CMR is the leading provider of funding and management support for small to medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday he will commute every death sentence in the state to life in prison without the possibility of parole, wiping out the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere with 548 people on it, 529 men and 19 women, according to ABC7.

In a letter he shared with the announcement, Newsom said he was using his "constitutional clemency authority" and that "state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California's values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us." Presumably the diminishment of the victims was less incompatible.

He called it one of the most difficult decisions of his career and wrote, "I alone bear responsibility for this decision and its impact," while acknowledging it will resurface painful memories for victims' families.

The commutations are not final for most of the condemned. The state constitution requires California Supreme Court approval to grant clemency to anyone convicted of a felony more than once, which ABC7 reports applies to 382 of the 548 cases, about 70%. The other 166 do not need the court's sign-off.

Nobody has been executed in California since Clarence Ray Allen at San Quentin on Jan. 17, 2006, as KTVU notes, and Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions in 2019. Voters upheld the death penalty at the ballot box in 2012 and again in 2016, which is the heart of the objection from prosecutors. 

San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said voters rejected a repeal in 2016 and told KTVU, "I don't think that's democracy at work."

Victims' groups were harsher. 

Topo Padilla of Crime Victims United said, "We are absolutely disgusted" by the move and suggested it was driven by political ambition, and Patricia Wenskunas, founder of Crime Survivors, called the decision "offensive" and "outrageous." 

The California District Attorneys Association did not immediately comment, but in a letter to Newsom last month its president, Jeannine Pacioni, warned that to "simply erase all those judgments with the stroke of a pen" would be "a profound disservice" to justice.

The ACLU praised the move. 

Executive director Anthony Romero called the death penalty "racist, error-prone, and inhumane." 

Newsom adviser Dan Newman answered critics by saying, "Life without parole is hardly leniency."

The timing is the political story. 

Newsom leaves office in January after eight years and is weighing a presidential run, and the decision clears the biggest death row in the hemisphere in one stroke. Per ABC7, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown granted broad clemency to death row prisoners in 2022, and in 2024 President Joe Biden commuted 37 of the 40 federal death sentences.

Among those affected, KTVU lists Richard Farley, who killed seven people in a 1988 Sunnyvale shooting, Robert Fairbanks, convicted in a 1985 killing of a San Francisco State student, and Yosemite killer Cary Stayner.

What happens next is up to the state's top court, and then to the next governor. Xavier Becerra, who takes over in January, has said he will extend the state's death penalty moratorium, per ABC7.

Iranian state media on Thursday is citing several more instances of tankers on fire in the Strait of Hormuz and regional waters.

Iran's IRGC military says, "This afternoon, two more offending oil tankers collided with naval mines in the insecure area east of the Strait of Hormuz and caught fire," as cited in IRIB.

Earlier on Thursday, the IRGC announced two prior instances of tankers hitting mines, which happened in the overnight hours while they attempted 'illegal' passage south of the strait.

If accurate, this would bring the number of impacted tankers over the past 24 hours to five: 

In a statement published by state broadcaster IRIB, the navy said “ignoring maritime warnings and entering prohibited areas without coordination are reported to be among the reasons for the fires in these two oil tankers”.

The navy has now reported blazes on at least five tankers in total attempting to cross the waterway through “unauthorized routes” in the past 24 hours.

One of these was a smaller tugboat, per some recent regional reports. Some may have been hit earlier in the week but may still be drifting, or on fire. October had seen a record pace of these shipping attacks, with only a slight slowdown observed so far in November.

In the wake of the midterm elections this week, after major Democratic victories across the House and Senate, there's been relative silence on the Iran issue coming from the White House.

There's been ample reporting on the potential for Trump to order a "short and intensive" new attack on Iran, but the question would still remain: what then?

Washington might be able to keep up the current status quo, despite these frequent Iranian attacks, but it's also the case that the Pentagon's 'limited' strikes against the southern Iranian coast could persist.

The war remains quite obviously deeply unpopular among the American public, and Trump has certainly felt this pressure, especially given the outcome of the election.

Tehran actually sees itself as having the upper-hand at this moment, at least when it comes to PR and 'leverage' in a political sense. Its leaders have been bragging that they essentially accomplished a 'regime change' of sorts in American Congress.

Backers want a lower price, the November timetable is in doubt, and executives and advisers are set to meet to review the deal...

Major institutional backers are pushing Anthropic to cut the $1.5 trillion valuation it had been targeting for its IPO, and one suggested pricing could fall closer to $1 trillion, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, after the Nasdaq Composite lost $2.5 trillion of market value in a single session.

Anthropic had aimed to raise up to $100 billion around the week before Thanksgiving, which would top SpaceX's June listing as the largest offering ever. According to the Journal, executives and advisers plan to meet in the coming days to review the IPO, and backers are debating whether to adjust the price range or push back the timeline. With a mountain of cash on hand, the company can afford to shrink the raise or wait.

Potential investors doubt Anthropic can complete its roadshow the week after next and still list in November, four people familiar with the discussions told Reuters. The roadshow had been expected to start the week of Nov. 9, with pricing the week after. Some now see $1.5 trillion as the high end of expectations, and Anthropic may need to offer a bigger discount because of its record of quarterly losses and its huge commitments to partners in the AI buildout. If the pressure on AI-related assets continues, the company could postpone until markets look sturdier, the sources said. Anthropic declined to comment.

Investors are also waiting on Anthropic's October revenue, which was left blank in its updated S-1, to see whether growth has recovered from its recent slowdown, two of the sources told Reuters.

The valuation has been marked down once already. After Anthropic told investors in October that third-quarter revenue grew 45% from the second quarter, down from more than doubling the quarter before, IPO investors marked it down from about $2 trillion to $1.5 trillion, as we reported.

Tech stocks suffered their sharpest selloff in a year after Tuesday's midterms handed Democrats the House and Senate, a blue wave that knocked the market's teeth in. The Journal tied the retreat to AI-skeptical lawmakers and local data center moratoriums; Reuters pointed to ballot efforts in many states to limit data center development. Meta president Dina Powell McCormick said Wednesday that building data centers will be "harder following the election results," Yahoo Finance reported.

Prediction markets have cut the odds of a November listing. On Polymarket, the odds of an Anthropic IPO by Nov. 30 fell from 84% to 58%, and by Dec. 31 from 90% to 73%...

In private markets, OpenAI has secured only $11 billion of the $30 billion it targeted in its latest round, at an adjusted $1.25 trillion valuation, according to the Journal.

As for those commitments, this week's amended filing put Anthropic's committed spend at $895.4 billion, more than $1 trillion all-in...

..., with $69.8 billion due in the next 12 months...

Buyers would also inherit Anthropic's philanthropy. Anthropic has already put 5% of its fully diluted stock into its own Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, managed initially by CEO Dario Amodei, his sister Daniela, Jack Clark and Buddy Shah, and the board may add up to another 2% every time the stock rises 50%. The co-founders, who stand to be worth hundreds of billions after the IPO, have each pledged 80% of their personal equity to charity. The employee donation-matching program alone produced a $2.0 billion non-cash charge in the third quarter, one of the two items that pushed Anthropic back to an operating loss.

And whoever buys in won't get much say. As we detailed when Anthropic's S-1 landed last month, a single Class F share owned by the seven co-founders carries 50.1% of the vote, the Long-Term Benefit Trust elects a majority of the board, and public shareholders will never hold more than 49.9% of the vote, one of the 10 biggest red flags we found in the filing.

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Your brain is the battlefield...

It feels as if the march of history is accelerating now. The number of meaningful current events around the globe continues to grow.

We don't have time to process the Islamic riots across France before turning our attention to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk's attempted judicial coup d'état. While President Trump seeks peace between Russia and Ukraine, the United Kingdom prepares its citizens for WWIII and a Russian invasion. The United States has elections, but Democrat seditionists and subversive members of the American Intelligence Community push for a "color revolution" to topple the Trump administration.

