A gag order prohibiting former President Donald Trump from criticizing court employees was reinstated by a New York appeals court.

On Thursday, the court restrained a gag order that forbids the 45th president and his attorneys from making public statements about the courtroom staff in his fraud case.

New York Judge Aurthur Engoron first issued the gag order in early October following a series of social media posts by Trump that were directed at one of his law clerks. 

Attorney General Letitia James of New York is accusing Trump of business fraud, which Trump is currently defending against.

Judge David Friedman of the Appeals Court put a stay on Engoron’s gag order, citing possible First Amendment violations by Trump.

Webmaster addition: The timing is curious, coming right after Deutsche Bank testified they used their own valuations of Trump's property!

George Santos vowed to file a motion to expel Jamaal Bowman. Additionally, the Republican blasted the representatives that want to expel him.

Santos (R-N.Y.) held a press conference on Thursday where he said that he will not be resigning. He announced that he is calling upon the press to investigate his fellow members of Congress.

“If the House wants to start a different precedent and expel me, that is going to be the undoing of a lot of members of this body because this will haunt them in the future,” he warned. “I came in here as a mad-as-hell activist and… I got to see how the sausage is made. I get to take that story back to the American people… I’m proud of the work I put forward. If this is it, then this is it.”

He continued by stating that he plans to file a motion  for expulsion of “convicted, guilty-pleaded Congressman Jamal Bowman (D-N.Y).”

Bowman has pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of setting off a fire alarm in the Cannon House Office Building before a significant House vote.

RT’s Steve Sweeney takes a look at the overall statistics from Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza as it seeks to eliminate the militant group Hamas. The damage sustained by the Palestinian enclave has already been described by the UN as “the darkest chapter in Palestinian history.”

According to a new UN report, the combined explosive power unleashed by the IDF in Gaza since October 7 already exceeds that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the US at the end of WWII. The Palestinian death toll is now higher than the count following several years of US strikes on Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Israeli bombardment campaign was launched following the surprise Hamas attack on Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed. Israel’s response has so far claimed the lives of over 15,000 Gazans, including some 6,000 children, according to the enclave’s health officials.

It was about four years ago that ZeroHedge went through ad monetization hell, having lost most of our advertisers because they did not approve of the content on this website and as a result they - together with such members of the Censorship Industrial Complex such as Newsguard, Sleeping Giants and CheckMyAds and various three letter US government agencies - did everything in their power to kill the site by starving it of ad revenue (it's what prompted us to launch a premium, subscription-supported version without which we would not have survived, and therefore we wish to personally thank all of our premium subscribers).

Fast forward to today, when Elon Musk is going through the same hell, as a growing group of companies are trying to do to X/Twitter what they tried to do to us by targeting the social media network and trying to starve it of ad revenue (their stated trigger of responding to the Media Matters fake news "report" was just a red herring: if it hadn't been for Media Matters, they would have found some other point of "virtue" to rally around, and pull their ads).

Of course, there is one key difference: Elon is the world's richest man, and if Twitter does not generate even one additional dollar of revenue, Elon will still be a multi-billionaire, and X can continue to operate for a long, long time if not in perpetuity (if costs are trimmed enough). It's also why Elon yesterday had some choice words for those advertisers who had halted advertising, telling them "go fuck yourself" (with a shout out to Disney chief Bob Iger) if they think they can blackmail Musk... which is precisely what ad demonetization is: a not so subtle way of pushing content and editorial direction in exchange for a monthly stipend.

Beijing and Washington are in talks to restore military communication channels following an agreement reached by the leaders of the two countries earlier this month, the Chinese defence ministry said on Thursday.

Senior Colonel Wu Qian, the ministry spokesman, said during a press briefing on Thursday that the defence authorities of the two countries were communicating and coordinating to resume military-to-military communication "on the basis of equality and respect".

It was the first time the Chinese defence ministry has confirmed it is working with the US to restore military communication channels that had been suspended amid deteriorating ties between the two powers.

A report from +972 Magazine published on Thursday detailed how Israel is intentionally targeting civilians in Gaza as part of its war strategy even when Israeli forces know strikes will kill young children.

The report, which cited current and former Israeli intelligence officials, said the massive civilian casualties in Gaza since October 7 are due to Israel expanding its authorizations to bomb non-military targets and the loosening of restrictions related to civilian deaths. Israel’s operations in Gaza have had a very high civilian casualty rate, but never at the scale of the current conflict.

Sources told +972 that the Israeli military has files on many potential targets that give them a good idea of the likely civilian casualties their strikes will cause. In one case discussed by the sources, Israel’s military command approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to kill one Hamas commander.

The House on Thursday passed a bill that would force the president to permanently freeze $6 billion in Iranian funds that were briefly made available to Tehran as part of a prisoner swap deal.

Under the deal, the US and Iran exchanged prisoners, and the US allowed the transfer of the $6 billion from South Korea to Qatar, where Iran would receive access to the money. But shortly after the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, the Biden administration decided to go back on the deal and cut off Iran’s access to the money.

The administration made the move due to pressure from Congress over claims that Iran was involved in the October 7 attack, even though there’s no indication it was. US intelligence determined Tehran was surprised by the Hamas assault, and Israel said it had no evidence of Iranian involvement.

A rocket strike on a US base in Syria on Wednesday was the first attack against US troops in Iraq or Syria since the truce between Israel and Hamas in Gaza took effect on November 24.

A Pentagon official told The National that a single rocket targeted Mission Support Site Euphrates, a US base in eastern Syria, and caused no injuries or damage to infrastructure.

The attack marks the 74th time US troops have been targeted in Syria and Iraq since October 17. Some of the Iraqi Shia militias responsible for the attacks have said they were following the Gaza truce by not attacking US forces, but there are many different factions in the operations.

Sen. Rand Paul is planning to force a vote on a resolution he introduced to withdraw all US troops from Syria, as US bases in the country have come under frequent attack since mid-October, Responsible Statecraft reported on Wednesday.

Paul introduced the resolution on November 15, and it would order the removal of the approximately 900 US troops stationed in Syria within 30 days unless President Biden receives authorization for war from Congress.

Sources told RS that the vote could happen as early as next week. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) introduced a similar resolution in the House earlier this year, which failed in a vote of 103-321.

According to the Pentagon, there have been at least 73 attacks on US troops in Iraq and Syria, including over 30 in Syria. The attacks started on October 17 in response to President Biden’s support for Israel’s onslaught in Gaza.

An extraordinary email uncovered by a Dutch researcher under freedom of information laws confirms what many have long charged: Bellingcat, the “open source” collective widely cited by mainstream journalists and loved by the CIA, collaborates directly with Western intelligence agencies.

An email sent on November 12 2020 by an officer within Amsterdam’s National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV) shows a Bellingcat investigation was intentionally shared with the agency prior to publication, so as to assist the Dutch spooks in shaping media strategies and messaging following its release. The revealing communication is irrefutable proof of the cozy relationship the self-styled “independent investigative collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists” enjoys with Western intelligence services.

In the message, marked “high importance,” the undisclosed author explained that Bellingcat would soon publish research amounting to a deeply libelous attack on independent journalists and researchers, who challenged the mainstream narrative surrounding Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. As such, the Dutch intelligence officer wrote, “it is probably smart to put together interdepartmental wording for this already”:

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at the age of 100 — though if the predecessors of Israel’s ruling Likud party had their way, he may not have made it even halfway to the century mark.

Despite his reputation as a geopolitical kingmaker, Kissinger was never able to fully impose total U.S. authority upon Israel, but he did seek to leverage U.S. influence — sometimes against what the right-wing Likud party viewed as its interests.

In the 1970s, Kissinger was so hated by the Likud party, which now controls Israel’s far-right coalition government, that some of its members tried to have him assassinated, according to a news report from the time.

This winter is likely to see a long and bloody stalemate in Ukraine, with neither side backing down from offensives and counteroffensives, but may sow the seed of negotiations next year, experts tell Al Jazeera.

“The winter is just going to reinforce the misery … neither side is going to have a tactical or operational breakthrough,” retired colonel Seth Krummrich, now vice president at Global Guardian, a security consultancy, told Al Jazeera.

Last week, Maria Zeee interviewed me on the Alex Jones Show (see below), and I mentioned something that everyone seems to be missing in the current maelstrom of geopolitics: That as the dollar dies, so does any other nation depending on US currency creation. Given Israel’s heavy dependence on U.S. foreign air and the dollar funding of the U.S. Navy, when the dollar dies, Israel will face an existential threat of its own.

It is the careless creation of trillions of dollars in US currency that powers the Pentagon, after all. It also funds government propaganda ops like what we all suffered through during the COVID years when the CDC and FDA ran a coordinated psychological operation against us all, trying to convince the weak-minded that “emergency use” vaccines are safe and effective at preventing infections and halting transmission. We now know, of course, it was all an engineered lie.

But it was a lie made possible through currency creation. Without easy money, a nation can no longer sustain its campaign of lies. And as the dollar collapses, so will the Empire of Lies, which might as well be the new name for the U.S. State Dept and accompanying Military Industrial Complex that gains power and profit from engineered mass human suffering and death.

Carron J. Phillips — the Deadspin writer who accused a 9-year-old boy of wearing blackface to a Kansas City Chiefs game — on Thursday posted two entries on the X platform calling attention to a Native American tribe's reaction to the kid wearing a headdress.

Philllips didn't use words to preface his pair of posts; instead he employed "eyeball" emojis, which typically are used as a "Look at this!" signal to readers.

But Phillips' attempt to keep his story afloat appeared only to make X users furious, as they're in the process of ratioing each entry into oblivion (i.e., when comments outnumber likes) and blasting him for "still harassing children" among other things.

Here's a tiny sampling from the nearly 1,500 comments — and counting — on one post:

Over the past several days, dozens of Palestinian women and children have been released from Israeli prisons as part of the hostage exchange deal between Israel and Hamas. 

As of Thursday, 180 Palestinian women and children were freed from Israeli prisons in exchange for 99 Israeli women and children, as well as foreign nationals, mostly Thai laborers, who were freed from captivity in Gaza. 

As more footage rolls in of Palestinian children, mostly young teenage boys, crying and hugging their mothers upon their release from Israeli prison, more and more people have been left wondering: why was Israel holding on to so many Palestinian children in the first place? 

The phrase is straight out of Yes Minister. Michael Gove's evidence to the Covid Inquiry on Tuesday was cut off for straying into what a smooth-talking Government lawyer deemed 'a somewhat divisive issue'.

Gove, a Cabinet minister for most of the past 13 years, ventured to state that 'there is a significant body of judgment that believes that the virus itself was man-made'.

This goes further than any British official has previously dared. Gove is an exceptionally clever man - and I have no doubt his intervention was deliberate. He has been long aware of the overwhelming evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid, was genetically engineered to become a human pathogen in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan in China.

As Yes Minister's Sir Humphrey might put it, the Secretary of State apparently forgot what it was he wasn't supposed to know. In fact, what Gove called the 'significant body of judgment' is overwhelming.

Brits will be told to 'go in, stay in, tune in' if the UK is hit by a 'radiation emergency', according to new advice from health chiefs.

The guidance was published today by UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).

It comes amid rising global tensions involving nuclear powers such as China and Russia.

Last year Russian state TV even brazenly simulated how Vladimir Putin could launch a nuclear strike on London, declaring there would be 'no survivors'.

While the document makes no mention of nukes, it does explain what Britons should do in a 'radiation emergency', which could be caused by a leak at a nuclear power plant or during the transport of radioactive material.

Ron DeSantis thinks Florida's Republican Party Chairman Christian Ziegler should step down while he's investigated for rape allegations from a woman he and his wife were engaged in a three-way relationship with.

In a press conference following a debate in Georgia on Thursday with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Florida leader said the mission of his state's GOP is 'too important' to get muddied with the investigation.

Ziegler's wife, Bridget, is co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a right-wing parental rights group and Sarasota County School board member.

The couple rising in the ranks of Florida politics had their ambitions rocked this week with the emergence of allegations against Christian.

The second intifada, which started in September 2000, prompted unprecedented awareness of the Palestine liberation cause, especially in the US and Europe. I was a student back then at Kent State University—a university historically known for its activism and powerful protests, particularly the anti-Vietnam war demonstration in the 1960s and 1970s. It just happened that the same year the university commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Kent State University massacre, where the US soldiers shot and killed four students and wounded nine others in an attempt to dispel a major anti-war demonstration. 

The spirit of activism was so palpable that year. I could clearly feel the shift in solidarity and support in favor of the Palestinian cause on US campuses, thanks to the many Arab-American student groups that were established across American universities, but also due to the brutality of the Israeli occupation and its genocidal tendencies. A peak watershed moment that swung the pendulum in Palestine’s favor and exposed Zionist lies and brutality was the killing of Muhamad al Durra. The short video of 12-year-old Muhamad and his father crouching behind a small barrier, pleading for help, while Israeli snipers kept shooting at them, became the icon of the second intifada. The video “went viral” at a time when social media did not exist yet. It was the dawn of the internet and hard to predict that 23 years later, social media will show thousands of Muhamad Al-Durras being killed in cold-blood by the Israeli apartheid regime.

Advocates calling for a ceasefire in Gaza were often interrupted by their own tears as they gathered outside the White House and read the names of Palestinians killed in the war.

Several speakers, including Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and actors Cynthia Nixon and Denee Benton, took turns reading from a long list of names on Wednesday evening. But they barely got through a fraction of the more than 15,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks.

The inclusion of Palestinian prisoners with Israeli citizenship (1948 Palestinians) within the prisoner-for-hostage truce deal between Israel and Hamas has sparked controversy among lawyers and human rights activists concerned about due process and their legal and civil rights.

Out of 50 new names added by Israel to the list this week of prisoners due for release as part of the swap, 20 were female prisoners with Israeli citizenship.

The vast majority of these prisoners were arrested after the current war on Gaza which began on 7 October, but not all.

Other '48 Palestinians released were Shatila Abu Ayada from Kafr Qasem, who has been imprisoned since 2016 and was sentenced to jail for 16 years over an alleged stabbing attack, and Aya Khatib, of Arara village, who began serving a four-year sentence two months ago for 'aiding Hamas', which she denied.

France’s foreign ministry spokesperson said Thursday that the European Union should consider sanctioning violent Israeli settlers who attack Palestinians in the West Bank.

“We believe that the international community has a role to play to end these acts of violence which are extremely destabilizing for the region, but also harm the prospects for a two-state solution,” Anne-Claire Legendre said during a briefing.

The French spokesperson did not elaborate on the type of sanctions she had in mind, but the comments came less than two weeks after US President Joe Biden threatened to issue US visa bans against violent settlers.

Shortly after the Hamas offensive against Israel on 7 October, the Israeli propaganda machine went into high gear to implement its genocidal war in Gaza.

Ghoulish allegations of decapitated and burned babies, mass rape of women, and other unconfirmed crimes were widely disseminated to a white supremacist western world ready to believe any Israeli claim about the racially inferior Palestinians.

Acting as stenographers for the Israeli government, western mainstream media outlets immediately began reporting unsubstantiated claims as incontestable truth before quietly retracting many of them. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, continues to shamelessly propagate these libels as facts.

The loosening of rules within the Israeli army on attacking "non-military" targets may have contributed to the massive death toll in the Gaza Strip since 7 October, a new report has suggested.

A joint investigation by Israeli outlets 972+ Mag and Local Call, including interviews with multiple current and former intelligence officials, indicates that lower expectations on limiting civilian targets were combined with the use of AI to generate a wider range of targets, which one person branded a "mass assassination factory".

In at least one case, sources said Israeli army intelligence approved the death of hundreds of Palestinians as part of an attempt to assassinate one Hamas military commander.

When compared with previous Gaza assaults, there has been a major expansion of "non-military targets", with private residences, infrastructure and high-rise blocks - all defined as "power targets" - now fair game for attacks.

Israel does not have the right to self-defense following the 7 October owing to its status as an occupying power, according to Diana Buttu, a lawyer and former spokesperson with the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

Israel and its allies have insisted that the bombing campaign in Gaza is justified following the attack that saw around 1,200 people in Israel killed.

According to Article 51 of the UN Charter, until the UN Security Council takes measures to maintain international peace and security, "nothing in the charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations."

Ever since Israel embarked on its bombing campaign, officials from the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union have defended Israeli actions by pointing to Article 51.

Philadelphia City Council is poised to ban the wearing of ski masks in certain public spaces this week, a move that police say could help them solve more crimes and stop more pedestrians they suspect of being involved in criminal activity.

The measure is cosponsored by 10 members, more than the majority needed to pass the bill Thursday. Authored by Councilmember Anthony Phillips, who represents parts of Northwest and Northeast Philadelphia, the bill allows the city to fine people $250 for wearing ski masks in parks, schools, and on public transit. There are carve-outs for religious expression and “First Amendment activities” like protesting.

… the ACLU says it could violate free expression rights and be misused by officers stopping and frisking pedestrians — a controversial but legal law enforcement tactic that’s been embraced by Mayor-elect Cherelle Parker. …

“We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.” — William O. Douglas, dissenting in Osborn v. United States (1966)

The government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.

Don’t believe it.

It doesn’t matter whether you obey every law. The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.

For instance, it was recently revealed that the White House, relying on a set of privacy loopholes, has been sidestepping the Fourth Amendment by paying AT&T to allow federal, state, and local law enforcement to access—without a warrant—the phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.

This goes way beyond the NSA’s metadata collection program.

Operated during the Obama, Trump and now the Biden presidencies, this secret dragnet surveillance program (formerly known as Hemisphere and now dubbed Data Analytical Services) uses its association with the White House to sidestep a vast array of privacy and transparency laws.

According to Senator Ron Wyden, Hemisphere has been operating without any oversight for more than a decade under the guise of cracking down on drug traffickers.

This is how the government routinely breaks the law and gets away with it: in the so-called name of national security.

Those of us who were around for the Vietnam War remember the photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc– “the napalm girl”– the naked, badly burned 9 year old girl fleeing the advancing bombing.

Today, thanks to “the only democracy in the Middle East” and Israel’s Washington enabler, we watch on TV, in Pepe Escobar’s words, “the wanton killing of women and children, the carpet bombing of hospitals, schools and mosques.”

And nothing is done. Washington sends more bombs, more money. European politicians speak of wanton murder of civilians as “Israel’s right of self-defense.” We are descending into darkness and losing our souls.