In an alarming and heartbreaking incident, an esteemed member of the Tohono O'odham community was brutally shot down by Border Patrol agents last week. The tragic story exemplifies the dangerous reality for many Americans living near the border, where instead of providing safety, law enforcement becomes a lethal threat.

Raymond Mattia, a respected and deeply loved man of the Tohono O'odham tribe, fell victim to this predicament when he was killed by the very forces he called upon for assistance. According to his anguished family, Mattia dialed Border Patrol for aid when he observed a group of illegal immigrants trespassing on his property in the village known as Menegers Dam, only a few miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Instead of the assistance he sought, Mattia was met with an onslaught of gunfire that ended his life.

In their grief and shock, the family now seeks answers. How could a situation that required assistance end so tragically? Why did a simple call for help result in a respected community member lying lifeless just two feet from his own front door?

On Tuesday, a U-Haul crashed into a barricade outside the White House grounds. Immediately, speculation that the driver was a “white supremacist” after a Nazi flag was allegedly pulled from the wreck. In fact, the flag was spread out and displayed for reporters by the FBI agents on the scene.

Why did they do that? Someone will have to ask them, but the narrative became a lot more complicated after the driver was identified as Sai Varshith Kandula. Needless to say, he didn’t exactly fit the “white supremacist” profile.

Now, in a move that is sure to spark much speculation, the DOJ has suddenly downgraded the charges involved. The original charges were as follows.

While authorities have not provided specific details on the alleged threat, the US Park Police said the man faces the charge of threatening to kill, kidnap or inflict harm on a President, vice president or family member.

The driver also was also arrested on charges of assault with a dangerous weapon, reckless operation of a motor vehicle, destruction of federal property and trespassing, according to the Park Police.

According to a new report (The New York Post), those charges have all been wiped away, and Kandula only faces a single count of depredation of property of the United States.

Ron DeSantis tried claiming that he 'broke the internet' during his chaotic Twitter presidential campaign launch - but did so without breaking a smile. 

The Florida governor and aspiring president shrugged off the shambolic start in a follow-up video clip after the Twitter event, saying he 'broke the internet.' 

While the delivery was a joke and appeared to make light of the haywire announcement, DeSantis did not crack a smile - although he did manage a brief grimace as he ended his speech. 

The tweet with the video clip said: ‘What can we break next?’

During his conversation with Musk, DeSantis touted his record dealing with COVID, taking veiled swipes at Donald Trump and promising to reverse 'everything' President Biden was doing at the border.

Since the day of the riots, chaos and vandalism that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, speculation has swirled about the presence of undercover federal agents among the protesters. Now the Biden administration is admitting that dozens of Justice Department plants were present on January 6th, as well as dozens more FBI agents, Secret Service agents and who knows how many other law enforcement personnel.

Jimmy notes that he has been consistent in his insistence that January 6 was a fed operation from the start and that this latest revelation represents complete vindication for that belief.

A human trafficker was caught on camera dropping a 4-year-old child from a height of about 30 feet over the border wall in San Diego, according to a border official.

The incident occurred a week before the video’s release, and footage of the crime was shared on Twitter by Chief of Border Patrol Raul Ortiz. Agents and emergency service personnel responded to the scene and administered first aid to the child. According to Ortiz, gunshots were reported in the immediate vicinity while the agents and EMS cared for the child. “Remarkably, the child is ok! Do not trust smugglers!” Ortiz wrote in the caption of the video.

In yesterday's press briefing, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre expressed staunch criticism against Florida's controversial policies and their impact on marginalized communities.

Although Jean-Pierre did not comment directly on the travel advisories recently issued by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), she did not shy away from expressing the administration's disapproval of actions by Florida's lawmakers.

Jean-Pierre stated, "So I'm not going to comment on the travel advisory specifically, but I'll say this broadly and where we have been as administration as the White House, we've been outspoken about the impact of misguided policies" in the state.

In Japan a 14-year-old girl died from multiple organ inflammation just 45 hours after getting her third dose of the Pfizer vaccine. A report conducted by researchers from Tokushima University Graduate School in Japan says the girl took the shot on August 10, 2022 and died shortly afterward. The study found the girl was “healthy by nature” and was active on her middle school athletic team.

The direct involvement of the NATO member states in the Ukrainian crisis increases the risk of a nuclear conflict, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday.

"De jure, NATO countries are directly involved in the conflict on the side of Kiev. Such an irresponsible line significantly increases the threat of a direct military clash between nuclear powers," Lavrov said at an international meeting of high representatives in charge of security issues taking place in the Moscow region.

Russia's top diplomat added that Moscow has called on the US and the EU to abandon unilateral forceful decisions to reduce tensions in the world.

Commander of the Ukrainian armed forces Gen. Valery Zaluzhny received a head injury and shrapnel wounds as a result of Russia's missile strike in early May, a representative of Russian law enforcement agencies told Sputnik on Wednesday, citing Ukraine military sources.

"First aid was provided Zaluzhny in Nikolayev in order to stop the bleeding. He had a cranial trepanation done in the Kiev military hospital," the representative said.

The condition of the Ukrainian commander-in-chief is complicated by the presence of an underlying disease of Type 2 diabetes, the source said.

Thanks to one of my patrons. He directed me to this piece of such a severe coping that one has to ask the question--if this dude teaches at West Point, especially air defense, I have to ask the question--what exactly does he teach? 

The May 4 interception of a Russian Kinzhal hypersonic missile by one of Ukraine’s Patriot air defense systems in Kyiv has caused a significant stir in the international missile defense community. The ensuing saturation attack against Kyiv on May 16, which according to Russian sources was specifically aimed at knocking out a Patriot system, has only further underscored the significance of advanced missile defense systems in today’s evolving security landscape. This dramatic first-ever engagement between modern Western air defense systems and the hypersonic weapons specifically designed to defeat them was marked by contrails streaking the skies over Ukraine, literally and figurately underlining the significance of this latest technological revolution.

I have news for this Captain Peter Mitchell--there was NO intercept of any Kinzhal on May 4. No US AD system is capable of that, what it was--it was Ukie BS spread by imbeciles at Bloomberg. The rest of the piece by this guy is one of the most fascinating exercise in confabulation I ever read.

The Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) Criminal Investigation (CI) unit will launch a pilot program in June in which cyber attachés will be sent across four continents to combat cybercrime, the agency announced on May 18.

This initiative focuses on cracking down on tax and financial crimes involving cryptocurrency, decentralized finance, peer-to-peer payments, and mixing services. It signals the IRS’s commitment to staying one step ahead of cybercriminals in the digital landscape.

The program will be from June to September 2023, in which cyber attachés will be stationed in strategic locations worldwide. The chosen cities for deployment include Sydney, Singapore, Bogota, and Frankfurt, covering the regions of Australia, Asia, South America, and Europe, respectively.

A father in Anne Arundel County was killed while protecting his children from a fight that started at a middle school and came to their home. Christopher Michael Wright, 43, was killed while protecting his children from a fight that started Friday at Brooklyn Park Middle School and was brought to his doorstep in Anne Arundel County, his family told 11 News. Wright's fiancée, Tracy Karopchinsky, told 11 News that her 14-year-old son got into a fight with another teen Friday afternoon at the school and that three teens and two adults came to her house looking for her son but encountered Wright outside.

Webmaster addition: Note that the race of the attackers is not mentioned, nor are clips of the attack caught on security cameras shown. Draw your own conclusions.

“We can never allow ‘Warp Speed’ to ‘trump’ informed consent in this country ever again”. Governor DeSantis talking about his new legislation.

Vanity Fair published a defamatory rant Tuesday wherein leftist polemicist Bess Levin likened Twitter CEO Elon Musk to the former head of the Ku Klux Klan.

Levin's piece, categorized as "news" on the gossip magazine's website, was entitled, "Report: Ron DeSantis Will Formally Announce His 2024 Bid With Elon Musk, Because Apparently David Duke Wasn't Available."

David Duke is a former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who ran for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination.

The article, which served to reveal more about its author than the intended subject matter, has attracted significant criticism online.

Fury is mounting over the revelation that the Aberystwyth Parkrun women's record is still held by a eunuch who brutally slashed and stabbed three UK Athletics staff over questions of his eligibility to compete as a female athlete.

What's the background?

Michael Jameson, who changed his name to Lauren Jeska, attempted to murder Ralph Knibbs at Birmingham's Alexander Stadium in March 2016.

According to the Guardian, at the time of the attack, Jeska's status as a female athlete was under review, as there were concerns he had a significant advantage over the real women with whom he was competing. The murderous transvestite had, after all, bested women in the 2010, 2011, and 2012 English Fell Running Champion and as well as in the British Championship in 2012.

Jeska, who did not "transition" or have his testicles removed until he was 26 years old, reportedly refused to provide relevant samples of his testosterone levels and other documentation to the governing body, prompting officials to void his race results in September 2015.

The 2014 referendum in Crimea on whether to join Russia accurately reflected the will of the people, Marine Le Pen said on Wednesday, addressing an inquiry before the French National Assembly. The National Rally leader was appearing before a parliamentary commission investigating “Russian influence” in France, to address accusations that her party took two loans from a Russian bank.

“I fully support the referendum,” she told the lawmakers. “I think that Crimea's residents expressed their will freely by a vote, in order to reunite with Russia. I think that it was absolutely legitimate.”

Le Pen explained that she has consistently maintained her position that the peninsula was Russian long before it was “given away” to Ukraine “at the whim of a dictator” for 60 years, referring to the decision of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to redraw internal borders in 1954. The Russian Empire had acquired Crimea from the Ottomans in the 18th century.

The US and UK should leave Iran alone, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergey Naryshkin, has said. The official also suggested that the two nations are dismayed by the success of China’s efforts to reconcile Iran and Saudi Arabia.  

Speaking on Wednesday at the International Meeting of High Representatives for Security Issues, Naryshkin said he would advise the “Anglo-Saxons to take care of their own internal civil conflicts. Or better yet, go to their old pal – the devil.” 

According to the official, Washington and London view the recent normalization of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in a strictly negative light. He claimed that the two allies are wary that Beijing’s diplomatic activities in the region could undermine their long-term strategy to weaken the Islamic Republic.  

The fighting between Sudan’s military and a powerful paramilitary force has displaced more than 1.3 million people, the U.N. migration agency said Wednesday.

The International Organization for Migration said the clashes have forced over 1 million people to leave their homes to safer areas inside Sudan. Some 320,000 others have fled to the neighboring countries of Egypt, South Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, the Central African Republic and Libya.

The fighting erupted on April 15 after months of escalating tensions between the military, led by Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces commanded by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. The conflict derailed Sudanese hopes of restoring the country’s fragile transition to democracy, which was disrupted by a military coup led by the two generals in October 2021.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba is urging African countries to abandon their stances of neutrality towards his country’s war with Russia.

Many African countries have refused to take sides in the European conflict, with several abstaining from votes at the United Nations General Assembly condemning Russia’s invasion. Ethiopia is one of them.

Speaking in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, on Wednesday, Kuleba said Ukraine was “very upset that some African countries chose to abstain” and called them to lend Ukraine diplomatic support “in the face of Russian aggression.”

“Neutrality is not the answer,” he told reporters. “By being neutral towards Russian aggression against Ukraine, you project neutrality to the violations of borders and mass crimes that may occur very close to you.”

More than a million Somalis have been displaced within their own country in just over four months through a "toxic" mix of drought, conflict and floods, humanitarian agencies said Wednesday.

Around 433,000 people were forced from their homes between January 1 and May 10 as a grinding Islamist insurgency raged and clashes broke out in the breakaway Somaliland region, the UN refugee agency UNHCR and Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said.

in addition, "over 408,000 people were displaced by floods sweeping across their villages and another 312,000 people were displaced by ravaging drought," they said in a joint statement.

Former Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri has slammed the military’s plans to set up regional commands, asking if it was preparing for a war.

Megawati, head of the Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), which includes President Joko Widodo, also questioned the rationale behind the proposal announced by Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto, who described the initiative as a key security strategy.

“They say that there will be one command in one region. I say, cut it off,” Megawati told an event organised by a government-run think tank founded by her father and Indonesia’s first president Sukarno.

Russia plans to move its newest nuclear submarine to a permanent base in the Kamchatka Peninsula in August, according to Russia’s state-run TASS news agency, as Moscow steps up its military presence in the Pacific.

The Generalissimo Suvorov, which entered service at the end of 2022, carries up to 16 nuclear-tipped Russian Bulava intercontinental ballistic missiles, each of which can carry more than one nuclear warhead.

Webmaster addition: The Bulava carries six warheads of 150 kilotons each.

Lotifi Hassan Misto was going about his business herding sheep in Syria’s Idlib province May 18 when a US drone strike blew him to smithereens.

