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.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed a decree ordering the country's internet providers to block access to the websites of 12 different Russian companies, including newspapers Vedomosti and Moskovskiy Komsomolets.

The document, signed on Friday, also targets Rostelecom, Russia's leading telecoms company.

Restrictions have also been imposed on TRK-3, the Foundation for the Study of Historical Perspectives, the Mutual Aid Association, Novinfo, Nashe Zavtra, Light Print, Narodnye Novosti, and Anna-News.

Lebanon is under unprecedented economic and social pressure, paying the price for Hezbollah's military capability that causes a threat to Israel. The options offered by those (US, EU and Israel) effectively participating in cornering Lebanon -notwithstanding decades of domestic corruption and mismanagement - are limited to two: either disarm Hezbollah or push Lebanon toward a failed state and civil war. However, the "Axis of the Resistance" has other options: Iran has responded to the request of Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah by regularly sending to Lebanon food supplies and medicine. It is now sending oil tankers, which are expected to reach the country in the coming weeks via the Syrian port of Tartous.

Iran is rushing to support one of its strongest allies in the "Axis of the Resistance", Hezbollah, which is suffering severe domestic pressure, as are the entire Resistance Axis members in their respective countries. Hezbollah's supporters of all persuasions are affected by the acute socio-economic crisis. But will Hezbollah succeed in overcoming the inevitable result of the current long-term crisis? How serious are the challenges?

In one of his private meetings, Sayyed Nasrallah said: "Israel considered that Hezbollah's military capability constituted a "vexing danger" at the first years of its existence. The level of danger moved up to "challenge" in 2000 when Israel withdrew from Lebanon, to the "serious menace" level after the 2006 war, and to "existential danger" after the wars in Syria and Iraq."

Australia will stick to its lockdown strategy against the coronavirus until at least 70% of its population is fully vaccinated, but after that it will have to start living with the virus, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Sunday.

The country set a record with 914 infections, its highest daily figure, as the southern and eastern states of New South Wales, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory remain under a strict lockdown.

"You can't live with lockdowns forever and at some point, you need to make that gear change, and that is done at 70%," Morrison said in a television interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corp's Insider program.

The United States' military mission in Afghanistan has collapsed in chaos and ignominy. The catastrophe has many parents. But surely "the experts" upon which our leader relied bear much blame.

They were the ones who often failed to comprehend the power of religious belief and the role pride in Islam played in the Taliban's unyielding commitment to victory. They were the ones who thought we could remake Afghanistan into a western liberal image. They were the ones who failed to comprehend the intractable tribal nature of Afghan society.

To say the least, Afghanistan has vividly exposed the utter stupidity of our vaunted foreign policy and national security experts. Our hapless Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, for example, assured us that Kabul would not fall from "Friday to Monday." He was right. It fell from Friday to Sunday.

Macron was billed as the 'moderate candidate' in the 2017 French presidential election but there's nothing moderate about this authoritarian who has transformed France into a police state under the guise of countering a virus.

A few weeks ago, I was in the picturesque Suffolk coastal resort of Southwold. There is a large mural of the novelist George Orwell - who once lived there - at the entrance of the renovated pier. It couldn't have been a more appropriate moment to be reminded of the author of '1984' for, in 2021, we are truly living in Orwellian times. Almost everything we are being told is an inversion of the truth. Extreme policies are being enacted across much of the Western world by those claiming to be 'moderates', while those who oppose the removal of basic, inalienable human freedoms and making them conditional on taking a new-on-the-market vaccine, or proving one's 'health status', are the ones being labelled 'extremists' - and categorised by the elite's propagandists as either 'far-right' or 'hard-left'.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in France.

It is now obligatory to present a 'Pass sanitaire' - proving you have been vaccinated or tested negative for Covid-19 or have recovered from the virus, to gain access to cafes, restaurants, health centres, libraries, department stores, long-distance trains and a whole host of public places. France has gone from a relatively free society to a 1940s-style 'Where are your papers?' state in an incredibly short time and without any proper parliamentary scrutiny or public debate. Macron the 'moderate' has turned into Macron the dictator.