A man who authorities say is a leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group and helped to organize a ring of other extremists and led them in the attack last month at the U.S. Capitol has held a top-secret security clearance for decades and previously worked for the FBI, his attorney said Monday.

Thomas Caldwell, who authorities believe holds a leadership role in the extremist group, worked as a section chief for the FBI from 2009 to 2010 after retiring from the Navy, his lawyer, Thomas Plofchan, wrote in a motion urging the judge to release him from jail while he awaits trial.

The defense said Caldwell, who has denied being part of the Oath Keepers, has held a top-secret security clearance since 1979, which required multiple special background investigations, according to Plofchan. Caldwell also ran a consulting firm that did classified work for the U.S. government, the lawyer said.

Iran's intelligence minister said persistent Western pressure could push Tehran to fight back like a "cornered cat" and seek nuclear weapons, which the Islamic Republic has for years insisted it has no intention of ever developing.

The remarks made in a television interview are a rare suggestion that Iran might have an interest in nuclear weapons, which Western nations have accused Iran of pursuing.

Iranian officials have repeatedly dismissed this charge, citing a fatwa or religious decree issued in the early 2000s by the Islamic Republic's top authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that bans the development or use of nuclear arms.

The United States and the other Western powers which originally signed up to a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran appear to be at an impasse over which side should return to the accord first, making it unlikely U.S. sanctions that have crippled its economy can be quickly removed.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that officials are considering a requirement that passengers provide a negative COVID-19 test ahead of domestic flights, according to an interview published on Sunday.

One of President Biden's first confirmed Cabinet members told "Axios on HBO" that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is engaged in "an active conversation" on whether to implement the requirement.

"What I can tell you is it's going to be guided by data, by science, by medicine and by the input of the people who are actually going to have to carry this out," he said. "But here's the thing: The safer we can make air travel in terms of perception as well as reality, the more people are going to be ready to get back in the air."

The claim often repeated by the mainstream media, social-media content moderators, and fact-checkers that lawsuits filed by President Donald Trump's campaign and Republicans were universally dismissed by the courts is untrue, according to a new analysis.

The findings do not necessarily suggest that if the lawsuits had all been decided before Joe Biden was certified as the official winner of the presidential election by Congress on Jan. 7 that former President Trump would have won the hotly contested election.

Nor would they necessarily have affected many of the Electoral College votes won by Biden in the disputed battleground states. Some of the legal victories took place in states like Colorado and Iowa where the popular vote counts for the respective winners of those states -Biden in Colorado and Trump in Iowa — were not close.

Of the 22 cases that have been heard by the courts and decided on their merits, Trump and Republicans have prevailed in 15, according to citizen journalist John Droz Jr., a physicist and environmental advocate in Morehead City, N.C.

This means Trump has won two-thirds of the cases fully adjudicated by the courts.

The Biden administration promised to reverse course on much of Trump's foreign policy, freezing troop withdrawals in Iraq and Afghanistan, while hinting US willingness to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal if Tehran returned to its commitments. In Syria, however, the new president appears to be continuing on the course set by his predecessor.

Two convoys numbering a total of 59 vehicles have made its way into Syria from two separate directions, the Syrian Arab News Agency has reported, citing local sources on the ground.

One of the convoys reportedly consisted of 45 vehicles, including refrigerators, tankers and trucks carrying military vehicles, and was said to have entered the country through the Semalka border crossing between Iraqi Kurdistan and the US-backed Kurdish-controlled region of northern Syria. Damascus considers the Semalka crossing illegal since it is outside the government's control.

As you know the International Criminal Court ruled Friday that it has jurisdiction to undertake an investigation of war crimes in occupied Palestinian territories, including Israeli settlements and its slaughter of civilians in Gaza. The decision has big symbolic resonance, and there's been a lot of response. I wanted to round up some of the usual suspects.

The State Department began Friday by issuing a neutral legal statement opposing the ICC's jurisdiction (responding to AP reporter Matt Lee's opening question). "We have serious concerns about the ICC's attempts to exercise its jurisdiction over Israeli personnel.... [T]he court's jurisdiction should be reserved for countries that consent to it or that are referred by the UN Security Council."

State spokesperson Ned Price went further on twitter, embracing Israel: "We will continue to uphold President Biden's strong commitment to Israel and its security, including opposing actions that seek to target Israel unfairly."

Aaron David Miller said the prompt response was telling.

The Biden Adm left no doubt about its reaction to ICC decision to probe Israeli and Palestinian war crimes. With Iran a top priority and Palestinian issue not; and facing greatest domestic challenge since FDR, Biden wisely just said no to this one.

