The Biden administration claimed on Monday there was “no link” between the Justice Department agreeing to drop its charges against a Huawei executive held in Canada and China releasing two Canadians that it had taken hostage shortly after her arrest.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked if the U.S. decision would incentivize China to engage in further hostage diplomacy, and Psaki attempted to reject this.
“I think it’s important to note, that to be very clear about this, there is no link,” Psaki contended. “We have an independent Justice Department. We can’t determine how the Chinese or others manage their business over there. It’s a little bit different. But we have an independent Justice Department that made independent decisions, law enforcement decisions. At the same time, we have made no secret about our push to have the two Michaels released. That’s certainly positive news and good news.”
The Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget proposal relies on a $100 billion tax hike that disproportionately targets the poor, lines the pockets of organized crime, and increases inequality.
The plan doubles the federal tax on cigarettes, which would break President Joe Biden’s promise to raise taxes only on those earning more than $400,000. Households with an income of $35,000 or less smoke at three times the rate of households with incomes of more than $100,000. Richard Marianos, a 27-year veteran of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives who worked on gang violence, said a tobacco tax increase will punish vulnerable communities.
“You’re punishing lower-income people, which the administration promised it wouldn’t do,”…
In what may be the “tip of the iceberg” of reports, the Wall Street Journal reports 131 Federal Judges heard and ruled on cases in which they potentially had something to gain or lose financially because of their ruling.
BELOW- Screenshot of WSJ’s headline reporting, the effort to downplay the significance is obvious.
“The judges failed to recuse themselves from 685 lawsuits from 2010 to 2018 involving firms in which they or their family held shares, a Wall Street Journal investigation found.”
Around a third of the cases heard by a corrupted judge were not ruled in their favor of the companies they owned stocks in, but 2/3rd were and as this information comes to light, cases are being set aside. This sets the whole process back and is frustrating for all sides. Meanwhile, the contacted judges are crying mea culpa and claiming innocent error.
Such reports tend to assuage people’s fears that corruption is not being reported by offering what may be a molehill for a mountain, giving a few bad examples to be duly shunned (but not too harshly) so as to make things seem legitimate. In truth, aside from this cursory investigation, which yielded some troubling fruit, the amount of corruption actually prevailing may be titanic, but will never be reported in its scope.
The reporting relied on self-reporting by over 700 judges and could not possibly have uncovered the many ways a judge could conceal such a conflict of interest. But of the 700 judges who self-reported owning stocks, 131 had serious conflicts of interest based on their own self-reporting. This is the smoke, but it’s not the fire and the corpostate press are all too happy to make is focus on the smoke while pretending there is no fire.
The Wall Street Journal claims that in no case where criminal law was at question did they find a conflict of interest. The depth and breadth of their investigation may be tarnished by their own conflict of interest in connection to the very entities, monopoly corporate powers, who corrupted those judges in the first place.
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After a report claimed that Facebook’s Instagram was having a deleterious effect on the psyche of teens, preying on their anger, and their sense of body worth thanks to the rise of instagrammodels, the mega corp is halting its development of Instagram for Kids until such time as the eyes of the world are no longer on them. Perhaps Facebook could claim any article or video that suggests this report is valid could be termed “misinformation,” and thus give Facebook full leeway to assure the bad report doesn’t get shared.
Well, maybe not just yet, but, it’s coming. When the mob goes on to the next outrage, Facebook will quietly resume its efforts to commodify the minds of children around the world. Cool. Everyone buckle up, the next few years are gonna be even MORE FUN than the last few.
Facebook is putting a hold on the development of a kids’ version of Instagram, geared toward children under 13, to address concerns that have been raised about the vulnerability of younger users.
“I still firmly believe that it’s a good thing to build a version of Instagram that’s designed to be safe for tweens, but we want to take the time to talk to parents and researchers and safety experts and get to more consensus about how to move forward,” said Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, in an interview Monday on NBC’s “Today” show.
Lavrov said at a press conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meetings that there is one remaining hotbed in Syria, in Idlib, and there is no problem in combating terrorism there as “our military sites and those of the Syrian army come under attacks in the de-escalation zones and we will not allow this issue to continue”.
In the same context, Lavruv condemned US occupation of the two areas of al-Tanf and al-Rukban in Syria, describing it as “unacceptable”, SANA reported.
He also condemned Western counties’ insistence on the mechanism of delivering aid to Syria without obtaining the acceptance of the Syrian government.
Apparently, this is the 12th lowest-ever-recorded extent of arctic sea ice, this year, 2021. Twelf lowest is pretty low. But the arctic ice expanse is 26 percent bigger than it was just a year ago. Even though warming trends continued this year, it looks like ice melting has still managed to slow. This is one of those half glass of water being half empty or half full kind of things.
