Minister of Foreign Affairs Espen Barth Eide delivered Norway’s statement during the general debate of the 81st session of the UN General Assembly. His speech highlighted how international law is eroding, wars are multiplying and the UN faces financial and institutional crisis. Reform is urgent, not because the organisation has failed, but because it still matters.

Espen Barth Eide

“The old world is dying, and a new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

President, distinguished delegates

Con Coughlin’s September 30 column in the Telegraph tells readers that Vladimir Putin’s decision to raise defense spending is a “desperate gamble” that could end with Russia following the Soviet Union into economic collapse. It is a familiar story. Western commentators have been predicting Russia’s economic implosion since the first sanctions packages in 2022. What the story lacks, as it did then, is evidence.

Russia Is Not Collapsing: A Reply to Con Coughlin

by Larry C. Johnson

Guten Tag from DW's newsroom in Bonn.

Things are getting increasingly tense inside Chancellor Friedrich Merz's coalition.

The conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is piling pressure on its center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) partners to deliver on pension and labor market reforms agreed earlier this year. And the CDU appears ready to play hardball.

The gloves are also coming off at Volkswagen. Germany's IG Metall union has accused VW management of provoking a conflict "that the company cannot afford."

Stay with us here for these stories and more of what Germany is talking about today.

Jordan Klepper gets into the headlines: Famously pro-Hispanic President Trump hosts a Hispanic Heritage Month event at the White House, and even invents a new stereotype to honor the occasion! Pete Hegseth purges the U.S. military's “beardos, weirdos, wimps, and radicals,” which has us wondering where that leaves… most of his fellow cabinet members.

Plus, Josh Johnson comes to us live from the Pentagon with exciting updates from Hegseth’s star-studded team tasked with studying the future of warfare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSuiWyrR2bY

PLEASE VISIT:

Burnham reopened the divisive Brexit debate by saying his centre-left Labour government could go "all the way" and propose membership of the bloc as one possible way to boost relationships with Europe.

Right-wing rivals immediately criticised the comments, as the UK appeared to be gearing up for a re-run of the bitter "Brexit wars" that dominated politics after the contentious 2016 vote to leave the European Union.

Burnham, premier since July after Labour MPs turfed out Keir Starmer, told his party's annual conference in Manchester on Tuesday that Britain's departure in 2020 had done "more harm than good".

Brexit had triggered "a decade of low growth" and the country must "decide on a long-term relationship" with its largest trading partner, he said.

Burnham promised to set out "different options" closer to a planned summit with the 27-member bloc later this year.

For most of human history, the age of the Earth was a theological question before it was a scientific one — and the answers ranged from a few thousand years to vague gestures at eternity, with almost no empirical foundation either way.

The real breakthrough came not from geology or astronomy but from physics, when the discovery of radioactivity in the late 19th century handed scientists an atomic clock hidden inside rocks themselves, one that had been ticking since the planet first formed.

The European Commission’s attempt to bolster its “digital sovereignty” and reduce reliance on US technology has fallen flat, with its chosen “backup”internal communications app facing sharp criticism from EU officials, Politico has reported.

Dubbed ‘Element Pro’, the new app was described by the Commission as a “sovereign back-up to Teams” – the body’s main communications tool developed by US software giant Microsoft – according to an internal memo seen by the news site. Element Pro was introduced in July to help “ensure… business continuity” in the event of a potential “disruption.”

For months, we were told that this moment was approaching. At first a lot of people didn’t want to believe it, and those that were sounding the alarm were mocked. But now even the mainstream media is being forced to admit the truth. When the war with Iran began, the world was sitting on vast stockpiles of oil that we could chew through to keep the global economy operating normally. Unfortunately, those stockpiles have rapidly dissipated and the conflicts on the other side of the planet are intensifying. As a result, we now find ourselves in unprecedented territory.

Even The Mainstream Media Is Admitting That “The Great Fuel Crisis” Is Here

BY MICHAEL SNYDER

The world is using a lot more oil than it is currently producing.

Nearly 1,000 armed private security guards are being deployed into United States Postal Service facilities in the final weeks before the November 3 midterm elections. Frank Albergo, president of the Postal Police Officers Association, told Raw Story that the union had been notified of about 39,000 work hours per week for 972 full-time armed guards across 54 USPS facilities, including 18 that previously did not have them.

Asked to explain the purpose of the operation, Brian Benson, a Postal Inspection Service spokesman in Denver, was unusually blunt. The guards, he said, are deployed “to provide security and act as a deterrent to criminals or employees who may wish to compromise the mailstream.”

American forces are completing their withdrawal from Iraq, yet the country that Washington once promised to turn into a model of democratic transformation in the Middle East is still facing questions that years of military presence never managed to answer.

Washington’s Iraq project ends where it began: in failure

The troops are going, but fractured power, sectarian distrust and armed rivalries still haunt the state Washington promised to remake

BY Murad Sadygzade

For Iraq, this is a long-awaited political milestone, but the end of a foreign military mission does not magically fix the fragmentation of power it created. The consequences of the intervention, sectarian distrust, and competition among armed centers of influence are likely to remain part of Iraq’s political landscape for years to come.

European NATO members should have been able to attack Iran instead of relying on the US and Israel, according to Secretary-General Mark Rutte, the head of the self-described defensive alliance.

Iran has been attacked twice in two years, both times over allegations that it seeks to develop nuclear weapons, which Tehran rejects as false. Speaking at the Euronews Defence & Space Summit on Friday, Rutte endorsed the idea that European nations should acquire the military capabilities needed to carry out such wars of aggression themselves.

In the future, “the Europeans will be able to take care of their backyard themselves. It should be us doing this, not the Americans,” he said.

On paper, the United States should be the world’s safety valve in this fuel crisis. American refineries make far more diesel than Americans burn. But every one of those barrels is already spoken for. Between rising domestic demand, heavy export commitments and refineries running near their limit, the U.S. is drawing down its own stocks, not sitting on a surplus. And as Karl W. Miller shows in his latest assessment, dated September 29, the shock from the Gulf hits the world’s fuel supply twice: it starves refineries abroad of crude and removes finished fuel from the Gulf’s own refineries. America has no spare diesel to offer a world that has lost 1.6 million barrels a day of diesel exports from the Gulf and Russia combined. Until finished-fuel supply recovers, the gap will be closed by higher prices, less economic activity, or both.

Sydney academics John Keane and Nick Riemer have finally been able to file a defence against their accusers. What’s the scam?

The scam is that for almost two years, John Keane and Nick Riemer have spent thousands of dollars and hours defending themselves against accusations of antisemitism by pro-Israel operatives, while their accusers regularly changed the details of their complaints.

In a statement, Nick Riemer told MWM the case is about lawfare, “intended to harass and silence opponents of Israel’s genocide.”