'Hunter Biden is a public figure who has been the subject of multiple investigations and is now a convicted felon'

Our “10 Happiest Songs in Rock Music” article presents a group of rock songs that simply make you feel happy. Who doesn’t want to be happy? Well, I guess there are some people who actually enjoy being miserable. It’s funny that they actually find happiness in being miserable. But that’s not the audience we’re writing this list for. No, we are creating our “10 Happy Songs in Rock Music” list for those who enjoy listening to happy songs or maybe are just looking for something to put them in a good mood and make them feel happy. There’s really no The post 10 Happiest Songs In Rock Music appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

In the north-central English county of Derbyshire, the removal of a dam has hundreds of salmon swimming up a beloved river once again. It’s the first time in 100 years that salmon have reached so far up the River Derwent, and it’s caused quite a stir among the locals. While the industrial activity in the […] The post Salmon Return to the Heart of UK for First Time in 100 Years After Dam Removal: ‘It’s very rewarding’ appeared first on Good News Network.

For the past few years, Transformers has the king of crossovers, creating new figures as they collaborate with Ghostbusters, Top Gun, Back to the Future, and most recently Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with the aptly CONTINUE READING... The post TMNT/MotU Crossover Review – Skeletor, Shredder, and Krang appeared first on The Retro Network.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—An “increased risk” exists that at least $293 million in U.S. aid disbursed by the State Department in Afghanistan between March and November 2022 could fall into the Taliban’s hands, a new report finds. Two subagencies of the State Department—the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs—provided incomplete documentation and therefore could not establish that they had complied with counterterrorism vetting requirements, the report says. The report was prepared by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR. Members of the Taliban have attempted to capture U.S. funds meant to provide aid to the people of Afghanistan since the U.S.-designated terrorist organization took over the country again in August 2021. “The risk of Taliban-founded NGOs, or other organizations that could funnel money to terrorist groups, benefiting from U.S. taxpayer funds underscores the importance of [the State Department] complying with its own vetting and document retention requirements,” the report reads. “As the U.S. government continues to provide assistance to the people of Afghanistan, it is vital that State complies with its partner-vetting requirements intended to prevent the department from awarding U.S. taxpayer funds to individuals and entities with ties to terrorism,” it says. Officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development told SIGAR that their agency had heard reports of over 1,000 new nongovernmental organizations registering with the Taliban and that many of those groups are affiliated with terrorists. The State Department requires officials to perform risk assessments before awarding funds to Afghan entities, leveraging an array of public and nonpublic information to gauge how likely it is that potential partners have ties to terrorist organizations. The State Department told SIGAR that its two subagencies didn’t retain some documents related to these vetting processes and, therefore, the documents couldn’t be provided to investigators. Noncompliance with the State Department’s counterterrorism partner-vetting protocols creates an “increased risk” that American tax dollars could end up in the hands of the Taliban, according to the report. SIGAR recommended that the State Department take immediate action to make sure its subagencies are complying with counterterrorism vetting requirements. There is some evidence that taxpayer funds have fallen into the hands of the Taliban since the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan. In May, SIGAR uncovered that $1.3 million flowed to the terror organization through the State Department’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement in Afghanistan. The Taliban also has interfered with American humanitarian operations in the country, with individuals linked to USAID’s $102 million “Democracy, Gender and Rights Program” in Afghanistan being detained by terrorists. Three years after the United States left Afghanistan, the country has experienced famine, erosion of women’s rights, and proliferation of terrorist organizations such as ISIS and al-Qaeda. “Afghanistan has not returned to a pre 9/11 state—in many ways it is much worse now, as our disastrous withdrawal has fueled a new global enthusiasm for Islamic extremism,” Simone Ledeen, former deputy assistant defense secretary for the Middle East, previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The Biden administration’s denials about the real and growing threat from Afghanistan are consistent with their reality-denying assertions that their withdrawal was a success and that no American service members have been killed on their watch (a false assertion President Joe Biden made in June),” Ledeen said. “The warning lights are flashing red.” Congress established SIGAR in 2008 to monitor government expenditures in Afghanistan during the war on terror and it now tracks the United States’ post-withdrawal spending there. The State Department and the two involved subagencies did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post Taliban Could Abscond With Hundreds of Millions in US Aid to Afghanistan, Watchdog Finds appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. In Bangladesh, authorities have implemented a sweeping internet blackout as student-led demonstrations intensify, demanding changes to the public sector employment quotas. The focus of the protests is a contentious policy reserving a third of government roles for family members of the veterans of the 1971 War of independence. This week, escalating tensions saw protestors ransack the BTV state broadcaster’s headquarters in Dhaka, resulting in significant damage and numerous casualties. According to AFP, the ongoing conflicts have already claimed the lives of at least 32 individuals. The situation deteriorated notably on Thursday when confrontations between protestors and law enforcement resulted in 17 fatalities. Amid the chaos, many were reportedly trapped inside the BTV offices following the protesters’ aggressive acts. To regain control and mitigate the spread of what it views as potential misinformation, the Bangladeshi government has completely cut off internet and telephone services across the nation. This drastic measure aligns with strategies observed in other South Asian countries under similar circumstances. NetBlocks confirmed the extensive nature of this internet suspension, announcing on Twitter on July 18, 2022, that Bangladesh is experiencing a “near-total national internet shutdown.” Related: Obama’s internet kill switch Such shutdowns are becoming an increasingly common global phenomenon, often utilized by governments to handle various crises, including protests, examinations, and elections. Bangladesh, in particular, has a troubling record of frequent internet blackouts used to suppress political dissent and activism. At the close of 2023, the CIVICUS Monitor, which evaluates civil liberties in almost 200 nations, reclassified the civic freedoms status of Bangladesh to “closed.” This comes after the country orchestrated six internet shutdowns in just the previous year. Despite assurances from the country’s telecommunications authority to maintain unrestricted internet access during the general elections earlier in 2024, disruptions continued, including blocking access to numerous news sites throughout the electoral process. This pattern underscores a troubling inclination towards curtailing communication and information, highlighting significant challenges to digital rights and access in the region. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Bangladesh Orders Internet Blackout Amid Student Protests appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

"A living miracle" – that's what they're calling a dog that was discovered and rescued from a Virginia cave by experienced cavers on Sunday, July 07.

Democrats Finally Unburdened By What Has Been

A world-first recording has revealed the harmonious way male African elephants signal when it's time to move on by vocalizing a bit like a barbershop quartet. One bull begins the call to action, and one by one, the others join in to create a sonorous, infrasonic chorus that rumbles across the landscape. The “let’s go” rumble was first recorded in 2004 at the Mushara waterhole in Etosha National Park, Namibia. Study lead author Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, a research associate at Stanford University’s Center for Conservation Biology, was a member of the team that captured the first-ever recording.“I was so excited when I managed to record it,” she said in a statement. “It was thrilling to realize that these males were using complex vocal coordination like the females were.”One recording in the bag, they returned from 2005 to 2017 with buried microphones and night-vision cameras to get a better grasp of the vocalizations, which are too low frequency to be heard by human ears. Their investigations revealed that how male bull elephants say “let’s go” closely mirrors the behaviors seen among female elephants, indicating they may learn the social call when they’re young and carry it into adult life. “They grew up in a family where all the female leaders were engaging in this ritual,” O’Connell-Rodwell said. “We think that as they mature and form their own groups, they adapt and use these learned behaviors to coordinate with other males.” In both males and females, the call is initiated by a lead and then added to by more members of the group, with each elephant waiting for the last individual’s rumble to finish before adding their own voice to the mix.“It’s very synchronized and ritualized. When one goes high, the other goes low, and they have this vocal space where they’re coordinating,” O’Connell-Rodwell added.Beyond the delightful mental imagery of barbershop quartet elephants rumbling across the savanna, the insightful research joins a recent study that discovered elephants may have names for each other in adding to the ongoing investigation into whether or not language exists in animals.“Our findings not only underscore the complexity and richness of the social lives of male elephants,” O’Connell-Rodwell said, “but also advance our understanding of how they use vocalizations in ritual and coordination and, really, move us closer to the idea of elephant language.”The study is published in PeerJ.

