The Russian envoy briefed the Security Council on recent attacks on the nuclear plant and submitted photos.

Russia has submitted photographic evidence of Ukrainian attacks on the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant to the UN Security Council and the General Assembly, ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said on Tuesday. He also briefed the Security Council on the most recent attacks, some of which involved NATO-supplied weapons, and insisted that Russia does not use the site as a military base.

"Despite the false statements of the Kiev regime and its backers, Russia has not placed heavy weapons on the territory of the ZNPP and does not use the station for military purposes," Nebenzia said during the council's emergency session on Tuesday afternoon.

"The Russian Ministry of Defense is ready to provide the IAEA with high-resolution images, which show that weapons, especially heavy ones, are not placed on the territory of the station," he added.

There is a video clip making the rounds showing President Biden speaking at a recent NATO summit about the seven billion dollars the US government had - at that time - provided to Ukraine. Attached to that is another clip showing the horrific state of several US major cities, including in Pennsylvania, California, and Ohio. The video of American cities is shocking: endless landscapes of filth, trash, homelessness, open fires on the street, drug-addicted zombies. It doesn't look like the America most of us remember.

Watching Biden bragging about sending billions of dollars to corrupt leaders overseas with American cities looking like bombed-out Iraq or Libya is US foreign policy in a nutshell. The Washington elites tell the rest of America that they must "promote democracy" in some far-off land. Anyone who objects is considered in league with the appointed enemy of the day. Once it was Saddam, then Assad and Gaddafi. Now it's Putin. The game is the same, only the names are changed.

The writing is on the wall for Europe in terms of this coming winter - It's going to get ugly. With natural gas imports from Russia cut by 80% through Nord Stream 1 along with the majority of oil shipments, the EU is going to be scrambling for whatever fuel sources they can find to supply electricity and heating through the coming winter. Two sources that were originally suggested as alternatives were Iran and Venezuela.

Increased Iranian oil and gas exports to the west are highly dependent on the tentative nuclear deal, but as Goldman Sachs recently suggested, such a deal is unlikely anytime soon as deadlines on proposals have not been met and the Israeli government calls for negotiators to 'walk away.'

French President Emmanuel Macron warned on Wednesday that France faced "sacrifices" in a new era marked by the climate crisis and instability caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine that signalled "the end of abundance".

After a summer marked by drought, massive wildfires and continuing loss of life in Ukraine, the 44-year-old leader delivered a stark speech at the start of the first cabinet meeting after the country's traditional August holiday break.

"I believe that we are in the process of living through a tipping point or great upheaval.

"Firstly because we are living through... the end of what could seem like the end of abundance."

As I read through the multitude of daily news articles about Russia, Ukraine, NATO and EU, it's getting ever harder to escape the idea that there is a controlled demolition of the continent happening. And that neither its "leaders", and certainly not its people, have any say in this. All we get from those "leaders" are NATO or World Economic Forum talking points. The only independent voice is Victor Orban. Who is either silenced in western media or painted as fully insane.

But Orban's Hungarians won't freeze this coming winter. He just signed a new gas deal with Russia. The main reason that is provided for all the others not doing that is of course Russia's Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Which is as insane as Orban is, and "totally unprovoked", say the western media. Noam Chomsky summarized that best: "Of course it was provoked. Otherwise they wouldn't refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion."

And no, it wasn't just Russia/Ukraine, way before that Europe had already screwed up its economies beyond recognition -if you cared to look under the hood. But why make it worse? I get a very strong feeling that those EU "leaders" have alienated themselves far too much from the people they purport to serve, and they'll regret it. For now it's obvious among farmers, for instance, but when people start freezing, they will want to know why. And if no answer is forthcoming that is both honest and satisfactory, many "leaders" will have it coming for them.

The entire energy and food crisis is being sold as "inevitable", but it is nothing of the kind. They are the result of choices being made in Brussels, Berlin, Amsterdam etc., about which nobody has asked your opinion. Something I jotted down a few days ago:

Is the west using Ukraine as an excuse to commit mass economic suicide? And, you know, fulfill some WEF-related goals? Why else would they cut off all economic ties to Moscow, at a time when it's obvious they have no alternative sources for much of what they import from Russia? Moreover, why does a country like Holland aim to close 10,000 of its farms when it's crystal clear that that will exacerbate the coming global food crises?

If you don't like Putin, that's fine, but why should your own people suffer from what you like or not? And of course you can ask whether it's a good idea that a country the size of a postage stamp is the world's no. 2 food exporter. But it is. And if you try to change that by doing a 180º, also on a postage stamp, it is very obvious that is not going to go well. And all the so-called leaders know this. But they still do it.

The inevitable transfer of power away from the west is leading to a surge in state-sponsored terrorism, but this will do little to reverse the trend

Six months after the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO) by Russia in Ukraine, the geopolitical tectonic plates of the 21st century have been dislocated at astonishing speed and depth - with immense historical repercussions already at hand.

