A Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill was apparently triggered by the Christmas decorations put up outside a neighboring congressman’s office, calling the U.S. Border Patrol-themed display “insensitive, charged and insulting.”

 A 50-year-old illegal immigrant was arrested and charged after allegedly fatally shooting two sisters in the head in their Dallas-area home last week and also shooting his daughter in the arm. 

 A teacher at a high school in southern Illinois kept parents in the dark about students participating in an LGBT club, according to emails between school teachers.

 Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) called for Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) to be expelled from the U.S. Senate on Friday as now-former Rep. George Santos (R-NY) was expelled from the U.S. House of Representatives.

 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis grilled California Governor Gavin Newsom during their debate in Georgia on Thursday night over the issue of parental rights.

 A group of GOP senators is pushing President Joe Biden to ban travel from China over the appearance of a new respiratory illness.

 Pope Francis quietly confirmed through a blog that he intends to rescind Vatican privileges for U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke, who says he remains uninformed about his status as rumors circulate about his status with the church.

 A Tennessee court ruled on Thursday that a group of parents can intervene in the legal fight to block the release of the manifesto of the transgender-identifying woman who murdered six people at a Christian school in Nashville earlier this year. 

Biden’s Department of Justice has slapped a whopping $700,000 fine on Covenant Transport Inc. and the affiliated Transport Management Services LLC, both stellar examples of Tennessee’s robust transportation sector.

The recent decision by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to impose a $700,000 fine on Covenant Transport Inc., a Christian trucking company based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, raises significant concerns about the overreach of federal power and the disregard for the realities faced by businesses in regulating their workforce.

The DOJ, under Joe Biden’s regime, claims this measure is to resolve alleged violations of the anti-discrimination provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) by Covenant and its affiliated entity, Transport Management Services LLC.

The department accuses Covenant of discriminating against non-U.S. citizen workers by requiring specific documentation to confirm their legal status to work in the United States.

Webmaster addition: Under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), it is illegal for employers to knowingly employ undocumented workers. When employees are hired, their employer is required to ask for documents.

The B61-12 nuclear bomb is now formally in the U.S. stockpile and cleared for operational use on the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber. It's the first U.S. combat aircraft cleared to employ the advanced B61 variant operationally.

U.S. Air Force F-35A Joint Strike Fighters, F-15E Strike Eagles, and F-16C/D Vipers, as well as the service's future B-21A Raider stealth bombers, are also in the process of being certified to employ the B61-12. Some NATO F-35s and F-16s, as well as Germany's swing-wing Tornado combat jets, are also set to be cleared to employ these weapons as part of the alliance's nuclear sharing arrangements.

A police investigation out of Israel has found that an Israeli helicopter was responsible for shooting an undisclosed number of the 364 civilians whom Israeli authorities reported as dead at the October 7 music festival, known as Nova.

Israel says Hamas had no knowledge that the music festival was even taking place at the time, despite it taking place just a few kilometers to the east of Gaza near Kibbutz Re'im, an Israeli settlement.

"According to a police source, the investigation also shows that an IDF combat helicopter that arrived to the scene and fired at terrorists there apparently also hit some festival participants," Haaretz reported about the matter.

(Related: This corroborates with the testimony of Yasmin Porat, an Israeli citizen who fled the Nova music festival to another nearby kibbutz called Be'eri, where she was held captive and treated nicely by Hamas, but meanly by Israel Defense Forces.)

The first synthetic cellular organism was created in 2010 and based on a very small, very simple bacterium called Mycoplasma mycoides. The bacterium was called synthetic because its DNA genome was chemically synthesized rather than replicated from an existing template DNA, as occurs in all other known cellular life on Earth. The experiment was undertaken in order to develop a system that would allow creation of a minimal bacterial cell that could lead to a better understand of the first principles of cellular life. The effort resulted in new synthetic genomics techniques called genome assembly and genome transplantation. The ability of scientists to design and build bacteria opens new possibilities for creating microbes to solve human problems.

Webmaster addition: The Chinese "White Lung" Pneumonia has been reported to be a Mycoplama Pneumonia. Did someone drop another test tube?

Hospitals are overflowing with children suffering from mysterious antibiotic-resistant pneumonia or similar severe ailments in large cities across China. The Chinese government continues to claim that no new pathogen has been found and that the surge in chest infections is due simply to the usual winter coughs and colds.

The ruling class also claims that the infections are “aggravated” by the lifting of the stringent COVID-19 restrictions in December 2022. The World Health Organization (WHO) has dutifully repeated this reassurance as if it learned nothing from Beijing’s disastrous cover-up of the COVID-19 outbreak, according to a report by Foreign Policy.

Fears of another novel respiratory pathogen emerging from China are understandable after the SARS and COVID-19 pandemics, both of which Beijing covered up. Concerns are amplified by Beijing’s ongoing obstruction of any independent investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19—whether it accidentally leaked from the Wuhan lab performing dangerous gain-of-function research or derived from the illegal trade in raccoon dogs and other wildlife at the now-infamous Wuhan wet-market. –Foreign Policy

Israel has long tried to write the Palestinians out of history by claiming the land settled by millions of Jews since the late 19th century was “empty,” which has made it easier for them to justify terrible actions from the 1948 war to the present assault on Gaza, a Palestinian academic told Sputnik.

The ceasefire between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Palestinian militant groups in the Gaza Strip that began last Saturday was canceled by the IDF, which claimed Hamas had broken the truce by firing on Israeli troops. The ceasefire had been called after more than six weeks of intense IDF attack on Gaza and what Israel described as a “complete siege” of the small territory, leading to acute shortages of food, water, medicine, fuel, and other basic necessities.

Several dozen prisoners were released by both sides during the “humanitarian pause,” which also saw much-needed aid begin to enter the densely-populated enclave that is home to more than 2.2 million people, more than half of whom have been forced from their homes by the IDF assault.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud, an author, editor of the Palestine Chronicle, and senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs, told Radio Sputnik’s The Backstory on Thursday that Israeli policy has always been based on negating Palestine and Palestinians as a concept, allowing the justification of any and every action against the Palestinian people.

Webmaster addition: See ISRAEL & PALESTINE: THE MAPS TELL THE TRUE STORY

In July, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the Russia-Africa Summit that Russia had decided to send free grain as humanitarian aid to six African countries on the World Food Program's list.

A ship carrying humanitarian grain from Russia arrived in Somalia's capital Mogadishu on Thursday, the Somali national news agency reported.

"Somalia has received a much-needed aid shipment of 25,000 tons of grain from Russia to address the [consequences of] flooding in the country. The aid shipment, which arrived in Mogadishu on Thursday, was handed over to the Somali Disaster Management Agency (SoDMA)," the media outlet said.

Secretary Blinken ended his visit to Israel and left minutes after fighting in Gaza resumed, nixing gushing reports in US media about the trip being “one of the most significant diplomatic moves” to date with an eye toward ending the conflict. Sputnik asked experts to explain why the Israeli tail seems so consistently able to wag the American dog.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken left Israel early Friday morning to take part in a climate summit in the United Arab Emirates, with Israeli warplanes taking off to pound Gaza shortly before his departure, signaling the collapse of the hard-fought for week-long truce brokered by Qatar and Egypt.

During his stay in Israel, the secretary warned Israeli officials that Tel Aviv wouldn’t be able pursue its war with Hamas in Gaza indefinitely, given domestic and international pressures, and wagged his finger at America’s closest ally about the need to avoid “the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale that we saw in northern Gaza” in the southern part of the Strip.

Israeli cabinet ministers reportedly “pushed back” against some of Blinken’s concerns during their private meeting, assuring that the IDF adheres to the laws of war, and that the Israeli public would support even the campaign to crush Hamas even if it lasted “months.” Blinken reportedly proposed a limit of just “weeks” more worth of fighting.

The US has steadily fallen behind Russia and China in terms of strategic competition, while still insisting on pursuing conflict with both nations in an attempt to reassert its claimed superiority. That situation is ripe for producing a disastrous outcome, an analyst told Sputnik.

