Zerohedge

McDonald’s told investors earlier that lower-income consumers remained under financial pressure in the fourth quarter as the inflation storm sparked by the Biden-Harris administration eroded their spending on Big Macs and McFlurries. The warning from MCD suggests headwinds for this consumer segment lingers into spring. 

Additional consumer insights come from Goldman’s Emily Ghosh, Nishi Agarwal, and colleagues, who published a lower-income activity dashboard. The dashboard aggregates macro data, industry insights, and high-frequency indicators—such as app downloads and store traffic—to reveal mixed monthly trends among consumers earning less than $30K annually.

Here’s more color on the low-income consumer update from Goldman: 

While we think investors are more confident in the health of the consumer in 2025, we continue to receive questions on the overall health of the lowest income consumer given mixed data points from macro indicators and company commentary. Our lower income activity dashboard analyzes a wide range of data across macro, industry, and higher frequency sources (e.g., app downloads, web traffic, and store traffic) in an effort to evaluate the health of that consumer cohort. We observe that monthly trends that reflect the health of the lower income consumer (defined as households that earn , with a possible tailwind coming from lower gasoline prices and improved employment trends and likely offset with headwinds from weaker credit metrics and mixed consumer confidence, while engagement trends reflect a wide range across discretionary retailers. Overall, the data set suggests a relatively consistent backdrop for the lower end consumer from last quarter with discretionary spending remaining selective. We will continue to monitor company commentary around the consumer as we progress through earnings.

Lower-income activity dashboard

Ghosh’s note on mixed consumer trends for the working poor is in line with McDonald’s fourth-quarter earnings that reported: 

The low-income consumer in the US was still down double-digits in Q4, and this segment is overweighted in the industry relative to the US in total.

Meanwhile, more broadly, consumers are draining personal savings and adding insurmountable credit card debt, as shown by the latest consumer credit debt data (See: Consumer Credit Unexpectedly Surges By Most On Record Despite All-Time High APRs). 

Nothing to worry about here…

Slide.

The takeaway is that low-income consumers continue to face strong headwinds that are likely to persist through the spring, although lower energy costs may provide some much-needed relief.

The Sarandí stream that winds through the dense outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina, has recently turned blood red, leading to fears of a potential industrial chemical leak. 

Local authorities are investigating the stream’s change in color following initial reports on Feb. 6.

Located near Villa Inflamable in Avellaneda, 9 miles south of the Argentine capital, Jacob Burg reports for The Epoch Times that the stream runs alongside tanneries and other industries that use chemicals to turn animal skins into leather. Residents quickly uploaded photos of the crimson stream to social media, spurring fears of the cause of the color change.

One local resident recounted waking early one morning and smelling strong odors.

“At 5:30 a.m., we already had a special and hazardous waste incinerator spewing pollutants into the air,” María Ducomls told The Associated Press. Shortly after she saw the stream, she said, “It looks like a stream of blood; we have never seen it like this.”

The stream flows into the Río de la Plata, a large body of water between Uruguay and Argentina.

Avellaneda officials believe there may be aniline in the stream’s water, a toxic substance used in medicines and dyes.

After officials took water samples, they filed a complaint with the Buenos Aires province Ministry of Infrastructure and Public Services, which will investigate the incident.

According to local residents, the stream has changed to different colors in the past, including gray, green, violet, blue, and brown, sometimes with an oily surface. These reports have led to complaints filed against local businesses since the 1990s. Some cases alleging environmental contamination are still open.

The Province of Buenos Aires’ environmental ministry said in a statement that it had responded on Feb. 6 to a report about the stream’s color change and that it had taken water samples for testing.

Other rivers in the area have faced similar environmental issues. The Matanza-Riachuelo River basin has been named one of Latin America’s most polluted waterways, leading to officials planning public works projects to prevent the dumping of sewage and industrial discharge into the basin.

By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com

Amid cold winter weather and fast-depleting inventories, Europe’s natural gas prices jumped on Monday to a two-year high to levels of over $100 per barrel oil equivalent, which now makes burning oil for industrial use more cost-effective.

