Dwindling public attention to the Ukraine conflict will be “fatal,”German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has said, in the run-up to a key NATO meeting in Brussels on Wednesday.

The first meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council on the level of foreign ministers took place amid a “stalemate” on the frontline, as described by the top Ukrainian general, Valery Zaluzhny, earlier this month. Dmitry Kuleba, Kiev’s top diplomat, rejected the assessment ahead of the meeting.

Western fatigue with Ukraine and its problems topped the agenda during the session, but according to German news program Tagesschau, the ministers offered no concrete solutions.

“The view of Ukraine is currently disappearing from the public – that is fatal,” Baerbock warned, as quoted by the German Foreign Ministry on social media.

Anyone who tries to pressure X (formerly Twitter) through advertising can “go f**k yourself,” the platform’s owner, tech billionaire Elon Musk, said on Wednesday.

New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Musk at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday whether his recent trip to Israel was “an apology tour” prompted by allegations of anti-Semitism on X that caused many major advertisers to ditch the platform.

“I hope they stop. Don’t advertise,”Musk responded, to Sorkin’s shock. “If someone’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money? Go f**k yourself.”

“Go. F**k. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is,” he added. “That’s how I feel. Don’t advertise.”

Say what you want about Napoleon Bonaparte, but there’s no denying that he was an absolute alpha who can still blow a beret right off the head of a Frenchman. The kind that sorely lacks nowadays in Western leadership roles. Which would explain why a new poll, released just as a Ridley Scott-directed biopic about him hits theatres, has found that 74 percent of French view his actions positively. 

 

BY Rachel Marsden

 

The German opposition has questioned Olaf Scholz’s competence as chancellor and urged him to resign, citing his inability to address crucial economic problems.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz was mocked by his peers in the Bundestag while talking about the supplementary budget for the year 2023. In his speech, he stressed that the German economy is facing an energy crisis and that a declaration of “state of emergency” is a legal way to suspend the “debt brake.” This was met by the bitter laughter of opposition members.

For any motorist inching their way through part of Sydney’s inner west, the state government’s traffic modellers have seriously miscalculated the flow-on effects from incorporating a massive spaghetti junction into the road network.

It has turned arterial routes and local streets in the inner-west suburbs of Balmain, Rozelle and Annandale into car parks during the morning rush.

For the third straight day, motorists and bus passengers endured bumper-to-bumper traffic on the City West Link and Victoria Road. A trip from Haberfield to the Anzac Bridge on the City West Link averaged an agonising 44 minutes in the morning peak on Wednesday.

In the Commonwealth’s prosecution of whistleblower David McBride for his disclosures of possible crimes by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, the Crown has (to date) been successful in arguing something that will surprise most Australians – that being that an Australian soldier does not serve Australia, or the Australian people or the public interest. Instead, a soldier’s oath obliges him or her to swear to do nothing more or less than to “well and truly serve [only] Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Her Heirs and Successors according to law,” and to “resist Her enemies.”

 

Recent statements by a top Ukrainian MP show that the so-called Bucha ‘massacre’ was staged by Kiev to disrupt the peace process with Moscow, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday.

The two countries could have struck an agreement in March 2022 but Kiev backed out of the talks following an intervention from London, Ukrainian MP David Arakhamia claimed last week.

The apparent ‘massacre’ in Bucha made international headlines in April 2022 when Ukrainian forces supposedly found the bodies of hundreds of civilians in a suburb of Kiev that had been under the control of Russian troops, who had left the area days before as part of a “goodwill gesture” as talks continued between the two countries in Istanbul.

Israel has problems with the United Nations. When it comes to the country’s conflict with Palestine, Israeli diplomats quickly become furious as they defy the world organisation and its member states. The ongoing bombardment of the population in Gaza – of densely populated residential areas, refugee camps, schools, hospitals, civilian infrastructure, and journalists and their families – shows that Israel is violating international law.

 

Israel and the United Nations.  by Karin Leukefeld, Bonn and Damascus

 

UN membership subject to conditions 

The practice of “embedding,” which requires correspondents to report in war and conflict zones as part of a given military unit, struck me as a repellent compromise with power as soon as American media began accepting this unacceptable practice. It is an undisguised effort to control what correspondents see and hear, and so what they write or broadcast, and so what their readers, listeners and viewers think.

It is a trick, in short. The ruling or governing power’s military pretends it respects the rightful freedom of an independent press, while correspondents and editors get to pretend they serve as brave correspondents and principled editors. 

 

Israel has no choice but to “destroy Hamas,” Elon Musk said on Monday after meeting with the country's leadership in West Jerusalem. The owner of X (formerly Twitter) traveled to the Middle East after critics in the US accused him of anti-Semitism.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took Musk to tour Kfar Aza, the kibbutz in southern Israel struck by Hamas during the October 7 incursion, and showed the visitor the 44-minute film Israel had put together to showcase the Palestinian group’s alleged atrocities. 

If somehow all those ‘rules-based’ systems work overwhelmingly to the benefit of the US and its Western allies, the rest of the world may wonder why they should follow them.

The latest meeting between presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden was covered all over the world. And yet, the Western media have been strangely silent about a key speech Xi gave before an audience of some 300 American business leaders in San Francisco, at the end of which they responded with a standing ovation.

 

Is this the end of America’s sanctimonious ideology?    By Alex Lo

 

In the 1990s, Argentina was often cited as an example of an “economic miracle” and Russia was advised to take the same economic measures as Buenos Aires: closely follow all the recommendations of the International Monetary Fund, remove trade barriers, sell key sectors of the economy to Western investors, eliminate the social sector, and make the dollar the official currency instead of the “rigid” ruble.

A quarter of a century later, it has turned out that Argentina was indeed a good example… of the kind of fate Russia managed to avoid.

THE PRESENT GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL AND ANTHROPGENIC... WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT?

 

DENY OUR RESPONSIBILITY?

CHANGE OUR SOURCES OF ENERGY?

REDUCE OUR CONSUMPTION OF ENERGY?

DO NOTHING?

FIND THE LEAST DESTRUCTIVE PATHWAYS?

MORE TO COME....

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.............

Ukraine will announce a new “complex plan” of mobilization next week, President Vladimir Zelensky said on Friday after meeting with the General Staff. While he offered no details, other Kiev officials hinted at the possibility of demobilizing some soldiers that had been fighting since February 2022.

Ukraine has been under pressure to make up the losses incurred in the four-month “counteroffensive” on the southern front, which Russia has estimated at over 90,000 men.

“As for the issue of mobilization, you know how complex and very relevant it is,” the Ukrainian president said at a press conference on Friday. “Today there was a comprehensive report on what the challenges are, how to resolve the issue, what to do, what legislative changes, who must do this... A comprehensive plan on this issue will be available next week.”