On Monday, at least two individuals were seen falling from an American C-17 Globemaster, shortly after takeoff from the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. It was later reported that the body of another individual was found stowed away in the landing gear of the transport aircraft.
Afghan news agency Ariana reported on Thursday that Zaki Anwari, a 19-year-old footballer on the Afghan national team, was confirmed as one of the individuals who fell from the C-17 transporting individuals fleeing Kabul after the Taliban seized the Afghan capital.
Anwari’s death was confirmed to the outlet by the General Directorate for Sport.
Zaki Anwari, a 19 year old Afghan who played in the national junior football team died as he fell from a US military plane, according to this post from the Afghan Sports Society. A young man with much promise and talent. What a tragic way to die. #Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/D1a3JiRXJW
“It is with great sadness that Zaki Anwari, one of the players of the national junior football team of the country, died in a bad accident,” the group wrote in a social media post. “The late Anwari, among hundreds of young people who wanted to leave the country, fell down in an accident from the air.”
It was reported on Tuesday that an individual believed to be an Afghan was found dead within the landing gear of an American C-17 Globemaster that was evacuating Afghans and US personnel from Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport.
The DailyMail has offered a conflicting narrative, presenting that Anwari was the individual whose remains were discovered in the landing gear of the C-17 following the aircraft’s emergency landing on Monday.
According to the UK-based outlet, the two individuals seen falling from the transport aircraft were two brothers, aged 16 and 17 years old, who sold watermelon in Kabul’s central market.
The US Air Force has announced that its Office of Special Investigations will be reviewing the incidents surrounding the chaotic Monday scene at the Kabul-based airport.
The service has also confirmed the presence of human remains in the C-17’s landing gear during an emergency landing at al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar.
“The aircraft is currently impounded to provide time to collect the remains and inspect the aircraft before it is returned to flying status,” said Air Force Chief of Media Operations Ann Stefanek.
However, US forces have not provided an estimate for those killed and injured during the American-led evacuation.
A California voter posted a video on her Instagram account on Wednesday evening apparently showing “holes” in the California recall election ballot envelope, according to Breitbart.
In the video, Amy Rose Cox votes ‘Yes’ to recall Governor Gavin Newsom and inserts the ballot into the envelope.
She then turns the envelope to the camera to show that holes in the return envelope can reveal a ‘Yes’ vote to anyone handling it.
“You can see, if someone, from the outside of the mail-in ballot, you can see if somebody has voted ‘Yes’ to recall Newsom,” she says.
“This is very sketchy, and irresponsible in my opinion, but this is asking for fraud. So anybody that has access to this mail-in envelope can see who’s voted ‘Yes,’ toss it, do whatever they want to it.”
A woman voter in California posted a video on her Instagram account on Wednesday evening appearing to show that the return envelope for mail-in ballots in the California recall election could reveal a “yes” vote to anyone handling it. https://t.co/Srhtmp5fxb
‘Disparately’ impacts ‘Latinx,’ Obama appointee claims, despite no ‘data’
A federal judge appointed by Barack Obama has concluded that a law making it illegal to re-enter the United States if you are an illegal alien and previously have been removed is racist.
Because it “disproportionately” impacts “Latinx” people.
The stunning ruling comes from Judge Miranda Du, who ruled in favor of Gustavo Carrillo-Lopez, who wanted an indictment against him for illegal reentry dismissed, because it was “discriminatory.”
The judge claimed, after granting the motion, that criminalizing illegal reentry is “racist” against “Latinx” illegal aliens, and therefore unconstitutional.
The ruling was considered “iffy,” as according to a report in Breitbart, the judge admitted there was no “publicly available data” to support her decision.
The fight was over “Section 1326 of the Immigration and Nationality Act.” Du opined that because it is racist in its origins, it violates the equal protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment.
Du: "Section 1326 has a disparate impact on Latinx persons."
Um, might that be because the vast majority of illegal aliens are "Latinx," judge? pic.twitter.com/F61mdLxjoi
A commentary at RedState reported the “Crazy Train continues to hurtle down the tracks.”
The judge wrote, “Because Carrillo-Lopez has established that Section 1326 was enacted with a discriminatory purpose and that the law has a disparate impact on Latinx persons, and the government fails to show that Section 1326 would have been enacted absent racial animus … the court will grant the motion.”
The commentary wondered, “I’m not an attorney nor do I play one on TV, but how can the federal government demonstrate that Section 1326 could have been enacted absent discriminatory intent if the vast majority of illegal aliens – including an even higher percentage of those who continue to re-enter the country after having been deported – are, in fact, so-called ‘Latinx’?”
It continued, “Let’s try this one more time, judge. Do you think maybe ‘over 97 percent of persons apprehended at the border’ are of Hispanic descent because over 97 percent of illegal aliens who illegally re-enter the U.S. are of … wait for it … Hispanic descent? Shot in the dark, your honor – whaddya think?”
Breitbart’s report noted that Du was appointed by Obama in 2012.
The judge claimed Carrillo-Lopez “convincingly” argued that, despite a lack of evidence, the law “disparately impacts Mexican and Latinx defendants,” the report said.
The case could be sent up to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but only if Joe Biden’s Department of Justice isn’t happy with the decision. Or state attorneys general could intervene.
Over 1 million illegal aliens have crossed the border since Joe Biden has been in office. pic.twitter.com/1YA8DW2PNI
The border crisis has developed under the policies of Biden, who took office and immediately halted construction on a fence to deter illegal entry.
Biden also worked to reverse virtually all of Trump’s policies that successfully had cut down on the illegal flow of people coming across the border in violation of federal law.
The result is that hundreds of thousands of people have been coming into the U.S. illegally, overwhelming the ability of the Border Patrol to contain them and exhausting the ability of social welfare programs to deal with their needs.
Google pulled every trick it could, an unredacted complaint alleges
(The Verge) There was never any question what Epic Games wanted when it took Apple to court: the 48-second “Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite” made it clear App Store hypocrisy was the agenda. But the justification for a parallel case against Google wasn’t as clear-cut until today — it’s only now we’re learning about the most damning accusations against the Android giant.
On Thursday, Judge James Donato unsealed a fully unredacted version of Epic’s original complaint against Google (via Leah Nylen), and it alleges the company was so worried about Epic setting a precedent by abandoning the Play Store that it unleashed a broad effort to keep developers from following the company’s lead. That included straight-up paying top game developers, including Activision Blizzard to stick around, and sharing additional chunks of its revenue with phone makers if they agreed not to preinstall any other app stores.“PROJECT HUG” AND THE “PREMIER DEVICE PROGRAM”
Remember when Google allegedly forced OnePlus to break off a deal that would have seen the Fortnite Launcher preinstalled on phones? LG and Motorola reportedly struck a deal where they got 12 percent of the search revenue from their customers, and up to 6 percent of the money they spent in the Play Store, to be exclusive to Google. OnePlus sister brands Oppo and Vivo were also onboard, with owner BBK committing the vast majority of its phones to the exclusive program. Nokia phone maker HMD Global signed up too, as did Sony, Sharp, Xiaomi, and another unnamed brand.
Apparently, Google viewed the so-called “Premier Device Program” as a huge success:
In a presentation prepared by and presented to senior Google Play executives, Google noted that in the short time since the beginning of the program, over 200 million new devices were covered. The same presentation shows that Google believed that the new RSAs successfully eliminated the “risk of app developer contagion”; noting that there was “no risk” under the “Current Premier tier”.
Google even suggested the idea of buying Epic to remove the threat — going behind Epic’s back and approaching minority owner Tencent, the Chinese tech giant that currently has a 40 percent stake in Epic. The suggestions were “to either (a) buy Epic shares from Tencent to get more control over Epic”, or “(b) join up with Tencent to buy 100% of Epic,” the unredacted complaint reads.IT’S NOT CLEAR GOOGLE ACTUALLY APPROACHED TENCENT
And that’s on top of the dealings Google had with Epic directly in July 2018, when Alphabet’s CFO and other senior Google executives reportedly offered up to $208 million in “special benefits” over three years to bring Fortnite to Google Play — in what would effectively be Google taking 25 percent of the game’s revenue instead of the standard 30 percent. Google allegedly tried to convince Epic to take the deal by pointing out the “frankly abysmal” 15+ step process gamers would have to endure to sideload Fortnite on Android.
Intriguingly, that would have been the month before Epic announced it would ditch the Play Store. That suggests Google had early access to Epic’s sideloading plans, despite CEO Tim Sweeney’s February 2018 instructions to his team to “SAY NOTHING TILL IT SHIPS”:
It also suggests Google, not Epic, might have been the one originally offering special deals. A year later, Epic had to defend the idea that it was the one asking for a “special billing exception,” a sequence of events that appears to have thwarted Epic’s original plans — if you read item #38 in my big story about the best emails from the Epic v. Apple trial, you’ll see Epic was planning to spring a legal trap for Google long before Apple became the primary target.
Why was Google running so scared that it allegedly resorted to these tactics? Apparently, it believed billions of dollars were at stake. According to Epic’s assessment, Google thought Epic had created a “contagion risk” that would spread to other game developers too:
In particular, documents that Google’s Finance Director for Platforms and Ecosystems prepared for the CFO of Alphabet around the time of Fortnite’s launch on Android showed that Google feared what it termed a “contagion risk” resulting from more and more app developers forgoing Google Play. Google feared that the “contagion” would spread in this way: first, inspired by Epic’s example, “[p]owerful developers” such as “Blizzard, Valve, Sony, Nintendo”—creators of some of the most popular and profitable entertainment—would be “able to go on their own”, bypassing Play by directly distributing their own apps.
Then, other “[m]ajor developers”, including Electronic Arts, King, Supercell and Ubisoft, will choose to “colaunch off Play”, collaborating to forego Google’s distribution services as well. And finally, Google even identified a risk that “[a]ll remaining titles [will] co-launch off Play”. Google calculated the total at-risk revenue from the threatened loss of market share in Android app distribution to be $3.6B, with the probability-weighted loss “conservative[ly]” estimated at $550M through 2021. Google also recognized that the “[r]ecent Fortnite + Samsung partnership further amplifies risk & urgency of problem” facing its monopoly position in Android app distribution. Google was determined not to let this happen.
“Epic’s partnership with Samsung and determination to bypass Google Play for distribution of Fortnite struck fear into senior Google executives,” Epic wrote, adding that Google saw it stood to lose up to $6B in revenue by 2022 alone, if Samsung, Amazon and other app stores were able to peel off game developers from Google Play.
A Google presentation looking back at 2018 mentions “Hug” incentives for game developers to keep them from “going it alone”.
Epic’s unredacted complaint might also explain some of the other tidbits we spotted in filings too, like Epic CEO Tim Sweeney’s cryptic assurance to Samsung’s DJ Koh that “You have my assurance Epic will support Samsung 100% in any battle with Google” (#32), or the reason Epic included an entire presentation in evidence about how Google felt it might be struggling in gaming. You can see a very relevant slide from that above.
It’s not clear Epic was ever going to succeed with Fortnite on phones the way it succeeded with Fortnite on consoles: as I discuss in the final section of the Epic v. Apple emails story, mobile is a tiny fraction of the company’s business and likely not the preferred place to play — more of a gateway drug than anything else.
But it sounds like Google certainly didn’t help Epic’s chances there, and it’s impossible to say how much more popular FortniteMobile might have been if Epic never challenged the standard app store toll or had an easier time establishing its own store. The documents showFortnite was exceptionally anemic on Android, even while competitors like PUBG Mobile and Call of Duty were blowing up around the world.
It also shows Google trying to quietly build the kind of walled garden that Apple has explicitly aimed for from the beginning. The company was allegedly locking down phone manufacturers with elaborate contracts, directly appealing to software developers to keep them on the Play store, and treating any alternative software channel as an existential threat — all of which makes an antitrust lawsuit against the more open of the two major mobile operating systems much more plausible.
A monthslong investigation into the 2020 presidential vote has found that Democrat-run cities and states used the COVID-19 crisis to change the rules that likely helped Joe Biden’s ascent to the White House.
The Republican National Committee report found several cases in which Democrats used the virus as an excuse to scuttle voter identification rules, flood mailboxes with ballots, and limit poll watching and vote-count observations.
“The pandemic brought chaos and comprehensive changes to voting processes beginning in the spring primaries and lasting through the post-election process,” said the 23-page report from the RNC’s Committee on Election Integrity, created by party Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.
“Democrats, including some public officials, used the pandemic as a pretense to achieve long-sought policy goals, such as expanded mail voting and the elimination of key safeguards, specifically for absentee voting, such as witness and ID requirements,” added the report provided to Secrets.
It was focused on the voting process and key areas in which state voting laws were abandoned, not on county-by-county claims of voting fraud.
McDaniel, who has weathered criticisms over the election, immediately set up a new election integrity unit that will challenge future voting schemes and advise states on election reform.
She told us, “The RNC established an election integrity committee to examine how Democrats attack election integrity — and more importantly, to lay out a blueprint for protecting our elections from the far-left.”
McDaniel applauded the panel’s leaders, Chairman Joe Gruters and Co-Chairwoman Ashley MacLeay, and said, “Republicans believe in making it easier to vote and harder to cheat, and we’re building a historic election integrity operation to do just that.”
Since the election, several in the GOP led by former President Donald Trump have challenged election results and drawn attention to states where rules were lifted because of the coronavirus. No elections, however, have been overturned.
The issues found in the report, shown below, are technical but amount to improper changes, said the RNC, which provided this list of highlights:
Democratic leaders leveraged the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to water down election integrity safeguards by ramming through last-minute changes to the election process.
Many changes were enacted by courts that disregarded long-standing laws, by Democratic governors who abused their emergency powers, and by officials such as secretaries of state who ignored state laws duly passed by their legislatures.
