This ought to win Deutsche Bank some badly needed good will with global prosecutors investigating the bank for its involvement in various financial frauds - not to mention Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters.

According to a Bloomberg report on Friday, DB has decided - apparently with the blessing of a federally appointed monitor - that it won't pay out the $4 billion balance on its commitment to help distressed homeowners impacted by the housing collapse. The bank had agreed to spend billions of dollars on consumer relief during the waning days of the Obama administration as part of a massive settlement with the DOJ over its role in selling mortgages.

They know what happened to their children. They don’t need sophisticated analyses. They don’t need disease or disorder labels. They don’t need the very doctors who administered the vaccines turning around and lying to them.

And the lying is vicious. It’s coming out of the mouths of physicians who are indifferent to human life.

Doctors, underneath their layers and layers of hostile fakery, know the truth, too.

So does the CDC. That agency spends billions defending the indefensible.

William Thompson, the CDC whistleblower who admitted to gross fraud and lying, in order to exonerate the toxic MMR vaccine…he knows, too.

Former Goldman banker Roger Ng has been sitting in a Malaysian jail cell since he was arrested in November and charged with abetting his employer's efforts to mislead investors in the three Goldman-organized bond offerings that helped capitalize the doomed Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB, which is at the center of what the DOJ alleges was a more than $4 billion fraud. But soon, Ng will find himself free on bail back in the US, now that the DOJ's extradition request has been granted by the Malaysian government.

On Wednesday, operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) sent a remote-controlled probe to the bottom of the plant's No. 2 reactor and lifted five small pieces of radioactive debris two inches.

"We were able to confirm that the fuel debris can be moved," said spokeswoman Yuka Matsubara, adding "We accomplished the objective of this test."

Matsubara says tht TEPCO plans to move more debris by next March.

Venezuelan Ambassador to the UN Samuel Moncada pushed back, during a special council meeting at the Organization of American States (OAS), against demands by the United States and its allies to hold elections and the bloc’s plans to deliver so-called humanitarian assistance.

"You have built a mountain of lies, all sorts of manipulations, accusations, [and] a fantasy world to confuse millions of people [about] what occurs today in Venezuela. Today, I am here to stay in touch with reality and tell our truth to the world", Moncada told the OAS members on Friday. "We have to remove the fog of lies from the eyes of the majority of people and the international public opinion. Each state has a sovereign right to recognize whomever they want. To chase us from here, you need to respect the [OAS] Charter".

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Friday suggested that a plan for the permanent mobilisation of the Armed Forces to guard against a possible foreign intervention should be adopted.

"It is a plan to maintain the mobilisation of the Bolivarian Armed Forces for protecting our country, which is one of the constitutional obligations … Mobilisation and training. Training and deployment. There must be tanks, missiles of the republic and the soldiers of the republic; [ways] to combine air defenses, naval forces, deployment of the military in order to carry out exercises", Maduro said, summarising the results of recent drills, as broadcast by his Periscope channel.

Maduro recalled that Colombia and the United States allegedly planned a military intervention in Venezuela, noting that his plan "guarantees the security and peace along the country’s border".

The Pentagon has rolled out its “stealth” aircraft, tasked with breaching enemy anti-air defenses on day one of a potential war.

The US military recently conducted drills in the Pacific Ocean, rolling out "stealth" aircraft including the discontinued F-22s, the troubled F-35s and even the B-2 Spirit strategic bombers built near the end of the Cold War, Business Insider reported Friday.

The drills were conducted with the assistance of the USS Wasp, a cross between an aircraft carrier and an amphibious assault vessel.

Interestingly, the F-35s participated with their weapons stored externally. This method increases the jet's payload, as compared to internal storage, but also significantly increases plane's radar visibility. According to the plane's maker, Lockheed Martin, the external payload model switches the airplane into "beast mode," which is expected to be utilized on day three of a war, after enemy anti-air defenses have been suppressed.

Earlier this week, Washington issued new sanctions against Caracas, imposing restrictions on Oil Minister Quevedo Fernandez and four other individuals close to President Nicolas Maduro, including the head of Venezuelan National Intelligence Service (SEBIN) and the commander of the Presidential Guard.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated that the conflict in Venezuela is an internal matter and that the international community should not issue ultimatums to Caracas.

The turmoil in Venezuela erupted in late January after the head of the opposition-led Venezuelan National Assembly, Juan Guaido, proclaimed himself the interim president.

The International Monetary Fund is reportedly making plans for the "day after" embattled President Nicolas Maduro's fall, according to Bloomberg. Though there's been little momentum in military defections following US-backed opposition leader Juan Guaido's offer of amnesty to any army officer that switches loyalties, Washington sanctions have effectively strangled state-owned PDVSA's access to global markets. News of IMF maneuvering also comes amidst fresh reports the US is amassing aircraft, troops and armored vehicles on the Venezuelan border under the pretext of getting humanitarian aid into the country.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned Pakistan on Friday to expect a strong response to a suicide attack that killed 44 paramilitary policemen in Kashmir, ratcheting up tension between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

The car bomb attack on a security convoy on Thursday was the worst in decades of insurgency in the disputed region. India said it had “incontrovertible evidence” of Pakistani involvement, a statement quickly rejected by Islamabad.

