On Friday, May 7, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will participate virtually in a UN Security Council meeting on Multilateralism. The session will be chaired by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and will include interventions from Foreign Ministers from other Security Council member countries. During this open debate, Secretary Blinken will discuss the importance of multilateral cooperation and highlight the core principles that are essential to maintaining a rules-based international order.
The debate will be livestreamed at 8:00 am on May 7, 2021.
A Florida man who called for surrounding supporters of former President Donald Trump was convicted Thursday of issuing threats to kidnap or injure.
Daniel Baker issued a “call to arms” for other leftists to violently confront protesters at Florida’s Capitol.
“Armed racist mobs have planted the Confederate flag in the nations [sic] Capitol while announcing their plans to storm every American state Capitol on or around inauguration day,” Baker wrote on Facebook on the “Defend Tallahassee” page, which he created, on Jan. 12 “We will fight back. We will circle the state Capitol and let them fight the cops and take the building. Then we will encircle them and trap them inside.”
“We will drive them out of Tallahassee with every caliber available. They are staging an armed takeover so only an armed community can stop them! We can win! We have a duty to and a duty to win,” he added.
Baker said he had already recruited military veterans and urged anyone else who could to show up and help.
Before posting the call, Baker had bought an AK-47-style .22 caliber semi-automatic rifle and ammunition, according to court documents. He once served in the military.
Baker posted a similar missive on the page of WTXL, a local news station, in response to an article about the Tallahassee Police Department being prepared for any Inauguration Day protests.
No large gatherings occurred at the Florida Capitol on Jan. 20.
Baker, who has described himself as a member of Antifa, a far-left, anarcho-communist network, told jurors this week that he was joking.
“After being harassed continuously for the past five years, if I create this presence of the far-left boogey man that the far-right believes is an Antifa super soldier, they’d be less likely to do a drive-by and shoot at me,” Baker said.
He also claimed he had not planned on attacking anyone unless he was attacked first, or if law enforcement was in need of reinforcement.
Stephen Kunz, an assistant U.S. attorney, told the jury that the claim clashed with what Baker wrote on Facebook.
“In the last two years, Mr. Baker’s rhetoric has gotten out of control to the point law enforcement had to step in. This isn’t a joke,” Lazaro Fields, another prosecutor, said in closing arguments.
Baker faces up to 10 years in prison, a $500,000 fine, and six years of supervised release. His lawyer did not respond to an inquiry.
“The free exercise of speech is central to our democracy,” Jason Coody, acting United States attorney for the Northern District of Florida, said in a statement. “However, the defendant’s threats of armed violence to inhibit expression of political views different than his own are both unlawful and dangerous. This office and our law enforcement partners are committed to protecting public safety, and the jury’s verdict today has ensured that the defendant will be held accountable for his actions.”
Antifa groups criticized the verdict.
“Baker’s call for armed defense against far-Right threats was in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s failed coup. Let’s make sure Baker gets strong support! Sentencing is in August,” the Atlanta Antifascists wrote on Twitter.
A photographer from Miami Beach was left shaking with excitement after a once-in-a-lifetime encounter with five elusive Florida panthers, from behind the lens, in one day.
Ezra Van had been tracking wild Florida panthers, the official state animal, for years without luck.
“I poured over Fish and Wildlife research maps and reports, talked to rangers, locals, law enforcement who worked night shifts, set up alerts for panther sightings, and put 38,000 miles on my truck,” he wrote in a personal account that was shared with The Epoch Times.
Van saw a lot of other amazing wildlife, but no panthers. He was in the Everglades’ Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve Park on Jan. 13 when that changed, after he chose a parking spot a few miles along the main road based on his knowledge of footprints, trail intersections, and water levels.
Van sighted his first lone panther from this spot, around 200 meters away. Unable to capture a good photo, he waited patiently for the panther’s return, but to no avail.
Then, at sunset, as he was just leaving at the entrance, an extraordinary sight appeared: a Florida panther chasing and toying with an injured turkey vulture, followed by three additional cats.
“I was about 60 meters away in the truck and frantically started taking pictures and video,” Van wrote. “It looked like it was a mom and three adult cubs, and mom was teaching them how to hunt.”
Later, Van shared his incredible footage on YouTube.
It seemed to be a practice run only; leaving the turkey vulture alone in favor of resting on the grass, the family of four eventually retreated into the Everglades. One of them, Van told WFOR-TV, looked over and “meowed” at him before the four departed.
The Florida panther, protected by the Endangered Species Act of 1973, is one of the most endangered mammals on the planet.
Alligator Ron Bergeron, otherwise known as the mayor of the Everglades, claims that Florida panther cubs will stay with their mother for roughly two years. Van’s sighting, he says, owes to years upon years of intensive conservation efforts.
“We put together a panther team to study it and today we estimate we now have somewhere around 180 to 230 panthers across the beautiful Everglades,” Bergeron told the media outlet.
“Its biggest enemy is loss of habitats and collisions with cars,” Bergeron continued, adding that the preserve needs more crossings in order to avoid vehicle collisions with panthers.
Van’s Jan. 13 experience has certainly left a lasting impression.
“I can’t lie, I was still shaking from excitement an hour later,” the covert photographer wrote in his personal account. “Many of the rangers that work days say they have been there decades and have never seen a panther.”
The sheriff, he went on, reported seeing panthers during night shifts “every once in a while,” but Van’s sighting of five in one day, and four at once, was nothing short of “a once-in-a-lifetime event.”
CNN’s Brian Stelter returns from vacation to host lowest-rated ‘Reliable Sources’ of year
CNN’s struggling media program “Reliable Sources” with Brian Stelter hit another low on Sunday with its smallest audience of 2021 as the liberal program has now failed to crack the one-million viewer plateau for five consecutive weeks.
Stelter’s program averaged only 810,000 total viewers and a dismal 163,000 among the key demographic of adults age 25-54 on May 2, for its worst performance of the year in both categories.
To make matters worse for Stelter, his own show performed better last week when replacement host John Avlon filled in. The Avlon-hosted edition of “Reliable Sources” on April 25 averaged 907,000 for nearly a 100,000-viewer increase over Stelter’s return.
Avlon also topped Stelter’s most recent episode in the key demo, averaging 182,000 viewers among the group coveted by advertisers.
Popular Republican Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) told FOX News on Wednesday that the votes are there to get rid of Liz Cheney from GOP House leadership.
She should have been removed months ago but Kevin McCarthy was too weak to remove her as the third-ranked Republican in the House of Representatives.
Maybe Kevin McCarthy will force members to make their vote public this time so their constituents can see who they support? President Trump or Liz Cheney?
Better yet, maybe Republicans will vote McCarthy out while they’re at it. McCarthy needs to get ousted along with Liz.
Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) said Wednesday that “the votes are there” to oust Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.) from her position as House GOP Conference Chair.
“You can’t have a Republican conference chair reciting Democrat talking points,” Jordan told Fox News. “You can’t have a Republican conference chair taking a position that 90 percent of the party disagrees with, and you can’t have a Republican party chair consistently speaking out against the individual who 74 million Americans voted for.”
Louisiana – Joe Biden traveled to Lake Charles and New Orleans on Thursday to promote his highly unpopular “infrastructure” bill that has nothing to do with infrastructure.
Biden visited the Carrollton Water Plant in New Orleans and he looked like a clueless child on a field trip.
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Joe Biden had to rely on notecards as he shuffled around the water plant.
78-year-old Biden can’t go anywhere without his notecards. He is always spotted reading from notecards because he can’t remember anything.
On Aug. 23, 2020, a Kenosha police officer shot Jacob Blake as he scuffled with law enforcement officers in one of several incidents that rocked the nation last summer. Riots that occurred in the ensuing days brought violence, destruction, and the national spotlight to the small Wisconsin city. The Washington Examiner recently went back to Kenosha to find out what has happened in the aftermath.
KENOSHA, WISCONSIN— Reminders of the shooting of Jacob Blake Jr. and the riots that followed are all over Kenosha.
The Dinosaur Discovery Museum in the middle of town still has plywood on all of its windows. The brick wall next to Hidden Treasures on 60th Street still reads "F--- you, Rusten Sheskey," despite numerous attempts to cover it up. Graffiti on side streets and boarded-up storefronts call out "racist" police. Nine months after the small Wisconsin city of fewer than 100,000 residents was thrust into the national spotlight, it is clear that the wound is still raw.
While there have been tensions in the past between police and Kenosha's minority residents, none has compared to the 2020 shooting of Blake.
Officer Sheskey, a white man, shot Blake, a black man, seven times in the back. No charges were filed against him.
The incident was caught on video and brought hundreds to the city nestled on the banks of Lake Michigan between Milwaukee and Chicago. The demonstrations gave way to clashes that ended with $50 million in damages, including burned buildings, looted stores, and the shuttering of a majority of black-owned businesses in uptown Kenosha.
The relationship between law enforcement and the people they were hired to police hit a low.
For a while, it seemed as though anybody who wanted to speak poorly of the police was given a national platform. Cable news outlets clamored for sound bites that tore into law enforcement and stoked racial resentment.
"It's incredibly frustrating to be vilified in the national media," Kenosha Police Lt. Joseph Nosalik told the Washington Examiner, adding that police officers have not been given a fair shake in the press. He believes that police departments are up against an "instant gratification society" that allows people to trash them without knowing the facts. Police are also not allowed to comment on active investigations, which prevents them from speaking out or standing up for themselves or their actions in real-time.
"There's a whole lot more to the story, and the disadvantage for the police department is that in order to keep these investigations intact, to make sure that it is a fair and impartial and an unbiased investigation, we can't get there and tell our side of the story like we want to," Nosalik said.
After the Blake shooting, the home addresses of police officers were plastered over social media. Their families were stalked, and people showed up ready for street justice.
A white doll was found hanging from electrical wires outside the courthouse with Sheskey's name on it.
When they weren't being trashed in the media, the police department was taking hits from politicians on local, state, and national levels.
Former President Donald Trump showed up in Kenosha to push his law and order campaign. Then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, during his first trip to the battleground state, told residents that the turmoil following Blake's shooting could help Americans confront centuries of systemic racism and that the country was "getting to the point where we're going to be addressing the original sin of this country, 400 years old ... slavery and all the vestiges of it."
"It's almost as if police are being used as pawns in this big chess game," Nosalik said.
As the politics played out, the Kenosha Police Department continued to be described almost daily as monsters and racists.
They went to work knowing they were hated.
Blake's father, Jacob Blake Sr., told the WashingtonExaminer the descriptions fit the bill and that the police deserved the onslaught of negative press and public outrage.
"These are people hired to protect and serve, not protect and kill," he said. "Protect one group and kill the other group. There is no patience with a white officer and a black person who they say has committed a crime."
Part of the problem is that Kenosha has a long history of being lax on racism.
The wall outside Hidden Treasures store in Kenosha, Wis. The brick wall outside still has faint graffiti on it slamming Officer Rusten Sheskey.
"You have this white supremacist contingent here in Kenosha, and for some reason, they feel very, very comfortable," Dayvin Hallmon, a former Kenosha County board supervisor, toldTIMEfollowing Blake's shooting.
Hallmon believes the underlying currents of racism have poisoned the relationship between the city's black population and its police force and said he recalled several incidents where he felt like the police weren't looking out for black people.
Compounding the issue is that the Kenosha police department doesn't really reflect the people they police. There are only five black officers on the force, one Asian, and one LGBT person.
"There are certainly challenges with policing, and we would certainly love to have more people of color, more people of different sexual orientations to be out there, to be ambassadors, to show that the Kenosha Police Department embraces all of humanity and not just a certain demographic," Nosalik said. "We're a small police department of only 211 people, so it's not like we have a lot of faces out there where they're really recognized. It's not like, 'Oh, they really do have people who are not white.' Predominantly, we are a white police department."
Nosalik believes the police are facing an unfair uphill climb. Activists have demanded Sheskey be fired from the force, something he said won't happen.
"There is no legal basis to terminate officer Sheskey," he said. "No criminal charges have been filed against him. He has not been found in violation of any policy or procedure. To terminate him would be a wrongful termination."
Nosalik also said the police department is working on being more transparent.
"Police departments realize that we do live in an instant gratification society and that we are getting better at sharing information in a more timely manner," he said. "Although it won't be instant gratification, it will be a promise made that you will have information on such and such a date, and that promise will be upheld, and we will inform the public. But the process will never be as fast as ordering something from Grubhub."
Red states are fighting off the specter of a permanent Biden administration policy change allowing patients to receive prescribed abortion-inducing drugs through the mail, a move that Republicans argue would abandon women to deal with complications on their own.
“Make no mistake about it, the states that are pro-life are reading the tea leaves of the Democrats’ radical agenda,” said Sue Liebel, state policy director for the anti-abortion advocacy group Susan B. Anthony List.
Forty-six states have introduced more than 530 abortion restrictions combined since January of this year, including 146 abortion bans. More than 60 restrictions have been enacted, according to the abortion-rights advocacy group Guttmacher Institute. Thirty-three of the total number of restrictions introduced concerned medication abortion, a noninvasive procedure that allows a person to take a one-time, two-drug regimen prescribed by their healthcare provider up to 10 weeks after the patient’s last menstrual period.
At this point in 2019, only 11 restrictions on seeking medication abortions had been introduced in state legislatures.
State legislators have proposed the flood of anti-abortion bills as a bulwark against Biden administration policies to bolster access to the legal procedures, namely the Food and Drug Administration’s temporary freeze on the in-person dispersing requirement for the medication to induce abortion.
The backdrop is that, with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court solidified by former President Donald Trump, state lawmakers believe that this is their opportunity to cement anti-abortion laws meant to chip away at Roe.
“This is the biggest pro-life set of legislative sessions we've ever seen,” Liebel said. “These states are just emboldened on the life issue, and they are bravely going forward on pro-life.”
Medication abortions have become increasingly common over the past 13 years, Guttmacher reported. From 2008 to 2017, the number of medication abortions increased 73%, while the overall number of abortions performed declined over that period. The most recent survey from Guttmacher in 2017 found that the procedure accounted for 39% of all abortions in the United States and 60% of all abortions performed up to 10 weeks gestation.
Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock announced the new policy last month in a letter to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, reporting that, after reviewing clinical data, their findings “do not appear to show increases in serious safety concerns (such as hemorrhage, ectopic pregnancy, or surgical interventions) occurring with medical abortion as a result of modifying the in-person dispensing requirement during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Under current law, patients who choose to undergo the procedure do not have to take the medication in the presence of their doctors. With or without a ban on mailing the drugs, patients are permitted to take the medication on their own in their homes. Abortion opponents argue that prescribing abortion medication to patients via telemedicine services without meeting in person to conduct a physical exam puts the patient at increased risk of not getting timely help in case something goes wrong once they’ve taken the medication.
“It's just incredibly important that we don't let the political aspects of the abortion topic get in the way of what's good for women. That's why we included this in this bill,” said Arizona Republican state Sen. Nancy Barto, whose Senate bill to ban abortion medication prescribed via telemedicine and sent to patients’ homes was signed into law last week by Gov. Doug Ducey.
Barto’s bill also outlawed abortions solely on the basis of a genetic abnormality in the fetus, such as Down syndrome or cystic fibrosis, except in cases when the fetal condition is lethal. Violators of the law will be charged with a Class 6 felony.
In the Texas Senate, Democrat Eddie Lucio’s bill to ban abortion medications sent through the mail made it out of the upper chamber and placed it on the Assembly calendar for a final vote. With just a few weeks left in the session, Lucio said the bill might die in the House before it can make it to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk. Still, he is confident that the measure has enough bipartisan support in the state Legislature to pass.
“I always say that this is not a party issue,” Lucio told the Washington Examiner. “Most in my party are against it, but I believe it is positive to be pro-life as well as a Democrat.”
Proponents of restrictions on medication-induced abortions insist the legislation is meant to protect the health of the woman seeking an abortion. Indeed, there is a chance of severe side effects of the drugs that could be fatal, such as excessive bleeding that the woman mistakes for the expected amount for a miscarriage. The medication also poses the risk of experiencing other severe complications such as an ectopic pregnancy, which occurs when a fertilized egg implants and grows outside the main cavity of the uterus. In that case, the pregnancy cannot proceed as normal and the fallopian tube could rupture, potentially killing the woman.
“We need to make sure that women are safe and that we understand that abortion is legal, but we want to make sure that if we lose the child in the process of this abortion, we don't lose the mother also,” Lucio said.
Alabama state Rep. Andrew Sorrell, meanwhile, proposed an all-out ban on medication abortions last month, making it a Class C felony to prescribe the drugs. The House Judiciary Committee has held a hearing on the bill, but the Assembly has not voted to advance it to the state Senate. While it is “mathematically impossible” for the Legislature to pass the bill before the session ends, Sorrell said that “there's really not a whole lot of opposition. … A lot of the Democrats here are pro-life.”
“This one might actually survive the challenge in court because we can make the argument that chemical abortion is four times riskier for a woman,” Sorrell told the Washington Examiner. “We're not prohibiting abortion with this. We're prohibiting a certain type of abortion.”
From the states’ points of view, the Biden administration has signaled its readiness to overturn Trump administration anti-abortion policies. The Trump administration had appealed a federal court ruling last July that allowed a temporary freeze on the in-person dispensing requirement, and the majority-conservative Supreme Court reinstated the requirement about a week before former Trump left office.
The Biden administration has not said how long the temporary freeze will be in place or what, if any, restrictions to remain, but ACOG Chief Legal Officer Skye Perryman told the Washington Examiner that the organization expects the policy change to extend through the end of the year.
“The FDA’s announcement makes us hopeful that the agency will make decisions based on scientific evidence, which has long shown that the in-person dispensing requirement is not necessary for the safe and effective use of mifepristone,” Perryman said. “We hope that this same evidence would drive future regulatory decisions regarding mifepristone, which is a safe and effective medicine for termination of pregnancy.”
A 22.5-metric-ton piece of space debris belonging to a Chinese Long March-5B rocket is about to make an uncontrolled reentry into Earth's atmosphere, with little information about when or where it will land. Here is what we know so far:
WHAT IS IT?
The debris itself is the core stage of the Long March-5B rocket, which is surrounded by four side boosters it uses to place its payload directly into low orbit. The Long March 5B launched the core module of China’s work-in-progress space station into orbit on April 28, and since then, space debris monitoring groups have kept a close eye on the rocket's core stage falling back to the planet at an uncontrolled pace.
It was speculated that the dislodged core would perform an active maneuver to de-orbit itself, though a Thursday press conference with Wang Jue, commander in chief of Long March 5B launch vehicle, failed to mention the maneuver, according to a translation from Space News.
The debris got into Earth's orbit after sending parts used to construct China's space station scheduled to be completed by the end of 2022. China is expecting 10 more launches to carry additional parts of the space station, according to the Guardian.
WHEN AND WHERE COULD IT LAND?
On Tuesday, the Space Command began providing updates on the status of the loose Chinese rocket, saying that reentry for the debris is "expected around May 8."
Leftover debris from the fiery space junk could hit the ground surface wherever it lands, the Scientific Americanreported.
Possible landing locations for the debris include New York, Madrid, and Beijing in the Northern Hemisphere and southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand, in the Southern Hemisphere, according to Space News.
Still, it is impossible to know exactly where it will land, as the debris is orbiting earth roughly every 90 minutes.
Concerns about potential damage from the debris' reentry stem from a previous Long March-5B rocket launch in which several reports indicated that fiery debris fell on at least two villages in the Ivory Coast, located on the southern side of West Africa, in May 2020.
Astronomer Jonathan McDowell told Space News that large pieces will likely be destroyed by the intense heat during the reentry to Earth, but smaller pieces may make it to the ground.
"I think by current standards it’s unacceptable to let it reenter uncontrolled," McDowell said. "Since 1990, nothing over 10 tons has been deliberately left in orbit to reenter uncontrolled."
Updated orbit height plot for this evening. You can really see now that the core stage perigee is starting to come down a little bit, although the main effect of atmospheric drag is that the orbit is becoming more circular (apogee is coming down, making it closer to perigee) pic.twitter.com/oMM1xfo2tZ
McDowell added that the Long March 5B rocket is "seven times more massive" than the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which stirred media attention after its reentry dumped a couple of pressure tanks on Washington state on April 2.
WHAT IS NEXT?
On Wednesday, the Defense Department said it has no plans to shoot down and break up the 46,000-pound debris.
“There are too many factors to take into account this early, such as the atmospheric conditions and the exact angle of the object as it enters the atmosphere,” a Space Command spokesperson said.
Meanwhile, the White House has opted to avoid discussions about the apparent space debris hurtling toward Earth, and press secretary Jen Psaki declined to commit to the United States seeking compensation from China if the debris makes contact with inhabited land.
"We'd, of course, refer to the advice and guidance from the U.S. Space Command and Department of Defense and others," Psaki told reporters on Wednesday. "We are certainly tracking its location through U.S. Space Command, and hopefully, that's not the outcome that we are working through."
While fragments of the rocket will likely land in an ocean or burn up when reentering the Earth's atmosphere, there is a chance it could also hit a population center.
A representative from Nike declined an invitation to testify Thursday at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing that discussed China's human rights abuses of its minority Muslim Uyghur population and American corporations that could be manufacturing products made with Uyghur slave labor in Xinjiang Province, according to committee members.
Punchbowl News released a new tracking poll Thursday showing a majority of senior Capitol Hill aides believe House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's partisan socialist agenda will not pass Congress.
The U.S. State Department said this week it recently fined U.S. defense contractor Honeywell $13 million after the company was found to have "harmed national security" by sharing sensitive information about U.S. military aircraft with China and other countries.
Thursday on FNC's "Your World," Sen. Bill Cassidy (R) weighed in on the possibility of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) losing her post of House Republican Conference chairwoman when the House comes back into session next week.
During a portion of an interview aired on Thursday’s “NBC Nightly News,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) stated that the Biden administration is engaging in a “shell game” on unaccompanied migrant children in Border Patrol custody in Donna, TX by simply
As a winter storm attacked Texas in February, the state’s grid operator made a last-ditch attempt to avert mass blackouts. The move ended up constraining natural-gas supplies needed by power plants, a Wall Street Journal examination shows.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas activated a program that pays large industrial power users to reduce their consumption during emergencies. But the grid operator, known as Ercot, didn’t know who was being paid to participate in this program and what type of facilities were getting shut off, it has since acknowledged.
The Journal’s analysis of grid records shows that participants included dozens of critical pieces of natural-gas infrastructure. Ercot ordered them to stay off for more than four days, as gas prices surged to extraordinary levels and some power plants stopped producing electricity because they couldn’t get enough fuel to function.
The estimated value of the program for the five days of the blackout was about $2 billion—and participants including oil-and-gas companies earned a portion of that for turning themselves off at Ercot’s behest. Two companies petitioned Ercot for permission for idled facilities to come back sooner, the grid operator said. By the time they were allowed to restart, the crisis was nearly over.
Natural-gas power plants wound up spending billions of dollars procuring fuel or shutting down altogether for lack of supply, exacerbating a dire electricity shortage that left more than four million Texans in the dark, bankrupted several crucial players in the state’s power market and resulted in more than 130 deaths.
WASHINGTON—The Biden administration says it’s trying to spur investment in America—while proposing to remove a four-year-old tax break that was intended to do exactly that.
The break—a deduction for foreign-derived intangible income—has an odd name, but it works in some ways like an export subsidy for companies.
Congress created FDII in the 2017 tax law as a break tied to U.S. companies’ foreign sales. It is designed to provide multinational companies roughly equal tax rates at home and abroad on profits that could be moved across borders. Lawmakers wanted to give companies reasons to put intellectual property, profits and jobs in the U.S. rather than in low-tax foreign jurisdictions.
Now, Biden administration officials say they intend to repeal the FDII deduction and replace it with unspecified tax breaks for research. That decision, announced in President Biden’s infrastructure plan, marked a shift from his campaign tax plan, which didn’t include a repeal.
“I would have thought it would fit their ‘Made in America’ and jobs policy preference fairly well, but obviously they’re not thinking of it that way,” said David Noren, a tax lawyer at McDermott, Will & Emery.
The year of the pandemic saw the largest increase in global house prices since the U.S. housing boom of the mid-2000s. And there is no sign the rally is coming to an end.
That provides immediate economic support for the global recovery from Covid-19. But a prolonged house price upswing would mean big new problems for both financial stability. And it could result in economic strife if middle-class citizens accustomed to a one-way housing bet suddenly find the rug pulled out from beneath them down the line.
House prices rose by 4.91% across 16 economies monitored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas last year, the sharpest increase since 2006. The move was large by the standards of a normal year—but explosive in the context of a global economic contraction of around 3.3%.
And the trend shows little sign of abating. The U.S. housing market is millions of homes short of buyer demand. Prices have climbed in places as varied as the eurozone, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Booming prices reflect a major difference between the liftoff from the financial crisis of 2008 and the nascent post-pandemic boom. The financial crisis emanated from a fragile, undercapitalized banking sector: The obvious postcrisis response was to lend much more conservatively. But at the beginning of last year, banks were far less overextended and, with greater government support, were much more rapidly able to pass on interest rate cuts to borrowers.
The Duchess of Cambridge cut an elegant figure in a vibrant red coat from Eponine as she arrived at the National Portrait Gallery today to meet photographers featured in her Hold Still book as it topped the bestseller list on its first day today.
Kate Middleton, 39, a keen photographer, started a campaign during the first lockdown last year to ask the public to submit images which captured the period.
Her new book Hold Still: A Portrait of Our Nation in 2020, features 100 final 'poignant and personal' portraits selected from 31,000 entrants.
The Duchess looked stunning as she arrived at the gallery in central London earlier today, stepping out of the car in a bespoke vibrant red coat from Eponine, which is price on application only.
The London boutique is a favourite of the mother-of-three's, who previously stepped out in a £1,650 coat and a top and skirt costing £1,200 from the brand in 2016.
She paired the striking coat with simple brown accessories, including a trendy new £295 micro-handbag from DeMellier and a pleated tan midi skirt.
Earlier this morning, the Duchess revealed the judges of the Hold Still competition, as well as the participants, had left '150 copies at places that gave us hope during lockdowns' in collaboration with the Book Fairies organisation.
Kate shared a video as she placed the book, which has shot to the top of the bestseller list, next to a fountain outside Kensington Palace, writing: 'Let the search begin! We’ve joined @the_bookfairies for the day to share copies of Hold Still around the UK with you. Each copy is adorned with a gold book fairy sticker, gold ribbon, and has a letter from The Duchess tucked inside. #HSbookfairies.'
Kate Middleton, 39, cut an elegant figure in a vibrant red coat from Eponine as she visited the National Portrait Gallery today as her photobook Hold Still was released
Earlier this morning, the Duchess revealed the judges of the Hold Still competition, as well as the participants, had left 'copies at places that gave us hope during lockdowns' in collaboration with the Book Fairies organisation
Kate looked stunning in the vibrant red coat, which she paired with brown accessories, during her visit to the gallery earlier today
The Duchess appeared animated as she arrived at the gallery in central London today, cutting a striking figure in a vibrant red coat from London boutique Eponine.
The piece, which is from their Autumn/Winter 2018 collection but hasn't been seen on the Duchess in public before, features a mandarin collar and pretty button detailing.
The Duchess paired the striking coat with simple brown accessories, including her new DeMellier micro-handbag, and opted for a pleated tan midi skirt beneath the coat.
Online, the £295 bag is described as a 'perfectly proportioned statement piece' which can fit 'handbag essentials' including 'most phones' as well as keys and a small purse.
Her long brunette locks were styled into her signature bouncy blow dry style as she placed the book onto the ground.
During the visit, Kate is set to meet Nicholas Cullinan, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, who has confirmed that the final 100 Hold Still images will become part of the Gallery’s national Collection, ensuring that this unique collective portrait of an extraordinary period in the nation’s history is conserved for future generations.
The Gallery is home to the largest collection of portraits in the world, including over 250,000 photographs which span from the 1840s through to the present day.
The Duchess will also see examples of other photographs from the Gallery’s Collection which demonstrate how photography has been used since the 19th century to document individuals’ experiences and key moments in our nation’s social history.
The Duchess appeared animated as she arrived at the gallery in central London today, cutting a striking figure in a vibrant red coat from London boutique Eponine
The mother-of-three opted for tan and brown accessories for the occasion, allowing her bright coat to be her statement piece for the day
The Duchess donned a medical face mask as she chatted with staff of the National Portrait Gallery during the appearance earlier today
Kate opted for her usual natural makeup for the occasion, and styled her long brunette locks into her signature bouncy blow dry (pictured)
The Duchess carried a £295 trendy micro-handbag from DeMellier for the occasion, with stunning gold detailing across the buckle (left and right)
She also met with Hold Still entrants, Lotti Sofia, Niaz Maleknia and Claudia Burton, whose photographs feature in the book, to hear more about the stories behind their photographs and their love of photography.
Later, she will visit The Royal London Hospital to hear how art is commissioned by its award-winning Arts & Health service, Vital Arts, and displayed throughout its wards, waiting rooms and corridors to enhance the environment and, in turn, improve the patient and staff experience.
The Duchess will see examples of arts projects and installations at the hospital delivered by the Vital Arts programme.
She will also hear more about how the National Portrait Gallery has collaborated with the hospital to bring workshops to young patients and their families through the Gallery’s Hospital Programme.
Kate will then speak with a small group of hospital staff who told her about their experiences of working throughout the pandemic, and showed examples of some photographs which have been taken by staff from Barts Health NHS Trust to document this period in history.
At the peak of the second wave, The Royal London was caring for COVID-19 patients from across North East London including 150 patients who required critical care, and treated more than double the number of COVID-19 patients they did during the first wave.
The Duchess will also view a framed portrait of Melanie, March 2020 by Johannah Churchill, which appears on the front cover of the Hold Still book.
The portrait, which has been gifted to The Royal London by The Duchess and the National Portrait Gallery, will hang in the hospital’s main corridor as a reminder of the phenomenal efforts of NHS staff throughout the pandemic. Further portraits will be given to locations around the UK for public display over the coming months.
The Duchess of Cambridge, 39, donned a medical facemask as she visited the National Portrait Gallery earlier today to mark the release of her new book
Kate Middleton could be seen browsing her phone as she made her way to the gallery in central London today
The mother-of-three could be seen adjusting her facemask as she settled into the car journey on the way to the gallery
The Duchess smoothed down her facemask as she travelled to the National Portrait Gallery to launch the book today
Kate's book, created in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, is available in UK bookshops and online from today, one year since the project was first launched.
Earlier today, The Book Fairies shared photographs of the Duchess as she placed the book outside Kensington Palace, tweeting: 'We are delighted that The Duchess of Cambridge has not only harnessed the power of The Book Fairies today but became a book fairy herself to hide copies of Hold Still!'
Another tweet from The Book Fairies, an organisation set up in 2017 which encourages people to share their books, revealed one of the Hold Still books had been wrapped in a green ribbon and hidden outside a hospital.
Other Hold Still participants and judges were quick to reveal snaps as they hid their copies of the book for others to find.
One person in Bishop Auckland posted an image of the book nestled in a flower bed, while another person shared images of a copy hidden in Northern Ireland.
The Book Fairies is a literary movement which urges readers to share books which they have read and enjoyed by leaving them in public spaces for others to find. Book fairies leave literary gifts all around the UK, and worldwide, every day, and to date have distributed over 300,000 books.
Meanwhile the book immediately shot to the top of the Amazon bestseller list.
As well as being number two on the charts overall, the photo book was number one in the Art, Architecture & Photography.
Earlier this week, Kate shared a video which flicked through the pages of the book to their Instagram, with the caption: 'Coming this Friday #HoldStill2020'.
Let the search begin! The Duke and Duchess shared a video of Kate placing a copy of the book outside her home of Kensington Palace
Earlier today, the Duchess of Cambridge launched a royal treasure hunt as she left copies of her photography book hidden around the UK with a letter tucked inside
Kate (pictured), a keen amateur photographer, wrote the introduction to the book, which showcases pictures from her Hold Still campaign of 2020
Each of the free copies has been wrapped in a colourful ribbon and bears The Book Fairies sticker on the front (pictured, another person hides their copy in a mystery location)
Copies of the book have been hidden around the country by the Hold Still judges and participants in different locations that 'gave them hope' during lockdown (pictured left, a book hidden in Bishop Auckland, and right, on a distinctive bench)
Another tweet from The Book Fairies revealed one of the Hold Still books had been wrapped in a green ribbon and hidden outside a hospital
Excited social media users were quick to share snaps of their photobooks hidden in various locations across the country (left and right)
The fast-paced video shared by the Cambridges on Instagram showed the different pages of the Hold Still book, and some of the 100 portraits that were selected.
Excited royal fans praised the Duchess's work, as some said she was 'smashing it'. 'Wonderful. I love the way this woman goes about her business,' one said.
Earlier this week she shared a glimpse of her photography book Hold Still (pictured) ahead of its release today
As well as being number two on the charts overall, the photo book was number one in the Art, Architecture & Photography
The new book includes an introduction from Kate, in which she explains why launching Hold Still was so important to her.
She writes: 'When we look back at the COVID-19 pandemic in decades to come, we will think of the challenges we all faced – the loved ones we lost, the extended isolation from our families and friends and the strain placed on our key workers.
'But we will also remember the positives: the incredible acts of kindness, the helpers and heroes who emerged from all walks of life, and how together we adapted to a new normal.
'Through Hold Still, I wanted to use the power of photography to create a lasting record of what we were all experiencing – to capture individuals' stories and document significant moments for families and communities as we lived through the pandemic.'
The book showed portraits taken during the pandemic (pictured), and will be released on Friday online and across UK bookstores
The new book includes an introduction from Kate, in which she explains why launching Hold Still was so important to her
She goes on: 'For me, the power of the images is in the poignant and personal stories that sit behind them. I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak to some of the photographers and sitters, to hear their stories first-hand - from moments of joy, love and community spirit, to deep sadness, pain, isolation and loss.
'A common theme of those conversations was how lockdown reminded us about the importance of human connection and the huge value we place on the relationships we have with the people around us.
'Although we were physically apart, these images remind us that, as families, communities and as a nation, we need each other more than we had ever realised.'
She concludes by thanking everyone who took the time to submit an image, adding: 'Your stories are the most crucial part of this project.
The announcement comes after the UK marked the one-year anniversary of the first national lockdown earlier this week. Pictured: an image from the new book
'I hope that the final 100 photographs showcase the experiences and emotions borne during this time in history, pay tribute to the awe-inspiring efforts of all who have worked to protect those around them, and provide a space for us to pause and reflect upon this unparalleled period.'
Net proceeds raised from the sale of the book will be split between the mental health charity Mind and the National Portrait Gallery.
The funds will help to support arts and mental health projects across the UK, including Mind's work in local communities and the National Portrait Gallery's education and community projects.
As well as showcasing the final 100 images and the stories that accompany each of them, the book - which has been put together with support from the Co-op - will look back at highlights from the community exhibition which took the portraits to billboards and outdoor poster sites in 80 towns, cities and areas in October 2020.
Net proceeds raised from the sale of the book (pictured) will be split between the mental health charity Mind and the National Portrait Gallery
Over the course of the project the Duchess shared a number of her favourite images on the Kensington Royal Instagram page, including one of a young girl seen drawing a huge rainbow onto a window pane, which made it into the book (pictured)
Over the course of the project the Duchess shared a number of her favourite images on the Kensington Royal Instagram page, including a Black Lives Matter protester holding a sign reading: 'Be on the right side of history.'
Another of the snaps was a black and white image showing a man embracing his daughter, while one shows a child kissing their godmother through a window.
Meanwhile others featured a student holding her exam qualifications, and a young girl seen drawing a huge rainbow onto a window pane.
Dr Nicholas Cullinan, director of The National Portrait Gallery said: 'The public response to Hold Still, which was spearheaded by our Patron, the Duchess of Cambridge, has been phenomenal.
'The photographs submitted have helped to create a unifying and cathartic portrait of life in lockdown. We are honoured to have been able to share a selection of these photographs with the nation, first through the online and community exhibition and now through this new publication.
'The proceeds raised from the book will help us to continue to care for and share our national Collection and to provide free access, inspiration and learning, through the work we do at the Gallery and our UK wide community and education projects.
'Hold Still is an important record of this extraordinary moment in our history – expressed through the faces of the nation – and we hope will remain so for generations to come.'
As well as showcasing the final 100 images and the stories that accompany each of them, the book - which has been put together with support from the Co-op - will look back at highlights from the community exhibition which took the portraits to billboards and outdoor poster sites in 80 towns, cities and areas in October 2020
Paul Farmer, chief executive of Mind, added: 'The coronavirus pandemic is a mental health emergency as well as a physical one. The devastating loss of life, the impact of lockdown, and any recession that lies ahead means there has never been a more crucial time to prioritise our mental health.
'This inspiring collection of portraits illustrates the impact of the pandemic in all its complexity, but also how creativity, art and human connection can help us find meaning in unprecedented challenges.
'Thank you to everyone who submitted a portrait to tell such a moving and deeply human story of the pandemic. And to the National Portrait Gallery and The Duchess of Cambridge for choosing Mind as a joint beneficiary of proceeds from the sales of this book.'
Melinda Gates warned her husband Bill against any further contact with Jeffrey Epstein after the couple had an uncomfortable meeting with the convicted sex offender, according to a new report.
Melinda was 'furious' at Bill's relationship with Epstein after the couple visited the predator's Upper East Side townhouse in September 2013, people familiar with the matter told the Daily Beast.
The meeting proved a turning point in Bill's relationship with Epstein, after Melinda expressed how uncomfortable she was with the sex offender and said she wanted nothing to do with him, the sources said.
It comes after Bill and Melinda announced their intention to divorce this week, offering no other explanation for the split aside from saying 'we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives.'
Melinda Gates warned her husband Bill (with her left) against any further contact with Jeffrey Epstein (right) after the couple had an uncomfortable meeting with the convicted sex offender
The meeting took place at Epstein's Upper East Side townhouse (above) in September 2013, and reportedly infuriated Melinda who wanted no contact with Epstein
Bill and Melinda's meeting with Epstein, previously undisclosed, took place on September 20, 2013, the same day that the couple had a public appearance in New York to accept the the Lasker Bloomberg Public Service Award at the Pierre Hotel.
At the time, Epstein had already been convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida. It was several years later that he was federally charged with sex trafficking, and died behind bars in 2019.
Sources told the Daily Beast that Gates' friendship with Epstein, who cultivated wealthy and powerful friends, still haunts Melinda to this day.
It's unclear whether Melinda had concerns about Epstein's prior conviction, or merely disliked him.
'He just was an obnoxious guy. He almost made a point of having bad manners, not paying attention at dinner,' one person told the outlet. 'I could see how anybody, even without suspicions, would not want to be around him.'
The New York Times reported in 2019 that Gates befriended Epstein in 2011, visiting Epstein at least three times at Epstein's New York City townhouse.
Gates has said that he initially hoped the wealthy financier would help him raise money for his global health initiatives.
In 2011, Gates wrote in an email to colleagues: '[Epstein's] lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me.'
On the same day as the meeting with Epstein, Bill and Melinda Gates appeared with Michael Bloomberg to accept awards for public service in New York City
A spokesperson for Gates told the Times that Gates 'was referring only to the unique décor of the Epstein residence - and Epstein's habit of spontaneously bringing acquaintances in to meet Mr. Gates.'
'It was in no way meant to convey a sense of interest or approval,' she said.
In March 2013, Gates flew on Epstein's private plane - the aircraft that has been dubbed the 'Lolita Express' because it was allegedly used to traffic young girls.
Bridgitt Arnold, a spokesperson for Gates, told the Times that Gates was not aware that the plane belonged to Epstein.
In September of that year, Gates and Epstein met for dinner in New York to discuss philanthropy, according to Arnold -- possibly the same meeting attended by Melinda, triggering her fury.
By the end of 2014, Gates and Epstein were no longer in contact, prompting Epstein to complain to an acquaintance that Gates was shunning him, the Times reported.
Logs for the 'Lolita Express' list Bill Gates on a flight from Teterboro in New Jersey to Abilene Regional Airport in Texas in March 2013. Gates said he didn't know it was Epstein's plane
The joint charitable fund that was discussed never came to be.
Arnold told the Times that Gates was introduced to Epstein by 'high-profile people.'
'Bill Gates regrets ever meeting with Epstein and recognizes it was an error in judgment to do so,' Arnold said.
'Gates recognizes that entertaining Epstein's ideas related to philanthropy gave Epstein an undeserved platform that was at odds with Gates's personal values and the values of his foundation.'
In 2019, after Epstein's second arrest, Gates took pains to distance himself, saying he 'made a mistake in judgement' in befriending the predator.
He told Axios that he 'wishes they never met' and insisted he had neither a 'business or personal relationship' with Epstein.
It comes after Bill and Melinda (seen in 2018) announced their intention to divorce this week, offering no other explanation for the split aside from saying 'we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives'
And Gates told the New York Times Dealbook Conference he 'made a mistake' meeting with the disgraced financier who he hoped would help raise money for his work with global health.
He said: 'That was a mirage. None of that money ever appeared, and I gave him some benefit by the association, so I made a doubly wrong mistake there.'
Gates told The Wall Street Journal: 'There were people around [Epstein] who were saying, hey, if you want to raise money for global health and get more philanthropy, he knows a lot of rich people.'
He added: 'There's some countries that we just haven't done any recruiting in at all because we're not in a position to really make those judgments.
'I feel bad. We probably will at some point accept someone into the Giving Pledge and it will turn out that their fortune is a disreputable fortune. When you're engaging in this, if you really want to get out there and get more people drawn into philanthropy, there is a risk that you'll make a mistake.'
Professional golfer Dan bowling has been arrested for sexting and attempting to meet up with an undercover cop he allegedly thought was a 15-year-old girl
Professional golfer Dan Bowling has been arrested for sexting with an undercover police officer he allegedly believed was a 15-year-old girl.
The Canadian sportsman, 26, was taken into custody in Orlando on Thursday after he tried to meet up with the 'teen' in person.
He was placed in handcuffs when he realized that the minor did not exist and that he had actually been conversing with an undercover detective.
Bowling is now facing charges of obscene communication, traveling to meet with a minor and attempted lewd and lascivious molestation, according to People.
Investigators allege that Bowling contacted the decoy on the app AdChat early last month.
The conversation 'turned sexual in nature within the first 24 hours and intensified quickly', police said.
Investigators allege that Bowling contacted the decoy on the app AdChat early last month. He is pictured checking his phone while on the links back in February
The Canadian sportsman, 26, was taken into custody in Orlando on Thursday after he agreed to meet with the 'teen' in person
Bowling was arrested without incident and it is currently unclear whether he has obtained a lawyer.
Police have described him as a 'dangerous online predator'.
'Unfortunately, there are potentially hundreds of predators like Mr. Bowling online,' Jennifer Wing, from the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, told People.
'I hope news of today's arrest encourages parents to be more proactive in monitoring their children's lives online.'
According to Yahoo Sports, Bowling has not competed professionally since 2016.
Additionally, he is not in the Official World Golf Rankings.
However, his Instagram is filled with golf snaps, and his bio reads: 'Pro golfer travelling PGA Tour events one Monday at a time'.
Last week, he shared a video which showed him out on the links beneath a caption that read: 'Down in North Carolina for the Wells Fargo Monday qualifying. Been putting in the work last few weeks with my guys.'
Bowling was arrested without incident and it is currently unclear whether he has obtained a lawyer
Hhis Instagram is filled with golf snaps, and his bio reads: 'Pro golfer travelling PGA Tour events one Monday at a time'
The husband of Suzanne Morphew, a Colorado mother who disappeared on Mother's Day of 2020, has been arrested and is facing murder charges nearly a year after her disappearance.
Twitter suspended the account linked to President Trump's new communications platform, just days after the platform launched. According to reports Thursday, the account at DJT Desk had been suspended as of late Wednesday.
Republicans are demanding answers from the CDC over reports that suggest teacher's unions are influencing school reopening guidelines, rather than hard science.
According to the White House, social media companies have the responsibility of shutting down misinformation. During a press conference Wednesday, Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked about Facebook's decision to uphold its ban of President Trump.
US birth rates have fallen to their lowest level in a generation thanks to the coronavirus pandemic
Bloomberg noted that birth rates dropped across every race, ethnicity and age group according to the data, which was published by the CDC’s National Center for Health.
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The birth rate hasn’t been this low since 1979.
Zero Hedge reports: As we noted at the time, a shrinking population is bound to create serious challenges for China’s debt-fueled economy. It’s one reason to doubt President Xi’s propaganda about China being “on the rise” globally.
Still, declining birth rates are a problem across the developed world, and the US is no exception. The provisional data for 2020, at 3.6MM births, marks the 6th annual drop in a row. The decline will likely continue in 2021, when the brunt of the impact from the pandemic will be recorded, but with a nine-month delay.
Bloomberg suggested that fears of contracting the virus while pregnant, or while in hospital to give birth, combined with job insecurity and government measures limiting social contact and business activity, dissuaded Americans from having babies, according to surveys by Ovia Health, a women’s health technology company.
“There are several factors that go into family planning, and an entire ecosystem of support that enables and empowers parents and parents-to-be,” said Paris Wallace, chief executive of Ovia Health. “In 2020, nearly all of those factors were turned on their head, and many of those support systems came crashing down.”
While birth rates fell for women in all age groups between 15 and 40, the declines were steeper in states that were hit the hardest by COVID-19, such as California and New York. And the exodus from crowded urban centers exacerbated the drop in birth rates in places like NYC, where the constant shriek of ambulance sirens over the summer likely made it difficult for couples to get in the mood.
California has unveiled its new woke math program which encourages teachers to punish good students by holding them back.
In the name of equity, California aims to discourage students who are gifted at math
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In their proposed manifesto the Sates Department of Education announced that the gap between well-performing students and their less able peers must disappear and they expect schools to deliver ‘equity’ in classrooms.
RT reports: Such an effort would involve faculty holding well-performing students back, even while pushing their less intellectual peers forward (as if they were all indeed equal in abilities). Potentially stranding a group of gifted individuals in a situation where they are held back by a single child who simply can’t get a problem right and needs endless special instruction is hardly something to be proud of, for the school or the students themselves.
Released on Tuesday, the sprawling, hundreds of pages-long manifesto delivered by the California Health Department described how schools must focus on “active efforts” in mathematics. Starting at the beginning of K-12 education to ensure no “gifted and talented” or advanced tracking programs take hold among the faculty, the policy implies to parents that if they want the same free public education as anywhere else in their school district, they have no choice but to subject their kids to racist pandering and a warped new form of mathematics that many may find insulting.
Indeed, the mathematically inclined children will be effectively held back until the last few years of high school, essentially forcing them to miss out on an opportunity to hone their talent at a younger age.
“We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents,” the proposal states, insisting “there is no cutoff determining when one child is ‘gifted’ and another is not.” The proposal also wants to “replace ideas of innate mathematics ‘talent’ and ‘giftedness’ with the recognition that every student is on a growth pathway.”
The authors of the district’s recently-released math instruction framework decided that “too many students are sorted into different math tracks based on their natural abilities,” arguing instead that gifted California kids owe it to their peers to sacrifice their own opportunities for as long as they can – all in the name of equity.
Fortunately for California students (and their parents), the proposition has not yet been passed into National Education Administration policy, but it runs the risk of joining several peer states in following through. Other states including Oregon, Virginia, and Illinois have eagerly embraced the idea.
Virginia was especially keen to join the nationwide efforts to refashion children’s education into a new and patronizing style of social control. Last month, Virginia announced it would streamline educational “equity” – a plan which involves replacing math with “foundational concepts,” ditching algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus, and imposing a lowest-common-denominator model of teaching and wiping out the option of taking any advanced math course before entering the 11th grade.
Meanwhile, New York City has done away with the admissions criteria to some of their most prestigious private schools, outraging parents who prefer their wealthy hothouse flowers be raised in a more ‘traditional’ environment. Dalton, a prestigious private school in the city, unleashed an “anti-racism manifesto” last year demanding the institution hire 12 “diversity officers” and even psychologists to push back on “race-based traumatic stress.”
A Bill and Melinda Gates funded Institute, whose statistical models were used to justify early Covid-19 lockdowns, is now arguing that the true death toll of the pandemic is more than twice as high as the official numbers.
In fact their figures are closer to their own apocalyptic predictions.
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RT reports: Covid-19 has killed more than 900,000 Americans and over 6.9 million people worldwide, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) claimed on Thursday, citing their own statistical models based on excess mortality.
Covid-19 has killed more than 900,000 Americans and over 6.9 million people worldwide, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) claimed on Thursday, citing their own statistical models based on excess mortality.
By contrast, official figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University list 3.24 million deaths globally, of which 580,000 are in the US, as of May 6.
This morning, we're releasing a major change in our COVID-19 model (➡️https://t.co/5biAggRz1T). We're now incorporating excess mortality to approximate the total COVID-19 death rate worldwide. pic.twitter.com/IehmwuuaKB
— Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) (@IHME_UW) May 6, 2021
IHME chief Dr. Christopher Murray explained in a series of videos that they used a “variety of statistical methods” to determine excess mortality, which was then weighed against six other factors to calculate whether it would have been due to the coronavirus or other causes.
They compared “anticipated deaths from all causes based on pre-pandemic trends with the actual number of all-cause deaths during the pandemic,” then removed the deaths both “indirectly attributable” to the pandemic and “averted” by the lockdowns.
“When you put all that together, we conclude that the best way, the closest estimate, for the true Covid death is still excess mortality, because some of those things are on the positive side, other factors are on the negative side,”
With this total COVID-19 mortality adjustment, these are the countries that we estimate currently have the highest total COVID-19 deaths .vs. reported COVID-19 deaths: pic.twitter.com/v7af0kO6Ab
— Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) (@IHME_UW) May 6, 2021
The institute apparently suggests that official Covid data is not to be trusted – and their extrapolated “statistics” imply that some nations are even more untrustworthy than the others. For instance, they claim that Russia had almost six times more coronavirus deaths than its official numbers – almost as many as Brazil, whose official numbers are supposedly off by a third, again by IHME metrics. By contrast, the UK “undercounted” its deaths by only 60,000 or so.
The bombshell claim, while promptly parroted by major media outlets, was met with some skepticism by other scientists. William Hanage of Harvard University told NPR in an email that IHME’s claim that Covid-19 deaths have been “substantially undercounted” in some places more than others “is likely sound, but the absolute numbers are less so for a lot of reasons.”
“Their estimate of excess deaths is enormous and inconsistent with our research and others,” said Dr. Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University. “There are a lot of assumptions and educated guesses built into their model.” Woolf’s team of researchers published a study on excess mortality in the US in last month’s Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
IHME is so confident of their figures, however, that it said their future modeling will be based on these estimates of total deaths.
The institute, which receives generous funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, produced models that were used by the US government last March and April to impose lockdowns – but ended up being far ahead of the actual death toll of the pandemic.
Germany’s Health Minister Jens Spahn told a World Health Organization (WHO) briefing on Wednesday that a “global reset” is needed to fight future pandemics.
His comments came as the UN agency announced the creation of a new pandemic and health research hub in Berlin.
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Speaking at a virtual news conference attended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the head of the WHO, Spahn said the world was still insufficiently prepared for pandemics.
RT reports: Spahn highlighted the findings of a review into the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which will be officially announced at the WHO’s World Health Assembly later this month.
The authors of the report will call for “nothing less than a global reset in pandemic preparedness” and say that the world needs to focus on the “next crisis,” Spahn said.
Spahn said that the world is “insufficiently prepared” for potential pandemic risks, including the extension of diseases to previously unaffected populations and the transmission of diseases from animals to people.
The minister appeared alongside WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who announced the creation of a new pandemic and health research hub in Berlin.
Set to open this year, the WHO hub for pandemic and epidemic intelligence will produce information to inform the policies of governments and other health authorities, Merkel said.
Ghebreyesus told the briefing that the pandemic has “exposed gaps” in global intelligence systems and said there will be “more viruses that will emerge with the potential of sparking epidemics or pandemics.”
He said the potential risks will be addressed by the global center in Berlin, which aims to collect, analyze and disseminate health data around the world in real time.
The Who frontman Roger Daltrey has warned that ‘woke’ leftists are creating a literal ‘hell on earth’ that stifles the kind of creative freedom he enjoyed in the 60s.
The iconic singer made the comments during a recent appearance on Zane Lowe’s Apple Music 1 podcast.
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“I don’t know, we might get somewhere because it’s becoming so absurd now with AI, all the tricks it can do, and the woke generation,” Daltrey said.
“It’s terrifying, the miserable world they’re going to create for themselves. I mean, anyone who’s lived a life and you see what they’re doing, you just know that it’s a route to nowhere,” he added.
Summit.news reports: The singer noted how he was lucky to have lived through an era where freedom of speech was encouraged, not silenced.
“Especially when you’ve lived through the periods of a life that we’ve had the privilege to. I mean, we’ve had the golden era. There’s no doubt about that,” he said.
Daltrey also slammed the negative impact that social media has had on the world, saying it has undermined truth.
“It’s just getting harder to disseminate the truth. It’s almost like, now we should turn the whole thing off. Go back to newsprint, go back to word of mouth and start to read books again,” he said.
While Daltrey’s comments may not be mind-blowing, any celebrity speaking out against the mob that has cannibalized culture is something to be applauded.
Once again, this only tends to happen with older celebrities who have already passed their peak of fame and entered icon status. They are beyond cancellation.
For any up and coming celebrity, or even one who is at the top of their game, to question ‘generation woke’ is career suicide.
Which makes it all the more ludicrous to continue to see identitarians, notably the LGBT movement, continue to claim they are ‘fighting oppression’ when their mantras are echoed by every cultural institution, media outlet and corporate entity in the west, while anyone who utters a whimper of dissent is swiftly cancelled.
Germany looks set to impose a total crackdown on all anti-lockdown protests across the country because protestors are not wearing masks or practising social distancing.
After numerous massive protests across Germany in recent months, the head of the German Police Union, Rainer Wendt, says it’s time to criminalize such behavior.
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“In these demonstrations, the violation of the law is preprogrammed and takes place permanently and thousands of times because the participants do not wear masks and do not keep the minimum distance,” Wendt told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung.
“You have to act much more rigorously against it,” he added.
Summit.news reports: According to Wendt, the intention of demonstrators to disobey lockdown rules (despite them literally being anti-lockdown protesters), should give authorities all the justification they need to ban the events in advance.
“It is completely incomprehensible why such demos are even still approved,” said Wendt.
Does Wendt really expect the thousands who attend the demonstrations to be concerned about masks and social distancing when a majority of them firmly believe that the government has massively overexaggerated the threat of the virus?
Many of the anti-lockdown protests in Germany have been organized by the Querdenker (lateral thinkers) movement, with authorities responding by characterizing the collective as a violent extremist group.
As we previously highlighted, Germany’s domestic BfV spy agency is monitoring anti-lockdown protesters, claiming they are potentially involved in a plot to subvert the country.
“Authorities fear that far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists who either deny the existence of Covid or downplay its threat to public health are exploiting lockdown frustrations to stir anger against politicians and state institutions five months before a general election,” reported Reuters.
Maybe members of the Querdenker movement all end up in detainment camps that have been set up to incarcerate persistent COVID-19 rulebreakers.
Because as anyone knows, German authorities putting dissidents in camps having treated them as second class citizens who don’t deserve basic rights always ends well.
President Biden has ordered Big Tech giants to heavily censor independent media outlets and promote outlets like CNN on people’s newsfeeds instead.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters during Wednesday’s press briefing that the Biden administration enthusiastically supports more online censorship.
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She said Biden believes that social media companies have a “responsibility” to block content deemed ‘questionable’ by the Democratic Party.
“His view is that there is more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life-threatening information is not going out to the American public,” she said.
Breitbart.com reports: Psaki singled out content questioning the results of elections, the fight to stop the spread of the coronavirus, and the effort to get Americas vaccinated as “misinformation” that should be scrutinized.
“The president’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans, to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation, and misinformation, especially related to COVID-19, vaccinations, and elections,” she said.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden enjoyed several attempts by social media companies to block damaging stories about him and his family from spreading online.
When asked about concerns that social media companies were not honoring the First Amendment value of free speech, Psaki suggested it did not apply to online “misinformation.”
“Well look, I think we are, of course, a believer in First Amendment rights,” she said. “I think what the decisions are that the social media platforms need to make is how they address the disinformation, misinformation, especially related to life-threatening issues, like COVID-19 and vaccinations that continue to proliferate on their platforms.”
CNN’s Michael Smerconish has urged people to mentally abuse friends and family members who refuse to recive the vaccine.
During a segment on his show on Wednesday, Smerconish discussed a suggestion made by prosecutor Michael Stern in a USA Today opinion piece about vaccination uptake.
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“We’ve gotta shun folks, we’ve gotta shun people into getting vaccinated,” Smerconish said, agreeing that businesses should make getting the vaccine mandatory as a condition of employment.
He also decalred that family members and friends should socially ostracize those who choose not to take the vaccine.
Summit.news reports: Continuing to quote Stern’s article, Smerconish stated, “People should require friends to be vaccinated to attend the barbeques and birthday parties they host – friends don’t let friends spread COVID.”
Smerconish then proudly revealed the results of a poll on his website which found that 73% of respondents thought it was “time to shun.”
“Doesn’t @Smerconish realise we absolutely want to be shunned by people like him and his viewers,” remarked Raheem Kassam. “That’s literally the dream.”
“This isn’t going to end well,” commented Donald Trump Jr.
Smerconish and his ilk are not encouraging others to shun “anti-vaxxers” because they care that much about incentivizing more people to take the vaccine (take up rates are already very high), they’re shaming them so as to legitimize the brutal discrimination that will be metered out later on down the line to those who don’t take it.
Meanwhile, the ‘sane’ people who insist everyone must take the vaccine are walking around behaving like this…
Republican lawmakers have announced plans to break up social media giant Facebook after its far-left Oversight Board upheld an indefinite ban on President Trump on Wednesday.
“It is a sad day for America,” Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows told “America’s Newsroom.”
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“It’s a sad day for Facebook because I can tell you, a number of members of Congress are now looking at: Do they break up Facebook, do they make sure that they don’t have a monopoly?”
“And I can tell you that it is two different standards, one for Donald Trump and one for a number of other people that are on their sites.”
“Facebook and Twitter and others have clearly established two different sets of rules.”
“One if you’re a conservative or a Republican or have a different ideology than them and one if you’re a liberal,” Corey Lewandowski also said in a radio interview.
“This ‘decision’ is absurd,” Ben Shapiro said on Twitter.
“Facebook’s decision to uphold its ban on President Donald Trump is extremely disappointing,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said in a statement.
“It’s clear that Mark Zuckerberg views himself as the arbiter of free speech.”
Foxnews.com reports: Facebook’s Oversight Board on Wednesday upheld Trump’s ban from Facebook and Instagram, but said it was “not appropriate” to impose the “indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension.”
“The Board has upheld Facebook’s decision on January 7, 2021, to restrict then-President Donald Trump’s access to posting content on his Facebook page and Instagram account,” the board said in a statement.
The board gave Facebook six months to review the “arbitrary” indefinite ban, saying in a tweet that the company “violated its own rules.”
The news prompted swift reaction from Republican lawmakers. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had a warning for Big Tech.
