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Chicago Schools to Bus Students to Anti-Trump May Day Protests Using Tax Dollars

Tomorrow on May 1st, teacher unions in Chicago have decided to once again hold ‘May Day’ protests, which will obviously be aimed at Trump and all things Republican.

As part of these protests, Chicago Schools are going to allow students to attend, and if they choose to go, they can be shuttled to the protests using tax dollars.

Aside from the fact that a significant number of students in Chicago schools can’t read at grade level, how is any of this even legal?

Using tax dollars to transport students to political protests? Where is the outrage?

This report is from PBS:

Chicago labor unions, community groups, students and other advocates are expected to participate in events around the city on Friday in recognition of May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day.

Thousands of Chicagoans are expected to participate in a May Day rally and march starting at Union Park, 1501 W. Randolph St., and ending at Daley Plaza downtown. Other related actions are scheduled in different parts of the city in the morning ahead of the march.

The main rally is expected to begin at 1 p.m. in Union Park. The march is set to step off at 2 p.m.

The expected May Day actions come after disagreements between Chicago Public Schools CEO Macquline King and the Chicago Teachers Union over whether to close schools on Friday to allow students and teachers to participate in demonstrations…

Chicago Public Schools will still hold classes on May 1 after reaching an agreement with CTU that will also allow students and staff to attend labor rallies.

The union said the school district has pledged to provide buses for field trips for students and educators who choose to attend the afternoon May Day rally in Union Park.

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Trump Admin Finalizes Rule Scrapping ‘Invasive’ DEI Requirements for Small Business Lending

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has finalized a rule that scraps diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) requirements and other burdensome regulations that affect small business lending, saving more than $166 million annually.

“This is a long-awaited win for both borrowers and small businesses. Annual savings from replacing the Biden-Harris rule will exceed an estimated $166 million annually,” Acting CFPB Director Russ Vought said in a statement to Breitbart News. “These reforms not only make borrowing more affordable for America’s small businesses, including our farmers, but minimize burdens on those needing quick access to credit without requiring them to answer unnecessary and invasive DEI questions introduced by the Biden-Harris-Chopra Administration.”

The CFPB, under the Trump administration, has moved to replace the Biden-era Section 1071 rule that was believed to be too invasive, and the Trump administration’s proposal would have the rule go back to the regulation’s intent as stipulated by the Dodd-Frank banking law. The rule intends to help with the administration’s mission to increase affordability as it would seek to save money for borrowers and small businesses who loan to them. It would also help farmers who get access to credit.

The Dodd-Frank Act directed the CFPB to adopt regulations governing the collection of small business lending data. Section 1071 amended the Equal Credit Opportunity Act to require financial institutions to compile, maintain, and submit to the CFPB data on applications for credit from women-owned, minority-owned, and small businesses.

The CFPB rule would reduce the discretionary data points adopted during the Biden administration and focus on data points set out in the Dodd-Frank ACT and only include a few essential discretionary data points such as time in business, number of principal owners, and NAICS code. The rule eliminates:

  • Application method (in-person, online, etc.)
  • Application recipient (direct vs. third-party submission)
  • Denial reasons
  • Pricing information (interest rates, fees, prepayment penalties)
  • Number of workers
  • LGBTQI+-owned business status

The rule modified demographic data collection to comply with the Trump administration executive order that requires binary sex categories of male or female and removes references to gender identity. It also eliminated disaggregated race and ethnicity categories and collects only aggregate categories to limit complexity.

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Feds Charge Sinaloa’s Governor, Senator, Mayor, & Other Top Officials With Running A Narco-State

Federal prosecutors in New York have charged ten current and former senior Mexican government officials — among them the sitting governor of Sinaloa, a sitting federal senator, the mayor of the state capital, and the state’s former secretary of public security — with conspiring to protect the Sinaloa Cartel’s most powerful faction in exchange for millions of dollars in drug money, in what may be the most sweeping corruption indictment ever brought against a sitting government in the Western Hemisphere.

