Calls mounted Wednesday for the Taliban to free a girls’ education activist arrested earlier this week in Kabul, as a minister in the Taliban-led government defended the detention.

Matiullah Wesa, founder and president of Pen Path — a local nongovernmental group that travels across Afghanistan with a mobile school and library — was arrested in the Afghan capital on Monday.

Since their takeover of Afghanistan, the Taliban have imposed restrictions on women’s and minority rights. Girls are barred from school beyond the sixth grade and last year, the Taliban banned women from going to universities.

Russia has started exercises with the Yars intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system and several thousand troops in what is likely to be seen as another attempt by Moscow to show off its nuclear strength.

“In total, more than 3,000 military personnel and about 300 pieces of equipment are involved in the exercises,” Russia’s defence ministry said in a statement on the Telegram messaging service on Wednesday.

The US should bluntly tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Kiev will eventually have to accept territorial concessions, former CIA Counterterrorism Center chief Robert Grenier said. This comes as Zelensky admitted that his people are becoming weary of conflict.

“The time is fast approaching when a senior representative of the Biden administration will need to begin a similarly tough, realistic — and empathetic — dialogue with Zelensky,” he wrote in The Hill, adding that although the US president is “a great friend” of Kiev, “his ability to deliver on his implicit and explicit promises of support for Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes’ is likely to be curtailed in the near future.”

“Zelensky must be pushed in the direction of a negotiated solution, likely to include territorial concessions on Crimea and the Donbass,” the former CIA official said.

In the expert’s opinion, the Ukrainian conflict does not threaten Washington’s national security, and therefore the total defence of every inch of Ukrainian territory is not on the list of vital interests of the West.

Lawmakers in Lesotho are to discuss on Wednesday whether the country should seek to reclaim large swaths of land from powerful neighbour South Africa.

A motion put forward by an opposition MP is aiming to have the parliament declare South Africa’s entire Free State province, which borders Lesotho, as well as areas of four more regions as part of the small mountain kingdom.

“I hope that, after the debate, our country will be returned to us as should have long been,” the lawmaker, Tsepo Lipholo of the Basotho Convenient Movement (BCM) told journalists before the debate.

A Bemidji High School teacher fantasizes about secretly injecting children with puberty blockers, according to a Facebook post obtained by Alpha News.

“Me coming to the realization I will never fulfill my lifelong quest of moving to Tennessee to secretly inject 11 year olds with hormone blockers while I do an interpretive drag dance to my favorite Judy Blume novel,” said the post, published to the Facebook page of Gina Marie Bernard.

America’s top military officer warned Wednesday that war between the United States and another major power would see “off the charts” munitions consumption and said there is work to be done to ensure the country is prepared.

Ukraine and Russia have fired huge amounts of artillery ammunition since Moscow invaded its neighbor in February 2022, sparking concerns about the amount the United States — which has supplied large amounts of shells to Kyiv — has on hand.

A “big lesson learned comes out of Ukraine, which is the incredible consumption rates of conventional munitions in what really is a limited regional war,” General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee.

A Navy sailor, an Army colonel and an Army major are the first active-duty military members taking the initial step toward suing the U.S. government over jet fuel that contaminated drinking water in Hawaii.

Navy Ensign Koda Freeman, Army Col. Jessica Whaley, and Army Maj. Amanda Feindt filed pre-litigation claim forms with the Navy late Monday, which will allow them to later file a federal lawsuit in Honolulu, their attorneys said.

In 2021, jet fuel spilled from a drain line at the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility, flowed into a drinking water well and then into the Navy’s water system serving 93,000 people in and around Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. Nearly 6,000 sought medical attention, complaining of ailments such as nausea, headaches and sores. The military put about 4,000 families in hotels for several months.

RUSSIA is staging major war games involving 3,000 troops and nuclear missiles after the Kremlin threatened a "target" in the West.

Vladimir Putin is flexing his military muscle with his "invincible weapons" in three regions, showcasing his nuclear-capable Yars rockets - one of Moscow's deadliest weapons.

Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury, a radical leftist biochemist, was arrested on Tuesday at Boston Logan Airport while attempting to board a one-way flight to Guatemala City.

Roychowdhury, 29, has been charged with one count of attempting to cause damage with a fire or explosive in connection with a May 2022 firebombing of Wisconsin Family Action's office in Madison.

According to the Department of Justice, the attack was perpetrated by far-left pro-abortion group Jane's Revenge, who claimed the attack was “only a warning” and threatened to destroy the “medical imperialism” infrastructure. The incident saw two Molotov cocktails thrown into the office and graffiti sprayed on the building’s side with the words, “If abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either.”

Two Black Hawk helicopters collided Wednesday night over Kentucky, reportedly leading to multiple casualties in the 101st Airborne Division.

At approximately 10:00 p.m., March 29, two Black Hawk helicopters were conducting a training mission over Fort Campbell when for a reason yet unknown, the two aircrafts collided.

“We can confirm two aircraft from the 101st were involved in an accident last night resulting in [several] casualties. Right now the focus is on the Soldiers and their families who were involved,” the 101st Airborne Division tweeted.

Several people were killed when multiple helicopters crashed in Trigg County Wednesday night.

Fort Campbell public affairs confirmed that two HH60 Blackhawk helicopters crashed during a routine training mission. The press release did not provide the status of the crewmembers but said the command is currently focused on caring for the servicemembers and their families.

Trigg County emergency personnel said the crash occurred between Bobby Light Road and Lancaster Road around 9:35 pm.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is not treating the shooting at a Nashville Christian school by a gender-confused woman as a domestic terror attack, the agency said in statements made to the Daily Wire. 

In response to comment from the outlet, Elizabeth Clement-Webb, spokeswoman for the FBI’s Memphis field office, said “If it was terrorism, we would have federal jurisdiction. Given that Nashville metro is leading the investigation, I think you can take a lot from that.” She added that the FBI is in an “assistance role” and that local police are currently leading the investigation. 

A cargo ship called the Felicity Ace, carrying 4,000 luxury cars collectively worth around $438million, caught fire last month. Thankfully, the crew members were not harmed and managed to quickly abandon ship. The fire, however, burned for a week. This was because the lithium-ion batteries inside the electric vehicles (EVs) in the consignment kept the fire alive. The fire only died once the supply of combustible material on board was exhausted.

Something similar happened in July last year. In Victoria, Australia, a 13-tonne Tesla ‘Megapack’ facility – which uses a vast array of lithium-ion batteries to store energy generated by intermittent renewables – caught fire. This fire eventually burned itself out after three days. In that time, it created numerous ecological hazards, including toxic smoke, which engulfed local residents. But firefighters could do little more than monitor the environmental damage – they had to wait for the fire to put itself out.

‘The most significant danger of a lithium-ion battery is that [fires] are almost impossible to put out once they are ignited’, notes engineer Robin Mitchell. ‘No matter how many safety systems are put in place’, he says, ‘a fire started by a lithium-ion battery is far too challenging to manage’. Such technology, Mitchell concludes, ‘may only be suitable for small-scale systems such as smartphones and EVs’. Even so, the fire risks posed by EV batteries are not insignificant.

Raytheon Missiles & Defense has been awarded a $1.2-billion contract to manufacture Patriot missile system fire units for the US Army.

The agreement was made after Washington vowed to provide Ukraine with an advanced air defense system to help counter Russia’s continued attacks.

According to the US Department of Defense, the contract would also support a foreign military sale to Switzerland.

On Navy ships docked at this vast base, hundreds of sailors in below-deck mazes of windowless passageways perform intense, often monotonous manual labor. It’s necessary work before a ship deploys, but hard to adjust to for many already challenged by the stresses plaguing young adults nationwide.

Growing mental health distress in the ranks carries such grave implications that the U.S. chief of naval operations, Adm. Michael Gilday, answered “suicides” when asked earlier this year what in the security environment kept him up at night.

One recently embraced prevention strategy is to deploy chaplains as regular members of the crew on more ships. The goal is for the clergy to connect with sailors, believers and non-believers alike, in complete confidentiality.

Two kinds of absolute controls are being prepared to implement The Great Reset, alias UN Agenda 2030. A potentially straitjacket and total control by programmable Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), and an all-oppressive health tyranny by WHO, overriding national Constitutional rights and national sovereignty as far as health measures are concerned.

The former will be “managed”, coordinated and supervised for faultless implementation, by the so-called Central Bank of Central Banks, the Bank for International Settlement (BIS); the latter by the 1948 Rockefeller-created, falsely called UN-agency WHO. The emerging tyrant’s budget is to 80% pharma, Gates and otherwise privately funded. Both are criminal organizations.

These are plans, not yet implemented. But the world better be aware, so We, the People, may stop this terrifying assault on humanity in its tracks.

CBDC may be upon us, humanity, rather sooner than later. Programmable CBDC is a weapon of mass destruction. The weapon has been in the planning for decades – and it fits right into the Bigger Picture of the Great Reset / Agenda 2030.

Programmable – means the money can be programmed on how it is to be spent by an individual, or blocked, or made to expire, or made to be used for certain goods or services – or it can be totally withheld, wiped out, depending on how well you behave, according to the standards of the all-commandeering death cult elite.

Let’s try to examine the roots of the [Ukrainian] conflict. It starts with those who for the last eight years have been talking about “separatists” or “independentists” from Donbass. This is a misnomer. The referendums conducted by the two self-proclaimed Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in May 2014, were not referendums of “independence” (независимость), as some unscrupulous journalists have claimed, but referendums of “self-determination” or “autonomy” (самостоятельность). The qualifier “pro-Russian” suggests that Russia was a party to the conflict, which was not the case, and the term “Russian speakers” would have been more honest. Moreover, these referendums were conducted against the advice of Vladimir Putin.

In fact, these Republics were not seeking to separate from Ukraine, but to have a status of autonomy, guaranteeing them the use of the Russian language as an official language–because the first legislative act of the new government resulting from the American-sponsored overthrow of [the democratically-elected] President Yanukovych, was the abolition, on February 23, 2014, of the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law of 2012 that made Russian an official language in Ukraine. A bit like if German putschists decided that French and Italian would no longer be official languages in Switzerland.

This decision caused a storm in the Russian-speaking population. The result was fierce repression against the Russian-speaking regions (Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lugansk and Donetsk) which was carried out beginning in February 2014 and led to a militarization of the situation and some horrific massacres of the Russian population (in Odessa and Mariupol, the most notable).

The Department of Energy (DOE) has announced new rules for using air conditioners and air cleaners, claiming that these would make the two appliances more efficient.

According to a March 23 press release by the DOE, it has already finalized new energy-efficient standards for window air conditioners and portable air cleaners. It argued that the new rules will “save American families and consumers approximately $1.5 billion per year on their electricity bills.”

Moreover, the DOE claimed that the new guidelines will “significantly cut pollution” by reducing “harmful carbon dioxide emissions by 106 million metric tons over 30 years.”

On March 13th, the Pentagon rolled out its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2024. The results were — or at least should have been — stunning, even by the standards of a department that’s used to getting what it wants when it wants it.

The new Pentagon budget would come in at $842 billion. That’s the highest level requested since World War II, except for the peak moment of the Afghan and Iraq wars, when the United States had nearly 200,000 troops deployed in those two countries.

$1 Trillion for the Pentagon?

It’s important to note that the $842 billion proposed price tag for the Pentagon next year will only be the beginning of what taxpayers will be asked to shell out in the name of “defense.” If you add in nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy and small amounts of military spending spread across other agencies, you’re already at a total military budget of $886 billion. And if last year is any guide, Congress will add tens of billions of dollars extra to that sum, while yet more billions will go for emergency aid to Ukraine to help it fend off Russia’s brutal invasion. In short, we’re talking about possible total spending of well over $950 billion on war and preparations for more of it — within striking distance, in other words, of the $1 trillion mark that hawkish officials and pundits could only dream about a few short years ago.

Webmaster addition:

Should the price of gold ever shoot up from its current price by, say, another $1,000 in the coming weeks or months due to an unexpected “black swan” event, banking giant JPMorgan Chase would more than likely find itself underwater due to the massive gold derivative short positions it currently holds.

Dr. Stephen Leeb, one of the world’s top money managers, says that JPMorgan’s gold derivate short positions are so numerous and large that they likely exceed the entirety of the bank’s assets on hand – which is a very dangerous position in which to be.

“What I lose sleep over is how much exposure does a bank like JPMorgan have to the [gold] derivative market,” Leeb is quoted as saying, adding that it is an “open secret” in the gold market that JPMorgan is heavy in gold derivative short positions.

Twitter has taken down a GitHub listing in which a significant amount of the social media site’s source code was leaked, according to a legal finding on Friday acquired by The New York Times.

The leaked code appeared to have been available on GitHub for several months before Twitter sent a copyright infringement takedown on Friday. It included “proprietary source code for Twitter’s platform and internal tools,” according to the filing. The code is no longer available on GitHub since that time.

WARNING: Graphic content— Fox News host Tucker Carlson weighs in on gun control following the Nashville school shooting on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'

British actor Orlando Bloom made a surprise appearance in the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday to bring his personal encouragement to the war effort against Russia.

He is the latest in a long line of Hollywood stars who have made the journey to the war-torn country to be pictured alongside Zelensky.

Bloom, a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, arrived over the weekend and visited the leader in Kyiv to personally deliver a gift from his Buddhist mentor and a message from his mom.

AP reports at his meeting with Zelensky, Bloom said “he was struck by the courage and resilience of Ukrainians, who despite the war remain strong.”

Actor Mark Hamill has joined an increasingly long line of Hollywood stars seeking to insert themselves into the Ukraine conflict with his voice, mustering a Jedi knight’s sonorous gravitas, now used on an air raid app to warn of incoming attacks from Russia.

“Attention. Air raid alert. Proceed to the nearest shelter,” says Hamill over Air Alert, an app linked to Ukraine’s air defense system.

When the threat is no longer at hand the 71-year-old American screen veteran simply signs off with “The alert is over. May the Force be with you.”

The whole time his delivery is in character as Luke Skywalker, the Verge reports, adding some of the lines contain recognizable quotes from the Star Wars franchise like “Don’t be careless. Your overconfidence is your weakness.”

Pro-transgender groups want to conceal the manifesto of transgender school shooter Audrey Hale from public scrutiny. 

Hale killed three children and three adults after leaving a still-hidden manifesto explaining her motives, according to Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake.

While Republicans such as Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) are calling for the manifesto to be released, several LGBT organizations are calling for the manifesto to remain hidden from the public.

The executive director of Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere (COLAGE) Jordan Budd stated, “It should not be published.” Budd also pivoted away from the shooter’s motive and directed the focus on firearm ownership, saying, “The focus should be on how this was able to happen in the first place. There should not be such easy access to deadly weaponry.” 

California’s Mammoth Mountain ski resort officially broke the record for winter snowfall on Wednesday — by a whopping 27 inches, after two-and-a-half feet of snow fell on the Sierra Nevada in yet another storm.

The European Union is developing proposals on what to do with assets of the Russian central bank that were seized by member states. According to European officials, the bloc may invest the money and give the returns to Ukraine. 

Anders Ahnlid, a Swedish diplomat who leads the commission exploring what to do with the Kremlin’s money, told Politico that whatever decision is made will be without precedent. "There is a consensus among [EU] member states that it’s important to examine very, very carefully, what can be done under the instructions that we’ve been given, including that what is going to be done will have to be in compliance with EU and international law," she said. "We are in an exceptional situation and probably any solution that we will come up with will be of a nature that hasn’t been there before."

The RESTRICT Act, introduced by Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Tom Thune (R-SD), is aimed at blocking or disrupting transactions and financial holdings linked to foreign adversaries that pose a risk to national security, however the language of the bill could be used to give the US government enormous power to punish free speech.

Warner, a longtime opponent of free speech who, as Michael Krieger pointed out in 2018 (and confirmed in the Twitter Files) pushed for the 'weaponization' of big tech, crafted the RESTRICT act to "ake swift action against technology companies suspected of cavorting with foreign governments and spies, to effectively vanish their products from shelves and app stores when the threat they pose gets too big to ignore," according to Wired.

Bad actors listed in the bill are; China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela.

In reality, the RESTRICT Act has very little to do with TikTok and everything to do with controlling online content.

In very specific terms a lot of U.S. websites would be impacted.  Why?  Because a lot of websites use third-party ‘plug-ins’ or ‘widgets’ or software created in foreign countries to support the content on their site.  The “Restrict Act” gives the DNI the ability to tell a website using any “foreign content” or software; that might be engaged in platform communication the U.S Government views as against their interests; to shut down or face a criminal charge.   In very direct terms, the passage of SB686 would give the Dept of Commerce, DNI and DHS the ability to shut down what you are reading right now. This is a big deal. -The Last Refuge