Whatever might be occuring or not occuring as a result of man-made climate change, the patterns are sure to be complex and yield results that, at least so far, no computer model seems to accurately be able to predict. Let’s hope the ‘scientists’ don’t get locked into an easy fix that satisfies the political wants and needs of the mostpowerful when they come up with their surefire fixes to cure climate change. Thank God something like that could never happen, though, ever.
Sea ice covered more area this summer compared to recent years, but it was also much thinner.
Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean and neighboring basins appears to have hit its annual minimum extent on September 16, 2021, after waning in the spring and summer. The summertime extent is the twelfth lowest in the satellite record, according to scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and NASA.
The map at the top of this page shows the sea ice extent on September 16, 2021. The ice extent (white) on that day—defined as the total area in which the ice concentration is at least 15 percent—measured 4.72 million square kilometers (1.82 million square miles)—higher than in recent years. Sea ice extents in 2020 and 2019 were the second and third lowest on record at 3.74 million square kilometers in 2020 and 4.14 million in 2019.
Immediately after the EU sided with France over the US essentially cancelling France’s submarine deal with Australia, Greece has announced a major multibillion dollar deal with France that will see Greece purchase a minimum of 6 French Warships, a move that is sure not to please the Turks, or the Americans, for that matter. The relationship between Greece and America is necessarily strong, for now, but Europe now appears ready to finally treat Greece like a member of the European family, choosing them at long last over Turkey.
The leaders of Greece and France are expected to announce a major, multibillion-euro deal in Paris on Tuesday involving the acquisition by Greece of at least six French-built warships, Greek state ERT TV reported.
ERT said Monday that Greece was planning to acquire three French FDI frigates — with the option of later buying a fourth —and another three corvettes.
The International Monetary Fund has long been mega bullish on the main regarding its characterization of China’s economy the past couple of decades, but, in the past few years, that bullishness was even more bullsh than usual. Now, accusations have emerged that the IMF chief, Kristalina Georgieva, has been taking kickbacks from the Chinese Communist Party to sugarcoat the reality to assure China continued to be viewed as THE place to invest your money and ship your home nation’s jobs.
What will come of these mounting calls for her resignation? Well, most likely, the whole affair will be counted up to another Russian troll farm or alt right hater or, or, or, you get the pattern of invalidation.
Amid mounting calls for her resignation, International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Kristalina Georgieva criticized as “false and spurious” the findings of an independent probe into allegations that as World Bank head she pressured staff to manipulate data to make China’s business climate appear more favorable.
On Sep 16, bank announced that it will be discontinuing ‘Ease of Doing Business’ reports after an in-house investigation found that bank staff improperly altered the scores of China and three other countries.
The unholy triumvirate known as Turkey, Russia, and Iran that has dominated most of the outcomes in Syria has always had a tenous hold on its union, but that potential is becoming even more strained as Iran begins to see a different type of triumvirate forming in the region to the north of Iran, Azerbaijan, where Turkey has now gained a foothold after equipping Azerbaikanis in their recent dust-up with Armenia with killer drones that tilted the balance of power to the Azerbaijanis significantly.
As you might imagine, given the fact that Turkey, through Erdogan, sees itself as the apex of a worldwide Muslim caliphate, Iran is none too keen to see this contender for the caliphate throne gain influence to their northern frontier. The dynamics of Syria are sure to become a bit more unstable as the tension between Iran and Turkey grows.
Since the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, tensions between Iran and the emerging Turkey-Azerbaijan-Pakistan Axis have significantly escalated. It is now glaringly obvious that Iran grossly miscalculated the new reality that would emerge with Azerbaijan capturing Armenian-held territories in the South Caucasus.
A major motivating factor of Azerbaijan’s insistence on controlling Nagorno-Karabakh is the Greater Pan-Turkic project, where Turkey sees itself as the domineering center of a sphere of influence stretching from Istanbul to Western China. Rather than dealing with this project, which supports Turkic separatist ideals in Iran, Tehran decided on pan-Islamic optics and continually congratulated and praised Azerbaijan’s capture of historically-demographically-culturally Armenian territories.
Jeff Bezos is chasing the ghost of Elon Musk, having already beaten him to “space” in a surely heroic effort. He wants to unseat the private space giant, and he wants to do it now, so he’s doubling his time commitment to his Blue Origin project in a bid to be this generation’s first space billionaire explorer hoping to build a space empire that will make him a space trillionaire tycoon.
Jeff Bezos has called Blue Origin his life’s most important work – and the hours he is devoting to the space company are growing accordingly.
Historically, Bezos had dedicated Wednesday afternoons to either updates and discussions at Blue Origin, people familiar with the situation told CNBC – meetings which were in person before the Covid pandemic, and have been by phone since. However, within the past month he added Tuesday afternoons as well, those people said.
While Bezos’ increased engagement with the company has been previously reported, just how much he’s involved with Blue Origin has not. As one of the richest people in the world, and still involved at Amazon as the company’s executive chairman, demands on Bezos’ time are high, so spending twice as much time with his space company represents a significant added commitment.
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