Seriously Though..., What's Not To Love About The Fabulous Dita Von Teese?

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I'll Believe It When I See Firings And Jailings For The mRNA Mandate

judiciary.house.gov  |  The House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust will hold a hearing on Wednesday, June 26, 2024, at 10:00 a.m. ET. The hearing, "Follow the Science?: Oversight of the Biden Covid-19 Administrative State Response," will discuss the Subcommittee's oversight that found how the Biden Administration pressured the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to "cut corners" and lower agency standards to approve the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine and authorize boosters. This approval enabled the Biden administration to mandate the vaccine, despite concerns that the vaccine was causing injury among otherwise healthy young Americans. Congress needs to address reforms to the administrative state to bring accountability to its agencies, particularly when it comes to the process of approving vaccines.

WITNESSES: 

• Dr. Philip Krause, MD, former Deputy Director, FDA Office of Vaccines Research & Review - testimony 
• Aaron Siri, Vaccine litigation expert - testimony 
• Jordan Vaughn, MD, Birmingham, Founder and President of Microvascular Research Foundation- testimony 
• Andrew Tobias Pavia MD, FAAP, FACP, FIDSA, FSHEA, Chief, Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine George and Esther Gross Presidential Professor, Department of Pediatrics University of Utah School of Medicine - testimony 

Subcommittees

Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law (118th Congress)

Nobody Is Safe Until Everybody Is Safe

judiciary.house.gov  |  Today, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust, led by Chairman Thomas Massie (R-KY), released an interim staff report titled, "Politics, Private Interests, and the Biden Administration's Deviation from Agency Regulations in the COVID-19 Pandemic" The report details how the Biden Administration pressured the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to go beyond its regulatory authority to change its procedures, cut corners, and lower agency standards to approve the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine and authorize boosters. This approval enabled the Biden Administration to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine, despite concerns that the same vaccine was causing injury among otherwise healthy young Americans. 

"In August 2021, when the Pfizer shots received FDA licensure, and just before the booster received EUA, the top two FDA vaccine reviewers with decades of experience announced they were leaving the agency," said Chairman Thomas Massie (R-KY). "During the pandemic, politics overruled science at the government institutions entrusted with protecting public health. The FDA abandoned its congressional directive to protect citizens from false claims and undisclosed side effects, and instead ignored its own rules to pursue a policy of promoting the vaccine while downplaying potential harms. Exposing and acknowledging mistakes that were made is a necessary step toward restoring integrity and trust in our regulatory agencies."

The Subcommittee's investigation also revealed that the administrative state mishandled reports of vaccine injury, despite requirements to actively obtain, synthesize, and report feedback on the safety and efficacy of the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) vaccine. Two former FDA scientists, Dr. Marion Gruber and Dr. Philip Krause, testified to the Subcommittee that they felt pressure to cut corners on the vaccine review, which was due to outside pressure to provide immediate approval so that the government could mandate vaccines. Despite evidence of harms from the EUA vaccine, the Biden Administration sought to fully approve the Pfizer vaccine through the Biologics Licensing Application (BLA) process.

Under the leadership of then-Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock, a long-time FDA staffer who the Biden Administration promoted to Acting Commissioner, and Dr. Peter Marks, head of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), the agency cut corners in its usually rigorous BLA process to brand the Pfizer EUA vaccine as the only fully licensed "safe and effective" COVID-19 vaccine on the market at the time.  Today, former Acting FDA Commissioner Woodcock says that, as it relates to vaccine-related injury, she is "disappointed in [her]self" and that the FDA did not do enough to address vaccine-related injury.

The FDA succumbed to the Biden Administration's pressure to act beyond its authority, which may have long-term impacts on the agency's ability to confidently serve the American public. This poor policy by the Biden Administration reveals many significant problems related to accountability and good decision making in the administrative state that warrant legislative reform. 

Read the full interim staff report and appendix here.

American Elites Begin Acknowledging America's Decline...,

This month has seen a bevy of new thinkpieces from top American deepstate figures or old-guard publications urging the changing of course, lest the country be swept away by the remorseless tide of history.

