In 2017, Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and a former adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, called Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa the “most influential man of the 20th century and, arguably, the beginning of the 21st.”

He was the man who pulled back the curtain to reveal the disinformation that was being churned out from the Soviet bloc. Unfortunately, most people remained unfamiliar with Pacepa and his work.

In the early morning hours of Feb. 14, 2021, COVID-19 accomplished what a $2 million bounty and two separate teams of Romanian-sponsored assassins could not. Ion Mihai Pacepa, “Mike” to those who knew him, was called home to his eternal reward. //

Eventually the CIA convinced Carter of Pacepa’s bona fides, and Western intelligence agencies tapped the invaluable information he provided. Most important was his explanation of the way Soviet agents planted disinformation to deceive and undermine faith in Western governments, leaders, history, and institutions—especially the churches. When Pacepa later attained U.S. citizenship, the CIA gave him a letter thanking him for his “important and unique contribution to the United States.”

In Romania, Ceaușescu created a special Securitate unit charged with the sole task of assassinating Pacepa. The dictator also put two separate $1 million bounties on his head and dispatched the infamous assassin “Carlos the Jackal” to carry out the job, as well as a second team of assassins. They came close. Twice Pacepa’s secret identity was compromised and he had to undergo plastic surgery and rebuild his life with his American wife, a CIA agent whom he met while being debriefed.

Researchers only drilled through an Antarctic ice shelf to sample sediment. Instead, they found animals that weren't supposed to be there. //

Bivouacked in the middle of the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf—a five-hour flight from the nearest Antarctic station—nothing comes easy. Even though it was the southern summer, geologist James Smith of the British Antarctic Survey endured nearly three months of freezing temperatures, sleeping in a tent, and eating dehydrated food. The science itself was a hassle: To study the history of the floating shelf, he needed seafloor sediment, which was locked under a half mile of ice.

Wow, what coincidental timing.

The story claiming that a police officer was murdered by Trump supporters during the Capitol Hill protest on January 6 is, for all practical purposes, retracted by the NYT the day after Pres. Trump is acquitted on the impeachment charge of having instigated those protests — which were declared by Democrats and the media an “insurrection” against the government. //

Was Officer Sicknick beaten or wasn’t he? Three individuals died from medical emergencies and one person was shot and killed by Capitol Hill Police. So Officer Sicknick was the other person “killed by hostile action.”

But the truth is that the NYT no longer has any interest in the truth of what actually happened to Officer Sicknick. The story can no longer be wielded as a political weapon against Donald Trump, and that was the entire purpose of the exercise from the beginning.

“The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is probably the most ideologically intoxicated, most dogmatic political party of Leninist stripe in human history. Yet, we don’t tend to think of the CCP that way.”

Tonight, we sit down with Miles Yu, who served as Senior China policy adviser to Mike Pompeo when he was secretary of state. While many today still harbor illusions about the Chinese regime, the CCP seeks to “replace the U.S.-led international order with its own authoritarian model of governance,” Yu says. And “their internal designation of the United States as chief adversary has never changed.”

Miles Yu grew up during China’s Cultural Revolution, a decade of revolutionary change and violence in which millions were killed. In 1985, he came to the United States as an exchange student.

He’s been a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy for 26 years and after finishing his time at the State Department, he’s now a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute.

The evening of May 31, 2009, was like any other in Rio de Janeiro. As the crew of an A330 prepared for departure, it would have been like any other flight home. A long stretch over the deep black of the Atlantic, dodging thunderstorms as they made their way back to Paris. Tragically, a few hours later the aircraft would enter a deep stall and fall into the ocean.

After a lengthy investigation, it was found that the pitot tubes which help detect the airspeed had momentarily frozen. This gave the crew conflicting and confusing information on the screens which ultimately led the speed to drop so low that the wings were not generating enough lift to keep them flying.

If anything positive came from this awful event it’s that it served as a wake-up to the industry to the dangers of unreliable airspeed and how it is handled by crews. It forced manufacturers and operators to review their procedures and improve training for pilots.

How the problem is dealt with very much depends on the aircraft type and how the airspeed is sensed and presented in the flight deck. As a result, when training on a new type of aircraft, it is important that we as pilots know exactly how the pitot-static systems works and what to do should they fail.

Scientists were expecting to find an intermediate-mass black hole at the heart of the globular cluster NGC 6397, but instead they found evidence of a concentration of smaller black holes lurking there. New data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have led to the first measurement of the extent of a collection of black holes in a core-collapsed globular cluster.

Van der Veen stressed—when addressing the issue of what Trump did or didn’t do while the riot was occurring—that the House’s single article of impeachment is for incitement and not for anything else.

“To claim that the president in any way wished, desired, or encouraged lawless or violent behavior is a preposterous and monstrous lie,” van der Veen said. “In fact, the first two messages the president sent via Twitter once the incursion of the Capitol began were ‘Stay peaceful’ and ‘No violence because we are the party of law and order.’ The gathering on Jan. 6 was supposed to be a peaceful event. Make no mistake about that.” //

Schoen complained about a lack of due process for Trump, including the House’s impeachment and the Senate’s trial.

“The hatred that the House managers and others on the left have for President Trump has driven them to skip the basic elements of due process and fairness,” Schoen said.

A bigger problem was the lack of opportunity for Trump’s lawyers to review the integrity of the evidence, he said:

On Wednesday of this week, countless news outlets repeated the Democrat talking point about the power of ‘never-before-seen’ footage. Let me ask you this: Why was this footage never seen before? Should the subject of an impeachment trial, this impeachment trial, President Trump, have the right to see the so-called new evidence against him?

More importantly, the riot and the attack on this very building was a major event that shocked and impacted all Americans. Shouldn’t the American people have seen this footage as soon as it was available? For what possible reason did the House managers withhold it from the American people and President Trump’s lawyers? For political gain? How did they get it? How are they the ones releasing it?

Between 10 and 15 million voters in this country decide the outcome of Presidential elections and the partisan makeup of the Congress. These are the voters who “swing” from one party to the other during election cycles. Capturing the majority of these voters is the path to winning control of the government. //

The amplification of her views through the megaphone of her Hollywood celebrity could not be tolerated by maybe the wokest of woke companies in Hollywood — Disney, a world-wide media behemoth. That one of their topline stars would align herself with the non-woke in such public ways was not tolerable. She could not be a source of conservative thought extending its reach via Disney portals of entertainment and communication.

Religious dissident Sun Yi, locked up by China in the Masanjia Labor Camp, used his sparse English vocabulary to pen numerous SOS letters -- one of which was found by Julie Keith.