PrairiePundit

Daily Mail: Trump administration says it will quit arms control treaty which banned U.S. nuclear missiles from Europe after accusing Putin of failing to comply with pact U.S. arms control officials say Russia has flouted the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty and as a result the U.S. could leave it by February 2, allowing it to develop new long-range missiles. The US says the cruise missile above has a range of 1500 miles and violates the 300-mile limit required by the treaty.  Russia says it does not exceed the 300-mile limit.  I suspect US intelligence has seen it tested and that is how the 1500 mile range was detected.

Fox News: California Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris lashed out at the White House after President Trump, under pressure from conservative activists, re-nominated two conservative California judges to the 9th Circuit federal appeals court over their opposition. “We are deeply disappointed that the White House has chosen to re-nominate Daniel Collins and Kenneth Lee to the 9th Circuit,” Feinstein and Harris said in a joint statement late Wednesday. “We made clear our opposition to these individuals and told the White House we wanted to work together to come to consensus on a new package of nominees.” ... The liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, with a sprawling purview encompassing nine Western states, has long been a thorn in the side of the Trump White House, with rulings against the travel ban and limits on funding to so-called "sanctuary cities." On Thursday, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, praise...

Hassan Mahmoudi: ... On Jan. 22, 2019, Ali Akbar Salehi, the nuclear chief of the Iranian theocracy, acknowledged that Iran had fooled the 5+1 and IAEA group of foreign ministers – these were U.S. and European foreign ministers who negotiated the Iran deal – into signing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. That was the deal President Obama signed with other leaders and touted to the U.S. public. President Trump scrapped it. In an unprecedented confession, Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the mullah regime's Atomic Agency, acknowledged that the mullahs had lied in nuclear negotiations with the five world powers at the Arak nuclear site and had in fact hidden some of the banned equipment. "As for the tubes we had, the tubes through which the fuel passes, we had bought similar tubes before, but I couldn't declare them at the time. Only one person in Iran knew this," he said on Jan. 22 in an interview with the 4th Channel of State Television, IRIB, about...

The Epoch Times: Congressional investigators have gathered enough evidence to suggest that the FBI, under the Obama administration, ignored a major lead in the Clinton-email probe, according to transcripts of closed-door testimonies of several current and former bureau officials. The office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General informed the FBI in 2015 that a forensic review of Hillary Clinton’s emails unearthed anomalies in the metadata of the messages. The evidence in the metadata suggested that a copy of every email Hillary Clinton sent during her tenure as the secretary of state was forwarded to a foreign third party. The existence of the lead was first revealed during the public testimony of Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz in June last year. Horowitz acknowledged the existence of the specific lead and said he spoke about it to Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) Charles McCullough. Yet, despite the alarming nature of the r...

Derek Hunter: ... But what Schultz’s potential candidacy really does more than anything else, and why the establishment really hates the idea of it, is it exposes just how crazy they’ve gone. Even an only semi-sane Democrat next to a lunatic radical leftist pulls back the curtain on how far left they’ve gone as a party. Schultz admits the country can’t afford the Democratic Party’s new proposals for “free” everything, no matter how much they tax the rich. I don’t blame Democrats for worrying, but they’re worrying for the wrong reasons. The possible entry of Schultz does threaten them, but not because he’d pull votes from them, it’s because their current positions could drive votes to him. A man having a screaming match with a lamppost looks even crazier when standing next to another man simply having a casual conversation with one. It’s not the fault of the former Starbucks CEO that the Democratic Party has abandoned sanity and blue collar America for the outrage mob. To paraphr...

Bloomberg: The Navy’s costliest warship, the $13 billion Gerald R. Ford, had 20 failures of its aircraft launch-and-landing systems during operations at sea, according to the Pentagon’s testing office. The previously undisclosed failures with the electromagnetic systems made by General Atomics occurred during more than 740 at-sea trials since the aircraft carrier’s delivery in May 2017 despite praise from Navy officials of its growing combat capabilities. The Navy must pay to fix such flaws under a “cost-plus” development contract. The new reliability issues add to doubts the carrier, designated as CVN-78, will meet its planned rate of combat sorties per 24 hours -- the prime metric for any aircraft carrier -- according to the annual report on major weapons from the Defense Department’s operational test office. ... The launch-and-landing issue is separate from the ship’s lack of 11 functioning elevators to lift munitions from below deck, an issue that’s drawn scrutiny from Sena...

