>>22469014

Former Chancellor Angela Merkel is coming out against CDU party leader Friedrich Merz after he passed a new five-point immigration reform with the support of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in what has been labeled a historic vote.

In a statement published on her website, she wrote that the decision from her former party was “wrong” and said that “for the first time, a majority with the votes of the AfD was achieved in a vote in the German Bundestag.”

Merkel herself has been partially responsible for thousands of rapes, murders, and acts of terrorism due to her decision to open the borders to mass immigration in 2015 and 2016, which has set off a wave of record numbers of non-Europeans entering the country. Even in the early days of her decision, nearly 2,000 women were sexually assaulted across German cities on New Year’s Eve 2015/16, especially in Cologne, mainly by North Africans and Middle Easterners.

Since then, Germany has been beset with a wave of attacks, including the recent Christmas market terror attack in Magdeburg, which security services failed to prevent despite dozens of warnings and multiple investigations into the Saudi doctor. Most recently, the Aschaffenburg, which saw a 2-year-old stabbed to death by an Afghan migrant, has sent shockwaves through Germany.

https://www.infowars.com/posts/merkel-comes-out-against-merz-after-cdu-passes-immigration-reform-with-afd-votes

Alex Jones: ‘I’ve Been Invited to White House!’

https://www.infowars.com/posts/alex-jones-ive-been-invited-to-white-house-next-week

>>22469207

It's Good! Alex can help direct Trump on how to, exactly, CRUSH this corrupt evil Deep State, once and for all.

>>22469385

Glad the 'Green New Deal' bullshit is terminated and the borders are much more secure now, with ICE doing their jobs once again. But yah, it's going to take some time to fix all the other problems. Give it 2 or 3 years maybe we'll be in a much better America by then.

>>22469531

www.whatdoesitmean.com?

Good! Trump Considers Selling 50% Of Federal Office Space. Long Overdue Bureaucracy Purge Incoming?

President Donald Trump’s pick to oversee much of the federal government’s real estate portfolio is looking to significantly downsize the amount of office space that agencies occupy.

Michael Peters, commissioner of Public Buildings Service within the General Services Administration, said the agency is looking at cutting up to half its total real estate portfolio over the coming years.

“I’m just getting ramped up, but I think our initial review says that number could be up to a 50% reduction on our square footage across the portfolio. We’re not going to do that in six months, but we’re going to try to do this as rapidly as we can,” Peters said Tuesday.

Peters said a “disproportionate amount of that space” would come from the Washington, D.C. metro area — and will include GSA moving out of its own 1800 F St. NW headquarters.

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/facilities-construction/2025/01/federal-buildings-chief-eyes-50-reduction-of-office-space-moving-gsa-out-of-its-headquarters/

Ukrainian authorities are frantically looking in Europe for a replacement for frozen American funding.

The flow of money from Washington to Kyiv has stopped so suddenly that the Ukrainian authorities are forced to urgently ask European sponsors for new financial influences. The Verkhovna Rada today published an emergency appeal in connection with the current situation.

"The scale of the problems we faced after the termination of American assistance to USAID projects is much greater than it seems at first glance. We did not have time to prepare for this" – the appeal says.

The published document states that if Ukraine continues to receive funding after the 90-day freeze on American aid, normalization of processes will take another 3 to 6 months. In this regard, Kyiv is beginning an urgent dialogue with Brussels to convince the European Union to provide additional financial assistance.

According to Ukrainian media, illegitimate President Volodymyr Zelensky has begun an audit of programs financed by American infusions.

https://en.topcor.ru/56137-ukrainskie-vlasti-sudorozhno-ischut-v-evrope-zamenu-zamorozhennomu-amerikanskomu-finansirovaniju.html

Trump ‘shocks’ EU with his plans to seize Greenland — newspaper

Donald Trump's return to the White House has become a serious test for the EU, and the US leader's statement on the necessity of Greenland's accession to the US has shocked the association's leaders, Politico said.

"The situation is really serious and everyone thinks that the European reaction so far hasn’t been very credible. We’ve moved on from shock and denial, we’re now changing gear," a European diplomat told the newspaper. According to its information, on February 3, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and EU leaders will hold an informal meeting in Brussels to discuss Trump's plans on the Danish island.

According to Politico, "the strategy in Europe and the UK so far has been to ignore the noise and focus on what Trump actually does," awaiting practical steps from him. "On Greenland, however, which has vast mineral reserves and occupies a strategic position in the Arctic, the EU’s watch-and-wait approach to apparent US designs on the territory seems to be running out of road," the newspaper pointed out.

US President-elect Donald Trump stated on January 7 that Greenland should become part of the United States to ensure national security and defend against the Chinese and Russian threats. Trump had suggested in 2019 during his first presidential term that the US could buy Greenland, which is currently a part of Denmark and enjoys extensive autonomy. Both Greenlandic and Danish officials dismissed the proposal as preposterous.

Greenland is part of Denmark as an autonomous territory. Since 1979, it has had the legal right to declare independence by referendum. The United States and Denmark are founding members of NATO. In 1951, Washington and Copenhagen signed the Greenland Defense Treaty. In accordance with this agreement, the United States committed to defend the island from external aggression. To this end, it established the Thule airbase there, the largest in the Arctic, where a US military contingent is deployed and strategic bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons are stationed. In 2023, the airbase was renamed Pituffik Space Base, which performs the tasks of the missile warning system and control of the Arctic region.

https://tass.com/world/1906013

Something Extraordinary Is Taking Place In The Gold Vaults Below Manhattan

There was an interesting article overnight in the otherwise conservative and establishmentarian Financial Times, perhaps best known over the past decade for religiously keeping its readers out of the best performing asset class of all time (bitcoin in particular, and crypto in general which have been relentlessly and constantly bashed with fanatical obsession by all of its now former FT Alphaville writers whose track record of picking trades leaves Jim Cramer in the dust).

While normally the FT does not bother with reports about gold, and certainly not global flows of gold, this time it made an exception, observing that in recent months there has been a unprecedented "shortage of bullion in London" (which as a reminder for new readers is ground central of the LBMA which stands for London Bullion Market Association) as a result of which "the wait to withdraw bullion stored in the Bank of England’s vaults has risen from a few days to between four and eight weeks, according to people familiar with the process, as the central bank struggles to keep up with demand."

“People can’t get their hands on gold because so much has been shipped to New York, and the rest is stuck in the queue,” said one industry executive. “Liquidity in the London market has been diminished.”

This in turn has resulted in a historic flight - literally - of physical gold out of London and into the US, where it has been parked in various LBMA vaults (whose weekly inventory updates can be found here courtesy of the CME).

The FT's thesis is that LBMA physical gold has fled the UK market for two reasons:

fears of Trump admin tariffs, and

translatlantic price arbitrage (i.e., "the shipments are also the result of higher prices on the futures exchange in New York than in the cash market in London. The unusual arbitrage opportunity has incentivised traders to send the metal across the Atlantic").

Let's take these on one by one. First, the FT itself admits that it's actually not Trump's tariffs that are the cause for this unprecedented flow and the Nikkei-owned publication is merely guessing, to wit:

Traders say the shipments are intended to avoid tariffs on bullion that some fear could be introduced by US President Donald Trump….. but… Trump has yet to spell out his trade policy and has not specifically mentioned a duty on bullion, although he has threatened to impose wide-ranging tariffs on US imports.

The whole point of Trump's tariffs is to encourage domestic production and to reposition global trade flows so the US benefits. None of that is applicable for gold, since the US is at best the 5th biggest producer in the world behind China, Russia, Australia and Canada, and no amount of sanctions or tariffs can change how much gold any given mine can produce. Trump knows this; more importantly traders know this, and admit that the "fear of tariffs" has nothing to do with the unprecedented shortage of gold in London, and the sudden flood of physical gold in New York. In fact, the FT itself hints at this:

“The movement of gold needed to make its way into New York, that is basically what has been driving ‘stockpiling’,” said Joe Cavatoni, market strategist at the World Gold Council. “That is leading a lot of people to say, ‘we want to get ahead of it’, and that is driving the futures market into a premium.”

However, Cavatoni said he was cautiously optimistic that the coming tariffs would most likely not apply to bullion. “We are not getting a sense from the rhetoric from the administration that it intends to go after the monetary metals,” he said…..

So if anyone, clearly not the FT, really wants to find where all that physical London gold has gone, look to Switzerland, but most of all look to China which has been gobbling up every last ounce of physical it can find for reasons which are still not entirely known, even if they are becoming clearer with every passing day… and if they aren't, look at this chart we first posted last April and they will.

But certainly don't blame the US - which received far less, or about 200-400 tonnes of London gold per year - for syphoning away the LBMA physical.

That however is not to say that physical gold isn't being store in the US. On the contrary, one look at the activity in the various Comex gold vaults underneath New York, and one will find something unprecedented, or rather something seen just once: in the aftermath of the covid collapse which nearly shut down the world and sparked a historic, $30 trillion fiscal and monetary stimulus.

Read more:

https://www.zerohedge.com/precious-metals/something-extraordinary-taking-place-gold-vaults-below-manhattan