Herrera “initially donated $2.5 million to MAGA Inc. in late 2024 as her father, Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan-Italian banker, was facing federal charges for trying to bribe the governor of Puerto Rico in 2020,” said the report. “In May, a top Trump appointee at the Justice Department authorized a misdemeanor plea deal to settle the case, overruling career prosecutors who had pushed for a harsher sentence. In July, Ms. Herrera donated another $1 million to MAGA Inc.”

This comes after a report back in August detailed how MAGA Inc. is effectively operating as a platform to sell access and favor with the president, despite it ostensibly being an independent and distinct entity not under control of the president by law.

It also comes as Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald reporter who has been covering the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case for years, has speculated that donors to pro-Trump causes who may appear in the Epstein case files are leaning on Trump and the Justice Department to obscure their names in the Congressionally-required release of the documents.

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At the heart of the pollution-poverty nexus lies inequality. Poor communities disprop or tionately inhabit environmentally hazardous spaces – along polluted rivers, near landfills, industrial zones, highways, or mining belts. These locations are not chosen freely but imposed by unaffordable housing, insecure land tenure, and social marginalization. In urban India, slum settlements often emerge on floodplains or beside drains, exposing residents to contaminated water, toxic air, and recurring disasters. In rural areas, land degradation, pesticide overuse, and deforestation affect small farmers and landless labourers the most, stripping them of productive assets. Environmental pollution directly deepens poverty through health impacts.

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France is bracing for a major farmers’ uprising as anger explodes over the EU–Mercosur trade deal. With tractors blocking highways and banners accusing Brussels of sacrificing French agriculture, farmers are now threatening to take their protest to Paris and bring the capital to a standstill. The 25-year-old trade agreement, expected to be signed in Paraguay on January 12, could flood European markets with cheaper South American agricultural imports. Farmers fear this will crush local farms, weaken food safety standards and threaten livelihoods across rural France. With “Next Stop Paris” banners going up and blockades being planned, the battle over Europe’s agriculture has officially begun.

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Farmers are protesting production costs and want guaranteed production prices that would cover them – a measure that would flout European Union regulations – as well as subsidized electricity prices, exemption from value-added tax, and no tariff-free imports of produce from regions with whom the EU has signed trade agreements. They also demand an immediate doubling of pensions, and, protesting delays in subsidy payments following the farm subsidies scandal, they demand that the government reverse its decision, imposed by the EU, to essentially scrap subsidies disbursement agency OPEKEPE and shift responsibility to the independent tax authority AADE. Farmers are also against a system for recording production and shipments online.

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Scammers steal billions of dollars in food stamps from needy people every year. Why isn’t Congress doing anything to stop them?
[…]
MAGA hacks like Rollins seldom acknowledge that a SNAP beneficiary is likelier to be the victim of a crime rather than its perpetrator. So-called targeted benefit fraud is common, costing an estimated $12 billion per year. And Rollins has to know that a thief who steals directly from a SNAP recipient is much likelier to be a hardened criminal than a SNAP recipient who bends or breaks some eligibility rule.

“This is white-collar crime,” Mark Haskin of the Agriculture Department’s special investigations unit told an Atlanta TV news reporter last year. “This is organized crime.” A Romanian transnational mafia gang known as the Dorneanu Organized Crime Group, for instance, allegedly led by one Mihai Dorneanu, stole over $180 million from California welfare funds, leading in February 2025 to 11 arrests by Romanian authorities, five by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and four by local police. Two members remained at large after they cut their ankle monitors and jumped bail in 2023. One of them was later arrested in Australia.
[…]
Vilsack’s successor, Rollins, included SNAP benefit theft among the items targeted in her “National Farm Security Action Plan,” but her main solution was to punish retailers judged insufficiently vigilant. In general, Rollins seems more preoccupied with chasing undocumented immigrants, penalizing states that didn’t suspend full SNAP payments during the government shutdown, and making all SNAP recipients reapply for benefits. Addressing actual SNAP fraud committed by real criminals like the Dorneanu Organized Crime Group is a low priority.

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Pompeo’s tenure as CIA Director in 2017-2018 coincided with a significant expansion of the CIA’s involvement in Ukraine. The CIA set up 12 clandestine bases following the February 2014 CIA-backed Maidan coup that fueled the conflict with Russia.

In November, AP News reported that Pompeo had joined the advisory board of Ukraine’s leading defense company, Fire Point, which develops long-range drones capable of striking targets deep inside Russia.[2]

At a press conference announcing his appointment, Pompeo said that his mission with the company was to help Fire Point become an important supplier for Western hardware [i.e., drones].”[3]
[…]
Allegedly, Fire Point CEO Yehor Skalyha first developed the know-how with drones when he used them in camera work that he did in the film-making industry.

Emerging from Ukraine’s film and TV industry, Fire Point, according to the Times, performed location work for a 2016 romantic comedy in which current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky starred.

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According to Redfin, investors were responsible for buying 48 of the 119 lots for sale in the Pacific Palisades area during the third quarter. In nearby Altadena, investors purchased 27 of the 61 lots available, and in Malibu, 19 of the 43 lots for sale were bought by investors.

Redfin’s analysis indicates that many investors made lowball offers for lots in Altadena, where some of the destroyed homes had been built in the 1940s and 1950s. These lots have been selling in the $500,000 to $600,000 range. The report noted that while some owners rejected these offers, others were forced to sell as they lacked the money to rebuild.

By comparison, a typical empty lot sold for $1.6 million in Pacific Palisades, and for $1.3 million in Malibu.

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The commodification of reality and the manufacture of demand have had serious implications for the construction of human beings in the late 20th century, where, to quote philosopher Herbert Marcuse, “people recognize themselves in their commodities.” Marcuse’s critique of needs, made more than 50 years ago, was not directed at the issues of scarce resources or ecological waste, although he was aware even at that time that Marx was insufficiently critical of the continuum of progress and that there needed to be “a restoration of nature after the horrors of capitalist industrialisation have been done away with.”

Marcuse directed his critique at the way people, in the act of satisfying our aspirations, reproduce dependence on the very exploitive apparatus that perpetuates our servitude. Hours of work in the United States have been growing since 1950, along with a doubling of consumption per capita between 1950 and 1990. Marcuse suggested that this “voluntary servitude (voluntary inasmuch as it is introjected into the individual) … can be broken only through a political practice which reaches the roots of containment and contentment in the infrastructure of man [sic], a political practice of methodical disengagement from and refusal of the Establishment, aiming at a radical transvaluation of values.”

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In an article this week, Fu Xiaoqiang, president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), said the world had entered a decisive phase of transition, marked by accelerating multipolarity, intensifying security concerns and growing strain on a global order shaped by Western dominance.
“Market appeal, technological innovation and institutional influence are becoming the core metrics of competition, reshaping how states pursue power and legitimacy,” he said in a review published on Tuesday by the Beijing-based think tank affiliated with the Ministry of State Security.
Fu attributed this shift to a new wave of technological and industrial transformation driven by advances in artificial intelligence, new energy, biotechnology and digital infrastructure.

He said these factors were rapidly reconfiguring global supply chains and innovation networks and exposing the limits of an international order built around Western industrial and financial dominance.

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Lifesaving items – including some medical and shelter equipment – appear on an Israeli blacklist of dual-use items, which the government says must be tightly restricted because they could be exploited and weaponized by Hamas or other terror groups in the Strip.

Despite this, Israeli authorities have, for at least a month, let private businesses bring several dual-use goods – including generators and metal pallets – through the same checkpoints that currently block such items for aid groups, the Guardian said.

The equipment is now being sold openly in Gaza markets, said the news outlet, citing military, diplomatic and humanitarian sources.

“It seems highly improbable that the Israelis don’t know about them,” the outlet quoted an unnamed diplomatic source as saying. “It’s very shocking that these things are able to enter through commercial channels.”

Gazan-born analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib told The Guardian regarding commercial deliveries to Gaza that “you’re not just paying fees and taxes to Hamas in Gaza, you’re paying fees and taxes to merchants on the Israeli side.”

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