Masks are no longer required of West Wing employees, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Wednesday, a loosening of a policy encouraged by administration health officials as a way to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

The White House issued a memo on May 11 requiring staffers to wear masks when away from their desks and when social distancing was not possible after two staffers tested positive for COVID-19. But enforcement of the policy had been lax in recent weeks, and McEnany confirmed Wednesday that the policy had changed.

"Masks are recommended but not required," she said when asked about the protocol around the West Wing.

Empire has one trick - divide and conquer. When it runs out of territory, nations, and people abroad to consume, it turns inward on itself.

The United States finds itself in a less-than-unique position of an empire in terminal decline. With nations around the globe standing up economically, militarily, and politically - closing off once lucrative avenues of exploitation - the US finds itself turning more and more inwardly upon its allies and even its own population - either to wring from it whatever wealth it can or at the very least - to prevent the displacement of America's current ruling special interests by any sort of alternative.

Geopolitical expert and analyst F. William Engdahl did an impressive job pointing out how current turmoil in the United States is being driven not by grassroots efforts to confront these special interests but by these special interests themselves.

No matter what people thought they were going into the streets for - for a nation adept at engineering revolutions abroad - there is no way it won't turn those same tools and techniques inward on unrest at home - ensuring it is channeled in the safest and most profitable way possible.

Berlin authorities orchestrated a crackpot scheme to place foster children into the care of known pedophiles, a new report says. Dreamed up by an infamous pederasty advocate and supported by politicians, it only ended recently.

Berlin's Green Party called on Tuesday for an investigation into a massive child abuse scandal that saw foster children placed into the care of pedophiles for more than 30 years - all the way up to 2003. According to a new report published on Monday, the city's educational authorities and Senate knew what was taking place, and the practice was "accepted, supported, [and] defended" by left-wing politicians and academics throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

"There were and are networks," Green politician Marianne Burkert-Eulitz told the Berliner Zeitung on Tuesday, calling on the left-wing SPD and FDP parties to own up to their responsibility for the scandal.

Burkert-Eulitz and her party colleagues likely know a thing or two about opening up. The party's predecessor, the Alternative List, was a clearinghouse for lunatic liberationist ideologies in the 1970s and 80s. At the party's convention in 1985, a splinter group calling itself 'Gays and Pederasts' demanded the legalization of adult/child sex. The Greens have spent nearly a decade repudiating this sordid slice of their history, but according to Monday's report, their activity was just the tip of the iceberg.

Russia is preparing to establish a military base near the ancient city of Palmyra in central Syria, the Zaman al-Wsl news outlet reported on June 14.

Citing a special source, the outlet said the base will be established at the Palmyra Air Base. A Syrian military delegation headed by Maj. Gen. Tawfiq Khaddour, commander of the air forces' 22^nd Air Division, reportedly handed the base to the Russian military a while ago.

"The Iranians have evacuated the air base, in addition to everything related or belong to regime forces, whether it is military or logistical," the source said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday that he hasn't spoken to President Donald Trump in weeks, and warned that America is still not through the first wave of coronavirus cases.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Fauci, the government's top infectious-disease expert, said that risky behavior as states reopen their economies is likely leading to a resurgence in COVID-19 cases.

"When I look at the TV and I see pictures of people congregating at bars when the location they are indicates they shouldn't be doing that, that's very risky," he said.


While the White House has dismissed the increase in coronavirus cases as a result of more widespread testing, Fauci told the Journal that, in many states, the upswing in new cases "cannot be explained by increased testing."

To those paying attention, the evidence about Covid-19 and the lockdown response is clear. We've been sold a pup.

The UK Government itself has confirmed several times that the virus is not serious to the majority of people who catch it. The lockdown was a panic-driven overreaction.

The facts and figures of what is known about Covid-19 are not really much disputed. More, it's a question of how those facts translate into ways to deal with the threat. My contention is that anyone looking at the facts, figures, and basic science cannot possibly agree that the response to the crisis is appropriate to the risk and proportionate in terms of wider implications.

US President Donald Trump is being savaged for praising the government scientists who'd "come up with the AIDS vaccine," with his haters holding it up as proof of incipient dementia. But it's not as outlandish as it sounds.

Trump made the remark during a press conference on Tuesday before signing an executive order on police reform, making a momentary diversion to update reporters on the progress towards a vaccine against Covid-19. Predicting researchers will have "a very successful vaccine, therapeutic, and cure" before the end of 2020, he hailed the "incredible scientists and doctors" who'd come up with "many other cures and therapeutics over the years" - including an AIDS vaccine that doesn't actually exist.

The president caught himself, referring instead to "the therapeutic for AIDS" and noting that the disease was once a "death sentence," but can now be treated "with a pill." Dozens of drugs are currently marketed to manage HIV infection and stop it from progressing into AIDS, though patient advocates complain many treatments are prohibitively expensive.

The European Union's foreign policy chief on Tuesday said moves by President Trump to sanction officials associated with the International Criminal Court (ICC) are "unacceptable and unprecedented."

"The European Union expresses grave concern about the announced measures and reconfirms its unwavering support for the International Criminal Court," Josep Borrell, the EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, said in a statement.

"Sanctions against those involved in the work of the ICC, its staff and their families as well as persons associated with the ICC are unacceptable and unprecedented in scope and content," he continued.

The plane used by Boris Johnson and members of the royal family for international travel is being repainted in the colours of the Union flag to "better represent" the UK abroad.

The red, white and blue "rebranding" will cost about £900,000, No 10 said.

Downing Street said it represented "value for money" and that all of the work was being done in the UK.

But opposition parties were critical, saying the money would be better spent on helping the victims of coronavirus.

No 10 said the aircraft was currently in Cambridgeshire for pre-planned repainting in "national branding".

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) isn't likely to have heard the old Australian working-class expression that a man is too crooked to lie straight in bed. It meant that lying and cheating are in the nature of a deformity, and can't be operated on or cured. "The Salisbury Poisonings", the three-part, three-hour film which concluded its run on Tuesday evening, was composed by individuals like that.

That isn't news. From the beginning in March 2018, the BBC has been a platform for the British Government's narrative that Russia, directed by President Vladimir Putin, waged chemical warfare on British soil, attempting to assassinate Sergei and Yulia Skripal, and then killing Dawn Sturgess. In May of 2018 - almost three months after the Skripals were attacked on March 4; one month before Sturgess was hospitalised — the corporation broadcast a series of interviews with the medical staff at Salisbury District Hospital attempting to prove that a Russian-made nerve agent called Novichok had been the weapon of the crime. The BBC broadcaster, Mark Urban — he admitted later - had been preparing interviews with Skripal by arrangement with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), and then to have produced his book on the case with the NATO information warfare unit, Bellingcat. In November 2018, the corporation broadcast a fresh hour claiming to be the "inside story" of the Salisbury nerve agent attack.

The corporation then began negotiations on an even longer version of the story. By mid-May 2019 money was committed and other terms agreed for what was initially planned to be "a two-part factual drama". Casting followed; filming began in October of that year. The drama was stretched into three parts. The facts were stretched, too.

Unravelling the facts composed by a crooked man trying to lie straight can be a whodunit of the conventional English type. This time, though, the BBC has revealed the complicated plot of a true crime hatched in the Cabinet Office in London by a character the new film introduces with an untraceable name.