The United States' diplomatic initiative to issue a joint statement condemning Iran on its "Attack on the State of Israel" has ended in fiasco, as there were hardly any takers for it from outside of the western bloc of nations.

This is a crushing blow to American self-esteem. The unkindest cut of all is that Turkey, an important NATO power and a West Asian powerhouse, whom President Biden is personally wooing lately, refused to sign up on the joint statement.

The 8 defectors from the Global Majority who complied with the US diktat are two mavericks each from Latin America and the Eurasian region, South Korea and three Pacific island nations.

The entire Africa, West Asia, Central Asia, South Asia and the ASEAN region refused to associate with the US initiative! Of course, not a single Muslim country would touch the joint statement with a barge pole.

This tells a humiliating story of US isolation in the UN. The international community understands fully well the hypocrisy and the notorious doublespeak that characterises American diplomacy. In the emerging multipolar world, this awareness will inevitably translate as the propensity of the Global Majority to cherrypick.

The bottom line is that Iran did not attack Israel. Iran instead retaliated to a blatant attack by Israel against its sovereignty in violation of international law and the UN Charter, which was tantamount to an act of war.

More important, Iran's retaliation was restricted to Israeli military targets that were involved in the Damascus attack on April 1 and was patently aimed at demonstrating its deterrent capability in future to discourage Israel from climbing the escalation ladder any further — and, all this while taking care to avoid civilian casualties.

US President Joe Biden has claimed that an uncle of his who went missing in the Pacific during the Second World War was eaten by cannibals.

Second Lieutenant Ambrose Finnegan of the US Army Air Forces was declared missing in May 1944, after his light bomber crashed in the sea.

"He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals at the time," Biden told reporters on the campaign trail outside Air Force One in Scranton, Pennsylvania. "They never recovered his body, but the government went back when I went down there and they checked and found some parts of the plane."

Several hours later, at a meeting with United Steelworkers union members in Pittsburgh, Biden told the same story.

"He got shot down in New Guinea and they never found the body because there used to be - there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea," the 81-year-old Democrat said.

According to the Pentagon's agency for prisoners of war and missing in action (POW-MIA), Finnegan was never shot down, however. Nor was it on a reconnaissance mission, as Biden claimed.

Kiev wants security guarantees from its Western backers similar to the level of protection that the US provides Israel, President Vladimir Zelensky's chief of staff, Andrey Yermak, said on Wednesday.

The Ukrainian government is negotiating a series of treaties intended to seal the country's pro-Western alignment until it is granted full NATO membership. Officials in Kiev say the deals will secure long-term military assistance from the US and its allies, regardless of political changes that might otherwise prompt donors to cut the aid.

"An agreement between the US and Ukraine must work no worse than the American memorandum with Israel, the effectiveness of which was confirmed by joint actions of the allies during the deflection of the mass attack on Israel by Iran," Yermak wrote on social media.

A defeat for Washington and its NATO partners in Ukraine would be a political disaster for the Western powers. Hence they are getting desperate.

Last week the British media (Telegraph and Guardian) reported allegations that Russia was using chemical weapons against Ukrainian troops and, as if that was not bad enough, the Russian military was also endangering the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe.

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou discusses these reports and concludes that the incidents are false-flag operations orchestrated by Western sponsors of the Ukrainian regime. Kiriakou says it is the CIA that has a notorious track record of engaging in dirty tricks when its operations are going badly.

Some definitions:

• An "account holder" is you, your IRA, your pension plan, your stock and bond investments held at an "account provider" or "intermediary" or "depository institution" such as Merrill Lynch, Schwab, Wells Fargo.
• An "entitlement holder" is the definition of you whose ownership claim to your financial assets has been subordinated to the claims of "secured creditors" of the institution where you have your accounts.

Please do understand that the dispossession of which I write is your dispossession.

Klaus Schwab tells us that in the Great Reset that the World Economic Forum is preparing for us "you will own nothing and you will be happy." Well, we already own nothing. Our bank deposits and stocks and bonds, in the event the depository institution gets into trouble, belong to the depository institution's creditors, not to us. All assets are pooled and serve as collateral whether or not labeled "segregated."

You might remember that during the last financial crisis we were told that there would be no more bail-outs, that in the future there would be bail-ins. A bail-out is when central bank money creation rescues the favored troubled financial institutions. A bail-in is when the depositors' assets are used for the rescues.

Was Tehran's 'symbolic' attack on the Jewish state a victory or a defeat for the future?

