US President Joe Biden is acting out the script written for the so-called “Obama Doctrine” perfectly. Which is no small feat considering the man seems narcoleptic. The truly sad part of all this is that the people of the countries involved do not want war. The world does not want more war. We are sick to death of the bloodshed so that all our elites can profit. The pundits of America’s foreign policy decisions, unfortunately, do not give a damn what the normal people want. If we truly are facing an endgame, history will tell how we marched in blindfolded.

Russia's military focus in Ukraine is no longer "only" the east of the country, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said. 

In an interview with Russian state media, he implied Moscow's strategy had changed after the West supplied Ukraine with longer-range weapons. 

Russia would now have to push Ukrainian forces further from the front line to ensure its own security, he explained. 

The US had earlier accused Russia of preparing to annex parts of Ukraine. 

If Boris Johnson was expecting a teary-eyed send off from all MPs, he didn't get one at his final Prime Minister's Questions.

The outgoing prime minister's last weekly grilling at the dispatch box was not unlike his first in September 2019 - acrimonious, raucous, and littered with his colourful quips.

Macron hosts UAE’s leader Sheikh Mohamed as the EU scrambles for energy deals to replace imports from Russia.

France has secured promises of new energy supplies from the United Arab Emirates after talks between President Emmanuel Macron and UAE leader Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan in Paris.

The UAE has emerged as a key partner for Western countries as they scramble for energy deals worldwide to replace imports from sanctions-hit Russia.

Ukraine has invited foreign arms manufacturers to use it as a location for trying out new weapons in battlefield conditions, the country’s Defense Minister Alexey Reznikov said on Tuesday.

In an interview with the Atlantic Council, a US-based pro-NATO lobby group partly funded by the industry, Reznikov said that, in his opinion, Ukraine can already be considered as “essentially a testing ground.”

“Many weapons are now getting tested in the field, in the real conditions of the battle against the Russian army, which has plenty of the modern systems of its own,” he explained.

Stressing that Ukraine is a trusted partner and needs all sorts of weapons, Reznikov revealed that the government is interested in building up the country’s “testing ground” potential.

The sun is high, and some inhabitants try to escape the stifling heat by taking refuge around the Créteil lake, in the Val-de-Marne  — A 42-hectare body of water where you can enjoy a light breeze in the shade of the plane trees. Adrien Cazal, a 21-year-old electrician, took a week's vacation to better withstand the heat wave.

“I install CCTV cameras outside, I could no longer work. It's unbearable," he says. If swimming is prohibited in this artificial lake created in a former quarry, Saïd Ryaad, an 18-year-old student, still plans to swim with his three friends "because the heat wave is crazy". “I had a fever a few days ago with the heat,” he explains, his towel and a pack of water under his arm. A few joggers, men in their fifties, push their limits but probably not the danger.

Tectonic shifts continue to rage through the world system with nation-states quickly recognizing that the “great game” as it has been played since the establishment of the Bretton Woods monetary system in the wake of the second World War, is over.

But empires never disappear without a fight, and the Anglo-American one is no exception, overplaying its hand, threatening and bluffing its way, right to the end.

End of an order

Tony Abbott, as prime minister nearly a decade ago, had more than a few bees under his bonnet. He thought his election had redeemed the nation from an intolerable scourge of a government of criminals. Other opposition leaders have engaged in this sort of hyperbole, but scarcely ever with the zeal and lack of restraint, of Abbott.

One example of how he had come to this conclusion involved the roof insulation scheme. Treasury proposed it as a good way of getting cash quickly into hundreds of communities when the 2008 global financial crisis threatened to seize up the money supply. A similar scheme involved pouring money into an instant program of building libraries and other facilities in primary and secondary schools.

By Jack Waterford

The ability of humans to believe whatever lie they want to believe never comes in lower than I expect, but it sometimes manages to come in even higher. Nowhere has that been more transparently true than in economics where everyday I read people in the financial media who must surely have IQs somewhere above a hundred but who write as if their brain were a rotten peanut inside a hollow shell. I call it economic denial, and this week provided some glaring examples around the hypersonic inflation data that came out and the sickly retail data. Yes, I said “sickly,” but you wouldn’t have guessed how negative it was by what you read.

Behind the militarese the professionals know this means that Australia will cough up as much money and forces as necessary to fight China in a high-intensity war on China’s doorstep.

In Washington, far from the people he serves, Australia’s Defence Minister Marles has unveiled a totemic security pivot for Australia, fraught with risk, costing far more than the kings-ransom nuclear submarines of AUKUS. Nobody can blame the previous government. The Albanese government is taking Australia deep into dangerous, fanciful security terrain in Asia without justification.

By Mike Gilligan

The West, in its intention to hurt Russia with sanctions, has shot itself in the foot, many media outlets have been writing for a while now. The result is high inflation, energy and food shortages, recession, and many political and social problems that Europeans don’t know how to deal with. The IMF itself admits that the promotion of a spiral of unilateral sanctions by Western countries threatens to increase inflation and a global recession.

The president of Mexico has revealed the contents of a personal letter he passed on to his US counterpart during their meeting last week. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador urged Joe Biden to intervene and dismiss charges against WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, who faces the prospect of 175 years in American prison.

“I left a letter to the president about Assange, explaining that he did not commit any serious crime, did not cause anyone's death, did not violate any human rights and that he exercised his freedom, and that arresting him would mean a permanent affront to freedom of expression,” Lopez Obrador said at news conference on Monday.

“And I explained to [Biden] that Mexico offers protection and asylum to Julian Assange,” the Mexican president added.

Ouf! C’est presque fini!

Or is it?

Meteorologists here in southwest France are predicting we will have some mid-night relief from this unbearable “canicule” (that’s French for way too bloody hot).

The drop in temperature probably won’t last long, however – and, anyway, the news is little comfort for the thousands of evacuees crammed into school halls and worried their homes are about to be razed by bushfires.

More than a dozen heat records fell on Monday in what one meteorologist described as France’s “heat apocalypse”.

by Andrea Hamblin

As I write this from Bordeaux, it’s going on 10pm and still up over 40C. It feels like twice that, inside.

A Middle Eastern state that Joe Biden once vowed to make “pariah” has now become pivotal to the success of the US plot to encircle and defeat Russia, both militarily and economically. This, first and foremost, is the cardinal objective behind Biden’s ‘U-turn’ on his Saudia policy and meeting with a CIA-designated ‘murderer’, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (M.B.S.).

In another era, Vladimir Fedorovsky was among those who whispered advice into Mikhail Gorbachev's ear as the latter tried to reform the Soviet Union's communist regime from within.

He was with the Secretary General when he let the countries behind the Iron Curtain – Poland, East Germany and the others – distance themselves from Moscow. He was there also during the negotiations which made it possible to put an end to the cold war.

On the phone, the former diplomat says he was also there when James Baker, Secretary of State to George Bush Sr., promised Eduard Shevardnadze, then Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, that NATO would not was not going to expand an inch eastward after the frosty relationship ended. A promise denied since.

BY LAURA-JULIE PERREAULT