Former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe has been confirmed by the Senate to become the next CIA director.
The former DNI and Texas congressman received bipartisan vote 74-25 on Thursday several days after the Senate Intelligence Committee advanced his nomination.
He is the second of Donald Trump‘s Cabinet selections to get confirmed by the Senate after Marco Rubio was unanimously confirmed Monday evening.
National security Cabinet positions are traditionally the first to be filled and Ratcliffe and Rubio’s confirmations are no exception.
However, the process of getting Ratcliffe confirmed hit a hiccup this week as Democrats held up the vote.
As CTH previously noted, much of the success in breaking up the Intelligence Community silo operations will fall on the shoulders of National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz.
In fact, the structure of the intelligence information system currently under construction in the Trump White House depends on Waltz successfully organizing the new system. {GO DEEP}
In following the roadmap for the optimal outcome, NSA Mike Waltz has suspended all aides to the National Security Council pending a review of their alignment with the Trump administration. Again, a good and necessary move.
That said, Mike Waltz is likely to make a few mistakes along the road to a rapid reorganization and anyone who does not have trust issues given the nature of what we have witnessed within the IC manipulation of government, would not be honest. However, Waltz is -so far- following a sequential process that will position the National Security Council for the optimal outcome.
The downside to these early moves is that the SSCI is watching this restructuring while simultaneously pending the nomination hearings of DNI Tulsi Gabbard who would also play a vital role in the information flow if the NSC is to get the best information to work with. A historic review of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence shows they support the status quo IC and simultaneously hold power over the IC confirmation positions.
The last secret files about the assassination of John F. Kennedy can now be published after President Donald Trump on Thursday ordered the declassification of all remaining documents about the 1963 murder.
Conspiracy theories continue to swirl 60 years after the killing.
And any new information will excite the amateur sleuths who continue to wonder whether there is more to the story than just a lone gunman in the shape of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Trump signed an executive order that directs his Director of National Intelligence to put together a plan within 15 days for the full release of documents about the JFK assassination.
‘More than 50 years after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Federal Government has not released to the public all of its records related to those events,’ reads the Executive Order, obtained by DailyMail.com.
‘Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth. It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.’
His intelligence chiefs will have 45 days to put together a plan to release the RFK and King archives.
A new memo from President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) orders federal prosecutors across the country to begin investigating state and local officials who attempt to block the administration’s deportations and immigration enforcement.
The memo was issued by Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, Trump’s former defense attorney.
It outlines “interim decisions and policy changes” pending the confirmation of Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi.
Bove said interim changes are necessary as an initial response to Trump’s executive orders regarding “three of the most serious threats facing the American people.”
Those threats, Bove wrote, are cartels and other transnational criminal organizations, such as Tren de Aragua (TdA) and La Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13).
He noted that organizations and other foreign criminals “are a scourge on society resulting in an unstable and unsafe border and huge flows of illegal immigration in violation of U.S. law.”
The Trump administration is attempting to amass a larger force of law-enforcement officials to help carry out deportations by granting agents across the federal government the same powers as an immigration officer, according to an internal memo seen by The Wall Street Journal.
The memo, sent by acting Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman, says DHS is granting immigration-enforcement authority to several agencies at the Justice Department, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Marshals Service.
The directive is the latest in a flurry of moves the Trump administration has taken this week to marshal the vast resources of the federal government to carry out the president’s signature campaign promise on immigration. Despite those steps, no large-scale immigration operations have yet materialized.
knowing that a person is an alien, brings to or attempts to bring to the United States in any manner whatsoever such person at a place other than a designated port of entry or place other than as designated by the Commissioner, regardless of whether such alien has received prior official authorization to come to, enter, or reside in the United States and regardless of any future official action which may be taken with respect to such alien;
(ii)
knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, transports, or moves or attempts to transport or move such alien within the United States by means of transportation or otherwise, in furtherance of such violation of law;
(iii)
knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien in any place, including any building or any means of transportation;
(iv)
encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law; or
(v)
(I)
engages in any conspiracy to commit any of the preceding acts, or
(II)
aids or abets the commission of any of the preceding acts,
shall be punished as provided in subparagraph (B).
(B)A person who violates subparagraph (A) shall, for each alien in respect to whom such a violation occurs—
(i)
in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(i) or (v)(I) or in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(ii), (iii), or (iv) in which the offense was done for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain, be fined under title 18, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both;
(ii)
in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(ii), (iii), (iv), or (v)(II), be fined under title 18, imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both;
(iii)
in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(i), (ii), (iii), (iv), or (v) during and in relation to which the person causes serious bodily injury (as defined in section 1365 of title 18) to, or places in jeopardy the life of, any person, be fined under title 18, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both; and
(iv)
in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(i), (ii), (iii), (iv), or (v) resulting in the death of any person, be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, fined under title 18, or both.
