“Staff at a logistics company in Germany threw cocaine with a street value of up to 1 million euros ($1.2 million) in the trash, not realizing that the packages they’d found inside banana crates were drugs, customs officials said Tuesday. Authorities said that a fruit logistics company in Erding, near Munich, called police on May 10 to report that workers had discovered at least 4.5 kilograms (almost 10 pounds) of cocaine in organic waste bins on their premises.”

“Police determined that the drugs had been dumped there a day earlier by subcontractors who gave no thought to the ‘foreign objects’ they found wrapped in tape inside the banana crates before discarding them. The Munich customs office said the crates had been shipped from Ecuador via the Netherlands. No further packets of the high-grade cocaine were found” – AP.

Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.

Vaccine passports & mask mandates create discrimination against unvaxxed people who trust their immune systems to a virus that is 99% survivable.https://t.co/6X6VNolcA7

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) May 25, 2021

Just Security: “In a bipartisan vote last week, the House passed legislation to create an independent national commission to investigate the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A 9/11-style commission is the best option for uncovering the truth about the attacks and its multiple causes, and for recommending ways to protect us in the future. But opposition from Republican leadership in the House and Senate, as well as former President Donald Trump, paints a bleak picture for passage in the Senate according to many observers.”

“Every effort should be made to overcome the opposition to a commission. But we should also consider alternatives given that the commission may not happen and, even if it does, the current plan to sunset the commission by the end of 2021 would render it effectively powerless to compel evidence. What’s more, laying out what might happen if a commission fails could help convince doubters that a commission is preferable: For all the concerns expressed by Republicans in the Senate, they may prefer a commission they can influence over a select committee they cannot. Norm Ornstein and Andy Wright have each suggested a few alternatives, among them a congressional select committee, a Department of Justice special prosecutor (or similar special entity), or a presidentially-created commission. Another option would be to let individual committees in Congress conduct separate investigations. All of these options have pluses and minuses but a House select committee would be the best.”

“It’s never been a better time to believe in UFOs. Barack Obama talked last week about inexplicable footage of unidentified aerial phenomena, and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) wrote about his trip to Area 51 in a recent op-ed. In June, American intelligence agencies are set to release an unclassified report on what the government knows about UFOs. For ‘ufologists,’ long mocked as tinfoil hat-wearers obsessed with little green men, some measure of vindication may finally be at hand. But for many UFO enthusiasts on the right, this new round of UFO disclosures is nothing to cheer about. Instead, they’re claiming the new videos of possible UFO sightings are meant to distract people from Donald Trump’s baseless voter fraud allegations and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic. ‘There’s no doubt that this mainstream UFO disclosure push is offering a convenient distraction for the Deep State to turn our attention away from important issues like the Scamdemic and the election fraud getting exposed,’ Jordan Sather, a UFO and QAnon conspiracy theorist, complained on social media network Telegram on May 19.”

“Sather, who has griped that interest in UFOs has just become a way for left-wing ‘social justice warriors’ to ‘virtue signal,’ typifies the response. At a moment when longtime UFO promoters are soaking in the mainstreaming of UFO discussion, many conspiracy theorists on the right instead see the sinister hand of a global cabal at play. Conspiracy theory hub InfoWars often posts articles about UFOs. But more recently, InfoWars has started to see the prospect of extraterrestrial revelations as a deep state plot. In an April video, InfoWars staffer Greg Reese posited that the UFOs were being faked using technology from inventor Nikola Tesla and the Nazis, with the ultimate goal of faking an alien invasion to enslave humanity in ‘the most dire false flag imaginable.’ In QAnon-heavy language about a nefarious ‘cabal’ and a ‘Great Awakening,’ Reese claimed that the new UFO videos were meant to convince people, wrongly, that the aliens are real, before vaporizing much of humanity with energy weapons” – Daily Beast.

Talking Points Memo: “The Ohio Supreme Court sided with the Stark County, Ohio board of elections Monday night, compelling the county commissioners to unlock funds for new voting machines – money they’d previously blocked after a wave of Trump supporters besieged them with conspiracy theories. The county board of elections decided to buy $1.5 million worth of new voting machines manufactured by Dominion voting systems back in December. Theirs were falling apart, and they wanted to obtain new ones in time for a special election in May.”

“That election came and went, as county officials were locked in a conspiracy theory-infused wrestling match that made its way up to the state Supreme Court. After the all-Republican slate of county commissioners rejected the board’s vote to purchase the machines, having been overwhelmed with calls from the conspiracy theorists, the board asked the Court to force them to approve the purchase. That decision finally came down Monday night, after the board initially filed the lawsuit in March. It wasn’t fast enough to get new machines set up for the May election, and it likely won’t be for an August one – but as county board of elections chair Sam Ferruccio confirmed to TPM Monday night, it’s fast enough to replace the machines for the November general election.”