The night of April 13-14 was another round of 'shock therapy' for the world as Iran launched a direct attack on Israeli territory. This followed an unjustified strike by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, which resulted in the deaths of 11 diplomats and two high-ranking generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Initially, Israel denied responsibility, but later indirectly admitted to targeting the building under the belief that it served as a military base coordinating Hamas operations. This act clearly violated the Vienna Conventions of 1961 and 1963, which protect diplomatic missions. Typically, such an infringement would lead to the severance of diplomatic ties, but since Iran and Israel have had no such relations and have been on the brink of conflict for decades, Israel's abrupt move can be interpreted as a declaration of war. Faced with this provocation, Iran was put in a very tight spot and felt compelled to act.

Almost two weeks of suspense followed as the world waited for Iran's response, which seemed logically inevitable. Pundits and analysts mostly considered two obvious options that Iran could use: either give a mirror response and hit Israeli territory or one of its diplomatic offices in the region, or use its proxy forces, which are as much of a problem for Israel as Iran itself. But Tehran decided to take a third course, both launching a direct attack and using its allies in the region. This attack made history as it was Iran's first direct assault on Israel. Among other things, it was the most massive drone attack on record, estimated to have involved more than 200 UAVs, as well as 150 cruise missiles, 110 Shahab-3, Sajil-2 and Kheibar surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, and seven Fattah-2 hypersonic cruise missiles. The strikes were launched from multiple locations including Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and the part of Yemen controlled by the Ansar Allah Houthi group.

Since October 7, 2023 it would appear a spontaneous chain of events is leading the Middle East deeper and deeper into conflict. From Israel's ongoing military operations in Gaza to its strikes on Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and repeated strikes across Syria (including the recent strike on Iran's embassy in Damascus), to the ongoing US-led confrontation with Yemen in the Red Sea, it would appear that poor diplomacy is failing to prevent escalation and is instead leading to mounting tensions and a growing potential for wider war.

In reality, almost verbatim, US-Israeli diplomacy (or lack thereof) and military operations are following a carefully laid out policy described in the pages of the Brooking Institution's 2009 paper, "Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran."

Washington's Middle East Playbook

The Brookings Institution is a Washington-based think tank funded by both the US government and military, as well as the largest corporate-financier interests across the collective West. Its board of directors and experts are among the most prominent figures in US foreign policy and political circles. What is produced in the institution's papers is far from speculation or commentary, but instead reflects a consensus regarding the direction of US foreign policy.

We can already see that modern states are facing such serious challenges that foreign policy is being subordinated to domestic considerations everywhere. This is true of Western countries, Russia, China, India, and everyone else. Indeed, it highlights what existing academic theories are unable to understand simply because of their methodology.

One of the curious effects of the two world wars of the last century, and in particular of the emergence of incredibly power weapons in the possession of several powers - the mass use of which could lead to the cessation of sentient life on the planet - has been to increase the importance of the foreign policy activities of states in the broad sense. The horror that a military catastrophe would be universal and irreversible in its consequences, which gradually became apparent and finally became firmly rooted in the minds of people, has firmly placed questions of international stability among the first priorities for the public.

In addition, industrial-scale warfare and economic globalization have contributed to the growing importance of issues directly related to external factors. The latter has, to a certain extent, linked the development and even the very existence of any given state to the tasks it undertakes in the international arena. This has especially been true for medium-sized and small countries for which the waters of the modern world are too shark-infested to offer the possibility of a fully independent existence. But even in the case of the great powers, foreign policy issues have become so important over the past century that they are almost on a par with domestic concerns.

The GOP members of the House want to hold Biden's Homeland Security Secretary account for border crisis

House Republicans walked over their impeachment articles against Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate on Tuesday in a dramatic show of disapproval for the Homeland Security secretary.

The handover immediately triggers a constitutional process that will force the Senate to decide the fate of the embattled border chief.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., with a slight smirk on her face, walked alongside Homeland Chair Mark Green, R-Tenn., and nine other Republican impeachment managers during the short ceremonial march to the Senate.

Mayorkas is the first Cabinet secretary in nearly 150 years to be impeached. Republicans voted to oust him from his position in February for facilitating the southern border crisis.

It was a little past midnight on Friday, and Israel's Supreme Command Post was racing to complete as many strikes as possible in the final hours before a cease-fire with the Palestinian militant group Hamas was to take effect at 2 a.m.

On a wall covered with huge screens, a three-dimensional diagram of a high-rise building with one of its apartments marked in red popped up. On another screen, a live video from the air circled above a building in Gaza that looked a lot like the one in the diagram.

This room is the nerve center of a bunker dubbed the "Fortress of Zion," a new Israeli Army command post deep underground beneath its headquarters in the heart of Tel Aviv. It is designed to command the kind of high-tech air wars that have supplanted ground invasions fought by tanks and infantry battalions.