Emmanuel Macron announced an increase in military spending on Wednesday evening, specifying that it would not be financed by tax increases and by preparing the French for further budget cuts. Mobilizing savings is reportedly under consideration. For its part, the left is arguing, on the contrary, for the wealthiest to contribute.

Financing Future Military Spending: A New Political Confrontation Ahead

Trump wants US ownership of Ukraine’s energy facilities – White House
The president has told Vladimir Zelensky it would be the best way to protect the country’s power plants

US President Donald Trump has proposed an American takeover of Ukrainian power plants, suggesting it would be the best way to protect the infrastructure, the White House has revealed.

The idea was floated by Trump during a phone conversation with Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky on Wednesday, described by the US president as a “very good” call.

Ukraine updates: Zelenskyy agrees to 'partial ceasefire'

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy says he is open to a "partial ceasefire" after a "frank" call with US President Trump, who suggested the United States take over Ukrainian power plants as a security guarantee. DW has more.

Ukrainian frontline troops suspicious of Trump and Putin's proposals

Matt Ford with AFP

At one stage the mining billionaire accidentally referred to his new political party, the Trumpet of Patriots, as the ‘Trumpet of Parrots’. Well, if the shoe fits …

Billed as news that could ‘break the Guardian’s website’, it turned out to be Clive Palmer’s best shot at Trump lite

BY Dan Jervis-Bardy

“It will break the Guardian’s website.”

Let’s restore the trust in China that we once enjoyed. This was the key message I presented to an online forum titled Does China Threaten Australia’s Peace and Security hosted by the Australian Peace and Security Forum on 18 March. Following is a condensed version of my talk.

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.