Blog

Alberta Surpasses 177,000 Signatures, Officially Triggering Its Independence Referendum for October 19th

Alberta has entered a historic chapter.
This week, organizers confirmed that the movement for an Alberta independence referendum has officially passed the required threshold of 177,000 verified signatures, clearing the final legal barrier for a vote set to take place on October 19th.

According to the organizers behind the petition, signatures continue to pour in even after the requirement was met — a sign of the momentum and frustration that have been building across the province.

For many Albertans, this referendum is the result of years of tension with Ottawa, fueled by policies that have targeted the province’s energy sector, restricted development, and undermined the economic backbone of Western Canada. Residents and local leaders argue that Alberta has carried the financial weight of the federation while receiving little more than political pushback in return.

The announcement marks a dramatic turning point in Canada’s national landscape.
Independence movements have existed before, but none had crossed the official threshold required to trigger a formal vote — until now. This makes Alberta the first province to force a federal showdown over sovereignty in the modern era.

Political analysts say the development could reshape the country’s balance of power, testing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s already strained relationship with Western regions. The federal government, por su parte, has avoided making strong public comments, aware that any misstep could inflate separatist sentiment even further.

Keep reading

Federal Judge Orders Trump Administration to Halt Construction on Privately Funded White House Ballroom – Trump Responds

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the privately funded Trump White House ballroom construction project to be halted.

US District Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, temporarily halted construction on the ballroom.

The judge said Congress has to approve the construction project.

AP reported:

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to suspend its construction of a $400 million ballroom where it demolished the East Wing of the White House.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington granted a preservationist group’s request for a preliminary injunction that temporarily halts President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project.

Last summer, the Trump Administration announced a White House Ballroom construction project:

For 150 years, Presidents, Administrations, and White House Staff have longed for a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests than currently allowed. President Donald J. Trump has expressed his commitment to solving this problem on behalf of future Administrations and the American people.

The White House is one of the most beautiful and historic buildings in the world, yet the White House is currently unable to host major functions honoring world leaders and other countries without having to install a large and unsightly tent approximately 100 yards away from the main building entrance. The White House State Ballroom will be a much-needed and exquisite addition of approximately 90,000 total square feet of ornately designed and carefully crafted space, with a seated capacity of 650 people — a significant increase from the 200-person seated capacity in the East Room of the White House.

In recent weeks, President Trump has held several meetings with members of the White House Staff, the National Park Service, the White House Military Office, and the United States Secret Service to discuss design features and planning.

President Trump has chosen McCrery Architects as lead architect, which is well-known for their classical architectural design and based in our nation’s capital. CEO Jim McCrery said: “Presidents in the modern era have faced challenges hosting major events at the White House because it has been untouched since President Harry Truman. I am honored that President Trump has entrusted me to help bring this beautiful and necessary renovation to The People’s House, while preserving the elegance of its classical design and historical importance.”

The construction team will be headed by Clark Construction, and the engineering team will be led by AECOM.

The project will begin in September 2025, and it is expected to be completed long before the end of President Trump’s term.

Keep reading

Beneath the Big Lie About Iran – An Economy That’s Been Shrinking for 50 Years

At some point it is wise indeed to pay heed to the numbers – and that’s overwhelmingly true with respect to the battling narratives about the Donald’s Iran War now raging in the Persian Gulf. The fact is, the Iranian “threat” is almost entirely an ideological and political sham confected by Bibi Netanyahu and his neocon fifth columns on the banks of the Potomac.

They would have you believe that Iran is some kind of super-Evil Empire that is a military threat to the whole world, including way over here 10,000 kilometers from Tehran.

We beg to differ. Completely. And Defiantly, Too.

At the end of the day, a realistic, deliverable, sustainable military threat to the Homeland territory of America – the only valid reason for military action by a peaceful Republic – must necessarily be anchored in a robust economic base of GDP. That’s the only place from which the advanced technology, professional military manpower, abundant tax revenues and other economic resources needed to support a massive War Machine can be obtained.

Yet without massive defense budgets and weaponry – both a nuclear first strike capacity and an overwhelming conventional armada of invasion and occupation – no nation on planet earth would have the capacity to threaten America. Not way over here inside the safe harbor of the great Atlantic and Pacific Moats.

Based on the hard economic data for the last 53 years, therefore, one thing is crystal clear: When it comes to the economic girth needed to support a true military threat to US citizens on American soil from sea-to-shinning-sea, Iran is, was and always has been a Flyspeck.

