Experts say Israel is using the new flight to Buenos Aires as a geopolitical tool to cement its footprint in Latin America.

Israel and Argentina have launched a direct flight starting in November as the two countries boost their ties under Argentina's far-right President Javier Milei and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The twice-a-week flight comes as Israel is aggressively pushing to cement its geopolitical footprint in Latin America amid its growing international isolation and its entrenched image as an occupying power.

On May 7, Israel's national carrier, El Al, opened bookings for a direct flight between Tel Aviv and Buenos Aires covering a distance of 12,000 kilometres (7,460 miles) - the longest route in the airline's history.

However, the 16.5-hour journey is driven by political ambitions rather than mere commercial viability.

The shooting down of a Ukrainian drone by a NATO warplane over Estonia this week shows how close the proxy war with Russia is to a European-wide escalation.

NATO and the EU leadership are pushing the Baltic states to escalate the war with Russia. Maybe it's time for Moscow to preempt as the best way to avoid all-out war.

It was the first reported case of a NATO fighter jet intercepting a Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Estonia's Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur announced: "We decided that we needed to take it down... it was meant to hit Russian targets."

His remarks betray a nervousness among the Baltic states about where their support for Ukraine is leading them after Russia warned that it is ready to deliver on threats of retaliation for allowing Ukraine to use their airspace to launch strikes. Effectively, they are forming a new front against Russia, with echoes of Operation Barbarossa when the Nazi Third Reich attacked Russia in a pincer through these same states in 1941. However, in the current situation, they are not sure about the consequences. Russia might have to relieve them of their doubts anyway before it's too late.

Russia's foreign intelligence service (SVR) this week claimed that the Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania - are colluding with Ukraine to target deep inside Russia with drones. That claim comes as Ukraine has stepped up air strikes on Russian cities, including the capital, Moscow, killing civilians and destroying key oil infrastructure. A massive €90 billion loan from the European Union is aimed at ramping up drone production in Ukraine in partnership with European manufacturers.

In recent weeks, there has been a surge in incidents of drones appearing in the skies above the Baltic states.

Several seasoned observers, including John Mearsheimer and Glenn Diesen, are predicting that the Kremlin may have no other choice but to escalate with attacks on decision-making centers in the Baltics to restore deterrence. Even though such retaliation could risk direct war with NATO under the U.S.-led alliance's collective defense pact.

The Baltic states appear to be playing a cynical double game under the illusion that their duplicity will spare them kinetic consequences. They claim that they have not permitted Ukraine to use their airspace to attack Russia. The Kiev regime has also claimed it has not requested such permission.

The world is changing. The once dominant imperial power of the United States is faltering, hollowed out by corruption, over-extended by hubris, eaten away by the cancers of hatred, nationalism and greed.

Even according to its own propaganda outlets, America has "become the villain", is "Officially an Empire in Decline", and we are witnessing its "final act".

And, as we await the titan's inevitable fall, the world is considering the future. Everyone is talking about the "multipolar world order" just over the horizon.

From "Pax Americana to Pax Multipolaris".

This "Multipolar World" has been a political talking point for a long time, but it has been building momentum over the last few years, and noticeably accelerating since the beginning of Donald Trump's second term.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been calling for this multipolar order for years, and did so again last week. China's Xi Jinping regularly does the same, most recently during his trip to South America in February. North Korea's Kim Jung Il echoed these sentiments in April.

Xi and Putin signed a joint declaration on "building a multipolar world" this morning.

Two weeks ago, in a talk at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for "a post-imperial world [and] a resilient rules-based order in a new era of multipolarity".

In a speech during his trip to China last month, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called for "embracing a multipolar world order":

"What is happening today is not a transfer of hegemony, but an increase in multipolarity — in both power and prosperity,"

Outside of politicians speechifying, the multipolar world order has become the main focus of the international think-tank circuit as well.

From the Israeli side, the 2026 confrontation in south Lebanon tells a story of its own. Military censorship kept much of the home front under control, but it could not contain the recriminations that followed a string of failures on the northern front.

The shock at Hezbollah's performance did not stay with military correspondents, security commentators, or analysts close to the army. It reached Northern Command itself.

On 6 April 2026, Channel 14 reported that Maj. Gen. Rafi Milo came under cabinet criticism after admitting the army had been surprised by Hezbollah's capabilities, with Israeli army Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir saying he had raised the matter with Milo during a situational assessment.

In a leaked Channel 12 recording, Milo also admitted that the first assessments after "Operation Arrows of the North" had been "too optimistic."

StanChart CEO says quote was 'taken out of context'

Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters and his team spent Wednesday in damage-control mode after the head of the London-based international bank told investors on Tuesday that artificial intelligence would be used to replace "lower-value human capital," sparking a backlash online.

"Many of you will have seen media coverage following the Investor Event in Hong Kong, particularly the reporting around automation, AI, and workforce changes," Winters wrote in an internal memo to employees on Wednesday that was seen by Bloomberg.

He continued, "I know this may be unsettling when reduced to simple headlines or a quote out of context."

The G2 summit between the US and China failed to produce any concrete responses to ongoing conflicts, from Taiwan to Iran, nor did it address issues such as tariffs. President Trump, suddenly displaying good manners, listened attentively to his counterpart Xi Jinping and imagined what relations between their two countries might be like if they weren't at war.

The visit of US President Donald Trump to the People's Republic of China on May 13, 14, and 15, 2026, brought to light profound contradictions.

From a Chinese perspective, the goal was to ensure that Washington would always respect Taiwan as a Chinese province, not an independent state. Beijing also wanted assurances that its Western partner would not cut off its access to raw materials and energy resources, but would allow it to develop its trade, particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative.

From a US perspective, the visit aimed to ensure that Beijing would not seize control of the "Western Hemisphere," meaning the South American continent. Washington also wanted to open the Chinese market to its companies, which were heavily represented in its delegation.

The group of conservative commentators and politicians has demanded that the British prime minister retract remarks accusing them of being "far-right agitators".

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been issued with a formal letter of claim after several foreign politicians, commentators, and activists were blocked from entering the United Kingdom ahead of a major rally in London last weekend.

The legal threat was announced on Saturday by Dutch commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek, who said she and others had instructed a lawyer to act on their behalf over potentially defamatory remarks made by the prime minister last week.

"Today, Dominik Tarczyński, Don Keith, Ada Lluch, Joey Mannarino, and I have formally instructed our lawyer, Francesco Gargallo di Castel Lentini, to issue a Letter of Claim to Keir Starmer."

Vlaardingerbroek wrote on X. The lawyer mentioned is Vlaardingerbroek's Italian husband.

Trump's China pilgrimage revealed not American strength but the exhaustion of an empire that increasingly mistakes spectacle for strategy, beneath smiling children and waving flags, standing between two civilizations moving in opposite psychological directions: one obsessed with image, the other quietly consolidating power.
The Ceremony of Decline

Upon arrival, young men and women stood along the tarmac waving small American and Chinese flags in careful unison while cameras captured the choreography from every angle, the sort of polished diplomatic pageantry modern states have perfected for international consumption. Yet one detail lingered beneath the surface of the spectacle: Xi Jinping himself was notably absent from the reception. The symbolism mattered. Trump arrived surrounded by billionaires, media attention, and the psychological momentum of a civilization accustomed to believing that visibility itself conveys status, while Beijing responded with discipline, ceremony, and calibrated emotional distance. The flags waved. The smiles remained fixed. But the deeper message seemed unmistakable: China was willing to host the American emperor, though not necessarily rush to greet him personally at the gate.

In diplomacy, who appears matters. Who does not appear sometimes matters more.

It did not feel like a meeting between equals, nor even a confrontation between rivals. It felt ceremonial, almost dynastic, as though Beijing instinctively understood that modern America communicates primarily through imagery and emotional theater while China itself continues thinking in terms of factories, shipping lanes, semiconductor independence, energy corridors, and generational timelines measured not in election cycles but in decades. Beneath the polished choreography lingered the uneasy sense that two civilizations were moving in opposite psychological directions: one still convinced that branding itself is a form of power, the other quietly converting patience into leverage. Empires often continue smiling long after history has already changed rooms.

Trump himself almost seemed less like a president than a wandering imperial artifact from the late American century, a man built perfectly for television entering a civilization that long ago mastered the art of absorbing spectacle without surrendering strategy. Washington still approaches geopolitics like a permanent campaign rally, obsessed with dominance displays, emotional optics, and headline victories measured in hours or days, while Beijing operates with the colder instincts of a state that expects to exist a hundred years from now. The tragedy is not simply Trump's performance, but the broader American inability to recognize the difference between economic dependency and strategic partnership. For decades the United States outsourced industrial capacity, pharmaceutical production, technological manufacturing, and supply-chain resilience to the very nation it now publicly describes as its greatest existential rival. No empire in history has ever successfully outsourced its own foundation while simultaneously pretending to contain the civilization receiving it.

President Trump took a victory lap late Saturday after a prominent international climate change panel backed off using some of the most aggressive doomsday estimates after determining that they were not the most plausible outcomes.

The United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had quietly adjusted its modeling framework of a 4-5°C warming by 2100 last month. That framework had underpinned a myriad of other analyses predicting terrifying consequences for greenhouse gas emissions.

"GOOD RIDDANCE! After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that 'Climate Change' is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!" Trump chided on Truth Social.

The IPCC framework in question was used to forecast a dramatic rise in sea levels, global crop failures, rapid melting of glaciers, and more, which made some hardcore climate change activists fret about future extinction.

Kentucky U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie lost his Republican House primary Tuesday in another test of President Donald Trump's power over his party after he handpicked challenger and ultimate winner Ed Gallrein to oust the incumbent.

The result showed the president's persisting influence over GOP voters, adding to a growing number of Trump-backed primary challengers to defeat Republican lawmakers who angered him in his second term.


Also Tuesday, in Alabama, former Senate race rivals U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville and Doug Jones are headed to a rematch in the Alabama governor's race.