“Facebook is more interested in acting like a Democrat Super PAC than a platform for free speech and open debate,” McCarthy wrote on Twitter. “If they can ban President Trump, all conservative voices could be next. A House Republican majority will rein in big tech power over our speech.”
Facebook is more interested in acting like a Democrat Super PAC than a platform for free speech and open debate.
If they can ban President Trump, all conservative voices could be next.
A House Republican majority will rein in big tech power over our speech.
“Big tech thinks it can control everything. Companies that censor Americans while giving brutal dictators a pass should not have free rein over your personal data to use for their benefit. I introduced the DATA Act to hold big tech accountable,” Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., wrote on Twitter.
Big tech thinks it can control everything.⁰⁰Companies that censor Americans while giving brutal dictators a pass should not have free rein over your personal data to use for their benefit.⁰⁰I introduced the DATA Act to hold big tech accountable: https://t.co/aS2i0NWre4https://t.co/hkS14eIZ3k
“Disgraceful. For every liberal celebrating Trump’s social media ban, if the Big Tech oligarchs can muzzle the former President, what’s to stop them from silencing you?” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, wrote on Twitter.
Disgraceful.
For every liberal celebrating Trump’s social media ban, if the Big Tech oligarchs can muzzle the former President, what’s to stop them from silencing you? https://t.co/Yky4P0B38X
“I’m broadly supportive of the antitrust recommendations released by Rep. Ken Buck last October. Current antitrust law needs to be amended to better handle competition in digital markets, antitrust agencies should be beefed up and they need to regulate mergers and acquisitions more strictly,” Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Banks told Fox News in a statement.
Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, considered a 2024 presidential contender, also criticized Big Tech.
“Facebook and Twitter ban a former U.S. President, yet, some of the world’s worst dictators, terrorists, and bad actors still have a platform,” Haley wrote on Twitter. “This is a gross double standard and it’s why most Americans don’t trust big tech.”
Facebook and Twitter ban a former U.S. President, yet, some of the world’s worst dictators, terrorists, and bad actors still have a platform.
This is a gross double standard and it’s why most Americans don't trust big tech.
“The Facebook Oversight Board is a dumb distraction from the actual issue of Facebook’s hegemonic control over global political speech, reinforced today by the platform anointing itself with the moral authority to memory hole future world leaders at their own discretion,” Rachel Bovard of the Conservative Partnership Institute wrote on Twitter.
The Facebook Oversight Board is a dumb distraction from the actual issue of Facebook's hegemonic control over global political speech, reinforced today by the platform anointing itself with the moral authority to memory hole future world leaders at their own discretion.
Meadows told “America’s Newsroom” that the days of Facebook enjoying a “Wild West kind of regulatory environment” are over.
“This is a sad day for America but a sadder day for the Facebooks of the world who have actually enjoyed a very wild, wild West kind of regulatory environment. I can tell you that’s going to change. The discussion will happen within hours of this decision on Capitol Hill,” Meadows said.
The board’s decision comes after Trump rolled out a new communications platform, “From the desk of Donald J. Trump.”
The space allows Trump to post comments, images and videos, and allows followers to share the former president’s posts to Twitter and Facebook, though it does not have a feature letting users “reply” or engage with Trump’s posts.
Trump-hating actress rosanna Arquette has declared that if Jesus were alive today he would be brutally murdered by U.S. police “because of the color of his skin.”
“If Jesus were alive today he’d be murdered by police officers because of the color of his skin,” the Hollywood star said in a tweet on Wednesday.
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If Jesus were alive today he’d be murdered by police officers because of the color of his skin
Breitbart.com reports: This is far from the first time the Desperately Seeking Susan star has bashed law enforcement on a public forum. In March, for example, Arquette insisted that white supremacists are now “front [and] center for the world to see.” She included governors, lawmakers, the military, and the police force on her list.
“Kkk spent years hiding behind their hoods. Now they are front [and] center for the world to see,” Arquette asserted. “Nazi White supremacists are many governors, people in Congress, our police force, military, in entertainment news. We see you and you won’t get away with it.”
Kkk spent years hiding behind their hoods. Now they are front center for the world to see. Nazi White supremacists are many governors , people in Congress ,our police force , military ,in entertainment news . We see you and you won’t get away with it.
The following month, Arquette attacked law enforcement in the U.S. as racist yet again.
“If there are any police officers left serving our communities who aren’t racist and aren’t set on killing human beings because they aren’t white, step up, show yourselves now, step up front [sic] and tell us you are not racist and because as it looks to us you are Gestapo,” she declared.
If there are any police officers left serving our communities who aren’t racist and aren’t set on killing human beings because they aren’t white ,step up ,show yourselves now .step up front and tell us you are not racist and because as it looks to us you are Gestapo.
In 2019, the radical left-wing activist posted a picture of herself kneeling with dozens of American flags in the background, promising to “never stand for the flag again.”
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for records about assaults on and abuse of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) in HHS custody (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (No. 1:21-cv-01190)).
The lawsuit was filed against Health and Human Services after the HHS denied a February 26, 2021 FOIA request for:
All summaries from individual case files of reports of physical and/or sexual abuse or assault of Unaccompanied Alien Children under the care of HHS, its sub-agencies, and or volunteer agencies, contractors, grantees, and sub-grantees, to include all segregable, non-exempt information.
Records reflecting aggregated data of physical and/or sexual abuse and assault of UACs under the care of HHS, its sub-agencies, and or volunteer agencies, contractors, grantees, and sub-grantees.
Texas welfare officials received three reports of abuse and neglect at the Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio, where more than 1,300 migrant children reportedlyhad been held. The site is one of several set up to handle the recent surge.
This report came on the heels of claims that multiple facilities where children are being held are unsafe.
“We are concerned that the surge of migrants seeking to take advantage of the Biden administration’s lax immigration policies has resulted in the foreseeable abuse of children, as overwhelmed federal authorities are ill-equipped to handle the huge number of children crossing the border. The unprecedented secrecy and censorship surrounding these sites compounds the problem and limits accountability,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Our lawsuit aims to expose the full truth about this particularly troubling consequence of the Biden administration’s lawlessness on immigration.”
Judicial Watch uncoveredHHS records in July 2018 revealing that in multiple cases, UACs processed during the Obama administration were assaulted by government employees.
Judicial Watch began investigating this matter in 2014 when a wave of UACs swamped the southwest border. Since that time, Judicial Watch has been investigating incidents of violence, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and other criminal activities, as well as whether migrant children were being abused while in U.S. shelters.
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton issued the following statement in response to the decision of Facebook’s Oversight Board to uphold President Trump’s Facebook censorship:
Today’s Facebook Oversight Board decision upholding President Trump’s Facebook ban undermines the First Amendment and free speech. The brazen deplatforming of President Trump is already chilling the speech of other Facebook users and Internet users generally, who fairly worry about Facebook and Big Tech censoring and deplatforming them.
It is notable that Facebook refused to disclose to its designated Oversight Board whether the Trump ban resulted from collusion with other government officials and politicians. Indeed, Judicial Watch recently uncovered that state government officials in Californiaand Iowa successfully pressured Facebook, Youtube/Google, and Twitter to censor election social media posts by Judicial Watch and other citizens. (I have been locked out of Twitter for four months over a tweet previously found not to be in violation of Twitter’s rules.)
Judicial Watch had argued that Facebook’s Oversight Board should have reversed the president’s ban because the ban is an affront to First Amendment protections of free speech, peaceable assembly, and the right to petition the government. There is no credible evidence that President Trump either morally or legally incited violence. He was resoundingly acquitted by the United States Senate after the impeachment “prosecutors” failed to produce credible evidence he incited violence. For Facebook and its Oversight Board to suggest President Trump incited violence and that complaints about the administration of an election could incite violence is a political position aligned with the Left and political opponents of President Trump and his supporters.
In an investigation fit for “McGruff the Crime Dog,” a fiscal watchdog group has sued for details on the two biting incidents by President Joe Biden’s dog Major.
In its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Judicial Watch said it is seeking from the Department of Homeland Security “records of communication between Secret Service officials assigned to the White House regarding the Biden family dogs.”
While Major has been labeled as the biter in two cases, Judicial Watch also wants communications mentioning the second Biden German shepherd, Champ.
Twice in March, the White House said Major bit people. In the first, it caused a “minor injury” to a member of the Secret Service, and the second required “medical attention” for a Park Service official.
The media reported that after the first incident, Major was sent to obedience school. It is unclear if he was otherwise punished.
“The public has a right to know the details about any incident in which Secret Service personnel were injured by President Biden’s dog,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “We have no doubt that Major and Champ are good dogs, but politicians and bureaucrats can’t be trusted.”
Judicial Watch, the conservative activist group that says its mission is to file lawsuits to expose government misconduct, has trained its sights on an unexpected target: the Biden family dogs.
The group announced Tuesday that it has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security in an attempt to secure records related to a biting episode involving Major, the younger of the first family’s two German shepherds, and a Secret Service agent on the White House grounds.
It is one of two biting incidents, which White House officials say resulted in only minor injuries, that prompted the Bidens to send Major to a trainer for a few weeks.
Judicial Watch said it filed the lawsuit because the Secret Service has been slow to process a Freedom of Information Act request seeking “all records of communications between USSS officials responsible for protection at the White House regarding the Biden family dogs, named Champ and Major.”
“The public has a right to know the details about any incident in which Secret Service personnel were injured by President Biden’s dog,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. “We have no doubt that Major and Champ are good dogs but politicians and bureaucrats can’t be trusted.”
(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the United States Department of Homeland Security for records of communication between Secret Service officials assigned to the White House regarding the Biden family dogs (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security(No. 1:21-cv-01194)).
The lawsuit was filed after the Secret Service failed to process records in a timely manner in response to a March 10, 2021, FOIA request seeking:
All records of communications between USSS officials responsible for protection at the White House regarding the Biden family dogs, named Champ and Major.
On April 12, 2021, the Secret Service replied to Judicial Watch’s FOIA request saying that they had identified responsive records which were being processed but have yet to produce them.
On March 9, 2021, the White House confirmed that President Biden’s dog Major, “did in fact bite someone at the White House, causing a “minor injury.” Press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed said that the dogs, “are still getting acclimated and accustomed to their new surroundings and new people.”
On March 30, 2021, the White House reported that, “President Biden’s dog Major on Monday afternoon bit another employee, who then required medical attention.” The encounter reportedly took place on the White House South Lawn Monday, March 29.
“The public has a right to know the details about any incident in which Secret Service personnel were injured by President Biden’s dog,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “We have no doubt that Major and Champ are good dogs but politicians and bureaucrats can’t be trusted.”
Many continue to argue that Big Tech corporations, as private companies, have a right to censor content on their platforms, but what if that decision were made by the government? As a bombshell Judicial Watch investigation reveals, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook were directly pressured by California state officials to remove election-related content posted by private individuals, including Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
Content including a Judicial Watch video which discussed the watchdog’s successful L.A. County voter roll clean-up case was removed by YouTube at “the behest of government officials,” Fitton noted Friday. “They [California state officials] targeted me because they didn’t want any criticism … so we have a government official working with Big Tech to take down a critic of the government.”
The documents show that CA state officials also made false claims to support the removal of Judicial Watch. “I know what I can and can’t say,” Fitton continued. “I know when I have to be accurate, which is all the time when I’m making public statements.”
Fitton has described these activities as being a “violation of your Constitutional rights under the First Amendment … they knew what they were doing was a problem.”
If you’re concerned about the violation of your First Amendment rights online and elsewhere, support Judicial Watch today.
The records show communications between the Secretary of State’s office and representatives of Facebook and Twitter to Target Judicial Watch Posts.
(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch announced today that it received 624 pagesof records from the office of the Secretary of State of Iowa, revealing how state officials pressured social media companies (Twitter and Facebook) to censor posts about the 2020 election. Included in these records were emails from Iowa state officials to representatives of Big Tech pressuring these companies to remove Judicial Watch’s posts. The emails show how the state agency successfully pressured Facebook to censor Judicial Watch’s post about Iowa’s management of its voter rolls.
Judicial Watch received the records as a result of a June 2020 Iowa Open Records lawsuit that was filed after the Iowa Secretary of State failed to comply with a February 2020 request for records and communications about a Judicial Watch reportregarding the accuracy of the state’s voter registration rolls (Judicial Watch v. Iowa Secretary of State(No. 05771 EQCE085973)). Judicial Watch was represented by Iowa lawyer Alan R. Ostergren of Des Moines, Iowa.
The records show that officials in the Iowa Secretary of State office on multiple occasions contacted officials from Facebook and Twitter to try to have these companies remove Judicial Watch posts that raised concerns about Iowa’s failure to maintain accurate election rolls.
On February 3, 2020, at 5:19 p.m., Kevin Hall, the communications director for the Iowa Secretary of State, wrote in a February 3, 2020, email to Facebook official Rachel Holland:
Circling back with an update regarding the content posted by Judicial Watch. Our third-party fact checkers have rated this content false, and we have applied a filter over the content warning users before they click to see it that the content has been rated false by independent fact checkers.
Please continue to report violating content to us by emailing [email protected], and copying me ([email protected]), as I will be on an airplane for the next couple hours. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns regarding this or any other matters.
A couple of hours later, Hall followed up, “Thank you! They have new posts up, doubling down on the false claims.”
And Holland responded, “Thanks for flagging- we’ve got a full team with eyes on this now and are applying the false filter to similar articles as well. I’ll send you an additional update shortly!”
That same day, Hall and Maria Benson, the director of communications at the National Association of Secretaries of State, both tried to convince Twitter to censor Judicial Watch’s posts but were ultimately unsuccessful.
Hall filed a report with Twitter, and Benson escalated it by looping in Kevin Kane from Twitter. On February 3, 2020, Benson wrote, “Iowa Secretary of State has reported the below election misinformation, but Twitter has declined to take it down. As you can see from facts the tweets are clearly wrong. I wanted to bring this to your attention to hopefully remedy the situation. I’ve cc’d Kevin Hall, their Communicators Director.”
Kane responded rejecting the request saying, “Thanks Maria – This was reviewed by our team and is not in violation of our election integrity policy as it does not suppress voter turnout or mislead people about when. where. or how to vote. I understand this is not the outcome you are seeking and appreciate you continuing to report Tweets to our team.”
In an email the next day, Hall wrote to Kane saying, “Facebook, thankfully, was helpful. I would suggest perhaps reviewing your policies at Twitter and putting them more in line with what Facebook is doing to counter election misinformation.”
After being rejected by Twitter, Benson emailed Brian Scully, an official at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, writing on February 3, 2020:
Hey Brian,
Can you report this as well? Hannity is now retweeting and Twitter isn’t playing ball with us. I’ve cc’d Kevin Hall who you met Saturday. He’s IA SOS’s Communications Director. He’s been reporting and playing wack a mole by trying to reply to misleading tweets.
Scully responded promising to contact Twitter. “Sorry … been out of pocket a bit. Will reach out to Twitter. Let me know if you get something.”
“These records are yet another example of state officials conspiring with Big Tech to deny Americans their First Amendment rights,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These records further show that Big Tech censorship is a government scandal: Iowa government officials worked with Facebook to remove posts they didn’t like, and Facebook bowed to this political pressure immediately. It should be disturbing to all Americans that government officials are working to censor speech they disagree with and that these behemoth companies often seem willing to roll over and censor free speech.”
Judicial Watch last week releasedrecords from the office of the Secretary of State of California revealing how state officials pressured social media companies (Twitter, Facebook, Google (YouTube)) to censor posts about the 2020 election. Included in these records were “misinformation briefings” emails that were compiled by communications firm SKDK, that listsBiden for President as their top clientof 2020. The records show how the state agency successfully pressured YouTube to censor a Judicial Watch video concerning the vote by mail and a Judicial Watch lawsuit settlement about California voter roll clean up.
California Officials Pressured Big Tech to Censor Social Media Election Posts
We now have chilling details of California state officials and Big Tech executives conspiring to uproot the First Amendment and influence the 2020 election. And, key targets were Judicial Watch and me.
The proof is in 540 pages and a supplemental four pages of documents we received from the office of the Secretary of State of California revealing how state officials pressured social media companies (Twitter, Facebook, Google (YouTube)) to censor posts about the 2020 election. Included in these documents were “misinformation briefings” emails that were compiled by communications firm SKDK, which lists Biden for President as their top client of 2020.
The documents show how the state agency successfully pressured YouTube to censor my Judicial Watch video concerning the vote by mail and a Judicial Watch lawsuit settlement about California voter roll clean up.
We received the records in response to our California Public Records Act (CPRA) requests to the Office of the California Secretary of State for records related to the Office of Election Cybersecurity’s database of social media posts; communications with social media companies; and other social media related records regarding the 2020 elections. We filed the requests after a December 2020 report surfaced that the state agency was surveilling, tracking, and seeking to censor the speech of Americans:
The Office of Election Cybersecurity in the California Secretary of State’s office monitored and tracked social media posts, decided if they were misinformation, stored the posts in an internal database coded by threat level, and on 31 different occasions requested posts be removed. In 24 cases, the social media companies agreed and either took down the posts or flagged them as misinformation, according to Jenna Dresner, senior public information officer for the Office of Election Cybersecurity.
“We don’t take down posts, that is not our role to play,” Dresner said. “We alert potential sources of misinformation to the social media companies and we let them make that call based on community standards they created.”
On September 24, 2020, a California Secretary of State chart lists a video I did and falsely alleges:
Head of conservative group Judicial Watch Hosts video alleging Democrats benefit from incorrect voter rolls and ballot collection.
The Secretary of State’s office details its communication with YouTube: “We wanted to flag this YouTube video because it misleads community members about elections or other civic processes and misrepresents the safety and security of mail-in ballots.” The chart quotes me describing Judicial Watch’s statement about its federal lawsuit settlement with Los Angeles County that will require it to clean up voter rolls and how a Michigan court “changed the rules” on ballot deadlines and ballot harvesting. (The controversial decision was overturned in October 2020.)
The document shows that California state officials contacted YouTube directly to remove the video on September 24, 2020, and that YouTube seemed to respond by deleting the video on September 27, 2020.
On September 11, 2020, outside consultant Zeke Sandoval, of the SKDK communications firm, provides the Secretary of State’s Office a “Misinformation Daily Briefing,” which again targets me:
Trump tweeted, “The big Unsolicited Ballot States should give it up NOW, before it is too late, and ask people to go to the Polling Booths and, like always before, VOTE. Otherwise, MAYHEM!!! Solicited Ballots (absentee) are OK,” and Twitter was quick to fact check and shared a link with info about how voting by mail is safe and secure. Viral reply on Twitter from Tom Fitton asserting, “Mailing 51 million ballots to those who haven’t asked for increases risk of voter fraud and voter intimidation!”
A 30-page “Misinformation Tracking Sheet” lists social media posts that the office disagrees with and has asked social media companies to remove.
In an internal email on January 12, 2021, Deputy Secretary of State and Chief Communications Officer Paula Valleemails Chief Counsel Steve Reyes and Jenna Dresner in the Office of Cybersecurity, as well as Press Secretary Sam Mahood stating that she is uncomfortable with CalMatters reporter Fred Brewster’s questions about the office’s tracking and censoring efforts:
Hi Steve – Please see below – the reporter at Cal Matters who PRA’d us is doing a follow-up story. We asked him to send us his questions. I am not necessarily comfortable with his line of questions and the additional doors that this will open. I want to get your feedback I would simply like to give him a statement about what our goal is and leave it at that. Thoughts?
Brewster’s questions, which include concerns from citizens who were targeted by the “Misinformation Tracker,” were sent on January 12, 2021:
I reached out to the users on page 7 and page 21 of the Misinformation Tracker request I received. Both individuals wanted to know how their posts ended up being labeled misinformation and how, given their relatively small following, they came to the attention of the Office of Election Cybersecurity?
Another user named “DC O’Bryan” had his post taken down (page 5 of the Misinformation Tracker). In an email, you highlight a report sent to the state that says, “I don’t know if this is hot air meant to provoke. If it is, a call from an official might get the point across that you don’t joke about election fraud.” Was O’Bryan called to confirm that his post was a joke?
How does the Office of Election Cybersecurity differentiate between parody and satire and misinformation?
Did CISA, Facebook, or any other partners provide guidance on how to spot and define misinformation? If someone has their posts in the Misinformation Tracker, are there plans to contact those individuals and is there a way for them to petition the state to delete them?
The Secretary of State’s Office emails Facebook and Twitter on April 25, 2019, with requests from the Office to remove tweets and posts for what they have labeled “misinformation.”
The office emails Facebook, attempting to set up a call to discuss removing future posts. This 15-minute call is with “new Facebook contact for social media reporting: Javier Hernandez, Politics & Government Outreach” in order to discuss how the office will report posts to Facebook. In the email, Facebook outlines its goals to directly work with “electoral authorities in every state” so that they can “report instances of voter suppression on Facebook directly to our team, so [Facebook] can look at them quickly and remove them from the site.”
On December 31, 2019, after the Secretary of State’s office reports a tweet to [email protected], Kevin Kane, a Twitter representative, replies and offers his direct contact for the Office’s future needs in removing posts.
In a September 21, 2020, email chain with the subject line “elections issue,” Jenna Dresner in the Secretary of State’s Office of Cybersecurity writes to “Cristina and team” at Facebook at 11:43 a.m.: “We want to flag this Instagram post.”
The reply comes from Facebook Community Operations: “Thank you for your report. We have reviewed the … content and can confirm that the content has been removed …” At 12:53 pm. Dresner writes to Press Secretary Sam Mahood, Social Media Coordinator Akilah Jones and others, “Post from this morning was removed (and fast!) Akilah we can update tracker.”
In an October 28, 2020, email, Jones writes to Flores at Facebook and CCs Dresner that a post, which was from a user named @Screenplaywale, “voters are being asked to gerrymander and voter suppress their ‘trump supporting father’s ballots.’”
In an email chain on September 14, 2020, titled “Election Issue” the office internally complains about how long it takes Facebook to remove a post and how to speed up this process.
Mahood writes to Dresner: “It looks like it took Facebook 2 weeks to respond to Chris. This is way too long, we should raise to FB and make sure we know best method to report posts.” Dresner responds: “Sure – I’m 98% sure this is the one you chased with an email directly to our FB contacts which resulted in it taken down that day. I can confirm that process works for the future?”
On August 22, 2019, Maria Benson, director of communications for the National Association of Secretaries of State emails the communications directors for Secretaries of State offices that Twitter confirmed that they streamlined their process for government officials to report “misinformation:”
Great news—Twitter is now on-boarding states into their mis/disinformation partner support portal! Once on-boarded, you will be able to directly report mis/disinformation instead of having to submit it to me first….” [Emphasis in original]
Benson also gives contact information for Facebook and Google complaints, and says: “If any of the items you reported do not get prompt attention, please let me know and I can also reach out the companies.”
On September 24, 2019, the California Secretary of State’s office confirms that it plans to participate in Facebook’s “misinformation” training which is a review from Facebook on “monitoring guidelines for reporting misinformation” and teaches participants how to use the direct reporting channel Facebook opened for them.
On October 1, 2020, Benson forwards information from Twitter about their training to directly remove posts they label as misinformation to the Secretary of State’s office. This is described by Twitter as: “training on creative and effective content strategies on Twitter in advance of the U.S. Election,” as well as “onboarding state and local election officials onto Twitter’s Partner Support Portal.” This portal is described as, “a dedicated way for critical stakeholders – like you – to flag concerns directly to Twitter.”
These documents detail a conspiracy against the First Amendment rights of Americans by the California Secretary of State, the Biden campaign operation, and Big Tech. These documents blow up the big lie that Big Tech censorship is ‘private’ – as the documents show collusion between a whole group of government officials in multiple states to suppress speech about election controversies.
Judicial Watch in Court to Stop a Maryland County from Giving Cash to Illegal Aliens
On May 5, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit will hear our lawsuit (Bauer, et al. v. Elrich, et al.(No. 20-1707)) challenging the legality of the Montgomery County, Maryland, program that provides cash payments to illegal aliens.
We argue on behalf of Montgomery County taxpayers Sharon Bauer and Richard Jurgena that the county’s program providing $10 million in cash benefits to illegal aliens violates federal law and irreparably harms county taxpayers.
This hearing arises from our complaint (Bauer et al. v. Elrich et al. (No. 482061V)) filed on May 8, 2020, in Montgomery County Circuit Court, which Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich and Raymond Crowel, director of the county’s Department of Health and Human Services, subsequently removed to federal court. The lawsuit seeks to permanently enjoin Elrich and Crowel from expending taxpayer money on the cash-benefits program known as the “Emergency Assistance Relief Payment Program” (EARP).
Under federal law, certain categories of aliens, including illegal aliens, are ineligible for state or local public benefits. Such benefits include direct, cash payments. If a state chooses to provide such benefits to illegal aliens, it must enact a state law affirmatively providing for such eligibility.
On May 29, 2020, the District Court ruled the program likely violates federal law and irreparably harms county taxpayers. The court ordered the county to hold back 25% of any unspent funds until the court could fully consider the merits of our taxpayer lawsuit. Later, the District Court dismissed the case, concluding it did not have jurisdiction to hear the case.
The Department of Justice filed an amicus brief in the appeal we brought, in which the agency agrees the policy is illegal but suggests state taxpayers have no right to sue state officials to stop them from using taxpayer funds to violate federal law.
We explain in our appeal: “The issues before this Court concern what cases federal courts may hear, whether state causes of action may rely on violations of federal law, and whether county officials acted illegally.” Also, pointing to 8 U.S. Code § 1621:
In short, Section 1621 prohibits unlawfully present aliens from receiving state and local public benefits unless the state legislature affirmatively authorizes it.
Even though the Maryland legislature had not affirmatively authorized it, Montgomery County, Maryland, nonetheless, started providing cash payments to unlawfully present aliens. As part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Montgomery County Council appropriated $10 million for an Emergency Assistance Relief Payment (“EARP”) program…. EARP provides cash payments to individuals or families, including unlawfully present aliens … who (1) live in Montgomery County, (2) are not eligible for federal COVID-19 stimulus checks or state benefits, (3) are not eligible to receive unemployment benefits, and (4) have an income equal to or below 50% of the federal poverty level…. The County Department of Health and Human Services (“DHHS”), which administers the program, distributes payments of $500 to eligible single adults, $1,000 to eligible families with a child, and an additional $150 to families for each additional child, up to $1,450 total….
Seeing their taxes being spent in violation of federal law, Sharon Bauer and Richard Jurgena (“Taxpayers”), Montgomery County taxpayers, sought to enjoin County Executive Marc Elrich and DHHS Director Raymond Crowel (collectively “Montgomery County”) from implementing EARP.
Politicians in Maryland are using COVID as an excuse to violate the law. If they want to give cash payments to illegal aliens, they must be accountable and transparent, and, as federal law requires, pass a state law to do so.
Judicial Watch Fights Hard Left ‘Critical Race Theory’
If you’re a parent or grandparent you need to pay close attention to what’s being taught in schools and colleges, and if you’re a voter, keep an eye on your local and state governments. All are being overrun by a Marxist racist madness known as Critical Race Theory. Judicial Watch is fighting this tidal wave, as Micah Morrison, our chief investigative reporter, describes in his Investigative Bulletin.
Not long ago, Critical Race Theory was the territory of far-left academics pushing the boundaries of Marxism and nihilistic counterparts such as radical feminism and post-structuralism. All the philosophies to one degree or another advanced the notion that objective truth and standards—in society, in institutions, in law—do not exist. All reality is contingent, all is in flux, all is a construct of language and illusion. One person’s truth is another person’s lies.
Critical Race Theory emerged from this philosophical train wreck in the 1980s to say that Western civilization—and the American experiment in particular—is suffused to its core by white supremacy, white privilege, and institutionalized racism, and must be dismantled. For a long time, CRT was dismissed as an esoteric academic fad. But ideas have consequences and today, in the mysterious alchemy of social upheaval, Critical Race Theory suddenly is everywhere, its poisonous agenda swiftly moving through universities and public schools, government, law, science, business, and the media.
Rooted in the Left doctrine of class struggle, CRT teaches that U.S. society—our culture, laws, beliefs, and modes of governance—are a racist system devoted to upholding the power of white people. CRT is closely linked the new cancel culture. Dissenters from this new orthodoxy are punished. Freedom of speech is dismissed, and open debate is canceled, as we’ll see below in the case of high school coach David Flynn.
The rhetoric of this radicalism is cloaked in the language of social justice, but if you “peel back the layers of ideology and you get to the core of this belief system,” notes writer Christopher Rufo, “they’re advocating for a kind of cultural revolution, steeped in Marxism, adjusted to identity politics, and now activated through Black Lives Matter, through Critical Race Theory, and absurdly through even corporate HR departments.” For more on CRT, see this Heritage Foundation special report.
Judicial Watch is fighting back. Three cases, in particular, illustrate the scope of the Critical Race problem. Tellingly, they all involve schools—a key battleground in this war of ideas.
In suburban Massachusetts, popular football coach David Flynn was abruptly fired from his job at Dedham High School after protesting unannounced changes to his daughter’s middle school curriculum.
Coach Flynn noticed that his seventh-grade daughter’s “World Geography and Ancient History” class was being taught things that had nothing to do with geography or history. The course description described the class as a review of the civilizations of Rome, Europe, Africa, North America, and South America.
Instead, as we note in our lawsuit defending Coach Flynn, the instruction focused on “issues of race, gender, stereotypes, prejudices, discrimination, and politics.” In other words, the Critical Race Theory agenda.
Coach Flynn sent a polite email to school authorities noting that parents had not been informed of the curriculum changes; that some of the issues were not suitable for seventh graders; that the teacher did not seem to be objective and was stating particular political points of view; and that the teacher was using class materials that labeled all police officers as risks to all black people, and all black males as risks to white people.
Coach Flynn asked school authorities for compromises and modest changes to the new curriculum. Their response? You’re fired.
Judicial Watch is suing school authorities in federal court for retaliating against the coach for exercising his First Amendment rights. We’ll be in court Monday, April 26, for a hearing on the case. The public is invited to attend. You can watch a JW video presentation on the case here.
One hour and a world away from Dedham, Harvard College faces a racial reckoning of its own. Bastions of higher education are the incubators of Critical Race Theory, but while accusing Americans of broad racist crimes, they’re often themselves promoting discriminatory policies. It’s no secret, for instance, that many universities have long been discriminating against Asians in admissions practices.
With our colleagues at the Allied Educational Foundation, we filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Students for Fair Admission’s petition for a Supreme Court hearing challenging the decision by a federal appeals court upholding Harvard’s racial preferences admissions program.
Students for Fair Admission argue that Harvard’s admissions program intentionally discriminates against Asian Americans on the basis of race and violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bans unconstitutional race-based admissions by public universities, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
Our brief rejects the notion that discriminating by race in admissions can be justified by “diversity” goals. “College and university administrators might promote greater cross-racial understanding and tolerance in their students, not by racially discriminating against applicants for admission to their schools, but by working to make their schools more tolerant of the expression of different points of view,” we note. “Admissions programs that intentionally discriminate on the basis of race may themselves be negatively affecting the level of racial understanding and tolerance on today’s college campuses.”
In New York City, we are tracking a major lawsuit filed by race-theory radicals seeking “an anti-racist education.” The suit is straight from the Critical Race Theory playbook. It seeks major changes to the New York City public school system, which it claims is “suffused with and perpetuates…various forms of racism in ways blatant and subtle, intended or willfully ignored and tolerated.” Racism in the lawsuit is defined to include “internalized racism,” “interpersonal racism,” “institutional racism,” and “structural racism.” Read the lawsuit here.
A successful lawsuit, The New York Times notes, could compel New York City “to restructure or even eliminate current admissions policies for hundreds of selective schools, including gifted and talented programs and academically selective middle and high schools,” and accelerate pressure for shifting student populations city wide in the name of “diversity” and “integration.”
Parents are fighting back. A new national grassroots organization, Parents Defending Education, has filed a motion to intervene in the New York City case. “PDE’s members, who are parents of children in the system, believe that their children should be judged based on their individual merit, not defined as members of a racial group or blamed for the collective sins of others,” PDE President Nicole Neily told Judicial Watch. “That’s why PDE opposes the call to inject more race-based decision-making into the City’s schools. The best way to achieve equality is to treat children equally, regardless of skin color, and to fix the parts of the City’s schools that are broken.” Read the PDE brief here.
Judicial Watch will be following these cases and other developments in the Critical Race Theory jihad in the months ahead. We’ll keep you posted.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said Thursday morning that he’s no longer sure “what we’re spending the money on,” regarding the long-awaited report and potential prosecutions from Justice Department special counsel John Durham.
“It’s now been two-plus years, and we’ve had virtually zero activity from Durham as best as anyone can see,” Fitton during an appearance on “Just the News AM.”
Durham was appointed in 2019 by then-Attorney General William Barr to oversee a probe into how the federal investigation into alleged Russia-Trump campaign collusion started and to determine whether intelligence gathered about the 2016 presidential campaign was “lawful and appropriate.”
He was later elevated by Barr to the post of special counsel for the Justice Department.
Durham’s efforts follows Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that effectively debunked the narrative of collusion between the campaign and Russian operatives.
Late last month, Trump issued a brief statement inquiring after Durham’s whereabouts.
“Is he a living, breathing human being? Will there ever be a Durham report?” Trump asked in the statement.
Fitton said Thursday he’s not so concerned about just the report.
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that on May 5, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit will hear Judicial Watch’s lawsuit (Bauer, et al. v. Elrich, et al.(No. 20-1707)) challenging the legality of the Montgomery County, Maryland program that provides cash payments to illegal aliens. Judicial Watch argues on behalf of Montgomery County taxpayers Sharon Bauer and Richard Jurgena that the county’s program providing $10 million in cash benefits to illegal aliens violates federal law and irreparably harms county taxpayers.
This hearing arises from the original complaint (Bauer et al. v. Elrich et al. (No. 482061V)) filed on May 8, 2020, in Montgomery County Circuit Court, which Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich and Raymond Crowel, director of the county’s Department of Health and Human Services, subsequently removed to federal court. The lawsuit seeks to permanently enjoin Elrich and Crowel from expending taxpayer money on the cash-benefits program known as the “Emergency Assistance Relief Payment Program” (EARP).
Under federal law, certain categories of aliens, including illegal aliens, are ineligible for state or local public benefits. Such benefits include direct, cash payments. If a state chooses to provide such benefits to illegal aliens, it must enact a state law affirmatively providing for such eligibility.
On May 29, 2020, the District Court ruled the program likely violates federal law and irreparably harms county taxpayers. The court ordered the county to hold back 25% of any unspent funds until the court could fully consider the merits of Judicial Watch’s taxpayer lawsuit. Later, the District Court dismissed the case, concluding it did not have jurisdiction to hear the case.
The Department of Justice filed an amicus brief in the appeal brought by Judicial Watch in which the agency agrees the policy is illegal but suggests state taxpayers have no right to sue state officials to stop them from using taxpayer funds to violate federal law.
Judicial Watch explains in its appeal: “The issues before this Court concern what cases federal courts may hear, whether state causes of action may rely on violations of federal law, and whether county officials acted illegally.” Also, pointing to 8 U.S. Code § 1621:
In short, Section 1621 prohibits unlawfully present aliens from receiving state and local public benefits unless the state legislature affirmatively authorizes it.
Even though the Maryland legislature had not affirmatively authorized it, Montgomery County, Maryland, nonetheless, started providing cash payments to unlawfully present aliens. As part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Montgomery County Council appropriated $10 million for an Emergency Assistance Relief Payment (“EARP”) program…. EARP provides cash payments to individuals or families, including unlawfully present aliens … who (1) live in Montgomery County, (2) are not eligible for federal COVID-19 stimulus checks or state benefits, (3) are not eligible to receive unemployment benefits, and (4) have an income equal to or below 50% of the federal poverty level…. The County Department of Health and Human Services (“DHHS”), which administers the program, distributes payments of $500 to eligible single adults, $1,000 to eligible families with a child, and an additional $150 to families for each additional child, up to $1,450 total….
Seeing their taxes being spent in violation of federal law, Sharon Bauer and Richard Jurgena (“Taxpayers”), Montgomery County taxpayers, sought to enjoin County Executive Marc Elrich and DHHS Director Raymond Crowel (collectively “Montgomery County”) from implementing EARP.
“Politicians in Maryland are using COVID as an excuse to violate the law. If they want to give cash payments to illegal aliens, they must be accountable and transparent, and, as federal law requires, pass a state law to do so,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
The chorus of voices this spring announcing the death of hard seltzer seems smaller, yet more strident, a sure sign of the continued power of the fizzy drinks.
Some folks desperately want hard seltzer to go away and for it to be just a fad. But I’m here to tell you hard seltzer isn’t going anywhere and it’s set to shift into a higher gear.
Hard seltzer dollar sales in retail stores increased by 160.4 percent from 2019 to 2020, according to Bump Williams Consulting, the go-to source for beer category numbers.
You might be tempted to attribute that increase to the fact that the Coronavirus pandemic closed bars and restaurants across the country. But 2020, saw overall hard seltzer sales top $4 billion, up from $2.6 billion the year before, and capture nearly ten percent of the overall beer category. Those are massive numbers for a product that first launched less than a decade ago.
Hard seltzer has fully penetrated national distribution channels and almost every major brewer has at least one brand. The craft folks have also gotten on board with these drinks, too. Truly, the second-largest seller in the U.S. hard seltzer market, is the product of Boston Beer, which is the parent company of Sam Adams. Hardly a week goes by without another craft brewer—large or small, new or old—announcing that it is launching a hard seltzer, too.
Recently, it was Stone Brewing, and it’s making an interesting case for entering this business. “We’re paying close attention to data, and the hard seltzer category just can’t be ignored,” the brewery’s new CEO Maria Stipp told me. “At the current rate, seltzer will pass craft in terms of category size. So, that’s meaningful to us. Beers are still our priority, we’re not walking away from that, but craft fans are drinking hard seltzers from their favorite breweries now.”
Stone IPA drinkers may be confused, even angry, about all this, but its seltzers have been selling strongly in its own taprooms. The launch also shows that Stone has its ears open to the sound of the market. The name of these drinks—Buenavida—and the look reflect a deep understanding of hard seltzer’s attraction: clean, healthy-looking, low calorie and fun.
The look? Stone chose to put Buenavida in a clear, embossed bottle, instead of the almost universal 12- ounce slim can. “Our decision to launch in glass bottles is intentional,” said Stipp. “Glass gives us the opportunity to show off that clean, clear liquid and it feels premium and special.”
Premium feeling is something hard seltzer has been missing, and it’s going to need it to continue to grow. We’ve come to expect a luxury option to almost anything in 2021, from cars to paint to toothpicks, and the major brands have been so busy just trying to keep up with basic demand that there’s been no time and little chance to build one.
But there is a new player in the canned drinks category that has a lot of experience with producing premium products now entering the fray: spirits companies.
What took them so long? The short answer: tax codes.
While no one could blame you for thinking that hard seltzer was essentially a canned Vodka Soda, it’s actually more like beer. You see, because of tax rates it’s much cheaper to brew alcohol from sugar and then carbonate it than to use a distilled spirit and mix it with club soda.
Blame the temperance types who were scared of demon rum. The U.S. federal excise tax (FET) is different depending how the alcohol in a drink is made, and it’s a lot more on spirits than it is on wine or beer. Keeping it as simple as possible (which isn’t easy), a gallon of wine at 16 percent alcohol by volume (ABV) or lower is taxed $1.07. The tax on a gallon of sparkling wine, oddly, is $3.40. A gallon of beer, no matter what ABV is just taxed at 58 cents. Cider, which always received special treatment because of its rural, “real America” image, is taxed at 22.6 cents a gallon. But a gallon of spirits at 100-proof (50 percent ABV) is taxed $13.50. The additional state taxes are similarly slanted.
A number of craft distilleries and some new beverage brands have started to make canned cocktails that actually use hard spirits. They, of course, pass along the tax costs to the consumer. But the big liquor brands have taken notice of the rapid growth and the money being made on hard seltzer and they want in. Give consumers seltzers with real spirits in them, from brands they already know and love, like Bacardi Rum, Tanqueray Gin or Ketel One Vodka, and they’ll likely switch over from hard seltzer and even pay more for them.
That idea is enough to get the beer companies scared, Jim Koch founder of Boston Beer and owner of Truly, recently wrote a missive to his colleagues in the industry urging them not to get complacent and see the threat that is emerging.
What’s even more terrifying for Koch and his compatriots is that the spirits brands are trying to change the tax code, so that these spirits-based drinks would be treated more like hard seltzer in the eyes of the federal government.
David Ozgo, the chief economist at the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, notes that thanks to these ready-to-drink beverages (RTDs) the once-clear lines between beer, wine, and spirits are getting blurred. Consumers don’t really care what kind of alcohol they’re drinking, it’s about how it tastes, how much it costs and where they can get it. “Currently,” he said, “spirits consumers are forced to pay much higher taxes for a spirits-based RTD product even if it has the same alcohol content as malt and wine-based RTDs, which are permitted to be sold at more than three times as many retail outlets. That’s completely unjustified and unfair to the consumer.”
This fight isn’t just taking place on the federal level but also on the local level. Some states are looking at treating beer-strength RTDs (of any alcohol type) like beer or wine for purposes of taxation and for where they’re allowed to be sold. In my home state of Pennsylvania, for instance, a move is being considered to allow spirits-based RTDs to be sold outside of the state stores that currently have a monopoly on their sales.
Don’t underestimate the value of expanding access to these canned cocktails and hard seltzers made with actual vodka. Dave Williams, vice president of analytics and insights for Bump Williams Consulting, believes it’s necessary for the success of spirit-based RTDs. “Until they can become as widely available as hard seltzers from a class of trade perspective, then I doubt we will see them reach the same heights,” he told me. “But that does not mean that this is not a fertile area for growth, because we have seen a number of brands do very well in this space, including the recently launched Crown Royal lineup.”
Much as I dislike the use of the phrase “market disruptors,” hard seltzer fits the bill. Now spirit-based RTDs are looking like market disruptors for hard seltzer. It should satisfy the continuing desire for new products, for a while anyway.
So, where does that leave us? Keep in mind that a substantial number of people only drink the latest thing because...it’s the latest thing. They don’t really love what they’re drinking, but they love drinking what everyone else is drinking. Hard seltzer frees them from that in the same way a Vodka Soda does. Or as a friend of mine put it when he found hard seltzers, “I’m just glad I don’t have to drink IPAs anymore.” That goes along with my own thought that the popularity of Michelob Ultra indicates that a lot of people want to drink beer...without having to taste it.
That lack of flavor isn’t necessarily all negative, either. You can add a range of ingredients to hard seltzer, from fruit, juice and bitters to even wine for a fizzy sangria. Hard seltzers can be your drink, or the canvas upon which you paint your drink. They’re versatile, and fun, and don’t require or reward connoisseurship at all. Anyone who tries to be a hard seltzer snob will richly deserve the derision they receive.
The abuse was a secret Tanisha Johnson says she kept for years. First, she says, she felt too unstable to report it: debilitated from the daily migraines for which she had gone to the doctor in the first place; addicted to the opioids she claims he purposefully overprescribed for her. Later, she worried she wouldn’t be believed. Who would take the word of a queer Black woman living in public housing over the word of a prominent neurologist? Who would believe that a department chairman would grope her, expose himself, even force her to perform oral sex on him—all from his offices in major East Coast hospitals?
Even as more women came forward with strikingly similar stories, Johnson says she held back for one more reason: her teenage son. She feared that speaking out would devastate him and fracture their close relationship. When she finally worked up the nerve—when he, in fact, encouraged her to go to the authorities—it was too late. The statute of limitations in her case had expired.
Now Johnson is advocating for the passage of the Adult Survivors Act—a bill in New York State that would give sexual assault survivors in New York state a one-year “lookback window” to file a lawsuit against their abuser, no matter how long ago the abuse occurred.
“You cannot put a time limit as to how long it takes someone to process it and report it,” she says in a new PSA promoting the act. “Who puts a statute of limitations on my pain?”
The Adult Survivors Act was introduced in early 2020 to great fanfare. A similar bill, providing a lookback window to survivors of childhood abuse, had finally passed the legislature the year before, and notable New York sex abuse cases—Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Robert Hadden—were making national headlines. But when COVID-19 hit, it was largely buried under the pandemic panic.
Now, a star-studded lineup of activists is launching a campaign to reignite support for the measure, in hopes of getting it passed before the session ends in June. A new public-service ad, produced by the victims services nonprofit Safe Horizons, features Johnson, Weinstein survivor Ambra Gutierrez, and Evelyn Yang—the wife of New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang—who is one of dozens of women who say they were abused by gynecologist Robert Hadden.
“We've seen how unfair it has been to survivors who have had their opportunity for justice cut short by a legal framework that seems to have benefitted abusers,” state Sen. Brad Hoylman (D), who introduced the bill in the Senate, told The Daily Beast. “There's a reckoning among legislators that, like with children, adult survivors should be able to pursue justice.”
Dozens of states have reformed their criminal statute of limitations in recent years, as prominent cases like Bill Cosby’s and Weinstein’s raised awareness that victims often take decades to come forward. Seven states have removed the criminal statutes of limitations on felony sex crimes entirely, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. But the U.S. Supreme Court has held that states cannot apply these changes retroactively—meaning that for survivors whose abuse occurred before the statute was extended, their only shot at justice is through the civil courts.
This particular solution—a one-year window in which victims can file cases outside the previous statute of limitations—has received growing acceptance in the case of childhood victims. Eight states, including New York, have adopted a lookback window for victims who were under the age of 18 when their abuse occurred. In New York alone, more than 5,000 cases have been filed since the Child Victims Act passed in 2019, many of them focusing on institutions that have shielded abusers.
But advocates say the trauma and structural barriers to reporting don’t disappear when someone turns 18. Victims of adult sexual abuse can still take years to come forward, according to Safe Horizons CEO Liz Roberts, because of the stigma around sexual assault and fear of retaliation, as well as the way traumatic memories are stored in the brain—squirreled away in bits and pieces until the survivor is ready to process them.
“The very act of facing the memory is a courageous act that requires support and requires you to be in a stable enough position that you can tolerate the feelings that come up,” Roberts said. “We frequently work with survivors who suffered a terrible trauma many years ago, who are just now at a point their life when they’re ready to face what happened to them.”
So far, the only state to allow a lookback window for adult survivors is New Jersey, which opened a two-year window for both child and adult survivors to file cases in December 2019. Marci Hamilton, the CEO of CHILD USA and a major advocate for the law, said the response to its passage has been “seamless,” if not overwhelming: Many adult survivors and attorneys were simply unaware that the law included them or their potential clients.
“[Adult] survivors have not been the ones that have sought a lot of attention in the press or otherwise, but the fact that it opened—I heard from a lot of both survivors and attorneys that this was a ray of hope for some that really felt left behind,” she said, noting that she expected a flurry of filings before the window closes in November.
Johnson is one such victim. Despite her failed attempt to file a criminal complaint, her doctor, Ricardo Cruciani, was eventually charged with sex crimes against patients across three different states. (The doctor previously pleaded guilty to groping seven patients in Philadelphia; his charges in New York and New Jersey are still pending.) Because Johnson claims some of the abuse occurred in Cruciani’s New Jersey offices, she is able to file suit against him there, which she plans to do before the end of the year.
The 46-year-old has also filed suit against Cruciani in New York, but his attorneys have pushed back, citing the statute of limitations. That case is currently on hold while the criminal charges progress, and she hopes the new bill will pass before it resumes.
“You can’t tell someone when it’s time for them to speak about something horrific that happened to them,” she told The Daily Beast. “To tell someone they are required to report a crime against them in a specific amount of time isn't fair to the victim, it only protects the assailant.”
The legislation is currently before the Judiciary Committee, where it must pass a vote before heading to the Senate and Assembly floors. Hoylman and the bill’s other supporters are hoping to hold a vote before the session ends in June.
The timing for the vote is somewhat awkward, given recent allegations of sexual harassment—and in one case, of sexual assault—against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. (The governor has denied sexually assaulting or harassing anyone.) But Hoylman said he thinks the current news cycle could work in their favor.
“Any attention on this issue that has been buried for decades and the conversation about sexual offenses is important,” Hoylman said. “Public debates in the media and elsewhere are really key to shine a light.”
He added: “People, generally speaking, don't want to talk about it, and the fact that survivors themselves are coming forward really forces the conversation.”
This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
Bennifer Is Back?!
On Saturday, you can watch Jennifer Lopez in a makeshift enchanted forest wearing a shimmering bodysuit with dramatic bell sleeves that eclipse her own height as she leads a stadium in Los Angeles through a singalong of Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” in the name of equitable distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Is this a chaotic game of doomsday Mad Libs? Or is it a beautifully bedazzled manifestation of hope and the future, a J. Lo-led future in which hands, once again, can be touching hands? Reaching out. Touching me. And, yes, also touching you.
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Lopez is one of the celebrities who appeared at Vax Live: The Concert to Reunite the World, the Global Citizen-produced event that calls on world leaders to unite to help make global access to the vaccine available. Beyond its noble message, there’s a surreal optimism to the concert: artists performing live to crowds again. The rest of us can watch it on Saturday as it simultaneously broadcasts on ABC, CBS, Fox, and YouTube.
You know who else appears at Vax Live? Ben Affleck. Wee-oo! Wee-oo! Call Us Weekly and sound the couple alert alarm!
The entertainment industry loves nothing more than a decades-old reboot that nobody asked for. So maybe none of us should have been taken by surprise when they who were once Bennifer were spotted “hanging out” a reported “multiple times” this week. This is just weeks after Lopez and Alex Rodriguez ended their engagement and several months after Affleck’s split from Ana de Armas.
I do not believe that the couple, who were engaged in 2002 and had the misfortune of being the most famous celebrity relationship at a craven turning point for the tabloid industry, are rekindling any sort of romance. (Though if they are? Hot.) They have long been friends. Friends hang out. Whatever.
The timing of it all, though, so soon after the breakup news and knowing exactly how the media and all our hearts were going to run with it? The devil works hard, and the J. Lo publicity team all have masters degrees from the Lucifer B. Devil School of Promotion.
And it’s not just her. No one stunts the media better than Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck.
Neither Lopez nor Affleck have released new projects during the pandemic. No new album. No new movies. (As self-care, we have erased Zack Snyder’s Justice League from our permanent memory.) Yet no two celebrities have kept us more entertained.
That Lopez ranks as one of the industry’s most electric live entertainers has made her especially suited to dazzle and distract us during a tough year, performing at scattered telethons, award shows, and events. But it’s not just been the usual jaw-dropping dancing. It’s been some atypically weird shit, too. Things like covering Neil Diamond on a set from FernGully.
At an earlier Global Citizen telethon, she covered Barbra Streisand’s “People,” a swerve if I’ve ever heard one from an entertainer not traditionally known for being a vocalist. On New Year’s Eve, she covered Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” and yes, she went for that note. Hell, she remixed “This Land Is Your Land” with her own songat the inauguration of Joe Biden, managing the rare combination of being both historic and iconic while also in questionable taste.
Off-stage, there was the Alex Rodriguez soap opera. She narrowly escaped the teeth of an alleged sex cannibal (phew!) in a last-minute casting switch in the lead-up to her new film. Instagram gossip account Deuxmoi, both the bane of my existence and my most unshakable addiction, seemed to pendulum-swing between anonymous reports of her diva behavior and her legendary professionalism on a daily basis.
Capping it all off by stoking some Bennifer nostalgia and hysteria? We do not deserve.
Then there’s Affleck. No man has been more relatable, let alone more popular, while doing absolutely nothing.
How damn long was that stretch of the pandemic when every day brought new photos of Affleck picking up his Dunkin Donuts order, to which the world would give a daily standing ovation? Ben Affleck! He’s just like us. He’s gotta have his Dunkin and looks like absolute shit while getting it, like he’s just had enough of the world, dammit.
Has there ever been a more boring couple that we inexplicably became obsessed with than Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas? They, like the rest of us, would go on their daily constitutional during lockdown, strolling hand-in-hand. The paparazzi would snap a photo. And we liiiiived for it!
Then there was the saga of the life-sized Ana de Armas cardboard cutout thrown out in Affleck’s trash after they broke up. The number of questions it begged—Did Affleck really have a cardboard cutout of his girlfriend in his home?—didn’t matter. It was the lunatic energy we needed in month 475 of pandemic boredom.
And while the rest of the world got excited about the potential of a Bennifer reunion, for me the real news this past week was the TikTok posted by a girl who claimed that she matched with Affleck on the exclusive dating app Raya, but didn’t believe it was really him. When she unmatched him, he allegedly sent her a video on Instagram asking why he unmatched her.
I can’t verify if this is a real video or a deepfake of Affleck generated to go viral. All I know is it was supreme Divorced Dad energy and the best thing Affleck has contributed to the culture since Good Will Hunting.
Are Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck getting back together? Who knows. But they do deserve happiness, especially after this last year, in which they have given just so much to us.
Troublemakers. We need them in our personal lives, as well as in our politics. Not during normal times, when nice, normal people employing nice, normal solutions are sufficient and usually preferred. But during tumultuous times, when it takes a stubborn pain in the ass to punch a bully in the nose. Liz Cheney is the exact kind of troublemaker that the Republican Party desperately needs, but is too decadent to support.
During times like these, we need someone who is so full of piss and vinegar that she, in this case, will relish the fight more than peaceful coexistence and comfort. We have finally found someone who is willing to be unreasonable and suffer the consequences. That someone is Liz Cheney. It is now assumed that Cheney will be replaced as No. 3 in House leadership by Rep. Elise Stefanik, who’s much less conservative but also much more of a MAGA loyalist. Not only that, but Cheney looks vulnerable to a primary challenge back home in Wyoming, according to a recent survey conducted by now-Trumpy The Club for Growth.
I hope I’m alive to see the GOP someday turn and support a strong leader who wasn’t tainted by the Trump years. Cheney would be in a class by herself. By doing good, she could do well (in the long run). But make no mistake, she is making a huge sacrifice. She has a lot to lose.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday that there is a "real chance" some Democrats and the White House could work with Republicans to pass a "bipartisan" infrastructure bill, a shift from other comments he made this week that Republicans are "100%" focused on stopping President Biden.
McConnell made the comments in Hopkinsville, Ky., and they were streamed live by FOX 17 Nashville. McConnell was asked about the state of play on infrastructure legislation and the $4 trillion-plus in spending the Biden administration is pushing for through its American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan.
"There's a group of 10 of my members… who put together a $600 billion proposal. Roads, bridges, ports, water lines, broadband," McConnell said. "There are 10 or so Democrats who look at it the same way. So this is a proposal that could pass on a bipartisan basis."
He added: "I think the administration will probably think of this as plan B. In other words if they can't pass their $4.1 trillion bill, which they'll have to do Democrats-only, if they're not able to get everybody behind the massive proposal, then I think we've got a real chance to do something important for the country on a bipartisan basis."
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., speaks during a news conference at Kroger Field in Lexington, Ky., Monday, April 5, 2021. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)
(AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)
Those comments follow a response earlier this week that the minority leader gave to a question about drama unfolding in the House surrounding Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo.
Cheney, the House GOP conference chair, has come under increasingly heavy fire for her regular barbs against former President Donald Trump and his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Now, most Republicans believe that she will be removed from her role as the third-ranking Republican in the House next week.
McConnell backed Cheney when she survived an earlier attempt to remove her from her position in February. But he sidestepped a question about her status on Tuesday, saying instead that Senate Republicans are "100%" focused on "stopping this new administration."
"What we have in the United States Senate is total unity from Susan Collins to Ted Cruz in opposition to what the new Biden administration is doing to this country," McConnell also said, sidestepping another question on the percentage of Republicans who believe the falsehood that the presidential election was not legitimate.
Despite the fact that McConnell made those statements in the context of dodging uncomfortable questions about internal GOP dynamics, Democrats nevertheless hammered the minority leader, suggesting he is acting in bad faith.
"I guess the contrast for people to consider is 100% of our focus is on delivering relief to the American people," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.
"Mitch McConnell just admitted that 100 percent of his focus is on obstruction. And with the filibuster, he can exercise a veto over the will of the majority," Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., tweeted. "We can't keep letting one person who's hell-bent on standing in the way of progress also stand in the way of democracy."
"Looks like McConnell’s team updated his talking points from '100% focused on stopping this administration,'" Democratic National Committee rapid response director Ammar Moussa said Thursday, in light of the new comments.
McConnell, despite apparently softening his stance on Republicans' opposition to Biden, did blame Democrats for the current acrimony in Congress Thursday, citing their efforts to pass massive spending bills with little effort to consult Republicans.
"Regretfully the bipartisanship is not on display this year," McConnell said, referencing the several bipartisan coronavirus relief bills passed in 2020. "And the principal reason for that is I think what the new administration and the Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate are doing are wildly out of proportion to what we need at this particular juncture."
"Now [Biden] wants to spend $4 trillion more on top of what we've already done, which he suggests is related to infrastructure," McConnell continued, before saying that there's only a little more than $600 billion that could "usefully" be spent by Congress on infrastructure.
Indeed, a Fox News analysis found that the president's proposal spends well under half of its money on things that fall under the definition of infrastructure.
"This is not something that I or do I think any of my Republican colleagues are prepared to support," McConnell said of the president's plan.
McConnell continued to say that he hopes eventually the Biden administration will move in a more moderate direction and that his "focus" is on steering it in that direction – not on stopping it.
"I'm not the majority leader, I'm barely not the majority leader – we've got a 50-50 Senate," McConnell said. "And I'm still hoping the administration will pivot to a more centrist position and that's where I'm spending my time and focus."
Fox News' Kelly Phares contributed to this report.
The Rangers denounced the NHL’s department of player safety, and they will pay for it — in probably more ways than one.
After issuing a brash statement earlier this week, expressing their extreme disappointment in the league’s decision to only fine repeat offender Tom Wilson $5,000 for his antics in Monday’s game and calling head of player safety George Parros “unfit to continue in his current role,” commissioner Gary Bettman levied a $250,000 fine on the Blueshirts on Thursday.
“Public comments of the nature issued by the Rangers that were personal in nature and demeaning of a League executive will not be tolerated,” Bettman said in a statement. “While we don’t expect our Clubs to agree with every decision rendered by the Department of Player Safety, the extent to which the Rangers expressed their disagreement was unacceptable.“It is terribly unfair to question George Parros’ professionalism and dedication to his role and the Department of Player Safety.”
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman fined the Rangers for complaining about an earlier fine imposed on Washington Capitals’ Tom Wilson’s for roughing Rangers’ Artemi Panarin on May 3.NHLI via Getty Images; AP
Word is the statement, which was made after Wilson beat on Rangers forward Pavel Buchnevich and ended star winger Artemi Panarin’s season prematurely, was driven by CEO Jim Dolan.
“I feel a little poorer today,” Dolan told The Post’s Larry Brooks. “But no, we said what we felt we needed to say and the league did what they felt they needed to do, so it’s fine. Hopefully we’ll both move on. I don’t think it’s worth enflaming anymore.”
The department of safety, however, wasn’t done with the Rangers. Buchnevich was suspended one game after having a hearing Thursday for cross-checking the Capitals’ Anthony Mantha in the face during Wednesday’s black-and-blue rematch with Washington. The confrontation came after Mantha was repeatedly slapping Buchnevich’s legs with his stick.
Rangers head coach David Quinn wouldn’t talk about Buchnevich’s suspension.
“It is what it is, our lineup is what it is,” Quinn said prior to Thursday’s matchup in Boston.
While President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris push their climate agenda, their effort to drum up support for electric vehicles has raised ethical questions vis-à-vis Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who holds millions of dollars in vested stock options in Proterra, the leading U.S. manufacturer of electric buses and the manufacturer of a myriad of products related to electric vehicles.
On April 20, Biden took a virtual tour of Proterra, where Granholm had served on the board. He told Proterra’s CEO, Jack Allen, “Chairman, let me say something quickly to you. The fact is you’re making me look good. I used to have a friend that said it’s always great to do well and do good — you’re doing both pal. You really are.”
“Despite the hundreds of electric vehicle-related companies in the United States, Harris also toured a partner of Proterra, and the Proterra’s CEO Jack Allen later took part in a session at the administration’s U.S. Climate summit,” CNN reported.
Jonathan Macey, a professor of corporate law, securities law and finance at the Yale Law School, said of the value of Biden’s visit, “That’s like money in the bank.” Proterra is scheduled to go public in the near future.
Granholm claimed she “had nothing to do with” Biden’s tour while pledging to divest her stock options, reiterating her promise from February, when she was confirmed as Energy Secretary.
In late April, Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, sent a letter to the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in which he wrote:
In connection with her nomination hearing, I asked Secretary Granholm the following question for the record: “With respect to your affiliation with and financial interest in Proterra Inc., please confirm in narrative form the practical limitations that the Committee can expect your ethics agreement to impose upon you, especially as those limitations may bear on DOE’s programs that promote or otherwise impact or potentially impact electric transportation, including, for example, the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) Program. … Should I infer, that you will recuse yourself as appropriate from matters involving electric transportation at least until such time as you divest your interests in Proterra?”
Granholm had answered, “If confirmed, I will recuse myself from all particular matters that to my knowledge have a direct and predictable effect on the financial interests of Proterra until I have completed the divestiture.”
Barasso continued:
I am concerned that activities Secretary Granholm may have been directly or indirectly engaged in within the Biden Administration to promote electric vehicles (including electric buses), batteries, and charging infrastructure may have violated general commitments she made during her nomination process and as she entered the Biden Administration “to avoid any actual or apparent conflict of interest;” to “avoid any actions creating the appearance of violating the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch;” and to conduct “decision-making on the merits and exclusively in the public interest, without regard to private gain or personal benefit.”
“Given that status, the up to $5 million in value of investment that Secretary Granholm continues to hold in Proterra, Inc. is positioned to increase in light of her personal and substantial involvement in an aggressive, wide-ranging and tireless public relations campaign to promote electric vehicles, batteries and charging infrastructure; her leadership in promoting President Biden’s American Jobs Plan, including its proposal to spend $174 billion ‘to win the EV market,'” Barrasso wrote.
“Secretary Granholm has acted in full accordance with the comprehensive ethical standards set by the Biden administration,” an Energy Department spokesperson responded to CNN. “She is in the process of divesting all holdings in the company within the 180-day period permitted by her ethics agreement.”
CNN noted, “Granholm soon stands to see a substantial payday as Proterra is scheduled to go public in the first half of 2021, according to a company statement. In her ethics agreement, the former governor pledged to divest her Proterra stock options “as practicable but not later than 180 days after” her February confirmation — a timeline that falls within the 180 days.”
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For decades, cosmologists have wondered if the large-scale structure of the universe is a fractal — that is, if it looks the same no matter how large the scale. After completing massive surveys of galaxies, scientists finally have an answer: No, but kind of, in a way.
In the early 20th century, astronomers — beginning with Edwin Hubble and his discovery of the enormous distance to Andromeda, the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way — started to realize that the universe is almost unimaginably vast. They also learned that we can see galaxies scattered about, both near and far. And so, naturally, a question arose: Is there any sort of pattern to the arrangement of those galaxies, or is it totally random?
At first, it looked random. Astronomers saw giant galaxy clusters, each containing a thousand or more galaxies. And there were also much smaller groups of galaxies, and galaxies hanging out by themselves. Taken together, the observations made it appear as if there were no overarching pattern to the cosmos.
And astronomers were fine with that. They had long assumed an idea called the cosmological principle — that is, that the universe is mostly homogeneous (roughly the same from place to place) and isotropic (roughly the same no matter which direction you look). A bunch of random galaxies and clusters fit right into that principle.
But in the late 1970s, galaxy surveys became sophisticated enough to reveal the beginnings of a pattern in the arrangement of galaxies. Besides the clusters, there were also long, thin filaments of galaxies. There were broad walls. And then there were the voids — vast expanses of nothing. Astronomers called it the cosmic web. This pattern would violate the cosmological principle, because it would mean that large regions of the universe did not look like other large regions of the universe.
So perhaps there was more to the story.
A universe within a universe
One proposal came from mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals. Fractals are frustratingly hard to define, but they can be simple enough to intuit: They are patterns that repeat no matter how far in or out you zoom. Mandelbrot didn't invent the concept of fractals — mathematicians had been studying self-similar patterns for ages — but he coined the word "fractal" and ushered in our modern study of the concept.
Fractals are everywhere. If you zoom in on the point of a snowflake, you see miniature snowflakes. If you zoom in on the branches of a tree, you see miniature branches. If you zoom in on a coastline, you see miniature coastlines. Fractals surround us in nature, and the mathematics of fractals have enabled us to understand a vast variety of self-similar structures in the universe.
If fractals are everywhere, Mandelbrot guessed, then perhaps the entire universe is a fractal. Maybe what we saw as the pattern in the arrangement of galaxies was the beginning steps of the greatest fractal possible. Maybe if we built sophisticated enough surveys, we would find nesting structures — cosmic webs inside cosmic webs, filling up the entire universe to infinity.
As astronomers discovered more about the cosmic web, they learned more about the history of the Big Bang, and they came up with ways to explain the existence of the large-scale patterns in the universe. Those theories predicted that the universe was still homogeneous, just on much, much larger scales than astronomers had observed previously.
The ultimate test of a fractal universe wouldn't come until this century, when truly gargantuan surveys, like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, have been able to map the locations of millions of galaxies, painting a portrait of the cosmic web on scales never observed before.
If the fractal universe idea is true, then we should see our local cosmic web embedded inside a much larger cosmic web. If it's wrong, then at some point, the cosmic web should stop being a cosmic web, and a random, large-enough chunk of the universe should look (statistically) like any other random chunk.
The result is homogeneity, but on a mind-blowing scale. You have to go up to around 300 million light-years before the universe appears homogeneous.
The universe is definitely not a fractal, but parts of the cosmic web still have interesting fractal-like properties. For example, clumps of dark matter called "halos," which host galaxies and their clusters, form nested structures and substructures, with halos holding sub-haloes and sub-sub-halos inside those.
Conversely, the voids of our universe aren't entirely empty. They do contain a few faint dwarf galaxies, and those few galaxies are arranged in a subtle, faint version of the cosmic web. In computer simulations, the sub-voids within that structure contain their own effervescent cosmic webs, too.
So, while the universe as a whole isn't a fractal — and Mandelbrot's idea didn't hold up — we can still find fractals almost everywhere we look.
HELSINKI — A large rocket stage that launched China’s first space station last week is likely to reenter the atmosphere around May 8, according to early space tracking predictions.
U.S. Department of Defense spokesman Mike Howard in a statement May 4 said that “U.S. Space Command is aware of and tracking the location of the Chinese Long March 5B in space, but its exact entry point into the Earth’s atmosphere cannot be pinpointed until within hours of its reentry, which is expected around May 8.”
“Until then, the 18th Space Control Squadron will be offering daily updates to the rocket body’s location on www.space-track.org beginning May 4. We will provide additional information as it becomes available,” the statement read.
The launch of the Long March 5B late April 28 Eastern successfully placed the 22.5-metric-ton Tianhe core module into orbit. However, the roughly 30-meter-tall, 5-meter-diameter Long March 5B first stage also reached orbital velocity instead of falling within a predetermined area downrange.
The empty rocket body is now in a 162 by 306-kilometer altitude orbit, according to U.S. 18th Space Control Squadron space tracking, down from an initial 170 by 372-kilometer orbit.
Without the ability to restart its engines, the core stage will be dragged towards Earth by increasing collisions with molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere. Atmospheric fluctuations and other variables and the high velocity of the stage mean that accurate predictions of when and where the stage will reenter are not possible until a few hours before the event.
The Long March 5B core stage’s orbital inclination of 41.5 degrees means the rocket body passes a little farther north than New York, Madrid, and Beijing, and as far south as southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand, and could make its reentry at any point within this area.
This morning's data on the altitude-versus-time of the Tianhe / CZ-5B objects. The core stage orbit continues to slowly decay as expected. pic.twitter.com/E8EPJ9yzRu
A May 4 update from the Aerospace Corporation predicts reentry will occur May 9 at 12:37 a.m. Eastern (04:37 Universal time), with a margin of error of plus or minus 28 hours.
Russian space agency Roscosmos also stated May 4 that its Automated Warning System on Hazardous Situations in Outer Space (ASPOS OKP) indicated that the Long March 5B was set for an uncontrolled reentry.
Calculations by Russian experts indicate a reentry window of 9:00 p.m. May 7 to 4:00 p.m. May 9 Eastern, with more refined predictions to follow in the coming days.
China has yet to comment on the status of the Long March 5B. The country is planning 10 more launches through 2022 of various spacecraft and launch vehicles to construct its three-module space station.
China is currently preparing to send the Tianzhou-2 cargo spacecraft to Tianhe in the next few weeks using a Long March 7 rocket. A first crewed mission, Shenzhou-12, is expected to send three astronauts to the new orbital outpost in June.
Notably, two more launches of the Long March 5B are expected in 2022 to send the Wentian and Mengtian experiment modules to join Tianhe in orbit.
It is unknown if the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), which designed and manufactures the Long March 5B, has planned alterations to the rocket or launch profile which would allow the core stage to either deorbit or fall to Earth on a ballistic trajectory.
The Long March 5B was designed specifically for launching modules for the Chinese space station into low Earth orbit. A test flight in 2020 also saw the core stage reach orbital velocity. That incident saw the stage reenter over the Atlantic Ocean with local reports suggesting debris from that 20-ton stage appears to have survived reentry and landed in the African nation of Côte d’Ivoire.
Components of the Long March 5B (Y2) to launch the Chinese space station core module at a facility in Tianjin. Credit: CMSA
Holger Krag, head of the Space Safety Programme Office for the European Space Agency, told SpaceNews that an average mass of about 100 tons reenters the atmosphere in an uncontrolled way each year.
“It is always difficult to assess the amount of surviving mass and number of fragments without knowing the design of the object, but a reasonable ‘rule-of-thumb’ is about 20-40% of the original dry mass,” Krag said.
Unlike older Long March series rockets, the Long March 5B core stage uses liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for fuel. Older-generation Long March 2, 3 and 4 series rockets use a toxic hypergolic propellant combination of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, which would make debris surviving reentry potentially hazardous to anyone approaching the wreckage.
Debris from Chinese rocket launches from inland spaceports occasionally falls within inhabited areas. China is understood to take precautions against causing injury through safety notices, evacuations and calculation of rocket stage drop zones, as well as experimenting with technologies including grid fins and parafoils.
While much attention is paid to the threat to people on the ground and aircraft in flight from satellite and rocket components reentering, the Aerospace Corporation last year raised the issue of pollution from reentry.
Only 9% of adult social media users say they often post or share things about political or social issues on social media, according to newly released results from a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted Sept. 8-13, 2020. Some 70% of social media users say they never (40%) or rarely (30%) do so.
When asked about five potential reasons for why they do not post about these topics, the top two reasons users cite are concerns that the things they post or share will be used against them and not wanting to be attacked for their views. About a third of those who never or rarely post or share about these issues say that each statement is a major reason.
Roughly a fifth of those who never or rarely post about these issues say that among major reasons for this are not having anything to add to the conversation, not paying close attention to political or social issues, or not wanting to offend others.
Pew Research Center has long studied the intersection of social media and politics. To explore how frequently Americans post or share about political or social issues on social media and what the reasons for not doing so might be, we surveyed 10,093 U.S. adults from Sept. 8-13, 2020. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.
Answers to these questions – asked of Americans last fall as the 2020 presidential election approached – vary by political party and ideology. Among social media users, Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party say they post about political or social issues less frequently – 74% say they never or rarely do so – compared with a smaller share (66%) of Democrats and Democratic leaners who say the same. Some 44% of Republican social media users and 36% of Democratic social media users say they never do this.
The newly released results also reflect a pattern seen in other Center explorations of political posts on social media and other political activities such as voting and activism. Those toward the center of the ideological spectrum (that is, self-described conservative or moderate Democrats, and liberal or moderate Republicans) are more likely to be reluctant about engaging on social media than those at the edges of the spectrum (liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans).
Among social media users, Republicans who identify as moderate or liberal are 15 percentage points more likely than conservative Republicans to say they never or rarely post or share about political or social issues (83% vs. 68%). Similarly, roughly eight-in-ten conservative or moderate Democrats who use social media (77%) say they never or rarely post this type of content, compared with a smaller share of liberal Democrats (56%).
These new results are consistent with other Pew Research Center findings about the relatively modest prevalence of political posts on social media. For example, a Center analysis of tweets posted by U.S. adults with public accounts from June 2018-June 2019 found that only 13% of tweets mentioned national politics. Just 6% of these users were classified as “prolific political tweeters” (posting at least 10 tweets during that period, with at least a quarter of those tweets being about national politics). This pattern is not just specific to politics: A 2020 analysis found that a minority of users produce the vast majority of tweets more generally. Still, in a separate study during the recent election season, 55% of Americans said they were worn out by political posts on social media, with Republicans more likely to say this than Democrats.
There are also numerous ways social media users can be politically or socially active on social media, and these can vary based on current events. Some 14% of U.S. adults reported they had used a hashtag related to a political or social issue in the past year when asked about these issues in a 2018 survey, and 18% had changed their profile picture to show support for a cause in that same time frame. In a June 2020 survey conducted in the wake of global protests against racial injustice, roughly one-in-five social media users (18%) said they had used such a hashtag in the past month, while about a third (36%) had posted a picture to show their support for a cause.
Several potential reasons for not posting or sharing content about political or social issues are cited as major ones by similar shares of Democrats and Republicans in this new survey. There are other areas, however, where partisan and ideological differences stand out.
For instance, Republicans who use social media but post about these issues infrequently are more likely than their Democratic counterparts to say concern that this content could be used against them is a major reason they don’t post in this way (37% vs. 29%). They are also more likely to say a major reason is that they don’t want to be attacked for their views (36% vs. 27%) – and conservative Republicans are more likely than moderates or liberals within the party to cite this as a major reason for rarely if ever posting.
Other Center research has examined political discourse and perceived harassment both offline and online: For example, Republicans reported a less “comfortable” environment for expressing their views in a 2019 Center study on political discourse, and another recent study revealed that half of Americans who have experienced harassing behaviors online think this was a result of their political views.
When it comes to other major reasons someone might not post about political or social issues, similar shares of Democratic and Republican social media users who never or rarely do so cite not wanting to offend others, not paying close attention to these issues or not having anything to add to the conversation. Among Democratic social media users, however, infrequent posters who identify as conservative or moderate are more likely to say the latter two reasons are major ones, compared with their liberal counterparts.
OpenDemocracy, a left-wing magazine funded by organizations linked to George Soros, called for granting statehood to five U.S. territories in order to “end the whiteness of Congress.”
Written by Karl Widerquist, a Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University-Qatar, the piece argues that “one of the most transformative things Democrats could do with their narrow majority in Congress would be to grant statehood to all the remaining inhabited US territories”: Washington DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Mariana Islands.
The article – “The Case For Five New States” – argues that doing so would assist in “ending the whiteness of Congress.” “These territories have so far been prevented from becoming states as part of a larger, long-standing project to keep the Senate and Electoral College White,” it argues before adding “given American history, it’s reasonable to believe that their ethnic makeup is a primary reason why they are not states already.”
“And by refusing to grant them statehood, the White majority is effectively choosing to guard and maintain its outsized influence in the federal government,” Wilderquist notes.
OpenDemocracy has taken several grants from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, including a grant from the left-wing group’s policy center worth $55,000 to $83,000 and a grant worth over $138,000 from the foundation in 2020 alone. The organization has been funding the outlet annually since at least 2012.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill on Thursday that would allow college athletes to receive pay when their "name, image, or likeness" is used.
The legislation, H.B. 617, states that "participation in intercollegiate athletics should not infringe upon the rights of student-athletes to have control over" their own names and any profit that is incurred from them. The funding will be placed in an escrow account and will not be available for use until the athlete departs from college.
"It was great to be back at the University of Georgia today to sign HB 617, which allows college athletes to be fairly compensated for their contributions to our state," Kemp wrote in a tweet shortly after signing the legislation. "Go dawgs!"
The rule change, which applies to all universities and colleges in the Peach State, including private institutions, also mandates schools conduct "a financial literacy and life skills workshop for a minimum of five hours at the beginning of the student athlete's first and third academic years."
The bill previously cleared the state House by a wide 43-8 margin and passed through the state Senate via an overwhelming 163-5 vote. The legislation made its way through the Georgia General Assembly before it hit Kemp's desk.
At least 35 states have introduced bills that would allow college athletes to recoup compensation. Laws have been passed allowing the practice in California and Florida, among other areas.
In March, the Supreme Court took up a case that would decide whether or not it is constitutional to pay college athletes. Justices have spoken on the dichotomy in which school coaches are raking in millions of dollars while their players are making nothing despite both being classified as amateurs.
“To pay no salaries to the workers who are making the schools billions of dollars on the theory that consumers want the schools to pay their workers nothing,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said at the time, adding that it seems “entirely circular and even somewhat disturbing.”
Similarly, Justice Clarence Thomas said, “It just strikes me as odd that the coaches’ salaries have ballooned, and they’re in the amateur ranks, as are the players.”
It’s the worst kept secret in Hollywood, a rule that virtually every mainstream comic follows in our deeply divided culture.
It’s why “Saturday Night Live” won’t lay a glove on President Joe Biden and Stephen Colbert would rather take on the MyPillow guy than a president holding “kids in cages.” Now, Bee wants us to trust her on one of the more divisive topics of the modern era.
“Full Frontal Wants to Take Your Guns,” to air at 10:30 p.m. EST May 12, will allegedly explore ways to reduce gun violence now.
The PR statement on the upcoming special is as biased as the show itself, a veritable DNC extension.
“Full Frontal Wants To Take Your Guns” … will explore how appalling and frankly stupid it is that we as Americans are told there’s simply nothing we can do about gun violence. Don’t even get us started on the whole “good guy with a gun” thing. It’s high time to figure out how America’s gun problem got this bad, and what we as citizens of this glorious mess can do to help fix it.
“The fact that 316 people are victims of gun violence in the United States every single day makes me want to Zoom call every politician in this country and just scream at them,” says Bee. “But the polite Canadian in me won’t actually allow me to raise my voice, so we’re doing the comedy special equivalent of that instead.”
Bee’s “Full Frontal” showcase, a cavalcade of hateful, hard-left talking points, cannot be trusted to share the whole story on gun violence and possible solutions. Progressive comedy exists, in part, to push partisan goals and dodge fact checks.
Bee’s upcoming show is just part of the comedy Left’s war on guns.
Jordan Klepper attempted something similar to Bee’s “Guns” special in 2017 via Comedy Central. “Jordan Klepper Solves Guns” delivered exactly what viewers expected, a one-sided look at a complicated issue with massive real-world implications.
The host doesn’t mention culture as a reason for gun violence. Broken homes. Fatherless families. The kind of dysfunction that leads young people to consider gangs and the mayhem they leave behind.
That’s the thing about dementia – and I don’t know if Joe actually has dementia – but he has *something*…but with dementia, you have good and bad days.
I grew up with a Grandmother who had Alzheimer’s. She lived with us – and early on, when she had good days, it was almost like she was her old self again, but when she had bad days, it was a nightmare.
And like I said, yesterday, he had a bad, bad day.
Joe was attempting to answer a question from a reporter. I am not exactly sure what the question was, but sadly, it doesn’t matter, because nobody could decipher what the hell Joe was even talking about.
He went so far off the rails.
He couldn’t seem to find his words and that just landed him deep in the weeds.
Of course, Joe’s handlers will excuse this type of behavior away by telling us that it’s not dementia — it’s just that pesky “childhood” stutter of his.
Insert *eye roll* here.
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What Fox News did to Lou Dobbs is reason enough to stop watching them. Think about this: Juan Williams still has a job at Fox News, but Lou Dobbs doesn’t. There’s something very wrong with that.
More from Wayne Dupree
In the video, Lou takes a moment to thank everyone for all of their support for him over the past few months – making reference of course to the firing.
Lou has been a Trump loyalist and an America First champion, and he was one of the brave souls who had the courage to call out the 2020 election sham and the viewers appreciated that, and what did Fox News do to repay Lou and the viewers?
They silenced him.
In actuality, Fox is no better than Big Tech.
Attn: Wayne Dupree is a free speech champion who works tirelessly to bring you news that the mainstream media ignores. But he needs your support in order to keep delivering quality, independent journalism. You can make a huge impact in the war against fake news by pledging as little as $5 per month. Please click here Patreon.com/WDShow to help Wayne battle the fake news media.
Well, the GREAT BORDER CZAR Kamala Harris has been supposedly assessing the border crisis and after all her “hard work” she’s finally come up with the “reason” for the sudden surge at the border.
Well, are you sitting down, because I’m sure that you’ll be completely and totally shocked….It’s (drum roll please) CLIMATE CHANGE.
Yes, suddenly, and out of nowhere, the weather has blown into town and turned everything on its heels.
It’s not the fact that Kamala and Joe and all the Dems raised their hands and promised illegal aliens “freebies” if they were elected into power. Nooooo. That has nothing to do with it.
“VP Harris claims “the lack of climate adaptation and climate resilience” are “root causes” driving the surge at the southern border”
Watch:
VP Harris claims "the lack of climate adaptation and climate resilience” are “root causes” driving the surge at the southern border pic.twitter.com/7hYYRsnI3t
I don’t know about you, but I could have thought of a better 4-letter word, but I think Ted Cruz wants to keep his Twitter account intact.
But maybe Ted’s right. That’s all Kamala’s silly speech deserved…a simple “nope.”
Here are some of the other comments from folks online about Kamal’s big “findings.”
“How the f&ck would @VP know?? She’s never been to the border.”
“This is false and a bogus attempt to deflect from the actual #BidenBorderCrisis the Biden Administration caused and make it a “climate” problem with a supercharged wealth redistribution solution. Punchline: American security, families and business will suffer.”
“So everything can be excused by climate change… not driving a car will stop the border crisis apparently…”
“How did the weather change so drastically within 12 months? It didn’t, obviously.”
“I thought it was the Democrat Welcome Wagon.”
“What an idiot!!!!!!!!”
“Gaslighting Big Lie drivel that only brainwashed fools would give any credit to”
“Nonsense. It was under control a year ago.”
“The root cause of the crisis is your open border policy, @kamalaharris”
It’s amazing how Climate Change can just morph and do amazing and bizarre things to suit the left’s agenda, just like COVID….
Things that make you go hmmm.
Attn: Wayne Dupree is a free speech champion who works tirelessly to bring you news that the mainstream media ignores. But he needs your support in order to keep delivering quality, independent journalism. You can make a huge impact in the war against fake news by pledging as little as $5 per month. Please click here Patreon.com/WDShow to help Wayne battle the fake news media.
Earlier this week, we reported that Bill and Melinda Gates shocked the world when they announced that they are divorcing after 27 years of marriage. Now, new details about the final days of their marriage are coming to light, and they may surprise you.
Sources told TMZ that the final days of the billionaires’ marriage were contentious and that virtually everyone in the family took Melinda’s side.
The divorce had actually been in the works for months, and it had initially been planned for Bill and Melinda to announce it back in March. Melinda had even planned to rent the entire Calivigny Island in Grenada for $130,000 a night so that she and her three adult children could flee there to escape the media storm that would ensue as soon as the divorce was announced. Everyone in the family was invited except for Bill because they are all reportedly very angry with him.
However, lawyers representing both Bill and Melinda talked them out of announcing the divorce in March because they were still trying to hash out a divorce settlement, and there were still outstanding issues that couldn’t be resolved at the time of Melinda’s trip. While she agreed not to announce the divorce that month, Melinda still jetted off on the trip with her three children and each of their significant others anyway.
The takeaway from this is that this divorce is not nearly as harmonious as the Gates’ would have you believe, as Melinda and the three children are fuming with Bill about things they claim he has done. It’s also clear that while the divorce was only just announced this week, it has been a long time in the making, as it seems that they have all but reached a property settlement. On the day the divorce was announced, Bill even transferred nearly $2 billion in stock to Melinda.
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Bill and Melinda have only spoken out about their divorce in the brief statement they released on Monday.
“After a great deal of thought and a lot of work on our relationship, we have made the decision to end our marriage,” they said. “Over the last 27 years, we have raised three incredible children and built a foundation that works all over the world to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives.”
“We continue to share a belief in that mission and will continue our work together at the foundation, but we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives,” Bill and Melinda added. “We ask for space and privacy for our family as we begin to navigate this new life.”
Attn: Wayne Dupree is a free speech champion who works tirelessly to bring you news that the mainstream media ignores. But he needs your support in order to keep delivering quality, independent journalism. You can make a huge impact in the war against fake news by pledging as little as $5 per month. Please click here Patreon.com/WDShow to help Wayne battle the fake news media.
Yesterday, we reported that Meghan Markle had written a children’s book called “The Bench,” which celebrates the relationships between fathers and their sons. This is already coming back to bite her, however, as she has now been accused of plagiarizing a children’s book that was written back in 2018.
“Before you run out and waste money on the book by Harry’s wife, read ‘The Boy on the Bench’ by Corrinne Averiss and Gabriel Alborozo … The original,” one Twitter user wrote, calling Meghan out.
Many other Twitter users soon chimed in to say that Meghan’s book not only shares a similar title to British author Averiss’ 2018 book, but also similar artwork from Christian Robinson. They even said that Meghan’s storyline, which she claimed “started as a poem I wrote for my husband on Father’s Day, the month after Archie was born,” sounded way to similar to the previous work.
Twitter user Emma Kaye Wootton went so far as to say that Meghan’s book was “blatantly plagiarized” and should be “boycotted.”
“I’ll wager a bet that Corrinne’s book is in Archie’s collection. That’s where her idea came from. I don’t believe that this is all her own thinking or reflects her idyllic life whatsoever,” she claimed, according to Page Six.
Averiss, however, has since spoken out to defend Meghan.
“Reading the description and published an excerpt of the Duchess’s new book, this is not the same story or the same theme as ‘The Boy on the Bench.’ I don’t see any similarities,” Averiss tweeted.
This comes after Meghan was accused of being a hypocrite for writing a book celebrating fathers when she has not spoken to her own father for years, and her husband isn’t on the best of terms with his dad at the moment either.
“It’s very easy to talk about relationships between fathers and sons when they are two years old,” royal biographer Penny Juror told The Sun. “But problems come when the children are older — as Meghan found out with her father and Harry with Prince Charles.”
“So it is an odd thing to have done,” she added. “She is on dodgy ground because of her relationship with her father and Harry with his. But it is also a very schmaltzy book by the sounds of it.”
Angela Levin, Harry’s biographer, agreed with this assessment.
“Once again we have the hypocrisy of Meghan and Harry saying one thing but not doing it themselves,” she said. “I don’t know how you can write about a boy, a son or a father, when you haven’t spoken to your own father for years. It is extraordinary.”
This piece originally appeared in UpliftingToday.com and is used by permission.
Attn: Wayne Dupree is a free speech champion who works tirelessly to bring you news that the mainstream media ignores. But he needs your support in order to keep delivering quality, independent journalism. You can make a huge impact in the war against fake news by pledging as little as $5 per month. Please click here Patreon.com/WDShow to help Wayne battle the fake news media.
While Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was telling the good people of Michigan that they have to stay home and avoid their friends and loved ones, she was frittering off to Florida to visit her “sick father” for 4 days.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, a local reporter has uncovered an explosive new discovery, and it all centers around the way in which Gretchen got herself from Michigan to Florida.
Whitmer was outed last month for that super-secretive trip to Florida while COVID cases soared in Michigan – it’s also fair to note that her top-aide was also enjoying herself, mask-free, on the Florida beaches as well.
Whitmer’s office went on record and stated that taxpayers did not pay for her trip to go see her father.
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Okay, so who did? Gretchen herself?
No.
And that’s where all of this gets really, really dicey and very scandalous.
It turns out that Whitmer asked a group of very wealthy Detroit businessmen to provide a private plane that they all share for her to use for her 4-day trip to Florida.
And to make matters juicier and more scandalous, those businessmen also have major dealings with the state of Michigan.
This is a big political no-no…yes, it happens all the time, but you’re not supposed to get caught and now Gretchen has landed herself in even more hot water.
Deadline Detroit spoke to one of the businessmen under the cover of anonymity. Here’s what he said: “We wondered why she reached out to us instead of booking a private charter,” said one of the plane’s owners, who exchanged his candor for confidentiality. “You can’t tell a governor no. Who needs that kind of trouble?”
The piece goes on to say that had Whitmer booked a round trip flight from Lansing to West Palm Beach through a private charter company, it would likely have cost $10,000 to $20,000, or a whopping $40,000 for the actual jet she took, according to private jet websites. The latter is more than 25 percent of the governor’s salary — before taxes.
It is unclear whether Whitmer reimbursed the company – Air Eagle – which manages the aircraft owned by the businessmen. And, if so, at what price and from which bank account?
The site added an update to the piece that said Whitmer was asked about this column during a Thursday morning event. “I’ve said everything I’m going to say about my trip to check on my father,” she told WWTV reporter Eric Lloyd, he tweets. “I’ve got nothing to add.
“We don’t discuss my travel. I have received an incredible number of death threats over the last year and a half. There are a lot of reasons we don’t discuss how I travel and when I travel.”
“She said she was going to see her sick daddy, but that’s not a legitimate political expenditure,” said Adolph Mongo of Detroit, a political consultant. “What it is, is a political favor. She asked. She got on their plane. Now she owes them one.”
Whitmer’s office did not respond to those questions.
The governor spent four full days in Florida – not two as her handlers insist. And again, according to the piece sshe was not vaccinated.
That’s pretty hypocritical, considering the fact that she’s holding Michigan residents “hostage” by telling them we can’t fully open the state up until 70 percent of us are vaccinated.
And this woman was traveling around in the lap of luxury without a vaccine?
Once again, the elites live by a totally different set of rules than the rest of us do…and that needs to stop.
Attn: Wayne Dupree is a free speech champion who works tirelessly to bring you news that the mainstream media ignores. But he needs your support in order to keep delivering quality, independent journalism. You can make a huge impact in the war against fake news by pledging as little as $5 per month. Please click here Patreon.com/WDShow to help Wayne battle the fake news media.
Human Rights First, an independent advocacy and action organization, is reporting an increased number of violent crimes on the border since President Biden took office. The report is called “Failure to Protect: Biden Administration Continues Illegal Trump Policy to Block and Expel Asylum Seekers to Danger.”
By continuing to use Trump's Title 42 order to expel #refugees to danger, President Biden is contributing to a new wave of family separation.
Back in March 2020, former President Trump executed a COVID-19 directive, also known as Title 42, to limit the flow of travelers during the coronavirus crisis. Now, a year later and over 100 days into Biden’s presidency, Biden has extended the directive. Human Rights First, along with organizations like the Haitian Bridge Alliance and Al Otro Lado, railed against Biden’s decision in their report.
As a result, border cities in Mexico report 492 incidents of crime from January 21 to April 20. The crimes listed are from gunpoint theft to kidnaping to rape. The report also shows that many of these crimes are “bias-motivated,” meaning that Black and LGBTQ migrants face a “disproportionate” risk.
Instead, the report suggested that the Biden Administration “address human rights abuses in the countries refugees are fleeing and support regional resettlement initiatives to provide other pathways to safety.” Many of these crimes are happening because migrants are trapped in dangerous border cities. The report also calls for the end of the COVID directive.
"Drug cartels preyed on migrants in the camps along the border, and @humanrights1st documented more than fifteen hundred cases of migrants being murdered, raped, kidnapped, tortured, assaulted, or extorted."
This fantastic piece lays out the complicated reality at the border 👇 https://t.co/xKOCUI0LJ7
— Human Rights First (@humanrights1st) May 6, 2021
“None of the more than 150 asylum seekers whom Human Rights First interviewed in March and April 2021 were referred to apply for asylum or given a protection screening by U.S. immigration officers before being expelled to Mexico,” the report reads.
“Family separation is still occurring,” the report goes on, “increasing the number of children held alone in influx facilities and shelters.”
While Vice President Kamala Harris is set to visit Mexico in June, she has yet to makea statement about the border crisis since assuming the role of border czar.
Biden likewise has faced criticism for not addressing the border crisis. Instead, he blames the previous administration.
Days since former President Trump launched his blog to share tweet-sized statements to his followers, Twitter banned accounts that reposted statements from that website. Twitter banned Trump following the Capitol riots in January.
Now, Twitter is taking it a step further by suspending accounts that tweet out Trump’s comments on current events. This comes after Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) Communications Director also briefly came under suspension after sharing the link to the website.
Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.
You can follow Jenny Goldsberry on Twitter @jennyjournalism
After her recent trip to the southern border, Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL) is demanding that Facebook remove human smuggling ads from the platform. Cammack believes ads like these are facilitating illegal border crossings.
“Facebook’s role in the crisis at the border is urgent and must be addressed immediately,” Cammack wrote in a letter she shared with Fox News. The original letter was addressed to Facebook CEO Zuckerberg.
🚨 EXCLUSIVE: I shared my letter to @Facebook about its ads for human smugglers and cartels encouraging illegal activity at the southern border.
It seems Facebook should spend more time policing drug cartels than conservatives.https://t.co/SItEVyvF3p
— Congresswoman Kat Cammack (@RepKatCammack) May 5, 2021
Just a month ago, Representative Buddy Carter (R-GA) also asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the ads directly in a hearing before the Energy and Commerce Committee. At the time, Zuckerberg promised that those ads go against Facebook’s policies. But, Cammack points out, “but the advertisements are clearly continuing to be posted.”
The Florida congresswoman called on Zuckerberg to remove existing ads and prevent more in the future.
“Facebook clearly has no problem monitoring and censoring conservative voices on a daily basis,” Cammack said, “so I am confident your company has the capabilities and resources to detect and prevent criminal enterprises from posting content that encourages and facilitates illicit activity.”
Congresswoman Cori Bush, D-MO, spoke before House Oversight Committee Democrats on Thursday about the hardships faced by some Black women and their babies during pregnancy. In a tweet with a clip of her testimony, she referred to the women as “birthing people” and that sparked many to question her choice of language.
“Every day, Black birthing people and our babies die because our doctors don’t believe our pain,” Bush wrote in sharing her personal testimony. “My children almost became a statistic. I almost became a statistic.”
It didn’t take long for many Twitter users to go after her choice of words.
"Birthing people" is something I'd expect to see in a piece of dystopian fiction where women are reduced to living wombs. https://t.co/1uXfcoUzAG
During her speech, Bush told the story of the complications she faced when she was pregnant with her oldest son Zion. At the time, she was having severe pains that she said her doctor dismissed. A week after she reported the pain, she delivered her son prematurely. He weighed 1 pound 3 ounces.
“He could fit within the palm of my hand. We were told he had a zero percent chance of life,” she said.
Luckily, a top surgeon in the hospital resuscitated Bush’s son and for the next month, he was on a ventilator. In total, he was in intensive care for four months.
Two months later, Bush was pregnant with her daughter. But 16 weeks into the pregnancy, she was told she was again preterm and was told that the baby would naturally “abort.”
She pushed back on the doctor’s advice to let the baby abort and demanded that she be able to carry the pregnancy. That saved her daughter, who is now 21 years old.
“Every day, Black women are subjected to harsh and racist treatment during pregnancy and childbirth,” Bush concluded. “Every day, Black women die because the system denies our humanity. It denies us patient care. I sit before you today as a single mom, as a nurse, as an activist, and as a congresswoman and I am committed to doing the absolute most to protect Black mothers, to protect Black babies, to protect Black birthing people, and to save lives.”
Every day, Black birthing people and our babies die because our doctors don’t believe our pain. My children almost became a statistic. I almost became a statistic.
State legislators prohibited curriculum and materials that include or promote that “one race or sex is inherently superior,” “an individual by virtue of the individual’s race or sex is inherently privileged, racist or oppressive” and or “an individual should be discriminated against.”
The bill also prohibits the teaching of concepts like “moral character is determined by the individual’s race or sex” and “an individual, by virtue of their race or sex bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”
The Granite School District Board of Education had to cut its Tuesday meeting short when about 40 protestors erupted into chants of “no more masks!” During the meeting, the board was seeking public comment on K-12 mask requirements in the district.
When Utah state Sen. Kathleen Riebe tried to thank the teachers, since it was teacher appreciation day, she was booed off the podium. A parent then approached the podium to say: “You let a senator come up here and speak in the name of my children who you guys are abusing? Are you serious?” That only riled up the crowd.
At another point, the board tried to end the public comment section of the meeting, but a man yelled “Remember this day! Remember this day!” Then, the man gestured with a sheet of paper, yelling to the crowd that, “This is the truth about masks in the state of Utah! What they’re telling you about masks is a lie!”
Utah’s Governor Spencer Cox lifted the state-wide mask mandate on April 1st. Vaccinations have also been going to Utahns over the age of 16 since March.
A spokesperson for the district reportedly said that police were eventually called to the scene. “Granite School District fundamentally believes and encourages a diversity of opinions when shared in respectful and civil manner [sic] and will continue to encourage civil discourse as a model for the children for which we have stewardship over,” the spokesperson said. “We applaud the efforts of law enforcement in keeping our employees safe and de-escalating the situation.”
You can follow Jenny Goldsberry on Twitter @jennyjournalism
Project Veritas publicized secretly recorded video of CNN technical director Charlie Chester and published highly edited clips. O’Keefe appeared on “Fox News Primetime” to say that he is confident that his company will win the lawsuit.
“Twitter banned us for reporting what [Chester] said. But, I don’t think we can lose if we fight back, go on offense, and have the courage to stay on offense — so we sued New York Times, we are suing CNN. We are suing Twitter and we just launched a new initiative to represent other people to sue for defamation.”
In O’Keefe’s suit, he is claiming CNN host Ana Cabrera acted maliciously when she claimed, on Brian Stetler’s program, that the organization was banned for “misinformation.” She knew that wasn’t the reason for the ban, because previously, she’d tweeted the actual reason.
The decision followed what a Twitter spokesperson described to CNN as repeated violations of Twitter's policies prohibiting the sharing — or threats of sharing — of other people's private information without consent.
“There is this oligarchy there – a connection – and we’re going to get past motion to dismiss in the CNN lawsuit — and depose Ana Cabrera and Brian Stelter at CNN,” O’Keefe told host Pete Hegseth.
CNN couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.
You can follow Jenny Goldsberry on Twitter @jennyjournalism
Just a day after former President Trump endorsed Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) for GOP Conference Chair, Twitter temporarily suspended the account of her communications director Karoline Leavitt.
🚨🚨
BIG TECH on the MOVE! Twitter just suspended my Communications Director.
An unconstitutional overreach SILENCING our voices and freedom of speech.
Republicans are united in fighting back against Big Tech’s tyranny.
Trump publicly endorsed Stefanik on his new blog which he uses to communicate with his followers. The former president has also long been suspended from Facebook and Twitter.
BREAKING: It appears I’ve been released from Twitter’s Conservative Jail ‼️
This was not an “error,” as Twitter claimed. This was another purge in their ongoing effort to silence conservatives voices!
We cannot back down to Big Tech Giants! Our movement is too important! https://t.co/RfY4HjwOut
Leavitt saw no credible reason for the suspension. But she took it to mean it was a suspension on her political beliefs. Just before Twitter blocked her from her account, she retweeted about an interview between Steve Bannon and her boss, and she tweeted out a link from the former president’s blog. Before her account was shut down, she followed several Republican House members and activists, but now her account shows that she’s following no accounts.
“Republicans have been screaming from the rooftops for months that if Big Tech can silence the President of the United States, they can silence YOU!,” Leavitt said in a statement to SaraACarter.com “Their suspension of my account, which they later admitted was made in ‘error,’ is another example of their tyrannical censorship, as they fundamentally believe conservatives do not belong in the public square.”
A Twitter spokesperson told this reporter that the suspension was an “error,” adding “This has been reversed, and the account has been reinstated. The account’s followers will take 24-48 hours to fully restore.”
“This has been reversed, and the account has been reinstated. The account’s followers will take 24-48 hours to fully restore.”
You can follow Jenny Goldsberry on Twitter @jennyjournalism
Almost two weeks since the news broke that former Secretary of State John Kerry allegedly revealed sensitive information about Israeli covert operations to Iran’s foreign minister, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is asking Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and acting Inspector General Diana Shaw to examine the allegations.
In a leaked recorded interview, Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif reportedly claimed that Kerry told him about covert Israeli operations on Iranian targets in Syria. Kerry denies the allegations.
Yet, the Biden Administration has not commented on the situation. Grassley, along with other senators, sent a letter to President Biden early last week to ask him to investigate Kerry. That letter went unanswered.
Now, as ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, Grassley is asking that records regarding meetings Kerry had with Zarif be sent to the committee for review. His deadline is May 18th.
“President Biden has the power to act and so do you,” Grassley writes in the letters.
But, when this reporter reached out to the State Department Inspector General for comment, a spokesperson said “We have no additional information to share at this time.”
The State Department echoed the empty statement. “The department respects the role of congress and does not comment on congressional correspondence,” a State Department spokesperson told SaraACarter.com
Many calls for action have gone unanswered. While some have asked that Kerry resign from his current position as presidential envoy for climate on the National Security Council, others like Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) are simply asking that Kerry’s security clearance be temporarily suspended while he is investigated. So far, nothing has changed.
You can follow Jenny Goldsberry on Twitter @jennyjournalism
After over a year of strict COVID regulations, Washington D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser is opening up reception centers for weddings, but has decided to ban dancing in them.
“Beginning May 1st, multi-purpose facilities and venues may host events such as weddings,” the mayor’s statement read, “provided that there are may be no more than 25% capacity in any room or up to 250 persons . . . standing and dancing receptions are not allowed.”
“An alternate headline may be, ‘Now You Can Host a Wedding in Washington, D.C.’” the mayor said in defense of her decision on CNN Wednesday. “And just like our restaurant guidelines suggest is that you have to be seated to enjoy the restaurant.”
Bowser stood by the regulation even if everyone in the wedding party is vaccinated.
You can follow Jenny Goldsberry on Twitter @jennyjournalism
"It's completely unacceptable that security forces keep committing grave human rights violations such as those that occurred in Jacarezinho against residents of the favelas, who are mostly Black and live in poverty," Jurema Werneck, executive director of Amnesty International Brazil, said in a statement, calling it a "massacre".
Getting the job done for Amazon means leaving a few shattered rules in the wake of speeding delivery trucks, according to a new report.
The report from Motherboard claims drivers are being told by Amazon delivery companies to shut off a monitoring app called Mentor that Amazon uses to track speed and score drivers on safety.
The report, which largely relies on unnamed sources, cites text messages telling drivers to sign out of the system, which supposedly monitors them at all times.
“By getting drivers to turn off the Mentor app, Amazon’s delivery companies … can push drivers to circumvent Amazon’s strict driving rules intended to prevent accidents in turn raising stats that can increase revenue in a cutthroat landscape where many delivery companies are barely scraping by, and get paid per package delivered on time in addition to bonuses that are earned through efficient, safe driving recorded by the Mentor app,” the report said.
In one Michigan case, the driver was reportedly told to sign out of the system halfway through his shift. The report said drivers in Georgia, Michigan, New York, Tennessee and Texas were told to use various tactics, including shutting off their phones, to avoid being monitored.
In a 2020 example from the Atlanta region, drivers working 10-hour shifts were told “Starting tomorrow everyone needs to be logged into Mentor for at least 2 hours no more no less, so make sure that’s one of the first things we’re doing in the mornings,” the report said.
Mentor works on the phones of drivers at Amazon Delivery Service Partners, which are “quasi-independent companies who are contracted by Amazon to deliver packages in Amazon-branded vans.” The app collects data on speeding, braking, cornering and other behaviors as well as phone usage.
Drivers who spoke to Motherboard, and whose names were not used, said the companies contracted by Amazon want speed over safety to meet Amazon’s delivery quotas. The report summed up drivers as feeling “threatened and pressured to break traffic laws and risk their own safety while delivering Amazon packages.”
“Speeding was the main thing. They were harsh on drivers that weren’t going as fast as they wanted,” the report quoted a former driver from Romulus, Michigan, as saying. “I complied when they asked me to turn off the app because I didn’t want to cause friction. But it was a lot of stress, high blood pressure, seething anger and frustration.”
“This behavior is unacceptable and does not adhere to the safety standards that we expect of all Delivery Service Partners,” said Rena Lunak, an Amazon spokeswoman. “It’s also misleading to suggest that this behavior is necessary — in fact, more than 90% of all drivers are able to complete their deliveries before the scheduled time while following all safety procedures.”
But Amazon sets the rules of the game that push its contractors to break them.
“Amazon delivery drivers are asked to deliver upwards of 400 packages a day on grueling 10-hour shifts under pressure from contractors who earn extra revenue from Amazon when their drivers deliver packages quickly and efficiently,” Motherboard reported.
“Amazon adds an additional revenue per package delivered, in addition to bonuses that can be pocketed by delivery companies or distributed to drivers at their discretion. These bonuses are only offered if drivers’ stats on the Mentor app collectively average to above 800 on a 100-850 scale.”
“Because of these bonuses, drivers say their companies ask them to drive a few hours or a couple stops, while minding their speed and braking, so that the app registers a high score, and then turn off the app for the rest of their shift.”
Amazon drivers and an Amazon delivery company owner told Motherboard low Mentor scores can also mean companies lose access to Amazon routes.
“The issue here is Amazon does not compensate delivery companies fairly for what they’re asking us to do. Everything is done on a shoestring budget,” the report quoted the owner of a delivery company near Seattle as saying. “Companies that tell their drivers to turn off the app are trying to get a perfect score so they can get their incentives. In my opinion, this is not ethical.”
“Our dispatcher told us after three or four hours you can turn Mentor off, and sign off, because when the thing with Mentor is when it’s on, it’s regulating things,” a driver from the Nashville area was quoted as saying. “People are driving slower and following traffic laws and rules Amazon wants us to follow, turning off vans, putting on hazards, wearing seatbelts.”
“Once it’s turned off there’s no tracking of speed, how fast you’re taking corners,” he said.
“I turned off the app around lunch everyday,” a former California delivery driver said. “I would be constantly stressed, worried all the time about making my quotas.”
Safety issues with Amazon vehicles also emerge because delivery companies do not want to report any problems in the app that might ground a vehicle.
“My vehicle had a damaged roof, rain leaked inside, the side door was broken for months. It also needed an oil change and tire pressure was low, but we weren’t allowed to report anything, because Amazon would ground the van, and that’s one less route that delivery company would have,” said Leonard Hodges, a former Amazon delivery driver in Houston.
A former Amazon delivery driver in Buffalo, New York, called the safety problem “a catch-22 situation. Either you turn the app off so you can deliver faster or you leave it on and deliver slower and don’t get your bonuses.”
To any who may believe cancel culture isn’t real: This officer begs to differ.
Sara Erwin, a New Jersey police officer, was allegedly fired due to a Facebook post in which she called protesters for the Black Lives Matter organization “terrorists.”
According to Fox News, Erwin wrote in the post, “Last night as I left for work I had my two kids crying for me not to go to work. I don’t think I’ve ever felt the way I did last night. And then I watched people I know and others I care about going into harms way. I love my police family like my own.”
She continued, “So when you share posts and things on Facebook I’d really appreciate if you’d THINK before doing so. I’ve seen so many black lives matter [sic] hashtags in these posts. Just to let you know — they are terrorists.”
“They hate me. They hate my uniform. They don’t care if I die.”
Erwin explained to “Fox and Friends” on Wednesday that she wrote the post amid a lot of “turmoil,” as Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the nation following the death of George Floyd.
“I had friends, family, tons of people reaching out — text messages, phone calls, reaching out through Messenger — checking on me and making sure everything is okay because they were seeing so many things in the news. I felt like it was easiest to put what I was feeling and get a message out there, that I was home, I was safe.”
“It was a really emotional — it was an emotional time.”
When asked how she felt after learning of her termination, Erwin was visibly upset.
“I have never been in trouble my entire career. I’m pretty much a rule-follower,” she said. “I’m devastated.”
Another officer, Mandy Gray, was reportedly suspended for liking Erwin’s post. She told “Fox and Friends” that she wanted to show support for Erwin out of love and understanding.
“The reason why I showed my support was, Sara is one of my officers. We had had a very emotional conversation that night at work. I had to send one of my officers into a neighboring city that was having riots, and it was just a very emotional night.”
She continued, “I knew where she was coming from because of the conversation we had had earlier in the evening, when she made that post, and I hearted on it in support in showing her my love.”
Fox reported that both Erwin and Gray were serving at Hopewell Township Police Department and are over 20-year veterans of the force, making their punishments even more infuriating if true.
The officers’ attorney, Frank Crivelli, thankfully filed an appeal with the New Jersey Superior Court, saying their treatment was “unjust and excessively harsh.”
Did this police officer deserve to be fired?
Yes: 2% (1 Votes)
No: 98% (60 Votes)
Crivelli called both policewomen “outstanding, decorated officers,” and pointed out that neither officer had ever been reprimanded or investigated by Internal Affairs throughout their entire careers. “As Sara said, we have nothing more here than a policy violation at best — at best.”
He noted that a policy violation was only an offense if the officers’ actions weren’t protected by the First Amendment.
The woke mob is at its strongest right now. Two officers with some of the cleanest records in New Jersey were allegedly fired because of a single Facebook post. Where does it end?
Hopefully, if Erwin and Gray are telling the truth, their attorney will be able to expose the Hopewell Township Police Department for what it seems to be: one more cog in the woke machine.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki disclosed in a Thursday podcast with CNN analyst David Axelrod that President Joe Biden’s advisers routinely caution him against speaking to reporters.
That’s of course no surprise. If you’ve been paying attention, Biden is often absent for days, and when he does speak, he rarely makes sense for more than a couple of minutes. The man even struggles when reading a teleprompter.
But Pskai actually admitted to Axelrod on his “The Axe Files” podcast Thursday that those around him make a concerted effort to keep him away from answering questions.
Axelrod, the former senior advisor to President Barack Obama, gushed over Psaki’s resume on the hour-long podcast. She of course worked for former Secretary of State John Kerry and also for former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
Axelrod, who has run in the same circles, asked the press secretary about what it’s like to work as the face of the Biden administration.
Psaki might have gotten a little too comfortable with her left-wing cohort, as she made a stunning admission: Biden is regularly dissuaded from being open with the Biden-friendly mainstream media.
After Axelrod essentially pointed out Biden has a propensity to speak without first considering the ramifications of his words, Psaki laughed and shared the truth about why he’s rarely seen in front of the cameras.
With regard to Biden going off the script and admitting that a federal minimum wage hike would not be inlaced in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, Biden created headaches for those around him — including Psaki.
The ineffectual Psaki downplayed the incident, and even claimed Biden answers to reporters “nearly every day.”
Do you think Biden is suffering from a cognitive health impairment?
Yes: 99% (1073 Votes)
No: 1% (9 Votes)
Then the admission came.
“That is not something we recommend. In fact, a lot of times we say ‘Don’t take questions,'” she added. “But he’s going to do what he wants to do because he’s the president of the United States.”
Not only has Biden not answered many questions from reporters, but when he has, his responses have often generated the wrong kinds of headlines.
There is of course endless speculation as to whether Biden is suffering from a cognitive decline. Biden does little to dispel rumors that he is capable of handling the most important job on the planet, as he doesn’t, nor has he ever been able to, get out of his own way.
But Psaki’s revelation that Biden is advised against taking questions from the media is important. It’s essentially an admission that even those around him don’t believe he’s capable of handling questions from people begging to give him not only softballs, but also the benefit of the doubt at every turn.
Whatever happened to all of that “truth” and “transparency” talk from inauguration day?
According to Psaki, the face of Biden’s floundering administration, Biden might intentionally be evasive when it comes to being available to reporters, and she and others encourage that. We’re all supposed to trust this man with the nuclear codes when those who know him best don’t even trust him with his own words.
Residents in one neighborhood in Elkton, Maryland, were stunned by a very odd and unsettling sight last month: a woman, sitting in a lawn chair with a book in hand, watching the house before her break out in a fire that she appeared to have set.
According to a media release from the Maryland State Fire Marshal, on April 29, witnesses spotted 47-year-old Gail J. Metwally starting fires inside the house she lived in with three other people.
In a video that was shared on social media, one witness filmed what appeared to be an altercation between Metwally, a man and one of the other female residents of the home.
The person filming the video narrated and said Metwally lit a trashcan on fire and then dumped it in the living room.
She was then seen sitting in a lawn chair, watching the house as it caught fire.
“I couldn’t believe that she was just sitting there, like it wasn’t happening,” Avery Hammond, who shot one of the videos circulating online, told Inside Edition.
A woman was in the basement when the fire started to get out of hand, and she began yelling for help. The same video on social media shows bystanders running to help her escape through a basement window.
Metwally stayed in the chair for a few minutes, then wandered away. She was found a short while later by police.
“She just casually went out there, sat in the chair, stated a few obscenities and watched the fire spread throughout the house,” Senior Deputy State Fire Marshal Oliver Alkire confirmed, according to Inside Edition.
It was shortly after 1:00 p.m. that Singerly Fire Company and other emergency responders showed up and worked to put out the fire.
“Deputy State Fire Marshals responded and conducted an origin and cause investigation and concluded the fire was incendiary (arson) in nature,” the fire marshal’s release read.
“A total of 4 people resided in the home, including Metwally. Two were not home, while the third was still inside when Metwally committed the arson.”
“Metwally has been charged with 1st and 2nd Degree Attempted Murder, 1st Degree Arson, 1st Degree Assault, two counts of Malicious Burning 1st Degree, two counts of Malicious Destruction of Property, and two counts of Reckless Endangerment.”
Metwally is being held without bond, according to state records referenced by NBC News. She also reportedly suffers from mental health issues.
Thankfully, no one was injured even though the house suffered serious structural damage.
Amanda holds an MA in Rhetoric and TESOL from Cal Poly Pomona. After teaching composition and logic for several years, she's strayed into writing full-time and especially enjoys animal-related topics.
As of January 2019, Amanda has written over 1,000 stories for The Western Journal but doesn't really know how. Graduating from California State Polytechnic University with a MA in Rhetoric/Composition and TESOL, she wrote her thesis about metacognitive development and the skill transfer between reading and writing in freshman students. She has a slew of interests that keep her busy, including trying out new recipes, enjoying nature, discussing ridiculous topics, reading, drawing, people watching, developing curriculum, and writing bios. Sometimes she has red hair, sometimes she has brown hair, sometimes she's had teal hair. With a book on productive communication strategies in the works, Amanda is also writing and illustrating some children's books with her husband, Edward.
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MCLEAN, Va., April 27, 2021 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — By Light Professional IT Services LLC (By Light) announced today that it has achieved Trusted Integrator status within the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) program. In addition to our ISO9001, 20000-1 and 27001 registrations and CMMI Level 3 Dev and Services ratings, we demonstrated the staff and processes necessary to architect, design, integrate, test, document, field, and support systems that meet the requirements of the CSfC program.
Trusted Integrator status enables NSA, Authorizing Officials (AOs)/Designated Approving Authorities (DAAs) to utilize By Light’s System Integration Development and Support Services for lifecycle CSfC solution support.
“CSfC’s use of conforming commercial products in layered solutions to protect National Security Systems (NSS) data improves design, integration, and deployment timelines,” says Jeff Adelman, By Light Vice President of Integration Services. “But the solution does not end with deployment; sustainment actions including continuous testing and security incident response are critical to the lifecycle success of any CSfC Capability Package implementation.”
Trusted Integrator status complements By Light’s capabilities in tactical and strategic networking, cloud architecture, cyber security, and synthetic training environments.
About By Light
By Light Professional IT Services LLC, headquartered in McLean, Virginia, is an ISO 9001, 20000-1, and 27001 registered and CMMI Level 3 rated systems integrator that provides secure, turn-key systems by incorporating exceptional engineering, project management, telecommunications, and cyber capabilities to safeguard mission success. Founded by industry professionals with extensive knowledge in the DoD, DISA, and other US Government agencies, By Light successfully implements technical solutions that integrate commercial best practices to meet the needs of government. For more information, visit http://www.bylight.com/.
HALF MOON BAY, Calif., April 6, 2021 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — Treadstone 71 announced today the release of the much-awaited and industry-leading Strategic Intelligence Analysis training certification. The in-depth, on-demand course breaks down intelligence collection and analysis complexities over 12-weeks of lectures, exercises, quizzes, and hands-on case studies.
The certification includes all aspects of the pioneering Cyber Intelligence Tradecraft, Certified Cyber Intelligence Analyst course combined with comprehensive instruction on all strategic intelligence elements. The course also includes extended lectures and exercises for analytic writing and structured analytic techniques.
“The Strategic Intelligence Analysis Certification covers all aspects of building cyber intelligence programs, interacting with stakeholders, building intelligence requirements, establishing adversary threat matrices, planning for intelligence collection through execution of analytic methods,” said Jeff Bardin, Chief Intelligence Officer for Treadstone 71.
He adds, “Students and corporate teams completing this program of study are ready to analyze, write, and forecast adversary activities that can prevent cyber-attacks. We believe this course is a game-changer that shifts the paradigm away from after-the-fact indicators of compromise analysis to what Intelligence is intended to be.”
The course provides instruction in a crawl-walk-run method that gives students the confidence to execute tasks throughout the cyber intelligence lifecycle. Templates and examples show students effective practices that are both descriptive and prescriptive while at the same time allowing for adapting the practices to corporate culture.
Organizations looking to build or mature their cyber intelligence program find this course of study a natural next step in establishing resilient and sustainable intelligence capabilities that assist leadership in decision-making.
“We deliver several hands-on exercises complete with templates and examples,” continued Bardin. “We intend to send each student back to their corporate environments armed with the knowledge necessary to immediately enhance their existing programs or start new programs with a foundation rooted in excellence. Teams taking the course learn how to think independently, establishing strong unit bonds crossing technical, tactical, and strategic boundaries.”
About Treadstone 71 LLC:
Treadstone 71 ( https://www.treadstone71.com/ ), founded in 2002, is a woman and veteran-owned small business delivering cyber Intelligence, counterintelligence, strategic analysis, clandestine cyber HUMINT, OSINT training and analysis, cyber psychological and target acquisition operations.
For more information, call (331) 999-0071 or email [email protected].
DALLAS, Texas, April 5, 2021 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — Baxter Clewis Consulting, an international consultancy on cyber security, announced today that it has joined the PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) as a new Participating Organization. Baxter Clewis will work with the PCI SSC to help secure payment data worldwide through the ongoing development and adoption of the PCI Security Standards.
The PCI SSC leads a global, cross-industry effort to increase payment security by providing flexible, industry-driven and effective data security standards and programs. The keystone is the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which provides an actionable framework for developing a robust payment card data security process and preventing, detecting and mitigating criminal attacks and breaches.
As a Participating Organization, Baxter Clewis adds its voice to the standards development process and will collaborate with a growing community of more than 800 Participating Organizations to improve payment security worldwide. Baxter Clewis will also have the opportunity to recommend new initiatives for consideration to the PCI Security Standards Council and share cross-sector experiences and best practices at the annual PCI Community Meetings.
“In an era of increasingly sophisticated attacks on systems, PCI Security Standards and resources help organizations secure payment data and prevent, detect and mitigate attacks that can lead to costly data breaches,” said Lance Johnson, Executive Director of the PCI Security Standards Council. “By joining as a Participating Organization, Baxter Clewis demonstrates they are playing an active part in improving payment security globally by helping drive awareness and adoption of PCI Security Standards.”
“Using third-party service providers is an organizational risk from a supply chain, security, and compliance standpoint. Companies should have the assurance that their systems and PCI data is appropriately managed and secured by third-party service providers,” said Boyd Clewis, VP of Baxter Clewis Consulting. Baxter Clewis enables service-providers to enhance security and compliance programs while reducing risk with systems, processes, and automation. We are proud to partner with PCI Standards Council, and we look forward to helping address risk related to third-party service providers.
About the PCI Security Standards Council
The PCI Security Standards Council is a global forum that is responsible for the development, management, education, and awareness of the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and other standards that increase payment data security. Connect with the PCI Council on LinkedIn. Join the conversation on Twitter @PCISSC. Subscribe to the PCI Perspectives Blog.
About Baxter Clewis Consulting
Baxter Clewis Consulting is an international cybersecurity firm specializing in helping service providers meet security and compliance requirements to secure vital company data, enhance efficiency, and protect profitability. Learn more about Baxter Clewis Consulting by connecting on LinkedIn and visiting the Baxter Clewis website at https://www.baxterclewis.com/.
HERNDON, Va., March 26, 2021 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — Aristi Technologies, Inc. announced that it is among the first firms to become an accredited Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Third-Party Assessor Organization (C3PAO) and Registered Provider Organization (RPO) by the CMMC Accreditation Body (CMMC-AB). C3PAOs are the only organizations authorized to conduct CMMC assessments.
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) created the CMMC program to enhance the protection of sensitive data, namely, controlled unclassified information (CUI) and federal contract information (FCI), within the Defense Department’s multi-tiered supply chain of more than 300,000 companies. CMMC is specifically designed for small and mid-sized suppliers as they are more vulnerable to cyber threats in the supply chain.
These small and mid-sized contractors are increasingly being targeted by nation-state attackers; they have limited internal resources and cybersecurity expertise to adequately secure their systems and safeguard sensitive customer data.
“Aristi is honored to achieve C3PAO and RPO credentials, demonstrating our commitment to the CMMC program in supporting the DoD’s mission to secure the defense supply chain,” said Neel Gopalani, Aristi’s vice president, and a CMMC-AB Registered Practitioner (RP). “Our CMMC practice is a natural extension of our cybersecurity compliance and assessment services that we’ve provided for more than a decade.”
Over the last year, Aristi has helped small and mid-sized government contractors prepare for complying with CMMC security requirements. Aristi’s CMMC consulting services include: boundary scoping, gap assessments, remediation support, security documentation and readiness assessments. As a C3PAO and RPO, Aristi will continue to help federal contractors effectively navigate the DoD’s new cybersecurity certification process.
About Aristi Technologies
Aristi Technologies is a cybersecurity consulting firm based in the Washington DC metro area. For more than a decade, it’s provided cybersecurity risk and compliance services to organizations, nationwide, including federal agencies, government contractors, and cloud-service providers.
Aristi delivers tailored and affordable solutions to achieve compliance with federal cyber compliance standards including National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) 800-53, NIST 800-171 (the core of the CMMC framework), Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP).
MEDIA CONTACT: Neel Gopalani of Aristi +1-703-459-6268 [email protected]
DETROIT, Mich., March 18, 2021 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — UBX Cloud is the first U.S. based cloud services provider to offer Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) cloud enclaves.
The CMMC represents the Department of Defense’s continued effort to protect Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) in the defense supply chain. Building on the 110 controls set forth in NIST SP 800-171, the CMMC specifies 173 security practices across five maturity processes. Starting in fiscal year 2021, the department will pilot the implementation of CMMC requirements for Level 3 and below.
UBX Cloud now includes CMMC-compliant Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) cloud enclaves in their service offerings, as a way for suppliers and contractors to fast-track themselves into CMMC compliance. UBX Cloud promises full service at a flat rate and per user basis for an easy comprehensive package.
“Our company and our team is always focused on the simplest approach and solution to things, and in this case with our CMMC enclaves there is no difference,” said Steve Panovski, UBX Cloud president. “UBX Cloud brings a tremendous amount of value to simplify the path to compliance while providing modern cloud solutions and simplifying IT complexity, or as just a bonus.”
UBX Cloud caters specifically to the IT MSPs and MSSPs market, as well as corporate IT and Chief Technology Officers, taking the complexity out of the CMMC process with flat rate assessment services and fast deployment. The all-in white label packages include Cybersecurity services, CMMC consultancy, and VMWare-powered cloud infrastructure to provide deeper discounts, and eliminates the need for any heavy upfront investment.
About UBX Cloud
UBX Cloud is a Michigan-based cloud service provider with data centers in the United States, South America and India. Our services include Managed IT-as-a-Service, Private/Hybrid Cloud, Disaster Recovery, Cloud Workspaces, Veeam Cloud Backup, and a variety of custom IT consulting services. Our team of IT Engineers helps organizations of all kinds maintain uptime and ensure business continuity.
PITTSBURGH, Pa., March 5, 2021 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — Valentis today announced that Martha Hunter will become the company’s first-ever Vice President of Strategy, effective March 2021. She fills a new position helping the company meet growing demand for expansion. Valentis is committed to an aggressive plan that focuses on messaging and education to advance its security solution, supply chain, and risk management consulting services worldwide.
Martha Hunter comes from the marketing industry where she was a Business Development Executive for six years. Hunter’s new position will be responsible for developing and implementing the strategic growth initiatives for Valentis using her experience and resolve to meet objectives to Valentis.
“Valentis already has a reputation for breaking the mold in the security and investigations industry. I have spent my career challenging people and companies to think differently and ask the question ‘Why not us? Valentis’s culture, values and leadership style embodies that spirit,” says V.P. of Strategy Hunter.
She adds, “Strategy development is not a once-a-year thing anymore, it’s ongoing and needs to come with recommendations and actions and the company needs to be willing to act. I’m honored to have the opportunity to play a role in the execution piece of strategy, and I’m thrilled to join a women-owned, purpose driven company and look forward to driving new possibilities for our people, our customers and our stakeholders.”
Marnie Sutch, CEO, of Valentis welcomed Martha to her new position, stating, “The addition of Martha to our team is about her ability to bring innovation and change to Valentis. The ability to deliver a professional service that delivers a driven result for our clients is a team effort and having Martha strengthens our team.”
About Valentis:
Valentis is a fully operational security logistics and risk management solution for a variety of clients and security concerns. We are growing domestically, and envision global ventures, with services and products under development to create a network of global affiliates, lead through branding, and expand our clients; financial institutions, governments, religious facilities, maritime, cybersecurity, combined with specially developed training, software and telecommunication consultancy, and more. We are mindful and committed and care about our clients, team, and shareholders.
ALAMO, Calif., March 2, 2021 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — Essential to managing today’s and the future electric grid is data—its movement and security. GRIDEON developed by GridBright (gridbright.com) under an award from the US Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA-E) addresses this need.
It was created in collaboration with a team of cybersecurity and utility industry experts from BetterGrids Foundation (Bettergrids.org), Midcontinent Independent System Operator (misoenergy.org), and Mid-Carolina Electric Cooperative (mcecoop.com). Over 40 organizations across the grid value chain have contributed to defining the requirements for GRIDEON.
“MCEC needed to share critical data with a strategic partner. Internet and email were not sufficiently secure. For years the method was walking a USB key to the partner for exchange. GRIDEON is a better way,” says Keith Sturkie, VP of IT at MCEC. “GRIDEON improved our security posture and lowered our costs.”
GRIDEON is an open-source-based suite of easy-to-use cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, technologies, enablement and support services, and standards that provide the full set of capabilities required to instantiate any type of secure grid data exchange.
GRIDEON efficiently ensures secure and compliant grid data exchange among all-electric ecosystem participants encompassing the entire electric value chain from generation to consumers (prosumers) spanning business and real-time operations.
It accommodates the creation of multiple types of exchanges necessitated by the utility industry’s grid data sharing applications such as collaboration, real-time system integration, publication-subscriber, one-to-many, among just a few.
Secure Grid Collaboration is the second service established on GRIDEON. The first is the BetterGrids Grid Model Repository that is presently used in 45 countries. BetterGrids.org is a free library of curated, non-sensitive grid models shared voluntarily by grid researchers. It includes synthetic and anonymized grid models and uses a rigorous curation process to ensure data quality. AI tools for semantic and natural language searching allow researchers to find their desired test data easily.
Secure Grid Collaboration extends the GRIDEON service reach. It establishes core grid data exchange standards that drive cost efficiency and management efficacy for foundational exchange artifacts such as nondisclosure agreements (NDA) between counterparties. It provides the foundation for future process management and real time services in emergency management and DER integration and beyond.
It also implements the enabling processes for secure grid data exchanges such as participant registration and advanced encryption key services that support exchange operations, security, and compliance.
Girding these key elements is a support organization providing 24 x 7 help, operations, and technical support functions required by the operational nature of many of the exchanges a typical utility will implement.
GridBright Inc. – https://www.gridbright.com/ – specializes in secure grid integration. Its services and solutions span the full electric value chain, safely interconnecting renewable and distributed energy resources to the grid, implementing and integrating modern computer applications for grid operations and planning, and providing solutions for the secure exchange of grid data among grid value chain participants.
MEDIA ONLY CONTACT Stephen J Callahan CMO, GridBright +1-415-846-6018 (media only) [email protected]
PHOENIX, Ariz., Feb. 23, 2021 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) –- TAG CXO, a provider of fractional IT executives, appointed Dan Streufert to lead its new IT Infrastructure practice area located in Phoenix, Arizona. In this role, Streufert is responsible to lead and develop the delivery teams helping TAG CXO clients build the robust and durable IT operating environments needed for growth and efficiency.
By optimizing critical IT infrastructures, clients benefit from much greater simplicity, overall security, and scalability. As practice lead, Streufert will serve existing clients, develop new clients and build the delivery bench, leading TAG CXOs infrastructure services across its national network of fractional executives.
Mr. Streufert comes to TAG CXO with broad experience designing, engineering, and implementing optimized IT infrastructures across large multi-national, multi-site businesses in the manufacturing and real estate industries. Most recently, Streufert was Principal Systems Architect for co-working giant WeWork, and formerly directed global IT operations for medical device manufacturers, Viant Medical and The Tech Group, as Head of IT. His clients have also included companies in the construction industry such as Buesing Corporation, Centuri Construction and NPL Construction. He holds a Bachelor of Business and Information Systems from the University of Phoenix.
“Dan Streufert is easily one of the best hiring decisions I made during my corporate career, and it’s a joy to be working together again,” said Paul Theisen, enthusiastically. “Dan is always professional, technically current, insatiably curious, humble yet driven, and has a very astute business mind,” Theisen described. “Now, 25 years into his career and seasoned with a depth of global-enterprise experience, Dan’s unique qualifications are available to the benefit of TAG CXO clients.” “To sum it all up,” Theisen concluded, “Dan has a certain techno-functional-engineering-business-leadership genius he brings into every interaction; and he really exemplifies the TAG CXO promise – to provide our clients with the best enterprise-level, industry-trained, battle-tested IT leaders…not career consultants.”
Based in Phoenix, Arizona, TAG CXO is a privately held company, providing Interim and Fractional IT leadership executives, founded in 2019. The company maintains a bench of industry-trained, enterprise-level executives, available on-demand to mid-market CEOs. TAG CXO executives help to round-out a firm’s leadership team and close the IT talent gap with fully qualified expertise, offering a more affordable, lower-risk option than hiring full-time staff. Learn more at: https://tagcxo.com/.
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Feb. 2, 2021 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — EPIC Insurance Brokers & Consultants is pleased to welcome John Prentis and Larry Bowlus to its Executive Risk and Cyber practice. Joining from a global broker, Prentis and Bowlus will focus on large public, technology, and financial institution executive liability coverages, including Directors & Officers Liability as well as Errors & Omissions, General Partnership Liability, Employment Practices Liability, Fiduciary, Crime, and Kidnap & Ransom.
The senior team of Prentis and Bowlus brings a combined experience of 50 years in the industry. Prentis most recently co-led Aon’s Financial Services Group in San Francisco, providing advisory and placement services for a variety of executive lines. Bowlus served as senior vice president and team leader within the same group, specializing in D&O and management liability insurance programs for public and private companies. Both bring a breadth of experience across industry groups, with deep experience handling executive risks for technology, life science companies and financial institutions, among many others in the public and private sectors.
“We are extremely pleased to welcome John and Larry to EPIC,” said Steve Denton, EPIC CEO. “Their experience serving large publicly traded clients and deep expertise in the technology sector fits perfectly with our deep resources currently deployed in the large account risk management sector. In fact, they will work closely with our Policy Response Unit focused on complex shareholder claims and our Analytics practice where we perform risk modeling and benchmarking analysis.”
Prentis and Bowlus will lend significant expertise to EPIC’s Executive Risk and Cyber practice, which emphasizes a holistic approach to identifying, understanding and managing risks.
“We’re fortunate to add two senior risk advisors and brokers in John and Larry to our team of experts,” said Kelly Geary, EPIC National Practice Leader, Executive Risk and Cyber. “Our clients will benefit instantly from their perspective and expertise, particularly in today’s challenging and dynamic marketplace.”
Prentis and Bowlus will work from the firm’s San Francisco office.
EPIC Insurance Brokers & Consultants has more than 2,600 team members operating from more than 80 offices across the U.S., providing Property and Casualty, Employee Benefits, Specialty Programs, and Private Client solutions to EPIC clients. For more information on EPIC, visit: https://epicbrokers.com/.
WARRENTON, Va. and Pittsburgh, Pa., Feb. 2, 2021 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — Pulsar Global Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary of Valentis, a defense and risk management firm, announces the acquisition of Blueshield Security and Investigations, LLC based in Warrenton, VA. The acquisition by Pulsar Global brings to realization the investigation unit of Valentis Security.
Pulsar Global Solutions is a new concept developed by Valentis that will provide investigative and intelligence services to commercial and government clients as well as individuals.
Blueshield Security & Investigations, LLC has been serving Fauquier and surrounding counties since 2006. Blueshield provides a full service private investigative business that specializes in domestic cases with a very high success rate. Case expertise include suspect cold case murder investigations, white collar crime, fraud, missing persons, accident investigations, and background investigations.
“It is with a happy heart and a desire to expand the business that I have decided to hand the business over to a new owner. Valentis Security has the experience and manpower to both take Blueshield into new directions, while continuing to service businesses and citizens with private investigative needs. The new staff at Blueshield will continue to ‘Find the Truth’ by doing the right thing for the right reasons, as we always have, said Elizabeth Kurtz, President of Blueshield.
“I guarantee you will find that under this new ownership, more can be accomplished. My thanks to all past and present clientele for allowing us to be there for you when you needed us. I have every confidence that you will continue to share your future needs with the new owners,” said Kurtz.
“Today we added a new piece to the puzzle with Blue Shield Security and Investigations LLC. This new piece brings Pulsar Global to market and helps our parent company, Valentis Security, grow stronger with more concepts to service clients,” said Daniel Ries, Executive Director of Pulsar Global Solutions.
Pulsar Global will operate as Blueshield until the State of Virginia finalizes the registration paperwork. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
About Valentis:
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Well, Logan got really personal Thursday during an exchange with the legendary boxer. Mayweather reference Logan Paul’s infamous suicide forest video in Japan, and the social media star hit back with Mayweather being “51-1 because he beat his wife too.”
To be clear, Floyd Mayweather has never been married, but he has multiple domestic violence situations. The star boxer has faced three separate allegations of domestic violence, and had to serve two months in jail after hitting the mother of his children, according to Business Insider.
I’m assuming that’s what Paul was referring to because he doesn’t have a wife.
Also, it’s a bit strange for Mayweather claiming to be fighting on behalf of Japan and the country’s honor.
Yes, Logan Paul’s suicide forest video was insanely stupid, but why does Floyd feel the need to defend Japan? Doesn’t really add up. Seems like a very strange line of attack.
The good news is that we won’t have to wait long before this is all settled. Make sure to tune in June 6 to find out how it goes down!
He wrote the following on Instagram about his injuries:
A 1 inch piece of metal blew through my neck lacerating my jugular vein and puncturing a hole in my right lung. My right lung would later fill with blood and collapse. My right orbital bone broke in three places and my nose broke. I went blind in my right eye instantly (My eyesight returned a day later). My left index finger snapped and I had fractured ribs. After having my right lung intubated and drained while I was awake, I was then sedated and life flighted to Vanderbilt hospital in Nashville.
You can read his full post below.
For those of you interested in seeing the exact moment DeShields weapon blew apart in his face, you can watch it below as he explains how it went south.
I’m a big gun guy, but all I can say about this is wow. This is pretty much every dude’s worst fear when he pulls the trigger.
Any gun blowing up in your face is going to be a terrible time. A .50 caliber rifle blowing up in your face could easily kill you.
Judging from DeShields’ description of the event, he’s damn lucky to be alive.
Wild stuff can happen on the range, but I’ve never seen anything like this happen before in my life. Again, I can’t stress enough how lucky Mr. DeShields is to be alive. He should thank God for looking out for him.
It’s just another classic example of playing stupid games and winning stupid prizes.
Trust me when I say the people who work in corner stores aren’t the kind of people you want to mess with. I’ve spent enough time in them to know those employees don’t play games.
Unfortunately, this guy had to learn his lesson the hard way.
Still, hell of a performance to never hit the deck. At the very least, you have to respect it.
The team dropped the first look at the star quarterback wearing Jags colors for fans Thursday night, and he looks ready to roll.
Check them out below.
Other than Andrew Luck and Peyton Manning, I can’t remember a quarterback entering the league with more hype than Lawrence.
Everyone wants to see what he can do with his golden arm and Urban Meyer as his coach. To say expectations are sky high would be an understatement.
The entire city of Jacksonville and the fan base is amped up. The savior for them has arrived!
He’s a hell of a player, and he’s the kind of guy you want leading your huddle. He’s the kind of guy you want dropping bombs all over the field.
The season can’t start soon enough. Jacksonville has their guy, and everyone wants to see how it goes. Trust me, I have all the faith in the world he’ll be just fine.
In case you thought Saban was worried, I can promise you that he’s not. In a video tweeted by Simone Eli, the seven-time national title was asked about the remark, and his reaction was gold.
He cracked a smile and responded with, “In golf?”
“In golf?” *laughs* “Is that what he was talking about? In football? ????
Pray for the Aggies in 2021 against Alabama. Nick Saban might pour 100 on them this time. That’s a dude with a score to settle and all the confidence in the world. It’s going to be a massacre.
Eventually, Jake Paul’s antics were going to write a check that his body couldn’t cash. Going after arguably the best boxer to ever live turned out to have consequences, and Paul didn’t hold his own at all.
Now, imagine what’s going to happen if one of these UFC guys catch Jake in a bar or a club. He’s going to get whipped.
It’s beyond tragic. Young men aren’t supposed to be dying at the age of 20 while in college. Young men aren’t supposed to die when their whole world is ahead of them.
It’s just heartbreaking for a family that has already known so much pain and tragedy.
We grieve and weep with the Ehlinger family. Prayers, love and support.
Bill and Melinda Gates met with Jeffrey Epstein in 2013, which infuriated Melinda and caused major issues in the couple’s relationship, according to a report from The Daily Beast.
The meeting occurred in September of 2013 at Epstein’s Upper East Side Mansion in New York City. It was a turning point for Epstein and Gate’s relationship, after which Melinda told friends that she was uncomfortable meeting with the sex offender and had not wanted to be there, according to The Daily Beast.
Gates and Epstein had met several times beginning in 2011, three years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting a young girl, The New York Times.
After Epstein was arrested in 2019, Gates was scrutinized for his relationship with the sex offender, according to The Daily Beast.
A technology associate who attended some of the same events as Epstein commented on Gates’ ties with him.
“If you ask Bill Gates, he’ll say, ‘Oh I had absolutely no idea he wasn’t up to anything of the highest moral character.’ But I seriously doubted Epstein’s moral character,” the person, who asked to remain anonymous, said, according to The Daily Beast.
Republican Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney “secretly orchestrated” an op-ed in the Washington Post from all living former secretaries of defense slamming former President Trump’s handling of the military in January, according to the New Yorker.
Eric Edelman, a friend of Cheney’s, reportedly told the New Yorker that Cheney had personally met with all 10 living former defense secretaries, including Trump’s first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, urging them to participate in the op-ed. The report comes as Cheney is facing an onslaught of criticism from pro-Trump factions in the Republican Party who want to see her removed from the GOP leadership in the House of Representatives. (RELATED: Lambasted For Lack Of Loyalty, Rep. Cheney Voted With Trump More Often Than Rival Rep. Stefanik)
“She was the one who generated it, because she was so worried about what Trump might do,” Edelman told the magazine. “It speaks to the degree that she was concerned about the threat to our democracy that Trump represented.”
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 17: (L-R) Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) talks to reporters with House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) following House Republican conference leadership elections at the U.S. Capitol on November 17, 2020 in Washington, DC. While Cheney, Scalise and McCarthy remain at the top of conference leadership, House Republicans elected Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) to serve as vice-chair of the conference; Richard Hudson (R-NC) as conference secretary; and Rep. Gary Palmer (R-AL) as policy chair. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Cheney has become one of Trump’s most vocal critics within the GOP since he left office, arguing repeatedly that he has no place in the future of the party.
Trump has lashed out at Cheney and many other Republicans he views as rivals since departing from the White House, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.
Cheney survived by a wide margin an attempt to oust her from leadership in February. That time, however, she went into the vote with endorsements from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise.
Now, both of them, as well as Trump, have endorsed Republican New York Rep. Elise Stefanik to replace Cheney.
A man charged with killing 10 people at a Colorado supermarket surrendered after being shot by a police officer who waited for him to come into view down a store aisle, according to new information about the shooting released Thursday.
The details were contained in a district attorney's report that found Boulder officer Richard Steidell was justified in shooting Ahmad Alissa and said his shots stopped the attack.
"Officer Steidell's shots were the last ones fired by anyone inside the King Soopers on March 22," District Attorney Michael Dougherty said in the report.
Police work the scene outside of a King Soopers grocery store on March 22 where a mass shooting took place in Boulder, Colo. (AP)
Alissa is accused of killing nine shoppers and workers inside and outside the store as well as Officer Eric Talley, one of the first three police officers who entered the store. He also was charged with attempted first-degree murder after authorities said shots were fired at 19 other people, including 11 law enforcement officers.
Alissa's defense team has suggested he suffers from mental illness. But they have not offered any other details about his condition.
According to the new report, Steidell was part of the second wave of police officers who entered the store after Talley was killed near the cash registers.
About 20 seconds later, shots were fired over their heads, with one bullet passing between the heads of two officers. Steidell dove to the ground and fired his handgun at a man he saw holding a long gun down an aisle.
A man charged with killing 10 people at a Colorado supermarket surrendered after being shot by Boulder Police Officer Richard Steidell, shown here, who waited for him to come into view down a store aisle, according to new information about the shooting released Thursday. (AP)
The gunman withdrew from view. Steidell remained on the ground, still and pointing his gun down the aisle. When the gunman came back into view about 90 seconds later and raised his weapon, Steidell fired at him, the report states.
It was later determined that one of his eight shots — the only ones fired by police during the ordeal — hit Alissa in the right thigh.
Steidell, a Coast Guard veteran who has been with Boulder police since 2019, was placed on paid leave while the district attorney's office and outside law enforcement agencies conducted a standard investigation of his decision to shoot at Alissa.
The 31-year-old Steidell, who was awarded pistol sharpshooter and rifle marksmanship ribbons in the military, will return to duty Friday now that the district attorney has found his actions were justified, police spokesperson Dionne Waugh said.
It’s all but certain that as early as next week House Republicans will strip Rep. Liz Cheney of her number-three GOP leadership position – but Cheney faces another major headache back home in Wyoming, as Republicans are plotting to oust her as the state’s lone representative in Congress when she’s up for re-election next year.
Cheney, the most high profile of the 10 House Republicans to vote in January to impeach then-President Trump for inciting the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by right-wing extremists, is facing primary challenges from an increasing number of GOP candidates. That, however, might be Cheney’s saving grace: A crowded field likely divides the anti-Cheney and pro-Trump vote.
It wasn’t that long ago that the conservative Cheney, the daughter of former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, was a rising star in the GOP. But thanks to her impeachment vote over Trump’s role in the storming of the Capitol and her vocal criticism of Trump’s repeated unfounded claims that the 2020 presidential election was "rigged" and "stolen," she’s become a party pariah and is now at the top of the former president’s list of Republican enemies.
Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the House Republican Conference chair, speaking with reporters following a GOP strategy session on Capitol Hill on April 20. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February, Trump urged his supporters to "get rid" of Cheney and added "hopefully they'll get rid of her with the next election."
Earlier this week he warned against splitting the anti-Cheney vote, arguing in a statement that "her only chance would be if vast numbers of people run against her which, hopefully, won’t happen."
The former president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., is also cautioning against multiple primary challengers.
The younger Trump called into an anti-Cheney rally in Wyoming earlier this year, emphasizing "let's not split this vote up and blow an opportunity to get rid of a RINO," which is the acronym for Republican in name only.
A source familiar with Donald Trump Jr.’s thinking tells Fox News that "getting rid of Liz Cheney is right near the top of his 2022 to do list. You can expect him to be very engaged in that race."
"While he and his father haven’t landed on a specific candidate yet, that will come sooner probably rather than later. They look forward to uniting the party in Wyoming," the source added.
The former president’s team is following the burgeoning race, with a separate source close to Trump’s orbit saying that among those Republican candidates or potential contenders they’re watching are businessman Darin Smith, state lawmaker Chuck Gray, and state Sen. Anthony Bouchard – who’s raised $400,000 since launching his bid a couple of months ago.
Surveys by Trump’s pollster and by the fiscally conservative and anti-tax outside group Club for Growth both suggest that Cheney would face a very challenging renomination if she faces off against a single primary challenger.
The Club for Growth’s political wing is vetting potential Cheney challengers, traveling to Wyoming recently to interview close to a dozen people.
"We’re definitely spending a lot of effort making sure we get the right person to run to challenge Cheney," Club for Growth President David McIntosh told Fox News.
McIntosh said his "goal to is create unity" with Trump’s political team and with the Wyoming GOP, which censured Cheney earlier this year, in order to "narrow down to a couple of different potential candidates."
He said the Club for Growth’s PAC "will bundle contributions from our donors around the country. I can’t tell you the number of them who have already called me and said ‘when will you give us a candidate in Wyoming. We want to contribute to that person.’"
And, McIntosh touted that "we’ll spend what it takes to win."
Smith, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2016 in an open seat race won by Cheney, told Fox News he’s "seriously considering making a run" and that "if we get in, it will be soon."
Smith added that he’s "America First all the way," and that "if I were to get in and he (Trump) were to endorse me, that would just be over the top."
But he also worried about a plethora of primary challengers dividing the anti-Cheney vote. "That’s the hope of the left. I think that we’re smarter than we were in the past," he emphasized.
And he added that "If I’m in and somebody is running stronger than me or gets the nod from Trump, and takes off, then I’m going to fold in behind that person."
Bouchard wasn't as concerned with the growing field of contenders.
He said that the "climate is good for conservatives." And pointing to his fundraising haul to date, he highlighted that "I think everyone knows I’m the front runner and we plan to stay in that position… we’ve exceeded every financial goal that we’ve had."
The barrage of attacks from Trump and his allies seems to have energized Cheney’s fundraising. Last month the congresswoman reported a record $1.54 million haul during the January-March first quarter of fundraising for her 2022 reelection campaign.
A source familiar with Cheney’s thinking tells Fox News that "she is running and she plans on winning" next year.
Cheney world acknowledges that there’s anger over her impeachment vote in January, but they feel that there’s also support, arguing that people recognize she did the right thing.
Expect Cheney to run for re-election on her achievements as an important advocate for the state, showcasing that she’s accomplished a lot in Washington because she’s an effective legislator. Also expect Cheney to talk directly to voters and explain her impeachment vote, and make the case that the 2020 presidential election wasn’t stolen.
Fox News’ Jason Donner contributed to this report.
SOHAG, Egypt – Countries worldwide wrestling with new coronavirus surges are trying to ensure they aren’t hit by an India-style disaster. They face many of the same risks, including large populations that have shirked restrictions and fragile health systems shaken under the strain.
In a province along the Nile in southern Egypt, hospitals have been flooded with COVID-19 patients, a main hot spot in a third spike swelling across the country. Doctors in Sohag province warn the health system there could collapse, even as the government rushes in new supplies.
"My estimate is that there is no family in Sohag that does not have a corona case," said Dr. Mahmoud Fahmy Mansour, head of the province's doctors’ union. "We lost five physicians in one week."
He said a scenario like India was a possibility, but "God willing, it is a very far possibility."
