“On Saturday night, U.S. reporters and government officials—including President Joe Biden—will gather at the Washington Hilton Hotel for the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a glitzy, humor-filled affair that has faced mounting boycott calls in recent weeks as Palestinian journalists in Gaza are targeted and killed by the Israeli military in appalling numbers. Earlier this month, dozens of Palestinian journalists urged their American colleagues to spurn the invite-only event ‘as an act of solidarity with us — your fellow journalists — as well as with the millions of Palestinians currently being starved in Gaza due to the Biden administration’s continued political, financial, and military backing of Israel.'” (04/27/24)
“San Francisco parking ticket officers are pushing back on the city’s plan to give more parking tickets. On April 16, Jeff Tumlin, director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, announced that as part of an effort to make the city’s streets safer, the agency plans by the end of this month to start cracking down on illegal parkers by issuing more citations. The increased enforcement plan will focus on citations for breaking ‘safety-oriented rules,’ such as by parking too close to a curb, and will happen in each supervisorial district on a rotating basis, Tumlin said. Many parking officers, though, believe that the intensive enforcement will lead to assaults and threats from drivers while they are on the job.” (04/27/24)
“A burst of shouts cascades as three men plunge downward. Other workers reach for them as the scaffold plummets. But no one can grab hold of them. Thinking he can still save them, a middle-aged construction worker scampers to aid the three men, one a long-time friend, he had helped get hired on the site. ‘I saw everything,’ he says, ‘In a video you can see me removing planks from them because I thought they were alive, but they were dead.’ Jose Canaca, 26, Gilberto Monico Fernández, 54, and Jesus ’Chuy’ Olivares, 43, had been putting up an outer brick wall for a 17-story apartment building in a popular neighborhood in Charlotte, N.C., when they fell from the 10th floor. They hit a patio rooftop on the fourth floor — a 70-foot drop. Months after the fatal construction accident in January 2023, the tragedy haunts him.” (04/26/24)
“A Pennsylvania man was in for the shock of a lifetime when he opened a bill from the state for $34 billion. ‘I knew it was an obvious blunder. I don’t even make over $100,000 a year, so there’s no way I could owe anywhere near that,’ Barry Tangert told News 8 about the mind-boggling blunder. The Lancaster County resident said the mystifying letter was one of two items that arrived in the mail last weekend. He opened the first to find a refund check from the federal government for over $900. Tangert’s high was quickly shattered when he opened the income billing notice from the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue claiming that he owed a jaw-dropping $34,576,826,561.47.” (04/27/24)
“A historical term in geopolitics – the Great Game, or when big powers fought to control the heartland of the Eurasian supercontinent – may need to be retired. Over the past two years, many countries in Central Asia and the Caspian basin have seen a flurry of investments and friendly diplomacy from around the world, reflecting the region’s emboldened streak of independence from foreign intervention. The latest example is an April 22 summit between Russia and Azerbaijan. The focus was mainly economic – how to finish building a road-and-rail corridor across Eurasia, one of several transportation projects in the region. That was in sharp contrast to news just days earlier when Russia, weakened by its war in Ukraine, started the withdrawal of some 2,000 peacekeeping soldiers from the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, a remnant of Moscow’s previous clout.” (04/25/24)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“It’s just a tough situation, with victims on both sides. On one side you’ve got people being slaughtered in droves by genocidal massacres and siege warfare, while on the other you’ve got people whose feelings get hurt when these atrocities are opposed. Hard to say which is worse. … I have dedicated every day of my life to the project of spreading awareness of the depravity and deceitfulness of the western empire, but I will never write anything more effective toward this end than what the empire is doing itself on university campuses right now. I mean, you kind of have to wonder what they’re thinking. ‘Yeah, that’s it. Violently quash pro-Palestine protests at universities, ban TikTok to ensure the suppression of pro-Palestine content, and saturate the boomer media with obvious propaganda. That’ll make the kids love Israel.'” (04/25/24)
“Former President Donald Trump is back in a Manhattan courtroom after a Wednesday break. On the way to court Thursday morning, Trump stopped at a construction site where he received an enthusiastic welcome from workers chanting, ‘USA! USA! USA!’ That just happened to occur the morning after President Joe Biden received the endorsement of the North America’s Building Trades Unions leadership in Washington. While Biden met with the bigwigs, Trump felt the love of the hard hats. As with Trump’s visit to a Harlem bodega last week, the stop-by was a planned event — these things don’t happen by accident. But it showed that even as he stands trial, Trump can work in a campaign event before court convenes.” (04/25/24)
“Workers at auto plants in the South should be free to unionize without pressure from employers or anti-union governors, acting U.S. Labor Secretary Julie Su said Thursday, even as some southern states pass laws to inhibit organized labor. ‘That choice belongs to the worker, free from intervention, either by the employer or by politicians, free from retaliation and threats,’ Su told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday in Atlanta. ‘And what we are seeing is that workers who were thought to be too vulnerable to assert that right are doing it, and they’re doing it here in the South.’ The United Auto Workers union vowed a broad campaign to organize southern auto assembly plants after winning lucrative new contracts in a confrontation with Detroit’s automakers. Last week, 73% of those voting at a Volkswagen AG plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee chose to join the UAW.” (04/25/24)
“Imagine it’s Monday, January 20, 2025, and by the end of the day, somewhere between 50,000 to hundreds of thousands of the 2 million federal government employees are summarily out of a job. A skeleton crew made up of a list of far-right, free-market conservatives excited to carry out an unpopular anti-democratic agenda has replaced them. Their marching orders are to cater to big business and rot every institution established to protect our lives, from education to transportation, from housing to labor to environmental protections to healthcare and more. This is not a far-fetched dystopian nightmare. It’s a plan outlined in a more than 800-page document from the conservative Heritage Foundation called Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership.” [editor’s note: The “progressive nightmare” … A government with only three branches of power, instead of ONE unelected one by default – SAT] [additional editor’s note: I haven’t read all of it, but apparently I’ve read more than Steve has – TLK] (04/25/24)
“‘Your kids have been turned into mindless vassals who look up to some twit instead of looking up to Thomas Jefferson,’ screams Alex Jones into the camera. ‘Kids! Magellan is a lot cooler than Justin Bieber! He circumnavigated, with one ship, the entire planet! He was killed by wild natives before he got back to Portugal!’ His face reddens and his fists begin to pound the air. ‘That’s destiny! That’s will! That’s striving! That’s being a trailblazer! Going into space! Mathematics! Quantum mechanics! The secrets of the universe! Life is fiery with its beauty!’ He finally explodes, ‘And they want to shutter your mind talking about Justin Bieber!’ This might sound like the ramblings of a madman (and it is), but as presented in the decade old original viral video, it is one of the funniest clips on the internet …” (04/25/24)
