India Stages Last-Minute Diplomatic Boycott Of Beijing Olympics After Chinese Soldier Made Torchbearer

India announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics on Feb. 3 after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) picked a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldier involved in a bloody 2020 conflict with India as a torchbearer in the Games’ torch relay. India’s state broadcaster also decided to not telecast the opening and the closing ceremonies of the Games as a result.

“It is indeed regrettable that the Chinese side has chosen to politicize an event like the Olympics … the Charge d’Affaires of the Embassy of India in Beijing will not be attending the opening or the closing ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics,” said Arindam Bagchi, the official spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs on Thursday.

The Indian government was considering sending its top diplomat to Beijing to attend the opening of the games until this week, but then Beijing made a PLA regiment commander, Qi Fabao, a torchbearer of the games on Wednesday, irking India. Qi had been involved in a violent border clash with Indian soldiers in the Himalaya’s Galwan Valley in June 2020.

New Delhi had earlier decided to set aside its problems with China following a meeting between the foreign ministers of India, Russia, and China in November, and supported the Games that were boycotted by many countries including the United States.

This was because traditionally India doesn’t believe in politicalizing sports events and has never boycotted one since its existence, according to Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor of Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

But India was blindsided when Qi who had sustained head injuries during the Galwan clash took the flame from Wang Meng, China’s four-time Olympic short-track speed skating champion. While doing so both “made military salutes to each other,” reported Chinese state media Global Times.

“The inclusion of a PLA soldier who tried to kill Indian soldiers at Galwan in 2020 in the Olympic torch relay was a provocative act that triggered the decision to boycott,” Madhav Nalapat, strategic analyst and vice-chair of the Manipal Advanced Research Group, told The Epoch Times.

To India, Qi’s participation is a politicization of the Games because the only criteria of his selection as a torchbearer was his involvement in Galwan conflict, said Kondapalli of Jawaharlal Nehru University.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/india-stages-last-minute-diplomatic-boycott-beijing-olympics-after-chinese-soldier-made

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John Jay College think tank is ground zero for woke DAs

Ground zero for woke district attorneys is a left-wing think tank in the heart of the Big Apple.

The soft-on-crime approach espoused by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and other progressive prosecutors in troubled Democratic cities has been nurtured and advanced by a policy center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, no less.

The public college in Hell’s Kitchen, where many future cops are educated, is home to the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution, which since 2016 — with the help of controversial figures such as Chicago prosecutor Kim Foxx, Los Angeles DA George Gascón and San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin — has been instrumental in reshaping how prosecutors across the country view crime and punishment.

The Institute’s symposiums and issue papers hold forth on topics such as race, officer-involved deaths and bail reform — all in a concerted effort to change the role of the prosecutor to be more proactive and less punitive.

“No one should be defined by their bad conduct alone,” the Institute’s “Vision for the Modern Prosecutor” declaration says about the accused.

Its position papers endorse charging accused criminals with fewer serious crimes or keeping them out of jail entirely. And it recommends that offenders not be called as such, but rather something that respects their “humanity.”

The Institute’s paper on “Creating a Culture of Racial Equity” suggests that a hotline be created for district attorneys so “whistleblowers” can turn in “internal obstructionists” not on board with their boss’ woke policies.

Another treatise on “How Prosecutors Can Support a Reimagined Police Response” bizarrely suggests celebrating times “when prosecutors exonerate someone.”

A John Jay spokesman said “no one benefits from the conviction of an innocent person.”

The papers are posted on the center’s website, which also includes a “living land acknowledgement” that New York was the Lenape homeland and that “We honor all of the indigenous nations and their land with great gratitude and acknowledge the genocide and continuous displacement of indigenous peoples.”

The institute says in its 2020 primer on “Prosecutorial Culture Change” that the job of the head prosecutor “is not to ‘win’ cases, impose long sentences, or ‘beat’ the defense. Instead, it is to promote safety, accountability, healing, trust, and empowerment.”

