🗣💸🤝🇺🇦 — 🇺🇸 The Wall Street Journal | Pentagon Chief Arrives in Kyiv Without Any Sign of Budging on Ukraine’s Biggest Weapons Requests | Lloyd Austin has helped bolster Ukraine’s fight against Russia but has argued for limiting military aid | October 21, 2024:

"KYIV—Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin arrived in Kyiv on Monday bearing a message of strong U.S. commitment to Ukraine’s war effort but with no new military assistance or permission for its forces to use long-range missiles inside Russia.

Austin, a former four-star Army general, has led the Western response to the conflict since the early days of the war, coordinating more than $64 billion in U.S. military aid for Kyiv and tens of billions more from Europe.

But his visit to Kyiv, an unannounced stop that will likely be his last to the Ukrainian capital as Pentagon chief, underscored the continuing debate over whether the Biden administration—and Austin himself—has hobbled Ukraine’s war effort with a cautious approach to providing American-made weapons and restrictions on their use."

🗄 Archive

🔗 Source:

🇷🇺📊📈❌💸 — 🏴 ZeroHedge | The Danger To The Dollar Isn't The Euro Or Yuan | Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com | October 20, 2024:

"Russia GDP is now estimated at +3.8 percent, topping the US, despite sanctions. What’s going on?

(...)

It is worth looking at the autumn forecast for Russia by the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, one of the best sources of economic information for central and eastern Europe. They upgraded their growth forecast for this year by 0.6pp to 3.8%. Russia is outgrowing all western economies, including the US. Growth is forecast to slow down to 2.5% next year because of the impact of a 19% interest rate. It is clear that Russia’s economic expansion is a classic case of a wartime Keynesian effect.

It is also interesting to contrast Russia’s economic development with that of Ukraine’s main supporters in Europe, which have entered into synchronised austerity, first in Germany, and now in France and the UK.

Russia’s fiscal stability is perhaps the biggest surprise. Defence spending is on trajectory towards 6% of GDP. And yet, the 2024 budget deficit is projected at 1.5%, falling to 1% in 2025.

Vasily Astrov, the Russia expert at WIIW, concludes that Putin will have money for the foreseeable future to continue financing the war against Ukraine. A rise in income and corporate tax has meant that Russia’s state finance will become less dependent on energy.

Financial sanctions are ultimately not as successful as their advocates once believed because money is not a natural global monopoly. International banks are certainly susceptible to US dollar sanctions. But not all banks in the world operate in dollar markets. The use of secondary sanctions has become a first-order instrument in the US’s diplomatic toolkit in this century. But it falls into the category of instruments which lose their value the more you use them. Even amongst US economists, we see a lot of complacency about this. It was friction combined with network effects that favoured the emergency of a single dominating currency – the pound sterling, the dollar later. The danger to the dollar is not the euro, or renminbi. It is that micro-channels are becoming viable as technology reduces the frictions.

Lessons of the Day
The more you depend on sanctions, the less they work.

That’s the real risk to the dollar."

#Geoeconomics #Sanctions

🗄 Archive

🔗 Full:

#BREAKING

🇮🇱❌🇮🇷❗️ — Channel 12 Israel, citing sources:

The Israeli army has completed its preparations for the attack on Iran and it seems that it will be within days.

#BREAKING

🥇📈🚀GOLD spot reach again a new All Time High over $2748/oz!

@FelipeChannel

🇦🇺❌💻 Encrypted Chat App ‘Session’ Leaves Australia After Visit From Police

After federal police came to an employee’s house to ask questions, encrypted messaging company Session has decided to leave Australia and switch to a foundation model based in Switzerland.

https://www.404media.co/encrypted-chat-app-session-leaves-australia-after-visit-from-police-2/

@FelipeChannel

💻💬✍️ A new Swiss foundation—the Session Technology Foundation—has been created for the ongoing stewardship of Session 🇨🇭

Session is now more resilient to hostility towards encrypted messaging, and better positioned to protect your privacy.

