More than a dozen people were killed by Ukrainian strikes on the Russian provincial capital of Belgorod, Russia's emergencies ministry said Saturday, with the Russian defence ministry vowing the strike "will not go unpunished".

Shelling in the center of the Russian border city of Belgorod killed 14 people, including two children, and injured 108 others Saturday, Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry said.

Russian officials accused Kyiv of carrying out the attack, which took place the day after an 18-hour aerial bombardment across Ukraine killed at least 39 civilians.


Images of Belgorod on social media showed burning cars and plumes of black smoke rising among damaged buildings as air raid sirens sounded. One strike hit close to a public ice rink in the very heart of the city.

South Africa has filed a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing it of crimes of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza after nearly three months of relentless Israeli bombardment has killed more than 21,500 people and caused widespread destruction in the besieged enclave.

In an application to the court on Friday, South Africa described Israel's actions in Gaza as "genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group".

"The acts in question include killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction," the application said.

By spring or summer 2024, the Ukrainian army will likely no longer be a credible fighting force, according to Yevgeny Balitsky, the governor of Russia's frontline Zaporozhye Region.

Balitsky cites his military experience as well as grapevine signals from the other side as the sources of his insight into the situation in Ukraine. Speaking to journalists on Wednesday, he cited "tectonic shifts" in Ukraine that he expects to "finish it off from the inside."

"Most likely [the hostilities] will end in late spring or early summer," he said. "The Ukrainian army will collapse."

Former President Trump in an unusual Christmas message on Truth Social called for various people he sees as "looking to destroy" the nation to "rot in Hell."

It was one of several Christmas messages on the former president's preferred social media platform going after President Biden, special counsel Jack Smith and other political opponents throughout Monday.

The opponents included world leaders and people in favor of the use of electric cars.

"Merry Christmas to all, including Crooked Joe Biden's ONLY HOPE, Deranged Jack Smith," Trump began in a Truth Social post at 2:38 p.m. EST.

The ECHR gives priority to anti-Russian complaints while "censoring" Moscow's concerns, Russia's deputy foreign minister says

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has been reduced to the role of a Western tool, rubber-stamping anti-Russian decisions while ignoring any cases it deems linked to Moscow's interests, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin said on Thursday.

In an extensive interview with Izvestia newspaper, Vershinin argued that the ECHR, a "once-promising" international organization post-WWII, created to uphold the rule of law and human rights, has now been discredited and degraded due to Western nations' "total control."

Donald Trump Jr. has expressed strong opposition to the prospect of Nikki Haley being tapped as his father's running mate in the 2024 presidential election, pledging to go to "great lengths" to prevent it.

In a recent interview, Mr. Trump Jr. declared that he "wouldn't have her" as the vice presidential candidate alongside his father, former President Donald Trump, should he secure the GOP nomination next year.

"I would go to great lengths to make sure that doesn't happen," the former president's son told Newsmax on Dec. 25.

The statement came after the outlet played video footage of Ms. Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a GOP presidential candidate, making critical comments about President Trump during an interview with ABC News Live Prime anchor Linsey Davis earlier in the month.

Historians of the future, flash-frying peccary testicles and mesquite pods over their campfires, will wonder at how the archetypal Shining City on a Hill of America's storied yesteryear got transformed into the roach motel that our country has become on the threshold of 2024 CE. Will they be as stupidly bewildered as, in our time, the faculty at Harvard, the editors of The New York Times, or the directorate of the CDC? Or will they figure out the score by then?

Which is: the nauseating state-of-the-nation is being driven by a cohort of our own fellow citizens lost in an evil crypto-religious salvation rapture that veils their own self-disgust, moral failure, peevish discontents, petty hatreds, willful profanations, compulsive lying, sexual depravity, fraudulence, venality, cupidity, and all-around wont of boundaries. They are wrecking the country on-purpose, led by their chosen figurehead avatar, "Joe Biden" and the horses of many different colors he rode in on.

The people running things, yanking the levers of power, managing the malign weapon they have made of government (and the law, and schooling, and medicine, etc.), have got to be turned out, and hard. Not a few should find themselves in the courts and, with proper and fair adjudication, be conducted to prison, perhaps even to the special room there where the lives of the wicked are ceremonially concluded.

You may legitimately ask: Does America deserve what it's getting? Well, you know the old maxim about hard times make strong men. . . strong men bring good times. . . good times make weak men. . . . Our national quandary is certainly a case of that, plus the manifestation of well-known terrestrial cycles (e.g., Fourth Turnings), plus the workings of emergence as the dynamics involved in all this sort themselves out. . . topped off by the "secret sauce" of Globalist wickedness, with the aim of severe population reduction and the asset stripping of Western Civ for the benefit of the that moneygrubbing Globalist transhuman technocrat rat-pack.

FM praises Netanyahu since 'he never dared' to criticize Russia, says Israel's campaign against Hamas 'sounds like denazification,' echoing Moscow's justification for its war...

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appeared on Thursday to offer some limited praise for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while appearing to compare Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza to Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

In an interview with the state-owned Russia-24 news channel, Lavrov indicated that Moscow is pleased Netanyahu has not vocally criticized Russia for its ongoing war against Ukraine. He said:

"Despite condemnations from around the world, including of course Israel, he finds himself in quite a serious situation, that he never dared to make any statements against Russia."

Former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid were publicly critical of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but Netanyahu has kept more of a careful tone, though Israel has offered its backing for Kyiv and sent repeated shipments of humanitarian and medical aid as well as field hospitals to Ukraine since the start of the war.

Under the current circumstances, demands for Ukraine to reclaim its 1991 borders are a call "for genocide," Sergey Lavrov argues...

Ukraine's conditions for ending the conflict with Russia, as declared in the 'peace formula' presented by President Vladimir Zelensky last year, are impossible to implement, and any support for it is futile, Moscow's top diplomat has said.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reiterated Russia's negative view on the proposal in an interview with national media on Thursday. He said the 'formula' is being promoted by Western backers of Ukraine, who have been trying to sell it to neutral nations in a series of meetings this year - the last of which took place recently, in strict secrecy, with attendance dwindling compared to the previous gatherings.

The minister described Kiev's plan as a "baby comforter" and "a figment of a sick imagination." It includes "fluff" such as commitments to global food and energy security, but its essence is a demand for Russia to:

"Hand over Crimea, hand over Donbass, and you know what, we are going to establish an alienation zone around Russia on the country's own territory."

Western attempts to whip up international support for the Ukrainian plan is a "hustle", Lavrov claimed. Nations who took part in the meetings and spoke to Russia about what happened there acknowledged that, and said they were trying to shift Kiev's position, the minister added.

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a motion Wednesday morning seeking to prevent former President Donald Trump from claiming in his federal case that he was targeted for political prosecution by President Joe Biden as a form of "election interference."

Donald Trump, unironically, stands accused of "election interference" in connection to his legal and constitutionally protected election challenges over the 2020 election.

Smith said in his motion that Trump should be barred from "introducing evidence, making arguments, or framing questions to advance a theory of selective or vindictive prosecution."

Judge Chutkan, an anti-Trump jurist who has consistently sided with the state's prosecution efforts, is expected to fulfill all of Smith's demands, no matter how contrary to due process or deleterious to the cause of justice.

The excessively constrictive measures would further rein in the speech of the 2024 presidential candidate in the midst of a campaign that has thus far established him as the clear favorite.