To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, this is the way the (new) world begins, not with a whimper but a bang.

The cold-blooded assassination of Darya Dugina - terrorism at the gates of Moscow - may have fatefully coincided with the six-month intersection point, but will do nothing to change the dynamics of the current, work-in-progress, historical shift.

Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) appeared to have cracked the case in a little over 24 hours, designating the perpetrator as a neo-Nazi Azov operative instrumentalized by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) - itself a mere tool of the CIA/MI6 combo that de facto rules Kiev.

The Azov operative is just a patsy. The FSB will never reveal in public the intel it has amassed on those that issued the orders, and how they will be dealt with.

One Ilya Ponomaryov, an anti-Kremlin minor character granted Ukrainian citizenship, boasted he was in contact with the outfit that prepared the hit on the Dugin family. No one took him seriously.

What is manifestly serious, however, is how oligarchy-connected organized crime factions in Russia would have a motive to eliminate Alexander Dugin, the Christian Orthodox nationalist philosopher who, according to them, may have influenced the Kremlin's pivot to Asia (he didn't).

These organized crime factions blamed Dugin for a concerted Kremlin offensive against the disproportional power of Jewish oligarchs in Russia. So these actors would have both the motive and the local know-how to mount such a coup.

If that's the case, it potentially spells out a Mossad-linked operation - especially given the serious schism in Moscow's recent relations with Tel Aviv. What's certain is that the FSB will keep their cards very close to their chest - and retribution will be swift, precise and invisible.

"Tricky." Over the course of 110 pages in a federal complaint, that one descriptive word seemed to stand out among the exchanges between social media executives and public health officials on censoring public viewpoints. The exchange reveals long-suspected coordination between the government and these social media companies to manage a burgeoning censorship system. Twitter just reportedly suspended another doctor who sought to raise concerns over Pfizer Covid records. Former New York Times science reporter Alex Berenson is also suing Twitter over his suspension after raising dissenting views to the CDC. In the meantime, Twitter is rolling out new procedures to combat "misinformation" in the upcoming elections — a move that has some of us skeptical. The recently disclosed exchange between defendant Carol Crawford, the CDC's Chief of digital media, revealed a back channel with Twitter and other companies to censor "unapproved opinions" on social media. The "tricky" part may be due to the fact that, during that week of March 25, 2021, then CEO Jack Dorsey was testifying on such censorship before Congress and insisting that "we don't have a censoring department." It seems that any meeting on systemic censorship with the government would have to wait until after Dorsey denied that such systemic censorship existed.

Fresh from vowing to investigate chief White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci for his role in the Covid-19 pandemic, Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has demanded that President Joe Biden's administration preserve documents and messages that could become evidence in the potential probe.

Paul, who has sparred with Fauci in Senate hearings over government funding of potentially dangerous virus research, sent a letter to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Tuesday, calling for the Covid-19 czar's documents and communications to be saved. The demand came one day after Fauci announced that, effective in December, he would step down as Biden's chief medical adviser and as director of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

A few days after the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021, a tough-talking FBI chief with a Boston accent promised the American people that the bureau would spare no resource in hunting down everyone and anyone involved in the four-hour disturbance that day.

Steven M. D'Antuono, the newly appointed head of the Washington, D.C. FBI field office, gave the public a stern warning during a January 12, 2021 press conference at the Department of Justice.

"The FBI will leave no stone unturned. This is a 24/7, full bore, extensive operation. As Director Wray says, the FBI does not do easy."

His agency, D'Antuono bragged, has a "long memory and a broad reach." Agents from 56 FBI field offices across the country "will be knocking on your door if we find out you were part of the criminal activity at the Capitol." He urged people to turn in their co-workers, neighbors, and relatives if they had information that could help the FBI in its dragnet.

One of the most glaring contradictions in the Mar-a-Lago controversy has been the Justice Department demanding absolute and unwavering secrecy over the FBI raid while officials have been leaking details on the raid. The latest example is a report in the New York Times that the Justice Department recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings, citing multiple sources connected to the investigation. Most judges would be a tad annoyed by the contradiction as the government continues to frame the public debate with its own selective leaks while using secrecy to bar other disclosures. That includes sections of the affidavit that detail the communications with the Trump team, information that is already known to the target.

Someone is clearly lying. The Trump Team said that it was cooperating and would have given access to the government if it raised further objections. The Justice Department has clearly indicated that time was of the essence to justify this unprecedented raid on the home of a former president. Yet, Attorney General Merrick Garland reportedly waited for weeks to sign off on the application for a warrant and the FBI then waited a weekend to execute that warrant. It is difficult to understand why such communications could not be released in a redacted affidavit while protecting more sensitive sections.