And, ironically, Washington’s decades of brutal economic warfare against Iran has drastically weakened its economic strength relative to that of the US, even as it has solidified the rule of the religious mullahs, who’s theocratic regime has further throttled Iran’s economy.

Thus, back on the eve of the oil crisis in 1973 and notwithstanding 20-years of the Shah’s systematic larceny, US GDP was only 8.4X that of Iran. Likewise, Iran’s respectable real GDP per capita of $13,239 was nearly half that of the USA at $28,500.

At the time, the Iranian $410 billion economy ($2025 USD) was also the most robust in the middle east by a long shot. Stated in 2025 USD, the Iranian economy was orders of magnitude larger than any of its regional rivals:

1973 Real GDP In 2025 $:

  • Iran: $410 billion.
  • Saudi Arabia:$170 billion.
  • Egypt: $130 billion.
  • Israel:$75 billion.
  • Syria: $30 billion.
  • Jordan: $10 billion.

But that’s all she wrote. For nearly the entire past half-century the girth of Iran’s economy has been steadily and relentlessly shrinking relative to that of the United States. Accordingly, there is now (2025) a staggering difference in the final column, which measures the real GDP of the US in 2025$ versus that of Iran. Today that crucial ratio now stands at 35.4X or more than four times greater than it was in 1973.

Keep reading

Trump signs order directing creation of a national voter list, a move already facing lawsuit threats

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order to create a nationwide list of verified eligible voters and to restrict mail-in voting, a move that swiftly drew legal threats from state Democratic officials ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

The order, which voting law experts say violates the Constitution by attempting to seize states’ power to run elections, is the latest in a torrent of efforts from Trump to interfere with the way Americans vote based on his false allegations of fraud. The president has repeatedly lied about the outcome of the 2020 presidential campaign and the integrity of state-run elections, asserting again Tuesday that he won “three times” and citing accusations of voter fraud that numerous audits, investigations and courts have debunked.

The order signed Tuesday calls on the Department of Homeland Security, working in conjunction with the Social Security Administration, to make the list of eligible voters in each state. It also seeks to bar the U.S. Postal Service from sending absentee ballots to those not on each state’s approved list.

Trump is also calling for ballots to have secure envelopes with unique barcodes for tracking, according to the executive order, which was first reported by the Daily Caller. Federal funding could be withheld from states and localities that don’t comply.

Keep reading

Marine Corporal Arrested for Allegedly Stealing Missile System, Ammo

A 23-year-old Marine Corporal is under arrest for allegedly stealing a missile system and other “weapons of war” from his California base and selling them for personal profit.

AZ Family reported the Marine, Andrew Paul Amarillas, is “accused of stealing a Javelin missile system and cans of ammunition… to sell on the streets in Arizona.”

Amarillas is an ammunition technician specialist at Camp Pendleton.

The New York Post noted that the Javelin missile system “is capable of punching through heavy tank armor from miles away.”

Keep reading

Pelosi Says Trump and Republicans May Hack Into Voting Machines to Rig Vote Count in 2026 Midterm Elections

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed President Trump and the Republicans are going to go into the voting machines and change the vote count to steal the 2026 midterm elections.

Pelosi, who previously announced she will be retiring after decades in Congress, sat down with MS NOWS’s Ali Vitali to discuss the 2026 midterm elections, Joe Biden, the partial government shutdown, female candidates for president, and other topics.

“I always thought the American people were much more ready for ‘Madam President’ than Congress was for ‘Madam Speaker,’ because it is a marble ceiling,” she said. “It’s not a glass ceiling; it’s a marble ceiling,” Pelosi said.

Pelosi took a swipe at Kamala Harris and said Hillary Clinton was the most qualified person of our generation to run for president.

“She turned out so many more people than who would have voted,” Pelosi said.

At one point, the conversation turned to election integrity and the 2026 midterm elections.

Nancy Pelosi said Trump and the Republicans may try to hack the voting machines and steal the midterms by altering the vote count.

“We always have concerns, but with this president and the Republicans who have no commitment to the rule of law and doing things the appropriate way- we’re ready,” Pelosi said.

She continued, “We have to make sure the elections are safe…. We have to be on guard as to what [the Republicans] may try to do to the technology. They may try to creep into the technology and create a false count,” Pelosi said.

MS NOW’s Ali Vitali entertained Pelosi’s claims.

“How do you guard against that?” she asked Pelosi.

“That’s a challenge,” Pelosi said.

