Blog

Biden Laughs and Smirks As the Press Is Ushered Out of the Oval Office Without Questions

In what is becoming a signature move, President Joe Biden smirked at reporters being ushered from a meeting by staff.

After President Biden and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen delivered four minutes of prepared remarks, media were banished. Biden reportedly laughed and smirked at reporters as they shouted questions at him.

Both leaders laughed while White House staff hectored reporters by forcing them from the Oval Office, where the meeting was conducted.

Fox News further reported:

Reporters were once again escorted out of the Oval Office and prevented from asking President Biden questions at the White House on Monday.

Keep reading

San Francisco mayor asks for $63 million more for police amid crime wave

San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s budget request for the upcoming 2023-24 fiscal year calls for a $63 million increase in spending for the police compared to the previous one.

Breed’s requested budget for the upcoming fiscal year is $14.6 billion, a record high for both San Francisco county and the city. The $63 million increase marks a 9% increase from what police would get from the 2022-23 fiscal year, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The requested budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year will likewise see police receive a higher amount than the previous fiscal year, going up by $11 million. In total, police would receive $787.9 million under Breed’s requested fiscal budget.

Keep reading

Enigmatic Species Seemingly Buried Dead and Carved Symbols 100,000 Years Before Modern Humans

A groundbreaking series of papers published yesterday proposes that Homo naledi , an ancient human species, engaged in burial practices and created engravings deep within a cave system in southern Africa approximately 300,000 years ago. If these claims are substantiated, they would revolutionize our existing knowledge about the development of human beliefs, culture, and symbolism. However, the study is yet to be peer reviewed and some uncertainties regarding the available evidence remain.

Keep reading

Rep. Jamal Bowman supports military aid for Ukraine but is unfamiliar with the Donbas and Crimea

A congressional Squad star seems to have no idea how or why the Ukraine proxy war started. But he he says he’s voting for military aid to Kiev anyway.

On Monday, the New York Democratic congressman and star member of the progressive Squad Jamal Bowman told The Grayzone that he continues to support the U.S. providing aid for the Ukraine war because Russian President Vladimir Putin is “a madman.” Just moments before, however, Bowman admitted that he did not know what Crimea or the Donbas region were.

Readers of The Grayzone are likely familiar with the history of these regions as flash-points of the Ukrainian conflict. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 in response to the US-backed ousting of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his replacement with a nationalist government. For the next 8 years, meanwhile, the eastern Donbas region became mired in a civil war, as its ethnically Russian majority resisted the government in Kiev.

When told in a followup discussion that events within the history of these regions were pivotal to understanding the Ukrainian conflict and the stated motives behind Russia’s invasion, Bowman expressed doubt. “That’s what you’re saying. I gotta dig in to see,” he said.

Keep reading

Kiev’s Long-Term “Last Resort” Plan To Blow-Up The Kakhova Dam Exposed

A day after Ukraine’s much-heralded counter-offensive appears to have failed, almost before it had even begun, a major dam in the Russian-occupied region of Kherson is suddenly bombed, prompting mass evacuations as floods spread across the region.

As we detailed earlier, both sides accuse each other of the attack that puts tens of thousands of homes at risk and might even threaten the safety of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.

However, as Raul Ilargi Meijer writes, twice last year (here and here), Ukrainian officials discussed Kiev’s plans to blow up the dam.

Andrew Korybko lays out the real narrative here:

The partial destruction of the Kakhovka Dam on early Tuesday morning saw Kiev and Moscow exchange accusations about who’s to blame, but a report from the Washington Post (WaPo) in late December extends credence to the Kremlin’s version of events.

Titled “Inside the Ukrainian counteroffensive that shocked Putin and reshaped the war”, its journalists quoted former commander of November’s Kherson Counteroffensive Major General Andrey Kovalchuk who shockingly admitted to planning this war crime:

“Kovalchuk considered flooding the river. The Ukrainians, he said, even conducted a test strike with a HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Nova Kakhovka dam, making three holes in the metal to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages. The test was a success, Kovalchuk said, but the step remained a last resort. He held off.”

Keep reading

REVEALED: BLM co-founder’s cousin’s death caused by enlarged heart, cocaine use after he ran from police pursuit following hit-and-run, was tasered

The Los Angeles County medical examiner-coroner announced on Friday that Black Lives Matter (BLM) co-founder Patrisse Cullors’ cousin Keenan Anderson’s death occurred due to the effects of an enlarged heart and cocaine use. 

“The Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner determined the cause of death for 31-year-old Keenan Darnell Anderson as effects of cardiomyopathy (enlarged heart) and cocaine use (death determined hours after restraint and conducted energy device [CED] use); the manner of death is undetermined,” the group announced in a news release. 

Anderson’s family filed a $50 million lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles for wrongful death and civil rights violations. According to NPR, the family said they still plan to continue with the lawsuit after the findings were released. 

