Author: admin

After a summer of high level military to military talks appear to have unraveled — though they’ve prevented another major border breach like the June 15 brutal hand-to-hand combat clash which saw 20 Indian troops killed — multiple reports confirm a new build-up of thousands of Indian and Chinese troops on either side of the Ladakh region.

“Thousands of Indian and Chinese troops are still locked in an impasse across the mountain passes of the Himalayan region of Ladakh and the banks of the glacial lake Pangong Tso, with neither side backing down despite their foreign ministers having agreed five days ago to improve mutual trust and de-escalate tensions,” South China Morning Post reported Tuesday.

And amid the blame game for the renewed mobilization of forces and the potential for more high altitude fighting, China’s state-run Global Times says to expect Sino-Indian border tensions to likely “extend to winter”. 

An @IAF_MCC #Mirage2000 at Leh airfield. #Ladakh.
India and China begin deployment for three months harsh winter beginning November when all the connecting roads block due to heavy snow.
China moved 10000 additional troops. pic.twitter.com/l80Wm9Hkhn

— Rishikesh Kumar (@rishhikesh) September 16, 2020

And citing Indian sources, Russia’s Sputnik reports China’s PLA military recently moved 10,000 more troops to the region, despite multiple rounds of talks with the Indian side briefly resulted in a pull-back from the immediate Line of Actual of Control.

“As tensions continue to soar between the two nuclear-powered rivals, China has moved an additional 10,000 troops forward since the past week along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Ladakh, government sources in New Delhi revealed,” Sputnik wrote.

Thread.

Since tensions escalated with China this summer, India has moved thousands of additional troops to Ladakh.

That’s been backed up by a massive military logistics operation.

Yesterday, we got a glimpse into how it works.https://t.co/Rdh76GdtCS

Below: A C-17 lands. pic.twitter.com/FZohkz8eMo

— Devjyot Ghoshal (@DevjyotGhoshal) September 16, 2020

“The additional hauling of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to the border has taken the Chinese deployment to approximately 52,000 with 150 fighter jets and surface-to-air missiles (SAM),” the report added. 

There does appear to be heightened build-up in the area based on both local reports and social media videos circulating. 

Meanwhile Reuters has cited India’s defense minister to say the conflict “remains unresolved” with “fears of a broader conflict” remaining high as ever, given that “the scale of deployment of troops and the number of disputed areas was much more than in previous years,” according to the report.

Reuters cited Indian defense minister Rajnath Singh in an interview as saying Tuesday:

As of now, the Chinese site has mobilized a huge number of army battalions and armaments along the LAC and inner areas. Our armed forces have made appropriate counter deployments in response to the actions by China, in eastern Ladakh and [INAUDIBLE] and Kongka La and Pangong Lake’s north and south banks, and many areas where there is friction, so that India’s security interests are fully protected.

Below is rare video showing Indian troops and supplies being transported into the difficult to reach region:

In recent months, the military has brought vast quantities of ammunition, equipment, fuel, winter supplies and food into Ladakh – more than 150,000 tonnes, via two highways and a fleet of large transport aircraft.

You can spot two below. pic.twitter.com/QPuTz0L3XO

— Devjyot Ghoshal (@DevjyotGhoshal) September 16, 2020

The Indian side is busy conducting a large-scale logistical operation observed resupplying Indian troops in the high, remote region.

The fact that on both sides troops and supplies have been seen pouring into the region strongly suggests we’re in for a long haul. When winter hits, all roads leading to the area are blocked. It appears the rival militaries are digging in for the long harsh winter. 

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

I am puzzled, as I assume my readers are, why the powers-that-be chose the two least electable candidates for the Democrat nominations for president and vice president.  

It makes no sense to choose people who have little chance of winning – unless the globalists intend to rig the election and elect them, or install them after a color revolution, in order to make the US a laughing stock throughout the world as a way of removing the US, a hegemonic power, as an obstacle to the global elite.

Really, once you see Biden in action, it is difficult to believe that even white liberals can vote for the Democrat ticket:

Imagine the ridicule that would be heaped upon Biden by the presstitute media if he were the Republican candidate.  

Those of you old enough to remember President Reagan will remember all the presstitute insinuations about Reagan being senile and falling asleep at cabinet meetings.  Of course, the presstitutes were never at cabinet meetings.  

