WORLD NEWS
Olympic Games in China ‘A Huge Political Theater’: Latvian Team Coach
The Beijing Games and the pandemic will make everyone realize that ‘we cannot sell our souls,’ the coach says
Epoch Times – Two-time Olympic bronze medalist and current coach of the Latvian men’s luge team Martins Rubenis took the opportunity to express his disdain over the Chinese regime hosting the 2022 Games during an interview with Latvian media hours after his team competed at the Winter Olympics on Sunday, Feb. 7.
As Chinese soldiers stood to his right, in an interview with Latvia’s national public broadcasters Latvian Radio and Latvian Television, Rubenis called the Beijing Olympics “political theater.”
“This is a huge ‘spectacle,’ and for me, as an Olympian, my heart aches watching this,” Rubenis told the Latvian media.
He told of his team turning on the TV in the evening only to see “Tiananmen Square on one of the channels with a picture of Mao and the Olympic rings on the corner.” When they’d first arrived and disembarked from the plane, they were met with “people dressed in white protective suits,” who may have been told the international athletes were “bringing another plague.”
“It felt like we were treated as a plague and that they had to keep a distance from us,” he said. “And it was clear, when we went through, the flowers and the flags of the CCP were flowing and we were shown such a huge political theater on the theme of, ‘you see how good everything is here.’”
Ukraine crisis live updates: Russia to respond to US proposals
US president accuses Russia of engaging in ‘false flag operation’ to stage a pretext for an invasion of Ukraine.
AL Jazeera – NATO’s secretary-general has voiced concern Russia may be attempting to “stage a pretext” for an attack on Ukraine following reports of shelling in the country’s conflict-hit east.
Jens Stoltenberg’s warning, delivered at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels on Thursday, came amid competing claims from across the front line in Ukraine’s years-long war with Moscow-backed separatists.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said pro-Russian forces had shelled a kindergarten, in what he called a “big provocation”. For its part, the Kremlin said Moscow was “seriously concerned” about reports of an escalation after the separatists accused government forces of opening fire on the territory they hold four times in the past 24 hours.
Russia expels deputy US ambassador – media
RT – The US is reportedly considering its response after Moscow showed senior diplomat Bartle Gorman the door
Russia has expelled a top diplomat serving in the US Embassy in Moscow, both RIA Novosti and TASS have reported on Thursday, citing the American mission.
Bart Gorman, who has been serving as deputy ambassador, was asked to leave the country, they claimed. The embassy told the news agencies that Washington is considering a tit-for-tat response.
The leader compared Russian invasion reports to claims Iraq had nuclear weapons and Kabul wouldn’t fall to the Taliban
RT – Czech President Milos Zeman lashed out at the US intelligence community for their claim that Russia would invade Ukraine, which so far has failed to materialize. It adds to their track record of making wrong predictions about crucial events, he argued in an interview published by the newspaper MF DNES on Thursday.
“The first was in Iraq, where no weapons of mass destruction were found. The second was in Afghanistan, when they claimed that the Taliban would never conquer Kabul. And the third is now,” the president explained.
The politician was referring to the US justification for the 2003 invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the assessment that the American-backed national government of Afghanistan would be able to defend against the militant Taliban movement after a scheduled withdrawal of foreign troops. On both counts American intelligence was seriously mistaken.
Washington has been warning for months that Russia was preparing a military invasion of Ukraine, and for weeks has been claiming that the attack was imminent. Some Western media went further and named Tuesday or Wednesday this week as the days Russia could have attacked Ukraine.
Ukraine’s President Volodymir Zelensky, who otherwise voiced skepticism about the purported Russian threat, made Wednesday a holiday celebrating Ukrainian national unity.
Video: Dr. David Martin’s Urgent Canadian Trucker Update & Trudeau’s Conflict Of interest, Lawsuits Coming
Activist Post – On Monday, the world — at least the free thinking, non-authoritarian world — was shocked when Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, declared dictatorial powers over the people of Canada by invoking wartime powers. He then labelled the peaceful protesters terrorists, claimed they were carrying out an “illegal occupation,” claimed the ability to seize their assets without due process using private banks, and empowered police and military to help him carry out those orders.
To anyone who has ever studied history, they see these moves by the Canadian government as a massive step to transform their parliamentary democracy into a fascist state. Freezing assets and government taking money from citizens over a peaceful protest, is a direct afront to any semblance of a free society.
“This is about following the money. This is about stopping the financing of these illegal blockades,” Trudeau’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said during a press conference on Monday. “We are today serving notice if your truck is being used in these illegal blockades your corporate accounts will be frozen.”
While this move was decried by many in the free world and should have been walked back as a mistake by the Canadian government, that did not happen. Instead, the Canadian government has doubled down — this time, going after “Trump supporters” as well.
During another interview on Wednesday night, Canada’s Justice Minister David Lametti told a reporter that anyone who donated money to the Canadian Freedom Convoy, should “be worried” about having their bank accounts frozen.
“You just compared people who may have donated to this to the same people who maybe are funding a terrorist,” the reporter stated on CTV’s Power Play. “I just want to be clear here, sir. A lot of folks say, ‘Look, I just don’t like your vaccine mandates and I donated to this, now it’s illegal, should I be worried that the bank can freeze my account?’ What’s your answer to that?”
“Well, I think if you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who’s donating hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars to this kind of thing, they oughta be worried,” responded Lametti.
After threatening anyone who would dare support resistance against a vaccine mandate, Lametti threatened to take away their entire livelihoods. Lametti told the reporter, that anyone involved in the trucker protest, “may now actually lose your trucking license.”
Instead of Joe Biden decrying this fascist move by Canada, which could end up affecting Americans who may have donated to the convoy, his administration is actually ignoring it, Adding to the shocking nature of such a move, the corporate press essentially began doxing the folks who donated.
Bank Run? Canada’s Top Banks Mysteriously Go Offline
ZeroHedge – Days after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he would invoke emergency orders to crack down on demonstrators by freezing their bank accounts, five major Canadian banks went offline on Wednesday night, as customers reported their funds were unavailable, according to technology website Bleeping Computer.
Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), BMO (Bank of Montreal), Scotiabank, TD Bank Canada, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) were all hit with unexplainable outages on Wednesday evening. Users began reporting issues with banks around 1600-1700 ET, Downdector data showed.
Canadian Twitter users reported they couldn’t access their funds at the ATMs. One user took a photo of an error message at one of RBC’s ATMs that read, “Tap transactions aren’t available for this card.”
In response, RBC tweeted, “We are currently experiencing technical issues with our online and mobile banking, as well as our phone systems.”
“Our experts are investigating and working to get this fixed as quickly as possible, but we have no ETA to provide at this time. We appreciate your patience.”
BMO customers also reported issues. One customer said, “I’m having trouble and money transfer just auto gets rejected for no reason. Not going over my limit, all info is verified correct and receiving bank says no issues on their end.”
There were countless stories of banking customers who experienced trouble accessing their funds yesterday evening. No bank explained the source of the outrage, but essential to note the outage comes, as we said above, days after Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act.
New Zealand Threatens to Use Military Against Civilian Anti-Mandate Protesters
Breitbart – The New Zealand Defense Force (NZDF) warned Wednesday it was poised to deploy “Defence Force assets” to Wellington to disband an anti-coronavirus vaccine mandate protest near New Zealand’s parliament building after the rally pushed into its ninth consecutive day.
“An NZDF spokeswoman said discussions on the possible deployment of Defence Force assets remain ongoing, and no decisions have been made,” New Zealand’s Stuff news site reported on February 16.
“Four Defence Force vehicles have arrived in Wellington and are on standby should they be required,” the NZDF spokeswoman confirmed.
“They are being pre-positioned should they be required, but as stated no decisions have been made about their use to assist the towing operation,” she told reporters.
“[The] four army vehicles travelled to Wellington from Linton and Waiouru on Wednesday,” according to Stuff.
The New Zealand Police issued an ultimatum to anti-vaccine mandate protesters gathered outside New Zealand’s parliament building on February 15 warning them to move their motor vehicles — many of which are blocking roads around the legislative center as part of the demonstration — or face the towing and seizure of their automobiles. The rally’s participants largely ignored this demand by the police force — which is controlled by New Zealand’s federal government — and continued to gather by the hundreds near the parliament building’s grounds on February 16.
The rally’s organizers have said they were inspired to protest New Zealand’s coronavirus vaccine mandate after witnessing Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” demonstration, which similarly calls for an end to pandemic-related vaccine mandates and restrictions on movement in Canada. The “Freedom Convoy” launched in late January and remains ongoing across Canada. It consists of thousands of commercial truckers purposefully blocking strategic stretches of Canadian trade routes to draw attention to the matter.
Massive U-Turn: Austria to Repeal Almost All ‘Corona Apartheid’ Rules Targeting Unvaxxed
Breitbart – n what amounts to a seismic u-turn in policy, Austria is to relax all ‘Corona Apartheid’ rules targetting the nation’s unvaccinated, despite having previously promised to keep unjabbed individuals under perpetual lockdown.
Austria’s coalition government has announced that the vast majority of lockdown measures in place in the country — including the almost all “Corona Apartheid” restrictions specifically targeting the nation’s unvaccinated — are to be scrapped from March 5.
This is despite authorities having previously promised that unjabbed individuals would remain under harsh restrictions in perpetuity, with the nation’s then-Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg telling Austrians that the unjabbed would not be able to participate in society until they were inoculated against the Chinese Coronavirus.
However, according to a report by Kronen Zeitung, this threat has not aged well, with the government announcing a roadmap for the relaxation of COVID measures which will see the nation’s unvaccinated once again allowed into bars and restaurants as soon as this Saturday.
From Feb 19th, regulations banning the unjabbed from bars and restaurants are to be relaxed, with individuals who have neither been vaccinated, nor have recovered from COVID-19, once again to be allowed present a negative test for the disease in order to enter such establishments.
What’s more, Austria’s unjabbed will not even have to put up with this inconvenient measure for long, with the use of vaccine passes in the country set to be all but abolished on March 5.
The almost complete removal of vaccine passes from Austrian life will coincide with the abolition of the vast majority of Austria’s other COVID lockdown rules, such as a curfew on the nation’s hospitality sector.
Some rules will nevertheless remain in place, however, including the mandatory use of high-class FFP2 masks on public transport and in supermarkets.
The use of COVID certs will also be maintained with hospitals and nursing homes within the country, while entering Austria from abroad will also reportedly require either proof of vaccination, recovery, or a negative COVID test.
This Religious Prosecution in Finland Could Be ‘Harbinger’ for Other Democracies
Daily Signal – A court in Finland heard final arguments this week in the prosecution of a member of Parliament and a Lutheran bishop for expressing opposition to same-sex marriage.
Charged under Finland’s “ethnic agitation law” are Päivi Räsänen, a member of Parliament who also is a medical doctor and former interior minister, and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola. Each faces up to two years in prison if convicted.
Andrew Brunson, an American pastor who was imprisoned in Turkey for about two years, traveled to Finland on behalf of the Family Research Council, an educational institute focused on traditional values, for closing arguments that wrapped up Tuesday.
Brunson brought 14,000 pledged prayer requests for the two defendants, FRC President Tony Perkins told The Daily Signal, adding that the Finnish court likely would issue a decision in early March.
Räsänen, 62, published a pamphlet in 2004 about the Bible’s teaching on marriage. In 2019, she was on a radio program and tweeted a picture of a Bible passage.
She is charged with three counts of violating Finland’s ethnic agitation law.
Authorities charged Pohjola with one count of violating the law in connection with hosting Räsänen’s pamphlet on his church’s website.
This type of prosecution could come to other Western democracies, including the United States, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said.
“The idea of Christians being persecuted in America just for living out our faith is not far away,” Roy told The Daily Signal in a written statement, adding:
In fact, we have already seen it happen here to Jack Phillips and Masterpiece Cakeshop out in Colorado, and a football coach in Washington state—Joseph Kennedy—being fired for praying after high school football games. Think about all the surveillance going on, about the persistent intrusions on our liberties.
U.S. NEWS, POLITIC & GOVERNMENT
16 Republican Governors Urge Biden to Reinstate Vaccination Exemptions for Cross-Border Truckers
Two Canadian premiers joined in the letter to Trudeau
Epoch TImes – Sixteen governors and two Canadian premiers on Wednesday urged President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to reinstate COVID-19 vaccination exemptions for cross-border truckers.
Failing to reinstate the exemptions will worsen the supply chain pain, the governors and premiers said in a letter.
“We are deeply concerned that terminating these exemptions has had demonstrably negative impacts on the North American supply chain, the cost of living, and access to essential products for people in both of our countries,” they wrote.
The leaders also criticized Biden and Trudeau for terminating the exemptions at a bad time.
“The timing of your decision to terminate the vaccine and quarantine exemptions could not have been worse, as North America already faces grave supply chain constraints,” read the letter.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, and 16 Republican governors signed the letter.
The U.S. governors who joined the petition include those from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and Wyoming.
The letter was also forwarded to U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Cohen and his counterpart Kirsten Hillman, the Canadian ambassador to the United States.
Hillary Clinton Responds to John Durham Court Filing
Epoch Times – Former presidential candidate Hilary Clinton on Wednesday denied claims that her 2016 campaign spied on former President Donald Trump following a court filing submitted last week by special prosecutor John Durham.
In a Twitter post, the longtime Democrat wrote that “Trump & Fox are desperately spinning up a fake scandal to distract from his real ones. So it’s a day that ends in Y.” She added, “The more his misdeeds are exposed, the more they lie.”
On Feb. 12, Durham wrote that a technology executive who was allegedly aligned with the Democrat Party and the Clinton campaign spied on Trump’s residences and the White House when he was president.
