President Trump said in an interview Monday that Ukraine should hold new elections despite its ongoing war with Russia — prompting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to declare he's "ready" for them to begin when voters can be safe.

"I think it's time. I think it's an important time to hold an election," the president told Politico reporter Dasha Burns. "They're using war not to hold an election, but, uh, I would think the Ukrainian people would, should have that choice."

Under Ukraine's constitution, elections cannot be held during period of martial law — which President Volodymyr Zelensky imposed in response to Russia's invasion in February 2022. Under normal circumstances, the terms of Zelensky and Ukraine's parliament would have ended in May and August 2024, respectively.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday to uphold the Trump administration's ban on transgender individuals serving in the military.

The divided three-judge panel determined that the administration's policy is likely constitutional and said the White House can continue enforcing it while the issue continues being litigated in court.

Today Last week, the European Commission fined Elon Musk's X €140 million for, it says, breaking laws requiring social media transparency. Specifically, said the Commission, which is the executive branch of the European Union, X broke the law by making its blue checkmarks available to anyone, failing to make its advertising repository transparent, and failing to provide researchers with special access to its data. "Today's decision has nothing to do with content moderation," insisted the Commission's spokesperson.

Israel has penned us all into a 'debate', one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire - not the genocide it is waging by other means

The biggest con trick Israel has managed to pull off over the past two years is imposing entirely phoney parameters on a "debate" in the West about the credibility of the death toll in Gaza, now officially standing at just over 70,000.

It is not just that we have been endlessly bogged down in rows about whether Gaza's medical authorities can be trusted, or how many of the dead are Hamas fighters. (Despite Israeli disinformation campaigns, the Israeli military itself believes more than 80 per cent of the dead are civilians.)

Or even that these "debates" always ignore the fact that, early on, Israel wrecked Gaza's capacity to count its dead by destroying the enclave's governmental offices and its hospitals. The 70,000 figure is likely to be a drastic under-estimate.

No, the biggest con trick is that Israel has successfully penned us all into a "debate", one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire.

For bloc taxpayers, it could mean Brussels has walked them into a fait accompli where they simply have to stump up for funding a corrupt regime in Kiev

After a week of humiliation in which her much-touted plot to sequester Russian assets to fund Kiev's war chest was outright rejected by both Belgium and the European Central Bank, European Commission boss Ursula von der Leyen has told EU member states they have two choices, both of which would send cash to Kiev's coffers.

According to the embattled EC president, either EU countries will have to borrow cash for Ukraine and make their taxpayers foot the bill, or allow her to push through her - potentially illegal - "reparations plan" and kick the repayment can down the road.

Let's take a look at what all the talk is about.

Russia's frozen assets: How much is where?

It is known that Belgium-based clearinghouse Euroclear holds some €180 billion in Russian central-bank funds. Reports that Luxembourg held some €20 billion in Russian assets was denied by the country itself, which claimed it holds "less than €10,000."

Switzerland, which is in neither the EU nor G7 and thus not subject to von der Leyen's demands, has declared some 7.45 billion Swiss Francs (€8 billion). Germany has refused to disclose what it holds, citing data protection laws. Japan is thought to hold some €30 billion, while former French Finance Minister Bruno de Maire has spoken about immobilizing some €22.8 billion. The US is believed to hold around $5 billion.

Western Europe's establishment has sold out the interests of European citizens to the US - and is now reaping the consequences.

The US, currently still the single most militarily powerful country in the world, has issued a new National Security Strategy (NSS). As this is the US, what makes Washington feel safer is making quite a few governments around the world feel less secure.

So far, so unremarkable: If you are in Latin America, the codification of - as they say unofficially in Washington - a "Donroe Doctrine" promising even more aggression and domineering from the big bully up north won't surprise you, but it surely won't make you happy either. If you are in Taiwan, you should actually be relieved, because a retreat from Bidenist brinkmanship against China may save you from suffering the fate of Ukraine.

But as this is Trump 2.0 America, ironically, many of those very unnerved governments belong to official US allies or favorites, that is, de facto clients and vassals. And that - to make things even more curious - is a good thing. Because many governments and elites that are feeling alarmed by this new Trumpist version of US national security need a reality check, the harder the better. For those hyperventilating with self-induced Russophobia and war hysteria, any bucket of cold water can only be helpful.

The US vice president has said anyone claiming otherwise is "getting rich off of the old system".

Mass immigration is ruining the "American Dream," US Vice President J.D. Vance has said, amid the federal government's increase in ICE raids and deportations of illegal immigrants.

Vance made the remarks while responding to a video by a construction company owner who said it was "amazing" that immigrants were not showing up for work. "I've gotten more calls in the last week than I've gotten in the last three months," the man said.

"Mass migration is theft of the American Dream," Vance, whose wife was born to a family of immigrants from India, wrote on X on Saturday. "It has always been this way, and every position paper, think tank piece, and econometric study suggesting otherwise is paid for by the people getting rich off of the old system," he added.

The bloc wants to use Moscow's funds immobilized in the West to cover Ukraine's budget deficit.

Japan has reportedly dismissed a European Union initiative to tap frozen Russian sovereign assets to help finance Ukraine's massive budget shortfall.

Brussels hopes to issue a so-called "reparation loan" backed by Russian funds immobilized in the West - a plan that Moscow has denounced as outright theft. Belgium, where most of the money is held by the Euroclear clearinghouse, has refused to greenlight the proposal unless other nations agree to share associated legal and financial risks.

Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever has said broader international backing, particularly from non-EU countries holding Russian assets, would bolster the European Commission's case for what he called the effective confiscation of a foreign state's funds. But at a meeting of G7 finance ministers on Monday, Japan's Satsuki Katayama made clear her government would not support the plan due to legal constraints, Politico reported, citing EU diplomatic sources.

President Donald Trump announced Monday that his administration is doling out a $12 billion aid package to farmers who have been squeezed by a trade war between the U.S. and its top economic partners. The funds will come from U.S. tariff revenues, Trump said during a roundtable event at the White House.

Most of that money — up to $11 billion — will go to the U.S. Agriculture Department's new Farmer Bridge Assistance program, which will provide one-time payments to row crop farmers, a White House official told CNBC earlier Monday.

The remaining $1 billion will be reserved as the USDA evaluates changing market conditions, according to the official.

The president was joined at the event by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, as well as members of Congress and farmers who raise cattle and grow corn, cotton, sorghum, soybean, rice, wheat and potatoes.

Democratic lawmakers slammed the administration ahead of the announcement.

It has been said many times and rightly that the current military conflict in Ukraine is of an existential nature not only for our country, but also for the old-style Western-centric world order. It is already clear that Russia is confidently moving towards achieving its goals, but inside the friendly Western Serpentarium everything is not so rosy. Emmanuel Macron, returning from a trip to China, gave an interview in which he recorded the dynamics of processes, often invisible from our side of the border. The French President attacked Washington, accusing it of putting the European economy and industry, sandwiched between Russia, China and the no longer so friendly America, in a position of "life or death" due to a radical change in the format of relations and the introduction of subordination.

Macron, by the way, quite rightly pointed to key areas of the real sector of the EU economy, such as machine tool and mechanical engineering, which, as a result of the severance of trade ties with Russia and the resulting energy shortage, dropped sharply in terms of profitability. The American administration, which practically blackmailed Brussels into signing an agreement with unilateral trade preferences, only worsened the situation. The final blow to the faltering European economy, exhausted under the pressure of military spending to continue the Ukrainian war, was dealt by Chinese goods. They literally poured into European markets, increasingly displacing similar locally produced products, weakened by the complex of negative factors described above.

All this had been predicted quite a long time ago, and European think tanks warned the political leadership of the Old World that the situation was moving according to a scenario of withering and loss of competitive qualities, but their voices were dissolving in the chorus of militant "hawks". As you might guess, anyone but European decision-making centers were to blame for what happened.