“We will give a befitting reply, our neighbour will not be allowed to de-stabilise us,” Modi said in a speech, after meeting security advisers to discuss options.

The attack comes months before national elections in India.

The Pakistan-based Islamist militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) claimed responsibility soon after a suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden car into a bus carrying police personnel.

In an exclusive interview with TRNN, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza says Guaido has not accepted the Pope’s offer to negotiate since he is being directed by Washington

According to eyewitnesses, quoted by the Daily Express, the car was in the middle of the rally when a passenger opened the door to shout at the protesters, which was then followed by the driver accelerating.

Several people were overthrown and at least three were injured as a result of a car that drove into yellow vests protesters in the French city of Rouen, BFM TV reported, citing a police source. As the broadcaster specified, first aid to those injured was provided immediately.

Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who has declared himself the country’s interim president, called on the Venezuelan Armed Forces, supporting President Nicolas Maduro, to change sides, giving the military seven days to do so, in the anticipation of humanitarian aid arrivals to the crisis-hit country.

"February 23 is coming, gentlemen from the Armed Forces. It is a very important date for the Venezuelan society not only because we have an opportunity to stop this emergency, which is directly and indirectly killing people, but also to open the doors of change for Venezuela. You have this opportunity, you have eight days to take the side of the constitution," Guaido said during a forum dedicated to national oil industry.

Guaido suggested that "usurpation" of power by Maduro and his supporters should be ended in order to leave poverty, facing the country, behind.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has ordered the military to come up with a plan for a permanent deployment of forces to the border with Colombia to avert “provocations” he accused the US of masterminding.

"Reinforcing the border with Colombia is necessary to make it “safe and peaceful,” Maduro said, adding that the permanent deployment would ensure that it is unpenetrable. "We must be well deployed to defend our land, to thwart any provocation, which we anticipate and which we do not know yet. Imagine them defending their maritime area against our marine and air force,” he said.

Waving both the carrot and the stick at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Washington hit Caracas with fresh sanctions and said it will use the military to send humanitarian aid to the crisis-stricken country.

The sanctions add to a growing pile of financial penalties the US has applied to Maduro’s government in recent weeks. They target the country’s state-owned oil company PDVSA, and five officials "in charge of Maduro's security and intelligence apparatus, which has systematically violated human rights and suppressed democracy, including through torture and other brutal use of force,” in the words of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

Intercepted by RT America correspondent Dan Cohen while leaving a conference in DC, US envoy for Venezuela Elliott Abrams did not seem in the mood to discuss his criminal convictions or Iran-Contra weapons shipments.

Cohen confronted Abrams, recently appointed point man for the US effort to oust the elected government in Caracas, as he exited a conference on the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela hosted by the Organization for American States (OAS) in Washington, DC. The former Reagan official, who played a key role in securing US support for death squads in Central America during the 1980s, was not in the mood to chat about his past exploits, however.

“What do you say to people who are skeptical about you because of your history of using humanitarian aid to send weapons to contras in Central America? Do you have any comment about that?” Cohen asked Abrams as he walked out the conference with a female colleague.

Russia is not afraid of sanctions and new penalties won’t hugely harm the economy, according to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. However, he added that the measures may slow development.

The latest bill pushing a fresh round of economic sanctions against Moscow was introduced to US Congress by Senators Lindsey Graham and Bob Menendez. It is the second attempt to expand anti-Russia penalties after the previous version was defeated last year. If approved, the new package will target Russia’s banking and energy sectors, as well as its foreign debt.

The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee shocked the liberal media world when it admitted there was no evidence of so-called collusion between Trump world and Russia. So what have the last two years been all about? And what is the damage left behind when Russiagate fades from the news cycle?

Oscar winner Jon Voight has come out fighting to defend his controversial pro-life film Roe v. Wade, a movie about the US abortion law, insisting critics 'know nothing.'

Conservative actor Voight asserted to DailyMailTV that his 'really good' new project will educate many on the subject, which has prompted decades of heated debates and outrage.

The movie, set for release next month, was shot in secret as filmmakers feared backlash from pro-choice activists and has prompted huge outrage on social media.

But Voight, 80, who plays Nixon-nominated US Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger in the film, and writer Nick Loeb have urged critics to stay quiet until they see the movie in theaters.

A retired soviet commando, who captured evidence of US deliveries of anti-aircraft missiles to the mujahideen during the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, has belatedly received Russia's highest national order.

Vladimir Kovtun is a decorated retired colonel with quite an eventful career behind him. While in service he was a commando officer of the elite special operation unit of the Military Intelligence Directorate, better known as the GRU. On Friday, he added a new merit to his collection – the golden star of the Hero of Russia, the country's highest military decoration.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Friday claimed in a new court filing that prosecutors have evidence that former Trump adviser Roger Stone communicated with WikiLeaks, the organization that released hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign.

