“European Military Powers Work on 5-10 Year Plan to Replace U.S. in NATO”
March 20th, 2025Good. Now make it five to ten months, with payments for goods and services provided by the U.S.
Via: Financial Times:
Europe’s biggest military powers are drawing up plans to take on greater responsibilities for the continent’s defence from the US, including a pitch to the Trump administration for a managed transfer over the next five to 10 years.
The discussions are an attempt to avoid the chaos of a unilateral US withdrawal from Nato, a fear sparked by President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to weaken or walk away from the transatlantic alliance that has protected Europe for almost eight decades.
U.S. Responsible for 43% of Global Arms Sales
March 20th, 2025Via: ZeroHedge:
The United States was the world’s largest arms exporter between 2020 and 2024, delivering weapons to 107 states.
As Statista’s Anna Fleck shows in the chart below, it accounted for 43 percent of global exports in that time period, up from 35 percent of all international arms sales between 2015 and 2019.
French Scientist Denied U.S. Entry After Phone Messages Critical of Trump Found
March 20th, 2025Via: Guardian:
France’s research minister said a French scientist was denied entry to the US this month after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration.
“I learned with concern that a French researcher” on assignment for the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) “who was traveling to a conference near Houston was denied entry to the United States before being expelled”, Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister of higher education and research, said in a statement on Monday to Agence France-Presse published by Le Monde. “This measure was apparently taken by the American authorities because the researcher’s phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy,” the minister added.
“Freedom of opinion, free research, and academic freedom are values ??that we will continue to proudly uphold. I will defend the right of all French researchers to be faithful to them, while respecting the law,” Baptiste said.
A diplomatic source told the French news agency that the incident occurred on 9 March.
Another AFP source said that US authorities accused the French researcher of “hateful and conspiratorial messages”. He was reportedly also informed of an FBI investigation, but told that “charges were dropped” before being expelled.
In Case You’re Rage Quitting Firefox Because Everything Is Broken…
March 19th, 2025tldr: It’s MetaMask. Disable MetaMask and Firefox will work normally again.
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I’ve been using Firefox for about two decades. I’ve had a few rage quits over that time. The latest was yesterday when many sites that I use were broken—just in Firefox. Without investigation, I used this latest Firefox snafu as an excuse to try to quit it again.
I’m on Brave at the moment. I can’t seem to enable a conventional window title bar, so trying to move the window around requires one to carefully pick an unused area in the top portion of the UI to click to drag the window around.
I’ve been moving windows around by grabbing the title bars since the 1980s, but in 2025, that had to go for some reason. How about an option to enable it for us geezers? Nope. And drop down menus… Those seem to be unavailable as well.
So, I slinked back to Firefox (again) to try to figure out why it shit the bed this time. Turning extensions off revealed that there’s a problem with MetaMask. Disabling it will cause sites to load normally again.
Do Cylindrical Structures Extend Hundreds of Meters Below Giza Pyramid [???]
March 19th, 2025Via: Project Unity:
Boston Dynamics Atlas: Walk, Run, Crawl, Reinforcement Learning Fun
March 19th, 2025Uh…
Via: Boston Dynamics:
JFK Assassination Records – 2025 Documents Release
March 18th, 2025Via: U.S. National Archives:
In accordance with President Donald Trump’s directive of March 17, 2025, all records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released.
President Trump: Stop Bombing Yemen and Exit the Middle East!
March 18th, 2025President Trump: Stop Bombing Yemen and Exit the Middle East! pic.twitter.com/dfDLAQvPwA
— Ron Paul (@RonPaul) March 18, 2025
30 U.S. Zip Codes Where $200 ATM Cash Withdrawals Trigger Federal Financial Surveillance
March 18th, 2025Via: Reason:
One of President Donald Trump’s Day 1 executive orders designated “certain international cartels” as “foreign terrorist organizations,” a classification that according to the State Department “play[s] a critical role in our fight against terrorism and [is] an effective means of curtailing support for terrorist activities and pressuring groups to get out of the terrorism business.”
To that end, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) announced a new rule cracking down on cash transactions this week, but only in certain geographical regions. No matter the administration’s intent to target cartels, the rule will expand government surveillance of its citizens.
FinCEN “issued a Geographic Targeting Order (GTO) to further combat the illicit activities and money laundering of Mexico-based cartels and other criminal actors along the southwest border of the United States,” according to the announcement. “The GTO requires all money services businesses (MSBs) located in 30 ZIP codes across California and Texas near the southwest border to file Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) with FinCEN at a $200 threshold, in connection with cash transactions.”
Hamas Refuses to Release Remaining Israeli Hostages, Israel Massacres Hundreds of Palestinian Civilians
March 18th, 2025Collective punishment is a punishment or sanction imposed on a group or whole community for acts allegedly perpetrated by a member or some members of that group or area, which could be an ethnic or political group, or just the family, friends and neighbors of the perpetrator, as well as entire cities and communities where the perpetrator(s) allegedly committed the crime. Because individuals who are not responsible for the acts are targeted, collective punishment is not compatible with the basic principle of individual responsibility. The punished group may often have no direct association with the perpetrator other than living in the same area and can not be assumed to exercise control over the perpetrator’s actions. Collective punishment is prohibited by treaty in both international and non-international armed conflicts, more specifically Common Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 4 of the Additional Protocol II.
Via: Al Jazeera:
At least 404 people, including many children, have been killed in renewed Israeli attacks that have shattered a fragile ceasefire in Gaza. The Health Ministry’s toll is expected to rise as many victims remain under the rubble.
Israel, which has enforced a total aid blockade on Gaza for more than two weeks, issues new forced displacement orders for several areas.
