States in the parched American west are “sharpening their knives” as a historic drought threatens their water supplies and the federal government reluctantly contemplates stepping in to impose rationing.
The political tensions boiled over this week with the announcement that the deadline for a deal had passed, with the threat of Uncle Sam stepping in and enforcing restrictions now looming large.
For the longest time, we were told that an informant on the inside of Mar-a-Lago, someone close to President Trump, alerted authorities he was holding onto super secret classified documents. Well, that’s not the half of it. Actually, the person isn’t tied to Mar-a-Lago, and they certainly are not “close” to Trump, but this person is close to Hillary, of course. Washington Times reports that the Aug. 8 search of former President Donald Trump’s home and the unprecedented criminal investigation into his possession of White House documents all began with David Ferriero, the now-retired national archivist who alerted the Justice Department after finding classified information in boxes he retrieved from Mar-a-Lago.
h/t Mom
The ousted CNN host was a hitman on behalf of the media
One of cable news infotainment’s most shameless hosts is out of a job. On Thursday CNN canceled the Sunday morning show Reliable Sources and released its host Brian Stelter.
The media’s janitor, as I’ve come to call him, is unemployed for now, but don’t expect it to last. The New York Times has had a media columnist opening since Ben Smith left in January — and that’s where Stelter made his name.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently revealed that he was influential in getting Senator Joe Manchin to support Democrats’ massive spending bill. The billionaire had personally lobbied the senator for several months to support the progressive climate and energy legislation. It later passed the Inflation Reduction act with the senator’s support.
The jaw-dropping trailer for new movie, My Son Hunter has been released showing the ‘corrupt’ history of scandal of President Biden’s son – including a shocking scene where the 79-year-old president kisses one of his Secret Service agents.
My Son Hunter, which will be distributed by right wing outlet Breitbart News, is set for release September 7 – just two months before the 2022 midterm elections.
Julius Franklin Howell (January 17, 1846 – June 19, 1948) joined the Confederate Army when he was 16. After surviving a few battles, he eventually found himself in a Union prison camp at Point Lookout, Maryland.
More at the link.
h/t Mauser 98
Two men who helped murder American journalist James Foley as part of the Islamic State group’s campaign of terror are facing justice in the US. One of them is being sentenced for murder on 19 August. James’s mother sat face-to-face with the other.
It was a cold morning in Virginia last year when Diane Foley sat opposite the man who kidnapped and helped murder her son, looking him fully in the face as they sat in a nondescript room in the courthouse where he would later be sentenced to life in prison.
When she entered the room, Alexanda Kotey was already there, seated amid a flurry of activity and noise from FBI agents and defence lawyers and minders.
The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) recently warned that China’s interest in the agriculture of the United States poses both a serious economic challenge and a security risk to the United States.
China sits on 7-9% percent of the world’s arable land, 294 million acres, but is home to nearly 20% (1.4 billion in 2020) of the global population (nearly 8 billion in 2022). By comparison, the US has more than 375 million acres of arable land and a population of 329.5 million.
Filings made by Elon Musk’s legal team in his battle with Twitter have been questioned by leading bot researchers.
Botometer – an online tool that tracks spam and fake accounts – was used by Mr Musk in a countersuit against Twitter.
Using the tool, Mr Musk’s team estimated that 33% of “visible accounts” on the social media platform were “false or spam accounts”.
However, Botometer creator and maintainer, Kaicheng Yang, said the figure “doesn’t mean anything”
While many are rightfully concerned about the growing influence of video-based social media platform TikTok and the Chinese government’s ability to harvest incredible amounts of user data from it, China’s largest social media and video game studio, Tencent, has quietly been acquiring a commanding stake in the most popular video game companies around the world, and no one has seemed to notice. From Riot Games’ flagship title Valorant to the popular Epic Games-produced Fortnite, Tencent and the Chinese Communist Party are inserting propaganda and influencing a generation of children around the world while their parents aren’t looking.
Prime Minister Trudeau slapped a ban on handgun imports until proposed legislation that would ban the sale and purchase of handguns, among other gun control measures, can be voted on by the Canadian Parliament. The import ban was a knee-jerk reaction after Canadians rushed to buy firearms when the Trudeau administration introduced legislation to end handgun sales.
Prime Minister Trudeau isn’t waiting for a debate or a vote. He’s operating by executive fiat. He’s acting like a mini-tyrant, and it’s not the first time he’s trampled on Canadian’s ability to own guns or even protest their own government.
A Black Lives Matter activist whose Boston non-profit was shut down amid a federal fraud case against her after she allegedly blew thousands in charity donations on dinners, vacations and nail salon trips, is now requesting to apply for unemployment benefits.
Monica Cannon-Grant, 41, the former head of the non-profit ‘Violence in Boston,’ and her husband, Clark Grant, 38, were federally indicted in March for allegedly soliciting millions of dollars in donations following the 2020 killing of George Floyd that they used for their own personal gain.
They’re also accused of illegally collecting an estimated $100,000 in pandemic unemployment benefits and lying on a mortgage application.
Many years ago — way back in the 20th Century — there was a thing called the three-strike rule. As readers know, today, a criminal can have a hundred strikes and still be happily walking the streets. Still, although it may no longer work on the streets, I do wonder why the three strike rule can’t apply in foreign affairs.
For an institution that continues to claim it’s independent and apolitical, the Bank of Canada sure keeps doing not-so-independent and apolitical things. In the latest news, BoC Governor Tiff Macklem gave insider advice to business leaders not to raise workers’ wages.
How do you best depress worker’s wages?
Open the immigration floodgates as the Trudeau government has done.
KYIV, Ukraine — Tensions around the nuclear power plant on the front lines of the war in Ukraine escalated sharply on Thursday, as the Russian and Ukrainian militaries traded charges that each was preparing to stage an attack on the plant in coming days, risking a catastrophic release of radiation.
The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that the Ukrainian military was preparing a “terrorist attack” on the sprawling Zaporizhzhia power plant complex on the Dnipro river, prompting the Ukrainian military intelligence agency to respond that the Russian warning was in fact a pretext for Moscow to stage a “provocation” of some kind there on Friday.
#Ukraine: The first documented loss of a Russian 2S5 Giatsint-S 152mm self-propelled gun, after being hit by counter-battery fire from the Ukrainian 44th Artillery Brigade. pic.twitter.com/FZn9wxF6xH
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) August 18, 2022
