'Obama, worried about Trump, urges Biden circle to bolster campaign'

 Former president Barack Obama has raised questions about the structure of President Biden’s reelection campaign, discussing the matter directly with Biden and telling the president’s aides and allies the campaign needs to be empowered to make decisions without clearing them with the White House, according to three people familiar with the conversations.

Obama grew “animated” in discussing the 2024 election and former president Donald Trump’s potential return to power, one of the people said, and has suggested to Biden’s advisers that the campaign needs more top-level decision-makers at its headquarters in Wilmington, Del. — or it must empower the people already in place. Obama has not recommended specific individuals, but he has mentioned David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s 2008 race, as the type of senior strategist needed at the Biden campaign.

Obama’s conversation with Biden on the subject took place during a private lunch at the White House in recent months, one of the people said, a meeting that has not been previously reported. Biden, who has long used Obama as a sounding board, invited his former boss to lunch, and the two discussed a range of topics including the 2024 election.

During the lunch, Obama noted the success of his reelection campaign structure in 2012, when some of his top presidential aides, including David Axelrod and Jim Messina, left the White House to take charge of the reelection operation in Chicago. That is a sharp contrast from Biden’s approach of leaving his closest aides at the White House even though they are involved in all the key decisions made by the campaign.

Obama also recommended that Biden seek counsel from Obama’s own former campaign aides, which Biden officials say they have done, the people said.

Obama has been even more explicit with people close to Biden, suggesting the campaign needs to move aggressively as Trump appears poised to quickly wrap up the Republican nomination. His concerns about the campaign structure were not tied to a specific moment, but rather his belief that campaigns need to be agile in competitive races, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential conversations.

Spokespeople for Obama and the White House declined to comment.

Obama has long harbored worries about Trump’s political strength, telling Biden during a different private lunch last summer that Trump is a more formidable candidate than many Democrats realize. He cited Trump’s intensely loyal following, a Trump-friendly conservative media ecosystem and a polarized country as advantages for the former president in 2024.

Obama warns of Trump's political strength

Obama, who commands enormous loyalty and star power in the Democratic Party, is not alone in worrying about Biden’s weak poll numbers and his unorthodox bifurcated campaign structure.

Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager, is based at the campaign headquarters in Biden’s hometown of Wilmington, while the president’s top political advisers — Anita Dunn, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti — work more than 100 miles away at the White House. That means any important move by the campaign is run by the White House first, prompting concern among some Democrats as they head into a turbulent contest that is likely to require immediate responses to fast-moving developments.

Axelrod said Friday he could not speak to Obama’s discussions with Biden, but that each president approaches his reelection differently, and Biden’s campaign structure may yet evolve.

“Jim and I started building the structure in Chicago in the spring of ’11. President Biden has chosen to keep many of his key political advisers in the White House,” Axelrod wrote in a text message. “But by necessity, I would expect several of them will move fairly soon to the campaign itself.”

But some Democrats running on the ticket with Biden are worried. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who is running for her state’s open Senate seat, has expressed concern to allies that she may not be able to win if Biden is at the top of the ticket, according to people familiar with the conversations. A spokesman for Slotkin’s campaign said she “looks forward to running with President Biden.”

Outside of urging structural changes, Obama’s sense of urgency about the upcoming presidential race has been reflected in his push to raise money for Biden’s effort. He has helped the Biden campaign raise $4 million in small-dollar donations, including $2.6 million through a “Meet the Presidents” contest where donors have the chance to meet Obama and Biden, Biden campaign officials said.In a statement this summer, Eric Schultz, a senior adviser to Obama, said the former president “looks forward to supporting Democrats up and down the ballot next fall, and no race has bigger stakes than President Biden’s reelection.”

“We place a huge emphasis on finding creative ways to reach new audiences, especially tools that can be directly tied to voter mobilization or volunteer activations,” Schultz said. “We are deliberate in picking our moments because our objective is to move the needle.”

