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I never imagined that we would ever see a time when it takes $177,798 for a family of four to live comfortably in the United States. Unfortunately, that day has arrived. Our leaders have been pursuing highly inflationary policies for many years, and now we have reached a point where inflation is wildly out of control. In fact, the latest wholesale inflation figure that was released on Tuesday came in much higher than expected. Sadly, this is just the beginning and we are in far more trouble than most people realize.

No indication of whether that amount includes the government’s beak-wetting. (Anyway, where are you going to find a ‘family of four’ any more? You’re lucky to find a family of three.)

The Antiplanner.

A little more than half of America’s incorporated cities collectively lost 2.7 million residents between 2020 and 2023, according to estimates released by the Census Bureau earlier this week. New York City alone lost almost 500,000 residents, or 5.5 percent of its population, while the next 20 biggest losers together lost about half a million people.

The biggest losers, other than New York City, were Chicago (-78,877), Los Angeles (-74,934), San Francisco (-61,530), Philadelphia (-50,142), San Jose (-39,664), and Portland (-22,846). San Francisco’s population slightly recovered between 2022 and 2023, but most major cities that have lost population have seen declines in every year from 2020 to 2023.

Out of 19,484 incorporated cities, population fell in 10,691, while the population of 8,049 cities collectively grew by 3.95 million people. (Some 744 small towns saw no change in population.) Of the cities that grew, the biggest growth was recorded by San Antonio (56,038), Fort Worth (54,866), Port St. Lucie (38,206), Phoenix (37,611), and Charlotte (35,559).

John C. Wright.

The managerial bureaucracy and civil service currently sets the agenda for major politicians, for the UN and the EU and the WEF, and all national and international organizations attempting to install a New World Order.

This New World Order regards men as fungible, interchangeable, merely resources to be used for given purposes. We are livestock to them.

If the population is aging in one nation, and new and younger workers are needed to pay for their pensions, merely importing a goodly number of units of people is regarded as prudent by the New World Order bureaucrats.

The fact that the migrants have different language, religion, worldview, different values, virtues, vices and cultural identity than do the native born is irrelevant to the bureaucrats.

To them, human life is numbers in a ledger.

Such thinking is the inevitable result of Identity Politics. No one is an individual, merely an instance of a class, whatever class is most useful for the person pushing his opinion.

Read it.

For President Biden and congressional Democrats, the fierce party division over the campus protests and the war in Gaza is full of warning signs during the 2024 election year. The unrest is unlikely to stop when universities break for the summer; protesters are pledging to disrupt the August Democratic National Convention planned to be held in Chicago.

Most House Democrats have been reticent on the antisemitic protests and encampments roiling college graduations this month, while a handful have vocally defended or even celebrated the student protests as displays of protected free speech.

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There’s a war being waged for America’s elementary, middle, and high school students. But the leftist agenda-driven campaign that began behind the closed doors of teachers unions and government-run schools is now out in the open and has led to a “parent revolution,” says Corey DeAngelis.

The “teachers unions overplayed their hand and awakened a sleeping giant, which happens to be parents who want more of a say in their kids’ education,” says DeAngelis, author of “The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools.”

DeAngelis—sometimes referred to as the “school choice evangelist”—dedicated his new book to “Randi Weingarten [president of the American Federation of Teachers] and the teachers unions for inadvertently doing more to advance school choice and homeschooling than anyone could have ever imagined.”

Read it.

Electric vehicles (EVs) may be the most subsidized product in America. Federal taxpayers shell out $7,500 every time a new eligible electric vehicle is purchased (usually by wealthy buyers). State and local taxpayers chip in an additional $1,500 for each EV purchase. Then, there’s the tens of billions of dollars “invested” by policymakers into building EV plants. Even these bank-breaking concessions aren’t enough to please the Biden administration. Recently finalized EV tax credit rules expand eligibility for the subsidy while maintaining bizarre trade sourcing rules likely to lead to further tariffs from China. It’s time for President Biden and lawmakers to ditch protectionism and finally end EV subsidies.

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With the threat of a conflict in the Pacific looming, a congressional subcommittee says the Navy is not moving fast enough to figure out how to better push munitions to its ships at sea and wants to know what is being done to fix the problem.

