The Republican-led push to establish a fiscal commission for the U.S. debt was met with vocal opposition during a House Budget Committee hearing on Wednesday, with progressive advocates and Democratic lawmakers calling the proposal a thinly veiled ploy to further undermine and cut Social Security and Medicare.

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), one of eight witnesses who testified at Wednesday's hearing, said he was "a little skeptical" that Republican lawmakers are now concerned about the national debt given that they have driven it up with tax cuts for the rich and large corporations in recent years—and are still trying to increase it.

According to one analysis, the series of tax cuts approved under former Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for the bulk of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001.

The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is spinning rapidly and altering space-time around it, a new study has found.

Space-time is the four-dimensional continuum that describes how we see space, fusing one-dimensional time and three-dimensional space together to represent the space fabric that curves in response to massive celestial bodies.

A team of physicists observed the black hole, which is located 26,000 light-years from Earth, with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, a telescope designed to detect the X-ray emissions from hot regions of the universe. They calculated Sagittarius A*’s rotational speed by using what is known as the outflow method, which looks at radio waves and X-ray emissions that can be found in the material and gases surrounding black holes, otherwise known as the accretion disk, according to the study published October 21 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

An Arizona judge on Wednesday denied 2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s request to review ballot envelope signatures, concluding it “would have a corrosive effect on public confidence in the electoral process.”

In September, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge John Hannah presided over a two-day trial to decide whether Lake’s legal team could have access to review the ballot envelope signatures for the 2022 general election in the county.

Lake lost the race to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs by less than 1 percent of the vote.

Earlier this month, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN announced that she had filed a subpoena demanding the release of flight logs associated with the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, a figure notorious for his connections with high-profile individuals in human trafficking and sexual abuse.

Blackburn has set her sights on the private flight logs of the late Jeffrey Epstein.

“Since we’re in the business of issuing subpoenas now, here are a few more that I filed a subpoena to Jeffrey Epstein’s estate to provide the flight logs for his private plane,” Blackburn announced.

“Given the numerous allegations of human trafficking and sexual abuse surrounding Mr. Epstein, I think it is very important that we identify everybody that was on that plane and how many trips they took on that plane and the destinations to which they arrived,” she added.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams fears he is about to be indicted on federal campaign violation charges, sources tell DailyMail.com. 

Adams is said to have expressed his fears this week to people close to him as the FBI investigation into his campaign finances gathered steam, and after his former top fundraiser Brianna Suggs retained her own lawyers, foregoing the team that is currently representing City Hall. 

Between 2018 and 2021, Adams' campaign accepted $18,000 in total from Turkish individuals and organizations. He returned $5,000 to fall in line with donation limits. 

The FBI is investigating whether those donations breach campaign laws that prohibit contributions from foreign governments or individuals working on their behalf. 

It’s probably new pandemic. Both China and West are complicit and need it for social engineering.

In a world inundated with information, the role of journalists is paramount. Their duty lies in presenting news objectively, devoid of personal biases. Let’s uphold the essence of unbiased reporting for a more informed society.

House Republicans are launching a "one-stop shop" website for all things related to the impeachment inquiry against President Biden on Wednesday so that the American people can "see the clear corruption that Joe Biden and his family have committed," Fox News Digital has learned. 

The website, GOP.gov/Bidenimpeachmentinquiry, will highlight the work of the committees leading the effort — the House committees on Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways & Means — and will include summaries of their findings to date, along with supporting "key evidence." A GOP aide told Fox News Digital that the website will be a "one-stop shop" for Americans. 

At least one person is dead after a U.S. military Osprey aircraft crashed near the coast of Japan Wednesday, the Japan Coast Guard said. 

Eight people were aboard the aircraft when it went down around 2:47 p.m. local time. Shortly after the crash, the 10th Regional Coast Guard Headquarters said it dispatched a patrol boat and aircraft to the crash scene, CNN reported. The aircraft crashed into the ocean near the island of Yakushima, which is about 45 miles south of the southern main Japanese island of Kyushu, a coast guard spokesperson told NBC News. 

The Japanese Coast Guard said one man was recovered “unconscious and was not breathing” near the site of the crash. He was given CPR and taken to Anbo Port, which was nearly two miles away, but the Osprey crew member was later pronounced dead. No details were given on the status of the other seven crew members. 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s presence in a potential three-way presidential race between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden has many pundits wondering what could happen. Leftists are panicking as new polls show Kennedy shifting more votes toward the former president, paving the way for negative articles about the independent candidate to surface.