In early November, a scheduled test of an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) by the United States ended in failure as the Air Force was forced to prematurely self-destruct the missile in mid-flight. The Pentagon said it was “due to an anomaly” during the test.

The nuclear-tipped missile has been in service since 1970, having its service life extended several times after the end of the Cold War in 1990, which caused the US to de-emphasize strategic missile production. A new system, the Sentinel ICBM, is currently being developed to replace the Minuteman III, but isn’t scheduled to fully replace the older missile for another decade.

However, when the Sentinel and other nuclear-capable weapons, such as the B-21 Raider bomber, finally enter service, they’ll already be outclassed by Russian and Chinese counterparts, since those nations have already achieved nuclear superiority over the US, Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, told Radio Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Thursday. Ritter recently authored an article on Consortium News titled: “The End of US Nuclear Superiority.”

A crucial rail link between Russia and China thousands of miles away from the frontline in Ukraine was sabotaged in an operation directed by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), it has been reported.

Since the start of Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion, Russian authorities have blamed Ukraine for attacks on its infrastructure, such as train lines and military storage facilities.

Ukrainian media outlets said Kyiv was behind two blasts in Russia's far east within 24 hours. The railway provides an important supply line for logistics coming from China and North Korea. Putin is increasingly relying on the two countries for military support in the war. Newsweek has contacted Russia's Investigative Committee for comment by email.

On November 21, 2023, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit found the State of Maryland had violated the Constitution with their recent handgun purchase law. The law requires considerable delay and process before a person can legally purchase a handgun. The opinion specifically states the recent add-on law enacted in 2016 infringes on the Second Amendment by hindering the right to acquire a handgun. From the opinion:

But—for handguns specifically—before you do any of that, there is an additional, preliminary step: You must also obtain a “handgun qualification license.” See § 5-117.1. Getting that license requires, among other things, submitting fingerprints to undergo a background “investigation” and taking a four-hour-long “firearms safety training course” in which you must fire at least one live round. Then, after submitting your application for this extra license, you must wait up to thirty days for approval before you can start the rest of the process.

Plaintiffs seek to enjoin the state from enforcing only this additional, preliminary handgun-licensure requirement. And Plaintiffs’ challenge must succeed. The challenged law restricts the ability of law-abiding adult citizens to possess handguns, and the state has not presented a historical analogue that justifies its restriction; indeed, it has seemingly admitted that it couldn’t find one. Under the Supreme Court’s new burden-shifting test for these claims, Maryland’s law thus fails, and we must enjoin its enforcement. So we reverse the district court’s contrary decision.

About 60 credit unions in the US are experiencing outages because of a ransomware attack on an IT provider the credit unions use, a federal agency said Friday.

The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), the agency that insures deposits at federally insured credit unions, said in a statement to CNN that it was “coordinating with affected credit unions” in the wake of the hack.

The full extent of the outage and its impact on credit unions was unclear Friday evening. One of the affected credit unions, New York-based Mountain Valley Federal Credit Union, said that technicians from the hacked IT provider were “working around the clock to get our systems” back online.

Credit unions reported that the ransomware attack — in which cybercriminals typically lock computer system as an extortion tactic — affected a unit of Trellance, a cloud computing firm provider used by credit unions, NCUA spokesperson Joseph Adamoli said in a statement to CNN.

Morbidity and mortality
Despite MPP been considered a “benign” infection, reports suggest that there is significant morbidity and mortality associated with it. A study looking at all patients admitted with MP infections from 2007 to 2012 at the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Centre identified 416 patients, of which 68 (16.3%) required intensive care unit (ICU) admission. ICU care was required for 18% of adult patients aged 19 – 65 years and 46.6% for older patients. 

On Friday, Judge Thomas S. Kleeh issued a decision striking down the federal prohibition against 18 to 20-year-olds purchasing handguns.

The plaintiffs in the case are Steven Robert Brown, Benjamin Weekley, the Second Amendment Foundation, and the West Virginia Citizens Defense League.

Judge Kleeh, a Donald Trump appointee, is Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia.

