Information Is Power
Good, solid information is the best resource that the public can use. Primary sources when possible and good discussions and studies when informative.
Is it AI | Elon Musk and Donald Trump Danceathon | Video: 36 Seconds
Haters will say this is AI 🕺🕺 pic.twitter.com/vqWVxiYXeD
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 14, 2024
The Undeniable Hate Of The Left | Elon Musk | X | Video: 59 Seconds
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2024
Man charged with attempted murder of two Chicago police officers after allegedly dragging one 40 feet with car
The 35-year-old struck two officers and almost hit a third on Friday in Englewood, police say.
A man has been charged with attempted murder after allegedly driving into two Chicago police officers, dragging one of them, Friday in Englewood on the South Side.
Jermaine Little, 35, was pulled over by police for a traffic violation around 7:30 p.m. in the 6300 block of South Michigan Avenue, Chicago police
Little then put the car in reverse and dragged one officer 40 feet before pinning the officer between the car and a viaduct, according to police and the Chicago Fire Department.
The officer fired at, but didn’t hit, the driver, police said. The officer was hospitalized in good condition.
Police said another officer was hit and a third officer was nearly hit by the car.
Little allegedly drove off but was arrested Tuesday in the Gresham neighborhood. Police said they recovered a handgun.
Little, of South Shore, also faces a count of unauthorized use of a vehicle as a weapon and aggravated assault to an officer.
He was expected to appear in court later Wednesday. . . .
‘Joe’s leading lambs to slaughter’: Trump tears into Biden for abandoning Afghans to the Taliban
‘Joe’s leading lambs to slaughter’: Trump tears into Biden for abandoning Afghans to the Taliban and says fall of Kabul was a ‘coup of incompetent people’ and makes the border ‘look like baby food’
- Trump attacked Biden’s ‘disaster’ foreign policy in his second Fox interview within 12 hours and said Biden’s bad decisions began ‘when he was born’
- The former president spoke with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo on Wednesday
- He said the Taliban are ‘great negotiators’ and ‘naturally tough’ but insisted Biden ‘let them gain 19 steps out of 20’ in their takeover of Afghanistan
- He suggested that Biden should have bombed US military bases after leaving
- In an interview with Sean Hannity, Trump said he told Mullah Baradar his village would be attacked if the Taliban failed to stick to a peace deal
- He said the problem was not leaving Afghanistan but ‘the way they withdrew’
- And he condemned Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, said he had no faith in him and blasted: ‘He spent all of this time wining and dining our senators’
- It comes as Taliban turned their guns on Afghans trying to flee to Kabul airport
- Trump has kept up a running commentary on Joe Biden’s handling of the crisis. . . .
Rubio Demands Biden Ban TikTok Over Chinese Communist Party Connection
Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio on Tuesday called for the banning of Chinese video sharing platform TikTok after China acquired a stake and board seat in a subsidiary of the platform’s parent company.
Rubio issued a statement demanding President Joe Biden block the app from U.S. mobile devices, citing the Chinese government’s recent acquisition of a 1% stake and one of three board seats in Beijing ByteDance Technology, a subsidiary of TikTok parent company ByteDance. The subsidiary owns licenses to operate video-sharing platform Douyin and news service Toutiao within China.
“The Biden Administration can no longer pretend that TikTok is not beholden to the Chinese Communist Party,” Rubio said. “President Biden must take immediate action to remove ByteDance and TikTok from the equation.”
The Trump administration attempted to ban TikTok in August 2020, claiming China was using the app to illegally harvest user data, but the ban was never enforced due to several court orders. Biden repealed the ban in June 2021, instead directing the Commerce Department to evaluate the platform and determine whether it posed a national security or economic risk. . . .
CDC Creates Center to Forecast Disease Outbreaks, Issue Warnings
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will launch a new outbreak analysis and forecast center, picking a group of outsiders from academia and the private sector to lead the new initiative.
The Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics is meant to help predict how disease spreads and act on it in in real time. It will also be charged with improving the Atlanta-based agency’s data tools, the CDC said in a statement. The goal is to have the center operational in 2022, said spokesman Ben Haynes.
