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Former Democratic Party organizer charged for attempted terrorist attack on railroad in Washington state

RT | December 2, 2020

Ellen Brennan Reiche, one of two women charged this week in Seattle for allegedly attempting a terrorist attack on a railroad, was reportedly the deputy field organizer for the Democratic Party in Washington state.

US Attorney Brian Moran announced the charges, saying that the 23-year-old Reiche and Samantha Frances Brooks, 27, were arrested on Saturday night after they allegedly placed a “shunt” on BNSF railroad tracks in Bellingham, Washington. A shunt is comprised of wire and magnets stretched between the tracks to disrupt the low-level electrical current and can be used to derail a train, cause train cars to decouple or stop safety gates from coming down at railroad crossings, Moran said.

The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force has been investigating the placement of shunts on BNSF tracks in Washington since January. There have been at least 41 such incidents during that period, causing crossing gates to malfunction, disrupting automatic braking systems and nearly derailing a train pulling tanks of hazardous and flammable chemicals.

An anarchist group called It’s Going Down claimed responsibility for the railway attacks on its website, saying it was being done to “fight against colonial invasion” of Wet’suwet’en Indian lands in British Columbia. Bellingham is located about 17 miles south of the Canadian border.

Reiche’s Linkedin profile, which has apparently been deleted, reportedly indicated that she had worked as deputy field organizer for Washington State Democrats. She’s currently a mentor for Wild Whatcom, which takes children on nature outings.

BNSF police observed Reiche and Brooks kneeling on railroad tracks on Saturday night, according to Moran’s statement. Whatcom County Sheriff’s Department deputies confronted the two women at the scene and found a shunt on the tracks near the spot where they had been spotted by surveillance cameras.

Reiche and Brooks tried to flee on foot but stopped when a deputy ordered them to halt. Deputies said they had a paper bag containing wire and a drill with a brush head. The wire was similar to the material used in previous shunting incidents. When confronted, Reiche allegedly told deputies that she and Brooks were walking along the tracks to look for her keys. They had no flashlight or other device to help see in the dark.

Reiche told deputies that she had left her phone in her car and pointed out her vehicle parked nearby, according to court documents in the case. The car had a sticker on the back with the words “indigenous land” over a map of the US.

If convicted, Reiche and Brooks could be sentenced to up to 20 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. “These crimes endanger our community,” Moran said.

December 2, 2020 Posted by | Aletho News | , | 2 Comments

Masterminds of 2019 Coup in Bolivia Denounced

teleSUR | December 2, 2020

The former deputy of the governing Movement towards Socialism (MAS) Lidia Patty presented on Monday a lawsuit before the Prosecutor’s Office of the city of La Paz (administrative capital) against the leader of the political group Creemos, Luis Fernando Camacho, and his father José Luis, for alleged crimes of “conspiracy” and “destabilization” after the victory of former president Evo Morales in the elections of November 2019.

The complaint also accuses the former commanders of the Bolivian Armed Forces, Williams Kaliman, and the police, Yuri Calderón, of having committed the crimes of “terrorism, sedition and conspiracy,” for which they have requested their immediate arrest given the danger of their escape from the Andean country.

“We have filed a lawsuit with the Public Prosecutor’s Office, together with my lawyer, and this is important because no one is doing any follow-up because they are free, calm and have destabilized our country economically and politically, Camacho and his father,” Patty told reporters.

According to the complaint, after the November 2019 elections, the accused’s acts caused a “social commotion” in the country that resulted in Morales’ resignation. She also portrayed Camacho and his father as some of the “masterminds” of the coup, who negotiated and paid high military officials to destabilize the democratically elected government.

The former Parliament member also repudiated that the ex-military had “deliberated and suggested” to Morales his resignation, thus violating the Bolivian Constitution. Furthermore, she explained that the former president, who no longer had the Armed Forces command, was forced to withdraw from power because of “the risk of losing his life” and the fear that the Bolivian people “would be massacred.”

Morales resigned as President of Bolivia on November 10, 2019, amid a coup d’état orchestrated against him by the opposition backed by the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United States. He first traveled to Mexico and then to Argentina, where he was granted political asylum status.

