A lightning strike which scored a direct hit on a gas tank triggered a huge explosion of "pulsating orange" to fill the sky near the British city of Oxford. | Posts on social media showed a large and ominous-looking fireball rising from the horizon, and confusion from people trying to work out what had happened. Mystery shrouded the explosion until energy firm Severn Trent Green Power moved to confirm a lightning bolt had struck a gas tank during a storm. ● Emergency services attended the scene, but early reports suggest no one was injured. Severn Trent Green Power confirmed that biogas from a container had ignited at its Cassington AD Facility, near Oxford airport, at about 7.20pm. Jack Frowde, who works at Oxford University, told the BBC he heard a deafening sound and saw a "pulsating orange" light in the distance.

■ Oxfordshire explosion: New pictures show damage caused by lightning strike at recycling plant (Sky News)

Unfortunately the real situation is worse then I had thought. | Via a Responsible Statecraft piece I came onto a EU study that tried to predict the future demographics of Ukraine's population. The War and the Future of Ukraine’s Population. The study is from early 2022 and is based on Ukrainian casualty numbers from only the very first month of the war. Their worst case scenario was this: Our third and fourth scenarios assume that the war will continue for a month or longer so that further casualties and refugees are expected. We assume the following casualties: 5,000 deaths among soldiers and 1,500 civilian deaths based on the current trends. There will be 5 million refugees, which is an estimate by UNHCR (UNHCR 2022a) The real refugee numbers are twice as high and the casualty numbers, wounded and dead, are of course about 100 times higher than the study assumed. It was thus not worth the money that had been spend on it. Still, some graphs in it are usable.

In the past 150 years, the US Money Supply has only contracted five (5) times; and they were Recessions and the Great Depression. It is happening again. | Two U.S. money supply metrics that investors tend to pay close attention to are M1 and M2. The former accounts for the cash and coins in circulation, as well as the demand deposits within an individual's checking account. Meanwhile, M2 factors in everything in M1 and adds money market accounts, savings accounts, and certificates of deposit (CDs) below $100,000. The main difference is that M2 factors in cash that takes a little extra work to get your hands on. ● For as far back as the eye can see, M2 has been climbing. Since the U.S. economy steadily grows over the long run, it's only natural that more cash/capital is needed to facilitate transactions. In fact, M2 rising is so common that some economists may not even be paying attention to it as a monthly reported datapoint. But in the rare event that M2 meaningfully declines, pay attention!

Dr. Meryl Nass explains how the WHO's proposed pandemic treaty will enable the WHO "to take over jurisdiction of everything in the world by saying that climate change, animals, plants, water systems [and] ecosystems are all central to health". "We're undergoing a soft coup... under the pretext of pandemic preparedness and the biosecurity agenda."

■ The WHO’s Proposed Amendments Will Increase Man-Made Pandemics (Meryl Nass)

The entertainer had accused the woman at the center of new allegations of harassing him in 2017, one report recalls | The actor and comedian Russell Brand is under investigation by a second UK police force amid new allegations of “harassment and stalking,” numerous UK media sources reported on Monday. ● Brand, 48, who is being investigated by London’s Metropolitan Police following the publication two weeks ago of an array of sexual-abuse allegations by The Times, the Sunday Times and broadcaster Channel 4, is also the subject of a separate probe by the Thames Valley police, several media sources, including The Guardian and the BBC, said. Brand has denied all allegations made against him.

The mRNA technology provided a method to fight “one of the greats threats to human health in modern times,” the committee said [The mRNA injections ARE one of the greats threats to human health in modern times...and they are NOT vaccines.] Two scientists have been awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for their pioneering research that led to the development of mRNA vaccines, which helped curb the spread of Covid-19, it was announced early on Monday in Stockholm, Sweden. ● Dr. Katalin Kariko and Dr. Drew Weissman will share the prize almost two decades after first publishing a 2005 paper examining the potential benefits of mRNA technology. Their research received little attention at the time but the Nobel Prize committee praised the scientists’ “groundbreaking findings,” which they said “fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with [damages] our immune system.”