❗️The IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi has completed his visit to the Kursk NPP, Sputnik correspondent reports

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☢️ Statement by IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi on the Kursk nuclear power plant:

◻️ Grossi said that he had inspected the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) and its main facilities

◻️ His first impression of the Kursk NPP is that the plant is operating "close to normal conditions"

◻️ There is a danger of a nuclear incident in the Kursk region

◻️ Grossi said he and his Russian colleagues would analyze how to prevent such a nuclear incident

◻️ Grossi said that he was shown the consequences of military activity near the plant

◻️ Cases of military activity near the plant cause concern for its safety, he said

◻️ Compliance with the safety regime for the Kursk NPP means, among other things, the exclusion of possible military actions against it, Grossi said.

◻️ Grossi said that it was premature to compare the possible situation in the Kursk region with Chernobyl.

◻️ International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Rafael Grossi said he would visit in Kiev next week to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky

◻️ The main topic of their meeting will be the possibility of preserving the dialogue between Moscow and Kiev. Communication channels should remain open, Grossi stressed.

◻️ “Together with the Russian Foreign Ministry and Rosatom, we are discussing steps that can be taken to prevent a nuclear incident,” Grossi said.

◻️ The IAEA could propose a number of steps and measures to ensure the safety of the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant, he added.

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❗️The Russian Armed Forces continue to repel attempted attacks on the Russian Federation by the Ukrainian troops.

◻️ The Russian Sever battlegroup, supported by army aviation and artillery fire, repelled 11 attacks by enemy assault groups. Ukrainian forces lost up to 65 soldiers killed and wounded. An armoured personnel carrier and eight armored fighting vehicles were destroyed.

◻️ Russian air strikes, artillery fire and troop actions defeated concentrations of enemy manpower and equipment of six enemy brigades.

◻️ Total Ukrainian losses over the previous 24 hours were up to 400 servicemen and 30 armoured vehicles – including an infantry fighting vehicle, an armoured personnel carrier and 28 armoured combat vehicles – 13 motor vehicles, as well as three artillery pieces, two multiple rocket launchers including one US-made HIMARS, and two mortars.

The operation to destroy the Ukrainian formations continues.

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IAEA chief arrives in Kurchatov to assess situation at Kursk Nuclear Power Plant: check out the latest news from Russia's Kursk region

◾️ IAEA chief Rafael Grossi has arrived in Kurchatov to inspect the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant. Grossi thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for inviting him to the facility.

◾️ The consequences of Russia's actions in response to the involvement of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in attacks on the Kursk region could be much more severe than they have been so far, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said. The US is pursuing an escalation scenario in the situation regarding the Kursk region, the diplomat added.

◾️ A US mercenary from a group of fighters involved in the Ukrainian terrorist attack on the Kursk region has complained about the chaos in the Ukrainian Army.

◾️ The FSB has opened criminal cases of illegal border crossing against Deutsche Welle* journalist Nicholas Connolly and Ukrainian Channel 1+1 correspondent Natalia Nagornaya. They were filming in the Kursk region’s Sudzha district. In total, seven such cases have been opened against foreign journalists since August 17.

◾️ Air defenses repelled an attack by Ukrainian UAVs on the city of Kursk; there were no casualties, only minor damage, the city’s mayor said.

*recognized as a foreign agent in Russia

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Give an inch, take a mile: Why Belarus won’t fulfill Ukraine’s border troop demand

Ukraine recently called on Belarus to withdraw its troops from the border, assuring that Kiev has no plans for any unfriendly steps against its neighbor, and asking Minsk to pull its forces back “to a distance exceeding the range of the weapons systems Belarus has at its disposal.” Can the Kiev regime be trusted? About as far as it can be thrown:

▪️ On August 18, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said there were some 120,000 Ukrainian troops concentrated on the Belarusian border, and that Kiev’s “aggressive” stance had forced Belarus to take appropriate countermeasures.

