Australia’s Fair Work Commission is set to decide on Friday whether to halt the strikes at Chevron’s two LNG export facilities in Australia after the latest talks between the U.S. supermajor and trade unions failed on Wednesday.

“The ongoing lack of agreement reinforces our view that there is no reasonable prospect of agreement between the parties,” a spokesperson for Chevron told Reuters today.  

The workers have stepped up their industrial action that began earlier last week, and plan further escalations in the coming weeks.   

After the latest negotiations between the trade unions and the U.S. company failed to resolve the labor dispute, the Fair Work Commission, the labor market regulator, will meet on September 22 to hear the dispute after Chevron reached out to it in an effort to force the workers to settle.

The supermajor is seeking to get a so-called “intractable bargaining” declaration from the Fair Work Commission, meaning the FWC could force workers to agree to terms proposed by Chevron.

About three weeks after Shell, Europe's largest oil company, quietly shelved the world's largest corporate plan to develop carbon offsets, the world's number four iron ore producer, Fortescue Metals Group Ltd., has decided to end purchases of voluntary carbon offsets. This comes as at least one major study has revealed carbon offsets are prone to 'greenwashing' and most credits don't actually benefit the climate. 

Billionaire Andrew Forrest's Fortescue Metals produced about 2.55 million tons of scope 1 and 2 carbon dioxide emissions in the year leading up to June 30. Bloomberg said the company has implemented a new policy to halt purchases of carbon offset credits from the current fiscal year.  

"We are the only heavy emitter in the world to stop purchasing voluntary offsets," Dino Otranto, chief executive officer of Fortescue's metals business, said in a statement. 

The move by Fortescue comes after Shell laid out an updated strategy for the company that included cutting costs and doubling down on profit centers (oil and gas) - which notably shelved the world's largest corporate plan to develop carbon offsets. 

According to Bloomberg Green's investigations, many offset programs don't deliver the promised environmental benefits.

The European Right is calling out Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni for what they call a betrayal and U-turn on migration at this key moment that the southern Italian island of Lampedusa is being overwhelmed with well over 6,000 migrants, the bulk of which flooded the tiny outpost on a single day last week.

For example, Matteo Salvini and France's Marine Le Pen, who leads the National Rally’s parliamentary faction, have blasted Meloni for her handling of the crisis, or rather for being missing in action at this pivotal moment.

"(There is) trouble, trouble for those leaders who don’t realize there are signs of alarm and danger from the massive arrival of migrants on Lampedusa," Le Pen said at a rally this week. "An island of 6,000 people, where more than 6,000 migrants arrived in a single day — trouble for the population in which the leaders don’t take action immediately to face this giant challenge."

The AP called it a direct "swipe" at Meloni, even though she wasn't mentioned by name. Le Pen went so far as to say these same leaders "justify their cowardice by claiming there is no alternative."

Syria is clearly on the verge of collapse in terms of the economy and humanitarian situation.

The country's southern province of al-Suwayda', whose population primarily comes from the Druze minority, is currently witnessing protests on an unprecedented scale. While the province has previously seen protests motivated primarily by the country's deteriorating economic and livelihood situation, these protests are now far more widespread in the province and larger in scale.

There has also been a definite paradigm shift in these protests: the main initial demands to improve the economy and livelihood situation were endorsed by the Druze community's three leading religious authorities in Syria. Calls for the government to resign, for the departure of President Bashar al-Assad and a political transition are now stronger and more prevalent. In multiple localities in the province, which has formally been under government control since the start of the unrest and civil war in 2011, demonstrators have closed the Ba'ath Party headquarters and removed portraits of Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad.

While these protests are in themselves remarkable for the province in terms of the numbers participating, their persistence and how open the calls for political change are, they do raise the question about whether they constitute the potential for a real shift in Syria's "status quo" since spring 2020. However much one might sympathise with the protests, they are probably unlikely to shift the situation in a significant way. The protestors, although immensely courageous, are too few, and have little leverage.

It will take ages to unpack the silos of information inbuilt in the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok last week, coupled with the – armored - train-keeps-a-rollin’ conducted by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un straddling every nook and cranny of Primorsky Krai.

​The key themes all reflect the four main vectors of the New Great Game as it’s being played across the Global South: energy and energy resources; manufacturing and labor; market and trade rules; and logistics. But they go way beyond – exploring the subtle nuances of the current civilizational war.

