Two members of the same family in Rukungiri district died on the spot on Wednesday after they were struck by lightning. Kigezi region Police spokesman Elly Maate identified the victims as Enoth Tukwasibwe, 30, and his mother, Jolly Baryakabuza, 75, both residents of Keita Village in Nyabitete Parish, Bugangari sub-county. Maate told journalists that the unfortunate incident occurred at their home during a heavy downpour while the old woman was in the kitchen preparing supper and the son was in the main house with his father, who was not affected. Police were alerted by area LC1 chairperson Alex Warugaba, and the scene was visited. Bugangari sub-county chairperson Gastone Byamukama was among the leaders who came to comfort the family. He said this was the second incident of lightning in the area in two weeks after a 26-year-old woman was also struck by lightning.

Telangana saw a tragic incident yesterday, as heavy rainfall, hailstorm, and lightning were witnessed in the state. The lightning in Telangana claimed the life of a young tribal shepherd and over 40 sheep in the Nagarjunasagar mandal of Nalgonda district. The young man named Saidanayak from Chintala Thanda used to make a living by rearing goats. He had taken the goats to the forest for grazing and stopped them under a tree after grazing since morning. While it was raining heavily, suddenly there was a thunderbolt with a loud noise. As a result, the young man and about 40 goats under the tree died on the spot due to lightning in Telangana. Video of disaster due to lightning in Telangana went viral The villagers came to know about the incident and reached the spot. Uncomfortable scenes of the disaster due to lightning in Telangana went viral on social media.

The effusive eruption of the volcano remains intense. We are regularly given first-hand information from our local expedition leader and volcanologist, Andi, about the volcano's behavior. Glowing lava blocks continue to detach from the actively growing lava dome, located within the Crater 1, and roll over the western and eastern slopes, most of which reach the base of the dome area. Feel free to enjoy a noteworthy video from the ongoing activity here. Some people have been evacuated to avoid being affected by large hot rock falls that may result in dangerous pyroclastic flows.

This bright bolide was spotted from Spain on March 14, at 1:47 local time (equivalent to 0:47universal time). The event was generated by a rock (a meteoroid) from an asteroid that hit the atmosphere at about 67,000 km/h. The fireball overflew the Mediterranean Sea. It began at an altitude of about 98 km over the sea, over a point located at a distance of 25 km from the coast of the province of Almera (south of Spain). From that position it moved east, and ended at a height of around 67 km over the Mediterranean Sea. This bright meteor was recorded in the framework of the SMART project, operated by the Southwestern Europe Meteor Network (SWEMN) from the meteor-observing stations located at Huelva, La Hita (Toledo), Calar Alto, Sierra Nevada, La Sagra (Granada), and Seville.

On March 13, Fox Nation released its documentary about disgraced actor Jussie Smollett titled Anatomy of a Hoax, which included an interview with the Osundairo brothers, whom Jussie enlisted to perpetrate the hoax and shout slurs at him, in a dubious incident that was almost immediately taken as fact by many, inducing Joe Biden. In a tweet from January 29, 2019, Biden wrote, "What happened today to @JussieSmollett must never be tolerated in this country. We must stand up and demand that we no longer give this hate safe harbor; that homophobia and racism have no place on our streets or in our hearts. We are with you, Jussie."

A tech tycoon has been branded a "creep" after allegedly offering a woman $100,000 to take off her face mask on board a Delta flight. Steve Kirsch took to Twitter to say he made the anonymous passenger the offer last Friday. "I am on board a Delta flight right now. The person sitting next to me in first-class refused $100,000 to remove her mask for the entire flight," the millionaire wrote. "No joke. This was after I explained they don't work. She works for a pharma company."

Trump-appointed US District Judge Timothy Kelly sided with Attorney General Merrick Garland's DOJ to allow the feds to hide a host of exculpatory evidence from the jury in the Proud Boys January 6th sedition trial after it was mistakenly leaked to the defense by an FBI agent involved in the case. Comment: See: Proud Boys J6 sedition trial halted after leaked chat logs show FBI agent said her boss ordered her to 'destroy evidence' As I reported last week, unintentionally leaked chat logs from FBI Special Agent Nicole Miller revealed she said she was ordered by her boss to "destroy" "338 items of evidence."

The pontiff called for holy sites to be respected after canonical Orthodox Church monks were ordered to leave their Kiev monastery. Pope Francis has voiced concern over the situation in the Kiev Pechersk Lavra following attempts by the Ukrainian authorities to expel monks from the iconic Orthodox Christian site. Speaking at the end of a general audience on Wednesday, the pontiff said he was "thinking about the Orthodox monks in the Kiev Lavra."

A Norwich City youth football coach who hit a man in the head with a metal pole for not wearing a Covid mask has been jailed. Conor Murphy was queuing for food at a McDonald's in June 2021 when he became enraged by a group of four who weren't wearing face coverings. After becoming increasingly irate, the 29-year-old went back to his car where he found the metal pole, before returning to attack one of the men.

Iranian authorities have proposed new measures to enforce the compulsory wearing of the hijab in the country, including the use of surveillance cameras to identify and punish women who fail to comply with the dress code amid months of nationwide unrest sparked by the death of a young woman while in police custody for allegedly not wearing her head scarf properly. In a public session of the Iranian parliament on March 14, Bijan Nobaveh a member of the Cultural Commission revealed that the body has proposed seven new measures related to the hijab, which have been fully endorsed by the leadership and discussed at the National Security Council. Under the new proposals, physical punishment will not be allowed. Violators instead will be punished according to a predetermined table. The surveillance cameras will be used to monitor public spaces for women not wearing the hijab, and offenders will be punished subsequently with measures that include cutting off their mobile phone and Internet...

The Canadian Cancer Society is advising men it describes as "trans women" who have had "bottom surgery" to discuss cervical cancer screenings with their doctors while acknowledging that men do not have cervixes. Men with a "neo-cervix" or "neo-vagina" created via surgery have "a very small risk" of developing cancers in these tissues, claimed the Canadian charity in a section titled "As a trans woman, do I need to get screened for cervical cancer?": If you're a trans woman, you may not have given much thought to Pap tests and cervical cancer. And if you haven't, that makes a fair amount of sense. After all, in order to get cervical cancer, you need to have a cervix that is, the organ that connects the vagina to the uterus. If you're a trans woman and have not had bottom surgery, you aren't at risk for cervical cancer. If, however, you're a trans woman who has had bottom surgery to create a vagina (vaginoplasty) and possibly a cervix, there's a very small risk that you can develop...

San Francisco regulators moved forward with regulations banning future sales of certain natural gas-powered appliances as part of the Democrat-led city's climate agenda. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which oversees air pollution and emissions regulations for the nine counties surrounding San Francisco, greenlighted amendments to regulations Wednesday evening related to eliminating nitrogen oxide emissions from natural gas furnaces and water heaters in the region. The action requires all commercial and residential furnaces and water heaters to be electric by 2027. "The 1.8 million water heaters and furnaces in the Bay Area significantly impact our air quality, resulting in dozens of early deaths and a wide range of health impacts, particularly in communities of color," Dr. Philip Fine, the executive officer of the Air District, said Wednesday in a statement. "This groundbreaking regulation will phase out the most polluting appliances in homes and businesses to...

Moscow will attempt to recover the wreckage of the American MQ-9 Reaper drone that fell into the Black Sea on Tuesday, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, has announced. Speaking live on federal broadcaster Rossiya 1 on Wednesday, the official admitted that he doesn't know if it will be possible to reach to the remains of the UAV but stressed that it was important to make an effort to find and study the wreckage. Patrushev also added that "Americans keep saying that they are not participating in the hostilities" in Ukraine and that this latest incident with the drone is "yet another confirmation that [the US] are directly involved" in the ongoing military conflict. The secretary's statement comes after Washington's European Command (EUCOM) reported that one of its MQ-9 Reaper drones was brought down over the Black Sea on Tuesday morning as a result of "unsafe and unprofessional" actions by two Russian Su-27 fighter jets. The Pentagon insists that one...

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Tuesday he had complained to President Vladimir Putin about "problems" with Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh, warning of an escalation in the restive Caucasus region. Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars for control of the Armenian-majority region and the latest conflict in 2020 ended with the deployment of Moscow's forces. Pashinyan's comments are the latest sign that Armenia, which relies on Russia as a security guarantor, is growing frustrated with the Kremlin whose attention is focused on Ukraine and confrontation with the West.

Scientists discovered evidence of active volcanoes on Venus, also known as Earth's "twin", while closely studying the archival images of the planet. The images were captured by NASA Magellan spacecraft in the early 1990s while it was circling the planet. A new analysis of the perspective of the orbiter of a region close to the Venusian equator revealed a volcanic vent which changed shape and increased in size in the period of eight months.

New warnings have been applied to dozens of beaches across the UK today after sewage water was discharged into the sea - with the newly-crowned 'best beach in the UK' among those affected Members of the public have been told to steer clear of 83 beaches across the country due to sewage leaking into the water. Comment: 'Leaking' or being dumped into the water by companies that were given the go ahead by the government? New pollution alerts from swimming charity Surfers Against Sewage from been unveiled following heavy rainfall over recent days, which has caused waste water to be discharged into the sea.

Staff from our Newark office have unearthed some exciting archaeology at a new industrial development at Dove Valley Park in Derbyshire, working on behalf of Orion Heritage and Clowes Developments (UK) Ltd. Cropmarks on aerial photographs hinted at the presence of several ring ditches and linear ditches on and close to the site. Our team confirmed the existence of these features through trial trench evaluation. We then conducted a strip, map and sample excavation to fully reveal and investigate the remains, leading to the discovery of a complete ring ditch and a substantial linear ditch. The ring ditch during excavation, with a possible entrance visible in the foreground. There was at least one re-cutting of the ring ditch, suggesting maintenance and possible longevity of use.

The UK has been downgraded in an annual global index of civic freedoms as a result of the government's "increasingly authoritarian" drive to impose restrictive and punitive laws on public protests. The Civicus Monitor, which tracks the democratic and civic health of 197 countries across the world, said the UK government was creating a "hostile environment" towards campaigners, charities and other civil society bodies. The UK's willingness to clamp down on civic freedoms such as the right to peaceful assembly means it is now classified as "obstructed" - putting it alongside countries such as Poland, South Africa and Hungary.

Large U.S. banks injected $30 billion in deposits into First Republic Bank (FRC.N) on Thursday, swooping in to rescue the lender caught up in a widening crisis triggered by the collapse of two other mid-size U.S. lenders over the past week. Banking stocks globally have been battered since Silicon Valley Bank collapsed last week due to bond-related losses that piled up when interest rates surged last year, raising questions about what else might be lurking in the wider banking system. Within days, the market turmoil had ensnared Swiss lender Credit Suisse (CSGN.S), forcing it to borrow up to $54 billion from Switzerland's central bank to shore up liquidity.

Farmers-Citizen Movement is projected to become the equal largest party in the senate, in a blow to Mark Rutte's four-party coalition A farmers' protest party angered by new green laws triumphed in shock Dutch election results, prompting its leader to ask: "People, what the f--- happened?" Caroline van der Plas's Farmers-Citizen Movement (BBB) is projected to become the equal largest party in the senate, taking 15 seats from none before the vote. The Left-wing GroenLinks/PvdA is also expected to win 15 seats, in the wake of months of turbulent farmer protests against government plans to cut nitrogen emissions. Mark Rutte, the centre-Right Dutch prime minister, insisted his coalition government would survive, after its four member parties lost eight of their combined 32 seats in the 75-seat senate

In an article yesterday I noted that a peer-reviewed paper published last year in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, titled "Neo-Darwinism Must Mutate to Survive," offered potent probability arguments against the Darwinian evolution of a complex molecular pathway. These arguments, presented by authors Olen R. Brown and David A. Hullender, in many respects resemble intelligent design probability arguments. Importantly, the authors seem aware that intelligent design offers similar arguments, and they appear to agree that these hold some merit: Probability reasoning has been applied to the evolution alternative known as intelligent design by Elliott Sober who argued that 'Darwinian gradualism' and 'random genetic drift' are reasonable 'evolutionary processes' to overcome weaknesses in natural selection by survival of the fittest (Sober, 2007). We challenge these assumptions. Stephen Gould, and Niles Eldredge initiated a controversy described in the book Punctuated...

In the first step toward understanding how dogs and perhaps humans might adapt to intense environmental pressures such as exposure to radiation, heavy metals, or toxic chemicals, researchers at North Carolina State, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, University of South Carolina, and the National Institutes of Health found that two groups of dogs living within the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, one at the site of the former Chornobyl reactors, and another 16.5 km away in Chornobyl City, showed significant genetic differences between them. The results indicate that these are two distinct populations that rarely interbreed. While earlier studies focused on the effects of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster on various species of wildlife, this is the first investigation into the genetic structure of stray dogs living near the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. The 1986 Chornobyl nuclear power plant disaster displaced more than 300,000 people living nearby and led...

Venus appears to have volcanic activity, according to a new research paper that offers strong evidence to answer the lingering question about whether Earth's sister planet currently has eruptions and lava flows. Venus, although similar to Earth in size and mass, differs markedly in that it does not have plate tectonics. The boundaries of Earth's moving surface plates are the primary locations of volcanic activity. New research by University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute research professor Robert Herrick revealed a nearly 1-square-mile volcanic vent that changed in shape and grew over eight months in 1991. Changes on such a scale on Earth are associated with volcanic activity, whether through an eruption at the vent or movement of magma beneath the vent that causes the vent walls to collapse and the vent to expand. The research was published today (March 15) in the journal Science.

The oil transport company says it has uncovered evidence of a plot to attack the connector supplying oil to western European markets Workers at the Russian oil pipeline transport company Transneft have reportedly found several explosive devices at the Novozybkov oil-pumping station of its Druzhba pipeline in the Bryansk region near Ukraine, according to company spokesperson Igor Demin. Speaking to TASS, he stated that on Tuesday evening and on Wednesday morning, the devices were found in destroyed plastic cases of "non-industrial production" with a striking warhead in the form of steel balls. "Presumably, the destruction of the cases occurred after hitting the ground when falling from drones," Demin suggested. He added that on Wednesday afternoon another explosive device was seen being dropped from a UAV, "likely similar to the other two [devices]."

The mortality rate for U.S. children and teens surged to the highest levels in decades between 2019 and 2021, according to research published Monday in JAMA. Researchers at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine and the University of Washington reported that all-cause mortality increased 10.7% for people ages 1 to 19 between 2019 and 2020, and an additional 8.3% between 2020 and 2021. The excess deaths were not caused by COVID-19, but by injuries, including incidents involving firearms, drugs and car accidents, the researchers said.

Kentucky transgender daycare worker Maria Childers is accused of sexually abusing a baby while changing the child's diaper, according to official documents obtained by WPSD Local 6. The Paducah Police Department got a complaint of the alleged abuse on February 8 from the Kentucky Department for Community Based Services after an anonymous tip came in about trans-identified male Childers, 25, who was employed at the Explore Learning Academy in November when the crime allegedly took place.

The New Scientist carries a story dated 11 March 2023 with this headline: A nationwide shortage of power grid transformers is causing delays across the US for everything from infrastructure for electric vehicles to new homes. Across the US, new houses sit unfinished - construction can't be completed until they are connected to the electricity grid. Utility companies worry about how quickly they can restore power after damage caused by hurricanes and other natural disasters. And nationwide efforts to modernize aging electrical grids face delays of months or even years.

Contagion could spread to Europe and beyond, Paul Craig Roberts warns... The policies of the US Federal Reserve are responsible for the unfolding banking crisis and could lead to more failures in the sector, Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy Paul Craig Roberts believes. The official, who served in the US Treasury in the 1980s, talked to RT about the recent high-profile bank failures that have rattled the US financial system and the potential fallout of those events. "For many years, the Federal Reserve kept the rates very low, so the interest on the financial assets that the banks have on their balance sheet is low. When the rates start rising, the values of their portfolios fall, but their liabilities don't. "The Fed's policy of high interest rates pushes the banks into insolvency. And this is the cause of the problem. If the Fed continues raising interest rates, there will be more failures."

Washington could clash with Moscow's forces if Kiev starts to lose, the veteran journalist argues... The US could get directly involved in the Ukraine conflict if it sees that Kiev's forces are on the back foot, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh suggested on Tuesday. Speaking at an event in Washington, DC hosted by the Committee for the Republic, a non-profit organization, Hersh noted that the US "did stupid things" during the Vietnam War, and suggested that Washington could "start doing something else" in the Ukraine conflict. "I don't know what happens if it goes bad for Ukraine, you have all this manpower," he said, pointing out that the US has dispatched units of its 82nd and 101st elite airborne divisions close to the Ukrainian border, while "a lot of weapons and arms are coming" to Europe. "I'm told the game is going to be: this is NATO, we are supporting NATO in offensive operations against the Russians, which is not going to fool the world... It's us fighting...

Saudi lender acquired a stake of almost 10% in Credit Suisse last year... Credit Suisse lost almost a quarter of its value on Wednesday, dropping to a new record low after its largest investor said it could not provide the Swiss bank with more financial assistance. "We cannot, because we would go above 10%. It's a regulatory issue," Saudi National Bank chairman Ammar Al Khudairy said on Wednesday. The Saudi lender acquired a stake of almost 10% last year after taking part in Credit Suisse's capital raising and committed to investing up to 1.5 billion Swiss francs ($1.5 billion).

A Chinese tycoon wanted in China and closely tied to president Donald Trump's former political advisor Steve Bannon was arrested in New York Wednesday and charged with bilking some US$1 billion from supporters of his anti-Beijing activities. The US Justice Department accused Guo Wengui and still-at-large British co-conspirator Je Kin Ming of stealing funds from participants in an investment scheme so they could buy luxuries, including a yacht, a 50,000 square foot (4,645 square meter) mansion and a US$3.5 million Ferrari. A court official said late Wednesday that Guo pleaded not guilty but consented to detention in an initial arrest hearing. Hours after his 6:00 am arrest at his Manhattan penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park, a fire broke out in his building, raising suspicions the two could be linked.

Tyson Foods Inc. plans to shut down two of its poultry plants and lay off nearly 1,700 workers as it tries to improve its chicken operations that produce about one-fifth of the U.S. supply. Tyson notified the nearly 1,000 employees at its Van Buren, Ark., chicken plant on Monday that it would close on May 12, the company said. About 700 workers at Tyson's plant in Glen Allen, Va., also found out on Monday that its plant would close in May, according to the local United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents employees at the Virginia plant. The Springdale, Ark.-based meat company said production would be shifted to other Tyson plants. The company said the closures were part of a broader plan in its chicken division to improve operations and use full available capacity at each plant. "The current scale and inability to economically improve operations has led to the difficult decision to close the facilities," a company spokesman said in a statement.

We might be getting closer to understanding why hundreds of large stone structures were built across the deserts of northwest Saudi Arabia thousands of years ago. According to an in-depth new analysis, the mysterious, rectangular enclosures were used by Neolithic people for unknown rituals, depositing animal offerings, perhaps as votives to an unknown deity or deities. Excavations have revealed hundreds of fragments of animal remains, clustered around an upright slab of stone interpreted as sacred. The roughly 7,000-year-old monuments known as mustatils (an Arabic word meaning rectangles) have baffled archaeologists since attracting scientific attention in the 1970s. It wasn't until 2017, however, that the full extent of their spread across the Arabian Peninsula was revealed in the first scientific paper documenting their discovery. Aerial surveys have aided in the identification of over 1,600 mustatils, sometimes in groups, scattered throughout the desert. Nicknamed 'gates'...

Masculinity has been in crisis for as long as anyone can remember. The usual explanation is that post-industrial society doesn't much care for brawn. We're all office dwellers now, mutely churning out spreadsheets for other spreadsheet producers. The theory makes sense as far as it goes. But something else has changed much more recently: a rejection of the very concept of masculinity. The polling company YouGov found that just 8 per cent of people have positive views of white men in their twenties, by far the lowest of any ethnicity or age group. Males are routinely presented as inherently dangerous, aggressive and animalistic, incapable of controlling their own instincts. You can see it on public transport, where government adverts announce that staring is sexual harassment. Us blokes can't even be trusted to use our eyes properly. Teenage boys are routinely disciplined by their schools for even the most minor infractions of an insurgent sexual politics. A friend's son at a smart...

Is Larry Fink a threat to democracy? As February turns to March, the finance world is waiting with bated breath for one of its most dubious annual traditions: The Larry Fink Annual Letter to CEOs. Since 2012, when the BlackRock chief executive wrote his first letter, the occasion has come to symbolise the growing threat both to shareholder capitalism and American democracy posed by investment houses' crusade to force the principles of ESG, or "environmental, social, and governance" investing, down the throats of companies, investors, and the public. ESG first entered the investment and banking mainstream as a survival strategy. In 2009, BlackRock had acquired Barclay's Global Investors Ltd, making it the largest investment firm in the world with almost $3 trillion in assets under management (AUM), a sum larger than the total revenue of the US federal treasury. Politically speaking, BlackRock's emergence as an investment superpower could hardly have come at a worse time. Amid the...

"Navalny" is a slick production full of highly dubious claims, misinformation, and enough new Cold War propaganda impact to win an Oscar for best documentary. The Oscar-winning 2022 documentary film Navalny tells the story of the opposition figure who has become the West's favorite Russian activist. Despite having garnered the support of about 2% of Russian voters, according to the polling firm Levada, Alexei Navalny is presented in the film as a national hero whose anti-corruption work made him such a threat to Vladimir Putin that he had to be targeted for elimination. The film's authors are Canadian Daniel Roher, who admits to having never visited Russia or speaking Russian; Bulgarian Christo Grozev of Bellingcat, an "open source" media organization openly hostile to the Russian government, and which acknowledges financing by governments of the US, UK and EU. The production team also includes the Russian opposition activist Maria Pevchikh, who has worked for Navalny's...

Weeks of storms have put so much stress on homes and buildings in the Sierra, that roofs are caving in. NBC Bay Area's Raj Mathai spoke to Captain Martin Goldberg, with the Lake Valley Fire Protection District, for some insight.

