Yesterday, Israel conducted strikes on the Qatari capital city of Doha, allegedly targeting (and supposedly killing) key members of the Hamas leadership.

An unprovoked attack in direct violation of another nation's sovereignty and territorial integrity. Textbook breaking of international law.

This is not unusual. Israel's contempt for international law is nothing new and is far from under-reported.

The wrinkle is the response from world leaders, which has been somewhat chillier than you'd expect.

The attacks were roundly criticised by puppets the world over - Canada's Mark Carney, Britain's Keir Starmer, Australia's Albanese, France's Macron and more.

In her State of the Union address, EU Chief Ursula von der Leyen warned the EU should "consider our bilateral support" for Israel.

Even Donald Trump's White House distanced themselves from the plan, which is as close to a full repudiation as you'll get from that quarter.

Earlier in the week, the Spanish government announced they were closing their airspace and naval ports to any planes or boats carrying weapons to Israel.

Expressing anti-Israel sentiment is becoming more and more common on a political stage where support for Palestine was once purely the domain of Cuba, Venezuela and other designated "enemies" of The West.

Israel is responding by doubling down, unleashing further strikes - this time on Yemen - earlier today.

Rather than allowing French voters to select their next government, President Macron appointed another loyalist to the Hôtel Matignon just hours after receiving the resignation of Prime Minister François Bayrou.

Armed Services Minister Sébastien Lecornu has been appointed as the next prime minister of France, the third such appointment by President Macron over the past year, Le Figaro reports.

Previously a member of the centre-right Les Républicains, the neo-liberal Lecornu joined Macron's Renaissance faction in 2017 and has served in the cabinet of multiple prime ministers. He will become the fifth prime minister since President Macron was reelected for a second five-year term in 2022.

"An example that shows the radical devaluation of thought is the transformation of words in propaganda; there, language, the instrument of the mind, become 'pure sound,' a symbol directly evoking feelings and reflexes."

- Jacques Ellul, Propaganda

"A leader or an interest that can make itself master of current symbols is the master of the current situation."

- Walter Lippman, Public Opinion

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was a non-teaching day for me. I was home in Massachusetts when the phone rang at 9 A.M. It was my daughter who lived and worked in New York City and was on a week's vacation with her future husband. "Turn on the TV," she said. "Why?" I asked. "Haven't you heard? A plane hit the World Trade Tower."

I turned the TV on and watched a plane crash into the Tower. I said, "They just showed a replay." She quickly corrected me, "No, that's another plane." And we talked as we watched in horror, learning that it was the South Tower this time.

Sitting next to my daughter was my future son-in-law; he had not had a day off from work in a year. He had finally taken a week's vacation so they could go to Cape Cod. He worked on the 100^th floor of the South Tower. By chance, he had escaped the death that claimed 176 of his co-workers. My father's good friend, retired from a NYC job and living in Pennsylvania, had a one-day-a-month consultancy job at the Twin Tower. Tuesday the 11^th was his day to die in the North Tower.

That was my introduction to the attacks.

Western elites don't care what you think or say, so long as you don't notice that they are the ones making money from a genocide, asset-stripping western economies and trashing our planet.

Inevitably, the more extreme the West's actions - by, for example, actively aiding Israel's genocide in Gaza - the more extreme the assumptions about the causes of that behaviour.

As a result, some are falling into an easy trap laid for them by western establishments. They assume that tiny Israel controls the West and its foreign policy, and then dedicate their energies to making the case for this analytical framework.

In a sense, the debate about whether Israel controls the West or the West controls Israel cannot be won on facts alone. It is too easy to select the facts that suit your view. It makes more sense to try to understand the context in which this debate is taking place, and address the question of "Cui bono?", or "Who ultimately benefits?"

I published a long essay this week, which you can read here, making the case that the West uses Israel to provide a moral gloss to its own larger, colonial aims in the oil-rich Middle East - aims the West has been pursuing for more than a century, when Britain promised to implant an explicitly "colonial" entity, one it fashioned as a "Jewish state", in the throat of the Arab world.

To be clear, the thesis that the West controls Israel, not the other way round, does not preclude the obvious fact that Israel advances its own particular aims, and meddles in western domestic politics to advance those aims. It can do so as long as those goals do not conflict significantly with the West's larger imperial agenda of "full-spectrum global military domination" and resource control.

You can believe Israel is fully a western client state without having to dismiss the fact of a powerful Israel lobby that seeks to widen its room for manoeuvre within overall western foreign policy objectives, or the fact that some Israeli leaders, such as Benjamin Netanyahu, are more difficult for Washington elites to handle than others.

You can also square it with the fact that Israel - in so far as its aims roughly accord with the foreign policy agenda of an unseen, permanent bureaucracy in Washington - can run rings around a US President trying to rein it in as part of his own myth-making, as Barack Obama signally tried and failed to do.

A Russian expert explains how Moscow and Beijing can help solve the unresolvable war between Israel and Hamas.

