Today’s News 12th March 2022

• CCP Seeks New Global Order At 'Expense Of All Others': US Admiral
  CCP Seeks New Global Order At ‘Expense Of All Others’: US Admiral

  Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is engaged in a whole-of-society effort to undermine the rules-based international order and to promote its own brand of authoritarianism, according to U.S. military and political leaders.

  “The People’s Republic of China is the most consequential strategic competitor that the United States has faced,” said Admiral John Aquilino, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

  “They are executing a dedicated campaign that utilizes all forms of national power in an attempt to uproot the rules-based international order to the benefit of themselves and at the expense of all others.”

  

  Aquilino delivered the testimony to the House Armed Services Committee during a March 9 hearing on national security challenges in the Indo-Pacific.

  Committee Chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) affirmed Aquilino’s sentiments and said that the CCP was the greatest threat to the United States’ continued global leadership.

  He said that American leadership was working to secure global peace, but that CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping appeared determined to seek conflict.

  “China is without question the country most capable of competing with the U.S. in terms of their economic strength, in terms of their growing military strength, [and] in terms of their global reach,” Smith said.

  “We all want a world where China and the U.S. peacefully coexist and that is what we are working towards,” Smith said. “But over the course of the last decade at least, it has become clear that President Xi and China intend something more combative than that.”

  Smith said that the United States would need to do a better job of convincing the nations of the world that following CCP authoritarianism would not end in their favor. To this end, he said that the United States would work to balance peace in east Asia through cooperation with regional partners.

  The hearing follows the release of the annual Threat Assessment released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which found China to be the number one threat to the United States in 2022.

  Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, told the committee that the United States would remain focused on the Indo-Pacific region as its strategic priority, settling uncertainty over whether Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would draw the U.S. focus to Europe.

  “The Indo-Pacific is the Department’s priority theater,” Ratner said.

  “We are committed to maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific region, where all nations, large and small, are secure in their sovereignty, and can pursue economic opportunity, resolve disputes without coercion, and exercise the freedoms of navigation and overflight consistent with an open and stable international order.”

  Ratner condemned the CCP’s “support for Russian aggression,” and said that the United States’ competition with China throughout the century would define international politics and shape the global order.

  “Strategic competition with the PRC [People’s Republic of China] will be a defining feature of the 21st century and our collective efforts over the next decade will determine whether Beijing succeeds in undermining the rules and norms that have benefited the Indo-Pacific region and the world for decades,” Ratner said.

  To curb the malign influence of the CCP throughout the Indo-Pacific, Ratner said that it was necessary to strengthen regional networks.

  He called the United States’ network of alliances and partnership one of its “greatest strengths,” and said that its defense strategy would continue to focus on developing relationship will allies and partners throughout Asia to increase prosperity and defend against authoritarianism.

  “Our approach aims to build a broader security architecture in the Indo-Pacific region that can sustain a free and open order and deter aggression,” Ratner said.

  “We are focused on strengthening our military position over the long-term through deepening cooperation with our allies and partners in terms of planning, operations, and greater collaboration on capability development.”

  To that end, Ratner said that the United States was strengthening its capabilities and improving interoperability with regional allies and partners including Japan, Australia, India, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Timor-Leste.

  “The United States’ ability to pursue common security and economic goals with like-minded nations is a cornerstone of our success,” Ratner said.

  Ratner highlighted several examples of CCP aggression throughout the Indo-Pacific, including the use of Chinese maritime militia to encroach upon the sea borders of its neighbors, the use of its army to push the effective northern border of India inward, and the ongoing campaign of intimidation by its air forces against Taiwan.

  To that end, Ratner said that a broad and bipartisan consensus had been reached that the United States ought to commit its focus to the Indo-Pacific and the continued competition with the CCP.

  “[A] powerful bipartisan consensus has emerged around the China challenge and the need for the United States to refocus its time, energy, and resources on the Indo-Pacific region,” Ratner said.

  “The reservoir of support for this approach is broad and deep, and we should continue working together to preserve this bipartisanship that is central to our ability to compete effectively in the region.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 23:40

•  62-Mile-High-Club? NASA To Study Sex-In-Space, Crucial To Life On Mars
   62-Mile-High-Club? NASA To Study Sex-In-Space, Crucial To Life On Mars

  Several scientists are pushing NASA to launch studies on sex in space as the human race prepares for off-world settlements on the moon and Mars in the coming decades, Mic reports.

  A team of Canadian academics recently published a research note titled “The Case for Space Sexology.” They argued the space agency should study whether humans can safely reproduce in outer space.

  

  “No research has explored intimate relationships, nor the human experience of sexual functions and wellbeing, in space or space analogs, or how any of this can affect crew performance,” Simon Dubé, a psychologist from Concordia University, told Mic.

  The move towards deep space and colonizing Mars, as Elon Musk hopes to do by 2050, should include a deep discussion about sex in space. The studies must include love, sex, and intimate relationships and impacts on human life in zero gravity as it would take seven months for astronauts to get to Mars. For years, the effects of microgravity on the human body have been studied extensively, but sex has been ignored. 

  “We are primarily concerned with ensuring crew members’ health and safety in space for long periods of time,” a NASA representative told Mic. 

  “Should a future need for more in-depth study on reproductive health in space be identified, NASA would take the appropriate steps.” But, they added, “we are not currently seeking proposals or considering a dedicated field or project office on this topic.”

  Physicist and astronomer John Millis, Ph.D., told BuzzFeed that a male erection would be “challenging in space, though it could still technically be possible, adding similar issues might affect female astronauts.”

  “Vaginal wetness could be an issue as the fluid-like sweat and tears – will tend to pool at the location of secretion in the absence of gravity. This wouldn’t inhibit arousal necessarily, but I imagine it would be uncomfortable or unpleasant,” Millis added.

  With the creation of private space organizations, like Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, it might be easier than ever for the space agency to study sex in space. Even a ‘quickie’ could be examined on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spacecraft. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 23:20

• Joe Biden’s Electric Car Plans Support The World’s Worst Humanitarian Abuses
  Joe Biden’s Electric Car Plans Support The World’s Worst Humanitarian Abuses

  Authored by Tom Harris via RealClear Energy (emphasis ours),

  In his State of the Union Address, President Joe Biden promoted electric vehicles (EVs), trumpeting his plans to establish “a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations.” In so doing, Biden is unwittingly supporting the worst humanitarian abuses in the world. This is because of the way in which the materials used in manufacturing the batteries that power today’s EVs are obtained.

  

  To obtain a reasonable amount of power per pound of battery weight, EV manufacturers generally use various forms of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, so named because the battery’s positive electrode, called the cathode, is largely made up of the highly reactive metal lithium (Li). To keep the cathode stable when a battery is not in use, the lithium is combined in a metal oxide matrix, with different manufacturers using different combinations of metals.

  Most EV manufacturers combine lithium with nickel, cobalt and manganese to create a Li-Ni-Mn-Co oxide matrix to form the cathode. Tesla substitutes aluminum (Al) for the manganese, yielding a Li-Ni-Co-Al oxide matrix for the cathode on their batteries. Tesla maintains that their formulae is more cost-effective as less cobalt is required.

  In all cases, the negative electrode, called the anode, in an EV battery is composed mostly of graphite.

  To support the huge EV expansion being promoted by Biden, we will need immense quantities of the materials needed to manufacture EV batteries, for example, lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel, manganese and aluminum. Let’s consider the sources of just three of these substances—lithium, cobalt and graphite—to see where the human rights issues arise.

  In a normal 1,000-pound Li-ion EV battery, there is about 25 pounds of lithium. Since lithium brines typically contain less than 0.1% lithium, about 25,000 pounds of brines are needed to get the 25 pounds of pure lithium. This is mainly extracted from Tibet and the highlands of Argentina-Bolivia-Chile (according to the U.S. Geological Survey, 58% of the world’s lithium reserves are found in Chile) known as the “lithium triangle.” Lithium production in Tibet results in dead, toxic fish, and carcasses of cows and yaks floating down the Liqi River. The Ganzizhou Rongda Li mine in Tibet has thoroughly poisoned this river.

  Similarly, native peoples in the lithium triangle face contaminated streams needed for human consumption, livestock watering, irrigation systems with mountains left desolate over discarded salt from the lithium brining process. A report titled, “COMMODITIES AT A GLANCE Special issue on strategic battery raw materials” issued in 2020 by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development explained: 

  “Indigenous communities that have lived in the Andean region of Chile, Bolivia and Argentina for centuries must contend with miners for access to communal land and water. The mining industry depends on a large amount of groundwater in one of the driest desert regions in the world to pump out brines from drilled wells. Some estimates show that approximately 1.9 million litres of water is needed to produce a tonne of lithium. In Chile’s Salar de Atacama, lithium and other mining activities consumed 65 per cent of the region’s water. That is having a big impact on local farmers – who grow quinoa and herd llamas – in an area where some communities already must get water driven in from elsewhere.”

  A 1,000-pound Li-ion EV battery typically also contains about 30 pounds of cobalt. Cobalt ore grades average about 0.1%, so we need to process almost 30,000 pounds of ore to get 30 pounds of cobalt. With 50% of the world’s cobalt reserves, the Democratic Republic of Congo contributes almost two-thirds of global cobalt production. This is causing immense humanitarian abuses. Congo has at least 40,000 children—some as young as 4-years old—working with their parents for less than $2 a day. They are exposed to multiple psychological violations and abuse as well as significant physical risks. Engineer and energy consultant Ronald Stein and Todd Royal, an independent public policy consultant focusing on the geopolitical implications of energy, go into more details in their book Clean Energy Exploitations – Helping citizens understand the environmental and humanity abuses that support ‘clean’ energy”:

  “Cave-in’s, constant exposure to toxic, radioactive water, dust, and dangerous air loaded with cobalt, lead, and uranium with other heavy metals breathed into lungs day-after-day so western citizens can feel good about their Tesla or wind turbine. Cobalt ore is sent to China since one of the larger mines in the Congo is Chinese-owned Congo Dongfang International Mining Company.”

  A 1,000-pound EV battery also has 110 pounds of graphite. At 10% concentration, 1,100 pounds of ore must be processed for each battery. China is now producing about 70% of the global supply of natural graphite. Villagers living near graphite companies in provinces in Northeast China complain of “sparkling night air,” crop damage, homes and belongings covered in soot and polluted drinking water.

  In his State of the Union address, Biden spoke of promoting “environmental justice” and “expanding fairness.” The president said, “I will be honest with you, as I’ve always promised.”

  Biden must now be honest about electric vehicles. They grossly violate basic environmental justice principles and are anything but fair to the poor of the world who suffer and die so that wealthy western elites can virtue signal with their electric vehicles.

  Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 23:00

• Russia Threatens To Leave US Astronaut And Abandon Space Station 
  Russia Threatens To Leave US Astronaut And Abandon Space Station 

  Two decades of space cooperation between the U.S. and Russia could be coming to an end after the U.S. and its allies imposed crippling sanctions on the country. The Russian government announced Friday that it might abandon a U.S. astronaut set to return to Earth. 

