There Are at least FOUR Pending Investigations Against Hunter Biden.

 

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Shocking video captures moment NYPD cops shoot gunman outside NYC church

 

Shocking video footage captured the moment police shot down a crazed gunman who opened fire outside an Upper Manhattan church on Sunday afternoon.

The video was posted to Facebook by Steven Wilson, who wrote that he and his family had attended the outdoor Christmas choir concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine that immediately preceded the chaotic 3:45 p.m. daylight shooting.

The unidentified 52-year-old suspect can be seen falling to the ground outside the church’s entrance after at least 13 shots were fired in the video clip.

“Kill me! Kill me!” the maniac screams from the top step of the church toward police gathered below on the street, according to the footage.

One cop is seen in the video running behind a garbage pail in front of the church, where he ducks, takes aim and repeatedly pleads with the man to drop his gun.

After that officer opens fire, the suspect can be seen moving behind a church pillar.

Soon after, another cop joins his colleague behind the garbage pail. After a quick succession of gunshots, the suspect finally drops to the ground, the footage shows.

“They got him, they got him,” the man filming can be heard saying.

About a dozen cops then creep up the stairs with their guns drawn before surrounding the suspect as he lies motionless.

The man was taken to Mount Sinai Morningside Hospital and pronounced dead, police said.

Nobody else was injured in the mayhem, authorities said.

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Santa Infects 75 with COVID-19 after visiting a nursing home in Belgium

 

Santa Claus spread more than good cheer at a nursing home in Belgium — with his visit leaving at least 75 people infected with COVID-19, according to local TV.

The alleged super-spreading St. Nick was one of the first to fall sick after his visit to the Hemelrijck care home in Antwerp just over a week ago, followed by 61 elderly residents and 14 staff, officials told VRT.

“It was made with the best intent, but it went wrong,” the Mayor of Mol, Wim Caeyers, said of the visit, calling it “a very black day for the care home.”

“It is a very great mental strain to bear for the man that played Saint Nicholas, as well as for the organizers and the staff,” Caeyers told the network.

“It will be all hands on deck during the coming week,” he said of trying to contain the outbreak.

Staff initially insisted that Santa — who was reportedly the son of one of the residents — wore a mask and adhered to safety protocols, as did those who met him. However, photos of the meet-and-greet quickly proved that to be untrue, the mayor claimed.

Jannes Verheyen, a rep for Armonea, the company that runs the care home, told The Brussels Times that everyone was “shocked” at what happened.

“It makes no sense to condemn people,” he said, with staff instead “motivated” to control the virus’ spread.

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Dusiznies ......Gmail, YouTube, other Google services hit with massive outage

B"H we are back ... 

Google services including the most popular blog, Dusiznies, Gmail and YouTube suffered a massive outage Monday morning that briefly shut users around the world out of their accounts.

The outage disabled all of Google’s Workspace services — including Google Calendar, Google Drive and the Google Meet videoconferencing tool — at the start of the workweek along with the tech titan’s flagship email platform.

Google confirmed the outage on its public status dashboard at 6:55 a.m. and said it had restored service for “some users” about 35 minutes later. The company did not immediately respond to an email asking what caused the problems.

“We expect a resolution for all users in the near future,” Google said on the dashboard.

The outage was most widely reported in Europe and the East Coast of the US but users also flagged problems in India, Japan and parts of South America, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.

Gmail users received error messages saying their accounts were unavailable when trying to access their emails, according to Twitter posts about the problems. For instance, the service said it “couldn’t find your Google account” when a Post reporter attempted to log into his Gmail account.

The YouTube homepage was also disabled — it currently shows a cartoon image of a monkey holding a hammer with the message, “Something went wrong…”

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the problems Monday.

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Why the cultural elite truly despises Chanukkah

 

Our cultural elites’ least ­favorite Jewish holiday has arrived: Chanukah, of course.

Why did Chanukkah irk everyone from the late Christopher Hitchens, who memorably ­derided it as a “celebration of tribal Jewish backwardness,” to author Sarah Prager, who took to the pages of The New York Times recently to explain that she won’t be teaching her kids about it?

Well, because Chanukkah is about as out of step with the contemporary elite consensus as any religious tradition can be.

If you haven’t reviewed the story in a while, here’s how it goes. One fine day in 167 BC, a crowd of Jews was gathered in the town square of Modi’in, a suburb of Jerusalem.

They were there ­because the Seleucid Empire — the successors of Alexander the Great’s expansive dynasty — had recently moved into town. The conquerors believed that their Greek culture was the only path to enlightenment. The Seleucids had resolved to Hellenize this peculiarly stubborn people, the Jews, and they sought out the right kind of Jewish collaborator — you know, those who weren’t too bearded or too weird — to persuade the rest of the locals to abandon their backward mountain God and primitive laws.

