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A suspected Chinese intelligence operative developed extensive ties with local and national politicians, including a U.S. congressman, in what U.S. officials believe was a political intelligence operation run by China’s main civilian spy agency between 2011 and 2015, Axios found in a yearlong investigation. Axios broke the story on Fang, alleging she had sexual and romantic relationships with two unnamed Midwestern mayors, including one in Ohio. She also forged political connections with a host of local and national politicians, among them a U.S. congressman, according to Axios. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) is refusing to say if he had sex with...

Minneapolis City Council unanimously approved a controversial budget which is set to move $8million of funding from the police department to violence prevention, mental health services and other programs. Mayor Jacob Frey, who had threatened to veto the entire budget if the council went ahead with a plan to cap police staffing, said the vote was a defining moment for the city which was the first to be hit by anti-police protests following the death of George Floyd. But the city has been plagued by soaring violent crime in the city has soared - with homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary,...

Justice Department’s interest in Hunter Biden covered more than taxes The federal investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter has been more extensive than a campaign statement indicates, according to a person with firsthand knowledge of the investigation. On Wednesday, Hunter Biden said he had been contacted about a tax investigation out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware. In addition to Delaware, the securities fraud unit in the Southern District of New York also scrutinized Hunter Biden’s finances, according to the person with direct knowledge of the investigation. The person said that, as of early last year, investigators in Delaware...

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer detailed the painful confrontations he had with Sen. Dianne Feinstein about taking away her leadership position on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “It was like Groundhog Day, but with the pain fresh each time,” Schumer told New Yorker writer Jane Mayer about his conversations with Feinstein, age 87. “Anyone who has tried to take the car keys away from an elderly relative knows how hard it can be.”

The U.S. Supreme Court handed U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly a defeat that could not have been more unequivocal. In its one-sentence order, with no noted dissents, the high court on Tuesday denied the Republican congressman's emergency request for a preliminary injunction to block the certification of the election results in Pennsylvania and throw out the state's more than 2.5 million mail-in ballots.Despite the loss, Kelly's lawyer said the case is not over. He said Kelly, whose 16th Congressional District includes Erie, still plans to join with other Republican petitioners to ask the Supreme Court to grant what is known as...

There is a lot that can go wrong between the manufacturing of the COVID-19 vaccine and when that vaccine actually gets into someone’s arm. Much of the challenge has to do with keeping those vaccines in crucial cold storage all along the way. Now, there is a clearer picture of what’s being done to keep this so-called “cold chain” intact in Connecticut. **SNIP** There is increasingly high demand for these ultra-low freezers because the vaccine made by Pfizer needs to be kept at -70 degrees Celsius (-94 degrees Fahrenheit). Meanwhile, the Moderna vaccine also needs to be kept frozen, but...

Senate Committee Plans First Federal Hearing on Election ‘Irregularities’The Senate will hold a hearing next week on irregularities that took place during the 2020 presidential election. “I am mindful that many of the issues that have been raised have been, and will continue to be, appropriately resolved in the courts. But the fact remains that a large percentage of the American public does not view the 2020 election result as legitimate because of apparent irregularities that have not been fully examined. That is not a sustainable state of affairs for our country,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate...

Christine Fang. Getting paid for what? Proof at link.

Wisdom is not the same as information, or knowledge. These days, there is more information available to everyone than ever before, thanks to the internet, but also, perhaps at least in part because of the internet, there is less wisdom. The late Walter Williams was full of wisdom, which is one reason his economic and social philosophies were so widely ignored by elite economists and the major media who traffic only in information. Much of it arguably debatable, even untrue. Williams, who died last week at age 84, was an economist, a political conservative and an African American. He likely...

WASHINGTON - In a new show of military might, two American bomber aircraft took off from the United States and flew over a swath of the Middle East on Thursday, sending what U.S. officials said was a direct message of deterrence to Iran. The flight of the two massive B-52H Stratofortress bombers over the region, the second such mission in less than a month, was designed to underscore America’s continuing commitment to the Middle East even as President Donald Trump’s administration withdraws thousands of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. The long-range heavy bombers, which are capable of carrying both conventional...

“In this outbreak, the distances between infector and infected persons were … farther than the generally accepted 2 meter 1/8 6.6 foot] droplet transmission range,” the study’s authors wrote. “The guidelines on quarantine and epidemiological investigation must be updated to reflect these factors for control and prevention of COVID-19.”snip “There’s a real misconception about this in the public.” said Seung, who was not involved in the South Korea study. “They’re thinking, if I’m not a close contact, I will magically be protected.” snip Linsey Marr, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech who studies the transmission of viruses...

