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 Catherine Yang via The Epoch Times,

New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan on April 3 denied former President Donald Trump’s latest request to delay his upcoming trial, based on a presidential immunity defense that will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court 10 days after the Manhattan trial begins.

“Defendant’s motion is DENIED in its entirety as untimely,” the judge wrote.

“The Court declines to consider whether the doctrine of presidential immunity precludes the introduction of evidence of purported official presidential acts in a criminal proceeding.”

The defense also argued that the prosecution’s evidence related to President Trump’s official acts should be excluded based on presidential immunity, which the judge rejected.

In Manhattan, the district attorney is prosecuting President Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records, alleging a payment scheme to kill unfavorable news stories to influence the 2016 elections.

Trial will begin with jury selection on April 15, and in recent weeks the defense has made several requests to delay the trial, citing among other things a late discovery production of more than 100,000 pages.

On March 25, the judge delayed trial until April 15 because of the late evidence produced, but has criticized the defense for “repeatedly” seeking delays in recent orders.

The defense has another motion to delay the trial still before the judge, this one arguing that the sheer publicity surrounding the case would prevent President Trump from being able to seat an impartial jury.

‘Timeliness’

The judge explained he decided against delaying the trial based on “timeliness,” describing the defense’s arguments as “excuses.”

“In reviewing the excuses proffered by the Defendant for the timing of his motion, this Court finds that they are inadequate and not convincing,” he wrote.

Justice Merchan found that the prosecutors had outlined the evidence they intended to show at trial in February, and wrote the defense should have raised the presidential immunity objections at that time, not with days to trial.

“The Defendant had ample notice that the People were in possession of, and intended to use, the various statements allegedly made by Defendant on social media, in public, and in various interviews,” the judge wrote. “He was also well aware that the defense of presidential immunity, even if unsuccessful, might be available to him.”

The judge noted that the defense had touched on presidential immunity last year in an attempt to move the case to federal court, yet did not argue it. He said the timing of the new motion “raises real questions about the sincerity and actual purpose of the motion.”

“The circumstances, viewed as a whole, test this Court’s credulity,” he wrote, finding that the defense had “myriad opportunities” to raise this defense earlier.

‘Pressure Campaign’

In arguing presidential immunity, the defense had also renewed arguments to exclude or otherwise counter evidence prosecutors intend to show regarding a “pressure campaign” they allege President Trump exerted over the star witness.

Michael Cohen, formerly a personal attorney to President Trump, had made public claims that he paid off an adult actress alleging an affair with President Trump in order to keep the story out of the news. He claimed President Trump falsified business records to pay him for these alleged bribes, and prosecutors argue that the claims and case were not brought until well after the alleged payments because of this “pressure campaign.”

The judge had rejected defense efforts to block Mr. Cohen from testifying, but the defense argued that they should be allowed to claim at trial that Mr. Cohen has never shied away from speaking about President Trump and would not have caved to the alleged “pressure.”

Presidential Immunity

Separately, special counsel Jack Smith is prosecuting President Trump on four counts of conspiracy and obstruction for his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Originally scheduled for a March trial, the case has ended up before the Supreme Court with an April 25 hearing on the defense of presidential immunity.

Last year, defense attorneys had filed a motion to dismiss the case based on presidential immunity. The motion was rejected by U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan in December, and the defense appealed the decision.

An appeals panel accepted and heard the appeal on an expedited schedule, and then issued the unusual decision that the court would not allow a stay in the event of a rehearing by the appeals court. It gave President Trump a six-day deadline to seek review from the Supreme Court.

President Trump applied for a stay from the Supreme Court, which the court dismissed, instead granting the special counsel’s request to treat the application as a request for review and scheduled an April hearing.

The arguments will be limited to applications of presidential immunity as it relates to official acts in criminal prosecutions.

The largest egg producer in the US has temporarily halted production at one of its facilities after bird flu—also known as highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI—was detected. 

Cal-Maine Foods, Inc. wrote in a press release that HPAI was detected at “one of the Company’s facilities located in Parmer County, Texas, resulting in depopulation of approximately 1.6 million laying hens and 337,000 pullets, or approximately 3.6% of the Company’s total flock.” 

“Production at the facility has temporarily ceased as the Company follows the protocols prescribed by the USDA. Cal-Maine Foods is working to secure production from other facilities to minimize disruption to its customers,” the company said. 

Bloomberg said this is the “biggest bird flu casualty” since early December when 2.6 million birds were culled at a commercial egg farm in Ohio after HPAI was found. Cal-Maine also had a Kansas farm cull 684,000 hens the same month.

In a mid-March note, we pointed out that data from USDA showed that Grade A egg prices at the supermarket were soaring again. 

Unlink the previous HPAI outbreak in 2022. There are reports the virus is spreading in dairy cattle herds – and even infecting humans. This raises significant concerns about the potential impact on the food supply chain. 

Infected Texas dairy cattle are experiencing decreased lactation and low appetite, with older cows more likely to be severely impacted. Some herds have reported pneumonia and clinical mastitis — an inflammatory disease — the Texas Animal Health Commission said by email. Most animals seem to recover in as many as two weeks with supported care, albeit with reduced milk production levels.

Some cows may never see their milk production recover to pre-infection levels, in which case they might be culled, according to a HighGround Dairy report Monday. “The longer-term impact on supply is not entirely clear, as farmers are trying to maintain herd inventories in a time of tight cattle supplies,” it said. –Bloomberg

There have yet to be any reports that the virus has spread to beef herds, where the US cattle herd is at seven-decade lows, and supermarket prices are at record highs. 

Dave Kurzawski, an analyst at StoneX Group Inc., mentioned in a note to clients that discussions are happening about possible consumer demand risks for dairy products. He further said that significant risks are present, and the effect of the illness on consumer purchasing patterns remains uncertain. 

The US food supply chain faces yet another challenge, as mysterious fires have hit food processing plants in recent years. Additionally, billionaire activists in the WEF cult advocate for a ‘reset’ in the global food supply chain, moving from beef, dairy, and chicken towards plant-based and insect-based foods. 

Meanwhile, billionaires like Bill Gates have been quietly purchasing America’s farmland. 

Authored by Ian Miller via The Brownstone Institute,

In the post-pandemic period of Covid, there’s now a concerted effort to comprehend and explain the damage that was caused by our capitulating to the hysterical overreaction and overreach of the ‘experts.’ There’s a long list of policy failures to examine; mask mandates were a disaster that accomplished absolute nothing of value, but instead led to tremendous harms, many of which continue today.

Children were forced into masks for years on end, millions of people still wear masks when traveling or inside stores and restaurants, permanently convinced of the deliberate falsehood that masks are effective prevention tools. Perhaps most disturbing is that healthcare workers in blue cities are often still required to mask. Some hospitals have required masking continuously since 2020, while others are now enforcing rolling mandates based on the delusions of administrators and expert authorities.

Research into the economic cost of many of our Covid policies and mandates is still ongoing, but a new, extremely detailed report on school closures has created a horrifying context for just how damaging Anthony Fauci’s advocacy was during the pandemic.

WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 17: Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies during the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee. (Photo by Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)

All of Our Covid Policies Failed

The research begins with an obvious acknowledgment of the failures which occurred due to Covid mandates. Despite wildly different policies, there was virtually no difference in outcomes between countries.

“From the available evidence, it is difficult to identify the specific responses to the pandemic that led to better outcomes,” they write. “Countries clearly responded to the challenges in very different ways, from essentially no school closures (Sweden) to multiple years of closures (Uganda and Indonesia). Yet, simple statistics such as the length of school closures or overall health policies cannot explain much of the variance in outcomes.”

Lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine passports…none of it mattered, nor does it explain the variance in outcomes between countries. Why? The obvious answer is that none of these policies had the slightest chance of preventing transmission of a highly infectious respiratory virus.

Instead, the likely explanation for variance in outcomes comes down to differences in accounting for Covid cases and deaths, underlying health and age demographics, or pre-existing immunity from exposure to similar coronaviruses, which was almost certainly the reason why countries in Asia performed much better than Western countries during the early part of the pandemic, but was conveniently ignored in favor of “experts” maintaining the wishful thinking that “mask culture” was responsible. 

