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Science vs politics: Kiwi’s long road to EU health-claim approval
In August 2025, Zespri, the world’s largest marketer of kiwifruit, announced that the European Commission had approved what it described as the first health…
Marjorie Taylor Greene Has the Most Bizarre Response to Upcoming Eclipse
Politics tamfitronics
Between the 4.8 magnitude earthquake that rocked a swath of the Northeast on Friday and the general solar eclipse anticipated just a few days later, conspiracy theorists are abounding with fodder. But a few of the people leading the mass speculation are far too close to national politics for comfort.
Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—who famously claimed that Jewish attach lasers had been the reason on the support of the California wildfires–got dangerously non secular on Friday, posting on social media that the 2 geological occasions needs to be heeded as an omen from God.
“God is sending the United States strong signs to tell us to repent,” Greene wrote on X. “Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our nation listens.”
That account was quickly amended by the platform’s community notes feature, which clarified that “Monday’s eclipse was predicted years in advance, and it could not have been caused by recent actions,” and that “earthquakes occur naturally and occur (on average) more than 30 times a day worldwide, even if many are too subtle to feel.” But flagging the facts did not stop Greene’s claim from gaining traction online and circulating through the far-right ecosystem.
Greene did not comment on what it might mean that the earthquake’s epicenter was just a few miles from Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
But Greene isn’t the most attractive fundamental figure of the American correct on board with this. Earlier in the week, InfoWars proprietor Alex Jones argued that Monday’s photo voltaic spectacle shall be a authorities “costume rehearsal” for enacting martial law, which he predicts will occur if Donald Trump wins the election in November.
“All right, this is a dress rehearsal,” Jones said on his podcast. “No authorities in unusual situations… have ever acted like this for a solar eclipse.”
Eclipses and other seismic phenomena have long conjured spiritual and conspiratorial speculation dating back to ancient times, so, in fact, the theories—and the people trying to profit or materially benefit from them—are nothing new.
“There are so many of them,” cult mediation specialist, Patrick Ryan, said to Salon. “There are the purveyors like Alex Jones, who make money off these, then religious people, who put together a narrative that can somehow make sense of the world, and it’s not new.”
Aloof, it may maybe perchance even be time to remind ourselves of the necessity of the U.S. Structure’s establishment clause: the separation of church and order.
More on Marjorie Taylor Greene:
A group of House Democrats came up with the best response on Friday to a Republican-backed measure to rename the Washington, D.C.-area Dulles International Airport after Donald Trump.
Whether or not it was an act of sycophancy or plain trolling, House Republicans launched a bill last week to rename the airport to Donald J. Trump World Airport. House Democrats weren’t pleased with the measure, the airport’s inducement of bother notwithstanding.
Among them was Representative Gerry Connolly, who said“Donald Trump faces 91 criminal charges. If Republicans want to name something after him, I’d suggest they choose a federal prison.”
On Friday, Connolly, whose Virginia district borders Dulles, decided to put his words into action, co-sponsoring a bill with Representatives Jared Moskowitz and John Garamendi to rename Miami Federal Correctional Institution in Florida to Donald J. Trump Federal Correctional Institution.
“When our Republican colleagues launched their bill to rename Dulles after Donald Trump, I said the more fitting chance may be to rename a federal penal complex,” Connolly said in a statement. “It is only fitting that the closest federal penal complex to Mar-a-Lago should have his name. I hope our Republican colleagues will join us in bestowing upon Donald J. Trump the most fitting honor he truly deserves.”
The name change may be fitting, considering Trump’s numerous criminal charges. He is on trial in New York for hush money payments, in Florida for mishandling classified documents, and in Fulton County, Georgia, as well as Washington, D.C., for attempting to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. In February, he was ordered to pay the State of New York more than $350 million for bank fraud.
