🇺🇸 🌍 City sued for paying hundreds of Black residents $25,000 in reparations

🔶️ Evanston, a Chicago suburb, has been credited with launching the country’s first government-funded reparations program for Black Americans. It has paid out nearly $5 million to 193 of the town’s Black residents over the past two years.

🔶️ But now a conservative advocacy group has filed a class-action lawsuit to kill the program, arguing that it discriminates against the suburb’s non-Black residents.

🔶️ The lawsuit is part of a wave of cases spurred on the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions. Conservative groups have since targeted diversity fellowships and waged a legal battle to force the federal Minority Business Development Agency to open up to White business owners.

🔶️ “This lawsuit is part of a larger movement to challenge race-conscious programs in all aspects of society,” said Jason Schwartz, a lawyer with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who is representing the Fearless Fund, a venture capital firm that provides grants to Black female entrepreneurs, against a similar lawsuit.

🔶️ In recent years, more than a dozen states and cities, including New York and Boston, have begun studying the possibility of offering reparations to their Black residents. California lawmakers are considering legislation to establish a state agency to oversee potential reparations programs.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/06/04/evanston-reparations-lawsuit/

https://archive.ph/S2wCc

🇫🇷 French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin wants to dissolve the Groupe union défense (GUD) for being an ”extreme right-wing organisation”

Darmanin is joined by Jordan Bardella from Le Pen's, National Rally (RN) who promises that, if RN performs well in the upcoming election, he, as prime-minister, will dissolve GUD and other "extremist left-wing groups".

🔗 https://www.bfmtv.com/politique/gouvernement/gerald-darmanin-va-proposer-a-emmanuel-macron-la-dissolution-du-gud-organisation-d-extreme-droite_AN-202406190294.html

🇫🇷 National Rally withdraws support for a candidate in Morbihan Department, Bretagne, suspected of antisemitism!

🔗 leparisien

🇫🇷 🌐 🇺🇦 Bardella backpedals on taking France out of NATO strategic military command

🔶️ National Rally President Jordan Bardella said at the Eurosatory arms show outside Paris in Villepinte that he “doesn’t plan to question the commitments France has made on the international stage” if voters give his party a majority that enables him to lead a new government, in what would be an awkward power-sharing arrangement with President Emmanuel Macron.

🔶️ Referring to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Bardella said that "France mustn’t leave NATO’s military command while we are at war, because it would considerably weaken France’s responsibility on the European scene and, obviously, its credibility with regard to its allies.”

🔶️ The comments pulled back from a campaign promise made by his party in its manifesto for the 2022 French presidential election. “The priority will be to leave the integrated NATO command,” the 2022 manifesto read, a move that would have taken French military staff out of the NATO body that plans operations, and weakened France’s role and influence within NATO.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/leader-bardella-backpedals-taking-france-nato-strategic-military-111247163

— ❗️🇱🇧 Nasrallah: 'We have intel that the Israeli Air Force is training in Cyprus, to use its airports. We warn Cyprus, if it opens its airports to Israel during a potential war, we will treat it as a part of the war'

@Middle_East_Spectator

🇺🇸 🇷🇺 Niall Ferguson: We’re All Soviets Now

⬛️ A government with a permanent deficit and a bloated military. A bogus ideology pushed by elites. Poor health among ordinary people. Senescent leaders. Sound familiar?

🔶️ I first pointed out that we’re in Cold War II back in 2018. But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets.

🔶️ A chronic “soft budget constraint” in the public sector, which was a key weakness of the Soviet system? I see a version of that in the U.S. deficits forecast by the Congressional Budget Office to exceed 5% of GDP for the foreseeable future.

🔶️ The insertion of the central government into the investment decision-making process? I see that too, despite the hype around the Biden administration’s “industrial policy.”

🔶️ We have a military that is simultaneously expensive and unequal to the tasks it confronts, as Senator Roger Wicker’s newly published report makes clear.

🔶️ The share of GDP going on interest payments on the federal debt will be double what we spend on national security by 2041, thanks partly to the fact that the rising cost of the debt will squeeze defense spending down from 3% of GDP this year to a projected 2.3% in 30 years’ time.

🔶️ Even more striking to me are the political, social, and cultural resemblances I detect between the U.S. and the USSR. Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership.

🔶️ Another notable feature of late Soviet life was total public cynicism about nearly all institutions. To reread Russians’ complaints about their lives in the 1980s is to come across more than a few eerie foreshadowings of the American present.

🔶️ The mass self-destruction of Americans captured in the phrase "deaths of despair" for years has been ringing a faint bell in my head. This week I remembered where I had seen it before: in late Soviet and post–Soviet Russia.

🔶️ Like the Soviet system as a whole, the U.S. healthcare system has evolved so that a whole bunch of vested interests can extract rents. The bloated, dysfunctional bureaucracy is great for the nomenklatura, lousy for the proles.

🔶️ As in the late Soviet Union, the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.

🔶️ A bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot ? Check. A population that no longer regards patriotism, religion, having children, or community involvement as important? Check. How about a massive disaster that lays bare the utter incompetence and mendacity that pervades every level of government? For Chernobyl, read Covid.

https://www.thefp.com/p/were-all-soviets-now

🇮🇱🇨🇾❌🇱🇧🇮🇷The Cypriot ambassador to Israel, in response to Nasrallah’s threats:

Our relationship with Israel is strong