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Houthi attacks in the waterway have prompted many companies to redirect vessels to longer and more expensive routes

The cost of shipping fuel by sea has in some cases soared above $100,000 a day due to continued disruptions in the Suez Canal and Red Sea caused by attacks by the Houthi rebels, Bloomberg reported this week.

According to data from the Baltic Exchange in London, the price of shipping oil and refined products from the Middle East to Japan surged by 3% on Thursday alone, to $101,000 a day, the highest cost for that particular route since 2020.

The same trend has been observed for vessels carrying fuel from the Middle East to Europe. Tanker costs on this route have surged to within the range of $97,000-$117,000 per day, depending on the size of the ship.

The Houthis, an Islamist group that controls a large part of Yemen, have been attacking and hijacking ships crossing the vital waterway that handles about 15% of global trade in what they claim is a show of solidarity with the Palestinians. Despite the US and allies having deployed a naval taskforce to the area to safeguard shipping, many freight companies have halted travel through the waterway and instead make the far longer and more expensive journey around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa.

According to an earlier report by the Wall Street Journal, citing data from London-based Drewry Shipping Consultants, the average worldwide cost of shipping a 40-foot container jumped 23% to $3,777 in the week ending January 18, more than double what it cost only a month prior.

Many analysts now warn that the shipping crisis in the Red Sea may cause a new surge in global inflation.

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Michael Yon joins Alex Jones to issue an emergency warning to those American and Texan patriots who wish to actively help protect the southern border.

Javier Milei’s honeymoon is over

Two months after libertarian firebrand Javier Milei was elected president of Latam basket case Argentina, pledging to overhaul the economy and openly warning a period of brutal austerity and pain is coming, the initial euphoria is fading fast and is being replace with the shock and horror of what comes next.

And sure enough, in the biggest show of resistance to date against Milei, Argentinian workers on Wednesday took to the streets for a general strike, bringing swaths of downtown Buenos Aires to a standstill.

In what has been called an “unprecedented mobilization” never before in modern Argentinian history has a mass strike been called less than seven weeks into a new presidency. But leaders from Argentina’s largest labor union – the guys who are used to a steady drip of handouts from the government – said the nationwide protests reflect the urgency they feel as Milei pursues radical economic and political reforms he likens to “shock therapy”.

Thousands of (most labor union) protesters swarmed the square in front of Argentina’s Congress on Wednesday, denouncing Milei’s sweeping plans to overhaul the government, privatize public industries and slash spending. Some banged pots and carried signs accusing Milei of being a “traitor”. Other banners featured the portrait of working-class icon Evita Peron.

Elizabeth Gutierrez made her way to the gathering after working an overnight shift as a nurse. She explained she was motivated by steep increases in food prices since Milei took office.

“Before we used to have asados [barbecues] every Sunday. Not now. Even rice is very expensive,” Gutierrez said. “Rents have shot up. You can’t live off your salary any more: It’s not enough” she raged adding that “the people are here to defend their nation.”

Well, here’s the problem: the nation has been bled dry by corrupt politicians, and the only thing that can save it is the most aggressive belt tightening in decades. And while Milei is trying it, he is about to find out just how much pushback his plans will cause, and how impossible it will be for his ambitious plan seeking to end the government’s parasistism of the economy, to succeed.

Another protester, 63-year-old retiree Alicia Pereyra, voiced opposition to Milei’s efforts to deregulate the economy, including plans to “modernise” labour law and ditch rent regulation. “He wants us to be slaves,” Pereyra said.

Draped in an Argentinian flag, Pereyra worried about her ability to make ends meet in the face of Milei’s reforms. Her retirement income amounts to only 85,000 pesos per month — about $70. She said basic necessities had become so costly under Milei that she is unsure whether she will be able to access the medicine she needs for a chronic illness.

Even small luxuries are now out of reach. Pereyra described how she and her husband opted for orange juice instead of wine to make their New Year’s toast for 2024, breaking a long-running family tradition.

“It’s a horrible feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow,” she said. “[Milei] is turning our heads upside down.”

Of course, Argentina had already been suffering from record triple-digit inflation when Milei took office on December 10. Elected on the promise that he would fix the sputtering economy  – but not before a period of brutal shock – Milei quickly moved to implement austerity measures that he said were needed to get Argentina’s finances in order.

In his inauguration address, he warned the country that Argentina’s situation would get worse before it got better. And he was right.

One of his earliest measures was to devalue the Argentinian peso by 54%, which only accelerated the already sky-high inflation rates.

According to the National Institute for Statistics and Censuses (INDEC), Argentina ended 2023 with annual inflation of 211% the steepest rate in Latin America, surpassing even Venezuela. The year also clocked the fastest inflation hikes since 1990, resulting in higher prices for consumers.