The storm system that's hammered California this week is heading east - but not before dousing the state with more torrential rain and knocking out power with ferocious winds. Daily rainfall records were shattered Tuesday in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Santa Maria. The deluge will keep hitting Southern California on Wednesday before moving east, threatening 25 million people in the central US. California Gov. Gavin Newsom expanded a state of emergency to cover 43 of the state's 58 counties Tuesday night as high winds and intense rain wrought havoc in the state. Some cities endured hurricane-force winds. Top wind gusts of 97 mph were measured at Santa Clara County's Loma Prieta, 93 mph at Alameda County's Mines Tower and 74 mph at San Francisco Airport, according to the National Weather Service. In San Francisco, firefighters believe fierce winds sent out glass falling from a downtown high-rise building, they said.

President Joe Biden called efforts to restrict transgender rights in Florida "close to sinful" in an interview released Monday, suggesting federal laws should be passed to protect those rights in all states. "What's going on in Florida is, as my mother would say, close to sinful. It's just terrible what they're doing," Biden said during an interview with Kal Penn for "The Daily Show." Biden's comments came as an unprecedented number of measures are introduced in state legislatures this year that are seeking to restrict LGBTQ rights. The proposed bills cover a wide range of policies, including some that seek to restrict transgender people from competing on sports teams or using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.

The heavy rains accompanying Cyclone Yaku led to flooding Wednesday in seven districts of Peru's capital, a desert city that rarely experiences significant precipitation. Prime Minister Alberto Otarola said the government will declare a state of emergency in the beachfront district of Punta Hermosa, which suffered a massive mudslide during the overnight hours. Cabinet ministers are "directing aid and coordinating with the local authorities" in all of the affected areas of the Lima metropolitan area, which includes the port city of Callao and is home to nearly a third of Peru's 34 million people. In Cieneguilla, on the eastern side of the capital, district Mayor Emilio Chavez told TVPeru that rain-driven mudslides forced some 2,500 residents from their homes. The houses of at least 100 families were completely destroyed, he said.

Alexander Dugin argues that the conflict has transformed from a limited SMO into a full-scale conflict against the unipolar neoliberal world order. One year into the Russian special military operation (SMO), Alexander Dugin argues that the conflict has transformed from a limited SMO into a full-scale conflict against the unipolar neoliberal world order. According to Dugin, the miscalculations which shifted the course of the war came early and were only reacted to later: "[t]he Kremlin probably did not take into account either the psychological readiness of the Ukrainian Nazis to fight to the last Ukrainian, or the scale of Western military aid." From my perspective here in the United States, I was aware of the Nazi presence in the Maidan coup since 2014, as were a good many others. Yet, what caught me off guard was the complete, total/totalizing, and in fact uncritical acceptance that Ukraine=Humanity and Russia=Barbarism. I wrote about this in the early days of the special...

An avalanche on Monday morning killed a 28-year-old Dutch skier near the ski resort of Nendaz, Switzerland. The victim had been skiing off-piste with two friends on the heights of Nendaz in an area known amongst Freeriders as 'Stairway to Heaven' when the avalanche was triggered. His friends located him, dug him out, and contacted search and rescue, which tried resuscitation. He was revived and transported to the hospital but later died. Unfortunately, he did not survive. On Wednesday, a separate, massive avalanche was triggered outside the marked tracks in the same location near the Col de Gentianes on the Nendaz side. It was between 300 and 400 meters wide and triggered an extensive search and rescue effort involving eight rescue helicopters and several search dogs. It was unclear at the time how many people may have been buried in the snow. At one stage, it was believed that up to ten skiers were in the avalanche, but apparently, all could free themselves and did not require...

A snowboarder died after an avalanche south of Bend, Oregon, at Paulina Peak Wednesday afternoon. Deschutes County Sheriff's Sgt. Jason Wall told KTVZ that a person had died several hours after a call for help was received by dispatchers. Three snowboarders had used snowmobiles to reach the area and were snowboarding down the 7,984-foot (2,433-meter) peak, located east of La Pine and the highest point on the Newberry Volcano, when the avalanche happened, according to Wall.

We received 6 reports about a fireball seen over AL, AR, LA and TX on Wednesday, March 15th 2023 around 05:00 UT. For this event, we received 2 videos and one photo.

A week ago an interesting story surfaced briefly in the news about how the developing Republican presidential candidate bids by Nikki Haley and others had been attacked over the past eleven months by possibly as many as hundreds of thousands of false automated personas, referred to in the trade as "bots," on Twitter and other internet based social media. Interestingly, the activity was discovered and shared with Associated Press by an Israeli internet security company called Cyabra, which also claimed that the "bots" generation seem to have originated in three separate networks of false Twitter accounts. The accounts appear to have been created in the United States and it is believed that Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications are increasingly being used to create completely lifelike fake personas, extremely difficult for security filters and censors to detect. The article claimed that those thousands of electronically generated non-persons had been programmed to disparage Haley...

Under the guise of stopping mass shootings, a surveillance system backed by top Mossad, CIA and FBI officials is being installed in schools, houses of worship, and other civilian locations throughout the country, much of it thanks to the recent donation of an "anonymous philanthropist." Launched in 2016 in response to a Tel Aviv shooting and the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, Gabriel offers a suite of surveillance products for "security and safety" incidents at "so-called soft targets and communal spaces, including schools, community centers, synagogues and churches." The company makes the lofty promise that its products "stop mass shootings." According to a 2018 report on Gabriel published in the Jerusalem Post, there were an estimated 475,000 such "soft targets" across the U.S., meaning that "the potential market for Gabriel is huge." Gabriel, since its founding, has been backed by "an impressive group of leaders," mainly "former leaders of Mossad, Shin Bet...

A waterspout was seen swirling near Darwin Harbour in the Northern Territory on Wednesday, March 15. Credit: Taryn Hirst via Storyful

At least 4 people have died and 7 are missing after floods and landslides in the provinces of West Java, South Sulawesi, Lampung and South Sumatra in Indonesia over the last few days. Meanwhile, search and rescue operations at the site of the massive landslide in Serasan, Natuna Regency, have found the bodies of 46 victims. As of 12 March, 9 people were still missing. West Java Province Indonesia's National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB) reported heavy rain caused a large landslide in Empang Village, South Bogor District in West Java Province on 14 March. The Bogor City Regional Disaster Management Agency (BPBD) reported that the landslide material then buried 6 houses and 1 place of worship. As a result, 17 people were buried under the rubble. Eleven people have since been found safe. Two of the victims died and 4 others are still missing.

Disaster authorities in Turkey report at least 1 person has died and 4 are still missing after torrential rain caused flash flooding in parts of the southeastern anlurfa and Adyaman provinces. Flooding struck on 15 March 2023 following heavy rain. According to figures from Turkey's General Directorate of Meteorology, in a 24-hour period to 15 March, Karakpr in anlurfa recorded 104.5 mm of rain and elikhan in Adyaman recorded 125.6 mm. Areas of neighbouring Malatya Province also recorded very heavy rain, with Doanehir recorded 151.4 mm during the same period. Local media reported the rivers broke their banks in Adiyaman Province. Trkiye's disaster management agency AFAD, police, gendarmerie and municipality teams were evacuating residents from flooded areas. One person died and 4 were reported missing in Tut District. Search and rescue operations are ongoing.

The ongoing conflict with Ukraine is not about achieving some geopolitical gains, the president says. The ongoing conflict with Ukraine - and the West - is a fight for Russia's very existence, rather than a mere geopolitical game, President Vladimir Putin has said. He made the remarks on Tuesday while meeting with aircraft factory workers in the capital city of Russia's Buryatia Republic, Ulan-Ude. "For our Western so-called 'partners' - for, actually, our adversaries, we can say that openly today - the matter is about improving their geopolitical stance," Putin stated, adding that the situation is very different for Moscow.

