A very short while ago, any US politician or media pundit publicly calling for peace negotiations in Ukraine with Russia's Putin was branded 'pro-Kremlin' and somehow compromised. For example, mainstream media has sought to isolate and cancel thinkers like John Mearsheimer for his realism toward Moscow and the conflict, and urging immediate ceasefire which would require territorial concessions from Kiev. It was only in September that one prominent publication branded him "the world's most hated thinker."

But now, at a moment Ukraine's leadership itself has become more desperate while admitting its forces are facing almost insurmountable odds, the D.C. beltway consensus has clearly and drastically changed, and now it's apparently okay to admit the following...

The Biden plan, announced in August 2022, aimed to provide relief ranging from $10,000 to $20,000 for 31 million federal student loan holders. Mired in legal challenges, court orders halted the program in November 2022 before the U.S. Supreme Court struck the final blow in June.

The Government Accountability Office's (GAO) report, released Thursday, revealed that the U.S. Department of Education's handling of the initiative lacked critical measures to ascertain whether the recipients’ incomes justified the debt forgiveness.

Spanning from January to September, the watchdog's report specifically noted that the "increased flow of federal funds" for relief programs due to the COVID-19 pandemic increased the risk of fraud. This, the report stated, underscored the "imperative for federal agencies to manage fraud risks strategically."

The watchdog's report highlighted concerns over the Biden administration's failure to verify incomes for millions of borrowers before granting relief.

Despite reports that behind the scenes the Americans and Iranians are talking 'de-escalation' related to the Gaza War, facts on the ground point to anything but...

The above unverified footage, said to show the aftermath of what appears a large attack on a US base in northern Iraq, is widely circulating online Friday. It shows a huge black plume of smoke rising high above the base, as it appears either an aircraft or vehicle suffered direct hit. 

"Iraq’s al-Harir airbase hosting US and international forces was targeted with an armed drone, Iraqi Kurdistan’s counter-terrorism service said in a statement on Friday," regional sources are reporting. Iranian state sources have posted the video.

Semi-official Iranian news source Mehr writes, "The video shows the moments when the Iraqi Islamic Resistance launched a drone attack on the American terrorists' base at Harir Airport located in Erbil province."

The White House has long warned it will escalate attacks on "Iranian proxies" if such attacks continue. There has so far been three waves of US airstrikes against Iran-linked targets in eastern Syria, but this supposed "deterrent" has not proven effective in stopping missiles and drones sent by regional militias.

Webmaster addition: The fact that this is being released by Mossad makes it highly questionable!

Citigroup (C.N) employees expect announcements about management changes and layoffs on Monday in the next phase of the bank’s sweeping reorganization, according to four people familiar with the situation.

Employees are awaiting more details about the scale of layoffs at the bank, which employs 240,000 people worldwide.

Citigroup declined to comment. The Financial Times reported the news earlier.

Last month, Citi announced plans to cut management layers from 13 to eight as part of its biggest overhaul in decades. In the two top layers of leadership, Citi reduced 15% of functional roles and eliminated 60 committees, it said in its third quarter earnings presentation.

Arizona GOP Senate candidate Kari Lake alleges in a brief recently filed in an appeals court that Maricopa County violated state law by falsely stating voting machines were certified prior to the 2022 gubernatorial election. 

The brief filed Tuesday by attorneys for Lake, who ran a unsuccessful bid last year for Arizona governor, alleges county officials cut the seals on hundreds of voting tabulators, took out memory cards and reformatted them and made sure the tabulators rejected votes on Election Day.

You can read the brief here:

Lake Appeal.pdf

House Republicans have begun releasing thousands of hours of footage from inside the Capitol from Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building.

“This decision will provide millions of Americans, criminal defendants, public interest organizations, and the media an ability to see for themselves what happened that day, rather than having to rely upon the interpretation of a small group of government officials,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said in announcing the website, where videos will be posted throughout the weekend.

According to Johnson, faces of private citizens will be blurred on any unreleased tapes and about 5 percent of the footage from the day will be redacted for building security concerns.

The Israeli army released footage on October 22 of its Maglan commando unit deploying a new precision-guided 120mm mortar bomb called the Iron Sting, against Hamas in Gaza.

The bomb’s Haifa-based manufacturer, Elbit Systems, has been advertising its qualities on the public relations page of its website since March 2021, when it was integrated into the Israeli military.

United States officials have increasingly suggested that the Palestinian Authority (PA) should rule over Gaza after Israel achieves its objective of eliminating Hamas, the group that currently controls the territory.

But analysts warn that the proposal may be unrealistic and premature, as the Israel-Hamas war nears the start of its seventh week.

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky admitted that the Ukrainian army will have to retreat if his country’s Western allies stop providing support to Kiev.

"Now I am focused on getting aid from the West," Bloomberg quoted Zelensky as saying at a meeting with foreign journalists. Their [Western countries’] "focus is shifting because of the Middle East <...>. Without the support, we will move backward," he said.

According to Zelensky, the shift in focus in the wake of the latest escalation in the Middle East has slowed deliveries of 155-mm shells to Ukraine. "Our supplies have decreased," he acknowledged.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem is one of the holiest sites in the world and one of the most contested. Why is it so significant?

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky told journalists on Thursday that he has received tips about a Russian influence campaign aimed at destabilizing his government, according to a Bloomberg report. He claimed that various intelligence agencies had informed him about the purported operation.

Ukraine’s top leadership has experienced divisions in recent months, with a series of publications in the Western press, based on leaks from Kiev staffers, describing Zelensky as calcified in pursuing an unrealistic goal of pushing Russia out of all territories claimed by Kiev.

His office has also publicly clashed with one of the country’s top generals, Valery Zaluzhny, who said earlier this month that the hostilities had reached a stalemate and that he expected no breakthrough for Kiev.

Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca informed that the cargo left the port of Alsancak in the western province of Izmir early Friday. According to the minister, "the aid, organized under the coordination of our Presidency," is expected to arrive at Egypt's Al-Arish port on Saturday. 

The ship is headed for Al Arish, Egypt, near the Egyptian border crossing of Rafah to the besieged enclave, which is facing a severe humanitarian crisis worsened by prolonged Israeli bombardment.

The cargo ship is loaded with nearly 500 tons of crucial humanitarian aid, including 51 containers of medical supplies and generators and 20 fully equipped ambulances. 

It also includes field hospitals with operating theaters and intensive care units, as well as medicines and medical consumables for use in these hospitals.

“In a jointly penned opinion… two Israeli Members of Knesset recently urged Western nations to welcome Palestinian refugees from Gaza amid the Israel-Hamas war…

’Hamas’s unprovoked terrorist attack on Oct. 7 has endangered not only Israel but the more than two million people who live in the Gaza Strip. Although Hamas won 2006 elections in Gaza and took control of the area from the Palestinian Authority the following year, the group has said that it bears no responsibility for the people living there,’ the two lawmakers wrote…

Danon and Ben-Barak stressed that Europe has a long tradition of helping migrants fleeing from conflict zones such as former Yugoslavia and Ukraine.

Webmaster addition: Demand?!?

Burying The Truth, In the Present And The Past

Unless you follow alternative media, or the right accounts on X, you may be unaware that a mob of black teens in Las Vegas recently stomped a white teen to death.

Wealthy Los Angeles homeowners are having a tough time selling amid a new tax on luxury sales, and turmoil in the entertainment industry. Rather than unloading their mansions in a sluggish market, many homeowners have resorted to renting them out, Bloomberg reports.

Rob DeSantis, a serial entrepreneur who cofounded Ariba and was an early investor in LinkedIn Corp, is a prime example of this trend. He recently placed his 13,000 sqft Manhattan Beach estate on the rental market for $150,000 per month. "This is a hedge," DeSantis said. "I believe leasing it out will highlight the value of the property in a much better way."

