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Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, center, and Evan Ryan, his wife, at the Group of 7 meeting on Capri in Italy. The group has grown more active and ambitious in recent years
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A surge of cheap solar panels from China is posing problems for American manufacturers and the Biden administration’s plans to jumpstart U.S. manufacturing.
At a Carrefour supermarket in Paris, orange signs indicate snacks that have been downsized.
Les cybertruck de tesla l’entreprise Elon Musk sont rappelés pour un problème lié à la pédale d’accélérateur.
«Grain de Sail II»mesure plus du double de son aîné, avec 52 m de longueur (contre 24), et peut transporter jusqu'à 350 tonnes de marchandises.
A makeshift memorial to victims of the stabbing attack in a Sydney shopping mall.
A Whole Foods shopper shared her frustration at reportedly paying $7 for an apple as people across America struggle with inflation.
The post WATCH — ‘Guess How Much’: Whole Foods Shopper Claims Apple Costs $7 Due to Soaring Inflation appeared first on Breitbart.
L'objectif est que 50.000 d'entre eux au contact direct des voyageurs soient connectés à TradSNCF d'ici le 26 juillet.
L'entreprise, une des dernières à opérer en France sur ce secteur, a pâti du contexte inflationniste.
Charles and Kate largely absent since January due to health problems, leaving Queen Camilla, Princess Anne and others to pick up the slack.
The post Prince William in First Royal Duty Since Wife Catherine Diagnosed With Cancer appeared first on Breitbart.
On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “11th Hour,” host and NBC Senior Business Analyst Stephanie Ruhle stated that one reason for rising gas prices is because of production cuts from Russia and Saudi Arabia, “who would sure like to help” 2024
The post NBC’s Ruhle: Gas Prices Are Rising Partially Because Russia, Saudis Are Trying to Help Trump by Cutting Production appeared first on Breitbart.
Siddharth Hariharoan tries to control a toy helicopter with his mind through the MindWave Mobile, a device by NeuroSky that reads brain waves.
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Kenneth Davis, a patient in an H.I.V. treatment trial, undergoes a routine exam with the assistance of Phoebe Bryson-Cahn, a research clinician, at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.
The ceremonial burning of a pyre topped with a fake snowman whose head is packed with fireworks is the centerpiece of Sechseläuten, Zurich’s spring festival. On Monday, the burning was called off because of strong winds.
A proposed development in Harbor Springs, Michigan could be the next episode in the uglification of America.
It’s no secret that America is confronting a crushing housing shortage; pundits on the left and right point out that high housing prices exacerbate the birth crisis, keeping Millennials and Gen Z from forming families and flourishing. But policies ostensibly designed to create more housing come in many forms, not all of them good. Top-down attempts to fundamentally re-engineer communities in the name of “housing justice” are particularly dangerous. Devolution and localism are important principles in housing policy; a neighborhood in the Bronx might look different from one in Palm Springs, and communities ought to build homes in ways that honor the best of their character and history.
Harbor Springs, a vacation town in northern Michigan, is discovering this lesson first-hand. The town has ties to important moments in American history. Its Catholic church, Holy Childhood of Jesus, was established as part of the larger Jesuit missionary movement in the 1800s, serving Native American families and logging communities. Its train station is where Ernest Hemingway’s family would arrive from Chicago for their annual summer vacations in the surrounding area. Its forests and pines, home to foxes and bald eagles, are prized to this day for their haunting tranquility. And, its views of sparkling Lake Michigan are refreshing and clarifying. It is understandable that residents are protective of Harbor Springs, having seen the destruction of other beautiful, historic communities at the hands of “central planning.”
It is questionable whether Harbor Springs even needs more housing, given that the current homeowner vacancy rate, according to census bureau data, is 9.7 percent, meaning one in ten dwellings is available. But one proposal for building new housing in Harbor Springs, backed by the city government, involves Michigan’s Redevelopment Ready Communities, a program of the quasi-governmental Michigan Economic Development Corporation. The agency was originally established as a job-creation engine for troubled regions and to help diversify the economy where it was too heavily dependent on the auto industry.
