NYC Mayor Eric Adams is considering a 2024 presidential run



Eric Adams, New York City’s recently elected Democratic Mayor, may be considering a presidential run if President Joe Biden does not seek a second term.

A person close to Adams said, “Eric has told me repeatedly that he thinks that he has a platform to run for national office, for president in 2024. He has said that repeatedly. He thinks New York is a national platform. He thinks the national party has gotten too far to the left, and he thinks he has a platform to win.”

The New York Post reported that a Democratic elected official in Brooklyn who frequently speaks with Adams said that the mayor was “considering a White House run in 2024 if Biden doesn’t seek re-election” and that Adams' advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin was “running point” on the issue.

Adams' interest in pursuing a presidential run is reportedly due to the “growing chatter” that Biden — who is currently 79-years-old — may not seek re-election despite Biden’s insistence that he will.

A GOP lawmaker suggested that Adams could be a strong candidate for the presidency if he is successful in his attempt to reign in New York’s out-of-control crime.

The lawmaker said, “I said you really have to consider that you are young enough where you will have a life after the mayoralty and if you solve the crime problem there would be a lot of interest in a big city Democrat, African American with progressive values but who mediated the crime problem in a major city.”

Adams' “Big Apple Agenda” has put him at odds with many in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party as he explicitly campaigned for the mayorship as a pro-police candidate, vowed to dismantle state bail reform, and positioned himself as opposed to the increasing presence of the socialist wing of the Democratic Party.

If Adams were to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, he would continue a long and storied tradition of New York mayors who sought the presidency. Bill de Blasio, Michael Bloomberg, and Rudy Giuliani, the three most recent mayors of New York, have also recently sought the presidency.

During an event in Harlem last week, Adams even joked that had he been screened early for dyslexia, “Right now, we would be not saying just ‘Mr. Mayor,’ you’d probably be saying ‘Mr. President.’”

Chris Coffey, Co-CEO of the political consulting firm Tusk Strategies, said, “[Adams] is one of the best-known black elected officials in the country. The play works if Adams makes progress on crime and the president decides not to run. I think he would [be] crazy not to consider it.”

BLM paid nearly $1 million to its co-founder's baby daddy, roughly five times more than to the Trayvon Martin Foundation



Black Lives Matter paid its co-founder’s baby daddy almost five times more than it gave to the Trayvon Martin Foundation – a nonprofit dedicated to the legacy of the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin, which kicked off the BLM movement.

Patrisse Cullors, the former executive director and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, paid a company owned by Damon Turner $969,459 for “live production, design and media,” according to its latest IRS filings. The New York Post reported that Turner’s company, a for-profit organization, which is known for selling $145 sweatshirts and soliciting donations for abstract causes known as “the movement,” received the second-highest payout from Black Lives Matter in the fiscal year 2020.

Turner, a rapper and artist, is the father of Cullors’ son and manages a Los Angeles-based entertainment and clothing company called Trap Heals LLC. Turner is a frequent recipient of Cullors’ redirection of money raised for nonprofit causes. In 2019, Turner’s company received $63,500 from Reform LA Jails, a state-level political action committee controlled by Cullors that had the mission of working toward criminal justice reform.

While Cullors used money raised through charitable donations to pay the father of her child nearly $1 million, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation paid the Florida-based Trayvon Martin Foundation just $200,000, according to IRS filings.

The Trayvon Martin Foundation was established by Martin’s parents to “provide emotional and financial support to families who have lost a child to gun violence,” according to its website. Trayvon Martin’s 2012 death led to the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The IRS filings disclosing the questionable spending by Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation show that the company raked in $76,872,002 in charitable donations in fiscal year 2020 and paid out $25,997,945 in grants to other nonprofit organizations.

Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation’s largest payout was just over $2 million and went to Bowers Consulting Firm, which is owned by Shalomyah Bowers, a current board member of the foundation. According to IRS filings, the money was paid to Bowers for “administrative support, general consulting, strategy, design … and staff management under the direction of the executive director.”

The foundation also paid $840,993 to Cullors Protection LLC, a private security firm owned by Patrisse Cullors’ eldest brother. According to the IRS filings, the payments were for “professional security services." Cullors Protection LLC was established in July 2020 and currently provides security for the foundation’s $6 million Los Angeles headquarters.

The truth is out there: Congress will hold the first open hearing about UFOs in over 50 years, Pentagon officials set to testify



A subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives will be holding an open congressional hearing next week about unidentified flying objects (UFOs) for the first time in more than 50 years.

Andre Carson, a Democratic representative from Indiana, said that the House Intelligence Committee will be leading the charge, Vice reported.

He said, “Congress hasn’t held a public hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena (UFO's) in over 50 years. That will change next week when I lead a hearing in @HouseIntel on this topic & the national security risk it poses. Americans need to know more about these unexplained occurrences.”

The hearing is currently scheduled for Tuesday, May 17, and it will take place in front of a subcommittee of the House Intelligence Committee that is currently chaired California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff.

Schiff said that the committee is holding the series of hearings to explore “one of the great mysteries of our time and to break the cycle of excessive secrecy and speculation with truth and transparency.”

At the time of writing, two officials currently serving in the Pentagon are scheduled to testify at the hearing.

