Judge rules to unseal dozens of documents about Ghislaine Maxwell's personal affairs, including those that reveal her and Jeffrey Epstein's relationship with the Clintons

Judge Loretta Preska ruled Thursday that dozens of documents about Ghislaine Maxwell's personal affairs should be unsealed in the next two weeks

The judge said that unsealing the documents would not impact Maxwell's right to a fair trial in November as her lawyers have claimed

Among the documents will be Maxwell's efforts to quash requests from Virginia Roberts Giuffre to obtain her financial records

Giuffre's lawyers demanded documents from Maxwell, including 'funding received from the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation'

Clinton flew on Epstein's plane dozens of times and photographs show the former president with the financier and Maxwell

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9747011/Judge-rules-unseal-dozens-documents-Ghislaine-Maxwells-personal-affairs.html

Deaths Reported

Controversial Romanian crypto billionaire - dubbed 'the father of bitcoin toxicity' - drowns off Costa Rica aged 41 leaving a $2bn fortune

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9746089/Mircea-Popescu-early-Bitcoin-adopter-died-suddenly-Monday-age-41.html

MISC

Howard University students want Phylicia Rashad fired over Cosby tweet

https://nypost.com/2021/07/02/howard-university-students-want-phylicia-rashad-fired-for-cosby-tweet/

The Epoch Times

CRIME AND INCIDENTS

Pilots Rescued After Cargo Plane Crashes in Ocean Off Hawaii

HONOLULU—A cargo plane made an emergency landing in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii early Friday and both people on board have been rescued.

The pilots of the Transair Flight 810 reported engine trouble and were attempting to return to Honolulu when they were forced to land the Boeing 737 in the water, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.

U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Commander Karin Evelyn said in an email that they received a report around 1:40 a.m. of a downed inter-island transport plane. About an hour later, rescuers in a Coast Guard helicopter spotted the debris field and two people in the water, Evelyn said.

One person was hoisted into the helicopter and taken to Queens Medical Center, Evelyn said. The Honolulu Fire Department rescued the other person, she said. Their identities were not immediately released.

Queen’s officials said a 58-year-old was in the intensive care unit in critical condition, according to Hawaii News Now. A boat brought the other 50-year-old to shore before being transported to the hospital in serious condition with a head injury and multiple lacerations, Hawaii News Now reported.

The plane debris remains, Evelyn said, and the Coast Guard will evaluate the pollution at first light.

According to the state Department of Transportation, the plane debris was found about 4 miles off Oahu, Hawaii News Now reported. The plane was flying from Honolulu to Maui.

The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate. The NTSB said in a tweet that it will send a team of seven investigators.

The Boeing 737 first flew in the late 1960s and is the most popular airline plane still in production. Boeing has delivered more than 10,500 of them and has unfilled orders for about 4,000 more, almost all of those for the latest version of the plane, the 737 Max.

Over the years, about 200 737s have been destroyed in crashes and several hundred others have been involved in less serious accidents and incidents, according to the Aviation Safety Network database.

“For a jet that has been in production for so long and is being used so extensively, 203 hull-loss accidents can be considered a very good safety record,” said Harro Ranter, who runs the database. He said the plane’s accident rate improved dramatically from the first models to more recent ones that preceded the Max.

The plane involved in Friday’s incident is 46 years old. It is a much earlier version of the 737 than the Max, and U.S. airlines no longer use the older ones for passenger flights.

Boeing said in a statement: “We are aware of the reports out of Honolulu, Hawaii and are closely monitoring the situation. We are in contact with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and are working to gather more information.”

By Caleb Jones, David Koenig, and Michelle A. Monroe

Pilots Rescued After Cargo Plane Crashes in Ocean Off Hawaii (theepochtimes.com)

EXECUTIVE BRANCH

Justice Department Orders Pause to Federal Executions

The Justice Department announced on Thursday it is pausing federal executions while a review of its policies and procedures is pending.

“The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely,” Attorney General Garland said in a memo to the Justice Department (pdf). “That obligation has special force in capital cases.”

He added, “Serious concerns have been raised about the continued use of the death penalty across the country, including arbitrariness in its application, disparate impact on people of color, and the troubling number of exonerations in capital and other serious cases. Those weighty concerns deserve careful study and evaluation by lawmakers.”

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, about 50 people are on federal death row, most of whom are imprisoned in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Garland’s moratorium on federal executions comes after a federal lawsuit was filed over the death penalty policies, over concerns that included the risk of pain and suffering associated with the use of pentobarbital sodium, the drug used for lethal injection.

Last year, the Justice Department under then-Attorney General William Barr resumed federal executions, after a pause of 17 years. The federal government carried out 13 executions between July 2020 and January 2021. The executions adopted a new protocol for administering lethal injections at the federal Bureau of Prisons, using the drug pentobarbital, which replaced the three-drug procedure that had been used in federal executions previously.

The Federal Corrections Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, on May 22, 2019. (Bryan Woolston/Reuters)

The 13 deaths all involved convicted criminals; including Keith Nelson, who was convicted of kidnapping, raping, and murdering a 10-year-old girl; Dustin Honken, convicted of murdering five people in Iowa; and Daniel Lee, who killed a couple and their 8-year-old daughter in 1996.

Dustin Higgs, who ordered three women killed in Maryland in 1996, was the final execution on Jan. 16. No executions have been scheduled since President Joe Biden took office in January.

Biden during his presidential campaign expressed that the death penalty should be abolished. He cited a database that alleges that more than 160 people who were sentenced to death in the United States since 1973 were later exonerated.

“Because we cannot ensure we get death penalty cases right every time, Biden will work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example. These individuals should instead serve life sentences without probation or parole,” his campaign website states.

In February, dozens of groups in a letter urged Biden to “act on your promise of ensuring equality, equity, and justice in our criminal legal system by immediately commuting the sentences of all individuals under federal sentence of death, and reinstating the federal moratorium on the use of the death penalty.”

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.

Follow Mimi on Twitter: @MimiNguyenLy

Justice Department Orders Pause to Federal Executions (theepochtimes.com)

Replacing God: The CCP’s Century-Long War Against Faith

Priests and nuns were forced to kneel down in front of a large bonfire, watching helplessly as the flames devoured their sacred instruments while burning their skin.

In another Chinese city, students wearing red armbands hit Catholics with sharp wooden sticks, throwing one priest into a fire pit after he collapsed in pain. They beat one nun to death after she refused to stomp on a statue of the Virgin Mary.

One Catholic priest was buried alive in Beijing after declining to give up his faith.

Unsettling as they might be, these acts of brutality documented by Hong Kong-based missionary Sergio Ticozzi were hardly out of the norm for faithful Chinese during the frenzy of the decade-long Cultural Revolution from 1966, when all forms of religious practices were declared “superstitious” and banned.

Nor was such repression unique to that particular period during the regime’s more than 70 years of ruling China.

Total Control

Belief in a higher power is anathema to the atheist Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that for 100 years has sought to command absolute loyalty and control over its members and the Chinese people.

“They just cannot handle an allegiance other than to the state,” Sam Brownback, former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, told The Epoch Times.

As a result, successive Party leaders have launched campaign after campaign to crush and control people of faith in China.

Mao Zedong, the first CCP leader, who oversaw one of the most thorough campaigns to dismantle Chinese religious life, compared religion to “poison” in a conversation with Tibet’s exiled leader, the Dalai Lama. In his autobiography, the Dalai Lama recalls Mao telling him in 1954 that religion “undermines the race” and “retards the progress of the country.”

Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin in 1993 declared religious freedom to be “unsuitable for Party members” and told Party members to “patiently educate” those with faith to help them “get rid of religious shackles.”

Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Christianity—the five religions the regime has officially sanctioned—remain under rigid state control, with Party officials setting the terms on how they operate.

Chinese officials for religious affairs have stressed the need to “guide religion with socialist values” and for devotees to possess “gratitude toward the Party.”

Under the Party’s rules, members also face possible expulsion for believing in religion or engaging in “superstitious activities.”

Worshippers walk past the shadow of a cross at the entrance to the “underground” Zhongxin Bridge Catholic Church, after a service celebrating the Feast of the Ascension in Tianjin, on May 24, 2015. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

Marking the Party’s centennial, the heads of six state-level religious associations met in June and extolled the CCP leadership. Expressing resolve to “always follow the Party,” they pledged to begin an education campaign to deepen “love for the Party” among their religious circles.

Pastor Bob Fu, the founder of Christian human rights group China Aid, described the CCP as the “world’s largest extreme atheistic Party.”

“[The] CCP has committed the worst religious persecution and crimes against humanity,” Fu told The Epoch Times.

In the words of Sam Brownback, the CCP is “at war with faith”—be it Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, or the Falun Gong meditation discipline.

“It’s a war they will not win,” Brownback said.

‘Zero-Tolerance Policy’

One year after the CCP took power in 1949, Chinese troops marched into Tibet and forced upon the Tibetans a 17-point agreement to legitimize the CCP’s rule. Yet despite rosy promises of Tibetan autonomy on paper, Beijing turned the region into a surveillance state and installed labor camps.

The Dalai Lama, the region’s spiritual leader, went into exile in India in 1959 after the regime brutally crushed an uprising, killing tens of thousands of Tibetans. In the 20 years following, about 1.2 million Tibetans have died under the regime’s repressive policies, according to estimates by the Tibetan government-in-exile. More than 150 have resorted to setting themselves on fire in a desperate act of defiance.

Police routinely monitor private correspondence, search homes, and examine phone records in search of forbidden content such as “reactionary music” from India, according to the latest U.S. State Department report. Provincial officials also banned students from participating in religious activities during school holidays. The report cited 273 Tibetans being “detained in violation of international human rights standards as of late 2019.”

A nun walking amid the debris of demolished houses at the Larung Gar Buddhist Institute in Sertar county in southwest China’s Sichuan province on May 29, 2017. (Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images)

A Tibetan herder named Lhamo, a 36-year-old mother of three, was detained in June 2020 for sending money to her family in India. The family members who saw her two months later found her “badly bruised and unable to speak,” according to advocacy group Human Rights Watch. She died days later at a local hospital and was immediately cremated.

With the current Tibetan spiritual leader in his 86th year, Beijing has made clear it wants a hand in selecting his successor. In a white paper issued in May, China’s State Council said it had identified and approved “92 reincarnated Living Buddhas”—indicating its intent to choose the next Dalai Lama when the current one passes away.

“The CCP practices a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to religious believers,” Lobsang Tseten, executive director of U.S.-based Tibetan activist group Students for a Free Tibet, told The Epoch Times. He added that the “CCP’s arbitrary rule in Tibet is a direct threat to every aspect of the life of a Tibetan.”

‘Sinicizing’ Churches

The CCP’s suppression of Catholic and Protestant churches has intensified under current leader Xi Jinping’s watch.

Chinese authorities have removed thousands of crosses from churches, arrested pastors, ordered the removal of Christian images, and aggressively pursued a “sinicization” policy by establishing “patriotic churches,” in which pictures of Jesus Chris and the Virgin Mary are replaced with portraits of Xi or Mao.

Screenshots from videos uploaded by ChinaAid show the destruction of Golden Lampstand Church in the city of Linfen in China’s Shanxi province on Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2018. (ChinaAid)

The Chinese regime is also reinterpreting and retranslating the Bible to promote “Chinese-style Christianity,” with one Chinese ethics textbook twisting a story from the Bible to have Jesus stone a woman to death while claiming himself a sinner.

In 2017, at least four cities and one province restricted Christmas celebrations, banning displays of Christmas decorations, themed performances, and promotional activities. Communist officials in one university banned activities related to Western religious holidays in the name of helping the younger generation “build cultural confidence.” One Christian this January received a hefty fine of 160,000 yuan ($24,733) for celebrating the holiday.

Underground churches have proliferated as a result of the regime’s oppression. In response, Chinese officials have detained church members and handed lengthy prison sentences to pastors.

Wang Yi, a pastor in central China’s Chengdu who founded one of the country’s largest unregistered Christian churches, was sentenced to nine years in prison in December 2019 for “illegal business operations” and “inciting to subvert state power,” a charge the regime frequently uses to silence dissidents.

In April, Radio Free Asia reported that Beijing was running secret brainwashing facilities, which usually involve torture, in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province to force Christians to give up their faith.

‘Each Day the Party Is Becoming Bolder’

In the far west region of Xinjiang, over 1 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are currently being held in Chinese internment camps—which the regime calls “vocational training centers” ostensibly used for “curbing extremism”—where they face forced labor, torture, sexual abuse, political indoctrination, forced abortion, and forced sterilization.

Led by the United States, a growing number of countries, including Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, have recognized the suppression campaign as a form of genocide.

“The genocide of the Uyghurs is ongoing still, and each day the Party is becoming bolder,” Rushan Abbas, executive director of Washington-based nonprofit Campaign for Uyghurs, said in a June 30 statement, one day ahead of the CCP’s centennial celebration. “This is our final wake-up call that the CCP must be stopped if we are to preserve a global system of dignity and order that is respected by all.”

