World News
China not interested in playing ‘Game of Thrones’ with Washington, Beijing says
RT – China isn’t looking to reenact ‘Game of Thrones’ with the United States, Beijing’s foreign minister has stated, adding that it seeks respectful relations – and not power struggles – on the world stage.
In a speech on the sidelines of the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York, Wang Yi made it clear that his country would not acquiesce to economic and political pressure from Washington. He stressed, however, that Beijing is not vying to replace the United States as a world power.
China has no intention to play the Game of Thrones on the world stage. For now and for the foreseeable future, the United States is and will still be the strongest country in the world
The Chinese diplomat claimed that “seeking hegemony is not in our DNA,” and said mutual respect for territorial sovereignty should serve as a starting point for rebooting US-China relations.
Indonesia protests: Hundreds hurt in student-police clashes
Broken bones, head injuries reported after changes to anti-corruption agency fuelled mass protests across archipelago
Al Jazeera – More than 300 university students and police in Indonesia‘s capital, Jakarta were being treated in hospital on Wednesday, a day after violent clashes with police during nationwide protests triggered by a new law that critics say cripples the country’s anti-corruption agency.
Jakarta police chief Gatot Eddy Pramono told a news conference that at least 265 students and 39 police officers were treated in several hospitals in the country’s capital, with their injuries ranging from minor to serious.
He said police have arrested 94 people they alleged were involved in violent acts in protests that turned violent as darkness fell.
“We are still investigating whether they are students or other members of society with different interests,” Pramono said.
Officials at the city’s Pertamina Central Hospital said that 90 students were treated for injuries that included broken bones, head wounds and respiratory problems due to tear gas. Most were allowed to return home after treatment although three were hospitalised with head wounds.
Another student was undergoing surgery at Pelni, another hospital in Jakarta, after suffering bleeding in his brain and fractured shoulder bones.
The protest outside parliament on Tuesday saw police fire tear gas and water cannons to disperse thousands of rock-throwing students. The protest was dispersed just before midnight and by Wednesday morning, city officers were cleaning up rocks, plastic bottles, banners and other debris from the protest.
UN urged to investigate ‘forced’ organ harvesting in China
China is murdering members of the Falun Gong spiritual group and harvesting their organs, senior lawyer tells UN.
Al Jazeera – A senior counsel with an independent tribunal has urged the top United Nations human rights body to investigate evidence that China is murdering members of the Falun Gong spiritual group and harvesting their organs for transplant.
Hamid Sabi on Tuesday called for urgent action as he presented the findings of the China Tribunal, an independent panel set up to examine the issue, which concluded in June that China’s organ harvesting amounted to crimes against humanity.
Beijing has repeatedly denied accusations by human rights researchers and scholars that it forcibly takes organs from prisoners of conscience and said it stopped using organs from executed prisoners in 2015.
But Sabi, counsel to the China Tribunal, told the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) that forced organ harvesting had been committed “for years throughout China on a significant scale … and continues today”.
The harvesting has involved “hundreds of thousands of victims”, mainly followers of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, he said, adding that detainees from China’s ethnic Uighur minority were also victims.
“Victim for victim and death for death, cutting out the hearts and other organs from living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people constitutes one of the worst mass atrocities of this century,” Sabi said.
“Organ transplantation to save life is a scientific and social triumph. But killing the donor is criminal.”
‘France can’t host everyone,’ Macron says, toughening migration stance
RT – President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday said that France “cannot host everyone.” Last week, he signaled a tougher line on immigration in the second half of his mandate, arguing the government must stop voters drifting to the far-right, AFP reported.
“France cannot host everyone if it wants to host people well,” Macron told Europe 1. He noted France had seen a sharp increase in the numbers of people asking for asylum since the 2017 presidential election and said much tighter European cooperation was needed.
“There is not enough cooperation in Europe and we need to look at this migratory phenomenon and take decisions,” Macron said. The comments came as the French parliament is set next week for a major debate on migration policy.
U.S. News, Politics & Government
Democrats’ double standard on Ukraine – Marc Thiessen
Inquirer – We don’t yet know whether President Trump delayed some military aid to Ukraine as leverage to get Ukraine’s president to reopen an investigation into Hunter Biden. But if we are concerned about U.S. officials inappropriately threatening aid to Ukraine, then there are others who have some explaining to do.
It got almost no attention, but in May, CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as “strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine,” the Democratic senators declared, “We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump,” before demanding Lutsenko “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.”
So, it’s okay for Democratic senators to encourage Ukraine to investigate Trump, but it’s not okay for the president to allegedly encourage Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden?
And then there is Joe Biden. In 2016, the then-vice president threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine if the government did not fire the country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. According to the New York Times, “Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden … who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.” The Post reports that it is “unclear how seriously Shokin — who was under fire by U.S. and European officials for not taking a more aggressive posture toward corruption overall — was scrutinizing Burisma when he was forced out.” But what is clear is that Biden bragged about getting him fired, declaring last year: “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a b –. He got fired.”
Pelosi launches formal Trump impeachment inquiry
CBS – Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the House is launching a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump, setting up a dramatic constitutional clash just over a year before the presidential election.
“Today I’m announcing the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry,” Pelosi said at the Capitol late Tuesday afternoon. The inquiry marks just the fourth time in American history a president has faced a viable threat of impeachment.
The speaker has long resisted calls from many progressive lawmakers to initiate impeachment proceedings against the president, but Democrats appear to have reached a breaking point over the administration’s refusal to hand over a whistleblower complaint related to Mr. Trump’s interaction with a foreign leader.
Doug Collins: No Impeachment Inquiry Without Floor Vote
Newsmax – Rep. Doug Collins Wednesday rejected the idea that there is an impeachment inquiry going on concerning President Donald Trump, because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not brought the matter to the House floor for a vote.
“If one more reporter said ‘started impeachment inquiry’ I want to scream,” the Georgia Republican and ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee told Fox News’ “Fox and Friends.” “(Pelosi) told her caucus really nothing has changed, but we are going to keep pushing the narrative. That’s not leadership; that’s advocating.”
Meanwhile, if Pelosi is not bringing the inquiry to the floor, then she needs to quit telling the American public she is doing something, Collins argued.
He added that Pelosi is acting “absurdly” because lawmakers have not yet seen the transcript of the July 25 telephone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump is accused of pressuring the Ukraine government into an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden, the frontrunner in the Democratic presidential race, and his son, Hunter.
Justice Dept releases much-anticipated summary of Trump’s call with Ukrainian president
RT – US President Donald Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into whether ex-Vice President Joe Biden blocked an investigation into his son’s company, according to a summary of the call between the two leaders.
The memo was released Wednesday morning.
Detroit Activists Fighting for Ban on Facial Recognition
Activist Post – A coalition of grassroots organizations is pushing to end the use of facial recognition technology in the city.
BYP100, Green Light Black Futures, We the People Michigan and Detroit Community Technology Project have banded together to fight what they call “hyper-surveillance and facial recognition technology.” A post on BYP100’s Facebook page proclaims, “We aim to dismantle Project Green Light and Facial recognition software used by police.”
On Sept. 19, the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners (BOPC) approved a new policy that put some limits on the use of facial recognition. Under the rule, police can’t use facial recognition technology on video – live or recorded. They can only use it on still photos. But this does not preclude cops from using the technology on photos pulled from videos. Police are also prohibited from using it to assess a person’s immigration status.
According to a Facebook post by Green Light Black Futures, the BOPC voted abruptly for the use of facial recognition technology in policing toward the beginning of the meeting without hearing public comments. The vote was 8-3 in favor of the proposal.
Veteran News
Veterans Affairs Secretary Removes Members Of Congress From Offices In VA Hospitals
NPR – The secretary of veterans affairs has told several members of Congress that he’s evicting them from offices they’ve been using in VA hospitals. The House members use the offices to meet with vets and discuss everything from their eligibility for benefits to the quality of the care they receive.
The VA says it wants the spaces back for clinical uses, but one of the lawmakers, Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., thinks it’s personal. Mast’s district extends from Palm Beach North to Port St. Lucie, and like many of his constituents, he is a veteran. He lost both his legs working as a bomb disposal expert in Afghanistan.
“I get all my health care from the VA,” Mast says, “so I’m there regularly getting health care needs taken care of.”
Mast has been an activist on veterans’ issues in Congress since he was elected in 2016. Last year, he became the first congressman to open an office inside a VA facility, the VA Medical Center in West Palm Beach. Five other members of Congress, all Florida Democrats, followed suit.
Last month, they received a letter from the VA telling them that their time was up and they would have to move out by the end of the year. Mast urged the VA to reconsider.
Fake veteran hiring site downloads spyware instead of jobs
Ars Technica – A “threat group” previously identified as being behind a set of attacks on IT providers in Saudi Arabia has now been spotted targeting US military veterans and companies with a malicious web page that purports to be an employment site. According to a report posted today by Cisco Talos researchers Warren Mercer, Paul Rascagneres, and Jungsoo An, the site offers a free desktop client—which is in fact a spyware installer.