Stone -- who was indicted last month on charges of obstruction, making false statements and witness tampering -- denied to Fox News that evidence of such communications exists.

Chinese Vice-Premier Hu Chunhua has cancelled trade talks with Britain’s Finance Minister, Mr Philip Hammond, after Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson threatened to deploy an aircraft carrier in Beijing’s backyard, The Sun newspaper reported on Thursday (Feb 14).

Mr Hu was due to hold trade talks with Mr Hammond this weekend.

Instead, the newspaper said, Mr Hu cancelled the talks in protest at Mr Williamson’s speech on Monday.

Mr Williamson had said in a fiery speech that Britain must be prepared to boost its “lethality” and threatened to send the warship to the Pacific in response to Beijing’s military ambitions.

The first lawsuit was filed in federal district court in Washington, D.C., Friday evening challenging President Trump’s new emergency declaration to build his border wall.

Three Texas landowners and the Frontera Audubon Society in Texas asked a judge to halt any action Mr. Trump might take under the declaration, arguing that a fight with Congress over spending money doesn’t constitute an emergency under the 1970s-era National Emergencies Act.

The landowners say they’re in the path for future wall construction, while the Audubon Society says its members are bird-watchers who might see their favorite fowls chased out of the area by wall construction, impeding their ability to birdwatch.

The litigants said whatever justification Mr. Trump had for declaring an emergency disappeared earlier Friday when, in announcing his plans, the president said he could have waited and gotten the money over time from Congress.

One of the facial recognition databases that the Chinese government is using to track the Uyghur Muslim population in the Xinjiang region has been left open on the internet for months, a Dutch security researcher told ZDNet.

The database belongs to a Chinese company named SenseNets, which according to its website provides video-based crowd analysis and facial recognition technology.

Yesterday, Victor Gevers, a well-known security researcher that made a name for himself in the past few years by finding leaky MongoDB databases did what he does best and found one of SenseNets' MongoDB databases that had been left exposed online without authentication.

Gevers told ZDNet that the database contained information on 2,565724 users, along with a stream of GPS coordinates that came in at a rapid pace.

A starker reality is that the US has aided and abetted a criminal, genocidal war against Yemen, mostly carried out by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and several allies. From the beginning, this war has been a nexus of war crimes that included using cluster bombs on civilian targets, such as weddings, funerals, hospitals, and schools. The US was involved from the start in selecting those and other targets. The US provided intelligence, maintenance, mid-air refueling, and support for a naval blockade (an act of war) that helped starve a country that has always needed to import food to survive.

Convention of States Action, the largest Article V grassroots organization in the country, is pleased to announce that today Arkansas became the 13th state to call for an Article V convention to propose constitutional amendments that impose fiscal restraints on Washington, limit its power and jurisdiction, and set term limits for federal officials.

“We are very excited that Arkansas has become the 13th state to pass the Convention of States resolution,” said Mark Meckler, President of Convention of States Action. “This success is the result of incredible grassroots effort in conjunction with great legislative champions. It’s a great way to start the year!”

“Almost seventy percent of the people of Arkansas favor this Article V convention,” said Sen. Gary Stubblefield, referring to a study conducted by the Trafalgar Group. “This isn’t a Democrat issue or a Republican issue. It’s an American issue.”

President Trump took bold and decisive action in the best interests of the American people when he declared a national emergency Friday to enable construction of a badly needed barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border to stymie human trafficking, drug trafficking and criminal crossings.

The president’s move is a dramatic contrast to the radical position of Democrats supporting open borders and the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, a vital law enforcement organization that protects our national security.

President Trump’s national emergency declaration is well within his executive authority. Along with other executive action and a new spending bill passed by Congress, it will permit him to reallocate and aggregate $8.1 billion in funding for a barrier along our southern border

There’s a persistent belief across America that crime is on the rise.

Since the late 1980s, Gallup has been polling people on their perception of crime in the United States, and, as Visual Capitalist's Nick Routley notes, the majority of respondents consistently indicate that they see crime as becoming more prevalent. As well, a recent poll showed that more than two-thirds of Americans feel that today’s youth are less safe from crime and harm than the previous generation.

Even the highest ranking members of the government have been suggesting that the country is in the throes of a crime wave.

We have a crime problem. […] this is a dangerous permanent trend that places the health and safety of the American people at risk.

- Jeff Sessions, Former Attorney General

Is crime actually more prevalent in society? Today’s graphic, amalgamating crime rate data from the FBI, shows a very different reality.

What dreamers they were! They imagined a kind of global power that would leave even Rome at its Augustan height in the shade. They imagined a world made for one, a planet that could be swallowed by a single great power. No, not just great, but beyond anything ever seen before — one that would build (as its National Security Strategy put it in 2002) a military “beyond challenge.” Let’s be clear on that: no future power, or even bloc of powers, would ever be allowed to challenge it again.

And, in retrospect, can you completely blame them? I mean, it seemed so obvious then that we — the United States of America — were the best and the last. We had, after all, outclassed and outlasted every imperial power since the beginning of time. Even that other menacing superpower of the Cold War era, the Soviet Union, the “Evil Empire” that refused to stand down for almost half a century, had gone up in a puff of smoke.