On Tuesday evening, Israel conducted a "precision strike" against the "senior leadership of Hamas" in Doha, Qatar. Along with the US and Egypt, Qatar has led several attempts to end the Israel-Hamas war, while also serving as Hamas' headquarters outside of Gaza for years. Despite Qatar being regarded as an important US ally and hosting the huge Al Udeid airbase used by the US Air Force, West Jerusalem still claimed the strike to be an action against terrorists and nobody else.

How will this strike affect the Gulf states, and is there a way to resolve the crisis with no more bloodshed? Russian expert, Research Fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Russia's State Academic University for the Humanities Grigory Lukyanov explains how Moscow and Beijing can try to resolve the crisis as soon as this October.

Qatar's vulnerability

RT: Why did Israel decide to strike Qatar, which was, so to speak, under protection, given its mediating position in negotiations between West Jerusalem and Hamas?

In true Chinese fashion, Xi Jinping reacted violently, but without naming it, to Donald Trump's ban on the State of Palestine from participating in the United Nations General Assembly. This was already the case in 1988, when Ronald Reagan similarly banned Yasser Arafat from participating. Both bans have the same objective: to prevent the General Assembly from granting voting rights to the State of Palestine, already a member of the Organization. However, China is now the world's leading economic power and a military superpower.

The Trump administration will not allow representatives of the State of Palestine to participate in the United Nations General Assembly in September. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has denied them entry visas to the United States to access the UN headquarters in New York. In doing so, the United States is violating the 1947 agreement with the United Nations, which stipulates in Article IV:

"The United States shall not impose any impediment to the transit to or from the central seat of the United Nations in New York of members and officials of the United Nations."

By violating this agreement, the Trump administration is effectively assuming the right to decide which member states can and cannot participate in the work of the United Nations. This includes the State of Palestine, already recognized by 147 of the 193 UN member states, but deprived of voting rights due to the US veto in the Security Council.

Polish officials have claimed that the country's military intercepted several drones that crossed from Ukraine during overnight Russian strikes, describing the incident as an "unprecedented" violation of national airspace. Moscow has yet to comment on the allegation, and Warsaw has yet to show any evidence.

Polish armed forces launched an operation in response to "multiple violations of Polish airspace" and defensive weapons were used against the objects, Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote on X early Wednesday morning.

"I informed the NATO Secretary-General about the current situation and the actions we have taken against objects that violated our airspace," Tusk explained in a separate post. He added that he remained in "constant contact" with Poland's President Andrzej Duda and Defense Minister Władyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz.

Nepalese Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli resigned on Tuesday, as furious protests against the government intensified across the Himalayan nation's capital, Kathmandu.

Nepal's army has confirmed that Oli and six cabinet ministers were moved to an undisclosed location after protesters set fire to the residences of both the prime minister and the vice president.

Anti-government and anti-corruption protests turned violent after several major social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, and X, were banned on Monday. The ban was revoked on Tuesday.

Visuals from Kathmandu show smoke rising from the country's parliament, which was set on fire by protestors. Local media also reported that the homes of ministers had been looted by large groups.

A trove of leaked data from Boris Johnson's private office reveals how the former prime minister has been profiting from contacts and influence he gained in office in a possible breach of ethics and lobbying rules.

The Boris Files contain emails, letters, invoices, speeches and business contracts. They shine a spotlight on the inner workings of a publicly subsidised company Johnson established after leaving Downing Street in September 2022.

The trove reveals how Johnson has used the company to manage an array of highly paid jobs and business ventures. They raise questions for the former Conservative leader about whether he has breached "revolving door" rules governing post-ministerial careers.

Ukraine's 2014 Euromaidan revolution derailed Vladimir Putin's vision of a pan-Eurasian integration from Lisbon to Vladivostok, leaving behind a "ghost corridor" of unrealized cooperation and fueling today's multipolar competition over ideas, technology, and global order.

Resetting the Board

As we have seen, history often pivots on inflection points. The Euromaidan protests of 2013-2014 in Kyiv marked a significant paradigm shift toward Western institutions, sparking a cascade of conflict, sanctions, and estrangement between Russia and Europe. But what if those protests had not succeeded? What if Ukraine had remained in Moscow's orbit, preserving the conditions for a radically different trajectory — one in which Vladimir Putin's long-articulated vision of a "common economic space from Lisbon to Vladivostok" could be realized?

Putin himself framed the initiative as nothing less than a continental reset:

"We propose the creation of a harmonious economic community stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok ... we could even consider a free trade zone or even more advanced forms of economic integration. The result would be a unified continental market with a capacity worth trillions of euros."

As I observed in 2018, this plan was essentially for the creation of one gigantic Eurasian market worth tens of trillions of dollars. The plan was for a full and fair integration of Russia within the global context. The part the Western elites had a problem with was that Russia would have been an integral partner rather than a network of small banana republics like Yugoslavia became.