News (1)
Report finds UFOs may be security risk, have no 'single explanation'
Reporters : Samuel Chamberlain etal, The New York Post
Is the truth out there? Maybe.
A long-awaited US government report on UFO sightings released Friday was largely inconclusive, describing the more than 140 strange objects seen by military personnel across the nation as a threat to flight safety and possibly national security, but adding that there was no “single explanation” for their appearance.
The nine-page public report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said the lack of “high-quality reporting … hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent” of the unidentified objects, but concluded they were likely physical in nature since they were picked up on radar and other sensors.
The report found that 144 UFO sightings had been reported by government sources since 2004 and said it was likely that the objects fall into one of five categories: “airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena,” output from government or industrial “developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall ‘other’ bin” for objects that have yet to be understood “pending scientific advances” — the closest the report came to addressing the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
Just one reported UFO was identified “with high confidence” as a “large, deflating balloon.” In 18 reported incidents, witnesses described “unusual … movement patterns or flight characteristics” while military pilots reported 11 near-misses with a UFO.
The report also tackled what it described as “[s]ociocultural stigmas” in the armed forces and intelligence community surrounding the reporting of UFOs.
“Although the effects of these stigmas have lessened as senior members of the scientific, policy, military, and intelligence communities engage on the topic seriously in public,” it read, “reputational risk may keep many observers silent, complicating scientific pursuit of the topic.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), one of the senators who pressed for the probe, described the report as “an important first step in cataloging these incidents, but it is just a first step.”
“For years, the men and women we trust to defend our country reported encounters with unidentified aircraft that had superior capabilities, and for years their concerns were often ignored and ridiculed,” said Rubio, who later added: “The Defense Department and Intelligence Community have a lot of work to do before we can actually understand whether these aerial threats present a serious national security concern.”
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) said he was first briefed on UFO sightings “nearly three years ago.
“Since then, the frequency of these incidents only appears to be increasing,” he added. “The United States must be able to understand and mitigate threats to our pilots, whether they’re from drones or weather balloons or adversary intelligence capabilities. Today’s rather inconclusive report only marks the beginning of efforts to understand and illuminate what is causing these risks to aviation in many areas around the country and the world.”
House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said the panel would hold a classified briefing later in the year on the matter, “as it has become increasingly clear that unidentified aerial phenomena [UAP, the official term for UFOs] are not a rare occurrence.”
Another committee member, Rep. Andre Carson (D-Ind.), said the report “represents a much-needed shift on this issue.
“We have to take these potential threats to our security more seriously precisely because we can’t fully explain them,” he said. “I’ll keep working through the House Intelligence Committee to get answers.”
The report was funded as part of a $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and spending package enacted by former President Donald Trump this past December. That legislation instructed the Pentagon and the ODNI to provide “a detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data” collected by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI, and the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force and report back in 180 days.
The report was funded as part of a $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and spending package enacted by former President Donald Trump this past December. That legislation instructed the Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to provide “a detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data” collected by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI, and the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force and report in 180 days.
Congress also asked the ODNI for information on “any incidents or patterns that indicate a potential adversary may have achieved breakthrough aerospace capabilities that could put United States strategic or conventional forces at risk.”
The UAP task force, headed by Navy intelligence analyst Brennan McKernan, was created last summer to “detect, analyze and catalog” sightings of objects that could pose a threat to national security.
That move was made after a series of high profile, unexplained events were recorded on US Navy ships and made public last year. At least four warships off the coast of San Diego reported sightings of unexplained objects in July 2019 that didn’t match aircraft currently known to exist, some of which appeared to harass the vessels and another that suddenly disappeared into the ocean.
In another incident, from 2004, several Navy aviators from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz encountered unknown aircraft off the California coast that were described as resembling large “Tic Tac” breath mints.
One of the pilots, retired Navy Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, recalled in an interview with Reuters this week that the oblong object lacked “any visible flight control surfaces or means of propulsion.”
Luis “Lue” Elizondo, the former head of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, has described receiving reports of vessels flying at 11,000 miles per hour, “making crazy right-angle turns” and being able to reverse “instantly.” Elizondo, who has accused the Defense Department of attempting to trash his reputation, also says he has seen radar and electro-optical data showing unknown aircraft zipping 60 miles in five seconds and descending at speeds of 14 miles per second.
Elizondo told The Post Friday that the ODNI report “is the first of many.”
“The American people now know a small portion of what I and my colleagues in the Pentagon have been privy to: That these UAP are not secret US technology, that they do not seem to belong to any known allies or adversaries, and that our intelligence services have yet to identify a terrestrial explanation for these extraordinary vehicles,” he added. “Out of 144 incidents, the Task Force was only able to identify one. This conversation is only just beginning.”
Months prior to the July 2019 incident, the Navy announced it would create a formal process for its pilots to report UFOs. Friday’s report noted that no “standardized reporting mechanism existed” prior to that time, and most of the incidents the task force examined were reported in the past two years as more military aviators knew about the process.
Some lawmakers suggested that the bizarre sightings could have captured advanced technology developed by a foreign adversary.
Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe disclosed to Fox News in March that “there are a lot more sightings than have been made public” and “some of those have been declassified.”
In May, former President Barack Obama fueled speculation about the nature of UFOs during an appearance on CBS’ “Late Late Show.”
“What is true — and I’m actually being serious here — is that there’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are,” the 44th president told host James Corden.
“We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory … they did not have an easily explainable pattern.”
Pilots and sky-watchers have long reported sporadic sightings of UFOs in U.S. airspace, seemingly at unusual speeds or trajectories. In most cases, those mysteries evaporate under examination.
The current push for more information about recent sightings began in December 2017, when The New York Times revealed a five-year Pentagon program to investigate UFOs.
News (2)
Trump orders SARS-CoV-2 research grant cancelled but Fauci resisted
Reporter : C. Douglas Golden, The Western Journal
The book, written by Washington Post writers Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, claims Trump wanted to send Americans infected with COVID-19 abroad in the early days of the virus to Guantánamo Bay. In another purported exchange, he supposedly said COVID testing was killing his re-election chances and asked former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar “[w]hat idiot had the federal government do testing?”
“Uh, do you mean Jared [Kushner]?” Azar supposedly responded, referring to the fact Trump had put his son-in-law in charge of testing.
When The Washington Post first reported on the book’s claims Monday, curiously missing was one allegation that didn’t involve screaming, cursing or moments of too-perfect confirmation bias straight out of a screenplay.
On Thursday, Fox News reported that Fauci resisted canceling a National Institute of Health grant to a group that was working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on how coronaviruses jump from bats to humans — which, if the lab-leak scenario turns out to be true, could mean he refused to cancel funding for some of the same kind of research that ended up with SARS-CoV-2 spreading.
While the amount of the canceled grant was small — $369,819 of the $3.7 million given by the NIH to nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance — the bombshell revelation here is how dug in Fauci was when it came to keeping the funding spigot turned on for groups working with the WIV.
“With questions swirling about the origins of COVID-19 — experts had determined that the virus was not man-made but could not rule out that it might have slipped out of a lab — the NIH had gone to the principal study investigator on April 19 and asked that payments be halted to the subcontractor in Wuhan until it had more answers,” Abutaleb and Paletta wrote, according to Fox News.
“A few days later, the relatively small grant had garnered new attention … On the afternoon of April 24, NIH director Francis Collins and Fauci received notice that Trump wanted to formally announce in a 5:00 p.m. press conference that the grant had been terminated.”
However, neither was willing to terminate the grant.
“Collins and Fauci told the White House and [the Department of Health and Human Services] that they were not sure the NIH actually had the authority to terminate a peer-reviewed grant in the middle of a budget cycle,” they continued.
“The HHS general counsel told them to do it anyway and made clear it was a direct order from the president, implying that their jobs were on the line if they didn’t comply. Fauci and Collins reluctantly agreed to cancel the grant.”
That’s very quaint — the idea that America was shutting down over COVID-19, partially at Fauci’s urging, but that he didn’t think that “peer-reviewed grant” could be terminated “in the middle of a budget cycle.”
Not only that, other scientists were infuriated that Fauci didn’t continue refusing, with HIV/AIDS activist Peter Staley criticizing him for the decision.
“What do you mean?” Staley said, according to the authors. “You can’t cancel a grant like this.”
“What do you want me to do?” Fauci responded.
“Can’t you and Collins threaten to resign over this?” Staley said.
“You want us both to resign over a $3.7 million grant?” Fauci hit back.