George Bernard Shaw famously observed that he knew three types of economists. Those who were brilliantly right. Those who were brilliantly wrong. And those who taught.

Judging by her tenure at the Federal Reserve's helm and her advocacy now as Treasury Secretary of a super-sized budget stimulus package, it would seem that Janet Yellen falls into Mr. Shaw's brilliantly wrong category. For this, the country is likely to pay dearly.

Janet Yellen's Folly

Mrs. Yellen's last year as Federal Reserve Chair will long be remembered as one in which she kept interest rates too low and the Fed's balance sheet too large for too long. She did so in an apparent attempt to curry favor with President Donald Trump in her unsuccessful bid to get a second term as Fed Chair.

In the process, she contributed importantly to the creation of a global everything asset and credit market bubble. It was only once she left the Fed and was safely ensconced at the Brookings Institution that she warned of the risk to the U.S. economy of a mushrooming of the highly leveraged loan market, which was of her own making.

Tanzanian President John Magufuli has warned the country's health ministry against rushing into embracing the Covid-19 vaccines promoted by foreign companies and countries.

Magufuli cast doubt on the global urge to develop Covid-19 vaccine claiming that little has been done to help cure other diseases like tuberculosis, HIV-Aids, malaria among other infections.

"You should stand firm. Vaccinations are dangerous. If the white man was able to come up with vaccinations, he should have found a vaccination for Aids by now; he would have found a vaccination of tuberculosis by now; he would have found a vaccination for malaria by now; he would have found a vaccination for cancer by now," he said.

"The Health ministry must know that not every vaccination is meaningful to our nation. Tanzanians must be mindful so that we are not used for trials of some doubtful vaccinations which can have serious repercussions on our health," he added.

Little is known in Tanzania on the number of positive cases due to the government's stun position on the virus.

We have almost reached a full year since the spread of SARS-Cov2 was proclaimed a pandemic. If we are to believe the World Health Organization's and individual governments' official statistics, the number of confirmed cases is reaching 100 million with over 2 million deaths. Indeed, if these numbers can be relied upon, we can surely acknowledge there is a real pandemic.

It would be common sense, therefore, to expect, in fact demand, international health agencies and governments to make every effort to identify the virus' origin. Suspicions that the virus, now responsible for the spectrum of medical symptoms known as Covid-19, may have been bioengineered and escaped from a maximum security BSL-4 lab in Wuhan, China, were already voiced within a month after its identification was first reported. Several highly respected medical experts, including Dr. David Relman at Stanford University, have suggested there is a strong likelihood that the virus escaped the Wuhan facility. To date, early queries about its origins remain unanswered and new questions are mounting.


Recently, Jamie Metzl, a WHO advisor who earlier served under Biden in the Senate and in Bill Clinton's National Security Council and State Department, told the Toronto Sun that the hypothesis of the virus' natural origin in a Wuhan wet market is "a lie." It is no secret, Metzl noted, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was heavily engaged in "gain of function" research to "amplify the virility of viruses."

That there is very reasonable evidence that coronaviruses were being engineered in a laboratory goes back to 2003 and perhaps earlier. That year, many Russian medical scientists, including Moscow's head epidemiologist Dr. Nikolai Filatov, shared their opinions that the first SARS outbreak originated from a bioweapons lab.

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft Corporation and one of the world's richest men and philanthropists, has written a new book that hits the stores on February 16^th. Unlike his two previous books, this one is not about software and the digital revolution. Mr. Gates' new book covers grounds far beyond the author's background in software engineering and his active philanthropic interests in global development, public health and U.S. public education via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (founded in 2000).

According to the blurb for How to Avoid A Climate Disaster, "In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical — and accessible — plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe." In the introduction, Gates explains how he got involved with the climate change field via the problem of energy poverty that he came across in looking at issues of public health in developing countries. In field visits to parts of India and Sub-Saharan Africa, the initial impression of "why is it so dark, where are the lights?" naturally led to understanding that an essential part of poverty was the lack of reliable access to electricity for over a billion people in the world, half of them in Africa. Gates asks, "Where is the reliable and affordable electricity for offices, factories, and call centres, for lights to read by and for keeping vaccines chill in working refrigerators 24/7?"

The first parts of the book give readers an idea of Gates' intellectual journey. He cites the Cambridge physicist David Mackay who showed the link between per capita income and per capita energy use. This historical correlation between energy use and standards of living led Gates "to think about how the world could make energy affordable and reliable for the poor." The work of economist Vaclav Smil on the essential role of fossil fuels in the evolution of human civilization is also commended by Gates.