Former U.S intel chief says where there’s smoke, there’s a lot of fire
By Art Moore Published September 29, 2021 at 7:51pm
Wuhan Institute of Virology (Wikimedia Commons)
The Wuhan Institute of Virology in the 11-million-strong Chinese city bought a PCR machine in November 2019 to test coronaviruses, according to Chinese security data that was wiped from the web and later recovered by cybersecurity experts.
The revelation is part of an investigation by Sky News Australia reporter Sharri Markson presenting evidence that the pandemic began with a virus engineered by researchers at the Wuhan lab who were partly funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Markson presents findings from her new book, “What Really Happened in Wuhan,” in a one-hour Sky News Australia feature, which is embedded at the end of this article.
The report of the purchase of the PCR machine coincides with the intelligence report cited by the Wall Street Journal that researchers from the Wuhan lab became sick with COVID-like symptoms and sought hospital care in November 2019.
Markson discovered there was a “buy up” in Wuhan of PCR equipment used to test for coronaviruses in October 2019. The next month a machine was purchased by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
She asked former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe if he was aware of the purchase by the Wuhan lab.
Hundreds of employees across the country are standing firm in their decision not to get vaccinated against COVID-19 despite the threat of losing their jobs. Scores have simply quit while many others have already been fired.
A health system in North Carolina has fired 175 people who were not vaccinated. Last week, the Winston-Salem-based health system Novant Health had announced 375 employees had been suspended and given five days to comply with the mandate. On Monday, they fired 175 of them.
The Delaware News Journalreports ChristianaCare has fired 150 employees who could not agree to its COVID vaccine mandate. Nurses in Delaware, President Biden’s home state, told the paper beforehand they already “felt they were in crisis due to understaffing”.
Hundreds of employees across the country are standing firm in their decision not to get vaccinated against COVID-19 despite the threat of losing their jobs. Scores have simply quit while many others have already been fired.
A health system in North Carolina has fired 175 people who were not vaccinated. Last week, the Winston-Salem-based health system Novant Health had announced 375 employees had been suspended and given five days to comply with the mandate. On Monday, they fired 175 of them.
The Delaware News Journalreports ChristianaCare has fired 150 employees who could not agree to its COVID vaccine mandate. Nurses in Delaware, President Bi
In Massachusetts, dozens of state troopers have resigned after they were told to get the shot by October 17 or face termination from their jobs.
“Many of these troopers are going to be returning to their previous municipal police departments within the state that allow for regular testing and masks,” said Michael Cherven, president of the State Police Association of Massachusetts.
Cherven explained that the State Police were already struggling with staffing shortages and the mandate is making the situation even worse.
“The State Police are already critically short-staffed and acknowledge this by the unprecedented moves to take officers from specialty units that investigate homicides, terrorism, computer crimes, arsons, and human trafficking, to name just a few,” Cherven said.
den’s home state, told the paper beforehand they already “felt they were in crisis due to understaffing”.
Survey shows he’s up over Biden by 10 points, Harris by 13
By Bob Unruh Published September 23, 2021 at 2:08pm
President Donald J. Trump sees off the USNS Comfort Saturday, March 28, 2020, as she departs Naval Air Station Norfolk Pier 8 in Norfolk, Virginia, and sets sail for New York City. (Official White House photo by Shealah Craighead)
In what prominent Washington Examiner columnist Paul Bedard classifies as “a stunning turnaround,” a new poll shows the extent of the buyer’s remorse evident following last year’s presidential election.
The results from Rasmussen Reports shows that given a second chance at Election Day, voters now would pick President Donald Trump over Joe Biden 51%-41%.
“Just 247 days since President Joe Biden took the keys to the Oval Office, a majority of people appear to want him evicted and former President Donald Trump back,” Bedard explained.
“And by a country mile.”
Key was the fact that independent voters “overwhelmingly” said they would go for Trump, by 20 points.
And Democrats? Those from gaffe-plagued Joe Biden’s own party?
One-fifth said they’d vote for Trump.
Trump, against a Vice President Kamala Harris, would win 52%-39%.
Rasmussen said the survey of 1,000 U.S. Likely Voters was done Sept. 21-22 and the margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Rasmussen said the survey of 1,000 U.S. Likely Voters was done Sept. 21-22 and the margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The turnaround comes after Biden took office and created a crisis at the southern border by canceling President Trump’s border security programs. Then there’s also the Afghanistan withdrawal catastrophe where Biden left behind, to be under the thumb of terrorists in the Taliban, hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghans who had helped the U.S. there.
And tens of billions of dollars worth of American war machinery.
Then there’s inflation that’s hitting all Americans in their wallets. There’s his party’s attempt to take over all elections. And his party’s COVID mandate agenda, as well as its pro-abortion agenda.
And voters probably remember that a Media Research Center poll shortly after the election found that nearly one-third of voters who chose Joe Biden were not aware of the evidence linking the former vice president to corrupt financial dealings with China and other nations through his son. Hunter. Had they known, according to the survey, President Trump would have won at least 289 Electoral College votes.
August 2021 will probably be remembered as the month when Joe Biden’s presidency was holed below the waterline. September is the month when it started to sink.
Biden is beset by several disasters at once. All the blame is his, for they flow from his dumb, stubborn, and ideological moves immediately after he was sworn in. First, his border crisis has graduated into a catastrophe.
Migrants are flooding across the trickle of the Rio Grande at sometimes hundreds an hour, and 10,000 or more of them now wait in a filthy shantytown under the international bridge in Del Rio, Texas. The city’s authorities are overwhelmed. There is no news yet of a cynically opportunistic visit from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to pose for a grief-stricken photo like the one she set up when the president was a Republican. Back then, many of these migrants were living in better conditions throughout South America. But after Biden told them during his presidential campaign that “you should come,” they accepted his boneheaded and reckless invitation.
The humanitarian situation is so bad and border officials are so overwhelmed that Biden is deporting some migrants back to an earthquake-stricken Haiti, where many of them haven’t lived for 10 years or more. They’d have preferred to remain in Mexico, which, coincidentally, was former President Donald Trump’s policy, while their cases were adjudicated.
Meanwhile, the disaster Biden created in Afghanistan continues to unravel apace. The deadly, disorderly, and dishonorable rout he made inevitable there will be a source of lasting shame for the United States and will inspire future terrorist attacks. More immediately, it has European allies, both in Britain and on the continent, openly doubting American resolve and reliability.
To compound matters, Afghans whom Biden brought back to the U.S. were, in many cases, random people taken off the street and entirely unrelated to the American war effort. To inflate the numbers of people he was seen rescuing — remember his administration’s boasting about the scores of thousands and its ludicrous braggadocio about being as admirable as the Berlin airlift? — Biden shipped out people who weren’t in danger from the Taliban while leaving behind tens of thousands who were and still are.
Biden’s incompetence — nay, his negligence, because incompetence at least implies an honest effort — is entirely to blame for both of these disasters. But it gets much, much worse.
We thought we had seen the greatest possible depths of presidential pettiness. But Biden has outdone everyone, including his famously thin-skinned predecessor. Just last week, Biden’s administration abruptly and without warning decided to withhold desperately needed treatments for COVID-19 from the states where they are most in demand. Not coincidentally, most of them are states governed by Republicans.
In Florida, for example, which is experiencing a high volume of cases despite its high vaccination rate, Biden’s administration has seized control of the distribution system for monoclonal antibody treatments and dramatically scaled back the number that will be made available to less than half of existing demand. The administration’s stated excuses for this are not remotely believable. There is no shortage of the treatments elsewhere, and this is a straightforwardly vindictive decision. He will let Florida’s hospitals be overwhelmed, and more people will die needlessly, apparently because Florida’s governor refuses to comply when Biden demands that he impose needless mask mandates on schoolchildren.
Biden’s cruelty in arbitrarily depriving people of a cure to a disease that will hospitalize or kill them is outrageous even in the lamentable catalog of his odious decisions. It is worse than anything his predecessor did, including the acts for which he was twice impeached. It is a deadly abuse of power by a president unfit to govern the country.
No wonder Biden’s approval ratings are collapsing. But there is a silver lining. Biden, or whoever makes decisions for him, has so fallen out of favor that no Republican or centrist Democrat will feel pressure to help pass his inflationary, unnecessary, and radical $3.5 trillion spending bill.
As of Monday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to approve the third round of shots for the above-mentioned group of Americans. The move comes as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) panel will meet on Wednesday to discuss the distribution of the shots.
Currently, the FDA doesn’t have to follow the CDC panel guidelines but they usually abide by them. The booster shots will begin to take place once the FDA approves the shots and the CDC signs off on them.
On Monday, Interim Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Janet Woodcock told Reuters that while she backs the booster shots, scientists have argued that they aren’t needed as of yet.
“If people are acquiring the virus and spreading it, you want to stop that as much as possible. Of course, we’re using mitigation measures like masking and so forth, but vaccination is important,” she said.
On September 17, an FDA advisory committee voted to authorize the additional Pfizer shots for both groups of Americans rather than the broader public for now. This decision is due to a lack of evidence and the need for additional health data.
“Today was an important step forward in providing better protection to Americans from COVID-19,” White House spokesperson Kevin Munoz told Reuters after the vote. “We stand ready to provide booster shots to eligible Americans once the process concludes at the end of next week.”
Thirty-eight percent of Americans said that they would prefer vaccines to be given to the unvaccinated in developing nations first rather than used as booster shots in the U.S., according to a recent poll conducted by Yahoo News and YouGov.Thirty-two percent of those surveyed said it was more important to “offer boosters to as many Americans as possible.”
The remaining 30 percent of people in the survey said they were undecided on the issue.
The survey also discovered that 73 percent of vaccinated Americans would be willing to get a booster shot if it becomes available to them.
Newsweek reached out to the CDC for comment but did not hear back in time for publication.
The Greek philosopher Plato predicted democracy would degenerate into anarchy once people lost their virtue. Then a tyrant would arise.
How do democracies and republics get taken over? Haven’t systems been put in place to prevent this from happening?
The best way to answer that is to look at history and perhaps no one tells it better than William J. Federer. William is a nationally known speaker, historian, author, and president of Amerisearch, Inc, a publishing company dedicated to researching America’s noble heritage. He’s the speaker on The American Minute daily broadcast. He has authored numerous books including, America’s God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations, Rise of the Tyrant, Who is the King in America? and Socialism: The Real History From Plato to the Present.
According to William, the first writing was Sumerian cuneiform on clay tablets from the Mesopotamian Valley (Iraq). Moving on he noted Nimrod and the Tower of Babel, 2,000 years of Egyptian pharaohs, Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Attila the Hun, etc.
His point? Although the titles may differ such as Pharaoh, Caesar, Kaiser, Sultan, Czar, Chairman, etc, the most common form of government is the king where power gravitates into the hands of one person. It’s the “default setting” for human government.
As centuries moved along these kings got bigger and bigger because of military and technological advancements. Eventually the King of England became so big that people said the sun never set on the British empire.
Eventually America’s founders decided to break away, not just from the King of England, but from having a king as a leader. They flipped the concept and made the people the king.
In the end, William views history as a long categorizing of how to limit the power of a king, but how do you do that, especially in the modern era when certain powerful individuals seemingly want to take away the rights of the people? William believes that history isn’t prophetic, but it is predictive. In other words, past behavior is the best indicator of future performance. So join him as he answers this question by steering listeners through world history, on this edition of Crosstalk.
The US soldiers were ambushed by Islamic State fighters on October 4, 2017 while attempting to return to their base, the Journal reported in 2018.
