1/ China Challenge: Believe It or Not*

China’s Property Market

2/ Which Chinese asset market has posted negative returns over the last 20 years—a period of unmatched meteoric Chinese economic and business growth?

3/ Answer: property. As of this month, China’s property market has erased nearly 20 years of appreciation (inflation adjusted). That means Chinese real estate investors would have made a better return over the last 20 years stuffing cash under their mattress. Most importantly, at the height of the bubble about 70% of Chinese household wealth was concentrated in real estate.

1/5
Who is on the Committee to Protect Journalists (@pressfreedom) payroll?

The latest reporting on the inner workings of CPJ, together with extraordinary claims from inside the organisation itself, paint a deeply troubling picture.

This is wild.
🧵

2/5
First, our research published by @FreeBeacon @Kredo0 found CPJ's ranks include people who have:

• accused Israel of "genocide"
• promoted BDS
• in one case, authored a manifesto calling for "resistance and revolutionary violent pressure" against the "Zionist occupation."

This is the organization much of the world's media treats as an impartial authority.

But it gets worse. ⬇️
freebeacon.com/israel/committ…

3/5
Days earlier, the virulently anti-Israel website Electronic Intifada (@intifada) published an article claiming to have spoken to current and former CPJ staff.

According to those sources, they were furious that CPJ removed 20 names from its Gaza "journalists" database after evidence linked some to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, including eight killed while participating in combat.

1/ The killers of a pro-Russian American are reportedly to be pardoned and sent to fight in Ukraine. 'Donbass Cowboy' Russell Bentley died under torture, reportedly after being electrocuted, and was subsequently blown into pieces in an attempt to cover up the killing. ⬇️

2/ Bentley was a communist activist and convicted marijuana smuggler from Texas who travelled to the occupied Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014 to fight in a pro-Russian militia. He married a local woman, settled in Donetsk city, and became a warblogger after being demobilised.

3/ He was abducted on 8 April 2024 by soldiers of the 5th Motorised Rifle Brigade of the 'Donetsk People's Republic' after being suspected of spying on the aftermath of a Ukrainian artillery strike. The men took him to a nearby abandoned mine repurposed as a torture centre.

🔥🔥🔥Breaking! The odd love triangle of Omidyar’s Reimagining Capitalism and the surging US communist candidates.

There are four orgs that I identified (likely tons more) from the Reimagining Capitalism program involved in promoting far left candidates.

Reimagining Capitalism partners:

- More Perfect Union
- Working Families
- Open Society (Crooked Media)
- Tides (funds working families)

🔹Meet Morris Katz:

As you can see in the post below, Zoran Mamdanis political strategist and advisor, Morris Katz, was involved in the selection of Graham Platner. It wasn’t just the two folks in the video everyone is sharing.

🔹Morris Katz and Rebecca Katz team up.

Rebecca Katz and Morris Katz etc created Fight Agency to push radical leftists. They signed up with candidates such as Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, and Graham Platner.”

Claims they got Mamdani elected.

*see post below

🔹Meet Rebecca Katz of New Deal Strategies and hired by Working Familes (communist):

“New Deal Strategies is proud to have served as senior advisers to senior leadership at the NY Working Families Party Party, consulting across high-level electoral strategy, digital campaigning and messaging, narrative strategy, and press and media relations.”

These groups are in a partnership ring;

Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement, New Deal Strategies, and Data for Progress.

Working Families Endorses:
Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, and Graham Platner etc.

🔹 We all know Soros linked, Tides:

“Center for Working Families Fund (Tides Foundation) – to support the Center for Working Families”

🔹Meet Crooked Media with Pod Save America and partially owned by Soros.

“ Crooked Media - With the funding, which closed Sept. 28, Soros Fund Management will have a seat on the board.”

Video - Graham Platner discusses Chuck Schumer an exposed (by me) member of the Working Families Party. And Graham also discusses “working people”. 😏

Pushes Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, and Graham Platner.

Obama’s Ben Rhodes cohosts pod save world.

Pod Save America was started by former Obama administration alumni.

🔹More Perfect Union

Obama and Omidyar Reimagine capitalism’s partner, More Perfect Union, didn’t just coordinate with Graham Platner, they coordinated with Zohran Mamdani too. And they are involved with Abdul El-Sayed too. Folks say Abdul is the next Obama. Watch out folks!

I’ve already reported on More Perfect Union and its university, so I’ll share the links below.

