Month: January 2022

Authored by Isabel van Brugen via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Comedic actress Betty White died just weeks shy of her 100th birthday as a result of “natural causes,” her agent confirmed on Monday.

“Betty died peacefully in her sleep at her home,” her agent and close friend Jeff Witjas said in a statement to People on Monday, shutting down rumors that White had received a COVID-19 booster shot on Dec. 28.

“People are saying her death was related to getting a booster shot three days earlier, but that is not true,” Witjas said.

“She died of natural causes. Her death should not be politicized—that is not the life she lived.”

White, an award-winning actress whose career spanned more than eight decades, starred in hit television sitcoms including “The Golden Girls” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” She died on Dec. 31 at the age of 99 at her home in California. Her 100th birthday would have been on Jan. 17.

Witjas’ statement follows the circulation of a fabricated quote on social media suggesting that the late actress had received a booster shot on Dec. 28.

“Eat healthy and get all your vaccines. I just got boosted today,” White was falsely quoted as saying next to a link to a report titled, “Betty White: I’m lucky to still be in good health” from a Minnesota news outlet Crow River Media, according to The Associated Press.

The article does not include the bogus quote, and archived versions of the story on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine also do not mention White having taken a COVID-19 vaccine booster.

She said in her interview with Crow River Media published on Dec. 28 that she was “so lucky to be in such good health and feel so good” at her age, and that she felt really healthy.

“Even though Betty was about to be 100, I thought she would live forever,” Witjas said on Friday. “I will miss her terribly and so will the animal world that she loved so much. I don’t think Betty ever feared passing because she always wanted to be with her most beloved husband Allen Ludden. She believed she would be with him again.”

White and her late husband Ludden were married from 1963 until he passed away in 1981 from stomach cancer. The 99-year-old’s “very last word” was reportedly “Allen,” according to Page Six.

White never had any of her own biological children, but the actress was stepmother to Ludden’s three children. The pair reportedly met after she appeared as a guest on the televised game show “Password,” where Ludden was the host, according to Romper.

White previously told People that she felt “blessed” to take on the role as stepmother to Ludden’s children.

On Jan. 17, White’s milestone birthday, the documentary “Betty White: A Celebration” will be screened nationwide. The film’s title was changed from “Betty White: 100 Years Young—A Birthday Celebration” after her death.

“Our hearts mourn today with the passing of Betty White,” producers Steve Boettcher and Mike Trinklein said in a statement.

“During the many years we worked with her, we developed a great love and admiration for Betty as a person, and as an accomplished entertainer. … We will go forward with our plans to show the film … in hopes our film will provide a way for all who loved her to celebrate her life—and experience what made her such a national treasure,” they said.

Quebec reimposed a nighttime curfew beginning New Year’s Eve as COVID-19 infections surged. Restaurants in the Canadian province only offer takeout service, while Gyms, bars, and movie theaters have been closed for days.

As the media and government drum up another COVID scare, Quebec Prime Minister Francois Legault wants to punish unvaccinated people for the soaring infections despite 85% of the residents in the province being vaccinated. 

This week, Quebec Prime Minister Francois Legault is expected to announce more restrictive measures towards unvaccinated people, such as banning them from purchasing hard liquor and marijuana. 

On Tuesday, the Journal de Montreal reported that “there was still some discussion to fine-tune the passport enforcement” at entrances or cash registers to block the unvaccinated from entering liquor and cannabis stores.

Vaccine passports have been required to access non-essential businesses such as theaters, bars and restaurants, casinos, conventions and conferences, places of worship, and sports facilities. If Legault goes ahead with the move, unvaccinated will only be able to purchase beer and wine. 

“Time and time again, the government has said it does not intend to force officials to be vaccinated,” the local paper said. However, through indirect ways, it’s making life for the unvaccinated into a living hell, with an end goal to make them eventually concede and get jabbed. 

What’s ironic is that the new vaccine requirement at liquor and cannabis stores will only apply to unvaccinated shoppers but not employees. 

