The European Union intends to begin discussions on admitting Ukraine and several other countries as early as October, European Council President Charles Michel announced on Monday.

Enlargement “is no longer a dream,”Michel told the officials from Albania, Bulgaria and former Yugoslav states gathered at the Bled Strategic Forum in Slovenia. 

“As we prepare the EU’s next strategic agenda, we must set ourselves a clear goal. I believe we must be ready, on both sides, by 2030 to enlarge,” Michel said. “This is ambitious, but necessary. It shows that we are serious.”

The bloc’s leaders will discuss enlargement at the next European Council meeting, said Michel, where they “will take a stand on the opening of negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova.” That meeting is scheduled for October. 

Using Ukraine to fight Russia offers great value – US Senator

Ex-presidential candidate Mitt Romney has claimed that sending weapons to Kiev is Washington’s best defense investment in history

US Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) has touted Washington’s strategy of trying to weaken Russia by providing massive military aid to Kiev, allegedly degrading Moscow’s forces while only Ukrainian troops are put in harm’s way.

Romney, who as the Republican Party’s nominee, lost the 2012 presidential election to Barack Obama, made his comments during a visit on Tuesday to Utah-based defense contractor Strider Technologies. He argued that the best way for the US to mitigate the security threat posed by China is to ensure that Russia is defeated in Ukraine.

Emmanuel Macron’s government has made the French nation irrelevant on the world stage. Day by day, horrendous internal and external policies transform a once irreplaceable nation and culture into nothing more than a tourist attraction and playground for elites.

Early this morning, I saw a share on Facebook of the French ironclad Redoutable in dry dock. The photo from 1875 showed the sleek outline of the first warship in the world to be built in steel.

BY Phil Butler

The French created so many world-changing innovations in her history. Most people don’t know that cinema, as we know it, would not exist had Louis Le Prince not applied the principles of Chronophotography created by Étienne-Jules Marey.

Donald Trump’s recent mugshot, which has already become iconic among his supporters, has also helped his campaign raise a record-breaking sum, according to Politico. The Republican frontrunner faces a plethora of charges and turned himself in at the Fulton County jail in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday. 

On Saturday, the outlet reported that the former president had raised some $7.1 million since he had the photo taken by authorities.  

Politico quoted an anonymous source as saying that Trump’s campaign raked in $4.18 million on Friday alone – its single-highest 24-hour take to date. 

Shortly after the Fulton County’s Sheriff’s Office released the mugshot, the former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., announced that he had launched a line of merchandise bearing the image and the tagline “NEVER SURRENDER!”. 

President Xi Jinping has called for China and Africa to join hands for modernization, and work together to create a favorable environment for realizing their respective development visions.

Xi made the remarks late on Thursday while co-chairing the China-Africa Leaders' Dialogue with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in Johannesburg on the sidelines of the 15th BRICS Summit. Xi returned to China on Friday, wrapping up his five-day tour to South Africa.

Addressing the meeting, Xi proposed concrete steps to promote China-Africa cooperation and contribute to Africa's integration and modernization.

On Monday, the Clinton family announced a new fundraising initiative within the framework of their Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), naming the Ukraine conflict among the gathering's main topics. What are they up to?

The Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) gathering scheduled for September is expected to bring together corporate leaders, Hollywood stars, and other celebrities with the aim to "address climate change, health care issues, gender-based violence, the war in Ukraine and a host of other issues."

BY EKATERINA BLINOVA

Post 9/11 the US embarked on a series of wars to ‘make the world safe’ and more importantly settle old and new scores.

The consequences – death and devastation – across much of the globe. It may not equal the impact of the 20th century’s two world wars, but they make Europe’s 17th century 30 Years War look like a skirmish.

By Noel Turnbull

All in all the US has been at war for 228 years of the 247 years since its formation in 1776 and the ones since 2001 have had a devastating impact on Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia – places where the US has intervened directly or acted by proxies. The US is also conducting ‘counterterror activities’ in 85 countries.

"US intelligence agencies believe that the American National Security Agency is attempting to influence public policy and public opinion in the West by directing American civilians to build relationships with influential US and Western individuals and then disseminate narratives that support the Pentagon objectives, obscuring the NSA’s role through layers of ostensibly independent actors."

“‘These influence operations are designed to be deliberately small scale, the overall goal being US [and] Western persons presenting these ideas, seemingly organic,’ a US official unauthorized to discuss the material told CNN. ‘The co-optee influence operations are built primarily on personal relationships … they build trust with them and then they can leverage that to covertly push the American Empire’s agenda.’”

The US is indisputably the most tyrannical regime on earth. Only the US is instigating wars around the world, circling the planet with hundreds of foreign military bases, starving populations with massive unilateral sanctions and blockades, and working to destroy any nation which disobeys it. No other government has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression; only the US has. Continually trying to destroy anyone in the world who doesn’t obey your dictates is as tyrannical as it gets.

A catastrophic die-off of emperor penguin chicks has been observed in the Antarctic, with up to 10,000 young birds estimated to have been killed. 

The sea-ice underneath the chicks melted and broke apart before they could develop the waterproof feathers needed to swim in the ocean. 

TOKYO (Sputnik) - Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has begun dumping wastewater from the plant into the Pacific Ocean, having diluted it with sea water.

The process is being broadcast live by leading Japanese television companies.

TEPCO has collected more than 1 million tonnes of wastewater more than a decade after a massive tsunami triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in March 2011.

On Tuesday, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said that the release of treated radioactive water from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant into the ocean would begin on August 24 if weather and marine conditions allow.

The biggest enemy of AUKUS is not the resistance of ALP branches and unions but its own over-engineered grandiosity, its naive ambition.

A vote wrung from a conference doesn’t deliver the cash for what is the biggest transfer of wealth outside this country in its history. The government places the cost between $268 billion and $368 billion. That gap of $100 billion is a warning that nobody knows and bureaucrats are taking stabs.

By Bob Carr

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEdA846aN18

Evgeny Prigozhin was a man of many talents who made a “significant contribution” to the struggle against neo-Nazis in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday, commenting on the plane crash that reportedly killed the Wagner Group head.

Speaking with journalists at the Kremlin, Putin said that he had known Prigozhin since the early 1990s, and described him as “a man of complicated destiny.”

I once saw an unidentified flying object. I couldn't identify it, it was in the sky, and I assumed it was an object rather than a subject, and certainly not a verb. But no congressional subcommittee was convened to hear my compelling testimony and question my national security implications.

You will always find someone to ridicule an elaborate theory by comparing it to "a game of 3D chess" as if no one was able to play 3D chess. However, it is entertaining to note that Vladimir Putin has been leading a game of 3D chess since 2008 to put an end to globalism, the master ideology for dominating the planet of a very small international elite made up of international banks, large investment funds — investments and their multinationals.

by Sylvain Laforest