Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg warned that a forthcoming book by a former prosecutor may jeopardize the criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump and his business empire.

Former Vice President Al Gore ranted about climate change during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and condemned the purported detainment of activist Greta Thunberg.

Tech executives whose online platforms routinely fail to protect children from "online harm" will face criminal charges and up to two years in jail, after UK ministers reached a deal this week.

Rishi Sunak was facing the prospect of defeat in a Commons vote on Tuesday after a rebel amendment to the online safety bill won opposition support. However, supporters have now withdrawn the amendment after the government agreed to change the legislation. -The Guardian

As part of the agreed upon legislation, senior managers at tech firms who ignore child safety warnings from Ofcom, the UK's communications regulator, would be held criminally liable over content deemed 'harmful.' Examples include the promotion of self-harm and eating disorders.

So basically, anything 'they' don't like and deem 'harmful.'

After destroying all individual freedoms in her idyllic island country, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Wednesday that she will resign and step down on Sunday.

Photos that were leaked from Hunter Biden’s laptop reveal Hunter had direct access to the garage where his father Joe Biden stored classified documents.

Retired Congressman Ron Paul is a man of integrity. He was sometimes described as the conscience of the Republican party.

Congressman Greg Steube (R-FL) was rushed to a hospital in Sarasota Wednesday afternoon after he fell off of a roof.

Elon Musk is taking shots at the World Economic Forum after Klaus Schwab, the chairman of the World Economic Forum, spoke about trying to “master the future”.

Schwab is said to be the leading proponent of what he calls “stakeholder capitalism.” This appears to be the comment with which Elon Musk took the most issue. He was speaking at an awards ceremony for so-called “cultural leaders” on topics such as climate change. He was honored for his contributions to those topics and went out of his way to discuss mastering the future.

The Republican Party has proposed a bill that would eliminate the need for the Internal Revenue Service and the need to pay income taxes.

The idea hits at the heart of the Democrat's lust for money.

President Joe Biden did not take long to speak out against the bill. He promises to veto the bill if it ever makes it to his desk. He cannot seem to bring himself to give Americans a break.

Republicans want to set up a tax system called the “Fair Tax.” The states would control this type of tax system. But Biden is all about power and having control. He cannot sign a bill that would give away his power.

Thousands of people from around the world have answered Ukraine’s call to arms and have traveled to the country to fight, with around 100 foreign nationals killed on the battlefield over the last year in addition to more than 1,000 wounded, the Washington Post reported.

In a series of interviews with foreign volunteers, the Post highlighted a range of different motivations driving the fighters. While some had found a new sense of purpose in Ukraine’s cause, others “seemed more interested in posing for Instagram than committing to the drudgery of trench warfare,” or were “too eager to live out fantasies from the Call of Duty video game.” A smaller number have “faced more serious allegations of theft or sexual assault,” or were fleeing legal trouble at home.

“There’s a part of me that’s doing it for the right reasons, and there’s part of me that’s doing it for the violence. It’s kind of a bit of both,” a British fighter told the outlet.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that the US is warming to the idea of helping Ukraine strike Crimea, something the Biden administration has previously avoided due to the risk of provoking a major response from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Citing unnamed US officials, the report said that after months of discussions with Ukrainian officials, the administration is now “starting to concede that Kyiv may need the power to strike the Russian sanctuary, even if such a move increases the risk of escalation.”

President Biden is still holding off sending the longer-range missiles that could hit targets in Crimea that Ukraine is seeking. But the US is discussing with Ukrainian officials how to attack the land bridge to Crimea Russia has secured for itself using US-provided weapons, such as US-provided HIMARS rocket systems and Bradley Fighting Vehicles.

The US will "soon" have laws to punish "illegal hate speech," EU Commission VP for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova told the World Economic Forum on Tuesday.

"Illegal hate speech, which you will have soon also in the U.S. I think that we have a strong reason why we have this in the criminal law," Jourova said.

Webmaster addition: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."  The First Amendment

Scientists on top of a Swiss mountain shot laser pulses into a stormy sky to guide lightning for the first time. This might pave the way for laser-based lightning protection systems for rocket launchpads, military bases, airports, and supertall buildings. There hasn't been an advance like this in lightning technology since Benjamin Franklin installed the first lightning rod in the 1750s, following an experiment flying a kite with a large metal key during a thunderstorm.

