The U.S. pharmaceutical industry’s aggressive and often unlawful efforts to prevent competition and keep drug prices elevated cost American patients, insurers, and federal health programs more than $40 billion in 2019 alone, according to a report released Tuesday.

The new report—put out by the American Economic Liberties Project and the Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge (I-MAK)—focuses specifically on pharmaceutical companies’ antitrust law violations, which the groups say are a key reason why U.S. drug prices are astonishingly high compared to those of other rich nations.

Examining the 100 top-selling drug products in Medicare Part D—which covers prescription medicines—and Medicaid, the report estimates that Big Pharma’s antitrust violations “increased Part D gross spending by 14.15%, or $14.82 billion, and increased Medicaid gross drug spending by 9.05%, or $3.15 billion, in 2019 for the top 100 drugs in each.”

Assuming that pharmaceutical companies’ antitrust violations similarly affected retail brand drug spending, the report estimates that “U.S. patients and payers spent an additional $40.07 billion on pharmaceuticals in 2019.”

This whole Ukranian episode of the Forever War is more and more like a caricature every day. In the first place, it’s not a Ukranian war. We have to abandon that propaganda narrative that we’ve been aiding and abetting. It’s not a war where “the Ukranians did this, the Russians did this, the Ukranians, the Russians…” and on and on. That’s not what’s happening. It is–and has always been–a proxy war of the combined west against Russia. Absolutely every bit of that is true.

And now even the word “proxy” is getting to be a little creaky. Because all they are using is foreign investment in weapons: missiles that shoot farther, uranium depleted weapons. All those things are overseen by NATO and by the US. What provides an interesting light shone on this idea of it being just another chapter in the Forever War is this weird foreign trip of Zelensky. You now have the President of Ukraine going to the Germans. To ask *The Germans* to be the greatest provider of weapons in his fight against Russia. 

Is this 1939? Is W.H. Auden going to write about this? Is Stepan Bandera actually alive? What is this? The trouble is that this is exactly what it is– to replay of the end of World War II. Which, let’s be honest—let’s be completely honest—didn’t quite end the way the west wanted. From that space which the Nazis share. ALL the Nazis! I don’t mean the German word “Nazi.” I  mean it sounds cool, and it’s fun to say the word, Nazi! But Nazi isn’t a German tradition. And they certainly weren’t the only Nazis around!

A group of services, often connected to pricey college counselors, has arisen to help high schoolers carry out and publish research as a credential for their college applications. The research papers — and the publications — can be dubious.

Americans have been so inundated with news and images of our immigration crisis over the last few years that they have become largely desensitized to it. The first few stories about illegal alien crime or catch-and-release excesses were shocking. After hundreds and even thousands of such stories, the reaction is mostly resigned disgust.

Now that the Biden Administration has opened the floodgates at the border by allowing the Title 42 public health order to expire, we are seeing the horrific results of our feckless leadership. While it takes a particularly offensive immigration story to command the country’s attention today, a recent tranche of news items stands out. 

Naturally, the 1,951-mile border from San Diego to Brownsville is the epicenter of the crisis, but New York has emerged as the area most impacted outside the border states. In New York’s Orange County, 70 miles northwest of New York City, outrage is building after 20 homeless veterans were evicted from hotels to make room for a group of migrants who recently entered the country. The migrants were sent to Orange County from New York City, which has been overwhelmed with migrants since last summer. 

Elon Musk recently commented on a compelling editorial cartoon, produced by someone with the Twitter handle “End Wokeness,” that highlights vital crime statistics. The cartoon features a chart showing the number of interracial violent crime incidents by race, based on numbers from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It shows that the number of black-on-white crimes is nine times higher than the number of white-on-black crimes, yet a news media cameraman has zoomed in on the white-on-black number so that it’s the only thing TV viewers can see. 

In response, Musk wrote: “Odd, why would the media misrepresent the real situation to such an extreme degree?”

Of course, the answer is that the media is determined to portray America as “systemically racist.” Sure enough, the response from the Left is that Musk is “racist” for drawing attention to such a “misleading” cartoon. 

Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis will officially enter the 2024 U.S. presidential race next week, according to two sources familiar with the decision, immediately becoming Donald Trump's biggest rival for the Republican nomination and shaking up a contest that largely has been one-sided.

DeSantis will likely file paperwork declaring his candidacy on May 25 to coincide with a donor meeting in Miami, with a more formal launch the week of May 29, according to a source.

A new study by the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) claims that at least $38 million in pandemic relief loans were sent to dead recipients through the use of incorrect Social Security numbers.

As reported by Just The News, the fraudulent loans in question were made through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) as well as the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program. Michael Horowitz, the chairman of PRAC, first testified before the U.S. House in February that PRAC had identified at least 69,000 suspicious Social Security Numbers (SSNs), which had been used to obtain $5.4 billion in relief funds. Another 175,000 suspicious SSNs were used in applications, but ultimately never received any money.

Two committee chairmen in the House of Representatives have threatened to issue subpoenas to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) if it does not hand over documents relating to the letter by over 50 former “intelligence experts” denouncing Hunter Biden’s laptop as “Russian disinformation.”

According to The Hill, Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) of the House Judiciary Committee and Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) of the House Intelligence Committee wrote a letter on Wednesday to CIA Director William Burns, giving him a deadline of May 30th to hand over the necessary documents.

“If the CIA does not produce all responsive documents,” the letter reads in part, “the Committees may resort to compulsory process.”

Slowly but steadily, our money is taking on a new role; in addition to its traditional function as a medium of exchange and store of value, money is increasingly becoming a means of surveillance and control.

Financial privacy has become one of the biggest casualties in the world’s relentless march to a digital payments system. Not only do corporations like your bank, credit card issuer, PayPal, and Amazon know your buying habits intimately, this data is routinely passed on to government to be mined in a warrantless search for criminal activity.

Behind this phenomenon is what some call the “war on cash,” with the goal of a cashless society. This transition includes partnerships of banking and tech companies, and the rise of the “fintech” industry.

A report by McKinsey, a management consultancy, states that 89 percent of Americans are now using some form of digital payments and more than two-thirds of Americans use or expect to use digital wallets in the next two years. The service providers for these digital wallets include banks, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.

One of the interesting aspects of the Russia-Ukraine war is that the regimes in both countries have resorted to conscription to get soldiers to “serve their country.” One would think that if a war is just, citizens would not have to be forced to fight in it. 

With conscription, the state commands a citizen to report to a military facility, where he is forced to become an employee of the state, at a wage set by the state. Even worse, his forced labor consists of killing people. Thus, conscription is really just a fancy form of military slavery because the citizen is being forced to provide his time and labor in the killing service of the state. 

One might be tempted to conclude that the United States is different from Russia and Ukraine. Not so. Just like those two countries, the U.S. government also relies on conscription. 

Oh sure, U.S. officials are not currently conscripting people but that simply is because they don’t currently need cannon fodder for one of their incessant foreign wars. They have been successful in inducing a sufficient number of men and women to voluntarily “serve their country.”

But the fact is that there is a system of conscription in place here at home, just as there is in Russia and Ukraine. That’s why young men are required to register for the draft when they reach the age of 18. 

If anyone fails or refuses to do so, he will be arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated. That’s what they did to draft resisters during the Vietnam War. Mohammad Ali was a good example of how they target people who refuse to comply with their system of involuntary servitude.

This video of Russian Foreign Minsitry spoksperson Maria Zakharova bitch slapping the moronic Ursula von der Leyen is notable for a number of reasons that form the theme of this article. Zakharov’s body language indicates that she is personally livid at the calculated insult von der Leyen, Zelensky and their fellow CIA puppets have given to the tens of millions of Russians, Belarusians and others who died fighting Hitler’s forces and that she might like to, as the more pugnacious Scots would put it, tell her a thing or two about that face to face with gloves either on or off.

