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The current buzz around Lombard is not all that different from what it was with Anthony Volpe in the spring of 2023.

"The proposed use by the new property owner is far more intensive than what is appropriate for a quiet residential neighborhood,” the leader of the “Saxon Says No" group against the school said.

“We just have a shortage of supply of homes,” argued the comptroller. Yet “in rent-stabilized buildings, we have tens of thousands of apartments” sitting vacant because the laws make it too difficult for landlords to rent these units.

Deaths Now Outnumber Births In 17 US States

Natural population growth is slowing across much of America.

According to the latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates, 17 states recorded more deaths than births between July 2024 and July 2025, up from only four states during much of the 2010s.

Using U.S. Census Bureau data, Visual Capitalist's Dorothy Neufeld created this map showing natural population change in every state.

Because the measure excludes domestic and international migration, it highlights where population growth increasingly depends on people moving in.

Natural Population Change by State

The table below ranks every state by natural population change between July 2024 and July 2025, highlighting where births continued to outpace deaths—and where they no longer did.

State Natural Population Change
Jul 2024–Jul 2025 Pennsylvania -10,708 West Virginia -7,887 Maine -5,019 Michigan -4,998 Oregon -3,764 Mississippi -2,607 Alabama -2,188 New Hampshire -2,167 New Mexico -1,885 Vermont -1,769 Florida -1,333 Arkansas -1,224 Ohio -729 Delaware -554 Rhode Island -304 Montana -90 Kentucky -83 Missouri 177 Wyoming 295 South Carolina 564 Wisconsin 1,161 Hawaii 2,024 Connecticut 2,283 District of Columbia 2,516 Oklahoma 2,559 South Dakota 2,605 North Dakota 2,630 Louisiana 2,774 Iowa 2,949 Nevada 3,051 Alaska 3,308 Tennessee 3,597 Kansas 4,951 Nebraska 6,136 Idaho 6,900 Massachusetts 8,419 Indiana 8,561 Illinois 10,903 Maryland 11,444 Minnesota 12,071 Virginia 13,817 North Carolina 15,129 Washington 17,230 Colorado 20,608 Utah 24,961 New Jersey 26,023 Georgia 28,631 Arizona 20,914 New York 42,815 California 109,715 Texas 157,711

Pennsylvania recorded the nation’s largest natural decline (-10.7K), followed by West Virginia, Maine, and Michigan. Most states with natural decreases were concentrated in the Northeast and Appalachia, regions that include several states with some of the country’s oldest populations.

Florida also recorded more deaths than births, yet remained one of America’s fastest-growing states because of migration.

The South remained the engine of natural population growth. Texas (+158K), Georgia (+29K), and North Carolina (+15K) posted strong gains. California (+110K) and New York (+43K) also recorded far more births than deaths despite slower overall population growth.

America’s Population Is Increasingly Shaped by Migration

Natural population change tells only part of the story.

Several states with more deaths than births, including Florida, Maine, and Pennsylvania, can still grow overall when migration offsets their natural decline. Others continue losing population even after attracting newcomers.

Meanwhile, states such as Texas, North Carolina, and Arizona benefit from both natural population growth and migration, helping drive some of the country’s fastest population gains.

As America’s population ages and birth rates remain historically low, natural population growth is becoming less common. For a growing number of states, migration—not births—is now the primary driver of population growth, making migration trends increasingly important to their long-term demographic outlook.

To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic on immigration’s role in U.S. population growth by state.

Tyler Durden Fri, 07/24/2026 - 05:45

The song references a range of political and cultural issues, with mentions of the nation's first black president, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, immigration and transgender rights.

NMN has become all the rage in the longevity space. Does it actually live up to the hype?

The all-business bear entered the Crestline Village Water District in the San Bernardino Mountains.

A maintenance worker was trapped inside a 130-foot-tall gas station sign for around six-and-a-half hours – but still managed to give a thumbs-up despite the mishap.

Nolan's Odysseus is the very embodiment of the questing, endlessly curious spirit of Western culture that has forged so many new discoveries and transformed the human condition.

The convicted sex offender considered to be the chief suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann allegedly attacked cops outside a German supermarket after taking photographs of them on his cell phone. Christian Brueckner, 49, is accused of clashing with the officers outside a store in Kiel, northern Germany, on June 6, and left one...

Hundreds of incoming Howard University students from across the country were blindsided just weeks before the start of school after receiving an email informing them they had been unenrolled.

EU Is Launching A Mission To Board Russian Shadow Fleet Tankers In The Indian Ocean

The European Union has authorized its naval mission in the Indian Ocean (apparently there is one) to stop and board Russian shadow fleet tankers suspected of operating under false flags, the bloc announced on Wednesday.

The Spanish Navy frigate Santa María F81, deployed as part of the European Union Naval Force Operation ATALANTA, seen off the coast of Mogadishu, Somalia, on April 24, 2025.

EU member states have authorized Operation Atalanta, the union’s counter-piracy naval mission off the Horn of Africa, to begin conducting flag-verification boardings of vessels suspected of belonging to Russia’s shadow fleet in the western Indian Ocean, DefenseNews reported. The decision, announced this week by EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, extends to Atalanta a power already exercised by the EU’s Mediterranean mission, Operation Irini.

Kallas made the announcement alongside news that Irini forces had boarded the sanctioned oil tanker MV South Star on July 20, acting on suspicion that the vessel was sailing under a false flag. “Every illicit voyage helps sustain Russia’s war machine. We are matching our sanctions with action at sea,” Kallas said, adding that the Atalanta authorization “further tightens the net.”

The move considerably widens the EU’s geographic reach against the shadow fleet, a loosely defined network of tankers with opaque ownership structures that Moscow uses to sell oil above the Western-imposed price cap. While Irini patrols the Mediterranean, Atalanta operates across the Somali Basin, the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Suez, the Gulf of Aqaba and waters around Oman, and was launched as the EU’s first-ever naval mission in 2008 to combat piracy.

It is separate from the EU mission ASPIDES, which is designed to protect shipping in the Red Sea from attacks by the Iran-backed Yemeni Houthi rebels. One look at the exploding price of oil shows just how much the market thinks of Europe "defending" this particular waterway. 

The corridor where the mission operates is a critical transit route for tankers carrying Russian crude toward buyers in Asia. Brussels has already sanctioned more than 600 vessels suspected of belonging to the network.

Generally, ships on the high seas cannot simply be stopped and boarded by any third country. However, Article 110 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea permits warships to stop and inspect a vessel only where there is reasonable suspicion it is stateless or flying a flag to which it is not entitled. This falls short of a blanket authority to stop any sanctioned or Russia-linked ship, but flying false flags has been a frequent practice on Russian shadow fleet vessels.

The council decision, the operational plan and the rules of engagement that would spell out exactly how far Atalanta’s new powers extend have so far not been made public.

The approach has already produced results elsewhere. Irini’s flag checks contributed to pressure that culminated in a Cameroon purge of 39 vessels from its shipping registry after investigators uncovered fraudulent paperwork and fake registry websites used to disguise shadow fleet tankers.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously denounced such interceptions as “piracy,” underscoring how the expanded mandate is likely to further sharpen tensions between Brussels and Moscow over enforcement at sea.

One caveat to all this: unlike oil, Russian LNG (which Europe is absolutely desperate for) will remain exempt from EU sanctions. Which prompted Rabobank's Michael Every earlier today to ask rhetorically "realpolitik or real weakness?"

Tyler Durden Fri, 07/24/2026 - 04:15

The company is one of several subcontractors to report financial trouble after working on the center.

Eco Loon Lobbies For Cameo In British Soap To Spread Climate Alarmism

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

BBC naturalist Chris Packham has openly requested a guest role on the fictional soap EastEnders so he can turn the nation's most-watched entertainment show into a vehicle for climate crisis messaging.

In comments reported by GB News and drawn from a Radio Times interview, the veteran naturalist described his fantasy appearance: an environmental disaster such as a flood hitting the fictional London borough, followed by him marching through as himself with a placard to lecture the locals.

Packham told Radio Times he wants the role because it "would give me the capacity to communicate to an audience which I don't talk to in my sphere of work."

Chris Packham makes request for BBC EastEnders role to spread awareness of climate crisishttps://t.co/EGpYTlGvjp

— GB News (@GBNEWS) July 22, 2026

He complained that while some people understand the "scale of the crisis," broader media fails at "truth telling" to "bring it home to everyone."

"The trouble is, I keep popping that bubble and looking outside, and I see that other people are not aware of the gravity of that crisis, or some of them are still in the position where actually they're denying ... and that's really scary," he said.

He called for the messaging to be "integrated into broader output, so properly into news obviously, properly into weather where we talk about climate as well as weather - but also into dramas."

? Chris Packham urges Barclays customers to set themselves on fire pic.twitter.com/0PtNRFqg7l

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) August 17, 2024

Chris Packham should consider fucking off pic.twitter.com/zt9LlndWvP

— MrFezziwig™ (@MrFezz15) April 18, 2026

Chris Packham, "Three things.. The message is to keep fossil fuels in the ground, we need a just transition towards renewables.. Stonehenge has been adequately cleaned.. For the first time we've seen people concerned about a rare species of lichen" @ChrisGPackham

"JSO have... pic.twitter.com/M8MQcO21hr

— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) June 21, 2024

I challenged Chris Packham on BBC bias around trans and gender ideology... pic.twitter.com/6qQcFaGfTI

— Andrew Gold (@AndrewGold_ok) April 29, 2026

This is not subtle. It is an explicit pitch to hijack prime-time entertainment and insert alarmist talking points into the daily lives of millions who never tune into nature documentaries.

British soaps have a documented history of being quietly weaponised for official narratives. FOI documents obtained last year revealed that during the Covid period the Department for Culture, Media and Sport held secret meetings with the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to coordinate "national unity programming."

Officials explored inserting pro-vaccine storylines into EastEnders and Coronation Street. Characters were scripted to celebrate jabs as winning the lottery while sceptics were mocked as "anti-vaxxers." One MP later described the broadcasters as reduced to "mere arms of the state."

The same playbook has been applied to immigration. EastEnders has featured storylines about exploited African migrants and racially motivated murders of immigrants after hiring campaigner Ade Lamuye in 2022.

Lamuye sits on the advisory board of the Power of Pop Fund, which has directed nearly £5 million to organisations that use media to reframe migration debates.

Similar influence operations have shaped sympathetic asylum-seeker characters in the other popular long running British soap Coronation Street. Activists openly boast that entertainment "holds influence and power to make real change."

Far from being organic storytelling, this is coordinated social engineering, the same approach visible in other mainstream dramas that lecture audiences on pronouns, "deadnaming" and the supposed problems with classic literature. Channel 5's The Teacher delivered some of the most direct examples yet, training viewers to treat biological reality and cultural heritage as potential sources of harm.

Watch the pattern laid bare across programming:

Even children's programming is being enlisted. Netflix is developing a live-action reboot of the 1990s cartoon Captain Planet, the original of which pushed environmental panic, progressive multiculturalism, population control and the idea that humanity itself is the enemy requiring global governance.

Ted Turner's creation was steeped in Club of Rome thinking that treated pollution and climate as a common enemy to justify changed attitudes and supranational control.

The method is consistent: identify a captive, trusting audience, embed the message inside drama so it feels organic, and watch compliance rise. Packham is simply asking for the same treatment for net-zero ideology.

While Packham demands soaps lecture viewers about "climate breakdown," the actual evidence keeps undercutting the apocalyptic script. A bombshell Royal Society paper concluded that climate change is not causing mass extinctions, directly challenging one of the most repeated scare claims.

The IPCC itself has admitted that its most extreme apocalyptic scenarios are implausible, a quiet but significant climb-down from the catastrophe rhetoric used to justify rapid policy upheaval.

Research examining three million years of data has found no consistent link between CO2 levels and temperature, leaving net-zero activists without a straightforward causal story.

Temperature records underpinning the COP30 alarmist agenda have been shown to rest on heavily adjusted and questionable data, further eroding the foundation of official claims.

Even Bill Gates has publicly walked back the idea that climate change will end the world, prompting a triumphant response from those who have long argued the threat was overstated.

Meanwhile the Great Barrier Reef continues to defy the narrative, recording its fifth-highest coral cover on record even as media outlets insist a tipping point has been reached.

A major US government report has catalogued the systematic abuses of "settled" climate science and the role those abuses have played in driving net-zero policies that impose heavy economic costs for uncertain benefits.

The milder public messaging about weather reports and soap storylines sits alongside far more radical demands. Some German climate groups have openly called for total deindustrialisation of their country within 15 years, treating economic self-destruction as a moral necessity.

Others treat the entire agenda as a quasi-religious cult, complete with orthodoxy, heretics and demands for collective sacrifice that go well beyond practical environmental protection.

When the warming narrative softens under the weight of contradictory data, the same voices simply pivot. Scientists have revived ice-age doom scenarios, and Al Gore has shifted his public emphasis in ways that suggest the next scare is already being prepared.

Earlier claims of imminent climate armageddon have been quietly cancelled or scaled back, yet the institutional machinery that produced them remains intact and ready for the next iteration.

Packham's EastEnders pitch is the latest attempt to keep the emotional temperature high after the hard data has cooled.

Flood Albert Square on screen, march through with a placard, and hope the audience never notices that the real-world evidence keeps failing to match the script.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Tyler Durden Fri, 07/24/2026 - 03:30

A New York mom who was killed in a grandmother’s murder-suicide alongside her four children may have been complicit in their deaths, cops have theorized amid their investigation. Amy Steadman, 64, Sarah Myers, 44, and Harper Harmon, 13; Hudson Harmon, 11; Gavin Harmon, 10, and Gracelynn Harmon, 10 – were all found dead inside Steadman’s...

Both victims had a gunshot wound to the head, according to police.

If you rewound the end of Silo Season 3, Episode 4, you're not alone. 👀

Dear Abby advises a wife whose husband won't contribute to their household income, and another whose husband won't clean himself or help around the house.

EU Approves Biggest Russia Sanctions Yet After Holdout Greece Secured LNG Exemption

What is there left to sanction and what is its effectiveness? Europe is boasting of no less that its 21st package of sanctions against Russia, approved by the EU on Thursday.

Apparently it has found plenty of entities still to sanction, as the compiled blacklisting is said to be the EU's largest in four years, targeting primarily financial and energy sectors. The bloc also agreed to freeze the Russian oil price cap at current levels for another year, alongside issuing 218 new designations.

Getty Images

"At a time when Ukraine has built military momentum, our sanctions continue to weaken the economic foundations of Russia’s war effort," EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.

And Kaja Kallas, High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and chair of the Foreign Affairs Council, announced that "With each round of sanctions, we squeeze Russia's economy and its capacity to prolong its illegal war. Our 21st package includes the highest number of listings in four years."

She described: "We’re hitting over a hundred banks and crypto operators, 40+ vessels in Russia’s shadow fleet, and several oil refineries in Russia and Belarus. More than 50 military-industrial entities are included, key actors involved in the production of Russia's long-range drones. Russia will only negotiate to end its illegal war and stop killing civilians if it is pressured to do so. Sanctions add to this pressure."

Notably the EU is targeting not just Russia's so-called shadow fleet, but any vessel that even assists ships under sanction. According to a rundown via an EU media readout:

Concerning energy, today’s package pauses the automatic adjustment of the oil price cap mechanism until 15 July 2027. This is to ensure that Russia's profits from oil sales remain contained, despite the exceptional market situation caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Today’s agreement foresees an interim review of the suspension to ensure that the mechanism remains necessary and proportionate. The EU is also continuing to target the shadow fleet by extending the scope of the existing rules also to cover vessels supporting the shadow fleet, by providing bunkering and other services, and listing 41 more vessels on top of the 632 already sanctioned. These measures target non-EU tankers that are part of the shadow fleet circumventing the oil price cap mechanism, that support Russia’s energy sector in other ways, or that transport military equipment for Russia or stolen Ukrainian grain. The EU is designating 8 entities and 1 individual active in the shadow fleet ecosystem, including companies operating on behalf of Russia’s oil majors and, for the first time, a crewing agency providing support to the shadow fleet.

Furthermore, the EU is targeting the oil sector, in particular refineries. It is designating 18 entities and 1 individual in the oil sector, including 3 refineries in Russia, a major Belarusian oil refinery, as well as a company created to sell Belarusian petroleum products within Russia. In addition, the package creates the possibility to prohibit transactions with listed refineries in Russia and in third countries which process or refine Russian crude oil and petroleum products. In that framework, the EU is imposing a transaction ban – entering into force in six months - on a Georgian refinery trading and processing Russian oil in Kulevi. Furthermore, the EU added five oil traders to the entities subject to transaction ban for frustrating the prohibition on purchasing Russian crude oil and petroleum products.

With the Iran war and Hormuz crisis seeing rising oil prices, Russia might not find itself so squeezed after all?

"Russia's state oil and gas revenue, which accounts for around a fifth ​of total budget income, is seen rising ‌by 60% in July from the same month a year ago thanks to the increase in ​global oil prices, Reuters calculations showed ​on Thursday.

A steep rise from profit-based… pic.twitter.com/tFLV902APw

— Rob Lee (@RALee85) July 23, 2026

Also notable is that Russian LNG is to remain partially exempt from EU sanctions - in what some analysts are calling a sign of weakness.

EU countries have reached a deal on a sweeping 21st sanctions package against Moscow.

It was only possible by allowing Greece to keep sending Russian gas to countries outside the bloc.

🔗 https://t.co/tqqhCCbmqW pic.twitter.com/TRpiygcDQL

— POLITICOEurope (@POLITICOEurope) July 23, 2026

After previously holding up the EU passage of the new anti-Moscow measures, Greece won an exemption permitting continued shipments of Russian LNG to non-EU buyers indefinitely.

Tyler Durden Fri, 07/24/2026 - 02:45

Steve Kerrigan's license was suspended for 45 days after failed breathalyzer during a traffic stop: police.