The US has promised that Amazon and Facebook will fall under the new global tax rules agreed by the G7 nations. But even in countries with rock-bottom rates, megacorporations have paid effectively nothing for years.

Finance ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) countries agreed on Saturday to implement a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15%. Bringing in this minimum rate is a goal of the US President Joe Biden administration, and while it will need to be debated by the G20 and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) later this year, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen hailed the agreement as "a historic achievement."

The agreement won't directly affect companies paying tax in the G7 nations, all of which levy corporate taxes at or above 15% already. It will, however, affect firms headquartered offshore, particularly American tech companies that can easily assign intellectual property rights to their foreign subsidiaries and dodge the 21% demanded by Uncle Sam.

The tech giants "will qualify by almost any definition" for the planned tax regime, Yellen said on Saturday, referring to Amazon and Facebook in particular.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Saturday that it will no longer secretly obtain reporters' private phone records as part of investigations into leaks, confirming a shift in policy under the Biden administration.

The move marks a reversal of a longstanding government practice to try to uncover reporters' sources, efforts that news organizations have decried. It comes amid a flood of criticism over a push by the DOJ during both the Trump and Biden administrations to obtain communications logs from reporters of various outlets. DOJ spokesperson Anthony Coley said Saturday:

"DOJ has now completed a review to determine all instances in which the Department had pending compulsory requests from reporters in leak investigations. All reporters involved have now been notified.

"Going forward, consistent with the President's direction, this Department of Justice — in a change to its longstanding practice--will not seek compulsory legal process in leak investigations to obtain source information from members of the news media doing their jobs.

"The Department strongly values a free press, protecting First Amendment values, and is committed to taking all appropriate steps to ensure the independence of journalists."

The statement comes after it was revealed that a gag order was placed on executives and reporters for The New York Times over efforts by the DOJ to obtain communications logs from some of its reporters. The gag order was reportedly put in place to keep the investigation from being publicized.

A large fire broke out Saturday night at a steel factory in the southeast city of Zarand in Iran. It's the latest in a mysterious string of blasts and 'accidental' blazes at sensitive sites to beset the Islamic Republic, raising questions of possible Israel sabotage akin to what happened a year ago in the summer of 2020.

"The governor of Zarand told the Iranian Fars News Agency that no injuries were caused in the incident and that the incident was under control," The Jerusalem Post reports. "The incident was reportedly caused by the sudden overflow of molten material in the blast furnace, with the governor stressing that no explosion occurred." But some early videos show otherwise.

President Biden told the class of 2021 in a pre-taped address that systemic racism is "the greatest crisis of our time," adding that graduates were at a "turning point" in history.

Biden, in the speech which he shared on his POTUS Twitter account Saturday, said:

"Every class enters the history of the nation up to the point that it has been written by others. But few classes, once in every few generations, enters at a point in our history where it actually has a chance to change the trajectory of the country."

Biden told the graduates they will see more change in the next 50 years than the country has seen in the last 50, in the nearly three-minute speech.

Broadcasting regulator Ofcom has come under fire this week for labelling scepticism of official statistics and statements as "misinformation" during the Covid crisis. The Telegraph has the story.

The broadcasting regulator has been accused of stifling "rational criticism" of the response to Covid by labelling scepticism about Britain's approach to the pandemic as "misinformation".

Amid major controversy over whether official statistics were overstating the prevalence of coronavirus, Ofcom described the idea that there were "a lower number of cases in reality than is being reported" as a "common piece of misinformation".

It also emerged that the regulator warned broadcasters in the early days of the pandemic that it was prioritising investigations into programmes or news reports featuring advice which "discourages the audience from following official rules and guidance".

The disclosure will lead to renewed concerns about the approach of the regulator, as the Government seeks a new chairman who can "provide proper scrutiny and challenge".

An Al-Jazeera journalist was arrested earlier by the Israel Police in the flashpoint Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, according to footage posted online and the Palestinian Authority.

She was identified as Givara Al Budeiri, the Qatari network's Jerusalem correspondent, by an Al Jazeera official.

