Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko is set to cruise to victory after more than 30 years in power. Sunday's presidential election has been slammed as a sham, with his rivals broadly seen as government stooges.

 

Belarus: Lukashenko poised for 'farce' election victory

 

Polling stations opened in Belarus on Sunday for a presidential election in which long-time leader Alexander Lukashenko — in power since 1994 — is seen as certain to be declared the winner.

Top Trump ally Elon Musk has publicly thrown down the gauntlet to the world's leading liberal 'philanthropist' and his NGOs' color revolution-fueling soft power influence operations. Sputnik asked a leading independent political commentator what this could mean under Trump 2.0.

Open Society Foundations chairman Alex Soros has put a brave face on the losses facing by his father's neoliberal philanthropic empire now that Joe Biden is gone and MAGA has turned to Washington with a vengeance.

 

Why Soros' Soft Power Empire is More Vulnerable Than Ever With Trump Back at the Helm

 

Will Thomas, assistant professor of business law at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, has been keenly and carefully following the legal twists and turns surrounding Donald Trump.

Thomas explores where things stand now that Trump is back in the White House:

“Unprecedented legal entanglements continue to cast a shadow. A New York trial court recently sentenced Trump over 34 felony counts of falsifying business records—crimes stemming from efforts to illegally influence the 2016 presidential election.

 

Trump returns to office as the first criminal president—but for how long? [WILL HE REMAIN A FELON]?

 

I have been reading Stan Grant’s beautiful new book, Murriyang song of time (Bundyi: Sydney 2024). There is in it a sentence pertaining to the Uluru Statement of the Heart and the subsequent failed Referendum. Stan Grant says, poignantly, that ‘the Uluru Statement spoke from the afflicted to a nation that has never loved us.’

 

Instead of noise and bluster, can January 26 be a day of loving awareness of those who are hurting?    By Philip Huggins

 

It is a very painful experience to feel unloved.

To feel, as Stan says, that it felt like the nation never fully listened to the Statement.

Republicans routed Democrats in the 2024 election. The coming year offers a chance for the defeated party to figure out if the last cycle was a realignment or an electoral anomaly.

There has been lots of soul-searching and finger-pointing in recent weeks; that will continue for months as Democrats sort through the results and test theories about how to win in this environment.

 

By Nia-Malika Henderson / Bloomberg Opinion

 

We can get a sense of where the party is moving by watching five key leadership contests in 2025:

The US Senate has confirmed army veteran and Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth as the next secretary of defense on Friday.

Vice President J.D. Vance arrived in the chamber and cast the tie-breaking vote, sealing Hegseth’s appointment.

Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Mitch McConnell broke ranks and joined the Democrats in voting no.

Hegseth, who wrote a book about the need to restore a “warrior culture,” has promised to boost combat-readiness and the prestige of military service.

During his confirmation hearing earlier this month, he pledged to be “laser-focused on warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, standards, and readiness.”

President Donald Trump said Hegseth will be “a courageous and patriotic champion of our ‘Peace through Strength’ policy.”

This is the political season to be thankful for small favors of optimism, and in this edition of Scheer Intelligence, host Robert Scheer and guest Joe Lauria, editor of the Consortium News website, are excited to have found a gift of striking significance to what remains of the practice of serious journalism on the internet. It is Donald Trump’s delivery on a promise in his inauguration address that “After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all censorship and bring back free speech to America.”

 

For Once Trump Gets It Right

 

It’s January in Australia and so the annual Australia Day political circus has rolled into town. It started much earlier this year, with Peter Dutton and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price working to grab some headlines before the upcoming election. Their followers have declared January is now “Australia Month” and have washed through social media with absurd lies and conspiracy theories about Aboriginal people. Yes, that crock about Aboriginal people wiping out the original pygmy race has been dug out again.

FOR GUS Leonisky, this is a personal issue. When JFK was assassinated, Gus was visiting someone who had been working for the family. The person is long dead, but the tears are still alive. GUS has been waiting 62 years to find out WHO killed JFK…

I think the files won’t reveal who did it… The CIA and the Secret Service wouldn’t have squealed or reported on one of their own. The files might contain the missing forensic pieces of the puzzle which we have explored in UNCLE GEORGE…

But we might be surprised....

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Jack Schlossberg, the only grandson of John F. Kennedy (JFK), has lashed out at US President Donald Trump for his decision to declassify files related to JFK’s assassination in 1963.

Donald Trump’s return to power for a second term has sent ripples across the globe. On his first day in office, he wielded executive authority with vigour, signing many executive orders, including withdrawing the US from the Paris Agreement for the second time. This move reversed the country’s climate commitments yet again, signalling Trump’s prioritisation of energy dominance and domestic interests.

 

Donald Trump’s return: gloves off reset    By Christine Loh

 

The inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States is this week’s main news story, not only in America but also in domestic Russian politics. Though all eyes on that day were fixed on Trump, it is telling that he also became the subject of intense discussions in this country, ranging from political circles to ordinary kitchen conversations. This is no anomaly — it is entirely logical.

 

Russia and the Trump Doctrine: Adapting to the ‘Rules of the Strong’     The Kommersant columnist outlines what Donald Trump’s return means for Russia and the world

    By Sergey Strokan

 

Just hours into his second presidency, Donald Trump was already bulldozing congressional Republicans.

He granted clemency to some 1,500 Jan. 6 offenders, some of them convicted of violent assaults. He flouted a bipartisan TikTok ban, ordering it to remain unenforced. And he moved to cancel some of his predecessor’s energy programs over the pleadings of some in the GOP who wanted him to wait — to name just a few of the ways he undercut members of his own party.

 

 

Russia intervened militarily in Ukraine to denazify the country. But, according to Westerners, there are no Nazis in Ukraine. Russia wants to invade and annex this country. This mutual incomprehension caused the Russian special operation to degenerate into open war.

However, several identical facts, which have occurred in the Baltic countries since 2005 and in the European Parliament since 2016, demonstrate that this is not a misunderstanding, but a deliberate NATO strategy.
This mobilizes 53 states to oppose the adoption by the United Nations of a traditional resolution against the glorification of Nazism.

 

Should we condemn or not the glorification of Nazism?
by Thierry Meyssan

 

The play Don’s Party premiered on August 11 1971 at Carlton’s Pram Factory, home to the radical theatre ensemble, the Australian Performing Arts Group. 

Established four years earlier in 1967, the group would nurture some of the most passionate Australian voices of a generation, including Max Gillies, John Romeril, Kerry Walker, Geoffrey Milne and Jenny Kemp. 

Until this point, there was very little original Australian theatre. With the exception of Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955), Australian stages were dominated by scripts imported from the UK and America.

This new generation was interested in creating a muscular, fiercely nationalistic form of theatre preoccupied with “staging the nation”.