Tag: corruption

Just 3.4 Percent Of American Journalists Identify As Republican

The percentage of full-time U.S. journalists who identify as Republicans has dropped significantly over the last decade, while journalists who said they are Democrats and Independents have increased, a study finds.

According to a survey by Syracuse University titled “The American Journalist Under Attack,” only 3.4 percent of journalists in 2022 identified as Republicans, compared with 36.4 percent of Democrats and 51.7 percent of Independents in the profession.

At the time the survey was concluded in April last year, 28 percent of Americans considered themselves Republicans, 28 percent identified themselves as Democrats, and 42 percent viewed themselves as Independents, according to a Gallup poll.

The survey found that the percentage of Republicans in the journalism industry has declined substantially over the decades.

In its first survey in 1971, 25.7 percent of journalists said they were Republicans. In 1982, the number dropped to 18.8 percent and further declined to 16.4 percent in 1992. It showed a slight increase in 2002 with 18 percent but plummeted to 7.1 percent in 2013 and to 3.4 percent last year.

The trend for journalists identifying as Democrats has remained relatively steady at around 35 percent over the decades. Last year’s figure of 36.4 percent marked the third-highest percentage of journalists identifying as Democrat since 1971, the survey noted.

Notably, the survey showed that 60.1 percent of journalists said journalism in the United States was headed in the wrong direction. In comparison, only 22 percent said it was going in the right direction.

“When asked about the ’most important problem facing journalism today,’ the journalists mentioned these issues most often: Declining public trust in the news media (20.8 percent); shrinking local and community news coverage (12.8 percent); perceived bias and opinion journalism (12.7 percent); fake news (9.9 percent); disrupted business model (9.3 percent).”

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Opelousas Police officer involved in shooting police chief turns herself in, sheriff reports

An Opelousas Police officer involved in a domestic shooting incident has surrendered to the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s office, according to a news release.

Officer Savannah Butler, 42, turned herself in Jan. 1 at the parish jail but then posted bonded of $22,000, according to Sheriff Bobby J. Guidroz.

According to the release, a domestic issue Dec. 22 led to the negligent shooting of Opelousas Police Chief Graig LeBlanc and his wife, Capt. Crystal LeBlanc of the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office. The investigation revealed that LeBlanc and his wife were shot at Butler’s home on Garnet Drive. 

Crystal Leblanc went to Butler’s home Dec. 22 to speak to her husband, according to the release. Chief LeBlanc walked outside, and the two began arguing. Butler then entered the doorway armed with a gun.  

Chief LeBlanc put his hand in front of Butler’s weapon to retrieve the gun and was shot in the hand, the release said. The bullet then traveled through his hand and hit his wife in the arm. After being shot, both admitted themselves to local hospitals. The LeBlancs were treated then released pending additional medical treatment.

The investigation revealed that Butler cleaned up the scene to cover up evidence prior to notifying the sheriff’s office, which constituted the charge of obstruction of justice.  

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Sickening Profits — The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth

The modern food system is being shaped by the capitalist imperative for profit. Aside from losing their land to global investors and big agribusiness concerns, people are being sickened by corporations and a system that thrives on the promotion of ‘junk’ (ultra-processed) food laced with harmful chemicals and cultivated with the use of toxic agrochemicals.

It’s a highly profitable situation for investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity and Capital Group and the food and agribusiness conglomerates they invest in. But BlackRock and others are not just heavily invested in the food industry. They also profit from illnesses and diseases resulting from the food system by having stakes in the pharmaceuticals sector as well. For them, it’s a win-win situation.

Lobbying by agrifood corporations and their well-placed, well-funded front groups ensures this situation prevails. They continue to capture policy-making and regulatory space at international and national levels and promote the (false) narrative that without their products the world would starve.

They are now also pushing a fake-green, ecomodernist agenda and rolling out their new proprietary technologies in order to further entrench their grip on a global food system that produces poor food, illness, environmental degradation, dependency and dispossession.

The prevailing globalised agrifood model is built on unjust trade policies, the leveraging of sovereign debt to benefit powerful interests, population displacement and land dispossession. It fuels export-oriented commodity monocropping and regional food insecurity.

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Federal Judge Rejects Press Freedom Claims By Project Veritas In Ashley Biden Diary Case

A federal judge in Manhattan has ruled that investigative journalism outfit Project Veritas should have to turn over documents detailing how the organization came into possession of the alleged diary of President Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres of the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of a special master’s recommendation that Project Veritas should be made to turn over all documents in its possession that detail how it came into possession of the diary in the fall of 2020. Judge Torres ruled against claims by Project Veritas that it has journalistic non-disclosure privileges under the First Amendment and thus should not be made to turn over its records.

With Judge Torres’s ruling, federal prosecutors could soon take possession of more than 900 documents detailing how Project Veritas came into possession of the diary. Judge Torres ordered a government evidentiary filter team to sort out any documents not protected under attorney-client privilege and turn those documents over to government investigators by Jan. 5.

