Author: Ron Chambers

U.S. sees some indications of possible Iranian attack in Mideast

Mosheh Gains – January 1, 2021

WASHINGTON — The U.S. has seen increasing indications that Iran could be planning an attack against American forces or interests in the Middle East, according to a U.S. official.

The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that reading Iran’s intentions was “difficult and at times unpredictable.”

But the indications are being taken seriously, the official said. The one-year anniversary of the U.S.’ killing of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani is just days away.

Soleimani was killed in a U.S. dronestrike in Iraq on Jan. 3, 2020, in what the Defense Department characterized as a “defensive action” because it alleged the leader of Iran’s Quds Force was developing plans to attack Americans. Iran launched missiles against U.S. forces in Iraq in response to the killing days later.

This week, the U.S. flew B-52 bombers based at a Minot, North Dakota, Air Force base to the Middle East in a “deliberate appearance,” U.S. Central Command said, in the second such show of force this month.

The U.S. has recently accused what it said was an Iranian-backed militia of a Dec. 20 rocket attack on Baghdad’s green zone, in which 21 rockets were fired. No one was injured or killed.

Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, in a Tweet on Thursday objected to the B-52 flights and wrote: “Intelligence from Iraq indicate plot to FABRICATE pretext for war.”

On Dec. 23, referring to the rocket attack that damaged the U.S. embassy in the green zone, President Donald Trump had tweeted: “Some friendly health advice to Iran: If one American is killed, I will hold Iran responsible. Think it over.”

https://www.nbcnews.com

New Year brings final Brexit split between EU and UK

DW – January 1, 2021

Britain saw a major reset to its relations with the European Union on January 1, the first day after the end of the 11-month transition phase which served to smooth its exit from the bloc.

The UK officially left the bloc on January 31, 2020, but it effectively remained tied to it in terms of customs and commercial arrangements while it sought a free-trade agreement.

At the stroke of midnight in Brussels and 11 p.m. in London on Thursday, the UK quit the EU’s Customs Union and Single Market. The New Year also ended freedom of movement between the UK and nearly all of the EU states, except for Ireland.

However, special rules are now in place for Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory on the southern Spanish coast. Talks between the governments in London, Madrid, and Gibraltar on Thursday came down to the last hours to scramble a deal that sees Gibraltar enter the Schengen zone.

The first post-Brexit truck carried goods across the border on Friday. The driver pulled in at the new pit stop at the exit of the Channel Tunnel with a new array of documents which will now become standard practice for those passing between the UK and the EU as a result of Brexit.

DW correspondent Barbara Wesel, reporting from Calais, in northern France, said that there was very little traffic on the morning of January 1, but she explained that this was because the bigger companies had had time to prepare and accustom themselves to the new rules.

However, “it is going to hit a lot of the smaller transport companies that carry mixed loads … For them, life is going to be much more difficult.”

She added that the delays might be more noticeable on Monday, after the long weekend and the New Year’s day holiday. “Then we might see those traffic jams that everybody has been warning about,” Wesel said.

https://www.dw.com

The 4 synchronous large earthquakes off Chile (2 M6.7 and 2 M6.8) are a true WARNING sign of bigger events to come

Strange Sounds – December 28, 2020

Depending on the app you use, three or four strong earthquakes hit off Chile on December 27, 2020 at 9:39 pm UTC.

These are called synchronous quakes, each of them having a ‘s-wave’ and a ‘p-wave’ (see below for their meaning).

But because those large quakes were SYNCHRONOUS with each other, you can deny, if you want, the existence of the other 2(-3) shocks. So it’s not that they didn’t happen, it’s just that the different seismic networks removed 2(-3) of these strong jolts.

However, the truth is that those Earth tremors are SYNCHRONOUS with the molten magma moving under their epicenters. And this means that the temblors are a true WARNING sign of bigger events to come.

Yes, these quakes in sync with each other at the same epicenter give you a direct WARNING of events which will follow!

This region, adjacent to the fast-moving Nazca Plate, has high tectonic activity as shown by the four M6.7 and M6.8 synchronous seisms and the nearby epicenter of the strongest earthquake recorded in modern times, the 1960 Valdivia earthquake.

Of the world’s 36 known earthquakes with M ≥ 8.5 since the year 1500, one-third occurred in Chile.

https://strangesounds.org

Wisconsin pharmacist arrested on charges of sabotaging COVID vaccine doses

Steve Gorman and Rebecca Spalding – January 1, 2021

Dec 31 (Reuters) – A Wisconsin hospital pharmacist was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of sabotaging more than 500 doses of coronavirus vaccine by deliberately removing them from refrigeration to spoil, police and medical authorities said.

