When Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong attended the United Nations General Assembly 12 months ago, it felt like something significant might be happening.

Australia joined a number of other nations in recognising the state of Palestine. The world was scrabbling to regroup around the chaos unleashed by Donald Trump. The UN was itself fighting for survival amid Trump's hostile assault on it.

The UN often feels damned to irrelevance, but it is needed now more than ever

By Laura Tingle

Canada and the EU "see the world with the same eyes," according to European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen.

And the feeling appears mutual.

"Our commitment to the rule of law, and our unyielding defense of human dignity, individual freedom and democracy share the same deep roots, the same unwavering dedication," Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said.

At NATO’s first high-level summit since Ankara, the bloc’s new, Europe-centric incarnation is taking shape. But it’s ordinary Europeans who stand to lose their future, and potentially their lives.

NATO 3.0 marches into Copenhagen

The military bloc’s European members are now footing the bill and taking all of the risk against Russia

Russian-Asian rapprochement in the Arctic is currently unfolding along two distinct tracks: the first driven by logistics and operations, and the second focused on resources and investment.

Russia’s new Trans-Arctic Transport Corridor (TATC), whose key section is the Northern Sea Route (NSR) running along its Arctic coast, is intended domestically to connect major Russian ports – from St. Petersburg through Murmansk to Vladivostok – and link them to inland cities and towns via land, rail, sea and inland waterway networks.

US bank JPMorgan has said that it no longer has a clear view on the oil price as the war in the Middle East drags on with no clear end in sight. The bank’s analysts have abandoned a baseline view of crude oil in what is an unusual step for a major bank and one of the world’s most watched commodities. 

“We simply don’t know how to model the endgame,” the bank wrote in a research note, noting that this was the first time it had been unable to generate a view since the US-Israeli war on Iran began.

The on-again, off-again approach to the war demonstrated by US President Donald Trump has left traders at a loss for how to proceed. A Bloomberg report wrote that JPMorgan is simply making public what traders have long been saying privately: how this ends is impossible to predict.

The images created by socialist and antiwar political cartoonists during the period around World War I were powerful tools for countering the elite’s propaganda of the time. 

Hedges Report: The Cartoonist Dissidents

Derf Backderf’s new graphic novel illustrates the repression of socialists during the McCarthy era through the stories of political cartoonists. It resonates powerfully with current times.

Throughout the summer, a major scandal has been brewing in Lithuania. In late July, the country suffered a landmark defeat in the European Court of Human Rights in a case brought by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi national held in secret detention and brutally tortured for four years in CIA black sites around the world – including Lithuania.

The CIA paid cash. A NATO ally supplied the torture prison

Just outside a European capital, the agency ran a black site with the knowledge and assistance of the local authorities

On September 2, without warning, Israeli bulldozers destroyed the homes of 12 Palestinian families in Khirbet al-Tabban, a herding community in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, leaving 70 people homeless, nearly half of them children.

The West’s pretend outrage won’t save Palestinians

A ban on Israeli settlement goods is meaningless in stopping the ethnic cleansing of Palestine

BY Eva Bartlett

Mary Kostakidis stood with Julian Assange when others stayed silent. After two years of legal action over her own speech, thousands of Australians returned that solidarity when she needed it.

Gabriel Shipton

I have known Mary Kostakidis for years. We met through the campaign to free my brother Julian Assange.

Mary supported Julian when much of the media had turned against him. During the years when he was isolated and smeared, many journalists who had built stories and careers on his work kept their distance. Mary stood beside him.

The latest SCO and BRICS summits offer a glimpse of a world no longer organized around a single center of gravity. As governments from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere seek greater room to maneuver, the old architecture of global governance is under pressure – not necessarily because it has become irrelevant, but because the distribution of power around it has changed.

That is the backdrop against which China’s Global Governance Initiative, or GGI, enters its second year.

When President Xi Jinping unveiled the initiative at the SCO Plus meeting in Tianjin on September 1, 2025, it could easily have been dismissed as another diplomatic cliché. A year on, and China has begun translating the GGI into institutions dealing with mediation, data, and artificial intelligence, while embedding its principles in its longer-term economic and diplomatic planning.

An empire is perhaps the most expensive indulgence that even the most powerful nations can afford only for a limited time. Arguments that empires are profitable are largely unconvincing and while they may enrich a narrow section of the elite, and perhaps do so spectacularly, it’s rarely for very long, and for everyone else, empire eventually means costs.

Why the world’s great powers are thinking about empire again

From Britain and the USSR to Trump’s America, the cost of imperial expansion raises a lasting question: Can great nations be secure without it?

By Timofey Bordachev

Berlin has officially blamed a murky drone incident at the Leipzig-Halle airport on Moscow. However, as unbiased observers agree, the German authorities have not published any actual evidence to back up this accusation. Instead, they have relied on unsubstantiated claims and what seems to be the systematic management of the public mood via leaks and speculation. 

The Fiedler Dare: Germany’s politicians never lie, they say

Berlin’s Moscow accusation rests on credibility Germany’s leaders don’t have

BY Tarik Cyril Amar

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has called for more EU power over security, social control, and militarization, while announcing tighter restrictions on Russia, avoiding Israel, and unilaterally making Canada special, during her sixth state of the union set-piece.

Key calls include: