Israeli settlers and politicians stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque on Thursday morning, ahead of thousands taking to the streets of Jerusalem for a divisive annual ultra-nationalist march. 

Security officers cleared the Qibli prayer hall of Palestinian worshippers following the Fajr dawn prayers, according to Palestinian media. 

At 7am local time, the Moroccan Gate (Bab al-Magharib) to Al-Aqsa's courtyards was opened and hundreds of settlers stormed the holy site.

Several lawmakers were in their ranks, including Negev and Galilee Development Minister Yitzhak Wasserlauf, who belongs to the far-right Jewish Power party. 

Russia has admitted “problems” with oil and gas revenues that have fallen to their lowest levels in years, underscoring the impact of western restrictions on Moscow’s primary engine for funding its war in Ukraine.

Finance minister Anton Siluanov acknowledged issues during a public video conference with President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, blaming “all these discounts” in explaining why energy revenues fell by more than 50 per cent in the first quarter of this year.

“Russia’s non-energy revenues are on track for growth as planned, with the potential for a small surplus by year-end, but there is a problem with energy revenues,” said Siluanov.

Russian oil has traded at a discount to global benchmarks because of a G7-led price caps on Russian oil and refined petroleum products, which were imposed in December and February respectively.

Japan will treat two injured Ukrainian soldiers at a Tokyo hospital run by its military, the Defence Ministry said on Thursday, Tokyo's latest support measure following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The Self-Defence Force Central Hospital plans to admit them next month for rehabilitation treatment, the ministry said in a statement, without providing details about the nature of the soldiers' injuries or if the hospital would receive more wounded troops from Ukraine in the future.

This was the first time the hospital has treated foreign soldiers, a senior member of Japan's ruling coalition told Reuters ahead of the official announcement.

Ukrainian forces pushed back Russian occupiers north and south of Bakhmut in the 64th week of the war, successfully pressing a counterattack they had begun on May 9.

As Russian troops fell back on the flanks of the city, Wagner Group mercenaries continued to push through the eastern city itself, claiming much of the last Ukrainian foothold in its western suburbs.

Tens of thousands of Israeli extremists marched through the Palestinian quarter of Jerusalem's Old City today as part of the provocative so-called "flag day" parade, marking Israel's illegal occupation of Jerusalem in 1967 - chanting racist slogans and attacking journalists. 

The parade has become a show of force for Jewish nationalists, and for Palestinians a blatant provocation meant to undermine their ties to the city.

The event is notorious for scenes of Israelis chanting racist slogans such as "Death to Arabs" and harassing Palestinians as they parade through the Old City - and this year was no exception. .

Before moving to Twitter, she was NBCUniversal’s Chairman of Global Advertising and Partnerships. During her decade-plus at NBC, she helped the network transition from a traditional broadcasting network to a modern media company, establishing partnerships with companies like Apple, Snapchat, Buzzfeed, and YouTube to increase NBC’s online presence dramatically.  

This is a woman who knows in what direction the winds are blowing and gets things done.

From a purely business perspective, her choice as Twitter’s CEO makes sense.  Twitter lost many of its big advertisers after Musk’s takeover.  Their revenue in December 2022 was down more than 70% from the year before.  Musk needs to start rebuilding his relationships with advertisers, and Yaccarino looks like the perfect person to do it.  

Yaccarino has conservative credentials.  Liberals hate her. After all, she was a Trump appointee to the Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition.  She follows Ron DeSantis and Libs of TikTok on Twitter. 

But…

One of the most powerful tactics in the left’s arsenal is leveraging the reluctance of conservatives to accept that the foundational reality of our society has changed. We are not a free country in the sense we were just a decade ago – hell, the Durham Report just showed our ruling caste collectively framing a president they disliked and we all know there will be zero consequences. But part of the reason is human nature. The left exploits our normalcy bias, the tendency to assume that things right now are the same as they have always been. Yet, this is not normal. This whole political/cultural morass that America has fallen into is the opposite of normal. And some of us just can’t handle the truth. 

They will not accept that this is not the society we grew up in. Hell, it’s not even the society our kids grew up in. It is something wholly other, a society where the norms and rules and guidelines that we thought existed, and that had existed right up until the left took over all of the institutions, no longer exist at all. And the fact is that many conservatives refuse to acknowledge the obvious, because to acknowledge it will require them to take action – radical action, like what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida to the howling horror of the commies. 

A 7.7 magnitude earthquake caused a small tsunami to wash ashore on South Pacific islands Friday. No damage has been reported, and the threat passed after a few hours.

The temblor was 23 miles deep.   

Waves 2 feet above tide level were measured off Lenakel, a port town in Vanuatu, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said. Smaller waves were measured by coastal or deep-ocean gauges elsewhere off Vanuatu and off New Caledonia and New Zealand.

We're getting a lot of conflicting information about the economy these days. On the one hand, today's job market is seemingly quite strong. In April, the U.S. unemployment rate fell to 3.4%, and more than 250,000 jobs were added to the economy. But on the other hand, many financial experts are still warning that a near-term recession is likely. The Federal Reserve itself has even told consumers to gear up for a recession, albeit a mild recession, in 2023.

It's therefore not surprising to learn that a large number of workers are worried about the possibility of losing their jobs. And in a recent Monster survey, 56% of respondents said that fears about job loss are negatively impacting their mental health.

If the idea of losing your job has been keeping you from feeling your best, there are steps you can take to try to alleviate those concerns. Here are a few worth focusing on.

As rumors swirled about Feinstein’s health, it appears things may have taken a turn for the worse.

The New York Times reported:

Using a wheelchair, with the left side of her face frozen and one eye nearly shut, she seemed disoriented as an aide steered her through the marble corridors of the Senate, complaining audibly that something was stuck in her eye.

Ms. Feinstein’s frail appearance was a result of several complications after she was hospitalized for shingles in February, some of which she has not publicly disclosed. The shingles spread to her face and neck, causing vision and balance impairments and facial paralysis known as Ramsay Hunt syndrome. The virus also brought on a previously unreported case of encephalitis, a rare but potentially debilitating complication of shingles that a spokesman confirmed on Thursday after The New York Times first revealed it, saying that the condition had “resolved itself” in March.

Gov. Joe Lombardo (R-NV) vetoed three bills seeking to tighten Nevada's laws on gun ownership and purchasing.

Lombardo said in a release on Wednesday that the legislation was in "direct conflict" with constitutional protections.

“I will not support legislation that infringes on the constitutional rights of Nevadans,” Lombardo said. “As I stated in my letters, much of the legislation I vetoed today is in direct conflict with legal precedent and established constitutional protections. Therefore, I cannot support them.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has called on Anheuser-Busch and the Beer Institute to investigate the marketing relationship with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney whose social media followers are primarily under 21.

Cruz, along with Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), on Wednesday, sent a letter to Brendan Whitworth, CEO of Anheuser-Busch and chairman of the Beer Institute, requesting the Beer Institute launch an investigation into the “recent and ongoing marketing partnership” with the Mulvaney (pdf).

“Anheuser-Busch needs to answer questions about their advertising partnership with Dylan Mulvaney,” Cruz wrote on Twitter. “Mulvaney’s content is directed at a younger audience. Why would Anheuser-Busch promote their product to people who cannot consume it?”

The Bilderberg Group, which brings a handful of the world’s power elites together annually in secret meetings to strategize about geopolitics, technology, war and peace, is preparing to meet this weekend, May 18-21, in Lisbon, Portugal.

The Group was co-founded in 1954 by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and a few other globalists affiliated with the Anglo-American European cabal that seeks to create a one-world system under Western control. The Bilderbergs operate under the Chatham House Rule, meaning participants are “free to use the information received but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speakers or participants can be revealed,” according to the Bilderberg website. “There is no detailed agenda, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken and no policy statements are issued.”

Chatham House is the London base for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, an elitist, globalist, war-mongering organization whose sister organization is the Council on Foreign Relations in the U.S. These two organizations together serve as the nerve center of the neoconservative globalist warmongering foreign policies that have come out of the United States and U.K. since the end of World War I.

As if the European Union didn’t have enough major problems already, now the troubled bloc is faced with the nontrivial prospect of a “Swexit”. Namely, senior officials of the second largest political party in the Scandinavian country, the Sweden Democrats, are now openly saying that their country needs to be prepared to leave the EU. This includes the party leader himself, Per Jimmie Akesson, who stated that “only by making the necessary preparations for ‘Swexit’ can the government maximize its bargaining power in Brussels”. The right-wing Sweden Democrats have long been frustrated by the power that the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels wield over their country, so this is hardly a surprising development.

However, even Eurosceptic Swedish parties usually refrain from such open anti-EU declarations, meaning that the bloc is gradually losing its power, even in previously somewhat pro-EU member states. On May 15, Akesson authored an article along with his Sweden Democrats fellow member Charlie Weimers, who also represents his party and his country as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP). The op-ed was published by the Stockholm-based Svenska Dagbladet daily, in which the authors explicitly stated that their intention is to ensure Sweden “maximizes its influence” in the EU, specifying several legal measures the country’s government must take to accomplish the stated goals.

For those interested in the truth about the Russian collusion investigation, the Durham Report has hundreds of pages of details of the alliance of political, government and media figures behind arguably the greatest hoax in U.S. history. The only thing it does not have is an actual indictment or true accountability for the critical players in an effort to derail an American presidency. Indeed, some witnesses associated with the Clinton campaign appear to have refused to cooperate with the investigation. Congress could change that.

Buried in the detailed account is a little noticed footnote stating that Clinton General Counsel Marc Elias “declined to be voluntarily interviewed by the Office.” Likewise, Durham noted that “no one at Fusion GPS … would agree to voluntarily speak with the Office” while both the DNC and Clinton campaign invoked privileges to refuse to answer certain questions.

It is not clear whether Durham was able to get a full account from these sources, but he was still able to establish the details on how this unprecedented political hit job succeeded despite a lack of evidence. In the course of that account, Durham demolished the prior claims of Democratic members like Adam Schiff and many in the media. Durham concludes that the investigation should never have been launched and that the whole effort was based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated” information.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, warned the FBI whistleblowers that they would be targeted for attack just before they began to testify before his select committee.

And Democrats on the panel soon obliged, with their key line of attack being that the three men aren’t real whistleblowers. 

“I just want to tell you guys, get ready,” said Jordan, who is chairman of the House Judicary Committee as well as the select subcommittee on government weaponization.

“These guys are going to come after you,” Jordan said of his Democrat colleagues. “Last hearing we had, we had two journalists, Democrats, two Democrat journalists sat right where you guys did, and these guys [subcommittee Democrats] tried to get them to divulge their sources. Someone needs to tell them how the First Amendment works.”

Unless you were in a coma, you are aware that there has been a lot of stuff going on in the world. Difficult to keep track, really, and more so because much of it is in a virtual “Area 51” and seemingly off-limits to discussion. Virtual is the operative word these days, of course—the new literal, and not figurative, while we descend together into the “big sleep” of a digital night.

Summing up all this “stuff” can be difficult. “Grocery list” kind of difficult, as when trying to stay calm at the prices—it becomes nearly impossible. But that is the point, isn’t it? As it was Rudyard Kipling’s point to his son. “If you can keep your head when all about you /Are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . .” It’s always worth reading that poem again, and often.

One recent revelation would suffice: Special Counsel John Durham’s report was commissioned reluctantly by the very culprits who committed the crime—and has now been presented to the public two years too late, though well before the next election, confirming much of what we all knew from independent sources in the meantime. Yet, it remains important. Not important as in an alcoholic who admits he is a drunk, but for the obvious reasons—that the extent of this perfidy must be far worse than they are admitting, and it must be thought by the intelligentsia that a good mea culpa now is worth a lot of flagellation later.

Nearly every House Democrat has endorsed an effort to make an end run around House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and bring a clean debt ceiling increase forward for a vote that doesn't include spending cuts for the federal government.

At the direction of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., Democrats began collecting signatures for a discharge petition on Wednesday morning. Discharge petitions can force a vote on legislation even if the majority party objects, but a majority of House lawmakers needs to sign it.

As of Thursday afternoon, 210 House Democrats had signed the discharge petition in the hopes of forcing a vote on a debt ceiling increase. The three Democrats who have not yet put their names to it are Reps. Mary Peltola of Alaska, Ed Case of Hawaii and Jared Golden of Maine.

Webmaster addition: There is renewed talk of Biden using the 14th Amendment to arbitrarily raise the debt limit.

Since 2017, junior sailors assigned to aircraft carrier USS George Washington (CVN-73) were subject to some of the toughest living conditions in the military, according to a new Navy investigation released on Thursday.

Sailors assigned to the carrier over its almost six-year-long maintenance period at HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding experienced poor living conditions, up to three-hour commutes and isolation from their families and peers as part of life in the shipyard. Complaints about the life as a George Washington sailor, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, fell on deaf ears within Navy leadership, according to the quality of life investigation released on Thursday and reviewed by USNI News.

While Washington has been in the middle of its midlife overhaul and refueling at Newport News Shipbuilding, nine sailors died by suicide, according to Navy records reviewed by USNI News.

Pakistani officials warned on 18 May that Islamabad faces paying an $18 billion fine if it fails to complete the Iran-Pakistan Gas Pipeline project.

The project, which offers to supply Pakistan with 750 million cubic feet of natural gas, has been fraught with difficulties, among them being Pakistan’s failure to build its infrastructure section due to US sanctions on Tehran.

“The US should pay the penalty if it does not approve of Pakistan and Iran going ahead with the gas pipeline project. The US will have to do away with double standards – being lenient with India in meeting its energy needs while punishing Pakistan for the same,” said Noor Alam Khan, the head of Pakistan’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) – a transparency watchdog for all ministries and public agencies.

A delegation of 28 Russian oil, gas and petrochemical companies will visit Iran to increase the cooperation between the two countries and assist Iran by sharing knowledge for improving "the efficiency of the oil, gas, and energy industry", the ISNA news agency reported.

Years of international sanctions on Iran have left its oil and gas industry in dire need of renovation and up-to-date technology.

According to ISNA, Russian firms would participate in Iran's oil fair and present their technology for drilling and maintenance for wells, as well as modern devices used for oil transfer systems and the loading and unloading of petrochemical products.

The United States of America, unlike any other nation, maintains a massive network of foreign military bases around the world.

How was this created and how is it continued? Some of these physical installations are on land occupied as spoils of war. Most are maintained through collaborations with governments, many of them brutal and oppressive governments benefiting from the bases’ presence. In many cases, human beings were displaced to make room for these military installations, often depriving people of farmland, adding huge amounts of pollution to local water systems and the air, and existing as an unwelcome presence.

To explore this database,  click on map markers or use the dashboard to make selections:

We are being accused of  “spreading disinformation” regarding the Covid-19 vaccine. 

The Reuters and AP media “trackers” and “fact checkers” will be out to smear the testimonies of parents who have lost their children.  

“Once the Lie becomes the Truth, there is no moving backwards. Insanity prevails. The world is turned upside down.”

Let us be under no illusions, the Covid Jab is not only “experimental”, it’s a Big Pharma “killer vaccine” which modifies the human genome. The evidence of mortality and morbidity resulting from vaccine inoculation both present (official data) and future (e.g. undetected microscopic blood clots) is overwhelming. 

The official data (mortality and morbidity) as well as numerous scientific studies confirm the nature of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine which is being imposed on all humanity. 

Peer reviewed reports confirm the causes  of vaccine related deaths and “adverse events” (injuries) including among others blood clots, thrombosis, myocarditis, cardiac arrests.

For almost as long as the West supplies Ukraine with weapons to kill Russians, it is known that most of these weapons – billions of dollars and euros-worth of weapons, would never reach the front, but would instead be sold on the black-market.

The West knew that from the very beginning. BBC and CNN were reporting on this calamity already in 2022. At one point BBC was reporting that up to 70% of the weaponry supplied by the West would disappear on the black market.

Of course, in the meantime all such references have been either deleted from the internet, or “fact-checked” away. The mainstream of the mainstream may not be seen or heard to say the truth. They are paid to lie or be silent.

However, there are some who speak up, who do not mind risking their reputation – but dare bringing the truth to the people. Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh is one of them. He recently spoke to Afshin Rattansi, a British broadcaster, journalist and author who presents Going Underground which is broadcast around the world, except in the UK and EU, on television stations including the RT network.

One big issue is absorbing G7 these days. Possible war on Taiwan.

Chief among the points of tension is how far to go in trying to stop a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which could trigger world war and wreck the global economy. The self-governing island, which Beijing claims as its own, provides most of the world’s advanced computer chips that are vital to the tech and defense industries.

Not all European governments are convinced it’s something they need to prioritize. See this.

From the reporting above, I deduce several things:

1. The possibility of a Taiwan war has become very real – and it plagues all of the G7. 
2. The US is obviously ready to go far in case of a Taiwan war – it seems even to the point of US entering war with China. 
3. The US is pushing the EU to support a war against China, first of all with sanctions and trade embargo, but even to the point of the EU participating with the US in war with China. 
4. Berlin and Paris don’t see a Taiwan war as their prime business. 
5. The prospect of a Taiwan war scares the sh*t out of the EU, and especially Berlin doesn’t want to take part in hostilities – they perhaps don’t even want to break trade ties with China if a Taiwan war breaks out.

The Defense Department is now aiming to complete defueling of the the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility in Hawaii by January 2024 — months earlier than the Pentagon originally forecast.

A fuel leak at the facility in November 2021 affected approximately 9,000 Army, Navy and Air Force families at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam and the Army’s Aliamanu Military Reservation and Red Hill Housing. About 6,000 people were sickened after drinking or using the contaminated water and sought treatment for nausea, headaches, rashes and other conditions. The military subsequently paid for many families to temporarily relocated to area hotels.

Police surrounded the home of former Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan on Wednesday, claiming he was sheltering dozens of people allegedly involved in violent protests over his recent detention.

The police deployment was likely to anger Khan’s many followers and raised concerns about more clashes between them and the security forces. Last week, Khan supporters had attacked public property and military installations after he was dragged out of a courtroom and detained.

The popular opposition leader was released over the weekend and returned to his home in an upscale district of Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city and the capital of the Punjab region.

Turkey criticised the US for dispatching a warship to the divided island of Cyprus on Wednesday, accusing Washington of disrupting the balance of power in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The USS Arleigh Burke, a guided-missile destroyer, arrived in Limassol, Cyprus, for a scheduled visit on Tuesday.

The Turkish foreign ministry issued a statement critiquing the move: “The steps taken in the region by the US which disrupt the balance at the expense of the Turkish Cypriot side damage [United State's] long-standing neutral position.”

Israeli forces have used live fire and tear gas against Palestinians who joined a demonstration on the besieged Gaza Strip’s eastern border with Israel, injuring several Palestinians, as far-right Israelis held a so-called ‘flag march’ in occupied East Jerusalem’s Old City.

Hundreds of Palestinians joined the protest on Thursday, which was called for by Palestinian factions in response to the Israeli march. The Gaza demonstration condemned the ‘flag march’ in Jerusalem, and called for an end to Israeli attacks in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.