Democratic New York Rep. Eliot Engel was caught on a hot mic Tuesday appearing to admit that he only cared about speaking at a press conference on the George Floyd protests because he has a primary opponent.

Local officials held a press conference Tuesday after rioters and looters ransacked New York City on Monday night. The press conference livestream appears to show Engel asking to speak at the event before telling a local official: "If I didn't have a primary I wouldn't care."

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. asked Engel to repeat himself, and the congressman obliged. "If I didn't have a primary I wouldn't care," Engel repeated.

"Don't do that to me," Diaz responded.

Australian researchers query origin of data used for Lancet study, but stress there is no evidence drug is a safe or effective treatment


Questions have been raised by Australian infectious disease researchers about a study published in the Lancet which prompted the World Health Organization to halt global trials of the drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19.

The study published on Friday found Covid-19 patients who received the malaria drug were dying at higher rates and experiencing more heart-related complications than other virus patients. The large observational study analysed data from nearly 15,000 patients with Covid-19 who received the drug alone or in combination with antibiotics, comparing this data with 81,000 controls who did not receive the drug.

The findings prompted researchers from around the world to reassess their own clinical trials of the drug for preventing and treating Covid-19. The World Health Organization halted all its trials involving hydroxychloroquine due to the concerns raised in the study about its efficacy and safety. It was once viewed as among the most promising medicines to treat the virus, though no study to date has found this to be the case, and the drug can have toxic side-effects. The Australian Department of Health had been stockpiling millions of doses of the drug in case clinical trials found it proved useful.

US President Donald Trump said in an interview with Fox radio that the problems in the world would be easier to solve if Russia were a part of the G7. The return of Russia to the summits of the G7 format requires common sense, since half of the issues discussed at these meetings are connected with Russia.

The host asked the American leader what Russian President Vladimir Putin had done to gain his confidence and return to the club of the leading countries of the world.

"Well, he helped us with the oil industry, which is good for him, too, and we raised it and now we can save millions of jobs in Texas, North Dakota and other places in Oklahoma. Now the production there is stable. They (oil prices) fell to zero, which would have cost five million jobs. But in general it is not a question of what he did. "It's a matter of common sense," Trump said. - We have a G7, it is not there, and half of the questions are devoted to Russia. If he was there, it would be much easier to solve them. "

The "leak"- this time from the German Ministry of the Interior - shows a "secret" 93-page document, admitting basically how badly Germany reacted to the corona hoax - no, the paper doesn't call it a "hoax", but you can taste it between the lines. In essence it says the economic and social collateral damage is much, but much larger than the impact of COVID-19- in terms of lives lost due to postponed treatment for cancer, heart and other life-threatening diseases, collapse of social infrastructure, despair, suicide, joblessness - no future in sight... for many the world just collapsed like a house of cards - no perspective nothing.

The paper also refers to other corona outbreaks from earlier years, and "regular" flu epidemics, which were much more serious than the 2020 one - the latter, COVID-19, denominated by WHO as a pandemic - under orders of the mighty behind the WEF -The World Economic Forum - the infamous Davos Club, to which also Bill Gates belongs, the vaccine tsar, who stated in a February 2010 Southern California TED Talk entitled "Innovating to Zero" -

"If we are doing are a real good job [vaccinating], we can reduce the world population by 10% to 15%" (see this).

Please, for your own sake and for that of your children and children's children, keep this always in mind, when you hear Bill Gates and vaccination. The one that we are all risking to be "forced" to get - is the one against COVID-19.

Would you trust Mr. Bill Gates - for any vaccine, actually for any health advice?

But, it gets better (or actually worse), he basically makes WHO's health policies as far as vaccination goes, literally wiping out (excluding) any other medically and scientifically proven preventive and curative measures.

The Revolution Won't Be Televised because this is not a revolution. At least not yet.

Burning and/or looting Target or Macy's is a minor diversion. No one is aiming at the Pentagon (or even the shops at the Pentagon Mall). The FBI. The NY Federal Reserve. The Treasury Department. The CIA in Langley. Wall Street houses.

The real looters - the ruling class - are comfortably surveying the show on their massive 4K Bravias, sipping single malt.

This is a class war much more than a race war and should be approached as such. Yet it was hijacked from the start to unfold as a mere color revolution.

US corporate media dropped their breathless Planet Lockdown coverage like a ton of - pre-arranged? - bricks to breathlessly cover en masse the new American "revolution." Social distancing is not exactly conducive to a revolutionary spirit.

There's no question the US is mired in a convoluted civil war in progress, as serious as what happened after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King in Memphis in April 1968.

Yet massive cognitive dissonance is the norm across the full "strategy of tension" spectrum. Powerful factions pull no punches to control the narrative. No one is able to fully identify all the shadowplay intricacies and inconsistencies.

