Important Takeaways:
- Underwater volcano off northwestern US could BLOW in weeks – as 300m-long stretch is hit with ‘great swarm’ of earthquakes
- Scientists have detected a ‘great swarm’ of earthquakes off the coast of Washington clocking as many as 200 in a single hour during one day.
- Geologists at the University of Washington said the quakes could lead to the Juan de Fuca Ridge erupting within a few weeks or years – but the effects are believed to be mild and not likely impact anyone on land.
- The underwater volcano sits more than 16,000 feet below the Pacific Ocean and about 150 miles off the coast of Washington.
- On March 6, the group’s real-time monitoring network detected the earthquakes, which registered a 4.1 magnitude
- The ‘great swarm’ of earthquakes followed multiple days of increasingly frequent quakes, according to Ocean Networks Canada (ONC), which is collecting the data for researchers to study.
- The spike indicated a possible ‘impending magmatic rupture,’ the research group reported.
- Officials at ONC have stressed that the effects will be mild and local, and that residents on land are extremely unlikely to feel the quake.
- Nor is it likely to trigger tsunami activity, as a tsunami is set off by a different type of tectonic plate boundary movement: pushing together and slipping, rather than pulling apart.
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Important Takeaways:
- Russia is beating us in Ukraine. China’s Navy outnumbers the US. The Army is collapsing – and the Air Force is falling from the sky. So, as Biden inexplicably CUTS defense budgets, ANDREW NEIL blasts: Does he have a death wish?
- From the very start of his State of the Union address last week, President Biden positioned himself as a war president.
- He posed as the champion of freedom and democracy which are threatened across the globe by autocrats on the march
- All the more remarkable then that, within days, the Biden administration produced plans for defense spending with all the hallmarks of a peace president who no longer thinks the US military need be a priority.
- The autocrats must be both baffled and amused. The rest of us should be frightened and angry.
- Biden proposes that defense spending should rise to $895 billion in the next (2025) financial year — an increase of barely 1 percent.
- It’s not that there’s no extra money around. The Biden budget will add over a trillion to federal spending and take it to a record peacetime, non-pandemic share of GDP (25 percent).
- Be in no doubt that the autocrats in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang are taking serious notice.
- The Chinese Naval fleet is already bigger than America’s and is on target to be over 400-strong before the decade is out — a formidable armada that will undoubtedly be used to intimidate Taiwan.
- Americans have rightly criticized the Europeans for putting welfare above military needs. But under Biden, America is doing the same — just another example of how he is ‘Europeanizing’ the USA.
- Yet the Russian economy is now on a total war footing, able to resupply its invaders in Ukraine at a greater scale than we are resupplying Kyiv and, as America struggles to find an extra 1 percent for its military, China has just announced an increase of over 7 percent for its armed forces.
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Important Takeaways:
- PLAYING GOD? Scientists Move Closer Towards Creating Artificial ‘Life’ in Lab
- In an experiment based on the premise that RNA was the initial ingredient in the original “primordial soup” predating the existence of DNA or proteins, the research team created an RNA molecule capable of accurately copying other RNA types, the result of which was an active enzyme.
- While the artificial RNA molecule is not yet self-replicating, Salk president Gerald Joyce, who co-authored a paper on this research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, called the research a significant advancement toward creating lab-based life. If self-replicating RNA can be made, Joyce said, “then it would be alive,” adding: “This is the road to how life can arise in a laboratory.”
- The discovery is one of a growing list of scientific advancements that just a few years ago would have been the preserve of science fiction. Earlier this month, it was reported that scientists are closer to being able to clone the wooly mammoth. Last week, a leading expert in the field predicted that the so-called ‘singularity’ could be achieved by 2027.
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Important Takeaways:
- When the Moon Turns Red: China’s Plan to Annex Space
- In 2021, Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency and the China National Space Administration agreed to build a shared moon base, to be named the International Lunar Research Station.
- “Chinese control of the moon would confer control of Cis-Lunar space, the portion of space between the Earth and the moon. Control of Cis-Lunar space would give a country the ability to shoot down or otherwise disable deep-space satellites, which are essential for, among other things, the early warning of ballistic missile attacks.” — Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, to the author, March 2014.
- The free world should view Chinese and Russian progress with alarm. China’s regime, for instance, has made it clear it intends to annex space.
- Ye Peijian made it clear that Beijing intends to exclude others from the moon, among other places, if it is in a position to do so.
- The American-led Artemis program also contemplates a base at the South Pole. NASA, unfortunately, has been pushing back Artemis timetables.
- Article II of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means,” but when has a treaty obligation ever stopped the People’s Republic from doing whatever it wants?
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Important Takeaways:
- Global Fuel Prices Are Surging With Supply Risks Ahead
- Disruptions on the world’s major trade routes, refinery closures and resurgent demand are pushing up global fuel prices and making forecasts difficult in the run-up to a US presidential election in which inflation will be a key issue.
- The average gasoline price at the pump in the US is now 60% higher than at the start of November 2020 — a potentially significant factor for American voters when comparing how well-off they feel now versus when President Joe Biden was first elected. And while pump prices are rising relatively slowly for this time of year, US fuel stockpiles well below seasonal norms will keep refining margins elevated, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
- As a result, the agency on Tuesday raised its second-quarter retail gasoline price forecast by 20 cents a gallon.
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Important Takeaways:
- Putin, speaking just days before a March 15-17 election which is certain to give him another six years in power, said the nuclear war scenario was not “rushing” up and he saw no need for the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
- “From a military-technical point of view, we are, of course, ready,” Putin, 71, told Rossiya-1 television and news agency RIA in response to a question whether the country was really ready for a nuclear war.
- Putin said the U.S. understood that if it deployed American troops on Russian territory – or to Ukraine – Russia would treat the move as an intervention.
- “(In the U.S.) there are enough specialists in the field of Russian-American relations and in the field of strategic restraint,” said Putin, the ultimate decision maker in the world’s biggest nuclear power.
- “Therefore, I don’t think that here everything is rushing to it (nuclear confrontation), but we are ready for this.”
- “Weapons exist in order to use them,” Putin said. “We have our own principles.”
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Important Takeaways:
- Pittsburgh Police Are No Longer Responding To ‘Non-Emergency’ Calls
- WPXI Channel 11 out of Pittsburgh reports that police will no longer be responding to calls that are not deemed to be “in-progress emergencies,” meaning theft, harassment, criminal mischief, and burglary alarms will essentially be ignored.
- Such calls will instead be redirected to an answer machine, according to the report which also notes that from 3 am to 7 am, the city’s six police stations will operate without desk officers present.
- Only around 20 officers will be available for overnight shifts to cover the entire city, the report further notes, stating that the decision has been taken due to “understaffing.”
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Important Takeaways:
- FBI Director Wray warns of ‘wide array’ of dangerous threats stemming from border
- FBI Director Christopher Wray testified on Monday about a range of threats that he said were “emanating from” the southern border, which has been plagued by record surges of illegal migration during the Biden administration.
- “From an FBI perspective, we are seeing a wide array of very dangerous threats that emanate from the border, and that includes everything from the drug trafficking, and the FBI alone sees enough fentanyl in the last two years to kill 270 million people,” Wray said. “That’s just on the fentanyl side. An awful lot of violent crime in the United States is at the hands of gangs who are themselves involved in the distribution of that fentanyl.”
- “The vast majority of the fentanyl that’s killing Americans is of course coming from Mexico, and the vast majority of the precursors for that fentanyl is coming from China,” Wray said.
- This fiscal year, officials have so far encountered 58 immigrants at the southern border whose names appeared on a terrorist watchlist, according to federal data. That figure coincides with border officials estimating last year that since President Joe Biden took office, more than 1.7 million immigrants have crossed into the country entirely
- Cornyn also pointed to border officials encountering tens of thousands of nationals from the U.S.’s top adversary, China, in 2023, noting that the number represented a sharp increase over the previous year.
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Important Takeaways:
- The typical American household must spend an additional $11,434 annually just to maintain the same standard of living they enjoyed in January of 2021, right before inflation soared to 40-year highs, according to a recent analysis of government data.
- Such figures underscore the financial squeeze many families continue to face even as the rate of U.S. inflation recedes and the economy by many measures remains strong, with the jobless rate at a two-decade low. The analysis, from Republican members of the U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee, taps government data such as the Consumer Price Index and Consumer Expenditure Survey to examine the impact of inflation state by state.
- Even so, many Americans say they aren’t feeling those gains, and this fall more people reported struggling financially than they did prior to the pandemic, according to CBS News polling. Inflation is the main reason Americans express pessimism about economy despite its bright points, which also include stronger wage gains in recent years.
- The Biden administration called the analysis “flawed.”
- Around the U.S., the state with the highest additional expenditures to afford the same standard of living compared with 2021 is Colorado, where a household must spend an extra $15,000 per year, the JEC analysis found. Residents in Arkansas, meanwhile, have to spend the least to maintain their standard of living, at about $8,500 on an annual basis.
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Important Takeaways:
- Tense moment Swedish fighter jets intercept Russian warplanes over the Baltic Sea – on the day Scandinavian nation’s flag was raised at NATO HQ
- Swedish fighter jets intercepted Russian warplanes over the Baltic Sea, marking a significant moment in their integration with NATO.
- The Swedish JAS-39 Gripen jets stormed the skies in their first real-world mission alongside German and Belgian aircraft on Monday morning after their flag was hoisted at NATO headquarters, in Brussels.
- Following Sweden’s official accession to the alliance on March 7, its multirole jets participated in their first visual identification mission as part of the NATO Air Policing mission over the Baltic Sea.
- In a show of operational readiness, the JAS-39 Gripens were scrambled twice on March 11 to identify and intercept Russian military aircraft.
- NATO’s Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) at Uedem had spotted an unidentified track over the Baltic Sea stretching from Kaliningrad to mainland Russia – sparking controllers to launch the Swedish jets from Sweden.
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