The Dalai Lama has taken home his first Grammy award, prompting criticism from China.

The 90-year-old Buddhist spiritual leader, who lives in exile in India, was announced as the winner for the narration and storytelling category for his spoken word album, Meditations: The Reflections of His Holiness the Dalai Lama – adding the award to a collection that includes a Nobel peace prize, a presidential medal of freedom and the Gandhi peace prize.

US President Donald Trump is weighing the possibility of killing Iran’s leadership in hopes of achieving regime change, the The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing US and foreign officials. The publication said the president has not made a final decision.

According to the report, Trump received several briefings on strike options, including a potentially weeks-long air campaign to “kill scores of Iranian political and military leaders,” with the end goal of toppling the government. Other options reportedly focus on nuclear and missile sites.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxYD1CSVjYY

Hillary Clinton BEGS Trump to Bomb Russia

War or peace? Diplomacy or disaster? Tonight on The Mother of All Talkshows, George Galloway tackles the global storm gathering over Ukraine, Iran, Gaza and Washington.

As “peace pow-wows” dominate the headlines, tensions are rising fast. Is Volodymyr Zelensky playing a dangerous game with Donald Trump? Is Iran preparing for open confrontation in the Persian Gulf? And what does it all mean for Israel, Gaza and the wider Middle East?

Joining George:

By Rami Amichai TEL AVIV (Reuters) Tue, May 13, 2014 — Israel's ex-prime minister Ehud Olmert was sentenced to six years in jail on Tuesday [for taking bribes in a real estate deal, a crime the judge said was akin to treason. The first criminal conviction of a former Israeli head of government all but ended speculation that Olmert - a centrist credited internationally with working towards a peace settlement with the Palestinians - might return to political life.

We used to be journalists, but now we mostly just bitch about them. (Kidding. Kind of.) We also break down broken news.

This weekly podcast brings you honest and original media analysis from two insiders who've broken plenty of news and been broken by it, too. Hosted by long-suffering journalists and even longer-suffering friends, Jan Fran and Antoinette Lattouf, We Used to Be Journos is your quide to the way the media works.

Join us every Wednesday as we unpack the headlines you see, and the power you don't.

We'll take you through the week's sketchy editorial decisions, suspect sources and thinly veiled bigotry. We'll show you how the media sausage is made -so you know what you're being fed.

Since 1945, one country has carried out a conventional military buildup unmatched in scale, cost and global reach. Claims about recent rivals distract from the historical record of how modern military dominance was built.

It’s become commonplace for western politicians – the latest being Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles at the Munich Security Conference – to argue that for the last two decades, China has been undertaking the biggest conventional military build-up that we’ve seen in the world since the end of the Second World War. 

Warwick Powell

Scapegoating migrants is designed to distract our attention from the truth and real issues – the abuse of corporate and media power and failure to tackle housing shortages for younger generations.

The Liberal Party looks like following the rot that set in with John Howard – Tampa and dog whistling about Asian migration. But this time the Liberal Party might be kicking an own goal because of the electoral clout of our migrant communities.

John Menadue

Russia’s stance that the Ukraine conflict can only be resolved if its root causes are addressed is “s**t,” Vladimir Zelensky has said.

The Ukrainian leader is increasingly using profanities in public statements and insulting those who disagree with his policies.

The latest verbal attack was quoted by Axios on Tuesday as Russian and Ukrainian delegations met in Geneva for US-facilitated talks. Zelensky lashed out at the head of the Russian team, Vladimir Medinsky. A historian by background, Medinsky argues – along with many Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin – that the crisis’s historical roots must be considered.

“We don’t have time for all this s**t,” Zelensky told the outlet. “So we have to decide, and have to finish the war.”

Talk about exquisitely bad timing. On Friday, the federal Liberal Party’s latest leadership spill – a mere nine months after the last one – showed the ability of the members of the federal parliamentary party to lose their heads when all about were keeping theirs.

The result, as history recorded, was Angus Taylor defeating leader Sussan Ley 34-17.

That was all happening in the morning. But while the shell-shocked members said goodbye to the party’s first federal female leader, an email plopped into their inboxes from party president John Olsen, a former premier of South Australia. He had other things on his mind.

Not, as party insiders might expect, the release of the post-mortem into the Liberals’ disastrous 2025 federal election campaign which has sat in the vault for a long time.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has said Israel is ahead of the US in developing cutting-edge weapons.

Graham made the remarks in Tel Aviv after meeting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and opposition leader Yair Lapid on Monday. The senator said Washington should invest in Israel’s defense industry rather than “just writing a check” for military aid.

“I like that idea. The wars of the future are being planned here in Israel. If you’re not one step ahead of the enemy, you suffer,” Graham said, praising the Israel Defense Forces as “most clever, creative military forces on the planet.”

The vicious and sustained campaign mounted against Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, by Israel and the U.S. now includes the German, Italian, French, Austrian and Czech foreign ministers demanding her resignation.

The Increasing Attacks on Francesca Albanese Presage a New Dark Age

BY CHRIS HEDGES

This campaign is part of an effort by industrial nations to at once sustain the genocide in Gaza — nearly 600 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the sham ceasefire took effect — and silence all those who demand the international community abide by the rule of law.

Palantir Technologies has been hacked, according to well-known blogger Kim Dotcom. The company develops software for intelligence and big data analysis. 

Palantir (named after the magical ‘seeing stones’ from ‘The Lord of the Rings’) doesn’t engage in surveillance in the conventional sense using spies, cameras, or bugs. Instead, it develops software that is sold to government agencies, military organizations, and large corporations.

AI overlords of the world hacked: Fallout from the massive Palantir breach

How should Russia respond to news about the attack on the AI snooping company?

By Igor Bederov

It is not a glitch (that nothing gets resolved). It’s a feature. For it opens rather, a path for ‘Business’ to be done – for ‘stakeholder’ deals to be cut, and for billions to be shared out in payoffs. This is Trump’s geo-political transactional model: Business displaces traditional negotiation (at least while the money flows); Money is the politics.

Trump Kabuki Theatre in Ukraine: Nothing of Substance Gets Resolved

BY ALASTAIR CROOKE