North Korea has issued somewhat rare statements lashing out at growing US military involvement in Ukraine, with the influential sister of Kim Jong Un condemning the decision to transfer heavy battle tanks.

Kim Yo Jong's statement came on the heels this week of the US confirming it will send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, and they were her first public remarks in months. She charged that Washington is crossing a "red line" in its drive to escalate a "proxy war" aimed at regime change in Russia. "I express serious concern over the US escalating the war situation by providing Ukraine with military hardware for ground offensive," said Kim.

"The US is the arch criminal which poses serious threat and challenge to the strategic security of Russia and pushes the regional situation to the present grave phase," she added, in her official statement as vice-department director of the Central Committee of the Workers Party of Korea.

"I do not doubt that any military hardware the US and the West boast of will be burnt into pieces in the face of the indomitable fighting spirit and might of the heroic Russian army and people," she added.

The Conference Board – a nonprofit think tank that delivers cutting edge research – recently published its latest Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the United States.  The findings were a giant bummer.  In December, the LEI dropped for the tenth consecutive month.

The LEI, if you’re unfamiliar with it, consolidates various measures of economic activity, including credit, interest rate spreads, consumer expectations, building permits, new orders of goods and materials, and several other items, to assess which way the economic winds are blowing.  Over the past six months, the LEI has fallen by 4.2 percent.  This is the fastest six-month decline since the great coronavirus panic.

This week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis provided its advance estimate of Q4 U.S. gross domestic product (GDP).  For the final quarter of 2022, real GDP increased at an annual rate of 2.9 percent.

The Washington Post counted 1,096 people in the U.S. who were shot and killed by police in 2022.

In previous years, about as many people - around 1,000 annually - have died this way.

As Statista's Katharina Buchholz shows in the infographic below, most of those killed by police were male and armed...

We saw it happen generations ago. We fought two of humanity’s most destructive wars and faced the horror of industrial-scale extermination. Never again, said the world’s peoples in the late 1940s, and they began the difficult task of uncovering all that had been done, all that had gone wrong. 

The mass graves, the German and Soviet labor camps, the Japanese massacres in the Far East, America’s internment camps, the secret police and the mutilations, the ever-present threat of violence hanging over every member of society. We saw the personality cults around Hitler or Stalin for what they were, the blatant ideologies for what they had resulted in. 

When the Berlin Wall fell in November of 1989, and with it the remains of the Evil Empire that had put it there, we discovered more horror. The archives of East Germany and the Kremlin showed that informants were everywhere happily giving up information – real or invented – on their fellow humans. We found more bodies. We learned that under enough fear and pressure, human life wasn’t worth anything. When push came to violent shove, bonds of family and community meant nothing. 

The error of this terrifying history is to think that this was a problem of “the other,” someone far away who is nothing like us. Asks Thorsteinn Siglaugsson in a recent article: ”How do you find your inner Nazi? And how do you get him under control? Most people would have participated in the atrocities of their time, had they been put in that position – or at least sat by and allowed them to happen.”

From couch surfing to shelters to sleeping on the streets, new research revealed the top US cities with the most homeless Gen-Z youth (aged 18 to 24). 

The nonprofit United Way of the National Capital Area reviewed data from the US Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development and found San Jose had the largest number of homeless Gen-Z youth per 100,000 residents. New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Seattle round out the top five cities for homeless young adults. 

Here is something you won’t hear anywhere else. It is clear that Joe Biden is being ratted out in the classified document scandal, but by whom? Tucker Carlson is convinced it is a cabal of Democratic Party members who want a new presidential nominee for 2024. Tucker, I love ya, but I don’t think so. I believe foreign actors and their interests  may be involved.

Joe Biden has been in politics for 50 years. He’s never had a real job. The only core conviction he has is the self-aggrandizement that comes from being able to have people suck up to him due to the power and vast resources at his disposal. He’s dumber than a doorknob. Yet, with 50 years of experience, he is on automatic pilot when it comes to self-preservation. He simply does what he is told and reads his teleprompter without really knowing what he is reading. Thus, I don’t buy Tucker’s analysis because the “powers that be” controlling him already have a pretty good gig. Why would they want to dump him?

