Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court unfroze the assets ofElon Musk’s satellite communications company Starlink and social platform X after 18.35 million reais, about $3.3 million, was transferred to the government’s coffers.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the unblocking of Starlink and X’s bank accounts and assets after the funds had been transferred, covering X’s fines for noncompliance, according to a press release Friday.
Some 7.28 million reais, about $1.3 million, was transferred from X, while 11.07 million reais, about $1.99 million, was transferred from Starlink on the judge’s orders.
X faced hefty fines after failing to comply with de Moraes’s orders to remove certain content from the platform and name a new legal representative.
The social media company closed its office in Brazil and declined to name a new representative after the judge threatened to arrest its previous representative over a failure to comply with the takedown requests.
Following X’s refusal to name a new representative, de Moraes ordered the suspension of X in Brazil. The platform has been blocked in the country of 220 million since the end of last month.
X and Musk have framed the feud with de Moraes as a battle over free speech and censorship.
Shortly before de Moraes’s suspension order went into effect, X’s Global Government Affairs team said it was facing a shutdown “simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”
“Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purpose,” Musk, the owner of X, also wrote in a post on the platform at the time.
Former House SpeakerNewt Gingrich (R-Ga.) slammed Vice President Harris’s performance at the ABC News debate versus formerPresident Trump,claiming she acted like a “spoiled teenager.”
Gingrich, in a Fox News op-ed published on Saturday, repeatedly slammed the debate moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, political “elites” and argued Harris “failed to achieve her objectives.”
“Harris further hurt herself by spending a large part of her listening time making faces and looking cute,” Gingrich wrote in the op-ed. “It was the behavior of a spoiled teenager, not a commander-in-chief.”
“The elites value style over substance,” he continued. “They would like everyone to behave as though they were at a Washington cocktail party. Most Americans are not so highfalutin. Most Americans do not appreciate well-dressed, clever people treating them as if they are ignorant and incapable of realizing when they are being manipulated and lied to.”
The former speaker said that political “elites” misread what happened at the ABC News debate Tuesday night because they prioritized “style” over “substance.”
“The fact is, authenticity beats wearing a mask,” he wrote. “Being yourself beats trying to be the person your consultants have trained you to be. This has always been true in American politics.”
The Georgia Republican wrote that Trump’s “authenticity” and “substance” outperformed Harris’s “dishonesty and overtrained style.”
“The simple fact is: Vice President Harris can’t tell the truth, because an honest admission of her beliefs – and the failures of the last three-and-a-half years – would doom her campaign,” Gingrich wrote.
“So, we had a debate between the privileged, protected elitist Princess of the Left and a down-to-earth guy who people understand,” he said.
Bomb threats were made toward two medical centers in Springfield, sending both facilities into lockdown.
On the morning of Saturday, Sept. 14, the Springfield Police Division was alerted to a bomb threat against two hospitals in the city.
Kettering Health Springfield, located on North Limestone Street, was one of the alleged targets. According to Kettering Health, police notified the hospital’s security team, who put the hospital under temporary lockdown.
Police officers and the hospital security team worked together to search the premises and did not find anything suspicious.
Kettering Health says the lockdown has since been lifted.
“The safety protocols we have in place for these instances allow us to work quickly with local law enforcement to investigate threats thoroughly and ensure the safety of our patients and staff,” Kettering Health said in a statement.
Mercy Health’s Springfield Regional Medical Center, located at 100 Medical Center Drive, was also sent into a temporary lockdown after officials heard of the alleged bomb threat around 6 a.m.
Police and security on site searched and found nothing, determining the threat to be not credible at this location as well. A spokesperson with Mercy Health says the hospital continued to operate during this time.
“One of our most important responsibilities is the safety and security of our patients, visitors, associates and physicians,” the spokesperson said. “We would like to thank the Springfield Police Department as well as our onsite teams for their swift, efficient and caring response.”
Springfield Police Division posted to social media, reminding citizens of their commitment to ensuring safety for everyone.
“We recognize that the past few days have been particularly challenging for everyone in our community. Please know that we remain fully committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of each and every person,” the statement reads. “We take any and all threats to our community’s safety very seriously and continue to work diligently to address them.”
Without sufficient data to work with, FDA advisors were strongly inclined against giving full approval of obeticholic acid (Ocaliva or OCA) in primary biliary cholangitis (PBC).
On Friday, the agency's Gastrointestinal Drugs Advisory Committee members voted 10-1 (with three abstentions) that the farnesoid X receptor agonist did not have a favorable benefit-risk profile when used as a second-line treatment for eligible adults with PBC and no contraindications.
As for the question of whether there is clinical benefit of obeticholic acid in the first place, the vote was 13-1 no.
One of those voting no to both questions was Daniel Gillen, PhD, a statistician from the University of California Irvine, who said it came down to not seeing a verifiable benefit and a reasonable question of harm.
Safety was an issue for obeticholic acid because the main trial supporting its application (747-302, or COBALTopens in a new tab or window) showed trends of excess liver transplants and death in people taking the drug without contraindications.
Friday's panel spent the day grappling with rocky evidence to support Intercept Pharmaceuticals' supplemental new drug application to get full traditional FDA approval for obeticholic acid as a treatment reducing hepatic decompensation, liver transplant, and death in adults with PBC without cirrhosis or with compensated cirrhosis.
Theo Heller, MD, hepatology chief of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, voted no to both benefit-risk and benefit questions. He described what he saw was a "complete lack of rigor" in the evidence presented by the drug sponsor.
Advisory committee members were told that COBALT failed to show a significant benefit on the expanded primary composite endpoint of liver transplantation, death, and liver-related outcomes in PBC patients with chronic disease. Notably, study investigators had struggled with challenges with functional unblinding and treatment crossover.
Additionally, during the study, the FDA started imposing safety restrictionsopens in a new tab or window contraindicating the use of obeticholic acid in patients with advanced cirrhosis due to reported cases of liver damage. This left remaining eligible patients in insufficient numbers to power an efficacy analysis.
"I don't know if OCA is good or not, don't know if it's safe or not ... Design a real study, do a real study, then we can talk about the data," Heller said. Until that happens, "it's not enough to feel comfortable to say it should be available for all patients."
During the advisory committee meeting, the sponsor tried to steer reviewers to more positive real-world evidence in 747-405. However, the FDA deemed this retrospective cohort study not fit for interpretation as it relied on diagnosis codes and did not confirm that patients actually had PBC.
The panel's consumer representative Joy McVey, of Emory Healthcare in Atlanta, echoed Heller's frustration with the data: "My heart hurts so heavy right now and it's because of exactly what you just said, that what we have to work with is just not there. The evidence is not there."
Obeticholic acid had been awarded accelerated approval by the FDA in May 2016opens in a new tab or window as a second-line treatment for PBC patients not benefiting from ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA). That decision had been based on observed improvements in the surrogate endpoints of alkaline phosphatase and total bilirubin.
The drug now risks getting pulled from the market, as the FDA has done recently with multiple cancer drugs that failed their confirmatory trials. The European Commission has already reportedly revoked marketing authorizationopens in a new tab or window of obeticholic acid for PBC.
The yes votes for obeticholic acid on Friday came from patient representative and PBC patient Danielle Alstat. "I do think the real-world evidence from [747-405] does show if given in the right dose in the right patient, there is a benefit there that shouldn't be ignored," she said.
FDA is not required to follow the advice of its advisory committees, but it often does. The agency has assigned a PDUFA target action date of October 15 for obeticholic acid.
Google seems keen on deploying the arguments that monopolists always do in these scenarios: that its dominance makes things more seamless, integrated and navigable to publishers and ad sellers. That is not really the point; an illegal monopoly can be rather frictionless, but that doesn’t make it not a monopoly. The problem is that it’s allowed to set prices and features and has no incentive to improve its services or face loss of customers to competitors.
