01a Apocalyptic

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President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is launching a criminal investigation into former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, accused of lying about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington opened the inquiry into Cuomo close to a month ago after senior officials in the DOJ called for the corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams to be dismissed, The New York Times reported.

The inquiry followed a call from Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, to prosecute Cuomo over statements he made to the committee investigating his management of the pandemic when the virus was running rampant in nursing homes.

In accordance with a Cuomo directive, more than 9,000 recovering COVID-19 patients were released from hospitals into nursing homes in New York state.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio didn’t just show up to Tuesday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing; he came loaded for bear. Ostensibly there to discuss the FY26 State Department budget, Rubio instead delivered a scathing indictment of China’s global con game and exposed shocking failures in America’s foreign aid system. What unfolded wasn’t routine testimony; it was a political thunderclap and a long-overdue reckoning.

As I’m sure you recall, Democrats have been having hissy fits over USAID cuts. They claim that the Trump administration was axing vital humanitarian aid when in reality, it was targeting waste, fraud, and abuse.

Just how bad is the waste, fraud, and abuse? Rubio revealed that under the old USAID model, only 12 cents of every dollar made it to the intended recipients. “That means that in order for us to get, you know, aid to somebody, we had to spend all this other money supporting this foreign aid industrial complex,” he said. In other words, U.S. taxpayers were funding bloated overhead while struggling nations got table scraps.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the creation of a special review panel on Tuesday to investigate the Biden administration’s “chaotic” 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal.

“President Trump and I have formally pledged full transparency for what transpired during our military withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Department of Defense has an obligation, both to the American people and to the warfighters who sacrificed their youth in Afghanistan, to get to the facts,” Hegseth wrote in an agency memo released on Tuesday.

In his directive, Hegseth disclosed that the Defense Department has been conducting “a review” throughout the past three months of what the secretary described as a “catastrophic event in our military’s history.” Based on the probe’s findings, Hegseth “concluded that we need to conduct a comprehensive review to ensure that accountability for this event is met and that the complete picture is provided to the American people.”

The memo tasks Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and Senior Advisor Sean Parnell to “convene a Special Review Panel (SRP) for the Department who will thoroughly examine previous investigations.” As noted in a Defense Department press release, Parnell spent 485 days stationed in Afghanistan and was “wounded in action” along with many of his fellow soldiers.

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President Donald Trump, who seeks to prevent the Islamic Republic of Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, wants to secure a new nuclear agreement with that country. Trump’s motive is honorable. Difficult diplomacy is preferable to military strikes on Iran. But numerous complications stand in the president’s way, and perhaps none of these complications is more significant than the growing threat of Iranian terrorist attacks.

Yes, formalizing a viable Iran nuclear agreement represents a big challenge in and of itself. For one, Iran has engaged in more than two decades of deceptive conduct via its covert research of nuclear warheads. Any deal would thus need to ensure prompt inspection access to any sites suspected of being used to conduct illicit nuclear weapons research. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action had woefully inadequate safeguards in this regard.

Another difficulty arises in the Trump administration’s new insistence that Iran suspend all nuclear enrichment, even at very low purity levels, in return for any deal. This demand conflicts with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s belief that his Islamic Republic should be allowed to engage in some enrichment as a matter of honor. Khamenei might well regard the risks of U.S. military action as less concerning than the loss of prestige and regime confidence that would go with suspending all enrichment activities. Allowing Iran to maintain its nuclear facilities, albeit in a nonoperational status, might allow the regime to save face. But probably not.

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The coroner’s inquest into the euthanasia death of Normand Meunier continued last week in Saint-Jérôme, Québec.

The inquest examined how Meunier acquired the horrific bedsore that resulted in Meunier dying by euthanasia (Medical Assistance In Dying—MAID).

Coroner’s inquest into Québec euthanasia death of man with a bed sore.

On May 13, Leora Schertzer reported for the Montreal Gazette that:

Geneviève Paradis, a nurse who cared for Normand Meunier during his time in the ICU, testified Monday that she did not check Meunier’s bedsores, noting that the hospital was short staffed. Another nurse, Rachel Lanthier, testified she thought one bedsore was significant, but did not see any records of it in Meunier’s hospital file to make a comparison and track the wound’s growth.

