28 Feb, 2024 12:29

Russia has ‘done very well’ at boosting its defense industry – US general

Moscow’s military is adapting and learning during the Ukraine conflict, the American army’s chief of staff has acknowledged

Russia should not be underestimated as its military has shown the ability to adapt and the country has expanded its industrial base amid the conflict with Ukraine, US Army Chief of Staff General Randy George has said.

George, who is the highest-ranking military officer in the Department of the Army, shared his assessment on Tuesday during a forum hosted by the Washington-based Defense Writers Group.

Russian forces “are adapting and they are learning” amid the fighting with the Ukrainian military, he said. The chief of staff highlightedRussia’s advances in drones, loitering munitions, and electronic warfare.

“Don’t underestimate your enemy. That’s never a good place to start,” George stressed, admitting that Moscow has “done very well by pumping money and energy into [its] industrial base.”

Fellow high-profile guests at the event included Christine Wormuth, secretary of the US Army, who acknowledged that Russia has proved capable of regenerating its industrial base, despite the sanctions imposed by the West.

Wormuth also insisted the Pentagon has learned a significant amount from the fighting between Moscow and Kiev.

“We’re moving away from counterterrorism and counterinsurgency; we want to be postured for large-scale combat operations,”she stated.

In order to increase efficiency, the size of the US Army will be reduced by 24,000 positions or almost 5% by 2029, decreasing from 494,000 to 470,000 troops, the US Army secretary announced.

Some American media outlets which reported Wormuth’s comments, including The Hill and Fox News, linked the move to “recruiting shortfalls” in theUS Army. Military.com revealed last month that the army had fallen 10,000 short of its 65,000 enlistment target in 2023.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier this month that the production of weapons and ammunition in the country is going at a “very good, high pace,” with the forces fighting Ukraine steadily receiving the arms they need in terms of quality and quantity.

Defense industry employees “work hard at their plants and, if necessary, go directly to the combat zone… making appropriate adjustments [to the hardware there],” Putin stated, describing it as “true heroism.”

Citing an unnamed Estonian official, the New York Times reported in September thatRussian ammunition production was seven times higher than that of the US and EU combined.

Last week, a Ukrainian battery commander told the Kyiv Independent that ammunition supplies to Russian forces were “running smoothly” as they were mostly firing shells produced in 2022 and 2023.

https://www.rt.com/news/593306-russian-industrial-base-us/

28 Feb, 2024 12:34

Apple scraps electric car project – Bloomberg

Work on the multibillion-dollar plan dubbed Project Titan started a decade ago

US tech giant Apple has abandoned its decade-long effort to build an electric car, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The anonymous sources told the outlet that the announcement, which Apple made internally on Tuesday, came as a surprise to the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project. The decision was reportedly shared by Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, a vice president in charge of the effort. They told the employees the project would begin being phased out and that many of them would be shifted to the company’s artificial intelligence division.

Apple and CEO Tim Cook never acknowledged the car project publicly, instead referring to it as work on “autonomous systems.” That made it a source of intense speculation in the automotive and tech industries.

Since Apple started devoting resources to the concept in 2014, the plans to build an electric semi-autonomous vehicle have repeatedly shifted and attempts to bring a product to market have faced numerous setbacks. Apple axed dozens of employees connected to the project in a 2016 restructuring. Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported the tech company’s estimated release date for the car had been delayed until at least 2028.

EV giant Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, responded to Apple’s decision to abandon the project by posting emojis of a salute and a cigarette on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter).

https://www.rt.com/business/593298-apple-electric-car-plans-dead/

28 Feb, 2024 09:29

Sanctions have reached their limit – Russian think tank

Experts from the Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration say new restrictions won’t stop growth

There is hardly anything Western nations could do more to stop Russian economic growth, researchers at a top university have concluded in a new study. The experts from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) say newsignificant restrictions on Moscow are unlikelybecause they would carry high risks for the West itself.

The EU unveiled its13th packageof sanctions last Friday, ahead of the second anniversary of Russia’s military campaign against Ukraine. The measures largely seek to close loopholes that could be exploited by the Kremlin to circumvent existing restrictions via third countries.

The US Treasury Department also announced a new round of sanctions on the same day.

In an article published on Tuesday, Russian daily Vedomosti cited a recent study by several RANEPA experts, who argued that the West had already imposed its most effective sanctions on Russia. The researchers analyzed two scenarios for the Russian economy in 2024-2026. The first envisages the almost-simultaneous lowering of the price cap for Russian oil to $50 per barrel, the introduction of a total embargo on exports to Russia, as well as secondary sanctions aimed at third countries.

