BREAKING: "INADMISSABLE!" Pope Leo XIV delivers a STINGING reminder about the sanctity of human life as Pentagon Pete prepares to turn a military execution into a ghoulish public spectacle! The first American pope has spoken out against the death penalty in unmistakable terms – just as Trump's Secretary of War Crimes is boasting about plans to livestream a prisoner being shot by a firing squad. “The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” Leo declared Saturday. The Chicago-born pontiff further pontificated that justice does not require taking a human life. “The common good can be safeguarded, and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment,” he wrote, emphasizing that even convicted criminals should not be completely deprived of the possibility of redemption. Meanwhile, Hegseth is taking a very different approach. You know, blood and death are awesome, or something. The SWC create a contretemps when he announced plans to execute Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist convicted of murdering 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, by firing squad – and broadcast the execution for the public to watch. This is hardly the first time Leo's understanding of Christianity has collided with the Trump administration's. Earlier this year, after Hegseth urged Americans to pray for military victory in the Middle East, Leo warned that the Christian mission has too often been “distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.” Trump accordingly attacked the pope as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for foreign policy.” Now the contrast could hardly be more vivid: The head of the Catholic Church is speaking about mercy, human dignity, and the possibility of redemption, while the man running America's military is promoting an execution as something the public should be able to watch, like the ISIS videos we used to watch in horror. Leo is preaching the sanctity of life. Hegseth wants an audience for a firing squad, just like the terrorists he purports to want to defeat.

 

In Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, the momentum of protests against the war economy continues and threatens to even bring down governments. In Spain, the forced eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal, and her death just two weeks later, has brought the issue of affordable housing to the forefront of people’s minds, with hundreds of thousands turning out in 50 cities across that country to protest in solidarity with Abascal. In France, student protests are rocking the country as youth demand better working and education conditions. The postwar neoliberal system has reached a breaking point: it can no longer meet the needs of its own citizens and simultaneously continue to pour resources into the military-financial complex that wages wars abroad. That contradiction can be seen in the remarks delivered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. On the surface, one might see it for what it purports to be—a speech defending the achievements of Western civilization. But, taking inspiration from the lying priests of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, who played a role in the assassination of Socrates and destruction of Greek society 2500 years ago, the speech actually proposes Western civilization’s destruction. It is a defense of Roman-style imperial warfare, couched as a defense of “Western civilization,” and delivered by the warmongers of the Epstein class who have accelerated its destruction. It celebrates the kidnapping of President Maduro from Venezuela, an illegal war of aggression against Iran, and the provision of military support to Israel amid its ongoing genocide in Gaza. Rubio says, “The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it – the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride – is the heart of great civilization. And without it? Without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive. Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality. Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional… The word “nationalism” became a dirty word. And so we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history. And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry, and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.” In the perverted minds of neocons such as Marco Rubio, it was the pursuit of war, bloodshed and terror which produced the beautiful works of Ancient Greece and the Renaissance. On the contrary, take the view of Pope Leo XIV and others in the Vatican, who are intervening in the world to supplant the doctrine of imperialism and geopolitics with a new paradigm which disarms and creates a disarming peace through economic development. Prof. Luigi Franco Pizzolato, writing in L’Osservatore Romano, challenges the doctrine of “just war” falsely attributed to St. Augustine. Pizzolato summarizes Augustine’s view in his work the City of God, where Augustine observes that “throughout the history of the world…just war is a condition that, strictly speaking, does not exist, because in the real world, even a just war is both an effect and a cause of sin and serves to disguise it. For more than a thousand years, the Roman state expanded its dominion precisely by invoking the principle of ‘just war.’” Rather than waging wars abroad for the purpose of expanding the dominion of a failed, collapsing neoliberal order, the U.S. and other nations of Europe can chart a new course with China and the BRICS nations, in line with the view of the American Founding Fathers—who inherited the philosophy of Plato, and the Renaissance—to challenge the notion of empire, and bring about development to emerging republics in the world. That was the view of Lyndon LaRouche, and is the view today of his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Will we chart a better course today?

 

 

🚨BREAKING: A government contractor is now blowing the whistle, telling NPR he pitched DHS on a more humane, FEMA-style detention camp. DHS said no. His claim: Stephen Miller wanted ICE facilities cruel, not comfortable. “He did not want facilities that were humane,” the contractor said. The White House calls that “defamatory,” saying he never met Miller. Meanwhile, 28 people have died in ICE custody this year, after 33 deaths in 2025, the most in two decades. Humane was off the table. Cruelty, apparently, was the whole point.