Fully-vaccinated Americans can gather with other vaccinated people indoors without wearing a mask or social distancing, according to long-awaited guidance from federal health officials.
The recommendations also say that vaccinated people can come together in the same way with people considered at low-risk for severe disease, such as in the case of vaccinated grandparents visiting healthy children and grandchildren.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the guidance Monday.
The guidance is designed to address a growing demand, as more adults have been getting vaccinated and wondering if it gives them greater freedom to visit family members, travel, or do other things like they did before the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world last year.
“We know that people want to get vaccinated so they can get back to doing the things they enjoy with the people they love,” said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, in a statement.
The CDC is continuing to recommend that fully vaccinated people continue to wear well-fitted masks, avoid large gatherings, and physically distance themselves from others when out in public. The CDC also advised vaccinated people to get tested if they develop symptoms that could be related to COVID-19.
Officials say a person is considered fully vaccinated two weeks after receiving the last required dose of vaccine. About 30 million Americans — or only about 9% of the U.S. population — have been fully vaccinated with a federally authorized COVID-19 vaccine so far, according to the CDC.
Authorized vaccine doses first became available in December, and they were products that required two doses spaced weeks apart. But since January, a small but growing number of Americans have been fully vaccinated, and have been asking questions like: Do I still have to wear a mask? Can I go to a bar now? Can I finally see my grandchildren?
House Democrats introduced a bill that would prevent any future president from lowering the cap for refugee admissions below 125,000.
The bill, dubbed the “‘Lady Liberty Act of 2021,” counts support from over 50 House Democrats and has been referred to the Committee on the Judiciary.
The 2-page bill seeks to “amend the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to provide for a minimum number of refugees who may be admitted in any fiscal year after fiscal year 2022.”
To do so, the act would amend Section 207(a) of the INA by inserting after ‘‘in any fiscal year after fiscal year 1982 shall be such number as the President determines,’’ the following: ‘‘except that in any fiscal year after fiscal year 2022, such number may not be less than 125,000, without regard to whether or not the President makes any determination’.’
In other words, from fiscal year 2022 on, the U.S. president would be unable to lower the refugee admission minimum below 125,000 people.
Regardless of their ages, the CCP is persecuting spiritual believers of all faiths under the disguise of ‘re-educating’ them.
As the world is celebrating International Women’s Day, let’s not forget the horrifying abuses that mothers and sisters, and even grandmothers, are subjected to in the land of communist China.
Reenactment of one of the brutal torture methods employed by the CCP officials to coerce female Falun Gong adherents to renounce their faith. (Minghui.org)
Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, it has been employing unethical ways to persecute citizens and suppress spiritual groups. Recently, several reports have confirmed how the CCP is using sexual abuse as a tool for re-educating and transforming prisoners of faith, regardless of their age.
Rooted in atheism and materialism, the communist regime has been brutally suppressing Uyghur Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and Falun Gong practitioners for years. Those who refuse to comply with the CCP’s orders are detained and taken to secretive “re-education camps” where they are subjected to unimaginable abuses, including gang rape and electrocution.[R]ape has become a culture. It is gang rape and the Chinese police not only rape them but also electrocute them. They are subject to horrific torture.— ANONYMOUS POLICEWOMAN FROM A CAMP IN XINJIANG, CHINA
To condemn the CCP’s grave human rights violations, the Trump-era administration said on Jan. 19, 2021, that the communist regime has committed “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” in its repression of the Uyghurs Muslims.
The then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement that the CCP has incarcerated over a million Uyghurs, subjecting them to forced labor, forced sterilizations, and torture.
“After careful examination of the available facts, I have determined that the PRC [People’s Republic of China], under the direction and control of the CCP, has committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,” Pompeo said. He added, “I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese party-state.”
Two weeks later, the BBC published a detailed report on the systematic sexual torture happening in Xinjiang’s tightly-guarded re-education network. The report that is based on first-hand interviews of several Uyghurs who were previously detained in the internment camps revealed the torture and gang-rape horrors they witnessed or lived through.
A watchtower on a high-security facility near what is believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, on the outskirts of Hotan, in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, on May 31, 2019. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)
Tursunay Ziawudun, 42, who fled to the United States after escaping from Xinjiang following her release, recounted to the BBC the sexual abuses she underwent and witnessed while detained for nine months in China’s secretive camps in Xinjiang.