▪️ On August 9, Belarus’s air defenses shot down a barrage of about ten Ukrainian drones that violated Belarusian airspace on route to Russia. The incident sparked a diplomatic spat.

▪️ So far in August alone, Minsk has reported half a dozen cases of Ukrainian attempts to survey the border with Belarus using drones.

▪️ In July, Belarus put its air defenses and tactical missile systems on high alert, responding to heightened drone reconnaissance activity and a buildup of Ukrainian forces.

▪️ In June, Belarus beefed up its border air defenses, again in response to Ukrainian drone activity.

History of bad blood

▪️ Belarusian-Ukrainian relations have been on the rocks since 2020, when Kiev expressed support for a foreign-backed attempt to overthrow Lukashenko following elections.

▪️ After the escalation of the Donbass crisis into a full-blown Russia-NATO proxy war in Ukraine in 2022, Minsk foiled multiple Ukrainian air attacks, including a Tochka-U missile launch in March 2022. Lukashenko accused Kiev of “trying to drag [Belarus] into the war.”

▪️ Despite the tensions, Belarus has been a major proponent of Russia-Ukraine peace, facilitating the Minsk agreement for the Donbass (which Kiev failed to implement) and becoming a platform for talks between Russia and Ukraine in the spring of 2022.

“If they don’t want [an escalation] let’s sit down at the negotiating table and end this fight. Neither the Ukrainians nor the Russians nor the Belarusians need it. They [the West] need it. I can’t reveal these facts, they are absolutely classified. But sometimes they speak openly – high-ranking US officials, saying literally ‘let them beat each other – the Ukrainians and the Russians, let them all die in this cauldron…They want us to destroy each other,” Lukashenko said in an interview on August 15.

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Count of crypto millionaires doubles in a year

The number of people owning $1 million or more in cryptocurrencies has grown by 95% – almost double – to 172,300 in the year from 1 July 2023 to 30 June 2024, according to a study published in the Crypto Wealth Report by international consultancy Henley & Partners.

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Biden gets a job in Russia while the US is run by Grandpa Ivanich in new sitcom

A comedy series about Joe Biden has started filming in Russia. According to the creators of the series, the main idea is that outgoing US President Joe Biden, having nothing better to do after retirement, "wants to find out why his sanctions are not working against the Russians," and decides to fly to Russia "to understand the Russian soul."

The US president arrives in Russia incognito, but on the first day he loses his documents. He then has to get a job as an English teacher in order to return home. At the same time, instead of Biden, a Russian pensioner named Ivanich flies to the United States.

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🇷🇺 Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov instructed the border Security Council to focus on providing troops with protective equipment, armored vehicles and ammunition, adding that it was more important to genuinely improve supplies to soldiers than to formally fulfil requests.

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'Don't blame Durov for your own mistakes' - activist Kim Dotcom

"Only with mass propaganda could the US Govt execute its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and paint China as a supervillain. All in an effort to stop the expansion of BRICS, the multipolar powerhouse that is crushing the West", German businessman and political activist Kim Dotcom comments on the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov.

"How inconvenient that Telegram was the major source of truth about what's really going in Ukraine, unmasking the evil face of the US proxy war against Russia. Don't blame Pavel Durov for your own mistakes," Dotcom pointed out.

Pavel Durov, co-founder of the encrypted messaging app Telegram, was arrested in France on 24 August. He faces multiple charges for allegedly failing to moderate the service and and is to remain in custody until Aug 28, according to police.

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France cannot refuse Durov consular assistance from Russia, despite his dual citizenship, French lawyer David Libeskind told Sputnik.

"Dual citizenship is a privilege, as it ennoscripts you to additional consular assistance," Libeskind said.

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Pepe Escobar: Durov saga shows ‘what hot information war is all about’

💬 “Paris was just waiting for a big break” to crack down on Pavel Durov and his rebellious social media empire, says veteran geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar.

