it looks like israel once again removed a terrorist from its midst, as you can discover in this post.  i'm expected to honor and respect israel for its being some sort of democracy and free country, just like the empire, which isn't, but when you read things like the following article it becomes apparent that this is business as usual and you can find stories like this, or the equivalent every day;

A baby girl has died after Israel denied her permission to leave Gaza to get medical treatment in Jerusalem. This is a breach of international law, but sadly not an uncommon event.

reposted from Israel-Palestine Timeline, March 25, 2022

Fatma Jalal al-Masri, 1, was declared dead at the Gaza European Hospital after she was denied access to a hospital outside Gaza by Israeli authorities at the Erez crossing. Fatma was subjected to Israel’s arbitrary and discriminatory permit system, which delays access to hospitals outside the Strip and denies care in around 30 percent of urgent cases.

The continued movement restrictions by Israeli authorities on Palestinian patients in the Gaza Strip systematically violate inhabitants’ right to health by aggravating health conditions and placing numerous barriers to health access.

According to Al Mezan, Fatma’s legal representative, she was diagnosed with a ventricular septal defect in 2021. Despite having obtained a medical referral from the Palestinian Ministry of Health and confirming three hospital appointments at Al-Makassed Hospital in Jerusalem, Israeli authorities denied Fatma the requisite exit permit to travel to Jerusalem for the appointments, the last of which was on 5 March 2022.

The young patient’s health deteriorated over the course of several months of denied care and she died three weeks after her last missed appointment.......read more........

 makes sense to me. why would russia choose to sell their gas for a money supply that they're not allowed to use because the creators of dollars and euros have said russia can't buy anything with them;

Russia’s insistence that its “unfriendly” nations pay in rubles for Russian natural gas risks disrupting European supplies as soon as this week as the deadline set by Putin for moving to ruble payments is drawing closer. 

Europe, which depends on Russian natural gas for more than one-third of its demand—with some countries, including the biggest economy Germany, depending on Russia for half of its consumption—has rejected the gas-for-rubles idea, saying it would be a breach of contracts to switch the currency in payments.   

Russia, for its part, says it demands only rubles for its gas and will not ship gas for free.  

Europe’s gas prices continued rising on Tuesday, two days ahead of the March 31 deadline Vladimir Putin has set for the government, Gazprom, and the central bank of Russia to make the arrangements for payments in rubles from the so-called “hostile” countries. 

The Russian President—whose list of “hostile” states includes the United States, all EU member states, Switzerland, Canada, Norway, South Korea, Japan, and many others—orderedlast week the central bank to develop a system for payments in rubles within a week. 

“The Russian government together with the Bank of Russia and Gazprom PJSC should implement a set of measures on changing the currency of payment for natural gas supplies to the countries of the European Union and other states that imposed restrictive measures against the citizens of the Russian Federation and Russian legal entities, to the Russian ruble,” Putin said this week per a Kremlin document cited by Russian news agency TASS. 

Putin has also ordered the Russian government to approve a move on changing Gazprom’s current contracts to reflect the change in the currency to the Russian ruble. This should be done “with supply volumes, prices, and price formation principles stipulated by contracts maintained” by March 31. 

Commenting on Putin’s rubles-for-Russian-gas plan, the EU and leaders of the biggest economies in Europe said that changing the currency of the payments would be a breach of contract and that Europe would not be blackmailed into buying gas with rubles.......read more....

 the empire is dying. it isn't due to outside forces. here is some evidence;

The Western financial system and world reserve currency is now in open decline.

From Rigged to Fail to Just Plain Failing

Just two years ago, I wrote a book warning that Western markets in general, and US markets in particular, were Rigged to Fail.

Well, now, in real time, they are failing.

This hard reality has less to do with COVID or the war in the Ukraine and more to do with one simple force, which euphoric markets and clueless leaders have been ignoring for decades, namely: Debt.

As I wrote then, and will repeat now: Debt destroys nations, financial systems, markets, and currencies.

Always and every time.

As we see below, the inflationary financial system is now failing because its debt levels have rendered it impotent to grow economically, react sensibly or sustain its chronic debt addictions naturally.

The evidence of this is literally everywhere, from the Fed to the Petrodollar and the bond market to the gold price.

Let’s dig in.

The Fed: No Best-Case Scenarios Left

The Fed has driven itself, and hence the U.S. markets and economy, into an all-too predictable corner and historically dangerous crossroads.

If it turns to the left (i.e., more money printing/liquidity) to protect a record-breaking risk asset bubble, it faces an inflationary flood; if it turns to the right (and raises rates or tapers UST purchases), it faces a market inferno.

How did we get to this crossroads?

Easy: Decades of artificially suppressed rates, cheap credit and a $30T sovereign debt pile of unprecedented (and unsustainable) proportions.

The Dying Bond Bull........read more.......

 fred sets you straight on the reality of life in mexico;

By Fred Reed for the Saker Blog

American notions of Mexico are often decades out of date or just wrong. Nativists suffering from what appears to be minor mental unbalance sometimes refer to it as a Third World hellhole, which is silly. The country has problems, corruption, organized crime, uneven distribution of wealth. The bureaucracy can be maddening. The cartels engage in intramural massacres. Things are uneven: In remote areas roads have sometimes crumbled to the point that cars need to proceed at two miles an hour, while elsewhere first-rate modern highways punch through horrific mountainous terrain. Yet all in all, Mexico is reasonably prosperous, modern and, in most things competent. It is not Japan or South Korea, not a technological leader and never will be, but hellhole it ain’t.

