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Ruth King

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Is America meeting the cybersecurity challenge? By Julio Rivera

By on October 16th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/is_america_meeting_the_cybersecurity_challenge.html

As the U.S. remains engaged in a persistent cyberwar, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an alert yesterday in reference to the Ongoing Cyber Threats to US Water and Wastewater Systems. The alert was a reminder of the persistent dangers that exist to America’s critical infrastructure.

For the past several years, the United States has endured attacks from North Korea, Russia, Iran, and in particular, China. During this time, the Chinese cyber threats have been among the most prolific, as we learned back in 2015 that the NSA had already documented over 600 occurrences of “corporate, private or government ‘Victims of Chinese Cyber Espionage’ that were attacked over a five-year period, with clusters in America’s industrial centers,” according to reports.

Despite American efforts to mitigate these attacks behind new cyber initiatives, the waves of attacks have persisted, with last week’s attack against Amazon’s live streaming platform Twitch being the most recent.

Amid the endless reports of attacks this year comes the revelation that a top Pentagon official involved in identifying the most secure software available for the Department of Defense (DOD) quit his position due to his belief that U.S. “AI capabilities and cyber defenses of some government departments were at kindergarten level.”

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

List of US Companies Secretly Owned by China: Tesla, Microsoft, GM, Uber…..etc.

By on October 16th, 2021

https://prepareforchange.net/2021/10/15/list-of-us-companies-secretly-owned-by-china-tesla-microsoft-gm-uber/

This is amazing list, some of these you will never think about. China is buying all America.

Some brands that you may think are quintessentially American are actually owned or overseen by Chinese investment conglomerates. It’s not always obvious until you see it yourself – even sports clubs have some interesting stakeholders.

America is home to many companies that are true titans of industry. From General Electric to General Motors, all of these thriving businesses help buoy the economy when it needs it – but even these giants need to get their money from somewhere.

Investments come from across the globe, but China is always looking to America to try and create fruitful partnerships. If that means saving a floundering brand, then so be it. Read on to find out which of Uncle Sam’s most influential companies are backed by some surprising businesses.

1. General Electric

Headquarters: Boston, Mass.
Bought By: Haier
Headquarters: Qingdao, China

General Electric may have started out as a relatively small brand when it was founded in 1892, but the company has grown exponentially since then. Now, GE has its fingers in a lot of pies, from aviation and healthcare to power and venture capital. It’s a titan.

Many Americans find the brand appealing because it has a “Made in America” stamp on its products, however, the company has been owned by Chinese company Haier since 2016. Haier bought GE for $5.4 billion, a recording breaking sum at that time. The products are still made in the USA, but the decisions are made in China.

It might come as a surprise to many considering just how long the company has been around. However, it just goes to show that when it comes to making money, it really doesn’t matter where the money comes from – as long as it’s coming.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Guilford, Connecticut Residents Accuse Pro-CRT School Board Candidates of Illegally Mass Mailing Absentee Ballot Applications By Caroline Downey

By on October 16th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/guilford-residents-accuse-pro-crt-school-board-candidates-of-illegally-mass-mailing-absentee-ballots/

Amid the heated school board fight over critical race theory that has roiled the sleepy town of Guilford, Conn., community members are alleging that Democratic and independent school board candidates mailed illegitimate absentee ballot applications to constituents.

Five parents new to the local politics scene are running on the GOP ticket for the school board after twice defeating three Republican incumbents, who they claim had earned a reputation for rubber-stamping the district’s equity and inclusion initiatives.

The five newcomers have made it their mission to recapture the progressive school board and restore education integrity in Guilford. Now, they face the challenge of besting a fusion slate of five Democrats and independents to win the vacant seats on the panel and secure a conservative majority to steer the district’s policies away from critical race theory.

On Wednesday, Deborah DeMusis and George Mack, who have lived in Guilford for decades, filed a complaint with the Connecticut State Elections Enforcement Commission requesting a cease and desist order to halt what they claim to be illegal absentee voting.

Appointed circulator by the town clerk to oversee the strict absentee ballot process, DeMusis first suspected malpractice when she learned that an anonymous individual in the town received an envelope filled with suspect materials. According to DeMusis, the envelope contained a disparaging letter targeting the GOP candidates, an absentee ballot guide directing residents to vote for the Democrats and independents, and an absentee ballot application that was pre-filled with voter information as well as signed, in violation of Section 9-140 of the Connecticut General Statutes.