Some public officials used the pandemic as a pretense to expand mail voting and eliminate key absentee voting safeguards such as witness and ID requirements. Policies such as automatically mailing ballots to all voters and waiving ballot delivery deadlines also led to chaos and decreased confidence in our elections.
The committee also took note of the millions dumped into election coffers by liberals such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
Now on alert, the RNC plans to fight back. It already spent $40 million on election integrity initiatives during the 2020 contests. It is building from there.
Officials said that a “year-round election integrity operation” will be created. They said that will include “hiring in-state election integrity directors, monitoring state and county-level election processes to ensure laws are being followed, training thousands of poll watchers to observe all steps in the elections process, and continuing to engage in lawsuits that protect and promote election integrity.”
The report issued several recommendations that McDaniel is acting on and the party sharing with states eyeing reform legislation.
Many of the recommendations are common sense but opposed by some Democratic lawmakers who instead are using reforms to paint Republicans as proponents of limiting voting. The committee’s top recommendations:
Clean up their voter rolls.
Eliminate same-day and automatic voter registration.
Enact ID requirements for all voting methods, while ensuring officials educate the public on ID requirements and provide free IDs to those few without one.
Only use voting systems that produce a paper record of a voter’s selections that is reviewable pre-tabulation and auditable post-election.
Prohibit ballot harvesting.
Enact uniform and enforceable standards for rejecting and accepting absentee ballots.
Enhance cybersecurity requirements for voting systems, including that they have no wireless, network, or internet connectivity at any stage of the election process.
Allow political parties and state legislatures to have standing to bring or intervene in election-related litigation.
Prohibit the acceptance or the use of any non-governmental, third-party, or private money, grants, or gifts from outside sources to assist in the administration of an election.
In a notable break with progressives, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said in an interview that the coal industry “will be saved, has to be saved, because the country can’t survive without it.”
Others in the Democratic Party have asserted that the coal industry contributes to global warming and that it should be replaced with other sources of “clean” energy like wind turbines, solar panels, and alternative, low-to-zero emission fuels. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) budget resolution includes provisions to encourage green energy sources and to discourage traditional energy sources. In 2016, then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton threatened to put the coal industry “out of business.”
Manchin has long been castigated by some progressives for his moderate policy positions. This defense of the coal industry is his latest break with the left wing of his party.
However, the West Virginia Democrat’s defense of the coal industry is not surprising. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, coal is the energy source for a staggering majority of electricity generation in his state.
In May 2021, coal provided nearly five million MWh of electricity to West Virginia, while the next most used source, natural gas, provided less than 300 thousand MWh. Green energy sources in the state provide even less: hydroelectric accounts for 134 thousand MWh and non-hydroelectric renewables (like biomass, solar, and wind) account for only 106 thousand MWh. This means that nearly 91 percent of all electricity in the state is sourced by burning coal. In short, West Virginia would simply not be able to abandon coal over any brief timespan.
Manchin went one step further and repudiated the idea that America’s coal industry was “polluting the world and the climate.” He argued that it “has no effect whatsoever compared to the impact of Asia.” According to the International Energy Agency, this is true. China surpassed the United States in carbon emissions in 2006; by 2018, the country pumped nearly twice as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the United States.
Manchin proposed another solution: “If you want to help clean up the climate, you’re gonna have to find the technology through innovation to capture the carbon [released from burning coal] and utilize it.” Moreover, Manchin believes that there will eventually be “a transition” to other sources of energy like atomic fusion, hydrogen gas, and nuclear power. While he looks forward to the adoption of these kinds of alternative fuels, he strongly rejects a sudden transition to these power sources.
This commitment to phasing coal out gradually puts Manchin in conflict with Sanders and other progressives. While presenting the $3.5 trillion budget resolution on the Senate floor, Sanders said that $265 billion would go toward funding an “extremely aggressive” transformation of the U.S. energy system away from fossil fuels.
While Manchin voted before the Senate went into recess to move the bill to debate “out of courtesy to [his] colleagues,” he also said that he was “not making any promises” to vote for it when it came back to the Senate. Beyond opposing this “extremely aggressive” transformation from coal, a move that would hurt his constituents, Manchin has expressed opposition to the extraordinary price tag of the bill and has voiced concerns elsewhere about the effect it would have on the national debt.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) must hold his thin coalition together to get Sanders’s budget passed. Even if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) can calm Democratic disagreement in the House, Manchin’s commitment to protecting the coal industry makes it increasingly unlikely that the resolution will make it to the president’s desk.
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22793574/say_nothing_till_it_ships.jpg)
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22793540/epic_google_hug.jpg)
