A Ukrainian attempt to stage an offensive near the city of Kremennaya in the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) has been repelled by Russian forces, which are advancing near the village of Serebryanka in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), former LPR Ambassador to Russia Rodion Miroshnik said on Friday.

"Combat operations in the direction of Kremennaya have intensified. In the morning, Ukraine’s armed units attempted to mount attacks on the village of Chernopopovka. As their initial advance forces were insufficient, they then tried to pull in reserves, which were hit by our artillery. Sustaining losses, they retreated to their starting positions. The attack failed," he wrote on his Telegram channel.

"Our assault units have carried out a number of successful actions in a forested area near Serebryanka," he said, adding that three Ukrainian command outposts came over to Russia’s control.

The United States does not have in service and is not working on the creation of hypersonic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads identical to those operational in Russia, a leading US military intelligence researcher, Paul Freisthler, said at a hearing in the strategic arms subcommittee of the US House of Representatives.

The Russian Avangard system is the world's only deployed hypersonic strategic system, he said.

To an elaborative question of one of the committee’s members, whether this meant that the United States neither had in service nor planned to create similar hypersonic strategic systems, none of the participants in the hearings provided an answer. At the same time, Michael Horowitz, the director of the Emerging Capabilities Policy Office at the US Department of Defense, explained that the issue of creating hypersonic strategic weapons was a political issue, while defense-related agencies were focused on their specific tasks.

Webmaster addition: Good reason not to piss them off!

Senior US military officials present at a House of Representatives Armed Services Committee hearing on Friday confirmed that Washington has no plans to develop hypersonic nuclear weapons.

A panel of six officials representing various branches of the US military said "no" when Congressman Seth Moulton asked them whether the United States intends to develop hypersonic nuclear weapons.

Some members of the committee, including Moulton, voiced concern that the United States will not be able to reach parity with China and Russia on a number of nuclear hypersonic missiles because it has not and is not investing in their development.

The United States is far behind China and Russia, which have been able to make significant progress in the development of hypersonic missiles in recent years, with Russia deploying and using such missiles in the Ukraine conflict, according to committee members.

If you keep a diary or news journal, be sure to write down March 9, 2023 as the day that a full-blown bank run began at non-traditional banks in the U.S.

Wall Street's biggest banks took quite a thrashing in the stock market Thursday as investors spooked the turmoil at Silicon Valley Bank and Silvergate Capital dumped financial shares.

JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley - the four most valued US lenders - saw $55 billion wiped off their combined market capitalization on Thursday, Refinitiv data show.

JPMorgan, the biggest US bank, alone saw a $22 billion tumble in its market value as its stock slid 5.41% to $130.34. Wall Street heavyweight Bank of America lost $16.16 billion as its share price fell 6.20% to $30.54. Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley saw their market capitalization drop by $10.3 billion and $6.2 billion, respectively.

Incredulity. Astonishment. Disgust. Anger.

It is these feelings—amongst others—that describe the general reaction to the revelations of the Twitter Files and other egregious episodes of Big Tech censorship of the electronic public square.

The implicit deal with companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. is very simple: we will look at your ads if you give us a service for free. The deal did not include censorship.

But what is society to expect when those doing the censorship seem to see absolutely nothing wrong with it, and that it didn’t even occur to them that what they were engaged in—often at the specific request of governmental agencies—was at all a problem?

For a generation that has grown up with speech codes, enforced nicety, automatic deference to the feelings of others, and has been swaddled in bubble wrap against the vagaries of life, censoring of speech is not only not an ethical leap, it is the right thing to do.

Couple that with a permanent, purposeful self-infantilization that makes them defer to (or incoherently rage at for NOT censoring speech) anyone they perceive to be a grown-up—such as former FBI bigwig James Baker at Twitter—and the stage is not only set, but the terrifying end of the play writes itself.

The city of Newark, New Jersey fell victim to a humiliating scam in which its mayor signed a "sister city" agreement with a nonexistent Hindu nation called "The United States of Kailasa." 

Kailasa exists only as an elaborate website created by a fugitive who's been on the lam from Indian authorities since 2019 after being charged with rape, reports CBS New York. However, in a January 12 ceremony, Mayor Ras Baraka signed a cultural and trade deal with the contrived country.

"Whose job was it to do a simple Google search?" asked Newark resident Shakee Merritt. "No one in City Hall, not one person did a Google search."

On its website, Kailasa portrays Newark as having committed the entire United States of America to a "bilateral agreement." Newark officials say no money exchanged hands, and the deal with the fictional polity has been rescinded -- just in case Kailasa tried to enforce it. 

Russia has been sending Western-supplied weapons captured on the battlefields of Ukraine to its ally Iran, which may be able to reverse-engineer the technology, according to CNN.