Big events happen every day, and we have scant opportunity to understand what they mean before another comes across our screens. The issue of "screens" is important. If you're reading this, you are not likely a hermit living self-sufficiently in the woods. Unless you limit your "screen time," televisions, computers, tablets, and phones are pumping your brain full of information all day long. Even when we're not consciously reading or watching something on our screens, our brains are picking up signals about the events playing out in the world.

If you are a fan of science fiction, it is not difficult to understand that we are now living in a version of the dystopian worlds that writers such as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick envisioned. People who possess power in this world have a strong incentive to shape our minds, and they use every available tool to condition our way of thinking.

Information is no longer confined to a book, catalogued in a quiet library. It is blaring at us from all directions.

Different cable news hosts on competing cable news networks repeat the same words and phrases all day long until we find ourselves reaching for those words while having polite conversations in real life.

Songs from pop artists representing different genres push the same messages, and when those pop artists collect awards, they use their acceptance speeches to drive those messages further into the brains of their most loyal fans. Those fans magnify those messages on their social media platforms, and pretty soon, tens of millions of people are expressing the same thoughts.

Movies and television shows teach us to fear or detest "hate speech," "global warming," "white supremacy," "Russian aggression," "science deniers," "right-wingers," "fascists," "European Union skeptics," "fossil fuels," "Islamophobia," "transphobia," Christianity, immigration enforcement, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. Any Hollywood character who doesn't condemn these things is depicted as a villain; any Hollywood character who denounces these things is a brilliant, beautiful hero.

This is information warfare in a nutshell, and it is all around us.

If you look back in time, you will realize that some version of it has always existed.

Twentieth-century newspapers gave us descriptions of the facts filtered through the worldviews of their writers, editors, and publishers. Three broadcast news anchors delivered almost identical accounts of each day's news. If you scrutinized those newsrooms, though, you realized that newspaper publishers came from the same prominent families that ran parts of the government and that federal licenses required television networks to abide by certain national security protocols. The same "journalists" who gave each other awards for their "integrity" and "independence" married members of the government. Twentieth-century "journalists" were never really part of a Fourth Estate; they acted as the public relations arm of the American government.

The most important aspect of "journalism" last century was its ability to seduce the reader or viewer into believing that "reporters" are impartial, just-the-facts clerics collecting important stories for the public's benefit. So long as "journalists" were seen as ink-stained priests who cared nothing for money or fame, they received a certain amount of public respect. If people could be convinced that "journalists" would risk their lives to inform the public what is "true," then some people might even consider those "journalists" heroes. Priestly heroes cultivate public trust, and public trust is its own kind of power.

In this sense, the government had no interest in telling Americans not to trust the news. All governments want the public to believe the news because it is through the news that governments disseminate their public messages. In true symbiotic form, newsrooms and governments do not have competing interests. They have a shared interest: to convince the public that what it reads or hears is the "truth."

The entertainment industry has long played its role in this propaganda program. A small number of publishing houses controlled which books would be printed and sold. A small number of magazines controlled popular opinion. A small number of movie studios controlled what stories were told. When everybody worked in tandem, publishing houses printed books whose authors expressed ideas that the government wanted the public to read. Magazines recommended those books until they became "best sellers" on newspaper lists. Hollywood chose good-looking actors to play the characters in those best-selling books, and families sat in theaters to hear government-approved programming. Sometimes, movie stars played hero journalists, so that the public remembered that The New York Times and The Washington Post could be trusted to report only the "truth."

When a propaganda system works well, you don't notice how all the various agents have clear conflicts of interest. You don't stop to ask why the deputy director at the FBI would be working with The Post to take down a sitting president (something that both Mark Felt and Andrew McCabe have in common). You don't wonder whether it's appropriate for "reporters" to depend entirely upon anonymous sources. You don't ask whether the billionaire moneymen who own newspapers might have ulterior motives that undermine the pursuit of truth. You don't notice that the same families that own movie studios and publishing houses also own multinational chemical plants, pharmaceutical firms, shipping conglomerates, and banking empires. You don't realize that these wealthy families include members of Congress and the heads of agencies. You don't see how government officials receive awards from nonprofits and NGOs that are run by the same families handing out awards to authors, musicians, actors, and "journalists" for their professional achievements or contributions to "truth."

See the problem? Over the last thirty years, the public started to see through this sophisticated network of information warfare and recognize it as the propaganda that it has always been. The expanding web of the Internet allowed people to learn information that had been hidden from them. Email allowed people to communicate with groups much more quickly than traditional phone calls or written correspondence. Social media platforms turned ordinary people into public broadcasters almost overnight.

Comedians lose their power over minds when ordinary people on YouTube are just as funny. Hollywood actors lose their star power when teenagers can become famous just for filming their lives. Publishing houses lose their gatekeeping power when writers publish online. "Journalists" lose their monopoly on objective "truth" when citizen reporters describe current events in real time.

When all these parts of the propaganda machine malfunction together, people finally see the puppet strings moving the various actors. And whether they work in Hollywood or for CNN, the narrative engineers are allactors - people paid to deliver messages that corporations and government officials wish to spread.

This is one of the reasons the march of history is speeding up! The people who have long controlled public opinion realize that they have lost their greatest weapon: legitimacy. Illegitimate systems are unsustainable. So the narrative engineers have been forced to flood the zone with so much information that it becomes ever more difficult to ascertain the truth. Global warming, Russian collusion, COVID, defending democracy, WWIII - the demand on your attention is huge and will get only worse!

As this happens, remember this: Your brain is the battlefield. If you prevent others from using it for you, they will lose.

A federal grand jury in Chicago has indicted Annette Johnson, the former president of the East Aurora School District 131 Board of Education, on charges that she entered the district into a $2.7 million air purifier purchase in 2021 in exchange for a $1.3 million payment. Johnson, 63, of Aurora, faces two counts of honest services mail fraud and one count of honest services wire fraud, each punishable by up to 20 years in federal prison, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois said. She remains a member of the board.

Prosecutors say that Johnson, then board president, voted for the purchase, and that the district paid for the purifiers with COVID-era federal grant money. Unbeknownst to the other board members, they say, Johnson and the vendor had agreed that the vendor would pay more than $1 million of the sale proceeds to a company owned by her boyfriend, where she served as chief financial officer.

Within days of a board vote in which Johnson participated and approved payment, prosecutors say, the vendor mailed a $1.3 million check labeled "commission" to that company. Later, she allegedly pushed the board to approve a $201,077 payment to the vendor in 2023 for an "extended warranty" on the purifiers. The US Attorney's office does not name the vendor nor the company in the complaint, and Johnson was the only person indicted.

The indictment also accuses Johnson of failing to list $7,500 paid to her in 2021 by a company involved in the deal on her statement of economic interests. Johnson said in a statement Monday that she recognizes the gravity of the allegations. "I maintain my innocence of the criminal charges brought against me, and I intend to vigorously defend myself through the judicial process," she said, according to the Sun-Times.

Aurora Mayor John Laesch told the Sun-Times that a whistleblower approached him in 2024 and that district records show eight companies with purported ties to Johnson received $43.1 million from the district between 2018 and 2023, which he says he gave to prosecutors. He has called on her to resign, the paper reported. The $43.1 million figure is Laesch's claim, not an allegation in the indictment.

The same report says Johnson's economic-interest statements were blank from 2012 to 2024 and that she first listed a company, DJ Payne Corporation, in 2025. A 2024 challenge to her candidacy over the filings was dismissed after the board ruled it lacked authority to review them.

The district said Johnson, like any defendant, is entitled to a presumption of innocence. Officials told the Sun-Times it is working with investigators. An indictment is not evidence of guilt, and Johnson is presumed innocent. Her term on the board runs through April 2029, according to the district's website, and the Sun-Times reports she is due in court Nov. 9.