The country allegedly paid $2 million to target American legislators in order to foster support for its war in Gaza.

Israel allegedly organized and funded an influence campaign last year targeting the US to drum up support for its ongoing Gaza offensive, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing unnamed Israeli officials and documents related to the operation.

The outlet claims that the country's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which is responsible for connecting Jews across the world with the State of Israel, commissioned the covert campaign and allocated some $2 million for the operation, hiring the Tel Aviv political marketing firm Stoic.

The campaign was apparently launched sometime in October, when the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) launched its war in Gaza following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, in which some 1,200 people were killed and another 250 were taken hostage.

Israel's subsequent war on Hamas and relentless siege of Gaza has drawn international criticism, including threats of sanctions, as the IDF is estimated to have caused the death of over 36,000 Palestinians, according to the enclave's health authorities.

At its peak, Israel's influence campaign used hundreds of fake accounts that posed as US students, concerned citizens and local constituents on various social media platforms, including X, Facebook and Instagram, the New York Times reports.

Washington has threatened Beijing with sanctions over an alleged increase in exports of dual-use goods to Russia

The US fails to realize that blackmail and threats are unacceptable when dealing with a "large, sovereign, and powerful" country such as China, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday.

Peskov was commenting after US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen threatened Beijing with sanctions earlier this week, claiming that Washington would not tolerate increased exports of "dual-use" goods from China to Russia, which are allegedly aiding Moscow's military production.

"We are well aware that our Chinese partners do not accept such language, do not accept such messages and such threats, such blackmail," Peskov told reporters.

The remarkable news that Italy's Defence Minister is calling for the West to make a concerted effort to end the conflict in Ukraine may give some people hope. Guido Crosetto recently told the daily Il Messaggero that negotiation with Vladimir Putin is the only way to end the bloodshed. However, doublespeak statements from Italian politicians and business people mirror the EU's and NATO's rudderless single mindedness. Indecision is spelling the end of Ukraine as a nation.

Crosetto, a staunch supporter of Ukraine, has also criticized Western sanctions against Russia as ineffective. As one of the founders of the national-conservative Brothers of Italy (FdI), he has also pointed out the overestimation of the Western order's economic influence by American and European leadership. He believes that arming Ukraine could expedite the conditions for a truce and ultimately peace. In other words, the solution lies in a strategic approach that leads to peace, not in a perpetual state of conflict.

When the clash between the combined West and the combining rest eventually winds down, it will go down as one of history's most spectacular and most embarrassing failures of leadership. If Western leaders were capable of shame, they would be resigning their positions in droves. The fact that they're not is because they were carefully recruited and cultivated precisely so that they wouldn't have such scruples.

The Russians are genetically inferior, OK?

When Russia initiated its Special Military Operation in Ukraine, many of our genius leaders, analysts and journalists eagerly hee-hawed about all kinds of ways in which the Russians were so, so inferior to us: they're incapable of thinking strategically; their military hardware is shoddy; LOL, their GDP is the size of Spain's; the West can outpace Russia ten to one in military spending; their soldiers are poorly trained, poorly organized, their morale is low, and on and on. The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper even said that the Russians were "genetically driven" to deceive and manipulate, clearly an adept of the old hypothesis about the inferior Asiatic genes.

At the same time, Sir Tony Blair, the Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter gushed on the pages of his extremely important Tony Blair Institute for Global Change about how the West, "impressively united to assemble a vast arsenal of sanctions which will over time collapse the Russian economy." He portrayed Vladimir Putin as an anxious leader, "detached from reality and with no one around him prepared to tell him the truth."

Others informed us that Putin was mad and isolated at the Kremlin, that he had stage four cancer, that he was falling down the stairs and unable to control his bowel movements, etc. In short, Western leaders were convinced that they had the winning hand. But their faith wasn't based on facts or a well-developed strategy. Ultimately, it was based on the conviction that we are better and that our system is better. That kind of conviction tends to be the great pitfall of ideologues and zealots.

Since the failure last year of the Ukrainian army's "counteroffensive" against Russia, NATO countries have relentlessly escalated their war with Russia in Ukraine, authorizing the Kiev regime to launch missile strikes on Russia and pledging to send their own troops to Ukraine. An interview with top NATO officials published yesterday in Britain's Daily Telegraph, titled "NATO land corridors could rush US troops to front line in event of European war," highlights that NATO plans to escalate the war from Ukraine across Europe.

