Two former White House officials said President Biden is frustrated with Vice President Kamala Harris' performance — even if he remains committed to keeping her as his running mate in the 2024 election, a new report reveals.

The 80-year-old Biden, who has gone out of his way to praise Harris in recent public remarks, reportedly has griped about his No. 2's reluctance to take on risky assignments.

One former White House official told Reuters:

"A point of tension in their relationship is that I don't think that the president sees her as somebody who takes anything off of his plate" due to a "fear of messing up. If he did not think she was capable, he would not have picked her. But it is a question of consistently rising to the occasion. I think his running for re-election is less about her and more about him, but I do think that she and the Democratic bench [are] a factor."

Another former White House official told the wire service that Biden, already the oldest-ever president, intends to seek a second term in part because he's concerned that Harris may not be able to beat former President Donald Trump, who is seeking the GOP nomination.

Nobody can give a precise dollar-number to U.S. 'Defense' spending because the U.S. 'Defense' Department has never been able to pass an audit, and is by far the most corrupt of all federal Departments (and is the ONLY Department that has never passed an audit), and also because much of America's military spending is being paid out from other federal Departments in order to keep down the published annual U.S. Government 'Defense' expenditure numbers (which come from ONLY the U.S. 'Defense' Department). Those are expenditures for America's privatized and overwhelmingly profit-driven Military-Industrial Complex. (By contrast: Russia and China require, by law, that their armaments-firms be majority-owned by the Government itself.)

According to the best available estimates, the U.S. Government has been spending, in total, for over a decade now, around $1.3T to $1.5T annually on 'defense', and this is around half of all military spending worldwide by all 200-or-so nations, and is more than half (around 53%) of all of the U.S. federal Government's 'discretionary' (or congressionally voted for) annual expenditures.

The Pentagon does not have plans to discipline an employee who was the Department of Defense's chief officer of diversity, equity, and inclusion for their anti-white tweets that have come under fire from Republican lawmakers, according to a top DOD official.

Kelisa Wing, the employee who has been found to have a history of tweets critical of white people, has been reassigned to a different role, Gilbert Cisneros Jr., undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness in the Biden administration, wrote in a Tuesday letter to House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY). However, Wing has not faced discipline despite the DOD's determination that the employee was "speaking in a personal capacity," Cisneros, who was grilled by Republicans on Thursday during a House Armed Services Committee, added.

"I do agree that that is not acceptable," Cisneros said in the hearing. "It's not something that I would condone, and it's not condoned by [Department of Defense Education Activity] or the Department of Defense."

This week, March 20, saw the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-British war launched on Iraq. The war resulted in over one million deaths and a decade of brutal military occupation. It spawned sectarian civil war, millions of displaced and destitute, and terrorism that engulfed the entire Middle East, as well as large swathes of Africa and Asia. Iraq and several other ancient nations have been destroyed because of the Anglo-American war. And it was a war based on flagrant American and British lies over alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The 20th anniversary of the U.S.-British war on Iraq, which was also supported by NATO partners, should be an occasion for proper accounting with Nuremberg-standard war crimes prosecutions of American and British political and military figures. Persons such as George W Bush, the former U.S. President, and Tony Blair, the ex-British premier, should be facing jail time for capital crimes. The current U.S. President Joe Biden should also be in the dock since his role as a senior Senator at the time was crucial in enabling the war. Also up for indictment are several Western media outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post which promulgated the lies that made the case for war.

Despicably, the man who shed so much light on the crimes, publisher Julian Assange, is the one who languishes in a prison torture dungeon.

Twenty years on, there is an eerie sense of collective amnesia among Western politicians and media over the colossal war crimes associated with Iraq. It's almost as if it did not happen. The Western protagonists and their propaganda outlets have gotten away with mass murder.

This week marked another odious anniversary, which shamefully, was met with the same Western silence and indifference. On March 24, 1999, the U.S.-led NATO military alliance unilaterally began bombing former Yugoslavia for 78 consecutive days. Thousands of civilians were killed in a military assault on that country - under the cynical pretext of "humanitarian protection" - which was not approved at the time by the United Nations. The bombing campaign was conducted, like the Iraq War only four years later, on the basis of unilateral action by Washington and its Western allies.

Lamentably, a glance at the calendar would throw up countless such vile anniversaries of unlawful American and Western military aggression. March 19, for example, marked the NATO bombing of Libya in 2011.

Political tribalism protects America's leaders from being held accountable for everything from failed policies to war crimes.

Washington is where securing political power means never having to say you're sorry - regardless of how many thousands or millions of people you might have gotten killed. Tribalism is what keeps the perpetrators from ever being held accountable.

Consider, for example, this month's Axios/Ipsos poll showing that more than six in ten US adults believe that George W. Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake. While it might seem encouraging that most Americans have come to realize that the Iraq debacle was a bad move - sort of like recognizing that the sun comes up in the East - a glance beneath the headline number reveals that voters haven't really learned anything.

Washington's purported superiority is meaningless as there would be no winner in an actual war, the former Russian president has warned.

Any serious conflict involving the world's leading nuclear powers would "obviously" have no winner, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has outlined. As a result, comparing the strength of the Russian and American militaries is pointless, he added.

The consequences of a nuclear war would be "monstrous" and make it "impossible to say which army was the first and which second," the senior official told the Russian media this week.

The prowess of a military force is measured by the outcomes of its campaigns, added Medvedev, who is now the deputy chair of Russia's National Security Council.

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey has warned firms hiking prices risk driving up the cost-of-living and hurting the "least well off".

Mr Bailey also suggested that increasing prices may have a knock-on impact on interest rates.

His comments follow a surprise increase in inflation on Wednesday and the central bank's decision to raise interest rates - the 11th rise in a row - from 4% to 4.25%.


Figures the same day showed food and soft drink prices rose by 18% year-on-year last month - the highest rate since August 1977.

Depleted uranium shells promised to Kiev by the UK would "cause irreparable harm" to soldiers and civilians alike, Moscow claimed

The potential use of British-supplied depleted uranium shells by Ukraine would have a devastating impact on the country's economy and population, lasting for centuries to come, the Russian Defense Ministry warned on Friday.

Speaking at a briefing, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, who is in charge of Russia's Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defense Forces, issued a scathing criticism of the UK's plans to support Kiev with armor-piercing rounds containing depleted uranium.

He noted that such munitions have only ever been deployed in combat by NATO countries, most notably during the Iraq War, when the US used at least 300 tons of depleted uranium.

The Biden Administration continues to conceal its responsibility for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines...
It's been six weeks since I published a report, based on anonymous sourcing, naming President Joe Biden as the official who ordered the mysterious destruction last September of Nord Stream 2, a new $11-billion pipeline that was scheduled to double the volume of natural gas delivered from Russia to Germany. The story gained traction in Germany and Western Europe, but was subject to a near media blackout in the US. Two weeks ago, after a visit by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Washington, US and German intelligence agencies attempted to add to the blackout by feeding the New York Times and the German weekly Die Zeit false cover stories to counter the report that Biden and US operatives were responsible for the pipelines' destruction.

Press aides for the White House and Central Intelligence Agency have consistently denied that America was responsible for exploding the pipelines, and those pro forma denials were more than enough for the White House press corps. There is no evidence that any reporter assigned there has yet to ask the White House press secretary whether Biden had done what any serious leader would do: formally "task" the American intelligence community to conduct a deep investigation, with all of its assets, and find out just who had done the deed in the Baltic Sea. According to a source within the intelligence community, the president has not done so, nor will he. Why not? Because he knows the answer.

President Joe Biden's order that federal employees get vaccinated against COVID-19 was blocked Thursday by a federal appeals court.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans rejected arguments that Biden, as the nation's chief executive, has the same authority as the CEO of a private corporation to require that employees be vaccinated.

The ruling from the full appeals court, 16 full-time judges at the time the case was argued, reversed an earlier ruling by a three-judge 5th Circuit panel that had upheld the vaccination requirement. Judge Andrew Oldham, nominated to the court by then-President Donald Trump, wrote the opinion for a 10-member majority.

Opponents of the policy said it was an encroachment on federal workers' lives that neither the Constitution nor federal statutes authorize.

Biden issued an executive order last September requiring vaccinations for all executive branch agency employees, with exceptions for medical and religious reasons. The requirement kicked in the following November, and the White House said in January that 98% of federal workers were vaccinated. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, who was appointed to the District Court for the Southern District of Texas by then-President Donald Trump, issued a nationwide injunction against the requirement in January.

The case then went to the 5th Circuit.