Muse, enthuse me! A union of views
Very venomous...
Sorry, bad news.
A combustible veil's
Put an end to our tale.
[gloomy guests: "Yummy, barbecued shrews!"]
[IsraelTimes] After arresting Oscar-winning activist Hamdan Ballal during a reported settler attack on Susya, the military says the violence began “after a number of terrorists threw rocks toward Israeli citizens and struck their cars” near the southern West Bank village.
“Afterwards, a violent confrontation developed that included mutual stone-throwing between Palestinians and Israelis,” the Israel Defense Forces says in a statement.
According to the IDF, when troops arrived at the scene “to disperse the conflict, a number of terrorists began throwing stones toward the security forces.” Soldiers then arrested three Palestinians, inclufing Ballal, on suspicion of throwing stones at soldiers, as well as an Israeli suspected of taking part in the violence.
The statement adds that an Israeli citizen who was wounded has been taken for medical treatment, while denying any of the Palestinians were arrested in an ambulance.
[IsraelTimes] Hezbollah denies involvement in attack on northern Israeli border town as IAF jets strike terror group’s sites in southern Lebanon; Lebanese president, PM call for de-escalation
Lebanese leaders have been in intensive contact with Washington and Gay Paree to prevent Israel from bombing Beirut, a Lebanese official said Monday, after Israel retaliated to rocket fire from southern Leb ...The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers... with heavy strikes on the country over the weekend.
Israel launched two waves of Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... s on Lebanon on Saturday in response to rocket fire from southern Lebanon at the northern border community of Metula, marking the first strike on Israel from Lebanese territory since a ceasefire took effect on November 27.
The IDF said its air defenses intercepted three projectiles that crossed the border, while the other three rockets fell short in Lebanon.
Israeli strikes targeted several Hezbollah sites in the region, including rocket launchers, killing eight people. The Iran-backed terror group denied involvement in the rocket fire.
Speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, the official said Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam "made diplomatic contact with La Belle France and the United States... as well as with the UN to achieve de-escalation following Israeli threats to target Beirut."
The US, La Belle France and the United Nations ...where theory meets practice and practice loses... belong to a ceasefire monitoring mechanism.
During the two months of full-scale war leading up to the ceasefire, Israeli airstrikes pounded the south Beirut bastion of Hezbollah, while occasionally striking the city center.
Salam "emphasized the need to control security and prevent a repeat of rocket fire" against Israel, the official added.
No party has grabbed credit for the rocket fire, which a military source said was launched from an area north of the Litani River, between the villages of Kfar Tebnit and Arnoun, near the zone covered by the ceasefire agreement.
The agreement stipulates that only the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers may be deployed south of the Litani River, with Hezbollah required to dismantle its infrastructure and withdraw north of the river.
Israel missed two deadlines to withdraw all its forces across the UN-demarcated Blue Line, the de facto border, and continues to hold five positions it deems "strategic."
The Lebanese army said later it dismantled three makeshift rocket batteries in the area, about 30 kilometers (18 miles) from the Israeli border.
A military source told AFP the army detained two Syrians who were "working as guards at a farm near the rocket-launching site." The Syrians reported seeing a car with several men who set up the launchers and fired the rockets before leaving.
[IsraelTimes] Lebanon’s health ministry says an Israeli drone strike in southern Lebanon has killed one person.
State-run Lebanon News Agency quotes a health ministry statement as saying that the Monday night drone strike took place in the village of Qaaqaaiyet el-Jisr. It is not immediately clear who the target was.
Israel has killed several Hezbollah members over the past weeks in drones strike on southern Lebanon
[IsraelTimes] The Israel Defense Forces announces that it just struck “remaining military capabilities” at the Palmyra and T-4 airbases in Syria, several days after similarly targeting both airfields.
“The IDF will continue to act to remove any threat to Israeli citizens,” says a statement from the military.
[IsraelTimes] The State Attorney’s Office files an indictment at the Beersheba District Court on charges of treason against Eduard Yusupov, a 65-year-old resident of Netivot, for having allegedly conducted spying activities on behalf of Iran.
Yusupov carried out various acts of espionage for an Iranian agent and received $41,000 in payment for his work, offenses which carry with them sentences of up to 15 years in prison.
According to the indictment, Yusupov, an immigrant who came to Israel from Azerbaijan, contacted an old acquaintance of his by the name of Tair in November 2024, who introduced him to a man called Mousa.
Mousa claimed to be seeking to open a business in Israel but was an Iranian agent and, communicating via WhatsApp, gave Yusupov a series of spying missions to carry out.
At Mousa’s request, Yusupov collected, photographed, and documented sensitive information about “national infrastructure sites” around the country, including IDF bases, military sites in the Negev, the Haifa port, as well as parks, libraries, zoos, and commercial and leisure centers.
Yusupov also rented an apartment for Mousa in Hafia with a view of the port from where he photographed ships and industrial chimneys in the port zone.
The indictment notes that Yusupov was careful to work in secret and operated with caution in order not to be discovered.
“The accused committed security offenses at a time when the State of Israel was conducting one of the toughest wars it has known, on multiple fronts, including against Iran,” the prosecutors wrote in the indictment.
“The accused suspected that Mousa was a foreign agent who was hostile to the State of Israel but continued to cooperate with him.”
Yusupov is charged with transmitting information to an enemy to harm state security, transmitting information to an enemy designed to assist them, contact with a foreign agent, and demonstrating a decision to commit treason.
Responding to the terror attack yesterday, where the jihadi rammed his car into a bus stop shelter at Tishbi Junction, knifed the soldier there, grabbed his gun and shot at cars until a Border Patrol car drove by and shot him dead.
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar says this morning’s deadly terror attack in the north “is a result of the ongoing incitement of the Palestinian Authority.”
Sa’ar says it is “only natural” for Israel to expect the European Union’s support in the ongoing conflict against Islamic terrorism, at a press conference with his European Union counterpart Kaja Kallas in Jerusalem.
“We are now fighting the war of the free world. Iran, Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah attack us because we are nearby. But make no mistake, the war is against Western civilization. Against its values and its ways of life,” he says.
[IsraelTimes] Doctors Without Borders (MSF) denounces the "extremely precarious" situation of Paleostinians displaced by the ongoing Israeli military operation in the West Bank.
According to the United Nations ...an idea whose time has gone... , some 40,000 residents have been displaced since January 21, when the Israeli army launched an operation targeting Paleostinian terror groups in the north of the territory.
The situation of the displaced Paleostinians is "extremely precarious," MSF says, which is operating in the area.
Paleostinians "are without proper shelter, essential services, and access to healthcare," the NGO says.
"The mental health situation is alarming."
In a statement to AFP, the Israeli military (IDF) says it had been operating "against all terrorist organizations, including Hamas ..the well-beloved offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood,... , in a complex security reality."
"The IDF follows international law and takes feasible precautions to mitigate harm to uninvolved individuals," the statement says.
MSF says the scale of forced displacement and destruction of camps "has not been seen in decades" in the West Bank.
"People are unable to return to their homes as Israeli forces have blocked access to the camps, destroying homes and infrastructure," MSF Director of Operations Brice de la Vingne says
"Israel must stop this, and the humanitarian response needs to be scaled up."
Petty bullying, but intended to remind the Jews that the authorities will not protect them, no matter the platitudes piously spouted after a serious attack.
[IsraelTimes] Authorities in London are investigating a potential antisemitic hate crime, after a masked man was seen tearing mezuzahs from the entrances of a kosher restaurant and a Chabad synagogue on Saturday.
Harden the things: replace them with mezuzahs wired to give a severe shock and spray marking paint on the miscreant. Or something equivalent that causes pain and identifies the jerk for the police, since CCTV is not useful enough for them..
The suspect, dressed in a hooded jacket, approached a kosher restaurant in West Hampstead and ripped the mezuzah from its doorpost just before 7 a.m. on Saturday.
Shortly afterward, he arrived at nearby Chabad synagogue, where he also wrenched the mezuzah from the entrance and pocketed it before walking away.
Both incidents were caught on security cameras. Police have yet to locate the suspect.
[IsraelTimes] A New York student is suing after high school officials painted over a parking spot that she had decorated with a watermelon slice — a symbol of support for Palestinians.
The lawsuit was filed this month in Brooklyn federal court and argues that the Half Hollow Hills Central School District violated the student’s free speech rights and inflicted emotional trauma on her when it painted over her design in September, just days into the new school year.
The student, who is identified in the suit by the pseudonym Jane Khan, had joined other classmates in decorating her parking spot — an annual tradition at Half Hollow Hills High School West — located on Long Island.
The senior painted a watermelon slice featuring a keffiyeh scarf-like pattern, followed by the phrase “Peace Be Upon You” and her name written in Arabic. The student is described as a Muslim American of Pakistani descent.
“Ms. Khan’s inclusion of the watermelon with a keffiyeh design was an expression of her solidarity with Palestinians — something she feels arises in part from her Muslim identity and Pakistani heritage,” the suit explains.
[IsraelTimes] Cairo proposes Hamas release 5 living hostages for resumption of aid, renewed truce; sources say US agreed to terms, Israeli official says no such proposal reached Jerusalem
A new Egyptian proposal aimed at restoring 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... ceasefire deal won tentative support from the Hamas ..a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth",... terror group, sources told Rooters on Monday, though Israel said it had yet to receive the terms of the offer.
Under Cairo’s plan, Hamas would release five living hostages, including American-Israeli Edan Alexander, in return for Israel allowing humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip and implementing a weeks-long pause in the fighting, an Egyptian official said.
After the first week, Israel would implement the second phase of the collapsed ceasefire agreement.
Israel would also release hundreds of Paleostinian prisoners.
Egypt presented the proposal last week, security sources said Monday, with a Hamas official saying that the terror group has "responded positively" to the idea.
The sources said that the plan also provides a timeline for the release of all 59 hostages in exchange for a timeline for a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, backed by US guarantees.
The security sources added that the US also agreed to Egypt’s plan, but an Israeli official told The Times of Israel on Monday, "We haven’t heard of any new proposal."
According to the Israeli official, Israel is still trying to get Hamas to agree to a US-backed proposal spearheaded by Trump’s special envoy to the Mideast, Steve Witkoff, which would not entail full Israeli withdrawal from the Strip.
The narrower "Witkoff proposal" rejected by Hamas thus far, would have seen the ceasefire extended through April 19 and have the terror group release five living hostages in exchange for a large number of Paleostinian security prisoners.
Israel said it accepted Witkoff’s proposal, but said it was seeking the release of 11 living hostages.
If Hamas does not agree to Israel’s terms, "we will keep increasing the pressure until Hamas breaks," the official said, threatening "a widespread ground campaign" in Gaza.
In mid-January, Israel and Hamas agreed to a hostage-ceasefire and prisoner-release deal that officially lasted 42 days and saw the terror group release 30 living hostages and the bodies of eight slain captives, while Israel released almost 2,000 bandidoshard boyz and other prisoners, before the expiration of the deal’s first phase.
The deal had originally envisioned a second phase that would see a permanent end to the war in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages and many more Paleostinian security prisoners.
Netanyahu ordered the resumption of fighting in Gaza last week, saying talks moving forward would be held under fire after Hamas rejected proposals to extend phase one of the ceasefire.
Hamas has insisted on sticking to the original terms of the deal, which was supposed to begin its second phase at the beginning of March.
For a month, though, Israel refused to enter talks on the specific terms of phase two, as the stage’s general framework requires it to fully withdraw from Gaza and agree to a permanent end of the war.
The terror group freed 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November 2023, and four hostages were released before that in the early weeks of the war.
In exchange, Israel has freed some 2,000 enjugged Keep yer hands where we can see 'em, if yez please! Paleostinian terrorists, security prisoners, and Gazook terror suspects detained during the war.
Tit for tat — though they don’t begin to match protestor violence, however little it’s been reported in the Times of Israel.
[IsraelTimes] Force championed by far-right police minister Ben Gvir was initially formed to quell riots in Arab locales and mixed cities
As protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government ramped up in recent days, police began deploying officers from a newly formed National Guard, who have been accused of using excessive force to quell the demonstrations.
Members of the force — a controversy-laden brainchild of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir — were filmed in recent days punching, kicking, and hurling protesters to the ground at protests in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
On Sunday, as hundreds of demonstrators railed against the cabinet’s no-confidence vote against Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara outside Netanyahu’s private residence in Jerusalem, around a dozen National Guard officers pushed their way to the front of the masses to man crowd control barricades, alongside police already stationed there.
Clashes broke out soon after, with security forces arresting three demonstrators, according to police. At the scene, officers were seen forcefully shoving protesters to the asphalt.
The establishment of a civil defense force — ostensibly to secure the country against internal threats — had long been one of the top demands of Ben Gvir, who returned to his post on Wednesday, after quitting the government in January in protest of the ceasefire 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... The notion of a National Guard first surfaced during former prime minister Naftali Bennett’s government, spurred by the police’s bungled response to inter-communal riots that broke out in mixed cities in May 2021, during a previous war with Gaza.
The reliance on Border Police officers dispatched to suppress the violence that erupted between Jewish and Arab residents put the latter force under strain, prompting calls to bulk up its personnel with an auxiliary force. But the government’s nascent plans came apart with the collapse of the Bennett-Lapid coalition in 2022.
Upon becoming national security minister later that year, Ben Gvir began to advocate for the formation of a National Guard, with the added demand that the force report directly to him. Contrary to Ben Gvir’s plans to steer the force, the National Guard was eventually folded into the Border Police gendarmerie.
Members of the force dress like regular Border Police officers, and are only distinguishable by patches on either arm with the force’s name and insignia, respectively.
The coalition agreement that Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party signed with Likud following the 2022 election showed that the far-right minister had sought to subordinate the force directly to his own office.
But his proposal drew flak from ex-police chief Yaakov Shabtai, who said the prospective arrangement would come with "a very heavy price, to the point of harming citizens’ personal security."
Before his sacking, former defense minister Yoav Gallant also came out against the idea in a letter to Ben Gvir, cautioning him that "there is no place in Israel for private militias."
Ben Gvir’s initiative became official in January, in an inauguration ceremony at the National Police Academy in Beit Shemesh. Ben Gvir placed the force under the command of Maj. Gen. Nahshon Nagler, formerly the chief of the Israel Police’s Negev precinct.
Speaking at the event, Israel Police Chief Danny Levy defined the aims of the force as "dealing with riots and dealing with crime, with an emphasis on the Arab community."
Ben Gvir also delivered remarks at the event, praising the National Guard’s establishment as a "realization of my personal vision." He added that the force would "operate in the Negev and the Galilee, in mixed towns and cities and in every place where there is an issue of governance."
But now it appears that the force is taking on a more active role in cracking down on anti-government protests, concurrent with a noticeable uptick in police violence against demonstrators in recent days.
"Five days ago, after several weeks of relative calm, a worrying wave of severe and unbridled police violence erupted
like lava from a volcano ," wrote police violence watchdog group Alimut Israel on Sunday in an X post. "Reports of recent incidents continue to stream in, sometimes several days late, as those documenting them manage to recover from the trauma and share what is happening."
Ben Gvir has often complained that police have not taken a tough enough hand against anti-government protesters, whom he derides as "anarchists," and in the past has thrown his support behind coppers under criminal investigation for harming protesters.
In August 2024, the minister promoted police officer Meir Suissa to a senior rank, while he was under investigation for ordering stun grenades thrown at protesters a year prior, landing two people in the hospital.
National Guard officers were caught on film in recent days punching and kicking protesters as they sat on the ground, a departure from the typical police conduct of hoisting and dragging them off the road.
During a particularly brutal dispersal of an anti-war protest Tuesday evening in Jerusalem, one National Guard officer could be seen rolling up his sleeve as he approached a kneeling protester who appeared to be trying to aid another demonstrator, only to grab her by the shoulders and fling her away. She landed on her back.
Protesters did not go so far as to block roads that night, and, rather, sat on the pedestrian-only Ben Yehuda Street without disrupting traffic — but the demonstration erupted into violence regardless.
Prominent anti-government activist Michal Deutsch told Haaretz that one officer kicked her, breaking her arm, as she tried to prevent him from punching another protester.
Another activist told The Times of Israel that she and other protesters collected some 80 videos documenting police violence from that night alone.
In a statement to Haaretz, the Israel Police said that "all the units in all areas of the country are operating to maintain public order and the safety of citizens," adding that the police chief "can activate the National Guard, just like other police units, in accordance with operational demands."
[IsraelTimes] Air force said to destroy over 100 of the vehicles used by Hamas in massacre and at hostage-release propaganda events; IDF says Hamas finance chief was planning attacks from hospital where he was killed
The Israel Defense Forces carried out dozens of Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... s Sunday night and Monday, including on empty white pick-up trucks belonging to the Hamas ..a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth",... terror group, of the type used in the October 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel and in propaganda ceremonies for the release of hostages.
The IDF and Shin Bet security agency also confirmed on Monday that a top Hamas official was targeted and killed the previous night.
Rocket sirens sounded in the Israeli community of Netiv Ha’asara near 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... border on Monday, but were later confirmed to have been a false alarm.
The IDF destroyed over 100 pickup trucks used by Hamas terrorists, in airstrikes across the Gaza Strip on Monday, the military said.
Some of the trucks were used by Hamas in its October 7, 2023, terror onslaught in southern Israel, as well as for other operations in Gaza, including to transfer weapons, the army added.
Armed Hamas button men were also seen parading in such vehicles during recent hostage release propaganda ceremonies.
The airstrikes targeting the pickup trucks were carried out in all areas of Gaza. A strike hit a building where several pickup trucks were being stored, the military said.
IDF, SHIN BET CONFIRM TOP HAMAS OFFICIAL KILLED
Also Monday, the IDF and Shin Bet confirmed that top Hamas official Ismail Barhoum was targeted and killed in a strike on Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis on Sunday night.
Not long after the strike, Defense Minister Israel Katz said that Barhoum had been eliminated. Hamas also made an announcement.
According to the military and Shin Bet, Barhoum, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, was chief of the terror group’s finances and the successor to Issam Da’alis, the de-facto prime minister of Gaza, who was killed last week.
"Barhoum was a key figure in Hamas’ political bureau and was actively involved in the military decision-making process that directly impacted Hamas’s operations," the joint statement said.
The IDF and Shin Bet said that he oversaw Hamas’s "financial management in the Gaza Strip, channeling funds to Hamas’s military wing, financing and planning the execution of terror attacks against the State of Israel.
"These funds financed the organization’s continued survival in the Gaza Strip and were used to carry out terror attacks and to purchase weapons, which posed a threat to Israeli civilians," the statement said.
IDF: BARHOUM WAS IN THE HOSPITAL FOR TERRORISM, NOT TREATMENT
While Hamas had claimed Barhoum was at Nasser Hospital for medical treatment after being maimed in a previous strike, the IDF said he was operating from within the medical center.
"This is yet another example of the way that the Hamas terrorist organization systematically violates international law while taking over civilian infrastructure in a manner that prevents the rehabilitation and livelihood of the Gazook population, and while brutally exploiting the civilian population as a human shield for its terror attacks against the State of Israel," the statement said.
In a separate statement on X, IDF international media front man Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani reiterated: "The claim that Barhoum was in Nasser Hospital for medical treatment is completely false and was spread to mislead the public and the media."
"Barhoum was in the hospital in order to commit acts of terrorism, cynically using hospital patients and the population in the area as human shields. He remained in the hospital for many weeks, during which he held meetings with other snuffies and senior figures in the terrorist organization," Shoshani said.
He suggested that "the media refrain from echoing the falsehoods of the Hamas terrorist organization and its members and check the facts before publishing such claims."
"The Hamas terrorist organization systematically violates international law and takes over civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, in a way that prevents the rehabilitation and livelihood of the civilians of Gaza," he added.
AL JAZEERA REPORTER, IDENTIFIED AS A HAMAS SNIPER, SAID KILLED
The Hamas-run Gaza civil defense authority, as well as Al Jazeera, said Monday that Hossam Shabat, a news hound in northern Gaza for the 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... i news station, was killed in an Israeli airstrike.
The agency said Shabat was targeted by a dronezap on his car on Monday afternoon near a gas station in the northern town of Beit Lahiya.
The civil defense authority said that Mohamad Mansor, a news hound on the Falstin al-Yom channel of the Paleostinian Islamic Jihad ...created after many members of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood decided the organization was becoming too moderate. Operations were conducted out of Egypt until 1981 when the group was exiled after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. They worked out of Gaza until they were exiled to Lebanon in 1987, where they clove tightly to Hezbollah. In 1989 they moved to Damascus, where they remain a subsidiary of Hezbollah... , was also killed in a separate strike on his home in Khan Younis.
Last October, the IDF said it had uncovered documents in the Gaza Strip that showed Shabat was a sniper in Hamas’s Beit Hanoun Battalion.
According to the army at the time, the documents showed personnel spreadsheets, lists of training courses, telephone books and salary documents that "unequivocally prove" Shabat and five other Al Jazeera personalities were members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad’s military wings.
There was no immediate official comment from the IDF on the reports of Shabat’s killing on Monday.
ISRAELI STRIKE SAID TO HIT SCHOOL-TURNED-SHELTER, KILLING 4
Paleostinian medics, meanwhile, said an Israeli strike on Monday hit a school where displaced people were sheltering in the Gaza Strip, killing at least four people, including a child.
Another 18 people were reported maimed in the alleged strike in the built-up Nuseirat refugee camp, according to al-Awda Hospital, which received the casualties.
Three other hospitals had earlier reported 25 deaths from Israeli strikes overnight and into Monday.
There was no immediate comment from the IDF.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said Monday the bodies of 61 people killed by Israeli strikes had been brought to hospitals over the past 24 hours. Hospitals also received 143 maimed, Gaza’s health ministry said in a daily report.
The ministry’s numbers are not independently verified and do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Israeli officials regularly note that the military makes efforts to avoid civilian casualties.
In a statement posted to X on Monday, Defense Minister Israel Katz reiterated: "Israel is not fighting the civilians in Gaza and is doing everything that international law requires to mitigate harm to civilians."
Katz said Hamas fights from civilian areas, disguised as civilians, and thus puts civilians in danger, and urged non-combatants to evacuate combat areas when instructed to by the IDF.
THOUSANDS SAID TRAPPED IN RAFAH AS IDF ENCIRCLES PART OF IT
As the fighting raged, thousands of people were still trapped in the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, officials in the Hamas-run Strip said Monday, after Israeli forces, having ordered residents to evacuate, encircled its Tel Sultan neighborhood.
Israel told residents by a single route on foot to al-Mawasi, a sprawling cluster of tent camps along the coast.
Thousands fled, but residents said many were trapped by Israeli forces.
The war in the Gaza Strip began on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led snuffies invaded southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
Fighting stopped briefly in November 2023 amid a hostage-ceasefire agreement and then stopped again for some two months starting mid-January 2025, when another hostage-truce deal was reached.
The fighting resumed last week, though talks are ongoing to secure the release of more hostages in exchange for another truce.
The IDF has indicated in recent days that it’s preparing to expand ground operations in Gaza, redeploying on Sunday an armored division that had been stationed on the border with 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....
Sirens went off in Sderot and neighboring communities near 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... border twice on Monday evening as Israeli air defenses successfully intercepted three rockets fired by Paleostinian gunnies from the northern part of the enclave, the military said.
Paleostinian Islamic Jihad ...created after many members of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood decided the organization was becoming too moderate. Operations were conducted out of Egypt until 1981 when the group was exiled after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. They worked out of Gaza until they were exiled to Lebanon in 1987, where they clove tightly to Hezbollah. In 1989 they moved to Damascus, where they remain a subsidiary of Hezbollah... grabbed credit for the rocket fire. Neither attack caused any injuries or damage.
The two volleys were the third instance of rockets being launched from the Gaza Strip at Israel since the military resumed its offensive against Hamas ..one of the armed feet of the Moslem Brüderbund millipede,... last week. Hamas on Thursday launched three long-range rockets at central Israel, and on Friday fired two rockets at the southern coastal city of Ashkelon.
In the first attack Monday at around 7 p.m., two rockets were fired from Gaza, setting off sirens in Sderot, Netiv Haassara, Karmia, Zikim, Nir Am, and Ibim. Both rockets were intercepted by air defenses, according to the Israel Defense Forces.
The second attack of one rocket occurred at 9 p.m., setting off sirens in Sderot, Ibim and Nir Am. It was also intercepted, according to the IDF.
Following the first round of rocket fire, the IDF issued an evacuation warning for Paleostinians in the Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun areas, where the two projectiles were fired from.
In a post on X, the IDF’s Arabic-language front man, Col. Avichay Adraee, published a map of the area to be evacuated, while issuing a "final warning" before the military was to carry out strikes there.
The IDF issued an additional evacuation warning for residents of the Jabalia area after Islamic Jihad fired a third rocket from the region two hours later.
Earlier Monday, the IDF said it carried out dozens of Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... s, including on empty white pick-up trucks belonging to the Hamas terror group.
Tel Sultan was encircled by the 14th Reserve Armored Brigade yesterday in a four-hour-long offensive. During the operation, the IDF estimates that some 20 terror operatives were killed, including in airstrikes.
The troops also raided a Hamas command center in the neighborhood, the IDF says.
The IDF’s Gaza Division continues to operate in the Rafah area and on the outskirts of Khan Younis. The military says the operation is intended to expand a buffer zone along the border with the Strip.
[IsraelTimes] Both families clear publication of video showing gaunt captives pleading with freed hostages to speak out about horrible conditions in Gaza
Hamas ..a regional Iranian catspaw,... published a propaganda video Monday evening showing Israeli hostages Elkana Bohbot and Yosef-Haim Ohana, who were both kidnapped from the Nova music festival on October 7 and are still being held 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... by the terror group.
Hamas has previously issued similar videos of hostages it is holding, in what Israel characterizes as deplorable psychological warfare. The families of both Bohbot and Ohana gave Israeli media the go-ahead to publish the video in its entirety.
"You can see in the video that he is in bad shape, that he has lost a lot of weight from continued starvation, that he is suffering from problems with his skin and his breathing," said Bohbot’s family in a statement, noting that he suffers from asthma and "hasn’t seen the light of day for almost a year and a half."
Video can be seen at the link should you be interested, dear Reader.
"This video is further proof that Elkana must return home to his family," the message continued.
The family issued an appeal to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump ...So far he's been unkillable, and they've tried.... to "think that this is your son, your father or your grandson, who is waiting to see the light of day."
Israel believes 24 hostages are still alive in the Strip — 22 Israelis, one Thai and one Nepali. All of them are young men who were kidnapped on October 7, 2023.
In the clip itself, the haggard-looking pair exhorted the Israeli government to allow released hostages to come forth about their horrible conditions in Hamas captivity, and Bohbot appealed by name to their freed counterpart Ohad Ben-Ami.
"Ohad, why don’t you tell them? You were with us. You were sitting with me and him," begged Bohbot, referring to himself and Ohana.
Ohana urged an end to the recently renewed fighting in Gaza, cautioning that continued bombing could pose a risk to the hostages who remain alive.
"Before the latest ceasefire deal on January 19, when the border crossings were closed throughout the war, there was almost no food. The situation was difficult and there was no safe place," said Ohana to the camera. "We felt neither dead nor alive."
Both Bohbot and Ohana were among the 24 living hostages slated for release in the planned second stage of the ceasefire deal agreed upon in January, which fell apart after its first stage, with Israel renewing the fighting in Gaza.
Ben Ami, who was mentioned by name in the video, later said he will not rest until all of the captives are returned home.
"I love you, and I miss you and the other three hostages who, for now, I can’t say their names," Ben Ami wrote in a Facebook post, saying he had watched the video.
"They fear for their lives, they are lacking all hope, and as we speak the conditions of their captivity are being worsened and their food is being reduced since we returned to fighting [in Gaza]," he wrote.
Ben Ami, who said he is currently in Germany as part of efforts to lobby for their release, promises to "do everything in my power to bring you and all the hostages home to your families alive!"
Bohbot’s and Ohana’s families had received previous signs of life from their loved ones in February, when several freed hostages disclosed that they had come into contact with the two while in Hamas captivity.
Speaking to Haaretz in February, David and Ruhama Bohbot said that they had received word that Elkana, 36, was alive from a released hostage who said he had been with him for most of their time in captivity, in a small room dozens of meters underground.
Ohana’s family did not elaborate on the sign of life they received that same month, but his aunt Hana Mastronov stressed to Ynet that they had a "clear indication" the 24-year-old remained alive.
"When we saw the people who returned this past Saturday, it broke us even more than we were already broken. That is why we chose to speak to the media," Mastronov said at the time. "[He is a] strong guy, both in mind and body. But there are limits to how much strength a person has. We’re coming up on 500 days. We didn’t think it would last this long."
Israel believes 24 hostages are still alive in the Strip — 22 Israelis, one Thai and one Nepali. All of them are young men who were kidnapped on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led forces of Evil stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and abduct 251, sparking the war in Gaza.
Among the group are four active-duty soldiers and several people who had been working security at the Nova music festival, some of whom Hamas has claimed were soldiers as well.
Another 35 hostages who were confirmed by Israel to be dead are also being held in Gaza. They include 34 kidnapped in the Hamas onslaught and a soldier killed in the 2014 Gaza war. The slain captives would be returned in the deal’s potential third phase.
[IsraelTimes] Filing on behalf of Yunseo Chung, who has been in the US since she was 7, follows her arrest this month during protest at which demonstrators handed out Hamas pamphlets
A Korean Columbia University student, who is a legal permanent US resident and has participated in pro-Palestinian protests against Israel, sued the administration of US President Donald Trump on Monday to prevent her deportation, a court filing showed.
Yunseo Chung, 21, has lived in the US since she was seven, but her legal team was informed two weeks ago that her lawful permanent resident status was being revoked, according to the court filing in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The Trump administration says her US presence hinders its foreign policy agenda, according to the lawsuit. Chung has not yet been arrested. Immigration agents have made multiple visits to her residences looking for her.
In hiding, is she? That won’t do at all.
Trump has pledged to deport foreign pro-Palestinian protesters and accused them of supporting terrorist group Hamas, of posing hurdles for US foreign policy and of being antisemitic.
Protesters, including some Jewish groups,
…that’s “Jewish” groups, founded by Hezbollah and funded by the Soros Open Society Foundations and some other of the usual suspects…
say the administration wrongly conflates their criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian rights with antisemitism and support for Hamas.
Actually, the Trump administration very rightly conflates them, because that is your point.
Human rights advocates have condemned the government’s moves.
These particular human rights groups have done, because they are full of vicious, unthinkingly self-righteous people.
Columbia protester Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested this month and is legally challenging his detention, is also a lawful permanent resident. Trump has accused Khalil of supporting Hamas, which the latter denies.
Seriously? Dude, that’s like a toddler denying he ate the chocolate when it’s smeared all over him.
Actions against Chung “form part of a larger pattern of attempted US government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity and other forms of speech,” Monday’s lawsuit says.
One assumes the lady was involved in the riots and harassment of Jews on campus, which is a) not speech, and therefore not protected, and b) beside the point when a non-citizen is engaged in actions to support a listed terror organization like Hamas.
“The government’s repression has focused specifically on university students who speak out in solidarity with Palestinians and who are critical of the Israeli government’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza,” referring to the war sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terror onslaught against Israel.
March 9 - ICE HSI agent texts Chung, says its "Audrey from the police" - text message mentions that Chung was arrested, along with many others, during a protest for failing to leave an area, charged with "obstruction of governmental administration," a misdemeanor, often dropped. pic.twitter.com/5VmbrWEwyR
A spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security alleged Chung has engaged in concerning conduct, including when she was arrested by police during a protest at Barnard College earlier this month that DHS termed “pro-Hamas” as the demonstrators who took over the campus handed out Hamas pamphlets.
The spokesperson did not elaborate further on the specifics of that conduct in question but said she was “sought for removal proceedings under the immigration laws” and will have a chance to present her case before an immigration judge.
Some briefs that have been awaiting an excuse to share with you, dear Reader:
Pitt suspends Students for Justice in Palestine
[IsraelTimes] The suspension means that SJP must cease all organizational operations and is banned from using any university resources to advance its mission.
Pitt received an overall grade of a D, the same as Columbia University, which has become a national symbol for antisemitic activity on college campuses. By contrast, Carnegie Mellon University, the only other Pittsburgh-area university graded in the report, received a B.
Pitt, the ADL said, performed below expectations in five categories: having an official position against BDS; having a Jewish alumni group; the level of severe antisemitic and anti-Zionist incidents; the level of other antisemitic and anti-Zionist incidents; and the level of hostile anti-Zionist student groups.
[HodhodYemenNews] Explosions were heard in Tel Aviv, Quds (Jerusalem), and the coastal area south of Tel Aviv as a result of a missile launched from Yemen ...an area of the Arabian Peninsula sometimes mistaken for a country. It is populated by more antagonistic tribes and factions than you can keep track of... , Hebrew media reported on Monday.
Media outlets stated that sirens continued to sound in several areas of central "Israel" while acknowledging that debris from an attempted missile interception fell in the central region.
[IsraelTimes] No injuries or damage caused by missile attack, which set off sirens across central Israel; Iran-backed Yemeni group has now targeted Israel six times in the past week
Sirens sounded across central Israel on Monday afternoon as the Iran-backed Houthis launched a ballistic missile from Yemen, which the IDF said it shot down before it crossed into Israeli territory.
Several pieces of shrapnel from the missile continued to fall after the missile was intercepted, reaching Israel and landing in the city of Beit Shemesh outside Jerusalem.
No injuries or major damage were reported as a result of the projectiles’ impact, according to rescue authorities.
Sirens went off in Tel Aviv, Rishon Lezion, Rehovot and the outskirts of Jerusalem at around 8 p.m.
The Houthis later issued a statement claiming responsibility for the missile launch, which like other recent attacks it claimed targeted Ben Gurion Airport.
No doubt it was, even if the last one actually hit Saudi Arabia.
The missile launch marks the sixth Houthi attack on Israel in the past week, following the IDF’s renewed offensive against Hamas in Gaza last Tuesday.
The missiles have all been intercepted by Israeli air defenses or fallen short of reaching Israel, but have nevertheless sent much of the country scrambling to shelters.
#1
"Houthis claim..." So, nothing there. The new Baghdad Bob pronouncement, without any there there. Houthis are a stain upon humanity. Turn them into glass.
Posted by: Whiskey Mike ||
03/25/2025 6:54
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[Gateway] The Trump DOJ said it is exercising the State Secrets Privilege and informed Judge James Boasberg it will no longer provide him with any information related to deportation flights.
Boasberg, an Obama appointee, has been grilling DOJ lawyers about the Trump Administration’s move to deport dangerous Venezuelan aliens under the Alien Enemies Act.
Judge Boasberg said Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to deport criminal aliens is "incredibly troublesome and problematic" and threatened the Trump Admin with consequences if they violate his order in the future.
On Monday evening, the DOJ had enough of Judge Boasberg’s intrusive orders and invoked the State Secrets Privilege.
$2.5T?
Ah'm thinkin' orbital laser.
[JustTheNews] Some skeptics say the technology needed to protect a land mass the size of the U.S. still isn't ready. Israel's Iron Dome system works only against short-range rockets.
If that lot are involved the politics must be seedy, however invisibly.
[Breitbart] A network of progressive non-profits has quietly spent years pushing the IRS’s new “Direct File” service.
Progressive supporters of Direct File claim to advocate for low-income taxpayers. Research shows that key organizations promoting Direct File are closely tied to Arabella Advisors and its billion-dollar network of left-leaning dark money groups.
One Arabella-backed organization, the Economic Security Project (ESP), has funded advertising and research in support of Direct File. Last year, the group received a $752,197 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to “conduct research on the impact and usage” of Direct File.
That work culminated in a media blitz encouraging largely low-income taxpayers to adopt Direct File, which was first made available as a pilot program in 2024 for taxpayers across a dozen states. Last year, the IRS agreed to make the program permanent, but it has since come under fire from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trump-appointed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent agreed to temporarily keep the program through the 2025 tax season, earning him praise from progressive groups including ESP.
ESP is fiscally sponsored by the Hopewell Fund, a nonprofit managed by Arabella Advisors. The arrangement allows ESP to operate as a project of the Hopewell Fund, taking advantage of Hopewell’s nonprofit status without having to register with the IRS or publicly disclose its own finances.
ESP’s goal isn’t simply to make filing taxes easier. Adam Ruben, a former aide to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) who is now managing outreach for the group, called Direct File “[o]ne of the best tools we have to create the infrastructure for guaranteed income in this country” and said Direct File “is a huge opportunity for economic security and racial equity.”
Groundwork Collaborative, another non-profit receiving funding through the Arabella Network, has led its own media blitz supporting Direct File. Groundwork Action, the group’s advocacy arm, funded a “Better IRS” ad campaign promoting direct file and attacking private-sector tax preparers. Like ESP, Groundwork is led by a former policy advisor to Elizabeth Warren.
ESP and Groundwork help fund and operate The Coalition for Free and Fair Filing, which “supports the Internal Revenue Service’s efforts to create a free online direct tax filing tool,” according to the group’s website. “The coalition is composed of organizations committed to racial and economic justice, consumer protection, the advancement of civic technology and the promotion of equity in tax administration.”
Supporters of Direct File frame it, in part, as an effort to help low-income tax filers and also as a better way to ensure collection of higher tax revenues by the IRS.
Critics of Direct File highlight the inherent conflict of interest in having the IRS prepare people’s tax returns. Last year, a group of Republican Senators challenged the IRS’s ability to unilaterally launch such a program, saying “[s]erious legal questions exist about the IRS Direct File launch,” which was undertaken without Congressional approval.
The IRS initially received funding for a pilot program for an in-house tax filing tool through the Inflation Reduction Act. Last year, Direct File was made available to users in 12 states. For 2025, availability has expanded to 32 million taxpayers in 25 states.
#1
A fair number of States have adopted 'no cost' filing for State income taxes.
Also, I think both HRBlock and Turbotax have some zero or very low cost options available.
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
03/25/2025 12:04
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#2
It is not direct file but if you go to irs.gov and sign up for "free file" it includes free e-filing.
Note; Direct file at the state level may be called I-file.
Posted by: Difar Dave ||
03/25/2025 14:12
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When I was starting out as a Chicago City Hall reporter for that big metropolitan paper‐when we could smoke in newsrooms on deadline, curse, tell jokes, laugh and wore jackets and ties to work‐I had one rule.
I'd often discuss this rule with my political sources, elected officials, cops, city workers and others:
Lie to me just once, just once, and I'll burn you to the ground.
....
RTWT
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
03/25/2025
07:27 ||
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#1
The sooner people stop talking about this old-fashioned newspaper, the sooner the disappear.
This is everyone's responsibility.
[IsraelNationalNews] The grief of October 7th still haunts every Israeli soul.
It wasn’t just a failure of security or intelligence; it was a shattering of our national innocence, the brutal end of a belief that goodwill could protect us.
And yet, in the face of one of the worst atrocities in Jewish history, there are those among us — the Israeli leftist elite — who continue to point fingers not at the monsters who crossed the border with murder in their hearts, but at their own people.
I can’t forgive that.
The problem is not just Hamas. It is Israel’s own elites, the NGOs, the academic class, the so-called humanitarians — those who have spent decades undermining victory, pursuing policies of enriching and placating Palestinian Arabs based on "the hope that being nice will win reciprocal gestures." Each has spectacularly failed. Instead of acknowledging this failure, they double down, desperate to preserve their moral vanity.
...What’s more, the Israeli Left (a minority after all) has spent decades trying to convince the world, and the rest of Israel, that peace comes from surrender, that empathy will melt away hatred. That if we just humanize our enemy, they will stop trying to dehumanize us.
It was a beautiful dream. But October 7th killed that dream. And the Israeli Left’s unwillingness to face that truth — their insistence on mourning the collapse of their ideology more than the collapse of our safety — is a betrayal I cannot overlook.
On October 14, 2023 — exactly one week following October 7th — I said to my Israeli cousin: "Just watch, in a few weeks or months the Israeli Left will take to the streets, wailing and screaming about how the real crime isn’t what Hamas did to us, but how our own government responded. They’ll say the hostages are being forgotten, that the war is immoral, that Bibi is the devil, and that somehow, somehow, Israel is to blame for all of this."
...In their worldview, the true enemy isn’t Hamas or Hezbollah or the Houthis — it’s the right. It’s the settlers. It’s the religious. It’s the Zionist who believes in Jewish power and defense and sovereignty. And that hatred has blinded them. It has made them incapable of unity, incapable of reflection, incapable of change.
This has nothing to do with holding leaders accountable and everything to do with salvaging a broken ideology. They do not oppose the war because they think it’s unjust. They oppose the war because it confirms what they most fear: that their decades-long program of appeasement, withdrawal, and moral relativism has utterly failed.
Posted by: Grom the Affective ||
03/25/2025
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#1
Sadly yes. I would be furious, but I haven’t the energy for it.
[FoxNews] 'The devastating cuts and layoffs at the Department of Education will directly harm Washington’s youth and their families,' Washington AG Nick Brown said
Washington state's attorney general has joined 20 other Democrat states in a lawsuit seeking to block President Donald Trump's executive order that calls to dismantle the Department of Education.
The state's Attorney General Nick Brown announced Monday that he joined 20 other attorneys general in filing a motion for a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration. A preliminary injunction would temporarily pause the president's March 20 executive order to eliminate the DOE.
The other 20 states filed lawsuits on March 13 attempting to block efforts to close the DOE after plans were announced to eliminate half of the department's workforce.
The latest lawsuit seeks to stop the layoffs and the move by the administration to transfer student loan and special education services outside the department, as Trump works to shift responsibilities away from the DOE.
For example, Trump announced last week that the Small Business Administration would handle student loans as part of this plan.
"The devastating cuts and layoffs at the Department of Education will directly harm Washington’s youth and their families," Brown said in a statement. "Our office will fight to defend the education and health of our students from President Trump’s illegal order."
Layoffs at the department have already led to the closure of the Office of Civil Rights outreach services across the country, which investigated students' claims of discrimination and sexual assault. Federal funding and approvals for state schools have also been delayed, Brown's office said.
The lawsuit argues that the Trump administration's executive order is illegal and that efforts to dismantle the DOE can only be authorized by Congress. GOP lawmakers have introduced legislation to eliminate the department, but the effort has not yet been approved by either chamber on Capitol Hill.
The lawsuit from the attorneys general also claims that the mass layoffs violate the Administrative Procedures Act, which establishes procedures for how administrative agencies of the federal government may propose and issue regulations.
[FoxBusiness] DOGE is asking consulting service providers to break down their work and identify cost savings
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is reviewing federal contracts provided for leading consulting firms, which have been tasked with submitting a scorecard explaining the services they're providing to government agencies before the end of the month.
In a letter sent to the leaders of consulting firms that was reviewed by FOX Business, the Government Services Administration (GSA) explained that it believes it's "important to undertake this review in partnership with industry," and will use firms' responses for comparison against the agency's government-wide review. The letter was sent by GSA Federal Acquisition Service Commissioner Josh Gruenbaum.
GSA is structuring the review as a scorecard, asking consulting firms to identify waste and savings opportunities and noting, "Scorecards that do not identify waste and spending reductions will not be deemed credible and your firm will be seen as unaligned with the Administration's cost cutting goals."
Consulting firms are instructed to identify spending by agency, then identify related contracts and projects to "further break down spending by functional category in simple layman terms (i.e. a 15 year old should be able to understand what service you provide and why it is important - no consultative jargon or gobbledygook."
GSA is also asking consulting firms to "detail how pricing is structured for each contract, project or category, explain any pricing differences between agencies and how these pricing structures compare to market information in your possession."
Firms are further instructed to "make recommendations of changes to pricing or pricing structures that would lead to savings for the U.S. taxpayer and provide a total identified cost takeout in your submission."
Consulting firms are required to submit their scorecard based on a template provided by GSA before a deadline of 5 p.m. ET on March 31.
A report to look forward to.
Firms that provide consulting services to federal agencies have warned that efforts by the Trump administration to cut back on spending through the DOGE initiative and agencies like GSA have impacted their businesses.
"As you know, the new administration has a clear goal to run the federal government more efficiently," Accenture CEO Julie Spellman Sweet said during a quarterly earnings call. "During this process, many new procurement actions have slowed, which is negatively impacting our sales and revenue."
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an appearance last week on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" that major consulting firms have a "chokehold" on government spending.
"One of the biggest surprises for me is just seeing how these entrenched interests just keep constricting themselves around the power, around the money, around the systems and nobody cares," Bessent said.
"Many of the employees are fantastic. It's this consultant group that has just – they're like a boa constrictor, they're like a python," around federal spending programs, he added.
#2
^ Ah hah! So the DOGEers *are* cutting Social Security! At least for dead people. This is obviously political since the dead are long-recognized as a Democratic Party constituency.
Not if the aid is not actually getting to patients.
[BBC] US funding cuts will lead to an additional 2,000 new HIV infections each day and over six million further deaths over the next four years, the UNAids chief has warned.
It would mark a stark reversal in the global fight against HIV, which has seen the number of deaths from the disease decrease from more than two million in 2004 to 600,000 in 2023, the most recent year for which figures are available.
UNAids Executive Director Winnie Byanyima said the US government's decision to pause foreign aid - which included funding for HIV programmes - was already having devastating consequences.
She called on the US to reverse the cuts immediately, warning women and girls were being hit particularly hard.
US President Donald Trump announced the pause on foreign aid, for an initial 90 days, on his first day in office in January as part of a review into government spending. The majority of the US Agency for International Development's (USAID) programmes have since been terminated.
Many US-financed HIV treatment and prevention programmes received stop work orders, leading to the closure of mother and baby clinics in Africa, and severe shortages of life saving anti-retroviral (ARV) medicines.
Ms Byanyima said she feared a return to the 1990s, when HIV medication was scarcely available in poorer countries, and infections and deaths soared.
The US has for years been the single biggest funder of HIV treatment and prevention, and Ms Byanima thanked Washington for its generosity and humanity.
She added it was "reasonable" for the US "to want to reduce its funding - over time", but said the "sudden withdrawal of lifesaving support [was] having a devastating impact".
There has been no sign that Washington is listening to appeals to change course.
Traditional aid donors in Europe also plan funding cuts, and UNAids - the joint UN agency which combats HIV - has had no indication that other countries might step in to fill the gap left by the US.
Last I heard, about 20% of USAID programs have been evaluated as worthwhile and restarted, including something for Gaza. If this particular program has not been restarted, very likely it is entirely too corrupt and ineffective to be worth spending American taxes on. Perhaps UNAids Executive Director Byanyima might want to consider the wisdom of announcing to the world that she is functionally evil.
#1
“She called on the US to reverse the cuts immediately, warning women and girls were being hit particularly hard.”
What is the basis of that assertion? Is it only possible to define a woman in a third world setting?
Posted by: Super Hose ||
03/25/2025 4:25
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#2
So will the other 192 UN members start doing their fair share?
Isn't it time to 100% focus on the USA Citizen's needs?
Instead of those nations that constantly need and demand more and more. Which never seem to actually change the root causes for their problems.
Then time after time bite the USA in the ass, despite what all the US Taxpayers have done for them? eg. Somalia
Or could it also be, Big Pharma, the MEGA-Political Donor, whining that it's going to lose $$$$$ and can't spread as much $$$$ around the next election?
#7
Maybe, England, Russia, Iran, Soddi, and the rest just might want to chip in a little more if they are so concerned. And a note to BBC, if it is so important, the UN will take directed donations.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
03/25/2025 11:42
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[Breitbart] President Donald Trump’s administration has delivered a “final offer” to Egypt to accept up to 700,000 Gazans, according to a new report which says the proposal includes billions of dollars in economic aid and a warning that the same deal will be offered elsewhere if Cairo refuses.
On Monday, the U.K.-based and Qatari-owned Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reported that the U.S. message was relayed through U.A.E. President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi during a visit to Cairo over the weekend.
According to the Arab outlet, Washington’s proposal would see Egypt receive a major financial package in exchange for absorbing 500,000 to 700,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.
The report cited a source familiar with the discussions, who claimed that the United States not only offered massive aid to bolster Egypt’s struggling economy but also issued a stark ultimatum: If Egypt rejects the proposal, both the financial support and refugee resettlement deal will be transferred to another willing nation.
The same source reportedly said that a refusal could result in the loss of existing U.S. aid to Egypt, which totals over $1.5 billion annually, including $1.3 billion towards military assistance. Cairo has so far resisted efforts to resettle displaced Gazans.
The matter comes as Israel remains locked in conflict with Hamas following the October 7 massacre — the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history, which saw thousands of terrorists burst into Israel from Gaza and gun down participants of an outdoor music festival. Other terrorists simultaneously went door to door in local towns hunting for Jewish men, women, and children who were then subject to kidnapping, torture, rape, execution, and immolation.
Last month, President Trump unveiled his vision for the Gaza Strip during a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His plan calls for resettling the strip’s population and rebuilding the territory into a thriving economic hub, marking a significant shift in U.S. policy and setting the stage for a bold new strategy in the Middle East.
Israel has since announced a new department to oversee the voluntary relocation of Gaza residents to third-party countries, a move ordered by Defense Minister Israel Katz. The plan aligns with Trump’s approach, emphasizing regional solutions over past failed policies.
“I welcome President Trump’s bold initiative,” Katz stated, calling it an opportunity for Gazans to seek a better future while ensuring Israel’s security.
According to a recent report from the Jerusalem Post, Israel plans to use its renewed ground offensive to advance the Gaza Strip emigration plan, as Hamas remains “unwilling to compromise” in hostage talks.
Previously, Breitbart News reported that President Trump’s plan to rebuild Gaza by resettling its inhabitants has significant support among many Gazans and is the “only solution” for struggling civilians, according to the Center for Peace Communications. The center says it is fighting for Gaza Strip residents to be given a chance to leave the war-torn enclave “to find a better life” for themselves and their families “before it’s too late.”
[YouTube]
Feb 26, 2025
No food, water, electricity, homes, schools, infrastructure. The violence between Israel and Hamas has reduced the Gaza Strip to rubble. Gazan civilians should have the opportunity to migrate to safe haven at a time when there are no viable options in Gaza.
Whereas President Trump's call to resettle Gazan civilians has sparked criticism, many Gazans say they want and need this opportunity. They are asking Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other countries across the region must urgently grant asylum to workers, women, children, the ill, and the elderly given dire conditions in the coastal strip.
The growing movement of Gazans speaking out comes as critics and mainstream media label President Trump’s plan unethical, while overlooking the real humanitarian crisis — people who want to leave the territory but remain trapped under Hamas rule.
According to a fresh Gallup poll of Gaza’s residents, a majority of Palestinians would leave the coastal enclave if they were able to. The findings revealed that a striking 52% of Gazans expressed a desire to relocate, with 14% saying they would leave permanently and 38% seeking temporary refuge abroad.
For U.S. interests, a potential outflow from the Gaza Strip could ease military tensions, reduce the influence of Hamas, and shift the regional burden of humanitarian care to wealthier Arab states and Western allies. It may also open new avenues for cooperation with Israel, Egypt, and the Gulf states on long-term stabilization.
#2
No. This is offering choices. Hamas has trapped them there since 2007. And then Hamas started a war that predictably triggered an Israeli response that left Gaza completely unlivable while still trapping them there as human shields.
#3
Hmm, "ethnic cleansing" when half of the Paleos want to leave?
Can we get a ruling from the judges on whether "Paleostinian" is an ethnicity or a mental disease?
Even less careful than they are at home, if that can be conceived.
[Breitbart] A Chinese-owned copper mine in Zambia suffered an accident in mid-February that dumped about fifty million liters of acid waste into the local water table, creating both an environmental disaster and a diplomatic rupture between Zambia and China.
The accident occurred on February 18 at the Sino-Metals Leach Zambia copper mine, located in Zambia’s Copperbelt province. China is the dominant operator of copper mines in Zambia, which in turn is one of the most important copper-producing nations in the world.
China’s mining operations in Zambia have been frequently criticized for having poor safety, environmental, and labor standards. Critics accuse the Zambian government of hesitating to confront Beijing or punish Chinese companies because Zambia is over $4 billion in debt to Chinese banks. Zambia defaulted on its massive debts to China in 2020 and restructured those debts in 2023.
Copper mining involves using acidic compounds to separate valuable copper from other minerals. The toxic waste left over from this process, known as “tailings,” is collected in a sealed reservoir. Depending on the processing method used, tailings can be incredibly poisonous, corrosive, or even radioactive.
Proper control and disposal of tailings is a perpetual source of controversy around industrial mining operations. The toxic residue is more or less permanent, so it constantly accumulates in a basin or well, which must be carefully monitored for leakage. Catastrophe results if the toxic material seeps into the surrounding environment.
On February 18, a tailings dam at the Sino-Metals Leach Zambia mine collapsed, resulting in a worst-case calamity: 50 million liters of toxic slurry poured into a stream that connects to the vital Kafue River. This river provides water for plants, fish, animals, and about 12 million human inhabitants, including residents of the national capital, Lusaka. In fact, about 60% of Zambia’s population lives in the Kafue River basin.
Environmental activists called the toxic spill an “environmental disaster of catastrophic consequences” and pronounced the 930-mile-long Kafue River “totally dead.”
Huge numbers of dead fish began washing up on the river banks, wiping out the local fishing industry. Crops watered by the river withered and died. The Zambian military used planes and speedboats to dump hundreds of tons of lime into the river to neutralize the acid waste.
Adding insult to injury — in fact, adding both insult and injury — another Chinese mine suffered a smaller acid waste leak a few days later. A mine worker was killed at this second mine after falling into the acid. Local officials accused the Chinese mine owners of first attempting to conceal the smaller leak and then defying government orders to halt operations. Two managers from the second mine have been placed under arrest.
On February 24, the Zambian government ordered Sino-Metals Leach Zambia Ltd. to halt operations at three of its tailing storage dams until their embankments have been fully repaired.
Environment minister Mike Mposha also ordered the company to supply safe drinking water to communities affected by the toxic spill, and to take all necessary measures to restore the local soil.
Mposha ordered the company to “engage an independent environmental consultant to continuously monitor both surface and groundwater quality” and conduct a biodiversity assessment of the Kafue River, Mwambashi River, and Lusale Stream.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) on Sunday saw signs that the Sino-Metals Leach Zambia disaster has pushed China-Zambia relations to the breaking point.
University of Johannesburg research director Emmanuel Matambo said a watershed moment arrived when the Zambian government, previously reluctant to criticize Beijing in any way because of its titanic debts, spoke up against China’s handling of the copper mine catastrophe. Until now, even Zambian politicians who campaigned as staunch critics of China have always gone silent as soon as they’ve won office.
Matambo said decades-old criticism of China’s reckless environmental record is once again being heard in public now that a Chinese company has caused one of the worst ecological disasters in Zambia’s history.
“While this concern had died down around the 2010s, the Kafue spillage will revive it, and will shine a very unflattering light on Chinese investment in Zambia,” he said.
#2
The Guardian, which dials up Maximum Vapors over any pollution by a US company, says nothing about this that I can find. Which may say something about how the Guardian survives with no visible means of support.
Posted by: Matt ||
03/25/2025 10:27
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#3
/\ Which may say something about how the Guardian survives with no visible means of support.
#4
RETRO
On August 5, 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began clearing material from the opening of the Gold King Mine in Silverton, Colorado, to install a pipe to pump water out of the mine. At 10:30 a.m., the material blocking the tunnel entry suddenly gave way, and a large buildup of water that had collected behind the debris was released into Cement Creek, a tributary of the Animas River.
#7
I spent part of my career in industrial wastewater treatment. Mining is a challenging business. The acids in that water can definitely be treated. The Chinese are just too cheap to do it. And don’t get me started on that EPA disaster of their own making. I did a presentation to the EPA office in Denver about removing heavy metals from legacy mine water and they couldn’t have cared less.
[Breitbart] Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem revealed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will be eliminated.
During a Trump administration cabinet meeting at the White House, Noem spoke about how DHS had increased deportations by 50 percent, and praised the United States Coast Guard for doing “phenomenal work” and breaking “historic records in the amount of drug interdictions” they have “brought in.”
“We are, in the month of March — the last couple of weeks, increased our deportations by 50 percent,” Noem said. “So, we’re now not even just getting the worst of the worst out, we’re making sure that there’s consequences for being here and committing crimes in our communities. And, the numbers are continuing to escalate and to go up…….this week I’m headed down to El Salvador. I’ll be in the prison where we sent TdA members, I’ll be meeting with the president and also Columbia and Mexico and talking about building these relations so that we can continue to get people out of this country that don’t belong here and take them home.”
Noem added that the U.S. Coast Guard’s fleet had been “repositioned” in order to address the fentanyl crisis and to also “go after the southern border” and to secure it.
“The Coast Guard has done phenomenal work — I don’t know if you all have reported on it, but we have broken historic records in the amount of drug interdictions that they have brought in,” Noem added. “We’ve repositioned the fleet to go after the fentanyl crisis and go after the southern border and securing it, and they’ve done amazing work as far as that.”
After the headline and that first sentence, the Breitbart reporter neglected to quote Secretary Noem’s entire statement on the subject of FEMA: “And we’re going to eliminate FEMA.” It has the virtue of being clear and succinct, if not containing any new information.
[FoxNews] A Kansas highway trooper rescued a 6-year-old girl missing for over a month after she was kidnapped and took two men she was with into custody, authorities said Saturday.
The Kansas Highway Patrol trooper pulled over an SUV for a traffic violation and discovered that the front-seat passenger had a warrant for his arrest from another state for kidnapping a 6-year-old girl just over a month earlier, the agency said.
The trooper spotted a girl around that age inside the vehicle with the passenger and driver, both men in their 60s, highway patrol said. It was also discovered that the driver had a criminal history which included homicide and numerous weapons violations.
The trooper, with help from a local sheriff’s deputy, secured both men before safely removing the girl from the vehicle, highway patrol said.
"This 6-year-old girl gave the trooper a false name and date of birth, after having been coached to do so, in an attempt to keep the adult out of jail," the agency said. "Ultimately, our trooper calmed the girl down and got her to tell him her real name."
The girl was identified as the kidnapping victim who had been with the suspect on the run for over a month, according to authorities.
The girl was unharmed, according to the agency, and the two men were taken into custody.
Kansas Highway Patrol told Fox News Digital that the traffic stop occurred in February. They were unable to share additional information at this time to protect the identity of the child and the integrity of the open case.
[FoxNews] Bondi thanked Elon Musk for uncovering 'a tremendous amount of fraud'
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a stern warning to those engaged in government fraud at the most recent Cabinet meeting on Monday.
Speaking with President Donald Trump present at the meeting, Bondi thanked Tesla CEO Elon Musk for uncovering "fraud, waste and abuse" through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative.
"A lot of waste and abuse, but there is a tremendous amount of fraud," Bondi began. "And, Elon, thank you for your partnership. Thank you for your team. You have uncovered so much fraud in our government."
Bondi then revealed that an internal task force is involved with bringing those accused of fraud to justice.
"We will prosecute you," the attorney general warned. "We have an internal task force now working with every agency sitting here at this table. And if you've committed fraud, we're coming after you. Thank you, Elon."
Bondi also mentioned that, under Trump's directive, the Department of Justice (DOJ) will begin seeking the death penalty for those convicted of violent crimes.
"All of these horrible violent criminals that you're hearing about around the country, they will face the death penalty federally within our country," Bondi said. "And the drug dealers need to get out of here, because we are coming after you. We're going to have 94 great U.S. attorneys around this country, and everyone will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."
The topic of government fraud was mentioned throughout the meeting, with Musk claiming that he found $330 million worth of waste within the Small Business Administration (SBA).
"[We found] a case of fraud and waste with the Small Business Administration, where they were handing out $330 million worth of loans to people under the age of 11," Musk said. "I think the youngest was a nine month year [sic] old who got a $100,000 loan."
"That's a very precocious baby we're talking about here," he joked.
Trump expressed appreciation to both Musk and the rest of the Cabinet for uncovering waste and fraud.
"We've had many fraudulent contracts that were caught by the work that Elon and his people are doing," the president said. "And working with our people, it's been brought to light. The fraud, not just waste and abuse, the fraud has been incredible."
President Donald Trump's Cabinet outlined billions of dollars in contracts it has canceled, including a "$300,000 contract educating on food justice for queer and transgender farmers."
Step #1 know there is a deliberate Government Fraud, Waste and Abuse problem (1923 over 100+ years ago.)
Step #2 elect persons willing to risk everything to address the deliberate Fraud, Waste and Abuse and take it on. (2016)
Step #3 Those being rewarded by the Fraud, Waste and Abuse. Will organize and attack those that are disrupting their pocket money flow. Accidents start happening, LAWFARE, rig an election, a Coup, install a mentally declining greedy figurehead, appoint judges and own them, violate civil rights using executive orders and DOJ controls. Knowing that the $$$$ train is about to be derailed soon. Go for broke, and start openly stealing massive amount of $$$$$ using mislead causes and names as cover. Then start a "military or Social issues" for voter deflection.
Step #4 Real Voters take control of the elections. Re-elect those persons willing to risk it all to stop the deliberate Fraud, Waste and Abuse.
Step # 5 Start Audits which cause immediate panic & reactions of those guilty as they are exposed.
Step #6 Wait for another 100 years for the real criminals to be arrested. Like "We The People" have been doing since the Teapot Dome scandal of 1923, when the U.S. Cabinet bribery scandal was announced.
#6
Gather legit evidence, keep it clean, form a grand jury, present the case, get an indictment, issues warrants, arrest. We're still the that process.
[IsraelTimes] Trump adviser Mike Waltz inexplicably includes The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg in encrypted messaging chat to plan bombing campaign against Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen
Trump administration officials earlier this month accidentally added the editor of The Atlantic magazine to an encrypted group chat, in which they discussed highly sensitive plans for the military to strike Iranian-backed Iran's Houthi sock puppets ...a Zaidi Shia insurgent group operating in Yemen. They have also been referred to as the Believing Youth. Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi is said to be the spiritual leader of the group and most of the military leaders are his relatives. The legitimate Yemeni government has accused the them of having ties to the Iranian government. Honest they did. The group has managed to gain control over all of Saada Governorate and parts of Amran, Al Jawf and Hajjah Governorates. Its slogan is God is Great, Death to America™, Death to Israel, a curse on the Jews They like shooting off... ummm... missiles that they would have us believe they make at home in their basements. On the plus side, they did murder Ali Abdullah Saleh, which was the only way the country was ever going to be rid of him... rebels in Yemen ...an area of the Arabian Peninsula sometimes mistaken for a country. It is populated by more antagonistic tribes and factions than you can keep track of... The incident was made public on Monday, in an article by Jeffrey Goldberg, who was included in the chat. The US National Security Council confirmed the messages appeared to be authentic, and said it was investigating how Goldberg was inadvertently added.
The group, on the Signal messaging app, included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ...The diminutive 13-year-old Republican U.S. Senator from Florida, Secretary of State in the second Trump administration... , Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff, and 12 other officials.
US President Donald Trump ...His ancestors didn't own any slaves... , asked Monday about the story, was apparently unfamiliar with it, and said he was "not a big fan of The Atlantic," and that the leak must not have caused problems, because the attacks were successful.
The officials used the chat — to which Goldberg was added, for reasons unclear, on March 13 — to debate the merits of striking the Houthis and how to present the attacks to the public.
Hegseth, according to the texts, was worried that Israel would hit the Houthis first.
As part of the chat, Goldberg received, some two hours before the bombing began on March 15, a "plan [that] included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing."
That post, sent to the group by Hegseth at 11:44 a.m., "contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the US would be deploying, and attack sequencing," Goldberg wrote.
The plans were sent to the group following a lengthy discussion between the vice president, the defense secretary, and a user identified as "S M" — presumably Trump confidant Stephen Miller — in which Vance complained about "bailing Europa ...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum... out again" and insisted that "messaging [be] tight" and that risks to Saudi oil facilities be mitigated.
They were followed up with confirmation that the strikes had been successful, and a series of congratulatory messages, and celebratory emojis, from the various cabinet officials.
On Sunday, Goldberg exited the group, triggering a notice to the group’s creator, Waltz. No one from the group reached out to him about the situation, however, and it was not until he emailed Waltz and sent him a message on Signal that NSC Spokesman Brian Hughes reached out to Goldberg to confirm the veracity of the chat.
"This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain," Hughes wrote.
"The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between bigwigs. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security," he added.
National security lawyers interviewed by The Atlantic said that sharing classified information over Signal — a commercial messaging app known for its encryption, and, according to the magazine, used by national security officials for lower-level purposes such as scheduling — was unheard of and potentially illegal.
In addition, Waltz set some of the messages to disappear after one week, and others to disappear after four, raising questions about whether the messages were records that the government is obligated to preserve.
The US launched military strikes against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis on March 15 over the group’s attacks against Red Sea shipping, and have continued Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... s against the group in the weeks since, as the Houthis have claimed to fire at American warships.
#3
You don't transmit 'war plans'. You courier them. Any transmission of operational plans go only by secure comm lines.
On the other hand, using other means and fake plans is a way to identify people who do leak.
#5
A curious story. The simple and obvious explanation is that someone screwed the pooch. But given that we live in a media age where things are seldom what they seem, I can't help but wonder if there is more going on here. Perhaps a convincing way to deliver a message that otherwise would not be taken seriously.
Not advocating either way, just wondering if the hoofbeats we hear are horses or zebras.
Side Note: I'm so old I remember when The Atlantic was worth reading.
A couple of days ago the Israeli govt let the US know that Israel intends to seriously neutralize the Yemen threat. - speculation
Some Iran-Qatar-Russia aligned elements in the Trump 47 administration want to prevent this. - speculation
The Trump 47 administration tells Israel: Don't strike Houthis in Yemen, 'leave it to us' - fact
Strikes are planned that would be impressive fireworks but that also would me materially ineffective if the Houthis received a warning a couple of hours before the strikes. - speculation
Information is leaked a couple of hours before the strikes "by mistake." - leak = fact, intentional mistake = speculation
/<tinfoilhat>
This is tinfoil hat stuff indeed.
What makes me suspicious is the prior public message to Israel not to engage Yemen who is constantly committing acts of war against Israel and the subsequent mistake/leak.
#7
6^
I had a similar hypothesis. My theory was that the US was seeing if they could use Jeffrey Goldberg set up to someday feed false information to the Houthis
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
03/25/2025 11:50
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#8
It’s curious that despite American direction to Israel to step back, it has nonetheless been Israel who shot down the missiles headed her way thereafter. Except the one that hit Saudi Arabia, anyway.
Rapid Response 47
@RapidResponse47
Senate Intel Committee Chair
@SenTomCotton
: "The Biden Administration authorized Signal as a means of communication that was consistent with presidential recordkeeping requirements for its administration — and that continued into the Trump Administration."
#13
Another possibility: In a stunning show of brilliant military strategy, President Trump has leaked his top-secret Yemen airstrike plans to The Atlantic so that no one will ever see them or read them.
-- Babylon Bee
#14
Another tweet about this morning’s Senate testimony. Video can be watched at the link:
Media Lies
@MediasLies
CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed that according to CIA record management, Signal is approved for “work use.”
Let’s set this record straight.
Here is the truth about Signal:
-In 2016, the DNC instructed all staffers to exclusively use Signal to talk crap about Trump because it was encrypted.
-In 2017, Signal was approved by the sergeant at arms of the U.S. Senate and staff.
-The use of common amongst the security community.
-Cybersecurity firm iVerify’s Rocky Cole has also stated the app has "stellar reputation and is widely used and trusted in the security community”.
-Even Edward Snowden has said that he uses Signal due to its strong encryption services.
Elmerert Hupens2660, that’s a very pretty piece of thinking. All sorts of things that hadn’t occurred to me.
In fact, this entire thread is full of thoughts that never occurred to me, so now I’m feeling a good deal more educated than I anticipated this morning. :-)
"According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city."
And this was not classified info? What is?
Posted by: European Conservative ||
03/25/2025 17:18
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#17
PJ Media’s Charlie Martin, who apparently has done intelligence analysis, introduces the term Canary Trap to describe this situation. It’s where a situation is set up to allow a leaker to reveal himself, in this case a private but not secret conversation. As it turns out, one of Mike Waltz’s staffers was the one who brought serial fake scandal trumpeter Mr. Goldberg into the conversation.
For European Conservative, Mr. Martin also makes the following points:
This wasn't a classified conversation.
In fact, it wasn't even sensitive, because they were talking about things that had already been said in public.
When they got to something that would be classified, they explicitly said they needed to take it to a higher level. So they knew what was and wasn't sensitive.
EC, President Trump had earlier very loudly announced that he was going after the Houthis because they announced they were going to resume firing missiles at Israel and attacking shipping in response to Israel resuming the war against Gaza in response to Hamas refusal to seriously negotiate surrendering.
#18
"So the person who supposedly added the journalist to the Signal group chat, Alex Wong, was an attorney for Covington & Burling, one of the law firms that Trump included in his EOs about government contracts and security clearances."
#21
Wiki scrubbed his private practice experience with a DC based law firm.
Wiki:
Wong worked in private practice with a Washington, D.C.-based international law firm. He provided Fortune 100 clients strategic and legal advice on international trade matters, governmental investigations, and regulatory compliance.[3]
A search of the archives for the first quarter of this year for Burling yields four articles, three connected to Special Council Jack Smith, whom the firm aided pro bono (see here). He also apparently has a public service resumé, per the attached tweet at NoMoreBS’s link:
2007-2009: Bush State Department "advisor" for Iraq
2012: Foreign policy director for the Romney-Ryan campaign
2015-2017: Foreign policy advisor for Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)
2017-2021: Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Trump/Pompeo State Department
2021-2024: Hudson Institute
It’s not clear to me how he managed two apparently disconnected careers
#24
Burn him. As an example Pour Encourager... you know
No further license, career, ...
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/25/2025 20:29
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#25
Speaking of the Hootis and war plans:
Seven B2 bombers have been moved to Diego Garcia.
Cross reference with US saying to Israel, "Just sit back. We got this".
File under War & Rumors of War
[FoxNews] Patel says 'the fake news will NEVER be responsible for operational command authority over the ATF, we are'
FBI Director Kash Patel is strongly refuting a CNN report alleging he is implementing a "major cutback" of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in a memo to ATF employees, Fox News Digital has learned.
CNN reported Saturday that Patel "has outlined plans to move as many as 1,000 ATF agents to the FBI" and "cutting ATF’s agents by more than a third," according to three unnamed sources.
"The move represents a major cutback of the ATF, an agency that long has been in the crosshairs of gun rights groups that believe its work infringes on Second Amendment rights," CNN said. "The ATF has about 2,600 agents and more than 5,000 employees, a number that has remained largely unchanged for years."
"After publication of this story and resulting pushback including from Republican allies, FBI officials began to back off aspects of their plan, according to a US official familiar with the matter," the report stated.
Patel, who is currently also serving as acting director of the ATF, issued a memo to ATF staff denying the CNN report.
"I want to address a report from this weekend speculating about the intentions of FBI leadership with personnel decisions at the ATF," Patel began the memo obtained by Fox News Digital. "This weekend, CNN reported news of a plan on the part of our leadership to ‘cut as many as one third’ of ATF agents and reallocate 1,000 agents over to the FBI. The report even suggested our leadership team altered course after reading a news report, and ultimately backed off certain aspects of changes. This ‘report’ is entirely false."
"The fake news will NEVER be responsible for operational command authority over the ATF, we are," Patel declared. "The brave men and women of the ATF who courageously dedicate themselves to protecting the American public will not have their security jeopardized by the media’s disinformation campaigns. When we make decisions, they will be final, regardless of the input of CNN or any other news organization."
CNN declined Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Patel previewed his tough stance against the media in remarks he made after being sworn in as FBI director last month.
"Look, I know the media's in here, and if you have a target, the target's right here," Patel said as he pointed to himself. "It is not the men and women at the FBI."
"You have written everything you possibly can about me that's fake, malicious, slanderous and defamatory. Keep it coming. Bring it on, but leave the men and women of the FBI out of it. They deserve better," Patel told news outlets, sparking applause from his supporters in the room.
President Donald Trump tasked Patel to overhaul the FBI, which has been viewed as politicized in recent years.
GPS—Here we go again, there were 20,189 devices. Still a large crowd but not even close to the 30,000 quoted in Denver newspapers nor the 34,000 quoted by Bernie Sanders and AOC.
84% of the devices present had attended 9 or more Kamala Harris rallies, antifa/blm, pro-Hamas,… https://t.co/zQuvc0ATx5
… antifa/blm, pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian protests, 31% had attended over 20.
For more insight into what data we also look at in addition to GPS location data would be demographic and psychographic data using over 6,000 different databases, i.e., like the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Pew Research Center, market research firms like YouGov, Experian, specialized tools like ESRI's Tapestry Segmentation, consumer surveys, social media platforms like 𝕏, Facebook, Linkedin.
Demographic data includes basic characteristics like age, gender, income, education level, occupation, marital status, family size, ethnicity, and where people live (e.g., city, state).
Psychographic data dives deeper into people's lifestyles, values, attitudes, interests, personality traits, social class, activities, and how they make purchasing decisions. For example, it might show if someone values sustainability, enjoys outdoor activities, participates in community activism.
While demographic data is straightforward, psychographic data can reveal sensitive personal details, like beliefs even life goals.
Additionally, by cross pollinating each device with other devices regularly within close proximity to the target device we are able to build a detailed profile for each target.
90% of those in the above 84% were likely working with one of these five groups and is the reason for their presence.
Once again, this is based a very sophisticated algorithm that looks at the behavioral metrics for each device, including the physical 1:1 proximity to leaders and paymasters from these groups in the past.
Disruption Project, Rise & Resist, Indivisible Project, Troublemakers and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Each receives money from ActBlue and at least three, via USAID.
Disruption Project: Legal status is unclear, likely operating illegally.
Rise & Resist: 501c4 non-profit
Indivisible Project: 501c4 non-profit
Troublemakers: Legal status is for profit.
Democratic Socialists of America: 501c4 non-profit
#2
Given the abundance of liberal white women it's not as though we have some kind of shortage of the mentally ill and unstable. Better they shelter in place...don't call us we'll call you when it's 'safe'.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Sergey Adamov
[REGNUM] While Russia and Ukraine are discussing a possible ceasefire with the United States and preparing for direct peace talks, fighting continues in the SVO zone.
In the Kursk region, the Russian Armed Forces continue to clear the region of enemy forces. After the liberation of the city of Sudzha on March 13, the operation entered its final stage.
After the defeat in the Kursk direction and the retreat from the Sudzha area, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are trying to destabilize the situation again in several areas of the Russian-Ukrainian border. Over the past few days, the enemy has made several attempts to break through with infantry groups into the territory of the Krasnoyarsk and Rakityansky districts of the Belgorod region.
CLASHES ON THE BORDER
The fighting continues in the area of the settlements of Grafovka and Demidovka, located in close proximity to the border. A number of Ukrainian sources have reported several times about the capture of one or both settlements, but in fact the Ukrainian Armed Forces have not managed to achieve any significant success.
According to information from the field, by the morning of March 23, Ukrainian troops were able to occupy a small bridgehead south of Demidovka and attempted to take the settlement by storm. The situation is complicated by constant shelling of the settlement from Ukrainian territory, as a result of which most of the buildings were completely or partially destroyed.
By March 24, Russian troops managed to push the enemy back from the Demidovka area, after which the Ukrainian Armed Forces retreated to the territory of Sumy Oblast. Combat operations in this area continue.
In the Grafovka area, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are actively using drones to adjust artillery and remotely mine roads, trying to make it difficult to supply the Russian group. Sources report that separate enemy formations remain in the border zone, which may be involved in new provocations.
South of Grafovka, clashes continue in the area of the settlement of Prilesye. The Ukrainian Armed Forces are using small sabotage groups that enter Russian territory and, having encountered resistance, retreat.
At the same time, the enemy is experiencing serious supply problems, since there are no major highways in the area, and the few country and dirt roads are under constant fire from Russian artillery and drones.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces are also not leaving their positions in the Kursk region, holding a small bridgehead in the area of Oleshnya, Guevo and the village of Gornal. Russian troops continue to push the enemy out of their positions. Combat operations are taking place in the area of the Sudzha checkpoint on the border with the Sumy region.
The scattered formations of Ukrainian troops were thus cut off from the border and surrounded in the area of the village of Gogolevka.
Nevertheless, despite the lack of prospects for any offensive in the border area, Kyiv retains some of its forces in the border area. In this way, the Ukrainian Armed Forces command is trying to prevent the transfer of Russian troops from the border area to another section of the front, for example, to Donbass or to the Kupyansk area.
At the same time, the majority of forces located in the Sudzha area were either withdrawn for rotation to the rear, or transferred to the Donbass - to the Pokrovsk (Krasnoarmeysk) area.
THE LIBERATION OF DONBASS CONTINUES
In the Kurakhovsky direction, the Russian Armed Forces continue to build on the successes achieved after the liberation of the strategically important settlement of Constantinople. The loss of control over the settlement led to a disruption of communications between the Ukrainian Armed Forces units in this section of the front.
According to information from the field, during the offensive, assault units of the Russian army liberated the settlement of Sribnoye. The information from field sources was later confirmed by the Russian Defense Ministry.
"As a result of active and decisive actions by units of the "Center" group of forces, the settlement of Sribnoye of the Donetsk People's Republic has been liberated, " the department noted. The offensive of Russian troops continues to the north - in the area of the settlements of Uspenovka and Udachnoye. The latter section of the front is strategically important, since Udachnoye is located on the highway connecting Pokrovsk with the territory of the Dnepropetrovsk region.
Over the past months, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have tried several times to push Russian troops back from the highway in order to restore full supplies to Pokrovsk. However, all attempts to advance were repelled, after which the Russian Armed Forces launched a counterattack. According to the latest information, military actions continue on the eastern outskirts of Udachny.
In the long term, success in this direction may allow the final stage of the operation to encircle Pokrovsk to begin, front-line sources at Regnum News Agency note.
"Our area may come to life in the near future, since the weather has become favorable. Once the ground dries out, we can expect an intensification of military operations. The key task now is to expand the bridgehead west of Pokrovsk, near Kotlino and Udachny. Then there will be an opportunity to break through to the north, to the E50 highway, which connects Pokrovsk with Pavlovsk and Dnepropetrovsk," the source told the publication.
According to sources, the Ukrainian Armed Forces command is aware of the gravity of the situation in Pokrovsk, and is therefore transferring units withdrawn from the Kursk region to this area.
"For both us and them, control over large populated areas, any built-up area in general, and especially over heights, is of key importance. They understood this and held the front line firmly, and did not withdraw some troops from this direction. Now we have begun to put pressure on them, and military actions are continuing in Malye Shcherbaki and Lobkovo," the agency's interlocutor noted.
Ukrainian sources, in turn, believe that the intensification of military operations in the Zaporizhzhya direction could become a prologue to a full-scale offensive. There are several scenarios for the further development of events. The Ukrainian Armed Forces Command expects an offensive on the city of Orekhov in the near future - the only large settlement in the predominantly flat theater of military operations.
Kyiv also does not rule out that the Russian army will move along the Dnieper to Kamenki and Stepnogorsk.
Successful advancement in one or both directions creates prospects for a further offensive on Zaporizhia. At the same time, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are preparing defensive fortifications on the approaches to the city along the Konka River. At this line, Kyiv will try to stop the Russian offensive if Stepnogorsk, Orekhov and Kamenskoye are abandoned.
However, for now, military operations in this direction are local in nature.
Overall, the Russian Armed Forces continue their successful offensive in all directions, pushing back the enemy. The Ukrainian army, in turn, is no longer seeking to seize the initiative, launching counterattacks with small forces only in certain sections of the front.
After the defeat in the Kursk direction and the retreat from the Sudzha area, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are trying to destabilize the situation again in several areas of the Russian-Ukrainian border. Over the past few days, the enemy has made several attempts to break through with infantry groups into the territory of the Krasnoyarsk and Rakityansky districts of the Belgorod region.
DIRECTION - TO ZAPOROZHYE
After a long pause, military actions also resumed in the Zaporizhia direction. After the liberation of the settlement of Stepovoe, Russian troops began an assault on the village of Lobkovoe. North of Stepovoe, military actions are taking place on the streets of the settlements of Shcherbaki and Malye Shcherbaki.
In the Stepnogorsk direction, Russian troops advanced in the area of the settlement of Kamenskoye, dislodging the enemy from a number of fortified positions they occupied. According to sources of the Regnum news agency, the offensive in the Stepovoye and Kamenskoye area became possible after the Ukrainian Armed Forces seriously weakened this section of the front in favor of the Kursk direction and Donbass.
"For both us and them, control over large populated areas, any built-up area in general, and especially over heights, is of key importance. They understood this and held the front line firmly, and did not withdraw some troops from this direction. Now we have begun to put pressure on them, and military actions are continuing in Malye Shcherbaki and Lobkovo," the agency's interlocutor noted.
Ukrainian sources, in turn, believe that the intensification of military operations in the Zaporizhzhya direction could become a prologue to a full-scale offensive. There are several scenarios for the further development of events. The Ukrainian Armed Forces Command expects an offensive on the city of Orekhov in the near future - the only large settlement in the predominantly flat theater of military operations.
Kyiv also does not rule out that the Russian army will move along the Dnieper to Kamenki and Stepnogorsk.
Successful advancement in one or both directions creates prospects for a further offensive on Zaporizhia. At the same time, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are preparing defensive fortifications on the approaches to the city along the Konka River. At this line, Kyiv will try to stop the Russian offensive if Stepnogorsk, Orekhov and Kamenskoye are abandoned.
However, for now, military operations in this direction are local in nature.
Overall, the Russian Armed Forces continue their successful offensive in all directions, pushing back the enemy. The Ukrainian army, in turn, is no longer seeking to seize the initiative, launching counterattacks with small forces only in certain sections of the front.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[NewsFront] 23:57 Official summary of the Office for Documentation of War Crimes of Ukraine from 00:00 03/24/2025 to 00:00 03/25/2025.
Three facts of armed attacks by the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
There were no reports of civilian injuries.
DAMAGED:
No damage to residential buildings or civil infrastructure facilities was recorded.
Three armed attacks in the Gorlovka direction.
A total of eight units of different ammunition were fired.
21:25 Having received the coordinates, the artillery crews of the 5th Combined Arms Army of the East group of forces in a matter of minutes struck targets in the areas of Volnoye Pole and Shevchenko of the Donetsk People's Republic.
20:26 The enemy is trying to break through the state border in the Belgorod region and is gathering strength for a new attack
Fighting is taking place in Popovka, Belgorod Region. In addition, enemy forces are being concentrated in the Miropolye area on the border of Kursk and Sumy Regions.
Possible attempts to break through the state border in the direction of Kondratovka are expected.
20:12 Russian paratroopers raised and installed Orthodox cross damaged during fighting on the border of the Kursk region
19:53 Around 18:15 Moscow time by air defense systems on duty destroyed Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle over the Black Sea.
19:33 Armed Forces of Ukraine fired upon three settlements of the Belgorod region
In the Belgorod region, in the village of Yasnye Zori, an enemy drone struck the building of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church, damaging the dome. In addition, one of the buildings of an agricultural enterprise was damaged by the munition.
In the village of Cheremoshnoye, as a result of the shelling, windows were broken, the roof, facade and fence of a private house were damaged. The power line was cut.
In the city of Shebekino, as a result of an FPV drone explosion, the glazing of an apartment building and a social facility was damaged. Three cars were cut by fragments.
According to preliminary information, there are no casualties.
18:41 Around 17:50 Moscow time by air defense systems on duty destroyed Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle over the territory of the Belgorod region.
17:33 FPV drone crews of the 155th Separate Guards Naval Infantry Brigade of the Pacific Fleet of the North group of forces destroyed military equipment and manpower of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Belgorod border area. The enemy was trying to break through to Russian territory.
17:05 March 24 at about two o'clock in the morning the Kyiv regime accomplished an attack using a UAV on the Kropotkinskaya oil pumping station of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) in the Krasnodar region.
As a result of the actions of Russian air defense systems, a Ukrainian attack UAV was intercepted seven km from an international energy infrastructure facility, with fragments falling in the area of the Kavkazskaya railway station.
14:52 RF Armed Forces knocked out Ukrainian soldiers from Rozovka (Alexandropol) of the DPR, and occupied most of the settlement, – MAP.
13:37 Around 11:35 Moscow time by air defense systems on duty destroyed two Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles over the territory of the Kursk region.
13:05 Artillery crews of the "Southern" group of troops destroyed UAV control center and Ukrainian Armed Forces bunker near the settlement of Grigorovka in the DPR.
11:12 Servicemen of the "Center" group of troops told
on the destruction of Leopard tanks in the Krasnoarmeysk direction
"The Leopard was destroyed. I was flying on duty, I saw a tank driving along a forest belt, I fired at it, it stopped. I flew the second drone, fired at the turret and burned it," said UAV instructor Alexander Baletsky.
10:33 TOS-2 "Tosochka" crew of the "Yuzhnaya" troop group supports
assault units in the Chasov Yar area.
10:12 FPV drone calculations at Rubicon Center are striking personnel and military equipment of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the border areas of the Kursk region.
09:43 Crew of the strike UAV "Cube" of the 1st Guards Tank Army of the "West" group of forces destroyed a Western-made mobile artillery unit of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Khar'kov region.
09:25 Around 08.05 Moscow time by air defense systems on duty destroyed Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle over the territory of the Belgorod region.
08:26 Artillery crews of the "North" troop group in the Belgorod border area continue to carry out fire missions around the clock.
The crew of the 152mm 2S5 Giatsint-S self-propelled gun of the 44th Army Corps inflicts pinpoint fire damage on military equipment and manpower of Ukrainian militants.
07:15 During the past night, air defense systems on duty intercepted and destroyed28 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles:
▪️12 UAVs over the Bryansk and Rostov regions,
▪️two UAVs over the territory of the Republic of Crimea,
▪️one UAV over the territory of Krasnodar Krai and over the waters of the Sea of Azov.
[EngMilRu] The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation continue the special military operation.
In Belgorod direction, units of the Sever Group of Forces inflicted fire damage on manpower and hardware of four mechanised brigades, an assault regiment of the AFU, and three territorial defence brigades close to Miropolye, Ugroyedy, Turya, and Krasnopolye (Sumy region).
The enemy's losses amounted to more than 175 troops, two tanks, four armoured fighting vehicles, 18 motor vehicles, and four artillery guns including a French-made 155mm Caesar self-propelled artillery system. One ammunition depot was destroyed.
The Zapad Group of Forces improved the tactical situation along the front line. Russian troops engaged three mechanised brigades, an assault brigade of the AFU, and two territorial defence brigades near Kamenka, Shiykovka, Zagoruykovka, Tishchenkovka, Kondrashovka, Cherneshchina (Kharkov region), Novoye, Kolodezi, Yampol, and Redkodub of the Donetsk People's Republic.
The AFU losses amounted to more than 250 troops, a tank, four armoured fighting vehicles including two M-113 armoured personnel carriers, and a U.S.-made HMMWV armoured vehicle. Four motor vehicles, three Western-made artillery guns including a UK-made 155mm FH-70 howitzer, three electronic warfare stations, and three ammunition depots have been neutralised.
Units of the Yug Group of Forces took more advantageous lines and positions. Russian elements damaged six mechanised brigades, an airmobile brigade of the AFU, a territorial defence brigade, and two national guard brigades near Seversk, Novomarkovo, Verolyubovka, Chasov Yar, Konstantinovka, Kurdyumovka, Ulyanovka, and Tarasovka (Donetsk People's Republic).
The enemy lost more than 310 troops, a U.S.-made M113 armoured personnel carrier, five pick-up trucks, five field artillery guns, an electronic warfare station, and a fuel depot.
Units of the Tsentr Group of Forces improved the tactical situation. Russian formations engaged three mechanised brigades, a jaeger brigade, an assault brigade, an unmanned aerial vehicles brigade, an assault regiment of the AFU, and a national guard brigade near Dimitrov, Zverevo, Krasnoarmeysk, Udachnoye, Novosergeyevka, and Alekseyevka (Donetsk People's Republic).
The AFU losses amounted to up to 460 troops, six armoured fighting vehicles including two U.S.-made M113 armoured personnel carriers, two French-made VAB armoured personnel carriers, eight motor vehicles, and four field artillery guns.
Units of the Vostok Group of Forces continued advancing into the depth of enemy defence. The Russian Armed Forces inflicted losses on manpower and hardware of a mountain assault brigade and an airmobile brigade of the AFU, a naval infantry brigade, and a territorial defence brigade close to Razliv, Volnoye Pole, Novopol (Donetsk People's Republic) and Temirovka (Zaporozhye region).
The AFU losses amounted to up to 145 troops, two armoured fighting vehicles, three motor vehicles, and three field artillery guns including a German-made 155mm Panzerhaubitze 2000 self-propelled artillery system.
The Dnepr Group's units improved the situation along the front line. Units of a mechanised brigade, a mountain assault brigade, two coastal defence brigades of the AFU, and two territorial defence brigades have been hit near Novodanilovka, Malye Shcherbaki, Lobkovoye, Kamenskoye (Zaporozhye region), Ponyatovka, and Antonovka (Kherson region).
Up to 90 troops, a tank, three motor vehicles, a U.S.-made 155mm M777 howitzer, an electronic warfare station, and an ammunition depot of the enemy have been neutralised.
Operational-Tactical Aviation, attack drones, Missile Troops and Artillery of the Russian Groups of Forces have engaged the military airfield infrastructure, ammunition depots, production plants, storage and training sites for the launch of unmanned aerial vehicles as well as clusters of enemy manpower and hardware in 142 areas during the day.
Russian air defence systems have shot down four JDAM guided aerial bombs and three HIMARS MLRS projectiles during the day as well as 227 fixed-wing drones.
In total, since the beginning of the special military operation the enemy has lost 659 aircraft, 283 helicopters, 48,312 unmanned aerial vehicles, 601 anti-aircraft missile systems, 22,471 tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles, 1,530 MLRS combat vehicles, 22,946 field artillery guns and mortars, 33,323 units of support military vehicles.
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 engaged a tank brigade, a mechanised brigade, an assault brigade, two air assault brigades, a naval infantry brigade, and a territorial defence brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine near Gogolevka, Gornal, Guyevo, and Oleshnya. One AFU counter-attack was repelled.
Operational-Tactical and Army aviation, and Artillery strikes hit enemy manpower and hardware in the areas of Gogolevka, Gornyal, Guyevo, and Oleshnya as well as Alekseyevka, Basovka, Belovody, Velikaya Rybitsa, Veselovka, Vladimirovka, Vodolagi, Zhuravka, Zapselye, Loknya, Miropolye, Mogritsa, Novonikolayevka, Obody, Sadki, Yunakovka, and Yablonovka (Sumy region).
