U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) has become the first member of the Washington establishment to say the quiet part out loud regarding the U.S. funding of the war between Ukraine and Russia, which is really a war between the U.S./NATO and Russia. Ukraine is just NATO's proxy.

Speaking in an interview with CBS News Face the Nation on Sunday, Senator Graham said Washington "cannot afford" to allow Russia to achieve victory in its war with Ukraine as this would mean losing direct access to vast mineral wealth.

Graham accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of being a "megalomaniac" who is attempting to "re-create the Russian Empire by force of arms," starting with Ukraine — this is a favorite talking point of the Washington neocons which has no basis in fact. Graham then claimed that if Moscow wins the war, it will proceed to take over Ukraine's wealth and share it with China. Graham described that prospect as "ridiculous," suggesting it would be better if this "gold mine" were claimed by the U.S. and its allies.

Biden: Israel is offering a ceasefire.
Israel: We're not.
Biden: I negotiated this ceasefire
Israel: There's no ceasefire agreement.
Biden: The ceasefire will begin soon.
Israel: It won't.
Rinse and repeat. @Pimso B

The Biden administration's ceasefire resolution is a cynical fraud aimed at airbrushing Israel's tattered image while laying the groundwork for the final expulsion of the Palestinian people. In truth, there won't be a ceasefire because Netanyahu and his entire cabinet are adamantly opposed to ending the hostilities. There's not even any gray area here. After the US-drafted resolution was passed on Monday, the Israeli Prime Minister's Office delivered a terse statement saying the following:

"The claim that Israel agreed to end the war before achieving all its goals is a total lie," says the PMO....

The full document, argues Netanyahu's office, would show that "Israel will not end the war until all its conditions are met — that is, fighting until Hamas is eliminated, returning all of our hostages, and ensuring that Gaza never again represents a threat to Israel." (Times of Israel)

We've reached a point of Maximal Bureaucratic Psychopathy in Science

That's where committees of committees aim to improve your health by giving one human the ability to kill a billion.

In 2015 a scientist at Anthony Fauci's agency thought it would be neat to mix two Monkeypox strains together to make a nastier one. For no reason anyone can explain, the National Institutes of Health's Institutional Review Board thought it would be neat too, and approved it.

A normal person might worry that doddery Joe Biden has the nuclear codes, but all along, unnamed, unaccountable countless others might have their fingers on equivalent bombs, and they won't need to input any codes to set off the bombs, just have a bad day.

The idea was to mix a deadly but slow strain of monkey pox with a tamer monkey pox strain that spread quickly. This could have created a virus with the "best of both" — an agent with a 15% fatality rate and a reproduction rate of 2.4, which would make it very much "pandemic potential". (With one infected person infecting 2.4 others, this was a similar rate of spread to the original Wu-Flu, but so much deadlier).

So any normal human would know this was a stupid risk to take, but the NIH did it anyway. Worse, they knew it was bad, and they hid the approval for nine years. Even when the investigators from a House Committee came knocking, they concealed the project approval. They now say the experiment was never done, but they can't point to a single email or memo to show it was stopped. The original approval has only recently been reversed.

As long as the festering mess that gave us Covid is not dealt with — it's just a matter of time before we get the next one.

Four years on and no one has been sacked for the lab leak that infected the world, or the cover up that hid the origin.

Fauci swears that a biosecurity breach in Wuhan could not possibly have anything to do with his former agency NIAID, but since they hid the monkeypox approval, and told journalists it never happened, then stonewalled and denied it to a congressional committee, Fauci's assurances are worth about as much as nine years of active deception suggest.

Reckless Gain-of-Function experiments with viruses is like letting the local university make nuclear bombs in basements of skyscrapers. Except it's more dangerous.

Is there any reason the NIH should not be razed to the ground?

The EAEU isn't a household name, but it has delivered what the EU can't - immediate results

The rumble of guns is now so loud across the world that it's easy to forget that there can be any relationship between states other than those based on brute force. But that is not the case.

However fierce the contradictions between the great powers may be, international politics and economics are not all about conflict. There is always room for cooperation, which is no less natural to human nature than competition and coercion. And it would be a mistake to 'fall for' the West's suggestion that the benefits are only one-sided - it is not necessarily the case. It only becomes so if the US and its Western European satellites initially see cooperation as a one-way street. The opposite is true, in reality. And it even produces quite tangible results.

Against the backdrop of dramatic events in the zone of direct confrontation between Russia and the West, the ten-year anniversary of a unique organization uniting five countries of the former USSR went virtually unnoticed by observers. We are talking about the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), whose founding treaty was signed in Astana in May 2014.

Israel rejects findings that 'outrageously and repugnantly attempt to draw a false equivalence between IDF soldiers and Hamas terrorists,' accuses UN commission of systematic bias

Both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes in the early stages of the Gaza war, a UN inquiry alleged on Wednesday, saying Israel's actions also constituted crimes against humanity because of the immense civilian losses, and that they included acts of "extermination."