Symantec identified the group in a threat intelligence post earlier this month. Called Tortoiseshell, the group has been connected with attacks on 11 companies, the majority of which are located in Saudi Arabia. All of the attacks used the same remote access tool, Backdoor.Syskit by Symantec, coded in both Delphi (the Object Pascal programming language originally introduced by Borland) and Microsoft .NET.
A very similar backdoor is part of a package dropped by the website discovered by Talos, hiremilitaryheroes.com. Still live, the site itself has no content other than three links to “try our desktop app for free”—for Windows 10, Windows 8.1 and Windows 8. The “app” is a fake installer, which, when the malware installation is complete, displays an error message that claims “your security solution is terminating connections to our servers.”
While it’s running, the installer checks to see if it can reach Google—a measure to check to see if it is being run in a security sandbox. If it can’t, it shuts down. But if it connects, it downloads two files from a server hosted by a company in Atlanta: a reconnaissance tool and the backdoor. If something fails during the download, the installer sends an email to a Gmail address from another Gmail address (ericaclayton2020@gmail.com), the credentials for which are hard-coded in the installer.
Economy & Business
Devin Wenig steps down as eBay CEO
Tech Crunch – eBay this morning announced that Devin Wenig has stepped down from the role of CEO. A former executive at Reuters, Wenig joined the company eight years ago this month as president of its global market place division. He was appointed to the CEO role in July 2015, following eBay’s spinoff of PayPal.
“Devin has been a tireless advocate for driving improvement in the business, particularly in leading the Company forward after the PayPal spinoff,” Chairman of the Board Thomas Tierney said in a release tied to the news. “Indeed, eBay is stronger today than it was four years ago. Notwithstanding this progress, given a number of considerations, both Devin and the board believe that a new CEO is best for the company at this time.”
Scott Schenkel, the company’s Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer has been appointed interim CEO by eBay’s board. Schenkel has been with the company for 12 years, having previously spent several years in management at GE. eBay says it will “consider internal and external candidates” as it searches for someone to fill the position on a permanent basis.
The move comes amid turmoil at the company. Earlier this year, investors Elliott Management suggested key structural changes to help reinvigorate a floundering company. “Today eBay suffers from an inefficient organizational structure, wasteful spend and a misallocation of resources,” it wrote in a letter at the time. eBay went through layoffs and restructuring, in the wake of the letter.
As part of these new changes up top, eBay will be appointing Vice President, Global Financial Planning and Analysis, Andy Cring, to the position of interim CFO.
‘IMF must DIE!’ Top Russian banker says International Monetary Fund should be abolished
RT – The CEO of Russia’s Sberbank, Herman Gref, has taken aim at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), saying the organization should cease to exist.
“I don’t have much to say about higher audit institutions, but as for international organizations like the IMF, they must die,” Gref said on Wednesday as he addressed the 23rd Congress of the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI).
“I think that the IMF is absolutely dead,” Gref added.
He said that the international watchdog is incapable of meeting the need to reform, something which has been discussed for many years.Other international organizations should not be dependent on the IMF, as it only offers old-fashioned ways to solve problems, according to the banker, who has headed Russia’s largest bank since 2007.
Russia has its own history with the IMF as it had to borrow money amid a dire economic situation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gref recalled that when he was the economy minister in the 2000s, the organization wanted Moscow to increase the tax burden, which already amounted to 41 percent of national GDP.
Iran, Russia Turn to Trade in National Currencies to Ditch Dollar
Sputnik – Last week, the Trump administration imposed new economic sanctions against Iran, targeting its central bank and its sovereign wealth fund.
The head of Iran’s Central Bank Abdolnaser Hemmati said Wednesday that Iran and Russia have turned to bilateral trade in national currencies as both countries fall under US sanctions.
“Now all of our financial transactions with Russia are through the national currency of the two countries. This trend is gradually removing the dollar from the trading cycle, with many countries now willing to trade in their national currency so that the US does not oversee their trade,” he told reporters in Tehran after a cabinet meeting.
Iran is eager to establish business, financial, and banking relationships with methods other than using the dollar, the governor said, noting a growing desire worldwide to get rid of the dollar in international transactions.
On Friday, the Trump administration imposed new economic sanctions against Iran, targeting its central bank and its sovereign wealth fund. “We’ve now cut off all sources of funds to Iran,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said.
The move came in response to the attack on Saudi Aramco oil facilities that caused major fires and partially disrupted the country’s oil production, affecting global oil prices. Although the attacks were claimed by Yemen’s Houthis, Washington blamed the incident on Tehran. The latter denied all the accusations.