Moreover, the envelopes that the Democrats and independents sent to voters were unsolicited, another illegality, according to DeMusis and GOP school board candidate Danielle Scarpellino. They said that multiple people came forward with their compromised applications, including the spouse of one of the Republican contenders.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

What lies beneath the progressives’ favourite cause Palestinianism has weaponised Israel against the Jewish people Melanie Phillips

By on October 16th, 2021

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/what-lies-beneath-the-progressives?token=

Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States who is now a candidate to head the Jewish Agency, has rightly said that the decline in support for Israel among American Jews has reached a crisis point. The Jewish Agency, he said, “needs to bring young American Jews back from the brink”.

However, the Jewish Agency won’t address this problem by simply tackling American Jews. The roots of this crisis are broader and deeper.

At a conference at the Al Quds University in Ramallah in June, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas delivered a recorded speech with the title, “The Zionist Narrative: Between Reversal and Cancellation”.

In a piece for the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser has written that Abbas “proudly noted” in this speech that international public opinion had recently undergone a gradual shift towards accepting the Palestinian narrative.

As Kuperwasser wrote, this “narrative” is a tissue of demonstrable and idiotic lies designed to promulgate the fiction that the Palestinian Arabs are the true inheritors of the land of Israel rather than the Jews.

But as Kuperwasser also observes, the Palestinian position is that the Jews of Israel must return to the places from where they allegedly came — not the land of Israel, their actual original homeland, but Europe, where they were scattered in exile, persecuted and murdered in great number.

“The narrative,” he writes, “also emphasises that the Palestinian struggle is national and Islamic at the same time and ultimately states that, in light of all this, all of Palestine is included, and Israel should not be recognised in any way as the nation-state of the Jewish people — which, at any rate, does not exist. At most, it is possible to temporarily accept the existence of an ‘Israeli people’ which is a new concept referring to Israel as the state of all its citizens”.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Educating Students about the Victims of Communism By Mike Sabo

By on October 16th, 2021

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/15/educating_students_about_the_victims_of_communism_110650.html

Many Americans today assume that the threat of Communism subsided with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But “We continue to see Communist and socialist regimes pop up and spread not only in Latin America – for example, in Venezuela and Nicaragua – but around the world,” says Ambassador Andrew Bremberg, president and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC). “These regimes regularly kill their own citizens and have a devastating effect on human rights and their national economies.” In fact, over 1.5 billion people – including those living in Laos, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and, of course, China – currently live under oppressive Communist and socialist governments.

Founded in 1993 by a bipartisan, unanimous Act of Congress, VOC is “devoted to commemorating the more than 100 million victims of communism around the world and to pursuing the freedom of those still living under totalitarian regimes.”

Before coming to VOC, Bremberg served as the Trump administration’s Representative of the United States to the Office of the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva. During his time there, which he describes as a “profound and life changing experience,” he “became aware of the challenge of China,” which was “far worse” than he had realized. He notes that the U.N. International Human Rights Council made investigating the United States’ record on racism during the summer of 2020 its highest priority – putting it above China’s appalling human rights violations against Uyghurs, among other ethnic groups within its borders.

“Communist countries by far have the worst record on human rights, past and present,” Bremberg argues. “Their brutality is only outdone by their lies and obfuscations.” Seeing this moral imbalance up close convinced him of the “need to educate Americans about the dangers of Communism today.”

American civic education, Bremberg states, entails not only understanding the structure of our form of government but also the world around us. Pointing to the competing claims of the 1619 Project and the 1776 Commission, he notes that while we should be willing to “be self-critical and examine our past,” we also need to view our nation in comparison to others, especially ones existing under Communism’s iron fist.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Lurching Between Crisis and Complacency’: Was This Our Last Covid Surge? Rising immunity and modest changes in behavior may explain why cases are declining, but much remains unknown, scientists say.By Emily Anthes

By on October 16th, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/health/coronavirus-delta-surge.html?referringSource=articleShare

“It’s a combination of immunity, but also people being careful,” said Joshua Salomon, an infectious disease expert and modeler at Stanford University.” “It’s not likely that it will be as deadly as the surge we had last winter, unless we get really unlucky with respect to a new variant,” Dr. Salomon said.”

After a brutal summer surge, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant, the coronavirus is again in retreat.

