A coalition of book publishers and individual authors have filed a lawsuit against the state of Florida over its law banning sexually explicit books from school libraries in the state.
As the Daily Caller reports, the lawsuit was filed in the Orlando Federal Court on Thursday by a group of over a dozen publishers and authors, claiming that the bill signed into law in May of 2023 by Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) is a violation of both the First and 14th Amendments. The law, the plaintiffs claim, “interferes” with their ability to produce and distribute “constitutionally protected” books, insisting that the law is too vague in its description of “sexual conduct.”
Among the publishers involved in the lawsuit are Simon and Schuster, Penguin Random House, MacMillan Publishing Group, and Hachette Book Group.
“Books that are required to be removed under the prohibitions on content that describes sexual conduct or content that is ‘pornographic’ as construed by the State Board are stigmatized, without regard for their value as a whole or their literary, artistic, historical, medical, or educational value as the Supreme Court requires,” the complaint claims.
The plaintiffs demand that the court rule certain parts of the law as unconstitutional, while failing to list any specific examples of books that they believe should be allowed despite the law.
“Educators who are already afraid of official state action or action by vigilante members of the public fear the loss of their credentials and livelihood and even threats to their safety,” the lawsuit adds, without citing any evidence.
The law in question is House Bill 1069, which was first implemented on July 1st, 2023. The law bans all materials that are considered either sexually explicit or outright pornographic. Parents and conservative activists supported such a bill after it was discovered that numerous novels were in public school libraries featuring explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse, particularly between homosexual couples. One such book was a graphic novel with X-rated visual depictions of homosexual sex.
“Over the past year, parents have used their rights to object to pornographic and sexually explicit material they found in school libraries,” said DeSantis in a February statement. “We also know that some people have abused this process in an effort to score cheap political points. Today, I am calling on the Legislature to make necessary adjustments so that we can prevent abuses in the objection process and ensure that districts aren’t overwhelmed by frivolous challenges.”
UK Announces Partial Ban On Arms Exports To Israel
The United Kingdom has announced it will suspend a portion of its current arms and defense sales to Israel, citing a “clear risk” to civilians and that they could be used to violate international humanitarian law.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy informed parliament Monday that the suspension will impact of 30 of 350 arms export licenses to Israel. The partial ban covers supplies “which could be used in the current conflict in Gaza” against Hamas. However, parts for F-35 fighter jets are exempt from the ban. He emphasized that the country still backs Israel’s right to self-defense, and thus the UK is not enacting a blanket ban on all items.
“It is with regret that I inform the House [of Commons] today the assessment I have received leaves me unable to conclude anything other than that for certain UK arms exports to Israel, there does exist a clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law,” Lammy said, after conducing a review of shipments to Israel.
“We recognize, of course, Israel’s need to defend itself against security threats, but we are deeply worried by the methods that Israel’s employed, and by reports of civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure particularly,” he continued.
The Gaza Health Ministry has said that over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in over ten months of war. Israel says a large percentage of the deceased are Hamas militants, while Palestinian sources assert the majority are women and children.
Analysts say this is not expected to have much of an impact on Israel’s operations given that British exports only make up less than one percent of total external arms sales Israel receives.
Israel reacted with disappointment, anger, dismay. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz lashed out Monday in wake of the UK decision, saying it “sends a very problematic message” to terrorist groups like Hamas and its supporters in Iran.
But Lammy had sought to emphasize in his comments it doesn’t mean he believes Israel is guilty of war crimes or human rights abuses per se. “This is a forward looking evaluation, not a determination of innocence or guilt, and it does not prejudge any future determinations by the competent courts,” he said.
Meanwhile, pressure from Washington to wrap up Gaza operations also could be growing…
⚡️US President Joe Biden was asked if he thinks Netanyahu is doing enough to reach a hostage deal, he replied: “No” pic.twitter.com/EFMvkTZQBw
Large and growing pro-Palestine protests which have gripped parts of London over the last weeks and months have been increasing in size and intensity, and are perhaps having an impact on Labour politicians.
The D.C. Circuit Court on Tuesday ruled against approval of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal and related pipeline projects at the Port of Brownsville, effectively canceling prior approval of three such projects by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
The Sierra Club, in announcing the ruling, said this is the first time a court has vacated FERC approval of an LNG terminal. FERC approved Rio Grande LNG, Texas LNG and the Rio Bravo Pipeline “despite widespread concerns for the harm the projects would cause to the surrounding communities and the climate.”
