News and Headlines: In The News, Politics, World News, Commentary/Opinion.
In The News:
Marines activate U.S. Space Command component
The organization, Marine Corps Forces Space Command, or MARFORSPACE, joins the Marines’ Cyberspace Command as a service component of USSPACECOM, which is responsible for military operations in outer space — defined as 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, above sea level.
MARFORSPACE will be headquartered at Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., and led by Maj. Gen. Matthew G. Glavy, who is also chief of the Marines’ cyberspace effort.
“We have an incredible opportunity to create asynergy across the information environment based on our unique position within the Naval and joint force,” Glavy said in a statement on Friday.
Newsom attended French Laundry party with more households than California advises during pandemic
The dinner the night of Nov. 6 at the famed French Laundry in Yountville in Napa County brought together at least 12 people to celebrate the 50th birthday of Jason Kinney, a longtime friend and political adviser to Newsom who is also a partner at the lobbying firm Axiom Advisors.
In addition to the governor, his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, was in attendance.
State guidelines limit gatherings, defined as “social situations that bring together people from different households at the same time in a single space or place,” to no more than three households.
South Carolina deputy coroner accused of murder in man’s disappearance, death
Deputy Horry County Coroner Christopher Dontell is one of two individuals who have been arrested in the disappearance and death of 46-year-old Gregory Rice near Myrtle Beach, authorities said.
The other is Meagan Marie Jackson, a 35-year-old woman, who is the mother of four of Rice’s children, WMBF-TV reported after interviewing Rice’s brother.
Horry County Coroner Robert Edge said he learned Dontell would be questioned by police in connection with Rice’s disappearance on Oct. 5. That was the day Rice was reported missing, police said. Rice was last seen three days prior.
Trump Teases Visiting Supporters at Rally in Washington
“Heartwarming to see all of the tremendous support out there, especially the organic Rallies that are springing up all over the Country, including a big one on Saturday in D.C. I may even try to stop by and say hello,” Trump tweeted on Friday.
The president added that the election “was Rigged, from Dominion all the way up & down!” — a reference to claims that a computer glitch led to thousands of votes to be mistakenly cast for Democrat Joe Biden.
The rally, billed as the “Million MAGA March,” comes one week after news organizations projected Biden as the winner of the 2020 election.
Tribe chairman charged with bribery in casino development
Cedric Cromwell, 55, of Attleboro, and David DeQuattro, 54, of Warwick, Rhode Island, were indicted on charges of accepting or paying bribes and conspiring to commit bribery. Cromwell, who is chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, also faces extortion charges.
Joseph Bonavolonta, the head of the FBI’s Boston office, said Cromwell is accused of using his position as chairman to extort tens of thousands of dollars in bribes from DeQuattro, who owns an architecture-and-design company in Providence.
Between 2014 and 2017, authorities said DeQuattro provided Cromwell with payments and other benefits valued at nearly $60,000 in exchange for nearly $5 million in contracts with the tribe’s gaming authority, which Cromwell heads.
Florida elected official, husband fatally stabbed in home in random attack
Edith and David Henderson were found stabbed to death in their home, which had been ransacked, Lakeland police said. They were killed Tuesday morning.
“The crime scene as you can imaging was absolutely horrific,” Chief of Detectives Sam Taylor said at a news conference Thursday to announce the arrest of Marcelle Waldon, 36, in the case.
Taylor said the investigation led to Waldon’s arrest Wednesday night at a Lakeland motel where was staying. He is facing 10 felony counts, including murder.
Alabama teen accused of murdering 5 relatives has shown ‘no remorse’
“Mason does not seem bothered by the fact he’s accused of murdering his family,” his juvenile probation officer wrote in a report released Tuesday. “He has not shown any sign of remorse. While in detention, he has not talked about his family at all.”
Sisk — whose cousin believes the slayings were sparked by the revelation that his mother wasn’t biologically related to him — had been getting along with other detainees at the Tennessee Valley Juvenile Detention Center in Tuscumbia, according to his probation officer.
“While in detention, Mason follows directions, does his schoolwork and interacts well with others,” the report reads.
Minneapolis City Council approves extra police funding amid crime surge, after defunding department
“Our resources are hemorrhaging,” Arradondo said to members of the city council during a committee meeting Tuesday. “Our city is bleeding at this moment.
I’m trying to do all I can to stop that bleeding and I’m hoping that having the funds to launch a citywide joint enforcement team initiative we can try to stop the bleeding in our city.”
The Friday vote passed 7-6 vote, which will allow for a Joint Enforcement Team pulling in officers from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office and Metro Transit Police to temporarily assist the Minnesota Police Department with violent crimes through the end of the year.
Target Stops Sale of Transgender-Skeptical Book
The book, titled Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, helps to explain how a wave of young girls are nudged and pushed into declaring they want to take life-altering drugs, adopt an opposite-sex identity, and undergo irreversible surgery.
Some corporations and many pro-transgender groups have tried to block and hide the book from American readers.
In August 2015, Target stores began pushing “gender neutral” product lines in the kids’ sections.
In April 2016, the company insisted that women share bathrooms with men who say they are women — prompting a huge consumer correction that temporarily chopped up to one-third of the company’s stock value.
Twitter Boasts of Slowing the Spread of All Information on Its Platform
Bloomberg reports that social media giant Twitter recently announced that it had successfully curbed the spread of misinformation on its platform during the presidential election.
It accomplished this task by curbing the spread of all information on the platform.
Twitter stated this week that it put labels on 300,000 user posts from October 27th to November 11th for violating rules related to election misinformation.
Twitter also implemented a retweet feature that required users to add their own comments before retweeting a post on the platform.
Twitter proudly stated: “This change slowed the spread of misleading information by virtue of an overall reduction in the amount of sharing on the service.”
Astronauts prepare for historic SpaceX launch this weekend
The six-month mission is the first crew rotation flight on a U.S. commercial spacecraft; Phil Keating reports.
Lawyer sentenced to 3.5 years for using $1.4 million donated to veterans charity for himself
The man, Kevin Creed, 69, who formerly operated the Creed Law Firm in Bristol, will also have to repay the money he stole, ordered U.S. District Judge Janet C. Hall.
According to Carson, in 2010, Creed established a charity called the Friends of Fisher House Connecticut, with the goal of raising funds to support the building and maintenance of a Fisher House comfort home at the West Haven VA Medical Center.
To raise money for the charity Creed solicited from businesses and from individuals, including at carnivals and supermarkets, and by holding fundraising events like the Bristol Half-marathon, according to Carson.
While Creed did donate $1 million to the construction of the Fisher House, he used approximately $1.4 million for personal and law firm expenses, Carson said.
Justice Alito criticizes ‘previously unimaginable’ coronavirus restrictions, says it’s up to the American people to stand up for their liberties
Alito, 70, also spoke about the dangers posed to free speech by intolerant leftist law schools and defended the legacy of the Federalist Society, an organization of conservative and libertarian lawyers and judges who support textualist and originalist interpretations of the U.S. Constitution in law.
“Unfortunately, tolerance for opposing views is now in short supply in many law schools, and in the broader academic community,” Alito said.
“When I speak with recent law school graduates, what I hear over and over is that they face harassment and retaliation if they say anything that departs from the law school orthodoxy.”
Southern Poverty Law Center: Teachers Are ‘Weaponizing’ Whiteness
The article, published by SPLC’s “Teaching Tolerance” division, outlines how white people weaponize their “entitlement, anger, … need for retaliation, feigned fear and, finally, white fragility.”
It suggests that teachers—particularly white, female teachers—can stop the weaponization of whiteness by relinquishing control of their classrooms when a student questions their authority.
Teaching Tolerance offers educators a free curriculum derived from critical race theory, which asserts that America was founded on racism.
Seattle homelessness explodes, with no end in sight
The only effective tool the city had to tackle the problem was just gutted by an ideologically-driven City Council.
The Navigation Team (commonly known as the “Nav Team”) was a specialized unit of Seattle police and social workers connecting the homeless with resources, like shelter or health care, while removing encampments.
The latter point earned the ire of the irredeemably progressive City Council, which considers encampment removals to be “inhumane” or against public health interests. Under the defund police movement, the Council gutted the entire team in August.
