Month: March 2023

Viktor Orban warned on Friday that Western leaders appear “very close to suggesting in all seriousness” that NATO troops be sent to Ukraine. Orban’s comments come amid growing concerns in Washington that the alliance’s Ukrainian client state is losing in the proxy conflict against Russia.

Any Western officials seriously considering deploying NATO military personnel to Ukraine should rethink the “insane” idea before plunging the planet into a nuclear war, Kentucky progressive Democrat Geoffrey M Young has urged.

“These ‘Western countries’ better think again about doing anything like that. Then they’d better think again and again. It’s insane. It could lead to the destruction by Russia of any country that sends troops; or it could lead to a nuclear war that could kill everyone on earth,” Young, a candidate in the Democratic primaries in the upcoming Kentucky gubernatorial race, tweeted in response to a tweet addressing Orban’s warning.

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Silicon Valley Bank’s 48-hour collapse led to the second-largest failure of a financial institution in US history.

SVB was one of America’s 20 largest commercial banks and is now under the control of the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation after it became unable to pay back customers who withdrew their deposits.

Though experts quelled fears of a wider contagion, the bank’s collapse could have significant ramifications on the startup and tech sectors.

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A newly discovered asteroid roughly the size of an Olympic swimming pool has a “small chance” of colliding with Earth in 23 years, with a potential impact on Valentine’s Day in 2046, according to NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.

The asteroid has a 1 in 625 chance of striking Earth, based on data projections from the European Space Agency, though NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Sentry system calculated the odds closer to 1 in 560. The latter tracks potential collisions with celestial objects.

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More than 100,000 leaked WhatsApp messages from ministers across the Channel provide a unique insight into the British government’s approach to the corona pandemic. The then Secretary of Health, Matt Hancock, has come under particular fire. He told his employees that he “wanted to scare everyone with a new variant” in order to improve compliance with the corona measures. While he himself broke the rules during his affair with a close co-worker.

Caught in economic turmoil, Sweden has been buckling under skyrocketing food inflation.

The price increase for food in February became the highest that Matpriskollen, an independent supermarket price comparison site, has ever measured. Baby food and gruel are among the things that have increased the most at 11.7% and 9.3% respectively in February alone.

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Russia fired at least 81 missiles of various types overnight into Thursday as it launched a fresh deadly onslaught against Ukraine, the head of the Ukrainian military said.

Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi said the missiles targeted critical infrastructure.

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A 6.1 magnitude earthquake struck off the southern coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East on Wednesday, with with two subsequent aftershocks hitting the area within three hours after the initial quake, according to the map of the geophysical service of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 

The initial earthquake was registered at 6:03 p.m. local time (06:03 GMT) near the southern part of the peninsula, with seismic shocks felt in the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy. 

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Russian troops will have “open road” to capture key cities in eastern Ukraine if they seize control of Bakhmut, President Volodymyr Zelensky warned in an interview with CNN, as he defended his decision to keep Ukrainian forces in the besieged city.

“This is tactical for us,” Zelensky said, insisting that Kyiv’s military brass is united in prolonging its defense of the city after weeks of Russian attacks left it on the cusp of falling to Moscow’s troops.

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