I have great respect for anybody who risks his own money creating a product or service that others want to buy, whether it is a plumber growing his business or a software engineer creating the next new gizmo that charms Menlo Park. But people who sell influence and access to American politicians are despicable.  The conspiring politicians are sewer rats. They are fiduciaries of your money, and they use their access to your money to grant favors to others so they will have the benefit of your money and in return they enrich themselves. The nation’s interests take second fiddle to their interests. Yet, the pernicious, indeed the treasonous element of all this is when they sell influence to foreign actors, bad people in charge of powerful governments that are hostile to the United States. It is sick. It is despicable. It is treasonous.

Money is money. It is a force for great good, but can also be a force for evil and corruption. Men of integrity, the type that should be our elected officials know this. They understand that they as humans are corruptible and thus studiously avoid any potential conflict which would compromise their integrity or loyalty to their principal. These are age old truisms that have been in circulation and practiced by those who are serious about preserving their character for at least the past 2,000 years. See Matthew 6:24. “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

Applicants to the police who can barely write in English are being accepted by the Met in an attempt to improve diversity, one of His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary has warned.

HMI Matt Parr said that while it was entirely “noble and right” that Scotland Yard was aiming to be more representative of the community it policed, it should not be at the expense of standards.

In 2021, Dame Cressida Dick, the then Met Commissioner, declared it was the force’s aspiration to recruit 40 per cent of its officers from the black and ethnic minority communities by 2023.

But despite the Government’s programme to boost the number of officers across the country, which has seen a significant recruitment campaign across policing, the number of BAME officers in London remains at less than 17 per cent.

The killing of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man in Memphis, at the hands of police has prompted outrage and condemnation from racial justice activists, police reform advocates and law enforcement officials, including the chief of the Memphis Police Department, a Black woman who lobbied for policing changes in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

The fact that the five officers charged with Mr. Nichols’s murder are Black complicates the anguish. It has also brought into focus what many Black people have said is frequently lost in police brutality cases involving white officers and Black victims: that problems of race and policing are a function of an entrenched police culture of aggression and dehumanization of Black people more than of interpersonal racism. It is the system and the tactics that foster racism and violence, they say, rather than the specific racial identities of officers.

Days before yesterday’s Twitter Files report about Hamilton 68, I wrote the public relations officers of both of the sites’ parent organizations, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) and the German Marshall Fund (GMF). I told them I was in possession of the Hamilton 68 list, which purported to track “Russian influence activities.” I said I had a slew of internal Twitter documents that among other things identified their project as “bullshit.” Toward the end I added:

Given the sheer quantity of news stories sourced to Hamilton 68, this has to go down as one of the great media frauds of all time. Unless you have an explanation for how and why hundreds of non-Russians like Dennis Michael Lynch, Patrick Hennigsen, Joe Lauria, and [I inserted the name of a San Diego school board member] came to be on this list, there’s no other conclusion. 

I hope you will treat this matter with respect and answer this query. My story is going to identify not just people like Clint Watts but members of the ASD advisory board as party to this. 

The story eventually published, “Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, The New King of Media Fraud,” was based on email assessments of Twitter executives like Yoel Roth and Nick Pickles, the forensic analysis Roth had done in 2017 and which was excerpted yesterday, and interviews with people on the list. These elements — especially the interviews — made for a pretty ironclad case that the much-ballyhooed Hamilton 68 “dashboard” was a sham, that took real opinions of real people and falsely declared them part of a “network” of “Russian influence activities.”

On the remote chance Hamilton 68 had inside information legitimizing the linking of Dennis Michael Lynch, David Horowitz, and @TrumpDyke to “Russian influence activities,” I not only reached out to Hamilton’s creators, but when they were quiet, threw a tantrum on Twitter, tagging every member of the ASD advisory board in an effort to hear from them pre-publication. I genuinely wanted to hear an innocent explanation if they had one. They still said nothing. Only after the story blew up online yesterday did they put out an explanation.

Pfizer late Jan. 28 responded to comments from a director at the company about exploring ways to mutate COVID-19 as a method to “preemptively develop new vaccines.”