That filing was made in connection to Durham’s case against Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who worked on behalf of the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee in 2016. Durham’s team alleged that Sussmann lied to the FBI when he told the bureau that he wasn’t working for any client when he provided false documents that claimed to have linked the Trump Organization to a Russian bank.
Sussmann, the filing said, “assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including a technology executive (Tech Executive 1) at a U.S.-based internet company (Internet Company 1) and the Clinton campaign,” according to the filing. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers on Monday said the filing included “prejudicial—and false—allegations” against their client.
The tech executive, identified in reports as Rodney Joffe, also “tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” the filing said, adding that the Joffe’s employer “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers” for Trump’s executive office.
Through a spokesperson, Joffe told news outlets this week that he is an “apolitical Internet security expert” and “legally provided access to DNS data obtained from a private client that separately was providing DNS services to the Executive Office of the President (EOP).”
Over the past weekend, in response to Durham’s court filing, Trump issued a statement saying the development vindicates his longtime claims that the Democrats and corporate news outlets unfairly and falsely linked his campaign to Russia.
“It shows how totally corrupt and shameless the media is,” Trump said in the statement. “Can you imagine if the roles were reversed and the Republicans, in particular President Donald Trump, got caught illegally spying into the Office of the President?”
He added: “All hell would break loose and the electric chair would immediately come out of retirement. The good news is, everybody is talking about not only this atrocity against our Nation, but that the press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place.”
On Monday, a White House spokesperson declined to comment on Durham’s findings.
“That’s something I can’t speak to from this podium, so I refer you to the Department of Justice,” White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.
Boston City Workers Win Bid to Overturn Vaccine Mandate
Epoch TImes – Boston city workers have won their bid to suspend Mayor Michelle Wu’s vaccination mandate policy.
A Massachusetts Appeals Court judge issued an injunction prohibiting the city from enforcing its Dec. 20, 2021, vaccine mandate policy for Boston union police and firefighters.
The ruling overturned a lower court’s earlier ruling that kept the mandate in place. The injunction is in effect indefinitely.
In an 18-page opinion, Judge Sabita Singh concluded that an injunction against the vaccine mandate posed a low risk to the public while denying one would risk the loss of essential public employees.
“Given the limited harm to the city and the public health interest it seeks to promote, and the substantial harm likely to be sustained by the unions in the absence of an injunction, the balance of harms favors the issuance of an injunction to preserve the status quo,” Singh wrote.
The ruling comes less than two weeks after Wu, a Democrat, held a press conference vowing to reaffirm her office’s intent to enforce the vaccine mandate for city workers after failed negotiations with the Boston police and firefighter unions. Outside of the press conference, Boston firefighters chanted “let us work” in protest.
In a written statement released to The Epoch Times on Feb. 16, Wu emphasized court rulings supporting government employee mandates.
“More than 95 percent of the city’s workforce is vaccinated because of the policy we enacted. Our workers and residents who rely on city services deserve to be protected,” Wu said in her statement.
Breitbart – Jurors in the recent defamation lawsuit by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) against the New York Times learned of the judge’s decision to dismiss the case even though they were deliberating at the time and were not supposed to find out.
As Breitbart News reported earlier this week, U.S. Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York announced that he believed Palin had not met the evidentiary burden of showing “actual malice,” necessary in the case of a public figure.
The jury then returned a verdict the following day that the Times was not liable for falsely claiming in a 2017 editorial that Palin had inspired the 2011 Tucson mass shooting, years after it was shown that Palin had no connection to the event.
The jurors were not to be told of the judge’s decision until they had reached a verdict. But the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that some had received work of the decision inadvertently, through push notifications on their smartphones:
Judge Rakoff made his announcement outside of the jury and said he would let deliberations conclude because a verdict would benefit an appeals court if it reviews the case—and potentially help avoid the need for a retrial if his decision were overturned.
Members of the jury were instructed several times to avoid any media coverage of the trial, but the judge in an order Wednesday said some jurors “had involuntarily received ‘push notifications’ on their smartphones that contained the bottom-line of the ruling.”
“The jurors repeatedly assured the Court’s law clerk that these notifications had not affected them in any way or played any role whatever in their deliberations,” the judge wrote.
The order brought new attention to the unusual timing of Judge Rakoff’s ruling announcement Monday. Legal observers said judges do sometimes override a jury verdict based on controlling law, but typically such a ruling would come before jurors begin deliberating or after their work is done.
The revelation could create new grounds for Palin to appeal. She may challenge the “actual malice” standard established by the Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), which requires a plaintiff to show that defendants knew what they were publishing was untrue but did so anyway, or that they published information with “reckless disregard for the truth.”
