The Israel Files is a new MintPress series exploring and highlighting the many revelations about the Israeli occupation of Palestine that WikiLeaks documents disclosed. It hopes to shed light on many of the most important and underreported revelations the publishing group exposed.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in ScheerPost as a reprint from MintPress News on September 29, 2022. We are reposting it now because of its relevance. 

     By Alan MacLeod / MintPress News

One of the most dangerous things that a government can do is present a glossy picture of the economy at a time when families and small businesses are suffering. Governments are always optimistic, but sending euphoric messages tends to backfire, especially when the situation for the middle class is complicated.

Daniel Lacalle

In the United States, the Biden administration’s message of “the strongest economy in decades” is not just an exaggeration; it may anger voters who suffer the burden of negative real wage growth, accumulated inflation, and higher taxes.

SOME PEOPLE HAVE ARGUED THAT PUTIN SHOULD NOT HAVE “INVADED” UKRAINE OUT OF HIS OWN FREE WILL. HE HAD A CHOICE NOT TO. OTHERS, MUCH CLEVERER THAN GUS, SUCH AS PROFESSOR JOHN MEARSHEIMER SAY THAT PUTIN “DID NOT HAVE ANY CHOICE”… 

After escaping an abusive partner more than a decade ago, Adriana Carrington felt life was just getting back on track.

She had worked through years of therapy, finally got a mortgage for a new home, and started her own business.

But she says the tax office has now derailed her life by hitting her with an alleged tax debt dating back to the 2008-09 financial year — a debt she never knew existed.

We have previously discussed the unrelenting attacks by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his allies on free speech. There has been a steady criminalization of speech, including even jokes and religious speech, in Canada.

The Georgia judge overseeing Donald Trump's trial on charges of trying to overturn his election defeat says lead prosecutor Fani Willis can remain on the case, but a deputy with whom she had a personal relationship stepped down in keeping with the judge's order.

Nathan Wade, the special counsel hired for the case, resigned on Friday in an open letter to Willis.

Ukraine must regain control over all the territories it once held, including Russia’s Crimean Peninsula, French President Emmanuel Macron has said. Otherwise, no “lasting peace” will be possible, he claimed.

The president made the remarks on Thursday in an interview with broadcasters TF2 and France 2, bluntly describing Russia as France’s “adversary.” At the same time, he insisted that Paris has not been “waging war on Russia” but merely “supporting” Kiev in the conflict.

QUESTIONING THE TV ACTORS: You know that all the news that’s fit to print is just a cog in the never-ending government-funded propaganda machine. From local news to international commentary the bought and paid for ‘repeaters’ of the world have let down their viewers and readers, time after time. 

“Zero. They’re in it for the clicks, or to set the propaganda of the day, not for the truth,” responded one reader.

By Ad Washbro

It’s 8 pm in Gaza, Palestine right now, the end of my fourth day in Rafah and the first moment I’ve had to sit in a quiet place to reflect.

I’ve tried to take notes, photos, mental images, but this moment is too big for a notepad or my struggling memory. Nothing prepared me for what I would witness.

Before I made it across the Rafah-Egypt border, I read every bit of news coming out of Gaza or about Gaza. I did not look away from any video or image posted from the ground, no matter how gruesome, shocking or traumatising.

Instead of actually engaging in measures to promote peace, the AUKUS governments are feeding us a racist notion that three Anglo nations targeting China from thousands of kilometres away are needed to ensure it.

Text of talk given to IPAN (Independent and Peaceful Australia Network) forum “AUKUS and military escalation: Who pays and who benefits”. Canberra, 12 March 2024

It was at a grand military awards ceremony last December that Vladimir Putin told the Russian public he would stand for the presidency for a fifth time.

Voting is now taking place over three days until Sunday, even though the result is not in doubt as he has no credible opponent.

At last December's solemn event in one of the Kremlin's most opulent halls, Russia's leader of 24 years had just handed out top honours to soldiers who had taken part in Russia's "special military operation" in Ukraine.

He was chatting with a small group of participants when the commander of a pro-Russian unit in Ukraine's occupied Donetsk region approached him.

Although the words have remained the same, the notions of separation, absence, distance, return, no longer contain the same realities. To understand the world today, we use a language that was established for the world of yesterday. And life of the past seems to us to respond better to our nature, for the sole reason that it responds better to our language.

Each progress drives us a little further away from habits that we had barely acquired, and we are truly emigrants who have not yet founded our homeland.

On 13 November 2023, following the terrible attack by Hamas on Israel, Jürgen Habermas and three other prominent German academics released a statement condemning the rise of antisemitism in Germany. They also criticised the use of the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s response. 

Israel’s military retaliation was “justified in principle”, they argued, and despite

all the concern for the fate of the Palestinian population […], the standards of judgement slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions. 

The Russian president gave an extended interview to the director of Sputnik’s parent media agency on Wednesday, focusing on the crisis in Ukraine, the threat of direct NATO intervention and the prospects for peace talks.

The key takeaway from President Putin’s conversation with Rossiya Segodnya head Dmitry Kiselev is that those “looking for a contrite Russia, a weak Russia, a compliant Russia” won’t find it in “the Russia that Vladimir Putin was presenting to the world in his interview,” says former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and independent military and international affairs observer Scott Ritter.

Part II: Al-Aqsa Flood, or People’s War in the New Era

Mao Zedong says: the enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue. His theorizing on guerrilla warfare can be described as the flea war.