US President Joe Biden’s administration has warned that it may soon halt sanctions relief for Venezuela unless the oil-rich nation makes more progress in meeting Washington’s demands for the release of “political prisoners” and detained American citizens.

At stake is a relaxing of sanctions, announced in October, that eased US restrictions on trading of Venezuelan oil, natural gas, gold and government bonds. In return, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s government was given a November 30 deadline to release jailed politicians and begin lifting bans on oppositional presidential candidates for the country’s 2024 election.

Naval forces from Iran, Russia and China are set to stage a joint naval exercise in the Persian Gulf, where the three powerhouses will conduct large-scale maritime drills involving various divisions of their military forces, Press TV reports.

Forces from the three countries will jointly practice exercises during the 2024 Marine Security Belt naval war game, Iranian Navy Commander Rear Admiral Shahram Irani told the IRINN news channel on Friday evening.

Admiral Irani added that delegates from Pakistan, Brazil, Oman, India, South Africa and a number of the Caspian Sea littoral states have also been invited to participate in the drills as observers.

Iran, China and Russia have held several joint military drills in recent years to improve the security of international maritime trade, counter piracy and maritime terrorism, exchange information in naval rescue and relief operations, and exchange operational and tactical experiences.

Irani went on to say that the main phase of the country's largest maritime zone will come on stream at the port city of Jask in southeastern Iran during the Ten-Day Dawn celebrations marking the 46th anniversary of the victory of the Islamic Revolution.

Heavy-lift vessels will be deployed in the maritime zone by the end of the current Iranian calendar year, which concludes on March 20, 2024, the navy chief stated.

After wasting ten-thousands of men in hopeless battles the Ukrainian comedian has finally acknowledged that his army's performative 'counter-attacks' and hold-to-the-last-man defenses have made no sense.

Politco's Dreamer of the year finally calls for building defensive lines:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called for a faster buildup of major defensive lines amid Kyiv’s stalled counteroffensive and concerns that Russia could attempt to take more territory.

Zelenskiy urged greater speed and efficiency in building defenses in a video statement on Telegram after a meeting with key military and security officials Tuesday evening. He encouraged local communities to pitch in and pledged to make money available for the effort.

“Our country will definitely have enough mines and concrete,” he said. He didn’t provide details on where the fortifications would be built or how extensive they might be.

There are several new report on how the Zionist want to continue their killing spree in Gaza (and beyond it).

Israel Planning for Gaza War To Last Over a Year - Antiwar

The Financial Times reported speaking with sources who said that Israel plans to wage war on Gaza for over a year. In a little less than two months, Israel has killed at least 15,000 people, damaged 100,000 buildings, displaced 1.7 million Palestinians, and destroyed most of Gaza’s medical facilities.

On Friday, FT reported sources said Israel was preparing for a multi-phase conflict in Gaza that will last at least a year. “This will be a very long war…We’re currently not near halfway to achieving our objectives,” said one person familiar with the Israeli war plans.

According to the sources, Israel’s goals include “killing the three top Hamas leaders — Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Marwan Issa — while securing a decisive military victory against the group’s 24 battalions and underground tunnel network and destroying its governing capability in Gaza.”
...
The first phase of the war, an intense bombing campaign and ground invasion, is expected to last well into 2024. One source said the first phase of the war is about 40% complete. “Gaza City isn’t finished yet, nor fully conquered. It’s probably 40% done,” the person explained. “For the north as a whole, it will probably require another two weeks to a month.”

• A Hamas official tells Al Jazeera negotiations on prisoner exchanges are now over and will not resume until Israel halts it attack and hands over all Palestinian prisoners.
• Israel ordered its Mossad negotiating team in Doha to return to Israel because of what it called an “impasse”.
• Israel renews its bombardment of Gaza, hitting areas across the enclave after the end of a week-long truce.
• At least 15,207 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7. In Israel, the official death toll stands at about 1,200.

Relations between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, have been icy for years.

When democratically elected Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi was removed from office by then General Abdel Fattah el-Sissi in 2013, Erdogan immediately sided with the jailed Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated leader, calling el-Sissi a putschist, murderer and tyrant.

Erdogan adopted the Muslim Brotherhood's signature hand gesture and often dismissively referred to Turkish opposition politicians as el-Sissis in an expression of loathing for the new Egyptian president.

Egypt, in turn, accused Turkey of supporting the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and granting safe haven to its members.

The countries supported opposing sides in the Libya conflict.

Podcast king Joe Rogan noted earlier this week that he believes there is no strategy for 2024 on the part of Democrats, and the only play they have is to imprison Donald Trump.

“I think at this point they kind of have to run [Biden] unless he dies,” Rogan asserted, adding “We have one year now, we’re in late November, we have less than one year. What are they going to do? If Biden died tomorrow, what do they do with Kamala Harris? Put her on the moon? What are they going to do, she’s the vice president. If he dies, she becomes the president, which is fucking wild when you hear that lady talk.”

Rogan further noted that throwing someone like California Governor Gavin Newsom in as the nominee in place of Harris would expose how lacking in direction the party has been.

“I think they have no cards and they’re looking at this game and I think they’re depending upon party loyalty and they’re depending upon Trump getting convicted and arrested and imprisoned,” Rogan contiuned.

Webmaster addition: Or "Something worse!"

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Saturday that the wars raging in the Middle East and Europe, coupled with increasingly brazen “bullying” by China, have underscored the need for robust U.S. leadership on the global stage.

“Only one country on Earth can provide the kind of leadership that this moment demands…and that’s the United States of America,” said Mr. Austin, who warned that global security crises will only worsen if Washington chooses isolation over engagement.

“We’re living through challenging times,” the Democrat-appointed defense secretary said in the keynote address at the 10th annual Reagan National Defense Forum — a bipartisan event well attended by devotees to the former Republican president’s “peace through strength” foreign and national security doctrine.

Mr. Austin said today’s challenges are multifold and include “the major conflicts facing our fellow democracies, Israel and Ukraine; bullying and coercion from an increasingly assertive China; and a worldwide battle between democracy and autocracy.”

Webmaster addition: Talk about arrogance!

Photo album at source.

Recent IPSOS polling (www.euronews.com/business/2023/11/26/one-in-four-europeans-say-their-financial-condition-is-precarious) found several concerning trends among the populations of Europe

30% of Europeans can no longer afford a “surprise expense”

Interest rate futures indicate expected rate cuts from March 2024, with a growing chance of cuts starting in January. Three weeks ago, markets anticipated an additional rate hike and cuts in June 2024; now, there’s a 2% chance of an extra hike and five expected rate cuts in 2024.

Yellow weather warnings for snow and ice have been issued by the Met Office. Follow the latest updates below.

Webmaster addition:

Europe is currently in the throes of the coldest weather it has experienced in two decades, with the United Kingdom being hit hard by plummeting temperatures. The Met Office has recently issued a fresh yellow weather warning for snow and ice, covering significant portions of the country.

This whole thing just keeps getting stinkier.

How do you go about getting some who’s getting out of prison in less than three years to commit crimes that you will certainly get caught for that will keep you in prison for the rest of your life?

The Pentagon is looking toward a future where the U.S. deploys “super soldiers” directly inspired by Captain America and Iron Man, officials said at a recent conference.

Militaries across the world are trying to give their soldiers an advantage and technology has long played an important role in that. On Wednesday, a group of military and military-adjacent scientists gathered at a conference to discuss the possibility of creating a super soldier. They discussed breeding programs, Marvel movies, The Matrix, and the various technologies the Pentagon is researching with the goal of creating a real life super soldier complete with cybernetic implants and thorny ethical issues surrounding bodily autonomy.

The talk happened at the The Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference, or I/ITSEC, an annual conference where military leaders come to talk shop and simulation corporations gather to demo new products. It’s the kind of place where execs and generals don virtual reality helmets and talk about the virtues of VR sims. You could even catch members of congress talking about the importance of simulations and war. “Winning the war of cognition by pushing readiness and lethality boundaries,” reads the official poster for the 2019  I/ITSEC. 

Entanglement is a quantum phenomenon where the properties of two or more particles become interconnected in such a way that one cannot assign a definite state to each individual particle anymore.

Rather, we have to consider all particles at once that share a certain state. The entanglement of the particles ultimately determines the properties of a material.

“Entanglement of many particles is the feature that makes the difference,” emphasizes Christian Kokail, one of the first authors of the paper now published in Nature. “At the same time, however, it is very difficult to determine.”

The researchers led by Peter Zoller at the University of Innsbruck and the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) now provide a new approach that can significantly improve the study and understanding of entanglement in quantum materials. In order to describe large quantum systems and extract information from them about the existing entanglement, one would naively need to perform an impossibly large number of measurements.

“We have developed a more efficient description, that allows us to extract entanglement information from the system with drastically fewer measurements,” explains theoretical physicist Rick van Bijnen.

Researchers from Tianjin University in China have proposed a way to turn tiny black holes into batteries and nuclear reactors. They published their calculations in the peer-reviewed journal Physics Review D. 

In their out-there study, Zhan-Feng Mai and Run-Qiu Yang of the Center for Joint Quantum Studies and Department of Physics describe how it could be possible to extract electric energy from the gravitational energy of a so far hypothetical kind of black hole called a Schwarzschild, or primordial, black hole—one that has mass but no spin or electric charge. 

There are a couple of ways theoretically to get energy out of a black hole, they wrote. For example, particles or waves moving around a spinning black hole can be flung away with more energy than they went in with, under certain conditions. Basically, they’re extracting energy from the black hole's spin. 