Prosecutors for Special Counsel Robert Mueller urged a federal judge in Virginia on Friday to impose a strict prison sentence for President Donald Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

The 69-year-old last year convicted by a jury on eight counts of bank and tax fraud.

In their sentencing memo filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, prosecutors said Manafort deserves between 19.6 and 24.4 years in prison and a fine of between $50,000 and $24 million.

Friday's court filing in Virginia came just days after a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that Manafort had breached his plea agreement in a parallel case by lying to investigators despite a pledge to cooperate.

A diamond in the rough can fetch over $2,000 per carat. These precious stones are mined deep within the Earth where they were forged in extreme pressure and heat over thousands of years. However, companies in mainland China have now mastered advanced technology to manufacture them en masse in several weeks or even in days, with products almost indistinguishable from natural ones, reported Xinhua News Agency.

China, a significant consumer of mined diamonds, has a decent chance of becoming a large supplier of synthetic gems and could reshape the entire global diamond industry, analysts warn.

Diebold: the controversial manufacturer of voting and ATM machines, whose name conjures up the demons of Ohio’s 2004 presidential election irregularities, is now finally under indictment for a “worldwide pattern of criminal conduct.” Federal prosecutors filed charges against Diebold, Inc. on Tuesday, October 22, 2013 alleging that the North Canton, Ohio-based security and manufacturing company bribed government officials and falsified documents to obtain business in China, Indonesia and Russia. Diebold has agreed to pay $50 million to settle the two criminal counts against it.

As TYT previously reported, the results of several recent high-profile Kansas primaries last month were delayed for many hours due to a computer “glitch” in Johnson County, the state’s most populous county.

Before the glitch, sitting Governor Jeff Colyer reportedly led Secretary of State Kris Kobach by 44 votes in the Republican gubernatorial primary, and Brent Welder led Sharice Davids by seven points in the Democratic primary for Kansas’s third House district seat. After the glitch, Kobach and Davids took the lead in their respective races. Colyer and Welder both conceded without requesting recounts.

Have we had enough of scandals - fake or real - in Washington? On one side, we’ve been hearing for two years about accusations of collusion between Trump and Russia - no proof found. From the other side comes claims that innocent Trump campaign operatives were drawn into an FBI trap to trigger an unfounded investigation - plenty of proof on that one.

But if you think you have a handle on all the scandals pervading the DC swamp, think again. There was another truly shocking turn of events involving Congress that flew mostly under the radar in the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign. An unvetted Pakistani national given to blackmail gained access to the computer files of more than 30 Democrats in the House of Representatives, and from there the story reads like a spy novel. Some have called it the biggest scandal in congressional history, notwithstanding the lack of publicity surrounding it.

Two adult brothers of Nigerian descent, one of whom appeared as an extra on the show Empire with Jussie Smollett, had their home raided by Chicago police Wednesday night for allegedly helping Smollett stage a fake hate crime against himself, according to a new report.

Both men reportedly left for Nigeria on the day of the attack, according to Charlie De Mar of CBS Chicago.

President Rodrigo Duterte and his top security officials on Monday visited a Catholic cathedral in the southern Philippines where suspected Islamic militants set off bombs that killed 20 people and wounded more than 100.

The first blast sent people, some of them wounded, fleeing out the church’s main door. Army troops and police were rushing inside when the second bomb exploded a minute later. The explosions scattered wooden pews inside the main hall, blasted out window glass panels and hurled human remains and debris across a town square fronting the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, witnesses said.

The attack occurred in the Sulu provincial capital on Jolo island, where Abu Sayyaf militants have carried out years of bombings, kidnappings and beheadings and have aligned themselves with the Islamic State group, which claimed responsibility for the attack.

A senior Abu Sayyaf operative and four members of the militant group believed to be behind the deadly bombing of a church in the southern Philippines surrendered to authorities over the weekend, the national police chief said on Monday.

Kammah Pae, whom authorities believe to have aided an Indonesian couple in the Jan 27 suicide attack, gave himself up to government troops, Oscar Albayalde said.

"He was forced to surrender," Albayalde told a media briefing. "He probably didn't want to die during the military offensive."

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned Pakistan on Friday to expect a strong response to a suicide attack that killed 44 paramilitary policemen in Kashmir, ratcheting up tension between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

The car bomb attack on a security convoy on Thursday was the worst in decades of insurgency in the disputed region. India said it had “incontrovertible evidence” of Pakistani involvement, a statement quickly rejected by Islamabad.

“We will give a befitting reply, our neighbour will not be allowed to de-stabilise us,” Modi said in a speech, after meeting security advisers to discuss options.

The attack comes months before national elections in India.

The Pakistan-based Islamist militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) claimed responsibility soon after a suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden car into a bus carrying police personnel.

Before allegedly killing five of his co-workers, Gary Montez Martin went into his local Circle K convenience store for his almost daily purchase of a few cigars. He seemed fine, according to clerks at the store.