Long reluctant to impose new lockdowns, Egypt’s government announced its strictest restrictions in months on Wednesday. It ordered cafés, restaurants, stores and malls to close at 9 p.m. and banned large gatherings for two weeks, as well as shutting down beaches and parks during the upcoming Eid el-Fitr holiday at the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
Egypt isn’t alone in seeing mounting new infections. Worldwide, more cases have been reported in the past two weeks than in the entire first six months of the pandemic, World Health Organization director general Tedros Adhanom said.
India and Brazil accounted for a large part of that, "but there are many other countries all over the world that face a very fragile situation," he said. "What is happening in India and Brazil could happen elsewhere unless we all take these public health precautions."
April 14, 2021: In this file photo, medical workers tend to coronavirus patients in the COVID-19 intensive care unit at Kenyatta National Hospital, in Nairobi, Kenya..
((AP Photo/Brian Inganga, File))
India has been hit by a catastrophic surge of COVID-19 infections after its prime minister boasted of vanquishing the pandemic and following multiple massive crowding events. New cases and deaths skyrocketed nearly 30-fold during March and April. The health system has been overwhelmed, leaving patients desperate for oxygen and other supplies.
Wealthier nations, as they immunize more of their populations, are finding room to open up. But countries where vaccination has been slow or minimal face grimmer prospects. They must grapple with whether to lock down to thwart new surges and risk damaging their economies — all with the possibility of an India-style tragedy looming.
In Turkey, new cases surged nearly six-fold from the beginning of March, reaching a peak of more than 60,000 a day. The government imposed a three-week national lockdown on April 29 but exempted many sectors, allowing millions to keep going to work.
Numbers have fallen, but medical experts are calling for a 28-day full closure of all non-essential services, while only some 10 million of its more than 80 million people have been fully vaccinated.
"These restrictions were not the restrictions we called for," said Vedat Bulut, secretary-general of the independent Turkish Medical Association.
In Egypt, average daily new cases have doubled since early February to just over 1,000 a day and continue to rise, compared to earlier peaks of 1,400 to 1,600 a day last summer and in December, according to official numbers.
The scope of the pandemic has been difficult to judge in the country of 100 million, most of whom live in densely packed cities along the Nile. Official figures report 234,015 cases, including 13,714 dead — considered a significant undercount like elsewhere in the world.
In Sohag province, health workers have grown desperate. One doctor who chairs a major hospital there said the real figures are likely 10 times the Health Ministry rate of 400-450 new cases a week.
"The ministry is like an ostrich burying its head in the sand," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
Mustafa Salem, a Sohag lawmaker, said he has received dozens of calls from people desperate to find ventilators or intensive care unit beds.
When Ismail Abdallah fell ill last month, his family rushed him to a clinic, where without being tested he was told it was pneumonia.
Two days later, the 50-year-old farmer and father of seven had trouble breathing. At the hospital, he was confirmed with COVID-19, and his family scrambled to find a bed in packed ICUs.
"There were no available beds in the free ward," said a relative, Amr Mahrous. "We struggled to find a bed in the paid ward."
After two weeks in isolation at a hospital, Abdullah died last week.
The Health Ministry has beefed up facilities in the province, sending oxygen generators and ventilators and increasing the number of ICUs. It deployed more physicians and doubled medical teams to follow up with those isolated at home. Two vaccination centers have been set up and more are planned, and 100 teams mobilized to raise awareness.
The Health Ministry listed Sohag among five hot spots in the country —- including Cairo, a metropolis of some 20 million people.
Health officials attribute the new spike to widespread ignoring of precautions. Throughout Egypt, mask wearing and social distancing are rare. Some cafes still serve waterpipes, shared among customers, despite government bans. Wedding parties and funerals still take place, and people crowd into marketplaces.
In Islamic Cairo, the capital’s historic center, families go to communal prayers during the holy month of Ramadan. Tens of thousands gather at night in the bazaar's narrow streets, shopping or sitting in cafes. Few wear face masks.
Hajah Fatima, 57, came from the southern province of Beni Sueif with her family and had "iftar," the meal ending the daytime fast, in a café next to the revered Al-Hussein Shrine.
"It’s a custom," she said. "Corona? Nothing will happen to us except what God has decreed."
So far, more than 1 million people, or just 1% of Egypt’s population, have been vaccinated, Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly said Wednesday.
In the crowded Palestinian enclave of the Gaza Strip, home to 2 million people, cases have risen swiftly. In March and April, infection rates surpassed 1,000 a day — the number Gaza previously recorded weekly. Daily deaths have doubled to a high of 20. The virus has killed more than 900 Gazans and sickened over 102,000, more than half of them this year.
"Hospitals are struggling to cope," the international aid group Doctors Without Borders warned this week.
The territory’s Hamas rulers closed mosques and restaurants and imposed a nighttime curfew at the beginning of Ramadan to slow the outbreak. But it decided to lift those restrictions for the final 10 days of the holy month, alarming health officials.
"We are concerned by the large-scale easing of the measures," said Rami Abadllah, head of epidemiology at the Health Ministry.
Amid concerns over India, Kenya, which is coming down from a recent peak, halted flights with the country for two weeks, while Nigeria suspended flights with India, Brazil and Turkey, fearing new virus strains could come in as it tries to bring down cases, particularly in Lagos, home to some 20 million people.
In South Africa, with by far the largest number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in Africa, officials warn of a new surge as the Southern Hemisphere’s winter approaches.
Pakistan is in the midst of a third wave, with single-day fatalities hitting their highest of the entire pandemic on April 28, with 201 deaths.
Health officials added hundreds more hospital beds. Oxygen production had already been nearly doubled to 800 tons a day compared to last year. Still, at the surge's peak in recent weeks, it was using 90% of that production.
New cases have eased slightly this week from a running average of around 6,000 a day.
"Thank God, we have so far managed to cope with this huge increase because of proactively building capacity of the entire system," Planning and Development Minister Asad Umar said.
But he warned the country of more than 200 million could face an India-level disaster unless people adhere to precautions that have been widely ignored. The government has rejected calls for a lockdown but warns that could change.
"Be careful. For yourself, and your loved ones," he said in a tweet.
The recall of California Gov. Gavin Newsom is headed to the ballot box this fall. While at first blush that may not seem like it matters if you live outside of California, the plain truth is that the Golden State’s far-left policies are damaging the entire nation and you have to pay for a good chunk of them.
That makes the recall of Gavin Newsom every American’s business.
California is beset with problems. For years, California’s policies have led to crisis after crisis. There is a perennial water crisis, a wildfire crisis, an electricity crisis, a crime problem, business and job flight from the state, homelessness and poverty.
Governor Newsom chose the most draconian shutdown route. He created a complex rubric of a color-coded tiered system of rules for counties on top of creating illogical regions that paired the state’s most populated counties with rural counties. The shutdown added t last in the nation in-school attendance to California's long list of problems.
The state legislative session was suspended, which ordinarily would be a welcome respite from the constant passage of budget-busting bills. However, Newsom engaged in a one man-one rule deluge of executive orders that suspended or modified over 400 laws.
In response, a flurry of lawsuits was filed by businesses, churches and even the City of San Francisco. Some made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which resulted in the overturning of some of Newsom’s executive orders. While other lawsuits in state court resulted, at one point, in an injunction prohibiting him from making more rules.
The sum of decades of Democrat rule in California and all those policies have been a tremendous loss of businesses and, therefore, jobs. "At least 50 large corporations have left California since 2014, with the vast majority leaving in 2019 and 2020," taking their jobs with them, according to notes from the California Policy Center which keeps a California "Book of Exoduses." Left behind has been an exacerbated joblessness crisis, a worsening homeless crisis and calls for higher taxes to pay for more programs.
Predictably, California needed a bailout and Biden and the Democrats obliged with "$42.6 billion according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. State government will reportedly get $26.1 billion in aid, while local governments will get about $16 billion." As one news station used to say: That’s your money.
It hasn’t been the only bailout California has needed.
For years, California Democrat politicians have bowed to the far left and refused to allow for proper forest and brush management on state and federal lands. As a result, California has been subject to ravaging and deadly wildfires of unnecessary dimensions.
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According to the Los Angeles Times California "received more than $1.3 billion in federal aid to rebuild after the 2017 wine country wildfires, the 2018 Camp fire in Butte County and other disasters from those years," and even more in 2020. That, too, is your money.
Even before COVID, California’s anti-job policies required $10.2 billion in federal loans (an amount larger than the total budget of 11 states that year) to pay for state unemployment benefits by the end of 2012. Between 2011 and 2018, California’s "General Fund paid a total of $1.4 billion in interest payments" on those loans. If that was not enough, in January of this year, California paid "as much as $31 billion in unemployment funds to scammers."
As for food price increases across the country, some Sacramento Democrats believe that farming harms the environment. So, they deprive Central Valley farmers of water (over 75% of the water that reaches San Joaquin/Sacramento Delta flows straight out to the ocean) and as described in Forbes, "make farming an increasingly more expensive enterprise, through wage and environmental regulations, to the point that they are driving farmers out of business – thereby reducing the capacity of California to produce food." That means higher food prices for everyone.
You can add to that trillions in long-term debt – between two and three trillion in government debt, pension liabilities and deferred infrastructure upkeep. The amount is so high the exact number is unknown. Someday, California will likely need a bailout for that as well.
If Gavin Newsom remains the governor of California, the assault on jobs, farmers, and employers will continue – including a ban on gas powered-vehicles. But still, there is more.
Last but not least, Newsom is pushing ahead with the early release of 76,000 felons including nearly 20,000 inmates who are serving life sentences with the possibility of parole.
That is Newsom’s California.
While the list of California’s problems goes on and on – keep this in mind – Gavin Newsom wants to be president of the United States. He wants his failed policies to be the norm across the Country.
That is why the recall of Gavin Newsom matters to all of America.
Fortunately, over 2.1 million Californians took a stand and signed a petition to Recall Gavin Newsom. This fall, a recall election will be held with a chance to bring sanity. While there are numerous additional reasons to recall the governor about which I have written, every American must come to understand that, just like Californians, the nation also cannot afford Newsom anymore.
LONDON – The European Medicines Agency says it has begun an accelerated authorization process for an experimental coronavirus treatment made by GlaxoSmithKline and Vir BioTechnology.
In a statement on Friday, the EU drug regulator said it had started a rolling review of sotrovimab, based on early results from an ongoing study into whether the treatment can prevent hospitalization or death in people who don’t yet have severe COVID-19. But EMA said it had not yet received the complete data and cautioned that "it is too early to draw any conclusions about the benefit-risk balance of the medication."
Although the EMA has given the green light to four vaccines, there are few licensed treatments for the coronavirus, especially any that might prevent people with mild COVID-19 from progressing to severe disease.
Sotrovimab is a monoclonal antibody, a lab-produced antibody that is intended to stimulate the immune system by reducing the ability of the coronavirus’s spike protein to enter the body’s cells.
The unprecedented explosion in cases came even after the country had fared relatively well against the pandemic until recently.
Experts point to a "perfect storm" of factors to explain why the country is being hit so hard all of a sudden.
The outbreak comes on the heels of the government allowing massive crowds to gather for Hindu religious festivals and political rallies before state elections — compounded by more relaxed attitudes about safety precautions and the emergence of new, more contagious strains of the virus.
"It’s almost like India hit a perfect storm," S.V. Subramanian, a professor of population health and geography at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told USA Today.
The country broke its own record for daily coronavirus cases and deaths on Thursday with 412,262 new infections and 3,980 fatalities over the last 24 hours. Both figures, however, are believed to be an undercount.
The latest crisis stands in stark contrast to the first wave of the pandemic, when it issued one of the harshest lockdowns worldwide on its 1.3 billion population.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned all domestic and international travel in late March 2020 and shut down factories, schools, offices and all stores other than those providing essential services.
Case numbers peaked around September at nearly 100,000 infections, but then the infection rate slowed significantly, declaring all-time case lows in January and February.
Modi said the country had beaten the virus in late January, insisting its efforts had saved "humanity from a big disaster by containing the coronavirus effectively," Foreign Policy reported.
"The government just did not see the second wave coming and started celebrating too early," Dr. Shahid Jameel, a top virologist, told the BBC.
Following the declaration of victory, people dropped their guard when it came to health measures, such as wearing masks and social distancing, experts said.
This included a number of Modi’s ministers who ignored the government’s mask recommendations while addressing large crowds at rallies during his election campaign.
The government also allowed people to gather for Kumbh Mela in April, a Hindu festival that attracts millions to go ahead on the Ganges River in Haridwa.
"There was a complete disconnect between what they practiced and what they preached," Dr. Chandrakant Lahariya, a health systems expert in New Delhi, told the BBC.
"When the first wave was tapering, that’s when they should have prepared for a second wave and assumed the worst. The [government] should have taken an inventory of oxygen and [the drug] remdesivir and then ramped up manufacturing capacity," Mahesh Zagade, who was former health secretary of Maharashtra state, told the BBC.
Vaccinations are also lagging in the country, which doesn’t have enough doses and has only been administering shots to about 2.1 million people daily, or around 0.15 percent of its population.
"It will take months before we have enough vaccines to speed up the program. In the meantime, millions will continue to be at risk of getting Covid," Lahariya told the BBC.
Bertha Lewis, CEO of the Black Institute, a progressive think tank, also called out the governor for using minority churches as "props."
"Stop doing this to us," Lewis said during a #WeAreEssential rally outside of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Thursday, according to the New York Post. "We’re not a `pop-up’ community. We’re tired of being treated as props and pawns by Governor Cuomo. …. He only shows up at Black and Brown churches when he wants a photo op. Enough is enough."
"We’re tired of being treated as props and pawns by Governor Cuomo. …. He only shows up at Black and Brown churches when he wants a photo op. Enough is enough."
— Bertha Lewis, CEO, Black Institute
Lewis was reportedly referring to news conferences Cuomo has held in minority communities that have excluded the press amid his nursing home and sexual harassment scandals.
Across the state, 17 "pop-up" vaccination sites have been set up in houses of worship, according to the Post.
Several of the rally speakers stressed the importance of designating churches as essential so they could open up and be long-term vaccination sites in minority communities in the city, where many have yet to be vaccinated.
"Our houses of worship can play a big role in vaccinating Black and Brown New Yorkers, but Governor Cuomo must designate them as essential to make that happen," Pastor Gil Monrose of the 67th Precinct Clergy Council in Brooklyn, said at the rally, according to the Post. "Until a larger number of our folks are vaccinated against COVID, our communities will be left out of the recovery after COVID."
New York City mayoral candidate Eric Adams said the city can’t underestimate the "power of credible messengers" in getting people vaccinated.
"Time and time again, I have found that our diverse community of interfaith clergy has the essential trust of audiences who are receptive to their messages, from vaccinations and preventive healthcare to youth empowerment and caring for our homeless neighbors in need."
Ralliers held up signs that read, "I am essential," and "#HowToVaxNYC."
A spokesperson for the New York Health Department told the Post, "We enthusiastically welcome any offer to join New York’s multi-pronged, multi-faceted efforts in breaking down barriers to access and empowering all New Yorkers to confidently make the decision to get vaccinated. Our goal is to get as many shots into as many arms as we can, as quickly and equitably as humanly possible … We look forward to reviewing their plans."
There is no suppression going on of anyone’s votes anywhere in the country. Anyone who says otherwise is just making it up.
The Census Bureau’s recent release of its 2020 election survey of voters clearly demonstrates that those who have been claiming, without justification or evidence, that we have been experiencing a wave of so-called "voter suppression" have a lot of explaining to do.
Among those making such claims: Vice President Kamala Harris, Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, U.S. Justice Department nominee Kristen Clark, former Attorney General Eric Holder, Stacey Abrams, and a host of leaders of leftwing organizations like the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and the NAACP, among others.
Instead, the Census Bureau reports that the turnout in last year’s election was 66.8% – just short of the record turnout of 67.7% of voting-age citizens for the 1992 election. It beat the turnout in President Obama’s first election, which was reported as 63.6% by the bureau.
Kamala Harris made that false claim about "voter suppression" in September last year when she was running for office. Yet the Census survey shows that there was higher turnout among all races in 2020 when compared to the 2016 election. Black Americans turned out at 63%, compared to 60% in 2016.
Vanita Gupta has repeatedly made the same dishonest claim about "voter suppression" and an "assault" on voting rights. But 59% of Asian Americans voted in 2020, a 10-percentage point increase from 2016 when 49% turned out to vote. Only 47% of Asian Americans voted in 2008 and 2012 when Obama ran for office and was reelected, including during a period when Gupta was in charge of the Civil Rights Division at Justice and was supposed to be protecting voting rights.
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Kristen Clarke, the radical who has been nominated by Biden to head the Civil Rights Division, has also made the same deceptive claim about "voter suppression," including states that, she claims, are "making it harder to register to vote."
Really? Because the Census Bureau reports that voter registration in 2020 reached 72.7%, which is higher than the 70.3% who registered in 2016 after eight years of the Obama-Biden administration. Not only that, but voter registration in 2020 was higher than in the 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections.
Eric Holder propagandized about "voter suppression" in 2020, claiming efforts to improve election integrity are "anti-democratic, anti-American." Hispanics obviously disagreed with him since they turned out at 54% in 2020, compared to only 50% of Hispanics who voted in 2008 when his boss was elected.
And Hispanic turnout actually dropped during Holder’s tenure as attorney general from 2009 through 2015, falling to 48% in the 2012 and 2016 elections.
Americans are easily registering – when they want to – and they are turning out to vote when they are interested in the candidates who are running for election.
So you mean to say that with the Trump administration running the Justice Department, Hispanic turnout actually jumped up six percentage points in 2020? Doesn’t sound very anti-democratic or anti-American to me. Although what does sound anti-democratic and anti-American is trying to scare and manipulate the general public with fabricated stories about "voter suppression."
Stacey Abrams has been spouting nonsense about Georgia, the American election system, and "voter suppression" since she lost her race for governor in Georgia in 2018. This despite record registration and turnout numbers ever since Georgia’s voter photo ID law went into effect in the 2008 election; Black and Hispanic turnout skyrocketed compared to the 2004 presidential election.
It is, of course, hard to make such deceptive claims when Hispanics made up 11% of the total turnout in the 2020 election, up from only 9% in 2016. But that certainly has not stopped those who reflexively recite the "voter suppression" mantra to a gullible crowd, including many in the media and corporate executive suites.
The Hispanic share of the vote was just behind that of Black Americans, who had 12% of the total vote in 2020 – the same percentage of the total vote by Black Americans in the 2016 election at the end of the Obama-Biden administration when all of these liberals who keeping pushing the phony "voter suppression" myth were running things.
The bottom line of the Census Bureau’s survey is that Americans are easily registering – when they want to – and they are turning out to vote when they are interested in the candidates who are running for election.
In fact, in an election year in which we were dealing with an unprecedented shut down of the country due to a pandemic, we had, according to the Bureau, "the highest voter turnout of the 21st century."
The Tennessee General Assembly has advanced a proposed ban on the teaching of critical race theory.
The bill was passed at the end of Wednesday's legislative session. It calls for withholding funding from public schools that discuss White privilege with their students, according to The Tennessean newspaper of Nashville.
State Sen. Brian Kelsey, a Republican from Memphis, argued that teaching the theory would be "harmful to our students."
"Critical Race Theory teaches that American democracy is a lie. It teaches that the rule of law does not exist & is instead a series of power struggles among racial groups. It is harmful to our students & is antithetical to everything we stand for as Americans & as Tennesseans," Kelsey tweeted Wednesday.
He proposed an addition to the bill that would forbid teaching students that "the rule of law does not exist, but instead is a series of power relationships and struggles among racial or other groups," the paper reported.
"That is the very definition of critical race theory," Kelsey added. "I was subject to this teaching 20 years ago in law school and know it very well, and that is the very definition of it."
State Sen. Raumesh Akbari, a Democrat from Memphis, argued that "children deserve to learn the full story and truth of our people."
"This offensive legislation pretends skin color has never mattered in our country. As far too many Americans know, race-based oppression, discrimination and inequality has been a fact of life since before the dawn of our nation," Akbari told FOX 13 of Memphis. "Our children deserve to learn the full story and truth of our people — the victories and the struggles. Unfortunately, the controlling party is attempting to erase historical fact in favor [of] whitewashed falsehoods."
"Critical race theory is rooted in critical theory, which argues that social problems are created and influenced by societal structures and cultural assumptions," added state Sen. Katrina Robinson, a Black Democrat from Memphis. "How ironic that a body made up of a simple majority of White privileged men can determine whether even my grandchildren can see reflections of themselves in the history lessons at their school."
Similar proposals surfaced in other states this year, The Tennessean reported.
Good morning and welcome to Fox News First. Here's what you need to know as you start your day
'God' left out of Biden's National Day of Prayer proclamation Like his predecessors, President Biden issued a proclamation on the National Day of Prayer this week, but one word was missing.
Both former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump mentioned "God" in their National Day of Prayer proclamations, but Biden's proclamation never mentions God, only Americans' "many religions and belief systems" and the "power of prayer."
"Throughout our history, Americans of many religions and belief systems have turned to prayer for strength, hope and guidance," Biden's proclamation reads. "Prayer has nourished countless souls and powered moral movements – including essential fights against racial injustice, child labor and infringement on the rights of disabled Americans. Prayer is also a daily practice for many, whether it is to ask for help or strength, or to give thanks over blessings bestowed."
Meanwhile, Trump's 2017 proclamation mentioned God five times, his 2018 proclamation mentioned God five times, his 2019 proclamation mentioned God seven times and his 2020 proclamation mentioned God 11 times.
While the proclamation itself didn't include "God," Biden's remarks for the occasion did say the coronavirus vaccine was developed "by the grace of God." CLICK HERE FOR MORE ON OUR TOP STORY.
In other developments: - Rev. Graham reacts to Biden leaving 'God' out of prayer proclamation: 'There is no one else to pray to' - Sara Carter exclusive: Biden border policies fueling sprawling cartel-linked pot-growing operations far inland - Hannity blasts White House after Psaki admits strategically 'hiding Biden' from unscripted press questions - White House edits transcript to downplay support for Ukraine to join NATO - White House slams Florida’s new voting bill: ‘Moving in the wrong direction’ - Biden repeats false claim about infrastructure plan after Stelter praised him for listening to fact-checkers - McConnell says 'real chance' Biden, Dems could work with GOP on 'bipartisan' infrastructure bill
Ron Klain, Biden's powerful chief of staff, leads White House rife with dark money ties President Biden has padded his administration with a number of individuals with strong ties to progressive dark money groups, including his chief of staff Ron Klain, which could provide a pipeline for the groups to push their agendas to the White House.
Biden has surrounded himself with such individuals despite aligning with the left-wing flank by calling for "an end [to] dark money groups" on his campaign website.
Klain, who has a long history with Biden dating back to the 1980s, now helps steer his political agenda from the Oval Office. Klain has ties to the Center for American Progress (CAP) Action Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based organization led by Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta. Klain for several years served on the group's board of directors, which does not disclose its donors in tax forms.
CAP held significant influence with the Obama administration as Biden served as vice president, and likely will again with Klain as Biden's right-hand man. Klain has touted CAP several times on Twitter over the years and praised their 2018 pressure campaign to get businesses to cut ties with the National Rifle Association, tweeting, "Big big big kudos to the team at @thinkprogress @amprog for spearheading this dramatic turnaround!!!"
"Believe it or not: dark money is about to get even darker," Klain tweeted in 2018, less than a year before Biden announced his candidacy for president. Biden heavily benefited from hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis. CLICK HERE FOR MORE.
In other developments: - Biden climate nominee touted 'environmental upside' to pandemic - Liberal dark money groups drive efforts to pack the Supreme Court - 'Dark money' surpassed $1B in 2020, mostly boosting Democrats
Minnesota bank standoff ends; hostages safe, suspect in custody, reports say A suspect was in custody Thursday night following an hours-long hostage situation stemming from an attempted bank robbery at a Wells Fargo bank branch in St. Cloud, Minnesota, according to reports.
All hostages were safe and unharmed, city police told FOX 9 of Minneapolis. The suspect was identified by police as Ray Reco McNeary, according to the St. Cloud Times. He was seen being led out of the bank shortly before 11:30 p.m. CT.
In March, McNeary was booked into jail on suspicion of two counts of felony domestic assault, the paper reported. Stearns County Attorney Janelle Kendall said her office expected to have formal charges for him on Friday.
At least four hostages were released shortly before 10 p.m. CT -- all of them bank employees, according to The Associated Press. It wasn't immediately clear if there were any other hostages.
Police deployed all of their resources to the scene, spokeswoman Lt. Lori Ellering told Fox News, and the FBI was assisting. Negotiators had been working to free all hostages. CLICK HERE FOR MORE.
In other developments: - Idaho school shooting: 3 wounded before teacher disarmed 6th-grade student, authorities say - Tucker Carlson: Could New York City have a gun-wielding mayor? - LA County DA Gascón won't seek death penalty for pair charged with torturing, killing boy, 10 - Portland driver confronted by armed group in broad daylight, shocking video shows
TODAY'S MUST-READS: - Bill and Melinda Gates divorce is ‘not a friendly split,’ sources allege: 'A long time in the making' - Fort Jackson IDs trainee accused of hijacking school bus with Army-issued M-4 - Jen Psaki admits Biden taking impromptu reporter questions is ‘not something we recommend’ - Pro golfer arrested in Orlando for allegedly trying to meet with decoy posing as 15-year-old girl - Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms says 'no' to reelection bid - Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine effective against coronavirus variants, study finds
THE LATEST FROM FOX BUSINESS: - Pfizer CEO calls vaccine patent waiver push ‘so wrong’: Report - Apple's app store chief fends off attacks in antitrust trial - San Francisco loses biggest convention of 2021 due to COVID-19 - Residents left big metros during pandemic for family: study - Alaska’s tourism economy frozen as pandemic weighs on cruise industry - AMC theaters CEO: Movie-going is coming back
#TheFlashback: CLICK HERE to find out what happened on "This Day in History."
SOME PARTING WORDS
Laura Ingraham examined the antiracist curriculum and propaganda infiltrating schools on Thursday’s "The Ingraham Angle."
The host claimed that many school districts will be teaching children systematic radicalism when classes resume in the fall.
"So they want to control language, instill fear and enforce rules with specific and implicit threats," Ingraham said. "And, of course, in some cases, life-altering punishment. … enter(s) the notion of what the anti-racist curriculum really is. It’s largely the brainchild of Ibram Kendi, and it embodies their supposed aim of promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in our schools."
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South Carolina is among 24 states where the death penalty remains law. In the past 16 years, 11 states have rescinded capital punishment, Mr. Dunham said, including Virginia, which in March became the first Southern state to do so. Governors have also imposed death penalty moratoriums in California, Oregon and Pennsylvania.
Park officials say the bison have altered vegetation patterns, damaged archaeologically valuable sites and even threatened the water supply for animals and humans in the Grand Canyon. “You’ll see them wading in the pools, munching grass next to the pool, just having a great time,” Ms. Thomas said. “They don’t generally go somewhere else to…
In response to the Dominion question, Mr. Youngkin said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most important issue we’re going to talk about right now.” He laid out “five steps to restore our trust” in elections.
WASHINGTON — Minutes after a group of congressional Democrats unveiled a bill recently to add seats to the Supreme Court, the Iowa Republican Party slammed Representative Cindy Axne, a Democrat and potential Senate candidate, over the issue.
WASHINGTON — In early 2020, members of a Taliban-linked criminal network in Afghanistan detained in raids told interrogators that they had heard that Russians were offering money to reward killings of American and coalition troops.
A federal appeals court has overturned the conviction of a former U.S. representative from Florida who had been accused of running a sham charity and had served time in prison, with the judges finding that a juror had been wrongfully dismissed for saying that the Holy Spirit had told him that the former congresswoman was…
The drug rehabilitation course, which was all that kept Mr. Channel from being released sooner, is not required for all inmates imprisoned for drug offenses, Mr. McDonnell said, adding that such decisions are made on an individual basis by the parole board. Mr. McDonnell said the programs were available only inside Texas prisons, so Mr.…
In the past, lulls in the pandemic were short-lived, giving way to the surge across the Sun Belt last summer, and the painful outbreak that stretched across the United States this winter. But now, there is one crucial difference: More than half of American adults — 148 million people — have received at least one…
It is one of the oldest religious symbols: the lotus flower, blooming out of muddy waters. The mud represents our suffering, pain and delusions, said Duncan Ryuken Williams, a Soto Zen Buddhist priest, retelling the ancient lesson. And the purpose of Buddhism is to rise above.
SAN FRANCISCO — From her flower stand on Market Street, Patricia Lee saw the glint of a large blade and then feathers from a winter jacket fly through the air. An older woman buckled to her knees. In broad daylight, on one of the busiest streets in San Francisco, two unsuspecting Asian women, one of…
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According to attorney Sidney Powell, the Democrat Party and its corporate allies are turning America into a centralized country.
The husband of Suzanne Morphew, a Colorado mother who disappeared on Mother's Day of 2020, has been arrested and is facing murder charges nearly a year after her disappearance.
Kamala Harris has finally announced set dates for her trip to Latin America amid the migrant crisis at the southern border.
Biden administration officials are attempting to insert themselves into the ongoing ballot audit despite lacking the authority to do so.
Twitter suspended the account linked to President Trump's new communications platform, just days after the platform launched. According to reports Thursday, the account at DJT Desk had been suspended as of late Wednesday.
Early on Wednesday, an apartment in the Bronx caught fire, leaving one woman dead and at least 11 others injured.
Republicans are demanding answers from the CDC over reports that suggest teacher's unions are influencing school reopening guidelines, rather than hard science.
The British government is sending the Royal Navy close to the Channel Islands in its latest fishing dispute with France.
According to the White House, social media companies have the responsibility of shutting down misinformation. During a press conference Wednesday, Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked about Facebook's decision to uphold its ban of President Trump.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) warned Joe Biden's policies are bolstering Chinese control over the global supply of critical minerals.
