Former ANTIFA member turned conservative activist, Gabriel Nadales, discusses what it was like to be a part of the Black Bloc and the shocking story that began his conversion to conservatism.
Derek Chauvin guilty on all counts in the death of George Floyd
The fired Minneapolis police officer was immediately taken away in handcuffs.
(StarTribune) Jurors convicted former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on Tuesday of all the counts filed against him — second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter — in the death of George Floyd, who died after being pinned under his knee for more than nine minutes last May.
Chauvin looked stern and glanced around the courtroom as the verdicts were removed from an envelope and read by Judge Peter Cahill.
The fired police officer had on a paper mask and showed no significant reaction to the results. When his bail was revoked, he stood up, put his hands behind his back, was handcuffed and gave a nod to defense attorney Eric Nelson as he was led out the back door of the courtroom by a Hennepin County sheriff’s deputy.
Cahill thanked the jurors, who each confirmed their votes as correctly read. “I want to thank you for not only jury service, but heavy duty jury service,” the judge said.
He asked the attorneys to file written arguments regarding aggravated sentencing factors that could add time to Chauvin’s sentence.
In a prepared statement from the Floyd family attorney said, “Painfully earned justice has arrived for George Floyd’s family and the community here in Minneapolis, but today’s verdict goes far beyond this city and has significant implications for the country and even the world. Justice for Black America is justice for all of America.
Wall Street slips off record highs, Tesla drops after fatal crash
NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. stocks closed lower on Monday, slipping from last week’s record levels, as investors awaited guidance from first-quarter earnings to justify high valuations, while Tesla Inc shares fell after a fatal car crash.
The electric-car maker slid 3.4% after a Tesla vehicle believed to be operating without anyone in the driver’s seat crashed into a tree on Saturday north of Houston, killing two occupants.
The stock was the biggest drag on the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite Index. An 8.4% drop over the weekend in bitcoin, in which Tesla has an investment, also weighed on its share price.
The S&P 500 was mostly lower, with Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Nvidia Corp also weighing on the benchmark index as analysts await results this week and next that form the bulk of earnings season.
Corporate outlooks should indicate to what degree the rally from last year’s lows can continue. Analysts expect first-quarter earnings to have grown 30.9% from a year ago, according to Refinitiv IBES data.
The U.S. economy is poised to boom as consumers hold $2 trillion in savings in excess of pre-pandemic levels, said Doug Peta, chief U.S. investment strategist at BCA Research, adding markets are in pause mode.
“If indeed we do keep grinding higher that would be healthy, that would suggest that the grinding higher is sustainable,” Peta said. “The pullbacks along the way are healthy.”
Real estate was the only one of the 11 S&P 500 sectors to post gains.
Nvidia fell 3.5% after the UK government said it would look into the national security implications of Nvidia’s purchase of British chip designer ARM Holdings, raising a question mark over the $40 billion deal.
Coca-Cola Co rose 0.6% after the beverage maker trounced estimates for quarterly profit and revenue, benefiting from the easing of pandemic curbs and wide vaccine rollouts.
Scientists Warn of ‘Vaccine Treadmill’ as Vaccine Makers Gear Up for COVID Booster Shots
COVID booster shots are music to the ears of investors, but scientists warn trying to outsmart the virus with booster shots could create new variants, each more virulent and transmissible than the one before.
Vaccine makers are telling investors and the media that COVID booster shots are already in the works. In some cases, companies say the boosters may be needed because the vaccine’s effectiveness may run out. In other instances, they suggest booster shots will be needed to combat new COVID variants.
Annual COVID booster shots are music to the ears of investors. But some independent scientists warn that trying to outsmart the virus with booster shots designed to address the next variant could backfire, creating an endless wave of new variants, each more virulent and transmissible than the one before.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said Thursday a third dose of the company’s COVID vaccine was “likely” to be needed within a year of the initial two-dose inoculation — followed by annual vaccinations.
Bourla said that “a likely scenario” is “a third dose somewhere between six and 12 months, and from there it would be an annual re-vaccination.”
In a conversation hosted by CVS Health, Bourla explained how some vaccines are given only once, while others need annual boosters like flu shots.
“It is extremely important to suppress the pool of people that can be susceptible to the virus,” Bourla said during an interview with CNBC. Booster shots will be an important tool in battling more contagious variants, he added.
Moderna’s chief commercial officer, Corinne M. Le Goff, said during a call with investors last week that Americans could start getting booster shots of its vaccine later this year to protect against COVID variants.
“It is likely that the countries that have already achieved high vaccine coverage are going to be ready to shift their focus to boosters in 2022, and possibly even starting at the end of this year,” Le Goff said.
