President Trump on Fed Chair Powell: "We have a stupid person, frankly, at the Fed. He probably won't cut today…Maybe I should go to the Fed. Am I allowed to appoint myself at the Fed?"

https://twitter.com/i/status/1935342230585164022

Near Total Internet Blackout In Iran As Israel Has Control Of Skies

pdate(1302ET): Things are quickly going from bad to worse for Iran, amid ongoing Israeli airstrikes, and given Iran's air defenses in its western portion of the country appear completely destroyed and disabled.

Iran is now in a 'near-total national internet blackout' - according to monitoring from a UK-based watchdog:

Vital civic infrastructure in Tehran, including some sewage system and water networks, have also been hit.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday fielded reporters' questions on the Iran crisis, but refused to answer whether the US military will directly enter the war, amid Israeli requests that the Pentagon assist in striking Iran's nuclear facilities.

"There's a big difference between now and a week ago," Trump told reporters outside the White House, and added curiously: "Nobody knows what I'm going to do."

He indicated that the Iranians had reached out but he feels "it's very late to be talking." But he also threw out the possibility: "We may meet. It's, I don't know, there's a big difference between now and a week ago," he said on the White House lawn.

"I can tell you this, that Iran's got a lot of trouble and they want to negotiate. And I say, 'Why didn't you negotiate with me before all this death and destruction?'" And more:

"For 40 years they've been saying death to America, death to Israel, death to anybody else that they didn't like," he said. "They were bullies. They were schoolyard bullies. And now they're not bullies anymore. But we'll see what happens.

"I wouldn't say that we won anything yet. I would say that we sure as hell made a lot of progress."

He further described Iran as "totally defenseless" at this moment of Israeli warplanes having full dominance of skies in Western Iran. According to a recent Bloomberg headline:

Iran’s Missile Attacks Wane, Allowing Israel to Start Reopening

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/trump-says-iran-reached-out-its-very-late-be-talking

Former Intel Officer Drops Truth Bomb – CIA and ODNI Covered Up 2020 CCP Election Interference, Fired Him for Speaking Out

A former National Intelligence Officer for Cyber under President Trump and Joe Biden has come forward with explosive allegations: the CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) deliberately buried evidence of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interference in the 2020 presidential election—and fired him when he refused to play along.

The whistleblower’s damning post came in response to General Mike Flynn’s tweet Monday questioning why foreign election interference by the CCP wasn’t exposed back in 2020:

“So there was foreign interference by the CCP in the 2020 presidential election. Who was running the USIC at that time and why didn’t this get exposed back then? @CIADirector.

Can we get four years of our lives back!?” Flynn asked, tagging President Trump and former DNI Tulsi Gabbard.”

Former intel officer Christopher Porter didn’t mince words in his reply:

“Sir, I WAS in charge of election analysis and DID call it out. CIA and ODNI tried to cover up the evidence and when I wouldn’t go along with it, terminated me.”

According to Boston College:

From 2019 to June 2022 he was the National Intelligence Officer for Cyber, leading the US Intelligence Community’s analysis of foreign cyber threats and threats to US elections. As a member of the National Intelligence Council, Porter oversaw production of National Intelligence Estimates, was the primary cyber intelligence advisor to the Director of National Intelligence, developed the analytic portion of the Unified Intelligence Strategy, and lead the IC Cyber Analysis Leadership Council made up of the other cyber leaders of CIA, FBI, NSA, DOD, and other agencies.

Serving under both the Trump and Biden Administrations, he frequently briefed and wrote for the President of the United States, senior Cabinet officials, the Gang of Eight and other legislative leaders in the US House of Representatives and Senate, and civilian and military cyber leaders throughout the executive branch.

This revelation is gaining steam following Monday’s bombshell from FBI Director Kash Patel, who confirmed that newly declassified documents reveal alarming CCP involvement in a scheme to flood the 2020 election with fake mail-in ballots. The ballots were allegedly backed by fraudulent voter registrations and Chinese-manufactured fake driver’s licenses.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/06/former-intel-officer-drops-truth-bomb-cia-odni/

Fyodor Lukyanov: Here’s how the West made Israel-Iran war possible

The fantasy of liberal reform has given us the ruins of war

Israel’s attack on Iran, which began last Friday, is the culmination of nearly 25 years of relentless transformation across West Asia. This war was not born overnight, nor can it be explained by simplistic moral binaries. What we see now is the natural outcome of a series of miscalculations, misread ambitions, and power vacuums.

There are no neat lessons to be learned from the last quarter-century. The events were too disjointed, the consequences too contradictory. But that doesn’t mean they lacked logic. If anything, the unfolding chaos is the most coherent evidence of where Western interventionism, ideological naivety, and geopolitical arrogance have led.

Collapse of the Framework

For much of the 20th century, the Middle East was kept within a fragile but functioning framework, largely defined by Cold War dynamics. Superpowers patronized local regimes, and the balance – while far from peaceful – was stable in its predictability.

But the end of the Cold War, and with it the dissolution of the Soviet Union, dissolved those rules. For the next 25 years, the United States stood uncontested in the region. The ideological battle between “socialism” and the “free world” vanished, leaving a vacuum that new forces quickly sought to fill.

Washington tried to impose the values of Western liberal democracy as universal truths. Simultaneously, two other trends emerged: political Islam, which ranged from reformist to radical, and the reassertion of authoritarian secular regimes as bulwarks against collapse. Paradoxically, Islamism – though ideologically opposed to the West – aligned more closely with liberalism in its resistance to autocracy. Meanwhile, those same autocracies were often embraced as the lesser evil against extremism.

https://www.rt.com/news/619568-fyodor-lukyanov-west-iran-israel/

President Trump on the distinction between being the 45th and the 47th president of the United States:

"I was the hunted — and now I'm the hunter."

https://twitter.com/i/status/1935345402678591942

Iran and Israel are at war, with the US already intimately involved and likely to become more so. Which of course means we’ll be spending the foreseeable future getting bashed in the face with lies from the most powerful people in the world.

The most immediately obvious of these is the Netanyahu-promoted narrative that Israel initiated this conflict because Iran was on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon. With absolutely no self-consciousness or sense of irony, the Israeli prime minister followed the attacks with a statement accusing Iran of “genocidal rhetoric” which it has backed up “with a program to develop nuclear weapons.” Israel, as we all know, has an unacknowledged nuclear arsenal, and its leaders are presently committing genocide in Gaza while spouting genocidal rhetoric.

“And if not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time,” Netanyahu claimed. “It could be a year. It could be within a few months — less than a year. This is a clear and present danger to Israel’s very survival.”

The western political/media class have been dutifully promoting this line and uncritically parroting Israel’s claim that its unprovoked attack on Iran was “preemptive”, but there is absolutely no evidence that any of this is true.

Benjamin Netanyahu has spent literally decades falsely claiming that Iran was a year or two away from developing a nuke, only to have the calendar prove him wrong with the passage of time over and over again.

US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard testified just weeks ago that “The IC [Intelligence Community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

As journalist Séamus Malekafzali recently noted on Twitter, one of the strongest arguments that Iran had not reversed its decision to refrain from obtaining nuclear weapons is that Iranian nuclear scientists have been publicly expressing frustration about the fact that their government won’t allow them to construct a nuke. They want to do it, but Tehran won’t let them.

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth helped pave the way for Netanyahu’s claims this past Wednesday when he told the Senate that “there have been plenty of indications” Iran has been “moving their way toward something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon.”

This claim by Hegseth was swiftly scooped up and promoted by warmongers like Tom Cotton who said that Hegseth had “confirmed that Iran’s terrorist regime is actively working towards a nuclear weapon.”

https://thefreethoughtproject.com/foreign-affairs/we-are-of-course-being-lied-to-about-iran

British lawmakers have backed the most significant change to abortion law in decades, voting in favour of an amendment to decriminalise abortions up to the moment of birth.

Under current British law, abortion is technically illegal. Still, it is decriminalised during the first 24 weeks of a pregnancy and in some limited cases beyond if the life of the mother is in danger. Over a quarter-million abortions take place legally in England and Wales under this system a year.

However, on Tuesday afternoon, the MPs backed an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill by a margin of 379 MPs in favour to 137 against to decriminalise abortions at any time for women in England and Wales, the BBC reported. This would effectively end the ability of the state to prosecute women who intentionally end their pregnancies up to the moment of birth.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2025/06/18/british-lawmakers-back-move-to-decriminalise-abortion-up-until-birth/