Energy rationing has already been introduced in Germany and in the UK, amidst threats of a choice between “rationing or blackouts,” a tsunami of pubs and restaurants face closure due to soaring energy bills | In Prague, on Friday, a large crowd gathered on the streets to protest primarily against soaring energy prices, but also against the European Union, NATO and EU climate change plans. Protesters also wanted the country to be neutral militarily. ● Some of the groups at the Prague demonstration include the populist Freedom and Direct Democracy party and the Communist party. ● ”The aim of our demonstration is to demand change, mainly in solving the issue of energy prices, especially electricity and gas, which will destroy our economy this autumn” said Jiri Havel, co-organizer of the event. ● The police estimate that the number of protesters were around 70 000 and they say that the protest was peaceful.

70,000 Czechs rally in Prague; Want Russian Sanctions Removed, Neutrality over Ukraine Fighting (Hal Turner)

Russia is reportedly weighing a plan to buy up to $70 billion in the Chinese yuan and other "friendly" currencies this year to stem the ruble's sharp surge amid Western sanctions against Moscow over its military operation in Ukraine | The ambitious plan gained initial support at a special “strategic” planning meeting of the top Russian government and central bank officials on August 30, according to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the deliberations. ● The move comes after the Kremlin’s years-long policy of containing spending and saving hundreds of billions in dollars, euros, and other foreign currencies as a cushion to insulate the Russian economy from the shocks of oil prices.

💬 “In the new situation, accumulating liquid foreign exchange reserves for future crises is extremely difficult and not expedient," the report stated. “The frozen $300 billion were of no help to Russia; on the contrary, they became vulnerability and a symbol of missed opportunities,” the report said, adding that saving that money “is a direct reduction of investments in Russia in favor of investments in other countries.”

Bloomberg said in the short term, with earnings from exports of oil and gas flooding in and driving the current account surplus to a record this year and pushing the ruble higher, the proposal calls for spending 4.4 trillion rubles ($70 billion) to buy the currencies of “friendly” countries, mostly yuan. ● Before the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine in late February, Moscow had steadily increased its yuan investments as part of its diversification campaign, becoming one of the largest holders of reserves in the Chinese currency in the world.

The US energy secretary is pressuring refiners to stop exporting more fuel to European allies in dire need | It’s starting to look like it’s Europe’s turn to learn what Washington’s promises are worth. (Spoiler alert: Not much.) In a letter that the Wall Street Journal editorial board has described as “bullying,” US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm demands that the nation’s main energy refining companies refrain from increasing fuel exports at a time when America’s allies in Europe are in deep need. 💬 “Given the historic level of US refined product exports, I again urge you to focus in the near term on building inventories in the United States, rather than selling down current stocks and further increasing exports,” Granholm wrote, citing “historically low inventory levels of gasoline and diesel in parts of the country.” In other words, America first. Who’s surprised? Europe certainly shouldn’t be – despite what it may have been led to believe.

Europe's Economic And Social Suicide - Provoked by The U.S. And Helped Along By Europe's Leaders

Helsinki has banned the “export” of euro banknotes to Russia | Finnish customs officials have begun seizing cash from Russians returning home across the border, media outlet Fontanka reported on Monday, citing a man who claimed his money was confiscated. ● A resident of St. Petersburg identified only as Yuri was returning from a business trip to Serbia via Finland. He was driving back to Russia on Saturday evening when he was stopped at the border. ● When asked if he had any money with him, Yuri showed the customs officials €1,390 ($1,390) in cash. The man said he brought all of it from Russia and did not acquire any additional money abroad. He also had rubles and Serbian dinars, but the customs officials were apparently only interested in the euros.

This is going to be a bitterly cold winter for a whole lot of people. In particular, things are likely to get really uncomfortable in Europe. Soaring energy prices and concern about potential shortages are causing anxiety all over the continent, and widespread protests have already started to take place. The cost of living has become extremely painful for those on the bottom of the economic food chain, and people want their governments to do something. Of course this is what always happens when nations embrace socialism. There is an expectation that those in charge will solve any and every problem, but this time around the limitations of the socialists running Europe will become very clear. Needless to say, many in Europe are being completely stunned by the size of their energy bills, and a massive backlash has been brewing.

Leaked data [sic] shows water companies are replacing 0.05% of England’s crumbling pipe network a year

Minister Admit 34 Hospital Buildings In England Have Roofs That Could Collapse
Buckingham Palace Has Had A £360m Refurbishment - This Is What It Looks Like Now

A top German official has trashed people who may be planning to protest against energy blackouts as “enemies of the state” and “extremists” who want to overthrow the government.