Reagan successfully confronted the two major problems of his time—stagflation and the nuclear armageddon that could result from misunderstood intentions or a warning system error.  Reagan’s supply-side policy deep-sixed stagflation—the simultaneous rise of inflation and unemployment—and his negotiations with Soviet President Gorbachev ended the Cold War.

The Establishment has buried both achievements, and today Reagan is understood as the president who made Americans feel good while he cut taxes for the rich and poured money into the Pentagon and defense contractors. Reagan’s “star wars” was more illusion than real. It’s purpose was to convince the Soviets to end the Cold War.  This was also the purpose of his military interventions against leftish takeovers in the US “sphere of influence.”  The reason for these interventions was to give the message to Moscow that there would be no further territorial gains for communism.  

Americans today, especially the youth, know nothing about how the Reagan administration gave us two decades of economic growth without having to pay for it with rising inflation, and they do not know that Reagan ended the Cold War.  

Today the rightwing and Russians themselves believe that Reagan won the Cold War. That was not Reagan’s goal.  President Reagan told those of us involved that the purpose was “to end, not win, the Cold War,” and that we must never act or speak in any way that implied that we had prevailed over the Soviets.  Wikipedia, a disinformation website, opens its account of Reagan’s foreign policy with a blatant lie:  “The foreign policy of the Ronald Reagan administration was the foreign policy of the United States from 1981 to 1989. The main goal was winning the Cold War.”  The ignorance of whoever wrote this is extraordinary. The Soviets never would have agreed to losing the Cold War.  President Reagan understood this, which is why he emphasized that our purpose was to end, not win, the Cold War.

Everything President Reagan accomplished by creating trust between Washington and Moscow has been destroyed by successor US administrations.  As Stephen Cohn, myself, and a few others emphasize, the danger of both accidential and intentional nuclear war at the present time is substantially greater than during the Cold War.

It is difficult to reconcile Washington’s pursuit of hegemony with the divisiveness that has been created in American society.  The Democrats and the presstitutes have made it clear that the November election will be used to deepen the divisiveness.  For the rest of the world, the silver lining in America’s internal conflict is the end of US hegemony.

The virus pandemic shock is generating deep economic scarring, the likes of which many have never seen before. The virus-induced downturn has led the economy into a “liquidity trap,” in which interest rates will likely reside on the zero lower bound until 2023, and monetary policy could have trouble stimulating the real economy besides artificially inflating asset prices. As Washington pumps fiscal injection after fiscal injection into the real economy, creating unstable artificial growth, the latest lapse of fiscal support, now 46 days, has sent the economy into another slump.

For more color on the deep economic scarring, not just a deterioration in the labor market, we turn our attention to a Yelp report published Wednesday that revealed as of Aug. 31, 163,735 businesses have closed on the platform, a 23% increase since mid-July.

Yelp pointed out an increase of permanent business closures over the past six months, now reaching 97,966, or about 60% of closed businesses will never reopen their doors again.  

“As of August 31, 163,735 total U.S. businesses on Yelp have closed since the beginning of the pandemic (observed as March 1), a 23% increase since July 10. In the wake of COVID-19 cases increasing and local restrictions continuing to change in many states we’re seeing both permanent and temporary closures rise across the nation, with 60% of those closed businesses not reopening (97,966 permanently closed).” 

“Overall, Yelp’s data shows that business closures have continued to rise with a 34% increase in permanent closures since our last report in mid-July,” Justin Norman, Yelp’s vice president of data science, told CNBC. 

Yelp notes restaurants, shopping and retail, and beauty and spas have been damaged the most with temporary and permanent closures since March 1. About 32,109 restaurants closed on Yelp, with 19,590 of those permanent, or about 61%. Shopping and retail saw 30,374 business closures, with 58% of those permanent. Beauty and spas saw 16,585 closures, with 42% of which are permanent. 

Professional services, like roofing, landscaping, accountants, and lawyers, experienced some of the smallest declines. Meanwhile, restaurants and retail businesses have been struggling the most. Readers may recall, dying restaurants have been panic selling assets on Facebook Marketplace as the industry remains in a bust cycle. 

Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco were three metro areas that saw the most closures and permanent closures.

And what does this all mean? Well, policy tools, if that is monetary of fiscal, are producing diminishing returns that will likely result in a recovery that does not resemble a “V.” The road to recovery could take years as the latest analysis from Opportunity Insights of US business activity reveals the number of small businesses open is plunging. 