“All individuals knows President Trump likes to jot down his title in gold letters on all his buildings,” Moskowitz said. “But he’s by no plot had his title on a federal constructing earlier than, and as a public servant, I beautiful are searching for to help the conventional president. Abet us accomplish that dream a actuality.”
Trump’s Florida and Washington, D.C. cases occur to be in federal court, making a federal prison the more appropriate place to have his name. At the state level, Trump only has a walk down, depressed excuse for a state park in New York named after him.
On why naming an airport after Trump can even be acceptable:
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy said Friday that a fundraising email issued earlier in the week that described January 6 rioters as “activists” was an error—but he still believes the events did not amount to a “proper riot.”
“It is rather clear that a number of the January 6 protestors broke the law in what may have started as a protest but turned into a riot. Because it happened with the encouragement of President Trump, and in the context of his belief that the election was stolen from him, many people see it not as a riot but as an insurrection,” Kennedy wrote in a statement. “I have not examined the evidence in detail, but reasonable people, including Trump opponents, tell me there is little evidence of a true riot. They note that the protestors carried no weapons, had no plans or ability to seize control of government, and that Trump himself had urged them to protest ‘peacefully.’”
But that is not correct, even from a cursory review of images from the day. The rioters who ransacked their way through the halls of Congress did indeed wield weapons, including baseball bats, hockey sticks, fence rebar, flagpoles, pepper spray, and bear spray, U.S. Capitol Police Sergeant Aquilino Gonell told CNN in 2021. The rioters also used more deadly force, by firearms, knives, stolen police shields, stun guns, fire extinguishers, and even hand-to-hand combat, which sent more than a dozen Capitol Police officers to the hospital.
Despite Kennedy’s insistence that Trump “urged” peace, the former president also ignored pleas from his children and aides to call off the mob, even as hundreds of his supporters chanted “Hang them all” while looking down at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence.
But these fundamental facts are, it seems, inconsequential to Kennedy, who argued that prosecuting those who broke the law amounted to “harsh treatment” that he might be willing to investigate via special counsel if elected president.
“Both establishment parties are using J6 to pour gasoline on the fire of America’s divisions,” Kennedy wrote. “Each side claims that a victory by their opponents means the end of democracy. Then, anything else is justified to stop them. We risk destroying democracy in order to save it.”
But conservative strategists say this kind of rhetoric is exactly where Democrats should double down. On Thursday, a former senior adviser to President George W. Bush criticized Trump’s own language on the subject, suggesting that the GOP presidential nominee’s staunch defense of the “sons of bitches” should disqualify him from the presidency.
“If [Democrats] had been clear, they’d have robbed the January 6 and worked hard at it,” Karl Rove told MSNBC. “And they would say, ‘He wants to pardon these folks that attacked our Capitol.’ I worked in that building as a young man. To me, the Congress of the United States is one of the greatest examples of the power of our democracy and a jewel of the Constitution.”
More on Kennedy’s claims:
The Department of Labor released its first-quarter report for jobs in the US on Friday, and the results were much higher than expected with nearly 303,000 jobs created. Good news for the country, right? Well, not according to the Fox Business Channel.
In a panel discussion about the report, host Maria Bartiromo wondered aloud if the numbers were too strong for cutting interest rates.
“Or is it an even number, but is it too strong for rate cuts?” — Maria Bartiromo wonders if the economy is TOO strong pic.twitter.com/qjGMVhjKpi
—Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 5, 2024
And then other panel members, such as economist Joseph A. LaVorgna and Steve Moore, a former Trump economic adviser, tried to downplay the numbers by pointing out the growth in government jobs, as well as government spending.
“Ah!” — Maria and her panelists love it when a talking head disparages the strong jobs report by linking it to growth in government jobs. They’ve hit on an important talking point! pic.twitter.com/oV6ZWLpMau
—Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 5, 2024
To top it all off, the panel even came up with an answer to credit Donald Trump indirectly, wondering “if maybe the market is pricing in somewhat, and employers too, the idea that maybe we’re going to get a new president in November,” Moore said.
