A Sky News journalist had snuck uninvited into Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s press conference at the G20 summit in Brazil. Once discovered, she was allowed to stay by a unanimous vote of the accredited reporters present.

Moscow’s top diplomat usually has the Russian press pool attend the conferences, along with reporters from host countries. Western journalists stopped getting invitations after their governments banned, sanctioned and denied accreditation to RT and other Russian outlets, however.

Speaking to Russian media on Wednesday about the incident Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova revealed that the unnamed “spy” was handled with professional courtesy.

After Trump’s emphatic win in the US presidential Election held on the 5th of November, I was both surprised and concerned by the lack of trouble making from the Democratic incumbent and his supporters. They were just too quiet, so I suspected that they had something up their sleeves.

Two hundred and fifty years after the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, our leaders insist that the prosperity of citizens rests upon a trickling down of bounty from the export of raw materials. This simplistic narrative is told, and retold, by almost every newspaper editor in the country, over and over again, in the form of a Gregorian chant without end.

Australia has a reputation for egalitarianism. It is not deserved.

Extract: Address to the Royal Society of NSW, October 2024.

This is a nation based on mercantilist plunder.

By Ken Henry

‘Almost no chance of survival’ – Ukraine’s ex-top general tells troops
Frontline conditions demand a kill-or-be-killed mentality, Valery Zaluzhny has told soldiers

Ukrainian troops currently being trained in the UK to fight Russia must steel themselves to face death and kill without a second thought, Kiev's ambassador in London, Valery Zaluzny has told the soldiers. The four-star general previously served as commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces.

The speech that Zaluzhny gave at a bootcamp in southern England was shared by The Sun on Tuesday, after the tabloid joined the official’s tour of the military facility. British Armed Forces Minister Luke Pollard accompanied the Ukrainian general-turned-diplomat.

Collapse can happen in mostly three ways: sudden,  progressively or change in sustainability. For many it seems that the Western civilisation is collapsing and someone in Joe Biden’s administration is working hard to make sure the entire human species goes down with it. There are counter-currents hopefully and what we might see is a realignment of greater human purpose in a senseless world.

From the arm-wrestling between the Anglo-Saxons and the Rus via the Galicians of Ukraine, to the Jews designing their new country stolen from the Arabs — namely the lowly appreciated Palestinians in their own Muslim world, and the birth of a freer alliance called BRICS, we are in the midst of change. This change is not bringing the collapse of the Western civilisation, but a reduction in its influence. The collapse could happen should the West try to maintain its full influence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VryTdK1uaIg

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOR8K-jIBs8

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDuR2N3IWXM

Elon Musk could make the US government operate like Silicon Valley, Dominic Cummings has claimed.

Speaking at New College Oxford about advances in AI, Boris Johnson’s former adviser said that a subset of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs could no longer ignore Washington’s overreach and may look to rebuild parts of the state that don’t function properly.

Cummings said he could “easily imagine” a new national industrial strategy led by tech elites like Musk, who has recently been appointed by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) along with former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy.

HBO host Bill Maher didn’t hold back as he laid into the Democratic Party for their “doubling down” on the politics that led to their recent election night defeat.

During a long rant about the state of the party, the comedian accused some Democrats of being “stupid,” others of being too liberal, and slammed those who blame racism and/or sexism for Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to President-elect Donald Trump.

Tax office whistleblower Richard Boyle has once again been denied justice, or rather, the High Court found the whistleblower legislation lacking, given the judges no option but to deny his appeal and uphold the judgment against him.

In a saga that reads more like a satirical dystopia than reality, Richard Boyle – a man of integrity and courage – finds himself facing the full wrath of the very government he endeavoured to serve. Once a dedicated employee of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), Boyle is now entangled in a legal nightmare that exposes the government’s alarming double standards and raises critical questions about the nation’s commitment to transparency and justice.

The subservience of the Labor-Coalition political class to Washington is now almost complete. It is no longer possible to consider the Albanese-Dutton political groupings as anything other than propagandists for US imperial interests. This has been apparent for some time, but it has now reached the stage of making John Howard’s role as “deputy sheriff” appear as a form of forceful independence.

Trump’s victory has exposed, for a second time, the failings of the entire US political system and its pursuit of a capitalist, imperialist agenda.

We need to look beyond conventional politics and policy to understand Trump’s triumph. The election was really about America’s declining quality of life.

When Donald Trump won the US presidency in 2016, upending the political establishment, it gave America a unique opportunity to examine closely what lay behind his victory, what was really ailing the country.

Alec Baldwin portrayed President-elect Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in the latest “Saturday Night Live” episode this weekend.

Ukraine should ramp up military mobilization and send more troops to fight Russia, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has suggested in an interview with PBS News on Monday. Sullivan also rejected the argument that more American weapons could turn the tide on the frontlines.

“Have we seen a marked difference since we have provided tanks to Ukraine in terms of the battlefield? Similarly, on F-16s, have we seen a marked difference?” he asked host Nick Schifrin, referring to the firepower donated by the US and its allies to Kiev.

“It’s about manpower, and Ukraine needs to do more, in our view, to firm up its lines in terms of the number of forces it has on the front lines,” he said. “Where is the straightest line between Ukrainian performance and inputs? It’s on mobilization and manpower.”

Западные страны, а конкретно — США, Великобритания и Франция, дали разрешение Киеву на применение дальнобойных вооружений вглубь российской территории. Речь идет о ракетах ATACMS, SCALP и Storm Shadow, чья максимальная дальность достигает 300 километров.

Ирина Алкснис

Irina Alksnis

Данная информация носит неофициальный характер. О принятом Байденом решении сообщила The New York Times, а о решении Лондона и Парижа — Le Figaro. Белый дом отказался от комментариев, не подтвердив и не опровергнув сообщения СМИ. А представитель переходной команды Трампа сообщил, что новый президент "может подвергнуть пересмотру" данное решение. Впрочем, в этих словах прозрачно читается, что может и не подвергнуть.

There was no time for nostalgia or looking back in anger, as Germany's Greens pivoted into campaign mode at their weekend party conference in Wiesbaden.

Germany is expected to elect a new federal parliament on February 23, seven months earlier than expected, following the collapse of its governing coalition of the Greens, the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), on November 6.