A cold start to Thursday, with widespread freezing conditions likely. However, with the strong May sunshine, temperatures quickly climb to the lower and middle 60s across the majority of New England.

Webmaster addition: Gosh darn that human-caused global warming!

 Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee signed a new bill into law Thursday that allows teachers in the Volunteer State to be free from mandatory union dues and increases pay for teachers. 

 A young girl died in U.S. custody this week on the U.S. southern border as the Biden administration struggles to grapple with an illegal immigration crisis that critics say has been sparked largely by the president’s policies.

 Actor Tom Hanks talked about the use of Artificial Intelligence in Hollywood and said that technology exists now such that he could die tomorrow and his “performances can go on and on and on.”

Explosive testimonies from FBI whistleblowers before congressional lawmakers have exposed the staggering extent that the federal agency has been weaponized against the American people.

Several whistleblowers have testified before congressional hearings regarding corruption at the highest levels of law enforcement.

According to the whistleblowers’ testimony, the events that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were instigated by “potential federal involvement.”

Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) held a press conference Thursday to confirm that the government was running several assets in the crowds during the Jan. 6 protests in Washington D.C.

During Gaetz’s House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government press conference today, the congressman showed videos from multiple depositions.

The depositions were conducted over the past few months with FBI whistleblowers.

Webmaster addition:

 Twitter owner Elon Musk warned during an interview this week that U.S. policymakers should take China’s threats of taking over Taiwan “seriously” because the communist nation is not kidding around when it comes to its intent to do so.

 Anheuser-Busch will launch camouflage and motorcycle-themed beer can redesigns for Bud Light and Budweiser as the multinational conglomerate reels from its recent partnership with self-identified transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

According to a report from aunew.com, New research has revealed that many soft contact lenses from the US are made up of compounds linked to a host of health issues including cancer, liver and kidney disease, autoimmune disorders and fertility problems.

Fluoropolymers are by definition described as PFAS or “forever chemicals” and some contact lenses are found to have extremely high levels of organic flueronic, a marker of PFAS, in each.

They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down, and are found in consumer products that resist water, stains and heat.

Talk about being way off target. Retail giant Target has a new line of pro-LGBTQ clothing for children—even for infants. In case, you know, your six-month-old makes the mature decision to become transgender.

Woke Alerts from Consumers’ Research, which notifies users about corporate wokeness, warned about a new LGBTQ “pride” clothing collection from Target. “This follows longstanding efforts by Target to indoctrinate kids via books titled ‘Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?,’ ‘The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish,’ ‘I’m Not a Girl,’ and more,” the Woke Alert noted. Now, Target is expanding its LGBTQ propaganda products to indoctrinate children even while they’re still babies.

Under its “take pride” section, Target gibbers, “Being true to yourself and your community is something to celebrate, all year long.” Unless your community is Christian or conservative, one presumes.

But it gets worse, of course. Go to “Pride Kids’ & Baby Clothing.” These include “Pride Baby Bien Proud Bodysuit – Light Mint Green,” or the same pattern for older kids, “Pride Baby ‘Be Kind’ Jumper Romper – Black,” “Pride Baby ‘Always Proud’ Bibs,” and “Pride Baby ‘It Takes All Kinds’ Bodysuit – Blue.” Or, alternatively, perhaps, Target could have a bodysuit for babies saying, “My parents are woke idiots.”

Webmaster addition: Claire and I did our Walmart run this morning and they had a small rack of LGBTQ flags offered for sale.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (https://twitter.com/RepMTG) joins The Alex Jones Show to call for support from the American people in her filing of articles of impeachment on Joe Biden.

Researchers at the Department of Defense wrote a devastating takedown of the Proximal Origin study, which was used by Dr. Anthony Fauci as proof that the COVID-19 virus had come from nature. 

The takedown, dated May 26, 2020, was written in the form of a working paper called “Critical analysis of Andersen et al. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” It was authored by Commander Jean-Paul Chretien, a Navy doctor working at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Dr. Robert Cutlip, a research scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency. The paper came to light on May 15, when it was leaked to the public via virus origins search group DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19). 

The working paper forensically dismantles the natural origin case made in Proximal Origin and concludes, “The arguments that Andersen et al. use to support a natural-origin scenario for SARS-CoV-2 are based not on scientific analysis, but on unwarranted assumptions.”

The existence of this internal Pentagon paper is crucial, as it proves that government officials were well aware in the early months of the pandemic that there was no evidence in support of a natural origin of the COVID-19 virus. Additionally, given the crushing discrediting of Proximal Origin, Pentagon officials would also have been aware of Fauci’s efforts to seed a false narrative about the origin of COVID-19. 

New York City will begin tracking the carbon footprint of household food consumption and putting caps on how much red meat can be served in public institutions as part of a sweeping initiative to achieve a 33% reduction in carbon emissions from food by 2030.

Mayor Eric Adams and representatives from the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy and Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice announced the new programs last month at a Brooklyn culinary center run by NYC Health + Hospitals, the city’s public healthcare system, just before Earth Day.

At the event, the Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice shared a new chart to be included in the city’s annual greenhouse gas inventory that publicly tracks the carbon footprint created by household food consumption, the Gothamist reported.

Hiding in plain site on a military website is a 2019 report that was published by the US Army Combat capabilities Development Command Chemical Biological Center.

“Cyborg Soldier 2050: Human/Machine Fusion and the Implications for the Future of the DOD”

The abstract of this report lays out it objectives:

The US and China have been locked in a five-year trade war. Lawmakers in Washington have been touting the economic "decoupling" of the world's two biggest economies, but that has not yet happened. 

It's unclear if a full decoupling is even achievable. Western countries urge corporations to rejigger supply chains from China to other "friendlier" countries like India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Mexico. 

However, there's one problem: even if firms relocate their manufacturing base to other countries, components are still sourced from China. The reality of achieving full decoupling appears more challenging and complex than once thought (and costlier). 

 Twitter owner Elon Musk addressed a variety of issues related to U.S. politics during an interview this week, saying he believes that President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, and that while there was likely some fraud, it was minimal and made no impact on the outcome.

 Nearly all Republicans in the Florida legislature have decided to endorse Governor Ron DeSantis over former President Donald Trump, according to a list released this week.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced that the Black Sea grain export deal designed to keep goods flowing through Ukrainian ports has been extended for two more months. Erdogan’s statement comes just one day before Moscow could have scrapped the agreement over long-standing impediments to its own fertilizer and grain exports, despite technical exemptions.

”With the efforts of our country, the support of our Russian friends, the contribution of our Ukrainian friends, it was decided to prolong the Black Sea grain deal for two more months,” Erdogan said during a televised address on Wednesday. Russia, Ukraine and the United Nations have each confirmed the extension. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Olexandr Kubrakov said the grain corridor will remain open at least until July 18th.

Since it was negotiated last July, the deal – which was brokered by Ankara as well as the UN – has allowed some 30.3 million tons of grain and other foodstuffs to be exported through Ukraine’s heavily mined Black Sea ports. That figure includes 625,000 tons of goods used in World Food Program aid operations in several poor and war-torn countries, such as Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Yemen.

 Canadian police reportedly arrested a teenager handing out bibles after an altercation broke out between his “Save Canada” group and pro-transgender counter-protestors during a demonstration on Wednesday in Calgary, Alberta.

Webmaster addition: Charges have been dropped.

Not long after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched what it called the Office of Strategic Influence, which would seek to “counter the enemy’s perception management” in the so-called war on terror. But it quickly became clear that the office, operating under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, would be managing those perceptions with its own disinformation.

As the New York Times reported at the time, its work was to “provide news items, possibly including false ones, to foreign journalists in an effort to influence overseas opinion.” In the nascent Internet age, observers worried the propaganda could boomerang back on Americans.

“The question is whether the Pentagon and military should undertake an official program that uses disinformation to shape perceptions abroad,” the Times reported in 2004. “But in a modern world wired by satellite television and the Internet, any misleading information and falsehoods could easily be repeated by American news outlets.”

 Swimming champion Riley Gaines — who was deprived of an NCAA award by trans-identifying swimmer Lia Thomas — slammed Adidas after it used male models to promote its line of women’s swimsuits.

