WORLD NEWS
Vlad the Evader: Russia’s Putin Will Not Attend G20 Summit in Bali
Russia President Vladimir Putin will skip a gathering of world leaders from the Group of 20 (G20) nations on the Indonesian resort island of Bali next week, choosing to stay at home instead.
Indonesian and Russian officials said on Thursday that Putin will send Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in his place.
Biden aims to assert American leadership abroad at UN climate summit and G20
It’s a story President Joe Biden tells at nearly every opportunity: last year, meeting his new counterparts at his first international summit, he proudly informed them, “America is back.”
“For how long?” one of them asked.
As Biden departs this week for a weeklong around-the-world trip, the question still resonates.
“They’re very concerned that we are still the open democracy we’ve been and that we have rules and the institutions matter,” Biden said Wednesday during a news conference.
Biden hopes his stops at a climate meeting here on the Red Sea, a gathering of Southeast Asian nations in Cambodia and a high-stakes Group of 20 summit on the Indonesian island of Bali will assert American leadership in areas former President Donald Trump either ignored or actively shunned.
“If the United States tomorrow were to, quote, withdraw from the world, a lot of things would change around the world. A whole lot would change,” Biden said ahead of his trip.
Energy Rationing for Plebs Only: COP27 Bigwigs Blast Air Conditioning in 80 Degree Egypt
Despite many green agenda-loving bigwigs pushing for countries to ration the use of heating and cooling to save energy, the COP27 conference is reportedly blasting its elite attendees with air conditioning in 80-degree Egyptian heat.
Despite sweltering temperatures in Egypt, there is said to be very little sweating going on at the COP27 climate conference, with green agenda officials attending the event reportedly being blasted with air conditioning while pushing for more to be done about carbon emissions.
El Paso Halts Migrant Buses to NYC, Chicago Until FEMA Sends Money
Despite a recent Biden Administration policy to reduce the number of Venezuelan migrant crossings along the southwest border, shelters and federal detention facility overcrowding is forcing the new arrivals onto El Paso’s streets. Those with the financial means to travel freely are sent to a downtown commercial bus depot. Meanwhile, local officials have paused dedicated buses to Chicago and New York City until federal reimbursements are met.
Germany Bans Communist China from Purchasing Microchip Factory
Despite recent steps to appease the Communist nation, leftist-run Germany has banned an attempt by China to buy a microchip facility in the country.
A Chinese takeover of a microchip wafer manufacturing plant in Dortmund has been blocked by the German government, with officials in the country deeming that such a sale poses a significant security risk to the state.
Gas Crisis Wipes $100 Billion off German Economy
The ongoing gas crisis has resulted in the German economy losing over $100 billion, a report from a major economics institute has claimed.
A paper published by the Ifo Institute for Economic Research, one of Germany’s largest financial think tanks, has claimed that the country has ultimately lost over $100 billion as a result of the ongoing energy crisis.
Justin Trudeau to appear on ‘Canada’s Drag Race’ spinoff seriesc
Justin Trudeau is swinging by the “werkroom” on an upcoming spinoff of “Canada’s Drag Race.”
Producers of the drag queen competition series say the Prime Minister will make a special appearance on “Canada’s Drag Race: Canada vs. the World.”
He’s the first world leader to visit the RuPaul-founded competition series, which has more than a dozen global spinoffs in countries including Sweden, Australia, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
An image from the set showed Trudeau beside Toronto drag queen and host Brooke Lynn Hytes in a segment where the contestants receive inspiring words before the episode’s main challenge.
U.S. Threatens Australia: Don’t You DARE Ban Nuclear Weapons
The United States has issued a threat to its ally, Australia. Washington insists that Australia will ruin its “deterrence relationship” with the U.S. if it signs a landmark treaty seeking to ban all nuclear weapons.
The U.S. is claiming the agreement will reinforce “divisions” between world powers while failing to address “prevailing security threats” around the globe. It also reduces the chance of a nuclear war.
In a statement to The Guardian on Tuesday, the US Embassy in Canberra said Australia’s signature on the treaty “would not allow for US extended deterrence relationships,” referring to the US “nuclear umbrella” which vows to protect some non-nuclear states with America’s massive atomic arsenal.
“While the United States understands and shares the desire to advance nuclear disarmament goals, we do not support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,” an embassy spokesperson told the outlet, adding that Washington “does not believe that progress toward nuclear disarmament can be decoupled from the prevailing security threats in today’s world.”
U.S. NEWS, POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
Paul Craig Roberts: Another Stolen Election
Republicans have won six million more votes nationwide in races for the House of Representatives, but have flipped relatively few seats, suggesting talk of a “red wave” may have anticipated the overall mood of the country but not the final result of the election.
US Army admits probe ruined soldiers’ lives
The US Army mistakenly put hundreds of participants in its National Guard and Reserve recruitment programs onto a criminal watchlist during an investigation into fraudulent bonuses, it revealed on Thursday.
Some 1,900 names were placed on the FBI’s Interstate Identification Index, a database of individual criminal histories which facilitates information sharing between federal and state law enforcement, in the course of a four-year investigation by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division into fraudulent payouts for recruitment referrals.
Recruiters were supposed to receive $2,000 for every new person they signed up, but by the time the program came under scrutiny, it was found that many were taking payments for recruits they’d never met. While the probe punished 286 of those people with administrative sanctions and 137 were prosecuted, hundreds more were found to have committed no offense – and “proper procedures were not always followed” to clear their names afterwards.
Reject Technocratic Overlords, Demand Paper Ballots!
“Democracy is on the ballot” was the constant henpecking refrain by the Democrat Party and the corporate media in the run-up to the “most important election of our lifetime” (like literally every election in the past twenty years).
Unfortunately, the voting machines they champion might not read the ballots, so we won’t really know for sure if democracy carried the day.
The 2022 midterms are already proving to be an epic disaster for the machines who lord over our free and fair elections.
Matt Margolis reported on what the local media and precinct operators are now dubbing “tabulation issues” in Maricopa County, Ariz. — an obvious euphemism for the failure of the Democrat machines to count votes.
Warnock, Walker Projected to Advance to Georgia Senate Runoff Election Next Month
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and GOP challenger Herschel Walker will head to a runoff next month for the Senate seat in Georgia, according to forecaster Decision Desk on Wednesday.
State election officials already predicted the race would advance to a Dec. 6 runoff earlier on Wednesday. While Warnock was ahead of Walker by a slim margin, he failed to breach the 50 percent threshold that prevents a runoff election from occurring.
Deceased Pennsylvania State Rep. Reelected in Landslide
A state lawmaker in Pennsylvania has been reelected to another term in office on Nov. 8 despite already passing away last month.
State Rep. Tony DeLuca, a Democrat, died at age 85 on Oct. 9 due to lymphoma. The timing of his death was too late for election officials to change the ballots.
DeLuca had served as a representative in the Pennsylvania state legislature for 39 years. He received more than 85 percent of the vote in the 32nd District in Allegheny County. This accounted for nearly 14,000 votes on Election Day, and more than 7,000 votes via mail.
DeLuca had served on the House Insurance Committee and the Democratic Policy Committee.
His opponent, Green candidate Queonia “Zarah” Livingston, received roughly 14 percent of the vote.
Arizona’s Largest County Has More Than 400,000 Ballots Left to Count
Arizona’s most populous county still has more than 400,000 ballots left to count, officials said the day after the midterm elections.
“We don’t know the exact numbers, but over about 400,000 votes yet to be counted and reported,” Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates, a Republican, told reporters during a press briefing.
That includes about 86,000 early ballots that were processed late last week and need to be tabulated. It also includes another approximately 50,000 early ballots dropped off on Monday and about 17,000 ballots from in-person voting that were dropped into secure slots at the tabulators.
Voters were instructed to drop them into the slots after machines stopped working at approximately 20 percent of precincts. About 7 percent of the in-person ballots were slotted.
The processing for absentee ballots include capturing the image of the signature and matching it to the signature on file before removing the ballots and tabulating them.
Officials say 1.1 million ballots have already been processed and counted.
Kayleigh McEnany: Trump Should Wait Until After Georgia Senate Election to Declare 2024 Candidacy
Former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany suggested former President Donald Trump should hold off on his expected announcement of a 2024 White House campaign until next month’s Georgia Senate runoff election is finished.
A number of forecasters on Wednesday morning said the race between Sen. Raphael Warnock (R-Ga.) and GOP candidate Herschel Walker will advance to a Dec. 6 runoff election. Neither candidate got more than 50 percent of the vote, although Warnock led by a small margin.
“I know there’s a temptation to starting talking about 2024—no, no, no, no, no,” McEnany, a Fox News hire, said on the network. The 2022 midterms are “not over,” she added, saying all “Republican energy needs to go to grinding the Biden agenda to a halt, and that could go straight through the state of Georgia.”
A day before the midterms on Tuesday, Trump told a rally in Ohio that he will make a “major announcement” on Nov. 15. Some believed he would be announcing another presidential campaign.
McEnany noted that another possible GOP contender such as Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), who easily won reelection in Florida, should also hold off on an announcement before Dec. 6.
“He’ll make that decision, he’ll make his own decision,” McEnany said. “If I’m advising any contender, DeSantis, Trump, whomever, no one announces 2024 until we get through Dec. 6.”
Nevada Midterm Election Results Still Mired in Mail-In Ballot Backlog
By late morning the day after Election Day, about a quarter of ballots cast in Nevada’s midterm elections remained untallied, leaving results in five key races undetermined.
Toss-up races for the U.S. Senate, three House seats, and the governor’s office are still too close to call, with elections officials warning that it could take several more days to produce definitive results.
Nevada’s two largest counties stopped counting ballots a half-hour after polls closed on Nov. 8 because understaffed elections workers were overwhelmed by late Election Day lines and an avalanche of vote-by-mail (VBM) ballots.
In Clark County, where 70 percent of Nevadans live in and around Las Vegas, and in Washoe County, which includes Reno, counting of VBM ballots that were dropped off or delivered on Election Day stopped after about 7:30 p.m. on election night.
Washoe County Registrar of Voters Jamie Rodriguez told reporters in Reno that Washoe County had received more than 6,000 ballots in the mail that day, and another 10,000 were turned in at ballot drop boxes.
Rodriguez said the next big “data dump” isn’t expected until the night of Nov. 9 or Nov. 10.
On Nov. 9, Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria said officials still need to count nearly 28,000 VBM ballots, including 15,000 received on Nov. 7 and Nov. 8 and another 12,700 received on Nov. 9 but postmarked Nov. 8 or earlier.
‘Vote Like A Mother’: Parental Rights Groups Notch Key School Board Wins Across The Country
Two grassroots organizations that prioritize parental rights in education saw many of their endorsed candidates win their school board elections.
“Last night was a disappointing night for Republicans in many parts of the country, but we’re happy to say we were very successful in key races in Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio, Maryland, which were by far the biggest places we targeted,” Aiden Buzzetti, head of coalitions and candidate recruitment for the 1776 Project PAC, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The organization Moms for Liberty told the DCNF that they hope to see their candidates focus on academic achievement and bring transparency back into the classroom.
ECONOMY & BUSINESS
Kerry, Podesta, Macron: Technocrats Openly Hostile Toward Capitalism
The World Economic Forum’s ‘First Movers Coalition’ climate change agenda was “modelled” off the effort to roll out vaccines during the Chinese coronavirus crisis, John Kerry said at a COP27 panel in Egypt on Tuesday.
Appearing alongside WEF President Børge Brende and various corporate executives, US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry said that it is urgent for the private sector to pair with governments to realise the goal of preventing the global temperature from rising and to save lives in the allegedly looming global climate crisis.
“We have an enormous challenge before us to bring to scale new technologies and to harness the deeply capable capacity of private sector entrepreneurs in order to bring them to the table because without it, no government has enough money… we need everybody behind this,” Kerry said in a speech before the panel.
“The idea behind the launch of the First Movers Coalition is pretty straightforward, we needed to create demand signals in the market where they didn’t exist, which takes boldness, it takes courage from these executives who have made the decision to be a part of this.
The First Movers Coalition was established ahead of last year’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in partnership between the U.S. State Department and Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum. The green project seeks to sign up private firms to commit to green agenda efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
“We modelled it somewhat on the experience on what happened with vaccines, the government said ‘we’ll pay for it, build it,’ and the same thing with SpaceX, if you build it we are going to use it and we’ll pay for it.
“People who were putting capital at risk knew that they could get a return on that capital or at least cover their expenses in the case of something like vaccines, where human life was so at risk. Well, human life is at risk now in the context of the challenges of the global climate crisis,” Kerry warned.
Facebook Parent Meta to Cut Over 11,000 Jobs; Zuckerberg Concedes He Got Trends ‘Wrong’
Facebook parent company Meta will cut more than 11,000 jobs, reducing its workforce by about 13 percent, as it faces a revenue crunch as advertisers pull back amid high inflation and a wobbly economy.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the cuts in a Nov. 9 blog post, in which he took the blame for overestimating the company’s growth prospects and overextending investments.
The COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns led to a surge in e-commerce activity, and for Meta, that meant bigger-than-expected growth in revenue.
“Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.”
Breitbart Business Digest: The Economic Consequences of the Midterm Elections
The midterm elections were never going to be a game-changer for the U.S. economy. What’s surprising, however, is how the economy turned out to be less of a game-changer for the elections.
Polls ahead of the election showed that inflation and the economy were the number one issue facing the country, far surpassing the runners up. The November poll from the Economist and YouGov had 27 percent of adult Americans saying inflation was the top issue, followed by ten percent who named jobs and the economy and another ten percent who said health care. Climate change came in as the top issue for nine percent of Americans and abortion as the top for seven percent.
Shares of the Walt Disney Co. plummeted late Tuesday and into early Wednesday to their lowest level in nearly a decade as concerns mount over the company’s profitability and wild spending habits on Disney+ and other streaming services.