On Thursday, the Biden campaign released a new fundraising video featuring the two leaders. “We need your help to ensure Joe’s leadership continues to guide us forward,” Obama says in the video. “We know the other side won’t rest, so we can’t either.”

The relationship between Obama and the man who served as his vice president for eight years is a complex one. The two men developed a strong working relationship and their families bonded well, but aides to both men say the “bromance” depicted in some pop culture accounts was always an exaggeration. These days, Biden and Obama check in with each other periodically, and Obama remains close to many of his former staffers who now work in the White House.

Some Biden allies who have heard about Obama’s musings on their campaign structure are dismissive, still feeling burned by Obama’s decision to support Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election instead of Biden.

Tensions linger between Obama and Biden camps

The mention of Plouffe in particular irritates some longtime Biden aides, because it was Plouffe whom Obama dispatched to warn Biden that he faced long odds if he decided to seek the presidency in 2016. “The president was not encouraging,” Biden wrote in his memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.”

The Biden aides note bitingly that Clinton, despite Obama’s support, lost to Trump in 2016, a defeat that remains traumatizing for many Democrats. Plouffe declined to comment but has told friends he is retired from active campaign work.

But even Biden is frustrated by his public standing, frequently complaining about his low poll numbers in private conversations with aides. In one meeting shortly before Thanksgiving, he demanded to know what his team and his campaign staff were doing about it. The low approval ratings have persisted despite a humming economy, as the country added 216,000 jobs in December.

Just before year’s end, Biden’s rating tied his record low, with 38 percent approving his performance and 58 percent disapproving, according to a Washington Post average of 17 polls in November and December. Voters, including a majority of Democrats, say they are particularly concerned about Biden’s age and consistently rank it as a bigger problem for the president, 81, than for Trump, 77.

Democrats are also concerned about Biden losing support among younger voters and communities of color because of his handling of the Israel-Gaza war. In December, a New York Times-Siena College poll found that 57 percent of voters disapproved of his handling of the conflict, while 33 percent approved.

Biden’s aides, however, say that if Trump becomes the Republican nominee as analysts on both sides expect, a clear majority of voters will find Biden preferable, given Trump’s chaotic style and anti-democratic tendencies. And in the Times-Siena poll, while all registered voters supported Trump over Biden, those likely to vote favored Biden.

On Friday, Biden held his first major official campaign event, traveling to Valley Forge, Pa., to give a speech blasting Trump as a threat to democracy on the eve of the anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Biden launched his reelection campaign in April, but to date his political activity has largely been confined to fundraisers and a few appearances at political rallies hosted by outside groups.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/06/obama-biden-meeting-campaign-2024/

North Korea's Kim Yo Jong vows immediate strike if any provocation

 North Korea will immediately launch a military strike in response to any provocation, Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of leader Kim Jong Un, said on Sunday.

The remarks come after South Korea's military said the North had fired more than 60 artillery rounds on Saturday near their disputed maritime border, following a similar volley of more than 200 the previous day.

North Korea was firing shots again on Sunday, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported, citing the South's military.

"I make myself clear once again that the safety catch of trigger of the Korean People's Army (KPA) had already been slipped," Kim Yo Jong said in a statement carried by state news agency KCNA.

"As already declared, the KPA will launch an immediate military strike if the enemy makes even a slight provocation," Kim said, using the official name of the North Korean army.

Although South Korea held its own fire drills in the sea on Friday in response to the artillery shells, Yonhap said there was no plan to do so after Saturday's events.

Friday's duelling drills sparked warnings for residents of South Korean border islands to seek cover in bomb shelters, although there were no reports of shells crossing the maritime border.

In the statement, Kim denied the Saturday firing and said the North had detonated explosives as a deception.

South Korea's military rejected Kim's statement as low-level psychological warfare, urging North Korea to cease military activity that raises tension near the border.

https://www.marketscreener.com/news/latest/North-Korea-s-Kim-Yo-Jong-vows-immediate-strike-if-any-provocation-45688021/

Italian foreign minister calls for formation of EU army

 The European Union should form its own combined army that could play a role in peacekeeping and preventing conflict, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said.