NATO cannot argue face to face with Zakharova, Lavrov or anyone of their calibre. When Liz Truss met Lavrov, she proved herself to be so moronic that she was sacked as British Prime Minister just a few weeks later. Karine Jean-Pierre, Zakharova’s White House counterpart, is such a lame duck that America’s comedians would be laughing their faces off mimicking her, if this simpleton wasn’t so far beyond parody.

The scripted interview made some comical errors on Stoltenberg’s part, which he might not have made if it was real, Martin Jay writes.

Can there be anything on the net right now, about the Ukraine war, more hilarious, disingenuous and darn right crackers than the “interview” between the Washington Post and the NATO secretary Jens Stoltenberg?

As a media event, it might not have appeared on your timeline, given that not ONE single western media outlet chose to write it up as a veritable news item in itself. The reason for this is that most editors smelt a rat and chose to ignore it.

The rat was simply that the interview was not really genuine and could be deemed by some as “fake news” given that the interview itself was not conducted in the classic sense of an interview. Stoltenberg did not sit down in front of the Post hack, face to face, and conduct the interview live. What was almost certainly the case, was that NATO press officers arranged with WaPo for the questions to be agreed beforehand; they may well have even written the questions themselves.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Iranian counterpart Ebrahim Raisi oversee, via video-link, the signing of a deal on financing and construction of an Iranian railway line to facilitate regional trade.

An industrial facility was damaged in Odessa on Wednesday evening, officials in the South Ukrainian city reported on Thursday, citing information from Ukraine’s Operational Command South.

"Industrial infrastructure was hit," the Odessa administration said in a statement on its Telegram channel. Two images used in the report show a hangar-like facility with its outer walls damaged.

• Explosions thundered in the Kyiv region;
• Explosions thundered in the Kharkiv region;
• Explosions thundered in the Cherkasy region;
• Russian Kalibr missile destroyed an ammunition depot of the AFU in the Zorya-Mashproekt military plant near Nikolaev;
• Russian X-22 and Kalibr missiles hit Ukrainian military facilities near the industrial zone on Maly Potemkin Island;
• Russian FAB bombs hit Ukrainian positions near Kizomys and Veletenskoe;
• The Russian Army destroyed an AN/TPQ-50 counterbattery warfare radar near Stupochki;
• The Russian Army destroyed an ammo depot of the AFU near Avdiivka;
• The Russian artillery struck Ukrainian positions near Chasov Yar;

A sarcastic promotion video calling for U.S. citizens to join Russian hackers spread across Russian social networks on May 16. Today, few people in Russia are really interested in what is happening in the U.S., they have enough problems of their own.

But the witty taunt was duly appreciated. In their turn, some Americans took the video seriously, because they are primarily interested in their own problems too, and they are seen more outside the window than in the MSM.

The narrator, with a terrible accent, speaks pathetically about the problems of the United States. What is this nonsense? Is this such a propaganda thing? Yes and no. This is simply a scintillating response to a CIA propaganda video posted on the organization’s official social media pages.

Someone at the CIA apparently decided to launder another million dollars. Recently, they cooked up an “ingenious” appeal to Russian citizens, especially high-ranking officials. Russian bureaucrats, who live in villas and use cars with state flags, are invited to betray their homeland in the name of some “evolutionary changes”.

The Main Customs Administration of the People’s Republic of China has included the port of Vladivostok in its internal logistics. It is assumed that cargo from the northern provinces will be delivered to the southern ones through the seaside hub, the Foreign Ministry office in Vladivostok reports. The news was picked up by the Western media, which obviously hastened to interpret the “threat”.

The innovation will significantly reduce and reduce the cost of the delivery shoulder. Now the transportation of goods from the provinces of Jilin and Heilongjiang to the south of China is carried out through the ports of Dalian province, the distance to which is about a thousand kilometers. At the same time, the distance to the port of Vladivostok is 200 km.

US President Joe Biden won’t apologize for the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Jake Sullivan, the White House’s national security adviser said on Wednesday.

