Earlier this week President Putin weighed in on America's Iran operations, and as we detailed his comments were predictably a bit guarded. He had compared the war and the Hormuz Strait closure - and subsequent impact on global energy - to the massive widescale impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. But fundamentally he highlighted the "unpredictable" nature of the conflict in terms of where it's headed, as Washington appears to be searching for an offramp on its terms.

On Friday Dmitry Medvedev weighed in, and as expected the former Russian president and current Deputy Chairman of the Security Council was much less guarded in his assessment. He warned, at a moment thousands of US Marines and Airborne troop are en route to the Middle East, that if the US enters a ground war in Iran it will be another "Vietnam".

They form a massive workforce, the last continuously growing sector of our society: civil servants.

Approximately 5.5 million employees work in the public sector, and last year alone, 205,000 new civil servants were added.

This is by no means a blind attack on the bureaucracy. Civil servants indispensable to our society work to maintain internal and external security and uphold the judiciary as guardians of law and order.

Yet the question must be allowed. How can a civil service army grow by over 200,000 in a single year, even as artificial intelligence and digital automation could handle repetitive tasks?

JD Vance confronted Benjamin Netanyahu in a tense phone call, accusing the Israeli leader of being overly optimistic about the chances of regime change in Iran.

The Vice President told the Israeli leader on Monday that many of his predictions about the war which he had sold to Donald Trump had not materialized.

Despite the killing of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hardline factions have tightened their grip on power and the regime remains firmly in control.

'Before the war, Bibi really sold it to the President as being easy, as regime change being a lot likelier than it was. And the VP was clear-eyed about some of those statements,' a source told Axios.

Last Friday afternoon, while President Trump was busy signing executive orders and powwowing with his cabinet on Iran, gold was spotted outside the Oval Office.

Specifically, a couple of dudes in dark suits were seen in the hallways of the White House wheeling what looked like a cart loaded up with gold bars, well-placed sources briefed on the situation told On The Money.

Mind you, these were not the puny, 1-oz trinkets you buy from Costco. These were those massive, Fort Knox-style gold bars — like a foot long each. The kind you've seen in a James Bond flick. The kind that, if you were planning to lift one, you'd need to grab it with both hands and get your back into it.

Queried on the spectacle, sources said the dark-suited "G-Men" replied that they were there to show the president part of a stash that was seized from former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro following his January arrest on various narco-terrorism charges, including tens of millions of dollars' worth of gold he had locked away in a safe.

Disclosure Day is an upcoming blockbuster science fiction movie about an alien invasion. Very little information has been released in relation to the actual content of the film. However, well ahead of its release on June 12th, the movie has a lavish promotional website and has enjoyed plenty of advanced publicity - both in the media and more widely.

This promotion campaign has included a half time showing of the promotional trailer in the January 2026 US Superbowl. Aside from plenty of symbolism, this publicity drive has revealed very little by way of narrative and storyline, although the tagline promises that: 'the truth belongs to seven billion people. We are coming close to...Disclosure Day'.

With a background of official promises to release a backlog of files on the existence of UFO activity, the movie will allegedly be 'a fictional account of the release of government material long shrouded in secrecy'.

As the awakening souls on the planet slowly realise that many of the events of their lives may well have been contrived, exaggerated, or simply made up, what are we to make of this movie when the more recent political weight attached to 'disclosure' suggests the possibility of another garden path to keep us distracted in the name of 'entertainment'.

It has become increasingly clear in recent times, that the entertainment industry is itself largely controlled by the Epstein class, and that many celebrities and high-profile industry leaders are no more than chess board pieces for the architects of the emerging NWO to move around as they continue to plan.

Outlining the first premises of the long coveted dream of a one world government system at the beginning of the 1970s, the Trilateral Commission's Richard N. Gardner (part of the in-house club which included co-founders Zbigniew Brzezinski, and David Rockefeller) argued that the final stages of clearing a path through sovereign nations for their intended 'new international economic order' would be experienced by the masses as 'a booming, buzzing confusion' [Hard Road to The New World Order - R N Gardner.pdf]

Well, you have to smash eggs to make an omelette, don't you?

A month into the Iran war, it is clear that Israel aims to disrupt any possible off-ramp the Trump administration and Iran may be looking for to end the fighting, and that Iran, not the U.S., is the key actor that will determine how the war ends.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) has been urging U.S. President Donald Trump to press on in his war on Iran. The claim is that the Saudis are concerned that if the war ends with the Islamic Republic still in control of the country, its resources, and what weaponry it still has, it will pose an even greater threat than it has in the past. The pitch to Trump is that he has an "historic opportunity to remake the Middle East."

There are many reasons to doubt the veracity of the report. The "sources" for this potentially explosive piece of news are described as "people who have had conversations with American officials." The Saudi government has explicitly denied the report as well. And the article itself lists a host of reasons that it would be against Saudi interests for the war to be prolonged.

Unfortunately the article has been cited and reprinted widely, accepted by many as true, despite its shaky foundations. The Trump administration is feeling a lot of heat over both the lack of a clear American objective in the Iran war and the growing belief that this war is not about American interests at all but Israeli ones.

What has become clear three weeks into the war on Iran is that there are divergent interests among Iran's adversaries, including the GCC states [Gulf Cooperation Council], the U.S., and Israel. Those differences directly impact the desire to prolong the war, as Israel desires, or quickly end it, as Trump seems to wish and that, despite the Times article, is likely what most of the GCC states want as well.

And then there are Iran's own interests that it is seeking to defend through the remainder of the fighting and the negotiation to end it.

How these interests get defined and met will determine the end of the war on Iran, but it is already clear that Israel holds the ability to disrupt any possible off-ramp the Trump administration and Iran may be currently looking for, and that Iran, not the United States, is the key actor who will frame the end of the war.

On Thursday, the European Parliament in Strasbourg delivered what many are calling one of the most significant setbacks in recent memory for the EU's traditional bureaucratic and centrist consensus.

In a single day, MEPs advanced stricter mass deportation rules, rejected controversial mass surveillance of private communications (known as "Chat Control"), and moved forward on dropping tariffs on key U.S. goods as part of a broader transatlantic trade reset.

Flynn filed suit in 2023 alleging malicious prosecution by a 'virulently anti-Trump leadership' within the FBI.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) reached a settlement Wednesday with Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor to President Donald Trump, over a legal battle tied to his contacts with a Russian diplomat during the Mueller probe.

Official court papers seen by Fox News Digital do not disclose the financial terms of the settlement, but the government is said to be paying Flynn approximately $1.2 million to resolve the matter, The Associated Press reported.

The agreement concludes a lengthy legal saga stemming from the Russia investigation.

After three months in jail, ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro appeared thinner and grayer, but still in command, as he appeared in federal court in Manhattan for a status conference on Thursday.

Maduro -- was shackled at the ankles and wearing a beige smock over an orange shirt -- nodded to the gallery and said "good morning," in English.

Judge Alvin Hellerstein said he would not dismiss the narcoterrorism and other charges Maduro faces, but appeared to wrestle with how to assure Maduro had access to sufficient counsel.

In recent weeks, we have referenced Gavin Newsom, the California Governor and presidential hopeful, who had seemingly modified his public position on Israel amid the war on Iran.

During an interview, Newsom said Israel was an apartheid state and floated the idea of conditioning military aid to the country. However, in a new interview with Politico, Newsom said he regrets using the word "apartheid" and insists he was only referring to a possible future where Israel emerges as an apartheid state.

Newsom told the website that he was simply referring to a New York Times Op-Ed by Thomas Friedman, a columnist for the paper, where he said that Benjamin Netanyahu's success in possible upcoming Israeli elections would "be a major propellant to his efforts to annex the West Bank, cripple the Israeli Supreme Court and make Israel an apartheid state."

Newsom's latest about-face comes amid even more polling showing that support for Israel has all but entirely cratered among Americans.

An NBC News poll shows that just 32% of registered voters view Israel in a positive way. 13% of Democrats view the country positively, and nearly 60% of them view it negatively. A recent Gallup poll also showed that, for the first time in 25 years, a majority of Americans sympathize with Palestinians more than Israelis.