northeast resident, now a Florida-based commentator, called the candidate a “racist” on X.

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President Trump Issues a Serious Veiled Threat to Israel as Leftist Prosecutors in the Jewish State Try to Lock Up Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Bogus Charges

President Trump appears to be ready to hit Israel directly where it hurts the most if leftist prosecutors do not leave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alone.

As The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft reported on Thursday, Trump erupted after learning Netanyahu had been summoned to Court next Monday for the continuation of a long-running legal witch-hunt.

To make things more insulting, the Netanyahu announcement came 48 hours after Iran and Israel agreed to a ceasefire in their ongoing war. The Bibi-hating leftists did not even wait to give the prime minister time to catch his breath after one of the most consequential battles in Jewish history.

As Trump noted, this is the first time a sitting Israeli Prime Minister has ever been on trial. This politically motivated case concerns ridiculous things like cigars and a Bugs Bunny doll.

Trump went on to demand that the trial be cancelled immediately or a pardon given to Netanyahu. He did specify what consequences Israel would face if this travesty of justice continued, though.

But in a new statement released on Truth Social Saturday night, Trump strongly implied that failure to drop this garbage case would result in the end of all U.S foreign aid to Israel.

It is terrible what they are doing in Israel to Bibi Netanyahu. He is a War Hero, and a Prime Minister who did a fabulous job working with the United States to bring Great Success in getting rid of the dangerous Nuclear threat in Iran. Importantly, he is right now in the process of negotiating a Deal with Hamas, which will include getting the Hostages back.”

How is it possible that the Prime Minister of Israel can be forced to sit in a Courtroom all day long, over NOTHING (Cigars, Bugs Bunny Doll, etc.)? It is a POLITICAL WITCH HUNT, very similar to the Witch Hunt that I was forced to endure. This travesty of “Justice” will interfere with both Iran and Hamas negotiations. In other words, it is INSANITY doing what the out-of-control prosecutors are doing to Bibi Netanyahu.

The United States of America spends Billions of Dollars a year, far more than on any other Nation, protecting and supporting Israel. We are not going to stand for this. We just had a Great Victory with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu at the helm — And this greatly tarnishes our Victory. LET BIBI GO, HE’S GOT A BIG JOB TO DO!

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Marsha Blackburn Proposes Bipartisan Bill to Rein In Big Tech as ‘Unaccountable Gatekeepers’ over Apps

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and a group of bipartisan lawmakers this week introduced legislation that would prevent big tech from operating as “unaccountable gatekeepers” for the mobile app economy.

Sens. Blackburn, Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Mike Lee (R-UT), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Dick Durbin (D-IL) introduced the Open App Markets Act, a bill aimed at setting clear and enforceable rules of consumer protections within the app market.

“Big Tech giants have operated as unaccountable gatekeepers of the mobile app economy, forcing American consumers to use their app stores at the expense of innovative startups that threaten their bottom line,” Blackburn said in a statement.

“Our bipartisan Open App Markets Act would ensure a freer and fairer marketplace for consumers and small businesses by promoting competition in the app marketplace and opening the door to more choices and innovation,” she added.

With the advent of the smartphone, mobile devices have become a central aspect of the American consumers’ economic, social, and civic lives. The bipartisan group of lawmakers asserted that their legislation would break Apple and Google’s predominant “grip on the app economy.”

Blackburn’s press release about the legislation noted that consumers spent $92 billion on the Apple App Store and roughly $35.7 billion on the Google Play Store.

Apple has actively worked to prevent users from using third-party app stores on Apple devices, requiring app users and developers to use their Apple payment system.

The lawmakers stated that startups often face serious challenges because big tech can prioritize their own app to the disadvantage of smaller competitors.

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