Robert De Niro’s London Nobu Restaurant Took Coronavirus Relief Program Loans

Despite being worth an estimated $500 million, actor Robert De Niro took coronavirus money from the government to pay for expenses at his various restaurants across the globe, including his London-based luxury restaurant Nobu.

The Daily Mail reported on De Niro’s expensive London eatery, Nobu, to which celebrities flock when they are in the U.K.’s capital city. According to the paper, the 77-year-old star took enough government relief money to cover 80 percent of the high-end restaurant’s operating costs. U.K. government officials revealed the award of coronavirus relief money to De Niro’s restaurant.

The government report notes: “The restaurant has been closed since March 21, 2020, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.K., and reopened on May 6, 2020, to operate in providing a limited restaurant service that can be operated by the company under the recommended health and safety guidelines imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic such as food take away service.”

Nobu told the government that it expected “a significant decrease in profitability due to materially reduced revenues in 2020.”

John O’Connell, the CEO of the watchdog group Taxpayers’ Alliance, reminded readers that the relief money, while helpful to struggling companies, “ultimately comes from taxpayers, and support should only be sought if it’s really needed.”

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Biden Removes ‘We the People’ Petitioning From White House Website

It appears that the ‘We the People’ petition system has been taken off the White House website. Here is an archive of what it looked like before Biden took office.

The system has been around for many years. At any given time, hundreds of petitions were active. If you get 100,000 signatures, the White House is supposed to give an answer. You may remember that there was an active “Free Assange” petition that the Obama Administration was obligated to answer (and gave a bad answer).

When Trump took office, he briefly discontinued it but put it back up after a media uproar.

Now it appears the Biden White House has removed it. The website used to be here:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov

This URL, as well as URLs for all currently-active petitions, just forward to the White House front page. I explored the website and could not find any mention of it. The link used to appear in both the “Contact” and “Get Involved” links, but it is gone from both.

I have seen nothing about this in the media. When I Google “White House Petition System Down” and other similar searches, I only get 4-year-old articles about the time that Trump temporarily disabled it.

Wikipedia says that the system was taken down the day Biden took office: On January 20 2021, the day the Inauguration of Joe Biden took place, the website’s address started redirecting to the White House’s website home address.

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National Guard To Stay In DC ‘Through Fall 2021’

A leaked email suggests that there are plans to keep the National Guard in Washington DC beyond the previously discussed deadline of March 12th, and throughout the Summer AND Fall.

report by FOX 5 cites an internal email seen by reporters that reveals The National Security Council is asking the Department of Defense to engage Capitol Police on planning for post-March 12th support.

The report notes that there will be a meeting for agencies to discuss the matter next Wednesday, February 17th.

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Northeast Ohio school district cancels class over COVID-19 vaccine reactions

Two days after employees were given their first round of COVID-19 vaccinations, the Fairless Local School District canceled classes, attributing it to many developing side effects and becoming ill.

School employees across Ohio started getting their first round of the COVID-19 vaccinations, including Massillon City Schools and Medina County Schools on Friday, Akron Public Schools over the weekend, in addition to Tuslaw Local Schools in Massillon, Plain Local Schools in Canton and Fairless Local Schools in Navarre on Saturday.

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DARPA’s New Space Program Stirs Worldwide Concern

On the same day that Joe Biden obtained the Electoral College majority needed to become president of the United States, a metallic asteroid roughly half the size of New York City made its closest approach to earth. Far from indulging in apocalyptic visions of cosmic destruction, mining company executives like Bob Goldstein of US Nuclear Corp. were seeing dollar signs. Somewhere in the ballpark of $10,000 quadrillion of them in fact.

Goldstein and others in the resource extraction industry have been salivating over these otherworldly mineral prizes ever since Barack Obama signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act into law, which grants U.S. citizens the right to own resources mined in space. The bill, introduced and co-sponsored exclusively by Republican Congressmen, was passed by a unanimous vote in 2015.

Praised as a “landmark for American leadership in space exploration” by Congressman Bill Posey (R-FL), the Space Act of 2015, as it is also known, has elicited all manner of effusive reactions from private sector space industry giants like Planetary Resources, which had already struck a deal with Bechtel Corporation in 2013 to mine asteroids. Planetary co-founder Eric Anderson declared that the legislation was nothing less than a “major step toward humanity becoming a multiplanetary species.”

Despite the Neil Armstrong-esque displays by both private and public sector players, the recent inclusion of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) into the conversation has many on the international space policy side of the equation worried.

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Woman Gets Late-Night Police Visit For Anti-Mask Facebook Posts

Florida hair and makeup artist and mother of three Angelique Contreras received an intimidating late-night knock on the door from a law enforcement officer in Palm Beach County after she published anti-mask posts on Facebook. NATIONAL FILE has obtained video footage of this disturbing 10:30 PM encounter. Contreras verbally confirmed with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office that it was a sheriff’s officer who made the house call.

According to Contreras, Palm Beach County is trying to send citizens who can’t wear masks due to medical exemptions into a parking garage basement while County Commission meetings take place. Local press reporting confirms that mask-exempt citizens who want to speak at meetings will be sent to a separate building beneath a parking garage, instead of being able to address their leaders directly. When a man on Facebook joked about dumping garbage onto a County Administrator’s lawn, Contreras replied with the retort, “thousands of Mask(s).” This was enough to get the sheriff’s office to show up to her house, with the officer making clear that such Facebook posts are monitored in this day and age. Contreras’ children are aged 11, 3, and 1.

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