A lawsuit was filed against FERC by the Sierra Club, the city of Port Isabel, Vecinos para el Bienestar de la Comunidad Costera and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, a Floreville-based nonprofit organization, claiming that FERC failed to “adequately consider the environmental justice impacts and greenhouse gas emissions of the three projects, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act and the Natural Gas Act.“
The D.C. court upheld the petitioners’ arguments, vacating FERC’s approvals, meaning the agency now has to reconsider the impacts of the three projects. This will require a new draft supplemental Environmental Impact Statements and public comment period before FERC decides whether to issue new project permits.
The court’s ruling follows two other rulings in July that “call into question the adequacy of FERC reviews,” according to the Sierra Club, which noted that last week the D.C. Circuit Court ruled FERC had failed to consider greenhouse gas emissions as well as market need for expansion of Real Energy Access, a Williams company pipeline project in the Northeast.
Also last month, the same court ruled that FERC failed to adequately assess Commonwealth LNG’s air pollution impacts and greenhouse gas emissions, the Sierra Club said, adding that “it is unacceptable for FERC to conduct insufficient environmental justice analysis and to decline to make determinations on the significance of climate-warming emissions.”
It was focused on regulating the rates charged by interstate natural gas transmission companies. In the years prior to the passage of the Act, concern arose about the monopolistic tendencies of the transmission companies and the fact that they were charging higher than competitive prices. The passage of the Act gave the Federal Power Commission (FPC) control over the regulation of interstate natural gas sales. Later on, the FPC was dissolved and became the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) pursuant to a different act. FERC continues to regulate the natural gas industry to this day.
National Environmental Policy Act
The National Environmental Policy Act was passed by the U.S. Congress in December 1969 and signed into law by President Richard Nixon on January 1, 1970.
Since its passage, NEPA has been applied to any major project, whether on a federal, state, or local level, that involves federal funding, work performed by the federal government, or permits issued by a federal agency. Court decisions have expanded the requirement for NEPA-related environmental studies to include actions where permits issued by a federal agency are required regardless of whether federal funds are spent to implement the action, to include actions that are entirely funded and managed by private-sector entities where a federal permit is required. This legal interpretation is based on the rationale that obtaining a permit from a federal agency requires one or more federal employees (or contractors in some instances) to process and approve a permit application, inherently resulting in federal funds being expended to support the proposed action, even if no federal funds are directly allocated to finance the particular action.
Environmental Justice?!
The courts have further expanded the act beyond all recognition to include environmental justice.
Now, on three approved projects, with construction underway, in the name of “environmental justice”, the three projects “will require a new draft supplemental Environmental Impact Statements and public comment period before FERC decides whether to issue new project permits.”
Wikipedia notes the average time for a review is 4.5 years!
I strongly suggest the affected parties challenge this all the way to the Supreme Court. Hopefully the Supreme Court will put a permanent end to this regulatory madness.
Pennsylvania Are You Paying Attention?
Pennsylvania is the second largest natural gas exporter in the US, second only to Texas.
This explains Kamala Harris’ reversal on fracking. Anyone paying attention knows she is a liar.
CLAIM: In Thursday’s interview, Ms Harris said she would not ban fracking and maintained that she has “not changed that position”.
VERDICT: This needs context and could be misleading as Ms Harris has changed her public position on fracking. In 2019, she said she was “in favour of banning fracking.”
The following year, in the 2020 vice presidential debate when she was on the Biden ticket, Ms Harris said “Joe Biden will not end fracking” and: “I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking.”
During the CNN interview on Thursday she was pressed on her 2019 statement, and Ms Harris responded: “I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020, that I would not ban fracking. As vice-president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.”
Has child poverty fallen by over 50%?
CLAIM: “When we do what we did in the first year of being in office to extend the child tax credit, so that we cut child poverty in America by over 50%.”
VERDICT: This is somewhat of an exaggeration and needs context. Child poverty rates did fall, but not by “over 50%” and they rose again the year after, so the impact was only temporary.
In Creampuff Interview, CNN Spoon Feeds Harris the Answers to its Questions
“How should voters look at some of the changes that you’ve made?” Bash asked Harris. “Is it because you have more experience now and you’ve learned more about the information? Is it because you were running for president in a Democratic primary? And should they feel comfortable and confident that what you’re saying now is going to be your policy moving forward?”
Nothing like giving the person interviewed the answer right in the question you ask in case they cannot figure out what to say.
“My values have not changed,” replied Harris, pretending to be pro- and anti-fracking simultaneously.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said that individuals who engaged in “criminal” behaviour during the pandemic still need to be held accountable.
Kennedy, who is in line for a health related position in Donald Trump’s administration should he be elected, declared recently that there needs to be a “reckoning” brought upon those responsible.
