Moody’s Investors Service placed First Republic Bank and five other US lenders on review for downgrade, the latest sign of concern over the health of regional financial firms following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

Western Alliance Bancorp., Intrust Financial Corp., UMB Financial Corp., Zions Bancorp. and Comerica Inc. were the other lenders put on review by Moody’s. The credit rating company cited concerns over the lenders’ reliance on uninsured deposit funding and unrealized losses in their asset portfolios.

Digital media company BuzzFeed swung to a fourth-quarter loss on reduced overall revenues and a non-cash goodwill impairment charge.

BuzzFeed brought in $134.6 million in overall revenues during the fourth quarter. The digital media company ended the quarter with $106 million in net losses, compared to a year-earlier profit of $41.5 million.

During the latest quarter, BuzzFeed posted a non-cash goodwill impairment charge of $102.3 million, in part due to a steep decline in the value of the company’s stock price in December 2022.

Credit Suisse shares fell five percent to an all-time low in early trading on Tuesday after the bank confirmed material weaknesses and an $8billion loss in 2022, just hours after a financial expert claimed it would be the next institution to fall following SVB. 

Last night, Robert Kiyosaki - a metals investor and author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad who accurately predicted the 2008 fall of Lehman Brothers - warned during an appearance on Fox Business, that 'the problem' is the bond market, and that Credit Suisse - the eighth largest investment bank in the world- was most vulnerable. 

'My prediction, I called Lehman Brothers years ago, and I think the next bank to go is Credit Suisse because the bond market is crashing. The bond market is much bigger than the stock market. The Fed is up and they're the firemen and the arson,' he said.

In case you missed President Bribem’s speech today let me provide you with my assessment of its key points. I learned three things: That the financial system is on the point of collapse; that the bank will be bailed out with taxpayer money + the printing press; that those responsible for the collapse will as always get away scot free, bonuses in pocket. What did Bribem say to make me draw these conclusions?

That the financial system is on the point of collapse: Bribem “Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe. Your deposits will be there when you need them.”

That the bank will be bailed out with taxpayer money + the printing press: Bribem “No losses will be borne by the taxpayers. They [investors] knowingly took a risk, and when the risk didn’t pay off, investors lose their money”

Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, the leader of Turkey's Republican People's Party (CHP), has emerged as the main challenger to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in elections scheduled for May 14. Kilicdaroglu hopes to deprive Erdogan of a third term as he grapples with the country's economic crisis and the fallout from last February's devastating earthquakes.

Turkey's presidential campaign officially kicked off on March 10 and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is running for a third mandate, now knows who his main opponent is.

Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, 74, a bookish former bureaucrat, is often described by observers as Erdogan’s polar opposite. He was chosen by the Table of Six, an alliance of the six main opposition parties, after weeks of negotiations and debates.

"Today, we are very close to overthrowing the tyrant's throne," Kiliçdaroglu said the day after his nomination.

"Together, we will end this madness,” he added.

Mark Zuckerberg is expected to slash thousands of jobs on Wednesday as Meta comes down hard on 'projects that aren't performing'.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, is reportedly preparing to make thousands of cuts to its policy, marketing and communications teams in particular, only months after laying off 11,000 staff in November.

This comes as part of Zuckerberg's 'year of efficiency', cutting functions and features deemed non-essential as the company looks to rein in its finances and prioritize new offerings.

As startups race to integrate AI into their products, they are running into a major roadblock: spiraling costs, caused by the immense computing power required to process AI queries.

CNBC reports on one startup, video game company Latitude, which found itself paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to process millions of AI requests from users: at least as much as its expenses for human employees.

Researchers have discovered why breast cancer cells that have spread to the lungs may wake up following years of sleep and form incurable tumours.

Around 44,000 Brits and 210,000 Americans are diagnosed with the most common type of breast cancer — oestrogen receptor positive (ER+) — every year.

These patients remain at risk of their cancer recurring in another part of their body for decades after their initial diagnosis, even after successful treatment. 

Now, experts have discovered the mechanism that triggers this cancer 'time bomb' in the lungs — one of the most common places the cancer can spread to.

And an existing cancer drug can slow the growth of these secondary tumours, their study on mice suggests.

Silicon Valley Bank's new CEO emailed customers to tell them it's 'business as usual' despite the 'extremely challenging' past few days - as employees were left asking how their former bosses could make 'absolutely idiotic' errors of judgement.

Tim Mayopoulos was named as the new chief executive officer on Monday morning, after the government fired the existing managers including boss Greg Becker.

'Silicon Valley Bank, N.A. is open and conducting business as usual,' wrote Mayopolous, in an email to all clients sent on Monday afternoon.

A week ago an interesting story surfaced briefly in the news about how the developing Republican presidential candidate bids by Nikki Haley and others had been attacked over the past eleven months by possibly as many as hundreds of thousands of false automated personas, referred to in the trade as “bots,” on Twitter and other internet based social media. Interestingly, the activity was discovered and shared with Associated Press by an Israeli internet security company called Cyabra, which also claimed that the “bots” generation seem to have originated in three separate networks of false Twitter accounts. The accounts appear to have been created in the United States and it is believed that Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications are increasingly being used to create completely lifelike fake personas, extremely difficult for security filters and censors to detect.

The article claimed that those thousands of electronically generated non-persons had been programmed to disparage Haley and Ron DeSantis and others, often using “fake news” or alleged leaks of embarrassing personal information, while also praising the virtues of Donald Trump. The apparent intention was to build popular support for Trump by exploiting the social media sites’ algorithms to reach a large audience at the expense of the other possible GOP candidates. There are also concerns among some Republicans that the effort to give life to the Trump campaign by materially impacting on online political discussion might possibly be orchestrated and paid for by major outside interests that could actually be either foreign or criminal. Of course, as the operation has been exposed by an Israeli company, the possibility exists that the story is itself at least in part a false flag to plausibly deny any involvement by the Jewish state if that were to be demonstrable.

After the 9/11 attacks, terrorism became the ultimate entitlement program for America’s political elite. Whether it is illegally spying on Americans or blowing Somali dissidents to smithereens, invoking terrorism justifies any attack favored by for Washington policymakers. But the disastrous results of granting politicians a blank check should have been undeniable almost 60 years ago.

Back in the 1960s, terrorism was what the communists did. Antiterrorist moral fervor and ideological blinders propelled the U.S. into its biggest foreign policy blunder since World War Two.

As the French Foreign Legion struggled to reconquer Vietnam in the wake of World War II, the U.S. government constantly embellished the storyline to demonize the communist opposition.  A CIA operative provided materials for a massive bomb that ripped through a main square in Saigon in 1952. A Life magazine photographer was waiting on the scene, and his resulting snap appeared with a caption blaming the carnage on Viet Minh Communists.  The New York Times headlined its report: “Reds’ Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center.” The bombing was touted as “one of the most spectacular and destructive single incidents in the long history of revolutionary terrorism” committed by “agents here of the Vietminh.” The press coverage boosted public support for U.S. government aid to the French army fighting the Communists.  

ALMOST TWO DECADES after the U.S. launched the disastrous invasion of Iraq, the Biden administration is on the verge of sleepwalking into yet another major armed conflict in the Middle East. Last week, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides appeared to endorse a plan for Israel to attack Iranian nuclear facilities with U.S. support. “Israel can and should do whatever they need to deal with [Iran], and we’ve got their back,” he said at a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Nides’s words come after recent high-level military drills between Israel and the United States intended to showcase the ability to strike Iranian targets, as well as recent acts of sabotage and assassination inside Iran believed to have been carried out by both countries.

WHEN THE AFGHAN military and government collapsed in the summer of 2021, it was the worst failure of the U.S. defense establishment since the fall of Saigon. The U.S. today has moved on — providing the Ukrainian military with weapons and tactical support in its fight against Russia — but the question of why the world’s most powerful nation failed to build a capable Afghan military has not yet been fully answered.

A new report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, issued this week sheds critical light on what went so terribly wrong in America’s longest war — and how tens of thousands of ordinary Afghans were set up by their leaders and foreign partners to fight and die for a doomed cause.

The SIGAR report, “Why the Afghan Security Forces Collapsed,” paints a picture of the U.S. government’s effort to construct an Afghan military from scratch over two decades. As in many other U.S. conflicts, this enterprise relied heavily on contractors and advisers who themselves were “poorly trained and experienced for their mission,” according to the report. Among other tasks, contractors would often run logistics systems and direct airstrikes on the Afghans’ behalf.

At first glance, the Twitter user “Canaelan” looks ordinary enough. He has tweeted on everything from basketball to Taylor Swift, Tottenham Hotspur football club to the price of a KitKat. The profile shows a friendly-looking blond man with a stubbly beard and glasses who, it indicates, lives in Sheffield. The background: a winking owl.

Canaelan is, in fact, a non-human bot linked to a vast army of fake social media profiles controlled by a software designed to spread “propaganda”.

Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims, which controls more than 30,000 fake social media profiles, can be used to spread disinformation at scale and at speed. It is sold by “Team Jorge”, a unit of disinformation operatives based in Israel.

Democrat former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) was a member of the board at the collapsed Signature bank.

As Slay News reported, New York-based Signature was shut down by regulators on Sunday in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse on Friday.

Now it has emerged that the former Democrat congressman, author of the 2010 Dodd-Frank bill, was a board member at the imploded bank.

After scoring significant victories in the legislature in the 2022 midterms, North Carolina Republicans are introducing legislation that would bar state and local election officials from accepting or using private money to conduct elections.

SB 89 stipulates that state and local election boards, as well as county boards of commissioners, are prohibited from accepting “private monetary donations, directly or indirectly, for conducting elections or employing individuals on a temporary basis.”

Concerns surrounding the use of private money to conduct elections became prominent following the 2020 election cycle, during which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gifted nonprofits such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) hundreds of millions of dollars. These “Zuckbucks” were then siphoned into local election offices in battleground states around the country to change how elections were administered, such as by expanding unsecure election protocols like mail-in voting and the use of ballot drop boxes.

The media-ratings giant NewsGuard denied it was “government-funded” after being called out as part of the vast Censorship Complex during congressional hearings last week. But government records and the company’s own public announcement celebrating a nearly $750,000 federal grant suggest otherwise. 

On Thursday, independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger appeared before the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to testify about what they had discovered during a review of internal Twitter communications. An hour before the weird hearing began, Taibbi released the latest installment of the “Twitter Files.”

An inspector general probe has been launched to investigate the potential theft of U.S. government grants that funded research projects at the Wuhan lab in China, CBS News reported Monday.

National Institutes of Health (NIH) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funneled potentially millions of U.S. taxpayer payer dollars through Dr. Peter Daszak’s non-profit  EcoHealth Alliance to the CCP-controlled Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“What I’ve found so far is evidence that points to double billing, potential theft of government funds,” said Diane Cutler, a former federal investigator with over two decades of experience combating white-collar crime and healthcare fraud. “It is concerning, especially since it involves dangerous pathogens and risky research,” she added.

Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kans.) hired Cutler to investigate U.S. government grants that supported risky gain-of-function research in China leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. This type of research involves making pathogens and viruses more lethal and virulent in a laboratory, purportedly to study them.

Webmaster addition: This is confirmation that the work done at Wuhan was directed and funded by the US!

Fairfax County is Virginia’s largest school district, and one of the biggest in the country. A recent test question in an advanced placement (AP) government course asked students a multiple-choice question to choose an "accurate comparison of liberals versus conservatives."

Some concerned parents say regardless of your politics, you should be furious with the nature of the question.

The choices represented a bunch of stereotypical identities -- based on race, gender, sexuality and age.

A Maryland teacher, who described herself as "proud as f*ck to be liberal" and bragged about "indoctrinating" her students, called for an urgent fight against capitalism while adding, "Revolutions involve violence."

The teacher, Rebeca F. Rothstein, works at North Bethesda Middle School in the Montgomery County School District and believes educators should use their classrooms to turn kids into anti-racist activists. She was an avid TikTok poster until Fox News Digital reached out about her comment on violent revolutions; her account was no longer active as of Monday. 

"As a teacher I wish we could do more with our students like teach anti-racism and how to be kind people. Does anyone else feel like… we can skip the math, skip the science, like we'll do that next year. Maybe this year we focus on teaching our youth how to be anti-racist," she said on TikTok.

A Russian missile strike on several residential buildings in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk killed one and wounded three people on Tuesday, Ukraine's president said. Images released by President Volodymyr Zelensky showed police and rescuers working in front of a three-storey partially-destroyed brick building with shattered windows. Follow our live blog for all the latest developments. All times are Paris time (GMT+1).

Credit Suisse shares fell five percent to an all-time low in early trading on Tuesday after the bank confirmed material weaknesses and an $8 billion loss in 2022, just hours after a financial expert claimed it would be the next institution to fall following SVB. 

Last night, Robert Kiyosaki - an investor and author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad who accurately predicted the 2008 fall of Lehman Brothers - warned during an appearance on Fox Business, that 'the problem' is the bond market, and that Credit Suisse - the eighth largest investment bank in the world- was most vulnerable. 

'My prediction, I called Lehman Brothers years ago, and I think the next bank to go is Credit Suisse because the bond market is crashing. The bond market is much bigger than the stock market. The Fed is up and they're the firemen and the arson,' he said.

During a conference call about the Silicon Valley Bank bailout yesterday, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) asked representatives from the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation (FDIC) if they had a way to censor information on social media to prevent a run on the banks, according to Republican members of the House of Representatives who were on the call.

The members said there were roughly 200 people on the Zoom call, including Senators, House members, and staff members from both parties. “On our conference call, led by [Senate President Chuck] Schumer, with Fed, FDIC, and Treasury, a democrat senator asked the three agencies if there was a program underway on social media to censor information that would lead to a bank run,” Rep. Thomas Massie told Public.

“I believe he couched it in a concern that foreign actors would be doing this,” said Massie, “but he didn’t suggest the censorship should be limited to foreigners or to things that were untrue. The people from the three agencies couldn’t answer him and just sort of took a pass on the question.”

Silicon Valley Bank made Forbes's annual list of America's Best Banks - just weeks before regulators seized control because it couldn't meet withdrawal demands.

The bank celebrated the achievement on Twitter last week and even pointed out it had made it onto the list for five consecutive years. 

In the last decade, prestigious lists prepared by Forbes have been mocked for championing people and businesses that have later gone on to ungraciously fail.

Webmaster addition: Maybe Forbes actually new all these companies were in trouble and was trying to boost investor confidence!

Israeli firms managed to transfer $1 billion out of Silicon Valley Bank to accounts in Israel just before the bank was seized by the feds, the Times of Israel reports.

From The Times of Israel (via If Americans Knew:):

Israel's two largest banks, Bank Leumi and Bank Hapoalim, set up a situation room that has been operating around the clock to help firms transfer their money from SVB — before it was seized — to accounts in Israel. Over the past few days, teams at LeumiTech, the high-tech banking arm of Bank Leumi, have been able to help their Israeli clients transfer about $1 billion to Israel, the bank said.

If Americans Knew has more:

Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper reports that "a good many Israeli companies had been able to get their money out in time, but that it was clearly not the case for everyone" and that "companies whose deposits are now locked will seek to conceal this, concerned that any rumors might drive away customers, suppliers and employees."

Webmaster addition: Together with the early bonuses, top SVB execs selling their stock, and now Israeli companies yanking their cash, it's obvious that insiders knew what was happening before the general public! 

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) will be sent to an inpatient rehabilitation facility after being treated at the hospital for a concussion and a rib fracture.

McConnell, 81, was rushed to the hospital last week upon tripping at a reception and private dinner at a Washington, DC, hotel hosted by the Senate Leadership Fund, a Senate campaign fund closely aligned with his establishment political position.

“Leader McConnell’s concussion recovery is proceeding well and the Leader was discharged from the hospital today,” McConnell’s communications director, David Popp, said in a statement. “Over the course of treatment this weekend, the Leader’s medical team discovered that he also suffered a minor rib fracture on Wednesday, for which he is also being treated.”

“At the advice of his physician, the next step will be a period of physical therapy at an inpatient rehabilitation facility before he returns home,” Popp said.

So far this year, the Mediterranean route has been the most popular for migrants trying to reach Europe...

The number of illegal border crossings from North Africa into Italy more than doubled in the first two months of the year, compared to the same period in 2022.

A total of 11,951 crossings via the Central Mediterranean migratory route were detected in January and February, up 118 percent over the same period last year and accounting for two of every five irregular border crossings into the European Union so far this year.

According to the European Union’s border agency, Frontex, the top three nations of origin for migrants arriving via the Mediterranean are Ivory Coast, Guinea, and Pakistan.

I was interviewed by Stew Peters today to discuss the Russian Military Chief citing my work as part of a global criminal investigation of Pfizer (and other guilty parties) who unleashed the mRNA bioweapons on civilian populations under the guise of ‘safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines.’

Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, Chief of Russian Military Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Protection Troops, cites the work of Project Veritas, the Stew Peters network, and specifically mentions my med-legal analysis, including citing the legal definition of mRNA technology as a bioweapon under 18 USC 175.

Stew Peters asked a great question during the interview which was, “If a General from the Russian Military can figure out that these injections are bioweapons, why can’t our Congress?”

The Latvian government last month approved a plan to donate cars seized from drunk drivers to Ukraine, in what it says is a creative scheme (or else we could say publicity-seeking scheme) to help the war effort there.

The first collection of cars have been shipped, as last week BBC confirmed that "Eight seized vehicles left a car pound in the capital, Riga, on Wednesday and are due to cross the border soon."

The cars will reportedly go to the Ukrainian military as well as hospitals. Vehicles in Latvia had previously been impounded at high rates due to the country having among the worst drunk driving problems in Europe, based on the size of the population.

It was only last year that lawmakers attempted a severe crackdown on the problem, changing the law to create the possibility of vehicle seizures in instances where a driver is found to have three times the legal limit of alcohol in their system. 

"No-one expected that people are drunk-driving so many vehicles," the NGO's founder [Twitter Convoy], Reinis Poznaks, told Reuters news agency. "They can't sell them as fast as people are drinking. So that's why I came with the idea - send them to Ukraine."