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Hourglass

Best of the Web: Here's why the new British-Ukrainian defense agreement is great news for Russia

Zelensky Sunak
© Daniel LEAL / AFPUkraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky (R) shakes hands with Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. The deal, which is supposedly intended to strengthen Kiev in its fight with Moscow, actually does nothing to bolster its chances.
The Ukrainian elite have been obsessed with obtaining security guarantees from the West since the early 1990s. Over the years, as Kiev has increasingly sought conflict with Russia, it has also tried to hide behind the US-led bloc's back, hoping to one day join NATO and the European Union.

This carry-on eventually led to the start of Russia's military operation, almost two years ago. Its first stage ended with negotiations in Istanbul in March-April 2022. Under the agreements, Kiev was supposed to receive security guarantees as long as it complied with the terms. France, the UK, and the US were supposed to become the guarantors.

Fireball 3

Best of the Web: Small asteroid hits Earth above Germany overnight on January 21

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Small asteroid hits Earth on January 21, 2024

In the late-night hours of January 21, 2024 - 90 minutes before impact over European skies - NASA said a small asteroid would hit Earth's atmosphere. And hit it did. The space rock struck on schedule above an area west of Berlin, Germany. The asteroid was only about 1 meter (3 feet) in diameter. It posed no danger to people on the ground. Yet it's possible the asteroid might have spread small meteorites over the landscape.

In the hours since then, footage of the fireball in the skies over Germany has been coming in on social media.


Snowflake

Best of the Web: Additional feet of snow pile up in Buffalo area (6 FEET in 5 days) after western New York buried by prior snowstorm

Crews work around the clock to clear city streets of snow
Crews work around the clock to clear city streets of snow
Heavy lake-effect snow will continue for one more day downwind of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario in New York state.

Off Lake Erie, the snow band will stay south of Buffalo on Thursday morning, with snowfall rates as high as 1-2 inches per hour over the Buffalo Southtowns, the FOX Forecast Center said.

The band will then begin to move north around midday, once again bringing heavy snow to the city of Buffalo. During the afternoon, the snow band will move north of Buffalo before sliding back toward the city during the evening hours.

The lake-effect snow will end once the snow from the cross-country storm begins Thursday night. By this time, some locations south of Buffalo may end up with 7 feet of snow when combining the two lake-effect events this week.


Bad Guys

Best of the Web: NATO set to mobilize 90,000 soldiers for biggest drill since Cold War, rehearsing rapid US deployment near Russia's borders

NATO drill
© REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/File Photo Acquire Licensing RightsPolish military vehicles are transported during TUMAK-22 NATO exercises in an area known as the Suwalki Gap, of crucial significance to the security of the alliance's eastern flank, at a polygon in Klusy, Poland November 25, 2022.
NATO is launching its largest exercise since the Cold War, rehearsing how U.S. troops could reinforce European allies in countries bordering Russia and on the alliance's eastern flank if a conflict were to flare up with a "near-peer" adversary.

Some 90,000 troops are due to join the Steadfast Defender 2024 drills that will run through May, the alliance's top commander Chris Cavoli said on Thursday.


Comment: There seems to be a number of converging events in the early part of this year: Google warns advertisers of 'sensitive events' in February


More than 50 ships from aircraft carriers to destroyers will take part, as well as more than 80 fighter jets, helicopters and drones and at least 1,100 combat vehicles including 133 tanks and 533 infantry fighting vehicles, NATO said.

Comment: Coincidentally: And yet the West wants us to believe that it's Russia that's the threat?


Danny Haiphong: Russia is going to march right through Poland and Romania, right to retake Germany. It's going to conquer Europe, and maybe it won't even stop in England.

American economist and professor Michael Hudson: Well, that's just nonsense. The reality is that Russia and China don't need Europe anymore. They don't need the United States.

Danny Haiphong: Just in the last few days, you've had numerous American military magazines and especially European spokesmen saying, if we lose in Ukraine, Russia is going to march right through Poland and Romania, right to retake Germany. It's going to conquer Europe, and maybe it won't even stop in England.

Michael Hudson: Well, that's just nonsense. The reality is that Russia and China don't need Europe anymore. They don't need the United States. Whereas under the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright says, America is the unique country, it's the necessary country.

The fact is that the rest of the world not only finds America unnecessary, but America and its NATO allies to be the major threat to their own prosperity. So they're essentially splitting into their own world. And the BRICS group is expanding its trade relations, its investment relations, and especially its financial clearing and monetary operations to be independent of the dollar, de dollarizing and certainly independent of the euro, which seems to have no visible means of support right now and going their own way.