Webmaster addition: Interestingly enough, lightning rods are mentioned in the bible!

Federal bureaucrats use proxies to stifle all kinds of activities they don’t like. The “Twitter Files” are revealing this tactic to a new wave of Americans, but it has been around a long time.

The bureaucratic assault on the First Amendment is part of a larger movement to end personal liberty. The ultimate goal may be to assume financial control over the populace through implementation of a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

If officials can replace the existing currencies with digital, programmable money, they will claim the power to dictate if, when, and where individuals can spend money as well as what they can spend it on.

Those who question whether forces inside the federal government are actually pursuing such power may wish to review recent history around the Federal Reserve note "dollar."

The effort to control people by targeting their money escalated in 1970 with the Bank Secrecy Act. It targeted cash specifically by requiring banks to report transactions involving more than $10,000.

Nearly a year in, the war in Ukraine has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and brought the world to the brink of, in President Joe Biden’s own words, “Armageddon.” Alongside the literal battlefield has been a similarly bitter intellectual battle over the war’s causes. 

Commentators have rushed to declare the long-criticized policy of NATO expansion as irrelevant to the war’s outbreak, or as a mere fig leaf used by Russian President Vladimir Putin to mask what Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates recently called “his messianic mission” to “reestablish the Russian Empire.” Fiona Hill, a presidential advisor to two Republican administrations, has deemed these views merely the product of a “Russian information war and psychological operation,” resulting in “masses of the US public … blaming NATO, or blaming the US for this outcome.” 

Yet a review of the public record and many dozens of diplomatic cables made publicly available via WikiLeaks shows that US officials were aware, or were directly told over the span of years, that expanding NATO was viewed by Russian officials well beyond Putin as a major threat and provocation, that expanding it to Ukraine was a particularly bright red line for Moscow, that it would inflame and empower hawkish, nationalist parts of the Russian political spectrum, and that it could ultimately lead to war. 

Aryeh Deri, Israel's interior and health minister, has been disqualified from holding his office by the High Court in a bombshell judgement that has implications for the future of Benjamin Netanyahu's government and the judiciary itself.

Deri is one of Netanyahu's most experienced allies and head of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party.

Ahead of the judgement, his Shas ally Yaakov Margi, who is welfare minister, told an Israeli radio station if Deri is disqualified then "there will be no government".

"If the court disqualifies him, the prime minister will have to decide what to do," Margi said. "We have said all along that there is no reason for Aryeh Deri not to serve as a senior minister in Israel."

 Police fired tear gas at demonstrators in eastern Congo on Wednesday after dozens of people took part in an unauthorized protest in Goma against the presence of foreign troops to help quell violence from armed groups.

Authorities later detained some participants, as well as some journalists covering the protest.

Leaders of the seven-nation East African Community resolved last year to create and deploy a regional force to eastern Congo, where the M23 rebel group has been blamed for growing violence.

Kenyan troops arrived late last year, and another contingent from South Sudan was expected in the coming days. However, the troops have faced opposition from some Congolese.

Among the lesser-known holes in the Constitution cut by the Patriot Act of 2001 was the destruction of the "wall" between federal law enforcement and federal spies. The wall was erected in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which statutorily limited all federal domestic spying to that which was authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The wall was intended to prevent law enforcement from accessing and using data gathered by America’s domestic spying agencies.

Those of us who monitor the government’s destruction of personal liberties have been warning for a generation that government spying is rampant in the U.S., and the feds regularly engage in it as part of law enforcement’s well-known antipathy to the Fourth Amendment. Last week, the FBI admitted as much.

Here is the backstory.

On Monday morning, January 16, Ahmad Kahla, 41, from the village of Ramoun 12 km east of Ramallah, was killed in cold blood by Israeli soldiers. 

At approximately 8:00 a.m., Kahla and his 20-year-old son, Qusai, were on their way to work in their car when they were stopped by Israeli soldiers at a flying military checkpoint near the neighboring town of Yabrud. 

Ahmad was the eighth son out of ten children. His older brother, 45-year-old Zayed, looks at his newly orphaned nephew as the gathering space is congested with men and boys joining to grieve the loss of 41-year-old Ahmad.

The FBI on Tuesday responded to an attack on a substation in Randolph County, North Carolina.