Given the timing, the new center may end up focused as much on future outbreaks as on Covid-19, though the pandemic is almost certain to still be ongoing next year. The center’s leaders include:
- Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard University epidemiologist who will be the director of science
- Dylan George, an executive with Ginkgo Bioworks Inc. and a former Obama administration official who will be director of operations
- Caitlin Rivers, a Johns Hopkins University professor who has studied the U.S. Covid-19 response and will be associate director
- Rebecca Kahn, a Harvard University researcher who will be the center’s senior scientist . . . .
Biden administration urges COVID booster shots after 8 months
Health officials recommended people receive a booster shot eight months after their second dose of COVID-19 vaccine, ‘to maximize protection.’
“Based on our latest assessment, the current protection against severe disease, hospitalization and death could diminish in the months ahead, especially among people who are at higher risk or were vaccinated during the earlier phases of the vaccination rollout,” according to a statement issued by Biden administration health officials. “For that reason, we conclude that a booster shot will be needed to maximize vaccine-induced protection and prolong its durability.”
Pending an FDA evaluation of the effectiveness and safety of the boosters, the statement said, the Biden administration plans to begin rolling out such shots starting the week of Sept. 20 to people who have already received two doses of vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna. Health officials believe the best time to get such a booster is eight months after the second dose of those vaccines, the statement said.
The first to receive boosters will be those who got the earliest doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, a group that largely consists of healthcare workers and nursing home residents.
The statement added that health officials expect booster shots will also be needed for those who received the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine. That vaccine did not roll out until March, and the statement said more data was needed to assess when those shots might be necessary. . . .
Apple says researchers can vet its child safety features. It’s suing a startup that does just that.
When Apple announced new technology that will check its US iCloud service for known child sexual abuse images, it was met with fierce criticism over worries that the feature could be abused for broad government surveillance. Faced with public resistance, Apple insisted that its technology can be held accountable.
“Security researchers are constantly able to introspect what’s happening in Apple’s [phone] software,” Apple vice president Craig Federighi said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “So if any changes were made that were to expand the scope of this in some way—in a way that we had committed to not doing—there’s verifiability, they can spot that that’s happening.”
Apple is suing a company that makes software to let security researchers do exactly that.
In 2019, Apple filed a lawsuit against Corellium, which lets security researchers cheaply and easily test mobile devices by emulating their software, rather than requiring them to access the physical devices. The software, which also emulates Android devices, is sometimes used to fix those problems—but it has also been used to sell or exploit the flaws.
In the lawsuit, Apple argued that Corellium violated its copyrights, enabled the sale of software exploits used for hacking, and shouldn’t exist. The startup countered by saying that its use of Apple’s code was a classic protected case of fair use. The two-year case was reportedly settled just last week—days after news of the company’s CSAM technology became public.
On Monday, Corellium announced a $15,000 grant for a program it is specifically promoting as a way to look at iPhones under a microscope and hold Apple accountable. On Tuesday, Apple filed an appeal to continue the lawsuit.
In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Corellium’s chief operating officer Matt Tait said that Federighi’s comments do not match reality.
“That’s a very cheap thing for Apple to say,” he says. “There is a lot of heavy lifting happening in that statement.”
“iOS is designed in a way that’s actually very difficult for people to do inspection of system services.”
He is not the only one disputing Apple’s position.
“Apple is exaggerating a researcher’s ability to examine the system as a whole,” says David Thiel, chief technology officer at Stanford’s Internet Observatory. Thiel, the author of a book called iOS Application Security, tweeted that the Californian company spends heavily to prevent the same thing it claims is possible.
“It requires a convoluted system of high-value exploits, dubiously sourced binaries, and outdated devices,” he wrote. “Apple has spent vast sums specifically to prevent this and make such research difficult.”
Surveillance accountability
If you wanted to see exactly how Apple’s complex new tech works, you can’t simply look inside the operating system on the iPhone that you just bought at the store. The company’s “walled garden” approach to security has helped solve some fundamental problems, but it also means that the phone is designed to keep out visitors—whether they’re wanted or not.
(Android phones, meanwhile, are fundamentally different. While iPhones are famously locked down black boxes, all you need to do to unlock Android is plug in a USB device, install developer tools, and gain the top-level root access.)
