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China

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Everything posted by China

  1. This was from 4 weeks ago: Jimmy Carter becomes first living ex-president with official White House Christmas ornament Former President Jimmy Carter has another distinction to his name. ------------------------- This was in the last 24 hours: Former President Barack Obama Meets with Belgian Royal Family Former President Barack Obama casually stopped by a castle this weekend for quick hello with the Belgian royal family. ----------------------------- This was yesterday: Ramona veteran featured in former President Bush’s ‘Portraits of Courage’ exhibit Alex Glenn-Camden, an Army infantryman injured in Afghanistan, stood next to former President George W. Bush looking at a portrait the former president had painted of him.
  2. People need to stop calling him "President Trump." He's not president. He's just Trump, unless you want to call him former president Trump, or defendant Trump.
  3. Judge declines Trump’s request to block Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels testimony Former President Trump’s hush money judge will allow Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels to testify at the trial over Trump’s objections. In two separate decisions issued Monday, Judge Juan Merchan ruled on more than a dozen requests between the two sides to exclude various evidence. Merchan’s ruling allows Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s (D) office to tell the jury a broad story about three people who say they were paid hush money by Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, to stay quiet about their salacious accusations against Trump. Prosecutors have looked to portray the payment as part of a broader “catch-and-kill” scheme to quash negative gossip about Trump leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Merchan’s ruling enables prosecutors at trial to not only call Daniels and Cohen as witnesses but also former Playboy model Karen McDougal and former Trump World Tower doorman Dino Sajudin. Both claim they also were paid off to withhold salacious accusations about Trump. Trump sought to block the jury from hearing from Cohen and the three who were allegedly paid off. Merchan rejected those demands, but he did agree to place some limitations on what Sajudin and McDougal can testify about. Merchan further ruled that any testimony regarding Cohen’s past guilty plea would not “open the door” for Trump’s counsel to introduce evidence regarding past Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaints dismissed against him or the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) decision not to charge him with campaign finance violations. The judge’s pair of rulings Monday also resolved a handful of other evidentiary disputes between the two sides. Last week, Trump in court filings suggested that he intended to present a watered-down, informal advice of counsel defense, wherein the former president would elicit evidence concerning “the presence, involvement and advice of lawyers in relevant events giving rise to the charges in the Indictment.” That evidence, his lawyers said, would be elicited in large part from Cohen. Merchan ruled Monday that Trump “may not offer, or even suggest,” a so-called presence-of-counsel defense, noting that such a defense would shield Trump from any of the tactic’s downsides, like giving up the right to claim privilege. “To allow said defense in this matter would effectively permit the defendant to invoke the very defense he has declared he will not rely upon, without the concomitant obligations that come with it,” Merchan wrote. “The result would undoubtedly be to confuse and mislead the jury. This Court can not endorse such a tactic.” As he ruled on some of the other matters, the judge chastised Trump’s attorneys for raising arguments the judge said he already rejected. Click on the link for the full article
  4. I'm in. I expect to do poorly, as I do every year.
  5. Or, is it a legitimate concern (as mentioned in the article) that since the military are using these batteries, we don't want the military dependent on a potential enemy for some of its equipment?
  6. CATL, the little-known Chinese battery maker that has the US worried The world’s two superpowers are so intricately linked that it’s hard to think of a pillar of the economy that hasn’t been strained by tensions between the US and China. And the next frontline in the economic conflict may be the most fundamental yet: a fight for power itself. A Chinese company that most people have never heard of is at the heart of the global race to store the clean energy needed to power the green transition in the US and the rest of the world. China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Limited, or CATL, is an energy storage specialist that is the world’s largest battery maker for electric vehicles (EVs). But despite the fact that the company controls nearly two-fifths of the world’s EV battery market – and has powered cars made by brands including Tesla, Volkswagen and BMW – it has long flown under the radar of US politics. Until now. In February, Duke Energy, a US energy company that serves more than 8 million customers, said it was phasing out the use of CATL batteries. Duke said it would replace the CATL products with technology from a “domestic or allied nation supplier”. The decision came after lawmakers had raised concerns about the use of CATL batteries at a Marine Corps base, Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina. Duke, which provides electrical infrastructure to the military base, disconnected the CATL batteries in December and now plans to decommission them entirely, as well as phase them out from civilian projects. Ford has also come under fire for doing business with CATL. A deal between the two companies to build a factory in Michigan to produce low-cost lithium iron phosphate batteries for EVs using CATL technology has repeatedly been questioned by US lawmakers. Marco Rubio, the vice-chairperson of the Senate intelligence committee, said the plan would bring “America’s greatest geopolitical adversary into the heartland” . In November, Ford scaled down its plans for the plant, reducing its capacity by about 40%. Click on the link for the full article