If I report on this any deeper, I risk confusing everyone. Sources will be provided.

https://x.com/pepesgrandma/status/2074495010959929396

Here’s my 🧵 on Omidyar’s Reimagining Capitalism program and its massive partner list. Feel free to look up more because there’s a lot.

More Perfect Union is brought up at the end.

@CCDHWatch brought up Crooked Media with me, and helped with all sorts of stuff

https://twitter.com/pepesgrandma/status/2074961237721379277

Actually, here you go, More Perfect Union is currently brainwashing our youth. Both K-12 and university students.

The fact that they are a functioning partner of Omidyar’s Reimagining Capitalism makes the a serious national security risk.

They are pushing all of the far left candidates. Not cool!

https://x.com/pepesgrandma/status/2074283594344808682

The billionaires who got rich under Putin are starting to get nervous.

Andrey Melnichenko, Russia’s biggest industrialist, says the war is breaking Russia's economy — and if nothing changes, the country ends up broke, isolated, or run by China, The Economist. 1/

Melnichenko is not anti-Putin opposition. He is an insider whose factories supported the war economy. Like most oligarchs, he lived by Putin’s rules: make money, but keep out of politics.

He speaks now because tycoons can no longer ignore the rot. 2/

The Ukraine war has come home to Russia.

Ukrainian attacks on energy infrastructure brought fuel queues and fistfights at filling stations. Drone strikes isolate Crimea. Forced military enlistment feeds resentment. Influencers’ war complaints go viral. 3/

: A Simple Guide to Getting RegisteredWinbox88vip.com

Signing up for a new gaming platform shouldn't feel like a chore, yet plenty of sites manage to make it more complicated than it needs to be with confusing forms and unnecessary steps. takes a different approach.

@threadreaderapp unrollWinbox88vip.com

@threadreaderapp keeping the entire process quick and easy to follow from start to finish. This article walks through exactly what to expect during Winbox register, along with a few tips to make the setup process even smoother. @threadreaderapp unroll

One Ruling, Forty-Seven Years: How Rabbi Ovadia Yosef Brought the Jews of Ethiopia Home (1/3)

[Lead image: Rabbi Ovadia Yosef's handwritten ruling, February 9, 1973. Credit: Israel State Archives (file G-7031/7).]

Who Were the Beta Israel Before 1973?

There is a single moment — a single rabbinic letter — without which an entire community, the Jews of Ethiopia, the Beta Israel, might never have reached Israel at all. But before we get to that moment, it is worth knowing the community it touched.

Thousands of Years in Isolation

According to Jewish legal tradition — first set down by the Radbaz (Rabbi David ibn Zimra, the chief rabbi of Egypt in the sixteenth century) — the Beta Israel are descendants of the tribe of Dan, who left the Land of Israel back in the First Temple period, around the time the Kingdom of Israel fell to Assyria. If that is true, we are speaking of a Jewish community that survived in near-total isolation from the rest of the Jewish world for thousands of years — with no Babylonian Talmud, no Jerusalem Talmud, following a religious tradition of its own that developed in the dark, cut off from the great centers of Jewish life.

The earliest written testimony of their existence comes from the late ninth century: Eldad ha-Dani, a mysterious Jewish traveler who appeared in Kairouan in North Africa, brought the Jewish communities a report of a whole Jewish people living beyond "the rivers of Cush" — sons of the tribe of Dan who had left the Land of Israel in the First Temple period and journeyed south.

They Did Not Wait to Be Discovered

In 1848 — decades before most of European Jewry had even heard of them — the Beta Israel themselves sent a letter to the Jews of Europe. They wrote that they were awaiting the coming of the Messiah and the ingathering of the exiles. A year later, Daniel ben Hananiah and his son Moshe were sent to the Land of Israel, opening a correspondence between Jerusalem and Ethiopia. This was not a passive community waiting to be "discovered" — it was a community with a memory and a longing of its own, one that reached out first.

A Journey That Ended in Catastrophe

In 1862 — when Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia permitted Jews to leave his empire — an independent wave of emigration set out, led by a spiritual leader named Abba Mahari. The journey, remembered as the "Aliyah of 5622," ended in tragedy: many died of hunger and disease along the way, still inside Ethiopia's own borders, never coming anywhere near the Land of Israel.

