One of the most self-defeating and yet inexplicably persistent mistakes Russia’s enemies have been making for over a thousand years is underestimating it. Regardless of the direction the invasion was coming from, Moscow was able to prevail each time. Its ability to not just successfully defend itself, but also counterattack and reach the opponent’s heartland has been unmatched in modern history. And yet, the myth of Russia’s supposed perpetual decline and dilapidation is an incessant propaganda trope used by its enemies for centuries. None of it ever came true, despite all the grim predictions, which are still being parroted to this very day and are unlikely to go away any time soon, especially nowadays, when the political West needs to keep its populace under the illusion that Moscow is supposedly “losing”.

We often hear that Russia is no more than a regional power with an economy the size of Spain’s, a military budget that has been consistently smaller than the Saudi one, etc. And indeed, on paper, this may seem true. Taking into account nominal GDP as the only measure of success and power, one might fall into the trap of believing such statistics. However, the reality is quite different. All one needs to do is ask just a few logical questions. Could the Spanish economy ever withstand the sanctions imposed on Russia, let alone grow and outperform those enforcing them? Is the Spanish economy a key global supplier of vital commodities such as food, oil, natural gas, various types of heavy machinery, crucial chemical products (such as fertilizers), enriched uranium for nuclear power plants, etc?

Fifth pilot incident this month…

March 13, 2023 – Emirates Flight EK205 MXP-JFK diverted due to pilot illness hour and a half after take-off (click here)

March 11, 2023 – United Airlines Flight 2007 GUA-ORD diverted due to “incapacitated pilot” who had chest pains (click here)

March ?, 2023 – British Airways pilot collapsed in Cairo hotel and died, was scheduled to fly Airbus A321 from Cairo to London (click here)

March, 3, 2023 – Virgin Australia VA-717 flight Adelaide to Perth was forced to make an emergency landing after First Officer suffered heart attack 30 min after departure. (click here)

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The U.S. military launched airstrikes against Iranian-backed terrorists in Syria on Thursday night after a U.S. contractor was killed and five U.S. service members and an additional U.S. contractor were injured in an attack by a suicide drone.

U.S. intelligence said that the attack was carried out by a “one-way unmanned aerial vehicle” that “struck a maintenance facility on a Coalition base near Hasakah in northeast Syria at approximately 1:38 p.m. local time.”

The Pentagon said that the precision airstrikes were launched to “limit the risk of escalation and minimize casualties.”

President Trump republished a 2018 letter moments ago on Truth social showing Stormy Daniels denying every having had a relationship with citizen Trump.

This is huge.

The letter was published by TMZ in January 2018.

About 75% of non-organic vegetables and fruits grown in the United States contain toxic pesticide residue. Blueberries and green beans contain organophosphates which can damage the human nervous system.

Unless produce is grown cleanly without pesticides and herbicides and is laboratory tested, it can be risky to consume to some degree because it might be chock full of hidden chemical poisons that are unseen to the naked eye, according to a report by The Daily Mail.

The Environmental Working Group looked at 46 different produce staples. Overall, the organization found that 75 percent of freshly grown produce in the U.S. contains some degree of harmful pesticide residue, which is deeply concerning. The worst offenders are among some of the healthiest fruits and vegetables when grown cleanly. These conventionally grown produce items are risky to consume because of the hidden chemicals they contain.

A study conducted by the National Toxicology Program (NTP) has been well-hidden by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). All three agencies conspired in tandem to cover up the findings of a six-year, long-delayed review of fluoride’s toxicity.

Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, the infamous transgender woman that Joe Biden appointed to head up the HHS, intervened last June to stop the release of the May 2022 NTP review, known internally as a monograph. The Fluoride Action Network (FAN) responded to Levine’s obstruction of the review by filing a lawsuit, which ultimately prompted the report’s release on March 15, 2023. The mainstream media is obviously ignoring the report, but it does show there’s no “safe exposure” to fluoride.

“[R]esearch on other neurotoxicants has shown that subtle shifts in IQ at the population level can have a profound impact … a 5-point decrease in a population’s IQ would nearly double the number of people classified as intellectually disabled,” the NTP review states.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday disclosed a bug that allowed some users of its popular AI chatbot ChatGPT to view messages from others.

