Month: April 2024

Authored by Beth Brelje via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

It is likely that the Department of Justice (DOJ) will be throwing an elderly survivor of a communist concentration camp in federal prison for sitting in a wheelchair in the hallway of an abortion business and singing church hymns.

A bench trial at the Fred Thompson Federal Courthouse in Nashville this past week lasted just one day.

By the end of it on April 2, four Christians were convicted of a misdemeanor FACE Law violation. The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) law prohibits anyone from obstructing, intimidating, or interfering with a woman seeking an abortion.

They had been charged after singing hymns, praying, and persuading women not to abort their babies on March 5, 2021, at the now-defunct Carafem Health Center in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. The DOJ characterized the action as an illegal “blockade.”

The abortion business closed after a change in Tennessee law, prohibiting abortion in most cases. It means the defendants are guilty of trying to stop what is now effectively outlawed in that state.

The four found guilty are Eva Zastrow, 25, of Michigan; James Zastrow, 27, of Missouri; Paul Place, 26, of Tennessee, and Eva Edl, 89, of South Carolina, who was in a wheelchair on the day of the incident.

Each faces up to a year in prison. They remain free until their July sentencing. But Eva Zastrow and Eva Edl have multiple FACE charges. They will go to a Michigan court in August, where each could get up to an additional 11 years in prison on a more aggressive FACE charge.

In January, six other defendants were found guilty of FACE and felony conspiracy (for social media posts showing what they were doing) for the same Tennessee incident. Each of the six could get up to 11 years in prison at their July sentencing. More people are headed to trial for the same action.

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, President Biden formed the Reproductive Rights Task Force, a DOJ-led group that has increased enforcement of the FACE Law.

Victim of Communism

Ms. Edl has been a long-time, peaceful activist at abortion clinics, motivated by her traumatic childhood in communist Yugoslavia. She was removed from her home with her family. They were allowed to keep only a dish and the clothing they wore.

She recalls being stuffed into a cattle car and shipped to a camp where she nearly starved to death, while she watched the people around her die. As a child, she watched the dead being put on wagons and then be buried in mass graves.

“We were considered to be non-human, with just permission given for torturing and killing us by the government,” Edl told an interviewer with WJBF television in 2018.

Our government’s legalizing abortion does not make it right or good, Edl told The Epoch Times in a 2023 interview.

“If it is right for the American government to legalize the killing of innocent human beings inside the womb, preborn babies, then why do we condemn the Nazis who also legalized the extermination of born people—Jews, Gypsies, and others—all unwanted individuals,” Edl said.

“If it is a good thing to kill human beings just as long as the government says so, then we have no right to condemn anybody else. But we all know deep down that these things are evil.”

“Nobody’s life is ultimately safe in a nation ruled by someone who does not respect all human life, from conception to natural death,“she continued. ”It will just depend on who is in power, and whose whim will dictate who is permitted to live, and who is going to be exterminated.”

She called compared abortion businesses to death camps.

“When I was on the cattle car with all my people, and we were shipped to the death camp to be exterminated, the people around us were not in agreement with what the government did. But they were intimidated,” Edl said.

“We have to overcome that fear and do what is right anyhow. … I wished in those days that somebody would have cared enough to go stand on those railroad tracks and say, ‘You cannot take these babies and children unless you go over our dead bodies.’

“If more and more would just lay down their lives and be willing to at least go to jail to protect these babies, we would have more success. But then, who knows what the Lord will do. Maybe he will honor even the sacrifice of the few. I’m always hopeful.”

The US Navy released a rare assessment of its “shipbuilding challenges,” indicating that the first Columbia-class submarine, classified as the future cornerstone of America’s strategic deterrence, is facing delays, as are other next-generation vessels. 

“The purpose of the review is to provide an assessment of national and local causes of shipbuilding challenges, as well as recommend actions for achieving a healthier US shipbuilding industrial base that provides combat capabilities that our warfighters need, on a schedule that is relevant,” the document states, as quoted by Breaking Defense.

The document lays out the notable delays, which account for eleven years of cumulative delays across four programs: 

• The first Columbia-class submarine, built jointly by General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII, is projected to be between 12 and 16 months late.
• The fourth and fifth blocks of the Virginia-class submarine, also by Electric Boat and HII, are 36 and 24 months late.
• The first Constellation-class frigate from Fincantieri Marinette Marine is 36 months behind schedule.
• The future aircraft carrier Enterprise (CVN-80), built by HII, is approximately 18 to 26 months late.

“When [Vice Adm. James Downey] and I started this review, we were looking at it from an internal [perspective]: What we were doing and how we were doing it. We weren’t just looking at the industry, we were also looking internally [at] how we were doing our business, how we were managing our relationships with our partners [military-industrial complex],” Nickolas Guertin, the Navy’s senior acquisition executive, told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday.

In a separate report, Bloomberg said the Columbia-class submarine program’s Northrop Grumman Corp. Sentinel ICBMs also face testing delays. 

“A delay of that length would make it more likely for the Navy to implement its backup plan to extend the service lives of up to five Ohio-class by a little bit,” Ronald O’Rourke, a naval analyst for the Congressional Research Service, said. 

Given the delays, the next-gen sub is now expected to be deployed in 2031, compared with the initial October 2027 deadline. 

O’Rourke said, “There would be some cost for doing those service life extensions.”

The delays were mostly attributed to snarled supply chains during the government-enforced shutdown of the economy during Covid. 

Delays and cost overruns are standard with the military-industrial complex. It comes at a time when Eastern Europe and parts of the Middle East are on the brink of much larger military conflicts. 

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Lara Merchan, the wife of the judge presiding over former President Donald Trump’s “hush money” case in Manhattan, once worked for New York Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the massive $350 million civil fraud case against the former president, with the revelation reviving claims of bias and calls for the judge’s recusal.

Records reviewed by The Epoch Times show that Ms. Merchan worked for 21 years as a Special Assistant to the AG in New York, including three years under Ms. James. She changed jobs over two years ago.

Ms. James is a Democrat who fixated on President Trump as she campaigned for New York attorney general, calling him a “con man” and vowing to shine a “bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings.”

She began investigating the former president soon after taking office, eventually suing him for allegedly misleading banks and others about the value of his assets.

Ms. James eventually won the case on Feb. 16, with New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ordering President Trump and Trump Organization executives to pay $350 million in damages, and barring the former president from doing business in the state for three years.

Judge Juan Merchan is presiding over a separate criminal trial involving President Trump in New York, in which the former president is accused of falsifying business records in order to conceal a $130,000 “hush money” payoff to an adult performer to stay quiet about their alleged affair.

President Trump on his Truth Social platform accused Judge Merchan of bias and corruption, while labeling the case against him “election interference” and also demanding the judge’s recusal.

The former president has also alleged that the judge’s daughter, Loren Merchan, has a partisan interest in the case because she leads a political marketing firm and has represented President Trump’s political opponents, receiving millions from them.

Claims of Conflict of Interest

Judge Merchan imposed a gag order against President Trump in the case and, on April 1, expanded it to include family members of the judge and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

The judge wrote in the order that President Trump’s speech “injects fear in those assigned or called to participate in the proceedings that not only they, but their family members as well, as ‘fair game’ for Defendant’s vitriol.”

Laura Loomer, an independent journalist and popular conservative commentator who on social media shared records that Judge Merchan’s wife worked for Ms. James, wrote in a post on X that this fact represents “another major conflict of interest!”

Various conservative accounts reacted to Ms. Loomer’s post, arguing that the revelation adds to evidence that the judge should recuse himself from the case.

“And this is why they expanded the gag order on Trump,” Paul A. Szypula, a popular conservative commentator on X with over 140,000 followers, said in a post. “It’s even more obvious how biased Judge Merchan is. He has to recuse himself now. There’s clearly at least an appearance of a conflict here. That’s enough in itself.”

Another popular account with over 46,000 followers called “The doppelgängers” argued in a post that, “everyone knows this is all connected and they are all connected to same sources to take down Trump.”

By contrast, Brian Krassenstein, a left-wing political commentator with a similar size following on X, pushed back on Ms. Loomer, saying the fact Judge Merchan’s wife once worked for Ms. James is not evidence of bias or conflict of interest.

“The New York State Attorney General’s office employs more than 700 Assistant Attorneys General. It’s not as if she was Letitia James’ right-hand woman,” he wrote in a post on X. “Literally 40% of all of the staff working in the Office of the AG in NY are ‘Special Assistants.’”

“Loomer is trying to somehow say that since the Judge in Trump’s Manhattan case was or is married to a woman who once worked in an office with 700 other people under the AG, who already won a civil suit against Trump, that Judge Merchan now has a conflict of interest,” he continued.

Further, Mr. Krassenstein suggested that Ms. Loomer, who is a vocal Trump supporter, may even have posted about the judge’s wife at his direction.

“If so that would likely be illegal now that a gag order is in place,” Mr. Krassenstein said.

Lara Merchan was not immediately reachable for comment.

Judge Merchan has already declined to recuse himself from the case.

In the case, Mr. Bragg charged President Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records, alleging a scheme to influence the 2016 election with payments meant to bury unfavorable news coverage of the alleged affair with the adult performer, which the former president has denied.

The trial has been set for April 15, and in less than two weeks, the first-ever criminal trial of a former American president will take place in Manhattan.

Catherine Yang contributed to this report.

Authored by Cara Michelle Miller via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People may be putting plastic into recycling bins, but most of it generally ends up in landfills or incinerated.

Yet the demand for more plastic production continues—at a growing cost to human and environmental health—because of the belief that recycling offsets the associated waste and risks. A new report by the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) alleges that the plastics industry knowingly caused the current plastic waste crisis.

The nonprofit’s report claims that as the plastics industry faced mounting concerns over plastics being incinerated and piling up in landfills, they promoted recycling as a viable solution while dismissing it internally as impractical.

“They knew since the 1970s that plastic recycling was not going to be scalable and effective in tackling the plastic waste crisis,” Melissa Valliant, communications director of Beyond Plastics, a nonprofit aiming to reduce single-use plastic use and production, explained to The Epoch Times.

The report asserts that the efforts to sell the false promise of plastic recycling were to avoid restrictive regulations and potential product bans.

Plastic Recycling Poses Many Challenges

According to the report, one problem with plastic recycling is that it is not technically or economically feasible at scale. Unlike glass and metal, plastic cannot be repeatedly recycled without quickly degrading in quality. Most recyclable plastics can typically only be recycled once. As a result, most recycled plastic eventually ends up in landfills, even if it goes through an additional use cycle as another product.

Between the 1970s and 2015, 91 percent of plastic was either landfilled, burned, or leaked into the environment, according to a global analysis published in Science Advances. Another recent report published by Beyond Plastics estimated that less than 6 percent of plastic in the United States is successfully recycled.

These figures are based on all plastic waste generated, which includes plastics not made to be recycled and those thrown away. As for the plastic that makes it to a recycling center, there isn’t an official nationwide estimate of what percent of those plastics get recycled in the end.

However, certain types of plastic containers—soda and water bottles (PET 1) and milk jugs (HDPE 2), in particular—are more likely to be recycled.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international organization focused on improving public policies, says only 9 percent of plastic collected for recycling worldwide in 2019 was actually recycled; 50 percent went into landfills, and 22 percent was mismanaged.

Another challenge is that there are too many different types of plastics. Recyclable plastics cannot be recycled with plastics made of different chemical compositions, and sorting the waste is infeasible.

Decades of Misleading Messaging

The plastics industry’s actions “effectively protected and expanded plastic markets,” the CCI report states, “while stalling legislative or regulatory action that would meaningfully address plastic waste and pollution.”

The report, highlighting industry communications and documents, details how, beginning in the 1950s, the plastics industry’s profits soared with single-use disposable plastics, and this “shift to disposables” created the waste problem.

In response, the industry promoted landfilling and incineration. However, by the 1980s, the plastics industry faced growing backlash and legislation to limit the sale of single-use plastics because of pollution and its environmental impact.

The industry “launched multimillion-dollar ad and PR campaigns to convince the public consumer that this was a consumer problem; just put the right things in the bin, and all the plastic pollution would go away,” said Ms. Valliant.

Plastic production then skyrocketed, from approximately 2 million tons of plastic in the 1950s to nearly 460 million tons in 2019, and continues to rise.

The CCI report cites a 1986 report by Vinyl Institute, a trade association, that “recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution [to plastics], as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of.”

Eight years later, an Exxon employee warned the American Plastics Council staffers that they did not “want paper floating around” saying they could not meet recycling goals since the issue was “HIGHLY SENSITIVE POLITICALLY.”

The report’s authors aim to hold fossil fuel and other petrochemical companies accountable by pointing out that these admissions contradict decades of messaging promoting recycling.

Plastics Companies Cite New Technologies, Goals

Twenty petrochemical companies, including major oil and gas companies such as ExxonMobil, manufacture half of the world’s single-use plastics, according to the CCI.

In response to the CCI report, the Plastics Industry Association characterized the report as “political attacks” and that it is based on “outdated information and false claims.”

“This report was created by an activist, anti-recycling organization and disregards the incredible investments in recycling technologies made by our industry,” Matt Seaholm, president and chief executive officer of the Plastics Industry Association, said in the press statement.

Similarly, in a statement published by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), Ross Eisenberg, the president of America’s Plastic Makers, called the report flawed, saying it “cites outdated, decades-old technologies, and works against our goals to be more sustainable by mischaracterizing the industry and the state of today’s recycling technologies.” He also pointed to the benefits of plastics and how they can be reused to meet different needs.

“We’ve set an ambitious goal for all US plastic packaging to be reused, recycled, recovered by 2040, and we are working towards this goal by supporting systems and technologies that remake new plastics from used plastics,” he shared.

But many wonder: Even if the ACC’s 2040 goal is met, does it solve the wide-ranging issues linked to plastics?

Is Recycling Enough?

“Possibly more concerning than the environmental impacts are the health impacts of plastics on the human body,” said Ms. Valliant, who recommends consumers focus on efforts to reduce, reuse, recycle, and, when possible, refuse single-use plastic.

The management of plastics “needs to be addressed at a higher level than the individual,” Mathew Campen, a toxicologist from the University of New Mexico, told The Epoch Times.

When plastic is recycled improperly, it ends up not only in landfills and water sources but also in our soil, air, and even our bodies. Every day, we eat, drink, and inhale tiny bits of plastic because plastic doesn’t biodegrade over time—it simply breaks down into ever-smaller particles.

Mr. Campen, who investigates the impact of environmental toxicants on human health, is concerned about the increasing amount of plastics, specifically microplastics, in the environment and the potential effects.

“The truth is, governments and industry need to figure out a path to actually take care of this waste and not have it show up in our bodies,” he added.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released previously hidden reports of facial paralysis and other adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination.

The 780,000 reports were received shortly after the COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, and show people experienced a wide range of post-vaccination problems, including heart inflammation, miscarriages, and seizures.

“Loss of consciousness and seizure immediately following injection. Went to ER by ambulance,” one person reported.

“Diagnosed with Bells Palsy today due to left-sided facial numbness and paralysis,” another said.

People lodged the reports with V-safe, a text-message system created by the CDC to monitor for possible side effects of COVID-19 vaccines.

The CDC, for years, declined to make the V-safe data public, instead publishing studies that described the reports as providing reassurance about the safety of the shots. However, according to data released in 2022, nearly 8 percent of the 10 million users required medical attention or hospital care after vaccination, and many others reported missing school, work, or other normal activities.

That topline data came from check-the-box surveys.

The same judge who ordered the release of that data ordered the agency in January to disclose free-text entries from a different section where individuals could describe their experiences. U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, appointed by former President Donald Trump, dismissed the government’s arguments that processing the responses and redacting sensitive information would require too much work.

The first two tranches, comprising 780,000 reports from some 523,000 people, include dozens of reports of heart inflammation, hundreds of reports of facial paralysis, and thousands of reports of tinnitus.

Multiple people said things were so bad that they were struggling with suicidal thoughts.

“For 24 hrs after [the] shot I was so fatigued I could not stay awake. I also have some very strong suicidal thoughts. Zero appetite,” one individual wrote.

Another person said they experienced symptoms of an allergic reaction. “I read where [sic] this vaccine should not be administered to anyone allergic to PEG and I am allergic to PEG. It would be incredibly reassuring if someone would call me as all I run into is dead ends,” the individual said.

The free-text portion of the surveys was the only place for people to report adverse events, including heart inflammation, even though the CDC knew the shots might cause those events, previously released documents showed. Other documents showed the CDC became aware of the vaccines possibly causing myocarditis, or heart inflammation, and a related condition called pericarditis early in 2021 but hid the knowledge from the public.

Judge Kacsmaryk’s order came in litigation brought by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), a nonprofit that has compelled the release of a number of government files since the COVID-19 pandemic started.

“ICAN had to sue the Centers for Disease Control in order to gain access to the COVID-19 shot V-safe adverse event data, which is yet another shameful chapter in the decades-long history of federal health officials trying to cover up vaccine risks by ignoring patterns of vaccine reaction symptoms in reports made to the government,” Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, told The Epoch Times after reviewing the new data.

“When people report the same symptoms over and over again after getting a biological product—in this case ’shortness of breath‘ and ’heart palpitations,’ which are both symptoms of myocarditis that has been causally linked to mRNA COVID shots—the public should be warned, not kept in the dark. It raises questions about what else government health officials are hiding,” she added.

The free-text entries are not dated. Elizabeth Brehm, an attorney representing ICAN, said the group is seeking the dates of the reports from the CDC. The group does know that the entries are the earliest ones received by the CDC. V-safe was launched as the vaccines were rolled out in late 2020. The rest of the entries are expected to be produced on a rolling basis.

A CDC spokesperson declined to answer many questions, including those related to the dates of entries.

“V-safe participants who reported that they received medical care after vaccination were called and encouraged to submit a VAERS report. If they submitted a VAERS report and the adverse events were classified as serious (as defined in the Code of Federal Regulations), CDC attempted to obtain additional information (medical records, hospital records, etc.) about the reported adverse event,” the spokesperson told The Epoch Times. “All data collected from VAERS is processed and analyzed for unusual patterns or unusually high numbers of rare and serious adverse events after vaccination.”

She said the information from VAERS helped detect problems the agency now acknowledges are caused by the vaccines, including myocarditis.

Graphics Processing Units, or GPUs, have moved beyond their original role of rendering video game graphics and are now used in a variety of high-performance computing applications (HPC), from AI training to zooplankton classification.  

To help understand this pivot, Visual Capitalist teamed up with HIVE Digital to look at how GPUs differ from traditional CPUs and what gives them an edge.

CPU vs. GPUs

CPUs, or Central Processing Units, and GPUs, generally have three main elements:

• compute elements—technically ALU or arithmetic logic units—that perform calculations and carry out operations;

• a control element that coordinates the operations of the above; and

• various levels of memory, including dynamic random access memory (DRAM), a kind of RAM or short-term memory used in the main memory of computers, and caches.

CPUs, or Central Processing Units, typically have one or more extremely powerful cores, made up of independent compute, control, and cache elements. A GPU, on the other hand, has many more less-powerful cores, each with multiple ALUs that share common cache and control elements. 

Core Values and the Value of Cores

The number of cores is important, especially when it comes to image processing. In order to display an image on your screen, the computer has to read, process, and display data for each pixel, which on modern high-definition displays can really add up. A 1,920 by 1,080 pixel display, for example, has 2,073,600 pixels.

Unlike CPUs, which have to go one operation at a time, GPUs can handle multiple operations like this in parallel, thanks to its multiple-core architecture. Computer scientists call this method of data-handling single instruction, multiple data (SIMD), but all we need to know is that this is why today’s computer games look so much better than 1972’s Pong. 

Beyond Graphics

It turns out that GPUs can do more than just render graphics. Researchers are now using GPUs to model protein folding and sequence genomes, while cryptocurrency miners rely on them to validate transactions. GPUs are also playing a critical role in the field of AI, where training datasets are only getting larger. 

GPUs are also working side-by-side with CPUs in the world’s only exa-scale computer, Frontier, which uses a combined 8,699,904 GPU and CPU cores to achieve an impressive speed of 1.194 exa-flops per second.

But when you consider that CPUs are still built on roughly the same von Neumann architecture from 1945, it’s perhaps no surprise that new specialized designs, like the GPU, are emerging to help us tackle some of the world’s toughest HPC challenges.  

Learn how Hive Digital’s renewably powered GPUs are helping customers worldwide meet their high-performance computing needs.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Lawyers for former President Donald Trump revealed in new court filings that the former president kept classified materials at his Trump Tower in New York City and his estate in New Jersey.

The former president kept the classified documents at those two locations as well as his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida while he was in office, and also during the months before he was inaugurated in 2017, the filings revealed.

His lawyers were responding to a deadline to support U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s proposed jury instructions.

“You may consider evidence that government officials discussed classified information with President Trump and provided classified briefings and documents to President Trump before and during his Presidency—including inside President Trump’s private offices and residences, such as at Bedminster, New Jersey, and Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, as well as at Trump Tower in New York City,” they wrote to the judge.

President Trump, the GOP presumptive presidential nominee for 2024, is facing dozens of felony counts related to alleged mishandling of classified documents, according to an indictment. Part of his defense centers around how he personally designated presidential files as his personal items before he left the White House in early 2021.

In Tuesday’s court filing, his attorneys said that jurors could be told that President Trump had the legal power as president to make those documents his personal belongings.

“President Trump acted as an ‘original classification authority’ while he was President of the United States” to declassify the records, it said, adding that it “means that all classification decisions during his term as President were based on his authority, and that he also had absolute and unreviewable authority to declassify documents and information.”

There also is “evidence relating to former Presidents, Vice Presidents, and other public officials being authorized to possess documents containing classified information without criminal prosecution by the government after they left their positions,” his attorneys continued to say.

“You heard evidence during the trial that President Trump exercised that authority, at times verbally and at times without using formal procedures, while he was President,” the proposed Trump jury instructions read. “I instruct you that those declassification decisions are examples of valid and legally appropriate uses of President Trump’s declassification authority while he was President of the United States.”

The former president in a separate court filing again asked Judge Cannon to dismiss the case.

Jack Smith’s Response

Also Tuesday, special counsel Jack Smith—who brought the charges against the former president—criticized Judge Cannon and warned her that the jury instructions rest on a “fundamentally flawed legal premise.”

Last month, Judge Cannon had asked prosecutors and defense lawyers to formulate proposed jury instructions for most of the charges, asking the lawyers to respond to two different scenarios on whether he was entitled under a statute known as the Presidential Records Act to retain the sensitive documents he is now charged with possessing.

The Smith team wrote that the 1978 law, which requires presidents to return presidential records to the government upon leaving office but permits them to retain purely personal ones, has no relevance in a case concerning highly classified documents.

Those records, prosecutors said, were not personal and there is no evidence President Trump ever designated them as such. They argued that the suggestion he did so was created only after it became public that he had taken with him to Mar-a-Lago after his presidency boxes of records from the White House.

“Not a single one had heard Trump say that he was designating records as personal or that, at the time he caused the transfer of boxes to Mar-a-Lago, he believed that his removal of records amounted to designating them as personal under the PRA,” prosecutors wrote. “To the contrary, every witness who was asked this question had never heard such a thing.”

As of Wednesday, it’s not clear when the trial would start. Judge Cannon last year set the case for trial on May 20, 2024, but she signaled she would reconsider that date during a March 1 hearing.

The hearing took place as scheduled, but no replacement date was picked.

Last month, the judge heard hours of arguments on two of the dismissal motions on whether President Trump was entitled under the Presidential Records Act to retain the classified documents after he left office and whether the Espionage Act law at the heart of the case was so vague as to be unconstitutional.

Judge Cannon appeared skeptical of the defense assertions and, after the hearing, issued a terse two-page order rejecting the vagueness argument while permitting President Trump to raise it again later. She hasn’t yet ruled on the Presidential Records Act motion that was submitted by the defense.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Early this week a Pakistani court suspended the 14-year jail sentence previously handed down to former prime minister Imran Khan while allowing for appeal of his conviction for graft.

The Islamabad High Court ruled in favor of Khan as his lawyer argued that the prior charge of retaining and selling state gifts in violation of his office when he led the country were politicized, trumped up charges concocted by his adversaries from the start.

Despite the judge ruling Khan and his wife could be freed on bail, they remain in prison (however, reportedly at very minimal security facilities) given they are serving sentences for other convictions.

Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, which made a better than expected showing in the Feb. 8 parliamentary elections, have decried that this was all a conspiracy to prevent his return to office by the military-run deep state. There are still a whopping 170 legal cases against him.

The Monday ruling has proven a big boost and vindication for his PTI party, with a close aide of Khan’s, Sayed Zulfikar Bukhari, saying in a statement: “I have said this since the conviction that the cases against Khan and his wife do not have the legs to stand on and it was only a matter of time before they would get thrown out.”

On Wednesday a new bombshell has emerged which appears to confirm brazen ‘deep state’ interference in Khan’s legal cases. The Guardian reports:

Claims by senior Pakistani judges that the intelligence agencies put pressure on them in cases involving the former prime minister Imran Khan have reached the country’s supreme court, following the publication of an unprecedented letter that has created a storm in Pakistan.

The letter from the six high court judges alleged the abduction of family members, torture, installation of cameras in their bedrooms and threats from the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

In one case the judges said they were forced to hear an appeal against Khan even after the majority of judges had decided it was not maintainable.

Torture was also reportedly used to induce officials to make “false allegations” against Khan:

“Considerable pressure was brought to bear on the judges who had opined that the petition was not maintainable, by operatives of the ISI, through friends and relatives of these judges. Fearing for their security, they sought additional protection for their homes. One of the judges had to be admitted in a hospital due to high blood pressure caused by stress,” the letter claimed.

It alleged the brother-in-law of one judge was abducted by “individuals who claimed to be operatives of the ISI” and “tortured into making false allegations”.

Meanwhile Khan’s team in reacting to the suspension of the 14-year jail sentence on appeal expressed hope for the same outcome in the array of other charges facing him. “We welcome this decision and hopefully this will be the outcome in all other cases against Khan and his wife as they are all frivolous in nature,” Bukhari continued.

There have also been new claims that the former first lady is being poisoned while in prison…

Slowly poisoning Bushra Bibi aims to break Imran Khan, the founder chairman. History lacks instances where imprisoning Bushra Bibi intimidated Khan or weakened his resolve. If met with resistance, resorting to imprisoning his wife aims to break him.
Kanwal Shuzab provided… pic.twitter.com/4zmODtlo5Q

— Insaf Khan 🇵🇰🌏 (@mipakwatan) April 3, 2024

Indeed, the graft sentencing and others had made Khan legally ineligible to run for public office for a full decade, and included a fine of the equivalent of $5 million for the couple (Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi). They’ve been in prison since August of last year, which helped set the stage of miring the February elections in violence. PTI candidates were also forced to run under independent labels. The tumultuous election week had witnessed bombings at polling stations and attacks on political offices. For example the two days going into the general election day vote saw over 35 people killed and scores wounded.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who emerged victorious while Khan had languished in jail, was seen more as the “military’s man” in Islamabad, while Khan’s legacy has sought to be erased by those same elite powers.

Authored by James Gorrie via The Epoch Times,

Is America as we know it over? Are we in the middle – or perhaps the end – of the transition from a national republic to a single-party regime that rules by fiat instead of law?

If we look at what’s happening to two, high-profile cases, the answer is less than comforting. It is becoming difficult to argue that the U.S. judicial system has not become a political arm of the Democratic Party.

The Left Waging Political Lawfare

Nations are either based on the rule of law or the rules dictated by the powerful. The former is meant to restrain, or better said, eliminate the possibility of the latter. But, as we’ve witnessed with the relentless political persecution of former President Donald Trump and, lately, of Elon Musk, laws only work when they’re fairly applied and enforced.

Neither of those things are happening with President Trump or Mr. Musk. President Trump was found guilty of fraud by a left-wing judge who determined this without considering, or despite, mountains of evidence to the contrary. The New York Attorney General Letitia James accused President Trump of over-valuing his real estate to obtain loans.

Coincidentally, Ms. James ran for the office of attorney general in 2018 with the campaign pledge to go after Trump, showing clear political animus toward President Trump. What’s more, Judge Arthur Engoron has been accused by Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York of violating “political giving rules with financial contributions to Democrats as recently as 2018, and ignored a decision on the appropriate statute of limitations in the case,” according to NBC News. Ms. James prosecuted President Trump in a civil trial, which was by design; criminal court cases require a trial by jury and proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Somehow, Deutsche Bank was “defrauded” by President Trump into lending him hundreds of millions of dollars on a property, the value of which the bank determined by their own analysis. Talk about shifty business dealings. Then, after a period of time, the former president had the audacity to sell the property at over $130 million profit and then pay the loan back, with interest.

Despite all of this exculpatory evidence that showed no fraud and no money loss or any other determinable damages, the judge refused to allow President Trump to give his closing argument in his own defense and found him guilty of fraud, fined him $354 million plus interest, and forced him to forfeit the profit he made on the deal with Deutsche Bank. President Trump was also ordered to pay $111,000 per day in interest. The financial penalty is excessive under the Eighth Amendment, which disallows “excessive fines,” which is the case because it doesn’t reflect the value of the “damages,” which are nil, nor the profits he made.

What’s more, President Trump is barred from doing business or getting loans in New York for three years, and two of his children are also barred from their executive roles in the Trump Organization for two years. All of this for paying back loans on properties that the bank made willingly, according to its own value assessments, and profited from.

Court Void Musk’s Payday

Meanwhile, a Delaware judge voided Elon Musk’s $56 billion Tesla payout. The judge arbitrarily determined that the record-breaking compensation granted by the Tesla board was an “unfathomable sum” and was “unfair” to shareholders. The payout was the result of a 10-year pay plan that the board agreed to with Mr. Musk back in 2018.

Mr. Musk is not only an entrepreneur extraordinaire, he’s also a fan of America and our constitutional right of free speech. He attracted the left’s wrath after acquiring Twitter (renamed X) and making it a bastion of free speech for conservatives who were formerly censored by Twitter and other social media outlets. In short, Mr. Musk single-handedly broke the stifling monopoly on speech and thought control the left had allegedly in close coordination with the federal government, prior to the acquisition.

The rationale for the judge’s unlawful decision was that the board was, in some way, “beholden” to Mr. Musk. Kathaleen McCormick of Delaware’s Court of Chancery speculated if the payout plan was necessary in order to keep Mr. Musk involved in Tesla and achieve the EV maker’s business goals. By that logic, the entire EV market is “beholden” to Mr. Musk since he is the single biggest influencer in the industry. There is no indication that the judge has a seat on the Tesla board or possesses expertise in the Tesla business model or investing strategies.

So far, Mr. Musk’s response has been to begin moving his companies out of Delaware to the business-friendly states of Texas and Nevada.

The World’s Largest Banana Republic

As unfair and anti-American as those two prosecutions undoubtedly are, they point to a more fundamental development in our national government, which is the undeniable breach of the walls that form the separation of power between the executive, judicial, and legislative branches on which our republic was founded.

Of course, these aren’t the only examples of unconstitutional behavior by the left. The Biden administration is still holding American citizens in jail without bail from the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and has reportedly arrested a journalist for being present, reporting on the incident, and providing evidence that conflicts with the Justice Department’s version.

Sadly, thug rule is becoming more common, not less. So is the celebration of it in the mainstream media. Persecuting political enemies through lawfare and unlawful asset seizure is the stuff of communist regimes, dictators, banana republics, and, apparently, of the United States of America.

Imagine, if the legal system can be used to go after a billionaire former president and the most innovative and wealthiest man on the planet without due process of law, the question that comes to mind is simply, “Who’s next?”

As the brewing industry is still recovering from the aftershock of the Covid-19 pandemic, alcohol-free beer has become one of the bright spots in a troubled beer sector.

And while buzz-free beer still accounts for just over 5 percent of global beer revenues, Statista’s Felix Richter reports that it has outgrown the alcoholic beer segment by a wide margin for the better part of the past decade, delivering double-digit growth in four of the past five years, with 2020 the only exception.

As the following chart based on data from Statist Market Insights shows, the non-alcoholic beer segment is poised for strong growth in the years ahead.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Having long been neglected by the industry, non-alcoholic beer is now viewed as an opportunity by brewers, which are continuously extending their selection of low and no-alcohol choices in response to growing customer demand.

“Consumers are increasingly looking for healthy hydration and a tasty, adult refreshment with lower or no-alcohol content to enjoy on any occasion,” the world’s second-largest brewing group Heineken recently noted in its annual report.

“As this global consumer trend for health and wellness continues, we see a great future for low-calorie and non-alcoholic beer,” the report concludes.

Following a small setback in 2020 due to Covid-related lockdowns and lifestyle changes, which hit the out-of-home segment particularly hard, the industry is back on track and expected to see solid growth this year and in the years ahead. By 2028, Statista expects global sales of non-alcoholic beer to reach $50 billion, more than double the 2020 figure.