Ukraine's unelected president Volodymyr Zelensky said at a press conference with Czech President Petr Pavel on May 3, 2025:

"An unconditional ceasefire is a model proposed by the Americans. We are following it. From this date or another - preferably earlier. Yes, let's try for 30 days. Why a ceasefire for 30 days? Because it is impossible to agree on anything in three, five, seven days.

"This is more of a theatrical production on his [Putin] part. Because it is impossible to build any plan for the next steps to end the war in two or three days. And therefore, it simply does not look very serious or very unserious. Playing in order to give Putin a soft atmosphere of coming out of isolation on May 9, and so that everyone is comfortable, safe - those leaders, or friends, or partners of Putin who will come to Kremlin Square for one reason or another on May 9 - no one will help Putin. We are simply either at war, or Putin is showing that he is ready for a ceasefire, for the first part of ending the war. We are ready to start from the 1st, from the 3rd, from the 5th. If he needs the date of the 7th - we don't care. From the 7th - 30 days."

During the same press conference, Volodymyr Zelensky said:

"Our position is very simple for all countries planning to go or already heading to Russia on May 9: we cannot be held responsible for what happens on the territory of the Russian Federation. They [Russia] are the ones providing security, and therefore, we will not offer any guarantees. We don't know what Russia will do on those dates. They may take certain actions - arson, explosions, and so on - and then accuse us. As president, I told the foreign minister that we must inform anyone who reaches out to us: 'We do not recommend visiting Russia from a [safety] standpoint. And if you do choose to go, do not ask us. That is your personal decision."

Calling the remarks "verbal provocations," deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said the same evening that no one could guarantee that the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, would survive on May 10 if Ukraine attacked Moscow during the May 9 victory celebration. As a precaution, Moscow cancelled the Victory Parade that was to take place in Sevastopol, Crimea, which the Zelensky administration considers to be Ukrainian.

The EU's annoyingly fake 'unity' is as brain-rotting as any illicit substance.

A brief scandal erupted last weekend during a visit to Ukraine by French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, when a couple of 'suspicious' objects they were handling were speculated to be drugs and drug paraphernalia.

They almost certainly were not, so let's cut Macron some slack. He did hop on the official Elysee Palace social media account to clarify that, non, he was not doing rails while riding the rails to Ukraine alongside Merz and Starmer. They weren't on drugs - just on good old-fashioned EU unity. Which, to be fair, seems to induce an equally brain-cell-crushing delirium.

"When European unity becomes inconvenient, disinformation goes so far as to make a simple tissue look like drugs," read the post. So, Macron suggests, it wasn't a party starter on the table, just the world's most suspiciously placed tissue - alongside what appeared to be an unfortunately shaped spoon. And anyone suggesting otherwise is just spreading fake news. The press walked in, the photo went up, and the internet did what it does.

The Trump administration's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, criticized Israel in a meeting with hostage families, according to a Sunday evening report by Channel 12:

"We want to bring the hostages home, but Israel is not willing to end the war. Israel is prolonging it despite the fact that we don't see where else we can go and that an agreement must be reached."

However, he added an optimistic message:

"There is currently an opportunity window that we hope Israel and all the mediators will take advantage of. We are putting pressure on all the mediators and doing everything we can to bring the hostages home."

The relationship between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump "has become strained," according to sources who spoke to NBC News on Sunday.

Kiev's response to Russia's offer of unconditional peace talks shows that Ukraine's Vladimir Zelensky wants to use it to rearm and regroup the country's military, Rodion Miroshnik, the Russian Foreign Ministry's ambassador-at-large, has said.

On Saturday night, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered Kiev the opportunity to restart direct negotiations in Istanbul, which it unilaterally walked away from in 2022. Russia is ready to return to the negotiating table without any preconditions, he said.

Zelensky responded by demanding that Russia first agree to a 30-day ceasefire starting on May 12.

"Is this what agreeing to start negotiations without conditions looks like?!" Miroshnik, who is tasked with investigating the Ukrainian military's alleged war crimes, wrote in a post on Telegram on Sunday. Zelensky is essentially "setting preconditions" for unconditional peace talks, he added.

The latest round of high-stakes nuclear talks between Iran and the US have ended, with Tehran calling them difficult but with both sides agreeing to further negotiations.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei confirmed on X that the talks had concluded, saying they were "difficult but useful to better understand each other's positions and to find reasonable & realistic ways to address the differences."

A senior Trump administration official gave a more positive assessment, telling CNN the discussions "were again both direct and indirect" and lasted over three hours, calling them encouraging.

"Agreement was reached to move forward with the talks to continue working through technical elements," the official said, adding that the US side was "encouraged by today's outcome" and looks forward to their next meeting "which will happen in the near future."

No date has been agreed for the next round although Baqaei said it would be announced by mediator Oman.

Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi said the fifth round of talks would take place once both sides have consulted their leaders. He said Sunday's discussions included "useful and original ideas" that reflected a shared wish to reach an "honorable" agreement.

On Friday, a popular Hebrew X account called "News From a Year Ago" tweeted a short video of Donald Trump, then running for US president, from May 2024.

"If any Jewish person voted for Joe Biden, they should be ashamed of themselves," Trump said in the video. "He's totally abandoned Israel and nobody can believe it."

One year later, if there's a president many Israelis are viewing with disbelief, it's Trump himself. Trump — who campaigned on his record of good relations with Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — has spent the past month building out a vision for US policy in the Middle East that appears to be sidelining the country and its leader.

It must be quite a burn for Brussels elites when Washington says their most vaunted quality is not as good as they try to make it look.

This one stings. When asked how the EU might dodge US President Donald Trump's tariff hammer, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent replied: "My observation... goes all the way back to [former US Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger's statement: 'When I call Europe, who do I call?' So, we're negotiating with a lot of different interests."

Translation: You can't sit with us until you stop fighting at your own lunch table.

Sure, the continent is tripping over its own policies and tumbling down an economic staircase, but at least everyone's falling in sync. Brussels tightens the "unity" straitjacket, and they all cheer, or risk getting whacked back into line.

Unity is the brand. Unity is the product. Unity is the hashtag.

In 1915, two years before the Balfour Declaration announcing the creation of a "Jewish national home" in Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, then an employee of the British Foreign Office, called for the creation of a Jewish state in order to mobilize the diaspora in the service of His Majesty's Empire. He specified that this state should never be able to provide for its own security and should always be dependent on military support from London.

The same Herbert Samuel, who had become His Majesty's High Commissioner to Mandatory Palestine, chose the anti-Semite Mohammed Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, while he sent his own son, Edwind Samuel, to serve in the Jewish Legion of the revisionist Zionist Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky.

This policy continues today when the "revisionist Zionist" Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister and son of Jabotinsky's private secretary, made sure to provide Hamas with $2.7 billion between 2012 and 2023 (cf. VIN 2505), i.e. to prepare for the "surprise" attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Blood calls for blood. The exterminating madness that is taking hold of part of the Israeli population as the majority lays down their arms (cf. VIN 3270) finds its answer in the madness seizing part of the Pakistani population.

"Those who perpetrated the greatest ruse in American presidential history by staging the Biden presidency will never tell us what their ultimate agenda was"
— Victor Davis Hanson

One baseline truth in current American life is that our bodily well-being gets worse as the so-called health care industry gets ever-larger — it is now 17.6-percent of the economy (GDP). This is clearly the basis of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) campaign that attached itself to the Trump 2.0 program. You hear almost no arguments against MAHA itself, even from the Party of Hustles and Hoaxes, but plenty of calumny and objurgation against MAHA's chief advocate, Robert Kennedy, Jr.

Mr. Trump's initial nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, was pulled last week just before her scheduled Senate confirmation hearing. Her credentials looked a bit sketchy — med school on the tiny Caribbean island of St. Maarten (say, what. . . ?) and other irregularities — which she confabulated about anyway. Plus, she was a Covid vaccine cheerleader and an avid advocate of the censorship campaign to slam down debate over it.

Which leads directly to a glaring quandary in President Trump's current order-of-business: he has avoided engagement with the whole Covid fiasco that unspooled in the last year of his first term. Now, it is the opinion of this blog that Mr. Trump was played on Covid by blob-marshaled "experts" Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, who led the White House Covid "team," and then snookered the president into Operation Warp Speed, appealing to his vanity to play the superhero. You can also surmise that the Covid operation was hatched to run Mr. Trump out of office by enabling epic election fraud, making a chump of him.

Trump calls out Democrats and announces plans to drop prices of prescription drugs 'almost immediately'

President Donald Trump announced he plans to sign an executive order on Monday that will reduce the cost of prescription drugs and pharmaceuticals "almost immediately, by 30% to 80%."

Trump made the announcement on Truth Social Sunday.

"For many years the World has wondered why Prescription Drugs and Pharmaceuticals in the United States States of America were SO MUCH HIGHER IN PRICE THAN THEY WERE IN ANY OTHER NATION, SOMETIMES BEING FIVE TO TEN TIMES MORE EXPENSIVE THAN THE SAME DRUG, MANUFACTURED IN THE EXACT SAME LABORATORY OR PLANT, BY THE SAME COMPANY???" Trump wrote. "It was always difficult to explain and very embarrassing because, in fact, there was no correct or rightful answer.