A new study released this week by the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has concluded that America's defense industry is "not adequately prepared" for "a protracted conventional war" with an enemy with a large military like China.

The findings were the result of a war games simulation which also relied heavily on observations and statistics being gained from the Ukraine-Russia war, and Washington's ongoing military support role to Kiev.

Information from the Ukraine war led CSIS to find that the US would rapidly deplete its munitions, particularly long-range, precision-guided ones - in merely less than a week of a hot war with China in the Taiwan Strait.

Webmaster addition: So why are we giving away all the weapons to Ukraine?!?

I took a drive down Mission street and saw tent after tent, person after person sleeping on the sidewalk.

The Tenderloin & SOMA were the same.

FiDi didn't have any tents (probably because the high-end property managers send in power washers at night).

It was beyond sad. 

Everywhere people were congregating, the surrounding area was littered with trash.

People were emptying bins onto the ground and rifling through them.

When I walked to my car a very large man came uncomfortably close to me, talking to himself in an angry, booming voice. 

“I said babe, that’s the car. So, I immediately call the police, 911.”

While on the phone, Wiggins says, the teens started “literally shooting, the passenger is shooting at us, because they seen, they ran the stop sign, they seen me go through. They like ‘yea she following us.’”

Wiggins said that’s when she started firing her own gun back at the fleeing suspects before the teens crashed the stolen SUV head-on into a car on Kings Lane.

U.S. health officials who spread inflated COVID-19 child death data in public meetings apologized to the source of the false data but not to the public, newly obtained emails show.

Drs. Katherine Fleming-Dutra and Sara Oliver, with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), offered the false data in 2022 while U.S. officials weighed granting emergency authorization to COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months.

The study they cited for the data was published ahead of peer review by a group comprised primarily of British authors. The study was corrected after the public meetings.

Emails obtained by The Epoch Times showed that Fleming-Dutra and Oliver were alerted that they had spread misinformation. Neither the officials nor the CDC have informed the public of the false information. Newly obtained emails showed the officials apologized to Seth Flaxman, one of the study’s authors, and even offered to see whether the study could be published in the CDC’s quasi-journal.

“I feel … that we owe you an apology,” Oliver wrote to Flaxman on June 27, about 10 days after she and Fleming-Dutra falsely said there had been at least 1,433 deaths primarily attributed to COVID-19 in America among those 19 and younger. “We draw the attention of a variety of individuals with the ACIP meetings, and apologize that you got caught in it this time.”

Israeli military raids on Palestinian communities have continued to escalate in magnitude and violence during the first month of 2023, said Palestinians in different parts of the occupied West Bank.

Since the beginning of 2023, Israeli forces have escalated their military raids into the Palestinian cities, towns and refugee camps in the occupied West Bank, often confronted by young Palestinians. In various areas, Palestinians began to confront Israeli raids with firearms, especially in the northern occupied West Bank.

The Israeli escalation claimed the lives of some 230 Palestinians throughout 2022, including 53 victims of Israel's war on the Gaza Strip in August.

Earlier this month, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees named eight commissioners who will review President Joe Biden’s National Defense Strategy and provide recommendations for its implementation.

But the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, which is tasked with “examin[ing] the assumptions, objectives, defense investments, force posture and structure, operational concepts, and military risks of the NDS,” according to the Armed Services Committees, is largely comprised of individuals with financial ties to the weapons industry and U.S. government contractors, raising questions about whether the commission will take a critical eye to contractors who receive $400 billion of the $858 billion FY2023 defense budget.

The potential conflicts of interest start at the very top of the eight-person commission. The chair of the commission, former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), sits on the board of Iridium Communications, a satellite communications firm that was awarded a seven-year $738.5 million contract with the Department of Defense in 2019.

“Iridium and its Board members follow Iridium’s Code of Business Conduct and Ethics and all rules and regulations applicable to dealings with the U.S. government,” Iridium spokesman Jordan Hassin told Responsible Statecraft.

Punchbowl News reports that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is planning a trip to Taiwan, which will be yet another incendiary provocation against Beijing if it occurs. The previous House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, sparked a significant escalation in hostilities with her visit last year, the consequences of which are still reverberating today.

Antiwar's Dave DeCamp explains:

Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was viewed in Beijing as a major provocation, and it sparked the largest-ever Chinese military drills around the island. The exercises included China firing missiles over Taiwan and simulating a blockade of the island, both unprecedented actions.

China has kept up the military pressure on Taiwan since Pelosi’s visit, and its warplanes regularly now cross the median line, an informal barrier that divides the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Before Pelosi’s trip, China barely crossed the line. Now, it’s an almost-daily occurrence.

Israeli far-right minister Itamar Ben Gvir has said he will ignore Jordan and continue storming the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the third-most important site in Islam.

Ben Gvir sparked a diplomatic storm between Israel and its Arab allies and neighbours when the extremist politician stormed the compound earlier in January.

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited King Abdullah in Amman on Tuesday to reassure the monarch that the status quo at the Jerusalem holy site, which Jordan is the custodian of, will be maintained.

Ben Gvir said that despite the promises Netanyahu made to the king, he will continue to raid the holy site.

"I do not conduct my policy regarding the Temple Mount according to the policy of the Jordanian government," he told the Israeli Kan broadcaster.

On the afternoon of January 10, Van Bawi Mang, a member of an armed resistance group fighting against the Myanmar military, was resting in his barracks at a camp on the country’s northwestern border with India when a loud explosion jolted him back to the reality of war.

He scrambled into a nearby ditch as jet fighters flew overhead, glass shattering with the reverberation of the falling bombs.

The People’s Liberation Army has ramped up combat patrols around Taiwan to deter Taipei from boosting defence ties with Washington, but observers warned Beijing’s increasing intimidation could cause backlash.

The PLA has sent more than 400 aircraft sorties and 80 vessels to carry out operations near Taiwan since Washington approved increased military aid for the island late last month, according to data released by Taiwan’s defence ministry.

The situation began to escalate on December 25, when 71 aircraft and seven vessels from the PLA’s Eastern Theatre Command, which oversees the Taiwan Strait, kicked off a joint combat operation in the air and waters around Taiwan.

The Russian Defense Ministry said Wednesday one of its hypersonic-missile carrying frigates had conducted “hypersonic missile exercises” in the western part of the Atlantic Ocean.

The frigate Admiral Gorshkov tested the strike capabilities of Russia’s much-hyped Zircon hypersonic missile in the western Atlantic Ocean, according to a statement released by the ministry, using “computer simulation” exercises.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the development of the hypersonic Zircon (or Tsirkon) missiles back in 2019 when he said the missiles have a top speed of mach 9 (or nine times the speed of sound) and have a range of 1,000 kilometers (620 miles). The missiles, Putin said, “can hit navy or land targets.”

“In accordance with the training situation, the frigate practiced arranging [a] Tsirkon hypersonic missile strike against a maritime target at a distance over 900 kilometers away,” Russia’s defense ministry said in its statement about the exercise.

It did not say it had launched a missile.

Yes, ChatGPT understands code, can write code, and can even help developers debug their code. This was previously unthinkable, and compared to previous AI text generation tools ChatGPT just seems to get it.

Billions of dollars worth of U.S. weapons are on the negotiating table between Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and Afghanistan’s Taliban government, according to at least one insider.

Presidentish Joe Biden’s bungled bugout from Afghanistan resulted in a windfall for the new radical Islamic government, including artillery, attack helicopters, and thousands of HUMVEES, machine guns, radios — all left behind as our orderly withdrawal degenerated into a rout.

The Department of Defense estimates the total value of the gear Biden left behind at a whopping $7.12 billion, and now Putin is reportedly offering to buy whatever he and the battered Russian Army need.

New research by top US government scientists has found that people exposed to the widely used weed killing chemical glyphosate have biomarkers in their urine linked to the development of cancer and other diseases.

The study, published last week in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, measured glyphosate levels in the urine of farmers and other study participants and determined that the presence of high levels of the pesticide were associated with signs of a reaction in the body called oxidative stress, a condition that causes damage to DNA. Oxidative stress is considered by health experts as a key characteristic of carcinogens.

The authors of the paper – 10 scientists with the National Institutes of Health and two from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – concluded that their study “contributes to the weight of evidence supporting an association between glyphosate exposure and oxidative stress in humans.” They also noted that “accumulating evidence supports the role of oxidative stress in the pathogenesis of hematologic cancers,” such as lymphoma, myeloma and leukemia.

“Oxidative stress is not something you want to have,” said Linda Birnbaum, a toxicologist and former director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences. “This study increases our understanding that glyphosate has the potential to cause cancer.”

The study findings come after the CDC reported last year that more than 80% of urine samples drawn from children and adults contained glyphosate. The CDC reported that out of 2,310 urine samples taken from a group of Americans intended to be representative of the US population, 1,885 were laced with detectable traces of glyphosate.

Bees are likely to be at high risk from exposure to glyphosate, the most widely used weedkiller in the world, via contaminated wildflower nectar and pollen after pre-harvest spraying (desiccation), according to new research from Trinity College Dublin and Dublin City University scientists in Ireland.

Glyphosate is the most frequently used weedkiller within the European Union and is also very common in other parts of the world. The residues the Irish scientists found in nectar in this study exceeded the European maximum permitted levels of glyphosate in honey and honey bee products, which suggests they could be harmful to honeybees and those eating the honey.

In an article published here in November 2018, I referred to the statement of the UK representative of a UN organisation named the International, Impartial, Independent Mechanism to Assist in the Investigation and Prosecution of Persons Responsible for the Most Serious Crimes under International Law Committed in the Syrian Arab Republic since March 2011.

I will repeat that statement because it is relevant to the current situation in Syria. That person stated,

“We must demonstrate that those who have committed the most serious crimes of international concern can have no place to hide. There must be no impunity for the horrendous acts taking place on a daily basis in Syria. There must be justice for the victims.”

The UK representative said this without any sense of irony, without any sense of shame, for, of course, it is the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada and their gang who have committed war crimes, and crimes against humanity beyond number in Syria since they instigated the uprisings against the government of Syria, beginning in 2011, supported their allied terrorists groups to attack Syrian armed forces and civilians, and imposed their illegal sanctions on the people of Syria.

The history of the war against Syria by the US and UK, Israel and their allies is well-known, the cruel sanctions, the aerial bombings, the missile attacks, the assassinations, the torture, the illegal occupation of the Golan Heights by Israel with US support, and, finally, the US invasion of Syria that began in 2015 with US special forces raids into its territory on a number of occasions that year and 2016 and the formal entry of US forces on March 8, 2017. Their invasion has continued to this day.

A recent update to the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) electrocardiogram (EKG) test limits for pilots has some aviation and medical experts questioning if the FAA’s move is concerned that COVID-19 vaccine injuries may be contributing to an ongoing shortage of pilots.

The FAA on Oct. 26, 2022, changed its Guide for Aviation Medical Examiners (AME), increasing the acceptable “PR interval” from 200 to 300 milliseconds — a 50% increase.

The PR interval — the time it takes for an electrical impulse to be transmitted from one part of the heart to another — is a key indicator of heart health.

The FAA did not publicly announce the revision and, according to Just the News, also has not disclosed the data used to justify the change.

US Freedom Flyers (USFF), an advocacy group opposed to COVID-19 vaccine mandates for pilots, detected the change last month, The Epoch Times reported.

The USFF and some vaccine safety advocates suggested the FAA revised the limits because airlines’ vaccine mandates, which some argued violated FAA regulations, resulted in a significant number of pilots sustaining adverse events.

The revelations surfaced amid claims the FAA did not investigate multiple cases of vaccine-injured pilots, including incidents where disaster nearly occurred, and that there is increasing demand for unvaccinated pilots.

Some critics called for FAA officials to resign, alleging the vaccines endangered the health of pilots and the public.