Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon says transgender criminals convicted for raping women are women, despite a car crash interview in which she appeared to flip flop all over the place.
The controversy began after 31-year-old Adam Graham, who was was found guilty of raping the two women during frenzied sex attacks, was sent to Scotland’s only all female prison.
Only when on trial for the attacks did Graham announce that he was “transitioning” into a woman, a process which seemingly culminated in him wearing a bad wig and cheap make-up.
The rapist was clearly trying to exploit Scotland’s ludicrously woke legal system in which biological males who identify as women can be sent to female prisons.
After a massive public backlash, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon reiterated her belief that “trans women are women,” no matter how many actual women they have violently raped.
During an excruciatingly awkward interview, Sturgeon flip-flopped back and forth on the question of whether violent male rapists are actually women on the basis of them claiming to be so in order to get more lenient treatment in prison.
Sturgeon’s assertion that men with penises should be accepted as women was backed up by Keith Brown, her justice secretary, who said: “If somebody presents as a trans person, then we accept that at face value.”
Brown said the decision on where to send male sex offenders who identified as women rested with the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), and its risk assessment, which Brown claimed had a “tremendous track record”.
Another biological male, who now calls himself, Tiffany Scott, was also set to be transferred to the same all woman prison after being convicted of stalking a 13-year-old girl.
Another transgender inmate also started identifying as a baby in order to get better treatment in prison, a demand that was “taken seriously” by prison bosses.
That sounds like a Babylon Bee article, but it’s a real story.
As we document in the video below, the situation in Scotland completely vindicates those who have been warning for years that sexual predators are exploiting the acceptance of transgenderism to target victims.
Hyperinflationary Hell: Lebanese Central Bank Devalues ‘Lira’ By 90%
Cash is now king in Lebanon, where a three-year economic meltdown has led the country’s once-lauded financial sector to atrophy and turned the country into a Venezuelan-esque hyperinflationary hell. The country has been hit hard by events over the past few years, starting with COVID.
In August 2020, the city of Beiruit was practically destroyed by a massive blast which killed at least 200 people and triggered as much as $15 billion in damage…
And most recently, In December 2022, the Lebanese parliament failed for the eighth consecutive time to elect a new president, as a majority of lawmakers opposed the options laid on the table.
The prolonged power vacuum only exacerbates the situation, as Beirut is currently unable to enact sweeping reforms demanded by international lenders as a condition for releasing billions of dollars in loans.
All of which has sent the ‘parallel’ FX rate to a stunning 60,000/USD (compared to the official Pound – often nicknamed ‘Lira’ – rate of 1500/USD)…
As Reuters reports,Zombie banks have frozen depositors out of tens of billions of dollars in their accounts, halting basic services and even prompting some customers to hold up tellers at gunpoint to access their money.
Not a week goes by without Lebanese depositors storming their own banks in a desperate attempt to access savings frozen after the country’s economy collapsed.
Banks began imposing draconian limits on withdrawals and transfers in 2019, leaving depositors able to access only a fraction of their savings in dollars and Lebanese pounds.
The National has recorded 27 depositor bank “heists” since the start of the year, including armed and unarmed hold-ups and sit-ins.
Former director-general of the Ministry of Finance Alain Bifani estimated that $6 billion was “smuggled” by bankers outside Lebanon for the political and economic elites while they were blocking transfers abroad for ordinary people.
“These forced withdrawals — we do not call them heists, because this would imply that these depositors are stealing other people’s money — are a solution of last-resort after the exhaustion of all possible ways for depositors to recover their money,” said lawyer Fouad Debs, co-founder of Lebanese Depositors Union.
People and businesses now operate almost exclusively in cash.
The local currency in circulation ballooned 12-fold between Sept. 2019 and Nov. 2022, according to banking documents seen by Reuters.
With more bank notes in circulation, crime has risen. Elie Anatian, CEO of security firm Salvado, said yearly sales of safes had grown steadily, with a 15% increase in 2022.
And that has seemingly forced officials’ hands as Reuters reports that Lebanon will adopt a new official exchange rate of 15,000 pounds per U.S. dollar on Feb. 1, central bank governor Riad Salameh said, marking a 90% devaluation from its current official rate that has remained unchanged for 25 years.
The shift from the old rate of 1,507 to 15,000 is still far off the parallel market rate of around 60,000.
Salameh said the change to 15,000 was a step towards unifying multiple exchange rates, in line with a draft agreement Lebanon reached with the International Monetary Fund last year that set out conditions to unlock a $3 billion bailout.
Nassib Ghobril, chief economist at Lebanon’s Byblos Bank, said the pound’s continuing decline meant the cash economy was now also dollarised, “with dollars accounting for approximately 70-80% of operations”.
“The transformation to a cash economy means the collapse of the economy,” said Mohammad Chamseddine, an economic expert at Lebanese research group Information International.
The IMF deal is widely seen as the only way for Lebanon to begin restoring confidence in its financial system and recover from the collapse.
However, as we previously noted,there have also been fights in supermarkets as people try to buy bread, sugar, oil, and other goods before they run out, with inflation 400 percent, the report said.
Murder rates and other crimes are also rapidly rising.
The economic collapse could reduce the country into a failed state, experts have warned.
“Not only do we have an absence of government and a political vacuum, but we’re going to have a severe problem with the function of the state of Lebanon,” Lebanese American University political scientist Imad Salamey told The Wall Street Journal. “We are heading toward the unknown.”
Europe’s benchmark gas prices have rebounded this week as traders closed short positions at the expiry of the front-month contract and some weather forecasts suggested colder weather in northern and central Europe next week than previously expected.
The Dutch TTF benchmark price jumped by 11% at over $65 (60 euros) per megawatt-hour (MWh) at the opening of trade in Amsterdam on Tuesday, extending small gains from Monday and recovering some of the losses from last week, when prices slumped by 17%.
On Monday, the prices were supported by short covering and an unplanned outage at a Norwegian gas processing plant. However, wind power generation is still expected to be strong, which could curb some demand for gas-fired power generation.
But next week, temperatures could be lower than initially expected, which would boost demand for household heating. Colder spells are set to return to northern and central Europe next week, according to weather models by Maxar Technologies Inc, cited by Bloomberg.
Still, the record gas prices in Europe could be behind us, according to ING’s revised outlook on natural gas for this year.
“Mild weather and weak industrial demand have ensured that gas storage has remained strong. The region should get through this winter comfortably and prospects also look better for the 23/24 winter,” Warren Patterson, Head of Commodities Strategy at ING, said on Monday.
The bank expects the TTF price to average around $65-70 (60-65 euros) per MWh over the first half of 2023—around current levels, before increasing to $81-87 (75-80 euros) per MWh over the second half of the year.
“The more comfortable storage situation does put Europe in a better position to handle the 2023/24 winter. It certainly isn’t looking as dire as it did just several months ago. Therefore, prices do not need to go as high as originally expected going into the next heating season,” ING’s Patterson said.
Former UK Defense Minister Says NATO May Need To Send Ground Forces To Ukraine
The “domino theory” was once used to great effect in order to manipulate the American public into supporting the Vietnam War, but will the same narrative work to get the west to support World War III with Russia?
Former UK Defense Minister Sir Gerald Howarth seems to think so as he uses this exact claim to justify NATO boots on the ground in Ukraine.
FORMER DEFENSE MINISTER OF UK SAYS NATO FORCES MAY NEED TO FACE RUSSIA ON THE GROUND pic.twitter.com/7LJ3Nksniq
It should be noted that a large percentage of the American populace and most of Europe have no interest whatsoever in engaging with Russia and possibly its allies in all out war, but the establishment appears intent on forcing the issue anyway. The delivery of NATO tanks and the possibility of longer range missiles will no doubt trigger a wider response from Russia, which will then be used by NATO as a reason to escalate further.
At the very least, Howarth does admit what many in the alternative media have been saying for some time – That Ukraine’s efforts have ground to a halt without further support from NATO troops. The deliveries of money and weapons are nothing more than a stop-gap; wars are won by men.
The former minister suggests that Ukraine is essentially too big to fail and that NATO cannot allow Russia to prevail in the region, otherwise they will be emboldened to strike other nearby nations. There is zero evidence to support this argument, but it is clear that NATO talking heads are desperate to drum up some kind of public fervor.
Are western citizens willing to fight and die for Ukraine? It’s highly unlikely.
Russia’s pipeline gas exports to Europe slumped to a new monthly record-low in January, falling by nearly 30% from December due to lower prices on the spot market, according to Reuters calculations.
Russia’s gas giant Gazprom has seen exports to Europe decline since the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year as Russia cut off gas supplies to a number of countries in Europe. Russia cut off supply to Poland, Bulgaria, and Finland in April and May, slashed gas deliveries via Nord Stream to Germany in June, then off Nord Stream supply in early September.
Russia still sends some gas via pipelines to Europe via one transit route through Ukraine, and via TurkStream.
This month, Gazprom has reduced pipeline gas transit flows to Europe via Ukraine on some days. Analysts have said that the lower pipeline flows were the result of lower demand for gas under long-term contracts, considering the milder weather in parts of Europe earlier in January and the fact that spot supply is currently cheaper.
Per Reuters calculations, which are based on daily data of flows from Russia via the transit route through Ukraine and via TurkStream, pipeline gas exports from Russia to Europe dropped to around some 1.8 billion cubic meters (bcm) in January, down from 2.5 bcm in December.
Gazprom hasn’t released January export data yet, but its exports to Europe via pipelines plunged to a post-Soviet low in 2022, according to data from the Russian firm calculated by Reuters. Last year’s Russian gas exports slumped by 45% year on year to reach 100.9 bcm in 2022.
Germany, Russia’s biggest customer of gas before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, doesn’t import any Russian gas via pipeline now. Norway became Germany’s single-largest natural gas supplier in 2022, overtaking Russia, as total German gas imports dropped by 12.3% compared to 2021.
China’s state-run medicare program recently failed to reach an agreement with Pfizer to import more Paxlovid, claiming the COVID-19 treatment drug is too expensive. This is despite the drug being offered to the state at a reduced rate in comparison with that offered to other developed countries. Lack of Paxlovid will leave only Azvudine, an anti-HIV drug the Chinese communist regime rushed through development and re-branded as an anti-COVID drug, as a treatment option.
Given the recent explosive spread of COVID and the resulting skyrocketing rates of hospitalization, finding viable treatment options is paramount.
Ivermectin in India and Peru
When the Delta variant broke out in 2021 across India, many states offered ivermectin population-wide. The efficacy of ivermectin in treating early and mild COVID-19 infections was confirmed in large states such as Uttar Pradesh—home to 241 million residents—where the use of the prophylactic dramatically reduced both the infection rate and the death toll.
Even among frontline health care workers, ivermectin proved to be an effective prophylactic against COVID-19. One study with 3,532 frontline health care workers from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences Bhubaneswar found that two doses of oral ivermectin (300 μg/kg given 72 hours apart) as chemoprophylaxis among health care workers reduced the risk of COVID-19 infection by 83 percent in the following month.
In Peru, mass ivermectin treatments were conducted through a broad-scale effort called Mega-Operación Tayta, or MOT for short. Operation MOT was led by the Peruvian army and involved 10 states, where the excess death rate saw a sharpdecline with an average of 74 percent over 30 days. In 14 states where ivermectin was administered locally, the mean reduction in excess deaths over 30 days compared with deaths was 53 percent.
Lima, the capital of Peru, where the distribution of ivermectin was restricted, saw only a 25 percent reduction in excess deaths. The findings of researchers, detailed in the diagram below, show infection numbers, deaths, and fatalities across Peruvian states which implemented ivermectin (blue) and those which did not (red). The conclusion is that a reduction in deaths correlated with the distribution of ivermectin with a statistically significant p-value of less than 0.002.
Ivermectin was discovered in Japan during the late 70s as a derivative of Avermectin, produced from a single organism isolated at the Kitasato Institute in Tokyo. Since then, ivermectin has played an immeasurable role in improving the lives of billions with its humble beginnings as an anti-parasitic drug.
Ivermectin, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and deployed worldwide since 1987, has made major inroads against two devastating tropical diseases—onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis. In addition, some topical forms of ivermectin are approved to treat external parasites like head lice and skin conditions such as rosacea.
In addition to its anti-parasitic effects, a 2022 study published in the European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry Reports found that ivermectin has a strong potency at low concentrations against many DNA and RNA viruses, including HIV-1, yellow fever, malaria, West Nile virus, Zika, dengue fever, etc.
According to the study, ivermectin has an amazing inhibitory effect across multiple species and can interrupt motility and reproduction in both arthropods (such as insects) and nematodes (such as roundworms). This explains why ivermectin is prescribed for parasite infections, and also sheds light on its potential as a prophylactic against vector-borne diseases. In insects and other arthropods specifically, it can interrupt the transmission of disease.
Ivermectin’s Potential Mechanisms Against COVID
SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that takes over host cells to multiply in the body. To enter the host cells, the virus binds to the ACE-2 receptor on the surface of cells which grants them entry. Ivermectin prevents the bonding process by interfering with the virus’s spike proteins—this is the same mechanism the vaccines use.
If the virus slips past the cell membrane, its top priority is to infiltrate the brain of the cell—the DNA-containing nucleus—to start mass-producing itself. SARS-CoV-2 latches itself onto a special class of transport proteins called IMPs that have enough security clearance to enter the nucleus. In the case of a viral infection, ivermectin binds to these transport proteins and halts the interaction.
Ivermectin also inhibits the nuclear transport mechanism mediated by the KPNA-1 protein, which has a similar effect when compared with IMPs. Both proteins can enter the nucleus and ivermectin can effectively stop the virus from getting to the nucleus. In the event that the virus does manage to invade the nucleus—ivermectin also has a backup plan.
For example, when the virus has taken over and initialized self-replication, it does so through a protein called RdRp, which is at the centerpiece of viral replication—and is directly inhibited by ivermectin with very high efficacy.
Ivermectin Could Reduce Severe Lung Damage in COVID Patients
Once COVID-19 reaches later stages, it may require intensive care for recovery. For example, white lung syndrome (a hallmark symptom of acute respiratory distress syndrome) now occurring in severe COVID infections in China, is a sign that the virus has deeply infected the lungs and may have caused cytokine storms (a severe immune reaction in the body) in patients.
Other complications that arise from COVID-19 involving the lungs are conditions such as pulmonary fibrosis and hypoxia. Hypoxia occurs when the virus infects lung tissue to the extent that the alveoli, tiny sacs of air at the end of lung branches responsible for oxygen exchange, become scarred causing a severe loss of oxygen in the body.
Cytokines and chemokines are responsible for inflammation, a natural immune system response to foreign invaders. However, a large number of cytokines released into the body all at once can cause a “cytokine storm,” wherein the body is flooded with armies of white blood cells that harm the body.
A cytokine storm can be triggered through the TLR-4 pathway by the virus. The same pathway also triggers the release of nitric oxide, causing fluid leaks, dilating blood vessels, or even sepsis and fluid buildup in the lungs.
“It’s Going To Be Spicy”: UPS Faces Upcoming Union Fight, Spike In Labor Costs
United Parcel Service (UPS) is facing a spike in labor costs after a union contract expires in July, along with a possible strike which would throw package delivery into chaos if the company isn’t willing to meet the new demands.
The Teamsters union, which represents 340,000 UPS employees, says the company needs to boost wages for part-time workers to over $20 an hour and eliminate a controversial two-tiered wage system, Bloomberg reports. Employees are also demanding air conditioning in vehicles as well as blocking inward-facing cameras that monitor drivers.
“We’ve got some great arguments on why these folks should be paid,” said Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, who has promised members a hard fight. “We’ve got a great argument just on how much money the company’s been making.”
In short, UPS CEO Carol Tomé has quite the problem on her hands. The company delivers 20 million packages a day in the US alone – making it the second-largest ground courier behind the US Postal Service. An employee strike would make it likely impossible for USPS and rival FedEx to make up for the volume from UPS customers – particularly Amazon.
A Bloomberg notes, a strike would have a much greater impact than it did in 1997, when UPS workers walked out for 15 days.
“It’s pretty clear that it’s going to be spicy,” said Morgan Stanley analyst Ravi Shanker, who has an underweight rating on the stock. Shanker has predicted UPS may increase compensation as much as 10% a year.