Immediately one wonders what relevance any of this has to flourishing and affluent Harbor Springs; this is not Flint or Detroit, but a town with an income per capita of $38,000 (versus $27,500 statewide) and 2.6 percent unemployment (versus 5.2 percent statewide). Relatively small and largely residential, Harbor Springs is also hardly the first place—or the 10th—that comes to mind for drawing new residents in the name of economic opportunity. If the state is serious about spending its finite money on cities that can actually be mobilized into economic success stories, rather than just looking to enact a power grab or punish a town it may perceive as being exclusionary or snobby, would not the funds be better spent in places like Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo?
A city overview published in March 2024 anticipates such questions. It asserts that the RRC program is not just for troubled communities but instead allows any community “to be proactive instead of reactive” with regard to economic downturns and perceived need for new development, to increase the transparency and fairness of government processes, and “to receive technical and/or financial assistance”—presumably from the state. This last function is perhaps what the Harbor Springs city government has primarily in mind here, as it is at pains to assert elsewhere in the overview that the proposed rezoning it seeks to pass has been devised independently of RRC. But how much can we expect the rezoning to diverge from RRC “best practices” when it is presented as part of certification for the program? And, more troublingly, how long can local independence in city planning be guaranteed if state funding is at stake?
There is good reason to fear that state involvement in local planning is likely to turn into ideologically motivated strong-arming to the eventual detriment of Harbor Springs. Federal government programs have sought to push suburbs to build more apartment buildings and other multi-family dwellings, sometimes under pain of loss of necessary funding (road maintenance, for instance); many on the Left have come to view single-family zoning as “racist” simply because many members of ethnic minorities are unable to afford homeownership. For such people, increasing density in a wealthy community becomes part of a moral crusade, whether or not it benefits those who already live there or even the disadvantaged they are trying to help.
It is worth noting that Cabrini-Green, until its demolition one of the most notoriously crime-ridden housing projects in Chicago, was located not in the virtual war zones of that city’s West or South Sides but on the desirable North Side, mere blocks from some of the richest neighborhoods in the city. True, the North Side did not suffer for the proximity, but nor did the projects benefit at all for it in quality of life.
Another example of government planning, driven by ideological concerns and theoretical constructs in diagnosing and addressing economic problems, is even closer to home for Wolverine State residents. In his book The Poor Side of Town, Howard Husock documents in harrowing detail how public housing projects helped ruin Detroit’s Black Bottom by displacing the neighborhood’s many black-owned business, residential properties, and self-help institutions in the name of “slum clearance.”
It is against the backdrop of America’s many Cabrini-Greens and Black Bottoms that we should consider top-down initiatives spearheaded by unelected city planners and bureaucrats, imported from left-leaning policy programs, with questionable ties to the communities for which they make decisions that may have decades of effects.
There is reason to be skeptical when city officials in a small town insist that, whatever local homeowners or business-owners say, zoning laws be changed to favor greater density and a wider range of businesses. What does it mean, for instance, when officials suggest that certain zoning laws are “out of date”? Could this refer to sex shops and residential treatment centers, both of which are permitted by default in certain districts under the proposed rezoning? Or the cannabis shops that are now ubiquitous in blue districts?
No doubt there are points upon which the zoning code could be legitimately clarified or improved, but if so, it should not be an excuse for squeezing in more contentious policies as a response to completely undefined future threats—policies that could very well draw developers with no connection or commitment to the area to undermine the very character that drew residents to Harbor Springs in the first place. Even where many parties have good intentions, extreme changes in density often bring a great risk of social unrest for the simple reason of clashing social customs or the introduction of problems a small community is not poised to handle.
Part of Harbor Spring’s appeal, its quaint architecture, is a reflection of what has happened to the architecture industry over the last century. New developments, especially of higher density, are often, shall we say, aesthetically deficient. Historical preservation movements may not be the sign of a dynamic community, but they may be the only way to preserve something beautiful—and thus human-friendly—in a public life that is often grimly utilitarian.
One hopes that this sad state of affairs comes to an end soon. But until it does, we must not let a poorly thought-out “luxury belief” impulse backed by state power further encroach on the surviving signs of a better way of living.
City officials insist that the current zoning proposal preserves current regulations pertaining to architectural style and does not call for sale or development of city-owned land. The question is how far such assurances will go if the RRC connection leads to greater involvement or pressure from Lansing—and whether the city government’s interest in RRC is really motivated only by a desire for greater resilience and administrative efficiency.
Undoubtedly, America does need some share of higher-density construction in order to combat its housing crisis and increase economic opportunity for those who would take advantage of it. High-density housing need not be ugly or create a low quality of life. (Who would turn up his nose at a townhome in Tuscany?) Nor, for that matter, is it necessary for state governments to assess and influence local zoning policy as a matter of course, as RRC effectively does through its best practices. In New York, for instance, the “Housing Compact” proposed in 2023 by Governor Kathy Hochul would have generally set housing growth rates for local communities while leaving it to them how to achieve these, only forcing rezoning in the vicinity of certain commuter rail stations.
But even so, we should remember that many Americans aspire to a quieter and more remote life in a beautiful setting, and if we cannot be proactive in preserving the communities that offer such a life, who will be left to benefit? Perhaps the state of Michigan should seek to make other communities more like Harbor Springs, at least in beauty and hometown pride, than vice versa—if it really wishes to offer a better life to those who need it.
The post Central Planning Comes for Vacation Towns appeared first on The American Conservative.
Tesla reported a decline in sales this month that caught investors off guard.
A memorial at Bondi Junction in Sydney, Australia, on Monday, after six people were killed last weekend.
Les bus électriques sont de nouveau en service à Paris depuis lundi avec de nouveaux dispositifs de sécurités.
People paying their respects on Sunday at a memorial for the victims of Saturday’s mass stabbing in Bondi Junction in Sydney, Australia.
In this still image from a livestreamed video posted on social media, an attacker approaches Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel during a service at an Assyrian Orthodox church on Monday.
An oil tanker off the coast of Bandar Abbas, Iran, last year. Oil prices had increased substantially in the days before Iran’s attack on Israel.
A Nebraska high school substitute teacher was arrested after being caught in a compromising position with a teenage student in the back seat of her car, before the boy fled.
The post Police: Nebraska Teacher Found Undressed with Student in Back Seat of Car appeared first on Breitbart.
A memorial in Bondi Junction, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, on Sunday, a day after six people were killed in a stabbing rampage.
Emergency vehicles lined the street outside the Westfield Bondi Junction shopping mall in Australia on Saturday, after a stabbing attack killed six and injured at least two others.
Protesters on Saturday in Niger’s capital, Niamey. Some carried Russian flags alongside Niger’s green, white and orange version.
The police escorted members of the public from Bondi Junction after responding to reports of the stabbing attack in Sydney, Australia, on Saturday.
The car used in a driving rampage that killed six people on a busy street in Melbourne, Australia, in 2017.
«Être pressé, de mauvaise humeur, fatigué ou encore avoir subi des perturbations sur son trajet, rien ne justifie jamais la violence», souligne la RATP.
Reacting outside the Westfield Bondi Junction shopping mall after the stabbings in Sydney, Australia, on Saturday.
An improvised barricade last month in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. A coalition of armed gangs has controlled most of the city since it began an offensive in late February.
Streaming giant Roku has disclosed a massive data breach that has compromised more than 576,000 user accounts, marking the second security incident for the company in just a month.
The post Roku Reveals Massive Data Breach – Here’s What You Can Do to Protect Yourself appeared first on Breitbart.
On Thursday's broadcast of Fox News Channel's "Jesse Watters Primetime," Kato Kaelin, who was one of the prosecution's key witnesses in the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial, reiterated his view on Simpson's role in the alleged murders of Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and friend Ronald Goldman.
The post Kato Kaelin: ‘I Still Believe’ O.J. Simpson Is Guilty appeared first on Breitbart.
A rally on Sunday in Jerusalem calling for the release of the remaining hostages as the war in Gaza reached the six-month mark.
Emergency workers near a flooded street in Orsk, Russia, on Monday after a dam burst on the Ural River, near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan.
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