“He came in almost every day and bought two or three Black & Mild cigars,” said Ricardo Moreno, 24, a clerk at a Circle K just blocks from Martin’s apartment.

Moreno said Martin was an engaging, happy customer who made a difference in the life of a clerk at the store. The two would chat about life and work and Moreno would kid Martin about his smoking habit.

Hours after leaving the store Friday, Martin went to his place of work and fatally shot his co-workers and six police officers before he was killed by police who had arrived at a factory in Aurora, Illinois, where the shooting took place, officials said.

Gab.com, known as the free speech alternative to Twitter, is creating a browser plugin to add a comment section to every website on the Internet.

Andrew Torba, who founded and runs Gab has shared a number of screenshots showing the plugin in action, commenting on websites with unavailable comment sections, and on websites with harsh moderating standards.

On October 11, 1996, the False Statements Accountability Act was sponsored by a one-term freshman Senator William J. Martini who later became a federal judge. It included a peculiar Subsection (b) that permits judges, attorneys and parties to lie to Congress, courts and agencies without liability.

A new bill proposed by Senator Jon Ford requires students in 6th through 8th grade to study the Holocaust.

It is a topic frequently taught in high school but not typically on the curriculum for middle schoolers.

The Holocaust was one event that is hard to forget which is why some locals feel it's important to maintain that memory in the classroom.

North Korea and South Korea are interested in a joint march at the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics as well as fielding some unified teams in different sports, the president of the International Olympic Committee said on Friday.

South and North Korean officials met with the IOC in Lausanne, buoyed by the role the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics played in easing tensions between the two countries.

The two nations had marched together at the opening ceremony in Pyeongchang for the first time since the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin. They had also fielded a unified women's ice hockey team.

"Following the bilateral conversations we had yesterday, we are taking note that both are very much interested in having some joined actions in the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 with a joined march and some unified teams in different sports," IOC President Thomas Bach said at the start of the meeting.

Does Mike Pompeo realise what a foolish figure he cuts as he shambles around Europe, spouting risible tosh about Donald Trump’s commitment to a “new liberal order” and America as “force for good” in the Middle East? It seems he does not. Pompeo is a former soldier, Tea Party Republican, hawkish CIA chief and enthusiastic torture advocate who complained in 2013 that Guantanamo Bay inmates on hunger strike had “put on weight”. Self-awareness is not really his thing.

Whatever else he is, Pompeo is plainly no diplomat. Yet thanks to Trump, his job since April last year is US secretary of state, arguably the world’s most influential diplomatic post. It’s a role previously held by such towering figures as James Monroe, John Foster Dulles and George Shultz. By comparison, Pompeo is a political pufferfish floundering out of his depth. His latest self-inflicted embarrassment is Wednesday’s conference in Warsaw, envisaged (by him) as an international rally to put pressure on Iran.

As Washington’s Secret Team continues to line-up its guns against the elected government led by Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela, it’s worth reminding viewers of another recently executed regime change operation – a portion of which was caught on tape – where US State Department officials could be heard discussing their new hand-picked, post-coup government in the Ukraine.

The plain fact is that we Jews are not a race and we should not let the Zionists persuade us that we are. Proof to the contrary lies in Palestine, plain for all to see. You had my letter, Mother, from my Army furlough there. I was second to none in my enthusiasm for. what my co-religionists had done for a desert brought to bloom, for clean new cities rising out of age-old sand dunes. All of these wonders had come to pass while only a few fanatics talked of statehood. One evening I went to see a performance of an opera in Jerusalem. In that theater lobby you could distinguish almost at a glance the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazic Jew from Poland, the Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jew from North Africa or Turkey, the German Jew, Jews from a score of countries all differing in dress, language, manners and mental attitudes. I had visual proof of the arguments of anthropologists. who laugh at the notion of a distinct Jewish race.

The FBI, CIA and NSA claim that the DNC emails published by WIKILEAKS on July 26, 2016 were obtained via a Russian hack, but more than three years after the alleged “hack” no forensic evidence has been produced to support that claim. In fact, the available forensic evidence contradicts the official account that blames the leak of the DNC emails on a Russian internet “intrusion”. The existing evidence supports an alternative explanation--the files taken from the DNC between 23 and 25May 2016 and were copied onto a file storage device, such as a thumb drive.

It was Guy Smith, writing in his Gun Facts blog, who first alerted his readers to a study showing that “people with concealed carry licenses are 5.7 times less likely to be arrested for violent offences than the general public and 13.5 times less likely to be arrested for non-violent offenses than the general public.” Referring to another study, Smith noted that “the four-year violent crime arrest rate of CCW holders is 128 per 100,000 [but] for the general population it is 710 per 100,000. In other words, CCW holders are 5.5 times less likely to commit a violent crime [than the general public].”

But it was John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, who went one step further: examining how CCW holders behave when compared to police. He concluded that “concealed handgun permit holders are extremely law-abiding,” adding, “In Florida and Texas, permit holders are convicted of misdemeanors and felonies at one-sixth of the rate at which police officers are convicted.”

A bipartisan team of US senators is preparing to hit Russia with additional sanctions over its 2016 US election interference and military operations in Syria and Ukraine.

Sens. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are spearheading the measure, called the Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act, which includes a wide range of financial penalties targeting Russia's energy complex, financial industry and "political figures, oligarchs, and family members and other persons that facilitate illicit and corrupt activities, directly or indirectly, on behalf of Vladimir Putin," reported The Independent.

Pro-Israel lobbyists funneled more than $22 million into the 2018 US election cycle, making the lobby far more active and influential than those aligned with other foreign nations, public records show.

Controversy was sparked last week after freshman Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar tweeted that pro-Israel money affected the decisions of members of Congress. Omar faced swift backlash and condemnation even from her own party, as her colleagues rushed to label her comments as “outrageous,” “disgraceful” and even“anti-Semitic.”

In the aftermath, the Guardian examined figures available from the Center for Responsive Politics – a D.C.-based organization which tracks money in politics – and found that the Israel lobby is indeed “highly active and spends heavily” to influence lawmakers.

Late last year, DoubleLine's Jeff Gundlach warned that as a result of rising hedging costs, US Treasury bonds have become increasingly unattractive to foreign buyers. This can be seen in the chart below which shows the yield on the 10Y US TSY unhedged, and also hedged into Yen and Euros. In the latter two cases, the yield went from over 3%, to negative as a result of the gaping rate differential between the Fed and ECB or BOJ.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will discuss issues related to maintaining stability and countering threats in different parts of the world with his counterparts and representatives of international organizations during the 55th Munich Security Conference. Lavrov, who leads the Russian delegation, is expected to address participants at the event during the high-level plenary meeting on February 16, TASS reports. The top Russian diplomat could meet with his German, Japanese, Belgian and Pakistani counterparts.

CARACAS, February 16. /TASS/. The fourth center for collecting humanitarian aid for Venezuela is being established in the US city of Miami, Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido wrote on his official Twitter account.

READ ALSO
Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido
Opposition to take all measures for humanitarian aid to get into Venezuela
"We announce opening a center for collecting humanitarian aid in Miami, so that Venezuelans all around the world can join the movement for Venezuela," Guaido said.

On February 2 Guaido announced opening three checkpoints for accepting foreign humanitarian aid. The three checkpoints are in Cucuta, on the border with Brazil and on an island in the Caribbean. He did not rule out that another checkpoint may be opened on the territory of Colombia but did not specify the details.

Pope Francis has defrocked a former US Cardinal after the church found him guilty of sexually abusing minors.

Theodore McCarrick, 88, who once led the Archdiocese of Washington and was a powerful figure within the Catholic Church in the U.S., was accused of sexually abusing three minors and harassing adult seminarians and priests.

He was also found guilty by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of soliciting sex while hearing confession, the Holy See said in a statement on Saturday.

An investigation last year detailed settlements paid to men who had complained of abuse when McCarrick was a Bishop in New Jersey in the 1980s.

The top Hungarian diplomat's remarks came during his joint press conference with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who, in particular, warned Hungary not to let Russian President Vladimir Putin "drive wedges between friends" in NATO.

Speaking at a joint news conference with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Budapest on Monday, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto specifically pointed out what he described as Western countries' hypocritical stance toward Moscow.

"As for Russia – and I have told the State Secretary about this – there is enormous hypocrisy and political correctness in the European political arena," Szijjarto said.

READ MORE: Hungary Refuses to Dance to US Tune, Step Up Pressure on Russia — Reports

He recalled that neither Hungarian nor central European energy companies are partnering with the Russian corporation Gazprom in the Nord Stream 2 project.

Large-scale protests erupted in France on 17 November 2018 in the wake of the government's decision to raise fuel prices and increase fuel taxes. Even though the French authorities later scrapped their plans, the yellow vest protesters, dissatisfied with the government's social policies, have continued to rally across the country.

The yellow vests are rallying for the fourteenth straight weekend in Paris and other major French cities on 16 February.

According to French TV channel LCI, about 1,300 police officers, gendarmes, and firefighters have been injured since the movement launched.

US State Secretary Mike Pompeo's quest to scare Hungary away from dealing with Russia and China appears to have turned sour, as Budapest said it's fed up with lectures about its foreign policy.

Pompeo is on a five-day massive charm offensive in Eastern Europe seeking to "make up" for the time the US "shunned" the nations of the region "in a way that drove them to fill a vacuum with folks who didn't share our values," as he himself put it.

A new US intelligence report, which highlights that Russia and China were trying to wage a war in the skies, sparked the ire of Beijing, which insists that space is not Washington’s “private property.”

“I want to make it clear that outer space belongs to all of humanity. It is not the exclusive property of any country and especially of US private property,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying.

He was referring to the latest article from the Pentagon’s Defensive Intelligence Agency (AID).

Hua criticized the “unjustified and utterly unfounded comments” in the AID report, saying that China advocates the peaceful use of space and opposes its militarization.

