Today, America owes foreign investors of its national debt $7.3 trillion.

These are in the form of Treasury securities, some of the most liquid assets worldwide. Central banks use them for foreign exchange reserves and private investors flock to them during flights to safety thanks to their perceived low default risk.

Beyond these reasons, foreign investors may buy Treasuries as a store of value. They are often used as collateral during certain international trade transactions, or countries can use them to help manage exchange rate policy. For example, countries may buy Treasuries to protect their currency’s exchange rate from speculation.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Sunday that President Biden is committed to staying in Syria following a series of attacks on US bases and US airstrikes in the country.

“Here’s what’s not going to change … the mission and ISIS is not going to change. We have under 1,000 troops in Syria that are going after that network, which is, while greatly diminished, still viable and still critical. So we’re going to stay at that task,” Kirby said on CBS News’s Face the Nation.

When asked if President Biden was committed to keeping US troops in Syria, Kirby replied, “That’s right. Absolutely.”

While Kirby says the US mission in Syria is about fighting ISIS, the presence is part of the US effort against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian government opposes the occupation of the eastern portion of Syria, which allows the US to control most of Syria’s oil resources. On top of the occupation, the US maintains crippling economic sanctions on Syria.

Following the dismissal of Yoav Gallant from the position of defense minister by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, thousands of people poured into the streets in droves all throughout Israel to protest Gallant's ouster, with some protesters lighting fires across Ayalon Highway, one of Tel Aviv's main thoroughfares.

Germany’s Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, who once claimed that COVID-19 vaccination is free of side effects, admitted last week that he was wrong, saying adverse reactions occur at a rate of one in 10,000 doses and can cause “severe disabilities.”

On Aug. 14, 2021, Lauterbach said on Twitter that the vaccines had “no side effects,” further questioning why some Germans refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

During an interview on ZDF’s “Heute Journal” on March 12, Lauterbach was asked by anchor Christian Sievers about the claim he made in the summer of 2021, confronting the health minister with his previous tweet that stated the shots are virtually free of side effects.

There were chaotic scenes in Israel on Sunday night after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu abruptly fired his Defence Minister just a day after he had called for an end to the PM's controversial judicial overhaul. 

Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Tel Aviv and blocked a main highway in front of the Ministry of Defence following the announcement, before water cannons were deployed in Jerusalem against crowds.

The dismissal signalled that Netanyahu will move ahead this week with his judicial plan, which has sparked mass protests, angered military and business leaders and raised concerns among Israel's allies. 

There are an estimated 6000 antiquity sites in the West Bank. “Practically in every village or town there are archeological remains of varying scale from a watering hole to a multilayered mound,” according to Emek Shaveh, an Israeli NGO that works “to defend cultural heritage rights and to protect ancient sites as public assets that belong to members of all communities, faiths and peoples.”

In its March newsletter, Emek Shaveh describes how changes in Israel’s 37th government threaten these sites as authorities in charge of safeguarding Israel’s heritage are consolidated under far-right settler extremists.

“In a climate of heightened political emergency and a constant fear of violent conflagration,” Emek Shaveh writes, “one can be forgiven for overlooking heritage related developments. However, in this area too, we are watching with concern.”

The atmosphere on the roads leading to Al-Aqsa Mosque during the first Friday of Ramadan, one of the holiest days for Muslims, was in stark contrast to previous days.

Israeli forces blocked roads towards the holy site in East Jerusalem, where over 100,000 Muslim worshippers - friends and families - came to pray. 

Drones and helicopters circled in the sky above the Dome of the Rock. 

In the narrow streets and markets of the Old City, leading towards Al-Aqsa, Israeli forces equipped with teargas canisters were seen stopping young men from entering.

More than half of Palestinians expect a new intifada to erupt as a result of Israeli military operations in the occupied West Bank, a new survey has revealed.

According to a survey carried out by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 61 percent of Palestinians expect a new uprising, while 68 percent support the formation of armed groups, such as the Nablus-based Lions' Den, who do not take orders from the Palestinian Authority.

While 52 percent said they were worried that the formation of such groups could lead to armed clashes with the PA security services, 52 percent also said that "the Palestinian people's interest lies in the collapse or dissolution of the PA".

