Good

🇺🇸 **New Yorker: Brett Kavanaugh Exposed Himself at Freshman Party; Kavanaugh Denies**
*Breitbart* - <https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/09/23/new-yorker-brett-kavanaugh-exposed-himself-at-freshman-party-kavanaugh-denies/>

The New Yorker reported a new accusation Sunday evening against Judge Brett Kavanaugh: that as a college freshman at Yale University, a drunken Kavanaugh “exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party,” and that when she tried to push him away in her drunken condition she accidently touched his penis.

<:trump:284711336934375425>

Legend says they come in pairs

everyone said this was coing

lmao

🇮🇷 🇺🇸 🇮🇱 **Iran warns U.S, Israel to expect a 'devastating' revenge: state TV**
*Reuters* - <https://archive.fo/JIfxU>

The deputy head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned U.S. and Israeli leaders on Monday to expect a “devastating” response from Iran, accusing them of involvement in Saturday’s attack on a military parade in the city of Ahvaz that killed 25 people.

“You have seen our revenge before ... You will see that our response will be crushing and devastating and you will regret what you have done,” Hossein Salami said in a speech before the funeral of the victims in Ahvaz, broadcast live on the state television.
----------------

🇺🇸 **Rosenstein Resigning?**
*Axios* - <https://www.axios.com/rod-rosenstein-resign-justice-department-trump-cf761f4c-fca3-4794-92d4-a56c9e32ff43.html>

Rosenstein resigning or on his way to be fired this Monday morning, mixed reports.
-------------------

^false reports,it was a regularly schedualed meeting between him and the chef of staff.

YUP, we been bamboozled, the media jumped the gun, fgts in the media reporting different variations too of him resigning or fired, was a total shit show and then some.

🇺🇸 **Axios Issues Critical "Clarification" To Rosenstein Resignation Report**
*Zero Hedge/Axios* - <https://archive.fo/AOPo6>

Jonathan Swan, the Axios reporter who initially broke the news this morning that Rod Rosenstein had "verbally resigned" and subsequently triggered a drop in the Dow that erased billions of dollars in value, has issued an important "clarification" that - as fate would have it - changes the story from a major news-cycle-dominating revelation to a barely noteworthy tidbit.

After sparring with Vanity Fair reporter Gabriel Sherman, who suggested that Swan "got played" by a White House insider looking to distract from the second Kavanaugh revelation, Swan has admitted that the phrasing of his initial report was a little off. Instead of reporting that Rosenstein had "verbally resigned", Swan said he meant to say that Rosenstein had verbally offered his resignation to Chief of Staff John Kelly.

```Note for readers: I regret the way I wrote this morning's version of the story. By saying Rosenstein had "verbally resigned" to Kelly rather than "offered his resignation," I conveyed a certainty that this fluid situation didn’t deserve. It’s an important nuance, and I regret the wording.```

Speaking to reporters at the United Nations, President Trump finally commented on the political event du jour, saying he's looking forward to meeting with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Thursday to discuss his future and "determining what's going on", after Axios reported earlier that Rosenstein told Trump's Chief of Staff John Kelly that he was resigning.

"We’ll be determining what’s going on,” Trump told reporters at the United Nations on Monday. “We want to have transparency, we want to have openness and I’m looking forward to meeting with Rod at that time."
----------------

🇮🇱 **In a blow to Israel, Russia says it will send Syria powerful antiaircraft missiles**
🇸🇾 🇷🇺 *The Washington Post* - <https://archive.fo/6Whnd>

Russia said Monday it would equip Syria with sophisticated air defense systems, a move that could worsen a rift with Israel by limiting its ability to bomb across its northern border.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Moscow would send Russia’s powerful S-300 ground-to-air missile systems to Syria, a longtime ally, in the next two weeks. Israel, which has repeatedly bombed Iranian targets in Syria, has long opposed such deliveries, and Russia up to now has refrained from supplying the weapons.

But the downing last week of a Russian reconnaissance plane with 15 service members aboard changed the dynamic. The plane was shot down by a Syrian missile, but Russia faulted Israel for the crash because an Israeli fighter jet allegedly had used the Russian plane as a screen against Syria’s air defenses.

Israel, by contrast, said that its air force had not violated any agreements with Russia and that Israeli jets had already returned to Israeli airspace when the missiles were launched. The crash was one of the deadliest incidents for regular Russian service members in the Syrian war.

“Today, the situation has changed, for no fault of ours,” Shoigu said in a televised statement Monday announcing the S-300 deliveries.

Shoigu said Russia also will jam military aircraft communications in the airspace next to Syria over the Mediterranean Sea while upgrading Syria’s air defense command systems.
----------------

🇺🇸 **Ted Cruz And Wife Chased Out Of DC Restaurant By Anti-Kavanaugh Protesters**
*ZeroHedge/Gateway Pundit* - <https://archive.fo/O5Z2R>

Senator Ted Cruz, a supporter of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, was verbally assaulted by a group of protesters at a DC restaurant Monday night while trying to dine with his wife, as seen in a video posted by twitter account Smash Racism DC.

The protesters, chanting "we believe survivors," blocked Cruz's wife from exiting the restaurant at one point, prompting the Texas Senator to ask them to "let my wife through."

In another clip, a woman claiming to be a survivor of sexual assault approached Cruz and his wife accompanied by her backup chanters, asking to discuss Brett Kavanaugh, "I know that you're very close friends with Mr. Kavanaugh. Do you believe survivors sir? We believe survivors. Senator, I have a right to know what your position is on Brett Kavanaugh. I'm a survivor of sexual assault. There are now three people that have come forward and said that Brett Kavanaugh attacked them. Have you talked to him about that?"

https://twitter.com/SmashRacismDC/status/1044408931169300481
https://twitter.com/SmashRacismDC/status/1044408830564683776
----------------

i cant wait till hes on the bench

*bhash thuh fash!!11!111!!*

🇺🇸 **Third Kavanaugh accuser, a former US Mint employee, '100 percent credible,' Avenatti says**
*USA Today* - <https://archive.fo/LR3fB>

A third woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct will come forward in the next 48 hours, according to Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for adult film star and alleged President Donald Trump mistress Stormy Daniels.

Following a Monday hearing over Daniels’ lawsuit against Trump and his former lawyer Michael Cohen over a hush-money deal, Avenatti told reporters he has been hired by a former employee of both the State Department and the U.S. Mint who has information of a sexual nature about Kavanaugh and his high school friend Mark Judge.

“It will relate to how they behaved at countless house parties,’’ Avenatti said.

Avenatti also told reporters the woman, whom he did not name, has multiple security clearances and will “literally risk her life’’ by coming forward. He called her “100 percent credible,’’ saying she has multiple witnesses to corroborate her story and would be willing to take a polygraph if Kavanaugh does as well.

Avenatti didn't disclose how his client met Kavanaugh and Judge or reveal details on the timing of the alleged misconduct.
----------------

*I'll bring out thousands of whores, got thousands of them baby, I'll bring them all out!* - Avenatti

<:gayfrogs:319792618576019466> **FOUNDER OF GROUP THAT HARASSED TED CRUZ TWEETED ABOUT DEAD COPS, ASSASSINATING MIKE PENCE**
*Info Wars* - <https://www.infowars.com/founder-of-group-that-harassed-ted-cruz-tweeted-about-dead-cops-assassinating-mike-pence/>

Antifa professor back in the spotlight after restaurant confrontation. He's the long neck fgt that plays the woman role in Star Wars Ep. VIII, previously was a professor at John Jay College in NYC.

The founder of the ‘Smash Racism DC’ group that harassed Senator Ted Cruz and his wife in a restaurant last night is Antifa professor Mike Isaacson, who previously tweeted about teaching “future dead cops” and assassinating Mike Pence.
----------------------

🇺🇸 **Bill Cosby Sentenced To 3-10 Years Behind Bars For Sexual Assault**
*Philadelphia CBS Local* - <https://archive.fo/fCcHk>

Bill Cosby learned his fate inside a Montgomery County courtroom on Tuesday. The 81-year-old actor and comedian has been sentenced to three to 10 years in a state facility for sexually assaulting a former Temple University employee at his home in 2004.

O’Neill also ruled Cosby as a “sexually violent predator.” The classification means that Cosby must undergo lifetime counseling and report quarterly to authorities. His name will appear on a sex-offender registry sent to neighbors, schools and victims.

Cosby’s lawyer argued for bail after the ruling, but O’Neill pushed back, saying he will not treat Cosby any differently under the law.

“I’ve imposed sentencing at this stage,” said O’Neill. “If you want to take it up with another court, you can.”

Cosby’s lawyers had fought the “sexually violent predator” designation, arguing that Pennsylvania’s sex-offender law is unconstitutional and that he is no threat to the public at his age. But O’Neill said prosecutors had met their burden of proof by “clear and convincing” evidence.

Cosby was found guilty in April on three counts of aggravated indecent assault. Jurors convicted Cosby of sexually assaulting Andrea Constand without consent, while she was impaired and after incapacitating her.
----------------

🇺🇸 **Michael Avenatti Makes His Twitter Private, Citing ‘Trump Trolls’**
*Daily Caller* - <https://archive.fo/Hupi5>

Lawyer Michael Avenatti said Tuesday that he was “forced” to make his Twitter account private after receiving some unwelcoming comments, which he says are due to his recent representation of an anonymous woman claiming Judge Brett Kavanaugh was involved in gang rapes in high school.

Avenatti tweeted Sunday that he represents a woman with “credible information” regarding Kavanaugh and has since demanded the Senate Judiciary Committee not only question Kavanaugh on his involvement in a “train of men” that he claims drugged and gang-raped women in high school, but also asked the committee to allow more witnesses to testify.

Since his announcement, Avenatti has attempted to prove the credibility of his accusations without revealing who his client is and without providing any evidence so far.

Avenatti’s claim made without any proof apparently has not sat well with the Twitter community. Avenatti tweeted Tuesday that he’s been “forced” to make his account private “because the bots and Trump trolls are out in full force due to my representation re Kavanaugh.”

A senior Democratic aide also told The Daily Beast that Avenatti “has a tendency to sensationalize and make his various crusades more about himself than about getting at the truth.”

Another Democratic source told the outlet that while he or she believes he represents a credible allegation, Avenatti has “undercut it. If he had vetted it through a media outlet and had journalists represent it in a well-reported way or have the committee introduce it, it would have been better.”

Avenatti says he will make his Twitter public as soon as he is able to.
----------------

🇺🇸 **Millennials Are Causing the U.S. Divorce Rate to Plummet**
*Bloomberg* - <https://archive.fo/rjIw1>

Americans under the age of 45 have found a novel way to rebel against their elders: They’re staying married.

New data show younger couples are approaching relationships very differently from baby boomers, who married young, divorced, remarried and so on. Generation X and especially millennials are being pickier about who they marry, tying the knot at older ages when education, careers and finances are on track. The result is a U.S. divorce rate that dropped 18 percent from 2008 to 2016, according to an analysis by University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen.

Demographers already knew the divorce rate was falling, even if the average American didn’t. Their question, however, was why? And what do current trends mean for the marital prospects of today’s newlyweds?

“The change among young people is particularly striking,” Susan Brown, a sociology professor at Bowling Green State University, said of Cohen’s results. “The characteristics of young married couples today signal a sustained decline [in divorce rates] in the coming years.”

Young people get the credit for fewer divorces because boomers have continued to divorce at unusually high rates, all the way into their 60s and 70s. From 1990 to 2015, according to Bowling Green’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research, the divorce rate doubled for people aged 55 to 64, and even tripled for Americans 65 and older. Cohen’s results suggest this trend, called “grey divorce,” may have leveled out in the past decade, but boomers are still divorcing at much higher rates than previous generations did at similar ages.
----------------

🇺🇸 **Yale study: Illegal immigrant population likely double, possibly triple previous estimates**
*The Washington Times* - <https://archive.fo/BBtyE>

Professors at Yale University have roiled the immigration debate with a new study calculating there are between 16 million and 30 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. — as much as three times more than most demographers figure.

The professors’ model looked at estimates of how many people came illegally, and how many people likely left, and concluded there are a lot more people who arrived than the 11 million suggested by traditional estimates. The model says the most likely figure is double that, at about 22 million.

If true, the numbers would mean U.S. officials have done a poorer job of catching illegal immigrants than imagined, and that one out of every nine people living in the U.S. is here illegally.

“Policy debates about the amount of resources to devote to this issue, and the merits of alternative policies, including deportation, amnesty, and border control, depend critically on estimates of the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., which sets the scale of the issue,” said the academics, Professors Jonathan S. Feinstein and Edward H. Kaplan and postdoctoral associate Mohammad Fazel-Zarandi, all at the Yale School of Management.

They published their findings in PLOS ONE, an open access scholarly journal, and sparked fierce pushback from the demographers who study the issue and say the professors’ numbers are impossible.
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🇮🇱 **Israel Is Giving China the Keys to Its Largest Port - and the U.S. Navy May Abandon Israel**
🇨🇳 *Haaretz* - <https://archive.is/g7JF4>

China will operate Haifa port, near Israel's alleged nuclear-armed submarines, and it seems no one in Israel thought about the strategic ramifications.

Shaul Horev dropped a bombshell, but hardly anyone noticed. Horev, an Israel Defense Forces reservist brigadier general who has served, among other posts, as the navy chief of staff and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, is currently director of the Research Center for Maritime Policy and Strategy at the University of Haifa. At the end of August, the center held a conference, to which participants from the United States were invited, to examine security issues relating to Israel and the Mediterranean region.

In an interview with the religious-Zionist media outlet Arutz Sheva, Prof. Horev noted that one topic that came up at the event was Chinese investments in Mediterranean ports, and in Israel in particular. Pointing out that a Chinese company will soon start operating Haifa Port, he said that Israel needs to create a mechanism that will examine Chinese investments to ensure that they do not put Israel’s security interests at risk.

“When China acquires ports,” Horev said, “it does so under the guise of maintaining a trade route from the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal to Europe, such as the port of Piraeus in Greece. Does an economic horizon like this have a security impact? We are not weighing that possibility sufficiently. One of the senior American figures at the conference raised the question of whether the U.S. Sixth Fleet can see Haifa as a home port. In light of the Chinese takeover, the question is no longer on the agenda.”
----------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbNLt8UKWQA

🇺🇸 **W. Virginia's Decision to Allow Smartphone Voting for Midterms Raises Serious Security Concerns**
*PJ Media* - <https://archive.fo/aIN2T>

For the first time in our nation's history, voters in 24 counties in W. Virginia will be able to vote using their mobile phones. While some are hailing the decision because it will make voting easier for members of the military deployed overseas, experts are warning of possible security breaches.

"Voatz has developed a secure mobile voting application that allows voters to receive, vote, and return their ballots electronically," the press release claims. "The application also utilizes blockchain technology to store electronically submitted ballots until election night, and requires a heightened standard of identity verification for users than traditional absentee ballot processes. This project is unprecedented in United States history, being the first mobile voting application and first use of blockchain technology in a federal election."

In order to use the mobile technology, users register with Voatz by taking a picture of their government ID and also a selfie video of their face. Voatz then uses facial recognition software that (they claim) can verify the voter's identity. Once approved, voters can cast their ballots using Voatz's app. After the vote is cast it is added to the blockchain, a digital ledger of sorts, popularized by digital currencies such as Bitcoin.

The state of W. Virginia admits that there are "substantial" security concerns, but explained that Voatz will be utilizing "federal standards for software development, regular maintenance and security upgrades, in-depth penetration testing, source code auditing and audits of the system’s cloud infrastructure. After surpassing those requirements, the pilot moved forward."
----------------

🇺🇸 **BREAKING: Michael Avenatti Reveals Client Making ‘Gang Rape’ Allegation Against Kavanaugh**
*MediaITE* - <https://archive.fo/UfmsE>

Attorney for Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, earlier this week, claimed to have a client with a third allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. He made the announcement, and tweeted lurid accusations, without offering the identity of the client or any evidence.

Today, Avenatti tweeted a name and photo of that client, along with a sworn statement from the alleged victim laying out her serious allegations.

In the statement, Julie Swetnick, a current government employee, alleges Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge attended a party where she was drugged and gang raped by a series of boys. While she does not accuse Kavanaugh of assaulting her, she claims she witnessed him participate in the gang rapes.

