This story is extremely important:
A whistleblower revealed that Brazil's far-right Bolsonaro family dynasty met with Meta to discuss US plans to interfere in Brazil's election, to prevent Lula from winning.
Lula's Facebook and Instagram accounts were censored a few days before the first round of the presidential election.
This had a huge impact on the election, because Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which are all owned by Meta, are the most popular apps in Brazil, and are hugely influential all across Latin America. (Jair Bolsonaro's son Flávio was declared the winner of the first round of the vote, by a narrow margin.)
Meta later admitted that Lula's accounts had been restricted, but it claimed that this was supposedly due to a "technical error"...
The whistleblower who disclosed this is Nadia Beller, a Bolivian journalist who was almost killed by hitmen hired by Fernando Cerimedo, a far-right Argentine political operative who oversees election interference, bots, and disinformation campaigns.
Cerimedo is closely linked to the US government and has worked for pretty much every right-wing leader in Latin America. He was photographed with Donald Trump Jr. and members of the Bolsonaro family, and he received an award at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida a few months before he was arrested for the failed assassination attempt against Beller, his pregnant ex-girlfriend.
Link here: https://t.co/9hqjur2P8x
Plano public schools plan to contribute $250M in tax revenue to the Dallas Stars' future billion-dollar arena.
The funds would come from recapture, which is money property-rich school districts give back to the state to be distributed to poorer schools.
Jim Nantz says Mike Ditka used to pay and tip for everything with $100 bills, and never ask for change
“I noticed early on that all he carried were $100 bills. All he did was peel off hundreds all the time. Buy a beer at the bar on the way out to dinner, ‘Yeah, give me a Budweiser.’ $100. Keep the change.”
“Coat check, comes into a restaurant, comes out, $100. Man on the street, homeless, there was one guy that kind of understood the routine and he was there every week. Mike, every time, $100 bill.”
“I finally got up the nerve to say, ‘Hey coach, why don’t you ever get change? Why just the hundreds?’ He says, ‘Hey, what’s the difference anyway?’”
“He said, ‘You know, the way I look at it, when I die and they drop me down into the ground, I hope there’s a little opening in that coffin and my last $100 bill comes flying out and goes up into the sky and drifts away. That would make me happy.’”
“So I said, ‘This gets a little pricey, doesn’t it?’ ‘It’s not that bad, Jim.’ He said, ‘Here’s the way I rationalize it in my head. We got 20 weeks. I come every single Friday to New York. I come in with 50 $100 bills, $5,000. And at the end of the season, I’m spending $100,000.’”
“He would say, ‘I’ve allocated $100,000 to the football season to go enjoy myself in New York. And that’s the way it is.’ I take $5,000 in cash in hundreds every single week. And that’s what he did.”
More Ukrainian military confirming that Musk stopped Ukraine's drones mid-flight last night.
This was exactly during Russia's massive missile and drone barrage on Kyiv.
The US is fully joining Putin's war.
From Sergei Flash:
Huge drop in Google searches for various health disinformation topics following the Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centers.
It makes you wonder how much of the “turbo cancer, ivermectin” nonsense is really fueled by Russian bots, & how many Americans they’ve killed…
Elon immediately suspended this account that showed Nick Sortor’s recorded call to the mental health facility was AI generated and is preventing community notes on the Sortor post.
It’s all hands on deck trying to make the fake Talarico story stick
If you're not following this huge conspiracy out of Massachusetts, you should be. Young girl groomed and passed around by Mass. police via their Police Explorers program. She got pregnant and she and her unborn son were killed (allegedly) by a cop who was caught on camera.
🚨🚨 BREAKING
The city of Elizabeth, Louisiana is about to elect Republican Christopher Paul as their police chief.
What’s the problem? Chris is out on bail right now for 2 counts of child rape.
Surprising literally no one, republicans are about to elect a child rapist
Whitney Webb is explaining how Palantir was built. It is the same story Danny Casolaro died chasing, and Israel and Robert Maxwell are in the middle of it.
