As the holiday season unfolds, a grim reality casts a shadow over American households – mounting food insecurity exacerbated by surging inflation and escalating grocery prices. Recent data from consumer surveys and analyses on food insecurity and grocery shopping behavior, as reported by Axios, paints a stark picture of the challenges faced by both citizens and food banks alike.

Big banks such as PNC Bank and JPMorgan Chase have filed to close several branch offices in multiple states amid a troubling pattern of rising branch shutdowns in recent years.

Between Nov. 12 and 18, several banks filed to close branch locations, with PNC Bank with the most filings, according to data from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Pittsburgh-based PNC Bank filed for 19 branch closures—five in Pennsylvania, four in Illinois, three in Texas, two each in Alabama and New Jersey, and one each in Indiana, Ohio, and Florida.

JPMorgan Chase followed closely with 18 filings—three in Ohio, two each in Connecticut and South Carolina, and one each in 11 states, including New York, Illinois, Florida, and Massachusetts.

Citizens Bank came in third with eight branch closure filings—six in New York, and one each in Massachusetts and Delaware. Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank filed for seven closures—three in Tennessee and one each in Missouri, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Illinois.

Bank of America made five filings—two in New York and one each in Texas, Massachusetts, and California.

When the Siege of Avdiivka started, I wrote that, according to what we learned about the similar sieges of Mariupol and Bakhmut, we could expect three things:

First of all – advances will probably be slow.

The second important lesson from past sieges in this war has to do with the coverage by the MSM.

Ukrainians always win – in the MSM headlines.

All the time, it is stressed in their how horribly failing the Russians are, how they don’t have a chance, while papers sing praises for the impenetrable Ukrainian defenses.

Meanwhile, the Russians will be losing the war in the headlines but winning in the ground, until they finally take the city.

The 3rd feature is: when Russians do, a key defensive bastion like Avdiivka will be rebranded as a minor non-strategic place.

But if we dig a bit, it’s easy to find good information.

US actions have destroyed actually an entire array of international arms control agreements, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday.

"I do not know how historians will call this period but US actions have destroyed actually an entire array of arms control agreements, which is a fact. Hundreds and hundreds of pages have already been written about that," Russia’s top diplomat said at the Primakov Readings international forum.

The Russian foreign minister said that "the current period in world history should be treated as responsibly as possible."

US President Joe Biden reportedly rejected the advice of staff to refrain from repeating unverified reports that Hamas had beheaded babies during its attack on Israel on October 7.

Some White House advisors appealed to the president to “cut a line about Hamas beheading babies because those reports were unverified”, according to a report by The Washington Post.

As President Joe Biden faces criticism and declining poll numbers, some within the Democratic Party, like Rep. Dean Phillips, openly express doubts about his ability to defeat Donald Trump. 

The Irish government’s swift push for anti-speech regulations, aimed at stifling criticism of their policies, raises serious concerns about the state of democratic discourse. As they tread further down the authoritarian path, they risk amplifying the very problem they seek to suppress. 

In the past quarter-century, the Euro’s trajectory has unveiled a stark absurdity, encapsulated vividly in one chart. Before adopting the Euro, the Italian Lira depreciated by a staggering 83% against the Deutsche Mark over 25 years.

In recent weeks, there has been an alarmingly small number of official voices calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

One exception has been Francesca Albanese - the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian territories. She joins us for an interview on terminology, context and the blindspots of mainstream media.

Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi proposes a government resolution to halt any state advertising, subscriptions or other commercial connection with the Haaretz daily newspaper, due to what he describes is the left-wing publication’s “defeatist and false propaganda” against the State of Israel during wartime.

In a letter to Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs, Karhi denounces Haaretz for its editorial stance on the war and proposes that the state not enter into any new commercial agreements with the newspaper, halt all advertising in it even if it has been paid for, and block any outstanding payments from being made.

“Since the beginning of the war, my office has received numerous complaints that the Haaretz newspaper has taken a harmful line that undermines the goals of the war and weakens the military effort and societal resilience,” writes Karhi.

