Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Ron Paul Institute 

In these last days, the Trump Administration has boarded or seized three tankers either loaded with Venezuelan oil or destined for Venezuela (such as the Bella1). The most egregious seizure – in terms of illegality – being a Chinese-owned, Panama-flagged vessel reportedly destined for China – and on no one’s sanctions list.

In a different zone of conflict, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) last Friday claimed that it had struck a Russian so-called “shadow fleet” tanker, the Qendil, with aerial drones in waters of the Mediterranean Sea off Morocco. The SBU did not give further details of the attack, including how the SBU deployed a drone in the Mediterranean (2,000 Km from Ukraine), or the site from which it was launched. The SBU source said the cargo ship was empty at the time of the attack. President Putin, in midst of his annual question and answer marathon, vowed that Russia would retaliate.

“Blockades,” seizures and attacks, very plainly, are acts of war (despite the US claim that America owns all oil produced by Venezuela – until all historical US legal claims against Venezuela are satisfied). This tanker-episode is yet another ratchet to the drift to lawlessness in US foreign policy.

Anadolu/Getty Images

These acts pre-eminently are aimed at China (which has large equities in the Venezuelan oil industry) and Russia, which has longstanding ties to both Venezuela and Cuba (now under Trump “blockade” too). Add to that the $11bn in weapons being sent to Taiwan — with a significant amount of medium to long-range missile systems being part of the planned transfer, including 82 HIMARS launchers with Army ATACMS missiles, allowing Taipei forces to hit targets across the Taiwan Strait.

This latter transfer has infuriated China.

What this suggests is that the National Strategy Statement (NSS) in respect to China (it states that Washington views China as no longer constituting a “prime threat,” but only as an economic competitor) is meaningless rhetoric. China is being treated as an adversarial threat and will respond as such.

China and Russia will “read” the Trump Administration by its actions, rather than its NSS rhetoric. And the signals speak plainly to escalatory steps.

Put all this into the context of “leaks” by senior Trump officials which Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard says are “lies and propaganda.” She says the claims that “the ‘US intelligence community’ agrees to, and supports the EU/NATO viewpoint, that Russia’s aim is to invade/conquer Europe (in order to ‘gin up support’ for their pro-war policies)” — that these are lies being pushed by what she terms “Deep State warmongers and their Propaganda Media … to undermine Trump’s efforts to bring peace to Ukraine.”

“The truth,” Gabbard writes on Twitter, is the opposite:

‘[That] the US intelligence community has briefed policymakers, including the Democrat HPSCI member quoted by Reuters, that US Intelligence assesses that Russia seeks to avoid a larger war with NATO. It also assesses that, as the last few years have shown, Russia … does not have the capability to invade and occupy Europe’ — and that ‘US Intelligence assesses that Russia seeks to avoid a larger war with NATO.’

So, what Gabbard is telling us is that there is open intra-warfare at the top of the Trump Administration. On one side, there is the CIA, the hawks and their European collaborators, and on the other, Gabbard’s Intelligence analysts and a larger US constituency.

Where is Trump in this brew? Why is he positioning himself at the cusp of another round of conflict with China? Why would he do that when US economic structures are so fragile, and when China has shown that it has economic leverage with which to fight? Is the explanation the simplistic response that it is a diversion from the release of further Epstein images?

Why too did Trump dispatch Messrs Witkoff and Kushner to Berlin when the intent of Europeans to wreck the negotiating process with Russia was quite evident aforehand? The two American “Envoys” did not sign the Euro-proposal. They sat silently; yet neither did they enter a dissent, not even when (NATO-like) Article 5 security guarantees were mooted?

Also who was it who provided the targeting data by which Ukraine (apparently) was able to attack the Qendil off the North African coast 2,000 kms from Ukraine? What conclusion was intended for Putin to draw from the two incidents? Certainly, Russians will have made their own surmise.

And why draw-in Iran too, by seizing the Iranian Bella 1, ostensibly flagged to Guyana heading toward Venezuela? Does this represent the start to another round to the Iranian tanker war originally pursued by Israel? Does it suit Netanyahu’s and certain constituencies in Israel’s purposes to heat up the situation in respect to Iran?

It is worth asking because Netanyahu is scheduled to leave for Palm Beach, Miami, on December 28 with a view to have one or perhaps two meetings with Trump at Mar-a-Lago during the following days (though the meetings with Trump have yet to be confirmed at time of writing).

It seems that it is neither Hamas, nor Gaza Phase Two, that lies predominantly behind Netanyahu’s summit intent – but rather Iran.

The Gaza and Hamas issues therefore are likely to play second fiddle to the “new” narrative being framed by the Israeli PM’s office: Iran will not be presented to Trump as rushing toward “a nuclear breakthrough” as per the old cliché.

That is the “old narrative.” The new one is, as leading Israeli commentator Anna Barsky writes in (Hebrew) in Ma’ariv:

The more immediate threat here: [more] than the nuclear itself … [is] the systematic [Iranian] reconstruction of the middle layer: the ballistic missile industry, its production lines and the ability to restore the functionality to damaged air defence systems.

In other words: ‘missile restoration’ and ‘nuclear restoration’ are not two separate axes, but one system – and it is of great concern to Israel. The missile builds a shell, the shell enables a nuclear power, and the nuclear power – even if rejected – remains the ultimate [Iranian] goal.

The message that Netanyahu will take to Mar-a-Lago is that “Israel will not allow Iran to rebuild a missile and defense umbrella that will close the skies over sensitive sites.“

Trump may be more preoccupied with creating a new regional order without being dragged into a war with no clear end. Netanyahu likely will claim nonetheless (as he has been doing for over 25 years) that the “window” in which Iran can rebuild its defense umbrella is fast closing, and will likely gently remind the President that Trump was placed in power, not just to promote Israel’s image, but for the Realpolitik purpose of expanding Israel’s real-world power in the region and control over territory.

Happy Christmas, Donald!

Authored by Paul D. Thacker via The DisInformation Chronicle,

A few days back I took several calls from officials working on President Trump’s policy to limit and track dangerous, gain-of-function pathogen research, the very studies that likely created the COVID virus, which most American believe leaked from a Wuhan lab. Trump signed an Executive Order on May 5 to stop risky gain-of-function scientific studies, leading to controversy and claims by media outlets politically aligned with virologists and the Democratic Party that it will harm science.

“Executive order on gain-of-function experiments could chill research on infectious diseases,” reported Science Magazine.

“Trump freezes ‘gain of function’ pathogen research ― threatening all US virology,” reported Nature Magazine.

In one of the more bizarre, confusing articles to splash across social media, the Daily Caller falsely reported that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is somehow subverting the White House policy process, and that an NIH contractor is somehow creating a potential virus bioweapon, even though he doesn’t work in a lab.

Yes. It’s that nutty out there, people. You’ve been warned.

Last Wednesday, senior officials from several dozen agencies assembled at the White House to review the plan, and the State Department “blew up the meeting”, I was told by several people. For some of the senior officials who showed up, it was likely their first time reviewing the policy which had been handled by lower-level employees in prior meetings. This might have led to the problems at the Wednesday meeting.

As I previously reported, employees from HHS, FDA, USDA, CDC, DOW, State Department, DNI, CIA, FBI, and branches of the military are among the dozens of officials putting the new policy together. Two employees at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), I am told, are actually holding the pen to write the strategy.

The White House was expected to roll out the rules earlier this month, but the government shut down and several employee problems caused unexpected delays. Dr. Gerald Parker, for example, was considered a key appointment for the White House, but resigned this summer to deal with some personal health issues.

However, I have learned that White House OSTP has decided Trump’s policy will take a “risk-based” approach to determine whether a particular pathogen study will be green lighted. Entities responsible will be penalized if they fail to heed the system.

Four entities will provide multiple checks in the process:

Scientist proposing the study;

Institution where the scientist works;

Funding agency (NIH, DOW, USDA, State Department, etc.);

Independent Review Board (this does not yet exist and will scrutinize all studies across the government).

Each entity will have different responsibilities and different penalties if they evade the new policy. For example, a researcher who submits a virus study to an agency for funding without running it through the system may be debarred from federal participation if one of the entities later finds the study is dangerous. That researcher’s institution could also be debarred as well, for not ensuring the scientist followed the new process.