A powerful 7.0-magnitude earthquake has struck the Pacific Ocean near the Kermadec Islands, far north of New Zealand's mainland, seismologists say. Small tsunami waves were observed at a nearby island. The earthquake, which struck at 1:56 p.m. local time on Thursday, was centered about 195 kilometers (121 miles) southeast of Raoul Island, the largest of the Kermadec Islands, or 1,125 kilometers (700 miles) northeast of Auckland. The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.0, down from 7.1 in an earlier assessment. It struck about 22 kilometers (14 miles) below the seabed, making it a shallow earthquake. Tsunami alerts - which were initially issued for the Kermadec Islands, Fiji, New Zealand and Tonga - were canceled when it was determined there was no longer a threat.

House Oversight Committee reviews 14 years of financial records related to Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has revealed that a new Biden family member has emerged in the investigation into Hunter Biden's overseas business dealings - Hunter Biden is the son of President Joe Biden. Comer, who is spearheading the investigation into the matter, declined to reveal the identity of the family member Tuesday but said the revelation raises more national security concerns about foreign "influence peddling."

New research paper, in draft form, comes from the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Pentagon officials said in a draft document last week that aliens could be visiting our solar system and releasing smaller probes like missions conducted by NASA when studying other planets. A draft research report authored by Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and Abraham Loeb, chairman of Harvard University's astronomy department was released on March 7 and focuses on the physical constraints of unidentified aerial phenomena.

Settlements between the countries could be arranged in local currencies or gold, a senior lawmaker has suggested. The central banks of Russia and Zimbabwe should establish settlements in local currencies and look at opportunities for securing trade in gold reserves, the speaker of the Zimbabwean ruling party ZANU-PF, Christopher Mutsvangwa, told RIA Novosti on Wednesday. The southern African country has been under Western sanctions for 22 years, the official noted, adding that curbs imposed on Russia should not handicap trade between the two countries. Earlier this year, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced that Russia and countries in Africa were developing a cooperation strategy to replace the US dollar and the euro in settlements, adding that the parties were preparing documents on rearranging the mechanism of cooperation under Western sanctions.

Do childhood vaccines impact a child's mortality risk? While controversy around this issue continues to swirl, peer-reviewed research suggests the answer is a yes. In 2011, Neil Miller, Ph.D., and Gary Goldman, Ph.D., published a paper in the journal Human & Experimental Toxicology showing infant mortality rates correlated with childhood vaccination rates, with high-uptake countries having higher child mortality. As detailed in the abstract:1 "The U.S. childhood immunization schedule specifies 26 vaccine doses for infants aged less than 1 year the most in the world yet 33 nations have lower IMRs. Using linear regression, the immunization schedules of these 34 nations were examined and a correlation coefficient of r = 0.70 (p < 0.0001) was found between IMRs and the number of vaccine doses routinely given to infants.

Israeli security forces killed a man suspected of planting a roadside bomb that injured a man near the occupied West Bank this week, the military said on Wednesday, adding that the suspect's potential ties to the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah were being investigated. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shortened a scheduled trip to Berlin on Wednesday, according to his office, which earlier said he had held consultations "on developments in national security". While a preliminary itinerary circulated last week had said he would return on Friday, the new statement said he would return on Thursday.

More than 7,000 tonnes of foul-smelling rubbish and waste continued to pile up in Paris, blocking doorways and pavements, as refuse collectors extended their nine-day strike for at least another five days in protest at Emmanuel Macron's plan to increase the retirement age. With bin lorries grounded at depots and at least three waste incinerators in the Paris area at a standstill, the national government and the capital's socialist-run city hall were engaged in a bitter standoff over rotting debris in the city. The interior minister, Grald Darmanin, instructed the Paris police chief to make city hall force bin collectors to break their strike and go back to work. But the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said that while the city was working on its own solutions for urgent cases, it supported the strikes against pension changes.

Teachers, London Underground train drivers and civil servants joined striking doctors Wednesday in a mass stoppage as Britain's finance minister unveiled his tax and spending plans. With hundreds of thousands of walking out, it was expected to be the biggest single day of industrial action since a wave of unrest began last year. From nurses to lawyers, workers hit by a cost-of-living crisis have been striking across the economy, pitting unions against the government which insists big pay hikes are unaffordable and will only fuel inflation.

Syrian President Bashar Assad on Wednesday reiterated his support to Russia in the fight with "old and new Nazis." "I want to take advantage of the moment, as this is my first visit since the [start of the] special operation in Ukraine, and reiterate the Syrian position in support of the special operation against the old and new Nazis. I'm saying they are old and new Nazis because the West accepted old Nazis on its soil, and now it supports them again," the Syrian leader said at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Assad arrived in Moscow on Tuesday evening. He was met at the airport by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, who is also the presidential special envoy for the Middle East and Africa, Syrian Ambassador to Russia Bashar Jaafari and Russian Ambassador to Syria Alexander Yefimov. Putin and Assad last met in September 2021 when the Syrian president came to Moscow.

A record drop in shares at Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse on Wednesday has fanned fears of a possible banking crisis. US-listed shares at the global investment bank plummeted by more than a quarter after the banks largest shareholder the Saudi National Bank said it would not inject in more cash into the bank. The Financial Times reported that Credit Suisse had appealed to the Swiss National Bank for a public show of support, citing people familiar with the matter. At the close of trade in Europe on Wednesday, Credit Suisse's stock price was down 24%, having recovered slightly from its lowest ebb during the day. It was trading at around 1.84 compared to almost 3 per share last week and more than 7.50 per share late last March.

On Sunday afternoon, September 14, 2008, hundreds of employees of the financial giant Lehman Brothers walked into the bank's headquarters at 745 Seventh Avenue in New York City to clear out their offices and desks. Lehman was hours away from declaring bankruptcy. And its collapse the next day triggered the worst economic and financial devastation since the Great Depression. The S&P 500 fell by roughly 50%. Unemployment soared. And more than 100 other banks failed over the subsequent 12 months. It was a total disaster. These banks, it turned out, had been using their depositors' money to buy up special mortgage bonds. But these bonds were so risky that they eventually became known as "toxic securities" or "toxic assets". These toxic assets were bundles of risky, no-money-down mortgages given to sub-prime "NINJAs", i.e. borrowers with No Income, No Job, no Assets who had a history of NOT paying their bills. When the economy was doing well in 2006 and 2007, banks earned record...