The government’s case will include a number of publishers — yes, including news publishers like ourselves — laying out how they’re all but forced to use Google’s ad services technologies, which dominate every part of the process, from the mechanisms to list ad space for sale to the methods of buying, placing and displaying that ad space. This makes the company indispensable for practically entire industries, which gives it plenty of leeway to squeeze.
That Google is a monopolist had already been legally established last month, when another federal judge ruled against the company in a separate lawsuit contending its eponymous search engine was itself a monopoly. The penalties for that ruling have yet to be determined, but for both these cases the consequence could eventually be a breaking up of the giant. We hope for another victory for the free market here, part of a drumbeat that can finally rectify the very lopsided landscape in the digital services and internet platforms and infrastructure world.
The behemoth, once a search company that has since branched out to touch almost every aspect of online commerce, business infrastructure and services from maps to artificial intelligence, cannot hold itself as unfairly or uniquely targeted. In recent years, Uncle Sam has gone after the range of tech giants, from Apple to Meta to Amazon, often under similar arguments. These companies grew out of an earlier Wild West of internet culture, where they saw themselves as frenzied upstarts trying to make it big in this new landscape.
Those times are long past, but these companies have kept that same attitude of scrappy startup that have to fight their way to the top even as they’ve become some of the world’s most valuable and powerful corporations, and often still frame these regulatory actions as the government overreaching against the innovators.
But monopoly has always been antithetical to innovation, going back to Standard Oil. How many other innovations and advancements could be accomplished if newcomers had any chance of competing with individual parts of Google’s business without being either crushed or absorbed?
These corrective steps are actually the surest way to preserve that culture of improvement and competition that Google and its contemporaries claim to hold dear. If and when they aren’t able to call the shots on whole sections of contemporary online life and commercial activity, new players will have the opportunity to step in and do things differently in ways that will help customers and consumers.
Editor’s Note: The thought police at Google immediately slapped a restraining order on this editorial — as they now do with everything we publish about “climate change” to punish us for not toeing the line. Here is the notice we received from them:
What do the climate activists really want? Do they have nothing more in mind than a noble crusade to prevent the burning sky from falling on us? Or is the global warming scare just another piece of the revolution? It’s of course the latter. We know this because they’re constantly telling us it is.
The most recent admission comes from Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Rosanna Xia, whose exhausting essay under the headline “To fix climate anxiety (and also climate change), we first have to fix individualism” was posted on Wednesday – yes, Sept. 11.
Xia dwells a great deal on “climate anxiety” caused by environmental events that have afflicted the planet since its creation but are now blamed on human progress through the combustion of fossil fuels. She worries “we’ll never go back to normal” without defining sufficiently “normal” – maybe because, in a world that has never stopped changing, there is no normal. She is angry, frustrated, helpless, and exhausted. Earth is so doomed that she questions “whether I could ever justify bringing my own children into this world.”
And the answer to all this? Diminish individualism and elevate the collective.
Xia approvingly quotes Sarah Jaquette Ray, whom she identifies as a “an environmental humanist who chairs the environmental studies program at Cal Poly Humboldt,” which tells us a lot about the state of academia.
“One huge reason why climate anxiety feels so awful is this feeling of not being able to do anything about it,” says Ray. “But if you actually saw yourself as part of a collective, as interconnected with all these other movements doing meaningful things, you wouldn’t be feeling this despair and loneliness.”
The West has become so weak in character that group therapy is needed to protect the handwringers from imagined bogeymen.
Though she has decided that individualism is an enemy, nowhere in her fear-filled screed does Xia directly demand a policy regime that would strip us of our individualism.
She does, however, insist that we must “reimagine the systems that got us into such a devastating crisis in the first place.” In other words, give her and the other climate nags power and money and they will turn our civil society into a political society they control.
Other alarmists have been similarly forthcoming about their intentions. We refer readers to our previous documentation of this phenomenon:
Christiana Figueres, one-time executive secretary of United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the climate activists’ agenda is not to protect the environment but to break capitalism. The task ahead, she said in 2015, is “to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”
The late Rajenda Pachauri was the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Chairman until 2015. He openly conceded “the protection of planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems” was “more than a mission” to him. It was his “religion” and “dharma.”