Keep reading

Yes, Iran Is Playing Chess – But Only After Rewriting the Rules of the Game

The origins of chess are contested, but few dispute that while the game began in India, it was the Sassanian Persian Empire that refined it into a recognizable strategic system. It was Persia that codified its language, symbolism and intellectual framework: the shah (king), the rokh (rook), and shatranj, the modern chess game.

This is not a trivial historical detail. It is, in many ways, a metaphor that has returned with force.

Since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran on February 28, 2026, political discourse – across Western, Israeli and alternative media – has repeatedly invoked the analogy of chess to describe Iran’s conduct.

The comparison is seductive. But it is also incomplete.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu articulated this framing as early as May 2012. Speaking of Iran’s negotiating posture, he said that “it looks as though they see the talks as another opportunity to delay and deceive and buy time… Iran is very good in playing this kind of chess game, and you know sometimes you have to sacrifice a pawn to save the king.”

That statement was not merely rhetorical; it revealed a long-standing Israeli interpretation of Iran as a strategic actor operating within a calculated, long-term framework.

More than a decade later, that framing has resurfaced with renewed urgency. Analysts, policymakers and commentators now routinely describe Iran’s actions as deliberate, layered and patient – defined not by immediate gains, but by positional advantage accumulated over time.

Some observers contrast this with what they perceive as a fundamentally different approach in Washington: one driven by immediacy, spectacle and the politics of rapid outcomes.

But such a contrast, while tempting, risks oversimplification.

Iran’s approach is rooted in historical continuity. It understands the current war not as an isolated confrontation, but as the latest phase in a decade-long process of pressure, containment and confrontation.

In this sense, the battlefield is not defined by days or weeks, but by political cycles measured in years – if not generations.

The objective of its adversaries, however, has remained consistent: Shāh Māt – checkmate – the dismantling of the Iranian state as a coherent political entity.

Yet this is precisely where the central miscalculation emerges.

When the Iranian Revolution overthrew the US-backed Shah in 1979, the collapse of the system was swift and decisive. But it was not the result of external pressure. It was the inevitable outcome of a structurally brittle system.

That system was vertical – organized as a rigid hierarchy with power concentrated at the apex and legitimacy flowing downward. When the apex collapsed, the entire structure disintegrated.

If the people are the piyādeh – the pawns – then in that moment, they did not merely encircle the king; they overturned the entire board.

This experience helped shape a strategic doctrine that would later define US and Israeli military thinking: the belief that removing leadership – what is often termed “decapitation” – can trigger systemic collapse.

Keep reading

Trump, Israel React to France Blocking U.S. Planes From French Airspace

American and Israeli leaders excoriated the cowardly, treacherous French government for preventing American airplanes from flying through the country’s airspace with military supplies for beleaguered Israel.

As the Iranian regime continues to fire at civilian targets in Israel and other nations, and as the United States and Israel take on the world’s worst terror-sponsoring regime (Iran’s), French President Emmanuel Macron and his government are determined to be on the wrong side of history. 

Donald Trump pulled no punches. “The Country of France wouldn’t let planes headed to Israel, loaded up with military supplies, fly over French territory. France has been VERY UNHELPFUL with respect to the ‘Butcher of Iran,’ who has been successfully eliminated! The U.S.A. will REMEMBER!!!” the president posted on Truth Social March 31.

The Israeli government immediately took action to punish the French government for their despicable decision. The Israeli Defense Ministry sent a statement to The Hill confirming:

The Director General of the Israel Ministry of Defense. Maj. Gen. (Res.) Amir Baram has decided to reduce all defense procurement from France to zero, replacing it with domestic Israeli procurement or purchases from allied countries.

France has taken a series of actions that have harmed Israel’s security and the operational capabilities of its defense industry…The Israel Ministry of Defense views the French government’s policy with serious concern, as it undermines security cooperation with Israel, a country that is actively operating on the front line against Iran and protecting the security of the Western world.

Keep reading

Two Different Wars, Two Different Presidents, But the Same Lies

I’m writing this piece well into President Donald Trump’s new war with Iran, which, with the help of Israel, has already killed more than 2,000 civilians, including 175 schoolgirls and staff; displaced some 3.2 million people; and is costing the American taxpayer at least one billion dollars a day. All of which is tragically reminiscent of the last time a Republican president led the U.S. into a war on a river of lies and greed. I’m thinking, of course, about George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Weapons that don’t exist. Threats to this country that aren’t real. Liberation for a people that the U.S. will never win over. Freedom for women about whom nobody in power cares a jot. A war that will bring total victory in only a few days or weeks. All this we heard in 2003, and all this we are hearing again now.

