Witnesses in Sudan’s capital Khartoum reported artillery fire, fighter-jet flights over the city, and continued street battles in some areas as a weeklong ceasefire got off to a shaky start.

Heavy bombardment could be heard in east Khartoum and one resident shared a photo of thick black smoke rising into the sky. In Omdurman and Khartoum North, Khartoum’s twin cities, people said they heard sounds of small arms firing.

After five weeks of fierce battles between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the warring factions agreed to a seven-day truce starting at 9:45pm (19:45 GMT) on Monday to allow the delivery of aid and let people escape.

The party of East Timor independence hero Xanana Gusmão has won the most votes in the country’s parliamentary election, according to preliminary results, boosting his chances of returning as prime minister.

Gusmão’s National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction (CNRT) won about 42 percent of votes after all ballots had been counted, according to election commission data carried by national broadcaster Radio-Televisão Timor Leste.

Webmaster addition: In the photo, note the blue dye on the finger. This is how East Timor prevents people from voting more than once. The blue goes away after a week.

The number of refugees in Chad who have fled the fighting between the forces of the two rival generals in Sudan for more than a month is "increasing very quickly" and is around 90,000, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was alarmed on Monday. refugees (UNHCR).

The UN estimated them at 76,000 three days earlier. "As of now, we think we are close to 90,000 people," Raouf Mazou, Assistant High Commissioner for UNHCR Operations, told reporters in N'Djamena.

The UN estimates to date at a thousand dead and more than a million internally displaced persons and refugees the toll of this conflict which began on April 15. Mr. Mazou mentioned him, "more than 250,000 people who have left Sudan" for neighbouring countries since the start of this war.

Papua New Guinea (PNG) will not be used as a base for "war to be launched", and a defence agreement with the United States prohibited "offensive military operations", its prime minister said on Tuesday.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday a defence cooperation deal signed with PNG earlier that day would expand the Pacific island nation's capabilities and make it easier for the U.S. military to train with its forces.

The deal sparked student protests amid concern it could embroil PNG in strategic competition between the U.S. and China.

Is China really on the verge of invading the island of Taiwan, as so many top American officials seem to believe? If the answer is “yes” and the U.S. intervenes on Taiwan’s side — as President Biden has sworn it would — we could find ourselves in a major-power conflict, possibly even a nuclear one, in the not-too-distant future. Even if confined to Asia and fought with conventional weaponry alone — no sure thing — such a conflict would still result in human and economic damage on a far greater scale than observed in Ukraine today.  

But what if the answer is “no,” which seems at least as likely? Wouldn’t that pave the way for the U.S. to work with its friends and allies, no less than with China itself, to reduce tensions in the region and possibly open a space for the launching of peaceful negotiations between Taiwan and the mainland? If nothing else, it would eliminate the need to boost the Pentagon budget by many billions of dollars annually, as now advocated by China hawks in Congress.

How that question is answered has enormous implications for us all. Yet, among policymakers in Washington, it isn’t even up for discussion. Instead, they seem to be competing with each another to identify the year in which the purported Chinese invasion will occur and war will break out between our countries.

“One of the creeping hands of totalitarianism running through the democracy is the Federal Bureau of Investigation… Because why does the FBI do all this? To scare the hell out of people… They work for the establishment and the corporations and the politicos to keep things as they are. And they want to frighten and chill the people who are trying to change things.”—Howard Zinn, historian

Power corrupts. We know this.

In fact, we know this from experience learned the hard way at the hands of our own government.

So why is anyone surprised to learn that the FBI, one of the most power-hungry and corrupt agencies within the police state’s vast complex of power-hungry and corrupt agencies, misused a massive government surveillance database more than 300,000 times in order to target American citizens?

This is how the government operates, after all.

First, they seek out extraordinary powers acquired in the wake of some national crisis—in this case, warrantless surveillance powers intended to help the government spy on foreign targets suspected of engaging in terrorism—and then they use those powers against the American people.

According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI repeatedly misused Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in order to spy on the communications of two vastly disparate groups of Americans: those involved in the George Floyd protests and those who may have taken part in the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol.

This is par for the course for the FBI, whose modus operandi has historically been to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.

Webmaster addition:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is slated to announce a presidential bid during a Wednesday evening Twitter Spaces with billionaire business tycoon Elon Musk, according to reports.

"BREAKING: @FoxNews confirms Florida Governor @RonDeSantis will announce his 2024 Presidential run tomorrow night, 6pm ET in a Twitter Spaces interview with @elonmusk," Bill Melugin of Fox News tweeted.

Very rarely does a movie designed to take my money for empty entertainment lose me with a 60-second clip. But Disney pulled it off using some of its new, equitable magic. 

“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is set to hit theaters on June 30, and it should be set on rekindling all the magic from our childhoods. Indy was a hero then, taking on enemies who had supernatural powers or who hoped to gain Biblical powers and overcoming them was kind of his thing—and it was enjoyable to watch. Bringing back the character for a fifth film, especially after the stinker that was the one with a UFO and an alien skull, should have been an easy sell to a majority of America—but they already spoiled it by exposing the film’s underlying woke lecture. 

Spoiler alert: Women are infallible, and men are old, bumbling, and weak.

In the year since the Uvalde school shooting, the GOP-controlled Texas Legislature has largely ignored pleas for stricter gun laws from victims' families who have been spurred into activism.

Kari Lake made a huge announcement earlier today at her first press conference since her lawsuit was tossed by weak and arguably corrupt Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson.

The Gateway Pundit reported live on the full event. Kari Lake announced during the conference that she will appeal Thompson’s bogus ruling all the way to the US Supreme Court and launch a massive voter registration and get-out-the-vote operation to help Republicans win in 2024.

Before the press conference, The Gateway Pundit correspondent Jordan Conradson was setting up his equipment when the other so-called journalists tried giving him hell, referring to him as Kari Lake’s “PR guy.” They were also openly trashing Kari Lake. So, Conradson turned on his microphone and picked up some of the leftwing propagandists’ public conversations to expose their biases.

In the video below, liberal hack Howie Fischer, founder of Capitol Media Services, begins joking that Kari Lake’s surprise announcement is that she will become “Donald Trump’s fourth wife.” Later in the video, Hank Stephenson of the Arizona Agenda on Substack can be heard telling other reporters that he received $100 from corrupt RINO Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, and appears to say “for some pact,” though it is not totally clear.

Palestinian song “Ana Dammi Falastini” (My Blood is Palestinian) by Palestinian singer Mohammed Assaf has been removed from music streaming services Spotify and Apple Music over allegations it “incites against Israel”.

Assaf said he felt “shocked” that his signature song was taken down from the widely-used streaming services in a statement on Sunday to Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, The New Arab’s Arabic sister site.

“I checked my official page on the Spotify and Apple Music platforms, and was surprised that the song ‘Ana Dammi Falastini’ was deleted,” he said.

“I received an official email about it, on the pretext that the song incites the Zionist enemy, which makes me more honored that my songs express the Palestinian people’s resistance to the occupation,” he continued.

The song, released in 2015, which translates to “My Blood is Palestinian”, is widely regarded as a patriotic Palestinian song that is often played or sung in events marking Palestinian culture.

“IT never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.”

Sadly, Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize for Literature lecture continues to be as relevant today as when he gave it in 2005.

And nothing confirms the accuracy of the British playwright’s incisive words better than the ongoing US intervention in Syria.

“Do you think the presence of the US military in Syria is illegal?” Chinese reporter Edward Xu asked Faran Haq, deputy spokesperson for the UN secretary-general, during a March press conference.

Haq’s jaw-dropping reply? “There’s no US armed forces inside of Syria… I believe there’s military activity. But, in terms of a ground presence in Syria, I’m not aware of that.”

Back in the real world, US troops have been on the ground in Syria since 2015.

Despite the efforts of the federal government, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency, to conceal evidence of the actual operation of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” (“EITs”) it deployed on detainees in dark sites and at Guantanamo, a steady drumbeat of disclosures has provided an unparalleled view into this disgraceful episode in the nation’s history.

One of the most dramatic revelations has been the drawings by Detainee Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn aka Abu Zubaydah (hereinafter “Mr. Abu Zubaydah”), the first victim of such EITs. These drawings viscerally convey the brutal reality the CIA sought to hide with its calculated destruction of video recordings of torture conducted by its agents. These drawings also depict the kinds of torture — in which the FBI was also complicit — inflicted on the artist and his fellow detainees. These tortures are, if possible, all the more disturbing as to Mr. Abu Zubaydah himself because even the torturers—CIA and FBI – now recognize that his was a case of mistaken identity. Nevertheless, he remains in detention – albeit uncharged – until this day. His drawings dovetail with the recent accounts of Dr. James Mitchell, a chief architect of the torture regime, who both wrote a book on EITs and testified in hearings on Guantanamo.

These sources, together with the report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, provide the most complete – and compelling – account to date of America’s torture program.

Click here to read the full report.

Kelly Sue – A Canadian woman who used to walk 10 miles a day and ride her bike 24 miles every 2 days had 9 strokes after her 2nd COVID-19 vaccine dose.

Kelly Sue had her 2nd COVID-19 vaccine on June 12, 2021. Three and a half weeks later she had back-to-back strokes. From July to early November 2021, she had 9 TIAs (mini-strokes) and strokes. She spent 31 days in the hospital.

She had blindness in her eyes, couldn’t use her mouth, couldn’t talk, would wake up and didn’t know who she was or where she was.

More than 30 women were abducted by separatist rebels in Cameroon, for protesting illegal taxes imposed on them by the fighters, said the government on Tuesday. The women were taken from Babanki, a farming village in the Northwest region along the border with Nigeria, said Simon Emil Mooh, the top official in the area.

“We have reliable information that 10 of the women, who are basically farmers and merchants, were tortured with guns and machetes,” he said.

The separatists were collecting monthly payments from children, women and men, imposing taxes on couples before they got married, and forcing families to pay $1,000 to bury their relatives, he said.

The Central African nation has been plagued by fighting since English-speaking separatists launched a rebellion in 2017, with the stated goal of breaking away from the area dominated by the French-speaking majority and setting up an independent, English-speaking state.

There has been mounting anger in Bahrain over the arrest of a senior Shia imam who called for the release of political prisoners in the kingdom.

Muhammad Sanqour, a senior religious leader at the Imam Sadiq Grand Mosque in the village of Diraz, was summoned by the Criminal Investigation Directorate (CID) on Monday.

A few hours later, a statement from the interior ministry said his case was being referred to the Public Prosecution Office (OPP) over “repeated inflammatory speeches that included legal violations" and "publicly inciting hatred and contempt for a group of people."

Although they did not specify, the arrest is believed to be linked to comments made last week during Friday prayers in which he raised concerns about the mistreatment of prisoners in the kingdom's jails.

Acting in support and not instead of: the French armies had to learn the lessons of their forced exit from Mali in the summer of 2022 and are today testing a discreet partnership in Niger, tailored to the demands of Niamey.

"In Niger and even globally everywhere in Africa, the philosophical position is different from what was done in Mali. Today our aid starts first from the need of the partner", summarizes the commander of the French Forces in the Sahel ( FFS ), General Bruno Baratz.

A change of paradigm necessary after the departure from Mali of the French soldiers of Operation Barkhane, under the pressure of a hostile junta which appealed to the Russian mercenaries of Wagner, although it denies it.

Neighbouring Burkina Faso, also led by putschist soldiers, in January demanded the withdrawal of French special forces from its territory and is in Wagner's sights.

Chinese energy firm Anton Oilfield Services Group released a statement on 23 May announcing the “nullification” of an oil exploration agreement signed days earlier with Yemen’s Ansarallah-affiliated government in Sanaa, expressing “sincere” apologies to all parties involved.

“Due to a lack of sufficient understanding of the relevant information previously, Anton Dubai Branch signed a non-legal Memorandum of Understanding regarding Yemeni oilfields development on May 1, 2023,” the statement reads.

“After verifying the relevant information, Anton hereby solemnly announces the nullification of the MOU and sincerely apologizes to the parties involved,” it added without elaborating further.

Webmaster addition: I wonder what pressure was put on China to get them to back out of the agreement.

Turkish intelligence (MIT) says it has uncovered a spy network linked to the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, according to Turkish media reports on Tuesday. The network allegedly operated within Turkey and consisted of 15 individuals.

The investigation led to the arrest of 11 members, who reportedly were trained in Israel and sent to Turkey with the aim of establishing a company involved in trading with Iran.

Reports from Turkey suggest that the network's activities, carried out over a period of 18 months, focused on espionage against 23 individuals who had commercial ties to Iran.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Monday that his country could withdraw from Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), in a fresh show of discontent over the lack of support from its ally Russia.

Yerevan has grown increasingly frustrated over what it calls Russia’s failure to protect Armenia in the face of military threats from Azerbaijan.

“I am not ruling out that Armenia will take a decision to withdraw from the CSTO,” if the bloc fails to respect its treaty obligations, he told a news conference in Yerevan.

Pashinyan’s remarks came ahead of the talks with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to be hosted by the Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Thursday in Moscow.

On 12 May, the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law live-streamed its commencement ceremony where Fatima Mohammed was speaking. The student was draped in the famous Palestinian keffiyeh. But just hours after the graduation ceremony, the video of the speech had disappeared from the school's YouTube page.

Students and activists say it’s because the speaker brought attention to Palestine. Mohammed had been voted by her classmates to give the address.

She spoke about how she and other students joined CUNY Law to gain the legal skills necessary to confront systems of oppression and apply law principles consistently.

“Israel continues to indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshippers, murdering the old, the young, attacking even funerals and graveyards as it encourages lynch mobs to target Palestinian homes and businesses, as it imprisons its children, as it continues its project of settler colonialism, expelling Palestinians from their homes, carrying the ongoing Nakba… our silence is no longer acceptable,” Mohammed said during her speech. 

A member of Russian President Vladimir Putin's powerful Security Council on Tuesday warned that the more destructive the weapons that the West supplied to Ukraine, the higher the risk of "nuclear apocalypse".

Russia, which has more nuclear weapons than any other state, has repeatedly said the West is engaged in a proxy war with Russia over Ukraine that could escalate into a much bigger conflict.

The United States has committed $37 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Putin sent troops into Ukraine in February last year.

U.S. President Joe Biden told fellow G7 leaders on Friday that he backed a joint effort with allies to train Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets, according to a senior U.S. Administration official, though there is no commitment as yet to supply the jets themselves.

A growing number of San Francisco tech executives are abandoning the city to move to London, fueling an American-led boom in foreign home sales in the UK capital city. 

'Tech workers have grown disenchanted with San Francisco,' Annie Ingram, a private banker at Coutts, told The Telegraph this week, citing concerns about rising crime, homelessness and open-air drug use in the Golden Gate City. 

Last year, Americans became the largest group of overseas buyers in prime central London, replacing Chinese buyers in the top spot the prior year, and the French in 2020, according to data from real estate agency Knight Frank cited in the report.

The trend has been helped by favorable exchange rates, which gave dollar buyers an effective 30 percent discount on purchasing property in London during parts of last year, according to a January study from Beauchamp Estates. 

The EU only has two choices when it comes to India selling refined Russian fuel: it can either retain the present arrangement for the pragmatic sake of all parties’ pecuniary interests, or it can ban the import of these products for ideological reasons at the expense of the aforesaid.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell sparked a scandal earlier this week when he criticized India for selling refined Russian fuel to Europe, ominously warning that “we have to act.” This implied threat prompted Indian External Affairs Minister Dr. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar to remind everyone to “Look at EU Council regulations, Russian crude is substantially transformed in the third country and not treated as Russian anymore. I would urge you to look at Council’s Regulation 833/2014.”

Borrell responded shortly after by sharing “Some Clarifications On The Circumvention Of EU Sanctions Against Russia” on the European External Action Service website. According to him, “The EU’s measures have no extraterritorial effect, meaning they only apply to European entities.” He also reaffirmed that “Once refined, these products are no longer treated as Russian but as Indian and we cannot prevent Indian refineries selling them to an EU operator, or to an intermediary.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., invited her colleague from across the aisle in Congress, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to educate Twitter users on the history of America's diametrically opposed political parties, and his answer is unlikely what she expected.