The fact that authorities in Quebec are using “totalitarian” methods to make the lives of unvaccinated people miserable and instill fear in the overall population as the less severe Omicron variant sweeps across the world is nothing short of disgusting. 

The Canadian government has even admitted to launching a psychological operations campaign against their own people to manipulate them into vaccine compliance. 

The use of fear by the government and corporate media has definitely been ethically questionable. On Sunday, a convoy of police rolled around Montreal with flashing lights and sirens telling people to go home or get fined for breaking curfew. 

Montréal, Québec Canada.. welcome to the NWO.. citizens told to go home before curfew, those who resist will be fined $5000 to $6000. pic.twitter.com/4G3FoAJcnM

— Pelham (@Resist_05) January 2, 2022

What’s happening is a pandemic power grab by elites who use mass formation psychosis to hypnotize the population through fear into being their subservient slaves. 

Authored by Ken Silva via The Epoch Times,

The five defendants accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer are pushing for more information about the wrongdoing allegedly committed by FBI agents who handled their case.

A federal grand jury has charged six men with conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer: from top left, Kaleb Franks, Brandon Caserta, Adam Dean Fox, and bottom left, Daniel Harris, Barry Croft, and Ty Garbin, in an indictment released Dec. 17, 2020. (Kent County Sheriff via AP File)

In a flurry of filings on Dec. 31, the defendants in the Whitmer case opposed a motion from federal prosecutors to exclude evidence about FBI agents involved in the investigation. The defendants—Adam Fox, Barry Croft, Kaleb Franks, Daniel Harris, and Brandon Caserta—also sought to admit as evidence 258 statements they believe will prove the FBI entrapped them.

The motions follow the dismissal of one FBI agent in the Whitmer case for beating his wife. Another agent has been accused of perjury in a separate case, and a third was pulled from testifying in the trial after it was revealed that he was operating a private intelligence business while working investigating the defendants.

Federal prosecutors have painted the slew of recent motions by the defendants as a stall tactic that threatens to delay the March 8 trial date. Defense attorneys, however, say the motions are crucial to prove entrapment and protect the rights of their clients.

When it comes to the alleged wrongdoing by investigating FBI agents, the defendants said the Department of Justice has been stonewalling them for more information.

For example, federal prosecutors have called the perjury claims against FBI agent Henrick Impola “unfounded,” but the defense said government hasn’t provided records proving that.

“It is of record that a local attorney has filed a complaint with the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility alleging that Mr. Impola committed perjury in another case,” the defendants said.

“It is not clear why the government won’t disclose the outcome of the investigation into allegations it characterizes as ‘unfounded’ when a simple disclosure could very well clear Mr. Impola’s name and moot this issue in its entirety.”

Likewise, the government has allegedly refused to provide records about the private business of FBI agent Jayson Chambers. BuzzFeed News revealed that Chambers had registered a business called Exeintel, which was linked to Twitter account that posted about the case before it became public.

In its motion to exclude evidence about Exeintel, prosecutors said Chambers’ business had nothing to do with the Whitmer case.

“The BuzzFeed story (and the defendants) implied that SA Chambers leaked confidential law enforcement information in this and/or other cases to an Exeintel-related Twitter user, to drum up business by making the company look prescient,” prosecutors said.

“The defendants have produced no evidence, however, showing SA Chambers had a financial stake in the outcome of this case.”

But the defendants argued otherwise in their Dec. 31 response, saying that Chambers’ business scheme calls into question whether he was investigating the Whitmer case in good faith.

“When an agent, like Chambers, is focused on using his active investigations on behalf of the government as a selling point to make money in his private business, it raises a serious question about whether the agent is conducting the investigations in good faith or is instead motivated to make arrests for personal financial gain,” the defendants said.

As for former agent Richard Trask the defendants agreed with the prosecution that the conviction for beating his wife is irrelevant to anything at issue in their case.

Along with its Dec. 31 filing in response to the government, the defense also made a motion to admit as evidence 258 statements, largely comprising texts and audio recordings. Such statements would generally be considered hearsay and inadmissible as evidence in court, but the defendants argued that the statements should be allowed because they provide a fuller context of the events leading up to their arrest.

For instance, one of the alleged co-conspirators, Ty Garbin, said in a recorded call that “Captain Autism can’t make up his mind”—referring to Fox, the alleged plot leader. The defense said this statement from Garbin—who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years imprisonment in August for his role in the plot—is important for multiple reasons

First, Garbin’s statement shows that Fox wasn’t fully committed to the plot, the defense argued.

Moreover, the statement also disproves the notion that Fox was the plot mastermind, as, “The meaning of it lies in the defendants’ recognition that Adam Fox had no actual disposition toward truly committing wrongdoing . . . with a true plan and viability. No one would have conspired with Adam Fox because no one believed he had any ability to form, much less carry out, a plan,” the defense said.

“This statement also demonstrates a lack of predisposition in the entrapment context—no one, even Adam Fox himself—was actually predisposed to make any decisions with regard to possible wrongdoing.”

Prosecutors haven’t responded to the defense’s motion to admit the statements as evidence, but they did oppose numerous motions in a Jan. 4 filing—including an earlier Dec. 25 motion to dismiss, as well as a separate motion to extend filing deadlines.

“The defendants have filed a motion for more time to file more motions. They have already begun recycling the same motions previously denied, and identify no particular legal issues they expect to address given more time,” prosecutors said. “Accommodating their request would either unduly compress the pretrial briefing schedule, or necessitate a third continuance of the trial.”

A motion hearing is scheduled for Jan. 18, followed by a final pretrial conference on Feb. 18 before the March 8 trial.

Tens of thousands of police officers were deployed to China’s Xi’an where public anger has exploded among the city’s 13 million residents who were left bargaining and bartering for essential foodstuffs amid ongoing food shortages, as the city entered its 13th day of lockdown amid a wave of COVID-19 cases.

As some people took to social media to appeal for assistance as their food supplies ran low, or they were unable to access medical care, others started local trading networks in residential compounds to try to meet each other’s needs through bartering.

“Everything is getting bartered in Xi’an,” a resident of the city told RFA. “People are swapping stuff with others in the same building, because they no longer have enough food to eat.” Another resident said in a video clip that some people were trading cigarettes and iPhones for bags of rice.

“We now have a barter system in our residential compound,” the man says in the clip. “We had a bag of rice, and the neighbor wanted to trade … a smartphone and a tablet.”

“We have six bags of rice in our home but no vegetables.”

According to Radio Free Asia, authorities in the northern Chinese city of Xi’an have called for calm, as many in Xi’an are taking to social media complaining that they were unable to get sufficient food supplies after being ordered to stay in their homes.

To contain any civil unrest, city authorities have deployed around 29,000 police officers to enforce the lockdown, while countless local security guards are preventing people from entering or leaving areas designated high or medium risk. One video clip that made the rounds on social media showed security guards beating a teenager in the lobby of a building because he went out to buy steamed buns.

“I was hungry, so I came out to get some mantou,” the youngster is heard telling the guards, who beat and kick him, knocking his food to the ground. City authorities later said the guards had been punished.

Residents were initially told they would be allowed to send a designated person to buy groceries every other day, but many have since told RFA that the security guards in many areas aren’t allowing anyone to leave.

Those who can make it out to buy supplies are finding that prices have skyrocketed, especially of fresh fruit and vegetables, despite a well publicized effort by the government and volunteers to bring fresh produce into the city in large quantities to hand out to beleaguered residents.

One video clip posted to social media showed a man who said he had paid around 40 yuan for 10 capsicum peppers, the same amount for six tomatoes and 40 yuan for two cabbages.

“The vegetable vendor must be making a fortune,” the man complains, while showing his haul to friends.

State media, which is tightly controlled by the ruling Communist Party, reported on a line of trucks hauling a selection of vegetables, fresh fruit and pork belly into residential households in one part of the city on Dec. 29, delivering fresh food to around 180 households.