The first and most prominent of these making the rounds is that of former speech writer and White House staffer to Obama, Ben Rhodes, entitled:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/biden-foreign-policy-world-rhodes

Rhodes remains among the political haute monde, having founded a thinktank alongside Jake Sullivan, which had many interlinkings with Soros’ Open Society organizations. That’s to say, Rhodes has his finger on the pulse of the ‘inner circles’ of the patriciate, which is underscored by the CFR’s journal offering tribune to his latest. And so it’s even more telling that he’s moved to sound the alarm against a country he feels is—as the cover art above obliges—stumbling headfirst into historic headwinds.

The article is actually quite long and detailed, so we have Arnaud Bertrand to summarize its finest points. The first bolded portion below gets to the heart of Rhodes’ startling argument—but read the rest of the bolded:

This is an interesting piece by brhodes, Obama's Former Deputy National Security Advisor

In an immense departure from US policy to date, he advocates that the US "abandons the mindset of American primacy" and "pivots away from the political considerations, maximalism, and Western-centric view that have caused [the Biden] administration to make some of the same mistakes as its predecessors".

He writes, and I find this a very powerful sentence, that "meeting the moment requires building a bridge to the future—not the past." As in not seek to regain a lost hegemony, but adapt to the "world as it is" which he calls "the world of post-American primacy".

To be sure, the piece still has strong relents of the liberal instincts to remake the world in America's image - a leopard cannot change its spots - but at least he acknowledges the reality that the world has changed and that the US should view itself as a power coexisting with others, not THE power that needs to dominate the rest of the world. Which is a first step...

Also, significantly, he points out the insanity of "framing the battle between democracy and autocracy as a confrontation with a handful of geopolitical adversaries" when the West's own democracies are in such sorry states today that they can hardly be called "democracies" anymore... He writes that instead of trying to constantly interfere in changing other countries' systems, "ultimately, the most important thing that America can do in the world is detoxify its own democracy".

The below encapsulates the core thesis, which is that America’s global primacy is over, and the only way for the country to stay afloat is to adapt to the new realities:

Yet even though a return to competent normalcy was in order, the Biden administration’s mindset of restoration has occasionally struggled against the currents of our disordered times. An updated conception of U.S. leadership—one tailored to a world that has moved on from American primacy and the eccentricities of American politics—is necessary to minimize enormous risks and pursue new opportunities.

This is the theme which recurs again and again throughout the new zeitgeist taking over political discourse in the stricken Beltway—panicking neocons are exhorting each other: we’re in a fight for our lives, if we don’t accept the new realities, we’ll drown!

Publications like Foreign Affairs are where the elite address not us, but each other, in the long-standing tradition of euphemism as secret-coded language of their ‘interior world’ of the deepstate and outlying political class. Here Mr. Rhodes adeptly navigates the nuances of this privileged cant when he declares that the Rules Based Order has fallen:

Honestly Not Sure How A Turd Like This Calls Itself A Scholar.....,

chronicle  |  It is not surprising for a boss to think that employees should avoid saying things in public that might damage the organization for which they both work. It is not even surprising for the boss to understand “damage” to include making the boss’s own life more difficult.

But college faculty members have fought very hard, for a very long time, to be protected from such attitudes. They have established that, unlike employees at most organizations, they have the right to publicly criticize their employer and their administration. So it is notable when an especially prominent administrator publicly announces that faculty speech rights should be rolled back a century or so. That is what Lawrence D. Bobo, dean of social science and a professor of social sciences at Harvard University, did last week in an opinion essay published in The Harvard Crimson with the ominous title, “Faculty Speech Must Have Limits.”

Members of the faculty, Bobo argued, have the right to debate “key policy matters” in “internal discussion,” but they should be careful that their dissent not reach outside ears:

A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors — be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government — to intervene in Harvard’s affairs. Along with freedom of expression and the protection of tenure comes a responsibility to exercise good professional judgment and to refrain from conscious action that would seriously harm the university and its independence.

Such public criticisms, Bobo says, “cross a line into sanctionable violations of professional conduct.” If a group of faculty members, for example, decides that a dean’s policies are inimical to their institution’s core mission, and if they take their criticism to the press, then — according to Bobo — they should be properly disciplined.

