Some lawmakers worry partial cancellation of student debts will harm military recruitment and they’ve written to the president and defense secretary about it. 

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

Neither Moscow nor Beijing are seeking to rule the world – unlike some other countries, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.

“In implementing their bilateral relations, Russia and China do not lay claim to ruling the whole world,” he told Russia’s Rossiya 1 channel on Sunday. However, “we know that some other countries have this tendency,” he added.

Moscow and Beijing also have “absolute similarity” in their views regarding “all sorts of provocative actions” by the US, according to President Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson. He added that both countries consider Washington’s “destabilizing behavior” to be “unacceptable.”

The remark comes shortly after Putin met with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Uzbekistan’s Samarkand as part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit last week.

French President Emmanuel Macron has described the upcoming Donbass votes on whether to join Russia as “another provocation” of Moscow’s and said that this “parody” on democracy might be funny if it weren’t tragic.

The French leader was speaking to journalists on Tuesday, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, soon after the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions, announced that they would hold a vote on joining Russia on September 23-27.

In Macron’s opinion, holding referendums in a region “that has been bombed, where people have had to flee” is a “signature of cynicism.”

“If it weren't tragic, we could laugh about it,” Macron said.

The volume of German imports from Russia has risen over the first seven months of this year by 32.6% in annual terms, amounting to $27.9 billion, the Russian Trade Mission in Berlin told RIA Novosti on Monday, citing data from Germany’s federal statistical office, Destatis.

According to the Russian trade representative in Germany, Andrey Sobolev, the rise in imports of fuel and energy products through July was 40.5%. Purchases of Russian gold have risen more than tenfold, while the volume of silver imports jumped by almost five times. The EU country has also boosted purchases of other metals from Russia, including copper, aluminum, and nickel.

The report also indicated that German exports to Russia decreased by 43.6% to $10.2 billion compared to the same period last year. Declining exports caused a $17.7 billion trade imbalance for Germany.

Donald Trump, the 45th US President, has claimed that FBI agents violated his constitutional rights and wreaked havoc in his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. The agency searched Trump’s premises in early August in connection with a probe into the former president’s handling of classified documents.  

Taking to Truth Social on Sunday, the Republican firebrand said that he would “soon be heading” to Mar-a-Lago to check on the “unnecessary ransacking of rooms and other areas of the house.” 

According to a post published on the social media platform, which was launched by Trump in February, the former head of state felt “totally violated” by the law enforcement’s intrusion. 

The UK remains one of the leading donors of military aid to Kiev, committing 2.3 billion ($2.6 billion) since Russia launched its special operation to "demilitarize and de-Nazify" Ukraine on February 24th. Moscow has repeatedly warned the West that delivering arms to Kiev will further exacerbate the Ukraine crisis.

UK Prime Minister Liz Truss has confirmed that in 2023, Britain will meet or exceed the amount of military aid that it spent on Ukraine this year.

The editorial (“The RBA says it out loud: Raise taxes to fix the budget”, September 19) highlights the dilemma facing the Albanese government over the promised stage three personal income tax cuts while the Reserve Bank says that taxes should be raised. But most fair-minded Australians would agree that, whatever the situation when the original promise was made, the difficult circumstances of our current economic reality demand the tax cuts be dumped, especially when they will favour the already wealthy. Albanese can be forgiven for breaking an election promise for the benefit of the people as a whole. 

Rob Phillips, North Epping

Mr MARTINO VIGNERONI APOLOGISES ABOUT HIS PREVIOUS CARTOON IN WHICH HE MENTIONED 24 HOURS OF NO NEWS OTHER THAN THE QUEEN'S DEPARTURE TO HIGHER GROUND. HE MEANT TO SAY: 24 DAYS, 24 MONTHS AND 24 YEARS OF NO MENTION OF ANY OTHER NEWS BUT THE WHOLE ROYAL PAGEANTED FUNERAL ORGANISED SHEMOOZLE...

