The authorities in the northern US state of Minnesota revealed on Thursday that a nuclear power plant near Minneapolis had suffered a radioactive water spill amounting to over 1.5 million liters. Xcel Energy, which owns the Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant, is working to clean up the spill and insists there is no danger to the general public.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) said that around 400,000 gallons of tritiated water leaked from a broken pipe at the facility. The leak was first discovered on November 22, and its source was found on December 19 and patched “soon after.”

The authorities decided to keep the public in the dark about the incident, while Xcel Energy and the state were “actively managing” the situation to prevent the underground plume of irradiated water from spreading to the nearby Mississippi River, MPCA assistant commissioner Kirk Koudelka told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Galicia, a historical region in the West of Ukraine, is currently the center of the country’s nationalist movement. However, things were once very different. A little over a hundred years ago, representatives of opposing Russophile and pro-Ukrainian political movements competed for the loyalty of the local Ruthenian population, also known as Rusyns. Galicia’s Russophiles welcomed the beginning of the First World War as a step toward an anticipated reunion with Russia. However the Ukrainian movement remained loyal to Austria-Hungary. With the help of the latter, Vienna killed off the Rusyn intelligentsia, which it considered a “fifth column”. To accomplish this, the Hapsburgs set up concentration camps.

What happened next amounted to a genocide. 

French President Emmanuel Macron bypassed parliament and enacted a controversial pension reform package on Thursday, triggering riots and arson on the streets of Paris. The move, which raises France’s retirement age to 64, had already caused months of strikes and protests.

Macron invoked a special constitutional power to pass the bill, immediately before a vote was set to take place. Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne announced the decision in the National Assembly, as opposition lawmakers booed, jeered, and sang.

Under the power invoked by Macron and Borne, the bill is considered passed unless a majority of lawmakers file a motion of no confidence against the government in the next 24 hours. Right-wing leader Marine Le Pen said that her National Rally party would back such a motion, as did a number of leftist leaders.

Daniel Rice, a special advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Valeriy Zaluzhnyi of Ukraine, believes that China will not supply Russia with weapons because Bejing has seen every mistake made by Vladimir Putin.

The official spoke with journalists on the occasion of his appointment as President of the American University of Kyiv, answering the questions of an Ukrinform correspondent.

Leftwing French MPs sang the national anthem at the top of their voices and waved placards saying '64 is no' as the prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, prepared to use special powers to push through without a parliamentary vote an unpopular bill raising the pension age from 62 to 64. The speaker had no success trying to quieten MPs. Subscribe to Guardian News on YouTube ► http://bit.ly/guardianwiressub

Minutes before MPs in the lower house were to vote, Emmanuel Macron was still holding frantic meetings with senior political figures. He then switched to using the special powers rather than risk a vote he seemed poised to lose.

Webmaster addition: Latest reports are that street battles are happening in Paris.

California Republican lawmakers introduced a bill that would require school districts to alert parents if their child is trans-identifying or “non-binary” after a state high school fired one of its teachers for violating a state anti-discrimination law that prohibits such interactions.

A senior executive at Swiss investment bank Credit Suisse who claims to be “nonbinary” and “gender fluid” spent much of the past several years campaigning for LGBTQ inclusion in the global financial system as performance at the company declined.

Webmaster addition: See CLIMATEGATE: A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

Two pilots involved in the downing of a U.S. drone over the Black Sea earlier this week were honored by the Russian government, the country’s Defense Ministry announced Friday.

Members of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine have revealed ‘a small number of violations’ of the laws of war by Ukrainian servicemen, the comission said in a statement released by the UN office in Vienna on Thursday.

The document focuses on violations allegedly committed by the Russian armed forces, including "indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks". "The Commission has found that the Ukrainian armed forces were likely responsible for violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law, and for some incidents which qualify as war crimes. They include indiscriminate attacks and two incidents of wounding and torture of Russian prisoners of war," the statement said.

According to the UN, the commission representatives visited 56 Ukrainian settlements and interviewed 595 local residents, including 348 women and 247 men, while preparing the report.

Webmaster addition: "indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks." Is that anything like "mostly peaceful demonstrations?"

Army Gen. Michael Kurilla, who leads U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that not only can the rejuvenated ISIS-K network in Afghanistan launch an attack against U.S. or Western interests abroad in under six months “with little or no warning,” but also hundreds of thousands of Americans abroad could be at risk.

