Authored by Agha Hussain via The Cradle,

Saudi Arabia’s recent reconciliations with Iran and Syria under Chinese-Russian guidance is perceived as a step toward reducing Riyadh’s dependence on the US, while also advancing Beijing and Moscow’s political and economic influence in West Asia.

On 6 March, 2023, Iranian and Saudi officials held a meeting in Beijing where they agreed to restore bilateral relations. The agreement was significant not only for the mutual de-escalation of tensions in West Asia, but also for Saudi Arabia’s growing importance in the process of Eurasian integration led by China and Russia.

By welcoming Chinese mediation, the kingdom has positioned itself as an independent actor capable of opening doors for Beijing and Moscow in a region where they have traditionally been overshadowed by a great power rival, the US. This move boosts Saudi Arabia’s importance in the geopolitical landscape and strengthens its ties with Beijing and Moscow.

Asserting autonomy from the US

For much of its history, Saudi Arabia was a staunch ally of the US in the Persian Gulf region. However, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s (MbS) military quagmire in Yemen – among other things – damaged Washington’s perception of the kingdom as a stable and reliable outpost in the region. The feeling was mutual and forced MbS to seek assistance from other nations to help lower tensions on Saudi frontiers.

Between 2021 and 2022, Riyadh engaged in several rounds of an Iraq-hosted dialogue with Iran to negotiate assistance from Tehran in preventing its allies in Yemen and Iraq from attacking Saudi territory.

What is particularly noteworthy to China and Russia is that MbS did not use this diplomacy as a means to restore the US’ traditional centrality in the kingdom’s regional and security policies. Instead, he made a point of cooperation with Beijing and Moscow while simultaneously snubbing Washington.

For example, in October 2022, Saudi Arabia partnered with OPEC+ partner Russia to cut oil production, breaking commitments made to US President Joe Biden during his July visit to Jeddah. MbS also overshadowed Biden’s trip with a much grander welcome for Chinese President Xi Jinping in December, during which Riyadh also hosted the first China-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Summit to underscore the Saudi view of China as a regional partner rather than just a bilateral one.

Against this backdrop, the Saudi decision to sign a Chinese-brokered deal with Iran without Washington’s involvement has been interpreted as a “middle-finger to Biden,” in the words of former US State Department analyst Aaron David Miller.

Similarly, Riyadh’s nascent Russian-brokered detente with Syria, whose Iran and Russia-allied government is still opposed by the US, also illustrates Saudi Arabia’s willingness to move away from its traditional pro-American stance.

Moving the region eastward

To China and Russia, these moves by MbS signify more than just diplomatic victories over the US. They represent Saudi Arabia’s support for their efforts to shape the dynamics in the Persian Gulf, where both Eurasian powers have hitherto kept a low profile on account of the decades-long western domination of the region – now on its way out.

Facilitated by Saudi Arabia, Beijing, and Moscow can engage the Persian Gulf as a bridgehead to expand their influence in the broader West Asian region and thus advance their Eurasian integration designs.

China, in particular, has taken the lead in this regard with its ambitious, multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The Persian Gulf is already well integrated with the BRI thanks to the burgeoning Chinese-GCC energy trade and China’s growing investments in industrial parks and ports across the GCC. However, the conflicts and disorder across the rest of West Asia have thus far hindered China’s ability to make significant BRI investments in the region.

As noted in a March 2022 analysis for Inside Arabia, China views the stability of its economic interests in the Persian Gulf as essential to the success of its plans, and sees its Sino-GCC ties as a model for stabilizing the wider West Asia under the BRI. To this end, China has supported GCC-led conflict resolution efforts in Yemen and has also put forward its Five Point Initiative in March 2021, calling for region-wide stabilization efforts and the establishment of an indigenous security architecture.

In this context, the Iran-Saudi normalization deal is great news for China. It affirms Beijing’s idea that its partnerships in the Persian Gulf can serve as a starting point for stabilization efforts for the whole of West Asia; after all, Tehran and Riyadh’s rivalry played out far more in places like Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine than it did in the Gulf itself.