Morales returned to his country on November 9 after Luis Arce, the candidate of his political formation, the MAS, won the first round of the Bolivian presidential elections last October with more than 55 % of the votes.

December 2, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption | , | Leave a comment

French former interior minister accused of concealing evidence in death of 80yo killed by riot police tear gas grenade in her home

RT | December 2, 2020

The daughter of an 80-year-old woman killed when a tear gas grenade was fired into her apartment by French riot police two years ago has filed a legal complaint against former Interior Minister Christophe Castaner over the death.

In 2018, Zineb Redouane was closing the shutters of her flat in Marseille when she was struck by the canister, fired during a Yellow Vest demonstration. Experts estimated it had been travelling at more than 97km/h when it hit her chest and face, and she died in hospital shortly thereafter. A report earlier this year into the incident cleared the police of any wrongdoing.

However, a recent investigation conducted by the French non-governmental organization Disclose, using reconstructions by a research group at the University of London, contradicted that report and alleged that the officer who had fired the canister was targeting residential homes.

As a result of the NGO’s findings, Redouane’s daughter, Milfed, has now lodged a legal complaint against Castaner, who was the interior minister at the time of her mother’s death.

Her daughter’s lawyer, Yassine Bouzrou, has repeatedly accused the former minister and others of obstructing justice, and now, in the formal complaint, is accusing him of concealing and interfering with evidence.

Castaner, who currently leads the ruling La République En Marche! party, has repeatedly claimed Redouane’s death was not linked with the tear gas grenade. In 2019, pronouncing claims that police killed her as false, he told France’s Inter radio station, “We must stop this talk of police violence”.

The complaint will now be heard before the Cour de Justice de la République – a special court that was set up to try cases of ministerial misconduct.

December 2, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Subjugation - Torture | , | Leave a comment

Fauci Slammed For Finally Admitting Schools Should Be Open

By Steve Watson | Summit News | December 1, 2020

Lockdown zealot Dr. Anthony Fauci was slammed this week for finally admitting that schools should have been open despite coronavirus restrictions, with critics charging that children have been subjected to eight months of hell for no good reason.

During a Sunday appearance on ABC’s “This Week”, Fauci stated that “The default position should be to try as best as possible, within reason, to keep the children in school, to get them back to school.”

“If you look at the data, the spread among children and from children is not very big at all, not like one would have suspected. So let’s try to get the kids back,” Fauci said.

Senator Rand Paul, who has been consistently pushing for an explanation as to why schools were closed without any scientific backing said that Fauci “owes [an apology] to every single parent and school-age child in America.”

Referring to Fauci’s admission, Paul said “I told him this multiple times this summer.”

Tucker Carlson took Fauci to task Monday, noting that “the country’s public health establishment has tortured your children for eight months for no apparent reason.”

“The authorities have admitted it,” Carlson urged, adding that “the most amazing part — and this really is the headline of the story — is that they knew they were wrong when they did it. But they kept lying about it even as American children began to kill themselves.”

“Why is this just now occurring to Tony Fauci?” Tucker asked, adding “Isn’t this Fauci’s entire job to, quote, ‘look at the data?’ Yes, it is. And, yet, somehow he never thought to do that.”

December 2, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 1 Comment

Covid-19 was present in America BEFORE being officially confirmed in China, study by US health protection agency says

RT | December 2, 2020

Coronavirus had been infecting people in the US even before China reported its first cases on December 31, 2019, research by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Red Cross has revealed.

American medics officially registered their first Covid-19 patient on January 19, 2020, but the findings in a paper published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases suggest the virus may have been circulating in the US prior to that.

The researchers studied almost 7,400 blood donations made in nine US states between December 13, 2019 and January 17, 2020. Evidence of Covid-19 bodies antibodies, the presence of which suggest a person had contact with the virus, were present in 106 of those samples, according to the study.

This means coronavirus could have been in the US a month before it saw its first confirmed case, and weeks before the Chinese authorities announced the infection in the city of Wuhan.

