— 🇮🇱/🇮🇷 NEW: A poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute between June 15 and 17 reveals that the majority of Jews in Israel believe Iranian civilian lives hold no value in the context of the Israeli aggression against Iran

When asked to what extent Israel should take the 'sufferings of the Iranian civilian population' into account, almost three-quarters of Jewish Israelis (73%) said 'not at all or to a fairly small extent.'

Similar polls have been conducted in the past regarding military operations in Gaza and Lebanon, with the majority of Israelis supporting genocide and ethnic cleansing, and a significant portion believing that 'Amalek should be erased' and that 'all inhabitants of an enemy city should be killed, including women and children.'

@Middle_East_Spectator

Rhetorically, this was among the less-remarked gifts of this campaign: to see and speak to working people in both the bonds of universality and with the dignity of specificity. But Mamdani wasn’t just making a gesture; he was choosing a side. While he vowed in the same speech to be “a mayor for every New Yorker,” his campaign has advocated, he said, “with no apology,” on behalf of a particular New York, a city where hours and commutes are long, paychecks stretched, and housing precarious. Such commitment shouldn’t count as rare or brave in urban politics, but it does. As a candidate, Zohran addresses city life with neither the doomsday paranoia of the MAGA right nor the vacuous optimism of so much mainstream Democratic rhetoric.

And Gaza. What does it mean that, in 2025, a mere call for equal rights for all Israeli citizens stirs more outrage than a plan for publicly owned grocery stores? Against two national parties in thrall to a genocidal regime and reflexively hostile to the very notion of Palestinian humanity, Mamdani spoke with the same force and clarity in defense of Gaza’s people as he did in support of working New Yorkers. Mamdani was always going to be labeled an antisemite by politicians and operators running cover for Zionist slaughter; his actual answers to all the rhetorical traps and ludicrous insinuations, the badgering questions about Israel and intifada, were almost irrelevant. Yet he did answer them, with conviction and without apology. Witness the interview with Stephen Colbert, where Mamdani meets the late night host’s anxious, circuitous interrogation about Jewish “safety” with plainspoken poise. The antisemitism panic has come so unmoored from empirical reality that any contact with that reality is a bracing risk.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/a-knock-at-the-door/

9) Despite what his opponents claim, Zohran is not a dogmatic extremist but a radical pragmatist. He could not have gotten this far had he not focused on bread-and-butter economic issues, spoken in a commonsense language, ran as a Democrat, dropped his support for defunding the police, and endorsed Brad Lander. Zohran refused to drop his support for democratic socialism or his opposition to Zionist apartheid, but performative ultraleftism was anathema to this campaign.

10) It took a liberal-Left alliance to defeat Cuomo. A huge amount of credit is due to Brad Lander for being a man of principle who refused to punch left. At the same time, Zohran smartly rejected a widespread leftist tendency to treat liberals and liberalism only as ideological competitors to be fought. Look at how he adopted the best parts of the “abundance agenda,” how he cross-endorsed Lander, and how he framed his criticisms of Israel in the language of liberal equal rights. Leftists can’t defeat the old establishment — let alone overcome the Right — on their own. And mutuality cuts both ways: we can’t ally with liberals only when we’re in the lead.

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/zohran-mamdani-nyc-mayor-cuomo/

China’s installations of wind and solar in May are enough to generate as much electricity as Poland, as the world’s second-biggest economy breaks further records with its rapid buildup of renewable energy infrastructure.

China installed 93 GW of solar capacity last month – almost 100 solar panels every second, according to an analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Wind power installations reached 26 GW, the equivalent of about 5,300 turbines.

While estimates for the amount of power generated by solar panels and wind turbines vary depending on their location and weather conditions, Myllyvirta calculated that May’s installations alone could generate as much electricity as Poland, Sweden or the United Arab Emirates.

Between January and May, China added 198 GW of solar and 46 GW of wind, enough to generate as much electricity as Indonesia or Turkey.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/26/china-breaks-more-records-with-massive-build-up-of-wind-and-solar-power

— 🇵🇸/🇮🇱 NEW: Two days ago, Israeli media outlet Haaretz published testimonies from IDF soldiers and officers, confirming previous reports that the murder of Palestinian civilians who are seeking aid is systematic and a deliberate policy of the IDF, and even has a name, 'Operation Salted Fish'

Israeli soldiers have killed at least 570 civilians and injured over 4,000 as they were seeking aid at the GHF (Gaza Humanitarian Foundation) distribution sites.

Additionally, Israel has been lacing the flour bags at aid distribution sites with Oxycodone.

Israel has previously been confirmed to have funded, trained, and armed ISIS-affiliated gangs in Gaza to loot the aid trucks.

Furthermore, the death toll of 56,000 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, murdered by Israel has been found by researchers as 'significantly underreported.' In January 2025, experts found that at least 75,000 people were killed by Israeli munitions, with the toll being estimated to be close to 100,000 by now.

Similarly, 'The Lancet' medical publication found the deaths to be underreported by 40%.

A recent map published by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs showed a reduction of more than 200,000 in Gaza's population.

@Middle_East_Spectator

The first two decades of the century witnessed a steady increase in technology integration (or less decoupling), but China’s dependence on the U.S. increased (decreased) during the first (second) decade. Decoupling in a technology field predicts China’s growing dependence on U.S. technology, which, in turn, predicts less decoupling further down the road. Decoupling is associated with more patent outputs in China, but lower firm productivity and valuation. China’s innovation-oriented industrial policies trade off the inherent conflict between indigenous innovation and firm competitiveness.

https://voxchina.org/show-3-261.html

1. Patents that are important for innovation in that they shift the knowledge frontier have become much less important on average, reflecting an overall decline in innovativeness and increase in crowdedness of patenting in China.
2. There is positive growth in the number of breakthrough patents in China (those with the greatest importance), but this growth has declined steadily over time.
3. Knowledge within China has become more important than knowledge outside China for driving the direction of innovation in China.
4. Knowledge produced by Chinese entities within China has become more important than knowledge produced by foreign entities within China.

https://voxchina.org/show-3-405.html

All major asset classes in China have significant higher volatilities than their counterparts in the US market, but they do not always yield larger returns. Small-company stocks, short-, medium-, and long-term treasury bonds outperform their US counterparts, while large stocks underperform and long-term enterprise bonds yield similar returns.

https://voxchina.org/show-3-282.html