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Attention

DC National Guard commander says Pentagon restricted his authority before riot

Rebecca Kheel
The Hill
Tue, 26 Jan 2021 12:16 UTC
Maj. Gen. William Walker
Pentagon officials restricted the commander of D.C. National Guard's authorities ahead of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, the commander told The Washington Post in an interview published Tuesday.

Normally, a local commander would be able to make decisions on taking military action in an emergency when headquarters approval could take too much time.

But Maj. Gen. William Walker, the commanding general of the D.C. National Guard, told the Post the Pentagon took that power away from him ahead of the Capitol riot, which meant he could not immediately deploy troops when the Capitol Police chief called asking for help as rioters were about to breach the building.

Comment: Meanwhile, the Capitol Police Chief has apologized. From the Hill:
The acting Capitol Police chief on Tuesday offered a formal apology to Congress for the agency's security failures during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol by a mob of former President Trump's supporters, acknowledging police failed to adequately prepare despite knowing in advance that armed militia groups and white supremacists posed a threat.

"I am here to offer my sincerest apologies on behalf of the department," Yogananda Pittman, the acting Capitol Police chief, testified during a briefing with members of the House Appropriations Committee.

"On Jan. 6, in the face of a terrorist attack by tens of thousands of insurrectionists determined to stop the certification of Electoral College votes, the department failed to meet its own high standards as well as yours," Pittman told lawmakers.

Pittman was not in charge of the Capitol Police force on Jan. 6 or in the days leading up to the riot. She has been serving as acting chief since Jan. 11, following the resignation of former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who stepped down shortly after the riots.

Pittman said that Capitol Police knew in the days before the riot that militia groups and white supremacist organizations would be part of the efforts to protest Congress formally certifying President Biden's Electoral College victory. She also said that they knew some participants intended to bring weapons.

"We knew that there was a strong potential for violence and that Congress was the target," Pittman said. "The department prepared in order to meet these challenges, but we did not do enough."


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NPC

Following the Woke Orthodoxy: 85% diversity on Biden people team

Alayna Treene
Axios
Sun, 24 Jan 2021 04:31 UTC
biden administration
© Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesPresident Joe Biden conducts a virtual swearing-in ceremony for members of his new administration
The Biden administration will announce a slate of political appointees to the Office of Personnel Management on Monday, and more than 85% of them identify as people of color, women or LGBTQ, according to a copy of the list obtained by Axios.

Why it matters: President Biden has pledged a diverse Cabinet and government, and his gatekeepers to it reflect that promise through their own ranks.

The backstory: The office is in charge of recruiting new government employees and managing their benefits. The president has yet to name an office director, but Kathleen McGettigan — a longtime civil servant who also served in a temporary capacity at the start of the Trump administration — currently is acting director.

Some of the new hires at the office:
  • Chief of staff: Chris Canning served as a senior adviser to the director of the office during the Obama administration.
  • General counsel: Lynn Eisenberg most recently served as deputy general counsel for the Biden-Harris campaign.
  • Press secretary: Shelby Wagenseller was deputy chief operating officer of the 2020 Democratic National Convention Committee.
  • Senior adviser to the chief of staff: Dave Marsh most recently served on the Biden-Harris transition team.
  • Senior adviser to the director: Mini Timmaraju most recently was executive director for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Comcast.
  • White House liaison: Jason Tengco was the chief of staff for the Biden-Harris campaign's coalitions department.

Comment: What does diversity matter if the foreign policy is still going to be regime change wars and imperial demands?

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Chess

Best of the Web: After COVID, Davos moves to Great Reset

F. William Engdahl
New Eastern Outlook
Mon, 25 Jan 2021 00:00 UTC
chess pieces
With the USA Biden Presidency, Washington has rejoined the Global Warming agenda of the Paris Accords. With China making loud pledges about meeting strict CO2 emission standards by 2060, now the World Economic Forum is about to unveil what will transform the way we all live in what WEF head Klaus Schwab calls the Great Reset. Make no mistake. This all fits into an agenda that has been planned for decades by old wealth families such as Rockefeller and Rothschild. Brzezinski called it the end of the sovereign nation state. David Rockefeller called it "one world government." George H.W. Bush in 1990 called it the New World Order. Now we can better see what they plan to impose if we allow.

The Great Reset of the World Economic Forum is a 21st Century rollout for a new form of global total control. "We only have one planet and we know that climate change could be the next global disaster with even more dramatic consequences for humankind. We have to decarbonise the economy in the short window still remaining and bring our thinking and behaviour once more into harmony with nature," declared WEF founder Schwab about the January 2021 agenda. The last time these actors did something at all similar in scope was in 1939 on the very eve of World War II.

