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Fri, 05 Nov 2021
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'Money is a great lubricant': Boris Johnson pledges to withhold £39bn Brexit bill to push new EU deal by Halloween

Boris Johnson in newspaper
Boris Johnson says he will withhold Britain's £39 billion Brexit divorce bill if the EU doesn't reopen negotiations to agree more favorable terms. His pledge has been met with both derision and enthusiasm on Twitter.

Johnson, the frontrunner in the race to take over from Theresa May as British Prime Minister, told the Sunday Times that if successful in his bid for the role, he would bin the Northern Irish backstop element of the current exit plan and refuse to pay the Brexit bill until "there's greater clarity on the way forward."

The backstop has been a key barrier in seeing the Brexit deal agreed by May's government and the EU passed by British MPs.

"In getting a good deal, money is a great solvent and a great lubricant," Johnson said, adding that he'd ensure Brexit was delivered by the current deadline of Halloween 2019.

No Entry

Tit for tat: Venezuela halts services at consulates in Canada until it 'regains sovereignty in foreign policy'

Protest against American attempts at a 'regime change' in Venezuela
© Global Look Press / ZUMA Press / Creative Touch Imaging Ltd
Protest against American attempts at a 'regime change' in Venezuela and Canada's complicity in the campaign, Toronto, 16 September, 2017.
Venezuela will no longer provide services at its consulates in Canada in response to Ottawa shutting down its embassy in Caracas. Canada must stop toeing the US line in its foreign policy, it said.

Venezuelan Foreign Affairs Minister Jorge Arreaza announced on Saturday a temporary suspension of all services at the country's consulates general in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. All of their functions will fall upon the embassy in Ottawa, the ministry said in a statement.

The diplomatic scale-down comes in retaliation to the Canadian government's recent decision to temporarily close its embassy in Caracas and redirect all consular assistance to its embassy in Colombia.

Info

Moldovan Parliament 'dissolved' by acting president after court suspends incumbent leader

Pavel Filip
© REUTERS / Valentyn Ogirenko
Pavel Filip shows a decree to dissolve parliament and hold snap election.
Moldova's Constitutional Court gave presidential authority to the acting prime minister so he could order the dissolution of parliament. This comes one day after the parliament formed a government, resolving months of deadlock.

The rapid succession of events in Moldova, a former Soviet republic located between Romania and Ukraine, stems from the inconclusive results of a parliamentary election in February, which produced no ruling majority.

The seats were more or less split evenly between three parties: the Russia-leaning Socialists, the EU-leaning Democrats (who are led by one of the wealthiest businessmen in Moldova), and the ACUM, a bloc formed by two new parties running on an anti-oligarch pro-European platform.

Bad Guys

Hillary Clinton's brother Tony Rodham has died

tony rodham hillary clinton
© Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, followed by her brother, Tony Rodham, stop at Casa Bella Italian Restaurant in Scranton, Pennsylvania on Friday evening April 22, 2016.
The former Democratic presidential candidate's brother, Tony Rodham, was previously married to ex-Sen. Barbara Boxer's daughter, Nicole Boxer.

Hillary Clinton announced on Twitter that her youngest brother passed away last night. She described him as "kind, generous and a wonderful husband and father", adding that they'll miss him very much.

The cause of his death has not been clarified yet.

Comment: Tony was one of the unsung members of the Clinton crime family. CNN adds:
Rodham did not appear to play a major public role in sister Hillary's 2016 run for the presidency but did campaign with her during some stops in Pennsylvania.

In 2000, while his brother-in-law was president, Rodham successfully lobbied Bill Clinton to pardon a couple convicted of bank fraud who paid Rodham $245,000 for consulting work, according to a House Government Reform Committee report at the time.

Most famously a consultant, Rodham previously worked as an insurance salesman, a prison guard and a private detective. In 1996, Rodham coordinated "constituency outreach" for the Democratic National Committee.

Rodham said in 1999 that he had both benefited and suffered from his sister and President Bill Clinton's rise to power.

"It can go both ways," Rodham said at the time. "There's some wonderful things that have happened to me because of my relationship with Hillary and Bill, and there's been some really terrible things that have happened to me."
USA Today summarizes Rodham's proclivity to trade on his sister's name:
In 2000, as the Clinton administration was coming to a close, Rodham successfully lobbied his brother-in-law, the president, to override the objections of the Justice Department and pardon a Tennessee couple convicted of bank fraud, according to The New York Times.

A congressional investigation later found that Edgar Allen Gregory, Jr. and his wife, Vonna Jo, who were in the carnival business, had paid him almost $250,000 as a "consultant" in their bid to get a pardon.

In 2010, former President Bill Clinton helped Rodham, then short of cash, get a job raising investments in GreenTech Automotive, an electric car company then owned by Terry McAuliffe, an old Clinton friend and later governor of Virginia, the Times reported in 2015.

"I was complaining to my brother-in-law I didn't have any money. And he asked McAuliffe to give me a job," Rodham said at a court proceedings involving unpaid legal bills to his lawyer in a child support case, the newspaper said.

He also drew scrutiny as co-chairman of Haiti's recovery commission, following the devastating 2010 earthquake, for allegedly seeking a multimillion dollar deal to rebuild homes in the ravaged country with funding from the Clinton Foundation.

In court proceedings in an unrelated lawsuit, Rodham explained how someone in Haiti had "donated" 10,000 acres of land to him. In court testimony, he said he had pressed Clinton for helping in breaking through red tape to get funding for the rebuilding project.