Ziawudun, who is married to a Kazakh and had returned to Xinjiang for work in 2016 after staying in Kazakhstan for five years, detailed how she was shocked with an electric baton and “gang-raped on three occasions,” the BBC reported.
“The woman took me to the room next to where the other girl had been taken in,” Ziawudun told the BBC. “They had an electric stick, I didn’t know what it was, and it was pushed inside my genital tract, torturing me with an electric shock.”
“They don’t only rape but also bite all over your body, you don’t know if they are human or animal,” she said. “They didn’t spare any part of the body, they bit everywhere leaving horrible marks. It was disgusting to look at. […] And it is not just one person who torments you, not just one predator. Each time they were two or three men.”
Talking to Fox News, Ziawudun said: “Any woman under 40 was raped. Every one in the camp experienced this … I was also beaten—I was kicked and stamped on—once so much on my private parts that I was bleeding, and I since had to have my ovaries removed.”
The BBC report said that even the elderly women detainees were not spared. Ziawudun recalled seeing an elderly Uyghur woman being humiliated.
“They stripped everything off the elderly lady, leaving her with just her underwear. She was so embarrassed that she tried to cover herself with her arms,” Ziawudun told BBC. “I cried so much watching the way they treated her. Her tears fell like rain.”
Members of the Muslim Uyghur minority hold placards as they demonstrate in front of the Chinese consulate on Dec. 30, 2020, in Istanbul, to ask for news of their relatives and to express their concern after China announced the ratification of an extradition treaty with Turkey. (Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images)
Ziawuden’s claims were backed by Qelbinur Sedik, an Uzbek woman from Xinjiang who was coerced to teach the Chinese language to the internment-camp detainees. Sedik told the BBC that a camp policewoman confirmed, after Sedik once secretly asked her, that sexual abuse is indeed happening in the camps.
“Yes, the rape has become a culture. It is gang rape and the Chinese police not only rape them but also electrocute them. They are subject to horrific torture,” Sedik recalled the policewoman’s words.
Gulzira Auelkhan, another Kazakh woman from Xinjiang who was forced to help the camp guards by stripping women, also confirmed to the BBC that gang rape is common in the camps.
“They forced me to take off those women’s clothes and to restrain their hands and leave the room,” Auelkhan said. “You can’t tell anyone what happened … It is designed to destroy everyone’s spirit.”
Gulzira Auelkhan, who spent close to two years trapped in China, speaks during an AFP interview at the office of the Ata Jurt rights group in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on Jan. 21, 2019. She is pictured with her 5-year-old daughter. (Ruslan Pryanikov/AFP via Getty Images)
In the recent past, several previously detained Uyghurs had also described similar harrowing tales of torture and rape from the Xinjiang camps.
Gulbakhar Jalilova, an Uyghur and Kazakhstan national who was detained in 2017 for 15 months in an all-female camp, told The Epoch Times that rape happened on a daily basis in the camps. “Young girls are taken out and raped all night long. If you keep resisting, they will inject you with something and kill you,” Jalilova said.
In 2019, Sayragul Sauytbay of Kazakh descent, who was forced to teach the Chinese language in the camp, told Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, that she once witnessed a female detainee being raped by policemen, “one after the other,” in front of 200 inmates. The incident left Sauytbay traumatized.
“While they were raping her they checked to see how we were reacting,” Sauytbay told Haaretz. “People who turned their head or closed their eyes, and those who looked angry or shocked, were taken away and we never saw them again. It was awful.
“I will never forget the feeling of helplessness, of not being able to help her. After that happened, it was hard for me to sleep at night.”
Sexual Abuse of Other Spiritual Believers
Apart from targeting Uyghur Muslims, the CCP also employs such horrendous torture methods on Falun Gong practitioners, Buddhists, and Christians.
Female adherents of Falun Gong are routinely subjected to sexual abuse and rape for not renouncing their faith. Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa) is a spiritual meditation discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, tolerance; it is freely practiced by over 100 million people worldwide but is being violently persecuted in China, and has been since July 1999.
An illustration of one of the sexual torture methods employed by the CCP officials to coerce female Falun Gong adherents to renounce their faith. (Minghui.org)
Detailing the torture and routine sexual abuse faced by Falun Gong practitioners, a two-part report (warning: article contains graphic content) has been compiled by Minghui.org, a U.S.-based website dedicated to documenting the persecution of Falun Gong.
