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Dressed all in black, pop idol Madonna broke into her hit “Nothing Really Matters” Saturday night before throngs of joyful fans jammed onto Brazil’s famed Copacabana beach in Rio.

The green new deal and switch to “alternative’ energy looks like it’s going exactly as planned: costing the taxpayer trillions of dollars and generally pissing everybody off.

That was the case with a number of solar panel owners who are now finding it difficult to get their panels serviced, according to WBAL TV.

Solar panel installation is touted as offering benefits like reduced energy costs, environmental friendliness, and significant rebates. However, many homeowners have discovered a concerning issue within the industry: addressing technical problems can be exceedingly challenging — if not outright impossible.

Those interviewed shared experiences with various solar providers, each facing prolonged unresolved issues.

Tom Lucas, who installed solar panels in 2018, initially saw higher electricity production. Yet, by 2022, 20% of his system failed, leading to considerable losses. Despite having a 25-year warranty from Invaleon Solar Technologies, the issue remains unaddressed.

Lucas commented: “I’ve been totally ghosted. All I want is a working system. To me, even though I’m generating some electricity, it’s not right.”

Read more: “I’ve Been Totally Ghosted”: After Install, Solar Panels Become Maintenance Nightmare

The European bloc’s top diplomat lamented that not everyone sees Moscow as a threat

The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, has admitted that not every member state agrees to view Russia as Europe’s “the most existential threat.” He argued that such differences are jeopardizing the bloc’s policies, especially the resolve to provide military aid to Ukraine.

Speaking at Oxford University on Friday, Borrell said that he sees “more confrontation and less cooperation” in world affairs, and brought up instances of dissent among EU members. When it comes to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the conflict in Ukraine, some countries are failing to fall in line with Brussels, he said.

“Today, Putin is an existential threat to all of us. If Putin succeeds in Ukraine, he will not stop there,” Borrell stated, adding that Russia’s victory would undermine the security of Europe. However, “not everybody in the European Union shares this assessment,” he stressed.

Read more

Threat of sending Western troops to Ukraine necessary – Macron

“Some European Council’s members say: “Well, no, Russia is not an existential threat. At least not for me. I consider Russia a good friend,’” Borrell said, without calling out specific counties. “In a union governed by unanimity, our policies on Russia are always threatened by a single veto – one is enough.”

The EU imposed multiple rounds of sanctions on Moscow after Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. However, Prime Ministers Viktor Orban of Hungary and Robert Fico of Slovakia have refused to send weapons to Ukraine and stressed that the conflict should be resolved through negotiations.

Hungary blocked the EU’s $54 billion Ukraine aid package for months until Orban lifted the veto in February 2024.

Earlier this week, French President Emmanuel Macron once again refused to rule out sending NATO troops to Ukraine, arguing that “the survival of the continent” is at stake. His remarks were heavily criticized by Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto, who said that NATO boots on the ground in Ukraine could spark a all-out global war.

READ MORE: Kremlin accuses Macron and Cameron of dangerous talk

Moscow, meanwhile, blasted Macron for the continuation of dangerous “verbal escalation” that could lead to the conflict spiraling out of control.

The attacker has been shot dead by police

Australian police have shot dead a 16-year-old suspect who stabbed a member of the public at a car park in Perth on Saturday and then charged towards the officers.

“There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Western Australia Premier Roger Cook said at a news conference on Sunday. He added that “it appears he acted solely and alone.”

The stabbing took place at around 10 am local time at the Bunnings carpark in Willetton, a southern suburb of Perth.

Western Australian Police Commissioner Col Blanch told reporters that the suspect was “a Caucasian male,” who had converted to Islam. He called the police himself, warning that he was about to commit an unspecified “act of violence.”

Shortly after, police received another call, alerting that a “male with a knife was running around the car park.”

The assailant had managed to stab a man in his 30s in the back before the officers arrived. The victim has been hospitalized and is in stable condition.

According to Blanch, the attacker had mental health issues and was undergoing a police deradicalization course. The police chief added that the authorities were alerted by the local Muslim community shortly before the stabbing happened. 

“[The attacker] posted something online to make them concerned but we believe he sent relevant messages to some of those members who immediately responded by calling the police,” Blanch said.

“My thoughts are with those who have been affected by the incident in the Perth suburb of Willetton overnight,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wrote on X (formerly Twitter). He thanked the police “for acting swiftly to contain the incident.”

“We are a peace-loving nation and there is no place for violent extremism in Australia,” Albanese wrote.

DETAILS TO FOLLOW

The results of Thursday’s local elections are “disappointing,” Prime Minister Sunak said

The UK Conservative Party has suffered its worst defeat in decades, having lost nearly 500 council seats during this week’s local elections in England. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has admitted his party’s defeat, calling the results “disappointing.”

Overall, the Tories lost 473 of the 985 seats they were defending and lost control of 12 councils in the vote held on Thursday. The Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats emerged as the main victors, with Labour gaining eight councils and 185 seats, according to a Sky News tally. This is the worst showing for Tories since the late 1990s.

“It appears to be the worst local elections for the Conservatives since the final years of the era of Margaret Thatcher and John Major,” said Robert Hayward, a polling expert and a member of the House of Lords, as quoted by the New York Times.

Labour politician Chris Webb has won the Blackpool South by-election, beating Conservative David Jones. “This seismic win in Blackpool South is the most important result today,” Labour leader Keir Starmer told reporters, adding that the win “shows that we are firmly back in the service of working people.”

Read more

British MPs pass bill to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda

Another good news for Labour came from London, where Mayor Sadiq Khan was re-elected for a third term. “Londoners voted to give their city a fairer, safer, greener future,” Khan wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

The campaigning was centered around inflation and the cost-of-living crisis, as well local issues, such as the state of housing and the work of the NHS in different areas. 

Sunak said on Friday that it is “disappointing to lose good hardworking Conservative councilors.” He added that he remains “focused completely on the job at hand – that’s delivering for people across the country.”

Despite the upset, prime minister said he is hopeful that the voters “are going to stick with us” in the general election expected to take place in the second half of 2024.

The activists have shouted slogans against “funding genocide” during a ceremony at the Michigan Stadium

Dozens of pro-Palestine protesters disrupted the University of Michigan spring commencement ceremony on Saturday, demanding that the college cut ties with Israel over the ongoing war in Gaza. 

During the event at the Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, the students in keffiyehs and graduation cap chanted “Regents, regents, you can’t hide! You are funding genocide!” and “Disclose, divest, we will not stop!” They held up Palestinian flags as they were walking between the aisles. 

Some attendees shouted abuse at the protesters, with one person yelling “shut the f**k up.” Another person in the audience was heard screaming “You’re ruining our graduation!” 

According to the New York Times, a plane flew over the stadium with a sign that said “Free Palestine” and “Divest from Israel now.” Another plane carried a message “We stand with Israel. Jewish lives matter.”

🇵🇸 Graduates at the University of Michigan demonstrate for Palestine at the commencement ceremony in Ann Arbor today.

“Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.” 🇵🇸❤️ pic.twitter.com/ogbg5Tq3vL

— Adam Y. Abusalah (@adam_abusalah) May 4, 2024

University of Michigan commencement ceremony RUINED after mob of anti-Israel activists stormed the ceremony waving Palestinian flags.

“Palestine will live forever.”

pic.twitter.com/Bmp3z0inmn

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) May 4, 2024

The protest occurred after more than 2,300 Palestine supporters were arrested across over 70 US college campuses this week for sit-ins and refusing to leave makeshift encampments on university grounds, according to an NBC News tally. On several occasions, police resorted to using stun grenades and pepper spray when students and activists failed to comply with orders.

Read more

Suspended US students get education offer from Houthis

The affected universities issued statements saying they were forced to ask the police for help because the protesters were disturbing the education process and breaking campus regulations. Pro-Palestine activists have also been accused of accosting Jewish students and shouting anti-Semitic slogans.

“There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos,” President Joe Biden said in a televised statement from the White House on Thursday, adding that students have “the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.” 

More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed during Israel’s military campaign, which nears its seventh month. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated this week that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would enter the southern Gazan city of Rafah, which is crowded with Palestinian refugees. The IDF still intends to “eliminate Hamas’ battalions” in the area, Netanyahu said.