The legal battle over Ms. Biden’s alleged diary began in the fall of 2021, when federal agents carried out search warrants at the homes of several Project Veritas employees, including the group’s founder and then-CEO James O’Keefe. Project Veritas has asserted that federal investigators should be compelled to return records seized from the organization, arguing that the records seizure violated their First Amendment rights as a press organization.

Project Veritas had specifically argued that past legal precedents had protected news organizations from liability for publishing information, even when said information was acquired illegally by an intermediary. Judge Torres, an appointee of President Barack Obama, ruled that such precedents don’t protect Project Veritas in this case because federal prosecutors are treating the press organization as an active participant in the theft of Ms. Biden’s alleged diary, rather than a simple recipient of unlawfully obtained information.

“The Supreme Court held that the First Amendment protects the publication of information by a ‘law-abiding possessor of information,’ even if the publisher received the information from a source who obtained it unlawfully,” Judge Torres wrote. “Here, the Government is investigating whether [Project Veritas and its members] participated in the theft of the Victim’s journal and the other items.”

Ms. Biden’s alleged diary was discovered by defendants Aimee Harris and Robert Kurlander. Without naming Ms. Biden specifically, federal charging documents state “an immediate family member of a then-former government official who was a candidate for national political office” had stored the diary at a private residence in Delray Beach, Florida.

Project Veritas has contended that it received the diary through a pair of tipsters, whom they referred to as A.H. and R.K., who approached the organization. Project Veritas further asserted that the diary was not stolen, but simply abandoned by Ms. Biden and subsequently found by their tipsters.

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CNN Caught Editing RFK Jr Speech To Mislead Viewers

When he appeared on CNN last week, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was confronted with a video from one of his speeches — a video CNN clipped to convey a false impression that he had compared Covid restrictions to conditions in Nazi Germany. 

The dishonest ambush came on Dec. 15 as Kennedy was interviewed by former MSNBC anchor Kasie Hunt. Hunt showed a video of Kennedy speaking at a January 2022 rally in Washington, which includes a passage in which he said…

“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.

Today, the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run and none of us can hide.”  

Hunt had framed the clip to suggest Kennedy was specifically comparing Covid mandates to Hitler’s Germany.

As we’ll soon show, that was false.

In the passage from which the above excerpt was drawn, Kennedy was broadly addressing the rise of technology that threatens to enable a “turnkey totalitarianism” that would wildly surpass the capabilities of Hitler’s Nazi regime.   

To spice things up, Hunt next displayed a tweet from Kennedy’s own wife, Curb Your Enthusiasm actress Cheryl Hines, which came a few days after the speech. 

At the time, Hines had been repeatedly nagged by NBC News reporter Ben Collins and others on social media asking if she stood by Kennedy’s remarks. She eventually folded and posted a tweet in which she threw her own husband under the bus, embracing the ridiculous, politically-correct notion — propped up by the likes of the Anti-Defamation League — that nobody’s allowed to compare anything to the Holocaust.

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Has A “Silent Depression” Already Started In The United States?

The Biden administration and the corporate media are telling us over and over that the economy is just fine, but the term “silent depression” has been going viral on TikTok.  Housing, vehicles, food and just about everything else that we spend money on is far more unaffordable today than it was during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  A realtor in Florida named Freddie Smith posted a video on TikTok with some absolutely startling numbers about the cost of living in the United States today, and that is what started the “silent depression” trend…

TikTok user Freddie Smith, a realtor based in Orlando, posted a video in September claiming that the U.S. economy is in what he calls a “Silent Depression.” In the video, which has amassed nearly 800,000 likes, Smith compares the average 2023 salary and basic costs to those of the Great Depression to highlight the growing cost-of-living crisis in the country.

“If you look back to the Great Depression, the house was only three times the average salary. Now, it is eight times the average salary,” Smith said. “The car was 46% of the salary, the car today is 85% of the salary. And here’s the craziest part, the rent was 16% of the average salary, it is now 42% of the average salary.”

Of course he is right on target.

There is a reason why 62 percent of the country is currently living paycheck to paycheck.

The cost of living has become incredibly oppressive for most Americans, and nobody can deny that reality.

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Brit anti-corruption cop is found dead in his car submerged in the sea off the British Virgin Isles: Family’s fury as death is ruled ‘an unfortunate accident’

A British anti-corruption police officer has been found dead in his car submerged in the sea off the British Virgin islands, with his family saying they fear a cover-up.

Paul France, 61, was part of a team that investigated organised crime and corruption in the British overseas territory.

The father-of-four was found dead in his car on October 7, his vehicle completely submerged in sea water off the coast of Tortola, the BVI’s largest island.

According to reports, the discovery of the ex-Greater Manchester Police detective came just hours after drugs and guns were seized in raids.

Police chiefs on the island passed the case to the coroner, but the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force force told The Sun newspaper that his death was an ‘unfortunate accident’.

An inquest into the incident also appears to have been scrapped, the publication reported.