At the notorious Masanjia Forced Labor Camp in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, 18 female practitioners were thrown into the men’s cells and the guards encouraged the inmates to rape the spiritual adherents, Minghui.org reported. The elderly or young, no one was exempted from these abuses.
In 2001, Zou Jin, 70, of Changsha City, Hunan Province, was gang-raped at the Changsha City First Detention Center and sentenced to nine years before she passed away. A 9-year-old girl, who was the orphan child of a Falun Gong practitioner, was gang-raped at the Changping Mental Hospital in Beijing in 2002. “Her screams and cries were heart-wrenching,” the Minghui.org report said.
The report said the authorities also forced pregnant practitioners to abort their unborn babies, beating and shocking them with electric batons which eventually lead to miscarriage.
The CCP hasn’t shown any leniency in abusing Buddhist nuns or Christians either.
The Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy has reported on the personal account of an anonymous Tibetan monk who was detained for four months in a re-education center, in Sog County, Tibet Autonomous Region, in 2017. The monk recounted seeing nuns being sexually abused after participating in military drills.
“Many nuns would lose consciousness during the [military] drills,” the monk wrote. “Sometimes officers would take unconscious nuns inside where I saw them … grope all over their body.”
“Who knows what else they did to the nuns?” the monk wrote.
Citing the sexual abuse account of a Chinese Christian, the editor-in-chief of the Bitter Winter magazine, Massimo Introvigne, wrote that Jiang Guizhi, a member of The Church of Almighty God in China, was raped by policemen and later died after the severe torture.
In 2019, the Association for the Defense of Human Rights and Religious Freedom (ADHRRF) reported a more detailed account of the torture experienced by Jiang. After being repeatedly asked by a cellmate, Jiang revealed that “the police had taken her to a private room in a hotel where she was interrogated, raped, and had objects stuffed inside her vagina,” the ADHRRF reported.
Watch the trailer now! Medical Racism, premiering March 11, chronicles the medical cartel’s history of targeting minorities for unethical experiments, the acquiescence of regulatory agencies and medical ethicists, and the silence of physicians who allow these atrocities to continue today.
Children’s Health Defense, in conjunction with Centner Productions and the Urban Global Health Alliance, along with co-producers Rev. Tony Muhammad and author-historian Curtis Cost, today released the trailer for their upcoming documentary, “Medical Racism: The New Apartheid.”
“Medical Racism,” which premieres March 11, illuminates the shocking history of government health regulators and private pharmaceutical companies conducting human experiments on Black Americans.
“Though many Americans are familiar with the history of medical atrocities committed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at Tuskegee, by the father of American gynecology, Dr. J. Marion Sims, on South Carolina slave girls and the continuing medical larceny against Henrietta Lacks, most people are likely unaware of the routine medical barbarism committed against Africans that persists today,” said Curtis Cost, the film’s co-producer.
The documentary, directed by Academy Award nominee David Massey, chronicles the medical cartel’s long history of targeting minority populations for unethical experiments, the acquiescence of regulatory agencies and medical ethicists, and the silence of physicians who allow these atrocities to continue today.
According to “Medical Racism” producer Kevin Jenkins of the Urban Global Health Alliance: “These racially targeted experiments have been hiding in plain sight for decades. It’s time to expose the truth and end inhumane and barbaric forms of racism by the ‘respected’ medical establishment.”
“Medical Racism” explores the recent racially based experimentation by government health officials and pharmaceutical companies on Black children in South Central Los Angeles.
The film also exposes Big Pharma’s medical experiments and “drug dumping” in modern-day Africa, and the World Health Organization’s 2014 population control campaign to sterilize a million Kenyan girls with infertility chemicals hidden in tetanus vaccines.
“The high levels of medical mistrust in the Black community are a rational response to routine callousness and systemic savagery toward Blacks by medical professionals and pharmaceutical interests,” said Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman of Children’s Health Defense. “Our hope in producing this film is to learn from past misdeeds, so we can avoid their future repetition.”
For more information and to register to receive a notification on where and how the film can be seen when it’s released, visit medicalracism.org.
President Joe Biden has formally created a gender policy council within the White House as part of two executive orders he signed Monday to mark International Women’s Day.
In a statement, Biden said: “In our nation, as in all nations, women have fought for justice, shattered barriers, built and sustained economies, carried communities through times of crisis, and served with dignity and resolve. Too often, they have done so while being denied the freedom, full participation, and equal opportunity all women are due.”
The council will include a staff of four, three of whom will hold the title of special assistant to the president.
