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Matt Hancock wanted to “deploy” a new Covid variant to “frighten the pants off” the public and ensure they complied with lockdown, leaked messages seen by The Telegraph have revealed. The Lockdown Files – more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages sent between ministers, officials and others – show how the Government used scare tactics to force compliance and push through lockdowns. In another message Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, said that “the fear/ guilt factor” was “vital” in “ramping up the messaging” during the third national lockdown in Jan 2021. In a WhatsApp conversation on Dec 13, obtained by The Telegraph,...

<p>Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has had a better few months than just about anybody in Republican politics, and Donald Trump the worst. Trump is hoping to reverse his fortunes and revive his moribund presidential campaign with a big event in South Carolina this weekend. A short video message his campaign released a few days ago was a positive sign — and one that should make DeSantis wary.</p>

When Covid-19 first erupted in 2020, the U.S. struggled to balance the trade-off between lives and livelihoods. Infections and deaths soared while lockdowns devastated economic output and sparked demonstrations across the country. China, by contrast, was a model of authoritarian efficiency. Mass testing, lockdowns and closed borders suppressed outbreaks. This allowed most Chinese to live normal lives without fear of infection, sustaining broad support for “zero Covid” (as best as outsiders could tell). The ruling Chinese Communist Party held out these divergent responses as proof of its superior governance model. The U.S. had lost its historical “capacity for self-rectification,” one...

The billions of dollars in military aid the United States has sent Ukraine includes some of the most advanced and lethal weapons systems in the world. But Ukraine has also scored big successes in the war by employing the weapons and equipment in unexpected ways, and jury-rigging some on the fly, according to military experts. From the sinking of the Moskva, Russia’s Black Sea flagship, in April to the attack on a Russian air base in Crimea this month, Ukrainian troops have used American and other weapons in ways few expected, the experts and Defense Department officials say. By mounting...

Sad. 25% of male Puffers going full schizo from the Wacky Weed. Explains a lot, really.

Often lauded as the optimal bun for smashburgers, the squishy, yellow potato roll has been a holy grail for burger geeks around the country. The reigning champ among those buns has to be the one from Martin’s Famous Pastry Shoppe, a family-owned company based in Chambersburg, Penn. It catapulted to fame with the rise of Shake Shack, which uses its bread exclusively at its locations around the world. Locally, use of the Martin’s potato bun, at operations like Wesburger, Kowbird and Smish Smash, has signified chefs’ seriousness about their sandwiches.

The first sign of trouble was Chechen soldiers bursting through the gate. Jumping from Jeeps, combat boots hitting pavement hard, they ordered 500 patients and staff from Borodianka’s special care home into the courtyard, at gunpoint. “We thought we were going to be executed,” Maryna Hanitska, said home director. The Chechen's pulling out a camera, yelled at her to make everyone smile. Most were crying. “We command you to say to the camera, ‘Thank you, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin,’’’ the soldiers demanded. With several guns in her face, she thought of options. She would never thank Russia’s president, she called “a...

Most of us see President Joe Biden’s falling job approval rating as a measure of his declining popularity. But for every candidate, Democrat or Republican, running for the House or Senate this year, Biden’s numbers mean political life or death. That is because the president’s job approval rating is an extraordinarily important factor in the upcoming midterm elections. Biden’s is low and going lower. A recent Pew poll puts Biden at 41% approval, versus 56% disapproval. Those results are very close to the RealClearPolitics average of several polls, which has Biden at 41.4% approval and 54.7% disapproval. If those results...

The past and current master of the GOP sees a future threat arising. [cut] “It was a mistake to ever embrace Donald Trump, and now we want to be the party of Adam Kinzinger.” [cut] Would DeSantis be audacious enough to run against Trump in 2024? The case against waiting is that it’s extremely unlikely that the governor can maintain his exalted status in the party until 2028. On the other hand, the case against running in 2024 is that it involves the enormous risk of encountering the business end of the Trump buzz saw, which could change DeSantis’s image...

PART 2 OF 3. The Hunter Biden Files Hunter Biden and his business partners were involved in discussions about possible deals in dozens of foreign countries, often corrupt backwaters, at times invoking official channels like ambassadors, emails reviewed by The Daily Wire show. While most attention has focused on Ukraine, where a gas company paid the now-president’s son tens of thousands of dollars a month while he was in deep crack addiction, and China, Hunter and his partners at a consultancy called Rosemont Seneca were eager to do business in a vast array of other places. The map below highlights...

In Northampton, artists’ feud over Mayflower print leads to fallout after biennial is canceled When members of the arts council logged into a meeting in late September, few could have imagined a retired librarian’s artwork was about to torpedo their upcoming biennial, a popular juried show at the local library. Continue reading →

A woman described by the San Francisco district attorney’s office as a prolific retail thief is facing multiple charges in connection with more than 100 thefts from Target that total more than $40,000 in value, district attorney’s officials said Wednesday. Aziza Graves has been charged with eight felony counts of grand theft and 120 misdemeanor counts of petty theft in thefts of items from the Stonestown Target store between October 2020 to November 2021, district attorney’s officials said. Graves was arrested by San Francisco police at the Stonestown Target location on Tuesday, authorities said. Target’s Asset Protection Team had reached...

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has updated its database on tap water in the United States, revealing where testing has detected potentially deadly pollutants in the nation’s water systems. First published in 2005, the database was most recently updated in 2018. “We’re collecting testing data from almost 50,000 water utilities nationwide,” said Sydney Evans, a science analyst with EWG, in an interview with The Epoch Times. In just one state—Illinois—EWG’s database shows that many water utilities exceeded the legal limits of arsenic, radium, and total trihalomethanes (TTHMS), among other chemicals. In its entry for the City of Chicago’s water system,...

Seinfeld is making waves again because of its arrival on the Netflix streaming platform. The classic ’90s show has spent some time in limbo after being a fixture on Hulu for a few years, but now fans can watch the show about nothing in all its glory.Seinfeld was easily my favorite show as a kid, and while it may have pushed some boundaries as to what topics were suitable for prime time television, it was widely lauded for the clever storylines that often took the mundane and made it funny. One episode, for example, involves the cast waiting for a...

Charles and Kathleen Moore have done well, but they certainly aren’t billionaires. Yet the couple’s constitutional challenge stands to slam shut the door on a federal wealth tax like the one Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants to enact. The story is complicated, though less so than the tax code. In the 1990s Mr. Moore, a software engineer, worked at Microsoft on its Office applications and grew close to a fellow programmer, Ravi Agrawal. Mr. Agrawal dreamed of returning to his native India to do something for the small-scale farmers he knew growing up in the state of Chhattisgarh. On a series...

Joe Biden is unfit to be President of the United States. It was obvious when he was running for office that he lacks the physical stamina and mental acuity for the job. It has become increasingly obvious since January that the part-time President has either hidden from the media or stumbled through the kind of scripted press conferences that Americans rightly used to deride as the hallmark of banana republics. The handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan has exposed Biden's incapacity. The painful truth is now undeniable. He must go — even if that means Kamala Harris, who has been...

Tony Blair’s condemnation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan – based, he wrote, upon an “imbecilic political slogan about ending the ‘forever wars’”, which just happens to be what Joe Biden ran on in 2020 – marks the complete transformation of elite perceptions of the Biden presidency. The establishment consensus, desperate to be rid of Donald Trump, was that the veteran Democrat would be a return to stability. Instead, the haunting scenes of chaos at Kabul airport have led to denunciation even by Left-wing admirers – by almost every faction in the foreign policy debate, in fact, from those who think...

Joe Rogan discussed COVID vaccines on a recent podcast. It is not surprising that he is not a fan of mandates or passports. But one segment of his podcast is causing the vax-at-all-costs crowd to lose their minds. The public health bureaucracy has everyone so worked up about virus mutation that they do not want to hear that the very therapeutic being pushed and even mandated can perpetuate mutations.On mandates, Rogan noted that prominent commentators such as Don Lemon publicly say that the unvaccinated should be barred from shopping and working. He went into a rant, laced with a few...

The Arlington County Board is voting Wednesday night on whether to create a civilian group overseeing police — and on just how much power such a body might have to launch independent investigations of misconduct by officers. The vote, more than a year after racial justice demonstrators nationwide called for greater scrutiny of police, particularly following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, comes as other jurisdictions around the D.C. region and the country have taken similar steps to ramp up accountability. In Arlington, months of debate have centered on whether the civilian board should be able to...

BEIJING/TAIPEI—A U.S. warship has again sailed through the sensitive waterway that separates Taiwan from China, a week after the self-ruled island reported the largest incursion here to date of Chinese air force jets in Taiwan’s air defence zone.The U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet said the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur conducted a “routine Taiwan Strait transit” on Tuesday in accordance with international law.“The ship’s transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.”The Chinese regime condemned the United States on Wednesday as the region’s greatest security “risk creator.” The People’s Liberation Army’s...