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Tax filings reveal Biden cancer charity spent millions on salaries, zero on research

A cancer charity started by Joe Biden gave out no money to research, and spent most of its contributions on staff salaries, federal filings show.

The Biden Cancer Initiative was founded in 2017 by the former vice president and his wife Jill Biden to “develop and drive implementation of solutions to accelerate progress in cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, research and care and to reduce disparities in cancer outcomes,” according to its IRS mission statement. But it gave out no grants in its first two years, and spent millions on the salaries of former Washington DC aides it hired.

The charity took in $4,809,619 in contributions in fiscal years 2017 and 2018, and spent $3,070,301 on payroll in those two years. The group’s president, Gregory Simon, raked in $429,850 in fiscal 2018 (July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019), according to the charity’s most recent federal tax filings.

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Biden COVID Advisory Board Member: Indoor Dining, Gyms, and Gatherings in Homes Should Be Targeted ‘for Closures’

During an interview aired on Friday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “WSJ at Large,” Biden COVID-19 Advisory Board member Dr. Celine Gounder stated that “places that we know are big contributors to transmission are indoor restaurants, bars, gyms, and also private social gatherings of friends and family in the home” “are really the places we need to target for closures” while prioritizing keeping other services, like schools, open.

Gounder said that the advisory board’s “consensus” is that “the draconian lockdowns, shutdowns that we had in the spring,” are unneeded, and that increased knowledge means we can “be much more targeted about how we tighten up some of our measures. I think of it like a dimmer switch, whereas before we had an on and off light switch. So, we can dial up and dial down in a much more granular fashion. So, some of the places that we know are big contributors to transmission are indoor restaurants, bars, gyms, and also private social gatherings of friends and family in the home. So, those are really the places we need to target for closures while keeping other services, for example, schools that are — have not been major contributors to transmission, they’re not zero-risk, but they are much lower risk, and they’re an essential service. And so, we’re really prioritizing keeping schools, for example, open.”

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The Army Tried To Turn Nerf Footballs Into Hand Grenades

Few things are as quintessentially American as football and most people in this country have probably played it in some form at least once in their life. This was what the U.S. Army was banking on when it developed an anti-tank grenade using an explosive charge jammed into a hollowed-out Nerf football in the early 1970s.

The Army’s Land Warfare Laboratory (LWL) at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland concocted the “football device,” something I wrote about briefly years ago now, as part of a broader effort to develop a hand-thrown anti-tank weapon of some kind that began in July 1973. The Army had originally established LWL in 1962 to develop, test, and evaluate any and all weapons or other technology that might be applicable to counter-insurgency campaigns, a type of warfare that was emerging around the world at the time. This included in various countries in Southeast Asia, such as South Vietnam and Thailand, where the United States was already becoming increasingly embroiled at that time. 

In 1970, LWL was renamed the Land Warfare Laboratory, a switch that kept its acronym intact, and it began exploring systems that be might useful to a broader set of conflict types. One of these efforts was the anti-tank grenade project, a requirement driven by concerns about the utility of existing infantry anti-armor capabilities, especially in an urban environment, such as the ones the U.S. military expected to be a primary setting for any major conflict against the Soviets in Europe.

“Current standard US Army antitank weapons have been designed to provide maximum practical stand-off range,” a 1974 final test report on the football grenade, as well as the other types LWL evaluated, explained. The primary infantry anti-tank weapons in Army service at the time were the BGM-71 TOW and FGM-77 Dragon anti-tank guided missiles and variants of the M72 Light Anti-Tank Weapon (LAW), a shoulder-fired rocket launcher.

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As Millions Face Eviction and Starvation, Pentagon to Spend Nearly $2 Billion a Day on War

According to an analysis from Feeding America, food insecurity will hit 52 million people due to COVID-19 in the United States, which is an increase of 17 million people from pre-pandemic times. Supply line disruptions, lower levels of donations, and millions of unemployed people who’ve lost their jobs due to government-imposed lockdowns have created a massive strain on America’s food supply and more and more family’s are being pushed into a situation of food insecurity.

It’s not just the brink of starvation that millions of Americans face either. Thanks to government-mandated lockdowns, a record number of Americans are unable to find jobs as businesses are forced to close or have gone out of business permanently. This is creating a situation in which families are unable to pay their rent — leading to the potential for mass evictions.

In March the CARES Act imposed a federal moratorium on evictions, which mandated that it was illegal to evict tenants who participate in federal housing assistance programs or who live in properties with a federally backed mortgage loan due to the nonpayment of rent. When the CARES Act moratorium expired on July 24, a host of state and local governments passed their own eviction prevention measures—but these actions varied significantly across the country and left many renters vulnerable to eviction once again.

Then, on September 4, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued another moratorium on evictions through December 31, 2020. While this will certainly help those who rent — temporarily — all the moratorium did was pass the burden onto the landlord who may no longer be able to pay the mortgage on the property without the incoming rent.

And no, contrary to what many believe, most landlords are not mega rich property owners and live modest lifestyles.

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Democratic senators warned of potential ‘vote switching’ by Dominion voting machines prior to 2020 election

Four congressional Democrats sent a letter to the owners of Dominion Voting Systems and cited several problems that “threaten the integrity of our elections,” including “vote switching.”

In a December 2019 letter to Dominion Voting Systems, which has been mired in controversy after a human error involving its machines in Antrim County, Michigan, resulted in incorrect counts, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, and Amy Klobuchar and congressman Mark Pocan warned about reports of machines “switching votes,” “undisclosed vulnerabilities,” and “improbable” results that “threaten the integrity of our elections.”

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