Justice Department press release: “Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Anne Milgram, the Administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (‘DEA’), announced today the arrests of TAKESHI EBISAWA, SOMPHOP SINGHASIRI, SUKSAN JULLANAN, a/k/a ‘Bobby,’ and SOMPAK RUKRASARANEE, for international narcotics and weapons trafficking offenses. EBISAWA, a Japanese national, JULLANAN, a United States and Thai national, and RUKRASARANEE, a Thai national, were arrested in Manhattan on April 4, 2022. SINGHASIRI, a Thai national, was arrested in Manhattan on April 5, 2022. EBISAWA, JULLANAN, and RUKRASARANEE were presented before Magistrate Judge Jennifer Willis on April 5, 2022, and were ordered detained, and SINGHASIRI was presented before Judge Willis on April 6, 2022, and was ordered detained. U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said: ‘We allege Mr. Ebisawa and his co-conspirators brokered deals with an undercover DEA agent to buy heavy-duty weaponry and sell large quantities of illegal drugs. The drugs were destined for New York streets, and the weapons shipments were meant for factions in unstable nations. Members of this international crime syndicate can no longer put lives in danger and will face justice for their illicit actions.'”

“DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said: ‘The expansive reach of transnational criminal networks, like the Yakuza, presents a serious threat to the safety and health of all communities. Ebisawa and his associates intended to distribute hundreds of kilograms of methamphetamine and heroin to the United States, using deadly weapons to enable their criminal activities, at a time when nearly 300 Americans lose their lives to drug overdose every day. These arrests represent the unwavering determination of the DEA, together with our U.S. and international partners, to target and bring to justice violent criminals who lead transnational drug trafficking organizations that continue to flood our country with dangerous drugs.'”

In a rare display of bipartisanship, the Senate unanimously passed a bill to ban the import of Russian oil to the United States and suspend Russia’s normal trading partner status, according to US News and World Report.

In rare unanimity typically seen only in the modern era when naming post offices, all members of the Senate passed two separate bills, one which rescinded Russia’s status as a normal trading partner with the United States and another which bans the import of fossil fuels from Russia.

“Ending normal trade relations hammers home that Putin has made Russia into a full-fledged pariah state,” said Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

The Senate voted 53 – 47 to confirm US Circuit Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US Supreme Court on Thursday, who will now become the third Black American, the sixth woman, and the first of both to serve on the highest court after retiring Justice Stephen Breyer vacates his seat within the next few months at the end of the current Supreme Court session.

House January 6th Committee Chair Congressman Bennie Thompson told CNN Thursday the panel is looking into formally requesting the fat bastard sit down for a interview. “We’ll be talking about the likelihood of a Trump interview in the not too distant future,” said Thompson, adding a subpoena would be unlikely “It’s not where he’d be forced to come in. It would probably be some invitation. If he would want to come we’d love to hear from him.” Trump claimed to the Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey in an interview on Wednesday he would consider a request.

In a major blow to Prime Minister Imran Khan political survival, Pakistan’s Supreme Court denied Khan’s effort to dissolve the nation’s Parliament, allowing the body to proceed with a “no confidence” vote that will lead to a round of elections that would end Khan’s term, Reuters reports.

The continuing uncertainty in Pakistani politics has hurt the nation’s economy, with the rupee hitting all-time lows this week.  The nation of 220 million people will undertake parliamentary elections to determine its new leader in the coming weeks.  The person who appointed Prime Minister would then serve the remainder of the term, until August 2023.

A former cricket star who led the nation to a world championship in 1992, the 69-year-old Khan had his deputy dissolve the lower chamber of the parliament in an attempt to avoid a “no confidence vote,” a move the court determined was unconstitutional.  Khan has said his ouster is the result of a US-led conspiracy to get rid of him as he has pushed the nation to closer relations with Russia and China.

