Why it’s too late to stop World War 3 – according to one of Britain’s greatest military historians
Can Iran create nukes? Will China invade Taiwan? As the world tilts towards global conflict, we are asking the wrong questions
Richard Overy 23 June 2024
Apocalypse now: a nuclear test in French Polynesia, 1970 Credit: Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo
Imagine, for a moment, that the Iranian government announces it has developed a nuclear bomb and threatens to use it on Israel. The United States reacts with the threat of military intervention, as it did in 1991 and 2003 in Iraq. Iran signals that it will not tolerate a third Gulf war and looks for allies. American forces mass to enter Iran, which orders national mobilisation. Russia, China and North Korea express their support for Iran, and Washington expands its intervention force, bringing in a British contingent. Russia enters the game, raising the stakes in the expectation that the West will back down. A nuclear standoff follows, but with tense and itchy fingers on both sides, as leaders gamble on the risk of not striking first, it all ends in disaster. The Third World War begins with an exchange of nuclear fire, and the rest, as they say, is history. (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/world-war-three-too-late-history-violence/)
The National Co Center (NGC) teamed up with the National War College (NWC) on May 31 for a Go teaching event as a fun end-of-term activity. The NGC team was composed of Bin Duan, Richard Duan, Laurie Ensworth, Ed Shu and Gary Smith. The program was a 30-minute talk on the game of Go, including rules of play, followed by an hour or so of 9×9 play by NWC students and staff. The NWC provides a year-long advanced degree program for senior US military, US State Department, and international military. Host Colonel Thomas Stevenson was delighted by the success of the program and invited all for an after-action debrief in the basement of Roosevelt Hall at a bar called Teddy’s.
Casual Elegance. Wake up with a hot cup of coffee at Teddy’s Café in our hotel’s Grand Lobby. Discover local favorites like café au lait and beignets, and indulge in a soft slice of our signature Waldorf Astoria Red Velvet Cake while surrounded by an elegant and welcoming space made for casual dining. Opening Hours: Daily from 6:00AM – 5:00PM
Photos: (top left, by Bin Duan) Bin Duan, Laurie Ensworth, Ed Shu, Richard Duan, Gary Smith; (top right, by Col. Thomas Stevenson) NWC students and staff enjoying exploring Go; (bottom right) Gary Smith’s presentation; (bottom left, by Col. Thomas Stevenson): Laurie Ensworth teaching; (middle left): Bin Duan, Col. Thomas Stevenson, Gary Smith, and Laurie Ensworth (https://www.usgo.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=454497&item_id=102613&)
Absurd 25ft contraption is the world’s tallest rideable bicycle By T.K. Randall June 22, 2024
Even getting onto the bike is a challenge. Image Credit: YouTube / Guinness World Records
This ridiculous bike, which towers above the ground, was put together by two friends in France. If you thought the Penny-farthing was difficult to ride, spare a thought for these guys.
Friends Nicolas Barrioz and David Peyrou built this colossal contraption after making a bet with each other in a pub that they could create the world’s tallest rideable bicycle.
Named “Starbike”, the device reaches the staggering height of 7.77 meters and despite its immense size, comes complete with saddle, handlebars, pedals and two brake levers.
“It also has a bell, in case other road users have not seen you,” said Nicolas.
Actually riding the thing is no easy task, however, not least because falling off it would be fatal. It took around 3 months to design the bike and a further 2 years to construct it.
To earn themselves an official world record, it was necessary to demonstrate that the bike could actually be ridden, so the person in the saddle had to be attached to a safety harness.
“This experience has completely transformed my worldview,” said Nicolas.
“Before this, I really needed self-confidence; I was shy and had a negative self-opinion. Now it’s better, and sometimes I feel unstoppable; I think I can repair, build or design anything.”
City in Meriwether County fires police chief, suspends police force
By Ellie Parker Published: Jun. 19, 2024
ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) – A city in Meriwether County has fired its police chief and suspended its entire police force.
The City of Warm Springs announced the “immediate termination” of Police Chief Emilio Quintana and the suspension of the police department following a “comprehensive departmental-wide investigation.”
“The decision to terminate Chief Quintana and suspend the police force was made after careful consideration of recent events and emerging concerns regarding the conduct and operations within the department,” city officials said in a press release.
Interim Police Chief Aisha Al-Khalifa will oversee the police department, city officials said. Neighboring departments will help “(ensure) that essential police services continue uninterrupted.”