Mr Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, born on 7 October 1952, President of the Russian Federation, is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation (under articles 8(2)(a)(vii) and 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute). The crimes were allegedly committed in Ukrainian occupied territory at least from 24 February 2022. There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes, (i) for having committed the acts directly, jointly with others and/or through others (article 25(3)(a) of the Rome Statute), and (ii) for his failure to exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts, or allowed for their commission, and who were under his effective authority and control, pursuant to superior responsibility (article 28(b) of the Rome Statute).

Webmaster addition: Bad Putin! Bad Putin! Repeat over and over!

This is pure Putin-bashing propaganda. Frankly, getting kids out of a conflict zone sounds like a good idea to me!

A bipartisan bill will be introduced Thursday by Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) to re-up a program to foster next–generation agricultural research, including work to address the agriculture sector's ability to withstand extreme weather.

Driving the news: The bill, to be introduced Thursday morning, would increase the funding authorized for the program and expand its scope.

• The program would grow to include sponsoring research on ways agricultural lands can play a role in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and saving more water and soil.

When Obama was 'President' he gave a half a billion dollars to startup energy company Solyndra.

They created the company, cleared a location, constructed a building, installed factory equipment, purchased inventory, hired workers, and went bankrupt- all within one year.

Within 2 days of the bankruptcy announcement, the FBI swooped in and grabbed all the financial records.

Instead of returning inventory to suppliers, they bulldozed it.

And then it disappeared from history. No financial accounting was ever made, no Congressional hearings, no one was investigated... It all went down the memory hole.

The new CEO of Silicon Valley Bridge Bank is asking its customers to help the financial institution rebuild after its collapse last week.

CEO Tim Mayopoulos reached out in an email to clients on Tuesday to encourage transferring money or leaving deposits in the bank’s accounts as it bounces back following its recent disaster, Bloomberg reported.

“The number one thing you can do to support the future of this institution is to help us rebuild our deposit base, both by leaving deposits with Silicon Valley Bridge Bank and transferring back deposits that left over the last several days,” he wrote.

The former editor of an Orthodox Jewish newspaper in New York City — identified two years ago as a member of the Jan. 6 mob by POLITICO — was charged Thursday with two felonies for his actions at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Elliot Resnick, who had drawn controversy prior to Jan. 6 for incendiary and bigoted comments — labeling African religions as “primitive” and suggesting white supremacy is fictional — grabbed a Capitol Police officer’s arm while he was attempting to defend the doors leading to the rotunda, according to charging documents. After those doors were breached, Resnick remained by the entrance and helped pull other rioters into the building at one of the earliest moments of the breach, according to the documents.

At present, the United States prefers providing weapons and military equipment to the Kiev government over reconciliation-themed diplomatic contacts with Russia, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday.

In Blinken’s opinion, "there has to be a just and durable peace" in Ukraine. "Just in the sense that it reflects the principles of the United Nations Charter. If it's a peace that allows Russia to keep all the territory seized by force, that's not justice," the secretary of state said. He also explained that by ‘durable,’ he implied "that no one wants to see Russia repeat this a year or two or three years later."

"With those principles in mind, every day we are looking for ways to see if we can bring the war to an end. I see no evidence that right now Russia is interested in a diplomatic resolution and negotiation that would end this war," Blinken told reporters during his visit to Niger’s capital Niamey.

The media tells you that Russia is planning a cyber offensive along with their on-the-ground offensive in the Spring. But who is their main source? The same Microsoft guy who was the source for Russiagate. I know, I know. Stop me if you think you've heard this one before!

Democrat presidential candidate Marianne Williamson responded to allegations made this week by former staffers that she flew into fits of rage during her unsuccessful bid for president in 2020.

The Russian VKS also noted that the UAV had its transponders off while heading toward Russian airspace. Moscow slammed Washington DC for violating the agreed protocols for avoiding escalation. However, the US insists that its drone was “merely conducting routine operations in international airspace over the Black Sea and posed no threat to anyone”. However, as the Pentagon claims that the MQ-9 was unarmed, this leaves us only with the option that it was carrying out ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) over critically important Russian military infrastructure. Considering this information is then shared directly with the Neo-Nazi junta forces, enabling precision strikes, it can hardly be considered a “nonthreat”.