“If you were elected head prosecutor, what is a change you would make on day 1?” the primer reads.

https://nypost.com/2022/02/05/manhattan-college-think-tank-is-ground-zero-for-woke-das/

Rand Paul: Mask Mandates About Submission, Collectivism

Friday on FNC’s “Hannity,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said he was worried about the continuing trend of mandates and alarming statements made regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Kentucky U.S. Senator suggested there were ulterior motives behind some of the mask mandates, and such a one-size-fits-all approach to combatting the pandemic had unintended consequences.

“You know, I think the dirty little secret is that it’s always been more about submission,” he said. “It’s always been more about collectivism. It’s been about growing government power over your lives because the science has been clear for a long time. Look, on masks for children. Sweden didn’t have the school kids wear masks at all. Not one child died. The incidence of the disease and the teachers did not rise from the kids not wearing masks. I mean, it’s sort of — you know, I worry about the future of America if the Europeans are leading us towards freedom, or the Canadians are ahead of us in trying to unwind mandates.”

“But yeah, for goodness sakes, we’ve got to stop the ridiculous mandates on children that Dr. [Ezekiel] Emanuel that you put forward saying that kids are dying from omicron,” Paul continued. “The statistics are this, and the science is this: the wild variant was 1,000 times less deadly for kids than 80-year-olds. It’s been progressively less dangerous to the delta to the omicron. The kids really as far as whether you vaccinate your kids — that’s up to you. But there should be no mandate. And I think particularly young males, the evidence is pretty strong now that the more vaccines you give young males, the higher their incidence of myocarditis. I personally, if you’re asking me about your children, I would get them checked first to see if they’ve already had COVID. If the child has already had COVID, I don’t think they need any treatment.”

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/02/05/rand-paul-mask-mandates-about-submission-collectivism/

End the Madness: ‘It’s Time for a Government Shutdown Fight Over COVID Measures’

This is one sure-fire way to kill the government’s addiction to COVID restrictions once and for all. If this happens, it will be a historic victory for freedom and liberty in America.

They are experimenting on our babies. They are destroying people’s jobs, creating apartheid, and blocking medical treatment for people who don’t receive expired, dangerous shots. They are criminalizing doctors who use treatment that would save many people from COVID. They are criminalizing our ability to breathe while traveling. With everything we know now about the crimes committed by our federal government against humanity over the past two years, if Republicans fail to take this fight to the brink, then they don’t deserve to be in the majority.

It’s embarrassing that Canadians are fighting more forcefully for liberty and basic human rights than those in the supposed “land of the free.” With the federal budget deadline looming in two weeks, why not create our own trucker convoy to D.C. with the demand that Republicans block any budget bill that fails to defund all of the vaccine and mask mandates and change FDA/NIH policies regarding treatments, as well as approval of the now defunct and discredited shots on babies and toddlers? We already have a convoy that plans to ride from Ottawa to D.C.; now we need a political party on the inside to take up the cause.

Democrats need 60 votes in the Senate to pass a budget bill and send it to Joe Biden’s desk. They only have 51 votes with the vice president and therefore need nine Republican votes to secure passage. How can any Republican vote for a bill that funds such fascism and malfeasance without proper redress for the people?

Madison wrote in Federalist #58 that the power of the purse vested in Congress is “the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.” If this grievance is not worthy of using the leverage of this power, then Republicans should all resign from Congress.

Moreover, as we head into the election season, such a brinksmanship over Democrat policies that are increasingly unpopular would force Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to finally stop straddling the fence. These red-state Democrats reject just enough of the far-left proposals to manipulate their voters to keep them in office, but if they had any integrity and desire to represent their constituents, they should have no problem joining with Republicans to block the mandates. Thus, even if Democrats threatened to abolish the filibuster during a budget fight, these two senators could be pressured to either deny them those votes or make it more likely they will lose their seats.

Republicans like Mitch McConnell will abrasively reject this idea because they’re concerned about a “government shutdown.” But what we have experienced the past two years is the ultimate shutdown, a shutdown he tacitly voted for by shepherding the most expensive trillion-dollar bills in American history through the Senate. They shut down our physical health, mental health, economy, schools, ability to breathe, small businesses, and bodily autonomy and destroyed the mental and emotional health of children. Republicans failed to lift a finger while they still controlled the Senate, and in the many states where they command supermajorities, to fight the issue of our time when it mattered and in the way it mattered. Now is the time to repent.

https://21stcenturywire.com/2022/02/05/end-the-madness-its-time-for-a-government-shutdown-fight-over-covid-measures/

16 States Challenge Biden’s Federal Vaccine Mandate For Healthcare Workers

States are fighting back against the Biden administration’s COVID tyranny.

