Former CIA and NSA head Michael Hayden has applauded treating fans of ex-president Donald Trump as subhuman - or at least second-class citizens, cheering a suggestion they be thrown out of the country and compared to the Taliban.

On Sunday, Hayden retweeted a post suggesting sending "MAGA-wearing unvaxxed" Americans to Afghanistan rather than sending the evacuation planes "back empty" after they deposited those fleeing the Taliban elsewhere, calling it a "good idea."

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has extended New Zealand's strict nationwide Covid-19 lockdown saying the current outbreak of the Delta variant of the coronavirus had not yet peaked.

The level 4 national lockdown was extended by three days until midnight on August 27 while Auckland, the epicenter of the outbreak, will have restrictions in place at least until August 31.

"The safest option for all of us right now is to hold the course for longer," Ardern said at a news conference.

"If the world has taught us anything it is to be cautious with this variant of Covid-19," she added.

Ardern said contacts in the community by people infected with the Delta variant were reported all over the country.

There are more than 320 locations of interest linked to the outbreak and 13,000 contacts have been recorded, far more than in previous outbreaks.

Scott Gottlieb, who stepped down as Food and Drug Administration Commissioner in April, will join Pfizer's board of directors, the company announced Thursday.

Gottlieb resigned from the FDA this spring after nearly two years at the helm. During his tenure, Gottlieb advanced a number of prescription drug policies, including to push the FDA to speed up generic drug approvals and use its powers to encourage wider use of biosimilars, or copycat versions of complex and often costly biologic drugs.

Biosimilar manufacturers, including Pfizer, have complained about roadblocks stalling biosimilars from becoming widely used. Having Gottlieb to advise the company could help Pfizer, one of the largest biopharmaceutical companies, navigate the landscape

Watch Behind The Headlines correspondent Dan Cohen explain how top foreign policy reporters are linked to the U.S. government, weapons industry and oil corporations - the very forces they are supposed to hold accountable.

Imagine a country where there's no separation between the government, the military, and the media. A lot of Americans would think of China, Russia or North Korea, but it's a perfect description of the United States today. And here in Washington, the think tank inside this nondescript building - Center For A New American Security (CNAS) - is the clearest example of just that.

CNAS is a premier militarist think tank in the nation's capital, especially for Democratic Party administrations. It is funded by the State Department and Pentagon and has taken more money from weapons companies over the last several years than any other think tank. On top of that, it's funded by oil companies, big banks, and right wing governments - basically the most destructive forces on the planet.

For President Joe Biden, CNAS serves as a farm, from which key positions in his administration are cultivated. In fact, at least 16 CNAS alumni are now in key positions in the Biden Pentagon and State Department.

But what's most shocking is that several national security and foreign policy reporters from elite U.S. media outlets are affiliated with CNAS - and therefore indirectly affiliated with, and likely paid by, the U.S. government and corporations - the very forces that they should be holding accountable.

Afghanistan has "fallen", that's the line. The Taliban forces have taken the opportunity of US/NATO withdrawal and swept across the entire country, taking every major city within a week and with barely a shot fired.

Joe Biden is being blamed for his "lack of plan", even as Democrats try and shift the blame to Trump who first decided to pull the US out of Afghanistan over 18 months ago.

Meanwhile, the press are reporting dozens of stories about the humanitarian crises, refugees fleeing the new regime, the fate of women under the Taliban, and "shocking videos" of desperate people.

That's the official story. But what's really going on?

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in an interview with host Martha Raddatz on ABC's This Week, one week after the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan unleashing chaos in the region, that "nobody predicted" the Afghan government

"would fall in 11 days. It was very difficult to predict with accuracy. This all occurred in a span of about 11 days. Nobody predicted that, you know, the government would fall in 11 days."

Austin said assessments he reviewed prior to the insurgent group's takeover estimated it could be several months or one to two years before the Afghan government fell.


He told Raddatz that U.S. officials saw Afghan military forces surrendering and "just kind of evaporating" as the Taliban began to make gains.

President Joe Biden was confronted by a reporter during a press conference on Sunday over a new CBS News poll that showed the majority of Americans no longer believe that he is competent in the job.

The poll comes after the administration has faced widespread criticism, as well as backlash at home and abroad over its disastrous pullout of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. A reporter said to Biden:

"A new poll out today shows Americans wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan, but they disapprove of the way you've handled it. The poll also found that based in part on what's transpired in the last week, a majority of Americans, and forgive me, I'm just the messenger, no longer consider you to be competent, focused, or effective in the job."