And Biden taps Awan’s collaborator Xavier Becerra for HHS boss. “Congress Pays $850,000 to Muslim Aides Targeted in Inquiry Stoked by Trump,” reads the November 25 New York Times headline. According to the story, the previously unreported settlement is one of the largest to resolve discrimination or harassment claims, in this case by people who “lost their jobs and endured harassment in part because of their Muslim faith and South Asian origins.” Reporters Noam Scheiber and Nicholas Fandos give no date for settlement and do not explain why it was “previously unreported.” Congress reportedly made the payment but the only...

Stand up and take a bow, Chancellor Merkel. The facts at hand presumably speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even usually do. The German-language news outlet Bild reported Monday that “the almost blind and handicapped ex-cook Helmut K. († 50) from Kaufbeuren made an appointment on the gay dating platform ‘Planet Romeo’ on March 14th at 4.30pm with the username wandalalaland.’” Then “at 9:01 p.m., the heavy metal fan was tied up and gagged in his bedroom, which is above the popular escape room ‘Countdown,” and was “gagged so hard that he choked on...

Spoiler alert: If you’re a rich Miami parent and you just got a text message, it’s about where Ivanka Trump’s kids are going to go to school. We’re told that after Page Six revealed that Trump and husband Jared Kushner bought land on exclusive Indian Creek and plan to move their family there after they leave Washington, DC, locals are frantically working up Robert Mueller-esque theories about the subject.

Country singer John Rich challenged Rolling Stone's Adam Gold to a $10,000 bet over how the Supreme Court will rule in regards to the presidential election after the music writer called him a "Nostradumbass" for still supporting Trump.

We used to take religious freedom for granted. Then the lockdowns came. The Jewish holiday of Chanukah has two major symbols: the menorah and the dreidel. The menorah, a candelabra with eight branches, and one light above, memorializes the liberation of the Temple from the religious persecution of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Syrian-Greek ruler who had outlawed Judaism, and the other a spinning top recollects how Jewish children learning the word of G-d in the banned ‘hedge schools’ of ancient Israel would take out tops and pretend to be playing games when Antiochus’ inspectors arrived. American Jewish children had lit...

Ottawa County Republican Party chairman David Kroll says that he was pushed out of his position last week, with the local party establishment illegally holding a meeting on Zoom before the regularly scheduled meeting was intended to take place, and booting him from his elected position. “Last week Thursday was supposed to be our election, but establishment ended up creating up a Zoom meeting that took place an hour before the regularly scheduled meeting, so a few people went there, and we couldn’t have a quorum at the real meeting, and they elected a new chair,” Kroll told Big League...

For decades China-watchers have debated what form a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) offensive against Taiwan might take. An onslaught seems to be coming. Saying no to a cross-strait union is not an option Chinese Communist Party (CCP) supremo Xi Jinping means to grant the islanders. Beijing wrote its threat to use force into law back in 2005. Xi regularly reminds everyone that the party’s patience is finite. It seems the only question is timing. Nor, however, is Xi likely to cow Taipei officialdom or ordinary folk into submission. Taiwanese are not obtuse. They saw what happened in Hong Kong last...

Despite constantly comparing themselves to African-Americans and the hard-fought civil rights plight in America, LGBT activists have been trying to sell this lie: Gay is the new black. It’s not. Not even close. The problem when we compare one dissimilar social movement with another is that, inevitably, it trivializes the preceding one. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling our temporary border detention facilities “concentration camps” would epitomize this kind of ignorance. Homosexuals in this country (or any other category in the rainbow-colored acronym) never faced what people of my complexion did. They weren’t enslaved. They weren’t lynched. They weren’t ever denied the right...

... While questions abound over what a guy with no experience in the energy sector did to earn such compensation - and how his influential father may have helped in that regard - another key question deserves an answer: “Where’s Hunter’s money?” While former Vice President Biden did release his federal tax returns from 2016 to 2019, these are essentially shell documents with no detail regarding the majority of his income earned since leaving office. In total, $13.5 million of the Biden couple’s $17.0 million flowed to their tax returns via upstream S Corporations: CelticCapri Corp (his), and Giacoppa Corp...