When X owner Elon Musk announced a digital fireside chat on the app with former US president and current Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, at least one EU official promptly went ballistic. 

EU Internal Markets Commissioner Thierry Breton reacted to the online promotion of the exclusive event with a threat – the kind of thing that goes over far better on an official company letterhead (the European Commission’s in this case) than, say, in a whispery, untraceable phone call. 

 

BY Rachel Marsden

Here’s who the EU is really afraid of (and it’s not Trump or Musk)
The biggest risk that Brussels faces after the pair’s fireside chat is that Europeans might start learning some inconvenient truths from each other

 

Serbia should pick BRICS over Brussels, Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin has said in an interview with Russian media.

The largest republic of the former Yugoslavia applied for EU membership in 2009 and has been a candidate since 2012, but the bloc has recently demanded recognition of the breakaway province of Kosovo as a condition for membership.

“BRICS does not ask anything of Serbia and offers more than we could want. The EU asks of us everything, and I’m no longer sure what it has to offer,” Vulin told RIA Novosti on Monday.

Hey, electric cars? It’s obvious that they’ve come into their own now that Tesla’s Elon Musk has once again been granted his (no, this is not a misprint!) $44.9 billion pay package by that company’s shareholders after a Delaware judge all too unreasonably tossed it out last year.

 

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - Ukraine's offensive in Russia's Kursk region will do nothing to achieve peace in the ongoing conflict, US Congressman Paul Gosar said in a statement to Sputnik on Tuesday.

“Ukraine’s suicidal cross border incursion will do nothing to end the horrible war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers," Gosar said. "I once again call for peace."

On Monday, White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby said that the United States continued to have discussions with Ukraine about its military operation in the Kursk region but had no further updates.

The newspaper, one America’s top dailies by readership and respectability among the political establishment, has been criticized relentlessly by libertarians, Trump-brand conservatives and independents for its biased and selective coverage, and the fact that it’s owned by major US government and military contractor Jeff Bezos.

Washington Post White House reporter Cleve Wootson Jr. is taking flak from conservatives, media impartiality and free speech activists after a controversial exchange with WH press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre apparently urging the federal government to “stop” the spread of “misinformation” relating to the 2024 campaign and beyond.

 

Zainab al-Jaabari, 79, sits a few dozen meters in front of the scene of the massacre. She is waiting for her family members to return from checking for her seven sons and grandchildren, who were in the prayer hall praying Fajr at the time it took place.

Her family members arrived to see the reality of the massacre with their own eyes: more than a hundred people were killed, and their bodies were now scattered and mixed in the prayer hall in the Daraj neighborhood in Gaza City. It is possible their delay in returning now is due to their horror at what they found, or perhaps because they can’t imagine how to tell Zainab that her seven sons and grandchildren have been killed.

 

When the former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, recently claimed that Australia was losing its “strategic autonomy” and turning into “the 51st State of the United States”, the current Prime Minister froze in the headlights.

Possibly caught before his staff could give him a few dot points, Albanese said “Paul was a great Prime Minister – that ended in 1996. Paul has views. They’re well know. The world has changed between 1996 and 2024. My government is doing what we need to do today, and everyone will get a go here.”

 

A timid PM, frozen in the glare of the Keating headlights    By Paddy Gourley

 

Minnesota’s collapse of K-12 education achievement since Tim Walz’ election as governor is well documented. (1) Once known for its relatively high educational performance, Minnesota’s shocking decline substantially exceeds the decline of the nation as a whole. (2)

Why is this happening? Governor Walz has dramatically transformed the purpose of education in Minnesota. Academic achievement is no longer the primary goal. Instead, Walz’s education focus is transforming the students’ values, attitudes, and beliefs into the woke worldview. This indoctrination is called “culturally relevant” teaching and is woven throughout the Walz education program. Social emotional learning and restorative justice are just two examples of how this “culturally relevant” teaching has been embedded into Minnesota’s K-12 curriculum.

 

In this recent, revealing interview into the mindset of the British and Irish security services, Assistant Irish Police Commissioner Michael McElgunn, who fronts Ireland’s Intelligence and Security Bureau, unequivocally states that Ireland’s main security danger comes from Russia. In citing China, ISIS-K, social media, the so-called far left and the so-called far right as the other top priority threats, McElgunn’s interview gives us a good template to identify the main threats NATO faces on its home front.

 

Ireland’s keystone cops are hot on the heels of Russian spymaster Vladimir Putin

BY Declan HAYES

 

'Heinous': Children Among 100 Killed by Israel Bombing of Gaza School Just Hours After US Weapons Approval
"It is hard to comprehend how the Biden administration can justify rewarding Israel with new weapons, despite Israel's persistent defiance of every single plea the Biden administration has made urging a modicum of restraint."

 

BY JON QUEALLY

 

Bill Shorten all but confirms to Q+A the federal government will reject calls from some in his party for a total ban on gambling advertising.

Ads during kids' TV will be targeted but Mr Shorten says media companies need gambling revenue in a battle with social media giants.

Economic and financial sanctions often backfire. The most notable example is the weaponization of the dollar against Russia. The measure has sparked a global movement to de-dollarize, the opposite of the punitive move’s strategic intent.

The historic miscalculation didn’t stop US Senator Marco Rubio of Florida from introducing a bill in Congress to punish countries that de-dollarize. The bill seeks to ban financial institutions facilitating de-dollarization from the global dollar system.

 

De-dollarization the path to global financial freedom

 

By JAN KRIKKE

 

On Monday (August 5) a US federal judge ruled Google has violated antitrust laws, saying the organization

is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.

Google disputes the ruling. Its president of global affairs, Kent Walker, said: “this decision recognises that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available.”

 

Google is an ‘illegal’ monopoly – and the internet will never be the same

 

By ZENA ASSAAD

 

Gathering in New York in September 2024, the world’s nations will be challenged to ‘end the scourge of war’, before it’s too late. All of them know that a nuclear cataclysm has never been so close.

The United States’ veto in the Security Council and its military colossus imperil the world’s nations, solely for the sake of perpetuating US global hegemony. In America, which regards itself as ‘exceptional’ and ‘indispensable’, whoever wins the coming presidential election, is unlikely to change entrenched US hostility to Iran and China. Neither Trump nor Harris is likely to head off war, regardless of its terrible cost.

 

AMERICAN POLITICS ARE A DISTRACTION DESIGNED TO MAKE PEOPLE THINK ABOUT CHOICE WHEN THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE IN THE PROPELLANT: THE DEEP STATE AND THE PENTAGON TELL THE WHITE HOUSE WHAT TO DO. WHEN PRESIDENTS DO NOT FOLLOW THE SCRIPT THEY ARE REMOVED BY WHATEVER TRICKS. FOR DONALD TRUMP, THE LOOSE CANNON, IT HAS BEEN A LITANY OF EXHAUSTING COURT CASES, TWO IMPEACHMENT ATTEMPTS, PLUS AN ASSASSINATION THAT FAILED BY half an inch.