“In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research,” Pfizer said in a lengthy written statement after days of ignoring queries from The Epoch Times and other outlets.

Pfizer did say that it has conducted research “where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern.”

“This work is undertaken once a new variant of concern has been identified by public health authorities. This research provides a way for us to rapidly assess the ability of an existing vaccine to induce antibodies that neutralize a newly identified variant of concern. We then make this data available through peer reviewed scientific journals and use it as one of the steps to determine whether a vaccine update is required,” the company added.

Pfizer did say it has conducted experiments in a level 3 laboratory.

Pfizer said, in its work developing a treatment for COVID-19, it has “engineered” the COVID-19 virus “to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells.”

“In addition, in vitro resistance selection experiments are undertaken in cells incubated with SARS-CoV-2 and nirmatrelvir in our secure Biosafety level 3 (BSL3) laboratory to assess whether the main protease can mutate to yield resistant strains of the virus,” Pfizer said. “It is important to note that these studies are required by U.S. and global regulators for all antiviral products and are carried out by many companies and academic institutions in the U.S. and around the world.”

Pfizer produces a COVID-19 treatment called Paxlovid, or nirmatrelvir that is authorized in the United States and some other countries.

The new far-right government in Israel has been in power for only a month, but on its watch, Israelis and Palestinians have already experienced one of their region’s most violent phases, outside a full-scale war, in years.

Nine Palestinians were shot dead on Thursday morning, in the deadliest Israeli raid in the West Bank for at least a half-decade. Then, a Palestinian gunman killed seven people on Friday night outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, the deadliest attack on civilians in the city since 2008. And on Saturday, an attacker who the police said was 13 years old shot and injured two Israelis near a settlement in East Jerusalem.

These events were not unique to this government’s tenure. But analysts fear that the policies and leaders of the new Israeli administration — the most right-wing in Israeli history — are likely to further inflame the situation.

Bill reveals how Congressman George Santos "pinocchioed" his way into power: by preying on America's obsession with identity politics.

Hunter Biden appeared to have been using his father's Delaware home as an office, with classified documents stored within the walls.

The president's son, now 52, listed his father's Wilmington mansion as his home following his 2017 divorce from Kathleen Buhle.

In 2018 and 2019 he had bills registered at the house, The New York Post reported on Saturday, and he asked his assistant to ship crates of his office equipment to the residence.

'Have what's in storage sent to my parents' guest house,' he told his assistant, Katie Dodge, in a December 2018 text message.

In fulfillment of his solemn, constitutionally-enshrined obligation, the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush, on January 28, 2003, stood before the rostrum in the chambers of the United States Congress and addressed the American people.

“Mr. Speaker,” the President began, “Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, distinguished citizens and fellow citizens, every year, by law and by custom, we meet here to consider the state of the union. This year,” he intoned gravely, “we gather in this chamber deeply aware of decisive days that lie ahead.” The “decisive days” Bush spoke of dealt with the decision he had already made to invade Iraq, in violation of international law, for the purpose of removing the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, from power.

Regime change had been the cornerstone policy of the United States toward Iraq ever since Bush 43’s father, Bush 41 (George H. W. Bush) compared Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler and demanded Nuremberg-like justice for the crime of invading Kuwait. “Hitler revisited,” the elder Bush told a crowd at a Republican fundraiser in Dallas, Texas. “But remember: When Hitler’s war ended, there were the Nuremberg trials.”

American politicians, especially presidents seeking to take their country into war, cannot simply walk away from such statements. As such, even after driving the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait in February 1991, Bush could not rest so long as Saddam Hussein remained in power–the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler had to go.

Notebooks that US President Joe Biden kept during his time as vice president were among the items seized by the FBI during a search of his home last week, as part of a probe into his mishandling of classified documents, a person familiar with the investigation told NBC.

Despite not being marked as classified, the notebooks were taken because they contain writing related to Biden’s official business within the Obama administration, including details of diplomatic contacts, the broadcaster reported on Saturday.

The notebooks were a mix of records on personal and official topics, the source said, adding that pages with no sensitive data could also be considered state property under the Presidential Records Act, as they relate to the activities of the government.