Examining the Telegraph article puts paid to arguments that NATO's escalation against Russia aims to defend Ukraine's borders or European democracy. NATO is preparing a continental war, sending hundreds of thousands of troops for operations along Russia's entire western border, from Finland to the Balkans. Even if the implementation of NATO's plans did not immediately trigger nuclear war, which is a very real danger, it would plunge Europe into mass slaughter on a scale unseen since World War II.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that Israel was "prepared for a very intense operation" along the border with Lebanon, where Israeli troops have exchanged near-daily fire with Hezbollah fighters.

Almost eight months of exchanges between Israel and the Iran-backed movement, a Hamas ally, have intensified over the past week, with Israel striking deeper into Lebanese territory.

"We are prepared for a very intense operation in the north. One way or another, we will restore security to the north," Netanyahu said during a visit to the border area.

Hezbollah said later it launched several attacks on Israeli positions during the day, including a "guided missile" strike on an "Iron Dome platform in the Ramot Naftali barracks".

U.S. private equity giant Blackstone has agreed to buy 1,750 new homes to rent from British housebuilder Vistry, as institutional investors bet on a shortage of rental properties.

Large investors are increasingly putting cash into rental homes which have fared better than other commercial property sectors such as offices and retail, through a period of soaring borrowing costs and changing working patterns.

Vistry said on Tuesday it had agreed terms with Blackstone Real Estate and minority investment partner Regis to buy the homes with a development value of 580 million pounds ($740 million).

This is Blackstone's second acquisition from Vistry in eight months, after the private equity firm bought more than 2,800 mixed-tenure new homes in November.

The former president dismisses Joe Biden's view that global warming is the greatest risk to humanity.

The potential for nuclear war poses a more immediate threat to the world than climate change, former US President Donald Trump claimed over the weekend in a TV interview.

Speaking on Fox & Friends, Trump referred to President Joe Biden's recent speech, in which he (Biden) said global warming posed the "greatest existential threat to our country."

The former president said:

"They say that the sea levels will rise over the next 400 years by one eighth of an inch, which means basically we have a little more beachfront property. This is the big threat.

"In the meantime we got these maniacs with nuclear weapons that can do damage which I won't even talk to you about. There has never been anything like it, the power of weaponry today. It will be obliteration. And that's your real threat."

Trump has previously pledged that if he wins the November 5 election, he will seek to quickly end the Russia-Ukraine conflict and is "committed to restoring peace and stability and to stopping Joe Biden's march to World War Three."

Could Poland intervene in Ukraine? Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to consider the possibility. At May 28 press conference during his visit to Uzbekistan, he said:

"The Polish authorities say they are ready to send their contingents. We can hear Polish language, so there are many mercenaries from Poland. If some contingents from European countries enter Ukraine together with the Poles, others will later leave whereas the Poles will never do. This is obvious, at least for me. I might be wrong but I doubt that."

The Russian President described this scenario as an "escalation" and "yet another step towards a large conflict in Europe and globally."

Putin's impressions are somewhat echoed by the Polish authorities in Warsaw. In an interview published last week in the Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski claimed his country should not exclude the possibility of sending troops to neighboring Ukraine:

"We should not exclude any option. Let Putin be guessing as to what we will do."

A spokesperson for Poland's Defense Ministry, Janusz Sejmej, however, told Polish journalists that he had "no knowledge of that".

Jeffrey Sachs, a world-renowned professor of economics and bestselling author, recounted how he warned senior US officials that sanctions on Russia would fail. His statement comes as Daleep Singh, the US deputy national security adviser for international economics, said a large flow of Russian weapons is still powered by electronic components from companies in the United States and allied countries.

"The percentage of Russian battlefield weaponry with US or allied branded components is alarmingly and unacceptably high," Bloomberg quoted Singh as saying on May 28, adding that the US and its allies have struggled to stem the flow of parts to Russia and called on companies to prevent these parts from being used in the Ukraine conflict

Export controls — which target the movement of goods rather than financial transactions — have been difficult to enforce because producers lack the large internal compliance departments that have emerged in the banking sector over the past two decades of US sanctions policy.

"Put your creativity and resources to work, know your customers, know their customers, and know the end users. Ensure that American firms are not unwitting cogs in Russia's arsenal," appealed the advisor.