  

  Fox News reports that the Russian Space Agency head, Dmitry Rogozin, has “threatened to leave” U.S. astronaut Mark Vande Hei aboard the International Space Station (ISS), who is scheduled to return to Earth on a Russian spacecraft by the end of the month. 

  JUST IN: Russia threatens to abandon ‘American Astronaut’ in spacepic.twitter.com/ybTrf8TR8e

  — Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) March 11, 2022

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  “Rogozin posted a threatening video on social media casting doubt over the astronaut’s safety. He also warned that without the help from Russia to move the ISS away from space junk, the station would crash into the U.S.,” reports the Express. 

  Relations in space are souring as the U.S. and its Western allies hammer Russia’s economy with devastating sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine. This angered Moscow so much that they threatened to deorbit the ISS last month. 

  Former U.S. astronaut Scott Kelly recently told ABC News that Russia’s threat to the safety of Americans on ISS is “not really based on reality.” 

  “We do have the ability to control the orbit of the space station independent of the Russian space agency, so I don’t really see that happening,” Kelly said. 

  Even if the Russians were to abandon the U.S. astronaut and ISS altogether, Elon Musk has suggested his space company SpaceX could keep the ISS from deorbiting and even shuttle astronauts and cargo to and from Earth. 

  Vande Hei holds the record for longest space flight (at 355 days). It remains to be seen in three weeks if the Russians will allow him to board the spacecraft bound for Kazakhstan with two Russian cosmonauts. If not, maybe Musk can send a rocket with a Dragon capsule to the ISS. 

  Things are so bad between the U.S. and Russia that Rogozin ordered flags of the U.S. and its allies to be removed off Russian rockets.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 22:40

• Escobar: Cutting Through the Fog Masking 'A New Page In The Art Of War'
  Escobar: Cutting Through the Fog Masking ‘A New Page In The Art Of War’

  Authored by Pepe Escobar,

  The non-government in Kiev is simply not allowed by the Empire to negotiate anything.

  

  By now what we may call a Triple Threat has been established as the catalyst anticipating the launch of Operation Z.

  1. Ukraine developing nuclear weapons. Zelensky himself hinted at it in the Munich Security Conference.

  2. U.S. bioweapons labs in Ukraine. Confirmed, tersely, by none other than the Sinister Cookie Distributor neocon wife in the uber-neocon Kaganate of Nulands, who described them as “biological research facilities”. ”

  3. An imminent attack on Donbass with massive civilian deaths. It could have been in March, according to documents seized by the Russian Ministry of Defense. Or even in late February, according to SVR intelligence, which was monitoring the line of contact on a minute-by-minute basis. This is what eventually prompted Operation Z as a Russian version of R2P (“Responsibility to Protect”).

  So after years of CIA-instigated shouts of “conspiracy theory!” and less than zero “fact checkers” activity, it turns out “it was all happening in Ukraine”, as divine messenger Maria Zakharova once again pointed out: “We have found your own products. We have found your biological material.”

  The first-class investigative work of Dilyana Gaytandzhieva on Pentagon bioweapons was fully vindicated.

  Based on documents received from Ukrainian biolab employees, the Russian ModD revealed that research with samples of bat coronavirus, among other experiments, were conducted in a Pentagon-funded biolab.

  The purpose of all this research – which included another Pentagon project to study the transfer of pathogens by wild birds migrating between Ukraine and Russia and other neighboring countries – was “to create a mechanism for the covert spread of deadly pathogens.”

  In trademark pysop mode, everything was turned upside down by the United States government: those evil Russkies could take control of biological samples, so any “accident” involving biological and chemical weapons in Ukraine would have to be blamed on Russia.

  The White House, in yet another flagrant display of unredeemable stupidity, accused Russia of “false claims” and China of “endorsing this propaganda”.

  Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov came up with the adult perspective: “The whole world will be interested to know what exactly the American bio-laboratories in Ukraine were doing.”

  Down on the ground

  Meanwhile, defying the fog of war while being targeted by Kiev’s free distribution of weapons without any measure of control, civilians on the path of Operation Z confirmed over and over again that Azov neo-Nazis prevent them from escaping encircled towns and villages. These Banderastan fanatics are the shock troops transforming Ukraine into a large Idlib – according to His Master’s Voice’s plan.

  Neo-Nazis are doing exactly what ISIS/Daesh did in Syria: hiding behind civilians taken as hostages. Azov are the white clones of ISIS/Daesh. After all they learned their tactics from the same masters.

  They will be bolstered by a fresh contingent of 450 fighters just arrived from – where else – Idlib, including lots of non-Syrians from Europe and the Maghreb. Most though are al-Qaedites and members of the Syrian branch of the Turkestan Islamic Party. Their transit point: the Syria-Turkish border, a smuggling free-for-all.

  As it stands, the most detailed macro-view of how strategic Operation Z is developing has been outlined here.  The inestimable Andrei Martyanov describes it as a “combined arms police operation”: a delicate crossover between formation-level warfare (“combined arms”) and a police operation to arrest and/or destroy criminals (the full extent of “demilitarization” and “denazification”).

  For an undiluted, down and dirty, eye to the ground perspective (translated into English), it’s hard to beat Russian military man

  Alexander Dubrovsky. He stresses how the objectives of the operation are “strategy and tactics”; and proceeding with haste is out of the question in this “completely new page in the art of war.”

  Cutting through the fog, no one could realistically expect any breakthrough out of the meeting between Foreign Ministers Lavrov and Kuleba on the sidelines of the Diplomatic Forum in Antalya – as much as Turkey may have played a constructive role.

  The non-government in Kiev is simply not allowed by the Empire to negotiate anything. The only tactic in town is stalling. Operation Z – or “the war” – could be stopped with a simple phone call from the Comedian in Kiev.

  Lavrov at least was quite explicit on some key issues. Russia does not want war; never used oil and gas as a weapon; and wants Ukraine to be neutral.

  The West, Lavrov added, refuses to understand the concept of “indivisibility of security”; those who supply Ukraine with weapons and send mercenaries should understand “they’re responsible for their actions”; and referring to the hysterical sanctions swamp, he stressed, “we will do everything to no longer depend on the West in any strategic sectors of our life.”

  It’s quite enlightening to juxtapose Lavrov with clueless NATOstan “analysts”, totally ignorant of Eurasia and pontificating about “a new ideological conflict between irredentist tyrannies and liberal democracies”. It’s about sovereignty, stupid – not ideology.

  NATOstan of course is incapable of understanding the process of Nazification of Ukraine – the key theme of any serious political/cultural/sociological analysis. It’s not an accident that the list of nations supporting the neoNazi-infested collapsed government in Kiev happens to largely coincide with the list of nations that refused to vote in favor of the UN resolution condemning the rehabilitation of Nazism.

  In historical terms, these “analysts” might learn something by reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard. Bulgakov considered Ukraine as an avowedly reductionist version of “the steppe”: culturally barren, not capable of creating anything, destined to barbaric destruction. It’s important to remember that when Ukraine attempted to constitute itself as a state in 1918-1920, cultural and industrial centers such as Odessa, Kherson, Nikolaev, Kharkov, Luhansk had never been Ukrainian. And western Ukraine for a long while was part of Poland.

  All aboard the Eurasian train

  On the economic front, the dogs of hybrid war bark while the Eurasia integration caravan marches on – with the Empire irretrievably being pushed outside of the Eurasian landmass.

  In a phone call prior to the Lavrov-Kuleba meeting in Antalya, President Erdogan suggested to Putin setting up a trading mechanism in gold and also rubles, yuan and Turkish lira to beat the Western sanction hysteria. The source is Abdulkadir Selvi, very close to Erdogan. No Russia-China official comment yet.

  The key fact is that Russia, China, and for that matter the entire Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – responsible for at least 30% of global GDP and the bulk of the Eurasian market – don’t need the West at all.

  As Peter Koenig, a former senior economist at the World Bank points out, “Western GDP has a different basis, with blown out of proportion services, whereas the GDP of the SCO and the Global South is production-based. A huge difference when one looks at the backing of currencies: in the West there is literally none. Eastern currencies are mostly backed by national economies, especially in China and soon in Russia too. That leads to self-sufficiency, and no longer reliance on the West.”

  In the larger geopolitical spectrum, the non-stop war of attrition by the Empire against Russia with Ukraine as a pawn is a war against the New Silk Roads; Maidan in 2014 took place only a few months after the launching of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), then OBOR (One Belt, One Road) in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. It’s also a war on the Russian concept of Greater Eurasia Partnership. In sum: it’s an all-out war on Eurasia integration.

  And that bring us to the key aspect of BRI: Eurasia rail/road connectivity – between China and the EU and with one corridor traversing Russia. The coordinated NATOstan sanction hysteria is not only against Russia, but also against China.

  For the Beltway, BRI is beyond anathema: it’s almost like the Beast of the Apocalypse. As a response, the West even has concocted puny schemes such as the American B3W (“Build Back Better World) and the EU’s Global Gateway. Their impact, so far, does not even qualify as negligible.

  Ukraine in itself is not a problem for BRI; traffic is only 2% of eastbound China-Europe freight trains. But Russia is another story.

  According to Feng Xubin, Vice Chairman of the China-Europe Railway Express Transportation Coordination Committee, the freight settlement system between China and Russia may be in trouble: “At present, freight is denominated in dollars […] If the West cuts off Russia’s intermediate settlement channel in the international financial system, it means that the settlement system for freight charges between China and Russia will not be able to proceed normally.”

  From the EU’s point of view, trade interruptions are not exactly a good deal. China-EU freight traffic increased over 100% last year.

  For instance, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) are co-financing a 67 km high-speed rail stretch from Istanbul to the Bulgarian border.

  Sanctions on Russia will definitely affect the trans-Eurasia supply chain – on transportation, ports, insurance, communications. Yet quite a few sanctions may be revised later on, as the EU itself starts to feel the pain.

  China will have an abundance of Plan Bs. The key northern BRI corridor remains China-Kazakhstan-Russia-Belarus-EU, but there is a possible detour via the Caspian, in Aktau in Kazakhstan. There will be extra incentive to fully link the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway with the Turkish grid. And there will be extra movement in the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), with Baku connecting to the Iranian Caspian Sea coast and by rail to ultra-strategic Chabahar port.

  So we may be heading towards extra impetus for BRI’s multimodal southern corridor – bypassing Russia: that means a boost for Turkey, the Caucasus and the Caspian. And no losses for China. As for Russia, even if this re-routing may last for a while, it’s not such a big deal. After all from now on Russia will be developing intensive trade towards the east and south of Eurasia, and not towards the sanctioning West.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 22:20

• Mapped: Where America's Truckers Live, By State
  Mapped: Where America’s Truckers Live, By State

  In 2021, the U.S. imported $2.8 trillion worth of goods.

  This incredible quantity of goods – along with much of what is produced domestically – is handled by the country’s 1.8 million truckers, which represents the 14th most common occupation nationally.

  To see how these truckers are distributed across the nation, Visual Captalist’s Marcus Lu has visualized data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to create two separate heat maps.

  Key Findings from the Data

  The relative density of each state’s truckers is measured by their location quotient.

  This represents the ratio of truckers in a state compared to the national average (both as a % of total employment). For example, if truckers made up 10% of a state’s employment, and the national average was 2%, the location quotient for that state would be 5.

  

  There are four states with a location quotient of two or more: Arkansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Iowa. This means that their trucker workforce (as a % of total employment) is at least double the national average.

  On the other hand, California and New York have some of the lowest location quotients in the country. Trucking companies have been competing fiercely to attract drivers in these areas, but with limited success.

  At a time when the whole American population is aging, truck drivers tend to be older than average. The work is stressful, lonely, exhausting and long plagued by a pay system that can make drivers feel they can’t get ahead of the game.

  – LOS ANGELES TIMES

  To entice more young people to enter the industry, New York recently created a truck driver training program for 18-20 year olds. Some have voiced their concerns about safety, though few alternatives exist. In October 2021, the American Trucking Association (ATA) announced that the national driver shortage had reached a record-breaking 80,000.

  A Different Perspective

  The location quotient is an effective measure because it controls for the differences in each state’s population. Seeing the raw data, though, can still add useful perspective.

  The following image shows the number of trucker’s in each state. As a reminder, the national total is 1.8 million.

  

  With these numbers, we can gain a more practical understanding of the location quotient. For instance, California has the second highest number of truckers, but it’s dwarfed by the state’s massive population of 40 million.

  Occupation Outlook

  The BLS expects employment of truck drivers to grow by 6% from 2020 to 2030, which is close to the national average for all jobs. Based on total employment of 1.8 million, this would translate to 108,000 new openings.

  Whether these openings will be filled is an entirely different story.

  In the American Trucking Association’s latest report, analysts estimate that the industry will need to recruit 1 million drivers just to replace retiring drivers, or those that leave voluntarily.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 22:00

• DuckDuckGo Updates Search Engine, Will Penalize Sites 'Associated With Disinformation'
  DuckDuckGo Updates Search Engine, Will Penalize Sites ‘Associated With Disinformation’

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The search engine DuckDuckGo has begun penalizing sites linked to “Russian disinformation” amid the Russia–Ukraine war, according to the company’s CEO.

  “Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create,” Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO, wrote on social media.

  “At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation,” he added.

  

  DuckDuckGo is also placing boxes with information at the top of the search results page “to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics,” Weinberg added.

  In addition to down-ranking sites associated with disinformation, we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics.

  — Gabriel Weinberg (@yegg) March 10, 2022

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  DuckDuckGo’s mission is to make simple privacy protection accessible to all. Privacy is a human right and transcends politics, which is why about 100 million people around the world use DuckDuckGo. (We don’t have an exact count since we don’t track people.)

  — Gabriel Weinberg (@yegg) March 10, 2022

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  DuckDuckGo is an alternative to Google that has been growing in popularity in recent years in part because it doesn’t track users. Weinberg has in the past promised “unbiased results” as part of his pitch to people to switch from Google.

  Some users quickly questioned the CEO’s update, including Tom Fitton, president of the Judicial Watch nonprofit.

  DuckDuckGo, “contrary to its implicit promises to the contrary, is now in the censorship business,” he wrote on Twitter. “Are there any search engines that respect users?”

  .@DuckDuckGo, contrary to its implicit promises to the contrary, is now in the censorship business. Are there any search engines that respect users? https://t.co/uUvzKhI5YQ

  — Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) March 10, 2022

  “Today, you are removing Russian disinformation Tomorrow you will be removing genuine protests,” another user wrote. 

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  Disinformation like the Russian bounty story? Or that drone strike that killed kids? Or Jussie Smollette? Or the Covington kids hoax?

  — Cernovich (@Cernovich) March 10, 2022

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  I understand your good intentions but not interfering like Google does to pick what’s disinformation and what’s not is why people use your product. Without that freedom you’re just baby Google. Please rethink this.

  — Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) March 10, 2022

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  Agreed. There should be an emergency executive/board meeting in response to this and a 180 degree reversal.

  — Larry Sanger (@lsanger) March 10, 2022

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  DuckDuckGo did not respond to a request for comment.

  

  Weinberg later responded to some of the critics.

  “Search engines by definition try to put more relevant content higher and less relevant content lower—that’s not censorship, it’s search ranking relevancy,” he said.

  Google has been placing Russian state media posts lower on its results since 2017.

  “We don’t want to ban the sites. That’s not how we operate. I am strongly not in favor of censorship. I am very strongly in favor of ranking. It’s what we do,” Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, said at the time.

  Russia Today, one of the outlets, pushed back then, saying, “His colleagues admitted three weeks ago that RT did not violate any rules of the platform.”

  Google also suspended selling online advertising in Russia in early March.

  Around the same time, Katie McInnis, a senior public policy manager for DuckDuckGo, told a congressional panel that the company suspended its relationship with Yandex, a Russian search engine.

  “In light of Russia’s assault on democracy and Ukraine, we have paused our relationship with Yandex,” McInnis told the House Committee on Energy & Commerce. “The index was used to provide traditional links, meaning non-news links, in Russia and Turkey.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 21:40

• North Korea Rebuilds Nuclear Testing Site After 2018 Collapse
  North Korea Rebuilds Nuclear Testing Site After 2018 Collapse

  Following the flurry of recent North Korean nuclear missile tests (the rogue state has launched at least 9 ICBMs so far this year), South Korea has reportedly detected signs that its neighbor to the north is rebuilding some of the nuclear test-site tunnels that collapsed back in 2018 (killing an undisclosed number of North Korean workers), as North Korea is believed to be paving the way for more ICBM tests, according to Reuters.

  North Korea symbolically destroyed the test site at Punggye-ri back in 2018. It destroyed the tunnels after a collapse late in the prior year likely rendered them unusable. The decision to blow up the tunnel was seen as part of a diplomatic rapproachment with the south.

  The confirmation from South Korea comes just days after private satellites picked up evidence of activity at the site, according to the BBC.

  

  But now that NK is rebuilding tunnels at the nuclear test site, it’s raising questions about whether the regime of Kim Jong Un plans to start testing the weapons again.

  North Korea hasn’t tested a nuclear weapon, or its longest range intercontinental ballistic missiles, since 2017.  But it has said it could resume such testing now that denuclearization talks with the US have stalled. North Korea also appears to have blown up tunnels at its only nuclear test site in a move to reduce regional tensions.

  The report came after the National Security Council said on Sunday it was paying particularly close attention to Punggye-ri and the main nuclear reactor site at Yongbyon.

  “Activity to restore part of the tunnels at North Korea’s Punggye-ri nuclear test site that were destroyed on May 24, 2018 has been detected,” South Korea’s military said in a statement.

  It didn’t elaborate any further on the type of activity detected.

  International monitors have also said that North Korea’s nuclear reactor facility at Yongbyon appear to be in full swing.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 21:20

• Democrat Spending Bill Contains 'Serious Expansion of Federal Gun Control': Gun Rights Group
  Democrat Spending Bill Contains ‘Serious Expansion of Federal Gun Control’: Gun Rights Group

  Authored by Joseph Lord via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Democrats’ $1.5 trillion omnibus spending package, unveiled early Wednesday, includes provisions that constitute “a serious expansion of federal gun control” according to the National Association for Gun Rights.

  

  Specifically, the omnibus bill includes the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).

  Though there is bipartisan consensus that violence against women is bad—more limited forms of the bill have passed through bipartisan votes since the first draft was introduced in 1994—more recent forms of the legislation have been controversial with Republicans for provisions relating to gun ownership.

  Due to continued efforts by Democrats to include gun control measures in the legislation, the bill was last passed into law in 2013, and has faced steep opposition from pro-Second Amendment Republicans since then.

  Currently, almost all firearm sales require a background check through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Purchasers who are tagged as having a criminal background barring them from possessing a firearm are tagged in the system and are not allowed to carry out the purchase.

  However, VAWA takes this system much further.

  Under its provisions, the attorney general is required “to issue a notice to State, local, or Tribal law enforcement and prosecutors if an individual has attempted to purchase a firearm and been denied pursuant to the national instant criminal background check system.”

  In other words, an attempt to buy a firearm while legally barred from owning one can be met with criminal investigation.

  In a statement, the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) warned that this system is dangerous.

  “Over 95 percent of all NICS denials are false positives, which means all local and state police would be required to investigate law-abiding citizens when they’re wrongly and unconstitutionally denied the right to purchase a firearm,” NAGR said.

  “Make no mistake—the NICS denial reporting embedded inside the Violence Against Women Act constitutes a serious expansion of federal gun control,” said Dudley Brown, president of the NAGR. “Not only does it rapidly expand federal gun control policy, it would actually endanger women, not keep them safe.”

  Brown also argued that women would be hurt by the bill, which could deny them the right to get a firearm while allowing their abusers to slide past the system.

  “Quite literally we will find ourselves in a situation where law-abiding women who need to arm themselves for self-defense get wrongfully denied a firearm purchase when the National Instant Check System wrongly flags them, and then find themselves being investigated by the cops for doing nothing wrong,” Brown said.

  “Meanwhile their abusers will be able to come after them knowing they’re likely to be unarmed. This is truly sickening expansion of gun control and it should be opposed by every pro-gun Member of Congress.”

  Gun Owners of America (GOA), another Second Amendment advocacy group, agreed.

  “The inclusion of the VAWA gun control provisions is a blatant attempt to restrict the Second Amendment and override [Second Amendment] sanctuary state laws,” Aidan Johnston, GOA’s Director of Federal Affairs, told the Epoch Times. “Even worse, anti-gun Democrats have circumvented typical congressional procedures to sneak this gun control through in the middle of the night on a spending bill.”

  The draft of VAWA included in the omnibus bill is less expansive than other forms of the same legislation has been.

  Proponents of gun control have long pushed for federal law to close the so-called “boyfriend loophole.” Though domestic abusers are prohibited from possessing a firearm arm if they were married to the person they abused, many state and federal laws do not extend the same prohibition to unmarried couples.

  To close this loophole, some Democrats and gun control groups have called for federal law to prohibit unmarried domestic abusers as well as those who are or were married to the person they abused.

  The omnibus bill’s draft of VAWA would not do so, as the measure has faced criticism from gun rights advocacy groups in the past.

  In a February statement on the latest draft of VAWA Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a proponent of the bill, admitted that the bill “is not perfect,” but insisted that it would strengthen “existing programs to support survivors and to prevent and to respond to domestic violence, and that’s dating violence and sexual assault and stalking.”

  After a draft of the bill closing the “boyfriend loophole” passed the House in 2021—later to fail in the Senate—the Brady Campaign, a gun control advocacy group, applauded the bill, saying it contained “common-sense solutions” and showed “the clear need to stop violence against women.”

  Though this draft of the bill is somewhat less expansive than previous drafts have been, it could endanger the omnibus package in the Senate, where a bill must achieve at least 60-votes to end debate before it can go to a simple majority floor vote. If at least 41 senators oppose the measure, the bill would fail in the Senate, potentially sending Democrats scrambling to beat the deadline for a government shutdown set to begin late on Friday.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 21:00

• Russia Soars Past Iran & Syria To Become World's 'Most-Sanctioned' Country
  Russia Soars Past Iran & Syria To Become World’s ‘Most-Sanctioned’ Country

  In the wake of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has become the most-sanctioned country in the world with 5,581 sanctions currently in place. Between its recognition of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions as independent states on February 22 and March 8, the number of sanctions against Russian individuals and entities imposed by the U.S., the EU and select countries like Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Japan more than doubled when compared to the period prior.

  As Statista’s Florian Zandt shows in the chart below, based on data aggregated by Castellum.AI, Putin’s invasion has pushed Russia past one of the United States’ biggest nemeses in Western Asia.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, Iran was by far the most-sanctioned state in history with 3,616 active sanctions by the U.S., the UN, the EU and countries like Australia, Canada, India and Israel. The relationship between the latter and the Islamic Republic has been especially fraught, with disputes surrounding Iran’s atomic arsenal and its general hostile stance towards Israel threatening to escalate on a regular basis.

  A majority of the sanctions imposed on Syria, which ranks third on Castellum.AI’s list, stem from the events surrounding the Syrian civil war starting in 2011. Following civil unrest in connection with the Arab Spring movement, clashes between President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and an unlikely coalition of foreign and domestic actors often opposed on key issues led to a humanitarian crisis and the internal and foreign displacement of more than half of Syria’s 22 million inhabitants over the years.

  Leading the current round of sanctions against Russia are Switzerland, the EU and France with 568, 516 and 512 restrictions, respectively. The overwhelming majority of those sanctions target individuals, with only 366 of the 2,827 sanctions geared towards entities. Not included in these figures are sectoral sanctions like general trade embargos placed on gas or oil. On top of the sanctions put in place by nation-states and governing bodies, over 300 companies have either partially or completely withdrawn from the Russian market according to researchers at the Yale School of Management, among them industry heavyweights like Adidas, Google, Disney, Exxon or Volkswagen.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 20:40

• The Next Terror Wave Looms
  The Next Terror Wave Looms

  Authored by Emily Estelle via RealClear World (emphasis ours),

  As the world focuses on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and others worry that China will copy Putin’s playbook in Taiwan, the next terror wave against the U.S. is looming.

  

  For a United States that is only prepared for a one-front war, this is more bad news. Salafi-jihadist terrorists are still gunning for us, and the measures meant to contain them are falling apart.

  The decision to retreat ignominiously from Afghanistan assumed, per President Joe Biden’s promises, that the U.S. would somehow sustain an “over the horizon” counterterrorism pressure. This means keeping the ability to strike terrorist targets, despite not having boots on the ground. This capability is required to keep the country from becoming a haven for Salafi-jihadist groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State. But as many predicted, it is not viable. Were the Salafi-jihadist movement’s gains confined solely to Afghanistan, the problem might not be so grave. Instead, these groups are embedding themselves anywhere in the world they can find a governance gap. Salafi-jihadist groups are now active in more than 20 African countries.

  Crises in Africa

  A worrisome crisis is unfolding in Africa. Militaries have launched successful coups in five countries and attempted them in at least four others since 2020. Ethiopia, home to Africa’s second-largest population, has gone from hope to catastrophe in just four years. This level of turmoil is highly unusual for the continent, contrary to the perceptions held by many Americans.

  Slowly but surely, these crises in governance are eating away at the existing system, which, though imperfect, has denied terrorist groups the space they need to operate. The most dramatic change is in Mali, where since 2013 French troops have led counterterrorism missions that now include European, UN, and regional personnel. Mali’s junta, which took power through coups in 2020 and 2021, has pushed back on international and regional pressure to hold elections, recently ousting the French ambassador and curtailing French and European operations in the regions targeted by jihadists. French forces will now reposition from Mali to neighboring countries within six months, taking a European special operations task force with them. This will remove many capabilities that enable regional and UN forces to fight back against militants linked to al Qaeda and the Islamic State in Mali and neighboring regions. Neither the Malian government, nor the Russian mercenaries it hired for regime security, will backfill the counterterrorism mission.

  Political crises are also relieving the pressure against terrorist groups in East Africa. On Feb. 15, the president of Djibouti, home to the U.S. military’s only permanent military base on the continent, reportedly fended off an attempted coup by senior military officers. Meanwhile, political turmoil in Somalia and a pullback of U.S. support have allowed al Shabaab, al Qaeda’s premier affiliate in East Africa, to expand since 2021. The government of Ethiopia — a regional giant with a key counterterrorism role — faces a real risk of collapse. Meanwhile, terrorists are steadily expanding in Eastern Africa, striking Uganda’s capital and entrenching themselves in Mozambique.

  Better policy is not enough

  Many argue that counterterrorism missions are deeply flawed. Structural challenges and missteps doomed the French mission in Mali. Corruption undermines the U.S. effort to train an effective counterterrorism force in Somalia. There are many such examples. Counterterrorism missions have short-term effects: disrupting leadership, recapturing terrain, and preventing groups from coordinating larger attacks locally or transnationally. But military victories only buy time to solve the harder problem — closing the governance gaps that allow Salafi-jihadist insurgencies to form and reform. Kinetic counterterrorism efforts at best do little to improve governance, and at worse reinforce the bad actors who caused the problem in the first place.

  Recognizing the need for better counterterrorism policy does not justify lifting pressure with no alternative in place. History shows that giving Salafi-jihadists more freedom of action will only stoke the terror threat by allowing globally minded jihadists to plan, gain capabilities, and amass resources. For example, al Qaeda’s branches in Yemen and Somalia have both jumped from regional to global threats by pivoting local skills and personnel to attempt attacks on international aviation. Salafi-jihadists will not content themselves with their local victories, but will interpret success as justification to launch new offensives on their enemies near and far.

  The United States is headed for a fortress policy that ignores supposedly minor problems overseas, instead of waking up to the growing threat of proliferating Salafi-jihadist groups and other destabilizing trends including the spread of Russian mercenaries and an ever-more aggressive Chinese outreach in Africa.

  It is imperative that the United States wake up to the crisis of governance in Africa, and look for sustainable solutions to contain, and ultimately roll back, the terror threat. All it takes is one successful terrorist attack on the homeland to drive Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping off the front pages. We cannot afford to forget the Salafi-jihadists. They have certainly not forgotten us.

  Emily Estelle is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the research manager of AEI’s Critical Threats Project. The views expressed are the author’s own.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 20:20

• Democrats Would Lose Control Of Congress If Election Were Held Today, New Polls Show
  Democrats Would Lose Control Of Congress If Election Were Held Today, New Polls Show

  The latest polls out of Washington show that President Biden and his fellow Democrats are continuing to lose ground to the Republicans despite the president’s first State of the Union Address and his recent ban on Russian oil imports.

  According to WSJ’s lastest poll numbers, just 42% of Americans said they approved of President Biden’s performance in office, which was virtually unchanged from the previous WSJ poll in mid-November. That’s also roughly in line with the Real Clear Politics average, which we’ll get to later.

  

  But on the question of who would win control of Congress in November if the vote were held today, the Republicans have a commanding lead at 46% to the Democrats 41% of respondents.

  The president and his fellow Democrats are losing ground on other issues as well.  Take COVID for example: a 16-percentage-point Democratic edge on which party would best handle the pandemic was down to 11 points, while a 9-percentage-point lead on education-related issues had fallen to just 5 percentage points.

  On the issue of responsible stewardship for middle-class families, the 5-point advantage that Democrats enjoyed just four months ago has evaporated to zero.

  Voters also gave Democrats poor marks for handling inflation and the economy, which 50% cited as the top issue they want the federal government to address. The Ukraine conflict was No. 2, with 25% of voters saying it was most important.

  Inflation is also an issue where President Biden has seen his popularity erode. A majority of voters, 63%, said they disapproved of Biden’s handling of rising costs on everything from oil to consumer goods. It was the worst rating for Biden among six policy issues addressed in the poll.

  More voters said that Republicans had a better plan to improve the economy, 45% to 37%, even though Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the party’s leaders in each chamber, have advanced few specific economic-policy proposals they would pursue if they controlled Congress.

  However, the Real Clear Politics aggregate of all the major polls shows President Biden’s headline approval rating has rebounded from its sub-40 percentage point lows.

  Headline approval now stands at roughly 42.8%.

  

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 20:00

• Russian Invasion Of Ukraine Is 'Crime Against Humanity,' Has To End Soon: Trump
  Russian Invasion Of Ukraine Is ‘Crime Against Humanity,’ Has To End Soon: Trump

  Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  

  Former President Donald Trump said on March 10 that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “truly is a crime against humanity” that “never would have happened” if he were still in office.

  Trump made the comments during an interview with Fox News on Thursday night where he also took a swipe at Russian President Vladimir Putin.

  “I’m looking at these scenes on television of things that are happening, and nobody can believe them,” Trump told host Sean Hannity. “So something has to happen, Sean. This can’t continue. This … truly is a crime against humanity. This is something that has to end, and it has to end soon.

  “The problem with Putin, he’s got a very big ego, and if he ends now in most forms, if he ends now, it’s going to look like a big loss for him. Even if he takes a little extra territory. I’ll tell you, Sean, it’s a little hard for Ukraine also, because they are actually doing well, and they would like to see if they could have our country back, but also, what are they getting? They are getting all of these cities, look like they’re almost completely bombed to the ground,” Trump continued.

  Trump also maintained that there was “no chance that this would ever happen” if he were still president, referring to the invasion of Ukraine, adding that during his time in office he had had a “very strong conversation with president Putin and he understood,” before declining to go into details about the alleged conversation.

  “I know him well [Putin] and this is not something that was going to happen but let’s see what happens, let’s watch,” Trump said.

  He also took aim at the Biden administration’s “horrible” and “incompetent” withdrawal from Afghanistan as well as sky-high inflation and the ongoing migrant crisis in the United States.

  “The way that they got out of Afghanistan looked like a complete surrender, and I’ll tell you that Putin was watching … bad things started to happen and they [Putin and other world leaders including Kim Jong-un] no longer respect our country, and that’s how this [Russia’s invasion of Ukraine] came about.

  Trump said he has been watching the “horrible” things taking place in Ukraine, and said they “never should have happened” and it’s a “sad situation” adding that president Putin “doesn’t seem to be the same Putin that I was dealing with” but that “he wouldn’t have changed if I was dealing with him.”

  The former U.S. president also touted the “tremendous amounts of equipment” his administration provided to Ukraine “so that they could defend themselves.”

  When asked by Hannity if his administration would offer to provide fighter jets to Ukraine from Poland, Trump responded that he would have done things “a lot different” than the Biden administration has.

  Poland’s government has called on NATO allies to send jets to U.S. bases which can then be transferred to Ukraine after Ukrainian officials stated that receiving them would help tremendously against the Russian invasion, which began on Feb. 24.

  However, U.S. Department of Defense’s spokesman John Kirby told reporters in Washington earlier this week that the United States won’t act on a proposal from Poland to take fighter jets from the ally and transfer them to Ukraine due to concerns that the Kremlin would view the move as “escalatory.”

  “The intelligence community has assessed the transfer of MiG-29s to Ukraine may be mistaken as escalatory, and could result in significant Russian reaction that might increase the prospects of a military escalation with NATO,” Kirby said, adding that based on the assessment, the military assesses the transfer as “high-risk” and will not carry it out.

  Trump’s comments come shortly after the International Criminal Court said it has launched an investigation into allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide committed in Ukraine.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 19:40

• American Police Have So Much Gear That They're Sending It To Ukraine
  American Police Have So Much Gear That They’re Sending It To Ukraine

  American police departments have so much extra tactical gear that they’re sending it to Ukraine to help the country’s mostly non-professional military fight back against the much more well-equipped Russian military. It’s also worth noting that Ukraine’s annual defense budget is smaller than that of the NYPD.

  

  According to Vice, law enforcement agencies in several states have announced in recent days that they’re donating dozens of pieces of body armor, such as ballistic helmets and vests. Some of the departments and their respective local partners—one of which is a top defense contractor with contracts from both the American and Ukrainian governments. contracts—say the donations will be distributed to the Ukrainian military.

  State law enforcement agencies in Colorado and Vermont both announced Wednesday that they were donating defensive equipment to Ukraine: it was a “coordinating an effort to donate used and expired body-armor vests to military units in Ukraine.” What’s more, the Vermont State Police also encouraged members of the public to donate their own body armor as long as it’s rated Level III or higher by the Department of Justice’s research arm (meaning it’s capable of protecting against some rifle rounds).

  Moving on, one Colorado PD descried the equipment it would be donating, claiming it had aged beyond its recommended life-cycle.

  The Colorado Department of Public Safety said it was donating more than 80 sets of body armor and 750 helmets, and that it was accepting donations from other law enforcement agencies in the state. “This is equipment that we are no longer able to use because it is beyond life cycle, or in some cases it may have been replaced or upgraded by some equipment that maybe better fits our needs or is safer,” Colorado DPS spokesperson Patricia Billinger told local station KARE9.

  The police in Sarasota, Fla. released a message to social media sharing their plans.

  A Message from Sarasota County Sheriff Kurt A. Hoffman. pic.twitter.com/JcY9QHqGOg

  — SarasotaSheriff (@SarasotaSheriff) March 3, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  One small town in central PA said it’s donating bullet-proof vests.

  In Pennsylvania, the Falls Township Police Department, which has 53 sworn officers and is situated about 40 minutes north of Philadelphia, is sending 52 ballistic vests, including 15 “military-grade” vests capable of stopping rifle bullets, although they’re no longer under warranty, according to Falls Township police chief Nelson E. Whitney II.

  “We took 45 vests from the back [of the department’s evidence facility],” Whitney said. “I looked through my basement, and I found a couple I had from over the years, and other officers did the same.”

  Even Yonkers is getting in on the donations, which are being led – at least in their region – by organizers out of Westchester.

  “The war in Ukraine is bearing down unbelievable tragedy upon the Ukrainian people, and the Yonkers Police stands united with them,” Yonkers police commissioner John J. Mueller said in a statement accompanying a press release announcing the donation. “It is our hope that this donation helps in the defense of their homeland.”

  One department decided to send gear at the behest of the wife of one of its officers.

  The department decided to coordinate donations after a request from one of their officers whose wife is Ukrainian and still had family there. The Ukrainian Educational and Cultural Center in nearby Jenkintown, is coordinating the donations and flying supplies from the U.S. to Poland every day, according to Whitney.

  The Biden Administration solicited donations from departments across the country earlier this week. And at least some of the material being distributed might otherwise have been destroyed if it weren’t for Ukraine.

  One sheriff claimed in an announcement that the federal government, including the Department of Defense and State Department, were soliciting donations for Ukraine from state and local law enforcement.Sarasota County Sheriff Kurt Hoffman announced last week that his department would send more than 340 expired ballistics helmets that would otherwise be destroyed to a Pentagon contractor, which would then send them to Ukraine..

  “Many of our Department of Defense (DOD) and State Department contacts have asked the law enforcement community for equipment to help the Ukrainian people push back against this violence and protect their citizens,” Hoffman said on Twitter.

  Of course, some American police departments have too much on their plate to justify sending arms to Ukraine. The Portland Police Department, for example.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 19:20

• Sperry: Ukraine Worked With Democrats Against Trump In 2016 To Stop Putin — And It Backfired Badly
  Sperry: Ukraine Worked With Democrats Against Trump In 2016 To Stop Putin — And It Backfired Badly

  Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClearInvestigations,

  Six years ago, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country, the Ukrainians bet that a Hillary Clinton presidency would offer better protection from Russian President Vladimir Putin, even though he had invaded Crimea during the Obama-Biden administration, whose Russian policies Clinton vowed to continue.

  

  Working with both the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign, Ukrainian government officials intervened in the 2016 race to help Clinton and hurt  Donald Trump in a sweeping and systematic foreign influence operation that’s been largely ignored by the press. The improper, if not illegal, operation was run chiefly out of the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, where officials worked hand-in-glove with a Ukrainian-American activist and Clinton campaign operative to attack the Trump campaign. The Obama White House was also deeply involved in an effort to groom their own favored leader in Ukraine and then work with his government to dig up dirt on – and even investigate — their political rival.

  Ukrainian and Democratic operatives also huddled with American journalists to spread damaging information on Trump and his advisers – including allegations of illicit Russian-tied payments that, though later proved false, forced the resignation of his campaign manager Paul Manafort. The embassy actually weighed a plan to get Congress to investigate Manafort and Trump and stage hearings in the run-up to the election.

  As it worked behind the scenes to undermine Trump, Ukraine also tried to kneecap him publicly. Ukraine’s ambassador took the extraordinary step of attacking Trump in an Op-Ed article published in The Hill, an influential U.S. Capitol newspaper, while other top Ukrainian officials slammed the GOP candidate on social media.

  

  At first glance, it was a bad bet as Trump upset Clinton. But by the end of his first year in office, Trump had supplied Ukrainians what the Obama administration refused to give them: tank-busting Javelin missiles and other lethal weapons to defend themselves against Russian incursions. Putin never invaded on Trump’s watch. Instead, he launched an all-out invasion during another Democratic administration – one now led by President Biden, Barack Obama’s former Vice President, whose Secretary of State last year alarmed Putin by testifying, “We support Ukraine’s membership in NATO.” Biden boasted he’d go “toe to toe” with Putin, but that didn’t happen as the autocrat amassed tanks along Ukraine’s border in response to the NATO overtures.

  The Ukrainian mischief is part of Special Counsel John Durham’s broader inquiry – now a full-blown criminal investigation with grand jury indictments – into efforts to falsely target Trump as a Kremlin conspirator in 2016 and beyond.

  Sources say Durham has interviewed several Ukrainians, but it’s not likely the public will find out exactly what he’s learned about the extent of Ukraine’s meddling in the election until he releases his final report, which sources say could be several months away.

  In the meantime, a comprehensive account of documented Ukrainian collusion – including efforts to assist the FBI in its 2016 probe of Manafort – is pieced together here for the first time. It draws from an archive of previously unreported records generated from a secret Federal Election Commission investigation of the Democratic National Committee that includes never-before-reviewed sworn affidavits, depositions, contracts, emails, text messages, legal findings and other documents from the case. RealClearInvestigations also examined diplomatic call transcripts, White House visitor logs, lobbying disclosure forms, congressional reports and closed-door congressional testimony, as well as information revealed by Ukrainian and Democratic officials in social media postings, podcasts and books.

  2014: Prelude to Collusion

  

  The coordination between Ukrainian and Democratic officials can be traced back at least to January 2014. It was then when top Obama diplomats – many of whom now hold top posts in the Biden administration – began engineering regime change in Kiev, eventually installing a Ukrainian leader they could control.

  On Jan. 27, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt phoned Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland at her home in Washington to discuss picking opposition leaders to check the power of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, whom they believed was too cozy with Putin. “We’ve got to do something to make it stick together,” Pyatt said of a planned coalition government, adding that they needed “somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing.”

  Nuland responded that Biden’s security adviser Jake Sullivan had just told her that the vice president – who was acting as Obama’s point man in Ukraine – would give his blessing to the deal. “Biden’s willing,” she said. But they agreed they had to “move fast” and bypass the European Union. “Fuck the EU,” Nuland told the ambassador, according to a leaked transcript of their call.

  

  Nuland’s role in the political maneuvering was not limited to phone calls. She traveled to Kiev and helped organize street demonstrations against Yanukovych, even handing out sandwiches to protesters. In effect, Obama officials greased a revolution. Within months, Yanukovych was exiled and replaced by Petro Poroshenko, who would later do Biden’s bidding – including firing a prosecutor investigating his son Hunter. Poroshenko would also later support Clinton’s White House bid after Biden decided not to run, citing the death of his older son Beau.

  The U.S. meddling resulted in the installation of an anti-Putin government next door to Russia. A furious Putin viewed the interference as an attempted coup and soon marched into Crimea.

  Nuland is now Biden’s undersecretary of state and Sullivan serves as his national security adviser.

  Whispering in their ear at the time was a fiery pro-Ukraine activist and old Clinton hand, Alexandra “Ali” Chalupa. A daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, Chalupa informally advised the State Department and White House in early 2014. She organized multiple meetings between Ukraine experts and the National Security Council to push for Yanukovych’s ouster and economic sanctions against Putin.

  In the NSC briefings, Chalupa also agitated against longtime attorney-lobbyist Manafort, who at the time was an American consultant for Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, which she viewed as a cat’s paw of Putin. She warned that Manafort worked for Putin’s interests and posed a national security threat.

  At the same time, Chalupa worked closely with then-Vice President Biden’s team, setting up conference calls with his staff and Ukrainians.

  Another influential adviser at the time was former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who provided Nuland with written reports on the Ukrainian crisis and Russia that echoed Chalupa’s warnings. Nuland treated them as classified intelligence, and between the spring of 2014 and early 2016, she received some 120 reports on Ukraine and Russia from Steele.

  2015: The Move Against Manafort Commences

  

  In April 2015, the DNC hired Chalupa as a $5,000-a-month consultant, according to a copy of her contract, which ran through the 2016 election cycle. (Years earlier, Chalupa had worked full-time for the DNC as part of the senior leadership team advising Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.) After Trump threw his hat in the ring in June 2015, Chalupa grew concerned that Manafort was or would be involved with his campaign since Manafort had known Trump for decades and lived in Trump Tower. She expressed her concerns to top DNC officials and “the DNC asked me to do a hit on Trump,” according to a transcript of a 2019 interview on her sister’s podcast. (Andrea Chalupa, who describes herself as a journalist, boasted in a November 2016 tweet: “My sister led Trump/Russia research at DNC.”)

  Chalupa began encouraging journalists both in America and Ukraine to dig into Manafort’s dealings in Ukraine and expose his alleged Russian connections. She fed unsubstantiated rumors, tips and leads to the Washington Post and New York Times, as well as CNN, speaking to reporters on background so a DNC operative wouldn’t be sourced.

  “I spent many, many hours working with reporters on background, directing them to contacts and sources, and giving them information,” Chalupa said.

  But no reporter worked closer with her than Yahoo News correspondent Michael Isikoff. He even accompanied her to the Ukrainian Embassy, where they brainstormed attacks on Manafort and Trump, according to FEC case files.

  Chalupa was also sounding alarm bells in the White House. In November 2015, for example, she set up a White House meeting between a Ukrainian delegation including Ukraine Ambassador Valeriy Chaly and NSC advisers – among them Eric Ciaramella, a young CIA analyst on loan to the White House who later would play a significant role as anonymous “whistleblower” in Trump’s first impeachment. In addition to Putin’s aggression, the group discussed the alleged security threat from Manafort. Chalupa was back in the White House in December. All told, she would visit the Obama White House at least 27 times, Secret Service logs show, including attending at least one event with the president in 2016.

  

  January 2016: High-Level Meetings With Ukrainians in the White House

  On Jan. 12, 2016 – almost a month before the first GOP primary – Chalupa told top DNC official Lindsey Reynolds she was seeing strong indications that Putin was trying to steal the 2016 election for Trump. Emails also show that she promised to lead an effort to expose Manafort – whom Trump would not officially hire as his campaign chairman until May – and link him and Trump to the Russian government. That same day, Chalupa visited the White House.

  A week later, Obama officials gathered with Ukrainian officials traveling from Kiev in the White House for a series of senior-level meetings to, among other things, discuss reviving a long-closed investigation into payments to American consultants working for the Party of Regions, according to Senate documents. The FBI had investigated Manafort in 2014 but no charges resulted.

  One of the attendees, Ukrainian Embassy political officer Andrii Telizhenko, recalled Justice Department officials asking investigators with Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, or NABU, if they could help find fresh evidence of party payments to such U.S. figures. (Three years later, Democrats would impeach Trump for allegedly asking Ukraine to dig up dirt on a political rival, Joe Biden.)

  The Obama administration’s enforcement agencies leaned on their Ukrainian counterparts to investigate Manafort, shifting resources from an investigation of a corrupt Ukrainian energy oligarch who paid Biden’s son hundreds of thousands of dollars through his gas company, Burisma.

  “Obama’s NSC hosted Ukrainian officials and told them to stop investigating Hunter Biden and start investigating Paul Manafort,” said a former senior NSC official who has seen notes and emails generated from the meetings and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

  Suddenly, the FBI reopened its Manafort investigation. “In January 2016, the FBI initiated a money laundering and tax evasion investigation of Manafort predicated on his activities as a political consultant to members of the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian politicians,” according to a report by the Justice Department’s watchdog.

  The White House summit with Ukrainian officials ran for three days, ending on Jan. 21, according to a copy of the agenda stamped with the Justice Department logo. It was organized and hosted by Ciaramella and his colleague Liz Zentos from the NSC. Other U.S. officials included Justice prosecutors and FBI agents, as well as State Department diplomats. The Ukrainian delegation included Artem Sytnyk, the head of NABU, and other Ukrainian prosecutors.

  Ciaramella was a CIA detailee to the White House occupying the NSC’s Ukraine desk in 2015 and 2016. In that role, Ciaramella met face-to-face with top Ukrainian officials and provided policy advice to Biden through the then-vice president’s security adviser Michael Carpenter. He also worked with Nuland and Chalupa.Ciaramella was carried over to the Trump White House. As RealClearInvestigations first reported, he would later anonymously blow the whistle on Trump asking Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to help “get to the bottom of” Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election, a phone call that triggered Trump’s first impeachment by a Democrat-controlled House. Ciaramella’s former NSC colleague Alexander Vindman leaked the call to him. Vindman, a Ukrainian-American, is also aligned with Chalupa. (Vindman is now back in the news for his demands that the United States provide more active military support to Ukraine and his insistence that Trump shares great blame for the war.)

  

  February 2016: Obama White House-Ukraine Coordination Intensifies

  On Feb. 2, two weeks after the White House meetings, Secret Service logs reveal that Ciaramella met in the White House with officials from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN, which would later provide the FBI highly sensitive bank records on Manafort. (In addition, a senior FinCEN adviser illegally leaked thousands of the confidential Manafort records to the media.)

  On Feb. 9, less than a month after the White House summit, Telizhenko, who worked for the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, met with Zentos of the NSC at a Cosi sandwich shop in Washington, according to emails obtained by the Senate. It’s not known what they discussed. In addition, on Feb. 23, the two emailed about setting up another meeting the following day. “OK if I bring my colleague Eric, who works on Ukraine with me?” Zentos asked Telizhenko, apparently referring to Ciaramella. In the emails, they discussed the U.S. primary elections, among other things.

  

  Telizhenko would later testify that Ambassador Chaly had ordered him then to “start an investigation [into the Trump campaign] within the embassy just on my own to find out with my contacts if there’s any Russian connection that we can report back.” He suspects the Ambassador delivered that report to Chalupa and the DNC. Chalupa visited the White House on Feb. 22, entrance records show, just days before the second meeting Telizhenko had planned with Zentos.

  March 2016: Chalupa Engineers Manafort Messaging Assault With Ukrainians

  

  On March 3, Zentos and Telizhenko planned to meet again, this time at a Washington bar called The Exchange. According to their email, Zentos wrote, “I’ll see if my colleague Eric is up for joining.” The pair also met the next day at Swing’s coffee house in Washington. After the meeting, Telizhenko emailed Zentos seeking a meeting with senior Obama NSC official Charlie Kupchan, an old Clinton hand who was Ciaramella’s boss on the Russia/Ukraine desk. Kupchan is an outspoken critic of Trump who has made remarks suggesting what countries “can do to stop him” and “protect the international institutions we’ve built .” Zentos and Telizhenko also met on March 10, patronizing the Cosi coffee shop again.

  On March 24, 2016, four days before the Trump campaign announced that it had hired Manafort, Chalupa met at the Ukrainian Embassy with Ambassador Chaly and his political counselor Oksana Shulyar, where they shared their concerns about Manafort, according to Politico.

  When news broke on March 28 that Manafort was joining the Trump campaign, Chalupa could hardly contain herself. “This is huge,” she texted senior DNC officials. “This is everything to take out Trump.”

  She immediately began circulating anti-Manafort memos, warning the DNC of the “threat” he posed of Russian influence. The next day, March 29, she briefed the DNC communications team about Manafort. They, in turn, hatched a plan to reach out to the Ukrainian Embassy to get President Porochenko to make an on-camera denouncement of Manafort and feed the footage to ABC News, where former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos works as a top anchor. On March 30, Chalupa fired off an email to Shulyar, her contact at the Ukrainian Embassy:

  “There is a very good chance that President Poroshenko may receive a question from the press during his visit about the recent New York Times article saying that Donald Trump hired Paul Manafort as an adviser to his campaign and whether President Poroshenko is concerned about this considering Trump is the likely Republican nominee and given Paul Manafort’s meddling in Ukraine over the past couple of decades,” Chalupa wrote. “It is important President Poroshenko is prepared to address this question should it come up. In a manner that exposes Paul Manafort for the problems he continues to cause Ukraine.”

  Within minutes of sending the email, Chalupa wrote the DNC’s communications director Luis Miranda, “The ambassador has the messaging.”

  Then she reached out to a friend in Congress, Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, about holding hearings to paint Manafort as a pro-Kremlin villain.

  April 2016: Chalupa Solicits Ukrainian Dirt on Trump, His Campaign, and Manafort

  

  American presidential campaigns aren’t supposed to work with foreign governments to dig up dirt on their political opponents. Geneva Convention rules bar diplomats from becoming entangled in their host country’s political affairs, particularly elections. There are also federal laws banning foreign nationals from engaging in operations to influence or interfere with U.S. political and electoral processes. In 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals on charges of conspiring to defraud the U.S. government for that purpose.

  But just weeks after Manafort was hired by the Trump campaign, the Ukrainian Embassy appeared to be working with the Clinton campaign to torpedo him and the campaign.

  Emails reveal that Chalupa and Shulyar, a top aide to Ambassador Chaly, agreed to meet for coffee on April 7, 2016, at Kafe Leopold, a restaurant near the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington. (Chalupa had paid a visit to the White House just three days earlier.) One of the purposes of the meeting, according to FEC case files, was to discuss Manafort and the danger he allegedly posed. They were joined at the café by Telizhenko, who said he was working on a “big story” on Manafort and Trump with the Wall Street Journal.

  In a sworn 2019 deposition taken by the FEC, Telizhenko alleged that Chalupa solicited “dirt” on Trump, Manafort, and the Trump campaign during the meeting. Telizhenko also testified that Chalupa told him that her goal was “basically [to] use this information and have a committee hearing under Marcy Kaptur, congresswoman from Ohio, in Congress in September and take him off the elections.”

  Telizhenko later approached Ambassador Chaly about the DNC representative’s overtures and he responded: “Yes. And I know that this is happening. You should work with her.”

  After speaking with Chaly, Telizhenko claims that he went back to Shulyar who instructed him to help Chalupa. “I went to Oksana and said, ‘Like what are we doing?’” he testified. ” And she told me, ‘You have to work with Chalupa. And any information you have, you give it to me, I’ll give it to her, then we’ll pass it on later to anybody else we are coordinating with.’”

  Less than a week later, on April 13, Telizhenko met again with White House official Zentos, email records reveal.

  Telizhenko said he resigned the next month because of concerns regarding his embassy’s work with Chalupa and the Clinton team.

  In her sworn account of the meeting, Chalupa acknowledged discussing Manafort and the “national security problem” he allegedly presented, but denied asking the embassy for help researching him. She allowed that she “could have mentioned the congressional investigation … that I had talked to Marcy Kaptur,” but maintained she couldn’t recall trying to enlist the embassy in the effort.

  Shulyar, however, clearly recalls that Chalupa sought the embassy’s help warning the public about Manafort – including pitching stories to the press and lobbying Congress, according to a 2020 written statement to the FEC. An “idea floated by Alexandra Chalupa was that we approach a co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus to initiate a congressional hearing on Paul Manafort,” Shulyar said, though she denied the embassy acted on the idea.

  Around the same time, two Ukrainian lawmakers – Olga Bielkova and Pavlo Rizanenko – visited the U.S. and met with journalists, as well as a former State Department official with close ties to Sen. John McCain – David Kramer of the McCain Institute. Kramer would later leak the entire Steele dossier to the media. The meeting was arranged by major Clinton Foundation donor Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch who lobbied Clinton when she was Obama’s secretary of state. Bielkova was also connected to the Clinton Foundation, having once managed a Clinton Global Initiative program for Ukrainian college students.

  While Clinton was at Foggy Bottom from 2009 to 2013, Ukrainians gave more money – at least $10 million, including more than $8 million from Pinchuk – to the Clinton Foundation than any other nationality including Saudi Arabians. Pinchuk’s donation was a down payment on an astounding $29 million pledge.

  On April 12, 2016, Bielkova also attended a meeting with Ciaramella and his NSC colleague Zentos, head of the Eastern Europe desk, according to lobbying disclosure records.

  In late April, Chalupa helped organize a Ukrainian-American protest against Manafort in his Connecticut hometown. Activists shouted for Trump to fire Manafort, whom they called “Putin’s Trojan Horse,” while holding signs that read: “Shame on Putin, Shame on Manafort, Shame on Trump” and “Putin, Hands Off the U.S. Election.” Chalupa also organized social media campaigns against Manafort and Trump, including one that encouraged activists to share the Twitter hashtags: “#TrumpPutin” and “#Treasonous Trump.”

  Also that month, Chalupa reached out to Yahoo News reporter Isikoff to pitch a hit piece on Manafort. She connected him with a delegation of Ukrainian journalists visiting D.C. Isikoff would later be used by Steele to spread falsehoods from his dossier.

  May-June 2016: Manafort Dirt Spreads

  In a May 3 email, Chalupa alerted DNC communications director Luis Miranda and DNC opposition research director Lauren Dillion that there was “a lot more [dirt on Manafort] coming down the pipe[sic].”

  Chalupa told them the dirt has “a big Trump component” and would “hit in the next few weeks.” It’s not clear if she was referring to the notorious “black ledger” smear against Manafort, who was promoted to campaign chairman on May 19, but a story about it was brewing at the time.

  On May 30, Nellie Ohr, an opposition researcher for the Clinton-retained firm Fusion GPS, emailed her husband, Bruce Ohr, a top official at the Justice Department who would become a prime disseminator of the Steele dossier within the government, and two federal prosecutors to alert them to an article indicating NABU had suddenly discovered documents allegedly showing Manafort receiving illicit payments.

  Amid the flurry of anti-Manafort activity, Zentos met again with Telizhenko on May 4, records show. And Chalupa visited the White House for a meeting on May 13.

  Chalupa paid another visit to the White House on June 14, Secret Service logs show. On June 17, Ciaramella held a White House meeting with Nuland and Pyatt of the State Department to discuss undisclosed Ukrainian matters.

  In late June, the FBI signed an evidence-sharing agreement with NABU, less than two months before the Ukrainian anti-corruption agency released what it claimed was explosive new evidence on Manafort.

  July 2016: Ukrainian Officials Attack Trump Publicly

  Chalupa continued to pow-wow with the Ukrainian Embassy and got so cozy with officials there that they offered her a position, which she declined, as an “embedded consultant” in the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  That same month, high-ranking Ukrainian officials openly insulted Trump on social media in an unusual departure from normal diplomacy.

  For instance, Ukraine Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov tweeted that Trump was a “clown” who was “an even bigger danger to the U.S. than terrorism.” In another July post, he called Trump “dangerous for Ukraine.” And on Facebook, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk warned that Trump had “challenged the very values of the free world.”

  (After Trump upset Clinton, Avakov and other officials tried to delete their statements from their social network accounts, saying that they had been wrong and had rushed to conclusions.)

  “It was clear that they were supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy,” Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Artemenko told Politico. “They did everything from organizing meetings with the Clinton team to publicly supporting her to criticizing Trump.”

  While attending the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, Chalupa spread the scurrilous rumor that Manafort was the mastermind behind the alleged Russian hacking of the DNC and that he “stole” her and other Democrats’ emails. She later told her sister’s podcast that she had reported her conspiracy theory to the FBI, eventually sitting down and meeting with agents in September to spin her tale of supposed espionage (the Senate has asked the FBI for copies of her interview summaries, known as FD-302s). Chalupa also prepared a report for the FBI, as well as members of Congress, detailing her Russiagate conspiracy theories, which Mueller later found no evidence to support.

  In addition, Chalupa helped spread a false narrative that Trump removed a reference to providing arms to Kiev from the Republican platform at the party’s convention earlier that month. Internal platform committee documents show the Ukraine plank could not have been weakened as claimed, because the “lethal” weapons language had never been part of the GOP platform. The final language actually strengthened the platform by pledging direct assistance not just to the country of Ukraine, but to its military in its struggle against Russian-backed forces.

  August-September 2016: The Phony Manafort Ledger Leaks 

  

  In another attempt to influence the 2016 election, Ukrainian lawmaker Serhiy Leshchenko leaked to the U.S. media what he claimed was evidence of a secret handwritten ledger showing Manafort had received millions in cash from Yanukovych’s party under the table. He claimed that 22 pages of the alleged ledger, which contained line items written by hand, had mysteriously appeared in his parliament mailbox earlier that year. Leshchenko would not identify the sender. A fuller copy of the same document showed up later on the doorstep of a Ukrainian intelligence official who passed it to NABU, which shared it with FBI agents stationed in Kiev. Leshchenko and NABU officials held press conferences declaring the document was “proof” of Manafort corruption and demanding he be “interrogated.”

  The Clinton campaign seized on the story. In an Aug. 14 statement, campaign manager Robby Mook stated: “We have learned of more troubling connections between Donald Trump’s team and pro-Kremlin elements in Ukraine.” He demanded Trump “disclose campaign chair Paul Manafort’s and all other campaign employees’ and advisers’ ties to Russian or pro-Kremlin entities.”

  But there was a big hole in the story. Though Manafort was a consultant to Yanukovych’s party, he was paid by wire, not in cash, casting serious doubt on the ledger’s authenticity. Another problem: the ledger was alleged to have been kept at party headquarters, but rioters had destroyed the building in a 2014 fire.

  Leshchenko admitted that he had a political agenda. He told The Financial Times at the time that he went public with the ledger because “a Trump presidency would change the pro-Ukrainian agenda in American foreign policy.” He added that most of Ukraine’s politicians are “on Hillary Clinton’s side.”

  Leshchenko also happened to be “a source for Fusion GPS,” as Nellie Ohr confirmed under questioning during a 2019 closed-door House hearing, according to a declassified transcript. Fusion was a paid agent of the Clinton campaign, which gave the private opposition-research firm more than $1 million to gin up connections between Trump and Russia. Fusion hired Steele to compile a series of “intelligence” memos known as the dossier. As a former MI6 operative, Steele gave the allegations a sheen of credibility.

  FBI counterintelligence veteran Mark Wauck said the dossier and the black ledger both appear to have originated with Fusion GPS, which laundered it through foreigners who hated Trump – Steele and Leshchenko.

  “The ledger and the dossier are both Fusion hit jobs,” Wauck said. “The two items shared a common origin: the Hillary campaign’s oppo research shop.”

  In an August 2016 memo written for Fusion GPS, “The Demise of Trump’s Campaign Manager Paul Manafort,” Steele claimed he had corroborated Leshchenko’s charges through his anonymous Kremlin sources, who turned out to be nothing more than beer buddies of his primary source collector, Igor Danchenko, a Russian immigrant with a string of arrests in the U.S. for public intoxication, as RealClearInvestigations first reported. Danchenko had worked for the Brookings Institution, a Democratic think tank in Washington that Durham has subpoenaed in connection to its own role in Russiagate. Danchenko was indicted last year by Special Counsel Durham for lying about his sources, including one he completely made up, as RCI reported.

  “YANUKOVYCH had confided in PUTIN that he did authorize and order substantial kick-back payments to MANAFORT as alleged,” Steele claimed in the unsubstantiated report, citing “a well-placed Russian figure” with knowledge of a “meeting between PUTIN and YANUKOVYCH” allegedly “held in secret” on Aug. 15. As a paid informant, Steele had long reported to the FBI about alleged corruption involving Yanukovych.

  The FBI used his Clinton-funded dossier as a basis to obtain warrants to spy on former Trump adviser Carter Page, including the false claim that Page acted as an intermediary between Russian leadership and Manafort in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” that included sidelining Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue. Steele also falsely claimed that Page had helped draft the RNC platform statement to be more sympathetic to Russia’s interests by eliminating language about providing weapons to Ukraine, according to a report by the Department of Justice’s watchdog. In fact, Page was not involved in the GOP platform. The misinformation came from Danchenko’s fictional source.

  Fusion co-founder Glenn Simpson worked closely with the New York Times on the Manafort ledger story. In his book, “Crime in Progress,” Simpson boasts of introducing Leshchenko to the Times as a source, who ended up providing the paper some of the dubious ledger records. On Aug. 19, Manafort stepped down from the Trump campaign the day after the Times reported what it had been fed by the anti-Trump operatives.

  In effect, Ukrainian government officials tried to help Clinton and undermine Trump by disseminating documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and telling the American media they were investigating the matter.

  In 2018, a Ukrainian court ruled that Leshchenko and NABU’s Sytnyk illegally interfered in the 2016 U.S. election by publicizing the black ledger. Among the evidence was a recording of Sytnyk saying the agency released the ledger to help Clinton’s campaign – “I helped her,” Sytnyk is recorded boasting. But the damage was done. The Ukrainians, along with Chalupa and the Clinton camp, achieved their goal of undermining the Trump campaign by prompting Manafort’s ouster though they never proved he was colluding with the Russians. Neither did Special Counsel Mueller. In fact, Mueller did not use the ledger to prosecute Manafort after a key witness for the prosecution told him it was fabricated. “Mueller ended up dropping it like a hot potato,” Wauck said. 

  Ukraine’s neutrality in the election was also called into further question that September, when Porochenko met with Clinton during a stop in New York. He never met with Trump, who appeared to get the cold shoulder from the Ukrainian leader. In statements following Trump’s surprise victory over Clinton in November, Ukraine’s embassy has denied interfering in the election and insisted that Chalupa was acting on her own.

  Epilogue

  After Trump won the election in spite of her efforts to sabotage him, Chalupa predicted: “Under President Trump, the Kremlin could likely invade U.S. allies in Europe without U.S. opposition.”

  Not only did Russia not invade Europe “under Trump,” it didn’t even invade Ukraine. Rather, the invasion came under Biden, whose campaign Chalupa supported. Yet she continues to blame Trump. Recent tweets show a still-obsessed Chalupa has not dialed back her extremist views about Trump or Manafort, whom she believes should be prosecuted for “treason.”

  In a Feb. 28 post on Twitter, for example, Chalupa claimed that Putin installed “a puppet regime in the U.S. with the help of Paul Manafort.” The previous day, she tweeted, “We had a Putin installed Trump presidency.” A day before that, she wrote: “Now would be a good time to release the Putin-Trump treason calls.”

  And on Feb. 25, Chalupa tweeted another wild conspiracy theory: “It’s important to note that Putin’s imperial aspirations are of a global criminal empire, as we saw when he installed Donald J. Trump president and tried to turn the U.S. into a Russian satellite state.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 19:00

• Putin Spokesman Says Russian Economy in 'Shock'
  Putin Spokesman Says Russian Economy in ‘Shock’

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  

  Russian government officials on Thursday said its economy is in “shock” after heavy sanctions and after a number of Western corporations pulled out of the country in recent days after the Ukraine conflict.

  “Our economy is experiencing a shock impact now and there are negative consequences; they will be minimized,” top Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday.

  Peskov, who himself is facing sanctions from the European Union and the United States, again said that while the situation is turbulent, Moscow can take measures to stabilize the country’s economy. He didn’t elaborate.

  “This is absolutely unprecedented. The economic war that has started against our country has never taken place before. So it is very hard to forecast anything,” he remarked.

  On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced the United States would ban all Russian oil imports, raising the likelihood of soaring gas prices domestically, over the Ukraine war. And on Wednesday, the European Union announced that it would expand its sanctions on both Russia and Belarus.

  Washington’s European allies are, however, more dependent on Russian oil and gas and have held back from sanctioning it.

  French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told an energy conference it was imperative the economic fallout from the Ukraine war must not lead to 1970s-style stagflation—a combination of high inflation and low growth.

  More than 160 Russians, including oligarchs and politicians, as well as the Belarussian banking sector, were sanctioned by the EU, said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

  The E.U.’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, told the European Parliament that the new package included travel bans and asset freezes on some 100 Russians at different levels of government.

  Several multinational corporations also said they would pull out of Russia in recent days. On Wednesday, Sony’s Playstation and Nintendo said they would cut ties.

  “Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) joins the global community in calling for peace in Ukraine,” Sony said. “To support humanitarian aid, Sony Group Corporation announced a $2 million donation to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the international NGO, Save the Children, to support the victims of this tragedy.”

  And a Nintendo spokesperson said it would suspend all products to Russia “for the foreseeable future” due to “considerable volatility surrounding the logistics of shipping and distributing physical goods.”

  Before that, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and General Electric said they would pull out of Russia—at least temporarily—including shuttering brick-and-mortar locations.

  Reuters contributed to this report.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 18:40

• Juror No. 50 Pleads The Fifth, Is Granted Immunity In Maxwell Trial
  Juror No. 50 Pleads The Fifth, Is Granted Immunity In Maxwell Trial

  Authored by Dave Paone via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Juror No. 50, who’s at the center of a possible mistrial in the Ghislaine Maxwell sex-trafficking case, appeared in federal court earlier this week where he pleaded the Fifth Amendment – the constitutional right to refuse to answer questions in order to avoid incriminating himself.

  

  U.S. District Judge Alison J. Nathan, who presided over the case in December, granted him immunity from prosecution with the exception of perjury.

  “You need to answer my questions today and you need to answer truthfully,” she instructed the juror, who chose not to disclose his actual name.

  Soon after the jury’s Dec. 29 guilty verdict on five of six counts of sex trafficking of a minor, Juror No. 50 stated publicly he was a victim of childhood sexual abuse and had made this known to his fellow jurors during deliberations.

  At the center of the issue is the questionnaire potential jurors filled out prior to selection.

  Juror No. 50 did not accurately answer questions relating to his childhood, sexual abuse at the hands of a stepbrother and his friend, prompting Maxwell’s defense to push for a new trial.

  Nathan read the pertinent questions with his responses, which were written on Nov.4, 2021, the first day he reported for jury duty.

  Juror No. 50 selected “no” to the first question that referred to sexual abuse, asking if he, a friend, or a family member had ever been a victim of it.

  ‘I was Super Distracted’

  “Is ‘no’ an accurate answer to that question?” Nathan asked him.

  “No, it is not,” he replied and said the accurate answer is “yes.”

  Juror No. 50 repeatedly cited the reasons for his incorrect answers.

  One was he was sidetracked while filling out the questionnaire.

  “At this point, I was super distracted,” he said and described sitting at the table at the spot where others were piling their completed paperwork and asking questions.

  “I felt rushed only because of all the commotion going on in front of me,” he said.

  A second was with the “sheer volume” of potential jurors, he didn’t anticipate being chosen.

  “I never thought I’d be one of the 12,” he said.

  Showed Remorse for Lack of Focus

  The third reason was he didn’t consider himself a victim, so he breezed by the questions pertaining to victimhood.

  Some of the questions referring to sexual abuse had boxes to check, that included “self” and “family and friends.”

  Juror No. 50 stated multiple times, that in his haste, he never noticed the “self” boxes.

  He showed remorse for his lack of focus calling it “one of the biggest mistakes I ever made in my life.” He said he did not intentionally give an incorrect answer.

  “I skimmed. I didn’t read everything,” he said and described the questionnaire as “a pretty thick packet.”

  Juror No. 50 also said several times that had he answered the questions accurately, he would still have been a fair and impartial juror and would have still have had the ability to render a fair and just verdict based on the evidence submitted at trial.

  It was during a post-trial interview with a reporter when Juror No. 50 learned about the importance of his inaccurate answers.

  “Did I just mess something up entirely?” he asked himself.

  Juror No. 50 took on lawyers in January with Todd A. Spodek, of Spodek Law Group in Manhattan.

  Pleading the Fifth came as no surprise, as Spodek sent a letter to Nathan on March 1, alerting the court to his client’s decision to do so.

  Juror No. 50 and Nathan looked directly at each other when speaking and he often replied with “yes, your honor,” and “no, your honor.”

  Maxwell, who was present in the courtroom, was tried on trafficking minors for the sexual abuse of her employer Jeffrey Epstein.

  Nathan gave both sets of attorneys the deadline of March 15 to file briefs regarding what they propose next.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 18:20

• China's No. 2 Leader Li Keqiang Announces Plans To Step Down
  China’s No. 2 Leader Li Keqiang Announces Plans To Step Down

  As President Xi prepares to formally accept a third term as the PROC’s paramount political leader in November (marking the first time since Mao that a Chinese leader would have served for such a long time), it looks like the Politburo has found another more appropriate sacrifice: China’s Premier Li Keqiang will step down, according to an announcement made Friday during an important annual CCP news conference.

  

  Of course, somebody important needs to take the fall for the country’s shocking slowdown in GDP growth, which contracted to just 4 percentage points, as we first reported back in January. And it’s not just GDP: all of China’s constituent economic indicators appear to be sliding as well.

  

  Although President Xi wields tremendous power by leading the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party along with the Politburo and the Politburo Standing Committee, which are more exclusive leadership groups organized around the chairman, who typically wields supreme executive power. The premier, meanwhile, leads the State Council, a key administrative body to which all the various cabinet-level department heads report.

  “You said this year is the last year in the current term of the Chinese government,” Li, 66, told reporters at the National People’s Congress in Beijing. “This year is also the last year in my premiership.”

  Friday’s press briefing shouldn’t be confused with the twice-a-decade Communist Party congress that’s set to take place during the second half of this year. During the meeting, where top party posts will be reshuffled, the Congress is expected to vote for President Xi to remain in power for a third five-year term, something that would break the precedent of Chinese post-Mao leaders only serving for a maximum of two five year terms.

  While Xi is widely expected to stay on, Chinese authorities have yet to comment publicly on his plans. Li said he had confidence in Xi’s ability to continue leading the Chinese people.

  “I’m confident that under the strong leadership of the CPC Central Committee, with comrade Xi Jinping at its core, with strong support of various sectors, and especially with the joint hard work of the Chinese people across the country, China’s economy will be able to overcome difficulties,” Li said. “We will be able to achieve all the major goals and tasks for economic and social development set for the whole year and lay a due, solid foundation for the development of the country in the future.”

  However, even if he gives up his premiership, Li could still hold on to another important position. Li also serves as the No. 2 member of the Politburo’s supreme Standing Committee, a position he is young enough to retain even as he abandons his posting as premier, which is indisputably the No. 2 position in Chinese government.

  Until Li’s promotion in 2012, the No. 2 party position was held by then-NPC Chairman Wu Bangguo while the No. 3 position was occupied by then-Premier Wen Jiabao.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 18:00

• Biden Blames Inflation On Putin, Big Oil And The Pandemic
  Biden Blames Inflation On Putin, Big Oil And The Pandemic

  Friday morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that Democrats have ‘lost ground’ over key issues – primarily inflation and the economy, which 50% cited as a top issue.

  A majority of voters, 63%, said they disapproved of Mr. Biden’s handling of rising costs, the president’s worst rating on six policy issues surveyed in the poll. Meanwhile, 47% of voters said Republicans were better able to handle inflation, compared with 30% who preferred Democrats. –WSJ

  “The mood of the country hasn’t gotten any better since the last poll. In fact, it’s gotten a little worse,” said John Anzalone, the lead pollster in Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign whose firm conducted the survey for the Journal.

  The devastating poll comes as the White House has spent the better part of the last week rebranding inflation as the “Putin price hike“:

  

  And so, just hours later while speaking with House Democrats at their member retreat in Philadelphia, Biden laid out his case on Friday for why inflation isn’t his fault. Instead, Russian President Vladimir Putin, big oil, and the pandemic are the culprits.

  “Here are the facts. Democrats didn’t cause this problem, Vladimir Putin did,” Biden said.

  Watch (entire speech here)

  Biden also blamed oil companies and their executives because they “don’t want to pump more oil, although they have every capacity to do so. Nothing is slowing them up,” he said in response to criticism that his administration’s canceling of the KeystoneXL pipeline and Executive Order stopping new oilfield leases is to blame. The administration has repeatedly said that the industry has 9,000 approved leases they can tap into at any time.

  “I’m SICK of this stuff!”

  Joe Biden is furious that Americans blame inflation on his government spending. pic.twitter.com/quRxB2lfvA

  — Townhall.com (@townhallcom) March 11, 2022

  BIDEN: “The oil companies and the executives, they don’t want to pump more oil, although they have every capacity to do so. Nothing is slowing them up.” pic.twitter.com/JKccKB6a4G

  — Breaking911 (@Breaking911) March 11, 2022

  Except, that’s not quite true…

  President Biden’s remarks earlier today. And goodness, I don’t know even where to start… 🤥🤥🤥 Even accepting he misspoke (instead of “by” he meant “from”), US oil output was ~11m bd when he took office. Using the 9.7m bd Feb 2021 level, hit by the freeze, is deeply misleading pic.twitter.com/DajAh219vl

  — Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) March 11, 2022

  Let’s review the Biden administration’s explanations for inflation over the course of the last year:

  

  Who could have seen this coming?

  THE PROPHET!
  pic.twitter.com/X813Vt5hqb

  — The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) March 11, 2022

  On Thursday, Fox News‘ Peter Doocy asked White House spox Jen Psaki “Are you guys going to just start blaming Putin for everything until the midterms?”

  To which Psaki responded: “Well, we’ve seen the price of gas go up at least $.75 since…Putin lined up troops[.]”

  Doocy 🔥🔥: “inflation goes up today. The President’s statement blames the #PutinPriceHike. Are you guys going to just start blaming Putin for everything until the midterms?”

  Psaki: “Well, we’ve seen the price of gas go up at least $.75 since…Putin lined up troops[.]” pic.twitter.com/WcmfcQDSWL

  — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) March 10, 2022

  Except… if all of this is the fault of Putin and big oil, how does the Biden administration explain this? Couldn’t have been Democratic admin responses to the pandemic – right?

  

  

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/11/2022 – 17:20

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