“An unarmed Black man, in obvious mental distress, was savagely attacked and repeatedly tased, in clear violation of LAPD policy by several trained officers,” they claimed, adding that “the innocent life of a little five-year-old boy will be forever changed as a result.”

Cullors responded to the report by saying, “My cousin was alive when he flagged the police. And after his interaction with the police, he was dead,” she continued, “This idea that the coroner is unable to determine how he died is unacceptable. And to point to the substances and point to the enlarged heart and not to the tasers is very, very disturbing.”

Keep reading

Biden Argues Damage Caused By Censorship Is Outweighed by “Taking Action To Promote The Public Interest”

Democratic values in the US – the way you knew them – are getting something of an “overhaul” official definition-wise. It all revolves around what’s now known and widely accepted as sufficiently documented Big Tech-government collusion.

The injuries caused by its censorship are “far outweighed by the government’s interest in speaking and taking action to promote the public interest,” – that’s how the Biden administration digests its policy, and spits it out for the willing world to digest.

We obtained the filing of the plaintiff’s response to these claims here.

The administration also claimed that an injunction that forbids federal officials to “demand, urge, encourage, pressure, coerce, deceive, collude with, or otherwise induce” social-media platforms to censor would “prevent the dissemination of vital public health information.”

It looks like, any censorship of free speech – if viewed by a US administration as “necessary” – is now that lesser evil, that “public interest” – that wins over allowing people to speak freely.

But how about the Constitution – is that, too, and its provisions, specifically protecting free speech – now something that’s also so – “fluid”?

That would be the logical, final conclusion, but for now what we have is documented justification to censor speech – if it works in favor of a declared “greater goal.”

Keep reading

MSU students are suing a professor after she required them to subscribe to a website she founded that funds Planned Parenthood

An adjunct professor at Michigan State University, Amy Wisner, is being sued by two of her students after requiring her business communications class to purchase a $99 subscription to an activist website she founded that funds Planned Parenthood.

The website, The Rebellion Community, was described in the class syllabus as “a global social learning community.”

Several students looked into the website and found posts from their professor on social media which detailed the leftwing causes that their membership fees were going to, most notably, Planned Parenthood.

MLive News reported,

Though Wisner initially told students that she would reap no benefit from the subscriptions, the lawsuit said, students found out that Wisner operated the site and had said in different contexts that its proceeds would be donated to Planned Parenthood or used to fund “an RV roadtrip around the United States to co-create communities of rebels.”

The university says that Wisner is no longer employed and the school has offered to refund the students the cost of their subscriptions.

Keep reading

NY farmers with 300K pounds of weed fume over state’s slow shop roll-out

New York’s weed farmers are fuming over the snail’s-pace rollout of legal cannabis shops in the Empire State — complaining they are sitting on mountains of spoiling marijuana crops.

The state’s failure to follow through on OK’ing dozens of dispensaries for legal marijuana as predicted by Gov. Kathy Hochul last year has thwarted the roughly 200 New York farmers who grew 300,000 pounds of cannabis — the equivalent of more than 272 million half-gram joints.

The farmers say their product, most of which is eventually converted into CDB oil, has been going nowhere fast, worrying them that it could soon become too old to peddle.

And this season’s new crop is already on the horizon.

“We’re really under the gun here,” New York marijuana farmer Seth Jacobs told The Associated Press. “We’re all losing money. Even the most entrepreneurial and ambitious among us just can’t move much product in this environment.”

Keep reading

Russiagate’s Missing Pieces

The first thing to understand about John Durham is that he was a fearless prosecutor who went after organized crime and put in prison retired and active FBI agents who protected the mob for money or other enticements. One of the agents he stopped had enabled James “Whitey” Bulger Jr., once one of America’s most wanted men, the Winter Hill Gang boss who evaded arrest for sixteen years.

In his forty-five years as a state and federal prosecutor in Connecticut and Virginia, Durham worked often and closely with FBI agents, especially on cases that involved violations of federal racketeering statutes.

Durham also handled two inquiries into the CIA’s conduct in the War on Terror, and he did so without angering his superiors in the executive branch. In one case he was asked to investigate the alleged destruction of CIA videotapes of detainee interrogations, the so-called torture tapes. His final report on the matter remains secret, and he recommended that no charges be filed. He was later asked to lead a Justice Department inquiry into the legality of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” that resulted in the death of two detainees. In that case, he was told that officers who were given and obeyed what were determined to be illegal orders—there were many of those after 9/11—could not be prosecuted. No charges were filed.

Durham’s 306-page report was made public on May 15, and it pleased no one with its focus on the obvious. The journalist Susan Schmidt, whose byline was a must-read when she was a reporter for the Washington Post, pointed out on Racket News that Durham said the FBI would have done less damage to its reputation if it had scrutinized the questionable actions of the Clinton campaign in 2016: the Feds “might at least have cast a critical eye on the phony evidence they were gathering.”

Keep reading