While Washington constantly talks of the need for international harmony, it has rarely played a positive role in it in recent years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said, stressing that stability is vital in world politics.

Asked during an interview with NBC's Keir Simmons, broadcast on Monday, whether he would support a call for predictability and stability from his US counterpart, Joe Biden, when the two leaders meet in Geneva on Wednesday, Putin said that it "is the most important value... in international affairs." However, he added, "on the part of our US partners, this is something that we haven't seen in recent years."

Simmons pointed out that Biden has previously accused Russia of causing "a lot of instability and unpredictability," with Putin responding that Moscow is concerned about the impact of American foreign policy as well. The Russian president pointed to what he described as Washington's role in destabilizing Libya in 2011, as well as across much of the Middle East.

There is a lot of optimism and big press regarding the upcoming meeting between Biden and Putin. This will be the first meeting of the two since Biden took that seat behind the lovely desk in the Oval Office. There are many issues on the table for discussion and there is tension and excitement in the political press in both the West and especially in Russia. There is a growing belief that this could be a turning point or at least provide some small nudging of relations in a positive direction. This wishful thinking, although pleasant from a moral standpoint, does not reflect the realities of the current divide between the United States and Russia. This meeting simply cannot provide some sort of new start for relations between the countries and will probably look like a head-nodding and pretending-to-listen fest the likes of which we have never seen before. Hours worth of hot air will be blown to throw words onto deaf ears with some background posturing to boot.

One reason for the Russians to be suspicious of any offers from Washington is simply recent precedent. Over ten years ago when Obama was still full of Hope and Change his feisty new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with a great big smile presented Foreign Minister Lavrov the infamous Russian Reset Button. The red button had the word "overload" accidentally written on it in place of "reset". This mistake due to a fake desire to make it seem like Washington cared enough to learn one word of Russian was very telling as during the brief era of the Russian Reset, America's Soft Power machine was working day and night to organize the Maidan in Kiev. From a Western perspective this revolution was another piece of evidence that the people of Eastern Europe want nothing to do with naughty Moscow, but from a Russian perspective the Maidan was the beginning of an endless waking nightmare. This all led to the genocidal war in the Donbass breaking out, the return of Neo-Nazism to Europe, and the now official systemic racism that Russian speakers have to endure in the "Zimbabwe of Europe". After an experience like that, can one really expect any sort of optimism from the Russian side because Biden sort of stepped back a bit on the whole Nord-Stream 2 thing?

It requires major suspension of disbelief to consider the G7, the self-described democracies' most exclusive club, as relevant to the Raging Twenties. Real-life dictates that even accounting for the inbuilt structural inequality of the current world system the G7's economic output barely registers as 30% of the global total.

Cornwall was at best an embarrassing spectacle, complete with a mediocrity troupe impersonating "leaders" posing for masked elbow bump photo ops - while on a private party with the 95-year-old Queen of England, everyone was maskless and merrily mingling about in an apotheosis of "shared values" and "human rights."

Quarantine on arrival, masks enforced 24/7 and social distancing, of course, is only for the plebs.

The G7 final communique is the proverbial ocean littered with platitudes and promises. But it does contain a few nuggets. Start with "Build Back Better" - or B3 - showing up in the title. B3 is now official code for both The Great Reset and the New Green Deal.

Then there's the Yellow Peril remixed, with the "our values" shock troops "calling on China to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms" with a special emphasis on Xinjiang and Hong Kong.

The story behind it was confirmed to me by an EU diplomatic source, a realist. (Yes, there are some in Brussels.)

In 2020, the world's nuclear powers have decreased the overall number of nuclear weapons in their possession, but more of them than a year ago are now ready to be fired at short notice, according to a report.

At the start of the year, there were around 13,080 nuclear weapons stockpiled by nine nations - the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea - which is down from 13,400 a year prior, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported on Monday. Yet, at the same time, the number of nukes deployed with operational forces - that is, mounted on missiles or stored where they can be quickly prepared for use - has increased by about 105, reaching 3,825.

Russia and the US, the two nations holding most of the world's nuclear weapons, were predominantly responsible for both changes, SIPRI said. Both have continued to reduce their respective arsenals by retiring outdated warheads, but also prepared for action, adding some 50 weapons each.

Jordan's military court will start the trial next week of a former royal court chief and a minor royal on charges of agitating to destabilise the monarchy, state media said on Sunday.

Prosecutors last week referred to court the case of Bassem Awadallah, an ex-royal court chief and finance minister who played a big role in the drive to liberalise Jordan's economy, and Sherif Hassan Zaid, a distant relative of King Abdullah.

The Health Secretary claims he "tried" to throw a protective ring around care homes but, from my experience in the early days of the pandemic, he couldn't have come up with a more disastrous and deadly policy.

As a GP working mainly with elderly patients in care homes and intermediate care I witnessed, at first hand, the absolute disaster that was the government policy at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak. Elderly patients who were Covid-19 positive, or not tested, or perhaps even negative, were simply shovelled out of hospitals and into care homes. 'The hospitals must be cleared out... nothing else matters.'

At the time there was no PPE available... at all. In fact, in many care homes staff were actually ordered by the management not to wear PPE. This was also the case in hospitals. Not that it would have made a great deal of difference in most care homes where patients with dementia often wander happily from room to room without masks, and oblivious to any potential danger. I had to usher one or two out of the nurse's office from time to time.

How and why did a hawkish young mandarin hothoused at elite universities and in the halls of state power end up an executive at an anarchic messageboard site with an anti-establishment reputation?

Reddit is one of the world's most influential news and social media platforms. The website attracted over 1.2 billion visits in April 2021 alone, making it the United States' eighth most visited site, ahead of other leviathans like Twitter, Instagram and eBay. Now majority-owned by a much larger corporate publishing empire, Reddit is also far ahead of more established news sites, garnering three times the numbers of Fox News and five times those of The New York Times.

That is why it was so surprising that so little was made of the company's decision to appoint foreign policy hawk Jessica Ashooh to the position of Director of Policy in 2017, at which time it was also the eight most visited site in the U.S. Ashooh, who had been a Middle East foreign policy wonk at NATO's think tank the Atlantic Council, was appointed at around the same time that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee was demanding more control over the popular website, on the grounds that it was being used to spread disinformation. In her role as Director of Policy, she oversees all government relations and public policy for the company, in addition to managing content, product and advertising. Yet a Google search for "Jessica Ashooh Reddit" filtered between late 2016 and early 2017 (after she was appointed) elicits zero relevant results, meaning not one media outlet even mentioned the questionable appointment.

This is all the more hair-raising, given her resume as a high state official — all of which raises serious questions about the extent of collaboration between Silicon Valley and the national security state.

The G7 was predictable theatre macabre, but the US president's bewilderment and confusion - in stark contrast to the acuity of 95-year-old Queen Elizabeth, who is still very much on top of her game - will be the lasting memory. As a befuddled Joe Biden was led around court at the so-called G7 by his good wife, the young Queen Elizabeth - sans the Duke of Edinburgh for the first time - held centre stage.

Age affects us all in different ways and one must extend charity towards the afflicted. But the US head of state cut a sorry spectacle when not in front of a teleprompter - at least by comparison with his hostess, who, at 95, is 17 years his senior.

The 78-year-old president said the Queen reminded him of his mother, which might have been why he climbed on her knee with a pelican bib on and asked her for a rusk. I made that last bit up, but such was the US president's permanently bemused bewilderment in England, nobody would have been too surprised had he done so.

Mrs. Biden - Dr. Jill - played the role of mother to Joe rather well, in fact. If not for her, several times, live on TV, Biden looked as if he might have walked off the end of the pier or waltzed into the waves. Not since Konstantin Chernenko has a more obviously gerontocratic cipher been in charge of a nuclear strike force. Kamala Harris must have been watching keenly in case Biden turned out to be not waving, but drowning.

On Saturday, President Trump posted a statement to his Telegram account warning patriots of the threats by the Biden DOJ and calling state legislators to stand up in the face of evil.

This comes after the Biden Department of Justice warned state lawmakers on Friday that if they proceeded to audit fraudulent elections they will be targeted by the Biden administration.

One brave Arizona State Senator, Wendy Rogers, responded to the Marxist threats.

The WATER WARS have begun: the state is simply turning off the water to farms & ranches, depriving them of water needed to grow food and raise animals. This will create food shortages by design, in order to then point at the massive problem and declare, "It's global warming! We NEED climate lockdowns! We MUST move to absolute zero carbon emissions! We HAVE to take away private ownership of cars! You HAVE to eat fake meat and move to post-animal economy!" The story is the same across the nation, and indeed the world. But who is behind these WATER WARS? Christian explores the WEF's "Global Water Initiative," an agenda to centralize and privatize control over the world's water supply, and how these engineered droughts are the lynchpin in the climate agenda and the takeover of food.


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