In an interview with Italian newspaper La Stampa, Tajani said that closer European cooperation on defence was a priority for the Forza Italia party that he leads.

"If we want to be peacekeepers in the world, we need a European military. And this is a fundamental precondition to be able to have an effective European foreign policy," he said in an interview published on Sunday.

"In a world with powerful players like the United States, China, India, Russia - with crises from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific - Italian, German, French or Slovenian citizens can only be protected by something that already exists, namely the European Union," he added.

European defence cooperation has risen up the political agenda since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost two years ago.

However, efforts have been more focused on NATO expansion, with EU nation Finland joining the alliance last year and Sweden also on track to become a member.

Tajani also said the 27-nation EU should streamline its leadership and have a single presidency, rather than the current structure of a European Council president and a European Commission president.

The foreign minister became leader of Forza Italia following the death of Silvio Berlusconi last year.

European Parliament elections in June will be the first gauge of the party's popularity after the loss of its charismatic former leader.

https://www.marketscreener.com/news/latest/Italian-foreign-minister-calls-for-formation-of-EU-army-45688041/

China's COSCO halts shipping to Israel -Israeli media

Chinese shipping firm COSCO has suspended shipping to Israel, Israeli financial news website Globes reported on Sunday.

The report, which did not include details behind the decision, came as shipping lanes in the Red Sea have been disrupted by attacks carried out by Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen.

COSCO offices in Israel declined comment. Israeli port officials said they were checking the report.

https://www.marketscreener.com/news/latest/China-s-COSCO-halts-shipping-to-Israel-Israeli-media-45688042/

'France and Iran discuss risks to Mideast stability'

 France's foreign minister said on Saturday that she had told her Iranian counterpart that the risk of a Middle East regional conflagration had never been greater and that Tehran and its proxies needed to end their destabilising activities.

"Iran and its associates must immediately stop their destabilising actions," Catherine Colonna said on social media platform X after speaking with Hossein Amirabdollahian.

"No one would gain from escalation."

Amirabdollahian said the only way to quell conflict was to resolve the root causes, Iran's state media reported.

"An effective step in ending violence in the region would be to stop the crimes of the Zionist regime (Israel) and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, as well as taking action to stop the killing of civilians, facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid and prevent forced migration," the minister added.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/frances-says-iran-must-stop-163050715.html

Sunak considers measures to clear all Post Office victims

 Measures are being considered by the government to clear hundreds of sub-postmasters who were wrongly convicted in the Post Office Horizon scandal.

More than 700 branch managers were convicted of false accounting, theft and fraud based on faulty software.

Fewer than 100 people have had their convictions quashed.

The prime minister said the government was now reviewing options - including removing the Post Office from the appeals process.

Rishi Sunak told the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that the scandal was "an appalling miscarriage of justice".

The Post Office - which is wholly-owned by the government - acted as the prosecutor when it brought the cases against its sub-postmasters and retains a role when those individuals appeal.

In some cases it has opposed attempts by sub-postmasters to clear their names.

Asked by Laura Kuenssberg if the Justice Secretary Alex Chalk was looking at whether all those convicted could be exonerated or the Post Office could be stripped of its role, Mr Sunak said: "Obviously, there's legal complexity in all of those things but he is looking at exactly those areas that you've described.

"It is right that we find every which way we can do to try to make this right for the people who were so wrongfully treated at the time."

Last month, a board overseeing compensation called for all Post Office staff wrongly accused of theft and false accounting to have their convictions overturned.

The Crown Prosecution Service could step into the Post Office's role in the appeals process.

The Ministry of Justice said last month that it wanted the criminal appeals system to be as efficient and effective as possible, adding that it had asked the Law Commission to examine whether reforms were needed, and was waiting for that review to be concluded.

Lee Castleton, a former postmaster who said his life has been ruined by the Post Office, said that people are "traumatised" by both the appeals process and the battle to secure compensation.

"We're just normal people", he told the BBC, adding that it should be taken out of the "hands of the people that really caused it".