Energy & Environment
Just as we suspected, climate youth puppet Greta Thunberg is controlled by George Soros
NaturalNews – She’s all over the news these days, but 16-year-old Greta Thunberg isn’t homegrown or grassroots. Her climate schtick is completely a product of George Soros and Company, which feeds Thunberg her lines as she traipses around the world pretending to have come up with all this climate hysteria on her own.
In truth, Thunberg is never without her handler, Luisa-Marie Neubauer, a 23-year-old, far-left activist from Germany who’s the “Youth Ambassador” for an international lobbying and campaigning organization known as the “ONE Foundation,” which is funded by George Soros, Bill & Melinda Gates, and Bono, among other celebrity names.
Besides the fact that Thunberg herself comes from a family of freemasons, her mother supposedly having ties to Bavarian Illuminati founder Adam Weisshaupt, Neubauer, her controller, works for a major globalist entity that’s working to implement Agenda 2030 in Germany via the Paris Climate Accord.
Neubauer is also a member of Alliance 90, The Greens, and Green Youth, three communist organizations that are using the “threat” of climate change as a cover to push for sweeping policy changes all around the globe – changes that will, of course, eliminate freedom and liberty in order to “save the planet.”
Neubauer herself actually tweeted about being a member of the ONE Foundation, bragging about the fact that she gets to travel the world spreading climate propaganda with others who were hoodwinked just like she was into believing that global warming is real.
UN report on world’s oceans is damning: ‘We’re all in big trouble’
Fox – A damning new report from the United Nations says that the world’s oceans are undergoing drastic, accelerated change. And the risks associated with these changes to the climate are getting ever greater, threatening hundreds of millions of people and the global economy itself.
The report, issued by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), highlights the changes that are happening as a result of increased emissions from greenhouse gases, including: sea levels rising by three feet by 2100; significantly fewer fish in the oceans; stronger hurricanes; and regular flooding in coastal cities such as New York.
“Global warming has already reached 1 [degrees Celsius] above the pre-industrial level, due to past and current greenhouse gas emissions,” a press release issued in conjunction with the report said. “There is overwhelming evidence that this is resulting in profound consequences for ecosystems and people. The ocean is warmer, more acidic and less productive. Melting glaciers and ice sheets are causing sea level rise, and coastal extreme events are becoming more severe.”
Tropical Storm Karen moves north of Puerto Rico
Fox – as your FoxCast.
Isolated strong to severe storms could pop up today across the Southern and Central U.S. after several reports of tornadoes over the Midwest yesterday.
Lingering tropical moisture across the Southwest will keep the threat for storms and flash flooding possible through Thursday.
Tropical Storm Karen has moved north of Puerto Rico, and will remain in this general area for the next several days as forward motion slows and eventually stalls. Karen may eventually resume a westward motion toward the Bahamas, but that will depend on how the next few days evolve.
Science & Technology
Russia says it won’t tell NASA why a hole appeared in the International Space Station
BGR – The mystery of why a small hole appeared in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft attached to the International Space Station last year is now somehow even more bizarre than it already was. The hole, which was detected by the crew and patched in space, sparked investigations by Russia’s Roscosmos and NASA, with both agencies vowing to get to the bottom of how such a thing could have happened.
Now, after months of silence, Roscosmos boss Dmitry Rogozin says he knows how it happened, but that NASA will never find out. It’s a bizarre state of affairs that highlights the odd tension that has been building between NASA and the Russian space agency for some time.
Initially thought to be the result of a tiny space rock or other debris slamming into the space station at high speeds, it later became clear that the hole had been drilled into the side of the spacecraft. Russia set out to determine when the hole was created, and since it was clear that it wasn’t drilled in space, figuring out who drilled the hole back on Earth was a top priority.
Early reports out of Russia claimed that a culprit had been determined, but nothing really came of those reports and we never learned of anyone being charged with sabotaging the mission. Had it been merely an accident, it could have been easily explained, but Russia refuses to reveal what actually happened.
This is sadly not surprising. Roscosmos has been increasingly moody as of late, and with NASA no longer wanting to pay for seats aboard the Soyuz crew launches to the ISS, and planning on using SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner in the near future, the Russian space program appears to be taking it personally.
“What happened is clear to us, but we won’t tell you anything,” Rogozin said in an interview with the state-run news outlet RIA Novosti.
Ford launching autonomous car testing in Austin
Fox – There will soon be some weird-looking cars riding around Austin.
Ford has announced plans to begin testing autonomous cars in the Texas capital, which has become a hot spot for self-driving tech.