Kleeh put the case in context:

This case requires the Court to assess the protected right of the people under the Second Amendment to the Constitution to keep and bear arms. U.S. Const. amend. II. Plaintiffs Robert Brown (“Brown”) and Benjamin Weekley (“Weekley”), individuals, are “law abiding, responsible adult citizens who wish to purchase handguns.”…Brown and Weekley are citizens of West Virginia and the United States of America and are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. Brown and Weekley, as law-abiding, responsible adult citizens, would purchase handguns and handgun ammunition from Federal Firearms Licensees (“FFLs”) but for the right proscribed by 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(b)(1) and (c)(1).

The Great Replacement is not a theory. 

White Genocide is not a theory. 

It is ethnic cleansing as government policy. 

It could and can be stopped and reversed at any time.

Houston Methodist, which made national headlines after becoming the first hospital in the United States to mandate the COVID-19 vaccines, will no longer require its employees to receive the controversial shots after a new law passed by the Texas legislature outlawed the practice of denying vaccine choice to workers in the private sector.

The hospital announced the change in policy in an internal email to employees, reviewed by The Epoch Times, that employees who choose not to receive the COVID-19 vaccine will no longer be prohibited from working at the institution, effective Dec. 1.

“The Texas Legislature passed a law in the special session that prohibits private employers from requiring employees and contractors to get a COVID-19 vaccination as a condition of employment,” the statement read. “We will continue to encourage everyone to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, but it will no longer be mandated at Houston Methodist. This means that getting the vaccine, or being approved for an exemption, will no longer be a condition of employment.”

Gavin Newsom is what one might call a rhetoric peddler more than a debater.  He has a talent for twisting cherry-picked statistics and offering them out of context to defend false claims, and anyone seeking to enter a discourse with him will be forced to keep a long list of data points on file in their brain in order to counter the lies.  The most difficult people to argue with are those that aggressively exaggerate or slant the truth every time they open their mouths.  They are not bound by the same rules as someone trying to argue logically; they have an edge, until they are exposed for what they really are.  

The political left's spin machine is out in force on social media suggesting that Newsom “wiped the floor” with Ron DeSantis during their recent and much hyped Fox News debate.  This is not really the case, though a same small set of clips will probably circulate for the next couple weeks showcasing Newsom's habit of throwing out soundbites and stats without evidence.  And, unfortunately in this day and age two minute video clips are what most people consume for their news.     

Some might say that neither DeSantis or Newsom are relevant because neither of them will be presidential candidates in 2024 (Newsom even made this assertion at the beginning of the debate).  Don't be so sure.  Joe Biden is increasingly losing his faculties and there is always the chance that he will step aside in 2024; as his public approval ratings plummet it may even be in the best interests of the DNC to push for a different candidate.  Gavin Newsom, suspiciously, has been acting as if he is auditioning for a chance at a presidential or vice presidential run.

It's a good idea to keep an eye on him.  He is, at the very least, a good litmus test for the kinds or propaganda the political left will rely on in the coming months.  And speaking of propaganda, here are the top most dishonest claims made by Newsom during his debate with Ron DeSantis.

Nearly 40 Congressional lawmakers aren't seeking reelection in 2024... and most of them are Democrats...

Twenty-one House Democrats are opting out of another term compared to 11 Republicans. On the Senate side, six senators, four Democrat and two Republican, said they're leaving public office, and one has opted to pursue a state governorship.

In comparison to the 38 lawmakers departing Congress so far this cycle, only 24 lawmakers retired before the 2022 election. Twenty-seven had done so before the 2020 election and 31 in 2018, according to Ballotpedia.

A spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which serves the same purpose for House Democrats as the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) does for House Republicans, didn't respond to The Epoch Times' request for comment.

In the era of pervasive surveillance reminiscent of Orwellian nightmares, old-school Cold War hacks have staged a comeback, offering a clandestine refuge for the exchange of information.

As Big Brother looms large on every screen, the savvy practitioner must resurrect time-tested techniques to outsmart the puppeteers of miscommunication particularly in the face of impending legal consequences for government-designated purveyors of deceit.

Here, in the spirit of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, are eight tried-and-true methods to outwit the masters of miscommunication:

Webmaster addition: See Rivero Challenges the NSA