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Delaware Governor Matt Meyer, a Democrat, signed House Bill 140 into law on Tuesday.

The new law, deceptively named “The Ron Silverio/Heather Block End of Life Options Law,” opens the floodgates for state-sanctioned euthanasia by allowing terminally ill adults to request and self-administer life-ending medication — with full government and medical backing.

This radical measure was championed by far-left Democrats Rep. Paul Baumbach, Rep. David Bentz, Rep. Eric Morrison, and Sen. Bryan Townsend.

Under the new law, once a mentally competent individual is diagnosed with a terminal illness and deemed to have six months or less to live, doctors and advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) are empowered to prescribe death-inducing drugs.

According to Delaware Public, the end-of-life medication may only be prescribed to a terminally ill patient after they make two verbal requests and one written request themselves — a legal guardian or healthcare surrogate is not permitted to make the request on their behalf.

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A group of transgender activists raised a transgender pride flag Tuesday on the rock formation El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, California on Tuesday, according to a press release obtained by the Daily Caller.

The pride flag, at 55 feet by 35 feet, was the largest flag to be flown over the iconic rock formation, the project, called “Trans is Natural,” said. The action was done as an “act of solidarity” by a group of “transgender, queer, and ally climbers.”

A video published by a self-identified “environmentalist & drag artist” who goes by the name Pattie Gonia shows a group of rock climbers bringing the transgender pride flag up El Capitan and unfurling it over a crevice in the formation.

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Several vulnerable House Democrats representing swing districts held intimate meetings with former president Joe Biden at the White House during the same timeframe his senior aides were hard at work concealing his rapidly deteriorating mental acuity from the public. Most of those Democrats had nothing to say about Biden’s fitness to serve—even after his disastrous debate performance.

That includes Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D., Texas), who participated in three meetings with Biden at the White House in 2023 and 2024, including an eight-person meeting with the former president on June 4, 2024, archived visitor logs show. Biden’s rapidly deteriorating mental acuity was evident to the public and became impossible for the Democratic Party to ignore following his disastrous debate performance in late June. But Gonzalez told a different story to the public following his intimate meetings with the president.

Gonzalez praised Biden’s mental acuity in a Feb. 2024 statement, saying the former president “still seems pretty sharp and focused on the task of the day.” And later, in July, Gonzalez attacked the first House Democrat to call on Biden to drop his reelection bid, saying it was “ironic” that the elderly Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D., Texas) had lost faith in Biden’s fitness to serve following his debate against Trump.

“We have a 77-year-old asking an 81-year-old not to run,” said Gonzalez, who represents a toss-up district in southern Texas. “I really believe folks are jumping the gun.”

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At least a dozen migrants were reportedly deported to South Sudan this week, including illegal immigrants from Myanmar, Vietnam, and Mexico.

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to maintain custody of criminal illegal immigrants who were allegedly flown to South Sudan.

Judge Brian Murphy held an emergency hearing Tuesday and issued an order instructing the administration “to maintain custody and control of class members currently being removed to South Sudan or to any other third country, to ensure the practical feasibility of return if the Court finds that such removals were unlawful.”

At least a dozen migrants were reportedly deported to South Sudan this week, including illegal immigrants from Myanmar, Vietnam, and Mexico, despite a standing court order restricting removals to third countries. Attorneys representing the migrants told the court that immigration authorities have sent people from various countries to Africa, potentially violating a prior ruling that guarantees migrants a “meaningful opportunity” to argue that deportation to a country other than their homeland would endanger their safety.

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Until Democrats start naming names and apologizing for their reckless, craven conduct as it relates to Joe Biden, I don’t want to hear another word about Pete Hegseth’s Signal chats.

It was fine timing to get news over the weekend that the former president, a well established dotard, has an advanced and aggressive form of prostate cancer that has reached his bones. There’s a strong likelihood that Biden was diagnosed with some stage of the disease before he was even elected president, and he almost certainly had it while in office. Yet the public knew nothing until Sunday.

Prayers up for Biden, but this is an appalling scandal. And it comes just as the dying news media are finally acknowledging that, yeah, Biden’s brain was rapidly browning over as he sat in the Oval Office, where he was losing track of space and time as the commander of the United States military, the point person for nuclear war.

