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John Dean, a White House counsel to former President Richard Nixon, used just two words to describe the raft of unsuccessful appeals that former President Donald Trump has filed in his futile attempts to delay the start of his criminal hush money trial. “I think these appeals now, everybody knows, are frivolous, they’re desperate,” Dean told CNN’s Boris Sanchez on Wednesday. The four-time-indicted presumptive GOP presidential nominee “doesn’t want this case to go on before he has to face the voters,” Dean added. “And it is not going to help his campaign contrary to any thoughts that he pretends that...

Jodie Foster took a humorous jab at Gen Z during a recent interview with The Guardian, saying they’re especially annoying to work with. Gen Z, the generation directly proceeding millennials, comprises those born after 1996 and through 2010. “They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster told the publication. “They’re like, ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10:30 a.m.’ Or, like, in emails, I’ll tell them this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like, ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’” This isn’t to say that...

Michael Cohen, former personal attorney of Donald Trump, compared the former president’s rhetoric and demands for unquestioning loyalty to the language in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi manifesto in an interview Sunday. “Right out of ‘Mein Kampf,’” Cohen said, agreeing with MSNBC host Ali Velshi, “which allegedly Donald used to keep on the side of his table.” Cohen issued a warning to Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, the two defendants charged alongside Trump in the case involving his handling of national security information and alleged obstruction. Invoking his own experience with loyalty to Trump, Cohen said his advice would be to...

Former CIA Director and retired U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus said in a new interview that Russia can still inflict destruction upon Ukraine, but Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot reverse Ukrainian gains in the four regions Moscow recently annexed. “I think he’s literally out of moves,” Petraeus told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble.

Bob Menendez (D-NJ), the powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unafraid to break with his party, has been a thorn in President Joe Biden’s side over several policies and decisions. Biden became acquainted with Menendez’s propensity for making matters difficult for presidents of either party, especially those who do not value Congress’s role in crafting U.S. foreign policy, when he served as vice president.

A New York father decided to pull his daughter out of a New York City private school because of the school’s woke race-based curriculum and move to Florida.“Little children don’t need to feel bad about the color of their skin,” Harvey Goldman told Fox & Friends First on Monday. “That’s what they’re teaching them, to feel bad about who they are.”“Schools are supposed to be teaching you confidence,” he added. Goldman also said that most parents and even teachers are “scared to say something.”According to Goldman, the Heschel School in Manhattan is “teaching these young children about having white privilege”...

ERBIL (Kurdistan24) – Citing “security reasons,” Turkey’s top electoral board decided on Sunday to move some ballot boxes in at least 19 provinces from which the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) traditionally gets most of its votes, party officials said. Moving or merging the boxes meant that hundreds of thousands of voters in different villages, towns, and city centers would have to go elsewhere to cast ballots instead of their local polling stations on June 24, the day Turkey’s challenged President Recep Tayyip Erdogan set for snap general and presidential elections. On Saturday, HDP lawmaker Mithat Sancar of Mardin visited...

Representatives of President-elect Donald Trump are challenging recount motions in Pennsylvania and Michigan, according to Politico. “Despite being no more than a blip on the electoral radar, Stein has now commandeered Pennsylvania’s electoral process, with an eye toward doing the same to the Electoral College,” the complaint filed Thursday states. “There is no evidence — or even an allegation — that any tampering with Pennsylvania’s voting systems actually occurred.” Green Party candidate Jill Stein is responsible for pushing the recount efforts in those states, and called Trump’s motion “outrageous.” “The recount in Michigan, which has been driven by an outpouring of grassroots support...

Typhoon Usagi came closest to Taiwan yesterday afternoon and is moving away from the nation in the direction of Hong Kong, but heavy rainfall is still expected to continue throughout today, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. As of 7:15pm, Typhoon Usagi had weakened slightly, with its center 140km southwest of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻). The wind speed near its center was 48 meters per second in a radius of 280km and the typhoon was moving west-northwest at 19kph. The bureau said that the land alert for Usagi may possibly be lifted as soon as this morning. The center of the typhoon...

the Obama administration prepared for a possible military response by moving naval forces closer to Syria. Obama discussed the situation in Syria by telephone with British Prime Minister David Cameron, the White House said. It was Obama's first known conversation with a foreign leader about Syria since the reports this week that hundreds of Syrians had been killed by the alleged chemical attack in a suburb of Damascus, the capital.

