by Jonathan Steel via The Guardian
Pilot Josh Yoder reports: “I’m being notified by passengers on a Southwest flight departing Las Vegas that the captain became incapacitated soon after takeoff this morning. He was removed from the flight deck and replaced by a non Southwest pilot who was commuting on that flight. This is now the fifth pilot incapacitation that I’m aware of in the past two weeks. I will post more details as they become available.” (click here)
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)
If the Armed Forces of Ukraine use shells with depleted uranium, the Russian Federation admits the possibility of responding with tactical nuclear weapons — Russian analyst
We are talking about the depleted uranium-core, armour-piercing, sub-caliber, feathered projectiles for Challenger 2 tanks that will be sent to Ukraine.
World tank building (the production of shells) went two ways :
Use expensive tungsten (safe for the health of the crew and safe for the environment) or an alloy of depleted uranium with titanium .
An alloy with uranium is much cheaper, because it can be used as spent fuel from nuclear reactors. Secondly, it has such a function as “self-sharpening”: when it bites into homogeneous armor (all-metal) at high speed, it does not flatten, but “leaves in layers,” continuing to be sharp and retaining penetrating properties .
By itself, it is not radioactive, but it is very toxic . If inhaled or if it comes into contact with the skin, it will cause serious poisoning.
On impact, part of the projectile is sprayed into fine dust, contaminating the area where the projectile was fired. According to American studies, in the area where such shells were used , oncology and other types of diseases grew six times.
Regarding the response: Russia has clearly defined that this type of munition is considered to be the use of “dirty bombs.” And this already opens up the possibility of conducting a retaliatory strike with tactical nuclear weapons. “Western countries should understand what games they are “playing “, ” said Andrey Klintsevich , head of the Center for the Study of Military and Political Conflicts.
Earlier, the United Kingdom confirmed the transfer of this type of ammunition to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
https://t.me/OstashkoNews/61087
Authored by Jordan Schachtel via ‘The Dossier’ Substack,
Last Thursday marked the three year anniversary of the infamous “15 Days To Slow The Spread” campaign.
By March 16, yours truly was already pretty fed up with both the governmental and societal “response” to what was being baselessly categorized as the worst pandemic in 100 years, despite zero statistical data supporting such a serious claim.
I was living in the Washington, D.C. Beltway at the time, and it was pretty much impossible to find a like-minded person within 50 miles who also wasn’t taking the bait. After I read about the news coming out of Wuhan in January, I spent much of the next couple weeks catching up to speed and reading about what a modern pandemic response was supposed to look like.
What surprised me most was that none of “the measures” were mentioned, and that these designated “experts” were nothing more than failed mathematicians, government doctors, and college professors who were more interested in policy via shoddy academic forecasting than observing reality.
Within days of continually hearing their yapping at White House pressers, It quickly became clear that the Deborah Birx’s and Anthony Fauci’s of the world were engaging in nothing more than a giant experiment. There was no an evidence-based approach to managing Covid whatsoever. These figures were leaning into the collective hysteria, and brandishing their credentials as Public Health Experts to demand top-down approaches to stamping out the WuFlu.
To put it bluntly, these longtime government bureaucrats had no idea what the f—k they were doing. Fauci and his cohorts were not established or reputable scientists, but authoritarians, charlatans, who had a decades-long track record of hackery and corruption. This Coronavirus Task Force did not have the collective intellect nor the wisdom to be making these broad brush decisions.
Back then, there were only literally a handful of people who attempted to raise awareness about the wave of tyranny, hysteria, and anti-science policies that were coming our way. There were so few of us back in March in 2020 that it was impossible to form any kind of significant structured resistance to the madness that was unfolding before us. These structures would later form, but not until the infrastructure for the highway to Covid hysteria hell had already been cemented.
Making matters worse was the reality that the vast majority of the population — friends, colleagues, peers and family included — agreed that dissenters were nothing more than reckless extremists, bioterrorists, Covid deniers, anti-science rabble rousers, and the like.
Yet we were right, and we had the evidence and data to prove it. There was no evidence to ever support such a heavy-handed series of government initiatives to “slow the spread.”
By March 16, 2020, data had already accumulated indicating that this contagion would be no more lethal than an influenza outbreak.
The February, 2020 outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship provided a clear signal that the hysteria models provided by Bill Gates-funded and managed organizations were incredibly off base. Of the 3,711 people aboard the Diamond Princess, about 20% tested positive with Covid. The majority of those who tested positive had zero symptoms. By the time all passengers had disembarked from the vessel, there were 7 reported deaths on the ship, with the average age of this cohort being in the mid 80s, and it wasn’t even clear if these passengers died from or with Covid.
Despite the strange photos and videos coming out of Wuhan, China, there was no objective evidence of a once in a century disease approaching America’s shores, and the Diamond Princess outbreak made that clear.
Of course, it wasn’t the viral contagion that became the problem.
It was the hysteria contagion that brought out the worst qualities of much of the global ruling class, letting world leaders take off their proverbial masks in unison and reveal their true nature as power drunk madmen.
And even the more decent world leaders were swept up in the fear and mayhem, turning over the keys of government control to the supposed all-knowing Public Health Experts.
They quickly shuttered billions of lives and livelihoods, wreaking exponentially more havoc than a novel coronavirus ever could.
In the United States, 15 Days to Slow The Spread quickly became 30 Days To Slow The Spread. Somewhere along the way, the end date for “the measures” was removed from the equation entirely.
3 years later, there still isn’t an end date…
Anthony Fauci appeared on MSNBC Thursday morning and declared that Americans would need annual Covid boosters to compliment their Flu shots.
So much of the Covid hysteria era was driven by pseudoscience and outright nonsense, and yet, very few if any world leaders took it upon themselves to restore sanity in their domains. Now, unsurprisingly, so many elected officials who were complicit in this multi-billion person human tragedy won’t dare to reflect upon it.
In a 1775 letter from John Adams to his wife, Abigail, the American Founding Father wrote:
“Liberty once lost is lost forever. When the People once surrender their share in the Legislature, and their Right of defending the Limitations upon the Government, and of resisting every Encroachment upon them, they can never regain it.”
Covid hysteria and the 3 year anniversary of 15 Days To Slow The Spread serves as the beginning period of a permanent scar resulting from government power grabs and federal overreach.
While life is back to normal in most of the country, the Overton window of acceptable policy has slid even further in the direction of push-button tyranny. Hopefully, much of the world has awakened to the reality that most of the people in charge aren’t actually doing what’s best for their respective populations.
A list of US actions aimed at discrediting and blurring Xi Jinping’s visit to Russia:
1. An information campaign stating that Xi Jinping will not come
2. Threats against China if Xi Jinping comes
3. Requirements for China to condemn Russia
4. Requirements for China not to supply weapons to Russia Only the West has the right to supply weapons to Ukraine.
5. Statements that any Russian-Chinese agreements will not matter
6. Hasty organization of the Japanese Prime Minister’s visit to Ukraine on the day of Xi’s visit
7. The death of Chinese workers in the Central African Republic
8. Announcement of hasty deliveries of new weapons to Ukraine
9. Declassified intelligence documents aimed at blaming China for the origin of the coronavirus
10. We began to equip a new military base in the Philippines
11. Reaffirm their commitment to Taiwan’s sovereignty
12. Depleted uranium for the Ukraine Army
13. ICC arrest warrant for Mr. Putin
14. Plus the standard whining about the fact that “China wants to take over Siberia” (a routine topic of Western Media)
Xi Jinping: There are changes going on now that haven’t happened for 100 years. And we are moving these changes together.
Putin: I agree.
Xi Jinping: Take care of yourself, please, dear friend.
Putin: Have a good trip!
Secretary of the Security Council of Russia Nikolai Patrushev:
◽️Last year, the number of extremist crimes committed against Russia mainly using the Internet increased by almost 40%. The extremists’ efforts are primarily aimed at reducing the level of public support for the special military operation [conducted by Russia in Ukraine].
◽️As an independent country, defending the interests of a multipolar and just world, Russia does not suit the United States, which is hiding behind the theory, invented by them, of the exclusivity of the exceptional America. The US is accustomed to juggle international law, dictate and impose their values and conditions on the world, have vassals, but not partners. Therefore, the United States and its henchmen, creating an enemy image of Russia, sow hatred towards our country and its people, try to discredit the Russian world, and impose confrontation with our state on the world community.
◽️For this purpose, any dirty and vile methods of conducting information warfare, blatant lies, unsubstantiated and indiscriminate accusations, staged incidents such as in Bucha, Mariupol, Kramatorsk, are used. Moscow was even initially accused of blowing up Nord Stream.
◽️All this is aimed at imposing neoliberal values on us instead of respecting our traditional Russian spiritual and moral values tested for centuries, thus depriving our people of pride in their country and its centuries-old history, undermining the unity of society that enabled us to defeat fascism in 1945.
◽️The West helps Kiev in planning military operations and provides intelligence, while not counting losses among Ukrainians as its problem.
◽️The winners are not those who opened the second front only in June 1944, when the Red Army was already closing in on Berlin. By encouraging neo-Nazism, the collective West seeks to erase the horrors and suffering that the Nazi ideology brought to humanity. Tomorrow marks the 80th anniversary of the tragedy in Khatyn, where the Nazis burned alive all the civilians of the village, among whom there were 75 children. We will never forget it!
by James Tweedie via Sputnik
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow for in-depth talks with Vladimir Putin has provoked angry responses from Washington and Europe. Hong Kong-based political and financial analyst Angelo Giuliano explains why the summit can be seen as a threat to Western hegemony.
Closer economic ties Russia and China could spell the end of the dollar’s primacy in trade and even US imperialist hegemony.
Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Moscow on Monday for three days of talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
The meeting had already provoked a flurry of angry statements and political diversions, including the International Criminal Court’s attempt to accuse Putin of child abduction and Washington’s rejection of Beijing’s blueprint for peace in Ukraine.
Angelo Giuliano told Sputnik that ever-deepening cooperation between the two Eurasian giants had “far reaching consequences for the ‘collective West’.”
“China and Russia are very complementary,” Giuliano explained. “Russia has the natural resources that China is lacking and China has a very large industrial/manufacturing base and financial strength.”
Crucially, China can help Russia bypass sanctions imposed by Western countries following the launch of the military operation in Ukraine.
Moreover, “Both countries are preparing for a possible wider confrontation with the collective West,” Giuliano stressed. “Both countries are already in a de-facto alliance.”
The agenda for the summit is likely to include building a new international money transfer mechanism, independent from the Western SWIFT system that Russia is now locked out of. The analyst said that could eventually be based on a new currency controlled the BRICS development bank, based on a basket of the member states’ currencies and backed by gold reserves.
That could herald the end of US dominance of the financial system and the privileged position of its currency in international trade.
“The end of the dollar hegemony would initiate the downfall of the US, the end of the exorbitant privilege to print the global currency, to constantly finance trade deficit by issuing US debt which not meant to be repaid, a de-facto ‘Ponzi scheme’,” Giuliano said. “This would mean the end of lavish US lifestyle at the expanse of the Global South.”
A new international financial system, in competition with the US-based ‘Bretton-Woods’ institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), could be opened up to any country which wants to join, the expert said.
Its selling point would be “a much more democratic system without the veto vote applied in the US controlled World Bank and IMF,” Giuliano said. “Many countries have shown interest and the shift could be gradual.”
More and more Western leaders are describing Beijing in terms such as “systemic challenge” or even an “opponent,” and new data shows China’s manufacturing sector is now bigger than the US and European union combined.
“China is already leading in 37 out 44 technologies, the West is definitely seeing this as a challenge in the long run,” Giuliano pointed out. “But it is just unavoidable as China has a much larger population and has 10 times more STEM (science technology engineering mathematics) graduates than the US.”
Chris Devonshire-Ellis, Chairman of Dezan Shira & Associates with a thirty-year investment and business career in China, Russia and Asia, wrote that Russia and China are likely to strengthen military as well as economic cooperation.
Regional security will be high on the agenda, with the 22-year-old Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) set to be “enhanced” and expanded to include such countries as Belarus, Bahrain, the Maldives, Myanmar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
“This will give the SCO regional coverage over the complete Eurasian land mass to the borders of Eastern Europe, as well as include significant gains in the Middle East and South-East Asia,” Devonshire-Ellis wrote. “This is likely to be seen as the world ‘beyond the West’ within a new Cold War and has specific ramifications in the energy and trade sectors.”
He predicted the West would dub the expanding SCO a ‘threat to NATO’ and use it to justify a military build-up in Europe and prolonging the conflict in Ukraine.
But “Russia and to some extent China view NATO as the initial problem as it has expanded eastwards,” Devonshire-Ellis pointed out, and the SCO will become “the security front line between the two.”
The rejection of China’s 12-point peace plan for Ukraine by Washington and Brussels shows how the West’s rhetoric on the conflict has become “shrill, increasingly prone to conspiracy theories and misinformation, and warmongering.”
“The danger here is that the rest of the world has a vested interest in this conflict too, essential supply chains have been disrupted in both food and energy and have created real stress factors in multiple developing nations,” Devonshire-Ellis warned.
He explained that Beijing’s interest in peace stemmed from Ukraine’s membership of its ‘Belt and Road’ initiative to secure trade routes to Europe and Africa. China has provided loans to improve Ukraine’s ports, roads, and rail infrastructure. It is also the country’s biggest trade partner, the source of 14.4 per cent of Ukraine’s imports and buying 15.3 per cent of its exports.