Russia's second consecutive bumper wheat harvest has cemented it as the top producer of the grain, with the surplus leading to a three-year low in prices, overshadowing any concerns about tensions in the Black Sea between Ukraine and Russia. As the quarter ends on Friday, wheat prices are on track to record the longest quarterly slump in 14 years. While this development is favorable for consumers, traders must closely watch prices. 

Bloomberg reports wheat futures in Chicago have tumbled about 11% in the past three months and are set for the fourth quarterly decline. Even though Russia terminated a safe-passage deal in July that allowed bulk carriers to export Ukraine's grain via the Black Sea to the rest of the world, prices have remained under pressure - mainly because Russia has had a record bumper harvest. 

"What the events around the start of the Ukraine conflict showed is that in this day and age, the world, by and large, has a way of getting grain to the people who need it," said Michael Whitehead, the head of agribusiness insights at ANZ Group Holdings Ltd. He continued, "This may be the new, low price level for wheat."

Bloomberg recently noted last year's invasion of Ukraine, which "hobbled Ukraine's food exports, helping cement Russia's domination of the global wheat market. That's reflected in record Russian shipments, as the nation's traders overcome the financing and logistical challenges some faced in the aftermath of the invasion."

"We have seen wheat prices substantially decline basically as a result of Russia," said Michael Magdovitz, senior commodity analyst at Rabobank.

However, the Financial Times pointed out some "analysts warn that prices could rapidly rise if the war spills out across the Black Sea. Russia's Black Sea ports handle about 70 percent of its wheat exports, making it a crucial artery for the global supply of grain." These low prices could be a potential entry point for traders looking for an area of value. 

The slide in wheat prices coincides with the UN's global food price index, hitting lows not seen since the early days of the invasion. 

This is a welcoming sign not just for inflation trends but also for consumers worldwide. 

However, there are risks, as Morgan Stanley warned clients: El Nino could spark another "inflation shock." 

Via The Cradle,

Qatar has called for intensifying international efforts to subject all Israeli nuclear facilities to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards and for Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The demand was put forward on Friday by the Chairman of Qatar's National Committee for the Prohibition of Weapons, Abdulaziz Salmeen al-Jabri, at the annual general conference of the IAEA currently underway in Vienna.

Jabri stressed these were legitimate demands that had been confirmed by "international legitimacy resolutions [that were passed] half a century ago," including "resolutions of the UN General Assembly [that have been passed] since 1974, [United Nations] Security Council Resolutions 487 of 1981 and 687 of 1991, numerous IAEA resolutions, and the resolution of the Review Conference of the Middle East Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1995."

He also said that bringing the Israeli nuclear program under international safeguards "is a prerequisite for establishing a nuclear-weapon-free zone in [West Asia]."

"Confronting nuclear proliferation in [West Asia] is at the core of the tasks assigned to the IAEA," he stressed.

Estimates of Israel's nuclear stockpile range between 80 and 400 warheads, which can be delivered via aircraft, submarine-launched cruise missiles, and the Jericho series of intermediate to intercontinental-range ballistic missiles.

Its first deliverable nuclear weapon is thought to have been completed in late 1966 or early 1967, making it the sixth country in the world to have developed them.

Israel has never openly tested its nuclear weapons nor signed the NPT, making it the world’s only unacknowledged nuclear power.

"The boys in Tehran know Israel has 200, all targeted on Tehran," the late former US state secretary Colin Powell wrote in a 2015 leaked email to business partner and democratic donor Jeffrey Leeds just months before Washington sealed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran – also known as the Iran nuclear deal.

Colin Powell claimed that Israel has 200 nukes in a leaked email https://t.co/fZFyjDEL5E pic.twitter.com/xe3rXPCzeG

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) September 16, 2016

While Israel and its vast nuclear arsenal have never been subjected to IAEA oversight, over a quarter of the 2,000 inspections carried out worldwide by IAEA in the past three years were conducted in Iran.

A November 2021 arrest in Queens, New York led to the discovery of a satanic cult of pedophile extortionists known as 764, which has been linked to significant criminal activity around the globe. The organization, which goes byseveral aliases, was uncovered by the FBI while investigating alarming posts on social media made by 23-year-old Angel Almeida of Astoria, Queens, The Guardian reports.

Almeida was flagged to the FBI by an anonymous tipster who was concerned over his social media accounts, which contained images of violence against children and animals. In one post, he expressed support for Charleston mass-murderer Dylann Roof. Another post showed him talking around with a shotgun while wearing a "a skull mask and crossed bandoliers of rifle ammunition across his chest with a flag in the background featuring an Order of Nine Angles symbol."

