Nearly 200 more banks may be vulnerable to the same type of risk that took down Silicon Valley Bank: The value of the assets they hold. 

There are 186 banks across the country that could fail if half of their depositors quickly withdraw their funds, a new study published on the Social Science Research Network found. Even insured depositors — those with $250,000 or less in the bank — could have problems getting their cash if these institutions face the sort of run that Silicon Valley saw a week ago.

The concern is that these banks hold a significant amount of their assets in interest-rate sensitive financial instruments like government bonds and mortgage backed securities. The value of those older, low-interest investments dropped sharply as the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates over the past year.

Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro said he sees fighting climate change as a top priority for the Navy as the Biden administration proposes shrinking the fleet by two ships and worries grow about how the U.S. Navy stacks up to China’s.

"As the Secretary of the Navy, I can tell you that I have made climate one of my top priorities since the first day I came into office," Del Toro said March 1 in remarks at the University of the Bahamas.

Del Toro said he met with Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis during his visit and spoke "at length" with him about the climate crisis and focused the bulk of his remarks on climate.

Webmaster addition: Facial recognition shows that the initial violent breachers of the capitol building were Federal agents!

New York will change what it takes for students to reach “proficiency” on state math and English language arts tests, calling last year’s lower scores the “new normal.”

A scoring committee that reports to the Board of Regents said Monday that they must take into account the results of last year’s tests for students in grades three through eight to determine whether schools are showing improvement from year to year. On Thursday, the committee wanted to clarify that they must also reset scores because the tests will have new performance standards.

Webmaster addition: Education is failing our students, teaching gender pronouns, critical race theory, and how to twerk, instead of math, science, literature, etc. So to save face, they just lower the testing standards so they can claim education is working!

The No. 2 Senate Republican has kept in touch by text with GOP Leader Mitch McConnell since a recent fall and concussion but has not yet talked directly to the Kentucky legislator, he told reporters Wednesday.

"I have not spoken with him," Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the GOP whip said. "I have communicated with him, but I look forward to making that happen."

"I would like to add to what Sen. Thune said about all of our thoughts and how much we miss our leader, Sen. McConnell," Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, of West Virginia, added during Wednesday's press conference.

The failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is just the tip of the iceberg as more than $620 billion in losses across the entire banking sector looms as a financial ticking time bomb.

According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the banking sector is currently sitting on unrealized losses of well over half a trillion dollars that at some point will have to be realized – but when?

The answer right now is nobody knows, but one thing is for sure: the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury Department are doing everything in their power to plug all the leaks on this financial Titanic to avoid a contagion event – at least for now.

We are told that the reason for this predicament has to do with the loads of bonds and treasuries that banks bought up during times of low-interest rates. Those bonds and treasuries are now deeply underwater as Jerome Powell continues to hike interest rates in a failed attempt to quell skyrocketing inflation.

Your favorite candies, snacks, and other food items might soon become a thing of the past if you’re a resident of California.

California lawmakers are considering enacting a law that would essentially ban the sale of candies and foods over the presence of additives inside that are linked to both cancer and organ damage.  

Democrat Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel (D-Calif.) introduced this new legislation, which pinpoints five different additives, three of which were already banned by the European Union.

The five specific additives are propyl paraben, brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, red dye #3, and titanium dioxide.

“Californians shouldn’t have to worry that the food they buy in their neighborhood grocery store might be full of dangerous additives or toxic chemicals,” Gabriel said in a statement. “This bill will correct for a concerning lack of federal oversight and help protect our kids, public health, and the safety of our food supply,” said Gabriel.

The case against Donald Trump over hush payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels in the build up to the 2016 presidential election is 'flawed', a legal scholar has said.

Jonathan Turley, a criminal defense attorney and Shapiro Chair of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, said the case by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is unlikely to succeed.

Turley was responding to Trump's claim on Saturday that he'll be arrested on Tuesday next week following a long-running probe by Bragg's office into the $130,000 paid to Daniels.

Webmaster addition: Nobody made a fuss when Bill Clinton paid $850,000 to Paula Jones to shut her up!

Former President Donald Trump said in a video posted Thursday that the biggest threat to the U.S. isn't Russia but rather Americans who hate their own country, including "godless" Marxists promoting progressive ideology.

"Our foreign policy establishment keeps trying to pull the world into conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia based on the lie that Russia represents our greatest threat," Trump said in a video first posted to his Truth Social account. "But the greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia. It's probably more than anything else ourselves and some of the horrible, USA-hating people that represent us."

Trump, who announced his 2024 presidential campaign in November, went on to suggest that the U.S. is fostering a culture and implementing policies that are leading to the country's demise.

'The American Jewish community and our American political leaders need to recognize and acknowledge this is a different day and it can't be the same old responses' a protest organizer said

Beyond the Death Wall and the prisoners` barracks, past the ruined gas chambers and crematoriums, at the edge of the Auschwitz death camp, is a row of 19 concrete memorials.

The memorials are dedicated to the victims of the Nazi killing machine that operated here with such horrific efficiency. But gone now from the memorials are the 19 inscriptions that said in 19 languages that four million people died here.

The memorials are blank because they were wrong.

Jewish and Polish scholars of the Holocaust now agree that the Auschwitz death toll was less than half the four million cited here for four decades. The actual number was probably between 1.1 million and 1.5 million-and at least 90 percent of the victims were Jews.

The fiction that more than a million non-Jews died here was a myth created by Poland`s communist leaders.

It was only after the fall of the last communist government in 1989 that Polish historians were finally allowed to say what Franciszek Piper, manager of historical department at Auschwitz, says he had known for five years. Jewish scholars say they knew the truth for at least 10 years.

Webmaster addition:

ABC News acknowledged on Friday that it has yet to verify Hunter Biden's infamous laptop nearly two-and-a-half years after it first surfaced publicly. 

While reporting on Biden's counter lawsuit against the Delaware computer repairman who handed a copy of the laptop's hard drive to the FBI and former Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, the Disney-owned outlet admitted to readers it has yet to authenticate the controversial device. 

"ABC News has not reviewed nor verified the contents of the laptop or hard drive," ABC News wrote in an article.

President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, step off Air Force One, Saturday, Feb. 4, 2023, at Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, N.Y.  (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

ABC News remains one of the very few legacy media organizations that has yet to verify the laptop after outlets collectively dismissed revelations about the Biden family from the device as Russian disinformation in the final weeks of the 2020 presidential election. 

Politico was the first among the liberal outlets to report it had verified the laptop in September 2021. The New York Times followed suit in March 2022, followed by The Washington Post, NBC News, CNN and CBS News throughout the year.

Blinken’s comments come one day after National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby lent support to President Isaac Herzog’s compromise plan, which Netanyahu’s far-right government already rejected while the opposition supported

The US Virgin Islands hit back against JPMorgan's claim earlier this month that CEO Jamie Dimon had no clue that Jeffrey Epstein was breaking the law.

"Jamie Dimon knew in 2008 that his billionaire client was a sex trafficker," argued US Virgin Islands attorney Mimi Liu during a late Thursday hearing in front of Manhattan US District Judge Jed Rakoff, referring to the year Epstein was first criminally charged with sex crimes, CNBC reports.

"If Staley is a rogue employee, why isn’t Jamie Dimon?" Liu said during the hearing to discuss the bank's efforts to have the USVI lawsuit against the bank dismissed.

"Staley knew, Dimon knew, JPMorgan Chase knew," Liu continued, noting that there were several cash transfers and wire transfers made by the prolific pedophile (Epstein), including several hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to several women which should have been flagged as suspicious.

I know talking about the border, at this point, makes us sound like a broken record. But the fact remains, Joe Biden has refused to protect one of our most vulnerable points of entry. The Southern border hasn’t been properly enforced since January 2021. How much damage do you think Biden’s open border has done to the country since then?

Well, the situation is much worse than what the media is willing to admit. Biden “visited” the border and has since brushed it off. His “border czar” Harris is busy doing nothing at all. But the chief of the U.S. Border Patrol tells a different story. And he is sounding the alarm, big time.

From Just the News:

U.S. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz told lawmakers on Wednesday that the U.S. border patrol doesn’t have operational control of the border.

We should take heed from the last generations of the Byzantines.

Nowhere is it foreordained that America has a birthright to remain the world’s preeminent civilization.

An ascendent China seems eerily similar to the Ottomans. Beijing believes that the United States is decadent, undeserving of its affluence, living beyond its means on the fumes of the past—and very soon vulnerable enough to challenge openly.

Left and Right seem to hate each other more than they do their common enemies.

Like the Byzantines, Americans gave up defending their own borders, and simply shrugged as millions overran them as they pleased.

Our once iconic downtowns, like end-stage Constantinople before the fall, are now dirty, half-deserted, dangerous, and dysfunctional.

The latest federal inflation data shows consumer prices rose again in February, sparking criticism of President Joe Biden and his spending agenda.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released the Consumer Price Index Tuesday, which showed consumer prices rose 0.4% in February, totaling up a 6% increase over the previous 12 months.

“Core CPI came in hot: 0.5% for the month as opposed to the (still hot) 0.4% expected,” Jason Furman, an economist and Harvard Professor, wrote on Twitter. “Core CPI higher for the month than the three months than the six months.”

“Core CPI came in at a 5.6% annual rate for the month of February,” he added. “In the 25 years before COVID the single highest monthly print (out of 300 prints) was a 4.6% annual rate.”

Josh Alexander, a Canadian high school student, was reportedly arrested last month while attempting to attend class following a suspension for protesting against biological males using girls’ bathrooms and saying there are only two genders.

Alexander, a student at St. Joseph’s Catholic High School in Renfrew, Ontario, told the Epoch Times he was barred from attending class for the remainder of the year because his presence would be “detrimental to the physical and mental well-being” of transgender students.

He was first suspended in November according to the outlet.

Alexander “had organized a protest against transgender students using the girls’ washrooms,” they wrote, and “had also said in class discussions that there are only two, immutable genders.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board on Monday called out President Biden for telling a host of “whoppers” regarding bank bailouts following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), including claims that Donald Trump is to blame.

Following in the footsteps of Barack Obama who famously blamed George W. Bush for every economic problem during his tenure, Biden, who has been in office for over two years, pointed the finger squarely at Trump.

First, the President declared that his “quick action” had stabilized the banking industry following the collapse of multiple banks, adding that clients “can breathe easier.”

Then, he took aim at his predecessor.

Yet another newly discovered space rock will safely zip past Earth, this one on March 25, 2023. It’ll sweep by at about half the Earth-moon distance. Astronomers at the observatory of La Palma, in the Canary Islands, Spain, discovered the asteroid in late February, 2023. And amateur astronomers might get a glimpse of the asteroid as it speeds past. See the charts at the bottom of this post.

Closest approach to Earth is thought to occur at around 19:31 UTC (3:31 p.m. EDT) on March 25. But the exact time and other details might be updated as more observations come in.

The asteroid has been labeled 2023 DZ2. It’s part of the Apollo family of asteroids. Current estimates put 2023 DZ2’s size at about 210 feet (64 meters) in diameter.