The troops waited nearly an hour to request help because they thought there were fewer militants during the attack.
Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) was formed by al-Sahrawi in 2015, the BBC said, and is blamed for most of the deadly attacks in the West African region, including violence against a group of six French aid workers and their Nigerien guides and drivers in 2020.
French forces have been fighting insurgencies in the region for years, the BBC said. There are several missions ongoing, including a counterterrorism mission and United Nations peacekeeping mission.
The eight-year campaign in the region by France is shrinking, the Journal said, with a reduced troop presence from 5,100 soldiers to between 2,500 and 3,000.
The ambush – which left four Americans and five Nigerian fighters dead in the Nigerien village of Tongo Tongo – was the deadliest attack on American troops in Africa since the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia, the Journal said.
In recent weeks, we have witnessed an unprecedented social media crackdown on conservative voices. YouTube’s war with Alex Jones has gotten the most attention, but literally hundreds of conservative content creators have had their accounts penalized, suspended or deleted by YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social media giants.
DOHA, Qatar — With the massive United States military effort to evacuate American citizens and endangered Afghans completed, those still scrambling to find safe passage from Afghanistan are now navigating a complicated and potentially dangerous diplomatic impasse.
Unable to fly from Kabul’s airport, which remains closed and in need of upgrades, many people have flocked to the airport in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, making it the latest flash point as the United States struggles to coordinate with its former Taliban adversaries to help people wanting to leave the country.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, speaking to reporters during a visit to Qatar on Tuesday, said U.S. officials were “working around the clock” to ensure that flights carrying Americans and endangered Afghans can safely depart Afghanistan. He contested claims that the Taliban have blocked charter flights from departing the Mazar-i-Sharif airport.
Mr. Blinken said he was unaware of any “hostage-like” situation in Mazar-i-Sharif, contradicting a claim by a prominent House Republican that the Taliban were reneging on promises they have made to U.S. officials to allow safe passage from the country of foreigners and Afghans with valid travel documents.
“We have been assured, again, that all American citizens and Afghan citizens with valid travel documents will be allowed to leave,” Mr. Blinken said, adding that “we intend to hold the Taliban to that.”
Mr. Blinken, who appeared alongside Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and their Qatari counterparts, said Taliban leaders had recently reaffirmed that commitment. He pointed to the exit from the country on Monday by an American family who used an undisclosed land route. The Taliban knew what the family was doing but did not impede them, U.S. officials say.
But in the case of Mazar-i-Sharif, Mr. Blinken said, the Taliban have objected to charter flights that combine passengers who have valid travel documents and those who do not.
“It’s my understanding that the Taliban has not denied exit to anyone holding a valid document, but they have said that those without valid documents at this point can’t leave,” Mr. Blinken said. “But because all of these people are grouped together, that’s meant that flights have not been allowed to go.”
On Sunday, Representative Mike McCaul of Texas, the top Republican on the House Foreign Relations Committee, said on “Fox News Sunday” that the Taliban were blocking the departure of six flights from Mazar-i-Sharif that included American citizens and Afghans who had acted as interpreters for the U.S. military. Mr. McCaul said the Taliban were holding the passengers “hostage” as they made demands of the U.S. government.
Mr. Blinken said he believed around 100 American citizens remain in Afghanistan, including “a relatively small number” seeking to leave Mazar-i-Sharif.
Further complicating matters, the Taliban said Tuesday they would not allow people to leave the country until a new government is formed. The Taliban announced a list of people who will fill key roles on Tuesday afternoon, but they held off on formally swearing in the new government.
The group said earlier in the day that without functioning ministries to grant exit stamps and perform other necessary duties, an orderly departure process was not yet in place.
The Taliban’s latest comments represent yet another twist in a chapter that has played out since their conquest of the country led tens of thousands to try to flee.
Like the United States, the Taliban do not want to see a repeat of the desperate scenes that played out in Kabul, where thousands of Afghans rushed to the airport and many were evacuated without proper documentation