The authors expect thateven this negative scenario would not have any significant impact on the Russian economy; though the government would be required to act quickly. While the country’s GDP growth would likely slow down to 0.3% in 2024 under such circumstances, it would then climb to 1.5% and 1.4% in the following two years.

A more optimistic scenario foresees pretty much the same measures on the part of Western nations, but spread out over time. In this case, Russia could see 2.2% growth in 2026, the experts wrote.

According to the study, the past two years have proven that theRussian economy is in better shape than originally thought, thus rendering Western sanctions less effective.

One of the article’s co-authors, Konstantin Tuzov, told Vedomosti that the West had “already thought up everything it could,” with Moscow’s economic outlook now improving thanks to cooperation with China and India.

On Monday, Euractiv, citing a study by the IESEG School of Management, reported thatEU sanctions on Russia are being “massively circumvented” via third countries, such as Türkiye, the UAE, and Kazakhstan.

Earlier this month, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin announced that the country’s economy had grown by 4% in 2023, eclipsing the 2.7% forecast by the Russian central bank in January.

(Boomerang effect on the West, they are getting desperate to prove they can defeat Russia, they can’t. Russia is only getting stronger. Think about it, numerous EU countries, US and Canada the richest countries in the world cannot take down Russia financially. The West is ruining their own countries for this pathetically corrupt state of Ukraine. Ukraine has lost a 1/2-3/4s of the population, due this stupid war. In addition their farmlands are being poisoned for years due to the fighting, chemicals and destruction to their country.)

https://www.rt.com/russia/593296-experts-western-sanctions-russia-reached-limit/

27 Feb, 2024 15:45

Rachel Marsden: Nuland accidentally reveals the true aim of the West in Ukraine

Regime Change Karen has said the quiet part out loud, complaining that Putin’s Russia is “not the Russia we wanted”. 1/2

US State Department fixture and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, aka “Regime Change Karen,” apparently woke up one day recently,took the safety off her nuclear-grade mouth, and inadvertently blew up the West’s Ukraine narrative.

Until now,Americans have been toldthat all the US taxpayer cash being earmarked for Ukrainianaid is to help actual Ukrainians. Anyone notice that the $75 billion American contribution isn’t getting the job done on the battlefield? Victory in military conflict isn’t supposed to look like defeat. Winning also isn’t defined as, “Well, on a long enough time axis, like infinity, our chance of defeat will eventually approach zero.” And the $178 billion in total from all allies combined doesn’t seem to be doing the trick, either. Short of starting a global war with weapons capable of extending the conflict beyond a regional one, it’s not like they’ve been holding back. The West is breaking the bank.All for some vague, future Ukrainian “victory” that they don’t seem to want to clearly define.

We keep hearing that the support will last “as long as it takes.” For what exactly? By not clearly defining it, they can keep moving the goal posts.

But now here comes Regime Change Karen, dropping some truth bombs on CNN about Ukrainian aid. =She started off with the usual talking point of doing “what we have always done, which is defend democracy and freedom around the world.” Conveniently, in places where they have controlling interests and want to keep them – or knock them out of a global competitor’s roster and into their own. “And by the way, we have to remember that the bulk of this money is going right back into the US to make those weapons==,” Nuland said, pleading in favor of the latest Ukraine aid package that’s been getting the side eye from Republicans in Congress.

So there you have it, folks.Ukrainians are a convenient pretext to keep the tax cash flowing in the direction of the US military industrial complex. This gives a whole new perspective on “as long as it takes.” It’s just the usual endless war and profits repackaged as benevolence. But we’ve seen this before. It explains why war in Afghanistan was little more than a gateway to Iraq. And why the Global War on Terrorism never seems to end, and only ever mutates. Arguably the best one they’ve come up with so far is the need for military-grade panopticon-style surveillance, so the state can shadow-box permanently with ghosts while bamboozling the general public with murky cyber concepts that it can’t understand or conceptualize.When one conflict or threat dials down, another ramps up, boostedby fearmongering rhetoric couched in white-knighting.There’s never any endgame or exit ramp to any of these conflicts. And there clearly isn’t one for Ukraine, either.

Still, there’s a sense that the realities on the ground in Ukraine, which favor Russia, now likely mean that the conflict is closer to its end than to its beginning. Acknowledgements abound in the Western press. And that means there isn’tmuch time left for Europe to get aboard the tax cash laundering bandwagon and stuff its own military industrial complexes’ coffers like Washington has been doing from the get-go. Which would explain why a bunch of countries now seem to be rushing to give Ukraine years-long bilateral security “guarantees,” requiring more weapons for everyone. France, Germany, Canada, and Italy have all made the pledge. PlusDenmark, which also flat-out said that it would send all its artillery to Ukraine. If security for Europe is the goal, that sounds kind of like the opposite. ..

https://www.rt.com/news/593261-nuland-nukes-west-ukraine-putin/

>>20489213

2/2

Particularly when Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba told the EU that “Russia has gotten closer to your home” in the wake of the most recent defeat in Avdeevka. He sounds like one of those guys in TV ads trying to peddle burglar alarms.Seems like Russia only exists in the minds of the West these days to justify sending weapons to Ukraine to get blown up, while also justifying to taxpayers why they should continue funding this whole charade.

Meanwhile, the West’s drive towards peace seems to be taking the scenic route. “As we move forward, we continue our support to Ukraine in further developing President Zelensky’s Peace Formula,” G7 leaders said after a recent meeting with Zelensky in Kiev. Nice to see that he’s devoting all his time to this magic peace formula instead of running around extorting his friends for cash by threatening them with Putin.

It was already a pretty big hint of what’s really been going on when the EU decided to use the taxpayer-funded European Peace Facility to reimburseEU countries for the unloading of their mothballed, second-hand weapons into Ukraine, where Russia can then dispose of them before anyone could be accused of overcharging for clunkers. Now, with the clunker supply running dry, they just have to make more weapons. Maybe funneling cash into weapons for themselves will be the Hail Mary pass that saves their economies that they’ve tanked “for Ukraine”?

Thanks to Nuland’s nuking of any plausible deniability on Ukrainian “aid” not going to Washington, it’snow clear that Ukrainians continue to die so poor weapons makers don’t end up shaking tin cans on street corners. She has also removed any doubt about theultimate US goal being Russian regime change, calling Putin’s leadership “not the Russia we wanted,” and sounding like someone who chronically sends back a meal to kitchens of a dining establishment.

“We wanted a partner that was going to be Westernizing, that was going to be European. But that’s not what Putin has done,”she told CNN. That’s exactly what Putin has done, actually. It’s the West that’s moved away from itself and is becoming increasingly unrecognizable by its own citizens. Pretty sure that it goes beyond just wanting a country to be “European,” too. Because Germany’s European, and an ally, and Nuland wouldn’t shut up about how much she hated its Nord Stream gas supply — until it mysteriously went kaboom.

Regime Change Karen saying the quiet part out loud has decimated the Western establishment’s narrativeso badly that it’s a miracle no one has yet accused her thermonuclear mouth of being an asset of Russia’s weapons program.

https://www.rt.com/news/593261-nuland-nukes-west-ukraine-putin/

25 Feb, 2024 16:26

Putin defeated US plan for Russia – Nuland

The arch-neocon has told CNN that Washington wanted a compliant leader installed in Moscow

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is “not the Russia that we wanted,” Acting US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland has told CNN. Nuland explained that Washington wanted acompliant leaderin the Kremlin who would “westernize”the country.

“It’s not the Russia that, frankly, we wanted,”Nuland told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday. “We wanted a partner that was going to be westernizing, that was going to be European. But that’s not what Putin has done.” (This creature is insane!)

Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, enjoyed Washington’s support as he oversaw the rushed privatization of the Russian economy in the 1990s. Yeltsin’s reforms saw the rise of the so-called ‘oligarchs’, who amassed huge fortunes selling Russia’s natural resources to Western buyers, while the majority of the population dealt with declining life expectancy, soaring crime and homicide rates, and the collapse of the ruble.

Putin, who first took office in 2000, is widely credited with taming the oligarchs, imposing public order, and reversing the economic and social decline of the 1990s.Putin initially sought friendly relations with the West, telling American journalist Tucker Carlson earlier this month that he asked then-US President Bill Clinton whether Russia could one day join NATO, only to be rejected.

Putin nevertheless reached out to Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, with a proposal that the US, Russia, and Europe jointly create a missile defense system. While Bush’s team initially expressed interest, Putin said that “in the end they just told us to get lost.”

A combination of NATO expansion, American support for jihadist groups in the Caucuses, and Nuland’s orchestration of the coup d’etat in Ukraine in 2014 made it clear that the US and its allies were not interested in cooperation, Putin told Carlson.

Nuland told Amanpour thatPutin has “destroyed his own country” by intervening in Ukraine, and that the US will “continue to tighten the noose on him,” presumably by supplying Kiev with weapons and imposing additional economic sanctions on Moscow.

However, successive rounds of sanctions have failed to “crater” the Russian economy, as US President Joe Biden predicted they would in 2022. Instead, the International Monetary Fund predicts that Russia’s economy will grow by 2.6% in 2024, while the US’ will expand by 2.1%.

Likewise, the unprecedented influx of Western arms failed to rescue Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive from failure. The operation fizzled out in the autumn after Kiev lost around 160,000 men and failed to retake any of its lost territory, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

Russian officials have repeatedly said that they are ready to negotiate an end to the conflict, but that Ukraine must accept the loss of its former territories and commit to neutrality.

(Victoria Nuland and that whole regime change puppet governments crew need to be tried at the Hague for hideous war crimes and death upon innocent civilians and innocent leaders like Khan in jail in Pakistan. The Department of State and IC agencies WW perceive themselves as gods, and they know what is the perfect world. They do all this knowing the killing and destruction of people and countries. The Clintons, Obamas, Bushs and all their DS in the US and around the World should be tried at the Hague, and be put to death.)

https://www.rt.com/russia/593142-victoria-nuland-putin-defeated/

28 Feb, 2024 14:47

US intel tried to track Putin – Wired

A tech firm devised a new surveillance tool under the auspices of the CIA and Pentagon, the media outlet has claimed, citing a new book

A US tech firm with close ties to the CIA and the Pentagon used a powerful tool to try to track the movements of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Wired has claimed, citing a new book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Byron Tau.

The company, PlanetRisk, reportedly created the tool – originally named Locomotive but later rebranded as VISR (Virtual Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) – to tap into geolocation data used by digital advertisers, andwas supposedly able to snoop on people close to the Russian president, thus gaining information on his whereabouts.

In its long-read on Tuesday, based on Tau’s ‘Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State’, Wired reported that researcher Mike Yeagley first became aware of the potential usefulness of large pools of data collected by certain apps in the mid-2010s. Tech companies were already routinely gathering the information and were willing to sell to any advertiser prepared to pay a relatively modest fee for the service, making it a particularly promising area, the report claimed.

According to the book, Yeagley, “who specialized in obtaining unique data sets for government agencies,” first experimented with geofences – virtual boundaries in geographical data sets – to track down employees of US government agencies. The method reportedly proved highly successful in terms of harvesting personal data on staff who used dating and weather apps, as well as games that require the user’s location.

In 2015, Yeagley was allegedly hired byPlaceIQafter the company received an “investment from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.” He then reportedly moved on to another obscure start-up, PlanetRisk.

“The CIA was interested in software that could analyze and understand the geographic movement of people and things,” the book explained.

During its trial period, the Locomotive tool was used to follow in near real time the movements of people in Syria, which was in the midst of a civil war. That included some US special forces operatives secretly deployed to the country, Tau wrote.

“After acquiring a data set on Russia, the team realized they could track phones in the Russian President Vladimir Putin’s entourage,”the book claimed, as cited by Wired.

While none of the devices in question could be linked to the Russian leader personally,PlanetRisk believed it had access to the smart phones that “belonged tothe drivers, the security personnel, the political aides, and othersupport staff around the Russian president,” according to the account. These people were allegedly “trackable in the advertising data,” supposedly meaning that Putin’s routes and locations could be identified.

According to the book, US government agencies were highly impressed with Yeagley’s work, with Locomotive – and later VISR – being adopted “as part of an interagency program.”

Tau claimed, however, that other entities, most notably Israeli ones, have since built their own tracking tools using the same principles. These are reportedly now available to a far wider range of clients globally, rather than just US intelligence agencies.

https://www.rt.com/news/593313-wired-book-tracking-tool-cia-putin/

28 Feb, 2024 14:23

Two children stabbed outside school in Germany

Police have not revealed the attacker’s identity or motive (Muslim and hatred of Catholics)

A boy and a girl, nine and ten, have been “seriously injured” in a knife attack on Wednesday in the German city of Duisburg.Police said they had detained a “youth” who allegedly attacked the children outside a Catholic elementary school.

The children were returning home from school in the Duisburg neighborhood of Marxloh when the attack happened, according to local media. They survived the attack and crawled back to the schoolhouse, where a teacher gave them first aid. A medical helicopter then evacuated them to an area hospital.

Duisburg police said a 21-year-old male suspect had been arrested and that there was no further danger to the public. Forensic investigators are working the crime scene and looking for possible witnesses.

Police did not identify the suspect or offer any information about his possible motive.

Duisburg is a city of about half a million residents in the Ruhr industrial region, in the West German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

https://www.rt.com/news/593321-duisburg-children-school-knife/

>>20489316

Germany has far more than 5.6 Muslims in their country they have been reporting the same figures since 2019, it’s never updated

HAPPENING NOW

=•Supreme Court hears arguments in challenge to Trump-era move to ban bump stocks after 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting==. Watch live

2/28/24

Watch Live: SCOTUS hears case involving Trump-era ban on bump stocks

Link to watch SC

https://www.cnn.com/specials/live-video-2

Germany’s Anti-Migrant Party Wants More Migrant Voters

Why the Alternative for Germany is increasingly targeting immigrants—as potential supporters.

Paul HockenosFebruary 22, 2024

Enxhi Seli-Zacharias is the improbable frontperson of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Gelsenkirchen, a working-class, industrial city in western Germany’s Ruhr Valley. The 30-year-old politician and political scientist arrived in Gelsenkirchen at the age of 6, together with her family, as refugees from newly post-communist Albania. Today, she sits in the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia.

She is the kind of cheerleader the AfD will likely need to achieve its stated goal of passing the Christian Democrats as Germany’s most popular party and eventually coming to power. Seli-Zacharias is a first-generation immigrant who is explicitly aiming to rally support for the bombastically anti-migration, xenophobic party among Germany’s immigrant communities. It’s a voting bloc that AfD leaders believe has massive potential for their project.

Seli-Zacharias’s TikTok and YouTube clips—which regularly get six-digit likes—speak straight to an unlikely voter pool:the 8 million registered voters in Germany with a migration background, 14 percent of the total electorate, and growing.Nearly a third of the country’s population—24 million—has roots in recent migration, and that number climbs ever higher as immigration outpaces the negative native-German birthrate. Germany has to crack down hard on “illegal immigration,” Seli-Zacharias inveighs in dire tones, targetingmigrants from Africa and the Middle East who she alleges regularly rob and rape upstanding Germanslike herself and the many other good people in Germany who speak proper German, work hard, raise families, and respect the law.

Seli-Zacharias counts herself among the latter demographic as a heterosexual, law-abiding citizen who speaks perfect German. In the North Rhine-Westphalia parliament, Seli-Zacharias believes she represents other integrated immigrantswhen she blasts the “chaos” and “failure” of Germany’s recent refugee policies.Migration has become the No. 1 topic for German voters overall, according to polls. Studies have shown that it’s also the foremost concern of non-native German voters. At the height of last decade’s refugee crisis, one study showed that40 percentof Germans with an immigrant background saidthey thought the country should take in fewer refugees, with a quarter (25%) saying it should stop all refugees from entering entirely. “This dissatisfaction [with immigration policies] is apparently greater among some of the people with foreign roots living here than is their fear of the AfD,” the weekly magazine Focus recently concluded.

These are the sentiments that Seli-Zacharias feeds. Germany’s Willkommenskultur (culture of hospitality) ”has reached its limit,“ she intones in her videos, most probably referring tothe 350,000 foreign nationals who applied for political asylum in Germany in 2023. “No federal state should have to spend 640 million euros for people who don’t belong here in the first place,” she says, referring to North Rhine-Westphalia’s 2023 state budget for all aspects of immigration.

Germany’s political class is not entirely unaware of the phenomenon of people with immigrant backgrounds voting for anti-immigrant parties, although previously in drips and drabs. In a regional election in the federal state of Hesse in 2018, more naturalized immigrants voted for the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and even the Greens than the AfD.But 14 percent of those with migration background did vote AfD, which is slightly higher than the share of Germany-born Germans(13 percent) who cast their ballots for the far right party. Experts like Sanem Kleff, director of aBerlin-based anti-racism NGO, argue that the AfD’s outreach to immigrants—in particular those hailing from Turkey and eastern Europe—has just begun and could pay off bigtime for the party.

Experts say there are several reasons for the affinity that some immigrant voters feel for this anti-immigrant party. One reason is their overlap on illiberal social views. “Just because a person moves from point A to point B doesn’t mean they leave their political socializations behind,” says Kleff, who was born in Turkey and raised in northern Germany. “Many come from deeply patriarchal cultures and are very conservative and nationalistic. In Turkish elections, the Turkish population in Germany overwhelmingly votes hard-right conservative,” Kleff told Foreign Policy…

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/02/22/germany-afd-migrant-populism/

>>20489711

It must be very boring to be the watcher. We research, post, get a little sleep and do it over again