Israeli Newspaper Says Country Is ‘Collapsing’ as 46,000 Businesses Shutter
Roughly 46,000 Israeli businesses have shut down since October 7, according to the Hebrew-language newspaper Maariv.
The Israeli economy has been declining rapidly since it launched its campaign in Gaza,particularly after the Yemen Ansar Allah movement (aka Houthi) and the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon have been taking action in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza.
The Houthis have blockaded the Red Sea from ships it says are connected with Israel or the United States. Because of their actions, the southern port of Eilat –the country’s busiest port before the war– has been virtually shut down since October 2023. Exacerbating the situation further, foreign tourism has also collapsed during the war, and as of December, nearly half a million Israelis have left the country and that was before tensions inflamed significantly between Iran and Israel.
Meanwhile, the Ansar Allah movement has been attacking Israel’s north, forcing tens of thousands of Israelis to evacuate the area, virtually wiping out businesses in the area.
However, businesses around all of Israel are struggling, the paper said, with construction and ancillary industries being hurt the most but it noted that nearly every industry is being affected.
Yoel Amir the CEO of Coface Bdi, a services and credit risk management firm, told the paper that they estimate 60,000 Israeli businesses could shut down by the end of the year.
“This is a very high number that encompasses many sectors. About 77 percent of the businesses that have been closed since the beginning of the war, which make up about 35,000 businesses, are small businesses with up to five employees, and are the most vulnerable in the economy,” Amir said.
In December, South Africa brought a case against Israel in the International Court of Justice, accusing it of genocide. Since then, a dozen countries have joined it and many more have publicly welcomed the case.
More than 38,300 Palestinians have been confirmed killed and another nearly 88,300 have been seriously injured in Gaza since Israel began its campaign, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
That number is largely assumed to be a massive undercount because of a lack of health services and thousands who remain missing are presumed to be buried under the rubble. A recent study by the British medical journal The Lancet estimates that more than 186,000 Palestinians have likely died as either a direct or indirect result of the Israeli campaign.
Elon Musk Exposes Secret Illegal Global Censorship System
EU Offered X Secret Censorship Deal – Musk
X (formerly Twitter) is facing persecution by the European Union because it rejected Brussels’ demand to secretly censor opinions on the platform, its owner Elon Musk has revealed.
The EU announced on Friday that it considered X in violation of its Digital Services Act (DSA) and intended to levy massive fines against the company unless it changed its practices.
“The European Commission offered X an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us,” Musk wrote in response. “The other platforms accepted that deal. X did not.”
“We look forward to a very public battle in court, so that the people of Europe can know the truth,” he added.
Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, after voicing displeasure over widespread censorship on the social media platform. He has since unbanned most blocked accounts, including that of former President Donald Trump.
When Musk announced “the bird is freed,” one of the responses came from Thierry Breton, the EU Commissioner for Internal Market.
“In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” Breton said, with a reference to the DSA.
On Friday, Breton explained the European Commission’s move against Musk by arguing that X violates the EU’s “transparency requirements” by denying access to “researchers,” among other things.
“Back in the day, BlueChecks used to mean trustworthy sources of information. Now with X, our preliminary view is that they deceive users and infringe the DSA,” Breton said.
According to the Commission, allowing anyone to obtain verification in exchange for a subscription fee “negatively affects users’ ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with.”
The Commission also objected that X does not maintain “a searchable and reliable advertisement repository” that would “allow for the required supervision and research into emerging risks.”
What most bothered the EU body was that X does not allow scraping its public data by “researchers” or grant access to its application programming interface (API), as DSA mandates.
Mike Benz, a former Trump administration official, highlighted this to suggest the EU’s real motivation is to “use the DSA to force X to restaff the censorship squad fired when Elon took over.” He further alleged that people who present themselves as researchers are actually “censorship activities & political operatives.”
Musk reposted Benz’s analysis with just one word of comment: “Exactly.”
X is now expected to respond to the Commission in writing. If the EU upholds Breton’s preliminary findings, X could be fined “up to 6% of the total worldwide annual turnover” and ordered to address its “breach” under “enhanced supervision,” the body said.
Elon Musk Exposes Secret Illegal Global Censorship System
Massive Breach of AT&T Customer Data
A breach on a third-party cloud platform released the call and text records of almost all AT&T customers, the service provider confirmed on Friday.