Researchers have discovered what may be the world’s oldest three-dimensional map, located within a quartzitic sandstone megaclast in the Paris Basin.
The Ségognole 3 rock shelter, known since the 1980s for its artistic engravings of two horses in a Late Palaeolithic style on either side of a female pubic figuration, has now been revealed to contain a miniature representation of the surrounding landscape.
Dr Anthony Milnes from the University of Adelaide’s School of Physics, Chemistry and Earth Sciences, participated in the research led by Dr Médard Thiry from the Mines Paris – PSL Centre of Geosciences.
Dr Thiry’s earlier research, following his first visit to the site in 2017, established that Palaeolithic people had “worked” the sandstone in a way that mirrored the female form, and opened fractures for infiltrating water into the sandstone that nourished an outflow at the base of the pelvic triangle.
New research suggests that part of the floor of the sandstone shelter which was shaped and adapted by Palaeolithic people around 13,000 years ago was modelled to reflect the region’s natural water flows and geomorphological features.
“What we’ve described is not a map as we understand it today — with distances, directions, and travel times — but rather a three-dimensional miniature depicting the functioning of a landscape, with runoff from highlands into streams and rivers, the convergence of valleys, and the downstream formation of lakes and swamps,” Dr Milnes explains.
Mapping of the cave floor with École River valley. Credit: Dr Médard Thiry
“For Palaeolithic peoples, the direction of water flows and the recognition of landscape features were likely more important than modern concepts like distance and time.
In another open-source win, DeepSeek aims to redefine ‘open AI’ with R1, its latest model. Open-source artificial intelligence (AI) has reached another milestone — and the cost differences it represents could shake up the industry.
On Monday, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek announced the release of R1, the full version of its newest open-source reasoning model, which the company launched in preview in November. The company noted that R1 beats or is on par with OpenAI’s o1 in several math, coding, and reasoning benchmarks.
Similar to o1, R1’s reasoning takes more time to answer than other models, but its queries are meant to be more sophisticated and accurate. Alongside the 671-billion-parameter model, DeepSeek also released six smaller “distilled” versions with as few as 1.5 billion parameters, which can be run on a local device.
The Democrats in the Senate are back to their old tricks of using delay tactics to stall President Trump’s nominees for cabinet positions.
The nomination of CIA Director John Ratcliffe passed out of the Senate Intelligence Committee with a vote of 14-3. However, when the Majority Leader John Thune calls the Ratcliffe nomination to the floor for a full Senate vote, suddenly individual Senators start using procedural processes to delay the votes.
The issue is not about Ratcliffe per se’, without doubt Ratcliffe will pass a full senate confirmation vote without issue when it takes place. The Democrats are using Ratcliffe to set the stage for delays in Pete Hegseth to be Defense secretary and Kristi Noem to be DHS secretary; along with a pending confirmation hearing set for Tulsi Gabbard (DNI) and Kash Patel (FBI).
This ultimately becomes the first test for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who has previously said he would fully support a rapid confirmation process for all of President Trump’s nominees. Former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did nothing to force the Upper Chamber to confirm, Senator John Thune does not want to be seen as following McConnell’s path.
Leader Thune and Senator Barrasso (#2) are now pledging to keep the Senate in session until the nominees are confirmed. This stops the Senators from going home but inevitably ends up on a game of attrition. Whose determination will last longest, the minority resistance or the Senate majority.
This activity in the Senate comes as the latest Presidential Tracking Poll shows a net approval of +14, President Trump’s highest approval rating ever. The Democrats in the upper chamber are walking a narrow path of irrelevance; however, they are counting on their superiority in the Senate to outlast any negative public opinion.
A high-class escort has spilled the beans on what happens behind closed doors in Davos during the World Economic Forum, including what the wealthy think really will happen to the world in the near future.
Salome Balthus, 40, is a high-end escort and author from Berlin who has travelled to Davos, Switzerland, to meet up with clients during the annual gathering of the global elite.
Salome revealed to MailOnline what she has learned about the global elite – and for many it is that they are doom-mongering about the fate of the world… so they’ve decided to enjoy it while it lasts.
Convinced that a climate change apocalypse is upon us they shamelessly spend their vast wealth on expensive escorts in Switzerland… which they fly to in their environmentally-unfriendly private jets.
‘The elephant in the room is climate change. Everyone knows it can’t be prevented any more,’ she said, adding that the ‘super rich’ could generally be split into two groups on the topic.
American Buddhist Net 