Robbers held up a television crew at gunpoint during an interview with the director of violence prevention in Oakland amid the city’s huge wave of violence, police have said. The attack took place outside City Hall on Monday just hours after the police chief blasted his city’s decision to defund its police department by $18.5million …
Author Archives: Richard Fernandez
Competence was never the criterion
There is dysfunction inside the VP’s office, aides and administration officials say. And it’s emanating from the top.
Iran shells US positions
In the late afternoon, around dusk, reports emerged that pro-Iranian groups had shelled areas in eastern Syria across from Deir Ezzor, ostensibly targeting US forces near the Omar oil fields. This is an important and strategic area and US forces who support the Syrian Democratic Forces, have been reported to have a facility or base …
Nokor Covid teaser trailer
Mysterious ‘grave incident’ may lead to unspecified crisis Nokor leader warns.
Bill Cosby
The basic issue in Bill Cosby’s shocking release from prison is whether the ends justify the means. The PASC held Cosby had been technically deprived of his 5th Amendment rights by a prosecutorial legal maneuver the court thought was improper.
Into the land of Nod, east of Eden
New at the Belmont Club. More than losing control of the Global World. Losing control period.
Shame bullets bounce off Burma generals
The military dictatorship now ruling the Southeast Asian nation has brushed aside the entreaties and threats, even as the country of 54 million people hurtles toward paralysis and possibly civil war that could destabilize the region.
US airstrikes on Iran drone attack bases
Green is Slave Labor and Biden weeps -WaPo
Most Americans likely don’t know that approximately 40 percent of the world’s polysilicon, a key component of solar panels, is manufactured in China’s northwest Xinjiang region, where the United States has determined the Chinese government is perpetrating a genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities. As evidence amassed in recent …
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Virus is coming through the shield
More than 4,100 people have been hospitalized or died with Covid-19 in the U.S. even though they’ve been fully vaccinated, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Climate change critic fired for “failing to act in the collegial and academic spirit”
His comments included telling Sky News that bodies like the Australian Institute of Marine Science “can no longer be trusted” and saying that many scientists examining the health of the Great Barrier Reef were “emotionally attached” and “not objective”. He was also accused of “failing to act in the collegial and academic spirit”, and of …
What a surprise
It turns out China is a geopolitical threat too
If CRISPR germline is banned in the West it will be offshored to China
The 2018 announcement in China by He Jianqui who genetically altered human embryos via CRISPR—producing twins known as Lulu and Nana—helped strengthen policies about germline gene editing. Despite the worldwide scorn leveled against him for conducting a brazen act of human experimentation, his research also helped usher in a more moderate point of view regarding …
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Who was it who said: ‘politics is where the real money is’?
Beware the hippo
A defining human characteristic
Walkback to two-track
WASHINGTON—President Biden walked back comments tying the fate of a roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure agreement to a separate, Democratic effort to pass a broad antipoverty plan, recommitting to the bipartisan deal after Republicans threatened to withdraw their support.
The serpent in revolutionary Eden
Twenty-four years ago, while in charge of a small television operation at Al Quds University, my team and I decided to broadcast live sessions of the Palestinian Legislative Council dealing with corruption in the newly established Palestinian Authority. The broadcast angered people in Yasser Arafat’s entourage and I was arrested and jailed for seven days …
What if social media users owned their data?
(Bloomberg) — Frank McCourt, the billionaire real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is pouring $100 million into an attempt to rebuild the foundations of social media. The effort, which he has loftily named Project Liberty, centers on the construction of a publicly accessible database of people’s social connections, allowing users …
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As we were going to say …
The Gettysburg Address speech that no one gives before it turns into a pie fight The best political speech in many years was not delivered. Instead, incoming Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid set it aside and reprimanded members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s departing coalition for their nonstop heckling of incoming Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, which was …