Puppet MastersS


Bad Guys

Desperation: Ukraine conducts drone strike on humanitarian convoy


RT
Sun, 31 Jul 2022 17:01 UTC
drone attack humanitarian convoy ukraine
© RTAftermath of a Ukrainian drone attack on a humanitarian convoy in Energodar, Ukraine, July 30, 2022
Kiev used drones to attack civilian vehicles in the city of Energodar, a regional official claimed

Ukrainian combat drones destroyed cars that were part of a humanitarian convoy in the Russian-held southern city of Energodar early on Saturday morning, a local official has asserted.

"The cars had the markings of a humanitarian mission," Yevgeny Balitsky, the top Russia-appointed official in Ukraine's Zaporozhye Region, wrote on his Telegram account.
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Russian Flag

Lavrov and Blinken hold first top level call since February


RT
Fri, 29 Jul 2022 16:07 UTC
lavrov blinken ukraine
© @mfa_russia/TwitterU.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russia Secretary of State Sergei Lavrov
Moscow has confirmed a phone conversation took place between the two top diplomats

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at Washington's request by phone on Friday, the ministry has confirmed.

It was the first conversation between Moscow and Washington's top diplomats since Russia launched its military offensive in Ukraine in February.

Aside from the conflict, they discussed the Ukrainian grain export deal, signed in Turkey last week, and a potential prisoner exchange between the two nations, the ministry reported.

Comment: In the game of diplomacy, who calls whom is significant. Lavrov pointedly blew off Blinken for several days before taking his call. Harsh.

'Busy' Lavrov will consider US request - Moscow

As The Duran pointed out, arranging prisoner swaps is normally handled by aides, not heads of departments. The U.S. is sweating as Russia continues to roll through Ukraine, with all the attendant political and economic consequences. Blinken has cottoned onto a thin excuse to reopen the channels they so arrogantly shut down in the early days of the 'special operation'.

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Telephone

'Busy' Lavrov will consider US request - Moscow


RT
Thu, 28 Jul 2022 22:23 UTC
LavBlink
© Al-Masdar News/Graeme Jennings/GettyImages/KJNRussian FM Sergey Lavrov • US Sec. of State Antony Blinken
Russia confirmed the receipt of a request from the US State Department on Thursday seeking a call between the two country's top diplomats, Sergey Lavrov and Antony Blinken.

A conversation between the pair may take place as soon as the busy schedule of Lavrov allows, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said.

Lavrov will "pay attention to this request when time permits," the ministry's spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, told journalists, referring to Washington's request for a phone conversation between Lavrov and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Earlier on Thursday, State Department spokesman Ned Price said at a news briefing that the US "made it clear to the Russian Federation that we are seeking a conversation between State Secretary Blinken and Foreign Minister Lavrov."

The request was conveyed to Russia "directly" and "repeatedly," Price said. The US expects the two top diplomats to "have an opportunity to speak in the coming days," he added.

The State Department spokesman, however, admitted that he had "no update" on any potential dates for the conversation, adding that the two sides "continue to discuss that in the appropriate channels."
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Oscar

American Diplomacy as a Tragic Drama

Michael Hudson
CounterPunch
Fri, 29 Jul 2022 00:00 UTC
EU greek
© The SpectatorEU's Greek Tragedy
As in a Greek tragedy whose protagonist brings about precisely the fate that he has sought to avoid, the US/NATO confrontation with Russia in Ukraine is achieving just the opposite of America's aim of preventing China, Russia and their allies from acting independently of U.S. control over their trade and investment policy. Naming China as America's main long-term adversary, the Biden Administration's plan was to split Russia away from China and then cripple China's own military and economic viability. But the effect of American diplomacy has been to drive Russia and China together, joining with Iran, India and other allies. For the first time since the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, a critical mass is able to be mutually self-sufficient to start the process of achieving independence from Dollar Diplomacy.

Confronted with China's industrial prosperity based on self-financed public investment in socialized markets, U.S. officials acknowledge that resolving this fight will take a number of decades to play out. Arming a proxy Ukrainian regime is merely an opening move in turning Cold War 2 (and potentially/or indeed World War III) into a fight to divide the world into allies and enemies with regard to whether governments or the financial sector will plan the world economy and society.
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Hourglass

The lights are going out across Europe

Fraser Myers
Spiked
Wed, 27 Jul 2022 00:00 UTC
Nordstream facility
© Getty ImagesGas Pipeline Nord Stream facility
The EU's 27 member states - all modern, advanced industrialised economies, some among the richest in the world - are about to start rationing their energy supplies. This week, at an extraordinary summit, EU members agreed to a European Commission proposal to slash their gas use by a punishing 15 per cent over the next eight months. From August 2022 to March 2023, the lamps will, quite literally, be going out all over Europe.

The immediate spur for this is the prospect of Russia limiting or even cutting off supplies of gas to the EU. According to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, even this worst-case, nightmare scenario is 'likely'. European leaders were particularly spooked earlier this month when the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline, which supplies Russian gas to Germany, had to be shut down for 10 days for repairs. They were afraid it would never reopen.

The EU's punishing plan is designed to get Europe through the winter, should the Russians do the unthinkable and turn off the taps completely. If the crisis deepens, voluntary gas cuts could become mandatory. The European Commission of unelected technocrats has also explored the use of emergency protocols which could block any country from exercising a veto on mandatory gas cuts and would also prevent the European Parliament from having a say.
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Stop

CDC told Big Tech to censor COVID claims now debated by mainstream scientists, documents show

Greg Piper
Just the News
Thu, 28 Jul 2022 11:39 UTC
headmask
© z_wei/iStockSocial media platforms censor Covid claims
New FOIA docs give boost to legal challenges to federal involvement in social media content moderation.

The newly revealed scope of collaboration between the feds and Big Tech in stamping out purported COVID-19 misinformation and promoting government narratives has opened a new chapter in constitutional challenges to state-influenced censorship by private actors.

On Wednesday night, America First Legal (AFL) published the first 286-page batch of emails among CDC, Google, Twitter and Meta staffers, some of whom were former Hill and White House aides. The production was compelled through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, and typical of government document dumps, it's not text-searchable.

The emails show intimate cooperation was well underway by the time the White House a year ago acknowledged the effort, which included thinly veiled threats for not more aggressively removing content.
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Arrow Up

'Horror chart' suggests Germany on brink of huge energy crisis


RT
Thu, 28 Jul 2022 10:14 UTC
Power plant
© Florian Gaertner/Photothek/Getty ImagesGerman Power Plant
Germany is heading for a "huge energy crisis," a senior editor at one of the country's most influential newspapers, Die Welt, warned on Wednesday.

"Not only [are] gas prices near record highs, but electricity prices in particular are signaling stress," Holger Zschaepitz, a senior editor on the daily's economic and financial desk, wrote on Twitter.

In what he called a "horror chart" that he posted with his tweet, Zschaepitz showed that the price of electricity had reached almost €400 per megawatt hour on the energy exchange, or €0.40 per kilowatt-hour. If consumer prices reflected such market rates, Germans would be paying around €0.80 per kilowatt-hour rather than the current €0.30, including taxes and fees. However, such a sharp increase would be socially explosive, Zschaepitz suggests. Meanwhile, in such a case energy companies would no longer be able to produce competitively, he adds.
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Snakes in Suits

White House resorts to 'economy doing great because it's not famine' defense

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Fri, 29 Jul 2022 09:50 UTC
famine
© Celtic Life International/KJN
Doubling down on the Biden admin's peddling in fantasy that two quarters of economic decline does not mean a recession, White House economic adviser Brian Deese this week tried to argue that 'all is fine' since Americans by and large aren't starving.

"I think that our economy is more resilient to the types of challenges that we face," Deese said. "For example, with respect to food, we're a net exporter of agricultural commodities. And obviously, the high prices are hitting Americans very hard, but in a way that is different from some places that are facing famine, for example."
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Attention

Going to Samarkand

Pepe Escobar
Strategic Culture
Sat, 30 Jul 2022 19:01 UTC
The SCO and other pan-Eurasian organizations play a completely different - respectful, consensual - ball game. And that's why they are catching the full attention of most of the Global South.

Putin and Shavkat
© REUTERS/SputnikRussian President Vladimir Putin and Uzbek Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev lay flowers at grave of late Uzbek President Karimov in Samarkand.
The meeting of the SCO Ministerial Council in Tashkent this past Friday involved some very serious business. That was the key preparatory reunion previous to the SCO summit in mid-September in fabled Samarkand, where the SCO will release a much-awaited "Declaration of Samarkand".

What happened in Tashkent was predictably unreported across the collective West and still not digested across great swathes of the East.

So once again it's up to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to cut to the chase. The world's foremost diplomat - amidst the tragic drama of the American-concocted Era of Non-Diplomacy, Threats and Sanctions - has singled out the two overlapping main themes propelling the SCO as one of the key organizations on the path towards Eurasia integration.
  1. Interconnectivity and "the creation of efficient transport corridors". The War of Economic Corridors is one of the key features of the 21st
  2. Drawing "the roadmap for the gradual increase in the share of national currencies in mutual settlements."
Yet it was in the Q@A session that Lavrov for all practical purposes detailed all the major trends in the current, incandescent state of international relations. These are the key takeaways.
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Fire

Zelensky's elite 1st Separate Brigade battalion destroyed by Russian airstrikes


RT
Sat, 30 Jul 2022 18:33 UTC
Iskander missile Russia
© Sputnik / Russian Defence MinistryIskander short-range ballistic missile system is used during the Russian military operation in Ukraine.
Dozens of neo-Nazis have been eliminated over the last two days, including fighters from the Kraken formation, the military said

Russia's armed forces destroyed an 'elite assault battalion' of the Ukrainian president and dozens of fighters from the notorious Kraken neo-Nazi formation, Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said on Saturday.

Providing an update on the progress of Moscow's military operation in Ukraine, Konashenkov said that on July 28, at the Krasnoarmeysk railway station in the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), the Russian military conducted a direct strike "with a high-precision air-based weapon" on a train transporting "an elite assault battalion of the 1st Separate Brigade of the President of Ukraine."
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