Quite expectedly, Washington DC warhawks were quick to call for a world-ending thermonuclear war over a single drone, with the “famously pacifist” Senator Lindsey Graham calling for the downing of Russian fighter jets. “What would Ronald Reagan do right now? He would start shooting Russian planes down, if they were threatening our assets,” he told Sean Hannity during a Fox News interview. On the other hand, top Russian officials, such as Nikolai Patrushev, the Secretary of the Russian Security Council, are adamant that the incident proves America’s direct involvement in the conflict. And indeed, as previously mentioned, the US battlefield data is directly shared with the Neo-Nazi junta, causing thousands of Russian military and civilian deaths.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) unloaded on leftist Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, also known as AMLO, this week in response to a recent meltdown from AMLO over the issue of tackling the country’s drug cartel problem.

Nevada’s Democratic state lawmakers plan to introduce a bill giving Medicaid to illegal immigrants, at an estimated initial cost of $78.5 million.

I had heard of Charles Negy, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Central Florida (UCF). What I heard seemed like a particularly egregious example of cancel culture that is purging academia and imposing uniformity of opinion, particularly with regard to the Black Lives Matter movement. Having looked into it more, it’s worse than I realized.

Negy’s alleged crime that sparked the controversy was two tweets questioning the orthodoxy of systemic racism and white privilege.

One tweet, which no longer is available,said:

“If Afr. Americans as a group, had the same behavioral profile as Asian Americans (on average, performing the best academically, having the highest income, committing the lowest crime, etc.), would we still be proclaiming ‘systematic racism’ exists?”

A second tweet, also no longer available, said:

“Black privilege is real: Besides affirm. action, special scholarships and other set asides, being shielded from legitimate criticism is a privilege. But as a group, they’re missing out on much needed feedback.”

What ensued was almost beyond comprehension, far worse than I experienced during the post-George Floyd cancel-culture mania that swept higher education as BLM riots and protests engulfed the nation. Read that post for more detail on the attacks on Prof. Negy, including from the senior administrators at UCF.

Bravo to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) for revealing just how much of a family business Biden, Inc. is. 

Bank records newly obtained by his House Oversight Committee show that Hunter Biden associate Rob Walker transferred north of $1.3 million in 2017 not only to usual suspects Hunter and presidential little brother Jim but also to daughter-in-law Hallie (son Beau’s widow; Hunter’s brief fling) — plus an unknown simply tagged as “Biden.” 

The family that gets paid together stays together, it seems. 

Most of that big chunk of change came from a $3 million transfer from an affiliate of Chinese energy outfit CEFC to Walker. CEFC, now defunct, was one of China’s biggest private companies and a main target of Hunter Biden’s operations back in 2017, with the First Son angling for a ultra-high-paid board seat and equity stakes for him and Jim and an unnamed “big guy” widely thought to be Joe. 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted in a Senate Finance Committee hearing Thursday that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Reserve might not guarantee large deposits at small community banks like they did for a failed California bank.

Eighteen years ago, I published an article in the Stanford Law Review which documented for the first time the enormous breadth and scale of race-based admissions preferences in law schools. At most law schools, the undergraduate grades (UGPA) and median LSAT scores of enrolled Black students were two standard deviations below those of white students at the same school. Outside of a handful of “Historically Black” institutions (where racial preferences were minimal), Blacks in law school were not faring well. They were failing out of school at more than twice the white rate; half of those who did graduate had grades in the bottom 10th of their class; and Blacks were six times as likely as whites to take the bar exam multiple times but never pass.

I argued that the preferences system was utterly perverse. What was meant as a helping hand was instead placing students in schools where they were not academically prepared to succeed. My article laid out considerable evidence that, when one controlled for the effect of preferences, Blacks and whites earned similar grades and graduated and passed the bar at the same rate. The use of massive preferences was depressing Black outcomes so much that eliminating preferences would actually increase the number of Black lawyers.

Most law-review articles languish in obscurity or are read by only a handful of specialists, but my Stanford piece was downloaded some 60,000 times in the two months after it appeared. Although other scholars had already published excellent work on “mismatch” effects at the undergraduate level, my article on “law-school” mismatch was the first to attract not only a wide readership but national media attention. It also spawned dozens of critiques, some by very prominent scholars. Many pointed out, correctly, that the evidence for law-school mismatch was circumstantial; the only large data source on law-school outcomes aggregated students across schools, so one could not directly measure an individual student’s “credentials” deficit, nor observe just what outcome he or she would have had at a less competitive school.