Apple’s locked-down approach means researchers are left locked in a never-ending battle with the company to try and gain the level of insight they require.
There are a few ways that Apple and security researchers can potentially verify that no government is weaponizing the company’s new child safety features, however.
Apple could hand over the code for review—though this is not something it has said it will do. Researchers can also try to reverse engineer the feature in a “static” manner—that is, without executing the actual programs in a live environment.
Realistically, however, all of those options have at least one major problem in common: They don’t allow you to look at the code running live on an up-to-date iPhone to see how it actually works in the wild. Instead, these methods still rely on trust not merely that Apple is being open and honest, but also that it has written the code without any significant errors and oversights.
Another option would be to grant access to the system to members of Apple’s security research device program in order to verify the company’s statements. But that group, made up of researchers outside of Apple, is a highly exclusive, constrained program with so many rules on what researchers can say or do that it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of trust.
That leaves really only two options for researchers who want to peer inside iPhones for this kind of thing. First, hackers can jailbreak old iPhones using a zero-day vulnerability. That’s difficult, expensive, and can be shut down with a security patch.
“Apple has spent a lot of money trying to prevent people from being able to jailbreak phones,” Thiel explains. “They’ve specifically hired people from the jailbreaking community to make jailbreaking more difficult.”
Or a researcher can use a virtual iPhone that can turn Apple’s security features off. In practice, that means Corellium.
There are also limits as to what any security researcher will be able to observe, but a researcher might be able to spot if the scanning goes outside of photos being shared to iCloud.
However, if non-child abuse material makes it into the databases, that would be invisible to researchers. To address that question, Apple says it will require two separate child protection organizations in distinct jurisdictions to both have the same CSAM image in their own databases. But it offered few details about how that would work, who would run the databases, which jurisdictions would be involved, and what the ultimate sources of the database would be.
Thiel points out that the child abuse material problem that Apple is trying to solve is real.
“It’s not a theoretical concern,” Thiel says. “It’s not something that people bring up just as an excuse to implement surveillance. It is an actual problem that is widespread and needs addressing. The solution is not like getting rid of these kinds of mechanisms. It’s making them as impermeable as possible to future abuse.”
But, says Corellium’s Tait, Apple is trying to be simultaneously locked down and transparent.
“Apple is trying to have their cake and eat it too,” says Tait, a former information security specialist for the British intelligence service GCHQ.
“With their left hand, they make jailbreaking difficult and sue companies like Corellium to prevent them from existing. Now with their right hand, they say, ‘Oh, we built this really complicated system and it turns out that some people don’t trust that Apple has done it honestly—but it’s okay because any security researcher can go ahead and prove it to themselves.’”
“I’m sitting here thinking, what do you mean that you can just do this? You’ve engineered your system so that they can’t. The only reason that people are able to do this kind of thing is despite you, not thanks to you.”
Apple did not respond to a request for comment. . . .
Governor Abbott Proves Once Again That The mRNA Covid Shot Does Not Prevent Infection, Incubation and Transmission Of Covid-19
“Governor Abbott is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, in good health, and currently experiencing no symptoms. Everyone that the Governor has been in close contact with today has been notified. Texas First Lady Cecilia Abbott tested negative.”
“Lasting immunity found after recovery from COVID-19” Without Any Vaccines | NIH
January 26, 2021
To better understand immune memory of SARS-CoV-2, researchers led by Drs. Daniela Weiskopf, Alessandro Sette, and Shane Crotty from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology analyzed immune cells and antibodies from almost 200 people who had been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and recovered.
Time since infection ranged from six days after symptom onset to eight months later. More than 40 participants had been recovered for more than six months before the study began. About 50 people provided blood samples at more than one time after infection.
The research was funded in part by NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and National Cancer Institute (NCI). Results were published on January 6, 2021, in Science.
The researchers found durable immune responses in the majority of people studied. Antibodies against the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, which the virus uses to get inside cells, were found in 98% of participants one month after symptom onset. As seen in previous studies, the number of antibodies ranged widely between individuals. But, promisingly, their levels remained fairly stable over time, declining only modestly at 6 to 8 months after infection. . . .