  7. Video shows Indiana lawmaker flashing holstered gun to students who were advocating for gun control A video taken by a high school student shows an Indiana lawmaker flash a gun to students who were visiting the statehouse to talk to legislators about gun control. A student from Burris Laboratory School in Muncie told The Associated Press that she and four other students were at the state Capitol on Tuesday to participate in a day of advocacy with Students Demand Action, an arm of Everytown for Gun safety. Alana Trissel, 17, said state Rep. Jim Lucas asked the students what brought them to the Capitol and began to defend gun rights. Lucas, a Republican from Seymour, and the group then conversed outside the elevator and one of the students filmed the interaction, as was first reported by the Statehouse File, a student journalism news site at Franklin College in Franklin, Indiana. In the video, Lucas told the students that people have to protect themselves and referenced failures of law enforcement to prevent mass casualties during school shootings in Parkland, Florida, and Uvalde, Texas. In discussing places where firearms are banned, Lucas said people aren’t “truly free” unless they can defend themselves. A student off camera asked Lucas if he means carrying a firearm. Just over six minutes into the 10-minute video, Lucas said, “I’m carrying right now,” and holds open his suit jacket exposing a holstered handgun. It was not immediately clear what kind of gun Lucas was carrying. “Nothing about someone carrying a gun makes me feel safe,” a student said off camera after Lucas lifted his jacket. Click on the link for the full article and video
  8. Sex, Lies, and Murder: GOP Candidate’s Former In-Law Goes Scorched Earth on Her A wild feud between a rising GOP star and the mom of her late ex-husband erupted into public view on Wednesday when candidate Elizabeth Helgelien’s infuriated former mother-in-law accused the MAGA-centric Nevada politician of being a liar and an adulterer. Daniel Halseth, Christine Halseth’s son, was stabbed to death in 2021 by the couple’s teenage daughter, Sierra Halseth, and her boyfriend, Aaron Guerrero. The pair are now serving life sentences. In a scathing op-ed published Wednesday in The Nevada Globe, Halseth pleaded with Helgelien to drop out of the race for the state’s 3rd Congressional District “for my family’s sake, and out of respect for voters and the office she’s seeking.” “Elizabeth raised a murderer, was forced out of office after a series of sex scandals, was caught in a series of lies, posed for lewd photographs, and has already proven to be unelectable,” Halseth wrote. “…We cannot, in good conscience, allow Elizabeth Helgelien to represent honest, decent Americans in Congress.” Click on the link for the full article
  9. Trump Calls for Liz Cheney and the Entire Jan. 6 Committee to Be Jailed Former President Donald Trump is directly calling for the imprisonment of nine of his political opponents — including former Congresswoman Liz Cheney. In a post on his Truth Social platform Sunday, Trump shared an article from far-right writer John Solomon which alleged that the Jan. 6 committee “withheld crucial evidence” in its probe by not releasing the testimony of a Secret Service agent who drove Trump’s limo on Jan. 6. The Jan. 6 committee had an agreement with the Secret Service to avoid disclosing “privacy information, for-official-use-only information, intelligence and law enforcement sensitive records and raw intelligence information” from 12 interviews it conducted. However, some on the Right have argued the real reason the interview with the unnamed driver never saw the light of day is because it contradicted Hutchinson’s testimony. Former President Trump not only does not buy the committee’s explanation, he thinks Cheney and its eight other members should be thrown in jail. “She should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” Trump wrote. Click on the link for the full article
  10. Here's one for you: Fox News issues correction after Trump claims Dems perform abortions after birth Trump noted that justices he appointed to the Supreme Court had helped to destroy Roe v. Wade abortion protections. "They did and you know, they did something that from a lot of standpoints is extremely good, number one, the Democrats are the radicals on this issue because it's okay to have an abortion in seven eight nine months and even after birth," Trump opined. Click on the link for the full article
  11. Trump cutting back on rallies to save money as cash shortfall hobbles campaign: report Faced with a massive shortfall in raising campaign cash compared to his presumptive opponent in the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump and his advisers have decided to cut back on his high-profile campaign rallies in an effort to not drain the coffers even more. With filings showing President Joe Biden and the Democrats sitting on a war chest of $130 million going into February while the former president, while not releasing all of his numbers, did show a combined $40 million with RNC cash included, the New York Times reports the Trump and his election prospects are facing a "perilous" stage. As the Times' Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher wrote, Trump has been holding donor meetings at Mar-a-Lago imploring supporters to increase their contributions. The report states, "Despite years of professing massive wealth and boasting of his desire to 'drain the swamp,' the deeply transactional former president is leaning yet again on the cash of others, turning Mar-a-Lago into a staging ground for billionaires and others with their own agendas," adding, "In a sign of the Trump orbit’s urgent need for cash, at least two donors who made seven-figure pledges to support Mr. Trump this year were nudged to see if they could cut an eight-figure check — meaning $10 million or more — instead, according to a person familiar with the request." Click on the link for the full article
  12. Ignorance and democracy: Capitalism's long war against higher education Donald Trump exposed his profound condescension and blatant manipulation with the notorious 2016 declaration, “I love the poorly educated.” Election results and polling data consistently show that the most poorly-educated Americans — at least, those who are white — love him back with almost religious reverence, treating him as guru, despot and pop-culture idol all in one. While it is easy to chortle at the hillbilly-Deadhead vibe surrounding Trump rallies, it is more important to consider how the better-educated are weakening their country by rejecting the tools necessary to maintain the structure of liberal democracy. Decades ago, universities across the country began making cuts to the liberal arts. The humanities, fine arts and social sciences are endangered everywhere, as evident by the staggering variety of state colleges and private universities no longer invested in their survival. In 2023, West Virginia University eliminated its world languages department, reduced its education department by a third and slashed its programs in art history, music, architecture and natural resource management. In the same year, Lasell University, a small private school in Massachusetts, killed five majors, including English and history. In Ohio, numerous of the state's best-known institutions of learning have announced cuts to the liberal arts, including Kent State, the University of Toledo, Miami University, Youngstown State, Baldwin Wallace University and Marietta College. But the academic carnage in the Buckeye State is hardly an outlier. A quick Google search reveals intellectual wreckage piling up across the nation. The University of New Hampshire permanently closed its art museum, the University of Tulsa eliminated degrees in history, and the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin system has instructed all 25 of its campuses — which enroll more than 160,000 students every year — to prepare for reductions in liberal arts programs. My alma mater, Valparaiso University, is now preparing to join in the self-destruction. A Lutheran liberal arts college on the shores of Lake Michigan, 50 miles or so southeast of Chicago, Valparaiso recently announced that it is considering the “discontinuation” of 28 programs, including philosophy, public health, theology and the graduate program in English Studies and Communication, where I earned a master's degree. When I graduated in 2010, Valparaiso had a regional reputation as a small, private institution with excellent educational standards, bolstered by an emphasis on the arts and humanities. Click on the link for the full article
  13. The Sneaky Snakey World of Donald Trump’s America I’ll bet you didn’t know that it is possible in this great big world of ours to live a comfortable life being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing basically nothing. Well, not nothing, exactly, but the money you get is unattached to normal stuff we are all familiar with like a job, complete with job-related duties and office hours and a W-2 and maybe even a job title. The money can thus be described by what it is not, which is aboveboard and visible. Instead, this kind of money often ends up in the kinds of accounts said to be “controlled” by you or others, which is to say, accounts which may not, and often do not, have your name on them. We could describe this kind of money, then, as free floating. It’s just out there. Your function in life, if you are a man like our friend the lying Russian agent and Republican witness Alexander Smirnoff, is to make sure that some of it becomes “controlled” by you. The Guardian published a fascinating story tonight in which it connected money paid to Mr. Smirnoff to firms connected to what the paper called “Trump associates.” It’s not a small amount of free-floating money, either. It’s $600,000, and according to The Guardian, it was paid to Smirnoff by a company called Economic Transformation Technologies (ETT) back in 2020, the same year he began his career as a witness against the family of Joe Biden by lying to the FBI. There’s got to be a whole industry that just has a bunch of people sitting in an office somewhere coming up with company names like Economic Transformation Technologies and selling them to people, almost always men, who are setting up businesses and need something to call them. Note the “ies” on the end of the word “Technology” in the company title. That sort of clever twist—that it isn’t just one technology we’re talking about, but several, maybe even many—is what you’re paying for. Now why would ETT want to pay $600,000 dollars to a person who has been described as a “criminal, fixer and agent” who has two passports and ends up having connections to Russian intelligence agencies? Six hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money, but in the world of people who traffic in information about, among others, Russian oligarchs, Ukrainian energy companies, and British holding companies with interests in Dubai and elsewhere, maybe it isn’t. Smirnoff, when he was arrested recently, was described to the judge considering whether or not to give him bail, as “having access” to as much as $6 million, three million of which was said to be held in accounts “controlled by” his girlfriend. Click on the link for the full story
  14. Justice Ginsburg’s Family Decries Bestowing RBG Award on Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch On Wednesday, the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation announced the 2024 recipients of the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Award. The winners: businessman Elon Musk, right-wing media kingpin Rupert Murdoch, lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, felonious Wall Streeter turned philanthropist Mike Milken, and actor Sylvester Stallone. The Foundation hailed these “iconic individuals” for their “extraordinary achievements.” Veteran corporate lawyer Brendan Sullivan, who was Oliver North’s attorney during the Iran-contra scandal and who now chairs the RBG Award, noted, “The honorees reflect the integrity and achievement that defined Justice Ginsburg’s career and legend.” And the chair of the foundation, Julie Opperman, a big Republican donor and the widow of publishing titan Dwight Opperman, who once was CEO of Thomson Reuters, remarked that the award embraces “the fullness of Justice Ginsburg’s legacy.” Attaching Ginsburg’s name to Musk, who has amplified racist and antisemitic posts and ideas on X, and Murdoch, whose Fox News purposefully spread Trump’s disinformation about the 2020 election and has repeatedly deployed falsehoods to challenge and undermine the values that Ginsburg fought for her entire life, seemed an odd and inappropriate choice. That’s what Ginsburg’s family believes. It has released a statement denouncing the awards: Click on the link for the full story
  15. Mike Lindell Wants Supreme Court to Fast-Track His Case Mike Lindell wants the U.S. Supreme Court to fast-track his case challenging the use of electronic tabulation systems in elections to ensure his concerns are heard before the November presidential vote. Lindell, CEO of MyPillow and an ally to former President Donald Trump who has backed Trump's claims of widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, on Friday announced he filed a case with the Supreme Court, challenging the use of voting machines. He believes the U.S. should shift to using only paper ballots, arguing that doing so would make elections more secure. However, despite allegations from some conservatives, there has been no evidence of widespread election fraud in Trump's 2020 loss to President Joe Biden or any other recent elections. Lindell said during a press conference held in an X Space that his attorneys urged the Supreme Court to hear the challenge before the November election, when Trump is again set to face Biden. Click on the link for the full article
  16. Peter Navarro files emergency appeal to Supreme Court to delay prison Former Trump administration adviser Peter Navarro filed a last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Court Friday, just days before his scheduled prison sentence. Navarro is supposed to report to federal prison in Miami Tuesday to begin serving a four-month sentence for defying a House Jan. 6 select committee subpoena. In the emergency application to the Supreme Court obtained by ABC News, attorney Stanley Woodward argued Navarro "is indisputably neither a flight risk nor a danger to public safety should he be released pending appeal." He had asked two lower courts to allow him to remain free while he appeals his conviction, but U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta -- who presided over Navarro's trial -- and a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday rejected his request. Click on the link for the full article
  17. Man Charged With Vile Acts At Safeway Market A supermarket employee pleasured himself onto produce and other unsealed merchandise, according to Colorado police who say that videos of the vile activity were found during a recent search of the man’s residence. Stephen Masalta, 32, was busted last month on charges that he masturbated outside numerous coffee shops and businesses in the Fort Collins area. At the time of Masalta’s arrest, cops executed a search warrant at his home and seized electronic devices containing incriminating video evidence. That cache--which investigators are still reviewing--resulted this week in additional misdemeanor and felony counts being filed against Masalta. Since his February arrest, Masalta (seen at right) has been held in the Larimer County lockup in lieu of $25,000 bond. He is scheduled for a March 22 court appearance on the new counts. The police probe of Masalta has determined that he was employed at a Safeway store in Fort Collins for a brief period ending last month. Videos recorded by Masalta, police allege, show him masturbating onto fruits, vegetables, and baked goods, all of which were not commercially sealed, inside the supermarket. The clips have allowed detectives to identify alleged victims, some of whom are believed to be minors. As a result, Masalta has been charged with 16 attempted sexual assault on a child counts. Click on the link for the full article
  18. Miami Beach implements weekend curfew amid spring break crowds The City of Miami Beach has imposed a weekend curfew starting late Friday night and lasting until Monday morning, citing concerns over spring break crowds and a commitment to public safety. The curfew, which will be implemented on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, will last from 11:59 p.m. until 6 a.m. the following morning. “In consultation with our public safety leadership, we have determined that a midnight curfew is necessary and appropriate to assist in maintaining public safety on this spring break weekend,” said Miami Beach City Manager Alina Hudak. 7News cameras captured visitors who descended on the city’s entertainment district, Friday afternoon. “I’m down here to have fun, party,” said a man. “I kind of expected the worst,” said a woman. Pezzy Jones and Marion Smith, who are visiting from Houston, said the curfew will not disrupt their plans. “I’m still going to go out and do my thing, you know?” said Jones. “I mean, nobody is really going to listen to it,” said Smith. “I feel it’s pointless. Like, just let people have fun,” said another visitor. After the sun went down, 7News cameras captured large crowds walking down Ocean Drive. News of the curfew came as a surprise to visitor Dakota Whims. “No, I didn’t know there was a curfew,” she said. A spring breaker who identified himself as August pointed out the heavy police presence, hours before officers were scheduled to clear everyone out. “As y’all see, the police is pretty much out on almost every single block, every street,” he said. Click on the link for the full article
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