Biden had a “large” number of these notebooks, the person said, but could not provide the exact figure.

“If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning. And tonight, I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: Your enemy is not surrounding your country, your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation” – this promise was made exactly 20 years ago, on January 28, 2003, by then US President George W. Bush in his annual message to Congress. This speech concerning Iraqi President Saddam Hussein became a prologue to the beginning of a large-scale and protracted military conflict, whose consequences the region is still dealing with today.

Unfounded accusations that Iraq might be developing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) became the main pretext for the invasion which started on March 20. Less than a year later, Washington admitted that it had been a false threat, but there was no turning back — Hussein was deposed and then executed. And the US occupied Iraq, plunging the country into chaos it is still struggling to overcome to this day.

‘So, what’s the difference?”

– was how Bush reacted in December of 2003 to a remark that pointed out that WMDs had not been found in Iraq.

According to Pentagon data from 2019, total losses of American servicemen during the entire Iraqi war amounted to 4,487 people. While the exact number of civilian deaths is incalculable, it is definitely measured in the hundreds of thousands.

Since 20 GOP-led states filed a lawsuit Tuesday against President Biden's new immigration plan, migrants are now rushing to fly into the United States. 

Hundreds of migrants flew into the Miami International Airport Thursday and Friday from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Haiti—all coming to the United States legally under the parole program. Under the new immigration plan, the U.S. will allow 30,000 migrants from four countries to enter each month. 

Migrant families are now coming to the United States earlier than expected after the lawsuit – fearing the program could end.

"My family particularly thought that if we couldn't push up the flight, she wouldn't have the chance. We made a decision to do it really fast because you know, we really just have one chance to do it and if we didn't do it now we couldn't ever bring her back," Yazmin Reyes said.

“Doesn’t matter what color those police officers are. The murder of Tyre Nichols is anti-Black and the result of white supremacy.”

So tweeted star freshman Democrat Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost of Florida Friday night upon the release of Memphis police video of the brutal murder of Black motorist Tyre Nichols at the hands and feet of five Black Memphis police officers earlier this month in a traffic stop turned deadly beatdown.

Frost later deleted the tweet without explanation. The screen capture posted below shows the tweet had over 1 million views before it was taken down by Frost.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced plans to make it easier for Israelis to get firearms amid escalating violence in the occupied Palestinian territory, a move seen as “collective punishment” and one that could further increase the violence.

Netanyahu announced the measure late on Saturday after convening a meeting of his security cabinet — filled with hardline politicians — over a pair of shootings that included an attack in occupied East Jerusalem.

The suspect in a machete attack on two churches in southern Spain in which one clergyman was killed and another seriously injured is a 25-year-old Moroccan man who was due to be deported from the country, police said on Thursday.

The suspect was arrested on Wednesday evening after a man wielding a machete attacked several people at the churches of San Isidro and Nuestra Senora de La Palma, around 300 metres (1,000 feet) apart, in the southern port city of Algeciras.

[...] The man was not in Spain legally and his deportation process began in June last year and was ongoing, the source added.

The representatives of the European Service of External Actions of the European Union visited the Ministry of Defense of Georgia. They were hosted by the first deputy minister, Lela Chikovani, together with the representatives of the Ministry of Defense and the Defense Forces. The meeting was held within the strategic dialogue.

The parties discussed current issues of cooperation between Georgia and the European Union within the framework of the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) and outlined plans for further deepening, expansion and strengthening of cooperation. The conversation touched upon the security environment in the region and the world, the financial assistance package allocated to Georgia within the framework of the European Peace Instrument (EPF), and Georgia’s contribution to the ongoing military training mission under the auspices of the European Union .

The Georgian side informed the representatives of the European Union about the ongoing transformation process in the Georgian Defense Forces and the implemented reforms. Attention was focused on the issues of strengthening the capabilities of the Georgian Defense Forces….

The US announcing that it will deliver its Abrams tanks to Ukraine was the result of a compromise between Washington and Berlin and basically a cover for Germany sending its Leopard 2 tanks to Kiev immediately while the supplies of the US-made vehicles are scheduled to begin later, according to an article in The Washington Post on Saturday.

