When New Delhi stripped Indian-administered Kashmir of its limited autonomy in 2019, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government defended the move, claiming it will wipe out a decades-old armed rebellion in the disputed region.

Three years later, the same government is reviving a civilian militia, called the Village Defence Guards (VDGs), in the region’s southern Jammu area.

The White House budget is calling for more troops with next year’s budget, but that hoped-for result, as administration budgets are, is tempered by the reality that low national unemployment and a shrinking pool of young people interested in serving means it’s harder and harder to recruit.

The Pentagon’s fiscal year 2024 budget is calling for 2,074,000 men and women in uniform, according to documents released Monday. That number is 13,334 fewer than it was authorized for last year, but 12,355 more than the Defense Department estimates are currently serving, reflecting a recent recruiting and retention environment that has shown some gaps.

Webmaster addition: Anyone feel a draft?

The U.S. Air Force's 2024 Fiscal Year budget request includes plans to divest 310 aircraft, while acquiring just 95 new ones. The service is looking to make substantial new investments in next-generation capabilities and argues that it needs to keep retiring old platforms to free up resources in support of these critical modernization efforts.

The total proposed Fiscal Year 2024 budget for the Department of the Air Force, which includes the U.S. Space Force, is 215.1 billion, excluding so-called "pass-through" funding. Ahead of the formal budget rollout today, the service had also provided additional details at a briefing at the Pentagon last Friday at which The War Zone was in attendance.

Webmaster addition: Look at all your tax dollars corroding away in that desert!

The Sunni Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Shia Republic of Iran have agreed – in a China brokered deal – to re-establish diplomatic relations within the coming two months.

Question is, will this new Riyadh-Tehran diplomacy bring an end to the horrendously atrocious war in Yemen? The worst killing and maiming of a most impoverished people in the last hundred years. Maybe this was a key objective of China’s in bringing these two countries back together.

Background

Diplomatic relations between the two countries broke down in January 2016, when Iran’s Foreign Minister claimed that Saudi warplanes had “deliberately” targeted Iran’s Embassy in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital city.

As a precursor to that event, on 2 January 2016, the Saudi Government executed 47 people throughout Saudi cities, one of them was a prominent Shia scholar. Iranian protesters about the execution ransacked and set ablaze the Saudi Embassy in Tehran.

This prompted the Saudi Sunni Foreign Minister to cut diplomatic ties with Shia enemy Iran. In hindsight and knowing what we know today, this rather harsh action by the Saudis, smells like provoked and directed by the powers that be – the US and the UK; those who also are the principal arms suppliers to Riyadh for their war against Yemen.

The Riyadh-Tehran conflict is, in fact, a triangular conflict involving Yemen in the first degree.

The banks rebounded in premarket trading this morning with shares rising up to 50 percent after dramatic slides yesterday that sparked contagion fears over the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

Regional banks that suffered in yesterday's bloodbath were heading toward the green. First Republic Bank leapt as much as 51 percent in premarket action after a record 62 percent drop. PacWest climbed 40 percent and Western Alliance rose 22 percent.

The Big Four of trillion-dollar banks were all trending higher. Bank of America was ticking over 3.6 percent, Citigroup moved north of 2.5 percent, JP Morgan Chase hiked 1.9 percent and Wells Fargo made a 3.2 percent stride to the good.

Webmaster addition: Sounds like someone dusted off the Plunge Protection Team!

The Treasury Department has agreed to let House Oversight Committee members review suspicious activity reports pertaining to President Biden’s family, panel Chairman James Comer announced Tuesday.

The records submitted by banks to the US government may contain new bombshells on the first family’s murky foreign income and the millions reaped by first son Hunter Biden and first brother James Biden in countries where their powerful relative held sway.

“After two months of dragging their feet, the Treasury Department is finally providing us with access to the suspicious activity reports for the Biden family and their associates’ business transactions,” Comer (R-Ky.) said.

“It should never have taken us threatening to hold a hearing and conduct a transcribed interview with an official under the penalty of perjury for Treasury to finally accommodate part of our request.”

Democrats and their progressive allies are vastly expanding their unprecedented efforts, begun in 2020, to use private money to influence and run public elections.  

Supported by groups with more than $1 billion at their disposal, according to public records, these partisan groups are working with state and local boards to influence functions that have long been the domain of government or political parties.  

Registering and turning out voters - once handled primarily by political parties – and design of election office websites and mail-in ballots are being handed over to those same nonprofits, which oare staffed by progressive activists that include former Democratic Party advocates, organized labor adherents and community organizers. 

Republicans have opposed such efforts, passing legislation in 24 states since 2020 curbing the private financing of elections. But the GOP does not have a comparable, boots-on-the-ground effort to influence election boards and workers, and the private-funding bans haven’t proved absolute in some states.  

I am frequently asked: why are the government agencies still pushing COVID-19 vaccination after there have been calls in the US Senate and all around the world to pull them off the market for lack of safety and efficacy?

In a March 10, 2023 letter from FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, MD, and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH, to Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, MD, PhD, the agencies give their rationale. While Walensky does not have a compelling academic track record, her FDA counterpart Califf has been considered a staunch advocate of randomized trials and a hawk on safety of cardiovascular drugs over his career which was notable for building the Duke Clinical Research Institute, one of the most impressive academic research organizations in the world.

Here are 10 assertions that Califf and Walensky make to Ladapo and Americans on why the COVID-19 vaccines should be “pushed.”

Former Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, slammed the IMF for callously unleashing riots on nations the IMF is dealing with; he pointed out that the riots are written into the IMF plan to force Nations to agree with the average 111 conditions laid down by the IMF, that destroys a country’s democracy and independence.   

Having captured political power in Sri Lanka on the back of a CIA instigated jockstrap-insurrection that delivered the country to the jaws of the IMF, there are ominous signs that the Americans are now hatching the classic IMF-riot to consolidate their triumph and create a climate to induct Quad military forces into the island; American occupation of Sri Lanka would then be a fait accompli.

The IMF (one of the two global money lenders purposefully favoured with the monopoly and authority to lend to world governments, from Bretton Wood days) controls Sri Lanka’s Executive, the Administration, and the Legislature.

The words attributed to Amschel Rothschild are perhaps relevant here; he reportedly said, I care not who makes a country’s laws; any fool can do it. Give me control of that country’s money supply and I shall rule that country.”

Moody’s Investors Service placed First Republic Bank and five other US lenders on review for downgrade, the latest sign of concern over the health of regional financial firms following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

Western Alliance Bancorp., Intrust Financial Corp., UMB Financial Corp., Zions Bancorp. and Comerica Inc. were the other lenders put on review by Moody’s. The credit rating company cited concerns over the lenders’ reliance on uninsured deposit funding and unrealized losses in their asset portfolios.

Digital media company BuzzFeed swung to a fourth-quarter loss on reduced overall revenues and a non-cash goodwill impairment charge.

BuzzFeed brought in $134.6 million in overall revenues during the fourth quarter. The digital media company ended the quarter with $106 million in net losses, compared to a year-earlier profit of $41.5 million.

During the latest quarter, BuzzFeed posted a non-cash goodwill impairment charge of $102.3 million, in part due to a steep decline in the value of the company’s stock price in December 2022.

Credit Suisse shares fell five percent to an all-time low in early trading on Tuesday after the bank confirmed material weaknesses and an $8billion loss in 2022, just hours after a financial expert claimed it would be the next institution to fall following SVB. 

Last night, Robert Kiyosaki - a metals investor and author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad who accurately predicted the 2008 fall of Lehman Brothers - warned during an appearance on Fox Business, that 'the problem' is the bond market, and that Credit Suisse - the eighth largest investment bank in the world- was most vulnerable. 

'My prediction, I called Lehman Brothers years ago, and I think the next bank to go is Credit Suisse because the bond market is crashing. The bond market is much bigger than the stock market. The Fed is up and they're the firemen and the arson,' he said.

In case you missed President Bribem’s speech today let me provide you with my assessment of its key points. I learned three things: That the financial system is on the point of collapse; that the bank will be bailed out with taxpayer money + the printing press; that those responsible for the collapse will as always get away scot free, bonuses in pocket. What did Bribem say to make me draw these conclusions?

That the financial system is on the point of collapse: Bribem “Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe. Your deposits will be there when you need them.”

That the bank will be bailed out with taxpayer money + the printing press: Bribem “No losses will be borne by the taxpayers. They [investors] knowingly took a risk, and when the risk didn’t pay off, investors lose their money”

Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, the leader of Turkey's Republican People's Party (CHP), has emerged as the main challenger to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in elections scheduled for May 14. Kilicdaroglu hopes to deprive Erdogan of a third term as he grapples with the country's economic crisis and the fallout from last February's devastating earthquakes.

Turkey's presidential campaign officially kicked off on March 10 and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is running for a third mandate, now knows who his main opponent is.

Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, 74, a bookish former bureaucrat, is often described by observers as Erdogan’s polar opposite. He was chosen by the Table of Six, an alliance of the six main opposition parties, after weeks of negotiations and debates.

"Today, we are very close to overthrowing the tyrant's throne," Kiliçdaroglu said the day after his nomination.

"Together, we will end this madness,” he added.

Mark Zuckerberg is expected to slash thousands of jobs on Wednesday as Meta comes down hard on 'projects that aren't performing'.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, is reportedly preparing to make thousands of cuts to its policy, marketing and communications teams in particular, only months after laying off 11,000 staff in November.

This comes as part of Zuckerberg's 'year of efficiency', cutting functions and features deemed non-essential as the company looks to rein in its finances and prioritize new offerings.

As startups race to integrate AI into their products, they are running into a major roadblock: spiraling costs, caused by the immense computing power required to process AI queries.

CNBC reports on one startup, video game company Latitude, which found itself paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to process millions of AI requests from users: at least as much as its expenses for human employees.

Researchers have discovered why breast cancer cells that have spread to the lungs may wake up following years of sleep and form incurable tumours.

Around 44,000 Brits and 210,000 Americans are diagnosed with the most common type of breast cancer — oestrogen receptor positive (ER+) — every year.

These patients remain at risk of their cancer recurring in another part of their body for decades after their initial diagnosis, even after successful treatment. 

Now, experts have discovered the mechanism that triggers this cancer 'time bomb' in the lungs — one of the most common places the cancer can spread to.

And an existing cancer drug can slow the growth of these secondary tumours, their study on mice suggests.

Silicon Valley Bank's new CEO emailed customers to tell them it's 'business as usual' despite the 'extremely challenging' past few days - as employees were left asking how their former bosses could make 'absolutely idiotic' errors of judgement.

Tim Mayopoulos was named as the new chief executive officer on Monday morning, after the government fired the existing managers including boss Greg Becker.

'Silicon Valley Bank, N.A. is open and conducting business as usual,' wrote Mayopolous, in an email to all clients sent on Monday afternoon.

A week ago an interesting story surfaced briefly in the news about how the developing Republican presidential candidate bids by Nikki Haley and others had been attacked over the past eleven months by possibly as many as hundreds of thousands of false automated personas, referred to in the trade as “bots,” on Twitter and other internet based social media. Interestingly, the activity was discovered and shared with Associated Press by an Israeli internet security company called Cyabra, which also claimed that the “bots” generation seem to have originated in three separate networks of false Twitter accounts. The accounts appear to have been created in the United States and it is believed that Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications are increasingly being used to create completely lifelike fake personas, extremely difficult for security filters and censors to detect.

The article claimed that those thousands of electronically generated non-persons had been programmed to disparage Haley and Ron DeSantis and others, often using “fake news” or alleged leaks of embarrassing personal information, while also praising the virtues of Donald Trump. The apparent intention was to build popular support for Trump by exploiting the social media sites’ algorithms to reach a large audience at the expense of the other possible GOP candidates. There are also concerns among some Republicans that the effort to give life to the Trump campaign by materially impacting on online political discussion might possibly be orchestrated and paid for by major outside interests that could actually be either foreign or criminal. Of course, as the operation has been exposed by an Israeli company, the possibility exists that the story is itself at least in part a false flag to plausibly deny any involvement by the Jewish state if that were to be demonstrable.

After the 9/11 attacks, terrorism became the ultimate entitlement program for America’s political elite. Whether it is illegally spying on Americans or blowing Somali dissidents to smithereens, invoking terrorism justifies any attack favored by for Washington policymakers. But the disastrous results of granting politicians a blank check should have been undeniable almost 60 years ago.

Back in the 1960s, terrorism was what the communists did. Antiterrorist moral fervor and ideological blinders propelled the U.S. into its biggest foreign policy blunder since World War Two.

As the French Foreign Legion struggled to reconquer Vietnam in the wake of World War II, the U.S. government constantly embellished the storyline to demonize the communist opposition.  A CIA operative provided materials for a massive bomb that ripped through a main square in Saigon in 1952. A Life magazine photographer was waiting on the scene, and his resulting snap appeared with a caption blaming the carnage on Viet Minh Communists.  The New York Times headlined its report: “Reds’ Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center.” The bombing was touted as “one of the most spectacular and destructive single incidents in the long history of revolutionary terrorism” committed by “agents here of the Vietminh.” The press coverage boosted public support for U.S. government aid to the French army fighting the Communists.  

ALMOST TWO DECADES after the U.S. launched the disastrous invasion of Iraq, the Biden administration is on the verge of sleepwalking into yet another major armed conflict in the Middle East. Last week, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides appeared to endorse a plan for Israel to attack Iranian nuclear facilities with U.S. support. “Israel can and should do whatever they need to deal with [Iran], and we’ve got their back,” he said at a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Nides’s words come after recent high-level military drills between Israel and the United States intended to showcase the ability to strike Iranian targets, as well as recent acts of sabotage and assassination inside Iran believed to have been carried out by both countries.

WHEN THE AFGHAN military and government collapsed in the summer of 2021, it was the worst failure of the U.S. defense establishment since the fall of Saigon. The U.S. today has moved on — providing the Ukrainian military with weapons and tactical support in its fight against Russia — but the question of why the world’s most powerful nation failed to build a capable Afghan military has not yet been fully answered.

A new report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, issued this week sheds critical light on what went so terribly wrong in America’s longest war — and how tens of thousands of ordinary Afghans were set up by their leaders and foreign partners to fight and die for a doomed cause.

The SIGAR report, “Why the Afghan Security Forces Collapsed,” paints a picture of the U.S. government’s effort to construct an Afghan military from scratch over two decades. As in many other U.S. conflicts, this enterprise relied heavily on contractors and advisers who themselves were “poorly trained and experienced for their mission,” according to the report. Among other tasks, contractors would often run logistics systems and direct airstrikes on the Afghans’ behalf.

At first glance, the Twitter user “Canaelan” looks ordinary enough. He has tweeted on everything from basketball to Taylor Swift, Tottenham Hotspur football club to the price of a KitKat. The profile shows a friendly-looking blond man with a stubbly beard and glasses who, it indicates, lives in Sheffield. The background: a winking owl.

Canaelan is, in fact, a non-human bot linked to a vast army of fake social media profiles controlled by a software designed to spread “propaganda”.

Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims, which controls more than 30,000 fake social media profiles, can be used to spread disinformation at scale and at speed. It is sold by “Team Jorge”, a unit of disinformation operatives based in Israel.

Democrat former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) was a member of the board at the collapsed Signature bank.

As Slay News reported, New York-based Signature was shut down by regulators on Sunday in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse on Friday.

Now it has emerged that the former Democrat congressman, author of the 2010 Dodd-Frank bill, was a board member at the imploded bank.

After scoring significant victories in the legislature in the 2022 midterms, North Carolina Republicans are introducing legislation that would bar state and local election officials from accepting or using private money to conduct elections.

SB 89 stipulates that state and local election boards, as well as county boards of commissioners, are prohibited from accepting “private monetary donations, directly or indirectly, for conducting elections or employing individuals on a temporary basis.”

Concerns surrounding the use of private money to conduct elections became prominent following the 2020 election cycle, during which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gifted nonprofits such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) hundreds of millions of dollars. These “Zuckbucks” were then siphoned into local election offices in battleground states around the country to change how elections were administered, such as by expanding unsecure election protocols like mail-in voting and the use of ballot drop boxes.

The media-ratings giant NewsGuard denied it was “government-funded” after being called out as part of the vast Censorship Complex during congressional hearings last week. But government records and the company’s own public announcement celebrating a nearly $750,000 federal grant suggest otherwise. 

On Thursday, independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger appeared before the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to testify about what they had discovered during a review of internal Twitter communications. An hour before the weird hearing began, Taibbi released the latest installment of the “Twitter Files.”

An inspector general probe has been launched to investigate the potential theft of U.S. government grants that funded research projects at the Wuhan lab in China, CBS News reported Monday.

National Institutes of Health (NIH) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funneled potentially millions of U.S. taxpayer payer dollars through Dr. Peter Daszak’s non-profit  EcoHealth Alliance to the CCP-controlled Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“What I’ve found so far is evidence that points to double billing, potential theft of government funds,” said Diane Cutler, a former federal investigator with over two decades of experience combating white-collar crime and healthcare fraud. “It is concerning, especially since it involves dangerous pathogens and risky research,” she added.

Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kans.) hired Cutler to investigate U.S. government grants that supported risky gain-of-function research in China leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. This type of research involves making pathogens and viruses more lethal and virulent in a laboratory, purportedly to study them.

Webmaster addition: This is confirmation that the work done at Wuhan was directed and funded by the US!

Fairfax County is Virginia’s largest school district, and one of the biggest in the country. A recent test question in an advanced placement (AP) government course asked students a multiple-choice question to choose an "accurate comparison of liberals versus conservatives."

Some concerned parents say regardless of your politics, you should be furious with the nature of the question.

The choices represented a bunch of stereotypical identities -- based on race, gender, sexuality and age.

A Maryland teacher, who described herself as "proud as f*ck to be liberal" and bragged about "indoctrinating" her students, called for an urgent fight against capitalism while adding, "Revolutions involve violence."

The teacher, Rebeca F. Rothstein, works at North Bethesda Middle School in the Montgomery County School District and believes educators should use their classrooms to turn kids into anti-racist activists. She was an avid TikTok poster until Fox News Digital reached out about her comment on violent revolutions; her account was no longer active as of Monday. 

"As a teacher I wish we could do more with our students like teach anti-racism and how to be kind people. Does anyone else feel like… we can skip the math, skip the science, like we'll do that next year. Maybe this year we focus on teaching our youth how to be anti-racist," she said on TikTok.