Pentagon says it hasn't determined the nature and purpose of the last 3 objects taken down, which it declines to describe as balloons.

U.S. military leaders on Sunday said they were in the dark about the exact nature and purpose of airborne objects shot down over the United States and Canada since Friday.

Unlike a balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina Feb. 4, described by officials as spy aircraft, it's unclear how the most recent objects stay aloft and move along, Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), said at a media briefing Sunday.

"I'm not going to categorize them as balloons," he said. "We're calling them objects for a reason. I'm not able to categorize how they stay aloft."

After the briefing, a defense official added that there was "no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns."

The FBI has discovered more relevant documents in a consensual search Friday of former Vice President Mike Pence's Carmel, Ind., home. Federal authorities removed one document with classification markings and six additional pages without markings, according to a Pence official.

"Following the discovery and disclosure of a small number of potentially classified documents that had inadvertently been transported to his home in Indiana, Vice President Pence and his legal team have fully cooperated with the appropriate authorities and agreed to a consensual search of his residence that took place today," Pence adviser Devin O'Malley said. "The Department of Justice completed a thorough and unrestricted search of five hours and removed one document with classified markings and six additional pages without such markings that were not discovered in the initial review by the vice president's counsel."

Two officials confirmed the search to CBS News Friday morning, and local police said they were directing traffic in the area while the search was carried out. No warrant was issued, and the search took place with the cooperation of Pence's team. The Justice Department declined to comment.

The high-altitude balloons promise a cheap monitoring platform

The US military is conducting wide-area surveillance tests across six midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons, documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reveal.

Up to 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons are being launched from rural South Dakota and drifting 250 miles through an area spanning portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before concluding in central Illinois.

Travelling in the stratosphere at altitudes of up to 65,000ft, the balloons are intended to "provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats", according to a filing made on behalf of the Sierra Nevada Corporation, an aerospace and defence company.

Hysterics at the Chinese balloon overflying the U.S. - taken to volume 11 - through scrambling a hush-hush Raptor jet (F-22) to 'pop' it, and then bally-hooing the 'pop' as Raptor's first ever 'air-to-air kill', may be a source for quiet derision around the world, yet paradoxically this seemingly trivial event may cast a long shadow over the U.S. war-timetable for Ukraine.

For it is the U.S. political calendar that may yet determine what happens next in Ukraine - from the western side.

Seemingly nothing important occurred - it was an instant of spy frenzy, leaving Biden's 'tough task' unchanged: He needs to convince the American voter, facing collapsing standards of living, that they misread the 'runes'; that rather than gloom, the economy - contrary to their lived experience - is 'working well for them'.

Biden needs to perform this magic against polls that say only 16% of Americans feel better off since the start of his tenure, and 75% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters wish him to not stand in 2024. Significantly, this message is coming today from the Democratic-leaning media, suggesting thoughts of replacing him are already in circulation.

For now, Biden's allies in the party establishment (the DNC) continue to clear the way for his candidature - postponing initial primaries (in which Biden could be expected to be trounced) for a later South Carolina primary election, where Black and Latino voters would reflect demographics in which Biden might (possibly) shine. It may work; it may not.

Simply put, against this highly sceptical Party backdrop, Biden will have to change American perceptions of the economy at a moment when many indicators signal further deterioration. It will be a 'heavy lift'. The economic team, for sure, will be insisting: 'Keep the focus on economic achievements! We don't want distractions from any foreign policy débacles; We do not want the TV debates to centre on Balloons, or around Abrams tanks: 'It's the economy, stupid!''.

The 'Chinese balloon' was popped, yes, but similarly popped was Team Biden's hope to negotiate a limited understanding with a tetchy President Xi that could stop China tensions becoming a spoiler issue in the primary debates. The balloon incident obliged the U.S. to cancel Blinken's appointment with Xi (even though such a meeting with the head of state would be a rare event).

The powerful 'China hawk' faction in the U.S. was ecstatic. The China balloon 'kill' inadvertently, and in an instant, elevated China to 'Main Threat'. It was the chance for these hawks to 'pivot' foreign policy back from Ukraine and Russia - to fully focus on China.

What in the name of God is going on in America?

Following last week's comically bizarre 'Chinese Spy Balloon Shoot-down', this weekend the Pentagon declared that it shot down two MORE 'Chinese balloons' over Alaska and Canada, and that it scrambled fighter jets to investigate a 'radar anomaly' over Montana. (And, since airing, a FOURTH balloon has been downed by the US Air Force over Lake Huron.)

