An adjunct professor at St. John’s University has allegedly been fired for reading a passage from Mark Twain’s anti-slavery novel “Pudd’nhead Wilson” during a class on satirical literature, The New York Post reported.

Hannah Berliner Fischthal, an adjunct at St. Johns for 20 years, used the word once during a remote class on February 10 after teaching her students the word’s history and context, and said she hoped the usage of the word would not offend anyone in the class, the Post reported.

“Mark Twain was one of the first American writers to use actual dialect. His use of the ‘N-word’ is used only in dialogues as it could have actually been spoken in the south before the Civil War, when the story takes place,” Fischthal said, referring to the book.

“It satirizes the entire evil institution of slavery,” she added in a statement after her firing, according to the Post.

U.S. Space Force officer who published a book saying that Neo-Marxism is influencing the military has been relieved of command due to remarks he made on a podcast.

“Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, Space Operations Command commander, relieved Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier of command of the 11th Space Warning Squadron, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado, May 14, due to loss of trust and confidence in his ability to lead,” the Space Force said in a statement, according to the Washington Examiner. “This decision was based on public comments made by Lt. Col. Lohmeier in a recent podcast. Lt. Gen. Whiting has initiated a Command Directed Investigation (CDI) on whether these comments constituted prohibited partisan political activity.”

He made the remarks while promoting a book on a podcast, where he decried leftist practices in U.S. institutions, including the  military. . .

A top official within the U.S. Marshals Service said that some 387 missing children were recovered by the agency in 2020, a record high number. Speaking to journalist Sharyl Attkisson, Chief Inspector Floriano Whitwell, who heads the U.S. Marshals’ sex offender investigations, said, “Last year, we recovered 387 missing children, and that was the most we’ve ever recovered, almost 100 more than the previous year. “But I would also emphasize that in my opinion, we’re barely scratching the surface,” he added. According to the FBI, the number of reported missing children was 421,394 in 2019 and 365,348 in 2020, while the majority of cases are considered “endangered runaways.” “I personally was extremely concerned by the lack of spotlight, the lack of resources, and just simply the lack of children being recovered across our country, knowing now how big of an epidemic it was,” Whitwell also said. “And so I decided to make that my focus” …

In previous articles, I’ve discussed the central role false advertising played in the creation of the opioid crisis.¹

To recap, a single paragraph in a 1980 letter to the editor^2,3 (not a study) in The New England Journal of Medicine — which stated that narcotic addiction in patients with no history of addiction was very rare — became the basis of a drug marketing campaign that has since led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, or four times the number of Americans killed in Vietnam.

Between September 2019 and September 2020 alone, opioid overdoses killed a staggering 87,000 Americans — a new record-high.⁴

Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, used this letter to the editor as the basis for its claim that opioid addiction affects fewer than 1% of patients treated with the drugs. In reality, opioids have a very high rate of addiction, have not been proven effective for long-term use⁵ and, in fact, fail to control moderate to severe pain any better than over-the-counter pain relievers.⁶

Various court cases have demonstrated how Purdue systematically misled doctors about OxyContin’s addictiveness to drive up sales, resulting in an avalanche of opioid addiction and subsequent deaths.⁷

Unethical to the core, Purdue also cashed in on the addiction trend it manufactured by secretly founding Rhodes Pharma to manufacture generic opioids,⁸ and getting into the business of creating overdose treatments.^9,10

Facing an estimated 2,600 lawsuits^11,12 relating to its role in the opioid epidemic, Purdue filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2019,¹³ as a way to avoid litigation losses. Just over a year later they pleaded guilty to three federal criminal charges, including violating a federal anti-kickback law, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government and violating the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.^14,15

The company agreed to pay $8.3 billion in fines, forfeiture of past profits and civil liability payments to settle the charges,¹⁶ but short on cash — having transferred more than $10 billion of the company’s funds into family trusts and offshore accounts¹⁷ — the company was dissolved and its remaining assets used to erect a “public benefit company” owned and controlled by the U.S. government.¹⁸ Future earnings will supposedly be used to combat the opioid crisis. . . .

The Department of Defense confirmed it is pulling 120 troops from Israel amid a flare-up in tensions between Jerusalem and designated terrorist groups in Gaza. Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters that U.S. Central Command and U.S. European Command staff flew on a C-17 military plane from Israel and arrived at Germany’s Ramstein Air Base on Thursday. “We made this decision to remove these individuals in coordination with our Israeli counterparts,” Kirby said, adding that the military staff “were in Israel for a routine planning event” before the fighting escalated. The move was done as a precaution, Kirby said. Israel carried out a number of airstrikes on targets in Gaza in recent days, including hitting buildings that were reportedly being used by Hamas—the group that rules over Gaza and was designated as a terrorist group by the State Department in 1997. The airstrikes were in response to Hamas and other groups …

Former Pink Floyd frontman Rogers Waters used a poster linking America and Nazism as a backdrop during an interview with RT on Friday.

Waters spoke with RT — formerly known as Russia Today, a English-lnguage news media outlet run by the Russian government — about ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinians.

The poster had the message “USSA,” with the two ses, referring to the Nazi Germany’s Schutzstaffel paramilitary, commonly referred to with the acronym “SS.” Waters joined RT remotely from his apartment in New York City.

With rockets flying and violence escalating in the Gaza Strip, the Biden administration announced Wednesday that it dispatched Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hady Amr to the region, in an effort to broker calm between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas. The likelihood of a successful mission is low. But that’s not Amr’s fault; it’s President Joe Biden’s. His Middle East foreign policy is simply out of sync with this mission.

In past conflicts, senior American officials often found ways to steer both sides to a ceasefire, even when Israel wasn’t quite satisfied with the results on the battlefield. But Jerusalem always acquiesced to Washington in the end, out of deference to the close ties between the two nations.

Given America’s foreign policy these days, it’s not clear how that will fly. Israeli officials are not exactly eager to hear America’s view of Iranian-backed terrorists like Hamas. Tensions are at a zenith, thanks to the Biden administration’s stubborn insistence that now is the time to re-enter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the flawed 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

Militaries around the world have long used deception and trickery against their enemies.

JERUSALEM — Early Friday, just after midnight, the Israeli military put out an ominous statement to the media: “IDF air and ground troops are currently attacking in the Gaza Strip.”

The terse statement set off frenzied speculation that Israel had launched a ground invasion of Gaza — a much-feared scenario that would mark a bloody escalation of this week’s operation against Hamas militants. Some reporters were even told outright the incursion had begun.

Hours later, the military issued a “clarification.” There were no troops inside Gaza. But by then, several major news outlets had erroneously reported the ground offensive was under way.

While the army attempted to play down the incident as a misunderstanding, well-placed Israeli military commentators said the media had been used as part of an elaborate ruse to lure Hamas militants into a deadly trap that may have killed dozens of fighters.

“They didn’t lie,” said Or Heller, a veteran military correspondent on Israel’s Channel 13 TV. “It was a manipulation. It was smart and it was successful.” . . .

Tensions between Israel and the Hamas terrorist group continue with no end in sight. On Friday, Israel bombed Gaza with artillery fire and airstrikes, and Hamas has fired almost 2,000 rockets at Israel in the last five days.

The post Deadly Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Continues appeared first on NTD.

Gaza City, Gaza Strip (AP) — An Israeli air raid in Gaza City killed at least 10 Palestinians, mostly children, early Saturday in the deadliest single strike since the battle with Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers erupted earlier this week. Both sides pressed for an advantage as cease-fire efforts gathered strength.

The Israeli military destroyed a Gaza building on Saturday containing the offices of several international media outlets including those of the Associated Press and Al Jazeera, both organizations confirmed following the strike.

The Israeli Defense Forces airstrike leveled Jala Tower in Gaza, flattening the building “that house[d] Al Jazeera and other international media outlets in Gaza City,” Al Jazeera said in a tweet on Saturday morning.

The Associated Press, meanwhile, confirmed in a news report that the building that had been destroyed “housed offices of The Associated Press and other media outlets.”

From Chris Farrell’s Op-Ed for The Daily Caller:

Wednesday’s White House summit with congressional leaders on the $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill, officially known as the American Jobs Plan, made little headway in forging bipartisan consensus. A large part of the problem is that President Biden and Congressional Democrats have decided that virtually any aspect of their big-government agenda can be redefined as infrastructure and tossed in the mix.

For example, fighting climate change is now part of infrastructure. The bill would fund a “Civilian Climate Corps,” a nod to the old Civilian Conservation Corps from the FDR era, which seeks to “put a new, diverse generation of Americans to work conserving our public lands and waters, bolstering community resilience, and advancing environmental justice.” In other words, it will spend billions to underwrite make-work jobs with full health benefits for environmental activists who can’t find gainful employment in the private sector. There are also $175 billion in subsidies for electric vehicles, which could very well be a replay of the Solyndra solar panels debacle. And throughout the bill are nods to promoting green best practices and “environmental justice,” whatever that is.

Education is now part of infrastructure. There is $100 billion devoted to public schools, on top of the $128 billion from the COVID-19 relief bill. A further $12 billion goes to community colleges, in addition to the planned $109 billion in the American Families Act to provide two years of tuition-free education. And other billions are devoted to reducing “racial and gender inequities” in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields. . .

Under a deal with the military court, Majid Khan, who has admitted being a courier for Al Qaeda, will give up his chance to call witnesses to his torture in return for being released as soon as next year.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday said it is responsible for colleges to teach the idea that racism is embedded in the American system, dismissing criticism that such teaching aims at indoctrinating American youth. . . .

Veterans of the campaign that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. helped lead to eradicate racial segregation in Birmingham nearly 60 years ago remain firmly in the corner of racial justice now that they’re old and gray.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Charles Avery had barely started marching when police arrested him, forced him into a police vehicle and took him to jail for participating in landmark civil rights protests that helped change the nation in 1963. He spent days in custody and then lived decades haunted by a conviction for the most innocuous of offenses — parading without a permit — that he saw as noble yet others questioned with suspicion.

“I had to explain what it was, that it was from Birmingham,” said Avery, 76. “It always came up.”

Yet Avery said he’d do it again all these years later, and he has a message for the thousands of demonstrators who have been arrested nationwide during the months-long uprising over police violence and racism: Keep going. A lifelong mark in the name of justice is worth the trouble.

Veterans of the campaign that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. helped lead to eradicate racial segregation in Birmingham nearly 60 years ago remain firmly in the corner of racial justice now that they’re old and gray, with some joining in protests that followed George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police last year and others watching at home on TV.

Nonviolence was King’s way, and some are put off by scenes of burning buildings and rioting that accompanied some protests, including one in Birmingham. But foot soldiers who first advocated for the idea that Black lives matter decades ago now support the movement of the same name; The Associated Press interviewed some of them ahead of an online commemoration of the ‘63 Children’s Crusade protests held Friday that focused on challenges facing young people today. . .

In recent months, China has stepped up a campaign on state media and with government-arranged tours to counter reports that say thousands of mosques have been targeted in a crackdown on the region’s mostly Muslim Uighur people.