The latest round of fighting between Hamas and Israel erupted on October 7, when the Palestinian militants carried out a surprise raid into Israeli territory, killing some 1,200 people and taking more than 200 hostages. Dozens of captives were subsequently released as part of a prisoner swap during a weeklong ceasefire in November.

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

French President Emmanuel Macron’s desperate move to get individual NATO member nations to send their troops into Ukraine so as to stave off and prevent Ukraine’s defeat by Russia in the current war between Russia and Ukraine, was endorsed on April 22nd by the Rhodesist U.S. Council on Foreign Relations’s Foreign Affairs journal’s publication of “Europe — but Not NATO — Should Send Troops to Ukraine”. This idea of sending troops from America’s colonies (‘allies’) into Ukraine is similar to America’s own desperate move to send yet another $61 billion to Ukraine for the very same purpose: to win that NATO proxy-war against Russia. On May 2nd, the Foreign Affairs journal of the Rhodesist CFR headlined “American Aid Alone Won’t Save Ukraine: To Survive, Kyiv Must Build New Brigades — and Force Moscow to Negotiate”. Russia did negotiate in March and April of 2022, and offered Ukraine a deal they accepted (banning Ukraine from NATO, and stipulating that Russia will  retain Crimea), but then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson went to Kiev on April 9th, and instructed Zelensky to reject the deal. Ever since then, Russia’s terms have increased, not decreased, and the only way that this war can possibly end — short of a nuclear WW3 — will be by Ukraine’s capitulation. In other words: short of an escalation to nuclear war (which would destroy the world), a defeat of Ukraine by Russia (in a non-nuclear war) is now inevitable and the only question is when that capitulation by Ukraine will occur. There are increasing signs that it will occur soon.

The great American investigative journalist in Russia, John Helmer, headlined on May 2nd, “CANADA IS LOSING ITS WAR AGAINST RUSSIA SO IT HAS THREATENED SENIOR ARMY OFFICERS WITH COURT MARTIAL FOR ‘DISLOYALTY’”, and he provided some of the most convincing evidence to-date about the imminent collapse of NATO in this war; so, I shall here excerpt enough of it so as to give a sense of it and of its cited evidences:

A senior Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) officer, who is the Assistant Chief of Staff at the NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC), faces court martial, “dismissal with disgrace”, and loss of his military pension for having disagreed with Canadian, American, and British military planners of Ukrainian battlefield operations against Russia. His disagreement was in private, when the officers were asking for his professional assessment, and didn’t like what he told them.

Colonel Robert Kearney was charged by the Canadian military police on April 23. The charge sheet says he faces “five (5) x counts of Conduct Prejudice to the Good Order and Discipline pursuant to section 129 of the National Defence Act.”

Public disclosure was delayed by the Department of National Defence in Ottawa until Monday, April 29, when a press release claimed Kearney had been under investigation since another officer filed a complaint against Kearney last November. According to the ministry statement, the military police had “received a complaint of a senior CAF officer allegedly making derogatory and disloyal comments about Senior CAF and NATO members.”

Section 129 of the law refers to “any act, conduct, disorder or neglect”, but it doesn’t define what “good order or discipline” means in the Kiev and Lvov bunkers where Canadians tell the Ukrainians what to do. Canadian sources believe the law has rarely been used against an officer of colonel’s rank, and never in a court martial of an officer for warning that military plans risked loss of Canadian lives and resources.

Canadian military sources believe Kearney is being court-martialed now because the Canadian government’s policy to finance, arm, train, plan, and direct Ukrainian operations against Russia is being defeated, and that the military collapse east of Kiev now risks loss of more territory and the lives of Canadians currently working in the Ukraine and at cross-border bases in Poland and Romania. At least one thousand Canadians have been counted by the Russian Defense Ministry on the battlefield since the start of the Special Military Operation; by March of this year, 422 had been confirmed killed in action.

“The timing of the alleged offences,” says a Canadian veteran who served with US and NATO units in Afghanistan, “was when the Germans took over command of NATO’s rapid reaction force which has been building up men and materiel, including heavy tanks and F-16s, in Romania for a plan to attack Russian forces around Odessa. Kearney’s court martial is a warning to his fellow officers not to object or predict destruction of the NATO forces engaged.”

“Kearney said things that clearly offended the top decision-makers in Ottawa,” the source says. “Criticizing the mission meant criticizing [Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia] Freeland [lead image, left] and the UCC [Ukrainian Canadian Congress]. Criticizing how the mission was being conducted also meant criticizing the Americans and British. That’s what has drawn the charge of disloyalty.”

Left: Colonel Robert Kearney from a social media posting; right, Kearney’s Meritorious Service Medal citation of May 2012. An earlier MSM was awarded to Kearney in October 2008. This medal is a US military award to foreign, allied soldiers. Following his first medal citation Kearney was promoted from command of a CAF training base for snipers, tankers, and artillerymen to a divisional headquarters in Toronto.

Colonel Kearney’s first offence allegedly occurred in December of 2021; this was nine months after Kearney had been promoted to the ARRC staff post in the UK, replacing another Canadian colonel. …

Since 1945, ARRC has been a British-led land-attack unit aimed at Russia, when “the scale of the Red Threat it faced was daunting.” While British generals lead the ARRC, Canadian officers staff the deputy posts, and troops from several European states fill the ranks. In the past they have been despatched to fight against Serbia and Bosnia, against the Iraqis in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Since 2022, the unit has been focusing on operations in the Ukraine. In February 2023, a lance corporal whose name was kept secret was awarded a unit medal for “exceptionally rigorous analysis and sound judgement to the chain of command supporting commanders’ decision making up to the most senior levels…Without his dedication, skill as an intelligencer and confidence as a team member, the HQ would not have been on the front foot throughout the Ukraine crisis.”

By then the difference between Kearney’s assessments and the lance corporal’s had begun to be noticed. Kearney reported to the AARC chief of staff, Major General Mike Keating (right), a British army helicopter pilot who saw action in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He was then vetted for a general’s command by the Pentagon before his promotion to a US unit in Texas, and then assignment to the ARRC in May 2023. As a graduate student at King’s College in London, he studied under the Russia academic warfighter Lawrence Freedman.

“Kearney is a competent officer, the charges are bullshit, and General Keating sacrificed his subordinate,” speculates a Canadian military source. “Maybe the Ukrainians heard what was being said, and put pressure on Keating to stop the rot. I mean, the truth.”

There is no reference to Kearney as Keating’s deputy in the ARRC archive; the Canadian Defence Ministry press release is keeping secret what disagreements Kearney had with Keating and other officers on the ARRC staff over plans, operations, and intelligence on the war against Russia in the Ukraine. “This case will now proceed through the Military Justice System and no further information can be released at this time”, the ministry has said.

By publishing the offence allegations and concealing Kearney’s criticisms, the Canadian government and the ARRC have eliminated the presumption of Kearney’s innocence, and ensured his court martial conviction. By keeping the case particulars secret, the political bomb Kearney’s case represents is being defused. No Canadian journalist dares to investigate. …

Like the two Canadian military reporters, no serving or retired Canadian military officer has attempted to identify what exactly Kearney had said or written to trigger the military police investigation, and what was the nationality of the officers involved.

The Canadian veteran of the NATO mission in Afghanistan observes that “instead of more insight regarding Kearney’s position, we are getting nothing but a list of charges within a temporal context only a few of us can identify as significant. Four of the five counts he’s charged with occurred January to November 2023, when the grand Ukrainian counter-offensive had turned into a grand Ukrainian slaughter and NATO defeat. His apparent griping also became noticeable to ‘senior NATO members’ after the NATO Rapid Reaction Force came under German command and deployed to Romania. After seeing the US and NATO performance in Afghanistan, he knew damn well that beating the Russians, even with an army of Ukrainian zombies, was a pipe dream.”

The source notes that during Kearney’s time on the staff of Canadian General Jonathan Vance he had seen “up close the aberrant behavior”. Criticism of sexual misconduct by Vance and other senior Canadian officers has been widespread throughout the active and retired Canadian services.

Source: https://www.espritdecorps.ca/

The capture of the state by the Ukrainian lobby led by Freeland, and of the chiefs of Defence Staff by the Pentagon has produced one of the most race-hating governments in the NATO group; click to read more here.

The source notes that the first charge against Kearney dated in December 2021 is “interesting as well. That was during the time of NATO preparations to back a Ukrainian offensive into the Donetsk and Lugansk republics and into Russia proper.

The best military analyst on this war (the one with the most consistency of his predictions about it turning out to have been true), is Brian Berletic, and here is his summary of the broader situation at his twitter site on May 3rd:

https://twitter.com/BrianJBerletic

@BrianJBerletic

Kiev doesn’t run the US.

Israel, like Ukraine, is a proxy. 

You need to convince your proxies you actually care about them and aren’t just using them.

US foreign policy is driven by think tanks funded by a US-European based corporate combine producing policy papers, transformed into bills by lawyers, brought to Washington by lobbyists to be rubber stamped, then sold to the public via the corporate media.

We should be outraged, speak up again, expose, oppose ALL interest groups influencing OUR representatives and work on building a greater balance of power.

Washington/Wall Street knows this will never happen if people can’t even understand the true nature of the problem.

The US sends billions to both regimes [Ukraine and Israel] annually – without this money either regime ceases to exist.

The US is run by US-based corporations which spend infinitely more on lobbying/bribery & other forms of influence/coercion than any foreign interests.

when examining leverage, follow the money, not the PR stunts specifically designed to mislead the public both in the US and in the targeted nation.

Western Analyst Calls on Ukraine to Build “Additional Brigades” for Fall Offensive.

The article appearing in Foreign Affairs [on May 2nd] claims: “it is crucial for Ukraine to build and train additional brigades now, so that it can mount an active defense in the fall;”

Russia has destroyed Ukrainian forces trained by NATO from 2014-2022, that Ukraine can just make “additional brigades” for fall reflects profound ignorance;

Ukraine is suffering the inevitable outcome of a successful [Russian] strategy of attrition.

It cannot be reversed short of other nations sending in their own forces to replace Ukrainian troops but the problem of insufficient ammunition production remains.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

The meaning of the words ‘civil society’ changes depending on whether Washington is speaking about protests inside or outside the American border

The elites and mainstream media of the West are so addicted to double standards that spotting yet another one is hardly news. These are the people who have just given us genocide re-labeled as ”self-defense,” who abhor spheres of influence except when they are global and belong to Washington (with a sidekick role for Brussels), and who insist on the rule of law while threatening the International Criminal Court if it so much as dares look their way.

Yet there is something special about the latest case of Western ‘values’ schizophrenia, this time about the concept of ‘civil society’ in conjunction with two political struggles, one in the US and the other in the Caucasus nation of Georgia.

In the US, students, professors, and others are protesting against the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and against American participation in that crime. In Georgia, the issue at stake is a proposed law to impose transparency on the sprawling and unusually powerful NGO sector. Its critics denounce this law as a government power grab and as somehow ‘Russian’ (which, spoiler alert, it is not).

The very different reactions to these two cases of intense public contention by the West’s political and mainstream media elites show that, for them, there are really two kinds of civil society: There is the ‘vibrant’ variety, with ‘vibrant’ an almost comically ossified cliche, used by the Washington Post Editorial Board, in EU statements, and by White House spokesman John Kirby, to name only a few. It is almost as if someone had sent around a memo on proper terminology. This vibrant, good kind of civil society is to be celebrated and supported.

And then there is the wrong kind of civil society, which must be shut down. US President Joe Biden has just expressed the essence of this attitude: “We are a civil society, and order must prevail.” This is, of course, a bizarre misreading of the idea of civil society. Ideally, its key features are autonomy from the state and the capacity to establish an effective counterweight, and even, if necessary, to offer resistance to it. Putting the emphasis on “order” instead is ignorant or dishonest. In reality, civil society makes no sense, even as an ideal, if it is not granted a substantial degree of freedom to be disorderly. A civil society that is so orderly as to disturb no one is a fig leaf for enforced conformism and – at least – incipient authoritarianism.

Read more

The top pro-Jewish organization in the US has shown it isn’t what it claims to be

But let’s set aside the mundane fact that Joe Biden says things that display ignorance or duplicity. What is more important is that ‘order,’ in his usage, is a transparent euphemism: According to the New York Times, over the last two weeks, over 2,300 protesters have been arrested on almost 50 American campuses. Often, arrests have been made with demonstrative brutality. Police have used riot gear, stun grenades, and rubber bullets. They have assaulted students as well as some professors with massive aggression.

The most well-known individual case at this moment is that of Annelise Orleck, a professor at Dartmouth College. Orleck is 65 years old and attempted to protect students from police violence. In response, she was slammed into the ground in the worst MMA style, knelt on by beefy policemen, who clearly lack elementary decency, and dragged away with whiplash trauma, as if she had been in a serious car accident. Ironically (if that’s the word), Orleck is Jewish and, at one time, used to be the head of her universities program in Jewish Studies.

In another, extremely disturbing development, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a violent police crackdown – including use of rubber bullets – was preceded by a vicious attack by so-called pro-Israeli ”counter-protesters.” In reality, this was a mob out to inflict maximum harm on the anti-genocide protesters, who, a New York Times investigation has found, maintained an almost entirely defensive stance. University security forces and the police failed to intervene for hours, letting the “counter-protesters” run wild. That is a pattern every historian of the rise of fascism in Weimar Germany will recognize: First the SA mobs of the rising Nazi party had a free hand to assault the Left, then the police would go after the same Left as well.

That is the real face of the “order” that President Biden and all too many in the West’s establishments endorse. But only at home. When it comes to the unrest in Georgia, their tone is entirely different. Make no mistake, there has been substantial violence – and what Biden would denounce as “chaos” if it happened in America – in Georgia. Indeed, while the US anti-genocide protesters have not been violent but disorderly (yes, those are very different things), the protesters in Georgia have used genuine violence, for instance, when they tried to storm the parliament.

Nothing remotely comparable has been done by the US anti-genocide protesters. Regarding the trespassing and causing public inconveniences that so agitate the US president, there has been plenty of that in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. By Biden’s logic a protest must not even disturb or delay a campus graduation ceremony. What would that imply for blocking a central traffic node in the capital city?

Read more

Georgia accuses Washington of trying to spark ‘two revolutions’

Don’t get me wrong: The Georgian protesters report violent police tactics used against them as well, and, more broadly, the rights or wrongs of their cause, or the draft law they reject are beyond the scope of this article. I do believe they are used by the West for a geopolitical play Color-Revolution-style, but that is not the point.

The pertinent point here is, once again, staggering Western hypocrisy: A West that thinks trying to storm parliament is part of having a “vibrant” civil society in Georgia, cannot mass-arrest and brutalize anti-genocide protesters on its own campuses. That is, of course, also the message of Georgian prime minister Irakli Kobakhidze, who clearly has had enough of the absurdity.

In a resonant post on X, Kobakhidze objected forcefully to American “false statements” about the controversial draft law as well as, more importantly, US interference in Georgian politics in general. The prime minister, in essence and very plausibly for the non-naive, named and shamed Washington’s habit of trying out a “color revolution” at regular intervals. Finally, he reminded his American interlocutors “about a brutal crackdown of the students’ protest rally in New York City.” With that phrase clearly standing for the totality of police repression against young Americans who object to genocide, Kobakhidze turned the tables.

And that is, perhaps, the most intriguing take-away from this fresh but not unprecedented episode of the long-running saga of Western double standards. To find condemnation and suppression of almost entirely peaceful protests against genocide, while more violent protests against a law to regulate NGOs are being celebrated – that is shameful but not new. As before, geopolitics trumps ‘values.’

But ‘civil society’ used to be a key concept for projecting Western soft power by, in essence, subversion and manipulation. It was so useful because its ideological charge was so powerful that its mere invocation stifled resistance. Now, by displaying how it handles its own civil society at home, the West is ruining yet another useful illusion.

 

Voters in England have taken to the polls in contests to elect new mayors across the country.

The party sees victory in London, Manchester and clinches a close win in the West Midlands mayor race.