Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council, on how the tectonic civilizational rift can and should be resolved

When it seems that the whole world is against you, remember that the plane does not take off in the wind, but against it. — source unknown, but attributed to Henry Ford and mentioned by Ayn Rand.

Once again, the West has raised a white noise and continues to pour accusations against Russia with all its might. Everyone is trying - from the [senile] senators in the U.S. Senate, sick with heavy Russophobia, to the unstable old men in the White House. It would seem that everything has long been said and done. Why are Western politicians again spouting nonsense about the need for a "strong signal" about Kiev's protectorate's participation in the North Atlantic Alliance? Why do they continue to conjure peace for Ukraine only on the terms of the Nazi Kiev regime? Why so much rage after almost a year and a half of the SMO?

Record rainfall and flooding around the world marked this month, but some rare snow events should be highlighted:

Some parts of Jasper, Alberta, received more than 4 inches of rain and more than 20 inches of snow during the week of the summer solstice. In Jasper National Park, two roads were closed and 60 visitors were rescued after becoming stranded. In western Canada, many ski resorts were blanketed with unusually heavy snow for June.

The same system dropped 6 inches of snow at Tamarack Resort, Idaho, and Beaver Creek Resort, Colorado. America's Mountain was also hit by a sudden blizzard that dumped a record amount of snow for June, bringing all traffic in the area to a halt as visibility dropped to zero in a matter of minutes.

In Santa Cruz, Bolivia, the country's largest agricultural region braced for a surprise wave of snow and ice that caused lasting damage to crops and livestock. Torrential rains also caused flooding in the same area, leading to road closures and air evacuations.

Other important flood events this month:

• Southern Brazil: Record flooding for June - 13 deaths, 5,000 homes damaged, and 84,000 people without power.
• Japan: Tropical Storm Mawar unleashed the heaviest 24-hour rainfall on record - thousands evacuated and 4,000 homes without power.
• Southwest China: 24.2 inches of rain in 24 hours broke a national record for the area - Thousands evacuated.
• Haiti - Torrential rains and heavy flooding caused 42 deaths - Tens of thousands of homes lost.
• Eastern Nepal: Hundreds of thousands affected by flash floods - 13 dead, 26 missing.
• Southern Cuba: 14 inches of rain in 24 hours - Thousands evacuated.

Another interesting event worth mentioning was the rare and powerful 5.8 magnitude earthquake that struck several parts of western France on June 17. The earthquake was described as one of the strongest ever recorded on the mainland.

All this, and more, in this month's SOTT Earth Changes Summary:

US Election reporting is dependent on a few suspicious companies that provide results that are arguably manufactured.

The number of Americans who believe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election has grown to 62 percent, with another 6 percent who say they don't know if he won or not. An enormous mountain of evidence, including whistleblower testimony, expert analysis, or proven machine vulnerabilities has awakened a huge majority of American voters to the realization that our elections are largely rigged.

As independent analysts and auditors improve their understanding of the centralization of election system architecture, the evidence revealed during the initial aftermath of November 3, 2020, is taking on new and vital importance. Case in point, millions of Americans that watched election results witnessed impossible changes to their vote tallies. Millions saw the "F-Curves" demonstrating an inexplicable injection of hundreds of thousands of votes in key races across the country. The F-Curve has come to represent rigged elections and corruption.

In the year from week ending June 5th 2022 to week ending June 4th 2023 the U.K. recorded 1,059 excess death per million people. The odd thing about this is that excess deaths in the U.K. in 2023 are higher than the excess deaths in the same period in 2020-21 in 13 of the 27 EU nations!

If the people of Austria, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands and Sweden were so worried about the likelihood of dying that they acquiesced in locking themselves up, voluntarily trashed their economies and stopped their kids going to school back in 2020-21 (well, Sweden didn't, but the rest did), why don't we feel the need to do the same now? We have more excess deaths now than they had then.

If YouGov did a poll tomorrow asking whether or not we should, right now, go back into lockdown, how many thumbs up would it receive? Very few, I should hope. But if U.K. citizens don't think it's a good idea now, why did the Germans or the Finns or the Greeks think it was a good idea in 2020 and 2021? Could it be that they were manipulated? That they weren't given the whole picture? That they were 'had'?

Oh mon Dieu! France - nay, all Europe - is about to fall!

Or so the screamers say. In this NewsReal, Joe and Niall take a calmer look at the riots in France, and last week's high-octane events in Russia.

First hour: Prigozhin is a snake, and why Putin had to make an example out of him.

Second hour: the root cause of France's riots is a six-decades-long 'African-French' problem that is insoluble - save a miraculous paradigm shift in Western elites' worldview.


Running Time: 02:16:46

Download: MP3 — 93.9 MB

Following in the footsteps of her illustrious predecessor Josef Goebbels, Mrs. Ursula Von der Leyen, unelected president of the "Fourth Reich", has imposed censorship. In the endless wisdom of her little brain, Mrs. Von der Leyen has decided that the inhabitants of the EU, who survived or escaped the covid death jabs she tried to force on them with her Pfizer cronies, are not to be exposed to Russian propaganda. For their own good, of course, because that is what autocrats always brandish as the main justification for imposing censorship. "We decide what is good for you," is what those people like to say. Like Von der Leyen's partner in crime, Blofeld is telling us from his Swiss retreat: "you vill own nussing but you vill bee heppy." However, EU censorship is not yet complete, but it is advancing. The goose steps of the censors and their columns of cowardly collaborationists can be heard all over the social media landscape. All the news information that is not to the liking of the rulers is branded "fake news" or "disinformation."