During the day, AFU losses amounted to more than 190 troops, three infantry fighting vehicles, three armoured fighting vehicles, six motor vehicles, three artillery guns, three mortars, an electronic warfare station, and three UAV command posts.
Since the beginning of hostilities in Kursk direction, the AFU losses amounted to more than 69,700 troops, 400 tanks,326 infantry fighting vehicles, 289 armoured personnel carriers, 2,219 armoured fighting vehicles, 2,532 motor vehicles, 583 artillery guns, 53 MLRS launchers, including 13 of HIMARS and seven of MLRS made by the USA, 26 anti-aircraft missile launchers, a self-propelled anti-aircraft system, ten transport-loading vehicles, 121 EW stations, 18 counter-battery warfare radars, ten air defence radars, 56 units of engineering and other materiel, including 23 counterobstacle vehicles, one UR-77 mine clearing vehicle, five bridge launchers, one engineering reconnaissance vehicle as well as 15 armoured recovery vehicles, and one command post vehicle.
The operation to neutralise the AFU units is in progress.
Worth noting, korrespondent.net has compiled its Invasion of Ukraine series into separate months, beginning May 9th, 2023. Linked in the title
[Korrespondent] 22.41 Ukraine and Russia are close to starting a full ceasefire, "closer than ever before." The United States continues to work on this issue. This was reported by the US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce.
22.24 The Contract 18-24 program will be extended to another branch of the armed forces. The issue of joining units of the State Border Service and the National Guard of Ukraine is currently being considered. This was stated in the evening address of the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky.
21.47 Ukraine hopes that the talks with the US in Saudi Arabia will help move towards real peace with Russia. This was stated in the evening address of the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky.
19:37 Propagandist of the pro-government Russian publication Izvestia Alexander Fedorchak was liquidated at the front in Ukraine. This was stated by the Russian media themselves.
19.07 Russian statements about peace are empty, since the aggressor country continues to mercilessly strike peaceful cities of Ukraine. This was written by the Minister of Foreign Affairs Andriy Sybiha on the social network X. In his opinion, any diplomacy with Moscow should be supported by firepower, sanctions and pressure.
18.59 Transportation of oil through the Kropotkinskaya station, which was attacked last night, is impossible in the near future. This was stated by the press service of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium.
18.26 In Sumy, 40 children and 16 adults were evacuated from the site of a Russian missile strike. This was reported by the State Emergency Service. According to the city council, there are currently 88 known victims , including 17 children.
17:59 Russia is constantly trying to modernize its "shaheeds" to bypass Ukrainian electronic warfare systems. This was stated by the head of the communications department of the Ukrainian Air Force, Yuriy Ignat, on the air of Unified News , commenting on the discovered Russian attack drones equipped with a Chinese 16-channel antenna.
17.52 In the Ternopil region, a lyceum student rejected an offer in a messenger to work part-time on sabotage. The boy received an offer on his phone to paste up leaflets with provocative texts for 150 hryvnia or "to smash and break everything" for 1000 dollars, and told his mother about it.
16:50 As a result of a missile strike by Russian aggressors on the city of Sumy, at least 65 people were injured, including 14 children. This was reported by the regional prosecutor's office.
16.29 Since the beginning of the current day, 87 combat clashes have occurred on the front. Russian troops are attacking in 10 directions, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported in an operational summary as of 16:00.
15:58 The Russians managed to influence some people in the White House team with the information that the Ukrainians allegedly do not want to end the war, and something needs to be done to force them. This was stated by President Volodymyr Zelensky in an interview with The Time .
15.29 Russian troops on March 24 hit the center of Sumy with missiles, there is destruction. This was reported by the press service of the Sumy OVA.
As a result of the missile strike on the city center, 28 people are already known to have been injured, including four children.
14.34 Russian-American talks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, are in full swing. This was stated in a commentary to Interfax by Grigory Karasin, a member of the Russian delegation and head of the Federation Council Committee on International Affairs. According to him, the talks are "being held creatively" and "interesting discussions of fairly topical issues" are continuing.
14:10 According to the evidence of the Security Service, 10 traitors who fought against the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Donetsk region received real prison terms. The court sentenced the militants to 15 years of imprisonment with confiscation of property.
13.42 Information that China is discussing a peacekeeping role in Ukraine "does not correspond to reality," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said at a press conference .
13.30 National Guardsman Ivan Petrovsky lost 40 kilograms during his time in captivity. The 30-year-old fighter shared photos before and after captivity on Instagram .
"I'm home. The difference is 1,037 days of captivity and minus 40 kilograms," the caption under the photo says.
According to the defender's mother, her son returned to his homeland as part of the prisoner exchange that took place on March 19.
13:12 Since the beginning of the year, the Ukrainian military has neutralized 748 Russian tanks in all directions of the front. This was reported by the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksandr Syrsky, who published a video of the combat work of Ukrainian units. According to him, thanks to the coordinated combat work of Ukrainian defenders, 1,609 armored combat vehicles have also been neutralized since the beginning of the year.
13:00 The Security Service's military counterintelligence detained an FSB agent in Odessa who was preparing coordinates for new Russian missile and drone strikes on the city.
On the enemy's orders, the woman was supposed to adjust the air attack on the locations of the Ukrainian Armed Forces' marines. The occupiers also hoped to obtain the coordinates of the temporary stay of Ukrainian border guards and police officers performing tasks on the southern front.
The adjustment was carried out by a 39-year-old local unemployed woman who was expecting the occupation of Odessa. She wrote about this in the comments under pro-Kremlin publications in Telegram channels.
12:52 The National Agency for Asset Search and Management (ARMA) transferred 1.87 billion hryvnia to the fund for the liquidation of the consequences of armed aggression of the Russian Federation. This was reported by the agency's press service.
12.43 Ukrainian military have liberated part of the territory near the village of Dvurechnaya in the Kharkiv region. These are "very important, but small operations," said Oles Maliarevich, a representative of the 429th separate regiment of unmanned systems, Akhilles.
12.18 The Black Sea Initiative is being discussed at the talks between the US and Russian delegations in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This was stated by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov at a briefing . According to him, the US and Russia have a common desire and readiness to follow the path of a peaceful settlement of the situation in Ukraine, but there are "technical issues."
12:09 Residents of the village of Repekhovka in the Belgorod region of the Russian Federation accused Russian soldiers of mass looting. This was reported by Russian media on Monday, March 24.
According to them, Russian soldiers, who are in the region due to fighting with the Ukrainian army, robbed at least 20 houses.
12:05 Over the past week, 1,226 citizens applied to the recruitment centers of the Ukrainian army. This is the best weekly figure in March of this year.
The total number of consultations provided reached 46,883. Of the total number of applicants to the centers, 9,550 candidates began the process of registration for military service.
In particular, over the past week, 171 citizens decided to join the Defense Forces of Ukraine.
11:52 The Austrian State Intelligence and Protection Agency (DSN) has exposed a large-scale Russian disinformation campaign in the country that spread disinformation about Ukraine, the Austrian Interior Ministry reported.
11:23 The Ukrainian delegation remains in Saudi Arabian Riyadh after talks with US representatives. This was reported on air by Fakty ICTV correspondent Olga Chayko, who is at the scene. The Ukrainian delegation is waiting for the results of the US-RF meeting, but it is not yet known for sure whether the trilateral meeting of the delegations will take place.
10:55 Russian sabotage and reconnaissance groups are trying to expand the zone of penetration into Sumy Oblast and transfer military operations from Kursk Oblast to Ukrainian territory. This was stated on television by the spokesman for the State Border Service of Ukraine, Andriy Demchenko.
10.41 The partner countries of the drone coalition have decided to allocate 20 million euros from the common fund for tactical-level reconnaissance UAVs (ISR) for the needs of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. This was reported by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
10:24 Law enforcement officers detained another FSB agent operating in Kharkov. He prepared explosives for terrorist attacks and adjusted the aggressor's missile and bomb strikes on the regional center. This was reported by the SBU.
10:23 Russian invaders stole at least 164 archaeological treasures from the temporarily occupied Crimea, found during excavations of the ancient cities of Nymphaeum and Panticapaeum. This was reported by the press service of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.
The Main Intelligence Directorate will publish data on 14 Russian museum workers engaged in propaganda and facilitating the theft of Ukrainian cultural treasures in the temporarily occupied territories.
09:55 More than 2,421 children have suffered in Ukraine as a result of the full-scale armed aggression of the Russian Federation. As of the morning of March 24, 2025, according to official information from juvenile prosecutors, 604 children have died and more than 1,817 have been injured to varying degrees of severity.
09:40 Representatives of the United States and Russia have begun another round of talks in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia). The meeting will be closed. Journalists have been asked to leave The Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where the talks will take place.
According to media reports, the goal of the conversation will be to achieve a ceasefire in the Black Sea to ensure free shipping.
9:30 Over the past 24 hours, 140 combat clashes between the Ukrainian Defense Forces and the Russian invaders have been recorded at the front. Over the past 24 hours, the aviation, missile forces and artillery of the Defense Forces have hit 13 areas of concentration of personnel, weapons and military equipment, three UAV control points, one air defense system, three artillery systems and one important Russian facility. This was reported on March 24 by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
8:49 The Ukrainian Defense Forces shot down 57 Russian drones, and another 36 enemy UAVs were lost. This was reported on March 24 by the Ukrainian Air Force.
7:57 The total combat losses of Russian troops from February 24, 2022 to March 24, 2025 in the war against Ukraine amount to about 904,760 people. Over the past 24 hours, the Ukrainian Armed Forces destroyed 1,280 Russian occupiers. This was reported on March 24 by the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
01:21 Russian troops shelled Zaporizhia. A fire broke out in the city. The blast wave and debris damaged the windows of multi-story buildings, a garage, and private homes nearby. A 54-year-old woman was injured in the enemy attack.
0:49 Russian military carried out a drone strike on the village of Bolshaya Babka in the Chuguevsky district of Kharkiv region. As a result of the attack, two people were injured: a 25-year-old pregnant woman and a 25-year-old man.
[DAILYPOST.NG] At least three people have been hospitalized after an undetonated Improvised Explosive Device (IED) exploded in Gujba Local Government Area of Yobe State.
The explosion occurred on Saturday in Ngomari Community, Buni Yadi, the headquarters of Gujba LGA.
Boko Haram terrorists have a history of using IEDs to carry out attacks in the region, leaving behind unexploded devices that pose risks to residents.
[FoxNews] Tom Homan says Massachusetts Democrats 'should be ashamed' and that despite their actions, deporting criminal illegals 'will be done'
Following a Massachusetts law barring law enforcement cooperation with ICE, illegal child rapists and other serious criminal illegals charged with "horrific crimes" are being released on to the streets on bail as low as $500 and, in some cases, no bail at all.
Responding to these releases, Tom Homan, President Donald Trump’s border czar, said that Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healy and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, both Democrats, "should be ashamed" and that despite their actions, deporting criminal illegals "will be done."
Healey has previously said that Massachusetts is not a sanctuary state. However, a 2017 ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Lunn vs. Commonwealth, bars local and state law enforcement from coordinating with ICE to assist with deportation operations. The ruling stipulates that law enforcement cannot comply with ICE detainers, forcing agencies to release criminal migrants onto the streets.
Last week, Wu renewed her pledge to resist Trump’s deportation efforts, saying, "We stand with immigrants," and "No one tells Boston how to take care of our own, not kings, and not presidents who think they are kings."
However, at least seven illegal immigrants charged with serious crimes, including child rape and fentanyl trafficking, were released by local law enforcement agencies in Massachusetts in recent months, according to CBS.
The outlet reported that in one instance, a 39-year-old Honduran national named Juan Alberto Rodezno-Marin, who was charged with indecent assault and battery on a person over 14, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, masked armed robbery and assault to rape, was released on his own recognizance without having to pay bail.
According to an ICE statement, immigration officials had previously arrested and removed Rodezno-Marin twice for illegally re-entering the U.S., in 2008 and 2009.
Despite these crimes and an ICE detainer being filed against him, the Middlesex Superior Court released Rodezno-Marin in December. He was not arrested by ICE until a month later. He is currently in ICE custody.
Meanwhile, ABC reported the Worcester County Jail released two illegal immigrant inmates charged with child rape on bail of just $500.
Another illegal immigrant, Jose Fernando-Perez, a 49-year-old Guatemalan national charged with three counts of forcible rape of a child and three counts of aggravated rape of a child, was released in 2022 on a $7,500 bail with just an order to "stay in his home."
Fernando-Perez was finally arrested by ICE on Feb. 2 of this year.
At the time, Patricia Hyde, ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Boston acting field office director, said Fernando-Perez’s "horrific crimes against a minor in our commonwealth" made him "exactly the type of alien we are targeting with our ‘worst first’ policy."
In northeastern Massachusetts, the Lawrence District Court released another Honduran national, 19-year-old Stivenson Omar Perez-Ajtzalan, on $7,500 bail despite pending charges of aggravated rape of a child with a 10-year age difference.
[JustTheNews] Within a month of Trump being in office, illegal border crossings dropped by 90%
Within less than three months of President Donald Trump being in office, more than 10,000 U.S. military troops have been deployed to support southern border security efforts.
On his first day and week in office, he issued multiple executive orders to secure the southwest border, including a Department of Defense directive for the United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) to “seal the borders and maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of the United States by repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking, and other criminal activities.”
Within 36 hours of his order being issued, an initial 1,500 U.S. troops were deployed to the southwest border, bringing the total to 4,000 troops, including 2,500 reservists already there.
By March 1, a 4,400-soldier Stryker brigade combat team and a 650-troop general support aviation battalion were deployed, bringing Title 10 forces to approximately 9,000, the DOD said. The units are equipped with Stryker vehicles, Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters to provide enhanced detection, logistic and aerial support for U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents on the ground. Troops have also been installing physical barriers and were deputized by Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks to perform immigration functions alongside CBP officers.
Within a month of Trump being in office, illegal border crossings dropped by 90 percent. February numbers were the lowest in U.S. recorded history, The Center Square reported.
In the past week, a missile destroyer was deployed to support USNORTHCOM southern border security efforts in U.S. and international waters.
Another 400 service members were deployed from New York, Colorado, Georgia and Maryland to support USNORTHCOM border security efforts.
On March 15, the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Gravely departed Naval Weapons Station Yorktown to support USNORTHCOM’s “southern border mission as part of the DOD’s coordinated effort in response to the Presidential Executive Order. Gravely’s sea-going capacity improves our ability to protect the United States’ territorial integrity, sovereignty, and security,” USNORTHCOM Commander Gen. Gregory Guillot said.
In order “to restore territorial integrity at the U.S. southern border,” Gravely’s crew will enhance maritime efforts and support interagency collaboration to combat maritime related terrorism, weapons proliferation, transnational crime, piracy, environmental destruction and illegal seaborne immigration, he said. A U.S. Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachment (LEDET) will be embarked aboard Gravely; LEDET’s carry out a range of maritime interdiction efforts.
On March 17, US Northern Command announced that an additional 400 service members had been approved to be deployed, including 385 US Army engineers. They include Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 41st Engineer Battalion, 10th Mountain Division and the 642nd Engineer Company, 41st Engineer Battalion, 10th Mountain Division, both from Fort Drum, New York.
They also include the 76th Combat Engineer Company-Stryker, 4th Engineer Battalion, 4th Infantry Division (Fort Carson, CO); Headquarters, 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division (Fort Stewart, GA); and 6th Medical Logistic Management Center (Fort Detrick, MD).
Troops from Georgia will provide aviation support as well as several MQ-1C Gray Eagle Unmanned Aircraft Systems with airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. Maryland troops will provide centralized management of deployed medical logistics, USNORTHCOM said.
Deployment of these units increases the total number of troops deployed or approved to deploy to the southwest border to more than 10,000.
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/25/2025 8:19
Comments ||
Top||
#3
But unlike a number of (D)'s, he resigned immediately, KNOWING his Political party would not cover for his perverted crap.
Plus, his wife (R) quickly dumped his ass for screwing around, instead riding it out to use his political position for self gain. EG. Bill-Hillary and few other D's
[Yahoo] With Snow White now in theaters, its box office performance has quickly become a topic of industry focus. The live-action remake arrived with high expectations and significant attention, both from audiences and analysts. As it continues its theatrical run, questions remain about how the film will perform in the coming weeks amid shifting audience interest and broader market trends.
Snow White’s box office starts with $87 million+ globally
Disney’s Snow White opened to $43 million domestically and $87.3 million globally (via Box Office Mojo)
------------------ best comments put to music here
some of my favs
- I was rooting for the poisoned apple
- If I saw this movie on a plane I would still walk out
- I would rather sit on my TV and watch the couch than sit on the couch and watch this movie
#6
I sure wish I could do more for its demise than just not pay to see it.
I've already not gone to see it three times!
I just want a story (or robots punching monsters). If you want to send a message, go make a Netflix docudrama.
[THEPOSTMILLENNIAL] A trans-identified female activist has been charged with two felonies after a domestic violence assault was reported to police in Frankfort, Kentucky, with the suspect claiming the marks left on the female victim were from "rough sex."
According to the State Journal, a 911 caller reported the incident at 4:11 am on Friday morning, with the female victim having "marks from head to toe." The suspect, Selena Marie Metts, also known as "Chad Lee Metts," claimed to officers that the two had "very rough sex, which resulted in the marks."
The victim claimed to police that Metts had repeatedly punched her in the face, used a metal piece of a fan to hit her in the face, held her down, and choked her to the point of being unable to breathe. The responding officer noted that the victim had red scratch marks and bruises to her head, face, neck, breasts, and arms."
The victim wrote on social media, "It makes me sick that the his defense is 'rough sex'. We didn't even have sex that night. These marks are not even close to rough sex. I'm going to scream this forever, I'm not going to be silent about it. He had intent on killing me that night and I'm thankful for my friend for calling. I'm beyond blessed with the friends that I have who are supportive and here. This is the same person who begged and begged and claimed they loved me and my kids so much. If they hit you once they will never stop."
#1
Would have been better if he was:
* Toes down, wrapped in a Pig stomach and facing hell,
* with parts removed and re-insert in his mouth,
* and a picture taken as an example, and warning for others like him?
#4
Having worked around _____.
The 1 on 1 personal touch has always seemed to have had greater deterring impact to those that followed such scum, than an air strike.
#5
NN2N1, well said, extremely well said. As with the most humane mule trainer in the world, you must get their attention and then communicate in a language they can grasp.
