In August 2022, Ukrainian security service (SBU) operatives hid explosives in a crate intended for a cat in a car driven by a woman and her twelve year old daughter. After the car passed through the Russian border, the SBU planted the bomb in the SUV of Russian journalist Darya Dugina, the daughter of well known philosopher Alexander Dugin, who was tragically killed.[1]

US President Joe Biden has refused to call for a ceasefire in the Israeli-Hamas conflict, instead proposing a temporary humanitarian pause.

Biden was speaking to an audience of some 200 people when a woman, who later identified herself as rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, shouted, “If you care about Jewish people, as a rabbi, I need you to call for a cease-fire right now.” 

The incident was captured on video and shared by the Jewish Voice for Peace account on X (formerly Twitter), claiming that Rosenberg was speaking on behalf of thousands of Jewish Americans who “refuse to allow a genocide to be carried out in [their] name”

The West’s sanctions proposals against Russia are becoming increasingly absurd, President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday during a televised government meeting on economic issues.

Earlier this month, Lithuania suggested including an embargo on buttons, nails, and sewing appliances in the 12th round of EU sanctions against Russia, which is currently being debated by the bloc’s member states.

Last week, the Australian government added tools used to drill, press, stamp, punch or press, as well as television and sound recorders to a broader export ban against Russia that also includes boilers, machinery, and mechanical appliances.

In a world aflame, the Biden administration launched a new round of airstrikes against Iranian-linked forces backing the Syrian government. American officials claimed “self-defense”—for America’s invading force illegally occupying Syria’s land, plundering its resources, and sanctioning its government. Washington foreign policy, meet George Orwell’s 1984.

Contrary to what I wrote last week based on dispatches from Western and Arab news agencies filtered by Israeli military censorship, Israel’s attack on October 7, 2023 (operation “Al-Aqsa Flood) “) was not perpetrated by Hamas alone. Its triggering was decided by a unitary operation chamber of the entire Palestinian Resistance.

Since January, the Netanyahu government has pushed for highly controversial judicial reforms, a series of changes to the judicial system and the balance of powers. 

The effort has been led by Yariv Levin, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s deputy prime minister and justice minister, and Simcha Rothman, chair of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee.

By Dan Steinbock
The World Financial Review 

Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was fixated throughout the Covid-19 crisis on elderly people accepting their fate and saw the virus as “nature’s way of dealing with old people,” an inquiry into Downing Street’s handling of the pandemic has heard.

At a Tuesday hearing as part of the government’s inquest into Covid-19, notes from Johnson’s top science adviser, Patrick Vallance, were shared, which detailed what the aide viewed as Johnson’s “obsession”with older people accepting risks as they related to the potentially fatal virus.

The notes, dated from August 2020, detailed Vallance’s opinion that Johnson was keen to let “the young get on with life and [keep] the economy going” – which Vallance described at the time as a “quite bonkers set of exchanges.”

Africa has become a strategic and economic attraction point for Germany. Europe’s biggest economy wants to build stronger ties, and Olaf Scholz's visit to Ghana and Nigeria sought to do just that.

Scholz's Africa visit: Desire to strengthen economic ties
Isaac Kaledzi

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's visit to Nigeria and Ghana in West Africa, his third trip to Africa in two years, had the aim of deepening economic ties between Germany and the two African nations.

The CEO of one of the world’s leading tech conferences was forced to resign after criticizing Israel’s assault on Gaza. He was quickly replaced by one of the industry’s most prominent US government-affiliated regime change specialists. 

Europe’s biggest tech conference, Web Summit, has appointed a veteran US regime-change operative named Katherine Maher as its new CEO, just days after founder Paddy Cosgrave stepped down from the position following an industry-wide backlash to his suggestion that Israel forces have carried out “war crimes” in their ongoing assault of Gaza.

BY WYATT REED

Australian journalists still cling to ‘objectivity’ as the hallmark of ‘good journalism’. And yet, Palestine has shown us how colonial notions of ‘objectivity’ pave the way for genocide.

Objectivity serves the powerful, and silences the oppressed

By Amy McQuire

Moscow and New Delhi have no major issues of mutual concern and this is a challenge because the absence of contentious divisions suggests a degree of mutual detachment.

Here’s the main problem in Russia-India relations, and it might surprise you...
There are no problems that directly concern both states and that means that they often aren't at the forefront of each other's thoughts

By Andrey Sushentsov, program director of the Valdai Club

The conflict in Israel-Gaza illustrates perfectly how the United States government runs on corruption, with the deep pocketed Jewish and Israeli lobbies able to buy every national level politician that matters to give the loathsome Benjamin Netanyahu a carte blanche both in terms of a free pass on committing war crimes while also having unlimited access to the US Treasury and the contents of military arsenals.

BY PHILIP GIRALDI 

If the US stops funding Ukraine, Russia will win the ongoing conflict between the two countries, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Monday, making the case for $44 billion more in military and other aid to the government in Kiev.

“I can guarantee that, without our support, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will be successful,” Austin told the senators. “If we pull the rug out from under them now, Putin will only get stronger and he will be successful in doing what he wants to do.” 

Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were asking the lawmakers to approve President Joe Biden’s $106 billion supplemental funding request, which has bundled the Ukraine funding with aid to Israel and Taiwan, among other things.

Since 2018 the painstaking discussions have picked through everything from chemicals to cosmetics, but have repeatedly come unstuck over market access for Australian products such as beef and sheep meat.

Australian agriculture minister Murray Watt said EU negotiators had refused to budge during the latest round of talks, held on the sidelines of a Group of Seven meeting in Japan.

"Unfortunately we just didn't get the movement on the EU side that was required," he told national broadcaster ABC on Monday.

A new war in Europe is no longer unthinkable and German society must adapt to this reality, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has claimed as he called for increased military spending.

In an interview with Germany’s ZDF broadcaster on Sunday, Pistorius insisted that Germans “must again get used to the thought that the danger of a war in Europe could pose a threat.” Discussing Berlin’s defense capabilities, the minister called on his compatriots to “become war-capable.”

The official cited the Ukraine conflict as well as hostilities between Israel and Hamas as proof that fighting could also erupt elsewhere.