This is hardly a new issue, but it has come into sharp focus in the Red Sea as Arleigh Burke class destroyers had fired more than 100 Standard family surface-to-air missiles alone as of mid-February at Houthi missiles and drones. The need to rapidly replenish warships would be far more pronounced in a large-scale fight with China that would occur over a vast, contested battlespace

Read it.

President Joe Biden’s retelling of economic history could win a fiction award.

He recently claimed in an interview that inflation “was 9% when I came into office,” even though it was 1.4% at that time. Not only is Biden lying about the historical record, but it was his policies that fueled the inflation fire.

The facts are clear: Biden was handed an economy that was recovering at an unprecedented pace. Gross domestic product was rising at an annualized rate of $1.5 trillion. Annual inflation as measured by the consumer price index was 1.4%. A monthly average of 1.5 million people were returning to work as lockdowns were lifted.

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Francis Collins, the top public health official during the COVID-19 pandemic, earlier this year said the lab leak hypothesis was not a conspiracy theory, according to a transcript of his testimony released Thursday by House Republicans, reports the Washington Times.

Read it.

Doesn’t surprise me. He wants Kennedy to take votes only from Biden, so he needs to bring out the fact that Kennedy is, in the last analysis, Just Another Democrat.

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Already in fiscal year 2024, more Chinese nationals have crossed America’s southern border than the three previous fiscal years combined. Under the Biden administration, “there is no serious vetting” of illegal aliens from China, Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., said during a House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability hearing held Thursday afternoon.

A five-question “limited interview,” as Bishop calls it, “combined with a lack of reliable information from China to verify biographical claims and limited translation services, severely constrain CBP’s ability to conduct rigorous vetting for criminal and national security concerns.”

John Derbyshire alway used to say that there wasn’t anything wrong with New York City that adding about a million ethnic Chinese wouldn’t fix.

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We identify points of conflict and consensus regarding (a) controversial empirical claims and (b) normative preferences for how controversial scholarship—and scholars—should be treated. In 2021, we conducted qualitative interviews (n = 41) to generate a quantitative survey (N = 470) of U.S. psychology professors’ beliefs and values. Professors strongly disagreed on the truth status of 10 candidate taboo conclusions: For each conclusion, some professors reported 100% certainty in its veracity and others 100% certainty in its falsehood. Professors more confident in the truth of the taboo conclusions reported more self-censorship, a pattern that could bias perceived scientific consensus regarding the inaccuracy of controversial conclusions. Almost all professors worried about social sanctions if they were to express their own empirical beliefs. Tenured professors reported as much self-censorship and as much fear of consequences as untenured professors, including fear of getting fired. Most professors opposed suppressing scholarship and punishing peers on the basis of moral concerns about research conclusions and reported contempt for peers who petition to retract papers on moral grounds. Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were generally more opposed to controversial scholarship. These results do not resolve empirical or normative disagreements among psychology professors, but they may provide an empirical context for their discussion.

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President Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen had his “knees chopped out” by Donald Trump’s defense attorneys in cross-examination during Trump’s ‘hush money’ trial.

Cohen was grilled by Trump attorney Todd Blanche about a pivotal phone call that connected Trump to allegations that he approved reimbursements to pay porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. Blance accused Cohen of calling the former president’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, to complain about harassing phone calls.

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n childhood, Tasliym Morales was always interested in civic affairs, so it was no surprise to those who knew her that as soon she turned 18, she registered to vote. What did take her family and friends aback, however, was the political party affiliation she chose.

“Republican,” she says with a broad smile.

The striking mother of six is sitting at the head table of the Delaware County Republican Party chairman’s dinner, dressed in a rich red jacket topping a paisley dress discussing her reasons for choosing the Grand Old Party when most of her peers and family – Morales is black – were Democrats.

The willingness of the Democrats to run a woke sock-puppet for President is opening a lot of eyes … and brains.

Read it.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a full pardon Thursday to a former U.S. Army sergeant convicted of murder for fatally shooting an armed demonstrator in 2020 during nationwide Black Lives Matter protests.

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Stormy Daniels is joining the long list of celebrities who have threatened to flee America because of Donald Trump. Given that Cher, Barbra Streisand, Snoop Dogg and every other Trump-hating celebrity is still stateside, Cockburn is doubtful Daniels will keep her word.

In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Barrett Blade, Daniels’s porn star husband, revealed that the couple will likely leave the United States if Trump is acquitted in his hush money trial. “I know that we would like to get on with our lives,” Blade said. “I know that she wants to move past this.”

Blade added his wife’s future will be uncertain whether or not she wins the trial. “Either way, I don’t think it gets better for her. I think if it’s not guilty, we got to decide what to do. Good chance we’ll probably vacate this country,” he said.

We can only hope….

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Silica glass, known for its brittleness, weight, and non-biodegradable nature, faces challenges in finding suitable alternatives. Transparent wood, made by infusing polymers into wood, shows promise but is hindered by limited availability of wood in China and fire risks associated with its use. This study explores the potential of utilizing bamboo, which has a shorter growth cycle, as a valuable resource for developing flame-retardant, smoke-suppressing, and superhydrophobic transparent bamboo. A 3-layered flame-retardant barrier, composed of a top silane layer, an intermediate layer of SiO2 formed through hydrolysis-condensation of Na2SiO3 on the surface, and an inner layer of Na2SiO3, has been confirmed to be effective in reducing heat release, slowing flame spread, and inhibiting the release of combustible volatiles, toxic smoke, and CO. Compared to natural bamboo and other congeneric transparent products, the transparent bamboo displays remarkable superiority, with the majority of parameters being notably lower by an entire order of magnitude. It achieves a long ignition time of 116 s, low total heat release (0.7 MJ/m2), low total smoke production (0.063 m2), and low peak CO concentration (0.008 kg/kg). Moreover, when used as a substrate for perovskite solar cells, the transparent bamboo displays the potential to act as a light management layer, leading to a marked efficiency enhancement of 15.29%. The excellent features of transparent bamboo make it an enticing choice for future advancements in flame-retardant glasses and optical devices.

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The largest pyramid field in Egypt is clustered along a narrow desert strip, yet no convincing explanation as to why these pyramids are concentrated in this specific locality has been given so far. Here we use radar satellite imagery, in conjunction with geophysical data and deep soil coring, to investigate the subsurface structure and sedimentology in the Nile Valley next to these pyramids. We identify segments of a major extinct Nile branch, which we name The Ahramat Branch, running at the foothills of the Western Desert Plateau, where the majority of the pyramids lie. Many of the pyramids, dating to the Old and Middle Kingdoms, have causeways that lead to the branch and terminate with Valley Temples which may have acted as river harbors along it in the past. We suggest that The Ahramat Branch played a role in the monuments’ construction and that it was simultaneously active and used as a transportation waterway for workmen and building materials to the pyramids’ sites.

UPDATE: Found at last: long-lost branch of the Nile that ran by the pyramids

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During my many years of teaching at different universities, nearly all my colleagues insisted that Lee Harvey Oswald alone assassinated President Kennedy, even while the general public questioned such a conclusion. This disparity between gown and town always amused and informed me that something in the “higher education” world was low indeed.

Despite the fact that we agreed on many political matters, my academic colleagues laughed at all my writing and courses that presented overwhelming evidence that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, led by the Central Intelligence Agency. They reveled in their certitude, good humored as it was, but refused to research the matter. They were smug.

Here is an excellent book that, if they would read it with open minds, would, as its subtitle says – inescapably prove that there was a conspiracy – and if Jack Ruby had not killed Oswald and he had been given a fair trial, Oswald would have been acquitted. Written by James DiEugenio, Paul Bleau, Matt Crumpton, Andrew Iler, and Mark Adamczyk, The JFK Assassination Chokeholds lives up to its claim and then some.

Read it.

An expert on Islamism has highlighted the dangers to Europe of the Muslim Brotherhood through its emphasis on legal rather than ‘terrorist’ methods. Dr. Lorenzo Vidino told a recent European conference how the Brotherhood is a “social network,” united by ideological and economic ties, and heavily financed by Qatar.

It facilitates Islamist radicalisation while impacting the discussion of human rights and democracy—which it wishes to abolish in favour of establishing a global caliphate: i.e. theocratic rule by a caliph, the recognised successor to the prophet Muhammad.

Le Journal du Dimanche reported how the conference—organised by the Défense des servants de la République association—brought together a wide range of Islamism experts in the French commune of Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine on Wednesday, May 15th.

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A prominent Belgian artist and his partner were found stabbed to death on Tuesday. The primary suspect is reportedly a 34-year-old homeless migrant they were sheltering at their home in the northern Brussels district of Molenbeek, understood to have been residing in the country illegally for an unknown amount of time.

Paul Buyse, a 63-year-old artist, and his partner and local teacher Muriel Borré died at an address in Avenue Henri Hollevoet in the north of the Belgian capital on Tuesday in what police are describing as a “domestic incident”.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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And rightly so.

“Diversity, equity, inclusion? Yeah, of course, they [military colleagues] think it’s a waste of time. Except my boss, I mean, Lisa, the admiral, she doesn’t think it is. She likes it. But secretly, everybody else is like eh,” said Riggs. “You know what’s going to happen when the first missile hits the first side of the first DEG [Guided Missile Escort Ship]? What’s it going to matter? It won’t. Diversity, equity, inclusion. It’ll just be out the window.”

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The Slovak interior minister said Thursday that a “lone wolf” has been charged in the shooting that seriously wounded Prime Minister Robert Fico and prompted soul-searching among leaders in the deeply divided society.

If he had been ‘rightist’, the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching would be never-ending.

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The Chinese-owned video app TikTok is a major element of what the Chinese military calls “cognitive warfare,” according to a national security expert.

Ian Oxnevad, senior fellow in national security at the National Association of Scholars, stated in a recent report that TikTok serves as “one of [China’s] foremost cognitive weapons.”

The military defines cognitive warfare as activities to alter the attitudes and behaviors of people and populations for political purposes by degrading rationality and changing perceptions of reality.

Read it.

Democrats are deeply divided over President Joe Biden’s handling of both the war in Gaza and the U.S. campus protests against it, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found, fraying the coalition that he relied on four years ago to defeat Republican Donald Trump.

OffGuardian.

Between 2008 and 2022, land prices nearly doubled throughout the world and tripled in Central-Eastern Europe. In the UK, an influx of investment from pension funds and private wealth contributed to a doubling of farmland prices from 2010-2015. Land prices in the US agricultural heartlands of Iowa quadrupled between 2002 and 2020.

Agricultural investment funds rose ten-fold between 2005 and 2018 and now regularly include farmland as a stand-alone asset class, with US investors having doubled their stakes in farmland since 2020.

Meanwhile, agricultural commodity traders are speculating on farmland through their own private equity subsidiaries, while new financial derivatives are allowing speculators to accrue land parcels and lease them back to struggling farmers, driving steep and sustained land price inflation.

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With Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filing the “climate” lawsuit that campaign supporter Michigan LCV had lobbied her to file against energy companies, and the UM law school faculty putting the shoulder to the wheel as well, GAO recalls the recently unearthed record of just how occupied Michigan’s government is with donor-financed “climate staff”.

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There is a time and place to be critical of a political leader if you are a news organization. However, the time to be critical of such a person is most definitely NOT just hours after an assassination attempt in which such a person lies in a hospital in critical condition from multiple bullet wounds. And yet the BBC, with the soul of a ghoul, went ahead on Wednesday and did just that hours after the Prime Minister of Slovakia Robert Fico was shot multiple times.

BBC Prague correspondent Rob Cameron somehow thought the very day of Fico being the gravely wounded victim of an assassination attempt would be a good time to write up this hit piece, “How Robert Fico rose to dominate Slovak politics.”

First came the smear in Cameron’s story followed by a medical description of the one he just smeared just a sentence earlier.

New York Post.

An Australian doctor who was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor last year is cancer-free thanks to a first-of-its-kind treatment that he helped to develop.

Richard Scolyer, a professor at the University of Sydney, revealed Monday that the incurable stage 4 glioblastoma discovered in his head has not recurred after receiving the heartbreaking diagnosis last June.

“I had brain #MRI scan last Thursday looking for recurrent #glioblastoma (&/or treatment complications). I found out yesterday that there is still no sign of recurrence. I couldn’t be happier!!!!!” the professor shared on X.

Power Line.