A spokesperson for AT&T said that the data was released as part of an attack three months ago on data-cloud provider Snowflake. The attack also released customer data from Ticketmaster and a number of other companies. Snowflake was compromised when login data were obtained using malware.
“In April, AT&T learned that customer data was illegally downloaded from our workspace on a third-party cloud platform,” AT&T said in a statement.
The statement details the precise nature of the information that was obtained. It’s believed that the content of calls and text messages is not part of the data breach.
“The call and text records identify the phone numbers with which an AT&T number interacted during this period, including AT&T landline (home phone) customers. It also included counts of those calls or texts and total call durations for specific days or months.”
“Based on our investigation, the compromised data includes files containing AT&T records of calls and texts of nearly all of AT&T’s cellular customers, customers of mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) using AT&T’s wireless network, as well as AT&T’s landline customers who interacted with those cellular numbers between May 1, 2022 – October 31, 2022. The compromised data also includes records from January 2, 2023, for a very small number of customers.”
Although the breach does not include data that could be used to identify individual customers associated with the records, AT&T cautions that “there are often ways, using publicly available tools, to find the name associated with a specific phone number.”
An announcement of the breach was delayed, in agreement with the FBI, which has now apprehended at least one person associated with the breach.
The company claims that the stolen information has not been made publicly available yet.
This new breach is apparently unrelated to another leak in which the data of nearly 75 million current and former AT&T customers was leaked.
BREAKING: Biden And Obama Locked In Blackmail War, Says Trump Insider
Democrats Prefer Harris as Potential Alternative Candidate
In a survey run by YouGov, respondents who identified as Democrats or as Independents who were Democratic-leaning were divided over whether or not U.S. President Biden should step aside in the presidential elections, with 42 percent saying he should while 43 percent said he should not.
At the same time, 64 percent said that the Democratic Party should support Biden rather than try to replace him, if he does choose to keep running.
YouGov then asked which candidates respondents would approve of hypothetically.
As Statista’s Anna Felck shows in [this] chart, Vice President Kamala Harris came out on top with 73 percent support.
Harris was also considered by supporters of the party as the person most likely to be able to hold onto the presidency.
By contrast, Pete Buttigieg received 57 percent support, while Bernie Sanders received 52 percent, although he also saw the highest level of disapproval of the polled politicians at 34 percent.
When asked to compare the attributes of Biden and Harris, a varied picture emerges.
For example, far more respondents considered Harris to be mentally fit (56 percent to Harris, nine percent to Biden, 25 percent equally matched) and a better communicator (47 percent to Harris, 15 percent to Biden, 25 percent even), while Biden received higher scores on being qualified for the role (34 percent to Biden, 13 percent to Harris, 41 percent equal) and being a strong leader (31 percent to Biden, 16 percent to Harris, 34 percent to both).
The most popular answer to this question on several of the character traits however was that they were equally matched.
Elon Musk Exposes Secret Illegal Global Censorship System
Moped-Mounted Crime Soars: Migrants Bring Third World Tactic to USA
Open-border advocates love to tell you that “diversity is our strength.” Unfortunately, illegal immigrants flooding into the United States are diversifying the criminal threats Americans face on city streets, exposing them to a tactic widely used across Latin America but rarely seen here — until now.
Latin Americans — and US followers of Phoenix, Arizona-based Active Self Protection‘s popular YouTube channel — are quite familiar with attacks carried out by two criminals riding a single moped or dirt bike — a modus operandi that facilitates both surprise and a quick getaway. Sometimes the criminals don’t even dismount. In other instances, one or both may get off the ride. Regardless, they frequently wield deadly weapons to compel their prey to part with valuables.
That was the recent experience of two friends strolling in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood after 11pm on a Thursday night. They say a man in a ski mask jumped off the back of a moped and pointed a gun at one of them, taking the 29-year-old man’s watch and the 32-year-old woman’s purse. The gunman then hopped back on the moped and the getaway driver sped the two criminals off into the night.
“It was very quick, but it was obviously super rattling. I’ve lived in the area for over seven years now, and I’ve never felt unsafe,” the woman told the New York Post, asking that her name be kept out of print for fear of criminal retribution.