[ NIH Article ]
Elon Musk says he supports COVID-19 vaccines after questioning safety
Tesla chief Elon Musk expressed support for COVID-19 vaccines despite previously raising questions about their safety and saying he wouldn’t get the jab himself.
The world’s second-richest man tried to clear up his vaccine views on Twitter after drawing ire last month for his vocal skepticism about two-dose regimens.
“To be clear, I do support vaccines in general & covid vaccines specifically,” Musk tweeted Wednesday. “The science is unequivocal.”
The 49-year-old electric-car tycoon sparked controversy last month by saying there was “some debate” about the safety of the second of two shots people must get to complete their Pfizer or Moderna vaccinations.
Musk claimed there had been “quite a few negative reactions” to the second doses as he encouraged elderly and immunocompromised people to take the vaccines.
While allergic reactions to Pfizer’s vaccine have been more frequent after the second dose than the first, they’re still rare overall with just 4.5 incidents reported for every million doses administered, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show. . . .
‘I’M NOT AT RISK’ Elon Musk slams Bill Gates as a ‘knucklehead’ and ‘stupid person’ – and defends vow not to take coronavirus vaccine
20:48, Updated: 21:12,
ELON Musk called Bill Gates a “knucklehead” on Monday and insisted he won’t take a coronavirus vaccine.
The 49-year-old SpaceX and Tesla CEO slammed his fellow billionaire and revealed his shocking plans on the New York Times podcast “Sway.”
Speaking to the host Kara Swisher, Musk slammed Gates – who has voiced support for a coronavirus vaccine – as “a stupid person.”
Musk added: “Gates said something about me not knowing what I was doing.
“It’s like, ‘Hey, knucklehead, we actually make the vaccine machines for CureVac.'”
CureVac, a company Gates has invested in, has machines manufactured by Tesla.
Musk also defended his decision not to vaccinate himself or his children, according to RT.
“I’m not at risk for COVID, nor are my kids,” said Musk, when asked if he would get the vaccine.
Covid-19 A Child Killer? Think again. | “Pediatric Flu Deaths During 2019-2020 Reach New High” by CDC
June 4, 2021 – CDC reported 1 new seasonal flu-related death in a child that occurred during the 2019–2020 season last week, bringing the total number of flu deaths in kids reported to CDC for that season to 199. Prior to 2019-2020, the 2017-2018 season had the highest reported number of pediatric deaths, with 188 pediatric deaths reported. This tragic milestone underscores the importance of vaccinating children.
Among the 199 reported pediatric flu deaths:
- 44% (87) occurred in children younger than 5 years old
- 12 occurred in children younger than 6 months and thus too young to get a flu vaccine
- 56% (112) deaths occurred in children 5-17 years old
- Of the 183 pediatric deaths that occurred among children with known information on medical conditions, 78 (43%) had a pre-existing medical condition.
- Only 22 percent of children eligible for influenza vaccination and for whom vaccination status was known were fully vaccinated against flu. This is consistent with data from previous seasons.
Most of the reported deaths last season (122) were associated with influenza B virus infections. The 2019-2020 season was heavily influenza B virus predominant during most of the season, but there was a surge of influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 viruses that occurred later in the season, before the COVID-19 pandemic began and influenza virus circulation dropped quickly. While influenza A(H3N2) viruses are often associated with more severe illness in older people, last season is a reminder that influenza B viruses can also be associated with serious illness and death, especially in children. . . .
[ Full CDC Article ]
Tennessee Seizes Thousands of Counterfeit COVID-19 Vaccination Cards Shipped From China
The counterfeit COVID-19 vaccination cards that Memphis seized come with a CDC logo on the top, in Memphis, Tenn., in August 2021. (U.S. Customs And Border Protection)
Over 3,000 fake COVID-19 vaccination cards from China have been seized in Memphis, Tennessee en route to other cities in the United States.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) caught a shipment from Shenzhen, China to New Orleans, Louisiana, which contained 51 blank counterfeit vaccination cards, CBP said in a press release on Aug. 13. “It was the 15th such shipment of the night,” they said.
The FBI warned on March 30 that buying, selling, or using a counterfeit COVID-19 vaccination cards is a crime, and violators will face a fine and up to five years in prison.
The White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients also warned on Aug. 13 that it is “a crime” to falsify COVID-19 vaccination cards, amid new restrictions handed down by several major cities.
After New York City announced it would mandate vaccine passports at certain businesses starting next month, and a growing number of colleges and universities across the country are requiring vaccination for students to attend in-person classes, there has been a surge in fake vaccination cards. . . .
COVID-19: China Owes the World $35 Trillion in Compensation
The “lab leak” hypothesis has never looked more credible. If the virus did escape from a lab in Wuhan, then the Chinese regime owes the world at least $35 trillion in compensation.
That’s according to Christian Whiton, a man who previously served both George W. Bush and Donald Trump. With the greatest of respect to Mr. Whiton, my father owes me “compensation” in the form of at least eight, if not nine, birthday presents, but he will never cough up (Dad, if you’re reading this, my apologies); the same, I argue, can be said for China.
Now, before I am accused of being facetious, remember this is the Chinese regime we are dealing with. For more than 18 months, the regime has lied repeatedly. At the time of writing this piece, more than 4.33 million people have lost their lives to the virus.
Instead of offering answers and agreeing to cooperate with further investigations, the Chinese regime has opted to double down on its lies. The virus, according to Beijing, likely originated in the United States, not Wuhan. This is the level of dishonesty and depravity we are dealing with here. If we can’t get one honest answer, how are we ever going to get $35 trillion worth of compensation?
In Whiton’s defense, he admits that the chances of receiving compensation are non-existent. As for the actual sum of $35 trillion, Whiton writes, although it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to put a “number on human suffering, let’s say that China should pay $5 million for every life it may have extinguished.” Now, let’s say 7 million people, in total, lose their lives “before the pandemic ends,” then the Chinese regime finds itself “on the hook for $35 trillion in damages.” With 7 million people dead, though, who, one wonders, would actually be compensated? “Their loved ones, obviously,” some will inevitably shout. But what if the deceased had no loved ones? Also, what about survivors with long-term COVID, or the people who lost homes, jobs, and business? Surely, they also deserve to be compensated. . . .
Biden reps ‘most diabolical presidency and party, probably since slavery’: Mark Levin
Conservative commentator Mark Levin has an absolutely scathing take on President Biden and the state of the Democratic Party.
Speaking on “Life, Liberty & Levin” last Sunday, the writer and political commentator unloaded on President Biden as engineering the “most diabolical presidency and most diabolical Democratic Party, probably since slavery,” in reference to the Democratic strongholds in the slave-holding South. Levin featured Stephen Moore and Stephen Miller as guests when he launched into his takedown of President Biden specifically but also the Democratic Party in general.
Levin referred to “Marxist” changes in the federal government as a “massive de-growth movement dress[ed] up as climate change and the Green New Deal.” He went on to accuse Democrats in Congress of working with Biden’s guidance and blessing to create a permanent change in America’s basic structure, from a limited government, economically liberal model to an ultra-centralized far-left regime, delivered into existence by way of massive “infrastructure” and “voting rights” bills that are fully intended to impact far more than their titles would indicate.
The goal of all this, according to Levin, would be to effectively shut the Republican Party out of power — permanently. With a permanent monopoly on elections and the various mechanisms of government power, the Democratic Party would be mostly free to reshape and distort the United States into whatever image it wanted. This would impoverish Americans and create dependency on the government — controlled by the Democratic Party.
“The economics of that, how that’s going to impoverish so many Americans in the war on success, the destruction of the voting system to make it [so] only one party can ever win, blowing out the Republican state legislatures so they have no say on it,” Levin said. . . .
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Taliban Enters Kabul, President and Diplomats Flee
KABUL (Reuters)—Taliban insurgents entered Kabul and President Ashraf Ghani left Afghanistan on Sunday, bringing the Islamist militants close to taking over the country two decades after they were overthrown by a U.S.-led invasion.
It was not yet clear where Ghani was headed or how exactly power would be transferred following the Taliban‘s lightning sweep in recent weeks across Afghanistan. Their advance accelerated as U.S. and other foreign troops withdrew in line with President Joe Biden’s desire to end America’s longest war, launched in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
By evening, the Taliban said they had taken control of most of the districts around the outskirts of the capital.
The U.S. Embassy said there were reports the capital’s airport, where diplomats, officials and other Afghans had fled, had come under fire.
“The security situation in Kabul is changing quickly including at the airport. There are reports of the airport taking fire; therefore we are instructing U.S. citizens to shelter in place,” an embassy security alert said.
Hundreds of Afghans, some of them government ministers and government employees and also other civilians including many women and children, crowded in the terminal desperately waiting for flights out.
“The airport is out of control… the (Afghan) government just sold us out,” said an official at the scene who declined to be named for security reasons.
American diplomats were flown from their embassy by helicopter to the airport as Afghan forces, trained for years and equipped by the United States and others for billions of dollars, melted away.
Ghani’s destination was uncertain: a senior Interior Ministry official said he had left for Tajikistan, while a Foreign Ministry official said his location was unknown and the Taliban said it was checking his whereabouts.
Some local social media users branded him a “coward” for leaving them in chaos.
Taliban fighers reached Kabul “from all sides”, the senior Interior Ministry official told Reuters and there were some reports of sporadic gunfire around the city.
A Kabul hospital said more than 40 people wounded in clashes on the outskirts were being treated, but there did not appear to be major fighting.
Insurgents entered the presidential palace and took control of it, two senior Taliban commanders in Kabul said. The Afghan government did not confirm this.
During Sunday, the government’s acting interior minister, Abdul Sattar Mirzakawal, said power would be handed over to a transitional administration. He tweeted: “There won’t be an attack on the city, it is agreed that there will be a peaceful handover”.
However, two Taliban officials told Reuters there would be no transitional government. The Taliban said earlier it was waiting for Ghani’s Western-backed government to surrender peacefully.
SHARIA
Many Afghans fear the Taliban will return to past harsh practices in their imposition of sharia, or Islamic religious law. During their 1996-2001 rule, women could not work and punishments such as stoning, whipping and hanging were administered.
The militants sought to project a more moderate face, promising to respect women’s rights and protect both foreigners and Afghans.
“We assure the people, particularly in the city of Kabul, that their properties, their lives are safe,” Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen told the BBC, saying a transfer of power was expected in days.
Many of Kabul’s streets were choked by cars and people either trying to rush home or reach the airport, residents said.
“Some people have left their keys in the car and have started walking to the airport,” one resident told Reuters. Another said: “People are all going home in fear of fighting.”
Early on Sunday, refugees from Taliban-controlled provinces were seen unloading belongings from taxis and families stood outside embassy gates, while the city’s downtown was packed with people stocking up on supplies.
U.S. officials said diplomats were being ferried by helicopters to the airport from its embassy in the fortified Wazir Akbar Khan district. A NATO official said several European Union staff had moved to a safer location in Kabul.
U.S. troops were still arriving at the airport, amid concern heavily armed Afghan security contractors could “mutiny” because they have not been assured Washington is committed to evacuating them, a person familiar with the issue said.
European nations, including France, Germany and the Netherlands, also said they were moving their diplomats to the airport and working to get citizens as well as some Afghan employees out of the country.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said he had discussed the rapidly evolving situation with Britain, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands.
AMERICAN EVACUATION
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said earlier in Washington that the embassy was being moved to the airport and has a list of people to get out of harm’s way.
Asked if images of helicopters ferrying personnel were evocative of the United States’ departure from Vietnam in 1975, Blinken told ABC news: “Let’s take a step back. This is manifestly not Saigon.”
A NATO official said the alliance was helping to secure the airport and that a political solution was “now more urgent than ever”.
Russia said it saw no need to evacuate its embassy for the time being.
Earlier on Sunday, the insurgents captured the eastern city of Jalalabad without a fight, giving them control of one of the main highways into landlocked Afghanistan. They also took over the nearby Torkham border post with Pakistan, leaving Kabul airport the only way out of Afghanistan still in government hands.
“Allowing passage to the Taliban was the only way to save civilian lives,” a Jalalabad-based Afghan official told Reuters.