History may one day show that two important events did not receive the attention they deserved. One may have led to the horrible way the war in Ukraine started; one may lead to the horrible way it ends.

Putin’s decision to illegally invade Ukraine seems to have been the result of the confluence of two factors. The Ukrainian rejection of the Minsk agreement left it committed to a military solution in the Donbas. The decree to reintegrate Crimea by military force if necessary, the massing of elite Ukrainian troops and drones on the eastern border of Donbas and the dramatically increased Ukrainian shelling into the Donbas created genuine alarm in Russia that Ukraine was about to escalate the civil war. That threat of war with Ukraine combined with the simultaneous US refusal of Russia’s request for a guarantee that Ukraine would not become a member of NATO, left Russia facing the possibility of being drawn into a war with NATO.

What has received very little attention is that that concern was in no way eased by Zelensky’s speech, made at the same time on February 19 at the Munich Security Conference, five days before the invasion, threatening Ukraine’s reacquisition of nuclear weapons.

When the Soviet Union broke up, Ukraine broke away with the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world. In 1994, under the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine agreed to give their nuclear weapons up and join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapons state. They, of course, maintain the knowledge, the equipment and the technology.

 Sam Brinton, the “nonbinary” activist tapped by Joe Biden for a key nuclear role before he was fired for repeatedly stealing women’s clothes, was arrested Wednesday night as a “fugitive from justice,” The Daily Wire has learned.

The number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of 2023 has reached 151, said the Palestinian health ministry in a press release on Monday.

According to the ministry, 33 of the Palestinians killed in the current year were killed by the latest Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip, which ended with a cease-fire on Sunday. The figure is three times the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces during the same period last year.

The year 2022 witnessed the killing of 230 Palestinians, 52 of them were killed between January and mid-May, including the Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. The UN said that 2022 was the deadliest for Palestinians since 2005.

Ukraine has ordered six additional TRML-4D radars from German firm Hensoldt to bolster its air defense capabilities amid increasing Russian aggression.

Valued at 100 million euros ($108 million), the high-performance radars will be handed over to the Ukrainian armed forces later this year following training of local operators.

According to company chief executive officer Thomas Müller, the new equipment will further strengthen Kyiv’s aerial surveillance.

He said that the TRML-4D can feed into Ukraine’s national air situation picture, providing increased protection to its citizens.

More than 40 nations agreed Wednesday to set up a system to tally the damage Russia has inflicted on Ukraine in the hope of getting reparations, adding to the international legal challenges the Kremlin is facing.

The register of damages, which will allow Ukrainian victims of war to catalog the harm they have suffered, found a plethora of support among the 46-nation Council of Europe summit in Iceland. Participants also discussed the details of a potential future tribunal where Russia would face charges for waging war.

“This Reykjavik summit shows clearly that Putin has failed with his calculations – he wanted to divide Europe and has achieved the opposite,” said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. “We stand closer together in Europe than ever before.”

While leaders were at the waterside venue on the far-flung island nation for two days, the United Nations’ top court announced it would hold hearings next month in a case between Russia and Ukraine. Kyiv claims Moscow is discriminating against minority groups in occupied Crimea and is financing terrorism in the region.

Several Palestinians were injured by bullets and dozens suffocated by tear gas as Israeli forces cleared the way for settlers to visit the tomb of Joseph, east of Nablus in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Local sources told The New Arab's sister site al-Araby al-Jadeed that the Israeli troops occupied the residential areas around the tomb to "protect" the settlers, who were intent on praying at the tomb.

Snipers were positioned on the roofs of surrounding buildings, and began shooting live fire at local youths in the street, while tear gas was fired around the area and into homes. 

Facial recognition technology was first introduced into Israeli apartheid in 1999.

But a new report from Amnesty International has examined the use of a novel facial recognition technology system known as Red Wolf, which has been deployed at military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron since 2022. It scans the faces of Palestinians, often denies them entry and adds them to massive Israeli government databases without their consent.

Facial recognition technology is increasingly being used to stalk Palestinians, keeping them under near-constant observation. The surveillance is accomplished with a ubiquitous network of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras mounted on lampposts, the sides of buildings, surveillance towers and rooftops.