U.S. closes embassy in Kyiv amid warnings of "significant" Russian air attack

The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv shut its doors Wednesday as Ukraine braced amid warnings of retaliation from Moscow for Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory with American-made missiles. CBS News senior foreign correspondent Holly Williams has more.

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Experts agree that the health of U.S. democracy has declined in recent years—but what does that mean? The United States is experiencing two major forms of democratic erosion in its governing institutions: election manipulation and executive overreach.

Most obviously, after the 2020 election, the sitting president, despite admitting privately that he had lost, attempted to subvert the results and remain in office. But democratic erosion in the United States is not synonymous with Donald Trump.

    October 17, 2023

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Russia became the EU's largest gas exporter for the first time since spring 2022 in September, with its share reaching 23.7%, Sputnik calculated on Thursday based on data from the European Statistical Office (Eurostat).

In September, European companies purchased $1.48 billion worth of gas from Russia, which is around 30% more than in the same month a year ago. Liquefied natural gas accounted for 40% of the purchases, with the remaining 60% being pipeline gas.

The increase made Russia the EU's largest gas exporter, with its share growing to 23.74% from August's 16.54%. This happened for the first time since May 2022, when Russia's share in the EU's gas imports was at 22.9%.

Outgoing US President Joe Biden has decided to write off about $4.7 billion in taxpayer-funded loans to Ukraine as part of a broader effort to bolster Kiev before President-elect Donald Trump takes office next year.

Since February 2022, the US Congress has approved more than $174 billion in aid packages to support Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. The latest tranche, approved in April, included over $9.4 billion in “forgivable loans” to help fill the gap in Kiev’s budget.

“We have taken the step that was outlined in the law to cancel those loans,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Wednesday, confirming that Biden seeks to write off half of that amount, or roughly $4.7 billion.

A Sky News journalist had snuck uninvited into Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s press conference at the G20 summit in Brazil. Once discovered, she was allowed to stay by a unanimous vote of the accredited reporters present.

Moscow’s top diplomat usually has the Russian press pool attend the conferences, along with reporters from host countries. Western journalists stopped getting invitations after their governments banned, sanctioned and denied accreditation to RT and other Russian outlets, however.

Speaking to Russian media on Wednesday about the incident Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova revealed that the unnamed “spy” was handled with professional courtesy.

After Trump’s emphatic win in the US presidential Election held on the 5th of November, I was both surprised and concerned by the lack of trouble making from the Democratic incumbent and his supporters. They were just too quiet, so I suspected that they had something up their sleeves.

Two hundred and fifty years after the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, our leaders insist that the prosperity of citizens rests upon a trickling down of bounty from the export of raw materials. This simplistic narrative is told, and retold, by almost every newspaper editor in the country, over and over again, in the form of a Gregorian chant without end.

Australia has a reputation for egalitarianism. It is not deserved.

Extract: Address to the Royal Society of NSW, October 2024.

This is a nation based on mercantilist plunder.

By Ken Henry

‘Almost no chance of survival’ – Ukraine’s ex-top general tells troops
Frontline conditions demand a kill-or-be-killed mentality, Valery Zaluzhny has told soldiers

Ukrainian troops currently being trained in the UK to fight Russia must steel themselves to face death and kill without a second thought, Kiev's ambassador in London, Valery Zaluzny has told the soldiers. The four-star general previously served as commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces.

The speech that Zaluzhny gave at a bootcamp in southern England was shared by The Sun on Tuesday, after the tabloid joined the official’s tour of the military facility. British Armed Forces Minister Luke Pollard accompanied the Ukrainian general-turned-diplomat.

Collapse can happen in mostly three ways: sudden,  progressively or change in sustainability. For many it seems that the Western civilisation is collapsing and someone in Joe Biden’s administration is working hard to make sure the entire human species goes down with it. There are counter-currents hopefully and what we might see is a realignment of greater human purpose in a senseless world.

From the arm-wrestling between the Anglo-Saxons and the Rus via the Galicians of Ukraine, to the Jews designing their new country stolen from the Arabs — namely the lowly appreciated Palestinians in their own Muslim world, and the birth of a freer alliance called BRICS, we are in the midst of change. This change is not bringing the collapse of the Western civilisation, but a reduction in its influence. The collapse could happen should the West try to maintain its full influence.

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Elon Musk could make the US government operate like Silicon Valley, Dominic Cummings has claimed.

Speaking at New College Oxford about advances in AI, Boris Johnson’s former adviser said that a subset of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs could no longer ignore Washington’s overreach and may look to rebuild parts of the state that don’t function properly.

Cummings said he could “easily imagine” a new national industrial strategy led by tech elites like Musk, who has recently been appointed by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) along with former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy.

HBO host Bill Maher didn’t hold back as he laid into the Democratic Party for their “doubling down” on the politics that led to their recent election night defeat.

During a long rant about the state of the party, the comedian accused some Democrats of being “stupid,” others of being too liberal, and slammed those who blame racism and/or sexism for Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to President-elect Donald Trump.

Tax office whistleblower Richard Boyle has once again been denied justice, or rather, the High Court found the whistleblower legislation lacking, given the judges no option but to deny his appeal and uphold the judgment against him.

In a saga that reads more like a satirical dystopia than reality, Richard Boyle – a man of integrity and courage – finds himself facing the full wrath of the very government he endeavoured to serve. Once a dedicated employee of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), Boyle is now entangled in a legal nightmare that exposes the government’s alarming double standards and raises critical questions about the nation’s commitment to transparency and justice.

The subservience of the Labor-Coalition political class to Washington is now almost complete. It is no longer possible to consider the Albanese-Dutton political groupings as anything other than propagandists for US imperial interests. This has been apparent for some time, but it has now reached the stage of making John Howard’s role as “deputy sheriff” appear as a form of forceful independence.