New Zealand's PM Jacinda Ardern has shut the nation's borders, interred the few still allowed to enter and now postponed the election for a month - but it's all okay because she's the 'right kind of leader'.

Ardern has postponed the elections in New Zealand for a month so the country can deal with a new spike in Covid-19 cases. The Kiwi PM has become something of a darling of liberal outlets around the world who larrup praise on her progressive outlook, being a female world leader and, most recently, the way she has dealt with the pandemic.

New Zealand has so far only had 22 deaths related to Covid-19, which is obviously all down to Ms Ardern and nothing to do with the fact that New Zealand is sparsely populated, over a thousand miles away from any other country and has five times as many sheep as people.

It was Russia in June, now it's Tehran. Don't US analysts understand that Taliban fighters really don't need any more motivation to target American troops? This is simply politicized (un)intelligence that isn't fooling anyone.

According to CNN, the Iranian government has paid "bounties" to the Haqqani network, a terrorist group with close links to the Taliban, for six attacks on US and coalition forces in Afghanistan in 2019, including one on December 11 which targeted Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, which wounded four US personnel.

This explosive allegation was contained in a Pentagon briefing document which was reviewed by CNN. While the bounties mentioned were attributed to an unnamed "foreign government," CNN claims that sources "familiar with" the intelligence named the country as Iran. These bounties, and the attacks on US personnel they underwrote, played a role in the deliberations that led to the assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Quds Force, by US forces in early January 2020, the network reported.

Pro-Israel advocates are overjoyed at the prospect of Joe Biden becoming the Democratic nominee for president this week. They say there has Never been a nominee from any party who is so pro-Israel, that Joe Biden personally wrote the Democratic platform that is "straight down the line" behind Israel, and that his choice of Kamala Harris as veep reflects his love of Israel. And as for the "hypercritical" new members of Congress, that attitude will be "defeated" under Biden.

"We've actually never had a nominee on any side of the aisle for president who has a longer and stronger record than Joe Biden," Halie Soifer of the Jewish Democratic Council of America said on an American Jewish Committee zoom call yesterday. "He was elected in 1972 to the Senate and has been working on these issues with nine Israeli prime ministers ever since. There is no one with a stronger record on Israel to run for president than Joe Biden and we can all rest asured that as president he would only strengthen the relationship."

The president of Belarus, who won his sixth term in last week's controversial election, had a rough face-to-face with striking workers in Minsk, telling them the vote is a done deal - at least as long as he is alive.

As massive anti-government rallies linger across Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko - the long-serving president who the opposition accuses of rigging the recent election - tried to win the hearts and minds of workers at MZKT, a key factory manufacturing an array of wheeled haulage trucks, including for the military.

I recently wrote a column discussing how Democratic leaders, including former Vice President Joe Biden, have argued against continuing the investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham despite growing evidence of misconduct by Justice Department officials and now the first guilty plea by former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith. Now, Andrew Weissmann, one of the top prosecutors with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, has derided the Clinesmith plea while actually calling on Justice Department attorneys to refuse to help on ongoing investigations that could implicate aspects of his own prior work.

I was among those who expressed concern when Mueller selected Weissmann due to his history of controversial prosecutorial decisions, including a pattern of prosecutorial overreach in the Enron litigation.

In these days of gaslighting, misinformation, disinformation and downright bullshit, the fevered postulations of some self-styled "pundits" about a secret weapon or mini-nuke being used in the Beirut blast are as irritating as they are inaccurate and improbable. That the US and or Israel are responsible for the detonation is indeed, highly likely, but yet to be proven, and not the point in question. But the irresponsible and absolutely unsubstantiated claims of a Hezbollah weapons depot, mini-nukes and secret weapons are not only preposterous, but provably false, and the otherwise respectable authors and news outlets that have published them have done themselves and their readers a real disservice. Allow me to set the record straight.

Before I get into the facts of the explosion in Beirut, I'd like to mention that I served three years as a 12-B Combat Engineer, a demolition specialist, in the US Army, and I have been trained on, worked with, and detonated pretty much every non-nuclear explosive, including quite a bit of ammonium nitrate. I'm not saying I am an expert, but I can assure you I know more about explosives than any of these armchair experts who have never even thrown a hand grenade. So, let's get to it.

THE HEZBOLLAH "WEAPONS DEPOT"

The first thing I notice about all these sensationalist, bogus and unfounded articles is that they all seem to take for granted that Hezbollah (HZB) actually had a weapons depot at the port. That's bullshit right off the bat. HZB DID NOT STORE WEAPONS OR AMMO AT THE PORT. HZB certainly knew, as probably every secret service in the world did, that there was a ticking time bomb sitting there since 2013, and if they stored ANY weapons ANYWHERE near the port, they'd be giving the zionist entity (ZE) a perfect excuse to destroy half of Beirut and blame it on HZB. Furthermore, they (HZB) couldn't have stored any kind of weapons there, even if they wanted to. The port is controlled by Hariri's "Future Movement" political party, the true source of corruption in Lebanon, and the true enemies of HZB, and has been since before the Rhosus docked there in 2013. The port is in the affluent north of Beirut, HZB's political base is in the proletarian south. Hassan Nasrallah himself has said, "No weapons, no ammo, no rockets, HZB stored _nothing_ at the port". It makes sense, and there is NO reason to doubt his word. For HZB to store weapons at the port, under the control and observation of their main political rivals in Lebanon, next to a enormous explosives stockpile that could be detonated by an ostensibly "justified" strike by Israel on HZB weapons, is as counter-intuitive and absolutely illogical and self-defeating, not to mention needless, as Assad gassing civilians in Ghouta or Russians poisoning the Skripals in the UK. It just doesn't make sense. So, HZB says they didn't store weapons there, there was zero reason for them to do so and myriad reasons not to, and they literally could not have, even if they had wanted to.

A 15-year veteran of the CIA was charged Monday with selling U.S. secrets to China then unwittingly admitting his spying to the FBI.

The method prosecutors said they used to get him to reveal the nature of his espionage was worthy of a spy novel itself.

Court documents said 67-year-old Alexander Yuk Ching Ma of Honolulu was charged with violating U.S. espionage laws. Prosecutors said he joined the CIA in 1967 then served as a CIA officer until he retired from the agency in 1989. For part of that time he was assigned to work overseas in the East-Asia and Pacific region.

Belarusian President Lukashenko's announcement that presidential elections will follow a planned constitutional referendum possibly paves the way for a "phased leadership transition" in the Color Revolution-beleaguered former Soviet Republic, one which opens up an opportunity for Russia to protect its national interests if a friendly candidate like Viktor Babariko comes out on top or ends up sharing power with a Western-friendly one like Sergei Tikhanovsky.

Lukashenko's Stunning Reversal

The latest twist in the Hybrid War on Belarus came after President Lukashenko's announcement on Monday that presidential elections will follow a planned constitutional referendum, which was curiously preceded by him promising earlier that same day that "There will be no other elections, unless you kill me." This surprising about-face speaks to how vulnerable he feels after a week of increasingly intense protests that are now transforming into a nationwide strike, albeit a limited one at this moment but which could nevertheless deal serious damage to the economy in a short amount of time if this movement suddenly spreads throughout the country. Even more interestingly for many observers is that this reversal came just a day after his second conversation with President Putin over the weekend where the Russian leader reaffirmed his country's CSTO mutual defense obligations to Belarus, which led to speculation among some that Putin could "pull a Crimea" there (though, as the author argued, likely only if he was tricked by his counterpart into doing so).

No Last Stand For Lukashenko?

This suggests that Russia realized the game that Lukashenko was trying to play and wisely advised him against it behind closed doors, perhaps even "encouraging" him to change his mind about new elections in order to initiate a "phased leadership transition" in the Color Revolution-beleaguered former Soviet Republic if its leader is desperate enough to remain in office that he might have been seriously contemplating tricking Russia into "pulling a Crimea" for that purpose. In any case, while Lukashenko's decision is pragmatic and could theoretically help his country escape its worst-ever political crisis (especially if he declines to run again), it also signifies weakness in the eyes of the opposition and could inadvertently serve to embolden them to intensify their efforts to seek his ouster. As the "father of the nation", he's resolutely against doing anything that tramples on the constitution and risks turning his country into a similarly failed state as post-Maidan Ukraine is. It's for that reason why he warned that "the fall of the first president will mean the beginning of your end. You will always stand on your knees, like in Ukraine and other counties, and pray to someone."

A United Nations-backed tribunal has convicted one member of Hezbollah and acquitted three others in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, during a long-awaited verdict session on Tuesday.

The Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) judges said there was "no evidence" the leadership of the Lebanese militant group or the Syrian government were involved in the suicide truck bombing which killed Hariri and 21 other people and injured over 200 more. Hezbollah has long denied any involvement.

Four members of the Iran-backed Shi'ite movement were originally charged with conspiracy to carry out the attack.

On Tuesday three STL judges said Salim Ayyash, 56, was guilty of five charges including conspiracy to commit a terrorist act and intentional homicide with premeditation by using explosive materials.

However, after nearly a decade of investigation and a lengthy trial, the same tribunal acquitted the three other defendants, Hussein Oneissi, 46, Assad Sabra, 43 and Hassan Merhi, 54.

A hearing will be held at a later date to determine Ayyash's sentence. As the UN-backed court has no death sentence, the maximum sentence is life imprisonment. He is unlikely to serve any time as Hezbollah has vowed not to hand over any suspects.

The World Economic Forum's (WEF) Great Global Reset is being 'paralleled' - not challenged - by the IMF. Both are pulling in the same direction, shoveling more assets from the lower echelons to a small elite, through debt enslavement - shifting from consumer capitalism to Green (consumer) capitalism - and all with an allure of friendliness towards the environment and the world population.

The WEF is an NGO, registered in a lush suburb of Geneva, with ambitions towards worldly power command. The IMF, created under the UN Charter, is an official international financial organization - one of the two Bretton Woods Institutions, the other one being the World Bank.

The IMF was created to watch over and regulate the world monetary conundrum. Both, IMF and WB, are controlled by veto-power by the US Treasury. The discourse of both, the WEF and the IMF, is to "doing as much good to a covid-disaster stricken world as we can." None of them mentions how their actions will put the world - especially the developing world, into even deeper 'sustainable' disaster.

The WEF's main message delivered by WEF founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab, called on June 3, 2020, for:

"The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions... Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a 'Great Reset' of capitalism."