Iran has reportedly agreed to stop supplying weapons to the Houthis of Yemen, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing anonymous US and Saudi officials. Tehran has officially denied sending weapons to the Houthis, and the Iranian mission at the UN declined to comment on the claim.

The UN estimates the years-long conflict in Yemen has claimed at least 377,000 lives, of which 150,000 were due to violence and the rest from starvation and disease. About four million people have been displaced.

Moscow has denied the allegations and labelled the warrants as "outrageous". It is highly unlikely that much will come of the move - the ICC has no powers to arrest suspects, and can only exercise jurisdiction within its member countries - and Russia is not one of them. However it could affect the president in other ways, such as being unable to travel internationally.

Also posting about a potential Trump arrest on Saturday was Musk. The Twitter head reacted to a report that Trump could be arrested as the result of a possible indictment stemming from his mountain of legal troubles. “If this happens, Trump will be re-elected in a landslide victory,” Musk tweeted in reaction to the Fox News report.

Fox News and other outlets reported that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is currently meeting with law enforcement officials ahead of an expected Trump indictment over alleged hush money payments to Stormy Daniels to keep an alleged affair secret.

Unlike Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, Credit Suisse is so critical to the worldwide banking system that it has officially been designated “as being systemically important by the international Financial Stability Board”… Credit Suisse is one of just 30 global financial institutions designated as being systemically important by the international Financial Stability Board. In other words, it’s too big to fail. A “too big to fail” bank has not collapsed in more than a decade.

Credit Suisse had total assets of $574 billion at the end of 2022 — down 37% from $912 billion at the end of 2020. Its asset-management arm supervises another $1.7 trillion in assets. Those numbers dwarf anything seen at Silicon Valley Bank, which had total assets of $212 billion. So let us hope that Credit Suisse can be stabilized, because the alternative would be a complete and total nightmare.

But just because these central banks can create an “infinite amount of cash” does not mean that they should actually do it. When you create crazy amounts of money, it leads to crazy amounts of inflation.

“Chinese-style modernization does not follow the old path of colonial plunder or the hegemony of strong countries,” Xi told them in a video call Wednesday, sitting at a desk surrounded by Chinese and Communist Party flags. “The world does not need another Cold War,” he said, announcing his new concept — the “global civilization initiative,” a set of lofty guiding principles for a “new type of international relations” that China is building.

Xi’s comments were a clear rebuke of the United States — and a reflection of the harder tack he is taking as he ramps up China’s diplomatic efforts with an expected visit to Russia. President Vladimir Putin said in December that he had invited Xi for a state visit in the spring. That trip could happen as soon as next week, Reuters reported Monday.

“Those who think that a real civil war, with human lives, is a border we won’t cross, have no idea,” Herzog said in a video address on Wednesday. “The abyss is within touching distance,” he continued, adding that “at any price, and by any means, I won’t let it happen.”

Israel has been rocked by continuous protests since Netanyahu announced his proposed reforms in January. These legal changes would allow Israel’s parliament to override Supreme Court rulings with a simple majority vote, would grant the government more power in appointing judges, and would limit the ability of the court to review legislation it deems “unreasonable.”

Tan dismissed all such concerns, insisting that China is committed to a path of peaceful development and stressing that its “limited defense expenditure is entirely for safeguarding national sovereignty, security, and development interests” along with regional and global stability. He stressed that China’s defense spending “is open and transparent within a reasonable and appropriate level.”

However, the spokesman noted that Japan “has been playing up the so-called ‘external threat’ in recent years” while boosting its defense budget and working to obtain advanced offensive weapons, thereby fueling regional tensions.

Look at it this way, by reducing carbon dioxide to nil (zero carbon) all plant life dependent for its growth on this natural gas, will die. By extension, all humans and animals dependent upon the oxygen that plants produce, via the conversion of carbon dioxide into oxygen, will also die. Basic biology reveals that is indeed the case.

So what the inventors of ‘Net Zero’ seem to be suggesting is that the objective is to end all plant, animal and human life by 2050. Or have I got something wrong? Have ‘they’ quietly dropped CO2 as the arch baddie of the past three decades – and are now trying to make simple ‘carbon’ the source of all our woes?

This is, after all, what they did by surreptitiously shifting ‘global warming’ into ‘climate change’ a couple of decades ago. A classic slight of hand by the cabal spin doctors.

“We were wrong. They’re not as reversible as we always thought, and they have longer term effects on kids’ growth and development, including making them sterile and quite a number of things affecting their bone growth. We thought that it was relatively safe, and endocrinologists said they’re reversible, and that we didn’t have to worry about it. I had this skepticism in the back of my mind all the time that maybe we were actually colluding and not helping them.

And I think that’s proven correct in that, once these kids get started at any age on puberty blockers, nearly all of them continue to want to go to cross sex hormones.” Despite the recent push to “affirm” children’s gender identity by use of puberty blockers, the safety of such drugs is relatively unknown.

The second worst-kept secret in Brussels is that for all the “peace project” kumbaya, the Germans actually enjoy dominating the place. That said, even stalwart veterans of the EU bubble were hard-pressed in recent days to cite a more blatant example of toxic Germanity than Berlin’s last-minute intervention to save the internal combustion engine.

To recap: Last week, EU countries were expected to rubber-stamp a package of measures aimed at ridding Europe’s roads of fuel-burning autos. Under the plan, the EU would prohibit new registrations of cars powered by internal combustion engines beginning in 2035. The sweeping deal, the culmination of years of painstaking negotiations in Brussels and European capitals, is a pillar of the EU’s ambitious goal to become carbon neutral by 2050.

Berlin’s 11th-hour intervention on a deal everyone believed was done and dusted not only left the EU’s environmental policy in limbo, it also laid bare the bloc’s power vertical in all its dubious Teutonic glory. The message: Germany is no longer even trying to hide its power.

The image of a piston-fired Porsche 911 zooming down the autobahn is as core to German identity as sex is to the French. Take that away, what’s left (aside from beer and bratwurst)? Indeed, considering that the country’s automakers haven’t proved particularly adept at manufacturing electric cars (or more specifically the batteries at the heart of the vehicles), there was a strong case for Germany to develop low-emission synthetic fuels that would keep the internal combustion engine alive.

Xi was speaking at the conclusion of the “two sessions” of the NPC and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which meet annually to draft new laws for the country. The Communist Party completely dominates both bodies and blocks any diversity of opinion; the Party typically prepares a slate or policy topics to address prior to the meeting.

Elsewhere in his remarks on Monday, Xi promised that China would inject “positive energy to world peace and development and create a favorable international environment for our country’s development.”

Shares of First Republic, one of the regional banks swept up in contagion fears after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, dropped up to 11 percent after the bank's bond rating was downgraded to junk status by S&P. In Europe, shares of Credit Suisse plunged more than 25 percent, hitting a new record low for the second day in a row, after the Swiss bank's largest investor said it could not provide more financial assistance to the lender.

Driving investor sentiment was turmoil at Credit Suisse, after its biggest shareholder - the Saudi National Bank - said that it would not inject more money into the ailing Swiss bank. Saudi National Bank chairman Ammar Al Khudairy told Reuters: 'We cannot [buy more shares] because we would go above 10 percent. It's a regulatory issue.'

“We welcome SVB UK’s customers to HSBC and look forward to helping them grow in the UK and around the world. SVB UK customers can continue to bank as usual, safe in the knowledge that their deposits are backed by the strength, safety and security of HSBC. We warmly welcome SVB UK colleagues to HSBC, we are excited to start working with them,” Quinn said in a statement.

“This morning, the Government and the Bank of England facilitated a private sale of Silicon Valley Bank UK to HSBC. Deposits will be protected, with no taxpayer support. I said yesterday that we would look after our tech sector, and we have worked urgently to deliver that promise,” tweeted UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt.

Bank runs at Silicon Valley Bank, Silvergate, and Signature led to a crisis of confidence, both from investors and depositors, the ratings agency said. Lenders that had “substantial” unrealized securities losses and uninsured deposits may be hurt more as customers look for safer alternatives to park their funds, it added.

Moody’s wrote it expects more banks will be pressured after SVB’s failure, namely those with large amounts of deposits that aren’t insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

According to a report on Channel 12 News, those government members who have already flown out have also been told not to meet with members of the Biden administration, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was among those receiving similar instructions and would in any case not have met with administration officials even if they had not rebuffed him. The only minister who is being permitted to fly out on an official trip to Washington and meet with American officials is Ron Dermer, who serves as a quasi-emissary of the premier.