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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday the “time is now” for Turkey to drop its objections to Sweden joining NATO but said the Biden administration also believed that Turkey should be provided with upgraded F-16 fighters “as soon as possible.” Blinken maintained that the administration had not linked the two issues but acknowledged that some U.S. lawmakers had. President Joe Biden implicitly linked the two issues in a phone call to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday. “I spoke to Erdogan and he still wants to work on something on the F-16s. I told him we wanted...

The House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees have obtained evidence that an active CIA employee may have recruited signatories for a now-infamous letter in which intelligence community veterans falsely categorized the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation in a bid to swing the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. "The Committees have evidence that an employee affiliated with the CIA may have assisted in obtaining signatories for the statement," reads a soon-to-be released report from the committees. "One signer of the statement, former CIA analyst David Cariens, disclosed to the Committees that a CIA employee affiliated with the agency’s Prepublication Classification...

51 is an interesting number, isn’t it? It’s one shy of a deck of cards. It’s the mysterious “Area” where a top-secret U.S. military installation associated with UFOs is located. It’s exactly three times the number of intelligence agencies who confirmed Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 election. It’s a large number — an impressive one, even. And when 51 current and former intelligence officials sign and publicize a letter, it’s designed to get your attention and, undoubtedly, persuade you of the import of what is being said. And so it did — for many Americans, the characterization of...

Antony Blinken represents neither the beginning nor the end of the info ops run to convince voters the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Revisiting the contemporaneous coverage of the laptop story in light of last week’s revelations about Blinken reveals the scandal extends far beyond the Biden campaign and involves government agents. Last week, news broke that a former top CIA official, Michael Morell, testified as part of a House Judiciary Committee investigation that Blinken, now-secretary of state and then-Biden campaign senior adviser, had contacted Morell to discuss the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story. Blinken and Morell...

VIDEO Commentators are hinting stongly about it but your humble correspondent is going to come right out and ask what those listening to them must be thinking: Was Hunter Biden shtooping Antony Blinken's wife? We already know that during campaign 2020, Antony Blinken was so desperate to be named Secretary of State that he was willing demand that 51 intelligence officials flat out lie and declare Hunter Biden's laptop to be probably the result of Russian disinformation. That information was not all that surprising given Blinken's desperation. But was Blinken desperation so far along that he even consented to let...

Matt Taibbi pointed this out last Friday. There’s currently another round of dueling memos taking place in Washington that is reminiscent of the Nunes-Shiff memo battle you may remember from back in 2018. I won’t walk through all of that again but the gist was that Nunes memo was basically right and Schiff’s memo was clearly wrong. But you wouldn’t have know it at the time from looking at the media coverage, because of course the media took Schiff’s side and presented him as more credible.So here we are once again. Rep. Jim Jordan released a letter last week pointing...

Speaking in a YouTube interview with the Consortium News outlet on Friday, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who exposed the CIA’s purported sabotage attempt on the Nord Stream pipeline, accused the Biden administration of making “so many bad mistakes,” that “it’s impossible to believe just how dumb this leadership was.”“It was suicidal to think you can win that war, that Ukraine can win the war [against Russia]. There’s just too much corruption. That was a very, very bad decision. We should have been pushing for peace, we should have made an agreement,” the former Pulitzer Prize winner insisted.US President Joe Biden...

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is being investigated by the Committee on the Judiciary and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for his prominent role in persuading 51 former intelligence officials to falsely discredit the “New York Post story regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop as supposed Russian disinformation” during the 2020 Presidential election. The intelligence assessment led to a nearly blanket censorship of investigative stories exposing the alleged corruption of President Joe Biden and his family and kept the truth hidden from the American people before the election, according to a letter released Thursday night by the committees and obtained by...

The Biden administration is set to give Chevron Corp. a license to pump oil in Venezuela, according to The Wall Street Journal. As part of the deal, Chevron would retain partial control of both production and maintenance for a select set of run-down oil fields it previously had stakes in with Petróleos de Venezuela SA, a state-run oil company in Venezuela, according to the WSJ, citing people familiar with the matter.

The website for WestExec Advisors includes a map depicting West Executive Avenue, the secure road on the White House grounds between the West Wing and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, as a way to show what the consulting firm can do for its clients... ...The firm, which now looks like a government-in-waiting for the next administration, was founded in 2017 by Tony Blinken, President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for secretary of State, and Michèle Flournoy, a top contender for secretary of Defense. And one of its former principals, Avril Haines, is Biden’s pick for director of national intelligence.