Pushing blocs like AUKUS and NATO into the region will cause confrontation, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned... The West's expansion of its military presence in Asia risks causing a prolonged conflict because people in the region will not accept the move, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. At a gathering in Moscow on Tuesday, he said: "By pushing "bloc structures, such as AUKUS and NATO infrastructure into Asia, Western leaders are making a serious bid for a confrontation lasting for many, long years. I cannot imagine the great Asian civilizations toeing the line the way the EU unfortunately did, and obediently delivering Washington's agenda." AUKUS - a military alliance comprising the UK, US and Australia - was touted as a mechanism to counter China's influence in the Asia-Pacific region when it was founded in 2021. Beijing this week reiterated its criticism of AUKUS and Canberra's plan to procure US-made nuclear-propelled submarines, citing the risk of...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom lobbied the White House and the Department of the Treasury about the pending bailout of Silicon Valley Bank, even as three of his private wineries had apparently been among the bank's clients, according to a Tuesday report by Ken Klippenstein of the Intercept. According to Klippenstein's reporting, Newsom's personal relationship with SVB went beyond the wineries. One anonymous former employee who handled Newsom's finances told Klippenstein that Newsom "maintained personal accounts at SVB for years." It is unclear whether those personal accounts were still active at the time of the bank's collapse last week. If they were, Newsom could have stood to benefit directly from the Biden administration's rescue package, which will reimburse SVB account holders even if their balances surpass the $250,000 limit insured by Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Religious freedom is being held hostage by the Ukrainian authorities, Russia's Foreign Ministry insisted on Wednesday. Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova was commenting on attempts to evict monks of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC) from the Kiev Pechersk Lavra monastery, which is considered the most important Orthodox Christian site in the country. When asked the previous day about the planned eviction, Ukrainian Minister of Culture Aleksandr Tkachenko said senior clergy and church administrators should be the first to leave, as they had carried out "illegal construction" at the Lavra. "We'll be able to talk about the rest after that," he added. The UOC monks at the Lavra, who are refusing to vacate the monastery and describe the eviction order as illegal, "always have a choice," Tkachenko continued. Their stance may "change drastically" once the leadership of the Moscow-linked church is out of the monastery, he suggested.

Khartoum is eager to expand trade ties with Moscow, the Sudanese ambassador to Russia has said... Sudan and Russia are mulling ways to switch to national currencies in mutual settlements, Sudanese ambassador to Russia, Hassan Mohammed Elghazali Eltijani Sirraj, has told RIA Novosti news agency. According to the diplomat, the countries' central banks are currently discussing the possibility. Sirraj explained: "Russia has suggested to Sudan to use a system of financial transactions, in which we would use national currencies. This issue is being discussed by the central banks of both countries; we will see if this is possible. This is largely a technical issue. The central banks will study this issue, see how it actually works, and in the near future we should see the result." Russia has been actively moving away from the US dollar and euro in foreign trade for months, after Western sanctions against the country made the currencies unreliable. Instead, it has been expanding its circle...

More than 9,500 lightning strikes hit France on Monday (March 13), a figure not seen on a single day in March since records began 35 years ago. Monitoring service Mtorage recorded the strikes, which numbered 9,549, beating the previous record of 9,134 in March 2001. The French storm observatory, Keraunos, said Monday was "the stormiest day of the previous 15 years". A statement on its website read: "The indicator of storm severity was at 19.7 for the day of March 13, 2023, which makes it the stormiest day since the start of our data in 2009."

Days of heavy rain triggered severe flooding in parts of the Cesar Department in Colombia where hundreds of homes have been damaged. Colombia's National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD) reported heavy rainfall from 08 March caused flooding in the municipality of Curuman on 11 March. The Animito, San Pedro, and Palmar rivers and the San Ignacio and the La Cubana streams all broke their banks, UNGRD said. More than 600 homes have been severely damaged in affected areas. Many residents have lost material possessions. Wide areas of crops have also been damaged.

An Oregon high school is facing severe backlash from parents after a health teacher allegedly assigned students to write a short story about a sexual fantasy. Kirk Miller, health teacher and football coach at Churchill High school in Eugene, allegedly wrote that the essays should not "involve penetration of any kind or oral sex," but that they should reference at least three items from a list of suggestions including "romantic music, candles, massage oil, feathers, a feather boa and flavored syrup," reports Oregon Live.

The one-time payment will be used to "counter disinformation" and support English-language broadcasting. The British government has announced an unexpected one-off payment to state broadcaster the BBC. The 20 million ($24.13 million) tranche will be transferred to the broadcaster over the next two years, the UK Foreign Office said on Monday. The package comes as part of an Integrated Review program document advocating for a 'Global Britain' originally adopted under former PM Boris Johnson.

A Pakistani court has ordered police to halt an operation to arrest Imran Khan after fresh clashes between supporters of the former prime minister and security forces trying to detain him at his residence in the northeastern city of Lahore caused dozens of injuries. Local media reported that more than 60 people -- as many as 50 of them police officers -- were injured in the clashes that extended overnight and into March 15, with dozens of people being admitted to hospital for treatment. Comment: "Video images released by PTI showed police hitting Khan supporters with batons and lobbing tear-gas canisters, some of which landed on the lawn of Khan's house, while Khan's supporters hurled rocks and bricks at the officers." Following the incidents, the Lahore High Court ruled that the police operation be paused until March 16 at 10 a.m. local time. The clashes started on March 14, when followers of Khan's political party, Pakistan Tehrik-e Insaf (PTI), gathered outside Khan's residence...

President Joe Biden patted himself on the back Monday morning as multiple banks have collapsed in recent days, claiming that the "quick action" of his administration has stabilized the banking industry. "Your deposits will be there when you need them. Small businesses across the country that deposit accounts at these banks can breathe easier knowing they'll be able to pay their workers and pay their bills," Biden said. "And their hardworking employees can breathe easier as well." Biden said he was focused on reducing the risk of other financial institutions collapsing. "During the Obama-Biden administration, we put in place tough requirements on banks like Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, including the Dodd-Frank law to make sure the crisis we saw in 2008 would not happen again," he said. "Unfortunately, the last administration rolled back some of these requirements."

James O'Keefe appeared on the Charlie Kirk Show to promote his newest project since being ousted from Project Veritas, the O'Keefe Media Group, or OMG. O'Keefe launched the website on Wednesday and urged viewers to sign up, as did Kirk.

Therapies that build on the natural tissue clearance by fibroblasts may accelerate healing, especially in slow-to-heal burn wounds. WASHINGTON - Burn wounds are notoriously prone to bacterial infection and typically lead to a larger amount of scar tissue than laceration wounds. In APL Bioengineering, by AIP publishing, researchers from Boston University and Harvard University created a biomimetic model to study wound healing in burn and laceration wounds. They discovered that fibroblasts - normally considered building cells that give shape and strength to tissues and organs - clear away damaged tissue before depositing new material. This part of the healing process is slower in burn wounds, where more tissue damage is present. Cell biologists identify four phases of wound healing: bleeding stoppage, inflammation, new tissue formation, and tissue strengthening. During the inflammation and formation stages, immune cells are thought to clear bacteria and dead cells from the wound....

The Vermont school sparked a firestorm last month in high school sports. A Vermont Christian school that forfeited a game in the girls state basketball playoffs because its opponent had a transgender student on the team's roster will be prohibited from participating in future tournaments, the sports governing association in the state said Monday. The Vermont Principals' Association (VPA) ruled that Mid Vermont Christian School had violated policies and is ineligible to participate in future tournaments that it sanctions. The move applies to all sports. "The VPA again reiterates its ongoing support of transgender student-athletes as not only a part of building an inclusive community for each student to grow and thrive, but also as a clear expectation by Vermont state law(s) in the Agency of Education Best Practices, and in VPA Policy regarding transgender student athletes," the governing body said in a statement.

Former President Donald Trump is set to release 150 private letters sent to him from an array of high-profile political figures and celebrities including former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, and Oprah Winfrey. The letters will be published in Trump's new book, titled "Letters to Trump," which will be released on April 25, according to the book's publisher, Winning Team Publishing. The publisher describes it as "a colorful photo book" that captures the "incredible, and oftentimes private correspondence, between President Donald J. Trump and some of the biggest names in history throughout the past 40 years."

The US government may have paid twice for grants it doled out to fund research at labs in Wuhan, China, according to a newly launched federal probe that found tens of millions of dollars in potentially fraudulent payments. The "risky" projects bankrolled by the National Institutes of Health and the US Agency for International Development would have helped pay for medical supplies, equipment, travel expenses, and salaries at the Wuhan labs, according to CBS News, which broke the story Monday. Among them was the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where taxpayers funded controversial gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses that federal officials now admit Among them was the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where taxpayers funded controversial gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses that federal officials now admit may have led to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A bill introducing stricter punishment for disinformation about the nation's military operations has been passed by the State Duma Russian laws protecting military service members from slander and "fake news" are to be expanded. Amendments were approved by the State Duma on Tuesday, which are intended to protect the country's military from disinformation attacks amid the ongoing armed conflict in Ukraine. Russia already has laws which prohibit knowingly publishing false information about its military forces or slander against service members. The two linked bills passed by the lower house of parliament will apply the same rules in respect of volunteer units, organizations and individuals assisting the armed forces.

Heavy rains in areas of the state of Amazonas in northwestern Brazil on 12 March triggered deadly landslides in the state capital Manaus. The government of Manaus said at least 11 houses were destroyed after a landslide in the Jorge Teixeira neighbourhood. Eight bodies were located under the rubble and debris. Three people were rescued alive.

It is snowing again in the Alps following the huge snowfalls in France, as well as some ski areas in western and northern Austria, Italy and Switzerland at the weekend. The snowfall today (Tuesday 14th March 2023) is more widespread than the weekend falls, with many areas further east in Italy and Switzerland as well as in Austria posting good falls down to the valley floor. The snowfall follows a temperature spike yesterday which saw many areas see afternoon highs of +10 to +15C on lower slopes, and is expected to just last a day or so before drier weather for the rest of this week. The weekend snowstorm brought up to 1.5 metres (five feet) of snowfall to ski areas in the northern French Alps. Avoriaz, Cervinia, La Rosiere and Tignes were among the resorts posting the biggest jumps in their upper slope base depths (at least a metre each). Avalanche danger levels have also risen to 3 (considerable) or 4 (high) on the scale to a maximum of 5. Tignes had the deepest upper slope base...

The season's first nor'easter has dropped nearly 3 feet of snow over parts of the US Northeast as of Tuesday evening, piling on trees and power lines and causing power outages for tens of thousands in the frigid weather with more snow possible into the night. More than 240,000 customers across the region were without electricity as the sun went down Tuesday, including in New York, Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, according to utility tracker PowerOutage.us. Areas from upstate New York into southern New England have reported snowfall totals of at least 2 feet since Monday night, and parts of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine could see another 6 to 12 inches through the night, according to the Weather Prediction Center.

We received 9 reports about a fireball seen over MD, NJ, PA and VA on Tuesday, March 14th 2023 around 06:44 UT. For this event, we received one video.

Wallace partnered with the state Department of Environmental Protection, the EPA and its contractors to collect 15 soil samples from farms across the region for more testing. Farmers in western Pennsylvania began offering their soil samples for collection in recent weeks after contamination concerns about the train derailment in nearby East Palestine, Ohio went unaddressed. Cliff Wallace, president of the Beaver-Lawrence Farm Bureau, told The Center Square on Tuesday he's spoken with property owners seven miles out from the burn site who say they saw plumes of smoke drifting over their land in the aftermath of the crash.

Many in the West have been predicting a downturn in the China-Russia alliance in the wake of the ongoing Russian Special Military Operations in Ukraine. A recent article in the Foreign Affairs magazine pointed out 'key' points of disagreement between Beijing and Moscow to highlight the obvious 'limits' of the otherwise 'no limits' friendship. According to such projections, we should have seen conflict between both countries. But what we are actually seeing is the exact opposite of this prediction: China and Russia recently reaffirmed their 'no limits' friendship, an alliance that originally started almost a year ago ('no-limits 1.0') and is now growing to the next level as 'no-limits' 2.0. This reaffirmation has caused some trouble in the Western world, as the latter has already started to scramble allies to 'punish' China for its persistent support for Russia against the combined strength of NATO. As reports in the mainstream media show, the US is already consulting with its G7...

Karl Lauterbach is Germany's Federal Minister of Health. Yesterday, he dropped a bombshell on Germans in an interview. It has been posted on Youtube with English subtitles. You can find the video here (start: 3:54; end:15:17 [interview with minister of health starts at 8:07). The COVID-19 'vaccine'-induced injuries that were covered in this program are severe, life-altering, and permanent. More people are waking up to the reality that more of these severe injuries have occurred and continue to emerge than what has ever been admitted publicly by those pushing the shots. This is the nature of passive monitoring systems, particularly when coupled with active dissuasion of reporting. COVID-19 'vaccine'-injured people are finding themselves falling between the cracks in health care systems. This is horrible, but unfortunately, is not news for most of us. The news agency and Minister of Health confirmed that the Pharma companies are free of liability due to 'vaccine' injuries. This...

Last week, Congress and the federal government stomped on press freedom and the press said nothing. Four watershed events lead to the inescapable conclusion that the entire Democratic Party and parts of the GOP have become the enemy of free speech and, astonishingly, they are aided and abetted by the most prestigious brands in news media, that have become tools of oppression, rather than defenders of the First Amendment. 1. Democrats in Congress tried to force a journalist to reveal his sources. Nowhere more sickening was the Democratic Party's lockstep defense of censorship than in Thursday's hearing of the House "Weaponization of Government" subcommittee. Independent liberal journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were asked to testify about the censorship regime imposed by the federal government, academia, NGOs and Twitter, as revealed in the Twitter Files. For their trouble they were slimed and threatened by Democrats.

A growing body of evidence suggests that the US would blow up the global economy to prevent China from laying claim to Taiwan's semiconductor factories. Former White House National Security Advisor Robert C. O'Brien has hinted at a sinister US contingency plan in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Rather than see Taiwan's semiconductor factories fall into the hands of the Communist Party of China, the US and its allies would simply pull a Nordstream. "The United States and its allies are never going to let those factories fall into Chinese hands," O'Brien told Semafor, a news outlet that has been funded by jailed Democratic financier Sam Bankman-Fried and his brother. O'Brien went on to compare the destruction of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) to Winston Churchill's bombing of a French naval fleet after the country's surrender to Nazi Germany. Semiconductors made in Taiwan are necessary for the functioning of everything from smartphones to cars. Taiwan...

Shares of First Republic rose sharply on Tuesday as regional banks attempted to rebound from a deep sell-off, but some of the stocks struggled to hold their ground as the day progressed. First Republic ended the day with a 27.8% gain after climbing more than 60% earlier in the session. PacWest was up nearly 34% after following a similar trajectory, and Charles Schwab added about 9%. However, the SPDR S&P Regional Banking ETF (KRE) rose just 2% as other regional banks struggled to hold onto their gains. The volatility was evident in Zions Bancorp. and Western Alliance, which each turned negative briefly in afternoon trading after rising earlier in the session. The banks then finished the day with gains of 4% and 14%, respectively. Those moves come after regional banks fell sharply Monday, even though U.S. regulators took extraordinary measures to backstop all depositors in the now-failed Silicon Valley Bank. The KRE suffered its biggest one-day loss since March 2020, tumbling...

The Kremlin says only through "military means" Russia can "achieve its goals" in Ukraine, more than a year after Moscow began the war in the ex-Soviet republic. At a press conference on Monday, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said at the moment there were no preconditions for the transition of the process into a peaceful course in Ukraine. "For us, the absolute priority continues and will always remain the achievement of the goals set. At the moment they can only be achieved by military means," the Kremlin spokesman said.

