A great humanitarian uproar in recent weeks demanding the safe shipping of Ukrainian grain to ease a hunger crisis in Africa and elsewhere is deceptive on many levels. Not the least is who owns the land on which the grain is grown and whether that grain is actually illegal GMO patented corn and other grains. A corrupt Zelenskyy regime has quietly made deals with the major GMO agribusiness companies in the West who have been stealthily taking control of some of the world’s most productive “black earth” farmland. 

The 2014 CIA Coup

Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska has sued opposition activist Aleksey Navalny and his associates over an “investigation” posted on YouTube in 2018 that accused the aluminum tycoon of giving bribes to Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Tweeting about the lawsuit on Wednesday, Navalny called on the US, EU and UK to impose more sanctions on Deripaska and Lavrov.

The opposition blogger is currently in prison for a series of transgressions, from defrauding a French company and donors to his political campaigns, to contempt of court. He claims to be a victim of political persecution by President Vladimir Putin’s government.

The series of major explosions at Russian military bases on the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea over the past week mark the beginning of a new, even more dangerous phase in the imperialist war waged on Ukrainian territory against Russia.

Ukrainian officials have all but admitted that Kiev is behind the attacks, threatening that more is to come. Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, described the explosions as part of a beginning counteroffensive. “Our strategy is to destroy the logistics, the supply lines and the ammunition depots and other objects of military infrastructure. It’s creating a chaos within their own forces.” Hinting at plans to strike the Russian-built Kerch Bridge, which connects Crimea with the Russian mainland, Podolyak stated, “Such objects should be destroyed.”

On August 2, 2022, a scandal occurred in the Senate of Australia – the upper house of parliament. One of its members, a representative of the Green Party Lidia Thorpe during her taking the oath of office as a senator called the British Queen Elizabeth II, who is the formal head of Australia, a colonizer.

President of the Senate Sue Lines demanded that Thorpe read the oath again, without adding extra words to the official text. After a short pause, Lidia Thorpe fulfilled the requirement of the President of the Senate, taking the oath again without her own additions. This incident demonstrated the increase of the negative attitude of a considerable proportion of Australian society towards the British monarchy.

BY Petr Konovalov

US Representative Liz Cheney has reacted to being voted out of Congress by 37 percentage points in Wyoming’s Republican primary by comparing herself to Abraham Lincoln, and hinting that she’ll try to follow his path to the White House.

“The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and the House before he won the most important election of all,” Cheney told supporters in Jackson, Wyoming, after losing Tuesday’s contest. “Lincoln ultimately prevailed, he saved our union, and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.”

The variety of opinions on what the governor-general should or should not have done serves to highlight the vague responsibilities of the role (“What G-G should have asked then-PM”, August 17). We are perhaps being unreasonable in criticising the G-G when the role appears to depend entirely on his or her definition of it. It now clearly needs a defined job specification against which all potential future candidates would be assessed, and which would also act as a guide – or deterrent – to future PMs tempted to act as Scott Morrison has done. Either that, or the role should go only to a constitutional lawyer. 

Penny Ransby Smith, Lane Cove

Social media behemoth Meta is beefing up its information-control tactics as the US heads into the 2022 midterm elections, tightening rules on voting misinformation and advertising. The changes were announced in a blog post on Tuesday.

The company will ban new political, social and electoral issue ads during the last week before the election, ensuring no “October surprises” – factual or otherwise – will disturb the information ecosystem. Editing existing ads will also be forbidden, and ads encouraging people not to vote or questioning the legitimacy of the results will not be permitted.

Julia Gillard delivered a gushing speech to the American Congress in March 2011. Then eight months later she agreed to US Marines in Darwin.

Julia Gillard laid it on thick in her speech to Congress…..you can do anything…we have shared values….you can do anything…we are doing our part in Uruzgan province….you brave and free people…you can do anything.

Then, in some political difficulty at home later in the year she was anxious for President Obama to visit Australia and address the Parliament. Kim Beazley, our Ambassador in Washington was very keen to help. As part of the deal to lock in the Obama visit Gillard agreed to the rotation of Marines through Darwin with US hopes for more future basing in Perth and Cocos-Keeling.

BY JOHN MENADUE

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres will meet with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv on Thursday. Discussions will likely include grain shipments from Ukraine and the endangered Zaporozhye nuclear power plant.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric announced the meeting on Tuesday, saying that Guterres was invited to Lviv by Zelensky. Guterres will also visit Odessa, a port city where grain shipments across the Black Sea recently restarted after Russia and Ukraine struck a deal with Turkey and the UN to ensure their safe passage.

The three-way meeting will focus on maintaining cooperation on these shipments, and “ending the Ukraine-Russia war through diplomatic avenues,” Erdogan’s office said in a statement.

This blood-soaked empire manager [Kissinger] is not warning about Washington’s pursuit of planetary hegemony because he has gotten saner. It’s because the war machine has gotten crazier.

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

The path to war in Asia – crossing the Rubicon.

The conditions for a war in Asia are ripening by the day, but be under no illusion, this situation is not organically happening. These conditions have been engineered for quite some considerable time. The unrelenting rhetoric, near constant media coverage and propaganda we are being subjected to daily is not in any way simply a result of ‘happenings’ or in response to ’emergent events’. On the contrary, this march to war has been a long and carefully orchestrated, craftfully engineered objective by the architects of this strategy.

NSW ministers will be barred from taking public sector jobs related to their portfolios for 18 months after leaving office.

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet announced the crackdown on ministers’ future job prospects after getting an independent review into the recruitment of former deputy premier John Barilaro to a lucrative trade envoy job.

“The process was just flawed from the outset,” he said on Tuesday.

The much-touted review into the bungled appointment was conducted by former NSW Public Service commissioner Graeme Head.

“The entire process that has been undertaken has been incredibly disappointing,” Mr Perrottet said.

Scott Morrison has defied a call from a senior Liberal to resign, after it emerged he secretly took over five key portfolios while prime minister.

In an extraordinary lengthy post on Facebook on Tuesday afternoon, Mr Morrison again defended his actions – although he conceded that “in hindsight these arrangements were unnecessary”.

“I used such powers on one occasion only. I did not seek to interfere with ministers in the conduct of their portfolio as there were no circumstances which warranted their use, except in the case of the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources,” he wrote.

The Ukrainian military has not been able to pull off its promised counteroffensive, and Russian forces are now likely to take over the whole of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a former adviser to the secretary of defense in the Trump administration, has said.

Appearing on a livestream hosted by former US judge and columnist Andrew Napolitano last Tuesday, Macgregor dismissed as “utterly nonsensical” reports in some US media outlets that the Russian military has lost some 80,000 personnel in Ukraine so far. According to the decorated Gulf War veteran, “more accurate numbers are probably thirteen to fifteen thousand dead on the Russian side,” with Ukrainian forces having lost “sixty to eighty thousand.”

Accusations that Moscow is jeopardizing the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) contradict the facts and allow Kiev to undermine the International Atomic Energy Agency’s efforts to inspect the facility, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on Monday.

Russia’s response comes after the EU released a statement on Sunday condemning the “unprovoked invasion of Ukraine” and accusing the Russian military of attacking the ZNPP and preventing nuclear and radiation safety from being maintained at the facility.

“Western countries are once again descending to outright lies, arguing that the threats to the ZNPP are created by Russia,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova in a statement published on the ministry’s website.