This is the humblest day of my life,  declared Rupert Murdoch to a parliamentary committee on 19 July 2011.

This was at the height of what the newspaper historian Roy Greenslade called “the most astonishing 14 days in British press history, with daily shock heaped upon daily shock”.

Rodney Tiffen

In recent European history, it is difficult to find a more striking example of electoral manipulation than the 2025 parliamentary elections in Moldova. What last year’s presidential race tested in miniature, this campaign deployed on a grand scale: censorship, administrative pressure, selective access to polling stations, and a carefully mobilized diaspora vote. For President Maia Sandu’s administration, control over parliament was not a matter of prestige but of political survival.

Trump can’t rely on CIA – ex-national security adviser
Mike Flynn’s idea of a White House intel unit has been backed by a Putin aide, who said the “deep state” is targeting the US leader....

The White House needs its own operations center to provide President Donald Trump with reliable intelligence, operating in parallel to the Pentagon and CIA, according to former US National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Speaking in an interview with Alex Jones on Saturday, the retired general argued that the president cannot fully trust the US intelligence community to avoid manipulating its reports.

“The CIA has a very robust operations center. You can see and do anything you want from there – certainly globally,” he said. “And you [could] understand what’s happening, if you had a CIA that was actually working on your behalf.”

The Russian side has refused trilateral meetings with US President Donald Trump and representatives from Ukraine, US Vice President J.D. Vance claimed in an interview with Fox News on Sunday.

Trump has increasingly expressed impatience with the pace of Ukraine peace talks. The Kremlin says Kiev has demonstrated that it is not interested in peace by sticking to megaphone diplomacy and ignoring Russian settlement proposals.

“Unfortunately, what we have seen over the last couple weeks, the Russians have refused to sit down with any bilateral meetings with the Ukrainians,” Vance told Fox News.

“They have refused to sit down with any trilateral meetings, where the president or some other member of the administration could sit down with the Russians and the Ukrainians,” he added.

Bob Brown’s latest book, Defiance, is a salubrious breath of a tall peppermint native forest. It’s not a hard book, but rather only hard to heed for some.

Defiance — we learn — is contagious. In the face of accelerating subsidised consumption of Mother Earth’s biotic and abiotic resources, bold action is the answer.

Reese Halter

US President Donald Trump’s newly adopted stance on the Ukraine conflict was shaped by his recent UK visit, The Telegraph has reported, citing unnamed sources. Vladimir Zelensky’s chief of staff Andrey Yermak has told the newspaper that the visit was very important. 

For months, Washington insisted that Kiev would need to give up on certain territorial claims for a US-mediated peace deal with Moscow to move forward. This week, however, the US President reversed course. He dismissed Russia as a “paper tiger”that Kiev could defeat and said his shift came from “getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine-Russia military and economic situation.”

The future of international relations is being defined by these routes [Ports Not Missiles]. As shipyards and energy nodes slip from Anglo-Saxon hands, the balance shifts. Sanctions turn into paper threats, the dollar loses its status as the world’s club, and new routes—from Chabahar to the Arctic—dictate the rules of trade. 

From Henderson to Chabahar the Future Flows Through Ports Not Missiles

BY Rebecca Chan

Cold War 2.0—Not Missiles, but Ports

Petro desmontó la narrativa estadounidense de combate al narcotráfico y pidió que se abra un proceso penal contra Donald Trump y los funcionarios que ordenaron atacar lanchas en el Mar Caribe.

What would Christopher Hitchens say about Donald Trump’s disastrous performance at the United Nations General Assembly? In this satirical reimagining, Hitchens unleashes a scathing critique of a speech so absurd it left world leaders in stunned silence.

From his imagined vantage point, Hitchens dismantles Trump’s rambling claims—ending wars that never existed, inventing trillions in investment, and declaring climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He mocks Trump’s fixation on coal, his fabricated statistics, his bizarre boasts about escalators and teleprompters, and his mafia-style threats to allies and enemies alike.

Hitchens exposes the spectacle for what it was: not diplomacy but delusion, not leadership but farce, and perhaps the clearest demonstration yet of how American exceptionalism has become a parody of itself.

Russia’s foreign minister gave another bombshell address at the UN on Saturday, followed by a press conference. Here's what he said.

1. Message to NATO: Don't Try US

Debunking NATO and EU leaders’ attempts to fearmonger their publics into believing that Russia has plans to attack, Lavrov emphasized that “any aggression” against Russia would be “decisively rebuffed.”

Russia does not plan attacks on NATO countries, but any aggression will receive decisive resistance - Lavrov https://t.co/pktdn2NPBC pic.twitter.com/T1OjE7Xg2O

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) September 27, 2025

2. Attack Our Planes? Regret It Instantly

While a treaty prohibits nuclear weapons stationed in Australia, the Government tries to circumvent it. Rex Patrick and Philip Dorling on Labor’s duplicitous nuclear word games.

From 2032, nuclear-armed cruise missiles will be loaded into US Navy Virginia-class subs. The Treaty of Rarotonga prohibits nuclear weapons from being ‘stationed’ at HMAS Stirling, but maybe it’s OK for them to be ‘rotated’ through the base.

George Galloway was temporarily detained at Gatwick Airport under the Terrorism Act upon his return from Russia on Saturday, according to his Workers Party of Britain.

Officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command stopped the 71-year-old former MP, along with his wife. The police have acknowledged an incident, but have not confirmed that Galloway was the man detained. 

“We can confirm that on Saturday, 27 September counter-terrorism officers at Gatwick Airport stopped a man in his 70s and a woman in her 40s under Schedule 3 of the Counter Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019. Neither of them were arrested and they were allowed on their way,” a Met spokesperson stated.

The decision by the United States to introduce 100% tariffs on pharmaceutical products starting October 1 is emerging as one of the most serious challenges for Germany and Europe in recent years. The move is viewed not only as a blow to European manufacturers’ economic interests but also as a threat to the stability of the global healthcare system.

BY DMITRY SUDAKOV

USA Readies to Crush European Pharmaceutical Industry

Ukraine is planning a possible false-flag operation in Romania or Poland that could escalate into a third world war, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said.

In a Telegram post on Friday, she pointed to reports in Hungarian media alleging that Kiev intends to stage acts of sabotage in neighboring NATO countries and place responsibility on Moscow.

”Europe has never been so close to the outbreak of World War 3 in modern history,” Zakharova wrote.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was found guilty and sentenced to five years in jail for campaign finance violations, a historic ruling in a case that has long captivated Parisian politics.

The court concluded that Sarkozy had exceeded legal spending limits during his 2007 presidential election campaign, and engaged in a conspiracy to obscure the sources of illicit funds he received from Libya’s late leader Muammar Gaddafi, as various evidence has demonstrated.