“I wonder if maybe the market is pricing in somewhat, and employers too, the idea that maybe we’re gonna get a new president in November” — Maria Bartiromo and company have an answer to give Trump credit for the strong Biden economy. Unbelievable! pic.twitter.com/fIkonoBvC8
—Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 5, 2024
For much of Joe Biden’s presidency, his administration has been fighting an uphill battle trying to win over voters on the state of the economy, which conservative outlets like the Fox Business Channel certainly haven’t helped. These latest jobs numbers are more evidence that Biden has been better for the economy than Trump, no matter how many conservative media talking heads are trying to pretend otherwise.
At around 10:23 a.m. Friday morning, a magnitude-4.8 earthquake shook the Northeastern United States from Maine to Virginia, including large parts of New Jersey and New York City.
But in all likelihood more surprising than the earthquake became the specific attach of the epicenter: Tewskbury, Contemporary Jerseyno longer as a lot as six miles from Trump Nationwi de Golf Membership in Bedminster, Contemporary Jersey.
And rapidly, the rep became all shaken up. Some commenters pointed out that Donald Trump’s first wife, Ivana, became buried on the club in July 2022.
Now they assert that the center of the earthquake became Trump’s nation club in Contemporary Jersey. Pointless to protest, you know what that plot.. pic.twitter.com/9iJepStRAy
— Johnny Reno (@JohnnyReno) April 5, 2024
Breaking – A shrimp earthquake has hit Contemporary Jersey including Trump’s golf route pic.twitter.com/ZtM8ciQOS7
— TheRealThelmaJohnson (@TheRealThelmaJ1) April 5, 2024
It gets more fresh: One poster even came all the plot thru that Chubb Insurance coverage, which backed Trump’s bond in his defamation case, has an govt topic of labor in Whitehouse Set up, Contemporary Jersey, additionally inside a six-mile radius of the epicenter and the golf club. Alina Habba, one of Trump’s attorneys, additionally has offices nearby.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene saw religious and political significance in the aftermath of the earthquake.
There’s no indication of what she thinks of Trump being so closely tied to the epicenter.
Representative Jamie Raskin’s office criticized House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer on Friday, urging him to explain why the leaders of the impeachment probe are failing to share evidence with other committee members.
Two weeks previously, Comer and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan accused the CIA of obstructing a prison investigation by “intervening” in an interview with Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Kevin Morris, performed by the Department of Justice—but in step with Raskin, the 2 lawmakers are refusing to portion fundamental substances.
“Your March 21 letter appears to be but another episode in the Committee’s gullible campaign to amplify the vacuous claims of sad Trump World figures and international disinformation and propaganda operators,” Raskin wrote in a letter obtained by The Contemporary Republic.
What’s more, “you have fully overlooked my staff’s requests to be allowed to identify the records that you claim precipitated your letter and upon which your letter is putatively and entirely based. This refusal to share Committee material with the Minority creates the unavoidable implication that this knowledge—like so many self-collapsing precursor tips in this Sisyphean quest for a scandal—cannot withstand even the most cursory scrutiny by the Committee’s Democratic Members,” Raskin said, arguing that the claims “directly conflict” with the testimony of an Internal Revenue Service special agent and Morris himself, each of whom said the lawyer cooperated with authorities.
But Comer’s troublingly opaque accusation earned more suspicion when Russian state media picked up the recount—the 2nd such instance of Russian intelligence inserting itself into the GOP’s impeachment inquiry.
Raskin noted that the “timely and unquestioning” article published in Sputnik, a Russian-owned outlet, included statements supporting the impeachment inquiry from “two discredited Trump World figures”—Rudy Giuliani associate Bradley Birkenfeld and former psychiatrist and Fox News contributor Keith Ablow.
“One can only regard with amazement how quickly Sputnik identified these Trump World commentators to boost this new tale!” Raskin said.
