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Britain and Japan to sign defense pact

UK and Japanese troops will be deployed on each other’s territory, as Tokyo deepens its alignment with NATO powers

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Japanese counterpart, Fumio Kishida, will sign a major defense agreement on Wednesday, Sunak’s office has announced. With Britain and its NATO allies focused on opposing both Russia and China, Japan is deepening its cooperation with the Western military machine.

The ‘Reciprocal Access Agreement’ will allow both countries to deploy troops on each other’s soil, and to hold “larger and more complex” joint military exercises, according to a statement from Downing Street.

While Japan already hosts around 50,000 US troops, Wednesday’s signing will make the UK the first European nation to have a reciprocal access deal with Japan. Australia has had such an agreement with Japan since 2007, although this pact became non-binding when it was renewed in October.

The signing comes a month after Japan, the UK, and Italy announced that they would team up to develop a sixth-generation fighter jet, merging separate national jet programs.

These developments mark a significant step by Japan away from its post-WWII constitution, which commits the country to a pacifist foreign policy and mandates that its military be a strictly defensive and peacekeeping force.

However, Japan joined the renewed Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – a loose military alliance with the US, India, and Australia explicitly aimed at countering China in the “Indo-Pacific” region – in 2017, and in December announced a doubling of its military budget, citing missile “missile threats” from China and North Korea.

Tokyo also joined the West in sanctioning Russia over the conflict in Ukraine, and plans on stationing supersonic missiles near Russia’s northeastern islands. Moscow considers this plan to pose “a serious challenge” to its security.

Sunak and Kishida are set to discuss both Ukraine and China on Wednesday, with the British prime minister’s office stating that they would talk about “the need to maintain our collective support” for Kiev and strengthen its military.

https://www.rt.com/news/569708-japan-uk-defense-agreement/

‘Russian trolls’ had no impact on 2016 US election – study

Researchers looked at Twitter posts allegedly ‘meddling’ in Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump

Accounts labeled as “Russian trolls” on Twitter had no impact on the 2016 US presidential election, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Communications. A team of researchers could not find any evidence that interactions with content attributed to the “Internet Research Agency” (IRA) in any way influenced attitudes, voting patterns, or political divisions.

Led by the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics, the study found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between the exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”

“My personal sense coming out of this is that this got way overhyped,” Josh Tucker, one of the study's authors, told the Washington Post.

Democrats have blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016 on “Russian meddling,” claiming the IRA precision-targeted voters in swing states with “misinformation” and accusing WikiLeaks of working for the Kremlin after it published Clinton campaign internal emails.

The researchers took these claims at face value, claiming that the IRA’s “alleged efforts to undermine US democracy are now widely documented” by the media, other researchers and the US government, who are all “consistent in their assessment of the potential goals” of such a campaign.

Yet they could find no statistical or other evidence that exposure to tweets allegedly created by the IRA had any effect on polarizing American society or changing anyone’s vote preference. Repeated modeling showed the relationship between the number of “Russian” posts and voting for Trump was “near zero (and not statistically significant).”

Faced with a result directly contradicting the position widely accepted in the US political establishment, the researchers argued that the Russian influence campaign still had some kind of an effect, by “convincing Americans that its campaign was successful.”

It was the US media and partisan operatives, however, that did all the convincing. The researchers’ footnotes rely heavily on media reporting. They also include the Senate Intelligence Committee report on “Russian meddling,” which relied on advice from New Knowledge, a group of Democrat operatives that ran a false-flag “Russian bot” operation during the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama. One of the footnotes cites a New Knowledge report authored in 2019 – after their operation was exposed, and just before they rebranded as Yonder.

Twitter’s internal documents, made public last week by journalist Matt Taibbi, also showed how Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees worked with media outlets to browbeat Twitter, first into finding any accounts that could be classified as “linked to Russia,” and then into accepting outside censorship as the norm.

https://www.rt.com/news/569668-russian-meddling-twitter-debunked/

Biden Administration Rescinds Military Vaccine Mandate After Republicans Force Them To

The Biden Pentagon released a memo from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin Tuesday evening that formally rescinded its COVID-19 military vaccine mandate, after Republicans forced the administration to back down via defense legislation last month.

The memo rescinds the vaccine mandate for both active duty, National Guard, and Reserve forces.

Austin had ordered, on August 24, 2021, that all forces be fully-vaccinated or else face discharge from the military. At least 8,400 troops were discharged, with several tens of thousands who had applied for accommodation requests — either medical, administrative or religious. Tens of thousands more reservists — up to 60,000 by some estimates — also remained unvaccinated and were on the chopping block, exacerbating a recruiting crisis.

Troops also successfully sued to temporarily enjoin the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps from taking action against anyone who had applied for a religious accommodation, and the Pentagon inspector general indicated in a memo to Austin that blanket denials of religious accommodation requests potentially ran afoul of the law.

Some troops also fought the mandate on the basis that the DOD can only mandate FDA-approved vaccines, and that the DOD was administering a different version that was still under Emergency Use Authorization and not FDA-approved. A then-DOD official, Terri Adirim, dubiously argued in a memo that the two vaccines were interchangeable.

Still, the Biden Pentagon refused to consider rescinding the policy until Republicans in the House and Senate fought to have it rescinded via the yearly defense policy bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes defense spending and policies every year.

The Pentagon said in a statement accompanying the release of the memo: “This rescission requirement was established by the James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023.” It added:

The health and readiness of the Force are crucial to the Department’s ability to defend our nation. Secretary Austin continues to encourage all Service members, civilian employees, and contractor personnel to get vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19 to ensure Total Force readiness.

The memo left open the possibility of troops still getting separated for not being vaccinated, however.

It said: “No individuals currently serving in the Armed Forces shall be separated solely on the basis of their refusal to receive the COVID-19 vaccination if they sought an accommodation on religious, administrative, or medical grounds.”

It said that the military would remove adverse actions for those individuals that were solely associated with denials of those requests, including potentially career-ending letters of reprimand.

It also said the military would cease any ongoing reviews of current service members’ accommodation requests.

The memo also indicated that the DOD would continue to take action against unvaccinated service members:

Other standing Departamental policies, procedures, and processes regarding immunization remain in effect. These include the ability of commanders to consider, as appropriate, the individual immunization status of personnel in making deployment, assignment, and other operational decisions, including when vaccination is required for travel to, or entry into, a foreign nation.

It said the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness would issue additional guidance to “ensure uniform implementation” of the memo. In recent days, the Army and Coast Guard had issued guidance, only to retract it within hours.

Republicans have promised to take up the issue of reinstatement of discharged troops with back pay in 2023.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/01/10/biden-administration-rescinds-military-vaccine-mandate-after-republicans-force-them-to/