Australia will impose another round of financial and travel sanctions on Russia following the Kremlin's move to sign treaties annexing four occupied regions of Ukraine.

In the Georgievsky Hall of the Kremlin, a ceremony was held  on Friday to sign agreements on the admission of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Luhansk People’s Republic, the Zaporizhia Region and the Kherson Region to Russia and the formation of new subjects of the Russian Federation.

September 30, 2022

For several years, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) managed its contacts with sources through a network of fake websites. However, after Iranian counterintelligence officers cracked their system and shared their findings with Beijing, at least two dozen CIA operatives were hounded out and killed.

That story was first made public in a Yahoo News report in 2018, but researchers wanted to know more. Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto announced its findings on Thursday, publishing them in a statement in lieu of a full report.

Today the Fitz gives up. What is the world coming to?

Author and former international rugby player Peter FitzSimons will step down as the public face of Australia’s republican movement after seven years at the helm.

Weeks after the Queen’s death spurred renewed debate about the British monarch’s role as Australia’s head of state, FitzSimons announced he would not renominate to chair the Australian Republican Movement (ARM).

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Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously described Ukraine as a “geopolitical pivot” of Eurasia, central to both US and Russian power. Since Russia views its vital security interests to be at stake in the current conflict, the war in Ukraine is rapidly escalating to a nuclear showdown. It’s urgent for both the US and Russia to exercise restraint before disaster hits.

By Jeffrey Sachs

The US is committed to the “open door” policy when it comes to NATO, but now is the wrong time to consider Ukraine’s membership application, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Friday.

“Right now, our view is that the best way for us to support Ukraine is through practical, on the ground support in Ukraine, and that the process in Brussels should be taken up at a different time,” Sullivan told reporters at the White House press briefing.

Earlier in the day, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky staged a signing of a membership application to the bloc, claiming Kiev is a “de facto”ally already and demanding an “accelerated” accession procedure. 

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has refused to negotiate a peace settlement as long as Vladimir Putin remains president of Russia, issuing a regime change demand via his official Telegram channel on Friday. 

Claiming he had “always offered Russia coexistence on equal, honest, dignified and fair terms,” Zelensky blamed Russia for the failure of negotiations, insisting that it was “obvious this is impossible with this Russian president.” 

“We are ready for a dialogue with Russia, but already with another president of Russia,” he wrote. Unlike the majority of his Telegram posts, this one was written only in Ukrainian, without an accompanying English translation.

Russia has accused the US of baiting it into using its UN veto power in a bid to limit Moscow’s influence on the Security Council. Russia blocked a US-sponsored resolution on Friday that would have condemned its acceptance into the Russian Federation of four former Ukrainian territories.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed accession treaties on Friday, starting the process of bringing the two Donbass republics and the Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions into the Russian Federation following successful referendums. Within hours of the treaties being signed, the US introduced a resolution to the United Nations Security Council condemning the “illegal so-called referenda in Ukraine” and demanding Moscow immediately withdraw its forces from Ukraine.

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Note: by the time the cartoon at top was re-posted, the unique reader figure now is 203,091 (at 03/10/22)..... (this figure is conservative as some people may visit the site and not be counted — as they only see the cartoons and read the headlines.....)

President Vladimir Putin has signed documents paving the way for the formal acceptance by Moscow of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions. The treaties await ratification by the Russian parliament.

According to the Kremlin, Friday’s decision followed a democratic vote, in which people living in the former regions of Ukraine exercised their right to self-determination and requested to be protected from Kiev.

The historic move was condemned and rejected by Kiev and its foreign backers, which regard it as an annexation of sovereign Ukrainian territory.

RT takes a look back at how an armed coup in Kiev eight years ago led to a change of European borders and a major armed conflict.

Maidan

“Too much blood has been spilled” — Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies highlight a few of the many under-reported appeals made at the General Assembly for peaceful negotiations.

We have spent the past week reading and listening to speeches by world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Most of them condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a violation of the U.N. Charter and a serious setback for the peaceful world order that is the U.N.’s founding and defining principle.

Climate tipping points are conditions beyond which changes in a part of the climate system become self-perpetuating. These changes may lead to abrupt, irreversible, and dangerous impacts with serious implications for humanity. Armstrong McKay et al. present an updated assessment of the most important climate tipping elements and their potential tipping points, including their temperature thresholds, time scales, and impacts. Their analysis indicates that even global warming of 1°C, a threshold that we already have passed, puts us at risk by triggering some tipping points. This finding provides a compelling reason to limit additional warming as much as possible. —HJS

Structured Abstract

At the behest of Washington, Western countries are intensifying the crisis in relations with Ankara by imposing more and more anti-Turkish sanctions. Be it for the drilling operations in the eastern Mediterranean, the purchase of Russian surface-to-air missile systems, or simply because of rapprochement with Russia – anything goes. All of this is done with the obvious expectation that such an ostentatious anti-Turkish policy will “clamp down” not only on Turkish leader Erdoğan, but will also point out to other European countries the “perniciousness of going against the American current.”

BY Vladimir Odintsov

One day after Hurricane Ian unleashed its fury across Florida, its destruction and the devastation left behind started to become clear just as it regained strength off Orlando’s east coast and threatened South Carolina as its next target.

As officials warned that Ian would be a problem for much of South Carolina after it regained hurricane-level strength, US President Joe Biden issued a formal disaster declaration and warned of “substantial loss of life”.

And in Deltona, Florida, came the first confirmed fatality: a 72-year-old man who died while attempting to drain his pool into a nine-metre-wide canal, when he slipped down the hill, fell into the water and drowned.

The best western journalists are overwhelmingly despised while the worst are acclaimed millionaires. Western civilisation is built on lies, dependent on lies, powered by lies. Don’t seek widespread approval. It’s worthless.

Live long enough and you’ll learn that the people who’ll really hurt you and screw you over aren’t the obvious, overt monsters but the sly manipulators who smile to your face. The US empire is a sly manipulator smiling and posturing as the good guy by contrasting itself with overt monsters.

BY Caitlin Johnstone