Trump Team Removes Members of Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, Business Board

Members of the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Defense Business Board and Defense Policy Board were replaced, according to the Pentagon chief. Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller, in a statement, confirmed there was a change to the Defense Policy Board. Miller did not provide the names of the members who were removed—or how many. “I am grateful to the departing board members, many of whom have served for decades. As we adapt the Department for great power competition, I look forward to naming new board members in the coming days,” Miller, who was named to his position about a month ago, said in the statement confirming the changes. On Friday, Miller told news outlets that members of the Defense Business Board were replaced. “I’m proud to welcome each of these new members to the Defense Business Board and I look forward to their contributions to help guide the Department’s business efforts in the coming years,” he said, without elaborating on who was replaced. “These individuals have a proven record of achievement within their respective fields and have demonstrated leadership that will serve our Department, and our nation well.” A Pentagon news release said the removed members “had been serving in expired positions.”

The Defense Business Board provides Pentagon leaders with advice on business management, while the Defense Policy Board is a federal advisory committee. The Defense Policy Board’s website only shows David McCormick, James Talent, and Paulina Dobriansky. According to a report from Fox News last week, longtime Defense Policy Board members such as former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, and about 10 others were removed. “As part of long-considered changes, we can confirm that several members of the Department’s Defense Policy Board have been removed,” a U.S. Defense official told the news outlet in late November. The Epoch Times has not been able to verify the claim and has reached out for comment. The head of the Pentagon’s Defeat ISIS Task Force, Christopher Maier, also resigned. “Today, Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller accepted the resignation of Christopher Maier, the Director of the DoD Defeat-ISIS Task Force,” a Pentagon spokesman said in a statement to CNN on Nov. 30. It added that “these changes recognize the success of the military fight to destroy the so-called physical caliphate of ISIS and reflect DoD’s commitment to institutionalize efforts to counter ISIS and integrate efforts with allies and partners within our counterterrorism and regional policy offices.” And a few days after the Nov. 3 election, former Pentagon chief Mark Esper was fired by President Donald Trump, who replaced him with Miller.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-team-removes-members-of-pentagons-defense-policy-board-business-board_3606804.html

https://policy.defense.gov/OUSDP-Offices/Defense-Policy-Board/

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Pathetic slide has been being pushed now for over a week in every shift. Did you run out of material?

Coalition Groups Urges US to Designate Chinese Communist Party as Transnational Criminal Organization

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently met with representatives of groups victimized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who urged the Trump administration to designate the CCP a “transnational criminal organization.” Washington-based advocacy group Committee on Present Danger: China organized the gathering, under the banner of the “Captive Nations Coalition,” which included representatives from the Tibetan, Uyghur, Inner Mongolian, Hong Kong, and Falun Gong communities. Also invited were people who have negatively affected by Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative, a massive foreign investment project that aims to advance the regime’s political and economic interests around the world. Committee Vice Chairman Frank Gaffney said the victim groups hoped to convey to the State Department their experiences of suppression by the regime, in the hopes of advancing the message that “all of us are under threat from the global, totalitarian ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party.” The meeting marked the first time that State Department officials met with these groups together, according to participants. The representatives met with Pompeo; Robert Destro, the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor; and Miles Yu, Pompeo’s policy adviser, on Dec. 3. The State Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Gaffney said the representatives urged the administration to designate the CCP a “transnational criminal organization” under U.S. law. Such a designation would help “delegitimize the most odious and most dangerous entity in the world today,” Gaffney told NTD, an affiliate of The Epoch Times. He added that it would also send a strong message to those in China who are “trying to empower, enrich, enable, and embolden this most dangerous entity to become even worse by transferring the wealth of Americans, particularly from our capital markets,” because this designation would mean that they would become accessories to criminal activity. Joyce Ho, president of Project Black Mask, a U.S.-based advocacy group for Hong Kong, said she told Pompeo at the meeting that the United States must continue fighting for the people of Hong Kong. In the past six months, the CCP has drastically escalated its crackdown on freedoms in the city after imposing a draconian national security law. The United States has responded with sanctions on the city’s leader and other officials, along with other measures. “If we don’t have the support of the United States government, it seems that Hong Kong will go down the path of becoming the next Uyghur population or the next Tibet,” Ho told NTD, referring to Uyghur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists who are suppressed in the Xinjiang and Tibet regions. Sean Lin, a representative of the Falun Dafa Association of Washington, said he thanked Pompeo for his strong statements condemning the persecution of its adherents, a campaign that Beijing began in 1999.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline that includes meditative exercises and a set of moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Adherents have been subjected to harassment, detention, and torture in an effort to coerce them into giving up their beliefs. Millions have been detained, according to estimates by the Falun Dafa Information Center. On July 20, the 21st anniversary of the start of the CCP’s elimination campaign against Falun Gong, Pompeo called on the regime to end its persecution—the first time a U.S. secretary of state has issued such a statement. During the recent meeting, Lin also emphasized to Pompeo the crime of forced organ harvesting committed by the CCP on imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners. In 2019, an independent people’s tribunal concluded, after a yearlong investigation, that state-sanctioned organ harvesting had occurred for years in China “on a substantial scale,” and continues. The main sources for the organs are Falun Gong adherents, it said. Pompeo said he was well aware of forced organ harvesting and that the department was looking into the issue, according to Lin. “I think in the future, we will hear more about the crime of organ harvesting being exposed,” Lin said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/coalition-groups-urges-us-to-designate-the-chinese-communist-party-a-transnational-criminal-organization_3606220.html

Florida requiring labs to report critical ‘cycle threshold’ of COVID-19 tests

Mandatory reporting rules include number of amplification cycles of test

The Florida Department of Health is requiring that all labs in the state report the critical “cycle threshold” level of every COVID-19 test they perform. In a press release this week, the department said that, regarding COVID-19 tests, “cycle threshold (CT) values and their reference ranges, as applicable, must be reported by laboratories to FDOH via electronic laboratory reporting or by fax immediately.” “Cycle thresholds” are the level at which widely used polymerase chain reaction test can detect a sample of the COVID-19 virus. The higher the number of cycles, the lower the amount of viral load in the sample; the lower the cycles, the more prevalent the virus was in the original sample. Numerous epidemiological experts have argued that cycle thresholds are an important metric by which patients and the public can make an informed decision about how infectious and/or sick an individual with a positive COVID-19 test might be. However, health departments across the country are failing to collect that data.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/florida-requiring-labs-report-critical-cycle-threshold-covid-19-tests

https://www.flhealthsource.gov/files/Laboratory-Reporting-CT-Values-12032020.pdf

State health departments across country failing to collect critical COVID-19 pandemic data

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/state-health-departments-across-country-are-failing-collect-critical