Speaking at the Limitless Expo, Kennedy explicitly referenced Anthony Fauci, noting “I wrote a book about Fauci. It’s a great book. There are 2,200 footnotes in the book… I invited people to find problems with the book… And nobody ever told us any factual error in that book.”
He charged that Fauci and others used their positions during COVID to enforce “totalitarian controls that were not science-based.”
“It’s a story, really, of people involved in really terrible, immoral, homicidal criminal behavior,” Kennedy urged.
RFK Jr: “There still has to be a reckoning” for Covid
“The mainstream media hasn’t caught up with the science, but the science is out there now and it’s devastating.”
“Yesterday, the chief attorney for FDA admitted, because he lost a case in court against a doctor, that there… pic.twitter.com/dvLRD6tvAx
He noted that effective treatments were repressed, stating “Ivermectin was a very, very devastating cure for COVID. It literally obliterated COVID.”
“By depriving people of Ivermectin, many, many people, millions of people around the globe, died, and they didn’t need to,” Kennedy added, charging that Fauci and others pressured the FDA to discourage such treatments in favour of relentlessly pushing unproven and untested vaccines.
“There were cures for COVID from day one, very effective cures. But they didn’t want that. They wanted the vaccine only,” Kennedy posited, adding “if they admitted that any of [the treatments] were effective, the whole vaccine project would have fallen apart.”
Kennedy added that after the vaccines, myocarditis cases among young people, particularly athletes, exploded.
“On average, it was, I think, 29 a month globally, athletes who died on the field. We’re getting down to hundreds a month now,” Kennedy emphasised.
He concluded that “the science is out there now, and it’s devastating.”
After endorsing Donald Trump last month, RFK Jr. declared that he is ready to help “make America healthy again.”
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Work defines us. It shapes our days, fills our hours, gives meaning to what we do and who we are.
For some, it’s a profession, a career, a calling. Others see a job as a necessity that allows them to do their most important work: raising a family, building a community, pitching in to help others.
This is the work that has built America. This Labor Day weekend, we pause to praise the American worker.
‘There Ain’t No Quit in Me’
Farrier Robb Hoffman thinks a lot about the state of America as he drives between commercial horse operations and backyard hobby farms throughout North Florida.
His “office” is a small, white pickup with a mobile workshop in the bed, filled with tools for trimming horses’ hooves and shaping horseshoes.
For job security and because he has five grandchildren, he hopes the next president will bring about “a good, strong economy and a strong border,” he told The Epoch Times. “That’s more conducive to business.”
Without those things, “the people start to suffer and they start to cut the fat. They start to do away with things they don’t need, like horses.”
Hoffman, 59, hopes the upcoming election will put someone in the White House who is “for the people, and for our country. They’re Americans first, and they’re politicians second.”
“I can tell you straight up, there’s been many a day that my wife and I have ate less, so our kids can eat more. And I think all families go through that.”
Horses’ hooves continuously grow and need to be trimmed and balanced about every 4-6 weeks. Some need shoes that must be customized for each hoof. Some need corrective or therapeutic shoeing in order to move freely and without pain.
Hoffman went to farrier school out West to become certified in his craft. Then he apprenticed with pros near Ocala, Florida, said to be the horse capital of the world.
To make ends meet, he often works 12- to 16-hour days, sometimes six days a week. It’s the kind of bent-over work that makes a guy’s back, legs, and arms ache.
Between each horse, he rests a bit and takes a few sips of water he keeps in his truck.
“If you don’t like hard work, and working when it’s 105 degrees, or working when it’s pouring down rain and all your tools are getting wet, it’s just not a career somebody would want to pursue.”
So why do it?
It’s simple, he told The Epoch Times.
“I love horses, and I love people.
“Plus, my dad instilled in me a work ethic that, no matter what, you don’t give up.
“He used to tell me all the time, that there’s nothing more important in your life than your job … you always provide for your family. You feed your kids, you clothe your kids, and you take care of your kids and your wife.”
Hoffman has had “a lot of health issues and a lot of debilitating things”… “but I just don’t quit. There ain’t no quit in me.”
He works wearing therapeutic shoes and leg braces.
“I just don’t look at it like a disability. I just look at it like, this is the cross that I bear, and I’m gonna do everything I can to do everything that I do well.
And he doesn’t see his work as just providing foot care for horses.
“I’ve tried to use this as a ministry. Sometimes that has to deal with Christianity, and sometimes people just need to talk, to get things off their chest, like therapy.”
One client calls him a “farr-apist.” It’s a moniker he’d like to put on a hat some day.
The Value of Work
Darryl Burkett doesn’t fit the stereotype of a CEO. With his ball cap cocked back on his head, he contemplates the grease under his nails, takes a break from restocking his truck with plumbing supplies, and opines about why he’s proud of his work in Durant, Oklahoma.
Since 2009, he’s owned and operated KD Plumbing & Construction, LLC., a business that has grown to employ 14 people in a warehouse near the airport. He figures the keys to his entrepreneurial success are his dedication to his family and his community and an education that extends beyond classrooms and lectures. His most skilled instructor, he says, was his father.
“My dad told me that if you learn how to do everything and you’re willing to do anything, you’ll always make a living. You make yourself valuable,” he told The Epoch Times.
Like most ranchers, tradesmen, and blue collar workers in this Southeast Oklahoma town, Burkett has amassed a variety of skills. He welds, fixes equipment, repairs plumbing, builds things, and operates all kinds of vehicles.
“There’s nothing that I’m scared to do.”
He played some baseball in college, then went to work at the Choctaw Casino & Resort-Durant. But realizing he “was not an inside guy,” he moved on to work with his father, who taught him valuable technical skills.
But more importantly, he said, his father taught him the value of work.
Eventually, he bought a truck, gathered his tools, and opened his own business. But it’s the work ethic, taught by his father, that has kept his company open and his family fed, he said.
“I like to work with my hands. I’ll get down in the hole like anyone else. If I have to keep my crew late, I’m right there with them.”
He likes knowing that others, far beyond his immediate family, depend on the jobs he provides. Few think about the workers who tend a city’s infrastructure … until the water stops.
“If [tradesmen] quit for a week, the country would fall apart,” he said.
Burkett wants his children to feel the same pride and satisfaction in their work, regardless of the career they choose. He’s less concerned about the kind of work they do and more focused on the type of workers they become.
“I want to teach them well enough to be my competitors someday.”
Blue Collar Skills Pay
Blue collar workers deserve the same respect as other professionals, some told The Epoch Times.
Nine years ago, Kevin Dougherty was a cybersecurity specialist with a company in Houston, Texas. Today, he prefers to wield a chainsaw from an elevated bucket mounted to a truck as part of a three-man tree-trimming crew in Bryan County, Oklahoma.
“I’m tired of working in an office,” said Dougherty, 39, foreman of Texoma Dirty Work Tree Service. “As much as I can, I like to get in the bucket.”
Along with co-workers DJ Henson and Billy Derryberry, he trims limbs away from roofs and electrical lines and removes trees that could fall on buildings or other property.
His coworker, Henson, left the loan department of a local bank about a year ago to trim trees. All three men in the crew agree: They find fulfillment and enjoyment in providing an essential service that protects their customers’ property.
“[Without us] trees would fall on houses,” Henson said.
Plus, running chainsaws and wood chippers pays better than shuffling papers and typing on computer keyboards, they said.
Henson spends about 55 hours a week raking tree debris and hauling away the limbs Dougherty drops to the ground from more than 20 feet above. Then he feeds them into a chipper.
“It’s harder work“ than at the bank, Henson said, ”but I make a lot more money.”
Dougherty said most of his coworkers were raised in politically and socially conservative homes. Most still lean that way, he said, and they base political preferences largely on policies affecting their work.
When it comes to who will inhabit the White House next, he said, issues such as the Keystone pipeline make the best barometers of blue collar sympathies.
“When they shut that down, a lot of blue collar guys started reaching [out to be] Republican. They’re deciding on [voting for] whoever will keep them at work.”
He believes salaries for blue collar vocations are rising because fewer people are willing to do physically demanding work. And despite what some may think, education matters, even in blue collar work. The more skills you master, the more you can earn, he said.
“You can make six figures easy.”
But, some things matter more than money.
“I get out here and do it because I love it,” he said. “People don’t realize that blue collar jobs are honorable.”
Every Shift Brings an Opportunity
Gina Rivera, 27, is filling shifts this Labor Day weekend as a server at a restaurant where patrons will be celebrating the holiday that honors workers.
She’s fine with that.
In fact, it’s an opportunity. Not only will the single mother earn some side-hustle cash, but she’ll also be able to market herself.
Rivera, of Lakeland, Florida, holds three jobs. She’s a licensed cosmetologist and a real estate agent, too. For her, each job blends into the others.
“I like networking. I like meeting new people, talking with people,” she told The Epoch Times.
Every diner, salon client, and prospective home buyer is a potential customer at one of her other businesses.
Those are Rivera’s jobs.
Her “work” is caring for her three children. At 7, her oldest, Malachi, is just starting second grade. Her middle child, Luca, is 4, and the youngest, Rosemar, is just 3 three months old.
It’s constant motion, a work in progress.
“It’s hard,” the Massachusetts native said. “I had to push myself. There were times I wanted to give up.”
If not for her mother—a fellow cosmetologist, who encouraged her to pursue that licensing—and a friend who watches her children, Rivera couldn’t support her family.
“It takes a village,” she said. “A lot of women don’t have a village.”
As the number of fees for booking Airbnb’s rise, more and more consumers are questioning whether or not it just makes sense to book a hotel. After all, at a hotel, you’re guaranteed customer service, housekeeping and amenities. With Airbnb, those add-ons can be exactly that…add-ons.
Him and his partner, Maggie, have “fallen out of love” with Airbnb. They discovered that Airbnb rentals are now pricier than hotels, and many hosts no longer provide basics like toilet paper, trash bags, or coffee.
Rozenblit noted that cleaning fees are excessively high, even though guests are still expected to do chores. One host mentioned charging $400 for cleaning.
He commented: “There are almost always over-the-top cleaning requirements for checkout, often including the requirement to take out the trash and strip the beds at the minimum.”
The Insider report says that travelers have noticed a shift with Airbnb becoming more expensive than hotels and offering less value, leading to frustration over high fees and uncooperative hosts, according to travel experts.
Locals in popular tourist destinations like Barcelona and Athens have protested against Airbnb hosts buying properties and driving up prices.
Airbnb recently warned investors of declining customer demand, lowering its Q3 earnings projection from $3.8 billion to between $3.67 billion and $3.73 billion, with profits down 15% from the same quarter last year. The company’s stock dropped 14% in one day.
Despite Airbnb’s statement claiming these issues aren’t widespread and bookings are up, hotels are seeing a resurgence with some achieving pre-pandemic occupancy levels. The hotel industry is projected to grow 3.72% annually, reaching $511 billion by 2029, according to Statista. Travel experts argue that hosts are largely to blame for Airbnb’s struggles.
One full time traveler commented: “Airbnb essentially allows anyone to sign up to be a host, which will always prove to be problematic. Because when you have people flooding in year after year who are seeing it as a way for them to make quick cash, you’re going to be met with bad customer service.”
Bad Airbnb experiences often make headlines, partly because viral TikTok videos from dissatisfied guests amplify their stories. Examples include a freezing cold trailer, an “Airbnb from hell” with a toilet not attached to the wall and a bed in the garage, and a host trying to triple the price of a booking for Taylor Swift’s tour.
Airbnb responded by stating that the stories were “cherry-picked” and emphasized that most stays are positive. They also noted that bookings and listings are increasing and that over 200,000 low-quality listings have been removed to improve guest experiences.
Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court on Monday ruled to uphold a countrywide ban as well as fines on Elon Musk’s X social media platform amid a high profile spat between the billionaire and the court.
Of a five-member panel of the country’s’ high court, three judges formed a majority to upheld Justice Alexandre de Moraes’s previous ruling to shut down the platform for not complying with local regulations.
Justices Flavio Dino and Cristiano Zanin sided with de Moraes, forming a majority before Justices Luiz Fux and Carmen Lucia had cast their votes. Moraes and Musk have been locked in a monthslong feud after X was required to block accounts implicated in investigations of alleged spreading of distorted news and what court officials said is hate speech.
“It is not possible for a company to operate in the territory of a country and intend to impose its vision on which rules should be valid or applied,” Dino said in joining with de Moraes. “A party that intentionally fails to comply with court decisions appears to consider itself above the rule of law. And so it can turn into an outlaw.”
X was taken down in Brazil, one of its largest markets, in the early hours of Saturday following a decision by de Moraes, after the platform missed a court-imposed deadline to name a legal representative in Brazil as required by local law.
In a shutdown order last week, de Moraes wrote that X has to be shut down until the firm complies with the order and set a daily fine of $8,900 for individuals or firms who attempt to circumvent the ban by using a VPN, also known as a virtual private network, or through another way.
Over the weekend, Musk fired off multiple X posts that criticized de Moraes, with one saying that “he should be impeached for violating his oath of office” and that his “actions are against the will of the Brazilian people he is supposed to represent.”
Some critics, including a professor of political science at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, said they believe the ban and fines are overboard.
“I used VPNs a lot in authoritarian countries like China to continue accessing news sites and social media. It never occurred to me that this type of tool would be banned in Brazil. It’s dystopian,” professor Maurício Santoro wrote on X before the ban went into effect.
The Brazilian Bar Association said on Friday in a statement that it would request the Supreme Court review the fines imposed on all citizens using VPNs or other means to access X without due process. The association argued that sanctions should never be imposed summarily before ensuring an adversarial process and the right to a full defense.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has issued public statements to support de Moraes’s decision to block the social media company, as has Supreme Court Chief Justice Luis Roberto Barroso.
“I have already said publicly, and I repeat, that a company that refuses to present a legal representative in Brazil is not able to operate in Brazil,” Barroso told the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo published on Sunday, according to a translation of his comments. “But I will still evaluate the specific case, if it is brought to the panel, and any appeals, always considering all the arguments.”
The ban officially went into effect on Saturday. An Epoch Times reporter based in the United States who attempted to access X through a VPN could not reach the site.
Brazil is one of the biggest markets for X, according to the Oosga research company, with tens of millions of users.
Some X users based in Brazil indicated on similar social media platforms such as BlueSky and Threads that they were migrating there in the meantime. The CEO of BlueSky, which was cofounded by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, wrote in a post over the weekend that traffic has risen.
“At peak traffic over these past few days, we’ve had 20x the usual load on our infrastructure!” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber wrote on the platform Sunday, adding that there might be “slow loading times” ahead.
She also delivered a separate message in Portuguese, ostensibly to the rash of Brazilian users that joined in recent days, about how the website works.
US Seizes Venezuelan President Maduro’s Plane, Flies It To Florida
In a surprise and unusual escalation of Washington’s actions against Venezuela, the Unites States has seized President Nicolas Maduro’s airplane on allegations its acquisition was a violation of US sanctions.
The plane is a Dassault Falcon 900, estimated to have cost around $13 million, and was seized at an airport in the Dominican Republic. It had been in the country for several months for unknown reasons, where the US Department of Homeland Security began monitoring it.
Anonymous US officials have confirmed to several media outlets that they flew the aircraft, which serves as the equivalent of Venezuela’s Air Force One, to Florida on Monday.
Maduro had frequently used to make state visits around the world. For the past multiple years he has enjoyed closer ties with Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Damascus, and other nations deemed ‘pariah’ states by Washington.
A Biden administration official said to CNN that is is largely about sending a strong ‘message’ to Maduro and other countries who engage in flouting US-led sanctions.
“This sends a message all the way up to the top,” the unnamed official said. “Seizing the foreign head of state’s plane is unheard-of for criminal matters. We’re sending a clear message here that no one is above the law, no one is above the reach of US sanctions.”
Below is a statement from the Department of Justice, which along with Commerce was involved in the operation to take the plane:
“This morning, the Justice Department seized an aircraft we allege was illegally purchased for $13 million through a shell company and smuggled out of the United States for use by Nicolás Maduro and his cronies,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
“The Department will continue to pursue those who violate our sanctions and export controls to prevent them from using American resources to undermine the national security of the United States.”
Separately, a US National Security Council spokesperson framed the whole episode as punishment from allegedly stealing the national election in July…
“Over the past month, as demonstrated by a wide variety of independent sources, Maduro and his representatives’ have tampered with the results of the July 28 presidential election, falsely claimed victory, and carried out wide-spread repression to maintain power by force,” the spokesperson said.
The increasingly rogue US government has stolen the plane of Venezuelan president Maduro in the Dominican Republic, and flew it to Florida pic.twitter.com/YHtlnXVBJr
Caracas will no doubt see this as brazen theft and a huge shot across the bow by Washington, which Maduro has accused of sponsoring several coup attempts in his country.
Highlighted by parades and backyard barbecues, Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer in a leisurely and restful way for many Americans, but the origins of the national holiday reflect a darker time for workers and include unrest over oppressive working conditions and a strike that turned violent.
Amid the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century, workers toiled for at least 12 hours a day, six days a week in factories, mines, railroads, and mills.
Appealing for shorter work weeks and better working conditions, the labor movement arose and escalated in the 1860s and 1870s.
Signed into law by President Grover Cleveland on June 28, 1894, the first Labor Day was celebrated on the first Monday in September that year following decades of conflict as American industry accelerated.
Here are five things to know about Labor Day in the United States.
Labor Day Origins
As with Independence Day, Labor Day is a time when many small towns and big cities alike host celebratory parades. In the late 19th century, activists from the Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor spearheaded what is known as the first Labor Day event when about 10,000 workers marched through the streets of New York City on Sept. 5, 1882.
Organizers proclaimed it “a general holiday for the workingmen of this city.” The parade became an annual event, and in 1884 it was set for the first Monday in September, according to the New-York Historical Society.
Between 1887 and 1894, Labor Day became an official holiday in several states. The day varied between the first day of September, the first Monday of September, and the first Saturday of September.
Oregon was the first state to designate a Labor Day holiday in 1887. Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York followed the next year.
In 1893, U.S. Sen. James Kyle of South Dakota introduced a bill to declare Labor Day a federal holiday. The bill languished without discussion in the Senate until June 26, 1894. Cleveland then signed the legislation, and response to the new holiday was positive.
Parades across the country drew large crowds. At the first official Labor Day parade in Chicago, Chairman of the House Labor Committee Lawrence McGann told 30,000 revelers, “Let us each Labor Day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement [sic], and the laws will be changed,” according to the Office of the Historian for the U.S. House of Representatives.
A Holiday Created Amid Strife
Another labor-centered holiday, May Day, was created in the aftermath of the Haymarket Riot on May 1, 1886. Workers flooded Chicago’s streets to demand an eight-hour workday. Scuffles between police and workers ensued over several days. Police ordered the crowd to disperse, and a bomb detonated on May 4.
At an international gathering of socialists in Paris in 1889, May Day was declared as a holiday honoring workers’ rights. Cleveland feared that May Day would become “a memorial to the Haymarket radicals.” He encouraged state legislatures to celebrate a labor-centric holiday in September instead and eventually signed the federal holiday at the same time tension arose in a company town outside of Chicago.
Employees of the railway sleeping car titan George Pullman went on strike on May 11, 1893.
Pullman, Illinois, was founded by Pullman in 1880 and designed to serve as a utopian community for workers.
Residents worked for the Pullman Palace Car Company. Their paychecks were drawn from the Pullman bank and their rent was set by Pullman and automatically deducted from their paychecks.
In 1893, there was a nationwide economic depression. Orders for railroad sleeping cars declined. Pullman laid off hundreds of employees. Workers who remained saw their wages cut while rents remained consistent.
Employees walked out, demanding higher pay and lower rents.
Led by Eugene V. Debs, who later ran for president in 1920, the American Railway Union aided the striking workers. Railroad employees across the country boycotted trains carrying Pullman cars. Burning, pillaging, and rioting of railroad cars followed. Mobs of nonunion workers participated.
Faced with a national crisis, Cleveland declared the strike a federal crime and sent federal troops to end the unrest on July 3, days after signing the Labor Day legislation.
Troops fired into a crowd of protesters on July 7, killing as many as 12 people.
The strike ended on Aug. 3, 1894.
Even with the creation of Labor Day, it wasn’t until the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act when the U.S. established a minimum wage, mandated a shorter work week, and limited child labor.
The Tradition of Barbecues
The tradition of backyard chefs preparing cookouts for their family and friends has defined Labor Day weekend since its inception.
Robert F. Moss, a food writer, culinary historian and author of “Barbecue: The History of an American Institution,” wrote on his website that “staging a big outdoor barbecue was one of the standard forms of civic celebration in the late 19th century, so it’s little surprise that some of the earliest Labor Day events features barbecue.”
When labor conditions improved in the 20th century, Moss said the focus of holiday barbecues started to reflect the evolution of the holiday itself as a celebration among family and friends in backyards to mark the unofficial end of summer.
“It still has a lot of that same communal sense, gathering around the grill, eating together,” he wrote.
Among the first celebrations traced to what is now known as Labor Day include the Volunteers Firemen’s Associations’ annual picnic and barbecue at Brommer’s Union Park at the southern tip of the Bronx borough of New York City on Sept. 3, 1888. It was an existing event that was moved to early September to commemorate the labor movement.
A 1,200-pound ox was roasted that day, Moss wrote.
When Labor Day was declared a federal holiday in 1894, workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, celebrated. The governor, mayor, and other dignitaries delivered remarks at a city park after a parade of floats constructed by labor unions.
Attendees then sat down for a feast that included “twenty beeves, thirty sheep, ten shoats and fifteen goats” along with “coffee, Kentucky bergoo’ and fresh bakery bread,” Moss wrote.
The Father of Labor Day
Kyle, the senator who introduced the bill to enshrine Labor Day as a federal holiday, is regarded as the father of the formal celebration.
Born at his family’s farm in Cedarville, Ohio, in 1854, Kyle’s family moved to Illinois when he was 11. He eventually made his way to South Dakota and entered politics in 1890 shortly after his new home became a state.
First elected to the state senate, he soon became a U.S. senator.
During his time in office, Kyle was chairman of the Great Industrial Commission, which was tasked with investigating questions regarding immigration, labor, agriculture, manufacturing, and business.
Kyle was also chairman of the Education and Labor Committee and introduced the bill that Cleveland signed into law establishing Labor Day.
Cedarville calls itself “the home of Labor Day.” Signs at the entry points of the rural village recognize Kyle as “the father of Labor Day.”
The village celebrates the holiday each year with a community festival called “Cedarfest.”
Grover Cleveland
Cleveland is the only president to leave the White House and return for a second, nonconsecutive term, a feat that former President Donald Trump is currently trying to accomplish.
