Author: J.P. Knowles

Authorities said the explosion of a World War II-era bomb shook a construction site near the train station in Munich, Germany earlier this week. The 250-kilogram (550-pound) bomb was discovered while workers were drilling.

The explosion left four people injured with one suffering from serious injuries according to the Munich fire brigade.

Germany’s Deutsche Bahn rail operator temporarily suspended all operations following the incident.

The police told commuters that there was “no danger outside of the immediate area.”

Approximately 2,000 tons of undetonated bombs from World War II are still in Germany, and construction sites are typically scanned for potential explosives prior to drilling.

Joachim Herrmann, Bavaria’s state interior minister, said the authorities’ main focus needs to be on finding out why the explosive had not been found earlier.

Official estimates are that somewhere around 15% of the explosives from World War II did not detonate and some could potentially be hidden as deeply as 20 feet underground.

Gov. Ralph Northam announced Sunday that the pedestal on which the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee stood for 131 years in Richmond, Virginia is scheduled to be removed.

Northam said in a press release that the land that housed both the statue and the pedestal will be returned to the city.

“This land is in the middle of Richmond, and Richmonders will determine the future of this space,” Northam said. “The Commonwealth will remove the pedestal and we anticipate a safe removal and a successful conclusion to this project.”

The pedestal has been repeatedly defaced with profane, anti-police graffiti.

The Lee statue was the last remaining Confederate figure to remain on the city’s historic Monument Avenue, after having become the subject of profound controversy following the death of George Floyd in May 2020.

Shortly after Floyd’s death while in police custody, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney ordered the removal of the memorials of Confederate Gens. Jeb Stuart and Stonewall Jackson, as well Confederate Naval commander Matthew Fontaine Murray. Protesters previously overturned a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Court litigation delayed the removal of the Lee statue because it was on state-owned land. The Virginia Supreme Court ultimately ruled in a 7-0 decision that the statue should be taken down and sawed into two pieces and put into storage.

“The commonwealth of Virginia will remove the largest Confederate statue remaining in the United States – the statue of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond – on Wednesday, September 8, following authorization by all three branches of state government, including a unanimous decision last week by the Supreme Court of Virginia,” the state announced in a press release at the time.

Former President Donald Trump issued a statement against the statue’s removal at the time, saying, “Our culture is being destroyed and our history and heritage, both good and bad, are being extinguished by the Radical Left, and we can’t let that happen!”

Northam faced a racially charged controversy himself in 2019, regarding a yearbook photo from his college days.

Many people are going to great lengths to try and get around vaccine mandates and one man in Italy is now looking at fraud charges for wearing a prosthetic arm to avoid actually receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.

The man went to a vaccine hub in Biella, a city in Northern Italy, to get his vaccination in accordance with recent governmental restrictions banning unvaccinated individuals from participating in a number of social activities.

It has been estimated that he spent hundreds of euros on the prosthetic arm which he then used to try to get a health pass while avoiding the actual vaccine.

When he sat down and rolled up his sleeve to receive the shot, health worker Filippa Bua noticed something peculiar about his arm.

“I felt offended as a professional,” she said. “The color of the arm made me suspicious and so I asked the man to uncover the rest of his left arm. It was well made but it wasn’t the same color.”

“At first I thought I made a mistake, that it was a patient with an artificial arm.”

Bua said that the deceptive man pleaded with her to not expose him.

Fake vaccination cards have been turning up across the country as a growing number of people are looking to get around COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Former President Donald Trump has never been one to hold back and he certainly didn’t start with General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when he called him a “f*cking idiot” Saturday.

Turning Point USA hosted an event at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida Saturday where Trump spoke his truth about Milley and the part he played in the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Referencing a previous conversation he’d had with Milley, Trump told the crowd that Milley claimed it would be “cheaper” to leave military equipment in the Middle East than it would be to bring it back to the U.S.

“Sir, sir. It’s cheaper to leave the equipment than to bring it,” Trump began, describing Milley’s advice. Trump listed the millions of dollars of brand new equipment in the Middle East. “You think it’s cheaper to leave it there so they can have it than to fill it up with a half a tank of gas?” questioned Trump.

“That’s when I realized he was a f*cking idiot,” Trump said as the audience broke out in laughter.

Trump also called Milley out in September, calling him a “dumbo” while citing the infamous phone call Milley made to China warning them of U.S. military strikes. Trump said “lightweight” Milley’s decision to make the call was counterproductive and outrageous.

Trump pushed back on Milley in July when Milley accused him of wanting to launch a coup after the November election. “So ridiculous! Sorry to inform you, but an Election is my form of ‘coup,’ and if I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley,” Trump exclaimed.

New York City Mayor-elect Eric Adams maintained his support of “stop and frisk” in reaction to last week’s Thanksgiving Eve shooting that wounded two police officers.

Adams, who will be the city’s second Black mayor, praised the “professional conduct” of NYPD officers Alejandra Jacobs and Robert Holmes in their handling of suspect Charlie Vasquez in the Bronx last week. Adams said the officers handled the situation correctly when they approached the suspect matching a 911 caller’s description and asked him to show his hands.

In response to the request Vasquez opened fire and shot officer Jacobs in the arm, Jacobs returned fire, and, “the threat was neutralized. One more gun off the street. One more blow against the bad guys,” Adams said. “Yet there are some in our city who would say these officers should never have confronted Vasquez, that he never should have been stopped and questioned.”

Adams rejected his opponents’ demands to “end stop and frisk forever,” maintaining that the tactic “stop, question and frisk” must be reinstated because it can actually help reduce crime “without infringing on personal liberties and human rights.”

“In fact, as American courts have affirmed over many years, stop, question and frisk is a perfectly legal, appropriate and constitutional tool, when used smartly, as opposed to indiscriminately against hundreds of thousands of young Black and Brown men, as it was for years in New York City,” Adams said. “Not only that, but it is a necessary tool, whereby police approach someone who fits a witness description or otherwise appears to be carrying an illegal weapon.”

He continued: “The question was never whether stop, question and frisk should be allowed; it was how it should be done. Those who claimed it should be outlawed entirely reduced a nuanced issue to an either-or argument, and unwisely answered it with a blanket ban.”

Adams has called for an end to “fighting from the extremes about public safety” and promised to make solutions his “number one priority” in January. He also discussed arguments about stop, question and frisk, defund the police and bail reform.

“The question should not be whether or not police are allowed to confront suspects; it should be about how we train them,” he said. “The question should not be whether we have police; it should be how we use them. The question should not be whether judges should have the ability to protect New Yorkers from violent offenders; it should be how we let them.”

At a press conference following the shooting, both NYPD Police Commissioner Dermot Shea and a police union president, Pat Lynch, spoke about the lack of fear among criminals in the streets in spite of efforts to remove illegal guns. Vasquez, who was also wounded in the shooting, was charged Saturday with attempted murder and other weapons offenses.

Florida Democrats are enraged about the Biden administration’s decision to remove a Colombian rebel group from a list of foreign terrorists.

The decision to take FARC, a guerrilla movement the Colombian government has been at war with for decades, off the terrorist list was based on an annual review that included input from the intelligence community, law enforcement, the U.S. embassy, and the State Department, according to a senior administrator.

However, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost at the hands of FARC and the millions displaced by the conflict still weigh heavily on the 150,000 Colombian American voters in Florida.

“This is terrible. It’s bad policy. It’s bad politics,” Florida state Sen., Democratic gubernatorial candidate and Colombian American, Annette Taddeo said. “These were terrorists, murderers.”

She blasted Biden’s decision on Twitter too, noting that she had to flee Colombia at the age of 17 “because of the Marxist terrorist organization, FARC, a group of militias who kidnapped my father who was a WWII American fighter pilot.”

When I was 17 years old I was forced to flee Colombia, the only country I ever knew because of the Marxist terrorist organization, FARC, a group of militias who kidnapped my father who was a WWII American fighter pilot.

1/ https://t.co/nwh9pvGL5H

— Annette Taddeo (@Annette_Taddeo) November 23, 2021

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist tweeted that he was “deeply concerned” with the administration considering the action. “They’ve caused decades of war and death — they’ve earned their designation,” he said.

I stand with Colombians across Florida and the U.S. who are deeply concerned with the State Department’s reported consideration of removing FARC from the list of international terrorist organizations.

They've caused decades of war and death — they've earned their designation. pic.twitter.com/nLBQ3j4Syy

— Charlie Crist (@CharlieCrist) November 24, 2021

The State Department had notified Congress of the decision, but the Colombian government had not been made aware of it when it was reported Tuesday. The government is five years into a peace deal with FARC rebels, of which 90 percent have been demobilized and met their commitments.

The administration intends to add the new armed groups formed by those who have not been demobilized to the list, but Florida Democrats say voters won’t understand the distinction.

“I can explain this to my students. I can have this debate among my colleagues, but local politics isn’t making that distinction,” Eduardo Gamarra, who polls Latino voters in the United States and throughout Latin America said.

“There are people in this community who were either kidnapped or had relatives who were kidnapped — while some of the people responsible [former FARC rebels] are now sitting in the Colombian Congress,” he said.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis criticized the decision in a statement on Wednesday, stating that it would “embolden terrorist groups” throughout the continent.

“Biden’s policy is an insult to members of the Colombian American community, many of whom fled that terrorist group’s barbaric attacks on civilians,” he said. “My administration stands squarely on the side of the millions of Floridians who want democracy, peace and freedom to endure in Colombia and against Joe Biden’s Castrochavista allies.”

A Madison, Wisconsin police officer opted to resign Wednesday after having been recorded while having sex in his patrol car Sept. 16. Lieutenant Reginald Patterson was in the back of his police cruiser with a woman when as soon as they noticed they were being recorded, the woman tried to cover herself.

Marcel Scott recorded the incident from the parking lot of a Farm and Fleet store. Scott said he started recording when he saw “white legs pop up in the back of the police car.” At one point during the video, Patterson can be seen getting out of the car briefly, when got back into the vehicle, he climbed over the seat then drove off according to Scott.

A departmental investigation found Patterson “violated multiple department policies” during the incident, of which Patterson has not been officially accused of committing. Results of the investigation recommended terminating Patterson, but Patterson chose to resign before a hearing in front of the city’s Police and Fire Commission could be conducted.

A hearing in front of the Commission could have taken up to a year and Patterson would have remained on paid administrative leave during that time.

The Dane County Sheriff’s Office found no crime had occurred in the incident in the parking lot of the store. Barnes has previously stated that the woman involved is not a prostitute.

Illegal immigrants from around the world are using the border crisis to their advantage by traveling to Del Rio, Texas and attempting to cross the southern border from there.

Migrants descending on Del Rio to cross into the U.S. from the southern border are coming from South American countries, Africa and the Middle East and include Eritrea, Lebanon, Uzbekistan, Lebanon and Tajikistan — which is next door to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

The Del Rio border sector in October saw more than 28,000 illegal migrants apprehended from 50 different countries.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued a statement on Tuesday outlining the countries of origin for the apprehended migrants.

“We encounter individuals from all over the world attempting to illegally enter our country,” Del Rio Sector Chief Patrol Agent Jason D. Owens said in the release. “Our agents are focused and work hard to ensure that we detect, arrest, and identify anyone that enters our country in order to maintain [the] safety of our communities.”

The surge of migrants from these countries further shows the urgency and growing danger at the southern border which has largely been ignored by the Biden administration.

Vice President Harris, who was appointed border czar by President Biden has only visited the border once since taking office. Furthermore, Biden himself has not visited the border in over a decade, in fact, the administration as a whole has done nothing in the way of improving the ever growing crisis.