The impetus for the Twitter discussion stemmed from Cruz first commenting on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) travel advisory for Florida that said the state "devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color."

"This is bizarre. And utterly dishonest." Cruz stated in a tweet Sunday. "In the 1950s & 1960s, the NAACP did extraordinary good helping lead the civil rights movement. Today, Dr. King would be ashamed of how profoundly they lost their way." 

Webmaster addition: In today's world, "optics" is cheaper and easier than actually trying to get something done.

For almost two years we have been experiencing the onslaughts of a brand new form of warring aggression. For all but a tiny percentage of the global population, we have become the targeted enemy. The we that is being attacked extends to most of the global population.

We are being culled in preparation for a new political economy characterized by an A.I. master-slave relation along with massive robotization. It is becoming increasingly clear that the transition to this scheme –which de facto implies depopulation– kicked into gear with the brutal economic and health impacts of the lockdowns and then with the deaths and injuries from the COVID injections.

According to the Wall Street Journal: “Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population”.

In May 2009, the Billionaire philanthropists met behind closed doors at the home of the president of The Rockefeller University in Manhattan.

This Secret Gathering was sponsored by Bill Gates. They called themselves “The Good Club”. 

The emphasis was not on population growth (i.e Planned Parenthood) but on “Depopulation”, i.e,. the reduction in the absolute size of the World’s population.

As the Ukrainian army squares off against ultra-right and neo-Nazi militias in the west and violence against ethnic Russians continues in the east, the obvious folly of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy has come into focus even for many who tried to ignore the facts, or what you might call “the mess that Victoria Nuland made.”

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs “Toria” Nuland was the “mastermind” behind the Feb. 22, 2014 “regime change” in Ukraine, plotting the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych while convincing the ever-gullible U.S. mainstream media that the coup wasn’t really a coup but a victory for “democracy.”

To sell this latest neocon-driven “regime change” to the American people, the ugliness of the coup-makers had to be systematically airbrushed, particularly the key role of neo-Nazis and other ultra-nationalists from the Right Sektor. For the U.S.-organized propaganda campaign to work, the coup-makers had to wear white hats, not brown shirts.

So, for nearly a year and a half, the West’s mainstream media, especially The New York Times and The Washington Post, twisted their reporting into all kinds of contortions to avoid telling their readers that the new regime in Kiev was permeated by and dependent on neo-Nazi fighters and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who wanted a pure-blood Ukraine, without ethnic Russians.

Nine adolescents and teens were arrested in connection with a spree of robberies and other crimes across the East Bay, including the recent assault of a 63-year-old woman in Oakland's Rockridge neighborhood, authorities said.

Ranging in age from 12 to 17, the underage suspects are believed to have committed 32 robberies in Oakland, two in Piedmont and one in El Cerrito, according to the Oakland Police Department. The group consists of three girls and six boys.

The robberies happened in the neighborhoods of Rockridge, Uptown, Trestle Glen, Grand Lake, Bella Vista, Acorn, Adams Point, Longfellow, Northgate, Fruitvale, Ivy Hill, Chinatown, Mosswood and Temescal.

Police believe the group is tied to the robbery and beating of a 63-year-old woman outside of Rockridge Market Hall on Sunday afternoon. The woman was pushed to the ground, robbed and assaulted, police said.

Webmaster addition: I checked several different versions of this story and not one of them mentioned the race of these kids!

Black Lives Matter's national organization is at risk of going bankrupt after its finances plunged $8.5 million into the red last year - while simultaneously handing multiple staff seven-figure salaries.  

Financial disclosures obtained by The Washington Free Beacon show the perilous state of BLM's Global Network Foundation, which officially emerged in November 2020, as a more formal way of structuring the civil rights movement.

Yet despite the financial controversy and scrutiny, BLM GNF continued to hire relatives of the founder, Patrisse Cullors, and several board members. 

Cullors' brother, Paul Cullors, set up two companies which were paid $1.6 million providing 'professional security services' for Black Lives Matter in 2022.

Webmaster addition: Where, oh where, did all that money go!