Global
“Renee sparkled. She literally sparkled. I mean, she didn’t wear glitter but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time. You might think it was just my love talking but her family said the same thing. Renee was made of sunshine.”
The words are those of Renee Good’s wife Becca. They cut to our heart – our humanity. She was shot in the face by an ICE agent, who then muttered: “Fuckin’ bitch.” The murder of this 37-year-old mom as she tried to drive around the ICE guys who stopped her is national news, of course. Almost everyone has seen at least one of the many videos of the incident and, you might say, the national dialogue about virtually anything else has been put on hold.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested, detained, deported, and/or imprisoned many people that it has unilaterally determined to be undesirables. At first, they claimed they would deport only criminals, but it has already gone beyond that. We at the Free Press consider every person who has been sent to the Tecoluca (El Salvador prison), Guantanamo naval base, or detained in other prisons throughout the country to be innocent until proven guilty. We will include students who have been expelled for protesting genocide. It appears the government will revoke Visa's to get rid of undesirable students. This article will be updated as long as is necessary.
We start GREEP Zoom #263 with the wonderful MAGA refugee JENNIE GAGE reporting from Arizona and her brave new post-Trump/Mormon life.
Amidst the aftermath of the now-iconic AI image of Donald Trump as Jesus, we hear from star Raw Story reporter ALEXANDRIA JACOBSON.
According to both Jennie and Alexandria, the “trinity” of the Epstein Files, the Iran War and the economy is shredding the Trump MAGA camp forever.
Viktor Orban’s monumental loss is tagged as a MAGA loss by Charisse Sebastian who emphasizes the need for “unconventional” thinking.
With memories of Hungary, we hear that SANDY BOLZENIUS remembers how Orban took power and has now been left in the dust by a worldwide people’s movement.
From Minnesota, KARLA SAND comments that the Democratic Party is in a complete shambles.
Also from Ohio, MORGAN HARPER dissects the economic crisis tearing the Buckeye State into unpredictable, independent pieces as she reminds us that the root of the Epstein/Wexner scandal is still right there.
In the aftermath of last week’s big meeting of the Democratic National Committee in New Orleans, supporters of the U.S.-Israel alliance have been quite content. “We’re pleased that the DNC Resolutions Committee rejected a set of divisive, anti-Israel resolutions,” the president of Democratic Majority for Israel said. The CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a former national security advisor to Kamala Harris, expressed gratitude to the DNC’s leadership.
Why did pro-Israel groups voice so much pleasure and praise – not only for the sidelining of pro-human-rights resolutions but also for the process that sidelined them? The answer has to do with the DNC’s mechanism that thwarted changes in positions on Israel. A panel named the Middle East Working Group gummed up all efforts to align the DNC with the views of most Democratic voters, even while supposedly hard at work.
In the Middle East, the perception of ordinary Americans has long followed a familiar script: detached, uninformed, inward-looking, and politically shallow— a society of ‘gas guzzlers’, with little grasp of global realities beyond their immediate geography.
This perception did not emerge from thin air. It was cultivated—reinforced, even—by American political and media institutions themselves. Politicians claimed to speak on behalf of ‘the American people’, while mainstream media shaped what those people knew, and, crucially, what they did not know.
For decades, Americans overwhelmingly aligned with Israel. This was not merely ideological; it was instructional. The public was told—repeatedly—that Israel reflected ‘American values’: democracy, civility, modernity. Palestinians and Arabs, by contrast, were framed as perpetual antagonists, initiators of violence, and ‘obstacles to peace’.
One common feature of western empire propaganda is that we are always given reasons for the empire’s violence, while the violence of those who resist the empire tends to be framed as happening for no reason at all.
We’ve all been fed reasons for the US-Israeli war on Iran, and we all know what those reasons are. Even less-informed members of the western public will have heard something about the Iranians being a nuclear threat, having a tyrannical government, and maybe something about sponsoring terrorist groups.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Let’s listen again to these viral words, as they hover over the planet . . . as they hover over, good God, the future. Finally, finally, the time has come for every last one of us to release the question these words force on us, from the privacy, from the cynicism, of our hearts, and collectively scream it until it begins to orbit Planet Earth: How do we transcend war?
The words, of course, are those of Donald Trump, U.S. president and perhaps the most powerful and troubled human being on the planet, whose finger has access to the “nuclear button.” The words are part of several social media posts he let loose last week, as his pointless war on Iran continued spiraling out of control. Iran was fighting back. It closed the Strait of Hormuz, creating financial chaos around the world.
Gas turbine prices triple
For those who feel that natural gas is the preferred option in meeting the unprecedented electricity load demand increase that the grid will face over the coming years - they just got a bit more bad news.
The price of natural gas rose 56 percent last year and just spiked another 21 percent in the past month largely due to the fossil fuel shock caused by the conflict in Iran. But that is not this week's bad news for those advocating for electricity generated by natural gas.
Driven by increased electrification demand, especially around the expansion of data centers, the gas turbine market faces a significant supply shortage that will see prices surge through 2027, according to a new report from Wood Mackenzie. According to the report, global orders for turbines sat at 110 gigawatts (GW) at the end of 2025, but global manufacturing capacity is only around 65 GW.
This has pushed prices to new highs, with the market anticipated to reach US$600/kW by end-2027—a 195 percent increase since 2019. Turbines make up 20 – 30 percent of project costs.