First elected president in 1884, Cleveland won the popular vote in 1888 but was defeated by Republican Benjamin Harrison in the general election. He and his wife moved to New York, where he became a father and told a colleague that he “had entered the real world” for the first time.
Life as a private citizen proved unfulfilling for Cleveland. He saw an opportunity to defeat Harrison in a rematch because the president had grown unpopular with many Americans. Cleveland won his party’s nomination and defeated Harrison in the rematch.
After Cleveland signed the legislation that established a national Labor Day holiday and summoned troops to Chicago to enforce the injunction against a railroad workers strike, he said, “If it takes the entire Army and Navy of the United States to deliver a postcard in Chicago, that card will be delivered.”
He faced backlash for his treatment of the railroad workers, and his policies amid a depression during his term were mostly unpopular.
Eric Weinstein: ‘I Don’t Know Whether Trump Will Be Allowed To Become President’
Eric Weinstein told Chris Williamson on the “Modern Wisdom” podcast that Donald Trump’s presidency has disrupted the old “rules-based international order,” which many view as an attempt to control global stability and wondered if the Republican nominee will “be allowed” to reenter the White House if elected in 2024. Weinstein argued that Trump’s unorthodox approach challenged the status quo, exposing flaws in the system and revealing that the impact of populist leaders on democracy and international agreements is more complex and significant than previously understood.
CHRIS WILLIAMSON: When we spoke at the start of the year, I said it was way too close to November to switch anybody out. Turns out that I was wrong.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Beginner’s luck.
CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You said what are the odds that Joe Biden has a debilitating event between now and November including death, so he runs a one in 20 chance of dying in any given year or above that. I don’t think you know whether he’s even going to make it to November debilitating event could have been a debilitating public event
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I purposefully left it vague. I didn’t say the other part of it, which I now feel comfortable saying, which is…
CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you mean by that?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I think there’s a remarkable story, and we’re in a funny game, which is: are we allowed to say what that story is? Because to say it, to analyze it, to name it, is to bring it into view. I think we don’t understand why the censorship is behaving the way it is. We don’t understand why it’s in the shadows or why our news is acting in a bizarre fashion. So let’s just set the stage, given that that was in February.
There is something that I think Mike Benz has just referred to as the rules-based international order. It’s an interlocking series of agreements, tacit understandings, explicit understandings, and clandestine understandings about how the most important structures keep the world free of war and keep markets open. There has been a system in place, whether understood explicitly or behind the scenes or implicitly, that says the purpose of the two American parties is to prune the field of populist candidatesso that whatever two candidates exist in a faceoff are both acceptable to that world order.
From the point of view of, say, the State Department, the intelligence community, the defense department, and major corporations involved in international issues—from arms trade to, oh, I don’t know, food—they have a series of agreements that are fragile and could be overturned if a president entered the Oval Office who didn’t agree with them. And if the mood of the country was, “Why do we pay taxes into these structures? Why are we hamstrung? Why aren’t we a free people?” So what the two parties would do is run primaries with populist candidates and pre-commit the populist candidates to support the candidates who won the primaries. As long as that took place and you had two candidates that were both acceptable to the international order—that is, they aren’t going to rethink NAFTA or NATO or what have you—we called that democracy. And so democracy was the illusion of choice, what’s called magician’s choice, where the choice is not actually, you know, “pick a card, any card,” but somehow the magician makes sure that the card that you pick is the one that he knows.
In that situation, you have magician’s choice in the primaries, and then you’d have the duopoly field: two candidates, either of which was acceptable, and you could actually afford to hold an election. That way, the international order wasn’t put at risk every four years because you can’t have alliances that are subject to the whim of the people in plebiscites.
Under that structure, everything was going fine until 2016, when the first candidate ever to not hold any position in the military nor any position in government in the history of the Republic, Donald Trump, broke through the primary structure. Then there was a full court press: “Okay, we only have one candidate that’s acceptable to the international order. Donald Trump will be under constant pressure—he’s a loser, he’s a wild man, he’s an idiot, and he’s under control of the Russians.” And then he was going to be, you know, a 20-to-1 underdog, and then he wins. There was no precedent for this. They learned their lesson: you cannot afford to have candidates who are not acceptable to the international order and continue to have these alliances. This is an unsolved problem.
I don’t have a particular dog in this fight. I believe in democracy; I also believe in international agreements. And it is the job of the State Department, the intelligence community, and the defense department to bring this problem in front of the American people and say, “We have a problem. You don’t know everything that’s going on, and if you start voting in populist candidates, you’re going to end up knocking out load-bearing walls that you don’t understand.”
