.... Speaking at the Jewish Community Centre in Krakow before the [Auschwitz] memorial, King Charles warned of the risks of allowing evil to flourish. 

On the eve of the war 56,000 Jews lived in Krakow, but when Nazi Germany was defeated only about 4000 Jews remained in the city. The community centre now has 1000 Jewish members including 58 Holocaust survivors, and is the heart of the city’s growing Jewish community.

“It is a moment when we recall the depths to which humanity can sink when evil is allowed to flourish, ignored for too long by the world,” he said.

London: Britain would have the right to buy Greenland before the US, the island’s last Danish minister has said.

Tom Hoyem was Copenhagen’s last permanent representative in the Arctic territory, which established its parliament in 1979 and began a new era of self-rule 30 years later.

Donald Trump has made clear to Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister, that he wants to place Greenland under American control.

But Hoyem said Trump would require approval from Britain’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer because of an undertaking signed in 1917, the first time the US was interested in acquiring the island.

Russia’s exclusion from the commemorations marking the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation is not just a diplomatic snub – it is an insult to history and to the memory of millions who suffered and died during World War II. This decision, part of a growing trend of historical revisionism, diminishes the decisive role played by the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany and liberating concentration camps, including Auschwitz. It’s a troubling development that undermines the lessons of the past in favor of political expediency.

Affront to history: The nation that liberated Auschwitz is being excluded from memory
A growing trend of revising World War II history risks erasing the immense sacrifices made by the Soviet Union in the fight against Nazi Germany

By Nadezhda Romanenko

Sussan Ley's analogy comparing the arrival of the First Fleet to Australia with Elon Musk's efforts to get to Mars was "strange" and disrespectful to Indigenous people, the prime minister says.

The deputy Liberal leader delivered an Australia Day message at a local church service on Sunday, where she said: "In what could be compared to Elon Musk's SpaceX's efforts to build a new colony on Mars, men in boats arrived on the edge of the known world to embark on that new experiment."

Ms Ley added that like astronauts arriving on Mars, the first British settlers would be confronted with "a different and strange world, full of danger, adventure and potential".

The CIA on Saturday offered a new assessment on the origin of the Covid outbreak, saying the coronavirus is "more likely" to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have come from animals. 

But the intelligence agency cautioned it had "low confidence" in this determination. 

A spokesperson said that a "research-related origin" of the pandemic "is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting".

The decision to release that assessment marks one of the first made by the CIA's new director John Ratcliffe, appointed by Donald Trump, who took over the agency on Thursday. 

Donald Trump’s billionaire ally Elon Musk proposed renaming the English Channel to the ‘George Washington Canal’ after America’s first president.

After suggesting changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the ‘Gulf of America,’ arguing it has a ‘beautiful ring to it’, the tech mogul has made yet another stir in the international pot.

US President Donald Trump has suggested that neighboring Arab countries should take in Palestinian refugees and “clean out” the embattled Gaza Strip.

Speaking to journalists aboard Air Force One on Saturday, Trump said that he spoke to King Abdullah II of Jordan over the war and was planning to speak with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on Sunday.

“I’d like Egypt to take people, and I’d like Jordan to take people,” Trump said. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, we just clean out that whole thing. It’s a real mess.”

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“I do hold the view that the luckiest thing that happened to this country was being colonised by the British,” he said. “Not that they were perfect by any means, but they were infinitely more successful and beneficent colonisers than other European countries.” – John Howard, October 26, 2023.

In confirmation of our erstwhile prime minister’s perspicuity, there follows an extract from a venturer’s Memorial from the late 1720s to his Majesty, the Hanoverian George II.

German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius has warned against ending support for Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression.

Source: Pistorius quoted by Zeit, as reported by European Pravda

Details: Pistorius said that Ukraine needs to be able to act from a position of strength and possibly "be able to negotiate at some point".

Quote: "If we stop supporting Ukraine tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow that will be the end of Ukraine – the end of a sovereign, free state in the centre of Europe."

Details: Pistorius also addressed calls for support to be withdrawn because this is not Germany's war.

The year 2025 had barely started when the outgoing Joe Biden administration presented a belated 'holiday gift' to Russian oil exporters. Washington announced a new sanctions package – the “most significant” yet, according to US officials.

This time, it affected Russian oil giants Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftegaz. These companies already face restrictions on access to American financing and technology, but now it seems that the US and UK are about to impose more severe sanctions on the Russian oil giants. 

In a daring thought experiment, imagine just for a moment that you are the powerful president of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). You are sitting next to a cozy fireplace in a mountain retreat, looking out of a panoramic window and musing about the ‘Middle Kingdom’. What is your sweeping vista of China’s current standing and what future do you envision for this dragon beyond the distant summits in a rapidly changing world, where conventional truth is apparently being pulverized at lightning speed?

Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass № 10: China’s silky future in a realigned world

The country’s road ahead looks increasingly bleak, but it has great countercyclical expansion potential via domestic and international rebalancing...

Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko is set to cruise to victory after more than 30 years in power. Sunday's presidential election has been slammed as a sham, with his rivals broadly seen as government stooges.

Polling stations opened in Belarus on Sunday for a presidential election in which long-time leader Alexander Lukashenko — in power since 1994 — is seen as certain to be declared the winner.

Top Trump ally Elon Musk has publicly thrown down the gauntlet to the world's leading liberal 'philanthropist' and his NGOs' color revolution-fueling soft power influence operations. Sputnik asked a leading independent political commentator what this could mean under Trump 2.0.

Open Society Foundations chairman Alex Soros has put a brave face on the losses facing by his father's neoliberal philanthropic empire now that Joe Biden is gone and MAGA has turned to Washington with a vengeance.

Why Soros' Soft Power Empire is More Vulnerable Than Ever With Trump Back at the Helm

Will Thomas, assistant professor of business law at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, has been keenly and carefully following the legal twists and turns surrounding Donald Trump.

Thomas explores where things stand now that Trump is back in the White House:

“Unprecedented legal entanglements continue to cast a shadow. A New York trial court recently sentenced Trump over 34 felony counts of falsifying business records—crimes stemming from efforts to illegally influence the 2016 presidential election.