Victor Davis Hanson: ... In the last two years, a mainstream consensus has grown that China poses a commercial and mercantile threat to world trade, to its neighbors and to the very security of the United States -- and requires a strong response, including temporary tariffs. The world did not fall apart after the U.S. pulled out of the flawed Iran nuclear deal. Most yawned when the U.S. left the symbolic but empty Paris Climate Accord. Ditto when the U.S. moved its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In retrospect, most Americans accept that such once controversial decisions were not ever all that controversial. There is also a growing, though little reported, consensus about what created the current economic renaissance: tax cuts, massive deregulation, recalibration of trade policy, tax incentives to bring back offshore capital, and dramatic rises in oil and natural gas production. Although partisan bickering continues over the extent of the upswing, most apprecia...

Andrew Syrios: Not even Trump’s most ardent supporters make the case that Trump doesn’t have a tendency to exaggerate and make false claims. (Or as he puts it,  “truthful hyperbole.” ) That being said, the American people have been bombarded with a new, unbridled form of arrogance that has been unleashed in a vain effort to destroy him. Of course, I am referring to the self-anointed “fact-checkers.” One article from the  Huffington Post  back during the election drew my attention to this new scourge. It claimed  “Donald Trump Made Up Stuff 71 Times In An hour.”  Here are a few examples, “1. Claim: “[Ted Cruz]’s home state is Texas. It may be Canada.” “Reality: Canada is not a state and Ted Cruz, while born there, calls Texas home.” Fact checking a joke. Good start. “5. Claim: “I’m a loyal person.” — Trump on his decision to stand by Lewandowski. “Reality: Trump is famous for the phrase, ‘You’re fired.’ His marital history also conflicts with t...

Daily Caller: The wife of a Justice Department official who worked for Fusion GPS during the 2016 campaign told Congress in 2018 that one of her tasks at the opposition research firm was to research President Donald Trump’s children, including their business activities and travel. Nellie Ohr, a former contractor for Fusion GPS, also told lawmakers during an Oct. 19 deposition that she recalls that Christopher Steele gave her husband, Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, materials from the infamous anti-Trump dossier funded by Democrats. Ohr said during the testimony that Steele, who like her was a contractor for Fusion GPS, hoped that her husband would pass the materials to the FBI. “My understanding was that Chris Steele was hoping that Bruce could put in a word with the FBI to follow up in some way,” Ohr testified to members of the House Oversight and House Judiciary Committees, according to transcripts confirmed by The Daily Caller News Foundation. ... This appears to be...

Washington Free Beacon: The government shutdown may be over, but House Democrats are still facing pressure by constituents to address border security. At town halls over the weekend, voters had their first opportunity to weigh in on the dispute that shuttered the federal government for more than a month. Although the impasse reached a short-term resolution on Friday it was still front and center in voters' minds. "I don't understand how anybody can think that you can have a compromise and have [a] discussion when Nancy Pelosi stands up there and says, ‘I'll give him $1 for whatever the wall is,'" George Rogero told Democratic congressman Sean Patrick Maloney during a town hall in New York. "So when you talk about compromise, unfortunately, a lot of times a compromise means we get what we want and you don’t get anything." In response, Maloney said he was open to "real" border security, including physical barriers where necessary, but...

LA Times: It seemed like everyone in Christian Castillo’s life was getting killed or running from death. Two neighbors on his block were gunned down, along with the taco vendor at the end of the street. Then came a childhood friend of Castillo’s mother who had started selling drugs and was shot dead with her husband. Soon their son was executed, too. Castillo, who until a few years ago held a good job at a Tijuana insurance company, didn’t attend any of the funerals. He was too busy getting high and trying not to be killed next. “It felt like death was following me,” he said. Tijuana, a city of 1.8 million that not long ago was celebrating a major reduction in violence, is in the grip of an unprecedented homicide crisis. A record 2,518 people were killed here in 2018 — nearly seven times the total in 2012. With 140 killings per 100,000 people, Tijuana is now one of the deadliest cities in the world. Across the border in San Diego, there were 34 homicides last year, or jus...

Bloomberg: Toby Darden stomped on the ATV’s gas pedal, carving through blustery winds to reach the far northern corner of his 37,000-acre West Texas ranch. He wanted to show off the crown jewel. This wasn’t the spectacular views of the Davis Mountains or the herds of aoudad rams with their distinctive curved horns. It was a big hole in the ground, the first cut at a well -- not to bring oil up but water, the precious commodity of the Permian Basin drilling play. The ranch’s water rights were front-and-center in marketing the property, which just went into contract for a hefty $32.5 million. Broken down per acre, the price is higher than any similar sale in the area for at least a decade. Not many who are familiar with these parts were surprised. “Water is the new oil,” said Laura Capper, a Houston-based oilfield consultant. “The value of water has changed.” The reason is fracking, a technique that helped kicked off the shale revolution a decade ago. It is the last major step ...

NBC News: Extreme cold gripping Midwest does not debunk global warming, experts say “A cold snap in the teeth of global warming is no more unusual than a cool day in summer. Both happen,” one climate scientist said. The extreme cold is certainly counterintuitive to the argument that the earth is becoming inexorably warmer. But the real point of this post is that the perceived answer to global warming is alternative energy and neither wind or solar energy can be produced in these conditions leaving the humans at the mercy of a killer cold front. This storm is already a killer according to the Washington Post: Extreme cold kills as many as 6 people as polar vortex spreads into Midwest It was colder than Alaska’s North Slope in many places, with one city in Minnesota reporting wind chills of minus-65 degrees. The death toll would be significantly greater if the effected area were limited to alternative energy.

New York recently approved of an abortion law that would allow infanticide if the baby survived the abortion.  Virginia is considering a similar law.  Not even liberal Europe allows such human sacrifice. This story about the ancient Carthaginians who were eventually defeated by the Romans exposes their rituals. Just as ancient Greek and Roman propagandists insisted, the Carthaginians did kill their own infant children, burying them with sacrificed animals and ritual inscriptions in special cemeteries to give thanks for favours from the gods, according to a new study. "This is something dismissed as black propaganda because in modern times people just didn't want to believe it," said Josephine Quinn, a lecturer in ancient history at Oxford, who is behind the study, with international colleagues, of one of the most bitterly debated questions in classical archaeology. "But when you pull together all the evidence – archaeological, epigraphic and litera...

CNBC: Private companies add 213,000 jobs in January, easily topping expectations: ADP/Moody's Analytics Companies added 213,000 jobs this month, the ADP and Moody's Analytics data show. Economists polled by Refinitiv expected payrolls to grow by 178,000. The strong jobs growth comes even after the longest U.S. government shutdown in history. "The job market weathered the government shutdown well. Despite the severe disruptions, businesses continued to add aggressively to their payrolls," says Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics. This has to come as a disappointment to Democrat politicans who thought the economy would suffer because of the shutdown over their refusal to fund a border barrier.  It is bad news for Democrats who think the secret to job creation is growing the government instead of the economy.

NY Times: Opposition Leader, and Oil, Become Focus of Venezuela-U.S. Struggle After Washington handed control of Venezuela’s assets in the United States to the opposition leader, the government of Nicolás Maduro struck back fiercely. With socialism only the guys at the top are fat.  The rest of the country is starving or migrating.  With socialism, the top government officials accumulate all the country's wealth and make sure they are at least well fed.  Those people in the streets complaining about Maduro are going hungry.  One of my enduring memories of Maduro is of him scarfing down an empanada before giving a national speech to his starving countrymen.