The female victim is certain the criminals were Venezuelan — based on her familiarity with their accents, thanks to her having grown up in that country. What she said next spoke volumes:
“It’s pretty insane for this to be happening here. My family left Venezuela because crime like that is very common there, and they just didn’t want us growing up in that kind of like, like lack of safety.”
NYPD told Fox News that, earlier this year, they arrested two armed Venezuelans on a moped — and believe just this one pair was connected to more than 100 robberies.
Awash in hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, New York City is the top hotspot for moto-crime. “Mopeds as a means of flight from the seven major [crimes] is up over 400% since 2022,”an NYPD source told the Post, “and that’s when we believe we first started seeing the beginning of the wave of new arrivals.”
Some victims have been targeted because of their foolish choice to wear outrageously pricey watches in public (compounding their foolish choices to spend their money that way in the first place). On June 26, a man in Greenwich Village had a gun pointed at his head before surrendering his $40,000 Rolex. On June 18, armed robbers stole another man’s $100,000 watch outside a Manhattan hotspot. They’ve also been known to yank gold chains off people’s necks.
Don’t think you’re immune from a moto-attack if don’t flaunt your money. An iPhone, purse or wallet could be all the enticement the low-lifes need. In June, there was a spree of at least four moped-launched robberies in which the thieves yanked headphones off pedestrians’ heads.
You’re not even safe once you’ve left the street. On June 21, two men with guns entered Williamsburg’s Birds of a Feather restaurant. “They basically held up the entire restaurant at gunpoint,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told NBC New York. He believes the two perpetrators are newly-arrived migrants.
New York City has seen a massive spike in armed robberies committed by moped raiders. The NYPD says they are #illegal #migrants.
— UinHurricane (@UinHurricane) July 11, 2024
The raiders enter cafes and restaurants and take wallets, watches and jewelry at gunpoint. Then they escape on mopeds. There’s nothing the police can… pic.twitter.com/vpBTPYU4Cy
Of course, you can’t commit a moto-crime without a moto, so they’re also stealing mopeds left and right — as was the case when a food delivery worker was stabbed in the chest and robbed in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn last month. In a May incident in Queens, thieves demanded that 15- and 19-year-old victims give up their moped. When they refused, both were slashed with a knife and yanked off the vehicle.
Sometimes the criminals simply grab what they want and hit the gas, with no regard for their victims’ lives — as seen in this February attack on a woman in New York City:
This is what these #NYC moped robberies look like: A victim dragged across the sidewalk and slamming into a pole as suspects on a scooter grab the purse off her shoulder and hit the gas. https://t.co/E3Rv6JNHcU pic.twitter.com/12FhU20feO
— Michael Ruiz (@mikerreports) February 5, 2024
It’s not clear in which country this happened, but here’s how one quick-thinking woman foiled an attempted purse-snatching (keep in mind this defensive tactic carries the risk of triggering punitive violence):
Typical moped operator behavior here.
— Mrgunsngear (@Mrgunsngear) July 7, 2024
1. Smart thinking by the woman.
2. Luckily they were after her purse and not her.
Plan accordingly…#CityLife #crime #smart #moped #urban #purse #women pic.twitter.com/VU4uV0ULWW
…and here’s another failed robbery with an even more fulfilling ending:
Elon Musk Exposes Secret Illegal Global Censorship System
Warning Shot: $2 Million Donation to Biden Critics Signals Trouble for His Re-election Campaign
Several major Democratic Party donors have begun financing Democratic congress members urging the current US President Joe Biden to withdraw from the upcoming election, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources.
According to the report, Michael Novogratz, founder of financial company Galaxy Digital, and film director Andrew Jarecki, have donated $2 million to Democrats in the US House of Representatives who were among the first to publicly call for Biden to exit the presidential race.
The financial support for opponents of the current president is a warning shot for his team, the publication noted.
The agency also reported that a significant number of donors stopped funding Biden’s campaign after his poor performance in the televised debate with former President Donald Trump on June 27. Many influential sponsors, including Hollywood actor George Clooney, have urged Biden to make way for a younger candidate.
According to a poll by The Economist and YouGov published on July 11, about 73% of Democratic Party supporters believe that US Vice President Kamala Harris should replace Biden as the Democratic candidate in the November presidential election. Additionally, 48% of surveyed Democrats believe that Harris is more likely to defeat former President Donald Trump.
Elon Musk Exposes Secret Illegal Global Censorship System