A Ukraine-operated drone "packed with explosives" has caused an explosion in the center of a Russian town, injuring three people and damaging three residential buildings.

The explosion took place in the town of Kireyevsk in Tula region, about 300 kilometers from the border with Ukraine, on Sunday, Russian news agency TASS reported. None of the three people are believed to have suffered life-threatening injuries, the report said.

According to the news agency, authorities identified the drone as a Ukrainian Tu-141, which has a range of about 1,000 kilometers.

The U.S. and Canada have agreed to allow asylum seekers who illegally cross the border in both countries to be turned back. This is a significant change made necessary by the huge influx of illegals trying to cross the border from Canada into the United States.

At the southern border, Joe Biden has been forced to renew most of the policies initiated by Donald Trump, including the automatic denial of asylum to migrants who transited a third country, a modified "Remain in Mexico" policy, and a modified Title 42 program. That program will end on March 31 and Biden has been looking for ways to keep the coming massive influx at the border under control.

The deal with Canada will be announced during the president's visit to Canada, which began last night.

According to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre:

"We're seeing an increase in irregular migration going north into Canada, which reflects the regional and global migration challenges we have been talking about. We're committed to working with them to address it, including by prioritizing orderly and safe migration through regular pathways."

The screengrab above is from a job advertisement for a senior academic role at a mid-ranking UK university (to which I have no connection), paying a maximum salary of around £63,000 a year. (For context, the median full-time salary in the UK is approximately £33,000.)

British universities frequently advertise a commitment to the Athena SWAN Charter, which is a set of ten principles designed to promote and support equality between genders in institutions of higher education, and which allocates bronze, silver and gold awards on application by such institutions. That universities should remove barriers that unfairly prevent employees from achieving their full potential is a project that almost anybody can get behind - even if we recognise that there is a certain amount of rent-seeking going on whenever a body sets itself up to give out industry awards of this kind.

But explicitly adopting an 'inclusive recruitment process' for the furtherance of equality between men and women in higher education is a new one on me - especially when it is so transparently and obviously wrongheaded (although I suppose nothing should surprise me in this regard anymore). The 'logic', if I can use that word, would appear to be that if all short-listed candidates know in advance what they will be asked at interview, and also know that there will be no unexpected questions or digressions (and can even bring pre-prepared notes on their answers), there will be a level playing field between them and - presumably - no danger of any particular candidate benefiting from the conversation straying into irrelevant areas ('Oh, I didn't know you were a West Ham supporter too! The job's yours!').

In the mad dash to pursue all things electric for the sake of climate change, Ford Motors has invested heavily in the production of electric vehicles.

So far, things are not going according to plan.

Ford is losing billions on this in 2023 and it's only March.

The Associated Press reports:

Switzerland's decision to rescue failing investment bank Credit Suisse could be a major burden for the nation's taxpayers, according to Bloomberg calculations.

The Swiss government has pledged to absorb 9 billion Swiss francs ($9.7 billion) of the bank's losses and provide a 100 billion-franc ($108 billion) public liquidity backstop from the Swiss National Bank (SNB). This means that each resident out of Switzerland's 8.7 million population will pay 12,500 francs ($13,500) for the bank's rescue, Bloomberg noted.

The deal also mentions a separate guarantee of 100 billion francs from the Swiss central bank that isn't backed by the government. Adding the 50 billion-franc loan from the SNB which the bank secured last week, the total sum of the rescue will top 259 billion francs ($280 billion), which is equivalent to about a third of Switzerland's entire economic output in 2022.

The amount will make the deal Switzerland's largest ever corporate rescue, far surpassing the 60 billion-franc bailout of UBS in 2008.

Stocks of Germany's Deutsche and Commerzbank fell sharply on Friday over investors' fear over the health of the European banking sector.

Deutsche Bank shares plummeted over 14% on early trade on Friday as borrowing costs surged over increased financial risks following the collapse of major banks in the past few weeks, spreading heightened fear over the future of the banking sector, AFP reported.

