Russia could have its most powerful and quiet nuclear attack submarines on persistent patrols off either U.S. Coast in the next two years, the head of U.S. Northern Command told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

In response to questions from Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) on the threat of Chinese and Russian cruise missile submarines operating close to the U.S., NORTHCOM commander Gen. Glen VanHerck said that the deployments of the Russian Yasen-class nuclear cruise missile attack boats have been deploying more frequently.

“[The risk is] absolutely increasing. Within the last year, Russia has also placed their [Yasens] in the Pacific,” he said.

The liberal crime bill pushed by local Washington, D.C. leaders and killed by President Joe Biden has backfired, inviting fresh oversight and the clamping down of federal authority on the capital city at a time when local leaders are pushing for autonomy.

The crime bill would have lessened penalties for a range of crimes even as D.C. has experienced a spike in homicides, arson, and other crimes.

Emails published earlier this week show the office of then-Vice President Joe Biden colluding with a Bloomberg News reporter to bury a damaging story about Hunter Biden.

The emails – obtained by America First Legal (AFL) through its ongoing lawsuit against the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) – show the President of Hunter’s firm Rosemont Seneca Partners, Eric Schwerin, checking in with the Vice President’s media team about potential follow up stories to a New York Times article in 2015.

The Times on December 8th of that year suggested the “credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined” by Hunter’s role on the board of Burisma Holdings. (Can you imagine such a story being written today?)

On March 18, on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, over 2,500 people representing over 200 organizations gathered in front of the White House to protest the latest war drive: the escalation and prolongation of the war in Ukraine.

The Iraq invasion and the US’s central role as an aggressor on the world stage could not be more related to the Russia–Ukraine war, speakers argued.

“[The warmongers] want you to somehow think that it’s progressive, that it’s good, that it’s morally right to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to fight to the last Ukrainian,” said Eugene Puryear of BreakThrough News, opening the rally. “For what? Just for the ability of the United States government to control the whole world!”

The U.S. carried out airstrikes in Syria Thursday night after a U.S. contractor was killed in a drone attack that wounded five troops and another contractor.

The attack came around 1:38 p.m. at an allied maintenance facility near the city of Hasakah in northeast Syria, the Pentagon said in a statement. The intelligence community has assessed the “one-way unmanned aerial vehicle” that “struck” the maintenance facility originated from Iran. 

Russia wants to create demilitarised buffer zones inside Ukraine around areas it has annexed, Former President Dmitry Medvedev said.

“We need to achieve all the goals that have been set to protect our territories, that is, the territories of the Russian Federation,” Medvedev, who is deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said in an interview with Russian media posted on Telegram.

We need to “throw out all the foreigners who are there in the broad sense of the word, create a buffer zone which would not allow the use of any types of weapons that work at medium and short distances, that is 70-100 kilometres, to demilitarise it,” Medvedev said.

Russia would have to push further into Ukraine if such zones were not established, he added, taking Kyiv or even Lviv.

Here comes the panic.

Bloomberg just reported that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen - who was singlehandedly responsible for stoking and restarting the bank crisis on Wednesday which until that day was easing back, with her comments that nobody in charge was even talking about a uniform deposit insurance, let alone working on one - will convene the heads of top US financial regulators Friday morning for a previously unscheduled meeting of the Financial Stability Oversight Council.

The meeting will be closed to the public, the Treasury Department said in a statement. The Treasury didn’t say what time the meeting would begin, and it wasn’t immediately clear whether the council would issue a statement following the meeting.

The step comes as regulators continue efforts to instill calm in financial markets and among bank depositors following the recent failure of two mid-sized lenders in the US and the near-collapse of banking giant Credit Suisse Group AG before its government-brokered takeover by rival UBS Group AG.

One of the most self-defeating and yet inexplicably persistent mistakes Russia’s enemies have been making for over a thousand years is underestimating it. Regardless of the direction the invasion was coming from, Moscow was able to prevail each time. Its ability to not just successfully defend itself, but also counterattack and reach the opponent’s heartland has been unmatched in modern history. And yet, the myth of Russia’s supposed perpetual decline and dilapidation is an incessant propaganda trope used by its enemies for centuries. None of it ever came true, despite all the grim predictions, which are still being parroted to this very day and are unlikely to go away any time soon, especially nowadays, when the political West needs to keep its populace under the illusion that Moscow is supposedly “losing”.

We often hear that Russia is no more than a regional power with an economy the size of Spain’s, a military budget that has been consistently smaller than the Saudi one, etc. And indeed, on paper, this may seem true. Taking into account nominal GDP as the only measure of success and power, one might fall into the trap of believing such statistics. However, the reality is quite different. All one needs to do is ask just a few logical questions. Could the Spanish economy ever withstand the sanctions imposed on Russia, let alone grow and outperform those enforcing them? Is the Spanish economy a key global supplier of vital commodities such as food, oil, natural gas, various types of heavy machinery, crucial chemical products (such as fertilizers), enriched uranium for nuclear power plants, etc?