Pentagon officials immediately trumpeted ‘We murdered an al-Qaeda leader bent on terrorizing the homeland’. That could well have been a recorded response that has been played hundreds, maybe thousands of times since the War of Terror began 22 years ago this September.

But the Pentagon fable quickly fell apart when family members came forward to defend Misto and were backed up by terrorism experts. They told the Washington Post Misto was likely not affiliated with al-Qaeda.

A Pentagon official offered an ‘oops’ stating “We are no longer confident we killed a senior AQ official. But another official claimed the person they killed was al-Qaeda without offering an iota of evidence. “Though we believe the strike did not kill the original target, we believe the person to be al-Qaeda.” With that the Pentagon has gone silent, refusing to release any details of the sheepherder killing attack.

Argentina is in talks to renew and potentially expand its currency swap line with China, a central bank source said on Wednesday, as the South American country battles tumbling foreign reserves that threaten its ability to meet payments.

The country has free access to some $5 billion as part of the China currency swap agreement that totals 130 billion yuan ($18.81 billion). The two countries activated the usable portion in January to help bolster Argentina's embattled peso.

The government source said the central bank was "advancing towards the renewal of the swap and discussing the possibility of increasing the unrestricted amount", with the aim to have an agreement ready to sign by the end of May.

The IRS opened an examination of journalist Matt Taibbi’s 2018 tax return on Christmas Eve of last year — three weeks after he exposed sensitive documents about government officials pressuring Twitter to censor content.

The House Judiciary Committee said Wednesday it obtained that detail and other information about the case from the IRS following the outcry over a tax agent visiting Taibbi’s home on March 9, 2022 — the same day he testified to Congress about the “Twitter Files.”

Documents provided to the committee “raise more questions than they answer,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) wrote to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel in a letter requesting that he make further disclosures.

The IRS told the committee it was trying to ensure the reporter wasn’t the victim of identity fraud, Jordan wrote.

In the aftermath of the first round of elections in Turkiye, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a speech on 23 May where he vowed that the opposition will be “erased from politics,” in what was seen as a threat to his main rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

“We will attack the polls on May 28 … opposition leaders will be erased from politics,” Erdogan said at a rally of his supporters in Malatya ahead of the runoff election scheduled for this coming Sunday.

At the start of the month, Erdogan’s government launched a crackdown on politicians, journalists, lawyers, and activists affiliated with the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), who have endorsed Kilicdaroglu.

Erdogan’s latest remarks come two days after the formal endorsement of Erdogan by Sinan Ogan, an ultranationalist third-place contender in the elections. With Erdogan already in the lead in the first round, it is expected that Ogan’s endorsement has pushed the president further up in the race.

Israeli occupation forces blocked all the entrances of  Al-Mugayyier village, to the east of Ramallah,  for the 12th day in a row, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.

Local sources told WAFA that Israeli forces continued to block the main entrances of the village, preventing the villagers from entering and leaving it and forcing them to take long detours to reach their destination.

Germany’s Commerzbank AG has suspended its correspondent banking relations with at least three Lebanese financial institutions citing a “lack of profitability,” according to unnamed banking sources that spoke with Lebanese daily L’Orient-Le Jour.

But despite the claims made by the German bank, experts believe this is a “pretext” and say the decision is more likely a result of Lebanon’s possible grey-listing by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) over money laundering concerns and the issuance of a red notice by Interpol against Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh.

Speaking to Al Akhbar, monetary advisor Ghassan Shammas also revealed that banks in the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, and the rest of the Scandinavian countries have adopted a “de-risking policy to end or reduce their dealings with Lebanese commercial banks.”

While the “de-risking” policy is usually adopted as a precautionary measure by banks over poor profitability or money laundering concerns, fears are mounting that this could snowball into a complete severance of relations by western banks given the complete inaction of Lebanon’s political class to address the dire economic crisis.

Israel's public prosecution announced that it would oppose the early release of long-term Palestinian prisoner Walid Daqqa on the grounds that he suffers from terminal cancer.

Daqqa, who has been detained since 1986, was diagnosed with a rare type of bone marrow cancer several months ago and has been in and out of hospitals due to successive health setbacks.

Israel's Prison Service's (IPS) medical administration said after diagnosing him that "his days are numbered and there is an immediate risk to his life".

Sana Salama, Daqqa's wife, told Middle East Eye that the 60-year-old prisoner is currently in intensive care receiving intensive antibiotics to treat a new lung infection.