Now, that is exactly what has led the United States to push Israel to take, essentially to follow Netanyahu's belligerence. Because the United States says, we realize we're losing power. We know that it's really not a stalemate. We know that we've lost the chance for world dominance. We may be reelected by telling people it doesn't really matter, but we know that it does matter. The last chance we have to assert american power is military, and the main military prize is the Near east.

Now, just as it was after 911 when Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld pressed for an invasion of the Iraq to begin grabing its oil and to essentially create America's foreign legion in the form of the ISIS and al Qaeda Iraq. So now America has two armies that it's using to fight in the Near east. The ISIS, al Qaeda, foreign legion. Arabic speaking foreign legion, and the Israelis. The plan is, and America is willing to fight to the last Israeli, just as it's trying to fight to the last Ukrainian in order to make this final grab of the near east in fighting Iran. This is a crazy idea, but it seems that that's exactly what is being planned.

General Petraeus, who lost the war in Afghanistan, has said, we've got to conquer Iran. That's going to, we can regain all the power that we've lost by attacking Iran. And so now it looks like President Biden is hoping to make a political comeback by saying, well, we may not have blocked Russia and Ukraine, but at least we've conquered the Near East.

'He did not rule out the presence of French intelligence services on Ukrainian territory. Earlier it became known that after the strike by the Russian Armed Forces, many foreigners who spoke French were admitted to Kharkov hospitals.'



Cult

Best of the Web: Davos' debauched underbelly: How the global 'elite' indulge in cocaine, caviar and champagne at secret 'bunga bunga' parties at World Economic Forum


Comment: Eyes Wide Open...


davos
Meanwhile, Ukraine pushed ahead with its peace formula to end nearly two years of war with Russia with a meeting of national security advisers from around the world in Davos on Sunday
Once a year, global elites from all sectors attend a five-day conference in the snow-capped town of Davos, Switzerland - which is supplemented by caviar, champagne, and all types of debauchery after hard work is over.

The World Economic Forum 2024 is kicking off this week, with world leaders and business executives convening for discussions and events surrounding the most prominent issues of the day.

The theme this year is 'Rebuilding Trust' - and will be attended by 3,000 guests.

Comment: There's undoubtedly much more that goes on after hours that hasn't been divulged. See also:


Eye 2

Flashback Best of the Web: 44 charged by U.S. in New Jersey corruption sweep which included five rabbis who trafficked in human organs

Agents led suspects from F.B.I. headquarters in Newark on Thursday. The inquiry began with questions on money laundering.
© Louis Lanzano/Associated PressAgents led suspects from F.B.I. headquarters in Newark on Thursday. The inquiry began with questions on money laundering.
A two-year corruption and international money-laundering investigation stretching from the Jersey Shore to Brooklyn to Israel and Switzerland culminated in charges against 44 people on Thursday, including three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis, the authorities said.

The case began with bank fraud charges against a member of an insular Syrian Jewish enclave centered in a seaside town. But when that man became a federal informant and posed as a crooked real estate developer offering cash bribes to obtain government approvals, it mushroomed into a political scandal that could rival any of the most explosive and sleazy episodes in New Jersey's recent past.

It was replete with tales of the illegal sales of body parts; of furtive negotiations in diners, parking lots and boiler rooms; of nervous jokes about "patting down" a man who turned out to indeed be an informant; and, again and again, of the passing of cash — once in a box of Apple Jacks cereal stuffed with $97,000.

"For these defendants, corruption was a way of life," Ralph J. Marra Jr., the acting United States attorney in New Jersey, said at a news conference. "They existed in an ethics-free zone."

Comment: Is it "antisemitic" to suspect that the very strange recent events of the tunnel built under a jewish synagogue in Brooklyn, NY may have something to do with human and even child trafficking - in light of the precedents among some of these groups to be involved in such horrific acts? We don't think so.

See also:


Yellow Vest

Best of the Web: Irish rebellion against directed mass migration: Mayo Co. Council votes to cease cooperation with govt dept for migrants


Comment: That's one way to do it: just stop cooperating with the loons in the capitals...


Mayo Co Council Building, Ireland
Mayo Co Council Building, Ireland
A meeting of Mayo County Council has unanimously passed a motion calling on its staff to "immediately" cease all cooperation with Department of Integration, until an agreed strategy is in place regarding the housing of migrants seeking asylum in the county.

At yesterday's meeting of the Council a cross-party motion which stated that 'all co-operation ceases immediately, between the staff of Mayo County Council and the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth of Ireland, until such time as an agreed strategy is put in place to properly co-ordinate the provision of additional services for the communities hosting refugees and international protection applicants', was approved.

Proposing the motion, Castlebar-based Independent councillor, Michael Kilcoyne, said councillors had no say in who arrives in Mayo or where they stayed - and claimed that those claiming asylum were being treated better than Irish people. It was time Irish people started to come first, he said, according to Mayo News.

Comment: And now a second county council is thinking about doing likewise:




Bullseye

Best of the Web: 'Insurrection' + 'Indictments' = Epic Fail! Trump wins Iowa Republican primary in total landslide

trump landslide victory iowa primary 2024
© Jordan Gale for The New York TimesDonald J. Trump held his first large event in Iowa in nearly four months on Friday, July 7, 2023
The ex-president received more votes than the next two candidates combined in the Iowa caucus

Former President Donald Trump won a landslide victory in the first Republican primary of the 2024 presidential race, taking home three times more delegates than his closest opponent and over 50% of the popular vote.

With more than 95% of the votes counted following Monday's caucus in Iowa, Trump had 51% of the electorate and 19 delegates, far ahead of Republican rivals Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, who earned 21.3% and 19.1% respectively. DeSantis won eight delegates and remained in second place, while Haley scored seven.

Comment: He didn't even have to campaign. Trump is, indisputably, "the people's king."


Quenelle

Best of the Web: Iran launches long-range missile strikes at 'Israeli spy HQs' & ISIS targets in Iraq & Syria marking 'new escalation'

iran strike
© Karzan Mohammad Othman/Anadolu AgencyEmergency teams carry out search and rescue operations after missiles target Erbil, Iraq, January 16, 2024
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) launched ballistic missiles at what it claimed were Israeli "spy headquarters" in Iraq's Kurdish region and hit targets allegedly linked to ISIL (ISIS) in northern Syria, saying it was defending its security and countering terrorism.

At least eight explosions were heard in Erbil, the capital of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region, early on Tuesday. Four people were killed and six were wounded, the regional security council said.

"Ballistic missiles were used to destroy espionage centres and gatherings of anti-Iranian terrorist groups in the region," the IRGC said, adding that it fired 11 missiles, state media reported.

Eye 2

Flashback Best of the Web: The Child-Rape Assembly Line

RABBI NUCHEM ROSENBERG
© CHRISTIAN STORMRABBI NUCHEM ROSENBERG, THE LONE WHISTLEBLOWER AMONG THE SATMAR, A POWERFUL HASIDIC SECT, WHO RECENTLY WAS THE VICTIM OF A BLEACH ATTACK IN WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN
Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg — who is 63 with a long, graying beard — recently sat down with me to explain what he described as a "child-rape assembly line" among sects of fundamentalist Jews. He cleared his throat. "I'm going to be graphic," he said.

A member of Brooklyn's Satmar Hasidim fundamentalist branch of Orthodox Judaism, Nuchem designs and repairs mikvahs in compliance with Torah Law. The mikvah is a ritual Jewish bathhouse used for purification. Devout Jews are required to cleanse themselves in the mikvah on a variety of occasions: Women must visit following menstruation, and men have to make an appearance before the High Holidays, such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Many of the devout also purify themselves before and after the act of sex and before the Sabbath.

On a visit to Jerusalem in 2005, Rabbi Rosenberg entered into a mikvah in one of the holiest neighborhoods in the city, Mea She'arim. "I opened a door that entered into a schvitz," he told me. "Vapors everywhere, I can barely see. My eyes adjust, and I see an old man, my age, long white beard, a holy-looking man, sitting in the vapors. On his lap, facing away from him, is a boy, maybe seven years old. And the old man is having anal sex with this boy.

"Rabbi Rosenberg paused, gathered himself, and went on: "This boy was speared on the man like an animal, like a pig, and the boy was saying nothing. But on his face — fear. The old man [looked at me] without any fear, as if this was common practice. He didn't stop. I was so angry, I confronted him. He removed the boy from his penis, and I took the boy aside. I told this man, 'It's a sin before God, a mishkovzucher. What are you doing to this boy's soul? You're destroying this boy!' He had a sponge on a stick to clean his back, and he hit me across the face with it. 'How dare you interrupt me!' he said. I had heard of these things for a long time, but now I had seen."