Hunger and malnutrition are rising sharply in Syria and more than half its population is short of food after 12 years of war, economic pressures and last month's earthquake, the World Food Program said on Wednesday.

"The situation is worse than ever in Syria, the United Nations agency's Middle East director, Corrine Fleischer, told Reuters.

About 55% of Syria's population of some 12.1 million people are food insecure and a further 2.9 million are at risk of sliding into hunger, a WFP report said.

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 and Ron DeSantis and others, often using “fake news” or alleged leaks of embarrassing personal information, while also praising the virtues of Donald Trump. The apparent intention was to build popular support for Trump by exploiting the social media sites’ algorithms to reach a large audience at the expense of the other possible GOP candidates. There are also concerns among some Republicans that the effort to give life to the Trump campaign by materially impacting on online political discussion might possibly be orchestrated and paid for by major outside interests that could actually be either foreign or criminal. Of course, as the operation has been exposed by an Israeli company, the possibility exists that the story is itself at least in part a false flag to plausibly deny any involvement by the Jewish state if that were to be demonstrable.

A court in the Pakistani city of Lahore has ordered the immediate halt of a two-day operation to arrest former Prime Minister Imran Khan until Thursday morning.

Security forces first attempted to take the leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party into custody on Tuesday afternoon after an Islamabad court issued an arrest warrant to ensure his attendance in court by March 18. Khan has repeatedly skipped hearings in a case related to selling state gifts.

A team of defence scientists in Beijing says it has simulated an intercontinental ballistic missile attack against the United States mainland by North Korea.

The North Korean missile could hit the central US in 1,997 seconds, or about 33 minutes, if the US missile defence network failed to intercept it, according to the simulation.

Similar studies conducted by Chinese scientists in the past have not usually named specific countries or locations, especially when the findings were made available to the public.

The German military is suffering from a greater shortage of weapons and equipment than before Russia's invasion of Ukraine a year ago, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces said in her annual report on Tuesday.

"The Bundeswehr has too little of everything, and it has even less since (Russia's invasion on) Feb. 24, 2022," Eva Hoegl, who acts as an advocate defending the rights of the troops, told reporters in Berlin.

She denounced the government for being slow not only in spending the 100 billion euro special fund set up last year to bring the forces back up to scratch, but also in replenishing the military's stocks after rushing arms to Kyiv.

Narrator: After more than 100 days of a violent insurrection in 2020 Portland (where more than half of those who were arrested for the violence would be extricated by the Federal Government because they were on the “right-side” of the racial justice crusade), the consequences for the law-abiding three years later were obvious. Axiomatic. [Nike BEGS Portland mayor for police protection to reopen shuttered community store plagued with retail theft, Post Millennial, February 17, 2023]:

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Shoigu, on Wednesday over the downing of the US MQ-9 Reaper drone in the Black Sea.

It marked the first time since October that the two military leaders spoke, as high-level engagement between the US and Russia has been rare since the invasion of Ukraine was launched in February 2022.

“I just got off the phone with my Russian counterpart, Minister Shoigu,” Austin told reporters at a press conference alongside Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.

Officials with the Russian oil company Transneft say they've uncovered a failed bomb plot to sabotage the Druzhba oil pipeline and maim civilians in the western Bryansk region of Russia. 

Transneft spokesman Igor Demin told TASS on Wednesday that two explosive devices were found at a pumping station. The devices, while they didn't detonate, had some degree of damage due to the likelihood they were dropped from drones, he explained.

"The character of the explosive parts — metal balls — indicates that the organizers of this sabotage did not intend to damage equipment, but rather to kill people, namely civilian workers at a pumping station on the Druzhba [pipeline]. Investigations are underway," Demin said. 

The station in question, identified in Bloomberg as the Novozybkov station, "hasn’t been used for oil pumping so far this year; its reservoirs are empty," according to reports. Demin noted that no part of the station was damaged.

So the DC media will just ignore this whopper of a lie?! @JoeBiden said gay people were national security threats when he was a Senator. He also campaigned against gay marriage as VP.

Preppers have a term for the civil unrest and chaos that could follow an SHTF scenario, and it is “WROL.” WROL stands for “Without Rule of Law” and is the thing that survivalists prepare for especially. Images of ‘Mad Max’ come to mind, in a society where the society has broken down and it’s every man for himself.

However, what about all the places on the continuum that are this side of WROL, which are far more likely to be experienced? What about a scenario where the economy collapses or is on the verge of collapse and crime skyrockets, but we still have police trying their best to keep order?

