The aim is to reward "sustainable" food production and practices that help tackle climate change and nature loss. To be eligible for the new payments farms must ensure 10% of land is planted with trees and 10% is treated as wildlife habitat. A consultation has suggested if every farm took part it could result in a 10.8% reduction in livestock numbers and an 11% cut in labour on Welsh farms. NFU Cymru said this would be the equivalent of losing 5,500 jobs.

The deadly storm that smashed records in Southern California, with mud and debris flows inundating roads and forcing evacuations, is finally on the horizon after a smaller system brought some downpours and flash flooding warnings to the region Wednesday night. An inch of rain fell in some higher elevations and a quarter- or half-inch in Los Angeles County, which pushed five-day rainfall totals even higher, hitting more than 14 inches in some places, including Topanga and Cogswell Dam north of Monrovia, according to Mike Wofford, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Oxnard.

As of Thursday morning, downtown Los Angeles had received 9.03 inches since Saturday — more than half its average yearly rainfall of 14.25 inches. About 1.4 million Pacific Gas & Electric customers statewide lost power during the storm. The bulk of the outages have affected Northern California, where powerful wind gusts toppled trees, sending them crashing onto electrical equipment and into homes.

There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers. Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices.

Stingray devices, facial recognition technology, body cameras, automated license plate readers, gunshot detection, predictive policing software, AI-enhanced video analytics, real-time crime centers, fusion centers: all of these technologies and surveillance programs rely on public-private partnerships that together create a sticky spiderweb from which there is no escape.

What this adds up to for government agencies (that is, FBI, NSA, DHS agents, etc, as well as local police) is a surveillance map that allows them to track someone’s movements over time and space, hopscotching from doorbell camera feeds and business security cameras to public cameras on utility poles, license plate readers, traffic cameras, drones, etc.

It has all but eliminated the notion of privacy enshrined in the Fourth Amendment and radically re-drawn the line of demarcation between our public and private selves. The police state has become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment, empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector.

“We’re doing it first because it’s our job — we’re in journalism, [and] our duty is to inform people,” he said. “Two years into a war that’s reshaping the entire world, most Americans are not informed. They have no real idea what’s happening in this region… but they should. They’re paying for much of it.” He meant the Russia-Ukraine war. He continued by warning that the war is doing more than just costing Americans — it’s upending US dominance in the global economy.

“This war has utterly reshaped the global military and trade alliances, and the sanctions that followed have as well,” he said. “And in total, they have upended the world economy — the post-World War II economic order. The system that guaranteed prosperity in the West for more than 80 years is coming apart very fast, and along with it the dominance of the US dollar.”

Water is very heavy. If you doubt this, just try lugging a couple of gallons of water around with you for a while. Now trillions of gallons of rain have poured down on California, and all of that added weight is going to put additional stress on the fault lines in the southern portion of the state. A number of years ago, a team of geophysicists determined that flooding helped trigger major earthquakes in southern California “at least three times in the past 2,000 years”…

Geophysicists have linked historical earthquakes on the southern section of California’s famed San Andreas fault to ancient floods from the nearby Colorado River. Now, new work in southern California suggests that at least three times in the past 2,000 years, the weight of river water spreading across floodplains seems to have helped trigger earthquakes in the region. What we are witnessing is truly unprecedented, and all of this water is going to put immense pressure on southern California’s fault lines.

It is astonishing that the British Prime Minister would even think of signing off on statements like this when Israel is under attack, while US and UK forces are coming under direct fire in the Middle East from Iranian-backed militias who openly declare their intention to destroy Israel and create a Palestinian state.

Cameron’s statements run counter to the wishes of the Israeli government, and are a direct assault on Israeli statehood, as well as appearing like an appalling reward for Hamas’s campaign of mass murder and terror. They risk strategically strengthening Iran, the biggest champion of Palestinian statehood in the region and the world’s largest state sponsor of terror.

They will be welcomed by the brutal Iranian regime, who will see this as a propaganda win, and a blow to Israel. They will also be cheered by the pro-Palestine mobs who have occupied the streets of London in recent months, and who will delight at the prospect of Israel facing humiliating pressure from the West to make major concessions.

Second, polarization is unusually high and virulent: As of 2020 already, a political scientist at one of America’s most prestigious universities, found that “political polarization among Americans has grown rapidly in the last 40 years — more than in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia or Germany,” for instance. The result: America is special, but not in a good way. “None of the wealthy, consolidated democracies of East Asia, Oceania, or Western Europe,” a 2022 paper published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace pointed out, “have faced similar levels of polarization for such an extended period.”

Third, the country also displays a pronounced cultural preoccupation, really almost obsession, not merely with the idea of civil war as such or the specific history of its own very bloody civil war in the nineteenth century. Rather its elites and general population are fixated on a coming civil war, which, as of 2022, a whopping 43 percent considered likely in the next ten years. Debates, high-brow books, articles, and popular culture feature this fantasy prominently and persistently.

To start with the latter question, perhaps the first thing to note is that big civil wars can start small and local. That is, by the way, the real significance of the recent, open tensions over migration and border control between the state of Texas and the federal government in Washington. They did involve armed forces and much foreboding rhetoric, but, fortunately, no shots were fired. Yet those glibly dismissing the incident as mere political theater are wrong. Because, as the New York Times has noted, it was not only Texas that defied the US government. Rather, “many Republican state leaders publicly expressed defiance in terms that echoed armed conflicts.”

Indeed, the second thing to note is that, due to America’s federal structure, a new civil war would most likely begin with secession. In the fracas between Washington and Texas, 25 Republican governors openly sided with rebellious Texas. This was a perfect illustration of how one local flashpoint could quickly suck in the rest of the country by creating a logic of ultimate polarization and then secession. This logic has not yet fully unfolded. Its contours, however, have emerged clearly.

So what’s the fastest growing group among them? Chinese migrants. Yes, you heard that right… Chinese. We saw large groups, including many from the middle class, come through a 4-foot gap at the end of a border fence 60 miles east of San Diego. The illegal entryway is a new route for those hoping to live in America.

A steady flow of what appears to be mostly Chinese nationals are shown walking through a clear gap in the border wall, with useless barbed wire fencing having being pushed aside. At one point, cameras capture an armed Border Patrol agent standing just 25 feet away who did nothing to deter the illegal entry.

“When Charles’ grandfather, George VI, was very gravely ill, the severity of his condition was kept not only from the public but from the patient himself,” Gristwood said of King George, who died in 1952. “Those were the attitudes of the time. Happily, things have now changed.”

Thus, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on January 8 that his country is ready to go to war with the Lebanese group. However, he still believes that it is better to resolve the conflict peacefully. Netanyahu made his statement following a visit to the town of Kiryat Shmona, after it was hit by a Hezbollah anti-tank missile. The locality in northern Israel is regularly shelled by the organization.

Later, on January 17, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Commander-in-Chief Herzi Halevy said that the likelihood of a full-scale military operation in Lebanon has now drastically increased. “I don’t know when a war will happen in the north. What I can say is that the likelihood of this happening in the coming months is now much higher than in the past,” The Times of Israel quoted him as saying.

If Netanyahu does decide to launch an operation in southern Lebanon, the war will be long and bloody. Representatives of the “Axis of Resistance” led by Iran will lend support with even greater effort. Then the specter of war will become a reality and the Middle East will burst into flames, the consequences of which no one can assess or foresee.