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A recruitment email sent by Mike Morell, co-author of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter, wanted former intelligence officials to become signatories to help give Joe Biden a “talking point” during a crucial presidential debate against Donald Trump...The revelation comes after Morell, the former Obama CIA acting director, admitted that now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken “triggered” him to write the October 2020 laptop letter.Morell's email explained that both he and Polymeropoulos believed Russia was involved in the Hunter Biden laptop stories and that Trump likely planned to attack Biden over the laptop revelations in the upcoming debate.“We want to give...

Former president Trump’s campaign quietly commissioned a second firm to study election fraud claims in the weeks after the 2020 election, and the founder of the firm was recently questioned by the Justice Department about his work disproving the claims.Ken Block, founder of the firm Simpatico Software Systems, studied more than a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations for Trump’s campaign in late 2020 and found they were “all false,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post.“No substantive voter fraud was uncovered in my investigations looking for it, nor was I able to confirm any of the outside...

Speaking on The Benny Show, DeSantis said: ‘Why would you want to drink Bud Light? I mean, like, honestly that’s like them rubbing our faces in it and it’s like these companies that do this, if they never have any response, they’re just going to keep doing it. ‘So, if you as a consumer are like … “Like, yeah, they’re doing that, but I’m just going to keep drinking anyways.” Well, then they’re going to keep doing it.’‘You know, my wife and I, they (bars) don’t have (Budweiser) here if we ever go out to just have a beer —...

A Maricopa County judge may soon allow Kari Lake to attempt to prove one of the most far-fetched claims she made in her lawsuit challenging her November loss against Gov. Katie Hobbs: That bad actors forged signatures on tens of thousands of mail-in ballot envelopes, and the county failed to follow state law when approving them.Lake’s claim, which the Arizona Supreme Court remanded to the trial court last week, is the losing GOP gubernatorial candidate’s last chance to prove her election should be overturned. She has spent the last several months on a money-making media tour based on the false...

Tucker Carlson “passionately” hates Donald Trump and fantasised in 2021 about the day he would no longer have to cover his fellow conservative, new messages released as part of a defamation lawsuit against Fox News reveal.“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” Mr Carlson told an unknown Fox News employee just two days before the January 6 Capitol riot, according to the court documents. “I truly can’t wait.”“I hate him passionately,” he added.

Florida Sen. Jason Brodeur (R-Lake Mary) wants bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis, Attorney General Ashley Moody, and other members of the Florida executive cabinet or legislature to register with the state or face fines.Brodeur’s proposal, Senate Bill 1316: Information Dissemination, would require any blogger writing about government officials to register with the Florida Office of Legislative Services or the Commission on Ethics. In the bill, Brodeur wrote that those who write “an article, a story, or a series of stories,” about “the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, a Cabinet officer, or any member of the Legislature,” and receives or...

A federal judge on Thursday imposed nearly $1 million in sanctions on former President Donald Trump and his lawyer for filing a since-dismissed ‘frivolous’ lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and many others, which had claimed they tried to rig the 2016 presidential election in her favor by smearing Trump.“We are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose,” wrote Judge John Middlebrooks in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in his order sanctioning Trump.The judge in his...

Background: During Late 2022, the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA.5 sublineages accounted for most of the sequenced viral genomes worldwide. Bivalent mRNA vaccines contain an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 strain component plus an updated component of the Omicron BA.4/BA.5. Since September 2022, a single bivalent booster dose has been recommended for adults who have completed a primary vaccination series and are at high risk for severe Covid-19 disease. Evidence regarding the effectiveness of the bivalent vaccine in reducing hospitalizations and death due to Covid-19 is warranted.Methods: This retrospective cohort study included all members of Clalit Health Services, aged ≥65, eligible for a bivalent booster....

Surveys showing strength for Republicans, often from the same partisan pollsters, set Democratic klaxons blaring in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Colorado. Coupled with the political factors already favoring Republicans — including inflation and President Biden’s unpopularity — the skewed polls helped feed what quickly became an inescapable political narrative: A Republican wave election was about to hit the country with hurricane force.Democrats in each of those states went on to win their Senate races. Ms. Murray clobbered Ms. Smiley by nearly 15 points… Traditional nonpartisan pollsters, after years of trial and error and tweaking of their methodologies, produced polls that...

Adults who received the updated coronavirus booster shots are better protected against severe disease than those who haven’t, cutting their risk of having to visit an emergency room or being hospitalized with covid-19 by 50 percent or more, according to new federal data.Two reports released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention give the first detailed look at how well the updated boosters from Pfizer and Moderna protect against serious illness. But uptake of the “bivalent” boosters rolled out in September has been low among vaccine-weary Americans, with only about 14 percent of those eligible — ages 5...

It all happened in a matter of seconds, from the moment the police arrived at the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and encountered an intruder with a large hammer to when her husband, Paul Pelosi, was lying unconscious on the floor.“Mr. Pelosi was face down on the ground, a pool of blood by his head,” said Kyle Cagney, one of the two San Francisco police officers first to arrive in the early hours of Oct. 28, during a court hearing on Wednesday...Prosecutors on Wednesday played an audio recording of the interview that Mr. DePape gave to the police in...

Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel unequivocally endorsed mail-in balloting Tuesday, distancing herself from former President Donald Trump on an issue that is fracturing the GOP in the wake of disappointing election results this fall.“What we do need is our voters need to vote early,” McDaniel, a longtime Trump ally, said during a televised interview on Fox News. “I have said this over and over again. There were many in 2020 saying, ‘Don’t vote by mail, don’t vote early.’ And we have to stop that.”..."The discussion was about Democrats having a month to bank votes while Republicans expect to get...

A judge in Arizona on Thursday ordered the governing board of a ruby-red county in the southeastern corner of the state to certify the results of the Nov. 8 election, finding that its members had no authority to shirk a duty required under state law...The denouement in Cochise County played out as a federal judge, also on Thursday, sanctioned lawyers for Kari Lake and Mark Finchem, the unsuccessful GOP candidates for governor and secretary of state, respectively. Taken together, the orders show how judges are scorning efforts to politicize ministerial roles and undermine election administration.The federal judge, John Tuchi of...

In a major defeat for former President Donald Trump, a federal appeals court on Thursday halted a third-party review of documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate.The ruling removes a major obstacle to the Justice Department’s investigation into the mishandling of government records from Trump’s time in the White House.In a ruling on Thursday, the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s order appointing a so-called special master to sort through thousands of documents found at Trump’s home to determine what should be off limits to investigators.“The law is clear,” the appeals court wrote. “We cannot write a...

A federal judge temporarily blocked a Florida law aimed at restricting state colleges and universities from teaching students certain ideologies related to race or sex.Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker of the Northern District of Florida blasted the "Individual Freedom Act," originally pitched as the "Stop WOKE" Act, for censoring what professors are allowed to teach, granting a preliminary injunction against its enforcement while litigation continues."The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints," Walker wrote in a Thursday order. "Defendants argue that, under this Act, professors enjoy "academic...

To paraphrase Voltaire after he attended an orgy, once was an experiment, twice would be perverse.A bruised Donald Trump announced a new presidential bid on Tuesday night, an invitation to double down on the outrages and failures of the last several years that Republicans should reject without hesitation or doubt.To his credit, Trump killed off the Clinton dynasty in 2016, nominated and got confirmed three constitutionalist justices, reformed taxes, pushed deregulation, got control of the border, significantly degraded ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and cinched normalization deals between Israel and the Gulf states, among other things. These are achievements that...

When employees at leading COVID pseudoscience group America’s Frontline Doctors tried to log in to work last week, they found themselves locked out of their email accounts. The nonprofit quickly fell into factions, with employees holding rival Zoom meetings to plot who would take over the group.The organization’s exiled founder, Dr. Simone Gold, tried unsuccessfully to gain access to a private Zoom call, only to find herself stuck in a waiting room. In internal emails, the group’s accountant worried about who could still access the $7 million locked in its bank accounts.The war for the right’s most prominent COVID quack...

When the Republican candidate for Arizona governor accused the state’s most populous county of “slow-rolling” the vote count to skew early election results, a local official fired back.“Quite frankly, it is offensive for Kari Lake to say that these people behind me are slow-rolling this, when they’re working 14 to 18 hours” every day, said Bill Gates, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County board of supervisors.In 2020, Maricopa County landed in the national spotlight while certifying results amid false claims that the election was stolen from Trump. The following year, it underwent an “audit” pushed by Republicans in the...

Political affiliation has emerged as a potential risk factor for COVID-19, amid evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death rates than Democrat- leaning counties and evidence of a link between political party affiliation and vaccination views. This study constructs an individual-level dataset with political affiliation and excess death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic via a linkage of 2017 voter registration in Ohio and Florida to mortality data from 2018 to 2021. We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines...

The British bond and currency markets have been in turmoil since Finance Minister Kwasi Kwarteng announced his “mini-budget” on Friday. The yield on the U.K. 10-year gilt soared to levels not seen since 2008 on Monday, while the British pound plummeted to an all-time low against the dollar. Markets have begun pricing in a base rate rise to as high as 6% for next year, from 2.25% currently, raising concerns among mortgage lenders and borrowers. Inflation fears were accelerated by the market moves, which indicated that the Bank of England would have to continue to hike interest rates to fight...