The Ukrainian army is suffering 27,000 casualties a month in the conflict with Russia, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has said, offering a rare public assessment of Kiev’s losses.

Neither Ukraine nor Russia provides regular updates on its battlefield casualties. Kiev’s Western backers also largely refrain from publicizing exact figures or estimates of how many Ukrainian soldiers are being killed or wounded.

Tusk, one of Ukraine’s strongest supporters in Europe, revealed the casualty rate during a speech to the Polish parliament on Thursday. “The new Russian strategy, and above all its new technical capabilities, namely jet-powered drones, are also causing much greater losses on the Ukrainian side,” he said.

Bill Gates turned the vast financial resources of his foundation into political leverage, using its wealth to pressure governments to spend more on vaccination, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said.  

In the Meckel & Matthes podcast released by Handelsblatt earlier this month, Merkel warned that uncontrolled corporate power could leave governments doing “what the corporations order.” She said she first saw the danger not with the rise of artificial intelligence, but when Gates set up his foundation, which had more money “than the development budgets of major industrialized countries.”  

An unelected billionaire had effectively put himself on a political footing with elected leaders, according to Merkel.  

As a historian who also happens to be German, that was my spontaneous reaction to Ursula von der Leyen’s annual grand – and always grandiloquent – “state of the union”address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

It’s not really a “union,” of course, and not really a “parliament,” either: technically, the EU is a confederation messed up by the ideological construct of “supranationalism”; and the parliament has no independent legislative power, but let’s not dwell on the obvious.  

The world is just enough: Ursula von der Leyen goes Bond villain

Leave it to a German to get EU-Europe properly encircled

BY Tarik Cyril Amar

There's an episode of The Twilight Zone, from late 1960, in which newlyweds Don and Pat Carter take shelter in an Ohio diner after their car breaks down en route to New York City.

Neither expects to be there long; an emergency mechanic just so happens to be around the corner.

To pass the time, Don, played by a young William Shatner, starts feeding pennies into a fortune-telling napkin holder: a grinning devil's head answering yes-or-no questions for a penny-a-pop.

What starts as harmless prompts soon becomes a compulsion as the machine somehow starts nailing the questions. Next thing you know, Don's stuck in a loop, unable to leave the restaurant without asking the machine's thoughts.

When Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong attended the United Nations General Assembly 12 months ago, it felt like something significant might be happening.

Australia joined a number of other nations in recognising the state of Palestine. The world was scrabbling to regroup around the chaos unleashed by Donald Trump. The UN was itself fighting for survival amid Trump's hostile assault on it.

The UN often feels damned to irrelevance, but it is needed now more than ever

By Laura Tingle

Canada and the EU "see the world with the same eyes," according to European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen.

And the feeling appears mutual.

"Our commitment to the rule of law, and our unyielding defense of human dignity, individual freedom and democracy share the same deep roots, the same unwavering dedication," Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said.

At NATO’s first high-level summit since Ankara, the bloc’s new, Europe-centric incarnation is taking shape. But it’s ordinary Europeans who stand to lose their future, and potentially their lives.

NATO 3.0 marches into Copenhagen

The military bloc’s European members are now footing the bill and taking all of the risk against Russia

Russian-Asian rapprochement in the Arctic is currently unfolding along two distinct tracks: the first driven by logistics and operations, and the second focused on resources and investment.

Russia’s new Trans-Arctic Transport Corridor (TATC), whose key section is the Northern Sea Route (NSR) running along its Arctic coast, is intended domestically to connect major Russian ports – from St. Petersburg through Murmansk to Vladivostok – and link them to inland cities and towns via land, rail, sea and inland waterway networks.

US bank JPMorgan has said that it no longer has a clear view on the oil price as the war in the Middle East drags on with no clear end in sight. The bank’s analysts have abandoned a baseline view of crude oil in what is an unusual step for a major bank and one of the world’s most watched commodities. 

“We simply don’t know how to model the endgame,” the bank wrote in a research note, noting that this was the first time it had been unable to generate a view since the US-Israeli war on Iran began.

The on-again, off-again approach to the war demonstrated by US President Donald Trump has left traders at a loss for how to proceed. A Bloomberg report wrote that JPMorgan is simply making public what traders have long been saying privately: how this ends is impossible to predict.

The images created by socialist and antiwar political cartoonists during the period around World War I were powerful tools for countering the elite’s propaganda of the time. 

Hedges Report: The Cartoonist Dissidents

Derf Backderf’s new graphic novel illustrates the repression of socialists during the McCarthy era through the stories of political cartoonists. It resonates powerfully with current times.

Throughout the summer, a major scandal has been brewing in Lithuania. In late July, the country suffered a landmark defeat in the European Court of Human Rights in a case brought by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi national held in secret detention and brutally tortured for four years in CIA black sites around the world – including Lithuania.

The CIA paid cash. A NATO ally supplied the torture prison

Just outside a European capital, the agency ran a black site with the knowledge and assistance of the local authorities

On September 2, without warning, Israeli bulldozers destroyed the homes of 12 Palestinian families in Khirbet al-Tabban, a herding community in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, leaving 70 people homeless, nearly half of them children.

The West’s pretend outrage won’t save Palestinians

A ban on Israeli settlement goods is meaningless in stopping the ethnic cleansing of Palestine

BY Eva Bartlett

Mary Kostakidis stood with Julian Assange when others stayed silent. After two years of legal action over her own speech, thousands of Australians returned that solidarity when she needed it.

Gabriel Shipton

I have known Mary Kostakidis for years. We met through the campaign to free my brother Julian Assange.

Mary supported Julian when much of the media had turned against him. During the years when he was isolated and smeared, many journalists who had built stories and careers on his work kept their distance. Mary stood beside him.