E-commerce giant Amazon touts the convenience and wide selection it offers to customers, but beneath the surface of its carefully cultivated image was secret technology that inflated prices across the web, according to the FTC.

The online retail giant Amazon used an algorithm called “Project Nessie” to maximize profits to the detriment of consumers, according to newly revealed claims from the US Federal Trade Commission.

That’s according to newly unredacted claims in a lawsuit filed by the US Federal Trade Commission against the company this week.

The Israel-Gaza war is "taking away the focus" from the conflict in Ukraine, the country's President Volodymyr Zelensky has admitted.

He said this was "one of the goals" of Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

On a shitty day like today

Smoking a pipe by the fireplace would be okay

Even should we run out of puff

By getting cancer would be completely fair enough

For the world is completely mad

Full of humans that are completely bad

Killing children and women with unborn child

The rain and bombs falling from buckets

The storms and wars getting worse than beastly rackets

Life and death of all being weirdo strange 

As the bastards, in prison keep Julian Assange

Using hypocrisy, lies, pearls of upside wisdom

While they say without any humbling hesitation:

The U.S. continues to advocate for open and free press

Around the world and accountability 

For those who attack press freedom. 

On International Day to End Impunity 

An intimate and complex understanding of China is now one of the most important prerequisites for understanding and furthering our national interests. For the two nations of China and Australia, to allow tensions and misunderstandings to provoke a decoupling in the knowledge production sphere –whether it be in the sciences, the social sciences or the humanities – would be extremely unwise, from the point of view of securing Australia’s future.

Israel will not change its approach to Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a press conference on Friday. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will continue its bombing campaign on the Palestinian enclave, he said, adding that West Jerusalem will not agree to a pause in the hostilities unless the Israeli hostages are freed. 

The IDF will continue to strike Gaza with “all of its power,” Netanyahu said in a statement to the media. Israel “refuses a temporary ceasefire that doesn’t include the return of our hostages,” he added. 

The November issue of Time magazine features a cover with a small portrait of Vladimir Zelensky and the word "Nobody" above it. The word in larger type is part of the longer headline "Nobody Believes in Our Victory Like I Do" but, whatever the designers had in mind, it was unmistakable: Zelensky equals a nobody.

The similarly illustrated article was no less scandalous. It made everything clear: we Russians must keep Zelensky as the apple of our eye, because no one brings more chaos to the conduct of hostilities on the Ukrainian side and more discord to Kiev's relations with the West than he does.

Russia should protect Zelensky
The Ukrainian leader’s erratic behavior and growing messiah complex means he’s now an asset to Moscow
By Sergey Poletaev

“It’s the dark heart of Britain, the place where democracy goes to die.” You’d be forgiven for thinking this describes a seedy underbelly of society – perhaps a British mafia. In actual fact, George Monbiot is describing The City of London. Not London, the geographical location, but the borough known as The City: the financial district of London which is governed by The Corporation of The City of London. How can a square mile of land hold such significance and also be such a threat to democracy? The answer partially lies in its history.

Diego Ramos, ScheerPost’s managing editor, forwarded me a video clip last week he thought I ought to see. Sending it under the subject line, “Disturbing trend in Israel,” my colleague must have reckoned I have not been sufficiently shocked by the events in Israel and Gaza since Hamas mounted an assault into southern Israel on October 7 and the Israeli Defense Forces began a purposely disproportionate response to the incursion—purposely disproportionate as a matter of official policy since David Ben–Gurion put it in place during his premiership in the 1950s. 

By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

The German federal government revealed on Wednesday that Berlin has sent Ukraine an additional 25 Leopard tanks. This latest shipment brings the total number of these vehicles handed over to the Eastern European country from Berlin to 115, according to a government press release.

Germany and Denmark have embarked on a collaborative project, as mentioned in the statement, to provide Kiev with older iterations of Berlin’s primary battle tank, the Leopard 1A5. The most recent shipment also added nearly two dozen reconnaissance drones and five new drone boats to Ukraine’s supplies. Berlin also shipped Kiev a total of 12 new armored personnel carriers and six airspace surveillance radars, along with around 30 military trucks and 30,000 sets of winter clothing.

In August 2022, Ukrainian security service (SBU) operatives hid explosives in a crate intended for a cat in a car driven by a woman and her twelve year old daughter. After the car passed through the Russian border, the SBU planted the bomb in the SUV of Russian journalist Darya Dugina, the daughter of well known philosopher Alexander Dugin, who was tragically killed.[1]

US President Joe Biden has refused to call for a ceasefire in the Israeli-Hamas conflict, instead proposing a temporary humanitarian pause.

Biden was speaking to an audience of some 200 people when a woman, who later identified herself as rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, shouted, “If you care about Jewish people, as a rabbi, I need you to call for a cease-fire right now.” 

The incident was captured on video and shared by the Jewish Voice for Peace account on X (formerly Twitter), claiming that Rosenberg was speaking on behalf of thousands of Jewish Americans who “refuse to allow a genocide to be carried out in [their] name”

The West’s sanctions proposals against Russia are becoming increasingly absurd, President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday during a televised government meeting on economic issues.

Earlier this month, Lithuania suggested including an embargo on buttons, nails, and sewing appliances in the 12th round of EU sanctions against Russia, which is currently being debated by the bloc’s member states.

Last week, the Australian government added tools used to drill, press, stamp, punch or press, as well as television and sound recorders to a broader export ban against Russia that also includes boilers, machinery, and mechanical appliances.

In a world aflame, the Biden administration launched a new round of airstrikes against Iranian-linked forces backing the Syrian government. American officials claimed “self-defense”—for America’s invading force illegally occupying Syria’s land, plundering its resources, and sanctioning its government. Washington foreign policy, meet George Orwell’s 1984.

Contrary to what I wrote last week based on dispatches from Western and Arab news agencies filtered by Israeli military censorship, Israel’s attack on October 7, 2023 (operation “Al-Aqsa Flood) “) was not perpetrated by Hamas alone. Its triggering was decided by a unitary operation chamber of the entire Palestinian Resistance.

Since January, the Netanyahu government has pushed for highly controversial judicial reforms, a series of changes to the judicial system and the balance of powers. 

The effort has been led by Yariv Levin, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s deputy prime minister and justice minister, and Simcha Rothman, chair of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee.

By Dan Steinbock
The World Financial Review