Submitting research proposals to the new Independent Review Board, however, will provide a safe harbor, protecting both scientist and institutions. Program officers at agencies funding research—NIH, State Department, DOW, USDA, for example—will also be forced to evaluate the studies they fund to ensure they follow the rules.

It remains unclear what penalties might befall federal employees who try to evade the rules, and those details will likely be worked out by each separate agency. The Department of Energy, for example, funds millions of dollars in pathogen research each year.

The Independent Review Board will review science study proposals from across the federal government, and might require a new charter and congressional action. The White House is expected to release the final plan in January or February.

NOTE TO READERS: While nobody will reveal who exactly is working on this new policy, an intelligence official, who wishes to remain anonymous, sent me several emails from the last major update to gain-of-function virus research policy in 2017. When White House National Security Council Advisor Hillary Carter emailed the research policy’s final version, she copied in those who had participated in the process.

The list of government employees stretches on for four pages, which you can view here.

One big geopolitical trend of the last year and beyond connected with the Ukraine war has been just how open North Korea and Russia have been about their deepening defense relations.

At the start, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un taking the high risk and controversial step of sending thousands of his DPRK troops to assist Russia was initially kept a secret, with little details made public.

Soon, international press reported at least 10,000 North Korean troops helping Russia, mostly in the Kursk border area.

But the last year saw North Korea go so far as to publish footage of North Koreans coming home from the Ukraine war in flag-draped coffins.

Pool, Getty Images

Kim Jong Un said Saturday that his country and Russia had bonded through “blood, life and death” during the war in Ukraine, as he delivered New Year’s greetings to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In his message released by the state-run KCNA news agency, Kim described 2025 as a “really meaningful year” for the partnership between the two countries, saying their alliance had been strengthened by “sharing blood, life and death in the same trench.”

It was only last April that North Korea publicly acknowledged for the first time it had deployed troops to assist Russia’s military operations in Ukraine and confirmed that some of its soldiers had died in combat. However, this had been an ‘open secret’ for much of the year even prior to that.

Earlier this month, Pyongyang also admitted it had sent personnel to remove land mines in Russia’s Kursk region in August 2025. Kim said at least nine members of an engineering regiment were killed during the 120-day mission, speaking at a Dec. 12 ceremony marking the unit’s return home.

Putin too has praised the North Korean soldiers for being especially instrumental in pushing back the short-lived Ukrainian occupation of southern Kurks oblast, in a brazen cross-border operation which lasted for months.

Kim’s New Year’s message to Putin came a day after he ordered officials to ramp up missile production. The world can expect more provocative missile tests from Pyongyang this year.

Putin’s travel in 2025 focused on non-Western and BRICS and non-aligned countries, some of which the West would call ‘rogue states’. But it also crucially included the Alaska Summit with President Donald Trump – the single biggest and most surprising trip since the Ukraine war’s start…

🤝Hands Russian President Putin shook in 2025

This year saw truly historic meetings between Putin and global leaders, including:

🇺🇸 Donald Trump

🇨🇳 Xi Jinping

🇰🇵 Kim Jong-un

🇮🇳 Narendra Modi

🇮🇷 Masoud Pezeshkian

…and many more. Watch to find out! pic.twitter.com/bRLgFogyiC

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) December 26, 2025

In addition to troop deployments, North Korea has also supplied Russia with artillery shells, missiles, and long-range rocket systems. Moscow has in turn provided its growing ally with with financial support, military technology, and supplies of food and energy.

Additionally, CNN reports that North Korea released images of what it claims is its first nuclear-powered submarine, which is designed as a challenge to American naval dominance in the region.

The state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Dec. 25 showed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, in the company of senior officials and his daughter, inspecting the new vessel, which was first revealed in March at an indoor construction facility.

Kim first discussed building a nuclear-powered submarine as part of a five-year military expansion plan at a party conference in 2021, and called the construction of the vessel one of the cornerstones of his regime’s defense policy.

“We regard the super-powerful offensive capability as the best shield for national security in developing the armed forces,” Kim was recorded as saying.