Session is different from other tech platforms—it doesn’t answer to any single person. Instead, it operates on a decentralised protocol designed with a clear purpose: preserving and protecting privacy. Session’s code is completely open source, and its servers are operated by a diverse community of operators from around the world. It is a truly decentralised communication protocol.

However, a steward is still required to handle duties like publishing to app stores, maintaining repositories, and writing documentation. The steward’s role is not to own or control Session, but to guide and support it. However, given the current regulatory environment in Australia around privacy technology and encrypted messaging, Session’s original steward, the OPTF, has chosen to pass on its responsibilities as steward of the project.

From now on, Session will be stewarded by a new Swiss foundation, the Session Technology Foundation.

https://getsession.org/blog/introducing-the-session-technology-foundation

@FelipeChannel

Leaked documents show UK government-backed Center for Countering Digital Hate had “Kill Musk’s Twitter” as its top priority.

📎 AF Post

🇵🇪❗️🇻🇪 — The President of Peru, Dina Boluarte, announced new measures to tighten the rules for regularizing Venezuelan migrants in the country. Among the adjustments, migrants will be required to present work and rental contracts, and strict control will be implemented over remittances sent abroad to combat organized crime.

💥 Boluarte warned that those who cannot clearly justify their income will face sanctions, and foreign criminals will be deported. Additionally, she blamed previous governments for leaving the borders open without control, which has worsened the situation.

🇻🇪💬❌🇧🇷🇨🇴 — María Corina Machado, Venezuelan opposition leader, criticized the presidents of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Colombia, Gustavo Petro, for continuing to insist on the release of the electoral records from the July 28 presidential election: "He [Maduro] is not going to hand over anything, your efforts are not helping at all!"

🎙 In an interview with Colombian station Blu Radio, Machado highlighted that three months have passed since the election, and it is the opposition that holds the original copies of the electoral records, which "the world already knows." She further emphasized that "there is nothing more to wait for" and that it is unrealistic to keep pushing for something the regime will not provide.

⁉️ Machado also questioned the neutrality that Presidents Lula and Petro are attempting to maintain, suggesting that despite their efforts to engage in dialogue with Maduro's regime, "they don’t even get their calls answered, and they don’t ask if anyone from the opposition was arrested today."

Source 🖇

👤🤝👔🌐🌐 — 🙃 RIA Novosti:

"Negotiations between Putin and Xi Jinping began in Kazan‌‌

Putin said that relations between Russia and China are an example of how relations between countries should be built; cooperation is equal and non-opportunistic in nature‌‌"

#Russia #China #BRICS

🇨🇳👤🤝👤🇷🇺 — 🇷🇺 Russian channel Prosnuvshiysya drakon:

"🇷🇺🇨🇳 Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a meeting as part of the BRICS summit in Kazan.

🔻Putin’s main statements:

▪️Relations between the Russian Federation and China are an example of what cooperation between countries should look like.

▪️Russia and China, despite the negative external impact, continue to increase bilateral trade. Trade turnover between the countries increased by 4.5%.

▪️Russian-Chinese cooperation in world affairs is a stabilizing factor on the world stage.

▪️Russia and China are successfully implementing joint projects in the fields of transport, energy and agriculture. Humanitarian ties are strengthening, and events are being held as part of cross-cultural years.

🔻Xi's main statements:

▪️Over the past decade, relations between China and Russia have come a long way and acquired an unprecedented character. Their inviolability cannot be shaken by serious shocks.

▪️The leaders of Russia and China keep relations between the two states under personal control.

▪️The Russian Federation and China have taken the path of building ties on the principles of non-alignment, non-confrontation and non-direction against third parties.

▪️BRICS is a system-forming factor in the formation of multipolarity. China highly appreciates the work of the Russian Federation within this format."

🔗 Via Rybar:

#BREAKING

🥇📈🚀GOLD spot reach a new All Time High over $2758/oz!

@FelipeChannel