Somalia: NISA Strikes Al-Shabaab in Al-Ba’ad, Kills Commander
09/03/2025
[ShabelleMedia] The National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA), working alongside international partners, carried out a targeted airstrike in the El-Ba’ad area of the Middle Shabelle region, killing several Al-Shabaab militants, including a key commander, Yusuf Dheg-naas, authorities said Saturday.
NISA confirmed the strike resulted in the death of Dheg-naas, who was responsible for overseeing Al-Shabaab’s operations in the El-Ba’ad area of Middle Shabelle region.
The agency also reported the destruction of several combat vehicles used by the terrorist group during the operation.
Dheg-naas had reportedly been involved in extorting money from residents, further terrorizing the community, according to NISA.
The operation, which is still ongoing, has so far resulted in the deaths of more than 20 Al-Shabaab fighters. Several military vehicles have also been destroyed.
NISA forces, alongside the Somali National Army and supported by international partners, have ramped up their efforts to eliminate Al-Shabaab, which the Somali government designates as a violent extremist organization.
Al-Shabaab Regains Control of Key Areas in Southern Somalia
08-03-2025
[Garowe] Al-Shabaab militants have reportedly regained control of several strategic areas in the Middle Shabelle region of Somalia, including the towns of Al-Kawthar and Boos-Hareeri, according to sources close to the regional administration.
This comes after the Somali federal government and local militia forces, known as Macwiisley, withdrew from several locations due to the continuous attacks launched by Al-Shabaab, which caused significant casualties.
In one of the recent clashes, a senior Somali military officer and his troops were killed in an ambush near Boos-Hareeri when Al-Shabaab launched an assault. The group also displayed military vehicles they had captured during the attack, further demonstrating their strengthened position in the region.
Since the beginning of Ramadan, Al-Shabaab has intensified efforts to reclaim territory it had previously lost in the Middle Shabelle region, resulting in a growing security threat. The Somali government and local forces are now focused on containing the group's expansion, though the situation remains precarious.
This latest development is part of a broader escalation in violence across central and southern Somalia, where Al-Shabaab has been regaining ground. Despite efforts by the Somali government and allied militias, the group’s resurgence presents a significant challenge to national security and efforts to stabilize the country.
The ongoing conflict has cast doubt on the effectiveness of the Somali government's military strategy, which had previously made some progress in pushing back Al-Shabaab. However, the recent setbacks, including the loss of key territories and the deaths of senior officials and soldiers, have led to a sense of crisis.
HirShabelle Leader Mourns Death of Senior Military Officer in Al-Shabaab Attack
08-03-2025
[Garowe] The president of Somalia’s Hirshabelle region, Ali Gudlawe, expressed condolences on Saturday for the killing of Major Abukar Abdulle Raage Gar-Maqaate, a senior Somali army officer, in an Al-Shabaab attack in Boos-Hareeri on Friday that left several dead.
The assault is part of a surge in Al-Shabaab attacks in Middle Shabelle since Ramadan began, targeting areas under Somali government control. Major Gar-Maqaate’s death adds to the mounting losses of military personnel in the region, where the group has intensified its campaign against bases of Somali forces.
Al-Shabaab retook Al-Kowthar and Boos-Hareeri villages in Middle Shabelle region from Somali troops after attacks, according to the residents.
Somalia’s government has struggled to contain Al-Shabaab since President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud launched a full-scale offensive against the militants in 2022. Heavy casualties, including senior commanders, have hit Somali troops, with the deadliest attack occurring at the Cowswayne military base in August 2023. Al-Shabaab said it killed more than 170 soldiers in the assault near El-dheer town, Galgadud region.
Gudlawe hailed the officer’s service and pledged to press on with the fight against the insurgents. Middle Shabelle, near the capital Mogadishu, remains a key battleground. Somali authorities have not released casualty figures from Friday’s clash or detailed their response to the militants’ Ramadan push.
In remarks made at a mosque in the State House [Villa Somalia] on Friday, President Mohamud emphasized that those who defect from Al-Shabaab will not face humiliation or imprisonment. He highlighted that former militants who have left the group are now living with dignity, working within the security forces, government, and even the private sector.
"You will not be humiliated, you will not be jailed… those who defected live with dignity, they are members of the security forces, they are members of the government, they are in the business sector," Mohamud said.
Al-Shabaab, which is designated as a terrorist organization by both Somalia and the United States, has been waging an insurgency in the country for over a decade. Despite its violent campaign, Mohamud’s government continues to offer a path for reconciliation for those willing to abandon the group.
The president also sought to downplay recent security alerts regarding potential attacks in Somalia, including in the capital, Mogadishu. He reassured the public that the government was taking necessary measures to ensure safety and stability.
Al-Shabaab has yet to respond to the amnesty offer, but the president's remarks reflect his ongoing effort to weaken the group's influence by offering former members a chance to reintegrate into Somali society.
The fighting reportedly began on Friday when Al-Shabaab launched an attack on positions held by Somali government forces in the region, after which they took control of the area.
A statement released by the Federal Government of Somalia confirmed that both government forces and local Macawisley fighters seized vehicles and military equipment from the Al-Shabaab fighters involved in the attack.
This clash is part of the ongoing conflict in various regions of Somalia, where government and local forces continue to battle Al-Shabaab militants.
In a separate development, the President of HirShabelle, Ali Gudlawe, confirmed that Al-Shabaab militants were also responsible for an attack yesterday that resulted in the death of a senior Somali military officer, Major Abukar Abdulle Raage Gar-Maqaate.
The attack took place near Boos-Hareeri and also resulted in the deaths of several soldiers accompanying the officer. Al-Shabaab later displayed weapons and vehicles they claimed to have taken from the scene of the attack.
Somali Forces Battle Al-Shabaab in Previously Cleared Areas Near Mogadishu
08/03/2025xj
[ShabelleMedia] Somali government forces are locked in fierce combat with Al-Shabaab militants in regions near the capital that were declared free of the extremist group three years ago, underscoring the persistent security challenges facing the Horn of Africa nation.
The clashes, spanning the past three years, have centered on the Middle Shabelle, Hiran, Galgadud, and Southern Mudug regions, where Al-Shabaab has launched repeated attacks to reclaim territory.
Among the most recently targeted areas are Ceel Cali, Cali Fool Dheere, Al-Kowsar, Daarunimca, Ceelbaraf District, Cadaan Laxeey, Boos Hareeri, Biyacadde, Mirtaqwo, Balcad, and surrounding districts.
The violence escalated last month, with a significant assault yesterday in the Aadan Yabaal district that killed military officers and soldiers. Government forces repelled the attack, though exact casualty figures were not disclosed.
Security analysts warn that the resurgence of Al-Shabaab in Middle Shabelle poses a growing threat, challenging the Somali government’s grip on these strategic areas. The conflict has raised doubts about the nation’s stability as it prepares for long-awaited elections.
Government officials recently touted improved security, claiming conditions are ripe for free and fair elections. However, the intensifying violence, coupled with political infighting, has fueled skepticism about the feasibility of holding polls soon.
The latest attacks highlight the delicate balance between maintaining territorial control and advancing the electoral process.
The Somali government has not commented on yesterday’s assault in Aadan Yabaal or provided an updated timeline for elections. As fighting persists, experts say the dual pressures of insecurity and internal divisions could further delay the nation’s democratic ambitions.
[ShabelleMedia] Æthiopian warplanes launched precision Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... s on Friday against al-Shabaab ... al-Qaeda's tentacle in East Africa... bases in Somalia’s Middle Shabelle region, Somali Defense Minister Abdulkadir Mohammed Nur said, marking a fresh offensive in the battle against the al-Qaeda-linked hard boys.
The bombardment, involving missile strikes, targeted key positions held by the group in the volatile region, located north of the capital Mogadishu. Nur told the state TV the operation was conducted under the direct supervision of the Somali government, though no immediate casualty toll was available.
"The strikes were carried out with full coordination and approval from Somali authorities," Nur said. "This is part of our unwavering commitment to dismantle al-Shabaab’s network and restore peace."
The minister pointed to the Ankara Agreement, a security pact signed between Somalia and Æthiopia, as the backbone of their joint efforts. The deal, brokered in recent years with The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...just another cheapjack Moslem dictatorship, brought to you by the Moslem Brüderbund... ’s mediation, facilitates military cooperation, intelligence sharing, and cross-border operations to combat the insurgency that has plagued Somalia for nearly two decades.
Friday’s airstrikes come amid a broader push to bolster security ties between Mogadishu and Addis Ababa. Last month, Somalia approved the deployment of Æthiopian troops under the newly established African Union ...a union consisting of 53 African states, most run by dictators of one flavor or another. The only all-African state not in the AU is Morocco. Established in 2002, the AU is the successor to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which was even less successful... Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM), which replaces the previous AU mission, ATMIS.
However,
there's no worse danger than telling a mother her baby is ugly... local officials in the Middle Shabelle region said that Æthiopian ground forces have yet to engage in active operations in the area.
Middle Shabelle, a fertile agricultural region, has long been a hotspot for al-Shabaab activity, with the group exploiting its proximity to Mogadishu to stage attacks and extort local communities. The Lions of Islam have waged a bloody insurgency since 2007, seeking to overthrow Somalia’s fragile, internationally backed government and impose a strict interpretation of Islamic law.
Æthiopia, a regional military powerhouse, has played a pivotal role in Somalia’s fight against al-Shabaab, contributing troops and air support since intervening in 2006. Its involvement has drawn both praise for stabilizing parts of the country and criticism over alleged civilian casualties—a charge Addis Ababa consistently denies.
Analysts see the deepening Somalia-Æthiopia alliance as a critical step toward curbing al-Shabaab’s influence. "This partnership could tip the balance if sustained," said Abdiwahab Sheikh, a Horn of Africa security expert based in Mogadishu. "But it hinges on consistent coordination and addressing local grievances to avoid alienating communities."
Residents of Jowhar, the regional capital of Middle Shabelle, reported hearing loud explosions early Friday. "The planes came low, and then we heard the blasts," said shopkeeper Halima Yusuf, 34. "We’re used to fighting, but this felt different—more precise."
Somali officials have vowed to ramp up operations against al-Shabaab ahead of the full AUSSOM rollout later this year. The mission, backed by the United Nations ...an organization conceived in the belief that we're just one big happy world, with the sort of results you'd expect from such nonsense... and funded by international donors, aims to secure key population centers and pave the way for Somali forces to assume greater control.
For now, the absence of casualty figures leaves the immediate impact of the airstrikes unclear. al-Shabaab, which rarely comments on losses, has not issued a statement on the attack.
The Horn of Africa nation remains one of the world’s most unstable, with al-Shabaab controlling swathes of rural territory despite years of military campaigns. Friday’s strikes signal that Æthiopia and Somalia are doubling down on their joint resolve to confront the persistent threat.
[IsraelTimes] The IDF says troops operating near the West Bank city of Tarqumiyah opened fire on several suspects attempting to breach Israel’s security barrier and enter the country a short while ago.
Several of the suspects were hit, and no soldiers were wounded, the IDF adds.
A military source says the incident is not terror related. Every day, dozens of West Bank Palestinians attempt to illegally enter Israel for work.
[IsraelTimes] Protesters, including several families of hostages, are sleeping rough for a second straight night outside Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv as they maintain a vigil and protest on behalf of the 59 captives still held in Gaza.
Inside the base, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been huddling with senior cabinet members regarding a negotiating team being dispatched to talks in Qatar tomorrow. There is no word on if the meeting is ongoing.
Earlier, hundreds of protesters joined hostage families at the site to rally for a deal and put pressure on the government at the site, briefly blocking traffic and setting a bonfire.
Only a naif or a fool would believe this is anything but taqiyya.
[IsraelTimes] US hostage envoy Adam Boehler praises what he calls a Hamas proposal that would see a five- to ten-year truce with Israel during which the terror group would disarm and forego political power in Gaza, and claims his decision to enter direct talks with the terror group was coordinated with Jerusalem.
As he makes his rounds on Hebrew-language newscasts this evening, Boehler tells the Kan public broadcaster that Hamas “suggested exchanging all prisoners… and a five-year to ten-year truce where Hamas would lay down all weapons and where the US, as well as other countries, would ensure that there are no tunnels, there’s nothing taken on the military side, and that Hamas is not involved in politics going forward.”
He calls the proposal “not a bad first offer.”
Amid concerns that the White House is prioritizing the release of American hostages over Israeli ones, the US envoy reassures the Israeli public that the Trump administration intends to get both “Americans and Israelis out, our commitment is full.”
Boehler also says Israel was informed about his talks with Hamas before they even started, contradicting Israeli officials who say they only learned of the talks when they were already underway.
“My actions were coordinated with Israel… even though maybe there were some who said they weren’t,” he says. “My job isn’t to move Israel aside, Israel is a major ally… I want to be added to what happens to Israel, not take away.”
He dismisses conflicting narratives from Israel and Hamas on ceasefire developments, saying “that sounds a little like a game to me, that sounds like politics.”
Boehler calls US special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, National Security advisor Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio “the A-team of foreign policy” from the US perspective, and asserts his confidence that the negotiators could reach an agreement in the region within “weeks.”
[IsraelTimes] Donald Trump’s former ambassador to Israel blasts the US president’s hostage envoy for meeting with Hamas, saying talks with the group are pointless.
“This past week, President Trump brilliantly presented Hamas with a binary choice: release all the hostages and surrender, or be destroyed. It is the only path to ending the war,” David Friedman writes on X.
“If I heard [hostage envoy Adam Boehler] correctly on the Sunday news shows, he took the unprecedented step to meet with Hamas to consider a third way — whether a deal could be struck where Hamas ‘would not be involved in governing Gaza,'” he continues.
He calls any agreement with Hamas “a waste of time” which “will never be kept.”
“Attempting one is beneath the dignity of the United States,” Friedman writes. “Adam, I know you mean well but listen to your boss. The choice must remain binary.”
Meanwhile, Boehler takes to X to praise Israel for unspecified moves, saying they have made an agreement with Hamas possible.
“Israel’s actions have opened the door to a lasting truce — prisoner releases, disarmed fighters and Hamas out of politics,” writes Boehler. “We’re close.”
#3
The way this type of logic gets fixed is by placing an indemnity on the agreement in such that if Hamas violates the agreement one of Adam Boehler children's lives is forfeited.
Harsh, but makes them have skin in the game so that their decisions are a bit more based in reality so that they suffer the consequences of their foo-foo wuu-wuu fantasies.
#7
If Hamas offered to change its charter, that would be taqqiya as well. Unfortunately, their reputation as untrustworthy is well-earnt. Any agreement with them needs sharp teeth — really, it should be that every dead hostage can be traded only for a single dead Palestinian, and if there are none already available, then the next in line will be stood up and shot at the exchange. For fairness, you see.
#8
it should be that every dead hostage can be traded only for a single dead Palestinian
Like for like seems reasonable, but the established exchange rate is something one Juice for a thousand Paleos. Given the surplus of jailed terrorists, it should be no problem to brew up sufficient deaders. The only question is whether Hamass wants them in bulk or individually wrapped.
[IsraelTime] Political adviser to terror group’s leader says Hamas not opposed to releasing soldier; Hamas spokesman rejects extension of original deal’s first phase
Meetings between Hamas ..a regional Iranian catspaw,... leaders and US hostage negotiator Adam Boehler in recent days have focused on the release of Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander, a senior Hamas official told Rooters on Sunday.
"Several meetings have already taken place in Doha, focusing on releasing one of the dual-nationality prisoners. We have dealt positively and flexibly, in a way that serves the interests of the Paleostinian people," said Taher Nunu, political adviser to the leader of the terror group, confirming that talks took place over the past week.
The US-Hamas discussions broke with a decades-old policy by Washington against negotiating with groups that the US has designated terrorist organizations. Hamas has been proscribed as such since 1997.
Nunu said the sides had also discussed how to see through the implementation of the phased agreement with Israel that went into effect on January 19.
"We informed the American delegation that we don’t oppose the release of the prisoner within the framework of these talks," Nunu told Rooters.
Alexander, a 21-year-old who grew up in New Jersey and then returned to Israel, where he was born, to serve in the IDF, is believed to be the last living American hostage held by Hamas in Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... , though the bodies of several Americans are also believed held in the Strip.
In total there are 24 presumed-living hostages and 35 bodies held by Hamas or its allies in Gaza.
US President Donald Trump ...So far he's been unkillable, and they've tried.... ’s special envoy Steve Witkoff told news hounds at the White House last week that gaining Alexander’s release was a "top priority for us."
Nunu praised what he described as the "important role" played by Witkoff — who is expected to travel to Doha this week, according to Axios — in reaching the January 19 ceasefire agreement that halted the fighting in Gaza.
"We hope that he (Witkoff) will work to succeed in the negotiation of the second phase," Nunu said.
In remarks on Sunday defending the US-Hamas talks, Trump’s hostage envoy Boehler said, "I want to note the American hostages that are there. One in particular that’s alive. Adi [sic] Alexander and four dead bodies of Americans. There have been about 50 killed, and that is just not acceptable."
HAMAS SPOKESMAN: NO EXTENSION OF PHASE ONE Meanwhile,
...back at the wreckage, Captain Poindexter wished he had a cup of coffee. Even instant would do... in an interview aired by al Jazeera early Sunday morning, Hamas front man Hazem Qassem said the terror group "does not mind the release of Israeli prisoners with American citizenship," but added that this will only happen "within a comprehensive agreement."
Qassem said Hamas is sticking to its conditions for a second phase to the ceasefire with Israel — a hostage-prisoner exchange, Israel’s complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and a guarantee of no return to war — stressing that Hamas "rejects extending the first stage of the ceasefire agreement."
Qassem said he does not "rule out the possibility of meeting with representatives of the US administration."
"Hamas understands that Washington has the ability to pressure" Israel on these conditions, he added.
ISRAEL SENDING DELEGATION TO QATAR FOR TALKS
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced late Saturday that he would send a delegation to Doha on Monday in an attempt to move negotiations forward.
The delegation will be headed by the government’s hostage point man Gal Hirsch, and senior Shin Bet official "M.," an Israeli official told The Times of Israel. Netanyahu’s political adviser Ophir Falk will also join the delegation. The delegation that flew to Qatar ...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi... in February was made up of the same officials.
M. is flying in place of the head of the security agency, Ronen Bar, whom Netanyahu removed from his negotiating role and is reportedly seeking to fire.
[IsraelTimes] US hostage envoy Adam Boehler says he doesn’t “really care” about Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer’s criticism of his direct talks with Hamas, while referring to Palestinian prisoners as “hostages.”
“I don’t really care about that that much — no offense to Dermer,” Boehler says during an interview with Israel’s Channel 13, appearing to escalate a scuffle that was first held privately between the two on Tuesday hours after Israel learned of the US hostage envoy’s direct talks with Hamas.
“If it was a big deal every time Dermer got a little bit upset… Ron might have a lot of big deals every day,” Boehler says. “I love Ron. We’ll work together again. It was great. I take no offense because he was doing what he was supposed to do.”
“I don’t mean to injure Ron or anyone else… Dermer runs a country with Bibi that is on its own, where they are exchanging massive amounts of hostages for one person,” Boehler says.
“And I will say, it’s a lot of hostages. We wouldn’t do that deal in the United States,” Boehler adds, revealing his views on the trades that Israel has been making with Hamas.
“I respect and understand his position. However, we also have our own interests in the US, and I believe and hope that some of those interactions [with Hamas] can speed things up,” he adds.
The senior American official, who has repeatedly referred to Israeli hostages as “prisoners,” appears to now be using the term “hostages” to describe Palestinian prisoners, adopting rhetoric common with Hamas but considered offensive in Israel and among many Americans. Hamas has referred to civilians kidnapped on October 7, including children and the elderly, as prisoners who were “arrested.”
Boehler tells i24News in a separate interview that he was the one who reached out to Hamas to hold direct talks earlier this year, not the other way around.
“We don’t think meeting somebody is a concession,” he adds.
[IsraelTimes] Drills in northern Indian Ocean meant to boost cooperation between the three countries; South Africa, UAE, Qatar and Pakistan among countries to send observers
The navies of Iran, Russia and China will hold military drills off the coast of Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... this week in a bid to boost cooperation, Iranian media reported on Sunday.
The three countries, which share a common desire to counter what they characterize as US hegemony, have held similar exercises in the region in recent years.
The drills "will begin on Tuesday in the port of Chabahar," located in southeast Iran on the Gulf of Oman, the Tasnim news agency said, without specifying their duration.
"Warships and combat and support vessels of the Chinese and Russian naval forces, as well as the warships of Iran’s naval forces of the army and the Revolutionary Guards" are expected to participate, according to Tasnim.
The exercises will take place "in the northern Indian Ocean" and aim to "strengthen security in the region and expand multilateral cooperation between participating countries," Tasnim said.
Azerbaijan, South Africa, Oman, Kazakhstan, Pakistain, Qatar ...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi... , Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Sri Lanka will attend as observers.
China will deploy "a destroyer and a supply ship," the Chinese Defense Ministry said on the WeChat social media network.
The Iranian army conducted drills in the same area in February to "strengthen defense capabilities against any threat."
China played a key role in rekindling diplomatic ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula, largely made up of sand and oil rigs. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual haj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. Formerly dictatorial and steeped in Olde Tyme Religion, deferring to Salafist holy men on all issues, it has now done a 180 and is making a serious effort to modernize, so as not to be left in the sand by its Gulf Arab neighbors. The holy men have been shoved to the background and the nation is now still dictatorial but somewhat rational. That doesn't make them trustworthy, but it's a start... in 2023.
Last week, Rooters reported that Russian missile specialists flew to Tehran around the time that Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel.
Since its establishment, the Islamic Theocratic Republic has repeatedly stated that it is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ...the very aged actual dictator of Iran, successor to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini...> said on Saturday that Tehran will not be "bullied" into negotiations, a day after US President Donald Trump ...The tack in the backside of the Democratic Party... said he had sent a letter to the country’s top authority to negotiate a nuclear deal.
[IsraelTimes] Experts say Iranians risked execution by sending footage to Channel 12; ‘We love Israel… Iranian women fell in love with Israeli soldiers,’ Baha’i woman says in report
Iranians in Tehran illicitly filmed scenes of their capital for Israeli Channel 12 news, an act that constitutes espionage in Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... and can warrant a death penalty The clips, broadcast on Saturday, included footage showing locals at high-end shopping malls that the videographers said are only financially accessible to those connected to the regime.
"I filmed this video with great difficulty and fear, and I said I would send it to the Israeli Channel 12," said a 44-year-old Iranian who sent footage for the report and went by the alias Ali, speaking in Persian. "I committed a dangerous act. If you just talk to Israelis, you become a spy and they will execute you."
The report showed Ali’s face from the nose down while he was speaking with a Channel 12 journalist.
"I have a master’s degree in electronics, and I’m unemployed," said Ali, who emphasized his economic grievances throughout the report.
Ali filmed himself traveling by subway to Tehran’s District 1, where senior regime and Revolutionary Guards officials reside.
"People are tired. The Iranian citizens, who are tired of the Islamic Theocratic Republic, are uncomfortable, bored, servile," he said.
Beni Sabti, an Iran expert, told Channel 12 that the Iranian regime considers the release of such footage from within Iran to be an embarrassment and harmful to the country.
Rani Amrani, also an Iran expert, told the outlet that had Ali been caught, he would have certainly received the death penalty.
Ali’s footage of Tehran’s Fereshteh Street showed lavish malls and homes, and women without their hair covered, even though hijabs are mandatory in Iran.
"Out of all the products, there isn’t one that is less than 200 or 300 dollars," Ali said as he walked past store windows inside a mall. "Only one percent of Iran’s residents can shop at a store like this. Me and those like me, can’t. Ninety-nine percent of Iranians can’t."
The images of luxury shown by Ali stand in contrast to Iran’s economic situation, which Sabti said is the worst since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Ali also showed footage of a market in Tehran at 6 p.m. running without any electricity. "Unfortunately, we have electricity only one hour a day. God knows where the electricity goes."
A clip shown on the report showed people suspended in midair on a fairground ride that stopped because of a power outage. At the same time of day, the report charged, the power was on in the malls of District 1.
"[The regime] gives money to Hamas ..always the voice of sweet reason... , Hezbollah, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the whole world gets its share from Iran," Ali told the Channel 12 news hound. "Why should we live in such poverty? Why should I be unemployed now?"
The report also showed another Iranian’s footage of a high-end restaurant in Tehran.
"This restaurant we’re seeing, if I come in to eat one meal, it will cost half my monthly salary," he said. "Only the men, children of the country’s leaders, children of politicians, the Revolutionary Guards, their children, them themselves, only they can come shop in [stores] like this."
The report also showed footage of young Iranians with connections to the regime at luxurious parties in bathing suits and without their hair covered.
"They’re always saying ’Death to America, Death to England,’ all over while their children have American, British and Canadian passports," Ali told Channel 12. "People are angry at them and disturbed by them."
HIJAB PROTESTS
Channel 12 also interviewed a Baha’i woman, using the alias Miriam, about Iranian women’s discontent with mandatory hijab laws.
Miriam told Channel 12 that while the enforcement of hijab laws has generally become more "gentle," women fear receiving fines for driving without a head covering. "You receive [a fine] if you are caught without a hijab behind the wheel three times. You receive three text messages telling you to adhere to the hijab mandate, and if you don’t adhere, they will impound your car."
Miriam said that after the death of Mahsa Amini — who died while in the custody of Iranian morality police for not wearing a hijab, sparking widespread protests — she found the courage to walk in the streets with her head uncovered.
"I think this regime will not last. Considering the pressures placed on it and the mistakes it made toward its people, it won’t last. It will destroy itself with its own hands."
When asked what she thinks of Israel, Miriam said, "We all want to have good relations with Israel, and we all love Israel... It’s funny, many Iranian women fell in love with the Israeli soldiers that were so handsome. They hoped Israel would attack Iran."
Ali, who said that until a decade ago he supported the regime, ended his interview with a message to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ...the very aged actual dictator of Iran, successor to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini...> "Know this, Khamenei, this is your end, you’re old, you’re dying. Nobody will replace you. We, the regular people, won’t allow it. If the working class wants to revolt, bullets and tanks won’t be able to stand in its way. The people will take down this regime... Later, they’ll write in the pages of history that there used to be a country like that. It was the richest country in the world, but its people were the poorest in the world."
[IsraelTimes] PM’s confidant claimed Egyptian public less opposed to idea than its government, alarming Cairo, which has since sought to bring him to country to further make case against idea
Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer held a "tense" meeting with a senior Egyptian official late last month in Jerusalem, during which the latter sought to convey Cairo’s fervent position against moving Gazooks into the Sinai Peninsula, an Israeli official and a second source familiar with the matter told The Times of Israel.
The Egyptian official relayed that Cairo is alarmed by calls from Israeli politicians to push Paleostinians into Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... and stressed that Egypt views any such effort as an existential threat, the sources said.
So? Leaving them where they are is an existential threat to Israel, and Egypt has been deliberately arming them, making them even more so. Consequences, O Egypt, that you have worked hard to earn.
According to the sources, Dermer responded by maintaining that the Egyptian people are not as opposed to taking in Gazooks as the Egyptian government is.
Alarmed by the answer — in addition to disagreeing with it — Egyptian officials have since sought to arrange a meeting for Dermer with some of the country’s more big shots in Cairo in order to further make the case against the relocation of Paleostinians into the Sinai. While Egypt was hoping that the meeting would take place earlier this month, it has not yet been finalized, the sources said.
Take the hint, dudes. The next iteration won’t be as gentle.
A spokesperson for Dermer said his office wouldn’t comment on private meetings.
Dermer was last in Cairo in January, quietly traveling there for meetings to discuss bilateral security coordination, the sources said.
The idea of moving Paleostinians to Egypt is also being pushed by US President Donald Trump ...The tack in the backside of the Democratic Party... , who proposed that the US take over Gaza and relocate all of its roughly two million residents.
The idea was quickly rejected by Egypt, whose leader, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, has held off on meeting Trump at the White House, despite overtures by Washington to set up such a sit-down, during which he’d likely be cornered into offering public comments regarding Trump’s plan, the two sources told The Times of Israel.
Last month’s tense meeting in Jerusalem came against a backdrop of already simmering tensions between the governments of Israel and Egypt, the two sources said. For the past several months, Israeli politicians have been raising in meetings with visiting US politicians allegations that Egypt is violating the peace treaty between the two countries by massing troops along the Gaza border.
Israel’s ambassador to the US also raised the issue during a meeting with the executives of US Jewish groups.
"Egypt is in very serious violation of our peace agreement in the Sinai. This is an issue that is going to come to the fore because it’s not tolerable," Yechiel Leiter told the American Jewish leaders in a recording obtained by The Times of Israel.
"We have bases being built that can only be used for offensive operations, for offensive weapons — that’s a clear violation," he said. "For a long time, it’s been shunted aside, and this continues. This is going to be an issue that we’re going to put on the table very soon and very emphatically."
Leiter also accused Sissi’s family of profiting from the desperation of Paleostinians seeking to flee the Gaza Strip and of duplicitously operating to benefit Hamas ..a regional Iranian catspaw,... The comments angered Cairo, which raised them during the meeting last month with Dermer, the Israeli official and the second source familiar with the matter said.
”How dare you speak hard truths about us where everyone can hear! Learn your place, O uppity Jews!”
Unlike Israel’s politicians, the Israeli security establishment has not been voicing concern to counterparts in Cairo regarding Egypt’s military posture in the Sinai Peninsula, the two sources said.
Some have pointed to recently posted footage showing a large Egyptian tank presence in the Sinai, but those clips have not been verified, and an Israeli security official said the clips were not recent.
#1
As long as we in Israel remember that, for Arabs, Peace treaties is just another way to wage war. And that their (and their Globalist allies) ultimate goal is final solution of the "Jewish Problem", we'll be OK.
Then it’s time for Israel to resume the war against Hezbollah — they aren’t abiding by the truce, which forbids them rearming, so why should Israel?
[IsraelTimes] In comments tonight, Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem insisted his organization is alive and well, but admitted taking heavy blows during its fight with Israel, while claiming that the group is choosing to lay low for the time being to let Lebanon’s armed forces confront Israel instead.
Qassem, speaking to Hezbollah mouthpiece al-Manar for the first time since taking over the group in the wake of leader Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination by Israel, said: “The resistance is fine and continuing, but it has been wounded and has made sacrifices. Does anyone expect the resistance to continue without sacrifices? Great sacrifices, yes, but we realize that these sacrifices must be made.”
He said Hezbollah was committed to “resistance to liberate the land and confront expansionist Israel that wants to usurp the region, not just Palestine.”
He also rejected the notion of Hezbollah disarming after new President Joseph Aoun said the Lebanese state must have control over “the decisions of war and peace,” and to do this, it must “monopolize or restrict weapons to the state.”
Qassem said: “We have nothing to do with this matter. We are a resistance that considers Israel a threat to Lebanon, and there is no objection to the army and the state defending Lebanon. The resistance has the right to continue to protect Lebanon. Therefore, we do not consider the president’s words about the exclusivity of weapons to be directed at us.”
He also praised Lebanese who have “offered martyrs” to fighting Israel.
“The resistance is not a phase, but rather it is ongoing, and it is an idea that is adopted by the young and old, women and men,” he said. “We feel proud when we hear the stances of these people… There is a woman who says: ‘I have offered three martyrs, two of my sons-in-law, and two of my grandchildren, and the rest I am ready to offer, and I am ready to offer myself.’
“Or the one who says: ‘I have offered my only son and I am ready to offer more,’” he added. “This is a great example. Who can defeat these people?”
[IsraelTimes] National Students for Justice in Palestine calls for mass unrest on campuses across the US, after the Trump administration’s crackdown on anti-Israel activists at Columbia University.
NSJP issues a statement calling on activist groups and individuals to walk out of class, “take over central spaces on campus, and assert our mass power.” The protest activities are scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.
The statement is cosponsored by several other leading anti-Israel activist groups and says it is in response to the Trump administration’s moves against anti-Israel activists.
“The popular movement against Zionism, imperialism, and fascism will not shy away in the face of federal threats,” the statement says.
The call to arms comes after the Trump administration cut $400 million in funding to Columbia, and ICE agents detained a student protest leader, days after campus activists held several disruptive rallies and distributed Hamas propaganda.
“We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said.
[IsraelTimes] The identities and addresses of thousands of Israeli gun owners have been leaked online following a hack carried out by Iranians in February, Haaretz has reported.
The newspaper says the leak could threaten some 10,000 people who could be targeted by criminal elements seeking to obtain the weapons.
The report says over 100,000 files were stolen from various sources including the police, the National Security Ministry, and private security firms. Police have said their systems were not breached, and Haaretz said it was not clear where the files were taken from.
Quaise Energy is planning to drill test holes up to 12.4 miles deep, using a 1-megawatt gyrotron that should zip through the rock in a mere 100 days. At these depths, the temperature will likely be around 932 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hot enough to provide a practical source of geothermal energy.
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
03/10/2025
09:28 ||
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#1
If they let out the methane the balloon will collapse.
#2
Prediction: they're going to find that lateral slip forces induced in the rock cause things to go sideways. Literally.
There's a lot of lateral 'squirt' the the rocks that deep.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
03/10/2025 15:43
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#4
" At these depths, the temperature will likely be around 932 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hot enough to provide a practical source of geothermal energy.."
1 Oops and a instant Super Volcano.
Wonder what it would do to the surrounding Underground water and wells.
#6
A gyrotron is a vacuum electronic device (VED) capable of generating coherent high-power electromagnetic radiation in the microwave, millimeter wave and terahertz band. It operates on stimulated cyclotron radiation of electrons gyrating in a strong magnetic field typically provided by a superconducting magnet.
Martin O'Malley: Musk wants to break Social Security so he can loot it
Former Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O'Malley breaks down Elon Musk's efforts to dismantle Social Security and potentially go after the Social Security Trust.
My trusty Alexa portal showed me the headline this morning. I just had to pass it along.
Posted by: Bobby ||
03/10/2025
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[NY Post] After four years of shady appeasement by the Biden administration, Iran’s bloodthirsty regime is under pressure again — and just in the nick of time, before it finesses its nuclear weapons capability.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hammered Iran in his speech to the Economic Club of New York last week, foreshadowing harsh new sanctions and a long-overdue crackdown on the Islamist regime’s black-market oil economy.
Iran’s sanctions fraud was a dirty little not-so-secret of the Biden administration, known to intelligence agencies and hedge fund traders alike.
“Iran has developed a complex shadow network of financial facilitators and black-market oil shippers via a ghost fleet to sell oil, petrochemical and other commodities to finance its exports and generate hard currency,” said Bessent.
When Donald Trump left office in 2021, Iran was on its knees.
Savage sanctions aimed at strangling Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and funding of terrorists had reduced Iran’s oil exports to a trickle. Trump had also torn up the diabolical Iran nuclear deal, the Obama administration’s so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
WEAK ON MULLAHS
Under Joe Biden, everything changed. He eased off on sanctions enforcement, betrayed Iranian dissidents, reanimated the nuclear deal and returned $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets in September 2023, a month before the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Biden and his handlers were so fixated on winning re-election that nothing mattered except maintaining high global oil supplies so they could keep a lid on soaring US gas prices that were helping fuel inflation.
So, as Bessent points out with contempt, the Biden administration, for base political reasons, turned a blind eye to the black market in comingled oil that continued to enrich Iran, whose exports went from a low of 100,000 barrels per day at the end of Trump’s first term to more than 1.7 million barrels a day under Biden.
This allowed the mullahs to fund their terrorist proxies to attack Israel and target US troops — such as the drone strike on Erbil Air Base in December 2023 that critically injured an American service member — and to strike global shipping in the Red Sea.
Iran also used the Biden largesse to supply Russia’s war machine in Ukraine with attack drones and ammunition, while advancing its own nuclear weapons program that endangers the world.
No more, says Bessent: “We are going to shut down Iran’s oil sector and drone manufacturing capabilities.”
Big international oil traders such as the private, Dubai-based Kasco Group are under investigation by the Trump administration for facilitating Iran’s oil trade using complex financial arrangements to evade US restrictions.
“Intelligence Community sources [have] detailed intelligence on how Iran is averting sanctions and illegally selling their oil in the West, using cutouts,” says former National Security Agency intelligence analyst John Schindler. “This intelligence fingers Kasco as one of the main culprits in this lucrative scam.”
The large-scale oil fraud has been well known to the intelligence community for years, according to Schindler.
“The Biden administration was briefed, but they did nothing,” he said.
MAIN CUSTOMER: CHINA
China, Iran’s main oil customer, is the architect of Iran’s “shadow financial channels which run from its oil rigs to the virtual vaults of its central bank,” the Economist reported last year in an investigation titled “Iran’s Secret Oil Trade.”
The way it works is that about 100 front companies buy old tankers flagged in Panama, rename them, switch off their transponders or lend them to another ship so they can’t be tracked and sail to one of Iran’s export terminals to pick up the oil.
The oil cargo is then usually transferred to another ship in Iraq or Oman or off the coast of Malaysia or Singapore, after which it heads to China.
The oil is mislabeled as Iraqi, Malaysian, Omani, or from some other legitimate source, according to the Economist.
It can be blended with legitimate oil to further disguise its chemical fingerprint and sell it on global markets.
But market sources say the unique sulfur level of Iranian oil is a dead giveaway — if anyone had cared to check.
China gets a great deal because it pays Iran 30% to 50% less for its oil than it would pay on the legitimate market.
Biden apologists, such as his longtime energy czar Amos Hochstein (who famously met with Hunter Biden in 2015 to discuss the then-vice president’s son’s lucrative involvement with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma), have argued that sanctions work well enough without being properly enforced because they reduce the revenue that countries like Iran and Russia can earn without hurting global oil supply.
“Our ultimate policy is I have to have enough oil on the market as long as I have the demand there and to make sure that the economy works,” Hochstein told Bloomberg last year in a discussion about sanctions enforcement on Iran and Russia.
But as the Economist points out, the problem with Biden’s lax enforcement in Iran is that the burden is placed on Iranian households, who face 35% inflation, while China and the mullahs get rich.
‘MAXIMUM PRESSURE’
Last month, the Trump White House announced a “maximum pressure campaign” on Iran designed to collapse its already buckling economy.
“We will close off Iran’s access to the international financial system by targeting regional parties that facilitate the transfer of its revenues,” says Bessent.
“We are going to shut down Iran’s oil sector and drone manufacturing capabilities,” he said. “If economic security is national security, the regime in Tehran will have neither.”
In a good cop-bad cop move coinciding with Bessent’s harsh speech Thursday, President Trump sent Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei a letter politely suggesting he negotiate a deal or face military action.
Reverse dawa (outreach of the “last chance to convert to Islam or else” style).
“We have to do something because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.
The ayatollah reportedly has rejected the overture, ironically criticizing Trump as a “bully.”
Iran is just one of the unholy messes Biden has left for Trump to fix. Godspeed.
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/10/2025
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[Breitbart] President Donald Trump vowed to invest billions into Greenland and to “create new jobs” if Greenlanders decide to join the United States, adding that they would be welcomed.
