About 100 CIA officers and family members are among about 200 US officials and kin sickened by “Havana syndrome”, the CIA director, William Burns, said on Thursday, referring to the mysterious set of ailments that include migraines and dizziness.
Burns, tapped by Joe Biden as the first career diplomat to serve as CIA chief, said in a National Public Radio interview that he had bolstered his agency’s efforts to determine the cause of the syndrome and what is responsible.
CIA Director William Burns recently selected the intelligence officer, who has not been identified, to lead a task force to investigate the unexplained symptoms, the Journal reported on Wednesday, citing “current and former officials familiar with the matter.”
The Biden administration has revealed new details of Chinese cyberattacks on American critical infrastructure starting nearly a decade ago, amid an ongoing effort to expose what the U.S. and its allies say is the extent of China’s malicious cyber actions aimed at the U.S. and other foreign targets.
China-sponsored attackers targeted U.S. oil and gas companies from December 2011 to 2013 in order to develop the cyberattack capabilities needed to disrupt and damage U.S. pipeline operations, according to an alert issued Tuesday from FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The federal government said it previously informed victims and others of the cyberattacks in 2012 but had not made public the full details until this week.
The fascistic impulse is very strong with these people.
When Jen “Circleback Girl” Psaki announced, to the astonishment of half the country, that the White House was going to flag social media posts for deletion based on whether or not those posts fit the official COVID narrative, on its face the statement was objectionable enough.
One can conjure countless scenarios of Sarah Sanders or Kayleigh McEnany doing the same thing, and the country erupting in outrage. They never did, and still their critics on the left called the Trump administration “authoritarian.”
As the United States prepares to complete its withdrawal from Afghanistan by August 31, 2021, a growing number of Arabs are worried that the American move will not only bring the Taliban back to power there, but also lead to the re-emergence of other Islamist terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS).
The Arabs are saying that the Americans are mistaken if they think that the war on terrorism will end with the withdrawal of the US troops from Afghanistan.
They are warning the US that it will pay a heavy price for allowing Afghanistan to fall into the hands of terrorist groups. They are also saying that they see no difference between the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and ISIS, and how these groups openly cooperate with each other.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) added her voice to a group of Democratic lawmakers Tuesday calling on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to appoint a special U.S. international envoy tasked with ending “Islamophobia” wherever it is found.
Omar and two dozen other political allies pointed to what they called the “persecution of Muslims manifesting itself around the world” as reason for the appointment.
Most unvaccinated Americans say there is nothing that could convince them to get the COVID-19 shots, according to a new Axios/Ipsos survey.
Families supporting the local team. A woman waiting for her ride. A six-year-old girl playing outside. In one weekend, a series of shootings affected all of these Washington DC residents – and shocked a city all too familiar with the plague of gun violence.
It was the sixth inning. The Nationals Park baseball stadium, just south of Capitol Hill, was packed with thousands of fans spending their Saturday night watching the Washington Nationals play the San Diego Padres.
That was when the shots rang out. Cries of “shooter” rapidly spread through the crowd. Where had the attack come from? Was a gunman inside?
Biden had announced the concept of the red flag rule in April and directed the Department of Justice to publish a model rule within 60 days. At the time, Biden called on Congress to pass “an appropriate national ‘red flag’ law,” but said the White House will move forward with gun control policy “whether Congress acts or not.”
America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive and frightening place by July 2021. How did that happen?
Nations have often gone mad in a matter of months. The French abandoned their supposedly idealistic revolutionary project and turned it into a monstrous hell for a year between July 1793 and 1794. After the election of November 1860, in a matter of weeks, Americans went from thinking secession was taboo to visions of killing the greatest number of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Mao’s China went from a failed communist state to the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno, when he unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966.
What is the biggest threat to the West right now — China or inflation? Stupid question, you might think. One is a country, the other an economic indicator. They belong to different categories, so comparing them is ridiculous.
Except there’s a very deep connection between the two. Right up until Covid, we’ve enjoyed a twenty years of miraculously low inflation. Over the last decade, we’ve really pushed our luck — forcing interest rates down to zero and instructing our central banks to turn on the printing presses…
Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, a project of its Saudi-founded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), claims it exists to combat the pernicious spread of “Islamophobia.” ACMCU’s June 30 webinar featuring former Bridge research fellow Jordan Denari Duffner offered further evidence that Bridge’s real mission is to depict all Muslims as victims and silence critical commentary on Islam. Like the term “Islamophobia” itself, Bridge exists to end, rather than advance, debate.
The UK and EU have accused China of carrying out a major cyber attack earlier this year.
The attack targeted Microsoft Exchange servers, affecting over a quarter of a million servers around the world.
The EU was the first to put out a statement saying the attack came from “the territory of China”, while the UK said Chinese state-backed actors were responsible. The US is expected to follow suit.
The countries have also said the Chinese Ministry of State Security was responsible for other espionage activity.
h/t DM
President Joe Biden inherited an America that was a net energy exporter, something that had not been achieved even once in his 44 years in federal office. The GOP’s energy strategy was, quite simply, working. The results were not just lower energy prices and independence from unstable or adversarial countries; this also helped us lower carbon emissions.
As the International Energy Agency reported last year, the United States in 2019 led the world with the biggest one-year reduction in energy-related CO2 emissions, and since 2000 (our peak emissions year), we have had the greatest absolute drop in emissions reductions of any nation.
A federal judge in Texas on Friday ruled that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), which granted pseudo amnesty for illegal immigrants under the age of 30 who were brought to the United States as minors, is illegal, reports the Wall Street Journal.