One such anti-Kennedy article was recently written by New York Times investigative reporter Susanne Craig, who rose to prominence in the editorial world after falsely writing that then-President Donald Trump was not a self-made millionaire.

Now, Craig is turning her focus toward Kennedy, who has been seen steadily rising in polls against the president, posing a risk to the Democratic Party in 2024.

A gag order prohibiting former President Donald Trump from criticizing court employees was reinstated by a New York appeals court.

On Thursday, the court restrained a gag order that forbids the 45th president and his attorneys from making public statements about the courtroom staff in his fraud case.

New York Judge Aurthur Engoron first issued the gag order in early October following a series of social media posts by Trump that were directed at one of his law clerks. 

Attorney General Letitia James of New York is accusing Trump of business fraud, which Trump is currently defending against.

Judge David Friedman of the Appeals Court put a stay on Engoron’s gag order, citing possible First Amendment violations by Trump.

Webmaster addition: The timing is curious, coming right after Deutsche Bank testified they used their own valuations of Trump's property!

George Santos vowed to file a motion to expel Jamaal Bowman. Additionally, the Republican blasted the representatives that want to expel him.

Santos (R-N.Y.) held a press conference on Thursday where he said that he will not be resigning. He announced that he is calling upon the press to investigate his fellow members of Congress.

“If the House wants to start a different precedent and expel me, that is going to be the undoing of a lot of members of this body because this will haunt them in the future,” he warned. “I came in here as a mad-as-hell activist and… I got to see how the sausage is made. I get to take that story back to the American people… I’m proud of the work I put forward. If this is it, then this is it.”

He continued by stating that he plans to file a motion  for expulsion of “convicted, guilty-pleaded Congressman Jamal Bowman (D-N.Y).”

Bowman has pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of setting off a fire alarm in the Cannon House Office Building before a significant House vote.

RT’s Steve Sweeney takes a look at the overall statistics from Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza as it seeks to eliminate the militant group Hamas. The damage sustained by the Palestinian enclave has already been described by the UN as “the darkest chapter in Palestinian history.”

According to a new UN report, the combined explosive power unleashed by the IDF in Gaza since October 7 already exceeds that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the US at the end of WWII. The Palestinian death toll is now higher than the count following several years of US strikes on Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Israeli bombardment campaign was launched following the surprise Hamas attack on Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed. Israel’s response has so far claimed the lives of over 15,000 Gazans, including some 6,000 children, according to the enclave’s health officials.

It was about four years ago that ZeroHedge went through ad monetization hell, having lost most of our advertisers because they did not approve of the content on this website and as a result they - together with such members of the Censorship Industrial Complex such as Newsguard, Sleeping Giants and CheckMyAds and various three letter US government agencies - did everything in their power to kill the site by starving it of ad revenue (it's what prompted us to launch a premium, subscription-supported version without which we would not have survived, and therefore we wish to personally thank all of our premium subscribers).

Fast forward to today, when Elon Musk is going through the same hell, as a growing group of companies are trying to do to X/Twitter what they tried to do to us by targeting the social media network and trying to starve it of ad revenue (their stated trigger of responding to the Media Matters fake news "report" was just a red herring: if it hadn't been for Media Matters, they would have found some other point of "virtue" to rally around, and pull their ads).

Of course, there is one key difference: Elon is the world's richest man, and if Twitter does not generate even one additional dollar of revenue, Elon will still be a multi-billionaire, and X can continue to operate for a long, long time if not in perpetuity (if costs are trimmed enough). It's also why Elon yesterday had some choice words for those advertisers who had halted advertising, telling them "go fuck yourself" (with a shout out to Disney chief Bob Iger) if they think they can blackmail Musk... which is precisely what ad demonetization is: a not so subtle way of pushing content and editorial direction in exchange for a monthly stipend.

Beijing and Washington are in talks to restore military communication channels following an agreement reached by the leaders of the two countries earlier this month, the Chinese defence ministry said on Thursday.

Senior Colonel Wu Qian, the ministry spokesman, said during a press briefing on Thursday that the defence authorities of the two countries were communicating and coordinating to resume military-to-military communication "on the basis of equality and respect".

It was the first time the Chinese defence ministry has confirmed it is working with the US to restore military communication channels that had been suspended amid deteriorating ties between the two powers.

A report from +972 Magazine published on Thursday detailed how Israel is intentionally targeting civilians in Gaza as part of its war strategy even when Israeli forces know strikes will kill young children.

The report, which cited current and former Israeli intelligence officials, said the massive civilian casualties in Gaza since October 7 are due to Israel expanding its authorizations to bomb non-military targets and the loosening of restrictions related to civilian deaths. Israel’s operations in Gaza have had a very high civilian casualty rate, but never at the scale of the current conflict.

Sources told +972 that the Israeli military has files on many potential targets that give them a good idea of the likely civilian casualties their strikes will cause. In one case discussed by the sources, Israel’s military command approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to kill one Hamas commander.

The House on Thursday passed a bill that would force the president to permanently freeze $6 billion in Iranian funds that were briefly made available to Tehran as part of a prisoner swap deal.

Under the deal, the US and Iran exchanged prisoners, and the US allowed the transfer of the $6 billion from South Korea to Qatar, where Iran would receive access to the money. But shortly after the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, the Biden administration decided to go back on the deal and cut off Iran’s access to the money.

The administration made the move due to pressure from Congress over claims that Iran was involved in the October 7 attack, even though there’s no indication it was. US intelligence determined Tehran was surprised by the Hamas assault, and Israel said it had no evidence of Iranian involvement.

A rocket strike on a US base in Syria on Wednesday was the first attack against US troops in Iraq or Syria since the truce between Israel and Hamas in Gaza took effect on November 24.

A Pentagon official told The National that a single rocket targeted Mission Support Site Euphrates, a US base in eastern Syria, and caused no injuries or damage to infrastructure.

The attack marks the 74th time US troops have been targeted in Syria and Iraq since October 17. Some of the Iraqi Shia militias responsible for the attacks have said they were following the Gaza truce by not attacking US forces, but there are many different factions in the operations.

Sen. Rand Paul is planning to force a vote on a resolution he introduced to withdraw all US troops from Syria, as US bases in the country have come under frequent attack since mid-October, Responsible Statecraft reported on Wednesday.

Paul introduced the resolution on November 15, and it would order the removal of the approximately 900 US troops stationed in Syria within 30 days unless President Biden receives authorization for war from Congress.

Sources told RS that the vote could happen as early as next week. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) introduced a similar resolution in the House earlier this year, which failed in a vote of 103-321.

According to the Pentagon, there have been at least 73 attacks on US troops in Iraq and Syria, including over 30 in Syria. The attacks started on October 17 in response to President Biden’s support for Israel’s onslaught in Gaza.

An extraordinary email uncovered by a Dutch researcher under freedom of information laws confirms what many have long charged: Bellingcat, the “open source” collective widely cited by mainstream journalists and loved by the CIA, collaborates directly with Western intelligence agencies.

An email sent on November 12 2020 by an officer within Amsterdam’s National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV) shows a Bellingcat investigation was intentionally shared with the agency prior to publication, so as to assist the Dutch spooks in shaping media strategies and messaging following its release. The revealing communication is irrefutable proof of the cozy relationship the self-styled “independent investigative collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists” enjoys with Western intelligence services.

In the message, marked “high importance,” the undisclosed author explained that Bellingcat would soon publish research amounting to a deeply libelous attack on independent journalists and researchers, who challenged the mainstream narrative surrounding Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. As such, the Dutch intelligence officer wrote, “it is probably smart to put together interdepartmental wording for this already”:

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at the age of 100 — though if the predecessors of Israel’s ruling Likud party had their way, he may not have made it even halfway to the century mark.

Despite his reputation as a geopolitical kingmaker, Kissinger was never able to fully impose total U.S. authority upon Israel, but he did seek to leverage U.S. influence — sometimes against what the right-wing Likud party viewed as its interests.

In the 1970s, Kissinger was so hated by the Likud party, which now controls Israel’s far-right coalition government, that some of its members tried to have him assassinated, according to a news report from the time.

This winter is likely to see a long and bloody stalemate in Ukraine, with neither side backing down from offensives and counteroffensives, but may sow the seed of negotiations next year, experts tell Al Jazeera.