“Meriwether Sheriff’s Office has and will continue to respond to any calls for service in the county and is ready to assist any municipality that has a request,” Sheriff Chuck Smith said in a statement.
Warm Springs officials tight-lipped on why police force suspended
By Patrick Quinn Published: Jun. 20, 2024 at 8:58 PM EDT
ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) – The Warms Springs Police Department remains empty.
On Thursday, no city officials could elaborate on the reason the department was shut down.
“Based on the evidence of our legal counsel and due to the ongoing investigation and pending litigation, there is no official comment at this time,” said Tammy Howe, a Warm Springs City councilmember, in a press briefing on Thursday.
The south Georgia town, known for its Roosevelt Little White House historic site, has a population of roughly 500 people.
In a social media post on Wednesday, the city wrote the mayor fired the police chief and suspended the remaining 13 police officers.
“The decision to terminate Chief [Emilio] Quintana and suspend the police force was made after careful consideration of recent events and emerging concerns regarding the conduct and operations within the department,” city officials said in a Wednesday social media post.
The city appointed Aisha Al-Khalifa as interim chief.
Al-Khalifa is the only person active on the police force as of Thursday.
Howe declined to answer any questions surrounding the investigation or current status of the suspended officers.
Atlanta News First reached out to Warm Springs Mayor Robyn Pynenburg on Thursday.
Pynenburg declined to answer any questions and said in a text message that she was out of town.
“We’ve been without a police chief before, and we’ve been short-staffed before,” said Gerrie Thompson, innkeeper in Warm Springs.
Thompson said she formerly served on the City Council and trusts the mayor had a legitimate reason to fire the police chief.
“It’s not something that’s just a spur of the moment thing. I’m not potentially worried about anything. And I’m sure whatever is going on, they will have it taken care of,” said Thompson.
Howe confirmed that they will rely on the Meriwether Sheriff’s Office for emergency response coverage.
“Meriwether Sheriff’s Office has and will continue to respond to any calls for service in the county and is ready to assist any municipality that has a request,” Meriwether Sheriff Chuck Smith said in a statement.
By Atlanta News First staff Published: Jun. 20, 2024 at 12:27 PM EDT
ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) – A Douglas County judge already under investigation for alleged misconduct was arrested at a Buckhead nightclub early Thursday morning.
Probate Court Judge Christina Peterson faces two charges — simple battery against a police officer and felony willful obstruction of law enforcement by use of threats of violence, according to Fulton County Jail records.
Atlanta police confirmed the arrest, saying Peterson was arrested at the Red Martini Restaurant and Lounge off Peachtree Road NE after a 911 call. The incident report is still pending.
In September 2021, the Georgia Judicial Qualifications Commission filed several misconduct charges against Peterson. She is accused of keeping settlement funds to herself instead of distributing them to other plaintiffs, violating the courthouse’s security protocols during a wedding and more.
This is a developing story. Check back with Atlanta News First as we learn more.
The article you are about to read appeared over a week ago…and I wanted to publish the entire article immediately, but refrained, thinking maybe only excepts should be published for legal reasons. Although I tried, it was difficult leaving anything out. Therefore, the decision was made to publish the entire article because it concerns MY STATE!
Donald Trump is a convicted FELON. What kind of political party chooses a CONVICTED FELON to lead the party? What else does one need to know about any party that is led by a CONVICTED FELON, especially when that CONVICTED FELON acts like a person with mental illness. Prior to the 2016 election between the Trumpster and Hillary Clinton, the former candidate asked the nefarious Russians for help, which was given. One would think asking a foreign government for help in an election to choose a POTUS would be illegal, yet there was the Trumpster doing just that:
It is Kafkaesque.
‘Back in the day’ my parents generation, often called the Greatest Generation, and also called the “World War II” generation, had much trouble with the changes occurring during the 1960s. They became Republicans because they did not like or want change. Unfortunately for those conservative types, life is change. Therefore, I have always thought change must be embraced because it cannot be stopped.
There is a war being fought out for the future of the United States of America, and my state, Georgia, is obviously a battleground state in the crosshairs.
During the 1960s the Vietnam “conflict” raged. Each and every night the television news readers gave We The People the “body count.” That would be the number of Americans killed that day. Fast forward to today and the body count is still being given, only it is not soldiers dying on the field of battle, but We The People being BLOWN AWAY by GUNS right here in the USA. The Republicans wanted everyone in America to own a weapon and now each day the news bring word of exactly how many citizens died via gun the previous day… and the drip, drip, drip of DEATH never ends, because We The People are ARMED TO THE TEETH.
