Brazil is against weapons deliveries to either party in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira has said. The diplomat also predicted that peace would eventually be achieved with the help of nations which have not taken sides, such as Brazil and African countries.

In an interview with Russia's RIA Novosti published on Monday, Vieira stressed that Brasilia has consistently voiced its opposition to arms shipments to Kiev and Moscow.

According to the diplomat, "several countries are ready to join" Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's peace efforts. The minister cited the initiatives recently put forward by a group of African nations.

"This will take time, but it's precisely this that will lead to peace which we are striving for," Vieira insisted.

While on an official visit to Rome last month, President Lula argued that Russia and Ukraine both need to compromise to end the conflict. "The two parties both need to get something. Only the Russians and the Ukrainians know what they need to reach peace," he said at the time.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed retaliation for a new overnight strike on the Crimean Bridge, targeted by two Ukrainian naval drones. Precise measures are currently being weighed up by the country's Defense Ministry, he said, during an extraordinary meeting with senior officials on Monday.

"The incident is a yet another terrorist attack by the Kiev regime. This crime is pointless from the military point of view, since the Crimean Bridge has long not been used for military transport, and brutal, since only innocent civilians were killed and injured," the president stressed.

Putin said Moscow would retaliate harshly for the attack. The Russian Defense Ministry is already preparing "necessary proposals" for such measures, he added.

The Nato summit in Lithuania this week served only to underscore the utter hypocrisy of western leaders in pursuing their proxy war in Ukraine to "weaken" Russia and oust its president, Vladimir Putin.

Both the US and Germany had made clear before the summit that they would block Ukraine's admission to Nato while it was in the midst of a war with Russia. That message was formally announced by Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Tuesday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky fumed that Nato had reached an "absurd" decision and was demonstrating "weakness". British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace lost no time in rebuking him for a lack of "gratitude".

The concern is that, if Kyiv joins the military alliance at this stage, Nato members will be required to leap to Ukraine's defence and fight Russia directly. Most western states balk at the notion of a face-to-face confrontation with a nuclear-armed Russia - rather than the current proxy one, paid for exclusively in Ukrainian blood.

But there is a more duplicitous subtext being obscured: the fact that Nato is responsible for sustaining the war it now cites as grounds for disqualifying Ukraine from joining the military alliance. Nato got Kyiv into its current, bloody mess - but isn't ready to help it find a way out.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid has reportedly warned that his country's relations with the US have deteriorated so much under the leadership of his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, that Washington is "no longer our closest ally."

Lapid made the comments on Monday at a faction meeting of his Yesh Atid opposition party, according to the Times of Israel. He argued that Netanyahu's government is destroying the alliance with the US by trying to pass controversial judicial reforms.

"The Israeli government is leading us into this crisis, making the biggest and most dramatic changes to the regime in our history, without holding a single discussion - not even one - about the economic, security, social and political consequences of the move," Lapid said. In a Channel 12 news interview, he argued that the nation is being "torn in two."

Millions of US military emails have been mistakenly sent to Mali, a Russian ally, because of a minor typing error.

Emails intended for the US military's ".mil" domain have, for years, been sent to the west African country which ends with the ".ml" suffix.

Some of the emails reportedly contained sensitive information such as passwords, medical records and the itineraries of top officers.

The Pentagon said it had taken steps to address the issue.

According to the Financial Times, which first reported the story, Dutch internet entrepreneur Johannes Zuurbier identified the problem more than 10 years ago.

Russia continues to be ready for a free substitution of the Ukrainian grain for needy countries after the exit from the Black Sea Grain Initiative, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

"Certainly," Peskov said. "Russia definitely maintains its position in this regard," he stressed.

Grain supplies from Russia to Africa will be discussed at a summit in late July, Peskov noted.

"We are interacting with our African partners. These communications will continue at the summit in St. Petersburg, we are preparing and waiting for them," Peskov said, speaking about Russian grain supplies to needy countries after the exit from the grain deal.

German MP Christine Anderson last week shredded the World Health Organization, calling it a group of "globalitarian misanthropists" who she - and a group of seven other MPs, have vowed to dismantle in order to oppose the WHO supplanting democratically elected governments.

"An unelected body like who is controlled and run by multi-billionaires should never be allowed to act in place of a democratically elected government," she said during the Citizen's Initiative conference in Brussels.

Anderson says she'll expose and name any individuals, including government officials and parliamentarians, who support the WHO 'power grab' and disrespect democracy.

"I don't think they interviewed the president's son, who's a known cocaine addict."

Following the announcement that the Secret Service has shut down the investigation into the cocaine found inside the White House without finding a culprit, Senator Tom Cotton said Sunday that they didn't even talk to Hunter Biden about the matter.

"We've got no answers," Cotton said during an interview with Fox News, adding "That's not surprising. The Secret Service is a troubled agency as it's long had challenges. It probably needs new leadership."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was rushed to a hospital on Saturday, but was in "good condition" as he underwent a medical evaluation, his office said.

The Israeli leader's office said he was being treated at Israel's Sheba Hospital, near the coastal city of Tel Aviv, but gave no further details.

Walla, a leading Israeli news site, quoted an unnamed official close to Netanyahu as saying he had fainted at home but was fully conscious at the hospital. Haaretz, another news site, quoted hospital officials as saying Netanyahu was conscious and walking on his own. The reports could not immediately be confirmed.

It's another stunning sunset in the western edge of the Sicilian coast, and I'm right in front of the Real Duomo in Erice, the pluri-millenary "Mount", sung by Virgil in the Aeneid as "close to the stars", and founded by the mythical homonymous son of Venus and Bute who became King of the Elimi, an ancient tribe that settled in these lands.

Welcome to a realm of gods and demi-gods, heroes and nymphs, saints and hermits, Faith and Art, who still survives as a practically intact, magnificent medieval village.

Following century after century of splendor, misery and wars, it's enlightening to remember how Thucydides recalled "Trojans in flight" arriving with their ships in Sicily and then interacting with the Sicani and the Elimi, "while their cities carried the names of Erice and Segesta".

And then, much later, Thucydides tells us, the Segestans took ambassadors from Athens to the temple of Aphrodite in Erice: that's where all the cool cats of the time used to hang out.

From the apartment of Roger II, King of Normandy in Cefalu in the late 11th century, to creeks and coves scratching the shores of the deep blue Mar Tirreno; from Venus worshipped in Erice to Venus worshipped in Segesta, it was in these realms drenched in History and Mythology that I happened to follow, from a safe distance, a rather prosaic, provincial manifestation of post-modernity: a clown show in Vilnius advertised as the NATO summit.

Imagine an epigone of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek historian from the early 1st century tracking the arrival of Aeneas and the Trojans to Sicily and pointing that the Venus altar at the Erice heights was erected by Aeneas himself to honor his mother, reacting to the "ceremonial" staged by a bunch of North Atlantic upstarts, led by a declining superpower which qualifies crossroads-of-the-world Sicily as a mere AMGOT: "American Government Occupied Territory".

Well, you don't need to be Seneca, in first century Rome, to observe that Sicily, like nowhere else in the world, embodies so many perfect archetypes of Beauty that it all seems superhuman.

So it was impossible not to see the NATO clown show for what it was: a tawdry, trashy crypto-Aristophanes rip-off - and deprived from the slightest trace of self-deprecating humor.