From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Jason Hopkins

Leaders in Aurora, Colorado, are looking to boost funding of its police force by roughly $10 million as reports of local Tren de Aragua activity continue to make national headlines.

The City of Aurora’s proposed 2025 budget includes a $125 million increase in funding, with an emphasis on law enforcement as international gang activity and retail crime has increasingly become an issue for the local community. The proposed plan would boost the police budget from $155.7 million in 2024 to nearly $165 million in 2025.

“Right now, we are not at our full complement of officers,” Aurora Police Department Chief Todd Chamberlain said to CBS News Colorado. “Our patrol is impacted by understaffing issues, and so that’s what I’m looking at right now.”

“I want to be able to have our officers have a clear understanding of what they are responding to before they even get there,” Chamberlain continued. “I want to see where our crimes are occurring, when they’re occurring and who they are occurring to.”

Aurora has been subject to massive media attention after footage of armed men inside an apartment complex went viral in August. Federal immigration authorities later confirmed the men in the video footage are members of Tren de Aragua and Aurora city officials have since sought a court order to clear the apartment building, according to Fox 31.

Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis initially pushed back on allegations that gang members had taken over apartment buildings in Aurora, with a spokesperson for his office telling the New York Post last month that “this purported invasion is largely a feature of [Aurora City Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky’s] imagination.” Jurinsky has consistently spoken out about Tren de Aragua’s presence in Aurora.

Jurinsky was not entirely optimistic when asked how the extra funding could help Aurora combat crime.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

On Monday, before most people even knew its annual General Assembly was again invading New York City, the United Nations issued a press release proclaiming the unanimous adoption of what it calls its “Pact for the Future.” Designed to be a successor plan to its “Agenda 2030” — which the international globalist organization admits is failing — the press release boasts that this “Pact” is designed to create a glorious “new global order.”

Where have we heard those dangerous words before?

The U.N.’s alarmist general secretary, life-long socialist Antonio Guterres, had laid the narrative groundwork for Monday’s press release during a preview delivered last week. In that statement, Guterres – who famously proclaimed the world had entered into “the era of global boiling” last July – advocated for a complete restructuring of the world’s “institutions and frameworks” to address major issues like “runaway climate change,” something that no real data indicates is even happening.

In addition to his usual climate alarmism, Guterres also raised questionable alarm about what he termed the “runaway development of new technologies like artificial intelligence.”

“Our institutions simply can’t keep up,” Guterres said. “Crises are interacting and feeding off each other – for example, as digital technologies spread climate disinformation that deepens distrust and fuels polarization. Global institutions and frameworks are today totally inadequate to deal with these complex and even existential challenges.”

In other words, Agenda 2030, the U.N. plan adopted to leverage those institutions to solve all the world’s problems, has failed. The solution? Why, adopt a new “Pact for the Future” to solve all the world’s problems while also rejiggering all those institutions and frameworks. Sure, that will work.

You would think such an all-encompassing Pact approved by a unanimous vote of the world community would make headline news, but that did not really happen. Perhaps that lack of breaking news coverage can be attributed to the fact that a reading of the document itself reveals it doesn’t really offer many plans for specific action items.

Instead, it reads like something written by the talking points compilers for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign — a lot of lofty language that doesn’t actually say anything.

Nowhere is this reality starker than in the section on “affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy.” After laying out the rationale for pushing the sputtering, subsidized energy transition – as always, painting oil, natural gas and coal as the convenient bogeymen justifying a forced move away from democratic national institutions to change forced by socialist central planning – the document offers only nebulous talking points instead of action items:

• “Countries can accelerate the transition to an affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy system by investing in renewable energy resources, prioritizing energy efficient practices, and adopting clean energy technologies and infrastructure.”
• “Businesses can maintain and protect eco-systems and commit to sourcing 100% of operational electricity needs from renewable sources.”
• “Employers can reduce the internal demand for transport by prioritizing telecommunications and incentivize less energy intensive modes such as train travel over auto and air travel.”
• “Investors can invest more in sustainable energy services, bringing new technologies to the market quickly from a diverse supplier base.”
• “You can save electricity by plugging appliances into a power strip and turning them off completely when not in use, including your computer. You can also bike, walk or take public transport to reduce carbon emissions.”

It all amounts to bits of advice, much of which constitutes laudable goals. But there is nothing new here, nor is there anything that is going to lead to meeting the UN-invented “net zero by 2050” target. The simple reality is that demand growth for energy – real, 24/7 energy – will continue to outstrip the ability of global or national governments to force reductions in carbon emissions, because modern life is not sustainable without the use of carbon-based energy. Period.

By citing the evolution of energy-hungry AI technology as a development to be feared and attacked, Guterres admits this reality. He also appears to be admitting that the attempt to displace democratic institutions with socialism using climate alarmism as the justification is also failing, thus necessitating the need for a different bogeyman.

It is all so incredibly tiresome and unproductive.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.