World News
Biden hits Putin with sanctions in retaliation for election interference, cyber attacks and Ukraine
Daily Mail – President Joe Biden has cancelled the deployment of two US warships from the Black Sea despite warning Vladimir Putin there would be ‘repercussions’ for the troop build-up in Ukraine.
Last week, Turkey said Washington was sending two warships to the Black Sea, in a decision Russia called an unfriendly provocation.
But the Biden administration has reversed the decision after the Kremlin warned them to ‘stay away for their own good’.
Washington’s U-turn in Crimea came on the day Biden announced sweeping new sanctions against Moscow as the White House seeks to rein in Russian aggression while avoiding an all-out diplomatic war with the Kremlin.
‘We have no desire to be in an escalating war with Russia,’ a senior administration official said Thursday on a briefing call with reporters, saying the White House doesn’t want things ‘spinning out of control.’
‘We do not seek a downward spiral. We can and think we can avoid that,’ the official said.
Officials made it clear, however, that the administration ‘will not accept its destabilizing behavior that harms the United States, its allies and its partners.’
To give the sanctions teeth – in a way financial sanctions have not deterred Russia before – the US is seeking to choke off lending to the Russian government.
The US also expelled 10 diplomats in retaliation for the Kremlin’s interference in American elections, its aggressive actions in the Ukraine, and the SolarWinds cyber hack.
The Treasury Department and Western allies – including the UK and Canada – also targeted eight individuals and entities associated with the ‘ongoing occupation and repression in Crimea’.
‘The Transatlantic community stands united in supporting Ukraine against unilateral Russian provocations along the Line of Contact in eastern Ukraine, in occupied Crimea, and along Ukraine’s borders, as well as agreeing on the need for Russia to immediately cease its military buildup and inflammatory rhetoric,’ the White House said.
The White House also denounced Moscow for offering the Taliban bounties for U.S. troops serving in Afghanistan.
Administration officials described its actions as ‘tailored and proportional’ and reiterated it seeks a ‘predictable and stable’ relationship with Moscow.
In a series of actions on Thursday, the United States sanctioned 32 Russian entities and individuals along with six technology companies, formally attributed the SolarWinds cyber breach to Russian intelligence agencies, and accused Moscow of still trying to hack American targets.
7 Key Reasons Why Vaccine Passports Are A Dangerous Idea
With vaccine injuries spiraling upwards, Technocrats are scrambling to implement vaccine passports before it is too late to convince a skittish public to accept them. It is a dangerous sign of impending tyranny and should be resisted at all costs. ⁃ Technocracy News & Trends Editor Patrick Wood
Naked Capitalism – As the use of vaccine passports snowballs around the world, concerns about their potential reach and implications are growing.
Vaccine passports (or passes or certificates) are being rushed through around the world, including in places where most people have not even been able to get a vaccine yet. They are being touted as a way of jump-starting the global economy by providing a means for people to prove their vaccinated status, allowing them to travel, shop, go to the gym, attend sporting and cultural events and conduct other indoor activities. Countries like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore have already introduced vaccine passports in the last couple of months.
Of course, the use of the word “passport” is deceptive. “Passport” implies a document endorsed by a state that establishes citizenship and guarantees diplomatic protection. A traditional passport does not require the bearer to participate in a vaccine program, although immunity certificates have existed for diseases such as Yellow Fever. Another difference is that a vaccine passport is likely to come in the form of a digital document. The potential scope of its application is also far broader than that of a normal passport. It could be required not only to establish identity and vaccine status at national borders but also to travel, access public buildings and basic services within one’s own country of residence.
In countries that already have an established national health service, such as the UK and Israel, the vaccine passport has been mandated at state level. In the US tech and health-care companies are firmly in the driving seat. At least 17 alternative programs are currently under development. As for the EU, it has proposed issuing “digital green certificates” that would allow EU residents to travel freely across the 27-nation bloc by the summer as long as they have been vaccinated, tested negative for COVID-19 or recovered from the disease. It’s worth noting that the EU has been studying the feasibility of creating a common EU vaccination card since early 2019.
International Initiatives
There are also initiatives taking place internationally such as the Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group, whose partners include WHO, UNICEF, ITU and the European Commission. The group “is focused on establishing key specifications, standards and a trust framework for a digital vaccination certificate to facilitate implementation of effective and interoperable digital solutions that support COVID-19 vaccine delivery and monitoring, with intended applicability to other vaccines.”
Another initiative is the CommonPass digital health app being developed by the Commons Project Foundation (CPJ), which was founded by the Rockefeller Foundation and is supported by the World Economic Forum. The CommonPass is both a framework and an app that “will allow individuals to access their lab results and vaccination records, and consent to have that information used to validate their COVID status without revealing any other underlying personal health information.”
Then there’s ID2020, a nongovernmental organization that advocates for digital IDs for the billion undocumented people worldwide and under-served groups like refugees. In 2019, ID2020 launched a new digital identity program in collaboration with the government of Bangladesh and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). It is now involved in the Good Health Pass Collaborative, “an open, inclusive, cross-sector initiative, bringing toget
Pause for Thought
Some of these initiatives are already being piloted by companies, including airlines, and local or regional authorities. All Nippons Airways has started a test of the CommonPass on its flights from Tokyo Haneda to New York. Last week New York unveiled its Excelsior pass, which is based on technology from IBM. Other states are likely to follow suit. France has also just completed a month-long trial of a health passport app for Air France passengers travelling to Martninique and Guadeloupe.
The speed at which these initiatives are being rushed out should give pause for thought. Just as with contact tracing apps, the rollout is haphazard and rife with conflicts of interest. The technology is unproven and the privacy issues are glaring. Below are seven reasons why I believe vaccine passports should worry us. Perhaps you can think of more.
- We still don’t know how effective or safe the vaccines are. The ostensible goal behind the vaccine passport is to provide proof that a person has taken an officially approved vaccine and therefore poses less of a contagion risk. Yet we still don’t know just how effective or safe each vaccine is. Naturally, the efficacy levels of each vaccine vary. As WHO itself concedes, there is still uncertainty over whether inoculation actually prevents transmission of the virus.
- Vaccine geopolitics. To all intents and purposes the West is already locked in a new cold war with China and Russia. Tensions are escalating on an almost daily basis. Against such a backdrop, it’s hardly beyond the realms of possibility that at some point down the line countries or companies in the West will refuse to recognise vaccines certificates that are based on Russian or Chinese vaccines, and vice versa. The justifications for doing so will grow as bad news continues to emerge about the efficacy and safety of vaccines.
- The potential for mission creep. To begin with, SMART Health Cards are likely to include a person’s complete name, gender, birth date, mobile phone number, and email address in addition to vaccination information. But although advertised as digital vaccination records, they are clearly intended to be used for much more. Public information on the protocol notes that SMART Health Cards are “building blocks that can be used across health care,” including managing a complete immunization record that goes far beyond COVID-19 vaccines, sharing data with public-health agencies, and communication with health-care providers.
- Creating a two-tier society/world. Since its very inception Covid-19 has been a pandemic of inequality. This is particularly true in Israel, which was already a two-tier society long before Covid came along. It recently became the first country to launch a nationwide vaccine passport scheme, the so-called Green Pass. But its intended target is Israelis, not Palestinians. According to The Guardian, just over 4% of the 5 million Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip have so far received vaccines. Active Covid cases are back near historic highs while in the rest of Israel they are at their lowest level since last June.
- Loss of bodily autonomy and integrity. Forcing an experimental vaccine upon someone who doesn’t want it clearly contravenes their right to bodily autonomy and integrity. According to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, “everyone has the right to respect for his or her physical and mental integrity. In the fields of medicine and biology, the following must be respected in particular: the free and informed consent of the person concerned, according to the procedures laid down by law.”
- Most governments and tech giants have already shown they cannot be trusted with our most valuable data. Vaccine passports raise huge privacy concerns. Data-hungry companies like Microsoft, a member of the Vaccine Credential Initiative, will be given new opportunities to track our daily movements and activities and share that data with third parties. There are also major concerns about data security. If recent history has taught us anything, it is that no data — no matter how private or precious — is completely secure.
- Whatever the politicians might say, a vaccine certificate will be permanent. When the vaccine certificate debate reached fever pitch in the UK last week the Conservative Party tried to assuage voter fears by insisting that the certificate would be temporary.
U.S. News, Politics & Government
Democrats launch ‘raw muscle play’ to take over Supreme Court
WND – Democrats in Washington have launched a “raw muscle play” to take over the U.S. Supreme Court to assure their party of ongoing – and leftist – decision victories.
The plan from Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., who orchestrated much of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s two failed impeach-and-remove campaigns against President Trump, and others was reported by the Intercept, and apparently would add four justices to the nine already on the bench.
Other promoters, so far, include Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass.; Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga.; and Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y.
Fox News reported even the usually liberal George Washington University law professor and constitutional expert Jonathan Turley was appalled.
“The House and Senate Democrats are moving forward with a bill to add 4 new justices to the Supreme Court. There is nothing subtle or elegant in the move. Just a raw muscle play to take control of the Court…,” he wrote on social media.
He pointed out the move shows “the cost of a failure of leadership in the Democratic party, including President Biden.”
That was because the Democrats apparently are refusing to cooperate even among themselves, since Biden announced just days ago a commission, dominated by Democrats and led by several activists in the party who have been strident in their opposition to two-party cooperation, to propose a court-packing scheme.
“Democrats are launching a full assault on the independence of the federal judiciary. Republicans will stop them,” said Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo.
Matt Whitlock, a former staffer for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, called the move, which had been described by Biden when he was a senator years ago as “boneheaded,” as a “fantastic gift” to Republicans.
“And making it a bill instead of a Senate rules process means we get to get moderate House D’s on the record on it too. Just a fantastic turn of events,” he said.
Democrats have claimed that Republicans “packed” the court when President Trump successfully nominated three justices to fill three vacancies, because then-Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell did not promote the Barack Obama nomination of Merrick Garland at the end of Obama’s term.
The attempt appears to be a raw campaign to change the decisions of the Supreme Court.
And the move comes despite the famed opposition to such a campaign from the late justice, Ruth Ginsburg, an icon to progressives and leftists in America, as well as the current liberal justice, Stephen Breyer.
Breyer recently warned, “My experience of more than 30 years… as a judge has shown me that once men and women take the judicial oath they take that oath to heart. They are loyal to the rule of law, not to the political party that helped to secure their appointment. These considerations convince me that it is wrong to think of the court as just another political institution and it is doubly wrong to think of its members as junior league politicians.”
He said that, “Structural alteration motivated by the perception of political influence can only feed that latter perception, further eroding that trust. There is no shortcut.”
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, called the Democrat power play “an act of arrogant lawlessness.”
Fox analyzed that the bill was “unlikely to pass,” since the Democrats have such a slim majority in the House they can lose only two votes, and in the Senate, they would need to destroy the
filibuster, and even then, there has been opposition from at least one Democrat senator to the court-packing idea.
House Judiciary Committee Approves Bill for Commission on Reparations for Slavery
Breitbart – The U.S. House Judiciary Committee approved a bill Wednesday that would create a commission to study reparations for black Americans for slavery. The vote was along party lines, 25 Democrats voting yes and 17 Republicans voting against.
The bill has been designated as H.R. 40, in reference to the “40 acres and a mule” once promised to freed slaves in the South.
The bill would create a 15-member “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans,” which would recommend “appropriate remedies.” The text of the bill argues that slavery resulted in “systemic” discrimination against black Americans whose effects endure: “[A] preponderance of scholarly, legal, community evidentiary documentation and popular culture markers constitute the basis for inquiry into the on-going effects of the institution of slavery and its legacy of persistent systemic structures of discrimination on living African Americans and society in the United States.”