Not only that, “Collins and Fauci heard from many members of the scientific community that they should have resigned. The HHS general counsel later found that the agency probably had not had the authority to terminate the grant. NIH had to reinstate the grant but stopped all of its funding.”
Staley thought this was an example of Fauci being bullied by Trump.
“You combine this with what happened with your Oval Office remdesivir announcement — and I know this doesn’t matter to the country. We’re not talking about Trump and politics and Fox and the whole country. We’re talking about the fact that you are now our leader in AIDS, in public health advocacy,” the authors say Staley told Fauci in a manner where “his voice [was] rising with emotion.”
“In the scientific community, you are our leader. And in the course of forty-eight hours, you have broken two major tenets of how the scientific community does things. We have these rules for a reason, which you’ve been a major defender of your whole life.”
Play me the world’s tiniest, most socially distanced violin.
Furthermore, when he went before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in June of 2020, he claimed ignorance as to why the grant was canceled.
“Why was it canceled? It was canceled because the NIH was told to cancel it,” Fauci said. “I don’t know the reason, but we were told to cancel it.”
It was canceled because we don’t know what role the Wuhan Institute of Virology played in the virus, if any, and the Chinese government hasn’t been forthcoming. That’s as good a reason as any. Even if Fauci didn’t know the WIV wasn’t conducting so-called “gain of function” research — where the virus is genetically modified so that it becomes more virulent or transmissible, which he’s claimed he didn’t — the sainted head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Now, we know the scientific community’s objections to the lab-leak theory were entirely based on who was in the White House, not the plausibility of it. If this revelation is true, it means that the NIH could have funded the research that led to the coronavirus being leaked. The Washington Post didn’t feel free to mention this to the reader, however.
But please, let’s talk about the alleged “[w]hat idiot had the federal government do testing?” quote. That’s far more newsworthy to the Post, apparently, even though this means the U.S. government might have paid for a dangerous experiment to pay to release the virus. Now, nobody’s being transparent, including Fauci — a bombshell indeed, and much more interesting than a poorly sourced fight between Azar and the president.
So far, radical Democrats have jumped at nearly every opportunity to cast blame on former President Donald Trump for the Jan. 6 incursion into the Capitol. But in a new twist, legal experts say President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice may be forced to defend Trump in a lawsuit relating to Jan. 6.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department’s Civil Division acting head Brian Boynton argued in favor of Trump in a lawsuit against him coming from writer E. Jean Carroll. She accused Trump of sexual assault in 2019, but Trump asserted she was “totally lying.”
As a result of Trump’s accusation, Carroll sued him for defamation. In a brief filed on June 7, Boynton said Trump was acting within the scope of his duties as president by responding to the allegations.
“When members of the White House media asked then-President Trump to respond to Ms Carroll’s serious allegations of wrongdoing, their questions were posed to him in his capacity as President,” he said.
“Likewise, when Mr. Trump responded to those questions with denials of wrongdoing made through the White House press office or in statements to reporters in the Oval Office and on the White House lawn, he acted within the scope of his office.”
According to Reuters, attorney Philip Andonian fears that defense could have implications on the case he is bringing against Trump on behalf of California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell.
Andonian said he found the DOJ’s defense of Trump in the Carroll suit “alarming.” He fears that if the president is immune to legal consequences regarding what he says about matters of public concern, the DOJ may consider Trump immune from his comments on Jan. 6.
This is a hilariously ironic place for Biden’s DOJ to be in. By defending Trump in a weak lawsuit brought by Carroll, the department may have inadvertently forced itself to defend Trump in a Jan. 6 lawsuit, as well.
“It would be very difficult for the Justice Department to change course now,” Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe said. “The Titanic is aimed at the iceberg.”
Reuters characterized Tribe as “a frequent critic of Trump.” The outlet also reported he served as a legal adviser to House Democrats during their second impeachment trial for Trump.
This makes it even more notable that the professor admitted Biden’s DOJ is in a tough position. If even Trump-haters are saying the DOJ may be forced to defend him, the possibility seems to be more believable.
Other experts feel the DOJ could still argue against Trump in the Jan. 6 lawsuit because the case has key differences from the Carroll suit. Joseph Sellers, an attorney representing Mississippi Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson in separate lawsuit regarding Jan. 6, said Trump’s actions on that day were outside his responsibilities as president.
