The caterpillar that made this cocoon seem to have decided to have a last meal before its final transform. The two views 24 hours apart in this picture by Gus Leoniksy shows that the cocoon had been moved overnight by the said caterpillar as a portion of the leaf above was eaten away...

Awaiting the result, possibly a Saunders Case Moth Metura elongatus....

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

The Met Office annual global temperature forecast for 2023 suggests that [2023] will be one of the Earth’s hottest years on record.

The average global temperature for 2023 is forecast to be between 1.08 °C and 1.32°C (with a central estimate of 1.20 °C) above the average for the pre-industrial period (1850-1900): the tenth year in succession that temperatures have reached at least 1°C above pre-industrial levels.

US drugmaker Pfizer admitted on Friday that it “engineered” treatment-resistant variants of Covid-19 in order to test its antiviral medicine. The admission partially backs up earlier claims by an executive with the company who told an undercover reporter that Pfizer was deliberately “mutating” the virus to “preemptively develop new vaccines.”

In a statement posted on its website, Pfizer said that it “has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research,” referring to the practice of amplifying a virus’ ability to infect humans and the process of selecting ‘desirable’ traits of a virus to reproduce, respectively.

Bill Gates has led a new $12m investment in an Australian company that is aiming to feed seaweed to cows in order to reduce the planet-heating emissions that come from their burps.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which the Microsoft co-founder created in 2015, has spearheaded the funding of the Perth-based startup, which is called Rumin8. Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, and Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma are also backers of the Breakthrough fund.

Rumin8 is developing a range of supplements to feed to cows in order to reduce the amount of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, they belch out. The feed includes red seaweed and rangeland plants that replicate “nature’s anti-methanogenic compound” and cut methane output.

The RAND Corporation, a highly influential elite national security think tank funded directly by the Pentagon, has published a landmark report stating that prolonging the proxy war is actively harming the US and its allies and warning Washington that it should avoid “a protracted conflict” in Ukraine.

By Felix Livshitz

The report has an unequivocal title, “Avoiding a long war: US policy and the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” which provides a strong indication as to its contents. 

... “Bradley is not a (expletive) tank,” James Cunny wrote on Twitter. “I take personal offense, most of my career I was a dismount, but also did crew, it is NOT a (expletive) tank.” 

Others took shots at news reports, particularly those produced by journalists who don’t regularly cover the military.

“If media folks would hire just a handful of the thousands of combat veterans out there from 20 years of war you won’t have this problem,” J.R. Salzman tweeted.

The United States of America was founded as an answer to the tyranny of abusive power from a leadership that everyone was required to be loyal to at all costs. Rebelling against the most powerful empire on Earth was a very risky proposition, and the Founders of the American nation had no ambition to create a tyrant nation themselves.

With all the woke navel-gazing that an increasingly illiterate and ignorant American populace is being drawn into, these same people seem to be unaware that their government (who “takes care of them”) is acting as World Tyrant on the geopolitical stage.

BY Seraphim Hanisch

Notebooks that US President Joe Biden kept during his time as vice president were among the items seized by the FBI during a search of his home last week, as part of a probe into his mishandling of classified documents, a person familiar with the investigation told NBC.

Despite not being marked as classified, the notebooks were taken because they contain writing related to Biden’s official business within the Obama administration, including details of diplomatic contacts, the broadcaster reported on Saturday.

The notebooks were a mix of records on personal and official topics, the source said, adding that pages with no sensitive data could also be considered state property under the Presidential Records Act, as they relate to the activities of the government.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is "nervous" about the probability of the US defaulting on its debt which could translate into nothing short of a "catastrophe" for the nation, as she told American reporters during her Africa trip.

Speaking to US journalists on January 28, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen described a picture of forthcoming doom in case GOP-led House Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling without hesitation this summer.

"Of course, it makes me nervous," Yellen said. "It would be devastating. It's a catastrophe." According to the Treasury secretary, the US will face a "financial crisis" and "recession" in the event of a default.

The New Silk Roads, or BRI, as well as the integration efforts of BRICS+, the SCO and the EAEU will be on the forefront of Chinese policy.

Liu He studied economics at Renmin University in China and got a Master’s from Harvard. Since 2018, he’s one of China’s Vice Premiers – along with Han Zheng, Sun Chunlan, and Hu Chunhua. He’s a Director of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission and heads the China Financial Stability and Development Committee. Anyone around the world who wants to know what will drive China’s economy in the Year of the Rabbit must pay attention to Liu He.

BY PEPE ESCOBAR

On the 5th anniversary of his death, we republish one of Parry’s many prescient articles on Ukraine, this one on the risks of ignoring the 2014 coup, the neo-Nazis’s role and the war against coup resisters in the east.

By Robert Parry
Special to Consortium News
April 16, 2014

They lied. They went to war under false pretences. They killed. They destroyed a country.

They write about their right to do the things they did and blame "intelligence" that got it wrong - though they were lying about everything - and, in a well-oiled threesome speil, they say they would do it all again...

They STILL take us for fools.

SEE: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/11276 

In January 2003, the then American leader gave a speech to Congress which signaled his intention to attack Iraq

IF YOU’RE YOUNG AND IDEALISTIC, YOU SHOULD HATE YOUR GOVERNMENT. WHETHER RUSSIAN, FRENCH, AMERICAN OR BRITISH, YOUR GOVERNMENT IS THERE TO ANNOY YOU. I AM POLITE. 

AND YOUR PARENTS! YOU LOVED THEM UNTIL THEY HAVE MADE YOUR LIFE A MISERY ON THE DAY YOUR MUM ADVISED YOU AGAINST HAVING YOUR BELLY BUTTON PIERCED, BECAUSE OF THIS AND THAT GERM. BEAUT! READ WHATSERNAME (OF THE VICAR OF DIBLEY’S FAME) BORING BOOK WITH NORA IN IT TO CONFIRM THIS... 

SO, THERE ARE WEBSITES DEDICATED TO TURN PEACEFUL YOUTH INTO LITTLE REBELLIOUS STINKING THINKERS. I SAY STINKING THINKERS, AND NOT PHILOSOPHERS, BECAUSE UNTIL ONE REACHES A CERTAIN LEVEL OF UNDERSTANDING WHICH IS NEVER PASSED A CERTAIN AGE, LIFE IS A MIRAGE WITH RASP (I MEAN RAP) MUSIC AND BORING DANCING GIRLS.

AND AS A YOUNG RUSSIAN REBEL (ACTIVIST) YOU LOVE NATO.

Tens of thousands of Italians have signed a petition protesting Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s planned address at a Eurovision-style song contest. Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini told reporters that the event “should remain the festival of Italian song and nothing else.”

The petition, which blames the Ukrainian conflict on NATO and on Kiev’s “brutal repression” of Russian-speakers in Donbass, has gained around 33,000 signatures, Reuters reported on Friday morning.

It calls on the organizers of the Sanremo Music Festival – a Eurovision-style contest held every year since the 1950s – to withdraw their invitation to Zelensky, who is set to speak via video link on the final night of the contest on February 11. 

The editor of [the] website (CONSORTIUM NEWS) is part of a secret list created by the organization Hamilton 68 that was fed to major media and Congress to identify so-called “Russian accounts” that were “sowing discord” in the United States. 

The list of 644 Twitter accounts was shared with Twitter executives who were unable to prove any links to Russia, reported Matt Taibbi in his latest installment of the Twitter Files on Friday.