But the address given in the news report was tracked down by social media users, who discovered it was a residential compound for employees of the Shaanxi Provincial People’s Congress and the Xi’an municipal government, prompting a public outcry on social media.

A Xi’an resident surnamed Song said the food given to the families of officials looked luxurious compared with what regular people are getting: “They were spoiled for choice when it comes vegetables,” Song said. “Where can regular people find stuff like that?”

“I managed to get one head of Chinese leaves, a zucchini, four bell peppers, three heads of garlic, a piece of ginger, two scallions and three potatoes,” she said.

According to the Shaanxi provincial government, a total of 41,000 police officers have been dispatched to Xi’an to maintain public order, with 29,000 of those deployed to Xi’an, 20,352 of whom are working in residential compounds. Some 4,000 are operating traffic roadblocks, while others are guarding hotels or COVID-19 testing sites.

A Shaanxi scholar who gave the surname Tian said the government’s top priority in times of crisis is always maintaining public order and social stability, rather than looking after the needs of ordinary people.

“They have been building up the stability maintenance system ever since 2004,” Tian said. “They say there are only 40,000 police officers in Xi’an, but actually there are many more [security personnel] who aren’t police, including neighborhood committees and security in charge of buildings.”

“There are also village officials and their teams and so on,” he said.

Commentator Han Dapeng said the lockdown doesn’t appear to be preventing the spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, however.

“They used this total lockdown method on Wuhan last year, but Omicron is still going strong,” Han said. “Yet the rates of fatality and severe disease are both very low.”

“I don’t think this Xi’an lockdown is about disease prevention,” he said. “It’s more about controlling the population.”

State news agency Xinhua reported that China had 161 confirmed cases of COVID-19 nationwide on Monday, 101 of which were locally transmitted.

New cases in Xi’an fell to their lowest in a week, health officials said Sunday, as the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) pursues a “zero COVID” approach involving tight border restrictions and swift, targeted lockdowns.

Zhang Canyou of the China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that several rounds of testing in Xi’an had showed there are “some positive changes” in case numbers, which have dipped since the lockdown began.

Meanwhile, to contain speculation that Beijing is only enforcing lockdowns “to control the population”, amid the widespread outcry about the draconian lockdown measures, the official local news platform of Xi’an said a hospital’s wrongdoings amid the lockdown led to miscarriage of a pregnant woman and requires the hospital “to compensate and apologize.” And just to make everything better, the hospital’s general manager was suspended and two department heads fired.

Liu Shunzhi, head of the city’s health commission, received a warning from the Communist Party for malpractice in emergency treatment during the Covid outbreak. It wasn’t clear just what the “malpractice” was.

And just like that everything in Xi’an is back to abnormal.

Oh, and then just a few moments ago, this hit: China’s Xian Xianyang International Airport Suspends All International Passenger Flights From Jan 5. Because things are clearly under control.

Authored by Mark Tapscott via The Epoch Times,

Fix Our Senate, the obscure outfit leading a coalition of 70 liberal advocacy groups backing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) anti-filibuster drive, is a left-wing “dark-money pop-up,” according to a political nonprofit finance expert.

“Fix Our Senate may present itself as a standalone, grassroots activist group, but it’s actually a front for the Sixteen Thirty Fund, itself part of a $1.7 billion left-wing ‘dark- money pop-up’ empire run by the shadowy consulting firm Arabella Advisors,” said Capital Research Center (CRC) senior investigative researcher Hayden Ludwig.

“We call these fronts ‘pop-ups’ because they’re websites which pop into existence, run attack campaigns, and disappear in an instant and almost never reveal their connection to Arabella or its nonprofits,” Ludwig told The Epoch Times on Jan. 4.

The CRC is a conservative nonpartisan foundation that specializes in tracking trends among the most influential charities, nonprofits, and special-interest groups affecting the public policy process in the nation’s capital.