The article:
The presidential election this year will come down to seven states — but there’s one that Donald Trump and his most committed lieutenants see as a blueprint for corrupting future local and national elections: Georgia.
The Peach State is unique — it’s the sole battleground state in which the Republican Party has total control over the levers of power: a trifecta in the state House, Senate, and governorship. Over the past four years, Trump-loving elements of the Georgia GOP have wielded that advantage in a crusade to convert discredited election-conspiracy theories into policies well ahead of Election Day 2024. It is an alarmingly anti-democratic experiment that Trumpland and much of the GOP hope to take national.
“Georgia is our laboratory,” a source close to the former president tells Rolling Stone. “If you can get this up and running in Georgia, you get a road map for other states, maybe the country as a whole.”
In 2020, top Georgia Republicans such as Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger managed to block Trump’s attempts to illegally overturn the election results. Kemp earned Trump’s fury by refusing to use what the then-president called “emergency powers” to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. In an infamous January 2021 phone call that helped lead to Trump’s indictment in Fulton County, Raffensperger rebuffed the president’s demands to “find” him votes. Kemp and Raffensperger both won handily in their 2022 reelection runs.
But ever since President Biden’s inauguration, conservative activists and policymakers in Georgia have tried to bypass Raffensperger and worked diligently to turn Trump’s heads-I-win-tails-you-lose philosophy of elections into public policy.
As Trump has continued to lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” and “rigged” , the former president and his supporters have been making concrete, step-by-step progress in shaping electoral processes to his benefit. Across the state, MAGA die-hards are devoting considerable resources to purging voter rolls, intimidating election officials, employing legal dirty tricks, and ousting Republican officials and election appointees who haven’t been initiated into the cult of Trump.
Republican operatives have remade Georgia’s state election board, executive branch, Legislature, and legal ecosystems, all in Donald Trump’s image. Conservatives in the state Assembly have unleashed thousands of voter eligibility challenges on county election boards — an effort that will be turbocharged with a new election law. Lawmakers also worked to limit Raffensperger’s role in overseeing elections, while sapping resources for election administration.
Conservative activists heckle election officials on a regular basis with the conspiracy theories Trump birthed, and an indicted election denier — now the state’s lieutenant governor — pushes Trump’s agenda in the Assembly as he eyes higher office. Trump sits atop this sprawling network, receiving updates on progress from political advisers and other MAGA acolytes.
Lawyers close to Trump are already preparing for the former president to claim fraud in Georgia and challenge the results of the election — even in the event that he wins — just to prove a point about imaginary “fraud” in Democratic areas. “There’s massive fraud, so that should be … solved, no matter who wins in Georgia or any state,” says one lawyer and conservative-movementarian who has discussed the matter with Trump, although they present no evidence to back such claims. “You can’t let the left get away with it just because their cheating did not work.”
None of this may be necessary. If the election were held today, polls suggest Trump would win Georgia outright. But to the Trump faithful, that is almost beside the point. In the past four years, Trump and his allies have been doing everything they can to make sure that a Republican defeat in Georgia simply cannot happen again — and to entrench a permanent GOP majority in a deeply divided state.
It’s happening throughout the country: Nearly every leader who matters in various state GOPs, the national Republican Party, and within the conservative movement is playing part in a well-funded, coordinated attempt to corrupt American elections in a way so transparently cynical, so authoritarian, that it makes the right’s “voter fraud” crackdowns of the pre-Trump era look like a flicker of intellectual calm by comparison.
In Georgia, with Election Day just months away, the effects of these Trump-backed initiatives can be felt in every corner of the state’s political environment, from the governor’s mansion to the local election officials increasingly facing threats and intimidation, all the way down to the everyday residents who are forced by conservative activists to defend their right to vote.
An audio recording of former President Donald Trump speaking to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is played during a hearing of the House Select Committee in 2022. Kent Nishimura/”Los Angeles Times”/Getty Images
“The effort to suppress the vote in Georgia happens year-round, and the countereffort needs to be equally, if not more, robust,” says Saira Draper, a Democratic state representative who worked on voter-protection issues for the Biden campaign in 2020. “Instead of investing in voter protection only in big election years, Democrats need to be at the forefront of defending democracy every day, and for every election.”
