#pt: The FTX fiasco has left its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried not only with personal financial exposure but potential criminal exposure, too, and for the same basic reason: lies about how much money was in the system. uk.news.yahoo.com/us-justice-dep…
#pt: Binance backs out of the proposal to bail out FTX.
The statement that the "crypto ecosystem is becoming more resilient" and that the fraudsters are "outliers" being "weeded out by the free market" is pure hopium; the evidence is all the other way.
People looking back fifty years down the line will almost certainly have cryptocurrency in the "They Did What?!" category. The extraordinary thing, even in real-time, is that it got anywhere; unlike most scams there isn't even a theoretical explanation for why it should work.
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So much for the idea #Ukraine negotiated a deal with #Russia to allow the Russians to withdraw unmolested from #Kherson: the Ukrainians are battering the Russians as they fall back, and all indications are this has degenerated into a rout for the Russians.
Eran Lerman, former deputy NSC director, explains how powerful #Israel's military-industrial complex has become since February now everyone needs Jerusalem's help ... then says Israel can't help #Ukraine b/c "there are limits to what Israel can part with" jns.org/opinion/the-wa…
Lerman has other strange ideas: that Russia must be appeased because it is a serious force in Syria; that Russia "restrains" Asad; that Russia's alliance with Iran started recently; and the maritime deal made with Hizballah undermines Hizballah in Lebanon.
Utterly absurd, but a useful reminder that the #US administration is not committed to victory in #Ukraine: every time the Ukrainians break through and actually bring us closer to ending the war by defeating #Russia, these officials leak these mad ideas for "diplomacy".
#pt: The #Biden people leaking to the press that "now is the time for diplomacy" over #Ukraine, when it plainly isn't and only #Russia thinks it is, comes a day after it was revealed the US was back at totally "compartmentalised" nuclear talks with Moscow. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
#pt: Not that there is any evidence of a slowdown over winter, certainly not from #Ukraine, which has been kitted out to continue forcing #Russia back during the season.
#pt: The government of #Ukraine, including President Zelensky, had publicly said that #Russia was not really withdrawing from #Kherson, but was trying to draw the Ukrainians into a trap. Now reasonably clear that is not true; unclear if it *was* true at some earlier point.
Very sceptical of this. The idea is that #Russia sent planes of money and captured US/UK anti-tank weapons (NLAWs and Javelins) to #Iran in exchange for the "suicide drones". There is reason to be sceptical of this in both directions.
#pt: On the one side, the @SkyNews framing makes it sound like the Iran-Russia axis is a narrow, transactional relationship, rather than a strategic partnership. Iran was sending drones to help Russia's war, and Russia was sharing any captured technology, no matter what.
#pt: On the other side, the @SkyNews is on its face very strange, since #Iran has had full access to all Western weaponry since Biden abandoned #Afghanistan and handed it all to their Taliban-Qaeda clients. They don't need to scavenge from #Russia in Ukraine.
Thread: 26 October 2022: Day 245 of #Russia's invasion of #Ukraine
Latest @DefenceHQ update: the governor of Belgorod within #Russia announced on Oct. 24 that the main rail line linking Russia and #Belarus was sabotaged by "Stop the Wagons" (StW), ostensibly a "Russian anti-war group".
It does not take an especially suspicious mind to believe that "Stop the Wagons" (StW) is supported by, if not fabricated by, #Ukraine's intelligence services, which suggests a serious issue for #Russia, at least in the key war staging areas on the border.