This has sparked anger among Mr France’s family, who believe there is more to his death, and has rattled his colleagues.

‘Everyone thinks the same thing. How do you end up in the ocean?’ Anne, Mr France’s niece who is from Bolton, told The Sun.

‘We are angry we have been left in the dark.’

A source told the newspaper that Mr France’s death in October has left his police colleagues rattled.

‘It has unnerved a lot of them. They’re not wanted there,’ the source said.

However, officials on the island say they don’t believe any foul play has taken place.

Instead, they suspect a ‘medical episode’ or a ‘malfunction with the vehicle’ is the most likely explanation, Police Commissioner Mark Collins said in October.

‘I have nothing that suggests any foul play has taken place,’ he said.

‘I don’t think we can rule out a medical episode and I don’t think we can rule out a malfunction with the vehicle. I’m not going to go into the investigation because the file will be made available of course to the Coroner’s Court, but to answer your question, I don’t think he’s the type of guy that would have committed suicide.’

Mr France had been a police officer either in the UK or the BVI for 40 years, according to local reports in the aftermath of his death in October.

The vehicle was found off the coast of Tortola’s capital of Road Town, in the Waterfront area, which is close to Queen Elizabeth II Park.

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US doctors are wrongly slicing off bits of babies’ TONGUES ‘to make breastfeeding easier’ and leaving them with life-long deformities, investigation finds

Doctors across the US are rushing families into having their babies’ tongues partly sliced off to make breastfeeding easier, an investigation has warned.

Known as ‘tongue tie surgery’, the involves using a laser to burn off excess skin under the tongue or the webbing that connects the lips and cheeks.

It is supposed to be used on babies with a genuine defect that prevents them from feeding properly but medical professionals have become increasingly liberal with prescribing it, despite around 60 percent of infants getting better without surgery. 

The rate of surgeries performed ballooned by 800 percent between 1997 and 2012 fromaround 1,280 procedures to more than 12,000, with doctors and breastfeeding consultants are raking in millions of dollars annually.

In some cases, the procedure causes severe lasting pain in infants as well as difficulty eating, resulting in malnourishment that can require them to be hooked up to feeding tubes. 

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Ex-FBI Intel Chief Who ‘Investigated’ Trump-Russia Collusion Gets 4 Years In Prison For Colluding With Russia

A former top FBI official who led the agency’s New York counterintelligence division, and played a key role in the Trump-Russia collusion probe, has been sentenced to 4 years in prison for colluding with Russia – and he may face an even longer sentence under a second indictment for hiding $225,000 in payments from a former Albanian intelligence officer.

Charles McGonigal, 55, was arrested in January and slapped with two separate indictments – one in New York and one in Washington, with the New York case related to taking nearly $200,000 in bribes from Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska to investigate a rival oligarch, and the Washington case concerning the Albanian money.

Mr. McGonigal made at least $25,000 as an investigator for the law firm before directly working for Mr. Deripaska. He received an initial payment of $51,000 and then payments of $41,790 each month for three months from August 2021 to November 2021, the indictment said.

Prosecutors said Mr. McGonigal concealed his ties to the Russian oligarch by telling friends he was working for a “rich Russian guy” and stressed that his work was legal. In conversations about Mr. Deripaska, he would try to keep his employer’s identity a secret by referring to him as “the big guy” and “you know whom.” -Washington Times

McGonigal pleaded guilty in August after being hit with four initial corruption charges – including conspiring to evade U.S. sanctions, money laundering, conspiring to commit money laundering and conspiring to violate federal law against doing business with sanctioned individuals. Each count carried a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

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‘This is Definitely Plagiarism’: Harvard University President Claudine Gay Copied Entire Paragraphs From Others’ Academic Work and Claimed Them as Her Own

Harvard University president Claudine Gay plagiarized numerous academics over the course of her academic career, at times airlifting entire paragraphs and claiming them as her own work, according to reviews by several scholars.

In four papers published between 1993 and 2017, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay, a political scientist, paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors—including two of her colleagues in Harvard University’s department of government—without proper attribution, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis. Other examples of possible plagiarism, all from Gay’s dissertation, were publicized Sunday by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Karlstack’s Chris Brunet.

The Free Beacon worked with nearly a dozen scholars to analyze 29 potential cases of plagiarism. Most of them said that Gay had violated a core principle of academic integrity as well as Harvard’s own anti-plagiarism policies, which state that “it’s not enough to change a few words here and there.”

Rather, scholars are expected to cite the sources of their work, including when paraphrasing, and to use quotation marks when quoting directly from others. But in at least 10 instances, Gay lifted full sentences—even entire paragraphs—with just a word or two tweaked.

In her 1997 thesis, for example, she borrowed a full paragraph from a paper by the scholars Bradley Palmquist, then a political science professor at Harvard, and Stephen Voss, one of Gay’s classmates in her Ph.D. program at Harvard, while making only a couple alterations, including changing their “decrease” to “increase” because she was studying a different set of data.

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