```In approximately 1982, I became the victim of one of these “gang” or “train” rapes where Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present. Shortly after the incident, I shared what had transpired with at least two other people. During the incident, I was incapacitated without my consent and unable to fight off the boys raping me. I believe I was drugged using Quaaludes or something similar placed in what I was drinking.”```

https://twitter.com/MichaelAvenatti/status/1044960940884709378
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🇺🇸 **GEORGE SOROS FUNDED FUSION GPS, HIS SPOKESMAN CONFIRMS**
*The Daily Caller* - <https://dailycaller.com/2018/09/26/george-soros-funded-fusion-gps/>

A spokesman for left-wing billionaire financier George Soros is acknowledging that he indirectly funded Fusion GPS, the firm behind the Steele dossier

Sources have told The Daily Caller News Foundation in the past that Soros helped fund Fusion’s post-election work on Russian interference in the election process

Soros’ spokesman told The Washington Post that Soros donated to the Democracy Integrity Project, a group founded by a former staffer to Sen. Dianne Feinstein

----------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPyRKSFuMes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZP0Kw1OLY8

🇺🇸 **Facebook Loses Around $13 Billion in Value After Data Breach Affects 50 Million of Its Users**
*Fortune* - <https://archive.fo/8XwrF>

2018 continues to be a challenging year for Facebook. The company’s stock closed down 3% Friday following reports that hackers gained access to the personal data on 50 million of its users.

The data breach is the latest in a string of mishaps and controversies that the company has endured, including its involvement in the Russian disinformation campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Facebook’s sharing its user data in what became the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his company during two days of Congressional hearings in April.

In the latest incident, Facebook said its engineering team discovered on Tuesday that hackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that exposed to attackers its site’s so-called access tokens – essentially, digital keys that allow people to stay logged into Facebook without having to re-enter their password.

“We’re taking this incredibly seriously,” Facebook said in a blog post announcing the breach, adding that the company has fixed the vulnerability and notified law enforcement of the hack.

The company’s swift response did little to settle investor unease about the string of snafus at the social media giant. Facebook’s stock fell as much as 5% to $162.57 a share during intraday trading Friday as news of the hack broke. The stock recovered slightly before the market’s official close, but once it did Facebook’s market cap had lost about $13 billion of its value.
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🇺🇸🇲🇽 🇨🇦 **Trump cites 'historic' trade pact with Canada, Mexico**
*Reuters* - <https://archive.fo/gOY3l>

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday took credit for salvaging a trilateral free trade accord with Canada and Mexico, marking it as a victory in his campaign to reshape global commerce as financial markets breathed a sigh of relief.

The deal, announced on Sunday, is a reworking of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, which underpins $1.2 trillion in trade between the three countries. Trump had described NAFTA as a bad deal for Americans and threatened to eliminate it as part of his “America First” agenda.

The new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is aimed at bringing more jobs into the United States, with Canada and Mexico accepting more restrictive commerce with the United States, their main export partner.

While changing NAFTA and bringing down U.S. trade deficits was a top Trump campaign pledge, Sunday’s agreement largely leaves the broader deal intact and maintains supply chains that would have been fractured under weaker bilateral deals.

U.S., Canadian and Mexican stocks were trading higher on Monday, with the benchmark S&P 500 index .SPX rising more than 0.7 percent and the Toronto Stock Exchange's S&P/TSX index .GSPTSE gaining about 0.4 percent.

The Canadian dollar CAD=D4 strengthened to a four-month high against the U.S. dollar, while the Mexican peso MXN=D3 rose to near a two-month high against the greenback before paring some gains.
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🇺🇸 **Feds Force Suspect To Unlock An Apple iPhone X With Their Face**
*Forbes* <https://archive.fo/SC3XR>

It finally happened. The feds forced an Apple iPhone X owner to unlock their device with their face.

A child abuse investigation unearthed by Forbes includes the first known case in which law enforcement used Apple Face ID facial recognition technology to open a suspect's iPhone. That's by any police agency anywhere in the world, not just in America.

It happened on August 10, when the FBI searched the house of 28-year-old Grant Michalski, a Columbus, Ohio, resident who would later that month be charged with receiving and possessing child pornography. With a search warrant in hand, a federal investigator told Michalski to put his face in front of the phone, which he duly did. That allowed the agent to pick through the suspect's online chats, photos and whatever else he deemed worthy of investigation.

The case marks another significant moment in the ongoing battle between law enforcement and tech providers, with the former trying to break the myriad security protections put in place by the latter. Since the fight between the world's most valuable company and the FBI in San Bernardino over access to an iPhone in 2016, Forbes has been tracking the various ways cops have been trying to break Apple's protections.

First came multiple cases in which suspects were told to unlock iPhones with their fingerprints, via Apple's Touch ID biometric login. The same technique was then used on dead subjects. Earlier this year, this publication uncloaked GrayKey, a $15,000-$30,000 tool that could break through the passcodes of the latest iOS models, including the iPhone X. Another contractor, Israel's Cellebrite, announced similar services.
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🇮🇱 **Israel seeks to 'justify another aggression' with false missile claims: Lebanon**
🇱🇧 *Reuters* <https://archive.fo/EWHQK>

Lebanon’s foreign minister said on Monday Israel was trying to “justify another aggression” by falsely alleging there are missile sites near Beirut airport belonging to Iran-backed Hezbollah.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking at the United Nations last week, identified three locations near the airport where he said the Shi’ite group Hezbollah was converting “inaccurate projectiles” into precision-guided missiles.

Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil, speaking to foreign ambassadors before taking them on a tour of the area, said there were “many statements ... affirming the possession of accurate missiles by Hezbollah”.

But he added: “This does not mean that these missiles are present in the vicinity of Beirut airport”.

Bassil accompanied the diplomats, who included Russian and Iranian envoys, and journalists on a tour of three sites near the airport, including the grounds of a top division Lebanese football team, Al-Ahed, which Israel identified as one of the sites.
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🇩🇪 **German Police Arrest Six Suspected Neo-Nazis Ahead of Planned Attack**
*Wall Street Journal* <https://archive.fo/c8K0I>

German police said they had arrested six men suspected of planning an attack on immigrants and politicians, as the country struggles with a backlash from far-right groups that has followed an influx of migrants.

The suspects, all of whom were between 20 and 30 years old, were part of skinhead and neo-Nazi groups, the country’s federal prosecutor said on Monday. The attack was allegedly planned to take place on Wednesday, the Day of Germany Unity, which commemorates the anniversary of German reunification.

Police arrested the suspects after a series of coordinated raids in the states of Saxony and Bavaria. During the raids, police found bats, tasers, an air gun and Nazi propaganda, including portraits of Adolf Hitler and Nazi flags, which are banned in Germany.

The group called itself Revolution Chemnitz, after the east German city that saw mass protests following a murder allegedly committed by asylum seekers this month. Neo-Nazis openly protested in Chemnitz, as well as at several other similar events that were since organized in other German cities.

Crime linked to far-right groups and motivated by racism has increased after the migration crisis of 2015, when hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers poured into the country. While the number of assaults has started to drop again this year, authorities and human-rights activists have said racist attacks are becoming more brutal.

“Far-Right terror is posing a real and great danger and we take it very seriously,” German Justice Minister Katarina Barley tweeted on Monday in reference to the arrests.
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🇺🇸 **Multiple Packages Sent To Pentagon Test Positive For Ricin**
*CNN * - <https://archive.fo/NuuU5>

WASHINGTON — Officials at the Pentagon say at least two pieces of mail sent to the facility tested positive for the deadly poison Ricin.
---------------------

you're supposed to include at least a paragraph of text you KIKE

why are you all shitting up my channel

🇺🇸 **Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father**
*New York Times* <https://archive.fo/duPUl>

The president has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.

President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.

The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.
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🇺🇸 **FBI Probe of Kavanaugh Is Expected to Wrap Up Very Soon**
*Wall Street Journal* <https://archive.fo/m81Mj>

People familiar with the process said Tuesday that the FBI investigation into the allegations of sexual misconduct against Judge Kavanaugh could wrap up very soon, well ahead of the end-of week deadline.

GOP aides on the Hill and another person familiar with the process said they were expecting the bureau to conclude its report as soon as late Tuesday or early Wednesday. Agents had interviewed at least four key people as of Tuesday in its background investigation of Judge Kavanaugh. The White House had given the bureau until Friday to wrap up the probe.

Senators would then be shown the FBI's findings, but it wasn't clear if the public would get a look as well.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said on Tuesday the report was expected "soon" and "will be made available to each senator and only senators will be allowed to look at it."
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🇺🇸 **Confidence in Pope Francis Down Sharply in U.S.**
*Pew Research Center* <https://archive.fo/VXYJ3>

By a two-to-one margin, American Catholics now give Francis negative marks for his handling of the sex abuse scandal

As allegations and investigations of sex abuse in the Catholic Church become more widespread, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that confidence in the way Pope Francis is handling the crisis has plummeted among U.S. Catholics. Just three-in-ten Catholic adults say Francis is doing an “excellent” or a “good” job addressing the issue, which is down 24 points since 2015 and 14 points from when Pew Research Center last asked the question in January of this year.

While seven-in-ten American Catholics say their overall opinion of Pope Francis is favorable, six-in-ten now say he is doing an “only fair” or “poor” job handling the sex abuse scandal, including 36% who say his efforts on this front have been poor. This is nearly double the share who said he was doing a poor job at the beginning of this year, and triple the share who said this in 2015.

The declining confidence in Francis’ handling of the sex abuse crisis is broad-based, occurring across a wide variety of subgroups of U.S. Catholics. Since 2015, for instance, the share who give the pope “excellent” or “good” ratings for his handling of the issue declined by 24 points among Catholic men and 23 points among Catholic women. Similarly, both younger and older Catholics have grown increasingly critical of the pontiff’s handling of the situation.

Even among Catholics who say they attend Mass weekly, the share who give Francis positive marks for his handling of the sex abuse crisis has been cut in half since 2015; 34% in this group now give Francis “excellent” or “good” ratings for his handling of the issue, whereas 67% gave him a positive evaluation in 2015.
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