Dutch TTF Natural Gas Futures, the benchmark for Europe’s gas trading, surged by 4% in Amsterdam on Monday, to the highest level since February 2023. The first proper winter in Europe with prolonged periods of cold snaps since the 2022 energy crisis is depleting the EU stockpiles of natural gas, which have dropped to the lowest level since the crisis for this time of the year.

As a result, European prices are rallying, and with most of Europe now relying on LNG imports for its natural gas supply, it has recently become more efficient for industries to burn oil and coal – wherever possible – as they are cheaper feedstocks than gas right now.

“We have already seen increased gas-to-fuel oil switching and gas-to-gasoil is next,” said Eugene Lindell, head of refined products at consultancy FGE. “This is one of the pillars of gasoil strength right now.”

The gas-to-oil switch could boost oil demand in Europe, and also in Asia, in the first quarter, potentially giving more room and reason for OPEC+ to return more barrels to the market.

The high natural gas price is a bullish tailwind for oil, Bjarne Schieldrop, Chief Analyst Commodities at SEB bank, said in a note on Monday.

Even 10ppm diesel is now cheaper than natural gas. Consumers of natural gas all over the world will now opt for any kind of oil product rather than gas if their natural gas price is set by in the LNG market, Schieldrop said.

“Europe and Asia will all lean towards consuming more oil and more coal if they in any way can do so.”

The surge in European natural gas prices comes as storage levels are tightening faster than in the past two years.

Stockpiles are already at their lowest for this time of year since 2022, according to ING analysts.

“Inventories are only 49% full compared with 67% at the same time last year,” ING’s commodities strategists Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey said.

Several bombshell claims were made on Tucker Carlson’s show while he interviewed Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, a retired United States Army officer who was awarded a Bronze Star for valor in Afghanistan.

Carlson stated that billions of dollars’ worth of US arms are being siphoned off and sold to America’s enemies. While the black market arms trade in Ukraine during the war has long been documented, including in mainstream media sources, Carlson and his guest Col. Davis agreed that many weapons have made it into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, among other criminal organizations.

Ukraine receives American weapons, they are skimmed by Ukrainian military officials, who then sell them to the cartels, the show asserted.

“They sell weapons to drug cartels… the fact is that the Ukrainian military sells a huge percentage, up to half of the weapons we send them. And this is not my guess. This is a fact. Not speculation. They sell it, and a lot of it ends up with drug cartels on our border. So this is a crime,” Carlson said, quoted by RIA Novosti.

“They’re selling it, and a lot of it winds up with the drug cartels on our border,” he also said.

Tucker Carlson EXPOSES a major scandal:

Up to 50% of U.S. weapons sent to Ukraine are being resold on the black market—some ending up with Mexican drug cartels.

Not only is this wasting billions in U.S. tax dollars, but it’s also arming criminals at our border. pic.twitter.com/RBL4jeyCzw

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 10, 2025

However, the claim has come under fire and much scrutiny online, particularly the statement that “half” of all US-provided arms end up with the cartels, given no particular evidence for this was presented in the show.

Given many tens of billions worth of US and Western arms have been sent over the nearly 3-year course of the Ukraine war, this would be an immense amount of weaponry requiring large military transport planes or else steady streams of trucks going back across Ukraine’s border to foreign destinations. This level of illicit arms trade would require immense logistics and would be incredibly difficult to conceal. Carlson suggested CIA assistance or profiting from the scheme, however.

But certainly it’s easy enough to believe that at least some quantities of black market US-provided arms or ammo have gone from Ukraine into an array of criminal networks worldwide, including possibly to the Mexican cartels just south of the US border.

The Blaze has meanwhile reviewed of the Ukraine to Mexico arms pipeline reporting as follows:

However, multiple reports have denied that this was evidence of any nefarious use of the money. Outlet Voice of America painted the claim as Russian propaganda, while PolitiFact claimed any accusations were based on a misunderstanding of how the aid has been distributed.

At the same time, a June 2024 study by Harvard said it was “highly likely that some weapons will go missing over the course of the conflict” but admitted it would be hard to prove the extent of which illicit weapons were being sold.

Harvard, too, stated that sales of arms to sources like “Finnish gangsters, French rioters, Nigerian fighters, and Mexican cartels” were debunked as “Russian propaganda” and cited a report from the Global Initiatives Against Transnational Organized Crime as evidence.

Watch the full interview here:

The Ukrainian military is selling American weapons systems on the black market, including to drug cartels. This war is killing the United States. Col. Daniel Davis on how Donald Trump can end it.

(0:00) Why Crimea Is So Pivotal
(13:17) Ukraine Is Powerless Without the US
(31:16)… pic.twitter.com/PgL3og9lTE

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 10, 2025

In 2023, the Pentagon’s Office of Defense Cooperation-Kyiv admitted after conducting an investigation that it “was unable to conduct required [end-use monitoring] of military equipment that the United States provided to Ukraine in FY 2022.”

“The inability of DoD personnel to visit areas where equipment provided to Ukraine was being used or stored significantly hampered ODC-Kyiv’s ability to execute” the monitoring, the report stated. Reports have since shown that the lack of monitoring and tracking situation has grown even worse since then.

Submitted by Preston Byrne

Friday’s edition of the Washington Post reveals that the United Kingdom has served Apple with a secret order, a so-called capability notice under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, demanding that Apple create a backdoor to its encrypted cloud storage systems that would permit access on-demand by UK government officials.

The Post also reports that, in response, Apple is likely to withdraw its services from the UK rather than comply. Apple told Parliament, in March of last year, that “[t]here is no reason why the U.K. should have the authority to decide for the citizens of the world whether they can avail themselves of the proven security benefits that flow from end-to-end encryption.”

Those of us with an English law education will recall Sir Ivor Jennings’ famous quip – “if Parliament enacts that smoking in the streets of Paris is an offence, then it is an offence” – as an illustration of the theoretically absolute power of the King-in-Parliament.

Our world is a very different place than Sir Ivor’s: for, when Apple turns off its services in the UK in defiance of a Home Office capability order, it may violate British rules, it will also undermine British authority. The streets of Paris are hundreds of miles away; the Internet is at our fingertips and, if formally blocked by the government, informally accessible via VPN.

So far, UK politicians have not appeared to have the stomach to regulate VPNs; by attempting to legislate over that which they do not control, they risk weakening public faith in the law.

This is the latest in a long line of proto-totalitarian conduct emanating from the UK’s security services with which the Americans are growing increasingly impatient. Nor is the Investigatory Powers Act the only law on the UK’s books which threatens global companies with fines, or worse, if they fail to act as the UK security state’s proxy arm. Popular U.S. encryption company Signal said in 2023 that if the content moderation requirements of the Online Safety Act – with which Signal necessarily cannot comply because it is end-to-end encrypted – required it to decrypt messages to carry out the mandatory content-policing functions called for by the law, Signal would “absolutely 100% walk” away from the United Kingdom rather than obey.

Similarly, the UK’s official broadsides against social media companies in the wake of the Southport riots, and arrests of social media users, were pilloried by millions of social media users in America, and regarded with considerable suspicion by the US tech industry. Considering that preeminent tech VC Marc Andreessen has been a vocal opponent of online censorship, both in the US and in the UK, it is not a stretch to think that Andreessen Horowitz’s closure of its UK office two weeks ago – effectively that firm saying that the UK is an uninvestable country – is related to the UK’s heavy-handed approach to political freedoms on the Internet.

The UK has not, as yet, attempted to wield the Online Safety Act quite that aggressively. Given that a Labour government is in power – and, as Labour’s leaders come neither from the technology sector nor global business, they do not understand what leverage they truly have in either domain  –  I am confident that, at some point, they will attempt to do so.

The inescapable reality they will face at that juncture is that tech capital is highly mobile, as the ASI has shown in recent research showing that millionaires are leaving the country in droves, and that the UK is not an especially large digital market compared to the United States or even compared to the neighboring EU. If the UK government’s feature requests are likely to scare off users in these larger jurisdictions, companies are likely to jettison UK business, and their executives likely to avoid traveling through Heathrow, before they will comply with orders that compromise their users’ freedoms or their privacy.

If Kamala Harris had won the U.S. election in November, we would doubtlessly be looking at a very different playing field for UK Internet regulators. The Biden Administration was highly sympathetic to technology companies who were willing to censor their users for traditionally left-coded political ends, as was revealed in the Twitter Files disclosures by Matt Taibbi and Mike Shellenberger after Elon Musk’s acquisition of that website. We also now know that government funding was used to fund counter-disinformation and pro-U.S. propaganda apparatuses abroad, including efforts to study how to censor U.S.-based platforms and their users under the guise of academic research.

There is new management in America, however, and the extent to which taxpayer dollars were deployed for use in partisan political fights was so offensive to the incoming administration that they are planning immediate reductions-in-force of up to 70%. Entire agencies, like USAID, the Department of Education, and possibly many others, have been deemed too politicized to be worth saving – and are being deleted wholesale.

Put differently, the permanent bureaucracy in the United States which might otherwise have helped the UK apply informal pressure on Americans who dared to disobey its decryption and censorship edicts – none of which, it bears mentioning, are enforceable against an American who refuses them and is happy to avoid setting foot in British territory – is gone.

If the UK chooses to be the worst place for an AI company, or a social media company, or a digital asset company to incorporate and do business, it will find that it has very few such companies. Regardless of your opinions on how British society should be structured, the NHS, immigration, or the appropriate quantum of social welfare, if you don’t have high tech employers generating revenues and paying taxes, social programs become very difficult to pay for.

If the United Kingdom wants to be a technology backwater, that is its choice. I am not optimistic that decades of bad policy, practically all of which was enacted by the Conservatives, can be reversed, even where it is patently obvious that these policies will be rather straightforwardly ignored, either by companies throwing these orders in the trash can when received in the post in America, or by simply cutting off their world-beating tech security services to UK nationals.

Either outcome is a terrible result for the British people, as it leaves the entire UK more vulnerable to scammers, criminals, and foreign adversaries than they otherwise would be – not because of corporate disobedience, but because the only services UK nationals will have access to will be ones which compromise user security and safety for the sake of British politics, something all of the best companies will be unwilling to do.

Those of us who have been around for a minute recall the brief moment between 2019 and 2021 when there was a broad consensus across the leaders of the western world that the Internet needed to be censored for public safety reasons. That moment has passed, and the biggest market in the world – the United States – is now charting a different course.

The UK’s tech sector is smaller, slower, and less well-funded than America’s – for very easy-to-understand reasons. If it wants to compete with America, it has to become more American than America. This is something the Conservatives broke and, based on their current policy platform, have no desire to fix. The only question is who will change the UK’s posture on tech regulation – Reform or Labour – and whether they’ll be able to get the changes done in time to avoid being left floundering in America’s wake.

The Russian government has confirmed that hundreds of its wounded soldiers have been taken from the battlefield in Ukraine and Kursk and are being treated in North Korean hospitals.

Russia’s ambassador in Pyongyang Alexander Matsegora said in an interview published Sunday, “The treatment, the care, the food – everything related to staying in North Korea was absolutely free.”

“When we offered to compensate our [North Korean] friends for at least part of their expenses, they were genuinely offended and asked us never to do it again,” Matsegora added.

This is yet another sign of deepened cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang following Putin and Kim Jong Un signing a defense pact last summer, which has seen North Korea reportedly send some 10,000 of its troops to assist in helping Russia regain its southern Kursk territory.

The two countries actually share a tiny border in the far east, comprising about 11 miles of terrestrial border and 12 nautical miles of maritime border. Oil, guns, artillery, and missiles have been exchanged by rail – a trend which has greatly alarmed Washington and the West.

Last month Ukraine claimed that North Korean troops had been withdrawn or “disappeared” from the front lines in Kursk, but on Friday President Zelensky described the Russian army had “brought back in North Korean soldiers” who were carrying out “new assaults” in the region. Ukraine has partially occupied Kursk for over six months, since last August.

Zelensky claimed in the address that “hundreds of Russian and North Korean military” personnel had been “destroyed”. Western intelligence officials have claimed that at least 1,000 DPRK troops had been killed since being introduced on the battlefield.

Reports in The Guardian and other Western outlets have offered some anecdotal and eyewitness evidence of significant amounts of North Koreans being treated for injuries in Kursk:

At dusk one afternoon last week, two dozen wounded North Korean soldiers were brought to one of the main hospitals in the Russian city of Kursk.

They were ushered into a specially designated floor, guarded by police, with access limited to translators and medical personnel.

“We were told in the morning to prepare for a special type of patient,” said one of the medical staff at the hospital who treated North Koreans.

“We’d heard rumours that North Koreans were fighting there, but I didn’t believe it. No one had actually seen them before,” the medic said. “I thought it was all fake news until they arrived,” the medic said, adding that most of them had shrapnel injuries.

A second medic at the scene said communication with the North Koreans was “impossible” without translators. They added that some North Koreans looked “frightened and nervous”.

On the battlefield itself, Russian units have complained about lack of easy communication with their North Korean allies, which has led to confusion and inefficiency.

North Korea uses Ukraine as a testing ground for its missiles,”
South Korea’s representative to the UN said……😂 pic.twitter.com/dXsjISP5uI

— Zlatti71 (@Zlatti_71) January 10, 2024

It’s expected that Russia and North Korea will continue cooperating on multiple levels. For example, regional media recalls the following:

Matsegora also said that orphans of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine were hosted at the Songdowon International Children’s Camp in North Korea last summer. Russian President Vladimir Putin personally thanked “comrade” Kim Jong Un for organizing the children’s stay during his visit to Pyongyang in June.

Both countries are of course nuclear-armed, as well as highly sanctioned by the West. President Trump has lately said he’s committed to seeing de-nuclearization on the Korean peninsula, but there’s yet to be any real diplomatic breakthrough on the level of the face-to-face meetings with Kim during his first term in office.

Pyongyang’s role in the Ukraine conflict has certainly complicated the potential for renewing dialogue with Trump, but the pressure could lessen if Trump-sponsored peace talks between Moscow and Kiev actually get off the ground.

Via Remix News,

In two speeches given less than 24 hours apart in the French city of Toulouse, Jean-Luc Mélenchon delivered some of the most shocking yet brutally honest words from a European politician, openly calling for the older French to be replaced by a “Creole” generation of mixed races and cultures.

The leader of France’s far-left LFI is calling outright for replacement of White French people, conjuring up the Great Replacement term that has been demonized as a conspiracy theory by the left for years.

“In our country, one person in four has a foreign grandparent. 40% of the population speaks at least two languages. We are destined to be a Creole nation and so much the better! May the young generation be the great replacement for the old generation,” said Mélenchon.

According to the dictionary, Creole is defined as a “a person of mixed European and black descent, especially in the Caribbean.”

He also goes on to make a number of further statements, saying the new immigrants need “to heal France from the wounds of racism.” According to Euronews, France is among the five European countries with the least discrimination. Furthermore, he makes inflammatory statements, calling for “torch-bearers” to bring about change, which has revolutionary undertones, although he stops short of any calls for direct violence.

🇫🇷🚨 French far-left leader calls for the Great Replacement

Jean-Luc Mélenchon: “France is destined to be a Creole (mixed Black and French) nation and so much the better! Let the young generation do the replacement of the old… Each generation is a new people!” pic.twitter.com/uLgOMlMXs5

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) February 7, 2025

In a column for Le Journal du Dimanche, Arnaud Benedetti writes that Mélenchon “has probably never been so explicit in his words and his vision, even though he never really tried to mask it. But this time, the objective is revealed without obscurantism, with the clarity of an arrow. He points to his horizon and aims at his enemy. His horizon? Creolization, a euphemism in place of the ‘great replacement.”

“His enemy? Tradition, the past, the France of yesterday and still today, which he denounces as an old rag to be thrown away because it no longer exists,” he continued.

