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Steve Bannon is heading to JAIL as appeals court upholds his conviction for defying the January 6 committee subpoena

Rob Crilly
Daily Mail
Fri, 10 May 2024 10:21 UTC
SteveB
© ReutersPardoned by then President Donald Trump Steve Bannon was indicted for alleged involvement in Jan 6 US Capitol riots
Donald Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon is likely headed to prison after an appeals court upheld his conviction for contempt of Congress.

He was handed a four-month sentence in 2022 for refusing to give evidence to a congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. But it was put on hold as he appealed, saying that he acted in good faith by following legal advice and that he was barred from including critical evidence at his trial.

The decision came on Friday when the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected his challenge.

'Bannon insists that 'willfully' should be interpreted to require bad faith and argues that his non-compliance does not qualify because his lawyer advised him not to respond to the subpoena,' wrote Judge Bradley Garcia.
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Target

Pro-Palestinian protesters demand endowment transparency; but it's proving not to be simple

Heather Hollingsworth, Trisha Ahmed
ABC News
Fri, 10 May 2024 12:07 UTC
Divest sign
© Steven Senne/APActivists hang a placard • Rhode Island School of Design • Providence, Rhode Island • May 7, 2024
Some universities are vowing to provide information about how much university endowment money is invested in companies profiting from the Israel-Hamas war amid calls from pro-Palestinian protesters. On college campuses across the country, a rallying cry of pro-Palestinian protesters has been "Disclose, divest! We will not stop, we will not rest."

Now some are winning the first of those two demands: Promises to provide information about how much university endowment money is invested in companies profiting from the Israel-Hamas war.

As part of that effort, the University of Minnesota, for one, disclosed this week that about $5 million of its $2.27 billion endowment investments — or less than a quarter of 1% — are tied to Israeli companies or U.S. defense contractors.

To Ali Abu, a 19-year-old University of Minnesota student and member of Students for Justice in Palestine, the disclosure is a first step. He was among more than a dozen students to stand before the university's Board of Regents on Friday and demand further action.

"That chant isn't a bluff," he said, adding: "We will truly not stop. And we will truly not rest until this university divests."
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Truck

Argentina labor unions stage 24-hour strike against President Milei: Paralyzes daily life


Fox News
Thu, 09 May 2024 21:02 UTC
argentina milei general strike labor unions
© AP Photo/Rodrigo AbdTrains stand idle at the Retiro train station due to a general strike against the reforms of President Javier Milei in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Thursday, May 9, 2024.
The annual inflation rate in Argentina currently is approaching 300%

Argentina's biggest trade unions mounted one of their fiercest challenges to the libertarian government of President Javier Milei, staging a mass general strike on Thursday that led to the cancellation of hundreds of flights and halted key bus, rail and subway lines.

Main avenues and streets, as well as major transportation terminals were left eerily empty. Most teachers couldn't make it to school and parents kept their children at home. Trash collectors walked off the job — as did health workers, except for those in emergency rooms.

The 24-hour strike against Milei's painful austerity measures and contentious deregulation push threatened to bring the nation of 46 million to a standstill as banks, businesses and state agencies also closed in protest.

Comment:

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Airplane

The "soft landing" lie: A global economic slowdown is already underway

Brandon Smith
Alt-Market.us
Wed, 08 May 2024 00:00 UTC
plane in flames
If people have learned anything from the past few years of Ivy League elites and TV talking heads feeding them economic predictions, I hope they finally understand that the "experts" are usually wrong and that alternative analysts have a far better track record. Whenever establishment economists make a call the opposite generally turns out to be true.

By extension, alternative economic predictions are usually well ahead of the curve - What we talk about might be labeled "doom mongering" or "conspiracy theory" today. In three years or less it will be treated as common knowledge and the mainstream "experts" will claim that they "saw it coming all along" while taking credit for financial calls they never made.

This has been a long running pattern and it's something those of us in the alternative media have come to expect.
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Stop

IBM will stop hiring for jobs that could be performed by an AI

Rob Thubron
Techspot
Thu, 02 May 2024 10:54 UTC
IBM building
A HOT POTATO: It's a case of another day, another example of AI replacing human jobs. Rather than directly causing layoffs, tech giant IBM has confirmed it expects to pause and slow hiring for roles that it believes could be replaced with artificial intelligence at some point in the future.

Speaking to Bloomberg, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said that hiring in non-customer-facing roles, such as human resources, will be suspended or slowed as AI could automate many tasks performed by these hires.

Around 26,000 people within IBM currently fill the roles Krishna is referencing. He envisions about 30% being replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period. That equates to around 7,800 jobs.

IBM emphasized that no people currently working in these positions will be fired to make way for AI. However, it did say that any roles vacated by attrition won't be filled.

Like virtually all tech giants, IBM announced job cuts earlier this year in response to the economic downturn and post-pandemic-boom blues. It will be laying off around 5,000 workers in total.
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Stop

'One-Party Rule': Taliban wages crackdown on political parties

Abubakar Siddique
RFE/RL
Wed, 08 May 2024 00:00 UTC
Hekmatyar
© Aamir Qureshi/fileGulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezb-e Islami party in Afghanistan, speaks at an event in Islamabad
The Taliban is widening its crackdown on dissent by targeting political parties in Afghanistan. The extremist group banned all political parties last year. But in recent months, the Taliban has clamped down on parties still deemed to be active.

Among the high-profile targets is the Hezb-e Islami party led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of Afghanistan's most notorious ex-warlords and a former militant leader.

The move comes as the Taliban intensifies its efforts to stifle opposing voices in Afghanistan, where scores of journalists and activists have been jailed since the militants' takeover in 2021.

'Bad Policies'

Hekmatyar signed a peace deal with the former Afghan government in 2016, under which he was granted security and a government-funded residence in the capital, Kabul. The 76-year-old initially welcomed the Taliban's resumption of control in Afghanistan. But he has grown increasingly critical of the group, which has monopolized power, severely curtailed women's rights, and stamped out the free press.

In March, the Taliban forced Hekmatyar out of his government-funded residence and barred him from holding his Friday sermons. Members of his party were then prevented from meeting with him in his new residence in the capital. In April, a TV station owned by Hezb-e Islami was shut down. Barya TV mainly aired Hekmatyar's speeches and sermons.
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Stormtrooper

Israel destroys entire Bedouin village to 'expand a highway'

Oren Ziv
972 Magazine
Fri, 10 May 2024 17:30 UTC
bedouin israel
© Oren ZivIsraeli forces raze the entire unrecognized village of Wadi al-Khalil in the Naqab, May 8, 2024. The demolition of Wadi al-Khalil, an unrecognized village in the Naqab, left over 300 citizens homeless despite their attempts to reach a compromise.
On the morning of May 8, Israeli forces razed the entire Bedouin village of Wadi al-Khalil in the Naqab/Negev desert. The demolitions, which were carried out in order to expand the Route 6 highway, left more than 300 residents homeless.

Wadi al-Khalil is one of 35 Bedouin villages in the Naqab whose existence the Israeli authorities do not officially recognize; as a result, the villages, which are home to around 150,000 Bedouin Arab citizens of Israel, face the constant threat of demolition. Many of the villages are decades old — some even pre-date Israel's establishment — but they are prevented from connecting to state infrastructure including water and electricity, and their residents are denied municipal services.

According to the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Bedouin Villages, Wednesday's demolition was the largest in the Naqab for 14 years. It comes as Israel's National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir vows to crack down on what he calls "lawbreakers" and restore meshilut — literally "governance," a euphemism for Jewish-Israeli control — to the area. Eight other unrecognized villages are currently under threat of forced eviction under the guise of urban development.