In a rare action, the United Nations General Assembly has voted to suspend Russia’s membership on the organization’s Human Rights Council, paving the way for the body to sanction Russia for atrocities its military is committing in Ukraine, the Associated Press reports.

Russia’s membership on the Council allowed it to block any actions the group could have taken against it, essentially making the Council impotent to punish Russia for the targeted murder of unarmed civilians in Ukraine.

The vote was 93-24 with 58 abstentions, which was significantly lower than votes to condemn Russia aggression in Ukraine in the past.  The last time the UN kicked a nation off the Human Rights Council was when it expelled Libya in 2011.

During a wide-ranging interview at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump told the Washington Post that he offered the former brevet First Lady Ivanka Trump and her concubine Jared Kushner “privilege” if they wanted to avoid testifying before the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th domestic terrorist attack on Congress, but they declined.  As numerous courts have determined, as an ex-president, Trump has no authority to convey executive privilege on anyone.

For the first documented time, Ivanka worked a full eight-hour day, testifying in person before the Committee on her and her father’s actions on the day of the insurrection.  Her husband testified earlier for six hours via teleconference earlier.

Trump continued to claim he had no power to do anything to prevent the violence at the Capitol, again pushing responsibility on others even though he was the Commander-in-Chief of the military.

“I thought it was a shame, and I kept asking why isn’t she doing something about it? Why isn’t Nancy Pelosi doing something about it? And the mayor of D.C. also. The mayor of D.C. and Nancy Pelosi are in charge,” Trump said of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in a 45-minute interview with The Washington Post. “I hated seeing it. I hated seeing it. And I said, ‘It’s got to be taken care of,’ and I assumed they were taking care of it.”

The Department of Justice has opened a probe into the fifteen boxes fat ex-President Trump stole from the White House after he left office in disgrace in early 2021, the Washington Post reports

Republican Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich sent a letter detailing the findings of his interim report on the investigation into the 2020 Presidential election to state Senate President Karen Fann on Wednesday that did not mention anything about the bamboo ballots that were sent from China to unfairly rig the election against the America First patriot president and illegally install Sleepy Joe Biden and his crooked son Hunter the crackhead in the White House.

Brnovich went over some “problematic system-wide issues that relate to early ballot handling and collection” in the letter but did not say if the ballots were made out of bamboo, or were even illegal votes at all. He mostly just rambles on and on for 12 pages with zero mention of the panda food used to steal the election. It’s pretty boring and does not have any secret Chinese bamboo ballots in it. Brnovich also leave out all of the stuff about how the Jewish space lasers beamed mind control energy into the minds of voters in Maricopa County and made them use Sharpies to vote which are illegal. The routers too. He never got to see those routers and the CyberNinjas – who were definitely Deep State plants who purposely fucked up the audit – didn’t get to investigate them either because Maricopa County unconstitutionally criticized them on Twitter. The investigation was rigged. Someone should audit this letter and see if it’s made out of bamboo.

.@ABC, this threat of violence against me by @jimmykimmel has been filed with the @CapitolPolice. pic.twitter.com/nxYX1LF2jK

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 6, 2022

German foreign intelligence service agents intercepted radio traffic in which Russian troops casually discussed, on open channels, their participation in the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians last weekend in the town of Bucha outside of Kyiv, Spiegel reports. The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) briefed members of German parliament on Wednesday about the intercepts, which reportedly make it clear the leaders of the Chechen militia occupying the town had deliberately planned the murders of defenseless Ukrainians, women and children among them. Per Spiegel, the tone of the conversations was simple and matter of fact, reporting “the material suggests that the troops spoke of the atrocities as though they were simply discussing their everyday lives.”

Loser ex-president Donald Trump falsely claimed in a Wednesday interview with the Washington Post that he wanted to march to the Capitol with his cult on January 6th, 2021 and that DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and Nancy Pelosi secretly colluded with them to attack the Capitol.

