Croatian President Zoran Milanovic has claimed NATO, a military bloc of which Zagreb is a member, is waging a "proxy war" against Moscow in Ukraine. He also dismissed sanctions against Moscow as "nonsense," adding that he does not want to be an "American slave."

Speaking to Croatian reporters in the city of Vukovar on Sunday, Milanovic said, among other things: "Washington and NATO are waging a proxy war against Russia through Ukraine," as quoted by media outlet Istra24.

He went on to argue that "The plan cannot be to remove Putin. The plan cannot be sanctions," adding that such punitive measures are "nonsense and we will not achieve anything with them."

Western biotech firms pressured Twitter to censor calls for sharing their Covid-19 vaccine patents and producing low-cost generic treatments, according to a new tranche of Twitter files. The companies also funded a nonprofit that created tools to fight misinformation, but declined to flag misleading claims by Big Pharma.

The lobbying efforts by companies including BioNTech, Pfizer and Moderna were detailed on Monday by Lee Fang at The Intercept, based on internal Twitter communications.

Fang reports that in December 2020, Nina Morschhaeuser, a lobbyist for Twitter in Europe, shared with colleagues a warning she received from the firm BioNTech and the German government about a campaign that could violate Twitter's terms of service.

The U.S. and its allies are laying the groundwork for a potential conflict in the Pacific, a shift characterized by moves to strengthen their militaries and deepen cooperation, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Patrick Cronin, Asia-Pacific security chair at the Hudson Institute, explained to the DCNF:

"The challenges posed by China and North Korea have grown, and the United States and its allies are vulnerable and underprepared for some plausible conflict scenarios."

Russia's invasion of Ukraine served as a wake-up call for U.S. allies in the region, including Japan and Taiwan, and provided a model for how to pre-position equipment, supply lines and bases of operation in preparation for a future conflict, Lt. Gen. James Bierman, the Marine Corps' top commanding officer in Japan, recently told the Financial Times.

"We call that setting the theater. And we are setting the theater in Japan, in the Philippines, in other locations," he told the FT.

A visit of Japanese heads of defense and foreign affairs to Washington on Jan. 11 underscored a changing attitude in formerly pacifist Japan toward the growing threat North Korea and China pose to the region. Chinese ballistic missiles, fired as part of China's largest-ever military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, splashed down in Japan's so-called exclusive economic zone in August.

Japan is working to assert itself as a global military power and could destabilize its entire region in the process...

Prime Minister of Japan Fumio Kishida commenced 2023 with a tour of G7 countries, having visited France, Italy, the UK, the US and Canada. Holding the Presidency of the US-centric group for this year, Kishida will host its summit in Hiroshima in May.

While a lot of his trips focused on preparing ground for the summit, Kishida notably signed scores of defence deals along the way, showing how the visit ties in with Japan's ultimate ambition right now: Rearmament.

Since the end of World War II, Japan's military power has been limited by its constitution to be strictly defensive. The country renounced the right to settle disputes via armed conflict and ruled out having an army or fighting a war abroad. This has posed limitations on defence spending, but also made Japan reliant on the United States for its security. However, now these limitations are all but defunct, even if they still exist on paper. Tokyo has the well-equipped Japan Self-Defense Forces, effectively a standing defensive army, and has recently pledged to double its defence spending by 2027 and to attain "second strike" capabilities with an eye on both China and North Korea, spurring on a regional arms race.

The probability of economic downturn in 2023 is very high despite the signs of easing inflation, experts warn...

Higher interest rates will push the US economy into recession in the coming year, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing its latest quarterly survey of economists.

According to the report, business and academic economists on average put the probability of a recession in the next 12 months at 61%. The forecast is slightly changed from 63% in October's survey.

The WSJ report indicated that the Federal Reserve had initially hoped it could bring down inflation with only a slowing in economic growth rather than an outright contraction, an outcome dubbed a "soft landing." However, three-quarters of respondents polled by the Journal said the Fed wouldn't achieve a soft landing this year.

The warning comes despite a slightly more optimistic outlook on inflation. The report said that, as measured by the year-over-year change in the consumer-price index, inflation has eased from 9.1% last June to 6.5% in December. Economists expect it to fall to 3.1% by the end of this year and see it ending 2024 at 2.4%.

Dmitry Medvedev says it's "good" that Russian businessmen are skipping the event as it's not about economics anymore...

Discussions about the supply of tanks to Ukraine at the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland are a "disgrace," former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has said.

Earlier on Tuesday, Polish President Andrzej Duda used a WEF panel to call on Western nations to organize "bigger support" for Kiev amid its conflict with Russia. "We hope a few partners, allies, will give tanks to Ukraine."

Duda was backed by his Lithuanian counterpart, Gitanas Nauseda, who said he "strongly believes" Germany would provide Ukraine with Leopard tanks, despite Berlin not having made any decision on the issue yet.

Medvedev wrote on Telegram on Tuesday:

"What a disgrace, to say the least... The Davos forum is discussing... the delivery of tanks to Ukraine. Previously, in Davos, they discussed other things, like the economy and stuff. It's 'good' that Russian companies are skipping the event this year."

Joe Biden met last week in Mexico City with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador for the 10th North American Leaders' Summit.

The three leaders signed onto a document that appears to be a prelude to a North American Union, which the globalists talked a lot about during the George W. Bush presidency. It looks like the push toward a merger of the U.S., Canada and Mexico may be back on the front burner if this written declaration of intent is any indication.

The document has attracted very little media attention since it was released on January 10, as the mainstream corporate press focuses instead on classified documents found in Biden's office and home. When major news happens there's almost always a misdirection play meant to divert our eyes.

The stated goal of the document is to fortify the continent's "security, prosperity, sustainability and inclusiveness."

The North American leaders, dubbed the "Three Amigos," committed their countries to six "pillars," all of which were taken straight from United Nations documents Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030.

A falling tree makes more noise than a growing forest. - A Tibetan proverb

Let's hope the silently growing forest represents a mass-awakening.

From the looks and evidence - ever more visible to even the ignorant - we are living in a Death Cult - a cabal-driven death cult, with a key objective to do away with: eliminate a large segment, if not the majority of the world population.

Who is executing this Death Cult? And on behalf of whom?

Three entities come to mind.

1. The World Economic Forum (WEF)

- a Cologny (lush suburb of Geneva, Switzerland)-registered NGO; a never-voted-for "influencer" organization that has amassed power and money in the hundreds of millions of dollars, like no other NGO around the world. Its founder and eternal chairman, Klaus Schwab (84), is an engineer cum economist, with origins linked to the former Third Reich Nazi-leadership.

By the way, the WEF is holding their annual Davos conference from 16-20 January 2023. The pathology of this outfit and of those elitist billionaires and corporate honchos attending is reflected in this year's even more dystopian agenda. Have a look at the official program.

This is only the visible agenda. None of us, the commons, knows what's going on behind closed doors in special secretive sessions. We feed on leakages, and as Globalism is fading, they become ever more abundant.

US and Israel will prevent the sale of Iranian drones to Russia

In spite of an overwhelming flood of disinformation coming from the Western mainstream media and governments, there continue to be obviously widely divergent views on the current war between Ukraine and Russia. The official and media supported narrative is that Moscow attacked its neighbor in violation of "rule based" principles of international relations, whereby an attack on any nation by a neighbor with the intent to seize territory is always and unambiguously wrong. That line of thinking, summed up in the media by the endlessly repeated phrase "Russia's unprovoked war of aggression" has provided justification for the US/NATO intervention to support the Volodymyr Zelensky government's effort to fight back against the Russians. It has also fed into the line that Ukraine and its supporters are standing up for "freedom," "democracy" and even "good against evil."

Flipping the argument to the Russian point of view, the Kremlin has argued that it has repeatedly sought to negotiate a settlement with Ukraine based on two fundamental issues that it claims threaten its own national security and identity. First is the failure of Ukraine to comply with the Minsk Accords of 2014-5 which conceded a large measure of autonomy to the Donbas region, an area indisputably inhabited by ethnic Russians, as is Crimea. Since that agreement however, Ukrainian militias and other armed elements have been using artillery to shell the Donbas, killing an estimated 15,000 mostly Russian residents. Second, Russia has balked at plans for NATO to offer membership to Ukraine, which would place a possibly superior hostile military alliance at its doorstep. Russian President Vladimir Putin has observed that the issues were both negotiable and that Zelensky only had to agree to maintain his country as "neutral," i.e. not linked to any military alliance. Reportedly it was the United States and Britain that pushed Ukraine into rejecting any and all of the Russian demands in a bid to initiate a war of attrition using Ukrainian lives to destabilize Putin's government and reduce its ability to oppose US and Western dominance.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has unveiled his ingenious plan for securing Russia's financial sovereignty.

"It is necessary to strengthen the financial sovereignty of the country, I count on the work of the Central Bank," Putin said during a meeting with government officials on Wednesday.

Obviously, it is perfectly understandable for Putin to have great expectations for his country's wonderful central bank.

Let's review why.