Responding to a journalist’s question as to whether Biden intends to issue an apology for the US dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities, Sullivan said that the US president wouldn’t be making a statement at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.

During a briefing aboard the presidential plane heading to Japan for a summit of the Group of Seven (G7), he pointed out that along with other G7 leaders, Biden would participate in a number of other events and pay respects but from the president’s point of view this was not "a bilateral moment."

The Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine “is no longer available in the U.S.,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stated in a recent update.

That’s due to the vaccine expiring on May 7. Health care workers were advised to dispose of any remaining doses in accordance with regulations.

The CDC and Johnson & Johnson didn’t respond to requests for comment.

U.S. regulators first cleared the jab in February 2021, giving Americans an alternative to the messenger RNA-based Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine became popular in part because it’s only a single dose. The messenger RNA vaccines each have a primary series of two doses.

But uptake slowed after U.S. authorities paused recommending the vaccine because of concerns about a reported link to a combination of blood clotting and low platelet levels, a condition called thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) that can cause death. About 15 percent of the post-vaccination TTS cases have been fatal.

Europe is losing what little common sense it has and risks an unpleasant surprise when it finds itself face to face with a new reality, which it has so far strenuously denied.

No matter what anyone says, there will be no going back to the old version of the world order. As there will be no continuation of the game under the old rules. This period is a thing of the past with no chance of repeating itself in the foreseeable future. All that remains are memories, some happy, some sad, but in any case, everything is limited to nostalgia.

In the new reality, Europe will have to structure its life differently, without relying on help from global financial institutions or “rich Uncle Sam”. And no matter how uncomfortable it may be for someone, but the truth is inexorably evidenced by a glance in the wallet or in your bank account. And this is just the beginning.

I signed up for Facebook in my senior year of high school, just as the service was branching out from its college campus confines. And even then, in those early days, the message from my teachers, my parents, and those talking heads on TV was the same: don’t put anything on the internet that you don’t want floating around forever.

To this day, that’s good advice. But it’s also clear the internet’s memory isn’t exactly the steel trap we were all told it was.

In (what else?) a tweet posted last week, Twitter CEO Elon Musk said the social media service would be “purging” user accounts if they lay dormant for long enough.

The period of inactivity that would prompt an account deletion is pretty long — Musk said the move would apply to accounts that have gone unused for “several years,” and that accounts would be “archived” in some way. But the lack of clarity around what “archiving” means is little comfort to, say, people who continue to seek a sense of closeness with Twitter-using friends and loved ones who have died or are incarcerated.

Ukraine’s ambassador to France has lashed out at TV network RTL for airing a segment that likened President Vladimir Zelensky’s tour of Europe to a traveling circus. Vadim Omelchenko is demanding an apology.

The sarcastic characterization was “cynical and lacked tact,” the diplomat tweeted on Tuesday, adding that the French presenter and show producers had demonstrated neither empathy nor responsibility in airing it. The envoy demanded that RTL apologizes to Zelensky and the Ukrainian people. They are “fighting for their freedom and for yours,” he declared, as well as for their right to "live lives that are enjoyable."

Despite claiming the Patriot wasn't utterly "destroyed" in the attack, CNN's reporting seems to confirm the narrative from the Russian Defense Ministry, which said in a Tuesday Telegram post: "a high-precision strike by the Kinzhal hypersonic missile system in the city of Kyiv hit a US-made Patriot anti-aircraft missile system." Ukraine had publicly denied Moscow's assertion.

While Kiev claimed it had intercepted six Kinzhals, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu told Sputnik in an interview that Ukrainian reports are mistaken in every regard, noting that only a couple of Russian missiles were enough to penetrate Kiev's defenses.

"According to verified information, as a result of a strike by the Kinzhal hypersonic missile system in the city of Kiev a multifunctional radar station, as well as five launchers of the Patriot anti-aircraft missile system manufactured by the United States were hit and completely destroyed on May 16, 2023," the Russian Defense Ministry said.