“We study unions, environmentalist groups, and a wide variety of nonprofit and activist organizations. We also keep an eye on crony capitalists who seek to profit by taking advantage of government regulations and by getting their hands on taxpayers’ money,” CRC says of its purpose on its website.

Schumer promised earlier this week to seek a vote by Jan. 17 on abolishing or reforming the filibuster—the Senate’s “cloture” rule that requires 60 votes to end debate and vote on a proposal—if Senate Republicans block consideration of two election reform packages that are top priorities of the Democrats’ progressive, or far-left, faction.

Republicans argue the reforms—the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act—severely limit or eliminate entirely the use of photo IDs and related ballot security measures, and require that all proposed changes to state election laws have prior Department of Justice (DOJ) approval.

Measures such as strengthening voter identification requirements are highly popular with the public, with recent surveys by Rasmussen, Monmouth, Pew, and AP-NORC finding 72 to 80 percent support for requiring photo IDs to vote.

Fix Our Senate describes itself as a “coalition of more than 70 organizations (and counting) representing millions of Americans fighting to eliminate the filibuster and fix the Senate so our elected officials can finally start delivering on their promises.”

While no individuals are identified as officials on Fix Our Senate’s website, Eli Zupnick is identified by The Hill as a “spokesman.”

He’s cited as praising Schumer for making “the choice clear: Senate Democrats must now choose between protecting our democracy or stubbornly preserving an outdated and abused Senate rule.”

The Epoch Times received no response to its questions submitted through the “Press Inquiries” contact form on the Fix Our Senate website by press time. Zupnick, who identifies himself with Fix Our Senate on his Twitter profile page, didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

He’s the former longtime communications director for Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), working for her in various positions from 2009 until 2019. He also was briefly in 2019 the managing principal for Precision Strategies, a Washington and New York City political consulting and marketing firm co-founded by Stephanie Cutter, who identifies herself as the former deputy campaign manager for President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

Among the 70 organizations participating in the Fix Our Senate coalition are the American Muslim Civil Rights Center, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Equal Justice Society, Faith in Public Life, Friends of the Earth, League of Conservation Voters, Peoples’ Action, Right to Health Action, and United We Dream. Many of the participating groups are locally focused activists groups such as the Long Beach Alliance for Clean Energy and Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.

Many of the coalition members, whether nationally or locally focused, share one thing in common—significant funding from the Sixteen Thirty/Arabella Fund dark money network, according to Ludwig.

“Because Fix Our Senate and other ‘pop-ups’ aren’t real nonprofits, they don’t file IRS Form 990 disclosures or publicly report their budgets, boards, or lobbying–making it impossible to trace their donors,” Ludwig explained.

 “Instead, all that money moves through the Sixteen Thirty Fund, itself created and managed by the for-profit company Arabella Advisors as a way for liberal mega-donors to quietly fund many of the Left’s most extreme causes.”

Ludwig said CRC has “traced about $10 million flowing from Arabella’s network funded by anonymous liberal donors to signatories on Fix Our Senate’s anti-filibuster coalition.”

Prospects for the success of the Schumer/Fix Our Senate campaign to abolish or reform the Senate filibuster suffered a major blow on Jan. 4, when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) told reporters that he worries that “being open to a rules change that would create a nuclear option, it’s very, very difficult. It’s a heavy lift.”

With the Senate split 50-50, the loss of even one Democratic vote on a filibuster reform proposal would be fatal unless 11 Republicans would then be willing to join the effort, which is highly unlikely.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) also has spoken publicly against revising the filibuster process, and a senior congressional GOP source who asked not to be named told The Epoch Times on Jan. 3 that “at least a couple of other Democrat senators will oppose it if Schumer forces a vote.”

For the last quarter of 2021, bargain hunters rushed to purchase apartments in Manhattan. Home sales in the borough reached a fourth-quarter record even though the Omicron variant scare has slowed the back-to-office return in the city. 

Appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate released a new report Tuesday that highlighted 3,559 co-ops and condos were sold in the fourth quarter of 2021, the most sales for the quarter going back three decades. The average price for an apartment sold jumped 11% to $1.17 million compared with the same quarter a year ago.  

The buying frenzy began in early 2021 as bargain hunters purchased apartments at a pandemic discount while thousands of Manhattanites in 2020 fled the metro area to suburbia because of pandemic lockdowns and violent crime. 

Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, believes the buying frenzy will continue through the first half of this year. 

“For the next several quarters, we’re going to see above-average sales activity and that is going to go a long way to bring down inventory levels,” Miller said. 

“One of the things that has differentiated the Manhattan market with the rest of the country has been that it was late to the party, and the city’s boom in activity really started at the beginning of 2021,” he added.

Supply is down 25% from a year earlier to 6,207 apartments in the borough. This was the most significant annual reduction in seven years. Supply remains elevated, but bidding wars are starting to pick up — the share of apartments sold above ask was 9.2%, the highest since early 2018. 

A separate report on the borough’s real estate market, released by Bess Freedman, chief executive officer at brokerage Brown Harris Stevens, showed tightening inventory is pushing home values higher and could suggest 2022 will be another banner year. 

“The good news is that the foreign buyer has returned, Wall Street bonuses are incredible and we have a new mayor, which all bodes well,” Freedman said. “Now, because pricing has ticked up a bit, it could slow things down with mortgage rates going up, but we’ll have to see.”

However, not all is rosy in the metro area. NYC Mayor Eric Adams has already promised to keep 1M+ students attending classes in person at the Big Apple’s public schools. Wall Street megabanks – including JPM and Goldman Sachs – are delaying their employees’ return to the office because of the Omicron scare.

Kastle Systems, whose electronic access systems secure thousands of office buildings across NYC, showed only 10.61% of workers were back at their desks in late December, compared with 37% on Dec. 2. 

A lopsided recovery appears to be playing out. Housing could be recovering, but the overall recovery will sputter without workers in office buildings. 

Authored by Jannis Falkenstern via The Epoch Times,

Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo issued new guidance for COVID-19 tests on Jan. 4 in a bid to reduce the strain on the state’s testing centers.

So many people are using the centers the availability of tests is under pressure.

“We are going to scale back,” Ladapo told reporters at a press conference.

“We’re coming back to something sensible.”

People have been flooding Florida testing sites, leading to long lines, he said.

Instead of restricting testing, however, Ladapo said he would place a new emphasis on “high-value” testing against those of “low-value” in order to give priority to tests that would “likely change outcomes” based on a positive or negative result.

For example, someone who is elderly with pre-existing medical conditions and is having symptoms he regards as high value.

Someone who is otherwise healthy with no pre-existing medical issues and with no symptoms is low value, he explained.

Ladapo said people need to get back to a “sense of normalcy” in society.

“We need to unwind this sort of planning and living one’s life around testing,” Ladapo said.

“It’s really time for people to be living; to make the decisions they want regarding vaccination; to enjoy the fact that many people have natural immunity; and to unwind this preoccupation with only COVID as determining the boundaries and constraints and possibilities of life.

“And we’re going to start that in Florida.”

Ladapo said Omicron is “on the rise” in Florida and cases are “vertically climbing,” but people are being “whipped into a frenzy” over it and there is no need because the variant is “much less violent” than other variants that have spawned from the COVID-19 virus.

“What you’re seeing in cases is actually just a fraction of what’s happening in the community,” he said. “For example, the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] estimates that only one in four cases of COVID are diagnosed, that may be an even bigger ratio with Omicron.”

He said that Florida has seen a rapid increase in cases and hospitalizations, but added it is not comparable to the case rise.

“A substantial share, based on the data we have from some of our hospitals of the patients in hospitals with COVID, are there in the hospital with COVID rather than for COVID.”

In other words, people who go to the hospital are there for other reasons and then test positive for COVID-19 because hospitals test everyone who comes for treatment, Ladapo said.

A health care worker use a nasal swab to test Marcelino Soto for COVID-19 at a pop up testing site at the Koinonia Worship Center and Village in Pembroke Park, Fla., on July 22, 2020. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The surgeon general said that federal leadership had “created a monster” in public health.

“What’s happened in the country is that people have forgotten, or abandoned basic public health principles,” he said.

“Instead, they have opted for things that are anti-public health.”

He said anti-public health is “taking away people’s options” and “ability to choose.”

“Anti-health tends to be mandates,” he continued. “Anti-public health is losing touch with sensibility.”

The Surgeon General’s office wants to educate and provide people with the ability to make “better decisions.”

“That’s what public health used to be,” Ladapo said.

“The federal approach has been to mandate and to create division and strife and really politicize this pandemic.”

Getting back to basic principles of public health is important, he said and part of that is prevention such as weight loss, exercise, and vitamin intake.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was present at the press conference and said COVID-19 tests have turned into “a testing industrial company” and are a “cash cow” for people.

“There’s people making huge amounts of money,” he said of the COVID-19 testing companies.

DeSantis urged everyone to live their lives like they did before the pandemic.

“I’m very surprised the emergency gear down systems didn’t work, or weren’t used,” a top regional military analyst and former air force officer told CNN after a $100 million US-designed stealth fighter was forced to do a “belly landing” after its landing gear failed to deploy.

It happened in South Korea on Tuesday, when a F-35A jet fighter suffered “avionic system issues” and the South Korean pilot didn’t eject, but instead came in on the plane’s belly, with emergency crews below having deployed a special foam on the runway to minimize damage to the aircraft.

It’s alarming given the ultra-costly F-35 stealth fighter is supposed to be cutting edge, having been transferred to over a dozen US allied countries.

According to more details by Air Force Magazine: 

The emergency landing occurred around 1 p.m. local time at a South Korean base in Seosan, some 70 kilometers from Osan Air Base. According to media reports, it is the first known instance of a belly landing by an F-35 since the U.S. began selling the fifth-generation fighter to partner nations.

South Korean officials have reportedly said they are suspending flights for all its air force’s 30-plus F-35 fighters while it investigates the emergency landing.

Amid an ongoing investigation into the incident, South Korean military officials have not confirmed the extent of damage, but described, “The jet did an emergency landing as the landing gear did not extend. This would mean the jet did the ‘belly landing,'”

A May 2020 crash landing happened with a US Air Force pilot in the advanced fighter at a base in Florida, while partner nations have also endured a growing number of mechanical and other failures in the aircraft: 

There have been other incidents involving allies and partners in the F-35 program—members of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force have had to make at least seven emergency landings in F-35s, news agency Nikkei reported. There was also a nighttime crash into the ocean in April 2019 that killed a Japanese pilot.

More recently, a British F-35B crashed just after takeoff from an aircraft carrier in November 2021, falling into the Mediterranean Sea. 

South Korea grounds F-35 fleet after malfunction forces ‘belly landing’ ✈️🇰🇷🇺🇸 Don’t buy American airplanes. #Lockheed #Boeing https://t.co/9d6zCFuBnP

— Spencer Wells (@spwells) January 5, 2022

In this latest incident, the South Korean pilot is being hailed for his skills given the extreme difficulty of a belly landing scenario in such a jet.

“A gear-up landing on the F-35 may be quite difficult and dangerous because of the angle of attack the aircraft has on approach to touchdown,” David Cenciotti, who runs the The Aviationist blog described. 

Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

On November 27, 2011, a federal judge named Jed Rakoff threw out a $285 million regulatory settlement between Citigroup and the Securities and Exchange Commission, blasting it as “neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate, nor in the public interest.” The S.E.C. and Citigroup were stunned. Expecting to see their malodorous deal wrapped up, the parties were instead directed “to be ready to try this case” the following summer.

Try a case? Was the judge kidding? A pattern had long ago been established in which mega-companies like Citigroup that were implicated in serious offenses would be let off with slaps on the wrist, by soft-touch regulators who expected judges to play ball. These officials in many cases were private sector hotshots doing temporary tours as regulators, denizens of the revolving door biding time before parachuting back into lucrative corporate defense jobs. A judge who refused to sign the settlements such folks engineered was derailing everyone’s gravy train.