Comment: The world is getting wise to what the elite-manufactured Great Reset is all about:

Don't miss what may be the next shoe to drop in this process:

Another Mega Group spy scandal? Samanage, sabotage, and the SolarWinds hack portends possible attack on Microsoft world-wide in service of Great Reset

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Better Earth

Time ripe to end 'illogical hostility' between Tehran and Tel Aviv, former Iranian Ayatollah says

Oleg Burunov
Sputnik
Tue, 26 Jan 2021 10:50 UTC
Tehran
© CC BY-SA 3.0 / Hansueli Krapf / Aerial View of Tehran
Iran-Israel tensions escalated in late November 2020, when prominent Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated in an attack that Tehran blamed on Tel Aviv, who has remained silent on the matter.

Hostilities between Tehran and Tel Aviv should end, former Iranian ayatollah Abdol-Hamid Masoumi-Tehrani told the Israeli news network Channel 12.
"It is time for the Iranian regime to stop inventing enemies that don't exist", Masoumi-Tehrani, who is currently an opposition figure, asserted, citing the "many years of friendship" between "Iranians and Jews".
The ex-ayatollah went on by claiming that he "hasn't met Iranians who don't have a positive opinion of Israel".

Comment: It's difficult to know if Masoumi-Tehrani is hopelessly naive about Israel's multi-pronged and mostly covert acts of aggression towards Iran over the last two decades - or if he actually knows and understands what's going on - but thinks his statements are actually a viable approach to detente with Israel. Which would also be hopelessly naive.

In either case, Israel has for many years now sought to not only demonize Iran before the world but to literally bring it to its knees.

Why else would Israel send no one less than the head of its notorious Mossad (for goodness sake!) to dictate what US policy should be towards Iran?!? Mossad chief to outline Israeli 'demands' to Biden for rejoining Iran nuclear deal

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Dollar

Dr. Fauci was among highest-paid federal officials in 2019 — He banked more than President Trump's $400,000

Virginia Kruta
Daily Caller
Mon, 25 Jan 2021 12:32 UTC
Fauci
Dr. Anthony Fauci was among the highest-paid federal officials in 2019 — the last year for which data is available — even surpassing the $400,000 salary earned by former President Donald Trump, according to a Monday Forbes report.

Fauci serves as the director of the National Institute for Health's (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and as chief medical adviser to the president. His salary of $417,608 placed him solidly among the top earners out of some 4 million federal employees, and making Fauci the highest-paid doctor on the government's payroll, according to data reported by Forbes.


Comment: Its galling that this technocratic monster is actually being paid with taxpayer money that is, in effect, aiding him in destroying the lives of many millions of individuals through his lies and obfuscations; this income being in addition to the money he's made owning the patents of his underlings' work, and God knows whatever other kickbacks he's pocketing from Big Pharma.

Not to mention the suppression of non-patented medication that could help countless numbers of people...



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Biohazard

WHO advisor says COVID-19 likely started as leak from laboratory

Jane Stevenson
Toronto Sun
Sat, 23 Jan 2021 12:00 UTC
vaccine lab
© Sputnik / Alexey DanichevFILE PHOTO
One year after the pandemic started, World Health Organization advisor Jamie Metzl wants China to come clean about the origins of the COVID-19 virus.

The Kansas City-born, New York-based Metzl, who served as Deputy Staff Director of the Foreign Relations Committee under then Senator Joe Biden (2001-2003) and before that on the National Security Council (1997-99) and the State Department (1999-01) under President Bill Clinton), theorizes it was most likely an accidental lab leak in Wuhan.

"There's no irrefutable evidence," said Metzl, who was appointed to the WHO's expert advisory committee on human genome editing in 2019 and is also the author of Hacking Darwin.

Comment: Coronavirus was mostly likely tweaked in a lab, but it appears that the US and its infamous biowarfare program is responsible: Compelling Evidence That SARS-CoV-2 Was Man-Made

See also:

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Bad Guys

Wrong target: UN chief urges global alliance to counter rise of neo-Nazis

Edith M. Lederer
Yahoo News
Mon, 25 Jan 2021 21:26 UTC
António Guterres
© Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged coordinated global action on Monday to build an alliance against the growth and spread of neo-Nazism and white supremacy and the resurgence of xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and hate speech sparked partly by the COVID-19 pandemic.


Comment: Critical Race Theory nonsense. There is no growth and spread of white supremacy. They just changed the definition of the word so that everyone who disagrees with the new racism is automatically a "white supremacist." Notice the "partly sparked by Covid" bit. What a convenient virus it is turning out to be.


The U.N. chief also urged international action "to fight propaganda and disinformation." And he called for stepped up education on Nazi actions during World War II, stressing that almost two-thirds of young Americans do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.


Comment: First point: what they say is propaganda and disinformation. Their own propaganda and disinformation is okay, though. Second point: great. Give equal time to the Gulag and Mao's Great Famine and Cultural Revolution.


Guterres spoke at the annual Park East Synagogue and United Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Service marking Wednesday's 76th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, held virtually this year because of COVID-19.

