#4
Squawks Mohammedans' g-wd-in-a-box
In their own honeyed tongue, "Money talks!
What is done in my name,
Sure I'll sanction the same
As if I were a sly desert fox."
Kinda weird, not to go all woowoo, that that popped out in a whole other context last night before I'd seen this page, let alone the typo.
[HodhodYemenNews] The Yemeni Armed Forces’ Air Defense Force successfully downed a United States MQ-9 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), Brigadier General Yahya Sare’e announced early Tuesday.
Amid ongoing US aggression against Yemen, which has resulted in dozens of civilian casualties, the YAF targeted the hostile drone over Ma’rib governorate using a domestically manufactured surface-to-air missile, Sare’e stated.
The strike marks the 16th confirmed downing of an MQ-9 UAV by the Yemeni Armed Forces since the Israeli aggression on Gaza began in late 2023.
[HodhodYemen ...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... News] United States aircraft launched on Sunday evening a series of strikes on Yemeni territories, including Sana’a province.
According to local sources, the American warplanes carried out four Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... s on the Jadr area in the Bani al-Harith district, located north of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a.
The strikes left one civilian dead and four others injured, according to a spokesperson for the health ministry.
In a statement published on social media Sunday, ministry official Anis al-Asbahi confirmed the casualties.
"According to preliminary information, one civilian has been killed and another four have been injured as a result of the US aggression on Sunday, March 30, 2025, against a village opposite the Jadr area of the Bani Al Harith district north of Sana’a," al-Asbahi wrote.
Moreover, the US enemy aircraft targeted al-Malikah area with eight air strikes and Sarf area in the Bani Hushaysh District, with five airstrikes, according local sourcesز
[HodhodYemen ...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... News] The Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF) successfully targeted an E-2 command and control aircraft belonging to the US aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, a senior Sana’a government source told Al Mayadeen on Sunday.
According to the source, "The Truman lost command capabilities following the attack, while both the White House and the US Department of Defense (Pentagon) have launched an investigation into the incident."
The targeted E-2 aircraft is designed to provide critical intelligence on potential threats faced by the warship during military operations. While it does not directly participate in attacks, it plays a crucial role in surveillance and tracking.
The aircraft, operated by a five-member crew—including two pilots and three radar specialists—lost its defensive protection, making it more vulnerable to attacks from Yemeni missiles and drones.
#5
The April Fools stories are thick today:
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2025/04/new-u-s-navy-aircraft-carrier-to-be-named-uss-musk/
Posted by: ed in texas ||
04/01/2025 12:17
Comments ||
Top||
#6
once again I suggest
a separate category for 'News from arab and shiite sources.
and maybe another from 'News from Russian sources'
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
04/01/2025 15:50
Comments ||
Top||
#7
I second Lord Garth. (There’s already a section for Russian sources. ). Iranian/Yemeni should have their own. These are the same folks that reported they had hit an aircraft carrier a few months ago….
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) March 30, 2025
Asra Nomani
@AsraNomani
Hello
@ElonMusk
and Friends,
You asked who is funding and organizing the #TeslaTakedown protests. I've got answers for you, after going onto the streets of northern Virginia for the local protests here, seeing familiar faces from the Virginia Democratic political machine and then following the money -- and the data.
AstroTurf Protest Industry
To your question, at latest count, as of 3/30, 5:30 AM:
🔴24 organizations and counting are funding and organizing the #TeslaTakedown protests and leading the very partisan propaganda campaign against Tesla, Tesla drivers, Tesla employees, Donald Trump and you. See below to see all 24 groups with their revenues, involvement, tax ID numbers and other info.
🔴These organizations have combined annual revenues of at least $124 MILLION and counting.
🔴 100% of the groups are aligned with the Democratic Party. At the protest on 3/29 at Tyco Road, in Tysons, Va., a photo I took of a "Virginia Democrats" sign in front of the Tesla dealership.
🔴 Most of these groups enjoy tax-deductible status as 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations, claiming they are "nonpartisan." A few have PACs. The organizations have not returned requests for comment.
Database
🔴 You can see the raw data on 306 #TeslaTakedown protests in the database here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13MOGhdMPc-_lGGdEGkS0QVSayczGG7Z5rlk_LUxdCTk/edit?usp=sharing
Back story
I'm a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a propaganda expert and editor of the
@DPearlProject
, a journalism nonprofit named for my WSJ colleague and friend Daniel Pearl. Since Oct. 7th, I have been reporting on the anti-Jew, anti-America, anti-Israel protests and building a database, following the money. It numbers 2,000 groups now, and I am working on a web and mobile app for parents, policymakers, university administrators, law enforcement, the public and others.
I went to the #TeslaTakedown protest a week ago Saturday on Tyco Road at the Tysons, Va., and saw familiar faces from Indivisible and the Fairfax County Democratic Party, shouting for you to be deported as they stood outside the Tesla dealership. I wondered too who is organizing and funding the protests nationwide.
I got the protest details scraped from ActionNetwork and Mobilize, the two platforms aligned with the Democratic Party promoting the #TeslaTakedown protests, and built a public database of the groups behind the Tesla protest.
AstroTurf, not "grassroots"
🔴 In an article for the
@FairfaxTimes
, I wrote about how the local protests in Tysons, are a window into how the protests are AstroTurf, not "grassroots." What this case reveals is the way that a multi-million dollar professional protest industry manufactures outrage in top-down political theater, agitprop, or agitation propaganda, and now criminal offenses. Here is the article: https://fairfaxtimes.com/articles/local-teslatakedown-reveals-grassroots-protests-are-astroturf/article_1c368d4d-708c-4074-b5fa-5eaf6a32ea97.html
🔴 Next step: I just got data on the April 5 #HandsOff protests and will be adding that data to the database. In addition, I am completing an analysis of the propaganda using the tools of natural language processing and content analysis.
Why is this important to report on? Because defending principles of free enterprise and individual liberty in the U.S. means allowing people to buy whatever make of car they wish without fear of danger or harassment and allowing companies to do business without fear of danger or harassment.
All, please let me know if you have any questions, ideas or recommendations.
Asra
asra@asranomani.com
To support the Pearl Project: http://asranomani.com/donate
24+ Groups Leading and Funding #TeslaTakedown
(and counting)
🔴1. Name: 50501
Mission: protesting "anti-democratic and illegal actions of the Trump administration and its plutocratic allies"
Annual Revenues: not yet found
IRS Status: Not transparent
Headquarters: Not transparent
EIN IRS Number: Not transparent
Key Leader(s): Not transparent
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: Protests
🔴2. Name: ActionNetwork
Mission: "trains and educates progressive"
Annual Revenues: unknown
IRS Status: 501(c)(4)
EIN IRS Number: 46-1832144
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: Organizing platform.
🔴3. Name: Action Network Fund
Mission: "helps organizations incorporate organizing strategies"
Annual Revenues: 195025
IRS Status: 501(c)(3)
EIN IRS Number: 45-2288010
Key Leader(s): Mark Fleischman
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: Organizing platform
🔴4. Name: ActUp New York Inc.
Mission: ACT UP NY, the "AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power," a "diverse, non-partisan group of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis."
Annual Revenues: $36,411
IRS Status: not yet found
Headquarters: New York
EIN IRS Number: 13-3501884
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: NYC demonstrations
🔴5. Name: Climate Defenders
Annual Revenues: not yet found
IRS Status: Program of the New York Communities Organizing Fund, Inc., 501(c)(3)
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: NYC protests
🔴6. Name: Climate Defenders Action Fund
Mission: Dedicated to "dismantle the fossil fuel industry"
Annual Revenues: not yet found
IRS Status: 501(c)(4)
Headquarters: San Diego
EIN IRS Number: 82-3232098
Key Leader(s): Cecilia Aguillon, Tara Kelly Hammond, Christine James, Lester Machado, David Neison
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: NYC
🔴7. Name: Democratic Party local and state chapters
Annual Revenues: Tallying for each chapter
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: Local presence in coordinated events
🔴8. Name: Democratic Socialists of America
Annual Revenues: $5,800,000
IRS Status: 501(c)(4)
Headquarters: New York
EIN IRS Number: 13-3109557
Key Leader(s): Michael Grochowski
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: local protests
🔴9. Name: Disruption Project
Annual Revenues: 28480
IRS Status: 501(c)(4)
Headquarters: Philadelphia
EIN IRS Number: 85-1066939
Key Leader(s): Wende Marshall, Kathryn Sipp, Arielle Klagsbrun, Jeffrey Ordower
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: 218/306 protests
🔴10. Name: Housing Works Inc.
Mission: providing "assistance & expertise to homeless persons living with AIDS or HIV-related illnesses"
Annual Revenues: $51,762,615
IRS Status: 501(c)(3)
Headquarters: Brooklyn, N.Y.
EIN IRS Number: 13-3584089
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: NYC demonstrations
🔴11. Name: Indivisible Action
Annual Revenues: $9,922,930
IRS Status: Hybrid Political Action Committee
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
EIN IRS Number: 83-0529629
Key Leader(s): Elizabeth Ramey
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: National protests
🔴12. Name: Indivisible Project, organizing "Tesla Takedown" and "Hands Off" protests
Annual Revenues: 12565196
IRS Status: 501(c)(4)
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
EIN IRS Number: 81-4944067
Key Leader(s): Leah Greenberg, Ezra Levin
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: 88/306; it has bragged it has organized 600 #HandsOff protests for April 5.
🔴13. Name: http://Mobilize.us, run by MobilizeAmerica Inc. - owned by EveryAction, the parent company of NGP VAN
Annual Revenues: not found yet
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: organizing platform
🔴14. Name: MoveOnorg Civic Action
Annual Revenues: $6,000,000
IRS Status: 501(c)(4)
Headquarters: Beaverton, Or.
EIN IRS Number: 06-1553389
Key Leader(s): Rahna Epting
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: #HandsOff "De-escalation Training"
🔴15. Name: Not Above the Law Coalition -- counted now as one but includes numerous groups
Members: As of 6/9/2023: American Oversight; Center for American Progress Action Fund; Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW); Common Cause; Congressional Integrity Project; Constitutional Accountability Center; The Criminalization of Poverty Project at the Institute for Policy Studies; Daily Kos; Defend Democracy Action Project; Defend the Vote Action Fund; DemCast USA; End Citizens United/Let America Vote; Fix Democracy First; Free Speech For People; Greenpeace USA; Indivisible; J Street; League of Conservation Voters; MoveOn; NextGen America; Our Revolution; People For the American Way; People Power United; Public Citizen; Public Wise; Secure Elections Network; Sierra Club; Stand Up America; Wisconsin Democracy Campaign; and The Workers Circle. SOURCE: press release
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: "Hands Off! Mass Call for mobilizing against Trump's power grab"
🔴16. Name: Planet Over Profit
Annual Revenues: not yet found
IRS Status: Program of New York Communities Organizing Fund, Inc.
EIN IRS Number: not yet found
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: NYC demonstrations
🔴17. Name: Public Citizen Foundation
Annual Revenues: $13,389,271
IRS Status: 501(c)(3)
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
EIN IRS Number: 52-1263996
Key Leader(s): Mark Chavez, director, chair; Robert Weissman, president; Sid Wolfe, founder, senior fellow;
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: NYC demonstrations
🔴18. Name: Public Citizen Inc.
Annual Revenues: $5,728,329
IRS Status: 501(c)(4)
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
EIN IRS Number: 23-7104508
Key Leader(s): JASON ADKINS, DIRECTOR, CHAIR; JOAN CLAYBROOK, DIRECTOR; ROBERT WEISSMAN, PRESIDENT
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: "Hands Off! Mass Call for mobilizing against Trump's power grab"
🔴19. Name: Rise and Resist Inc.
Annual Revenues: $21,999
IRS Status: 501(c)(4) (most recent filing 2017)
Headquarters: New York, N.Y.
EIN IRS Number: 82-2188628
Key Leader(s): Ivy Arce, Martin Joseph QUinn, Jamie Ray Bauer, Jay W. Walker, Stuart Waldman
Annual Revenues: $14,588
IRS Status: Fiscal program of A.J. Muste Memorial Institute, 501(c)(3) - EIN No. 23-7379088
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: NYC demonstrations
🔴20. Name: Stand Up America Inc.
Mission: Established to "mobilize progressive Americans"
Annual Revenues: $9.867,658
IRS Status: 501(c)(4)
Headquarters: Bethesda, Md.
EIN IRS Number: 32-0512546
Key Leader(s): Sean Eldridge, Christina Harvey, Joe Hines, Brett Edkins, Monica Garcia, Joi Rae, Brynna Quillin
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: "Hands Off! Mass Call for mobilizing against Trump's power grab"
🔴21. Name: Swing Left
Mission: Dedicated to "help Democrats win"
Annual Revenues: $16,523,456
IRS Status: Hybrid PAC/Super PAC
EIN IRS Number: FEC Committee ID: C00632133
Key Leader(s): Yasmin Radjy
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: Protests
🔴22. Name: Tax Reformers LLC, running "http://TaxElon.us" "("an offshoot of http://TeslaTakedown.com")
Annual Revenues: not yet found
IRS Status: not yet found
Headquarters: Erie, Pa.
EIN IRS Number: not yet found
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: Protests
🔴23. Name: Third Act Initiative Inc.
Annual Revenues: $2,008,973
IRS Status: 501(c)(4)
Headquarters: New York
EIN IRS Number: 88-0776955
Key Leader(s): Bill McKibben, Vanessa Arcara, Akaya Windwood
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: DC, Virginia and Maryland protests
🔴24. Name: Troublemakers
Annual Revenues: not yet available
IRS Status: not yet available
Headquarters: Seattle
EIN IRS Number: not yet available
Key Leader(s): unknown
Involvement in Tesla Takedown: 224/306 protests
If you have any tips to add to this reporting, please write to me at asra@asranomani.com or DM me. Thank you.
[IsraelTimes] An attempt by Hamas to carry out a shooting and bombing attack in the West Bank, directed by members of the terror group in Turkey, was recently foiled, the Shin Bet announces.
In January and February, six members of the Hamas cell, residents of Nablus, were detained by Israeli forces. The six were interrogated by the Shin Bet and Israel Police on suspicion that they were planning attacks.
The investigation found that the cell was being directed and funded by Hamas in Turkey. The cell received tens of thousands of dollars to carry out attacks on security forces and other targets in the West Bank, the Shin Bet and police say in a joint statement.
An assault rifle and $40,000 in cash were seized during the arrest of three of the suspects on January 29, and another $20,000 was captured during the arrest of another suspect that day, the statement says.
The other suspects were arrested on later dates.
Following the interrogation of one of the suspects, the Shin Bet says troops located a bomb that had been planted by the cell near the Gitai Avisar Junction in the West Bank. The explosive device was successfully neutralized.
The suspects aren’t named by police and the Shin Bet says indictments are expected to be filed against the six in the coming weeks.
#1
With the funeral involving senior Islamist leaders that followed the death of Turkey's Nekemettin Erbakan in March 2011 the international Muslim Brotherhood agreed to settle its headquarters in Turkey. Since that date Turkey under Erdogan has been only a sometime ally of the USA. Which leads many to believe that Turkey has bought off the Pentagon with more than just Istanbul whores.
[IsraelTimes] The IAF airstrikes earlier this month on the T-4 airbase near Palmyra were designed to warn foreign powers against building up a military presence in Syrian air bases, The Times of Israel has learned.
Last week, a Turkish Defense Ministry source told Sky News Arabia that the country is looking into establishing a base in Syria to train the new Syrian army.
A senior IDF official told The War Zone last week that “any significant Turkish military presence, especially in strategic locations like Palmyra, could be perceived as a threat to Israeli security interests.”
In addition, the airstrikes Israel carried out in Beirut over the weekend were meant as a message to Lebanon’s government.
Good to know.
Israel wants the new government headed by Joseph Aoun to understand that it will be held responsible for rocket fire into Israel.
Two rockets were fired at northern Israel from Lebanon last Friday.
Israel also believes that Hezbollah recognizes that it cannot avoid pulling back fully north of the Litani River.
In the meantime, Israel remains in five points inside of Lebanon, and will stay there for the foreseeable future.
[IsraelTimes] Columbia University’s coalition of anti-Israel protest groups says it has been banned from Instagram for the second time.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest, an alliance of dozens of student groups, says on the Telegram messaging app that it was banned “because we dared to speak up for Palestine.”
“This is part of a long and concerted imperial effort to censor and erase the Palestinian people,” the group says.
The group shares a screenshot of a message from Instagram saying its account was disabled because it “doesn’t follow our Community Standards.”
The message says that the group’s account is no longer visible, accessible to its managers, and that all of its information will be permanently deleted.
“You cannot request another review of this decision,” the message says.
The account’s page says it is no longer available.
The account was suspended from Instagram in December 2024, after posting threatening rhetoric, but reinstated days later. At the time, it had more than 40,000 followers.
Unlike the previous ban, the latest suspension appeared to be permanent.
It was not clear what the group posted to cause the ban this week.
Instagram last year also banned Within Our Lifetime, the leading anti-Israel protest group in New York City, which often collaborates with the Columbia activists.
[IsraelNationalNews] IAF strikes Hezbollah terrorist who had recently directed Hamas ..the well-beloved offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood,... operatives and assisted them in planning a significant and imminent terror attack against Israeli civilians.
With the direction of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), the IAF early Tuesday morning conducted a strike in the Dahieh suburb of Beirut, a key Hezbollah terrorist stronghold.
According to a joint IDF and Shin Bet statement, the strike targeted a Hezbollah terrorist who had recently directed Hamas operatives and assisted them in planning a significant and imminent terror attack against Israeli civilians.
"Due to the immediate threat the terrorist posed, the IDF and ISA acted to eliminate him and removed the threat," the statement said.
"The IDF and ISA will continue to operate to prevent any threat posed to the civilians of the State of Israel," it added.
Media in Leb ...The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. Only one of those statements is an exaggeration.... reported that at least three people were killed and seven were maimed in the Israeli strike, which reportedly targeted a residential building.
Late last week, the IAF struck and eliminated the terrorist Ahmad Adnan Bajjiga, a battalion commander in Hezbollah's Radwan Force, in the area of Derdghaiya in southern Lebanon.
The IDF said that throughout the war, the terrorist advanced and directed numerous terror attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF troops.
In recent months, he had continued directing terror attacks against Israel’s Home Front, posing a threat to the State of Israel and its civilians, the IDF added.
On Friday, Israel began conducting strikes on targets in the Dahieh suburb of Beirut, with the IDF confirming it struck a terrorist infrastructure site used to store UAVs by Hezbollah's Aerial Unit (127) in the area of Dahieh.
"The Hezbollah terrorist organization systematically embeds its terrorist infrastructure amidst the Lebanese civilian population, a clear example of Hezbollah's cynical exploitation of Lebanese civilians as human shields," it said.
Later in the day, the IDF struck Hezbollah command centers, terrorist infrastructure sites, launchers, and Lions of Islam in southern Lebanon. The strikes followed a missile attack on Kiryat Shmona.
[IsraelTimes] A Cornell University student who participated in pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests and was asked to surrender by US immigration officials says he was leaving the United States, citing fear of detention and threats to his personal safety.
Momodou Taal, a doctoral candidate in Africana Studies and dual citizen of the UK and The Gambia, has participated in pro-Palestinian protests against Israel’s war in Gaza following an October 2023 Hamas attack. His attorneys said last month that he was asked to turn himself in and that his student visa was being revoked.
US President Donald Trump has pledged to deport foreign protesters accused them of supporting Hamas, being antisemitic and taking part in violent or destructive campus demonstrations.
Last year, Taal was in a group of activists who disrupted a career fair on campus that featured weapons manufacturers and the university thereafter ordered him to study remotely. He previously posted online that “colonized peoples have the right to resist by any means necessary.”
Taal filed a lawsuit in mid-March to block deportations of protesters, a bid that was denied by a judge last week.
“Given what we have seen across the United States, I have lost faith that a favorable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs,” Taal says on X.
[ABCnews] The New Mexico Republican Party headquarters was targeted in a suspected arson attack on Sunday, according to party officials.
At approximately 5:56 a.m. on Sunday, Albuquerque Fire Rescue was dispatched to the headquarters for a reported structure fire, officials said.
The flames were brought under control within five minutes of their arrival and there were no reported injuries, fire rescue said.
The structure suffered "damage to the front entryway and smoke damage throughout the building," fire rescue said.
The words "ICE=KKK" were also spray-painted on the building, officials said.
Albuquerque Fire Rescue, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives recovered "incendiary materials" at the scene of the fire, but the investigation remains ongoing, officials said on Monday.
The Republican Party of New Mexico said the incident was a "deliberate act of arson."
"This horrific attack, fueled by hatred and intolerance, is a direct assault on our values, freedoms and our right to political expression," party officials said in a statement on Sunday.
Party officials said this is not an isolated incident, claiming it is part of a "disturbing pattern of politically motivated violence that has plagued our country -- fueled in part by the silence and implicit encouragement from progressive leaders who refuse to condemn these acts."
The Democratic Party of New Mexico said on X that it also "condemns the vandalism of the @NewMexicoGOP office as strongly as possible."
"We firmly maintain that this sort of act has absolutely no place in our Democracy, & that peaceful discourse & organization are the only ways to approach political differences in our country," the party wrote. "We hope whoever is responsible is found and held accountable."
New Mexico Democratic Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez added, "Political violence is unacceptable, including the arson attack on New Mexico’s GOP headquarters. The perpetrators must be held accountable. Every American should be able to freely and safely participate in our democracy."
Every word is true. What a pity it’s Progressive donors paying these activists for labour and supplies, not to mention legal representation should they be caught.
[IsraelTimes] Some 2,000 gather in capital as Qatargate scandal escalates and Gaza fighting expands; video shows cops rough-handling Democrats MK Naama Lazimi; her party chief vows ‘justice’
Twelve protesters were arrested at anti-government and pro-hostage deal rallies in Jerusalem on Monday, as police clashed with some of the roughly 2,000 demonstrators, including a politician.
The protests were held amid dramatic political developments, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being summoned by police for questioning for some two hours in a scandal surrounding his aides’ ties to Qatar ...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi... , and two of those aides being taken into custody.
As far as I can tell, this is entirely manufactured. Everyone knew at the time that Qatar was giving money to Hamas — they had Israeli government agreement because it was supposed to give Hamas a reason to keep Gaza quiet. We had reports here at Rantburg whenever Qatar came through with the next tranche.
The rallies were also held against the backdrop of the government’s advancement of key legislation aimed at radically overhauling the country’s judiciary while also moving to fire Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar — all while expanding 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... where 59 hostages are still being held.
Among those arrested in Jerusalem on Monday was the cousin of freed hostage Arbel Yehoud. Bystanders said she was violent mostly peacefully detained after cursing a police officer for allowing a counter-protester into a barricaded zone barred to other demonstrators.
Two protesters were detained while blocking Begin Highway to traffic alongside around a dozen others, holding a large banner that read: "What about the hostages?"
Hostage families have warned that the resumption of fighting endangers their loved ones.
Not resuming fighting also endangers the hostages, as Hamas has made clear.
Polls indicate that most Israelis back their stance and support ending the war in exchange for the release of all remaining hostages.
Shikma Bressler, who was among the leaders of the pre-war protests against the government’s judicial overhaul efforts, referred to Netanyahu repeatedly as a “Hamas asset” — alluding to policies over many years that favored keeping the terror group in control of the enclave while weakening the more moderate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
Bressler asserted that Netanyahu and his aides are accused of what amounts to “the dictionary definition of treason” and “the dictionary definition of spying.”
Amit Becher, head of the Israel Bar Association, also addressed the crowd.
At a separate protest in Jerusalem’s Agranat Square, officers were recorded rough-handling Democrats MK Naama Lazimi, drawing condemnation from protest groups and political allies.
[IsraelTimes] Long-promised fence to stop frequent gun- and drug-smuggling will run from Golan Heights down to Ramon airport, hewing close to border, with remainder to Eilat already upgraded
Israel intends to begin building a long-promised new fence along the border with Jordan in June, The Times of Israel learned on Monday. The work was expected to take three years.
The fence will run from Hamat Gader at the southern edge of the Golan Heights to the Ramon International Airport north of Eilat. A 30-kilometer (18-mile) portion of the border with Jordan, from Eilat to Ramon Airport, was already upgraded in a similar fashion to Israel’s border barriers with Egypt and the Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... Strip in the 2010s.
The new fence will cost NIS 5.2 billion ($1.4 billion).
Israel will aim to build the fence as close as possible to the actual border with Jordan, keeping in mind security and topographical considerations. The current fence leaves some 170 square kilometers between it and the border.
It also has plans to develop new towns along the border.
There is an aging chain link fence equipped with sensors along some of the border that Jordan shares with Israel and the West Bank. Other sections are only equipped with barbed wire.
The border’s porousness has made it a site of frequent gun- and drug-running. Officials say that weapons that have made it over the border — likely tens of thousands over the past decade — have fueled a surge in violence in the Arab community in Israel, and have been used by Paleostinian terrorists.
Last August, then-foreign minister and now-Defense Minister Israel Katz called for a security fence to be built "quickly" along the Israel-Jordan border, accusing Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... of attempting to establish an "eastern terror front" against Israel by smuggling in weapons via Jordan.
In November, the Defense Ministry said it had begun preliminary work on the project.
The idea of boosting the existing fence or building some sort of border wall has been floated repeatedly by Netanyahu and others for more than a decade, although many have seen any such major effort as unlikely due to the sheer length of the border and the enormous cost.
In September 2023, Netanyahu once again floated the idea of building a fence along the entire length of the border to "ensure that there will be no infiltration." The prime minister also ordered IDF and Defense Ministry officials to start planning in 2012, touted the start of construction of a sensor-laden fence on the southern border with Jordan in 2015, and announced in 2016 that he planned to "surround the entire State of Israel with a fence."
For years, Netanyahu and other Israeli officials touted its NIS 3.5 billion ($1.1 billion) hi-tech state-of-the-art fence along the border with Gaza, which was equipped with a wall of iron, sensors and concrete, as providing ultimate security to citizens in the area.
On the morning of October 7, 2023, the wall was handily breached by thousands of Hamas ..a regional Iranian catspaw,... terrorists, who disabled its sensors with drones, knocked parts of the barrier down with bulldozers, then drove right through the gaping holes while others sailed right over in paragliders, ultimately massacring around 1,200 people in Israel and taking 251 hostage in Gaza.
[IsraelTimes] School president acknowledges antisemitism problem, but says it’s being addressed and warns that cut would ‘halt life-saving research, imperil key scientific research and innovation’
The Trump administration said on Monday that it was reviewing $9 billion in federal contracts and grants awarded to Harvard University, part of a crackdown on what it says is antisemitism on college campuses.
The Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and the US General Services Administration said in a written statement that $255.6 million in contracts between Harvard, its affiliates and the federal government were being reviewed, along with $8.7 billion in multi-year grant commitments.
The investigation is the latest move by the Trump administration to pressure American universities to change their policies on a number of issues at the heart of culture wars that have beset the US in recent years.
Supporters of Trump’s efforts say it is a long-needed check on far-left extremism at US colleges. Critics say the crackdown is a draconian over-reaction that stomps on academic freedom and the right to free speech.
"If this funding is stopped, it will halt life-saving research and imperil important scientific research and innovation," Alan Garber, the president of Harvard, said in a written statement.
Some of that, yes. But at Harvard as in the rest of academia, most of the research is a waste of money and never should have been approved.
Garber said that antisemitism "is present on our campus" and that he had experienced it himself, even as the university president.
He said Harvard had been enacting reforms to combat antisemitism during the past 15 months, though, he acknowledged that "we still have much work to do," and the university will work with the federal government’s antisemitism task force on the matter.
The focus on Harvard comes after the Trump administration this month canceled $400 million in federal funding for fellow Ivy League school Columbia University. It was the epicenter of anti-Israel protests that broke out on college campuses following the October 7, 2023, Hamas ..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,... attack inside Israel, and Israel’s subsequent incursion 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 Paleostinian enclave controlled by Hamas.
Protesters, including some Jewish groups, say the administration conflates their criticism of US ally Israel’s assault on Gaza with antisemitism and their support for Paleostinian rights as sympathy for Hamas.
Columbia earlier this month announced it had made some changes demanded by the Trump administration to start negotiations to win back its federal funding. The university’s interim president announced over the weekend that she was stepping down after an outcry by some students and faculty over what they characterized as the school’s acquiescence to the federal demands. In addition to targeting funds, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have detained some foreign student protesters in recent weeks and are working to deport them.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration suspended $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania, another Ivy League school, over its transgender sports policies.
The Department of Education this month sent a letter to 60 universities — including Harvard — warning that it could bring enforcement actions against them under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act if they failed to protect Jewish students on their campuses. It said antisemitic "eruptions" have disrupted life at elite schools around the country for a year.
"Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from antisemitic discrimination — all while promoting divisive ...politicians call things divisive when when the other side sez something they don't like. Their own statements are never divisive, they're principled... ideologies over free inquiry — has put its reputation in serious jeopardy," said Secretary of Education Linda McMahon ...business executive, and former professional wrestling performer. She was the 25th administrator of the Small Business Administration from 2017 to 2019. McMahon has been nominated to lead the Department of Education under the second Trump administration. McMahon, along with her husband, Vince McMahon, founded sports entertainment company Titan Sports, Inc. (later World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.) where she worked as the president and later CEO from 1980 to 2009. During this time, the company grew from a regional business in the northeast to a large multinational corporation. She made occasional on-screen performances, most notably in a feud with her husband that culminated at WrestleMania X-Seven. In 2009, she left World Wrestling Entertainment to run for a seat in the United States Senate from Connecticut as a Republican, but lost to Richard Blumenthal in the 2010 general election. She was the Republican nominee for Connecticut's other Senate seat in the 2012 race, but lost to Chris Murphy because that's the kind of guy people in Connecticutt like best. ... . "Harvard can right these wrongs and restore itself to a campus dedicated to academic excellence and truth-seeking, where all students feel safe on its campus."
Harvard and other elite universities came into the crosshairs of conservatives in late 2023, when the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology appeared before a congressional committee looking into a rise in antisemitism on campuses.
Former Harvard President Claudine Gay, along with the other school leaders, declined to give a definitive "yes" or "no" answer when asked if calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment, saying they had to balance it against free-speech protections.
[IsraelTimes] As at Columbia University, its fellow Ivy League school, Cornell University, has had a pro-Paleostinian, anti-Israel student protest leader sought for deportation — as well as a handful of disruptive protests this year of the sort that drew attention from the Trump administration.
But Mike Kotlikoff, Cornell’s new president, says he isn’t too worried that protest activity on his campus will ignite the kind of sweeping federal sanctions Columbia has faced.
"I’m very comfortable with where Cornell is currently," Kotlikoff said in an interview on Thursday, five days after being appointed permanently to the position he has held on an interim basis since July 2024.
"We’ve had a relatively peaceful two semesters this year," he added. "We’ve had a couple of situations where individuals who were protesting really went over the line and infringed on other people’s rights, and in both of those cases, there were consequences for those infringements."
Kotlikoff said he believed that conditions on campus for Jewish students are "pretty close" to where they stood on October 6, 2023, the day before the Hamas-led massacre that saw some 1,200 people slaughtered in southern Israel and 251 kidnapped to the Gazoo Strip ignited a war that has elicited widespread protests on campuses and elsewhere.
He noted that both Hillel and Chabad are in the process of constructing new buildings and said there were more than 30 active Jewish organizations at Cornell.
"There’s really a lot of Jewish activity, Jewish life that [is] celebrated on campus," he said. "I periodically go to Shabbat. I’m going to go to Passover Shabbat. So I think it’s pretty normal. If you ask most kids, it’s quite comfortable on campus."
Trump signed an executive order within days of taking office in January that vowed to deport "Hamas sympathizers" on campus under the mantle of combating antisemitism. One, Momodou Taal, is a Cornell graduate student. He has sued the Trump administration to block his deportation, saying that his free speech and that of his fellow pro-Paleostinian students is being infringed upon. A federal judge issued a preliminary ruling against him on Thursday.
Kotlikoff said Cornell had adopted four core principles "for how we would meet the political pressures that we’re currently seeing" that would allow the school to stick to its own values in such a contested environment. They include ensuring access for all, prioritizing diversity and making decisions based on merit. The last principle, he said, was obeying the law: "That is obeying the law as it’s written, not necessarily what’s asserted, but what is we believe is a lawful way to proceed."
The Trump administration applied financial penalties to pressure Columbia into agreeing to overhaul supervision of some of its academic departments that teach about the Middle East. It’s in an unusual intervention of the federal government into academics at a private university, and the American Association of University Professors has decried the move.
Kotlikoff drew criticism last year from the American Association of University Professors for challenging a professor, in private emails that the Jewish Telegraphic Agency obtained, over the content of his course on Gaza. Kotlikoff said the incident reflected the way things are supposed to work — and noted that the course ultimately enrolled only a handful of students, while another course on the Middle East that calls on students to "leave your politics at the door and have a free exchange" of ideas enrolled hundreds.
"The choice of what to teach as faculty is a really a key part of academic freedom," he said. "My private criticism of a course that was publicized was one around balance within the classroom. It’s something that we expect, and we’ve talked a lot about."
But ultimately, he said, expectations for professors are the same as they are for students — and both retain a core right to express themselves, no matter what any advocate or the Trump administration may argue.
"We’re not suppressing speech, we’re not suppressing individual opinions," he said. "But we are saying [to] you there are guidelines that protect all of our community’s rights, and my job as a university president is to protect everybody’s rights."
#2
Harvard med's most famous accomplishment: 1988
Laser tattoo removal. Mass General researchers develop laser treatment for removal of pigmented lesions and tattoos.
[IsraelTimes] Mass evacuation orders in Rafah are first act in multi-week operation, as Israel gives terror group last chance to free 11 living hostages and gain truce before IDF retakes Strip
The renewed ground operation 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... is entering its next stage.
On Monday, the Israel Defense Forces issued evacuation orders for the entire Rafah area in the southern Gaza Strip, telling residents that the military is "returning to fight with great force to eliminate the capabilities of terror organizations in these areas."
It’s no idle threat.
The army is initiating a multi-week operation that will see massive Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... s on evacuated areas before IDF forces push further into Gaza from the buffer zones it currently holds, expanding them and reducing the territory held by Hamas ..a regional Iranian catspaw,... and populated by civilians, The Times of Israel has learned. The major pushes will come simultaneously from the north and south of the Strip.
The evacuation area covers a large swath of land between Rafah and Khan Younis, where the IDF has so far not operated with ground forces.
The operation will result in a significant amount of territory along Gaza’s borders falling into Israeli hands.
It will not require the call-up of additional reserves, though reservists will take part in the campaign. Elements from four divisions will push into Gaza if Hamas does not give in before then.
No aid will be going in, at least not in the early stages of the military push into Gaza.
For four weeks, Israel has shut off all sources of food, fuel, medicine, and other supplies for the Gaza Strip’s population of more than 2 million Paleostinians, citing Hamas’s refusal to extend the first phase of the ceasefire deal and release more hostages. Israeli officials insist they allowed enough aid in during the two-month ceasefire to last Gaza for several months, while accusing Hamas of hoarding supplies for itself.
The United Nations ...a formerly good idea gone bad... warned this week that Gaza’s bakeries would run out of flour for bread within a week, saying that agencies have cut food distributions to families in half, markets are empty of most vegetables, and many aid workers cannot move around because of Israeli strikes targeting terror sites.
The growing campaign is still not a return to full-blown ground maneuver, though Israel is expecting Hamas to carry out attacks on troops in some areas. The "maximum pressure" operation is meant as a last effort to push Hamas to accept Israel’s demands for a hostage deal, The Times of Israel has learned.
The security cabinet on Saturday night voted to increase pressure on Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
Israel’s demands haven’t changed much from what it calls the "Witkoff proposal," after US President Donald Trump ...Oh, noze! Not him!... ’s Middle East envoy.
It insists that Hamas release 11 living hostages on the first day of a 40-day ceasefire. One of the hostages is to be US citizen Edan Alexander, as Hamas has indicated to the Americans that it is ready to free him as a goodwill gesture.
On the fifth day of the ceasefire, Hamas will have to give Israel information on all the remaining hostages, and lay out exactly who is alive.
On day 10, Hamas will be required to turn over half of the slain hostages it still holds.
Israel is willing to engage in talks on ending the war, but will insist on achieving its war aims — the disarming of Hamas and other Gaza terror groups, the exile of Hamas leaders, and a new governing structure that does not include Hamas.
The IDF will also hold on to a buffer zone to protect border communities.
However,
if you can't say something nice about a person some juicy gossip will go well... Israel has yet to receive a response from Hamas after it sent its conditions to the mediators on Saturday, the Prime Minister’s Office has told The Times of Israel.
If Hamas continues to dig in its heels and refuses to meet Israel’s demands, the IDF will eventually issue emergency orders for large numbers of reservists to retake the Gaza Strip and defeat Hamas in the field.
Fifty-nine hostages remain in Gaza, 24 of whom are still believed to be alive. The 35 confirmed dead include a soldier killed fighting in the 2014 Gaza war.
Israel reached a ceasefire and hostage release deal with Hamas in January, but after the deal’s first phase expired, Israel halted the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza on March 2 and resumed military activity in Gaza on March 18.
Since resuming operations in the Gaza Strip on March 18, the IDF has said it is targeting senior Hamas political officials and mid-level military commanders, along with the terror group’s infrastructure, including weapon depots and rocket launchers. Members 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... and other terror groups have also been targeted.
[IsraelTimes] Israel says it is targeting Hamas infrastructure, senior officials in renewed fighting; Red Crescent: bodies of 15 health workers recovered after Israeli strike last week "health workers"
The Israel Defense Forces issued an evacuation warning on Monday for Paleostinians in the entire Rafah area in the southern Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... Strip, saying the military was "returning to fight with great force to eliminate the capabilities of terror organizations in these areas."
In a post on X, the IDF’s Arabic-language front man, Col. Avichay Adraee, published a map of the area to be evacuated, telling Gazooks to move to the al-Mawasi area on the southern Strip’s coast.
It was the most significant evacuation order issued by the IDF since the resumption of the offensive against Hamas ..one of the armed feet of the Moslem Brüderbund millipede,... earlier this month ended a two-month ceasefire.
The evacuation area covers a large swath of land between Rafah and Khan Younis, where the IDF has so far not operated with ground forces.
The orders came during Eid al-Fitr, a normally festive Moslem holiday marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.
Since resuming operations in the Gaza Strip on March 18, the IDF has said it was targeting senior Hamas political officials and mid-level military commanders, along with the terror group’s infrastructure, including weapon depots and rocket launchers. Members of 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... and other terror groups have also been targeted.
On Saturday, the military said it had expanded its operations in south Gaza, with troops pushing into Rafah as part of efforts to expand a buffer zone along the borders of the Strip and to eliminate terror infrastructure.
Separately, on Sunday, the Paleostinian Red Islamic Thingy Society said it had recovered the bodies of 15 rescuers killed a week ago when Israeli forces targeted ambulances in the Gaza Strip.
The IDF acknowledged Friday that it had fired on ambulances and fire engines in southern Gaza last week, saying it had mistakenly identified them as "suspicious vehicles." According to the military, troops had initially opened fire "toward Hamas vehicles and eliminated several Hamas terrorists" in the Tel Sultan area of southern Gaza.
"A few minutes afterward, additional vehicles advanced suspiciously toward the troops... The troops responded by firing toward the suspicious vehicles, eliminating a number of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists," the IDF said.
It added that "after an initial inquiry, it was determined that some of the suspicious vehicles... were ambulances and fire trucks," while condemning "the repeated use" by "terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip of ambulances for terrorist purposes."
The bodies of eight medics from the Red Islamic Thingy, six members of Gaza’s civil defense agency and one employee of a UN agency were retrieved, the Red Islamic Thingy said in a statement.
It said one medic from the Red Islamic Thingy remained missing.
In an earlier statement, the Red Islamic Thingy said the bodies "were recovered with difficulty as they were buried in the sand, with some showing signs of decomposition."
Gaza’s civil defense agency also confirmed that 15 bodies had been recovered, adding that the dear departed UN employee was from the agency for Paleostinian refugees, UNRWA.
In a separate statement issued in Geneva, the International Federation of Red Thingy and Red Islamic Thingy Societies (IFRC) said it was "outraged" at the deaths of the medics.
"They were humanitarians. They wore emblems that should have protected them; their ambulances were clearly marked. They should have returned [to] their families; they did not," IFRC secretary general Jagan Chapagain said.
"International Humanitarian Law could not be clearer — civilians must be protected; humanitarians must be protected. Health services must be protected."
IFRC said the incident represents the single most deadly attack on Red Thingy and Red Islamic Thingy workers anywhere in the world since 2017.
The International Committee of the Red Thingy said it was "appalled" that the medics "were killed while carrying out their work" alongside others.
"Their bodies were identified today and have been recovered for dignified burial," the ICRC said. "The high number of medical personnel killed during this conflict is devastating. The ICRC strongly condemns attacks on health care workers."
Meanwhile,
...back at the palazzo, Count Guido had been cornered by the banditti... The IDF said Monday that it had demolished a kilometer-long tunnel in the northern Gaza Strip amid ongoing operations in the area.
Troops of the 252nd Division have been operating in the Strip’s far north and in the Netzarim Corridor area, which the military said was aimed at expanding Israel’s buffer zone with Gaza.
Amid the division’s operations in north and central Gaza, the IDF said troops killed over 50 terror operatives.
In the Beit Lahiya area, a Hamas tunnel which was at least a kilometer long, was destroyed by the elite Yahalom combat engineering unit, the military says.
In a separate operation, the troops found a rocket manufacturing site and several launchers, the IDF added.
According to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, at least 921 people have been killed in the territory since Israel resumed its large-scale strikes.
In total, over 50,000 Paleostinians have been killed in the war sparked by Hamas’s October 7 massacre, according to the ministry. The figure cannot be independently verified and does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Israel says it had killed some 20,000 combatants in battle as of January and another 1,600 hard boyz inside Israel during the Hamas onslaught.
UN WARNS GAZA IS RUNNING OUT OF FLOUR
*shrug* Breach the Hamas warehouses — there is plenty of everything in them.
On Sunday night, the United Nations ...an organization which on balance has done more bad than good, with the good not done well and the bad done thoroughly... warned that Gaza’s bakeries will run out of flour for bread within a week, saying that agencies have cut food distributions to families in half, markets are empty of most vegetables, and many aid workers cannot move around because of Israeli strikes targeting terror sites.
For four weeks, Israel has shut off all sources of food, fuel, medicine and other supplies for the Gaza Strip’s population of more than 2 million Paleostinians, citing Hamas’s refusal to extend the first phase of the ceasefire deal and release more hostages. Israeli officials insist they allowed enough aid in during the two-month ceasefire to last Gaza for several months while accusing Hamas of hoarding supplies for itself.
It is the longest blockade yet of Israel’s 17-month-old campaign against Hamas, with no sign of it ending.
Aid workers are stretching out their supplies but warn of a catastrophic surge in severe hunger and malnutrition, the UN warned. Eventually, food will run out completely if the flow of aid is not restored because the war has destroyed almost all local food production in Gaza.
The World Food Programme said Thursday that its flour for bakeries is only enough to keep producing bread for 800,000 people a day until Tuesday and that its overall food supplies will last a maximum of two weeks. As a "last resort" once all other food is exhausted, it has emergency stocks of fortified nutritional biscuits for 415,000 people.
The UN added that fuel and medicine will last weeks longer before hitting zero, hospitals are rationing antibiotics and painkillers, and aid groups are shifting limited fuel supplies between multiple needs, all indispensable — trucks to move aid, bakeries to make bread, wells and desalination plants to produce water, hospitals to keep machines running.
Last week, the High Court of Justice ruled unanimously that Israel has taken a variety of steps to provide for the humanitarian needs of Gaza’s civilian population during the war, and that there was no cause for the court to order the government and the army to take any additional action.
Critically, the court stated that the human rights One man's rights are another man's existential threat. groups which petitioned the court over the humanitarian situation in Gaza had "not even come close" to showing that Israel had violated legal prohibitions on starving a civilian population as a tool of war or as a form of collective punishment.
[IsraelTimes] The IDF’s Strategy and Third-Circle Directorate, tasked with the military’s Iran file, is being shuttered today and its units are being returned to the Planning and Force Design Directorate, the military announces.
New IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, upon entering the role earlier this month, ruled that the Iran unit, established only in 2020 by former chief of staff Aviv Kohavi, would be closed.
The Planning Directorate, headed by Vice Adm. Eyal Harel, will now be responsible for the Planning Division; the international cooperation unit, known as the Tevel Division; and the Strategic Division.
The Combat Methods and Innovation Division and Iran Headquarters unit are also being placed under the Planning Directorate for now, though they may be moved to another directorate at a later stage, the IDF says.
In 2020, the IDF established the Iran directorate by removing the Tevel and Strategic divisions from the Planning Directorate, rebranding it as the Planning and Force Design Directorate, and opening a new Iran Headquarters unit. The three units were then placed under the Strategy and Third-Circle Directorate.
The current commander of the Iran directorate, Maj. Gen. Eliezer Toledano announced his intention to resign from the military in December.
#1
'Posed an immediate threat': IAF strikes Hezbollah terrorist in Beirut According to a joint IDF and Shin Bet statement, the strike targeted a Hezbollah terrorist who had recently directed Hamas operatives and assisted them in planning a significant and imminent terror attack against Israeli civilians.
[PJMedia] You too can be reimbursed for up to $200, and all you have to do is protest Department of Government Efficiency chief Elon Musk from the comfort of a Tesla dealership. It isn't clear whether the offer from the left-wing Indivisible Project covers the cost of spray paint, keys, or bail, but money is fungible — so wink-wink, nudge-nudge, comrade.
"Indivisible Project can reimburse groups for eligible expenses associated with your Musk or Us actions, up to $200 per group, per congressional recess!" the group's website reads, followed by a link to get the reimbursement form.
But here's the kicker. Since gaining social media attention, the page has been removed — curiouser and curiouser — but the form is still online. I suspect the people who make their living this way, or at least enjoy a nice side gig or three, are involved with various online groups where direct links to reimbursement forms can be shared.
Indivisible Project's parent organization — more on that in a moment — was founded and is run by the husband-wife team of Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin. Greenberg is your typical NGO type — nice upbringing, good schools, brief Capitol Hill career (with Tom Perriello [D-Va.] and at State). She followed up with the creation of an online anti-Trump publication called "Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda," and the establishment of the Indivisible Civics organization.
While DataRepublican doesn't show Indivisible Civics receiving any taxpayer money, it has received $5,424,005 from somewhere, with about half of those funds going to wages and salaries and another 10% to benefits.
But here's where it gets fun. The fine print disclaimer at the bottom of the since-deleted signup page reads, "Indivisible.org is a joint website of Indivisible Project and Indivisible Action. Indivisible Project is a registered 501(c)(4). Indivisible Action is a Hybrid Polítical Action Committee. They are separate organizations."
That's legalese for "the parent organization (Indivisible Civics aka Indivisible.org) is legally and financially shielded from any stupid stuff people do with the money and encouragement of the new organization (Indivisible Project)." But again, money is fungible — so wink-wink, nudge-nudge, comrade.
Back in the '80s, we called that "plausible deniability."
I haven't been able to find anything about where Indivisible gets its funding. What I did find was The American Prospect's Peter Dreier saying that Indivisible's goal is to "save American democracy" and "resume the project of creating a humane America that is more like social democracy than corporate plutocracy."
And the way to do that is by paying agitprop protestors with mysteriously sourced dollars to try and frustrate the will of the American people as expressed in the last election.
[NYPOST] Russia is taking US proposals for a cease-fire in Ukraine ''seriously'' but can't accept the deal as it stands, a senior Russian diplomat said Tuesday — suggesting peace talks between the two countries have stalled.
''We take the models and solutions proposed by the Americans very seriously, but we can't accept it all in its current form,'' Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said, according to state media.
''As far as we can see, there is no place in them today for our main demand, namely to solve the problems related to the root causes of this conflict. It is completely absent, and that must be overcome,'' Ryabkov said.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/01/2025
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[NYPOST] Rescue workers saved a 63-year-old woman from the rubble of a building in Myanmar's capital on Tuesday, but hope was fading of finding many more survivors of the violent mostly peaceful earthquake that killed more than 2,700 people, compounding a humanitarian crisis caused by a civil war.
The fire department in Naypyitaw said the woman was pulled from the rubble 91 hours after being buried when the building collapsed in the 7.7-magnitude earthquake that hit midday Friday.
Experts say the likelihood of finding survivors drops dramatically after 72 hours.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/01/2025
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[Breitbart] Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) said Monday on MSNBC’s "The Rachel Maddow Show" that she was training Americans to help take down a potential "dictatorship" of President Donald Trump. Jayapal said, "It appears that the Trump administration is willing to ignore judicial decisions and so that brings us to you in this room. It brings us to the people that is really, the bulwark, the wall against the crumbling of democracy."
Maddow said, "Help me understand this idea of the resistance lab and what you’re talking about in practical terms at these events."
Jayapal said, "We decided is that we really need to help Americans understand what happens when democracies fall; when dictators take over. And now I think people need to understand what are the lessons from other countries and working with experts who have studied democratic backsliding in countries around the world and the resistance movements that emerged to take on that democratic backsliding."
She added, "We’ve developed a curriculum where we help people understand, how do you go after the pillars of support that allow that person to continue to have power? And how do you shift allies from being sort of passive opponents to being active supporters of taking down a dictatorship?"
[Econ Times] Billionaire Elon Musk has claimed that his crew in DOGE would be looking into members of Congress whose wealth had increased significantly even though they get relatively modest paychecks, reported Daily Mail. The world's richest man revealed this during a town hall in Wisconsin on Sunday, where he also awarded two $1 million cash awards and made headlines over his clever jabs at a protester among his audience, as per the report.
Musk, who is estimated to be worth $343 billion, has been a longtime critic of what he sees as the fiscal success of professional politicians, as per Daily Mail. While giving his speech, he expressed his doubts about how some lawmakers have accumulated enormous wealth when they had been receiving average congressional wages, reported Daily Mail.
He said, "A lot of strangely wealthy members of Congress, where I just can't, I'm trying to connect the dots of how they became rich," quoted Daily Mail. Musk also asked "How'd they get $20 million if they're earning $200,000 a year? Nobody can explain that.," as quoted in the report. He then went on to say, "We're gonna try to figure it out, and certainly stop it from happening," quoted Daily Mail.
Congress Members to Be Investigated
According to Daily Mail, Musk, who heads DOGE, has specifically taken aim at Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren, whose cumulative net worth is reportedly estimated to be $439 million, as per a social media X post.
Schumer is worth about $2.3 million, while Warren's tax returns indicate she is worth $9 million, as per a 2023 public disclosure, reported Daily Mail.
Musk concludes: "Biden was not asleep at the switch. This was a massive large-scale program to import as many illegals as possible, to ultimately change the voting map of the United States, disenfranchise the American people and make it a permanent deep blue one party state…"
Musk has also revealed Democrats' nefarious funneling of money from the federal government and into thousands of liberal NGOs, which receive little oversight and which often serve the party instead of the country.
#4
“Show me a man that gets rich by being a politician, and I'll show you a crook.” ― Harry Truman
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
04/01/2025 11:36
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#5
^#2, just remember, the Great Replacement story is just a conspiracy theory.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
04/01/2025 11:47
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#6
Fascinating read.
She calls herself a MAGA liberal, Besoeker, and just was hired as a columnist for Bari Weiss’s Free Press — after several years of placing the occasional piece. Announcement today.
[WND] Billionaire entrepreneur and Trump advisor Elon Musk dropped a bombshell this weekend during a fiery 100-minute town hall in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he campaigned for conservative judge Brad Schimel in the state's upcoming Supreme Court election on Tuesday.
Joined by Antonio Gracias, a private equity titan and a key member of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team tasked with rooting out waste in the federal government, Musk unveiled a shocking chart: a dramatic spike in Social Security Numbers issued to non-citizens, soaring from 270,000 in 2021 to a mind-blowing 2.1 million in 2024.
That's almost 5 million non-citizens now embedded in the system—collecting benefits, draining taxpayer dollars, and, most alarmingly, infiltrating the voter rolls.
Stern Magazine is calling for mass conscription of German youths to join the army, including to ensure the defense of "freedom and diversity." The reaction to the article has been harsh to say the least, with hundreds of negative comments directed at Stern.
The article, entitled "Others no longer defend us? Then we must do it ourselves!" claims that "the USA no longer wants to protect Germany. This brings a bitter realization: Our unbearable complacency must end."
The solution? Start drafting German youth to fight the future wars. The author, Tilman Gerwien, a German male noticeable well past the age of someone who might typically be drafted, says that the days of a "dollhouse-like Bullerbu" are over and "we have to grow up." He details the left’s traditional stance against conscription, which saw German youths demanding American troops leave Germany, was "not only a matter of conscience, but also a lifestyle." He noted that at demonstrations against NATO, "people hopped around in peace-loving spirits, chanting ’Out of NATO, into fun!'" All of this has to end, according to Gerwien.
There is no way to know if Gerwien was ever a part of these previous protests or ever shared those sentiments at one time, but it is notable that he is now old enough to not have to face the draft himself. Lucky him.
He is a part of the trend of the German establishment left suddenly becoming gung-ho in recent years, especially since Putin invaded Ukraine. The old Green Party ideals of removing NATO from Europe and pursuing an anti-war agenda have been jettisoned. In this sense, much of the establishment left has become outright hawkish. With Trump now in office, the hawkishness from this German establishment has now gone into overdrive, with the Greens joining forces with the CDU to promote a defense-oriented Germany.
Will Germans fight for the "New Germany?"
Of course, the "New Germany" does not exactly have people lining up to fight for it, and that is a real problem for the establishment. Much of the conservative youth no longer see a Germany they would lay down their lives for, and in fact, the "New Germany" openly despises these AfD-voting youths, and maybe even sending them to the front would solve this "problem."
Meanwhile, the left-wing youth is coddled and mostly pacifist. This "Spiegel/Stern left" may like the idea of soldiers going off to fight on their behalf, but they don’t actually want to do the fighting themselves. The old notions of "honor" and "heroes" have been widely mocked and denigrated by the German elite, which Stern acknowledges,
So, who will fight?
Well, in the end, there doesn’t have to be a "reason" for conscription. Youths in Germany, just as in Ukraine, will be forced to the front for the likes of Stern’s editorial staff when push comes to shove, but it’s a nice thought for these journalists that these youths will at least think they have something worth dying for.
So, what should they die for? Stern addresses this problem, as the very atomized and multicultural society it promotes reduces the will for Germans to die face down in some trench at the frontline.
The magazine writes, "Taking all of this into account, Germany faces a tremendous challenge. We must dare to embrace more ’heroism’ — and less hedonism. More communal commitment and less responsibility-avoiding individualism. And be careful not to lose sight of what we want to defend: freedom and diversity. If the pendulum swings too far toward individualization, we become defenseless. If the focus is too strongly on defense, the ghosts of the past are awakened, keyword ’national community.’ It’s important to find the balance."
See, Stern doesn’t want right-wing people who love their country fighting a patriotic war at the front. This could lead to people voting for the AfD, and then... Hitler will come back. This is the logic of Der Spiegel, Stern, and many others.
They instead want iPhone-wielding hipsters who love diversity dying in the trenches. These iPhone-wielding youths should be at the front to defend guys like Gerwien so they can go to Vietnamese restaurants, attend book readings from African authors, and enjoy art installations from Brazilian LGBT activists.
German youth should die for all the above, not for the "German people," or the "German flag," or "hearth and home" or any of that other fascist nonsense that typically united nations and led men to lay down their lives for each other and their families.
Stern also appears relatively sure this youth will indeed be dying as well, saying they "will have to take up arms at some point."
"At the very latest, when conscription comes into effect, ’they’ (the Bundeswehr) will be all of us — even if only because our children and grandchildren will have to take up arms at some point," writes Stern. "This raises the question: What are we prepared to fight for and, when push comes to shove, to die for? The fact that we are being asked to answer for the first time in decades is the true ’turning point.'"
However, as Stern writes, German youths are not just fighting for diversity, but also for "freedom."
Notably, if you have any problem with "German freedom," such as Germany’s harsh free speech laws, then your freedom should be curtailed with a visit from the police, as is increasingly the case in Germany.
Of course, freedom and democracy are tied together, and German youths should be fighting at the front to defend a government increasingly intent on banning the second most popular party in the country, the AfD, which just hit a new polling high this week at 23.5 percent. But freedom also means banning political parties, and we must all fight for the right to ban political parties whose opinions we do not agree with, especially if that party is opposed to the war in Ukraine, which all German youth (future soldiers fighting for diversity) should support..
It all sounds very confusing, but "freedom and diversity" certainly sound good as long as we don’t look at the details.
It is also worth noting that despite Germans being called to "defend diversity," the cover of Stern is remarkably lacking in diversity. It’s two White people, a boy and girl.
Considering Germany’s youth are becoming more and more diverse, one would think that it would have been the perfect opportunity to feature a Black or Arab person. Go to any clothing store in Germany or any other Western country, and the classic motif of the Black male paired with the White female is ubiquitous. However, as those on the right often point out, when the threat of real wars start, the White males suddenly start appearing more and more frequently in the recruiting ads of the armed forces.
Laughably, the Stern call to action quotes military historian Sönke Neitzel, who told the magazine in support of conscription: "What are we waiting for?" "That 100 percent of the population is in favor of it?" He claims people won’t like it, but it simply has to happen.
Well, maybe they could at least wait until there is 20 percent of the population supporting such measures? A new Forsa poll shows that only 17 percent of Germans are willing to take up arms and die for their country. In short, Stern’s vision of an army of conscripts ready to die for Germany sounds a bit like Hitler at the end of the war, who was completely separated from reality and moving armies around on the map that did not exist.
Of those 17 percent, how many of them are older people or women who actually would not take up arms or even be forced to take up arms should the call to war come?
As Remix News reported in the past, the Ukrainian army has had something the German army did not, which was a patriotic, hardcore, right-wing element that was willing to "die for Ukraine." Not all of these soldiers were neo-Nazis, but many certainly were. A huge number of these soldiers are already dead, and the war may be coming to an end. Ironically, Ukraine may end up more like Germany in the end with the death of these soldiers, as calls by Ukrainian business leaders to accept the mass importation of migrants to replace the soldiers lost are becoming more of a mainstream idea.
Germany’s push for conscription will continue, with hundreds of billions being directed into weapons purchases. The only problem is that Germans are not going to want to fly these fighter jets or drive these tanks.
As the X comments note, Germans do not seem especially enthusiastic. One user writes: "Why should you fight for a country that you can’t even be proud of?"
Another responds: "You’ve failed with your miserable war training and war mentality. Only 17% of Germans want to defend Germany with weapons in hand, according to the latest Forsa survey. You won’t have my children, you miserable indoctrinators and arms industry lobbyists!"
Another asks how old the boy on the cover of the magazine is: "Shouldn’t the question be: Would you give your child? How old is the boy on the cover? 17? Man, man, man... This is on the level of ’Jesus would have been vaccinated.'"
Some do not even want people to buy Stern, period.
"No—don’t fight! And don’t buy that stupid state propaganda magazine either," wrote another.
Posted by: The Walking Unvaxed ||
04/01/2025
08:12 ||
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#1
The Stern article is behind paywall...
Posted by: European Conservative ||
04/01/2025 9:22
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#2
Rather than drafting their reluctant youth who have been thoroughly indoctrinated against war and nationalism, why not just get rid of the army? Without soldiers and guns for fighting, we can all live in peace and harmony. Wouldn't that be nice?
#4
In 1989 the Bundeswehr had 509,000 troops. Never more. Nobody felt threatened by it.
That said, I don't think we need the draft. We need a lean competent professional military acting in concert with other major European nations like France, Poland, U.K., Italy. Nobody will invade Russia. We just want to keep Russia out.
Posted by: European Conservative ||
04/01/2025 11:00
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#9
They instead want iPhone-wielding hipsters who love diversity dying in the trenches.
Those that survive will no longer be what they began as. Though, to be fair, that's anyone whose seen a friend die brutally in front of them. Me included.
I kind of wish there were a 130-year-old Ernst Junger still alive in Germany to write a response article to Tilman Gerwien's. That would be a hoot.
#11
I kinda feel like it's too late for Europe, the frog is already in the pot and the water is heating up. Their leaders are deliberately destroying their cultural identities by dilutions with muslim colonizers.
Given that, I feel like the only way out is likely to be the nightmare fuel that Europe used to be capable of that they lack the spine for now. Things like the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre. Unless there's a second coming of Charles Martel or someone like him to lead the charge against the invaders Europe has invited to pillage them.
[Jpost] The initial firing misses the drone, but in a second round of shots, the TYPHOON system successfully hits the drone, causing it to fall and crash into the sand.
[ZeroHedge] A Spanish conservative lawmaker is facing a hate crime investigation after a press conference in which he highlighted the link between mass immigration and rising crime rates — a connection supported by official data but often ignored by Spain’s far-left administration.
José Antonio Fúster, national spokesman for the populist Vox party and member of the Madrid Assembly, addressed the media on July 29 last year, where he read out the forenames of several dozen individuals arrested during violent incidents in Barcelona that weekend.
“Sabar, Omar, Nassim, Abdelkader, Salah, Salah, Younes, Karim, Jamil, Amir, Ali, Oussama, Hassan… I can go on. Do you notice any patterns? Do you notice anything?” Fúster asked.
“We do, and this is what we have been denouncing for a long time, that the open-door policy of the Popular Party and the PSOE has direct consequences on the security of Spaniards,” he added.
Though the list he read had the surnames redacted and had already circulated online via party channels, his public use of it has led the National Police to file a report for alleged incitement to hatred. Fúster, protected by parliamentary immunity as a sitting deputy, expressed disbelief upon receiving the notification last week and doubled down on his comments.
“We’re constantly told that immigration and crime have no link,” Fúster said, as cited by Spanish digital newspaper The Objective.
“But they’re not fooling anyone. The criminals that Spaniards endure in their neighborhoods have names — and we all know them.”
Vox maintains that spurious criminal complaints are part of a wider effort to silence those who raise valid security concerns. The party highlighted charges against MP Rocío de Meer last year for writing, “The future of this country is dark,” in response to the birth of a child named Ayoub in a rural Spanish village, and Jordi de la Fuente, another Vox figure, who is awaiting trial over a 2019 protest targeting an asylum center.
The party continues to call for reform of Article 510 of the Penal Code, which defines hate crimes, arguing it has been weaponized to censor uncomfortable conversations. In a recent interview, Vox leader Santiago Abascal remarked, “What they call ‘hate speech’ is often just speech they hate. We’re simply describing reality, and it’s backed by the government’s own data.”
Some of that government data was reported on by Remix News last month after an information request by La Gaceta online newspaper found a growing trend in violent crimes involving foreign nationals.
Between 2013 and 2023, for example, homicides involving foreign suspects soared by 69 percent compared to a 28 percent increase in total cases.
Similarly, the Spanish Interior Ministry’s own crime stats for 2023 revealed that the top 10 Spanish cities with the highest rates of violent robberies and intimidation were all located in Catalonia, with foreigners vastly overrepresented.
The data showed that there are 8,505 inmates in Catalan prisons and that 50.48 percent of them are foreigners.
When focusing on specific violent offenses like rape, 91 percent of those convicted in Catalonia are foreigners. When it comes to sexual assault and rape combined, 64.2 percent of all prisoners are foreigners.
[ZeroHedge] Back in 2022, Ukraine’s President Zelensky posed for a photo shoot wearing an olive green t-shirt emblazoned with a bizarre design that read, “Come to the dark side … Dominate or Die.” At the time, I wondered who thought it appropriate to even come up with such slogans, let alone have Ukraine’s president wear it on his chest. The photoshoot was arranged by a British PR team. At the time, a short documentary report about this was published in social media (here’s a YouTube clip).
Who thought this up?
Dennis Small, an editor at the Executive Intelligence Review, commented as follows:
“Let’s remember, Zelensky is an actor … he’s being given lines to read. The people providing those lines to Mr. Zelensky are two public relations (PR) firms in London who are working with Ukrainians to craft the message coming from Zelensky, which is largely directed to the West.”
The Clarion call, “come to the dark side” was probably passed down to Zelensky through these channels. He obliged and addressed the Western public with that message on his chest. Imagine how the Western media would have reacted had Vladimir Putin worn a t-shirt like that. But if Zelensky invites you to the dark side, that’s all perfectly good and wholesome and there’s no need to question that message. I do believe, however, that this was a very significant moment that should not have been overlooked.
EUROPE’S IDIOT WARHAWKS
European Commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen has announced her ReArm Europe plan with up to €800 billion of military spending. Soon to be German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is pushing for unlimited borrowing for infrastructure and defence spending. Even before assuming office, he won German parliament’s approval for a €500 billion fund to finance defence projects. But this is only the start: Merz is pushing through constitutional amendments that would remove fiscal restraints on debt and unleash a massive boost to military spending. Ultimately, the figure could rise up to €1.7 trillion. It would more than double Germany’s debt to GDP, from 62.4% currently, to about 125%. How much money is €1.7 trillion? It’s about €20,400 per man, woman and child in Germany.
Over in France, Emmanuel Macron wants to send troops to Ukraine and boost France’s nuclear arsenal. He’s dreaming about hypersonic missiles that could carry nuclear warheads toward Russian targets. Across the channel, Keir Starmer is obsessing about military conscription, scotching up a “coalition of the willing” against Russia and providing ever more financial and military aid to Ukraine. He even said that Britain’s deployment of troops to Ukraine is already “operational,” whatever that means.
WEAKENING, EXHAUSTING RUSSIA
But what is the point of all this busywork? Even European leaders are not so delusional as to think that they can reverse Ukraine’s defeat or vanquish Russia with their weak militaries. Instead, they simply want the war to continue, hoping to weaken and exhaust Russia with the view of toppling Vladimir Putin’s government. Well, let’s see how that’s going…
Russia has been fighting the war in Ukraine for more than three years now. When the war started, the Armed Forces of Ukraine were the largest and most powerful army in Europe. The estimates of its size vary, but in an interview with the German TV network ARD, Zelensky said that, "...We have 880,000 [troops]. We have a million-strong army.” In February 2022 that force was fully intact, all trained up and armed to the teeth. They also had full support from the collective West. Together with the United States, they were united behind Ukraine with their arsenals full of weapons and ammunition. Then, as soon as the conflict began, they hit Russia with a nuclear sanctions package, determined to collapse her economy.
But none of it worked; Russia didn’t weaken: instead, it got much stronger. In a recent talk at Hillsdale College, former Navy Seal and founder of Blackwater Worldwide, Eric Prince delivered a sobering message: “First of all, don’t listen to the idiot politicians that say, yeah, we've degraded the Russian army. No,” said Prince, “we have chewed up a lot of material. The Russian army has gotten infinitely smarter.”
THE RUSSIAN ARMY GOT INFINITELY SMARTER
For example, "The thing that the Russians are very good at is electronic warfare," which has negated the effectiveness of the most advanced Western systems, such as Javelin missiles, HIMARS and Copperhead guided artillery shells. Such weapons often became ineffective within weeks of their use in the battlefield: “It works for a week or two, and the Russians figure [out] how to jam the navigation or the command link, and the stuff goes blind.”
Meanwhile, all the bright minds at NATO haven’t been able to figure out how to fight the Russians. A report published by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) acknowledged that Russia's evolving tactics are leaving NATO strategists at a loss.
Is that because they don’t know how to fight Russia, or they don’t know how to better fight Russia using the Ukrainian army?
In a nutshell, the Russian military is combining infantry operations with drones and gliding bombs in a sort of "offensive triangle" that paralyzes enemy troops behind the front lines. Infantry and artillery action prevent them from maneuvering; drones continuously attack and wear down the trapped forces and the gliding bombs finish them off with precise hits at their fortifications. If the Ukrainian military chooses to hold static positions, they become targets for gliding bomb raids; if they opt for 'flexible,' mobile defense, they expose themselves to attacks with artillery and drones.
SHARPENING ITS SWORD…
Contrary to Western media's trash talk, Russian military has not been degraded. If anything, it has been significantly upgraded. The Russians have been very strategic and methodical in learning from their operations. Battlefield experiences have been systematically fed back up the command chain in order to study the army's weaknesses, and potential improvements to its operations. Eric Prince offered another telling example:
"If you shot at a Russian with artillery in March or April of 2022, it would take them an hour and a half to shoot back accurately. Now, about two minutes, which means if you shoot at them, you better be in your vehicle and hauling ass because they're going to get you otherwise."
I was trained as an artillery marksman in the military; for a well-trained, coordinated team, two minutes is enough to fire off perhaps four or five rounds but with no time to adjust the aim. Hitting a target with the first round can only happen by luck: normally you fire, get feedback if the shot was too long, short, off to the left or right, and then adjust the aim accordingly. Unless you’re shooting smaller calibre mortars, two minutes is only enough time to fire a few rounds, hope for a lucky strike and run.
If what Eric Prince said is true, the implications are actually quite staggering. It means that the Russian troops have been able to largely neutralize one of the most important and most effective means of modern warfare. And let’s not forget Russia’s logistical operations and unmatched industrial base producing a massive abundance of ammunition.
[YouTube] Sep 5, 2018
During a hearing with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Rep. Billy Long, R-Missouri, drowned out a protester by making an impromptu auction call. He received a round of applause after the protester was removed.
[Breitbart] Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud wrote a letter to U.S. President Donald Trump last week offering the United States exclusive control of some of the nation’s airbases and ports, which would greatly improve America’s military presence in the region.
The implicit bargain was that the U.S. would use these bases to protect Somalia against incursions by Islamist militants.
“These strategically positioned assets provide an opportunity to bolster American engagement in the region, ensuring uninterrupted military and logistical access while preventing external competitors from establishing a presence in this critical corridor,” Mohamud wrote to Trump, as related by Reuters, which reviewed a copy of the March 16 letter on Friday.
Reuters mentioned four specific sites covered by the letter: airbases in Baledogle and Berbera and ports in Berbera and Bosaso.
Baledogle’s airfield, located about 55 miles from Mogadishu, is already heavily utilized by the U.S. military. The Port of Bosaso is controlled by the autonomous state of Puntland and operated by a company from the United Arab Emirates, which has been working to modernize the port’s commercial facilities.
By far the most provocative aspect of the Somali president’s letter was his offer to give the United States operational control over the port and airfield in Berbera, which is located in the breakaway province of Somaliland. The region became part of Somalia in 1960 and declared independence in 1991 after overthrowing a brutal military dictator. It has been self-governing since then, with its own president, administration, and constitution. No other country recognizes Somaliland’s independence, however.
The breakaway region’s inhabitants consider their government to be more honest and transparent than Somalia’s. Somalilanders have won international applause for holding clean elections where opposition parties can actually win sometimes, though no other nation or major international organization formally recognizes the outcome of those elections.
Somaliland Foreign Minister Abdirahman Dahir Aden was not amused when Reuters told him the president of Somalia offered to give control of Berbera’s port and airfield to the United States.
“The USA gave up this corrupted regime called Somalia. The USA is now ready to deal with Somaliland, who has shown the world to be a peaceful, stable, and democratic nation,” he asserted.
“The USA is not stupid. They know who they need to deal with when it comes to Berbera port,” he added confidently.
“It is astonishing to hear statements from the President of Somalia, who cannot even manage Mogadishu, yet meddles in Berbera,” Somaliland President Abdirahman Irro told reporters on Saturday.
“I tell the international community, the President of the United States, and the world at large: Somaliland governs its own land, sea, and airspace,” he declared.
The Financial Times (FT) reported on March 14 that American diplomats have made initial contacts with Irro’s administration to take control of Berbera’s port in exchange for U.S. recognition of Somaliland’s independence. According to FT’s sources, these “very tentative, initial contacts” represented the “beginnings of a conversation” about the U.S. acquiring territory in Somaliland, which might be used to handle refugees from Gaza under President Trump’s vision of relocating the Palestinians and renovating Gaza to become “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Irro denied negotiating with the U.S. to relocate the Palestinians in February, and Somali President Mohamud has insisted the Palestinians must remain in Gaza.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] California's formerly overrun border with Mexico is now virtually empty just months after Donald Trump's election, images show.
Aid workers have begun packing up after weeks without seeing any migrants, SF Gate reports.
'To say there has been a dramatic change would be an understatement,' Jeffrey Stalnaker, acting chief patrol agent of the San Diego sector, said.
Not long ago, the stretch along southern California was dealing with a record number crossings.
December 2024 saw a record 301,981 people caught crossing the border illegally.
The number of migrants caught crossing illegally stayed well above 200,000-a-month for much of Biden's time in office. He insisted there was nothing he could do.
But during Trump's first month in office the number of illegal migrants intercepted plunged to just 11,709 people, making a mockery of Biden's claims that his hands were tied.
Former President Biden's decision to reverse a pandemic-era policy which denied asylum seekers and immediately deported them back to Mexico was largely blame for the spike.
President Trump vowed to tackle the border crisis if elected and has since enacted several measures which have seen daily arrests fall from their high of 1,200 to just 30.
Among them was deploying 750 US troops to reinforce six miles of the border wall with concertina wire.
Adriana Jasso, a human rights lawyer who works for the American Friends Service Committee, said the last time she saw any migrants in the notorious 'Whiskey 8' area near San Diego was February 15.
Angel Mom of woman murdered by illegal aliens slams radical judges blocking administration deportation efforts.
Last week, Patty Morin, whose daughter Rachel was found dumped in a drain near a trail in Maryland eighteen months ago, slammed Boasberg, who is attempting to single-handedly undermine national security.
[FoxNews] Kentucky Republican Attorney General Russell Coleman is hopeful that the Trump administration will address an issue he says is a little-known "loophole" allowing shipments of fentanyl to enter the U.S.
"On its face, this looks hyper technical and bureaucratic, but what it is is closing a loophole," Coleman told Fox News Digital in an interview on Monday. "And it's closing a loophole where we receive a massive number of shipments from overseas, particularly China, that receive under this Type 86 with little or no inspection. And that should astound people, that there's little or no inspection in this threat environment."
Coleman is referring to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) pilot program called Entry Type 86, which was introduced to streamline the importation process for low-value shipments, particularly those associated with e-commerce. However, Coleman, along with 24 other Republican attorneys general, says the program's "use far exceeds its original scope" and "raises serious concerns about the flood of deadly drugs coming into our country."
Not just drugs, but all the cheap, legal stuff bought from Amazon and WalMart that’s shipped primarily directly from China.
"We're looking at over a billion packages shipped through this loophole last year," Coleman said. "That's in an environment where, I would argue, we're facing a threat that has never existed before, and that is this, no margin of error environment in which we're trying to raise families and protect families, and that is an environment where as little as one pill can and is killing people can and is killing folks Kentuckians."
Coleman said they urged the Biden administration to look into the program, and now, they are hoping the Trump administration will respond to a letter they sent Monday. Most of the shipments are arriving from Mexico and China, he said.
"Entry Type 86 now accounts for 75% of all de minimis goods entering the United States, with shipments increasing from 153 million in 2015 to more than 1.2 billion in 2024," the AGs wrote to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. "Any surge of this magnitude requires further study, especially when it comes to potential challenges within our customs enforcement system. It raises serious concerns about the flood of deadly drugs coming."
Law enforcement and those in the shipping industry are well aware that this loophole exists, Coleman said, and it is unlikely to surprise those in Washington receiving this information, and there are ongoing dialogues about the potential dangers of parcel shipments with law enforcement agencies.
"This is what drug trafficking looks like in the 21st century," Coleman said. "It looks very different than ‘Breaking Bad.’ It looks very different than what we saw a decade ago. It's not surreptitious."
"I'm optimistic that the administration will be responsive," he added.
#1
This is also where you get the goods that are sold by a supposed US vendor, actually come from China, and when you try to return it, return shipping is more than the item is worth.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
04/01/2025 11:43
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#2
Obama gave China some crazy discount shipping rates.
Bought a jacket once, it had zippers but no pockets.
Bought a shirt once, it had buttons, but the buttons were sewn on with no button holes.
Bought some other stuff that was bait and switch, were they used the designers pictures but sent a poor knock-off instead. That's what really made me rage b/c the whole operation was to rip you off knowing that it would cost you triple the cost to send it back. And if you complained, Amazon would protect China by staying out of it, telling me to take it up with the vendor.
2000's Amazon had my back no matter what.
2010+ Amazon has China's back, no matter what.
I use Amazon as little as possible anymore. Cheap China Garbage.
#3
We found online- ok my wife found- a frame for holding logs to cut up with a chainsaw. $20 Australian. It’s a scam, said I. Waited about a year. Finally arrives- a little goldish locket on a chain with a letter of undying love and gratitude from our dearest vendor. That was the last thing we ever bought from China.
[FoxNews] Government subsidies for electric vehicles (EVs), combined with a regulatory credit system for vehicle emissions, are leading to rising automobile and utility costs, a new report from the American Energy Institute (AEI) reveals.
Increasingly stringent Corporate Average Fuel Economy and greenhouse gas tailpipe emissions standards have forced gas-powered vehicle manufacturers to produce more EVs. As a result, this has siphoned auto manufacturers' resources away from gas-powered vehicle production and toward EV production, ultimately pushing the costs of gas-powered cars higher, according a report by the AEI.
If auto manufacturers do not produce enough EVs to meet state and federal standards, they are forced to buy into a credit system to offset their emissions production, inevitably creating another avenue where additional costs are transferred to consumers, according to the report.
Utility costs also see an impact, AEI's report points out. State and federal subsidy and rebate programs for EV charging infrastructure, while beneficial for utility companies' profits, lead once more to increased costs that are subsequently passed on to rate payers. Forty states offer rebates for in-home level two chargers, while at the federal level, rebate and subsidy programs for EV charging infrastructure received an investment of roughly $7.5 billion under former President Joe Biden.
"By distorting the market with regulatory credits, subsidies, and behind-the-scenes rulemaking, federal agencies are shifting costs from affluent EV buyers to working-class Americans — while straining a grid that’s already under pressure," said Jason Isaac, co-author of the report and the founder and CEO of AEI. "This isn’t about consumer choice or energy innovation. It’s administrative overreach that leaves Americans paying more to drive and to keep the lights on."
#1
Dept of Energy was established to get more energy not to reduce per capita use of energy. Another department that needs to be radically downsized as it lost its mission focus.
[FoxNews] "It's interactive where you can blow up the Gold King mine and flood the Animas River watershed with toxic waste! Fun for the whole family!" 'The scarcely visited museum cost a whopping $4 million taxpayer dollars to build,' according to Zeldin's EPA
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin is shuttering the Biden-era EPA museum located near the White House that "scarcely" saw visitors since it opened in 2024, Fox News Digital learned.
Zeldin announced Monday afternoon that the National Environmental Museum and Education Center, which opened last year under the Biden administration, will shutter after costing taxpayers millions to build and subsequently drew a lackluster number of visitors.
"The scarcely visited museum cost a whopping $4 million taxpayer dollars to build in accordance with Smithsonian standards and more than $600,000 annually to operate," the EPA said of the museum in Monday comment provided to Fox News Digital, describing the museum as the "Biden EPA’s pet project." "It had less than 2,000 external visitors between May 2024-February 2025 and while the museum was free, the cost to taxpayers per external visitor amounted to nearly $315 per person."
The EPA museum opened in May 2024 within the William Jefferson Clinton federal building, which is home to the EPA's headquarters and sits just blocks from the White House. A smaller EPA exhibit previously was showcased in a neighboring federal building ahead of the construction and opening of the National Environmental Museum and Education Center in 2024.
[JustTheNews] Congressman Rudy Yakym talks about the Veterans Administration's (VA) misrepresentation of a $3 billion shortfall to Congress, which was later found to be false due to poor accounting practices. Yakym criticizes the Biden administration for using veterans as political pawns and highlights his efforts to combat improper government payments, which totaled over $2.8 trillion in the last two decades. He also addresses the issue of unemployment fraud, where $135 billion was fraudulently claimed during the pandemic, with only $5 billion recovered. Yakym introduces legislation to extend the statute of limitations for prosecuting fraudsters and to protect Jewish students and faculty from discrimination and ties to terrorist groups.
Additional interviews include Congressman Eric Burlison, who sheds light on the potential end of taxpayer-funded media, citing the abundance of information sources and the U.S.'s $37 trillion debt.
And The Wellness Company's Dr. Peter McCullough, who shares new scientific research indicating that repeated COVID-19 vaccinations may harm individuals by causing the body to produce harmful antibodies, leading to recurring infections.
[JustTheNews] Pro-government briefs focus on the merits of the policy rather than the constitutionality of the law. "Nothing bars the President from nominating Task Force members for senatorial confirmation," Republican AGs note.
A legal fight over free insurance coverage for HIV-prevention drugs and making a self-insured Christian company "complicit in facilitating homosexual behavior" reaches far beyond its Obamacare context, but ordinary Americans wouldn't know that by reading pro-government friend-of-the-court briefs submitted to the Supreme Court.
Affordable Care Act provisions that force insurers to charge beneficiaries nothing for preventive services on a list determined by a task force – neither appointed by nor answerable to the president – are symbolic of unaccountable bureaucrats throughout the federal government making unconstitutionally unreviewable decisions, newly filed briefs argue.
[JustTheNews] The GOP-led states of Idaho and Missouri took nearly 300,000 registrations off their voter rolls after finding inactive, ineligible, or deceased voters, in addition to duplicates and voters who moved. Non-citizens ineligible to vote under those states' laws have also been removed.
Two Republican-led states have removed hundreds of thousands of registrations from their voter rolls this month, while another identified hundreds of non-citizen voters during their voter list maintenance.
Collectively, the GOP-led states of Idaho and Missouri took nearly 300,000 registrations off their voter rolls after finding inactive, ineligible, or deceased voters, in addition to duplicates and voters who moved. Iowa identified nearly 300 non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls and referred them to the Iowa attorney general.
AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL, SUPPORT FROM WHITE HOUSE
President Donald Trump issued an executive order on election integrity last week, offering assistance to states on maintaining voter rolls. “To identify unqualified voters registered in the States: the Secretary of Homeland Security shall, consistent with applicable law, ensure that State and local officials have, without the requirement of the payment of a fee, access to appropriate systems for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of individuals registering to vote or who are already registered,” the executive order reads.
The order added that DHS, with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), “shall review each State’s publicly available voter registration list and available records concerning voter list maintenance activities … alongside Federal immigration databases and State records requested, including through subpoena where necessary and authorized by law, for consistency with Federal requirements.”
Also, within three months of the order, the DHS secretary is to give “the Attorney General complete information on all foreign nationals who have indicated on any immigration form that they have registered or voted in a Federal, State, or local election, and shall also take all appropriate action to submit to relevant State or local election officials such information.”
The executive order also requires the attorney general to “take appropriate action with respect to States that fail to comply with the list maintenance requirements of the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.”
IDAHO
Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane (R) announced on March 19th that 144,121 voter registrations were removed from the state’s voter rolls during its biennial voter list review and maintenance. The removed registrations were for inactive voters, ineligible voters, and voters who moved. The affected voters were sent notices before their registrations were canceled.
“Ensuring the integrity of our elections starts with maintaining accurate voter rolls,” McGrane said in a statement. “Thanks to the hard work of our county clerks and our collaboration with state and federal agencies, Idaho continues to lead the way in protecting our elections. We are committed to ensuring that only eligible voters are on our rolls, and we are taking every step necessary to make that happen.”
In July, Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) issued an executive order to ensure that only U.S. citizens are on the state’s voter rolls, which started a review and verification of registered voters.
IOWA
On March 20th, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate (R) announced that there were 277 non-citizens confirmed to be on the state’s voter rolls, after gaining access to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program. Of the 277 non-citizens, 35 of them cast ballots in the November election, and five attempted to vote but their ballots were rejected.
Pate sent proposed legislation to the Iowa legislature that would require citizenship verification when people register to vote.
"The federal government reviewed our data and verified the citizenship status but refused to share who the noncitizens were," Pate said in a statement with the announcement. "Only eligible Iowa voters should participate in Iowa elections. We are working with the Iowa legislature on solutions to verify citizenship at registration rather than as ballots are cast, and we're confident both chambers will recognize the importance of this legislation. Our proposed solutions will be crucial next steps in confidently balancing voter participation with election integrity."
Regarding whether the non-citizens had been removed from the state’s voter rolls, Pate’s office told Just the News on Wednesday, “The 277 noncitizens have been turned over to the Iowa Attorney General and Iowa Department of Public Safety for next steps.” In December, the Iowa attorney general and secretary of state sued then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, DHS, then-USCIS Director Ur Jaddou, and UCIS itself for allegedly refusing to inform the state of how many non-citizens were on Iowa’s voter rolls. The case is ongoing.
“Maintaining election integrity is a team sport, and we need cooperation from multiple agencies, including the federal government,” Pate said in a statement. “We are hopeful that between our legislative proposals and this lawsuit, we will have the tools we need to verify voter eligibility during the voter registration processes, allowing us to ensure in the future, only eligible Iowa voters are participating in Iowa elections.”
When asked by Just the News about whether the lawsuit will be dropped following the executive order, Pate’s office said, “Our goal is to receive the best possible information to help us maintain Iowa’s election integrity. At this time, we do not have plans to drop the lawsuit. We will be paying close attention to the implementation of the executive order and revisit the question as necessary.”
MISSOURI
Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) announced on March 14th that his state had removed 18,637 deceased voters from Missouri’s voter rolls since Jan. 13th.
State law requires county clerks and local election authorities to examine their voter rolls for people who have moved away, died, or cannot vote anymore. “In Missouri, we are taking action—not just making promises—when it comes to election integrity,” Hoskins said in a statement. “By working hand-in-hand with local election officials, we have removed outdated registrations, strengthening confidence in our elections and making sure every vote cast is legitimate.”
Missouri also removed 75 duplicate registrations, 1,864 disqualified registered voters (adjudged incapacitated or felon), 133,520 inactive voters, 2,583 voters who moved, and 282 voters who requested to be removed from the state’s voter rolls.
Are they turning over the names of those that are violating 18 U.S. Code § 611 - Voting by aliens,
which makes it illegal to register or vote being Non-Citizens?
I am sure the ICE & the DOJ could go use of the names and addresses.
#4
Despite Admitting Voter Fraud was Real in 2020 Election
Given who won in 2020, Skidmark, what difference would it have made had he referred them to the feds? At least now the new attorney general doesn’t have to overcome double jeopardy.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] A new device that 'reads' a person's mind can turn their thoughts into speech. Would it work on Jasmine Crockett (D-Stupid) whose speech has no thoughts?
A team of engineers from the University of California invented a breakthrough brain-computer interface (BCI) system with electrodes that get adhered to a person's scalp to measure brain activity and brainwaves.
The brainwaves are analyzed and then converted into audible speech by a computer, which then translates them to spoken words read aloud by AI.
The researchers believe the new technology could restore paralyzed people’s ability to communicate by converting the brain activity from the motor cortex into audible speech.
The motor cortex is instrumental in controlling speech, and signals are generated even when a person has lost the ability to speak.
Researchers employed advanced AI models to capture brain signals in that area and convert them to sound in about one second, allowing continuous speech output without delays.
They tested the BCI on a woman named Ann, who has severe paralysis and cannot speak. She had participated in a previous study by the same team, but their system at that time resulted in a lag-time of eight seconds.
Kaylo Littlejohn, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and co-leader of the study, said: ‘We wanted to see if we could generalize to the unseen words and really decode Ann’s patterns of speaking.
Iran has seized two foreign tankers with suspicion to be US-affiliated,carrying over three million liters (792,516 US gallons) of smuggled diesel fuel according to Iran Naval Units
The tankers are being transferred to the country’s Bushehr port.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] Hooters — known for its scantily-clad waitresses — filed for bankruptcy on Monday night.
It is the latest American restaurant chain facing financial problems. But despite the filing, and $376 million of debt, the 42-year-old brand insists it's not going anywhere.
The US arm of the chain is restructuring through Chapter 11. As part of the restructuring, Hooters plans to sell more than 100 company-owned restaurants to two franchise groups that currently operate locations in Tampa, Florida, and Chicago.
Together, these groups already manage about one-third of the franchised Hooters locations in the US, the company said.
Founded in 1983, Hooters became famous for its chicken wings and its servers' uniform of orange shorts and low-cut tank tops.
The buyer group is backed by some of Hooters' original founders, and it pledged to take Hooters 'back to its roots.'
'With over 30 years of hands-on experience across the Hooters ecosystem, we have a profound understanding of our customers and what it takes to not only meet, but consistently exceed their expectations,' said Neil Kiefer, a member of the buyer group and the current CEO of the original Hooters´ location in Clearwater, Florida.
Hooters said it expects to complete the deal and emerge from bankruptcy in three to four months.
It is not clear if any other restaurants will shut. Hooters currently directly owns and operates 151 locations, with another 154 restaurants operated by franchisees, primarily in the United States.
Like other struggling chains such as Red Lobster - which filed for bankruptcy in the summer - Hooters is blaming the rising cost of rent and food and customers eating out less.
Hooters shuttered around 40 'underperforming' restaurants in June, including locations Florida, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Texas and Virginia as it bid to cut costs. A bankruptcy would likely lead to more closures of the 300 remaining locations.
[FoxNews] Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo ordering the military to adopt the same standards for both men and women serving in combat roles on Sunday.
Hegseth highlighted the memo in a video filmed as he returned from a trip to Japan on Sunday, saying that the U.S. military's standards had flagged under the previous administration.
"For far too long, we allowed standards to slip, and different standards for men and women in combat arms MOS's and jobs. That's not acceptable," Hegseth said.
"We need to have the same standards – male or female – in our combat roles to ensure our men and women who are under our leaders and in those formations have the best possible leaders and the highest possible standards that are not based at all on your sex," he continued.
The memo, released by the Pentagon Monday, said "As the nature of warfare evolves and the demands on our Service members grow more complex, it is imperative that we assess and refine the physical fitness standards that enable our readiness and lethality.
"I am directing the Secretaries of the Military Departments to develop comprehensive plans to distinguish combat arms occupations from non-combat arms occupations," Hegseth wrote in the document. "This effort will ensure that our standards are clear, mission-focused, and reflective of the unique physical demands placed on our Service members in various roles.
"Additionally, for certain combat arms roles, it is essential to identify which positions require heightened entry-level and sustained physical fitness. These roles, which are critical to our military’s mission success, demand exceptional physical capabilities, and the standards for them must reflect that rigor," the memo continues.
"All entry-level and sustained physical fitness requirements within combat arms positions must be sex-neutral, based solely on the operational demands of the occupation and the readiness needed to confront any adversary. In establishing those standards, the Secretaries of the Military Departments may not establish standards that would result in any existing Service member being held to a lower standard," it also said.
The new memo comes after Hegseth ordered a review of military fitness and grooming standards earlier this month. Hegseth has vowed to bring back tougher standards while reversing "woke" policies that don't align with restoring the warrior ethos, rebuilding the military and reestablishing deterrence.
"Our standards will be high, uncompromising, and clear," he said in a Jan. 25 memo to service members. "The strength of our military is our unity and our shared purpose."
#2
There are no front lines. There were no mechanics or clerks during the Battle of the Bulge in Dec '44 or Tet in Jan '68. Everyone was an infantryman.
#3
Here's an idea, why doesn't Hegseth authorize the creation on a Woman's Army Corps? A pilot program which could be expanded to other services if successful. Distinctive standards, uniforms, training, etc.
Posted by: Bobby ||
04/01/2025 8:15
Comments ||
Top||
#5
"The battle is not always to the strong nor the race to the swift, but it is a good way to bet."
We have seen this over and over again:
Profession X is "male-dominated"!
OK, we'll hire girls. But we are not lowering the standards.
Women are being excluded because of the so-called "standards".
OK, OK, we'll lower the standards.
#6
#3 Better would be a Army Auxiliary Corps for men and women. I had a short stint as a APO officer overseas and got several paratroopers who had one too many jumps. Good workers, got to stay in from the weather and got to go home to momma every night. Better than the school trained personnel. Some people just get busted up but still have the esprit to be there and the ability to do jobs that are available.
[FoxNews] The Department of Health and Human Services sent letters to several Planned Parenthood affiliates informing them funding had been withheld
President Donald Trump's administration told several Planned Parenthood affiliates on Monday that it was withholding funding due to possible violations of civil rights laws, according to reports.
Politico reported that tens of millions of dollars were being withheld from Planned Parenthood clinics that provide low-income Americans services like contraception, STI testing and other health services.
…but mostly abortions. As I recall, they outsource the other stuff.
On Monday, nine state affiliates of Planned Parenthood that receive money from the federal government through Title X, a family planning program, got notices saying their funding was being "temporarily withheld."
The publication said that the letter, which was provided by Planned Parenthood, pointed toward "possible violations" of Trump’s executive orders – like the banning of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs – and federal civil rights laws.
Another policy by Trump that the family planning program allegedly violated had to do with "taxpayer subsidization of open borders."
The Planned Parenthood chapters that received the letters were mostly in GOP-controlled states, the publication noted. The administration also pointed to evidence of violations by citing the mission statement from the clinic, as well as other documents that stress a "commitment to black communities."
The deputy director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Public Affairs, Amy Margolis, reportedly argued that those materials "paint a picture of Planned Parenthood" suggesting it is "engaged, across its affiliates, in widespread practices across hiring, operations, and patient treatment that unavoidably employ race in a negative manner."
The letter also accuses Planned Parenthood of encouraging illegal aliens to receive care.
Planned Parenthood has 10 days to respond to the letter and provide evidence it plans to comply with the president’s executive orders. Once provided, the administration will determine whether to suspend or terminate the grants.
Planned Parenthood and HHS did not respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment on the matter.
In a social media post, Planned Parenthood wrote, "When we say, ‘Care no matter what,’ we mean it. Planned Parenthood health centers’ doors are open to everyone. Period. We’ve fought to protect your care for decades and won’t stop now."
In another post, Planned Parenthood directed its supporters to its website to submit a letter to Congress regarding the funding.
[FoxNews] Damon Marsalis Gaines, 38, is on administrative leave, the FAA said
A Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employee working at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) outside of Washington, D.C. was recently charged over a workplace altercation, authorities said.
Upper Marlboro, Maryland, resident Damon Marsalis Gaines, 38, was charged with assault and battery in relation to the incident. POLITICO reported that the suspect works in controller operations.
I have no idea what that means.
The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) confirmed the developments to Fox News Digital, explaining that the incident transpired in a control tower on Thursday.
The FAA also confirmed the incident to Fox News Digital.
"The employee is on administrative leave while we investigate the matter," an FAA spokesperson said.
It's unclear what sparked the scuffle.
The incident is one of many newsworthy stories involving DCA air traffic control recently. The airport has faced scrutiny after an American Airlines plane and an Army helicopter collided on Jan. 29, killing 67 people.
[ArsTechnica] FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado.
Indiana University quietly removes profile of tenured professor and refuses to say why.
A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer, Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why.
Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles. He was the associate dean for research at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a tenured professor at Indiana University at Bloomington. According to his employer, he has served as principal investigator on research projects totaling nearly $23 million over his 21 years there.
He has also co-authored scores of academic papers on a diverse range of research fields, including cryptography, systems security, and data privacy, including the protection of human genomic data. I have personally spoken to him on three occasions for articles here, here, and here.
“NONE OF THIS IS IN ANY WAY NORMAL”
In recent weeks, Wang's email account, phone number, and profile page at the Luddy School were quietly erased by his employer. Over the same time, Indiana University also removed a profile for his wife, Nianli Ma, who was listed as a Lead Systems Analyst and Programmer at the university's Library Technologies division.
As reported by the Bloomingtonian and later the Herald-Times in Bloomington, a small fleet of unmarked cars driven by government agents descended on the Bloomington home of Wang and Ma on Friday. They spent most of the day going in and out of the house and occasionally transferred boxes from their vehicles. TV station WTHR, meanwhile, reported that a second home owned by Wang and Ma and located in Carmel, Indiana, was also searched. The station said that both a resident and an attorney for the resident were on scene during at least part of the search.
Attempts to locate Wang and Ma have so far been unsuccessful. An Indiana University spokesman didn't answer emailed questions asking if the couple was still employed by the university and why their profile pages, email addresses, and phone numbers had been removed. The spokesman provided the contact information for a spokeswoman at the FBI's field office in Indianapolis. In an email, the spokeswoman wrote: "The FBI conducted court authorized law enforcement activity at homes in Bloomington and Carmel Friday. We have no further comment at this time."
Searches of federal court dockets turned up no documents related to Wang, Ma, or any searches of their residences. The FBI spokeswoman didn't answer questions seeking which US district court issued the warrant and when, and whether either Wang or Ma is being detained by authorities. Justice Department representatives didn't return an email seeking the same information. An email sent to a personal email address belonging to Wang went unanswered at the time this post went live. Their resident status (e.g. US citizens or green card holders) is currently unknown.
Fellow researchers took to social media over the weekend to register their concern over the series of events.
"None of this is in any way normal," Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Mastodon. He continued: "Has anyone been in contact? I hear he’s been missing for two weeks and his students can’t reach him. How does this not get noticed for two weeks???"
In the same thread, Matt Blaze, a McDevitt professor of computer science and law at Georgetown University, said: "It's hard to imagine what reason there could be for the university to scrub its website as if he never worked there. And while there's a process for removing tenured faculty, it takes more than an afternoon to do it."
Local news outlets reported the agents spent several hours moving boxes in an out of the residences. WTHR provided the following details about the raid on the Carmel home:
Neighbors say the agents announced "FBI, come out!" over a megaphone.
A woman came out of the house holding a phone. A video from a neighbor shows an agent taking that phone from her. She was then questioned in the driveway before agents began searching the home, collecting evidence and taking photos.
A car was pulled out of the garage slightly to allow investigators to access the attic.
The woman left the house before 13News arrived. She returned just after noon accompanied by a lawyer. The group of ten or so investigators left a few minutes later.
The FBI would not say what they were looking for or who is under investigation. A bureau spokesperson issued a statement: “I can confirm we conducted court-authorized activity at the address in Carmel today. We have no further comment at this time.”
Investigators were at the house for about four hours before leaving with several boxes of evidence. 13News rang the doorbell when the agents were gone. A lawyer representing the family who answered the door told us they're not sure yet what the investigation is about.
Indiana University terminated professor Xiaofeng Wang on Friday, the same day that two of his homes were searched by the FBI, according to a document sent by the American Association of University Professors’ IU Bloomington chapter.
The document, IU Provost Rahul Shrivastav’s email informing Wang of his termination, said it was Shrivastav’s understanding that Wang had accepted a faculty position with a university in Singapore.
Odd that he hadn’t informed IU management…
Shrivastav said in the email that Wang would not be eligible to be hired again at IU.
The email also told Wang he needed to return all IU property to the IU Police Department as soon as possible. IUPD did not respond to a request for comment by publication.
The Indiana Daily Student reached out to IU to confirm the document’s veracity, to which a spokesperson responded that IU will not comment on the investigation.
"Indiana University was recently made aware of a federal investigation of an Indiana University faculty member," an IU spokesperson told the IDS on Monday. "At the direction of the FBI, Indiana University will not make any public comments regarding this investigation. In accordance with Indiana University practices, Indiana University will also not make any public comments regarding the status of this individual."
Wang had been a director at IU’s center for Security and Privacy in Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. The center's co-director, L. Jean Camp, confirmed details first reported by the South China Morning Post that Wang is still in the United States, and that to her knowledge he has not been charged with anything.
[FoxNews] Trump not 'fully aware' about 'serious' DOGE spending cuts, Harry Dent says
How on Earth did such a stupid fellow get a BS in economics from Wharton and grow a multi-billion dollar international empire? That said, it seems to me that Mr. Dent and Mr. Musk are substantially in agreement.
With Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reportedly on track to save hundreds of billions of dollars annually, one outspoken U.S. economist explained how cutting costs can paint a harsh reality for the economy.
"Trump is not fully aware of how these serious (and needed) cuts in federal spending will very likely tip the economy back toward recession," Harry Dent told Fox News Digital. "Secretary of the Treasury Bessent is warning there may be some pain, but the $2 billion intended cuts would be 7% of GDP and enough alone to cause a recession."
I thought the economy already was in a recession. Also, according to the internet, in 2024 the American GDP was over $29 trillion. Did Mr. Dent misplace his decimal point? I realize economics is considered a branch of philosophy rather than an actual science, but this seems a tad egregious, even for a non-math type. (When I ran the numbers past Mr. Wife, he asked, “Was he smoking dope?” which is another possible explanation.)
"Such a recession would be worse than most economists think as our economy has been stretched beyond compare with $27 trillion in combined fiscal and monetary stimulus since 2008, and still rising $2 trillion or so a year from record deficits despite monetary stimulus being pulled back," he noted.
Or is could be better, when all that inflating is balanced by deflationary cuts in government spending. Many things are possible — what matters is the most probable.
"It’s good to make such cuts, but naïve to underestimate the economy’s ability to absorb them at this time."
The farther down the road the can is kicked, the higher the cost when it stops. The end point is total collapse, and we can’t go back in time to when the cost would have been less, so right now this minute is the very best we can do.
Though DOGE’s mission to cut federal budgets, fire employees and gain access to potentially sensitive information has received widespread criticism from politicians and average Americans alike, the department is claiming its measures have netted $115 billion in savings.
Thus far. The projection is for accelerating savings as DOGE gets deeper into the files.
A combination of canceling contract leases, stopping fraudulent or improper payments and canceling grants is reportedly what led to the figure, according to DOGE’s website.
The estimated $115 billion in savings will save an average of $714.29 per taxpayer, based on the 2022 figures of 161 million individual income taxpayers.
Dent encouraged Musk to make budgeting decisions with a fine-tooth comb, as he sticks to his outlook that an economic downturn will hit the U.S. economy between 2025 and 2027.
But thereafter freeing up the funds that had been flowing to government spending will be available to the private sector, and the private sector always, always, always gets a better return on better targetted investments, right? So we have that to look forward to.
"My expertise was turnaround management. The secret of that is not just slashing costs, okay? You go in, it's always in the fixed costs. The background overhead is where 90% of the waste is," Dent told Fox Digital in a recent interview.
You mean like Welfare/Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare payments going to illegals and imaginary people? The DOGE team has already started working on that.
"I like change, and I can make 10 times the change in half the time if something's failing than if it's sailing along and you got to fight inertia, and people don't want this. And the change is always disruptive," he added.
A Harvard Business School graduate, the now-economist’s first job after college at consulting firm Bain & Company was similar in principle to Musk’s role at DOGE, he pointed out.
"You have to go in there and find out what's really causing those costs and cut those fixed costs. In other words, you have to do a surgical cut," Dent said.
"I could go into a healthy business and cut 20% in a heartbeat out of their fixed cost. And I can go in an unhealthy business, what I used to [do], and cut 50% of the fixed cost and that makes you lean and mean," he expanded. "That's what we need."
Though it seems to Dent that Musk – for the time being – is "mindlessly" making government savings moves,
…that sounds like he’s a reflex anti-Musker, rather than reasoned disagreement…
"it’s better than nothing."
"We don't need to say, 'We're just going to cut this whole department, we're just going to cut 50% of this department,’" the economist posited. "That's not the way to cut costs. And so I would say Musk, with all his experience, did not get a lot of it in the turnaround side like I got. And I didn't intend to get it, but I got it in spades."
"And anybody [who's] been around in turnarounds would tell you that you cut selectively to make yourself healthy. You don't cut out of panic to keep from just dying," Dent continued.
Worth noting, korrespondent.net has compiled its Invasion of Ukraine series into separate months, beginning May 9th, 2023. Linked in the title.
[Korrespondent] 22.33 On March 31, President Volodymyr Zelensky discussed with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer the upcoming meeting on the deployment of military contingents in Ukraine after the war. The head of state announced this in his evening address.
The parties coordinated the next steps and discussed preparations for a meeting of representatives of the general staffs of countries ready to provide their contingent at the end of this week in Ukraine.
20:49 Over the past week, from March 24 to 31, the Ukrainian Defense Forces destroyed 408 artillery systems of the Russian occupiers. This was reported by the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksandr Syrsky.
According to him, such losses were inflicted thanks to effective counter-battery warfare, drone attacks and the coordinated work of all units.
In total, since the beginning of 2025, Ukrainian soldiers have already destroyed 4,005 artillery systems of the Russian army.
18.13 Russia should not escape fair responsibility for what it has done in Ukraine. The number of recorded war crimes by Russians has exceeded 183 thousand. This was announced by President Volodymyr Zelensky during his speech at the Bucha summit.
17.34 Russian ruler Vladimir Putin has ordered the conscription of 160,000 Russians into military service in April-July 2025. This is the largest conscription in Russia in 14 years.
16.59 In Odessa Oblast, a law enforcement officer was exposed who, for $25,000, organized illegal travel abroad for draft dodgers. This was reported by the State Bureau of Investigation press service.
16.36 A Kharkiv resident was sentenced to 15 years in prison for treason. She provided Russians with information about the locations of Ukrainian troops, which the enemy used for targeted attacks. This was reported by the Office of the Prosecutor General.
16.31 Since the beginning of the current day, 109 combat clashes have occurred on the front. The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported details of the battles in the operational summary as of 16:00.
16.13 Moscow does not believe that US President Donald Trump is "furious" over Russian leader Vladimir Putin's statements regarding Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelensky. This was stated by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Interfax reported.
15.58 The Ministry of Defense has codified and approved for use in the Ukrainian Armed Forces the domestically produced AGL-53 automatic grenade launcher of 40 mm caliber. This was announced by the Main Directorate for Support of the Life Cycle of Weapons and Military Equipment, the Ministry of Defense reports.
15:23 Sweden announced the transfer of the 19th package of military aid to Ukraine. It is a record-breaking one in terms of volume - almost $1.6 billion. This was reported by Swedish Defense Minister Paul Johnson.
14.59 Operators of the 413th Battalion of the SSS Raid discovered and carried out a precise strike on the heavy flamethrower multiple launch rocket system TOS-1A Sontsepek. The Russians tried to hide this system in a landing 25 km from the front line. The command of the Unmanned Systems Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported this on its Facebook page.
14.50 Evidence has been collected on two more Russian generals who commanded the air strike on Chernigov on August 19, 2023. The SBU reported this on March 31.
14.41 The Netherlands will finance a large-scale project to develop drones for Ukraine. 500 million euros will be allocated for these purposes, the Dutch Ministry of Defense reported .
14.08 Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksandr Syrsky summed up the battles on the front in March. According to him, the main tasks for the Ukrainian army remain holding the defensive lines and stabilizing the situation in the threatening directions of the front. This month, successes were achieved in the Pokrovsk direction.
14:05 On the morning of March 31, Russian troops launched a drone strike on the Dniprovskyi district of Kherson. Three people who were near a store were hit by the enemy strike. This was reported by the Kherson OVA.
13:50 Last week, 1,523 citizens applied to the recruitment centers of the Ukrainian army. This is the second best weekly figure since the beginning of the year. The largest number of applications in one week was in February - 1,808. A total of 4,942 consultations were provided in March. This was reported by the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.
13:36 Operators of the 6th Regiment of the Special Operations Forces captured Russian soldiers in the Kursk region of the Russian Federation. This was reported by the Command of the Special Operations Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which published a video .
13:18 Russian troops shelled Kupyansk with a Uragan multiple launch rocket system. This was reported by the head of the Kharkiv OVA Oleg Sinegubov. According to preliminary data, two people were injured to varying degrees of severity: a 63-year-old man and a 35-year-old woman.
12.59 The Supreme Commander-in-Chief's Headquarters has decided that Ukraine needs a body responsible for the development of innovations, technologies and robotics. It is proposed to grant the corresponding status to the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media. This is evidenced by the government's draft law No. 13141.
12:28 US President Donald Trump's personal spiritual adviser Mark Burns has arrived in Ukraine on a visit. Chief Rabbi of Ukraine Moshe Azman reported this on his Facebook page.
12.20 The Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and the Center for Countering Disinformation under the National Security and Defense Council published data on 11 Russian propagandists on the War&Sanctions portal, including Vitaly Averyanov and Yuriy Kotenok. This was reported by the press service of the Main Intelligence Directorate.
11:21 The Zhytomyr Regional Territorial Center for Recruitment and Social Support (TRC SP) denied information about the beating of Mykhailo Matviychuk, who was wanted and was taken to undergo a medical examination. The department reported this on Facebook .
Earlier, a video was distributed on social networks in which Matviychuk stated that he had severe abdominal pain in the TRC building due to a chronic ulcer, but was allegedly not allowed to go to the ambulance.
10:58 On Monday night, Kharkiv was subjected to a massive attack by Russian drones. The city suffered extensive destruction. Mayor Igor Terekhov and the State Emergency Service reported the details .
10:20 An agent group of the Russian military intelligence (better known as the GRU) has been neutralized in Kiev. As a result of complex measures, three enemy henchmen have been detained, one of whom is a citizen of the Russian Federation. This was reported by the SBU.
9:52 The Ukrainian Defense Forces shot down 57 Russian drones, and another 45 enemy UAVs were lost. This was reported by the Ukrainian Air Force. The aftermath of the Russian attack was noted in the Sumy, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kyiv and Zhitomir regions.
9:20 The ATESH partisan movement reported that their agent conducted reconnaissance of the bay in Vladivostok, where large anti-submarine ships and anti-sabotage boats of the Russian Pacific Fleet were recorded. It is noted that at present, the warships are not preparing to be redeployed or perform any serious tasks. The servicemen themselves are worried about the possible mass dispatch of marines to war in Ukraine, but this information does not go beyond rumors.
8:57 On Monday, March 31, Russian troops shelled the Zaporizhia region, there is damage. This was reported by the head of the Zaporizhia OVA Ivan Fedorov. It is noted that as a result of the attack, a high-voltage power line and at least ten houses in dacha cooperatives were damaged. Due to the shelling, part of the village of Kushugum was left without power supply. Currently, emergency teams are working to eliminate the consequences.
8:46 Over the past 24 hours, 171 combat clashes were recorded at the front. Over the past 24 hours, aviation, missile troops and artillery of the Defense Forces hit 14 areas of concentration of personnel and equipment, as well as one command post of the Russian invaders. This was reported by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
7:46 Over the past 24 hours, the Defense Forces neutralized another 1,230 Russian invaders and more than 170 units of weapons and military equipment of the Russian Federation. The total combat losses of the Russians from 24.02.22 to 31.03.25 amounted to approximately 915,230 people. This was reported by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
7:23 Two Russian Kalibr carriers remain on combat duty in the Black Sea with a total salvo of up to eight missiles. This was reported by the Ukrainian Navy.
06:00 Six explosions were reported in Kharkiv overnight. All of the strikes occurred in the Kyivskyi district. There was a significant fire at the site of the strikes.
04:57 At least two enemy UAV hits occurred in Kharkiv on the night of Monday, March 31. Around 2 a.m., a civilian enterprise in the Kyivskyi district was hit. The glazing of windows in nearby apartment buildings was damaged. A kindergarten building and a cultural and sports complex were also damaged. At 4:49, another Shahed attacked the city.
01:51 Russian troops advanced in Razliv, near Panteleimonivka and Novoye in the Donetsk region, the DeepState analytical project reported.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Korrespondent] Ukrainian Armed Forces are holding back Russian offensive in southern and eastern Ukraine.
The largest number of battles were recorded in the Pokrovsky direction, where the Russians organized dozens of assaults in the areas of 15 settlements.
Since the beginning of the current day, 109 combat clashes have occurred on the front. This was reported by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in an operational report as of 16:00 on Monday, March 31.
Thus, in the Kharkov direction, the Russian invaders carried out one unsuccessful attack in the Volchansk region.
In the Kupyansk direction, the enemy carried out four attacks towards Peschanoye and nearby Zagrizovoye, Stepova Novoselivka. One combat clash continues.
In the Liman direction, the Russians attacked 14 times near Nadezhda, Dibrova, Kolodtsy, in the directions of Novoye, Serebryanka, Torskoye, Zelenaya Dolina and Novomikhaylovka. Six battles are still ongoing.
In the Seversky direction, our defenders repelled two attacks near Belogorovka and Ivano-Daryevka.
In the Kramatorsk direction, four attempts by the occupiers to advance forward in the area of Chasovy Yar and in the direction of Predtechino have been stopped. Two more attacks are ongoing.
In the Toretsk direction, the enemy attacked 10 times in the Toretsk area. Four combat clashes continue.
In the Pokrovsky direction, the Russians organized 36 assaults in the areas of the settlements of Alexandropol, Elizavetovka, Lysovka, Zelenoe, Shevchenko, Kotlinoe, Sergeyevka, Novosergeevka, Novoaleksandrovka, Uspenovka, Serebryanoye, Kotlyarovka, Bogdanovka, Andreyevka and Alekseyevka. Eight battles are still ongoing.
In the Novopavlovsk direction, the enemy attacked six times near Constantinople, Burlatskoye, Dneproenergiya and in the direction of Razliv. Four combat clashes are still ongoing.
In the Gulyai-Polye direction, the enemy carried out eight attacks near Novoselka, Privilnoye and in the direction of Volnoye Pole, Novopol.
In the Orekhov direction, the enemy attacked the Ukrainian Armed Forces positions seven times in the directions of the settlements of Malye Shcherbaki, Lobkovoe, Shcherbaki, Kamenskoye and Novodanilovka. Two combat clashes are still ongoing.
In the Dnieper direction the enemy carried out one offensive action. It was not successful.
In the Kursk region, our defenders repelled nine attacks by the Russians, and five more military clashes are still ongoing.
We remind you that on March 30, 171 combat clashes took place on the front in 24 hours. The Russian army lost more than 1,200 soldiers killed and wounded. The total losses of the Russian army since the beginning of the war are approaching 1 million people.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited
[Korrespondent] The defense forces are using active defense tactics where possible, and are moving forward in some areas of the front, noted Alexander Syrsky.
The main tasks for the Ukrainian army remain holding the defensive lines and stabilizing the situation in the threatening directions of the front. This month, successes were achieved in the Pokrovsk direction. This was reported by the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksandr Syrsky in Telegram following a meeting on Monday, March 31.
"Thanks to the management decisions taken and the steadfastness of Ukrainian soldiers, this task was partially accomplished, in particular, with regard to the Pokrovsk direction. Here, in the operational zone of the Donetsk OTG, the enemy is concentrating its main offensive efforts, but is actually stalling in place," he wrote.
Syrsky noted that the Defense Forces, where possible, are using active defense tactics, advancing forward in some areas of the front, improving the tactical situation, restoring dozens of positions, and tying down significant enemy forces.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine also summed up the results of fire damage to enemy forces in March.
"Since the beginning of March, the artillery of the Defense Forces has carried out about 100 thousand fire missions, and UAV operators have carried out more than 81.7 thousand special combat missions, including 158 hits using DeepStrike," he said.
Syrsky listened to reports from the heads of military command bodies on problematic issues – staffing units and restoring their combat capability, forming new army corps, logistics and repair of military equipment, etc., and set tasks for April.
He drew attention to the need to increase the number of fiber-optic drones that are resistant to enemy electronic warfare systems.
"In addition, he defined the tasks for staffing combat brigades with personnel. He emphasized the need to improve the quality of training, because the preservation of the lives of our soldiers depends on this direction," the commander-in-chief noted.
He also noted that the basic general military training course had already been optimized and an adaptation period had been introduced for new recruits.
"The BZVP and increased its duration to 1.5 months, introduced a mandatory adaptation period for newcomers in combat brigades, and this gives positive results - this month we recorded a decrease in losses compared to previous ones. However, there is still work to do. It is worth achieving the highest standards of training," Syrsky said.
The issue of maintaining and preparing weapons for use in the spring-summer season, increasing the protection of various types of military equipment from FPV drones and maximizing the use of combat capabilities of equipment was also considered.
Let us recall that on March 30, 171 combat clashes took place on the front in 24 hours . The Russian army lost more than 1,200 soldiers killed and wounded. The total losses of the Russian army since the beginning of the war are approaching 1 million people .
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] A senior Hamas leader has called for supporters worldwide to pick up weapons and fight Donald Trump's plan to relocate Gazans to neighbouring countries.
'In the face of this sinister plan - one that combines massacres with starvation - anyone who can bear arms, anywhere in the world, must take action,' Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement on Monday.
'Do not withhold an explosive, a bullet, a knife, or a stone. Let everyone break their silence.'
Abu Zuhri's call comes a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered to let Hamas leaders leave Gaza but demanded that the Palestinian group disarm in the final stages of the war in Gaza.
Netanyahu said Israel was working towards a plan proposed by Trump to displace Gazans to other countries, which could include Egypt and Jordan.
Netanyahu said that after the war, Israel would ensure overall security in Gaza and 'enable the implementation of the Trump plan' - which had initially called for the mass displacement of all 2.4 million people living in the Palestinian territory - calling it a 'voluntary migration plan'.
Trump's plan for the region risks inflaming deep underlying tensions, and has been met with fury from Palestinians and American allies alike. The UN has warned it was tantamount to 'ethnic cleansing'.
But the call from Hamas comes at an uncertain time, with thousands of Gazans defying fear of reprisal to march against the group in anti-war demonstrations.
One protestor was this week alleged to have been kidnapped, tortured and left at his family's doorstep as a warning.
Days after taking office in January, Trump had proposed that Gazans be removed from the territory with no right of return.
He later appeared to backtrack, saying he was 'not forcing' the widely condemned plan for the United States to take over the territory and redevelop it.
Trump said that the U.S. should take control of Gaza to ensure its stability, and suggested the population could be relocated elsewhere, where he said they would be 'better off'.
'The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the US by Israel at the conclusion of fighting' he said.
On February 9, the American president said he was 'committed to buying and owning Gaza'.
Two days later, he told a news conference with Jordan's King Abdullah II: 'We're not going to buy anything.'
'We're going to have it and we're going to keep it and we're going to make sure that there's going to be peace and there's not going to be any problem.'
An AI-generated clip of 'Trump Gaza', redeveloped into the 'Riviera of the Middle East', was then posted to his Truth Social social media platform, met with horror.
The video showed high-rises and beachside resorts, with a giant gold statue of Trump towering over the enclave.
Trump and Netanyahu featured in the AI video, drinking by a pool. The clip was widely condemned as being 'tone deaf'.
Palestinians in Gaza argued the proposal ignores their rights and ties to their ancestral land.
The right of return remains a sensitive issue for Palestinian diaspora displaced by the long conflict with Israel.
About 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes on land which became Israel after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
As many as 531 Palestinian towns were razed by Israeli militias by 1949, according to the West Bank-based Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, and thousands were killed in clashes.
Many refugees today remain in camps in neighbouring countries, unable to return to the places they were born.
Outrage at the loss of life in Gaza since Hamas launched its shock October 7, 2023 incursion into Israel saw a rise in support for the group among Palestinians, reflecting anathema towards Israeli policy and lack of progress towards a lasting solution.
This was in spite of the 1,170 lives taken during the massacre, and some 250 hostages taken back into Gaza.
A group of independent human rights experts warned earlier this month that Israel had resumed weaponising starvation in Gaza with the decision to break from the fragile ceasefire agreement and block aid into the Palestinian enclave.
More than 400 Palestinians were killed as Israel resumed its bombardment of the strip on March 18. More than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict since October 2023, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza reports.
Israel warned its attacks were 'only the beginning'.
Earlier this month, defence minister Israel Katz also threatened to permanently occupy parts of the Gaza Strip unless Hamas releases the hostages still held in captivity.
Since coming to power, Hamas has done little to move towards a lasting solution with Israel, launching attacks across the border that rights groups say have killed civilians and even landed back in Gaza.
'The unpredictable nature of the crude rockets has meant that rockets have struck areas not only inside Israel but also inside Gaza,' Human Rights Watch observed in 2009.
The group has also done little to alleviate poverty in the Gaza Strip, despite receiving plenty of money from foreign backers.
In 2023, it was estimated to have an investment portfolio of real estate and other assets worth $500mn and an annual military budget of $350mn.
But Gaza remains one of the poorest places in the world. In 2023, the GDP per capita for the West Bank and Gaza sat at just $3,372.3 USD.
In recent days, Palestinians have expressed their ire towards the governing group with mass protests in the beleaguered enclave.
Thousands took to the streets in northern Gaza last weeks for days of anti-war protests, many chanting against Hamas.
The protests, which centered mainly on Gaza's north, appeared to be aimed generally against the war, with protesters calling for an end to 17 months of deadly fighting.
In the town of Beit Lahiya, where a similar protest took place Tuesday, about 3,000 people demonstrated, with many chanting 'the people want the fall of Hamas.' In the hard-hit Shijaiyah neighborhood of Gaza City, dozens of men chanted 'Out, out out! Hamas get out!'
'Our children have been killed. Our houses have been destroyed,' said Abed Radwan, who said he joined the protest in Beit Lahiya 'against the war, against Hamas, and the (Palestinian political) factions, against Israel and against the world's silence.'
Ammar Hassan, who gave his name after taking part in a protest on Tuesday, said it started as an anti-war protest with a few dozen people but swelled to more than 2,000, with people chanting against Hamas.
'It's the only party we can affect,' he said by phone. 'Protests won't stop the (Israeli) occupation, but it can affect Hamas.'
The militant group has violently cracked down on previous protests. This time no outright intervention was apparent, perhaps because Hamas is keeping a lower profile since Israel resumed its war against it.
Hamas was then accused of torturing a Palestinian protestor to death and leaving him on his family's doorstep as a warning.
Uday al-Rabbay was reportedly kidnapped by the terror group amid the swell of anti-Hamas actions taken by the people of the Gaza Strip, who have in the last week been seen begging the organisation to give up control.
Mazen Shat, a senior police officer affiliated with Fatah from Ramallah and a vocal critic of Hamas, told The Telegraph Uday had been tortured for four hours, and was left with open wounds and bruising.
'Uday was martyred by the criminals of Hamas. And what's his crime? He told the truth, because he refused to be silent on injustice, because he did not kneel to Hamas.
'Hamas is oppressing people in a brutal way. Like a puppy on a rope around his neck, they dragged him to the door of his house and told his family that this is the punishment for those who complain about Hamas.'
[FoxNews] A nuclear electromagnetic pulse strike could cripple the US, an expert warned
A Golden Dome, peddled by President Donald Trump during his campaign, is how the United States could protect itself from the "existential threat" that a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) strike presents, an expert says.
Historian William Forstchen, a New York Times bestselling author and an expert on EMPs, discussed with Fox News Digital how a Golden Dome can provide a safety net for the danger that an attack poses.
"The Israeli system has been very effective in protecting Israel against the aggression of Iran and others. It's called the Iron Dome, but that's a tactical defense system, meaning it shoots down missiles only a couple of miles up," he said.
"But if the U.S. had a Golden Dome, it would be a strategic defense system. It would take out systems, ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) that are launched at the United States and destroy them in space before they get to the United States."
While an EMP strike, at first glance, might appear to be more science fiction than fact, Forstchen said that the potential for such an attack was recognized decades ago.
"It's a no-brainer to me. We need a strategic defense system. It was proposed in the '80s, but the technology wasn't quite there that technology is now," he said. "It can be built. We have to defend the United States against an EMP attack, which could destroy us in a matter of minutes."
Forstchen, citing Congressional reports from 2002 and 2008, said that 80%-90% of Americans would be dead a year later if an EMP strike happened.
I probably would be — one of my key meds needs refrigeration. Also, survival in a Third World environment is a high-energy endeavour, not one of my options. So let’s use some of the savings from the DOGE government clean-up to do some long-overdue hardening.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Victor Lavrinenko
[REGNUM] A tragicomic story has unfolded in Lithuania. Four American soldiers traveling in an M88A2 Hercules tracked armored recovery vehicle went missing at a training ground near the city of Pabrade. The Lithuanians later found out where the vehicle was, but that didn't make things any easier for anyone.
It turned out that the transporter had sunk to rest at the bottom of one of the local swamps. The epic of extracting the "Hercules" with the soldiers' bodies dragged on for almost a week.
While the country's residents are amazed at how it was possible to fall so deep into the swamp, the Lithuanian leadership has practically declared a national day of mourning.
DIFFICULT TERRAIN
The disappearance of soldiers from the American contingent in Lithuania became known on March 25. The missing soldiers served in the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division of the 5th Corps of the US Army.
The soldiers were taking part in a planned tactical exercise, driving through the training ground, and suddenly disappeared. When their vehicle failed to return to base, a hasty search was organized. A day later, the population was informed that four Americans and their vehicle had fallen into a swamp.
The main and most frequently used firing range of the Lithuanian army is located in Pabradė. It is divided into sections, and the central element is the shooting range - this is more than 10 hectares of open space. Around it there is a hilly area covered with forests, abundant with streams, swamps and lakes. There is also a training area "combat in the city": there are buildings erected there that imitate urban development.
According to Lithuanian military expert Darius Antanaitis, the missing Americans were riding in a 70-ton recovery vehicle designed to rescue damaged equipment. Such a vehicle usually has a crew of three, but can accommodate four.
Antanaitis put forward three versions. The first was that the soldiers drowned together with the car. The second was that they got out of it, but drowned because they were wearing bulletproof vests and possibly carrying weapons. The third version, put forward by a Lithuanian expert, sounded simply astonishing: “the frightened soldiers reached the shore and are now hiding.”
Antanaitis added that traffic at the testing ground is carried out according to established rules: you can’t drive wherever you want, because not all the roads there are capable of supporting heavy equipment. “Nobody could order them to drive straight into the swamp,” the Lithuanian expert noted thoughtfully.
He assumed that the driver either fell asleep or mistakenly turned onto the wrong road in the dark. And he added with concern that "this story will undoubtedly be used by Russian propaganda." Indeed, the theme of "aggressive Russia" simply could not fail to arise in such a story.
At first, the Baltic news agency BNS reported that, according to unnamed Lithuanian experts, the special services of Russia and Belarus could be involved in the deaths of the four Americans. But then they abandoned the idea of promoting such a promising plot for local propaganda - apparently because, despite all their desire, they could not find even the most minimally convincing clues.
The theme of “evil Russians” began to be developed from a different angle.
A version appeared on some Russian-language Telegram channels that these Americans actually died in combat in Ukraine, but their bodies were specially taken to Lithuania in order to, so to speak, “legalize” their deaths. In connection with this, the Lithuanian media was seized with feigned indignation at the treachery of “Kremlin propaganda.”
SILT AND GAS MIXED
Lithuanian authorities have been busy but chaotic. "Inland Waterways Administration officials, hydrographers and dredger specialists with equipment designed for working in swamps are being dispatched to the scene," the Lithuanian government said.
They also announced that they were planning to use a powerful echo sounder to scan the bottom of the reservoir. And on Thursday morning, the head of the Lithuanian government Gintautas Paluckas, the Minister of Defense Dovilė Šakalienė and the US Ambassador Kara McDonald arrived at the scene.
Šakalėne haltingly explained that the armored vehicle was in a mud hole at a depth of at least five meters. The wife of one of the missing, Sergeant Edvin Franko, gave an interview to Lithuanian media - she said that her husband and his colleagues did not notice the water and drove straight into it. Readers immediately asked how the American could know such details?
Naturally, another question arose: why haven’t they been pulled out yet after such a long time?
According to Shakalene, the problem was complicated by the fact that the swamp in the search area is connected to a lake, and the muddy water made it impossible to see the car. "We managed to remove some of the silt overnight, but that is not enough - water from the nearby lake continues to flow in," the minister explained.
On Friday morning, Shakalene reported that hundreds of people and dozens of vehicles were working day and night to try to reach the armoured personnel carrier that had sunk into the swamp. “The plan is to attach cables, use pulleys and pull the vehicle to shore using military equipment,” she explained.
The minister justified herself by saying that at first it seemed as if the complicated scenario of the work could be avoided. "If everything had been simple, then probably the Americans themselves would have pulled out the car without our help," added the commander of the Lithuanian army, Raimundas Vaikšnoras. According to him, the second difficulty is that a gas pipeline runs near this place.
On the same day, Friday, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda arrived at the scene. The Lithuanian leader defended himself: “The situation is absolutely unique – you see what natural traps have been set up here and how difficult it is to carry out rescue work. ”
OFFICIAL GRIEF
The Lithuanian authorities have shown signs of deep grief all the time. According to Nausėda, who was visiting Paris the day before, “many leaders – prime ministers, presidents – have approached me not to offer condolences, because we are still looking and still hoping for a miracle.”
Nauseda expressed gratitude to Poland, which sent a group of soldiers and engineering equipment to help. A team of army engineers from the United States also arrived, and a little later American divers arrived.
"Such moments only confirm how strong we are when we are together, when we are in the NATO alliance," the Lithuanian president emphasized. According to him, it is very important to him that the Americans do not accuse him of anything and treat the incident with understanding.
And Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys recalled that Lithuania is currently celebrating twenty-one years of membership in NATO. Budrys assured US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Vilnius is ready to accept twice as many American troops as it currently has. It would be hard to pick a more inappropriate time for such a statement – now it sounds like an outright mockery.
On March 30, on the fifth day of the rescue operation, Defense Minister Dovilė Šakalienė said that it was not going as well as she would have liked: during the night, a large piece of soil fell on the Hercules buried in the swamp and the progress already achieved was nullified.
A service for the rescue of American soldiers was held in the Vilnius Cathedral, attended by the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other representatives of the Lithuanian elite.
Lithuanian media reported on the progress of the rescue operation every hour, convincing the population that there was no topic more important and pressing for the state than this.
On Sunday, Lithuanian Army Captain Indrė Pilkauskaitė reported that they were being hampered by dense silt. Closer to lunchtime, Commander-in-Chief Vaikšnoras trumpeted that they had attached the first cable to the sunken armored vehicle. And US Army Colonel Jim Armstrong said that in almost a quarter century of service, he had never seen a vehicle so bogged down.
Finally, early in the morning of March 31, the American armored vehicle was pulled out of the swamp. Three bodies were also found, and the search for the fourth missing person is still ongoing. Military police and American investigators are working at the scene.
The official press was given the task of portraying national grief - the media published blitz interviews with various representatives of the Lithuanian "deep" people, who told how sorry they were for the dead Americans and what inhuman gratitude they felt towards them for "defending Lithuania".
Sensible Lithuanians look at this with irony and skepticism: they understand that the state would hardly have raised such a pompous fuss if several of its own citizens had died in the swamps. Visiting soldiers are a different matter.
And here's a shocking detail: the head of the Lithuanian Foundation for Restoration and Protection of Marshes, Nerijus Zabletskis, said that the swamp in which the four Yankees drowned was not marked on state maps. That is, a NATO and EU country has still not bothered to make normal maps of its own territory.
[Breitbart] According to a recent survey from Ifop, Le Pen is the clear frontrunner in the upcoming 2027 presidential election in France. Depending on potential opponents, she recorded between 34 and 37 per cent support. In comparison, her closest rival, Le Harve Mayor Édouard Philippe, only recorded 21 per cent support.
more at the link...
Another from Walking Unvaxxed:
Lawfare against the European right-wing is being taken to a whole new level.
[WhatFinger] Marine Le Pen @MLP_officiel has been convicted for "misusing" European funds and has been BARRED from running for President of France, yet @vonderleyen is under investigation for corruption and refuses to disclose her text messages regarding a 35 BILLION euro deal with Pfizer and is currently the President of the European Commission. Talking about two tier politics.
Prayers for our brothers and sisters in Europe. We have massive challenges here but we have the freedoms to fight most of those challenges. In Europe, freedom is at a premium. Stay strong, y’all. — JD Rucker
The European elite have escalated their lawfare crusade into a full-on blitzkrieg against the right, with Marine Le Pen as their latest scalp. Banned from France’s presidency for misusing EU funds—peanuts compared to the corruption cesspool in Brussels—this is a naked assault on sovereignty. Trump supporters, this is our fight: the globalists are torching democracy to cling to power. Let’s unpack the stench: Le Pen’s convicted over €600,000, while Ursula von der Leyen, queen of the EU swamp, stonewalls an investigation into her shady 35 billion euro Pfizer deal—text messages hidden, accountability zero. She still lords over the European Commission, untouched.
Two-tier justice doesn’t even cover it—this is aristocracy vs. the people. The Left’s playbook is clear: kneecap populist lions like Le Pen who dare roar against open borders and corporate handouts. Sound familiar? They tried it on Trump too. Patriots across continents must unite, expose this double standard, and dismantle their rigged game before it’s too late. — More at Post on X
Just to break down the French charges against Marine Le Pen and other members of her party—the courts allege that she "embezzled" funds by using EU money intended for the EU-wing of National Rally on their national (French) wing. They’re supposed to be separate, but the overlap is basically impossible to avoid and every single European party, including liberal and leftist parties does this.
The fact that they’re going after Le Pen for this is lawfare, plain and simple. The system is being weaponized to go after conservatives and populists over the slightest infraction that the courts would otherwise turn a blind eye to. Marine Le Pen is by far the most popular leader in France and her party has more public support than all of the others, individually. The EU couldn’t beat her in the polls so they used the courts to take her down. — Ian Miles Cheong
More from The Walking Unvaxed: EXPLAINED: How The Lawfare Against Marine Le Pen Led to Her Prison Sentence and Politics Ban.
[NationalPulse] A French court convicted Marine Le Pen, leader of the populist National Rally (RN) party, on March 31, 2025, of "embezzling" European Parliament funds—but make no mistake, the move was nothing short of politically orchestrated lawfare.
Prosecutors alleged that from 2004 to 2017, during her time as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP), Le Pen and 24 co-defendants funneled over €3 million (~$3.2 million) earmarked for assistants to support their Brussels-based parliamentary work into party operations in France. For this, she received a four-year prison term—two years suspended, two under house arrest—a $108,000 fine, and a five-year ban from public office, slamming the door on a projected 2027 presidential election triumph.
Her lawyer, Rodolphe Bosselut, rightly calls the ban a "declaration of civil death." RN president Jordan Bardella notes she is not the only victim: "It is French democracy that is being executed."
’POLITICAL BY DEFINITION.’
To be clear, RN doesn’t deny Le Pen’s assistants performed RN work. They argue that, as the leader of a national movement, advancing the RN platform she was elected on was a perfectly legitimate part of their work—particularly when it comes to fighting European Union overreach into national affairs.
"Parliamentary assistants do not work for the Parliament. They are political assistants to elected officials, political by definition," she argued at trial. "Their role is to assist us in our political work, which is inseparable from our mandate as elected representatives."
Such work is commonplace, even standard, among MEPs’ assistants, and the fact that Le Pen is being singled out is a dead giveaway of bias from a judiciary in lockstep with France’s liberal elite and the EU she’s vowed to defy.
DOUBLE STANDARDS.
Even if you accept that Le Pen violated some technical, selectively enforced interpretation of the European Parliament’s rules around assistants, the 56-year-old’s sentence is clearly disproportionate.
Contrast the iron fist used against her with Christine Lagarde’s velvet-glove treatment. In 2016, Lagarde, then France’s finance minister—later head of the International Monetary Fund, and now the head of the European Central Bank—was convicted of negligence over a €404 million (~$428 million) payout to businessman Bernard Tapie.
The court ruled her guilty but handed down no punishment at all—no fine, no jail, no ban. She sailed into one of Europe’s top jobs without consequence. Lagarde’s negligence dwarfed Le Pen’s €3 million case—but Europe’s elite cradle their own, like Lagarde, while smashing outsiders like Le Pen, whose anti-EU, populist politics threaten their power.
THE ROMANIAN PRECEDENT.
Polls show RN well ahead of the Renaissance party founded by Emmanuel Macron, and Le Pen was favored to win the next presidential election in 2027. Now, however, she will have no opportunity to defeat the establishment—because the French people will not be able to vote for her.
It mirrors the tactics used against Călin Georgescu, the Romanian populist barred from his country’s May 2025 presidential race. Georgescu, a skeptic of the EU and NATO, took a surprise win in the first round of the race last year—only for the courts to step in and cancel the election, ostensibly because voters had been tricked into supporting him by Russia-funded TikToks.
His supporters slammed this as a stitch-up by a rattled establishment, and polls suggested he would win a planned rerun—so the Constitutional Court made his exclusion permanent in a March ruling.
The EU playbook is clear: when populists like Le Pen and Georgescu surge, the EU doesn’t seek to defeat them at the ballot box; it shuts them out. Americans should be thankful similar partisan efforts to stop Donald Trump from standing last November failed, but they should be wary of the way Europe is normalizing such behavior.
At this time Marine Le Pen demanded a lifelong ban for politicians who had embezzled funds. And her - then - Front National voted for the law.
The court found beyond any reasonable doubt that this was embezzlement, that the party knew - from their correspondence - that this was illegal and that Marine very much knew it was illegal. That's why the party set up fake contracts to make Europe pay for family members and bodyguards.
The law mandates a temporary ban. The court had the discretion to apply it immediately or not. It decided to do so immediately because Marine Le Pen still denies that what she did was illegal, and so the chances she would do it again were substantial.
If you think corruption is ok because a hard right wing party does it, that's your problem, not mine.
And all that talk about Europe being irrelevant is getting a bit boring. But whatever floats your boat.
Posted by: European Conservative ||
04/01/2025 6:21
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#5
If you think corruption is ok because a hard right wing party does it, that's your problem, not mine.
My problem is that when they all do it and selectively decide who they're going to go after. Corruption is corruption regardless of color, race, or creed. Either the law is based upon principle or its just ritualistic exercise of power.
#8
I'm sure Europe is still quite relevant to Europeans. I just don't want to get caught up in any of their troubles...not like the USA did in the last century. If diversity means Arabs, I don't want American boys dying for it. If democracy becomes Zelensky's martial law, I don't consider it democracy. I hope the guillotine doesn't start working again but if it does, I would prefer to stay out of it. Let's just say I prefer California wine to French wine. Italian might be OK. James Bond morphed into Christopher Steele and I like Toyota better than Mercedes. Hell, I like Tesla better than Mercedes.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/01/2025 12:45
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#9
If you think corruption is ok because a hard right wing party does it, that's your problem, not mine.
That’s why I asked yesterday whether this is something the main political parties do or do not do, if padding the bills is common political practic, even if not precisely in that way. If they all do it — and naturally they voted for the law as well — then I must object to selective prosecution if the main party politicians were not immediately prosecuted for it. If this action is unique to the Le Pen crowd, then they are indeed hoisted by their own petards, and need to learn the lesson.
#10
@tw
at this point, radical leftist and Jew hating Mélenchon's party France Unbowed is being investigated over misuse of funds (including his party's use of European Parliament funds). Maybe that's why he didn't look so happy yesterday.
Posted by: European Conservative ||
04/01/2025 12:58
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#11
*happy sigh* I do love being given answers to my questions…
Thank you, European Conservative — that does answer whether the Le Pen situation is entirely unique.
I am suddenly reminded of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who apparently is sitting his fifth trial for corruption back when he was not yet forcibly retired. Le Monde link (in English)
#12
I keep hearing about WWIII, but what does that even mean? Russia is putting everything short of nukes into Ukraine. It literally cannot handle anything more. It also cannot keep this up indefinitely. So unless WWIII is synonymous with Russia lobbing nukes around then ... what, exactly?
'As Great Mother Russia's dormition
Grows nigh, thoughts of Polish partition
Might well fill her head
But the White and the Red's
Still not dead!"
Little Father: [Gone fishing.]
#14
Mother plucking Ukraine? People stare.
"Use a pachyderm, Putin mon frere,
Ou peut-etre a goose!"
Good advice for the Rus
Should they try to get down from the bear.
[X] Six minute video of the presentation at the link.
Wall Street Apes
@WallStreetApes
HOLY CR*P 🚨
- Democrats did give MILLIONS of illegals Social Security Numbers
- They were REGISTERING TO VOTE
- Elon Musk has confirmation THEY DID VOTE
- Democrats qualified illegals for MAX SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS
- They enrolled in Medicaid with their new Social Security Numbers
See graph in video:
“Then you'll notice there's a strange, what jumped out at us when we saw these numbers. We're like, what is this? In 2021, you see 270,000 people, it goes all the way to 2.1 million and 2024. These are non-citizens that are getting social security numbers.
This is a mind-blowing charge. This literally blew us away.”
“If I hadn't seen this myself, I'm not sure I believed it. I went through it myself and mapped it. And Elon is right. This is true. The defaults in the system from social security to all of the benefit programs have been set to max inclusion, MAX PAY for these people and minimum collection.
We found 1.3 million of them already on Medicaid as an example. We've gone through on every benefit program we went through, we found groups from this particular group of people, this 5.5 million people in those benefit programs.
And then what was really, really disturbing us was why we're asking ourselves why.
So we actually just took a sample and looked at voter registration records and we found people here registered to vote in this population. Yes.
Who did vote? We found some by sampling that ACTUALLY DID VOTE.
We have referred them to prosecution at the Homeland Security Investigation Service.
There goes that Progressive talking point, that no vote fraud has been found despite lack of the Republican-demanded vote and registration security steps.
Yeah. Already, already. That is already happening right now. The truly disturbing thing though, I just want you to know this, a truly disturbing thing to me, and the darkest thing about this, to me, the voter fraud is terrible.”
When this is over, will we discover that Social Security and Medicaid aren’t about to go bankrupt after all?
#5
I once thought that, since Social Security is basically a Ponzi scheme, there might be some reason, however evil, for letting illegal aliens into the country because we need more suckers at the bottom of the pyramid. But there can be absolutely no justification for giving benefits to illegal aliens when they haven't even paid into the scheme. That's not just wrong, it's stupid.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/01/2025 12:52
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#6
^ Giving credence to the line of thinking that says this really was meant to collapse the system and that DOGE's sense of urgency is warranted.
Posted by: Rex Mundi ||
04/01/2025 14:54
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#7
there might be some reason, however evil, for letting illegal aliens into the country because we need more suckers at the bottom of the pyramid.
We were told repeatedly that was one of the benefits of illegals, in addition to them doing jobs lazy, demanding welfare-sucking Americans would not do, especially at those pay scales.
Possibly they even meant it at the time, back when Democrats still prided themselves on being American patriots.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] A submarine carrying 6.5 tons of cocaine has been captured in one of the biggest drug busts of its kind.
The vessel had been heading towards Europe from Brazil when it was intercepted by Portuguese police in an operation involving the British Crime Agency earlier this week.
The smugglers were busted during their attempted crossing of the Atlantic, with police finding £530million of cocaine onboard.
Five alleged members of a criminal organisation were travelling aboard the vessel - three Brazilian men, one Colombian and a Spaniard.
All five crew members were arrested and transferred to the Portuguese island of Sao Miguel.
The arrests mark the first time a drug-smuggling semi-submersible has been intercepted in the open sea, Spanish authorities claimed. Maybe the first by them, but in the Pacific there's been several. They usually open the hatches and sink the shipment before capture
The vessel is thought to be one of the largest ever built with the purpose of transporting drugs between continents.
'The traffickers planned to collect the drugs near the coast using high-speed vessels and smuggle them ashore,' a statement by Spain's Guardia Civil read.
[NYPost] China has held up the $23 billion sale of dozens of ports worldwide — including two key ports in the Panama Canal — to a group led by US investing giant BlackRock after President Trump expressed concern about Beijing’s sway over the strategic shipping lanes.
On March 4, CK Hutchison, a Hong Kong-based conglomerate controlled by 96-year-old billionaire Li Ka-shing, announced plans to sell 43 port facilities globally — including critical ports at both ends of the Panama Canal and near the Suez Canal — for approximately $22.8 billion.
But China’s State Administration for Market Regulation unexpectedly initiated an investigation on Friday into potential violations of Chinese anti-monopoly laws, effectively stalling the deal.
China President Xi Jinping is reportedly “angry” over CK Hutchison’s plans to sell its Panama Canal port operations — particularly because the company did not consult Beijing beforehand, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Whoops! It’s important to acknowledge your master — masters tend to become miffed when not.
The deal — spearheaded by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, a longtime Trump confidante — called for an agreement to be signed by April 2, though it now is likely that the Wednesday deadline will be missed.
The Post has sought comment from BlackRock and the White House.
Insiders say Chinese leadership had hoped to leverage the port issue in its talks with the Trump administration, only to be caught off guard by the deal’s sudden progress.
Trump hailed the development as a strategic win over China — casting Panama as a key battleground in the broader US-China struggle for global influence.
In response, an op-ed published in the pro-Beijing newspaper Ta Kung Pao condemned the sale as a “betrayal of all Chinese people.”
The timing of the deal’s announcement, coming just before the start of the “two sessions,” China’s most significant annual political and economic gathering, only deepened the offense for Xi and the Chinese Communist Party.
The Panama Canal — used extensively by both the US and China — has reemerged as a flashpoint in global politics after President Trump renewed his pledge to assert American dominance over the waterway.
Beijing’s move to influence the affairs of CK Hutchison reinforced concerns among global observers about China’s diminishing distinction between private and public sectors as well as its aggressive encroachment into Hong Kong’s affairs.
Trump has claimed that the canal is controlled by China and operated by its military.
In reality, CK Hutchison, the company at the heart of the port sale, is headquartered in Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous region historically afforded a high degree of operational independence from Beijing.
The dispute over the canal’s ports arises at a sensitive moment as China faces ongoing tensions from a US trade war.
This week, Trump is expected to announce a new round of so-called “reciprocal tariffs.”
#2
Just remember, none of this is important, you jingoist.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
04/01/2025 11:55
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#3
In reality, CK Hutchison, the company at the heart of the port sale, is headquartered in Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous region historically afforded a high degree of operational independence from Beijing.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[NewsFront] 20:28 Calculations of strike FPV drones of the motorized rifle unit of the "Center" group of forces continue to carry out combat missions to destroy military facilities, armored vehicles, radio communications equipment and command posts of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Krasnoarmeysk direction. 20:10 The "East" group of forces liberated Razliv –MAP
19:38 Russian troops destroyed four units of Ukrainian Armed Forces equipment during an unsuccessful attempt at a counteroffensive by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Chasov Yar area.
18:45 FPV drone operators of the Dnepr military group successfully attacked a stronghold of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Zaporizhia region. The servicemen used an enemy FPV attack drone, which was intercepted using electronic warfare.
17:36 Novopavlovskoe/Bogatyrskoe direction
The main arenas of confrontation at the moment are the settlement of Razliv on the way to Bogatyr and the settlement of Vesyoloye on the way to Komar. In both settlements, our units have consolidated their positions and continue to advance. Razliv is already 2/3 under the control of the Group of Forces "Vostok".
At the same time, our units advanced south and north of the village.
The enemy has been driven out of a number of positions between Constantinople and Bogatyr.
Our artillery and UAVs are working intensively. Air strikes are being carried out by aircraft.
The destruction of enemy positions in the direction of Otradny and Komar continues, and attacks are being launched on the enemy’s immediate rear, where he is trying to concentrate reserves.
17:06 Fighters of the Dnepr group of forces knocked out the Ukrainian Armed Forces from a large stronghold near the settlement of Kamenskoye. The enemy is fleeing, there are prisoners.
16:28 Servicemen of the 29th Guards Combined Arms Army of the "East" group of forces captured stronghold of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the South Donetsk direction.
16:11 Change in the situation in Dzerzhinsk –MAP
It is known that Russian troops were able to occupy a fortification south of the Khimkolonka microdistrict. The situation in the microdistrict itself remains under clarification, in some houses there are still soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, work is underway to destroy them.
⏺To the north, in the area of the Toretskaya mine, assault groups were able to occupy a trench near waste heap No. 2, and also advance into the woods to the west.
Overall, the situation in the city remains difficult but under control. Enemy drones are still a big problem that Russian fighters have to deal with.
16:00 Bogatyrsky direction
The units of the Group of Forces "Vostok" are confidently advancing in Razliv.
We control over 50% of the village. The enemy maintains a presence in the western part.
15:00 Airborne assault units supported by artillery fire and UAVs to the village of Gogolevka in the Kursk region.
Moving from house to house, the "winged infantry" stormtroopers from the Ryazan region captured the settlement and planted the Airborne Forces flag.
14:38 Published footage of the destruction of a Ukrainian Armed Forces Kozak armored fighting vehicle with a Lancet loitering munition by UAV operators from the strike division of the 238th Guards Separate Artillery Brigade of the Yug group in the village of Shcherbinovka.
💥13:58 SummaryThe Russian Ministry of Defense on the progress of repelling the attempted invasion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces into the territory of the Russian Federation in the Kursk region as of March 31, 2025
During offensive operations, units of the North group of forces defeated formations of a mechanized brigade, two airborne assault brigades and a territorial defense brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the areas of the settlements of Gornal, Guevo and Oleshnya. One enemy counterattack was repelled.
Strikes by operational-tactical and army aviation and artillery fire hit enemy manpower and equipment in the areas of the settlements of Gornal, Guevo and Oleshnya, as well as Basovka, Belovody, Varachino, Velyka Rybitsa, Vladimirovka, Vodolaghi, Zhuravka, Zapselye, Loknya, Miropolye, Mogritsa, Novaya Sich, Sadki, Yunakovka and Yablonovka in Sumy Oblast.
13:08 Drone operators of the 1442nd Motorized Rifle Regiment of the "Southern" group of forces destroyed a tank, pickup truck, UAV control point and enemy manpower in the Kramatorsk-Druzhkovsky direction.
13:05 Footage released of destruction of fuel and lubricants depot of the Ukrainian Armed Forces using the Forpost UAV and the destruction of a 122mm D-30 howitzer of the Ukrainian Armed Forces using the Inokhodets UAV in the Kursk direction.
12:16 In the Sumy direction, the FPV operator GV "Sever" tracked the movement of a Ukrainian soldier who was hiding in a dilapidated house.
12:04 Multifunctional radar station ieMHR "RADA" of the Armed Forces of Ukraine together with its servicing personnel destroyed missile strike in the area of the village of Petrushevka in Sumy Oblast.
11:18 "Moles" undermine Ukrainian Armed Forces' strongholds in the Krasnolimansk direction
Ground robotic systems "Krot" destroyed enemy fortifications in the area of the settlement of Yampol in the DPR.
10:44 Missile strike destroyed radar station of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Intelligence units of the Russian Armed Forces have discovered a multifunctional radar station ieMHR "RADA" of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the area of the settlement of Petrushevka in the Sumy region.
The precision strike completely destroyed the Ukrainian Armed Forces radar station along with its service personnel.
09:48 FPV drone calculations at Rubicon Center destroyed manpower and military equipment of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the border areas of the Kursk region.
09:33 It is reported about the significant advance of the Russian Armed Forces in the Khar'kov region on the western bank of the Oskol River.
07:32 Changes on the map over the past 24 hours:
Control zone in the Dzerzhinsk area has been expanded;
Advance in the Druzhba area;
The Russian Armed Forces approached Novoalexandrovka;
Advance in the Kondrashovka area.
07:05 During the past night, air defense systems on dutydestroyed 66 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles:
41 UAVs over the territory of the Bryansk region,
24 UAVs over the territory of the Kaluga region,
One UAV over the territory of the Kursk region.
05:32 Artillerymen of the 25th Combined Arms Army of the West group of forces lead continuous combat work in day and night conditions.
The crews of the 152mm 2S5 Giatsint-S self-propelled guns destroyed a camouflaged 155mm M-777 howitzer made in the USA, a radar, a UAV control point and the manpower of the Ukrainian Armed Forces units with rapid fire.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] Statements by US President Donald Trump that he was angered by a conversation with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin demonstrate a change in Washington's policy toward Moscow. This was stated by The Washington Post.
"The comments mark a change from the softer approach toward Russia and its president that Trump has taken in the first two months of his new administration," the article, published March 30, said.
It is noted that Trump's previous approach led to "the creation of a world more favorable to Moscow" and the weakening of NATO's position.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, on March 30, the NBC News channel stated that the head of the White House was allegedly "very angry and furious" after the Russian leader's words about the illegitimacy of the head of the Kiev regime, Volodymyr Zelensky. The publication emphasized that the reason for such a reaction was Putin's proposal to create a transitional government in Ukraine under the auspices of the UN and a number of countries. According to the TV channel, Trump also threatened to impose duties on Russian oil in the amount of 25% to 50% if Moscow does not agree to resolve the armed conflict with Kiev.
However, Trump also noted that he maintains a good relationship with the Russian leader and intends to hold another telephone conversation this week, NBC News reports.
In response, the press secretary of the Russian president, Dmitry Peskov, reported that the statements published by the American TV channel were presented in a retelling, without supporting quotes. He also added that Moscow continues to work with Washington, primarily on building bilateral relations, which were significantly damaged by the previous administration. In addition, Peskov clarified that Putin remains open to dialogue with Trump, and their conversation will be promptly organized if necessary.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] The Russian Prosecutor General's Office is asking to suspend the ban on the activities of the Taliban movement (under UN sanctions for terrorist activities). This was announced on March 31 by the press service of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation.
Not a choice I would have made, given the various jihadi groups the Taliban shelters on their territory, some with connections to Russia. Another Beslan, another Crocus City Hall… but it that’s what you want, to feel like a world player, go for it.
“The administrative claim of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation to suspend the ban on the activities of the Taliban movement, which is included in the single federal list of organizations, including foreign and international organizations, recognized as terrorist in accordance with the legislation of the Russian Federation, has been accepted for processing,” the press service responded to journalists’ questions.
It is noted that the court scheduled the consideration of the Prosecutor General's Office's application for April 17.
In Russia, the Taliban movement was recognized as a terrorist organization in 2003.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, on December 28, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law introducing a mechanism for temporarily suspending the ban on the activities of a terrorist organization by a court decision. It was specified that this could happen if there was actual data on the cessation of activities aimed at promoting, justifying and supporting terrorism. In addition, after the court decision is made, a copy will be sent to the FSB within five days for further changes to the list of terrorist organizations.
Earlier, on December 10, the State Duma also adopted in the first reading a bill to exclude this movement from the list of those banned in Russia.
In November, the press secretary of the Russian president Dmitry Peskov noted that the removal of the terrorist organization status from the Taliban is necessary for the development of contacts with the Afghan authorities. The Kremlin representative emphasized that Moscow intends to establish relations with this country.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] Conscripts called up as part of the spring draft of 2025 will begin to be sent to the troops from assembly points on April 10. This was reported on March 31 by Vice Admiral Vladimir Tsimlyansky, Deputy Chief of the Main Organizational and Mobilization Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
“The start of sending conscripts from assembly points is planned for April 10, 2025. The term of military service by conscription, as before, will be 12 months,” he noted.
Tsimlyansky added that all conscripts will be sent to serve in the military at permanent deployment points of units and military units of the armed forces and other military formations on the territory of Russia.
At the same time, he emphasized that conscripts will not be sent to the deployment points of units in the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions. They will also not be involved in the implementation of special military operation tasks.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, on March 31, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on the spring conscription, which will take place from April 1 to July 15, 2025. A total of 160 thousand people will be called up.
The Ministry of Defense reported that notification of conscription for military service will be carried out by paper summonses, they still have legal force. Summons will be sent by registered mail with notifications to the place of residence or stay of the conscript or delivered in person. At the same time, electronic summonses will be sent to the personal account on the State Services portal and to the personal account of Muscovites on the official portal of the mayor and the government of Moscow "Mos.ru".
Since 2024, the draft age in Russia has been increased to 30 years. Last year, 150 thousand people were called up for the spring draft and 133 thousand people for the autumn draft.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] On Monday, March 31, Russian schools, technical schools and colleges held extracurricular classes dedicated to the art and legacy of composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky. This was reported in the all-Russian project "Conversations about the Important."
It is noted that the topic of art and its role in the modern world was announced by Russian film actress Ekaterina Temnova. During the lesson, students were able to expand their knowledge of Russian culture and its outstanding figures.
"A special place in these discussions was occupied by the figure of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, a brilliant composer whose music is the pride of Russia and the heritage of all mankind. It was on the example of his life and work that schoolchildren and students reflected on the importance of music in human life," the press service said in a statement.
A worthwhile thing to teach and learn.
Ada Ainbinder, head of the department of manuscript and printed sources of the State Memorial Music Museum-Reserve of P. I. Tchaikovsky in Klin, participated in the classes as a federal speaker. She noted the influence of art on the formation of the worldview of the population of Russia, revealed the meaning of the expression "to serve the country" through creativity, shared recommendations for understanding classical music, and also told how she sees the future of art in the modern world.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, on March 17, classes were held in schools and colleges across the country dedicated to the reunification of Crimea and Sevastopol with Russia and the 100th anniversary of the international children's center "Artek" as part of the "Conversations about the Important" project. Temnova also spoke at the event and told stories about the center that unites children from all over the world.
[Breitbart] A 70-year-old man has been arrested and charged with aggravated assault after allegedly striking an Elon Musk supproter with his vehicle during an anti-Tesla rally outside a dealership in Meridian, Idaho, according to local law enforcement.
ABC News reports that on Saturday, approximately 30 people gathered outside a Tesla dealership in Meridian, Idaho, to protest against the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, and his role in the Trump administration’s federal job cuts. The protest was overshadowed by a counter-protest of about 200 individuals. According to the Meridian Police Department, as a 49-year-old counter-protester arrived at the scene, Christopher Talbot, 70, of Meridian, allegedly made an obscene gesture toward him before striking him with his car.
Police reported that the victim, who had been driving a truck displaying pro-Trump flags, had just parked and exited his vehicle when Talbot hit him. The counter-protester sustained non-life-threatening injuries and drove himself to a nearby hospital for treatment.
The incident occurred amid a series of planned “Tesla Takedown” protests organized by an anti-Musk group, targeting Tesla dealerships and facilities across the country. In recent weeks, Tesla has become a focal point for vandalism and demonstrations due to Musk’s prominent and controversial role in President Donald Trump’s second administration.
Authorities used the license plate information from Talbot’s vehicle to locate his residence, where he was subsequently arrested. Talbot was booked into Ada County Jail and charged with one count of aggravated battery, a felony offense, according to the Ada County Sheriff’s Office.
A police spokesman commented: “The Meridian Police Department reminds people to respect everyone’s right to protest and express their 1st Amendment Rights without resorting to violence.”
Breitbart News recently reported on a viral case of Tesla vandalism that is representative of a large and escalate wave of violence and domestic terrorism against Tesla and Elon Musk:
Demarqeyun Marquize Cox, 33, was taken into custody by the Texarkana Police Department after one of his alleged attacks was captured on video by the very Tesla he intentionally crashed into. The incident occurred while the electric vehicle’s owner, Virita Carstaffin, was having lunch inside a nearby restaurant.
The footage, obtained by local news station KTBS, shows the 5-foot-2, 449-pound Cox backing up his ATV and then ramming head-on into the side of Carstaffin’s red Tesla, causing considerable damage to the front driver-side door. Carstaffin, who was alerted to the attack by a phone notification, estimated that replacing the entire door would cost over $1,000.
Police were called to the area after receiving reports of a second Tesla being damaged at a nearby Lowe’s store. Officers stopped Cox just over a mile south of the Golden Palace, with one officer recognizing him from the video of the buffet restaurant incident. During the initial interrogation, Cox allegedly provided a false name and claimed to be someone else, but police were not fooled by his cocky demeanor and proceeded with the arrest.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] Five M-class flares were detected on the Sun on March 30 in the 4048 spot group. This was reported by the press service of the Institute of Applied Geophysics.
Scientists recorded the first flash lasting 33 minutes at 00:38 Moscow time. The second was detected at 02:00 Moscow time. Its duration was 38 minutes.
The remaining flashes were recorded by specialists at 04:48, 19:42 and 20:07 Moscow time.
All flares of this class cause small to moderate radio interference on the dayside of the Earth and can also trigger a solar radiation storm.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, on March 11 at 15:04 Moscow time, in the X-ray range, scientists registered a solar flare of the penultimate M class in terms of power, lasting 3 minutes.
On March 5, scientists from the Institute of Applied Geophysics confirmed a powerful M-class solar flare that lasted for nine minutes.
At the end of February, the Sun ejected its largest plasma cloud since the beginning of the year. It occurred on the side opposite to Earth, and therefore did not pose a threat to the planet.
[Powerline] Democracy is imperiled across what used to be known as the Free World. In France, Marine Le Pen, who likely would have won that country’s next presidential election, has been prosecuted and found guilty of embezzlement, and barred from running for office for five years—until after the 2027 presidential election, in other words.
As I understand it, Le Pen and her party used funds from the European Union that were supposed to be paid to third-party contractors to fund positions within the National Rally itself. There is no suggestion that Le Pen, or anyone else at the Rally, enriched herself or himself. I have not seen any legal explanation of why that conviction would preclude her from running for office.
In Romania, the presidential election was abruptly canceled as final voting was about to begin, apparently because populist candidate Călin Georgescu appeared likely to win.
In Brazil, former President Jair Bolsonaro is charged with attempting a coup, after some of his supporters "stormed" government buildings following his 2022 re-election defeat. Bolsonaro was out of the country when the alleged "storming" occurred. The current prosecution seems designed to prevent Bolsonaro from contending for the presidency again in 2026. Does that sound familiar, or what?
In Germany, the entire political system has been distorted to achieve a single goal: keeping the Alternative For Germany, that country’s second-leading vote-getter, from any role in government.
And, of course and most significantly, here in the U.S. the Democratic Party brought three ridiculous criminal prosecutions against Donald Trump, hoping to send him to prison and block him from another presidential run. Happily, the Democrats failed.
What the targets of all of these anti-democratic prosecutions and political machinations have in common is that they are populists. They all challenged the corrupt and incompetent ruling groups in their countries, which are now desperate not just to stop them, but to stamp them out. The problem faced by these generally left-wing establishments is that national populism is popular with voters. So, unwilling to take any risk of losing power, ruling coalitions have struck hard against the populists, democracy be damned.
These events have been illuminating. Liberals love to talk about democracy, but only as long as they are winning. As soon as it appears that they may lose, democracy goes out the window. The only legitimate government, they believe, is a liberal government. It seems, therefore, that a liberal government is always a tyranny in waiting. A valuable lesson that should be absorbed by voters in all Western countries, next time they have an opportunity to vote.
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/01/2025
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Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
#1
Next time they have an opportunity to vote? The liberals can always declare martial law like Zelensky did and there won't be any next time.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/01/2025 11:42
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[Daily Mail where America gets its news] Elon Musk has directed his team at DOGE to investigate Congress members who have amassed vast fortunes.
The world's richest man made the revelation at his town hall in Wisconsin on Sunday evening, where he also handed out two $1 million cash prizes and mocked a protester who tried to interrupt his speech.
In a brutal six-word sledge to the protester, whose voice was nearly drowned out by the roaring crowd, Musk said: 'Say hi to George for me!'
He was referring to liberal mega-donor George Soros. Musk said: 'It was inevitable that at least a few Soros operatives would be in the audience.'
Musk, whose own $343 billion fortune is tied to Tesla and SpaceX, has long been vocal in his suspicions about ultra-wealthy career politicians.
'A lot of strangely wealthy members of Congress, where I just can't, I'm trying to connect the dots of how they became rich,' he told the crowd of about 2,000 people.
'How'd they get $20 million if they're earning $200,000 a year? Nobody can explain that. We're gonna try to figure it out, and certainly stop it from happening.'
Members of Congress are entitled to buy and sell stocks and cryptocurrency, as long as they disclose all transactions.
Still, Musk has specifically taken aim at Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren, whose cumulative net worth is said to total an estimated $439 million in a post shared to Musk's X account.
According to public disclosures as recent as 2023, Schumer is realistically worth closer to $2.3 million, while Warren's tax returns suggest she is worth $9 million.
DOGE has taken an axe to federal departments since Trump returned to the White House, sparking countless protests and legal challenges.
But Musk recently set his sights on the upcoming Wisconsin state Supreme Court vote, backing Judge Brad Schimel in an effort to flip the panel from 4-3 Democrat to 4-3 Republican.
'I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it's going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will,' Musk said.
'We've got to pull a rabbit out of the hat. We actually have to have a steady stream of rabbits out of the hat, like it's an arc of rabbits flying through the air, and then landing in a voting booth.'
He, through his America PAC, has poured upwards of $20 million into this race, conscious that the state high court may take up redistricting congressional districts, which could ultimately affect which party controls the US House.
'They will try to stop all the government reforms we are getting done for you, the American people,' Musk warned.
And Musk reverted to a tried-and-tested method he used during the presidential race, offering cash prizes to citizens who registered to vote.
In this case, doing so fell afoul of Wisconsin law, which states that people cannot offer 'anything of value' in exchange for encouraging a person to vote. Doing so is a felony offence.
Musk quickly removed the initial post and revised his offer, instead offering two people $1 million each to be spokesmen for his petition.
On Sunday night, the lucky winners were announced and walked up on stage to collect their checks.
'I should say that the reason for the checks is that it's really just to get attention,' Musk said.
'And somewhat inevitably, when I do these things, it causes the legacy media to kind of lose their minds.'
Moments before the town hall was due to begin, the Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously decided not to hear and 11th hour bid to block the payments.
Two lower courts had already rejected the legal challenge by Democrat Josh Kaul.
The room was packed full of about 2,000 people - all of whom had to sign a petition which declared they were opposed to 'activist judges' in order to receive an invitation.
Signing the petition also entitled them to a $100 check.
State Supreme Court judges in Wisconsin are elected on a 10-year term.
During the presidential election campaign, Musk used a nearly identical tactic, offering to pay $1 million a day to voters in Wisconsin and six other battleground states who signed a petition supporting the First and Second amendments.
A judge in Pennsylvania said prosecutors failed to show the effort was an illegal lottery and allowed it to continue through Election Day.
Posted by: Skidmark ||
04/01/2025
00:00 ||
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[11156 views]
Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
#1
They tried to ban it as an illegal lottery and not as an attempt to buy votes. Telling.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
04/01/2025 6:58
Comments ||
Top||
#2
'How'd they get $20 million if they're earning $200,000 a year?
#3
Back in high school, I noticed the imbalance of spending a couple million bucks on a campaign to get a job that paid a $100K or so. It seemed suspicious. What has to happen for that to make sense?
Kash Patel and Dan Bongino both fail to understand the severity of the compromise underneath them. Hence the "95% honorable" quote by Patel recently (interview with Gowdy).
♦ The core issue is that institutional corruption is the status of the FBI. That is challenging to deal with and simply cannot be addressed (in any reasonable timeframe, or effect) from the top of the leadership pyramid.
The various downstream field offices of the same institution (there are hundreds) will keep Patel/Bongino flush with busy work and positive investigative outcomes for them to announce on television. [see VA recently] That approach purposefully satiates a reviewing audience yet leaves the process under them without oversight.
Corrupt FBI officials continue operations as needed (influence selling, evidence burying, pay-to-play investigative outcomes, DC monitoring, money laundering, trafficking, drugs and generally willful blindness to their outside group partners) and simultaneously push specific attention-grabbing info up the ladder toward leadership offices in DC.
[As decades of top-down corruption took over, it slowly permeated the field offices. Most of the really good FBI officials; those who did not want to follow a path paved with the need to join the internal corruption; took up FBI positions in foreign countries. The good guys, the SMEs are overseas now, having long left the domestic rank and vile behind them.]
Kash Patel and Dan Bongino would likely make excellent FBI special operation compliance officers and internal auditors. That’s where the real impact can be delivered [think Elliot Ness approach].
However, as leaders of the institution, the function of their role — as outwardly prestigious as it might seem, essentially isolates them with busy work. They must assign the role of compliance and audit review below them, to the same internal silo operators who have previously been identified as working within a corrupted institution.
You might note that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent noticed this need very quickly, because he was/is a subject matter expert in large institutional leadership. Bessent has experience, Patel and Bongino do not.
Secretary Bessent hired/promoted/moved the IRS whistleblowers into strategic position; to become the heads of an internal compliance and audit team, reporting almost exclusively to Bessent himself.
Bongino and Patel would have been good in similar roles within the FBI organization. However, as heads of the agency they can affect very little operational change. Yes, they can steer the ship, but it is the chief engineer who determines the speed of the vessel. The mechanics within the FBI will simply control the speed and wait out the leadership.
Kash and Dan will then play a long game of whac-a-mole, removing each identified agent stalling as they are discovered. This will take more years than they have.
Contrast that FBI approach (Patel, saying everyone is awesome) with Treasury (Bessent, saying there’s an institutional problem here), and you will understand the visible absence of accountability.
♦ The issue is not Patel or Bongino’s intent or motivation. The problem is their ability.
So far, the duo has not publicly admitted the severity of the corruption they sit atop; let alone announce a plan to deal with it. Ergo the intellectually honest person who understand the silo operations, only expect soundbites and pretenses.
Or, think of the problem like President Trump and Elon Musk (DOGE) to the total executive branch. President Trump is the tip-top of the silo. Elon Musk and DOGE are the compliance/audit officers, reviewing each agency — taking action and reporting back to the principal, President Trump.
Both President Trump and Elon Musk are familiar leading massive organizations (high competence, high motivation). However, even with their incredible large institutional skillset, both Trump and Musk need to break down the responsibilities using DOGE. Musk hires highly competent highly motivated DOGE members to do the actual compliance and audits.
Again, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino do not possess the same executive leadership skills (they are low competence, high motivation). The pair of FBI directors need high-direction and high-support to overcome their competency challenge.
If the institutional corruption within the FBI was being addressed, we would not need to be told the institutional corruption within the FBI was being addressed. We would be able to visibly see it.
Ex. If Treasury was saying 95% of IRS employees were honorable and good, Secretary Bessent would not be removing tens-of-thousands of IRS agents.
The FBI reportedly has around 48,000 agents/employees.
Step one begins as President Trump, Elon Musk and Scott Bessent each noted. First, admitting there’s an institutional problem. Patel and Bongino are denying they have an institutional problem.
I/We want to see Kash Patel and Dan Bongino succeed. However, it takes large system executive leadership skills to execute any effective reform strategy. Patel and Bongino would be excellent compliance officers, unfortunately that’s not the role they have been assigned to.
Trump's ban has now been delayed because the State Department continues to miss deadlines to submit a report detailing recommendations for restrictions.
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.
...
..the well-beloved offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood,...
...business executive, and former professional wrestling performer. She was the 25th administrator of the Small Business Administration from 2017 to 2019. McMahon has been nominated to lead the Department of Education under the second Trump administration. McMahon, along with her husband, Vince McMahon, founded sports entertainment company Titan Sports, Inc. (later World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.) where she worked as the president and later CEO from 1980 to 2009. During this time, the company grew from a regional business in the northeast to a large multinational corporation. She made occasional on-screen performances, most notably in a feud with her husband that culminated at WrestleMania X-Seven. In 2009, she left World Wrestling Entertainment to run for a seat in the United States Senate from Connecticut as a Republican, but lost to Richard Blumenthal in the 2010 general election. She was the Republican nominee for Connecticut's other Senate seat in the 2012 race, but lost to Chris Murphy because that's the kind of guy people in Connecticutt like best. ...
..a regional Iranian catspaw,...
[Breitbart] Representative 
[WND] Billionaire entrepreneur and Trump advisor Elon Musk dropped a bombshell this weekend during a fiery 100-minute town hall in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he campaigned for conservative judge Brad Schimel in the state's upcoming Supreme Court election on Tuesday.
Angel Mom of woman murdered by illegal aliens slams radical judges blocking administration deportation efforts.
[REGNUM] A tragicomic story has unfolded in Lithuania. Four American soldiers traveling in an M88A2 Hercules tracked armored recovery vehicle went missing at a training ground near the city of Pabrade. The Lithuanians later found out where the vehicle was, but that didn't make things any easier for anyone.
