Watchdog Calls for Transparency from University of Pennsylvania’s Biden Center

Calls come as center's director, Biden's secretary of state nominee, undergoes Senate confirmation process

A good-government watchdog is calling on secretary of state nominee Antony Blinken to disclose any foreign-funding sources for the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Biden Center, where Blinken served as director, as part of his Senate confirmation vetting process.

The National Legal and Policy Center (NPLC) is arguing that any foreign money that made its way into the Penn Biden Center could pose a conflict of interest for Blinken, who served as the center's director from 2017 to 2019 and received a more than $79,000 salary, according to his financial-disclosure records. The watchdog group said the university also saw a significant spike in contributions from China after the Penn Biden Center opened in 2017, raising questions about whether the funding had any connection to the policy center.

While President-elect Joe Biden has vowed to tighten ethics standards for his incoming administration, the Penn Biden Center's lack of financial candor raises questions about the Biden cabinet's commitment to transparency as Blinken testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday afternoon.

"The Penn Biden Center is the poster child for revolving-door conflicts of interest," said Tom Anderson, director of the NPLC's Government Integrity Project. "It's time they disclose their donors and allow the American people the opportunity to evaluate whether any lines have been crossed."

The Penn Biden Center was founded by Joe Biden at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. Biden's other policy-research institute at the University of Delaware has faced similar criticism over a lack of transparency and has no plans to disclose its donors after the president-elect takes office. Both organizations have served as cabinets-in-waiting, employing former Biden advisers who are now expected to join his administration.

Stephen MacCarthy, a spokesman for the University of Pennsylvania, told the Washington Free Beacon that the Penn Biden Center "is funded entirely with University funds" and doesn't engage in fundraising.

"The University has never solicited any gifts for the Center. Since its inception in 2017 there have been three unsolicited gifts (from two donors) which combined total $1,100. Both donors are Americans," said MacCarthy.

MacCarthy declined to discuss additional details of the center's funding, or the sudden spike in donations from China, on the record.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/watchdog-calls-for-transparency-from-university-of-pennsylvanias-biden-center/

Winner of Food Network’s ‘Worst Cooks In America’ Charged In Death of 3-Year-Old Girl

SIMPSONVILLE, South Carolina — Simpsonville Police today arrested a Greenville County couple for the January 14 death of a 3-year-old girl.

Last Thursday, cops were called to a home on Sellwood Circle due to a report of an unresponsive child. The girl was taken to a hospital where she was pronounced dead. The coroner determined the cause of death to be “multiple blunt force injuries.”

Following the announcement from the coroner, Jerry Austin Robinson, 34, and Ariel Robinson, 29, were both charged with homicide by child abuse.

Ariel Robinson won season 20 of Food Network’s “Worst Cooks in America.” She told Fox Carolina at the time she had five children.

Both were booked at the Greenville County Detention Center. The homicide by child abuse charge carries a sentence of 20 years up to life in prison.

The case will be prosecuted by the 13th Circuit Solicitor’s Office.

https://breaking911.com/winner-of-food-networks-worst-cooks-in-america-charged-in-death-of-3-year-old-girl/

Biden V Hitler

Thousands of Israelis Tested Positive for Coronavirus After First Vaccine Shot

Over 12,400 Israeli residents have tested positive for COVID-19 after being vaccinated, among them 69 people who had already gotten the second dose, which began to be administered early last week, the Health Ministry reported.

This amounts to 6.6 percent of the 189,000 vaccinated people who took coronavirus tests after being vaccinated.

According to the ministry’s data, 5,348 people were found infected up to a week after getting the vaccine, of the 100,000 people who were vaccinated and then tested a week later – an infection rate of 5.4 percent of those vaccinated during that time.

Another 5,585 people tested positive for the virus between the eighth and 14th day after getting the first vaccine – 8.3 percent of the 67,000 people who were vaccinated and tested during that post-vaccination period.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/thousands-of-israelis-tested-positive-for-coronavirus-after-first-vaccine-shot-1.9462478

Tricare fraud ‘mastermind’ sentenced to 18 years in prison

A Mississippi man described as the “mastermind of the largest health care fraud scheme” in that state’s history has been sentenced to 18 years in prison and ordered to pay nearly $350 million in connection to his role in a scheme to defraud Tricare, Justice officials said.

Wade Ashley Walters, 54, of Hattiesburg, Miss., who earlier pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, was sentenced Jan. 15 in federal court in Mississippi, according to an announcement from the Justice Department. He is co-owner of numerous pharmaceutical distributors and compounding pharmacies — companies that make individualized medications for people.

He was ordered to pay nearly $288 million in restitution, and to pay an additional $57 million to forfeit his personal profit from the scheme, officials stated.

The sentencing “is another mile marker on the long road to justice for victims, our veterans, our military, and all American taxpayers, as the mastermind of the largest health care fraud scheme in Mississippi history has been held to answer for his crimes,” said Mike Hurst, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, in the Justice Department announcement.

Since 2007, federal officials have been engaged in a coordinated, large-scale investigation of health care fraud. Some involve schemes to submit claims to Medicare, Medicaid and Tricare for treatments that weren’t medically necessary, and sometimes never provided. Some schemes resulted in convincing Tricare beneficiaries to fill prescriptions for pain creams, ointments and other topical medicines they didn’t necessarily need, resulting from illegal kickback schemes.

Between 2012 and 2016, Walters ran a scheme to defraud Tricare and other health care benefits programs by distributing compounded medications that weren’t medically necessary, officials stated.

According to Justice officials, Walters and his co-conspirators:

*adjusted prescription formulas to ensure the highest reimbursement without regard to effectiveness; and solicited recruiters to get prescriptions for high-margin compounded medications,

https://www.militarytimes.com/pay-benefits/2021/01/19/tricare-fraud-mastermind-sentenced-to-18-years-in-prison/

Trump Issues Executive Order on Cybersecurity

President Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order aimed at stopping the foreign use of cloud computing services for cyber attacks against America.

“What we have seen in this space is that…an individual will rent thousands of pieces of this infrastructure inside the United States and resell them to actors who then abuse them,” a senior administration official told Reuters. “This provides the Secretary of Commerce the ability to say…’There is no reason for you to continue to have access to the nation’s products,'” the person added, noting the restrictions could apply to jurisdictions as well as people and companies.

Executive Order on Taking Additional Steps to Address the National Emergency with Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities / WHITE HOUSE

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.) (NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code:

I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, find that additional steps must be taken to deal with the national emergency related to significant malicious cyber-enabled activities declared in Executive Order 13694 of April 1, 2015 (Blocking the Property of Certain Persons Engaging in Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities), as amended, to address the use of United States Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) products by foreign malicious cyber actors. IaaS products provide persons the ability to run software and store data on servers offered for rent or lease without responsibility for the maintenance and operating costs of those servers. Foreign malicious cyber actors aim to harm the United States economy through the theft of intellectual property and sensitive data and to threaten national security by targeting United States critical infrastructure for malicious cyber-enabled activities. Foreign actors use United States IaaS products for a variety of tasks in carrying out malicious cyber-enabled activities, which makes it extremely difficult for United States officials to track and obtain information through legal process before these foreign actors transition to replacement infrastructure and destroy evidence of their prior activities; foreign resellers of United States IaaS products make it easier for foreign actors to access these products and evade detection. This order provides authority to impose record-keeping obligations with respect to foreign transactions. To address these threats, to deter foreign malicious cyber actors’ use of United States IaaS products, and to assist in the investigation of transactions involving foreign malicious cyber actors, the United States must ensure that providers offering United States IaaS products verify the identity of persons obtaining an IaaS account (“Account”) for the provision of these products and maintain records of those transactions. In appropriate circumstances, to further protect against malicious cyber-enabled activities, the United States must also limit certain foreign actors’ access to United States IaaS products. Further, the United States must encourage more robust cooperation among United States IaaS providers, including by increasing voluntary information sharing, to bolster efforts to thwart the actions of foreign malicious cyber actors.

https://breaking911.com/trump-issues-executive-order-on-cybersecurity/

1/2

>>12617167

Sec. 4. Ensuring Sufficient Resources for Implementation. The Secretary, in consultation with the heads of such agencies as the Secretary deems appropriate, shall identify funding requirements to support the efforts described in this order and incorporate such requirements into its annual budget submissions to the Office of Management and Budget.

Sec. 5. Definitions. For the purposes of this order, the following definitions apply:

(a) The term “entity” means a partnership, association, trust, joint venture, corporation, group, subgroup, or other organization;

(b) The term “foreign jurisdiction” means any country, subnational territory, or region, other than those subject to the civil or military jurisdiction of the United States, in which any person or group of persons exercises sovereign de facto or de jure authority, including any such country, subnational territory, or region in which a person or group of persons is assuming to exercise governmental authority whether such a person or group of persons has or has not been recognized by the United States;

(c) The term “foreign person” means a person that is not a United States person;

(d) The term “Infrastructure as a Service Account” or “Account” means a formal business relationship established to provide IaaS products to a person in which details of such transactions are recorded.