The superseding indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York and unsealed Wednesday, charges all ten defendants with narcotics importation conspiracy — specifically, conspiracy to flood the United States with fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine — as well as conspiracy to possess machineguns and destructive devices in furtherance of drug trafficking.

One defendant, a municipal police commander, faces additional charges of kidnapping resulting in death: the alleged abduction and murder of a Drug Enforcement Administration confidential source, his relative, and a 13-year-old boy, carried out using a police patrol car.

The document does not describe a cartel that corrupted a government. It describes a government that became the cartel’s operating infrastructure.

In what appears to be the first instance in American legal history of the Justice Department indicting a sitting Mexican governor, prosecutors allege that Ruben Rocha Moya, 76, who has served as governor of Sinaloa since November 2021, did not simply accept cartel money. He allegedly made his deal with the Chapitos — the sons of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman — before he was ever elected, in a meeting guarded by Cartel sicarios armed with machineguns, and delivered on every term thereafter.

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No, Zelensky Is Not ‘The Leader of the Free World’

Just when sensible people might conclude that American or European members of Ukraine’s sycophantic fan club cannot become even more detached from reality, a prominent member of the club proves the opposite.  This time, it is conservative pundit David French, who wins the prize in his April 26, 2026, New York Times column, “Meet the New Leader of the Free World.”   That leader is Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

French contends that “A remarkable thing has happened on the world’s battlefields. Ukraine – a nation that was supposed to dissolve within days of a Russian invasion – has fought Russia to a stalemate, revolutionizing land warfare in the process.  It has become an indispensable security partner in the Western alliance, including in the war against Iran.”

But according to French, such military resilience barely begins to measure the extent of Volodymyr Zelensky’s achievements. He also “is taking the next step, one that would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2024. By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post-American free world can preserve its liberty and independence.” French then delves into well-worn episodes in which Donald Trump’s administration has alienated, antagonized, and berated America’s longtime NATO allies, thereby provoking Europe to become more self-reliant, as one manifestation of the “post-American” free world.

French seems downright awestruck at Ukraine’s alleged military prowess. “This might be difficult for many readers to grasp – given our nation’s longstanding military supremacy – but the largest and most battle-hardened land force in the Western world may well be the Ukrainian Army.”  He adds that “It’s also worth noting that the U.S. forces have much less combat experience than Ukraine forces – especially when it comes to combat with a great power.”

But there’s more!  Ukraine’s military “is the only Western force that has fully adapted to modern drone warfare.  Indeed, Ukraine is arguably the world’s leader in drone warfare.”

Observers who recall the Western news media’s hyped propaganda offensive during the prelude to the Persian Gulf War may be experiencing a sense of déjà vu.  Prominent news correspondents insisted (while maintaining sober expressions) that Iraq was a borderline military superpower.  Of course, in that case the purpose of the propaganda was to generate fear of Iraq as a military threat.  In this case, the propaganda is an attempt to convince a skeptical global audience that Ukraine is a surprisingly capable military bulwark against Russia, Iran, and other authoritarian threats.  The current disinformation is nearly as flagrant, however, as during the earlier episode.

Russia continues to make gains on the battlefield, slowly conquering additional Ukrainian territory. The bloodied Ukrainian forces appear increasingly beleaguered, and Russia (because of its much larger population and military reserves) is better positioned for a continuing war of attrition.  Western officials and their media allies have gone to great lengths to obscure the fundamental reality that Russia is winning the war, albeit in a costlier and more grinding fashion than the Kremlin had assumed.  The credibility of arguments that Moscow cannot continue to sustain the drain on its manpower is not enhanced by the continuing refusal of Western analysts to provide even a rough estimate of Ukrainian casualties.  Such clumsy attempts at concealment suggest that the actual news about that issue is not good.

If the battlefield situation were not worrisome enough for Ukraine, major domestic political fractures have occurred over the past year.  Zelensky’s latest moves also alienated some of his most reliable supporters and apologists in the West.  When prominent establishment media outlets such as the Financial Times, the Spectator, and Politico all began to publish stories critical of the Ukrainian leader’s undemocratic moves in late 2025, there was a sense that attitudes even among pro-Ukraine Western elites were shifting.  That trend has quietly continued in 2026.

