Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's interview with Ultrahang Youtube Channel, Moscow, October 26, 2025

Question: Thank you, Mr. Foreign Minister, thank you for giving us your time.

Sergey Lavrov:  My pleasure.

Question: So we are here in Moscow. And I came from Hungary, from Budapest, just a few days ago. And Moscow is beautiful. This is the first time for me in Moscow. And when we planned this interview, there was a plan for you to come to Budapest with Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State. You were going to help to set up a negotiation between President Putin and President Trump. But finally, you didn't come. We heard many different stories about why. What really happened? Is everything ok between you and Mr. Rubio and between Russia and the United States?

Moves to restrict just what journalists can report on defence and intelligence matters are underway – and journalists need to get up to speed fast.

Documents obtained by Declassified Australia show that following the June 2019 Federal Police raids on the ABC and News Corp, the Department of Home Affairs began secret efforts to revive a four-decade dead system to censor the Australian media.

William Evans

Ever notice that Western foreign interference hysteria inherently presumes that everyone in the general population is just a giant baby?

The observation really leaped out during a court case last week in Paris. Russia was tried in absentia, by headline and soundbite, in what’s being called a “Russian interference case.” The problem? The three Bulgarians actually present in the Paris courtroom weren’t charged with Russian interference.

Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani was elected on Tuesday as the 111th mayor of New York City, defeating the former governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa and making history as the city’s first Muslim mayor.

The 34-year-old democratic socialist and state assembly member from Queens, secured victory with more than 50% of the vote. Cuomo, 67, finished second with just over 40%, while Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa received just over 7% of the vote.

German arms giant Rheinmetall has reported a surge in operating profit for the first nine months of 2025 and a record backlog of orders, citing the Ukraine conflict and growing EU defense budgets.

Company shares have nearly tripled over the past year on rising demand for military hardware. Rheinmetall produces a wide range of weapons supplied to Ukraine, including tanks, armored vehicles, artillery shells, and ammunition.

Sales jumped by 20% to €7.5 billion ($8.7 billion), while operating profit rose by 18% to €835 million, according to the Dusseldorf-based firm’s third-quarter results released on Thursday. Rheinmetall said its order backlog reached a record €64 billion.

LIFE AND DEATH IS THE ESSENCE OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION… THIS HAS BEEN THE MESSAGE FROM MR GUS LEONISKY FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS… 

THUS THE THEORY PUSHED BY PROFESSOR PHILIPPE AGHION THAT GAVE HIM THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS IS A STEAL FROM NATURAL LAWS — AND FROM SCHUMPETER, WHO STOLE IT FROM THE SAID NATURE AS WELL. WE KNOW. 

THE JEWISH SURVIVAL CODE IS BASED ON THE SAME PRINCIPLE — A PRINCIPLE THAT ISRAEL HAS APPLIED WITH FERVOUR IN GAZA, ON THE FOOTSTEPS OF A DUDE CALLED HITLER… ONE DOES NOT CREATE SOMETHING WITHOUT DESTROYING SOMETHING ELSE. ALLELUYAH…

FROM CHARLIE HEBDO:

Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve as the powerful Speaker of the US House of Representatives, said on Thursday that she will not run for re-election to Congress in 2026, ending a four-decade career of a progressive Democratic icon often vilified by the right.

The 85-year-old congresswoman, first elected in 1987, made her announcement two days after voters in California on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved “Proposition 50”, a state redistricting effort aimed at flipping five House seats to Democrats in next year’s midterm elections.

“I will not be seeking re-election to Congress. With a grateful heart, I look forward to my final year of service,” Pelosi said in a video posted on X.

Today's summit of world leaders has made one thing clear - there is a lot of frustration and concern about the direction climate change is heading.

The UN says it's now "virtually impossible" to stick to the international target of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

And, 2025 is set to be one of the hottest years on record.

If you only skimmed the headlines from News Corp, you’d be forgiven for thinking China was launching a krill-powered naval strike from Antarctica, staging an electric vehicle blitzkrieg across the outback and forcing Hyundai into some humiliating act of surrender.

Fred Zhang

Reality, of course, is far less dramatic.

Col Doug Macgregor predicts political turnover in Western governments (London first) and expects Emmanuel Macron to be removed from power — arguing new leaders will be less hostile to Russia and more interested in restoring trade.

They portray Putin as having outlasted his committed opponents; Russian strategy is to wait until Western political will weakens.

On the U.S. side, the speaker characterizes Donald Trump as blustery but not genuinely eager for confrontation — claiming Trump favors withdrawing U.S. forces from Eastern Europe and reducing long-term U.S. military presence on the continent.

The speaker sees a broad Western shift coming: rising parties (e.g., Germany’s AfD mentioned) will seek to normalize relations and revive energy/trade links (Nord Stream referenced), so European governments now in power will be replaced by more Russia-friendly administrations.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is applying double standards by claiming that Moscow is conspiring with China and other nations to “undermine global rules,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said.

In a post on her Telegram channel on Thursday, Zakharova inquired “what ‘global rules’” Rutte was referring to, calling on NATO to post a “full list” on its website. She further pointed out that the military bloc itself has a track record of breaking international law. The Russian diplomat cited the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 on fabricated pretexts, as prime examples.

Zakharova stressed that no NATO member states have stopped cooperation with China, despite Rutte’s claims.

Chris Minns’ police unleashed pepper spray on hundreds of peace protestors yesterday. Today the Premier is the drawcard for an Israel business lobby lunch with ties to the genocide in Gaza. Wendy Bacon reports. 

NSW Police unleashed hundreds of pepper spraying police on protesters against his government’s sponsorship of a Defence Expo at which Israel’s biggest weapons companies were promoting their wares. It was an event the Defence Minister Richard Marles labelled “beautiful, menacing and extremely cool”.

Chris Minns – pepper spray for peace protestors one day, lunch at war-crimes-lobby the next

by Michael West and Wendy Bacon

Signs of the ongoing US government shutdown causing difficulties or uncertainties for US soldiers appeared, and then were swiftly removed after drawing attention, on the US Army Garrison Bavaria website this week. 

The US Army Garrison Bavaria is the army's largest group outside the US with around 36,000 troops stationed across four facilities in Germany.

"The shutdown will impact services provided by the Garrison at installations across Rose Barracks, Tower Barracks, Hohenfels and Garmisch," it said on a web page to provide guidance to members of how to deal with the government shutdown.

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s recent tour of several units fighting in the Donbass featured a flurry of Nazi and Nazi-adjacent symbolism, worn on the flags and shoulder patches of Ukrainian servicemen. None of it, of course, was picked up by Western media.

First off, we have the infamous Wolfsangel – a medieval Germanic symbol, widely adopted by Nazi Germany during the Second World War and used by multiple Nazi-linked groups then and since – including Ukraine’s now-defunct Azov Brigade and its still-intact successors, the 1st Azov Corps.

When the razzle dazzle of the prime minister’s first face-to-face meeting with the mercurial US president is forgotten and the huge sigh of relief that nothing went wrong subsides, questions will be asked about what all the puffery achieved.

Trump gave a vacuous sounding endorsement of AUKUS, but did nothing for Australia on tariffs, despite the US running a continuous trade surplus with Australia and the infinitesimal amount of revenue the Australian tariff raises.

Geoff Raby