Santiago Manoukian, chief economist at the consulting firm Ecolatina, told Al Jazeera that December’s price increases will continue hitting consumers’ pocketbooks for the next several months. Salaries will have a hard time keeping up.

“We believe that real wages fell in December more than in any other month since at least 2002,” he said. “Purchasing power is going to continue to go down.”

That trend is expected to slow consumer spending, which Manoukian said will likely result in a recession and an uptick in unemployment and poverty. Four in 10 Argentines were already in poverty when Milei took office, according to national data

Milei coupled his currency devaluation measure with immediate cuts to government spending, including consumer subsidies.

One presidential “mega-decree” in December reformed or overturned dozens of laws and paved the way for the  privatisation of state-run companies. Another decree axed 5,000 government jobs. But further changes are on the way. Wednesday’s nationwide strike comes as Congress prepares to consider a slimmed-down version of Milei’s “omnibus law” the following day.

Originally containing 664 articles, the bill sought to reimagine the country’s elections, restructure the lower chamber of Congress and enact tough new restrictions on protests, including through penalties of up to six years in prison. The streamlined version is still massive, with over 500 articles. If passed, it would hand broad legislative powers to Milei’s executive branch for an “emergency” period of one year.

Still, the president dismissed Wednesday’s strike as evidence of backward thinking. “There are two Argentinas,” he told local media. “One wants to stay behind, in the past, in decadence.”

Members of his administration likewise blasted the protesters. On Wednesday, Security Minister Patricia Bullrich — Milei’s erstwhile rival on the campaign trail — called the union groups that organised the strike “gangsters” and “guarantors of poverty”.

“There’s no strike that will be able to stop us,” she wrote on X.

Meanwhile, the establishment – realizing their jobs are about to be rugpulled – is lashing out: Federico Finchelstein, a New York-based historian and fascism scholar, said Milei’s first month in office has demonstrated his “authoritarian style of populism”. He drew parallels to Donald Trump, the controversial — but popular — former president of the United States who sought to claim broad executive authority while in office. Finchelstein likened Milei to a “mini-Trump”.

“It’s a type of populism that looks to undermine democratic institutions,” Finchelstein said, clearly forgetting that it was Argentina’s “democratic institutions” that brought pushed it beyond the edge of collapse.

And indeed, despite the criticism and protests he faces, Milei continues to enjoy broad support among Argentinians. One survey this month, conducted by the pollster Escenarios, found that 55% of respondents believed Milei’s reform measures were necessary to improve the economy.

Political scientist Federico Zapata, the director general at Escenarios, credits those poll numbers to the president’s successful messaging to voters.

“In a way, Milei and the libertarians seem to have won the culture war,” he explained. “They managed to have installed a consensus over the diagnosis of the [economic] crisis, and that’s helping build approval over the slate of measures.”

Zapata added that Milei has also been successful in attributing the economic spiral to his left-wing predecessor, former President Alberto Fernandez. “He says that the economic problems are the complete responsibility of the previous government. Based on that, he’s lowered expectations so that people stick with him for longer than the normal honeymoon period,” Zapata said.

Still, Escenarios’ poll showed a majority of respondents felt any major policy changes should take place gradually, and not all at once.

And Milei could face further challenges to his reforms, beyond Wednesday’s large-scale protest. A top Argentinian court has already invalidated a key component of his “mega-decree”, which had sought to cancel a host of worker protections. Both Gutierrez and Pereyra suggested that opposition to Milei may grow to the point where he is unable to finish his term in office.

“The government could find itself in the eye of the storm in just a few months,” Zapata said.

But Milei’s supporters remain optimistic that the firebrand president will make good on his campaign promises.

Luis Testa, a cab driver who voted for Milei, said he still backs the president, even as he makes cuts in his day-to-day expenses.

“We need to give him a chance. Let’s give him a year,” Testa said. “And if, for a year, all of us have to eat beans, we’ll eat beans.”

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Michael Yon joins Alex Jones to issue an emergency warning to those American and Texan patriots who wish to actively help protect the southern border.

Fracturing of U.S. political system has been developing in public view over the past quarter century

The escalating dispute between Texas and the Biden administration over Abbott’s efforts to erect its own barriers to illegal immigration from Mexico show that the quarter of a millennium old federal US political system is collapsing along many different fault lines, constitutional and political experts told Sputnik.

Twenty-five state governors have come out in support of Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s declaration that he will defy the Biden administration in Washington, DC and go ahead with building barbed wire barriers along his state’s land border with Mexico.

The Supreme Court ruled in a narrow 5-4 decision Monday authorizing federal Border Patrol agents to remove razor-wire fencing set up by Texas authorities on Abbott’s instructions. However, on Friday, Abbott said he was prepared for a conflict with federal authorities over the issue.

“We are prepared, in the event that that unlikely event does occur, just to make sure that we will be able to continue exactly what we’ve been doing over the past month, and that is building these barriers,” the Texas governor told Tucker Carlson in an interview.