Disney stock was down more than 13 percent on Wednesday following the company’s disappointing fourth quarter results that contained a slew of bad news, including the revelation that Disney lost a staggering $1.5 billion on streaming services such as Disney+ and Hulu for the period.
HEALTH
How Sugar Changes Your Brain Chemistry
Excessive sugar consumption underpins the obesity epidemic by eliciting addiction-like cravings reminiscent of other drugs of abuse
Research looking at the brains of pigs given access to sugar water for one hour per day for 12 days showed sugar reduced the availability of opioid and dopamine receptors, which is indicative of opioid and dopamine release
Reduced receptor availability is a sign of overstimulation, as when your brain gets overstimulated, it downregulates the receptors in order to protect your brain from damage. The drawback of this protective mechanism is that you now need a higher dose of the substance to get the same pleasure response, and this is a key mechanism by which addiction develops
Daily sugar consumption also impairs spatial memory and inhibits neurogenesis in the hippocampus, a brain area involved in learning and memory processes
High-sugar diets alter inhibitory neurons in the prefrontal cortex, where decision-making and impulse control are centered. Aside from impaired impulse control and the inability to delay gratification, this alteration may also increase the risk of mental health problems in children and adolescents
How Birds in Nature Can Improve Our Mental Health
Hearing birdsongs may yield lasting mental health benefits that last up to eight hours
Significant improvements were reported in the mental well-being of people with and without depression upon seeing a bird or hearing birdsongs compared to not seeing or hearing a bird
Separate research found birdsongs and calls were the natural sounds most often associated with stress recovery and attention restoration
In a study of the perceived restorative benefits of wetland paths in China, the presence of singing birds significantly enhanced the experience
Humans are designed to be connected to their natural environment, and when this connection is severed, as is so common in the modern world, physical, emotional and mental health suffers
According to data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, 13.5% of bird species are threatened with global extinction, 4% of which are endangered and 2% that are critically endangered
ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT
Oman’s Energy Minister: It’s Foolish To Assume Renewables Can Meet Global Demand
The world’s energy needs will only grow, and it would be “foolish” to think that rising demand can be met with renewables alone, Oman’s Energy Minister Salim Al-Aufi told CNBC on Tuesday.
Energy needs to be affordable and this is the first pillar of energy supply when the energy transition is concerned, the minister said.
Oman’s official also defended, again, the OPEC+ decision to reduce the headline target oil production by 2 million barrels per day (bpd) as of this month, saying that the group is proactive in trying to balance the market.
Al-Aufi also said that he wasn’t surprised by the U.S. blowback after the OPEC+ decision was announced.
“It was expected,” he told CNBC.
Over 1,200 flights canceled as Nicole makes landfall
More than 1,200 flights have been canceled Thursday after Tropical Storm Nicole made landfall in Florida, packing winds of up to 75 miles per hour.
Data from flight tracking site FlightAware showed that, as of 8:15 a.m. ET, carriers in the United States had canceled 1,226 flights, affecting both international and domestic services.
More than 900 flights had been canceled Wednesday. Orlando International Airport was the most impacted destination, according to FlightAware.
The airport announced it was closing due to the storm on Wednesday, as did Orlando Sanford International and Melbourne Orlando International.
GARDENING, FARMING & HOMESTEADING
Hearty Ground Beef Stew (Quick to Cook, Budget Friendly)
This easy ground beef stew recipe makes a quick budget friendly meal that’s great for week night dinners. (The leftovers reheat well, too.)
The ground beef cooks up tender taster than stew meat, and you can chop the veggies while the beef browns to save time. Homemade beef broth adds great flavor if you have some on hand.
COVID RELATED NEWS
Paxlovid Is a Fraud, When Will It Be Taken Off the Market?
Paxlovid, which was granted emergency use authorization to treat mild to moderate COVID-19 in December 2021, has become widely associated with rebound infection
While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Pfizer have tried to suggest that COVID rebound is spontaneous and not necessarily linked to Paxlovid, recent research found no rebound cases among COVID-19 patients who did not take Paxlovid
People who take Paxlovid can also still transmit COVID-19 to others, even if they’re asymptomatic
A number of high-profile individuals have experienced COVID rebound after using Paxlovid, including “The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert, comedian Jimmy Dore, Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden, First Lady Jill Biden and CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky. Most were double-jabbed and double-boosted. Walensky actually had three boosters
Emerging evidence also suggests SARS-CoV-2 can develop resistance to Paxlovid. Two separate studies cultured SARS-CoV-2 and exposed it to low levels of nirmatrelvir — the active antiviral ingredient in Paxlovid — which would kill some, but not all, of the virus. As a result, the virus became 20 times and 80 times less susceptible to the drug, respectively
ICYMI
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