It’s the critics of Western empire who actually embody values such as truth, free speech, equality, accountability for the powerful and adversarial journalism.

Have you ever noticed how those who shriek the loudest about tyranny in foreign countries are the same people calling for the censorship and de-platforming of anyone who criticizes the Western empire?

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

Supplying Kiev with weapons may be a morally justified thing to do under certain conditions, Pope Francis said on Thursday when asked about nations arming Ukraine.

Speaking to journalists on his plane as he returned from a three-day trip to Kazakhstan, the pope explained that motivation played a key part in judging whether an action was morally acceptable or not.

Selling weapons to another nation can be “morally acceptable if done under the conditions of morality,” he said. But an arms shipment “can be immoral if done with intentions of making more war” or to profit from it in some way, he added, as quoted by the Catholic News Service.

The cause of self-defense is “not only licit, it’s also an expression of love toward one’s homeland,” the pope explained.

The sports sanctions imposed on Russian athletes have threatened the basic principles of the Olympic movement but the West will eventually realize the “injustice” of the situation, according to Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) president Stanislav Pozdnyakov.

Pozdnyakov met with fellow officials and Russian athletes in Moscow on Thursday, at an event which welcomed counterparts from Belarus – a nation which has also faced bans from international competitions as a result of the conflict in Ukraine.

The fact that nearly every US citizen will know at least one victim of gun violence in their lifetime and more than 1 million US citizens have been shot in the past decade presents a horrifying picture about how firearms in private hands pose a threat to people's safety in the United States.

What is even more shocking and alarming is the fact that firearm-related deaths increased 13.5 percent from 2019 to 2020, and among children and adolescents they surged a staggering 30 percent. Statistics show that 12 children die from gun violence each day in the United States and another 32 are injured.

Tony Blair rubbed Queen up wrong way: ‘She didn’t like him’ – insider claims

THE QUEEN "didn't like" Sir Tony Blair for steering her away from her "stiff upper lip" approach, an unearthed account claims.

By CHARLIE SMITH

Sir Tony’s knighthood, in recognition of his service to the nation, proved incredibly controversial due to his role in the Iraq war, and a petition to revoke the honour garnered one million signatures in January.

However, as well as governing the country, the former Prime Minister also played a crucial role for the Queen and the Royal Family behind the scenes during a major crisis.

Current attempts to push for a unipolar world “have taken an absolutely ugly form lately, which the overwhelming majority of nations of the planet find unacceptable,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.

The remark came as he met his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

Russia and China “stand together for a just, democratic, multipolar world order based on international law and the central role of the UN, and not on some rules that somebody invented and attempts to impose on others without even explaining what they are,” Putin said. 

The administration of US President Joe Biden has been using the phrase “rules-based world order” to describe the way it prefers the world to operate.

The European Parliament voted on Thursday to brand Hungary an “electoral autocracy.” The symbolic declaration comes as the rift between Budapest and Brussels widens, with the EU accusing Hungary of corruption and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of breaking with the bloc on immigration and anti-Russian sanctions.

In a 433 to 123 vote, the parliament agreed to no longer consider Hungary a “democracy,” and instead to label it a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy.” 

Since the establishment of the Bretton Woods system in 1944, the US dollar has been the global reserve currency. Even when the United States terminated convertibility of the dollar to gold, effectively bringing the Bretton Woods system to an end and making the greenback a flat currency, the dollar's global hegemony continued.

Since 1971, the dollar's hegemony has been based mostly on one fact: almost all commodities in the world, especially oil, are traded in the dollar. Despite the growing economic problems of the US, including the stagnation of the income of the middle class, increasing inequality, and the ballooning of the country's national debt, the US has maintained its position as the largest economy in the world with high per capita GDP.

By Benyamin Poghosyan

A US grouping, constituted around the thought of the philosopher Leo Strauss, controls from now on both the Secretariat of Defense and the Secretariat of State. After having organized many wars since those of Yugoslavia, they imagined the one in Ukraine. It is now manipulating the European Union and is preparing to deprive it of energy sources. If European leaders do not open their eyes, their alliance with Washington will lead to the collapse of the Union’s economy. There is no point in believing that Europeans will be spared because they are developed. The Straussians wrote, as early as 1992, that they would not hesitate to destroy Germany and the EU.

The EU brought to its knees by the Straussians

by Thierry Meyssan

The Spanish government has had to contend with a number of critical situations over the past few years, such as the worst pandemic in the last century, and everything but a zombie invasion, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said during an interview with TVE on Tuesday.

Sanchez explained that since he took office in 2018, his government has had to deal with an onslaught of issues such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the La Palma volcano eruption, Storm Filomena, monkeypox, as well as the conflict in Ukraine and the subsequent economic consequences.

Asked about the low poll numbers for his government, the Spanish leader said he understood the frustration and anger of the people, and is working to “turn these polls around.”

On Aug. 30, President Joe Biden gave a speech at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He was angered that many Republicans were predicting politically motivated violence as a result of the legal proceedings being taken against former President Donald Trump.

Biden argued that “a safer America requires all of us to uphold the rule of law. Not the rule of any one party or any one person .… The idea you turn on a television and see senior senators and congressmen saying, “If such and such happens, there’ll be blood in the street. Where the hell are we?”

Except for a brief moment after his dramatic arrest in 2019, the mainstream media has abandoned Julian Assange. They do this at their own peril.   

That’s because the arrest and espionage indictment of Assange for practicing journalism is a danger to all journalists everywhere. 

Consortium News started covering the Assange case on Dec. 16, 2010 with an article by founding editor Robert Parry, one of the leading investigative reporters of his generation. Bob argued that Assange was practicing journalism in the exact way that he did.   He wrote: 

Is Putin’s Goody Two Shoes Behavior with his “Limited Operation” Blowing up in his face?

The Kremlin’s attempt to fight a war with minimal resources and no commitment to disrupt the government and functioning of Western Ukraine and the weapons flowing in from the US and NATO now brings the humiliation of having Ukrainian troops break through Russia’s thinly defended line in the Kharkov region of Eastern Ukraine.

Paul Craig Roberts

Today the United States, because of the growing global criticism of White House policies, is desperately seeking to maintain its leadership through destructive actions against not only its adversaries, but also allies in all directions. This is evidenced both by the numerous armed conflicts and aggressions around the world instigated by the United States and by the sanctions imposed on states that do not wish to become silent puppets of Washington, in violation of generally accepted norms and without the approval of international organizations.

The position of other countries, including US allies, on the political, economic and military dictate is of no interest to Washington at all, nor are their losses from the same White House-initiated sanctions.

BY Valery Kulikov

Russia is no longer fighting a Ukrainian army equipped by NATO, but a NATO army manned by Ukrainians. Yet, Russia still holds the upper hand despite its Kharkiv setback.

The Ukrainian army began a major offensive against Russian forces deployed in the region north of the southern city of Kherson on Sept. 1. Ten days later, the Ukrainians had expanded the scope and the scale of its offensive operations to include the region around the northern city of Kharkov.