Macron slams Moscow’s claims of French role in terror attack

Paris had earlier said it had no intelligence linking the Crocus City Hall shooting spree to Kiev

French President Emmanuel Macron has dismissed claims that Paris may have been involved in the Crocus City Hall massacre outside Moscow, speaking to French media on Thursday. In a phone call on Wednesday with his French counterpart, Sebastien Lecornu, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu suggested that Kiev’s Western backers, including Paris, may have been behind the attack.

The terrorist incident in March claimed over 140 lives, after armed gunmen stormed a packed music venue near the capital. The suspected shooters were apprehended by Russian law enforcement on the way to the Ukrainian border.

The French and Russian defense ministers talked by phone on Wednesday. During the conversation, Lecornu repeatedly told his Russian counterpart that Western countries and Ukraine had no involvement in the massacre, the Russian MOD reported.

Shoigu replied that he had intelligence to the contrary, saying, “the Kiev regime does nothing without the approval of its Western backers.”

“We hope that in this case the French intelligence services are not behind this,” he added.

Macron called the statements “ridiculous,” “baroque and threatening.” “It makes no sense,” to say that France “could be behind [the Moscow terror attack] and that the Ukrainians are behind it,” the president told the media on Thursday.

He added that the phone call was prompted by Paris’ willingness to share “useful information” as a part of “joint work” among countries affected by terrorism.

Moscow also maintains that the terrorists had a “window” prepared for them to cross the border into Ukraine. While Islamic State’s Afghanistan-based wing (ISIS-K) has claimed responsibility for the attack, the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), Aleksandr Bortnikov, suggested in March that the US, UK, and Ukraine may have been involved.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated on Thursday that Kiev’s connection to the case is obvious, “especially since Ukraine’s involvement in other terrorist attacks on Russian soil is no longer in doubt.” He referred to the assassinations of journalists Darya Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky as examples of Kiev’s acts of terrorism.

https://www.rt.com/news/595448-russian-remarks-ridiculous-macron/

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McDonald’s to buy back its Israeli restaurants

The fast food chain has reported decreased sales amid boycotts in Muslim countries over the Gaza conflict

McDonald’s has announced that it will be buying back all of its restaurants in Israel after sales in the region plunged due to a boycott of the franchise over its perceived support for the Jewish State in the ongoing Gaza conflict.

The popular burger chain uses a franchise system under which individual operators are licensed to run outlets and employ staff. For over 30 years, all McDonald’s restaurants in Israel were run by the Alonyal company.

In a statement released on Thursday, McDonald’s said it remains “committed to the Israeli Market and to ensuring a positive employee and customer experience in the market going forward.”

The company said it will be purchasing all 225 outlets from Alonyal and that all 5,000 of its employees, as well as its restaurants and operations in Israel, would be retained on “equivalent terms.” No other terms of the sale have been revealed.

McDonald’s faced widespread criticism after its Israeli restaurants were filmed giving away thousands of free meals to Israeli military personnel. The outcry resulted in spontaneous boycotts from consumers across the Middle East and other Muslim-majority countries such as Pakistan, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia.

As a result, the company’s fourth-quarter revenues came in significantly below market expectations. McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said the company is witnessing a “meaningful business impact.”

Others Western brands, such as KFC, Starbucks, and Unilever, have also faced backlash over their perceived position on the Israel-Palestine conflict and have reported financial losses in the fourth quarter of 2023. In Pakistan, anti-Israel protesters torched a KFC restaurant last week.

The boycotts against major Western brands come after Israel launched a military operation in Gaza following an incursion by Hamas militants into the southern part of the country last October. During the attack, over 1,200 people were killed and scores of hostages were taken. The Israeli campaign has left at least 33,000 Palestinians dead, and over 75,000 injured, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. UN Human Rights Council rapporteur Francesca Albanese has accused Israel of committing “genocide” in the enclave.

https://www.rt.com/business/595490-mcdonalds-buys-israeli-restaurants/

A great wealth transfer is underway: How the West lost control of the gold market

Pricing power in a market long dominated by Western institutional money is moving East and the implications are profound

The gold price has risen to a series of new all-time highs of late, a development that has received only cursory attention in the mainstream financial media. But as is the case with so much else these days, there is much more going on than meets the eye. In fact, the rise in the dollar price of gold is almost the least interesting aspect to this story.

For thousands of years, gold was the ultimate store of value and was synonymous with the concept of ‘money’. Trade was often settled either in gold itself or in bank notes backed by gold and directly exchangeable for it. Currencies backed by nothing but government decree – called 'fiat' currencies – have tended to eventually fail.

However, in 1971, gold found itself cast out of this ancient role when the US unilaterally suspended dollar convertibility into gold as enshrined in the Bretton Woods agreement that established the framework for the post-war economy. Shortly thereafter, in an act that medieval alchemists only dreamed of, gold was created out of thin air in the form of futures contracts, meaning bullion could be bought and sold without any metal changing hands – or even existing.

Besides the obvious ramification of all of this – the removal of gold backing to the dollar and thus implicitly to nearly all currencies – there are two important features of how the gold market has subsequently functioned: first, gold has essentially been reduced to trading like any other cyclical financial asset; second, the price of gold has largely been determined by Western institutional investors.

Both of these longstanding trends are now breaking down. As we will see, the importance of this development is hard to overstate. But let’s begin with a very quick examination of how gold went from being the ultimate source of value to just another ticker moving in predictable patterns in the constellation of financial instruments.

How paper replaced metal

The collapse of Bretton Woods in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s – culminating in the gold window being shut in 1971 – was a messy period of transition, uncertainty, and instability. The dollar devalued and a fixed-rate system was negotiated and soon thereafter abandoned. But what was clear was that the US was steering the world away from gold and toward a dollar standard.

Jelle Zijlstra, president of the Dutch central bank, chairman of the Bank of International Settlements from 1967 until 1981, and a prominent figure at the time, recalled in his memoirs how “gold disappeared as the anchor of monetary stability” and that “the road… through endless vicissitudes to a new dollar hegemony was paved with many conferences, with faithful, shrewd, and sometimes misleading stories, with idealistic visions of the future and impressive professorial speeches.” But, he concluded, the ultimate political reality was that the “Americans supported or fought any change, depending on whether they saw the dollar’s position strengthened or threatened.”

Nevertheless, gold was lurking in the shadows like a deposed but still-living monarch and thus represented an implicit guard against the abuse of what had become fiat currencies. If nothing else, as dollars continued to be printed, the price of gold would surge and signal a debasement of the greenback. And this is more or less what happened in the 1970s after the gold window was shuttered. After breaking the $35 per-ounce peg in 1971, gold rocketed all the way up to $850 by 1980.

So the US government had a strong interest in managing the perception of the dollar through gold. Most importantly, it didn’t want to see gold recreate a pseudo reserve currency by strengthening substantially. Legendary Fed chairman Paul Volcker once said “gold is my enemy.” And indeed it traditionally had been the enemy of central banks: it forced them to tighten rates when they didn’t want to and imposed on them a certain discipline.

This framework helps make sense of the rise of the unallocated – i.e. ‘paper’ – gold market in the 1980s and the countless gold derivatives that emerged. This actually started in 1974 with the launch of gold futures trading but exploded in the next decade. What happened is that bullion banks began selling paper claims on gold for which there was no actual gold attached. And buyers were not actually required to pay upfront but could simply leave a cash margin.

more…

https://www.rt.com/business/595122-west-losing-gold-east/

>>20683398

well said

>>20683396 27 seconds ahead

>>20683397

these go together baker (if noted)

>>20683454

notable

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