And by the way, the fiscal cliff, which we’ve warned about since late July (see: here) – is finally showing up in economic data as online spending growth hit a wall. Lower spending by consumers will pressure businesses and lead to more closures.  

What this all means is that America’s coming double-dip recession could be dead ahead.  

Authored by Alan Hamilton via Off-Guardian.org,

“On at least 3 or 4 occasions in the past week we’ve had to smash the windows of people in cars and pull them out of there so they could provide their details – because they weren’t telling us where they were going; they weren’t adhering to the chief health officer’s guidelines, they weren’t providing their name and their address.”

– Shane Patton, Victorian Chief Police Officer 04/08/2020

On Saturday 5th of September a national day of protest occurred in cities around Australia against the unnecessary and draconian lockdowns that have been occurring across the country and which are still occurring in Victoria. Similar protests have occurred in cities around the world, most especially in Europe.

These protests are a legitimate and rational response to despotic and often unconstitutional laws that unscientifically characterize every member of society as a bio-security risk to everyone else. They are also a protest against law enforcement bureaucracies that identify responsible, civic-minded citizens as criminals if they dare to question such laws or even worse, step out of their homes in defiance of the lockdown to register their dissent.

The Australian protests occurred peacefully and without incident in most places, including Brisbane where I participated. But it was not the case in Victoria where a State of Disaster has been declared due to the ‘extraordinarily high’ number of active Covid cases there.

On the eve of the nationwide protests, mainstream news reported on the harrowing state of affairs in Victoria which was suffering from hundreds of active cases but, as it turns out, had only 20 people in intensive care suffering from covid-related illnesses. This is in a state of 6.35 million people that has 58 metropolitan hospitals and 69 rural hospitals and District Health services.

Despite the ‘extraordinarily low’ incidence of people who were actually sick from Covid 19, the Victorian Premier decided that new case numbers (>100 per day) were just too high to tolerate anyone leaving their homes for any reason other than the four exemptions provided by the government.

What he neglected to mention when insisting on preserving his lockdown was that most new cases are occurring in the under-30 age bracket: a demographic that is almost always asymptomatic to SARS CoV-2 and which has more chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident than of Covid19.

Undeterred by inconvenient truths like this, the Premier announced he had to protect the public from the potentially catastrophic medical emergency that would doubtless result from masked people walking down St Kilda Road to the Cenotaph in a socially distanced manner, so he banned all participation in the national day of protest.

Just days earlier the Assistant Police Commissioner for the North West Metro Region, Luke Cornelius, warned everyone in Victoria against participating in the Saturday protests. He referred to people who planned to protest against lockdowns as “boof heads”, calling them an “anti-vax, anti-mask, tinfoil hat-wearing brigade who were batshit crazy”.

This oddly extreme language from one of the State’s most senior police officers is not accidental. It serves a specific purpose.

In order to get ordinary well-adjusted police officers – who may have joined the force out of a desire to be of public service – to brutalize a population whose only crime is that they object to being locked in their homes for 23 hrs a day for months on end, you need to demonize dissent. If your officers on the ground can identify in any way with the people they are being told to terrorize, they might not follow orders.

This is a perennial problem for martial leaders everywhere. It’s particularly problematic when the rules being enforced are arbitrary or unjust. Hence the need to malign.

As Saturday rolled around, the police were out in force across Victoria on horseback with cuffs, batons, tasers and guns ready to intimidate, arrest and fine anyone unfortunate enough to attract their attention within the vicinity of a protest in any town in the State – even those towns where not a single case of Covid-19 has been recorded.

And here we get to the crux of the SARS-CoV-2 scam. Sure, there’s a virus out there. It’s real and it certainly kills people but we know enough about it now to know that the draconian response taken by Premier Danial Andrews is scientifically indefensible. So why is he persisting with the lockdowns?

My personal opinion is that the global program of lockdowns is a mechanism for reorganizing societies around the world along the lines of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset” agenda and all that this entails. It seems Daniel Andrews is fully on board with this agenda. But make no mistake, its coming to your state and country next.

I believe that sustained lockdowns are a “Stanley Milgram-style” experiment designed to see just how far bureaucrats in authority will exceed the moral limits of their power and how much abuse the Australian public will tolerate before they push back.

As part of this experiment, the algorithms that once monitored every nuance of our social media interactions to make frighteningly accurate predictions about us have been extended to track and predict our off-line experience as well. It should come as no surprise that both the Azure and AWS cloud eco-systems have expanded by 50% since the beginning of the pandemic.

The purpose of all this surveillance is not to better understand us as potential marketing targets (the standard explanation) but rather to better control us as victims in a system of profound inequality. Such a system is already in place across much of the world and under the guise of a health pandemic, it is rapidly being expanded to developed countries as well.

So far as I can see the whole experiment is going spectacularly well for the globalists, billionaires, and authoritarians, and very poorly for free citizens everywhere: mostly due to the effectiveness of media propaganda in driving public passivity.

A SCIENTIFIC DICTATORSHIP

Many medical practitioners are aware that Victoria’s management of the SARS CoV-2 pandemic is based on highly selective medical advice which doesn’t stand up to serious scientific scrutiny.

Recently a group of doctors wrote an excellent letter to the Premier advocating an alternative response to disease management, noting that more than 41,000 people die every year in Victoria, roughly 10,000 each from cardiovascular disease and cancer, yet in 7 months of a supposed pandemic less than 600 Victorians have died of Covid-19: 90% of them over 65 years of age and most with multiple co-morbidities.

The problem with the doctor’s alternative advice is that it assumes the government is merely mistaken or misinformed in its policymaking and implementation. The idea that the exercise of political power in Victoria has become pathological never seems to occur to them – despite a wealth of evidence supporting such a notion.

When governments pass laws that are extreme or unjust or which by-pass constitutional constraints, it is rarely by accident. As doctors they ought to be the first to appreciate what a pathological exercise of power means to the cultural and institutional bonds that hold a society together:

• As bio-security increasingly substitutes for health care, doctors will find that the personal confidences of their patients are no longer inviolate and that the Hippocratic obligations they once held so dear can be easily compromised by legal mandates to force-medicate people regardless of need or consequence.

• When politicians rule by executive decree the police force morphs from a public service comprised of citizens in uniform to the enforcement arm of a political clique. When this happens, public trust in the police is lost and this loss of legitimacy results in a loss of respect. Eventually this loss of respect becomes mutual and the police start to despise the people they victimize and abuse the power they have. The opening quote being a perfect example.

• Similarly with the military: when the exercise of our democratic rights is pathologized by those in power, our servicemen and women eventually find they’re being asked to apply, at home, the counter-insurgency training and urban warfare tactics they learned for battlefields abroad. This is something that has occurred since the time of Thucydides and it’s happening again.

• Even the tools we use to make sense of the world, such as the scientific method, cease to function properly when our governments become toxic. Once everyone in a society has been force-vaccinated by government decree, it will become legally impossible to prove a link between mandated vaccines and any potential vaccine-related injury. Not because the manufacturers will have immunity from liability (they will), but because there will no longer be a non-vaccinated control group left against which randomized double-blind control studies can be conducted.

Not one of these developments is accidental. All of them are known, predictable outcomes of policy decisions being taken today. And these policy decisions rob everyone of their integrity; health workers, academics, the police and the military.

When those in power have a pathological relationship to the people they rule, you know you are on a road to perdition. We can see such a pathology evolving among our politicians most clearly in Victoria with its home invasions, curfews and lock downs but it is also evident in the overreach of governments around the country.

Western Australia’s recent dispute with mining magnate, Clive Palmer, over the State’s Covid border closure is a case in point. According to the WA Law Society the Government’s anti-Palmer legislation violates several of the fundamental legal principles that underpin the rule of law in a civilized society. Such overreach is also apparent in the ASIO Amendment Act 2020, introduced into Federal Parliament by Peter Dutton in May this year – right at the height of the Covid panic while most members were not even in Canberra.

This legislation is the latest in a succession of Bills that have been passed by our Federal government since 9/11 (85 and counting) which have vastly expanded the powers of law enforcement and security agencies in Australia while limiting public oversight. The legislation effectively criminalizes the free exercise of our basic democratic freedoms.

The Dutton amendment extends powers normally applied to terrorists, to any group or person engaged in any kind of civil disobedience or protest that could possibly result in ‘politically motivated violence’. That would include the anti-lock down protests that I participated in last week.

Among a raft of frightening provisions this bill allows police and intelligence agencies to track, apprehend and question children as young as 14 yrs of age as though they were terrorists. It suspends the rules of habeas corpus and allows the State to arbitrarily restrict a defendant’s access to legal representation.

