Tag: Region Europe

The BRICS bloc’s push to create a new trade and reserve currency that can serve as an alternative to the dollar could start chipping away at the greenback’s hegemony in less than three months’ time, former CIA and Department of Defense advisor and investment banker James Rickards has predicted. “It involves the rollout of a major new currency that could weaken the role of the dollar in global payments and ultimately displace the US dollar as the leading payment currency…

Treasury officials have been accused of being asleep at the wheel on breaches of confidential government information. Officials were grilled on their knowledge of potential breaches of confidential Treasury data by former PwC partner Peter Collins, who has been referred to federal police to investigate the allegations. Greens senator Barbara Pocock hit out at Treasury’s decision to sign new confidentiality agreements with Mr Collins after they became aware of a possible breach. While Treasury officials told the committee they had…

The U.S. government has given Chinese and Russian entities at least $1.3 billion for various research programs over the past five years, according to an analysis released Wednesday by Republican Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst and watchdog group Open the Books. The analysis revealed that millions of taxpayer dollars have been given to, among others, a Chinese software developer for military tech support, a Russian health insurance provider that has since been sanctioned and Chinese agriculture companies. And it showed the federal government…

We’ve written a lot about AB 2273, California’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) that requires websites with users in California to try to determine the ages of all their visitors, write up dozens of reports on potential harms, and then seek to mitigate those harms. I’ve written about why it’s literally impossible to comply with the law. We’ve had posts on how it conflicts with privacy laws and how it’s a radical experimentation on children (ironically, the drafters of the…

The symposium that was to take place on Sunday aimed to honor the memory of Dominique Venner, a historian who took his life exactly 10 years ago in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris as a “sacrifice” to “break with the lethargy that is overwhelming us,” to “awaken slumbering consciences.” “I rebel against fate. I protest against poisons of the soul and the desires of invasive individuals to destroy the anchors of our identity, including the family, the intimate basis of our…

Epstein’s calendars show the financier meeting with A-listers including tech billionaires Bill Gates and Peter Thiel, music executive Tommy Mottola, artist Jeff Koons, magician David Blaine, and filmmaker Woody Allen – all after being required to register as a sex offender as part of the sweetheart plea deal that allowed him to serve less than two years under house arrest.  Allen, whose ex-wife and her children have accused him of molesting one adopted daughter and who married his other adopted…

WASHINGTON — More than 1 million F-35 spare parts worth at least $85 million have gone missing over at least the last five years, according to a new Government Accountability Office report criticizing the program’s supply tracking. Auditors said that because the government doesn’t have its own system tracking those parts, officials may not truly know how many spare parts are actually in the global spares pool, where they are, or their total value. As a result, “the full quantity…

India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) filed a complaint on Monday against British multinational aerospace and defense company Rolls Royce, the company’s former India director – Tim Jones, arms dealer Sudhir Choudhrie and his son Bhanu Choudhrie (who are UK citizens), and British Aerospace Systems (BAE Systems). The allegations include criminal conspiracy, cheating and corruption in a 2004 procurement of training jets India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) — the country’s premier probe agency — on Monday registered a complaint…

A former Federal Security Service officer said Putin could be overthrown by Wagner. The Wagner Army is Putin’s private military army, largely made up of mercenaries. The Army chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, could pose an active threat to Putin, said the war analyst. Vladimir Putin could be ousted by Russia’s private military group, the Wagner army, according to Igor Girkin, a former Federal Security Service officer who once led a group of Russian militants in Donetsk. Girkin, who is also known…

While Ukrainian forces tend to treat each new addition to their arsenal supplied by the West as a game changer, their jubilation tends to be short-lived as Russian forces swiftly learn how to deal with these threats. A Storm Shadow cruise missile Kiev recently got from the UK proved to be no exception.Yesterday, Russian air defense units operating in the Ukrainian conflict zone shot down two Storm Shadow missiles, as well as several other airborne threats.Also, some 12 UAVs operated by Kiev forces were shot down by Russian air defense units in Russia’s Lugansk People’s Republic, Donetsk People’s Republic and Zaporozhye region.The United States and its allies have supplied billions of dollars worth of weapons and military hardware – including small arms, artillery, multiple launch rocket systems and air defense systems – to Ukraine, fanning the flames of the ongoing conflict in the country and effectively helping prolong the fighting and the suffering of the Ukrainian civilians.

Mila Antonova – a bridge player who multiple media reports this week claim had an affair with Gates starting in 2009 – was captured in a newly unearthed photograph walking alongside Chapman in New York City. The picture, which is believed to have been taken in 2009 or 2010, around the same time as Gates’ alleged trysts with the decades-younger Antonova, the newspaper claims. The report adds that Antonova was an “associate and financial beneficiary of the late financier and…

The value of frozen Russian private assets under sanctions increased from 18.9 billion euros in December to 24.1 billion euros in late May, the newspaper said. As many as 1,473 individuals and 205 firms from Russia have been sanctioned by the EU, German media added. After the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Western countries have imposed comprehensive sanctions against Russia, including the freezing of nearly half of the country’s foreign currency reserves – amounting to about $300 billion. The European Union alone has frozen assets of Russian entities and individuals worth dozens of billions of dollars under 10 packages of sanctions.

German police have launched a criminal investigation into English rock legend and Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters on suspicion of glorifying Nazism during two concerts in Berlin. The musician has insisted the performance was in opposition to fascism. On Friday, in a statement quoted by several media outlets, the Berlin police said that Waters was suspected of inciting hatred, and that the probe was centered on his performances on May 17 and 18 in the German capital. In footage posted…

The court ruled that the initial money laundering suspicions were insufficient to warrant the searches at Usmanov’s premises in the first place. The judges also pointed to some “serious deficiencies” in the search warrants requested by Frankfurt’s Public Prosecutor’s Office at the time. Suspicions against Usmanov were based on allegations that were too vague, the court declared. The assumption that his assets – which are worth billions of dollars – were the result of some “crimes committed in Russia,” coupled…

In March, Der Spiegel claimed a yacht called ‘Andromeda’ had allegedly been used by a team of divers to sabotage the Nord Stream pipelines. The publication cited the discovery of traces of explosives in the cabin of the vessel and fake identification documents that were used in the hiring of the boat.  The outlet’s most recent report indicates that metadata from an email sent to enquire about the renting of the yacht “leads to Ukraine.” The president of a presumed…

When then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull called for heads to roll after the 2016 census was pulled offline – amid fears IBM’s data servers hosting the survey had been infiltrated – the American enterprise technology giant made an important decision. IBM ran most of the big mainframe systems that had powered core government functions for several decades, earning it billions of dollars a year in fees and making the Australian government one of its top global clients. No census data was…