“The winter is just going to reinforce the misery … neither side is going to have a tactical or operational breakthrough,” retired colonel Seth Krummrich, now vice president at Global Guardian, a security consultancy, told Al Jazeera.

Last week, Maria Zeee interviewed me on the Alex Jones Show (see below), and I mentioned something that everyone seems to be missing in the current maelstrom of geopolitics: That as the dollar dies, so does any other nation depending on US currency creation. Given Israel’s heavy dependence on U.S. foreign air and the dollar funding of the U.S. Navy, when the dollar dies, Israel will face an existential threat of its own.

It is the careless creation of trillions of dollars in US currency that powers the Pentagon, after all. It also funds government propaganda ops like what we all suffered through during the COVID years when the CDC and FDA ran a coordinated psychological operation against us all, trying to convince the weak-minded that “emergency use” vaccines are safe and effective at preventing infections and halting transmission. We now know, of course, it was all an engineered lie.

But it was a lie made possible through currency creation. Without easy money, a nation can no longer sustain its campaign of lies. And as the dollar collapses, so will the Empire of Lies, which might as well be the new name for the U.S. State Dept and accompanying Military Industrial Complex that gains power and profit from engineered mass human suffering and death.

Carron J. Phillips — the Deadspin writer who accused a 9-year-old boy of wearing blackface to a Kansas City Chiefs game — on Thursday posted two entries on the X platform calling attention to a Native American tribe's reaction to the kid wearing a headdress.

Philllips didn't use words to preface his pair of posts; instead he employed "eyeball" emojis, which typically are used as a "Look at this!" signal to readers.

But Phillips' attempt to keep his story afloat appeared only to make X users furious, as they're in the process of ratioing each entry into oblivion (i.e., when comments outnumber likes) and blasting him for "still harassing children" among other things.

Here's a tiny sampling from the nearly 1,500 comments — and counting — on one post:

Over the past several days, dozens of Palestinian women and children have been released from Israeli prisons as part of the hostage exchange deal between Israel and Hamas. 

As of Thursday, 180 Palestinian women and children were freed from Israeli prisons in exchange for 99 Israeli women and children, as well as foreign nationals, mostly Thai laborers, who were freed from captivity in Gaza. 

As more footage rolls in of Palestinian children, mostly young teenage boys, crying and hugging their mothers upon their release from Israeli prison, more and more people have been left wondering: why was Israel holding on to so many Palestinian children in the first place? 

The phrase is straight out of Yes Minister. Michael Gove's evidence to the Covid Inquiry on Tuesday was cut off for straying into what a smooth-talking Government lawyer deemed 'a somewhat divisive issue'.

Gove, a Cabinet minister for most of the past 13 years, ventured to state that 'there is a significant body of judgment that believes that the virus itself was man-made'.

This goes further than any British official has previously dared. Gove is an exceptionally clever man - and I have no doubt his intervention was deliberate. He has been long aware of the overwhelming evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid, was genetically engineered to become a human pathogen in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan in China.

As Yes Minister's Sir Humphrey might put it, the Secretary of State apparently forgot what it was he wasn't supposed to know. In fact, what Gove called the 'significant body of judgment' is overwhelming.

Brits will be told to 'go in, stay in, tune in' if the UK is hit by a 'radiation emergency', according to new advice from health chiefs.

The guidance was published today by UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).

It comes amid rising global tensions involving nuclear powers such as China and Russia.

Last year Russian state TV even brazenly simulated how Vladimir Putin could launch a nuclear strike on London, declaring there would be 'no survivors'.

While the document makes no mention of nukes, it does explain what Britons should do in a 'radiation emergency', which could be caused by a leak at a nuclear power plant or during the transport of radioactive material.

Ron DeSantis thinks Florida's Republican Party Chairman Christian Ziegler should step down while he's investigated for rape allegations from a woman he and his wife were engaged in a three-way relationship with.

In a press conference following a debate in Georgia on Thursday with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Florida leader said the mission of his state's GOP is 'too important' to get muddied with the investigation.

Ziegler's wife, Bridget, is co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a right-wing parental rights group and Sarasota County School board member.

The couple rising in the ranks of Florida politics had their ambitions rocked this week with the emergence of allegations against Christian.