It was only a week ago that Donald Trump announced that an announcement would be forthcoming. Teased out for months, with the former president saying that he would "very probably" run again, Trump made good on that promise Tuesday night from his home at Mar-a-Lago.

"In order to make America great and glorious again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for President of the United States," Trump announced.

"I am running because I believe the world has not yet seen the true glory of what this nation can be," he later added. "We have not reached that pinnacle. Believe it or not, in fact, we can go very far. We're gonna have to go far. First, we have to get out of this ditch."

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau deleted a tweet containing false information on mass death sentences in Iran, after a viral campaign on social media circulated the fake news.

Celebrities and users shared a picture on Instagram showing a woman holding an Iranian flag with the caption "Iran sentences 15,000 protesters to death - as a 'hard lesson' for all rebels."

Instagram has since tagged the post as "False Information" and said "Independent fact-checkers say this information has no basis in fact."

Washington is using Ukraine to advance this objective, Nikolay Patrushev says.

The US wants to weaken and destroy Russia, and is using Ukraine as a "battering ram" to achieve that goal, the secretary of Russia's national Security Council has warned.

While Washington declares Russia "a source of instability", it also fosters "anti-Russian alliances, builds up military strength, deploys NATO forces at our border," Nikolay Patrushev said on Tuesday during a government meeting.

U.S. President Joe Biden apparently sought to lower tensions with China this week when he promised Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that Washington was "not seeking a new Cold War" with Beijing.

The two leaders met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Indonesia. It was their first face-to-face meeting since Biden took office in January 2021. While Biden was all smiles for a handshake photo-op, Xi looked noticeably reserved, like a guy who was bracing himself as one about to hear loads of bullshit.

After more than three hours of private discussions, the Americans and Western media subsequently tried to spin that both sides had agreed on condemning Russia's alleged threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. This was the Americans taking license. Xi did not specify Russia, according to the White House readout of the meeting. Both leaders condemned nuclear war and said it should never be fought, a rebuke which applies as much to the United States as anyone else. The Western media, however, tried to spin it as joint condemnation of Russia.

The Chinese side had quite a different take on what was conveyed in the meeting. No wonder that Xi had looked reserved when he greeted Biden earlier.

President Xi was quoted as telling Biden: "A statesman should think about and know where to lead his country. He should also think about and know how to get along with other countries and the wider world... Instead of talking in one way and acting in another, the United States needs to honor its commitments with concrete action."

This was pretty close to the Chinese president calling out his American counterpart as a bare-faced liar who can't be trusted in what he says.

After all, Biden has continued the policy of massively arming China's island province of Taiwan. That is a direct assault on Beijing's sovereignty and China's territorial integrity as well as posing a threat to its national security across the 150-km Taiwan Strait.

Russian oil has stopped flowing to Hungary through the "Druzhba" (Friendship) pipeline transiting Ukraine, the Hungarian oil company MOL confirmed on Tuesday evening.

The official reason given by the Ukrainian side was that a Russian air strike hit a transformer station near the border with Belarus, which supplies electricity to one of the pumping stations, needed for operations.

Ukraine has also informed Russia's Transneft that service was suspended due to a "drop in voltage," according to Igor Demin, a spokesman for the Russian oil giant.

Beijing will cooperate with Moscow to build a multipolar world, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Tuesday, after meeting his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia.

"China is ready to work with Russia and other like-minded countries to promote the development of a multipolar world, firmly support the democratization of international relations, and defend the international system based on the United Nations," he said, according to remarks posted by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Wang's phrasing echoes statements made by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, when they met in Beijing in early February. Putin had also said that he and Xi "hold largely the same views on addressing the world's problems."

The conflict in Ukraine is a hybrid war, in which Russia is essentially facing Western nations, which triggered the crisis in the first place, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. He gave the assessment on Tuesday on the sidelines of the summit of G20 leaders in Indonesia.

The minister, who heads the Russian delegation, said that the US and its allies were pushing to include the Ukraine issue in the final declaration, which participants are set to sign on Wednesday.

"They wanted to add wording that would have condemned the actions of Russia on behalf of the entire G20 club, including Russia itself," Lavrov said. Moscow's delegation believes the issue to be irrelevant to the agenda of the gathering, but suggested reflecting the difference of opinion about it, he added.

A Resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly urging Moscow to compensate losses inflicted on Ukraine, aims to enshrine the theft of Russian funds blocked by the West, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday.

Peskov said that "organizers of this process are trying to complete the plundering of our gold and foreign currency reserves," which he said were illegally frozen by Western countries over the Ukraine conflict.

"This is a formalization of this plundering under the guise of the United Nations," he reiterated, adding that "Russia is categorically opposed to this."

The official also reminded reporters that the resolution "is not legally binding... This is the way we are going to regard it," he stated.

Southeast Asia is right at the center of international relations for a whole week viz a viz three consecutive summits: Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Phnom Penh, the Group of Twenty (G20) summit in Bali, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Bangkok.

Eighteen nations accounting for roughly half of the global economy represented at the first in-person ASEAN summit since the Covid-19 pandemic in Cambodia: the ASEAN 10, Japan, South Korea, China, India, US, Russia, Australia, and New Zealand.

With characteristic Asian politeness, the summit chair, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen (or "Colombian", according to the so-called "leader of the free world"), said the plenary meeting was somewhat heated, but the atmosphere was not tense: "Leaders talked in a mature way, no one left."

It was up to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to express what was really significant at the end of the summit.

No, she's not simply an idiot. Nor do the Hansiatic elites consider us to be so stupid. The nuclear dystopia or frozen future we may all soon experience is all about economics. So, they have us over a barrel, so to speak. Since they control the distribution of energy, which is the only true measure of success or failure nowadays. Ukraine, climate change, the green movement, freedom of this or that all boil down to profit, as I am sure you already know. Unfortunately for us, the last battle for a Btu or megawatt will be fought by us, for them.

A recent POLITICO report reveals just how little the European Union's leadership knows about the energy market. It also shows us how western leadership rests on pure acting ability and shamelessness. Take the unelected EU President Ursula von der Leyen. She's the best example of a shameless string puppet lying to citizens. Anyone who has watched the video segment where she's showing people how to wash their hands to save water/energy knows she's willing to stoop to any level.

The POLITICO story "The Russian gas habit Europe can't quit: LNG" brings to light that the EU is trying to replace Nordstream gas by any and every means possible. In this case, via the Russian energy firm Novatek, which operates the Yamal LNG terminal in northwestern Siberia. The story bends and twists with the same old "Putin energy blackmail" rhetoric but finally gets to France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Belgium importing Russian LNG as fast as they can.

Finally, most people realize the Russians are not blackmailing anyone. And new proof emerging that the UK and the US blew up Nordstream shows the real blackmailers. This is not the point, however. The energy reality we face today is what's crucial. A Columbia University research scholar named Anne-Sophie Corbeau makes my point for me with:

In economic terms, it "made sense" for Europe to keep importing LNG from Russia for now. Cutting Russian LNG out of the EU market would mean European countries buying up more LNG from elsewhere in the world, driving up prices for poorer countries in Asia.

Supply and capacity, this is what the western politicians are either obvious to, or are hiding from the public. Russia and other energy rich nations cannot be left out of the supply equation. The people behind Ursula von der Leyen and even Joe Biden certainly know this. Look at the Saudis shunning the U.S. president when he went there begging for more capacity. Most media outlets framed their refusal as some kind of rebuff, but in reality, the Middle East is tapped out production wise. I don't want to burden the reader with another discussion of "peak oil" here. It should be clear to everyone, though, that the world is operating in energy consumption overdrive right now.