Correspondence between the FBI and senior Twitter staff, revealing how the agency pressured the platform to suppress certain narratives, is not evidence of wrongdoing, the Bureau said in a statement on Wednesday, adding that "conspiracy theorists" are presenting their activities in a nefarious light.

The files turned over to journalists by Twitter CEO Elon Musk "show nothing more than examples of our tradition, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements," the FBI statement claims.

"It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency," the statement concludes, reminding its critics that "the men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public."

Messages appearing to show FBI agents pressuring Twitter staff to classify legitimate stories such as the Hunter Biden laptop revelations as foreign influence operations are, according to the Bureau merely examples of the FBI "provid[ing] critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers." Internal communications among platform employees suggest otherwise.

Former Russian space chief Dmitry Rogozin, who was wounded in an artillery strike on the city of Donetsk, has said someone leaked his location to Ukrainian forces. He also said he would have to undergo surgery after shrapnel lodged in his back above the right shoulder blade.

The details were shared by Rogozin in a post on social media on Thursday, his first since the Wednesday evening incident. He stated he and his associates had been living for months in the hotel targeted by the strike. "In eight years the enemy didn't shell the location a single time," he claimed.

The recent corruption scandal in the European Parliament (EP) is a sign that the EU institution should be abolished in its current form, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Wednesday. He added that the EP already had an abysmal reputation.

Orban's remarks came after Eva Kaili, a Greek politician who served as one of the European Parliament's vice presidents, was arrested and charged this month with corruption for receiving bribes from Qatar.

"The Hungarians would like for the European Parliament to be dissolved in its current form," he said at a press conference in Budapest.

Catherine Austin Fitts (CAF), Publisher of The Solari Report and former Assistant Secretary of Housing (Bush 41 Admin.), says the U.S. government is so fraudulent that it will self-destruct much sooner than later. CAF predicts:

"If you look at FTX, my question is how much of the money sent to Ukraine got laundered right back for the (2022 midterm) election? So, to me, Ukraine is not a destination point, it is a through put point. . . . At this point, and I hate to say it, but we are in full scale implosion. The corruption is that bad. That's why I am telling you what we need is sovereignty. The federal government is not going to deliver. . . . The financial coup has reached a point where if you want sovereignty, the only person who can deliver that is your state governor and your legislature. . . . If you've got a great state AG, if you have great legislature, if you have a great governor, you better start supporting them. They are the people that can protect your sovereignty. You need governmental sovereignty if you are going to have individual sovereignty, and you better do it now. You have no time to be entertained by Joe Biden, Trump and Hunter Biden."

Republican President George Bush Jr., and Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden have destroyed freedom of expression in the West. All three have managed to make the main media support their common ideology. In two decades, the press has turned a blind eye to anything that contradicts the official rhetoric from Washington and has become converted to its nonsense. The Jacksonian, Donald Trump, has made the restoration of freedom of speech the focus of his 2024 campaign. He is currently the only candidate to position himself in this way.

On Thursday, December 15, 2022, candidate Donald Trump gave his first election speech. He made it his priority to restore freedom of expression in the United States, while the revelations of Elon Musk (Twitter Files) and those of the America First Legal Foundation attest that all information is manipulated.

We can think what we want about Mr. Trump, especially since he has been the subject of a global smear campaign since his election in 2016 preventing us from properly assessing his actions, but we must admit that, since 9/11, he has been asking the right questions.

As we learn more and more from the "Twitter Files," it is becoming all too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In Friday's release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary.

The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022. Those emails regularly featured demands from US government officials for the "private" social media company to censor comments and ban commenters they did not like.

The Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a US government entity that included the FBI as well as other US intelligence agencies expressly forbidden from domestic activities, numbered 80 agents engaged regularly in telling Twitter which Tweets to censor and which accounts to ban. The Department of Homeland Security brought in outside government contractors and (government-funded) non-governmental organizations to separately pressure Twitter to suppress speech the US government did not like.

US Federal government agencies literally handed Twitter lists of Americans it wanted to see silenced, and Twitter complied. Let that sink in.

Bolsonaro reduced Brazil to resources-exporter status; now Lula should follow Argentina's lead into Belt and Road.
Ten days of full immersion in Brazil are not for the faint-hearted. Even restricted to the top two megalopolises, Sao Paulo and Rio, watching live the impact of interlocking economic, political, social and environmental crises exacerbated by the Jair Bolsonaro project leaves one stunned.