Texas landowners who have been deeply and negatively impacted by the crisis are now demanding compensation from the federal government for damages they have incurred.

“It’s getting very expensive. We have heard nothing from the federal government on help for private property owners,” South Texans’ Property Rights Association executive director Susan Kibbe said.

According to a Small Business Administration analysis, around $3.7 billion in government help went to fraudsters prohibited from obtaining government funds.

The SBA provided low-interest, fixed-rate, long-term financing to assist businesses in surviving COVID-19 and the recession caused by the lockdown. Thousands of individuals, however, exploited the system as a result of bureaucratic inefficiency. While thousands of honest Americans lost their chance to receive the low-interest financing to save their businesses causing a drought of small businesses to close their doors forever in the last couple of years.

The New York Times reported:

The finding adds to a mountain of evidence chronicling what the Small Business Administration’s inspector general, Hannibal Ware, called an “unprecedented amount of fraud” in the agency’s pandemic relief efforts. In October, Mr. Ware’s office chastised the agency for improperly doling out billions in relief money to self-employed people who made “flawed or illogical” claims of having additional workers on their payroll.

Its Economic Injury Disaster Loan program distributed more than $210 billion last year in loans and grants. The program was organized in a hurry by the Trump administration as millions of businesses temporarily shut down because of the coronavirus and was designed to quickly send out money to help companies keep up on their bills.

Ware’s office released a report explaining that the agency neglected to cross-reference applications against the Treasury Department’s “Do Not Pay” system:

The Do Not Pay system was set up in 2011 to reduce improper payments to people who are dead, convicted of tax fraud or barred from receiving federal contracts, among other red flags. Mr. Ware found 117,135 applicants who got grants and 75,180 recipients who got loans despite matches in the system indicating a “high likelihood” that the payments were improper.

Other reports indicate that the federal government’s enhanced unemployment aid program wasted billions of dollars on fraudulent requests.

Just this last June, Axios found that up to half of all unemployment benefits awarded under COVID-19 — about $400 billion — may have been lost to scams and fraud, the majority of which occurred outside the United States.

“Unemployment fraud during the pandemic could easily reach $400 billion, according to some estimates, and the bulk of the money likely ended in the hands of foreign crime syndicates — making this not just theft, but a matter of national security,” Axios explained. Up to 70% of the stolen funds “likely left the country,” flowing to groups based in China, Nigeria, Russia, and other hostile nations. The remainder was likely “stolen by street gangs domestically, who have made up a greater share of the fraudsters in recent months.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki laid blame on unvaccinated Americans for the continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic.

During his campaign for the presidency, President Joe Biden promised to “shut down the virus,” furthermore calling former President Donald Trump’s travel restrictions against China “xenophobic.”

“What ever happened to President [Joe] Biden’s promise to shut down the virus?” Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked Wednesday.

“We’re working on it, Peter,” Psaki said.

“There’s another variant here, is the idea that you want people to wrap their heads around that the president, instead of shutting down the virus, is gonna try to help people amidst the virus?” Doocy pressed.

Psaki shifted the blame onto Americans when she answered by saying that life cannot go back to normal until at least 20 percent of the American population has been fully vaccinated against the COVID virus and also received a booster dose.

“What we can do, as the federal government, is make those vaccines free, make the boosters free, make them available. The president will talk more about what we’re going to do tomorrow,” Psaki said. “But we need the American people to do more, who are not vaccinated to help us continue to fight the virus.”

According to a CDC report, 59% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated, and 21% have received a booster shot.

The recent emergence of the Omicron variant recently discovered in South Africa prompted the Biden administration to implement travel restrictions on South Africa and Botswana. Monday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first positive case in the U.S. only days after Dr. Angelique Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association, warned that the variant had already reached the U.S.

During an address Monday, Biden urged the public to get the vaccine and booster shots, insisting that it is the most effective way for people to ensure protection against the virus. Biden promised to fight against the newly identified variant while urging people not to panic, on the other hand this is not the first promise the president has made concerning the virus.