The findings were from two parallel reports by "independent experts," one focusing on the Oct. 7 Hamas assault on Israel and another on Israel's military response, published by the UN Commission of Inquiry (COI). The commission has an unusually broad and open-ended mandate to collect evidence and identify perpetrators of alleged international crimes committed in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Israel is guilty of a committing the crime of "extermination" in Gaza, as well as the crimes of sexual violence, torture, and starvation as a weapon of war, along with other war crimes and crimes against humanity, UN investigators have found.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel also said Palestinian groups were guilty of war crimes, particularly over the taking of hostages.

The report covers the period between the 7 October Hamas-led attack on Israeli communities and 31 December.


During those 12 weeks Israel began a ferocious war on the Gaza Strip that has now killed more than 37,000 people.

As thousands of protesters camp out near the National Assembly building demanding his ouster, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced June 12 that a peace deal with Azerbaijan is close to being finalized.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have held multiple rounds of talks aimed at delimiting their mutual border and agreeing on a lasting settlement to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. As part of the peace process, Pashinyan earlier in 2024 agreed to a territorial handover to Azerbaijan that sparked widespread domestic opposition. Speaking with Armenian journalists, Pashinyan described the draft treaty text as "quite mature."

Also on June 12, Pashinyan told a government session that while officials hadn't worked out the details of Armenia's departure from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), there is "no alternative" to withdrawal. "We won't go back," he said.

Washington's decision to greenlight the use of US-supplied weapons by Kiev's notorious Azov Brigade is a desperate move that only reinforces Russia's claim that it is fighting neo-Nazism in Ukraine, Michael Maloof, a former senior security policy analyst at the US Department of Defense, has told RT.

On Monday, the US State Department scrapped a ban on deliveries of arms to the Azov Brigade, which had been imposed by Congress in 2018 over the unit's ties to neo-Nazism. According to the agency, a recent review has found "no evidence" of the military formation being in violation of the Leahy Law, which prohibits Washington from aiding foreign security force units that violate human rights with impunity.

"Clearly, the Azov group didn't go from sinners to saints overnight," Maloof said in an interview on Tuesday. "There still is a list of atrocities that they had committed, human rights abuses... you still see them marching around as a group with their symbols, with their camaraderie and their discipline in support of fascism."

So Le Petit Roi in Paris was predictably crushed in the European polls. He has called parliamentary snap elections, dissolving the Assemblée Nationale in an act of blind, puerile revenge on French citizens, de facto attacking French institutional democracy.

That doesn't mean much anyway, because the lineaments of "liberty, equality, fraternity" have long been usurped by a crass oligarchy.

The second round of these fresh French elections will be on July 7 - nearly coinciding with the British snap elections on July 11, and only a few days before the slow-burning urban catastrophe which will be the Olympics in Paris.

Paris salons are ablaze with intrigue on why the little Rothschild stooge with a Napoleon complex is throwing all his toys out of the pram now because he's not getting what he wants.

After all what he really craves is to become a "War President" - together with the Cadaver in the White House, Starmer in the UK, Rutte in the Netherlands, the Toxic Medusa von der Lugen in Brussels, Tusk in Poland, without having to answer to the French people.

It's nearly certain that Le Petit Roi will be facing the real prospect of becoming a lame duck President who needs to obey a right-wing parliament; Elysée Palace chatter already joined the circus, conveying the impression he might resign (that was later denied). Still, if Le Petit Roi runs off to war on Russia no French citizen will follow him, least of all the - pitiful - French army.

Bigger things though are in play. Following the - auspicious - game-changing messages to the Global Majority coming out of the St. Petersburg forum last week, anchored on openness and inclusiveness, the BRICS 10 meeting of Foreign Ministers in Nizhny Novgorod carried the baton early this week.

Foreign Minister Lavrov stressed three key points:

1. "The countries of the Global South no longer want to be dependent on the double standards of the West and its whims."
2. "Everyone knows that the BRICS countries already serve as the locomotive of the world economy."
3. "We [at the BRICS FMs meeting] stressed the need for consistent efforts to create a new world order, where the equality of independent states will be the key."

Now compare it with the shrinking G7 meeting later this week in Puglia in southern Italy: the same old song, from a "tough new warning" to Chinese banks ("Don't do business with Russia or else!") to vociferous threats against the China-Russia strategic partnership.

And last but not least, extra plotting to skim interest from the massive, frozen/stolen Russian assets with the intent of sending them to country 404; the Toxic Medusa itself announced that country 404 will receive €1.5 billion of the income from stolen Russian assets from the EU in July, 90% of it to buy weapons.

As for U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell - the man who invented the defunct "pivot to Asia" during Harpy Hillary Clinton's tenure in the early 2010s - he had already advanced that Washington will sanction Chinese companies and banks over Beijing's relations with Russia's military-industrial complex.

Russia could potentially make changes to its nuclear doctrine should the "escalatory actions" by the US and its allies push it into doing so, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov has warned.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a BRICS ministerial meeting in Nizhny Novgorod, Ryabkov admitted the international situation has been getting increasingly "complicated" and changes to his country's nuclear posture could not be ruled out.

"The challenges that are growing thanks to the unacceptable and escalatory actions of the US and its NATO allies undoubtedly prompt a full-fledged question of how the basic documents in nuclear deterrence can be brought more into line with current needs," Ryabkov said.

The diplomat refused to elaborate on the exact nature of the potential amendments, explaining that Moscow does not have a "practice of covering in advance what kind of changes can be made" before actual decisions are taken.