JPL video here

Update: 1:49PM NORTH Korea has reportedly been seen moving a long-range missile in to position for launch. South Korean Yonhap news agency reports that North Korea's new KN08 Musudan missile has been spotted in the process of being transported towards the Sea of Japan. The KN08 Musudan is still under-development and it is unclear if it has the range to reach the United States mainland. Previous assessments have given it a range of 4000km - potentially enough range to reach Guam.

President Obama sat down yesterday with a cadre of far-left foreign policy writers, several of whom regularly lambast the state of Israel, to get advice on a range of critical foreign policy issues, among them Afghanistan, Israel, and NATO, according to press accounts. The group of nine included several writers who promulgate fringe views about the state of Israel, advocate in favor of divestment from Israel, and describe the Jewish State as an “apartheid” state—views that are also endorsed by the most extreme anti-Israel advocates. Liberal author Peter Beinart—who has compared Israel to the segregated South and advocates boycotting areas

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama is bombarding Americans with job initiatives that may lack economic heft but show him as an activist leader compared to a 'do-nothing' Congress as he campaigns for re-election in 2012. Obama will have rolled out three separate measures in three days when he wraps up a tour of electorally vital western states on Wednesday, and more moves are coming. White House Communications Director Dan Pfieffer said the Democratic president will use executive orders and other tools to deliver initiatives "on a consistent basis for months to come." "While the policy benefits of this new...

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday night, just hours before the president's State of the Union address, began the legislative process of forcing the House-passed health care repeal bill to the Senate floor for a vote. Typically, only the leaders in the chamber use this procedure, which gets around committee action. It's a way for members to bring a bill before the Senate without the support of the Majority Leader. McConnell's Democratic counterpart, Harry Reid of Nevada, has vowed that no such repeal vote will occur,

In a move to counter the House Republicans’ planned vote to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care law this week, the White House on Tuesday released data showing that half of all Americans under the age of 65 have pre-existing conditions and could be denied coverage if reform is weakened. Republicans quickly dismissed the study as a political stunt. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that from 50 million to 129 million Americans have some type of pre-existing condition and would be protected by the Affordable Care Act when it takes full effect in 2014. Those numbers represent...

The National Commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Richard Eubank, has moved to amend his organization's bylaws to dissolve its PAC, which is run independently. The PAC endorsed Democratic incumbents starting with Nancy Pelosi based on their votes on a relatively small number of votes to do with veterans in a year when many VFW members are siding against Democrats on broader policy concerns, and the PAC has already refused the VFW's entreaty that it "rescind" its endorsement. "[T]he recent endorsement decisions have, in fact, harmed the VFW’s reputation and future ability to fulfill our mission," writes Eubank in...

The idea that President Obama is anti-business broke into the mainstream this week. It has long been a widely held view on the right that Obama’s rhetorical nods to the free market and American business were little more than that. But as Washington slowly staggered back to work this week following a long July 4 weekend, discussions of Obama’s troubled relationship with the private sector popped up with surprising frequency. Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria wrote Monday that after speaking with numerous corporate executives, most of whom voted for Obama, he found that “all think he is, at his core, anti-business.” Tuesday,...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- It could soon cost California shoppers at the checkout aisle if they forget to bring their own bags to the grocery store. Legislation passed Wednesday by the California Assembly would prohibit grocery stores, pharmacies, liquor stores and convenience stores from giving out plastic bags.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - Sarah Palin has taken to her Facebook page to complain about her new neighbor—a writer penning a book about her. Author Joe McGinniss has taken up residence in a house next to Palin's lakeside home in Wasilla. McGinniss previously wrote a critical expose on Palin and her natural gas pipeline plan for the Conde Nast publication Portfolio last year, and is planning a book about the former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential candidate. It's tentatively titled, "Sarah Palin's Year of Living Dangerously" and could be on the shelves in the fall of 2011.