On July 2 Lysichansk came under Russian control:

This comes only a week after the cauldron around Lysichansk began to close. Until a few hours ago there was still a chance to flee from Lysichansk but the only passable road was under Russian fire. It is not know yet how many made it out or how many gave up and were taken prisoners.

Some of those who retreated went to Siversk some 20 kilometer west of Lysichansk. That city will be the next bigger target in that campaign sector.

The speed of this operation was much faster than the one in Mariupol. That points to diminished capabilities and soldier motivation of the Ukrainian forces.

Zelensky, 2022, Stalin 1942: the US propaganda machine can easily make heroes, but it can quickly change the script

The US campaign to build public support for Ukraine harks back to a propaganda push lionizing Stalin’s Soviet regime during WWII

America’s sudden love affair with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and Kiev’s military forces is reminiscent of an old campaign to exalt a previous ally of geopolitical circumstance: Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Tory leadership frontrunners have clashed over how best to fund public services and control inflation in the contest's first TV debate.

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss attacked tax rises introduced under ex-chancellor Rishi Sunak as "wrong" and pledged to reverse them.

At some stage Albanese may need to re-examine Shearer’s role as head of the Office of National Intelligence.

Andrew Shearer did not expect to remain head of the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) after the election. It wouldn’t have been surprising if he were replaced from what is an extraordinarily powerful job at the pinnacle of the Australia’s sprawling intelligence apparatus. At the time of his appointment in 2020, a Labor staffer told journalists the Opposition had indicated to the then prime minister Scott Morrison that it didn’t have confidence in Shearer, describing him as a “partisan operative”. Others say he has a well established reputation as a right wing hawk keen to promote his own views. He has also worked for several military hawks including Tony Abbott when Prime Minister.

When Joe Biden was a presidential candidate, he made no bones about his stance on the U.S.-Saudi relationship. Shortly after announcing his candidacy, Biden declared he was going to “cancel the blank check” the Trump administration had given Saudi Arabia during its war in Yemen. Some three months later, Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations that “America’s priorities in the Middle East should be set in Washington, not Riyadh.” 

The following article is part bullshit and part rubbish. So what else can we expect from an extreme right wing website? It's always worth knowing what influences are pushing the buttons of ignorance, including inside the Supreme Court — considering the rotten bananas amongst the bunch of judges. Here goes the "Independent Institute":

In the last of a series of landmark rulings issued at the end of its 2021–2022 term, the U.S. Supreme Court held that federal executive branch agencies cannot take major regulatory initiatives without explicit congressional authorization. It was the right decision.

John Pilger, Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges have lent their expertise to the subject of the war in Ukraine with some recent comments that help bring some much-needed clarity to an often confusing and always contentious issue. 

Here they are:

“I’ve spent my career working in the mainstream, and I’ve covered probably seven, eight, nine shooting wars; I’ve never seen coverage so utterly consumed by a tsunami of jingoism, and of manipulative jingoism as this one.” — John Pilger

This comment comes from a recent interview with the legendary Australian journalist by The South China Morning Post, and it says so much about the information ecosystem in which we now find ourselves floundering.

The European Union’s newest round of sanctions on Russia will target the country’s gold exports and tighten up existing loopholes, news site Euractiv reported on Thursday. Further sanctions on energy are apparently off the table, as Europe grapples with the consequences of its earlier sanctions packages.

Russian gold imports have already been banned by the US, UK, Japan and Canada, in a move agreed during the G7 summit in Germany last month. While Russia’s gold exports were estimated to be worth around $15 billion in 2021, the ban was described by industry analysts as mostly symbolic, as Western sanctions have already closed off European and US markets to Russia’s bullion.

For anyone still puzzled about what’s going on in the world, just look to Germany. Whatever the EU’s ruling nation is mulling over, that’s at the core of the world’s problems. Take German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s most recent whining about the world’s hopes of progress being ruined by Putin and the demilitarization campaign on Ukraine. Did Europeans not notice the EU’s failures before February 2022?

I was reading Scholz on Politico this morning and thinking about a global pandemic, the Germans’ domination of EU economics and policy for decades, and the general failures of western capitalism overall. It’s no stretch to theorize that the whole Ukraine affair is another facet of the cover-up/reset the western elites set in motion some years back.

BY Phil Butler

President Joe Biden’s administration is driving the world toward a devastating nuclear conflict by using the Ukraine crisis to fight a “proxy war” with Russia, former congresswoman and 2020 presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has warned.

“The American people need to understand the seriousness of the situation that the Biden administration and leaders in Washington have put us in,” Gabbard said on Wednesday night in a Fox News interview. The Hawaii Democrat, who was among the candidates whom Biden defeated to win his party’s 2020 presidential nomination, called for stepping back to focus on “the big picture and the great threat that we face, which is the reality that this war is continuing to escalate.”

Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions, including punishment. 

In some ways, Foucault was the super high-grade intellectual fence-sitting analytical philosopher, the antithesis to our present prolific scribe fence-sitter and home-cooking scone-maker star, Annabel Crabb. 

This came from an article by Gus

https://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/30164

… Gus continued:

If there had not been an active rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing over the past decades, and if Russia did not have an Asian alternative to European markets for oil and gas, it would not have been able to attack Ukraine.

Does this mean China is the main beneficiary of the European crisis and that the situation is developing according to Beijing’s plans?

It began when the Biden regime and the press misrepresented Russian aims in Ukraine. All else has flowed from it.

What were the policy cliques, “the intelligence community” and the press that serves both going to do when the kind of war in Ukraine they talked incessantly about turned out to be imaginary, a Marvel Comics of a conflict with little grounding in reality? I have wondered about this since the Russian intervention began on Feb. 24. I knew the answer would be interesting when finally we had one.

Now we have one. Taking the government-supervised New York Times as a guide, the result is a variant of what we saw as the Russiagate fiasco came unglued: Those who manufacture orthodoxies as well as consent are slithering out the side door.

Scott Morrison has given his fullest explanation for the Coalition’s federal election loss yet, blaming the “hit for the mission” of managing the pandemic.

Mr Morrison’s admission comes in a speech to an international forum in South Korea, where he has been mingling with other leaders, including former US vice-president Mike Pence, former US first lady Michelle Obama and former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad.

The speech to the Asian Leadership Conference in Seoul on Thursday was “given exclusively to The Australian“ ahead of time.