When so many people are being kept in the dark about so many topics for a long time, it comes as no surprise to learn that most Europeans have no clue about what is really happening in the Ukraine. Of course, Russia has already won the engagement, but the European state and corporate media staunchly maintain a mendacious narrative and, on a daily basis, spread heavy doses of fake news and disinformation. When repeated often enough, any lie will end up sounding like the truth. Dr. Goebbels knew this and Mrs. Von der Leyen knows it also. Needless to say, this does create a certain peace of mind, albeit a false one.

Herodotus (History, Book 1.53) tells the story of Croesus, king of Lydia c. 585-546 BC in what is now Western Turkey and the Ionian shore of the Mediterranean. Croesus conquered Ephesus, Miletus and neighboring Greek-speaking realms, obtaining tribute and booty that made him one of the richest rulers of his time. But these victories and wealth led to arrogance and hubris. Croesus turned his eyes eastward, ambitious to conquer Persia, ruled by Cyrus the Great.

Having endowed the region's cosmopolitan Temple of Delphi with substantial silver and gold, Croesus asked its Oracle whether he would be successful in the conquest that he had planned. The Pythia priestess answered: "If you go to war against Persia, you will destroy a great empire."

Croesus therefore set out to attack Persia c. 547 BC. Marching eastward, he attacked Persia's vassal-state Phrygia. Cyrus mounted a Special Military Operation to drive Croesus back, defeating Croesus's army, capturing him and taking the opportunity to seize Lydia's gold to introduce his own Persian gold coinage. So Croesus did indeed destroy a great empire, but it was his own.

The events of the past weekend (June 23 - 25, 2023) were so surreal and phantasmagorical that they militate against narration and defy description. On Friday, the infamous Wagner Group launched what appeared to be a genuine armed insurrection against the Russian state. They occupied portions of Rostov on Don - a city of over 1 million people, regional capital, and headquarters of Russia's Southern Military District - before setting off in an armed column towards Moscow. This column - replete with heavy military equipment including air defense systems - came within a few hundred miles of the capital - virtually unmolested by Russian state forces - before abruptly stopping, announcing that a deal had been brokered with the aid of Belorussian President Aleksandr "Uncle Sasha" Lukashenko, turning around, and heading back to Wagner bases in the Ukrainian theater.

Needless to say, the spectacle of a Russian mercenary group making an armed march on Moscow, and of Wagner tanks and infantry cordoning off Ministry of Defense buildings in Rostov, sparked widespread confidence among the western commentariat that the Russian state was about to be toppled and the Russian war effort in Ukraine would evaporate. There were confident and outlandish predictions pushed out in a matter of hours, including claims that Russia's global footprint would disintegrate as the Kremlin recalled troops to defend Moscow and that Russia was about to enter a state of Civil War. We also saw the Ukrainian propaganda machine kick into overdrive, with characters like Anton Gerashchenko and Igor Sushko absolutely bombarding social media with fake stories about Russian army units mutinying and regional governors "defecting" to Prigozhin.

There's something to be said here about the analytic model that prevails in our time - there's a machine that instantly springs to life, taking in rumors and partial information in an environment of extreme uncertainty and spitting out formulaic results that match ideological presuppositions. Information is not evaluated neutrally, but forced through a cognitive filter that assigns it meaning in light of predetermined conclusions. Russia is *supposed* to collapse and undergo regime change (Fukuyama said so) - therefore, Prigozhin's actions had to be framed in reference to this assumed endgame.

The Biden administration had a glorious few days last weekend. The ongoing disaster in Ukraine slipped from the headlines to be replaced by the "revolt," as a New York Times headline put it, of Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the mercenary Wagner Group.

The focus slipped from Ukraine's failing counter-offensive to Prigozhin's threat to Putin's control. As one headline in the Times put it, "Revolt Raises Searing Question: Could Putin Lose Power?" Washington Post columnist David Ignatius posed this assessment: "Putin looked into the abyss Saturday — and blinked."

Secretary of State Antony Blinken — the administration's go-to wartime flack, who weeks ago spoke proudly of his commitment not to seek a ceasefire in Ukraine — appeared on CBS's Face the Nation with his own version of reality: "Sixteen months ago, Russian forces were . . . thinking they would erase Ukraine from the map as an independent country," Blinken said. "Now, over the weekend they've had to defend Moscow, Russia's capital, against mercenaries of Putin's own making. . . . It was a direct challenge to Putin's authority. . . . It shows real cracks."

Newly declassified British files shed disturbing light on the origins and internal workings of Operation Gladio, a covert NATO plot deploying fascist terror militias across Italy. Have spies in London applied these lessons in Ukraine?

Newly declassified British Foreign Office files have added disturbing details to the history of Operation Gladio. The covert operation was uncovered in 1990, when the public learned that the CIA, MI6 and NATO trained and directed an underground army of fascist paramilitary units across Europe, deploying its assets to undermine political opponents, including through false flag terror attacks.

Among them was a young Silvio Berlusconi, the media oligarch who served as Italian Prime Minister in four separate governments between 1994 and 2011. Listed as a member of the P2, the secret Cold War-era cabal of political elites devoted to Gladio's aims, Berlusconi undoubtedly took some weighty secrets to the grave when he died this June 12th.

It is almost impossible to believe that inconvenient truths were not weeded from Britain's documentary record on Operation Gladio prior to declassification. Nonetheless, the recently released material is highly illuminating. Covering a fraught twelve month period after the first public disclosure of Gladio's existence, the papers illustrate how London's foreign intelligence apparatus kept a keen eye on the continent as events unfolded.

The papers not only shed fresh light on the conspiracy, they underline Gladio's relevance as British intelligence joins its America counterparts in contemporary plots involving secret partisan forces from Syria to Ukraine.