“I thought it was a shame, and I kept asking why isn’t she doing something about it? Why isn’t Nancy Pelosi doing something about it? And the mayor of D.C. also. The mayor of D.C. and Nancy Pelosi are in charge. I hated seeing it. I hated seeing it. And I said, ‘It’s got to be taken care of,’ and I assumed they were taking care of it,” said the fat orange bastard, adding he told the crowd “I said peaceful and patriotic,” without mentioning all the other shit he said. When asked why he didn’t march to the Capitol with his fans after the speech, which Trump claims the media suppresses photos showing the tremendous crowd size, Donald told the Post “Secret Service said I couldn’t go. I would have gone there in a minute,” which is false because he’s too fat and out of shape to run the roughly mile and a half from the Ellipse to the Capitol, which no human can run in under a minute.

“From the standpoint of telephone calls, I don’t remember getting very many,” Trump said about the nearly eight hour gap in the White House phone logs from the day, even though he also said he has a “very good” memory. “Why would I care about who called me? If congressmen were calling me, what difference did it make? There was nothing secretive about it. There was no secret.”

When asked to address Congressman Mo Brooks’ claim that Donald unendorsed him over Brooks’ failure to convince the House and Senate to overturn the 2020 election and return him to the Presidency, Trump said “I didn’t ask him to do it. He’s in no position to do it. I certainly didn’t ask him to do it. But I believe when you see massive election fraud, I can’t imagine that somebody who won the election based on fraud, that something doesn’t happen? How has it not happened? If you are a bank robber, or you’re a jewelry store robber, and you go into Tiffany’s and you steal their diamonds and get caught, you have to give the diamonds back.”

‘VERY DANGEROUS’: The Louisiana senator rips into the White House, saying its progressive policies are creating an illegal immigration crisis. pic.twitter.com/fESd3WK7MF

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 7, 2022

Thomas Middlebrooks, the federal judge for the Southern District of Florida, rejected Donald Trump’s motion to recuse himself from Trump’s self-indulgent, overarching lawsuit against Hillary Clinton because Middlebrooks was appointed to the federal bench by her husband, Politico reports.

“When Plaintiff is a litigant before a judge that he himself appointed, he does not tend to advance these same sorts of bias concerns,” Middlebrooks wrote, citing two of Trump’s failed lawsuits that were heard, and dismissed, by judges Trump appointed.

In the final kicker, Middlebrooks noted that he was unanimously approved by the Senate when his confirmation was submitted.

It's going to take all of us to protect our democracy, especially young people. There is no silver bullet, but if we focus on ideas and solutions that will strengthen our democracy, rather than weaken it, we can live up to our ideals and show the world what is possible. pic.twitter.com/6ZU2fYQyJm

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) April 7, 2022

Pilots on an Air France Boeing 777 traveling from New York to Paris suddenly and mysteriously lost control of their plane as it was approaching for a landing at Charles de Gaulle Airport, with gripping audio depicting the pilots struggle to avoid a crash, the New York Post reports.

The audio (which can be heard after the fold) starts with routine chatter as Air France Flight 11 but changes to the grunts and noises from the cockpit as the pilots at first don’t understand what happened, and then fight the unresponsive controls.

A few thousand feet from the ground, the pilots were able to regain control of the aircraft and do a fly-by of the runaway to re-enter the landing cycle.  The plane landed the second time safely. 

The sun was setting, literally and figuratively, on the demonstration to protest Disney’s acceptance of the fact that LGBTQ people exist.  The lead singer in the band entertains the “crowd” (?) of about 100 people by reading signs they brought.  And while they don’t have any problem with seven elderly short men living with a supple, virginal maiden, nor do they care that Goofy treats Pluto like a pet, they do have a problem with acknowledging two men kiss, two women kiss, and innumerable other combinations.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has scheduled the roll call vote on nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson taking the seat of Justice Stephen Breyer to start at 1:45 p.m. ET.  At the end of the roll call, it is expected that Jackson will be voted in as the first Black woman to be on the United States Supreme Court.