Under the current contract set to expire in June, UPS had been benefiting from predictable labor costs, which shielded the company from wage spikes which have hurt FedEx – and which gave UPS a temporary advantage during the pandemic, when the demand for home-delivery surged.
UPS is hopeful (or at least spinning it that way) that they can come to a speedy agreement with the Teamsters.
“We have more alignment on key issues with the Teamsters than not. That’s especially true with respect to maintaining industry-leading pay and benefits, and delivering the best service in the industry with the best safety record,” said a spokesperson to Bloomberg in an emailed statement.
UPS argues that it already pays its workers, especially drivers, much more than competitors. The average wage for a delivery driver with at least four years on the job is $42 an hour, not counting pension and health benefits, the company says. A typical wage for an experienced driver at rival FedEx Ground, depending on the region, is $20 an hour and usually comes with no benefits. The company also added 72,000 Teamsters jobs in three years through August 2021, which is more than was pledged under the current contract. UPS has about another 100,000 US workers who aren’t unionized. -Bloomberg
That said, the company’s ratio of compensation to sales is the lowest it’s been in at least 25 years.
According to O’Brien, the starting wage for part-time workers should jump from $15.50 per hour to $20, in order to attract more part-time workers. He also has a broader goal of organizing more warehouse workers, including at Amazon, and intends to showcase the upcoming UPS contract as a shining example of the leverage organized labor has over employers.
“We’re going to use the UPS agreement as a template to basically say, this is what you get when you work for a unionized carrier,” he said.
Days ago marked 50 years since the signing of the Paris Peace Accords which effectively ended American participation in the Vietnam war. One of the consequences, according to Georgetown University international affairs scholar Charles Kupchan, was that an “isolationist impulse” made a “significant comeback in response to the Vietnam War, which severely strained the liberal internationalist consensus.”
As the Cold War historian John Lamberton Harper points out, President Jimmy Carter’s hawkish Polish-born national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, scorned his intra-administration rival, the cautious, gentlemanly secretary of state Cyrus Vance as “a nice man but burned by Vietnam.” Indeed, Vance and a number of his generation carried with them a profound disillusionment in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. And for a short time, the “Vietnam Syndrome,” (shorthand for a wariness and suspicion of unnecessary and unsupportable foreign interventions) occasionally informed American policy at the highest levels and manifested itself in the promulgations of the Wienberger and Powell Doctrines which, in theory anyway, represented a kind of resistance on the part of the Pentagon to unnecessary military adventures.
But such resistance didn’t last long. Only hours after the successful conclusion of the First Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush declared, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” And kick it Bush did: In the decades following his 1991 pronouncement, the United States has been at war in one form or another (either as a belligerent or unofficial co-belligerent—as is the case with our involvement in Saudi Arabia’s grotesque war on Yemen) for all but two of the 32 years that have followed.
Yet the atmosphere that now prevails in Washington makes it exceedingly difficult to believe such a thing as a “Vietnam Syndrome” ever existed. Indeed, President Joe Biden’s handling of the war in Ukraine has been met with rapturous approval from the Washington establishment, winning plaudits from all theusualsuspects.
But can the Biden policy truly be credited as a success when the entire ordeal might have been avoided by judicious diplomatic engagement? Are we really to believe that the war which so far has resulted in 8 million refugees and roughly 200,000 battlefield deaths has been worth a promise of NATO membership for Ukraine?
While the war has seemingly ground to a stalemate, the legacy media and various and sundry think-tank-talking-heads have been busy issuing regular assurances of regime change in Moscow and steady progress in the field with victory soon to come:
Writing in the Journal of Democracy this past September, political scientist and author of The End of History and The Last Man Francis Fukuyama exulted: “Ukraine will win. Slava Ukraini!”
Washington Post reporter Liz Sly told readers in early January that “If 2023 continues as it began, there is a good chance Ukraine will be able to fulfill President Volodymyr Zelensky’s New Year’s pledge to retake all of Ukraine by the end of the year—or at least enough territory to definitively end Russia’s threat, Western officials and analysts say.”
Also in early January, the former head of the U.S. Army in Europe, Lt. General Ben Hodges told the Euromaidan Press that, “The decisive phase of the campaign…will be the liberation of Crimea. Ukrainian forces are going to spend a lot of time knocking out or disrupting the logistical networks that are important for Crimea…That is going to be a critical part that leads or sets the conditions for the liberation of Crimea, which I expect will be finished by the end of August.”
Newsweek, reporting in October 2022, informed readers by way of activist Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of the Russian parliament, that “Russia is not yet on the brink of revolution…but is not far off.”
Rutgers University professor Alexander J. Motyl agrees. In a January 2023 article for Foreign Policy magazine titled ‘It’s High Time to Prepare for Russia’s Collapse’ Motyl decried as “stunning” what he believes is a “near-total absence of any discussion among politicians, policymakers, analysts, and journalists of the consequences of defeat for Russia…considering the potential for Russia’s collapse and disintegration.”
And this week comes word, courtesy of Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of the once realist National Interest magazine, that “The German decision to send tanks to Ukraine is a turning point. It is now clear that Vladimir Putin signed the death warrant of his regime in invading Ukraine.”
As Gore Vidal once quipped: “There is little respite for a people so routinely—so fiercely—disinformed.”
Conspicuous by its absence in what passes for foreign policy discourse in the American capital is the question of American interests: How does the allocation of vast sums to a wondrously corrupt regime in Kiev in any way materially benefit everyday Americans? Does the imposition of a narrow, sectarian Galician nationalism over the whole of Ukraine truly constitute a core American interest? Does the prolongation of a proxy war between NATO and Russia further European and American security interests? If so, how?
RAND Corporation identifies chief “impediment” to ending the Ukraine war: “The centrality of Western assistance”
Causing misperceptions similar to what prolonged World War I, they say
An amazing acknowledgment from the Pentagon’s in-house Think Tank, but will be largely ignored pic.twitter.com/xk0aO42hnx
In truth, the lessons of Vietnam were forgotten long ago. The generation that now populates the ranks of the Washington media and political establishment came of age when Vietnam was already in the rearview mirror. The unabashed liberal interventionists who staff the Biden administration cut their teeth in the 1990s when it was commonly believed that the U.S. didn’t act often enough, notably in Bosnia and in Rwanda. As such, and almost without exception, the current crop of foreign policy hands now in power havesupported every American mis-adventure abroad since 9/11.
The caution which, albeit all-too-temporarily, stemmed from the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ is today utterly absent from the corridors of power in Joe Biden’s Washington.
The Vietnam Syndrome is indeed kicked: Dead and buried.
Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Bill Gates again responded to questions about his relationship with sex offender financier Jeffrey Epstein, saying that “there was never any relationship.”
“I had dinner with him and that’s all,” Gates said in response to a question from an Australia Broadcasting Corporation reporter. When pressed further, Gates said that “there never was any relationship of any kind” after being asked if there is a connection between Epstein and the Gates Foundation.
The reporter, Sarah Ferguson, asked if he regretted the relationship, saying that it went against the wishes of his ex-wife, Melinda. “You’re going way back in time. But yeah, I will say for the, you know, over [the] hundredth time that I shouldn’t have had dinners with him,” Gates said in the interview, published Jan. 30.
Ferguson noted that Epstein was involved in “sexually compromising people” and asked whether his ex-wife warned him about that. “No,” Gates said.
Tucker drops shocking new footage of Bill Gates in PANIC after Jeffrey Epstein relationship called out on LIVE TV pic.twitter.com/VVy4qzdhbc
Gates, one of the wealthiest people in the world, was asked in 2021 by PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff about whether he had a connection to Epstein or not. Gates at the time provided similar answers but stated that he had “dinners” with Epstein, whereas in Australian TV interview, he said that he had “dinner” with him.
“What did you know about him when you were meeting with him, as you said yourself, in the hopes of raising money?” Woodruff asked Gates
“You know, I had dinners with him. I regret doing that,” he replied. “He had relationships with people he said, you know, would give to global health, which is an interest I have. You know, not nearly enough philanthropy goes in that direction.”
Gates conceded at the time that “those meetings were a mistake.”
“You know, that goes back a long time ago now, so there’s nothing new on that,” Gates added.
Pressed further by Woodruff, the Microsoft mogul asserted: “You know, I’ve said I regretted having those dinner, and there’s nothing … absolutely nothing new on that.”
Melinda French Gates, his former wife, told CBS in 2022 that she wasn’t happy that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein. “I wanted to see who this man was, and I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door,” she said at the time. “He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. I had nightmares about it afterwards. My heart breaks for these young women.”
Before the CBS interview aired, Bill Gates told news outlets that his meeting with Epstein “was a mistake that I regret deeply” and was “a substantial error in judgment.”
Gates told The Times of London in May that those dinners were a part of efforts to fundraise but “didn’t result in what he purported, and I cut them off.” He added, “At the time, I didn’t realize that by having those meetings it would be seen as giving him credibility. You’re almost saying, ‘I forgive that type of behavior,’ or something.”
Epstein Details
Epstein, who was convicted in 2008 after pleading guilty to soliciting a prostitute who was a minor, died in August 2019 while he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Officials found him hanged inside his Manhattan jail cell, triggering widespread speculation about his cause of death.
The New York City Medical Examiner’s office at the time ruled that Epstein, 66, committed suicide by hanging himself with his bedsheets. But in early 2020, Michael Baden, a forensic pathologist who previously worked for the same medical examiner’s office, alleged Epstein’s death was “more indicative of homicide” after graphic photos of his death were made public.
A former associate and girlfriend of Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, was found guilty in 2021 of child sex trafficking in connection to the former financier. She was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in prison and is currently serving time in Florida’s low-security FCI Tallahassee prison.
During a recent phone interview with a British television show, Maxwell suggested that Epstein didn’t kill himself.
“I believe that he was murdered,” Maxwell said in a Talk TV interview published on Jan. 23. “I was shocked. Then I wondered how it had happened because as far as I was concerned, he was going to—I was sure he was going to appeal.”
Over the years, Epstein was reportedly known to have powerful friends and acquaintances, including politicians, business magnates, celebrities, and high-powered lawyers—further adding to the speculation around his jailhouse death.
Biden Promotes EV Hummer That Pollutes More Than Gas-Powered Sedan
President Biden’s 70-person social media team tweeted a photo of the president in the new Hummer EV. They celebrated the president’s push to ‘electrify and greenify’ America.
On my watch, the great American road trip is going to be fully electrified.
And now, through a tax credit, you can get up to $7,500 on a new electric vehicle. pic.twitter.com/n3iZ9etL4A
The president has signed an Executive Order that sets a new target to make about half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 zero-emissions vehicles. The main idea behind the EV push is to “cut emissions,” according to the Executive Order.
Though there’s a dirty side to clean energy, one of these inconvenient truths is the very EV the president is sitting in pollutes more than a typical gasoline-powered sedan, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE).
ACEEE revealed the inconvenient truth about the Hummer EV in a report last year:
Emissions per mile driven are lower for EVs than for similarly sized gasoline-powered cars, but they are not zero. The Chevy Bolt EV is responsible for about 92 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) per mile when accounting for emissions from the electric grid. (The CO2 calculations are based on the national average, but electric grid emissions vary considerably across the country.) The gasoline-powered Chevy Malibu causes over 320 grams per mile. Comparing larger vehicles, the original Hummer H1 emits 889 grams of CO2 per mile and the new Hummer EV causes 341 grams, demonstrating that behemoth EVs can still be worse for the environment than smaller, conventional vehicles.
ACEEE continued:
The environmental impact of EVs isn’t just about the electricity generated to power each mile. The manufacturing process also causes the release of greenhouse gases at several stages, known as the embodied emissions of the vehicle. EVs in particular—with heavy battery packs—use minerals that need to be mined, processed, and turned into batteries.
The pursuit of greater driving range and larger vehicles require increasing battery size, also increasing embodied emissions. Mining the minerals used for batteries has a significant impact on the environment and can have negative social impacts, including the well-documented human rights abuses surrounding the mining of cobalt, an important mineral for many EV batteries. More-efficient EVs need less battery to have the same range, which means fewer emissions and fewer of the problems associated with mining the minerals.
Perhaps the people in power aren’t that bright after all … there’s an inconvenient truth to EVs, especially larger ones, such as the Hummer.
And by the way, there’s a lot of disconnect between what the average working-class person can afford. Most folks can’t afford a $100k EV.