Almeida served 18 months in prison for third degree burglary in 2018, and was arrested for being a felon in possession of a firearm. He was detained in Brooklyn's metropolitan detention center. In February 2023, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment on child pornography and exploitation charges related to his involvement in the cult, as well as hundreds of thousands of digital files recovered from his residence.

In new charges, Almeida is accused of coercing a teenage girl into having sex with an older man, and convincing another girl to cut herself on camera and send it to him.

In one post, Almeida posts "For the 2k pedophile haters," showing his finger over the trigger guard of a Taurus handgun.

When the FBI searched his New York apartment, they found a 9mm handgun, ammunition, books pertaining to the Order of Nine Angles (a satanic occultist group). They also found a flag with the insignia of a US -9A offshoot, the Tempel ov Blood, according to a November 2021 detention memorandum.

The most telling item was an O9A “blood covenant” featuring a blood-smeared drawing of a hooded figure with glowing red eyes surrounded with sigils for four O9A deities and the caption Vindex, Nythra, Satan and Abatu. At the bottom of the page is an oath: “A covenant signed in blood. May the DEVIL walk with you always – SATANAE MANIBUS” (“by Satan’s Hand” in Latin). Similar indicia have been found in possession of O9A-influenced killers in Britain and Canada. -The Guardian

According to the agency, the group is "deliberately targeting minor victims on publicly available messaging platforms to extort them into recording or livestreaming acts of self-harm and producing child sexual abuse material."

Using manipulative tactics, the gang operated on several platforms, including Roblox, Discord, Twitch and SoundCloud - but the group's main platform has been Telegram.

764 uses "threats, blackmail and manipulation" to convince underage victims to record videos showing acts of self-harm, animal cruelty, sexual acts and even suicide. The footage is then circulated among members, who then further exert control over the victims. Members share "gore" videos depicting all sorts of horrific acts, in order "to gain notoriety and rise in status within their group."

Documents and sources familiar with 764 indicate the group is an offshoot of the Order of Nine Angles (O9A), a violent, subversive amalgam of esoteric Hitler worship, Satanism and Wiccan tenets that American authorities recognize as a terrorist ideology and that has been connected with murders and attempted terrorist attacks in countries including the US, Britain, Germany, Canada and Russia. -The Guardian

In one case, a German teenager allegedly connected to the group was accused of murdering his foster family in Romania, according to Der Spiegel and Libertatea.

Several books connected to satanism were also recovered.

The Stain Account

According to the detention memorandum:

Law enforcement also reviewed the publicly accessible portions of an Instagram profile with the name “Stain_Lord_352” (the “Stain Account”). That review revealed that Almeida acknowledged that the account belonged to him, admitted to owning and took pictures with a firearm, posted pictures depicting violence against animals, and threatened violence against police if they attempted to apprehend him. For example, on or about November 2, 2021, Almeida posted on the Stain Lord Account a photograph of a masked individual holding a firearm with the same mask and Order of Nine Angles flag depicted in photographs on the Sargent Account, which also appears to be the same mask that Almeida purchased from Amazon in June 2021 and had shipped to his residence.

Hardcore Kiddie Fiddler

In November 2021, Almeida posted a photograph of an individual in front of a Nazi flag while wearing a shirt that reads "Kiddie Fiddler," and standing in front of a sign that rads "I'M ADDICTED TO HARDCORE CHILD PORNOGRAPHY."

Earlier this month, Almeida was deemed fit for trial despite repeated violent behavior in the courtroom - including attempts to attack a DOJ staffer as well as his own court-appointed counsel, his fourth attorney since his 2021 arrest. His trial is currently scheduled for December 4. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Authored by EJ Antoni and Peter St.Onge via The Epoch Times,

Every major economic downturn of the last 110 years bears the mark of the Federal Reserve.

In fact, as long as the Fed has been around, it has swung the economy between inflation and recession. Yet Americans, surprisingly, have tolerated it.

But we shouldn’t expect that to go on forever. We had three central banks before the Fed, and confined each to the ash heap of history. The problems inherent to central banking are cause to scrap the Fed as well.

Central banking dates to 1694, when the Bank of England was founded for the purpose of creating the hidden tax of inflation to provide cheap money to government—above all, for Britain’s many foreign wars. In exchange, the central bankers were paid well with interest.

Like any government-favored bank, the Bank of England lent money it didn’t have, lending far more than the silver in its vaults. The British government endorsed this fraud because the king and Parliament wanted the money.

But the fraud went further still: The Bank of England was allowed to use its new government bond holdings to back private loans, which meant creating even more money with no silver behind it to lend to private banks. This, too, earned interest, even though the money was created out of nothing.