The council’s mandate is to work across the federal government’s domestic and foreign policy to fight discrimination and bias, boost economic security, increase access to health care, and advance general equality through diplomacy, trade and defense.
“Today, the global crises we now face have made abundantly clear both the contributions of women and the challenges facing women,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in remarks to the European Parliament. “If we build a world that works for women, our nations will all be safer, stronger and more prosperous.”
The second order asks the Department of Education to re-examine the Trump administration’s policies and rule-making on Title IX, the 1972 law which governs the way sex-based discrimination in schools is handled. The goal, one of the officials said, is to ensure students have an education “free of sexual violence.”
The Trump administration also scrapped key Obama-era policies and put forward their rules which, among other items, said transgender students couldn’t use the bathroom consistent with their own gender identities. Biden’s executive order instructs the agency to make sure all policies related to Title IX are consistent with the ethos of the Biden-Harris administration, the official added.
“President Biden knows we need a government-wide focus on uplifting the rights of all women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, restoring America as a champion for gender equity,” said one of the officials.
The Obama administration had a White House Council on Women and Girls. The new gender council reflects the idea, one official said, that gender discrimination can happen to people of all genders.
The co-author of The Boy Crisis says the Biden-Harris administration’s plan for a White House Gender Policy Council is both “sexist and racist.”
San Francisco-based Dr. Warren Farrell, who touts he is “the only man ever elected three times” to the National Organization for Women’s board of directors, is challenging President Joe Biden with the question: “How can the Gender Policy Council eliminate sexism by perpetuating sexism?”
Farrell, who earned a Ph.D. in political science with an emphasis on Constitutional Law, also questions how a Gender Policy Council can claim to address racial injustice without addressing the “male” half of the phrase “black male?”
The speaker and author, who co-wrote The Boy Crisis with John Gray, challenged the administration after Biden and Kamala Harris announced, the day before the inauguration, a plan to create a council to advance gender equality. In its “Agenda for Women,” Biden’s campaign also promised to form a White House Council on Gender Equality.
According to the Hill, the Biden transition team said the goal of the White House Gender Policy Council is part of the effort to build the “nation back better.”
The council is expected to be co-chaired by Jennifer Klein, chief strategy and policy officer at TIME’S UP, and Julissa Reynoso, assistant to the president and chief of staff to First Lady Jill Biden.
“Too many women are struggling to make ends meet and support their families, and too many are lying awake at night worried about their children’s economic future,” Biden said in the announcement about the Gender Policy Council. “This was true before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the current global public health crisis has made these burdens infinitely heavier for women all over this country.”
“The work of this council is going to be critical to ensuring we build our nation back better by getting closer to equality for women and to the full inclusion of women in our economy and our society,” he added.
“All Americans deserve a fair shot to get ahead, including women whose voices have not always been heard,” Harris also said in the announcement, according to the Hill. “I look forward to working with these deeply knowledgeable and experienced public servants to address the challenges facing women and girls, and build a nation that is more equal and just.”
Farrell said in comments to Breitbart News, however, that, in the past, the “dominant force” so often labeled by feminists as “patriarchy” was actually “survival.”
“To survive, women raised children; men raised money,” he explained. “Women risked their lives in childbirth; men risked their lives in war.”
“Neither sex had rights or privileges; both sexes had responsibilities and obligations,” Farrell continued. “In developed societies’ middle classes, when survival became less all-controlling, we began focusing on women’s right to be whoever they wanted to be.”
He explained that “the next evolutionary shift” must be a “focus on creating a parallel flexibility for boys and men: recognizing that some of our sons will feel fulfilled and are needed as provider-protectors (e.g., warriors, firefighters); others will feel more fulfilled and needed as nurturer-connectors (as full-time dads; elementary school teachers; nurses; social workers).”
“In the past, we used what I call ‘social bribes’ like calling boys heroes if they became a Navy Seal in that generation’s war,” Farrell said. “Women fell in love with the Officer and the Gentleman, not the Private and the Pacifist. Lois Lane would ignore Clark Kent until she discovered he was Superman.”
Farrell’s research, however, led him to discover more than 50 developmental areas in which boys and men are falling behind girls and women.
In addition, black males have been shot by police 24 times more often than black females.
“It is disingenuous to say Black Lives Matter if our gender policies ignore the single biggest solution to better Black lives: re-engaging Black fathers,” Farrell also said in a press statement. “Caring exclusively about racial injustice for black females exacerbates racial injustice with sexism.”