“As I made clear during my Joint Address to Congress, the United States strongly supports the people of Greenland’s right to determine their own future,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “We will continue to KEEP YOU SAFE, as we have since World War II. We are ready to INVEST BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to create new jobs and MAKE YOU RICH — And, if you so choose, we welcome you to be part of the Greatest Nation anywhere in the World, the United States of America!”
As Breitbart News’s Joel Pollak reported, during Trump’s address before a joint session of Congress, Trump expressed that the U.S. respects Greenlanders’ “right to determine” their future, while adding that Greenlanders would be welcomed if they join the U.S. Then he added, in an ad-libbed aside: “One way or the other, we’re going to get it.”
In December 2024, Trump announced that Ken Howery would serve as the U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark and expressed that the U.S. taking ownership over Greenland was an “absolute necessity” for national security and freedom worldwide.
Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte Egede responded to Trump’s statement by stating that Greenland is “not for sale” and would “never be for sale,” according to the Guardian.
“Greenland is ours,” Egede said. “We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom.”
Breitbart News’s John Hayward reported in January that Denmark “announced a $2 billion investment in Arctic security” and acknowledged that Trump has been critical “of the region’s vulnerability to Russian aggression.”
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] Donald Trump is offering 80,000 federal health workers a $25,000 incentive to leave their jobs.
As the administration seeks to purge the federal workforce, an ultimatum has been given to employees responsible for researching diseases, inspecting food and administering Medicare and Medicaid.
The workers - employed by Robert F Kennedy Jr.'s Department of Health and Human Services in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) - received an email detailing the proposal.
They can begin opting in from Monday and have until 5pm on Friday to agree to the 'voluntary separation offer.'
Trump vowed to reduce the bloated bureaucracy upon his return to the White House, with billionaire Elon Musk hired to weed out wasteful spending as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency.
In January, almost the entire workforce of federal employees received a deferred resignation offer that came with eight months of pay in an initial DOGE effort to reduce spending.
Thousands of probationary employees have been fired across the board, including at HHS. The layoffs have sparked mass protests and lawsuits from disgruntled workers.
The mass buyout email went out to a 'broad population of HHS employees,' landing in their inboxes days before agency heads are due to offer plans for shrinking their workforces.
HHS is one of the government's costliest federal agencies, with an annual budget of about $1.7 trillion that is mostly spent on health care for millions of people enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid.
It comes just days after Trump assured department heads that staffing decisions ultimately lay with them - not Musk.
But he said if tough decisions that need to be made aren't done so appropriately, Musk is waiting in the wings to swoop in.
'If they can cut, it's better. If they don't cut, then Elon will do the cutting,' Trump said Thursday.
That should be of no concern to RFK Jr., who has already expressed a desire to implement deep cuts to his department.
Last year, he promised to immediately clear out 600 employees at the NIH, the nation's biomedical research arm.
And after he was sworn into the portfolio, he revealed he had 'a list' of people he was wanting to remove from the office.
'I have a list in my head,' Kennedy said of potential firings at the agency.
'If you've been involved in good science, you have got nothing to worry about. If you care about public health, you've got nothing to worry about.
'If you're in there working for the pharmaceutical industry, then I'd say you should move out and work for the pharmaceutical industry.'
The entire incoming class of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) were reportedly told they are no longer needed as part of 1,300 layoffs at the CDC when RFK Jr. took over.
These staff generally investigate disease outbreaks both within the United States and abroad, and are highly educated and sought-after experts with doctorates or masters degrees in their fields.
'This will destroy the EIS, which is one of the absolute crown jewels of global public health,' director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy Michael Osterholm said.
Trump tapped the 70-year-old former Democrat to be the country's top health official with the mandate to 'Make America Healthy Again' after he pulled out of the Presidential race and endorsed the Republican candidate.
But Kennedy was put under the microscope for his past controversial stances on vaccinations, abortion and for promoting conspiracy theories.
He promised Americans would still be able to take as many vaccines as they wanted, but said he wanted to study them and make them safer.
'If people are happy with their vaccines, they ought to be able to get them,' he said.
Kennedy also vowed to preserve American's food choices, even if they were unhealthy.
'That's what I'm saying if you want to eat a Big Mac you ought to,' he said.
He added there were ways to make fast food more healthy, by removing unhealthy additives and offering incentives for fast food companies to use beef tallow fat instead of seed oils.
'We want to do a number of things but not take away choice from people,' he said.
Now change the law that allows pharms pay anyone in government service. It's a blatant conflict of interest. How many have to die because of the jab before you act?
#2
"inspecting food and administering Medicare and Medicaid"
Uhh, no. CDC has no business in any of this.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
03/10/2025 10:40
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#3
CDC was already losing credibility long before Covid. They had transformed into a leftist think-tank and were declaring that salt and gun ownership were somehow "diseases" and within their perview.
#4
Inspecting food belongs to the Food & Drug Administration. Don’t Medicare and Medicaid belong to Social Security? Or are they under Health & Human Services?
[Breitbart] The son of the supreme leader of Mexico’s Cartel Jalisco New Generation (CJNG) will spend the rest of his life in a U.S. prison. The sentence comes as the U.S. government is placing extreme pressure on Mexico’s government to force them to act against drug cartels.
On Friday, 34-year-old Ruben “El Menchito” Oseguera Gonzalez, a U.S.-Mexico dual citizen,
…dual citizen? How did he manage that particular bit of cleverness, given the family profession?
went before U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell in the District of Columbia. Judge Howell handed down the life sentence in prison plus 30 years and ordered the restitution of more than $6 billion. The sentence follows a weeks-long trial that took place in September 2024, where several top drug lords testified against him.
Oh dear.
Witnesses singled him as the number two leader of CJNG just under his father, Ruben Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes.
“This defendant helped build Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion into a brutal terrorist organization that pumps poison onto the streets and commits horrific acts of violence,” said U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in a prepared statement released after the sentencing hearing.
According to information from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, El Menchito is directly responsible for moving ton quantities of drugs into the country and is one of the first drug traffickers to begin moving fentanyl into the country.
El Menchito is directly responsible for ordering the shooting down of a Mexican military helicopter in 2015 to allow him and his father to escape, Breitbart Texas reported at the time. In 2015, after the attack on the helicopter, Mexican authorities only confirmed three casualties and several other officers injured. However, according to information from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, at least nine officers died in that crash.
Federal authorities also claimed that much like his father, El Menchito is considered to be a bloodthirsty individual who personally killed some of his victims and ordered more than 100 murders as part of his criminal endeavors.
Mexican authorities captured El Menchito twice before, once in 2014 and once in 2015. Each time, he had been released under suspicious court rulings. However, after the 2015 arrest, authorities were able to get additional warrants to hold him in custody. Mexico’s government eventually extradited him in February 2020, and he has been in federal custody since.
[FoxNews] Todd Lyons has been selected to serve as the acting director of ICE, while Madison Sheahan was appointed to the role of deputy director
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem tapped a new director and deputy director to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as she works to reinstate a culture of results and accountability under President Donald Trump’s administration.
Noem announced the appointments on Sunday, saying Todd Lyons will serve as acting ICE director, and Madison Sheahan will serve as the deputy director of ICE.
"For the past four years, our brave men and women of ICE were barred from doing their jobs—ICE needs a culture of accountability that it has been starved of under the Biden Administration," Noem said. "Todd Lyons and Madison Sheahan are work horses, strong executors, and accountable leaders who will lead the men and women of ICE to achieve the American people’s mandate to target, arrest and deport illegal aliens."
In a press release, Homeland Security said Lyons currently serves as the acting executive associate director of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO).
He has served in a variety of other roles within ICE, including assistant director of field operations for ERO, where he oversaw all 25 field offices and domestic operations across the U.S. Prior to that, Lyons worked as the ERO field office director (FOD) in the Boston field office, where he oversaw ERO activities in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Vermont.
Lyons started his career in federal service in 1993 as a member of the U.S. Air Force, and in 1999, he went into civilian law enforcement in Florida. Lyons joined ERO as an ICE agent in Dallas, Texas, in 2007.
Sheahan and Noem have worked together in the past, though most recently the new deputy director of ICE has served as the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, where she oversaw a $280 million budget and led a team of over 800 employees across wildlife, fisheries and enforcement divisions.
She helped establish the Special Operations Group inside the enforcement division, which places priority on public safety through historic partnerships with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies when major events like Mardi Gras and the Super Bowl take place in The Big Easy.
Sheahan also advised Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry in her role.
Prior to that, she worked for then-South Dakota Gov. Noem in various leadership positions, including the state Republican Party and on special initiatives aimed toward advancing Noem’s agenda.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] …dressed up in skirts and make-up then forced to dance for groups of powerful men - before being sexually abused
In the dimly lit rooms of Afghanistan's private gatherings, young boys adorned in makeup and brightly coloured women's clothing are forced to dance for the amusement of powerful men.
But these boys - some as young as ten - are not merely dancers.
They are victims of Bacha Bazi, an ancient practice that often turns them into sex slaves for Afghanistan's elite.
The barbaric tradition, whose name translates to 'boy play', has persisted for centuries, surviving empires, wars, and political upheavals.
Now, while Afghanistan's current Taliban leadership claim to oppose it, Bacha Bazi continues as an open secret.
A 2024 UK government report found that boys remain at high risk of commercial sexual exploitation through Bacha Bazi, with the practice thriving under the same warlords and power brokers who have ruled Afghan society for generations.
Though some boys reportedly volunteer, many are sold into this life by their own impoverished families desperate to get by.
And under the Taliban, more are impoverished and desperate, while foreign aid flows directly into Taliban pockets and coffers. Hopefully shutting down USAID has reduced the flow somewhat, since it hasn’t been helping the target populations anyway.
Others are quite simply abducted, including by police officers - the very people supposed to prevent Bacha Bazi from resurging.
Victims often face further violence upon returning home, and the suspension of international aid to Afghanistan since the Taliban returned in 2021 has left them with little access to support or rehabilitation.
All this in a country where homosexuality attracts the death penalty and pederasty is supposedly punishable by long prison sentences.
So long as the powers-that-be get a cut, all is fine.
The roots of Bacha Bazi stretch back to at least the 13th century and the practice has been widely documented by domestic and foreign intellectuals, historians and politicians visiting the region.
But its most infamous resurgence came during the Mujahideen's war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
Afghan commanders who fought in the resistance were notorious for keeping young boys as their personal possessions, treating them as status symbols as well as objects of abuse.
When the Taliban first rose to power in the 1990s, they claimed one of their chief grievances was this 'perversion' among the warlords, and they outlawed the practice.
But after the Taliban was ousted in 2001 amid the US invasion of Afghanistan, the old power structures returned, and so did Bacha Bazi.
The foreign forces operating in Afghanistan were well aware of the heinous practice, but did little to intervene.
During the US occupation, American and British soldiers gave disturbing accounts of scenarios in which men they were ordered to work alongside routinely abused young boys.
One US Marine, Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley Jr., confided to his father that he could hear Afghan police officers raping boys on a military base at night.
'At night we can hear them screaming, but we're not allowed to do anything about it,' Buckley junior was reported as saying by his father.
The Marine was later gunned down by local Afghan forces his unit was tasked with training - one of many so-called 'green on blue' incidents that blighted US and coalition troops in Afghanistan.
Other Western soldiers told how their commanding officers warned them to 'look the other way' and ignore the rampant abuse of children because confronting Afghan allies about the practice could damage diplomatic relations.
The horror of the situation was laid bare when Dan Quinn, a former US Special Forces captain, was relieved of his command and pulled from Afghanistan for attacking an American-backed Afghan militia commander who had kept a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave.
'The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,' Quinn later said.
'But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban.'
By 2015, the scale of the problem was undeniable.
A New York Times investigation revealed that child rape by government-affiliated Afghan commanders was so common that it became an open secret among US troops.
The Taliban, meanwhile, exploited Bacha Bazi to their own advantage, infiltrating US-backed Afghan police and military headquarters by sending in boys to entertain their enemies as Trojan Horse 'honey traps'.
These boys, once inside the American-allied Afghan law enforcement compounds, would either poison their abusers, shoot them, carry out suicide bombings - or simply open the gates for Taliban fighters to carry out deadly attacks of their own.
In one 2016 operation in Afghanistan's southern Uruzgan province, this method led to the deaths of dozens of Afghan soldiers and police officers.
Meanwhile, in his harrowing documentary 'The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan', Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi exposed the ease with which men acquire these children.
Once young boys are sold by their families or abducted, many are harangued into harems and flogged by pimps and traffickers.
Some boys are kept effectively as personal property, with their owners wary of allowing other men to see the children for fear they would try to steal them away.
Others, however, are traded willingly as a commodity.
One powerful figure in the north of Afghanistan named Dastager, when asked how he selected a boy, responded chillingly: 'He should be attractive, good for dancing. Around 12 or 13, and good-looking.
'I tell their parents I will train them. I'll give the family money and tell them I'll look after him.'
The reality is far worse. That man admitted he had been with more than 2,000 boys, using them until they were no longer useful.
Another individual whose name was given as Mestary said that every military commander had a young companion as part of a sick game.
'I had a boy because every commander had one. There's competition amongst the commanders. Without one, I couldn't compete with the others.'
In 2024, the EU Agency for Asylum claimed: 'Afghan security forces, in particular the Afghan Local Police, reportedly recruited boys specifically to use them for Bacha Bazi in every province of the country.'
With the US departure in 2021 and the Taliban's return to power, one might assume the practice has been stamped out once more.
Officially, it is illegal. In reality, it remains rampant.
Despite the Taliban's public stance against Bacha Bazi, reports indicate that many of its own members continue the practice.
A 2024 US State Department report revealed that Taliban officials had engaged in sexual slavery, including employing child soldiers who were also victims of abuse.
The Taliban's own morality police - the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice - focus almost exclusively on policing women's behaviour, while crimes like Bacha Bazi continue in the shadows.
Many of the same men who were warlords before 2001 - former Mujahideen fighters, tribal leaders, and wealthy elites - still wield influence, even under Taliban rule.
And with Afghanistan now more isolated than ever, there is little external pressure to stop them.
Reports from human rights organisations indicate that boys are still being bought, sold, and raped - sometimes by the very figures who claim to uphold the Taliban's strict moral code.
Once in their captors' hands, the children are forced to wear women's clothing and subjected to systematic sexual abuse.
Photographs and videos that have surfaced online show boys at these gatherings, forced to perform in front of groups of men who later pass them around as objects of pleasure.
Survivors who have escaped speak of beatings, rape, and psychological torment, only to be cast out once they grow facial hair and are no longer considered desirable.
Many turn to prostitution, drug addiction, or suicide, unable to escape the trauma they have endured.
A report by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) said: 'The victims of bacha bazi suffer from serious psychological trauma as they often get raped.
'Such victims suffer from stress and a sort of distrust, hopelessness and pessimistic feeling. Bacha bazi results in fear among the children and feelings of revenge and hostility develop in their mind.'
In turn, many adolescent victims are said to grow up to have boy lovers of their own, repeating the cycle.
'In the absence of any services to recover or rehabilitate boys who are caught in this horrendous abuse, it's hard to know what happens to these children,' said Charu Lata Hogg, a London-based fellow at Chatham House, told MailOnline.
'We have heard anecdotal reports that many grow up to keep their own bachas, perpetuating the revolving door of abuse.'
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] The Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah is also responsible for destabilizing the situation in Syria. This opinion was expressed on March 9 by Sajid al-Deek, a representative of the security forces in the Syrian province of Latakia.
Interesting times for the allies of the old regime, and Iran’s willing tools. More than Hezbollah might want to retreat to their home territory post haste, if they can…
"Hezbollah has provided support to some parties in some areas of the [Mediterranean] coast," he said on Al Arabiya TV.
According to al-Dik, the Lebanese movement, together with other countries, supported some parties and the remnants of the forces of supporters of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in a number of areas along the country's coast.
A Syrian security official added that five people who held high positions under Assad had been detained, but declined to name them for security reasons. He said the new Syrian authorities were 90% in control of the situation.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, on March 6, clashes occurred in Latakia between Assad supporters and forces of the new Syrian government. As a result of the unrest, a curfew was imposed in the province. Later, units of the Syrian army loyal to the new government entered the city.
Kurdish television channel Rudaw reported on March 8 that at least 532 civilians had been killed in clashes in the provinces of Latakia, Tartus and Homs. It specified that most of the dead were members of the Alawite community, which makes up 12% of Syria's population.
Assad resigned as president of Syria on December 8, 2024, and fled the country after a large-scale offensive by armed opposition groups on Damascus. He received political asylum in Russia. Ahmed al-Sharaa became the head of the interim government.
[MSN-Jpost] Qatar has been increasingly vocal in its critique of Israel. Its foreign minister warned against attacks on Iran in an interview with Tucker Carlson in the US on Friday.
Qatar said the “Persian Gulf states will run out of drinking water in three days if Iran’s nuclear sites are attacked,” according to Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), Iran’s official news agency.
This seems to be a talking point aimed at getting the Trump administration to enter a new deal with Iran, rather than pressure the Iranians in a way that could lead to Iran-Israel military clashes.
This appears to be part of Doha’s strategy, which is connected to a string of recent comments. In early March, for instance, Qatar slammed the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) for issuing a report about the October 7 massacre that said financial payments from Doha to Gaza had empowered Hamas.
In a statement from Qatar’s International Media Office, Doha cited “false accusations made by the Shin Bet security agency linking Qatari aid to the October 7 attack… yet another example of deflection driven by self-interest and self-preservation in Israeli politics.”
This also comes as media outlets and protesters have expressed concern about Doha’s role in influencing Israel.
PRESSURE ON ISRAEL
Over the weekend, Doha appeared to ratchet up pressure on Israel. Qatar said Israeli nuclear facilities should be brought under the regulation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and it called for Israel to sign the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT) at a session of the IAEA in Vienna on Saturday.
This happened as Doha was continuing to host talks on a ceasefire in Gaza, Ynet reported. So far, Israel appears to have been outplayed in those talks, as Doha and Hamas hold most of the cards. The US is also having direct talks with Hamas now.
The foreign minister’s comments to Carlson are of particular interest in the region, and Iranian media outlets appeared to be pleased by them.
“[Qatar’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani] says Persian Gulf countries will run out of drinking water within three days if Iran’s nuclear facilities are attacked,” IRNA reported.
“[He] has strongly warned that any attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities will have catastrophic consequences for the entire region,” the report said.
The comments were made about the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant because of its proximity to the sea, which is close to the other Persian Gulf countries.
The water supply “would basically be entirely contaminated... the whole country would run out of water in three days… This is not only applied for Qatar, it is applied for Kuwait, for the UAE, for all of us in that part… We are physically close to Iran, about 120 miles away, right across the water,” the report said. “You can get there by a 90-minute boat ride.”
“Al Thani also expressed hope for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear issue,” the report said.
“We do not support any military action in this region in any way, and we will not stop trying until a diplomatic solution is found between the United States and Iran,” IRNA quoted him as saying.
This is important, and it illustrates how Qatar is now playing its cards. Doha is pressuring Israel while also hosting talks. It is also more openly critiquing Israel while seeking to gets its message to more Right-leaning media and media personalities who are followed by some people in the pro-Trump orbit.
It remains to be seen whether the Trump team and envoy Steve Witkoff can achieve a new hostage deal.
Trump has been very vocal about support for the hostages and bringing them home. He hosted several of the freed hostages at the White House in early March.
Witkoff also said he hoped Hamas would show goodwill and release American citizen Edan Alexander, one of the hostages in Gaza.
Any Hamas leadership still hanging around in Qatar should be eliminated.
By Qatar if they were smart, but we know they aren't.
