BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Russia has concentrated more than 150,000 troops on Ukraine’s border and in annexed Crimea, the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell said on Monday after EU foreign ministers were briefed by Ukraine’s foreign minister. “It is more than 150,000 Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian borders and in Crimea. The risk of further escalation is evident,” Borrell said, declining to give a source for the figure. He said no new economic sanctions or expulsions of Russian diplomats were planned for the time being, despite saying that the military build-up on Ukraine’s borders was the largest ever. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, after addressing EU foreign ministers, called on the EU to impose new sanctions on Russia. Tensions between Moscow and Kyiv have been rising amid the military build-up and clashes in eastern Ukraine between the army and pro-Russian separatists.
U.S. broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) on Sunday (April 18) published a report of shelling in Ukraine’s east. The clip, filmed by one of its reporters, showed night shots of soldiers in a trench and sound of gunfire heard in the distance. Reuters were unable to independently verify the reports made by RFE/RL. Tensions between Moscow and Kyiv have been rising amid a build-up of Russian troops along the border and clashes in eastern Ukraine between the army and pro-Russian separatists. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday (April 16) pressed for peace talks with Moscow Kyiv and Moscow have traded blame for rising clashes in the eastern Donbass region, where Ukrainian troops have battled Russian-backed forces in a conflict that Kyiv says has killed 14,000 people since 2014. The standoff has fueled tensions between Moscow and U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, which imposed a new round of sanctions on Russia this week that prompted Moscow to retaliate with its own measures on Friday.
Ever since the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan was signed into law in mid-March, the IRS has been working furiously to get stimulus payments out to the public — especially given the number of people who have been struggling financially during the ongoing pandemic. So far, more than $376 billion in funds has gone out in the form of physical checks, debit cards, and deposits made directly into recipients’ bank accounts. But some people who are eligible for a stimulus have still not received their money. Here’s where things stand. The IRS is sending out stimulus payments in large batches, and recently, it made its fifth blast. To date, an estimated 159 million recipients have received stimulus funds. The latest batch includes about 2 million checks that went out to Veterans Affairs beneficiaries who do not normally file a tax return and did not register for a stimulus payment with the IRS’s non-filer tool last year. Those beneficiaries received a total of about $450 million. Seniors on Social Security were also included in the recent batch payment. About 72,000 checks went out to beneficiaries who did not file a tax return for the past two years and who also didn’t use the IRS’s non-filer tool to register for a stimulus last year. Additionally, almost 850,000 payments worth about $1.6 billion went out to non-filers — people who didn’t submit a tax return over the past two years. Many lower income households generally aren’t required to file taxes, but in the absence of a return or registration on its non-filer site, the IRS has a harder time knowing how to track people down who are entitled to stimulus funds. Finally, the latest blast included plus-up payments for recipients who were due a larger stimulus than they initially got in light of the information contained on their 2020 tax returns. Though the IRS has now sent out multiple batches of stimulus checks and has managed to target a distinct number of groups, some people are still waiting on that money. The IRS is limited in the number of physical checks and debit cards it can issue at once, so some people who aren’t eligible for direct deposit may still be waiting on their stimulus to trickle in. If you haven’t gotten a stimulus check yet, you can use the IRS’s Get My Payment tool to see where it stands. But also, it could pay for you to get moving on your 2020 tax return if you haven’t filed it already. If your income was lower in 2020 than it was in 2019, that could render you eligible for a stimulus check — but until the IRS sees that, it won’t know that you’re entitled to a payment. Tax returns aren’t due until May 17 — the IRS postponed the filing deadline after the American Rescue Plan was signed into law. But if you want your stimulus sooner, then you may want to expedite your return. Nick Note: the happy checks keep coming and coming and they will spend the shit out of this money. Biggest stimulus program to the masses ever………. PARTY TIME!
John Kerry has apologised for former President Donald Trump’s “non-leadership” on the effort to combat climate change during his four years as US leader. Speaking on Sky News’ Sophy Ridge on Sunday, Mr Kerry, the Biden administration’s climate envoy, said the government was “very sorry for the last four years with a president who didn’t care about science”. Noting how President Joe Biden reversed his predecessor’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change, on his first day in office, Mr Kerry said it was unfortunate that “the United States became a renegade in the last four years under the non-leadership of President Trump”. “But, we are now back and present with a very aggressive series of initiatives in order to try to make up for lost time,” he said. Meanwhile, a two-day conservative conference on “Health and Freedom” appears to have closed out on Saturday night with a Covid-19 mask-burning event. The two-day conference, which was hosted by Rhema Bible College in Tulsa, Oklahoma, saw a range of speakers from Donald Trump’s disgraced national security advisor, General Michael Flynn, to Tulsa Sheriff Vic Regalado, and Jim Caviezel, an actor who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ. An itinerary for the conference listed the event as ending with a “Time to Burn Those Masks” ceremony. Nick Note: Climate Change is here… No not as a man caused even but as a political tool to tax and regulate the shit out of you. I have traveled to the north pole….. I bough some Wollie Mamouth tusks an associates friend found while digging in the slush. Any way when you dig around the melting tundra you discover fern leaves frozen in the ice. So obviously the polar ice caps have melted before. I do not think the cave men fires pumped out that much green house gases. The earth cools and it warms… it not climate change as much as it is climate cycling…. But I DO NOT GIVE A SHIT. I ALREADY HAVE MY GREENIEE WINNIEEE CREDENTIALS WITH A ZERO CARBON FOOTPRINT AND CARBON CREDITS FROM MY SOLAR POWER GENERATION… over 100KW a day. Another way to fuck them when we get carbon credit trading….
(Reuters) – British warships will sail for the Black Sea in May amid rising tensions between Ukraine and Russia, the Sunday Times newspaper reported, citing senior naval sources. The deployment is aimed at showing solidarity with Ukraine and Britain’s NATO allies, the newspaper reported https://bit.ly/32pc4BK. One Type 45 destroyer armed with anti-aircraft missiles and an anti-submarine Type 23 frigate will leave the Royal Navy’s carrier task group in the Mediterranean and head through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea, according to the report. RAF F-35B Lightning stealth jets and Merlin submarine-hunting helicopters will stand ready on the task group’s flag ship, the carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, to support the warships in the Black Sea, the report added. Tensions between Moscow and Kyiv have been rising amid a build-up of Russian troops along the border and clashes in eastern Ukraine between the army and pro-Russian separatists. Officials at the UK Ministry of Defence were not immediately available for comment. A ministry spokesman told the newspaper that the UK government was working closely with Ukraine to monitor the situation and continued to call on Russia to de-escalate. “The UK and our international allies are unwavering in our support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”, the newspaper quoted the spokesman as saying. Nick Note: its called the winds of war! Always stirred up by stupidity… In war no lives matter
The Taliban could largely retake Afghanistan within two or three years if American troops leave without the warring sides reaching a power-sharing deal, intelligence agencies have told US President Joe Biden. A rushed US exit from Afghanistan without finalized peace terms between Taliban insurgents and the Kabul government could end bitterly, American intelligence agencies have warned. TheNew York Times on Saturdayreported that US President Joe Biden has been told that the Taliban could overrun most of the war-ravaged country within a couple of years and would potentially allow al-Qaida to regroup. The intelligence assessment was originally compiled last year for the Trump administration. Some 7,000 international troops, including 3,500 US soldiers, remain in Afghanistan — 20 years after the US-led invasion — with the Taliban warning it will resume attacks if the foreign troops do not depart by May 1. That deadline was part of a Trump-Taliban agreement signed in Doha, Qatar last year. However, talks are still dragging on between envoys of the Sunni Muslim insurgents and the Kabul government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.Last year, the Taliban vowed that if all US and international forces were withdrawn by May it would enter into such intra-Afghan peace talks and cut ties with al-Qaida. At his first White House news conference on Thursday, Biden said it would be hard to comply with that deadline, although he “could not picture” US troops still being present next year. “We will leave. The question is when we leave,” said Biden.
Biden: ‘We are not staying a long time’
The New York Times said Biden’s officials were “jockeying” to influence the new president and his defense secretary, Lloyd Austin. Austin, visiting Kabul last weekend, said only that America wanted a “responsible end” to Afghanistan’s decadeslong warfare. And at the United Nations earlier this week, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield warned that gains for Afghan women, girls and health care would not be sacrificed. “We will not give an inch on this point,” she told the Security Council, echoing a key point in the US intelligence report. Briefing the US Senate, General Richard Clarke, the head of US Special Operations Command, said capabilities provided to Afghan government forces were “critical to their success.” On Friday, the Taliban said a troop presence beyond May 1 would amount to a “violation” and it would be “compelled to… continue its Jihad and armed struggle against foreign forces to liberate its country.” Last Wednesday, an early election proposed by President Ghani’s Kabul government was rejected by Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, who said any decision on Afghanistan’s future must be reached at the ongoing talks. Going to election would be “scandalous,” said Mujahid. “We will never support it.” In recent months Taliban attacks on foreign troops in Afghanistan have largely ceased, although assaults on Afghan security forces and personnel have continued. Also targeted in recent months have been civil society members, including students, feminists and journalists, with the government and Taliban blaming each other for the violence, often involving small magnetic “sticky” bombs attached to cars. Resistance by Afghan warlords against Soviet occupation in the 1980s led to the Taliban ruling Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, when al-Qaida used hijacked passenger airliners to attack the US on September 11, prompting a massive US-led invasion of Afghanistan. In Paris earlier this week, Ahmad Massoud, 31, the son of a late ethnic Tajik Afghan commander, said he was “very skeptical of the talks in Doha.” He welcomed parallel attempts, though, by regional powers to break the deadlock, with Moscow hosting Afghan factions recently and Turkey planning peace talks in April. “I welcome any sort of regional power entering the peace process of Afghanistan,” Massoud told the French news agency AFP. “One aspect is regional rivalries.” His French-educated father, Ahmad Shah Massoud, was killed by al-Qaida two days before the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The World Bank has said two-thirds of Afghanistan’s 35 million people live on roughly $1.90 (€1.60) and unemployment is around 30%. Nick Note: Its all part of the lefty agenda. In essence to turn America into a nanny state and reduce her influence around the world. We have less then 10,000 troops in Afghanistan. Their presence is to keep a lid on the Taliban. It is the height of stupidity to withdraw. It will take a 100,000 oops trto root them again when ISIS regroups…… I frankly do not give a shit my dear. One of the most disruptive events in human history is the fall of a great empire. This is where new fortunes are made. The fall of America as a terrible thing to waste.
SpaceX’s broadband satellite internet, Starlink, is still in beta, but already has over 10,000 customers. The fledgling service is expected to be a cash cow for SpaceX, bringing in as much as $30 billion a year — more than 10 times the annual revenue of its existing rocket business. This revenue will be used to fuel Elon Musk’s ultimate goal of building a colony on Mars. Eventually, Starlink may even keep us connected on the Red Planet. Elon Musk’s SpaceX rolled out its Starlink early access program to the public six months ago, with the satellite internet service growing to more than 10,000 users in the first few months. To get real-life first impressions of the service, CNBC spoke to more than 50 people who have been using Starlink. Those surveyed included households in Canada and 13 U.S. states: California, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming. The majority of these Starlink users are in rural or remote areas, such as farmland or wilderness, with limited access to terrestrial broadband options – and a few with no access altogether. “I expect to keep the service long term,” a user in Montana told CNBC. “The price of the beta for the service is more reasonable than any other option we have, and those are worse in performance. I will keep Starlink as long as its the only broadband option available to me.” Starlink is the company’s capital-intensive project to build an interconnected internet network with thousands of satellites, known in the space industry as a constellation, designed to deliver high-speed internet to consumers anywhere on the planet. SpaceX launched the “Better than Nothing Beta” program for the public in October, and the majority of users CNBC surveyed received invitations to join between November and February. The service is priced at $99 a month in the U.S. under the beta, with a $499 upfront cost for the equipment customers need to connect to the satellites – plus taxes, shipping, and any accessories needed to mount the antenna. CNBC’s surveyed users on total cost, the installation process, what they thought of SpaceX’s equipment, internet speed, reliability of the service, what their service alternatives were, their experience with customer service, any concerns they had, and their overall impressions. ‘ Nick Note: I give you the future of the internet. And their are 3 other companies that have approval for similar systems and are in production…
MOSCOW, April 17 (Reuters) – Two Russian warships transited the Bosphorus en route to the Black Sea on Saturday and 15 smaller vessels completed a transfer to the sea as Moscow beefs up its naval presence at a time of tense relations with the West and Ukraine. The reinforcement coincides with a huge build-up of Russian troops near Ukraine, something Moscow calls a temporary defensive exercise, and follows an escalation in fighting in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government forces. Russia’s relations with Washington, which canceled the deployment of two of its own warships to the Black Sea last week after fierce Russian protests, are at a post-Cold war low. Moscow expelled 10 U.S. diplomats on Friday in retaliation for the expulsion of the same number of Russian diplomats from the United States over alleged malign activity. Russia has also temporarily restricted the movement of foreign warships “and other state ships” near Crimea, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014, a move condemned by both Kyiv and Washington.
Two Russian Ropucha-class landing ships from Russia’s Northern Fleet, capable of carrying tanks and of delivering armor and troops during coastal assaults, transited the Bosphorus on Saturday, a Reuters reporter in Istanbul saw.
More Russian naval reinforcements in the form of two more landing ships, this time from Russia’s Baltic Fleet, are expected to imminently transit the Bosphorus. The RIA news agency on Saturday also reported that 15 smaller vessels from Russia’s Caspian Flotilla have completed their transfer to the Black Sea as part of an exercise. In a further sign of heightened tensions in the region, a ship carrying logistics trucks and equipment for NATO forces in Romania transited the Bosphorus on Friday evening, the same Reuters reporter saw. In St Petersburg, Russia’s FSB security service briefly detained a Ukrainian diplomat, Ukraine’s foreign ministry said on Saturday. The Interfax news agency earlier cited the FSB as saying Oleksandr Sosoniuk was taken into custody when he tried to obtain classified information from Russian law enforcement databases during a meeting with a Russian citizen. Nick Note: this bears close scrutiny. Imagery shows troops and armor build up on land and ships at sea. My analysis is that the very lest a test of Biden is occurring and worse case a Russian invasion of the Ukraine is being planned. SO far Biden has really fucked it up. The defense department was planning a build up of US naval forces in the Black Sea.. As ships were on the way Biden turned them back. Smells a lot like the bay of pigs to me……..
Airbnb’s CEO on Friday said it needed millions more hosts for the post-pandemic travel boom.
Airbnb sees a “rebound coming that’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” CEO Brian Chesky told CNBC.
It has 4 million hosts with about 5.6 million listings, numbers mostly unchanged by the pandemic.
Airbnb will need millions of new hosts to meet demand as the world exits the pandemic, CEO Brian Chesky told CNBC on Friday. “To meet the demand over the coming years, we’re going to need millions more hosts,” Chesky told the network’s Deirdre Bosa on air. As the world tiptoes out of the pandemic, travelers are taking their first steps towards normal vacation routines. Many are wondering if Airbnb accommodations and hotels are safe. Chesky said on Friday that Airbnb expected the industry to roar back. He told CNBC: “I think that we probably will have a high-class problem where there will probably be more guests coming to Airbnb than we’ll have hosts for, because … we think there’s going to be a travel rebound coming that’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen.” Airbnb lists 4 million hosts, at present. As of the end of last year, they had about 5.6 million active listings in more than 220 countries and regions, according to the San Francisco company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Chesky’s positive outlook echoed past statements and filings from the company. In a late February filing, the company said its listings had remained steady at 5.6 million for the entirety of 2020, despite a decline in bookings because of the pandemic. The company said: “While we believe that travel will change as a result of COVID-19, the adaptability of our business suggests that we are well-positioned to serve this dynamic market as it continues to evolve and recover.” After a blockbuster December IPO, the company in February beat Wall Street’s Q4 expectations. But its $859 million in revenue was down 22% from the $1.1 billion reported in the same year-earlier period. Airbnb was “primed for recovery,” wrote Brian Nowak, a Morgan Stanley analyst, in a note sent to clients earlier this year. Nowak said he expected Airbnb to be the “only player growing” in the first quarter, versus its competitors, including Expedia and Booking Holdings. “Similar to ’20, when people are returning to travel, they are choosing local (in country/close to home, driving over flying) and more rural locations…which gives an edge to alternative accommodations,” Nowak said. Nick Note: the reflation fuse has been lit. DO not be fooled they will go anywhere and every where.. by plane, train, car horse back, piggy back … shit even motor cycle. And they will stay in a airb&b, hotel, motel, camper van, tent homeless shelter…. because the captives have been set free…….
Major stock markets on Wall Street closed the last session of the week with gains as Dow Jones, Nasdaq 100 and S&P 500 hit their record highs. Investors’ optimism sparked after some blue-chip companies released their earnings reports. The University of Michigan reported Consumer Sentiment Index in the US increased by 1.9% in April, compared to the previous month, while the Current Economic Conditions Index grew by 4.5% from last month and by 30.8% year-on-year. Dow Jones gained 0.48% as Cisco Systems increased by 2.25%, while S&P 500 grew by 0.36% with PPG Industries soaring by 8.73%. The Nasdaq 100 climbed 0.11% led by Moderna jumping 6.84%. Nick Note: Have you ever seen a rodeo. Where the cowboy jumps on the back of a bull for a wild ride. Well if you are doing the deal you are on a wild ride. And i want to be clear here. It will be over very soon. As the fools rush in we will rush out. Nick Note: The really BIG BUCKS will be made when the fools go ALL IN AND WE GO ALL OUT. So ride em cowboy… but be ready for the bear attack!