“Flexible roles for our future require re-examining the social bribes we use to restrict both sexes,” he remarked to Breitbart News. “We’ve done a good job of doing that with women even as feminism has become toxic by honing victimhood as a fine art and calling equally-restricted males the privileged oppressors.”
In April 2019, Farrell observed in an op-ed at USA Today that the “boy crisis” is “particularly egregious in America.”
“The crisis is more than economic,” he wrote. “It is multifaceted, with each facet magnifying the others.”
He pointed out that 60 percent of students who perform below the baseline level of proficiency in international assessments in core subject areas are boys.
Boys are continually confronted with claims their “masculinity is toxic,” he wrote, “that the future is female; that dads are but bumbling fools or deadbeats.”
With more children being raised without fathers, boys are suffering from “dad-deprivation,” Farrell said.
“Aggregately, this leads to my predicting that the biggest gap between boys who are successful and unsuccessful in the future will be the gap between those who are dad-enriched versus dad-deprived,” he observed.
The solution to the “boy crisis,” Farrell wrote, is “dad-involvement.”
Conservative nonprofit Heritage Action for America is on Monday expected to announce plans to spend $10 million on a wide-ranging election integrity campaign to strengthen voting laws in eight swing states, according to reports.
According to Fox News, the campaign will target Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin, with the effort involving such initiatives as digital and television advertisements, as well as direct lobbying of state lawmakers.
“Fair elections are essential for every policy debate in the future,” Heritage Action Executive Director Jessica Anderson told the outlet in a statement. “We are working to help state lawmakers restore trust in our elections, ensure transparency, and protect the rights of every American to a fair election. This is our number one priority, and we are committed to doing whatever it takes.”
Heritage Action, which is affiliated with the right-leaning think tank The Heritage Foundation, seeks to turn “conservative ideas into reality on Capitol Hill,” the nonprofit says on its website.
“We do that by holding lawmakers accountable to their promises to advance the conservative principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense,” the organization says of its core priorities.
Election integrity came to the forefront in a dramatic way in 2020, with former President Donald Trump and his allies making claims that reduced security measures—primarily around mail-in ballots—led to fraud that cheated him out of victory.
In the broader debate about election security, conservatives—and Republicans in general—have tended to argue that casting a vote is a privilege of citizenship that should be safeguarded with secure processes and restrictions, and that lowering requirements around voting opens the process up to fraud and abuse. Progressives—and their Democrat allies—tend to hold the view that barriers to casting a ballot should be as low as possible and that the kind of security measures pushed by conservatives, such as stricter voter ID or proof-of-citizenship laws, amount to disenfranchisement. Progressives often frame the debate as between voter suppression and expansion, while conservatives tend to see it as election security versus vulnerability to abuse.
In the wake of the 2020 election controversy, Republican and Democrat lawmakers across the country have been pulling in opposite directions by introducing legislation that either reduces barriers—and guardrails—to voting, or seeks to strengthen election integrity, which can also make casting a vote more effortful or burdensome.
The Brennan Center for Justice, an advocacy group that pushes for progressive policies, counted 106 bills in 28 states designed to tighten voting standards so far this year, a significant jump from last year. At the same time, 35 states introduced a total of 406 bills to make voting less restrictive, also up from last year.
BELOIT, WISCONSIN – NOVEMBER 03: Stickers ready to be passed out to residents after they vote at the Beloit Public Library on November 03, 2020 in Beloit, Wisconsin. After a record-breaking early voting turnout, Americans head to the polls on the last day to cast their vote for incumbent U.S. President Donald Trump or Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
A key law in this regard being pushed by Democrats is H.R. 1, or the For the People Act of 2021. It passed the Democrat-controlled House last week on a largely party-line vote of 220-210, with all Republicans voting against it.
The controversial election reform package, which spans nearly 800 pages, seeks to impose requirements on voting procedures across the entire country. Its provisions include transferring authority over how elections are administered from states to the federal government, mandating automatic voter registration in all 50 states, and legalizing nationwide vote-by-mail without the need to provide photo ID to obtain an absentee ballot.
Heritage Action, in one of its key election integrity policy fights, called H.R. 1 “Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s signature piece of legislation to rig the election system in favor of Democratic politicians by undermining America’s electoral process.”
The organization argues that the bill “interferes with the ability of states and their citizens to determine qualifications for voters, to ensure the accuracy of voter registration rolls, to secure the integrity of elections, to participate in the political process, and to determine the district boundary lines for electing their representatives.”
“The end goal of H.R. 1 is clear—to enshrine into law dubious electoral practices that enable and encourage fraudulent behavior, such as ballot harvesting, false voter registrations, duplicate voting, and ineligible voting,” Heritage Action says.
The Biden administration, which has strongly pushed for the bill, praised its passage, saying the legislation is “urgently needed to protect the right to vote and the integrity of our elections, and to repair and strengthen American democracy.”
President Joe Biden speaks about his administration’s COVID-19 response, in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington on March 2, 2021. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Biden has said he would sign the bill into law if it reaches his desk, which may be a tall order since the proposed legislation would need 60 votes to overcome the Senate filibuster, meaning 10 Republicans would have to buy in.
Republicans have roundly denounced the bill, with governors and state legislators across the country saying it would kneecap election integrity efforts.
A previous version of the bill had passed the Democrat-controlled House 234-193 at the beginning of the 116th Congress in 2019 but ultimately did not get taken up in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Eritrea has freed 21 female Christian prisoners but the country’s forces stand accused of attacking churches in the troubled Tigray region of neighboring Ethiopia.
The women, all reportedly young mothers, had been held in an island prison on the Red Sea since last August.
They were arrested in 2017 after a series of raids on underground churches by the Eritrean authorities. Many of their husbands were conscripts, leaving their children without anyone to care for them, human rights group Release International reports.
They are the latest Christians to be freed from prison in a string of unexpected prisoner releases over the past half year.
Last month, 70 Christians from evangelical and orthodox backgrounds were freed, and another 27 last September. In total, 171 Christians have been freed since last August.
There are still around 130 Christians in Eritrean prisons and an unknown number of Army conscripts locked up for practicing their faith. A further 150 Christian prisoners are believed to be detained by the Army, but little is known about them, Release said.
Although the charity has given a cautious welcome to the prisoner releases, it warns that this good news is being overshadowed by attacks on churches in Tigray by Eritrean forces.
A massacre in the sacred city of Axum killed an estimated 800 people, including many priests and church members.
The attack involved the Church of St Mary of Zion in Axum, which Ethiopians traditionally believe is home to the Ark of the Covenant, which held the Ten Commandments.
Eritrea has denied involvement in the fighting in Tigray, but local witnesses have reported troops in Axum identifying themselves as Eritrean. They also claim to have seen Eritrean forces hoisting their flag and distributing Eritrean identity cards to Ethiopians under their control.
“Despite the prisoner releases in Eritrea, these horrific church attacks suggest it’s far too soon to suggest a change of heart toward Christianity,” said Release CEO Paul Robinson.
“The attacks on churches in Tigray are appalling, and Eritrea continues to hold many senior pastors who have been detained indefinitely — some for up to 17 years.
“Until all are set free and the killing of Christians stops it’s too soon to talk of lasting change.
“Any such change would have to be proven by giving full freedom of religion to all Eritrea’s citizens.”
Local Release partners believe the prisoner releases might have been carried out in order to curry favor with Ethiopia’s prime minister, who is a Christian.
“Our partners believe Eritrea is trying to extend its influence in the Horn of Africa,” said Robinson.
Release International partner Dr Berhane Asmelash believes the assault on Tigray churches is more about power than religion.
“Religion is power. Every village has a church. The church is the center of the community. Remove the church and the community will be left without leaders,” he said.
“The Eritreans believe if they kill the priests and leaders, they can easily manipulate the people. So wherever they go, if they see a priest they will kill him.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas begged Monday for volunteers from agencies within his department to rush to the border to help with an “overwhelming” surge of illegal immigrants.
In an email to department employees, Mr. Mayorkas said he was copying an idea the Trump administration used in 2019, during the last surge.
The email is another indication that despite public pronouncements to the contrary, the Biden administration believes it is facing a crisis at the border.
“Today I activated the Volunteer Force to support Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as they face a surge in migration along the Southwest Border,” Mr. Mayorkas wrote in his note.
He pointed to the 900 employees that stepped forward in 2019 and asked for a similar effort this time.
“I also realize these are uncertain times and being away from home may be concerning. But today your colleagues need assistance carrying out their mission to help others, and DHS is going to support you while deployed,” Mr. Mayorkas wrote.
He didn’t say exactly what that meant, but said “your health and wellbeing will remain priorities.”