Here's a tip for any Islamic hell-hole that wishes to pretend to be a "vacation destination": Shut up. Literally. Shut up and quit exposing the fact that your government and your people have nothing in common with the money you'd like to have come visit your bullshit country.
#5
@3 This could allude to a possible contamination of the Gulf' water with radioactive isotopes from Iranian facilities or it could be a threat of direct retaliation against desalination plants.
[Breitbart] The European Union saw over a million over a million asylum applications lodged by foreigners for the second straight year in 2024, the international migration regulator disclosed this week.
The annual report from the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) revealed that EU nations, as well as Norway and Switzerland, had 1,014,420 requests for asylum last year. This marked the second year in a row that over a million requests were filed, 1,143,437 recorded in 2023, Euronews reports.
According to the EUAA, some 48 per cent of asylum applicants came from countries with historically low chances of qualifying for refugee status, perhaps indicating an economic motive behind their attempts to gain residency in Europe.
Meanwhile, figures from the EU’s Frontex border agency showed 239,000 illegal border crossings into the bloc, meaning that around one in four asylum applicants likely entered the bloc illegally.
In terms of countries of origin for supposed asylum claims, Syria remained in the top place with 151,000, followed by Afghanistan at 87,382, Venezuela (73,187), Turkey (55,705), and Colombia (51,529).
Germany, with its large economy and generous welfare schemes for migrants, remained the top destination for migrants seeking asylum last year, with over a quarter of a million filed at 237,000. Spain stood in second at 165,767, followed by Italy at 158,867, France (158,730), Greece (73,688), Belgium (39,206) and the Netherlands (33,437).
In contrast, Hungary only saw 29 asylum applications last year, in a demonstration of the strict border controls enacted by the conservative-populist government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Budapest.
For protecting his nation’s borders, Orbán has long been at odds with Brussels, which has imposed millions in fines against Hungary, subtracting from reallocated EU funds.
The issue of mass migration into Europe has become a key driver of elections, with anti-mass migration parties seeing wins in recent years in countries like the Netherlands and populist parties making significant gains in countries like France and Germany.
A survey from YouGov conducted last month found that majorities in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden all believe that immigration has been too high into their countries over the past decade.
This was particularly true for Spaniards and Germans, with 80 and 81 per cent of their respective populations saying that levels of been too high.
Meanwhile, a majority of respondents in the seven nations surveyed felt that their governments had performed very or fairly badly in terms of controlling immigration. Over eight in ten in both France and Germany felt their governments had failed on the immigration front.
[NYPOST] The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says it is ending collective bargaining for Transportation Security Officers with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
In a release obtained exclusively by FOX Business, DHS said the TSA has more people doing ''full-time union work'' rather than performing screening functions at 86% of U.S. airports.
This means that out of 432 federalized airports, 374 airports have fewer than 200 TSA Officers to perform screening functions.
These officers are paid by the government but work ''full-time on union matters'' and do not retain certification to perform screening functions, DHS said.
The department cited a recent TSA employee survey which found that more than 60% of ''poor performers'' are allowed to stay employed and ''not surprisingly, continue to not perform.''
Posted by: Fred ||
03/10/2025
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[11160 views]
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#1
The article itself isn't focused on the real problem because it wanders around instead of getting to the point, so I'll make it clear:
LESS THAN HALF of the TSA employees were actually working on "Transportation Security". The rest were paper pushers "working" for their union.
*Your* tax money funded this madness, and nobody gave a damn until now.
#2
But, but... The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents TSOs, has pushed back on DHS’ claims, saying TSOs who volunteer as union representatives account for less than half a percent of all work hours performed at TSA
There's a clever lie buried in that particular phrasing.
Posted by: Bobby ||
03/10/2025 8:22
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#4
I have supervised in both union and non-union facilities over the years. Both can be efficient. It is more difficult to get rid of poor performers in a union shop. Market conditions and management cowardice can also make discharging poor performers problematic. The priorities and interests of union hierarchies above the shop steward level often diverge from the interests of the union membership. As a taxpayer, my primary interest is in not being blown up. My secondary interest is in not getting ripped off. In this case I don’t have a problem with eliminating the union for TSA. I would also like to see TSA managed effectively. Luckily, the FAA currently is making TSA look well managed.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
03/10/2025 12:26
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#5
major TSA change to shorten airport security wait times
They going to classify all of us as illegals and avoid the entire process too?
[FoxNews] President Donald Trump has used his new powers to dismiss a slew of lawsuits filed under former President Joe Biden, including challenges to state abortion bans, allegations of racism in police and fire departments, environmental and anti-whistleblower cases, and various business-related disputes. Meanwhile, he has largely left Biden-era antitrust lawsuits untouched.
The Trump administration took steps as recently as this week to drop a lawsuit challenging Idaho's abortion ban that only permits the procedures when necessary to save the life of the mother, or in cases of rape or incest. The Biden administration tried to circumvent the state ban with its lawsuit that argued the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) required doctors to provide abortions in cases when they are needed to prevent serious health consequences, not just the life of the mother.
"Democrats’ abortion extremism cost them the election," said Katie Daniel, Director of Legal Affairs & Policy Counsel at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. "With President Trump and a new administration in charge, Biden’s weaponization of the federal government is over — no more lawfare. The will of the people is clear and activist judges must not interfere."
Multiple federal civil rights cases revolving around hiring discrimination have also been dropped under Trump. The Department of Justice (DOJ) said it intends to drop a 2023 case alleging anti-immigrant hiring practices at Elon Musk's SpaceX. Additionally, several federal civil rights lawsuits accusing police and fire departments of racial discrimination based on their provision of certain physical fitness tests and other requirements like credit checks have also been dropped.
"American communities deserve firefighters and police officers to be chosen for their skill and dedication to public safety — not to meet DEI quotas," U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement after dismissing the lawsuits that had been levied against multiple jurisdictions around the country.
A former DOJ civil rights attorney, Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow Hans von Spakovsky said that in one of the cases against a fire department in Cobb County, Georgia, a judge refused to grant a settlement proposed by the Biden administration due to a lack of evidence proving physical fitness tests and credit report checks are racially discriminatory toward minorities. Spakovsky noted that settlements are typically approved by judges, but the one in Cobb County sought to set up racial hiring quotas that the judge likened to "a racial spoils system," he said.
"Here's a direct quote from the judge: ‘The court will not approve of an agreement which may violate the rights of others without a sufficient evidentiary basis to show that such race-based action is warranted,’" Spakovsky said.
"The broad scope of all of these dropped civil rights cases," he concluded, "is that they are throwing out the ones — in my opinion — that call on defendants to violate federal laws against discrimination."
Two other high-profile lawsuits recently dropped by the Trump administration include a Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency case against local Louisiana regulators and the synthetic rubber manufacturer Denka, which alleged failure to adequately protect the predominantly minority community near its plant from cancer risks linked to air pollution.
Another dropped case involved a medical whistleblower, Dr. Eithan Haim, who faced prosecution from Biden's DOJ after he leaked documents to the media revealing Texas Children's Hospital in Houston was performing transgender medical procedures on minors, even after it said it had stopped complying with new state regulations.
Trump has also dropped a number of consumer protection and cryptocurrency lawsuits, but has done little in the way of disrupting the Biden administration's antitrust enforcement, something tech professionals were expecting after the last administration challenged Big Tech companies aggressively for allegedly building monopolies.
"It's a big plus for the crypto and fintech sector as a whole, because you just see them celebrating, like you see social posts online of a lot of these executives at those companies that just missed lawsuits who are really happy," said Kison Patel, a financial tech entrepreneur and the host of "M&A Science," a podcast about mergers and acquisitions. "It seems like there's going to be less scrutiny and regulations around that sector."
Patel added that while mergers and acquisitions were expected to ramp up this year, he isn't so sure anymore considering the approach Trump has signaled towards antitrust enforcement.
"I think there's still a lot to watch in the antitrust area," said Patel, who pointed to a new case the Federal Trade Commission has brought against a medical device company on antitrust grounds. "But, the take home is there doesn't appear to be a big shift in position in the realm of regulations around antitrust."
#1
I was horrified to learn that we apparently have laws that allow the arrest of peaceful protest at abortion sites. How can we pretend this is ok while simultaneously allow major universities to have their buildings taken over by lunatics when THEY wish to protest?
[FoxNews] Carney expected to call election in coming days where he will face Conservative challenger Pierre Poilievre
Trudeau deserved everything he got, but unfortunately the fallout may take the election from Mr. Poilievre.
Former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney will become Canada’s next prime minister after winning the Liberal leadership race on Sunday night. Carney told cheering supporters that "Canada never ever will be part of America in any way, shape or form."
We really don’t want you, guys. President Trump is just trolling because you insist on your right to let drugs and illegals pass across your southern border.
The prime minister-designate said Canada’s tariffs against the United States will remain until the Americans "show us respect" and added that Canadians "are always ready when someone else drops the gloves."
Carney said that while "Donald Trump thinks he can weaken us with his plan to divide and conquer," Conservative Official Opposition Leader "Pierre Poilievre’s plan will leave us divided and ready to be conquered."
Carney received 86% of the vote, or 131,764 votes of the 151,899 ones cast from the nearly 400,000 party members who registered to participate in the leadership election.
The new Liberal leader told party members that they should be prepared to fight "the most important election of our lives" where the "stakes have never been higher."
He said that Canada is the "greatest country in the world and now our neighbors want to take us. No way," said the incoming Canadian prime minister referring to President Donald Trump’s repeated desire for the U.S. to annex Canada as the "51st state."
When Trump announced his tariffs against Canada last month, Carney issued a statement that "Canada will not bow down to a bully. We won’t stand by as illegal U.S. tariffs hurt our workers and their families. As Canadians, we need to face this challenge as one united team."
But Canadian tariffs against American product are just fine? Got it.
In December, outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
…and thank goodness for that…
reportedly approached Carney to serve as Canadian finance minister, which caused the incumbent, Chrystia Freeland, to leave the Cabinet and publicly release her resignation letter in which she wrote that she and the prime minister had "found [themselves] at odds about the best path forward for Canada."
Less than a month later, Trudeau announced his intention to step down as Liberal leader and prime minister, saying that if he’s "having to fight internal battles, [he] cannot be the best option" in a general election scheduled to be held no later than Oct. 20.
But opposition parties have vowed to force an earlier national vote through a non-confidence motion in the House of Commons against the Liberal minority government when Parliament is recalled on March 24.
On Saturday, Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper reported that Carney will likely call a snap election the week before the March 24 resumption of Parliament, with voting day on either April 28 or May 5.
The new Liberal leader is expected to meet with Trudeau on Monday to discuss the transition that will find Carney and a slimmed-down Cabinet sworn into office by Friday.
But regardless of the Liberals having a new leader with some momentum in the polls, Canada’s Conservatives under their leader, Pierre Poilievre, are ready for a "change election," said Laura Kurkimaki, who served as deputy national campaign manager for the Conservative Party during the last federal election in 2021.
"We’ve had 10 years of a Liberal government, and Canadians are tired of that," said Kurkimaki, who also served as principal secretary to former Conservative official opposition leader Erin O’Toole, whose party won the popular vote but not enough House seats to win the 2021 election.
Furthermore, she said the new Liberal leader would be running on "Trudeau’s record," and while Carney wasn’t a member of the prime minister’s government, he was appointed last September by the Liberal Party to chair a task force on economic growth for Trudeau.
"The next election will be about who is going to make life more affordable for Canadians," said Kurkimaki. "What’s going on in the U.S. impacts that, of course, and creates economic uncertainty in Canada."
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] Justin Trudeau's replacement as Canada's next Prime Minister sent a warning to President Trump just minutes after he was elected amid increasingly hostile relations between the United States and its northern neighbor.
Former central banker Mark Carney issued a withering takedown of Trump on Sunday immediately after he was chosen to take over Trudeau as the Liberal party leader and Prime Minister of Canada.
The 59-year-old leader made it clear that he intends to continue down Trudeau's path of public spats with the US leader.
He accused Trump of 'trying to weaken our economy' in his speech to a raucous room full of Liberal party voters.
'Donald Trump, as we know, has put unjustified tariffs on what we build, on what we sell, on how we make a living,' he said.
'He's attacking Canadian workers, families and businesses. We cannot let him succeed. And we won't.'
Opposition Conservatives hoped to make the election about Trudeau, who shed tears on Sunday while giving his farewell address to the party. The outgoing prime minister's popularity declined as food and housing prices rose and immigration surged.
Trump has repeatedly touted his ambition to annex Canada, referring to Trudeau as 'Governor Trudeau' and the nation as America's '51st state.'
#3
A quarter to a third of all Canadian exports go to the US. Around five percent of all US exports go to Canada. Guess who's economy would be hurt worse?
…the Scottish-Pakistani lawyer tapped in 2021 to be prosecutor for the ICC. With his expensive suits, shining shaved head, and comfortable padding, he looks exactly like movie villain, despite being Ahmadiyya — so he should know better. Oddly enough, one of his brothers, former Conservative Party MP Imran Ahmad Khan, is a convicted sex offender…
the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor leading a war crimes case against Israel, is facing renewed scrutiny following allegations of serious misconduct. According to the Daily Mail, Khan allegedly pressured a female colleague for over five months to withdraw her accusations of sexual misconduct, including making multiple daily calls urging her to retract her claims.
The report highlights that Khan’s alleged actions coincided with his pursuit of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. These charges, announced in May 2024, came just two weeks after he learned of the accusations against him, raising concerns over his ability to act impartially. Critics argue that his legal actions against Israel may be politically motivated, serving as a distraction from his personal scandal.
Sources cited in the report indicate that Khan repeatedly attempted to convince his accuser to sign a letter disavowing her claims. His persistent efforts allegedly led the woman to flee the Netherlands, leaving her car at the airport and cutting off contact with her immediate family. This has raised further concerns about the ethical conduct of the ICC's top prosecutor and his handling of sensitive cases, including those involving Israel.
Adding to the controversy, Khan’s close adviser, Mamadou Racine Ly, reportedly also pressured the woman to state she had no complaint, further calling into question the ICC's internal integrity. The report suggests that such behavior could undermine confidence in the ICC’s ability to conduct fair investigations, particularly regarding Israel’s actions in the ongoing conflict.
Despite the allegations, Khan remains in his role, refusing to step aside even after direct pleas from senior ICC officials, including American lawyer Brenda Hollis, who leads the court’s Palestine investigation. His refusal to temporarily step down has raised fears that the ongoing investigation into his misconduct could be compromised, further damaging the credibility of the ICC's case against Israel.
The controversy surrounding Khan has cast a shadow over the ICC's pursuit of Israeli leaders, with many questioning whether justice can be served impartially under his leadership. As the investigation into his actions unfolds, scrutiny over his motivations and the broader implications for Israel remains high.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] During search operations in the Zaporizhia region, employees of the Investigative Committee of Russia found the remains of Red Army soldiers who died during the Great Patriotic War. This was reported on March 9 by the press service of the department.
The events were held jointly with the Zaporizhzhya regional branch of the All-Russian public movement "People's Front "For Russia" and members of the search squad "Southern Front".
“During search operations in a forest 70 m from the road leading to the urban-type settlement of Akimovka in the Melitopol urban district, the remains of three Red Army soldiers were discovered,” the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation reported on its Telegram channel.
In addition to the skeletal remains, the search participants found the soldiers' personal belongings: belt buckles, a sapper shovel, and fragments of uniforms.
Forensic examinations will be carried out to establish the cause of death, after which the remains will be reburied.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, in May of last year, the remains of 49 Red Army soldiers who died in 1943 during the assault on the German fortified line "Wotan" were buried in the Zaporizhzhya region. The fortified area, considered impregnable by the fascists, was stormed by the Red Army for more than five months. More than 200,000 Red Army soldiers died on this land. All the soldiers whose remains were found by the regional search party remained nameless.
[BBC] A wild road to the highest city in North America
The highway climbs through aspen forest glinting gold in the Sun, rising through zigzag gullies, escarpments and precipices onto a high mountain plain so lonesome it seems to hum with silence. Snowdrifts huddle at the road's verges and on it goes persistently, almost gasping for air, past lonely farms beneath besieging summits.
There are many superlative road trips to take in North America, but if you find yourself on US Route 24, driving through Lake County in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, know you are on an old road to somewhere extraordinary.
Among the places on this storied route is Leadville, with a reputation often chalked up to its elevation. At 3,109m (10,200ft), it's the highest incorporated city in North America. But while the town is always in danger of being dwarfed by the surrounding landscape, the setting also reveals much mythology about Colorado's most lionised subjects: the gold rush and the Wild West.
"So many people, Americans included, are so unfamiliar with our story," said Katie Hild, manager of Leadville's Tourism and Visitor Center, housed today in the original red sandstone American National Bank building. "This is a town that's been shaped by bust and boom – so much has happened here."
But wherever you go in Colorado in winter these days, the subject everyone is obsessed with is not silver dollars, but snowfall — and 11 miles farther along US Route 24, the next chapter in Leadville's untold history is slowly revealed.
Ski Cooper isn't Colorado's most celebrated mountain resort, but where it beats others in the state is it retains the authenticity of a mountain as it used to be. Non-profit and municipality owned, it looks out to Mount Elbert, the state's highest mountain at 4,399m (14,433ft). More than that, the landscape has the emptiness that purists seek away from the surrounding busier towns.
"Cooper is not a resort, but a place to come skiing," said head of operations Patrick Torsell. "We only have three lifts – nothing compared to the mega-resorts – but Leadville locals have a strong relationship with us and our history. It's a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches in the parking lot kind of place."
Likewise, this is a mountain that covers its tracks well. For this is where Colorado's ski culture began.
The story starts with the first mountain unit in US military history, the 10th Mountain Division of World War Two. In summer 1941, its soldiers received extensive training in winter warfare on Cooper Hill, constructing what was then the world's longest draglift. Then, in the winter of 1944-1945, three of its regiments marshalled a series of surprise attacks during a surprise offensive in Italy's Apennine Mountains. It's a melancholy tale: around 1,000 soldiers were killed and 4,000 injured. And yet, their actions were instrumental in Germany's later surrender.
What many don't know is following their return to the Rockies, the 10th's veterans shaped the American ski industry. More than 66 ski resorts were managed or founded by former military personnel, including Aspen, Vail and Arapahoe Basin – and this taps into a broader strain of patriotism among locals today.
At Arapahoe Basin, during the 1953-1954 season, for instance, the unit installed the first Poma lift in the US. Then, in 1957 at Winter Park, they constructed two draglifts said to be the fastest in the world. The division's backcountry cabins, once used for deep-snow combat training, are now open to visitors to book year-round.
But that's not all. Six miles from Leadville in the Pando Valley, the 10th Mountain Division trained at Camp Hale. Sitting between sheer-sided rocky spurs and snow-daubed mountains with the Eagle River winding nearby, it was once a sprawling encampment of 14,000 soldiers, 226 barracks, 100 mess halls, three theatres, a chapel, horse and mule barns and a hospital. Little remains nowadays, but a 10-stop self-guided tour of relics snakes past ammunition bunkers, a guard shack and a field house. To be so rapidly transplanted from pistes to pistols fires the imagination.
The best story at Camp Hale concerns the CIA, which took over the base in the 1950s to train secretive special ops teams. At one time, 170 Tibetans were drafted in for secret operations against the Communist government in China. The unexpected coda is locals were told it was a test site for bombs. Nowadays, with snowshoe, hiking, biking and horse-riding trails, it is a less-assuming and simpler world away from the currents of history.&”
[IRNA] Qatar has called for increased international efforts to place all Israeli nuclear facilities under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
In a statement on Sunday, the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs urged the UN nuclear watchdog to bring all of Israel’s nuclear facilities under its supervision.
The statement followed a meeting of IAEA governors in Vienna attended by Jassim Yacoub Al-Hammadi, Qatar’s ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations Office and International Organizations in Vienna. It also called on Israel to join the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
During the meeting, Al-Hammadi stressed the need for the international community and its institutions to uphold their commitments under UN Security Council resolutions.
He called for increased international efforts to make Israel join the NPT, noting that all Middle Eastern countries are parties to the treaty and have established effective safeguard agreements with the IAEA.
Like Iran, you mean? How is that working out for you?
The official further condemned Israel’s aggressive policies toward Palestinians, including calls for the forced displacement of residents of Gaza, blocking humanitarian aid, and intensifying military raids in the occupied West Bank.
[KhaamaPress] The U.S. State Department has issued a travel advisory urging American citizens to reconsider their travel plans to Pakistain due to the rising number of terrorist attacks and armed conflicts in the country.
According to a report by Express Tribune on March 8, the U.S. government has labeled Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... , and several areas along the Pakistain-India border as "threat areas." These regions are at a high risk of armed conflicts and potential terrorist activity, with the likelihood of violence escalating in the near future.
The State Department warned that Lions of Islam might launch attacks without warning, targeting a range of locations such as transportation hubs, shopping centers, military facilities, airports, universities, and places of worship. This widespread threat poses significant risks to both locals and foreign visitors.
The advisory also pointed out that U.S. diplomats and diplomatic areas in Pakistain have been attacked in the past, raising concerns that public places and vehicles in the country are now vulnerable to similar attacks. The increasing threats have prompted the U.S. to advise its citizens to remain alert when traveling in Pakistain.
Pakistain has yet to respond publicly to this heightened travel advisory. However,
death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate... the country has seen a surge in violence in recent months, with both the Baloch Liberation Army in Balochistan and the Tehrik-e-Taliban ...the once and current oppressors of Afghanistan... Pakistain (TTP) in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa continuing to clash with Pak security forces.
The U.S. travel warning underscores the escalating security situation in Pakistain, particularly in regions like Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, which have become the epicenter of armed conflicts and terrorist activities. The government’s focus on these areas highlights the growing instability and the challenges faced by local authorities in maintaining law and order.
The ongoing violence, with groups like the Baloch Liberation Army and TTP intensifying their campaigns against Pak forces, points to a broader security crisis in the country. These conflicts not only jeopardize the safety of civilians but also impact the overall stability of Pakistain.
Worth noting, korrespondent.net has compiled its Invasion of Ukraine series into separate months, beginning May 9th, 2023. Linked in the title.
[Korrespondent] 22.23 Since the beginning of the day, 140 combat clashes have occurred. The enemy carried out 55 air strikes, dropped 68 KABs, carried out 1,239 kamikaze drone strikes and 4,835 shellings of our troops' positions. This was noted in the General Staff report on Sunday, March 9.
20:34 Ukraine has signed a memorandum of cooperation with the manufacturer of IRIS-T systems, the German company Diehl Defence. The agreement envisages an expansion of supplies of missiles and air defense systems. This was reported by the press service of the Ministry of Defense on Sunday, March 9.
The memorandum provides for a three-fold increase in the supply of missiles and air defense systems.
18.34 Russian troops attacked the village of Gorsk in the Snovsk community in Chernihiv region at midday on March 8. A civilian was killed as a result of the shelling. This was reported by the head of the Koryukov RVA Pavel Miroshnichenko.
17.33 Since the beginning of the day, 95 combat clashes have occurred at the front. Our defenders are stopping the enemy, holding the lines and destroying the plans of the Russians. This was reported to the General Staff on Sunday, March 9.
16.19 As a result of an enemy attack on the Zaporizhia region on March 9, a 16-year-old teenager was wounded. This was reported by the head of the Zaporizhia OVA Ivan Fedorov on Sunday, March 9.
15.37 Russian troops have once again struck residential areas of the central part of Kherson, using artillery systems from the temporarily occupied left bank. The enemy also continues to attack civilians with drones. This was reported by the head of the Kherson OVA Roman Mrochko on Sunday, March 9.
As a result of shelling by Russian troops, five civilians were injured. One of the victims suffered a mine blast injury and traumatic amputation of her legs.
14:57 Russian invaders have reduced the pressure in the direction of the city of Pokrovsk thanks to the effective defensive actions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The occupiers are trying to change the tactics of the battles in the Donetsk region. This was stated by the representative of the operational-strategic group of forces Khortytsia Viktor Tregubov on the air of Yediniye Novyny.
13.26 Russia has carried out hundreds of attacks on Ukraine with various types of weapons in a week: more than a thousand bombs and hundreds of drones. This was reported on his Facebook page by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
12:45 One of the victims of the missile strike on Krivoy Rog on March 5 died in hospital on the morning of March 9. This was reported by the head of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Military Administration (OVA) Serhiy Lysak on his Telegram channel.
11.59 A sharp warming in March disrupted the logistics of Russian troops in the Kupyansk direction in the area of the Oskol River. In particular, it complicated the rollback of forces, said Viktor Tregubov, spokesman for the Operational-Tactical Group of Forces (OTGV) Khortitsa, on the air of Yedinye Novyny.
9.58 Starlink is a key factor for the Ukrainian army and without it "the front line would collapse." This was stated by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on the X network (Twitter) and he called for immediate peace after this statement.
9.29 Russian aggressors attacked Ukraine on the night of March 9 with 119 attack UAVs. Of these, 73 were successfully shot down. This was reported by the air force on its Telegram channel.
8.45 Ukrainian defenders hit two Russian drone control points and 18 areas with the occupiers' manpower. Over the past 24 hours, 167 combat clashes occurred on the front in Ukraine. This was reported by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in its morning report, published on March 9.
7.57 Over the past 24 hours, Russian troops have lost 1,180 soldiers and three multiple launch rocket systems in the war with Ukraine. This is evidenced by data from the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, published on March 9.
7.46 Representatives of the Ukrainian underground carried out a successful operation to disrupt fuel supplies to a group of Russian invaders in the Zaporizhia region. The sabotage was carried out in the Dzhankoy district of occupied Crimea, the ATESH partisan movement reported on its Telegram channel.
7.27 The Kremlin is promoting a fake narrative that the EU countries and Ukraine are trying to prolong the war and escalate the situation. Moscow claims that they are trying to prevent Russia from making long-term preparations for war with the West. This is stated in a report by the Institute for the Study of War.
01:00 France said it would provide Ukraine with €195 million in military aid from interest on frozen Russian assets. The funds would be used to supply 155mm artillery shells and AASM air-to-air bombs used by Mirage 2000 fighters. France would also expedite the transfer of AMX-10RC light tanks and VAB armored personnel carriers previously used by the French military.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Korrespondent] In the Seversky direction, the Russians have already carried out 18 attacks, seven of which have already been repelled by Ukrainian soldiers.
The occupiers' units are trying to move forward in the areas of Belogorovka, Verkhnekamenskoye and in the direction of Serebryanka.
Since the beginning of the day, there have been 95 combat clashes on the front. Our defenders are stopping the enemy, holding the lines and destroying the plans of the Russians. This is reported in the General Staff report on Sunday, March 9.
The border areas of Ukrainian settlements suffered from Russian artillery shelling, including Ulanovo, Turya, Svobodnoye in Sumy Oblast; Karpovichi, Yanzhulovka, Tymonovichi and Bleshnya in Chernihiv Oblast.
In the Kharkov direction, the Defense Forces repelled three enemy assaults on troops near Volchansk. In addition, the enemy launched air strikes with guided bombs on the areas of the settlements of Borovaya and Kazachya Lopan.
In the Kupyansk direction, the enemy attempted to advance towards our positions in the areas of Lozovaya, Petrovpavlovka and Zagryzovoye three times during the day.
The aggressor also increased the number of attacks to nine in the Liman direction. Attacked near the settlements of Balka Zhuravka, Novolyubovka, Mirnoye, Ivanovka and Yampolevka, 11 battles are ongoing.
The invaders have become more active in the Seversky direction, having carried out 18 attacks today, seven of which Ukrainian soldiers have already repelled. The occupiers' units are trying to move forward in the areas of Belogorovka, Verkhnekamenskoye and in the direction of Serebryanka.
In the Kramatorsk direction, our defenders are repelling the enemy's attack, three more clashes have already ended, the enemy is conducting active operations in the areas of Chasovy Yar, Grigoryevka and in the direction of Stupochki and Belaya Gora.
In the Toretsk direction, the enemy tried to advance 13 times in the areas of Toretsk, Druzhba and Dachny. Currently, six combat clashes are ongoing.
In the Pokrovsk direction, the enemy initiated clashes of varying intensity 20 times. Our defenders repelled 17 enemy attacks in the areas of the settlements of Elizavetovka, Luch, Dachenskoye, Kotlino, Nadeyevka, Preobrazhenka, Andreyevka and Ulakly. Three more clashes are currently ongoing. Enemy aviation struck Pokrovsk, Nadeyevka, Otradnoye and Zverevoy with UABs.
One attack in the Novopavlovsk direction was repelled by Ukrainian defenders near Skudnoe.
In the Gulyai-Polye direction, in the areas of Novopol and Privolnoye, two combat clashes have now ended, and four more attacks by the invaders are continuing. The settlements of Gulyai-Polye and Shevchenko were subjected to air strikes with UABs and unguided rockets.
In the Orekhov direction, the invaders advanced three times near Stepnoye and Shcherbaki, one battle continues. Novoandreyevka was subjected to NAR strikes.
The enemy did not conduct active offensive operations in the Dnieper direction.
In Kursk region, Ukrainian defenders repelled 15 attacks by the invaders, six combat clashes are still ongoing. In addition, the enemy carried out 12 air strikes, dropping 13 UABs, and also carried out 257 artillery shellings, including ten from a multiple launch rocket system.
While in other areas there were no significant changes in the situation.
Let us recall that over the past 24 hours, Russian troops have lost 1,180 soldiers in the war with Ukraine, as well as three multiple launch rocket systems.
[EngMilRu] The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation continue the special military operation.
In Kharkov direction, units of the Sever Group of Forces hit formations of two motorised infantry brigades of the AFU close to Kazachya Lopan and Volchansk (Kharkov region).
The AFU losses amounted to up to 50 troops, nine motor vehicles, and four artillery guns. One communication station was neutralised.
Units of the Zapad Group of Forces improved the tactical situation. Manpower and hardware of three mechanised brigades and one airmobile brigade of the AFU were hit near Monachinovka, Zagoruykovka, Kondrashovka, Kupyansk, Podvysokoye, Gorokhovatka (Kharkov region), and Serebryansky forestry.
The AFU losses amounted to up to 255 troops, 10 motor vehicles, two Western-made field artillery guns, one Polonez and one Nota electronic warfare stations, and one ammunition depot.
Units of the Yug Group of Forces took more advantageous lines and positions. Formations of three mechanised brigades, one airmobile brigade, one guard brigade of the AFU General Staff, one territorial defence brigade, and two national guard brigades suffered losses close to Shcherbinovka, Rozovka, Dronovka, Druzhkovka, Grigorovka, Dyleyevka, Seversk, and Konstantinovka (Donetsk People's Republic).
The AFU losses amounted to up to 250 troops, one armoured fighting vehicle, three motor vehicles, six field artillery guns, and two materiel depots.
Units of the Tsentr Group of Forces continued advancing to the depth of the enemy's defences. Formations of four mechanised brigades, one assault brigade, two jaeger brigades, one assault regiment of the AFU, two naval infantry brigades, and one national guard brigade were hit close to Ulyanovka, Krasnoarmeysk, Zverevo, Kotlino, Shevchenko, Uspenovka, Udachnoye, Petrovskoye, Novopavlovka, Dimitrov, Mirolyubovka, Alekseyevka, and Sribnoye (Donetsk People's Republic).
The AFU losses amounted to up to 580 troops, two M-113 armoured personnel carriers, and one U.S.-made MaxxPro armoured fighting vehicle, two French-made VAB armoured personnel carriers, four motor vehicles, and four artillery guns.
As a result of active and decisive operations, the Vostok Group of Forces units liberated Konstantinopol (Donetsk People's Republic).
Strikes were delivered at formations of two mechanised brigades, one jaeger brigade, one assault regiment of the AFU, and one naval infantry brigade near Bogatyr, Fedorovka, Veseloye, Voskresenka, Dneproenergiya, and Razliv (Donetsk People's Republic).
The AFU losses amounted to more than 145 troops, one armoured fighting vehicle, one motor vehicle, and three field artillery guns, to include one Polish-made Krab self-propelled artillery system.
The Dnepr Group of Forces' units inflicted fire damage on manpower and hardware of one mechanised brigade and one mountain assault brigade of the AFU near Novonikolayevka, Davydov Brod (Kherson region), Pyatikhatki, and Pavlovka (Zaporozhye region).
Up to 80 troops, one U.S.-made HMMWV armoured fighting vehicle, eight motor vehicles, two field artillery guns, to include one U.S.-made 155mm M-777 howitzer, one U.S.-made HIMARS and one U.S.-made MLRS launchers, one Israeli-made RADA RPS-82 radar station, one electronic warfare station, three ammunition depots, and one materiel depot were eliminated.
Operational-Tactical Aviation, strike drones, Missile Troops and Artillery of the Russian Groups of Forces have engaged clusters of AFU manpower and hardware in 143 areas during the day.
Air defence systems have shot down one JDAM guided bomb, two U.S.-made HIMARS MLRS projectiles as well as 228 fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles, including 99 of them outside the special military operation zone.
In total, since the beginning of the special military operation, 656 aircraft, 283 helicopters, 45,877 unmanned aerial vehicles, 600 anti-aircraft missile systems, 22,090 tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles, 1,525 MLRS combat vehicles, 22,390 field artillery guns and mortars, and 32,630 units of support military vehicles have been neutralised.
The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation continue the operation to neutralise AFU formations on the territory of Kursk region.
The Sever Group of Forces' units liberated Lebedevka (Kursk region) and Novenkoye (Suy region) during the offensive.
The Russian Armed Forces inflicted damage on units of one heavy mechanised brigade, five mechanised brigades, one motorised infantry brigade, one assault brigade, two air assault brigades, two territorial defence brigades, and two assault regiments of the AFU near Agronom, Bogdanovka, Goncharovka, Guyevo, Zaoleshenka, Kazachya Loknya, Pervy Knyazhy, Vtoroy Knyazhy, Kositsa, Loknya, Malaya Loknya, Makhnovka, Rubanshchina, Sudzha, Cherkasskaya Konopelka, Cherkasskoye Porechnoye, and Yuzhny. Two counter-attacks were repelled.
Operational-Tactical and Army aviation and artillery inflicted fire damage on AFU manpower and hardware close to Bondarevka, Pervy Knyazhy, Kubatkin, Kurilovka, Lebedevka, Martynovka, Mirny as well as Basovka, Belovody, Zhuravka, Miropolye, Novenkoye, Obody, Yunakovka, and Yablonovka (Sumy region).
Within the past 24 hours, AFU losses amounted to more than 350 troops, one tank, two infantry fighting vehicles, five armoured personnel carriers, 19 armoured fighting vehicles, 29 motor vehicles, six field artillery guns, one mortar, one electronic warfare station, one Israeli-made RADA radar station, 11 UAV command posts, and one ammunition depot. Six AFU servicemen surrendered.
Since the beginning of hostilities in Kursk direction, the AFU losses amounted to more than 65,930 troops, 387 tanks, 300 infantry fighting vehicles, 264 armoured personnel carriers, 2,163 armoured fighting vehicles, 2,370 motor vehicles, 528 artillery guns, 52 MLRS launchers, including 13 of HIMARS and seven of MLRS made by the USA, 25 anti-aircraft missile launchers, one self-propelled anti-aircraft system, ten transport-loading vehicles, 120 EW stations, 15 counter-battery warfare radars, ten air defence radars, 54 units of engineering and other materiel, including 22 counterobstacle vehicles, one UR-77 mine clearing vehicle, five bridge launchers, one engineering reconnaissance vehicle as well as 14 armoured recovery vehicles, and one command post vehicle.
The operation to neutralise the AFU units is in progress
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[NewsFront] 19:40 The Russian army has liberated the village of Martynovka in the Kursk region, the cleanup is ending, –MAP. 18:42 Around 17.30 Moscow time, air defense systems on duty destroyed Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle over the territory of the Belgorod region.
17:43 Around 16:50 Moscow time by air defense systems on duty destroyed Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle over the territory of the Belgorod region.
17:31 Governor of the Kherson region Volodymyr Saldo reported, that the enemy fired from the HIMARS MLRS at the market in Velyki Kopani. There are dead and wounded among civilians.
16:55 Around 16:05 Moscow time by air defense systems on duty destroyed Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle over the territory of the Belgorod region.
15:30 The Russian flag is raised over Constantinpol in the DPR.
The servicemen of the assault units of the "East" group of forces carried out a mop up and consolidated their positions in the village. Strike drones and artillery were deployed to support the assault units and destroy enemy positions.
14:35 FPV drone crews of the North group of forces destroyed a pickup truck and an ATV of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Khar'kov region, –video.
13:40 In the Sudzhansky district, under the blows of our troops, Ukrainian soldiers left their positions in the Kubatin farm and are running for Ivashkovsky, our fighters are working on the fleeing militants, -video.
13:10 Units of the "East" group of forces, as a result of active and decisive actions released the settlement of Constantinpol in the Donetsk People's Republic.
12:48 During aerial reconnaissance, the crew of the Merlin-VR UAV revealed an accumulation of camouflaged enemy equipment and shelters.
The detected targets were destroyed by precise artillery strikes from the 25th Combined Arms Army of the West Forces Group.
12:05 During offensive operations, units of the North military group liberated the village of Lebedevka in the Kursk region and the village of Novenkoye in the Sumy region.
Over the past 24 hours, the Ukrainian Armed Forces lost more than 350 servicemen, one tank, one mortar, two infantry fighting vehicles, five armored personnel carriers, 19 armored combat vehicles, 29 cars, six field artillery guns, an electronic warfare station, a RADA radar station, as well as 11 unmanned aerial vehicle control points and an ammunition depot in the Kursk direction.
11:30 Ukrainian Armed Forces militants en masse surrendered on the Kursk front
Stormtroopers of the 30th Motorized Rifle Regiment captured 13 militants of the "elite" 80th Lviv Airborne Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in battles in the area of Cherkassky Porechny in the Kursk region.
11:26 Information is received that on March 8, 2025, servicemen of the 51st Airborne Regiment were released from the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the settlement of Lebedevka in the Kursk region.
11:20 Personnel of the engineering and sapper unit of the North group of forces liquidated remnants of unexploded submunitions, explosive objects and shells discovered during work in the Khar'kov direction.
10:10 Frontline report for the morning of 03/09/2025
Zaporizhzhya Front. Active fighting in several areascontinuesremain above average, but there have been no reports of any major advances.
Donetsk Front. Heavy fighting continues here in several directions. Russian troops continue to develop the offensive in the direction of Bogatyr and Razliv. The Ukrainian Armed Forces are putting up fierce resistance, holding the line, but have not yet decided on serious counterattacks.
In Constantinpol, the Russian Armed Forces are fighting for the western outskirts of the settlement. Fierce fighting continues in several areas in the Pokrovsk direction. The Ukrainian Armed Forces are pulling their most combat-ready units here, conducting counterattacks.
Chasovoyarskoe direction. Russian troops continue assault operations in the western part of the city. No serious changes in the LBS are known. Long-range weapons are actively working on both sides.
Kursk Region. Here, Russian troops have entered the final stage of liberating Sudzha. They are attacking from several directions, the Russian Armed Forces are putting pressure on the defense of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
The Ukrainians are pulling back closer to Sudzha, trying to withdraw the most combat-ready units. But this cannot yet be called a flight, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are holding the defense, putting up fierce resistance. There are tactical successes of the Russian Armed Forces in Malaya Loknya, from where Ukrainian troops are moving in the direction of Kazachya Loknya.
The Russian flag has been raised over the settlement of Cherkasskoye Porechnoye. Fierce fighting in Martynovka. In Samaya Sudzha, the Russian Armed Forces defeated a column of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
9:01 Ukrainian soldiers fired upon civil infrastructure of Nova Kakhovka
As a result of the shelling, a fire broke out in a residential building. Gas supply to houses on Nekrasov Street, 3, 5, 7 was cut off
8:42 In the period from 20:00 Moscow time on March 8 to 07:00 Moscow time on March 9, air defense systems on duty intercepted and destroyed 88 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles :
52 UAVs over the territory of the Belgorod region,
13 UAVs over the territory of the Lipetsk region,
Nine UAVs over the territory of the Rostov region,
Eight UAVs over the territory of the Voronezh region,
Three UAVs over the territory of the Astrakhan region and
one UAV each over the territories of the Krasnodar region, Ryazan and Kursk regions.
8:05 Footage of brutal mobilization in Ukraine is spreading online, –video.
7:30 Information is received about the destruction of a column of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the western part of Sudzha, –video.
1:10 Kursk region. Assault on Sudzha. 09.03
Armed Forces of Ukraine lost supply trucks heading to help the military in Sudzha
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] Fierce fighting has broken out between Syrian security forces and supporters of former President Bashar al-Assad in the suburbs of the Syrian port city of Latakia. This was reported on March 9 by the Al Ikhbariya TV channel.
"Heavy clashes are taking place around the village of Batanita on the outskirts of Latakia, where many war criminals from the former Assad regime and the armed groups who protected them have fled," the statement said.
The new leader of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, called the events one of the expected challenges. He called for maintaining unity and peace, noting that the country has the "potential for survival."
As reported by the Regnum news agency, on December 8, 2024, Assad resigned as president of Syria and left the country after the successful offensive of armed opposition groups on Damascus. He received political asylum in Russia. Al-Sharaa became the head of the interim government.
On March 7, clashes broke out in Latakia between Assad supporters and forces of the new government. Clashes also began in Tartus province. The republic's authorities sent troops into these regions.
According to the Kurdish television channel Rudaw, as of March 8, at least 532 civilians have been killed in armed clashes in Syria. It is also reported that 93 members of the security forces and 120 fighters from among the former president's supporters have been killed.
In addition, fighting broke out in the port city of Baniyas in Tartus province on March 9. According to the Syrian state news agency SANA, Assad supporters attacked a gas power plant in an attempt to destroy the city's energy infrastructure, and government forces are trying to retake the facility.
Fighting Clashes Begin at Baniyas Gas Power Plant in Syria Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] Clashes between supporters of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and forces of the country's new government began at a gas power plant in the port city of Baniyas in Tartus province. This was reported on March 9 by the Syrian state agency SANA.
Pro-Assad militias are said to have attacked the plant in an attempt to destroy the city's energy infrastructure, while security forces loyal to the interim government are trying to retake the plant.
Baniyas is a city and port on the western coast of Syria, located between Latakia and Tartus. It is an important center for the gas and oil industry in the Damascus-controlled areas.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, on March 6, clashes occurred in Latakia between Assad supporters and forces of the new Syrian government. As a result of the unrest, a curfew was imposed in the province. Later, units of the Syrian army loyal to the new government entered the city.
Kurdish television channel Rudaw reported on March 8 that at least 532 civilians were killed in armed clashes in the provinces of Latakia, Tartus and Homs. It specified that most of the dead belonged to the Alawite community.
The new head of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, called on armed groups of Assad supporters in the provinces of Latakia and Tartus to lay down their arms.
On March 7, the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, noted that Russia is alarmed by the sharp aggravation of the situation in Syria. The diplomat added that in the conditions of the transition period that Syria is currently experiencing, national accord, strengthening the security of citizens, and respect for their legal rights regardless of religious or national affiliation are of primary importance.
On December 8, 2024, Assad resigned as President of Syria and fled the country after a large-scale offensive by armed opposition groups on Damascus. He received political asylum in Russia. Ahmed al-Sharaa became the head of the interim government.
In a video speech, Sharaa says "remnants of the former regime" have no choice but to surrender immediately.
An ambush on a Syrian security patrol by button men loyal to ousted leader Bashir Pencilneck al-Assad One of the last of the old-fashioned hereditary iron-fisted fascist dictators... Thursday has escalated into festivities that a war monitor estimates have killed more than 1,000 people over four days, amid claims of mass executions and a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Sharaa says those who attacked civilians will be held responsible, following intense international outcry.
In its latest toll, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor says 830 Alawite non-combatants were killed in "executions" carried out by security personnel or pro-government fighters in the coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus.
The fighting, which is ongoing, has also killed 231 members of the security forces and 250 pro-Assad fighters, according to the Observatory, taking the overall corpse count to 1,311.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Leonid Tsukanov
[REGNUM] The Israeli high command continues to undergo changes caused by the conflict in the Gaza Strip. Recently, Eyal Zamir replaced the Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Herzi Halevi, who resigned under public pressure.
"Tank General," as Zamir's opponents nicknamed him (referring to his many years of service in the armored forces, his general inflexibility and intractability), appeared at the General Staff at the right time. Tel Aviv-Hamas talks have reached a dead end, and the parliamentary "opposition of the generals" is persistently trying to blame the current cabinet for the failures. The US is looking for a balance between pressure on the enclave and cautious diplomacy.
Against this background, the new appointment in the General Staff shows that the Israeli government is ready to continue the confrontation with Hamas and is doing everything to ensure that the new operation proceeds without delay.
SUITABLE CANDIDATE
Zamir's biography is fully in line with the "spirit of the times". He is a second-generation career soldier; his grandfather fought in the ranks of the underground organization "Etzel" against the Arab-British forces in Palestine.
In addition, the future Chief of the General Staff himself fought against Hezbollah and Palestinian forces for many years and is familiar with the tactics of his opponents first-hand. As commander of the Saar mi-Golan armored brigade, he contributed to the isolation of the Gaza Strip, for which he earned a place on the list of "eternal enemies of Hamas."
In addition, the new Chief of General Staff has the advantage of having strong ties to American politicians and industrialists. Since the beginning of the conflict in Gaza, Zamir has overseen the procurement of weapons for the IDF's operational needs from the United States, and has also participated in coordinating US financial aid packages for Israel for defense purposes. He played a significant role in increasing the American "weapons ration" and lifting restrictions on the supply of MK-84 heavy aerial bombs to Tel Aviv.
It would be difficult to find a more suitable candidate among the career military to emphasize the readiness of the Israeli authorities to fight the Hamas threat “until victory.”
CLEANING UP THE GENERAL STAFF
Zamir's appointment as Chief of Staff not only serves practical purposes, but is also intended to strengthen the Israeli government's shaky influence over the army. It is no secret that Zamir has close ties to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and fully shares his views on fighting Israel's internal and external enemies.
Back in 2022, it was assumed that Zamir would take the post of Chief of General Staff - the Israeli Prime Minister had been insisting on this for quite some time. However, in order not to upset the balance of power in the coalition, he was forced to give in to then Defense Minister Benny Gantz and agree on the candidates he proposed for the Chief of General Staff and his deputies.
This later resulted in constant attempts by Gantz and his protégés in the General Staff and parliament to impose their own vision of the operation in Gaza on the prime minister’s office.
After Gantz left the military cabinet in July 2024, Netanyahu considered his obligations to his former ally completely exhausted. In this regard, it is not surprising that other candidates for the high post - Generals Amir Baram and Tamir Yadai, who were considered ideologically close to Ha-Levi and other opposition-minded military leaders (the so-called "generals' opposition") - were not appointed.
In fact, Netanyahu managed to “cleanse” the General Staff of opponents of continuing the armed struggle against Hamas, or at least push them out of decision-making.
Without a connection with those who are fighting Hamas “on the ground,” the claims of the retired members of parliament, led by Gantz, no longer sound so confident.
"LESSONS OF WAR"
The very first press conference of the "Tank General" only emphasized the upcoming changes within the Israeli armed forces. Zamir unambiguously called 2025 "the year of war with Hamas and Iran" and announced large-scale reforms in the troops.
Among other things, they decided to disband “due to low efficiency” the Department of Strategy and Iran, created by their predecessors and responsible for developing operations against Iranian proxy formations throughout the Middle East.
Along the way, the new Chief of Staff plans to form at least one new infantry and tank brigade, as well as to bring back into service the previously disbanded reconnaissance units within the armored forces (Palsari). The return of the Palsari, according to Zamir, is dictated by the "lessons of war", since most of the IDF's armored losses in Gaza occurred precisely because of weak reconnaissance.
Moreover, the initiated reshuffles among the generals, in particular the appointment of "hawks" Yaniv Asor and Itzik Cohen to the posts of commander of the Southern Command and head of the operations department, respectively, indicate that "Tank General" intends to impose a more aggressive and assertive strategy of action on the army. Both officers are known as opponents of any agreement on Gaza other than the capitulation of Hamas.
Another important step was the intention to completely revise the investigations into the "October 7 catastrophe" prepared by Ha-Levi and his subordinates. The IDF's February report, which blamed the government for military miscalculations in the initial stages of the conflict with Hamas, was declared invalid.
The new commission, the convening of which Zamir has already announced, will include high-ranking retired officials, equally distant from both Netanyahu and the key figures of the “generals’ opposition,” which will make it possible to smooth over the political component of the investigation or at least not bring it into the public arena.
TWO WAYS
So far, the course of the new Chief of Staff completely coincides with the American vision of the situation in Gaza: US President Donald Trump supports Israel’s plans to act more harshly towards Hamas and issues ultimatum after ultimatum to Gaza.
However, in parallel, the White House has entered into direct negotiations with the movement outside the existing formats. This turn of events is causing concern in Tel Aviv, no matter how much Washington prefers diplomatic means to force. Especially in conditions when its other regional allies are categorically against a tough scenario.
However, Netanyahu has taken precautions against this eventuality as well. The Israeli army is gathering strength for a decisive attack. And even in the event of a “disengagement” with the US, Zamir’s connections should help maintain the previous volumes of military supplies for some time and provide fuel for the blitzkrieg in Gaza.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] On the morning of March 9, a weak magnetic storm began in the Earth's ionosphere. This was reported by specialists from the Solar Astronomy Laboratory of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IKI RAS) and the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics SB RAS.
According to the data on the laboratory's website, the Earth was caught in a stream of fast and dense solar wind from another coronal hole on the Sun on the evening of March 8. As a result, at about 06:00 Moscow time on March 9, the level of disturbances in our planet's magnetosphere reached 5 units, i.e. a weak magnetic storm of class G1.
The end of the magnetic storm is predicted by 12:00 Moscow time.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, on March 5, scientists from the Institute of Applied Geophysics (IPG) recorded a powerful M-class flare on the Sun that lasted for nine minutes. It was noted that the solar activity is assessed by scientists as moderate.
Earlier, on February 28, the Sun ejected its largest plasma cloud since the beginning of the year. It occurred on the side opposite to Earth, and therefore did not pose a threat to the planet.
Solar activity can also lead to magnetic storms on Earth, which was last recorded on March 4. The phenomenon was observed for two days.
Sucking up to the Moslem colonists, of course. But the Tories did nothing about it when they were in charge, so it’s hard to take their current umbrage seriously.
[FoxNews] UK PM's office doesn't explain opposition to bill, says 'of course we do not want people to enter in cousin marriages'
A former British Conservative minister and current MP renewed his push in Parliament last week for legislation that bans first-cousin marriage, prompting opposition from the ruling Labour party, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and a British-Muslim MP.
The Conservative MP Richard Holden said during a parliamentary debate, "A marriage between first cousins carries significant health issues, many of which aren't even knowable until post-birth." He added, "When practiced generation after generation, there is a significant multiplier effect."
Adverse health effects on the children of first cousin marriages have been established in medical research. Holden added that "the real impacts on the openness of our society and women’s rights in our country are significant. After all, there are significant dynamics in sharing the same set of grandparents."
Holden urged Starmer to "think again" about blocking his legislation from moving forward. Starmer responded to Holden, stating "We've taken our position on that Bill, thank you."
The Daily Mail reported that nearly 46% of females from the Pakistani community in Bradford, England had a "common ancestor," according to a 2024 study. A government study showed that the number was at 62% 10 years earlier.
While the prime minister's office did not say why they are against the bill's codification into law, a spokesman for Starmer told Fox News Digital, "Expert advice risks on first-cousin marriages are clear. In terms of legislation and what the government set up in the King’s Speech after the election, so of course we do not want people to enter in cousin marriages."
He continued, "We are focused on making sure every part of the government is focused on delivering on issues that matter to the British public. We set out our legislative priorities in the King’s Speech."
Given the large influx of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa to Scandinavian countries, the BBC reported that Norway has banned cousin marriage while a ban is expected to come into effect in Sweden next year.
The failure to codify a ban on interfamily marriage among first cousins has outraged many prominent conservative voices in the United Kingdom.
Ben Habib, chairman of the Great British Political Action Committee, told Fox News Digital, "Liberalism in the U.K. is out of control. In the pursuit of allowing people to do whatever they like, sanity is being set aside. It matters not whether that which you wish to do is deeply damaging. If you’re a minority, you have a protective blanket put around you and encouraged to continue."
[FoxNews] Prince Frederik of Luxembourg, the son of Prince Robert of Luxembourg and Princess Julie of Nassau, has died at the age of 22.
Prince Robert shared the news in a statement on the website for the POLG Foundation, an organization started by Frederik to help with treatments and a cure for the illness.
Frederik was born with PolG mitochondrial disease, a rare genetic condition.
[ShabelleMedia] A significant contingent of Æthiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) troops have been stationed near the border town of Ferfer, close to Æthiopia’s frontier with Somalia, military sources reported Saturday.
The deployment comes amid heightened tensions as the troops prepare to support operations against an ongoing al-Shabaab ... the personification of Somali state failure... offensive in Somalia’s Hiran and Middle Shabelle regions.
The murderous Moslem group al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda affiliate, has intensified attacks in central Somalia in recent weeks, prompting concerns over regional security.
Æthiopian forces, which have a history of involvement in Somalia to combat the insurgency, are expected to bolster Somali National Army efforts in the affected areas.
The strategic positioning near Ferfer suggests a potential cross-border operation to stem the murderous Moslems’ advance.
Æthiopian officials have not yet commented on the scale or timeline of the deployment. The move follows reports of al-Shabaab recapturing territory in Middle Shabelle, reversing earlier gains by Somali government forces.
Regional analysts say Æthiopia’s involvement could be critical in stabilizing the volatile Hiran and Middle Shabelle provinces, though it may also heighten tensions with Somalia amid ongoing diplomatic disputes.
The situation remains fluid, with further developments anticipated as Æthiopian troops mobilize to address the growing threat.
[NYPOST] A mob of trans rights activists are repeatedly hijacking community education council meetings in Manhattan — and even danced the ''Macarena'' last week to disrupt a meeting and protest those opposed to boys playing girls' sports.
The group of about 100 demonstrators descended on the monthly meeting of the Community Education Council for District, interrupting, heckling and blowing bubbles throughout, with one person rushing the stage and plopping down at the members' dais.
When attendee Jo Vitale spoke on behalf of female athletes during the public comment portion of the meeting, the group stood up and silently — and awkwardly — danced the ''Macarena,'' many out of step with the '90s dance hit.
''I am here to speak up for the female athletes who are intimidated by this nonsense that is occurring behind me, all the dancing and the buffoonery,'' Vitale said as the dancers, many of whom were masked, danced slow-motion in silence.
The group has been protesting at nearly every CEC 2 meeting for the last year, ever since the advisory board passed Resolution 248 calling for the city Department of Education to review its policy that allows students to play on teams according to the gender they identify with.
The demonstrations have gotten increasingly disruptive, with the trans activists, most of whom do not have kids in District 2 public schools, rallying beforehand and bringing doughnuts.
One of the main organizers is trans teacher Alaina Daniels, who runs an after school program for LGBTQ kids called Trans Formative Schools, and is trying to open a ''trans middle school,'' according to her website.
The group held a ''strategy and tactics briefing'' last week and then urged supporters to attend the CEC 2 meeting. ''Wear pink, blue, and/or white!'' it said in an Instagram post, referring to the colors of the trans flag.
''Your physical presence makes the biggest impact,'' it added.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Mikhail Kucherov
[REGNUM] Spring 1945. Continuous fighting is going on in the streets of a ruined German city. Sixty-year-old men in hats and civilian coats and young men who barely know how to handle weapons are hiding in the ruins. In their hands are Faustpatrone, aimed at the approaching Soviet tanks.
This picture was typical of the last months of the war - Adolf Hitler tried to mobilize the civilian population to fight the Red Army, which was inexorably advancing on the lair of the Reich. But there was no turning point: the "people's storm" (as the German word Volkssturm can be literally translated) did not prevent the defeat of Nazi Germany.
The idea of creating a "people's militia" was not new for the Germans - back in the years of the Liberation War against Napoleon, the Prussian General Gerhardt von Scharnhorst rallied local residents to fight the French. Towards the end of World War II, this was remembered by the radicals from Hitler's circle - Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann, who began to call on the Fuhrer to turn to the force that brought him to power. It worked - on September 25, 1944, the Fuhrer issued a decree on the mobilization of all men aged 16 to 60.
The new units were not led by the military, but by the National Socialist Party – the NSDAP had access to a contingent that was larger in number than the army. Germany’s “war economy” employed 13.5 million men, while the Wehrmacht had 11.2 million servicemen. The party had to organize these people, train them, and send them to the “war of liberation.”
But the conscription was not limited to men. Soon women from 18 to 55 years old began to be recruited into the Volkssturm, and in the last months of the war the Nazis no longer shunned sending children to the front.
There were no written orders on this matter, but it is known that teenagers from the Jungvolk, a division of the Hitler Youth that included children aged 10–14, were taken to the front. “The Volkssturm will include those who can already walk and those who can still walk,” was a well-known joke at the time.
Somewhat reminiscent of modern Ukrainian practice. Thus, on March 5, it became known that the Verkhovna Rada is developing a bill providing for the registration of teenagers for military service from the age of 14. On the other hand, all men under 60 are required to have a military ID with them - so elderly men are at risk of getting into another wave of mobilization (in the form of " busification "). The fact that Volodymyr Zelensky is considering the possibility of mobilizing men over 60 into the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was reported in August last year.
But whether total mobilization for the sake of total war will help the Kyiv regime is a big question. It did not help the Berlin regime. Although, unlike modern Ukraine, fanatically motivated children and old people went to defend the Reich in its last months and days.
"OUR WALLS, BUT NOT OUR HEARTS"
In total, according to various estimates, the German leadership managed to mobilize from 6 to 8 million people into these units.
Although the Volkssturm were formed by the NSDAP, the army soon began to take over the reins of power, training new recruits and incorporating them into its city defense plans. The militias were classified as combatants and took a short but bravado-filled oath to Hitler:
"I give this sacred oath before God that I will be unquestioningly loyal and obedient to the Great German Empire, to Adolf Hitler. I solemnly promise that I will fight bravely for my homeland and would rather die than give up my freedom and thereby abandon the social future of my people to the mercy of fate."
But gathering people is one thing. But what to equip them with? Here, things were not the best. The militia wore black-red-white armbands "Deutscher Volkssturm Wehrmacht", but there was no single uniform, so many went into the attack either in civilian clothes or, if they belonged to these organizations, in the uniform of the SS and NSDAP, often already outdated. There were also very exotic cases when Volkssturm fighters put on the uniform of the First World War.
There was also a problem with small arms. The German Mauser 98k carbine, a good unit by the standards of that era, was a great rarity for the militia. They were issued captured Soviet, Belgian, Danish and Italian rifles. Often among them were versions from the late 19th century: for example, the Italian Carcano M1891.
German concerns tried to quickly make "popular" models from cheap raw materials, but the quality of these weapons was poor, and the "submachine guns" were unsuccessful copies of the British STEN. Many "developments" remained on paper. The only weapon that was in abundance was the anti-tank grenade launcher "Panzerfaust", also known as the "Faustpatrone".
In these conditions, the emphasis in training units was on the same ideological work. In words, the Reich leadership placed great hopes on the Volkssturm - Bormann believed that they would fight with the same zeal as the Japanese: until the last bullet and breath. Therefore, the militias were fed in every possible way with propaganda slogans in the spirit of "We will not repeat 1918! They can destroy our walls, but not our hearts."
The megaphones were issuing calls to urgently stop the “Bolshevik inhumans” and “steppe barbarians” who would allegedly cruelly take revenge for the atrocities of the Nazis in the East.
"I LOOKED, BLINKED AND CRIED"
We know what this “revenge” turned out to be from the memoirs of the commander of the naval infantry reconnaissance unit, Albina Gantimurova, who lived through the end of the war on German territory:
"A boy with a machine gun ran out to meet me - a Volkssturm. And I had my machine gun at the ready and my hand on the gun. He looked at me, blinked and started crying. I looked at him and started crying with him - I felt so sorry for him, this kid standing there with this stupid machine gun. And I push him towards a ruined building, into a gateway. And he got scared that I would shoot him now: I had a hat on my head, you can't see whether I'm a girl or a guy. He grabbed my hand, and his hat flew off, I stroked his head."
In reality, the militias were used to cover the regular troops. For example, on April 6, 1945, a few hours before the final assault on Königsberg, the Germans evacuated 10,000 lightly wounded soldiers from the city fortress by train. Civilians, many of whom were drafted into the Volkssturm, did not have this opportunity.
They were not told about the impending offensive of the Red Army, which is why the garrison had to experience all the horrors of the "total war". There were many more victims among the civilians defending the Königsberg castle than among the military. This was also facilitated by the activities of military courts: those who left their positions were shot on the spot.
“The total number of troops subordinate to me, together with the Volkssturm and police units, amounted to more than 100 thousand people... We lost the entire 100 thousand-strong army near Königsberg,” General Otto Lasch, commander of the group located in the city, later said.
The Red Army soldiers considered the Volkssturmists fanatics, ready to attack tanks alone at the cost of their lives. According to the memoirs of artilleryman Grigory Sukhorukov, on the approaches to Berlin the Germans turned every old house into fortifications:
"In one populated area, a shooter who climbed into the attic started a duel with a tank. He kept shooting until he was destroyed along with the attic. Someone climbed up to see who the daredevil was. It turned out to be a guy of about 16-17 years old."
Some militiamen turned out to be good fighters - among them was Ernst Tiburczi, who destroyed five, and according to other sources, nine Soviet tanks in Königsberg in one battle using a grenade launcher. He was given a rare award: the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. But this is a big exception to the rule. Usually, the Volkssturm members left to provide cover fled after the retreating regular units, and the level of losses in the ranks reached a monstrous 70 - 80%. After the victory, more than one million "militia" fighters were captured.
That is, the Volkssturm were not partisans ready to fight to the last, but hastily assembled units of yesterday's teachers, engineers, doctors or schoolchildren accustomed to playing football, and not to carrying a rifle or a Faustpatrone in their hands. Most of the people called up to these ranks nevertheless understood that they were being led into an unequal battle with the Red Army units, hardened by hard battles.
However, the regime, which was losing the war but did not want to admit its defeat, had no other choice. It had to throw its last depleted reserves into battle - even if they were "ideologically charged" and even capable of causing harm to the advancing Soviet troops and the armies of the allies with their last strength. The Kyiv regime, judging by the news from the Ukrainian streets, does not have its own "boys from the Hitler Youth". So it has to rely on pure coercion - the last police-dictatorial argument, which can be neither effective nor long-term.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] The opinion that Russian Emperor Alexander III said the phrase "Russia has only two allies - its army and navy" is a common myth; in reality, he did not say this. This was stated on March 9 by Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor Kirill Solovyov.
He noted that there are no reliable sources that would confirm the authorship of this saying. The belief began after the publication of the memoirs of the Emperor's son-in-law, Prince Alexander Mikhailovich. These memoirs contain many inaccuracies, and there are no other references to the winged aphorism.
“There is no doubt that if the Russian emperor had ever publicly uttered this bright and unusual phrase, many at court would have remembered it and immediately picked it up,” Solovyov said in a conversation with Lenta.ru.
According to the scientist, the popular expression appeared based on the greeting of Alexander III when he met with Montenegrin Prince Nikola I. The Emperor then called him the only ally of Russia outside its borders. Since Montenegro was not an influential state, the phrase actually said that Russia had no allies.
“It seems to me that Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich simply slightly rephrased this phrase to make it sound more effective,” Solovyov suggested.
Earlier, candidate of historical sciences, specialist in the study of the Patriotic War of 1812 Lidiya Ivchenko in an interview with the Regnum news agency stated that Russia stopped the Western crusade during the Battle of Borodino. She noted that it was not the French army, but the pan-European army that actually invaded Russian territory. Napoleon, who led it, spoke directly about plans to stop the "destructive influence of Russia" on Europe.
[Rudaw] A Kurdish politician on Saturday said that more than 600 settler families have left Afrin, while 400 Kurdish families have returned to their homes.
"The percentage of Kurds in Afrin and its countryside has increased, while the percentage of [settled] Arabs has decreased," Ahmed Hassan told Rudaw. He is the head of the local council for the Kurdish National Council (ENKS/KNC) - a coalition of Kurdish political parties that is considered the main opposition in northeast Syria (Rojava).
"Some villages in Afrin have been completely emptied of displaced Arabs who had settled there," he added.
In 2018, The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the decaying remnant of the Ottoman Empire... and its allied Syrian militias seized control of Afrin, a Kurdish enclave in northwest Syria. Thousands of Kurds fled, many moving to the nearby Shahba region and families displaced from elsewhere in Syria moved into Afrin.
International organizations have recorded numerous human rights One man's rights are another man's existential threat. violations against Afrin’s Kurdish population since 2018, including killings, kidnappings, looting of agricultural crops, cutting down olive trees, and imposing taxes on farmers.
Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa visited Afrin in mid-February, and met with locals, the majority of whom were Kurds. He pledged to remove gangs and put an end to the violations, a representative from ENKS who attended the meeting told Rudaw.
Hassan confirmed that the general security forces under the Syrian government in Damascus are present in the center of Afrin, while armed factions still control several other districts.
"The general security forces have informed residents of these districts that within 15-20 days, they will extend their control there as well, and no armed factions will remain. Residents should be able to return safely," he said.
He added that the situation in Afrin "has significantly improved compared to previous years" and that the return of property to its original owners "is being resolved within a matter of days."
"Armed factions are no longer interfering, and their presence is now limited to only a few areas," he said.
Kurds returning to Afrin are no longer subjected to imprisonment or forced to pay levies. Displaced families returning to their homes had been forced to pay fees, ranging from $1,000 to $1,500.
[NYPOST] Two murder suspects who allegedly killed a good Samaritan in Los Angeles County while he was attempting to stop them from stealing his neighbor's catalytic converter were in the country illegally and have lengthy criminal records, Fox News has learned.
Wilber Alberto Rabanales and Jose Christian Saravia Sanchez were arrested by police in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood Thursday for the Feb. 25 murder of Juan Miguel Sanchez.
The incident was caught on surveillance video.
Rabanales, a Guatemalan national, has been arrested at least 15 times in the last few years in the county, predominantly on gun charges, grand theft, burglary and drug charges, police sources told Fox News.
He has multiple grand theft arrests, mostly for stealing catalytic converters, and past charges for multiple DUIs, conspiracy, felon in possession of a gun, possession of burglary tools, possession of meth, possession of stolen property and felony hit-and-run during a police pursuit.
Sanchez has been arrested at least a dozen times, mostly for grand theft, gun charges, drugs, burglary, kidnapping, possession of meth and possession of burglary tools, the sources said.
Fox News Digital has reached out to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The victim was shot in the chest after he confronted the suspects while they were allegedly attempting to steal the catalytic converter, FOX 11 reported.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/10/2025
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[NYPOST] President Trump is giving this anti-Israel campus rabble-rouser a ticket to study abroad — for good.
A Paleostinian activist who led a coalition of twisted forces of Evil seeking the ''total eradication of Western Civilization'' responsible for riotous protests at Columbia University and Barnard College has been arrested by ICE agents, according to his lawyer.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest leader Mahmoud Khalil, who completed his graduate studies at Ivy League Columbia in December, also potentially faces having his visa revoked and his green card canceled following President Trump's crackdown on unrest at colleges, attorney Amy Greer said Sunday.
He also has an American wife who is eight months pregnant. It will be interesting to see if she follows him into exile after he is expelled from the country. It will also be interesting to see where his connections lead — internationally to Iran, Hamas, and/or Communist China, domestically beyond the protest organization he leads at Columbia to Muslim Brotherhood and other jihadi organizations, to Antifa/Black Bloc groups, and of course to the Progressive NGO financing network. And his wife’s connections — is she also an “activist” or is she a dupe married just for the green card that marriage provides?
He was inside his university-owned apartment a few blocks from campus Saturday night when ICE agents entered the residence and took him into custody, Greer said.
Despite graduating months ago, Khalil, who earned his undergraduate degree in Beirut, still lived in school-provided housing due to a policy allowing students to remain on campus after graduating, a source told The Post.
He has remained active in recent disruptive protests, including last week's takeover of the Milstein Library at Barnard College. Videos and photographs posted on X depict him holding a bullhorn near the library entrance and engaged in discussion with school administrators.
That protest featured violent mostly peaceful propaganda flyers that purportedly came directly from the ''Hamas ..a regional Iranian catspaw,... Media Office,'' including one pamphlet titled ''Our Narrative— Operation al-Aqsa Flood,'' which justified the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people — and in which women were repeatedly raped, whole families were executed and 251 hostages were taken to the Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... Strip.
Others at the Barnard library takeover passed around trading card-like photos of notorious Hezbollah leader His Eminence Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah ...The late, lamented satrap of the Medes and the Persians in Leb...> , who was killed by an Israeli Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... in Leb ...The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. Only one of those statements is an exaggeration.... last September.
Ari Shrage, head of Columbia's Jewish Alumni Association, told The Post he was dismayed and concerned to see the literature that was being distributed.
''These protesters were handing out materials from terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah. Every American citizen should be concerned when students are encouraging terrorist activities on US soil regardless of their nationality.''
Khalil is being held in ICE custody, with some reports saying he is at the Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility in New Jersey, although his location is not confirmed.
"We have not been able to get any more details about why he is being detained," Greer told the AP. "This is a clear escalation. The administration is following through on its threats."
WHO IS MAHMOUD KHALIL?
Khalil finished his graduate studies at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) in December 2024. Prior to attending Columbia, he received a Bachelor of Science in computer science from the Lebanese American University, according to the Society for International Development (SID).
A profile of him on SID states that he has worked for the Syria Office in the British Embassy in Beirut and Jusoor, a Syrian American educational nonprofit.
Prior to his arrest, the Palestinian activist told AP last week, "I have around 13 allegations against me, most of them are social media posts that I had nothing to do with."
The allegations are from the university's newly created Office of Institutional Equity, which has sent dozens of notices to students who have participated in a range of activities in support of Palestinians, according to the AP. Khalil has been accused of organizing an event that glorified Hamas' October 7 attack. The U.S. recognizes Hamas as a terror organization.
Khalil is now being held at a detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Greer told the AP, which reports federal agents have refused to tell the activist’s pregnant wife whether Khalil has been charged with a crime.
Khalil was born in Syria, according to the record of his detention on ICE’s website, and served as a key negotiator between students and university officials regarding the end of protesters’ tent encampment on Columbia’s campus last year, with the AP noting he was one of only a few students involved with the protests who publicly shared their name and identity.
Greer said the firm filed a habeas corpus petition overnight on "Mahmoud’s behalf challenging the validity of his arrest and detention."
"Currently, we do not know Mahmoud’s precise whereabouts. Initially, we were informed this morning that he had been transferred to an ICE facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey," Greer added.
"However, when his wife – a U.S. citizen who is eight months’ pregnant and was threatened with arrest as well by the ICE agents last night – tried to visit him there today, she was told he is not detained there."
Greer added that the firm has received reports that Khalil may be transferred as far away as Louisiana.
#3
Who's paying his attorney: Khalil's attorney, Amy E. Greer of Dratel & Lewis? She released a statement alleging that ICE agents wrongfully arrested Khalil.
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/10/2025 5:36
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#4
Mr. Dratel is co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Legal Road to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge University Press: 2005), which won the American Association of Publishers 2005 Award for Excellence in Professional and Scholarly Publishing (Law and Legal Studies), and was named among the 100 Best Books of 2005 by the Toronto Globe and Mail, and The Enemy Combatant Papers: American Justice, the Courts, and the War on Terror (Cambridge University Press: 2008). His essays have appeared in The Torture Debate in America, Edited by Karen J. Greenberg (Cambridge University Press: 2005) (“The Curious Debate,” and “Torture: The Road to Abu Ghraib and Beyond”) and The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison, Outside the Law, Edited by Mark Denbeaux and Jonathan Hafetz (New York University Press: 2009) (“No Laughing Matter”). He is co-author of the 2003 Supplement of Practice Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. He was profiled in a chapter of In Defense of Our America: The Fight for Civil Liberties In the Age of Terror, by Anthony D. Romero and Dina Temple-Raston, and in the May 29, 2014, edition of The New York Times (“With Distancing, and a Zeal for Fair Trials, a Lawyer Defends Terrorism Suspects”). He is also featured in the 2015 documentary “Deep Web.”
#6
"Poor Emma! Oh, how they oppressed her!
I too want an A, and to best her
I'm schlepping this Joo --
With great gravitas, too! --
Till the end of my final semester."
[NYPOST] Vice President JD Vance said Saturday he was confronted by pro-Ukrainian protesters while he was out walking with his 3-year-old daughter.
''Today while walking my 3 year old daughter a group of 'Slava Ukraini' protesters followed us around and shouted as my daughter grew increasingly anxious and scared,'' Vance posted Saturday afternoon on X.
''I decided to speak with the protesters in the hopes that I could trade a few minutes of conversation for them leaving my toddler alone,'' he continued. ''Nearly all of them agreed.''
Vance said it was a ''mostly respectful conversation, but if you're chasing a 3-year-old as part of a political protest, you're a s— person.''
''Slava Ukraini'' is a battle cry for the Ukrainian armed forces, meaning ''Glory to Ukraine.''
While the vice president didn't specify what he talked to the protesters about, the Trump administration has cut off funding in the last week for Ukraine and stopped intelligence sharing with the country after a tense Oval Office exchange between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, President Donald Trump ...The Hero of Butler, Pennsylvania... and Vance.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/10/2025
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#1
Wait, do we no longer have a Secret Service?
I'm more than a little outraged that this took place.
"Shaka, when the walls fell..."
[Regnum] Archaeologists excavating in the area of the ancient Israeli city of Megiddo (Greek name Armageddon) have found traces of the presence of the Egyptian army, confirming the battle described in the Bible in which the last righteous Judean king Josiah died. This was reported by the newspaper Haaretz.
The main part of Megiddo was excavated in the 1920s, but it was only recently that a building was discovered that contained large quantities of Egyptian pottery shards, which were found to date back to the 7th century BCE.
"When we opened the boxes of finds from the excavations in my lab, I told my students to put Egyptian pottery on the tables, and table after table filled up. The number of Egyptian vessels is double or even triple the number found in the entire Levant during that period," said Dr. Assaf Kleiman of Ben-Gurion University.
These were not the remains of fancy pottery, but of simple pottery. Since it is unlikely that the local population suddenly switched to imported cheap pottery, the scientists assumed that the shards were the result of the many years of Egyptian soldiers in the city. This confirms that the city was conquered by Egypt in ancient times, according to the article published on March 3.
According to the Old Testament, Josiah lived in the 7th century BC. He died at Megiddo (Armageddon), when he went out against the army of Pharaoh Necho II, who was moving through Judea to battle Assyria.
The New Testament also mentions Armageddon as the place where the final battle between the forces of good and evil will take place before the end of time. Armageddon also began to be called the battle itself, and the word also became synonymous with the end of the world.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, archaeologists have previously made a discovery that sheds light on the location of Noah's Ark. Research is underway in the area of the villages of Telceker and Uzengili in the province of Agri in eastern Turkey. There, using ground penetrating radar, they discovered an artificial structure in the form of a ship underground. It was established that human activity in the region took place between 5500 and 3000 BC. This coincides with the supposed time of the Great Flood.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] Tech titan Elon Musk has suggested crippling sanctions on Ukraine's oligarchs is the key to halting the nation's bloody conflict with Russia
Musk, 53, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, called for sanctions targeting Ukraine's wealthiest elite in a post on X Sunday morning.
The stunning intervention was a radical departure from the current strategy focused on punishing Russia for its unprovoked invasion of the country.
'Place sanctions on the top 10 Ukrainian oligarchs, especially the ones with mansions in Monaco, and this will stop immediately. That is the key to the puzzle,' Musk wrote bluntly.
The remark comes at the end of a week of intensive debate in Washington over whether continued US financial and military aid to Kyiv is sustainable as the war drags on with no clear end in sight.
Republican Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) recently argued that the US shouldn't offer 'another penny' to Ukraine - a view echoed by growing segments of the American public weary of the seemingly endless bloodshed and multibillion-dollar aid packages.
Facing a torrent of criticism for his stance, including accusations that he's gone soft on Russian aggression, Musk doubled down on his position, invoking his personal efforts to support Ukraine's defense.
'I literally challenged Putin to one on one physical combat over Ukraine and my Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army. Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off,' Musk fired back at critics accusing him of siding with Moscow.
#3
I don't get it. If the current Rus v Ukr conflict is the first step in Darth Putin's plan to conquer Ukraine, then Europe, Earth, and finally the entire Solar System in order to spread International Interplanetary Communism, why are we not stopping him? And by "we", I mean everybody - Germans, Poles, the rest of Europe, Canada and the United States.
Instead, we are all playing "Let's you and him fight!" by supplying weapons and ammo to the weaker side. Without this support, the game would have already been over due to Ukraine not being able to field a team.
At the start of the war, I believe it was badanov here who correctly describe the conflict as a big Soviet army fighting a smaller Soviet Army. Spoiler Alert: the big army wins. With some plot twist like WWIII or a Trumpeus ex machina, it is inevitable. There simply are not enough Ukrainians.
#7
I really don't understand Trump or Elon on this. Sending Ukraine old equipment we were paying to store and eventually dismantle isn't going to break the bank. The numbers floating around of how many billions it's worth is misleading at best. An Abraham may have cost millions to make in the 80's, but it's just scrap now. Why not let the Ukrainians use it to to fight Russians? It's not like there are any good guys in the fight. Let them have at it for as long as they like.
Also worth noting, the Russians will run out of Soviet hardware in 1.5-2 years. What happens then? I'm willing to find out.
Russia started manufacturing new tanks and things. Whether the quality is as good as what they had before this all started, I couldn’t say, but they aren’t just pulling the Cold War equipment out of the spare parts warehouses anymore.
What should more concern President Putin is that he is burning through Russia’s breeding population, even as the most driven and productive have been escaping abroad. And Russia has been below replacement since the 1980s or the early 1990s. Even with the current drive to seduce the most conservative of Western Europe to move to Russia, that won’t be nearly enough to make up for the multi-decade population shrinkage that has led to the emptying of Siberia and the eastern part of the country.
Russia might well win the current war, but if they can be fought to a standstill in Ukraine, what odds they would do better with what’s left of their military should they try to reach beyond? For all the tough talk in Europe, in their heart of hearts Europe must believe that, too, or they would have already begun frantically rearming and drafting men and women of war-fighting age, as does Israel as a matter of course, instead of waiting until bullied into it by President Trump.
#9
Russia can make between 100-150 new tanks a year. They are losing that many each month. Without the Soviet stock they cannot continue to support operations at anything resembling the current pace.
Agree on Russia's population decline. Which is another reason, IMHO, to bleed them out in Ukraine. Many of the men Russia is losing will not be replaced. Which means that Russia's ability to launch another war may very well disappear forever. At the very least the threat is reduced.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] Iran will never discuss with the United States the cessation of the republic's nuclear program. This was stated by the Iranian mission to the UN on March 9.
"If the goal is to dismantle Iran's peaceful nuclear program in order to claim that what [44th US President Barack ] Obama could not achieve has now been achieved, such negotiations will never take place," said a statement published on H.'s social network.
It is also noted that Tehran allows the possibility of holding negotiations on its nuclear program only if the topic of discussion is possible militarization.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, on March 7, US President Donald Trump said that he had sent a letter to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei proposing to hold talks on the country's nuclear program. Washington is considering both military and diplomatic solutions to the issue, but prefers negotiations, the American leader clarified.
The next day, Khamenei said Tehran would not negotiate with the US because the White House was trying to impose its own interests on the republic instead of solving problems. Trump responded by saying that time was running out for the US to conclude a nuclear deal with Iran.
The press secretary of the Russian president Dmitry Peskov recalled Moscow's position, according to which the US and Iran should resolve the issue of the nuclear program only by peaceful, political and diplomatic means. He also added that the topic of Iran was raised during the talks in Riyadh, but it was not discussed in detail.
Posted by: badanov ||
03/10/2025
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#1
That's fine, their words would mean nothing anyway.
[IsraelTimes] Captive soldier’s family says video shows time has run out, point to his ‘severe psychological state, non-functional right hand, and broken nose,’ and express torture fears
Hamas ..a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth",... on Friday published a video of hostage Matan Angrest begging to be set free, in an apparent effort by the terror group to mobilize Israeli public opinion in favor of continuing the ceasefire deal amid an impasse in negotiations.
In the video, the 21-year-old captive IDF soldier, taken from a tank at Nahal Oz during battles there on October 7, 2023, says he has been held for 511 days, indicating it was likely filmed last week.
Angrest, whose family approved the clip for publication, says he’s been told of the impasse in talks and feels that the Israeli government is deserting the hostages. "We’re starting to lose hope," Angrest says, his voice emotionless throughout the video.
He warns against a return to fighting by the IDF, saying doing so won’t secure freedom for the remaining 59 hostages. Angrest says the only way the hostages will go free is through a continuation of the phased deal to which the sides principally agreed in January.
On Saturday, the first phase of the ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas drew to a close. Talks regarding terms of a poteantial second phase were supposed to have begun on February 3, but Israel has largely refused to engage in them, as phase two requires Israel to fully withdraw from Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... and agree to a permanent end to the war in exchange for the remaining living hostages.
Instead, it has sought to advance a new proposal for an extension of the first phase through Ramadan and Passover, which ends on April 19. At the beginning of the period, Hamas would release half of the remaining 59 hostages — 24 of whom are believed to be alive — while the second half would be released at the end of the ceasefire, if the sides agree to terms for a permanent end to the war.
Reflecting on his conditions in captivity in the Hamas propaganda video, Angrest says he hasn’t seen sunlight and has sufferd from the winter cold. He adds that he’s been treated "like a soldier," and not as a regular hostage, without offering details.
Pleading to US President Donald Trump ...Perhaps no man has ever had as much fun being president of the US... to secure his release, Angrest says, "You’re the only one who has the power to influence Netanyahu."
He tells his parents and three siblings that he knows they’re fighting for him and that he can’t wait to hug and see them again.
Angrest closes by calling on the Israeli public to take to the streets in droves in order to protest for the release of the remaining hostages.
In a statement released by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, Angrest’s family said, "We are shaken by the video we just saw, in which we see our Matan looking drained and desperate after 518 days in Hamas’s tunnels."
"Beyond the grave psychological state evident in the footage, his right hand is non-functional, his eyes and mouth are asymmetrical, and his nose is broken: according to testimonies from those who have returned, this is all due to interrogations and torture in captivity. What more proof is needed to understand that time has run out?"
The family also appealed to Trump — the latest demonstration that hostages’ families believe the US president, not the Israeli prime minister, is the key to their loved ones’ release — urging him to "continue fighting for our Matan and all 58 other hostages with the same unwavering commitment and relentless determination. We must not stop until the deal is completed — only when the last hostage comes home."
On Monday the family had published the first photo of Angrest from captivity, from a previous video received from Hamas. That still photo joined an audio recording released several months back, in which Angrest begged Netanyahu to secure his release, in comments likely dictated by his captors.
Angrest’s family said he was "undergoing hellish torment, torturous interrogations, and is being held in inhuman conditions."
The family also lamented that although he was seriously maimed when kidnapped to Gaza, the soldier was not included in the "humanitarian" category of hostages released in the first stage of the ceasefire agreement, "because he’s an Israeli soldier."
Israel unveiled the offer to extend the ceasefire’s first stage a week ago, dubbing it the "Witkoff proposal" and saying it had been crafted by US special envoy to the Mideast Steve Witkoff.
Netanyahu’s office indicated it would be willing to hold talks on the terms of a permanent ceasefire in this framework, but the premier has long insisted that he will not accept anything other than Hamas’s complete surrender and exit from Gaza.
Hamas has thus far rejected the "Witkoff proposal" — which the US envoy himself has yet to publicly endorse — insisting that it will only agree to release hostages through the framework that the sides inked in January.
Meanwhile,
...back at the abandoned silver mine, there was another explosion... the US began holding direct talks with Hamas in recent weeks aimed largely at securing the release of five American-Israeli hostages. Those negotiations have yet to bear fruit, leading US President Donald Trump to issue an ultimatum on Wednesday, demanding that the terror group immediately release all hostages or face destruction.
Top Trump aides indicated that they expected movement toward their goal in the coming days.
Trump issued the ultimatum shortly after meeting with a group of eight former hostages in the Oval Office.
Reflecting on the experience on Friday, Trump told news hounds he was surprised to learn from the released hostages he’d met that not a single one of their Hamas captors treated them with kindness.
"I said, ’Did you see anybody in there [who] was kind out of the hundreds of people that you were seeing [from] Hamas? Did some of them wink at you and say, ’Don’t worry, you’re going to be okay, or give you a piece of bread?’ ’No,’" Trump recalled.
"I said, ’Were there any people that were kind? I was shocked. The answer was nobody. There was nobody. Just the opposite. They’d be slapped and punched. One man broke his ribs. He couldn’t breathe for a month. It was brutal," he said, appearing to reference the testimony of recently released hostage Eli Sharabi.
"I was so surprised. Because you think there’d be a couple of people that would be kind, that would say, ’You’re going to be okay.’ But they had none of that. It’s pretty amazing," Trump said.
Meanwhile on Friday, a group of more than 50 former Hamas hostages signed onto a letter to Netanyahu calling for Israel to continue with the ceasefire deal so the remaining captives in Gaza can return home.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Korrespondent] Analysts reported probable advances of Russian troops in Kursk region.
The biggest problem is the enemy's fire control over all logistics of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in Kursk region from Ukrainian territory.
Russian troops captured Martynovka, Malaya Loknya and the outskirts of Kurshchyna. There are many shots of the enemy continuing to advance. This was reported by DeepState analysts on Sunday, March 9.
"Unfortunately, today there are many shots from Kursk region, where the enemy continues to advance. There is simply no desire to comment on anything. The main thing now is the lives of those who carry out their tasks to the last," the statement says.
Let us recall that the General Staff recently stated that the Ukrainian Armed Forces Command is in control of the situation in the Kursk Region of the Russian Federation, and the information about a massive breakthrough of the Ukrainian border by Russians in the Sumy Region is not true. At the same time, it is confirmed that Russian assault groups have moved along a gas pipeline branch with the aim of gaining a foothold in the vicinity of Sudzha.
Earlier it was reported that Russian troops continue to try to break through to the Ukrainian border in the direction where the Defense Forces are conducting an operation in the Kursk region. The occupiers are trying to enter the territory of Ukraine to cut off logistics routes, but these attacks are not massive.
[Powerline] Democrats are screeching about cuts in Veterans’ Administration spending, calling them a war on veterans. It would be more accurate to call it a war on house plants in the VA headquarters, except the plants are still being watered. It just won’t cost so much.
Who would pay $1,400 a year to water one house plant? No one, if it was his $1,400. That is the key to government spending: it is grotesquely wasteful because the people spending the money don’t really care. The inefficiency is inherent, and it infects every government department and agency.
But that is only part of the problem; the rest of the truth is worse. The inefficiency is inherent, but the corruption has exploded in recent years. Today, government spending is largely intended to benefit Democratic Party constituencies and people who have recently served in Democratic Party administrations. A case in point is the $20 billion that the EPA shoveled out the door to party cronies in the dying days of the Biden administration, in the name of "environmental justice." Those dollars, if they are ever spent—the government is trying to get them back—represent pure corruption. They would have done zero good, and a considerable amount of harm.
Another instance is the $2.13 billion that USAID purports to have spent on Haiti relief. You can’t cut foreign aid, the Democrats scream. People will die! But it turns out that of that $2.13 billion, only two percent, $48.6 million, went to people in Haiti. $1.2 billion was paid to people and entities in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Northern Virginia. It was a Democratic Party slush fund. No doubt some percentage of that $1.2 billion eventually wended its way down to Haiti, but that was incidental: as with the EPA grants, the purpose of the effort was to enrich employees of liberal NGOs who are closely allied with the Democratic Party.
I wish President Trump well in his effort to clean up Washington, D.C., but he has his work cut out for him: both the incompetence and the corruption run deep.
[Rudaw] Kurdish-led forces on Thursday captured an Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems.... (ISIS) leader in eastern Syria with the help of the United States army, the two allies announced on Saturday.
The US military’s Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement on Saturday that they assisted the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to conduct a raid and capture Salah Mohammed al-Abdullah, "an ISIS cell leader," near the town of al-Shuhayl in Deir ez-Zor province.
"During the operation, the SDF recovered multiple weapons to include a 12.7mm (.50 cal) Sniper rifle, an AK-47, hand grenades, and various weapons and ammunition," said CENTCOM, which oversees US troops in the Middle East.
"The SDF-led operation is part of the ongoing Defeat-ISIS campaign to degrade ISIS networks and prevent the resurgence of the terrorist group in the region. CENTCOM forces enabled SDF during the operation by providing technical support and intelligence," it added.
The SDF thanked CENTCOM for their support in the operation.
"These joint operations increase the level of security in the region and prevent ISIS cells from harming residents. Our forces affirm their firm and steadfast commitment to pursuing and eliminating ISIS cells through the strong partnership with the international coalition forces," said the SDF.
ISIS, which was territorially defeated in 2019, has recently sought to gain ground, taking advantage of the situation after the fall of the Bashir Pencilneck al-Assad Lord of the Baath... regime. The SDF, which controls northeast Syria (Rojava), has fought to prevent the Lions of Islam from reestablishing their presence in the evolving security landscape.
The SDF said in January that they carried out nearly 100 operations against ISIS in 2024, capturing more than 270 suspects and eliminating several of its high-ranking leaders.
The SDF has warned that their ability to combat ISIS in the east of the country is being undermined by an offensive by The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...a NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Originally it was a mutual defense pact directed against an expansionist Soviet Union. In later years it evolved into a mechanism for picking the American pocket while criticizing the cut of the American pants... member, but not the most reliable... and its allied militias in the north who are trying to take control of a key bridge and dam on the Euphrates River in an area that is under SDF control.
Posted by: trailing wife ||
03/10/2025
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[Regnum] Due to global warming and the melting of polar ice, there is a risk of megatsunamis, in which the height of waves can reach 150 meters. This is reported by New Atlas.
According to scientists from the University of Potsdam, such waves will move at high speed, destroying everything around them. They can be caused by the collapse of large pieces of ice and rocks into the ocean.
According to university staff, it was the melting glaciers that caused the tsunami that hit Dixie Island on the east coast of Greenland in 2023.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, scientists have discovered methane emissions up to 700 m long and 70 m wide in the depths of Antarctica. Methane accumulated in the depths of the sea about 20 thousand years ago as a result of the decomposition of organic matter.
According to geologists, there are 24 gigatons of carbon accumulated in methane hydrates in Antarctica. The gas probably breaks through from the depths of the Earth along faults. Instability of marine sediments can lead to giant landslides on the continental slope and cause a tsunami.
#3
Methane hydrate? Also called methane clathrate. If it all suddenly melted, it'd turn Earth into a Venus hellscape!
Posted by: Bobby ||
03/10/2025 8:35
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#4
It cracks me up when they find megafauna and other things from melting permafrost and go "Look! Proof of Global Warming!!!"
Um... if it was stuck in the permafrost it means that the permafrost was forming at the time and wasn't there before so it isn't like it has never NOT been there.
#6
To defrost the methane clathrate would require the oceans of the planet to warm ...how many degrees? Sorry, Charlie, try something slightly plausible!
[NY Post] Actions (or lack of) have Consequences. Who knew? Shiver in the dark, savages
Israel is cutting off its electricity supply to Gaza as the country’s energy minister vowed to use “all the tools available” to free the last of the hostages held by Hamas.
The supply of electricity into the Gaza Strip from Israel was cut off suddenly on Sunday by the Israel Electric Corporation on the orders of Energy Minister Eli Cohen.
“We will employ all the tools available to us so that all the hostages will return, and we will ensure that Hamas won’t be in Gaza on the ‘day after,'” Cohen said in a short video statement.
The decision to cut electricity is expected to also cut off a major source of clean drinking water for hundreds of thousands of residents of the war-torn territory — a desalination plant, which converts salt water to fresh water.
Israel previously cut electricity from Israel to Gaza in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, but that November, the country announced the renewal of supply to the desalination plant close to Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.
This plant, which serves more than 600,000 residents of Gaza, has now had its power cut off by Israel.
The facility is one of three seawater processing plants in the Gaza Strip, which, before the war, met around 15% of the water needs for the more than 2 million residents of the territory.
Israel has not ruled out cutting off water supplies to Gaza, the government said on Sunday.
The move came a week after Israel announced it was halting the entry of goods into Gaza on March 2, in response to what it called the Hamas terror group’s refusal to accept a proposal to extend the initial stage of the ceasefire and hostage release deal.
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/10/2025
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#2
I looked into this. I was thinking there was no way the Israelis cut Gaza Palestinians off from electricity. Things that get me excited, I have learned, are usually exaggerations. This is no exception.
The electricity that the jews supplied only powered 50% of the Palestinian grid. Palis still have solar farms, and Hamas has control over Diesel Generators and has a monopoly on Diesel in Gaza.
That is plenty of electricity to keep the Pali War Machine going. Which disappointed me.
#3
If, as protesters allege, Israel is really committing "genocide", why are they supplying any electricity, water, or food? I really doubt that Hitler supplied these thing to Jews.
[Garowe] Omar Ali Abdi, the Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Defence, revealed that some senior government officials under President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s administration have been sharing sensitive military intelligence directly with al-Shabaab ... the personification of Somali state failure... holy warriors.
Ali stated that the government is currently investigating these officials, who are suspected of collaborating with al-Shabaab, and that measures will be taken, including stripping them of their ranks and removing them from the military register.
"Some former officials are passing crucial military information to al-Shabaab, including secrets related to ongoing operations," said Ali, who expressed support for the administration's efforts to defend the government and its recent military appointments.
This disclosure is not new to the Somali public, who have long suspected that al-Shabaab has infiltrated government institutions, the military, and other key offices. This infiltration has allowed the group to access critical intelligence, including sensitive details about military operations.
On Friday, near Boos-Hareeri, located in the Middle Shabelle region, senior government military officer Abukar Abdulle Raage Gar-Maqaate was killed, along with his accompanying troops. Their vehicles were seized by the holy warriors.
The government has faced setbacks in its operations in the Shabelle region, with areas that were previously liberated from al-Shabaab now slipping back into the holy warriors' control. Continuous attacks are also making it difficult for the government forces to maintain their defense.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] A constantly widening crack runs through the Eurasian lithospheric plate, which reaches Lake Baikal, and tectonic processes in hundreds of millions of years will lead to this reservoir turning into a freshwater ocean. This was stated on March 9 by geologist Stanislav Zavatsky.
In hundreds of millions of years? Whew! I was worried about getting everything packed up this weekend!
"It will really be comparable to the ocean. If the plates continue to move away from each other, it will occupy all of Eastern Siberia, Central Siberia and up to the Urals. But the Urals will no longer exist, it will already be eaten away by erosion," Life.ru quoted him as saying.
The geologist noted that this process will be a unique phenomenon for the planet and will affect the ecological situation on Earth. He also added that such global changes occur cyclically approximately every 600 million years.
Earlier, Australian scientists from Curtin University predicted that in a few hundred million years the Pacific Ocean will disappear, and the continents will unite into a new supercontinent – Amasia. Zawacki agrees with this scenario. According to his forecast, Antarctica will shift north and probably split into two parts.
He explained that such changes are associated with the rotation of the earth's core, which generates convective currents that affect the movement of lithospheric plates.
"Our core is very hot and rotates rapidly. This is what provides tectonic activity, which is absent, for example, on Mars," Zawacki said.
The scientist also expressed skepticism about plans to change the climate of Mars, noting that without an active core and magnetic field, the planet would not be able to hold on to an atmosphere. He called plate tectonics a gift to Earth, providing the dynamics that facilitate the development of life.
As reported by IA Regnum, earlier scientists from the University of Southampton in the UK found out that North and South America continue to move away from Europe and Africa. They are moving in different directions due to processes inside the mantle. It was established that South America and Africa completely separated from 80 million to 100 million years ago, and Europe and North America - approximately 60-55 million years ago.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...
..a regional Iranian catspaw,...
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula, largely made up of sand and oil rigs. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual haj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. Formerly dictatorial and steeped in Olde Tyme Religion, deferring to Salafist holy men on all issues, it has now done a 180 and is making a serious effort to modernize, so as not to be left in the sand by its Gulf Arab neighbors. The holy men have been shoved to the background and the nation is now still dictatorial but somewhat rational. That doesn't make them trustworthy, but it's a start...
..always the voice of sweet reason...
Martin O'Malley: Musk wants to break Social Security so he can loot it
Where the Layoffs are happening in the bloated Federal Government workforce.
...the once and current oppressors of Afghanistan...
One of the last of the old-fashioned hereditary iron-fisted fascist dictators...
... the personification of Somali state failure...
[NYPOST] A mob of 
...the decaying remnant of the Ottoman Empire...
..a regional Iranian catspaw,...
[NYPOST] Vice President JD Vance said Saturday he was confronted by pro-Ukrainian protesters while he was out walking with his 3-year-old daughter. 
...The Hero of Butler, Pennsylvania...
..a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth",...
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling 
... the personification of Somali state failure...