Casolaro was found dead in a Martinsburg hotel bathtub on August 10, 1991. Wrists slashed a dozen times. Ruled a suicide. He had told his brother that if he turned up dead, it would not be an accident. The files for the book he called The Octopus were gone.
What he was tracking was not one scandal. It was a network. The Inslaw/PROMIS theft. Iran-Contra. BCCI. The October Surprise allegations. Arms and intel cutouts like Cabazon-Wackenhut. A bankruptcy judge had already found the Justice Department obtained Inslaw's enhanced PROMIS by "trickery, fraud and deceit." That ruling was later tossed on jurisdiction, not on the facts. The allegation that stuck was that the software was backdoored and sold or given to foreign governments so intelligence services could read the databases it sat on. Israel was at the front of that list.
Webb's Palantir history is that pattern, a decade later, with some of the same people.
John Poindexter was the highest-ranking Reagan official indicted over Iran-Contra. After 9/11 he was put in charge of DARPA's Total Information Awareness, a dragnet built to fuse commercial and government data and predict crime and terror before they happened. Congress defunded it in 2003 after the backlash. The same year Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir. Richard Perle introduced Thiel and Alex Karp to Poindexter. Perle had already been caught in the 1970s passing classified material to the Israeli embassy, and he later had deep ties to Netanyahu's first government. Karp has said the CIA was the intended client from the start. In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm, was an early backer. Palantir engineers were at Langley every other week in the early years.
PROMIS was the 1980s case-management system allegedly turned into a spy tool. The claim Casolaro was chasing, and that Webb has documented, is that Robert Maxwell helped move the bugged version. A trapdoor was planted so Israeli intelligence could read any database the software touched, and Maxwell was the salesman who carried it to governments and institutions abroad. Palantir Gotham is the 2000s version of the same job. Stitch the databases. Surface the hidden links. Sell pre-crime as predictive policing. Same function. Private letterhead. So the constitutional fight Congress already won does not have to be refought.
The part most people miss is at the end of the clip. Webb says CIA CIO Alan Wade, who helped shape the early Palantir product and had been inside the TIA world, teamed with Christine Maxwell on a homeland-security program called Chiliad. Christine is Robert Maxwell's daughter. The Maxwell family did not stop at Ghislaine. Robert Maxwell was tied to the PROMIS distribution story. His daughter shows up later on pre-crime software with a CIA official out of the same surveillance program Palantir was built to replace.
So the chain runs like this. Stolen DOJ software in the 1980s. Robert Maxwell and Israeli intelligence on the backdoored version. Iran-Contra figures. Then the same Iran-Contra figure running TIA. Then a Maxwell daughter and a TIA-linked CIA official on pre-crime software. Then Palantir as the scaled private version, introduced by a man already tied to Israeli intelligence channels.
Casolaro was trying to map the first half. He never got to the second half. Palantir did not exist yet. His files disappeared. The architecture did not.
The Octopus was a thesis about a standing network that builds surveillance software, routes it through private cutouts, and uses Iran-Contra-era operators and Israeli intelligence partners to keep it off the books. PROMIS was tentacle one. Robert Maxwell was the courier. TIA was the failed government version. Palantir is tentacle two.
The software Casolaro died investigating, after it learned to survive a congressional ban by becoming a company.
Trump administration refuses international election monitors for first time in over 2 decades.
The decision not to invite observers from the OSCE puts the U.S. alongside Russia and Belarus, while the Justice Department prepares to deploy its own poll monitors.
https://t.co/XD7zVFYsGf
From an Israeli intel official in NAZA:
“I hack into the phone of a 12 year old girl. If a girl calls her mom, ‘Mummy,’ she says, ‘when are you returning home? Daddy just came back.’ That’s a message that would alert the system bc it contains the words ‘return’ and ‘daddy.’”
This builds on @yuval_abraham’s previous reporting on the (incomprehensibly evil) “Where’s Daddy” program the IDF built to learn when fathers were at home with their children so they could kill then all at once (along with anyone else killed in the building during the attack).