The BBC, one of only two news organizations allowed into Al-Shifa Hospital by Israel, is reporting that the IDF tampered with evidence, edited the "unedited" video of the raid they released on social media and have failed so far to prove that the site is being used as a "Hamas Command Center" as they claimed.
 

Israel is so far struggling to produce evidence of the much-hyped "Hamas Command Center" they claimed was located inside and below Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza.

After dramatically raiding the building on Wednesday, all the IDF claims they found were a few rifles behind an MRI machine (which could have easily been planted) and some laptops and CDs.

Basel al-Araj, a Palestinian resistance leader, shortly before Israel’s 2014 invasion of Gaza, laid down the fundamental rules for warfare against the Israel.

The rules by al-Araj, not a member of Hamas, provide the Palestinian lens for the incursion by Israeli forces in Gaza. While Israel’s superior firepower — its air force, missiles, tanks, armored personnel carriers, drones, naval forces, mechanized units and artillery — make it possible to inflict huge numbers of Palestinian casualties, most of them civilians, while Israel can level whole neighborhoods and turn hospitals, schools, power stations, water treatment plants, bakeries, mosques and churches into piles of concrete, this does not translate into a defeat of the Palestinian resistance groups.

Al-Araj argued that the fight with Israel cannot be measured with body counts. The Israelis will be able to kill far greater numbers of Palestinians. Resistant movements, he wrote, always suffer disproportionate losses. In the independence war in Algeria, between 1954 and 1962, upwards of 1.5 million Algerians — or around 10 percent of the population — were killed by the French. In the airport in Algiers, the country’s capital, is a huge sign that reads: “Welcome to Algeria. Land of a million Martyrs.”

Synthetic hormones used for birth control may slow brain maturation and disrupt the development of an area of the brain responsible for impulsivity, according to new research. 

Adolescents commonly use hormonal contraceptives despite the unknown effects on brain and behavioral maturation, prompting scientists at Ohio State University to explore how common synthetic hormones used for birth control affect the prefrontal cortex—an area of the brain essential to regulating emotional behaviors and executive function.

In the study, presented during a Nov. 12, 2023, poster session at an annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, researchers gave a combination of synthetic estrogen and progesterone in hormone-based contraceptives to female rats from early to late adolescence and compared their behavior and brain tissue to untreated rats. 

Because synthetic hormones found in contraceptives decrease the ovaries’ production of natural progesterone and estrogen to prevent ovulation, researchers looked at how the brain is affected by these hormonal differences when it is still developing.

During a Nov. 15 House Armed Services Committee review of a congressional commission’s report assessing the nation’s nuclear forces, fears surfaced that potential adversaries—namely Russia and China—are developing capacities from space, from cyber, from under the sea, from everywhere all at once, to elude U.S. early warning systems and launch a surprise strike.

Chair Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and ranking member Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) both cited such a scenario as not merely speculative, but as an urgent threat that must be addressed.

“In terms of resiliency and survivability, regardless how many nuclear weapons or what platforms we have, our command-and-control structures and the ability to make them less vulnerable” is vital, Mr. Smith said.

The UN Security Council passed a resolution earlier this week (Wed) that called for a temporary pause to the fighting in Gaza. Tel Aviv said the call for a short peace was a decision "disconnected from reality and holds no significance."

The resolution passed the UN’s most powerful body in a vote of 12-0. The US and UK did not vote for the motion because it did not condemn Hamas. Russia abstained over concerns that the resolution did not make a strong enough call for peace. Moscow’s representative said Washington is responsible for removing the word "ceasefire" from the text.

Webmaster addition: The UN should eject Israel. But they won't.

Think back to those grim days of mid-March 2020. Many things didn't make sense. There were screams about a new virus but no tests available for anyone to find out if we had the dreaded disease or not. The main question in everyone’s mind was, “How can I find out if I have this strange new bug?”

Hold on just a moment there. If there were no tests, how do we know that there was a reason to panic? If there were only a handful of positive tests, how do we know for sure that the virus wasn’t here and spreading months earlier? Maybe what they were calling COVID-19 was here for a year or more.

