The North West Shelf Extension is the textbook example of everything wrong with Australia’s gas policy. Its approval comes off the back of a dangerous myth that more gas means cheaper prices for Australians.

The first act of a re-elected Albanese Government has been to betray future generations.

David Pocock

Before the final votes are counted, before ministers have even had time to get their feet under their desks, the government has approved one of the biggest fossil fuel projects in our history: the North West Shelf Extension.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard much about Joe Biden, hasn’t it? Yet here he is, back in the headlines – not because of some triumphant return to form, but for all the wrong reasons. The former US president has once again found himself at the center of national attention, thanks to a sequence of revealing and deeply troubling events.

The Biden years: When America started to resemble the late-stage USSR
How Washington became a gerontocracy
By Vitaly Ryumshin

It began with Axios publishing the full audio of Biden’s now-infamous interview with special prosecutor Robert Hur. The same interview in which Hur concluded that the then president suffered from serious memory issues. As the recording confirmed, he wasn’t wrong. Biden struggled to recall basic facts – even the date his son died.

As Democrats cast about for a strategy to thwart President Donald Trump’s agenda, rebrand their party and take back power, Sen. Elissa Slotkin recently offered one intriguing idea: Build a shadow Cabinet.

The video criticizes recent comments and actions by U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Lindsey Graham following their trip to Kyiv, where they threatened Russia and proposed aggressive U.S. policies. Blumenthal suggested seizing $300 billion in Russian sovereign assets frozen in European banks to fund Ukraine's military and reconstruction, despite such actions being illegal under international law and potentially damaging to global trust in Western financial institutions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J4rAkNMnWo

The speaker argues this would undermine the West's credibility, accelerate the rise of alternative systems like BRICS, and have far-reaching economic consequences.

KURSK, Russia (Sputnik) - The NATO bloc's staff committee had been preparing the Ukrainian armed forces' invasion of Russia's Kursk Region for over half a year, the deputy head of the Russian Defense Ministry's military-political office, Lt. Gen. Apti Alaudinov, told Sputnik.

"The NATO bloc's staff committee was preparing such a super operation, which in essence had to be guaranteed to be effective. They gathered all the resources that they had, all types of foreign equipment, trained fighters. They had been preparing the operation for more than half a year, with the fighters trained in the United Kingdom and in other NATO countries," Alaudinov said.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces planned to use the territories they had temporarily captured in the Kursk region as leverage in negotiations.

Russia has continued to make billions from fossil fuel exports to the West, data shows, helping to finance its full-scale invasion of Ukraine – now in its fourth year.

Since the start of that invasion in February 2022, Russia has made more than three times as much money by exporting hydrocarbons than Ukraine has received in aid allocated by its allies.

Data analysed by the BBC show that Ukraine's Western allies have paid Russia more for its hydrocarbons than they have given Ukraine in aid.

Campaigners say governments in Europe and North America need to do more to stop Russian oil and gas from fuelling the war with Ukraine.

During this Reconciliation Week (27 May – 3 June), with the theme Bridging Now to Next, the nation is aware that there is still unfinished business on the national agenda when it comes to the due recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.

Frank Brennan

US President Donald Trump’s recent announcement that he intends to lift all sanctions on Syria stands as one of the most unexpected and controversial foreign policy moves Washington has made in the past decade.

Declared during Trump’s Middle East tour at the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Riyadh, the decision marks a dramatic shift in America’s approach to the region – one that could reshape the strategic landscape for both allies and adversaries.

What is Trump’s game in Syria?
Why has the US president decided to lift all sanctions on Damascus, and how will it shape the future of the region?

Moscow has the means to respond to Berlin’s decision to lift the range restrictions on Ukrainian strikes with missiles provided by Germany, Russian Security Council Secretary Sergey Shoigu has said.

Earlier this week, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz claimed that “there are no longer any range restrictions on weapons supplied to Ukraine, neither from the British nor the French, nor from us, nor from the Americans.”

In a separate interview on Wednesday, Merz said deliveries of German Taurus missiles – which have a range of 500km and could potentially reach Moscow – to Kiev is “in the realm of possible.”

Speaking at a conference on Thursday, Shoigu highlighted the inconsistency of Ukraine’s Western backers regarding the use of long-range weapons.

After Merz's speech, von der Leyen was awarded the Charlemagne Prize. 

Shortly afterward, von der Leyen gave an address of what Europe means for her and how she views the way forward for the continent in the future. 

Von der Leyen urged the building of an "independent Europe."

"The next great era, our next great, unifying project must be about an independent Europe," von der Leyen said. 

She said this doesn't just mean the countries in the European Union, but also countries on the whole continent.

In light of "enormous" geopolitical tensions, von der Leyen asserted, "what we once took for granted as an international order has tranformed into international disorder within a very short time."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfN-upExT_4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muMepimnwPk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R9Yb5tjM_I

Adam Riess was 27 years old when he began the work that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics, and just 41 when he received it. Earlier this year, Riess, who is now in his early 50s, pulled a graph-paper notebook off a bookshelf in his office at Johns Hopkins University so that I could see the yellowing page on which he’d made his famous calculations. He told me how these pen scratches led to a new theory of the universe. And then he told me why he now thinks that theory might be wrong.

Today is the 139th anniversary of Randolph Bourne’s birthday. Antiwar.com named its parent institute for this early 20th century antiwar activist. Read Jeff Riggenbach’s biography of Bourne.

[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Randolph Bourne (1886–1918)”]

Senate Republicans and their majority leader are Johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to punishing Russia with sanctions after bad Vlad Putin and crew upped their missile strikes against Ukraine. Political strongmen tend to get a little testy when they suspect the countries they’re attacking of trying to blow them up. 

Tech billionaire Elon Musk, head of the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has announced that he will no longer serve as a government employee. The statement comes amid reports of a growing rift between Musk and President Donald Trump.

Trump established DOGE to identify and eliminate wasteful spending as part of his effort to make the federal government more responsive to everyday Americans. Musk’s organization, which is not a federal agency in the traditional sense, has overseen the elimination of grants and programs, as well as the termination of government jobs. Trump has also used DOGE to dismantle the Department of Education and the US Agency for International Development (USAID).