And then, just as one of those Hellenizing Jews stepped up to sacrifice to almighty Zeus, out came a priest named Mattathias. Having precisely zero ­patience for idolatry, the fiery-eyed zealot killed not only the Jewish collaborator but the ­Seleucid governor, as well. Mattathias thus launched a war — partly an internal Jewish conflict, partly a rebellion against Greek imperial power — that would end with that well-publicized victory of the priest and his sons, the Maccabees, aided by one miraculous vat of oil.

So what’s Chanukkah truly about?

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Simple: It’s about the rootedness of tradition against the imperialism of cosmopolitanism. If you were a Jew at that time, you basically had two choices: You could love the beauty of your ancestral heritage and love it no matter what, or you could watch as the ruling class attempted to recreate the social order in its own universalist image — and hope that your acceptance by the powerful would somehow substitute for the loss of family, community and tradition.

Plus ça change. . . This is why the story of ­Chanukah still makes so many people, particularly in elite, technocratic quarters, so ­uncomfortable. Unlike other Jewish holidays, such as Passover, this one can’t be reduced to a stripped-down celebration of bourgeois, liberal values: “It’s about going on long journeys of self-discovery!” “It’s about the unending quest for tolerance and inclusion!”

Chanukkah is a story about national and religious aspiration, about the beauty that comes from belonging somewhere in particular. And how the refusal to follow the empty pieties of the ruling class of the time kept the Jewish people together. It’s a story that horrifies the mandarins of liberal modernity. But it should reassure the rest of us.

Remember, after all, that the greatest moments in American history have come not when we’ve severed ourselves from our traditional sources but when we’ve consecrated ourselves to them. Think Abraham Lincoln reinterpreting the Declaration of Independence as an aspiration rather than a description of fact or Martin Luther King Jr. telling and retelling the story of Moses for a nation still mired in the idolatry of racism.

Let’s not kid ourselves: The American culture war isn’t going anywhere, and it increasingly isn’t a war between left and right, Democrats and Republicans, the coasts and the heartland. Rather, we confront two radically different visions of society. One views the very idea of rootedness as inhibiting progress and prosperity. It regards tradition as, at best, just another amusing pastime like bird watching or online gaming, easily discarded at the first sign of inconvenience — at worst, as the enemy of true human fulfillment, which requires us to unburden ourselves of all received wisdom, all inherited obligations.

But there are also those of us who’ve learned the lesson of Chanukah. We realize that the rush to denounce our old traditions means squandering the greatest societal good we have. For it is precisely in understanding that we come from somewhere — that our past puts obligations upon us in the present — that we’ll help create an American future that is not just great, but good.

Happy Chanukah.

Rabbi Ari Lamm is chief executive of Bnai Zion and the founder of The Joshua Project. Twitter: @AriLamm

If you get sick... don't call Dr. Jill Biden .... She can't help you

An opinion essay criticizing Jill Biden for using the honorific “Dr.” has reportedly resulted in its author having his profile removed from the website of Northwestern University.

The essay, titled, “Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not if You Need an M.D.,” appeared Friday in The Wall Street Journal. It was written by Joseph Epstein, an author and editor who was a lecturer at the university, which is located near Chicago.

Epstein wrote that Jill Biden – the wife of President-elect Joe Biden -- using “Dr.” before her name “sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic,” because her doctorate is in education, not medicine or science.

He also argues that earning a Ph.D. “may once have held prestige, but that has been diminished by the erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards in university education generally.”

Late Saturday, journalist David Gura wrote on Twitter that Epstein was no longer identified as an “emeritus lecturer” on the Northwestern website.

Gura then posted a statement from Northwestern regarding Epstein, in which the university said it does not agree with Epstein, whom it accused of having “misogynistic views.”

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John Brennan "the hypocrite" disputes Israel’s right to defend itself

 The former CIA director who drew up the US 'kill list' criticizing the assassination of Iran's Fakhridazeh? You've got to be kidding.

It has been over a week since the lynchpin of the Iranian nuclear project, Mohsen Fakhridazeh, was killed in what appears to be an immaculately planned and flawlessly executed strike by elusive and yet to be identified assailants. Nonetheless, analysis of what took place and speculation of what might take place as a result, are still at the focus of considerable media attention.

The prime suspect?

While no state or organization has claimed responsibility/credit for the action, and despite the fact that a good number of interested parties had reason to approve of his sudden demise, suspicion fell chiefly on the secret intelligence service of Israel, the Mossad.

Depressingly, but not unexpectedly, international condemnation was both swift and widespread.

Thus, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, issued a disapproving statement, calling the killing “a criminal act [that] runs counter to the principle of respect for human rights the EU stands for.”

In similar critical vein, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab expressed concern over “the situation in Iran and the wider region [where] we do want to see de-escalation of tensions.” Although he admitted that “We’re still waiting to see the full facts…of what’s happened in Iran,” he nevertheless stressed the need to “stick to the rule of international humanitarian law which is very clear against targeting civilians.”