The explosion of money caused a tissue fire in the British economy—a short period of fast growth followed by rampant inflation and an economic collapse. The boom-bust cycle was born, what we now call the “business cycle.”

When the Bank of England didn’t have enough silver to exchange for all the money it created, the British government pulled the 18th-century equivalent of a bailout by suspending specie redemption, allowing the Bank of England to stop repaying in the silver it had promised.

Central banking was imported to the New World before the Constitution was even written. The Bank of North America, our first central bank, copied the Bank of England and created hyperinflation under the Articles of Confederation. At that point, the Founding Fathers scrapped both the Articles of Confederation and the bank.

Thinking that the bank needed a replacement, Congress created the First Bank of the United States in 1791 to consolidate the various currencies and debts from the states and to provide short-term loans to the government.

The First Bank was forbidden from buying government bonds to avoid its predecessor’s hyperinflation. But when the government needed more revenue, Congress decided to sell its shares in the bank, and the charter wasn’t renewed. The central bank was dead, and the U.S. economy boomed until the War of 1812.

To finance that war, the government borrowed heavily from regional banks, which created money out of nothing for the government. That meant that much more paper money was in circulation than gold and silver in bank vaults. When people tried to redeem their paper for specie, the banks didn’t have enough, and many failed.

To bail out the banks, Congress created another central bank in 1816, the Second Bank of the United States.

The Second Bank curtailed excessive lending by regional banks, but only after first encouraging it. The result was a debt-fueled boom followed by a bust in 1819 that sparked the nation’s first depression.

Many in Congress were tolerant of the violent economic spasms caused by the central bank because it provided money for them to spend without overtly raising taxes. But the people were not fooled and would not tolerate it. They elected Andrew Jackson to do battle with the beast, and he ensured the bank’s charter wasn’t renewed in 1836.

That ushered in some of America’s greatest decades of economic growth.

The Golden Age came to an end in 1907 when mismanagement by major banks touched off a bank crisis that required a herculean rescue effort by J.P. Morgan and Co. In response, J. Pierpont Morgan wanted the government to sanction a private “bank for bankers” to respond to such crises.

The progressives in Congress refused because, as Sen. Nelson Aldrich (R-R.I.) said, “We may not always have Pierpont Morgan with us to meet a banking crisis.” And so, shortly after Morgan’s death in 1913, the politicians created a fully government-run institution to bail out government and bad banks alike: the Federal Reserve.

The boom-bust cycle was on steroids from that moment on.

The Fed ominously began with an inflationary boom to pay for World War I, ending in the depression of 1920. It created another inflationary boom to keep Britain afloat in the late 1920s, which set off the Great Depression. Every five to 10 years for the last century, the Fed has created, then popped, bubble after bubble, each time taking down swatches of the American economy.

Just in the past three decades, the Fed’s low interest rates caused the dot-com bubble in the 1990s, then the housing bubble and a global financial crisis in 2008. Today, there’s an “everything bubble” from the Fed’s panic-printing to bribe voters into lockdowns, yielding the combined risks of 1970’s stagflation and a 2008-style bank collapse.

Since its founding, the Fed has stolen 98% of the value of a dollar. It has used those profits to repetitively launch boom-bust cycles and to transfer trillions to the federal government, special interests, and wealthy borrowers.

Jackson did not tolerate such thieving rampages from his central bank. And we need not either.

In a fall call-up, Russia is drafting 130,000 more young men for compulsory service, based on a decree signed by President Putin on Friday. Men aged 18-27 will be recruited for a one-year period from Oct.1 and Dec.31, however, this latest conscription drive will not involve sending this new batch to fight in Ukraine, the Kremlin said. 

Deputy head of the military’s mobilization department, Rear Admiral Vladimir Tsimlyansky, sought to assure in a briefing, "There are no plans for additional mobilization measures."

The defense ministry previously said they are taking long-term steps to reach Putin's goal of increasing the national armed forces' combat personnel from 1.15 million to 1.5 million.

The last draft came in the spring, which conscripted 147,00 men, and thus with this new fall drive a total of 277,000 will have been conscripted in 2023.

While new conscripts will not be sent to fight in Ukraine, for the first time they will be drawn from the newly "reunited" regions of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, and the Zaporozhye and Kherson oblasts:

Conscription for military service in what Moscow describes as Russia’s new regions is regulated by a so-called constitutional law on admission to the Russian Federation, according to Russian state news agency TASS.

According to the law, the autumn 2023 conscription round will include the newly annexed territories for the first time.

Russia is meanwhile celebrating one year since these territories were declared 'legally' part of the Russian Federation, according to remarks of Putin Saturday.