Johnson & Johnson (J&J) has said its single-shot vaccine will probably need to be given annually.
The U.S. is also preparing for the possibility that a booster shot will be needed between nine to 12 months after people are initially vaccinated against COVID, a White House official said Thursday.
While the duration of immunity after vaccination is being studied, booster vaccines could be needed, David Kessler, chief science officer for President Biden’s COVID-19 response task force told a congressional committee meeting.
According to initial data, Moderna and Pfizer vaccines retain most of their effectiveness for at least six months, though for how much longer has not been determined.
Even if that protection lasts longer than six months, experts have said rapidly spreading COVID variants may emerge and could lead to the need for regular booster shots similar to annual flu shots.
Boosters could enable new, more infectious variants — and a never-ending market for vaccines
According to Rob Verkerk Ph.D., founder, scientific and executive director of Alliance for Natural Health International, variants can become more virulent and transmissible, while also including immune (or vaccine) escape mutations if we continue on the vaccine treadmill — trying to develop new vaccines that outsmart the virus.
Verkerk said “if we put all our eggs” in the basket of vaccines that target the very part of the virus that is most subject to mutation, we place a selection pressure on the virus that favors the development of immune escape variants.
ISIS executes Coptic businessman in Egypt, sends message to ‘all crusaders in the world’
Church, family mourn death: ‘A saint in the highest places of heaven’
Islamic State-linked terrorists killed a Coptic Christian man kidnapped in November and two others in Egypt, as Christians and those who support the Egyptian army continue to face terror in the Sinai region.
A 13-minute video circulated by Islamic State media platforms Saturday showed Nabil Habashi Salama, a 62-year-old businessman and member of Egypt’s minority Coptic Orthodox Church, being shot in the head by a terrorist in the desert.
A video screenshot showed Salama kneeling with his head down as the three militants stood behind him holding rifles with their faces blurred out.
“As for you Christians of Egypt, this is the price you are paying for supporting the Egyptian army,” a militant was quoted as saying in the video.
The released video also showed two young Sinai tribesmen being shot and killed in the desert by masked militants, who accused them of fighting alongside the Egyptian military, according to Agence France Presse.
The militants used the video to send a message to “all crusaders in the world,” Egypt Today reports.
“As you kill, you will be killed, and as you capture, you will be captured,” a militant was quoted as saying.
On Monday, Egypt’s interior ministry confirmed that it killed the three “terrorist elements” linked to the Coptic man’s execution after an “intense firefight” with security forces. A search is on for other suspected members of the terror cell.
The statement said the suspected terrorists had plans to carry out terror operations against homes and Coptic houses of worship, according to AFP. The ministry noted that security forces found a suicide belt and hand grenade in the militants’ possession.
Dershowitz: Maxine Waters’ Tactics Similar to Those Used by Ku Klux Klan
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) was clearly trying to influence the jury in the Derek Chauvin trial when she traveled to Minnesota and said Chauvin should be found guilty, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz charged on Tuesday.
“Her message was clearly intended to get to the jury—‘If you will acquit or if you find the charge less than murder, we will burn down your buildings. We will burn down your businesses. We will attack you. We will do what happened to the witness—blood on their door,’” he said during an appearance on Newsmax, referring to how the former home of defense expert Barry Brodd was recently vandalized.
“This was an attempt to intimidate the jury. It’s borrowed precisely from the Ku Klux Klan of the 1930s and 1920s when the Klan would march outside of courthouses and threatened all kinds of reprisals if the jury ever dared convict a white person or acquit a black person. And so, efforts to intimidate a jury should result in a mistrial with the judge, of course, wouldn’t grant a mistrial because then he’d be responsible for the riots that would ensue, even though it was Waters who was responsible,” Dershowitz added.
Waters told a crowd in Brooklyn Center, just outside of Minneapolis, over the weekend that they should “get more confrontational” if a guilty verdict isn’t handed down.
“We’re looking for a guilty verdict and we’re looking to see if all of the talk that took place and has been taking place after they saw what happened to George Floyd,” she also said. “If nothing does not happen [sic], then we know that we got to not only stay in the street but we have got to fight for justice.”
Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill, the judge overseeing the trial of Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer accused of killing Floyd, told the court on Monday he was aware of Waters’ statements.
Cahill rejected a motion from Chauvin’s lawyer for a mistrial. However, he told the lawyer that he could submit articles about the remarks for an “appeal that may result in this whole trial being overturned.”
Eric Nelson, the lawyer, had argued that Waters was making “threats against the sanctity of the jury process” and “threatening and intimidating the jury” into delivering a guilty verdict against his client.