When European Jewry "Discovered" Them

Already by the mid-1860s, European rabbis had recognized the Beta Israel as a Jewish community. Among the most prominent was Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer, who in 1864 — while serving as rabbi in Eisenstadt, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (he only moved to Berlin in 1869) — published a forceful call to rescue the community, arguing that the duty to help them flowed from the mutual responsibility of all Israel. In 1867, the French-Jewish orientalist Joseph Halévy — born in Adrianople in the Ottoman Empire — was sent by the Alliance Israélite Universelle to visit the communities in Ethiopia itself, becoming the first Western Jew to see them. On his return, he issued a call to European Jewry to "rescue" Ethiopian Jewry. His student, Jacques Faitlovitch, carried the work forward: funded by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, he set out on his own expedition in 1904, and in 1913 the first Hebrew school opened in the village of Wolleka, followed by a larger school in Addis Ababa in 1924.

This, then, was a community that had already, in the nineteenth century, built ties with world Jewry, established schools, and preserved a deep bond to Zion — yet none of this resolved the question that would delay its immigration for nearly another century: would the official rabbinate of the State of Israel recognize them as Jews?

The Man Who Made the Request: Hazi Ovadiah (2/3)

Before Rabbi Ovadia's letter came, there was a request — and behind it stood one man. Hazi Ovadiah (1922–2012) was born in Asmara (today in Eritrea) to a Jewish family that had migrated there from Aden in Yemen in the early twentieth century; his father, Shlomo, served as the chief rabbi of the Jews of Asmara. The family immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1935, and Hazi went on to serve many years as a disciplinary sergeant-major in the Israeli army, fluent in Amharic and Tigrinya. He devoted years to researching Ethiopian Jewry and preparing the legal arguments for their Jewishness, headed the first organization of Ethiopian immigrants in Israel, and worked to regularize their status — even securing the release of immigrants who had been served with deportation orders.

And here a circle closes that is worth pausing on: the person who initiated and led the fight for recognition was not the Ashkenazi establishment, but a Yemenite-Adeni Jew, the son of a chief rabbi from Asmara, who turned to a Sephardi chief rabbi born in Baghdad. It was Hazi Ovadiah's appeal to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef that produced the ruling, and his letter is preserved to this day in the Israel State Archives (file N-340/7).

The Letter, February 9, 1973

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, then the Rishon LeZion — Israel's Sephardi Chief Rabbi — replied with a legal letter to Hazi Ovadiah's request, which had asked him directly about the legal status of the Beta Israel. Rabbi Ovadia did not invent a position out of thin air. He conducted a genuine inquiry and rested first and foremost on the Radbaz (Rabbi David ibn Zimra, chief rabbi of Egypt in the sixteenth century), who had already determined that the Beta Israel were "without doubt of the tribe of Dan," and that their status was that of "a child taken captive among the gentiles" — Jews whom one is obligated to rescue. Following him, Rabbi Ovadia also cited the ruling of the Radbaz's student, Rabbi Yaakov Castro (the Maharikash). And he noted that "several distinguished authorities" had ruled likewise before him: Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer (the same Hildesheimer from our opening, whom the letter calls "head of the beit midrash in Berlin"), Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, and Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog — the first Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel. He was also preceded by Rabbi David Shloush, the chief rabbi of Netanya, who had ruled unequivocally on their Jewish origin.

His conclusion was unambiguous. Here is how he put it himself, in a document preserved to this day in the State Archives:

"…Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that the Falashim are descendants of the tribes of Israel who journeyed south to Cush… and I have decided that they are Jews whom we must rescue from assimilation and absorption, hasten their immigration to the Land, educate them in the spirit of our holy Torah, and make them partners in the building of our holy land. And the children shall return to their borders."

Not Just on Paper — Four Young Men in Kfar HaMaccabiah

The ruling was not born of abstract study in a drawer. Rabbi Yosef Hadana — later the chief rabbi of Ethiopian Jewry and a student of Rabbi Ovadia, who immigrated in 1972 and witnessed the process up close — testified in writing that the rabbinic and governmental establishment of the day had no wish to deal with the issue at all, and even opposed bringing the community over: "only Maran [Rabbi Ovadia] agreed to take up the matter." Rabbi Ovadia studied the question deeply before he decided: he heard the testimony of tourists who had visited Ethiopia, sought the opinions of other rabbis, and turned directly to members of the community themselves. One night, according to Hadana, the rabbi telephoned him after midnight simply to hear, word for word, what was recited in the community at a wedding ceremony.