Webmaster addition: Don't drop the damned thing or it will eat the Earth!

CRISPR—Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats—is the microbial world’s answer to adaptive immunity. Bacteria don’t generate antibodies when they are invaded by a pathogen and then hold those antibodies in abeyance in case they encounter that same pathogen again, the way we do. Instead, they incorporate some of the pathogen’s DNA into their own genome and link it to an enzyme that can use it to recognize that pathogenic DNA sequence and cut it to pieces if the pathogen ever turns up again.

The enzyme that does the cutting is called Cas, for CRISPR associated. Although the CRISPR-Cas system evolved as a bacterial defense mechanism, it has been harnessed and adapted by researchers as a powerful tool for genetic manipulation in laboratory studies. It also has demonstrated agricultural uses, and the first CRISPR-based therapy was just approved in the UK to treat sickle-cell disease and transfusion-dependent beta-thalassemia.

Now, researchers have developed a new way to search genomes for CRISPR-Cas-like systems. And they’ve found that we may have a lot of additional tools to work with.

“This is in my opinion, the worst thing that’s ever happened to our country in my lifetime in the world, and the government’s role cannot be denied,” — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on C-19-Vaxx

History is a trickster. It unfolds emergently with uncanny creativity, often blindsiding humanity with the unanticipated consequences and non-linear outcomes of previous unfoldings. So, here we are now in a Second Civil War. Really? “Between whom?” you might ask. Between truth and untruth. Between a sociopathic bureaucratic blob steeped in lies and a citizenry obliged to live and die by the blob’s lies.

Case-in-point: the emergent evolution of US public health agencies, the CDC, the FDA, the NIH, the NIAID and their many fiefdoms, into a gigantic engine of death fueled by incessant and persistent lying. The people running these agencies lied to you about the creation and origin of the novel corona virus, SARS Covid-19. Then they lied about the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines created as the sovereign remedy for Covid-19. They also lied about and suppressed actual effective treatments for the disease they invented and loosed on the world and then coerced the whole medical establishment into breaking its Hippocratic oath (first do no harm) to administer vaccines that killed. They lied about these things knowingly. And through the whole three-year episode, US public health has hidden the data about Covid and the vaccines while aggressively lying about it and punishing American citizens who found ways to expose the truth.

Today you will get to see the data that nobody wants you to see. FINALLY.

No State or country has ever released record-level public health data on any vaccine.

Privacy is not the reason for this; the data can be easily obfuscated (which we did on this data) so that no record entry would match that of any person, living or dead.

The reason the data is kept secret is simple: it would expose the fact that the COVID vaccines are unsafe, as well as all the vaccines that I have been able to get record-level data on.

Today, thanks to a courageous whistleblower who works at the New Zealand Ministry of Health, we have record-level information from a large population of all ages and are making it public for the first time in history. Buy New $24.99 ($0.10 / Count) (as of 04:57 UTC - Details)

Here is the Rumble video announcing the leak.

There was a YouTube link as well, but YouTube censored it within minutes of posting, just like we knew they would.

Just as you suspected, the COVID vaccines have killed millions of people worldwide, an estimated 1 death per 1,000 doses on average in a standard population.

Travel was halted across Europe Saturday as heavy snow blanketed cities and freezing temperatures set in following a week of deadly early-season storms.

Flights were grounded in Munich and Dublin Saturday after a winter storm dumped snow across southern Germany and parts of Austria, Switzerland and the Czech Republic, disrupting travel across the continent.

Hundreds of flights in and out of Munich were canceled and not expected to resume until Sunday morning, the airport announced.

Video captured airplanes and the tarmac at Munich Airport blanketed in white as crews worked to clear the wintery mess.

Delays of an hour or more were reported at London, Vienna and Zurich airports, according to tracking service Flightaware.

The United States must expand and modernize its nuclear arsenal beyond planned improvements to deter combined aggression from communist China and Russia, according to a new congressional report.

Planned nuclear capacity “limits” the United States' ability to effectively prevent a war with China and Russia, says the report (pdf) by the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States.

“Given current threat trajectories, our nation will soon encounter a fundamentally different global setting than it has ever experienced: we will face a world where two nations possess nuclear arsenals on par with our own,” the report says.

“The size and composition of the nuclear force must account for the possibility of combined aggression from Russia and China.”

The report emphasizes that a new conflict with either or both of the powers could realistically result in nuclear catastrophe and would need to be deterred.

“There is a growing risk of confrontation with China, Russia, or both. This includes the risk of military conflict,” the report says.

The Jerusalem Post removed an article on Saturday that accused another outlet of misrepresenting a doll as a dead Palestinian baby.