According to the newspaper which cites conversations with more than a dozen current and former officials as well as those familiar with discussions, Washington and Berlin have not been able to reach a compromise on sending tanks to Kiev for a long time. Washington wanted Kiev to receive the German tanks because the Pentagon thought that it would be easier for Ukrainian troops to learn to handle them and there is a sufficient number of spare parts for them. However, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was concerned over Moscow’s potential reaction should Berlin act unilaterally and did not want to be perceived as a party to the conflict so he was insisting on the US supplying its Abrams tanks.

According to The Washington Post, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin "was against supplying Abrams tanks he thought were too complicated for near-term use in Ukraine." Another defense official told the newspaper that "the US vehicles were clad with specialized, depleted uranium armor, a classified design that no one wanted Russia to get its hands on."

 Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev has lambasted Western attempts to justify arms deliveries to Kiev as an alleged effort to prevent a world war.

"Firstly, defending Ukraine, which nobody needs in Europe, will not save the senile Old World from retribution if anything occurs. Secondly, once the Third World War breaks out, unfortunately it will not be on tanks or even on fighter jets. Then everything will definitely be turned to dust," Medvedev wrote on his Telegram channel on Saturday.

In this post, Medvedev commented, in particular, on Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto’s remarks that the Third World War would erupt if Russian tanks reached Kiev and "the borders of Europe", and that the weapons sent to Ukraine were meant to stop the escalation. Medvedev equated his remarks to the calls from the United Kingdom to provide Kiev with all the weapons NATO has.

Webmaster addition: That's odd. Americans would like to have guns to prevent crime but the US Government doesn't like that idea at all!

Ukraine intends to receive 24 fighter jets from international allies as part of the first batch, Yuriy Ihnat, spokesman for the Air Force Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, told the Spanish newspaper El País.

“The Air Force’s priority is to get American F-16s, although Kyiv is considering the option of French Rafales and Swedish Gripens,” the newspaper writes.

It is noted that the first package will include two battalions of 12 combat aircraft each. “This is a new package of military assistance that the Ukrainian army intends to receive from its international allies. The 24 fighter jets – ideally US F-16s – would represent only an urgent first phase in a new chapter in the supply of weapons to the country invaded by Russia: combat aircraft,” the report notes.

 Chair of the NATO Military Committee Rob Bauer said that the US-led bloc is ready for a direct confrontation with Russia in an interview with Portugal’s RTP TV channel.

Replying to a question on the matter, he asserted: "We are ready." That said, he added that NATO is going to respond only if Russia crosses the red line by invading one of NATO member states.

The military official stressed that NATO should be better prepared because currently Russia has the military initiative. "The fact that your enemy has better weapons is not the problem of the enemy. That is your problem," he said.

On January 25, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told journalists in Angola that BRICS, an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, may soon explore the possibility of creating its own currency. What message does this plan send regarding the greenback's dominance?

While delivering a statement after his meeting with Angolan President Joao Lourenco, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov emphasized that the West had shattered vital principles of the inviolability of property, the presumption of innocence, fair competition, and globalization.

Under these circumstances, BRICS, an informal group of developing nations, and the CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) have started to discuss the establishment of their own new currencies within the frameworks of these blocs, according to the Russian foreign minister.

Earlier this week, President of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva touched upon the issue of the creation of a common currency for BRICS and the countries of Mercosur, a South American trade bloc, during his meeting with his Argentine counterpart Alberto Fernandez.

At least 14 people have been killed and 24 injured after Ukrainian missiles struck a hospital in the city of Novoaydar in the early hours of Saturday, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement.

The medical facility in the city, which is located dozens of kilometers away from the frontlines in the central part of the Lugansk People’s Republic, treated both local residents and soldiers, the ministry noted. It added that both patients and medical personnel were among the victims.

“A deliberate missile strike on a known civilian healthcare facility is an absolutely grave war crime of the Kiev regime,” the MOD stated in a Telegram post, vowing to bring all those involved in planning and executing the attack to justice.