The Beijing Agreement was not only a positive development for China’s BRI, but also for the Russian-led International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC). Just as Moscow supports the BRI as a means of promoting multipolarity and decreasing US dominance, it has actively worked to advance the INSTC, which connects India by sea to Iran and then to northern Europe via Azerbaijan and Russia.

With the calming of tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the INSTC stands to benefit from increased economic opportunities. Russia can explore possibilities such as increasing its own trade with the Persian Gulf via Iran through the INSTC and, further, with the rest of West Asia. Thus, the Iran-Saudi detente is good news for Russia’s own connectivity projects and regional integration efforts.

Bolstering the SCO

On 29 March, 2023, Saudi Arabia announced its intention to become a dialogue partner of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an institution founded by China to foster multilateral security and diplomatic coordination on regional issues in Eurasia.

The SCO already includes China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, covering China’s immediate Eurasian neighborhood in Central and South Asia as well Russia.

With the ongoing accession of Iran as a full member of the SCO, Saudi Arabia’s entry as a dialogue partner would bring two of the most important states in terms of conflict resolution in West Asia into the organization’s ranks.

This is the kind of expansion of the SCO’s membership, scope, and relevance that is sought by China and also Russia. Moscow has long viewed the SCO as an ideal platform to present a unified Sino-Russian front against US interests, with an early example of this being the SCO’s July 2005 Astana Summit declaration demanding the withdrawal of US military presence from Central Asia.

Thus, an extension of the SCO’s mandate to West Asian issues offers Moscow the opportunity to push for Sino-Russian cooperation against the US in West Asia as well, continuing in the spirit of their Eurasian partnership as enshrined in the SCO.

Riyadh’s new horizons in Eurasia

Arguably, Saudi Arabia’s move toward the SCO is highly advantageous to both China and Russia. By proving its utility to the latters’ efforts for a bigger, more interconnected Eurasian community, the kingdom is also well-placed to pursue its own ends in Eurasia that pertain to Saudi national interests.

For instance, Saudi Arabia can double down on its plans for significant investments in Central Asia, a part of the Eurasian space that Russia closely monitors for any signs of activity by countries it sees as antagonistic to its Eurasian designs.

The Central Asian republics’ attempts to diversify their economies away from oil and gas present lucrative investment opportunities to Riyadh as it seeks its own diversification beyond energy under the ambit of MbS’ mega-project, Vision 2030.

Additionally, Saudi Arabia can leverage its elevated reputation with China and Russia to deter potential opposition from competitors to its moves in Eurasia. An example of this is Riyadh’s investments in the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline project, a rival to neighboring Iran’s own ambitions to penetrate the large South Asian gas market.

If Riyadh lacked a Eurasian understanding with Beijing and Moscow, Tehran – considered a vital Eurasian state – would be tempted to raise alarm over its dealings with Ashgabat, which also buys Saudi defense equipment.

The kingdom’s Eurasian pivot

The move toward a more diversified foreign policy has been a relatively smooth transition for Saudi Arabia. Despite its major military failure in Yemen and resulting security concerns, the kingdom has been successful in finding new partners.

By embracing the Eurasian paradigm promoted by China and Russia, Saudi Arabia is able to fill the gaps exposed in its foreign policy after the breakdown of its strategic rapport with Washington in the region.

This ultimately presents flexibility for the kingdom to pursue its own national interests, while also contributing to the larger goal of a more interconnected Eurasian community.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google is testing a new price guarantee program for Google Flights, which will refund your money if the cost of your booked flight drops. 

“On Google Flights, you can already see whether current prices are low, typical, or high compared to historical averages. Now, we’re going a step further with a new pilot program for price guarantees in the US If you see a flight with the price guarantee badge, it means we’re confident that the price you see today won’t get any lower before takeoff,” according to a Monday blog post. 

“We’ll monitor the price every day until departure, and if it does go down, we’ll send you back the difference via Google Pay,” the post continued. 

Currently, Google Flights displays the new price guarantee badge on domestic US flights and some international flights departing from the US. 

During a recent press conference, Jade Kessler, product manager for Google Flights, said the new feature on Google isn’t a travel agency, so customers will have to contact the airline directly to make any changes. 

The introduction of the cost-saving travel service may be an attempt to lure more users into using Google Pay wallets to usher in a cashless society. 

