New York City endured a 2020 crime surge straight out of hell: a 97 percent jump in shootings and a nearly 45 percent surge in murders, including 15 weeks straight of gunfire as COVID-19 ravaged the city.

The NYPD released the sobering preliminary year-end stats Friday, eager to turn the page on a tally that recorded more shootings from mid-May through mid-September than in all of 2019, a soul-crushing surge that never let up — with 1,868 people hit by bullets.

When the ball fell in Times Square, the NYPD had responded to 1,531 shooting incidents across the five boroughs, 754 more than in all of 2019, officials said. The NYPD Detective Bureau investigated 462 killings around the city — 143 more than the year before.

The hasn’t been such alarming violence since 2006, when 1,565 shootings were reported, according to Police Commissioner Dermot Shea.

In a surprise twist on the Alexei Navalny saga, and on the very day that it's being widely reported Biden is preparing sanctions on Russia as punishment for his alleged poisoning by nerve agent last August, the human rights organization Amnesty International has withdrawn its formal designation of Navalny as a "prisoner of conscience".

US state-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports the following on Tuesday:

Amnesty International has reportedly withdrawn its recent designation of Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny's as a "prisoner of conscience" over his alleged advocacy of violence and discrimination and comments that included hate speech.

Aleksandr Artemyev, the rights watchdog's media manager for Russia and Eurasia, confirmed the decision to Mediazona on February 23 after the news was first reported by U.S. journalist Aaron Mate.

Pssst. Can I have your attention, please? I'm going to share a little secret that liberal "people of color" and their public relations agents in the media don't want you to know. The recent crime wave against Asians in America's big cities is not the fault of Donald Trump, MAGA activists, conservative talk radio, or white people. It's the fault of the perpetrators and the perpetrators alone—most of whom happen to be thugs "of color."

A police officer in Kentucky was fired on Feb. 19 over allegations he provided a Black Lives Matter organizer with information about other officers in the department during protests last year.

Lexington Police Officer Jervis Middleton was fired after a unanimous vote by the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council, said local reports. The council found Middleton guilty on two of three counts of violating operational rules.

“Officer Middleton’s conduct during a highly stressful and potentially vulnerable time during the history of our community - the most significant policing event in our community in 20 years - demonstrates that he should no longer be a police officer,” said Keith Horn, a lawyer with the city, told the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Middleton challenged his termination and said the information didn’t jeopardize officers’ safety and was free speech. Middleton, who is black, said he faced racial taunts and discrimination in the department.

The chair of Texas’s power grid operator and four other board members have resigned in the wake of the widespread outrage resulting from the energy crisis that crippled the state’s electrical system.

According to a filing by the PUC of Texas, Electric Reliability Council of Texas Chair Sally Talberg resigned along with Vice Chair Peter Cramton and board members Raymond Hepper, Terry Bulger, Vanessa Anesetti-Parra,/

In their resignation letter, the member cited recent concerns raised about out-of-state board leadership at the grid operator. “To allow state leaders a free hand with future direction and to eliminate distractions, we are resigning from the board effective after our urgent board teleconference meeting adjourns on Wednesday, February 24, 2021."

Despite all of the craziness that is going on out there, many pundits are trying to convince us that life will soon “return to normal” and that great days are just around the corner. They are telling us this despite the fact that the state of Texas has been in a state of collapse this week, the real economy continues to implode, the unemployment numbers are going up, civil unrest continues to rage in our streets on a nightly basis, and our entire planet continues to become even more unstable. Those that believe that happy days are here again have a fundamental misunderstanding of the times in which we live. This isn’t a period of time when America is going to “build back better”. Rather, this is a time when America is going to go even deeper into “the perfect storm”.

The financial repercussions of the winter-storm electricity crisis in Texas have entered the confession phase.

Just Energy Group, the Canada-based retailer of electricity and natural gas that is heavily involved in Texas, announced this morning in an SEC filing that it might have lost $250 million over the few days during the “Weather Event” in Texas, and that “the financial impact could change as additional information becomes available,” and that “once known,” the financial impact “could be materially adverse to the Company’s liquidity and its ability to continue as a going concern.”

This “going concern” warning is a standardized accounting term for the acknowledged possibility that the company might not be able to meet its obligations and might not be able to stay afloat.

When the columnist with the longest tenure at the country’s leading newspaper has no clue on the biggest issues facing the world, then it is a good sign that the elites in general have no idea what they are doing. He notes the disaffection of large numbers of middle class people in both Europe and the United States with the status quo.

Friedman correctly observes that “average work no longer returns an average wage that can sustain an average middle-class lifestyle.” However he absurdly blames this on “rapid accelerations in technology and globalization.”

Alternative for Germany (AfD) candidate Stephan Schwarz was hospitalised after a brutal attack by Antifa militants in the town of Schorndorf over the weekend while campaigning for this year’s regional election.

Schwarz, along with several other AfD activists, manned an information booth in the centre of the town on Saturday when they were approached by a group of around 15 to 20 people carrying hard-left Antifa flags and banners, the city prosecutor said.

A Trump supporter brought his Trump 2024 flag to an ice rink in New York’s Central Park and was tackled to the ice by security.

Dion Cini, who calls himself a “guerrilla marketer,” brought his flag to Central Park’s Wollman Ice Rink, a rink run by the Trump Organization, on what was supposed to be its last day of business after being targeted by the Democrat Big Apple mayor.

A video posted by FreedomNews TV shows Cini skating around the rink with a long pole festooned with his large Trump flag before security guards begin demanding that he leave the ice.

Eventually, security officers grab Cini and wrestle him to the ground to eject him from the rink. But as security deals with Cini, another man — identified as Travis Scott – is seen stealing Cini’s flag.

Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund said that a pre-Jan. 6 intelligence assessment suggested that Antifa, Proud Boys, and extremist groups would partake in the Jan. 6 event in Washington.

“The assessment indicated that members of the Proud Boys, white supremacist groups, Antifa, and other extremist groups were expected to participate in the January 6th event and that they may be inclined to become violent,” Sund said in a written statement (pdf) to the Senate.

It added that an “intelligence assessment indicated that the January 6th protests/rallies were ‘expected to be similar to the previous Million MAGA March rallies in November and December 2020, which drew tens of thousands of participants,” adding that faulty intelligence was to blame for the outmanned Capitol defenders’ failure to anticipate the riots.

With an ongoing pandemic, increasing unemployment, and an ever-growing amount of social unrest, 2021 is starting off as one of the more chaotic years in decades. With so much chaos, the obvious question to ask is how much is too much? How much can our institutions sustain before they begin to fall apart?

For many, the idea of societal collapse may seem like an unimaginable impossibility, but so too was the idea of mass shutdowns only a short time ago. The truth is societies often have, and still can, collapse, and we are fooling ourselves if we think that our specific little slice of history is any different.

As an exercise, I want to look at the current state of the United States and the three most likely ways it could collapse in the near future.

With one hand on his revolver, New York City police officer Frank Serpico knocked on the third-floor door. On the other side were drug dealers. Serpico had three colleagues waiting outside the apartment building, but when he cried out for help after being shot, none of the other officers came to his rescue.

Weeks later, Serpico would go on to expose deep-seated corruption in the country’s largest police department in 1970. It forced an overhaul that subsequent commissions of inquiry have said led to a reduction in systematic graft, previously commonplace in the NYPD. Now, half a century later, the killing of George Floyd by a cop in Minneapolis is sparking fresh demand for dramatic police reforms to end a culture of impunity that surrounds racial discrimination by law enforcement officials.