“I don’t think anyone would think it’s within the scope of the president’s legitimate duties to encourage people to interfere with the functioning of another branch of government,” Sellers said. “He was promoting an insurrection and a riot.”
There are two main roadblocks Democrats are facing with outstanding lawsuits against Trump for his actions on Jan. 6.
In addition to the possibility that the DOJ will back Trump, there is also a strong chance that prosecutors will be unable to prove Trump’s actions “incited” the Capitol incursion, as Sellers alleged.
In his speech on Jan. 6, Trump told his supporters to “fight like hell” and ensured them he had won the election, according to The Guardian. Those claims may be controversial, but they are far from a direct call for his supporters to riot.
The Guardian also reported the FBI made its disdain for the Jan. 6 incursion clear in a March hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“That attack, that siege, was criminal behavior, plain and simple, and it’s behavior that we, the FBI, view as domestic terrorism,” FBI director Chris Wray said at the hearing.
Even if the accusation of “domestic terrorism” is true of the people who entered the Capitol, it does not necessarily mean Trump incited their actions.
While it is not a guarantee that the DOJ will back Trump, prosecutors will have the burden of proving “incitement” no matter what. Given the vague nature of the current evidence against Trump, this will be a difficult task.
Some, if not most, of the people who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 are likely to face punishment of some sort. Yet with each new development, a Trump conviction for the Jan. 6 incursion seems less and less likely.
News (4)
Florida Governor DeSantis on scene at Florida tragedy while Biden has to be reminded about the tragedy
Reporter : C. Douglas Golden, The Western Journal
In the early hours of Thursday morning, a portion of a shorefront condominium tower in the Miami suburb of Surfside, Florida, collapsed. The full extent of the tragedy isn’t known yet, but nearly a hundred people are missing.
And when President Joe Biden had to be reminded to mention it during an appearance at the White House later in the day, he got in a slight laugh before addressing the situation.
According to WPLG-TV, four people are dead and 99 unaccounted for as of Friday morning after part of the Champlain Towers South fell. Of the more than 130 units in the building, 55 collapsed. Rescuers had saved 102 people from the rubble as of 2 a.m. Friday.
A man who was near the building when it collapsed told WFOR-TV he “was walking with my brothers, we were walking our dog in the neighborhood, and basically we heard a really big rumble and we thought it was a motorcycle, you know, and we turned around and saw a cloud of dust just coming our way.
“We were like — ‘What is going on?’
“We went rushing toward it with shirts over our faces and the security guard came out and we were, like, ‘What happened?’ and she said the building collapsed.”
Many political leaders spoke about the horrific event.
“It’s a dark and tragic day,” Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said. “From it, we continue to pray for some miracles, and we are inspired by the men and women, the heroes, who are out there right now risking their lives to hopefully rescue people.”
“This is a tragedy without precedent in the United States of America,” Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said. “The devastation that I witnessed today is the likes of which I have never seen.”
If Biden runs again in 2024, here’s the man who could be his opponent, GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis:
“We just toured around the complex to be able to see, and the TV doesn’t do it justice,” DeSantis said in a news conference, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “I mean it is really, really traumatic to see the collapse of a massive structure like that.”
DeSantis signed an executive order declaring a state of emergency in Miami-Dade County, allowing federal aid and assistance to begin flowing in.
There’s a natural reaction to this: And? This is what you’re supposed to do as a politician when a tragedy like this happens under your purview — sign needed executive orders, comfort families whose relatives are unaccounted for, update the media. It’s an expected part of the job.
We contrast this with Biden, doing what you’re not supposed to do as a president:
Speaking at the White House on Thursday, Biden needed to be reminded of something by Vice President Kamala Harris — you can probably take a guess at what it was — as reporters yelled at him, asking for his reaction to the tragedy in Surfside.
“Oh, yes, Florida,” Biden said with a slight avuncular chuckle.
According to a transcript from Rev.com, Biden went on to say that he’d “gotten in touch with FEMA” and that they were “ready to go” once DeSantis issued a state of emergency.
“I say to the people of Florida, whatever help you want, the federal government can provide,” Biden said. “We’re waiting. Just ask us. We’ll be there.”
Which is, again, what a president is supposed to do.
He isn’t supposed to have to be reminded to say this, however, by the media and his own vice president.