The United States is recording roughly 90,000 new infections a day, down more than 40 percent since August. Hospitalizations and deaths are falling, too.

The crisis is not over everywhere — the situation in Alaska is particularly dire — but nationally, the trend is clear, and hopes are rising that the worst is finally behind us.

Again.

Over the past two years, the pandemic has crashed over the country in waves, inundating hospitals and then receding, only to return after Americans let their guard down.

It is difficult to tease apart the reasons that the virus ebbs and flows in this way, and harder still to predict the future.

But as winter looms, there are real reasons for optimism. Nearly 70 percent of adults are fully vaccinated, and many children under 12 are likely to be eligible for their shots in a matter of weeks. Federal regulators could soon authorize the first antiviral pill for Covid-19.

“We are definitely, without a doubt, hands-down in a better place this year than we were last year,” said Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research at Boston University.

But the pandemic is not over yet, scientists cautioned. Nearly 2,000 Americans are still dying every day, and another winter surge is plausible. Given how many Americans remain unvaccinated, and how much remains unknown, it is too soon to abandon basic precautions, they said.

“We’ve done this again and again, where we let the foot off the pedal too early,” Dr. Bhadelia said. “It behooves us to be a bit more cautious as we’re trying to get to that finish line.”

Crushing the curve

When the first wave of cases hit the United States in early 2020, there was no Covid vaccine, and essentially no one was immune to the virus. The only way to flatten the proverbial curve was to change individual behavior.

That is what the first round of stay-at-home orders, business closures, mask mandates and bans on large gatherings aimed to do. There is still debate over which of these measures were most effective, but numerous studies suggest that, collectively, they made a difference, keeping people at home and curbing the growth of case numbers.

These policies, combined with voluntary social distancing, most likely helped bring the early surges to an end, researchers said.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

John Durham and the Amazing Disappearing DNC Hack Evidence grows that the alleged Russian hacking of the DNC server in 2016 was an inside job by George Parry

By on October 16th, 2021

https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-amazing-disappearing-dnc-hack/

This is the fifth in a series of articles analyzing the 27-page federal grand jury indictment charging lawyer Michael Sussmann with making a false statement to the FBI.

As stated in the fourth article, when the FBI learned of the alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee’s (“DNC”) emails,

it asked to examine the server.  In fact, at the same time as the alleged DNC hack, there were similar reports regarding the

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (“DCCC”) server as well as DNC Chairman John Podesta’s personal email devices.

In testimony before the Senate, FBI Director James Comey stated the following:

Question (by Senator Burr): Did the FBI request access to those devices [the servers and Podesta’s devices] to perform forensics on?

A: Yes, we did.

Q: And would that access have provided intelligence or information helpful to your investigation in possibly finding … including to the Intelligence Community Assessment?

A: Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that’s involved. So, it’s the best evidence.

Q: Were you given access to do the forensics on those servers?

A: We were not. We were … a highly respected private company eventually got access and shared with us what they saw there.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Biden walks naked into a climate conference With Congress stalled, he likely won’t meet his own green commitmentsRupert Darwall

By on October 16th, 2021

Nye Bevan, the British socialist, famously denounced the nuclear unilateralists in his party for sending a future foreign secretary ‘naked into the conference chamber’. Unless Congress passes the stalled budget reconciliation bill, President Biden will fly to the COP26 Glasgow climate conference, which starts in less than three weeks’ time, in a similar state of undress.

Before the Paris agreement in 2015, UN climate change conferences were about hammering out the texts of binding climate treaties and agreeing to emissions reduction targets. All that has changed. Climate change targets are now decided in advance by individual countries in their Nationally Determined Contributions, draining climate conferences of drama and turning them into a giant show-and-tell. Unless, that is, the world’s self-styled climate leader turns up in Glasgow with nothing to show.

The Biden administration’s NDC is long on rhetoric, starting with climate change as an existential threat. Yet when it comes to the ‘bold action’ the threat demands, the cupboard is bare of bankable action. Interviewed in April, Gina McCarthy, Biden’s national climate adviser, who put together the NDC, was asked what was the one piece of legislation she wanted Congress to pass. ‘To make sure that by 2035 we have a clean energy sector,’ McCarthy answered.