With both the Biden and Trump presidential campaigns privately bracing for an extraordinarily close election in November — and a possible protracted legal battle in the aftermath — any minor change at the margins on either side could help make the difference between a Trump victory or loss in the state. And Trump and Georgia Republicans have made it abundantly clear they aren’t willing to leave the electoral outcome up to chance.
“Everybody is gearing up for full-blown warfare,” says a Republican source close to Trump who has worked on “election integrity” efforts. “The campaign, the RNC, everyone is going to be fighting Biden’s team over every single inch, and each bit of process.”
IN THE WAKE of Trump’s loss and record-breaking voter turnout in 2020, Republicans enacted a series of sweeping laws to suppress the vote.
SB 202, the “Election Integrity Act,” passed in 2021, restricted early voting and ballot drop boxes and limited mail-in-ballots. It also made it illegal to provide water or food to people waiting in line to vote. And it limited the secretary of state’s role on the state election board — a move to punish Raffensperger. Despite the bad blood between Trump and Kemp, the Georgia governor signed the bill, dubbed “Jim Crow in the 21st century ” by Biden, into law.
Perhaps most important, the law massively expanded the number of challenges that activists can file contesting the validity of voter registrations in their county — opening up more voters to pernicious nuisance challenges to their right to vote. MAGA activists have flooded the state with tens of thousands of baseless voter-eligibility claims.
Everybody is gearing up for full-blown warfare. —Republican source close to Trump
One Fulton County resident had her voter registration challenged by a third party on the suspicion that she had listed an invalid address, despite living at the same home since 2011. Atlanta’s mayor and city council moved unanimously in 2018 to change the name of her street, as part of an effort to rid the city of its Confederate iconography. Thanks to Georgia Republicans, that street-name change was used as a rationale to try to disenfranchise her.
“I just feel like this is a waste of my time and also my kids’ time,” she told county officials at a 2023 hearing. “I’m here when I have other things to do,” she said. “I have a job.”
Many challengers rely on data from a website known as VoteRef. The site is a subsidiary of Restoration Action Inc., an election-denial group backed by the billionaire Trump donor and cardboard-box magnate Richard Uihlein.
VoteRef purports to offer a user-friendly interface for aggregated government voter-registration data. But Kristin Nabers, the state director for the nonprofit voting-rights group All Voting Is Local, says the site “is using a voter roll for Georgia from November 2022. It’s a year-and-a-half-old voter roll that is massively out of date. The secretary of state did a list cleanup in 2023, none of which is reflected on VoteRef. These sites are just not reliable.”
The wave of voter challenges has been exacerbated by new rules in how the state funds its elections. For years, election officials in Georgia and around the country have benefited from grants and donations from private foundations. Now, just as county election boards grapple with the overwhelming weight of mass challenges, officials will have fewer resources available to manage them. Last year, Republicans made Georgia one of the first states to ban private charitable contributions for election administration in 2024.
The move was part of a nationwide campaign by MAGA activists to block those donations, which they call “Zuckerbucks,” based on the prominent role of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in funding nonpartisan election-support charities. “I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people” for Zuckerberg’s role in funding election-administration charities, Trump told CNBC in March.
County election boards have dismissed most of the challenges resulting from SB 202. However, a Republican law that Kemp signed in early May offers new guidance to county election boards, and could lead to more voter-registration challenges being upheld on thin evidence before the 2024 election.
Under the National Voter Registration Act, states are required to finish cleaning their voter rolls 90 days before federal elections. The new Georgia law, however, sets its moratorium on registration challenges at 45 days before an election — which some experts argue is a violation of the NVRA.
“The 45-day quiet period is trying to bypass the 90-day quiet period the NVRA has. You don’t have a quiet period unless what you’re trying to do is list maintenance under another name. That gives away the game right there,” one Georgia election official says. The official adds that with the new law, “if a voter gets caught up in a challenge, they are never going to get the opportunity to reregister if they were inappropriately removed.”
To the former president, however, these voter-suppression laws do not go far enough. During his time out of office, Trump has noted to close advisers that while the state’s voting overhaul does “some nice things,” the changes won’t matter unless, in Trump’s words, “you get the fucking RINOs out of the way,” according to a source with direct knowledge of the ex-president’s opinions on the matter.
AS REPUBLICANS HAVE overloaded local election boards with frivolous voter challenges, they have also worked to reshape the state board overseeing elections — and make it more MAGA.