The Jieleixi No.13 village mosque with slogans “Love the [Chinese Communist] Party, Love China,” in Yangisar, south of Kashgar, in China’s western Xinjiang region on June 4, 2019. (GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images)A recent report by two Washington-based organizations—Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs and Uyghur Human Rights Project—showed that at least 28 countries in the world were “complicit in China’s harassment and intimidation of Uyghurs.” Many of these countries had strong economic ties to China, including those that have signed up to China’s Belt and Road initiative (BRI, also known as One Belt, One Road).

“As China expands its role globally through the BRI, more states will likely become locked into relations of dependence, increasing China’s ability to coerce or co-opt them to assist in targeting diaspora members and exiles,” according to the report.

‘We Can Make You Disappear’

Nowhere is the CCP’s hatred for religion more evident than in its bloody suppression of practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline with slow meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, according to its website.

Out of fear of Falun Gong’s popularity in China, then-leader Jiang on July 20, 1999, launched a brutal persecution against adherents. Top Chinese officials gave secret orders to “destroy them politically, bankrupt them financially, ruin their reputation,” according to a former military colonel who attended the meeting.

Since then, millions of Falun Gong adherents have been held in prisons, labor camps, psychiatric hospitals, and other detention facilities in China. Hundreds of thousands have been tortured in those venues in a bid to force practitioners to give up their belief. An untold number have died under China’s state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting, with their organs cut out to be sold on the transplant market.

The persecution has continued to this day.

Over the first five months of 2021, 599 Falun Gong practitioners are documented to have been sentenced for their faith; one of them, 81 years old, received nine years, according to data from Minghui.org, a U.S.-based website that monitors the persecution of the faith group. More than 15,000 were documented to have experienced harassment or arrests last year.

Lured by handsome bonuses, police and local officials last year began a sweeping “Zero-Out Campaign” going after adherents country-wide, Minghui reported. The adherents were told to sign a statement renouncing their faith or see their pensions, careers, or children’s education imperiled. “We can make you disappear if we say the word,” one officer from China’s northernmost province Heilongjiang allegedly told an adherent.

Falun Gong practitioners take part in a parade in Flushing, New York, on April 18, 2021, to commemorate the 22nd anniversary of the April 25th peaceful appeal of 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners in Beijing. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Guo Zhenfang, from Chifeng city in Southeastern Inner Mongolia, died in June, one day after his trial. At the hospital, his family found bloodstains on his nose and a wound around his knee cap. His back from the waist down had turned “purple-red,” according to Minghui. Dozens of plain-clothed police officers blocked the family from further examining the body and sent it to the crematorium without their consent.

Lü Songming, a former history teacher at a middle school from southern China’s Hunan Province, spent a total of 14 years in jail. He lost around 20 teeth to beating, forced labor, electrocution, and other forms of torture. When he was released in 2018, he had only six teeth left and was no longer fit to work. He suffered from frequent heart failure, eventually dying in March at the age of 53.

‘A Real Weakness’

Former Ambassador Brownback observed that increasingly in Xi’s China, brutal, inhumane tactics from the Mao era are making a comeback.

But in its rush to assert power over China’s faithful, Brownback said, the regime is “showing a real weakness.”

“They must be feeling the loss of control, and so they are being far more repressive and brutal,” he said.

Beijing’s human rights and religious freedom abuses are costing the regime its global image, while at home, it is hurting its ability to maintain its rule, said Brownback.

“Communism and faith just have great trouble co-existing, and faith will not be subdued, so eventually the communism will fall,” he said.

What remains of the CCP’s 100-year legacy, said Pastor Fu, will be its record as “the single political party through which the largest number of human lives were arbitrarily lost … in the whole of human history.”

Replacing God: The CCP’s Century-Long War Against Faith (theepochtimes.com)

Today's news in a nutshell

Pilots Rescued After Cargo Plane Crashes in Ocean Off Hawaii

see article

Justice Department Orders Pause to Federal Executions

see article

Replacing God: The CCP’s Century-Long War Against Faith

see article

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The Epoch Times

Pilots Rescued After Cargo Plane Crashes in Ocean Off Hawaii

Justice Department Orders Pause to Federal Executions

Replacing God: The CCP’s Century-Long War Against Faith

Total Control

‘Zero-Tolerance Policy’

‘Sinicizing’ Churches

‘Each Day the Party Is Becoming Bolder’

‘We Can Make You Disappear’

‘A Real Weakness’

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