President Biden's approval rating has reached a new low, according to an NBC News poll released Sunday.

Biden's overall approval rating declined to 40 percent in the survey, which found that 55 percent of respondents did not approve of how he is doing as president.

In a January NBC News poll, Biden's job approval stood at 43 percent, while 54 percent did not approve of his performance.

The two recorders should help investigators determine what caused the plane to plummet from 29,000 feet and into a forested mountainside, killing all 132 people on board.

The second "black box" has been recovered from the crash of a China Eastern Boeing 737-800 that killed all 132 people on board last week, Chinese state media said Sunday.

Firefighters taking part in the search found therecorder, an orange cylinder, on a mountain slope about 5 feet underground, state broadcaster CCTV said. Experts confirmed it was the second black box. The impact of the crash scattered debris widely and created a 65-foot-deep pit in the side of the mountain.

In the past five years, a cadre of fact-checkers has marched through the institutions of journalism and installed itself in the U.S. media as a privatized, quasi-governmental regulatory agency. What's wrong with facts, you say? Fueled by a panic over misinformation, the fact-checking industry is shifting the media's primary obligation away from pursuing the truth and toward upholding vague notions of public safety, which it gets to define. In the course of this transformation, journalists are being turned into rent-a-cops whose job is to enforce an official consensus that is treated as a civic good by those who benefit from — and pay for — its protection.

At Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — content flagged as false or misleading gets downgraded in the platform's algorithms so fewer people will see it. Google and Twitter have similar rules to bury posts. In reality, America's new public-private "Ministry of Truth" mainly serves the interests of the tech platforms and Democratic Party operatives who underwrite and support the fact-checking enterprise. This, in turn, convinces large numbers of normal Americans that the officially sanctioned news product they receive is an ass-covering con job — an attitude that marks many millions of people as potentially dangerous vectors of misinformation, which justifies more censorship, further ratcheting up the public's cynicism toward the press and the institutional powers it now openly serves. On and on it goes, the distrust and repression feeding off each other, the pressure building up until the system breaks down or explodes.

Has any story ever been more energetically fact-checked than Hunter Biden's laptop? The news broke just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, and was so effectively buried by accusations of disinformation and social media bans that it became synonymous with the power of the new truth regulating bureaucracy. Shortly after the first reports of the laptop, The New York Times' Kevin Roose modestly acknowledged the role that misinformation journalists like him had played in pressuring tech companies to take "more and faster action to prevent false or misleading information from spreading ... in order to prevent a repeat of 2016's debacle."

Yesterday, the media delegation I joined for a two day trip to the Donbass visited Schastia, a town liberated by Russian forces a few weeks ago. We saw lines of people waiting for (quite ample) food aid. Telesur journalist Alejandro Kirk asked me some of my thoughts on media & propaganda around what we were seeing. I drew parallels to how liberations of towns in Syria occurred & the inevitable corporate media lies that followed.


Under Fire from Ukraine and Misperceived by the West, The People of the DPR Share Their Stories

Warm up the Wagnerian orchestra and call in the goose-stepping chorus girls, because ... yes, that's right, it's Springtime for GloboCap! "The Winter of Severe Illness and Death" is over! The big Black Sun is shining again! God's in his heaven, all's right with the world!

OK, sure, the vast majority of humanity are suffering from post-traumatic stress, having been terrorized, gaslighted, threatened, bullied, and otherwise systematically mindfucked by their governments, the media, and "health authorities" on a daily basis for the past two years, and we're all exhausted and at each other's throats, and many of our businesses and incomes have been ruined, and inflation is spiraling out of control, and a lot of us are still being gratuitously demonized, segregated from society, banned from traveling, and forced to submit to invasive procedures and wear medically-pointless symbols of ideological conformity on our faces, so we're not quite in the spirit of the season ... but, for GloboCap, things couldn't be going any better!

Not only is the final phase of their roll-out of the new pathologized totalitarianism (i.e., the New Normal) going more or less to plan, but those pesky, non-ball-playing Russians have been baited into a military quagmire in the Ukraine that could be dragged out for years! Think of all the destabilization, restructuring, and privatization opportunities, and not just in Russia and Eastern Europe, and not just during the next few years, but throughout the world and well into the future! With the majority of the Western masses brain-buggered into a state of almost catatonic credulity and obedience, who's going to stop them? The sky's the limit!

Rocketing global food prices as a result of the war in Ukraine could trigger riots from those going hungry in poor countries, the head of the World Trade Organization has said.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala warned food-producing countries against hoarding supplies and said it was vital to avoid a repeat of the Covid pandemic, when rich countries were able to secure for themselves the bulk of vaccines.

In an interview with the Guardian, the WTO director general expressed concern about the knock-on effects of Russia's invasion - stressing the dependence of many African countries on food supplies from the Black Sea region. Okonjo-Iweala said:

"I think we should be very worried. The impact on food prices and hunger this year and next could be substantial. Food and energy are the two biggest items in the consumption baskets of poor people all over the world. It is poor countries and poor people within poor countries that will suffer the most."

Okonjo-Iweala, a former Nigerian finance minister, said 35 African countries were dependent on food imported from the Black Sea region, adding that Russia and Ukraine were responsible for 24% of global supplies of wheat.

A group of protesters injured by police during the George Floyd demonstrations in 2020 has been awarded $14 million in compensation in a Denver civil rights settlement.

After a three-week trial, a jury on Friday found that the city and county of Denver violated the First and Fourth Amendment rights of 12 protesters. Jurors found that Denver failed to properly train officers, resulting in police violating the plaintiffs' constitutional rights.

Attorneys for the protesters argued rights were violated by police shooting them while they were protesting peacefully. Objects shot toward the crowd included tear gas, flashbang grenades, pepper balls, rubber bullets and other projectiles.

According to the lawsuit:

"Officers used these weapons indiscriminately and without any or adequate warning, even at times when the crowd was merely chanting, kneeling, or standing with their hands up."

The plaintiffs' injuries included a skull fractured by a less-lethal projectile, eyes and throat burning from pepper spray and bruises and cuts from other projectiles, according to the lawsuit.

Protesters say the excessive force violated their rights to demonstrate and be protected from the unnecessary force. Each protester was awarded $1 million, except a man who ended up in the intensive care unit after being hit in the head with a less-lethal projectile, who received $4.5 million.

Telsa and SpaceX boss Elon Musk confirmed on Saturday night that he is "giving serious thought" to building a free speech friendly alternative to Twitter.

On Friday, Musk polled his Twitter audience, asking whether or users of the platform believed that "Twitter rigorously adheres" to the principle that "free speech is essential to a functioning democracy."

Authorities in Lower Saxony and Bavaria have banned the display of the 'Z' symbol that has become synonymous with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is unclear if other German states will follow suit.

Two German states on Saturday said they have outlawed public displays of the "Z" symbol used by the Russian army in their invasion of Ukraine.

Anyone who brandishes the symbol at demonstrations or paints it on cars or buildings in a show of support for Vladimir Putin's war could risk up to three years in jail or a fine in Lower Saxony or Bavaria.

Please read this article very carefully, because it contains very important information that is going to affect you and your family. In fact, it is going to affect every man, woman and child on the face of the planet. For the past couple of years, I have been specifically warning that a major global food crisis was coming. In fact, in recent months I have been writing about this multiple times per week. At first, I think that a lot of people out there thought that I was exaggerating, but at this point the reality that we are heading into a major global food crisis has become undeniable. In fact, Joe Biden just told a press conference in Brussels that worldwide food shortages are "going to be real"...

President Joe Biden said that the world will experience food shortages as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and production increases were a subject of discussions at a Group of Seven meeting on Thursday.

"It's going to be real," Biden said at a news conference in Brussels. "The price of the sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia. It's imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well."

And Biden is definitely not alone.