The interior minister of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Herbert Reul (CDU), says that anti-mandatory vaxx and anti-lockdown demonstrators have found a new cause – the energy crisis. In an interview with German news outlet NT, Reul revealed that German security services were keeping an eye on “extremists” who plan to infiltrate the protests and stage violence, with the unrest being planned via the Telegram messenger app, which German authorities have previously tried to ban.

💬 “You can already tell from those who are out there,” said Reul. “The protesters no longer talk about coronavirus or vaccination. But they are now misusing people’s worries and fears in other fields. (…) It’s almost something like new enemies of the state that are establishing themselves.”

A top German official is predicting energy rationing riots that will make anti-lockdown unrest look like a “children’s birthday party” in comparison. We’re not talking about energy price hikes. We’re not talking about people’s bills being more expensive. We’re talking about the power being turned off completely, for God knows how long. Share this video!

The UK government has slammed the ‘Don’t Pay’ campaign as “highly irresponsible”

As energy prices in the UK are set to reach record highs, an anonymous group called ‘Don’t Pay UK’ has launched a campaign calling on 1 million Brits to stop paying their energy bills on October 1, when prices are expected to jump once again. Campaign members say that at least 75,000 people have so far pledged to cancel their direct debits for gas and electricity in protest of escalating costs. [...] Don’t Pay UK estimates that around 6.3 million UK households will be thrown into fuel poverty by winter, with tens of millions of homes experiencing “fuel stress,” meaning they will spend more than 10% of their income on energy bills alone.

The Russian and Turkish presidents adopted a joint declaration covering issues ranging from grain exports to fighting terrorism

Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to Russia’s southern city of Sochi on Friday. The two leaders spent over four hours discussing a broad range of issues, ranging from grain exports to bilateral trade and counter-terrorism efforts. RT outlines the major points of the talks.

Russia’s relations with Erdogan observed – the deliverer of Russian gas to European markets (Tap News)

Bratislava and Prague, SANA- Slovak writer, Milan Antal, has stressed that the US occupation of parts of Syrian territory and the presence of its illegal forces in them constitutes a flagrant violation of international law.

💬 “The United States is plundering resources in Syria, and it is not only stealing oil, but also grain in cooperation with affiliated militias, which compels Syria to import wheat to meet the needs of its citizens, after it was able before the crisis to produce quantities of wheat and export some of it to other countries, including Europe.”

In turn, the Czech Nitsenzirovana Pravda website affirmed that the US is practicing theft and looting in Syria through its illegal forces, noting that this is the custom of the Americans in any country they occupy, all or part of it.

A report from early July by CNBC would discuss these sanctions. In their article, “US mulls fresh bid to restrict chipmaking tools for China’s SMIC,” CNBC would report:

💬 The Biden administration is considering new targeted restrictions on shipments of chipmaking tools to China, seeking to hamstring advances by China’s largest chipmaker, SMIC, without slowing the flow of chips into the global economy, five people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The Commerce Department, which oversees export policy, is actively discussing the possibility of banning exports of chipmaking tools to those Chinese factories that make advanced semiconductors at the 14 nanometer node and smaller, the people said, to stymie China’s efforts at making more state-of-the-art chips.

The very notion of one nation dictating to another what it can and cannot manufacturer and specifically to keep one nation subordinated to another as its “factory,” helps illustrate the true nature of the United States’ “rules-based international order,” an order in which the US makes rules solely serving its interests and achieved at the expense of all other nations. Those who refuse to follow these rules become “adversaries” as China clearly has.

The US is Trying to Oppose China in the Field of International Economy (Vladimir Terehov)

The American Prairie (AP), a conservation project in Montana, has quietly scooped up more than 450,000 acres of land with the help of its billionaire donors and the federal government.

The American Prairie (AP), a conservation project in Montana, has quietly scooped up more than 450,000 acres of land with the help of its billionaire donors and the federal government. The little-known project aims to create the largest "fully functioning ecosystem" in the continental U.S. by stitching together about 3.2 million acres of private and public lands, according to the American Prairie Foundation, which founded the reserve more than 20 years ago. The group has recorded 34 transactions spanning roughly 453,188 acres of land throughout central Montana — much of which were once used for farming and grazing — since 2004 and continues to aggressively expand.

💬 "Our mission is to assemble the largest complex of public and private lands devoted to wildlife in the lower 48," Pete Geddes, AP's vice president and chief external relations officer, told Fox News Digital in an interview. "For comparison, about 25% larger than Yellowstone." "We're not asking the federal government to create anything, we're not asking the federal government for any money," he added. "Instead, we're engaged in private philanthropy and voluntary exchange by buying ranches from people who would like to sell that to us."

The U.N., the WEF, and other organizations are advancing the use of weeds and bugs as food. This, combined with a multitude of other signs, indicate that the UN and WEF are behind a global war on the farmers.

The United Nations’ “Agenda 2030” Sustainable Development Goals and the U.N.’s partners at the World Economic Forum (WEF) are directly related to the rising regulatory assault on agricultural producers from Holland and the United States to Sri Lanka and beyond. In fact, a number of the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are directly tied to the implementation of laws that put pressure on global agriculture, ranching, and food sources.

High-ranking Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials within the U.N. system assisted in the development of the SDGs and are currently assisting in directing the organization’s execution of the global strategy. The U.N.-backed sustainability regulations on agriculture and food production, according to a number of experts, would cause economic ruin, shortages of essential items, widespread starvation, and a significant loss of personal freedoms if not stopped.

Ireland joins Canada and the Netherlands in contributing to world famine (Andrea Widburg)

Since the end of World War II, the U.S. dollar has been the world’s reserve currency since the U.S. had become, by far, the world’s most powerful country. | But in addition to being the most powerful and being able to project that power globally, the U.S. also had become the wealthiest nation on the planet as well, thanks to our ingenuity and, for decades, successive presidential administrations and congresses that had America’s best interests in mind. Yes, Donald Trump was not the original “America first” president; in fact, that’s why his campaign in 2016 was so successful: He ran on a platform of returning our country to those days (and you see what the deep state that now runs the country from within the shadows did to him). Trump’s stolen election, the installation of a dementia patient as president, and the fact that Americans did not revolt over what took place by the tens of millions have led many of the world’s lesser powers to conclude that we are now an ’empire in decline,’ like the British and Romans before us, and as such, feel it’s the right time to move on from the United States.

In December 2020, a new resident appeared in Vésenaz, a respectable suburb in Geneva. He paid an astronomical price of 60 million francs, or Hr 2 billion, to become part of the community and settle on the shores of Lake Geneva. This young man isn’t a successful businessman. Rather, he is an heir to an oligarchic empire created by his father, the richest man in Ukraine. The man who bought the house in Geneva is Damir Akhmetov, a 32-year-old son of Rinat Akhmetov, the biggest oligarch of the poorest country in Europe, Ukraine.

Damir is Akhmetov’s eldest son. He left Ukraine at the age of 10, studied in Switzerland and the UK, and is a member of the supervisory boards of his father’s energy and metallurgy companies, DTEK and Metinvest. His story has nothing to do with the success of a self-made man, he never ran a business independently, and was involved only in the management of his father’s companies. It is a depressing reminder of how Ukraine has become a resource base for a select few while leaving 40 million people impoverished. After all, outside of Ukraine, Akhmetov Sr. has no significant business, and the fusion of politics and oligarchic influence has allowed him to amass billions. Forbes Akhmetov’s net worth to be $7.6 billion. (H/T-Vanessa Beeley)

Hal Turner | For those of us who have been scratching our heads as to why the US and EU are so bent on "helping" Ukraine, I found something out today: Since the 2014 Coup which overthrew Democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovich, and put a puppet regime, favorable to the west, in his place...three giant corporations -- Cargill, DuPont and Monsanto -- bought seventeen million hectares of Ukraine agricultural land. That's sixty percent (60%) of the total agricultural land in Ukraine! Thought you'd be interested in that.

James Cobett | For weeks now, farmers in the Netherlands have been engaging in heated protests over their government’s plan to halve the country’s nitrogen and ammonia pollution by 2030. It is estimated that this plan—which will mandate emissions cuts of 95% in some provinces—will require a 30% reduction in livestock and will drive many of the nation’s farmers out of business.

The protests have been remarkably heated, as tens of thousands take to the streets to block the country’s highways, torch bales of hay and spread manure around politicians’ homes. In one incident, Dutch police actually fired live rounds on one of the protesters as he attempted to breach the police line with his tractor.

Yes, the scenes coming out of the usually quiet Dutch countryside are shocking. But they should not be. They are just the early stages of a great worldwide battle that is shaping up between the free people of the world and the technocrats who are starting to clamp down on them in the name of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Enslavement. Make no mistake: Whoever you are, wherever you live, whatever you do, these power-hungry elitists will be coming after your livelihood next. We are all Dutch farmers now.

eugyppius | For about a week now, gas has not been flowing through Nord Stream 1, the crucial pipeline from Russia to Germany. Officially, it’s down for scheduled maintenance, and we’ve even been treated to a minor farce, featuring Robert Habeck pleading with Canada to violate their own sanctions and return to Russia a pipeline turbine that had been shipped there for repairs. Unofficially, of course, we’re being squeezed, as an inducement to stop our war-prolonging material support to Ukraine, and for our imprudent bellicosity towards the country that keeps our lights on.