As for the chuckle, one understands Biden was celebrating one of the first bipartisan wins of the new administration, getting enough Republicans on board to support a somewhat more modest version of his infrastructure bill.
The Surfside condo collapse was the big news of the day, however, and it’s an event of a magnitude that a president has to be cognizant of it. Furthermore, this is something that should have been addressed at the top of Biden’s speech, not 28 minutes into it as the next-to-last thing he mentioned.
Again, these are potentially the two men who’ll be running for president in 2024. Thursday revealed a stark difference in leadership style. It’s not particularly difficult to guess which will resonate better with voters.
News (4)
The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Friday filed a lawsuit against Georgia over the state’s recently passed Election Integrity Act, announced Attorney General Merrick Garland, who alleged the law is a violation of the federal Voting Rights Act’s protections for minority voters.
“Where we see violations of federal law, we will act,” Garland said at a press conference on Friday, describing the new lawsuit as “the first of many steps we are taking to ensure that all eligible voters can cast a vote.”
The DOJ’s move is the first federal response to the push by Republican-led state legislatures for more regulations around elections; including mandating popular voter ID laws; rule changes around mail-in balloting; enhanced signature verification processes, audits, and more. Democrats, meanwhile, have pushed for sweeping legislation that would attempt to expand voting access; while rejecting controls around voter ID, mail-in balloting, and other proposed laws.
During Friday’s announcement, Garland appeared to echo rhetoric from Democrats who argued that Georgia’s voting law would violate the rights of black people and other minority groups.
“We are scrutinizing new laws that seek to curb voter access, and where we see violations of federal law, we will not hesitate to act,” Garland said. “We are also scrutinizing current laws and practices, in order to determine whether they discriminate against black voters and other voters of color.”
The attorney general did not provide more details about the claim that the law violates minority groups’ rights during the news conference. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, previously has categorically denied that the law would imperil minorities’ voting rights.
On Friday, in a statement to The Epoch Times, Kemp criticized the DOJ’s lawsuit as being a product “of the lies and misinformation the Biden administration has pushed against Georgia’s Election Integrity Act from the start.”
“Now,” his statement added, “they are weaponizing the U.S. Department of Justice to carry out their far-left agenda that undermines election integrity and empowers federal government overreach in our democracy.”
The lawsuit comes about three months after Kemp signed the measure into law, which had been passed by the GOP-controlled legislature.
Broadly, the law mandates a Georgia driver’s license or a state-issued or state-approved ID in order for one to vote absentee by mail, replacing the previous signature match process that was in place that was previously derided by Kemp and GOP lawmakers. Among other measures, it also limits the use of ballot drop-boxes.
Over the past several months, Kemp has repeatedly defended the law, asserting that Democrats including President Joe Biden have willfully mischaracterized it. Biden and other Democrats have said the law invokes the Jim Crow-era laws that had enforced segregation.
“It is obvious that neither President Biden nor his handlers have actually read SB 202, which I signed into law yesterday,” Kemp said in a statement to The Epoch Times earlier this year. “This bill expands voting access, streamlines vote-counting procedures, and ensures election integrity.”
Garland’s lawsuit and announcement also came after the Senate failed to advance a sweeping Democrat-backed voting bill after Republicans invoked the filibuster. And earlier this month, Garland made a major policy speech and pledged to make voting laws a top priority for his department.
Georgia isn’t alone in passing a voter integrity bill. In May, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a similar law, while other state legislatures across the country are considering similar legislation.
The new DOJ lawsuit is being handled by Kristen Clarke, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Pamela Karlan.
“The provisions we are challenging reduce access to absentee voting at each step of the process pushing more Black voters to in person voting, where they will be more likely than white voters to confront long lines,” Clarke said Friday in criticizing the law, adding that civic groups are banned from handing out food and water to individuals waiting in line. Kemp and Republicans have denied the claim about lines.
Meanwhile, Gupta’s involvement in the case is sure to draw GOP scorn. During her Senate confirmation hearing earlier this month, she faced intense GOP pushback over her views on policing and prior criticism of conservatives. Some groups have also questioned her previous involvement with the Oakland, California-based Rockwood Leadership Institute, which is accused of having close ties with the Chinese Communist Party.
The federal lawsuit DOJ’s lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of Georgia. The suit is one of several others petitioning the courts for relief after the voting measure was signed into law.
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