“Durov became a French citizen only 3 years ago – significantly, before the launch of the SMO - via a special ‘eminent foreigner’ program set up by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Very few are eligible; only a ‘French-speaking foreigner who contributes through their eminent action to the influence of France and the prosperity of its international economic relations’. Well, no ‘eminent action’ was enough to keep him away from a French slammer,” the observer wrote in an analysis for Sputnik.

💬 “The charges against Durov revealed by France’s Prosecutor of the Republic should be destroyed in court by any crack legal team. Essentially, the claims are that Durov himself is responsible for those abusing Telegram. He is ‘complicit’ of every misdeed under the sun – from organized fraud to drug-trafficking – all the way to a hazy accusation of providing encrypted services without a ‘certified declaration’. The accusations about Telegram’s lack of moderation are false. For instance, Telegram actively censors correspondence inside the EU; EU residents cannot access countless chats and channels. Moreover, Telegram is not concerned by the recent, hardcore neo-Orwellian EU law against mega social networks, because it harbors less than 45 million European users a day,” Escobar stressed.

“The current liberal-totalitarian Euro-gulag, or EuroLag, is a massive power bloc that does not have access to Telegram’s content. Telegram maintains its own servers around the world, and routing goes via Amazon, Cloudfare and Google. Since the start of Telegram, US intel/surveillance has the means to easily block it - if they feel like it. The EU is a different ball game. So here we have Brussels, via Paris, trying to acquire at least some control over Telegram – and social networks in general,” he added.

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☢️ Ukraine’s attacks on Kursk Nuclear Power Plant even more dangerous than strikes targeting Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant: Here’s why

The Kiev regime’s mad policy of attacking nuclear power plants – first in Zaporozhye and now Kursk, signals a dangerous lack of control, and threatens to turn Europe into a radioactive wasteland, veteran nuclear expert and European Committee on Radiation Risk scientific secretary Dr. Chris Busby warns.

The Zaporozhye NPP “is a pressurized water reactor with thick concrete walls that would be pretty hard to penetrate. Of course, the spent fuel pools are easy to hit, and the supplementary control systems, the cooling, and those things are vulnerable. But Kursk is another matter. This nuclear site has the RBMK reactors like Chernobyl, and these have no thick concrete shielding. They are therefore vulnerable to missile and drone attacks which could damage the reactor systems directly,” Busby wrote in an analysis for Sputnik.

“Unlike Zaporozhye, where the reactors are in shutdown, in Kursk, one of these is apparently operating. And it appears that Ukraine is shooting missiles and drones at the Kursk plant,” Busby stressed.

Based on Ukraine’s chaotic behavior, and the actions of an array of internal and external actors influencing policy and driving events, Busby fears the worst: “that no-one really has control of everything that happens and that there are independent chaotic elements in play here with aims and strategies that are hard to fathom.”

“The possibilities in this new Kursk theatre are therefore scary. For example, it is an obvious Great Game strategy to pop a cruise missile into the critical Kursk reactor, cause a nuclear explosion and then call in NATO to ‘save’ Europe,” Busby warned.

“What is the solution? It is to do whatever it takes to stop Ukraine or those actors inside (or outside) Ukraine from arranging attacks on either of the nuclear plants. If one of those reactors goes up, Europe is in deep trouble,” the expert concluded.

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Eluding Big Brother and casually chatting: Here's why Telegram's popularity is skyrocketing globally

The more the surveillance state tightens its grip, the more people wind up slipping through its fingers. Since Telegram CEO Pavel Durov’s arrest in France, interest in his social media and messenger service has skyrocketed, becoming the second-most downloaded app on the App Store in the US, and the most downloaded App Store app in France in the social media category. Here’s who’s using the messenger, and why it’s so popular.

How many users does Telegram have?

◻️ Telegram now has over 950 million active monthly users, and aims for a billion by the end of 2024.

The app has more than quadrupled its user base over the past five years.

Where is Telegram most popular?

