An agreement between Berlin and Washington that will see the US drop its opposition to the vital Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in exchange for Germany investing in Ukraine is based on assumptions that Moscow has malign intentions.

That's according to Russia's Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov, who has accused American officials of taking a confrontational stance towards his country over the Russian-backed gas link. In a statement issued on Thursday, he wrote that the new agreement, published by officials the day before, was based on "misunderstandings and political attacks on Russia."

According to the ambassador, the "hostile tone" of the deal "fundamentally contradicts the spirit of the meeting between the two presidents last month in Geneva." American leader Joe Biden met with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, for a crunch summit in June, with both sides praising the talks as constructive and positive.

CNN's Wednesday night town hall with President Joe Biden in Ohio barely made a ripple in the cable news prime-time ratings race, as the network drew just over half the viewers of Fox News and finished a hair behind MSNBC.

Deadline, citing Nielsen ratings, reported that CNN pulled in an average of 1.46 million viewers between 8 p.m. and 9:15 p.m., when the president was on stage in Cincinnati. That's a 58 percent drop in viewership from the previous CNN town hall with Biden this past February, which drew 3.5 million viewers.

Over the same 75-minute period Wednesday, Fox drew an average of 2.76 million viewers for Tucker Carlson Tonight and the first part of Hannity. The latter program featured a town hall with Florida Republicans, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Marco Rubio, Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez discussing the ongoing pro-freedom protests in Cuba.

How many absentee ballots were mailed out in the state and did they agree to the number of requests received?

Has anyone asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger how many absentee ballot requests were returned and how many were sent out in the 2020 Election?

We reported in December how the results in Georgia made no sense. Clearly, the results were tainted.

Also, to date, there are reportedly over 300,000 ballots included in the 2020 Election results in Georgia that have no attached legally-required chain of custody documentation.

Labour MP Dawn Butler has been ordered to leave the Commons chamber after she refused to withdraw accusations that Boris Johnson is a liar.

Ms Butler said the prime minister had "lied to the House and the country over and over again".

Under parliamentary rules, MPs are not allowed to accuse each other of lying in the House of Commons.

The acting Deputy Speaker asked the MP to withdraw her remarks but Ms Butler refused and was ordered to leave.

Hunter Biden will meet prospective buyers before he auctions his art this fall, despite the White House's promise that sales will be anonymous. Fresh accusations of corruption have been leveled at the Biden family.

Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, says he took up painting while recovering from a crack cocaine addiction. When news broke that he was planning on selling these paintings at a show in New York later this year, the Biden administration headed off conservative outrage with a convoluted scheme that it said would stop buyers using the sale to purchase favor from the Bidens.

"After careful consideration, a system has been established to allow Hunter Biden to work in his profession within reasonable safeguards," Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters earlier this month. Psaki said that a gallery owner would price Hunter's art, that the identity of buyers would be kept secret from Hunter and his family, and that bids above the asking price would be rejected.

For a few months a lot of people were convinced that humanity's efforts to defeat COVID were being successful, and many believed that the pandemic would soon be behind us for good. But now the "Delta variant" is spreading like wildfire all over the globe, and this is prompting national governments around the world to institute a new wave of restrictions and lockdowns. Needless to say, the restrictions and lockdowns that we witnessed in 2020 were absolutely devastating for the global economy, and many areas of the planet remain economically depressed as a result. As the "Delta variant" continues to spread, will this new wave of restrictions and lockdowns push the world economy into another major downturn during the second half of 2021?

I am extremely concerned about how some national governments are choosing to respond to this new variant. In particular, I think that officials in Australia have gone completely nuts. Now that a third state has implemented new restrictions, more than half of the country is currently under lockdown...

"More than half of Australia's 25 million people were under lockdown on Tuesday after a third state adopted movement curbs to rein in the highly contagious Delta variant of coronavirus.

"Australia's infections and deaths are well below other developed nations, but its use of lockdowns, prompted by a sluggish vaccination campaign, is putting pressure on the national government, with polls at their lowest in a year and just months before elections are due to be held."

Once upon a time, I used to recommend Australia as a potential relocation destination.

Earlier today, an unlikely coalition of senators introduced a bipartisan bill that would impose significant curbs on presidential power to initiate armed conflict and declare "national emergencies." Neither idea is entirely new. But this proposal is distinctive because of its broad reach, and its combining of the two issues in one bill. The Washington Post summarizes the bill's war powers provisions:

A bipartisan group of senators unveiled legislation Tuesday to give Congress a more active role in approving arms sales, authorizing the use of military force and declaring national emergencies, in an across-the-board effort to claw back national security power from the executive branch. The bill aims, for the first time, to define what type of "hostilities" require a president to seek congressional approval before committing military resources; establish expiration dates for national emergencies and military authorizations; and automatically curtail funding for any operation a president continues without explicit congressional support....

The comprehensive measure imposes more stringent restrictions than current law does, and comes as Washington grapples with whether and how to repeal long-running authorizations for use of military force, or AUMFs, including those passed nearly two decades ago to greenlight U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan..... It would define "hostilities" as any operation involving the use of force, remotely or directly — superseding the unofficial custom of administrations interpreting the law as applying only when there are combat troops on the ground. It also would shorten the time that presidents have to engage in those hostilities from 60 to 20 days and automatically terminate funding for an operation if a president fails to secure congressional support for the venture by that deadline....

If we look back throughout history, all societies whose government attempted to, or actually succeeded in, controlling the speech of their citizens, have been totalitarian nightmares. It is for this reason that the founders crafted the first and most important Amendment to the Constitution, barring government from doing exactly that.

Aside from a few constitutionally illiterate politicians over the past couple of decades and the horrid atrocities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, recently Americans have had the ability to express their protected speech in any manner they see fit. Over the last several years, however, tech giants and social media companies have brought down the hammer in the name of protecting society from "disinformation."

Many have argued — although incorrectly — that companies like Facebook and Twitter are private entities and therefore can censor whatever speech they want to on their own platforms. As TFTP has been reporting for years, however, this censorship was anything but private.

While there has been a grey area as to the relationship between social media and government, on Thursday, the White House made sure to clear up any doubt. During a press briefing, Jen Psaki removed any uncertainty that Facebook is a wholly private entity by claiming that the United States government will now dictate to the social media behemoth, exactly what is and isn't allowed on their platform.

"We are in regular touch with the social media platforms," said Psaki, adding, "we're flagging problematic posts for Facebook."

Sanctions & support for opposition movements from abroad is driving Europe down a dangerous path, Belarus' long-time leader Alexander Lukashenko has claimed, in an explosive new broadside against the EU and its politicians.

In an interview with Sky News Arabia published on Wednesday, the embattled president said that "the Europeans [are] directing a hybrid war against us, Russia, and even China."

Calling the leaders of EU states "crazy politicians" who are dependent on the US, Lukashenko argued that their approach to Moscow, Minsk and Beijing "isn't just creating a hotbed of tension - they are pushing for a third world war."

Lukashenko's government has faced a series of new political sanctions since its officials ordered a Ryanair flight transiting the country's airspace to land, telling the pilots at the time that they had received credible intelligence that a bomb was on board. However, once on the ground, security operatives arrested two prominent opposition activists who had been on board, Roman Protasevich and Sophia Sapega.

Last Thursday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki revealed that the Biden administration will partner with Facebook and other social media platforms to surveil COVID-related posts. They plan to flag and censor people whom the administration considers to be purveyors of COVID "disinformation" or "misinformation." Psaki said:

"We've increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General's office. We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We're working with doctors and medical professionals to connect ... medical experts ... who are popular with their audiences with accurate information and boost trusted content. So we're helping get trusted content out there."

In other words, if respected epidemiologists and health professionals from Harvard Medical School, the University of Oxford, and Stanford University, such as Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, respectively, disagree with the so-called White House-approved "experts" as to whether wearing masks provides any significant safety benefits to children (it doesn't) or whether there is a medical imperative for healthy adolescents to be vaccinated (there isn't), then that could be grounds for them to be deplatformed or banned from sharing content on social media channels.