This is another one of those things that they are scrapping because they think it is “woke” but that will end up biting them on the arse, partly as they are going into an El Niño phase.
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Yeah. I was frustrated at the cuts to NOAA, a bit more with the order to crash / dismantling OCO-2 and 3 but this next level.
Very dumb but straight out of the fascist playbook.
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Them? You mean us all, surely?
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Thousands of Albanians have flooded the streets for two days straight to stop Jared Kushner from bulldozing a protected wildlife sanctuary into a playground for billionaires.
This is what it looks like when an entire country decides its land is not for sale.
While the Trump administration guts environmental protections here at home, his son-in-law is doing the same thing abroad, just with bulldozers and barbed wire.
The project, tied to Kushner’s firm Affinity Partners, is a $4 billion luxury resort planned for the protected Vjosa-Narta coastal landscape in southern Albania.
This is one of the most ecologically important coastal wetlands on the entire Adriatic. Home to flamingos, Mediterranean monk seals, loggerhead turtles, and more than 200 bird species. It sits at the mouth of the Vjosa, one of Europe’s last truly wild rivers, which only became a protected national park in 2023.
The plan calls for roughly 10,000 hotel rooms and villas.
In early May, excavators began tearing up pine forests and dunes. Barbed-wire fences went up, cutting locals off from beaches they’d used for generations. Then a video went viral showing private security guards dragging a peaceful protester along a cliff.
That was the spark.
Thousands poured into the capital, Tirana, for two consecutive days, carrying signs reading “Hands off Vjosa-Narta,” chanting “Albania belongs to Albanians,” and demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama. The pressure was enormous enough to shake the government itself.
Why Rama? Because Kushner submitted his plans just weeks after Albania’s parliament conveniently rewrote the law to allow construction permits inside protected areas, but only for resorts rated five stars or higher.
Albania’s anti-corruption prosecutors have now opened a formal probe into exactly how that protected status got quietly altered.
Here’s the engine behind it all.
Affinity Partners isn’t really American money. It’s funded largely by Gulf state capital, with billions reported from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi, with the Trump family name as the connective tissue.
This is the same Kushner who landed a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund right after leaving the White House.
And it’s not even his first Balkan controversy. In 2025, Affinity abandoned a project in Serbia after anti-corruption authorities started investigating.
Flamingos don’t have lobbyists. Wild coastlines don’t write campaign checks. But Kushner has a very famous father-in-law, and a foreign government bet that was reason enough to sell off its own natural heritage.
The Albanian people are betting otherwise. Loudly, and by the thousands.
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the fuck is wrong with people
i get making money…but selling your own national heritage up the creek?..
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If I may?
One of my hobbies is fishing and by nature and a long time ago profession, a conservationist. Here on the eastern coastlines every winter we have the ‘greatest shoal on earth’ which coincides with large numbers of gamefish travelling up the coastlines as well along their migratory routes to spawn etc. Anyway, there is a species of predatory fish which we call shad (in Aus they’re tailor, the US bluefish). What happens is that this particular species shoals and becomes very aggressive in patches that we call a ‘shad run’ where they will take absolutely everything that you throw out and I mean everything, even a bare hook with some cotton trailing along. As such, they are extremely easy to catch with all that’s required is being able to semi cast a bait or lure. They’re also very good eating as well which doesn’t help but be that as it may, the bag limit is 4 per angler per day with a minimum size of 30cm.
The carnage of this species in particular from shore anglers in horrific; during a run, anglers at the popular spots can run into hundreds. At Margate Pier here for example, a ‘run’ can sometimes last a few days with anglers fishing day and night and individuals racking up catches of 100’s with the only limit being how long they can stay at the pier for. A very common excuse is that it’s just a few months a year or that the Chinese Trawlers are doing worse and so on. The math is stark. Along my stretch of coast, there are about 13 ‘hotspots’.
Margate Pier can sometimes have a hundred fisherman during a frenzy and with very little self control except for a few and ineffective policing, the average catch can be anywhere from 30 - 200. That’s probably 10k shad. In one spot. In one day. Amongst the various spots, perhaps 50k. In one day. And that’s just here, go up the coast and you have Hibberdene, Scottburgh, Umkomaas before you even get to Durban and beyond. It’s not an exaggeration to say that millions of this species is raped from the ocean by the multitudes of a simple ‘recreational’ angler with a rod and reel. In conversation with one of these idiots, I asked what would he be leaving for his son and his words, ‘thats their problem, I need to eat now’. The fish is just a commodity to be exploited because it can be.
How does this correlate to what you’ve just said, though. Well it’s the same thing, the other end of the spectrum is just closing off the circle; wealth needs something to feed off, it has to come from somewhere and with no apparent checks on the wealthy, just as self control is rarely evident in the example O showed above, it’s also rarely evident in the wealthy where more and more and more must be gleaned from… everything. I will say this is not everyone but money and power does indeed corrupt and natural resources are just commodities to be exploited because it’s here now and so is he/she.
Edit: the shad are late this year, they were late last year. Everyone complains that the fish are later, the fish are smaller, the fish are fewer… Very few have seemed to make the mental leap as to why.
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Saw something similar a good few years ago. I booked for my father, brother and myself a fishing boat charter off Shell Island. There were in total 10 or do on the boat, most campers staying on Shell Island.
We hit our chosen spot off shore and were straight into Mackerel, bream, the odd Bass. It was boringly easy. Drop a line of feathers overboard. Wait till they hit bottom, 2 turns and jiggle it. Reel in catch. After 15 minutes I stopped. I’d had a few fish, released most. Others on the boat were busy filling buckets. Lots of buckets, do many buckets. These people were staying in tents. Too many to eat, no way to freeze them. It was just waste and in the most stupid manner I’ve ever seen.
I’ll never go again.
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Who knows how they will manage the Wimbledon Qualifiers for instance today… Play would be suspended till 7pm.
with Wed and Thursday the same…
A once in a generation event has become a once in a decade event to now what seems to be once in every 1-2 years, though this would be the second time it’s hit over 35 degrees
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The third day here in the South of France where it’s been 40+ , with no relief forecast until the end of the week. It doesn’t even drop below 30 until about 2am.
phew … what a scorcher !
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Opening windows doesn’t help even at 4am unless there’s some wind.
I’m used to it here as many August’s are like it but this early in the year is strange, though it happened last year.
Just sit in a pool of sweat 
.
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Two extreme events before we’re even into summer , and it’s only gonna get worse. 
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Shad still haven’t arrived in numbers nor has the Greatest Shoal on Earth made much of an appearence. Sea temperatures hovering around 24 celcius in the middle of winter as reported by those who measure that kind of thing whereas should be around 18/19. Nothing Arctic, to be sure, but that’s what it should be at this latitude in these parts for this time of the year. The weather itself doesn’t get all that cold compared to what you guys would call Winter but even so, been unseasonably warm and the sea has been like glass more often than not.
Can’t ever recall atmospheric and sea conditions ever being like this here. Almost a surreal calm going back to April bar and the extremely rare day or two.
Edit: We should also by now should be seeing large numbers of Southern Right and Humpback whales making their way northwards to calf. Nada
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It’s a very pleasant 25C here today, and not too humid. I’m taking a half day to use up vacation time, watch the World Cup, and sip something cool and refreshing in my garden.
We will have plenty of days that get a lot hotter this summer, and much more humid, but right now it’s lovely.
From memory, there’s not a lot of air conditioning in the UK so I hope everyone is doing ok with the heatwave. Perhaps little units that cool a single room have grown more popular? Otherwise that will make for a restless night.
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The drownings are shocking, is it a simple matter of a population with relatively low levels of swimming training being pushed to cool themselves?
Meanwhile, here it has been an unusually cool spring - the same inversion bringing hot air from Africa to Europe is bringing polar air here. Our lake is still borderline spanner water, the one hot week we have had was not enough to bring the temperature up.
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Swimming lessons are compulsory , and free , at school. And there are plenty of well maintained municipal swimming pools with excellent facilities which are subsidised and within most peoples’ reach.
I think it’s simply a problem of people jumping into dangerous rivers , lakes and the sea when it becomes this hot. Accidents happen unfortunately.
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No it’s that certain rivers are very dangerous, the Loire in particular, and people are unaware of those dangers.
Then there’s the temperature difference that again people are unaware of the circumstances which cause a shock to the body.
There’s information given on the news but that’s not where people get their information or ideas from anymore.
I mean it’s only June and even in August you go to the Gard for a dip. Temperature you feel outside 44ºC temperature of the water feels like freezing in comparison. In June the temperature of the water will be much lower.
The Durance is one you shouldn’t ever swim or canoe in without checking when they will be releasing water from the artificial lakes that’s electricity Enedis. There’s a number of people who get caught out from time to time.
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I was reading a report about conditions for this years El Nino and it is apparently the most extreme we have on record going back about 200 years.
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