News and Headlines: In The News, Politics, World News, Commentary/Opinion.
In The News:
NYPD hunts suspects in disturbing attacks on officers caught on video
Chief Rodney Harrison tweeted out a video that showed one officer being hit over the head with a red fire extinguisher, before zooming in on pictures of the suspects.
The clip, which appeared to be a mashup of footage from recent riots around the city, then showed an officer being hit on the head from behind before another cop was struck with a metal chair.
“Anyone with information in regard to the identity of these individuals is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-(8477) TIPS or DM, @NYPDTips,” he added.
Pro-Police ‘We Back Blue’ Event Marches in D.C.
Opponents of the “Defund the Police” movement marched around Washington, DC, Saturday morning to voice their support for law enforcement.
Rayshard Brooks killing: Former Atlanta Officer Garrett Rolfe charged with murder, could face death penalty
“We’ve concluded, at the time Mr. Brooks was shot, that he did not pose an immediate threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or officers,” Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard Jr. said at a news conference Wednesday.
Rolfe will face at least 11 charges, Howard announced — including felony murder and aggravated assault.
The charges include counts in connection with a stray bullet that struck a bystander’s occupied vehicle.
Man accused of attacking NYC woman, 92, was released with tickets in past 3 arrests: sources
Rashid Brimmage, 31, is a registered sex offender who has been arrested 103 times, including for allegedly sexually abusing a 13-year-old. But he was given a court date for his three most recent arrests instead rather than be held in police custody until arraignment.
He was busted most recently on Tuesday and charged with assault against the 92-year-old woman, whom he shoved on the afternoon of June 12 in the Manhattan neighborhood of Gramercy.
Brimmage is due to appear before a judge later Wednesday, when bail will be set. But this year alone, he’s been arrested at least three other times, a law enforcement source said.
He was previously nabbed on March 5, Feb. 17 and Feb. 4, each time for assault, among other charges, but was given a DAT every time, according to sources and criminal reports.
Aunt Jemima brand retired by Quaker due to racial stereotype
Just hours later, the owner of the Uncle Ben’s brand of rice says the brand will “evolve” in response to concerns about racial stereotyping.
Quaker, which is owned by PepsiCo, said it’s overhauled pancake mix and syrup will hit shelves by the fourth quarter of 2020.
PepsiCo also announced a five-year, $400 million initiative “to lift up black communities and increase black representation at PepsiCo.”
Caroline Sherman, a spokeswoman for Mars, which owns Uncle Ben’s, says the company is listening to the voices of consumers, especially in the black community, and recognizes that now is the right time to evolve the brand, including its visual identity.
Seattle police officers will only enter CHOP if matter of ‘significant life-safety,’ mayor says
“The Seattle Police Department’s definition of life-safety issues may include an active shooter incident, an assault, a structure fire, significant medical emergency (i.e. heart attack, stroke, trauma) and other incidents that threaten a person’s life safety,” the office of Mayor Jenny Durkan said on Tuesday.
City officials and organizers occupying the area previously called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or the CHAZ, reached an agreement to remove temporary roadblocks set in place by protesters and replace them with concrete barriers, reducing the size of the zone from about seven city blocks to just three.
The Seattle Department of Transportation began at 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday to remove a tent barrier at 10th and Pine Street and replace it with a sturdier concrete barrier to improve public safety. The concrete was topped with plywood crowns to be decorated by protesters.
Tucker: Google tries to censor content it disagrees with
Commentary/Opinion:
Google is acting directly to shape what people can say and where they’re allowed to speak.
Politics:
DOJ Plans To Roll Back Tech Monopoly Legal Protections Over Left-Wing Speech Policing
The Justice Department announced plans Wednesday to make legislative recommendations for changes to the legal protections surrounding big tech companies.
The decision comes just a day after Google Ads attempted to demonetize The Federalist over “race based content” and just a month after President Trump signed an executive order with intentions to curb the cut back on the protections after alleged censorship of conservative news outlets.
Lawmakers in Congress are already examining ways to crack down on big tech censorship. On Wednesday, Sen. Joshua Hawley (R-M0.) along with Sens. Marco Rubio, Mike Braun, and Tom Cotton debuted new legislation that would allow “users who believe the provider is not ‘operating in good faith’ by consistently and fairly applying its content rules could sue for $5,000 and attorneys’ fees.”
GOP Senators Introduce Bill Empowering Americans To Sue Big Tech Companies Censoring Political Speech
Just hours after media reports shined a light on a new DoJ legislative recommendation to hold tech giants accountable for censoring political speech and discriminating against conservatives.
The “Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act,” will force tech companies like Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet to bind themselves to “good faith” standards of impartiality outlined as follows:
Users could sue the major Big Tech companies for breaching their contractual duty of good faith.
The duty of good faith would contractually prohibit Big Tech from:
Twitter Tried To Ban Tom Cotton For Demanding Rule Of Law During Riots
“First on television, then on Twitter, I noted that the National Guard and active-duty troops could be called out to support local police if necessary, as happened during the 1992 Los Angeles riots,” Cotton wrote in a Fox News op-ed Tuesday. “‘No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,’ I wrote.”
Twitter however, Cotton said, took “no quarter” to mean “no prisoners.” In other words, Twitter tried to claim Cotton was calling on the U.S. military to shoot citizen protestors.
Cotton explained that when the senator’s staff tried to reason with the tech giant, the company only put forward a low-level employee and demanded the Arkansas Republican delete the tweet in question in thirty minutes or lose control of the account while avoiding the creation of any paper trail during the process. After Cotton called their bluff,
Twitter backed down and told the senator it would take no action.
Facebook ‘Solves’ Censorship Controversy By Allowing Users To Block All Political Ads
The decision comes amid pressure especially from Democrats and the Left to get Facebook to fact-check political ads to root out alleged “disinformation”. Instead the company has opted to roll out a feature allowing its some two billion individual users to essentially turn off or mute “all social issue, electoral or political ads from candidates and Super PACs.”
The ‘opt out’ feature will be available on Instagram as well, and seeks to ease the pressure of the question of social media platforms becoming ‘arbiters of truth’.
The move is a huge defeat for the Biden campaign, which called for censoring political posts nebulously deemed “disinformation” and “offensive”.
Pelosi Pushes Advertisers To Boycott Social Media, Pours Nearly $200K Into Facebook Ads: REPORT
Pelosi added: “We need to empower advertisers to continue to object and to use their power to hold social media companies accountable for their bad behavior. This is an undermining of democracy. It is a challenge to people’s health. It is just wrong.”
Pelosi dropped $182,528 on Facebook ads over the last seven days, the company’s ad library shows.
The Washington Free Beacon originally reported the ad buy, noting that Pelosi’s decision to take advantage of Facebook’s ads come as former Vice President Joe Biden ramps up a crusade against the tech giant.
Pelosi and Biden’s criticisms came after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg refused to remove or flag a Trump post in May referencing “looting and shooting” and “THUGS.”
Rudy Giuliani sounds off on ‘left-wing takeover’ of policing
Commentary/Opinion:
Attorney for President Trump Rudy Giuliani pushes back on defunding and disbanding the police on ‘America’s Newsroom.’
California Legislators Say 137-Year-Old Christopher Columbus Statue Will Be Removed From State Capitol
The decision came in a statement from state Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, and Assembly Rules Committee Chairman Ken Cooley, saying the statue was deeply polarizing “given the deadly impact his arrival in this hemisphere had on indigenous populations.”
Many Democratic lawmakers praised this decision, saying the statue was “out of place.”
However, Robert Niello, a former Republican assembly member from the Sacramento area tweeted his disapproval, saying “I guess now if we don’t like part of our history we just erase it.”
House Dems line up behind plan to make D.C. 51st state
House Democrats announced Tuesday evening that they will hold a vote June 26 on making the District of Columbia the 51st state.
The response to protests in D.C. over the killing of George Floyd have led prominent Democrats to criticize the fact that the district has no voting representation in Congress and call for its residents to be granted the same rights as Americans who reside in the 50 states, The New York Times reported late Tuesday.
“Over the past few weeks, we saw further examples of why the District of Columbia’s lack of representation in Congress is so damaging,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said.
Former Bush, Trump administration officials form pro-Biden super PAC
Borges – the Ohio GOP chair from 2014-2017 – is teaming up with former officials from the Bush and Trump administrations to launch a super PAC to turn out disaffected Republican voters for the former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee.
“In order to get our country and our party to heal, the first step is to beat Donald Trump in November,” the former veteran of the George W. Bush White House and Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign told Fox News on Wednesday.
Also part of the team setting up The Right Side PAC is Anthony Scaramucci, who was fired after just 10 days as White House communications director and who later became one of the president’s most vocal critics.
World News:
Al Qaeda leader taken out by ‘secret’ US missile filled with knives dubbed the ‘ninja bomb’
It is a variation of the Hellfire anti-tank missile, referred to as the R9X, and internally called the “Flying Ginsu” or the “ninja bomb,” and it just might drastically shape the way war is waged given its exactitude and subsequent ability to vastly reduce the risk of collateral damage and civilian casualties.
“The Hellfire R9X missile is a modified version of the Hellfire anti-tank missile, the likes of which have been featured on America drones like the Reaper and Predator.
The reference to knives is no accident, as it features multiple steel blades that emerge from the missile moments before impact,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) told Fox News.
UAE adamant on cooperation with Israel despite Palestinian issue – TV7 Israel News 17.06.20
1) King Abdullah of Jordan warns that Israel’s plan to assert its sovereignty over parts of the West Bank would jeopardize the stability of the Middle East.
2) The United Arab Emirates Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash highlighted his country’s ambition to bolster relations with the State of Israel.
3) The Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Rafael Mariano Grosse continues to concern over Iran’s refusal to allow inspectors to visit suspected locations that may have been used for the purpose of undeclared nuclear activities.
Foreign Interference: UK Govt-Linked Group Attempts to Ban Conservative Websites from Google Ads
Research conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a UK “anti-hate” non-profit, is stated to be behind the bans, according to NBC which reported that The Federalist had been banned by tech giant Google after the “NBC News Verification Unit” brought the CCDH research to their attention.
NBC spoke to CCDH’s CEO Imran Ahmed who said his group has been targetting companies which have expressed support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, asking them to suspend advertising to websites that oppose the BLM agenda.
Websites targeted by CCDH’s “Defund Racism” campaign include Breitbart News, World Net Daily, The Gateway Pundit, American Thinker, American Greatness, and The Federalist — which is incorrectly marked on the organisation’s website as “defunded”, even though Google says it has not yet pulled ads from the site.
Also serving on the commission is Nick Lowles, of the far-left “anti-hate” activist group, Hope not Hate, which was identified as being linked to far-left extremism in a Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) report published in May of 2018.
CCP-Run Newspaper ‘China Daily’ Paid American Media $19M to Publish Propaganda |CCP Virus |COVID-19
Records from the U.S. Department of Justice showed that ‘China Daily’–a CCP based English-language newspaper’ paid nearly 19 million dollars to U.S. media companies for advertising in the past 4 years.
Paid supplements with a pro-Beijing agenda produced by “China Daily” were published in newspapers such as “The Washington Post,” and “The Wall Street Journal” masquerading as news articles.
US Restricted 4 Additional Chinese State-Run Media Outlets
Turkey launches major attack on Kurdish militants in Iraq
Special forces were airlifted and deployed overland to the border region of Haftanin in the early hours of Wednesday for Operation Claw-Tiger.
The campaign targeted 150 suspected Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) positions and was supported by jets, helicopters, drones and artillery, the Turkish defence ministry said.
The attack follows Operation Claw-Eagle overnight on Monday, a major bombing campaign on 81 suspected PKK installations across the region, including in the Yazidi homeland of Sinjar and the Qandil mountains, the traditional PKK stronghold.
Rumours of a major Turkish offensive against the PKK in northern Iraq have been growing for months.
The local Kurdistan regional government (KRG) has a strained relationship with the PKK and strong trade links with Turkey, long allowing Ankara to maintain military bases in the area.
Commentary/Opinion:
Larry Elder
Police Protests Over ‘Institutional Racism’—What ‘Institutional Racism’?!?
By Larry Elde
Studies not only do not show disproportionate use of deadly force against black suspects, if anything, the police or more hesitant, more reluctant to use deadly force on blacks than against whites.
The Supreme Court Just Turned A Law To Protect Women Into A Weapon Against Them
It isn’t plausible to argue — with a straight face at least — that the legislators who wrote the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s or any citizen reading it at the time understood “sex” to mean anything different than being a man or woman.
Yet the court just decided to step outside its role as interpreter and revised federal law 50 years after it was enacted.
Justice Samuel Alito clearly said as much in his dissent: “There is only one word for what the Court has done today: legislation. The document that the Court releases is in the form of a judicial opinion interpreting a statute, but that is deceptive.”
In light of this challenge, progressive feminists and religious conservatives have found common ground—arguing that being a woman is a biological reality…..
Will Witt Debunks “Defunding the Police”
Diverting funds away from police departments is not the solution you think it is.
It will hurt the communities it purports to protect.
Yet many leftists like John Oliver are attempting to justify the idea of “defunding the police.” Will Witt isn’t having it.