The automaker and its autonomous vehicle subsidiary Argo AI will first spend several months developing detailed maps of the area, which it sees as a key component to safe self-driving vehicles. Engineers will also note any local traffic quirks that the car’s brains need to be particularly aware of and will address the issue of scooters, which are a prevalent obstacle in the city.
The self-driving hybrid Fusion sedans and their roof-mounted sensor arrays are already being tested in several cities, including Miami and Washington, D.C., ahead of the planned deployment of autonomous delivery and ride-hailing services in 2021 that will feature specially designed hybrid utility vehicles.
Volkswagen recently pledged to invest $2.6 billion in Argo AI to become an equal partner in the company with Ford with an eye on eventually integrating the technology into its own vehicles.
Health
Fake Meat Is Junk Food
Mercola – Ultra Processed foods typically have five or more ingredients, many of which are not commonly used in home kitchens. This aptly describes the Impossible Burger and Beyond Burger, including fake blood processed from genetically engineered yeast to mimic the taste and texture of real beef.
Although the soy-like hemoglobin used in the Impossible Burger is classified as generally recognized as safe, no tests have been done by independent labs on the product’s safety. However, tests on lab rats altered the animals’ blood chemistry; the company did not follow up on the results.
The parent companies for Impossible Burger and Beyond Burger commissioned studies to assess the environmental impact of production against typical CAFO beef production. Not surprisingly, they found their product had a lower impact. But it’s not nearly as low as the beef production at White Oaks Pastures, which uses regenerative farming practices to produce natural beef products.
If a plant-based, GE meat alternative is not enough of a science fiction adventure, consider the “meat” scientists are growing from stem cell cultures in the lab. Some see these alternatives as the lesser of two evils, but when holistic herd management improves the environment, your best choice is to seek food from natural sources
Juul Said It Will Stop All US Advertising And Not Fight Trump’s Plan To Ban Vape Flavors
Buzzfeed – Juul, the San Francisco–based company that made vaping popular in the last few years, announced on Wednesday that it would stop all broadcast, print, and digital advertising of its products in the United States.
The company’s announcement comes amid an influx of vaping-related lung illnesses and deaths across the US. Juul has come under severe criticism for its marketing practices, which critics say target young adults.
9 Reasons to take Manuka honey, a nutrient dense superfood with unique health-supporting molecules
NaturalNews – Honey has been utilized as both a superfood and natural remedy for thousands of years. In fact, cultures around the globe recognize it for being an amazing healing treasure. However, the overall potency of honey can vary greatly depending on several factors, including the brand, the type of honey, the bees that make it, and even the plants used to create the honey. Manuka honey is considered the most potent honey in the world. It comes from bees that pollinate the Manuka bush, a plant found along the East Coast of Australia’s pristine bushlands and forests, and throughout New Zealand. If you want a healthy way to indulge your sweet tooth, use Manuka honey as a healthier alternative to artificial sweeteners and regular sugar.
Disclaimer: This article includes a link to a lab-tested, potency-verified Manuka honey solution that helps support this publisher. While the toxic mainstream media is funded by dangerous pharmaceuticals and disease-promoting junk food, this publisher is funded by safe, nourishing superfoods and nutritional solutions. We thank you for your support.
What makes Manuka honey unique is its high levels of naturally occurring methylglyoxal (MGO). This component of the Manuka flower’s nectar is believed to give Manuka honey its health-promoting benefits. The higher a honey ‘s MGO rating, the better its quality. The impressive MGO rating of Manuka honey means that its beneficial properties are much more potent and stable than those of regular types of honey. (Related: Everything you need to know about manuka honey.)
Pfizer now openly testing toxic vaccines on pregnant women – they just don’t care anymore
NaturalNews – The vaccine industry has reached a point where it no longer has any qualms about testing new vaccines on healthy, pregnant women – and announcing it to the world like it’s no big deal!
As part of a new nationwide study, vaccine giant Pfizer is recruiting 650 healthy, pregnant women between the ages of 18 and 49 and with a gestational age between 24 and 36 weeks to sign up for an experimental vaccine for RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus.
According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s official clinical trials website
Pfizer is the study’s sponsor, and the goal is to see how the experimental vaccine for RSV will affect unborn babies’ health, either good or bad.
“The SAVVY study is assessing the safety of an investigational RSV vaccine given to healthy pregnant women,” reads a portion of the descriptor that’s been assigned to this research project by Pfizer.
“The study will also measure immune system response to a single study injection to evaluate the role the investigational vaccine may potentially play in protecting a baby’s health,” it goes on to explain.
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