Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time… in the coming days the Guardian will be revealing the identities of many innocent people who have been identified as …
Author Archives: Richard Fernandez
The Eden tripwire
New at the Belmont Club. Discernment and reasons of the heart are the secret to survival.
Psaki: deniers should be everywhere banned
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that the Biden administration believes social media users who spread COVID-19 misinformation should be banned from all platforms if one platform has given them the boot. Psaki had revealed the day before that White House staff were tracking dangerous coronavirus misinformation with help from the surgeon general’s …
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3 Texas Democrats test positive for COVID after packing onto private jet to flee to DC
All three have been fully vaccinated, but one of the lawmakers is experiencing symptoms
Not changing lanes, a U-turn
Although officials still remain divided on whether the virus emerged from nature, passing from animals to humans, the acknowledgment marks a shift from the scorn that was heaped on former President Trump and a group of European scientists who first brought up the lab-leak theory during the height of the pandemic last year.
Biden admin says lab leak now level with natural theory
Tighter than a fast and furious movie U-turn
A curious factoid
No hay comida
HAVANA — Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel for the first time is offering some self-criticism while saying that government shortcomings in handling shortages and other problems played a role in this week’s protests.
Dying alone rather than infecting others
JAKARTA — Indonesia has overtaken India as Asia’s new epicenter for the coronavirus pandemic, with daily infections exceeding 40,000 for two straight days and officials warning that the delta variant is spreading outside the most populous island of Java. Southeast Asia’s largest economy on Tuesday reported 47,899 new infections, a record high, up from 40,427 …
Was Jeffrey Epstein a Spy?
in the last 10 years of his life, Epstein bragged to various people, including journalists, that he was advising a whole assortment of foreign leaders who included Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Zayed, Mohammed Bin Salman, various African dictators, Israel, the British — and, of course, the Americans…. He also told several of the same people …
“What could you be doing to achieve better gender balance?”
Po-Shen Loh has resurrected the United States International Mathematical Olympiad team, leading it to four first-place rankings in the last six years as the team’s head coach.
No foreign money, no foreign troops
What’s a sovereign nation to do? When Moïse came to power in February 2017, he had little or no access to some of the economic levers that two of his predecessors, Joseph Michel Martelly and René Garcia Préval, had enjoyed. The latter were able to benefit from more than US$4 billion from the PetroCaribe fund, …
Whew
This is true for the much-worried-over Delta variant. It is also true for all the other variants, and for the original strain. Most remarkably, it has been known to be true since the very earliest days of the pandemic — indeed it was among the very first things we did know about the disease. The …
Merkel refuses to go with the Biden Nordstream 2 program
But on July 12 Merkel expressed doubt the upcoming talks with Biden would resolve the disagreement between Berlin and Washington over Nord Stream 2. … U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on June 23 reiterated warnings about Nord Stream 2 during meetings in Berlin with Merkel and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. Blinken said he and …
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Skyrocketing prices a bonanza for OPEC
The price of oil surged to $75 a barrel the other day under President Joe Biden’s green energy policies. The price was as low as $35 a barrel under former President Donald Trump because he believed in American energy dominance (“Drill, baby, drill”). So, more oil meant lower prices at the pump. It was effectively …
This Island Earth is sinking
Thanks to a “wobble” in the moon’s orbit and rising sea levels, every coast in the United States will face rapidly increasing high tides that will start “a decade of dramatic increases in flood numbers” in the 2030s.
‘Please loot carefully and responsibly’ says Zuma son
‘For the people that are protesting and looting, please do so carefully and please do so responsibly. Because you cannot hold people responsible for defending what they love,’ Zuma said. The 37-year-old, who has his own ambitions to run the country, said that ‘finger pointing’ was not going to help because the government must ‘feed …
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Cuban messaging services cut off by regime
NetBlocks metrics show that communications platforms WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and as well as some Telegram servers are disrupted on government-owned ETECSA (Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba, S.A. / AS27725) including Cubacel, the cellular network operated by Cuba’s sole telecommunications company. Findings corroborate user reports of disruptions to the services.
Biden as a transitional figure
The old global world is going down. Biden’s political challenge is how to avoid becoming the Chernenko of a collapsing edifice. He will either transition to a new, more sustainable political order or go down in history as the captain of the new Titanic.
There’s no money left to bail Communism out
Biden’s remarks disappoint leaders in Havana. Before Biden came to office, they hoped he would follow in President Barack Obama’s footsteps and thaw relations with the island, reversing Trump’s actions that tightened the Cold War-era U.S. embargo. On the campaign trail, Biden said he would reverse policies on Cuba that “have inflicted harm on the …
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