President Joe Biden attempted to illustrate his support for Israel by touting a supposed wartime meeting with former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir during a time when he was in law school and the former PM had not yet been elected.

Biden said he met with Meir during 1967's Six-Day War, in which he claimed he served as a "liaison" between Israel and Egypt. He made the remarks during a menorah lighting at the White House Wednesday, apparently referencing a meeting he had with Meir just before a 1973 conflict, Fox News reported.

The Six-Day War, in which Israel annihilated a surprise attack from the Arab coalition of Jordan, Syria and Egypt and reshaped the Middle East, broke out a year before the future president graduated Syracuse University College of Law, according to the report. Meir was elected prime minister two years later.

"I have known every — every prime minister well since Golda Meir, including Golda Meir. And during the Six-Day War, I had an opportunity to — she invited me to come over because I was going to be the liaison between she and the Egyptians about the Suez.

"And I sat in front of her desk. And she had a guy — her staff member — to my right. His name was Rabin. And she kept flipping those maps up and down. She had that bevy of maps — sort of kept it — and it was — it was so depressing what she was — about what happened. She gave me every detail."

White House press secretary Jen Psaki appeared to blame the number of unvaccinated Americans for the continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic.

During his presidential bid, Biden made it a campaign promise to "shut down the virus," then called former President Donald Trump's travel restrictions against China "xenophobic."

"What ever happened to President [Joe] Biden's promise to shut down the virus?" Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked Wednesday.

"We're working on it, Peter," Psaki said.

"There's another variant here, is the idea that you want people to wrap their heads around that the president, instead of shutting down the virus, is gonna try to help people amidst the virus?" Doocy continued.

An intensive secret lobbying campaign by Saudi Arabia, featuring "incentives and threats," reportedly succeeded in shutting down a UN investigation into human rights violations committed in the Yemen conflict this year.

Citing sources with close knowledge of the process, The Guardian reported that the Saudi carrot and stick approach forced members of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to vote against extending the independent war crimes probe in October.

It marked the first time a UNHRC resolution had been defeated in the agency's 15-year history. The vote saw a majority of 21 countries oppose the motion to allow the Group of Eminent Experts (GEE) on Yemen an additional two years to investigate. A previous vote in 2020 to extend their term had been opposed by only 12 countries.

"That kind of swing - from 12 no's to 21 - does not just happen," one official told the paper, which reported that "alarm bells" rang for the measure's supporters a week before the vote about how the Saudi campaign was apparently "very different" from previous years.

According to the report, Saudi Arabia warned Indonesia - the world's most populous Muslim country - that it would not recognize the Covid-19 vaccination credentials of citizens who were looking to travel to the holy city of Mecca if it didn't reject the resolution. Indonesia ended up casting an opposing vote.

Offhanded joke underscores closer relationship that Biden and Fauci have compared to Trump

President Joe Biden quipped on Thursday that his top Covid-19 adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci, could himself serve as president and that he sees the infectious disease expert more than he sees the first lady.

The offhanded joke came during an address Mr Biden gave on Thursday regarding his administration's Covid-19 response and the new omicron variant, which spurred the US to institute travel bans on South Africa and a handful of other southern African nations.

New data has unearthed specific information about Melbourne's 'freedom' protesters, including which suburbs they hail from.

Staggering new data has pinpointed exactly where Melbourne's "freedom" protesters hail from, with many found to be everyday Australians who have battled through consistent lockdowns and struggled to make ends meet.

Australian research company Roy Morgan released the data on Wednesday after monitoring and then analysing who attended Melbourne's anti-government protest outside Parliament House on November 20.

Ministers have given GPs in England the green light to provide less care to millions of patients for the next four months so they can join the "national mission" to urgently deliver Covid booster jabs.


Family doctors will spend less time monitoring people with conditions such as diabetes and heart problems, do fewer health checks on the over-75s and stop performing minor surgery until April.


Sajid Javid, the health secretary, and NHS bosses have approved the controversial changes so that GPs and practice nurses can join the drive to administer top-up shots as quickly as possible.

