Australia’s leaders are trying to avoid becoming a target in a harsher, more coercive world. But silence and caution can’t substitute for strategy – or for honest leadership that levels with the public.

Higher Australian foreign policy has probably never been so simple. Our government, and probably an alternative coalition government (if anyone could imagine such a thing), would like very much to escape international attention for as long as possible.

Jack Waterford

British Conservative lawmaker Suella Braverman, who was home secretary — the UK equivalent to interior minister — between 2022 and 2023, has joined Nigel Farage's populist Reform UK party.

Braverman, a sitting member of parliament, is the latest in a string of high-profile Conservatives join Farage's camp. Reform UK is currently the fourth power in the House of Commons but leading opinion polls ahead of both the ruling Labour Party and the Tories  as both traditional parties struggle.

Moscow and Washington will not engage in dialogue with Brussels’ foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.

Peskov made the remarks after the US, Russia and Ukraine concluded their first round of three-way negotiations in Abu Dhabi on Saturday. EU officials have complained that, despite providing military and financial aid to Kiev, the bloc has been largely excluded from the talks.

In an interview with Russia-1 journalist Pavel Zarubin which aired on Sunday, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman described the current EU leadership as “incompetent,” adding that its actions “undermine the system of international relations.”

Global warming is one of the biggest challenges faced by humanity today. As emissions continue to rise, global temperatures keep breaking records and the world's poorest nations bear the brunt of a crisis they did little to create.

Time to fix responsibility for climate change

By Hu Yong | CHINA DAILY

However, public discourse on climate responsibility remains mired in individualism. Citizens are told to recycle, go vegan and shrink their "carbon footprints" while systemic sources of emissions — from industrial production to state-backed fossil fuel subsidies — remain largely untouched. It is time the global conversation shifts from personal virtue to structural accountability, from lifestyle tweaks to large-scale political and economic reform.

On the war’s momentum [September 2022]: It has fundamentally shifted, and I’m normally fairly guarded and cautious about this, but the tide clearly has turned because the success of this offensive, as important as it is itself on the ground, is that it reflects a hugely important development: Ukraine has been incomparably better than Russia in recruiting, training, equipping, organising and employing additional forces. Russia has been struggling to do just that, literally running out of soldiers, ammunition tanks, fighting vehicles and so forth.

David Petraeus

Ukraine will win the war

Now, this is a tricky one, George, because it’s a subject on which my opinion has altered violently. And this is a disaster! My God, everyone knows that newspaper readers cling to the opinions of columnists like passengers on the Titanic fastened on to the few lifeboats there upon the chopping, churning sea.

What are the rules about wearing one’s hat indoors?

BY Hadley Freeman

Australia’s alliance with the United States is no longer reliable, and clinging to it now risks Australia’s interests and values. The case for a deliberate, staged Plan B begins with strategic autonomy – and an overdue reckoning with extended nuclear deterrence.

Michael McKinley

One hundred years ago – in The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway wrote that some things proceed “at first slowly, and then very fast.” This is an accurate description of the decomposition of the Western Alliance in general and Australia’s alliance relationship with the United States in particular.

Right-wing campaign groups and Coalition MPs are again using Australia Day to drive petitions, wedge politics and anti-elite rhetoric. This year’s campaign is being amplified by paid digital ads, ARC grant outrage and calls to “legislate the date”.

Marian Sawer

Washington and Kiev have discussed several options for ending the Ukraine conflict, including the creation of a demilitarized zone or the deployment of neutral peacekeepers to the Kiev-controlled parts of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), The New York Times has said. The options were reportedly brought up earlier this week at trilateral talks in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with Russian officials.

In an article on Saturday, the NYT reported that during the negotiations – the first of their kind since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022 – Kiev once again ruled out territorial concessions to Moscow.

Israel’s reputation is treated as a strategic asset to be managed in Western media and political domains. The Israeli ‘machine’ spends lot of money and effort doing it. The passing of hate laws in the Parliament just switched some of the cost to us. Rex Patrick explains.

Let’s start with some disclosures. 1) I respect people of Jewish faith. 2) I respect people of Islamic faith. 3) Hamas’ 7 October 2023 attacks on Israeli citizens were wrong. 4) Israel’s genocide in Gaza was wrong. 5) Hezbollah and Houthi attacks on Israeli citizens were wrong. 6) Israel’s attacks on Lebanese citizens were wrong. 7) The terrorist attack at Bondi Beach was wrong.

Violence against civilians is wrong.

Some of the responses to the brutal murder of Alex Pretti by federal agents. Pretti, a U.S. citizen and an ICU nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital known for his care and compassion, was shot and killed Saturday morning near Nicollet Avenue. Family members and colleagues say he was participating in protests against federal immigration actions and was filming or attempting to intervene when federal officers confronted him.

His family speaking this was from CNN’s reporter Brian Setler

The Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua has ridiculed the administration of US President Donald Trump for using the popular ‘Nihilist penguin’ meme to promote its campaign to gain control of Greenland.

On Saturday, the White House’s page on X decided to exploit the hype around the meme, which features a lone Adelie penguin abandoning his colony to walk towards distant icy mountains.

It published an AI-generated picture of Trump leading the flightless bird by his wing along an ice-covered plane towards the mountains, where a flag of Greenland is erected. In his other wing, the penguin is holding a US flag. “Embrace the penguin,” the caption reads.

Trump, more than a decisive player, is a symptom of the changing times.

The world is hanging on the twists and turns of the American president's belligerent, xenophobic protectionist policies. We are at a crossroads, with analyses of the situation rapidly becoming obsolete. Unless he flops, which is possible, and crashes against a Wall Street market crash, or loses control of Congress halfway through his term. But he has already succeeded, whether intentionally or not, in weakening global capitalism through his erratic actions—and in endangering the United States. For that, we can already be grateful.

Trump ou la possibilité de l'effondrement du capitalisme à l'échelle mondiale

He has also succeeded in exposing the predatory and terrorist structure of imperialism, notably through the recent operation against Venezuela.

Iran (1953), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Russia (2022), Syria (2024), and now Venezuela (2026). The common denominator underlying the U.S. attacks and economic sanctions against all these countries is America’s weaponization of the world’s oil trade. Control over oil is one of its key methods for achieving unipolar control over the world’s broad trade and dollarized financial arrangements.

Weaponizing the World’s Oil Trade is the Bedrock of the U.S. Rules-Based Order

BY MICHAEL HUDSON

The prospect of the above-mentioned countries using their oil for their own benefit and diplomacy poses the most serious threat to America’s overall ability to use the oil trade to enforce the aims of its diplomacy.