In June 2022, more than 1600 Subaru Solterras – and approximately 2700 examples of its Toyota BZ4X twin – were recalled globally within two months of going on sale because the electric SUV’s wheels could wriggle loose, resulting in two known incidents where wheels completely detached from the car.

At the time, Automotive News reported: “The defect stemmed from not accounting for the high torque exerted on the wheels by the car’s all-electric drivetrain.

“The wheels are attached with hub bolts, but even in low mileage use, the wheels can come loose due to vigorous driving – such as turning sharply or braking aggressively.”

Last week, Subaru’s US division issued a recall notice and an immediate ‘do not drive’ warning to 1182 Solterra owners after it was discovered the third-party contractors who had been tasked with completing the first recall did not rectify the fault correctly.

“Subaru identified an issue with vehicles repaired at two port locations by one particular team of contractors,” said a media statement by Subaru USA.

“The teams did not properly complete the repair procedure resulting in the potential for significantly under-torqued bolts. Out of an abundance of caution, Subaru is recalling all vehicles repaired at all port locations supported by the third-party contractor.

The theory: moisture is gradually drawn away because rice is an absorbent material. But does it work with an object the size of a car?

A YouTube star in the US has tested the theory by immersing an expensive electric vehicles in a giant crate of rice.

Rich Benoit, presenter of the Rich Rebuilds YouTube channel, purchased a flood-damaged Audi E-Tron GT at auction for $US55,000 ($AU79,000).

Given a new Audi E-Tron GT is priced from $US104,900 (the Audi E-Tron GT starts locally from $AU180,200 before options and on-road costs), it seemed like a good deal except for one crucial thing. The car didn’t work.

In the first video about the car, Rich and his team try to jump-start the electrics on the stricken Audi but have no luck.

The team then try some ‘internet science’ blended with real science and build a crate around the car where the remaining volume was filled with 4275 pounds (about 2 tonnes) of free rice that had passed its used-by date.

After leaving the car for a few days, the team tries to start the car again and – surprisingly – it works.

While it is worth noting the video points out there are risks to using rice to dry out your phone (dust and other particles can do more damage than the water) – let alone your car.

The video clip amassed almost 500,000 views in its first week.

Whether the car makes a full recovery remains to be seen, no doubt in a third follow-up video.

The state’s Coalition government has promised to beef up its building code and its Construction Compliance Unit to take over some of the work done by the Australian Building and Construction Commission at a time when builders are complaining that the CFMEU is pushing an “no ticket, no start” campaign of forced union membership.

Mr Perrottet is acting six weeks out from a tight election. But the union’s predictable “anti-worker” spin doesn’t wash with its record of contempt for community standards: a $16 million rap sheet of fines since 2016 for threats, slurs and intimidation towards other workers, employers and regulators.

It’s a modus operandi, says a Federal Court judge, of a union that’s able to consider itself completely “above the law” and shrugs off fines as a cost of doing business.

The NSW government has an ambitious $117 billion infrastructure project pipeline over the next four years, including the Metro rail system and the WestConnex highway network that will change daily life around Sydney. But inflation will make some projects more expensive.

And the big east coast states with large infrastructure pipelines are far more indebted now than when those projects were conceived.

The High Court ruled last year that the maximum level of fines are now needed, not to secure some repentance, but simply to make it too expensive for the union to keep up its misbehaviour.

Yet Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has approved a settlement in which the union paid no costs after losing a legal case to the ABCC involving display of union flags on a Lendlease site. The ABCC was given $300,000 in costs, which the union appealed.

A day after the ABCC was scrapped, the CFMEU proposed the appeal and the costs be dropped too. The ABCC proposed a settlement of half the costs or $150,000 to the publicly funded body, at least acknowledging that the commission had won the case.

When it reached Mr Dreyfus, he ordered a settlement in which the union paid no costs, supposedly in the name of efficiency.

That’s an extraordinary decision to waive costs involving one of Labor’s top donors. Unions provided half of Labor’s funding ahead of the 2022 election, and a disproportionate half of that came from the CFMEU.

Yet the law-breaking union is becoming frighteningly normalised into Australia life. CFMEU-associated super fund CBUS, chaired by former treasurer Wayne Swan, has announced plans to inject $500 million of members’ money into Treasurer Jim Chalmers National Housing Accord, before ensuring that this would maximise members’ returns.

The CFMEU’s most prominent public face is still Victorian construction branch secretary John Setka, who resigned as a member of the ALP after public criticism following his criminal conviction for harassing his wife.

The CFMEU’s mining and manufacturing divisions are attempting to leave the union and its law-breaking behind. But they have been unable to because of the Fair Work Commission’s interpretation of a Morrison-era law, backed by Labor, intended to allow the easier unwinding of union mergers which reinforce the power of an incumbent union and its labour monopolies. It simply is not easy to escape.

Calling themselves Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, they informed him: ‘What your advisers should have told you is that none of the newly promised weaponry will stop Russia from defeating what’s left of the Ukrainian army. If you have been told otherwise, replace your intelligence and military advisers with competent professionals – the sooner the better.’

Two decades ago, before the US/UK attack on Iraq, some of the same signatories warned President George W Bush that ‘justification’ for such an attack was based on false intelligence. In their February 5, 2003 memorandum on Colin Powell’s speech, they alerted the then president to the unintended consequences of an attack on Iraq which were likely to be catastrophic. Then, as now, they urged the president to widen the circle of his advisers beyond those clearly bent on a war for which they saw no compelling reason. Five years later the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded: ‘In making the case for war, the [Bush] Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.’

The current Alert Memorandum goes on: ‘The issuances of your current intelligence advisers rival those of Bush’s and Cheney’s fixers in disingenuousness. Their statements run from dishonest to naïve. They betray a woeful lack of understanding of Russia’s strategic concerns and its determination to use its formidable military power to meet perceived external threats. The statements also reflect abysmal ignorance regarding how US behaviour has led willy-nilly to a profound shift in the world correlation of forces in favour of Russia and China – to include making them military allies in all but name.’

Such is the case with the current American preoccupation in Ukraine.

The reasoning in Washington goes like this: for the “low cost” of Ukrainian lives and American taxpayer dollars, the West can end Putin’s strategic threat to the United States and its NATO partners.

Throw in some generous rhetoric of saving democracy and accusing any skeptics of the plan of being new Neville Chamberlains and you’ve got yourselves a winning dynamic. Besides, no Americans are dying. It’s not like Iraq or Afghanistan. This is a postmodern, “clean” great power war—and the Russians can do nothing to stop us.

This is the thinking. And, my friends, I’m here to tell you this is the same kind of two-dimensional analysis that got us mired in the failed Middle East wars of the last 20 years. While there may not (yet) be large US armies in Ukraine, the fact remains that the same kind of wishful thinking that got us stuck in Iraq has now ensnared the United States in an unwinnable war in Ukraine.

After toppling Saddam Hussein, though, the plan went off the rails. Chalabi’s group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC) proved itself incapable of garnering popular support from the Iraqi people in a post-Saddam Iraq or of being a reliable partner to the Americans in Iraq.

Washington told the world it was supporting Ukraine “to preserve” NATO (despite the fact that Ukraine was not a member of NATO). Yet, to keep Germany—a major NATO member—on-side in the Russian-Ukraine war, Washington supposedly conducted a covert attack on Germany’s critical civilian infrastructure that will have lasting, negative consequences for the German economy.

With this news now in the open, how does Washington think the German people will react?

There is in Germany today a large–and growing–anti-NATO and pro-Russian Far Right and Far Left.

This news, combined with the terrible economic conditions that the war has brought on, will likely lead to the end of the pro-NATO government there and the rise of a government that will weaken NATO more than America’s feckless behavior already has.

As this happens, Russia continues plodding along in Ukraine, bleeding that country dry of its blood and the US taxpayer of their treasure. All that America’s intervention in Ukraine has thus far achieved is to totally militate Russia against Ukraine and the West–meaning that no deal to save the Ukrainians will be made anytime soon.

Russian forces will be that much closer to NATO’s eastern flank and Moscow may even decide to escalate further against NATO in retaliation for their ham-fisted efforts at “breaking the Russian army in the field.”

Washington hasn’t broken the Russian military at all. It’s broken its own power–and NATO–in the mindless pursuit of defeating a great power rival, like Russia, without actually fighting it.

In so doing, it may end up having to fight Russia only from a much weaker position than what it had at the start of the Russo-Ukraine War.

If Washington can get back to viewing NATO that way, a geopolitical catastrophe might yet still be avoided. Washington and Brussels must work to restore a semblance of diplomacy with Moscow, too.

A 24/7 hyped news cycle, with breathless US defense official press briefings and reporters asking about aliens and UFOs, and just like that… the public is casually informed they were probably just “balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose.”

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday: “Given what we’ve been able to ascertain thus far, the intelligence community’s considering, again, as a leading explanation, that these could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose.”

Additionally, coming off the alleged Chinese ‘spy’ balloon shootdown off South Carolina on Feb.4 – which started this sensational trend of Pentagon jets taking potshots at floating unknown small objects in skies over North America with Sidewinder missiles that cost the taxpaying public $400,000 a pop,

Kirby admitted:

“We haven’t seen any indication or anything that points specifically to the idea that these three objects were part of the People’s Republic of China’s spy balloon program, or that they were definitively involved in external intelligence collection efforts,” Kirby said.

And what’s more, with the “China balloon threat” new read scare over American skies narrative now apparently being walked back, the Pentagon says it may never know with certainty, as Axios reports further of Kirby’s briefing:

Asked whether there was a possibility that the debris would never be recovered, Kirby acknowledged that it was a “difficult question” but said, “we’re taking this day by day and doing the best we can to try to locate the debris and then develop a plan to recover it.”

“We haven’t seen any indication or anything that points specifically to the idea that these three objects were part of the People’s Republic of China’s spy balloon program, or that they were definitively involved in external intelligence collection efforts,” Kirby said.

The objects did not appear to have been operated by the U.S. government, per Kirby.

“Prior to installing the 30km/h speed limit there were a number of pedestrian accidents along the beach front and within the CBD zone, due to the high pedestrian activity and other distractions experienced by drivers in the Manly area. Lowering the speed of the traffic will reduce the severity of any accidents that occur.”

However, the concrete islands themselves became a new hazard, with reports that not only were motorists colliding with them, but trucks – including buses and fire engines – were experiencing difficulty getting past the ones installed along the seafront, where the lanes are narrow either side.

The island on South Steyne at the southern end of Denison St reduces the size of the turning area for vehicles exiting Denison and going left (north). Manly Observer watched several trucks and longer vehicles having trouble driving around this tight turn.

This same traffic island is on a patch of road where stormwater builds up and floods the road during heavy rain. Several readers drew our attention to the island being completely submerged during a recent rainfall.

Installed in partnership with Transport for NSW, the dividers, 14 of them, began appearing on 11 January without advance notification, and immediately caused consternation.

The first ten were installed along the seafront along South Steyne and North Steyne, from Manly Corso north to Stuart Somerville Bridge in Queenscliff.

Second, some of the most significant western oil-service providers didn’t leave the country. SLB and Weatherford International Plc continue Russian operations, with some limitations.

I am no Catholic, but I fail to see how anyone supporting the traditional Latin Mass in opposition to Pope Francis and holding a pro-life and a biblical worldview of marriage and sexuality would qualify as a domestic terrorist compared to the ignored Antifa members. Despite this nonsensical accusation, the traditional wing of the Catholic Church is robust and gaining members.

Nevertheless, there had to be much more to the release of the FBI memo. Top FBI leadership knows that President Biden, Nancy Pelosi, many in Congress, and most of the Supreme Court members are Catholics (okay, many only claim to be). However, none is known to admit being to being a traditional (Latin Mass) Catholic.

Little else substantive was heard on the FBI memo until this half-hour video was released Super Bowl Sunday from Remnant TV (a subsidiary of The Remnant Newspaper, a widely read traditional Catholic publication). “In this episode of The Remnant Underground, Michael J. Matt provides the backstory behind the recent FBI memo recommending surveillance of Latin Mass Catholics as potential domestic terrorists.

Although the FBI HQ recalled the Richmond memo one day after the FBI whistleblower leaked the memo, Michael argues that there is more to this story. A lot more!”

The Remnant TV video is well worth the half-hour it takes to watch, whether the viewer is Catholic or not.

Nuland, who served under former US presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, is infamous for her aggressive pursuance of Washington’s geopolitical interests. She played a key role in the 2014 fascist-led coup that overthrew the pro-Russian Ukraine government of President Viktor Yanukovich.

In 2013, Nuland bragged that Washington had “invested over $5 billion” in the Ukrainian opposition, and in 2014, she was recorded on a telephone call with the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, selecting the head of a post-coup government and discussing US collaboration with neo-fascist forces like the Svoboda party.

Nuland spent January 29 and 30 in Nepal, where she met with Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal and several other officials. She was the highest-ranking foreign dignitary to visit the country since Dahal’s election as prime minister on December 25.

In Kathmandu she denounced unnamed “autocrats” for “trying to change global rules by force”—a provocative reference to Beijing and Moscow.

Washington repeatedly and falsely promotes its political and military aggression against Russia and China as missions to defend “democracy.”

Underscoring US efforts to enlist Nepal in the military-strategic offensive against China, Nuland declared: “It’s enormously important for the US to have partners like Nepal.” Sandwiched between China and India, Nepal is caught in the intensifying strategic conflict between the US and India on one side, and China on the other.

Nepal is receiving heightened attention from Washington since Dahal, leader of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre), became prime minister with the support of K.P. Sharma Oli, head of the pro-China Communist Party of Nepal—United Marxist-Leninist. It was expected that Dahal would become prime minister backed by Sher Bahadur Deuba, leader of the pro-India Nepali Congress. The US and India fear that the Dahal government will be closely aligned with Beijing.

On February 5, a few days after Nuland’s visit, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) chief Samantha Power arrived in Kathmandu. Nepal is due to receive $US500 million under the US Millennium Challenge Corporation project.

Washington has also agreed to provide another $659 million in economic assistance through USAID in the next five years. The aid is clearly aimed at undermining the influence of China, which remains Nepal’s largest foreign investor.

On January 31, Nuland travelled to India where she met with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and later Foreign Secretary Vinay Kwatra. Media reports said Nuland and Jaishankar discussed the Indian subcontinent, the Indo-Pacific, and the “many points of convergence” in the India-US relationship.

It was Nuland’s second meeting with Jaishankar in the past two months. At their previous meeting, on December 15 at the UN headquarters, Jaishankar and Nuland discussed their efforts to support “security in the Asia Pacific and globally.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Joe Biden will meet three times this year—at the G7, Quad and G20 summits—while US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is to visit India next month.

India is Washington’s principal military-strategic partner in South Asia. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has been transformed into a frontline state of the US war drive against China. New Delhi has bilateral, trilateral and quadrilateral alliances with the US, Japan and Australia. New Delhi and Washington are collaborating closely to enlist Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the Maldives into this anti-China military-strategic offensive.

As Nuland was visiting New Delhi, Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval met with his US counterpart Jake Sullivan and other senior officials in Washington to inaugurate the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies (ICET) dialogue between the two countries.

In an exclusive interview with Mint, former Indian envoy to the US Arun Singh said the ICET would provide mechanisms for the two countries to “explore and deepen collaboration in several critical and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, quantum, 6G, space, semiconductors and biotech.” Singh said the “rise of China” was a factor in driving this collaboration.

Nuland visited Sri Lanka on February 1 where she met with President Ranil Wickremesinghe. Nuland declared that Washington supports the Colombo government’s efforts “to stabilize the economy, protect human rights, and promote reconciliation” and that both countries were together for “an inclusive, prosperous and secure future for all Sri Lankans.”

Nuland’s call for a prosperous future “for all Sri Lankans” is totally hypocritical. The extreme economic and political crisis facing the country, which was worsened by COVID-19, was even more dramatically intensified by the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.

Contrary to Nuland’s bogus claims, the Wickremesinghe government, working in tandem with the US and the International Monetary Fund, is brutally imposing the full burden of this crisis onto millions of already impoverished workers, rural toilers and their families.

Nuland also used her Sri Lankan trip to further denounce Beijing. She declared: “We expect that China will provide credible and specific assurances regarding its readiness to join the rest of us in meeting the IMF standards regarding debt restructuring. We are seeing the rest of Sri Lanka’s creditors come forward with those assurances, and now all eyes are on China to do the same.”

Nuland’s comment is a reference to Sri Lanka’s negotiations with its creditors on the restructuring of Colombo’s defaulted loan repayments, as demanded by the IMF.

Immediately responding to Nuland’s provocative remarks, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning stated: “What was said by the US side does not reflect the truth. The Export-Import Bank of China has already provided Sri Lanka with the letter to express support for its debt sustainability. Sri Lanka has responded positively and thanked China for that.”

Nuland has loyally served every administration, Democrat and Republican, since Bill Clinton, with a single exception. Donald Trump most likely refused to exploit her acquired competence on the grounds that she had been tainted by working for Barack Obama’s State Department under Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. Or perhaps Trump felt she had become too embedded in the culture of the deep state he claimed to abhor.

Nuland’s closest direct collaboration with a luminary of American politics occurred between 2003 and 2005 when she held the position of principal deputy foreign policy advisor to Vice-President Dick Cheney.

That enabled her to hone her skills as an aggressive agent of US power while playing an influential role in promoting the Iraq War. After that stint, she became George W. Bush’s ambassador to NATO.

In January 2021, President-elect Joe Biden named her under secretary of state for political affairs, the fourth-ranking position in the State Department.

According to Foreign Policy, who quotes Bill Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, Nuland “has a high degree of self confidence and an absolute dedication to working for the administration she is working for, whatever administration that is.”

In other words, she is a reliable tool of anyone’s policy decisions, however generous, cynical or perverse they may be.

That is what she proved when sent to Kyiv in February 2014 to pilot the operations around the peaceful protests that were then taking place that the State Department judged could then, with the appropriate level of management, be turned into a revolution.

The hacked recording of a phone call between the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, and Nuland sealed the otherwise discreet diplomat’s place in history.

In the recording, Nuland’s voice can be heard giving Pyatt orders about who the United States had selected to be Ukraine’s new prime minister. Countering Pyatt’s suggestion of the popular former boxer, Vitali Klitschko, Nuland selected Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

After the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country and Yatsenyuk struggled to lead a new government, an anti-Russian billionaire, Petro Poroshenko, won the presidency in September 2014.

He immediately appealed to the Obama administration for military assistance to counter Russia, but President Obama kept him at bay, reasoning that “Ukraine is a core interest for Moscow, in a way that it is not for the United States.”

In other words, not only did the CIA work to overthrow the elected president, Yanukovych, but Nuland managed to manipulate Ukrainian politics from within and thus contribute to what was to evolve into a notoriously corrupt regime under Poroshenko.

Nuland could have simply denied that any such laboratories existed and Rubio would have been satisfied. Instead, she uncomfortably explained not only that “biological research facilities” exist, but that the State Department is worried the Russians might effectively gain control of the labs, creating the risk of “research materials … falling into the hands of the Russian forces.” Some attentive observers deduced that the worry Nuland expressed concerned the possible revelation of illicit research funded and encouraged by the United States.

The scandal that exploded after this exchange provoked two reactions. The first was a firm and over-the-top denial by the Biden administration.

It was accompanied by a defensive counter-accusation claiming somewhat absurdly that the Russians were only making the accusation to cover up their own intention to use chemical weapons against Ukraine.

The second more serious reaction was Rubio’s attempt to clarify the ambiguity of Nuland’s revelation by interrogating Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and CIA Director William Burns.

Rubio counted on Haines not to make the same mistake as Nuland. Clearly, he expected her to give just enough perspective to dismiss any suspicions that the US may be involved in illegal military research.

Claiming that “the best way to combat disinformation is transparency,” to make sure Haines would understand the type of response he hoped to hear to dispel the negative effect of Nuland’s testimony,

Greenwald took the time to remind his public of the troubling precedent of the anthrax attacks following 9/11 in 2001. Only months after killing five people did Americans learn that the anthrax originated in the Fort Detrick military lab in Maryland and not in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. (I have written elsewhere on Fair Observer about my own interrogations and investigation of that affair.)

Nuland’s testimony was seriously embarrassing. Rubio’s follow-up failed to put the scandal to bed.

It was time for the White House to go into full denial mode. Predictably, presidential Press Secretary Jan Psaki stepped up with the intent to kill all debate by peremptorily tweeting: “This is preposterous. It’s the kind of disinformation operation we’ve seen repeatedly from the Russians over the years in Ukraine and in other countries, which have been debunked, and an example of the types of false pretexts we have been warning the Russians would invent.”

We may be justified in asking whether, in times of armed conflict, anything is more preposterous — and indeed more dangerous — than seeking to kill debate on a serious topic that might permit a better understanding of the context of the war. The refusal of debate would be especially preposterous concerning a war in which one’s own nation is theoretically not involved. (In reality, the Ukraine War is a showdown between the United States and Russia.) But now that fighting on the ground is real, preposterous discourse of any kind from either side becomes dangerous as the perspective of using weapons of mass destruction, either chemical or nuclear, has clearly become part of the equation.