(e) The term “Infrastructure as a Service Product” means any product or service offered to a consumer, including complimentary or “trial” offerings, that provides processing, storage, networks, or other fundamental computing resources, and with which the consumer is able to deploy and run software that is not predefined, including operating systems and applications. The consumer typically does not manage or control most of the underlying hardware but has control over the operating systems, storage, and any deployed applications. The term is inclusive of “managed” products or services, in which the provider is responsible for some aspects of system configuration or maintenance, and “unmanaged” products or services, in which the provider is only responsible for ensuring that the product is available to the consumer. The term is also inclusive of “virtualized” products and services, in which the computing resources of a physical machine are split between virtualized computers accessible over the Internet (e.g., “virtual private servers”), and “dedicated” products or services in which the total computing resources of a physical machine are provided to a single person (e.g., “bare-metal” servers);

(f) The term “malicious cyber-enabled activities” refers to activities, other than those authorized by or in accordance with United States law that seek to compromise or impair the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of computer, information, or communications systems, networks, physical or virtual infrastructure controlled by computers or information systems, or information resident thereon;

(g) The term “person” means an individual or entity;

2/2

>>12617245

Reported embedded content

CNN airs guide to DEPROGRAM MAGA SUPPORTERS as cult expert claims ENTIRE country needs post-Trump help

As calls to “deprogram” Trump supporters mount, CNN has hosted a former Moonie-turned-professional deprogrammer who suggested the whole nation had been “negatively influenced” and needed help. Viewers were not eager to sign up.

Cult expert Steven Hassan was on Tuesday brought on CNN to advise on how to deprogram members of what he described in his 2019 book as the “Cult of Trump.” Perhaps with an eye toward boosting his deprogramming business, however, he suggested the entire country was in need of his services.

https://youtu.be/TnblPVMEYAc

After CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota spoke of the Trump supporters who’d thronged the Capitol earlier this month as if they were no longer living, dramatically intoning over footage of the raid that “some of the people that you see here were once elementary school counselors, some of these people were firemen,” she asked Hassan how Trump had “radically changed their personality.”

A former member of the infamous Unification Church (better known as the ‘Moonies’) during the 1970s, Hassan suggested Trump devotees had been “deceptively recruited by an authoritarian political cult” and had undergone a “radical personality change” psychologically diagnosable as “dissociative disorder.”

https://www.rt.com/usa/513005-trump-cult-cnn-deprogram-everyone/

The ECB Has Quietly Launched Yield Curve Control… Just Don't Call It Yield Curve Control

When the BOJ - that experiment guinea pig among "developed" central banks which now holds a record 133% of Japan's GDP on its balance sheet and which simply can't stop intervening or Japan's economy will implode in an instant - launched Yield Curve Control in late 2016, most market participants knew that it was just a matter of time before this particular experiment came to every other "developed" central bank. After all, the world's monetary experimentalists long ago found themselves permanently trapped by pushing yields to record low levels to enable a tsunami of debt by inflating a gigantic asset bubble and then hoping they can let some air out of the bubble occasionally, and let yields rise again, if ever so slowly in hopes of "renormalization." Alas as the recent events of late 2018 showed, in a world that has over $300 trillion in debt, higher yields - and renormalization - are now impossible, which is why central banks can never stop their micromanagement of capital markets and the economy, and why digital currencies are coming as the current fiat regime is now effectively defunct.

But first, it means that Japan's Yield Curve Control will be attempted across the world.

And while we wait for Jerome Powell to launch YCC in the US, which according to some may happen once the nascent inflationary spike pushes 10Y yields to 1.50% or higher threatening a crash in the bond market - and from there all other markets - it appears that the ECB has already launched a stealthy version of Yield Curve Control of its own, i.e., controlling and manipulating government bond yields which are only permitted to trade within a narrow range of parameters. Just two caveats: it's "different" from the BOJ version of YCC, and whatever you do, don't call it yield curve control.

According to Bloomberg, the ECB "is buying bonds to limit the differences between yields for the strongest and weakest economies in the euro zone, according to officials familiar with the matter, with one person saying the central bank has specific ideas on what spreads are appropriate."

In other words, yield curve control. But since the ECB does not want to be associated with the stigma that trails the BOJ which, as everyone knows, will be the first central banks to capitulate, the European incarnation of bond market nationalization is called yield spread control.

The ECB’s stealthy market manipulation strategy, which has never been disclosed previously in any official capacity, explains for example why the spread between Italian and German debt "has stayed remarkably stable despite the Italian government nearing collapse, after the central bank raised the pace of bond buying." It also explains why rates volatility - both in Europe and by extension, in the US - has been is at record lows.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/ecb-has-quietly-launched-yield-curve-control-just-dont-call-it-yield-curve-control