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth.”

– Former New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg

Let’s talk about fake news stories, shall we?

There’s the garden variety fake news that is not really “news” so much as it is titillating, tabloid-worthy material peddled by anyone with a Twitter account, a Facebook page and an active imagination.

These stories run the gamut from the ridiculous and the obviously click-baity to the satirical and politically manipulative.

Anyone with an ounce of sense and access to the Internet should be able to ferret out the truth and lies in these stories with some basic research.

That these stories flourish is largely owing to the general gullibility, laziness and media illiteracy of the general public, which through its learned compliance rarely questions, challenges or confronts.

Then there’s the more devious kind of news stories circulated by one of the biggest propagators of fake news: the U.S. government.

In the midst of the government and corporate media’s carefully curated apoplexy over fake news, you won’t hear much about the government’s own role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because that’s not how the game works.

Why?

Because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media. They don’t want us to be more discerning when it comes to what information we digest online. They just want us to be leery of independent or alternative news sources while trusting them—and their corporate colleagues—to vet the news for us.

Indeed, in recent years, Facebook and Google have conveniently appointed themselves the arbiters of truth on the internet in order to screen out what is blatantly false, spam or click-baity.

Not only does this establish a dangerous precedent for all-out censorship by corporate entities known for colluding with the government but it’s also a slick sleight-of-hand maneuver that diverts attention from what we should really be talking about: the fact that the government has grown dangerously out-of-control, all the while the so-called mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation—the U.S. government.

As veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, who along with Bob Woodward blew the lid off the Watergate scandal, reported in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece, “The CIA and the Media”:

“More than 400 American journalists … in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency… There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services… Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters… In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.”

Bernstein is referring to Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.

In some instances, as Bernstein shows, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA.

Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news. Bernstein writes: “Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.”

In fact, in August 1964, the nation’s leading newspapers—including the Washington Post and New York Times—echoed Lyndon Johnson’s claim that North Vietnam had launched a second round of attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. No such attacks had taken place, and yet the damage was done. As Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon report for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, “By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.”

Fast forward to the early post-9/11 years when, despite a lack of any credible data supporting the existence of weapons of mass destruction, the mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon to sound the war drums against Iraq. As Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian put it, “our government … used its immense bully pulpit to steamroll the watchdogs… Many were gulled by access to administration insiders, or susceptible to the drumbeat of the government’s coordinated rhetoric.”

John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for Knight-Ridder, one of the only news agencies to challenge the government’s rationale for invading Iraq, suggests that the reason for the media’s easy acceptance is that “too many journalists, including some very famous ones, have surrendered their independence in order to become part of the ruling class. Journalism is, as the motto goes, speaking truth to power, not wielding it.”

If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only it’s been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.

In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”

Thus, whether you’re talking about the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the government’s invasion of Iraq based upon absolute fabrications, the Russo-Ukrainian War, or the government’s ongoing war on terror, privacy and whistleblowers, it’s being driven by propaganda churned out by one corporate machine (the corporate-controlled government) and fed to the American people by way of yet another corporate machine (the corporate-controlled media).

“For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it,” writes investigative journalist Nick Davies.

“The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news.”

But wait.

If the mass media—aka the mainstream media or the corporate or establishment media—is merely repeating what is being fed to it, who are the masterminds within the government responsible for this propaganda?

Davies explains:

The Pentagon has now designated “information operations” as its fifth “core competency” alongside land, sea, air and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US military has had its own “psyop” element producing output for local media. This military activity is linked to the State Department’s campaign of “public diplomacy” which includes funding radio stations and news websites.

This use of propaganda disguised as journalism is what journalist John Pilger refers to as “invisible government… the true ruling power of our country.”

Clearly, we no longer have a Fourth Estate.

Not when the “news” we receive is routinely manufactured, manipulated and made-to-order by government agents.

Not when six corporations control 90% of the media in America.

Not when, as Davies laments, “news organizations which might otherwise have exposed the truth were themselves part of the abuse, and so they kept silent, indulging in a comic parody of misreporting, hiding the emerging scandal from their readers like a Victorian nanny covering the children’s eyes from an accident in the street.”

And not, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, when media outlets have become propagandists for the false reality created by the American government.

After all, as Glenn Greenwald points out, “The term propaganda rings melodramatic and exaggerated, but a press that—whether from fear, careerism, or conviction—uncritically recites false government claims and reports them as fact, or treats elected officials with a reverence reserved for royalty, cannot be accurately described as engaged in any other function.”

So where does that leave us?

What should—or can—we do?

I’ll close with John Pilger’s words of warning and advice:

Real information, subversive information, remains the most potent power of all — and I believe that we must not fall into the trap of believing that the media speaks for the public. That wasn’t true in Stalinist Czechoslovakia and it isn’t true of the United States. In all the years I’ve been a journalist, I’ve never known public consciousness to have risen as fast as it’s rising today…yet this growing critical public awareness is all the more remarkable when you consider the sheer scale of indoctrination, the mythology of a superior way of life, and the current manufactured state of fear.

[The public] need[s] truth, and journalists ought to be agents of truth, not the courtiers of power. I believe a fifth estate is possible, the product of a people’s movement, that monitors, deconstructs, and counters the corporate media. In every university, in every media college, in every news room, teachers of journalism, journalists themselves need to ask themselves about the part they now play in the bloodshed in the name of a bogus objectivity. Such a movement within the media could herald a perestroika of a kind that we have never known. This is all possible. Silences can be broken… In the United States wonderfully free rebellious spirits populate the web… The best reporting … appears on the web … and citizen reporters.

The challenge for the rest of us is to lift this subjugated knowledge from out of the underground and take it to ordinary people. We need to make haste. Liberal Democracy is moving toward a form of corporate dictatorship.

Coming off last year’s thawing of tensions between Australia and China when their two leaders met at the G20 in Bali, a rare visit by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to Beijing where he’ll again meet with President Xi may soon take place. 

On Tuesday it was revealed that China issued an invitation “in principle” for Albanese to come on the 50th anniversary of the first trip to China by an Australian prime minister. Gough Whitlam had visited in October and November of 1973.

Previously the South China Morning Post reported that Albanese is “anticipating” a visit, following years of a trade war and ratcheting tensions over closer military cooperation with the United States in the Pacific region. 

While China has of late expressed its outrage over the controversial ‘AUKUS’ nuclear submarine deal with Washington, both sides have said they remain committed to seeking the betterment of relations. It remains that Beijing has focused most of its vitriol on Washington.

Bloomberg too is confirming the invitation from China, and also details that:

• The Trip could take place around September and October
• Beijing has also sent an invitation to Australian trade minister Don Farrell while an exact date has yet to be confirmed, the Post adds, citing a unidentified person close to the Chinese government

There is still some level of internal dissent within the Australian government and establishment pundits over the question of antagonizing China too strongly amid increased military-sharing with the US.

‘It’s illogical, when China🇨🇳 is our biggest economic partner, why are we going out of our way to antagonise them?’

-Former senior Australian diplomat Tony Kevin on Australia joining the US in attempts to militarily contain China

FULL INTERVIEW: https://t.co/QZ3xj5VRbj pic.twitter.com/M2zQ4So8ZO

— Going Underground (@GUnderground_TV) April 3, 2023

For example, former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, who is among the country’s most well-known and influential political thinkers, shocked the establishment last month by coming out with a blistering attack on Australia’s AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine deal with the United States and the United Kingdom. He blasted it as the “worst international decision” by a Labor government since the conscription order of World War I. 

He said in a mid-March written statement that the deal is fundamentally about “US strategic hegemony in Asia” and that Australia has now unwisely hitched its wagon to Washington. Keating wrote in the rare critique that “China has committed, in the eyes of the United States, the great sin of internationalism. And what is that sin? To develop an economy as big as the United States.”

Via The Grayzone, 

On March 17, the Prosecutor General of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, introduced an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Llova-Belova. The warrant, which accused Putin and Lolva-Belova of conducting the “unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children to a “network of camps” across the Russian Federation, inspired a wave of incendiary commentary in the West.

US Sen. Lindsey Graham, perhaps the most aggressive cheerleader in Congress for war with Russia, proclaimed: “The ICC has an arrest warrant for Putin because he has organized the kidnapping of at least 16,000 Ukrainian children from their families and sent them to Russia. It is exactly what Hitler did in World War II.”

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria echoed Graham, declaring the ICC warrant revealed that Putin “is in fact following parts of Hitler’s playbook.”

The ICC prosecutor appeared to have based his arrest warrant on research produced by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL). Yale HRL’s work was funded and guided by the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, an entity the Biden administration established in May 2022 to advance the prosecution of Russian officials.

During an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Yale HRL’s executive director, Nathaniel Raymond, claimed his report provided proof that “thousands of children are in a hostage situation.” Invoking the Holocaust, Raymond asserted, “We are dealing with the largest network of children camps seen in the 21st century.”

Yet in an interview with Jeremy Loffredo, the co-author of this report, and in his own paper for Yale HRL, Raymond contradicted many of the bombastic claims he made to the media about child hostages. During a phone conversation with Loffredo, Raymond acknowledged that “a large amount” of the camps his team investigated were “primarily cultural education – like, I would say, teddy bear.”

Yale HRL’s report similarly acknowledges that most of the camps it profiled provided free recreational programs for disadvantaged youth whose parents sought “to protect their children from ongoing fighting” and “ensure they had nutritious food of the sort unavailable where they live.” Nearly all of the campers returned home in a timely manner after attending with the consent of their parents, according to the paper. The State Department-funded report further concedes that it found “no documentation of child mistreatment.”

Yale HRL based its research entirely on Maxar satellite data, Telegram postings, and Russian media reports, relying on Google translate to interpret them and at times misrepresented the articles in its citations. The State Department-funded unit conceded that it performed no field research for its paper, stating that it “does not conduct ground-level investigations and therefore did not request access to the camps.”

Unlike the Yale investigators who inspired the ICC’s arrest warrant, Loffredo gained unfettered access to a Russian government camp in Moscow that houses youth from the war-torn Donbas region. Though it is precisely the kind of center that Yale HRL – and by extension, the ICC – have portrayed as a “re-education camp” for Ukrainian child hostages, he found a hotel full of happy campers receiving free classical music lessons in their native Russian language from first-class instructors – a “teddy bear,” as Raymond called it.

At The Donbas Express music camp located just outside of Moscow, youth told Loffredo they were grateful to have found refuge from the Ukrainian army’s years-long campaign of shelling and besiegement of their homeland. By fleeing the war in Donbas, these children had escaped a nightmarish military conflict for which Yale HRL and the ICC have demonstrated little to no concern.

When I, Jeremy Loffredo, visited a youth music camp in Russia in November 2022, I was unaware that the US government would soon exploit altruistic programs such as the one I witnessed to advance political warfare.

At the time, I was in Moscow on assignment for Rebel News, my former employer, to conduct man-on-the-street interviews with average people around the city.

After meeting someone whose wife was influential in the Russian music scene, I was invited 45 miles southwest of Moscow to visit the kind of program that was described by State Department-funded researchers as a “re-education camp.” It was there, at a Soviet-era hotel in the town of Pokrovskoye, that I entered one of the so-called facilities now at the center of the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin.

By the time of my visit, the Russian government had transformed the hotel into a makeshift sleep-away camp for children native to the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The center I visited, dubbed “The Donbas Express,” was focused on providing classical training to children interested in musical arts. Parents who wished to keep their families protected from the conflict back home had enrolled their children in the program.

Read the rest of the full report here…

Authored by Debra Heine via AmGreatness.com,

The three Democrat representatives who encouraged student rioters at the Tennessee State Capitol last week have reportedly been stripped of their committee assignments and are facing a vote Thursday on articles of expulsion.

Three Democratic representatives face expulsion from the House after their involvement in last week’s gun control rallies at the Tennessee State Capitol. https://t.co/8vnWj5RZwp

— Gene Bryant (@GeneBryant2) April 3, 2023

Tennessee State Troopers were forced to intervene as a pro-gun control mob stormed the state capitol during a session of the legislature on March 30.

State Reps. Justin Jones, Justin Pierson, and Gloria Johnson all reportedly joined the rioters in the well of the chamber, where they shouted slogans through a shared bullhorn.

