SINCERETALK

As the Senate GOP seeks to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence ahead of Donald Trump's inauguration in less that two weeks, Democrats are are blocking the way to a confirmation date, according to Politico . Per the report, "Committee rules stipulate that vetting paperwork for the nominees must be received by the panel at least one week before the confirmation hearings. But snow and office closures at the Office of Governmental Ethics have slowed civil servants from processing some of the necessary vetting paperwork for" the MAGA nominee. Democrats are so far unwilling to waive the rules. In addition to the "key paperwork" necessary for the former Democratic lawmaker's confirmation, CNN reports that an FBI check is also needed , "according to two sources familiar with the matter." According to CNN, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton's (R-AR) spokesperson told the news outlet that Cotton "'int...

Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan shared his thoughts on Donald Trump's Tuesday declaration that he's not opposed to using military force to take control of Greenland and the Panama Canal. Speaking with Hasan on the latest episode of MSNBC's The ReidOut , host Joy Reid said, "At the moment, Trump is either talking tough to make it look like he's the real boss by saying he's going to invade Panama and Greenland and Canada, and be an expansionist like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, or he's just speaking Putin and [billionaire] Elon [Musk's] desires." She added, "I can never tell which, I just know Trump is not in charge." READ MORE: 'Open for business': Here’s why Donald Trump Jr. is headed to Greenland Hasan replied, "Before we go any further, Joy, let's just take a step back to your viewers and just remind ourselves, to keep ourselves sane. None of this is normal. Rght? The beginning of 2025, we should not be on l...

U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), ignoring his home state’s aerospace and defense industries that manufacture military aircraft components and ships, is siding with President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to take back the Panama Canal from Panama, by claiming America needs the canal to defend Taiwan against China. “We’ve got to take the Panama Canal back,” Tuberville told Fox Business on Tuesday (video below), hours after Trump spoke. “We’ve got to do something because if we were to happen to go to war with uh China over Taiwan and they were to shut the Panama Canal down, we’d have to go eight to ten-thousand miles longer just to get things back uh, to the to the war zone if we had to go from the east coast to China.” China does not control the Panama Canal, contrary to Trump’s claim and Tuberville’s suggestion. During his rambling and wide-ranging press conference, Trump had said he would not rule out taking control back of the Panama Canal by military force. “It might be that...

The country's biggest apartment landlords have been added to a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice last year — which is considered "one of the most sweeping legal actions ever taken by the federal government against a private company in the rental-housing industry," according to the Wall Street Journal . Per the report, the agency has added six prominent landlords to the suit, accusing them of using "RealPage’s rent-pricing algorithm to artificially inflate rents" across the country. “While Americans across the country struggled to afford housing, the landlords named in today’s lawsuit shared sensitive information about rental prices and used algorithms to coordinate to keep the price of rent high,” said the DOJ's acting Assistant Attorney General of Antitrust Doha Mekki in a press release, according to WSJ. READ MORE: Trump DOJ officials may have used media leaks to interfere with 2020 election: report The newspaper notes, "The defendant...

As the countdown to next Monday’s announcement of the 2024 matric results begins, most education experts are unanimous that the national pass rate will either hover around 82% or increase by between 1% and 4%. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/BZ2XwSI via sinceretalk

While Republicans work to pass the one "big, beautiful bill" that contains President-elect Donald Trump's biggest priorities — immigration, energy, and the economy — as he prepares to take office in two weeks, the party hasn't discussed its "first priority" nearly as much as the others, according to journalist Katelynn Burns. " The first priority in the rules package House Speaker Mike Johnson , R-La., unveiled last week was banning trans people from sports," Burns writes. "The bill, which will be heard in the House now that the rules package has passed , seeks to define sex under Title IX for sports participation as defined at birth," she continued. "This follows a yearslong moral panic over a small handful of trans athletes who found mostly middling success at lower levels of competitive collegiate athletics." One of the reasons the GOP is so concerned about ejecting trans women from sports "when there are almost ...

After Donald Trump's legal team asked Judge Juan Merchan to delay the president-elect' sentencing in his New York hush money case on Monday, the presiding judge swiftly shut down the MAGA team's request. In an op-ed published by MSNBC, legal correspondent and former litigator, Lisa Rubin, explained why she's "expecting a flurry of activity in New York appeals courts this week — and that none of it will end in a sentencing." Rubin suggests that Trump's sentencing hearing on January 10 "is no sure thing" because of Merchan's "own opinion", as well as the president-elect's "appellate maneuvers". READ MORE: Why a delay on Trump sentencing would cause 'irreparable harm': defense lawyer Despite the fact the New York judge already said that "his inclination is 'to not impose any sentence of incarceration,'" Rubin notes, he also knows that "a sentence is necessary in virtually all circum...

A federal judge on Monday found former Donald Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani in contempt for failing to comply with turning over information to the two Georgia ex-election he defamed following the 2020 election. Speaking with defense lawyer Misty Marris about the former New York mayor's case, CNN's Boris Sanchez emphasized that Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, are pursuing Giuliani for $150 million in damages. Noting that the mother-daughter duo has "had a hard time trying to collect that," and that "Giuliani had a lot of issues after he was found liable in court over this," the CNN host asked Marris about next steps for the former MAGA lawyer. READ MORE: Judge warns Giuliani headed for danger in upcoming contempt hearing: report "This was an issue about his Palm Beach residence primarily," Marris began, "and whether or not that can be used to satisfy the judgment." The defense attorney continued, "And his argument is t...

More than 90% of matric pupils studying Dramatic Arts in KwaZulu-Natal are black. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/UY6WQ9F via sinceretalk

NEW ORLEANS – The FBI has released video — some of it obtained from terrorist Shamsud-Bin Jabbar — that shows him in the French Quarter in the hours before he killed 14 people and injured dozens more, and his view as he rode a bicycle through the historic district more than two months earlier. The footage comes from French Quarter surveillance cameras and scenes Jabbar recorded on Meta glasses in October, during what the FBI said was the first of two trips he took to New Orleans before his early New Year’s Day massacre. Authorities recovered three homemade bombs they said Jabbar placed in small coolers, including two that he’s seen on video placing on Bourbon Street. One of the explosive devices was found in the pickup truck he drove after he sped through a crowd of pedestrians and was killed in a shootout with police. Also recovered from the truck was what the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms considers a remote detonation device. Jabbar, a 42-year-old IT professional and U...

In a Proteas side of changing faces, yet steadily improving performances, Kyle Verreynne's one is comfortably the most recognisable. from News24 news24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/w5zvUsl via sinceretalk

2025: The year American Oligarchy officially begins? I’m an unpaid volunteer member of the board of directors of a nonprofit that’s making use of a multi-million-dollar endowment, and working with their professional investment advisors over the years has given me insight into some of the ways the morbidly rich get richer, faster, and in ways impossible for average people: there are multiple types of investments and investment advisors that are only accessible to people or organizations that can pony up millions or hundreds of millions of dollars at a time. Thus, according to the Institute for Policy Studies , Elon Musk (for example) went from being worth $25 billion in 2020 to $428 billion a few weeks ago. During that same time, Jeff Bezos (who apparently just censored a Washington Post comic showing him bowing down and handing a bag of money to Trump) reportedly went from $113 billion to $235 billion; similarly, three heirs to the Walmart fortune reportedly went, during the same...

Money in politics has a long and ignominious history. Corruption by money of individual politicians, and of the legislative process as a whole, hit three peaks in the history of our nation: during the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, the Roaring Twenties in the last century, and the years since 2010 when the Supreme Court struck down numerous campaign finance and good-government laws, throwing the doors open to corporate and billionaire cash with its Citizens United decision. The Gilded Age excesses led to the Tillman Act of 1907, which made it a federal felony for a corporation to donate money or anything of value to a campaign for federal office. It was gutted by Citizens United. The political corruption of the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations led directly to the great crash of 1929, causing most corporations to pull back from the political arena until the 1970s, when Lewis Powell revived it with his infamous memo to billionaires and corporate CEOs. After the Watergat...

In this week's edition, embark on thrilling biking adventures, connect with inspiring trailblazers, embrace holistic wellness, and uncover the latest fitness trends of 2025! from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/B8WIFL2 via sinceretalk

A federal judge has officially ruled that a participant in the January 6, 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol who brought a knife and a tactical vest to the riot will not be allowed to attend President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration. NBC News reported Friday that U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth rejected a request from Russell Taylor — who attempted to recruit "fighters" to the January 6 insurrection — to attend the inauguration on January 20. The rejection comes despite Taylor being invited to the Capitol for Trump's swearing-in ceremony by former Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) and three other unnamed members of the Utah congressional delegation. "To attend the Presidential Inauguration, which celebrates and honors the peaceful transfer of power, is an immense privilege," Lamberth wrote in his ruling. "It would not be appropriate for the Court to grant permission to attend such a hallowed event to someone who carried weapons and threatened police of...

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) narrowly avoided the embarrassment of failing to get a majority of votes to keep the speaker's gavel on Friday, when the 119th Congress was sworn in. But a new report suggests that a faction of far-right House Republicans is likely to give him plenty of headaches over the next two years. Politico reported Friday evening that Johnson securing the 218 votes necessary to be speaker came with conditions. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who is a member of the arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus, told the outlet that there would be potential "consequences" for the speaker if he failed to uphold his end of the bargain on certain sticking points. "Let’s make no mistake about it. There will be things that are, in fact, red lines that we need to deliver," Roy said, referencing Johnson's reliance on Democratic votes to push a must-pass government funding bill across the finish line in late December. "We can have no more of the n...

President-elect Donald Trump ended up siding with billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO and X owner Elon Musk in their feud with MAGA activists over a contentious immigration issue. But Trump's anti-immigrant base isn't planning to give up easily. That's according to a Friday report in Politico , which delved into the still-raging fight over H-1B visas for migrant workers. Both Musk and billionaire pharmaceutical investor Vivek Ramaswamy took public stances in favor of increasing H-1B visas despite pro-Trump influencers like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon (Trump's former chief White House strategist) calling on Trump to curb new H-1B admissions. In late December, Musk defended his position by saying foreign-born workers brought in through the H-1B visa program were more preferable to the tech industry than American workers, saying Americans lacked the proper education and training needed to work for companies like Tesla and SpaceX. He added that the anti-migrant MAGA base...

Vice President-elect JD Vance, the Republican Senator from Ohio, is facing criticism both domestically and internationally for endorsing and seemingly defending an op-ed by Elon Musk that is supportive of a far-right German political party reportedly linked to neo-Nazis. The New York Times late last month described the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, as “a group with ties to neo-Nazis whose youth wing has been classified as ‘confirmed extremist’ by German domestic intelligence.” The paper of record also noted that AfD has been “called a threat to German democracy” by Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz and others. “News that members of the AfD attended a secret meeting with the Austrian extreme-right provocateur Martin Sellner , who has admitted to once being a member of a neo-Nazi group and has called for deporting migrants en masse, led to large protests early this year,” The Times also reported. “Then, starting in May, a leading light of the party was twice given a hefty fine ...

Ahead of the House speakership vote on Friday, constitutional and congressional experts are weighing the various outcomes if Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) doesn't win the vote, according to Politico. One of the potential outcomes includes a roadblock to Donald Trump's ability to officially begin his second presidency on January 20. Despite the president-elect's endorsement of Johnson last month, several GOP members want the speaker out. “I don’t think Trump has any interest in messing with the [certification]. And so there’s going to be a lot of pressure to coordinate on someone without a protracted fight," ex-Hill staffer Matthew Glassman told Politico. READ MORE: Ex-House lawmaker stuns MSNBC hosts with surprise candidate to replace Mike Johnson Politico reports, "If it becomes clear that Johnson can’t win the gavel, congressional experts say the least chaotic path for the House would be to elect a temporary or 'caretaker' speaker." Whoever beco...

The FBI has announced that it confiscated a stockpile of explosives from a suspect the bureau has been investigating for years, who may be a member of an extremist terror cell. Salon reported Thursday that, according to recently released court documents , Virginia man Brad Kenneth Spafford was arrested in late December after he was found with what Salon's Nicholas Liu called "the largest collection of homemade explosives seized by the FBI in its history." Spafford was charged under the National Firearms Act with possession of an illegal firearm. Several of the homemade bombs were found in a backpack with a patch that read "#NoLivesMatter," which could be a reference to a far-right group that embraces political violence. An August threat assessment by the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness (OHSP) said the group recruits "true misanthropic individuals" on the messaging app Telegram, and encourages arson, vandalism and manufactu...

Christall Kay, ventures into the beauty industry with her debut jasmine-based fragrance, Falling, while reflecting on her dynamic journey in reality TV and music. from News24 news24/topstories/rss https://ift.tt/CdabF6f via sinceretalk