Democrat Challenger Tries to Disqualify Indiana’s Banks for Vote Against Certifying 2020 Election
Epoch Times – A Democratic challenger is trying to use an obscure constitutional provision to disqualify Indiana GOP Rep. Jim Banks in this year’s congressional election, arguing that his vote in Congress against certifying the 2020 presidential election results constituted supporting an insurrection.
In a Facebook post before the votes, Banks had said he was simply doing his job as a member of Congress.
“Article II, Section 1, clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution clearly states that Presidential Electors must be appointed according to rules established by each state’s legislature,” Banks wrote. “But in the months before the 2020 election, these rules were thwarted in some states, not by their legislatures—but by governors, secretaries of state, election officials, judges and/or private parties.”
Banks, now in his third term in the U.S. House of Representatives, isn’t the only sitting Republican congressman targeted in a legal challenge that cites the so-called Disqualification Clause, which is Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a post-Civil War measure that, among other things, was aimed at keeping individuals who fought for the defeated Confederacy out of Congress. The 14th Amendment was ratified July 9, 1868, a little over three years after Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox Court House.
U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina is involved in litigation in federal court over his eligibility to seek reelection, as The Epoch Times reported earlier this week.
Activist Post – This week we learned that San Francisco Police used a woman’s own DNA—collected years earlier as part of an investigation into her sexual assault—to charge her for an unrelated property crime. What’s worse—it appears the S.F. police routinely search victims’ DNA in criminal investigations.
This practice is possible because San Francisco has been storing DNA gathered from rape survivors in the same local database where it stores DNA from rape assailants and other suspects. The San Francisco District Attorney stated the database potentially includes thousands of victims’ DNA profiles, with entries over “many, many years.”
This is not the first time San Francisco has had problems with its DNA crime lab. In 2010, the SF Weekly reported the same lab concealed DNA mixups and lacked proper security practices to prevent contamination. And in 2015, a lab technician was found to have improperly analyzed DNA evidence in a murder trial, which caused the police to reexamine 1,400 criminal cases that were prosecuted in part based on that same technician’s DNA work.
The San Francisco police chief asserted this week that the lab’s collection practices “have been legally vetted and conform with state and national forensic standards.” However, local DNA databases like San Francisco’s are not held to the same strict laws and regulations as state and federal-level DNA databases like the FBI’s CODIS database. This means that there is nothing to prevent local police and the DA from storing—and searching—DNA from nearly anyone who might interact with the criminal justice system. This includes crime victims, potential suspects who are never arrested or charged, people who have consented to have their DNA collected to rule themselves out as suspects, and even people whose DNA has been collected without their knowledge.
Even if police and prosecutors in San Francisco decide to limit the DNA included in the local crime lab database, this won’t affect similar “rogue” DNA databases in other parts of the country. In Orange County, California, the DA has a well-known “spit and acquit” program that offers to drop petty misdemeanor charges—like walking your dog off-leash—if people agree to provide a DNA sample for the local database. As of 2019, the Orange County database included DNA from 150,000 people who would not otherwise be required to give the state their DNA. In San Diego, police were stopping juveniles and only letting them leave after they “consented” to the collection of their DNA, even though California state law strictly regulates and limits the collection of DNA from kids. (This practice was later outlawed by California state law.). In New York, police collected DNA from 360 black men after a woman was beaten and strangled in Queens and later collected DNA from a 12 year old without his or his parents’ knowledge. None of this DNA can legally be entered into state or federal DNA databases—it can only be collected and then repeatedly searched—in local databases like San Francisco’s.
This case also highlights the problems with police failing to respect the scope of a person’s “consent,” and shows that, if police have access to data, they will find a way to search that data. Here, the rape survivor likely agreed to a medical exam where her own DNA would have been collected along with her assailant’s. However, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where she would have consented to her DNA being stored indefinitely in a criminal database along with her assailant’s. And in fact, as the San Francisco DA and police chief have recognized, and any victims’ rights advocate can tell you, there are very good reasons to prevent that practice—the last thing we want to do is discourage crime victims from reporting because they are afraid they, themselves, will be charged with a crime. But, as the example above with the San Diego teens and as many, many other examples show, police regularly push the boundaries of “consent.” This comes up in cell phone searches, as Upturn discussed in a fantastic report last year, just as it does in DNA cases.
Bob Saget’s Family Sues in Bid to Stop Authorities From Releasing Pictures, Videos
Epoch TImes – Update: A judge temporarily blocked the release of the materials.
Original story below.
The family of recently deceased actor Bob Saget has sued authorities in Florida in a bid to stop them from releasing pictures, audio, and videos from the investigation into Saget’s death.
Saget’s widow Kelly Rizzo and the late actor’s daughters told a judge that some media outlets have already lodged or plan to lodge public records requests for the materials and are angling to block the efforts.
“Plaintiffs will suffer irreparable harm in the form of extreme mental pain, anguish, and emotional distress if defendants release the records in response to public records requests or otherwise disseminate the records for any other reason or purpose,” the 10-page lawsuit, filed in circuit court in Orange County and obtained by The Epoch Times, states.
Any photographs, videos, or audio recordings captured during the death investigation should be deemed confidential and exempt from disclosure under Florida law, Saget’s family asserts. Additionally, no legitimate public interest would be served by the release of the records, they say.
“The facts of the investigation should be made public, but these materials should remain private out of respect for the dignity of Mr. Saget and his family. It’s very simple—from a human and legal standpoint—the Saget family’s privacy rights outweigh any public interest in disclosure of this sensitive information,” Brian Bieber, an attorney representing the family, told The Epoch Times in an email.
The Orange County Sheriff’s Office and the county’s medical examiner’s office were named as defendants.
“While we are sensitive to the family’s concerns about the right to privacy, that must be balanced with our commitment to transparency, compliance with the law, and the public’s right to know,” the sheriff’s office told The Epoch Times in an email.
The medical examiner’s office said that it “continues to offer our condolences to the family and loved ones of Robert Saget.”
Illegal Aliens Ran Sex-Trafficking Ring in New York City, Using Minors From Mexico
Epoch TImes – Five members of a family-run sex trafficking operation smuggled young Mexican women and girls to New York City and forced them into prostitution. Several girls were 14 years old.
Last week, all five received prison sentences of 20 to 39 years for sex trafficking, sex trafficking conspiracy, sex trafficking of minors, interstate prostitution, alien smuggling, and money laundering conspiracy, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).
A sixth co-defendant is awaiting sentencing.
The original complaint, filed on July 11, 2017, by a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) officer, said the investigation into the Melendez-Rojas family was opened in 2014.
“Jane Doe 1” met Francisco Melendez-Perez in Tecamachalco, Mexico, and moved in with him two weeks later, at age 14. In July 2010, Melendez-Perez told her they were moving to the United States for work and he hired smugglers to take them, as well as his aunt.
Arizona Border Patrol agents apprehended them twice, days apart, for illegally entering the country and returned them to Mexico. At the end of October 2010, they successfully avoided Border Patrol and were smuggled to New York City.
Melendez-Perez told his aunt to use a different name and date of birth for “Jane Doe 1” to make it appear as if she wasn’t a minor.
Once they arrived at Melendez-Perez’s aunt and uncle’s house in the Queens borough of New York, “Jane Doe 1” was told she had to work as a prostitute.
“Jane Doe 1 initially refused to work as a prostitute, but Francisco repeatedly told her that she did not speak English or have any papers that allowed her to work. Francisco also threatened Jane Doe 1 that if she ran away she would be arrested and deported. Feeling that she had no other choice, Jane Doe thereafter began to work as a prostitute,” the complaint states.
“Francisco also threatened to kill her family if she stopped working as a prostitute.”
The girl was never allowed to leave the Queens residence by herself or be alone there, according to the court documents. However, she managed to run away in April 2014 and rented a room in a house in Queens.
EXCLUSIVE: Former Harvard Prof. Martin Kulldorff: ‘Science and Public Health Are Broken’
Epoch Times – Dr. Martin Kulldorff is one of the most qualified public health pandemic experts in the United States. To the narrative-shapers, he’s a pariah.
As a prominent epidemiologist and statistician, Kulldorff has worked on detecting and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks for two decades. His methods are widely used around the world and by almost every state health department in the United States, as well as by hundreds of people at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Kulldorff has also worked on vaccine safety for decades, developing globally used methods for monitoring adverse reactions in new vaccines.
His résumé on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) website is 45 pages long and includes a list of 201 peer-reviewed published journal papers. His work has been cited more than 27,000 times.
Since 2003, Kulldorff worked at Harvard Medical School, first as an associate professor of population medicine and later as a professor of medicine.
In November, Harvard and Kulldorff abruptly parted ways.
Kulldorff prefers to keep the reasons private, but it’s hard to ignore that he placed himself in the crosshairs of the pandemic narrative early on in the “15 days to slow the spread” lockdown and has since paid the price.
It’s quite something for a public health scientist at the top of his game to admit that “both science and public health are broken.”
“For some reason, a public official narrative was established, and you weren’t allowed to question it—which, of course, is very detrimental, both to the pandemic and how to deal with the pandemic, because you have to have a vibrant discussion to figure out how best to deal with these things,” he told The Epoch Times.