"I would love it to be taken out of the hands of the people that really caused it in a way," he said."This is not just a computer issue, this is a people issue.

"People took people to court. People made decisions on faulty data that they probably knew was faulty."

A Post Office spokesperson said: "We share fully the aims of the public inquiry to get to the truth of what went wrong in the past and establish accountability. It's for the inquiry to reach its own independent conclusions after consideration of all the evidence on the issues that it is examining."

The Metropolitan Police is now investigating the Post Office over potential fraud offences arising from the prosecutions.

Potential offences could relate to "monies recovered from sub-postmasters as a result of prosecutions or civil actions", it said.

The Met has already been examining potential offences of perjury and perverting the course of justice in relation to investigations and prosecutions carried out by the Post Office.

Two people have been interviewed under caution but nobody has been arrested since the investigation was launched in January 2020.

The Met announced its new investigation after 50 new potential victims of the scandal came forward following an ITV drama on the issue, which aired this week.

ITV/REX/Shutterstock

ITV's Mr Bates vs the Post Office drama - a scene from which is seen here - has led to renewed anger over the scandal

Between 1999 and 2015 more than 700 sub-postmasters were prosecuted and convicted based on information from the Horizon accounting system which made it look like money was missing.

Some sub-postmasters wrongfully went to prison, many were financially ruined and forced to declare bankruptcy, while others describe being shunned by their communities following convictions for false accounting and theft. Some have since died.

To date, 93 convictions have been overturned and, of those, only 27 people have agreed "full and final settlements".

Some 54 cases have resulted in convictions being upheld, people being refused permission to appeal, or people withdrawing from the process, according to the Post Office.

A public inquiry into the scandal is ongoing.

There has been widespread sympathy for the victims - and renewed anger - after the four-part mini-series Mr Bates vs the Post Office: The Real Story aired on ITV this week.

It centres on the story of sub-postmaster Alan Bates, played by actor Toby Jones, who led and won a legal battle, paving the way for dozens of convictions to be overturned.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67905194

Obama's Weird New Movie And America's Extreme Vulnerability To Cyber-Attack

 by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us

There has been a lot of buzz lately about a recently released film by Netflix titled ‘Leave The World Behind’ based on a novel by the same name.  The plot revolves around a catastrophic collapse in the US triggered by a cyber attack (and mass drone attack) that shuts down the internet and disrupts the global economy, leading to questions of who might have been behind the sabotage?

The most interesting aspect of the film is not so much the story (which is lackluster at best), but the fact that Barack Obama was so deeply involved in the making of the film as executive producer and as adviser on the script. This has led many people to suggest the movie is actually predictive programming – Propaganda designed to acclimate the masses to the idea of an event that is planned to happen in the near future.

Similar concerns were raised back in 2021 when the World Economic Forum oversaw a “war game” called Cyberpolygon, an event meant to simulate a massive cyber attack on the vulnerable functions of the world-wide web. The reason Cyberpolygon raised so many eyebrows was perfectly understandable; the WEF had also hosted another simulation at the end of 2019 called Event 201. The game, which included the CEOs of some of the most powerful health and media corporations in the world along with numerous government officials, “coincidentally” focused on the outbreak of a global coronavirus pandemic, and it was held only a couple of months before the real thing happened.

In other words, it was as if the globalists at the WEF knew that covid was about to strike.

While Hollywood interpretations of cyber attacks are usually exaggerated in terms of the true effects, there is a very real and considerable threat associated with such a disaster. So-called “experts” in the tech field often dismiss the wider dangers to the internet itself because they have been indoctrinated into believing that the design of the web has too many redundancies. In other words, they act as if it is invincible.

This is not really the case. Though data loss can be prevented through cloud storage, the internet as a mechanism can still be shut down or taken down deliberately for long periods of time.

In the past I have written about a very interesting event that was barely covered by the corporate media called the “Fastly Outage.”  In June of 2021 there was an internet outage that led to large swaths of the web going completely dark, including a number of mainstream news sites, Amazon, eBay, Twitch, Reddit. A host of government websites also went down. All this happened when content delivery network (CDN) company Fastly experienced a “bug.” Although Amazon had its website back online within 20 minutes, the brief outage cost the company over $5.5 million in sales.

A content delivery network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. They make up the what is known as the “backbone” of the internet.

Fastly identified and fixed the problem within two hours and continues to claim the outage had nothing to do with a cyber attack. However, a huge vulnerability for the internet (a center of structural support Carl von Clausewitz would’ve called a “schwerpunkt”) was revealed to the public. A sizable portion of the web is dependent on only a handful of CDN companies, including Fastly.

It is also through collusion with these companies that governments are able to implement an “internet kill switch” in the face of possible civil unrest. A cyber attack would simply remove the government as the arbiter (or act as a false flag scapegoat so the government can avoid blame).  But what would really happen if we lost the internet for a week, or a month or a year? In the US the result would be calamity because our economy has become far too dependent on digitization.

Around 10% of US GDP is directly tied to online commerce. This doesn’t seem like much, but a loss of that GDP would send the US into immediate and steep recession. Around 17 million jobs in the US are generated by commercial internet enterprises, and around 38% of these workers are employed by small businesses. According to surveys 70% of American workers say they cannot do their jobs effectively without internet access.

Keep in mind, if the trend of “work from home” during the covid lockdowns had stuck, an even bigger piece of the economy would be dependent on the health of the web.

The five industries considered most vulnerable to cyber attack are public administration, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, finance and insurance, education and retail. That is to say, these are the industries that are attacked most often. Attacks on vital utilities are usually the favorite set pieces for disasters portrayed in fiction and film, but these are actually far less worrisome. The real danger is the potential for an attack on the internet as a system. All it would take is for a couple CDNs or more to be hit simultaneously to cause vast online blackouts.

Most important of all are the ways in which international banking and finance utilize online networks to maintain the flow money. Without the web, trade velocity dies immediately and building it back from implosion could take years.

But who would benefit from such an attack? Certainly, foreign powers might see the crippling of America’s digital infrastructure as a way to severely damage the country without having to fight directly and militarily. However, there are also a number of benefits to the globalists.

For example, one of the biggest obstacles for the elites during their attempt to institute medical tyranny and the ‘Great Reset’ during covid was the proliferation of factual data that debunked the pandemic narrative. American conservatives represented a serious barrier to their success with tens of millions of gun owning patriots refusing to comply. The harder they pushed, the greater the chance of an armed insurgency.

Even though the establishment had every single Big Tech conglomerate on their side when it came to mass censorship of contrary information, they still failed to stop the spread of the truth – Covid was nowhere near the threat they hyped it up to be and the public was quickly made aware of this by the alternative media. The elites did not have as much control over the web as they thought they did.

In the event of a large scale cyberattack, the internet could be shut down completely, leaving only corporate media sources to filter information and control the narrative. The alternative media would be silenced and the public would be left in confusion, desperately searching for answers. Interestingly, this is a core theme of Obama’s ‘Leave The World Behind’ – The idea of a population utterly cut off from reliable information and scrambling to figure out who is attacking them.

The internet has become an integral pillar of western economies to the point that a majority of people would not know how to live without it should it disappear. This is the disturbing reality we face in the midst of a growing series of geopolitical conflicts and more oppressive governments. It would seem it’s only a matter of time before there’s a major disruption.

The solution is pretty straightforward – Localization of trade and production is the way to prevent full spectrum collapse, and alternative communication networks such as ham radio networks can prevent information silence. There is no reason why Americans should have to become subservient to the whims of globalism, the interdependent supply chain or digitization; they can and should create their own backup plan. Getting people to realize this and implement basic local measures is where we run into difficulties. Sadly, a lot of first-world citizens assume that the system will always be there for them when they need it, and they don’t actively seek out solutions until disaster is at their doorstep.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/obamas-weird-new-movie-and-americas-extreme-vulnerability-cyber-attack