The government is under pressure to explain why a series of air strikes in Yemen, many involving civilian casualties, have not been recorded in its confidential log of alleged breaches of international humanitarian law (IHL).

The existence of the database, which has been kept by the Ministry of Defence since 2015, emerged only when the government became embroiled in a legal challenge over its decision to grant UK arms manufacturers export licences to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen. The challenge came amid claims the weapons were being used in breach of IHL.

By last July more than 500 possible breaches had been recorded in the database. But human rights groups allege that the true number of breaches in a conflict in which Saudi-led forces have conducted more than 20,000 air strikes must be much higher.

Well, we've made it to Christmas.

We don't need to tell you what a portentous year 2020 has been. After two decades tracking 'the news' and warning people that we would all one day wake up to global totalitarianism, this past year has confirmed our analyses of trends in spectacular fashion. World War 3 hysteria following Trump's assassination of a top Iranian official gave way to global panic over a tame 'novel' coronavirus and tyrannical 'lockdowns', and wrapped up at year's end with a flagrantly rigged US presidential election. Interspersed with these momentous events, the 'Powers That Be' sponsored a 'Cultural Revolution' eradicating historical and cultural monuments and symbols, then effectively sanctioned an outbreak of mass rioting in US cities over the phantasm of 'systemic racism'.

Radical Islamic Terrorism, meanwhile, was 'put back on the shelf' throughout the madness, only to be briefly reintroduced through a spate of attacks in France and Austria in October, just as curfews and a second 'lockdown' were introduced simultaneously across the West. Apparently terror of 'The Covid' was wearing off, so a 'booster shot' was administered to optimize compliance and 'immunize' the masses against critical thinking.

All of the above, in the final analysis, amounts to little more than crass weapons of mass distraction, deployed for the purpose of deflecting our attention from the near-Earth objects pinging the planet on an increasingly regular basis, the increasingly extreme weather and seismic phenomena (and likely drivers of future waves of 'climate migration'), and the 'drip-drip-disclosure' all year long about serious US government interest in the UFO phenomenon - tantamount to quasi-official acknowledgment that higher intelligence(s) are indeed meddling in human affairs 'from above and beyond'.

This time last year, we explained that the reason 'Signs of the Times' (SOTT.net) exists is because those who work in media and the information sphere generally don't notice the momentous changes that are taking place to people and planet - and to the extent that they do grok the gravitas of one or another facet of these changes, they don't realize their full significance and why it's important to reflect back to their audiences reality as it is, not as they would wish it to be.

A U.S. judge on Friday rejected a lawsuit filed by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and other Republicans against Vice President Mike Pence, who is due to preside over a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 for the formal certification of states' electoral votes for the president of the United States.

Gohmert (R-Texas) and others filed a lawsuit last week that concerns Pence's role as president of the Senate. The lawsuit, filed against Pence, requested that the court grant Pence "the exclusive authority and sole discretion in determining which electoral votes to count for a given State" on Jan. 6.

Pence argued that he was not the correct defendant to the lawsuit. "A suit to establish that the Vice President has discretion over the count, filed against the Vice President, is a walking legal contradiction," his attorney said in a Thursday filing in Texas (pdf).

In an order of dismissal on Friday (pdf), U.S. District Judge Jeremy Kernodle wrote that plaintiffs lack standing to bring the legal action that would prevent Pence from confirming Joe Biden's electoral victory.

"Plaintiff Louie Gohmert, the United States Representative for Texas's First Congressional District, alleges at most an institutional injury to the House of Representatives. Under well-settled Supreme Court authority, that is insufficient to support standing," he wrote.

President Trump, frustrated by the courts in his bid to overturn the election results, is urging legislatures in several key states to reconvene and reject the Electoral College votes that gave Joe Biden the win in their states.

In a private call late Saturday to legislators who believe that Trump was robbed of reelection by fraudulent voting organized by Democrats, the president said that they were the only path to stopping Biden's election.

"You are the real power," he said on the call, details of which were shared with Secrets.

"The most important people are you. You're more important than the courts. You're more important than anything because the courts keep referring to you, and you're the ones that are going to make the decision," he said in a 14-minute call into a two-hour session organized by the group Got Freedom at the request of some 300 state legislators.

Several leaders of the #StopTheSteal movement were on the call, organized by Phill Kline who also heads the Amistad Project of the nonpartisan Thomas Moore Society. Others included Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who got Trump on the phone, law professor John Eastman, Peter Navarro, Trump's trade czar who recently authored a report on the election, and John R. Lott Jr., a Justice Department official who also separately authored a new report suggesting some 300,000 "excess" ballots were counted, giving Biden his win.

COVID-19 cases in Britain are at record levels and the increase in numbers is fuelled by a new and more transmissible variant of the virus.


The government has cancelled the planned reopening of schools in and around London but teaching unions want wider closures.

Much of England is already living under the toughest level of restriction under a four-tier system of regional regulations designed to stop the spread of the virus and protect the national healthcare system.


But, asked in a BBC interview about concerns that the system may not be enough to bring the virus under control, Johnson said restrictions "alas, might be about to get tougher".

"There are obviously a range of tougher measures that we would have to consider ... I'm not going to speculate now about what they would be," he said.


The opposition Labour Party leader Keir Starmer said Johnson must implement a national lockdown within the next 24 hours.

On Sunday morning President Trump posted a tweet on the exaggerated COVID numbers by the CDC in the United States.


Trump is right.
The latest CDC weekly coronavirus numbers lists 294,884 deaths due to coronavirus.

Judicial Watch announced today that it received 243 pages of records from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that show the Obama administration's scanning the election systems of Georgia, Alaska, Oregon, Kentucky and West Virginia in 2016. This activity prompted a letter from then-Georgia Secretary of State (now Governor) Brian Kemp to then-DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson accusing DHS of, "an unsuccessful attempt to penetrate the Georgia Secretary of State's firewall."

The records were produced in response to Judicial Watch's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which asked for all records related to reported cyberattacks against the Georgia secretary of state's information network involving DHS, including investigative reports, memoranda, correspondence and communications between October 1, 2016, and February 14, 2017.

The minutes of a DHS "Enterprise Security Operations Center" (ESOC) meeting indicate that on November 15, 2016, at 8:43 a.m. a "scanning event" occurred. The "'scanning' event was the result of a FLETC [Federal Law Enforcement Training Center] user's Microsoft Office Discovery Protocol sending a packet with the OPTIONS flag to the Secretary of State of Georgia site."

The minutes notes that the Enterprise Security Operations Center "has received requests from NCCIC [DHS's The National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center] and MS-ISAC [Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center] to investigate other states that have seen 'suspicious' activity." The minutes note that Kemp accused DHS of conducting illicit scans on at least February 2, February 28 and May 23, 2016, as well.

Will Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi rob Iowa voters by seating Democratic House candidate Rita Hart instead of the actual election winner in Iowa's 2nd District, Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks?

Hart is challenging the certified election results and seeking for the U.S. House to declare her the winner. The same may occur in upstate New York, where Democratic incumbent Rep. Anthony Brindisi and former Republican congresswoman Claudia Tenney are separated by fewer than 20 votes.

House Democrats refusing to validate certified election results in two closely contested districts is not exactly a crime. However, it certainly would rob voters in Iowa's 2nd Congressional District and New York's 22nd District of what they decided with their votes. This would unlikely bother Speaker Pelosi, as it would give her two more Democratic votes that are completely beholden to her. It is almost impossible to imagine a single action by Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats doing more to unite House Republicans and becoming more determined in their opposition.

Recently, some House Democrats have openly suggested they might ignore these outcomes and simply seat the Democrats based on the Rules of the House that allow that body to make the ultimate decision as to who is allowed to hold office in the chamber.

It wasn't long ago that Lin Wood was respected nearly universally on the right. It wasn't because of any previous partisan gambit by the lawyer, but because he helped deliver defamation case settlements for Nick Sandmann after the media relentlessly, and falsely savaged the high school student. Whether you liked Wood personally or not, you had to admit that he put in the work for those cases and delivered when almost every media analyst flack was confidently predicting the cases would be dismissed.

But the 2020 election has broken Wood, and when I say broken, I mean he's gone completely nuts. Things have gotten so bad that it's probably time to start asking whether he was trying to sabotage Trump's election challenges all along.

A few days ago, he asserted that John Roberts is a pedophile and that people should "go ask" Jeffrey Epstein, who he claims is still alive. In reality, Roberts appeared at a hearing in person on the date Wood's conspiracy theory said the Chief Justice was on Epstein's plane. It was a completely made-up allegation that made no sense anyway. It wasn't just Roberts who refused to hear the Pennsylvania case, for example. Are we to believe that every other conservative Justice was part of some grand conspiracy against Trump?

Iran is commemorating the American (and, no doubt, Israeli-inspired) assassinations of IRGC commander General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi Popular Mobilization Committee commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis outside Baghdad Airport on January 2nd 2020. As part of their coverage, Iran's PressTV invited Sott.net editor Joe Quinn to share his thoughts on the bloody event.


As readers can infer from what Joe was saying when the discussion was ended, it seems likely to us that the 'diplomatic channel' that was open at the time between the US and Iranian governments didn't just produce agreement on the extent of Iranian 'vengeance' after the drone strike on Baghdad Airport (specifically, the Iranian missile barrage against the largest US airbase in Iraq) - the Trump administration may also have arranged with Iranian leadership before the drone strike to 'take out' Soleimani.

Such 'conspiring with the enemy', understandably, is not something that ordinary Iranians or supporters of Iranian policy in the Middle East would readily accept. But if what Joe is saying is correct - that Soleimani's enthusiasm in 'gunning for Israel' was alarming not just Israel but Iranian leaders who know what Israel is capable of - then it can be understood that motivation indeed existed within Iranian leadership for removing the general.

Perhaps, in being 'too successful for his own good', Soleimani was viewed as a domestic political threat. He was, by all accounts, de facto the second most powerful man in that country - behind Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. History is replete with stories of rising, popular military leaders becoming victims of palace intrigues as 'the status quo' seeks to maintain its position and head off 'threats to the throne'.

But short of accusing Iranian leadership of what would effectively amount to fratricide, a clue to what was probably the main motivating factor was ironically provided by Donald Trump, who stated simply at the time that he ordered the hit "to stop a war, not start one."