LOS ANGELES (AP) — Peter Yarrow, the singer-songwriter best known as one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk-music trio whose impassioned harmonies transfixed millions as they lifted their voices in favor of civil rights and against war, has died. He was 86. Yarrow, who also co-wrote the group’s most enduring song, “Puff the Magic Dragon,” died Tuesday in New York, publicist Ken Sunshine said. Yarrow had bladder cancer for the past four years. During an incredible run of success spanning the 1960s, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers released six Billboard Top 10 singles, two No. 1 albums and won five Grammys. They also brought early exposure to Bob Dylan by turning two of his songs, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” into Billboard Top 10 hits as they helped lead an American renaissance in folk music. They performed “Blowin’ in the Wind” at the 1963 March on Washington at which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. ...After months of rehearsal the three became an overnight sensation when their first album, 1962’s eponymous “Peter, Paul and Mary,” reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart. Their second, “In the Wind,” reached No. 4 and their third, “Moving,” put them back at No. 1. From their earliest albums, the trio sang out against war and injustice in songs like Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have all the Flowers Gone,” Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “When the Ship Comes In” and Yarrow’s own “Day is Done.” Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, is undergoing a major overhaul of its content moderation practices. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that the company will end its fact-checking program, plagued by severe leftist bias, and replace it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes. The changes come as a response to what Zuckerberg perceives as a “cultural tipping point” towards prioritizing speech, influenced by the recent elections. Kaplan acknowledged that Meta had developed complex systems to manage content in recent years, partly in response to societal and political pressure. However, he admitted that this approach had gone too far. “As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable. Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do,” he said. Under the new approach, Meta will eliminate some content policies around hot-button issues such as immigration and gender, and re-focus its automated moderation systems on “high severity violations.” The company will rely more on users to report other violations. Additionally, Facebook’s trust and safety and content moderation team will be moving from California to Texas. Mark Zuckerberg stunned the world when he announced this week that Meta would embrace free speech on its platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. But to hold the billionaire to his promises of removing bias and censorship from these platforms, we must first acknowledge the terrible levels of censorship faced by conservatives on Zuckerberg’s platforms since 2016. Here are six particularly egregious examples from Zuckerberg’s inglorious reign as the internet’s arbiter of truth. On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced there would be major changes to the content moderation policies on Facebook and Instagram, citing a desire to embrace free speech and avoid censorship. Zuckerberg explained that one of the first steps will be to axe Facebook’s third-party “fact check” system, which is notorious for its leftist bias. 1) Hiding the Story on Hunter Biden’s Laptop from Hell 2) Creating the Leftist “Fact Checker” Industry 3) Dropping Donald Trump’s Engagement by 45% in 2018 4) Banning President Donald Trump 5) Unpersoning Regular People for “Misinformation” 6) Killing the Reach of Political Content ROME — The Vatican City State has enacted stiffer penalties on anyone entering its territory or violating its airspace without permission, threatening offenders with fines and jail time. The Vatican City State, the world’s only completely walled-in sovereign territory, has several entry points, all but one of which — the Saint Anna gate — are locked tight from dusk until dawn. The gates are manned by the Swiss Guard, with gendarmes carrying firearms not far off. Penalties will be more severe if illegal entry is carried out with the aid of weapons, dangerous substances, or as a group. In addition, they are increased by two-thirds if there is forced entry through the border control while driving a vehicle, the text stipulates. British millionaires are fleeing the country in record numbers since Sir Keir Starmer’s left-wing Labour Party claimed last year’s election win and set out in socialist fashion to try and tax the country into prosperity. LBC reports some 10,800 people with liquid assets of over $1 million left the country in 2024, an increase of over 150 percent on 2023, in a move predicted not long after Starmer moved into Number 10 Downing Street. Millionaires are mostly moving to other European countries such as Switzerland and Italy, as well as to places such as the United Arab Emirates. David Hawkins, of Foreign Investors for Britain... explained the Government’s policy is “a monumental act of national self-harm”. He said: ..."It’s a real worry because more and more people are leaving. And it’s businesses, jobs, investment, spending into the economy and tax take and philanthropy that are hit.” Britain’s left-wing government has blocked a law seeking to outlaw first-cousin marriages. As pressure grows on Prime Minister Keir Starmer over his government’s refusal to fully investigate the grooming gangs scandal in which mainly Pakistani men were allowed to groom young white girls, the Labour Party is seeking to shore up ties with their Islamic voting base. Conservative MP Richard Holden, who proposed the legislation, wrote on the X platform that Labour has blocked any further advancement of his 1st Cousin Marriages Bill, which would outlaw marriages between first cousins that are common within Muslim communities. Yet, as well as social stigma among wider society, breeding between cousins leads to a highly elevated risk of genetic disorders and physical weakness. Last month, a far-left independent Muslim MP spoke out against the proposal, saying that he did not want to “empower the state to ban adults from marrying each other not least because I don’t think it would be effective or enforceable”. “The reason the practice is so common is that ordinary people see family inter-marriage overall as something that is very positive, something that helps build family bonds and helps put families on a more secure