Pacific Island nations have urged Japan to delay the release of wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant over fears it could contaminate fishing grounds.

The appeal on Wednesday came days after Japan announced that treated wastewater from the Fukushima plant — which was destroyed in an earthquake and a tsunami in 2011 — could be released into the sea “around this spring or summer”.

More than 1 million tonnes of water are being stored in about 1,000 tanks at the destroyed plant, hampering its decommissioning and in danger of leaking in the event of a major earthquake or tsunami.

The Pacific Island Forum (PIF), a regional bloc of 17 island nations, many of whom are still grappling with the legacy of nuclear testing decades ago, say the release of the water could have a significant effect on fishing grounds that their economies rely on, and where up to half of the world’s tuna is sourced.

Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram are modifying their regulations to allow transgender and non-binary users to post photos and videos featuring their bare breasts, according to an update published on Meta’s advisory board.

A far-left protestor from Stop Cop City ATL, a communist group and possibly Antifa, was killed Wednesday after shooting and wounding a Georgia State Patrol trooper according to the Georgia Department of Public Safety. The incident occurred just outside the “Cop City” police training center near Atlanta.

Before Covid, four types of pneumonia added together were the highest cause of death in the UK.  In a newly implemented Medical Examiner System to certify deaths, the Medical Examiner was certifying all types of pneumonia deaths as covid-19 deaths, a former Director of End-of-Life Care has said.

On Saturday, Sai, a former NHS Director of End-of-Life Care, wrote a Twitter thread which, amongst other things, gave a personal account of the changes to the system of reporting deaths implemented in the NHS:

“When four different diseases [are] grouped and now being called covid-19, you will inevitably see covid-19 with a huge death rate.  The mainstream media was reporting on this huge increase in covid-19 deaths due to the Medical Examiner System being in place.

“Patients being admitted and dying with very common conditions such as old age, myocardial infarctions, end-stage kidney failure, haemorrhages, strokes, COPD and cancer etc. were all now being certified as covid-19 via the Medical Examiner System.

A viral video is making the rounds online showing a young girl sucker-punching a young white kid in a charter school in Newark, Delaware.

Ronna Romney McDaniel doesn’t have the votes to win the RNC Chair position again according to insiders.

The World Economic Forum brings together politicians, corporate leaders, government leaders and quite a few nutjobs to Davos annually. This year is no exception.

Conservatives in general rightfully associate Planned Parenthood with the killing of unborn babies. But an exclusive report from a conservative organization in Idaho shows the malevolent organization is also deeply involved with poisoning the minds of children in the classroom.

You know that happy feeling when things are going your way? Everything is turning up roses? You got a nice buzz going? Well, if you feel that way then you certainly are not a member of Ukraine’s ruling elite. Some genuine chaos unfolding in Kiev in the wake of Russia’s victory in Soledar.

Let us commence with the news that someone (or a group of someones) assassinated Ukraine’s top three intelligence officials — the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Denis Monastyrsky, his first deputy Yevgeny Enin and the State Secretary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Yuriy Lubkovich. Wait a minute (some will say) we do not know if this was a mechanical failure or pilot error. True, no final conclusions, yet. But an eyewitness interviewed by one of the Kiev media claimed:

that the helicopter with the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine on board was spinning and burning in the air before the collision.

https://t.me/c/1840140143/126

If that witness is giving an accurate account then it is highly unlikely that the mid-air fireball was caused by pilot error or a mechanical malfunction. This sure sounds like a surface-to-air missile, like a U.S. supplied Stinger that popped up on the black market. Here is one of the rumors floating around Ukraine. It emerged shortly after the chopper crashed into a kindergarten courtesy of someone with the nom de plume, Hacker DPR Joker:

Webmaster addition: Another report is that the helicopter was accidentally shot down by Ukrainian air defense.

Protesters ended blockades Wednesday that had largely isolated the rich Santa Cruz region from the rest of Bolivia for more than 15 days, but leaders said the roadblocks could resume to press demands that the goverment free the region’s governor.

Gov. Luis Fernando Camacho, who is widely considered leader of opposition to Bolivia’s left-leaning national government, was detained late last year on “terrorism” charges related to previous demonstrations.

“It has been decided to lift the blockades,” said José Ernesto Serrate, head of rural areas for the Civic Committee for Santa Cruz. “We don’t discard that we will return with our measures” in the future.