Trump has played a key role here, behind the scenes. Ed Lindsey, a Republican member of the state election board, landed in the former president’s crosshairs after he opposed an end to no-excuse mail-in voting, which allows registered voters to submit their ballot by mail without providing a reason.
In recent months, Trump spent time calling Georgia lawmakers and fellow MAGA hard-liners in the state to ask them about Lindsey and to demand that he be shown the door, somehow. “He’s got to go,” Trump said privately, noting Lindsey’s position on the “very important” election board, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Lindsey’s vote against recommending that the Legislature curb voting by mail was just one in a series of moves that infuriated the MAGA activists who have become influential in the state party. He also took a hard line on the bogus claims of election fraud made by the conspiracy nonprofit True the Vote, which recently had to admit in federal court that it had no evidence for voter-fraud claims it had put before the board of elections.
Lindsey’s principles did not sit well with the MAGA movement, which sprang into action. The DeKalb County Republican Party demanded Lindsey’s resignation, claiming newfound conflicts of interest on his part. That position was echoed by a host of conservative media outlets and at least one think tank with ties to Trump.
The final straw came in May. At a meeting of the state election board, Lindsey refused to join calls for the Georgia attorney general to investigate Fulton County’s audit of the 2020 election — long a rallying cry for election deniers.
On May 15, the far-right activists got their wish when Lindsey abruptly resigned his post on the state election board. Republican state House Speaker Jon Burns announced that he would replace Lindsey with Janelle King, a Republican media pundit in Georgia who supported Trump in 2020 and said on her podcast that she is “against no-excuse” voting by mail.
Lindsey, a holdover appointment from the previous speaker, had already served a term on the board and expressed a willingness to continue serving throughout the 2024 election, or until Burns found a replacement for him, according to a copy of his resignation letter obtained by Rolling Stone.
In the letter to Burns, which came shortly after the contentious May election-board meeting, Lindsey indicated that the speaker prompted his exit: “In our talk yesterday, you informed me that you have found someone to appoint and wish to do so this week.”
In an email to friends and colleagues announcing his departure, also obtained by Rolling Stone, Lindsey revealed the pressure the state’s election officials will face, including from conspiracy theorists, in the upcoming election. “Together they must not only be strong and diligent enough to root out those who wish to cheat the system through fraud or suppression, but also wise and judicious enough to identify, expose, and call out others who cynically spread false claims of the same for cheap personal or partisan gain,” he wrote.
Donald J. Trump, in 2020, listens as Atlanta small business owner Janelle King delivers remarks during the ‘Rebuilding of AmericaOs Infrastructure: Faster, Better, Stronger’ event. Storms Media Group/Alamy
The move to implement a more MAGA elections agenda in Georgia has been a bottom-up process as well as a top-down one. Across the state, conspiracy theorists have begun to populate the ranks of election boards in places like Spalding County, giving Trump’s election lies a more powerful constituency than they enjoyed in 2020.
“The MAGA movement will be set for life if Donald Trump and the party can purge the RINOs from Georgia,” says the Republican source close to Trump. “In the last [presidential] election, there were too many establishment Republicans standing in the way. They are why Georgia fell to Joe Biden.… If we beat them back there, which we couldn’t in 2022, you’re clearing out the losers who want to go back to the party of Bush or McCain.”
Deep within Trumpworld, preliminary planning is underway, spearheaded by attorneys and others close to the former president, to challenge the results and supposed fraud in Georgia’s Democratic strongholds. Already, at least a handful of influential Republicans in Georgia have moved in a similar direction. In the state’s November 2023 elections, four Republican board members on three Georgia county-election boards refused to certify the results of the elections, citing concerns about voting machines, reminiscent of Trump’s lies in 2020.
During Georgia’s presidential primary in March, Fulton County Republican Board of Elections member Julie Adams refused to certify the results of a primary contest that Trump won without question. In May, Adams sued the board with help from lawyers at the Trump-connected nonprofit America First Policy Institute — seeking judicial backing for her claims that Board of Elections members have the authority to deny the certification of election results.
Democrats see Adams’ move as part of a pattern. “The MAGA Republicans have made it clear they are planning to try to block certification of November’s election, and this is a transparent attempt to set the stage for that fight,” the Georgia Democratic Party said in a statement responding to Adams’ suit.