"I haven't seen that poll," Biden immediately responded. "It's out there," the reporter responded. Biden responded by shaking his head no and laughing. WATCH:

To the question recently posed by Daniel Johnson, whether Poland has once again become a battleground for freedom and democracy, I answer in the affirmative. Yes, Poland is one of few countries in the West where freedom is still more or less secure, mostly because a lot of Poles continue to resist that mono-ideology that has taken hold of the entire Western world and that is being enforced on us and, in no small part, because we are lucky to have the conservative government led by the Law and Justice party (PiS) that has managed to steer a sane course in the world of growing insanity.

Obviously, this is not what Daniel Johnson had in mind. His view is the opposite of mine. He claims that the conservative government is an enemy of freedom and all those who oppose it are freedom fighters. If one could imagine a text that could be constructed solely of anti-Polish and anti-PiS stereotypes and falsehoods, Daniel Johnson's is a perfect illustration. We learn that Poland is ruled by one man who after the death of his brother even increased his despotic power. He and his government ignore and dismiss the criticism and warnings from all over the world, and in particular from the EU, the US, and Donald Tusk. The government conducts socialist economic policies and is far-Right, anti-western in culture. The government betrayed the ideas and principles of the Solidarity Union; freedom and the rule of law are "embattled". The Poles collaborated with the Germans (who are now called the Nazis) in the Holocaust and now the conservative government wants to whitewash Polish history. They also refuse to compensate the Jewish heirs of the victims of the Holocaust for the property lost or destroyed on the Polish territory.

All this, to say mildly, is not true. It would require a long text to dispel falsehoods, half-truths, and caricatures. Let me say that the spectrum of opinion in Poland is larger than in any other EU country, that in Poland you can say and write things for which you would be punished in France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, etc. As elsewhere in Europe, the dominant orientation in the media, corporations, and universities is Left and liberal, critical of and even hostile to the government. What makes Poland exceptional in Europe is the existence of conservative media, about 30 per cent of the entire market: an unheard-of phenomenon in the world in which the Left practically has the monopoly. Poland did not collaborate with the Germans in the Holocaust. The Polish government in exile and its representatives in German-occupied Poland ruled that the denouncing of the Jews to the Germans was punishable by death. The percentage of anti-Semites was certainly not higher than in France or elsewhere in Europe. The Polish government in exile did more to help the Jews during the war than other governments, certainly more than the French, British or American governments. Today's Poland is one of the few countries in Europe that has been consistently pro-Israeli, particularly on the conservative side of Polish politics.

As anyone who's been paying attention will know, Imperial College London played a key role in providing the justification for the scamdemic hysteria and Oxford University played a key role in providing the "solution" to that problem.

Specifically, as you'll recall from Who Is Bill Gates?, it was the Imperial College COVID-19 Research Team that issued a report on March 16th, 2020, predicting the deaths of up to 500,000 Britons and 2.2 million Americans unless strict government measures were put in place, and it was this (completely erroneous) report — along with a similarly alarmist model from the Gates-funded Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation — that was used to justify the first round of lockdowns in the US and the UK. And, as you'll recall from my report with Whitney Webb on the Oxford-AstraZeneca Eugenics Links, it was the Oxford Vaccine Group's partnership with AstraZeneca that gave rise to one of the injections currently making its way into the veins of hundreds of millions around the globe in the name of "fighting COVID."

So it should be no surprise that Imperial College and Oxford University researchers also played a key role in a pre-scamdemic report that was recently dug up by The Daily Expose and that lays out the gameplan for the implementation of an even bigger globalist agenda: the shutdown of the global economy.

The report, entitled "Absolute Zero: Delivering the UK's climate change commitment with incremental changes to today's technologies" was produced in 2019 by UK FIRES, "a collaboration between the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Nottingham, Bath and Imperial College London" that is "aiming to reveal and stimulate industrial growth in the UK compatible with a rapid transition to zero emissions." It slipped largely under the radar

"Absolute Zero" is supposedly a reference to the UK's commitment to reach "zero emissions" — or a state in which there is no net emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — by the year 2050. But "absolute zero" also serves as a reference to the bone-chilling vision for the future of humanity that the globalists and their academic minions are busily constructing for humanity under cover of the scamdemic.

Strap in, folks. This is going to be a wild ride.

Former social affairs minister of Indonesia was sentenced to 12 years on Monday after he was convicted of taking USD 1.2 million in bribes. The money was linked to food aid for poor families affected by coronavirus pandemic.

The sentence was handed to Juliari Batubara, the minister by a court in Jakarta. Batubara was arrested in December. A sting operation had turned up suitcases, backpacks and envelopes stuffed with cash.