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Russian Troop Movements on Ukraine Border Test Biden Administration After fresh fighting inside Ukraine, Kyiv puts forces on alert and bolsters units in country’s east by Thomas Grove and Allen Cullison

Posted By on April 1st, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-troop-movements-on-ukraine-border-test-biden-administration-11617230084

Russia has begun mobilizing troops along its border with Ukraine, presenting a fresh challenge at the Biden administration and threatening to upend a cease-fire between Ukraine and pro-Russian fighters.

The move follows escalated fighting along the demarcation line inside Ukraine, where one attack last week killed four Ukrainian soldiers and wounded two.

In response, Ukraine said Tuesday it had put its own forces on alert and was reinforcing units in eastern Ukraine and on the border with the Russian-occupied peninsula of Crimea.

While Mr. Biden has wrestled with Kremlin machinations such as a massive suspected Russian hack of U.S. government computer systems and the assessment by U.S. intelligence that Moscow attempted to interfere in the 2020 election, the situation in Ukraine is the first involving movements of Russian troops. Russia has denied meddling in the election and denied responsibility for the hack.

In Washington, a State Department spokesman said the department was discussing the situation with NATO allies.

“We are concerned by recent escalations of Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine, including violations of the July 2020 cease-fire that led to the deaths of four Ukrainian soldiers on March 26 and the wounding of two others,” a State Department spokesman said.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Wuhan Whitewash A WHO report on Covid’s origin echoes Chinese propaganda.

Posted By on April 1st, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wuhan-whitewash-11617142921?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The World Health Organization on Tuesday finally released its report on the origins of the coronavirus, and the result wasn’t worth the wait. The document is best understood as a whitewash heavily influenced by the Chinese Communist Party and Westerners with conflicts of interest.

The report—based primarily on an international team’s visit this year to the city of Wuhan, where Covid-19 was first detected—has little new information. But the team analyzes four origin scenarios.

The report says the most likely origin was a transfer to humans through bats with an intermediary host. The second most probable, according to the report, is that bats directly transmitted Covid-19 to humans. The report also takes too seriously a third theory, pushed by Beijing, that the virus arrived in China in frozen food, which the WHO claims is “possible” and merits more study.

Most telling is that the team concludes it is “extremely unlikely” that the virus leaked from a lab such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The report simply asserts that WIV facilities “were well-managed, with a staff health monitoring programme.” The report suggests “regular administrative and internal review of high-level biosafety laboratories worldwide” and following up on new evidence.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Here Come the Biden Taxes The middle class will pay for the largest tax increase since 1968.

Posted By on April 1st, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/here-come-the-biden-taxes-11617231225?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

So much for the illusion of cost-free spending blowouts. The bill for President Biden’s agenda is coming due, starting with Wednesday’s proposal for the largest corporate tax increase in decades. Can we finally drop the pretense that any of this is moderate or unifying or bipartisan?

Mr. Biden’s corporate tax increase alone is more than $1.5 trillion over 10 years, with another $1.5 trillion coming soon on individual income and investment. That’s about $300 billion a year, or 1.36% of GDP each year, assuming U.S. GDP of $22 trillion. Dan Clifton of Strategas Research Partners compares that to Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase of 0.4% of GDP, making the Biden increase the largest since 1968.

***

Mr. Biden’s corporate increase amounts to the restoration of the Obama-era corporate tax burden, only much more so. The GOP tax reform of 2017 was designed to fix a corporate tax system that was uncompetitive and convoluted. Companies paid taxes in countries where they earned the income, but then again if they returned the money to the U.S. Trillions of dollars piled up overseas. Remember the string of corporate “inversions” when CEOs moved their headquarters overseas?

Those inversions all but ended after 2017 as reform lowered the top corporate rate to 21% from 35% and moved the U.S. closer to a territorial tax system in which income is taxed where it is earned. Mr. Clifton calculates that companies repatriated $1.6 trillion from overseas to the U.S. from 2018-2020, which they deployed for a variety of useful economic purposes. The repatriation total three years before reform: only $495 billion.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden $2.3 tn boondoggle is no challenge to China David Goldman

Posted By on April 1st, 2021

https://asiatimes.com/2021/04/biden-2-3-tn-boondoggle-is-no-challenge-to-chin

Democrats would hike corporate taxes without restoring the R&D incentives that the Trump tax cut eliminated.

President Joe Biden’s proposed $2.3 trillion spending package unveiled March 31 should have come a day later, as an April Fool’s exercise.

Labeled an infrastructure package, it offers just $447 billion for transportation infrastructure over eight years. That’s less than a quarter of the most widely accepted estimates for the US infrastructure deficit.

On February 21, Biden told a group of US senators, “If we don’t get moving, [the Chinese] are going to eat our lunch. They’re investing billions of dollars dealing with a whole range of issues that relate to transportation, the environment and a whole range of other things. We just have to step up.”

Biden might as well instruct Secretary of State Blinken to ask the Chinese if they want fries with that.

Most of the $2.3 trillion will buy votes rather than infrastructure, including $400 billion for “elder and disability care,” $213 billion for “green and affordable homes,” $174 billion for electric vehicles, $137 billion for “school and childcare infrastructure,” $100 billion for “job training” and so forth.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

GovCon Expert Chuck Brooks: Strategic Paths of Cybersecurity

Posted By on April 1st, 2021

https://www.govconwire.com/2021/03/govcon-expert-chuck-brooks-strategic-paths

GovCon Expert Chuck Brooks, an invaluable member of Executive Mosaic’s GovCon Expert program, has published his latest feature detailing the essential understanding of cybersecurity, its capabilities, the best practices to get the most out of the technical concept and the awareness of cyber’s potential to find success.

“At its very core, the practice of cybersecurity is risk management. It requires being vigilant and encompasses educating employees, identifying gaps, assessing vulnerabilities, mitigating threats, and having updated resilience plans to respond to incidents.”

You can read Chuck Brooks’ latest GovCon Expert article below:

Strategic Paths of Cybersecurity

By GovCon Expert Chuck Brooks

Cybersecurity requires a plan and strategy.

At its very core, the practice of cybersecurity is risk management. It requires being vigilant and encompasses educating employees, identifying gaps, assessing vulnerabilities, mitigating threats, and having updated resilience plans to respond to incidents.

Government and industry leaders should have a working understanding of risk management (and risk exposure) and have context on the different array of threats and threat actors. They should also be knowledgeable on the guiding axiom of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Framework: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Marxist Agenda Infiltrating Our Schools. Clare Lopez

Posted By on April 1st, 2021

https://jamieglazov.com/2021/03/30/clare-lopez-video-the-marxist-agenda-infiltrating-our-schools/

This new webinar features Clare Lopez, is the Founder/President of Lopez Liberty LLC, with a mission to alert and educate Americans on a range of national security threats, international as well as from the Islamic Movement/Muslim Brotherhood and collaborators among the ranks of Marxists/communists in this country.

Clare discusses The Marxist Agenda Infiltrating Our Schools, revealing how parents across America, some for the first time, are realizing what their children have been learning in school — and they’re horrified.

Don’t miss it!

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Foster Parents Forced to Break Up Family after Non-Profit Takes Home to Accommodate Migrant Children By Zachary Evans

Posted By on March 31st, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/non-profit-orders-foster-parents-to-vacate-home-to-accommodate-migrant-children/

A foster family in Washington state was told to vacate their home by the non-profit organization that provided it, in order to make space for housing unaccompanied migrant children.

Friends of Youth, a non-profit that provides services to homeless and foster children, told Edmundo Serena Sanchez and his wife Paual to vacate their home in Renton, Wash., in a story first reported by King 5, a Seattle-area NBC affiliate. In an interview with National Review, Serena Sanchez said the couple was forced to send three of their foster children to other families because they were not able to find a suitable home by the time of their eviction.

A fourth teenager under their care ran away upon learning of the move, and has not returned as of Wednesday.

Edmundo, a driver for Uber and Lyft, and Paual are licensed therapeutic foster parents, who are trained to raise children with serious behavioral problems. They’ve raised more than 20 foster children in the home over the seven years they’ve lived there.Serena Sanchez said that Friends of Youth, which currently serves over 3,000 children in the Seattle area, sent him a notice on January 29 that his foster home contract “will be terminated,” and that the house would be used “to provide a different scope of services in support of unaccompanied youth.”

“Unaccompanied youth” is the federal term for unaccompanied migrant children, and the Biden administration is currently struggling with a major influx of migrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Dawn of a New Age of Tyranny Is Upon Us Michael Walsh

Posted By on March 31st, 2021

http://www.theepochtimes.com/the-dawn-of-a-new-age-of-tyranny-is-upon-us_3755195.html

If you’re bewildered by the breakneck pace of “change” since the inauguration of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., on Jan. 20, you’re not alone.

Average Americans have been puzzled and, in many cases, chagrined by the flurry of executive orders, ukases, policy prescriptions, social proscriptions, vengeful rollbacks, and other government meddling in the lives of our citizens. Conservatives, meanwhile, understand that all this activity has one overarching purpose: to punish the bad Orange Man and the country that voted for him. And make sure he never happens again.

To that end, the string of top-down bossiness has been designed to look, and be, punitive. Every major Donald Trump initiative or accomplishment must be negated and anathematized. His supporters who unwisely marched on the Capitol on Jan. 6—what did they hope to accomplish?—shouldn’t just be deplored but hunted down by the FBI for “sedition”; there’s even a tip line for junior Stasis-in-training to rat out their friends and neighbors.

Woke hall monitors must screech like Donald Sutherland at the end of the 1978 version “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” whenever they see a constitutionally free and unmasked citizen daring to appear in public without a slave muzzle.

Meanwhile, “white supremacy” (which is just a leftist term for Western civilization) and rampant “bigotry” (disagreement over political processes and objectives) must be hunted down and eradicated, civil rights suspended, and core provisions of the Bill of Rights overthrown, including all or parts of the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and 10th amendments. It’s a mad scramble for a Year Zero to rival those of the French and Bolshevik revolutions—the dawn of a new age of tyranny masquerading as compassion.

Never Again

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

CDC Manipulated COVID Death Toll – Number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 radically inflated

Posted By on March 31st, 2021

https://nationalcenter.org/?utm_source=The%20National%20Center&utm_camp

A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States has a recorded death toll of over 525,000 people. National Center Senior Fellow Bonner Cohen, Ph.D. asks: “But is it accurate?”

The number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 may be radically inflated due to a change in policy by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that did not go through the proper channels and could be in violation of the law.

Bonner’s news analysis for The Heartland Institute’s Health Care News summarizes and explains the findings of a new peer-reviewed study of the CDC’s COVID-19 reporting procedures. These procedures “willfully violated several federal statutes, including the Data Quality Act, Paperwork Reduction Act and the Administrative Procedures Act,” Bonner writes.

According to Bonner’s analysis:

[T]he Centers for Disease Control and Prevention unilaterally altered the 17-year-old process by which it calculated disease-caused fatalities, creating a special procedure for tabulating COVID-19 deaths. This, the study says, enabled the CDC to produce inaccurate data which were widely disseminated by the media and served to justify a host of coercive measures to stem the spread of the disease.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China shows it too can play rough in the Middle East China is asserting its interests in Iran, Israel and elsewhere as the Biden administration bumbles in its first approaches to the region. David Goldman

Posted By on March 31st, 2021

https://asiatimes.com/author/spengler-david-p-goldman/

American influence is fragile in several key Eurasian nodal points and China has the capacity to hurt the United States in retaliation for American efforts to build an alliance to contain it.

China’s rhetoric has been harsh in recent weeks and it appears ready to back up the rhetoric with tough actions.

On Saturday (March 28), China and Iran formally signed a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” agreement that promises to chart the two sides’ economic, political and trade relations over the next 25 years, Iranian state media reported.

“The document can elevate bilateral ties to a new strategic level,” Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said in a televised interview. The agreement, which had been in the works since 2016 and comes while both sides face US sanctions, will boost private sector ties including through China’s Belt and Road Initiative, he said.

When the proposed deal first was floated in August 2020, I wrote, “The prospect of a deal with Iran is a move on a global game board in response to American efforts to hinder China’s breakout as a technological superpower.”

A significant Sino-Iranian investment deal had long been rumored, and it is probably not a coincidence that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi arrived in Tehran to sign it a week after the acrimonious exchange at the Anchorage ministerial meeting between the US and China.

China has sent a clear signal to the Biden administration that its plans for reviving the Iran nuclear deal as well as its ability to put economic pressure on Iran depend on China’s cooperation.