What's different this week is that the Pentagon isn't exactly confirming that these latest 'objects' are balloons, much less Chinese 'spy' ones. In fact, the media and govt spokespeople seem to be deliberately insinuating that these 'unidentified objects' are... extraterrestrial in origin!

In this NewsReal, Joe & Niall suggest that the USA is NOT 'under attack' - from either China or aliens. More likely, the Pentagon is knocking out Chinese versions of the very same network of stratospheric spy balloons the US government sent up for global military surveillance many years ago. Seen in this context, the Pentagon is 'taking out' a competing sub-space ISR network under the guise of an 'alien invasion', thereby 'setting the theater' for an upcoming proxy war with China...


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An unnamed Israeli military official told Saudi Arabia's Elaph newspaper on 9 February that Tel Aviv will not hesitate to bomb Iranian aid deliveries for disaster-struck Syria under claims that Tehran seeks to "take advantage of the tragic situation ... to send weapons and equipment to Hezbollah."

The anonymous official added Israel has "intelligence" to back up their claims, as the Israeli army has "intensified its monitoring by air, land, and sea of ​​everything that Iran is transporting to Syria."

Iran has been one of the leading countries providing humanitarian assistance to Syria since a 7.8 magnitude earthquake devastated the country's northwest region.

Lula during the inauguration of the ophthalmology and diagnostic units in Benfica, Rio de Janeiro.

Stolen elections have consequences.

Brazil's socialist President, Lula da Silva, has made mandatory childhood vaccinations a condition of receiving government subsidies.

The socialist president announced that parents would once again need to provide proof of vaccination for their children in order to participate in the Bolsa Familia program and receive the benefit, or else families will not receive any help from the government.

"The Bolsa Família Program (BFP) in Brazil is a conditional cash transfer program with national coverage that aims to support families living in poverty or extreme poverty, as well as expanding access to education and health services. The program was created by the federal government in October 2003 and enshrined in law in January 2004," according to Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Sudan's ruling military concluded a review of an agreement with Russia to build a navy base on the Red Sea in the African country, two Sudanese officials said Saturday.

They said the deal was awaiting the formation of a civilian government and a legislative body to be ratified before it takes effect. The officials said Moscow met Sudan's most recent demands, including providing more weapons and equipment.

"They cleared all our concerns. The deal has become OK from the military side," one official said.

If you think the reasons behind the First World War were incomprehensible, imagine what historians of the future — pan-frying peccary loins over their camp fires — will think about World War Three. Some people started something in Ukraine... and then the USA blew up the main energy supply line of its NATO ally, Germany... say, what...?!?

Weird, a little bit. A sane person in a sane world would call sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines an act-of-war against a friendly nation, since the result was to virtually destroy the basis of Germany's industry, not to mention the domestic comfort of German citizens. Now, thanks to 85-year-old Seymour Hersh, the independent investigator who uncovered the My Lai Massacre in 1969 and reported on the depraved antics of American jailers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004, we have a pretty good idea how the Nord Stream caper went down.

For a year before the op, "Joe Biden" and Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland — architect of the 2014 Maidan Coup in Ukraine, which kicked-off the present fiasco there — blabbed about "ending" the Nord Streams. Curiously, the Germans said nothing. Meanwhile, the US made a deal to beef up military bases in Norway, an original NATO signatory (1949), for staging the Nord Stream sabotage op. Of course, Norway, being Western Europe's sole remaining oil-and-gas exporter, had an interest in eliminating its competition.

Former House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff allegedly leaked highly classified information so frequently that a former CIA director claims he was forced to limit how much information he gave to him and his staff.

Mike Pompeo, who served in that post for a year before then-President Donald Trump named him secretary of state, made the accusation and claims in a Fox News interview on Wednesday.

"During my time as CIA director and secretary of state, I know that he leaked classified information that had been provided to him," Pompeo, who is rumored to be considering a run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, said.

No doubt due to the nature of such information, Pompeo did not go into details about the suspected leaks. However, he did say that the issue got so bad he had to restrict what he could share with members of Congress.

"Outnumbered" co-host Emily Compagno, after emphasizing what a huge problem that is, asked Pompeo why there hadn't been any accountability if leaking that kind of information is "a felony at a minimum, up to treason."

Pompeo said:

"It's a complicated process, right? It's difficult to pin down precisely what happened. But I could tell you that when we provided information to him and to his staff, it ended up in places it shouldn't have been with alarming regularity. We could see it. In the end, I decided I held back information from them as a result."