A video clip distributed by the Taliban showed people cheering and shouting “Allahu Akbar” – God is greatest – as a convoy of pickup trucks entered Jalalabad with fighters brandishing machine guns and the white Taliban flag.
Iran said it had set up camps along the Afghan border to provide temporary refuge to Afghans fleeing their country.
Biden on Saturday authorised the deployment of 5,000 U.S. troops to help evacuate citizens and ensure an “orderly and safe” drawdown of military personnel.
Biden said his administration had told Taliban officials in talks in Qatar that any action that put U.S. personnel at risk “will be met with a swift and strong U.S. military response.”
He has faced rising domestic criticism after sticking to a plan, initiated by his Republican predecessor Donald Trump, to end the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan by Aug. 31.
“An endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me,” Biden said on Saturday.
(Reporting by Kabul and Washington bureaus Writing by Andrew Cawthorne and Philippa FletcherEditing by William Mallard, Andrew Cawthorne and Frances Kerry)
Georgia Fulton County Elections Chief Ralph Jones Resigns – He Ran the Late Night Ballot Dump Operation in Atlanta
Ralph Jones resigned from his Election position in Fulton County on Friday.
Jones was one of the county officials onsite at State Farm Arena on Election Night, as the counting of ballots continued past midnight.
Those hours became a fixation of the Trump campaign’s efforts to discredit Fulton County’s handling of the election. In his position, Jones became a target of the former president’s supporters who sought to prove an Election Night conspiracy at the arena.
Back in early December we first learned the name of the individual who told election workers to go home on Election night so he and some hand-picked workers could pull ballots out from under tables and jam thousands of Biden-only ballots through tabulation machines.
A short time later, the CFO of the Secretary of State’s office, Gabe Sterling, claimed that nothing was out of the normal in Fulton County on Election Night. Sterling lied in an interview with Newsmax and said that there was an election poll watcher in Fulton County when they were jamming thousands of ballots into voting tabulation machines on election night. This poll watcher, Sterling said was Ralph Jones. But this was a lie because Jones worked for Sterling and the elections department of Fulton County. Jones was not an independent observer. Jones also was pushing thousands of ballots through the tabulation machines himself on Election Night.
Gabe Sterling and Secretary of State Raffensperger were lying. The actions in Fulton County on Election Night were criminal.
Raffensperger and his gang were notified of the ballot stuffing in Fulton County on Election Night and they did nothing. They tried to cover it up.
Anyone who committed crimes in Georgia in the 2020 Election should be in jail. This starts with the corrupt Governor Kemp and his CFO Sterling and everyone else they covered up for and lied about. They all should be in jail. Are there any law enforcement personnel in Georgia who enforce the law? . . .
Henry County Judge Surprises Many with New Ruling in Fulton County Mail-in Ballot Inspection Case
Henry County Chief Judge Brian Amero late last week ordered that all parties involved in the Fulton County mail-in ballot case appear in court next month — for reasons unspecified.
According to court documents, Amero ordered the parties to appear at 9 a.m. September 20 in Courtroom A of the Henry County Courthouse in McDonough.
Garland Favorito of VoterGa.org is a petitioner in this case.
The Georgia Record reported late last week that Amero’s ruling surprised people.
“Amero was expected to issue a ruling to allow the ballot inspection to continue at a higher level of imagery than previously used to detect counterfeit ballots. Instead, he ordered a hearing on Sept 20th, 38 days from now. The ruling is a setback for those wishing to prove election fraud occurred in the 2020 election in the state of Georgia. Amero seems to be running out the clock,” The Georgia Record reported.
“Amero allowed ‘progressive’ law firm Perkins Coie to Pro-hac vice (join the case from out of state) in the Michael Daugherty election legality complaint and then dismissed the case in recent weeks. This ruling we understand will be appealed by Daugherty.”
Petitioners in a lawsuit to inspect Fulton County mail-in absentee ballots from the November 3, 2020 election added new claims last month. They provided new evidence they say proves the hand recount audit conducted after the election, “was riddled with massive errors and provable fraud.”