This is the sort of legislation you’d expect to find in China or Saudi Arabia, not Australia.

The permanent changes to our society that are now in place in Australia following the SARS CoV-2 pandemic mean we qualify as proto-fascist State by any measure of political freedom. This thought is anathema to most Australians and would be vociferously denied by paid-off mainstream media pundits – but probably not constitutional lawyers – because the legislative reality is that we are now much closer to full-blooded fascism than we are to the liberal democracy that existed when I was born in 1963. And we are a very far cry from the nation our diggers returned to in 1945.

The only way we will arrest and/or reverse this trend is if we all take direct, non-violent, physical (not digital) action to exercise our civic and democratic rights at every opportunity we can. The time to speak up and stand up is now. It will be too late tomorrow.

Despite Beijing’s threats centered on the ‘red line’ of the Taiwan issue, Washington only looks to ramp up its arms sales, which will no doubt earn more condemnations alleging violation of the ‘One China’ policy. 

Reuters points out the US is content to further build up ‘Fortress Taiwan’ while “needling China” – as it “plans to sell as many as seven major weapons systems, including mines, cruise missiles and drones to Taiwan, four people familiar with the discussions said, as the Trump administration ramps up pressure on China.”

The Trump administration is throwing caution to the wind, given the reality is that this many sales at once is “a rare departure from years of precedent in which U.S. military sales to the island were spaced out and carefully calibrated to minimize tensions with Beijing.”

Here’s Taiwan’s shopping list, in various phases of passing US legal hurdles and discussions, according to the new Reuters report:

• Drones that can see over the horizon for surveillance and targeting, coupled with advanced missiles and coastal defenses that include smart mines and anti-submarine capabilities to impede a sea invasion…
• A Lockheed Martin-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), essentially a truck-based rocket launcher, is among the weapons Taiwan wants, people familiar with the negotiations said.
• at least four large sophisticated aerial drones to Taiwan for what could be about $600 million.
• under discussion are land-based Boeing-made Harpoon anti-ship missiles to serve as a coastal defense against cruise missiles.
• Other systems include “underwater sea mines and other capabilities to deter amphibious landing, or immediate attack,” Taiwan’s de facto ambassador here to United States said in July.

Anti-tank missile systems are also said to be under consideration, at a moment Chinese PLA naval and aerial drills near the island have been on the uptick.

Beijing has repeatedly signaled that it considers reunification as a landmark mission and won’t stand idly by as external forces intervene in what it sees as inter-China affairs.

And as South China Morning Post recently warned, “Unlike other areas of territorial contention, such as in the South China Sea, analysts say Beijing will show no flexibility on this issue and has not ruled out force to reunify Taiwan with the mainland.”

Authored by Ye Xie, Bloomberg macro commentator and analyst

There were few surprises at the FOMC meeting as the Fed signaled it plans to leave rates near zero for at least three years, even as it upgraded growth forecasts. The fact that bond yields and the dollar erased earlier declines perhaps reflected the positioning of a minority of investors who were looking for more. In the bigger picture, though, the macro backdrop remains the same – accommodative monetary policy with continued economic recovery, coupled with both upside risks (a vaccine) and downside risks (fiscal, virus and the presidential election).

In China, Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen said Beijing is “seriously” implementing the phase-one trade deal with the U.S. even as it faces difficulties caused by the pandemic and complexities in the relations between the two nations.

So why does Beijing bother to stick to the deal when the conflicts extend everywhere from technology to human rights and capital markets?

In a long article published this week to promote his upcoming book, Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio shed some light on the thinking of Chinese policy makers: It’s really about avoiding a real war.

Dalio, who has connections with senior policy makers since the 1980s, recounted a meeting between him and China’s top negotiator Liu He during the first round of trade talks:

“He explained that going into his meeting with Trump, he was concerned about how it would go, not because of the trade negotiations, which he was confident didn’t have any issues that couldn’t be worked out, but because he was concerned about the worst-case scenario where tit-for-tat escalations could get out of control and lead to more serious consequences.”

China has long said that trade is the anchor for the Sino-U.S. relationship. Without it, relations could slip into a military confrontation. To Dalio, the U.S. conflicts with China rose in a way that was “analogous to the rise of Japan and Germany to challenge the then-existing powers in the 1930s,” which eventually led to World War II.

