Western Europe must keep sending billions in aid to Ukraine even if it comes at the expense of health services and education provision to citizens, former NATO Secretary General and current Norwegian Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg, has said.

Stoltenberg, who led the military bloc from 2014 to 2024 and oversaw the deterioration of the Ukraine crisis into a full-scale conflict in 2022, addressed the Warsaw Security Forum on Tuesday. His remarks echoed previous calls by his successor, Mark Rutte, to cut social spending in order to further aid Kiev.

”I know that one additional billion to Ukraine or one billion extra to national defense is one billion less to other good purposes like health, education and infrastructure. But we must remember that the highest cost is to let Putin win,” he said.

Can governments keep their sovereignty without becoming innovation-stifling totalitarians? And on the other hand, are the tech feudalists willing to provide innovative digital infrastructure without eating into state sovereignty and freedoms?

Non-State Actors, Techno-feudalism, and Governments’ Dependency Syndrome

BY Tamer Mansour

Dante Alighieri, in his book Inferno, places those who betray benefactors in the deepest circle of hell. If that is true, the place is likely overpopulated with the managers and executives of nonprofit organizations. 

In recent years, such organizations have been implicated in egregious schemes to launder money and influence for every sundry and malevolent cause and hundreds of billions in taxpayer money. But even those not on the take from taxpayers have vast problems, so much so it is a wonder why anyone donates to them at all.

In October 2024, Vladimir Zelensky told Donald Trump that Ukraine faced a stark choice: either ironclad security guarantees or a return to nuclear weapons. Nearly a year later, that statement still reverberates through international debates. Moscow has warned that any Ukrainian move toward nuclear arms would cross a “red line,” while in the West it’s seen as a deeply unsettling signal.

Fallout without the bomb: Ukraine’s nuclear rhetoric is the real radioactive waste
Three decades after giving up the world’s third-largest arsenal, Kiev is once again dangling the nuclear option – a move Russia vows it will never allow

By Petr Lavrenin

The US is working to ramp up missile production in preparation for a potential conflict with China, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, citing officials familiar with the matter. The Pentagon is reportedly pressing defense contractors to double or quadruple output amid mounting concerns over insufficient weapons stockpiles.

The US Department of Defense launched the drive in June, when it invited top missile makers to a Pentagon roundtable, sources told the paper.

Led by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, the meeting drew major arms contractors, startups like Anduril Industries and crucial component suppliers.

Scott Morrison, former PM and architect of Robodebt, got a large ‘secret handshake’ payout when sacked by Tourism Australia. After a 4-year battle the FOIs finally surface for Jommy Tee.

The political career of Scott Morrison was built on punching down at welfare recipients. Yet, in a bitter twist of irony, the architect of the pernicious Robodebt scheme was himself the beneficiary of a massive, secret overpayment when sacked as managing director of Tourism Australia in 2006.

Revealed: brawl over Scott Morrison’s big secret payment on sacking by Tourism Australia

by Jommy Tee

This is the humblest day of my life,  declared Rupert Murdoch to a parliamentary committee on 19 July 2011.

This was at the height of what the newspaper historian Roy Greenslade called “the most astonishing 14 days in British press history, with daily shock heaped upon daily shock”.

Rodney Tiffen

In recent European history, it is difficult to find a more striking example of electoral manipulation than the 2025 parliamentary elections in Moldova. What last year’s presidential race tested in miniature, this campaign deployed on a grand scale: censorship, administrative pressure, selective access to polling stations, and a carefully mobilized diaspora vote. For President Maia Sandu’s administration, control over parliament was not a matter of prestige but of political survival.

Trump can’t rely on CIA – ex-national security adviser
Mike Flynn’s idea of a White House intel unit has been backed by a Putin aide, who said the “deep state” is targeting the US leader....

The White House needs its own operations center to provide President Donald Trump with reliable intelligence, operating in parallel to the Pentagon and CIA, according to former US National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Speaking in an interview with Alex Jones on Saturday, the retired general argued that the president cannot fully trust the US intelligence community to avoid manipulating its reports.

“The CIA has a very robust operations center. You can see and do anything you want from there – certainly globally,” he said. “And you [could] understand what’s happening, if you had a CIA that was actually working on your behalf.”

The Russian side has refused trilateral meetings with US President Donald Trump and representatives from Ukraine, US Vice President J.D. Vance claimed in an interview with Fox News on Sunday.

Trump has increasingly expressed impatience with the pace of Ukraine peace talks. The Kremlin says Kiev has demonstrated that it is not interested in peace by sticking to megaphone diplomacy and ignoring Russian settlement proposals.

“Unfortunately, what we have seen over the last couple weeks, the Russians have refused to sit down with any bilateral meetings with the Ukrainians,” Vance told Fox News.

“They have refused to sit down with any trilateral meetings, where the president or some other member of the administration could sit down with the Russians and the Ukrainians,” he added.

Bob Brown’s latest book, Defiance, is a salubrious breath of a tall peppermint native forest. It’s not a hard book, but rather only hard to heed for some.

Defiance — we learn — is contagious. In the face of accelerating subsidised consumption of Mother Earth’s biotic and abiotic resources, bold action is the answer.

Reese Halter

US President Donald Trump’s newly adopted stance on the Ukraine conflict was shaped by his recent UK visit, The Telegraph has reported, citing unnamed sources. Vladimir Zelensky’s chief of staff Andrey Yermak has told the newspaper that the visit was very important. 

For months, Washington insisted that Kiev would need to give up on certain territorial claims for a US-mediated peace deal with Moscow to move forward. This week, however, the US President reversed course. He dismissed Russia as a “paper tiger”that Kiev could defeat and said his shift came from “getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine-Russia military and economic situation.”

The future of international relations is being defined by these routes [Ports Not Missiles]. As shipyards and energy nodes slip from Anglo-Saxon hands, the balance shifts. Sanctions turn into paper threats, the dollar loses its status as the world’s club, and new routes—from Chabahar to the Arctic—dictate the rules of trade. 

From Henderson to Chabahar the Future Flows Through Ports Not Missiles

BY Rebecca Chan

Cold War 2.0—Not Missiles, but Ports

Petro desmontó la narrativa estadounidense de combate al narcotráfico y pidió que se abra un proceso penal contra Donald Trump y los funcionarios que ordenaron atacar lanchas en el Mar Caribe.

What would Christopher Hitchens say about Donald Trump’s disastrous performance at the United Nations General Assembly? In this satirical reimagining, Hitchens unleashes a scathing critique of a speech so absurd it left world leaders in stunned silence.

From his imagined vantage point, Hitchens dismantles Trump’s rambling claims—ending wars that never existed, inventing trillions in investment, and declaring climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He mocks Trump’s fixation on coal, his fabricated statistics, his bizarre boasts about escalators and teleprompters, and his mafia-style threats to allies and enemies alike.

Hitchens exposes the spectacle for what it was: not diplomacy but delusion, not leadership but farce, and perhaps the clearest demonstration yet of how American exceptionalism has become a parody of itself.