The biggest concern is what GEC paid Park Advisors to do: fund and coordinate the censorship of Americans’ speech and our supposedly free press. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center used a cutout corporation headed by a former intelligence officer to fund and promote the blacklisting of conservative media outlets and other censorship endeavors, research by The Federalist reveals. When Elon Musk gave a group of independent journalists access to internal Twitter communications, the resulting “Twitter Files” quickly revealed the existence of a Censorship-Industrial Complex that included an array of federal agencies colluding with social media companies to censor disfavored...

The US Secretary of State—once the most powerful diplomatic title on earth—announced that the US would not permit Ukraine to engage in peace talks with Russia and China. Hours later, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky invited Communist China’s Xi to Kiev to work on a peace plan.

Switzerland's largest bank UBS reported in talks to take over all or some of the Credit Suisse bank... US politics Joe Biden's campaign and the Democrat National Committee say they will return any political contributions related to the failed Silicon Valley Bank... Security guards and other workers at British Airways Terminal 5 of London's Heathrow Airport will stage a 10-day strike... Financially troubled Pakistan receiving a 500-million-dollar boost from China... The latest release of "The Twitter Files"... Finland getting the thumbs up from Türkiye on NATO membership but Sweden... "We consider the very foundation of the issue outrageous and unacceptable"...

Joint communique says Jerusalem won't discuss new West Bank units for 4 months, authorize outposts for 6 months but PM, Hanegbi insist 'there is no change in Israeli policy' Israel committed to halting new settlement projects Sunday during a summit in Aqaba, according to a joint communique issued after the meeting, though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu swiftly denied there would be any construction freeze over the Green Line... Preempting Netanyahu's rush to deny a settlement freeze, far-right members of the his governing coalition rejected the outcome of the summit. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is a minister in the Defense...

Republican Congressional members have urged President Joe Biden to veto an anti-Israel resolution slated to be brought before the U.N. Security Council on Monday."As the UN Security Council once again moves to consider another one-sided, biased, anti-Israel resolution, it is imperative that the United States maintain its position that only direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians can yield progress," Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy wrote in a letter to the president.The missive was co-signed by Steve Scalise, the Majority Leader and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul."If the U.N. Security Council takes action on Monday to punish Israel,...

As the rift between the US and China over the balloon saga widens, so has the divide within the global community scrutinising their high-stakes dispute. The latest testy exchange took place on Saturday, when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met China's foreign affairs minister Wang Yi on the sidelines of a security conference in Munich, in the first high-level meeting since the row began. Mr Blinken said they would not "stand for any violation of our sovereignty" and said "this irresponsible act must never again occur". Mr Wang, meanwhile, called the episode a "political farce manufactured by the US"...

China is considering giving Russia weapons and ammunition for the Ukraine war, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said. Mr Blinken told CBS News that Chinese companies were already providing "non-lethal support" to Russia - and new information suggested Beijing could provide "lethal support". This escalation would mean "serious consequences" for China, he warned. China has denied reports that Moscow has requested military equipment. Chinese President Xi Jinping is an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and is yet to condemn Russia's invasion - but he has sought to remain neutral in the conflict and has called for peace....

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says China is considering providing weapons to Russia in its war against Ukraine, warning Beijing that any supplies would "cause a serious problem." "The concern we have now is based on information we have that they're considering providing lethal support," Blinken tells CBS's "Face The Nation"....

Prof. Alan Dershowitz and other experts tell JNS they would disband the U.N. agency. BY BRADLEY MARTIN (February 7, 2023 / JNS) On his recent trip to Israel, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke often about the importance of security and stability in the region. Following a terrorist attack in which seven Israelis were murdered, he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israelis should know that America’s commitment to their security is “ironclad.” But several legal analysts told JNS that Blinken’s pledge of roughly $50 million in U.S. additional assistance to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine...

We read a LOT of tweets from people who have less than zero amounts of self-awareness, but this from Secretary Antony Blinken about ‘zero tolerance’ for female genital mutilation may be the worst yet considering he’s part of an administration that believes it’s a GOOD thing for minor females to mutilate their genitals to swap genders. In America. Maybe read the room, Antony. Just a little. On International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, the U.S. condemns the practice of female genital mutilation and cutting as a form of #GBV and a human rights abuse, rooted in gender...