The Swedish native said he tried to point out in March 2020 that there was a very steep age gradient on mortality for COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Kulldorff said he attempted to publish a paper both in U.S. medical journals and mainstream newspapers stating that while anyone could contract the virus, the focus should be on protecting the elderly and those at high risk. His paper was knocked back from all directions.
“I was able to publish in Sweden, in the major daily newspapers there during the spring of 2020, so that was not a problem,” he said. “But the United States was not allowed to have a debate, which is very troubling.”
COVID RELATED NEWS
Breitbart – During an interview with ABC News on Wednesday, White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci responded to a question on what the threshold of cases that would cause him to determine the coronavirus pandemic has passed is by saying that “there’s no magic number” and that metrics for making decisions will look more at the rates of severe disease and hospitalizations over infection rates, but “We don’t know what that number is yet.”
Host Linsey Davis asked, “[O]ur country, right now, at least, is still seeing about 147,000 new cases of COVID per day. But what would that threshold be in the future for you to say, okay, the pandemic has passed?”
Fauci responded, “You know, there’s no magic number. But you want is to make sure the trajectory keeps going down and down and down. And I think the important issue, and that relates to one of the questions you asked before about the CDC considering giving more precise metrics for decisionmaking, that concentrating more on what the rate of severe disease and hospitalization is will determine that. We don’t know what that number is yet. But that will be much more of a determinant than the rate of infection.”
Hidden camera: FDA executive discloses Biden will require annual COVID shots
WND – A U.S. Food and Drug Administration executive disclosed in a conversation captured on hidden camera by a Project Veritas journalist that President Biden plans to require Americans to get an annual COVID-19 shot, which will be a “fountain of revenue” for the drug companies.
Christopher Cole said Biden “wants to inoculate as many people as possible.”
“You’ll have to get an annual shot,” he said. “I mean, it hasn’t been formally announced yet ‘cause they don’t want to, like, rile everyone up.”
Cole, captured on camera at a restaurant, acknowledged the financial “incentive for Pfizer and the drug companies to promote additional vaccinations.”
“You’ll have to get an annual shot,” he said. “I mean, it hasn’t been formally announced yet ‘cause they don’t want to, like, rile everyone up.”
Cole, captured on camera at a restaurant, acknowledged the financial “incentive for Pfizer and the drug companies to promote additional vaccinations.”
The FDA said in a statement on the Project Veritas video that the “person purportedly in the video does not work on vaccine matters and does not represent the views of the FDA.”
Cole is an executive officer leading the agency’s Countermeasures Initiatives, which helps ensure drugs, vaccines and other measures to counter infectious diseases and viruses are safe.
When he was pressed on how he knows that the Biden administration will require an annual shot, he said, “Just from everything I’ve heard, [the FDA is] not going to not approve it.”
He said the vaccines will be a “recurring fountain of revenue” for the pharmaceutical companies.
COVID Criminal Network Leads to the Gates of Hell
Mercola – The German Club of Clear Words takes a deep dive into the network of individuals and organizations responsible for the COVID scam
Whether blatantly visible or not, you can identify just about any network by connecting dots between individuals and organizations. Who’s working with whom, where, and why? Who’s paying whom? And once you’ve done that, you can more clearly identify the motivations behind various decisions
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation appears to be near the top, or the center, of this COVID plandemic network. Gates is also a major funder of mainstream media, and his network extends into global food and climate change policy
The Gates Foundation, through its funding of the WEF, also plays an important role in The Great Reset, which was officially unveiled during a WEF summit in May 2020
Every conceivable aspect of life and society is scheduled to be “reset” according to their plan. Ultimately, that’s where this criminal COVID enterprise is trying to take us
Fauci: Recent Easing of COVID-19 Mandates Has ‘Nothing to Do With Politics’
Epoch TImes – White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci suggested that politics had little to do with decisions in recent weeks from Democrat officials to rescind COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates.
“I wouldn’t say it’s the politics. I think it’s the different evaluation of what’s right for a particular community,” Fauci said in response to a question during an MSNBC interview on Tuesday.
States including New Jersey, New York, Delaware, and Connecticut in recent days started lifting vaccine and mask mandates, prompting speculation that polling numbers may have contributed to their decisions. Several cities, including Philadelphia and Washington, also announced ends to their respective vaccine passport mandates for restaurants.
“When you use the word ‘politics,’ I’m not sure it’s that. I just think at the local level, there’s a strong feeling of needing to get back to normality,” Fauci added during the Tuesday interview. “Now, if you look at the science of it, I mean the direction is going in the right direction. Are we there yet in every single place throughout the country? I don’t believe so. But there are some places that are looking at what the trajectory is, and are saying let’s go with it.”
Data provided by Johns Hopkins University shows that nationwide, COVID-19 cases are down about 44 percent over the past week to about 151,000 per day.
“What I believe the states are doing is anticipating that we are going in the right direction and they feel they might as well just get back to trying to get back to some form of normality by pulling back on restrictions,” added Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984.
Critics have suggested, however, that Democrat leaders are turning away from COVID-19 rules amid fears of losing the House and Senate in the 2022 elections. Democrats currently have slim majorities in both congressional houses, and the party of the president generally loses seats during midterms.
Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) told NTD’s “Capitol Report” on Feb. 10 that the lifting of mandates is “political science.”
“I find it very disingenuous that all of a sudden, as we get closer to the elections and the midterms that they decide to follow the science. They’re following political science.”
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Electronic Cash Designed By The Boston Fed, MIT
The Fed in general is studying the plausibility of releasing a U.S. digital currency. It has said that a digital currency would not be intended to replace cash, in spite of a mountain of global evidence that cash is in the crosshairs for extinction. The United Nations has declared Fintech to be to financial system to support Sustainable Development, aka Technocracy. ⁃ TN Editor
Some members of the Federal Reserve are continuing to explore the launch of its own digital dollar, as the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on Thursday unveiled its first attempt at designing an electronic form of cash.
The Boston bank’s research, conducted in a collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, does not offer a recommendation about whether the Fed should create its own digital currency. The central bank’s leaders in Washington are in the process of collecting public feedback on that question now, and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said it will only proceed with congressional authorization.
But in the meantime, the Boston team said Thursday that it has solved technical challenges such a product would need to meet. Researchers said they designed a system that can settle the vast majority of payments in less than two seconds, handles more than 1.7 million transactions per second and operates around-the-clock with no service outages in the case of a disruption in its network.
The ultimate product could help extend financial services to people who lack a bank account and make cross-border payments such as remittances safer and easier, said Neha Narula, director of the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT. Narula, in a conference call with reporters, noted that the Boston researchers “aren’t the ones making policy decision on how such a system might operate,” so they have aimed to “create a flexible system that can work with a variety of models.”
Along with a paper describing the team’s work to date, researchers on Thursday published open-source code for the platform that would support the digital currency. Jim Cunha, executive vice president of the Boston Fed, called that a first for the central bank, intended to encourage public input that improves the technology.
Infrastructure Bill Provides Billions To Roll Out Smart City Tech
City-based Technocrats are thrilled that Biden’s recently passed infrastructure bill will lather cities with billions of dollars for smart city projects designed to light up the Internet of Things, provide ubiquitous surveillance and wrap in outlying areas that are currently out of reach of the surveillance state. Did you think that infrastructure spending was about fixing potholes and bridges? ⁃ TN Editor
In recent years, smart cities have received criticism for over-promising and under-delivering—or, in many cases, failing to deliver at all.
However, due to a combination of new government funding and what experts say is a shift in perspective about how to approach these projects—from tech-first to resident-first—smart-city experts told us they’re optimistic about the prospects in 2022.
“What we’re seeing now is that you can have connectivity, electrification, and autonomy. You don’t have to just pick one,” Karen Lightman, executive director of the Metro21 Smart Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, told Emerging Tech Brew. “We can, with some catalyst investment money from the federal government, encourage the private sector to come in and jobs can be created. I really feel like 2022 is the year.”
The year ahead
The recently passed infrastructure bill contains $500 million in grants that cities around the country can apply for to pursue their own smart-city efforts, from building out autonomous and connected vehicles infrastructure to kickstarting smart-grid projects. The bill also carves out $65 billion to expand broadband to underserved areas around the country, including less-connected urban areas.
“There has been a lot of talk about doing things, but cities are not well-funded. They don’t have a lot of money to spare. This is going to be huge,” Andres Carvallo, CEO and co-founder of smart-grids and smart-cities consulting firm CMG Consulting, told us at the time.
Lightman called the bill a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to connect people historically left out in infrastructure efforts.
Under the bill, the Transportation Secretary will have $100 million at their disposal each year, 40% of which can go to large communities, while midsize and rural communities each get 30% respectively.
Those funds can be used on a variety of smart-city projects, but there are some restrictions. For instance, cities can’t use any of the funds in the grant program for traffic or parking enforcement activities or license-plate readers. But some privacy advocates, like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, expressed concern in August that expanding smart-city projects could lead to greater surveillance without more explicit privacy protections.
The Curious Case of Polio, DDT and Vaccines
Mercola – We are told that the science on polio is settled — but it may not be the case
There are scientists who believe that polio-like symptoms could be caused by toxic substances, including pesticides
At the time of its popularity, DDT was considered not only “safe and effective” but also good for the prevention of polio
However, the opposite could be true, and DDT could have been a major contributing factor to the “polio epidemic”
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