◻️ Data from analytics service Demand Sage indicate that India, Russia, Indonesia, the US, Brazil, Egypt, Vietnam, Mexico, Ukraine, and Turkiye are Telegram’s top 10 countries by usage, accounting for more than a quarter of total active monthly use. India, for example, has 104 mln users, while Russia and Indonesia have an estimated 34.4 and 27.2 mln, and the US and Brazil 26.85 and 21.94 mln, respectively. By other accounts, Russia actually has up to 85 mln users.

Who uses Telegram and why?

◻️ Just 30 employees have the titanic task of running an app used by about 1/10 of Earth’s population. About 80% of Telegram’s users use it to get news (much of it from independent or non-mainstream sources). Some 86% use it for personal correspondence, 63% for group chats, and 52% for communication with colleagues.

◻️ The gender breakdown is about 58% men and 42% women. About 29.5% of the user base falls in the 25-34 years old age bracket, and 24% in the 35-44 years old range.

◻️ Telegram is especially popular among users weary of state and corporate control, with Pavel Durov’s absolutist rejection of censorship and surveillance – no matter the source – extremely popular. The app’s features include things like end-to-end encryption, self-destructing messages, and two-step verification. Durov has jealously guarded Telegram’s encryption keys against security services seeking access to user data.

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☣️ Bioweapons targeting specific ethnic groups are real, have been known about since 1930s – UN expert

“The task was set back in 1999 by then-CIA director George Tenet to create pathogens that would be ethnicity-specific,” Igor Nikulin, a Russian military expert and former member of the UN Commission on Chemical and Biological Weapons, told Sputnik. “Tenet, one could say, is the main villain of the 21st century, outdoing even Bill Gates on this question.”

Nikulin was speaking after the latest revelations from the Russian NBC Troops about the US military’s bioweapons research in Ukraine.
“The Americans first showed interest in the Slavic ethnic group and genome in the early 1990s, perhaps even earlier,” he said.

“In the early 1990s, I worked on the Human Genome Project as a junior research fellow at the Institute of Molecular Biology of the Academy of Sciences,” Nikulin recalled. “The Americans would ask not only for our decoding work, but all the source materials as well, supposedly for verification. Then, during what was still the Soviet Union, hundreds if not thousands of samples went overseas to American and European laboratories.”

Bioweapons targeting specific ethnic groups have been known about since at least the 1930s, the expert said.

“Atypical pneumonia, let’s say, targets the Slavs, the same as typhus, which the Japanese discovered in the 1930s affects mainly white Europeans,” Nikulin explained. “Delta-Omicron strains of Covid affect Asians – the Chinese, Koreans and Vietnamese. Ebola affects Africans, and is a product of high technology never before recorded. MERS (Middle East Acute Respiratory Syndromes) targets Arabs. So there are already specific approaches for every national and racial group.”

Former Executive Intelligence Review White House correspondent William Jones believes the US military biological activities across the former Soviet space from the 1990s onward are no different from those of the Nazis during WWII.

“Most disconcerting are General Kirillov’s statements that blood samples are also being transported back to US labs for the selection of biological agents that are most dangerous for the population of a certain region that target a particular group of people,” Jones told Sputnik.

“This gives an even more sinister touch that puts US policy in the same realm as the Wannsee Conference in 1942, where General Reinhard Heydrich revealed his plans for a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish question’.”

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Теlegram’s Durov vs Meta’s Zuckerberg: How do they stack up on censorship?

While Telegram founder Pavel Durov awaits formal charged France for allegedly allowing criminal content to be shared, no such fate is likely to befall Mark Zuckerberg.

The Meta* CEO has admitted that senior Biden administration officials “pressured” him to “censor” content. Let’s see how the two social media giants and their CEOs stack up:

Zuckerberg’s Meta

Staff at the corporation have blown the whistle on its dubious end-to-end (e2e) encryption of messages and non-open source algorithm, and documented cases of censorship and manipulation of public opinion.

Scandal

In 2018 it emerged that British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica paid Facebook for user data from tens of millions of profiles in 2014, which it used to tailor political campaigns for Ted Cruz and later Donald Trump during the 2016 US presidential campaign.