"A year ago, on September 30, a defining and truly historic event took place when agreements were signed to incorporate four new constituent entities into the Russian Federation," he said in a video address, according to TASS.

He hailed the occasion on which "millions of residents of Donbass and the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions made their choice to be with their Fatherland," saying further: "This conscious, long-awaited, hard-won and genuinely popular decision was made collectively through referendums in full compliance with international norms."

One year ago it was noted by media sources that Russia was annexing lands roughly the size of Portugal...

"People showed courage and integrity in the face of attempts to intimidate and deprive them of their right to determine their own future, their destiny, and to take away something every person values, namely, culture, traditions, and mother tongue, in a word, everything that was loathed by nationalists and their Western patrons who orchestrated a coup in Kiev in 2014 and then unleashed a full-scale civil war and terror against dissenters and organized blockades, constant shelling, and punitive actions in Donbass," Putin described, reiterating his rationale for the "special military operation".

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

There have been repeated references to the ten facts that I alluded to in my congressional testimony as establishing an ample basis to launch a formal impeachment inquiry. I have received emails asking about those ten developments so I wanted to post them. They are found in my written testimony, but I did not have time to go through them all in the course of my oral statement before the Committee.

While many have noted that I stated that I do not view the current evidence as sufficient for articles of impeachment, that is hardly surprising. This was the first hearing of the inquiry and was called to address why the threshold for an inquiry had been established. I was also asked to address the constitutional standards and best practices going forward. Indeed, I criticized the last two impeachments for prematurely declaring impeachable conduct without fully developing a record to support such articles. This hearing returned the impeachment process to a type of regular order in reserving judgment until all of the evidence could be acquired by the three committees.

Here are the ten developments that I cited as justifying an impeachment inquiry (a view with which my fellow witness University of North Carolina Professor Michael Gerhardt disagreed):

The record currently contains witness and written evidence that the President

(1) has lied about key facts in these foreign dealings,

(2) was the focus of a multimillion-dollar influence peddling scheme, and

(3) may have benefitted from this corruption through millions of dollars sent to his family as well as more direct possible benefits.

The President may be able to disprove or rebut these points, but they raise legitimate concerns over his role based on the accounts of key figures in the matter.

Consider just ten of the disclosures from the prior investigation:

1. Hunter Biden and his associates were running a classic influence peddling operation using Joe Biden as what Devon Archer called “the Brand.”[1] While this was described as an “illusion of access,” millions were generated for the Bidens from some of the most corrupt figures in the world, including associates who were later accused of or convicted of public corruption.[2]

2. Some of the Biden clients pushed for changes impacting United States foreign policy and relations, including help in dealing with Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin investigating corruption.[3]

3. President Biden has made false claims about his knowledge of these dealings repeatedly in the past, including insisting that he had no knowledge of Hunter’s foreign dealings which Archer has declared “patently false.”[4] The Washington Post and other media outlets have also declared the President’s insistence that his family did not take money from China as false.[5]

4. The President had been aware for years that Hunter Biden and his uncle James were accused of influence peddling, including an audiotape of the President acknowledging a New York Times investigation as a threat to Hunter.[6]

5. President Biden was repeatedly called into meetings with these foreign clients and was put on speakerphone.[7] He also met these clients and foreign figures at dinners and meetings.[8]

6. Emails and other communications show Hunter repeatedly invoking his father to secure payments from foreign sources and, in one such message, he threatens a Chinese figure that his father is sitting next to him to coerce a large transfer of money.[9]

7. A trusted FBI source recounted a direct claim of a corrupt Ukrainian businessman that he paid a “bribe” to Joe Biden through intermediaries.[10]

8. Hunter Biden reportedly claimed that he had to give half of his earnings to his father[11] and other emails state that intermingled accounts were used to pay bills for both men, including a possible credit account that Hunter used to allegedly pay prostitutes.[12]

9. At least two transfers of funds to Hunter Biden in 2019 from a Chinese source listed the President’s home in Delaware where Hunter sometimes lived and conducted business.[13]

10. Some of the deals negotiated by Hunter involved potential benefits for his father, including office space in Washington.[14] At least nine Biden family members reportedly received money from these foreign transfers, including grandchildren.[15] For Hunter Biden, this included not just significant money transfers but gifts like an expensive diamond and a luxury car.[16]

These are only some of the serious corruption allegations facing the President, but each could raise impeachable conduct if a nexus is established to the President.

Texas installed razor wire in Eagle Pass to stop illegal crossings.

Today the Biden Admin CUT that wire, opening the floodgates to illegal immigrants.

I immediately deployed more Texas National Guard to repel illegal crossings & install more razor wire. pic.twitter.com/eMtLS8Z6WI

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) September 20, 2023