Armenia and Turkiye are set to permanently reopen their land border by this year’s tourist season for the first time in three decades, Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan announced on Friday, 24 March.

The border will initially be opened only for citizens of third countries and diplomatic officials. There is already direct air traffic between the two countries.

After the devastating earthquake at the start of last month, Turkiye opened the border with Armenia in order to allow in Armenian humanitarian aid shipments and relief workers.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called for an “immediate” end to the war in Ukraine during a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday.

Erdoğan “highlighted the importance Türkiye attaches to the immediate cessation of the Russia-Ukraine conflicts through negotiations” and “thanked President Putin for his positive stance regarding the extension of the Black Sea Grain Initiative,” according to a statement from Turkey’s Directorate of Communications.

The Black Sea Grain Initiative, which was brokered by the United Nations and Turkey last July, allows Ukrainian grain exports to safely travel through the Black Sea. 

The Israeli protest movement against planned judicial reforms is entering its 12th week, with little sign of slowing down. The Netanyahu government has passed its initial plans, and the protest movement is redoubling its efforts with growing support from Jewish communities in the United States. In many ways, this is an extraordinary moment for Israel and Jewish communities’ connection to it around the world. 

Still, in the midst of the struggle against the current government, we must remember that the root of the problem lies with the colonialist regime as a whole rather than bemoan a democracy that has never existed here. As the Jewish supremacist militias grow stronger, as the dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians grow deeper, we keep staring directly at the roots of racism and violence and insisting on a vision of a shared society that respects the rights of all the country’s inhabitants and the refugees who seek to return. 

Two cosmonauts and an astronaut who were supposed to leave the International Space Station this month will be brought back to Earth in late September, doubling their time aboard the orbiting laboratory to more than a year, Russia's space agency announced Friday.

The return of Russians Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, and NASA's Frank Rubio was delayed after the Soyuz capsule they planned to ride in developed a coolant leak while docked to the space station.

An empty Soyuz was sent to the station in late February to serve as a rescue capsule. The three-person replacement crew that was originally scheduled to be aboard that capsule is now set to head for the space station on Sept. 15, the Roscosmos space agency said.

Why aren’t there more? It’s a question I’ve often asked myself. Many of the people whistle-blowers work with know the same things and actually regard the information in the same way — that it’s wrong — but they keep their mouths shut. As Snowden said to me and others, “Everybody I dealt with said that what we were doing was wrong. It’s unconstitutional. We’re getting information here about Americans that we shouldn’t be collecting.” The same thing was true for many of my colleagues in government who opposed the war. Of course, people are worried about the consequences.

Before my case and the Obama administration’s prosecutions of whistle-blowers, they needn’t have been worried about going to jail. But apart from that, they fear losing their jobs, their careers, risking the clearances on which their jobs depend. People who have these clearances have often invested a lifetime in demonstrating that they can be entrusted to keep secrets. That trust becomes a part of your identity, which it is difficult to sacrifice, so that one loses track of a sense of higher responsibility — as a citizen, as a human being.

A giant super-tanker anchored off the coast of Yemen is “likely to sink or explode at any moment”, a United Nations official has said.

The FSO Safer, which contains more than a million barrels of oil, was abandoned in 2015 during the Yemen civil war and is now starting to fall apart.

David Gressly, UN humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, said authorities need to act quickly to stop one million barrels of oil from spilling into the Red Sea.

He told Sky News: “We don’t want the Red Sea to become the Black Sea, that’s what’s going to happen.

Webmaster addition: Can't they just offload that cargo onto newer tankers and sell it?

In a day and age when libraries are holding drag queen story hours and pro-transgender children’s books like “I Am Jazz” are being pushed on kids, pro-family content is needed more than ever.

“‘She is she’ apparently is a controversial thing to say,” says Ryan Bomberger, author of the new book “She Is She.” Bomberger and his wife, Bethany, decided to write a children’s book that explores and celebrates what it means to be female after they saw controversy over biological reality in their community of Loudoun County, Virginia.

“With this book, we want to celebrate undeniable, biological, beautiful her,” Bomberger says. “We want to celebrate femininity. We want to celebrate motherhood.”

Ryan and Bethany Bomberger are the co-authors of “She Is She.” A companion book, “He Is He,” is due for release this summer. (Photo: Shirley & McVicker Public Affairs)

“The Democrat Party is the party that denied people of my complexion our personhood,” Bomberger says, adding, “and today, it’s now the party that denies females their womanhood.”

SECRET AND PERSONAL / PM/02/019 /PRIME MINISTER

CRAWFORD/IRAQ

1 The rewards from your visit to Crawford will be few. The risks are high, both for you and for the Government. I judge that there is at present no majority inside the PLP for any military action against Iraq, (alongside a greater readiness in the PLP to surface their concerns). Colleagues know that Saddam and the Iraqi regime are bad. Making that case is easy. But we have a long way to go to convince them as to:

(a) the scale of the threat from Iraq and why this has got worse recently;

(b) what distinguishes the Iraqi threat from that eg Iran and North Korea so as to justify military action;

(c) the justification for any military action in terms of international law; and

(d) whether the consequence of military action really would be a compliant, law abiding replacement government.

2 The whole exercise is made much more difficult to handle as long as conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is so acute.

Mark Petrakis shared an Ayn Rand quote on Facebook today that left me thinking for hours, especially as I watched the spreading waves left behind by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. The quote describes how you can tell when your society is doomed.

I certainly read the orchestrated bank crisis that will unfold after Silicon Valley Bank as a sign that the parasite class has decided that opposition to their rule has reached an unacceptable level and that the final card of their hand must be played earlier than expected: destruction of money and the end of all financial interactions. In a sense SVB is the equivalent of Wuhan in December 2019, only this time the virus has infected money itself.

“It’s a year or two from now” and here’s what we see: explosions at Pearl Harbor and nearby Hickam Air Force Base, a drone attack at Naval Base San Diego, the collision of a Chinese-crewed fishing vessel with a US oil tanker departing Hawaii for the Western Pacific. Meanwhile, “the People’s Liberation Army is ashore on Taiwan in large numbers.”

Its internet and other communications down, Taiwan is cut off from the world. The US government is caught flat-footed. The Marines never make it to Taiwan and US Navy ships on their way from Singapore, Guam and even West Coast ports are hit by missiles before they have time to react. Chinese special forces launch attacks in Hawaii, Guam and Japan.

“Taiwan realizes no help is coming. It sues for terms and gives up. Immediately, the rest of Asia gets the message.” The reputation of the US has been shredded. Its First Island Chain of defense in the Western Pacific is broken. China can no longer be contained and it will not stop at Taiwan.

A trillion dollars is a lot of money.  If you stacked a billion dollar bills on top of one another, the pile would be 67.9 miles high, but if you stacked a trillion dollar bills on top of one another the pile would be 67,866 miles high.  And if you lined up a trillion dollar bills end to end, the line of dollar bills would be a staggering 96,906,656 miles long.  That is longer than the distance from the Earth to the Sun.  A trillion dollars is such a vast amount of money that it is truly difficult to comprehend, but as you will see below, that much money has already been pulled out of “vulnerable” U.S. banks over the past year.  Hordes of small and mid-size banks are now in trouble, and that is really bad news because those institutions issue most of the mortgages, auto loans and credit cards that our economy runs on.  The other day, I asked my readers to “imagine what our country will look like if the banking system implodes and the economy plunges into a depression”, because if our banks continue to collapse that is precisely where we are headed.

Unfortunately, the recent banking panic has greatly accelerated matters.  In fact, a whopping 98.4 billion dollars was pulled out of U.S. banks during the week ending March 15th…

The House Armed Services Subcommittee for Military Personnel held a hearing last week to discuss the growing national security crisis arising from the military's cratering recruitment numbers.   A potpourri of Pentagon nincompoops all universally lauded the Defense Department's ideological obsession with "lived experiences" and "diversity for diversity's sake." While championing the Marxist military's decision to waste over six million man-hours of training on the dangers of "extremism" and "white privilege" and the seminal importance of "diversity, equity, and inclusion," not one Pentagon official could muster a real answer as to why recruiting numbers are so disastrous.

The touchy-feely, group hug–loving mandarins proved experts in Critical Race Theory but poor problem-solvers when tasked with the actual duties of their jobs — building and maintaining lethal military forces filled with top-notch warriors who will fight to win.  Intentionally dividing Americans against each other and pouring salt in old wounds obliterate personnel cohesiveness.  As Representative Elise Stefanik succinctly concluded: "Biden's woke agenda comes at the expense of our military's readiness."

There are different ways of looking at the issue of human inequality. The modern Left obsesses about inequality as measured in dollars of income.  But if one measures inequality based on quality-of-life, it quickly becomes clear that we have achieved great progress toward equality on the things that really count. Much of that progress is at risk of reversal from imposition of the green dream.

By the time I was born in the late twentieth century, comforts that had begun in the exclusive domain of the very wealthy had long since become widely available to most hard working people. I’m thinking of things like cars and personal travel, but also small scale conveniences like in-home washers, dryers and dishwashers. All of these things, of course, were brought to us by the widespread access and affordability of electricity and fossil fuels.

But even as the baseline human experience improved, the Left has continued to campaign on the moral abomination that is persistent “income inequality.” This is “inequality” as measured by dollars of income and ability to buy super luxuries.  The rich don’t just travel, they travel via yacht and private jet. And the cities where wealth accumulates, like New York and San Francisco, are, according to their own voters, the worst offenders. Former New York Mayor de Blasio campaigned, and won, on the theme of a “Tale of Two Cities,” the “inequality that increasingly divided New York along the fault lines of fabulous wealth and grinding poverty.”  Guilty New Yorkers fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

Are central banks like The Federal Reserve and European Central Bank ({ECB) sinking the banks?

Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank (eerily like Germany’s World War II battleship The Bismarck) is seeing a blow out in its 1-year credit default swaps (CDS) as the ECB cranks up it main refinancing rate to fight inflation.

The expulsion of India’s top opposition leader from parliament Friday has prompted a rare display of solidarity among a dozen of the country’s opposition political parties who condemned the move.

Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for the latest updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine.

After a court convicted Rahul Gandhi, the scion of past prime ministers and a leader of the Indian National Congress Party, of defamation, the speaker of Parliament stripped him of his seat after 19 years in the legislature.

For decades, Israelis have been telling themselves that the army owns the country. Sometimes it was said as a joke. Sometimes, as a perceived reflection of reality. 

But since protests erupted against the government's controversial judicial overhaul plan more than ten weeks ago, the perception of army institutions among many Israelis has drastically changed.

From once being viewed as cherished heroes, army units are now routinely vilified by supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government and officials from his ruling coalition.

Air force commanders from Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark have said they have signed a letter of intent to create a unified Nordic air defence aimed at countering the rising threat from Russia.

The intention is to be able to operate jointly, based on already known ways of operating under NATO, according to statements on Friday by the four countries’ armed forces.

After nearly two years and at least $1.4 million spent, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration on Friday released an external review of its overseas operations that barely mentions recent corruption scandals and offers recommendations that critics dismissed as overly vague.

Much of the 50-page report outlines the DEA’s sprawling, 69-country “foreign footprint,” while lauding its efforts to plug gaping holes in the oversight of undercover money laundering operations and special vetted units overseas.

“This report is stunningly vague in its actual evaluation of known problems at the DEA and remedies to fix them,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “This speaks to the agency’s broader effort to evade oversight. The agency has attempted to dodge my oversight inquiries but I intend to push forward.”

Tunisians in contact with western diplomats could find themselves subject to persecution, according to leaked documents targeting critics of President Kais Saied.

On Friday, French newspaper Le Monde reported that court documents regarding critics of Saeid that have been arrested in recent weeks suggest communication with western embassies is being used to drive the prosecution's case.

Defendants were asked whether they have been to embassies, arranged meetings with diplomats, and who had authorised them to meet with representatives of foreign countries without official status.

US Vice President Kamala Harris will start a three-country tour of Africa this weekend, promoting the White House's positive vision of the continent as the "future of the world."

Harris' trip to Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia is the latest salvo in deepening US engagement with a continent largely ignored under Republican Donald Trump -- and long viewed in Washington as more of a problem area than a land of opportunity.

"We want to dismantle long-held and often outdated notions of what it means to live, work and invest in Africa," a senior US official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Harris "believes African innovation and ideas will shape the future of the world," said the official.

The tour is also part of Washington's pushback against growing Chinese and Russian involvement in the resource-rich continent, with US officials touting what they say is the more positive US message.