“It’s the dark heart of Britain, the place where democracy goes to die.” You’d be forgiven for thinking this describes a seedy underbelly of society – perhaps a British mafia. In actual fact, George Monbiot is describing The City of London. Not London, the geographical location, but the borough known as The City: the financial district of London which is governed by The Corporation of The City of London. How can a square mile of land hold such significance and also be such a threat to democracy? The answer partially lies in its history.

Diego Ramos, ScheerPost’s managing editor, forwarded me a video clip last week he thought I ought to see. Sending it under the subject line, “Disturbing trend in Israel,” my colleague must have reckoned I have not been sufficiently shocked by the events in Israel and Gaza since Hamas mounted an assault into southern Israel on October 7 and the Israeli Defense Forces began a purposely disproportionate response to the incursion—purposely disproportionate as a matter of official policy since David Ben–Gurion put it in place during his premiership in the 1950s. 

By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

The German federal government revealed on Wednesday that Berlin has sent Ukraine an additional 25 Leopard tanks. This latest shipment brings the total number of these vehicles handed over to the Eastern European country from Berlin to 115, according to a government press release.

Germany and Denmark have embarked on a collaborative project, as mentioned in the statement, to provide Kiev with older iterations of Berlin’s primary battle tank, the Leopard 1A5. The most recent shipment also added nearly two dozen reconnaissance drones and five new drone boats to Ukraine’s supplies. Berlin also shipped Kiev a total of 12 new armored personnel carriers and six airspace surveillance radars, along with around 30 military trucks and 30,000 sets of winter clothing.

In August 2022, Ukrainian security service (SBU) operatives hid explosives in a crate intended for a cat in a car driven by a woman and her twelve year old daughter. After the car passed through the Russian border, the SBU planted the bomb in the SUV of Russian journalist Darya Dugina, the daughter of well known philosopher Alexander Dugin, who was tragically killed.[1]

US President Joe Biden has refused to call for a ceasefire in the Israeli-Hamas conflict, instead proposing a temporary humanitarian pause.

Biden was speaking to an audience of some 200 people when a woman, who later identified herself as rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, shouted, “If you care about Jewish people, as a rabbi, I need you to call for a cease-fire right now.” 

The incident was captured on video and shared by the Jewish Voice for Peace account on X (formerly Twitter), claiming that Rosenberg was speaking on behalf of thousands of Jewish Americans who “refuse to allow a genocide to be carried out in [their] name”

The West’s sanctions proposals against Russia are becoming increasingly absurd, President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday during a televised government meeting on economic issues.

Earlier this month, Lithuania suggested including an embargo on buttons, nails, and sewing appliances in the 12th round of EU sanctions against Russia, which is currently being debated by the bloc’s member states.

Last week, the Australian government added tools used to drill, press, stamp, punch or press, as well as television and sound recorders to a broader export ban against Russia that also includes boilers, machinery, and mechanical appliances.

In a world aflame, the Biden administration launched a new round of airstrikes against Iranian-linked forces backing the Syrian government. American officials claimed “self-defense”—for America’s invading force illegally occupying Syria’s land, plundering its resources, and sanctioning its government. Washington foreign policy, meet George Orwell’s 1984.

Contrary to what I wrote last week based on dispatches from Western and Arab news agencies filtered by Israeli military censorship, Israel’s attack on October 7, 2023 (operation “Al-Aqsa Flood) “) was not perpetrated by Hamas alone. Its triggering was decided by a unitary operation chamber of the entire Palestinian Resistance.

Since January, the Netanyahu government has pushed for highly controversial judicial reforms, a series of changes to the judicial system and the balance of powers. 

The effort has been led by Yariv Levin, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s deputy prime minister and justice minister, and Simcha Rothman, chair of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee.

By Dan Steinbock
The World Financial Review 

Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was fixated throughout the Covid-19 crisis on elderly people accepting their fate and saw the virus as “nature’s way of dealing with old people,” an inquiry into Downing Street’s handling of the pandemic has heard.

At a Tuesday hearing as part of the government’s inquest into Covid-19, notes from Johnson’s top science adviser, Patrick Vallance, were shared, which detailed what the aide viewed as Johnson’s “obsession”with older people accepting risks as they related to the potentially fatal virus.

The notes, dated from August 2020, detailed Vallance’s opinion that Johnson was keen to let “the young get on with life and [keep] the economy going” – which Vallance described at the time as a “quite bonkers set of exchanges.”

Africa has become a strategic and economic attraction point for Germany. Europe’s biggest economy wants to build stronger ties, and Olaf Scholz's visit to Ghana and Nigeria sought to do just that.

Scholz's Africa visit: Desire to strengthen economic ties
Isaac Kaledzi

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's visit to Nigeria and Ghana in West Africa, his third trip to Africa in two years, had the aim of deepening economic ties between Germany and the two African nations.

The CEO of one of the world’s leading tech conferences was forced to resign after criticizing Israel’s assault on Gaza. He was quickly replaced by one of the industry’s most prominent US government-affiliated regime change specialists. 

Europe’s biggest tech conference, Web Summit, has appointed a veteran US regime-change operative named Katherine Maher as its new CEO, just days after founder Paddy Cosgrave stepped down from the position following an industry-wide backlash to his suggestion that Israel forces have carried out “war crimes” in their ongoing assault of Gaza.

BY WYATT REED

Australian journalists still cling to ‘objectivity’ as the hallmark of ‘good journalism’. And yet, Palestine has shown us how colonial notions of ‘objectivity’ pave the way for genocide.

Objectivity serves the powerful, and silences the oppressed

By Amy McQuire

Moscow and New Delhi have no major issues of mutual concern and this is a challenge because the absence of contentious divisions suggests a degree of mutual detachment.

Here’s the main problem in Russia-India relations, and it might surprise you...
There are no problems that directly concern both states and that means that they often aren't at the forefront of each other's thoughts

By Andrey Sushentsov, program director of the Valdai Club

The conflict in Israel-Gaza illustrates perfectly how the United States government runs on corruption, with the deep pocketed Jewish and Israeli lobbies able to buy every national level politician that matters to give the loathsome Benjamin Netanyahu a carte blanche both in terms of a free pass on committing war crimes while also having unlimited access to the US Treasury and the contents of military arsenals.

BY PHILIP GIRALDI