🚨 BREAKING: Leftists storm the Tennessee Capitol demanding more gun control measures.

h/t: @TheTNHoller pic.twitter.com/d2K0Kb5t1c

— MRCTV (@mrctv) March 30, 2023

We took to the House floor demanding justice to end the support of the NRA, end the support of gun violence, & end support of these guns. The @TNGOP continue to support gun violence to the detriment of children, parents, & families. We must never quit! @brotherjones_ @VoteGloriaJ pic.twitter.com/RH75ZeoC1S

— Justin J. Pearson (@Justinjpearson) March 30, 2023

Rep. Pearson denied that their antics on the House floor was radical, calling it as “good trouble” to “save kids’ lives.”

WATCH: “What we did was not radical — INACTION IS RADICAL.” @brotherjones_ & @VoteGloriaJ say they took over the well with @Justinjpearson to call for action on guns because it was time for “good trouble” with thousands outside demanding action on guns to save kids’ lives. pic.twitter.com/HPYo6MBsqc

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) March 30, 2023

All three reportedly received a letter Monday from Tammy Letzler,  the chief clerk in the Tennessee House, informing them that they have been kicked off their committees.

“Dear Representative Johnson: You have been removed from the House standing committees and subcommittees and any committees on which you serve as designee. Please let me know if you have any questions,” the letter to Rep. Johnson read.

Rep. @VoteGloriaJ has been kicked off of all committees for speaking up in the well — as has @brotherjones_

They are currently sitting in Gov ops anyway pic.twitter.com/yfxIwe3bq1

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) April 3, 2023

In addition, House Republicans will vote Thursday on House Resolution 64 to expel the three Democrats. Rep. Johnson posted a screenshot of the first page of the articles of expulsion on Twitter.

Expulsion resolutions filed pic.twitter.com/ZMLOlzG18Q

— Rep. Gloria Johnson (@VoteGloriaJ) April 3, 2023

The resolution, filed by Republican Reps. Bud Hulsey, Gino Bulso, and Andrew Farmer, declares that the three participated in “disorderly behavior” and “did knowingly and intentionally bring disorder and dishonor to the House of Representatives,” the Associated Press reported.

Pearson and Jones are both freshman lawmakers. Johnson has served in the House since 2019. All three have been highly critical of the Republican supermajority. Jones was temporarily banned from the Tennessee Capitol in 2019 after throwing a cup of liquid at former House Speaker Glen Casada and other lawmakers while protesting the bust of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest inside the Capitol.

House Republican Caucus Chairman Jeremy Faison reportedly referred to Jones as the “former representative” during the evening session Monday night.

Along party lines, members voted 72-23 to have an expulsion vote on Thursday. A two-thirds vote is required in Tennessee for the expulsion of any member, but the GOP has a supermajority with 75 of the House’s 99 seats.

In reaction to the vote, protesters in the House balconies screamed “fascists, fascists!” before being escorted out by state troopers.

Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

An attorney in West Palm Beach, Florida, who represented survivors of sex crimes was recently arrested with possession of child pornography.

Michael T. Dolce, 53, appeared in West Palm Beach federal court for his first appearance in the case on March 30, the Southern District of Florida U.S. Attorney’s Office announced in a release.

According to the release, citing the criminal complaint affidavit, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Dolce’s apartment and found that Dolce was “actively downloading child pornography using peer-2-peer software.”

“Nearly 2,000 images and videos of child pornography were recovered from his devices,” it stated.

At the March 30 hearing, Dolce agreed to submit to pretrial detention while reserving his right to later challenge it, reported the Miami New Times. His arraignment is scheduled for mid-April, according to the outlet. He faces a child pornography possession charge, which has a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

The office of Leonard Scott Feuer, Dolce’s attorney, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times.

Dolce’s LinkedIn profile describes him as a “highly regarded trial lawyer and political activist” whose practice “is dedicated to representing survivors of sexual crimes, including child and adult victims, and adult survivors of child sexual abuse.”

According to the LinkedIn profile, he was a partner at the Palm Beach Gardens office of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll since late 2015. But his name is no longer listed on law firm’s website as of the time of writing.

According to an archived entry on the firm’s website, Dolce was the leader of its Sexual Abuse, Sex Trafficking, and Domestic Violence team.

In a statement to multiple outlets, the firm said it was “stunned and saddened” by the allegations against Dolce. A spokesperson confirmed Dolce was “terminated and is no longer affiliated with the firm.”

“We are focused on attending to the needs of our clients and staff and continuing to cooperate fully with the investigation,” the spokesperson added.

Separately, Dolce’s LinkedIn profile states that he has been on the board of directors of the Florida Council Against Sexual Violence since 2011.

He also served on the advisory board of Florida’s Children First, according to a now-deleted entry on the legal-aid organization’s website. The non-profit group is dedicated to representing “at-risk children, especially those in foster care.”

According to the website’s entry, Dolce founded a political committee called “Protect Our Kids First, Inc.” Separately, he also served on the Florida Bar’s Legal Needs of Children Committee, and on the governing board of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in West Palm Beach.

Aimee Adler Cooke, a spokesperson with the church, told The Palm Beach Post that congregation leaders have instructed Dolce not to attend or participate in church events amid ongoing litigation.

A Seattle man has been arrested for making over 20 “swatting” calls across the United States and Canada, which prompted real emergency responses to fake reports of shootings, bombs or other threats.

Using VOIP to conceal his identity, 20-year-old Ashton Connor Garcia of Bremerton broadcast his calls over Discord for entertainment, according to federal prosecutors, which have slapped him with 10 felony counts filed in the US District Court in Tacoma, Washington.

Garcia could spend up to a decade in prison if found guilty.

“Every time Mr. Garcia is alleged to have made one of his false reports to law enforcement, he triggered a potentially deadly event—sending heavily armed police officers to an address where they mistakenly believed they would confront someone who was armed and dangerous,” said Seattle US Attorney Nick Brown in a Thursday press release.

“Fortunately, no one was hurt, but the unpredictable and terrifying dynamic these calls created for Mr. Garcia’s alleged victims cannot be overstated.”

Garcia’s arrest came as a spate of threats and false reports of shooters have been pouring into schools and colleges across the country, unnerving officials, parents and students who are already on edge about actual school shootings—including at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, this week.

Computer-generated calls on Wednesday made hoax claims about active shooters in Pennsylvania, and a day earlier, nearly 30 Massachusetts schools received fake threats. -AP

Specifically, the indictment charges Garcia with these crimes:

• Extortion – Ohio: On July 17, 2022, allegedly demanded credit card information or would injure the reputation of the victim, their family, would leak nude photos, and “swat them.”

• Threats and Hoaxes -Ohio: On July 22, 2022, allegedly made a swatting call to the Shaker Heights Police Department falsely alleging his father was holding the family hostage with firearms and a hand grenade.

• Threats and Hoaxes – Ohio: On July 28, 2022, allegedly called the Cleveland Police Department falsely claiming he had planted a bomb at the Fox News station in Cleveland.

• Hoaxes regarding firearms – California: On July 29, 2022, allegedly called the Los Angeles Police Department falsely claiming his father was raping his sister, that his father had lots of guns and was both mentally ill and a drug addict.

• Interstate threats – Kentucky: on July 30, 2022, allegedly called the Kentucky State Police threatening to kill named hostages.

• Hoaxes regarding aircraft – California: on August 23, 2022, allegedly called the Los Angeles Police and claimed his daughter told him there was a bomb on her flight from Honolulu to LAX.

• Extortion – New jersey: on August 24, 2022, allegedly attempted to obtain photographs and videos of a minor female’s body by threatening to accuse a family member of a crime and “swat” them.

• Threats and hoaxes regarding explosives – Michigan: allegedly reported to the Milan Michigan Police Department that his father was holding him hostage with a gun and bomb.

• Threats and hoaxes – Tennessee: on September 2, 2022, allegedly called the Milan, Tennessee Police Department alleging he was being held hostage by his father who had a gun and bomb.

• Threats and hoaxes regarding explosives – California: allegedly called Los Angeles Police Department alleging he had stashed four pounds of C4 explosives at an airport in Los Angeles and would detonate it unless he was paid $200,000 in bitcoin.

According to prosecutors, Garcia collected personal information about his victims and threatened to send emergency responses to their homes unless they paid a ransom of money or credit card information. He also threatened to release sexually explicit images.

Authorities said that in some cases, law enforcement entered homes with guns drawn and detained people inside.

In other cases, Garcia called in fake bomb scares, including at the Fox News station in Cleveland, Ohio, and on July 28 for an August 23 flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles. In another instance, he threatened to bomb a Los Angeles airport unless he was sent $200,000 in bitcoin.

According to the indictment, Garcia called agencies in California, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oho, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Washington and Edmonton, in Alberta, Canada.

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Human beings are not ready for a powerful AI under present conditions or even in the “foreseeable future,” stated a foremost expert in the field, adding that the recent open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on developing advanced artificial intelligence is “understating the seriousness of the situation.”

“The key issue is not ‘human-competitive’ intelligence (as the open letter puts it); it’s what happens after AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence,” said Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist and leading AI researcher in a March 29 Time magazine op-ed. “Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die.

“Not as in ‘maybe possibly some remote chance,’ but as in ‘that is the obvious thing that would happen.’ It’s not that you can’t, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it’s that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers.”

After the recent popularity and explosive growth of ChatGPT, several business leaders and researchers, now totaling 1,843 including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, signed a letter calling on “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” GPT-4, released in March, is the latest version of OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT.

AI ‘Does Not Care’ and Will Demand Rights

Yudkowsky predicts that in the absence of meticulous preparation, the AI will have vastly different demands from humans, and once self-aware will “not care for us” nor any other sentient life. “That kind of caring is something that could in principle be imbued into an AI but we are not ready and do not currently know how.” This is the reason why he’s calling for the absolute shutdown.

Without a human approach to life, the AI will simply consider all sentient beings to be “made of atoms it can use for something else.” And there is little humanity can do to stop it. Yudkowsky compared the scenario to “a 10-year-old trying to play chess against Stockfish 15.” No human chess player has yet been able to beat Stockfish, which is considered an impossible feat.

The industry veteran asked readers to imagine AI technology as not being contained within the confines of the internet.

“Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow.”

The AI will expand its influence outside the periphery of physical networks and could “build artificial life forms” using laboratories where proteins are produced using DNA strings.

The end result of building an all-powerful AI, under present conditions, would be the death of “every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth,” he warned.

Read more here…

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi struggled to recover after an ultra-awkward and embarrassing moment with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a Monday event hosted by Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA).

During the very first exchange, Peloso thanked Clinton for her leadership in safeguarding democracy “when president” – and that’s when she quickly realized her error, dramatically recoiling and making hand motions. She then tried to recover by saying rather that it was “my hope” that Clinton become president. Watch the below – Pelosi’s Freudian slip comes just after the 1-minute mark:

Clinton had introduced the conversastion with Pelosi by saying, “Let’s start with this little matter of democracy, because I think you and I believe that it’s not just in our country, but that’s where we see it most clearly, there is a concerted effort to undermine some of the very foundations of democratic governance, of a democratic society.”

“There’s research, some of it done by SIPA in this university, showing that half the world’s democracies are backsliding, and that includes, sadly, the United States. So, what do you, Nancy, view as the biggest threats and challenges facing our democracy and what are the opportunities to try to stop that backsliding and turn it around?” she asked. Pelosi replied:

“Well, I appreciate that question, but I also appreciate your leadership in this regard when president –”

Another interesting moment came when Pelosi claimed that Clinton is the one person that Russia’s President Putin feared the most:

She went on to scapegoat Russian leader Vladimir Putin for stealing the 2016 election from Clinton, saying it was because he feared her the “most.”

“It was her clarity and position to the present – Putin – present occupant leader of Russia, that made him turn around and ensure, in an illegal way, come out against her in her campaign and interference in our democracy by Vladimir Putin, because Hillary Clinton was the person he feared most in terms of his lack of democracy in Russia. That’s, I think, self-evident, so thank you for what you have done,” Pelosi said.

But we highly doubt Putin ever “feared” Clinton; instead, it’s more likely he considered her hawkish policies to be dangerous to the world, heightening the risk of a major clash among superpowers.

There’s also a number of examples where Clinton’s policies contributed to failed states, for example in Libya, Syria, and Iraq.