Laos - a landlocked communist state in Southeast Asia, wedged between China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar - has the potential to be a nexus of sorts for the entire region. However, its cooperation with Beijing has come under fire from the West.

The impoverished nation holds the unenviable distinction of "the most bombed country in history" after the US dropped over 2 million tons of bombs on it during the Vietnam War. Laos is still weathering the consequences, including deaths from unexploded munitions. Faced with numerous challenges, it has leaned on its giant northern neighbor for assistance.

In recent years, Laos has benefited considerably from China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In late 2021, the China-Laos railway was built, a high-speed system connecting the country's capital to Beijing. This has been a gamechanger for its foreign trade and exports. Сurrently, a new superhighway is also being built across the country. Last week, however, an article from Reuters attracted widespread disdain on social media as it sought to frame China's development in the country as risking a "new pandemic." It was titled 'China, birthplace of the covid pandemic, is laying tracks for another global health crisis.'

The article argued that Laos is home to a bat population that carries "novel coronaviruses," the same source which allegedly gave rise to Covid-19. By building a highway through the country's tropical forests, the argument goes, humans will be brought into closer contact with bats, thus destroying their environment and risking a new pandemic. This textbook example of an over-the-top 'China bad' story exaggerates and fixates on the speculated negative consequences of Beijing's activities, never providing the full picture. It is never touched on, for example, how up to 50 people a year in Laos continue to die from undetonated US bombs dropped on the country during the Vietnam war.

Former deputy national security adviser under former President Donald Trump, K. T. McFarland, joined Maria Bartiromo's Wall Street on Friday to discuss the Durham Report and others.

In a stunning allegation, McFarland said that the FBI, Justice Department, and CIA are planning to rig the upcoming 2024 U.S. presidential election.

According to McFarland, these intelligence agencies, having succeeded in rigging the 2016 and 2020 elections, aim to prevent Donald Trump from winning.

"We now have black-and-white evidence that the FBI interfered in the 2016 election. When they failed to elect Hillary Clinton, they set out to destroy the Trump administration," said McFarland.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies amplify upon a full-page ad in The New York Times on Tuesday calling the war an "unmitigated disaster" and urging Biden and U.S. Congress to help bring it speedily to an end.

On May 16, 2023, The New York Times published a full-page advertisement signed by 15 U.S. national security experts about the war in Ukraine. It was headed "The U.S. Should Be a Force for Peace in the World," and was drafted by the Eisenhower Media Network.

While condemning Russia's invasion, the statement provides a more objective account of the crisis in Ukraine than the U.S. government or The New York Times has previously presented to the public, including the disastrous U.S. role in NATO expansion, the warnings ignored by successive U.S. administrations, and the escalating tensions that ultimately led to war.

Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev arrived in the Saudi capital Riyadh on 23 May for talks with his counterpart in the kingdom Prince Abdulaziz bin Saud, according to the Saudi Press Agency (SPA).

"During the session, they discussed ways to enhance security cooperation paths between the two countries' ministries of interior, in addition to discussing a number of issues of common interest," a report by SPA reads.

The meeting was attended by several other interior ministry authorities from the kingdom, as well as Russian Ambassador Sergey Kozlov.

Kolokoltsev's warm welcome to Riyadh comes despite a slew of sanctions issued against him by the US, Australia, Canada, the EU, Japan, New Zealand, and the UK. In 2022, Washington refused to grant him a visa to participate in a UN chiefs of police summit.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Defence wrote a devastating takedown of the Proximal Origin study, which was used by Dr. Anthony Fauci as proof that the COVID-19 virus had come from nature. The Epoch Times has the story.

The takedown, dated May 26th 2020, was written in the form of a working paper called 'Critical analysis of Andersen et al. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2'. It was authored by Commander Jean-Paul Chretien, a Navy doctor working at the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Dr. Robert Cutlip, a research scientist at the Defence Intelligence Agency. The paper came to light on May 15th 2023, when it was leaked to the public via virus origins search group DRASTIC (Decentralised Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19).

The working paper forensically dismantles the natural origin case made in Proximal Origin and concludes, "The arguments that Andersen et al. use to support a natural-origin scenario for SARS-CoV-2 are based not on scientific analysis, but on unwarranted assumptions."

North Carolina Republican Dan Bishop said this week that the Bank of America provided the FBI with private financial information about anyone who was in Washington, D.C., from January 5-7, 2021.

Bishop, a member of the Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, said that the federal government had widely victimized Americans through widespread surveillance, even those not accused of any wrongdoing on January 6.

"Bank of America gave a list to the FBI of anyone who used BofA credit/debit cards in the DC area between Jan 5-7th, 2021 — regardless of whether they participated in the events of Jan. 6th," he said on Twitter.

Are you the type of person who works hard, saves money, and invests with the intent of accumulating lasting wealth?
If so, you've likely noticed that things don't quite add up between what you're regularly told about how the economy and financial markets work and what you actually experience. We think there's more to this than just dollars and cents.

The central feature of economics is prices. How they are determined and how people respond to them. This process establishes how prices adapt to meet the supply and demand pressures of the market.

Through experience, buyers can determine what's a good deal or not. And they adjust their behavior accordingly. Similarly, through testing, sellers determine the optimal price of their products; a price where profit margin is best supported by sales.

For example, when airfares are cheap, a father may spring for long distance plane tickets so his family can vacation somewhere exotic. When plane tickets are expensive, he may opt for a road trip and tent camping at a national park.

Both experiences will create lasting family memories. Prices, nonetheless, are a critical determinant in the decision.

In fact, prices, and how people respond to them, are factored into nearly all free exchanges for fulfilling wants and needs. You may already have an ample supply of socks. But a 'buy one get one free' sale may incentivize you to buy more.

Your old beater car may work just fine. Still, you may want a new car that has all the latest digital integrations.

But how badly do you want it? Bad enough to sign-up for a $1,000 per month car payment? At that price, you'll miss out on a lot of steak dinners.

The point is prices and incentives matter. Moreover, changes in conditions that raise or lower prices, such as interest rates or regulations, will influence behavior.

This is an important insight. And it is one that is not lost on government policy makers. By influencing prices, they can influence behavior.

Our language is in constant evolution. Partly this is bottom up, from the inventiveness of creative personalities or writers for commercial advertising. Partly it is top down, from the powers that be as they seek to manipulate and control the thought processes of the broad public.

My brief essay today addresses the latter phenomenon and the introduction of the word "disinformation" into common parlance. There is a charming freshness to it, unlike the stale and repugnant word "propaganda."

The word "disinformation" has a specific context in time and intent: it is used by the powers that be and by the mainstream media they control to denigrate, marginalize and suppress sources of military, political, economic and other information that might contradict the official government narrative and so dilute the control exercised by those in power over the general population. It is to remove "disinformation" from public life that the United States and EU member states ban RT and other Russian media outlets from the internet, from satellite and cable television channels. The censorship here in Europe varies from country to country and is probably most drastic in France and Germany. One would think that these European states are truly at war with Russia, not just giving a helping hand to Kiev.

In reality, it is these censorious states and the mass media that carry their messages with stenographic precision into print and electronic dissemination who are the ones that day after day feed disinformation to the public. It is cynically composed and consists of a toxic blend of 'spin,' by which is meant misleading interpretation of events, and outright lies.

The many months long battle for the provincial Donbas city of Bakhmut, or Artyomovsk as it is known in Russia, has been described variously from on high in Washington, London and Berlin. When the likely outcome was unclear, the defense of Bakhmut was called heroic and demonstrative of the brave fighting spirit of the Ukrainians.

Casualty figures issued by Kiev and then trumpeted from Washington suggested that the Russians were stupidly throwing away the lives of their fighting men by using WWI style human waves of attackers who were decimated by the defenders. Russian lives are cheap was the message. The fact that Russian artillery on site outnumbered and outperformed Ukrainian artillery by a factor of five or seven to one was freely admitted by the Western propagandists as they pleaded for increased supplies to Kiev. They, nonetheless, issued casualty reports for the Russians that inverted the force correlation. It was assumed, obviously with reason, that the public was too lazy or too uninterested to do the arithmetic.

The Brazilian president said the Ukrainian leader was late for a planned event at the G7 summit in Japan

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has said his Ukrainian counterpart, Vladimir Zelensky, had failed to show up for a scheduled bilateral meeting at the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan.

"I had an interview, a bilateral one with [Zelensky] here in this room at 3:15 pm. We waited and received the information that he was late," the president, who is commonly referred to as Lula, said on Monday, as cited by Reuters.

He added that Zelensky "did not show up" because "clearly he had appointments and he couldn't come."

Austria has maintained informal contact with Russia since the conflict in Ukraine began, Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg said on Monday. While Vienna has backed the EU's sanctions regime thus far, the diplomat insisted that the bloc cannot cut off its "largest geopolitical neighbor."

In an interview with Die Welt, Schallenberg was asked whether Vienna maintains "informal channels of communication with the Russian government." The official replied "yes," adding that "the US administration is doing the same."

"We have a global responsibility," he explained. "Russia has not disappeared from the map. Russia is the EU's largest geographical neighbor and the largest nuclear power on this planet."