The United States Department of Defense has demanded the retraction of a newspaper report alleging that a broker for defence chief Pete Hegseth attempted to make a large investment in weapons companies in the run-up to the war on Iran.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell demanded the “immediate” retraction on Monday after the Financial Times reported that a wealth manager for the defence secretary contacted BlackRock about making a multimillion-dollar investment in a defence-related fund in the weeks leading up to the war.

Hegseth’s broker at Morgan Stanley ultimately did not go ahead with the investment in the exchange-traded fund, whose holdings include Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, because it was not yet available for purchase at the time, the Financial Times reported, citing three unnamed sources.

The United States has deployed its third nuclear aircraft carrier to the Middle East. The USS George H.W. Bush departed Naval Station Norfolk on March 31, 2026, heading into a theater where the USS Abraham Lincoln has been repositioned away from Iranian strike range and the USS Gerald R. Ford spent weeks in a European repair facility after a fire.

Cost-of-living pressure will not automatically shift votes to the Coalition, as culturally aligned voters begin drifting toward alternatives that project conviction and stability.

Every political cycle, someone rediscovers the old rule: when household budgets are hurting, voters punish the government of the day. It’s a tidy theory. It’s also increasingly wrong and under Angus Taylor, the Coalition is about to find out the hard way.

Kos Samaras

[23 MAY 2025]... Friedrich Merz is Germany’s new chancellor — head of government in Europe’s largest economy, but likely also setting the direction for the EU as a whole. Leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Merz’s campaign for the federal election this February 23 was marked by sharp conservative rhetoric and promises of market‑driven reforms. Yet, falling well short of a majority, he immediately turned toward the familiar terrain of negotiating a “grand coalition” with the center‑left Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Friedrich Merz’s Failed Quest to Be a New Angela Merkel

BY NILS SCHNIEDERJANN

THE VAGARIES OF READING FIVE-YEAR OLD SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES AGAIN, AND LINKING A FEW NEW SOURCES, CONTROVERSIAL IN THEIR CONTENT, RE-AWAKEN A MONSTER THAT SHOOK THE WORLD SIX YEARS AGO…. 

WAS COVID-19, A NATURAL EVENT OR WAS IT IS ENGINEERED — OR ACCIDENTALLY RELEASED — WITH GAIN-OF-FUNCTION ADDED TO NATURAL PATHOGENS?… Gus asks the question AGAIN..…

I am writing this for people who were then too young to understand the breadth of the event. Many people died, mostly old people. EVERYWHERE. 

According to statistics, more than seven million people died worldwide from the disease — or about 0.9 per cent of people infected. (779 million worldwide). About 1.2 million people died in the USA…

There is a particular kind of intellectual courage that consists not of grand gestures or romantic rebellion but of something far more demanding: the stubborn, lifelong insistence that human beings are capable of reasoning their way to a better world. Jürgen Habermas, who died on Saturday at the age of 96 in Starnberg, Germany, possessed that courage in abundance.

Jürgen Habermas, the Last Rationalist
The German philosopher built the 20th century’s most rigorous defense of democratic reason and then watched it tested.

By Bobby Ghosh

In an era that has grown increasingly comfortable with irrationalism, tribal identity, and contempt for expertise, his death feels less like the closing of a chapter and more like the extinguishing of a lamp.

As we begin a new week, the media is filled with reports that President Trump is ready to approve a US ground operation against Iran, either to seize Iran’s uranium or to attack an island off the country’s coast. Thousands of US troops have sped to the conflict area to await President Trump’s decision.

by Ron Paul 

Welcome to meaningless planet

Where happiness is measured by parking meters

Bio-mechanical levers mimicking an electronic device

Vandalised by inspectors of numbers

Thinking their laziness and your honesty shall suffice

Your overstay anyway by death be met

Welcome to disinterested planet

Where the rising seas have reached under the trees

For the brown skin rangers angels under the stars

Hesitate to take a deep freeze

In the twirling space now filling with useless Mars

As deaths by flowing tears are met

Welcome to a useless blue planet

Where little princes want you for toiling slaves

Unless you're female for them to be whores

A demented President raves

By declaring terribly painful and deadly wars

Having fun while losing his biblical bet

Trump’s Secretary of Defence invoking divine violence against Iran has intensified concerns about the fusion of religion, politics and war in US leadership.

Jon Queally

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivered a prayer in the name of Jesus Christ during an Evangelical Christian service at the Pentagon on Wednesday in which he called for American soldiers to be blessed with “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” and for “every round to find its mark” as the US-Israeli war on Iran continues despite widespread disapproval by a majority of US voters and global condemnation.

What happened to Labor and Australia, the ‘Land of the Fair Go’? In the 4th of his Light on the Hill series examining the party’s retreat from reform, Andrew Brown looks at housing inequality.

The consequences of political retreat are not abstract.

They are lived.

Light on the Hill. Labor and the cost of caution

by Andrew Brown

They arrive as rent notices and eviction letters. They sit in empty fridges and crowded shelters. They echo through emergency departments and police call outs. They narrow lives, not by accident or misfortune, but by design.

Housing is where this becomes undeniable.

All I asked was if Labor would help the states make public transport free...

Free public transport during a fuel crisis just makes sense. The PM could have used national cabinet this morning to make it happen everywhere.

But instead of answering the question, Minister Wong could only deflect.

Unlike this Labor government, we've been pretty vocal about our opposition to war crimes. We just want the government to get on with addressing the growing fuel crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwwuh-x52jg

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

Former compliance officer for the international financial powerhouse Deutsche Bank told the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) she was fired in 2018 after raising concerns about suspicious banking activity from accounts owned by financier and sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, as well as accounts linked to Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, adviser, and business partner. The allegations come from an FBI interview report included in the Justice Department’s latest release of Epstein-related documents.

Since the turn of the century, the expansion of solar power has surpassed expectations, more than any other energy source. 

Once extremely expensive and only used in remote regions, space travel or pocket calculators, today's solar modules — easy to set up and operate — generate cheap electricity all over the world.

Solar is winning the energy race

Gero Rueter

The world’s cheapest power source is scaling at warp speed, pushing coal, gas and nuclear aside.

Global solar energy capacity has skyrocketed over the last decade:

Some old truths about warfare have been knocking on the door of the Oval Office in the month since US President Donald Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent US and Israeli warplanes to bomb Iran.

The failure to learn from the past means that Donald Trump now faces a stark choice. If he cannot get a deal with Iran, he can either try to declare a victory that will fool no-one, or escalate the war.

Jeremy Bowen: Trump is waging war based on instinct and it isn't working

by Jeremy Bowen