Among outdated ideas is that the Mexican population is exploding. It is not. The CIA World Factbook puts total births per woman in Mexico at 2.17, .07 above replacement, and mother’s mean age at first birth, as 21.3. In the Fifties, the birth rate was astronomical. Now, no. Why the change?

An anecdotal explanation for the drop in fertility: When I came to Mexico twenty years ago, I met Lupita, a pretty and very Indian woman, from a family of eleven (!) siblings. She had two children. The son is now a lawyer, the daughter a doctor. Why only two children, I asked. She said she could have two, raise them well, and live in a nice house, or have a dozen and live in a shack, and said that if I tried having a baby, I wouldn’t want ten more. I might add that Lupita and her American husband founded a successful elder-care service, with Lupita handling the facility and routine nursing with hubby managing patient relations.

A broader explanation for the drop in fertility and a great many other things in Mexico is that the country is becoming middle class, loosely defined as having a house, job, husband or wife, refrigerator, and children in school. The middle class all around the world has low crime, small families, and values education.

Health in Mexico is generally good. The Fact Book puts life expectancy at birth in Mexico at 76.9 years. America: 77 years. These figures do not suggest a disease-ridden hellhole.

Another belief common in America is that Mexicans would all move to the US if they could. No. In the past the reason for emigrating northward was money, nothing else. American culture is seldom attractive to Mexicans. As the economy has improved, emigration has dropped, with impoverished Central Americans now going north.

Mexico is not a technological backwater. Landline telephones, cellphones, and WIFI work. Mexican airlines have good safety records, train their pilots, maintain high-bypass turbofans and avionics. In Guadalajara, a medical center, I have twice had eye surgery with good results, an MRI, for $150, and various instrument-heavy procedures. The poor, rural, and uninsured have less access to medical care, but this is also true in America, where many do not go to doctors because of cost.......read more......

 syria, explored and explained in light of the empire's war on it;

The Syrian war was the first fully observed conflict on social-media and the ability to connect directly with Syrians real time as they were experiencing the crisis was unprecedented. This created a unique opportunity to get unfiltered information directly from all sides of the conflict to gain insights and understanding. The results have helped shake off the control by conventional news media over foreign events reporting and analysis. While this has created some chaos, valuable lessons have been (or should have been) learned.

I began researching Syria and the war there in late 2012, and have made seven extended journeys traveling around during the war from 2016 through 2019, meeting with hundreds of Syrians from different backgrounds, walks of life, and opinions as a 100 percent non-affiliated, unpaid, and self/crowd-funded, independent citizen-journalist.

It became clear that what’s been happening in Syria was not a spontaneous, organic, popular uprising against a tyrant, but a proxy regime-change attempt war in the works since the mid 2000’s against the quite popular Assad. This effort was spearheaded by the US, UK, France, and Israel, using Sunni violent fundamentalists and extremists (unpopular with the majority of Syria’s Sunni population as well as minority groups) armed and funded by the West and regional allies of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar to start the violence and do the dirty work. The basic character of the rebel groups was apparent from the beginning: Syrian and non-Syrian fighters most Westerners would call terrorists and be screaming for their government to crush if the same heavily armed groups had taken over their cities, towns, and suburbs by massacring, beheading, torturing, kidnapping, and raping.

Syrians often remarked to me that before the war their country was “almost a paradise.” The middle class was the largest economic sector and growing. Religious harmony was the norm and Christians there were doing well. International investment was increasing as were the tourists. Women were equal or outnumbering men in the universities and present in leadership roles in nearly all aspects of society. Syria had made the “Top 5” list of the world’s most personally safe countries. President Assad had brought the Internet into the country and kept it open throughout the war and the people there knew all that was being said in the West about the crisis........read more.......

 as i surf and read it appears that the empire's moves on money belonging to others, like russia, finally has much of the world realizing that it could happen to them as well and are moving to dump the dollar which pcr speaks of indirectly in this essay;

The Sanctions Have Backfired

Paul Craig Roberts

The idiot Biden Regime’s sanctions have turned out to be a great gift to Russia while driving up inflation in the US and its empire, forcing Washington to remove some of the sanctions.  https://www.rt.com/business/553034-us-russia-fertilizers-sanctions/ 

The sanctions have created a great opportunity for import substitution in Russia.  Russian investment in the Russian economy prevents foreign ownership from taking the profits out of the country.  Instead the profits are reinvested and enrich Russians instead of Westerners. 

The sanctions also save Russia from globalism and save her sovereignty with it, while breaking up the Bretton Woods agreement that gave the US a financial and currency monopoly.  The main effect of the US sanctions is dedollarization, that is, the end of the dollar’s role as world currency.  This means the end of the free ride the US has had from foreigners financing the US trade deficit.  Americans will soon be experiencing life no longer subsidized by the rest of the world.

Russia is now set for rapid economic growth like China once Putin gets rid of his incompetent central bank director.  The current central bank director is 100 times more damaging to Russia than sanctions. 

The American Empire is not the real problem Russia faces.  Its real problem are the pro-western globalists in its own upper circles.  These Russians are the real danger to Russia.  Everyone of them is a de facto American agent.  Washington is hoping they will assassinate or overthrow Putin, or in the least continue to restrain his effectiveness......https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/03/31/the-sanctions-have-backfired/