Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, trust each other, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said regarding the two leaders’ phone conversation on Tuesday.

During the call, which lasted more than two hours, the two heads of state discussed the resolution of the Ukraine conflict, with Putin responding positively to a 30-day ceasefire proposed earlier by Trump and agreeing to halt attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure as an initial step in that direction. On top of that, the Russian and US presidents reportedly discussed the situation in the Middle East.

Speaking to Russian media on Wednesday, Peskov stated, “I can say with a high degree of confidence that Presidents Putin and Trump understand each other well, trust each other, and intend to proceed step-by-step along the path of normalizing Russian-US relations.”

With Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, the United States has attempted to reshape its global image from a disrupter to a peacemaker. However, this transformation appears to be an illusion masking long-standing hegemonic ambitions.

Germany’s federal parliament, the Bundestag, is voting today on the largest rearmament programme since the Nazi regime. It will provide the future government with around €1 trillion to rearm Germany into a major military power and enable it to wage war.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has rejected the idea of deploying troops in Ukraine, after France and the UK proposed sending peacekeepers to secure an eventual truce between Kiev and Moscow.

Meloni expressed her opposition during an address to the upper house of the Italian parliament on Tuesday, ahead of a European Council meeting in Brussels this week expected to discuss the Ukraine conflict.

France and the UK have been leading efforts to form a “coalition of the willing,” with French President Emmanuel Macron suggesting that “a few thousand troops per country” would be deployed at key locations in Ukraine.

Meloni said the Italian government respected the proposal but was not “convinced” by it.

Former attorney-general George Brandis has rubbished Peter Dutton's proposal to hold a referendum in order to deport criminal dual nationals, labelling it "as mad an idea as I have heard in a long time".

The opposition leader confirmed he would consider holding a national poll to change the constitution if elected at the coming federal election, after the High Court ruled that only judges, not politicians, could strip people of Australian citizenship.

Mr Dutton has previously criticised the government for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the failed Voice referendum during a cost of living crisis, but defended his plan on the basis that the changes required constitutional change.

Matt Taibbi, once a populist writer who criticized big banks (Rolling Stone, 4/5/10; NPR, 11/6/10), has aligned himself with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, the kind of slimy protector of the ruling economic order Taibbi once despised.

Are app messages ‘Commonwealth records’? If so, why do Canberra’s elite routinely delete them via Signal and WhatsApp? Andrew Gardiner reports.

Canberra politicians and bureaucrats could be breaking the very law they supposedly strengthened late last year, by auto-deleting app messages transparency advocates say “must be made publicly available”. 

    by Andrew Gardiner

The US is considering recognizing Crimea as part of Russia and may urge the UN to do the same, American news website Semafor reported on Monday, citing two people familiar with the matter. 

According to Semafor, President Donald Trump has not made any decisions. The discussions about the status of Crimea are in line with a “multitude of options being floated as his administration pushes for an end of the war,” the publication said.

National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes told Semafor that the White House “made no such commitments, and we will not negotiate [a peace] deal through the media.”

“The goal remains the same: stop the killing and find a peaceful resolution to this conflict,” Hughes said.

Only 25 years after the end of the Cold War, the Western-dominated global order is fading and our hopes that liberal democracy would spread and bring world peace are evaporating. 

While the West is increasingly preoccupied with its internal problems, threats to global peace have fundamentally changed: wars among nation-states and their alliances, once the dominant scourge of humankind, have almost disappeared and are replaced by a triple threat from intra-state armed conflicts, the failing of nation-states and the rise of belligerent non-state actors. The global peace we felt within our reach in 1991, is escaping us. 

Michael von der Schulenburg

On Building Peace
Rescuing the Nation-state and Saving the United Nations

Human intellectual abilities such as reasoning and problem-solving are diminishing, possibly due to increased exposure to visual media, the Financial Times (FT) has reported.

Human intelligence appeared to peak in the early 2010s and has been in decline since, the FT added, citing PISA, an international benchmarking test for 15-year-olds that includes reading, mathematics and science, and adult cognitive evaluations.

The reported trend comes amid a rise in artificial intelligence (AI) which, by some estimates, may surpass human IQ in a matter of years.

The recorded spike in the share of high school students who reported difficulties in PISA tests coincides with a broad change in people’s relationship with information, such as the transition away from reading and towards visual content, the publication explained.

BRUSSELS, March 5th. /tass/. The European Commission (EC) estimates the total level of unused savings of EU citizens at €10 trillion, and it intends to find ways to mobilize this money to finance its plans to militarize Europe and support the European military-industrial complex. This is stated in a statement issued by the EC's press service by Maria Luis Albuquerque, European Commissioner for Financial Services and Investments.

"A significant part of Europeans' savings lies in the form of deposits at very low interest rates (from 0.3 to 0.8% per annum) and even in the form of cash reserves. The mobilization of even a small part of these resources will make it possible to change the investment landscape in the EU," the European Commissioner said.

The Albanese Government has jammed itself by trying to not talk about the greatest threat to Australia’s future, but has now opened itself to the charge of playing politics with security issues.

The absurdity was on full display in a front-page story last weekend, when The Saturday Paper reported that the government gave a secret briefing on 9 December last year to a number of Teal and independent members of parliament on the contents of the Office of National Intelligence assessment of climate-related security risks — one which the government has classified and refused to release in a declassified form for two years.

Russia has accused the United Kingdom of engaging in modern-day piracy following former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s call to seize the Russian assets that were frozen in the West as part of Ukraine-related sanctions. 

In a social media post on Sunday, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova likened Sunak’s position to historical acts of piracy. 

“This is one of the English traditions, like tea drinking and horse racing. The fact is that piracy was legalized in England. Pirates were forbidden to attack English ships but were allowed to plunder rival vessels,”Zakharova wrote on Telegram. 

Zakharova’s criticism follows Sunak’s post on X, where he claimed that “Now is the time to seize [the Russian assets] and make Russia pay.” 

Dr Edmund Freud of the European Centre for Political Pathologies recently completed a secret in-depth review of world leaders for the United Nations Security Council.  His reports on President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Keir Starmer are now public, thanks to hackers, believed to be Russian, who have posted the findings on Tik-tok. 

10 Downing Street has dismissed the claims as Russian disinformation but the clinical profiles seem accurate according to sources in Washington, Paris and London who spoke on condition of anonymity. Dr Freud has been uncontactable since the leaks. The Palais de l'Élysée has warned that the Tik-Tok “désinformation scandaleuse” is so serious that the next French Presidential elections may have to be postponed indefinitely in order to preserve democracy.

European militarism on steroids is not good, either
Lacking in any strategic thinking, a new bellicism has swept up the elites and gone into cataclysmic overdrive in recent weeks

U.S. security experts and leaders have been telling European NATO allies to increase their defense spending for at least a quarter century, initially as a gentle nudging, later more insistently, rising to a deafening din after Trump’s election.

BY ALMUT ROCHOWANSKI