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Ukraine Situation Report: U.S. Sending More Bradleys

The Pentagon tomorrow will announce a new aid package that will include additional Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Stryker Armored Vehicles, a U.S. official tells The War Zone.

“I can confirm that the next Presidential Drawdown Package (expected tomorrow) contains roughly two dozen Bradleys and Strykers,” a U.S. official said in a statement to The War Zone.

The official, confirming earlier reporting by The Voice of America about the types of vehicles to be included, did not know the exact number of each vehicle.

The news about the additional donated armor vehicles comes as the open source tracking group Oryx said that Ukraine has lost 16 Bradleys so far in its counteroffensive. The group, which only tabulates vehicles for which is can visually confirm, does not mention Strykers damaged or destroyed in its latest assessment.

You can read much more about how Ukrainian troops performed in breaching operation that led to a bulk of the destroyed Bradleys in our story here.

To date, the U.S. has donated 109 M2A2-ODS Bradley variants and four B-FIST variants as well as as 90 Strykers.

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WHO Member Says Agency Needs To “Nullify The Conspiracies” About Covid Vaccines

In 2020, as people challenged the “expert guidance” on Covid during the first few months of the pandemic, the use of the term “misinformation” in news articles almost doubled. This rapid increase in the use of the term by legacy media outlets was followed by an equally rapid rollout of new Big Tech misinformation rules which targeted content that questioned the Covid guidance being pushed by authorities.

Fast forward to 2023 and the first signs of this censorship pattern are starting to play out again.

The WHO, an unelected global health agency, is less than a year away from finalizing an international pandemic treaty/accord and amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005). These two instruments will collectively give the World Health Organization vast new powers to target misinformation and increase its surveillance powers.

And as this WHO power grab faces mounting criticism and pushback, several representatives of this unelected global health agency decided to use the recent seventy-sixth World Health Assembly (WHA) (the annual meeting of the WHO’s decision-making body) to claim that dissent is misinformation and call for more action against dissenting voices.

During a WHA committee meeting, the WHO representative for the Bahamas said “dissenting voices can clutter the airwaves and derail the public health good with disinformation and misinformation.” She added that “more is needed to nullify the conspiracies.”

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What Happens When a QAnon Cult Leader Moves Into Town

TATAMAGOUCHE, Nova Scotia – The QAnon Queen of Canada leans so close to the windshield of her motorhome her face is almost pressed against the glass when she screams into her walkie-talkie. 

“Ignore them!” her voice crackles over the radio. “Ignore them!” 

The small collection of Romana’s Didulo’s ragtag group of cult followers-turned-servants who populate a rural Nova Scotia property look at me with a mix of horror and apology. One man, wearing a security hat straight out of a dollar store costume section, tries to take control and meekly tells me I need to leave the area. Another follower, a bit bolder than the security guy, coldly says “absolutely not” when I ask if we can speak to their so-called “queen.” 

There are three motorhomes strewn across the front lawn of the property and our conversation has to be loud in order to hear over the cacophony of the dozen or so dogs barking and fighting. Here is where Didulo and her followers, who have been proselytizing her unique brand of QAnon conspiracy-cum-alien stuff-cum-soverign citizenship beliefs  across Canada for the better part of a year, stayed over the winter. Here is where Didulo made her most loyal followers sleep on the floor of RVs so her dogs could sleep on the bed, and made people sit in their filth for weeks, eat expired food, and face torrents of abuse. 

Marching from the motorhome housing their spiritual leader, Didulo’s second-in-command comes storming towards us. Pointing her phone at us she begins to take control of the situation.

“No comment,” she screams repeatedly. “No comment!”

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Eight Years of Corrosive Lies about Syria

We are told constantly that Donald Trump’s lies corrode the life of our Republic. Jacob Levy of the Niskanen Center invoked Hannah Arendt on the subject, and said that Trump uses lies the way authoritarians do, to demonstrate and expand their power, by “making his surrogates repeat the lies [he] compromised them; that tied them to him. And it degraded them, and made clear where power lay.” James Pfiffner of the Brookings Institute solemnly argued that Trump’s lies are different than past presidential fibs because Trump doesn’t try to equivocate, and that they thus “challenge the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment.”

I’m willing to give these arguments in the defense of truth-telling a great deal of time. The triviality of some presidential lies, they often tell us, is an aggravating factor. By lying trivially, and casually, the president demeans truth itself, which is suborned by power. All true, as far as it goes.

But, then I come across another story about Syria in the Wall Street Journal, suggesting that the United States may leave 1,000 troops in that country after all. The president, if you’ll remember, announced a complete withdrawal of troops from Syria months ago. Then, weeks later the White House announced that a small force of 200 would stay behind. Now, the Journal was reporting that it would actually be 1,000. A few hours later the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff said the original plan remained unchanged.

I realized that I no longer knew what to believe.

Consider three assertions routinely made about Syria by pundits, politicians, and policymakers: 1) Syria shows the perils of U.S. non-intervention; 2) We’re only in Syria to fight ISIS; and 3) U.S. withdrawal from Syria would mean handing a victory to Vladimir Putin.

All of the above statements have become conventional wisdom. The same people sometimes repeat more than one of them. And yet they are entirely irreconcilable with one another.

If withdrawing from Syria means handing a victory to Vladimir Putin, then we are doing something other than fighting ISIS there, something that certainly can’t be described as “non-intervention.”

One fact I do know: The CIA began the U.S. mission in the Syrian Civil War years before ISIS came into being, and a full year before President Obama began talking up his red lines and proposing a congressional vote to authorize intervention in Syria.

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Ohio Cops Raided Afroman’s House Looking for a Dungeon Because of a Bizarre Confidential Informant Tip

When sheriff’s deputies in Adams County, Ohio, raided Afroman’s house last year, they were looking for more than just marijuana, which the rapper is famously fond of. The deputies were searching for evidence of outlandish claims from a confidential informant that the house contained a basement dungeon.

The Adams County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO) executed a search warrant on Afroman’s house last August on suspicion of drug possession, drug trafficking, and kidnapping. Afroman was not charged with a crime, and the kidnapping angle was never explained. But now, public records obtained by Arthur West, a public records advocate, and provided to Reason shed more light on the raid, which has since led to a bitter legal battle between Afroman and the ACSO deputies.

According to the search warrant affidavit, the Adams County Sheriff’s Office received a tip from a confidential informant that Joseph Foreman, better known as Afroman, was not only trafficking large amounts of marijuana, but he also “has a basement, referred to as ‘the dungeon’ in which he…keeps women locked in, forcing them to urinate and defecate in a bucket as punishment for upsetting or disobeying him.”

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Railway Track Unearthed at Nazi Bunker Complex Sparks Amber Room Speculation

An unearthed railway line within a Nazi bunker complex in Poland has sparked speculation that it could lead to the legendary lost Amber Room. The remarkable discovery was reportedly made by researchers in the town of Mamerski, where the German Army Supreme Command was headquartered during World War II. A recent deforestation project saw the site cleared of trees, which allowed experts from the Jaćwież-Elk, Augustów Historical and Exploration Association to survey the area. To their amazement, they discovered a set of railway tracks and wagon wheels at a depth of around five feet below the ground, leading into what would have been the bunker system.

Detailing the find on social media, the Mamerki museum’s Bartlomiej Plebańczyk marveled that “this is a huge surprise as we did not know that there was a railroad inside the complex.” He went on to observe that “the railway line and the wagon were covered up on purpose, but we have no idea who did, when they did it and why.” The mysterious nature of the discovery led Plebańczyk to theorize that it could possibly be connected to the apocryphal Nazi ‘gold train’ which is said to have been stuffed with a slew of pilfered treasures, including the ornate gold and amber paneling stolen from a Russian palace, and subsequently hidden at the end of WWII.

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Taxpayers Shell Out $45 Million After Man Paralyzed As Cops Slam Brakes in Police Van, Sending Him Flying

On June 19, 2022, Randy Cox was arrested for an alleged gun charge. Moments later, he would be paralyzed from the waist down — his treatment reminiscent of Freddie Gray, who was killed by police during a similar ride.

This week, the City of New Haven announced that the taxpayers of Connecticut will pay $45 million to settle a lawsuit with Cox.

News 8 reports that they spoke with the sister of Richard “Randy” Cox, who remains focused on getting Cox the care he needs. The money from the settlement will undoubtedly help.

“If a situation like this happens again, hopefully, others won’t stand around and watch,” LaToya Boomer said, quoting her brother.

“He appreciates the mayor and the police chief for keeping their word and holding everyone accountable,” Boomer said.

The accountability Boomer is referring to happened last November when the officers involved were charged.

In November, five New Haven police officers were charged with second-degree reckless endangerment and cruelty to persons — all misdemeanors. The officers were given a $25,000 bond. The officers involved are Officer Oscar Diaz, Sgt. Betsy Segui, Officer Ronald Pressley, Officer Jocelyn Lavandier, and Officer Luis Rivera.

Two of the officers involved were fired, while two others will learn their fate at a Board of Police Commissioners meeting later this month. A fifth officer retired following the incident.

“We need to be transparent and accountable. Period,” said New Haven Police Chief Karl Jacobson. “You cannot treat people the way that Mr. Cox was treated.”

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The Western Media Is Whitewashing the Azov Battalion

Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has already resulted in millions of losers—chief among them the civilians who’ve been tortured, murdered, forced to become refugees, or forced to spend their days worrying about loved ones fighting Russia.

But there are also winners: the neofascists whom Putin’s war has turned into heroes.

For seven years, Western institutions have warned about Ukraine’s Azov Movement, which began as a neo-Nazi paramilitary group in 2014 and became notorious for its worldwide recruitment of extremists.

Then came Russia’s invasion. Within months, Azov fighters were being feted in Congress and at Stanford University. MSNBC swooned over a Ukrainian soldier whose Twitter account overflowed with neo-Nazi images. Facebook made the stunning decision to allow posts praising the Azov Battalion, even though the company admitted that it was a hate group.

This overnight normalization of white supremacy was possible because Western institutions, driven by a zeal to ignore anything negative about our Ukrainian allies, decided that a neo-Nazi military formation in a war-torn nation had suddenly and miraculously stopped being neo-Nazi.

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The world’s top H.P. Lovecraft expert weighs in on a monstrous viral meme in the A.I. world

Artificial intelligence is scary to a lot of people, even within the tech world. Just look at how industry insiders have co-opted a tentacled monster called a shoggoth as a semi-tongue-in-cheek symbol for their rapidly advancing work.

But their online memes and references to that creature — which originated in influential late author H.P. Lovecraft’s novella “At the Mountains of Madness” — aren’t quite perfect, according to the world’s leading Lovecraft scholar, S.T. Joshi.

If anyone knows Lovecraft and his wretched menagerie, which includes the ever-popular Cthulhu, it’s Joshi. He’s edited reams of Lovecraft collections, contributed scores of essays about the author and written more than a dozen books about him, including the monumental two-part biography “I Am Providence.”

So, after The New York Times recently published a piece from tech columnist Kevin Roose explaining that the shoggoth had caught on as “the most important meme in A.I.,” CNBC reached out to Joshi to get his take — and find out what he thought Lovecraft would say about the squirmy homage from the tech world.

“While I’m sure Lovecraft would be grateful (and amused) by the application of his creation to AI, the parallels are not very exact,” Joshi wrote. “Or, I should say, it appears that AI creators aren’t entirely accurate in their understanding of the shoggoth.”

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White House Set To Approve Depleted Uranium Munitions For Ukraine

The Biden administration is set to transfer depleted uranium shells to Ukraine for the first time since the Russian invasion began The Wall Street Journal reports Tuesday.

Internal administration debate over the controversial munitions has been ongoing for several months, but an admin official quoted in WSJ says at this point there are “no major obstacles” to sending it, which will be used to equip M1 Abrams tanks provided by Washington. 

This came at the request of the Ukrainians themselves: “The Pentagon has urged that the Abrams tanks the U.S. is providing Ukraine be armed with depleted-uranium rounds, which are regularly used by the U.S. Army and are highly effective against Russian tanks,” WSJ writes.

Already the UK has been providing armor piercing rounds which contain depleted uranium for its Challenger 2 main battle tanks. This was first announced by Britain’s defense ministry in late March.

The condemnation from the Kremlin in response to London was swift, with a Russian foreign ministry statement at the time saying it was tantamount to using a “dirty bomb” – given the highly dangerous remnant health effects on the battlefield.

While the UK defense ministry asserted that “Such rounds are highly effective in defeating modern tanks and armored vehicles,” Moscow responded “These shells not only kill, but infect the environment and cause oncology in people living on these lands.”

There have been ongoing attempts over the years of international watchdogs to get depleted uranium shells banned by international treaty. EU parliament, for example, has long pushed for a ban.

A defense analyst cited in the fresh WSJ report describes why they are so sought after by Ukrainian forces: 

“The projectile hits like a freight train,” said Scott Boston, a defense analyst at the Rand Corporation and former Army artillery officer. “It is very long and very dense. So it puts a great deal of kinetic energy on a specific point on an enemy armor array.”

But, as the report also notes, “The proposal has been debated at the White House, where some officials have expressed concern that sending the rounds might open Washington to criticism that it was providing a weapon that may carry health and environmental risks.”

It is the “chemical toxicity” of the metals used which poses the biggest danger, also as upon explosion it is turned into toxic dust which is dispersed on the battlefield and can have a permanent presence. 

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