Citigroup had replicated a scheme employed by numerous big banks of the era, helping construct a “born to lose” portfolio of rotten mortgage securities to be unloaded on customer-dupes, who were unaware the bank intended to bet against them. A similar case involving a Goldman, Sachs deal called “Abacus” had concluded the previous year with a hefty fine, but, infamously, no admission of wrongdoing.

In the Citigroup version, the bank earned $160 million in profits, customers lost $700 million, and the S.E.C. wanted to impose a $285 million fine. As noted by papers like the Washington Post at the time, the S.E.C.’s logic was to ask the bank to return the money ($160 million plus interest equaled $190 million) and pay a $95 million civil penalty on top.

Citigroup that quarter alone earned $3.8 billion in profits, which meant the S.E.C. proposed to charge the bank — which had been functionally bankrupt in 2008 and was booming again thanks to a massive public bailout, engineered in part by former Citi officials by the way — a fee of 2.5% of its quarterly profits. In a country where an ordinary schlub could get multiple years in prison for something like third-degree attempted theft of a car, seeking no individual penalties and asking shareholders to forego a tiny fraction of earnings as restitution for stealing $160 million was a joke.

The fine was “pocket change to any entity as large as Citigroup,” noted Rakoff, in a blistering 15-page opinion. Objecting to the practice of allowing corporate crooks to walk away without admission of wrongdoing, he noted that Citigroup had already begun asserting its right to deny the allegations, both in litigation and to the media. This, he said, left the public despairing “of ever knowing the truth in a matter of obvious public importance.”

Such a policy, he concluded, would reduce the court to “a mere handmaiden to a settlement privately negotiated on the basis of unknown facts.” And, well, screw that.

There was cheering in the legal community and even in the press (“Judge Jed Rakoff Courageously Rejects SEC-Citigroup Settlement” was the Post headline) for a few minutes. Then came the inevitable plot twist. Citigroup and the S.E.C., robber and cop, joined together to appeal the decision, forcing Rakoff to retain counsel. Before long, Rakoff was overturned. An appeals court judge ruled he had stepped out of bounds by demanding the “truth” behind allegations, saying “consent decrees are primarily about pragmatism.”

The original dirty deal was re-routed back to Rakoff, who was then forced by the appeals court to approve it. “That court has now fixed the menu, leaving this court with nothing but sour grapes,” Rakoff wrote in a succinct but seething opinion, adding one parting warning:

This court fears that, as a result of the Court of Appeal’s decision, the settlements reached by governmental regulatory bodies and enforced by the judiciary’s contempt powers will in practice be subject to no meaningful oversight whatsoever.

The symbolism of the Rakoff episode was striking. Citigroup had been created by something like the ultimate insider deal. The merger of Citicorp and the insurance conglomerate Travelers had been struck in the late nineties despite apparently conflicting with several laws, including the Glass-Steagall Act and the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956.

The merger to create the first American “supermarket bank” only happened because a temporary waiver was granted by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve. This held up in time for Bill Clinton to sign a bipartisan piece of legislation called the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, sanctifying the deal after the fact. Former Clinton Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin then skedaddled to a job at the new super-bank that Citi itself described as having “no line responsibilities,” but nonetheless would go on to earn Rubin $115 million, a transaction that grossed out even the Wall Street Journal.

Thus the way the S.E.C. and the Appellate Courts essentially joined hands with this particular firm to strike down Rakoff’s ruling was a graphic demonstration of the self-defense capability of what one former Senate aide I know calls “The Blob,” i.e. the matrix of interconnected (and, not infrequently, intermarried) lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and executives who run the country from the Washington-New York corridor. I don’t think it’s an accident that politicians in both parties, ranging from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump, began scoring political points by talking about the “rigged game” just after Rakoff’s Capra-esque gesture was overturned. What did Rakoff himself think?