NEW DELHI (AP) — The elder brother of the Dalai Lama and former chairman of the Tibetan government-in-exile in India, Gyalo Thondup, who led several rounds of talks with China and worked with foreign governments for the Tibetan cause, has died. He was 97.
Thondup died at his home in Kalimpong, a hill town in the Himalayan foothills of eastern West Bengal state, on Saturday evening, media reports said. No other details were immediately released about his death.
Tibetan media outlets credited Thondup for networking with foreign governments and praised his role in facilitating U.S. support for the Tibetan struggle.
The Dalai Lama led a prayer session for Thondup at a monastery in Bylakuppe town in India’s southern state of Karnataka on Sunday where the spiritual leader is currently staying for the winter months.
He prayed for Thondup’s “swift rebirth,” in accordance with Buddhist traditions, and said “his efforts towards the Tibetan struggle were immense and we are grateful for his contribution.”
Thondup, one of six siblings of the Tibetan spiritual leader and the only brother not groomed for a religious life, made India his home in 1952 and helped develop early contacts with the Indian and U.S. governments to seek support for Tibet. In 1957, Thondup helped recruit Tibetan fighters who were sent to U.S. training camps in subsequent years, a report by the U.S.-funded Radio Free Asia said.
Since retiring a few years back, I’ve kept myself busy by working as a night attendant for a large retirement facility in the mid-West. The two main advantages of the job are that I get to meet some wonderful people as well as walk about seven miles each night which helps to keep me in generally good shape. Hearing the life stories of folks who have been on earth for the past eighty or ninety years and the insight they’ve learned has, at times, been fascinating and I’ve enjoyed it immensely.
Over the past few years, however, I’ve discovered many truths about our corrupt and broken Heathcare system, including just how badly uninformed enormous numbers of elderly people are about nutrition and the medical industrial complex that has largely taken over their lives.
The following are my observations and opinions based on numerous conversations with elderly residents. I don’t claim to be novel or innovative in my criticism of the contemporary Healthcare system. Nothing I’ve written here hasn’t also been said or written by someone else in some form. But this doesn’t make it any less true, and I hope some will be encouraged to rethink their opinion of doctors and the corrupt medical system that we’ve been subjected to.
The first thing I’ve learned is just how naively trusting the elderly are of their doctors. They really do view them as their ‘savior,’ almost godlike in a sense. To think their primary care physician may have ulterior motives other than the improvement of their personal health would come as a shock to a good many of them.
Before getting to the announcement, let me first answer a repeated question. “Why is it so easy for DOGE to identify wasteful spending?” ..in simple form.
When the trillion-dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was passed, those “shovel ready jobs” in fiscal year 2009, that was the last year of a full federal budget. Every budget year thereafter has been a process of continuing resolutions and omnibus spending. Within the CR process they use “baseline budgeting,” which essentially accepts all prior spending as the starting point for the next spending allotment within the Continuing Resolution process.
That means, the $1 trillion ARRA was not only spent in 2009 (Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi on behalf of Barack Obama), but it was also spent again in ever year thereafter. Without a formally followed federal budget process, every year there is an extra trillion dollars (that’s a thousand billion) injected into federal spending. That accounts for $16 trillion of the current deficit. Make sense now?
To be clear, what the DOGE team and U.S Treasury have jointly agreed makes sense is the following:
– Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible.
– All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale but simply requiring that SOME attempts be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!
– The DO-NOT-PAY list of entities known to be fraudulent or people who are dead or are probable fronts for terrorist organizations or do not match Congressional appropriations must actually be implemented and not ignored. Also, it can currently take up to a year to get on this list, which is far too long. This list should be updated at least weekly, if not daily.
The above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees, not anyone from DOGE. It is ridiculous that these changes didn’t exist already!
Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious.
When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!!
This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately. {link}
A lot of people are missing the point with USAID. Yes it’s great we are exposing that our money has been funneled to corrupt institutions, but USAID is not the boogeyman, it is just a tool.
There is a reason Mike Benz ✡️ (Jewish) is running point on this, and it’s to mislead you from the Jewish influence that has actually been running these NGO’s, the Media, and the like.
President Donald Trump has decided to remove security clearances for several Democrats, including former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, both of whom are vocal Trump critics.
Former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Biden’s Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and attorneys Andrew Weissmann, Mark Zaid and Norm Eisen.
The move comes a day after Trump stripped his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, of his security clearance and his access to presidential daily briefs.
In a stunning and sweeping emergency injunction that has even stunned the people who demanded it, a Manhattan-based District Judge has just removed Secretary of State Scott Bessent from his authority over the Treasury Department; blocked any political appointee from accessing records within the Treasury Department; blocked any “special appointee” of President Trump from records within Treasury; and demanded that all information previously extracted be destroyed.
The emergency injunction was signed by District Judge Paul Engelmayer in Manhattan, {Ruling pdf Here} determined without any input from the Trump administration and applies until Friday, February 14, 2025, when U.S. District Judge Jeannette A. Vargas will hear the full arguments of the lawsuit.
The emergency ruling comes as a result of 15 (Soros installed) attorneys general from New Jersey, New York, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Vermont, all filed suit in New York seeking to block Elon Musk and DOGE from access to information that would reveal how activist groups in their states have been funded by the U.S. government. [Link to Press Release Here]
UPDATE: A comment from the link above. Many good comments but this one is thorough:
This is awesome! I’m dead serious. Under no conceivable reading of the Constitution is this jack wagon judge permitted to do this. This is going to backfire in ways that Lawfare is going to regret far more than their election loss last Fall. This is going to get straight to SCOTUS and SCOTUS very quickly going to strike this down in a way that essentially blocks all other Federal judges from future interference in DOGE and the criminal prosecutions that are going to follow.
Essentially, what they’re arguing is that the President is not actually the President. And a Senate-confirmed Treasury Secretary is not a Senate-confirmed Treasury Secretary unless some Podunk judge says it is okay.
We’re at the point I’ve been stating for many days now: IT IS TIME TO ANNOUNCE THE CRIMINAL PROBE. DOGE has not just uncovered “government inefficiency”. DOGE has uncovered obvious evidence of Federal crimes being committed by USAID employees, Treasury Dept. employees, CPFB employees, etc. Among these are money laundering, racketeering, influence peddling, embezzlement, etc.
Trump should simply issue an EO that as the nation’s Chief Law Enforcement Officer he has direct evidence of federal crimes having been committed. Direct the AG to launch an immediate criminal investigation. And then target not just USAID or CPFB, but the Federal Judges who are participating in obstruction of justice.
In parallel, fast track it to SCOTUS and the central theme of your brief isn’t just that this is absurdly unconstitutional, but also that it is directly interfering in a criminal investigation as well as a national security matter.
The Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf[2] (Arabic: مجلس التعاون لدول الخلیج), also known as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC; Arabic: مجلس التعاون الخليجي), is a regional, intergovernmental, political, and economic union comprising Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.[3][4] The council’s main headquarters is located in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.[5] The Charter of the GCC was signed on 25 May 1981, formally establishing the institution.[6]
During the Arab Spring in 2012, Saudi Arabia proposed to transform the GCC into a “Gulf Union” with tighter economic, political and military coordination, a move considered to be intended to counterbalance Iranian influence in the region,[11] however objections were raised by other countries.[12][13] In 2014, Bahraini prime minister Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa said that current events in the region highlighted the importance of the proposal.[14] The Peninsula Shield Force is the military arm of the GCC, formed in 1984.[15]
Important to have some familiarity with the GCC because they are going to figure into Trump’s plans for Gaza. It is the GCC that will invest most of the money. ABN
American Buddhist Net 