The highest-ranking member of the Louisiana State Police on the scene of the Ronald Greene arrest, which ended in Greene’s death, denied that he had been wearing a body camera and hid the footage from his body cam from investigators for two years, the Associated Press reports.

Emerging last last month, the footage shows troopers repeatedly tazing Greene, unarmed 49-year-old Louisiana Black man who had led police on a high-speed chase before reportedly hitting a tree.  On the video, Greene is see attempting to comply with police instructions and being very penitent about his actions, repeatedly saying “I’m sorry.”

On the tape, Greene is tasered, handcuffed, shackled and dragged across the pavement face down.  When police took Greene to the hospital after he stopped breathing, officers told doctors Greene had died after his car struck a tree.  An observant doctor, however, noticed the taser prongs in Greene’s back and questioned by police would have to taze a dead man. 

The US Department of Justice under Attorney General Merrick Garland will appeal a court order to release a memo that Trump Attorney General William Barr claimed he used for his legal basis for not charging Donald Trump with obstruction of justice, MSNBC News is reporting.

During the investigation into the Trump campaigns work with the Russian government to swing the 2016 election to Trump, Robert Mueller noted ten separate incidents in which Trump himself attempted to obstruct the course of justice by blocking or fabricating evidence.  Barr, in testimony to Congress, said that he decided not to charge Trump based on recommendation from Robert Mueller, although the Mueller report made it very clear he did not view the duty of the investigation to determine whether or not Trump would be charged.

On May 5th, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Washington, DC said that the Barr statement was disingenuous and that it should be released unredacted.  “The review of the document reveals that the Attorney General was not then engaged in making a decision about whether the President should be charged with obstruction of justice; the fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given,” Jackson wrote in a 35-page opinion in which she said Barr had already made his decision prior to reading Mueller’s report.

A 24-year-old California man was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay more than $5,200 in restitution for throwing a Molotov cocktail at the East Valley Republican Women Federated (EVRWF) office in La Quinta, the US Department of Justice announced.

On March 15th, Carlos Espriu of Palm Desert had pleaded guilty to attempted arson of a building.  In the May 2020 incident for which he pled guilty, Espriu broke the windows of the storefront offices of the EVRWF.  While wearing a mask, Espriu threw lit three bottles he taped together through the broken windows.  The bottles failed to break, so he picked them up and threw them in again.  They failed to catch fire the second time.

For his third attempt, Espriu took the bottles out of view of a security camera.  After he returned, he had taken off his mask and threw the bottles into the office again, this time with them breaking and setting the office on fire.

A letter containing a suspicious white powder was sent to the Kentucky home of Republican Senator Rand Paul, NBC News reports.  The FBI and Capitol Police are investigating the incident, although it is unclear if Paul was in Kentucky when the package arrived.

Without evidence, Paul took the opportunity to claim that he was the victim of Twitter harassment.  “I take these threats immensely seriously. As a repeated target of violence, it is reprehensible that Twitter allows C-list celebrities to encourage violence against me and my family,” Paul tweeted.

On Sunday, pop singer Richard Marx posted a tweet in which he said he would thank the neighbor who was convicted of assaulting Paul after a landscaping argument. 

Eugene Chung, a former Super Bowl winning assistant coach with the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs, said that he was told by an NFL executive that he was “not the right minority” for a coaching job, CNN reports.

A seven-year veteran of the league, Chung is believed to be only the third player of Korean descent to ever play in the NFL.  “It was absolutely mind-blowing to me that in 2021, something like that is actually a narrative,” Chung, who is Korean, told the Boston Globe.  Chung did not name the football team or the individual involved.

“If the comments regarding his status as a Korean American are true, it is further evidence that despite good faith changes to diversity-related policies, the NFL’s actual hiring practices are still riddled with discrimination,” the Fritz Pollard Alliance, a group dedicated to furthering diversity in the NFL, said in a statement.

The board of governors that oversees the Stone Mountain Monument celebrating Confederate leaders voted to make changes to the monument that will acknowledge the horror of the slavery supported by the Confederacy and those leaders depicted, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

The Stone Mountain Memorial Association board will include information to “tell the truth” about the abuses and brutality of the Confederacy of slavery and the roles Confederate president Jefferson Davis and generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee had in attempting to preserve the institution in the secessionist states.

The board also voted to more a plaza of Confederate flags from the pedestrian approach to the mountain to an area close to the mountain that already has items honoring noted Confederates.  Georgia state law prevents the complete removal of the Confederate flags, so the flags will be moved to a less prominent location.

Bloomberg: “President Joe Biden said he applauded European Union efforts to impose economic sanctions against Belarus over the forced landing of a Ryanair Holdings Plc jetliner and the arrest of a dissident journalist, and had ordered his team to “develop appropriate options” to hold those responsible accountable. The ‘removal and arrest of Raman Pratasevich, a Belarusian journalist traveling abroad, are a direct affront to international norms,’ Biden said in a statement Monday night, adding that the U.S. condemned the act ‘in the strongest possible terms.'”

“European Union leaders hours earlier asked the European Commission to propose that Belarus officials be added to an existing sanctions list, as well as to develop broader measures to penalize entire sectors of the country’s economy. The sanctions could target the financial interests of President Alexander Lukashenko and his close relatives and associates, as well as businesses, according to a EU official who described the effort on the condition of anonymity. The plane was traveling between two member states of the union, Greece and Lithuania. Biden added in the statement that he welcomed the demand for sanctions and had ‘asked my team to develop appropriate options to hold accountable those responsible, in close coordination with the European Union, other allies and partners, and international organizations.'”

https://youtu.be/IphMW0Q6JKA

Tucker Carlson, a Fox News host and man whose little voice in his head sounds strangely like Adolf Hitler, stated in plain language that the Democrats are planning on replacing white Americans with people like Haitians because President Joe Biden extended Temporary Protected Status to 42,000 Haitians who were welcomed into the United States after a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in 2010.

The Associated Press circulated a memo to its staff after more than 100 of its journalists signed a letter questioning the motivations for firing former news associate Emily Wilder, who was let go by the service after two weeks of work allegedly because of a social media post supporting the Palestinian cause in the recent Gaza conflict, the AP reports.

The 22-year-old Wilder, who covered news in the Western United States from her location in Phoenix, reportedly violated the AP’s rules about expressing a personal opinion about a controversial current event.  In a statement following her firing, Wilder said that she was being harassed by young Republicans’ club from her alma mater, Stanford, “by an onslaught of harassment against me.”

The AP said it was undertaking a review of its policies to ensure employees had the ability to exercise their First Amendment rights without being seen as biased journalists. 

News 5 Cleveland reports 55-year-old Michael Hopkins died of injuries sustained while building homemade explosive devices in his garage in Jefferson township, Ohio on Saturday.

A search on VoterRecords.com for a Michael Hopkins in that locale confirms there is indeed a registered Republican by that name, aged 55, living at the address in mentioned in the News 5 article. The article does not mention whether the bombs were intended to be used in a MAGA white nationalist terrorist attack or if they were meant for a gender reveal party.

Nearly five months after the domestic terrorist attack by Trump supporters on the Capitol, the National Guard units called in to protect the Capitol complex from ongoing threats by right-wing extremists are scheduled to return home, Politico reports.

At one point, more than 20,000 Guard members were stationed in DC from all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Guam were assigned to the nation’s capital after the January 6th insurrection attempt.  The Guard members stayed in Washington through the inauguration of President Joe Biden on January 20th.  Currently, about 2,000 remain.

The Capitol Police have come under scrutiny for the lack of preparation in running up to the Trump rally on January 6th, even though multiple local and federal law enforcement had intelligence that Trump supporters were planning on violent action at the Capitol. 

“The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 54% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Biden’s job performance” says a likely deeply disappointed Rasmussen.

Daily Beast: “On Tuesday, May 25, Nevada’s Clark County Republican Party was scheduled to hold a meeting guarded by an armed security force. But on Monday, the party abruptly canceled the gathering altogether. ‘Our management team has decided the risk to our members outweighs the value of this meeting,’ Clark County Republican Party Vice Chair Stephen Sliberkraus said in a press conference. The alleged threat was not from opponents across the aisle, but from the far right.”

“For months, Clark County Republican meetings have played host to intra-party warfare, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported last week. At those meetings, an insurgent group associated with the Proud Boys and other fringe-right clubs clashed with more mainstream Republicans. In recent days, elected Republican officials in the county accused some of those far-right participants of making threats and participating in a luridly antisemitic Telegram channel, while some of those same fringe characters accused the Clark County Republican Party of freezing them out and hinted that they might run for office to take over the party. The feud is the latest flashpoint in a national battle for control of local Republican parties, some of which have openly associated with far-right paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys. Increasingly, holding an event as routine as a local party meeting is a fraught exercise.”

Superstore retailer Walmart shocked online shoppers with an automatic email that contained the n-word the shoppers received when they set up a new account, CNN reports.

The store’s Twitter stream started to fill up with shoppers questioning the company’s language.  “What’s the best way to contact you guys for a very inappropriate email my daughter received in their inbox from you?” one Twitter user asked.

Walmart responded in a statement saying “an external bad actor” someone accessed their system and set up a fake account to send the emails.  “We were shocked and appalled to see these offensive and unacceptable emails. We’re looking into our sign up process to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again,” spokesperson Molly Blakeman said.