At a press conference last month in Roswell, Georgia, Favorito and other organizers of the lawsuit, said there was “a whopping 60 percent” error rate in Fulton County’s hand count audit held on November 14 and 15, 2020.
Most of the new allegations and evidence are based on VoterGA data team analysis of Fulton County’s mail-in ballot images from the November 2020 election, which were made available after the petitioners won a court order on April 13 and VoterGA lobbying efforts led the Georgia General Assembly to make all images public.
There were several significant findings from VoterGA’s data team in Fulton County for the November 2020 election and the subsequent hand count audit. Of 1,539 batch files containing 100 mail-in ballots each, 923 – or 60 percent – contained votes incorrectly reported in the official November 3, 2020 results as compared to the reported audit totals.
At least 36 batches representing 4,255 mail-in ballots were redundantly added into the audit results, including extra vote totals of 3,390 for Biden, 865 for Donald Trump and 43 for Jo Jorgensen.
What a Piece of Work – We Caught Him Again: Self-Described Colorado ‘Republican’ Matt Crane Caught at Dominion Party with Democrat Leaders and Eric Coomer
What a piece of work.
The critic of our article on the obvious questionable election results in Colorado neglected to disclose that his wife worked for Sequoia and Dominion Voting Machines for more than a decade.
Today we’ve uncovered that he also failed to mention attending a party with top Democrat schemers and Dominion employees.
We reported on February 12th the suspect and questionable results in Colorado in the 2020 election.
One individual by the name of Matt Crane responded to our post and claimed to be a “strong conservative and very proud republican” in an email to top Republicans. He challenged our report but never reached out to us. He did, however, have the gall to reach out to state Republicans and disparage our report. One of those who received his email provided it to us. We responded to Crane’s email in another article.
We weren’t really sure why a ‘conservative and very proud republican’ (as Crane referred to himself) would write the email Crane sent out. We mentioned this in our post and provided in our rebuttal three things never addressed by Crane:
- Colorado had a greater than 85% voter turnout and that is way over the national average of 50-55% in Presidential elections.
- Obama and then Hillary held the record for most votes in the state at around 1.3 million but Trump beat Hillary’s record by thousands of votes. However, Biden had half a million more votes than Hillary at 1.8 million which makes no sense when you acknowledge the poor results, poor attendance, and lifeless rallies of the Biden campaign. No way Biden beat Obama, Hillary, or President Trump.
- Thirdly, the state’s population increased by less than 200,000 since 2016. None of this makes sense.
We then discovered that there is more to this Matt Crane individual than he was telling us. He was the former Clerk and Recorder in Arapahoe County. We located support for this in various articles, even one report that mentions the woman who took his job:
Arapahoe County Clerk and Recorder Joan Lopez had no elections experience prior to being elected clerk. And it’s showing — frequently — in ways that should make every resident question her ability to fulfill her duties.
The article goes on to mention how the new Clerk and Recorder blocked individuals on Twitter:
But she didn’t just block me. At least three fellow constituents were also blocked, including former Deputy Secretary of State Suzanne Staiert and Lisa Flanagan-Crane (Lopez’s predecessor’s wife).
Then we uncovered that Ms. Lisa Flanagan-Crane, Matt Crane’s wife, claims on her Linked-In profile that she worked for Sequoia and Dominion:
We also know that Ms. Flanagan-Crane worked with Eric Coomer at Dominion and were both named on the Dominion proposal with Colorado in 2015 that was removed from the Colorado Secretary of State’s site after the 2020 election and before the election was certified.
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We do know Matt Crane is not an unbiased “strong conservative and a very proud Republican.” We know his wife worked for Dominion. We also know that when he wrote about us as “actively trying to mislead people” he was projecting on us what he himself was actively trying to do. What a piece of work Mr. Crane is. Shame. . .
To Many Americans, It’s Apparent That Fraud In Election 2020 Cost Donald J. Trump The Presidency | Video: 16 Minutes 29 Seconds
For many Americans there’s an overwhelming sense that our 2020 election was stolen. Election 2020 was probably one of the most confusing in modern history. In one of the most watched videos, many of the contentious allegations are discussed. Hearings were held in many states and insuring election integrity is still ongoing.