North Korea’s ambassador to the UN, Kim Song, expressed his solidarity with the Venezuelan people in the face of attempts to overthrow Nicolás Maduro’s government, the country’s Foreign Ministry said after Kim Song’s meeting with Vice Minister of Venezuela Félix Plasencia.

“In this interventionist context aimed at overthrowing the constitutional government of President Nicolás Maduro, Ambassador Kim Song expressed his solidarity with the Venezuelan people and expressed the will of his government to continue to strengthen the ties of cooperation and fraternity between both nations,” said the statement, posted on the website of the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry.

During the meeting, the Venezuelan diplomat informed the North Korean ambassador about the “latest political events in the Caribbean country, motivated by the campaign of international disrepute.”

“Many Germans cannot be identified as rich. There are many citizens living on welfare, pensioners, lonely and older people… In some parts of the country, especially in the East, unemployment rate totals eight percent,” Professor Johannes Ringel from Leipzig’s University told Russia’s state TV channel Rossiya 2.

A university building has partially collapsed in the city of St. Petersburg. It is feared that a number of people may be trapped under the rubble, Russian media reports, citing eyewitnesses and local officials.

The incident occurred at the Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics University on Saturday afternoon, while lectures were in progress. At least 60 people were evacuated from the building following the collapse, a source with the emergency services told TASS.

As many as 21 people may be trapped under the rubble, local administration has said.

A 74-old senior social worker who helped with Germany’s migrant influx in 2015 must move out of the flat he has lived in for 24 years. A 1990s court ruling allows German municipalities to evict tenants to accommodate refugees if other options are exhausted.

Klaus Roth, a 74-year German national living in the municipality of Neckartailfingen, approximately 20 kilometers south of Stuttgart, must vacate the 150-square-meter apartment he has lived in for 24 years to accommodate Middle Eastern migrants, municipal authorities say, according to the Junge Freiheit newspaper.

Esslingen County has been assigned six new immigrants, in addition to 40 migrants already accommodated in the village.

The local council has reportedly decided to house the migrants in Roth's flat, Mayor Gerhard Gertitschke said in an interview for Nürtinger Zeitung. In order to allow that, Roth must move to an apartment half as big, the report says.

This election ... is our last chance to secure the border, stop illegal immigration and reform our laws to make your life better. -- Donald Trump, Phoenix, Aug. 31, 2016

It's coming from all over South and Latin America, and it's coming probably -- probably -- from the Middle East. But we don't know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence. ... And it's got to stop, and it's got to stop fast. -- Donald Trump, New York City, June 16, 2015

We take anybody. Come on in, anybody. Just come on in. Not anymore. ... We need a system that serves our needs, not the needs of others. -- Donald Trump, Phoenix, Aug. 31, 2016

The costs for the United States have been extraordinary: U.S. taxpayers have been asked to pick up hundreds of billions in health care costs, housing costs, education costs, welfare costs, etc. -- Donald Trump, Immigration Policy Paper, Aug. 16, 2015

The writing is increasingly on the wall for the ludicrously expensive HS2 scheme after a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation this week revealed the ballooning cost of the white elephant project, with fears that the final bill could be as high as £100 billion. The investigation claimed that ministers have already secretly increased HS2’s budget allocation to £6 billion a year. Almost as much as the entire rest of the rail network put together…

Israeli forces this week opted to cut off water supply lines feeding into more than a dozen communities in the West Bank city of Hebron, according to the Palestine News Network.

In total, the changes will affect 17 Mafasir Yatta communities, where an estimated 1,500 Palestinians reside.

The Wednesday move has been largely criticized by locals as yet another Israeli measure to force Palestinians away from their home in order to expand settlements, PNN reported.

It was tweeted in a thread focused on Netanyahu's meetings with Arab delegates at the US initiated conference which was originally touted as focused on the "Iran threat". The AP also confirmed the Netanyahu tweet, which quickly generated multiple headlines focused on what appeared essentially a declaration of war.

The AP noted the statement was published just after the Israeli PM's meeting with Oman's foreign minister:

Israel’s prime minister says he plans on working with Arab countries at a U.S.-backed Mideast conference in Warsaw to focus on the “common interest of war with Iran.”

The full deleted tweet read as follows: "What is important about this meeting. and it is not in secret, because there are many of those - is that this is an open meeting with representatives of leading Arab countries, that are sitting down together with Israel in order to advance the common interest of war with Iran."

French intelligence services have looked at the RT broadcaster, Le Parisien outlet reported citing sources.

The French intelligence decided that it would be "premature" to make a conclusion about a disinformation strategy, although the RT France reporting had a certain tone, the outlet reported Thursday.

This comes after in early February, French President Emmanuel Macron accused RT and Sputnik news agency of meddling in France's internal affairs.

A Hungarian government minister has accused a senior representative of British Jews of politically-motivated lying, telling her to “mind your own business” following a meeting in which she raised concerns about antisemitism.

The secretary of state, Vince Szalay-Bobrovniczky, wrote to Marie van der Zyl, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, this week to take issue with the board’s account of a meeting between the pair.

The board said the meeting, which took place on 8 February, was “an important opportunity to raise a number of the [BOD’s] long-standing concerns directly with the Hungarian government, including the use of antisemitic tropes and … moves to downplay the role of historical Hungarian leaders in supporting the Holocaust.”

Other issues raised by the board included the Hungarian government’s attitude to Muslims and migrants, and relations between it and Jewish communities in the country.

I am sorry to have to inform you that Ian has passed away.

If anyone was the founder of UK 911 Truth, now http://www.reinvestigate911.org/ , it was Ian. I recall the inaugural meeting (2002?) with barely more than half a dozen people, in the days when 9/11 doubting the official story would often get an angry response.

In sadness

In recent weeks, the chances of a dreaded no-deal Brexit occurring have increased exponentially ahead of the deadline on March 29th.

A new study has looked into that scenario's potential impact on jobs across the world. Statista's Niall McCarthy notes that the analysis was carried out by the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH), focusing on 56 industrial sectors across 43 countries while assuming a 25 percent drop in EU exports to the UK in the event of a hard Brexit.

It found that Germany could lose the most jobs with around 103,000 threatened if the UK crashes out of the EU with no deal.

The newly introduced EU regulations - banning unfair business practices by app stores, search engines, e-commerce sites and hotel booking websites - are meant to see small start-ups and traditional businesses level with tech giants.

The new deal was announced by the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission Main European Union bodies on Thursday. According to the Vice-President for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip, the EU aimed "to outlaw some of the most unfair practices and create a benchmark for transparency."

Commissioner for the Digital Economy and Society, Mariya Gabriel, added:

The gender dysphoria madness affecting our culture is a bit of a puzzle to me. Yes, I knew about people who wanted a sex change, thirty or more years ago…but they were rare things, and I couldn’t claim to have even been in the same room as, much less met, such a person until just a few years ago.

Added to this mix is there seems to be a great number of people who think, maybe, they might be the opposite gender, and just aren’t sure. I hardly know what to make of it. Is it truly a result of school indoctrination, or are there some chemical additives nowadays that affect some people more than others?

The current wave of gender dysphoric children do little to answer my question—children are more vulnerable to indoctrination than adults, but also have been exposed to any alleged chemicals for a greater proportion of their lives (particularly the early years, which strike me as more capable of affecting one’s sexuality).

Wireless carriers are working hard to talk up 5G (Fifth Generation) wireless as the future of broadband. But don’t be fooled—they are only trying to focus our attention on 5G to try to distract us from their willful failure to invest in a proven ultrafast option for many Americans: fiber to the home, or FTTH.

A recent FCC report on competition found that the future of high-speed broadband for most Americans will be a cable monopoly. Without a plan to promote fiber to the home, that’s not likely to change. In fact, because the 5G upgrade relies on fiber infrastructure, even 5G will be possibly limited to areas that already have FTTH – meaning, they already have a competitive landscape and, therefore, better service. The rest of us get monopolistic slow lanes.

Officially, the US government has barely conceded that there is an investigation into WikiLeaks at all. Yet after years of efforts to quietly vilify the whistleblower for its publications. The efforts to overtly criminalize the group are picking up pace.

The government has accidentally admitted to charges against Assange, at least in secret, and WikiLeaks is in the midst of a lawsuit trying to learn more.

Reports are that investigators have been pursuing leads dating back several years in their investigation of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. and the long-standing goal of charging him with serious crimes now looks to be expanding into an overall criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.

While WikiLeaks is said to believe a lot of interest is built around the 2017 Vault 7 leaks on CIA hacking tools, reporters say witnesses are also being pressed on leaks dating back to 2010,

Less than 24 hours after Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) sent out tweets implying that AIPAC pays off American politicians to defend Israel, she had already apologized, in response to a swift rebuke from House Democratic leaders. Just like that.

One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They’re happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there’s no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America.

Boot is a professional foreign policy expert, a job category that doesn’t exist outside of a select number of cities. Boot has degrees from Berkeley and Yale, and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written a number of books and countless newspaper columns on foreign affairs and military history. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank, describes Boot as one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict.”

F-35B Lightning II stealth fighter jets with the fixed-wing detachment of Medium Marine Tiltrotor Squadron 262, 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), conducted a bombing exercise from the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Wasp in the Philippine and East China Seas, Jan. 26 through Feb. 6, according to a press release by the US Indo-Pacific Command.
F35B releases smart bombs above the Pacific Ocean, Feb. 3, 2019.
During the exercise, fifth-generation combat aircraft were armed with Sidewinder missiles and precision-guided munitions.

A student who was called transphobic after re-tweeting ‘women don’t have penises’ has been excluded from a free speech debate at Bristol university over ‘security concerns’.

Angelos Sofocleous posted the statement on his social media account last August. The tweet led to him being sacked from his role as president of Humanist Students and assistant editor of Durham University’s philosophy society journal.

Sofocleous had hoped to take part in a panel hosted by Bristol University’s Free Speech Society on Wednesday but he claims to have been ‘de-platformed’.