financial foothold.” A whistleblower and U.S. Air Force veteran said he has participated in the recovery of downed aircraft he believes were not created by humans. “Just visually looking at the object on the ground, you could tell that it was extraordinary and anomalous. It was not human,” Jake Barber said this week in speaking to Ross Coulthart of NewsNation. “I saw an egg, a white egg,” he described. Barber said he worked under contract to recover a wide variety of downed aircraft. “Over the last couple years, it’s been confirmed to me by ranking members of the UAP task force that what we were working with that night was, in fact, NHI (nonhuman intelligence) and it was not a unique experience,” Barber said. David Grusch, formerly of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, previously testified before the House Oversight Committee that he is certain crashed UAPs are in the government’s possession. “Absolutely, based on interviewing over 40 witnesses over four years,” Grusch informed lawmakers two years ago. Grusch also claimed that the United States had “intact and partially intact” vehicles that were not made by humans. “Due to my extensive executive level intelligence support duties, I was cleared to literally all relevant compartments and in a position of extreme trust both of my military and civilian capacities,” Grusch said. “I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access to that additional read-on when I requested it,” he continued. “I thought it was totally nuts and I thought at first I was being deceived, it was a ruse. People started to confide in me. Approach me,” he recounted. “I have plenty of senior, former, intelligence officers that came to me, many of which I knew almost my whole career, that confided in me that they were part of a program.” He said Americans have never been told the truth about this highly secretive group. “There is a sophisticated disinformation campaign targeting the U.S. populace which is extremely unethical and immoral,” Grusch said. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/01/air-force-vet-testifies-recovering-alien-craft-not/ No Matter What Abortion Activists Shout… It Is Not Her Body, And It Is Not Her Choice: Those who argue for abortion tell us it’s a woman’s choice whether to have a baby. They argue that it is her body and her choice. After all, it is her body . . . right? We know that an appendix or kidney is part of your body and has no separate consciousness. When someone has an emergency appendectomy or a kidney transplant, there are no moral questions about the life of the appendix or the kidney. An embryo is completely different—in fact, an embryo is a child in an early stage of development. Embryology textbooks note how in the placenta, the syncytiotrophoblast controls nutrient flow between the mom and the fetus. It also acts as a barrier between the maternal immune system and the baby’s, both of which would otherwise react to the other as foreign objects. Clearly, the health of each would be compromised were not the immune systems of both mother and fetus kept from attacking each other. Biologically, the baby’s body is not the mother’s body! Also, about half the time, the baby is a boy, with male-specific genetics and developing body parts. Does the mother suddenly have a Y chromosome? If the baby is part of the mother’s body, that’s the logical outcome! When did “you” become “you”? Is this a scientific question or a theological one? Ultimately, the Bible tells us that God created each of us as unique beings from our mothers’ wombs. The Bible, because it is true, will not disagree with genuine science. Furthermore, the Bible is the only valid and consistent basis for making moral judgments since it comes from the Creator of the whole world and all the people in it. The answer starts in Genesis. God said that he made man in his own image in Genesis 1:26. So when is each human being made? At conception! Unborn life is not worth less than life that has been born. Murder is murder regardless of the age or level of development of the victim. All life is precious because each human being is made in God’s image and skillfully wrought together by him (Psalm 139:13–16). Life does not begin after a baby emerges from the protection of his or her mother’s womb; life begins at fertilization and should be protected from that moment. This means we actually shouldn’t be talking about what mom can choose to do with her body. We should be talking about the life and body of someone else: an unborn child. A sad statistic is that at least 50% of all “patients” who go into an abortion clinic die. Think of it this way. A woman gives birth and soon realizes her baby is a lot of work. She’s overwhelmed. Would that justify killing her newborn? No! But what if that baby were 24-hours younger and were still in the womb? Is it okay then? No! Murder is wrong, whether the child is born or unborn, because it’s taking the life of someone made in God’s image. President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran on Friday signed a 20-year pact between their countries at the Kremlin, just three days before Trump's inauguration. Dubbed the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty, the Kremlin is hailing it as bringing relations with the Islamic Republic to a new level, enshrining the two countries' status as strategic partners. Putin hailed the "real breakthrough, creating conditions for the stable and sustainable development of Russia, Iran and the entire region." Russian media has described it covers all spheres, including defense, counter-terrorism, energy, finance, transport, industry, agriculture, culture, science and engineering. The pact is heavily focused on defense and security cooperation.
Peter Yarrow, of Folk-Music Trio Peter, Paul and Mary, Dies at 86:
Mark Zuckerberg Promises Less Censorship on Facebook as He Scraps Biased Third-Party ‘Fact Checkers’:
6 Acts of Despicable Facebook Censorship that Mark Zuckerberg Must Never Let Happen Again:
The Meta CEO blacklisted Trump, a sitting U.S. President, from both Facebook and Instagram “indefinitely” in early 2021.
Vatican Promises Stiff Penalties for Illegal Aliens Crossing its Border:
...violators will face monetary fines ranging from 10,000 to 25,000 euros and prison sentences from one to four years.Millionaires Flee UK in Record Numbers Since Left-Wing Labour’s Election Win:
Britain’s Leftist Government Blocks Law Outlawing Cousin Marriages in Effort to Appease Muslim Voters:
Air Force Vet Testifies to Recovering Alien Craft – ‘It Was Not Human’ – Says Officials Later Confirmed NHI (Non-Human Intelligence) Involved:
Russia & Iran Sign 20-Year Defense, Energy Pact 3 Days Before Trump Inauguration:
