Understanding the present-day events in Ukraine is impossible unless you study what happened in 1999 with Serbia. There is a Hegelian thread that runs directly from NATO’s ostensible “humanitarian intervention” to the Russian “special military operation,” linking Belgrade to Belgorod – and everything in-between.

Following the meeting of the Heads of Member States of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, held on 15 and 16 September in the Uzbek city of Samarkand, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told journalists that his country aims to join the SCO.

Turkey is still a member of NATO. The SCO was founded by Russia and China, hence Washington demands that its allies cut ties with Russia. However, Turkey noted that NATO statutes do not provide for this kind of scenario.

President Erdoğan has left for the United States where he is to meet President Biden.

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With well over a billion monthly views, Britain’s populist and pugnacious Daily Mail is one of the world’s most widely-read newspapers on the Internet, having twice the traffic of the Washington Post and five times that of the Wall Street Journal, even sometimes approaching the readership of the New York Times. The publication has stayed true to its original tabloid roots and its success comes from its willingness to wholeheartedly jump on those controversial stories that other outlets avoid.

Meanwhile, the British Lancet is located at the opposite end of the spectrum of respectability, being one of the world’s most prestigious and authoritative medical journals, as sober and responsible as any publication in existence.

We have another entirely Australian own goal to China.

Australians are no better informed about what will be Australia’s most expensive-ever defence project – equipping the Navy with US or British nuclear-powered submarines – than they were a year ago when the Morrison government announced the deal a year ago.

Yet while the Albanese government shows little sign of serious engagement to the increasingly heavy load of domestic criticisms of the globally-unprecedented project, its most serious and effective opposition may be a new and wide-ranging Chinese attack in the global legal nuclear arena.
 

Former US President Bill Clinton has rejected criticism that NATO’s eastward expansion on his watch helped set the stage for today’s Ukraine crisis, suggesting that Russia would have threatened the security of its neighbors sooner without the Western military bloc’s presence in the region.

“I think we did the right thing at the right time, and if we hadn’t have done it, this crisis might have occurred even sooner,” Clinton said in a CNN interview broadcast on Sunday. Three former Warsaw Pact states – Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – joined NATO during Clinton’s second term, in 1999, and seven others, including three former Soviet republics, followed in 2004.

The Russian army shelled its own detention center in the east of Ukraine. The Russian army shelled a nuclear power plant it has guarded since taking control of it last March. The Russian army wantonly shelled a maternity ward, a theater, and an art center in Mariupol last spring. The Russian army shells hospitals and apartment houses everywhere and randomly. The Russian army massacred residents of Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, as it withdrew in the final days of March.

Here’s the real reason that the US wants to sanction China

Washington’s modus operandi is ‘create problem, blame target country, impose sanctions, expand influence’

The US is considering sanctioning China as a deterrent from attacking Taiwan, according to media reports. Washington always justifies economic sanctions by evoking a military or security threat against either the US or any one of its allies. Then it actively works to prove the legitimacy of the threat – or to create the illusion thereof.  

BY RACHEL MARSDEN

It is important that the parliament and the government of Australia start to learn about “Ukraine”. Daily on the news — the Western news — we are fed erroneous information about this former USSR country. This news is managed to frame fake premises about Russia. "WeStandwithUkraine" is a simpleton madness. Since the break up of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has been a hot mix of Western inspired fascism and alignment with Russia. It was only when the US-financed revolt against a legitimately elected government, in 2014, that a portion of “Ukrainians” decided they had enough. Here I state that the Donbass region, MOSTLY populated by Russians decided to declare independence/autonomy from the then “nazi-fied” regime in Kiev. 

Reserve Bank boss Philip Lowe wants businesses to offer shoppers more discounts, saying corporate profits must fall to curb soaring inflation and avoid a “damaging” economic downturn.

Speaking to the House Economics Committee on Friday, Dr Lowe said bosses and workers must share the pain of subduing price pressures.

He also signalled more interest rate hikes will be needed this year to help bring inflation back below 30-year highs and avoid a recession.

BY Matthew Elmas

Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the US House of Representatives, landed in Armenia on Saturday after several days of clashes between the Armenian and Azerbaijani militaries. Pelosi’s office said that the trip would promote an end to a border dispute that has erupted into conflict twice in the last two years. 

Pelosi arrived in Yerevan on Saturday afternoon and headed straight for talks with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. She was accompanied by Democrat Reps. Frank Pallone, Anna Eshoo, and Jackie Speier, the latter two of whom are of Armenian descent.

According to a press release from her office, Pelosi will meet with government leaders, security officials, and civil society members in Yerevan, and will “convey the strong and ongoing support of the United States” for a settlement to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

In Washington, wide agreement exists that the Russian army’s performance in the Kremlin’s ongoing Ukraine “special military operation” ranks somewhere between lousy and truly abysmal. The question is: Why? The answer in American policy circles, both civilian and military, appears all but self-evident. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has stubbornly insisted on ignoring the principles, practices, and methods identified as necessary for success in war and perfected in this century by the armed forces of the United States.

Grave news comes to us from the United Nations. The latest Human Development Report (2021–22) records that for the first time in 32 years, the Human Development Index has registered a second consecutive year of decline.

The previous five years of gains in areas such as health and education have been negated by this reversal. “Billions of people face the greatest cost-of-living crisis in a generation,” says the report. “Billions already grapple with food insecurity, owing largely to inequalities in wealth and power that determine entitlements to food. A global food crisis will hit them hardest.”

It’s the critics of Western empire who actually embody values such as truth, free speech, equality, accountability for the powerful and adversarial journalism.

Have you ever noticed how those who shriek the loudest about tyranny in foreign countries are the same people calling for the censorship and de-platforming of anyone who criticizes the Western empire?

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

Supplying Kiev with weapons may be a morally justified thing to do under certain conditions, Pope Francis said on Thursday when asked about nations arming Ukraine.

Speaking to journalists on his plane as he returned from a three-day trip to Kazakhstan, the pope explained that motivation played a key part in judging whether an action was morally acceptable or not.

Selling weapons to another nation can be “morally acceptable if done under the conditions of morality,” he said. But an arms shipment “can be immoral if done with intentions of making more war” or to profit from it in some way, he added, as quoted by the Catholic News Service.

The cause of self-defense is “not only licit, it’s also an expression of love toward one’s homeland,” the pope explained.

The sports sanctions imposed on Russian athletes have threatened the basic principles of the Olympic movement but the West will eventually realize the “injustice” of the situation, according to Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) president Stanislav Pozdnyakov.

Pozdnyakov met with fellow officials and Russian athletes in Moscow on Thursday, at an event which welcomed counterparts from Belarus – a nation which has also faced bans from international competitions as a result of the conflict in Ukraine.