This is National Whistleblower Week, with Saturday marking National Whistleblower Appreciation Day. The National Whistleblower Center in Washington has its annual lunch, seminar and associated events scheduled.  Whistleblowers from around the U.S. attend, a couple members of Congress usually show up and we talk about how important it is to speak truth to power. 

During the upcoming televised debate, British Conservative leadership candidate Rishi Sunak, who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Boris Johnson’s government, is expected to promise resolute action against China, which he accuses of “being the biggest long-term threat to the UK.”

President Joe Biden first came under pressure to declare a national climate emergency last week after Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) withdrew his support for climate legislation and killed a bill that promised to bolster renewable energy and electric cars in order to cut carbon emissions.

Manchin, a centrist, has made millions from the coal industry but stated his reasoning for not supporting the bill was that the climate package would worsen current inflation.

Former prime minister Scott Morrison will skip the first week of his first Parliament since losing the federal election to instead make an overseas trip to Japan.

Mr Morrison said he accepted the invitation to speak alongside other former world leaders in Tokyo before the new parliamentary schedule was released.

“Prior to the new Government advising the sitting schedule for the remainder of 2022, I had already accepted an invitation to join other former Prime Ministers from Canada, the UK and New Zealand to address an international event to be held in Tokyo this week,” the Member for Cook said in a statement.

We need to develop the habit of thinking independently in our own national interests.

Which western country has:

We shall start today with an excerpt from Adam Lindsay Gordon, Hippodromania. 

Our common descent we may each recall

To a lady of old caught tripping,

The fair one in fig leaves, who damned us all

For a bite at a golden pippin.

Then some savage dude takes this too seriously:

The Syrian Arab News Agency reported recently that US troops illegally transported oil tankers and trucks carrying weapons from Syria to Iraq, which made Syrian Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Bassam Tomeh's earlier words go viral again: "Americans and their allies are targeting the Syrian oil wealth and its tankers just like pirates".

It is good that Syria realized that the United States and its allies have been targeting global oil wealth. However, the US has been seeking oil since the middle of the last century, ever since every family there got a car.

BY Zhang Zhouxiang

At the Paris military event in honor of Bastille Day on July 14, infantry troops from nine countries – France’s NATO allies Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria – were the first to march along the Champs-Elysees. The French state-run radio broadcaster RFI called this event a “parade under the banner of Ukraine.”

By inviting states from the Bucharest Nine to open the celebrations, “France is demonstrating its support for these countries as members of the EU and NATO,” the French Ministry of Defense stressed. “The countries in the Bucharest Nine are now concerned about Russian aggression and the immediate threat it poses {to them}.”

by Daria Platonova

There aren’t a lot of journalists that Americans can look up to these days, especially in the mainstream media. Edward R. Murrow and his “boys” are long gone. Americans don’t have a Walter Cronkite to set their minds at ease. Even the venerable 60 Minutes has had a carousel of unremarkable talking heads since the retirements of Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, and Harry Reasoner.

A “security spillover” from worsening relations between the collective West and Russia has put on ice many initiatives vital to the environment and wellbeing of native populations in the Arctic, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned on Friday. However, Russia still hopes that the Arctic Council will resume normal operations in the near future.

Russia currently chairs the council, an inter-governmental forum established in 1996 to address the issues of the northern polar region. In early March, however, all of its other members – the US, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden – suspended their participation, citing the conflict in Ukraine.

Outgoing UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson revealed that earlier this week he joined Ukrainian troops for a training session, his second military exercise in two weeks.

On Saturday, Johnson tweeted out a video showing him in full camouflage as he tested out various weapons, including an anti-tank missile launcher and grenade machine gun. He is also seen throwing a grenade.

“This week I visited Ukrainian troops being trained by British Armed Forces in North Yorkshire,” the prime minister said, adding in the video that he had met “some of the 400 Ukrainian troops” who are being trained by UK forces as part of a “huge” initiative. The program, which was announced during Johnson’s visit to Kiev last month, provides for the training of up to 10,000 service members in the coming months.

The U.S. has the largest number of surveillance cameras per person in the world. Cameras are omnipresent on city streets and in hotels, restaurants, malls and offices. They’re also used to screen passengers for the Transportation Security Administration. And then there are smart doorbells and other home security cameras.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, explaining the reasons behind his country’s refusal to negotiate with Moscow, compared Russia to an insatiable “cachalot” who would not understand the language of diplomacy.

In a Friday interview with the Wall Street Journal, Zelensky responded to the recent remarks of his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, who said earlier this week that Russia and Ukraine could have ended their conflict in March if Kiev had not withdrawn from negotiations.

Calling this statement “total delirium,” the Ukrainian leader said that, prior to Moscow’s offensive, he had been trying to talk to Putin for a long time but he couldn’t be bothered to take a phone call.

Amazon, the $1.25 trillion company founded and led by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, has announced that it is acquiring One Medical, a private equity-backed primary care provider that generates over half of its revenue from Medicare.

Statistics lie. Some lie more than others. The ones regarding unemployment lie brazenly and have done so for years, erasing the very existence of the long-term unemployed by simply deleting them from the regular tally. Statistics about homelessness lie. But they have an excuse: the homeless are hard to keep track of. So we’re told that roughly half a million Americans have no home.

by Eve Ottenberg