Nikki Haley, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during a portion of former President Donald Trump's White House tenure, will reportedly launch a 2024 presidential bid in February, according to the Post and Courier.

The outlet reported that an individual in "Haley's inner circle" confirmed that Haley will jump into the 2024 presidential race — the outlet also reported that according to an invitation slated to be sent to Haley supporters, a "special announcement" will take place on February 15.

Sources confirmed to Fox News Digital that Haley will formally announce her presidential bid on February 15.

Austria and Hungary agree on not sending weapons to Ukraine, Austrian Defence Minister Klaudia Tanner and her Hungarian counterpart Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky said at a meeting in Budapest on Monday, stressing their close cooperation.

Austria and Hungary's position regarding the war in Ukraine is clear, as both countries are not sending weapons to the conflict area to prevent a further escalation, Tanner and Szalay-Bobrovniczky stated during a joint press conference.

They would be on the side of peace, with Austria being militarily neutral, Szalay-Bobrovniczky stressed, while providing humanitarian aid to war refugees. Close cooperation would be the most important as "we live in a time of danger," he said.

Precious metals expert and financial writer Bill Holter said last summer that the Fed rate increases would tank the economy. Everywhere you look you see the economy falling apart. House prices and sales are down. Banks are clocking record losses, vehicle prices are falling and unemployment is rising. The economy has not completely crashed, but it will. Holter explains,

"There are over $2,000 trillion worth of derivatives outstanding on a global economy . . . that has maybe a little more than $500 trillion in asset values. So, you have this dog walking around with a gigantic tail that will shake the dog. When derivatives go, it's a 48-hour event. Who do you think holds all these derivatives? You've got the big banks, all the big brokers, all the big insurance companies and they are all going to go down. It's like one giant financial STD, and everybody is in bed together and everybody is infected."

The fund expects 0.3% growth in 2023, having previously predicted a contraction

The International Monetary Fund has revised upwards its estimate of Russian economic development, projecting GDP to grow by 0.3% this year, and 2.1% in 2024.

According to the fund's World Economic Outlook update published on Monday, Russia's GDP fell by 2.2% last year. In its October forecast, the IMF reported that the decline was expected to be 3.4%. For this year, the fund previously predicted a drop of 2.3%, and for 2024, a 2.1% decline.

One may be excused to imagine all sorts of amusement games unrolling at the HQ of the Russian General Staff as The Empire and NATO go literally bonkers. What crazy stunt will they come up with next - short of WWIII?

Here is a delightful put down of NATO's dementia praecox. Everything so far has failed, from "crippling sanctions" to all sorts of wunderwaffen, while the whole Global South marvels at the exploits of Wagner PMC - now configured as the planet's top urban fighting machine.

CIA mouthpiece Washington Post duly released how Washington, once again, had the Liver Sausage Chancellor Scholz for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The idea was floated by Secretary of State Tony Blinken: let's announce we will deliver M1 Abrams to Ukraine in a hazy, unspecified future, thus providing cover for Scholz to release the Leopards now.

Don't you just love German sovereignty in action?

Every military analyst with an IQ over room temperature knows all those Leopards will be duly incinerated - or better yet, captured, and dissected by Russian military specialists.

So what happens next is yet another vector of the - very successful so far - U.S.-unleashed German de-industrualization racket: the Americans will invade the German industrial military complex with their "much improved" Abrams - which may perhaps arrive in 2024, when only a rump Ukraine may still exist, or never arrive at all. So no need for the Abrams to prove themselves in actual combat - as in being captured and/or incinerated.

Rumors in Washington advance that the U.S. "strategy" in Ukraine - extensively detailed by endless think tank reports - had to be adapted. It's not about "defeating Russia" anymore, but providing Kiev with the means to "scare" Russia. The Russian General Staff must be trembling in their boots.

Meanwhile, in real life, nearly every possible scenario gamed in Washington and Brussels finishes with NATO like a giant, armoured version of Wile E. Coyote plunging to the depths of the Grand Canyon. And that happens even if the much ballyhooded "Big Arrow" Russian offensive starts in a few days or weeks, or never starts at all.

Arguably the Russian General Staff has concluded a long time ago there's no point in reducing Ukraine to rubble in a matter of hours - something they could easily accomplish. Thus the fabled mincing machine approach - offering no excuses for NATO to "escalate" (which they continue to do anyway, as Jens "War is Peace" Stoltenberg is so fond of parroting).

The trick is that NATO's escalation overdrive, as it happens, is somewhat controlled by the Russian General Staff, which is always calculating which optimal maneuvers will consume NATO's military hardware faster. Call it a Russian version of the popular axiom "frog in a boiling pot doesn't realize it's being cooked until it croaks."

Kiev should get Western fighter jets and longer-range missiles, Lithuania's Gitanas Nauseda has declared

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda has called on NATO to escalate its brinkmanship in Ukraine by supplying Western-made fighter jets and long-range missiles to Kiev. Moscow suggested that Nauseda had failed to consider the potential consequences.

"I have seen many red lines... that were not drawn by us, democratic states," the Lithuanian leader said in an interview with LRT television on Tuesday. "The terrorist state of Russia is trying to draw them, using fear and threats."

Nauseda praised previous instances when NATO crossed "Russian red lines", such as by greenlighting the supply of Western-made main battle tanks to Ukraine. The lines "exist only in our heads" and can be ignored, the Lithuanian president suggested.

Russia is unlikely to take the bait: It has the real strategic advantage in all areas of engagement with the Ukrainian forces.

There is too much 'noise' in the system, and it is obscuring the view.

Davos has always been 'weird'. But this year, the kookier aspects were so obvious. The WEF is dying on the vine. The 'vision' seems ever more fantastical, and the hubris - inherent in the 'behavioural conditioning' to make people make the 'right choices' - stands naked. The schism between life, as experienced in the round, and the WEF's bleak prescription, has never been more stark. The gap will only widen as sharply falling living standards focus the great majority on immediacy and family survival.

One may dismiss this happening as a curiosity. But that would be wrong. The Davos vessel may have struck a large credibility iceberg, but it has not yet sunk.

Rather, the fact of Davos sinking into creepy idiosyncrasy is significant - highly significant.

It is difficult to admit, but the Anglo-Saxons do not hide from it. To paraphrase a famous quote from the first Secretary General of the Alliance, NATO was designed to "keep Russia out, the Americans in and the European Union under trusteeship". There is no other possible interpretation of the continuation of the useless "sanctions" against Moscow and the vain and deadly fighting in Ukraine.

It has been almost a year since the Russian army entered Ukraine to implement Security Council Resolution 2202. NATO, rejecting this reason, considers that Russia invaded Ukraine to annex it. In four oblasts, the referendums on joining the Russian Federation seem to confirm NATOs' interpretation, except that the history of Novorossia confirms Russia's explanation. The two narratives continue in parallel, without ever overlapping.

For my part, having edited a daily newsletter during the Kosovo war [1], I remember that the NATO narrative at the time was contested by all the Balkan news agencies, without my having the means to know who was right. Two days after the end of the conflict, journalists from the Atlantic Alliance countries were able to go to the scene and see that they had been fooled. The regional news agencies were right. NATO had been lying all along. Later, when I was a member of the Libyan government, NATO, which had a Security Council mandate to protect the population, misused it to overthrow the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, killing 120,000 of the people it was supposed to protect.

These experiences show us that the West lies shamelessly to cover its actions.

The hypocrisy of the billionaires who are funding anti-hydrocarbon campaigns, including bans on gas stoves. Natural gas bans are more about class than climate change.

The Climate Imperative Foundation is the newest and richest anti-hydrocarbon, anti-natural gas group you've never heard of.

How rich is Climate Imperative? According to the latest report from Guidestar, the group took in $221 million in its first full year of operation. (Guidestar calls the income "gross receipts.") That means that Climate Imperative, which is less than three years old, is already taking in more cash than the Sierra Club, which bills itself as the "nation's largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization." According to Guidestar, the Sierra Club collected $180 million in its latest reporting year. Climate Imperative is also taking in more money than the Rocky Mountain Institute which collected about $130 million in its latest reporting year. I use those groups for comparison because they are pushing anti-gas initiatives across the country. More on them in a moment.

The emergence of Climate Imperative -- which has received virtually no attention from legacy media outlets -- is important for several reasons.

First, it shows that the effort to "electrify everything" and ban the use of natural gas in homes and businesses - and that includes gas stoves -- is part of a years-long, lavishly funded campaign that is being bankrolled by some of the world's richest people.

The Western public, like others, are justly appalled by the human suffering and the horrors of the Ukrainian war. Empathy is one of the great virtues of humanity, which in this instance translates into the demand for helping Ukrainians. Yet, propaganda commonly weaponizes the best in human nature, such as compassion, to bring out the worst. As sympathy and the desire to assist the displaced are used to mobilize public support for confrontation and war with Russia, it is necessary to ask if the Western public and Ukrainians are being manipulated to support a proxy war.

Is NATO helping Ukraine to fight Russia or is NATO using Ukraine to fight Russia?

The organization as a passive actor?

The US-led military bloc commonly depicts itself as an innocent third party that merely responds to the overwhelming desire of the Ukrainian people to join its ranks. Yet, for years NATO has attempted to absorb a reluctant Ukraine into its orbit. A NATO publication from 2011 acknowledged that

"The greatest challenge for Ukrainian-NATO relations lies in the perception of NATO among the Ukrainian people. NATO membership is not widely supported in the country, with some polls suggesting that popular support for it is less than 20%."