US, NATO, and other Western officials have observed several instances of Russian forces capturing US-made Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft systems that the Ukrainian army has left behind, CNN reported, citing four sources familiar with the matter.

According to the sources, Russia has flown some of these weapons to Iran, likely so that it can take them apart and analyze the technology in order to create its own versions of the weapons.

Ukraine has received billions of dollars worth of weapons from the West, with the US supplying FGM-148 Javelins and FIM-92 Stingers from its own military stockpile.

The situation on the Korean Peninsula seems to be deteriorating. In 2022, North Korea launched a record number of missile tests, aiming to demonstrate its capabilities in delivering conventional or nuclear payloads to more distant targets, potentially including the US mainland.

This trend has continued into this year, including in late February, with North Korea launching another ICBM and cruise missiles, and the US and South Korea holding a nuclear-themed tabletop exercise and conducting a joint air drill over the peninsula.

Jacob Chansley, the January 6th protester cast by the media as a 'violent insurrectionist' and sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison, has been vindicated in the eyes of many, after new footage emerged last week which refutes the entire narrative surrounding the events of that day.

After reviewing footage withheld from the public by the January 6th Committee, Fox News host Tucker Carlson revealed that Chansley (given the moniker "QAnon Shaman"), was calmly escorted throughout the Capitol complex by Capitol Police, who even helped him find open doors.

“The tapes show the Capitol police never stopped Jacob Chansley," said Carlson. "They helped him. They acted as his tour guides," said Carlson.

Webmaster addition: Violent insurrections don't have tour guides! Time to free all the J6 prisoners, as their prosecutions violated the Brady Rule in that defense lawyers were not given access to exculpatory videos!

Thus far in this 3-year fiasco of mismanagement and corruption, we’ve avoided a financial crisis. That’s for specific reasons. We just had not traveled there in the trajectory of the inevitable. Are we there yet? Maybe. In any case, the speed of change is accelerating. All that awaits is to observe the extent of the contagion.

The failure of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), $212 billion in assets until only recently, is a huge mess and a possible foreshadowing. Its fixed-rate bond holdings declined rapidly in market valuation due to changed market conditions. Its portfolio crashed further due to a depositor run. And it all happened in less than a few days.

It’s all an extension of Fed policy to curb inflation, reversing a 13-year zero-rate policy. This of course pushed up rates in the middle and right side of the yield curve, devaluing existing bond holdings locked into older rate patterns. Investors noticed and then depositors too. The high-flying institution that specialized in providing liquidity in industries that have lost their luster suddenly found itself very vulnerable.

In addition, the bank was exposed with a portfolio of collateralized mortgage obligations and mortgage-backed securities. But with rates rising, those are coming under stress too as high leverage in housing and real estate become untenable amidst falling valuations. Borrowers are finding themselves under water and that in turn adds to stress on lenders.

Webmaster addition: Mortgage-backed securities was a major cause of the 2008 melt-down! 

Brigitte Macron, the First Lady of France, filed a complaint last year against two women who uploaded a YouTube video titled "Brigitte Macron is a man." The video alleged that Brigitte had a gender reassignment at 18.

On Wednesday, the French newspaper Le Point reported that Brigitte's complaint against the two women was "voided" by a Paris Judge. 

In its decision, consulted by AFP, the court declared void the summons issued by Brigitte Macron for invasion of privacy and image rights, considering that the facts she denounced should have been qualified of public defamation.

Brigitte Macron, her brother, and the three children of the First Lady had assigned two women on February 15, 2022, one presenting herself as a "medium," the other as an "independent journalist."

They asked the court to condemn these two women to pay them damages for having broadcast on the YouTube channel of the "medium", on December 10, 2021, "a perfectly eccentric thesis" according to which Brigitte Macron, born Trogneux, does not would never have existed, but that his brother would have taken on this identity after changing sex.

Global air pollution declined by 31% during the initial COVID-19 lockdowns, demonstrating a link between economic activity and air quality.

As Visual Capitalist's Jenna Ross details below, this graphic from The Hinrich Foundation, the fourth in a five-part series on the sustainability of trade, explores how air pollution varies by economy. It pulls data from the 2022 Sustainable Trade Index, which The Hinrich Foundation produced in collaboration with the IMD World Competitiveness Center.

Joe Biden just can’t stop lying about his policies that have crushed the American people.

How long has he been telling us that he only wants to go after the “rich” people with his phalanx of thousands of new IRS agents? A long time it seems. Anyone who knows Joe Biden knows what malarkey his claim truly is and we’ve pointed out some of the lies surrounding this claim in the past.

But Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen finally admitted under grilling on Friday by Rep. Adrian Smith (R-NE), the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee, that 90 percent of the new audits were going to be on families and small businesses — lower and middle-income people making under $400,000, and not on “billionaires and tax cheats,” as Joe Biden has claimed.

Webmaster addition: