A bomb has gone off in a Jewish school in the capital city of the Netherlands, Amsterdam, in “a deliberate attack against the Jewish community,” according to the city’s mayor.

Indiana and Florida homeowners face mounting foreclosure pressures as 300,000 properties teeter on the edge, marking a troubling aftermath of pandemic-era policies and Biden administration fiscal failures that drove inflation and insurance costs through the roof. Pandemic Policies Created a Ticking Time Bomb Federal forbearance programs from 2020 to 2023 artificially suppressed foreclosures, halting legal processes and creating massive backlogs that now flood state courts. Nationwide foreclosure filings jumped 185 percent from 2021 to the first half of 2023, with 185,580 cases filed as lenders resumed proceedings. Florida recorded 13,837 foreclosure starts in the first half of 2023 alone, trailing only California and Texas. This surge reflects not economic recovery but the unraveling of government interventions that delayed inevitable consequences for overleveraged buyers encouraged by reckless pandemic-era monetary policies. Florida and Indiana Emerge as Ground Zero By October 2025, Florida claimed the nation’s highest foreclosure rate at one in every 1,829 homes, with Tampa leading metro areas at one in 1,373. Indiana overtook Florida by February 2026, securing the top state ranking as foreclosure activity accelerated in both regions. Florida metros like Lakeland and Punta Gorda filled the distressed property rankings, driven by collapsing home values, insurance premiums that doubled or tripled post-hurricane, and living costs that squeezed retirees on fixed incomes. Counties such as Osceola, Charlotte, and Okeechobee saw filings spike, while Hillsborough County’s backlog delayed reporting, masking the true scale of distress in Tampa. Biden Inflation and Insurance Crisis Squeeze Families Rising costs tied to Biden administration spending and regulatory overreach devastated household budgets. Hidden homeownership expenses now average $16,000 annually beyond mortgage payments, with Florida property insurance premiums soaring due to hurricane exposure and insurer flight from the state. Retirees and recent buyers who purchased at inflated 2020-2023 prices find themselves underwater, unable to absorb property taxes, insurance hikes, and utilities that outpaced wage growth. ATTOM CEO Rob Barber characterizes the trend as gradual normalization from pandemic suppression, yet the reality for families losing homes feels anything but normal. This crisis underscores how government-fueled inflation erodes the American dream of homeownership. Market Normalization or Warning Signal Completed foreclosures rose 35 percent year-over-year through February 2026, though industry analysts argue current levels remain below 2008 financial crisis peaks. Foreclosure timelines stretched to 1,212 days on average in the second quarter of 2023, with states like Michigan averaging 2,601 days due to judicial backlogs. Real estate experts advise distressed homeowners to contact lenders early, yet many recent buyers lack equity to negotiate. The influx of foreclosed properties creates opportunities for investors tracking Florida markets in 2026, but it simultaneously displaces families and destabilizes communities already struggling with vacancy spikes and depressed valuations. Whether this wave stabilizes or intensifies depends on whether the Trump administration can reverse inflationary pressures and restore affordability. Fears as banks seize 40,000 homes in a single month as foreclosure tsunami sweeps America https://t.co/A55JUqG5F2 — Unapologetic Fun (@stevewells11) March 13, 2026 The concentration of foreclosures in Indiana and Florida exposes how Biden-era policies hit heartland and sunbelt states hardest, where working families and retirees expected stability. Lenders initiated 4,136 foreclosure starts in Florida during October 2025 alone, compared to 3,080 in Texas and 2,685 in California, signaling disproportionate strain in states with high growth but insufficient infrastructure to absorb cost shocks. Local governments now grapple with managing filings while investors position for bargain purchases, creating a two-tiered housing market where wealth consolidates among institutional buyers. This dynamic threatens the middle-class foundation that conservatives champion, as homeownership slips further from reach for average Americans crushed by policies that prioritized spending over fiscal discipline. Sources: World Property Journal: ATTOM Midyear 2023 Foreclosure Market Report ATTOM Data Solutions: Mid-Year 2023 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report Fox 13 News: Tampa Foreclosure Florida Nation Housing Distress PropertyOnion: Florida Foreclosure Stats Late 2025 Homes.com: Foreclosure Filings Rise for 12th Straight Month Realtor.com: Florida Home Foreclosures 2025 Affordability

An 80-year-old farmer in England was being forced to pay $52,000 (£40k) to remove rubbish that was illegally dumped on his land by miscreants, until a kind neighbor set up a fundraising campaign to help clear the mess. The farmer in his eighties was facing prosecution, after the UK Environment Agency deemed the clean-up job […] The post Farmer Saved From Ruin After Strangers Rally to Pay $40k to Remove Tons of Rubbish Dumped on His Land appeared first on Good News Network.

As the war in the Middle East rages, let’s take a pause and a walk back through some history of the media and America at war. Let's start specifically with the war in Vietnam. As someone (ahem!) old enough to recall the media coverage of the Vietnam War there is plenty to remember. And specifically to remember the slow and then rapid change of pace with the media of the day going from supportive to questioning to an outright anti-war coverage that was televised nightly into American living rooms.  So much did the media coverage of the war become a hot and then hotter topic in the day that it has even earned its own space in places like the Encyclopedia Britannica. The headline there:  The Vietnam War and the media  The entry reports:   The role of the media in the Vietnam War is a subject of continuing controversy. Some believe that the media played a large role in the U.S. defeat. They argue that the media’s tendency toward negative reporting helped to undermine support for the war in the United States while its uncensored coverage provided valuable information to the enemy in Vietnam.   Eventually the American media’s coverage of the war became heavily anti-war. The rest, as they say, became history as America recorded its first serious defeat in war. The media coverage effectively ended the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. LBJ had been elected in a landslide in 1964. But with the overwhelmingly negative media coverage of the war after his election his public support and the support for the war slowly drained away. And now? With President Trump’s decision to take out Iran’s growing nuclear capabilities? Now the media is on alert. A few days back Trump launched what is called “Operation Epic Fury” headlined as follows by NPR:  The U.S. and Israel launch a major attack on Iran That story reported:  “In an attack the Pentagon has called “Operation Epic Fury”, the United States along with Israel launched a major strike on Iran bombing sites in Tehran and other cities. In announcing the operation on social media, President Trump said the Iranian regime’s activities endanger the United States.” The question now, with an eye to the media’s history on Vietnam, is simple. That would be: How long will any favorable media coverage of the war in Iran and the larger Middle East last? The question has a reason behind it. As the Vietnam media experience illustrated vividly, as the media of the day - led by CBS anchor Walter Cronkite - turned against the war, so, slowly, did the American public, but that came because they got the sense the war was lost and victory was no longer a goal. Over time it made the Johnson Vietnam policy so hotly controversial that it forced the once-popular LBJ out of the 1968 race for re-nomination. An anti-war candidate, Minnesota Democrat Senator Eugene McCarthy, gained enough political steam, aided by the anti-war media, to humiliate LBJ in the party’s primary in New Hampshire.  With that, New York Senator Robert Kennedy got into the race. The Johnson presidency very quickly was effectively over. RFK was assassinated as he was winning various primaries, and by pure political force LBJ got his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, nominated. Humphrey would go on to lose to the GOP’s former Vice President Richard Nixon. Nixon effectively ended the war and was re-elected in a 49-state landslide. Which is to say, what started as a small regional conflict had been so escalated, with the anti-war media of the day slowly increasing its coverage until it became the dominant story of every day, that it forced a once popular president to cease his re-election campaign and his party to lose the 1968 presidential election altogether. The question now?  Will history repeat itself when it come to the media’s coverage of the situation in Iran and the Middle East? And will the Trump White House ignore the coverage? Or make it a hot topic all of its own? Already, we may have an answer. By Friday late afternoon the White House released this statement:  CNN Is Lying to Undermine Operation Epic Fury’s Crushing Success The statement says:  Fake News CNN is at it again. While U.S. forces deliver crushing blows to obliterate Iran’s terrorist regime, CNN’s hack ‘journalists’ are peddling Democrat-sourced fiction to undermine our decisive victories in Operation Epic Fury. The statement goes on by citing specifics.  The first:  CNN alleged the Pentagon and the National Security Council ‘did not plan’ for Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz. The second reads: CNN further alleged ‘Top Trump officials acknowledged’ this to lawmakers in a classified briefing. The White House statement goes into specifics to answer the charges, closing by saying that “No amount of CNN hackery will change that.” In short? Unlike 1968 and Walter Cronkite’s attack on LBJ’s Vietnam policy, President Trump is not sitting back and allowing today’s media - CNN in this case - to paint its own anti-media picture of the Trump Iran/Middle East policy. Time has moved on. As is said often enough in this corner: Stay tuned. What unfolds between the media and the Trump administration when it comes to the coverage of American policy in Iran and the larger Middle East remains to be seen.

CNN International/PBS anchor Christiane Amanpour welcomed former colleague Reza Aslan, whom she labeled an “Iranian-American religious scholar," to her Friday show to discuss what the future holds for ordinary Iranians after the current war ends. According to Aslan, it is the United States’s fault that previous protest movements have failed to topple the regime because we have “been doing the tyrant’s work for him.” Amanpour’s question was actually not that bad, “What hope do the Iranians have? Let's say this war ends or the bombing campaign ends and the regime is still in place. This is the regime that killed so many people and really crossed, if there was a line that it was going to cross, it really crossed the line of barbaric behavior to its own people in January. How do people who want change actually try to affect change?”   Reza Aslan tells PBS/CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour that it is America's fault that previous Iran protests have failed "Look, an authoritarian regime, a tyrant, stays in power by isolating his people from the rest of the world. The United States has been doing the tyrant's work… pic.twitter.com/hHAVlidQ8f — Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) March 14, 2026   Aslan’s answer, however, was that bad, “This is a question that we've been asking for a very long time. And there are models of this throughout the 20th century. Look, an authoritarian regime, a tyrant, stays in power by isolating his people from the rest of the world. The United States has been doing the tyrant's work for him in Iran for the last half century. Our policy of containment, isolation and sanction as a hope for regime change has done the exact opposite. That's just a fact.” He added, “We have entrenched this regime further into power. That's not illogical. If the people themselves have no access to the rest of the world, no access to the free market economy, then they are handicapped from being able to rise up and take down a government that they rely upon for their very sustenance, for their very bread.” In addition to wanting basic rights, Iranians also protest precisely because the regime can’t provide them with bread. Nevertheless, Aslan then made the illogical claim that if the U.S. wants Iranians to overthrow the clerical regime, then it needs to win the approval of low-level clerics, “No wonder that these protests that we see, these legitimate protests that we see almost every year, which had been brutally repressed by these dictatorial police state in Iran, have never actually managed to bring down this regime because the only way to do so is to get the entirety of the people and particularly the pious poor and the sort of mid-level, low-level clerics and seminary students to come out onto the streets as well.” The nonsensical suggestions were just beginning as Aslan continued, “Look, we actually had a plan in place. The P5+1 negotiations that President Obama put together, which miraculously brought in Russia and China, two countries that have radically opposing interests in Iran than the United States, was by every measure working. First of all, it absolutely removed Iran's ability to develop nuclear weapons, to enrich uranium to the point in which it could develop nuclear weapons.” It is interesting Aslan cited Russia and China. Both countries are dictatorships. China is still very much economically connected to the outside world, and, before 2022, Russia was as well, and yet Aslan’s theory of economically empowering ordinary people to overthrow their dictatorial overlords never came to fruition. Besides, why would tethering our Iran interests to our Russian and Chinese adversaries be a good idea? Nevertheless, Aslan reiterated his earlier idea that America is at fault, only this time he implied that President Trump specifically is to blame: That relationship that we put together under President Obama had an opportunity to possibly give, particularly the struggling middle class in Iran, the chance to rise up and make their voices heard. We started seeing a wave of reform in Iran immediately following that negotiation, but of course the negotiation was torn up. And what we have seen since that moment, which has resulted in the destruction and death that we are seeing now, was a direct result of reversing course on a policy that had the possibility, not guarantee, but the possibility of actually creating the change that we are desperate to see in Iran. Aslan’s theory that the way to bring down the regime is to make it richer betrays any idea of common sense. More immediately, given that this war is just the latest in a series of post-October 7 events, it is likely that if the Iran deal had remained in place, Iran’s military would have been in a better fighting position than it was. Here is a transcript for the March 13-taped show: PBS Amanpour and Company 3/13/2026 CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: What hope do the Iranians have? Let's say this war ends or the bombing campaign ends and the regime is still in place. This is the regime that killed so many people and really crossed, if there was a line that it was going to cross, it really crossed the line of barbaric behavior to its own people in January. How do people who want change actually try to affect change? REZA ASLAN: This is a question that we've been asking for a very long time. And there are models of this throughout the 20th century. Look, an authoritarian regime, a tyrant, stays in power by isolating his people from the rest of the world. The United States has been doing the tyrant's work for him in Iran for the last half century. Our policy of containment, isolation and sanction as a hope for regime change has done the exact opposite. That's just a fact. We have entrenched this regime further into power. That's not illogical. If the people themselves have no access to the rest of the world, no access to the free market economy, then they are handicapped from being able to rise up and take down a government that they rely upon for their very sustenance, for their very bread. No wonder that these protests that we see, these legitimate protests that we see almost every year, which had been brutally repressed by these dictatorial police state in Iran, have never actually managed to bring down this regime because the only way to do so is to get the entirety of the people and particularly the pious poor and the sort of mid-level, low-level clerics and seminary students to come out onto the streets as well. Look, we actually had a plan in place. The P5+1 negotiations that President Obama put together, which miraculously brought in Russia and China, two countries that have radically opposing interests in Iran than the United States, was by every measure working. First of all, it absolutely removed Iran's ability to develop nuclear weapons, to enrich uranium to the point in which it could develop nuclear weapons. That relationship that we put together under President Obama had an opportunity to possibly give, particularly the struggling middle class in Iran, the chance to rise up and make their voices heard. We started seeing a wave of reform in Iran immediately following that negotiation, but of course the negotiation was torn up. And what we have seen since that moment, which has resulted in the destruction and death that we are seeing now, was a direct result of reversing course on a policy that had the possibility, not guarantee, but the possibility of actually creating the change that we are desperate to see in Iran.

Long before his association with Michael Jackson, "Q" was one of the music world's most accomplished composers, arrangers, producers and band leaders. The post Quincy Jones: A ‘Lost’ Interview With ‘Q’ appeared first on Best Classic Bands.

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