It turns out that Russia can do without German automobiles, but Germany can’t do without Russian gas. If the hydrocarbons don’t come back online, Germany will face its greatest economic crisis since World War II. The state will implement emergency rationing plans, which call for starving our lockdown-ravaged industry first, in favour of keeping people alive in their homes. Probably water will also be rationed as a secondary measure, so that not too much gas is wasted in the heating of it. Some municipalities are already establishing facilities where the elderly, the poor and the sick can sleep in heated rooms on cots in the coldest months.

No Gas for Germany (Vox Popoli)

Russia turns off the Nord Steam 1 gas pipeline to Europe for its annual 10 days' maintenance and no one is sure that it will be turned on again. If that’s it for gas deliveries this year, how many days of gas are currently in the storage tanks? Europe is afraid that the Kremlin will spark a major energy crisis this winter by turning off its gas supplies completely. Gazprom reduced flows of gas to Europe by 60% in mid-June just as the tanks were half full.

The EU has set a target of having the tanks 80% full by the end of October and as bne IntelliNews reported, even at the reduced flow rates Europe should hit that target after the tanks reached 60% of capacity in the first week of July. Despite the reduction of gas from Russia, Europe is currently importing record amounts of LNG from the US that allow the gas in tank storage to continue growing. But things are not quite that simple. Just getting to 80% full by the end of October is not enough gas to get through the whole heating season, which runs from October 1 to March 31, without continuous supplies of more gas during the winter.

An initial Russian freight train has arrived at Iran’s Sarakhs railway station in Khorasan-Razavi province on the border with Turkmenistan, IRNA reported on July 12.

The rail haulage development is important in the context of the accelerated development of the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC). A big aim of the corridor is to provide Russia with substantial import-export trade access to the Persian Gulf and Sea of Oman (Indian Ocean) via Iran, while also allowing it to develop trade links with Iran’s Arab neighbours to the west. INSTC has been under discussion for years, with little tangible progress in realising the project, but it has taken on a new lease of life given how Western countries have cut off access to Russian hauliers following the invasion of Ukraine. The Iran route now provides Moscow with increasingly vital options when it comes to trade with India and other points east. The Russian freight train is reportedly pulling 39 containers with building materials for India. It departed from Chekhov station in the Moscow region before covering 3,800 kilometres to reach Sarakhs.

International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC) (ClearIAS)
Iran Proudly Embraces Its Geo-Economic Role In Integrating Eurasia (Andrew Korybko)

Minister for Nature and Nitrogen Policy, more precisely. That’s an official position in The Netherlands. And that position is occupied right now by Christianne van der Wal-Zeggelink, of the super-rich van der Wal family. They are known for owning a massive supermarket chain called Boni, but few people know they are also massively invested in Picnic, huge groceries retailer in The Netherlands, about to expand in Germany too, as attested by the mainstream media RTL.

Even less people know is that…Picnic directly buys from an existing supermarket chain (Boni), which saves them the operational costs on that side. Not having shops saves them big time on distribution and rent, which they can use to benefit consumers: So whether you buy from Boni or Picnic, you buy from the Dutch Nitrogen Minister.

But, in September 2021, after pouring in about half a billion dollars, the lead investor in Picnic has become none other than Bill Gates. That kind of money buys you access to anything.

Be Proud that we Excel (Watts Up With That?)
Broad sense of frustration, anger, despair': Dutch farmers protest against nitrogen cuts (07/12/22)
Dutch cops now shooting at protesting farmers! (07/07/22)
Eva Vlaardingerbroek: Dutch Farmers Protesting Communist Agenda (NTD-Video)

VILNIUS, July 11 (Reuters) - Lithuania on Monday expanded restrictions on trade through its territory to Russia's Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, as more European Union sanctions against Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine took effect. Additional goods barred from Monday morning include concrete, wood, alcohol and alcohol-based industrial chemicals, a spokesperson for Lithuanian customs said. Lithuanian Railways estimated that the restrictions would apply to the equivalent of about 15% of the 3.7 million tonnes of cargo it transported from Russia to Kaliningrad in the first half of 2022. That includes expanding a ban on ferrous metals which began last month.

2022.07.13 16:34: Sanctioned goods to Kaliningrad can transit Lithuania by rail, says Brussels - The European Commission has issued new guidelines, saying sanctions do not apply to rail transit via Lithuania to Russia's Kaliningrad. In the document published on Wednesday, the Commission said rail transit can only be used to satisfy the needs of essential goods in Kaliningrad.
13/07/2022 | 16:30 GMT+2: EU tells Lithuania to allow transit of Russian goods to Kaliningrad in sign of war thaw - Lithuania had put itself in a standoff with Russia by blocking the transit of many essential goods to its Kaliningrad enclave. Russia had threatened reprisals. Now the EU is telling Lithuania to back down. This is a sign that EU leaders are no longer willing to punish Russia further for the invasion of Ukraine. It's a sign that they're trying to make a deal for Russia to keep the natural gas taps open.