The analysis of hospital data from across the US in late 2019 also showed a spike in flu patients, many of whom had “heavy coughing” and other severe respiratory symptoms.

European researchers have also speculated that coronavirus had been present in their countries before China officially announced the outbreak of the new strain. A French survey has discovered there were Covid-19 antibodies in blood samples taken in early December 2019. A similar study carried out by their Italian peers revealed that samples in Italy were already showing antibodies in September.

Spanish virologists, meanwhile, found traces of coronavirus in sewage water samples collected in March 2019 – a full nine month before the events in Wuhan.

The precise origins of coronavirus are currently unknown, but the US has been making active attempts to blame it on China since the start of the pandemic. President Donald Trump has often referred to the disease – which has so far infected more than 13.8 million people, and killed more than 271,000 in America – as the “Chinese virus,” provoking vehement protest from Beijing.

December 2, 2020 Posted by | Aletho News | , | 1 Comment

Five Burning Questions About the New Covid Vaccine

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | December 2, 2020

The United Kingdom government has today announced its approval of the first Covid19 vaccine for general use. 800,000 doses are slated to be released for general use by the end of the week, and has already signed a contract for 40 million more doses (to go along with over 300 million doses of as-yet-unreleased vaccines from other companies).

With the newest phase in the Covid19 roll-out set to begin, it’s time we addressed the five biggest questions about this vaccine, its effectiveness, its safety and whether or not we’ll be forced to use it.

1. Does it work?

Clearly, the company claims it does, and the UK government seems to believe them. The Guardian, in their coverage of the vaccine, claim it has a 95% efficacy rating, but does not provide a source for this or any kind of data at all.

Fortunately, better journalists and researchers are writing for the British Medical Journal, including this piece from Peter Doshi just last week.

To explain where this “95% effective” claim actually comes from:

The Pfizer vaccine trial included nearly 44,000 people. Half getting their vaccine, half getting a placebo. In total, from the 44,000 people, 170 were later recorded as having become ‘infected with Covid19’. 162 of them were in the placebo group, 8 of them in the vaccine group.

The vaccine is therefore credited with preventing 154 cases of Covid19… or 95%.

You don’t need to be a medical researcher or virologist to see how potentially flawed this reasoning is. The entire trial of 44,000 people is deemed a success based on the potentially multi-variant outcome from less than 4% of those involved.

The details of the trial are hard to come by, so we have yet to find out how these 170 people were even diagnosed with “Covid19”. Was it a clinical diagnosis based on symptoms? Or PCR test? Either method would raise serious questions about accuracy.

In short, the answer to “Does it work?” is “we have no idea.”

2. Is it safe?

Potentially more important than the question of efficacy is the question of safety. No one, not even the vaccines most ardent defenders, is denying that this vaccine process has been rushed – vaccines typically take years and years to produce, whereas this one has been hurried on to the market in less than nine months. Some of them have skipped important stages in testing altogether.

Even supposing the short term trials have not shown any side effects, there has simply been no time to do long-term outcome studies. The potential for complications, months or years down the line, certainly exists.

Further, the vaccine is based on new technology – an mRNA vaccine, which injects viral genetic material to generate an immune response. The technology has been in development for years, but this would be the first mRNA vaccine actually put to use.

So, again, the short answer to “is it safe?” is “we don’t know”.

However, the vaccine pushers and manufacturers clearly have doubts about its safety, since they have gone out of their way guarantee they have total legal indemnity from prosecution or civil suits should something go wrong. Not a confidence booster that.

Ask yourself: if Ford or BMW were releasing a new type of car based on “cutting edge technology”, but before you buy one you have to sign a waiver saying you can’t sue the car manufacturers in the event you explode in a fiery ball of death…would you drive that car?

3. What’s in it?

This is a simple one. We don’t know, they won’t say. At least not in anything but the vaguest terms.

4. Who will get it?

First on the docket are the elderly and NHS workers. We don’t know who will be excluded. Immunocompromised people were excluded from the efficacy study, so presumably, they’ll also be excluded from taking the vaccine. If not, that’s a potential disaster waiting to happen (although they have legal protection, so I guess that doesn’t matter).