"I deal through the Clinton Foundation. That gets me in touch with the Haitian officials," Rodham said, according to a transcript of his testimony, the Times reported. "I hound my brother-in-law, because it's his fund that we're going to get our money from. And he can't do it until the Haitian government does it."

The Clinton Foundation said in a statement at the time that it was not aware of Rodham's Haiti project, which never materialized, and had no involvement in it, the newspaper says. Likewise, Clinton's office said at the time he had no involvement in the scheme.

In another venture, Rodham sought to export hazelnuts from the Republic of Georgia, where he was linked to a rival to then Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, a close Clinton ally. The incident prompted a National Security Council official to intervene to defuse a potential diplomatic embarrassment, according to The Washington Post.
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Propaganda

YouTube Just Fired the First Shot in a New War on Journalism

youtube
(TMU) - Wednesday morning, news began circulating warning that YouTube was about to delete thousands of accounts in the platform's latest wave of censorship. This time, the massive video sharing platform claimed to be targeting hateful content, "supremacists," conspiracy theorists and anything that promotes discrimination or segregation based on sexual orientation, religion, race, gender, age and more.

Upon hearing the news, regular consumers of independent media knew exactly what to expect: Censorship. Corporate platforms use these vague terms that sound nice in theory to cast a wide net that also de-platforms independent, anti-war, and rational voices. Whether this is done on purpose or is a consequence of using artificial intelligence and algorithms to monitor content remains to be seen.

Comment: See also:


Black Cat

Not the first time: Australian public servant accuses AFP of political bias after Dutton au pair raids

australian police raid au pair scandal
© Alex Ellinghausen
A man entering an AFP-marked vehicle after a raid in October at the Department of Home Affairs Canberra headquarters.
A public servant suspected of leaking embarrassing documents about Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton's intervention in a foreign au pair visa case says a police raid over the incident was politically biased and designed to deter future whistleblowers.

The Department of Home Affairs headquarters in Canberra was dramatically raided on October 11 as part of an investigation into leaks against Mr Dutton after he stepped in to stop two European au pairs from being deported.

AFP Deputy Commissioner Neil Gaughan told a Senate inquiry last year that he alerted Mr Dutton's chief of staff Craig Maclachlan to the raid ahead of time.

Comment: Latest assault on press freedom : Federal Police raid ABC offices in Sydney, Australia with sweeping search warrant


Snakes in Suits

Meadows: FBI knew 'within 60 days' that Russia probe 'built on a foundation of sand'

mccabe comey
Mark Meadows confirmed what many have suspected about the Trump-Russia for a long time; the FBI knew early on that the foundation of its counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign was built on 'a foundation of sand,' reports the Daily Caller's Chuck Ross.

North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows (R) told Hannity Friday night that the FBI knew "within 60 days of them opening the investigation, prior to [Robert] Mueller coming on, the FBI and the [Department of Justice] knew that Christopher Steele was not credible, the dossier was not true, George Papadopoulos was innocent."

Meadows did not elaborate on why he believes the FBI knew their investigation was built on a mountain of lies, however according to The Hill's John Solomon last month, memos which were retroactively classified by the DOJ reveal that a high-ranking government official who met with Christopher Steele in October 2016 determined that information in the Trump-Russia dossier was inaccurate, and likely leaked to the media.

Quenelle

Jordan's King tells Kushner Palestinians must have a state

King Abdullah II of Jordan.

King Abdullah II of Jordan.
Jordan's King Abdullah drew a red line on the plan that the Trump administration is expected to unveil to attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, telling White House senior adviser Jared Kushner Wednesday it must be based on a two-state solution that gives Palestinians a capital in East Jerusalem.

Kushner is traveling in Morocco, Jordan and Israel this week to meet with officials and drum up support for the long-awaited plan's economic portion, which will be unveiled during a June conference in Bahrain.

King Abdullah, who acts as custodian of Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, has not committed to attend the conference.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Has Trump Gone Full Shlemiel in Planned U.S. Embassy Move to Jerusalem?


Chess

Putin and Xi step up the strategic game

xi putin
© Dmitri Lovetsky / AFP
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping get friendly at a ceremony to present Xi with a degree from the St Petersburg State University on June 6.
A single image epitomizes the hurricane at the center of the current geopolitical chessboard: an extremely affectionate handshake between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

The image crystallizes the stuff of nightmares by those in the US that still follow the Eurasian prophecies of Halford Mackinder and his disciples, such as the late Zbigniew "Grand Chessboard" Brzezinski, that focused on the imperative of preventing the emergence of a peer competitor in Eurasia.

The peer competitor has emerged, in full: the Russia-China strategic partnership.

On Wednesday, Xi said at the Kremlin this was his eighth trip to Russia since 2013 - when the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), were announced. And he added he and Putin had met "almost 30 times" since then.

Comment: See also:


Arrow Down

Symbolic: Oak tree planted by Trump and Macron at White House dies

oak tree macron trump
© AP Photo / Andrew Harnik
A tree that was brought to the United States from a forest in the French department of Ain in 2018 during President Macron's tour was supposed to be planted in front of the White House and symbolise the strength of ties between Paris and Washington.

According to Le Figaro newspaper, the oak tree that President Trump planted on the lawn near the White House in April 2018 has died. The report specifies that the site where the tree was supposed to grow is now empty.

The tree originated from a forest in the French Ain department, where thousands of US Marines died during World War I and was deemed to be a sign of strong French-US ties when it grew.