Enslave
Profiteer
Rule
Don’t go there!
Perhaps ironically, one of the most famous 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse paintings is by a Russian:
- Pestilence (on a White Horse -> COVID !?)
- War (on a Red Horse -> PUTIN !?)
- Famine (on a Black Horse -> HYPERINFLATION !?)
- Death (on a Pale Horse -> TOO LATE !?)
- Meduza
- DW
- Ahead
Two years after Alexey Navalny died in a Russian prison, five European countries confirmed through independent testing that he was poisoned. Analyses of Navalny’s biological samples, conducted by multiple independent laboratories, revealed traces of epibatidine — a deadly neurotoxin derived from a South American frog species and now produced synthetically. Why would Russia use an exotic poison to assassinate an imprisoned opposition leader? Where did the Kremlin get the toxin? And will Moscow face any consequences for potentially violating international weapons conventions? For answers to these and other questions, Meduza spoke with biochemist and chemical weapons expert Marc-Michael Blum, former head of the OPCW laboratory.
Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom and former commander in chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, gave the Associated Press a wide-ranging interview in which he described his deepening rift with President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The Winter Paralympics will begin on March 6 in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, exactly one month after the Winter Olympics opened in the same Italian venues. For the first time since the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russian athletes will compete under their national flag and anthem. The International Paralympic Committee cleared six Russians and four Belarusians to compete, with both delegations marching under their respective national flags. The Russian delegation includes alpine skiers Alexey Bugayev and Varvara Voronchikhina, cross-country skiers Ivan Golubkov and Anastasia Bagiyan, and snowboarders Dmitry Fadeyev and Filipp Shebbo Monzer. The decision has drawn fierce condemnation from Ukraine, whose officials say they will boycott official Paralympic events.
On February 14, the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Sweden announced that Alexey Navalny had been poisoned in a Russian prison with a lethal toxin — epibatidine. The governments said the conclusion was based on independent laboratory analyses of samples taken after Navalny’s death in 2024.
Svetlana Savelyeva, a translator from the Siberian city of Irkutsk, traveled to Russia’s Kursk region in October 2024 with the goal of crossing the border into Ukraine. She hoped to reach her fiancé, a Ukrainian soldier waiting across the front line. Instead, she was arrested and tortured by the FSB. Savelyeva now faces trial for attempted treason, having been accused of training for combat herself. Meduza summarizes Savelyeva’s story, based on reporting by the independent outlet People of Baikal.
2026.02.15
Rick Mills, Editor/ Publisher, Ahead of the Herd:
Louis, you’ve been in the exploration development business for many years. Could you please tell us where your knowledge base lies and a little bit about yourself.
Louis Martin, Harvest Gold Senior Technical Advisor:
Sure. I guess we can move quite a ways back. I was born in a mining town up in northern Quebec, my parents worked there so I was actually born into the industry.
2026.02.13
Gold and silver’s dramatic pullback on Jan. 30 was supposedly predicated on the notion that Trump’s pick to replace Jerome Powell as Fed Chair, Kevin Warsh, is a fiscal hawk who has previously criticized quantitative easing, wants to unwind the Fed’s massive balance sheet, and may not lower interest rates as Trump has long criticized Powell for failing to do.
But a deeper reading into Warsh reveals that he is not the hawk many think he is, and in fact is likely to move the Fed in lock step with the President’s low-interest-rate, low-dollar desires.
From X
FT Exclusive: Canada aims to create 125,000 jobs by increasing military spending to 5% of GDP over the next decade and shifting away from US arms manufacturers, according to a new strategy paper.
Read More
By Pia Gray – Futura
A stone wall deep inside a Greek cave stands as the oldest known human made structure. Dated to 23,000 years ago, it predates Egypt’s Great Pyramid by over 18,000 years.
In 2025, after nearly a decade closed to the public, Theopetra Cave reopened. The timing coincides with new research published in 2026 by Dr. Nina Kyparissi-Apostolika, who has led excavations at the site since 1987. The wall, discovered decades ago, was built during the Last Glacial Maximum, a period of extreme cold when much of Europe was blanketed in ice.
By Wes O’Donnell – The Walrus
Canada doesn’t talk about the Avro Arrow because it’s nostalgic. It talks about the Arrow because it’s unfinished business. Every time Ottawa finds itself boxed in on defence procurement, every time the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) tries to remind Canada who it thinks really owns North American air power, the Arrow reappears. It doesn’t show up as an engineering debate or a budget line.
Continue reading The F-35 Debate Is Really about How We Killed the Avro Arrow at Ahead of the Herd.
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Mandela’s Kiss Endures
The 2024 Global Elections Super-Cycle
Stay tuned for continuous updates on elections around the world. Click on a country for the latest elections data and analysis.
- Number of national elections to be held in 2024 18 of 68
- Overall turnout (based on registered voters) 63%
- Total number of ballots cast in 18 elections 467,094,737
Pulled conclusions from pooled data compilations
Using some of the world’s largest companies by market cap & some of the most quoted indices + two most sung alternatives: data for this millennia where available
- At 134x, Apple is the absolute stock price growth winner; with Amazon at 45x and Google at 32x
- Despite the lack of interest or dividends, gold at 6.6x looks good compared to any other stock or index!
- Barrick Gold on the other hand seems to be poorly correlated to anything including the gold metal itself!?
- But Barrick is the only stock producing negative correlations with most of the indices including a relatively high -0.77 with the Euronext100 index
- If one wast trying to get something totally uncorrelated on purpose- it would be hard to beat: gold and the Euronext100 index at -0.03; or Barrick and the Hang Seng index at 0.04; or gold and Merck at 0.16; or BTC and the FTSE index at 0.19
- Correlation against a basket of indices & alternatives is best in Disney and Google (0.81-0.82), albeit at different growth multiples
- If an average historical P/E is somewhere in the 20x range, then the current S&P quoted average which is in high 30s is as warned high, BUT: only Amazon and Visa seem to be widely out of range (justified by growth in online transactions?), with many below current & historical averages
- In the current world of no interest & no inflation, maybe the higher P/E averages are justified..? For how long, that is a different question…
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