As a twister barreled down on Shawnee, Oklahoma, which is located about 40 miles northeast of Cole, the strong winds blew over a tractor-trailer. “Truck started rocking… next thing I know, I am upside down,” Jim Johnson, the truck driver, told AccuWeather National Reporter Bill Wadell. “Highway patrol stopped. They broke my windshield down for me so that I could get out.”

With three fatalities, Wednesday was the deadliest tornado day in Oklahoma since May 20, 2013, nearly 10 years ago, when 24 people were killed by the tornado that leveled the city of Moore. That twister was also the most recent EF5 tornado to occur in the United States, according to SPC data.

What they won’t tell you: The DC and coastal elites won’t tell you that the cars will indirectly run on oil, gas, and coal. The energy source will still be fossil fuels. No amount of pixie dust magic energy production will change that reality anytime soon. Another one million Chinese windmills are not going to make a dent in the fossil fuel reality.

A reliable grid is a foundation of our quality of life. Our lives depend on ultra-reliable electricity for the refrigerators that preserve our food, the water treatment plants that keep our water drinkable, the air conditioning that keeps us cool, the factories that produce our goods, etc.

The root cause of our grid’s reliability problems is simple: America is shutting down too many reliable power plants — plants that can be controlled to produce electricity when needed in the exact quantity needed. And it is attempting to replace them with unreliable solar and wind. Thanks to government mandates and subsidies, solar and wind — “unreliables” — provide about 13% of American electricity. This 13% has already caused big electricity price increases and huge reliability problems. Instead of admitting this failure, Biden is doubling down.

The shift in Philippine policy parallels that in South Korea, where President Yoon Suk-yeol has endorsed joint South Korea-US exercises on the ground, in the air and at sea for the first time since Donald Trump foolishly canceled them after his summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in Singapore in 2018.

In the event of a war for Taiwan, South Korea would be reluctant to join in the fray. The Koreans don’t want to upset China in a conflict for the island. South Korea, like most other countries, including its American ally, recognizes Taiwan only as a province of China, which is by far the South’s biggest trading partner.

The proximity of those Philippine bases to Taiwan is just as important as their relationship to the South China Sea. American warships periodically enter the Taiwan Strait, as they do the South China Sea. It’s as though the battle lines are being drawn for a showdown, though a real war remains a distant cloud on the horizon.

Delivering his remarks as armored vehicles rolled by and fighter jets flew overhead, Raisi marked Iran’s annual Army Day by proclaiming that “the smallest hostile move” from the “Zionist regime” in Israel will “lead to the destruction of Haifa and Tel Aviv,” according to Iran’s Tasnim news agency.

Iranian leaders often use Army Day to make bombastic threats against Israel and the US. Last year, Raisi issued a similar warning, saying that Iran’s armed forces would target “the center of the Zionist regime” if Israel made “the tiniest move against the nation of Iran.”

While Saudi Arabia is often a target of Tehran’s rhetoric, Raisi’s speech made no mention of Riyadh. The president did, however, say that Iran’s armed forces “warmly shake the hand of regional nations” willing to cooperate on issues of mutual security, likely a reference to the recent Chinese-brokered detente between the two countries.

Li arrived in the Russian capital on Sunday for a three-day trip and has already held talks with President Vladimir Putin. On Tuesday, the Chinese minister met with his Russian counterpart Sergey Shoigu at the Russian Defense Ministry’s headquarters in Moscow.

“After my appointment as the defense minister, my first visit is made to Russia in order to demonstrate to the outside world the high level of Chinese-Russian relations,” Li said before the beginning of talks. The trip is also intended to stress Beijing’s “firm determination to strengthen strategic cooperation between the militaries of China and Russia,” he added.

Speaking to London’s Daily Telegraph, a French official said: “Mr Macron said publicly during his trip that he wanted to get China to commit to playing a constructive role. Naturally, diplomatic discussions took place and there is a follow-up.”

The reports come as Macron cause outrage in Berlin, London, and Washington over his comments following his China trip, in which he said that Europe shouldn’t “follow” America into a conflict with Beijing if the communist nation invades Taiwan and that Europe should develop its own “strategic autonomy” to stop being the “vassal” of the United States.

The existing regulations would only allow the nation to get through the next winter “if temperatures are warm,” the INES report said, adding that “if temperatures are medium to cold, the gas storage facilities will be heavily or completely emptied.”

In the worst-case scenario, the storage facilities will be “already completely emptied in January 2024 during cold temperatures,” the forecast said, adding that it is unlikely Berlin would be able to compensate for the missing volumes and would face a severe shortage through the rest of the winter.

Inflation is now at the same level as it started the year, having been in double-digits since September and reaching an eye-watering 41-year high of 11.1 per cent in October. After figures yesterday showed wages still rising rapidly, traders chalked up a 97 per cent chance of an interest rate rise from 4.25 per cent to 4.5 per cent at the next meeting on May 11.

Markets are also anticipating a probability that the level will peak around 5 per cent. Until recently there was considered to be a significant chance that the base rate had reached the top.

This decision was taken while, during his visits in China and the United Arab Emirates, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was exploring ways to bring about a peaceful settlement between Moscow and Kiev. The USA needs to stop encouraging the war and start to talk about peace,” Lula demanded, and called also on the EU to engage in peace talks. The dispute between the West and the Global South over how to handle the Ukraine war is taking on a principled character, with governments such as the Brazilian pushing for an end to Western hegemony.

The Brazilian government is not only refusing to join the sanctions against Russia or to deliver weapons to Ukraine. Recently it also allowed – under hefty protest from the United States – two warships from Iran to anchor in Rio de Janeiro.

During his visit to China, Lula announced that he constantly asks himself “why all countries have to base their trade on the dollar.” Brasília will raise the level of the strategic partnership with the People’s Republic and, together with China, “balance world geopolitics” – an implicit commitment to strive for the transition from the era of Western global hegemony to a multipolar world. Lula is pursuing, as Foreign Minister Vieira recently explained, “a universalistic foreign policy.”

Behind closed doors, 15 bilateral agreements and memoranda of understanding were signed, including investment deals, research and development plans, food standards, state news agencies, technology transfers, and cooperation on building the seventh China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS). The meeting built upon years of strategic partnership. China displaced the US as Brazil’s largest trade partner in 2009, and the event was about deepening that process.

However, the most interesting facet of the visit was the tone of the public statements by both leaders, as it went beyond diplomatic niceties and showed a clear commitment from both countries in taking on a leadership role that will challenge the years of Washington’s unipolar dominance. The success of Lula’s China trip will clearly put an extra spring in the step of the Latin American governments that will be receiving Russia’s official delegation this week. The win-win cooperation possible with China and Russia stands in clear contrast to the arrogant finger-wagging and interventionism on offer from the US.

Taiwan is “part of China’s sacred territory,” Wang responded, stating that “to truly keep the Taiwan Strait peaceful, it is essential to unequivocally oppose and stop” any steps by Taipei toward independence. Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet are “China’s internal affairs that no foreign forces should intervene in under any pretext or in any way,” he declared.

“We urge the G7 to concentrate on their own problems and discard the Cold War mentality,” Wang concluded. “The G7 foreign ministers’ meeting has grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs, and maliciously smeared and discredited China,” Wang said. “The communique is full of arrogance and prejudice.”

Yellen was asked during an interview on Sunday by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria about the efficiency of the anti-Russia sanctions and about Washington’s track record of what he described as the “weaponization of the dollar.” Zakaria cited recent statements by Brazil’s President Lula da Silva and other politicians about the risk of dependency on the US currency. He asked whether the present time would be remembered as the moment when “the dollar’s hegemony and its status as a reserve currency began to falter.”

Yellen acknowledged that use of financial sanctions “could undermine the hegemony of the dollar” in the long run, but promised that Washington was using this “important tool” judiciously and with the backing of its allies.

“The USA is a mess. Our economy is crashing, inflation is out of control,” the former president stated. The US dollar is “crashing” as well, he claimed, adding that the American currency “will soon no longer be the world’s standard.” This would amount to Washington’s “greatest defeat in 200 years” and was “unthinkable just a few years ago,” Trump said as he addressed the NRA convention in Indianapolis last Friday.

The Biden administration’s failures in the foreign policy field have seen Russia join forces with China, the former president said, adding that, together with Iran and North Korea, Moscow and Beijing have now formed a “menacing and destructive coalition.” “We have never been in such danger in our lives. I believe it is the most dangerous time in the history of our country,” he said.

Nenner says his cycles see, “The dollar going down to 70 on the dollar index.” It’s a bit over 100 now, but it gets worse. Nenner points out, “I don’t want people to get depressed, but I am really worried. If the US does not rule the world any more... They think they can still tell the world what to do. Physically, the Americans are in danger, and they don’t seem to understand that... The economy is really going to suffer. Nenner says the signs are clear in the cycle that “America is at the end of empire... The United States is going backwards, and it is not number one anymore.”

On the war cycle, Nenner has been forecasting a huge loss of life coming. Nenner is predicting “30% of the people on Earth will die in the next war cycle. We are like at the end of civilization of the United States. It’s not that we are all going to drop dead, but it’s the end of civilization. The same issues that finished other countries like bad education, too many outstanding loans and people will become too lazy to really do hard work. That usually means the end of an empire.”

For many years, Saudi Arabia’s relationship with Hamas has been cold and tense, and the kingdom even arrested many people with ties to the jihadist group, which rules the Gaza Strip and openly seeks Israel’s destruction. But following its landmark rapprochement with Iran, Riyadh appeared set to host a high-level delegation that will try to mend Hamas’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, which has been frosty since 2007, when the terror group overthrew the Palestinian Authority and took over Gaza in a bloody coup. Saudi leaders had blamed Hamas for the failure of attempts at reconciliation between it and the PA’s Fatah party.