When some of the nation’s best informed business and financial players start describing the current economic outlook as “GFC-like”, it’s time to worry.

For weeks, the concern about the confluence of higher interest rates on government debt, the AI building boom, inflation and the Trump administration’s loose grip on economic reality has been building.

 

Alarms flashing red as Trump takes US debt to level almost beyond comprehension

BY Shane Wright (SMH)

 

As one analyst I spoke to recently put it, that concern is now flashing red.

The ghost of Berlin 1939 is haunting Europe.

The present and the past cannot simply be the same, yet the politics and the psychology bear remarkable similarities.

We are entering a new and dangerous era: military logic is increasingly dominant; freedom of thought and media are restricted; public discourse about an inevitability of conflict intensifies, and diplomacy is pushed to the background.

 

Berlin 1939/Berlin 2026

How can we simultaneously protect the sovereignty of smaller states, such as Ukraine, and the security interests of great powers, such as Russia? asks Uros Lipuscek.

 

This is the atmosphere today not only in Berlin, but in several European capitals.

Independent senator Jacqui Lambie has backed in Liberal MP Andrew Hastie as his stoush with One Nation leader Pauline Hanson intensifies. 

Hastie called Hanson a “coward” yesterday after she labelled the former SAS soldier a “traitor” for testifying in a defamation case brought by Ben Roberts-Smith. She also refused to delete or apologise for satirical cartoons commissioned by One Nation that called Hastie a “gutless maggot”. 

Lambie, also a veteran, defended Hastie during an interview with ABC radio this morning.

 

The US is turning Australia into a forward base for potential military operations in the Pacific, with American forces and defense contractors controlling or having access to roughly two-thirds of the country’s military facilities, The Guardian reported on Sunday.

 

US turning Australia into military base – Guardian

American forces and contractors have access to roughly two-thirds of its defense facilities, the outlet has reported

 

Citing data compiled by the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, the newspaper identified 110 facilities across Australia with some form of US military or corporate presence out of 168 surveyed.

Say what you will about ex-BlackRock bigwig German Chancellor and uber-grinch Friedrich Merz, but he has his moments of unexpected alertness.

Israel’s far-right national security minister has put a seven-year timetable on emptying Gaza of most of its people, and dressed it up as choice. Gazans RT spoke to call it what international law already names it: forced displacement.

Last week, Jewish Power chairman and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir unveiled ‘Disengagement 710’, a policy blueprint for what he calls the voluntary migration of Gaza residents to countries willing to take them. Destinations floated by his party include Türkiye, unspecified Arab states, Ethiopia, and Congo.

The numbers are not modest. The plan foresees the departure of about 250,000 people in the first year, 1.11 million within three years, and some 1.86 million within seven, encompassing the bulk of the Strip’s population.

Diplomatic efforts to end an acute and bloody armed conflict should always be welcomed and the persistence of Donald Trump’s administration, which has pursued this goal for more than a year and a half, also deserves recognition, even if the results so far can hardly be called outstanding.

 

Fyodor Lukyanov: Here’s why it’s hard for Witkoff and Kushner to close the Russia-Ukraine deal
Why American peace diplomacy keeps going in circles

 

 

It’s impossible to fully understand the legacy of American feminist icon Gloria Steinem without mentioning Russia.

Steinem – who fought her entire life to promote the radical concept that women should be able to choose whatever kind of life they want – passed away peacefully at her New York home last week at the age of 92. Judging by all the hair-pulling going on over her involvement with the CIA, you’d think that she had been tasked with planting exploding cigars on Fidel Castro.

 

This woman was the link between the Soviets, the CIA, and feminism

Gloria Steinem rose as women’s rights became a Cold War battleground, with Washington reacting to Moscow’s model of female modernity

BY Rachel Marsden

 

In the first of a two-part series, the destruction of the US Institute of Peace shows what is lost when decades of conflict-resolution expertise are discarded.

Established by Congress in 1984, with legislation signed by Ronald Reagan and funded annually by Congress, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) was a well-respected, authoritative, independent, officially non-partisan, non-profit organisation, until it was eviscerated by Donald Trump early last year.

 

Connie Peck

The danger of not knowing what you don’t know, part one: How Trump dismantled the US Institute of Peace

 

Russia has the right to strike NATO plants making weapons for Ukraine, but President Vladimir Putin is showing great restraint to avoid a direct clash with the bloc, former American judge Andrew Napolitano has said.

 

Putin shows ‘saint-like patience’ – former US judge (VIDEO) The Russian president has refrained from striking NATO arms plants despite their role in producing weapons used by Ukraine, Andrew Napolitano has said

 

 

OTTAWA – Prime Minister Mark Carney said Thursday he will have one simple message for Vladimir Putin if the Russian president attends the G20 leaders’ summit this December in Florida: “get out of Ukraine.”

“He only understands strength and directness,” Carney said when asked Putin at a news conference in Thunder Bay, Ont.

“The message would be simple: get out of Ukraine, give back all of Ukraine to Ukraine, end this war which is killing more than 30,000 of your people every single month,” Carney said, adding he’s spoke numerous times in the past with Putin.

Ahead of its full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia captured Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

 

Unsurprisingly, local politics can be a bit self-absorbed and insular. Denigrating outsiders, even if they’re fellow Australians, is de rigueur, even if using pretentious foreign phrases isn’t. Even so, Premier Roger Cook talking about “east coast clowns” took the state’s favourite pastime to a new level.

 

WA’s resource riches fuel a politics of greed and grievance

By Mark Beeson

 

Despite its vast resource wealth, WA’s politics remains fuelled by corporate power, parochial resentment and populist grievance, writes Dr Mark Beeson.

 

Erwin Schrodinger is the rare physicist whose work escaped the laboratory and entered everyday language, because almost everyone has heard of his cat. Behind that famous half-alive, half-dead thought experiment sits one of the most important equations in all of science, the wave equation that bears his name and still governs how physicists calculate the behaviour of atoms and molecules. He gave quantum theory a language of smooth, continuous waves at the very moment the subject seemed destined for abstraction.