#Russian man claims he was in prison with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the nominal manager of "Wagner". Says Prigozhin was an "offended/outcast" (Обиженный), the lowest caste, who regularly provided sex to prisoners, including this man personally.
"[Priogozhin] had his place ... and agreed to his place. ... [T]hose who join Wagner ... are commanded and managed by a faggot ... [and therefore] become lower than faggots."
Shapur Bakhtiar broke with a lifetime of opposition activity to form a government at the Shah's behest as the King left Iran in January 1979. A stern secularist, Bakhtiar tried fight the laws of gravity to pull his country back from the brink of madness as the Revolution crested.
If everyone, even the greatest men, get only a sentence in history, Shapur Bakhtiar's is that he reigned in Iran for 37 days after 37 years in opposition. However, his life both before and after the Iranian Revolution is equally as interesting.
Born in 1914, Bakhtiar went to a French high school in Lebanon and then the Sorbonne. His cultural and political sensibilities would remain significantly French all his life, and, indeed, his life would end in France.
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.
#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.
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.