Regardless of the explanation, the fact that there is no consistent factor to attribute better outcomes to is in itself an indictment of our Covid policies and mandates. If it’s impossible to define why a country did better or worse than another country, there should be no justification for continued restrictions. If only someone had told Fauci or his allies in the public health establishment in 2020-2021, but instead they forcefully criticized any opposition who understood the reality, such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

School Closures Caused Unimaginable Harms

The researchers spent most of their time attempting to assess the many harms caused by one of the pandemic’s most inexcusable policies: school closures. And the results of their estimates are jaw-dropping.

“Based on the available research on lifetime earnings associated with more skills, the average student in school during the pandemic will lose 5 to 6 percent of lifetime earnings,” they found. “Because a lower-skilled workforce leads to lower economic growth, the nation will lose some $31 trillion (in present value terms) during the twenty-first century. This aggregate economic loss is higher than the US GDP for one year and dwarfs the total economic losses from either the slowdown of the economy during the pandemic or from the 2008 recession.”

That’s not a misprint: $31 trillion. 

Teachers unions, Fauci, the CDC, and politicians have all ensured that the American economy will be decimated in the next century because they refused to admit they were wrong about all of it. As cost of living skyrockets thanks to rampant inflation, also caused by our incompetence and malicious, purposeful ignorance, children forced to learn under school closures will be irreparably set back, which will cost them hundreds of thousands if not millions of earned income throughout their lives.

It’s easy to suggest that maybe these harms may be erased or mitigated over time. The researchers addressed that too, yet they failed to provide much hope for the future.

“Finally, we provide a few observations about recovery from the learning losses. History suggests that these losses are likely to be permanent unless the schools become better than they were before the pandemic,” they conclude.

With wholly incompetent political activists like Randi Weingarten controlling schools, disgraceful DEI policies infiltrating every aspect of public education, the lack of acknowledgment from Fauci and other organizations that Covid mandates were a failure, and the complete ideological capture of the education system, it’s impossible to reasonably expect that schools will ever “become better than they were.”

The damage they caused is locked in – forever.

Once Again, Florida Provides the Alternative

Importantly, the results of school closures varied per region. In far-left states such as California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois, school closures persisted well into 2021. 

But Florida was one of the few states, and perhaps the only large one, to make reopening schools a priority, despite the objections of teachers unions and media outlets that attempted to label the governor as “DeathSantis.” 

And it’s going to pay off, relatively speaking. A figure presented in the research shows that Florida’s economic state loss in GDP is nearly equal to Pennsylvania, despite a population that’s nearly 75% bigger than Pennsylvania. And California’s estimated losses, roughly $1.3 trillion, are more than 116% higher than Florida, much larger than the population difference. Similarly, New York’s economic losses far exceed Florida’s, despite a smaller population.

DeSantis followed the actual science, listened to competent outside expert advisors, and as a result, when compared to other major states, Florida is set to massively benefit in the future. It is yet again another clear indictment of the blue states that chose to follow the Fauci blueprint into economic disaster.

And make no mistake, this is a disaster.

No Accountability for Failure

The researchers compared the learning loss train wreck to the 2008 recession, showing that the Covid response is responsible for substantially more damage than even that economic cycle. 

“The lopsided attention to the business-cycle losses from the 2008 recession and from the pandemic is startling once we see the comparable pandemic learning loss figures,” they wrote. “The economic losses from the loss of human capital are fully six times the total losses from the 2008 recession, which was labeled the largest recession since the Great Depression.”

This is staggering. Six times the total losses from the 2008 recession, already considered one of the worst in modern economic history. All because Fauci and his band of “experts” seized an opportunity to enforce their agenda of control onto a compliant society. And also because they refused to admit failure when many were desperately trying to expose them.

It’s an inexcusable, historic set of decisions with lasting consequences both in soft cultural terms and harder economic ones. A $31 trillion loss is the loss of GDP exclusively from school closures. That doesn’t even account for the loss of business income, the years-long setback in terms of new business, or the loss of GDP from adults who gave up on career plans or other pursuits out of despair or lack of opportunity.

The damage the “experts” caused is incalculable. But the attempts to calculate it has resulted in absolutely horrifying estimates. 

And not one of those responsible is willing to acknowledge it.

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Republished from the author’s Substack