Patricia McCarthy: For nearly ten years now, Americans who have been paying attention have known that our government has become corrupt, that its premier institutions were weaponized by the Obama administration to the point that we have become something of a police state or banana republic. This is not to say there was no corruption previous to Obama. As Sidney Powell addresses in her book License to Lie , the current special counsel, Robert Mueller , and his amoral, ruthless right-hand man, Andrew Weismann, had already been practicing their prosecutions of personal destruction for decades. In the 1980s, Mueller sent four men to prison who he knew were innocent. He did it to protect a confidential informant. Two of them died in prison. The lawsuits filed cost taxpayers $100M. That trial was connected to the murderous mafia hit man Whitey Bulger , who was finally caught after sixteen years. He died in prison in 2018. Was he murdered to protect Mueller ? There was the total de...

AP: The U.S. will be sending “several thousand” more American troops to the southern border to provide additional support to Homeland Security, Acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan said Tuesday, providing for the first time new estimates for the next phase of the military aid. He said the troops will mainly be used to install additional wire barriers and provide a large new system of mobile surveillance and monitoring of the border area. Plans call for about 150 more miles of concertina wire placed mainly in the gaps between ports of entry. ... Officials said that the majority of the troops going to the border now will be combat engineers and support forces who will install the additional barriers. The expectation is that they will complete the job in a few months and then be able to go home. Many of the others will start the expanded surveillance mission which will last at least through September. The U.S. forces will use Customs and Border Protection vehicles that have mount...

Washington Free Beacon: An industry study found that the Obama administration's crackdown on franchising has cut hundreds of thousands of job openings and dealt a $33.3 billion blow to the economy each year dating back to 2015. A report put out by the International Franchise Association and a Chamber of Commerce found that the Obama administration provoked an "existential threat" to the franchise model in which small business owners operate under the umbrella of a national corporate brand. The Obama administration departed from decades of precedent when the National Labor Relations Board held that parent companies could be held liable for labor violations committed by franchisees. The report estimated that the new joint employer standard set curtailed expansion in the industry, leading to between 142,000 and 376,000 lost job opportunities—a 2.55 to 5 percent reduction in the workforce. "All of this economic cost was predictable and avoidable," IFA spokesma...

Washington Examiner: Democratic presidential contender Sen. Kamala Harris wants to " move on " from the current healthcare system in favor of a plan that would roll everyone in the U.S. onto a government plan known as "Medicare for all," doing away with private health insurance. As the California Democrat and others in her party make their case, however, they will face considerable opposition not only in the insurance industry, but across the healthcare sector, which would see massive upheaval from the plan. And polling suggests that the public, roughly half of which relies on private insurance, isn't quite on board. Drug companies, insurers, doctors, and hospitals have united in recent months to fight national government healthcare. One healthcare industry group, called the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, has launched a five-figure digital ad campaign arguing that "Medicare for all" would cause massive disruption, higher taxes, lower...

Red States: DEMS Call For Starbucks Boycott If Howard Schultz Runs; ‘Don’t Help Elect Trump, You Egotistical, Billionaire A**Hole’ I have never been a fan of Starbucks coffee.  It is bitter in taste and overpriced.  So my boycott has nothing to do with whether Schultz runs for President or not.  I think his chances of winning are pretty remote.  Democrats seem to think he could get a significant number of votes from whomever they nominate.  That is on them and not Schultz.  If they run a far left wacko who favors confiscatory taxes, job-killing regulation and baby killing abortion policies they will have created their own problems.

James Robbins: The main takeaway from informal presidential adviser Roger Stone’s arraignment Tuesday is that the Russian collusion narrative has collapsed. If there were anything there, we’d know about it by now. Stone was hauled in to federal court Friday morning after a theatrical, televised arrest that should be the subject of a Justice Department investigation or congressional inquiry. Why the excessive threat of force ? Though CNN denies it , many still wonder whether the network was tipped off. The extreme intimidation tactic might have been intended to send a message, but it only tended to confirm the biases of those who see special counsel Robert Mueller's entire effort as a rogue operation. The “process crimes” Stone is charged with, such as lying and witness tampering , are potentially serious. But he was not charged with facilitating Trump campaign collusion with Russian hackers, and the indictment itself gives little reason to believe there ever were any. It...

Washington Examiner: From the outside, Texas appears troubling for President Trump in 2020 because of demographic changes that have featured a steady climb in the population of Hispanic voters. But actually, the leftward drift, first evident in 2016 when Trump won Texas by less than 10 percentage points, is a byproduct of sharp opposition to the president in Texas’ burgeoning upscale suburbs that are dominated by whites, according to Texas Republican strategists. In 2016, Trump lost suburban Houston’s 7th Congressional District and suburban Dallas’ 32nd Congressional District — both traditionally held by Republicans up and down the ballot — to Democrat Hillary Clinton. In 2018 the Republican incumbents who for several years had easily defended these House seats fell to Democratic challengers in the midterm elections. The president’s particularly low job approval ratings among women fueled the Democratic Party's victories there, and Republicans worry that this situation coul...

Fuel Fix: Exxon Mobil began construction today on an expansion to its refinery in Beaumont, Texas, after reaching a final investment decision. The expansion, expected to start-up up in 2022, will increase the refinery's capacity by 250,000 barrels per day — equivalent to a 65 percent increase in current capacity. When complete, the refinery will be among the nation's largest. From HoustonChronicle.com:  Oil majors prepare refineries for West Texas crude Exxon Mobil previously announced that it was in the midst of planning for the additional unit, which will allow it to process light crude. Most refineries in the Gulf can only process heavy crude, which typically comes from Venezuela and Canada. As more oil flows in from the booming Permian Basin of West Texas, that isn't helpful, as the oil there is light. "The Beaumont refinery is strategically positioned to benefit from Permian production growth," said Bryan Milton, president of Exxon Mobil Fuels and L...

The Federalist Papers: The following is a press release from the CPB, or United States Border Patrol on the latest apprehension data at our southern border: Today, United States Customs and Border Protection released new information regarding the number of family units apprehended along the southwest border and the demographics of large groups apprehended in recent months by the United States Border Patrol (USBP). As of today, USBP has seen a surge in Family Unit Aliens compared to the same time from last fiscal year by 280%. Fiscal Year 2018 was a record year and this year will surpass that if the current trend continues without any legislative fixes. Overall apprehensions between the POE’s are up 81%. APPREHENSIONS Over the past few months (FY19 to date), USBP has seen a dramatic increase in the number of large groups of 100 illegal aliens or more being apprehended along the southern border. In the El Paso, Rio Grande Valley, Tucson, and Yuma Sectors over the last four...

Oil Price: The U.S. holds more oil reserves than anyone else in the world, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela. That conclusion comes from a new independent estimate from Rystad Energy, a Norwegian consultancy. Rystad estimates that the U.S. holds 264 billion barrels of oil, more than half of which is located in shale. That total exceeds the 256 billion barrels found in Russia, and the 212 billion barrels located in Saudi Arabia. The findings are surprising, and go against conventional wisdom that Saudi Arabia and Venezuela hold the world’s largest oil reserves. The U.S. Energy Information Administration, for example, pegs Venezuela’s oil reserves at 298 billion barrels , the largest in the world. Rystad Energy says that these are inflated estimates because much of those reserves are not discovered. Instead, Rystad estimates that Venezuela only has about 95 billion barrels, which includes its estimate for undiscovered oil fields. Moreover, Rystad argues that there are not ...