A U.S military MQ-9 surveillance drone crashed into the Black Sea on Tuesday after being intercepted by Russian fighter jets, in the first such incident since Russia's invasion of Ukraine over a year ago. The Pentagon said that one of the Russian Su-27 jets struck the propeller of the drone, making it inoperable, while Russia's defense ministry blamed "sharp maneuvering" of the unmanned drone for the crash and said that its jets did not make contact. Although no lives were lost, it was a reminder of the risk of direct confrontation between the United States and Russia over Ukraine, which Moscow invaded over a year ago and which Western allies have supported with intelligence and weapons. Comment: The West has admitted it is directing Ukraine's forces, and Germany's minister recently admitted that the West 'is at war with Russia': US & EU special forces and the CIA ARE on the ground in Ukraine after all - Coordinating Ukraine's weapons, training, and 'attack app'

Bankers in Israel were able to successfully transfer $1 billion in funds from Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) right before it collapsed on Friday, according to reports. The Times of Israel is reporting that the country's two largest banks, Bank Leumi and Bank Hapoalim, were able to move the money before it was seized by the feds. The funds were transferred to bank accounts in Israel.

China will once again start issuing a range of visas to foreigners as of Wednesday, the country's foreign ministry said, in a major easing of travel restrictions in place since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The move marks the latest step towards reopening China to the outside world, as Beijing breaks with the strict zero-Covid strategy that defined its pandemic response until a few months ago. In addition to new visas being reviewed and approved, those issued before March 28, 2020 that remain valid will once again allow entry to China, said a notice posted Tuesday on a social media account affiliated with the foreign ministry's consular affairs bureau. Similar notices appeared on the websites of several overseas Chinese missions, including its embassies in the United States and France.

The New York Times has fired a fresh salvo at India's right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for its muscular Hindutva policies aimed at neutralizing Islamist separatists in the troubled Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) region. The US outlet, which has found itself at odds with the Modi administration since it came to power in 2014, mounted a fresh two-pronged attack with two articles on March 8. In doing so, it provoked stinging rebukes from the Indian government.

Movie star Steven Seagal made an appearance at the inaugural meeting of the International Russophile Movement in Moscow on Tuesday, claiming he was actually "a million percent Russian" himself. The actor received Russian citizenship back in 2016 and currently serves as a special envoy of the Russian Foreign Ministry on humanitarian relations between Moscow and Washington. Speaking at a press conference following the event, Seagal said that roughly half of Americans still "love" Russia despite the ongoing international turmoil. The actor also spoke about his ancestry - his grandfather immigrated to America from Russia - revealing what it means for him to be Russian. "To be Russian is to stand for the truth, to fight for the truth. ... I can say that I am one hundred percent Russophile and a million percent Russian," Seagal stated.

Armenia does not want to leave the six-nation Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has stressed. "It is not that Armenia is leaving the CSTO, the CSTO is leaving Armenia, which is of a great concern to us," Pashinyan said at a press conference on Tuesday. Armenia, which is locked in a territorial dispute with Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, has been reducing its involvement with the CSTO, which incorporates Russia and former Soviet Republics Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In January, Pashinyan warned that he might ask the United Nations to deploy peacekeepers to Nagorno-Karabakh to protect its ethnic-Armenian population after the five-year mandate of Russia's peacekeeping contingent there runs out in 2025.

A Wolf-Rayet star is a rare prelude to the famous final act of a massive star: the supernova. As one of its first observations in 2022, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope captured the Wolf-Rayet star WR 124 in unprecedented detail. A distinctive halo of gas and dust frames the star and glows in the infrared light detected by Webb, displaying knotty structure and a history of episodic ejections. Despite being the scene of an impending stellar 'death', astronomers also look to Wolf-Rayet stars for insight into new beginnings. Cosmic dust is forming in the turbulent nebulas surrounding these stars, dust that is composed of the heavy-element building blocks of the modern Universe, including life on Earth. The rare sight of a Wolf-Rayet star among the most luminous, most massive, and most briefly-detectable stars known was one of the first observations made by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Webb shows the star WR 124 in unprecedented detail with its powerful...

To understand how driverless vehicles can navigate the complexities of the road, researchers often use game theory mathematical models representing the way rational agents behave strategically to meet their goals. Dejan Milutinovic, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa Cruz, has long worked with colleagues on the complex subset of game theory called differential games, which have to do with game players in motion. One of these games is called the wall pursuit game, a relatively simple model for a situation in which a faster pursuer has the goal to catch a slower evader who is confined to moving along a wall. Since this game was first described nearly 60 years ago, there has been a dilemma within the game a set of positions where it was thought that no game optimal solution existed. But now, Milutinovic and his colleagues have proved in a new paper published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control that this long-standing dilemma does not...

In what was truly a bizarre scene, soldiers belonging to the British Army's Brigade of Gurkhas filled the populated streets of Cahors in southern France. The sound of blank ammunition rounds being fired off echoed down bustling avenues as locals casually strolled by and life went on seemingly as normal as the mock battle unfolded around them. While it looked like a war was being fought in Cahors, what was really happening was a hyper-realistic training scenario that was part of a much larger set of multi-national exercises that are ongoing in France. While this may be the most realistic military operations in urban terrain (MOUT) training we have ever seen based on the very un-canned setting, it serves as another reminder that militaries are racing to ready themselves for fighting in huge cities with all their unique impediments and tactical opportunities which, according to the Pentagon, is where future wars are likely to take place.

If China's journalists, foreign intelligence analysts, and People's Navy staff have needed an opportunity to demonstrate, if not to the Middle Kingdom audience, then to the US exceptionalist public how peripheral and how mediocre American legends have become, Seymour Hersh has provided it in an interview he recorded with China's state broadcaster CGTN on Saturday. For the first time since Hersh's earlier interviews with American, British, German, and Russian reporters, Hersh faced skepticism and cross-examination of the account he published on February 8 of what he claimed then, and insists still, was a joint US and Norwegian operation to destroy the Nord Stream gas pipelines on September 26, 2022. According to Hersh, the operation was directed by the White House and ordered by President Joseph Biden, with the reluctant support of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In his 28-minute interview with Liu Xin, Hersh repeats his original claims; makes fresh mistakes of fact;...

The Lockdown Files have shown it was a complete lack of leadership that led to the unprecedented historical step of shutting down the UK... The 19th-century sage William Hazlitt once observed that those who love liberty love their fellow men, while those who love power love only themselves. Matt Hancock says that he has been betrayed by the leaking of his WhatsApp messages. But few people will have any sympathy for him. He glutted on power and too obviously loved himself. Some things can be said in his favour. The Lockdown Files are not a complete record. No doubt there were also phone calls, Zoom meetings, civil service memos and the like, in which the thoughts of ministers and officials may have been more fully laid out. Not all the accusations levelled against him are fair. Care homes, for example, were probably an insoluble problem, given the absence of other places for many elderly patients to go, and the scarcity of testing materials in the early stages of the pandemic....

Strengthening military ties with the US will bind the Philippines to a "chariot of geopolitical strife," Beijing has claimed... The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Sunday cautioned the Philippines against strengthening military cooperation with the US, saying it will be used to serve Washington's geopolitical agenda to the detriment of Manila's own security. The latest warning from the Chinese embassy in Manila cited Philippines' President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.'s decision last month to give US troops access to four additional military bases in the Southeast Asian country. "Such cooperation will pull the Philippines against China and tie the country to the chariot of geopolitical strife, seriously jeopardizing Philippine national interests and regional peace and stability." The Chinese embassy urged the Marcos administration to avoid getting sucked into US efforts to maintain global hegemony. "We should abandon the perverse path of sowing dissension and causing trouble, not to mention...