The North Korean dictator also listed several high-priority weapons systems at the conference, including solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying multiple warheads, hypersonic weapons, two new guided-missile destroyers, and advanced spy satellites.

Kim called the naval construction program, while inspecting the new sub, “a leap forward in bolstering up the combat capabilities of our fleets,” according to KCNA.

However, as PJMedia.com’s Bryan Jung notes, one of the new destroyers capsized on launch earlier this year, to Pyongyang’s embarrassment, but was subsequently refloated and repaired.

Authored by Mollie Engelhart via The Epoch Times,

I want to be very clear.

Yes, I am a regenerative farmer.

Yes, I farm without chemicals.

Yes, I speak publicly—on podcasts, from stages, and in print—about better ways to grow food.

But I never villainize farmers. Not conventional farmers. Not farmers locked into systems they did not design. Not farmers working with razor-thin margins, massive equipment debt, weather risk, and policy pressure stacked against them.

No one wants to be the generation that loses the farm.

And yet that is exactly what is unfolding across Europe right now…and quietly, steadily, in the United States as well.

Over the past two years, farmers across Europe have mobilized at a scale that should dominate headlines. Instead, it has been treated as background noise.

In the Netherlands, farmers have protested nitrogen rules that would force mass farm closures—even among low-input and regenerative operations. In France, farmers have blocked highways and surrounded Paris with tractors, protesting fuel taxes, land-use restrictions, and impossible compliance burdens. In Germany, tens of thousands of farmers drove tractors into Berlin over the removal of diesel tax exemptions that many farms rely on to survive. In Belgium, farmers dumped produce and manure outside EU buildings in Brussels. In Poland, Romania, and Hungary, farmers have protested cheap imports and regulations that apply to domestic producers but not foreign competitors.

These are not isolated events. They are sustained, multinational protests by people who feed entire continents.

And yet the coverage is minimal, fleeting, or framed as an inconvenient disruption rather than an existential warning.

European farmers are not protesting environmental responsibility. Many already practice conservation, reduced inputs, rotational grazing, cover cropping, and soil-building methods.

What they are rejecting is regulation divorced from reality.

Under policies driven by the European Union and initiatives like the European Green Deal, farmers face rules that impose arbitrary nitrogen caps per acre, treat synthetic nitrogen and organic nitrogen as if they are identical, require land to be taken out of production regardless of local context, and demand extensive reporting and compliance that small and mid-size farms cannot absorb.

This is no longer about practices. There are fully regenerative farmers—no chemicals, integrated livestock, biologically active soils—who are still being regulated to death.

Biology cannot be legislated by spreadsheet.

Cows on grass are not the same as animals in confinement. Cover-cropped fields with livestock integration are not the same as continuous monocropping. Rainfall, soil type, slope, climate, and ecosystem function matter.

Yet modern regulation ignores all of this.

Instead, it relies on modeling, averages, AI projections, and “eco-science” disconnected from outcome-based measurement. These rules are written far from the fields, enforced uniformly across radically different landscapes, and paid for by farmers who were never invited to the table.

If governments want fewer chemicals in the food system, the solution is straightforward: ban the chemical. Then step back and let farmers adapt and innovate.

What does not work is regulating farmers themselves with arbitrary input limits that punish nuance and reward consolidation.

When farming becomes unworkable, land changes hands.

Small and mid-size farms fold first. Family land is sold. Consolidation accelerates. Institutional capital moves in. Farmers become tenants—or disappear entirely.

European farmers understand this. That is why they are angry. They are not fighting for comfort. They are fighting for their land, their livelihoods, and their way of life.

They want to be left alone to grow food.

What Europe is experiencing is not a foreign anomaly. It is a preview.

In the United States, the regulatory burden on farmers and food entrepreneurs is already staggering. Joel Salatin titled his book “Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal” because for many farmers, that is not hyperbole—it is daily life.

Every permit, inspection, compliance mandate, and fine functions as a form of taxation without representation.

No founding generation imagined a country where every carcass must be stamped by a federal inspector, where farmers are criminalized for selling food directly to their communities, or where innovation outside industrial models is functionally illegal.

And yet here we are.

If all this interference produced extraordinary health outcomes, perhaps the argument could be made that it was worth it.

But Americans are sicker than ever.

More than 40 percent of adults are obese. Nearly half of adults have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Metabolic dysfunction is now normal.

This is not happening despite regulation. It is happening alongside it.

So why, after decades of food and farm regulation, are health outcomes collapsing?

Because regulation does not target the true problem. It protects corporate interests.

Farmers do not have powerful lobbies. Chemical companies do. Seed conglomerates do. Large processors do.

Regulation often preserves harmful substances in the food system while making it illegal for farmers to operate outside centralized, industrial pipelines.

After the Food Safety Modernization Act under President Barack Obama, many farmers were suddenly unable to sell directly to grocery stores.

Food had to travel farther. Middlemen became mandatory. Small producers were pushed out.

The result was less fresh food, lower nutrient density, and greater distance between people and their food.

We may have reduced certain types of foodborne illness—but we did not create a healthier population.

Every layer of interference pulls us further from food, farmers, and biological truth.

European farmers are not extremists. They are early warning systems.

They are telling us that overregulation destroys resilience, undermines food security, and centralizes control of land and food.

They are telling us that stewardship cannot be mandated by spreadsheet.

And they are asking something profoundly reasonable.

Talk to us. Not at us.

Invite farmers to the table. Regulate at the chemical level if something is unsafe. Measure outcomes, not inputs. Reduce bureaucracy instead of expanding it.

Why are tractors filling European cities while the media barely notices?

Because acknowledging these protests would require admitting something uncomfortable: that governments are overreaching, that farmers are right, and that the systems sold as “for the public good” are failing both the public and the people who feed it.

What’s happening in Europe should concern every American.

Because once you regulate farmers out of existence, you don’t get them back.

And no society survives long after it breaks its relationship with the land—and the people who know how to work it.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Brazilian authorities are really going after some of the loyalists of imprisoned ex-President Jair Bolsonaro. In the latest, a former Brazilian police chief who fled the country after being convicted for his role in an alleged “attempted coup” linked to Bolsonaro has been arrested in Paraguay.

Silvinei Vasques was detained Friday at Silvio Pettirossi International Airport in Asunción, Paraguay authorities confirmed in a statement. He was detained charges of “identity theft” after trying to bypass immigration checks by posing as a Paraguayan citizen.

Paraguay border police image after Silvinei Vasques caught in country illegally. 

He was trying to board a flight to Panama, claiming El Salvador as his final destination. Apparently he didn’t enter Paraguay legally, but entered “clandestinely” while “evading justice in his home country.”

Vasques as a powerful former police official in Brazil was accused of ordering highway patrol officers to block voters in left-leaning regions during the 2022 election, which Bolsonaro eventually lost to current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

He was arrested in 2023 and released under supervision with an electronic ankle monitor while awaiting trial. His legal proceedings have been running simultaneously to the more high profile Bolsonaro case.

At the conclusion of his trial, Vasques was sentenced to more than two years in prison to be served under house arrest, after which he fled the country. Regional reports indicated that he broke his ankle monitor and drove into Paraguay.

But he apparently made a break for it after on Friday Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the former police chief’s preventive detention as a precaution.

Other alleged co-conspirators who are allies of Bolsonaro have also fled. One notable one is former intelligence agency director Alexandre Ramagem, who earlier left Brazil in September and has since been living in the United States.

Fake passports found on ‘wanted’ ex highway police chief as he was trying to make it to El Salvador…

El exdirector de la Policía de Tránsito Federal brasileña, Silvinei Vasques, llega a Brasil tras ser entregado por las autoridades paraguayas.

El Director de Migración de Paraguay, Jorge Kronawetter, informó que al contrastar datos se confirmó que Vasques portaba un documento… https://t.co/XXtJH58nV6 pic.twitter.com/EBzOw5PFBz

— Nacho Lemus (@LemusteleSUR) December 27, 2025

As for Bolsonaro himself, once dubbed the “Brazilian Donald Trump” – at the age of 70 he is currently serving a 27-year prison sentence after being convicted in September of trying to prevent Lula from taking office.

Last week the former president underwent surgery for a hernia, and has been suffering a variety of health problems while first under house arrest and now under confinement, after he too was caught trying to break his ankle monitor.