How can we allow this to continue (“Land clearing threatens wildlife”, February 6)? It’s an established fact that rampant land clearing is decimating native wildlife. In this case, the endangered greater glider will face certain extinction, and for what? More urban spread in Jervis Bay and to top it off, facilities for two wealthy educational institutions, Scots College and the University of Sydney. Really?

Australia has been persuaded, enticed and strongarmed into taking gravely dangerous decisions. But Australia is a sovereign state and its fingerprints are, ultimately, all over the formation of its terrible abdication of national independence.

We need to pay particular attention to a definitive insight advanced by Paul Keating: Taiwan is not a vital Australian interest. In fact, it is an entity that could help unravel decades of remarkable, positive development in Australia, if we allow this to happen.

By Richard Cullen

FROM CARTER TO BIDEN, EIGHT AMERICAN PRESIDENTS OVERSAW DEMOLITION SUCCESS IN AFGHANISTAN…. 

JIMMY CARTER, 1977-1981

RONALD REAGAN 1981-1989

GEORGE H W BUSH 1989-1993

BILL CLINTON 1993-2001

GEORGE W BUSH 2001-2009

BARACK OBAMA 2009-2017

DONALD TRUMP 2017-2021

JOE BIDEN 2021-

YES THE AFGHANISTAN CAMPAIGN, THE US LONGEST WAR, FINALLY BORE THE DESIRED FRUIT — DESPITE A SPECTACULAR EXIT DEBACLE. SO WHAT WAS THE AMERICAN PLAN FOR AFGHANISTAN FROM THE TIME OF JIMMY CARTER ONWARDS:

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is willing to pull the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights if the continental court that interprets the agreement tries to interfere with his legislative crackdown on illegal immigration, official sources told The Times on Saturday. 

The PM’s new legislation will prohibit anyone arriving in the UK illegally from claiming asylum there. Set to be unveiled “within weeks,” according to The Times’ sources, it establishes a process to deport new arrivals in “days or weeks” to their origin country, if considered “safe,” or to Rwanda, with whom the UK signed a controversial hosting agreement last year. Previously, the deportation process took “months or years,” Sunak told TalkTV last week after unveiling the proposal. 

President Joe Biden says he gave his authorization to shoot down a Chinese high altitude balloon a day after he was first briefed on the suspicious device, which was hovering over sensitive US military sites, but defense officials convinced him to wait until it was safe for people on the ground. 

“I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday as soon as possible,” Biden told reporters on Saturday. “They decided, without doing any damage to people on the ground… they decided that the best time to do that was when it got over water outside within a 12 mile limit.”

This is for Western politicians. They obviously pass for what they are: liars doubling as idiots (c**ts in the original work).

Whether they work for pension “reforms”, or for the war they “launched” against Russia.

As I said before, the Ukrainian army has been brought up to NATO standards, that is to say extremely mediocre. The role of the Ukrainian army was to hold a heavily fortified line, while the sanctions against Russia would bring down the Moscow regime. This would have been child’s play — in a matter of a few weeks.

Rédigé par Patrick REYMOND — TRANSLATION and adaptation BY JULES LETAMBOUR. 

In the thick of Oscar season, the Alec Baldwin shooting story has returned like a nightmare Hollywood can’t rouse itself from - or perhaps a dreadful cautionary tale that refuses to be ignored.

The latest development, announced last week by Santa Fe’s District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies, is that Baldwin is to be charged with involuntary manslaughter over the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of his western Rust in October 2021: Hutchins was killed by a live round fired from a prop gun by Baldwin during a scene. (Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the film’s armourer, is facing the same charge.)

Carmack-Altwies also said that David Halls, Rust’s first assistant director, has agreed to plead guilty to a charge of “negligent use of a deadly weapon,” after handing the loaded revolver to Baldwin before the shot was fired.

Russia’s food exports jumped by 12% in monetary terms last year to more than 70 million tons, despite difficulties caused by Western sanctions, the country’s Ministry of Agriculture reported on Thursday.

The ministry highlighted that domestic agricultural products had been supplied to 150 countries, emphasizing that Russia’s contribution to world food security is constantly growing.

According to the latest report, exports of oil and fat products soared by 26%, meat and dairy products rose by 16%, and grain exports increased by 14%.

Jules Letambour had a fondue night with a few of his dwindling (socialist) friends. Jacques, Robert, Frank, Jean-Paul, Rémy, Phillipe and Jason. The hot Glühwein flowed like the pure local water stream fed by the Jura’s melting snow.

The conflict between the advocates of "a world based on rules" and those who advocate a return to "a world based on international law" continues. It began with the Russian military intervention in Ukraine and will last for years.

The military situation on the ground is blocked, as always in winter in this part of the world. The supporters of "a world based on rules" still refuse to implement the UN Security Council Resolution 2202, while those of "a world based on international law" are conducting a special military operation to implement it. In the end, they gradually moved away from it and stabilized the situation of the people of Novarussia.

by Thierry Meyssan

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has postponed a visit to China which was scheduled for February 5-6 over an alleged Chinese "spy balloon" which has been recently detected in US airspace. Beijing explained that it is a weather device that had deviated from its planned route.

"Looking at this from outside the Biden administration, it seems like there was indecision as to how to respond to the balloon," Ross Feingold, a Taipei-based political risk analyst, told Sputnik.

During and after the Second World War, public intellectuals in Britain and the United States grappled with concerns about the future of democracy, the prospects of liberty, and the decline of the imperial system. Without using the term “globalization,” they identified a shift toward technological, economic, cultural, and political interconnectedness and developed a “globalist” ideology to reflect this new postwar reality. The Emergence of Globalism examines the competing visions of world order that shaped these debates and led to the development of globalism as a modern political concept.

How competing visions of world order in the 1940s gave rise to the modern concept of globalism

George Soros is either stunningly prescient or frighteningly influential when it comes to determining who will need to do all the bleeding and dying that he deems necessary to bring about a desirable “new world order.”

The most ancient parts of truth … also once were plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatsoever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for 'to be true' means only to perform this marriage-function.

— "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth," Pragmatism (1907), p. 83.

— William James