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Historic New Mexico Town Blocks Cell Tower After Consulting Lawyer Featured in The Defender

Residents of San Cristóbal, New Mexico, a historic valley in Taos County, successfully blocked a 195-foot cell tower from being built in their community after teaming up with a telecommunications attorney featured in The Defender.

San Cristóbal residents contacted attorney Robert Berg on Sept. 19, after reading a Sept. 18 article in The Defender. The article featured Berg’s work representing communities that opposed cell towers or wireless antennas near homes and schools.

Berg agreed to represent the residents in person and praised their teamwork. “It’s a remarkable group of people — and a remarkable valley,” he said.

On Oct. 14, the Taos County Board of Commissioners voted 3-2 to overturn the Planning Commission’s July approval of a special use permit for Skyway Towers, a Tampa-based company that builds cell towers on speculation.

“Our community was united in opposition to this tower because we know that better alternatives exist,” Mandy Sackett, a San Cristóbal resident, told The Defender. “It’s heartening that the county commissioners took our voices seriously.”

The San Cristóbal residents’ victory comes as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) — the agency that oversees wireless infrastructure — is proposing new rules that would hand the wireless industry sweeping control over where cell towers are built, according to an Oct. 17 Children’s Health Defense (CHD) action alert.

If adopted, the rules would eliminate public hearings for conditional and special use permits and automatically approve new tower applications after 150 days.

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The #1 Killer in Hospitals Isn’t a Disease — It’s a Word

Hospitals murdered COVID patients. The more they killed, the more money they made.

When the hospitals tested for COVID, they got paid more.

When they admitted patients for COVID, they got paid more.

When they put people on Remdesivir, they got paid more.

And when they put loved ones on the ventilator, they got paid more.

Meanwhile, family requests for ivermectin were denied, while their loved ones were placed on this death protocol instead.

If you think this started with COVID, think again. Hospitals are still a death sentence for loved ones.

Before the unexpected happens, learn how this death trap works to keep your loved ones safe.

COVID pulled the curtain back for millions of people.

On a mass scale, we learned that hospitals across the country followed standardized federal protocols—not individualized care.

Things like Remdesivir and ventilators were pushed on dying patients.

Ivermectin and other affordable therapies were banned.

Even when doctors knew their patients would die, many refused to try alternatives.

And families were left in the dark.

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Army Lieutenant Who Was Court-Martialed for Refusing COVID-19 Shot Granted Full Reinstatement and Retroactive Promotion After Under Secretary of War Steps In to Fix Slow Processing

The U.S. Army has officially granted full reinstatement to former First Lieutenant Mark Bashaw, retroactively promoted to Captain, after Under Secretary of War Anthony J. Tata personally intervened to address the “last mile” delays in the reinstatement process.

Under Secretary Tata announced the action on X, formerly Twitter:

“On Monday, @MCBashaw emailed me about several ‘last mile’ issues in the COVID reinstatement process. We immediately convened @USArmy leaders to address them. At this stage, any delays are unacceptable. We’re committed to reinstating our impacted warriors ASAP.”

He later added that the Army and Department of War were engaging directly with Kevin Bouren and Mark Bashaw to resolve any outstanding concerns, noting that not all corrective efforts are visible to the public, but they are “happening steadily behind the scenes.”

Retired U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer 2 and intelligence officer Sam Shoemate responded on Under Secretary Tata’s announcement, stating: “I spoke to [Bashaw]. You sure lit a fire under their ass to get him taken care of. The problem is that it shouldn’t take the Undersecretary of the DOW to get that done.

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AWS outage post-mortem fingers DNS as the culprit that took out a chunk of the internet and services for days — automation systems race and crash

The recent Amazon Web Services outage that took out a significant portion of the internet, games, and even smart home devices for days, was extensively covered in the news. Cloud services’ distributed architecture should protect customers from failures like this one, so what went wrong? Amazon published a detailed technical post-mortem of the failure, and as the famous haiku poem goes: “It’s not DNS. / There’s no way it’s DNS. / It was DNS.”

As a rough analogy, consider what happens when there’s a car crash. There’s a traffic jam that stretches for miles, in an accordion-like effect that lasts well after the accident scene has been cleared. The very first problem was fixed relatively quickly, with a three-hour outage from October 19 at 11:48 PM until October 20 at 2:40 AM. However, as with the traffic jam example, dependencies started breaking, and didn’t fully come online until much later.

The root cause was reportedly that the DNS configuration for DynamoDB (database service) was broken and published to Route53 (DNS service). In turn, parts of EC2 (virtual machine service) also went down, as its automated management services rely on DynamoDB. Amazon’s Network Load Balancer also naturally depends on DNS, so it too encountered issues.

It’s worth noting that DynamoDB failing across the entire US-East-1 region is, by itself, enough to bring down what are probably millions of websites and services. However, not being able to bring up EC2 instances was extra bad, and load balancing being affected was diamond-badge bad.

The specific technical issue behind the DNS failure was a programmer’s “favorite” bug: a race condition, in which two repeating events keep re-doing or undoing each other’s effects — the famous GIF of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck with the poster is illustrative.

The DynamoDB DNS resolution uses two components: a DNS Planner that, as the name implies, periodically issues a new Plan that considers system load and availability. The DNS Enactors, whenever they see a new Plan, apply it to Route53 as a transaction, meaning a plan either fully applies or it doesn’t. So far, so good.

What happened was that the first DNS Enactor was taking its sweet time to apply what we’ll call the Old Plan. As New Plans came in, another Enactor took one and applied it. There’s now good and updated data in Route53, and a clean-up of outdated plans (Old Plan included) is issued, just as First Enactor finished applying Old Plan.

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White House Savages Biden, Obama and Clinton with New Major Events Timeline

The White House on Thursday unveiled a new “Major Events Timeline” – and it’s one for the history books, literally.

The Trump White House took a shot at former President’s Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden on its official website.

Bill Clinton- Monica Lewinsky Scandal

“President Bill Clinton’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky was exposed, leading to White House perjury investigations. The Oval Office trysts fueled impeachment for obstruction.”

Obama Muslim Brotherhood visit

“Obama hosts members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that promotes Islamist extremism and has ties to Hamas. The Muslim Brotherhood is a designated terrorist organization by nearly a dozen nations.”

Cocaine Discovered at the Biden White House

“During Biden’s administration, a U.S. Secret Service agent discovered a small, zippered plastic bag containing cocaine in the West Wing entrance lobby. Speculation has pointed to Hunter Biden, an admitted drug user. Additional evidence includes a laptop, seized in 2019, which contains photos of frequent drug use alongside emails about foreign business dealings (Ukraine, China) involving his father, Joe, while he was Vice President.”

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German Economy Unravelling: Hospitality Crisis, Jobs Vanishing & Industrial Decline

While the federal government is desperately waiting for the start of the multi-billion euro debt package, the real economy is burrowing ever deeper into the ground. The numbers from the hospitality sector speak a clear language: things continue to go downhill.

On Monday, Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited the six-day congress of the trade union IG BCE (Industrial Union for Mining, Chemicals, Energy). There he emphasised the high importance of social partnership between workers, employers and politics and assured the union that he was well aware of the increasingly difficult situation of many people in the country.

In these days Merz would have done better to visit the German hospitality industry. There, without the glamorous distraction of a functionary congress, he could have seen first-hand the reality of the German economy: The interest in uplifting speeches by the Chancellor among restaurateurs, hoteliers and caterers is likely vanishingly small — business is simply too bad.

Cold shower in the holiday season

The Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis) delivered catastrophic figures for August for the entire German hospitality industry, i.e., both gastronomy and hotels: Even in the most important vacation month, restaurants, hotels, caterers and snack bars lost a real turnover volume of 3.5 per cent compared with the previous year. Nominally there was still a minus of 0.6 per cent in the overall balance. Also compared with the previous month, July, the hospitality sector lost real turnover of 1.4 per cent.

Such a poor development, of all times in the high-volume holiday months, is a fatal proof that nothing seems to be running smoothly anymore in the German economy — exactly now you would have had to cash in. Here, the until now weak year with a minus of about 4 per cent at least should have offered a small glimmer of hope. Pfft. The summer months turned into a disaster. 

Consumers are suffering under the political framework conditions, the high energy prices, inflation and the labour market, which has long since entered rough seas.

Those who take a look into the engine room of the German economy will quickly find the causes for this crisis. It is the expression of an economic disaster that remains insufficiently described in media and politics. The industrial core of the German economy could not permanently withstand the shockwaves of the Brussels eco-regulators and the gnawing attacks of interest-driven NGOs such as the Deutsche Umwelthilfe.

General decline 

And so it came to pass, as it had to. Starting from its best year 2018, German industry across sectors lost a production volume of almost 25 per cent — an indescribable exodus of firms abroad, countless insolvencies: an economic knockout, delivered by a self-inflicted uppercut. 

Large parts of the economy hang on this industrial foundation as if on an umbilical cord — once it is severed, the service providers, the suppliers, the hospitality industry, tourism plunge too. Roughly 1.3 million jobs in the private sector have disappeared to date.

The German economy is in a veritable clearance sale — in a spiral of deindustrialisation. From July 2024 to today, more than 270,000 jobs have been lost in the manufacturing industry, the metal, electrical and steel industries. At the same time, the public administration expanded by almost 50,000 new jobs this year.

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Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Announces Plan to ‘Unmask’ ICE Agents

Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is spearheading a project to reveal the names and locations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers while pro-migration activists are trying to block pro-American law enforcement.

The ex-mayor, who in 2023 became the first Democrat mayor to lose a re-election bid in 40 years, announced the launch of “The ICE Accountability Project,” WFLD-TV reported.

The deposed mayor claimed that the new effort will “unmask” ICE agents so the public can know their identities and track their whereabouts.

“They are on public property out in the open,” she insisted. “We have an absolute right under our constitution to document what’s happening.”

“We want to create a centralized archive of all the purported criminal actions of ICE and CBP agents,” Lightfoot explained. “We want to create a portal where what’s happening in real time can be centralized and put out for the public to view.”

The ex-mayor said she wants her tracking information to be used to take ICE agents to court on an individual basis and to stop the Trump administration from rounding up and deporting criminal illegal aliens.

Lightfoot is far from the only Democrat looking to dox ICE agents and putting federal law enforcement officials in more danger.

As Breitbart News reported, Democrats in Los Angeles, California, are also threatening to launch an online tracker of ICE activity to help left-wing activists more quickly interfere in immigration raids, arrests, and other essential enforcement actions.

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Jack Smith Starts Getting Nervous — Demands Chance to Testify Against ‘Mischaracterizations’ of His Trump Prosecutions

Jack Smith, who led the attempts to prosecute and imprison President Trump in the run-up to the 2024 election over his efforts to challenge the voter fraud that took place in the 2020 presidential election, said he wants to appear “in open hearings” to share his side of the story.

In a letter from his attorneys, he pledged to address the “numerous mischaracterizations” surrounding his investigations, which were designed to prevent Trump from taking back the presidency.

The letter, sent by Smith’s lawyers and obtained by CNN, states:

We have received Chairman Jordan’s October 14, 2025, letter and are aware of Chairman Grassley’s interest in testimony from our client, Jack Smith.

Given the many mischaracterizationsof Mr. Smith’s investigation into President Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified document sand role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Mr. Smith respectfully requests the opportunity to testify in open hearings before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

During the investigation of President Trump, Mr. Smith steadfastly adhered to establishedlegal standards and Department of Justice guidelines, consistent with his approach throughouthis career as a dedicated public servant.

He is prepared to answer questions about the Special Counsel’s investigation and prosecution, but requires assurance from the Department of Justicethat he will not be punished for doing so.

To that end, Mr. Smith needs guidance from theDepartment of Justice regarding federal grand jury secrecy requirements and authorization onthe matters he may speak to regarding, among other things, Volume II of the Final Report of theSpecial Counsel, which is not publicly available.

In addition, to provide full and accurate answersto your questions, Mr. Smith requires access to the Special Counsel files, which he no longer no longer has the ability to access.

Just last week, Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee referred Smith to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation and possible disbarment over “deeply disturbing revelations” that he illegally obtained Senate Republicans’ call logs.

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Carney urges Canadians to ‘make sacrifices’ ahead of record deficit

Prime Minister Mark Carney forewarned future challenges to Canada’s economy, which he suggested was performing “reasonably well” in a pre-budget address to the nation.

Carney warned on October 22 at the University of Ottawa that economic transformation would require “some sacrifices” and time, a message tied to the November 4 budget.

“Our government will work relentlessly to cut waste and drive efficiencies,” he claimed, “and when we have to make difficult choices.”

“We will be thoughtful, we will be transparent, we’ll be fair, we will work collaboratively with our colleagues across the aisle to build, protect, and empower Canadians.”

The upcoming budget is projected to include a “substantial” deficit, according to Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon. While specific program cuts haven’t been announced, the Liberal government states key support programs like national dental and childcare will continue.

Carney’s government plans to balance the “operating deficit” in three years by reducing “wasteful government spending,” such as initiatives to reduce red tape. He noted that federal spending has grown over 7% year-over-year for the past decade, exceeding economic growth, a trend that must change.

The Liberal government plans to separate daily spending from capital investment in future budgets. While they claim this provides a clearer picture and prioritizes major projects, the Conservatives accuse them of attempting to “bury the deficit.”

On May 18, the former central banker delayed the spring budget, promising a “comprehensive, effective, ambitious, prudent budget”, to address the impact of U.S. tariffs.

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The Shadow Of Terror: Zohran Mamdani’s Radical Islam Problem

New York City’s 2025 mayoral race has thrust Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist and New York State Assembly member, into the spotlight as the Democratic nominee. His candidacy, while historic as potentially the first Muslim and Indian-American mayor, raises serious concerns due to his (1) adherence to the Shi’a Twelver sect, (2) support of Hamas jihadist terrorists and its parent group, the Muslim Brotherhood, (3) rabid antisemitism, and (4) devastating economic implications of his socialist policies. Mamdani’s candidacy is a natural result of decades of failed NYC policies toward Islamists and jihadists, which have almost turned the city into a Muslim Brotherhood sanctuary. Mamdani’s candidacy is a symptom of a larger Islamist problem in NYC.

While many American Muslims in New York City are patriotic and capable of great leadership, Mamdani’s religious and ideological stances demand scrutiny. Mamdani wants to rule New York City, but who rules Mamdani?

New York City is home to over half a million Muslims, many of whom contribute significantly to the city’s vibrant fabric. Numerous Muslim leaders possess the vision, integrity, and capability to serve as mayor, championing policies that align with American values and the U.S. Constitution; however, Mamdani is not among them. He belongs on a terror watchlist and not in a mayoral race.

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