Comment: Israel's leadership perhaps considers the ongoing genocide as ideal cover for the other deplorable tasks it has on its 'to-do' list. Taking that into account, alongside Israel's escalation of the slaughter in Rafah, and the fact that, as noted, there was no rush to get the project done - Israel is already struggling economically, and so a project such as this is hardly going to take precedence - one could conclude that this is yet more evidence of the rapacious and heartless nature of the Israeli state.

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Biohazard

Best of the Web: Tyson Foods dumps 87 BILLION gallons of toxic waste, including cyanide, blood and feces into US rivers and lakes in just 4 years

Dominic Yeatman
Daily Mail
Sun, 05 May 2024 13:34 UTC
tyson food waste pollution
The sheer scale of the poison flowing into the country's rivers and waterways is starting to emerge after scientists took a look at one of America's biggest meat processors.

Tyson Foods released 87 billion gallons contaminated with cancer-causing cyanide, nitrates, chloride, phosphorous and oil directly from 41 plants into public waters across 17 states between 2018 and 2022.

The toxic water would cover 165 square kilometers to a depth of two meters and fill three Olympic-sized swimming pools every hour.

But the study by the Union of Concerned Scientists looked at just two percent of meat processing plants nationwide leaving the total figure terrifyingly uncertain.

Comment: We see a similar disaster in the making over in the UK, which, in just the last few years, changed the laws so that industrial waste can be discharged at ever more deplorable levels. This has already resulted not only in the contamination and ruin of waterways and coastlines, but raw sewage levels have, increasingly, been so excessive that it's poisoning swimmers.

It's rather odd that these same governments, that are fearmongering about viral outbreaks - such as bird flu, but also TB, and blue tongue - and that are culling birds by the tens of millions, enforcing ever stringent biological restrictions, and concocting more questionable mRNA injections, have also, basically, made it legal to knowingly contaminate water supplies.

This, despite there already being good reason to believe that the bird flu that was recently detected in US cattle may have been because the cows were being fed the excreta and waste dredged together as 'fodder' for them from bird farms:

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Attention

Boeing passenger plane makes emergency return to airport, 2 days after Boeing cargo plane forced into an emergency landing


Kyodo News
Fri, 10 May 2024 12:52 UTC
boeing
© KyodoPhoto shows the United Airlines aircraft that made an emergency return to Fukuoka Airport, in Fukuoka on May 10, 2024.
A United Airlines plane bound for Guam on Friday returned to Fukuoka Airport in southwestern Japan for an emergency landing, with no injuries reported among the about 50 passengers and crew on board, according to the transport ministry and police.

Flight 166, a Boeing 737 aircraft, landed back at Fukuoka Airport at around 11:45 a.m. after declaring an emergency. The police are investigating the incident, with an irregularity in a wing flap reported.

There were no reports of fire, according to the police.

Comment: It's looking like a significant number of planes are going to need to be pulled from service, and so what are the chances that this scandal will culminate in the serious disruption of air travel?

Below is footage of the other incident:

The incidents linked below - which are not all planes, nor Boeing - are from the last 6 months or so:

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Stop

Bipartisan House kills MTG motion to oust Johnson as Speaker

Cami Mondeaux
Washington Examiner
Wed, 08 May 2024 05:26 UTC
MTG/MJ
© Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesHouse Rep Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) • House Speaker Mike Johnson
The House rejected an effort from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) from his top leadership position, bringing an end to a weekslong saga of the Georgia Republican seeking to leverage her motion to vacate to make conservative demands.

Lawmakers voted 359-43 to table the motion, effectively killing the measure before it could be brought to the floor for a final vote. The motion succeeded after 163 Democrats joined nearly all Republicans in tabling the bill.

Only 11 Republicans voted against tabling the bill. Seven Democrats voted present.

After the vote, Johnson said:
"I want to say that I appreciate the show of confidence from my colleagues. I'm glad that this distraction is not going to inhibit [our] important work and all the other things that are on the table, on the agenda for us right now. Hopefully this is the end of the personality politics and the frivolous character assassination that has defined the 118th Congress."
Greene noticed her motion to vacate on Wednesday evening, over one month after she initially filed it on the House floor.

Comment: See also:

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