(Headline USA) The lead singer of the Four Tops said a Detroit-area hospital restrained him and ordered a psychological exam after refusing to believe that he was part of the Motown music group.
Alexander Morris, 53, filed a lawsuit Monday against Ascension Macomb–Oakland Hospital in Warren, Michigan, alleging racial discrimination and other misconduct during an April 2023 visit for chest pain and breathing problems.
Hospital staff “wrongfully assumed he was mentally ill when he revealed his identity as a celebrity figure,” the lawsuit says.
The Four Tops started in the 1950s and had hits such as “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)″ and “It’s The Same Old Song.” The group was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.
Morris is not an original member, but he joined the group in 2019.
The lawsuit says a nurse finally believed Morris was in the Four Tops and the psychological exam was canceled.
The hospital offered a $25 gift card as an apology, but Morris refused to accept it, the lawsuit says.
“We remain committed to honoring human dignity and acting with integrity and compassion for all persons and the community,” the hospital said in response to the lawsuit. “We do not condone racial discrimination of any kind. We will not comment on pending litigation.”
Morris talked publicly about the incident last year, saying he had returned to Detroit, his hometown, and was “being told that I’m insane or schizophrenic.”
(Ken Silva, Headline USA) As President Joe Biden compares average MAGA supporters to neo-Nazis at home, his administration is apparently set to arm a literal neo-Nazi unit in Ukraine.
The Washington Post reported Monday that the Biden administration has lifted a ban on arming Ukraine’s infamous Azov Battalion after a review found “no evidence” that it’s involved in human-rights violations.
The Azov Brigade was reportedly founded in 2014 amidst the CIA-backed coup in Ukraine to fight pro-Russia separatists in the Donbas. In 2015, it was absorbed by Ukraine’s National Guard.
U.S. Embassy officials have confirmed that “the 12th Operational Purpose Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine” (the official name the 12th Special Forces Brigade Azov of the National Guard of Ukraine) has passed the vetting required by U.S. law and is eligible to receive… pic.twitter.com/8grhFzbRvT
“The military unit’s founder, Andriy Biletsky, is known for his neo-Nazi and white supremacist rhetoric,” antiwar.com explained in a Tuesday article.
“In 2014, Biletsky was also the leader of an ultra-nationalist organization known as the Social National Assembly (SNA), which dissolved in 2015.”
Headline USA has documented Azov’s ties with U.S. neo-Nazis.
One of the more prominent U.S. neo-Nazis, Blood Tribe leader Christopher Pohlhaus, went as far as briefly planning a compound in Maine to train American extremists to fight for Ukraine against Russia.
However, it’s doubtful whether American neo-Nazis will be keen to fight in Ukraine now that their brothers can receive U.S. arms. But as it became increasingly clear last year that hundreds of thousands of white Ukrainian males have been sent to the slaughter for the benefit of Western war hawks, Pohlhaus abandoned his plans to build a compound and said he and his friends are less zealous in their support for Biden’s proxy war.
“I will still continue to support the struggle of the people there,” Pohlhaus reportedly said on Telegram last November.
“I’m not going to allow our guys, my guys’ efforts and blood to go towards [the war].”
The Guardian reported in January that Pohlhaus’s sentiment is shared by the wider neo-Nazi movement, which is now more focused on Israel and more local issues.
“Within the wider web of neo-Nazi militancy, Ukraine chatter has all but evaporated with the conflict in Gaza and domestic issues outshining what was once a well-followed world event,” the Guardian reported.
“In September, a prominent far-right publication, linked to the disbanded American neo-Nazi terror group Atomwaffen Division, boldly declared that the war not only ‘doesn’t matter anymore to us,’ but it would ‘like to refocus’ on American issues,” the Guardian added.
(Headline USA) The U.S. House of Representatives voted 208-208 Wednesday to pass a resolution holding Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over audio of President Joe Biden’s interview in his classified documents case.
The move comes just weeks after the White House blocked release of the recording to lawmakers following an earlier subpoena. Special counsel Robert Hur cited the interview as forming much of the basis for his decision not to criminally charge Biden, whom he deemed unfit to stand trial.
Hur spent a year investigating the president’s improper retention of classified documents, from his time as a senator and as vice president. The result was a 345-page report that questioned Biden’s age and mental competence but recommended no criminal charges for the 81-year-old.
With Democrats now campaigning heavily over the spurious show trial in a Manhattan kangaroo court that convicted presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump on 34 felony counts, the demand for greater clarity as to why Biden has eluded accountability may be even more amplified.
However, the corrupt DOJ claims it cannot permit transparency in this case because the public would not be capable of discerning the actual recording it released from a doctored copy, and there was no workaround solution that it could come up with to prevent manipulation by artificial intelligence.
Despite the outlandishness of the DOJ’s novel “executive privilege” claim, it remained uncertain prior to the vote that House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., could garner enough support on the floor to pass the contempt resolution.
Republicans have the slimmest of majorities, which meant that any bill that lacking Democratic support—like the contempt resolution—can quickly collapse if even a few Republicans defect.
Even if the resolution were to pass, it would likely be a strictly symbolic one as it would be the DOJ itself that would be handed the decision whether to prosecute. Two of Garland’s recent predecessors, Eric Holder and William Barr, have both been charged with contempt of Congress by Houses in which the other party had the majority.
Still, giving himself a free pass will pose another awkward moment for Garland in his dubious claims of equal application of the law after having charged Trump allies Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro for their refusal to heed subpoenas in the sham Jan. 6 committee. Both, like the DOJ, cited executive privilege.
The White House’s decision to exert executive privilege over the audio recording, shielding it from Congress, makes a criminal case against Garland more difficult, although the legal precedent that they themselves established with Trump has substantially eroded many of the protections that previous presidents enjoyed.
Garland has defended the Justice Department, claiming officials had gone to extraordinary lengths to provide information to the committees about Hur’s investigation, including a transcript of Biden’s interview with him that appeared to be selectively edited.
“There have been a series of unprecedented and frankly unfounded attacks on the Justice Department,” Garland complained in a press conference last month, while ignoring the underlying reason for those criticisms. “This request, this effort to use contempt as a method of obtaining our sensitive law enforcement files is just most recent.”
(Chris Powell, Money Metals News Service) Headlines like this have been pummeling the monetary metals sector in recent days: “Gold Is Getting So Expensive That Even China’s Central Bank Stopped Buying.”
According to this particular report:
China’s central bank gold-buying streak has been a major driver of prices that hit record highs recently. However, it looks like gold has gotten so expensive that even the People’s Bank of China is taking a break.
On Friday official data showed China’s gold holdings were unchanged in May from the prior month — which means the central bank did not buy gold.
The PBoC’s pause has left gold ‘vulnerable to more downside pressure,’ wrote Ewa Manthey, a commodities strategist at ING Bank, on Monday. …
China’s central bank gold buying had actually started to slow in April when it bought just 60,000 troy ounces of the precious metal. That was down from 160,000 ounces in March and 390,000 ounces in February.
Before its pause in purchases last month, the PBoC had been snapping up gold for 18 straight months, making it the world’s largest institutional buyer. …
Mainstream financial news organizations don’t yet seem to notice that official statements about gold reserves are, to put it politely, not reliable.
That the People’s Bank of China did not report acquiring gold in May does not mean that the bank or the Chinese government did not actually acquire gold in the month. It meant only that the central bank did not report acquiring gold in May. The bank or other agencies of the Chinese government could have acquired huge amounts of gold in May and simply not reported them — perhaps because China wanted to knock the price down abruptly to make acquisitions easier and less expensive, or wanted to oblige pressure from the United States not to push the gold price up so fast.
We have been here before.
In April 2009 China caused a sensation by announcing that its gold reserves had increased by 76%, from 600 tonnes to 1,054 tonnes. For the previous six years, China had been reporting to the International Monetary Fund, the compiler of official gold data, only 600 tonnes. Had China acquired those 454 new tonnes only in the year prior to the April 2009 announcement?
That’s unlikely. That much official buying in a year or less almost certainly would have manifested itself in price action or comment by market participants. It’s far more likely that China acquired the 454 tonnes reported in April 2009 over at least several years, largely by purchasing the production of China’s own fast-growing gold mining industry, but didn’t announce it or report it to the IMF. The metal may have been in the solid possession of the Chinese government but kept on the books of state-owned commercial banks or government entities other than the central bank. That would have been easy to arrange.
So for as many as six years, the official gold reserve data about China was way off.
The next year, 2010, the same thing happened in Saudi Arabia. In June 2010 the World Gold Council reported that Saudi gold reserves had increased by 126%, from 143 to 323 tonnes, in just two years. That the world’s top oil exporter had made such a new commitment to gold in its foreign exchange reserves also caused a sensation. It implied a reduction of Saudi loyalty to the petrodollar.
But a few weeks after the announcement of the spurt in Saudi gold reserves, the governor of the Saudi Arabia Monetary Authority, Muhammad al Jasser, insisted to news reporters in Kuwait that Saudi Arabia had not recently purchased the gold cited in the June reports but rather had held that extra gold all along in what he called “other accounts. ” That is, held the metal in accounts not reported officially — just as the true status of China’s gold accounts had not been reported officially for six years.
Official fudging about gold reserves continued this year as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell refused to answer the question posed by U.S. Rep. Alex Mooney, R-West Virginia, as to whether any foreign custodial gold recently had been repatriated from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Powell ignored Mooney’s letter for a while. Eventually, the Fed chairman was compelled to acknowledge it but he simply ignored the question about repatriation.
The secret IMF report establishes not only that central banks are surreptitiously intervening in the gold market through swaps and leases but also that no official central bank gold data is any good. The IMF allows its members to count their leased and swapped gold as if it is still sitting in their vaults, unencumbered, when the gold may have left the vaults or have multiple claims on it.
That is, the secret IMF report shows that central bank gold reserves are double-counted or worse.
The exaggerated response of the gold price to the recent reports that China had stopped buying gold in May showed again that while central banks and governments have the power to create and deploy infinite amounts of money, this is not their greatest power. Their greatest power is their command of mainstream financial news organizations, which never pose or press the most obvious critical questions about gold but report only what central banks and governments want reported.
Maybe those news organizations sense, or maybe they have been frankly told, what central banks and governments know: that the true size, location, and disposition of national gold reserves are secrets far more sensitive than the true size, location, and disposition of nuclear weapons. For nuclear weapons can only destroy the world, while the control of gold means the control of all financial valuations everywhere — the value of all capital, labor, goods, and services – since the value of gold is the inverse of the value of government currencies.
If it ever knew where all the official gold really was and how it was really being deployed, the world would be nearly free. Not even nominally democratic governments want that.
Chris Powell is a political columnist and former managing editor at the Journal Inquirer, a daily newspaper in Manchester, Connecticut, USA, where he has worked since graduating from high school in 1967. His column is published in newspapers throughout Connecticut. He is also secretary/treasurer of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc., (GATA) which he co-founded in 1999 to expose and oppose the rigging of the gold market by Western central banks and their investment bank agents.
The White House plans to give work permits and deportation protections to certain illegals through the immigration parole authority, as long as they have spouses who are American citizens, CBS News reported.
The “parole in place” policy could also make illegals eligible for permanent U.S. residency and citizenship.
It is unclear how the Biden administration plans to pass the policy since the president of the United States doesn’t have the unilateral authority to declare people American citizens since the naturalization process is governed by federal law and requires the approval of Congress.
The anonymous sources — two current U.S. officials, two former officials and a congressional official — said the final details of the Biden administration’s proposal have not been approved or finalized, adding that the plan would likely benefit longtime illegals who have been living in the country for many years, instead of the recent criminals.
A grant of parole in place would allow illegals married to American citizens to obtain temporary work permits and legal status and overcome a rule in U.S. immigration law that prohibits illegals from getting permanent legal status if they were not officially admitted or paroled into the U.S.
If they meet other requirements, the anti-American law would give illegals who are married to American citizens a chance to become permanent U.S. residents without having to leave the country. Green cards for spouses of American citizens are unlimited and green card holders may apply for U.S. citizenship several years after getting the document.
One of the reasons why Biden would want to do something like this is to allow more people to vote for him and bring some of the American Latino voters back to the Democratic Party.
(Headline USA) MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow claimed this week that she is worried former President Donald Trump will throw her in “one of his camps” if he wins the White House in November.
“I’m worried about the country broadly if we put someone in power who is openly avowing that he plans to build camps to hold millions of people, and to ‘root out’ what he’s described in subhuman terms as his ‘enemy from within.’ … He’s not joking when he says this stuff, and we’ve seen what happens when people take power proclaiming that kind of agenda,” she whined.
Maddow then suggested that Trump might throw his political rivals in “massive camps” along with illegal immigrants.
“What convinces you that these massive camps he’s planning are only for migrants?” Maddow continued. “I’m worried about me — but only as much as I’m worried about all of us.”
After efforts to detain illegals in facilities built by the Obama administration drew performative backlash, Trump ultimately was able to negotiate a deal with Mexico to continue hosting asylum seekers as they awaited their hearings, eliminating the need for such camps except for those who illegally crossed the border and were awaiting deportation.
Maddow—a vocal proponent of the debunked Russia-collusion hoax and other false stories about Trump—continued her rant by predicting that Trump would not simply go after “well-known liberals” but everyone who had unkind thoughts about him.
“When Trump invokes the Insurrection Act to deploy the U.S. military against civilians on his first day in office, do you think he then rescinds the order on day two?” she asked. “If every election is a new opportunity for him to go to prison, do you think he allows us to have new elections?”
The question raised a valid point that Trump himself has made in his argument to the U.S. Supreme Court while contending that presidents should be afforded some degree of immunity in order to do their job without fear of partisan reprisal.
Maddow is the latest leftist to publicly speculate about a hyperbolic “revenge” crusade if Trump wins in November. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., also claimed that she wouldn’t be surprised if Trump tried to imprison her.
“It sounds nuts, but like, I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy threw me in jail,” she said last week.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald, himself a red-pilled liberal, joked that Trump’s master plan was likely to force Maddow to “share a cell” with Ocasio-Cortez in “domestic concentration camps” that he “forgot to build during the four years of his recent presidency.”
He added: “Those two brave dissidents are major threats to institutional power and imprisoning them is Trump’s top priority.”
Trump's plan is for Maddow to share a cell with AOC in his domestic concentration camps (the camps he forgot to build during the 4 years of his recent presidency).
Those two brave dissidents are major threats to institutional power and imprisoning them is Trump's top priority: https://t.co/6WkwkG2rKZ
Many have noted the Left’s lack of self-awareness in panic-mongering over Trump’s reprisal at the very same time that they are continuing to wage lawfare attacks against him and attempt to jail him for purely partisan reasons.
Trump’s 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, even suggested recently that if Democrats were to win the election, Trump supporters might need a “formal deprogramming.”
In response, former President Donald Trump’s campaign and leftist media outlets have voiced their thoughts on the guilty verdict, which came after years of the DOJ slow-walking the criminal investigation, a failed sweetheart deal and a broader web of alleged illegal activities currently facing Hunter Biden.
On the Trump side, campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called the trial a “distraction” from the real crimes allegedly committed by the “Biden Crime Family,” including the receipt of payments from foreign countries.
“Crooked Joe Biden’s reign over the Biden Family Criminal Empire is all coming to an end on November 5th, and never again will a Biden sell government access for personal profit,” Leavitt wrote in a statement.
On Tuesday, Hunter Biden was found guilty on three felony counts in what prosecutors described as a reckless criminal act about a gun purchase.
Joe Biden—who has been shielded by his own DOJ from potential prosecution—defended Hunter Biden in a press statement. “So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery,” he wrote.
The leftist media—which has been implicated in shielding the Biden family from scandals—unsurprisingly rushed to defend Hunter Biden with overwhelmingly positive coverage.
On MSNBC, there was discussion about Joe Biden potentially pardoning his son.
“Joe Biden had the power to stop this if he chose to,” lamented anchor Chuck Todd on Tuesday. “If he chose to pervert the rule of law, he could’ve done that but he chose not to do that.”
"Joe Biden had the power to stop this if he chose to."
As compiled by conservative media watchdog Media Research Center, below are some examples of the legacy media’s coverage of the verdict:
CNN's Paula Reid announces Hunter Biden being found guilty on three felony accounts like she is speaking at a funeral service. pic.twitter.com/PBtdezCSvw
ABC was seemingly upset that the guilty verdicts were read without Jill Biden in the courtroom and seemed to huff about a juror smiling before the verdict was read. pic.twitter.com/TZ5nl0OJHe
Jon Karl admits that while President Biden claimed he was not going to pardon Hunter, "I am sure there are some interesting conversations happening right now inside the Biden family and at the White House." pic.twitter.com/ptqQbYD4dz
(Headline USA) The View host Ana Navarro claimed this week that President Joe Biden is “the most religious president” she can remember.
Navarro was responding to former President Donald Trump’s warning to Christian voters last week that Biden and the Democratic Party were “against your religion.”
She insisted that just because Biden doesn’t adhere to Christian doctrine on several issues, such as abortion, that he is still a “church-going practicing Catholic.”
Navarro added, “It’s crazy for [Trump] to say Democrats are against religion at a time when we are led by Joe Biden, who, in my lifetime, is the most religious president I can recall.”
She went on to blast evangelical voters who continue to support the former president.
“I think a lot of evangelicals crossed that bridge already and they did so in 2016 after they voted for Donald Trump after they heard him boast about sexual assault on video and on tape,” she said.