Fifth pilot incident this month…

March 13, 2023 – Emirates Flight EK205 MXP-JFK diverted due to pilot illness hour and a half after take-off (click here)

March 11, 2023 – United Airlines Flight 2007 GUA-ORD diverted due to “incapacitated pilot” who had chest pains (click here)

March ?, 2023 – British Airways pilot collapsed in Cairo hotel and died, was scheduled to fly Airbus A321 from Cairo to London (click here)

March, 3, 2023 – Virgin Australia VA-717 flight Adelaide to Perth was forced to make an emergency landing after First Officer suffered heart attack 30 min after departure. (click here)

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The U.S. military launched airstrikes against Iranian-backed terrorists in Syria on Thursday night after a U.S. contractor was killed and five U.S. service members and an additional U.S. contractor were injured in an attack by a suicide drone.

U.S. intelligence said that the attack was carried out by a “one-way unmanned aerial vehicle” that “struck a maintenance facility on a Coalition base near Hasakah in northeast Syria at approximately 1:38 p.m. local time.”

The Pentagon said that the precision airstrikes were launched to “limit the risk of escalation and minimize casualties.”

President Trump republished a 2018 letter moments ago on Truth social showing Stormy Daniels denying every having had a relationship with citizen Trump.

This is huge.

The letter was published by TMZ in January 2018.

About 75% of non-organic vegetables and fruits grown in the United States contain toxic pesticide residue. Blueberries and green beans contain organophosphates which can damage the human nervous system.

Unless produce is grown cleanly without pesticides and herbicides and is laboratory tested, it can be risky to consume to some degree because it might be chock full of hidden chemical poisons that are unseen to the naked eye, according to a report by The Daily Mail.

The Environmental Working Group looked at 46 different produce staples. Overall, the organization found that 75 percent of freshly grown produce in the U.S. contains some degree of harmful pesticide residue, which is deeply concerning. The worst offenders are among some of the healthiest fruits and vegetables when grown cleanly. These conventionally grown produce items are risky to consume because of the hidden chemicals they contain.

A study conducted by the National Toxicology Program (NTP) has been well-hidden by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). All three agencies conspired in tandem to cover up the findings of a six-year, long-delayed review of fluoride’s toxicity.

Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, the infamous transgender woman that Joe Biden appointed to head up the HHS, intervened last June to stop the release of the May 2022 NTP review, known internally as a monograph. The Fluoride Action Network (FAN) responded to Levine’s obstruction of the review by filing a lawsuit, which ultimately prompted the report’s release on March 15, 2023. The mainstream media is obviously ignoring the report, but it does show there’s no “safe exposure” to fluoride.

“[R]esearch on other neurotoxicants has shown that subtle shifts in IQ at the population level can have a profound impact … a 5-point decrease in a population’s IQ would nearly double the number of people classified as intellectually disabled,” the NTP review states.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday disclosed a bug that allowed some users of its popular AI chatbot ChatGPT to view messages from others.

“We had a significant issue in ChatGPT due to a bug in an open source library, for which a fix has now been released and we have just finished validating,” Altman tweeted.

“A small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users’ conversation history.”

Some users had reported seeing messages from others as early as Monday.

Deutsche Bank DB –6.74%  shares tumbled Friday after the cost of insuring the lender against default rose.

Deutsche Bank (ticker: DB) fell 12% in Frankfurt trading. U.S.-listed shares fell 7.5% in premarket trading. The move followed a spike in the price of the lender’s credit default swaps to a four-year high on Thursday, according to Reuters.

Almost 4,000 failed asylum seekers who have been issued deportation orders in Ireland over the past five years currently have an “unknown status” in the country, the latest figures have revealed.

The Fed’s actions to stem the banking crisis are beginning to accelerate the effects of QT, causing money velocity to drop and intensifying the tightening of financial conditions.

In an implicit acknowledgement that policy may have been overtightened, the Fed at its meeting Wednesday hiked rates by 25 bps, but gave the impression it is on the verge of stepping back from further raises.

The rescue of SVB et al has shifted the landscape and compromised moral hazard, and prompted a reorganization of how bank deposits and Fed reserves are spread through the system. Money has migrated to large banks from small ones as the credit risk of the latter is reappraised in the wake of recent lender failures.

Having enraged bondholders (who saw their entire AT1 debt tranche wiped out before the equity was fully impaired, violating every conventional liquidation waterfall):

Mark Dowding, chief investment officer at RBC BlueBay, which held Credit Suisse AT1 bonds, said Switzerland was “looking more like a banana republic”

“If this is left to stand, how can you trust any debt security issued in Switzerland, or for that matter wider Europe, if governments can just change laws after the fact,” David Tepper, the billionaire founder of Appaloosa Management, told the Financial Times.

“Contracts are made to be honored.”

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article on Substack on Wednesday that said the CIA was instructed to come up with a cover story for the Nord Stream bombings that was fed to The New York Times and the German newspaper Die Zeit.

The cover-up story was created to shift blame from the US after Hersh’s bombshell report published on February 8 that said President Biden ordered the attack on the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines, which connect Russia to Germany. "It was a total fabrication by American intelligence that was passed along to the Germans, and aimed at discrediting your story," Hersh was told by a source within the American intelligence community.

This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new report. Unsurprisingly alarming, the report aimed to turn up the heat on governments, the business world, and every one of us to do more about the energy transition. Decarbonization, the report said, had to move faster and more dramatically. Yet that wasn’t the only document that made the headlines this week. Shell also released a report in which it detailed two different scenarios for the future to 2050. In those scenarios, the supermajor’s analysts pitted energy security against the energy transition – something the IPCC reports have never done.