Also on today’s menu:
Report Claims U.S. Blew Up Nord Stream Pipeline
Rochester Woman Charged With Ax Attack
Special Counsel Subpoenas Mike Pence
“The National Democratic Committee would like to dictate to New Hampshire when they will allow us to hold our primary,” said New Hampshire Senator Regina Birdsell (R-Hampstead), “but our primary is set by law, not by a political committee.”
With bipartisan support, the senate passed a resolution to ignore the DNC and preserve the state’s first-in-the-nation primary which has been in effect more than 100 years.
While the Republican National Committee has approved the current lineup, which begins with Iowa’s caucuses followed by New Hampshire’s primary, the DNC voted to give South Carolina the first primary, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada, asking New Hampshire to rescind its law requiring that the state’s primary take place before any similar contest.
Report Claims U.S. Blew Up Nord Stream Pipeline
Seymour Hersh — the reporter who broke the story of the My Lai massacre in which a unit of American soldiers in Vietnam who had been ordered to attack a peasant village and kill on sight murdered, raped, and mutilated the residents, none of whom were enemies, and also broke the story about the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib — has now revealed that it was Navy divers, operating under the cover of the mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines.
Basing his report on “a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning,” Hersh said the United States worked with Norway to send deep-water divers underwater to plant the explosives to destroy both Nord Stream 1, which had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade, and Nord Stream 2, which was not yet operational, to cut off that revenue to Russia which had amassed troops on the Ukrainian border and then invaded the country.
While the White House has called Hersh’s report false, members of Congress are demanding answers about the operation which Russia had blamed on the U.S. or Western Europe from the beginning, despite the West’s contention that it was Russia that had blown up its own pipeline — an allegation that makes no sense and for which no evidence has ever been provided.
Rochester Woman Charged With Ax Attack
Sarah Rawlins, 35, of Rochester is facing two felony counts of criminal threatening with a deadly weapon after allegedly attempting to hit another woman with an ax and asking another person who was present at the October 22 incident to “give me the gun and I'll shoot,” according to an affidavit filed in connection with the case by Rochester police.
The confrontation began over a dispute at a Glenwood Avenue address over missing possessions, and Rawlins is accused of smashing all the windows of a VW sedan with an ax while someone was in the vehicle. When taken into custody, Rawlins had an “injury to her right hand, consistent with cutting her hand on glass,” the affidavit states.
If Rawlins is found guilty, each felony carries a three-and-a-half to seven-year prison sentence and a $4,000 fine.
Special Counsel Subpoenas Mike Pence
Former Vice President Mike Pence has received a subpoena from Special Counsel Jack Smith as part of the investigation into former president Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss secret grand jury proceedings.
Aides to Pence were unsure whether the former vice-president intends to resist the subpoena.
Trump had pushed Pence to help him derail the transfer of power to Joe Biden by preventing Congress from counting the electoral votes that would affirm Biden’s victory. In his recently released book, Pence wrote that he had directly told Trump that even his own lawyers didn’t think courts would support the former president’s plan to single-handedly overturn the results.
The subpoena may trigger an executive privilege fight if Trump or Pence ask a judge to rule that some or all of their testimony should be off-limits in order to protect White House deliberations.
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