LUCKY FOR THE WORLD, THERE ARE NEWS OUTLETS OTHER THAN THE WESTERN MEDIA ENAMOURED WITH THE WINDSORS (Saxe-Coburg-Gotha), WHO ARE VERY VERY VERY THINLY RELATED (INBRED?) TO A LINE OF BLUE BLOOD GOING BACK TO 1066 WE ARE TOLD... OF COURSE WE ARE NOT INVITED TO PONDER ABOUT THE WAY THESE ROYALS FOUGHT EACH OTHERS TO SIT ON THE THRONE: TITS, BUMS, MARRIAGES, MURDERS, ASSASSINATIONS, DECEIT, WARS, HANGINGS, DECAPITATIONS, PROSTITUTION AND MANY OTHER DEEDS THAT MAKETH THE ROYAL FAMILIES.... ESPECIALLY THAT OF ENGLAND AND DEPENDENCIES....

Understanding the present-day events in Ukraine is impossible unless you study what happened in 1999 with Serbia. There is a Hegelian thread that runs directly from NATO’s ostensible “humanitarian intervention” to the Russian “special military operation,” linking Belgrade to Belgorod – and everything in-between.

Following the meeting of the Heads of Member States of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, held on 15 and 16 September in the Uzbek city of Samarkand, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told journalists that his country aims to join the SCO.

Turkey is still a member of NATO. The SCO was founded by Russia and China, hence Washington demands that its allies cut ties with Russia. However, Turkey noted that NATO statutes do not provide for this kind of scenario.

President Erdoğan has left for the United States where he is to meet President Biden.

READ MORE:

https://www.voltairenet.org/article218024.html

With well over a billion monthly views, Britain’s populist and pugnacious Daily Mail is one of the world’s most widely-read newspapers on the Internet, having twice the traffic of the Washington Post and five times that of the Wall Street Journal, even sometimes approaching the readership of the New York Times. The publication has stayed true to its original tabloid roots and its success comes from its willingness to wholeheartedly jump on those controversial stories that other outlets avoid.

Meanwhile, the British Lancet is located at the opposite end of the spectrum of respectability, being one of the world’s most prestigious and authoritative medical journals, as sober and responsible as any publication in existence.

We have another entirely Australian own goal to China.

Australians are no better informed about what will be Australia’s most expensive-ever defence project – equipping the Navy with US or British nuclear-powered submarines – than they were a year ago when the Morrison government announced the deal a year ago.

Yet while the Albanese government shows little sign of serious engagement to the increasingly heavy load of domestic criticisms of the globally-unprecedented project, its most serious and effective opposition may be a new and wide-ranging Chinese attack in the global legal nuclear arena.
 

Former US President Bill Clinton has rejected criticism that NATO’s eastward expansion on his watch helped set the stage for today’s Ukraine crisis, suggesting that Russia would have threatened the security of its neighbors sooner without the Western military bloc’s presence in the region.

“I think we did the right thing at the right time, and if we hadn’t have done it, this crisis might have occurred even sooner,” Clinton said in a CNN interview broadcast on Sunday. Three former Warsaw Pact states – Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – joined NATO during Clinton’s second term, in 1999, and seven others, including three former Soviet republics, followed in 2004.

The Russian army shelled its own detention center in the east of Ukraine. The Russian army shelled a nuclear power plant it has guarded since taking control of it last March. The Russian army wantonly shelled a maternity ward, a theater, and an art center in Mariupol last spring. The Russian army shells hospitals and apartment houses everywhere and randomly. The Russian army massacred residents of Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, as it withdrew in the final days of March.

Here’s the real reason that the US wants to sanction China

Washington’s modus operandi is ‘create problem, blame target country, impose sanctions, expand influence’

The US is considering sanctioning China as a deterrent from attacking Taiwan, according to media reports. Washington always justifies economic sanctions by evoking a military or security threat against either the US or any one of its allies. Then it actively works to prove the legitimacy of the threat – or to create the illusion thereof.  

BY RACHEL MARSDEN