United States

In the latest escalation over what may be an imminent preemptive airstrike on North Korea by US warships now located just 300 miles away from the North Korean nuclear test site, moments ago China's national airline, Air China, announced it was suspending flights from Beijing to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, from late on Friday, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said. It did not say why the flights, which operate on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, were being suspended.

One day after the Trump administration demonstratively used the GBU-43/B Massive Ordinance Air Blast bomb (MOAB, also known as Mother Of All Bombs) the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal in Afghanistan, in a clear show of force meant to send a signal to North Korea, it released a video of the explosion.

JUST IN: New video shows massive, 21,000-pound bomb hitting ISIS in Afghanistan https://t.co/FHXxuPb0Xq https://t.co/8A69FEO26y

— CNN (@CNN) April 14, 2017

Authored by Alex Hopkins via AirWars.org,

March was the deadliest month ever recorded by Airwars during the Coalition’s campaign in Iraq and Syria. This coincided with the greatest number of munitions dropped by the allies so far in the war. The high number of alleged incidents across both countries forced Airwars temporarily to pause its full vetting of Russian airstrikes in order to keep pace with the reported Coalition toll.

 

It appears that Mike Cernovich, who earlier this week wrote that Trump's national security advisor, Gen. H.R.McMaster, was planning on sending as many as 150,000 troops to Syria, may have been right again. According to Bloomberg commentator Eli Lake, who has now made a habit of confirming Cernovich "conspiracy theories" (he did so previously with the Susan Rice scoop), Trump may be on the verge of escalating the proxy war in Syria by sending anywhere between 10,000 and 50,000 troops on the ground, and - if Cernovich is indeed correct - as much as three times more.

With just two days to go until North Korea's "Day of the Sun" celebrations, when as reported yesterday it may conduct its 6th nuclear test at the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site, NBC reports citing multiple senior U.S. intelligence officials that in the latest stepwise escalation, the U.S. is prepared to launch a preemptive strike with conventional weapons against North Korea should officials become convinced that Kim Jong-Un's nation North Korea is about to follow through with a nuclear weapons test.