He said the pandemic "has exacerbated longstanding injustices and divisions."

"Propaganda linking Jews with the pandemic, for example, by accusing them of creating the virus as part of a bid for global domination, would be ridiculous, if it were not so dangerous," he said. "This is just the latest manifestation of an anti-Semitic trope that dates back to at least the 14th century, when Jews were accused of spreading the bubonic plague."


Comment: We see a lot at SOTT. One thing we haven't seen is this looney conspiracy theory. We've seen a LOT of mainstream Covid nonsense, however, and countless other straight-up lies shoved down the public's throats.


Comment: Canada is doing their part:



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Mr. Potato

More Biden libtard pandering: Lifts Trump transgender military ban

Rebecca Kheel
The Hill
Mon, 25 Jan 2021 19:19 UTC
Biden executive order
© GettyBiden signing one of his blizzard of executive orders.
President Biden on Monday repealed former President Trump's ban on most transgender people serving in the military, the latest action Biden is taking to quickly unravel his predecessor's policies.

The president signed an executive order that "sets the policy that all Americans who are qualified to serve in the Armed Forces of the United States should be able to serve," according to a fact sheet released ahead of newly minted Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's meeting with the president at the White House.

"What I'm doing is enabling all qualified Americans to serve their country in uniform and essentially restoring the situation ... where transgender personnel, if qualified in every other way, can serve their government in the United States military," Biden said before he signed the order.

Comment: In other news, Reuters is reporting that Biden will impose a South Africa travel ban due to covid:
President Joe Biden will impose a ban on most non-U.S. citizens entering the country who have recently been in South Africa starting Saturday in a bid to contain the spread of a new variant of COVID-19, a senior U.S. public health official told Reuters.

Biden on Monday is also reimposing an entry ban on nearly all non-U.S. travelers who have been in Brazil, the United Kingdom, Ireland and 26 countries in Europe that allow travel across open borders.

"We are adding South Africa to the restricted list because of the concerning variant present that has already spread beyond South Africa," said Dr. Anne Schuchat, the CDC's principal deputy director, in an interview Sunday.
So is Biden racist too?

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Bullseye

Why not? Trump establishes 'Office of the Former President' in Florida

Alana Mastrangelo
Breitbart
Mon, 25 Jan 2021 18:21 UTC
trump florida return hom
© Michael Reaves/Getty ImagesPalm Beach, Florida residents welcome former President Donald Trump home.
Former President Donald Trump has formally established an official post-presidency "Office of the Former President" in Palm Beach County, Florida.

"The Office of the Former President" will be responsible for managing Trump's "correspondence, public statements, appearances, and official activities," according to a statement released on Monday.

The office will also seek to "advance the interests of the United States and to carry on the agenda of the Trump Administration through advocacy, organizing, and public activism."

Comment: The Washington Examiner adds:
Former President Donald Trump gave nothing away about his plans for life after the White House as he dined with friends at his golf club on Friday.

"We'll do something, but not just yet," he told the Washington Examiner as he sat at his regular table in the Grill Room of the Trump International Golf Club. An aide to the former chief executive then swooped in and swiftly, but politely, ended the interaction.

Those marked his first words to a journalist since he left the White House on Wednesday and flew to Florida.

Allies have said Trump is eyeing supporting primary challenges against Republicans who he feels wronged him following his election defeat, such as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and House Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney (Wyo.), who was one of 10 Republicans to vote to impeach Trump earlier this month.

The president is readying an impeachment defense team for next month's Senate trial, though he has not commented on it publicly.


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Snakes in Suits

"Plague" of corruption in UK tax haven British Virgin Islands, outgoing governor declares

Rupert Neate
The Guardian
Mon, 25 Jan 2021 06:00 UTC
virgin islands
© Morrelli & Melvin Design and Engineering in Newport BeachWith a judicial inquiry looming and the EU looking to blacklist the territory, the BVI is debating where its future lies
The shuffling of diplomats around the UK's Caribbean territories rarely makes much of a splash. But Gus Jaspert ensured his last days as governor of the British Virgin Islands would be remembered.

In an emotional Facebook video post to the BVI's 30,000 inhabitants, he accused the country's government of overseeing a "plague" of corruption, interfering in the criminal justice system and attempting to silence anyone who raised concerns about the misuse of funds, including £30m to help the islands' fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

Jaspert claimed that the BVI government had deliberately delayed legal reforms and hindered local inquiries into a string of corruption allegations including £5m spent on a non-existent airline and nearly £1m on building a short wall around a school. Tens of millions more spent on a hospital and a cruise ship dock are in question. Citing concerns about organised crime, he mentioned $250m (£180m) of cocaine seized from the home of a police officer last year.

Comment: That these tax havens exist and have been used to cover and support ongoing nefarious activity in the UK in particular, and elsewhere in the West, is not news, so one wonders just what else is behind these recent maneuvers:

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