Trump’s appeal to Christian voters came during an address at the Life & Liberty Forum on Monday.
“You just can’t vote Democrat. They’re against religion. They’re against your religion in particular,” Trump said to the Christian group, according to Politico.
This isn’t the first time Trump has blasted the Democratic Party for being anti-Christian.
“How any Christian can vote for a Democrat, Christian or person of faith, how you can vote for a Democrat is crazy. It’s crazy,” Trump told attendees at the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) International Christian Media Convention in February.
Biden has been called out by several leaders of the Catholic Church for advocating policies that directly contradict Catholic teaching.
Citing Biden’s support of abortion in particular, Washington D.C.’s Archbishop Cardinal Wilton Gregory called Biden a “cafeteria Catholic” and said he is out of step with the church.
Bishop Robert Gruss of the Diocese of Saginaw agreed, saying he pities Biden.
“I don’t have any anger towards the president. I feel sorry for him. I’m not angry at him, he’s just stupid,” Gruss said.
Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Harrison Butker was one of the most notable recent examples to call him out during a commencement address where he slammed Catholic leaders who failed to actually adhere to doctrine.
“Our own nation is led by a man who publicly and proudly proclaims his Catholic faith, but at the same time is delusional enough to make the sign of the cross during a pro-abortion rally,” Butker said referencing a controversial gesture Biden made at a Florida event.
(Headline USA) President Joe Biden responded to news of Hunter Biden’s felony conviction on Tuesday by saying he was “so proud” of his son and that he will “respect” the jury’s conviction.
Hunter Biden was found guilty on all three felony gun charges reluctantly brought by special counsel David Weiss over Hunter’s illegal purchase of a firearm in 2018. Hunter’s legal team must now decide whether to appeal the outcome.
In a statement released shortly after the verdict was handed down, Biden attempted to appeal to other families whose loved ones have struggled with addiction.
“Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today. So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery,” the president said.
He added, “I am the president, but I am also a Dad. I love our son … I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal.”
Notably, the president did not raise the idea of a presidential pardon, though he has denied that he would use his executive authority to pardon Hunter Biden.
However, even CNN has questioned the sincerity of Biden’s pledge.
“Let’s wait and see what happens if he loses,” CNN’s Chris Wallace said last week.
Commentator Jonah Goldberg agreed, predicting that if Hunter’s conviction resulted in prison time, Joe Biden would be more likely to issue a pardon, regardless of his previous promise not to.
“If he does get a real prison sentence, despite your endearing faith in Joe Biden’s word, Joe Biden will pardon his son to spare him a prison sentence after the election one way or the other,” Goldberg said.
Biden also has the authority to commute the sentence without technically pardoning his son.
(Headline USA) The New York Times finally published a “fact check” of President Joe Biden’s lies on Sunday, but it downplayed them as “tall tales” that either “stretch the truth or are downright false.”
The Times cited several examples of stories Biden has told that have been proven to be false, including his claim that he marched in civil rights protests, that he drove an 18-wheeler truck, that he was the first in his family to go to college, and that his uncle died of cannibalism.
“Mr. Biden persists in telling personal tales with rhetorical flourishes and factual liberty when he works a room or regales an audience,” Times reporter Linda Qiu wrote.
Qiu went on to excuse Biden for his use of “hyperbole,” arguing that he exaggerates to try to connect with different audiences, such as during a speech he gave at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, when he falsely claimed he was nominated to attend the U.S. Naval Academy.
The Times also downplayed Biden’s frequent lies about his participation in the 1960s civil rights movement.
“For decades, Mr. Biden has occasionally suggested that he played a greater role in the civil rights movement than he actually did,” the outlet said.
“While there is corroboration of Mr. Biden’s participation in a few desegregation events, he has also said he would not consider himself an activist in the movement,” it continued. There is no evidence that he was ever arrested.”
Biden has boasted previously about having been on friendly terms with pro-segregationist Democrats during his early years in the U.S. Senate, suggesting that his level of commitment to civil right was not a top priority.
Unsurprisingly, the Times also went on to emphasize that “Biden’s penchant for exaggerating details when recounting episodes form his life … differ in scale and significance from the stream of lies about a stolen election peddled by his opponent, former President Donald Trump.”
The fact check, which appears to be the first the Times has released on Biden, comes after months of tension between the outlet and the Biden campaign.
Biden’s team reportedly has blasted the Times for its negative coverage of the president, while the Times has rebuked Biden’s campaign publicly for its lack of media access.
