The Minnesota Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling and will allow a lawsuit to proceed against Minneapolis public schools over a bizarre policy making racial minorities exempt from layoffs or reassignment unless all white teachers are removed first.

Hennepin County District Court had dismissed the lawsuit, filed by a taxpayer, claiming the “client lacked standing and that her claims were not ripe,” reports Judicial Watch, a non-profit public interest law firm representing her. 

The Minnesota Court of Appeals overturned that decision, ruling the “client does have standing as a taxpayer who helps fund Minneapolis Public Schools through property taxes and her claims are ripe because the lawsuit alleges an actual future controversy using public funds,” JW reports.

Gaza hospitals have come under bombardment and some have been besieged or raided as part of Israel’s response to Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attacks. Hospitals that remain open are overwhelmed by the numbers of dead and wounded arriving and sometimes procedures are carried out without anaesthetics.

A WHO database shows there have been 449 attacks on healthcare facilities in Palestinian territories since Oct. 7, without assigning blame.

China’s once-thriving property market is in the midst of a severe downturn, with property stocks plummeting approximately 65% from their previous highs, now mirroring levels last seen in 2008. The last year alone has witnessed a staggering 25% drop in sales of Chinese property stocks, surpassing the dismal performance of 2008 when sales fell by around 20%.

Wells Fargo is planning to be “more aggressive” about layoffs at the bank, and expects to have higher severance costs in the fourth quarter than initially expected, its CEO said.

The French government is targeting right-wing groups for protesting about the recent racially motivated murder of a white French teenager.

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin announced that he will personally oversee the dissolution of three separate organizations that encouraged its members to travel to Romans-sur-lsere, the place where a youth gang had traveled from to gatecrash a winter ball that took place in nearby Crepol.

This youth gang had previously vowed to “stab white people” at the ball. Once they got there, the teens proceeded to stab to death a 16-year-old promising rugby player named Thomas, while wounding several others.

After stabbing Thomas to death, the young gang fled Romans-sur-lsere and even tried to flee the country.

Instead of targeting the teenagers involved with the horrific crime, Darmanin announced that he will throw the book at the protest groups who demonstrated publicly in solidarity with Thomas while calling on French authorities to deal with perpetrators.

The problem isn’t ‘global inaction’ to prevent mass atrocities, as the Guardian claims. It’s intense US and UK support for atrocities so long as they bolster their global power

How do politicians, diplomats, the media and even the human rights community keep us politically ignorant, docile and passive – a collective mindset that prevents us from challenging their power as well as the status quo they benefit from?

The answer: By constantly misrepresenting reality to us and their own role in shaping it. And they do it so successfully because, at the same time, they gaslight us by flaunting the pretence that they crave to make the world a better place – a better place where, in truth, the unspoken danger is that, were those advances to be realised, their own power would be severely diminished.

A perfect illustration of how this grand deception works was provided in a report at the weekend in the supposedly progressive Guardian newspaper, headlined “World faces ‘heightened risk’ of mass atrocities due to global inaction”.

I have often wondered what Roman citizens thought as they watched the Roman Empire fall apart culturally, politically, morally, and militarily. Cicero, quaestor, praetor and Counsel of Rome, tried to save the Roman Republic. For his efforts he was chased down and murdered. As Cicero was, perhaps, the most famous Roman, his murder stopped efforts to prevent Rome’s descent into tyranny.

The same thing is happening today to those who attempt to arouse us to our danger. Julian Assange, for example, has been imprisoned contrary to every known US and UK law for a decade without conviction for simply doing his duty as a journalist and reporting the crimes of our rulers, the crimes of the corrupt vermin we continue to return to office and power over us. No one has done anything about it, not even his fellow journalists.

When truth is punished, a country dies.

The Israeli army opened fire on six ambulances of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, escorted by UN vehicles, carrying 11 patients with critical injuries, including amputations and head wounds, in Gaza, the Red Crescent said on Sunday, adding that one of the injured died before receiving any treatment, Anadolu Agency reports.

“The Palestine Red Crescent Society coordinated with the United Nations to evacuate 11 casualties in critical condition last night from Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City to the hospital in the south of the Strip,” the Red Crescent said in a statement on X.

A convoy of six Red Crescent ambulances, accompanied by UN vehicles, set off from Khan Younis after waiting about four hours for the first green light to move towards the military checkpoint that separates the north from south in the Gaza Strip, it added.

In May, American YouTuber and columnist Gonzalo Lira was arrested in Ukraine because he “publicly justified” the Russian invasion, according to a press release by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).

The statement from Kiev said that Lira “has the citizenship of one of the countries of Latin America” but omitted that he is also California-born U.S. citizen, as ZeroHedge contributor Space Worm reported at the time.

Following his release, Lira said he was tortured in a Ukrainian prison, explaining that "two thugs held my head and used a toothpick to scratch the whites of my left eye, while asking me if I could still read if I had just one." Lira informed followers that he was making a mad-dash via motorcycle towards the Hungarian border:

Grayzone reporter Liam Cosgrove pressed State Department spox Matthew Miller on the issue, asking how the Biden Administration has allowed an American to be tortured by a closely allied nation: 

The Israeli military is committing “horrific crimes” against civilians in Gaza, a human rights group said on Sunday.

The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor called for an “urgent international investigation” into field executions, torture and threats of rape against Palestinians by Israeli ground forces in Gaza.

Palestinians arrested in their homes and later released told the Geneva-based group that they were stripped naked and attacked with “machine guns, electric cables and cold water.”

A 16-year-old boy told the Euro-Med Monitor that Israeli forces stormed his family’s home in Shujaiya, near Gaza City, after they were besieged for a week without food or water.

“He stated that over the past few days, Israeli forces killed everyone in his neighborhood who tried to leave their home, including [his] brother,” the rights group said.

Israel’s armed forces, officially the Israeli Defence Forces, are reportedly seeking to engineer the mass expulsion of the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip into the Sinai Peninsula of neighbouring Egypt, according to the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini. Israel has prevented the population of northern Gaza from returning to their homes after responding to attacks by militias based in the territory with mass bombardment and an invasion invasion in October, and has moved to target civilians further south on a significant scale creating a serious humanitarian crisis and tens of thousands of casualties. Cutting off water and electricity from the Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people, combined with mass targeting of housing and infrastructure, are expected to lead to a further surge in death rates for civilians leaving growing parts of the territory unliveable. Lazzarini warned of Israeli designs for “forcibly displacing Gazans out of the Gaza Strip… the developments we are witnessing point to attempts to move Palestinians into Egypt, regardless of whether they stay there or are resettled elsewhere.”

Air Force pilots and others in rated fields who opt to stay in uniform can earn up to $600,000 over 12 years under the latest round of retention bonuses announced Nov. 30.

The fiscal year 2024 incentives offer manned aircraft and drone pilots, combat systems operators and air battle managers an extra $15,000 to $50,000 per year, depending on their assigned aircraft and the years to which they commit.

Annual bonus pay programs aim to keep airmen around to blunt the effects of a pilot shortage that has lasted decades, robbing the service of aviators in policy jobs that rely on their know-how to help the service plan for the future.

Germany imported 2.5 times less gas in January-September this year compared to the same period in 2021, but failed to make any savings as prices also grew 2.5 times, Sputnik has calculated based on data from the German statistical office.

German gas imports in the first nine months of 2023 dropped to 47.9 billion cubic meters from 65.9 billion cubic meters in the same period last year. For comparison, the country imported as much as 121.7 billion cubic meters of gas in 2021, data showed.

At the same time, the average annual price per cubic meter of gas has risen sharply from 0.18 euros ($0.19) in 2021 to 0.45 ($0.48) this year. As a result, Germany's gas import bill stood at 21.3 billion euros in January-September this year compared to 22.2 billion euros in the same period in 2021, despite the significant drop in supplies.

On Saturday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz blamed Russia for cutting off pipeline gas supplies to Europe and the resulting spike in energy prices. Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev, in turn, said on social media it was Europe that had rejected Russia's gas supplies and accused the German leader of "lying through his teeth."

The bursting of the tech and housing bubble is sending shockwaves through the markets, with ominous signs pointing to an impending economic downturn. San Francisco, a city synonymous with skyrocketing real estate prices, is witnessing a significant shift as condos are now priced under $1000 per square foot for the first time in eight years. This unsettling development comes alongside a series of WARN notices, indicating a rise in job cuts and economic uncertainty.

A U.S. senator is asking for some straight answers about the extent governments have been able to spy on Americans through their smartphones.

Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon recently wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland to kick free information Apple and Google have said the federal government is keeping under wraps.

Wyden indicated that he had particular concern over information shared with foreign governments.

A report in The Washington Post said that based on a review of court records, searching what are known as push notifications in order to develop a map of a targeted individual’s contacts, was used in the investigations of participants in the protests of Jan. 6, 2021, and the Capitol incursion that followed.

The Post noted that every push notification that tells a user a friend contacted them creates what is called a token. Obtaining information in the tokens allows investigators to determine who contacted the user.

“It’s insane, it’s just insane,” Valerie Haney kept saying as she emerged from her first day undergoing the Church of Scientology’s ultra-secretive “religious arbitration” process.

Dressed in a tight black minidress and thigh-high leather boots, which, with her long curly hair and spiky sharp fingernails, Haney presented a picture about as far as possible from the drab Sea Org uniforms she had been forced to wear for decades.

Her two attorneys, Guy D’Andrea and Graham Berry, were ready with their notepads, and all eyes were on Haney, who was set up in front of a portable backdrop in a hotel room at the Commerce Casino, just a mile away from Scientology’s massive printing plant warehouse southeast of Los Angeles—where she had just spent the past several hours reliving the most traumatic events of her life.

Germany may have to wage a defensive war against Russia in the future, German televisions news program Tagesschau reported on Dec. 9, citing Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) Inspector General Carsten Breuer.

Breuer expressed concern about Russia's rearmament and the behavior of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, saying there will be no return to the times before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Germany will have to get used to the idea "that one day we might have to fight a defensive war," he said.

Asked whether the Bundeswehr would be able to cope with a possible Russian attack on NATO after the war in Ukraine, Breuer replied, "Yes. Period. We have no alternative. We can defend ourselves and we will defend ourselves.

Gerston Miranda and his wife were among thousands of migrants recently arriving at this remote area on Arizona’s southern border with Mexico, squeezing into the United States through a gap in the wall and walking overnight about 14 miles (23 kilometers) with two school-aged daughters to surrender to Border Patrol agents.

“There is no security in my country,” said the 28-year-old from Ecuador, who lost work when his employer closed due to extortion by criminals. “Without security you cannot work. You cannot live.”

A shift in smuggling routes has brought an influx of migrants here from countries as diverse as Senegal, Bangladesh and China, prompting the Border Patrol to seek help from other federal agencies and drawing scrutiny to an issue critical in next year’s presidential elections.

Another electric vehicle (EV) startup is touting “holy grail” charging technology.

The news from UK-based Nyobolt might just rise to the billing, as it promises 155 miles on a six-minute charge, with production slated to start in 2024. 

Most EVs take much longer, sometimes even hours, to fully charge.

“With our unique technology we have … developed smaller battery packs that can deliver more power and charge in less time,” Nyobolt CEO Sai Shivareddy told BBC Top Gear.

Israel supporters are like, “No no you don’t understand, the side that’s killing babies and incinerating families and assassinating journalists and starving civilians and bombing cultural heritage sites and carpet bombing entire neighborhoods and driving an indigenous people off their land are the GOOD guys.”

There is literally nothing Israel could do that its supporters wouldn’t defend. Try to fill in the blank in “Israel could _______ and people would defend it” with something that wouldn’t be true. Most of the insanely evil things you could put in that space are already actually being done. Genocide? They’re already doing that. Murdering babies? They’re already doing that. Killing thousands of children? Already doing that. Deliberately targeting and assassinating journalists, artists and scholars? Already doing that.

Israel supporters will defend any evil — literally any evil — as long as it is being perpetrated by their favorite regime. There are zero constraints of any kind, because Israel supporters are completely uninterested in morality. If they were, they wouldn’t be supporting one of the most immoral governments on this planet even after all it has done in the last two months.

The song “Running on Empty” by Jackson Browne comes to mind when analyzing the state of American banking, especially regional banks.

Al Gore says that people having access to information outside of mainstream media sources is a threat to “democracy” and that social media algorithms “ought to be banned.”

Yes, really.

Gore made the comments during an appearance at the Cop28 climate change hysteria conference in Dubai.

The Biden administration has proposed a new rule that would allow federal authorities to seize the patents of costly drugs that were developed using taxpayer dollars and to let third parties use those patents to make the drugs available more cheaply.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, on Dec. 7 published a set of draft guidelines for government agencies to evaluate when it might be appropriate to invoke what are known as "march-in" rights under the legal framework of the Bayh-Dole Act.

The Bayh-Dole Act, which is shorthand for the University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act of 1980, grants the government the authority to suspend the patents of products of inventions that were developed with federal funding if those products or inventions are not made available to the public.

The US Space Force's Boeing X-37B unmanned, reusable space plane will be launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on Sunday evening. 

The mysterious spaceplane is built by Boeing and operated by the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office and the Space Force. Its last mission ended a little over a year ago after spending 2.5 years in low-Earth orbit.