Parking lots today are no-go zones where savages with low impulse control often prey on vulnerable people.

• Sherry Smith Sain, 64, died after being intentionally struck by a car in a Walmart parking lot [Source].
• 17-year-old Ian Hagerty was fatally shot while attending a candlelight vigil in an apartment parking lot [Source].
• Andy Billinger, age 38, was fatally shot in a McDonald’s parking lot [Source].
• Ashley Nicole Chambers, 29, was fatally shot in an apartment parking lot [Source].
• Jacqueline Mixon, 78, died after being pushed to the pavement and run over in a hospital parking lot [Source].
• Stormy Clere, 28, was fatally shot in a parking lot [Source].
• Elsa Mikeska, 62, was fatally shot in a gym parking lot [Source].

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said that he would welcome any Russian proposals to set up new military bases and boost troop numbers in the Middle Eastern country, suggesting Moscow’s military presence there should become permanent.

When Russia intervened in the war in Syria in 2015, four years after protests began in the country, it helped tip the balance in al-Assad’s favour, ensuring the Syrian leader’s survival despite Western demands that he be toppled.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced on Thursday $150 million in new humanitarian assistance for Africa's Sahel region, saying it would provide life-saving support to refugees and others impacted by conflict and food insecurity.

Making the announcement during a visit to Niger, Blinken said the aid would address needs in Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali and Mauritania. The package also included funding to support Sahelian refugees in Libya and Niger, he said.

The Pentagon will soon make its first awards under the $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract as interest in commercial cloud services booms, according to a Defense Information Systems Agency official.

The Defense Department in December selected Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle for the closely watched JWCC contract, a follow-up to the failed $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure arrangement.

Lawmakers argued this week that too many potential recruits are being barred from military service if they admit to seeking mental health treatment.

“We disqualify young men and women if they’ve seen a psychiatrist or if they’ve been on medicine for mental health and yet we want them to try to improve themselves,” said Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, questioning Pentagon personnel officials during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Wednesday.

During this decade’s still-ongoing “racial reckoning,” assaults by university administrations on the academic freedom of tenured professors have gotten ever more blatant. Beside the Amy Wax case at Penn, Charles Negy was fired from his tenured post at the University of Central Florida for retweeting my Taki’s column from the first week of the Mostly Peaceful Protests in which I concluded:

Instead, the Establishment views blacks as our Sacred Cows, above criticism, but beneath agency.

An arbitrator later reinstated Professor Negy.

And Cleveland State fired tenured professor Bryan Pesta after he co-authored a breakthrough study of one of the oldest and most controversial questions in psychology: Is the racial gap in IQ between whites and blacks narrower on average among self-identifying blacks with more white genes?

Pesta has now filed a lawsuit against Cleveland State, and let’s just say, he doesn’t pussyfoot around or rely on a lot of legal technicalities, but instead calls out the huge issues raised by his case:

In a report covering covid-19 period from March 2020 to March 2021 OXFAM’s research bring home some hard facts that are camouflaged by words & terms. IMF Fiscal consolidation is nothing but austerity upon low-income & middle class populations while IMF reforms means cutting social welfare & subsidies. OXFAM says that these measures which cover taxing, wage bill cuts or freezes, pension cuts, subsidy elimination, cuts to public spending have over period of time brought countries to great difficulty as they have to continue taking loans & paying back taken loans with interest while people suffer consequences of IMF recommendations. OXFAM claims IMF austerity increases income of the wealthiest 10% at the expense of the bottom 80% which include the middle class who face the most burdens.

IMF Consolidation = austerity

IMF reforms = elimination of subsidies/cuts/freezes etc.

How does the wealthiest 10% increase their income.

IMF while recommending to slash state subsidies to the people, also promote privatization & when state entities are privatized while state increases prices/taxes which have to be borne by the poor – the private owners naturally gain more income as they hold most avenues of revenue.

Within 9 months in 2020, 1000 billionaires wealth had increased by $3.9trillion but workers had lost $3.7trillion in labor income. This showed the gap between top 10% & bottom 80% widening.

One hundreds officers from a classified Israeli Air Force unit have threatened to stop reporting to duty if the government's legal coup goes ahead. "The call of our conscience may determine that we can no longer report to reserve duty," the officers wrote in a joint letter, published by Israel's Channel 12 News on Thursday night. Among the signatories are two former Air Force chiefs.

The officers wrote that "in face of the constitutional situation developing in front of our eyes, which includes the demise of Israeli democracy as we know it, we fear that following military orders would be a violation of our oath, our conscience and our mission."

Maricopa County submitted a bogus response on Monday, falsely claiming that Kari Lake “presents—for the first time—a misleading factual theory about chain-of-custody documents” and “does not present any argument illustrating a need for this Court to review the court of appeals’ Opinion.”

They don’t even want the Supreme Court to consider this case because they are terrified of how this will end up – so they lie.

The Gateway Pundit has reported extensively on the alleged discrepancies corroborated by whistleblower testimony, including missing chain of custody documentation for hundreds of thousands of ballots and the injection of likely phony ballots into the election. Lake also challenges the burden of proof used in the Maricopa County Superior Court and the opinion that Kari Lake did not provide “clear and convincing evidence” of voter fraud.

Lake’s attorneys previously argued that according to Findley v. Sorenson (1929), even if not intentional, election errors can nullify an election if “they affect the result, or at least render it uncertain.” This is further confirmed by the opinion in Hunt v. Campbell (1917), which states, “wherever such practices or influences are shown to have prevailed, not slightly and in individual cases, but generally, so as to render the result uncertain, the entire vote so affected must be rejected.”

Two years later…

Biden’s Justice Department recently told a federal court to expect more than 1,000 more prosecutions related to January 6.

The DOJ has already charged nearly 1,000 people with ‘crimes’ related to January 6.

Webmaster addition: Even with Tucker Carlson's exposure that the January 6 Committee lied about the events of that day, the persecution continues. This is what happens when you have stolen elections. The government does what it wants, unafraid of what the public thinks!

After a train carrying highly toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, President Joe Biden hopped on Air Force One, transferred to a train and went to … Ukraine.

You see, the U.S. president is worried about their border. He doesn’t care about the U.S. border, mind you, just theirs. And he’s now been to the Ukraine border as many times as he’s visited our southern border: once.

But when billionaire bankers once again crashed and burned, Biden was on it fast.

Everything went south on Friday, when the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed — the second largest in history. Biden actually did some work over the weekend, assuring the financial sector that he’s got their back.

Then on Monday, 30 minutes before the New York Stock Exchange opened, Biden vowed that the federal government would hand out money just like the last time the banking world imploded, just 15 years ago.

Webmaster addition: Thereby driving up inflation and increasing the hardship of the American people! In the end, the poor are always made to pay for all!

Action by the largest U.S. banks reflects their confidence in the country’s banking system and helps ensure First Republic has the liquidity to continue serving its customers.

• Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo announced today they are each making a $5 billion uninsured deposit into First Republic Bank.
• Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are each making an uninsured deposit of $2.5 billion
• BNY-Mellon, PNC Bank, State Street, Truist and U.S. Bank are each making an uninsured deposit of $1 billion, for a total deposit from the eleven banks of $30 billion. 

This action by America’s largest banks reflects their confidence in First Republic and in banks of all sizes, and it demonstrates their overall commitment to helping banks serve their customers and communities.  Regional, midsize and small banks are critical to the health and functioning of our financial system.

Webmaster addition: This is a puff piece to reassure us all thing are hunkey-dorey. But behind the puffery is the fact that $30 billion in unsecured deposits is desperate move and a huge gamble. If First Republic collapses, those four other banks will be severely damaged.

According to a new United Nations report, there has been a spike in global cocaine production as demand bounces back after Covid lockdowns, reaching unprecedented levels. 

Between 2020 and 2021, coca cultivation soared by 35%, the sharpest yearly increase since 2016. Coca cultivation across South American countries has hit new record highs. 

One of the more absurd shibboleths of modern-day feminism is the notion that women, somehow, are constitutionally better than men. More virtuous, kinder, and ethically superior, we are mothers, sisters, friends, and just naturally more supportive and caring. Remember former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s aphorism? “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!”

Really? Somebody better tell that to Vice President Kamala Harris and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Turns out the “First Female Vice President Ever” and the “First Native American Female Senator” are demonstrating for everyone to see that ambitious women in politics can be just as petty, malignant, and unadmirable as the men they claim to outshine in virtue.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Congress on Thursday the U.S. "banking system is sound" after two bank failures stirred economic fears.

Yellen, who testified before the Senate Finance Committee about President Joe Biden's proposed budget, began her remarks by addressing the abrupt collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in California and Signature Bank in New York.

"I can reassure the members of the committee that our banking system remains sound, and that Americans can feel confident that their deposits will be there when they need them," she said. "This week's actions demonstrate our resolute commitment to ensure that depositors' savings remain safe."

Webmaster addition: And if you believe that, I have some of Saddam's nukes to sell you!

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) purchased data from tracking companies to monitor compliance with lockdowns, according to contracts with the firms.

The CDC paid one firm $420,000 and another $208,000. That bought access to location data from at least 55 million cellphone users.

The contracts, approved under emergency review due to the COVID-19 pandemic, were aimed at providing the CDC “with the necessary data to continue critical emergency response functions elated to evaluating the impact of visits to key points of interest, stay at home orders, closures, re-openings and other public heath communications related to mask mandate, and other merging research areas on community transmission of SARS-CoV-2,” the contracts, obtained by The Epoch Times, state.

The CDC said it would be using the tracking data to “assess home-by-hour behaviors (i.e. curfew analysis) by exploring the percentage of mobile devices at home during specific period of time.” The data could also be integrated with other information “to provide a comprehensive picture of movement/travel of persons during the COVID-19 pandemic to better understand mandatory stay-at-home orders, business closure, school re-openings, and other non-pharmaceutical interventions in states and cities.”

Despite suspending negotiations with Sweden, Turkey now says it is ready to approve Finland's bid to join NATO, an approval likely to be formally announced Friday when Finnish President Sauli Niinisto travels to Istanbul to meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

On Wednesday Erdogan had responded positively to reporters' questions over whether Turkish parliament stands ready to ratify Finland's membership after the Niinisto meeting. Erdogan responded: "God willing, if it is for the best." He also mentioned keeping "our promise".

At the same time that Department of Justice officials were using spying and corruption statutes to aggressively pursue Donald Trump’s allies based on what turned out to be rumor and innuendo, they declined to use those same laws to investigate evidence of wrongdoing involving Biden family members and one of their corrupt Chinese business partners, DOJ documents and federal court records reveal.  

In 2016-2017, the evidence shows, the FBI raided the offices and intercepted the communications of Chi Ping “Patrick” Ho, a Chinese national agents suspected of espionage even as he was negotiating business deals with former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and brother James. 

DOJ later used information obtained from the searches and wiretaps – which included conversations with the current President’s son and brother – to convict Ho of bribery and money laundering, as part of a separate corruption case involving United Nations officials. But it declined to tap into its trove of evidence – including “over 100,000 emails” – to explore the connections between Ho and the Bidens, who received millions of dollars from Ho and a Chinese intelligence front and discussed sharing office space. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. that Joe Biden made the decision to blow up Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines because he saw being a war president as giving him a better chance at re-election.

Last month, Hersh published a report asserting that the pipelines were destroyed by the US as part of a covert operation.

According to Hersh’s sources, the explosives were planted in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise and were detonated three months later with a remote signal sent by a sonar buoy.

One source told Hersh that the plotters knew the covert operation was an “act of war,” with some in the CIA and State Department warning, “Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.”

Last week, the New York Times reported that a “pro-Ukrainian group” had sabotaged the pipelines, using a team with as few as six people involved in the mission, contradicting previous assumptions that only a state would have had the resources to carry out the operation.

The incredible crime fighting skills of Lori Lightfoot have already driven Ken Griffin out of Chicago, as we noted last year. Now, it looks like CME Group Inc.'s Terry Duffy could be next. 

Duffy had already been outspoken to Chicago's mayor about fighting crime - and, according to Bloomberg, that was before his wife was carjacked.

Duffy told the ICE House Podcast this week: “Three o’clock in the afternoon, my wife got carjacked right in the city of Chicago and it’s absolutely insane what’s going on here. Ninety percent of the carjackings in Chicago are done by juveniles. So the juveniles go in and they come right back out literally an hour later.”

The CME head grew up on the Southwest side of Chicago, the report notes, and currently works from a skyscraper downtown. But he says that crime in the city is inciting fear amongst his employees, who no longer want to return to the workplace. 

Britain is prepared to consider leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) if it prevents the government from implementing its plans to crack down on illegal immigration, Justice Secretary Dominic Raab has warned.

The Illegal Migration Bill, unveiled on March 7, aims to ban anyone who arrives in the UK illegally from claiming asylum. If it becomes law, illegal entrants will be swiftly removed from the UK to their home country or a safe third country like Rwanda, and will be banned from reentry.

The bill would enable powers to be granted to detain immigrants for 28 days without recourse for bail or judicial review, and then indefinitely for as long as there is a “reasonable prospect” of removal.

The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) latest objection to allegations that it suppressed evidence in its prosecution of Jan. 6 defendant Jacob Chansley flies in the face of the Sixth Amendment, current and former attorneys of Chansley told The Epoch Times in separate interviews this week.

“They are hiding. They affirmatively are electing not to disclose [exculpatory evidence],” Albert Watkins, Jacob Chansley’s former attorney that negotiated the navy veteran’s 41-month sentencing agreement in 2021, told The Epoch Times on Tuesday, referring to the DOJ.

“They’re doing so in a fashion which, in my opinion, gives rise to an inescapable conclusion that the Department of Justice has done more damage to our democracy by how it has treated Jan. 6 defendants than anything that had occurred on January 6.”

And I don't mean it disrespectfully, but American operational experience in any war the US fought since Vietnam is absolutely worthless in application to real war in the so called "peer-to-peer" environment. Some tactical tricks are for the consumption and discussion of armchair generals from mommy's basement during school breaks. But that truism, evidently, is not known to Mr. Kelley.

A group of senators from both parties is pressing the Pentagon for more information on what it would take to send F-16 jets to Ukraine.  The fresh push came in a letter Tuesday to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin from eight senators, and obtained by POLITICO, as top administration officials from President Joe Biden on down have poured cold water on bipartisan calls to send U.S.-made fighters into the fight for now. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine is “now at a critical juncture,” the senators wrote, arguing F-16 fighters could give Kyiv an edge as Moscow’s full-tilt invasion enters a second year. “After speaking with U.S., Ukrainian, and foreign leaders working to support Ukraine at the Munich Security Conference last month, we believe the U.S. needs to take a hard look at providing F-16 aircraft to Ukraine,” the senators wrote. “This would be a significant capability that could prove to be a game changer on the battlefield.” The letter was organized by Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.).

Senator Mark Kelly was a great astronaut and I deeply respect him for his career in NASA, and for his aeronautical engineering degree, but this line in his C.V. doesn't make him an authority of the REAL air combat:

B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories strives for a future in which human rights, liberty and equality are guaranteed to all people, Palestinian and Jewish alike, living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Such a future will only be possible when the Israeli occupation and apartheid regime end. That is the future we are working towards. B’Tselem (in Hebrew literally: in the image of), the name chosen for the organization by the late Member of Knesset Yossi Sarid, is an allusion to Genesis 1:27: “And God created humankind in His image. In the image of God did He create them.” The name expresses the universal and Jewish moral edict to respect and uphold the human rights of all people.

Since B’Tselem’s inception in 1989, we have been documenting, researching and publishing statistics, testimonies, video footage, position papers and reports on human rights violations committed by Israel in the Occupied Territories. The initial mandate we took upon ourselves focused on the occupation regime in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and in the Gaza Strip. However, over the years, it has become clear that the concept of two parallel regimes operating between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River – a permanent democracy west of the Green Line and a temporary military occupation to the east of it – is divorced from reality. The entire area that Israel controls is ruled by a single apartheid regime, governing the lives of all people living in it and operating according to one organizing principle: establishing and perpetuating the control of one group of people – Jews – over another – Palestinians – through laws, practices and state violence.