“We had a significant issue in ChatGPT due to a bug in an open source library, for which a fix has now been released and we have just finished validating,” Altman tweeted.

“A small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users’ conversation history.”

Some users had reported seeing messages from others as early as Monday.

Deutsche Bank DB –6.74%  shares tumbled Friday after the cost of insuring the lender against default rose.

Deutsche Bank (ticker: DB) fell 12% in Frankfurt trading. U.S.-listed shares fell 7.5% in premarket trading. The move followed a spike in the price of the lender’s credit default swaps to a four-year high on Thursday, according to Reuters.

Almost 4,000 failed asylum seekers who have been issued deportation orders in Ireland over the past five years currently have an “unknown status” in the country, the latest figures have revealed.

The Fed’s actions to stem the banking crisis are beginning to accelerate the effects of QT, causing money velocity to drop and intensifying the tightening of financial conditions.

In an implicit acknowledgement that policy may have been overtightened, the Fed at its meeting Wednesday hiked rates by 25 bps, but gave the impression it is on the verge of stepping back from further raises.

The rescue of SVB et al has shifted the landscape and compromised moral hazard, and prompted a reorganization of how bank deposits and Fed reserves are spread through the system. Money has migrated to large banks from small ones as the credit risk of the latter is reappraised in the wake of recent lender failures.

Having enraged bondholders (who saw their entire AT1 debt tranche wiped out before the equity was fully impaired, violating every conventional liquidation waterfall):

Mark Dowding, chief investment officer at RBC BlueBay, which held Credit Suisse AT1 bonds, said Switzerland was “looking more like a banana republic”

“If this is left to stand, how can you trust any debt security issued in Switzerland, or for that matter wider Europe, if governments can just change laws after the fact,” David Tepper, the billionaire founder of Appaloosa Management, told the Financial Times.

“Contracts are made to be honored.”

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article on Substack on Wednesday that said the CIA was instructed to come up with a cover story for the Nord Stream bombings that was fed to The New York Times and the German newspaper Die Zeit.

The cover-up story was created to shift blame from the US after Hersh’s bombshell report published on February 8 that said President Biden ordered the attack on the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines, which connect Russia to Germany. "It was a total fabrication by American intelligence that was passed along to the Germans, and aimed at discrediting your story," Hersh was told by a source within the American intelligence community.

This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new report. Unsurprisingly alarming, the report aimed to turn up the heat on governments, the business world, and every one of us to do more about the energy transition. Decarbonization, the report said, had to move faster and more dramatically. Yet that wasn’t the only document that made the headlines this week. Shell also released a report in which it detailed two different scenarios for the future to 2050. In those scenarios, the supermajor’s analysts pitted energy security against the energy transition – something the IPCC reports have never done. 

Yesterday, while attention was still focused on the US banking system and the ongoing botched response by the Fed and especially the Treasury's senile Secretary, who more than two weeks after SIVB collapsed, have still not been able to stabilize confidence in banks - thereby assuring the US is about to slam head first into a brutal recession, just as Biden ordered to contain inflation, as US consumer spending is now in freefall - we pointed out that something bad was taking place in Europe: the credit default swaps of perpetually semi-solvent banking giant Deutsche Bank were quietly blowing out to multi-year highs.

France is engulfed in turmoil following President Emmanuel Macron's controversial decision to raise the retirement age. Over a million people participated in nationwide protests on Thursday, transforming urban areas into scenes of chaos. These demonstrations, the largest in years, have triggered fuel shortages, hundreds of arrests, and even claims of "civil war." 

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told French media outlet CNews on Friday morning that more than 900 fires were reported in the streets of Paris on Thursday night -- in one of the most violent days of protests in a while. 

"There were a lot of demonstrations and some of them turned violent, notably in Paris," Darmanin said. He said more than a million people marched yesterday. 

Goldman Sachs' traders said they think the pain in European banks is "simply a function of market selling leveraged and opaque business models post CS, with some discomfort on what may roll out of 1Q IB earnings following the spike in rates vol. There’s also 7% of the loan book in CRE (EUR33bn), of which 51% in the US. Total office exposure is 34%, which is the market’s core area of concern, so could say the range for US office is EUR5.5-11bn"