Mr. Mayorkas has declined to label the surge of migrants a “crisis,” instead calling it a challenge.
Officials on the border, though, say they have little doubt the surge in numbers, and the return of catch-and-release policies, is a crisis.
The Arizona Department of Education has launched an internal review in response to revelations that it promoted a number of controversial claims in its “equity” toolkit, including the notion that babies as young as 3 months old can be racist, according to filmmaker and City Journal contributing editor Christopher Rufo.
SCOOP: The Arizona Department of Education has created an "equity" toolkit claiming that babies show the first signs of racism at three months old and that white children "remain strongly biased in favor of whiteness" by age five.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 2, 2021
What are the details?
Rufo posted a statement from the state education department on Twitter, in which the department announced the review while suggesting the resources were part of a “school improvement process” and were “intended for use by school leaders as they work closely with the families they serve.”
In the statement, the department noted that it “recognizes the need for resources that explore equity and inclusion issues” in order “to ensure that every student has access to an education that allows them to achieve their full potential,” but admitted it is “currently conducting an internal review” of certain resources in light of the recent scrutiny.
What’s the background?
Rufo broke the news last week that some of the resources recommended for educators and parents on the department’s website advanced controversial claims associated with the critical race theory agenda.
BREAKING: The Arizona Department of Education has launched an internal investigation into their "babies are racist" teaching materials. This isn't enough. Governor @dougducey must conduct a full external audit—and end this absurd propaganda. Featured on @IngrahamAngle. pic.twitter.com/KneZdU4tfZ
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 6, 2021
He took screenshots of a number of the resources and posted them in a Twitter thread. One of the resources included an infographic entitled, “They’re not too young to talk about race!” which cites a study claiming, “At birth, babies look equally at faces of all races. At 3 months, babies look more at faces that match the race of their caregivers.”
Another resource suggested that babies are not “colorblind” and that parents must instill “antiracist attitudes and actions” starting at birth in order to prevent their children from “absorb[ing] bias from the world around them.”
Still, additional resources reportedly recommended by the department suggest to white parents that they “can have a black friend, partner, or child and still be racist” and claims that white people deny their own racism to “alleviate some of their white fragility.”
The news is only the latest example of critical race theory and progressive identity politics making their way into classrooms across the United States.
Rufo discovered last month that Buffalo Public Schools in upstate New York had woven similar ideas into its “woke” new curriculum, which teaches students that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism” and that American society was designed for the “impoverishment of people of color and enrichment of white people.”
Last week, TheBlaze broke news that a public school system near St. Paul, Minnesota separated a class full of middle schoolers into “privileged” and “targeted” groups in order to demonstrate how oppression is carried out against minorities in the U.S.
Joe Biden has released $3 billion of Iran’s funds in Iraq, Oman and South Korea that were tied up by President Trump’s sanctions.
Despite the fact Iran was likely behind the attack on a U.S. air base in northern Iraq last month, Biden has reportedly approved access to billions of dollars for Iran without any known preconditions.
Hamid Hosseini, a member of the Iran-Iraq Chamber of Commerce, says $3 billion of Iranian assets in Iraq, Oman & S. Korea have been freed.
He says Iraq's PM got approval from the US to release the assets for humanitarian purchases, which Iran has used to buy corn already. pic.twitter.com/pzpP3GYtyo
US sanctions imposed by former President Donald Trump have prevented Iran from accessing tens of billions of its assets in foreign banks.
Iranian frozen assets in Iraq amount to more than $6 billion, according to Iranian officials.
The head of the Iran-South Korea Chamber of Commerce said in October Iranian frozen funds in South Korea are worth $8.5 billion and added that their release depended on the outcome of the US presidential election.
Iranian officials have not commented on the value of Iran’s frozen assets in Oman.
Iran’s economy has been hit hard since 2018 when Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers and reimposed sweeping sanctions on the country.
Iran’s chances of gaining access to billions of dollars of its frozen assets abroad have risen significantly since Trump, who pursued a policy of “maximum pressure” against Tehran, left the White House.
Biden’s renewed policy of appeasement toward Iran is similar to Barack Obama’s, who had sent Iran a pallet of $1.7 billion in cash in 2015 to coax them into the Iran nuclear deal.
Notably, Iran put an $80 million bounty on Trump’s head last year after he ordered the airstrike against Gen. Qassam Soleimani, leading some to wonder if Obama’s payment was used to fund the bounty against Trump.