Significantly, as Ron Jontof-Hutter deftly points out, both Borrell and Raab seem either woefully misinformed or willfully misleading in describing Fakhrizadeh as a “civilian/official.” After all, it is widely known that he was a brigadier general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, not only an elite and highly privileged arm of Iran’s military, but also designated a terrorist organization by the US in April 2019.

Hostile & hypocritical?

But perhaps the most alarming and annoying reaction came from John Brennan, who served as the Director of the CIA under the Obama administration (2013-17). In a series of tweets immediately after the attack, Brennan decried the killing of Fakhrizadeh in the strongest of terms.

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Time to call in a special counsel on Hunter and Joe Biden

by Michael Goodwin

Now that the election is over and it is safe for the media to cover the Hunter Biden scandal they ignored when The Post broke the story in October, things in Washington are getting back to normal. FBI and Justice Department officials are once again leaking like sieves to their favorite reporters.

The New York Times knew before the election that Joe Biden was the “big guy” in line for a secret 10 percent stake in a deal with a Chinese energy conglomerate, but the paper withheld the information from readers. Yet now that Hunter Biden admits he’s under a criminal tax probe, the Gray Lady begins to stir.

In a Friday piece about the perils of the probe for Hunter’s father, the Times writes that “the inquiry originally focused on possible money laundering but did not gather enough evidence for a prosecution, according to people close to the case.”

Yada yada yada, the real question is, what else did the Times know and when did it know it? And why did it keep silent before Election Day?

Try to imagine Donald Trump and his family getting the same deference.

“People familiar with the matter” are also telling The Wall Street Journal that Attorney General Bill Barr kept two separate probes into Hunter Biden quiet during the final weeks of the campaign.

Perhaps it wasn’t Barr — perhaps it was the leakers who stayed silent to protect Biden. Or maybe the leakers leaked but the media didn’t want to hurt their candidate, so they waited until after the election.

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Brooklyn woman, 47, is sexually assaulted and robbed 0n Ave N and E 33rd in Marine Park

 

Police in New York City are hunting for a man who has been accused of following a woman to her apartment in Brooklyn in broad daylight, tying her up while pretending he was armed with a gun and sexually assaulting her. 

The attack took pace at around 12.40pm on Thursday in the area of Avenue N and East 33rd Street in the Marine Park section of Brooklyn.

According to police, the assailant followed the woman up to her apartment, pushed an object resembling a gun into her back and ordered her to open the door.

Once inside, the intruder punched the victim in the face, restrained her using zip ties and duct tape, and sexually assaulted her, reported CBS New York.

Before fleeing, the suspect ransacked the woman’s apartment in search of valuables, and got away with her cellphone and and an unspecified sum of cash.

When police responded to the scene, they found the woman with her hands and feet still bound.

The woman was later taken to NYC Health & Hospital/Coney Island, where she was listed in stable condition.

The victim's boyfriend told WABC she is in shock.

The perpetrator was last seen driving westbound along Kings Highway in a 2012 grey Mitsubishi Outlander SUV.

The NYPD has released surveillance video, showing the wanted man dressed in a dark-colored hooded sweatshirt and jeans with shiny kneepads, a black hat and a matching face covering.

He was described as a man with a medium build and light complexion.

Anyone with information on the suspect’s whereabouts is being asked to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477), or visit www.nypdcrimestoppers.com.

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Hangman who sent the Beasts of Belsen to hell: Gripping portrait of the cigar-smoking book-keeper who executed 13 of the most depraved Nazis

 

Albert Pierrepoint (left) was the third in the dynasty to take up the lethal profession. His father Henry was a Northamptonshire butcher who, as a young man, used to practise the best way to tie a noose. Nazi murderers Josef Kramer and Irma Grese, pictured, were hanged at Hameln, Germany, by Albert Pierrepoint. They were two of 13 Belsen guards, put to death on December 13, 1945. Inset: Defendants at Belsen War Crimes Trial in Luneberg, Germany.

The family name was synonymous with Death. It was notorious across Britain. Everyone knew the hangmen, the country’s official executioners, were called Pierrepoint.

And 75 years ago this weekend, it was a Pierrepoint who was summoned to Germany, to mete out justice to 13 of the most evil and depraved Nazis to be captured at the end of WWII— concentration camp commandant Josef Kramer, the Beast of Belsen, and his psychopathic cadre of guards.

This was perhaps the most macabre meeting of the war . . . between a cigar-smoking grocer’s book-keeper from Manchester and part-time Angel of Death, and a fanatical SS officer with an insatiable appetite for murder.

Albert Pierrepoint was accustomed to working in the shadows. On his very first job as an assistant hangman, aged 27, he accompanied his uncle Thomas to Dublin, to hang a murderer at Mountjoy Prison, in 1932. His uncle emphasised the importance of travelling incognito, especially in the Irish Republic where the British were widely despised.

All his equipment was carried in the capacious pockets of his coat and jacket, to avoid becoming conspicuous by taking a bag through the prison gates. Also in Thomas Pierrepoint’s pocket was a loaded revolver. He insisted ‘Our Albert’ must carry one, too.

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