The return of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for what will be his third presidential term, starting January 1, 2023, is an extraordinary story trespassed by Sisyphean tasks. All at the same time he will have to

• fight poverty;
• reconnect with economic development while redistributing wealth;
• re-industrialize the nation; and
• tame environmental pillage.

That will force his new government to summon unforeseen creative powers of political and financial persuasion.

Even a mediocre, conservative politician such as Geraldo Alckmin, former governor of the wealthiest state of the union, Sao Paulo, and coordinator of the presidential transition, was simply astonished at how four years of the Bolsonaro project let loose a cornucopia of vanished documents, a black hole concerning all sorts of data and inexplicable financial losses.

It's impossible to ascertain the extent of corruption across the spectrum because simply nothing is in the books: Governmental systems have not been fed since 2020.

Alckmin summed it all up: "The Bolsonaro government happened in the Stone Age, where there were no words and numbers."

Now every single public policy will have to be created, or re-created from scratch, and serious mistakes will be inevitable because of lack of data.

And we're not talking about a banana republic - even though the country concerned features plenty of (delicious) bananas.

By purchasing power parity (PPP), according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Brazil remains the eighth-ranked economic power in the world even after the Bolsonaro devastation years - behind China, the US, India, Japan, Germany, Russia and Indonesia, and ahead of the UK and France.

A concerted imperial campaign since 2010, duly denounced by WikiLeaks, and implemented by local comprador elites, targeted the Dilma Rousseff presidency - the Brazilian national entrepreneurial champions - and led to Rousseff's (illegal) impeachment and the jailing of Lula for 580 days on spurious charges (all subsequently dropped), paved the way for Bolsonaro to win the presidency in 2018.

Were it not for this accumulation of disasters, Brazil - a natural leader of the Global South - by now might possibly be placed as the fifth-largest geo-economic power in the world.

Ukraine is unable to defeat Russia. The next step is for direct NATO involvement.

If Olga Lebedeva and Pravda.ru can be believed, NATO is on the verge of entering the war in Ukraine.

"Such announcements were heard from officials of the Polish Ministry of Defence, the General Staff of the NATO alliance, officers of the French army and (of course) the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence," according to Lebedeva.

"The main reason would be the very next Russian general offensive that NATO is planning and which according to it would decimate the Ukrainian army not only in the Donbass but also on the Kiev side (many Russian units are in combat situation in Belarus at the borders with Ukraine)," explains Rusreinfo.ru, a Russian website.

But NATO has always been very clear: Ukraine CANNOT LOSE. For Washington, the only solution would therefore be for NATO forces to enter Ukraine, hoping that this will end the Russian offensive. The calculation is that Vladimir Putin will not want to directly face NATO with the possible (nuclear) consequences, and will therefore then retreat.

The idea here is that the entrance of NATO into the conflict will strike fear into Russia and Putin and his generals and they will rethink the SMO and retreat with tails tucked.

Not going to happen.

On March 5^th, 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his famous Sinews of Peace speech in Fulton Missouri in which he famously claimed that, "an Iron Curtain has descended across Europe." The essential purpose of the speech, a speech clearly approved in advance, and probably partly written by the staff of US President Harry Truman, was to declare Anglo-American hegemony over the world.

On the 27^th October, 2022, President Putin, delivered his world-historical speech at Valdai which spelled the end of the hegemonic power of the United States, and with it, the English speaking nations and their allies in Europe. Perhaps it should be called the "symphony of civilisations' speech since that is the phrase President Putin used to express his vision of the world which replaces the concept of iron curtains placed between nations with the concept of a dialogue of civilisations.

The two speeches not only express the beginning and end of one epoch in world history and the beginning of another, overcoming the first, they are an expression of two worldviews, of two different worlds.

But let's examine what Churchill and Truman proclaimed to establish in 1946, that is, the Anglo-American world order.

Media outlets claiming to have court documents say jailed ex-lawmaker Eva Kaili has acknowledged partial guilt in a devastating scandal involving cash and gifts from Qatar in exchange for political influence in the EU.

Disgraced Greek politician Eva Kaili has reportedly given a partial confession of guilt in a high-profile corruption scandal that has rocked the European Union (EU) according to media reports.

Belgium's Le Soir and Italy's La Repubblica newspapers broke the story Tuesday, citing internal investigation documents from authorities in Brussels, where Kaili remains jailed.