[ZeroHedge] “There’s an iPhone moment happening with humanoids,” said Brett Adcock, founder of Figure, a humanoid robotics company in California. “It’s going to happen right now,” added the serial entrepreneur, his robots already working on the production line in BMW’s Spartanburg factory. Another major corporate customer is trialing his robots for warehouse work. “To succeed at this, you have to do three things that have never been done before. And you have to get all three of them right within the next 5yrs or you’re going to fail for sure.”
“The first thing is you have to build hardware for humanoids that’s incredibly complex and can never fail, and it’s got to work at human speeds with human range of motion,” explained Adcock. “The second thing is a neural net problem, not a control systems problem. You can’t code your way out of this problem. You need to have a robot that can ingest human-like data through a neural net and it has to be able to imitate what humans do. Humanoid robots are not like arms bolted to a factory table. None of those robots have AI.”
“The third problem is that you then have to generalize. This is the holy grail of robotics,” explained Adcock. “To have a robot look at something it’s never seen before, or heard through speech, and to be able to tell a robot how to do it, and then have it be able to complete that task end to end with one neural net,” he said. “If you can solve those three things, then you’re in the right decade and you’re at the iPhone moment,” he said. “And we can confidently say we have solved or are making major progress on all three problems.”
“If we had 100,000 robots today that all worked, our two commercial customers would take them all,” said Adcock, not able to leverage scaled up supply chains because they do not yet exist, it’s still early. Which nation wins remains up for grabs. “And we could sign on fifty Fortune 100 companies by the weekend. We are bombarded by demand. The supply of humans is going down.” The working age population is in steep decline across the developed world. “There is unbounded demand. We could ship 1-million robots this month if they were all ready to go.”
I asked Perplexity to tell me about the leading companies that are producing humanoid robots. Perplexity is an AI that excels in searching the web for the most up-to-date information. I now use different robots depending on the type of task. I’d guess that someday soon we’ll all have multiple robots. Anyhow, Perplexity gave me the top ten companies. Brett Adcock’s Figure, Boston Dynamics, many others I’d never heard of. Tesla made the list of course, its Optimus humanoid robot, run on a proprietary AI, getting smarter every day I drive.
[HodhodYemenNews] US aggression aircraft resumed their criminal raids on the capital, Sana’a, and Sa’adah province, which led to the martyrdom of at least one person and injuring 15 others, including 3 children and 2 women in an initial toll.
According to local sources in Sana’a, reported that the US aggression launched raids on the capital, targeting a residential building in the Asr neighborhood of Mo’een district.
In Saada, the aggression aircraft carried out two raids on the outskirts of the city. The US aggression later launched a raid on Sahar district and another on Saqeen district.
These raids on Saada follow a series of US aggression strikes on Saturday evening and Sunday dawn, which targeted the districts of Kitaf and Saqeen in the same province, as well as Hodeidah airport, Salif port, and areas in Ma’rib province.
The American aggression is aimed at trying to stop Yemen’s operations against Israeli targets, including Israeli ships, and Israeli-linked vessels. They describe the aggression as an attempt on the part of Washington to render Sana’a’s defenses incapable of taking on the regime in response to its bloodshed and destruction 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... .
Saudi news site claims senior rebel killed in strike on residential neighborhood in capital; Trump official claims bombing campaign taking out Iran-backed group’s ‘key leadership’
US airstrikes targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels pounded sites across the country into Monday, with the group saying the one attack in the capital killed at least one person and wounded more than a dozen others, as the American air campaign against the rebel group entered a second week.
The rebel-controlled SABA news agency reported, citing health officials, that the US-attributed strike on a residential neighborhood in western Sanaa killed one and injured 13, including three children.
According to the Saudi Al Hadath network, a senior Houthi official was killed in the strike on the capital. However, the report did not identify the official by name or by position.
Footage released by the rebels showed the rubble of a collapsed building and pools of blood staining the gray dust covering the ground.
A building next to the collapsed structure still stood, suggesting American forces likely used a lower-yield warhead in the strike.
The Houthis also described American airstrikes targeting sites around the city of Saada, a Houthi stronghold, the Red Sea port city of Hodeida, and Marib province, home to oil and gas fields still under the control of allies to Yemen’s exiled central government.
The American strikes entered a 10th day without a sign of stopping, part of a campaign by US President Donald Trump, targeting the rebel group that threatens maritime trade and Israel, while also trying to pressure Iran, the Houthis’ main benefactor.
So far, the US has not offered any specifics on the sites it is striking, though Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz claimed the attacks have “taken out key Houthi leadership, including their head missileer.”
That has not been acknowledged by the Houthis, though the rebels have downplayed their losses in the past and exaggerated their attacks in attempting to target American warships.
“We’ve hit their headquarters,” Waltz told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “We’ve hit communications nodes, weapons factories, and even some of their over-the-water drone production facilities.”
The campaign of airstrikes targeting the rebels, which killed at least 53 people immediately after they began March 15, started after the Houthis threatened to begin targeting “Israeli” ships again over Israel blocking aid entering the Gaza Strip.
The latest US strikes came after antisemitic influencer Jackson Hinkle visited Yemen over the weekend and met with senior Houthi leaders at a conference in Sanaa entitled “Palestine: The Central Issue of the Nation – You Are Not Alone.”
Hinkle, a US citizen known to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories about Israel and Ukraine on social media, met with members of the US-listed terrorist organization at the conference in apparent violation of American law, though he currently resides in Russia.
❤️???????? It was a GREAT HONOR to meet ANSAR ALLAH’S YAHYA SAREE in Yemen. pic.twitter.com/nZISJuDCAH
— Jackson Hinkle ???????? (@jacksonhinklle) March 23, 2025
Hinkle also attended the funeral of slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon last month.
The conference on Saturday included Hamas representatives in Yemen, former South African parliamentarian and grandson of Nelson Mandela, Zwelivelile Mandla Mandela, former Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi, Brazilian analyst Deb Escobar, former Member of European Parliament Mick Wallace, and others.
The conference discussed the strategic dimensions of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, the dangers of normalization, and the role of resistance in confronting the Zionist entity, according to its press announcement.
📌 Geolocated footage posted today to 2.25160, 45.39555 which confirms #AlShabaab set up a checkpoint just 15km from Mogadishu—a bold show of control as the group pushes closer to the capital amid intensifying offensives.
Ali Dheere delivered a fiery open-air speech, flaunting the group’s presence.
The video, posted by the militants themselves, paints a chilling picture of confidence and control despite Somali government-backed media claiming major air and ground offensives are “crippling” the group.
So who’s lying?
Is the government winning or spinning?
[IsraelTimes] Trump administration court filing laying out its case against Mahmoud Khalil claims he ‘withheld membership in certain organizations,’ including work for UN agency for Palestinians
The US government has alleged that Columbia University student and pro-Paleostinian demonstrator Mahmoud Khalil withheld that he worked for a United Nations ...the Oyster Bay money pit... Paleostinian relief agency in his visa application, saying that should be grounds for deportation.
The UN agency known as UNRWA provides food and healthcare to Paleostinian refugees but has become a flashpoint in the Israeli war 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... , as Israel contends that several UNRWA employees participated in Hamas ..a regional Iranian catspaw,... ’s invasion and slaughter in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, leading the US to halt funding of the group.
The administration of US President Donald Trump ...dictatorial for repealing some (but not all) of the diktats of his predecessor, misogynistic because he likes pretty girls, homophobic because he doesn't think gender bending should be mandatory, truly a man for all seasons... on March 8 detained Khalil, a prominent figure in the pro-Paleostinian campus protests that rocked the New York City campus last year, and is seeking his deportation.
The case has drawn attention as a test of free speech rights, with supporters of Khalil saying he was targeted for publicly disagreeing with US policy on Israel and its military actions in Gaza. Khalil has called himself a political prisoner.
The US alleges Khalil’s presence or activities in the country would have serious foreign policy consequences.
A judge has ordered Khalil not to be deported while a lawsuit challenging his detention, known as a habeas petition, is heard in another federal court.
Khalil, a native of Syria and citizen of Algeria, entered the US on a student visa in 2022 and later filed to become a permanent resident in 2024.
In a court brief dated Sunday, the US government outlined its arguments for keeping Khalil in jug while his removal proceedings continue, arguing first that the US District Court in New Jersey, where the habeas case is being heard, lacked jurisdiction.
The brief also says Khalil "withheld membership in certain organizations" which should be grounds for his deportation.
It references a March 17 document in his deportation case that informed Khalil he could be removed because he failed to disclose that he was a political officer of UNRWA in 2023.
UNRWA — short for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Paleostine Refugees in the Near East — provides education, health care and aid to millions of Paleostinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Leb ...an Iranian satrapy until recently ruled by Hassan Nasrallah situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel... and Syria. The UN says it is the backbone of humanitarian operations for Paleostinians.
The UN said in August an investigation found nine of the agency’s 32,000 staff members may have been involved in the October 7 attacks, during which Hamas-led turbans stormed southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 251 people as hostages, mostly civilians.
Israel alleges that more than 10 percent of UNRWA’s staff in Gaza have ties to terrorist factions and that educational facilities under the organization’s auspices consistently incite hatred of Israel and glorify terror.
The US court notice also accused Khalil of leaving off his visa application that he worked for the Syria office in the British embassy in Beirut and that he was a member of the group Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
Attorneys for Khalil did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
One attorney, Ramie Kassem, a co-director of the legal clinic CLEAR, was quoted in the New York Times
...which still proudly claims Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... as saying the new deportation grounds were "patently weak and pretextual."
"That the government scrambled to add them at the 11th hour only highlights how its motivation from the start was to retaliate against Mr. Khalil for his protected speech in support of Paleostinian rights and lives," Kassem said, according to the Times.
[THEPOSTMILLENNIAL] President Donald Trump ...Oh, noze! Not him!... announced on Monday that Hyundai will be investing $5.8 billion to build a steel plant in Louisiana, as part of a larger $21 billion investment into the country in the next few years. This is the latest company to announce multi-billion-dollar investments into the country.
Trump said that the new Louisiana steel plant would produce 2.7 million metric tons of steel per year and create more than 1,400 jobs for American steel workers. He said that there will be "major expansion after that."
"This will be Hyundai's first-ever steel mill in the United States—one of the largest companies in the world, by the way—supplying steel for its auto parts and auto plants in Alabama and Georgia, which will soon produce more than 1 million American-made cars every single year."
Trump said that the investment from the South Korean company "is a clear demonstration that tariffs very strongly work, and I hope other things also, but the tariffs are bringing them in at levels that have not been witnessed. Hyundai will be producing steel in America and making its cars in America, and as a result, they'll not have to pay any tariffs."
A couple of the main reasons we saw many US manufactures LEAVE the USA, was their Union leadership constant overbearing demands, strikes while under contract and production disruptions that they caused.
The political "donations" made to get NAFTA passed.
The another reason was Gov. with its Taxes, upon taxes and always increasing local EPA reg's.
So has the Local/State/Fed Gov's and the Steel and UAW Unions learned their lessons?
[THEPOSTMILLENNIAL] Former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas will no longer receive Secret Service protection after President Donald Trump ...The man who was so stupid he beat fourteen professional politicians, a former tech CEO, and a brain surgeon for the Republican nomination in 2016, then beat The Smartest Woman in the World in the general election. Then he beat Kamala while dodging bullets... revoked his security detail, the agency confirmed on Monday. The decision comes months before the protection was originally set to expire, reports The Washington Post.
Mayorkas, who served under President Joe The Big Guy Biden ...46th president of the U.S. You're a lyin' dog-faced pony soldier... , was not automatically entitled to protection after leaving office in January. However,
Caliphornia hasn't yet slid into the ocean, no matter how hard it's tried... Biden had extended his security detail for six months, which would have lasted until mid-July. Trump's decision to terminate the protection cut that timeline short.
The president has also ended Secret Service protection for Hunter Biden and Ashley Biden, the children of the former president.
Their protection officially ceased on Monday, just one week after Trump publicly announced his decision on Truth Social.
''Former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Mr. Hunter and Ms. Ashley Biden and their families are no longer protectees of the United States Secret Service,'' agency front man Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement.
[CompactMag] It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.
And then the doors shut.
By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.
Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).
“The kind of novel we think about as the literary novel, the Updike or DeLillo, I think it’s harder for white men,” a leading fiction agent told me. “In part because I don’t know the editors who are open to hearing a story of the sort of middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience. The young agents and editors didn’t come up in that culture.” The agent proceeded to list white male writers who have carved out a niche for themselves—Nathan Hill, Joshua Cohen, Ben Lerner, Michael Connelly, Adam Ross—but none was younger than Cohen, who was born in 1980. Read the rest at the link.
#4
That's because the publishing industry is dominated by AWFLs - has been for some time.
Posted by: Rex Mundi ||
03/25/2025 12:31
Comments ||
Top||
#5
And movie scripts, and prestige western gaming.
Well I guess Dragonage: Veilguard was a dude pretending to be an AWFL.
On on the other side, all men in general are probably not writing to impress Vanity Fair, New York Times, The New Yorker, or if you've seen what it is now Esssquire.
[ARISE.TV] Six coppers have been killed in an ambush on a security base in north-east Kenya near the Somali border, a regional official has confirmed.
Garissa County Commissioner Mohammed Mwabudzo said the attack, which occurred at 05:30 local time (02:30 GMT) on Sunday, bore the hallmarks of Somali-based Islamist bad boy group al-Shabaab ... Somalia's version of the Taliban, functioning as an arm of al-Qaeda... . The officers were preparing for their morning prayers when the assailants struck.
In addition to the six fatalities, four other officers sustained injuries and were taken to hospital for treatment. The attack targeted a camp housing reservists—local volunteers who assist the regular police in securing remote areas.
Mwabudzo described the assault as a ''guerrilla-style'' raid, consistent with al-Shabaab's repeated cross-border incursions aimed at destabilising the region. ''The suspected militia used assorted weapons to overrun the camp,'' he added.
While no group has officially grabbed credit, al-Shabaab has a history of launching deadly attacks in Kenya, targeting both security forces and civilians. The al-Qaeda-affiliated group controls large parts of southern and central Somalia and has been engaged in a violent mostly peaceful insurgency against Somalia's government for nearly two decades.
[BUSINESSDAY.NG] The Nigerian Air Force (NAF) has ramped up its counter-insurgency operations in Borno State, launching a series of precision Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... s against 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.... West Africa Province (ISWAP) hideouts.
The latest strikes targeted key terrorist enclaves, resulting in the destruction of multiple murderous Moslem facilities and the elimination of several terrorists.
According to intelligence sources cited by Zagazola Makama, a counter-terrorism expert in the Lake Chad, NAF fighter jets carried out a major offensive on March 22, striking ISWAP positions in Chilaria, within the notorious Timbuktu Triangle.
The operation inflicted heavy damage on the murderous Moslems, neutralizing several fighters and destroying four Hilux trucks used for their activities.
[EWN.CO.ZA] Chad on Monday warned its traditional foe Sudan ...a Moslem country located in the Horn of Africa. It is noted for its affinity for rule by ex- or current generals, its holy men, and for the oppression of the native Afro population by its Arab conquerors. South Sudan, populated mostly by the natives, split off from Sudan proper, which left North and South Darfur to be oppressed by the guys with turbans... that it "reserves the legitimate right to respond" if attacked, following threats made by a senior Khartoum military official.
In a video broadcast Sunday on Al Jazeera, the deputy commander of the Sudanese forces, Yasser al-Atta, warned that the airport in the Chadian capital N'Djamena and at Amdjarras in northeastern Chad "are legitimate targets for the Sudanese armed forces".
The remarks "could be interpreted as a declaration of war if followed through," Chadian foreign ministry front man Ibrahim Adam Mahamat said.
"Such rhetoric could lead to a dangerous escalation for the entire sub-region," and "Chad reserves the legitimate right to respond vigorously to any attempted aggression," he added.
"Sudan has just declared war on Chad," declared former Chadian prime minister Saleh Kebzabo on his official Facebook page.
"We must take this very seriously, prepare for it militarily, and mobilise," he added.
Chad has accused the Sudanese government for over six decades of doing everything it can to destabilise its neighbour, notably by "orchestrating rebellions" and supporting the Boko Haram ... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality... Islamist group.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been torn apart by a conflict pitting General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the army and de facto ruler of the country since a 2021 coup, against his former deputy, Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, known as Hemedti, the chief of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
At the end of October 2024, N'Djamena denied any involvement in the Sudanese conflict but Khartoum's de facto rulers accused it of playing an active role in arms deliveries from the United Arab Emirates to the RSF.
The alleged support for the RSF has been highlighted in various reports -- including one from the United Nations ...a lucrative dumping ground for the relatives of dictators and party hacks... in January 2024 -- but Chad and the UAE have consistently denied involvement.
The presence in El Fasher in Sudan's perennially restive Darfur region of a Zaghawa rebellion -— an ethnic group also present in Chad -— is N'Djamena's main concern.
It is led by Ousman Dillo, the younger brother of Chadian opposition leader Yaya Dillo Djerou who was killed by the Chadian army.
In February 2008, a Zaghawa rebellion based in Sudan launched a lightning offensive in Chad alongside other groups, forcing former president Idriss Deby Itno to take refuge in his presidential palace, before successfully repelling the rebels with decisive support from former ruler La Belle France.
The war in Sudan since April 2023 has left tens of thousands dead, displaced more than 11 million people and created the risk of widespread famine, in what the UN considers the worst humanitarian crisis in recent times.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Oleg Shevchenko
[REGNUM] "We knew what we were doing. It was a dirty deal. We'd use any bastard as long as he was an anti-communist."
To be fair, during the Second World War America had teamed up with Stalin against the Nazis, who were at the time the more immediate threat. Afterward the nuclear armed and equally totalitarian Soviet Union moved up to first place.
This characterization of the "information work" of the United States against our country in the post-war era could be written off as "Moscow propaganda." If not for one "but": the phrase is very likely genuine.
This statement by former CIA operative Harry Rositzke is cited by Christopher Simpson, a researcher of Nazi crimes at the Washington American University, in his 1988 book, " Blow Back : America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Devastating Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy."
Intelligence officer Harry Rositzke, who worked in West Germany under CIA co-founder Frank Gardiner Wisner, had a very specific operation in mind when he spoke of recruiting “bastards.” It was the opening, 72 years ago, in March 1953, of Radio Liberation, better known by its other brand name, Radio Liberty (recognized in Russia as a foreign agent), in Munich.
Now this station, along with another “honored” foreign agent media outlet, the Voice of America, is being closed by decision of the Donald Trump administration.
In the age of social networks, radio as such is no longer an effective instrument of soft power and a weapon in a proxy battle.
But at the beginning of the last Cold War, under another Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower (to whom Trump is often compared), it was a powerful tool that could be put into the hands of ex-Nazis.
Let us add that the second information warfare machine, the Voice of America, was launched in Washington even before the start of the Cold War, at the height of the fight against Hitler and our alliance with the Americans.
"THE VOICE" CHANGES INTONATION
The Voice of America (VoA) first went on the air on February 24, 1942, at a time when the Third Reich and its allies were enjoying their greatest successes. Europe from Scandinavia to the Balkans was occupied, the Germans were advancing in North Africa, the Japanese had taken Singapore, and the Battle of Moscow—which marked the collapse of Hitler’s blitzkrieg in the East—was not yet over.
The Franklin Roosevelt administration's decision to begin broadcasting the Voice of America had a noble goal: it was necessary to interrupt the flow of Goebbels' propaganda, which was benefiting from the situation at the front.
"We will talk about America and the war, the news can be good or bad - we will tell you the truth" - this was the first phrase with which VoA went on air. And the fact that, in addition to news broadcasts, jazz and pop melodies and stories about the American way of life were heard on the airwaves - was perceived as an integral part of the "truth".
Immediately after the war, propaganda and counter-propaganda work acquired a new target: no longer Europe, but a recent ally – the USSR. The Russian-language broadcast of the Voice of America was launched on the initiative of a man from Roosevelt’s team who specialized in our country.
It was the industrialist and diplomat William Averell Harriman, who represented the United States at the Moscow Conference of 1941, was Roosevelt's special representative to the Soviet Union and the United States ambassador to Moscow in 1943–1946, was responsible for contacts on Lend-Lease issues, met with Joseph Stalin on several occasions, and witnessed decisions in Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and American diplomat Averell Harriman (left to right) at a meeting in Moscow
At the same time, the master of Soviet diplomacy Oleg Troyanovsky noted: it was Harriman who was largely responsible for the deterioration of relations between the USSR and the USA after Roosevelt’s death in 1945.
In early 1946, he conveyed to the Harry Truman administration his thoughts on the ineffectiveness of distributing American printed materials in the USSR and pointed out that radio was the most effective means of directly reaching the Soviet audience. On February 17, 1947, the first Voice of America broadcast in Russian was broadcast.
And a year later, in 1948, the Voice officially ceased broadcasting... on the territory of the United States itself.
Congress then passed the Information and Educational Exchange Act, better known as the Smith-Mundt Act. It created a foreign policy propaganda agency within the State Department, the United States Information Agency (USIA), and simultaneously restricted propaganda broadcasts to the United States.
The authors of the published collection “U.S. Foreign Affairs in the New Information Age: Charting a Course for the 21st Century,” edited by senior USIA veteran Alvin Snyder, noted that in passing the Smith-Mundt Act, “Congress wanted to make sure that a government agency (USIA) could not brainwash citizens, as Hitler did in Germany.”
"THE BEGINNING OF AN ORGANIZED POLITICAL WAR"
But “brainwashing” the inhabitants of Europe and the peoples behind the Iron Curtain seemed not only acceptable, but also necessary.
At the same time, the Voice of America and other “voices” distanced themselves more and more from the White House administration. In full accordance with the memorandum that diplomat George Frost Kennan, the author of the doctrine of containing the Soviet Union, presented to the US National Security Council in 1948.
Kennan's memo spoke of "The Inauguration of organized political warfare" and mentioned "carefully concealed official control so that it would be impossible to connect the operations with the state."
"General direction and funding come from the government; guidance and funding are provided to private American organizations... private individuals... these organizations, through their branches in Europe and Asia, establish contacts..." the memorandum stated.
One of the "guiding instructions" was the propaganda treatment of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union "oppressed by Moscow." Usually, in this connection, the law PL 89-90 "On Captive Nations", adopted under Eisenhower in 1959, is recalled, but in fact the "instructions" came much earlier.
On March 12, 1947, at a joint session of the Houses of Congress, Harry Truman declared: "The United States...must help to liberate peoples so that they can decide their own destiny."
In 1949, the Ukrainian broadcast of the Voice of America began. The first editor was Nikifor Grigoriev, a full namesake of the famous ataman, who himself had distinguished himself during the Civil War as the head of the press bureau of the Symon Petliura army. It is not surprising that one of the main topics of the broadcast was the "national liberation struggle" against Russia.
Since 1951, the Voice of America has been broadcast in the languages of the Baltics and Transcaucasia. At the same time, the Radio Free Europe began to broadcast from West Germany, initially targeting the countries of the socialist camp, from Poland to Romania, and then expanded to include Baltic editorial offices.
And then the interesting personnel policy of the Voice of America - Free Europe showed itself. For example, Mikhail (Michel) Dadiani broadcast in the Georgian editorial office of VoA, about whom it is cautiously reported that during the war he became "a victim of fascist propaganda and fought in the German army."
Another example: the first editor of the Estonian edition of VoA was Harald Parrest - in biographical sources he is called a "literary critic", but if you dig a little, it turns out that Parrest "was known under the pseudonym Partisan", from 1944 he also served in the Wehrmacht, and in 1949, that is, the year the American occupation regime in West Germany ended, the "literary critic" moved to the United States.
THEATERGOERS AGAINST THE BOLSHEVIKS OR THE DEATH OF DUBROVSKY
In 1953, the Russian Service of the Voice of America was headed by Alexander Barmin, also a very curious character. In the early 1930s, a repentant Trotskyist, later a resident of the Red Army Intelligence Directorate in France and the Balkans, since 1937 a defector, an employee of the first unified intelligence service of the USA – the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
At the same time that Barmin took over the reins of the Voice of America, Radio Liberation from Bolshevism debuted in Munich, also known as Radio Liberation/Radio Liberty. In full accordance with Kennan’s memorandum, this “office” was not quite state-owned – its founder was listed as the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism (ACLB).
But the personnel policy was reminiscent of that adopted at the Voice of America: they recruited people who had collaborated with the Nazis.
The first broadcast of “Radio Liberation from Bolshevism” was hosted by Boris Vinogradov, a man with a strange fate.
Before the war, he was an actor at the Lensovet Theatre, was evacuated along the "Road of Life" to the Caucasus, found himself under German occupation in Pyatigorsk and "retreated" with the Wehrmacht. Another prominent theatre-goer, former actor and director of the Moscow Art Theatre Sergei Sverchkov, who ended up with the Germans immediately after the war began, worked in the editorial office. Unlike Vinogradov, he gave the impression of being ideological.
In particular, Sverchkov worked productively in the "Vineta" - the Special (Eastern) Department of the Propaganda Ministry of the Third Reich. In 1945, Sverchkov managed to escape to the Allies, the Americans refused to hand him over to the NKVD, and in 1946, the successfully "denazified" former Goebbels employee arrived in New York, where he was already in circulation.
At Radio Liberty, Sverchkov (hiding under the pseudonyms Ostrovsky, Orlovsky, and finally Dubrovsky) was considered a mentor. And in 1955, Vinogradov informed his boss Dubrovsky that he intended to... quit. Moreover, it became known that the first announcer had applied for repatriation to the USSR.
Vinogradov gave a farewell dinner, after which Sverchkov-Dubrovsky suddenly fell ill. And in October of the same 1955, the "mentor" of the Svoboda members mysteriously died suddenly - with a diagnosis of "rapid cirrhosis of the liver." Vinogradov calmly moved from the FRG through East Berlin to his homeland, returned to work in the theater and cinema (for example, he played the role of a pastor in Mark Donskoy's 1962 film "Hello, Children!") and died a natural death.
Let's just chalk it all up to luck.
FROM SMERSH VIA NTS TO THE CIA
Another person with an interesting fate in the first line-up of Radio Liberty was an actress from Rostov-on-Don, “the first female voice of Liberty” Victoria Semenova-Mondich.
This employee of Sverchkov-Dubrovsky's troupe ruined her career with "Great Russian chauvinism": she believed that radio should fight Bolshevism only by broadcasting to Great Russians. And at that time, broadcasting to enslaved peoples was just being developed - from Adyghe and Armenian to Uzbek and Turkmen languages.
Rostov resident Semenova apparently did not consider herself an “ethnic Cossack”.
Of no less interest to the curators of Svoboda was her husband, the Transcarpathian writer Mykhailo Mondich (aka Mykola Synevyrsky), an activist in the émigré People's Labor Union (NTS).
The well-known part of Mondich-Synevyrsky's biography is quite interesting: this Carpathian Rusyn, a citizen of Czechoslovakia, worked as a translator for SMERSH with the arrival of the Red Army, supported the annexation of Transcarpathia to the USSR, then fled to the West, joined the NTS and got a job at Radio Free Europe. Mondich-Synevyrsky was subsequently a full-time employee of the CIA and, according to him, survived several assassination attempts by MGB agents.
But what is interesting is that it was precisely at the time of the formation of the staff of Radio Liberty that Mondich was not accepted into the editorial board - precisely as a person from NTS, at that time this organization was under suspicion of being “infiltrated by Soviet agents.”
FROM VLASOV'S BARRACKS TO "FREEDOM"
If you continue to study the biographies of Svoboda employees, you will see less and less “spy passions” and more and more stories of dirty deals between American propagandists and Nazi collaborators.
For example, the Ukrainian editorial office of Radio Liberty employed career CIA employees Ivan Maistrenko and Alexander Voznyak. Not only Soviet, but also American intelligence services were well aware of their past: as militants of the OUN (an organization whose activities are banned in the Russian Federation), Maistrenko and Voznyak participated in mass shootings in Stanislav (Ivano-Frankivsk) in 1941.
One of the founders of the Tatar-Bashkir editorial board of Svoboda, the predecessor of Idel. Realii (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia), was Garif Sultan, who had recently been a fighter in the SS legion Idel-Ural. According to historians, it was Sultan who gave Musa Jalil's anti-fascist underground group, which operated in the legion, to the Gestapo.
Jalil's case could theoretically have fallen into the hands of the Slovak Gestapo functionary Imrich Kruzlyak, who rose to the post of editor of the European service of Radio Liberty under his new bosses.
Even more well-known is the case of Konstantin Kromiadi (Sanin), the head of the personnel department of Radio Liberty and a devout Christian who was a member of the Holy Prince Vladimir Brotherhood.
At the same time, Kromiadi rose to the rank of chief of the CIA's Munich base for relations with the second wave of emigration. His superiors knew his track record very well. In particular, this included participation in the creation of the 1st Russian National SS Brigade "Druzhina" and the so-called Russian National People's Army (better known as the "Gray Head" Special Purpose Unit as part of the sabotage Abwehrkommando-25).
Kromiadi-Sanin also "showed up" in the most famous collaborationist project - he was the head of Andrei Vlasov's personal chancery. Before moving to work for Svoboda, he was known for successfully hiding "officials of the Russian Liberation Army" from being extradited to the USSR, where the traitors would face a well-deserved sentence.
BRAINWASHING ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE
Having been staffed with Vlasovites, Banderites, “forest brothers”, defectors and other “ideological fighters against Bolshevism”, the conglomerate “Voice of America” – “Radio Liberty” – “Free Europe” reached a serious technical level.
As the Voice of America staff liked to tell, already in the early 1950s their broadcasts could theoretically be received by about 1.5 million listeners in the Soviet Union. By the 1960s, the supposedly not quite state radio station was already broadcasting 850 hours a week in 38 languages of the peoples of the USSR, creating materials for TV centers in 90 countries around the world.
American music has always been one of the elements of "soft power". Jazz producer and radio host Willis Conover worked for VoA for more than 40 years
The transmissions were transmitted using state-of-the-art, top-secret military radio transmitters at American bases in Lampertheim, Germany, and Taiwan. The network was reinforced by the resources of over a hundred powerful radio stations in the United States, as well as a network of radio centers in London, Munich, Athens, Tangier, Thessaloniki, Manila, Delhi, Bangkok, and on the islands of Okinawa and Rhodes.
An exotic project was also carried out to transmit news using Morse code (to break through our jamming system).
At the disposal of "Svoboda" were 28 powerful radio transmitters, 2 thousand employees (among whom were 700 successfully denazified West Germans and 470 post-war emigrants). Fruitful cooperation with the same "white émigré" NTS, which no longer raised questions from the CIA, also made its contribution. The Munich Institute for the Study of History and Culture of the USSR, affiliated with "Svoboda - Free Europe", worked closely with the diasporas of "enslaved peoples" - Ukrainian, Belarusian, North- and Transcaucasian organizations.
The history of counteraction to this intelligence and propaganda factory (which counteraction is not limited to "jammers") is worthy of separate consideration. Let us just note that the counter-efforts were nullified in 1989-1991 with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR.
Let us recall that Voice of America, Liberty and Free Europe were added to the register of foreign agents only in 2017.
#1
Christmas 1942 was, by ten thousand times, the most interesting part of WW2.
Fight me.
I know, the Americans weren't in the war so it didn't count.
A lot of Americans only like to pay attention to the part of the war when the Axis was already broken and it was one one-sided ass-kicking after another.
Like a video game player playing alone on a server destroying bot after bot and thinking he's the best player in mom's basement.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] Almost 70 mm of precipitation fell in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in one day, which is more than 60% of the monthly norm. This was reported on the morning of March 24 by the city's head, Yevgeny Belyaev.
"Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky remains in the grip of a cyclone. Road services are working in an enhanced mode: about 50 units of equipment are working on the roads. Snow removal is complicated by the fact that there are many abandoned personal cars along the roads," Belyaev wrote on his Telegram channel.
The mayor called on residents to refrain from driving on roads unless necessary. According to him, over 60% of the monthly precipitation norm fell in 24 hours. Wet snow makes it difficult for equipment to operate, Belyaev added. In addition, due to snowfall in the mountainous areas of the city district, the avalanche danger regime has been extended until March 27 inclusive.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, on March 9, a blizzard and snowfall impeded traffic in six districts of Bashkiria. At 15:50 local time (13:30 Moscow time), freight and passenger transport were prohibited from entering the federal highway M-7 "Volga" from the 1231st to the 1331st km, in the Ufimsky, Kushnarenkovsky and Dyurtyulinsky districts. At 16:00 (14:00 Moscow time), a similar restriction was introduced on the regional road Birsk - Tastuba - Satka from the zero to the 144th km, in the Birsky, Mishkinsky and Karaidelsky districts.
On February 25, passengers of several planes flying to Sochi were unable to reach their destination. The planes diverted to alternate airfields due to heavy snowfall.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] Six people, including Izvestia journalist Alexander Fedorchak, were killed as a result of artillery shelling by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. This was reported on March 24 by the head of the Lugansk People's Republic (LPR) Leonid Pasechnik.
"Today, another crime by Ukrainian Nazis occurred. Six people were killed as a result of artillery shelling of the Kremensky municipal district by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Among them were three employees of federal media outlets working in the territory of the Luhansk People's Republic: Izvestia correspondent Alexander Fedorchak, cameraman and driver of the Zvezda TV channel Andrei Panov and Alexander Sirkeli," Pasechnik wrote on his Telegram channel.
He added that the victims were trying to tell the world the truth about what was happening. Pasechnik expressed his condolences to the families and friends of those killed in the shelling.
According to the head of the LPR, a 14-year-old teenager was also injured in the attack by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He received shrapnel wounds. He was quickly taken to a medical facility.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, the Russian Investigative Committee opened a criminal case on the following grounds regarding the deaths of journalists and civilians as a result of shelling by Ukrainian forces of the village of Mikhailovka in the LPR : murder; obstruction of the lawful professional activities of journalists; intentional destruction or damage to someone else's property. The Investigative Committee assured that all measures would be taken to identify and prosecute those involved in these crimes.
Zvezda TV channel cameraman Andrey Panov and the film crew driver Aleksandr Sirkeli died in a special operation zone on LPR territory on March 24. The death occurred as a result of a strike on a civilian car by two HIMARS missiles. Izvestia military correspondent Aleksandr Fedorchak was also with them.
The death of Izvestia correspondent Alexander Fedorchak in the area of the special operation is another crime of the Kiev regime against freedom of speech. Russia will seek an international reaction to what happened, commented the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova on March 24.
"I can assure you that the latest crime of the Kiev regime against freedom of speech and journalism will not be consigned to oblivion by "strategic silence" paid for by Western curators. We will not only bring information to the attention of the relevant international organizations, but we will seek their reaction. The OSCE and UNESCO, as well as other specialized international institutions, are obliged to react," the diplomat told Izvestia.
Zakharova expressed her condolences to the family and friends of the deceased journalist.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, Alexander Fedorchak died as a result of an artillery strike by the Ukrainian Armed Forces on the territory of the LPR on March 24. Previously, he worked in the Kupyansk direction. His last report from the Kharkiv region was published on March 23.
The head of Crimea Sergey Aksyonov expressed condolences in connection with the death of his fellow countryman Alexander Fedorchak, calling him a talented journalist and a courageous man. The chairman of the Union of Journalists of Russia Vladimir Solovyov also addressed words of condolence. The correspondent of "Russia 24" Evgeny Nipot added that he will remember his deceased colleague as a truly brave patriot and professional.
The UN opposes the murders of journalists and demands their thorough investigation, Deputy Spokesman for the Head of the World Organization Farhan Haq commented on the death of Alexander Fedorchak on March 24.
The Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media will provide support to the relatives and friends of Izvestia correspondent Alexander Fedorchak, who died in the special operation zone, said the head of the department, Maksut Shadayev.
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.
 as The Shrew Getting Tamed.jpg)
...The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers...
..the well-beloved offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood,...
..a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth",...
..one of the armed feet of the Moslem Brüderbund millipede,...
..a regional Iranian catspaw,...
...a Zaidi Shia insurgent group operating in Yemen. They have also been referred to as the 
...Oh, noze! Not him!...
...46th president of the U.S. 
... Somalia's version of the Taliban, functioning as an arm of al-Qaeda...
...
...a Moslem country located in the Horn of Africa. It is noted for its affinity for rule by ex- or current generals, its holy men, and for the oppression of the native Afro population by its Arab conquerors. South Sudan, populated mostly by the natives, split off from Sudan proper, which left North and South Darfur to be oppressed by the guys with turbans...
... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality...
