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."

The breakup of banks that is now occurring in the United States is the inevitable result of the way in which the Obama administration bailed out the banks in 2008.

When real estate prices collapsed, the Federal Reserve flooded the financial system with 15 years of quantitative easing (QE) to re-inflate real estate prices – and with them, stock and bond prices.

What was inflated were asset prices, above all for the packaged mortgages that banks were holding, but also for stocks and bonds across the board. That is what bank credit does.

This made trillions of dollars for holders of financial assets – the One Percent and a bit more.

The economy polarized as stock prices recovered, the cost of home ownership soared (on low-interest mortgages), and the U.S. economy experienced the largest bond-market boom in history, as interest rates fell below 1%.

But in serving the financial sector, the Fed painted itself into a corner. What would happen when interest rates finally rose?

18 yo Ohio high school athlete had a heart attack 

Ebonie Sherwood is a High school athlete in Ohio. She collapsed during track practice on March 7, 2023 and had no pulse. She was brought back with CPR and is currently on a ventilator and ECMO machine. (click here)

“She is a three-sport athlete. She is one of the healthiest kids we know. She is so active”

Doctors are baffled. “Her doctors want to see if her heart will be able to heal itself, or if a device will have to be put in to help her heart.

“Worst case scenario she would need a heart transplant.

17 yo North Carolina cheerleader had a heart attack

17 year old Keianna was warming up for a cheer competition in Raleigh, NC when teammates noticed she was acting “weird”. Her muscles were flexing and her eyes were rolled back in her head. Keianna was having a seizure and was not breathing. She also had no pulse (cardiac arrest) (click here).

CPR was started, then she was given a shock with a defibrillator. She had 3 more seizures in the hospital and had to be intubated.

17 yo Florida high school cross country runner had a heart attack after 5K race

17 year old Gabe Higginbottom, a high school cross country runner had a heart attack on Sep.10, 2022, after finishing a 5K race in Pensacola, Florida. (click here)

He was rushed to the hospital and was found to have a blocked right coronary artery requiring an angioplasty. Later, they performed a 3-hour surgery inserting two stents and found two blood clots.

On Friday, March 10, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed and was taken over by federal regulators. SVB was the 16th largest bank in the country and its bankruptcy was the second largest in U.S. history, following Washington Mutual in 2008. Despite its size, SVB was not a “systemically important financial institution” (SIFI) as defined in the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires insolvent SIFIs to “bail in” the money of their creditors to recapitalize themselves. 

Technically, the cutoff for SIFIs is $250 billion  in assets. However, the reason they are called “systemically important” is not their asset size but the fact that their failure could bring down the whole financial system. That designation comes chiefly from their exposure to derivatives, the global casino that is so highly interconnected that it is a “house of cards.” Pull out one card and the whole house collapses. SVB held $27.7 billion in derivatives, no small sum, but it is only 0.05% of the $55,387 billion ($55.387 trillion) held by JPMorgan, the largest U.S. derivatives bank.

SVB could be the canary in the coal mine foreshadowing the fate of other over-extended banks, but its collapse is not the sort of “systemic risk” predicted to trigger “contagion.” As reported by CNN:

“Despite initial panic on Wall Street, analysts said SVB’s collapse is unlikely to set off the kind of domino effect that gripped the banking industry during the financial crisis.

‘The system is as well-​capitalized and liquid as it has ever been,’ Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi said. ‘The banks that are now in trouble are much too small to be a meaningful threat to the broader system.’

No later than Monday morning, all insured depositors will have full access to their insured deposits, according to the FDIC. It will pay uninsured depositors an ‘advance dividend within the next week.’”

Doctor and nurse deaths from COVID-19 vaccines were always going to be the focus of cover-ups. The reason is practical: the state needs doctors and nurses to enthusiastically push COVID-19 vaccines on their patients, and it needs these same doctors and nurses to stay silent about COVID-19 vaccine injuries and deaths.

Doctors and nurses mustn’t know that their colleagues are dying suddenly from the same COVID-19 mRNA vaccines that they are pushing daily on their own patients.

31 year old NZ nurse died 4 days after booster shot

Divya Simon, 31, a rest home nurse, had her third COVID-19 booster vaccination four days before suffering a massive heart attack, according to a decision from coroner Luella Dunn released today. (click here)

“She had the booster on January 25 last year, and took the next day off work because she felt unwell. She complained of pain in the left side of her neck and shoulder.

Simon, who had two children aged 4 and 2, worked a night shift on January 28 returning home early the next morning and went to sleep at 10am. After she woke mid-afternoon she went to have a shower and told her husband she felt dizzy and had chest pains. That evening she had a cardiac arrest.

The US banking industry is reeling from a string of bank failures, which kicked off last week and continue to rattle both domestic and global markets. Economists spell doom and gloom, despite efforts to stem the fallout. Here's what you need to know.

Former US President Donald Trump has said he doesn't want Washington to support a regime change in Russia but would like to see one happen in his own country. He made the remark in his reply to a questionnaire on the Ukraine crisis that Fox News host Tucker Carlson had sent to Republican candidates, both declared and potential, for the party's 2024 presidential nomination.

“We should support regime change in the United States, that’s far more important. The Biden administration are the ones who got us into this mess,” Trump responded to one of the questions.

In his response to Carlson Trump largely reiterated his claims that if he were the president, the conflict in Ukraine would not have escalated into a shooting war and that he could end it in 24 hours if put back in office. He also vented anger at European nations, whom he accused of taking advantage of the US.

Protesters claim the Dutch government is lying about the extent of the emissions problem in order to grab privately owned land...

Thousands of Dutch farmers protested on Saturday against the government’s policies to reduce nitrogen emissions, warning they will put farms out of business and affect food production.

Hundreds of tractors from across the Netherlands could be seen driving to the event in The Hague ahead of regional elections this week, and more than 10,000 farmers were in attendance, according to the Reuters news agency.

Protesters accused the Dutch government of forcing farmers off of privately owned land in order to appease Brussels, and carried banners reading “No farmers, no food” and “There is no nitrogen ‘problem.'”

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told state broadcaster the BBC on Sunday that his government’s successful efforts to reduce people’s energy bills were more important than his own expenditure to heat the pool at his $18 million North Yorkshire estate.

Sunak landed in hot water recently over revelations he will pay up to £14,000 ($17,000) per year to heat his recently upgraded private swimming pool while the country experiences a cost of living crisis. 

“I absolutely understand that the number one challenge people are facing is with the cost of living and particularly energy bills,” Sunak told Chris Mason in response to a question about whether the amount of money he spent on his private pool made him seem out of touch. “The important thing is what the government does to help people with energy bills.”

The British government has announced an unexpected one-off payment to state broadcaster the BBC. The £20 million ($24.13 million) tranche will be transferred to the broadcaster over the next two years, the UK Foreign Office said on Monday.

The package comes as part of an Integrated Review program document advocating for a ‘Global Britain’ originally adopted under former PM Boris Johnson.

The money is set to be funneled to the BBC World Service and will be used to “support English-language broadcasting,” as well as to “counter disinformation,” the foreign office explained, implying the funds will be specifically used to counter Russia.

Webmaster addition: "Disinformation" being anything that the government doesn't like!

Toilet paper worldwide contains per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and may be a major source of water pollution, a new study by researchers at the University of Florida suggests.

According to the study, published by the Environmental Science & Technology Letters journal, the team tested rolls from 21 major toilet paper brands sold in the Americas, Africa and Europe, as well as sewage samples from eight wastewater treatment plants in Florida. Both toilet paper and sewage sludge turned out to contain PFAS, with so-called diPAPs, specifically, 6:2 fluorotelomer phosphate diester (6:2 diPAP), found to be the most abundant compound. 

Based on the findings, available data on PFAS levels in sewage and per capita toilet paper usage in other countries, the researchers estimated that toilet paper can contribute to 89% of the 6:2 diPAP in wastewater in France, as well as to 35% in Sweden. At the same time, the hygienic implement is responsible for only about 4% of the compound in wastewaters in Canada and the US, according to the study.

Silicon Valley Bank’s crisis and subsequent closure has rocked financial markets since late last week. In a bid to protect depositors and investors, federal regulators announced Sunday that they would “address any liquidity pressures that may arise.” 

Many people have described the emergency measures as a bailout and say that they mark a major shift in how the federal government deals with banking crises. Until now, only deposits up to $250,000 were insured under federal law. But the Sunday decision by regulators will protect all deposits made at SVB and crypto-heavy Signature Bank, which regulators wound down on Sunday, to avoid “system risk.”

“We’ve changed the system,” economist Mohamed El-Erian, president of Queens’ College at the University of Cambridge, told CNBC’s Squawk Box on Monday. He also echoed Roger Altman, founder of investment bank advisory firm Evercore, that “we are now in a different world.”