Comer, meanwhile, has already admitted that the impeachment was a dud. Last week, the Oversight chair confessed that criminal referrals had been the only accountability that the meritless, wayward probe was going to achieve. That is, clearly, a far cry from its original aim, which was to remove Joe Biden from office.
“It’s clear that Democrats will prioritize their party over their country and the facts at every turn. They should be ashamed of themselves,” Comer wrote in a fundraising email in March. “That’s why I am preparing criminal referrals as the outcome of my investigation.”
So far, Republicans have not presented any witnesses or concrete evidence demonstrating criminal wrongdoing by the president. The committee’s key witness, Alexander Smirnov, served as the sole source for claims that Biden had profited millions from his son’s connection to Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. But that claim, which House Republicans had believed was their best chance to implicate Biden, completely collapsed in February when Smirnov was indicted by the Department of Justice for lying to the FBI. Since then, Smirnov has reportedly admitted to law enforcement that senior Russian intelligence officials were involved in the smear campaign against the sitting president.
Meanwhile, the general witnesses that Republicans have called, claiming that their testimony will blow the case wide open, have instead debunked each accusation against the Biden family.
With social media, service providers, tracking cookies, and all kinds of personal identifiers online today, it may be difficult to protect your privacy. But you’d think a national security official would know better. As it turns out, one of Israel’s top intelligence chiefs doesn’t.
Yossi Sariel has unintentionally revealed himself as the commander of Israel’s Unit 8200, one of the most sensitive roles in the nation’s military, heading up a major surveillance agency. He left his identity exposed online due to publishing a book on Amazon, The Guardian reported.
When publishing the book, Sariel unintentionally linked it to a personal Google account in his name. The Google account came with a specific ID, as well as links to calendar profiles and maps.
In its report, The Guardian was able to verify with multiple sources that Sariel wrote The Human Machine Group, which concerns the use of artificial intelligence in military operations. Sariel had published the book under the pen name “Brigadier General YS.”
The e book, released in 2021, discusses the A.I. systems for the time being in exhaust by the Israel Defense Forces of their brutal battle in Gaza. The machine became described in November by one normal intelligence officer as constructing a “mass assassination manufacturing unit,” and a more most unusual characterize detailed an absence of oversight and lax protections against casualties.
It’s further criticism of Unit 8200, which has been compared to Britain’s GCHQ and the United States’ National Security Agency. The unit was criticized for failing to anticipate and prevent Hamas’s October 7 attacks on southern Israel, which killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and resulted in 240 hostages being taken. Since then, Israel has conducted a large-scale military campaign in Gaza, killing more than 33,000 people, including 13,000 children, and has faced renewed criticism for its bombing of a World Central Kitchen convoy that killed seven aid workers.
A uncommon, 4.8 magnitude earthquake struck Contemporary Jersey on Friday, rattling denizens the general plot from the Garden Convey to Massachusetts. But almost presently after the tremors settled, Contemporary Yorkers had beautiful one thing on their minds: What the hell became Mayor Eric Adams going to protest about this?
“The first thing I thought of was how alarming it is that Eric Adams is the Mayor while there was an earthquake. Because if we need that man to put together a plan or a response or anything else, we are all doomed,” wrote PodSaveThePeople host DeRay Mckesson.
Utterly different Contemporary Yorkers aged the different to rag on their mayor for his reliance on hiring more cops as a supposed acknowledge to the general metropolis’s complications.
“Eric Adams is about to send 500,000 cops to the earth’s core,” posted Maysles Documentary Center’s guest programmer, Kazembe Balagun.
“Eric Adams is sending 1,000,000 more cops to the subway stations to address this earthquake as we keep in touch,” wrote comedian Otto Fernandez.
Or for his tangential and repetitive speeches which drag on too long and repeatedly rely on the same proverbial crutch of comparing the city to … just about anywhere else that’s struggling.
“Eric Adams said New York City is the San Andreas Fault of the United States,” wrote Politico’s Jeff Coltin.
“Bracing myself for what our insane mayor will say about the earthquake,” posted journalist Rebecca Fishbein. “Eric Adams: ‘That’s what I love about New York. You wake up every day and a new small business can open or the magic crystals beneath us can get excited and shake the whole city.’”
Or for his reported nightlife dependence.
“Eric Adams easy on the club, belief the earthquake became heavy bass,” wrote entertainment editor Marlow Stern.
Actually, the metropolis issued a delayed response, notifying New Yorkers that slight injury had occurred inside the city during the ancient geological event.
“Our preliminary reports do not indicate fundamental life safety or infrastructure complications from the earthquake. We are conducting thorough inspections of critical areas,” Adams posted to his personal account more than an hour after the quake occurred, warning New Yorkers about the effects of aftershocks—after the period in which they are most likely to occur had ended.
At his Wisconsin rally on Tuesday, Donald Trump taunted President Joe Biden with an empty lectern on stage, claiming he’s been “trying to get him to debate“. But his allies don’t appear to have a very clear idea of what Trump could actually attack him on.
In a Newsmax interview on Thursday, Trump’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, Lara Trumpsuggested the most effective way to prompt Biden into another one-on-one with Trump might be to level this kind of wildly vague accusation that she said … amounted to almost nothing.
“Joe Biden should be asked various questions about a wide range of issues happening in this country and around the world. He has numerous answers to give the American people,” Trump said on Newsmax Thursday. “I can only assume he doesn’t have the answers to the questions he will be asked.”
Lara Trump: Biden has numerous answers to give the American people. I can only assume Biden doesn’t have the answers to the questions he will be asked. pic.twitter.com/TGGHb0culU
— Acyn (@Acyn) April 5, 2024
Donald Trump has so far refused to participate in any debates this election cycle. Undoubtedly, he generally tried to upstage Republican primary debates with counterprogramming of his own.
Trump hand-picked Lara Trump and former North Carolina GOP Chairman Michael Whatley to replace former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel last month. The pair have confirmed the final nail in the coffin for a GOP MAGA makeover.
And their support comes at a critical juncture for the Republican presidential nominee, who’s struggling to pay for a legal reckoning that to this point entails more than half a billion dollars in judgments and mountains of cash for his four upcoming criminal trials.
Even after bragging about his sources and methods got him in legal trouble, Donald Trump simply can’t quit.
After a tough week for his new social media enterprise, Trump Media & Technology Group, or TMTG, the former president said on his Truth Social post Thursday about how well the platform is doing—at least, in his view. But Trump also may have broken some Securities and Exchange Commission rules in the process.
SEC laws prohibit the use of “manipulative and deceptive devices” to inflate shares. Trump’s boasting in the face of heavy losses by his company also may fall under that category, Trump critic George Conway tweeted Thursday afternoon.
The Truth Social posts in question can even be seen as the former president seeking to boost his company to increase its stock price after a tough week. Trump Media’s initial public offering started strong last week, reaching a high of $79.38 per share. But then, SEC filings released on Monday showed that the company had losses in 2023 of a whopping $58 million, with only $4.1 million of revenue. Then, on Wednesday, two of the company’s top executives pleaded guilty to using the company’s private data to engage in insider trading.
This means that, TMTG’s stock price has dropped sharply. It currently sits at just below $43 a share. To make matters worse, stock traders are short-selling the company, betting its share prices will fall even further.
Trump has a long history of bragging about his financesand ended up in serious trouble when a New York court ruled that he committed bank fraud and issued a final judgment of a $350 million penalty for inflating his net worth and lying about the value of his various real estate holdings. His most recent posts about one of his newest business ventures appear to follow that pattern. Trump absolutely cannot afford any new legal troubles right now, especially when he already struggles to pay the legal payments for the cases he already has.
Originally reported by newrepublic.com. Adapted for our readers.