I spent many years writing about the Iraq War, even though it took me some time to figure out how to begin. I was sickened by the Muslim-baiting that had been going on since the 2001 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and disgusted with the Hollywood movies and legacy press articles glorifying our vengeful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while deifying our soldiers. I wanted to tell a different story. I just didn’t know how.

Then, in 2004, I came across the blog Baghdad Burning by a 24-year-old Iraqi woman who called herself Riverbend. She was the first Iraqi I had ever read on the war, and she taught me that those in an occupied country tell a very different story than do the occupiers.

Back then, if Iraqi men showed up in American books, movies, or journalism at all, it was usually as an enemy or a clown. Meanwhile, Iraqi women were depicted as little more than incomprehensible black-clad figures hovering in the background or wailing over the dead. But Riverbend was none of those. She was a computer technician in a sophisticated city who sounded like an American college student. I was hooked.

Over the next few months, I read her blog religiously. Riverbend’s language and thoughts sounded no different than those of my own daughter, except that she was describing what it was like to live, hour-by-hour, through the overwhelming, heart-freezing violence of a U.S. bombing campaign and the occupation of her country.

Today, we can get the same sense of immediacy by reading or listening to brave civilians and journalists in Gaza, but during our post-9/11 wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, hearing any voice from the “other side” was rare. So, Riverbend’s blog was not only eye-opening, but it made readers like me feel as though we were experiencing the war right beside her. She wove the mundane moments of her days — jokes, lighthearted observations, conversations with her family — in with her terror at the falling bombs and her feelings about the United States as she watched us tear apart her country. Her blog was eventually collected into a book and published by The Feminist Press in 2005.

Soon, I began reading other Iraqi blogs, too, along with every translation I could find of Iraqi poetry and fiction. I also followed videos by Iraqis that were appearing online, telling stories remarkably different from those I was hearing here in the United States. Some of those Iraqi civilians did indeed want democracy, although they didn’t believe it could be forced on anyone by a foreign power or bombs. Some had been satisfied living under Saddam Hussein’s autocratic rule. Many were too focused on their daily struggles to find food and avoid bombs to think about politics at all. But all of them, whatever their thoughts and opinions, were suffering horribly, not only from our bombs, but from wounds, illnesses, malnutrition, starvation, and threats of all kinds, as well as from bullying, kidnappings, rape, and murder at the hands of the gangs and militias our war had unleashed.

One of the most eye-opening of those Iraqi videos was made by an anonymous woman early in the war, who put on a burqa, hid her handheld camera under it, and drove around the countryside interviewing women about their struggles and poverty. As she explained, what she was doing was so dangerous that she had no doubt her video would only remain up on YouTube for a day or so. Sure enough, it quickly disappeared. I only hope that she didn’t disappear with it.

Keep reading

The Seder That Turned on Mamdani

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani walked into the “Downtown Seder” at City Winery in Manhattan ready to set a tone. He spoke first, leaned into unity, and tried to present himself as a mayor who moves easily across lines that divide the city.

Unfortunately for the mayor, the room didn’t follow his lead.

Zohran Mamdani is clearly aiming to convince the world that he isn’t anti-Semitic in the most lefty-coded theater-kid way possible. It didn’t quite go as he planned.

The New York mayor attended what The New York Times called a “hip” Passover Seder on Monday.

The event was also attended by former CNN host Don Lemon, who is in a bit of legal trouble at the moment, and a whole host of other characters, including a drag-queen rabbi who phoned in from Jerusalem and George Floyd’s brother, who spoke about “racism,” according to the Times.

Michael Dorf, founder of City Winery and longtime host of the event, has run the gathering for over 30 years. Mamdani took a seat alongside Don Lemon and Amichai Lau-Lavie.

Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie will appear at the Seder by video from Israel. The rabbi and human rights activist is best known as the subject of the documentary film Sabbath Queen (2024), which followed Lau-Lavie’s “epic journey” as a “drag-queen rebel” who “challenge[s] patriarchy and supremacy.” It is not known if the rabbi will appear as himself or as his drag alter ego, Hadassah Gross. Other guests will include Terrence Floyd, brother of George Floyd, and Matthew Broussard, the actor and comedian who played “Comic 2 at Stage Deli” in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

Mamdani addressed antisemitism and told the audience he stands with Jewish New Yorkers, framing himself as a bridge builder, even while promoting a political agenda rooted in democratic socialism and expanded government authority.

That contrast didn’t sit well.

Keep reading