Bobo’s views were conventional wisdom among university officials and trustees in 1900. They are shocking in 2024. Shocking, but unfortunately no longer surprising. The Harvard dean’s arguments resonate with a growing movement of those who wish to muzzle the faculty. Professors are to be free to speak, so long as they do not say anything that might disturb the powers that be. Those in power may not want the faculty to march to the same tune, but they do all like giving the faculty their marching orders and expecting them not to step out of line.

The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, issued jointly by the American Association of University Professors and what was then called the Association of American Colleges, established the now widely adopted rules regarding faculty speech. It specifies that when professors “speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline.” The statement does suggest that professors have some “special obligations” when speaking in public, though the AAUP has long urged that those be treated as suggestive rather than obligatory. Even so, the statement merely urged professors to “be accurate” and “exercise appropriate restraint.” They “should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances,” and thus they should avoid embarrassing themselves in public by being rude or ignorant. But there was no suggestion that they should avoid airing the university’s dirty laundry.

Harvard’s own free-expression policy, first adopted in the Vietnam era, is if anything even more emphatic about the need for officials to tolerate dissent and critique. It notes that “reasoned dissent plays a particularly vital part” in the university’s existence and that all members of the university community have the right to “advocate and publicize opinion by print, sign, and voice.” Dissenters are not to obstruct “the essential processes of the university” or interfere “with the ability of members of the university to perform their normal activities,” but they are free to “press for action” and “constructive change” by organizing, advocating, and persuading. Bobo’s ideas about where the limits of faculty speech are to be found are plainly at odds with both AAUP principles and common university policies, not to mention First Amendment principles that would bind officials at state universities.

The AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles provided the rationale for such protections of faculty dissent. “With respect to certain external conditions of his vocation,” a professor “accepts a responsibility to the authorities of the institution in which he serves,” but “in the essentials of his professional activity his duty is to the wider public to which the institution itself is morally amenable.” The “university is a great and indispensable organ of the higher life of a civilized community,” and the members of the faculty “hold an independent place, with quite equal responsibilities” for caring for and preserving those institutions. For those purposes, the “professorial office” was not that of an employee doing the bidding of a boss but that of a scholar answering to a public trust. The faculty’s ultimate duty is not to the college as such but to the larger public that even private universities, as charitable institutions, serve.

KC Gets KKFI Community Radio And Kultcha That Y'all Don't Get...,

pbs.org   |  [Cerrone's "Supernature" playing] Woman: The disco sound was just wonderful.

It was exciting, powerful, you know, spank you, and you just had a good time.

Barry Walters: Disco brought together Black Pride, women's liberation, and LGBT culture.

It was the coming together of that that made it so powerful.

Allen Roskoff: Listening to the music and letting yourself go, you become a different person.

Singers: ♪ Supernature ♪ ♪ Supernature ♪ ♪ Supernature ♪ ♪ Supernature ♪ There was this powder keg chain reaction that happened that made it suddenly totally take over the airwaves.

Singers: ♪ Supernature ♪ Jake Shears: It was, of course "Saturday Night Fever" that really, like, tipped everything over, that, like, tipped the scales.

It just set the world on fire.

Disco was on everybody's lips.

Clubs were packed every night.

♪ Woman: Studio 54, I created it as a playground.

Sex, drugs, disco, whatever you need.

Singer: ♪ Angry with the man ♪ ♪ 'Cause he changed their way of life ♪ Bill Bernstein: In the late seventies, the outsider became the insider.

Singer: ♪ Take their sweet revenge ♪ Woman: The Black disco diva was a breakthrough persona.

Someone like Donna Summer, she was a disco queen.

Don't forget Gloria in all her gloria.

Singers: ♪ Supernature ♪ I think that era music allowed the disco diva to have this stage to be adored and celebrated.

♪ Candi Staton: Disco freed me.

It saved me.

[Cheering] ♪ Singers: ♪ Supernature ♪ [Protestors shouting] ♪ Richard Nixon: In all the decisions I have made in my public life, I have always tried to do what was best for the nation.

Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me.

Woman: In the mid-1970s, the United States was not a happy place.

There was the Watergate scandal, and any faith that Americans had in government was shaken to its core.

What percentage of the American people do you think still have confidence in President Nixon?

Well, among young people, very few, I'd say less than 25%.

Nixon: Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

P.A.

announcer: Nixon has announced he will resign as president of the United States at noon tomorrow.

Roskoff: In my life and everybody I knew, Nixon was detested, but it was an intense period of time.

You knew you were living history.

You knew that this is monumental.

♪ [Machineguns firing] George McCrae: Was a hard time because of the Vietnam War.

Also a nuclear bomb threat And Russia, you know.

that they might drop a bomb any day.

"Oh, my God.

What we gonna do?"

♪ Farrington: The flip side of this dark moment is that when life gets hard, you party harder.

[Gloria Gaynor's "Never Can Say Goodbye" playing] ♪ I was living in New York in the 1970s.

All we wanted to do was dance to disco music.

Gaynor: ♪ I never can say goodbye ♪ David Depino: There was a freedom.

It was like express yourself was so welcome and wanted, and music was the common denominator.

Gaynor: ♪ Heading for the door ♪ ♪ There's a very strange... ♪ Nicky Siano: I mean, it was just igniting people's dance souls.

Gaynor: ♪ It says, "Turn around, you fool" ♪ ♪ "You know love him" ♪ Man: Why is everybody rushing and flooding the doors of discotheque?

Oh, I think it's because with all of the hardships that are going on in the world today, people need a place to go and relieve tension and release their anxieties, and discotheques are a great place to do just that.

Gaynor: ♪ Say goodbye, boy ♪ ♪ Ooh, ooh, baby ♪ ♪ I never can say goodbye ♪ ♪ No, no, no, hey ♪ ♪ I never can say goodbye ♪ ♪ Say goodbye ♪ ♪ Oh, no, I ♪ Reporter: Gloria Gaynor is a rock 'n' roll singer whose records have really never made it before until she decided to specialize in a brand-new rock 'n' roll musical style called disco music.

Gaynor: ♪ All gonna work out ♪ ♪ But there's that same unhappy feeling ♪ ♪ And that anguish and that doubt ♪ Depino: She made you raise your hands up and want to touch the ceiling while you were dancing and screaming.

When Gloria was doing her thing, I think she was the First Lady of Disco.

♪ Say goodbye ♪ ♪ It is so ♪ ♪ I don't want to let you go ♪ Vince Aletti: She was one of the earliest people to have a major presence in the clubs, was, you know, Queen of Disco before there was such a title.

Gaynor: ♪ No, no, no, no, no, ooh ♪ Gloria, did you ever think this would happen?

No, I really didn't.

Not like this, anyway.

I always thought I would sing eventually, but I never thought all this would happen.

♪ I never can say goodbye ♪ ♪ No, no, no, no, no, no, no ♪ Woman: I think disco means to most people, probably it means a lot of fun.

To me, it meant a change.

♪ Farrington: In the early seventies, Black women were caught between a rock and a hard place.

Statistically, they were at the bottom of the heap.

They earned less than most any other group, male or female.

They were victimized by a notorious government-sponsored report called the Moynihan Report.

It was a report that discussed what were the particular problems of Blacks and Jews and Puerto Ricans.

Black women were literally blamed for the problems of Black men.

Black women were heads of their families, too matriarchal, too strong, and unfortunately, when scholars produce a document that is government-approved, people tend to believe it, and so rather than fight against this, which was virtually impossible for a group that oppressed to do, they tried not to be like that.

Nona Hendryx: You had to work hard to fit in, and to fit in, you're gonna be quiet.

You're not gonna bring all your loud culture with you or whatever it is and make demands.

You're gonna try and fit in.

[Church choir singing] Ward: When I was growing up, the only time that people heard my voice, I was singing.

My father had been a minister, so we just had to kind of stick to what we were told to do.

I just wanted to sing.

Woman: ♪ I can hear Jesus calling me ♪ Choir: ♪ Calling me ♪ Staton: The pastor called me up on the stage, and I started singing, and the church people started shouting and screaming and standing up and waving.

