Huawei Technologies Co. executive Meng Wanzhou reached a deal with US prosecutors on Friday that will allow her to return to China, effectively resolving the case that has kept Meng in legal limbo in Vancouver for nearly three years.

The deal, in the form of a deferred prosecution agreement that will be in effect until December 2022, releases Meng on the condition that she abides by a "statement of facts" about the case, providing a reprieve to a legal dispute that helped to throw Beijing's relations with Canada and the United States into crisis.

"We fully expect the indictment to be dismissed with prejudice," Meng's lawyer Michelle Levin of Steptoe & Johnson told reporters after the hearing at a US federal courthouse in New York. "Ms Meng is free to go home to her family."

Press secretary Jen Psaki tried to explain away President Biden's refusal to take questions from reporters during his Tuesday sitdown with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson by claiming that the UK leader had blindsided White House aides by calling on two British reporters.

"I think our relationship with the United Kingdom and with Prime Minister Johnson is so strong and abiding, we will be able to move forward beyond this," Psaki said Wednesday, "but he [Johnson] called on individuals from his press corps without alerting us to that intention in advance."


After Johnson and Biden answered queries from Harry Cole of the Sun newspaper and Beth Rigby of Sky News, White House press aides known as "wranglers" began shouting and herding reporters outside the Oval Office, where the meeting was taking place.

"That's absurd," one reporter was heard complaining as he headed outside. "Two British reporters get questions and we don't get anything."

During an Australian TV primetime segment this week, the well-known China-based expert Victor Gao, who is vice president of the Center for China and Globalization and once served as communist leader Deng Xiaoping's translator, issued a chilling scenario and shock to his Aussie audience over the controversial AUKUS defense pact between the US, Australia and the UK.

Gao bluntly warned that the deal which will see Washington give Canberra nuclear submarine technology now makes all of Australia a target for nuclear strike:

"The watershed moment will be if Australia is armed with nuclear submarines to be locally produced in Australia, Australia will lose that privilege of not being targeted with nuclear weapons by other countries," Gao warned.

As a rudderless West watched on, the 20th anniversary meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was laser-focused on two key deliverables: shaping up Afghanistan and kicking off a full-spectrum Eurasian integration.

The two defining moments of the historic 20th anniversary Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan had to come from the keynote speeches of - who else - the leaders of the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Xi Jinping: "Today we will launch procedures to admit Iran as a full member of the SCO."

Vladimir Putin: "I would like to highlight the Memorandum of Understanding that was signed today between the SCO Secretariat and the Eurasian Economic Commission. It is clearly designed to further Russia's idea of establishing a Greater Eurasia Partnership covering the SCO, the EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union), ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and China's Belt and Road initiative (BRI)."

In short, over the weekend, Iran was enshrined in its rightful, prime Eurasian role, and all Eurasian integration paths converged toward a new global geopolitical - and geoeconomic - paradigm, with a sonic boom bound to echo for the rest of the century.

House Democrats have quietly moved to restrict the GOP's ability to use its limited power in the minority to press for investigations, an effort that has Republicans crying foul as they seek to pressure their foes over the Biden administration's handling of Afghanistan.

According to publicly available documents reviewed by CNN, Democrats last year began slipping language into House rules that essentially blocks Republicans from using a "resolution of inquiry." That tool allows a lawmaker to formally request information from the executive branch. Once the inquiry is introduced, the relevant committee is required to act within 14 days or else it can be brought up as a privileged resolution on the House floor.

While a resolution of inquiry has less teeth than a subpoena — and the party in power would have the numbers to prevent it from advancing — it's one of the few investigative tools that the minority has at its disposal. At the very least, it would enable the minority party to force members of the majority to take a public stance and vote on certain issues in committee.

The British prime minister is seeking to fashion himself as a switched-on leader on climate change - but isn't it all just more hot air and bluster from one of the world's biggest confidence tricksters?

Boris Johnson was doing his best Greta Thunberg impression at the United Nations yesterday.

According to BoJo, we have been acting like a 16-year-old and "it's time for humanity to grow up." Interestingly, Greta was only 16 when she told the UN that "you have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words," and yet for some reason, everyone listened to her.

Boris also said that the world has just 40 days "to come to Glasgow to make the commitments necessary" to save the planet. And if we don't, "our grandchildren will know that we are the culprits ... and that we missed our cue, and they will ask what kind of people we were to be so selfish and so short-sighted."

If he carries on making alarmist statements like this, he'll end up gluing himself to the M25 or peppering the City of London with red paint.

France has said Australian military officials sent them a letter confirming they were "extremely satisfied" with French submarines just hours before they announced the €56bn (£48bn) contract would be cancelled in favour of a US, UK and Australia defence pact.

The submarines crisis - in which France said it was "stabbed in the back" by the sudden announcement of a deal between the US, Australia and the UK to form an Indo-Pacific security group - had plunged the Paris-Washington relationship into its most acute crisis since the US-led invasion of Iraq.

Talks took place in New York on Thursday between the French and US foreign ministers after the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the US president, Joe Biden, held a phone conversation on Wednesday to end a five-day standoff and France agreed to return its ambassador to the US next week.

UK diesel and Unleaded fuel shortages as stations close in addition to spiking natural gas prices. PVC record high replacing lumber as new record high in construction as we enter the bubble of all bubbles. Take heed as Dollar General stores post Emergency Supplies posters in the front windows. Society has been told, here we go, it begins now to Nov 2021.


Sources

The Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives has agreed to add legislation to the annual defense-spending bill that would place sanctions on Russia's Nord Stream 2 project, potentially putting into jeopardy an agreement reached between the Biden administration and Germany in July.

The House on September 22 unanimously passed on a voice vote a package of amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), including the sanctions legislation.

The House is expected to vote on the NDAA on September 23. The bill would still require approval in the Senate and President Joe Biden's signature to become law.

"Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impossible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. Day to day vestiges of modern civilization - bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments - all recede into irrelevance. Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a saecular winter. Don't think you can escape the Fourth Turning. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.

"In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction. At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability - problem areas where America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action."
- Strauss & Howe, The Fourth Turning

I've been pondering this Fourth Turning in articles since its spectacular onset in September 2008, with the Wall Street/Federal Reserve initiated global financial implosion. The description above is apt, as this ongoing two-decade long storm gains intensity and our freedoms, liberties and rights are slowly extinguished as the electricity flickers and our modern civilization reverts to a more brutish state of antipathy among competing tribes, based on race, gender, class, party, geographic location, and now medical status.