US President Joe Biden fell from his bicycle while stopping to greet supporters in Rehoboth, Delaware on Saturday. The 79-year-old president did not require medical attention, the White House said.

Video footage of the incident shows Biden crossing a street at low speed, before putting one foot down on the asphalt as if to dismount his bike. Instead, the president fell to the ground, landing on his side.

Biden, who was wearing a helmet, was helped to his feet by assistants. He rode away after speaking briefly to the small crowd of supporters who had gathered along his bike route.

According to the White House, Biden fell after his “foot got caught on the pedal,” and did not need medical attention.

When people talk about Asia, they do not generally mean Australia. After all, it is the largest part of a theoretically separate continent, Oceania, and its people are white and British in origin for the most part.

However Oceania is a cultural term as much as anything. It refers to places where there a mix of native Polynesians and white European settlers, and English is the language of the educated, and more prestigious than native languages. As a functioning entity, it has no meaning, so Australia, which should be taking the lead as the largest country in that continent, has to be part of something else to serve any purpose.

BY Seth Ferris

Hillary Clinton has criticized Emmanuel Macron’s policy towards Russia – the French leader should take it as a compliment

If the warmongering American chastises you for seeking diplomacy, you know you’re doing something right

Former US Secretary of State, First Lady, Senator, and failed presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, passed through Paris last week, and seized an opportunity to chastise French President Emmanuel Macron on his own turf. 

BY Rachel Marsden

Caitlin Johnstone: Assange is doing his most important work yet

Thanks to him, we know what Western leaders' claimed support of free press is really worth

By Caitlin Johnstone, an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz

June 14 (Reuters) - A growing number of people are selectively avoiding important news stories such as the coronavirus pandemic, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the cost-of-living crisis, according to a report released on Tuesday.

Any government that is a national-security state needs big official enemies — scary ones, ones that will cause the citizenry to continue supporting not only the continued existence of a national-security state form of government but also ever-growing budgets for it and its army of voracious “defense” contractors.

That’s, of course, what the current brouhaha about Russia is all about. It’s really a replay of the Cold War decades, when Americans were made to believe that the Reds were coming to get them, take over the federal government and the public schools, and indoctrinate everyone into loving communism and socialism.

BY Jacob Hornberger

The U.S. Capitol Police arrested a group of nine staffers from CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for allegedly trespassing in the U.S. Capitol on Thursday night, according to Fox News. 

The group of Colbert staffers was arrested in the Capitol’s Longworth House Office Building and charged with illegal entry into the House office buildings after hours. These nine individuals were reportedly escorted out of the January 6 Committee hearing earlier Thursday for not having proper press credential.

Britain’s prime minister intends to scrap his own Brexit deal and provoke a crisis in Northern Irish politics. Everyone who assisted Boris Johnson’s rise to power to block a left-wing government now shares responsibility for his criminal recklessness.

After several months of brinkmanship, Britain’s Conservative government has decided to launch a direct assault on the Northern Ireland Protocol of Boris Johnson’s Brexit agreement. Instead of haggling with the European Union for concessions over the way it operates the protocol, Johnson’s foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has announced legislation to override it altogether. The EU has responded with threats of legal action and a trade war.

Matthew Duss is a leading figure 0n the American political left. However, the left is fragmented, and so we have to qualify this and say he is an important voice in one part of the left — the “connected” left. 

Duss is a foreign policy adviser to the independent Sen. Bernie Sanders. Sanders is allied with the Democratic Party, which gives Duss some access to the foreign policy debate inside that party. This can be considered a good thing. We certainly need as many “connected” progressive voices as we can get. 

BY Lawrence Davidson 
TothePointAnalysis.com

Diogenes, one of the ancient world’s illustrious philosophers, believed that lies were the currency of politics, and those lies were the ones he sought to expose and debase. To make his point, Diogenes occasionally carried a lit lantern through the streets of Athens in the daylight. If asked why, Diogenes would say he was searching for an honest man.

An artificial atmosphere of hostility, sustained by geopolitical agendas, double standards, fake news and skewed narratives has made it difficult to tackle specific human rights problems particularly in Xinjiang.

As former UN rapporteurs we are committed to the promotion and protection of human rights in all corners of the world, including China. Progress can only be achieved on the basis on good faith implementation of the UN Charter and UN human rights treaties, and requires patience, perseverance, and international solidarity.

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have long been criticized for the onerous influence they exert over the domestic policies of many states. Especially since the 1990s, they have been excoriated for imposing policies—such as structural adjustment reforms and austerity measures—on client states that deepen inequality in the Global South, which, in turn, benefits the powerful countries of the Global North.

Hendrik Webber: As a politician, I tried to be a voice of reason on Ukraine. For that, my party expelled me

Western European elites willfully ignore the context and history that led to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as well as reality on the ground

By Hendrik Weber, former Norwegian politician and member of the Rødt party, head of the People's Diplomacy Norway NGO

Western countries have found themselves in a difficult situation since the beginning of the special military operation in Ukraine. Almost all of their governments condemn the “invasion of Ukraine” by Russian troops. I am convinced that the current situation in Western countries is very tense and aggressive.

Petro Poroshenko has admitted that the 2015 ceasefire in Donbass, which he negotiated with Russia, France and Germany as president of Ukraine, was merely a distraction intended to buy time for Kiev to rebuild its military.

He made the comments in interviews with several news outlets this week, including Germany’s Deutsche Welle television and the Ukrainian branch of the US state-run Radio Free Europe. Poroshenko also defended his record as president between 2014 and 2019.

“We had achieved everything we wanted,” he said of the peace deal. “Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war – to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces.”

J.K. Rowling has given her permission for a killing curse from Harry Potter to be inscribed on Ukrainian missiles during a call with Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus, who were pretending to be President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In the course of the conversation, which was published on Thursday, the fake Zelensky thanked Rowling for her decision to remove her books from sale in Russia.

The author explained that she did this out of “solidarity with Ukraine” amid Moscow’s military operation, which has been underway in Ukraine since late February.

Rowling didn’t seem to regret the loss of her Russian audience, saying “they certainly didn’t understand” her books.