The British military are already busily setting up “mass vaccination centres”. So eventually, of course, almost everyone will be expected to get injected if they want to partake of society in any way at all. Which leads us onto question five…

5. Will it become mandatory?

The question of “mandatory vaccines” has been buzzing around since the earliest stages of the pandemic narrative. The final result will obviously vary country-to-country, but it’s certainly a possibility here in the UK.

A few months ago a group of scholars submitted written evidence to the UK Parliament that mandatory vaccinations would be defensible on a human rights basis, and that there was already legal precedent for this action in UK legislation (specifically, treating mental health patients who may be a danger to themselves).

In the end, and this is purely my speculation, I doubt the vaccine will ever be literally legally mandatory. Parliament will reject the “expert advice” suggesting Covid19 vaccines be forced on people.

This will accomplish two goals at once: a) It will give the government a veneer of “libertarianism”, a thin facade to cover it’s tyrannical nature. And b) It will allow a potential “third wave” of Covid19 to be blamed on “vaccine hesitancy”.

Though it will probably never be literally mandatory, they will certainly make it much easier to function should you get the vaccine.

There’s been much talk of “immunity passports”, meaning digital documents showing your vaccination status which make you exempt from lockdown and social distancing rules.

In the future it’s not hard to see these documents (either physical or digital) being vital to the ability work, socialise, travel, get loans, apply for state benefits or even receive medical treatment.

So, even if not forced to partake of the vaccine, you will likely be bribed, blackmailed or coerced into doing so eventually.

*

To sum up – we don’t know exactly what’s in the vaccine, it might not work, it may not be safe, and we’re probably all going to end up being forced to use it.

Merry Christmas everyone.

December 2, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Nursing Homes and Covid Fatalities: The Empirical Relationship

By Stephen C. Miller | American Institute for Economic Research | December 2, 2020

In the search for strategies in dealing with Covid-19, policymakers have preferred broad-based interventions like curfews or business, school, and church closures in order to slow or stop the spread. In the argument over the consequences of these measures, a crucial question has been lost. Where precisely is the greatest risk of severe outcomes from contracting the virus? We’ve known from the beginning of the pandemic that SARS-CoV-2 disproportionately impacts the sick and aged, but what precisely does that imply about policy?

A particularly dangerous setting is Long Term Care Facilities (LTCs). LTCs account for over 100,000 Covid-19 deaths, almost 40% of the total in the United States. To better understand the variance in outcomes across the country, I looked at differences in state-level deaths per capita as reported by the COVID Tracking Project versus the number of LTC residents in each state.

The share of a state’s population in such facilities could be a better predictor of severe outcomes from the virus than nonpharmaceutical interventions such as curfews, closures, and mask mandates. State case and death totals in nursing homes, as they are often reported, give an impression of how deaths are spread across the country. But those data typically do not include a population adjustment, and do not allow for comparisons between states based on their population’s vulnerability.

Vermont and North Dakota both have relatively small populations, 624,000 and 762,000, respectively, and the median age is substantially higher in Vermont. However, North Dakota has more than twice as many people in nursing facilities as Vermont does. States report LTC deaths differently from each other; in New York, for example, deaths in LTCs are undercounted, as staff and residents who die after being transported to a hospital are not counted as part of the total. State outcomes are only comparable to the extent that the data are reported the same way.

One obvious difference to look at is the median age in each state. However, plotting each state’s median age against Covid-19 deaths shows no peculiar vulnerability (see Chart 1). If anything, there is a slight negative correlation (not statistically significant) between a state’s median age and its Covid-19 death rate. How is this possible? Median age is different from the number of vulnerable aged people in a state. To focus on the most vulnerable requires looking at nursing home populations.

Chart 1: Covid-19 Death Rates vs. Median Age by State

I gathered data from each state and correlated Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 people with the relative size of the population in Certified Nursing Facilities, as estimated by the Kaiser Family Foundation. How do population-adjusted deaths correlate with the state-by-state ranking of numbers of long-term care facilities? The results are noisy, but more conclusive than is seen with many NPIs or by looking at each state’s median age, showing a clear positive relationship between the two measures (statistically significant at the 1 percent level).

Chart 2: Covid-19 Death Rates by Proportion of Each State’s Population in Nursing Facilities

What does this imply for public health? Primarily, we should focus on the key objective: protecting the elderly and the sick in these homes from the virus. We’ve known since March that Covid-19 was a problem in these facilities. Why did governors require nursing homes to readmit these patients who were still testing positive for Covid-19, instead of protecting LTC residents from that risk?

Why were they so anxious to shut down schools and concerts attended by healthy young people — or just healthy people in general — while disregarding a vastly greater and more obvious risk? Instead of demanding stricter rules for everyone, governors should look to improve safety in nursing homes.

The data further suggest that certain states continue to have challenges ahead; namely those with a large share of residents in nursing homes. In particular, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, and the Dakotas need to focus intensely on these institutions.

While not all deaths are preventable, we have a moral obligation to engage in focused protection rather than continue one-size-fits all approaches to public health. To the extent that resources for testing, vaccines, health care worker time, and federal grants are scarce, they should be focused on the most vulnerable, and few are more vulnerable than nursing home residents.

Stephen C. Miller is the Adams Bibby Chair of Free Enterprise and an Associate Professor of Economics in the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University.

December 2, 2020 Posted by | Economics | | Leave a comment

A global team of experts has found 10 FATAL FLAWS in the main test for Covid and is demanding it’s urgently axed

By Peter Andrews | RT | December 1, 2020

A peer review of the paper on which most Covid testing is based has comprehensively debunked the science behind it, finding major flaws. They conclude it’s utterly unsuitable as a means for diagnosis – and the fall-out is immense.

Last week, I reported on a landmark ruling from Portugal, where a court had ruled against a governmental health authority that had illegally confined four people to a hotel this summer. They had done so because one of the people had tested positive for Covid in a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test – but the court had found the test fundamentally flawed and basically inadmissible.

Now the PCR testing supremacy under which we all now live has received another crushing blow. A peer review from a group of 22 international experts has found 10 “major flaws” in the main protocol for such tests. The report systematically dismantles the original study, called the Corman-Drosten paper, which described a protocol for applying the PCR technique to detecting Covid.

The Corman-Drosten paper was published on January, 23, 2020, just a day after being submitted, which would make any peer review process that took place possibly the shortest in history. What is important about it is that the protocol it describes is used in around 70 percent of Covid kits worldwide. It’s cheap, fast – and absolutely useless.

The 10 deadly sins

Among the fatal flaws that totally invalidate the PCR testing protocol are that the test:

  • is non-specific, due to erroneous primer design
  • is enormously variable
  • cannot discriminate between the whole virus and viral fragments
  • has no positive or negative controls
  • has no standard operating procedure
  • does not seem to have been properly peer reviewed

Oh dear. One wonders whether anything at all was correct in the paper. But wait – it gets worse. As has been noted previously, no threshold for positivity was ever identified. This is why labs have been running 40 cycles, almost guaranteeing a large number of false positives – up to 97 percent, according to some studies.

The cherry on top, though, is that among the authors of the original paper themselves, at least four have severe conflicts of interest. Two of them are members of the editorial board of Eurosurveillance, the sinisterly named journal that published the paper. And at least three of them are on the payroll of the first companies to perform PCR testing!

Heroes we deserve

The 22 members of the consortium that has challenged this shoddy science deserve huge credit. The scientists, from Europe, the USA, and Japan, comprise senior molecular geneticists, biochemists, immunologists, and microbiologists, with many decades of experience between them.

They have issued a demand to Eurosurveillance to retract the Corman-Drosten paper, writing: “Considering the scientific and methodological blemishes presented here, we are confident that the editorial board of Eurosurveillance has no other choice but to retract the publication.’’ Talk about putting the pressure on.

It is difficult to overstate the implications of this revelation. Every single thing about the Covid orthodoxy relies on ‘case numbers’, which are largely the results of the now widespread PCR tests. If their results are essentially meaningless, then everything we are being told – and ordered to do by increasingly dictatorial governments – is likely to be incorrect. For instance, one of the authors of the review is Dr Mike Yeadon, who asserts that, in the UK, there is no ‘second wave’ and that the pandemic has been over since June. Having seen the PCR tests so unambiguously debunked, it is hard to see any evidence to the contrary.

The house of cards collapses

Why was this paper rushed to publication in January, despite clearly not meeting proper standards? Why did none of the checks and balances that are meant to prevent bad science dictating public policy kick into action? And why did it take so long for anyone in the scientific community to challenge its faulty methodology? These questions lead to dark ruminations, which I will save for another day.

Even more pressing is the question of what is going to be done about this now. The people responsible for writing and publishing the paper have to be held accountable. But also, all PCR testing based on the Corman-Drosten protocol should be stopped with immediate effect. All those who are so-called current ‘Covid cases’, diagnosed based on that protocol, should be told they no longer have to isolate. All present and previous Covid deaths, cases, and ‘infection rates’ should be subject to a massive retroactive inquiry. And lockdowns, shutdowns, and other restrictions should be urgently reviewed and relaxed.

Because this latest blow to PCR testing raises the probability that we are not enduring a killer virus pandemic, but a false positive pseudo-epidemic. And one on which we are destroying our economies, wrecking people’s livelihoods and causing more deaths than Covid-19 will ever claim.

Peter Andrews is an Irish science journalist and writer based in London. He has a background in the life sciences, and graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in genetics.

December 2, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | | 1 Comment

“And Why Stop There?”: CNN Analyst Calls For Sweeping Regulation of Free Speech On The Internet

By Jonathan Turley | November 30, 2020

We previously discussed the unrelenting drumbeat of censorship on the Internet from Democratic leaders, including President-elect Joe Biden. Those calls are growing as anti-free speech advocates see an opportunity in the Biden Administration to crackdown on opposing views. One vocal advocate of censorship and speech controls has been CNN media analyst Oliver Darcy who just ratcheted up his call for de-platforming opposing views. Like many anti-free speech advocates, Darcy simply labels those with opposing views as spreading “disinformation” and demands that they be labeled or barred from social media. In a recent newsletter, Darcy calls for every tweet by Trump to be labeled as disinformation while asking “and why stop there?” Precisely. Once you cross the Rubicon of speech regulation, there is little reason or inclination to stop. Just look at Europe.

Darcy wrote:

“Nearly every tweet from the president at this point is labeled for misinfo. Which had me thinking. Why doesn’t Twitter just take the step of labeling his entire account as a known source of election disinfo? And why stop there? Why not label accounts that repeatedly spread claims the platform has to fact-check?”

There was a time when the very touchstone of American journalism was the rejection of such calls for censorship, including at CNN.

What is chilling about Darcy’s writings is that they reflect the view of many now in Congress and in the Democratic Party. Indeed, they reflect many in the Biden campaign. Once a party that fought for free speech, it has become the party demanding Internet censorship and hate speech laws. President-Elect Joe Biden has called for speech controls and recently appointed a transition head for agency media issues that is one of the most pronounced anti-free speech figures in the United States. It is a trend that seems now to be finding support in the media, which celebrated the speech of French President Emmanuel Macron before Congress where he called on the United States to follow the model of Europe on hate speech.

Darcy is calling for a more active and extensive regulation of speech to protect users from thoughts or views that he considers false or dangerous: “Think of it as a version of NewsGuard for Twitter.”

“NewsGuard” has a lovely Orwellian sound to be added to other codes for censorship like Sen. Richard Blumenthal recently calling for “robust content modification” on the internet. Who can object to a NewsGuard, which Darcy describes like some beneficent St. Bernard watching over our news and social postings? Of course, what Darcy considers “disinformation” or what Blumenthal considers “robust content modification” is left dangerously undefined.

So put me down as preferring free speech without the helpful guards and content modification. Instead, I hold a novel idea that people can reach their own conclusions on such is disinformation just as Darcy does.

December 2, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | 1 Comment