Saturday, January 27, 2024

Terror Attack on Edmonton City Hall

"The Canadian Edmonton Journal reported that the alleged 28-year-old shooter was armed with a long gun when he “entered the building through the parkade, fired shots and threw a Molotov cocktail.” Some councillors were in the building at the time of the attack but were taken to safe locations by police/security.
Despite these and numerous other gun controls, a 28-year-old attacker–who allegedly made a video mentioning, among other things, the “genocide” in Gaza before attacking–was able to open fire on the Edmonton City Hall Tuesday." Breitbart

Hunter and the hunted: How Joe Biden is being linked to corruption, terror attacks, and political assassinations in Ukraine

"Ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, there’s been much talk about the family of US President Joe Biden and alleged corruption schemes connected with Ukraine. The story itself isn’t new, but facts have recently come to light which make it clear why the American leader and his fellow Democrats remain intransigent on the Ukraine issue.Andrey Derkach, a former Ukrainian parliamentarian who became widely known for publishing recordings of conversations between ex-Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko and high-ranking foreign officials, including Biden (who was then US vice president), gave an extensive interview earlier this month to journalist Simona Mangiante. During this conversation, he disclosed sensational new details about the “special ties” between the Biden family and the Ukrainian authorities.
According to Derkach, “President [Vladimir] Zelensky’s office was involved in distributing the Poroshenko-Biden recordings and helped organize the media coverage [of the story].” At the time, Zelensky and his team were interested in exposing his political rival by any means possible.
Everything changed after the start of the 2020 US election campaign and the arrival of Biden as president. “In a situation when Zelensky and [Ukrainian presidential aide Andrey] Yermak are begging Biden and [US Secretary of State Antony] Blinken for money, a [news] story about how they had once created problems for Biden’s election campaign is a big problem for them,” Derkach explained.
So, instead of exposing the corruption in the previous Ukrainian administration, the Bidens (along with Zelensky and his team) turned against anti-corruption fighters. Derkach, who has been forced to hide in Belarus, was stripped of his citizenship by the Ukrainian authorities and sanctioned by the US. But that’s not all. In addition to criminal investigations and sanctions, Derkach says he has faced assassination attempts ordered by top officials in Kiev and Washington.
On January 19, 2022, US Secretary of State Mr Blinken arrived in Ukraine to meet with Zelensky. Quite a lot of people attended this meeting – at least 14 people. At the meeting, Mr Blinken told Zelensky the following: ‘You urgently need to resolve the issue with Derkach’. Zelensky began talking about some people from the opposition. But Blinken said, ‘If you don’t resolve this issue with Derkach, then we will resolve the Derkach issue with our partners.’ Those who were at the meeting were taken aback, because the position of the US secretary of state was quite harsh. Just think of it, the task for the president of Ukraine is to resolve the issue with Derkach, the former deputy said.
It is noteworthy that in 2021, the Ukrainian police discovered plans to assassinate Derkach and the head of the group of prosecutors in the Burisma energy company case, Konstantin Kulik, but did not initiate a criminal case. The investigation tracked down the criminal gang from Eastern Europe hired to carry out the hit, as well as their base in Transcarpathia. The assassin himself was supposed to be an Albanian, but the information was leaked, and the gang escaped.
There was also an attempt to assassinate former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. According to former US Associate Attorney General and ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Shokin (whose dismissal Joe Biden has openly bragged about) was poisoned with mercury while on a trip to Greece. Nikolay Korpan – a doctor at the Austrian Rudolfinerhaus private clinic who treated presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko in 2004 – reportedly confirmed this to Giuliani. According to Korpan’s findings, while the permissible amount of mercury in the blood is no more than two units, Shokin was found to have 9.2 units and was starting to experience liver failure. It was clearly a murder attempt.
The number of witnesses in the Burisma case – a company though which Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden earned profits via alleged corruption schemes – is also steadily decreasing. Shortly before she was due to testify as a witness in the case, the wife of Nikolai Lisin – a former partner of Nikolai Zlochevsky – was found dead in her apartment. She had been responsible for accounting at Burisma and had been aware of transactions carried out in the interests of the Bidens. Lisin himself died in a car accident back in 2011.
In light of this, it seems Derkach is right to say that anyone who talks about Biden’s corruption in Ukraine is in danger of being physically removed.
The fact that Hunter Biden abused his father’s official position, receiving a profit of several million dollars through corrupt schemes and violating US legislation on foreign agents, isn’t the only problem. There’s much more to it than that.
In order to understand the scale of the potential profits for the Biden family, we need to go back to 2012. The Yuzovsk shale gas field is located on the territory of the Donetsk and Kharkov regions. The total area of the deposit is about 7886 sq km. According to the State Geologic and Subsoil Survey of Ukraine (UGS), the proven resources of the field are up to 10 trillion cubic meters, and it can deliver around 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year. In May 2012, the British-Dutch company Shell won the tender (organized by the UGS) for the right to conclude an agreement on its development. On January 24, 2013, Ukraine signed a production sharing agreement with Shell. Incidentally, US company ExxonMobil had participated in the tender along with Shell, but the Europeans won.
At the end of November 2013, when then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign an Association Agreement with the EU, mass protests broke out in Kiev, which became known as the ‘Euromaidan’. One of the officials who greatly supported the protesters and encouraged the establishment of pro-Western power in Ukraine was Biden’s colleague, Nuland, who was dubbed the ‘Maidan midwife’. The State Department official was so active in Ukraine that she became embroiled in numerous scandals. She was known for handing out cookies in the center of Kiev, cursing the EU, and boasting that the US had invested $5 billion into “building democracy” in Ukraine.
On February 22, 2014, the Ukrainian parliament removed Yanukovych from power, in a move of dubious legality. Aleksandr Turchinov became interim president, and Arseniy Yatsenyuk, backed by Nuland, became prime minister. In April 2014, the Ukrainian army started an “anti-terrorist operation” in Donbass, and Shell was forced to stop the development of shale gas deposits.
Meanwhile, on May 12, 2014, Burisma announced that Hunter Biden had joined its board of directors. The energy company was headed by Ukrainian oligarch Nikolay Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s minister of natural resources under Yanukovych. While he held that post, Zlochevsky’s firm received nine licenses for the development of various energy deposits, thereby increasing its annual production volume sevenfold. The oligarch’s activities drew the attention of Interpol, since Zlochevsky had ties with Maltese businessman Pierre Pillow. He was involved in laundering huge sums of money in Maltese banks and helped Zlochevsky open accounts for Hunter Biden in Satabank, known for its dubious operations.
In 2018, Burisma took up the development of shale deposits located in the exact same area where the military conflict between Kiev and Donbass was raging. At least $10 billion – i.e. the sum of the contract with Shell – was at stake.
But the story didn’t end there. Sergey Zavorotny, adviser to former Ukrainian Prime Minister Nikolay Azarov, described the Bidens’ alleged schemes involving reverse gas flows. Derkach’s records state that while he was US vice president, Joe Biden pressured Poroshenko to leave Andrey Kobolev as CEO of Ukraine’s Naftogaz. In turn, Kobolev appointed Amos Hochstein – who may be called Biden’swallet” – as an independent director of the Naftogaz supervisory board. It is at this time that the reverse gas flow scheme was organized.
The scheme implied that “Russian gas crossed the Ukraine-Slovakia border through a built-in 1.5 kilometer-long pipe and immediately returned to Ukraine, but with an added cost of $50 per one thousand cubic meters. Biden, Kobolev, and Amos Hochstein collected one and a half billion dollars using this scheme," Zavorotny also claims.
Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko drew attention to the fact that the perpetrators of the corruption scheme were never punished, and said that “the investigation was not carried out under the new president. The president changed, but all the policies that were carried out externally in regard to Ukraine, as well as inside the country, have remained the same.”
While intense fighting was underway in Ukraine, Burisma launched the first shale gas production line in Donbass. Hunter Biden arranged that process, while Hochstein “organized” the reverse gas flows. At that time, Hochstein became the US Special Envoy for Nord Stream 2.
Everybody knows what happened to Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipelines, built to supply energy to Germany. We won’t accuse anyone in particular, but will only let the interested parties speak for themselves.
In a recent interview, Derkach recalled the criminal case against Burisma lawyer Andrey Kichi, who tried to give a $6 million bribe to law enforcement officials in order to close the Burisma case. On April 21, 2022, with the consent of a Burisma representative, a Ukrainian court transferred the $6 million in cash to the military unit of the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine. According to Derkach, “after a certain period of time, Nord Stream exploded, there were assassination attempts. The heads of the Ukrainian special services do not hide the fact that they commit terrorist acts and political assassinations using off-budget cash. Once again, Biden’s business partners who are involved in the corrupt business in Ukraine also finance terrorist acts, thus avoiding responsibility for corruption in Ukraine.”
These claims are yet to be proven, but the hostility towards the Nord Stream project by representatives of the US administration is indisputable. In his investigation of the explosions, renowned US journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh wrote that the Democrats directly threatened to destroy the gas pipelines. As President Biden stated during a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in February 2022, “If Russia invades [Ukraine], there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” Twenty days before that, Under Secretary of State Nuland had said: “I want to be very clear: if Russia invades Ukraine one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.
As a result, the European gas market has undergone a huge transformation in the past couple of years. By the end of 2023, LNG accounted for 42% of the EU’s gas imports. This comes down to about 165 billion cubic meters of natural gas, when converted through regasification. Half of it – i.e. 77 billion cubic meters – was supplied by the US. According to a report by shipbroker Branchero Costa, the US is now the largest exporter of LNG, accounting for 21.7% of global shipments. In total, the US exported 88.9 million tons of LNG last year, which is 12.0% more than in 2022. To compare, the US exported 72.5 million tons of LNG in 2021, and just 48.2 million tons in 2020. What more can we say?
As German Economy Minister and Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck said in the Bundestag, “We provide military and economic support to Ukraine, as well as to European countries that continue to support Ukraine. Therefore, we spend money – the money is no longer here, and we have to admit that it does not enter our economy.” Habeck admitted that the German economy had lost its competitive advantage due to the rejection of Russian gas, and energy prices in the country have increased." RT