Activist and influential author Naomi Klein once wondered if the fearmongering was “the best chance we’re ever going to get to build a better world?” The world must “change, or be changed,” she says, because an “economic system” — our free and open markets — has caused environmental “wreckage.”
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said almost five years ago that Miami will not exist “in a few years” due to the effects of global warming. She of course had a plan, not to deal with the changes, but to pass Democratic Party policies. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” former Ocasio-Cortez chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti said, according to the Washington Post Magazine. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti asked an aide to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee while the pair met at a Washington, D.C. coffee shop in May. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
The climate change scare is a role player in the larger revolution the political left is determined to push through. That’s why climate brat Greta Thunberg is also a Hamas apologist, the Black Lives Matter movement intersects with the demonization of Christopher Columbus and the transgender madness is sacred to Democrats. It’s part of Obama’s goal of “fundamentally transforming” not just the U.S., but the entire Western world. If it’s allowed to roll on, through Harris-Walz and a Democratic Congress, things will end badly. Revolutions led by power-mad malfeasants seeking meaning for their lives always do.
A retired Immigration and Customs Enforcement official warned DailyMailin a new shocking interview that Venezuelan prison gangs are quickly setting up their network in preparation for all-out gang wars on America's city streets and in neighborhoods. Just days ago, unclassified documentsfrom the US Army North Division warned thousands of Tren de Aragua gang members, some of which are heavily armed, have spread across America.
"Tren de Aragua has unleashed a crime wave from Miami to New York, but for the first time, law enforcement officials are revealing what TdA's future plans are," DailyMail said.
Journos from DailyMail spoke with John Fabbricatore, retired ICE field office director for the Denver region, and he revealed, "There's about to be a big gang war."
"I believe that they're setting up their network right now. These guys are setting up faster than MS-13 did. They're getting into these apartment complexes and what they're doing is they're starting with prostitution," Fabbricatore said.
Days ago, in the northern Denver suburb of Aurora, the local police department arrested ten TdA members.
TdA has taken over at least three apartment buildings, exploiting and unleashing chaos in the community that appears to be spreading. More from DailyMail:
A bombshell report by a law firm that represents one of the apartment management companies assaults, threats of murder, extortion and even child prostitution.
Source: DailyMail
Nothing to see here...
The former ICE official said, "Prostitution is a big money-maker, and the thing with prostitution is that it brings guys in that they can then sell dope to."
He warned that Tda is rapidly expanding and buying weapons on the black market in an area that Bloods, Crips, and Sureños have controlled for years. This creates turf war risks.
"These gangs already set up their networks. They've been dealing dope in those areas. They control prostitution in that area. So Tren de Aragua comes in and they start to try put their girls on the street, and they start to move dope in the area, you're going to see push back. We've haven't seen it yet, but I believe it's about to happen," Fabbricatore warned.
In a separate interview, retired FBI agent Dan Brunner told DailyMail, "TdA is MS-13 on steroids." In other words, the Venezuelan prison gang is way more organized as a transnational criminal organization.
Recall that US Army documents warned about TdA expanding across the nation.
This was only made possible by...
Since January 2021, the Biden-Harris-Mayorkas trio destroyed whatever border security the Trump administration built and facilitated the greatest migrant invasion this nation has ever seen, flooding cities and counties with millions of unvetted migrants, some of which have been confirmed as criminals and terrorists.
The breadth and depth of the migrant storm is only beginning to be realized as once-peaceful neighborhoods across the US, from New York City to Chicago to Denver to some West Coast cities, are being subjected to third-world-esque chaos.
Some municipalities, such as Springfield, Ohio, and Charleroi, Pennsylvania, are being overrun by illegal aliens as local resources are quickly dwindling. It seems as if the Biden-Harris team precision dumped illegal aliens in specific towns.
Flooding the nation with ten million illegal aliens, some of which are armed prison gangs, and overwhelming small towns and suburbia with migrants begs the question of whether the radical left deployed an intentionalstrategy to overload the current system, a move that has been referred to as the Cloward-Piven strategy.