Was there really any way to know? Sure, we could have done seroprevalence tests on the population, but there were none underway. The one that came out earliest, in May 2020, showed that exposure had already happened by March, a fact which completely undermines the entire cockamamie policy response. The study was brutally attacked.

Why precisely was it mid-March 2020 when all official institutions, including media, not just in the United States but all over the world, decided suddenly to freak out? Why not in January 2020? Why at all?

Indeed, it wasn't even clear what the point of the lockdowns was. Were we trying to make the virus go away through brute force? Early on, then-Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci even told The Washington Post that the virus would be defeated by social distancing alone.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's career appears to be fading to blackface - as his approval ratings, which now suck, have plummeted thanks in no small part to housing and inflation woes fueling a firestorm of disapproval. Despite a safety net agreement with a left-leaning opposition that defers his political reckoning until 2025, the rumblings within his own party suggest Trudeau's leadership is skating on increasingly thin ice.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has in recent days gone on a US media blitz, at a moment American public opinion has become increasingly divided on Israel's military action in Gaza and the soaring civilian death toll.

But in a new interview with CBS, he made a surprising admission - surprising especially given the current scrutiny on him after international institutions, including a panel of UN experts - have accused Israel of conducting "genocide" and "war crimes". Netanyahu acknowledged to CBS that Israel has not been successful in minimizing civilian casualties among civilians.

Webmaster addition: No kidding.

In a new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) response, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now admits that it recommended COVID-19 vaccines for people who had recovered from COVID-19 despite the fact that CDC subject matter experts didn't have access to the underlying data.

The stunning disclosure came in reply to a FOIA request for information on the CDC’s claim, first made on Oct. 29, 2021, that unvaccinated people with previous infection were five times more likely to get COVID-19 than vaccinated people.

The CDC’s claim was based on a CDC study published in the Nov. 9, 2021, edition of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The conflicts-of-interest section of the study had noted that a number of the study’s authors were being sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Merck, Sanofi, and GlaxoSmithKline. At least four of the listed pharmaceutical companies were involved in the manufacturing and sale of COVID-19 vaccines.

Given that the conflict-of-interest disclosures were made at the time the study was first published, the CDC would have been aware of the heightened need to scrutinize its findings. However, this appears not to have happened. Notably, the CDC’s public pronouncement about unvaccinated COVID-19 survivors being five times more likely to get reinfected was made on the same day that the study was released as a preprint. This would have left no time for any review.

A Turkish vessel carrying materials for field hospitals arrived Monday in Egypt's port of El Arish near the Rafah border crossing with the war-ravaged Gaza Strip, a port official said.

It is the first such aid vessel to arrive in Egypt since war broke out on October 7. A Turkish health official told AFP that the vessel was carrying "materials, generators, ambulances to establish eight field hospitals".

The Turkish official added that Ankara had requested Cairo's approval to build the field hospitals in El Arish, which lies about 40 kilometres
from the Rafah border, the only crossing to Gaza not controlled by Israel.

"We received the green light from Egyptian authorities. We will set up these hospitals to the areas shown by the Egyptian authorities," the official said.

A wave of murders, violence, and harassment waged against Palestinians has been unleashed by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) personnel and illegal settlers alike in the occupied West Bank, according to the Time of Israel. Nearly 200 Palestinians have been killed, including 48 children, in the West Bank since Tel Aviv’s massive bombing campaign against the besieged Gaza Strip was launched last month.

B’tselem, the premier Israeli human rights organization, reports that since the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, 963 Palestinians have been displaced in these rampant attacks. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates the number of people forced from their homes and villages is even higher.

On Friday the UN said that it was no longer able to continue aid deliveries into Gaza as an Israeli fuel blockade of the enclave has led to a widespread communications blackout. The World Health Organization warned that the ending of aid deliveries means the “immediate possibility of starvation” for the 2.3 million people in Gaza.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) announced it was forced to halt aid shipments into Gaza. “The communications network in #Gaza is down because there is NO fuel,” the agency said in a statement on social media. “This makes it impossible to manage or coordinate humanitarian aid convoys.”