​​

To some extent, the tension is inevitable, given the two sides’ different understandings of the role of the state in the economy. In fact, Dalio said he “would have done almost the exact same things as they did if I were in their shoes,” given the constraints China faces. He urges the U.S. to abandon the stereotype of “communist China” to really understand what Beijing is actually doing.

So where do we go from here? Dalio left his conclusion for the next chapter of his book. From what we’ve learned, though, he seems to believe that gold is something that one must have in the current chaotic global environment. After all, 12 of the past 16 global transitions of rival powers in the last 500 years ended in war, the ominous curse of the “Thucydides Trap.”

During the signing of the Abraham Accords Peace Agreement at the White House Tuesday, which is the first ever historic Treaty of Peace, Diplomatic Relations and Full Normalization Between the United Arab Emirates and the State of Israel, Hamas rockets rained down on communities in southern Israel. 

“Thirteen people were injured after two rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip towards Ashkelon and Ashdod in southern Israel on Tuesday,” The Jerusalem Post reports. “Rocket sirens sounded as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed normalization deals with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. One of the rockets was intercepted by the IDF.”

Israel was quick to respond in airstrikes overnight and into the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Considering that during past volleys of rocket fire out of the Gaza Strip, most projectiles fail to hit any target and instead fall into the desert, the high injury rate from Tuesday night’s attack points to most of these rockets striking residential areas in Israel. 

Gaza’s Islamist armed factions confirmed the rocket fire was in response to the Israeli-UAE deal, which includes Bahrain as well, and had declared Tuesday a Palestinian “day of rage”:

Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem responded to the normalization deals shortly after the rockets were fired from Gaza, saying that “the normalization agreements between the UAE and Bahrain with the Zionist entity are not worth the ink with which they were written – and our people, with their insistence on the struggle until the full recovery of their rights, will deal with these agreements as if they were non-existent,” according to Palestinian media.

“A question to the United States of America, Israel, Bahrain and the UAE: Will the signing of the normalization agreement at the White House now prevent these missiles from leaving Gaza tonight to Israel?” asked senior Fatah official Monir al-Jaghoub in response to the deals and rocket fire. “Peace begins in Palestine and war begins in Palestine.”

In the early hours of Wednesday morning the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed it responded by conducting at least ten air strikes on Hamas targets throughout the strip.

At least two people were wounded in the southern coastal city of #Ashdod, #Israel, by rocket fire from Hamas-controlled #Gaza, emergency services confirm, as Israel signed normalization deals with Bahrain and the UAE.https://t.co/SQfNXJt2qO pic.twitter.com/RowCw1PTBX

— Al Arabiya English (@AlArabiya_Eng) September 15, 2020

Hamas rockets continued just before dawn on Wednesday, and given the escalating tit-for-tat are likely to continue. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed retaliation and charged Hamas with attempting to “turn back the peace”. 

Video of the rocket impact this evening in #Ashdod, #Israel. pic.twitter.com/6pbhhqaECm

— Aurora Intel (@AuroraIntel) September 15, 2020

“I’m not surprised that the Palestinian terrorists fired at Israel precisely during this historic ceremony,” Netanyahu told reporters before leaving Washington where he had been personally presented a “key to the White House” by President Trump and the first lady after signing the Abraham Accords.

“They want to turn back the peace. In that, they will not succeed,” he added. “We will strike at all those who raise a hand to harm us, and we will reach out to all those who extend the hand of peace to us.”

The text of the UAE-Israel Normalization Agreement has been released by the White House. It’s four pages long and makes no mention that Israel is obligated to halt its annexation of Occupied Palestinian Territories. pic.twitter.com/JSENKXkiI5

— Ayman Mohyeldin (@AymanM) September 16, 2020

However, Palestinian leadership considers that it’s being sold out by the Arab gulf states which in past decades have resisted Israeli expansion.

Authored by Leana Dippie via Campus Reform,

With many colleges and universities across the country shifting to remote learning for the fall semester, and even the spring semester, one college president is arguing that campuses need to reopen.

Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern University in Boston wrote in a Washington Post op-ed titled, “The virus isn’t going away. That’s why campuses need to reopen,” that he believes schools need to reopen, and explained why he himself worked tirelessly to ensure Northeastern students could return to their classrooms this fall.

He argues that the coronavirus is going to be a constant threat, and states that the world cannot hit the pause button.