US official admits misleading Trump on US troop numbers in Syria
Trump called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria at the end of 2018 and again in October 2019, both times receiving pushback. Despite calling for the withdrawals, both times Trump was convinced to leave a contingent of U.S. troops in the county.
“What Syria withdrawal? There was never a Syria withdrawal,” Jeffrey told Defense One.
“When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, [Trump] was inclined to pull out.
In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay.
And we succeeded both times. That’s the story.”
Parler Adds 5 Million Users as Pro-life Conservatives Grow Tired of Twitter’s Censorship
On Tuesday, Parler, which emphasizes free speech as its mission, announced that it gained 4.5 million new users since last week.
“People from all walks of life, fed up with opaque, biased content curation, inconsistent agenda-driven fact checking, and manipulative algorithms built on data mining, are joining Parler to speak free,” CEO John Matze said in a statement.
The social media site saw eight times its average daily activity this week, compared to a week ago, Matze said. He said the session activity increased 20 times during the same time period.
Politics:
Fox News Host Sandra Smith Caught on Camera Mocking Trump Supporting Panelist
Chuck Schumer Puts Democrats Back on Their Heels in Georgia Senate Runoffs
US Appeals Court Rejects Effort to Block Late Ballots in Pa.
The ruling involves the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to accept mail-in ballots that arrived by Friday, Nov. 6, three days after the close of polling places.
That court had agreed with Democrat state officials who wanted to extend the deadline amid concerns about Postal Service delays and the pandemic.
State Republicans have separately asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the issue. However, there are not enough late-arriving ballots to change the results in Pennsylvania, given Joe Biden’s lead.
The Democrat former vice president won the state by about 60,000 votes out of about 6.8 million cast.
Detroit contracted poll workers from firm owned by key figure in ex-mayor’s corruption case
On Sept. 22, the city council approved a $1 million contract for Phillips’ staffing firm P.I.E. Management, LLC to hire up to 2,000 workers to work the polls and staff the ballot counting machines.
Dominion Voting Systems, which provides voting equipment and software for the city, also got fresh money that day for additional machines to count absentee ballots.
And one longtime city worker, Jessy Jacob, swore out an affidavit saying she witnessed widespread tampering ordered by her supervisors that impacted thousands of ballots.
“On November 4, 2020, I was instructed to improperly pre-date the absentee ballots receive date that were not in the QVF as if they had been received on or before November 3, 2020,”
‘Never bet against me’: Trump makes first post-election comments, lays out path to victory
That’s what President Trump told Washington Examiner reporter Byron York on Thursday, in his first post-election comments on the state of the 2020 presidential race.
Trump was optimistic, laying out a scenario in which he pulls out wins in key battleground states and gets to the magic number of 270 votes in the Electoral College.
“We’re going to win Wisconsin,” the president said in the exclusive phone interview. “Arizona – it’ll be down to 8,000 votes, and if we can do an audit of the millions of votes, we’ll find 8,000 votes easy. If we can do an audit, we’ll be in good shape there.”
World News:
U.S. Army to participate in artillery drills in Romania
Nov. 13 (UPI) — Rapid Falcon, a bilateral exercise next week in Romania, will include two U.S. artillery rocket systems, U.S. Army Europe announced Friday.
Two M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket systems and about a dozen personnel of 1st Battalion, 77th Field Artillery Regiment, 41st Field Artillery Brigade, will be deployed from Grafenwoehr, Germany, for exercises with the Romanian Land Forces at Mihail Kogalniceanu Airbase.
The Army representatives will join forces of the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Special Operation Command Europe and U.S. Navy in demonstrations of long-range precision firepower.
Jerusalem-Athens-Nicosia bolster Defense ties;Israel-Lebanon talks dismal – TV7 Israel News 13.11.20
1) Israel has signed a defense agreement with Greece and Cyprus to advance a work plan to contend with mutual challenges and threats and advance common interests in the Eastern Mediterranean.
2) Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan emphasized the need to become less reliant on weapon-procurement from other nations – which will ultimately elevate Ankara’s freedom of action.
3) Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz tells TV7 that he is “not very optimistic” about the ongoing negotiations on maritime boundary demarcation in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Free COVID-19 vaccine could be coming to Australians next year
A coronavirus vaccine would be available free of charge under an immunisation policy agreed at National Cabinet.
Coronavirus: Italy extends ‘red zones’ as infections soar
image captionStaff at this hospital in Naples treated waiting patients in their cars because the wards were overwhelmed.
Authorities in Campania, which includes Naples, have warned that the health system there is close to collapse.
Friday’s announcement came as Italy confirmed 40,902 new infections – its highest ever daily total.
It passed the one million mark earlier this week and there have been more than 44,000 deaths.
ISIS Returns: Jihadis Claim Credit for Saudi WWI Memorial Bombing
The Jeddah attackers detonated an improvised explosive device at a non-Muslim cemetery where Western diplomats were gathered for a ceremony organized by the French embassy to Saudi Arabia.
The bombers evidently targeted the French, the latest in a series of jihad attacks after cartoons of Mohammed were republished by French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo in September 2020. Jihadis attacked the offices of the magazine in 2015, brutally murdering 12 people and beginning a series of Islamist terrorist attacks across France.
Much the same thing is happening today, beginning with the savage beheading of a teacher in Paris last month after he showed the Mohammed cartoons to his class.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s unyielding response to the terror attacks enraged Islamists around the world, bringing threats of terrorism against the French at home and abroad.
THE MOST MASKED EUROPEAN COUNTRIES HAVE THE BIGGEST CORONAVIRUS SURGES
Few European countries have been more mask-obsessed than France.
In July, France issued a national mask mandate compelling everyone to wear masks indoors in public spaces.
Anyone caught not wearing a mask would face a fine of around $150.
In August, Paris and a number of other regions imposed mask rules for anyone leaving the house.
Global report: Germany may extend lockdown as Covid cases in Italy soar
New daily coronavirus cases in Germany hit a record of 23,542 on Friday, the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases reported, prompting government spokesman Stefan Seibert to say measures “were not expected to be relaxed” by next week.
Federal and regional leaders are due to meet on Monday to discuss whether the country’s closure of all gyms and entertainment venues has slowed the disease’s spread, but the health minister, Jens Spahn, said it was too early to say.
“We will see in the next few days whether they are making a difference,” Spahn said. Winter gatherings and festivities such as office Christmas parties were in any event unlikely to go ahead.
Commentary/Opinion:
Larry Elder SCHOOLS Woke Liberals | Larry Elder
Woke liberals are making race relations worse.
Have you noticed how race relations work?
How Black people feel about White people, and how White people feel about how Black people feel about White people?
Yes, you read that correctly. What the hell is systemic racism anyway?
If it’s so widespread and so pervasive, how come nobody seems to come up with any proof?
The so-called woke liberal need to take a nap, wake up, and try again.
Bill O’Reilly on possible Trump media EMPIRE to challenge Fox News
Bill O’Reilly says that if President Trump leaves the White House next year, he won’t be gone for long.
Axios recently predicted that the president will begin a digital media empire to challenge the network he feels wronged him on Election Day — Fox News.
And, O’Reilly says he’s already receiving calls to join the cause.
Only time will tell, but one thing is certain — Donald Trump enjoys the spotlight, and Americans love watching him there too.
Who Was Thomas Jefferson?
Rioters are tearing down statues of American heroes, INCLUDING Thomas Jefferson, as the President predicted. Why should Jefferson be remembered? This video explains.
Arabs: “Westerners Must Stop Appeasing Islamists”
The recent terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims in France and Austria should serve as a warning to Europeans who have long been appeasing and endorsing extremist Muslim politicians and organizations.
This warning was sounded in the past few weeks by a growing number of writers, political analysts and politicians in Arab and Islamic countries.
The main message they are sending to the Europeans: Political Islam is a threat not only to non-Muslims, but to Muslims and Arabs as well. Europeans need to wake up and start confronting the Muslim extremists.
“Political Islam organizations are the reason for spreading hatred and terrorism in the world,” said Saudi writer Mohammed al-Sheikh.