Whatever situation we find ourselves in, we all want to know how to stay safe, and only the young studs among us are naive enough to think that they can be vigilant enough with their stockpile of guns to not have to worry.

There are two main strategies that I advocate for wiser men to employ in order to stay safe when the SHTF happens and you realize that you can’t walk around with a gun in your hand 24/7.

Multiple federal authorities have launched investigations into the fall of Silicon Valley Bank, the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, as lawmakers and officials point fingers over who and what to blame for the collapse.

Federal regulators took over Silicon Valley last week after depositors flocked to the firm to pull funds after executives said they needed to raise billions in capital to secure the bank’s balance sheet.

The separate probes from federal authorities, which were reported by a number of outlets, will examine the background of the event, including the actions of bank executives in the days leading up to the failure.

Here is what you need to know about the federal investigations into Silicon Valley Bank.

Congressional Democrats of the Homeland Security Committee will reportedly not be joining a field hearing to be held in McAllen, Texas on March 15 where U.S. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz is scheduled to testify.

The Republican leadership of the committee sharply criticized the decision in statements released Monday.

“It’s deeply disappointing that the Minority members of the Committee have chosen to bail on this week’s full committee field hearing in Texas, only after they invited and confirmed a minority witness for one of the panels,” Committee chairman Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee told Fox News in a statement.

Former House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff has been accused of leaking classified information so frequently that former CIA Director Mike Pompeo wants the Democrat lawmaker to no longer to have access to it.

“During my time as CIA director and secretary of state, I know that he leaked classified information that had been provided to him,” Pompeo said, noting that Schiff played a crucial role in the Trump-Russia investigation, which was plagued with leaks to the media for years.

“It’s a complicated process, right? It’s difficult to pin down precisely what happened,” Pompeo said. “But I could tell you that when we provided information to him and to his staff, it ended up in places it shouldn’t have been with alarming regularity. We could see it. In the end, I decided I held back information from them as a result.”

Following the release of President Joe Biden’s budget proposal, House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Jodey Arrington, R- Texas, is proposing a means for voters to have a say about rising debt and soaring inflation.

Arrington introduced a resolution calling for an Article V convention of states. More than the required two-thirds of states previously called for either a fiscal responsibility amendment or a balanced budget amendment in the 1970s. Arrington’s legislation says, Congress "appears to have failed in its constitutional duty to count applications and call a ‘convention for proposing amendments.’" He introduced a similar measure last year, but now Republicans hold the majority in the House.

David M. Walker, former U.S. comptroller general under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, was set to testify in favor of a convention in the House Budget Committee in March.

According to attorney Joe McBride who uncovered the report, the government knew MAGA was coming to DC and so they entrapped them. It was all a setup.

The report is included in the first tweet below from Jan 6 attorney Joe McBride.

President Biden is set to formally propose an array of tax increases on wealthy individuals and corporations in a budget plan that he says will reduce the deficit by $2 trillion over the next decade, setting up a battle royal with Republicans on Capitol Hill.  

Biden told lawmakers during his State of the Union address last month that his budget will lower the deficit and extend the solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund “by making the wealthy and big corporations begin to pay their fair share.”

He has pledged not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 annually.  

The White House on Tuesday unveiled a proposal to raise the Medicare surtax on earned and unearned income above $400,000 from 3.8 percent to 5 percent.  

Webmaster addition: This sort of things happen when elections are stolen!

President Joe Biden on Tuesday issued an executive order that would bring America “as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation.”

The president is also calling for a restoration of the so-called “assault weapons ban.” Biden’s executive order has the stated goal of “increasing the number of background checks conducted before firearm sales, moving the U.S. as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation.”

“The Executive Order will also keep more guns out of dangerous hands by increasing the effective use of ‘red flag’ laws, strengthen efforts to hold the gun industry accountable, and accelerate law enforcement efforts to identify and apprehend the shooters menacing our communities,” the executive order adds. “President Biden is also encouraging the Federal Trade Commission to issue a public report analyzing how gun manufacturers market firearms to minors.”

Joe Biden left out a very important point this morning about the bailouts he and his Administration are taking to rescue the Silicon Valley Bank. 

Biden lies through omission.

This morning, Joe Biden tried to reassure the nation about the banking segment of the economy as his Administration announced over the weekend that it was bailing out two banks – Signature Bank and Silicon Valley Bank.

 A transgender, U.K. doctor known for being a fatness advocate expressed outrage that thin people were being celebrated for "The Whale" movie at the Oscar awards ceremony on Sunday.