“The pandemic, we realized, is going to be endemic: an ongoing threat to manage, not a brief blip in history, cleanly wiped out by a miracle vaccine. The science will take time. But the world cannot,” Aoun explains after consulting with various epidemiologists, biologists, and scientists from the Northeastern faculty.

“Manufacturing enough doses to vaccinate the entire country, let alone the world, will take many months. And we don’t yet know the strength and duration of the immunity that will be conferred, making it likely that the world will experience covid-19 outbreaks, albeit at lower levels, for years,” Aoun continued.

Auon states that the coronavirus will likely be a “four-to-five-year problem” and explains that putting a pause on in-person learning would “be devastating to colleges and their students.”

“This will likely make COVID-19 at least a four-to-five-year problem, epidemiologists say. Pausing in-person education that long would be devastating to colleges and their students. And even a one-year delay would be a substantial challenge.

It would disproportionately hurt low-income students who spent the spring continuing their studies online, without adequate technology, sometimes in overcrowded and even traumatic living conditions. And it would impair universities’ ability to discover solutions that would make the world safer — from this pandemic, and from ones that are yet to come.”

Campus Reform reached out to Northeastern students to get their takes on Aoun’s stance.

One student, Tess Dufour, a sophomore at Northeastern told Campus reform that she “absolutely” agrees with her university president.

“I absolutely agree with his push to reopen,” Dufour said.

“I agree with the principle that this is an ‘endemic’ virus that will not be erased within one year. I acknowledge how serious and high risk the coronavirus is, however, I also acknowledge the importance of college students being able to thrive within a new normal. We have the benefit of seeing other colleges go back before us. We have learned from their mistakes and plan to handle this pandemic way better.”

Bernardo Costa is an international student about to embark on his second year at Northeastern.

When asked whether he agrees with Aoun’s push to reopen schools this fall, he said that international students are disadvantaged by remote learning, stating that if they stay home, they risk losing their visas.

“Many international students have worked their whole lives towards studying in the U.S. Taking classes at home could be a very big time difference for them. Many times they cannot watch the classes live and it hurts their academic performance. We also risk losing visas, scholarships, and things like that.”

“These are things we can’t afford to lose,” Bernardo continued.

“By reopening campuses, they’re giving people a choice on whether they’d prefer to come back and continue their educational journey where they intended to be from the beginning – in the United States.”

In the wake of George Floyd’s death while in the custody of the Minneapolis police, the city council – nearly all Democrats, made the brilliant decision to defund the city’s police department and embark on a “police-free future.“

“We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department,” tweeted Council Member Jeremiah Ellison on June 4, pledging to “dramatically rethink” the city’s approach to emergency response.

We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.

And when we’re done, we’re not simply gonna glue it back together.

We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response.

It’s really past due. https://t.co/7WIxUL6W79

— Jeremiah Ellison (@jeremiah4north) June 4, 2020

Now, via The Blaze, a development that we promise isn’t from the Babylon Bee: Minneapolis lawmakers are baffled over the recent crime wave sweeping the city.

“During a two-hour meeting with Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo this week, the Democratic city council, in brazen fashion, demanded to know why city police are not responding to the violence with enhanced law enforcement measures,” Writes Chris Enloe.

From Minnesota Public Radio:

The number of reported violent crimes, like assaults, robberies and homicides are up compared to 2019, according to MPD crime data. More people have been killed in the city in the first nine months of 2020 than were slain in all of last year. Property crimes, like burglaries and auto thefts, are also up. Incidents of arson have increased 55 percent over the total at this point in 2019.

“Residents are asking, ‘Where are the police?‘” Councilman Jamal Osman said, MPR reported. “That is the only public safety option they have at the moment. MPD. They rely on MPD. And they are saying they are nowhere to be seen.”

Anti-police Council President Lisa Bender claims the cops are being “defiant,” adding “This is not new.”

Democratic council member Phillipe Cunningham called out his colleagues for their hypocrisy.

“What I am sort of flabbergasted by right now is colleagues, who a very short time ago were calling for abolition, are now suggesting we should be putting more resources and funding into MPD,” he said.

Police Chief Arradondo insisted that Minneapolis PD has taken measures to combat the crime wave, such as adding more officers to patrols, devoting additional resources to investigative duties, and discussing the spike in crime with department leadership.

That said, over 100 officers have left the department this year, over double the typical number.

What did they expect?