Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will lead the Russian delegation to the UN General Assembly, scheduled for the end of September in New York, the Kremlin announced on Monday. President Vladimir Putin does not intend to travel to the UNGA or even address the event online. It is unclear whether the US will allow Lavrov and another member of the delegation to enter the country, even for the UN event.

There are “no plans” for Putin to travel to the US or address the world body, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday. Instead, the Russian president signed a directive designating Lavrov as the head of the Russian delegation. 

President Joe Biden’s assassination of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan was illegal under both U.S. and international law.

After the C.I.A. drone strike killed Zawahiri on Aug. 2, Biden declared, “People around the world no longer need to fear the vicious and determined killer.”

Some people are used as foils by the inner sanctum of the political hardshitters, like the US presidents and their semi-official friendly cronies. These foils, these guys and dolls, are called advisors. More often than not, the Powermen (they are mostly men or women with balls, like Thatcher) don’t listen to them. But the advice is taken on board as to find a way to bullshit and go around the advice. This is one of the tricks of POWER.

Caretaker UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson once described his job as foreign secretary – the post he held from 2016 to 2018 – as being “imprisoned in a steel condom.” Baroness Davidson, a former Scottish Tory leader and no friend of Johnson, revealed the saucy turn of phrase in a LBC interview.

Ruth Davidson resigned as the leader of Scottish Conservatives in 2019, shortly after Johnson became prime minister, and has been highly critical of him since. She later became baroness of Lundin Links in the County of Fife, and is presently sitting in the House of Lords as a life peer.

Asked about any anecdotes about Johnson during a LBC show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival, Davidson recalled a reference to his term running the Foreign Office.

US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi has stated that she has no regrets about her recent controversial trip to Taiwan and described it as “totally worth it” in an interview with the Today show on Tuesday.

The 82-year-old politician insisted that she had “overwhelming bipartisan support” for the visit and that she and her delegation were very well-received by the Taiwanese government and its people.

However, she stated that China’s position on her trip was irrelevant, and insisted that China would “not be allowed to isolate Taiwan” or dictate who can and cannot visit the island.

In a display of support, the US has protected Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky from any criticism ever since Russia attacked Ukraine in February. As it becomes evident the war has been lost, someone will have to take the fall, and it appears that Washington is preparing to throw the leader in Kiev to the wolves.

Ukrainian forces have “had the American military at their side” from the start of the conflict with Russia, the magazine Causeur cited a “well-placed analyst” in French intelligence as saying. Pentagon-hired contractors are allegedly “everywhere on the battlefield.”

The claim was published by the right-leaning outlet last week in an analysis of the five-month-long Russia-Ukraine conflict, which, it stated, “is not the fight of David against Goliath,” contrary to what many people believe.

Editor’s Note: This article was distributed by a Chinese government accepted source, but we believe it is worthy of a wider audience because it provides documentation of important ongoing dialogue within top circles in China unavailable elsewhere.

By Huáng Píng | 经济导刊（Economic Herald）

Sen. Bernie Sanders took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to offer a sweeping critique of the Democratic Party’s new reconciliation package, applying particularly close scrutiny to the legislation’s massive and destructive handouts to the fossil fuel industry.

A new imperialism stalks the Third World. It shares with the old an unquenchable thirst — for its labor, its land, its minerals, and its water. If colonization depended on the political strategies of divide and rule, the imperialists no longer have to rule today. Instead, they rely on local elites eager to aid their peoples’ exploitation in return for a share of the spoils — a process sanitized with the language of investments, trade deals and partnerships.

The difficulty for the Australian Labor government in deciding how to respond to the Julian Assange case is that once a prosecution is characterised as a political prosecution then, by its nature, there can be no expectation of due process.

The U.S.-U.K. Extradition Treaty forbids extradition in the case of “political offences.” Former Australian High Commissioner to the U.K. George Brandis — who was commissioner for almost the entirety of Assange’s Belmarsh imprisonment since 2019 — doesn’t agree that Assange is a political prisoner.

By Kellie Tranter
Declassified Australia

Kyiv: The head of Amnesty International’s Ukraine chapter has resigned, saying the human rights organisation shot down her opposition to publishing a report that claimed Ukrainian forces had exposed civilians to Russian attacks by basing themselves in populated areas.

In a statement posted on Facebook, Oksana Pokalchuk accused her former employer of disregarding Ukraine’s wartime realities and the concerns of local staff members who had pushed for the report to be reworked.

The report, released on Thursday (Ukraine time), drew angry denunciations from top Ukrainian officials and criticism from Western diplomats, who accused the authors of making vague claims that appeared to equate the Ukrainian military’s defensive actions to the tactics of the invading Russians.

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman released photos on Monday apparently showing former President Donald Trump’s handwritten notes flushed down two toilets, supposedly in violation of White House protocol. Trump himself ridiculed Haberman, and his office called her scoop “desperate.”

Published by Axios on Monday, the photos show two torn-up wads of notes, apparently in Trump’s handwriting, lodged in a pair of toilets, one in the White House and the other from an overseas trip.

Former deputy premier John Barilaro has been told to prepare for a grilling about his girlfriend's job at Investment NSW later this week, as the saga into his appointment to a lucrative trade position continues.

Democrats and the Washington press corps spent the last week insisting that the party was about to close a notorious tax loophole that allows many Wall Street billionaires to pay a lower tax rate than most Americans. 

In truth, the proposal would have left most of the loophole open, fulfilling Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) longstanding pledge to protect the private equity industry that bankrolls his campaigns. Now, the plan is gone.