In a quest to maintain its hegemony in a unipolar world, American foreign policy strategy has sought to weaken a Russia that it sees as an “acute threat” and to confront and contain a China that it sees as “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security.”

The immediate challenge is Russia, the theory goes, but the long-term challenge is China. It is not strategically optimal to fight both superpowers at once. Russia has to be weakened so China can be confronted in its challenge to the U.S.-led unipolar world.

The attempt to weaken Russia in the war in Ukraine, though, may be having the ironic effect of strengthening China’s role in an emerging multipolar world.

Lebanon has no alternative for economic recovery but to make progress on a deal with the International Monetary Fund, a senior U.S. official said on Thursday.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf visited Lebanon, which is suffering one of the world's worst financial meltdowns, according to the World Bank, on a regional trip earlier this month.

Beirut signed a staff-level agreement with the IMF in April 2022 but its progress towards financial reforms required to unlock $3 billion in funding has been "very slow", according to the lender of last resort.

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency plans to upgrade its international intelligence-sharing system to allow more seamless collaboration with a broader coalition of allies.

DIA uses the top-secret system to communicate with and share intelligence among the U.S. and its Five Eyes partners — the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Chief Information Officer Doug Cossa told reporters the agency will begin designing an upgrade to Stone Ghost in fiscal 2024 to allow information to be shared with more countries as needed.

Webmaster addition:

The U.S. Air Force isn’t going to buy the hypersonic AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon after the prototyping phase ends, following problems during testing, the service’s acquisition chief told lawmakers Wednesday.

But the service will still finish the ARRW program’s last two all-up round test flights to collect data to help with future hypersonic programs, Andrew Hunter told the House Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee in written testimony.

“This started from a trip my daughter and I had and we stopped by McDonald’s and this lady [who was] going to a pro-abortion march asked my daughter to join her because she saw she was black, and she thought she was a liberal Democrat,” Vince Everett Ellison recalls. “And my daughter very, very nicely said, ‘Uh, ma’am, I’m a Christian and I vote my values.’”

“And that was just so interesting to me because I said, why don’t more people say that? ‘I’m a Christian and I vote my values?’”

Fear? The fear of being shouted at. The fear of being ostracized. The fear of being canceled, and losing one’s career, friends, and social standing. The siren song of the woke herd mentality can be enticing. But not to the Ellison family.

Three predictable themes surfaced. 

The first was led by none other than Joe Biden. He lectured that guns were the cause of the mass deaths, not the free will of a psychopathic killer. 

Few noted that the shooter illegally purchased firearms by hiding her documented record of emotional disorders. 

Second, America was told that it would serve no purpose to publish the shooter’s manifesto. Apparently, this exception to the usual practice was due to fears her manifesto would hurt the transgender cause. 

Third, some in the activist media claimed that, while such murdering was regrettable, it was also understandable—given supposed Christian, conservative America’s intolerance of the transgendered. In our sick society, the targeted victims became the political victimizers.

Donald Trump has been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury after a probe into hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, becoming the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges even as he makes another run for the White House, the New York Times reported on Thursday.

The charges, arising from an investigation led by Democratic Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, could reshape the 2024 presidential race. Trump previously said he would continue campaigning for the Republican Party's nomination if charged with a crime.

Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) is planning to host a family event featuring a drag story hour and a talk given by the director of a pediatric gender clinic who has previously claimed that children as young as three years old are able to “identify” as “transgender.” 

A “gender resource fair” is scheduled for Thursday, April 13, at Loring Elementary School. The Minneapolis school district advertises the event as “a gathering for families and their gender creative young ones.” 

Dr. Angela Kade Goepferd, director of the “gender health program” at Children’s Minnesota hospital, will be featured as a guest speaker pushing gender ideology and“transition” procedures for gender confusion on the parents in attendance. Meanwhile, their children will be exposed to a drag queen story hour. 

A court in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore has struck down a colonial-era sedition law, calling it “inconsistent” with the constitution, in a verdict hailed by free speech advocates and journalists.

A single-judge bench of the Lahore High Court on Thursday declared the sedition law unconstitutional. The court’s verdict will be applicable across the country unless the Supreme Court overturns the high court’s decision.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Children’s Health Defense (CHD) on Friday filed a class action lawsuit against President Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top administration officials and federal agencies, alleging they “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.

Kennedy, CHD and Connie Sampognaro filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, Monroe Division, on behalf of all the more than 80% of Americans who access news from online news aggregators and social media companies, principally Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

The plaintiffs allege top-ranking government officials, along with an “ever-growing army of federal officers, at every level of the government” from the White House to the FBI, the CIA and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to lesser-well-known federal agencies induced those companies:

“to stifle viewpoints that the government disfavors, to suppress facts that the government does not want the public to hear, and to silence specific speakers — in every case critics of federal policy — whom the government has targeted by name.”

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Friday called for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine and for talks to start on a lasting peace settlement.

In a scheduled address to the nation, Lukashenko said there should be no preconditions for a ceasefire. He warned Ukraine against launching an anticipated counter-offensive, saying it would make negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv impossible.

The Kremlin said on Friday that it had noted a call by Lukashenko for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine and would discuss it with him, but that it could not at the moment achieve the goals of its "special military operation" in this way.

 For the first time in years, India's splintered opposition is sinking its differences to take on strongman Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which could extend to a substantial challenge in national elections due in 2024. That is if the disparate groups can stay united, which is far from certain.

  Since Modi came to power in 2014, he has dominated Indian politics, and trounced the opposition in two successive general elections. But his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party does not get a majority of the vote and could be in trouble if it comes up against a united opposition.

The opposition has come together after this month's conviction of opposition leader Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party on a charge of defamation and his disqualification from parliament.

Joanne Segovia, the police union director for San Jose Police Officers' Association (SJPOA), has been charged with illegally importing Fentanyl into the U.S., as reported by the Washington Examiner.

Ismail Ramsey, United States Attorney, and Charge Tatum King, Homeland Security Special Agent, announced the federal complaint against Segovia on Wednesday. The complaint alleges that she used her office at the SJPOA to distribute controlled substances and sent herself shipments from various countries, including Hong Kong, India, and Singapore, all labeled as “Wedding Party Favors,” “Chocolate and Sweets,” and “Gift Makeup.”

I have served on or chaired two dozen data safety monitoring boards for randomized trials of novel experimental drugs or devices. I can tell you first hand that for COVID-19 vaccines, a 30 day regulatory window after injection is fair game for attribution of health events to the product when the adverse events of interest are known to be caused by the mRNA induced Wuhan Spike protein.

Jabagi et al, NEJM, reported from the French National Health Data System linked to the national COVID-19 vaccination database disclosing cardiovascular events after mRNA BA4/BA5 bivalent boosters. All persons who were 50 years of age or older and who had received a booster dose between October 6 and November 9, 2022, were included in the study. The composite of ischemic/hemorrhagic stroke, myocardial infarction, or pulmonary occurred in 335 unfortunate individuals. The authors make the mistake of dividing by the cases by the entire number vaccinated and comparing rates to monovalent boosters. Neither of these operations are valid since there is incomplete capture of events and comparison was not made to a placebo or control group.

Ron DeSantis, a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is set to visit Israel in April despite widespread condemnation of Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial judicial overhaul.

As the war in Ukraine drags on into its second year, protest demonstrations have been taking place in major European cities. They express the growing sentiment that the people are tired of the protracted conflict and fearful of what could come should the war continue even longer. Memories of the catastrophic world wars that ravaged Europe in the first half of the last century and the terrible threat of nuclear annihilation that divided the continent in the second half of the century form the traumatic foundation from which Europeans are voicing their aversion to this conflict, which has the potential to spiral out of control and bring a major war to Europe and the world again.

Justice Department officials are said to be annoyed by the Manhattan District Attorney's decision to indict Trump, as they believe it is a weak case which could undermine more serious legal probes Trump is facing.  

Alvin Bragg's intention to criminally charge the former president for his payment of hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels was revealed on Thursday - sparking consternation and anger in Mar-a-Lago, and, according to The New York Times, in Washington DC.

The paper reported that 'senior officials' at the Justice Department had concerns about the strength of Bragg's case.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., stormed off after being accused of lying by Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik in the Capitol on Thursday, calling her "super transphobic" for good measure.

Raichik had just filed an ethics complaint at the congresswoman's office, saying the "Squad" member had defamed her during a Feb. 8 House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing. 

The Libs of TikTok creator then spotted the Democrat walking through the Capitol and seized the opportunity to confront her.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday that the "trans community" in America is "under attack," just days after a transgender former student opened fire in a Nashville, Tennessee, school and killed six people.

"One of the things that we saw during the midterm elections is that people don't want their freedoms to be taken. They want us to fight for their freedoms," Jean-Pierre said to reporters as she answered questions from the briefing room. "It is shameful, it is disturbing, and our hearts go out to the trans community as they are under attack right now."

Jean-Pierre's comments came when she was asked for the White House's message to states across the country who are moving to take action against certain care for transgender minors, specifically the Kentucky legislature's vote on Wednesday to override Gov. Andy Beshear's veto of legislation that prohibits transgender procedures for minors as well as restricts bathrooms based on biological sex.

Webmaster addition: Just please remember who was shooting who, Karine!

Donald Trump has been indicted by a New York City grand jury on charges of falsifying business records stemming from payments he made to adult film star Stormy Daniels to prevent her from revealing an affair he had with her before the 2016 election.

A source told The Independent that grand jurors voted to indict the ex-president at some point this week, and that indictment is currently under seal.

It was only filed with the New York Supreme Court late Thursday, just before the court clerk’s office wrapped its’ business for the day.

On Wednesday, a group of protesters advocating for transgender individuals stormed the Kentucky Capitol in response to the Kentucky state legislature overriding the veto of Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY).

The bill in question prohibits discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in all grades, requires that transgender students use the restroom that corresponds with their biological gender, allows teachers to not use preferred pronouns, bans gender surgery for minors, and requires doctors to detransition individuals if they received ‘gender reassignment’ surgery, as reported by USA Today.

Hunter Biden was asked to use contacts in the FBI to help his Chinese business partner who was arrested for bribery and money laundering, emails reveal.

The news comes as a whistleblower claims Hunter used a top former or current FBI official code-named 'One Eye' to funnel secret bureau information to his Chinese business partners.

Patrick Ho – convicted of bribery and money laundering in 2018 – was secretary general of CEFC, the Chinese oil giant Hunter partnered with, and which sent the Biden family more than $5million.

Former President Donald Trump made a U-turn this week after slamming the Manhattan grand jury investigating a hush money payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

“I have gained such respect for this grand jury, & perhaps even the grand jury system as a whole,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday.

The post comes after Trump has slammed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for a “political witch hunt” and suggested that the jury could be tainted against him. Trump also declared earlier this month that he believed that Bragg’s office would have him arrested.

But on Wednesday, Trump delivered a more positive tone and said that he believes the grand jury is questioning the evidence put forward against him, adding he believes the evidence is “overwhelming” in his favor.