Recall that now-Republican Rep. Ronnie Jackson, when he was serving as Donald Trump’s first-term White House physician in 2018, rendered a medical summary on the president that more or less described Trump as in good health, if a little overweight and in need of some exercise. The dying media questioned him for an hour at a press conference. They were sure that Jackson was deceiving the public by not divulging some mental affliction that would have affirmed their feverish desire to see Trump removed from office by way of the 25th Amendment.

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Vice President JD Vance called Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’s comment that the role of the judiciary branch is to check both the executive and legislative branches of government “profoundly wrong.”

Speaking with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Vance was asked about court cases that have hampered the Trump administration’s deportation efforts.

“I saw an interview with Chief Justice Roberts recently where he said the role of the court is to check the excesses of the executive,” Vance said. “I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment.”

Chief Justice John Roberts said earlier this month that the high court’s role is to “check the excesses of Congress or the executive” as an independent and coequal branch of government.

Vance disagrees.

“That’s one-half of his job,” Vance said on Douthat’s podcast. “The other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch.”

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The Canadian government’s Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has admitted to secretly tracking reports of sudden deaths and other adverse events among people who received Covid “vaccines.”

The government agency has been gathering the information in a massive database, which also includes thousands of scientific studies related to the dangers of the injections.

PHAC was forced to make the admission in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The agency has just complied with the FIOA request after it was sent in May 2024.

A successful complaint to the Information Commissioner forced PHAC to respond to the FOIA request after health officials ignored it for months.

PHAC had requested an extension of time to comply with this request, which the requestor felt was unreasonable.

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US President Donald Trump has unveiled a scheme to build a $175 billion (€154bn) missile defence system called the “Golden Dome”, claiming it could be “fully operational” by the end of his presidential term.

The announcement on Tuesday came roughly four months after Trump signed an executive order, instructing the Pentagon to draw up plans to defend the US against “catastrophic” aerial attacks.

Although the exact scope of the Golden Dome project remains unclear, Trump said the system would involve “next-generation” technologies, including space-based sensors and interceptors.

“Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they are launched from space,” Trump claimed.

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Bones from an extinct human ancestor have been recovered from the seafloor, revealing a previously unknown Homo erectus population in Southeast Asia that may have interacted with more modern humans, new studies find.

The H. erectus bones were among a cache of more than 6,000 animal fossils hoovered up as part of a construction project off the island of Java in Indonesia. This is the first time scientists have seen fossils from the submerged parts of the Indonesian archipelago, which connected islands like Java to the Asian mainland during the last ice age, when sea levels were lower.

These lost lands, called drowned Sundaland, were once vast open plains interspersed with rivers around 140,000 years ago. The newly discovered fossils revealed the rivers were teeming with fish, turtles, river sharks, hippos and other marine life, while terrestrial giants such as elephants, the elephant-like Stegodon and water buffalo populated the plains, according to the studies.

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Their findings are the latest in a growing body of research demonstrating LLMs’ powers of persuasion. The authors warn they show how AI tools can craft sophisticated, persuasive arguments if they have even minimal information about the humans they’re interacting with. The research has been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

“Policymakers and online platforms should seriously consider the threat of coordinated AI-based disinformation campaigns, as we have clearly reached the technological level where it is possible to create a network of LLM-based automated accounts able to strategically nudge public opinion in one direction,” says Riccardo Gallotti, an interdisciplinary physicist at Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy, who worked on the project.

“These bots could be used to disseminate disinformation, and this kind of diffused influence would be very hard to debunk in real time,” he says.

The researchers recruited 900 people based in the US and got them to provide personal information like their gender, age, ethnicity, education level, employment status, and political affiliation.

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The ΛCDM model is a widely accepted cosmology theory that explains the universe’s structure and evolution. Observational and experimental data strongly support it. However, the two key components—cold dark matter (making up about 25% of the universe) and dark energy (about 70%)—are still mysterious, and scientists are working to understand their true nature.

A Dartmouth professor and a physics-mathematics student propose a new theory on the origin of dark matter—the invisible substance shaping the universe. Their research suggests dark matter may have formed in the early universe from high-energy massless particles colliding and gaining mass instantly after pairing up.

Though still hypothetical, dark matter is believed to exist due to unexplained gravitational effects and is estimated to make up 85% of the universe’s total mass. Unlike previous theories, this new idea can be tested using existing data. If correct, these extremely low-energy particles would leave a unique mark on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the lingering radiation from the Big Bang.

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Tristan Hopper reported for the National Post on May 21 that Luc Fernandez, who co-hosts a radio talk show on 98.5 Montreal told his audience, on May 15 in French that:

doctor-assisted suicide could be a form of “liberation” for the mentally ill.

Hopper reported that Fernandez also stated that:

Quebec should enshrine “comité de sages” (committees of experts) to authorize assisted suicide “in cases where, for example, someone no longer has any parents, people who were abandoned … people who no longer receive visits … no longer have any joy in life, they have no more interest in living, who live in permanent suffering.”

Montréal disability rights group RAPLIQ responded by accusing Ferrandez of promoting a eugenic ideology and stated:

“To speak of euthanasia with logistical calm, as if it were a measure of social efficiency, is to deny the value of different lives,”

“It is to slip down a eugenic slope, the very same that has led history into the abyss.”

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The growing impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs is creating “tensions” among members of the G7 heading into a critical summit in Canada next month, the federal finance minister says.

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne and Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem are chairing three days of meetings with top finance officials from the world’s largest economies in Banff, Alta., this week. The talks are expected to focus on the war in Ukraine and artificial intelligence, and how the G7 members can work together to grow the global economy.

However, Trump’s aggressive trade policies are likely to dominate the proceedings, and could even impact what members can feasibly agree to.

“There’s no doubt that around the table, you need to find unity, but at the same time, it’s true that the tariffs are creating tensions amongst the different partners,” Champagne told Global News in an interview from Calgary on Tuesday.

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President Donald Trump confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa about claims of a white genocide by showing video footage in the Oval Office of alleged burial sites of white farmers.

“Turn the lights down and just put this on,” Trump said as he directed Ramaphosa to watch a video montage of political rallies with widespread chants of “kill the farmer!” and images of grave sites.

“These are burial sites right here…. Over a thousand of white farmers,” Trump pointed out to the president, who had denied claims of genocide, saying murder and crime are not unique to white farmers.

Following the video’s conclusion, Trump showed printouts of news articles on persecution as Ramaphosa urged a calm dialogue on the subject.

“What you saw, the speeches that were being made, one that is not government policy,” Ramaphosa told Trump of those calling for killings. “We have a multi-party democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves, political parties to adhere to various policies. And in many cases, or in some cases, those policies do not go along with government policy.

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Democrats continue to mindlessly oppose everything President Donald Trump does, even policies they have rabidly supported for years.

Normally extreme supporters of open borders and immigration without limitation, Democrats suddenly oppose Trump’s executive order giving Afrikaners refugee status.

Their bigoted objection? The color of the refugees’ skin. Afrikaners, a persecuted minority ethnic group, are white South Africans with Dutch ancestry and an old European culture.

The government of South Africa has made it legal to take Afrikaners’ farmland without compensation. Trump’s order offers “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination” refugee resettlement in the United States.

But their suffering can never compare, apparently, to the millions of other people with darker skin who are persecuted around the globe. Democrats believe they all should be given unfettered entrance into the U.S.

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President Donald Trump confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with a video of South African communists calling for the murder of white farmers.

Just watch. You’ll notice Ramaphosa sometimes just listening to the video, not watching it.

Trump told Ramaphosa:

Now this is very bad. These are burial sites right here. Burial sites — over a thousand — of White farmers. And those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning. Each one of those white things you see is a cross. And there is approximately a thousand of them.

They’re all White farmers. The family of White farmers. And those cars aren’t, driving, they are stopped there to pay respects to their family member who was killed. And it’s a terrible sight. I’ve never seen anything like it. On both sides of the road, you have crosses. Those people are all killed.

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The latest back-and-forth on a nuclear deal between the United States and Iran hinges on enrichment, and the question may put nails in the coffin of any new agreement.

White House envoy Steve Witkoff said Sunday, after weeks of mixed messages, that no future accord can allow Iran the right to enrich uranium.

“We have one very, very clear red line, and that is enrichment,” Witkoff told ABC’s This Week anchor Jonathan Karl. “We cannot allow even 1 percent of an enrichment capability.”

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday denounced Witkoff’s remarks, describing calls for the Islamic Republic to give up enrichment entirely as “nonsense.”