After the New York Times published a 2017 article about the existence of a project called “the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)” in the Pentagon that was focused on the identification of UFOs, official government disclosures about UFOs have come with increasingly rapidity.

In 2021, the Pentagon released a report about its UFO program that detailed more than 140 sightings of aerial objects that could not be explained between 2004 and 2021. The report was considered to be relatively underwhelming at the time, because much of the information had already been disclosed and much of the report was simply concerned with securing additional funding for the Pentagon.

The Black Vault, a government transparency organization, was able to obtain a classified version of this report earlier this year. Reportedly, this version of the report contains more fascinating details but still has considerable parts of it redacted.

Since the 2021 report was released, various outlets have obtained hundreds of pages of reports and research on futuristic technology funded by the government under the auspices of the AATIP and a sister program called the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program.

The Barack Obama Presidential Library has also said that it has thousands of pages of documents pertaining to UFOs.

Elon Musk and SpaceX thwarted a Russian electromagnetic attack on Ukraine



SpaceX — a company founded and owned by Elon Musk with the express intention of colonizing Mars — successfully stopped a Russian electromagnetic attack in Ukraine.

In March, Musk’s company worked at a breakneck pace to shut down Russian efforts to disconnect Ukrainians from the internet by jamming the country’s access to its Starlink satellite constellation.

Starlink is operated by SpaceX and provides internet coverage to 32 countries. The constellation consists of more than 2,000 mass-produced small satellites that reside in low orbit and communicate with designated transceivers on the Earth’s surface.

At the outset of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, when it became clear that the Russian government was going to target the Ukrainian people’s ability to communicate, Ukrainian officials pleaded with Musk to intervene and provide them with relief.

Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route.
— Elon Musk (@Elon Musk) 1645914834

Dave Tremper, director of electronic warfare for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, lauded SpaceX’s ability to turn on a dime and swiftly stymie Russia’s efforts to jam the Starlink satellite’s ability to provide broadband.

Defense News reported that Tremper said, “The next day [after reports about the Russian jamming effort hit the media], Starlink had slung a line of code and fixed it, and suddenly that [Russian jamming attack] was not effective anymore. From [the] EW technologist’s perspective, that is fantastic … and how they did that was eye-watering to me.”

Tremper noted that it would have taken the American government considerably longer to counteract the Russian electromagnetic attack than it did Musk’s company.

Tremper said, “We need to be able to have that agility. We need to be able to change our electromagnetic posture to be able to change, very dynamically, what we’re trying to do without losing capability along the way.”

Noting that electromagnetic warfare requires very finely tuned machinery and highly skilled operators, Tremper said the Russian invasion of Ukraine indicated how important it was to make sure that American personnel were properly trained in electromagnetic warfare operations.

He said, “It is a very hard problem, if you don’t have well-trained operators. The degree of coordination and synchronization of these types of operations is such that the undertrained operator will have a harder time pulling off those types of events successfully.”

This is not the only time that Elon Musk has thwarted the Russians’ plans in the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

When the Russian government threatened to drop the International Space Station on the Earth by ceasing to provide it with resources and technology for propulsion, Musk said that he would keep the station from falling onto the planet.

Russia has begun a 'selective default' on foreign debts as it attempts to pay in rubles



The S&P credit rating agency has said that Russia’s attempts to pay bondholders in rubles, not dollars, amount to defaults on the country’s foreign debt.

Russia has now attempted to pay holders of two dollar-denominated bonds that recently finished maturing with rubles, CNN Business reported. The S&P said that this amounted to a “selective default” because the people redeeming these bonds are likely unable to convert the rubles into “dollars equivalent to the originally due amounts.”

A “selective default” is declared when an entity has defaulted on a specific obligation but not on its entire debt.

The Russian government is currently in the middle of a 30-day grace period that began April 4 that will enable Moscow to make payments of capital and interest on the redeemed bonds. However, the S&P does not expect that Russia will be able to convert the bonds into dollars given the thoroughgoing sanctions placed on Russia by Western nations.

These sanctions undermine Russia’s “willingness and technical abilities to honor the terms and conditions” of its financial obligations to bond holders.

If Russia issues a full foreign currency default, it will be the country’s first in more than 100 years. The last time Russian leaders issued a default was after the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin rejected bonds that were previously issued by the regime of Tsar Nicholas II.

Currently, the Russian government cannot access the more than $310 billion it has stored in foreign currency reserves as a result of Western sanctions aggressively isolating the Russian economy. Up until last week, the U.S. allowed Russia to continue using some of these frozen assets to pay back specific investors with U.S. dollars.

Since then, the U.S. Treasury has blocked Russian banks from accessing its financial reserves held in American banks in a deliberate effort to diminish Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ability to finance his military.

JPMorgan estimates that Russia had around $40 billion of foreign currency debt at the end of 2021, and it believes that half of that was held by foreign investors.

The Russian government remains defiant in the midst of this default and intends to take legal action at the international level so that investors can receive what they are owed.

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, said, “We will sue, because we undertook all necessary action so that the investors would receive their payments.”

He said, “We will show the court proof of our payments, to confirm our efforts to pay in rubles, just as we did in foreign currency. It won’t be a simple process.”