From revelations about Israeli efforts to "destroy" him, to attempts by a powerful pro-Israel lobby group to stop him becoming a minister for the Middle East, Sir Alan Duncan saw up close the power of the Israeli state in British politics during his time at the heart of the UK government.

Duncan served as British foreign minister from 2016-19, having previously held the international development brief. His new book, In The Thick Of It, reveals much about UK government policy that has been missed by the British press and broadcasters.

At the beginning of 2017, media outlet Al Jazeera contacted Duncan to inform him about its undercover investigation into Israeli influence in UK politics, which included revelations related to him personally.

The Biden Administration has proposed what it calls a $2.3 trillion "infrastructure" legislation which it calls the "American Jobs Plan." Far from addressing the huge deficit in America's highway, bridges, railway, electric grid, water supply and such economically vital infrastructure that would address critical problems in the functioning of the economy, the Biden planners have cynically taken a politically popular word, "infrastructure," and packed hundreds of billions of dollars into economically wasteful, destructive initiatives having more to do with the Green Agenda than rebuilding a healthy economy. If passed, it will have negative consequences for the world's once-leading economy with serious geopolitical implications.

In March Biden signed another huge extra-budget bill, the $1.9 trillion "American Rescue Plan." That one was allegedly to aim at dealing with the impact of COVID. The bill dealt in fact with almost everything but COVID. The act is a grab bag of partisan pet projects. Among other things the act provided $12 billion for foreign aid; $15 billion for health care for illegal immigrants; $112 billion for welfare benefits and a generous $350 billion for Democrat-run states. Less than 10% was directed at COVID relief measures. In politics how you frame or package a bill is more important than the true content. Critics claim these huge spending bills are aimed at buying a future Democratic voter base with government handouts.

For over forty years, coalitions of academics, governments, corporations, and world governance bodies have colluded to build a global ed-tech schooling system meant to shackle children to the transhumanist Fourth Industrial Revolution.

I recently visited former Senior Policy Advisor to the US Office of Educational Research and Improvement, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, who gave me access to her archive of files that she collected from the US Department of Education. After digging through a collection of files collated by Lawrence P. Grayson, who was the Advisor for Mathematics, Science and Technology at America's National Institute of Education (NIE), I discovered that the Department of Ed's Project BEST (Basic Education Skills through Technology), which Iserbyt leaked in 1981, was actually the USA's domestic version of an international technology initiative spearheaded by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

While stationed at the NIE, Grayson was also the US Department of Ed's liaison with UNESCO's educational technology programs, including "Study 11: New Technologies in Education", which he procured for Iserbyt in a bundle of interrelated memorandums and journals. Labeled as the "Grayson File," this folder compiled the following documents:

• UNESCO Study 11 whitepapers that issue ed-tech directives to a region of 14 nation states grouping together communist, socialist, and capitalist countries;
• US Department of Ed memorandums which stipulate American collaboration with Study 11 and other UNESCO technology programs;
• Law journals that call for restructuring legal systems in order to globalize the computerized "information technology" (IT) revolution necessary to streamline international ed-tech markets;
• Academic journals containing ed-tech promotionals from Project BEST contractors and UNESCO Study 11 representatives published alongside commercial advertisements and order forms for Project BEST courseware and other e-learning products being sold by the very same companies, including Microsoft, Apple, and IBM, that are endorsed in the UNESCO Study 11 whitepapers.

Authorities in Denmark have shut down much of the country's access to video platform Bitchute in the name of preventing the spread of "dangerous information" about COVID.

Denmark's National Police Cyber Crime Center (NC3) petitioned for a court order to block the site and ISPs followed suit by blocking access to users.

"The National Police Cyber Crime Center (NC3) has blocked the homepage that your browser has tried to access contact as there is reason to assume that from the website commits a violation of criminal law, which has a background in or connection with the covid-19 epidemic in Denmark," states a message users see when trying to access Bitchute.

It then advises the owner of the website that they will have to contact the authorities in order to try to get the website back online.

"The block appears to be site-wide meaning that Danish citizens aren't just being prevented from viewing alleged COVID-19 misinformation on BitChute - they're being blocked from viewing any BitChute videos, regardless of the topic," writes Tom Parker.