THERE is no surprise in the fact that hardly anybody here knows the name: Victor Dubreuil. Not many did anywhere — whether in his native France, or in the US where he eventually settled down — even when he was still around. A recent article on him opens like this: “In October 1893, an unidentified reporter for the New York World visited Victor Dubreuil’s studio on West Forty-Fourth Street to ask him about his deceptively realistic paintings of United States currency."

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s speech ahead of her visit to China was incoherent, contradictory, and misinterpreted Beijing’s policies and positions, the Chinese ambassador to the EU said on Friday.

“I was a little bit disappointed,” Fu Cong told the news network CGTN. “That speech contained a lot of misrepresentation and misinterpretation of Chinese policies and Chinese positions. And I would say that whoever wrote that speech for President von der Leyen does not really understand China, or deliberately distorted Chinese positions.”

The little Ukrainian girl is wearing a Hello Kitty t-shirt that says “love cat.”
She looks to be about four or five years old, maybe younger.
She is holding a knife in her tiny hands.
From off camera, her father says, “Marinochka, will you cut Russians?”
He uses a slur for “Russians.”
“Yes!” She shouts.
“What will you do to them?” He asks.
She shrieks: “I WILL CUT RUSSIANS!”
She repeats this phrase several times and makes little thrusting motions with the knife.
Then she gives a Nazi salute. “Sieg Heil!” She says, “Sieg Heil!”
Her father laughs.

by Regis Tremblay

We are 2015.

On 14 March, when the AUKUS nuclear powered-submarine details were revealed, I spent most of the day in the Emergency Department of a hospital in Brisbane, with a family member needing urgent medical care.

It took over 12 hours for my relative to get a bed in the ED and then several hours more before a doctor could see him. He was not given his regular medication – a potentially disastrous omission – because the nursing staff simply had no time to do so. They were rushed off their feet, with another 72 patients in Emergency to tend to at the same time.

The biggest threat facing the USA is not the collapse of democracy. Even though a twice impeached former president talks of death and destruction if he is arrested, while New York’s Attorney General seeks his indictment.

Wokeism isn’t the biggest threat, although, due to death threats to staff, the Florida Education Department is cancelling the “drag act” of Moma Ashely Rose, a man who was due to attend an Orlando High School dressed as a woman to present to school kids about his life as a gay cross dresser. These are localised, not national security, threats.

The military's top uniformed officer suggested Wednesday he does not support drag shows being hosted on military bases, something that has been done for years to boost morale and show support for LGBTQ members of the military community but which has come under attack by Republicans as part of their war on "wokeness."

President Joe Biden made an uncomfortable joke about ice cream while addressing the horrific shooting which unfolded in Nashville on Monday.

The UN Security Council on Monday rejected a Russia-backed resolution calling for an international independent investigation into the blasts that severely damaged the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines last autumn. Russian diplomats suggested that the outcome of the vote was the result of diplomatic pressure exerted by the West on other countries.

The draft resolution, which sought to establish an international independent commission to look into “all aspects of the act of sabotage” of the pipelines that directly linked Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea, as well as identify the attack’s sponsors and organizers, was supported by three countries (Russia, China, and Brazil). No country voted against the document, with 12 abstentions, resulting in the resolution being rejected.

In March 2003, the United States launched an invasion of Iraq on false pretenses and without a clear long-term strategy. Twenty years later, it is repeating many of the same mistakes in Ukraine.

This time, however, the stakes are much higher. The United States is no longer the undisputed superpower that it was in the early 2000s. Two decades of failed military interventions abroad, poor economic governance at home, and dysfunctional culture wars have significantly undermined its potential.

Pope Francis: Ukraine war is “fueled by imperial interests of several empires.”

No, the U.S. did not invade in the same way that Russia brutally invaded a year ago. But in other significant ways, America, with its massive flow of arms and weapons, is now in control of how this war ends—and when. 

It is a fiction of the highest order when President Biden confidently says that President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people have to decide on negotiations for a settlement and ceasefire.

No rational person believes this.

By Blake Fleetwood / Original to ScheerPost

WHAT FOLLOWS IS THE GLORIOUS GARBAGE THAT THE WESTERN MEDIA INDULGE IN.... IT WOULD BE EASY TO ACCEPT IT AS REALITY — IF WE DID NOT KNOW IT WAS COMPLETELY DELUDED — AS PART OF AN IMPERIALISTIC HEGEMONIC GRAND SCHEME...

"Attention. Air raid alert," the voice says with a Jedi knight's gravitas. "Proceed to the nearest shelter."

It's a surreal moment in an already surreal war: the grave but calming baritone of actor Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker of Star Wars, urging people to take cover whenever Russia unleashes another aerial bombardment on Ukraine.

The intrusion of Hollywood science-fiction fantasy into the grim daily realities of war in Ukraine is a consequence of Hamill's decision to lend his famous voice to "Air Alert" — a downloadable app linked to Ukraine's air defence system.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has argued that the West should prepare for continued conflict in Ukraine and that member countries of the alliance will have to spend part of their GDP on defense spending and arms aid to be provided to Kiev. But Europeans and Americans cannot afford NATO's proxy war against Russia in Ukraine to last too long.

"If the West wants a protracted war and it seems that it does, it is because it is afraid of the defeat which seems inevitable at this time, the defeat of NATO in its proxy war against the Ukraine!" Said to Sputnik Professor Stevan Gajiс, a research associate at the Institute for European Studies in Belgrade.

Emmanuel Macron has defended the last-minute postponement of King Charles’s state visit to France next week, saying it would not have been “serious or good sense” for it to go ahead as it clashed with another national day of mass strikes and social unrest.

The king had been scheduled to arrive in France on Sunday on his first state visit as monarch. He was due to visit Paris and Bordeaux before heading to Germany on Wednesday.