The draft of Japan’s 2026 Defence White Paper, published in May, offers yet another illustration of the extent to which the country’s political and military leadership has become literally wedded to the idea of magnifying both its defensive and offensive capabilities, and to constructing its own security at the expense of others.

Hell-raiser from Asia: 81 years after World War II Japan is obsessed with militarism again

Ksenia Muratshina

Shifting the Emphasis

Gina Rinehart has presented Pauline Hanson with an orange bulldozer and urged a crowd to make mechanical noises in a bizarre moment during a Queensland bush summit.

Australia’s richest person gave a speech talking up the One Nation leader this afternoon, before she called for staff to bring out the “beautiful, big, fat” bulldozer.

“We need more than one of these things, we actually need a beautiful, big, fat ... we need an orange bulldozer,” Rinehart said at a News Corp event in Townsville. 

“You might remember Elon Musk was given a big chainsaw to try and cut government tape and bureaucracies over in America.”

US automakers could begin producing missiles and other weapons as Washington moves to expand military output and replenish its arsenals, President Donald Trump has said.

Speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, Trump said car companies with spare factory capacity are discussing deals to manufacture weapons, including Patriot air-defense missiles and Tomahawk cruise missiles.

”They’re dealing with General Motors. They’re dealing with Ford,” Trump said. “I know General Motors is all excited about building weapons now.”

He added that some plants belonging to the two carmakers are expected to be converted to military production, describing the shift as part of a “big strong economic push” to produce arms.

We are becoming aware, often belatedly, of the crimes committed by the Benjamin Netanyahu government against civilians in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. No other government in the world considers the elimination of those who resist it to justify all collateral damage, regardless of the number.

Should the State of Israel Be Defascistized?

by Thierry Meyssan

We must also realize that this way of thinking did not arise from nowhere; it has a long and abominable history.
We must take responsibility and intervene before this government begins to attack its own citizens. Not because they are more valuable than Arabs and Persians, but because they are the same: they are human beings too.

Under the grey clouds of a late solstice

Black trees darken in a fiery el Nino

Folks wishing warming was a fake practice 

Winter is late and the Hanson woman has bravado

Promising to end future floods and fires

Promoting a forever tax-free paradise

Spruiking for votes from angry cocky farmers 

Whose Bedfords died thirty years ago

With seized engine and threadbare tyres

Still blaming the present political artifice

For a never achieved flowered garden 

That became a junky grand yard of rust

Unkept like rotten hats and boots of dust

Unhappily surviving in the best enclaves

Under eternal skies of infinite modem

Working life hard towards a mediocre eden

Where heaven is hell and earth enslaves

In country towns cemeteries full of graves

Of decent departed and century-old bods

Against the odds, the Memorandum of Understanding signed by the US and Iran appears to be holding, after threats and counter-threats. It may collapse, but it has survived a first round of talks between the two sides in Switzerland over the weekend.

by Ron Paul

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced that he will resign from his post and will step down as the leader of the Labour Party.

In an address outside 10 Downing Street on Monday, Starmer said he already informed King Charles III of his decision and asked the Labour Party to lay out a timetable to elect a new leader by September, adding that he will remain in his post until then.

Keir Starmer resigns

The UK prime minister has announced that he will step down from his post and will no longer lead the Labour Party

Starmer became prime minister in 2024 following the Labour Party’s victory in that year’s general election. He has repeatedly vowed to stay in the post, but has faced pressure to resign amid growing discontent and the declining popularity of his party.

Magyar Visits Poland: Brussels Discovers That Realism Is Suddenly Acceptable

Adrian Korczyński

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Countries across Asia, Africa and the Middle East are increasing imports of Russian food products amid uncertainty surrounding the Strait of Hormuz and concerns over the approaching El Nino climate phenomenon, Russia’s state-owned Rosselkhozbank (RSHB) told Sputnik on Sunday.

El Nino is a characterized by unusually warm sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The resulting temperature shifts can trigger major weather disruptions worldwide, causing droughts in some regions and flooding in others.

Remember Taurusgate? When several German officers, including its former air force head, were caught making insane and childish plans for plastering Russia with German missiles but from Ukraine? That and the amateurish manner in which these grand strategists in prankster mode let themselves be caught were daft as well as sadly comical. But lessons have not been learned, even if the German Air Force is now under new management.

Germany is itching to get revenge on Russia for 1945

Germany’s top brass is proclaiming its readiness to “fight tonight,” seemingly eager to rush toward total annihilation

“I couldn’t be part of a Writers Festival accepting this dirty money from the Club.” Former ambassador Gregory Andrews resigns from Canberra Writers’ Festival over National Press Club links.

Last week I resigned as Deputy Chair of the Canberra Writers Festival because I could no longer reconcile my governance responsibilities with the Festival’s funding and other links with the National Press Club.

Australia’s most powerful media club has a legitimacy problem

by Gregory Andrews

The buffoons who orchestrate fascism, with its quack science, idiocy, penchant for violence and grotesque hypermasculinity, are ripe for satire. It is easy, as late-night comics do — and as the cabarets did for the Nazis in Berlin — to pillory the goons, misfits and mediocrities who hold power and spew fascist bile. But this form of satire blinds opponents to its destructive power and murderous core.

The retreat into satirical attacks on Trump and his supporters fuels the solidification of fascism.

Chris Hedges

"We are being taken for bloody fools."

If there's one sentence that sums up Pauline Hanson's attitude to Australia's place in the world, this probably is it. 

With One Nation running red hot in the polls and posing a serious challenge to the incumbent parties, there's more and more scrutiny on what its policies would mean for Australia. 

Russian officials have welcomed Warsaw’s decision to strip Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state honor. The decision came after Kiev named a military unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a nationalist force implicated in massacres of Poles and Jews during World War II.

Polish President Karol Nawrocki announced the move on Friday, saying Kiev had crossed a red line. He argued that “historical truth is not and can never be a bargaining chip” and that remembering the victims was “the moral duty of the Polish state.”