Censorship

Posts criticizing everything from US foreign and immigration policy to climate policies and vaccines were either deleted outright, or hidden and deranked – what is dubbed ‘shadow-banning’.

◻️ After the 2016 US elections, conservative viewpoints were suppressed under the pretext of ‘hate speech’ while liberal ones were elevated.

◻️ Biden officials "repeatedly pressured” Facebook for months to “censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire" during the pandemic, Zuckerberg has admitted. In April 2020, Facebook announced that it was imposing limits on “harmful misinformation about COVID-19.” The decision was reversed a year later.

◻️ A month before the 2020 presidential elections, Facebook suppressed the New York Post exposé of Hunter Biden’s laptop, with evidence of influence-peddling by the Biden family. Zuckerberg admitted this in a 2022 interview with Joe Rogan, claiming he was acting on FBI orders. He has now conceded that the laptop story was not 'Russian disinformation' as Democrats and the mainstream media claimed.

◻️ While Meta admitted in 2021 that Palestinian posts using words like “martyr” and “resistance” were inaccurately labeled as incitement to violence, the firm showed its hypocrisy the following year by allowing calls for violence against Russian citizens after the start of the Ukraine conflict. In March 2022 it loosened rules on violent speech for users in Eastern Europe, allowing ads with violent content.

Durov’s Telegram

The Russian-born IT entrepreneur co-created Telegram with the promise of secure message encryption, no moderation of messages. He pledged to reject reject government demands to store user’s confidential data, telephone messages and internet traffic, or to hand over keys for decrypting their texts.

◻️ Telegram’s unlimited size channels and group chats are encrypted using a combination of 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, 2048-bit RSA encryption, and a Diffie-Hellman secure key, the company says.
Telegram does not provide end-to-end encryption for common private and group chats, but does provide a secret chat feature. Telegram lets users post files with unlimited cloud storage. There is no targeted advertising or algorithmic feed.

Relations with authorities

"Telegram has historically had problems with regulators in some parts of the world because, unlike other services, we consistently defended our users' privacy and have never made any deals with governments," Durov wrote in 2017.

◻️ The US government wanted to get its hands on Telegram’s code to infiltrate the system and spy on its users, Durov revealed in an April interview with ex-Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. The entrepreneur rejected pressure to allow a "backdoor" in the app for Western intelligence. Durov resisted personal “pressure” in the US, where legal authorities approached him seeking to find a way to “control Telegram better.”

*banned in Russia

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◻️ IAEA chief visits Kursk Nuclear Power Plant – check out his statement

◻️ Dr. Chris Busby explains why Ukraine’s attacks on Kursk Nuclear Power Plant even more dangerous than strikes targeting Zaporozhye nuclear power plant

◻️ Russian Defense Ministry: The US, aided by Ukraine, is developing bioagents capable of selectively targeting specific ethnic groups

◻️ Durov vs Zuckerberg: what’s their stance on censorship?

◻️ Why is Telegram's popularity skyrocketing globally?

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Hezbollah: Israeli nightmare of its own creation. Part 1 👉 Part 2

Months of escalating tensions between Hezbollah and Israel reached a tipping point over the weekend, with the two stepping back from a full-scale war after large-scale back-to-back strikes. Israeli officials have been warning for months about a “very intense operation” against the Lebanese militia, but observers warn that any large-scale confrontation could leave Israel more than a bloody nose. Here’s why:

◻️ Forged in 1982 out of smaller resistance groups that emerged spontaneously in the aftermath of Israel’s short-sighted 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Hezbollah is a moderate Shia Islamist political party and militia movement with about 12 percent of the seats in Lebanon’s parliament, and a 100,000 men-strong militia. Concentrated in southern Lebanon, Beirut and in the country’s northeast, Hezbollah’s rejection of Israel’s right to exist, and readiness to fight a campaign of asymmetric warfare with the Tel Aviv, has made it arguably the single greatest headache on the Jewish State’s border, with the two clashing well over half-a-dozen times since the 1980s.