"Sing, baby!

Sing that song."

That was the beginning.

♪ Ohh ♪ Woman: The gospel diva or the soul diva, that's a really powerful, full-bodied sound that moved into the mainstream in the sixties.

Man: Sarah Dash, Nona Hendryx, Patricia Holt, known as Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles.

♪ Somewhere over ♪ ♪ The rainbow ♪ Hendryx: In the sixties, se were a traditional girl group, and we dressed alike.

We did the kind of, you know, lead singer with backing singers waving their arms and looking very nice.

Farrington: Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles were fulfilling a vision of Black womanhood that was on the tail end of the early sixties Motown era.

They embodied that non-threatening persona that America wanted to place Black women in.

♪ Hey, hey, oh, oh, oh ♪ Hendryx: We were expected to carry ourselves a certain way in the public, you know, well-dressed, well-behaved.

That's how it was.

♪ Really do come true ♪ Staton: In the music industry, we were fighting, trying to get out of that box that we were put in in the sixties, so disco was wonderful.

Royster: Disco did offer Black women new opportunities.

Disco did give space for Black women to kind of add soul and funk and depth to a lot of different kinds of music to kind of take center stage like Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles.

[Labelle's "Lady Marmalade" playing] ♪ Woman: My next guest stars are the hottest girl group in America.

Man, they are truly hot, and they've got the hottest single, too, "Lady Marmalade," and here they are-- Nona Hendryx, Sarah Dash, and Patti LaBelle known throughout the music industry as Labelle.

♪ Go, sister, soul sister ♪ ♪ Flow, sister ♪ ♪ Go now ♪ ♪ Go, sister, soul sister ♪ ♪ Flow, sister ♪ ♪ He met Marmalade ♪ ♪ Down in old New Orleans ♪ ♪ Struttin' her stuff on the street ♪ Farrington: When Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles changed their name, they changed their look, and they changed it dramatically.

♪ Da da ♪ ♪ Gitchi gitchi ya ya here ♪ ♪ Mocha ♪ ♪ Mocha chocolata, ya ya ♪ Hendryx: Patti LaBelle And the Bluebelles were a girl group, right?

Labelle were a girl band.

♪ Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?

♪ ♪ Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?

♪ Ana Matronic: Labelle looking like they just, like, beamed in from some crazy, funky galaxy.

It was just so over the top and so amazing and so out there.

That to me meant a certain kind of freedom.

♪ Oh, gitchi gitchi ya ya here ♪ The architect of the look of Labelle was Legaspi.

He also designed the look for KISS.

Patti LaBelle: ♪ Ahh ahh ♪ Farrington: He also designed the look for Funkadelic.

Labelle: ♪ Coucher avec moi ce soir?

♪ Larry was already sort of making things that looked like a futuristic look, and then with us being open to even going further, he began to design more.

♪ More, more, more ♪ Farrington: I was mesmerized and delighted to see my people in a way that was unlike any way anyone had ever imagined them.

Labelle: ♪ More, more, more ♪ ♪ Gitchi gitchi ya ya da da ♪ ♪ Gitchi gitchi ya ya here ♪ Hendryx: Just singing songs that felt right to us or mattered to us, and the audience were responding to it.

♪ Touching her skin, feeling silky smooth ♪ ♪ Ahh ♪ ♪ Ahh ♪ Royster: Lady Marmalade is talking about, I mean, basically sex tourism and sex work.

♪ Roar until it cried ♪ All: ♪ "More, more, more!"

♪ Royster: Women don't often get center stage, or if there is a story that's being told, it's also a story that's about titillation or about fetishization.

Hendryx: It's like a playwright, you know, someone describing something as opposed to judging it and in a way that-- not celebratory, but in a way that was not downtrodden and horrible and that this is just yet another aspect of life.

[Indistinct chatter] Royster: I really think that music is really important in terms of creating social change, and in this moment, you know, music was reflecting Black women's lives in a way that it hadn't ever been.

Staton: I was so glad disco came in.

You know, good music, good lyrics, songs that had a meaning to them.

In the sixties, we were known as R&B singers.

♪ I'd rather be lonely ♪ ♪ Than to lose you ♪ My songs were, like... ♪ I'm just a prison ♪ and begging men not to leave me and "Oh, God, if you leave me, I'm just gonna die," you know, I mean, this was the kind of songs they would play on us.

Women.

Women.

Men could sing anything they wanted to sing.

So to make a long story short, disco freed me.

It saved me.

♪ You know, I been married a few times, and I don't mind telling it because, you know, I was in one of those type of marriages, but it was dangerous.

It was a really a dangerous marriage.

So I was doing Las Vegas with Ray Charles.

I was opening for Ray Charles.

The last night, I decided I was gonna just sit in the audience and watch Ray do his show, and my ex-husband, he was looking for me, and he couldn't find me, and I was in the audience, and he kept walking up and down the aisle.

I saw him.

And that's the night when he went completely nuts.

My suite was on the--way up on the 20th-something floor, and he pushed me.

You know, he was pushing me all the way through the lobby to the elevator, and then we get to the floor.

He said, "I'm--I'm gonna kill you tonight.

"I tell you what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna throw you off the balcony."

20-something floors.

He picked me up, and had me--holding me over the banister like this, and I'm like, "This man is gonna kill me tonight.

"How in the world?

Well, how am I gonna get out of this one?"

I said, um, "You know you're in this hotel, "and it's owned by Mafia.

This is Las Vegas.

We're in Las Vegas now."

I said, "You got to get out of here.

"You got to walk out of here.

"How are you gonna feel with my body splattered at the bottom and my name is on the marquee?"

And I said, "You won't make it out of Vegas."

He thought, and he brought me back in, and he said, "I'll tell you what I'm gonna do.

I'm just gonna shoot you."

So I laid--I just, you know, I was so tired.

I just laid down on the bed.

I said, "OK.

Shoot me."

I went to sleep.

He had the gun like this.

I said, "Just shoot me.

I won't know it.

I just--forget it."

That's how "Young Hearts Run Free" came about.

Can It Be That It Was All So Simple Then....,

 

Don't Believe Your Lying Eyes - Whatever They're Telling You About Biden Is Disinformation

Biden campaign spokesman Adrienne Elrod tries to spin the viral video of Biden wandering aimlessly across Italy as "disinformation" — and demands "social media platforms" censor it. pic.twitter.com/hfMuZpMkwU

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 14, 2024

thesun.co.uk  |  "He was wandering around, he sort of wandered off and Giorgia Meloni, the Italian premier had to sort of guide him back to the crowd. It was quite painful viewing.

"Everyone's putting a slight brave face on it this morning. We've got some more for that for the paper tomorrow. But you can see from that footage yourself, can't you?

"This is getting embarrassing now. It makes you really wonder how President Biden is going to be able to run an election campaign in October and November for re election and if that is a man who really thinks he's going to get through the next four years?"

It comes as earlier this week, Biden appeared to freeze again for a moment during a Juneteenth celebration at the White House.

He looked static at the event - sparking further concern just months before the presidential election.

The Democrat's term has been plagued with gaffes and blunders.

He has fallen up the stairs of Air Force One and has stumbled on countless occasions.

Last year, Biden took a tumble at the Air Force Academy graduation ceremony.

In February, Biden confused the leaders of Mexico and Egypt while delivering a rambling address to the nation after it emerged he wouldn't face criminal charges over storing secret docs.

Last week, Biden seemed to fumble for his seat while on stage with the Macrons and his wife, Jill, at a D-Day event - but there was no chair behind him.

Questions continue to swirl over Biden's health and competency for office - just months before Americans go to the polls.

And polling suggests Biden's re-election bid could be tricky.

This week's G7 meeting was also shrouded in controversy after Putin vowed an "extremely painful" reaction to a deal made at the event to raise $50billion for Ukraine.

The Kremlin dubbed the deal "cynical and criminal" after hearing the money will be raised using frozen Russian central bank assets.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke with the leaders before the viral clip asking for the "historic" loan to keep Putin's soldiers from breaking through the frontlines.