The stock value of Germany's biggest lender rebounded almost 6 percent on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, closing at 8.54 euros.

The cost of the bank's debt insurance against default risk fell as investors' trust in the financial sector dropped. The collapse of US' SVB and two other banks, in addition to the chaotic takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS - enforced by the Swiss government - left markets in turmoil.

The British government plans to move asylum seekers from hotels to military bases or disused ferries under plans that could be announced as early as next week, a report has revealed.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is expected to announce the "beginning of the end" of asylum hotels, which are currently being used to house asylum seekers as part of the government's legal obligation to provide people seeking help with a basic level of accommodation, the Telegraph newspaper reported on Sunday.

More than 50,000 migrants are currently housed at a cost of nearly £7 million a day in the hotels, the report said.

Soldiers of Ukraine's 'Thor' special operations group are using satellite data provided by the CIA to choose targets when conducting drone strikes against Russian forces, the unit's commander told The Times.

The 27-man group, which is formally a police special operations unit, functions independently from the Ukrainian army and works in close collaboration with the country's military intelligence, the GUR, which provides them with ammunition and intel. According to The Times, the unit has complete license to select its missions, where it barracks and when it fights.

The unit's commander, whose name is said to also be Thor, claims he uses a special application on a tablet that is synced to a CIA satellite to select potential targets for their attacks.

Thor told the outlet:

"We select targets in the program, and targets can be placed there both by the CIA satellite and by our own satellite, which our volunteers pay for. Information is collected from all kinds of sources there. We choose, then we arrive and conduct our own reconnaissance."

Another member of the group told the Times that Thor also intentionally uses drones to maim - rather than kill - Russian servicemen. "These ones are to wound the Russians," Aleksander, 30, told The Times as he armed a 3D-printed drone with mining explosives. "Take an arm or a leg, he will be a burden on the state forever," he said.

There are various degrees of acceptable insanity, but in general you would not want a person who thought a toad had the same intrinsic value as your mother to manage her Alzheimer's disease. You would not want a person who equated the value of your daughter with that of a rat to decide whether she be injected with medicine still under trial, such as an mRNA vaccine. Or perhaps you would, as you may agree with the Lancet editorial in January 2023 that equates these, insisting: "All life is equal, and of equal concern."

Whatever value system you apply to other humans, it is important to understand that international public health is currently dominated by such rhetoric, if not such thinking. This will greatly influence society and your health for the next few decades.

The Lancet is one of the most influential international medical journals. The above passage is not taken out of context. The editorial recommends we change the way society is managed:

Taking a fundamentally different approach to the natural world, one in which we are as concerned about the welfare of non-human animals and the environment as we are about humans.

To understand where public health has gone during the past few years, and why the Covid response could happen, it is important to pick this short editorial apart. Why did health professionals recommend children be denied the right to play together, and coerce pregnant women to be injected with novel pharmaceuticals that pass to their foetus? The answer lies partly in the dogma that now dominates health institutions and the journals that claim to inform them.

What's happened to Maria Zee is a sign of what's in store for all of us.
In Soviet Russia and Maoist China, communism was a government affair.

If you were reported by a colleague or family member as expressing beliefs contrary to the ideology of the state, or complaining about the lack of potatoes in the shops, you would be hauled in for questioning.

Generally, you were a goner unless you dobbed in someone else for real or imaginary crimes against the Party, or turned informant. Files released after the fall of the Berlin Wall showed one in six East Germans were informants on their family, friends and neighbours.

Just as we didn't get class Marxism but instead identity Marxism in the West, we haven't got government communism, either. Not in the same way as the Eurasian nations had it last century. The protections for citizens' rights in liberal democratic states proved too strong.

Instead, in the West, communism got privatised. The Marxists evolved, like a virus; they put on suits and used the jargon of corporate capitalism while pushing to undermine liberal protections for individuals and create a slave society under the guise of a tolerance utopia.

We're seeing exactly the same totalitarian surveillance and control grid being erected in Western nations as in Eastern nations last century, but in our case, the long arm of tyranny is being exercised via the private sector.