Things are not going well here in America. That is obvious to pretty much everyone who lives here. And yet, our democratic, free market heritage is not yet entirely squandered. That is perhaps most easily seen through the eyes of others, like Britain’s Telegraph, which documents how much better off we Americans are compared with UK residents.

StrategyPage.

Documents collected and interviews conducted by Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that senior Hamas leaders had a plan for what they would do if they somehow invaded and conquered Israel. First, Palestinian occupied Israel would be divided up into several cantons, each ruled by a Hamas leader. The plan included details on which Israelis would be killed, expelled, or forced to remain because they were educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry.

Fatah, another Palestinian organization founded in 1959 with the help of exiled Palestinian professionals working in the Persian Gulf oil states and elsewhere, eventually became the dominant political force in the West Bank after the Six Day War. In the 1990s Fatah was a major component of the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) when a peace deal was negotiated with Israel. Fatah was supposed to hold elections to select leaders but corruption eventually made the elections meaningless. That was trouble for Fatah, but the Hamas faction in Gaza won the election there and took control as an area no longer ruled by Fatah in the West Bank. Hamas was founded with the help of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood. In 2007 Hamas ejected Fatah from Gaza and Israel blockaded Fatah in Gaza, not allowing Palestinians in Gaza to enter Israel without permission.

Read it.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah urged Lebanese authorities to ‘open the sea’ in order to flood Europe with a new wave of migrants.

Nasrallah made the remarks during a televised address at a rally marking the eighth anniversary of the assassination of late Hezbollah Resistance military commander Mustafa Badreddine.

The militant leader called for “a national decision that says: we have opened the sea… whoever wants to leave for Europe, for Cyprus, the sea is in front of you. Take a boat and board it.”

Read it.

Woke activists today often like to hearken back to nostalgic media from the 1960s; what they consider the golden era or genesis moment of far-left movements in British and US history. These were the days when being a progressive was considered “counter-culture” and cool, with every major rock star and celebrity tapping into youth angst and hippie philosophy. The progressive shift led to considerable social instability in the 1970s.

It is common these days to hear leftists in popular media argue that TV shows like Star Trek or Doctor Who were “always woke” and that they are simply carrying on the tradition. This is simply not true. While many productions in the US and in Europe displayed liberal sensibilities, woke activists are not liberal and do not hold liberal values. They are, rather, a hybrid ideology combining elements of Marxism/communism/fascism, collectivism, moral relativism and narcissism.

One could argue that the woke cult is the natural end state, the unavoidable final evolution of liberal thinking. That may be true, but that’s a debate for another day. The point is, the woke activism of today has very little in common with the political movements of the 1960s. In fact, if you were to go back in time only 15 years ago and tried to explain to a typical Democrat in the US or Labour member in the UK what leftists are trying to get away with in 2024, they would laugh in your face and call you crazy.

Newsbusters.

As pertains to the ongoing war in Gaza, CBS News continues to solidify its reputation as the most pro-Hamas among the networks. A brief report on the Biden administration’s request for new military assistance for Israel quickly turned into an opportunity to echo pro-Palestinian points and observe “al-Nakba”, which loosely translates to “Catastrophe Day”

Newsbusters.

The Regime Media kicked off their respective evening newscasts by hyping the upcoming presidential debates, which were just agreed to by President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. But ABC News, aggressively Biden-servile and an announced debate host, chose to disinform the public by insisting on casting Biden as the one who challenged Trump to a debate, when the record reflects the exact opposite.

Read it.

Good news for Gordon Liddy … Oh, wait, he’s dead.

The Ninth Circuit is famous for being the most reversed-by-the-Supreme-Court Circuit in the country. Just sayin’.

Washington Post.

Gotta be careful when a season looms.

Read it.

Largest city being run into the ground by crooked racist Democrats? Check.

Chief executive a morbidly obese billionaire? Check.

People leaving for Red States? Check.

Read it.

As heat pump adoption spreads and more options become available, some companies are considering aesthetics without sacrificing function. A new heat pump system from Quilt, a California-based climate control company, promises top-of-the-line efficiency and indoor units that can be painted or wallpapered to match your interior decorating.

Steve Sailer.

From the New York Times news section, an exercise in pounding home the Democrats’ talking point that the late May 2020 explosion in gun murders was due to the pandemic. The pandemic was the cause. The cause was the pandemic. Pandemic, pandemic, pandemic.

Number of times mentioned by NYT:

Pandemic: 26
George Floyd: 1
Protest: 1
Black Lives Matter: 0
Riot: 0
Defund: 0
Depolice: 0
Racial reckoning: 0

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The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, is the leading authority in the field of gender medicine. Its guidance is routinely used by top medical associations in the U.S. and abroad, while its standards of care inform insurance companies’ approach to coverage policies.

But behind closed doors, top WPATH doctors discussed, and at times seemed to challenge, the organization’s own published guidelines for sex-change procedures and acknowledged pushing experimental medical interventions that can have devastating and irreversible complications, according to exclusive footage obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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U.S. officials have cut off funding to a nonprofit that funneled government money to a laboratory in China located in the same city where the first COVID-19 cases appeared.

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A school district in Riverside County will pay $360,000 to settle a suit by a former high school teacher who was fired after refusing, for what she described as religious reasons, to promise to call transgender students by their chosen pronouns or to keep their gender identity secret from their parents.

The Jurupa Valley Unified School District agreed Tuesday to pay $285,000 to former high school gym teacher Jessica Tapia and $75,000 to her lawyers at Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative religious nonprofit. The settlement said it was not an admission of wrongdoing by district officials, but Tapia’s lawyers proclaimed a victory for religious rights.

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Former federal prosecutor Robert Costello testified Wednesday before Congress that disgraced lawyer Michael Cohen—the star witness in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against former President Donald Trump—told him he had “nothing truthful” implicating Trump in a crime.

Costello, who advised Cohen when he became the subject of an investigation by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, told the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government that Cohen is now on a “revenge tour” against Trump and lacks credibility. His testimony challenges claims Cohen made on the witness stand during Trump’s Manhattan trial.

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Two legal challenges were filed over the new emissions rules, Nebraska Attorney General Hilgers said in a statement on May 13.

They include a petition for review filed by a coalition of 24 states in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit which challenges the Biden administration’s new regulation setting stronger greenhouse gas emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles.

That petition lists the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its administrator Michael Regan as defendants.

LifeHacker.

Shoot them with an air gun or a bow, drag them inside, dress them out, bury the entrails in the garden (good compost), section the carcass, throw the parts in the freezer, don’t tell anyone.

Eventually the deer will learn to avoid your yard. Problem solved. Good eating along the way.

The Spectator.

It saddens me to admit it, but the evidence is too overwhelming to dismiss: Democrats are significantly more cunning than Republicans.

I say “Democrats,” but that is an imprecise, even a misleading, designation. Party affiliation is not now, if it ever was, a really accurate predictor of ideological coloration.

What I mean are those people, most of whom happen to belong to the Democratic Party, who have been bitten by the bug of extremism, who are fired by revolutionary fervor, who regard every opponent, every contrary opinion, as a “by-any-means-necessary” fire alarm.

It is an attitude that has stirred their creativity, also their vindictiveness.

Hercules had to undertake twelve supposedly impossible labors. Donald Trump is fast catching up.

The Spectator.

On October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas massacre further south, Hezbollah started firing rockets into northern Israel, reviving the world’s most dangerous game of chicken. What exactly has been accomplished? Hezbollah’s Shia supporters may be comfortable with their leader Hassan Nasrallah and his Iranian sponsor, head of state Ali Khameini, risking open war. But no one consulted the local Christians, who would never agree to spill Lebanese blood as a supportive gesture to Hamas.

“The south [of the country] belongs to Lebanon, and Hezbollah cannot go to war on behalf of the Lebanese,” says Marc Saad, a spokesman for the Lebanese Forces, a Christian political party and Hezbollah opponent. But championing the rule of law and national unity can only go so far in Lebanon, where anarchy and sectarianism reign.

Deep in Hezbollah country, right along the Israeli border, lies a cluster of Maronite Catholic villages, the southernmost and largest being Rmeich. Since the war began, Israel has generally refrained from targeting the Christian communities, making them an oasis within a sea of its Shi’ite targets. But the fighting around Rmeich is becoming more ferocious, and Hezbollah has several times tried to use the village as a staging ground for rocket attacks. If a full-blown war were to start, it’s hard to imagine Rmeich being spared by Israel.