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..I was there as part of a three week investigation into the growing efforts of both the US and Afghan governments to develop Afghanistan's oil and gas sector. I prepared my itinerary to include what are supposed to be among the safest regions, and was traveling alone with just a local guide and driver, my only "safety-gear" the local clothing and black head covering I wore. As long as I kept my mouth shut, with my dark hair and Middle-European heritage, I regularly passed for a local. I was tracking an oil and gas trail across Western and Northern Afghanistan....

Gov't says unused doses of Moderna COVID vaccine contain foreign materials

HARRISBURG — Gov. Tom Wolf is calling on the Republican-led legislature to return to the Capitol immediately to pass legislation mandating the use of masks in K-12 classrooms and child-care centers throughout Pennsylvania. In a letter to legislative leaders in both chambers, the Democratic governor struck a note of urgency, noting that many public schools have already returned to the classroom — many without mask requirements — and that parents overwhelmingly support a statewide mask mandate in classrooms. Just 59 school districts out of the 474 that submitted health and safety plans to the Department of Education had implemented mandatory...

Billionaire "Bond King" Jeffrey Gundlach says the stimulus and the Federal Reserve's low interest rates have "been a very deep punch bowl spiked pretty heavily with 100-proof liquor," and "once this party ends, the hangover is going to be in the form of a sharp drop in economic growth." Gundlach, the founder and CEO of $137 billion DoubleLine Capital, explained that the economic picture in the U.S. is "very hard to divine" because of the government's intervention. "It's like pushing on like a waterbed or something. As you push on the side of the waterbed, the other side goes up,...

The central government will give prefectures under the coronavirus state of emergency priority for receiving Moderna Inc.’s COVID-19 vaccine, said Taro Kono, who is overseeing the country’s vaccination rollout. The state of emergency, covering 13 prefectures, including Tokyo and neighboring Saitama, Chiba and Kanagawa, is set to run through Sept. 12. “We will work together to accelerate (vaccinations) with the Moderna product and the vaccine from Pfizer Inc.,” Kono, who also serves as regulatory reform minister, told an online news conference Friday. The vaccine made by U.S. biotechnology company Moderna is expected to be sent to the prefectures in September....

The White House bragged about the 4,400 Americans they've evacuated so far. They didn't mention those still stranded or the masses of non-Americans they've airlifted out. What they didn’t mention was that tens of thousands remain. They also didn’t mention that America’s efforts thus far have been focused on evacuating non-Americans. According to Jordan Davidson at The Federalist, that number is staggering: More than 82,300 have been airlifted from Kabul since the government’s collapse nearly two weeks ago, but the Pentagon says that, as of Wednesday, only 4,400 Americans were rescued in those evacuation operations. The State Department also confirmed...

In the video above, Alexander Stockton, a producer on the Opinion Video team, explores two of the main reasons the number of Covid cases is soaring once again in the United States: vaccine hesitancy and refusal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd8P12BXebo&t=139s

Blair brands Biden's decision to quit Afghanistan 'imbecilic' Britain loses patience with Sleepy Joe: Tony Blair brands Biden's decision to quit Afghanistan 'imbecilic' amid claims Boris remarked 'we would be better off with Trump'

Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at John Hopkins School of Medicine, during an appearance on The Vince Coglianese Show, said individuals formerly infected with COVID-19 are seven times more likely then vaccinated people to fight off the virus. “It appears that natural immunity is better against the Delta variant. When you get infected with COVID, your body’s immune system develops antibodies to the entire surface of the virus,” Makary said. “Not just the slight protein that the vaccines gives you, but the entire surface. And so you get a more diverse antibody portfolio in your system.” Makary said data from...

Former President Donald Trump would love to take down Adam Kinzinger, one of his chief House GOP antagonists, in next year's midterms. But Democrats might beat him to it. Illinois lawmakers are on the verge of rolling out a new congressional map that will very likely gut Kinzinger’s exurban Chicago seat, according to several sources close to the redistricting process, leaving him with just a few bleak options for remaining in office next year. The elimination of his district would force the veteran Republican congressman to choose between running in unfamiliar territory, possibly against another incumbent, or making a long...

Enlist in your local Cajun Navy, the American refugees are coming.Watching the dumpster fire Joe Biden and his team lit with U.S. dollars and materiel in Afghanistan is demoralizing. Realizing we’re facing at least three more years of such catastrophic ineptitude, even if Biden is nominally replaced, is almost too much to absorb.Just eight months to the regime of “normalcy,” we’ve seen millions of unknowns crossing our southern border unchecked and child-raping third-world terrorists chasing off U.S. helicopters in Afghanistan. These are not accidents; these are man-made catastrophes. They are the direct result of our elites’ corruption and of American...

Life expectancy in the United States fell by 1½ years in 2020, the largest annual decline in life expectancy since World War II. Now, one and a half years into the COVID-19 pandemic, with over 626,000 American lives lost, we have an abundance of safe, accessible COVID vaccines, and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine just received full approval beyond emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Summer 2021 was supposed to be a return to normalcy, a “hot vax” summer of connection and prosperity. Instead, we saw a fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and the return of Center...

The five-decade-old paradox — long thought key to linking quantum theory with Einstein’s theory of gravity — is falling to a new generation of thinkers. Netta Engelhardt is leading the way. =============================================================================== In 1974, Stephen Hawking calculated that black holes’ secrets die with them. Random quantum jitter on the spherical outer boundary, or “event horizon,” of a black hole will cause the hole to radiate particles and slowly shrink to nothing. Any record of the star whose violent contraction formed the black hole — and whatever else got swallowed up after — then seemed to be permanently lost. Hawking’s calculation...

For baby boomers, the minute it became apparent the United States would finally end its military involvement in Afghanistan, even as the Taliban rapidly took over the country, images from the shocking end of the Vietnam War — America’s longest before this one — came flooding back. They were certainly on the mind of the baby-boomer-in-chief when he spoke of the endgame in July: Now that the images and the reality of two bitterly divisive and costly wars ending in the triumph of America’s adversaries are converging so dramatically, those mulling the political impact of the debacle in Kabul should...

Americans who trained Afghan pilots and ground crews are now raising the alarm about their safety. Though some flew out of the country, others are still in Afghanistan, hiding from the Taliban. And they are desperate to get out, fearing the Taliban may learn their identities and retaliate. As videos emerged of Taliban fighters carrying US-made M4 and M18 assault rifles and M24 sniper weapons, the US conceded it does not have the “complete picture” while adding that “a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban”. “Obviously, we don’t have a sense that they are...

CULVER CITY, CA—It seemed like a big coup for the game show Jeopardy! as they got the President of the United States himself, Joe Biden, to host. But it ended up being a disaster, as every time a contest answered in the form of a question, Biden would immediately turn and leave. “What is the Roman Empire?” answered contestant Keith Black, a school teacher. “I’m not taking questions at this time,” Biden said as he turned to leave the studio. Producers then had to explain to him that in Jeopardy!, all answers are in the form of questions, but he’s...

Has Newsweek lost its mind? The outlet published an insane article giving the Taliban praise for promising to fight “terror” and “climate change” in order to gain legitimacy in world politics. The magazine’s headline read like a Babylon Bee joke: “Seeking World Recognition, Taliban Vows to Help Fight Terror and Climate Change.” Newsweek Senior Writer, Foreign Policy Tom O’Connor pushed how Taliban Cultural Commission member Abdul Qahar Balkhi, “told Newsweek that his group sought worldwide recognition of the Islamic Emirate.” Balkhi propagandized to the outlet how the organization's drive for “recognition” would be bolstered in part by the terror group’s...

Even as the United States made the controversial announcement this week that it would begin to offer COVID-19 vaccine booster shots in September, scientists and public officials were scrambling to assess the rationale officials offered: that the vaccines’ protection against the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 is waning. As vaccines rolled out early this year, the pandemic coronavirus seemed to almost magically melt away in some countries. But now, as Delta infections surge in highly vaccinated countries that once seemed to have COVID-19 on the run, including Israel and the United Kingdom, many fully vaccinated people are wondering how protected they...

ATLANTA (AP) — Jimmy Carter is sometimes called a better former president than he was president. Nodding to Carter’s decades of work as a globe-trotting humanitarian but with a glaring reminder of his landslide defeat in 1980, the backhanded compliment rankles Carter allies and, they say, the former president himself. Yet now, 40 years removed from the White House, the most famous resident of Plains, Georgia, is riding a new wave of attention as biographers, filmmakers, climate activists and Carter’s fellow Democrats push to recast his presidential legacy, even as Republicans sometimes try to remind voters of the volatile economy...

Officials in Colombia accidentally published contracts from both Pfizer/BioNTech and AstraZeneca, detailing the multimillion-dollar deals and indemnification agreements struck between the South American nation and the pharmaceutical giants to import around 25 million combined doses of their COVID-19 vaccines. While attempting to transfer the confidential information to a regional court following a tutelage filing, Colombia’s Council of State, the supreme judicial authority in the country, mistakenly disclosed contracts signed between the Colombian government and the drug manufacturers on its publicly accessible judicial information system, an RT news report revealed. Though the mistake was quickly discovered by the government and the...