The main cause of the worsening situation in the world is the "persistent desire of the West led by the United States to ensure its global dominance," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday in an exclusive interview with Newsweek. This endeavor is "impossible for obvious reasons," Lavrov added.

"Those whom we believed to be trustworthy economic partners have chosen illegitimate sanctions and a unilateral break-off of business ties," Lavrov told the magazine, referring to the US and EU.

Lavrov, who is in New York this week for the 77th UN General Assembly, also discussed the impact of the Western embargo on the Russian economy - and their own. The sanctions appear to be a double-edged sword:

"Increasing prices and decreasing incomes are seen in many European countries, as well as energy shortages and threats of social upheaval. The routine benefits of civilization become the privilege of the rich. This is the price that ordinary citizens pay for the anti-Russian policy of the ruling elites."

Lavrov told Newsweek:

"Affordable Russian energy had enabled EU industry to compete with American companies, but it looks like this will not be the case anymore, and it has not been our choice. If people in the West want to act to the detriment of their own interests, we cannot keep them from doing that.

"After the West wrecked what took decades to build practically overnight, I do not think that in the foreseeable future they will be able to restore their credibility as business counterparts."

"Russia will continue working with those partners who are ready for equal, mutually beneficial cooperation, who have not been affected by anti-Russian hysteria. And they constitute the vast majority of the international community."

When President Joe Biden declared the coronavirus pandemic "over," he was observing a shift in preparedness from the early days of the pandemic, the White House said, still cleaning up after Biden's Sunday interview.

Biden's press secretary said Wednesday that the president was speaking about public sentiment, not the state of emergency, during a headline-grabbing 60 Minutes interview that appeared to throw into disarray his administration's agenda.

Karine Jean-Pierre, during an appearance on MSNBC Wednesday. said:

"Just to step back for a second, when he made those comments, he was walking through the Detroit car show, the halls of the Detroit car show, he was looking around. We have to remember the last time that they had held that event was three years ago. We are in a different time. He's been very consistent about that."

Biden's comments, which aired Sunday, have forced the White House into clean-up mode as it bats back the president's assessment that the pandemic has ended.

Emmanuel Macron has proposed relocating asylum-seekers to the countryside from overpopulated cities like Calais, sparking a furious political row.

In a speech to France's prefects, the highest state representatives in the country's regions, Mr Macron, 44, argued that French immigration policy at present was "absurd" and "both inefficient and inhumane".

"Inefficient because we find ourselves with more illegal foreigners than our neighbours. Inhumane because this pressure means that we often welcome them poorly."

The centrist French president suggested that a win-win solution could be to dispatch immigrants to

"rural areas that are losing population; zones where we will have to shut classrooms, and probably primary and secondary schools"; and where "the welcome (for migrants) will be better than if we put them in zones that are already densely populated".

The idea succeeded in uniting the fractious French Right and hard-Right opposition who both argued that Mr Macron would do better getting a handle on illegal immigration rather than simply passing the buck to the countryside.

Hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin ushered in a new phase to the ongoing war in Ukraine with a partial nationwide military mobilization, his longtime top diplomat, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, spoke with Newsweek Senior Foreign Policy Writer Tom O'Connor about the state of the conflict and its implications for Moscow's relationships with the international community, including other leading powers the United States and China.

Lavrov's career in diplomacy extends back half a century through the heat of the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin, who appointed him as foreign minister in 2004. Since then, Lavrov has served as the most senior representative of the Kremlin's foreign policy both in Moscow and in nearly every corner of the Earth to which he's traveled.

Now, he's in New York to attend the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly, which is taking place at a particularly difficult time in the international order. Chief among the many key areas of global contention is the Ukraine conflict, which Lavrov has defended as a necessary endeavor to secure Russia's national security interests, even as Washington and its allies pour further support into Kyiv while attempting to isolate Moscow on the world stage.

"We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution." — Abraham Lincoln

It's easy to become discouraged about the state of our nation.

We're drowning under the weight of too much debt, too many wars, too much power in the hands of a centralized government, too many militarized police, too many laws, too many lobbyists, and generally too much bad news.

It's harder to believe that change is possible, that the system can be reformed, that politicians can be principled, that courts can be just, that good can overcome evil, and that freedom will prevail.

So where does that leave us?

Benjamin Franklin provided the answer. As the delegates to the Constitutional Convention trudged out of Independence Hall on September 17, 1787, an anxious woman in the crowd waiting at the entrance inquired of Franklin, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" "A republic," Franklin replied, "if you can keep it."

What Franklin meant, of course, is that when all is said and done, we get the government we deserve.

Those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.

Unfortunately, although the Bill of Rights was adopted as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

"We the people" have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares nothing for our lives or our liberties.

The bogeyman's names and faces have changed over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, a viral pandemic, and more to come), but the end result remains the same: in the so-called name of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of Congress, the White House, and the courts.

A recitation of the Bill of Rights — set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and the like (all sanctioned by Congress, the White House, and the courts) — would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.

What we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Sadly, most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.

US President Joe Biden accused Russia of making "reckless" and "irresponsible" threats to use nuclear weapons and said Moscow had violated the core tenets of United Nations membership by invading Ukraine.

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Biden slammed Russian President Vladimir Putin for starting an unprovoked war that some 40 UN members were helping Ukraine fight through funding and weapons.


Earlier on Wednesday, Putin ordered a Russian mobilisation to fight in Ukraine and made a thinly veiled threat to use nuclear weapons, in what NATO called a "reckless" act of desperation in the face of a looming Russian defeat.

China's cooperation with Moscow since Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Chinese comments against NATO enlargement show why the Western defense alliance should regard Beijing as a security challenge, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Wednesday.

"The sum of all is this just increases the importance of NATO allies standing together and realizing that China is part of the security challenges we need to face today and in the future," Stoltenberg said in an interview with Reuters.

The Pentagon has ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms' rules.

Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, last week instructed the military commands that engage in psychological operations online to provide a full accounting of their activities by next month after the White House and some federal agencies expressed mounting concerns over the Defense Department's attempted manipulation of audiences overseas, according to several defense and administration officials familiar with the matter.

The takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States was disclosed last month by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. While the researchers did not attribute the sham accounts to the U.S. military, two officials familiar with the matter said that U.S. Central Command is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny. Like others interviewed for this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations.

Moscow's enemies want to land a fatal blow on the country, some even want to dismember it

And here comes Bucha 2.0: Another provocation where Ukraine has allegedly discovered "mass graves of victims" shortly after Russian troops have withdrawn.

This time in Izium. What it amounts to is clear evidence that along with the development of the military conflict in Ukraine, the informational "special" operation against Russia is intensifying.

It's not even about Kiev's reaction - officials there concoct primitive fakes against our state and the army non-stop, around the clock. The indicator here is the way in which this provocation was immediately picked up by Western politicians, who are already urgently calling for an "international tribunal" to punish Russia. Meanwhile, the West's media, in a united push, is putting unfounded statements about "mass executions and torture in Izium" on its front pages.

This fakery is crass and easily refuted. But it is clear from this unanimous reaction of the West that no one there cares at all how and when the people buried in the cemetery died. The culprit has been appointed in advance - and it has to be Russia. Because only this verdict fits into the overall strategy of the current campaign in Ukraine.

Prior to the invasion on February 24th, Russia deployed approximately 180,000 troops near the Ukrainian border. (According to the U.S., it amassed "between 169,000-190,000 personnel"). The two separatist republics may have deployed another 34,000 troops (going by the 2021 estimates from the Institute for Strategic Studies). This makes a total force of 214,000 men.

How many have died or been wounded since the invasion began? (Note that 'casualties' is typically defined as 'dead plus wounded'.)

As The Economist notes, there are several different ways to estimate Russian casualties, and none is wholly reliable. You can rely on secret Russian intelligence, use Ukrainian contact reports from the battlefield, or make inferences based on destroyed equipment.

The Ukrainian Government claims Russia has suffered about 55,000 "combat losses". It's not entirely clear whether this figure includes the wounded. But it almost certainly doesn't, since otherwise it would probably be an underestimate - and the Ukrainian Government has no incentive to underestimate Russian casualties.