Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron in the early hours of Tuesday, after Azerbaijan opened fire with artillery and drones on several areas along the border.

In separate phone calls, Pashinyan told Putin and Macron about the "provocative, aggressive actions of the Azerbaijani armed forces against the sovereign territory of Armenia, which began at midnight," and "stressed the importance of an adequate response from the international community," the government in Yerevan said.

The Armenian Defense Ministry claimed that military and civilian infrastructure in Sotk, Vardenis, Goris, Kapan, Artanish and Ishkhanasar have been shelled, and that there were reports of casualties. Azerbaijani claims that the shelling was started by Armenia were "completely false," Yerevan added.

Overcoming a reluctance to share their strategy, the Ukrainians were able to use U.S. resources to identify key Russian targets.

Senior Ukrainian officials stepped up intelligence sharing with their American counterparts over the summer as they began to plan the counteroffensive that allowed them to make dramatic gains in the northeast in recent days, a shift that allowed the United States to provide better and more relevant information about Russian weaknesses, according to American officials.

Throughout the war, the United States has provided Ukraine with information on command posts, ammunition depots and other key nodes in the Russian military lines. Such real-time intelligence has allowed the Ukrainians — who U.S. officials acknowledge have played the decisive role in planning and execution — to target Russian forces, kill senior generals and force ammunition supplies to be moved farther from the Russian front lines.

A top administrator in Ukraine's Kherson region, who's death had been announced, claims it was staged to save his life.

Vitaly Gura, deputy head of the town of Novaya Kakhovka in Ukraine's Kherson Region, has revealed that his death was staged by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) in order to save him from an assassination attempt by Kiev.

Reports of the pro-Russian official's murder emerged on August 6, with local authorities saying he was shot by Ukrainian forces near his home in Novaya Kakhovka, and died on his way to hospital.

Revelation that heir to throne is routinely sent confidential papers comes after three-year freedom of information battle.

Prince Charles has been receiving confidential cabinet papers for decades, giving him access to the inner workings of British government, according to a Whitehall manual released after a three-year freedom of information battle.

The heir to the throne, who has previously been criticised for "meddling" in politics, is sent all cabinet memoranda, alongside the Queen and ministers in charge of departments, including secret proposals for new legislation and other discussion documents that have only been released to the public after 30 years.

The weakest link in the British government's four-year long story of Russian Novichok assassination operations in the UK - prelude to the current war - is an English medical expert by the name of Guy Rutty (lead image, standing).

A government-appointed pathologist advising the Home Office, police, and county coroners, Rutty is the head of the East Midlands Forensic Pathology Unit in Leicester, he is the author of a post-mortem report, dated November 29, 2018, claiming that the only fatality in the history of the Novichok nerve agent (lead image, document), Dawn Sturgess, had died of Novichok poisoning on July 8, 2018. Rutty's finding was added four months after initial post-mortem results and a coroner's cremation certificate stopped short of confirming that Novichok had been the cause of her death.

Rutty's Novichok finding was a state secret for more than two years. It was revealed publicly by the second government coroner to investigate Sturgess's death, Dame Heather Hallett, at a public hearing in London on March 30, 2021. In written evidence it was reported that "on 17th July 2018, Professor Guy Rutty MBE, a Home Office Registered Forensic Pathologist conducted an independent post-mortem examination. He was accompanied by Dr Phillip Lumb, also an independent Home Office Registered Forensic Pathologist. Professor Rutty's Post-Mortem Report of 29th November 2018 records the cause of death as Ia Post cardiac arrest hypoxic brain injury and intracerebral haemorrhage; Ib Novichok toxicity."

Jacinda Ardern has declared it "time to safely turn the page" on New Zealand's Covid-19 restrictions, scrapping all but a handful of remaining rules.

New Zealand, which once eliminated the virus through the toughest pandemic rules in the world, has made relaxations similar to Australian or European conditions.

Mask-wearing will no longer be mandatory in public places, and the last vaccine mandates will be ditched in two weeks under sweeping changes announced by the prime minister on Monday.

However, the government is sticking by a seven-day isolation period for people with virus, defying calls to shorten isolation to five days.

September 9 - 11 will go down in history as a period of great significance in the Russo-Ukrainian war. Both belligerent parties crossed very important thresholds, which taken together suggest that the war is entering a new phase. On the 9th and 10th, Ukraine achieved its first concrete success of the war by retaking all the Russian-held territory in Kharkov Oblast west of the Oskil river, including the western bank of Kupyansk and the transit node of Izyum.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin convened an emergency meeting of his national security council, which precipitated Russia's own escalation on the 11th, when Ukrainian infrastructure was at long last subject to attack, plunging much of the country into darkness.

It seems clear that the war is entering a new phase, and it seems highly likely that both parties will attempt to take decisive action in the near feature. For now, let's try to parse through the developments of the past week and get a handle on where the war is heading.

Xi Jinping is due on a state visit to Kazakhstan on Wednesday and will then meet Vladimir Putin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization's summit.

Xi Jinping will leave China this week for the first time in more than two years for a trip to Central Asia where he will meet Vladimir Putin just a month before Xi is poised to cement his place as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.

The trip, his first abroad since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, shows just how confident Xi is about his grip on power in China and just how perilous the global situation has become: Russia's confrontation with the West over Ukraine, the crisis over Taiwan and a stuttering global economy.

Over 400 doctors, scientists and professionals from more than 34 countries this morning declared an international medical crisis due to "diseases and death associated with the 'COVID-19 vaccines'". The declaration, which originates among concerned medics and professionals in India, makes eight "urgent" demands, including an immediate stop to the vaccinations and investigation of all deaths in previously healthy people.

Three weeks ago, American psychiatrist Peter Breggin and his wife Ginger Ross Breggin formulated some harsh criticism of my new book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism. They did so in a book review published in three parts (here, here, and here), asserting that in describing the mass formation that took place during the Covid-19 pandemic I was blaming the victims and absolving the perpetrators. Even more, Breggin and Breggin claim that there hasn't been such a thing as a mass formation during the corona crisis. People were not allowed to meet - how could they have formed a mass?

I reached out to Peter Breggin and his wife immediately after their review was published, proposing to have a constructive public or private conversation about their review. It is about two months later now, and it seems that they refuse to accept my invitation. That's why I will respond here.

This seems to be their core criticism: that I argue there was no intentional manipulation at work in the crisis, and no conspiracy — only a spontaneously-emerging mass formation from the population itself. For Breggin and Breggin, that means I am blaming the victims (the population) and psychiatrically labeling anyone who thinks there was, in fact, conspiracy at play.

It is correct that in my book, I describe the societal dynamics of the corona crisis as an emergent phenomenon, driven by a certain narrative of man and the world — the mechanistic-rationalist-materialist ideology — which created a certain elite and put the population in a certain state that made it vulnerable to mass formation. In The Psychology of Totalitarianism and numerous podcasts, I describe that mass-formation can emerge in a more or less spontaneous way (as happened in the first stages of Nazism in Germany) or that it can be artificially provoked through indoctrination and propaganda (as in the former Soviet Union). In this process, both the elite and the population itself shoulder responsibility — the first because they actively manipulate the population and the second because they prefer to stay blind and, ultimately, commit atrocities towards those who don't join them.