War Cabinet minister Benny Gantz warned Sunday that failure to divert all coalition discretionary funds to war needs would cause his National Unity party to vote against a proposed war budget and could lead it to “consider its next steps,” hinting he could bolt the government.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office indicated it would not accept Gantz’s demands, saying the proposal will be brought before the cabinet Monday and “answers the needs of the war.”

The cabinet was set to discuss changes to the 2023 state budget due to the needs of the conflict with Hamas in Gaza, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich insisting on keeping hundreds of millions of shekels in discretionary coalition money directed at their pre-war targets.

As a cautious calm descended on the border of south Lebanon on Saturday, the second day of a four-day ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, villages that had emptied of residents came back to life – at least briefly.

Shuttered shops reopened, cars moved through the streets and, in one border town, a family on an outing posed for photos in front of brightly coloured block letters proclaiming, “I [HEART] ODAISSEH” – the town’s name

About 55,500 Lebanese have been displaced by clashes between the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah and Israeli forces since the beginning of the war in Gaza, according to the International Organization for Migration.

The fighting has killed more than 100 people in Lebanon, including more than a dozen civilians – three of them journalists – and 12 people on the Israeli side, including four civilians.

The Walt Disney Company recently admitted that wokeness and culture wars have had major impacts across the board on the multinational entertainment and media conglomerate. Disney also warned investors that the company's wokeness presents risks to its "reputation and brands."

Last week, the Walt Disney Company filed its annual financial report with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30. The report detailed the performance of the variety of its properties for the last fiscal year as well as potential future risks for the worldwide entertainment company.

The SEC filing revealed that Disney employs roughly 225,000 workers worldwide. The company notes that it has a "key human capital management objective" of "making the workplace more engaging and inclusive" and creating a more "diverse workforce."

Some Palestinians returned to their homes in the central and northern parts of the Gaza Strip after a four-day truce came into effect.

But for many, only rubble waited where their homes once stood.

A new poll shows that 72% of American voters would not be willing to volunteer to fight for their country if the United States faced a major conflict.

According to Newsweek, the new poll of 1,029 likely voters in the United States, conducted by Echelon Insights, a research institute, showed that the overwhelming majority of U.S. adults would not be willing to serve in the United States military if the country faced a major war.

The Echelon Insights poll obtained by Newsweek was conducted Oct. 23-26, following the brutal Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel on Oct. 7, which have led to concerns regarding the potential for escalated conflict in the Middle East and fears that the United States could be entangled in another war.

While 72% of voters indicated that they would not be willing to volunteer to serve in the U.S. military in the face of a major conflict, 21% said they would be willing to volunteer to fight for their country. Roughly 7% of voters answered that they were not sure whether or not they would be willing to fight for the United States.

A suspect has been arrested in what police have called the “hate-motivated” shooting of three college students of Palestinian descent in the US state of Vermont.

Police in the city of Burlington arrested the 48-year-old suspect, identified as Jason J Eaton, on Sunday afternoon, according to US news reports.

The three victims, Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ahmed, were shot on Saturday evening near the University of Vermont’s campus. The students, who attend different universities in the US, remain hospitalised with gunshot wounds.

The students, two of whom are American citizens and the third a legal resident, were visiting Burlington to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with families.

Crammed beneath a small, tattered tent, whose roof is a flimsy black blanket, Hazem Abu Ghaben’s family members sleep restlessly on torn mattresses that exude odour.

The displaced family has a spacious house in Jabalia, in northern Gaza, but they had to leave it when the Israeli army ordered 1.1 million people living in the north and Gaza city to evacuate to the south of the strip under ferocious bombardment.

In their arduous evacuation journey, with taxis nowhere in sight due to continuous air strikes, the family had to traverse over 10 kilometres amidst the chaos of bombardments, joining a sea of displaced individuals. They left behind all their belongings, carrying only a few blankets and items of clothing.

Hamas and Israel on Sunday engaged in a third prisoner exchange that saw another 39 Palestinians freed from Israeli detention, while 13 Israelis held in Gaza were released by Hamas.

The exchange took place for the third straight day amid a temporary four-day truce in Gaza, the first such halt of fighting since the war began on 7 October. 

Ahead of the arrival of the buses filled with the prisoners, massive crowds of Palestinians filled the streets of Ramallah in anticipation and celebration.

And once they got off the bus, the prisoners, wearing grey sweatshirts and sweatpants, were paraded throughout the city just like the group of freed prisoners were the previous night.

Many Palestinian prisoners released in the past few days have told media that their treatment under Israeli detention was brutal, and they were subject to beatings and harsh conditions.

Progressive commentator Ana Kasparian recently appeared on the popular right-wing podcast PBD. The interview ranged over several subjects, but her most intense debate with the two hosts was about Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Kasparian expressed horror at the civilian death toll, which she compared to historical atrocities like the Armenian genocide during and after World War I. In response, one of the hosts accused her of falling for a liberal “media narrative.” The Israeli military didn’t want to kill civilians, he told her. The problem is that Hamas uses civilians as “human shields.”

In response, Kasparian asked him if he had any kids. When he said no, she switched examples:

OK, your mother. You talked about your mother. If an armed gunman grabbed your mother [and] had a gun to her head . . . and he is confronted by the authorities . . . they just decide, you know what? We’re not going to negotiate. We’re not going to do anything. We’re just going to shoot the hell out of both of them.

And then they come to you and say, well, your mother, sorry, was a human shield. Would you accept that argument?

The host refused to engage with what he called a “random story” about his mother. But Kasparian’s point was clear.

It is impossible to ignore Israel’s painful parallels to the American playbook of the Vietnam War, including the indiscriminate killing of over 2 million Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian civilians and the illegal use of white phosphorus in dense civilian areas then and now. The Harvard Law International Human Rights Clinic, United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem, one of Israel’s most respected rights groups, have described Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as apartheid, a crime classically synonymous with 20th-century South Africa.

Harvard has silenced and stood against students protesting against these gross instances of human rights abuses and massacres before. It took over a decade of constant pressure from the student body for Harvard to only partially divest from apartheid South Africa in the late 1980s. On April 10, 1969, several hundreds occupied University Hall in peaceful protest of on-campus recruitment for the Vietnam War. Harvard responded by calling in 400 armed police officers who beat and arrested hundreds of demonstrating students. 

In his ubiquitously calm, reasoned, non-ad-hominem, and ruthlessly fact-driven few minutes, Victor Davis Hanson dives into the left's apparent hysteria at the looming shadow of Donald Trump's potential return.

Hanson articulates a sense of deep-rooted fear among Trump's opponents, summed up perfectly as follows:

"they look at Trump as a vampire and they put a stake in his heart but they're afraid that that stake could come out any time."

This vivid imagery sets the stage for a discussion about the intense paranoia and strategic maneuvering in the political arena, particularly among those who view Trump not just as a political rival, but as an existential threat to their vision of America.

The New York Times reported Saturday that Israel is killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza at a historic pace.

The huge civilian death toll in Gaza is explained by the scale of the bombing campaign and Israel’s willingness to drop US-provided 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas that are packed with civilians.

Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon analyst who advises the Dutch NGO PAX, told the Times that he’s never seen anything like it. “It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,” he said. Garlasco added that to find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, one would have to “go back to Vietnam or the Second World War.”

David Arakhamia, a high-ranking member of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People political party, said that Kyiv could have ended the war with Russia after a month if it agreed not to join NATO. The official said that Moscow was not concerned about other issues, such as “denazification,” but only wanted Kyiv to agree to neutrality.

In an interview with TV channel 1+1, a Ukrainian network, Arakhamia confirmed previous reporting that Moscow and Kyiv had nearly agreed to end the war in March 2022. Still, Ukraine’s Western backers pushed it to try to win the war against Russia. “They really hoped almost to the last moment that they would force us to sign such an agreement so that we would take neutrality,” Arakhamia  said.” It was the most important thing for them. They were prepared to end the war if we agreed to – as Finland once did – neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO.”