Key statements by Russian President Vladimir Putin in his address to delegates at the Eastern Economic Forum:

▪️ The global economy continues to change, primarily because the West is tearing down the system of financial relations;

▪️ Amid the destruction of the financial system by the West, the list of countries that are ready to cooperate not based on Western conventions, but for all humanity, is expanding;

▪️ The dynamics of investment in the Far East is three times faster than for all of Russia in its entirety;

As Hurricane Nigel churns in the Atlantic Ocean, weather forecasters are closely watching the possibility of a subtropical depression or storm forming off the Southeast coast later this week and could swamp the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast by the weekend. 

While NYC Mayor Eric Adams insists that the migrant crisis will "destroy New York City," and hurt 'low-income New Yorkers' because of the 'financial tsunami,' it seems the city is somehow able to rationalize launching a reparations task force, and removing statues of George Washington.

These are among various measures the city council discussed on Tuesday during a public hearing on a measure to remove works of art on city property that "depict a person who owned enslaved persons or directly benefited economically from slavery, or who participated in systemic crimes against indigenous peoples or other crimes against humanity," Fox News reports.

[We assume this includes all Islamic art, since Muhammad had 14 concubines?]

The removals would include statues of America's first president, George Washington, Dutch governor and New York settler Peter Stuyvesant, and Christopher Columbus.

If the Public Design Commission (PDC) determined not to remove the work of art, then it would be required to include a plan to install an "explanatory plaque" next to the work of art. The proposal would also require PDC to consult with the Department of Education to install plaques on sidewalks or other public space adjacent to schools named after a person that fits the criteria. -Fox News

Assistant Secretary of the US Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology Doug Bush told Defense News in an interview on Monday that the service's Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) aims to be fielded at the end of the year, contingent on a successful retest after missing a four-year-old target to deploy by the government's fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. 

Bush said the delay of the LRHW is due to the cancellation of a test of the Common Hypersonic Glide Body, adding the test planned for this month was going to be "pretty close to an operational test" instead of a developmental test. 

"We still have a path with a follow-up test to get to a fielded capability by the end of calendar 2023," Bush said. 

He continued, "It is just what it is, I mean, a fact of life, we're not going to field something until we have some confidence that if soldiers are asked to go use it in combat that it's going to work and be safe for them to use."

Bush noted, "We're still finding problems" and "it's actually good we're finding these" problems rather than later.

A homeless camp in Denver was cleaned up after a viral video revealed that some enterprising individuals had set up a makeshift speakeasy with prostitution tents, according to police.

The setup featured lounge chairs, umbrellas and astroturf was found in the city's burgeoning homeless encampment at 23rd and Champa streets.

The encampment resulted in "numerous complaints" to the police after pedestrians were forced into the street to pas it.

"We’re hearing there was an open bar, sales of alcohol, things like that," Denver Police Patrol Division Chief Aaron Sanchez told CBS Colorado, adding "We have officers looking into that."

Sanchez also said that there have been complaints that surrounding tents and couches at the streetside bar were being rented out for prostitution.

The Austro-libertarian movement has the better ideas. They continue to be discussed, elaborated, and intellectually defended. But how can the right ideas be implemented? What good is it to be right if the reality is left-wing? In fact, most of the population, or at least public opinion, seems to be drifting further and further to the left, with cancel culture, climate hysteria, a sprawling welfare state and ever higher taxes and levies.

The right ideas and theories are there, but they have not yet been put successful in practice. How can this be changed? Of course, ideas are important, they must also be disseminated, from below, from the grassroots up. It's an arduous process. And there has been undeniable progress in recent years. Nevertheless, the left-wing zeitgeist is rolling over the freedoms of citizens almost unhindered; most shockingly during the Covid crisis. The left tries to paint anyone who stands in the zeitgeist´s way as an extremist or even a Nazi.

Against this background, what can a successful strategy look like? Murray Rothbard addressed this question in an article in the Rothbard-Rockwell Report entitled Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement. His contribution is groundbreaking and forward-looking. He anticipates the successes of Donald Trump in the United States and, more recently, of Javier Milei in Argentina.