It is not clear who would pay reparations to whom. Moreover, as the Washington Post noted, one Democrat’s comments highlight another potential problem with the idea: namely, that once reparations for “systemic” problems in the past begin, it is unclear where they should end.
“Although Democrats are largely on board with the proposal,” the Post reported, “Rep. Lou Correa (D-Calif.) used the moment to argue the nation also should issue an apology to the Mexican American community, which has faced discrimination and deportation for more than a century.”
The Post also noted Republican responses:
Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah), one of two Black Republicans in the House, characterized the legislation as portraying Black communities as helpless while ignoring their successes.
“Slavery was and still is an evil,” he said. “Reparation is divisive. It speaks to the fact that we are a hapless, hopeless race that never did anything but wait for White people to show up and help us, and it’s a falsehood.”
…
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) introduced an amendment that would make the Democratic Party pay for the commission’s fees “since it is the only relevant entity today that supported the institution of slavery” throughout U.S. history. It failed on a voice vote.
The idea of reparations — or, at least, a committee to study them — was embraced by every single Democrat in the 2020 presidential primary, largely under the influence of Al Sharpton, who hosted the candidates at his National Action Network. However, only about one in four Americans supports the idea.
California enacted a law last year providing for a similar reparations commission, though it entered the Union as a free state in 1850. The liberal city of Evanston, Illinois, created the nation’s first reparations program for slavery earlier this year; it will compensate past victims of housing discrimination with funds from taxing the sale of legal marijuana.
Capitol Police Officer Will Not Face Federal Charges for Shooting Ashli Babbitt on January 6
Breitbart – Federal prosecutors will not charge a U.S. Capitol Police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt when she was entering the Capitol on January 6 through a broken door.
Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran, was unarmed.
Another Capitol Police officer, Brian Sicknick, died the day after he confronted protesters on January 6, but the exact cause of death has not been made public.
The Associated Press (AP) reported on the development:
The Justice Department’s decision, though expected, officially closes out the investigation. Prosecutors said they had reviewed video of the shooting, along with statements from the officer involved and other officers and witnesses, examined physical evidence from the scene and reviewed the autopsy results.
“Based on that investigation, officials determined that there is insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution,” the department said in a statement.
Video clips posted online depict Babbitt, wearing a stars and stripes backpack, stepping up and beginning to go through the waist-high opening of an area of the Capitol known as the Speaker’s Lobby when a gunshot is heard. She falls backward. Another video shows other unidentified people attempting to lift Babbitt up. She can be seen slumping back to the ground.
Mark Schamel, a lawyer for the officer, an unnamed lieutenant, said that the decision to not bring charges was “the only correct conclusion” and that his client, in fact, “saved the lives of countless members of Congress and the rioters.”
AP reported that Schamel said the officer fired only one shot and did so only after identifying himself and “ordering the mob not to come through the barricade.”
“He used tremendous restraint in only firing one shot, and his actions stopped the mob from breaking through and turning a horrific day in American history into something so much worse,” Schamel said.
“The Justice Department does not bring criminal charges in most police shootings it investigates in part because of the high burden for prosecution,” AP reported. “Criminal charges were not expected in this case because videos of the shooting show Babbitt encroaching into a prohibited space, and second-guessing the actions of an officer during the violent and chaotic day would have been a challenge.”
752 El Pasoans test positive for COVID-19 after getting vaccinated
KFOX 14 – Hundreds of El Pasoans have tested positive for COVID-19 after being vaccinated, according to city officials.
City leaders said 752 people in El Paso tested positive after receiving the vaccine.
El Paso’s Public Health Authority Doctor Hector Ocaranza said he is unsure if the positives came after the people impacted first or second doses.
He said that information is not known at this time.
New Poll Shows Biden Can’t Shake Voters’ Belief That Democrats Cheated In 2020 Election
Gateway Pundit – Democrats and the media have created an environment where no one is allowed to suggest that the 2020 election was illegitimate in any way. People have been suspended or even expelled from social media for saying it.
This campaign of suppression has not changed public perception, however.
A new poll from Rasmussen found that a significant number of voters in both parties believe the Democrats cheated in some way.
Science & Technology
Scientists Create Early Embryos That Are Part-Human, Part-Monkey
NPR – For the first time, scientists have created embryos that are a mix of human and monkey cells.
The embryos, described Thursday in the journal Cell, were created in part to try to find new ways to produce organs for people who need transplants, says the international team of scientists who collaborated in the work. But the research raises a variety of concerns.
“My first question is: Why?” says Kirstin Matthews, a fellow for science and technology at Rice University’s Baker Institute. “I think the public is going to be concerned, and I am as well, that we’re just kind of pushing forward with science without having a proper conversation about what we should or should not do.”
Still, the scientists who conducted the research, and some other bioethicists defended the experiment.
“This is one of the major problems in medicine — organ transplantation,” says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a professor in the Gene Expression Laboratory of the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, Calif., and a co-author of the Cell study. “The demand for that is much higher than the supply.”
“I don’t see this type of research being ethically problematic,” says Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist at Case Western Reserve University and Harvard University. “It’s aimed at lofty humanitarian goals.”
Leaked documents show that Google and the FTC have been engaged in a decades-long criminal cover-up
NaturalNews – Google’s team of lawyers made a huge mistake with the release of key documents requested by a group of state attorneys general.
Portions of the documents that should have been redacted were left in plain sight, revealing illegal behavior on Google’s part with regards to its massive advertising monopoly.
Google’s online advertising marketplace, we now know, has long been secretly rigged under a scheme known as “Project Bernanke.”
As explained by Matt Stoller, the scheme allowed Google to have “one arm of its ad business front-running trades for ad inventory,” which the company used to award itself “hundreds of millions of dollars a year by giving itself a better position in the auctions.”
We also now know that Facebook was also involved.
“The agreement was signed by, among other individuals, Philipp Schindler, Google’s Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer, and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operation Officer.”
Not only is this little operation illegal, but it is also criminal. Such collusion and rigging of the online advertising ecosystem is about as illicit as it gets when it comes to Big Tech’s monopolistic behavior.
That this all went on in secret for so many years speaks volumes as to the failure of our current regulatory system in keeping companies in check. Stoller explains it even better:
“Today, big business in America is far too secretive, with an endless thicket of confidentiality rules, trade secrets law, and deferential judges and enforcers who think that revealing public information about big business is some sort of scandal,” he writes.
“It’s so bad that when the FDA asked pharmaceutical companies where their manufacturing plants were at the beginning of the pandemic, some firms cited trade secrets rules and refused to divulge the information.”
Google and Facebook both need to be disbanded
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) could have brought a case against Google back in 2012 when much was already known about the company’s antitrust criminality. The regulatory body failed to do so, however, because it works with Google against We the People.
They say that God works in mysterious ways, however, and Google’s lawyer’s failure to cover up for his client by accidentally spilling the beans serves as poetic justice that one’s sins tend to eventually find him out.
In this case, Google’s collective sins as one of the world’s most evil corporations are now on fully display for the world to see. The company could not care less about following things like laws – those are for the peasants – and now everybody knows it.
Stoller notes that there is a lot to learn about this hilarious blunder. First, he says, judges redact far too much information under the guise of protecting “business proprietary information” when the reality is that what they redact is often incriminating details about illicit behavior.
“The court system is supposed to be a public accounting,” he notes.
Secondly, lawyers, no matter how much money they charge, are not gods and we should stop looking at them in such a manner. Google and other large corporations pay them the big buck so they can thwart having to abide by the rules that the rest of us have to follow.
“The Financial Services Industry has long been the clear leader in criminal activity – Google Bernanke name for its criminal front-running activity was no accident,” wrote one of Stoller’s commenters.
“Second, of course, is Big Pharma, which routinely writes checks for billion-dollar fines, but this time it’s for killing people rather than just robbing them – and thank God the Feds pick up the tab for vaccines.”
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