64 combat clashes on front lines, most attacks repelled in Lyman sector

"Sixty-four combat engagements were recorded on the battlefield in Ukraine in the past 24 hours. In the Sivershchyna and Slobozhanshchyna sectors, the enemy maintains its military presence in the border areas, conducting subversive activities to prevent the deployment of Ukrainian troops to dangerous sectors and increasing the density of minefields along the state border. Enemy artillery and mortar attacks were recorded in more than 30 settlements, including Yeline, Bleshnia, Karpovychi and Leonivka in the Chernihiv region, Chuikivka, Iskryskivshchyna, Andriivka, Volodymyrivka, Basivka and Popivka in the Sumy region, Udy, Kozacha Lopan, Ohirtseve, Vovchansk, Budarky and Kolodiazne in the Kharkiv region.
In the Kupiansk sector,
Ukrainian defenders repelled five enemy attacks outside Synkivka in the Kharkiv region and Stelmakhivka in the Luhansk region, where the enemy tried to break through Ukrainian defenses. 
More than ten settlements came under artillery and mortar fire, including Dvorichna, Synkivka, Petropavlivka, Ivanivka and Berestove in the Kharkiv region.
In the Lyman sector,
Ukrainian defenders repelled 11 enemy attacks near Terny, Yampolivka and Torske in the Donetsk region, and Bilohorivka in the Luhansk region, where the enemy tried to break through the defenses of Ukrainian troops. More than ten settlements came under enemy artillery and mortar shelling, including Karmazynivka, Nevske and Bilohorivka in the Luhansk region and Torske, Dibrova, Serebrianka, Verkhnokamianske, Spirne and Rozdolivka in the Donetsk region.
In the Bakhmut sector,
Ukrainian forces repelled six enemy attacks near Ivanivske and Klishchiivka in the Donetsk region, where the enemy unsuccessfully tried to improve its tactical position. About ten settlements came under artillery and mortar fire, including Vasiukivka, Bohdanivka, Ivanivske, Klishchiivka, Andriivka and New York in the Donetsk region.
In the Avdiivka sector,
Ukrainian defenders repelled eight enemy attacks near Stepove and Avdiivka and 12 attacks outside Tonenke and Pervomaiske in the Donetsk region, where the enemy unsuccessfully tried to break through Ukrainian defenses. About ten settlements, including Novobakhmutivka, Berdychi, Avdiyivka and Pervomaiske in the Donetsk region, came under enemy artillery and mortar fire.
In the Marinka sector,
Ukrainian forces continue to hold the enemy near Heorhiivka and Novomykhailivka in the Donetsk region, where the enemy unsuccessfully tried to improve its tactical position ten times. Such settlements in the Donetsk region as Maksymilianivka, Heorhiivka, Pobieda and Novomykhailivka came under artillery and mortar fire from the occupiers.
In the Shakhtarske sector,
Ukrainian defenders repelled three enemy attacks outside Zolota Nyva and west of Staromaiorske, Donetsk region. More than ten settlements, including Vodiane, Vuhledar, Bohoiavlenka, Staromaiorske, and Zelene Pole, came under artillery and mortar attacks.
In the Zaporizhzhia sector,
Ukrainian defenders repelled an enemy attack west of Verbove in the Zaporizhzhia region. More than 15 settlements, including Levadne, Huliaipole, Charivne, Mala Tokmachka, Novoandriivka, and Lobkove in the Zaporizhzhia region were hit by artillery and mortar attacks." Ukrin

Ukraine appears to be attacking Russia's oil and gas industry with small, cheap drones that can bypass its air defenses

"Several oil and gas facilities in Russia have caught fire in recent weeks following suspected drone attacks.
Ukraine appears to be targeting energy infrastructure to hamper Russian supply lines.
Russia's air defense systems have proven to be less effective against small drones.
Ukraine appears to be targeting Russia's oil and gas industry with small, cheap drones as it seeks to disrupt Russian supply lines.
Fires have broken out at several energy infrastructure locations in Russia over the last few weeks following suspected drone strikes, including at a Rosneft oil refinery in Tuapse, a Rosneft storage facility in Klintsy, and Novatek's Baltic Sea Ust-Luga terminal." MS

China Unveils High-Speed 'Dream Bullet' That Changes Directions Via Instructions Sent by Satellite

"Chinese scientists have reportedly brought to life the "dream bullet," a concept initially
conceived by the
United States Navy.
This groundbreaking ammunition has the ability to continuously alter its flight path based on satellite instructions." MS

Troops neutralize 10, arrest bandit kingpin in N’West

"The Nigerian Army says its troops have eliminated 10 terrorists and arrested a bandit kingpin in clearance operations in the North-West region.
The Information Officer, Joint Task Force, Operation Hadarin Daji, Capt. Yagata Ibrahim, said this in a statement in Gusau." DailyNigeria