Welcome to Sott.net
Sat, 16 Oct 2021
The World for People who Think

Puppet Masters
Map

Gold Coins

Venezuela files legal claim in bid to force Bank of England to hand over $1 billion of gold for pandemic response

Maduro
© Getty Images
Venezuela has launched legal proceedings to try to force the Bank of England to hand over $1 billion worth of gold, claiming it needs the money to fund an appropriate response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The gold is being retained at the Bank of England as a result of U.K. and U.S. sanctions on the crisis-stricken South American country.

President Nicolas Maduro's administration has claimed it wants the Bank of England to sell part of the reserves in order to help fund the country's response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The legal document, which was filed in a commercial court and dated May 14, calls for the Bank of England to transfer the funds to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

Comment: It's rather insane that Venezuela can't have access to their own money, however that is the state of the world in which we live. Using the coronavirus 'pandemic' as a means of accessing such funds is a smart move, and plays on the 'panic' generated by the world's power structures.


Bad Guys

US nukes in Poland would not be a deterrent, but a MASSIVE provocation for Russia

German Tornado fighter
© Getty Images/ Thomas Lohnes
A German 'Tornado' fighter aircraft prepares to land at Büchel air base on February 27, 2019 near Cochem, Germany
The US has promoted the deployment of US nuclear weapons on Polish soil as part of NATO's 'nuclear sharing' arrangement. Such a move would only increase the chances of the very war such a deployment seeks to deter.

For the second time in little more than a year, the US ambassadors to Germany and Poland have commented on matters of NATO security in a manner which undermines the unity of the alliance while threatening European security by seeking to alter the balance of power in a way that is unduly provocative to Russia.

Richard Grenell, the US ambassador to Germany and the acting director of national intelligence, put matters into motion by writing an OpEd for the German newspaper Die Welt, criticizing politicians from within Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition who were openly calling for the US to withdraw its nuclear weapons from German soil.

Brick Wall

Biden says he opposes Israel annexing territory but supports military aid for annexation

Joe Biden
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said Tuesday he does not support Israeli moves to annex territory, his most forceful opposition to the prospect of Israel's government moving forward on sovereignty over the West Bank and Jordan Valley.

"I do not support annexation," the vice president said during a virtual fundraiser with members of the American Jewish community, according to a transcript reviewed by The Hill.

"The fact is, I will reverse Trump's undercutting of peace."

President Trump laid out in the January unveiling of his "Vision for Peace" between Israelis and Palestinians that he would allow Israel to exercise sovereignty over approximately 30 percent of West Bank territory and the Jordan Valley.

Comment: In other words, Biden is fully on board with providing military assistance for Israel to do whatever it wants.


Eye 1

Media ignores Israel connection to creation of dystopian 'smart cities' in New York

cuomo and israel
In recent weeks, considerable media attention has been given to the decision by NY Governor Andrew Cuomo to tap former Google executive Eric Schmidt to lead a 15-member panel tasked with "reimagining" New York's post-pandemic tech infrastructure as well as its education, economic and healthcare system. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was also recruited for this initiative by Gov. Cuomo, leading some American media outlets to criticize the venture as turning New York "into a Silicon Valley science experiment."

However, it is much more than merely a Silicon Valley experiment. As The Last American Vagabond reported last month, Schmidt currently chairs the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), which discussed plans last May regarding how to re-make American society to foster the mass adoption of AI-driven technologies, including so-called "smart cities" and related systems of mass surveillance. That commission includes key people, not just from Silicon Valley, but also the U.S. military and intelligence communities - a testament to how the divisions between Big Tech, the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence have become increasingly blurred in recent years.

Light Sabers

Russian Embassy fights back after Bloomberg "caught blatantly lying" about Russian healthcare

doctors
© Sputnik / Tatiana Makeeva
If you're going to tell blatant lies about Russia, you better make sure they don't catch you. On Tuesday, US news site Bloomberg was caught bungling statistics to make Russia look bad - and they weren't happy about it.

An op-ed written by regular columnist Clara Ferreira Marques titled 'How Putin's Russia Bungled the Pandemic' described how, as of 2013, Russia had 3.8 beds per 1,000 people, way behind the OECD average of 8.2 per 1,000. The truth was the exact opposite - Bloomberg had swapped the numbers.

On their Facebook page, The Embassy of Russia in the US hit back hard.

"Another major American media outlet has been caught blatantly lying about the measures taken by the Russian authorities to combat the spread of coronavirus infection," the embassy wrote.

Star of David

Abbas: Palestinians withdraw from all US and Israeli agreements

Abbas
© Reuters/Issam Rimawi/Pool/File
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas
The head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has repeatedly warned Israel that he will tear up any bilateral agreements with the Jewish state if Tel Aviv attempts to further extend its sovereignty over parts of the West Bank, a possibility left open by Israel's new unity government.

Palestinians have terminated all agreements with Israel and the US amid Tel Aviv's intention to extend its sovereignty over "the Palestinian lands", the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, stated Tuesday to Al Jazeera TV channel:
"The Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian State today has discharged all obligations under all agreements with the governments of the United States and Israel, including those related to security."
The agreements Abbas hinted at, without directly mentioning them, allegedly include a series of documents signed in the 1990s during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution process among which are the Oslo Accords, the 1997 Hebron Protocol and the 1998 Wye River Memorandum.

Snakes in Suits

Ukrainian lawmakers: Biden tapes show quid pro quo

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
© Sergey Dolzhenko/Pool Photo via AP
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy speaks to media during a news conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, May 20, 2020. Zelenskiy announced an investigation Wednesday into the leaked tapes that allegedly feature the country's former president Petro Poroshenko and former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and appear to be yet another episode of an anti-Biden campaign waged by a Ukrainian lawmaker.
Ukrainian lawmakers released the recording of a 2016 phone call between Joe Biden and then-President Petro Poroshenko. In the recording, Poroshenko told Biden he asked prosecutor general Viktor Shokin to resign.

Biden has since admitted that he blocked aid to Ukraine unless the prosecutor was fired over Shokin's investigation into gas company Burisma and his son Hunter.

"I'm a man of my word and now that the new prosecutor general is in place, we're ready to move forward to signing the $1 billion loan guarantee," Biden stated.

He also asked Poroshenko to nationalize Ukraine's largest bank, which is a move that was reversed because it's considered illegal by the new Ukrainian government.

Syringe

Disaster: 20% of Moderna's human test subjects sustained severe injuries from Gates-Fauci coronavirus vaccine

gates fauci moderna vacine
Despite Moderna's cheery press release this morning, the clinical trial results for its groundbreaking COVID vaccine could not be much worse.

The vaccine, developed and championed by Anthony Fauci and financed by Bill Gates,used an experimental MRNA technology that the two men hoped would allow rapid deployment to meet President Trump's ambitions "warp speed" time line.

Dr. Fauci was so confident of his shot's safety that he waved ferret and primate studies ( Moderna suspiciously reported no health data from its mouse studies). That appears to have been a mistake.

Three of the 15 human guinea pigs in the high dose cohort (250 mcg) suffered a "serious adverse event" within 43 days of receiving Moderna's jab.

Moderna did not release its clinical trial study or raw data,but its press release,which was freighted with inconsistencies acknowledged that three volunteers developed Grade 3 systemic events defined by the FDA as "Preventing daily activity and requiring medical intervention. "

Comment:


Star of David

Israel's annexation plan is the Nakba revisited

Israeli soldiers

Israeli soldiers walk as Palestinian demonstrators gather on a hilltop during a protest against Israeli settlements in the town of Beita in the Israeli occupied West Bank on 2 March
In its current formulation, Israel knows only one direction: to deepen its domination over a people whose land it has stolen and continues to steal

Anniversaries commemorate past events. And you could be forgiven for thinking that an event which happened 72 years ago is indeed in the past.

This is true of most anniversaries, except when it comes to the Nakba, the "disaster, catastrophe or cataclysm" that marks the partition of Mandatory Palestine in 1948 and the creation of Israel.

The Nakba is not a past event. The dispossession of lands, homes and the creation of refugees have continued almost without pause since. It is not something that happened to your great grandparents.

It happens or could happen to you any time in your life.

Comment: See also:


Better Earth

China's new cryptocurrency: Another step towards full dedollarization?

China blockchain

'We'll cut off the whole relationship'
-Trump threatened China in a recent Fox-Business interview, suggesting he may cut diplomatic relations with China and thereby saving US$ 500 billion. He didn't say how, though.

Mr. Trump's anger referred to what he calls China's "mismanagement" of the corona crisis. This is consistent with the new China bashing hard line being pushed by his administration. "I'm very disappointed in China," Trump said during the same Fox interview. "We asked to go over and they said no," he continued, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) February offer of assistance to the virus-stricken city of Wuhan. "They didn't want our help. And I figured that was OK because they must know what they are doing. So, it was either stupidity, incompetence or deliberate."

These are strong and unsubstantiated words, since there has never been a clearly documented accusation against China in how precisely China mismanaged the COVID-19 outbreak and is supposedly responsible for the COVID crisis in the US where real mismanagement, corruption, conflict of interest and particularly pharma-interests, competing private vaccine company interests are written all over the walls, the walls of shame, falsifying corona statistics, by falsifying death certificates, paying hospitals for declaring any patient a COVID-patient, even if many of them aren't, and for using ventilators, though it is widely known that ventilators are causing death in 60% to 80% of patients.

Comment: See also: