A senior lawmaker from Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU has proposed requiring Germans to use their homes to pay for elderly care, triggering a political row over social welfare amid the country’s mounting fiscal pressures.

The proposal by Albert Stegemann, deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, would tighten eligibility rules for public assistance with nursing-home costs, potentially requiring homeowners to draw on property wealth before receiving state support.

“Those who own assets must first use their own assets, including their home, before the community pays,” Stegemann told Bild on Thursday.

AI megacorporations like OpenAI and Anthropic have scraped every word of human knowledge from the internet, and the US government is helping them sell it back to the public, Google whistleblower Zach Vorhies has told RT.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman caused controversy last month during an appearance at BlackRock in Washington DC, when he described his company’s vision of “a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”

US government protecting ‘data cartels’ – whistleblower to RT (VIDEO)

Sam Altman’s Open AI is building a monopoly on human knowledge, Zach Vorhies has warned

Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on Saturday, US defence secretary struck a relatively balanced tone in his address, first acknowledging some progress in China-US ties before expressing the usual Western rhetorics over China’s military strength. Analysts note that Hegseth’s speech contained a relatively higher degree of positive remarks on the bilateral ties compared with previous years. However, these remarks were still accompanied by persistent stereotypes and flawed assumptions about China’s strategic intentions.

Hegseth’s Shangri-La address shows more positivity on China-US ties, but also familiar rhetoric: Chinese experts

By Su Yaxuan and Guo Yuandan in Singapore and Li Aixin in Beijing

America is Profiteering on the Coffins of Innocent Iranians

Pranay Kumar Shome

The United States is caught in a trap of its own making. It wants to preserve its unique position in world politics, while at the same time freeing itself from the growing burden that this position imposes. Yet Washington hasn’t found any way to do so except by insisting, ever more loudly, on its own superiority so the result is that America clings more tightly to the very role it should have consciously begun to abandon long ago.

This is the dangerous myth holding America hostage

Washington’s global supremacy has become its own tar pit

By Timofey Bordachev

French officials and analysts are raising the alarm after former RT France chief Xenia Fedorova began appearing regularly on major conservative media outlets in the country. They warn that Kremlin-aligned narratives are gaining visibility ahead of crucial elections, testing the limits of free speech in France. 

The soft-spoken commentator delivered her views in fluent, Russian-accented French, as she appeared this week on one of France's most influential television channels.

New Liberal federal president Tony Abbott has sought to rally the party at “this time of existential crisis”, labelling it “the patriot party” and declaring it must boost its membership. 

While not directly mentioning the threat from Pauline Hanson, One Nation’s surge was clearly in Abbott’s mind when he addressed the Liberal federal council in Melbourne after being elected president unopposed on Friday.

New Liberal president Abbott tells party it must build bigger membership in time of ‘existential crisis’

BY Michelle Grattan

Pope Leo’s first encyclical offers a vision in which human dignity and relationships guide technological development rather than people becoming slaves to technology.

Adrian Rosenfeldt

Is One Nation the worker’s friend? Or a fully owned subsidiary of Gina Rinehart, as Jim Chalmers suggested?

There is a right-wing populist surge across the world - in the US (MAGA), UK, Italy, France, Germany and Australia.

John Menadue

In an exclusive interview with The Grayzone’s Wyatt Reed, Wafiq Safa, a senior Hezbollah official and former head of Hezbollah’s Liaison and Coordination Unit, discusses Hezbollah’s conflict with Israel in Southern Lebanon, and provides new details on resistance operations, its intelligence capacity, and how he believes it has forced Israel into a costly stalemate that exposes the limits of Israeli military power.

Hezbollah leader to The Grayzone — Israel-First Trump ‘turned America into a joke’

Safa argues that any US-backed attempt to disarm Hezbollah would be illegitimate and could trigger civil war, noting that Hezbollah sees itself as part of a broader regional front that includes Iran and other anti-Israel forces.

Just four days after a drone attack killed 21 people in Starobelsk, CNN aired a promotional segment about Ukrainian drone operations, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday.

The video was filmed by CNN correspondent Nick Walsh, who has been charged in absentia in Russia for involvement in the incursion into Kursk region, with a unit that claimed to have launched 200 drones at Russia, including recent attack on Stavropol, Zakharova noted.

Ukraine Hires CNN to Film Drone Strike Operations - Russian MFA Spokeswoman

This week, as UK Labour’s destructive leadership contest intensified, former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair staged a remarkable intervention in which he single-handedly sought to save the party from political oblivion.

Blair’s dramatic intrusion into Labour politics took the form of a 5,600 word essay – in which he denounced Keir Starmer, criticized leadership contenders Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting, and, more importantly, set out a radical political manifesto that he believes the Labour Party must adopt if it wishes to remain a viable force in UK politics.

Tony Blair emerges a fake ‘savior’ of UK’s Labour Party

As the party implodes under inept leadership, the former PM has come up with his own ten commandments – which will only poison it further

By Graham Hryce

Changing voting patterns are no longer a reaction to short-term events, they are a rebellion against inequality, says Kos Samaris.

Our MRP polling doesn’t show a swing. It shows a sorting. And it has its roots in the end of Australia’s long post-war boom.

For most of human history, children lived as their parents did. And their parents before them.

Kos Samaras

Tucker Carlson recently confessed: “I’ll be tormented for a long time by the fact that I played a role in getting Donald Trump elected. And I want to say that I’m sorry for misleading people.” How can one not feel sorry and ashamed today for having believed in Trump? I’ll be honest: although I hold no responsibility in Trump’s election, I feel ashamed for having placed any hope in him.