TRUMP’S YEARS-LONG election-denial campaign has unleashed a darker tide of threats toward election officials.
The intimidation of election workers has grown to such a peak that the Justice Department had to create a special Election Threats Task Force to prosecute what Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this year called “a deeply disturbing spike in threats against those who serve the public.”
In January, Gabriel Sterling, a Republican and the chief operating officer in Raffensperger’s office, was the victim of a “swatting” call — an attempt to trick armed police into rushing a victim’s home on false pretenses. Around the same time, Georgia’s state assembly received a bomb threat.
The secretary of state’s office has had to prepare for a range of different security contingencies as the 2024 election gets closer. “Interest gets elevated, as do emotions, so that is something that we are assessing,” Raffensperger tells Rolling Stone.
His office has set up regular meetings with county election officials and law enforcement to carry out tabletop exercises examining a host of different potential threats, some of them fairly exotic.
“Someone sent a fentanyl-laced letter several months ago to Fulton County,” Raffensperger says. The attack targeted election officials in Georgia and Washington state.
“Within days of that happening, we worked with state public health and we were able to get Narcan to all 109 counties and do a training session for everybody who was at our big state conference,” explains Sterling. “We had public health come and do training on that for about 45 minutes, and we distributed it all.”
For Sara Tindall Ghazal, the Georgia state election board’s lone Democrat, the prospects of violence and intimidation loom heavy. “I am worried about more-aggressive voter-intimidation efforts,” she says. “I am worried about people getting in the back of a truck with AR-15s and giant flags, and driving past polling places.”
Tindall Ghazal, who is battling cancer, recounts how she had to reach out to police “after a pointed email talking about treason and the death penalty” landed in her inbox.
“I had police patrol in front of my house before a particularly controversial meeting,” Tindall Ghazal says. At the time, the state election board was convening to consider a push by Republicans in the state Assembly to give the body the authority to investigate Raffensperger over his handling of the 2020 election.
At another meeting, Tindall Ghazal tried to explain that voters had already reelected Raffensperger by a commanding majority in 2022. The crowd erupted in shouts of denunciation.
“I am the one person who they literally yell at in meetings. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to stop speaking because I’m getting yelled over,” she says. “Any time I talk about the fact that the 2020 election was legitimate, they just start yelling,” she says.
Burt Jones, Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor speaks as Republican Governor Brian Kemp listens at a press conference 2022, in Atlanta. Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
FOR TRUMP AND HIS FOLLOWERS, the right’s multipronged offensive to influence Georgia’s election process isn’t just about 2024.
Since last year, Trump has regularly asked confidants whether Georgia’s Republican Lt. Gov. Burt Jones would make a good governor. A hard-line MAGA conservative, Jones served as one of Trump’s fake electors in Georgia during the then-president’s endeavor to overturn the 2020 election results. The day before the Jan. 6 riot, Jones was in Washington, D.C., trying to convince Vice President Mike Pence to go along with Trump’s coup plot.
Jones’ efforts earned him scrutiny from state law enforcement. In April, a special prosecutor was appointed to probe his role in the 2020 Georgia election-subversion scheme.
In Trump’s private discussions of Jones, he likes to note that Jones is “very loyal,” and has frequently suggested that Jones would be a “strong” leader for Georgia, two people familiar with the situation say.
As lieutenant governor, Jones replaced a Republican critical of Trump. Now, Jones is aiming for higher office. There’s no guarantee that Jones secures a Trump endorsement, much less the Republican nomination. But the election of an indicted election denier to the state’s highest office would represent a stunning and four-year-belated victory for the MAGA movement. And for a thoroughly Trumpified GOP, that’s the goal.
“It is Donald Trump’s party,” says a GOP source close to Trump. “Every conservative state is gonna act like it, and there’s nowhere more important for winning that battle than Georgia.”
Adults bought more toys for themselves than for any other age group last quarter for the first time ever, surpassing toys for even the historically-dominant preschooler market.
Consumers 18 years of age and up spent $1.5 billion in toy-related purchases in the period from January through April, overtaking the three-to five-year-old demographic as the most important age group for the toy industry, according to a new report from market research firm Circana.
Looking back over a longer period, the report said as many as 43% of adults purchased a toy for themselves in the past year, with the top reasons being for personal fun, socialization and for collecting.
Trading cards, Squishmallows (which are a rage across age groups), Lego sets and sports toys were among the most sought-after toy products in the period, the report said.
Armchair Warrior 