Several years back I asked what it would take to halt the diversity, inclusion, equity obsession in America.

What would it take to get back to excellence and competence as the only criteria for employment?

Perhaps it would require the bridges to start falling down.

Though I suspect that if they did then certain people would claim they’d only fallen because of “structural racism.”

Still, this week we had a good reminder of just how over-tolerant we have been of this insane, anti-excellence agenda.

Because although the bridges haven’t yet started to collapse, the banks have.

And one reason is that the banks in question prioritized equity over excellence.

Over the last five years, the promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has become a “central concern of higher education” in the United States. On its face, this “new trinity of American higher education” sounds like a virtuous (and long overdue) set of governing principles. Indeed, anyone researching DEI on college campuses would be hard-pressed to find any objectionable material on university websites. To take just one example, consider the definitions of DEI offered by the University of Michigan’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:

Here, “diversity” is defined (partly) as a commitment to representing a variety of “political perspectives” and “inclusion” is defined as a commitment to making sure these “different perspectives are respectfully heard.” When defined in this way, DEI sounds like a bedrock institutional commitment and operational blueprint for protecting free speech on campus. It would not be unreasonable, therefore, to expect that the increasing size and significance of university DEI bureaucracies might significantly improve the speech climates on college campuses.

Yet, the rise of DEI bureaucracies has actually coincided with the beginning of a “Free-Speech Crisis on College Campuses.” Careful observers of American higher education saw the tension between DEI and free speech early on. Most notably, in a 2016 lecture, Jonathan Haidt pointed out that universities were now attempting to simultaneously pursue “two incompatible sacred values”: truth and social justice. Haidt argued for a schism in higher education, with universities explicitly adopting either a John Stuart Mill-style commitment to the pursuit of truth through unfettered speech or a Karl Marx-ian commitment to the pursuit of “social justice” (even if it occurred at the expense of free expression). Although Haidt did not mention them explicitly, DEI bureaucracies were clearly implicated in his discussion (as they had become the primary institutional vehicles for pursuing the “social justice” values of “diversity” and “equity”). In other words, it was clear from the start that, regardless of what was on their websites, DEI bureaucracies were more likely to suppress than encourage free expression on college campuses.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen finds herself in a very dubious position. Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the U.S. Treasury Secretary was given increased powers to oversee financial stability in the U.S. banking system. This increase in power came in response to the 2008 financial crisis – the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression. The legislation made the Treasury Secretary the Chair of the newly created Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC), whose meetings include the heads of all of the federal agencies that supervise banks and trading on Wall Street. The legislation also required the Treasury Secretary’s authorization before the Federal Reserve could create any more of those $29 trillion emergency bailout programs for the mega banks – which had tethered themselves to casino trading on Wall Street since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.

Yesterday, after the Swiss banking behemoth Credit Suisse had traded at an all-time low of less than two bucks; blown out its credit default swaps to unprecedented levels; and tanked the Dow Jones Industrial Average by more than 700 points intraday, Bloomberg News ran this headline at 12:54 p.m. – “US Treasury Reviewing US Banks’ Exposure to Credit Suisse.” By “exposure,” the Treasury really means how many billions of dollars of underwater derivatives are U.S. banks on the hook for as a counterparty to Credit Suisse. The Treasury also has to worry about U.S. banks’ exposure to Credit Suisse’s other major counterparties that U.S. banks do business with, even if the banks are not direct counterparties to Credit Suisse itself.

Apple temporarily removed former President Donald Trump’s debut single, “Justice For All,” from iTunes on Thursday after the hit single spent one week at number one on the iTunes chart, Kash Patel told Breitbart News.

Trump released “Justice For All,” less than two weeks ago. The song features the “J6 Prison Choir,” an ensemble of January 6 prisoners who can be heard singing the national anthem while Trump recites the Pledge of Allegiance.

Notably, the song topped the iTunes chart, staying at the number-one spot for seven consecutive days. The song beat out Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers,” Tim McGraw’s “Standing Room Only,” and Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” for the top spot on the iTunes chart.

The song was sold for $1.29, with all net proceeds going to “certain J6 families in need.” The song sold over 22,000 digital downloads from its release on March 3 through Monday, March 13.

However, the song was temporarily removed from iTunes for a period of hours on Thursday, consequently removing the song from its number one position on the charts, Patel told Breitbart News.