By then, the reality on the ground was already harsh. From 1970 onward, young members of the community had been arriving in Israel as tourists on three-month visas, and when their time ran out, they received deportation orders signed by the Interior Minister. Hadana recounts that when four such young men were hidden away in Kfar HaMaccabiah, Rabbi Ovadia said, "Bring them to me," performed a conversion for them, and immediately issued them documents that allowed them to receive immigrant status — and only afterward published his comprehensive legal ruling. In other words, the fight for actual human lives came before the statement of principle.

"What is astonishing," Hadana said, "is that when he wrote the ruling, the government was against it, and so were the rabbis. He stood alone and did what he believed in."

The Opposition Rabbi Ovadia Had to Overcome

The ruling was not issued into a vacuum — it had to overcome an organized, institutional opposition. As early as January 1973, a month before Rabbi Ovadia's letter, Dr. Yosef Litvak — a researcher in the Planning and Research Division of the Israeli Ministry of Absorption — published a report titled "The Falashim," compiling the arguments against bringing the community. The report included pseudo-scientific and racist claims: that the Falashim were "an organic part of the Ethiopian people" and had no connection to "the Jewish race," and that most of them had no interest in immigrating anyway. The report was linked to Interior Minister Yosef Burg (of the National Religious Party) and Absorption Minister Shlomo Rosen.

Rabbi Ovadia's ruling, about a month later, overrode it: the report's recommendations were never officially adopted, and Prime Minister Begin later ordered it shelved as "another document typical of the Mapai era." But the opposition did not vanish. Even after the ruling, the Interior Ministry — which had already tightened its visa procedures for the Beta Israel back in 1971 — continued to issue deportation orders against community members living in Israel, on the grounds that they were not Jews under the Law of Return. The deportees went underground with the help of the Public Committee for Ethiopian Jewry. The rabbi's ruling, in other words, had changed the religious law — but not, overnight, the bureaucracy.

Resistance, a Decision, and a Standstill

The road from the ruling (1973) to actual immigration was a winding one. In 1974, the Interior Minister of the day, Shlomo Hillel (of the Labor Alignment), tried to change the state's position — but the Interior Ministry was controlled by the National Religious Party, whose leaders, in Hillel's words, opposed recognizing the Ethiopian immigrants. In early 1975, Justice Minister Chaim Zadok wrote to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that it had been decided to form a team to examine applying the Law of Return to the community. In July 1975, a forum of ministers, several heads of the Jewish Agency, and Interior Ministry officials decided to apply the Law of Return to Ethiopian Jewry, on the basis of Rabbi Ovadia's ruling.

But the decision remained, in large part, on paper. When Hillel returned to the Interior Ministry in 1977, he found — by his own account — that no real progress had been made in the interim on their immigration.

1977 — The Wheels Begin to Turn (3/3)

The renewed push came with the Begin government in 1977, and with the return of Shlomo Hillel — a Jew born in Baghdad, the same figure we have met before as an Iraqi community leader — to the Interior Ministry. That year, the Ministerial Committee for Security Affairs decided to look favorably on bringing Ethiopian Jews over, and Begin approached Ethiopia's ruler on the matter. Four years after Rabbi Ovadia's original letter, the wheels finally began to turn — though the road to mass immigration was still a long one.

The Ashkenazi Rabbi Who Joined In

In 1975, Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, also wrote a letter of support to the community: they are brothers, flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood, Jews in every sense of religious law. This is important to note — this was not a "war between ethnic communities," Sephardim against Ashkenazim. It was a struggle between those willing to recognize a Jewish community that had lived in isolation for thousands of years, and a bureaucratic apparatus that demanded they prove themselves all over again.

A Commitment That Lasted to the End of His Life

Rabbi Ovadia did not stop at a single legal letter in 1973. In 2009, when three schools in Petah Tikva refused to accept additional students from the Ethiopian community, he personally threatened to dismiss school principals within his own Shas network if they refused to admit the children. Prime Minister Netanyahu called the affair, at the time, "a blow to morality." Thirty-six years after his first letter, Rabbi Ovadia was still fighting for the same community.

What Took Another Forty-Seven Years

The Chief Rabbinate itself — not only the Interior Ministry — continued to demand conversion of community members for decades. And here it is worth being precise about Rabbi Ovadia's own position: whereas the Radbaz, on whom he relied, still had reservations regarding matters of lineage, Rabbi Ovadia went further and ruled that the Jews of Ethiopia are full Jews, "permitted to enter the congregation of Israel without any conversion at all, not even as a stringency." In other words, he did not merely recognize them — he denied the very need for the conversion that the Rabbinate kept demanding. Only in 5780 (2020), almost half a century after his original letter, did the Council of the Chief Rabbinate officially adopt his ruling — at the initiative of Rabbi Yehuda Deri, the rabbi of Be'er Sheva. Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch, head of the rabbinical court of the Edah Haredit, still opposes the ruling to this day.

"The Rabbi's Jews"

There is a paradox here worth pausing on. A community that has existed for thousands of years, that preserved its Judaism in total isolation from the rest of the Jewish world — and yet many of its members today feel that it was, of all people, one rabbi, a Sephardi from the Middle East, who let them through the gate.

Rabbi Sharon Shalom, who immigrated from Ethiopia in 1982, put it this way: in the minds of many in the community, they are "the Jews of Rabbi Ovadia" — not by virtue of their ancestors having stood at Mount Sinai, but by virtue of the ruling. "The one who, in effect, 'validated' the Jews of Ethiopia as Jews is him," he says, "even though the Ethiopian Jewish community has existed for thousands of years."

And that is precisely the heart of the story. Not an Ashkenazi rabbi from the establishment demanding they prove themselves again — but a Middle Eastern rabbi, who saw them as brothers and worked to bring them home. When the former Miss Israel, Titi Aynaw, heard of his passing, she said: "Because of his ruling, we are here… He changed people's lives. You could say that because of him, I am here." Member of Knesset Pnina Tamano-Shata recounted rereading the ruling after his death and bursting into tears — out of gratitude for a man who called on the authorities of the state to act "with courage" to save an entire community and bring it home.

One ruling. Forty-seven years. An entire community, home.

Can deportable illegal aliens use the Constitution's Due Process Clause to end run around federal immigration law? A Fifth Circuit panel said yes, over a dissent by Judge Wilson. Now, the full Fifth Circuit has agreed to hear the case. The panel opinion is vacated.

The original panel opinion split on the Due Process clause. 71 total pages between the majority and dissent. Very interesting dispute.

Order here: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

Original opinion here: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

🚨EXPOSED — New Biden-era DOJ records obtained by AFL reveal former Acting Associate AG Matthew Colangelo’s involvement in lawfare targeting President Trump before joining Alvin Bragg’s prosecution.

The records contradict claims by officials and the media that he was uninvolved.

Matthew Colangelo served as Acting Associate Attorney General and Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General — the third-highest ranking official at DOJ — from January 2021 through November 2022.

Colangelo then resigned to help Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg “jump-start” his investigation of President Trump.

Colangelo personally delivered the prosecution’s opening statement.

Seems like the DHS want to establish its own air transport company for deporting "illegals."

No just a government fleet, but a "company" - i.e. contractors.

Lets break this development down below👇👇👇
1/20

1. DHS is a taxpayer money pit where our dollars go to be spent frivolously. This latest announcement indicates an existing contractor, looking for ways to profit futher, suggested the creation of a contracted DHS airline for shuttling detainees. LIkely very lucrative. 2/20

2. DHS is experiencing increasing pushback for its domestic expansion, finding it difficult to find new holding locations. Recently, they have started divesting property (bought at inflated prices) that was slated for detention facilities. This indicates they reached a point 3/20

🚨Can bipolar membrane electrodialysis (BMED) make #OAE commercially viable?

New study evaluates techno-economics of producing alkalinity from desalination brine & finds that commercial success depends far more on C markets & financing than on incremental tech improvements🧵1/11

2/ OAE works by increasing the ocean's alkalinity, allowing seawater to absorb and store more atmospheric CO₂ while helping counter ocean acidification.

3/ So, the proposed BMED system converts desalination brine into ~1,993 t/yr of NaOH for OAE while simultaneously producing ~1,768 t/yr of HCl as a marketable by-product.

The plant was modelled to remove ~878 tCO₂ annually, creating two potential revenue streams.

1/ Is Alexey Melnichenko's interview in The Economist a worthwhile vision of Russia's future, or a sneaky British provocation? Opinion among Russian commentators is divided, with some praising the oligarch's views and others looking for a hidden agenda. ⬇️

2/ (For part 1 of this thread, see the link below.)

https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/2075611738460803315

3/ 'Intelligence Diary' comments that Melnichenko was approaching the question of Russia's future from a rather different perspective, but had come to the same conclusions as the author: