Russia faces unprecedented sanctions pressure that continues to intensify, President Vladimir Putin said on Monday, noting that despite the prevailing conditions, the country's economy has the opportunity to function stably and smoothly. He has promised to support businesses as much as possible, including foreign firms that have stayed in Russia.

To do that, it is necessary to respect the rights of business owners and support them to the full, including by reducing the administrative burden, Putin said. Foreign companies that have remained in Russia despite sanctions pressure should be allowed to "work peacefully," he added.

The Russian president earlier instructed the government to allocate additional resources to support small and medium-sized businesses and create better growth conditions for new industries based on new and yet-to-be-developed supply chains. Putin also said he believes that sanctions will result in new leaders emerging in the Russian market.

On the day before Good Friday (Orthodox), Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu reported at the Kremlin to President Vladimir Putin that at Mariupol, inside the Azovstal steel works, about two thousand troops remain underground, including foreigners. Putin issued the following order: "There is no need to penetrate these catacombs and crawl under these industrial facilities. Seal off the industrial zone completely."

Four days earlier on April 17, the Defence Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov told the press that "up to four hundred foreign mercenaries were trapped [at Azovstal]... Most of them are citizens of European countries, as well as Canada. We have already reported earlier that radio conversations between militants in Mariupol are conducted in six foreign languages"

Today, an unusually detailed report by the Moscow internet broadcaster Tsargrad was published to signal the strategic significance and political value of the NATO officers in their command bunker under Azovstal.

There's no denying that PiS' faux nationalist project has utterly failed. Patriotic Poles won't be distracted by vague foreign policy victories that have yet to even happen and might never transpire, nor will they let PiS' rabid Russophobia influence them into forgiving it for their country's forced Ukrainization.

It's impossible for anyone to seriously describe Poland's ruling "Law & Justice" (PiS per its Polish abbreviation) party as "nationalists" after they willingly allowed their country's Ukrainization by hosting over 3 million refugees from that former Soviet Republic. Warsaw's population jumped by 15-20% according to Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski as quoted by the New York Times (NYT) in their article about this issue titled "Warsaw's Welcome Mat Risks Unraveling Under The Pressure Of A New Wave Of Refugees".

The outlet also revealed some other intriguing facts, including Trzaskowski's concern that "these costs (related to accommodating so many refugees) amount to hundreds of millions of dollars" and that "Warsaw's largest pediatric hospital has put Ukrainian patients on its waiting list for liver transplants, sometimes ahead of Polish children." A Ukrainian refugee in Poland whose son has a rare liver disease also revealed that medics at the hospital in Kiev that was treating him left to treat soldiers at the front.

When I first read the Chinese war manual Unrestricted Warfare in 1999, I thought it was wacky. I was flying B-2 Stealth bombers out of Whiteman Air Force Base in western Missouri and reading a lot about war. As an Air Force officer, I thought it was part of my day job to understand the bigger picture - even though the prevailing attitude in the military was "Just fly the planes." Unrestricted Warfare was one of those books that caused a stir among some military folks because it had recently been translated into English. It had that insider whiff of mystery and secrets, a peek into the mind of the Chinese Communist Party.

Despite that mystique, not a lot of people were finishing the book. For one thing, regardless of its title, no one thought we were ever going to be fighting a war with China, so it seemed like a lot of work for very little payoff. For another, the book itself is not a light read. It is a dense compendium of strategy, economics, social theory, and futuristic thoughts about technology. It imparts centuries of military history, particularly as it relates to the United States, but I already knew a lot of that. It seemed vague and also a little sci-fi, not relevant to a U.S. bomber pilot - even one with a fascination for military history. My mistake.

First Lady Jill Biden was against choosing Kamala Harris as her husband Joe Biden's running mate after she attacked him during a primary debate, according to an upcoming new book.

The first lady's vexations were revealed in a bombshell new book by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns titled This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future, due to be released in May.

After learning that Harris was the leading candidate for the job, according to an excerpt of the book provided to Fox News, Jill Biden said:

"There are millions of people in the United States. Why do we have to choose the one who attacked Joe?"

Many from Biden's inner circle, however, believed that Harris would give the president the best chance of winning the election, according to the book.

A fire broke out on Monday morning at an oil depot in Bryansk, a large Russian city around 150km from Ukraine, and 370km south-west of Moscow.

The blaze occurred at a premises operated by Transneft-Druzhba JSC and at another location, officials told RIA Novosti. No casualties have been reported and there is no threat to residential buildings, the Ministry of Emergency Situations has advised.

"The evacuation of the population is not planned. According to preliminary information, there were no victims," its press service stated, according to TASS. Local residents have reported that explosions were heard and sirens are audible in social media videos.

Wikipedia editors are under fire this week for removing the entry for Rosemont Seneca Partners, the investment company connected to Hunter Biden and his alleged multimillion dollar influence peddling schemes. The site bizarrely claimed that the company was "not notable." The timing itself is notable given the new disclosure that Hunter Biden's business partner, Eric Schwerin, made at least 19 visits to the White House and other official locations between 2009 and 2015. That included a meeting with then-Vice President Joe Biden despite Biden's repeated claim that he knew nothing about his son's business dealings. Schwerin was the president of Rosemont Seneca.

Wikipedia has been accused of raw bias in removing the entry at a time when interest in the company is at its peak, including the possibility of an indictment of Hunter Biden over his financial dealings. Rosemont Seneca is one of the most searched terms for those trying to understand the background on the Biden business operations.

It's no secret that, according to politicians and the corporate press, "food shortages" and a "food supply crises" have been on the way for a while now. They have been regularly predicted for several years.

What's really strange is that despite its near-constant incipience, the food shortage never seems to actually arrive and is always blamed on something new.

As long ago as 2012, "scientists" were predicting that climate change and a lack of clean water would create "food shortages" that would "turn the world vegetarian by 2050".

In 2019, UN "experts" warned that "climate change was threatening the world's food supply".

Later the same year, the UK was warned that they could expect a food shortage as a result of "post-Brexit chaos".

By early March 2020 supermarkets were already "warning" that the government had been too slow to act on the coronavirus outbreak, and they might run out of food. (They never actually did).

A month later, in April 2020 when the "pandemic" was less than three months old, "officials" warned Covid was going to create a global food crisis. Three months later it had ballooned into "the worst food crisis for 50 years".

In the Summer of 2021 the British press was predicting the "worst food shortages since world war 2" and "rolling power cuts", allegedly due to a lack of truck drivers blamed equally on Covid and Brexit (neither the shortages nor power cuts ever really materialised).

By September 2021, the UK was told the gas price spike would create a shortage of frozen food, and just a month later, that we may have to ration meat ahead of Christmas, due to the gas crisis. (There never was any rationing)

In January 2022, Australia saw "empty supermarket shelves" blamed on the Omicron variant crippling the supply chain, while the US had the same empty shelves blamed on bad winter weather.

Moving into the spring of 2022, the food crisis is still on its way...only now it's because of the war in Ukraine, or China's "Zero Covid" policies, or the bird flu outbreak.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that - since the food crisis is always expected but never arrives, and is always blamed on the current thing - that it doesn't really exist. That it's nothing but a psy-op designed to spread panic and give suppliers an excuse to jack up their prices in response to fake "scarcity" created by the press.

However, there are indications that this may be about to change.

In a Brussels press conference on March 25th of this year, Joe Biden said...

Regarding food shortages - yes, we did talk about shortages, and they're going to be real."

...which is a decidedly odd thing to say.

Most of the time the only reason to strongly affirm something is "going to be real" from now on, is that up to that point it was not.

Indeed, there are a few signs that the food supply is about to genuinely come under attack.

Dozens of civilians who died during the Russian occupation of the Ukrainian city of Bucha were killed by tiny metal arrows from shells of a type fired by Russian artillery, forensic doctors have said.


Pathologists and coroners who are carrying out postmortems on bodies found in mass graves in the region north of Kyiv, where occupying Russian forces have been accused of atrocities, said they had found small metal darts, called fléchettes, embedded in people's heads and chests.

"We found several really thin, nail-like objects in the bodies of men and women and so did others of my colleagues in the region," Vladyslav Pirovskyi, a Ukrainian forensic doctor, told the Guardian. "It is very hard to find those in the body, they are too thin. The majority of these bodies come from the Bucha-Irpin region."

Independent weapons experts who reviewed pictures of the metal arrows found in the bodies, seen by the Guardian, confirmed that they were fléchettes, an anti-personnel weapon widely used during the first world war.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Monday that the U.S. would like to see Russia's military "weakened to a degree."

The big picture: Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Sunday.

• Austin and Blinken promised Zelensky over $300 million in foreign military financing and noted that the U.S. had approved a $165 million sale of ammunition.
• They also said that U.S. diplomats will return to Ukraine this week.

What they're saying: "We want to see Russia weakened to a degree that it can't do the kinds of things it has done in invading Ukraine," Austin told reporters in Poland.

• "It has already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly," Austin added. "And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability."