U.S. shoppers spent a record $9.12 billion online on Black Friday, a report showed Saturday, as consumers weathered the squeeze from high inflation and grabbed steep discounts on everything from smartphones to toys.

I want to make it clear from the start that I have no quarrel with Apple products. I am not an Apple fan, but millions of people love Apple products, mostly with good reason, and Apple has become a fad. However, there is a very dirty underbelly to all this, one that the Western and especially US media desperately hide, with a censorship that is total.

Apple today is in the news due to severe labor unrest at its main assembly plant in Zhengzhou, China, with the Western media providing about 98% misinformation. This is the last part of the legacy of Steve Jobs who created a kind of sociopathic monster behind the scenes that is not at all in keeping with the cute, pretty and friendly image Apple try to convey as a company.

Apple do not manufacture or assemble any of their products, all this being subcontracted to others with Apple simply collecting the profits. CPUs and specific parts are made in China, Taiwan, other nations, then all delivered to Apple's main assembly plant in Zhengzhou, China for assembly, testing, packaging and shipping. This is the source of all the trouble. The company in charge of this venture, a Taiwanese firm named Foxconn, has facilities in Zhengzhou with about one million workers for Apple products, a site that has been operated as virtually a concentration camp for years. The situation is well-known in China but not a single word appears to have ever escaped into the Western media.

These young people working for Foxconn assembling Apple products work very long shifts, live in "dormitories" that are little over 100 sq. ft. each, and are virtually prisoners in this "factory campus". The pressures have always been intense. Several years ago, it was so bad that there were flurries of suicides at the factory where young people were simply unable to withstand the strain and pressure. The pay has never been good and the working conditions, terrible. Those who accepted these jobs did so because they had few other choices, but the undercurrents of brutality were always there. The lack of concern for these young people in the West was unconscionable. I was stunned to read a report on the suicides in the Western media where someone wrote that the suicide rate per million for Foxconn employees was lower than that for China generally, and that this proved it was a good place to work. Aside from being untrue, I can scarcely imagine a heart more callous than to write something like that.

It is only due to the arrangement Jobs made with Foxconn that Apple is at all profitable - "the world's most valuable company". If those young people were employed at any normal facility, paid anything resembling a living wage, Apple would be nothing, at least financially. It has always been a surprise to me that the Chinese government didn't just shut the entire place down. One of the issues is that both Apple and Foxconn have consistently been permitted to violate almost all labor laws in China, usually by claiming unclear legislation. One result is that Apple has ensured its costs remain low by Foxconn requiring their staff to work 10 and 12 hours per day, sometimes 7 days a week, but somehow always neglecting or refusing to pay overtime.

Almost as repugnant as the deadly attacks that are occurring with alarming frequency in the United States is the speed with which certain individuals rush to politicize them. The Club Q massacre in Colorado Springs, which left five dead and 18 injured, was certainly no exception.

The Democrats' reaction kicked off with predictable calls for gun control. In this particular tragedy, however, the killer, 22-year-old Andersen Lee Aldrich, should never have been allowed to buy a gun in the first place. Moreover, he should have been high on the FBI's 'person of interest' radar.

A year-and-a-half before Aldrich went on his deadly shooting spree, this troubled young man (who, according to court documents, has now started to identify as non-binary and use the pronouns them/they) threatened his family with a homemade bomb, forcing neighbors to evacuate while police talked him into surrendering. Yet, despite this, the district attorney of Colorado, Michael J. Allen, not only refused to press charges, but did not impose Colorado's red-flag laws, which would have prevented Aldrich from purchasing a firearm. Had the Democratic-run state of Colorado enforced its own laws, five people might still be alive today.

Meta reportedly fired more than a dozen security guards and other workers in the last year after internal investigations revealed they had been selling users' information and login details to hackers. Some of those who received disciplinary actions were contractors who acquired information from users that were locked out or had trouble with their accounts.

The company utilizes a mechanism called "Oops" (Online Operations) to help users access or reset their accounts for Instagram or Facebook. The Wall Street Journal first reported that an internal probe found that some security guards were illegally accessing the accounts and providing the information to hackers for alleged bribes.

Oops is generally used as a last resort if users can't reach someone from Meta by email or phone and are supposed to be used for employees, their family, and friends. But as the number of employees rose, so did the number of requests that were filed. According to the WSJ, in 2017, Oops responded to about 22,000 recorded tasks which increased to 50,270 only three years later.

Swiss football captain Granit Xhaka has rejected the deluge of virtue signaling taking place at the World Cup, asserting his team isn't in Qatar to "hand out lessons to anyone."

Since it began, the tournament has been beset by controversy over teams attempting to express their support for the LGBT movement in a country that still imprisons homosexuals.

FIFA has banned players from wearing 'OneLove' armbands, something the German team protested this week by placing their hands over their mouths during a pre-game photo.

78% believe the pandemic to be "over."

A Gallup poll has found that fewer than a third of Americans remain worried about COVID.

"Twenty-eight percent of Americans say they are 'very' or 'somewhat worried' they will get COVID — the lowest percentage Gallup has recorded since the summer of 2021," the pollster notes.

Musk announces that all internal Twitter communications about censoring the laptop story from 2020 will be made public.

Lefty 'philosopher' Sam Harris has deleted his Twitter account, just days after he claimed that the New York Post report on the infamous Hunter Biden laptop was correct "by accident," a comment that renewed scrutiny of Harris' previous comments that he supported censorship of the story.

Harris complained on the Bill Maher podcast that he was being harassed by 'right wing lunatics' on Twitter in regards to his previous comments that he would still have supported censoring the story even if Hunter Biden had "the corpses of dead children in his basement," as a way of preventing a second Trump term.

'As revenge for [Elon Musk] suspending violent extremist accounts on Twitter, [Antifa] in Portland are organizing arson attacks on [Tesla] locations tonight,' reported Ngo, who provided screenshots of the calls to action.

Following his takeover of Twitter, "Chief Twit" Elon Musk has quickly begun to address many of the platform's problems. Musk, who intends for Twitter to be a platform for legal free speech, has moved to crack down on terrorists and violent far-left extremists who have for many years been a fixture on Twitter and used it to organize riots.

Now Tesla, which Musk owns, has become the target of violent retaliation by far-left militants angered by the suspension of their accounts.

A 10-minute miscommunication on Slack between journalists at the Associated Press resulted in an erroneous report last week that appeared momentarily to bring tensions between NATO and Russia to their highest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Last Tuesday, AP posted a news alert saying that a "senior U.S. intelligence official says Russian missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, killing two people," and noting that leaders in Poland were "holding an emergency meeting due to a 'crisis situation.'"

The report, which would have represented a Russian missile striking a member of NATO, immediately sparked fear of a dramatic escalation of tensions between the US and Russia.

Six million people were on Friday under Covid lockdown in a Chinese city home to the world's largest iPhone factory, after clashes between police and workers furious over pay.

Authorities have ordered residents of eight districts in Zhengzhou, in the central province of Henan, not to leave the area for the next five days, building barriers around "high-risk" apartment buildings and setting up checkpoints to restrict travel.

There have been only a handful of coronavirus cases in the city.

The orders follow protests by hundreds of employees over conditions and pay at Foxconn's vast iPhone factory on the outskirts of the city, with fresh images of rallies emerging Friday.