Doctors' leaders sought to reassure the public that anyone falling ill or worried about their health would still be seen and assessed.

The U.N. Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate (CTED) is now responsible for taking entire privately hosted websites offline, as they seek to take total control of the flow of information and establish their "Great Narrative." CTED notifies domain registrars of "extremist" sites -- i.e., those that promote narratives they don't approve of -- and the sites can no longer be found. This reflects a new level of internet censorship, but it is not just publishers who are in the crosshairs...it is all of us. Christian breaks it down in this Ice Age Farmer broadcast.


Sources

The Syrian government has warned farmers in northeast Syria against using the wheat seeds supplied by USAID, which is a department of the US State Department in Washington.

The "seeds contain a high rate of nematodes [plant-parasitic worms], which reached 40 percent, and this poses a great danger to agriculture in the region, especially as its effects cause great damage that is exacerbated by the passage of time," according to Said Hajji, head of the government's agriculture directorate in Hasaka province.

USAID says the wheat seeds it recently provided to farmers meet "high standards for safety and quality."

"USAID is supplying Adana and Cihan wheat seed varieties to Syrian farmers, which are sourced from the region and undergo a series of tests at a qualified lab in (the) Kurdish Region of Iraq to verify their quality before they are transported and distributed to farmers in northeast Syria," the spokesperson said.

President Joe Biden announced that he hoped America would continue spearheading international COVID-19 relief projects, saying it was a "moral obligation" to "vaccinate the rest of the world."

At a Thursday press conference, Biden announced a series of new policies to be implemented that would hopefully curb pandemic-related infections within the United States. New policies included an expansion of testing sites, a mandate for at-home testing to be made free of charge for all, and adjustments to the nation's already tightened travel restrictions.

But toward the end of his speech, the president focused globally, emphasizing that because infections continue to come from "elsewhere," the U.S. will have to "go to where it came from."

He first appeared publicly two weeks ago, on November 17, to say he had escorted a battery of Russian Army BUK missiles from Russia into Ukraine early in the month of July 2014; that was days before Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was downed and destroyed on July 17, 2014.

Tarakanov's claim contradicts everything known for seven years and made public by the US National Intelligence Council, State Department and White House; the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD); the Russian Defence Ministry; the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) headed by Dutch police; Dutch prosecutors at the murder trial which opened in Schiphol in March 2020; the presiding judge at the trial Hendrik Steenhuis, and his secret investigating judges; the Dutch lawyers defending the Russian Army officer in the dock; and the agency in charge of all evidence in the prosecution's case file, the Ukrainian Security Service SBU.

Tarakanov is an unusual name Russians aren't keen to have. It means cockroach. As insects go, these are very ancient - about 350 million years - very hardy, very numerous. There is no evidence that soldier Igor Tarakanov exists - except for a publication in English by the Bellingcat group two weeks ago, and in Russian at the same time by a related publication, TheInsider.

In their story, Tarakanov appears as one of thirty-four Russian soldiers, retired from active service and recruited to work as international mercenaries. Thirty-three of them were arrested in Minsk, Belarus, on July 29, 2020, in a plot which has been nicknamed in the press "Wagnergate". That's a reference to the Russian private military company called Wagner. Tarakanov has been reported as the 34th man who was not arrested.

A quick memory refresher: last year, on July 29, 2020, the Belarusian KGB and OMON special police arrested the 33 Russians when they were staying at a countryside resort outside Minsk. Shortly afterwards both the Russian and Ukrainian prosecutors filed extradition requests. Kiev claimed the Russians captured in Minsk were Wagner employees who had fought in the eastern Ukraine conflict and who had committed war crimes by fighting alongside the separatists against the Kiev forces.

There was wild speculation in the media as to why the 33 men were in Belarus. The rumours ranged from an alleged plot to overthrow the Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko shortly before the presidential election due on August 9, 2020, to an alleged plot by the SBU to capture the men, extract confessions for war crimes trials in Kiev, and possibly send their statements to the MH17 trial in The Netherlands.

In due course, it was confirmed there had indeed been a Ukrainian sting operation, and the 33 Russians had fallen into the trap. It turned out, it was reported in the Russian and western media, that Ukrainian agents had pretended to be a Russian private military company, using a fake website, fake emails, fake identities and Russian company letterheads, in order to provide the men with fake contracts to work as guards for Rosneft oil operations in Venezuela.

The selected recruits were lured from Russia to Belarus, and a flight from Minsk to Istanbul was booked for them. From Turkey they were told they would be flown on to Havana and then Caracas. The Ukrainian plan had been to force their Turkish flight as it crossed Ukraine airspace to land in Kiev and to arrest them at the airport. This plan was similar to the capture in May 2021, ten months later, of Belarus oppositionist Roman Protasevich when he was on a Ryanair flight between Athens and Vilnius, Lithuania, flying over Belarus. In Germany an operation like this is called a Himmelfahrtskommando ("suicide squad").

On July 31, 2020, the Belarusian news agency BELTA published a list of the 33 detained mercenaries with their names, patronymics, and dates of birth. Already in the first message, the detainees were called employees of the Wagner foreign private military company.

From this list, Novaya Gazeta of Moscow was able to publish more detail about each of the men. About a third of the detainees were veterans of the Wagner group. "Before considering the reported versions of the appearance of these brutal men in Belarus, let's look at the questionnaires filled out by them... "

Source: https://novayagazeta.ru/

Source: https://www.ukrinform.net/

The western media, the secret services and many government officials readily adopted the version which was published by the Ukrainian state agency Ukrinform. This is how the nickname for the affair became Wagnergate.

According to Ukrainian government sources reported by CNN, Wagnergate was "an elaborate intelligence sting by Ukraine, with the knowledge and alleged support of the United States. According to the Ukrainian intelligence officials, the Ukrainian-led operation got US cash, technical assistance and advice from the CIA on how to draw the Russian mercenaries in. A senior US official told CNN those claims are 'false.' He indicated US intelligence was aware of the operation but denied any involvement. The official, who requested anonymity as he was not authorized to speak publicly, suggested efforts to implicate US agencies may be an attempt to share, or even pass, blame for what was a high-risk Ukrainian operation that went wrong. CNN spent weeks in Ukraine, verifying and reviewing accounts of the operation and speaking to the men who were on the inside."
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/

This CNN report appeared on September 8, 2021, just days before Bellingcat started broadcasting. CNN made no mention of Tarakanov or of BUK missiles. Nor did the US intelligence or Ukrainian goverrnment sources who briefed CNN mention the MH17 shootdown or trial. "According to CNN's Ukrainian sources, the failure was a serious blow to Ukrainian intelligence who they say had worked on hooking the Russian suspects for close to 18 months. 'If these people would have ended up here in Ukraine, the details of their criminal acts would have become known around the world,' one of the sources told CNN. 'Ukraine could have brought them to justice and shown that our fight with Russia is serious and that we won't raise our hands in surrender,' the source added. "

Two weeks after CNN, the Wagnergate story resurfaced in the Ukrainian media on September 24, 2021. One of the Bellingcat writers, Christo Grozev (lead image), told a Ukrainian publication that three of the Russian candidates for the fake Venezuela operation "may be involved in the MH17 crash. Two of them boasted themselves that they were at the launch site, but, to be honest, this is not supported by objective data." Note the subjunctive verb and the disclaimer of evidence.

One of them, according to Grozev, claimed he had "accompanied the convoy with BUKs and in a managerial role was engaged in convoys of these BUKs [note the plural] from the border of Ukraine and Russia to the distribution point in the Lugansk region."

Igor Tarakanov was making his first appearance. Bellingcat was conceding he hadn't gone to Belarus with the others; had not been arrested; and apart from his say-so, there was no evidence of his BUK claim. At first, Bellingcat wasn't giving him his name. That surfaced several weeks later on November 17. According to the new publication, "at least two of the mercenaries claimed to have used sophisticated, Russia-provided anti-aircraft weaponry in and around a location near Snizhne on certain days that might make them useful witnesses in the ongoing MH17 trial. One of the mercenaries had even spoken of having escorted a BUK-TELAR [transporter-erector-launcher-and-radar] across the Russian-Ukrainian border — an anti-aircraft weapon of the same type as of the one that shot down MH17 - in early July 2014."

The individual identified is still not named as Tarakanov. There is no photograph of him alongside the others identified by Bellingcat in their report. The source of these papers included documentation created by the SBU to lure the Russians. The earlier claim that the BUK-TELAR battery had been deployed in the Lugansk area is missing from the report. The number of BUKs has dropped from several to one. The name Tarakanov appears in the report as one of the group, but only that he did not appear in the group which traveled from Moscow to Minsk. There is no evidence of the missing man talking about escorting BUK-TELARs into Ukraine days before July 16, which is the official version of the date presented by Dutch prosecutors at the MH17 trial.
In the parallel publication in Russian by The Insider, it was reported that the 34th man was still expected to appear in Moscow and travel with the party to Minsk. "On July 15, 2020, 34 tickets were purchased from Minsk to Istanbul for a flight departing in 10 days. With the help of a Ukrainian travel agent hired by the scouts, 34 tickets were found for a flight departing for Turkey on July 25... the main persons of interest to the GUR [Ukrainian military intelligence agency] were included in the list of 34... Thus, on July 15, 34 tickets were purchased from Minsk to Istanbul for a flight departing in 10 days."

Source: https://theins.ru/

The Insider repeats the same claims of the Bellingcat report that one of the 34-man group had escorted BUK missiles into Ukraine in early July; that Tarakanov had been one of the original 34 recruits; and that he had dropped out. In the Bellingcat version, the 34th man had gotten suspicious; in the Insider version he had become ill.

A report by Regnum reveals that the July 15, 2020, seat reservations and ticketing by Turkish Airlines - paid for in cash - counted only 33 individuals, not the 34 reported by The Insider. The data of these Turkish Airline electronic tickets suggest that no 34th man was planned for or expected in Minsk. These data were published on August 2, 2020.

Source: https://regnum.ru/

Research by Alexander Kotz, a reporter for Komsomolskaya Pravda in Moscow, revealed on August 6, 2020, the 33 names booked initially to fly on Turkish Airlines to Istanbul, as well as travel documentation, reservation agents, and photographs of several of the 33 men arrested in Minsk.
Source: https://www.kp.ru/

The link between Tarakanov as the 34th man and the BUK TELAR missile deployment days earlier than the Dutch version comes from questionnaire papers gathered by the SBU from the fake recruitment operation. The papers revealing the early July BUK-TELAR delivery have not been published. They are missing, like Tarakanov himself.

Kotz reported on the Belarus arrest operation more than a year ago. He has also reported on the role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), first in devising the plan, and then exposing what went wrong with the Ukrainian operation. "Operations in intelligence and counterintelligence are not figure skating or rhythmic gymnastics, where the performance of complex elements is evaluated. Here success or failure is evaluated by the final result. It is necessary, as in hockey, to look at the scoreboard. And there today we see that the Russian citizens are at home. What is this, if not the failure of the CIA and their Ukrainian partners? "

According to Kotz, reporting this month, Russian counterintelligence sources have told him two CIA agents in Kiev, Timothy Skovin and Brian O'Bern, were the masterminds of the plot to sting the Russians.
Left, Timothy Skovin; right, Brian O'Bern. Source: https://www.kp.ru/

According to Kotz, the postponement in the flight plan of the 33 mercenaries in Minsk followed an order from the Ukrainian President, Vladimir Zelensky, who had just agreed with the Kremlin on a temporary ceasefire in the fighting in Donbass. The delay led to the arrests which, Kotz claims, was a coordinated operation by the Russian and Belarusian services. "Russian counterintelligence worked to prevent this, which quickly and efficiently unraveled this tangle, naming almost everyone who was involved in the first act of a state prank in history. "