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Senator Finds More Evidence Federal Officials Evaded FOIA

A U.S. senator and his team say they have uncovered additional evidence that federal officials worked to evade requests made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Several emails obtained by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) showed personnel with the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were aware of FOIA requests and sought to evade them. FOIA enables people to request records from the government. It requires officials to retain and produce requested records, subject to certain exemptions.

In a Nov. 26, 2022, missive, Allison Lale, a medical officer with the CDC, asked a colleague about receiving safety analyses of COVID-19 vaccination from the FDA.

Pedro Moro, a CDC epidemiologist, responded. “I think that because of the FOIAs we may have asked FDA to stop sending these weekly data mining outputs,” Moro wrote.

“Oh interesting,” Lale said. She added that during calls for a CDC-managed program, “we used to just verbally mention” that certain terms had not triggered safety signals, or signs vaccines were causing problems.

“But we could also leave it out if that [sic] this creates more hassle,” she added.

In a separate email chain, FDA officials were told by an FDA vaccine safety analytic expert, Dr. Ana Szarfman, that the approach they were using to analyze the safety of COVID-19 vaccines was faulty. The information sparked a long discussion, during which officials considered asking the expert to contact an outside expert on the matter.

“Before we potentially reach out to Ana, we should meet internally – many considerations not suited to email…” David Menschik, an FDA official who distributed the data mining reports, wrote on April 15, 2021.

“Sounds good,” Bethany Baer, another FDA worker, responded. “Happy to meet and discuss anytime open on my calendar.”

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UK Schools Pushing Books On Kids Telling Them ‘There’s Plenty Of Room’ For Small Boat Migrants

British kids as young as five are now being read picture books that paint small boat crossings in glowing terms and urge them to open the door to unlimited migration.

While record numbers of illegal arrivals strain housing, schools and public services, left-wing charities are using taxpayer-backed programmes to turn classrooms into recruitment centres for open borders ideology.

More than 1,100 schools and nurseries across the UK have signed up to the Schools of Sanctuary programme, run by the City of Sanctuary network. The scheme requires schools to complete a “rigorous” award process to prove they are “working collaboratively to strengthen community approaches to welcoming refugee children and families.” Once awarded, they pay a minimum donation of £75 to £300.

As part of the programme, schools are given a suggested reading list packed with pro-migrant messaging. One book, Kind by Alison Green, illustrated by renowned children’s illustrators such as Quentin Blake and Axel Scheffler, tells children: “Sometimes people have lived through very hard times. They’ve had to leave their homes and their countries because of danger. They are brave and amazing and have extraordinary stories to tell.”

It continues: “Sometimes people say there’s no room for anyone more. But maybe you can say ‘There’s plenty of room! Come on in!’ After all, if you don’t let people in, you’ll never know what you’re missing.”

Yeah, come on in! In fact, come on in and live in a hotel in a nice green village, all at taxpayer expense!

The book features a cartoon lion in a crowded boat with other animals and encourages pupils to share toys, draw pictures together and even learn words from a foreign child’s language.

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The Trump Surveillance State

The Fourth Amendment protects all persons from warrantless government searches and seizures of their persons, houses, papers and effects. It requires that warrants be supported by probable cause of crime and specifically describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

Last week, for the first time in the modern era, the government argued to the Supreme Court of the United States that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution did not outlaw general warrants. General warrants were issued in the colonial era by a secret court in London. They were not based on probable cause of crime or even on articulable suspicion about a potential defendant. They did not identify a target or state what crime was being investigated.

Rather, general warrants were based on governmental need; a meaningless standard as whatever the government wants it will tell a court it needs. The warrants authorized the bearer of the warrant to search wherever he wished and seize whatever he found.

The stated motivation for the general warrants was the British government’s enforcement of the Stamp Act. That legislation required all colonists to have stamps affixed to all papers, books and newspapers in their possession. The enforcement of the Stamp Act was the government’s fig leaf for spying.

We know that the true reason for the Stamp Act was to conduct surreptitious searches for revolutionary materials. We know this because during the one-year existence of the Stamp Act — 1765 — a group of enterprising students at the College of New Jersey, now known as Princeton University, calculated that more revenue was spent to enforce the act than was collected by the sale of the stamps.

Historians believe that the use of general warrants for the enforcement of the Stamp Act pushed many colonists into the independence camp 10 years later in 1775. The use of general warrants also motivated James Madison and his colleagues in 1791 to craft the Fourth Amendment whose specificity requirement “particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized” poignantly did away with search where you wish and seize whatever you find.

Until now.

Now, in one week on Capitol Hill, the right to privacy is facing its gravest challenges since pre-colonial days, in Congress and the Supreme Court. Congress will wrestle with Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expires in just days, and the court will hear a claim that general warrants are still viable.

Sec. 702 permits warrantless surveillance on Americans by permitting federal agents to use software that allows them to conduct surveillance of all fiber optic means of communication — mobile phones, message texting, emails — based on the lawful communications of some Americans to foreign persons and then their subsequent lawful communications to other Americans. The “other Americans” can include all 340 million of us.

Theoretically, the data gathered from these warrantless searches cannot be used for criminal prosecutions, since even the feds who do this spying have told members of Congress that they recognize the need for search warrants to access the content of the data. There are at least two reasons that no one should believe what the feds have said. The first is the feds lie. In 2023, they accessed the content of the data thousands of times without warrants. The second reason is that Madison and the Fourth Amendment’s ratifiers did not believe the government would restrain itself, hence the specificity requirement.

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Former Ukraine Top Spy and Currently Presidential Chief of Staff, Popular General Budanov Has Become a Danger to Zelensky’s Rule

Keep your enemies closer?

We have been reporting here on TGP on how the corruption scandal involving Volodymyr Zelensky’s close friend and partner Timur Mindich shook Kiev’s political landscape.

Ukrainian anti-corruption agencies NABU and SAPO exposed a $100 million embezzlement and kickback scheme at the state nuclear energy company Energoatom, which led to Mindich fleeing justice to Israel.

To survive the political crisis, the all-powerful chief of staff Andriy Yermak was sacrificed by the regime, and Zelensky appointed in his place Kirill Budanov, head of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR), and his moderate critic.

As journalist and political analyst Vitaly Ryumshin detailed in RT, this has been a dangerous idea.

Budanov started in his new role keeping a low profile, but soon he started making public statements at odds with those of Zelensky.

“While the president has prepared the country for a prolonged conflict, Budanov has spoken of ongoing negotiations and suggested that peace may not be as distant as many assume. When Zelensky highlighted Ukraine’s technological breakthroughs, Budanov has downplayed them. He has also openly acknowledged the growing difficulties of mobilization, a rare admission from a senior official in a country at war.

At the same time, Budanov has been carefully constructing his public image. In Western media, he is presented as both a war hero and a pragmatic ‘dove’, a man who understands the need to bring the conflict to an end. For domestic audiences, his team promotes stories of personal bravery, portraying him as a hands-on commander who has taken part in operations and narrowly escaped danger.”

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Hormuz: Who Is Calling The Shots?

I’ve been trying to make sense of what’s going really on with the war on Iran. The US says it is blockading the Straits of Hormuz to destroy Iran’s economy, but it risks destroying the world economy, including its own, in the process. So, let’s have a look and see if we can make any sense out of it. Take it up in the comments.

Picture this: it’s the end of April 2026, and the world is holding its breath over the powder keg in the Persian Gulf. After a whirlwind of airstrikes, naval showdowns, and shadowy proxy battles, it has simmered into an uneasy ceasefire, but the air crackles with the threat of explosion. What kicked off as a thunderous US-Israeli assault on 28 February is now a high-stakes game of chicken, where nobody’s blinking. Western headlines scream of taming a rogue regime, Iranian voices roar defiance, and powers like Russia, India, and China shake their heads at the chaos rippling across the globe. At the epicentre? The Strait of Hormuz, where only about ten ships a day are making the passage through it, way less than a tenth of normal traffic. 

And just what is Donald Trump’s strategy. Is he out to crush Iran? Or China? Is he creating his own new world order based on US hegemony? Or is he handing globalist elites at the World Economic Forum (WEF) and their UN Agenda 2030 playbook a golden opportunity to reshape the world into the Global government tyranny they desire? 

Let’s rewind to the fireworks. The war erupted when Trump, fresh off a 60-day ultimatum for Iran to scrap its nuclear ambitions and ditch its proxies like Hezbollah and the Houthis, imitated joint strikes with Israel. Tehran lit up under the bombs and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed. Trump’s strategy was, he said, crystal clear: regime change, pulverise Iran’s missiles, sink its navy, wipe out its air force, neuter its terror network, and slam the door on any atomic dreams. But Iran didn’t follow the script, fought back effectively, and oh so predictably closed the Straits. By early April, a fragile two-week truce kicked in and on 7 April Iran eased tanker access through Hormuz, the US paused the pounding and Trump stretched it indefinitely on 21 April, bragging that 75% of targets were toast. And then, after calling the Iranian regime a bunch of gangsters for closing the Straits, the US imposed its own, very much reducing traffic and directly ordering around 40 ships to turn back and putting shells into at least one of them. But still, there’s no grand deal in sight. Iran’s rebuffing US demands for ironclad nuclear handcuffs and talks in places like Islamabad have hit the skids after Iran refused to accept America’s demand for capitulation and Trump yanked his envoy at the last minute.

Western sources paint a picture of gritty impasse. “An awkward limbo of ‘no war, no peace’,” as the NYT quips, with diplomacy derailed and both sides digging in like a modern Somme. The Guardian captures the frustration: a “deepening sense of deadlock” despite frantic regional shuttle diplomacy. Trump keeps dangling the phone line to Tehran; “Call if you want to talk” but insists no nukes, period. Casualties? Murky as ever, though US brass concedes Iran’s still got plenty of punch left in its missile and drone arsenals.

In Tehran it’s a tale of grit and grievance. PressTV and IRNA frame this as a brutal US-Israeli bulldozer trampling sovereign soil—day 57 of invasion by 25 April, no less. Iran’s pushing “workable frameworks” for peace, but with teeth: demands for war reparations from Gulf neighbours over wrecked bridges and power grids, like the Karaj-Tehran lifeline. Their 10-point blueprint? Crack open Hormuz, lift the US naval stranglehold, but only if the West coughs up real security pledges. No more nuclear grovelling without it. And the warnings? Chilling. Tehran vows “mayhem” on Israel and the US if the truce snaps, teasing “new surprises” in its arsenal. Even US senators are calling the whole mess “disastrous,” with failed bids to leash Trump’s war powers stacking up.

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$65B lithium mother lode hidden beneath Appalachian Mountains could supply US with power for centuries

They’ve hit the mother lode.

We may no longer need to rely on foreign batteries to power our electronics. Geologists have announced that the Appalachian Mountains could be hiding a sprawling multibillion-dollar cache of lithium that could last the US hundreds of years.

“This research shows that the Appalachians contain enough lithium to help meet the nation’s growing needs,” declared US Geological Survey Director Ned Mamula in a statement.

According to a map by the institution, this East Coast mountain range houses around 2.5 metric tons of this battery precursor, most of which is concentrated in the Carolinas, Maine and New Hampshire. Total value: around $64.4B dollars.

Per Bloomberg, the US imports nearly half of its consumption of lithium, which powers lithium-ion batteries that are used for everything from iPhones to vehicles and even aerospace alloys.

With this recent mineral motherlode, USGS officials estimate that we could supply 1.6 million grid-scale batteries — enough to power 130 million electric vehicles or supply 180 billion laptops for a collective thousands of years of global use.

It could also fuel 500 billion cellphones, the equivalent of 60 devices for every person on Earth.

All told, this haul is enough to replace 328 years of imports at least year’s level, providing “a major contribution to US mineral security, at a time when global lithium demand is rising rapidly,” said Mamula.

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