In a congressional testimony on Wednesday, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo emphasized the potentially severe consequences for the United States if China were to decide to reunify with Taiwan.

Raimondo, showcasing that the US is only interested in Taiwan's "security" because of its importance in the microchip sector, highlighted the critical role of Taiwan in microchip supply and production, stressing the decades-long collaboration between Taipei and Washington in this domain.

Speaking before the US House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science, Raimondo underscored the significance of Taiwan's contribution to the microchip industry. She pointed out that the United States currently relies heavily on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), procuring 92% of its leading-edge chips from the Taiwanese firm.

There are some recognizable similarities among the empires vassals. They always censor and ban news outlets that are anti imperialists.

Europe banned RT, Israel banned Aljaazera, and now Argentina banned Telesur.

First and foremost, absolutely fuck fiscal austerity and laissez-faire, there is nothing natural about this, only consequence of shit political choices, such as scraping environment disaster prevention, basically no relief efford funding, global warming denial and shredding of environment protection laws.

The Israeli occupation forces officially began, on Monday, the forceful displacement of the already-displaced Palestinian people currently seeking shelter in Rafah, which had been designated by the Israelis as an alleged "safe zone" early in the war.

WSJ Source for claims

> Foreign bondholders paused Kiev’s debt payments in 2022, but their patience is reportedly running out

> A group of foreign bondholders have taken steps to force Ukraine to begin repaying its debts as soon as next year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. If they succeed, Kiev could hemorrhage $500 million every year on interest payments alone.

> The group, which includes investment giants Blackrock and Pimco, granted Kiev a two-year debt holiday in 2022, gambling that the conflict with Russia would have concluded by now.

> With no end to the fighting in sight, the lenders have now hired lawyers at Weil Gotshal & Manges and bankers from PJT Partners to meet with Ukrainian officials and strike a deal whereby Ukraine would resume making interest payments next year in exchange for having a significant chunk of its debt written off, anonymous sources told the Wall Street Journal.

> The group holds around a fifth of Ukraine’s $20 billion in outstanding Eurobonds, the newspaper reported. While this figure represents a fraction of Ukraine’s total external debt of $161.5 billion, servicing the interest on these bonds would cost the country $500 million annually, the bondholders said.

> Should the bondholders fail to strike a deal with Kiev by August, Ukraine could default. This would damage the country’s credit rating and restrict its ability to borrow even more money in the future.

> According to the newspaper, Ukrainian officials are hoping that the US and other Western governments will take its side during talks with the bondholders. However, a group of these countries have already offered Ukraine a debt holiday on around $4 billion worth of loans until 2027, and are reportedly concerned that any deal with the bondholders would see private lenders being repaid before them.

> Ukraine already relies on foreign aid to keep government departments open and state employees paid.

> According to the Wall Street Journal, some bondholders have suggested that the US and EU could use frozen Russian assets to pay off Ukraine’s debts. While around $300 billion in assets belonging to the Russian central bank have been frozen in American and European banks since 2022, the US only passed legislation allowing for their seizure last month, and no similar legal mechanism exists in Europe, where the vast majority of these assets are held.

> The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank (ECB) have both urged governments not to steal this money, with ECB chief Christine Lagarde warning last month that doing so would risk “breaking the international order that you want to protect.”

Israeli police also storm a room used by Al Jazeera in the Ambassador Hotel in Jerusalem.

On Sunday, the Israeli cabinet unanimously approved the shutdown of the Al Jazeera channel and office in the country.

> By Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory

> The meaning of the words ‘civil society’ changes depending on whether Washington is speaking about protests inside or outside the American border

> The elites and mainstream media of the West are so addicted to double standards that spotting yet another one is hardly news. These are the people who have just given us genocide re-labeled as ”self-defense,” who abhor spheres of influence except when they are global and belong to Washington (with a sidekick role for Brussels), and who insist on the rule of law while threatening the International Criminal Court if it so much as dares look their way.

> Yet there is something special about the latest case of Western ‘values’ schizophrenia, this time about the concept of ‘civil society’ in conjunction with two political struggles, one in the US and the other in the Caucasus nation of Georgia.

> In the US, students, professors, and others are protesting against the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and against American participation in that crime.

> In Georgia, the issue at stake is a proposed law to impose transparency on the sprawling and unusually powerful NGO sector. Its critics denounce this law as a government power grab and as somehow ‘Russian’ (which, spoiler alert, it is not).

[Poster's Note: Their law is less far reaching than a US law called FARA, additionally most EU states have similar laws.]

> The very different reactions to these two cases of intense public contention by the West’s political and mainstream media elites show that, for them, there are really two kinds of civil society: There is the ‘vibrant’ variety, with ‘vibrant’ an almost comically ossified cliche, used by the Washington Post Editorial Board, in EU statements, and by White House spokesman John Kirby, to name only a few. It is almost as if someone had sent around a memo on proper terminology. This vibrant, good kind of civil society is to be celebrated and supported.

> And then there is the wrong kind of civil society, which must be shut down. US President Joe Biden has just expressed the essence of this attitude: “We are a civil society, and order must prevail.” This is, of course, a bizarre misreading of the idea of civil society. Ideally, its key features are autonomy from the state and the capacity to establish an effective counterweight, and even, if necessary, to offer resistance to it. Putting the emphasis on “order” instead is ignorant or dishonest. In reality, civil society makes no sense, even as an ideal, if it is not granted a substantial degree of freedom to be disorderly. A civil society that is so orderly as to disturb no one is a fig leaf for enforced conformism and – at least – incipient authoritarianism.

> What is more important is that ‘order,’ in his usage, is a transparent euphemism: According to the New York Times, over the last two weeks, over 2,300 protesters have been arrested on almost 50 American campuses. Often, arrests have been made with demonstrative brutality. Police have used riot gear, stun grenades, and rubber bullets. They have assaulted students as well as some professors with massive aggression.

> The most well-known individual case at this moment is that of Annelise Orleck, a professor at Dartmouth College. Orleck is 65 years old and attempted to protect students from police violence. In response, she was slammed into the ground in the worst MMA style, knelt on by beefy policemen, who clearly lack elementary decency, and dragged away with whiplash trauma, as if she had been in a serious car accident. Ironically (if that’s the word), Orleck is Jewish and, at one time, used to be the head of her universities program in Jewish Studies.

> In another, extremely disturbing development, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a violent police crackdown – including use of rubber bullets – was preceded by a vicious attack by so-called pro-Israeli ”counter-protesters.” In reality, this was a mob out to inflict maximum harm on the anti-genocide protesters, who, a New York Times investigation has found, maintained an almost entirely defensive stance. University security forces and the police failed to intervene for hours, letting the “counter-protesters” run wild.

> That is a pattern every historian of the rise of fascism in Weimar Germany will recognize: First the SA mobs of the rising Nazi party had a free hand to assault the Left, then the police would go after the same Left as well.

> That is the real face of the “order” that President Biden and all too many in the West’s establishments endorse. But only at home. When it comes to the unrest in Georgia, their tone is entirely different. Make no mistake, there has been substantial violence – and what Biden would denounce as “chaos” if it happened in America – in Georgia. Indeed, while the US anti-genocide protesters have not been violent but disorderly (yes, those are very different things), the protesters in Georgia have used genuine violence, for instance, when they tried to storm the parliament.

> Nothing remotely comparable has been done by the US anti-genocide protesters. Regarding the trespassing and causing public inconveniences that so agitate the US president, there has been plenty of that in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. By Biden’s logic a protest must not even disturb or delay a campus graduation ceremony. What would that imply for blocking a central traffic node in the capital city?

> Don’t get me wrong: The Georgian protesters report violent police tactics used against them as well, and, more broadly, the rights or wrongs of their cause, or the draft law they reject are beyond the scope of this article. I do believe they are used by the West for a geopolitical play Color-Revolution-style, but that is not the point.

> The pertinent point here is, once again, staggering Western hypocrisy: A West that thinks trying to storm parliament is part of having a “vibrant” civil society in Georgia, cannot mass-arrest and brutalize anti-genocide protesters on its own campuses.

Original Non-archived Source

A group of foreign holders of Ukrainian Eurobonds intends to seek from Kiev the resumption of interest payments on government debt as early as 2025. This is according to WSJ citing informed sources.

The creditors' committee includes BlackRock and Pimco, which account for about 20% of Ukraine's outstanding $20 billion Eurobonds.

According to the bondholders, Ukraine, which received $60.6 billion in aid from the United States , could agree to forgive part of the debt in exchange for the resumption of interest payments of up to $500 million a year. Some creditors have already discussed these plans with Ukrainian authorities. Kiev hopes to involve Washington and other allies in the work.

However, the United States and its partners are concerned that bailouts for Ukraine will end up with bondholders if Kyiv starts servicing its debt again. Countries have granted debt holidays of about $4 billion until 2027.

If the deal is not concluded, Ukraine may face default in August after the expiration of the holiday for bondholders. This will make it difficult for it to continue to attract loans on the market.

Initially, creditors agreed to a two-year deferment, believing that the conflict would end by 2024. Despite the protracted nature of the situation, they hope for the stabilization of Ukraine’s finances thanks to the support of the West. 🤡

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The article notes that the refusal of direct purchase of Russian gas seriously hit the competitiveness of industrial enterprises in Europe due to a sharp jump in energy prices.

According to the economist, Europe may lose the industrial technological race to the United States, since the United States has already become more profitable for businessmen, even taking into account the relocation of production.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/turkiye-suspends-all-trade-with-israel-in-surprise-new-blow-israel-threatens-retaliation.html

U.S. mercenary Luke Denman admitted that the operation aimed to kidnap President Maduro.

On May 3, 2020, U.S.-backed mercenaries failed in the so-called "Operation Gedeon," an attempt to assassinate Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and execute a coup d'état.

https://archive.ph/vzYFB

https://archive.ph/zADeG

Russia, has been invited to open a branch in Wenchang with room for 10,000 students of aerospace engineering. The prime site is evidence that space co-operation, is surging ahead.

Examples abound in a study published by a research arm of the USAF. The study details Russia’s willingness to help China build missile-warning/defence systems, and to sell it advanced rocket engines. With  agreements to link up, Beidou and Glonass. The two countries have pledged to build a base on the Moon and to work together on detecting space debris—(useful for tracking an adversary’s satellites). The study quotes Xi Jinping, linking technical co-operation with Russia to plans for “the reform of the global governance system” (ie, pushing America from centre stage).

China wants to harness Russia’s decades of expertise in space. Russia’s space programme needs China’s money. It has also wanted access to Chinese components.

The western values Ukraine is defending are becoming more apparent by the day.

Israeli news broadcaster Channel 12 on Sunday reported that a total of 30 servicemembers in the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) refused to comply with orders to ready the army for a ground invasion of the city of Rafah.

The broadcaster cited fatigue as the primary reason for the refusal, stating that these servicemembers feel unable to continue fighting in Gaza after nearly 7 months of combat.