The pharmacist, an employee of Aurora Medical Center in Grafton, Wisconsin, at the time that 57 vials of vaccine were found left out of cold storage earlier this week, has since been fired but has not been publicly identified, officials said.

Each vial contains 10 doses. Nearly 60 of the doses in question were administered before hospital officials determined the medication had been left unrefrigerated long enough to render the vaccine ineffective. The remaining 500-plus doses were then discarded.

Moderna Inc, maker of the vaccine, has assured the hospital that receiving an injection of any of the doses removed from refrigeration poses no safety issue, other than leaving the recipient unprotected from COVID infection, said Dr. Jeff Bahr, Aurora Health Care Medical Group president.

Neither Aurora Health nor law enforcement offered any possible motive for the sabotage.

https://news.trust.org

Christians Were Persecuted in a Record 145 Countries in 2018, New Pew Report Says

Michael Foust – November 12, 2020

Christians are persecuted in more countries than any other religious group in the world, followed closely by Muslims, according to a new Pew Research Center study that also found government restrictions of religions are at an all-time high.

The lengthy Pew report was released this week and found that in 2018 – the most recent year studied by Pew – government limits on religion continued to climb, contributing to a “substantial rise in government restrictions on religion” compared to 2007, the first year Pew conducted the study. Pew defines restrictions as “laws, policies and actions by officials that impinge on religious beliefs and practices.”

The worldwide Government Restrictions Index score in 2018 was 2.9, compared to 1.8 in 2007 (The score involves a 10-point scale based on 20 indicators).

China is the world’s most restrictive country toward religion with the highest score (9.3) of all 198 countries and territories studied. Iran (8.5) is second, followed by Malaysia and the Maldives (8.2 each) and Tajikistan and Turkmenistan (7.9 each).

Most of the world’s religious persecution takes place in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as in the Middle East and North Africa, Pew said.

Christians and Muslims in 2018 received the highest level of persecution, which Pew calls “harassment.” Harassment, Pew said, “can include a wide range of actions – from verbal abuse to physical violence and killings – motivated at least in part by the target’s religious identity.”

Christians were persecuted in 145 countries in 2018 – a record – while Muslims were persecuted in 139 countries. Jews experienced persecution in a total of 88 countries.

“As in previous years, Christians and Muslims experienced harassment in more countries than any other religious groups in 2018. This pattern has remained consistent since the study began in 2007,” Pew said in its analysis.

https://www.christianheadlines.com

Abortion Leading Global Cause of Death in 2020 with 42.7 Million Killed

Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D. –  January 1, 2021

Abortion was once again the number-one cause of death globally in 2020, with a record 42.7 million unborn babies killed in the womb, according to data provided by Worldometer.

As of December 31, 2020, there were 42.7 million abortions performed in the course of the year, Worldometer revealed, while 8.2 million people died from cancer, 5 million from smoking, and 1.7 million of HIV/AIDS.

By comparison, worldwide deaths from the coronavirus in 2020 totaled 1.8 million, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Worldometer — voted one of the best free reference websites by the American Library Association (ALA) — keeps a running tally through the year of major world statistics, including population, births, deaths, automobiles produced, books published, and CO2 emissions.

It also registers the total number of abortions performed worldwide, based on the latest statistics on abortions published by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Globally, there were more deaths from abortion in 2020 than all deaths from cancer, malaria, HIV/AIDS, smoking, alcohol, and traffic accidents combined, according to Worldometer statistics.

The shocking number of deaths from abortion, in fact, has led certain observers to call abortion “the social justice cause of our time,” since the sheer magnitude of the problem completely overshadows other human rights issues.

The year 2020 also saw abortion legalized in Argentina, one of the last bastions in the world to recognize and protect the right to life of unborn children.

https://www.breitbart.com

Rocky start: 2021 will begin with unwelcome, 220-meter wide asteroid visitor, NASA warns

RT – January 1, 2021

As nations across the globe say ‘good riddance’ to 2020, NASA has warned that a monstrous 220-meter asteroid is headed Earth’s way early in the new year.

Before that, this year’s final asteroid, 2020 YB4, measuring just 36 meters in diameter or roughly half the wingspan of a 747, passed by the Earth shortly after 6am UTC at a distance of 6.1 million kilometers. That means, in terms of the threat posed by space rocks at least, the planet made it out of 2020 somewhat intact.

However, in the first days of January, three additional, small Near Earth Objects (NEOs) will grace the Earth with their presence, for a brief time.

Just two days into 2021, the 15-meter asteroid 2019 YB4 will fly by at a safe distance of 6.4 million kilometers. The very next day, it will be followed up by two more chunks of cosmic debris in the form of the 15-meter 2020 YA1 and the 21-meter 2020 YP4, which will pass by at 1.5 and 2.1 million kilometers respectively.

But the biggie will come on January 3, as the relatively mountainous 2003 AF23, measuring an impressive 220m in diameter or about as wide as the Golden Gate Bridge is tall, will shoot past at 6.9 million kilometers.

https://www.rt.com

China is developing Genetically Modified ‘Super-Soldiers’: Was this prophesied in War of Gog-Magog?

_ December 24, 2020

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this month, John Lee Ratcliffe, the Director of National Intelligence in the Trump administration, wrote that “the People’s Republic of China poses the greatest threat to America today and the greatest threat to democracy and freedom world-wide since World War II. The intelligence is clear: Beijing intends to dominate the U.S. and the rest of the planet economically, militarily, and technologically.”

“There are no ethical boundaries to Beijing’s pursuit of power,” Ratcliffe wrote, adding that China is working to develop “soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities” as part of a scheme to take over “the planet economically, militarily and technologically.”

Last year,  Elsa Kania and Wilson VornDick a brief in the Jamestown Foundation claiming that Chinese scientists have been exploring “the potential of biotechnology on the future battlefield”. Some applications could include “brain-machine interfaces”. Since the potential for these technologies is still being explored, many of the possible applications go beyond what people can currently imagine.

One of the avenues of exploration includes the use of CRISPR (an acronym for “clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”), a new technique for gene editing that has demonstrated unique potential. Chinese scientists are at the forefront of CRISPR technology, unencumbered by the moral and ethical limitations imposed on western scientists. For example, developing the use of gene-edited animals to grow human-like organs. A doctoral dissertation titled “Evaluation and Research on Human Performance Enhancement Technology,” published in 2016 and supported by the Central Military Commission (CMC) Science and Technology Commission envisioned CRISPR as one of three primary “human performance enhancement technologies” that can be utilized to boost personnel combat effectiveness.

Another ethical obstacle is the use of gene modification to enhance healthy subjects. Western scientists currently refrain from this type of research however Ratcliffe’s article implied that China is actively researching the possibility.

https://www.israel365news.com

Brexit deal is finally DONE as Boris Johnson hails ‘immense moment where we have taken back control of our destiny’

– December 25, 2020

BORIS Johnson hailed “glad tidings of great joy” in a Christmas message last night after sealing his £660billion Brexit trade deal.

The PM gave the nation an early Christmas present yesterday as he secured a historic agreement which finally sees the UK take back control from the EU and ends four years of bitter wrangling.

Mr Johnson last night punched the air as he proudly showed off the 500-page trade deal.

Speaking in a video on Twitter, the PM said: “Tonight, on Christmas Eve, I have a small present for anyone who may be looking for something to read in that sleepy post-Christmas lunch moment.

“And here it is, tidings, glad tidings of great joy because this is a deal.

“A deal to give certainty to business, travelers, and all investors in our country from January 1.

“A deal with our friends and partners in the EU.

“You remember the oven ready deal by which we came out on January 31, that oven ready deal was just the start – this is the feast, full of fish, by the way.

“And I believe it will be the basis of a happy and successful and stable partnership with our friends in the EU for years to come.

https://www.thesun.co.uk

54 Million Americans – Including 18 Million Kids – To Lack Access to Sufficient Food by Year’s End

Elias Marat – December 23, 2020

A new analysis has found that 54 million people in the United States, including 18 million children, will lack access to sufficient food by the end of the year.

The report from U.S.-based anti-hunger group Feeding America underscores the extent to which chronic food scarcity and malnourishment has surged in poor communities amid a devastating increase of coronavirus infections which federal and state governments have failed to get under control.

The group has distributed 4.2 billion meals across the country between March and October 2020. It is estimated that there has been a 60 percent average increase in food bank users as the pandemic has swept across the country, with roughly four out of 10 users being first-time seekers of food aid.

The analysis comes one month after the U.S. Census Bureau reported that less than half of U.S. households with children feel “very confident” about having sufficient money to afford food through December, with a stunning 5.6 million households struggling to put food on the table during Thanksgiving week, according to a pandemic survey.

The crisis of food insecurity has slammed Black and Latino communities the hardest, as well as poor people living in remote “food deserts” where affordable and healthy food is less accessible. The same individuals who have suffered from the economic impact of the pandemic, including seniors and people with chronic disease, are also at the highest risk of major coronavirus-associated illness.

The report noted that even prior to the pandemic, over 37 million people – including over 11 million children – lived in homes that were food insecure.

https://www.activistpost.com