After the article was originally published, social media users assailed the Post, arguing that the image did indeed depict a human infant.

The Post issued a statement following the retraction blaming the issue on “faulty sourcing.”

“The article in question did not meet our editorial standards and was thus removed. We take this matter seriously and will be handling it internally in order to prevent similar incidents from reoccurring,” the statement continued. “We regret this incident and remain committed to upholding the highest journalistic standards at all times.”

American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh made another revealing statement. Referring to an unnamed official in Washington, Seymour Hersh reported that “cease-fire negotiations have begun between Russia and Ukraine.” According to him, the negotiations are being conducted by the chiefs of the General Staffs of the armed forces of Ukraine and Russia – Valery Zaluzhny and Valery Gerasimov. Moreover, Zaluzhny is reportedly negotiating with Russia without the consent of President Zelensky.

According to the investigator, the West has made it clear to Zelensky that if he does not agree to negotiate with Moscow, then someone else will do it. The negotiations are based on the situation on the front. Hersh states that the Russian side stands that Kiev should recognize Crimea and the Russian-controlled territories of Donbass, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions as part of Russia.

In its turn, Kiev could reportedly join NATO with the rest of its territory, but the alliance will take responsibility not to deploy its troops and offensive weapons on Ukrainian territory.

So far, neither Moscow nor Kiev has officially commented on the report.

On December 2, Hezbollah and its allies escalated attacks against the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from southern Lebanon in support of the Gaza Strip.

Hezbollah fighters targeted the Israeli military sites of Al-Raheb, Ruwaisat al-Alam, Jal al-Alam, al-Marj and al-Matula as well as the headquarters of the IDF’s 91th Division in the Pranit barracks on the Lebanese-Israeli border.

On December 2, the Mossad spy agency said that the Israeli negotiating team that engaged in talks with the Palestinian Hamas Movement in Qatar had been ordered home with talks on extending a ceasefire reaching a “dead end.”

“Due to the dead end in negotiations, and following instructions from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mossad head David Barnea ordered the negotiating team in Doha to return home,” said a statement from Netanyahu’s office issued on behalf of the agency.

“The Hamas terror group did not fulfill its obligations under the agreement that included releasing all the women and children that were on the list provided to Hamas that had authorized it,” the statement explained.

“The head of Mossad thanks the head of the CIA, Egypt’s intelligence minister, the prime minister of Qatar for their partnership and the tremendous mediation efforts that led to the release of 84 women and children from Gaza, in addition to 24 foreign nationals,” it added.

Former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has blamed his successor Vladimir Zelensky for border guards refusing to allow him to leave Ukraine on Friday.

Poroshenko is a member of parliament and leader of the small opposition party European Solidarity. He said he was trying to travel to Poland on official business to champion Kiev’s cause in Warsaw and Washington.

“I have a business trip [order] signed by the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, but the border guards did not let me through,” Poroshenko said on his Telegram channel. “Everyone can guess who canceled the document signed by the Speaker of the Parliament.”

“What happened today at the border is not a minor mischief. This is anti-Ukrainian sabotage” and “a blow to Ukraine's defense capability,” Poroshenko insisted.

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram continues to struggle with its algorithms enabling child molesters on its platforms, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. 

Earlier this year, the Journal and researchers at two US universities revealed that Instagram algorithms were helping connect accounts “devoted to the creation, purchasing and trading of underage-sex content.” Meta responded by setting up a child-safety task force and developing software tools to deal with the issue. 

Five months later, the company is “struggling to prevent its own systems from enabling and even promoting a vast network of pedophile accounts,” the Journal noted.

Earlier this week, the Journal cited research by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, showing that Instagram algorithms still recommended pedophile content. While some pedophilia-related hashtags have been banned, the system just spits out new ones with minor variations, they said.

According to the Canadians, a “network” of Instagram accounts that had up to 10 million followers apiece “has continued to livestream videos of child sex abuse months after it was reported to the company.” Another group, the Stanford Internet Observatory, flagged several groups “popular with Instagram’s child sexualization community” to Meta back in June, and said that some of them are still operating. 

After seven weeks of relentless Israeli bombing throughout Gaza, according to the modest estimates of the UN as of November 23 (right before a humanitarian ceasefire came into effect), more than 14,800 people have been killed in the enclave, including about 6,000 children and 4,000 women.

While these Israeli attacks on Gaza are by far the worst yet, with Israel dropping a reported 40,000 tons of explosives in less than two months, it is worth recalling that Israel has repeatedly waged assaults against the Palestinians of Gaza over the past 15 years.

Living in Gaza for years between late 2008 to March 2013, I was witness to two major Israeli assaults (and countless smaller ones over the years). Here, I will highlight what I saw and documented, to show that the horrific Israeli war crimes we are seeing coming out of Gaza are not new, even if they are exponentially worse this time around.