Much of what McCarthy wants is embedded in the gargantuan reconciliation Build Back Better package, including $300 billion of clean tax credits and a Clean Energy Standard to meet Biden’s goal of having a zero-greenhouse gas emitting grid by 2035, items that McCarthy describes as ‘non-negotiables’. There is a reason for this. The White House touts the falling cost of renewables, but its convoluted formulation that clean alternatives ‘may start looking like the cheap alternatives’ suggests cost competitiveness is still years away. Until recently, the rapid transition the White House wants ‘looked anything but cheap’, so it seeks to place the cost of decarbonizing electricity on taxpayers rather than in higher electricity bills. Doing this will require congressional approval.

McCarthy claims the administration has ‘lots of regulatory authority’ should the administration fail to get the reconciliation package through Congress. But she knows as well anyone that regulation is a distant second to legislation. Build Back Better’s Clean Energy Standard is a successor to the Clean Power Plan, which McCarthy oversaw when she was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during the second Obama term. Challenged in the courts, the Supreme Court imposed a stay on the EPA implementing the plan. Would the Supreme Court’s decision slow down the transition to a low carbon future? ‘Absolutely not,’ McCarthy responded two weeks later. If so, what was the point of the plan?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Was January 6 Part of the FBI’s ‘Operation Cold Snap’? It’s only a matter of time before we learn how many “Big Dans” or Stephen Robesons were part of January 6. By Julie Kelly

By on October 15th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/14/was-january-6-part-of-the-fbis-operation-cold-snap/

The tony, bucolic town of Dublin, Ohio would be one of the last places in America expected to host a convention of white supremacist militiamen. Nestled along the Scioto River, the Columbus suburb’s biggest claim to fame is hosting the PGA’s annual Memorial Golf tournament every summer.

But in June 2020, days after the nation was roiled by Black Lives Matter looting and rioting, a man from Wisconsin named Stephen Robeson sponsored a “National Militia Conference” at a Dublin hotel. (Yes, that was the real name of the event.) 

According to BuzzFeed’s exceptional July 2021 investigative report on the FBI-led plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, Robeson “helped organize the national meeting, and he was enthusiastically pushing people he knew to attend.” The purpose of the conference was to recruit people who ultimately would stoke “political violence” against governors who refused to reopen their states after lockdowns supposedly necessitated by COVID.

Some participants said Robeson, known as “Robey,” relentlessly pestered them until they agreed to show up; people came from as far as Maryland and Kansas City, BuzzFeed’s Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison reported. One member of the Three Percenters, an alleged militia group on the FBI’s naughty list, observed people taking photos from discreet locations in the hotel. “The feds are everywhere,” he thought to himself.

Indeed. One of the feds was Robeson himself.

In a motion filed in July by a defense lawyer in the Whitmer kidnapping prosecution, Robeson is described as having a long record “of cooperating with the government in exchange for personal benefits. Basically, this [confidential human source] has a decades-long history of acting as a professional snitch for the government.”

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FOREIGN POLICY, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Biden’s Credibility Plummets over Purchase of Chinese-Made Drones by Con Coughlin

By on October 15th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17861/biden-china-drones

Critics of DJI’s systems claim they have the potential to be monitored remotely, and a review of the drones conducted by the Pentagon earlier this year concluded that they posed a potential threat to national security.

The Pentagon has been voicing concerns about commercial off-the-shelf drones since 2018, when it implemented a ban. The following year, Congress passed legislation banning the use of drones and components manufactured in China, and the Trump administration blacklisted DJI for national security reasons

“DJI drones are safe and secure for government and enterprise operations.” — spokesman for DJI rejecting claims that its drones posed a security risk, Reuters, July 23, 2021

Given the Chinese Communist Party’s abysmal record for trustworthiness, however – as in prominsing not to militarise the fake islands they built in the South China Sea just before they militarised them, or claiming that their Chinese virus, COVID-19, was not transmissible human-to-human – this assessment is less than reassuring.

Nothing better illustrates the Biden administration’s utter incompetence in safeguarding America’s interests than the revelation that a number of federal agencies are reportedly purchasing surveillance drones from China.

The Pentagon has previously advised against US agencies purchasing Chinese-made drones on the grounds that they could be used to transfer sensitive data to Beijing’s communist rulers.

But now a new report by the Axios website claims that a number of federal law enforcement agencies in the Biden administration have purchased drones from China that have previously been labeled a potential national security threat by the Pentagon.

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