◻️ Dubbed “the world’s most heavily armed non-state actor” by the globalist neocon Council on Foreign Relations, Hezbollah has some of the best-trained and battle-hardened fighters in the world, fighting Israel into a stalemate in the 2006 Lebanon War, and playing an indispensable role in the defeat of an array of foreign-sponsored jihadists in Syria from 2012 onward.

👉 Part 2

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Hezbollah: Israeli nightmare of its own creation. Part 2 👉 Part 1

Hezbollah’s ability to wage successful asymmetric warfare against an entity as militarily powerful as Israel is assured by three factors: its weapons, its tunnels and its discipline:

◻️ The militia is estimated to have accumulated over a million missiles and rockets, from Kornet and Almas anti-tank missiles to modified Katyushas, Zelzal-2 and Fateh-110 missiles (the latter capable of reaching any point inside Israel). The Israeli military has some of the most sophisticated air and missile defense systems in the world, meaning the key to Hezbollah’s missile threat is saturation – sending more projectiles Israel’s way than can be defended against simultaneously. Hezbollah has also shown the growing prowess of its surveillance and strike drones, with its Hudhud (lit. ‘Hoopoe’) UAV recently penetrating Israeli airspace unmolested and snapping top-secret military targets in northern Israel. The militia’s armed strength is rounded out by its C-802 anti-ship missiles and reportedly, Sayyad-2 SAMs, complicating the operation of Israeli warships, aircraft and drones in the vicinity of the Lebanese border.

◻️ Hamas’ vast tunnel network has proved a major headache for Israeli forces in Gaza, with the IDF likening it to an “spider’s web” into which fighters disappear underground and reappear suddenly in the rear areas of maneuvering Israeli forces. But some Israeli intelligence analysts, including former intel officer Tal Beeri, say Hezbollah’s tunnel network is “far more sophisticated,” consisting of a literal “land of the tunnels” consisting of hundreds of kilometers under the whole of south Lebanon. Combined with southern Lebanon’s hilly, greenery rich environment, any ground incursion into the region threatens to become a nightmare for attackers.

◻️ Hezbollah’s troops are characterized by allies and adversaries alike as “well-trained and disciplined,” with their training, experience and weaponry described as superior to that of the Lebanese Armed Forces. This, combined with the culture of martyrdom for soldiers of the Shia faith, has allowed Hezbollah to demonstrate a level of tactical prowess superior to virtually all Arab armies clashing with Israel during the 20th century. For example, during the month-long clash with the IDF in July-August 2006, 1,000-2,500 Hezbollah fighters armed with automatic rifles, anti-tank missiles and rocket artillery faced off against between 10,000-30,000 Israeli troops equipped with 100 tanks, 80 APCs, 40 guns and military aviation. After the dust settled, Israel’s sophisticated, high-tech forces lost over 120 troops killed, 1,240+ wounded, 20 tanks destroyed, four helicopters lost and one naval corvette damaged. Hezbollah, for its part, lost 250 fighters, with most of Lebanon’s casualties coming from the nearly 1,200 civilians killed and 4,400+ wounded in Israeli strikes on infrastructure in Beirut and other cities.

👉Part 1

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The Pentagon said the US has no plans to lift current restrictions on Ukrainian strikes with American weapons deep into Russia, despite Zelensky's complaints.

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Durov was supposed to have dinner with Macron on night of his arrest – report

Telegram founder Pavel Durov has told police that he was supposed to have dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron on the day of his arrest, respected French investigative newspaper Le Canard Enchaine has reported.

“Macron is perfectly capable of this kind of deceit aimed at fulfilling the mission demanded by his masters: jailing all those who defend freedom of expression! We demand explanations from Macron!” Les Patriots Party leader Florian Philippot wrote in a social media post commenting on the story.

The Elysee Palace rushed to deny the newspaper’s claims.

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