In another speech last week, Mélenchon reiterated his point: “Yes, Mr. Zemmour, there is a great replacement,” exclaimed the leader of La France Insoumise last Friday, in front of an enthusiastic audience. Mélenchon said this “great replacement” “that “of a generation that comes after the other and that will never resemble the previous one.” He emphasized “the importance of this creolization that creates something new.”

Mélenchon also defended the settlement of foreigners into the French countryside, and it all appears to be part of a strategy by him to fuel his political support, both from France’s growing immigrant population but also Whites who believe the old White France is a tired and racist cliché voting for National Rally, and one that must give way to a new people.

“And yet, even isolated, Jean-Luc Mélenchon continues his strategy of radicalization, notably by going even further on immigration,” writes Benedetti

Appearing on the Europe 1 television network, Frank Allisio, the National Rally (RN) MP for Bouches-du-Rhône, said Mélenchon’s intervention is “both a provocation, a way of speaking again and again to his voters, but also a basis of doctrine, a basis of conviction for Jean-Luc Mélenchon.” Allisio said he believes that Jean-Luc Mélenchon not only backs the thesis of the great replacement, “but in addition, he wants to achieve it.”

Read more here…

Authored by Andrew Korybko via substack,

The EU would do well to indefinitely suspend Ukrainians’ visa-free access to the bloc after martial law ends.

Outgoing Polish President Andrzej Duda told the Financial Times that a crime wave could sweep across Europe after the Ukrainian Conflict ends if that country’s PTSD-afflicted troops spill into the bloc and engage in organized crime like their Soviet predecessors from the 1980s Afghan War did after 1991. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry swiftly reacted by denying that they could pose any such threat, pointing to how they didn’t between 2014-2022, and claiming that they’re actually a security asset for Europe.

Their three points are superficial though since traumatized troops anywhere in the world are much more prone to deviant behavior, the latest phase of the conflict has objectively been much more traumatizing than the prior one, and this therefore makes its veterans a security liability for Europe at the very least. Compounding the aforementioned risks is the fact that the US failed to track billions of dollars’ worth of weapons sent to Ukraine according to Reuters so some of these likely ended up on the black market.

The threat that Duda just drew attention to is thus a very credible and urgent one that should be taken seriously by all European stakeholders. This doesn’t mean that they need to foot part of the bill for Ukraine’s security and development like he strongly implied in his interview, but just that they should at the minimum indefinitely suspend its citizens’ visa-free access to the bloc otherwise traumatized veterans armed with illegally obtained US weapons might turn his warning into a prophecy.

The floodgates will open if the US succeeds in brokering a ceasefire like it’s arguably aiming to do for the purpose of prompting Ukraine into lifting marital law and therefore legally setting the stage for the next elections. Military-age Ukrainian males will then be able to freely leave to the EU unless the bloc indefinitely suspends their visa-free access. The arguments in favor of these restrictions far outweigh those against them from the perspective of European and Ukrainian national interests.

Europe already received several million low-wage laborers so it doesn’t need to risk the credible security consequences of accepting traumatized Ukrainian veterans just to obtain some more, while Ukraine needs as many of its refugees to return as possible after the conflict ends in order to rebuild. It goes without saying that Ukraine also can’t afford another large-scale exodus and thus has an interest in requesting that the EU indefinitely suspends their visa-free access to the bloc if it won’t do so on its own.

Keeping the border open to them would be a recipe for mutual disaster. There’s also the possibility that Poland takes the lead in unilaterally refusing to admit military-aged Ukrainian males after their country’s martial law is lifted just like it unilaterally decided to suspend asylum rights for some migrants last year. 

That could trigger a legal crisis within the bloc, especially if others like Hungary and Slovakia follow suit, which would be a worst-case political scenario at the time when the EU would need unity on Ukraine.

Poland’s ruling liberal-globalists, who are closely aligned with EU-leader Germany, might not have the political will to do that though but Hungary might and it could justify this based on Duda’s warning. Even if no member state makes such a dramatic move, some of their citizens might angrily agitate for this if their compatriots fall victim to PTSD-afflicted Ukrainian veteran criminal gangs. The issue deserves to be closely monitored since it’s a credible security risk that could have outsized consequences for the bloc.

How soon before we have the Canadian version of DOGE?

Global Affairs Canada (GAC) contributed $1,623,711 in taxpayer funds to BBC Media Action, the charitable arm of the BBC, in 2023–2024, primarily for DEI initiatives in Africa, according to a new report by True North Wire.

Despite this, GAC’s website listed only one BBC Media Action project for that year, costing just over $1.5 million.

The report notes that GAC allocated most of its $1.5 million contribution to a gender equality initiative in Tanzania, “Broadcasting for Change: Empowering Young Women Through Media.”

Although $2.12 million was budgeted for 2023–2024, only $1,536,981 was transferred. The program funded the youth radio show Niambie, aimed at shifting attitudes toward gender equality and promoting young women’s social, economic, and political rights. When asked about the nearly $100,000 in unaccounted funds, GAC requested an indefinite extension to respond.

GAC praised the program’s impact, citing radio content on women’s rights, DEI training for media professionals, and reports that 91% of listeners showed gender equality awareness, with 42% using counseling services. This aligns with Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy, which cost $15.5 billion in 2022–2023 alone.

Critics over at True North questioned the spending. “Canadians shouldn’t be forced to pay for our own state broadcaster, and we definitely shouldn’t have our tax dollars going anywhere near another country’s state broadcaster,” said Franco Terrazzano of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, calling GAC “one of the worst waste offenders in the entire government.”

He added, “With the government more than $1 trillion in debt, we need to open up the books and cut wasteful spending in every department, and that definitely includes Global Affairs Canada.”

GAC has a history of similar spending. From 2016 to 2020, it provided $4.8 million to BBC Media Action for “Her Voice, Her Rights,” a gender equality media training initiative in Afghanistan.

In October 2024, True North reported GAC spent over $3 million on alcohol, with GAC declining to respond before publication. Other reported expenses included an $8,800 sex toy show in Germany, a $12,500 talk show featuring seniors discussing sex in Taiwan, Austria, and Australia, and a $51,000 monthly bar tab.

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview on Friday that he was interested in President Trump’s proposal for a deal that would involve the US getting access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals in exchange for continued military aid.

“If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelensky told Reuters. The Ukrainian leader insisted the deal wouldn’t involve “giving away” Ukraine’s resources but framed it as a partnership.

“The Americans helped the most, and therefore, the Americans should earn the most. And they should have this priority, and they will. I would also like to talk about this with President Trump,” he said.

When Trump made the comments about a rare earth deal, he said he wanted a “guarantee” that the US would have access to the minerals because the US was giving Ukraine money “hand over fist.”

While Trump still says he wants to end the war in Ukraine, the idea of a deal for continued US military aid suggests he thinks the US will continue supplying weapons, something Russia would likely not accept as part of a potential future peace deal.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one of the most fervent supporters of the proxy war in Ukraine, has frequently brought up Ukraine’s rare earth minerals as a reason to continue fueling the conflict.

“This war is about money. People don’t talk much about it. But you know, the richest country in all of Europe for rare earth minerals is Ukraine. Two to seven trillion dollars’ worth of minerals that are rare earth minerals, very relevant to the 21st century,” Graham said in November.

Just one not so small problem: most of those resources Zelensky wants to offer are currently under Russian control in Eastern Ukraine, or the four annexed territories which have been declared part of the Russian Federation…

JUST IN: 🇺🇦🇺🇸 Ukrainian President Zelensky offers the US access to Ukraine’s rare earth and mineral deposits in exchange for a security deal from President Trump.

pic.twitter.com/defk3suq3G

— BRICS News (@BRICSinfo) February 8, 2025

“Ukraine’s ready to do a deal with us, not the Russians. So it’s in our interest to make sure that Russia doesn’t take over the place,” the senator had said. This is a far cry from the mainstream media narrative of ‘protecting democracy’ in Ukraine, however.