Raisi's visit to Beijing, the first for an Iranian president in 20 years, represents Tehran's wholesale 'Pivot to the East' and China's recognition of Iran's centrality to its BRI plans.
The visit of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to Beijing and his face-to- face meeting with counterpart Xi Jinping is a groundbreaking affair in more ways than one.

Raisi, the first Iranian president to officially visit China in 20 years, led an ultra high-level political and economic delegation, which included the new Central Bank governor and the Ministers of Economy, Oil, Foreign Affairs, and Trade.

The fact that Raisi and Xi jointly supervised the signing of 20 bilateral cooperation agreements ranging from agriculture, trade, tourism and environmental protection to health, disaster relief, culture and sports, is not even the major take away.

This week's ceremonial sealing of the Iran-China comprehensive strategic partnership marks a key evolution in the multipolarity sphere: two Sovereigns - both also linked by strategic partnerships with Russia - imprinting to their domestic audiences and also to the Global South their vision of a more equitable, fair and sustainable 21st century which completely bypasses western dictates.

Beijing and Tehran first established their comprehensive strategic partnership when Xi visited Iran in 2016 - only one year after the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or Iranian nuclear deal.

In 2021, Beijing and Tehran signed a 25-year cooperation deal which translated the comprehensive partnership into practical economic and cultural developments in several fields, especially energy, trade and infrastructure. By then, not only Iran (for decades) but also China were being targeted by unilateral US sanctions.

Here is a relatively independent analysis of the challenges and prospects of the 25-year deal. And here is an enlightening perspective from neighboring Pakistan, also a strategic partner of China.

The collective West, increasingly becoming more directly involved in the conflict in Ukraine, has been vague about the objectives of its participation in the war and has repeatedly contradicted itself on the nature and number of weapons to be sent to Ukraine. From another standpoint, however, it has maintained clarity and constancy over time: the total dedication to a neoliberal project for a Ukraine open to Western corporations in which workers have no guardianship or protection.

King Charles III on Thursday encountered a group of anti-monarchy activists while on walkabout in the city of Milton Keynes north of London.

A group of protesters held up distinctive yellow placards with the message "Not my king", joining a crowd waving Union Jack flags.

The demonstration was organised by "Republic", a group calling for an end to the monarchy and an elected head of state in Britain.

Local newspaper the Milton Keynes Citizen reported that Charles "ignored the small banner-waving group" of 20 or so protesters.

The Spanish students were protesting against Israeli crimes while the Israeli Ambassador, accompanied by her security detail, was giving a lecture at a university in Madrid.

A guard wielded his gun on a university campus in Spain's capital Madrid on Friday at students protesting against the crimes of the Israeli occupation.

Dozens of Spanish students held protests at Complutense University where the Israeli Ambassador to Spain, Rodica Radian-Gordon, was giving a lecture in one of its halls.

China's foreign ministry says the US has flown balloons into its airspace more than 10 times in the past year.

It comes after the US on 4 February shot down a suspected spy balloon over its airspace - which China said was one of its weather balloons gone astray.

Relations between the two countries have since deteriorated. In recent days, the US has also shot down a number of other unidentified objects.

Questioned on Monday, Beijing said the US had made many airspace breaches.

"It's not uncommon as well for the US to illegally enter the airspace of other countries," said foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin at a regular press briefing.

A top Russian Defense Ministry official has been found dead after apparently falling from a high-rise apartment building in St. Petersburg, the latest death of a senior official.

Marina Yankina, 58, was the head of finance and procurement of the Russian Defense Ministry's Western Military District. The report of her death on February 16 comes just days after Major General Vladimir Makarov -- who was recently fired by Russian President Vladimir Putin -- was found dead in a suspected suicide outside of Moscow.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has awarded one of the country's combat units an "honorary title" that harkens to a notorious Wehrmacht division that was involved in numerous war crimes during World War II.

In a presidential decree published on Tuesday, Zelensky granted the name 'Edelweiss' to the 10th Separate Mountain Assault Brigade due to "exemplary performance of assigned tasks during the protection of the territorial integrity and independence of Ukraine" amid Kiev's conflict with Moscow.

The newly bestowed title bears similarity to the one used by Nazi Germany's 1st Mountain Division, which took part in the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and raised a swastika flag on Mount Elbrus in a propaganda stunt during an advance into the Caucasus in 1942. The name 'Edelweiss' stuck because the chevrons on the unit's uniform bore a depiction of the edelweiss flower.

The Latvian government is pouring hundreds of thousands of euros into a feature film about a Waffen-SS unit called the Latvian Legion and one of its Nazi-decorated officers.

The move has led to a furious reaction from Moscow where the Foreign Ministry claimed, this week, that it betrayed the Baltic nation's issues with historical memory.

The film titled 'Neredzamais Cietoksnis' (The Invisible Fortress) has been in the works for a couple of years now. The Latvian Culture ministry decided last month that the project qualified for its program to support cultural heritage projects and allocated €300,000 ($320,000) from the scheme's €1.4 million budget, the television program 'De Facto' reported on Sunday.

The movie will be about Ernests Laumanis, a Latvian-born Nazi officer. He volunteered after Germany invaded during World War II, rose through the ranks to major, and served as commander of a recon unit in the Latvian Legion, a Waffen SS force composed of ethnic Latvians. He was awarded several decorations for his service, including two grades of the Iron Cross.

Since the beginning of Russia's military offensive, almost one year ago, Ukraine has received tens of billions of dollars from the West. These funds are directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, including civilians in the east of Ukraine. Primarily focused on their own interests, the US and its allies are full aware that the war would have ended long ago, without their largesse.

Billions spent on murder

The process of pumping Ukraine with money and weapons didn't begin in 2022. It started eight years earlier, in the wake of the Maidan coup in Kiev. According to Transparency International, in the period from 2014 to 2017, the US alone provided Ukraine with $658 million in technical assistance. By March 2022, US military assistance to Ukraine had topped $2 billion.

Prior to Russia's military offensive, arms supplies to Kiev were falsely labeled as 'defensive' and 'non-lethal'. In 2016, for example, Lithuania gave Ukraine about 150 tons of ammunition (mainly 5.45 × 39 mm cartridges), 60 KPV, and 86 DShK heavy machine guns. In 2017, Vilnius supplied weapons worth 2 million euros: 7,000 Kalashnikov rifles with cartridges, 80 machine guns, several dozen mortars and anti-tank guns. Since 2018, the United States has been supplying Ukraine with Javelin AAWS-M missiles.

The West is attempting to use the Ukraine conflict to portray Russia as a "rogue state" in the eyes of the world, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday. He stressed that the strategy has not been successful.

Speaking to the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, Lavrov said:

"The US and its satellite states are waging an all-encompassing hybrid war that they have long been preparing for, and are using Ukrainian radical nationalists as a battering ram against us.

"They are not even trying to hide the goal of this war: it is not only to defeat our country on the battlefield and destroy our economy, but also to surround us with a 'sanitary cordon' and turn us into a type of a rogue state."