The crisis was real and serious, US constitutional historian and political commentator Dan Lazare warned on Friday.

US System Fracturing

“Sure, it’s a crisis, a big one,” Lazare said. “It’s yet another sign of how the US constitutional system is fracturing along multiple fault lines.”

The crisis had been developing in full public view over the past quarter century, Lazare pointed out.

“First it was the breakdown on Capitol Hill as gridlock took hold from the mid-1990s on. Then it was the Electoral College, which backfired in 2000 and again in 2016 by cancelling the popular vote,” he said.

In 2022, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court overturned the overwhelmingly popular Roe vs. Wade decision of nearly half a century before that had legalized abortion on demand throughout the United States. And now the process of disintegration and the discrediting of ancient national institutions was accelerating, he observed.

“Now it [the US political system] is cracking along state and federal lines. I have no idea how far this will go,” he said.

The crisis goes far beyond a local dispute between Texas and the federal government: it threatens the very existence and survival of the United States, Lazare stated.

“It is nearly 10 months to the presidential elections, yet already civil war is erupting. The 248-year-old American republic is crumbling before our very eyes,” he said.

Secession Measure

University of Houston Professor of African American History Gerald Horne agreed that the crisis was alarming.

“It is quite serious. The ultra-right in the Lone Star state is seeking to place on the ballot a measure that would allow for secession from the United States,” he said.

The principle of secession is not unimaginable in Texas but, on the contrary, it is deeply rooted in the origins and history of the state, Horne explained. “Recall that Texas seceded from Mexico in 1836, formed an independent state – then joined the United States in 1845… then sought to secede again in 1861,” he said.

Abbott has actually been traveling the world already to assess what support he might be able to gather for any move to secede from the United States, Horne noted. “As we speak the governor is touring abroad – ostensibly on a commercial mission but likely seeking to gauge international support,” he said.

Texas is the second largest state in the Union in terms of both territory (after Alaska) and population (after California).

Horne acknowledged that Abbott had not yet made any hard or irrevocable decision to break with Washington. “To be fair, he has not endorsed officially ‘Texit’ or Texas exiting the United States, [comparable to] the United Kingdom exiting the European Union (EU) or ‘Brexit,’” he said.

However, the possibility of a Texas secession followed by a wider disintegration of the United States remained very possible, Horne advised. “A question is this: does all this portend a breakup of the United States, especially if there is a controversy concerning the November presidential election: Stay tuned,” he said.

Not Serious Threat

Nevertheless, the crisis still had plenty of time to be peacefully resolved and there has been similar false alarms throughout US history, George Mason University Professor of Law Francis Buckley advised.

“[The crisis is Not [Serious]. It’s called interposition and [US Founding Father and early president James] Madison proposed it in 1798. [It] happens often,” he said.

Abbott has issued a “Statement on Texas’ Constitutional Right to Self-Defense” in which he stressed the state’s right to defend itself against an “invasion” of illegal immigrants, and he also accused Biden of violating and refusing to enforce immigration laws.

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Michael Yon joins Alex Jones to issue an emergency warning to those American and Texan patriots who wish to actively help protect the southern border.

Company has paid out billions in various settlements in recent years

A subsidiary of German pharmaceutical giant Bayer was ordered to pay $2.25 billion (€2.07 billion) to a Pennsylvania man who said he developed cancer from exposure to the company’s Roundup weedkiller.

A jury found that John McKivision developed non-Hodgkins lymphoma as a result of using Roundup for yard work over several years.

The verdict includes $2 billion in punitive damages and $250 million in compensation.

“The jury’s punitive damages award sends a clear message that this multi-national corporation needs top to bottom change,” Tom Kline and Jason Itkin, McKivision’s attorneys, said in a joint statement.

Bayer said in a statement that it disagreed “with the jury’s adverse verdict that conflicts with the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence and worldwide regulatory and scientific assessments, and believe that we have strong arguments on appeal to get this verdict overturned and the unconstitutionally excessive damage award eliminated or reduced.”

A spokesperson for the company told the AFP news agency that it plans to appeal the verdict.

Thousands more claims

Roundup is among the top-selling weed killers in the United States.

It was originally produced by US agrochemical company Monsanto, which Bayer acquired in 2018. Bayer phased out sales of the household version of Roundup last year.

Bayer has said that decades of studies show that Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, are safe for human use.

But in 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen.”

Around 165,000 claims have been made in the US against the company for personal injuries — mainly non-Hodgkins lymphoma — that were allegedly caused by Roundup.

The company has paid out billions in various settlements in recent years.

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Michael Yon joins Alex Jones to issue an emergency warning to those American and Texan patriots who wish to actively help protect the southern border.

Each successive US generation has seen larger numbers of self-identified non-heterosexuals

More than one in four (28%) Americans between the ages of 18 and 25, known as Generation Z, identified as LGBTQ in a survey published earlier this week by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). 

The figure was the largest percentage recorded for any generation by the pollster, which conducted its research during August and September on a sample of over 6,600 people. 

Nearly half of the non-heterosexual Gen Zers said they were bisexual, amounting to 15% of all Gen Z adults. Gays and lesbians (5% of total) were outnumbered by “other” (8%).

Generation Z was far more likely to identify as something other than straight than previous generations. Among millennials, 16% said they were some form of LGBTQ, with gays and lesbians nearly as common as bisexuals (5% vs 7%). 

Among Generation X, gays and lesbians actually outnumbered bisexuals (3% vs 2%) among the 7% of the total age group who said they weren’t heterosexual. Even fewer Baby Boomers (4%) and members of the Silent Generation (3%) said they were LGBTQ.

Generation Z was also more racially diverse than any other age group surveyed. Just 52% of adults – and only 50% of teens – described themselves as white, compared to 62% of the total US population. Additionally, they were less likely to politically identify as Republican and more likely to identify as liberal. The survey even suggested there are more LGBTQ Gen Zers than there are Gen Z Republicans, who comprise just 21% of the age group compared to 27% of the total population. 

The PRRI did not speculate on possible reasons for the trend, which has accompanied a rapid liberalization of attitudes about homosexuality in American society. Despite this shift, 20% of Gen Z adults said they had experienced hostility or discrimination because of their sexual orientation.

Homosexual acts only stopped being a federal crime in the US following the 2003 Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas, though many states had already scrapped their sodomy laws by this time. The 2014 Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalized same-sex marriage, which had been illegal across the US since 1996. 

Individual states have since been required to license and perform such marriages, while same-sex couples have been able to adopt children. Just 35 UN member states allow same-sex marriage.

While the PRRI’s numbers echoed previous surveys showing Generation Z is the most LGBT and liberal group to come of age in the US yet, the percentage who identified as something other than heterosexual was significantly higher in this week’s findings than in a similar poll by Gallup last year, which found 19.7% of Gen Z adults aged 18 to 26 self-identified as LGBTQ, compared to 7.2% of the general population.

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Michael Yon joins Alex Jones to issue an emergency warning to those American and Texan patriots who wish to actively help protect the southern border.

City has agreed to pay $10 million to 50 rioters injured by police during the summer of riots

Peacefully protest at the Capitol before getting teargassed by Capitol Police and possibly murdered by them? The Biden DOJ will hunt you down and lock you up.

Participate in a summer of anti-Trump chaos? Cities will pay you because the cops were mean while stopping you from smashing windows and setting fires.

In the last year, Denver agreed to pay $4.7 million to 300 BLM rioters arrested in 2020. Philadelphia coughed up $9 million. NYC is paying $13 million.

And now, Seattle has agreed to pay $10 million to 50 rioters injured by police during the summer of riots.

“This decision was the best financial decision for the City considering risk, cost, and insurance,” said Seattle City Attorney Ann Davidson in a press release reported by The Federalist. “The case has been a significant drain on the time and resources of the City and would have continued to be so through an estimated three-month trial that was scheduled to begin in May.”

The lawsuit was filed by demonstrators in September 2020 in a case which includes over 10,000 videos, more than one million documents, and “hundreds of interactions between the plaintiffs and law enforcement officers.”

“This settlement resolves the majority of the remaining claims arising out of the 2020 demonstration period and is a big step toward allowing the City to focus on the important work of today, while moving forward from events four years ago,” said Davidson.

As The Federalist notes;

The far-left city of Seattle became a hotspot for the politically charged riots in 2020 when violent demonstrations erupted in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. According to the Associated Press, demonstrators were hit with crowd control devices the city council had previously banned.

In February last year, the city settled a separate lawsuit in federal court related to the summer demonstrations. Seattle agreed to pay more than $3.6 million after a federal judge found officials deleted evidence of government failures to protect businesses during the “Capitol Hill Organized Protest” (CHOP).

. . .

CHOP is more popularly known as the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ), wherein far-left anarchists annexed a six-block area the group declared “autonomous” with their own border control and I.D. checks. Then-Democrat Mayor Jenny Durkan compared the autonomous zone to a “block party” and celebrated the demonstration as a “summer of love.”

The utopian project, however, was far from the peaceful “block party” the city’s mayor made it out to be.

“More than a dozen businesses and residents, led by the investment group Hunters Capital, sued the city over its handling of the three-week CHOP protests, claiming the city’s decision to tolerate — and in some cases aid — the closure of an eight-block section of Capitol Hill hurt their businesses,” according to the Seattle Times.

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Michael Yon joins Alex Jones to issue an emergency warning to those American and Texan patriots who wish to actively help protect the southern border.