Sixteen states are suing the Biden administration over their federal vaccine mandate for healthcare workers.

From Fox 17:

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has issued a statement on the state’s joint lawsuit with 15 other states regarding the federal healthcare worker vaccine mandate.

In November of last year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) published regulations which required healthcare providers which work with Medicare and Medicaid to be vaccinated. The Supreme Court earlier this month issued an opinion which allowed the mandate to remain in place for the time being but did squash the OSHA mandate which required employers with 100 or more employees to require vaccines.

Now, 16 states, including Tennessee are challenging the CMS mandate in a lawsuit filed today in the Western District of Louisiana.

The states are pointing out that the vaccine mandate was meant to deal with the Delta variant which is no longer the dominant variant in the United States.

Epoch Times reported:

The rule, signed by Health Secretary Xavier Becerra, repeatedly references the danger the Delta virus variant poses to the unvaccinated, and says that vaccines “continue to be effective in preventing COVID-19 associated with the now-dominant Delta variant.”

…

But as of mid-December 2021, the Omicron virus variant is the dominant strain in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, another agency within HHS.

“It is now established beyond any serious question that the secretary’s speculation was wrong. The Delta variant effectively disappeared from the scene within weeks of the issuance of the rule,” the states say.

The primary series of COVID-19 vaccines, required by the mandate, provide little protection against infection from Omicron and reduced protection against severe disease, studies show. “Just about everybody” will contract the variant, Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, has said.

“The mandate was promulgated in response to the Delta variant, which now accounts for only 0.1 percent of all COVID-19 cases in the United States. But research suggests that COVID-19 vaccines do little to stop the transmission of the predominant strain today—the Omicron variant, which accounts for 99.9 percent of all cases—which undermines the premise for forcing people to submit to them,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican representing one of the 16 challenging states, said in a statement.

The Supreme Court ruled against Biden’s vaccine mandate for private business but ruled in favor of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services vaccine mandate.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/02/fighting-back-16-states-challenge-bidens-federal-vaccine-mandate-healthcare-workers/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/02/fighting-back-16-states-challenge-bidens-federal-vaccine-mandate-healthcare-workers/

Former Vodafone Boss Blows Whistle On 5G Corona Virus Agenda

https://www.bitchute.com/video/8ps51bEpnKjG/

Charges against female teacher dropped after she marries the student she was alleged to have abused

A former Missouri teacher charged with having sexual relations with a student is now having her charges dropped after she married her alleged victim.

Baylee A Turner was teaching at Sarcoxie High School when she was charged with having sexual contact with the male student in February 2019, following an investigation by the Jasper County Sheriff’s Department, the Joplin Globe reported.

Watch viral video above to learn about a police officer assaulting a teenage girl

Ms Turner was 23 years old and a first-year English teacher at the high school when she had allegedly had sexual intercourse with the student in January 2019, resulting in her resignation.

Both Ms Turner and the student admitted to the sexual affair, which allegedly took place from January 14-21 at Turner’s home in Sarcoxie, about 418km southwest of St. Louis, according to court documents.

Ms Turner, who resigned from her teaching position at the school following her arrest in February 2019, taught English at the Sarcoxie middle school for two years before being assigned to teach high school students.

Nate Dally, assistant prosecutor in the case, told the Joplin Globe that the charge against Turner was dismissed after she married the male student, whose identity has been suppressed.

According to Mr Dally, because the former student now has marital or spousal privilege, he can no longer be subpoenaed or compelled to testify against his wife. This weakened the state’s case in court.

It is unknown when the teacher-student couple got married and court documents did not provide the name of age of the student.

Under Missouri state law, school employees, volunteers and/or officials are prohibited from having sexual contact with a student - regardless of age or consent.

https://7news.com.au/news/crime/charges-against-female-teacher-dropped-after-she-marries-the-student-she-was-alleged-to-have-abused-c-5562914

Conservatives, independent voices build own platforms to counter Big Tech censorship, managed news

Emerging alternative information ecosystem expected to receive big boost with first-quarter launch of former President Trump's Twitter-like platform, Truth Social.

Conservatives took critics to heart when they said, "build your own platforms," in the wake of digital censorship claims.

Twitter competitors like Gab, Parler and now GETTR offer a "safe space" for those frustrated by the former's inconsistent rules. The video platform Rumble, active since 2013 but experiencing a massive boost over the past year, is a haven for voices like conservative talker Dan Bongino recently silenced by Google-owned YouTube. And GiveSendGo.com lets clients denied access to GoFundMe crowdfund without compromising their values.

Bongino, with ties to both Rumble and Parler, launched AlignPay last year as a competitor to PayPal, "free from the threat of Cancel Culture," as its mission statement declares. Bongino is now working with another alternative payment platform called paralleleconomy.com, a competitor with Stripe.

The wave of alternate platforms, part of an emerging parallel economy, may receive its biggest boost yet with the advent of former President Donald Trump's Truth Social, set to launch in the first quarter of the year, with Feb. 21, Presidents' Day, targeted in an App Store listing. The new, Twitter-like platform will let the banned leader back on social media, likely joined by his considerable base.

Jason Miller, a former Trump aide and CEO of GETTR, calls 2020 the "the worst year for political censorship in U.S. history," citing citizens and news outlets alike punished by social media for sharing the Hunter Biden laptop story and the theory that COVID-19 stemmed from a lab leak in Wuhan, China.

The former proved accurate, while the latter has gained at least equal footing as the most likely explanation for the origin of the pandemic.

"We needed an alternative solution," Miller says of GETTR, which launched last year.

Claims of digital censorship extend across platforms, from major players like Facebook to smaller, but still influential sites like Reddit. Both platforms recently attacked "Thin Blue Line," a pro-police comic book project from Mike Baron, without evidence it broke any existing rules of either platform.

Even right-leaning satire, courtesy of The Babylon Bee, has faced chronic punishment from Facebook for its mock news headlines.

The future for alternative platforms like GETTR is brighter than some suggest, Miller says, despite how entrenched existing platforms are in the culture and an early security breach that brought sour news to its 2021 debut.

"The big tech social media platforms are ceding effectively half of the world for potential clients," he says.

https://justthenews.com/nation/free-speech/independent-voices-shunned-big-tech-flock-big-tent-alternatives-controlled

US troops land in Europe

American soldiers sent by President Biden to reinforce the US’ NATO allies have touched down in Germany

Soldiers with the US Army’s 18th Airborne Corps touched down at Wiesbaden Army Airfield on Friday, unloading vehicles and equipment from military transport planes. The soldiers are the first of 2,000 US troops ordered to NATO countries in Eastern Europe amid ongoing tensions between Washington and Moscow over Ukraine.

According to the US’ European Command, the soldiers will set up a headquarters in Germany, while 1,700 paratroopers with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division head to Poland, which borders Ukraine. Altogether, 2,000 troops from Fort Bragg in North Carolina will head to Europe over the coming days.

Video footage showed the troops disembarking their planes on Friday evening and unloading packs and vehicles.

The deployment is intended to “deter and defend against any aggression” from the Russian military, said the White House, which maintains that Russia is planning an attack on Ukraine. Moscow has denied these claims, and rubbished allegations by US intelligence agencies that it is planning on staging a ‘false flag’ incident to justify such an attack.

The US maintains that Ukraine should be allowed to join the NATO alliance, something that Russia has for decades deemed an unacceptable threat to its security. Throughout negotiations, Moscow has demanded that the US and NATO halt the continued expansion of the Cold War-era alliance, but leaders in Washington and Brussels have refused to consider such a move.

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko has called the US deployment a “destructive step” that would only “delight” the Ukraine's pro-Western government, as well as “increase military tension and reduce the margin for political solutions.”

https://www.rt.com/news/548442-us-troops-arrive-germany/