Javier Milei is making a splash on all sides, because on August 13, 2023, he won the primaries for the presidency in Argentina. In the German media, he is described as ultra-right and ultra-libertarian. Recently, the Financial Times dealt with the self-confessed anarcho-capitalist in a column, in which the author insinuated that the libertarian Milei would follow the strategy of right-wing populism designed by Murray Rothbard in 1992. This gives rise to the question if that claim is true and what exactly is this right-wing populism?

Update(1336ET): The controversial American transgender spokesperson for Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces Sarah Ashton-Cirillo (born Michael Cirillo) has been suspended indefinitely by the Ukrainian military, also pending an investigation. According to an official Ukrainian military statement, Ashton-Cirillo's recent statements regarding "hunting down" dissidents and "propagandists" were not approved...

The Biden administration's Department of Health and Human Services announced on Wednesday that it has officially banned the Wuhan Institute of Virology from receiving US funding for a decade, based on mounting evidence that it was ground zero for the Covid-19 pandemic.

On Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra sent a letter to WIV Director Genera, Dr. Yanyi Wang, to inform her that the lab - which Dr. Anthony Fauci offshored risky gain-of-function research to, would no longer be funded by US grants until July 16, 2033, the NY Post reports.

The letter notes that attempts had been made to contact the lab via fax, email and mail about HHS’s decision to suspend funding in July, but no WIV officials had contested the designation or even responded to the agency.

In that earlier missive, the NIH said it found the Wuhan Institute of Virology had “conducted an experiment yielding a level of viral activity which was greater than permitted under the terms of the grant,” which was for the study of bat coronaviruses.

Other requests for the Chinese research institution’s lab findings had also been ignored after NIH made requests for them on Nov. 5, 2021, and Jan. 6, 2022. -NY Post

A court in Alberta, Canada, sentenced Pastor Artur Pawlowski on Monday to 60 days in prison for a speech to Freedom Convoy truckers in February 2022 in which he supported their protests against repressive lockdown, vaccine, and other mandates related to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

Pawlowski, who first rose to prominence for expelling Canadian police from his church for trying to shut down an Easter service in 2021, faced multiple charges, including “mischief,” a crime in Canada, and violating the Critical Infrastructure Defense Act (CIDA). The latter charge suggested that Pawlowski’s speaking to protesters on the Alberta-Montana border was an attack on the province’s road infrastructure, as he encouraged them to continue an ongoing blockade demanding the lifting of coronavirus-related mandates. Prosecutors were demanding up to ten months in prison for the pastor on the grounds that he has publicly and repeatedly denied having any remorse for his vocal opposition to lockdowns.

“I’m not ashamed of what I did. If I had a chance to do it again, I would do it again, gladly,” Pawlowski told a crowd of supporters after his conviction on Monday.

Now, New York magazine has compiled a list of high-profile individuals known to have met with Epstein who do not appear in the black book. Its reporting is based on documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

The names include:

Webmaster addition: Are we being ruled by pedophiles?!?

Stephen Buyer, a former congressman for an Indiana district, has been sentenced to 22 years for insider trading.

The sentencing is in response to Buyer purchasing Sprint stock ahead of its merger with T-Mobile.

I never thought I would see the day a government official gets charged with insider trading.

If this is the new precedent, maybe Nancy Pelosi will get life in prison!

It’s only fair, given her net worth in the hundreds of millions.

A hidden disadvantage of our ruling class within the US/NATO imperialist sphere is that frequently, these elites need to scramble in response to developments they haven’t foreseen, and whose consequential outcomes they have limited control over. When the Democratic Party and its partnered intelligence agencies used the DNC leaks to construct a narrative about “Russian hacking,” they hadn’t planned the inciting incident; they were reacting to it. And their attempt to turn the leak in their favor by pointing to it as “evidence” of a Russian plot against America wasn’t ultimately effective. When somebody decides to lie strategically, they then take on the risk of that lie getting exposed, and of their ability to control situations becoming limited due to their credibility being ruined. That’s the backfiring effect which the anti-WikiLeaks, anti-Assange, and anti-Russian psyops have had on our ruling institutions.

These psyops have worked to the imperial hegemon’s detriment partly because the empire has tried to maintain another psyop alongside these ones: the Syria psyop. Which became too much for the narrative managers to handle; when this psyop got exposed, it made all the other deceptions apparent.

As we all know, the U.S. already has imposed sanctions on Nicaragua, but they haven’t yet brought about the kind of hunger and poverty and suffering that some U.S. policymakers think is necessary to overthrow the popular Nicaraguan government. So there is a new sanctions bill co-sponsored by Marco Rubio and Tim Kaine that will try to further depress the Nicaraguan economy, increase unemployment, decrease revenue for the government’s popular programs so the government will be less popular.

The stated goal is the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government and a “free and fair election” to replace Daniel Ortega. Another target is the repeal of the foreign agents law, a law in Nicaragua that prohibits foreign governments from funding its elections and requires the registration of lobbying activities on behalf of foreign governments. It’s very similar to U.S. laws, but the bill’s authors demand that foreign governments be allowed to underwrite political parties in Nicaragua’s elections.

That’s why they call it the ‘sovereignty bill’, because all of the sanctions bills are ironically named. The foreign government they’re referring to, of course, that should be allowed to meddle in Nicaragua’s elections is the U.S. government.

Iran has invited Saudi Arabia to join the Islamic Republic in a proposed initiative for the global registration of the “intangible cultural heritage” of Iftar, the fast-breaking evening meal of Muslims in the holy month of Ramadan.

The invitation was extended by Ali Darabi, the deputy minister of Cultural Heritage, Tourism, and Handicrafts of Iran, during a meeting with Saudi assistant minister of Culture, Rakan bin Ibrahim Al-Touq, in Riyadh on Thursday.

During the meeting, both sides called for efforts to expand cultural and tourism relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Al-Touq, in turn, extended a warm welcome for Iran’s participation in the 45th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee being held in Riyadh on September 10-25.

He also extended an invitation to Iran to participate in an international tourism exhibition, scheduled to be held in Jeddah in 2025.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel gave her first budget presentation as Chairwoman to the Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee this week. In her address, she praised the FSGG for adding the full $410.743 million requested by the FCC in its 2023-2024 Fiscal Year bill.

The new fiscal year budget contains a 5.3% increase, up from $20.5 million over the current $390 million budget, which ends on September 30.

In her message, Chairwoman Rosenworcel made it a point to discuss the FCC’s crackdown on pirate radio broadcasters through the implementation of the Pirate Act. Backed by a $5 million budget increase, the initiative aims to protect licensed broadcasters by imposing stricter fines on violators and granting the FCC the power to take action against landlords knowingly hosting illegal radio operations.

Those who understand the heinous nature of the United Nation as well as their failed nature as a so-called  “peacekeeping” force, should understandably be concerned with the impending presence of UN soldiers on the streets of Chicago.

Extreme gun violence is listed as the primary reason why. This may be the one truthful aspect of this planned UN occupation of an American city. Eventually, the UN is going after the guns of all Americans and on this point, history has spoken. Gun confiscation is always followed by genocide.

Below is an image of a United Nations document regarding gun confiscation. The full text follows the printed image.

“The issue of military grade weaponry in the hands of civilians looms ever larger in the face of the global implementation of 22/Agenda 21 by member nations. In particular, the United States of America has an estimated 500 million weapons in the hands of its civilian population. This is not just a static problem, it is a massive dynamic problem for the process of confiscation as there will be those who refuse to surrender their firearms.

“The conclusion of discussions by the CWCSG led to the adoption of a proposed agenda to begin the process for introducing to member nations a framework by which they can begin codification of national laws to disarm civilians within their borders through a graduated process.

Roughly 1,000 individuals gathered at Germany’s Berlin Potsdamer Platz railroad station, howling and barking in their interactions with each other.

Viral video of the bizarre meetup shows hundreds of people gathered, howling and barking. Many of them can be seen wearing dog-like masks and sitting upright on their knees, as seen in a video shared by the New York Post.

Commenters across social media did not mince words.

“How nice of mental institutions to allow patients outdoors every once in a while. A win for animal rights at the same time,” one individual wrote, as another made the plea to “call animal control.”

“This has to be a joke right? There’s no way people are doing this!” one exclaimed as another asked the deeper questions.

“If they do indeed identify as canines and only communicate in barking and howling how do they interact with non canines [sic] in a professional space or even any where [sic],” they asked.

A top government official has blown the whistle to warn the public that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been running deadly “depopulation experiments” in African villages.

The allegations were made by Chukwumerije Okereke, a Nigerian government scientist.

Okereke claims to have uncovered evidence of Gates’ secret tests of unproven vaccines and experiments with dangerous technology, which have been killing and injuring millions of people in the process.

According to Okereke, Gates has been running these dangerous experiments on African people to keep them out of sight of the preying eyes of Western regulators.

Gates has a long history of disastrous medical trials in Africa, most recently involving children who were paralyzed by vaccine-derived polio linked to the new nOPV2 polio vaccine developed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, according to health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi, who announced the news in March this year.

Ukraine’s armed forces have fired over 100 rounds of various ordnance at residential areas in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) over the past 24 hours, the DPR mission at the Joint Center for Control and Coordination of Ceasefire (JCCC) said.

"In the past 24 hours, the mission reported 26 instances of fire opened by Ukrainian armed formations. <...> Some 103 units of various munitions were launched," a statement on the mission’s Telegram channel said.

It added that in the Donetsk area, the Ukrainian army launched 10 shelling attacks, using an AGM-88 HARM anti-radar missile and 155mm artillery. In the Gorlovka area, the observers recorded 16 shelling attacks using multiple launch rocket systems, 152mm and 155mm artillery, including cluster munitions.

The European Union has been providing weapons to Ukraine to help it to defend itself, Charles Michel, President of the European Council, told reporters on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

"We are supporting and helping Ukraine to defend itself, to defend its territory <…>. Never we have had the intention to attack Russia. And that’s why it’s so important that the agreement that we have with Ukraine is respected <…>: we provide military equipment to help the Ukrainians to defend themselves," he insisted.

Ukraine’s NATO-backed armed forces have faced overwhelming Russian air superiority across the 1,000 km frontline of the special operation zone. According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, some 473 Ukrainian fixed wing aircraft and 249 helicopters have been knocked out to date, with the country’s pre-escalation air force almost completely destroyed.

Russia’s electronic warfare systems are forcing Ukrainian combat aircraft to prematurely abandon combat missions and return to their bases, an informed source has told sputnik.

“Russian electronic warfare system such as the Krasukha are presently capable of completely suppressing the avionics of Ukrainian fighter jets and attack aircraft. As a result, Ukrainian Armed Forces pilots regularly have to abandon combat missions due to failure of onboard systems, turn around and return to base,” the source said.

Webmaster addition: This might be a good time to recall the USS Donald Cook incident in the Black Sea!

Poland will no longer provide arms to the Ukrainian military, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has said, adding that Warsaw would instead shift focus to its own security. The decision follows a diplomatic row over Ukrainian grain imports, which were banned in Poland after flooding local markets. 

Morawiecki told reporters on Wednesday that the government would halt the weapons shipments, highlighting a growing rift between the two neighbors after more than a year of heavy support from Warsaw.

“We are no longer transferring weapons to Ukraine, because we are now arming Poland with more modern weapons,” Morawiecki said. He later warned that additional trade bans could be imposed on Kiev, given that the “Ukrainian authorities do not understand the degree to which Poland’s farming industry has been destabilized” by foreign imports.

At Wednesday's House Judiciary Committee hearing, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) clashed with Attorney General Merrick Garland about Biden family business dealings.

During a House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing, Rep. Rick Crawford (R-AR) questioned Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg about the allocation of Infrastructure and Jobs Act funds and the completion of major projects.

Remember when President Trump got indicted on 34 felony counts for campaign finance violations for making ‘hush payments’ to Stormy Daniels?

The FBI and IRS investigated criminal campaign violations involving Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and a politically connected lawyer who paid Hunter Biden’s large tax debts.

However, according to congressional investigators, federal prosecutors inside US Attorney Dave Weiss’s office blocked agents from pursuing the campaign finance violation case.

Was the politically connected lawyer’s payoff of Hunter Biden’s tax debt a contribution to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign?

Hollywood attorney Kevin Patrick Morris paid off Hunter Biden’s past-due tax debts according to CBS.

“A source familiar with the arrangement between Morris and Hunter Biden said the attorney paid Hunter Biden’s past-due tax debts,” CBS reported.

According to the New York Times, Hunter Biden told business associates that he had to take out a loan to pay off more than $1 million in past-due taxes.