Internal Twitter documents and communications published by the journalist Matt Taibbi have provided devastating detail on a sweeping censorship operation conducted by the social network. They expose the central role played by a senior FBI agent in potentially influencing the outcome of the 2020 US election.

Immediate reaction to the Twitter Files was mixed, but overwhelmingly the mainstream American media has rushed to pour cold water on Taibbi's bombshell disclosures, with, for example, The Washington Post branding them a "dud" and CNN claiming they "largely corroborated what was already known."

Such responses are quite extraordinary given that the Twitter Files offers incontrovertible evidence of one of the largest, most influential global social networks taking extraordinary measures - usually reserved to prevent the dissemination of child pornography - to block information on its platform.

Western nations are intentionally seeding chaos and violence to achieve their geopolitical goals, Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed. The conflict in Ukraine is an attempt by "the US and its satellites" to use the country to harm Russia, he stated.

Putin offered the disparaging analysis in a video address to defense ministers from several Asian nations who had assembled for a summit in Moscow.

"For years, the West has been brazenly draining and exploiting [Ukraine's] resources, encouraged genocide and terror in Donbass, de-facto turned this nation into a colony, and is now cynically using the Ukrainian people as cannot fodder, a battering ram against Russia, as it keeps delivering weapons and munitions to Ukraine, sending mercenaries, pushing it down the path of suicide," Putin said.

This violence is just one example of a destructive influence that Western nations exert around the world, in an attempt to preserve dominance on the global stage, the Russian president contended.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's popularity has plunged to the lowest level since she entered Government, according to the latest polling, which puts opposition parties on course to win the next election, expected next year. The Telegraph has the story.

German ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel reveals that in 2014, the Minsk agreements aimed to give Ukraine time to get stronger and for NATO to increase its support to the country in the face of Russia.

The Minsk accords were signed to "give Ukraine time" to strengthen itself, according to ex-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was in office from 2005 to 2021, in an interview published on Wednesday in the Zeit newspaper.

Merkel said "The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It also used this time to become stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the modern Ukraine."

The EU must begin to take more responsibility for its own security, its foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has told a conference, announcing that total expenditure by member states will grow by €70 billion over the next three years.

Speaking at the 'Investing in European Defence' forum on Thursday, Borrell, who also heads the European Defence Agency (EDA), called on European nations to cooperate more on upping defense capacities in the common interest of bloc security. They should also look past the current conflict in Ukraine and anticipate "future threats."

Borrell said states' spending on defense had surpassed the €200 billion-level in 2021 for the first time, though they're still playing catch-up.

"After the Cold War, we shrunk our forces to small-size armies without coordination ... We lack critical defense capabilities," he said. "We have to compensate for years of underspending."

Billionaire George Soros has financial ties to at least 253 media organizations worldwide, helping him to mold public opinion and insulate himself from criticism, a new study by a conservative US watchdog group has found.

The 92-year-old, America's biggest donor to Democratic political candidates and leftist causes, has built connections with press outlets and activist media organizations by bankrolling them through his not-for-profit groups, the Media Research Center (MRC) reported on Tuesday. The recipients of Soros' money reach readers, viewers and listeners in virtually every corner of the world and in many languages. The MRC said:

"Soros once told the New York Times that he was working to bend the arc of history in the right direction. He means it."

Tuesday's report was the first in a three-part series that will reveal the extent of the media influence that Soros wields. The second and third installments will lay out how much money the Hungarian-born activist has funneled into media organizations and will identify the establishment outlets that have ties to the "propaganda czar," the watchdog group said.

A United States federal judge has tossed out a lawsuit that was brought against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in response to input from the Biden administration that claimed he is immune in his newly appointed post as prime minister.

The court, under separation of powers, must yield to the executive branch despite its "uneasiness, then, with both the circumstances of bin Salman's appointment and the credible allegations of his involvement in Khashoggi's murder", wrote United States District Judge John Bates in a filing in Washington.

Ms Hatice Cengiz, Mr Khashoggi's fiancee and plaintiff in the lawsuit, accused Saudi Arabia of trying to manipulate US courts by appointing the Crown Prince as head of government only six days before the Justice Department's deadline to weigh in on the case.

America is widely understood to be a key instigator behind conflict in Ukraine that has pitted brother against brother

Smeared, stigmatized, and lied about in Western media propaganda, the mostly Russian-speaking people of the Donbass region were being slaughtered by the thousands in a brutal war of "ethnic cleansing" launched against them by the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv, which the U.S. installed after the CIA overthrew Ukraine's legally elected president in a 2014 coup.

Although the Donbass people had been pleading for Russian military aid to defend them against the increasingly murderous military assaults by the Ukraine government forces, which killed more than 14,000 of their people, Russian President Vladimir Putin declined to intervene. Instead, he tried to broker a peace agreement between the warring parties.

But the U.S. and Britain secretly colluded to sabotage peace negotiations, persuading president Zelenksy to ignore the Minsk 2 peace agreement that the Ukraine government had previously signed, and which had been countersigned by Russia, France and Germany.

Realizing that the U.S. and its NATO allies would never permit peace negotiations to succeed, Putin finally sent troops into Ukraine on February 24. Russian troops went in to support and reinforce the outnumbered and outgunned Donbass Special Forces who had been defending their land against attacks by the Kyiv government for nearly eight years.

The signs of the coming economic contraction are already both present and obvious, but the overall economic picture probably won't be acknowledged in the mainstream until the situation becomes much worse.

It's a problem that arises at the onset of every historic financial crisis - mainstream economists and cable-news commentators deliberately mislead the public about the severity of the challenges and the chances of recovery. They feed their audiences false reassurances in the hope of lulling people back to sleep.

Even now with inflation pummeling the average American family, they tell us that there is nothing to worry about. The Federal Reserve's "soft landing" is on the way.

Consider the Great Financial Crisis

I remember in 2007, right before the epic derivatives collapse that took down Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns, when media pundits were applauding the U.S. housing market and forecasting even greater highs in both sales and in valuations. A "permanent plateau," which would generously spread wealth across the nation.

I had only been writing economic analysis for about a year at the time, but I remember thinking that all this overt optimism felt like compensation for something. It seemed as if they were trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public in the hopes that, if people just believed hard enough that all was well, then the fantasy could be manifested into reality. Science has even developed a term for this: the Tinkerbell effect.

Unfortunately, that's not how economics works.

Here's some free advice most people learn the hard way: the more your financial future depends on hope, rather than basic economic principles, the more likely it is to disappoint you.

The fundamental forces that make markets, supply and demand, debt and credit, money velocity and inflation - these cannot be ignored.

If the system is out of balance, it will fall apart and there's nothing anyone, including central banks, can do about it. (In fact, there are times when they deliberately engineer collapse - though they don't call it that.)

AfD party's Eugen Schmidt said the arrest of alleged conspirators is a smokescreen amid the energy crisis

A lawmaker from the right-wing Alternative for Germany party, Eugen Schmidt, has called into question the authorities' claims that a group of QAnon followers had been plotting a coup to overthrow the German government. The MP alleged that the powers-that-be in Berlin arranged the arrest of dozens of people on Wednesday merely to divert Germans' attention from an increasingly acute energy crisis.

Speaking to Russia's Izvestia media outlet on Wednesday, Schmidt pointed out that the vast majority of the suspects are in their 60s or even 70s. He noted that the elite troops who officials say were part of the conspiracy had served before 1990, when the German Democratic Republic was still around, and added that these soldiers are "long past their prime."