Democrats have plenty of problems, but they’re working through them. The party solved the Joe Biden problem Sunday when he announced he would decline the party’s nomination for president. They haven’t gotten any closer to solving the election problem, and they know it — Biden basically booby-trapped the gift box, and the assassination attempt on Donald Trump put a bow on it. But hey, at least they might have solved the Kamala Harris problem. Here’s how it all plays out. The deadly July 13 assassination attempt on Trump broke the dam on public, popular, and even celebrity support for a man the Democrats, Hollywood, and the media had spent eight years demonizing. First, the booby trap. Remember back when Biden put Harris in charge of immigration? Her aides were so angry that they leaked on him to the press. The political realities of the Democratic Party’s base, they cried, barred any politician from any actually workable border solutions. It was political sabotage, they moaned. Worse: Kamala was totally unwilling to do the work or even read the briefs her staff had compiled. (They leaked this part, too.) Biden’s goal, they suggested, was to take out an insurance policy against the vice president to keep her ambitions against him in check. In all fairness to the Biden camp, Harris’ lack of political resonance (she came in last in the 2016 Democrat primary) was balanced by her vicious ambitions (she did not hesitate on the primary trail to call Joe a racist). When you look at the party swinging behind Kamala Harris despite her problems, it’s vital to understand the realities they had confronted. First, Joe Biden was losing to Donald Trump even before the disastrous debate that broke the dam open and Democrats began to criticize their nominee-apparent publicly. That was because of his own record — a record Harris owns and must defend. Next, who else was going to take the job? The deadly July 13 assassination attempt on Trump broke the dam on public, popular, and even celebrity support for a man the Democrats, Hollywood, and the media had spent eight years demonizing. Less than four months from a presidential election, that’s going to change the calculus for top Democrats thinking about jumping into this race. If you’re the governor of California, for example, are you going to jump from a semi-floating ship to one that’s clearly on fire and in distress, or will you wait for the next chance? This reality served to shore up Harris. Democrats knew they needed someone — anyone — else, but few wanted the job. And then there’s the money. We’ve discussed this before. Kamala gets the money. That doesn't mean the Republican Party won’t challenge it. The GOP absolutely will. But in the end, it's just about certain that Kamala will get it because it’s going to satisfy donor intent to support her. And that money might help in the House and Senate, where many Democrats are more hopeful. The first task was the hardest: giving Biden the boot. The job was helped by his declining health, which is reportedly so bad that his brother Frank talked about just enjoying “whatever time we have left.” By the way: His brother’s candidness was so on point. The Biden machine publicly called Frank an alcoholic to deny it. You can’t make it up about these people. The second task was avoiding all-out Democrat civil war after Biden was gone. That was almost as hard as booting Biden but was made easier by the assassination attempt whittling down the list of those willing to run on a short runway in an increasingly difficult race. The third task is going to be winning with a candidate who is closely tied to all of Biden’s failings, particularly stained on one of the issues Americans are angriest about (immigration), and guilty of both propping the president up and openly lying about his obviously horrible mental state. Democrats were stuck with Harris, having picked the vice president to satisfy identity politics. They’d spent the past four years hiding the Hillary-esque politician and were going to have to give her chance someday. Might as well be on a race few Democrats are bullish on winning, right? And then maybe, in a way, they’ll have solved that last, lingering problem of what to do about Harris. Either she wins, and there’s no problem left — a possibility Republicans ought to take seriously. Or she loses, and the decks are cleared for the next round of Democrat leaders. That’s one way to earn a win on a bad day. Blaze News: Joe Biden announces he is ending his presidential campaign, will finish term New York Times: Biden staff found out about their boss’ decision on X Blaze News: Republicans call for Biden to resign if he cannot finish his campaign Beltway Brief: Reality check: You can’t just switch candidates Sign up for Bedford’s newsletter Sign up to get Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford's newsletter.