Hardcore agendas mingle: an attempt at color revolution/regime change (blowback is a bitch) interacts with the Boogaloo Bois - arguably tactical allies of Black Lives Matter - while white supremacist "accelerationists" attempt to provoke a race war.

To quote the Temptations: it's a ball of confusion.

Antifa is criminalized but the Boogaloo Bois get a pass (here is how Antifa's main conceptualizer defends his ideas). Yet another tribal war, yet another - now domestic - color revolution under the sign of divide and rule, pitting Antifa anti-fascists vs. fascist white supremacists.

Meanwhile, the policy infrastructure necessary for enacting martial law has evolved as a bipartisan project.

We are in the middle of the proverbial, total fog of war. Those defending the US Army crushing "insurrectionists" in the streets advocate at the same time a swift ending to the American empire.

Amidst so much sound and fury signifying perplexity and paralysis, we may be reaching a supreme moment of historical irony, where US homeland (in)security is being boomerang-hit not only by one of the key artifacts of its own Deep State making - a color revolution - but by combined elements of a perfect blowback trifecta: Operation Phoenix; Operation Jakarta; and Operation Gladio.

But the targets this time won't be millions across the Global South. They will be American citizens.

Things continue to spiral out of control in the U.S. as the myth of policing fails and anti-civilizational forces move into the power vacuum.

And while I'm still completely committed to the end of the U.S. empire and its imperial edicts, It's also not lost on me what's happening, who's making it happen and how they are taking advantage of this.

I warned you President Trump's near atavistic pursuit of U.S. 'enemies' in places like Syria, Iraq, Iran and Venezuela would turn the world against us. Look at the protests for George Floyd across Europe and tell me things haven't changed.

The empire is the problem. It's a lesson Justin Raimondo taught me at Antiwar.com twenty years ago. And it's only now that that idea has reached any kind of critical mass.

Are we going to dismantle the empire in an orderly fashion or a chaotic one? The animals on the streets have cast their vote. What's yours?

And while Trump has made a hash of foreign policy in so many ways, I also told you that he was smart enough to only play the crazy Ivan role up the to point of actually starting a shooting war.

China's priority infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), faces enormous problems just seven years after it was proclaimed in 2013. Serious problems and charges of China luring poorer nations into what a leading Indian analyst termed a "debt trap diplomacy," began to appear already in 2018 when Malaysia and Pakistan, under new governments demanded a renegotiation of terms with Beijing. Now the global economic impact of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, with the simultaneous collapse of economies from China to the USA, to the EU and across the developing world, are creating staggering new challenges for the China prized project.

When Xi Jinping first announced the ambitious China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), then known as the Economic Silk Road in 2013, it was hailed as a much-needed boost to world infrastructure development which had the promise to lift hundreds of millions across Eurasia and beyond out of poverty. Many saw it as the effort to replicate the economic model that gave China the most extraordinary industrial growth of any nation in modern history.

US President Donald Trump has dubbed Russia rejoining G7 "common sense" - but the move was met with resistance by some US allies. Trump insists it is better to talk with Moscow, instead of talking about it.

"Many of the things that we talk about are about [Russian President Vladimir] Putin," Trump told Fox News Radio. Having the Russian leader in the room during the G7 talks would "get things done," he added.

His statement came after the UK and Canada - two of America's closest allies, and fellow G7 members - voiced their opposition to the idea of having Russia onboard again. London, for example, demanded Moscow be barred from rejoining the group until it "ceases its aggressive and destabilizing activity."

Republican allies of President Donald Trump attacked the FBI's probe of his 2016 presidential campaign on Wednesday, but failed to get a key witness to agree that former U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation was unfounded.

At the opening hearing in a Republican-led Senate probe that Democrats called politically motivated, former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein defended his 2017 decision to appoint Mueller to investigate Russian election interference and numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.

"I still believe it was the right decision under the circumstances," Rosenstein told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"All the charges that were filed were legitimate," he said when asked about cases filed against a half-dozen campaign officials and Trump associates.

Surgisphere, whose employees appear to include a sci-fi writer and adult content model, provided database behind Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine hydroxychloroquine studies

The World Health Organization and a number of national governments have changed their Covid-19 policies and treatments on the basis of flawed data from a little-known US healthcare analytics company, also calling into question the integrity of key studies published in some of the world's most prestigious medical journals.

A Guardian investigation can reveal the US-based company Surgisphere, whose handful of employees appear to include a science fiction writer and an adult-content model, has provided data for multiple studies on Covid-19 co-authored by its chief executive, but has so far failed to adequately explain its data or methodology.

Data it claims to have legitimately obtained from more than a thousand hospitals worldwide formed the basis of scientific articles that have led to changes in Covid-19 treatment policies in Latin American countries. It was also behind a decision by the WHO and research institutes around the world to halt trials of the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine. On Wednesday, the WHO announced those trials would now resume.