The Kinzhal (lit. "Dagger") is one of new strategic weapons unveiled by Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2018. It first entered combat duty in December 2017, seeing extensive flight and combat testing. The nuclear-capable weapon was the first hypersonic missile system to be fielded by any country.

The office of the Ukrainian president does not rule out the possibility that the Ukrainian leader may attend the Hiroshima G7 summit in person, Deputy Head of the Presidential Office of Ukraine Igor Zhovkva told Kyodo News on Thursday.

"Everything will depend on the situation on the battlefield. The final decision will be made after a careful analysis of the situation on the battlefield," the Japanese news agency quoted him as saying. That said, the official stressed that Zelensky would participate in the summit in some format in any case.

Meanwhile, Kyodo’s sources in the Japanese government ruled out the possibility of Zelensky’s in-person visit to Hiroshima.

Russia will respond immediately if new threats to the security of its Far Eastern borders emerge, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a briefing on Wednesday.

"We are closely monitoring the development of the situation, and in the case that new circumstances that can create threats to the security of the Russian Federation's Far Eastern borders emerge, we will immediately and duly respond in accordance with national legislation," the diplomat said, commenting on remarks by Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi, who expressed concern over growing military cooperation between Russia and China in the Asia-Pacific region.

The nation’s power grid is in precarious shape heading into what could be an especially hot summer, according to the regulatory authority that monitors the electricity system, with much of the country at risk for outages if it experiences scorching weather scientists say looks increasingly likely.

While the seasonal electricity forecast is more optimistic than it was last year — when much of the Midwest and southeast was so short of power that the regions were on high alert for “energy emergencies” — it points to an unnerving summer ahead. The report comes as scientists are tracking a developing El Nino weather pattern that threatens to cause temperatures to spike and big storms to form in the coming months.

The mid-Atlantic and southeastern states are the only areas of the country where the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) is not warning of the potential for outages in the event of prolonged and intense heat waves or monster storms.

Shocking video footage showed the co-chair of a taxpayer-funded Seattle committee angrily defend the nomination of a pedophile for a role - and shout down a fellow member who accused the pervert of molesting her.  

Shanee Colston was seen on the May 3 Zoom call yelling furiously that she was 'glad' that registered sex offender Thomas Whitaker wanted to be part of their team.

And she angrily accused a fellow member of invading Whitaker's privacy by highlighting his sex offenses, with the pervert's nomination ultimately approved.

She was angered when Kristina Sawyckyj, a former veteran who says she was left wheelchair-bound by a sex attack in the 1980s, spoke up to object and claimed Whitaker had molested her.

Webmaster addition: WTF?!?

Moscow will not leave CIA’s attempts to carry out propaganda and recruitment in Russia without a proper response, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said during a briefing Wednesday.

"Such malicious activities, including dissemination of inciting materials, will not be left without proper effective response. They know that we won’t keep them waiting, and you, probably, were able to make sure of that as well," she said, answering a question about CIA’s attempts to recruit Russian nationals via the Telegram messenger.

"This includes attempts to carry out aggressive espionage, as well as attempts to interfere in our internal affairs, and attempts to destabilize the situation in our country from the inside, by recruiting various marginalized individuals. Overall, this approach is nothing new, unfortunately. There are some innovations, technological ones, but they did not hide their aims and goals in the recent years," Zakharova added.

It comes as no surprise that the United States and the European Union didn’t have the face to commend the performance of Recep Erdogan and his party in the presidential and parliamentary elections in Turkiye on Sunday. The election results do not serve the geopolitical interests of the US and its European allies. It is apparent that the entreaties and media management in the run-up fell on deaf ears. 

The western powers hoped for a weak unstable government and are instead worrying that a turbo-charged Erdogan with a commanding majority in the parliament will be presiding over a strong government and won’t be a pushover. 

Thus, pin-pricking has begun. A question mark is put on the legitimacy of Erdogan’s victory over his opposition rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu who is backed by the West. A real time report by the OSCE election observer mission’s preliminary findings have come handy, which alleged attempts to gerrymander the election results.