Charles C.W. Cooke: Our national press is a national joke. Vain, languid, excitable, morbid, duplicitous, cheap, insular, mawkish, and possessed of a chronic self-obsession that would have made Dorian Gray blush, it rambles around the United States in neon pants, demanding congratulation for its travails. Not since Florence Foster Jenkins have Americans been treated to such an excruciating example of self-delusion. The most vocal among the press corps’ ranks cast themselves openly as “firefighters” when, at worst, they are pyromaniacs and, at best, they are obsequious asbestos salesmen. “You never get it right, do you?” Sybil Fawlty told Basil in Fawlty Towers. “You’re either crawling all over them licking their boots or spitting poison at them like some Benzedrine puff adder.” There is a great deal of space between apologist and bête noire. In the newsrooms of America, that space is empty. It’s getting worse. Despite presenting an opportunity for sobriety and excellence, the elect...

Power Line: Obama administration CIA Director John Brennan lied notoriously and repeatedly to Congress, yet he remains at large. He is not under indictment. The FBI has not sent a heavily armed battalion to raid his home and take him into custody in front of his friends at CNN. Is there any dispute about Brennan’s lies? I don’t think so. Looking around for a summary of Brennan’s lies, I find Victor Davis Hanson’s useful compilation in the June 2018 NR post  “A reply to Ronald Radosh’s smear.”  The compilation purports only to be illustrative, not exhaustive. Brennan could certainly have been included in Rep. Devin Nunes’s list of those who should be charged with lying to Congress along with Roger Stone if lying to Congress is now to be treated as a serious offense (see  “They need to start with themselves” ). Brennan seems to have reacted with the consciousness of guilt in his wild response to President Trump’s query “what about the lying done by Comey, Brennan, Cl...

The Border Patrol agents say it is the worse crisis they have seen and she shows how migrants can come in and go straight to a US highway.

John Crudele: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who represents Massachusetts and is 69 years old, probably followed rock and roll culture in the 1960s when the “British invasion” changed our music scene. It’s also when a lot of British rock groups including some of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones decided that England’s taxes took too much of their earnings — so they left the country. They were, according to the phrase of that day and today, “tax exiles.” Both Warren, who is running for president, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young freshman congresswoman who represents Queens and the Bronx, have proposed that Americans who happen to be very rich pay upward of 70 percent tax on their incomes. ... It should also make people worry that raising taxes to the moon will kill the incentive of creative business people to set up shop in the US. What if the late Steve Jobs, who founded Apple in the mid-1970s or Microsoft’s Bill Gates had felt that US taxes were too high and decided to set up ...

Sidney Powell: The Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Hillary Clinton have a HUGE Weiner problem that is even bigger than we first realized. According to the recently released inspector general report , on September 28 and 29, 2016 the New York office of the FBI immediately reported to the Washington headquarters its discovery of, first, 141,000 and then 350,000 emails on the laptop of Anthony Weiner — also known as “Carlos Danger,” a now-convicted sex offender. Mr. Weiner is the husband of Hillary Clinton’s inseparable aide Huma Abedin. Now we know by October 4, the New York office had found 700,000 emails. The New York agents had seen and reported to FBI leadership they had seen email headers, all domain names , Mrs. Clinton’s initials on one sensitive but not classified document, and the missing BlackBerry backups. The New York agents described it as the “entire file” of all Hillary Clinton emails from 2006 until 2016, including the BlackBerry messages...

USA Today: U.S. authorities unsealed a wave of criminal charges Monday against a Chinese telecom giant, its affiliates and one of its top executives who has been detained in Canada, alleging that the company defrauded banks, stole trade secretsand tried to obstruct justice. The move is almost certain to stoke tensions between Washington and Beijing. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, New York, and Seattle brought the charges against Huawei and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, who has been in Canadian custody since last month. Huawei’s affiliates Skycom and Huawei Device USA also were included in indictments unsealed Monday. Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, flanked by two cabinet secretaries and FBI Director Christopher Wray, said the misconduct goes "to the top of the company." “The behavior in both those cases alleged more than just rogue employees,” Whitaker said. “These are very serious actions by a company that appears to be using corporate espio...

Fox News: New details contained in congressional transcripts and emails about a July 2016 meeting involving the author of the anti-Trump “dossier,” Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, and his wife, Nellie, appear to conflict with claims from Democrats -- and the co-founder of the firm behind the dossier -- that significant contacts did not occur until after the election. According to the records, the little-known breakfast meeting was held on July 30, 2016 at Washington, D.C.’s Mayflower Hotel. Congressional transcripts, confirmed by Fox News, showed Nellie Ohr told House investigators last year that Christopher Steele, the British ex-spy who compiled the dossier, wanted to get word to the FBI at the time. “My understanding was that Chris Steele was hoping that Bruce (Ohr) could put in a word with the FBI to follow-up in some way,” Nellie Ohr testified in response to a Republican line of questioning, regarding the purpose of the meeting. Bruce Ohr did just that, almost immed...

Jerusalem Post: A small team of Israeli scientists think they might have found the first complete cure for cancer. “We believe we will offer in a year’s time a complete cure for cancer,” said Dan Aridor, of a new treatment being developed by his company, Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd. (AEBi), which was founded in 2000 in the ITEK incubator in the Weizmann Science Park. AEBi developed the SoAP platform, which provides functional leads to very difficult targets. ... Aridor, chairman of the board of AEBi and CEO Dr. Ilan Morad, say their treatment, which they call MuTaTo (multi-target toxin) is essentially on the scale of a cancer antibiotic – a disruption technology of the highest order. The potentially game-changing anti-cancer drug is based on SoAP technology, which belongs to the phage display group of technologies. It involves the introduction of DNA coding for a protein, such as an antibody, into a bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria. That protein is th...

Washington Post: Trump administration announces sanctions targeting Venezuela’s oil industry U.S.-based Citgo and oil refiner Valero will be able to continue importing crude as long as payments do not go to the government of Nicolás Maduro. That would be bad news for Russia and China which have liens on Venezuelan assets as a result of loans to the socialist government.  That is also why Russia continues to back the failed regime.

NY Times: Polar Vortex to Seize Midwest With Coldest Weather in a Generation A polar vortex is forecast to bring dangerously cold weather to much of the Midwest. Records are expected to topple, with wind chills to dip as low as minus 60. They might try to slip in "climate change" to describe cold weather that that is a tough sell.  When climate 'scientist' can't explain why their models always predict more warming that is subsequently recorded it is usually because they don't want to admit they are overestimating the impact of increased CO2 emissions.   All those predictions of no more snow go out the window too.

Andrew McCarthy: Special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Roger Stone elucidates what has been apparent to the public for a year, and therefore must have been known to prosecutors and the FBI for much longer: There was no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian government. That is, the Kremlin’s cyber-espionage efforts to undermine the 2016 election by hacking Democratic email accounts were not coordinated with the Trump campaign. In the Stone indictment, Mueller offers up 20 pages of heavy-breathing narrative about the Russian theft of tens of thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, the transmission of the purloined materials to WikiLeaks (portrayed as a witting arm of the Putin regime), and their subsequent media publication in the final weeks of the campaign. But the big wind produces no rain. At the end, we get a couple of pages of process crimes. Stone is charged with such comparati...

Brandon Darby and Ildefonso Ortiz: EXCLUSIVE — Terrorist Who Targeted Americans Takes Over Mexican Cartel on Texas Border A verified and convicted terrorist who attacked a U.S. Consulate with a grenade and automatic rifle fire has taken over the ruthless Los Zetas cartel, a group headquartered at the Texas border in the Nuevo Laredo-Laredo metropolitan border area. Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, sits immediately across the border from Laredo, Texas, and is the only urban location along the entire U.S.-Mexico Border that does not have any fencing or constructed security barrier of any kind. The convicted terrorist, Hector Raul Luna Luna, is known as “El Tory” and was convicted in the 2008 terror attack on the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey, Mexico. He was released from prison due to bribes paid by Cartel Jalisco New Generation (CJNG) and has now taken over the dominant faction of Los Zetas, Cartel Del Noreste (CDN), to open up the lucrative and unsecured border corridor into Texas. ... Po...