The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations has refused to ask for a ceasefire in Gaza to save lives, after more than 12,000 civilians have died, and half are children.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has refused to ask for a ceasefire in Gaza to save lives, after more than 12,000 civilians have died, and half are children. Thomas-Greenfield's policy statements suggest Israelis are deserving of human rights, while Palestinians are not.

In 2015, Thomas-Greenfield received the Bishop John T. Walker Distinguished Humanitarian Service Award, and yet her current presence at the UN has not exhibited any humanitarian urgency for Gaza, which her own colleagues at the UN are calling a humanitarian disaster, and genocide.

She forgets that her own ancestry mirrors the Palestinians, not the Israelis. She is representing the interests of the masters, while denying the oppressed people's rights.

NATO is looking into a more permanent increase in the number of troops in the Western Balkans to keep tensions under control, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization sent hundreds of additional forces to Kosovo from Britain and Romania after a battle between police and armed Serbs holed up in a monastery turned a quiet village in northern Kosovo into a war zone on Sept. 24.

"We are now reviewing whether we should have a more permanent increase to ensure that this doesn't spiral out of control and creates a new violent conflict in Kosovo or the wider region," Stoltenberg told reporters on a visit to Kosovo.

"The name of operation is Maidan 3. It is meant to change the president," he said in an interview with The Sun. "Maybe it's not by killing. I mean it's changing. They will use any instruments they have. So that's the idea, to the end of the year," he added.

This has been the second time in less than a week that Zelensky has told Western media that a third "Maidan" is being plotted against him. He first said that such information had been coming from Ukrainian intelligence and Western allies at a meeting with foreign reporters on November 17.

France encourages separatists and provides weapons to Armenia, setting the stage for a new war in the South Caucasus, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said in a welcoming address to participants at a conference titled "Decolonization: Empowerment and Development of Women."

"Apart from its former and current colonies, France is also destabilizing our region, the South Caucasus, by supporting separatist tendencies and separatists, providing weapons to Armenia, imposing a military policy, encouraging revanchist forces in Armenia and setting the stage for a new war in our region," Aliyev said in his address, which was read out by Azerbaijani Presidential Aide Hikmet Hajiyev.

The Russo-Ukrainian War has been a novel historical experience for a variety of reasons, and not only for the intricacies and technicalities of the military enterprise itself. This became the first conventional military conflict to occur in the age of social media and planetary cinematography (that is, the ubiquitous presence of cameras). This brought a veneer (though only a veneer) of immanence to war, which for millennia had unveiled itself only through the mediating forces of cable news, print newspapers, and victory steles.

For the eternal optimist, there were upsides to the idea that a high intensity war was slated to be documented in thousands of first-person view videos. Purely from the standpoint of intellectual curiosity (and martial prudence), the flood of footage from Ukraine offers insight into emerging weapons systems and methods and allows for a remarkable level of tactical-level data. Rather than waiting for years of agonizing dissection of after action reports to reconstruct engagements, we are aware in near real time of tactical movements.

Unfortunately, all the obvious downsides of airing a war live on social media were also in effect. The war instantly became sensationalized and saturated with fake, fabricated, or incorrectly captioned videos, cluttered with information that most people are simply not equipped to parse through (for obvious reasons, the average citizen does not have extensive experience differentiating between two post-Soviet armies using similar equipment and speaking similar, or even the same language), and pseudo-expertise.

The Russian foreign minister has revealed his thoughts about the most pressing international issues dominating the news today.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has spoken to RT in an exclusive interview that aired on Wednesday. The conversation largely revolved around the new escalation in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas and ways to potentially resolve it. The top diplomat also spoke about the crumbling "rules-based order" promoted by the West and the emerging multipolar world, the ongoing "awakening" of Africa, and other current events.

Russia's stance on Gaza conflict

Moscow maintains its position that the ongoing hostilities in the Middle East should be brought to an end as soon as possible, Lavrov stated. Resolving the increasing "humanitarian problems, which are all over the place," must be "an absolutely necessary first step" to remedy the situation.

"When the Israeli reaction to [the] October 7 massacre became known, we strongly condemned what Hamas did and, at the same time, we called immediately for [a] measured response in full accordance with international humanitarian law," Lavrov explained.

The allegory is one in which a scorpion depends on the frog for its passage across a flooded river, by hitching a lift on the frog's back. The frog distrusts the scorpion; but reluctantly agrees. During the crossing the scorpion fatally stings the frog swimming the river, under the scorpion. They both die.

It is a tale from antiquity intended to illustrate the nature of tragedy. A Greek tragedy is one in which the crisis at the heart of any 'tragedy' does not arise by sheer mischance. The Greek sense is that tragedy is where something happens because it has to happen; because of the nature of the participants; because the actors involved make it happen. And they have no choice but to make it happen, because that is their nature.

It is a story that was deployed by a former senior Israeli diplomat, well versed in U.S. politics. His telling of the frog fable has Israel's leaders desperately fending off responsibility for the 7 October débacle, with a cabinet furiously trying to turn the crisis (psychologically) from culpable disaster - to present the Israeli public instead with an image of epic opportunity.

The chimaera being presented is one that by reaching back to earliest Zionist ideology, Israel can turn the catastrophe in Gaza - as Finance Minister Smotrich has long argued - into a solution that once and for all 'unilaterally resolves the inherent contradiction between Jewish and Palestinian aspirations - by ending the illusion that any kind of compromise, reconciliation or partition is possible.

This is the potential scorpion sting: the Israeli cabinet betting all on a hugely risky strategy - a new Nakba - that could draw Israel into major conflict, but in so doing also sink what remains of western prestige.

Of course, as the former Israeli diplomat underlines, this ploy is essentially constructed around Netanyahu's personal ambition - he manoeuvres to alleviate criticism and to stay in power as long as he can. More importantly, he hopes this will enable him to spread the blame, shedding all and any responsibility and accountability from himself. [Better still], "it can place Gaza in an historic and epic context as an event that might render the PM as a formative wartime leader of grandeur and glory".

Far-fetched? Not necessarily.

The meeting will be dedicated to the ongoing escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Moscow has said

Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, will join an emergency video conference with other BRICS leaders on Tuesday to discuss the ongoing escalation between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas militant group, the Kremlin said in a statement on Monday. The presidential administration provided no further details about the upcoming event.

Earlier on Monday, the office of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said that he will chair an extraordinary joint meeting on the situation in Gaza. South Africa currently chairs the BRICS group, which also includes Russia, China, Brazil, and India.

Alejandro Vidal-Quadras was reportedly walking alone when a gunman got off a motorcycle and shot the former veteran politician in the jaw. Police say they are searching for two men who were on a black Yamaha motorcycle.
A former Catalan political leader has been shot in the face in Madrid.

Alejandro Vidal-Quadras, who co-founded the far-right party Vox, was shot in the affluent Salamanca area at about 1.30pm on Thursday.

The 78-year-old was conscious when he was taken to hospital, a police spokesman said.

Mr Vidal-Quadras, who also used to lead Spain's centre-right People's Party in Catalonia, is expected to survive the attack.

Police are still searching for the gunman.

Santiago Abascal, president of the Vox party, said it is too early to speculate why Mr Vidal-Quadras was targeted.

"Thank god it seems that Alejandro Vidal-Quadras is out of danger," he said.

An oped by Joe Biden indicates that Washington is ready to sacrifice others for its interests, ex-Russian president says

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said that US President Joe Biden's latest opinion piece for the Washington Post once again highlighted the essence of Washington's security doctrine, which is to provide for America's interests at the expense of others.

The US supposedly makes itself safer by pouring money into "its own military industry" and starting "wars on other continents," Medvedev said Sunday in a post on X (formerly Twitter), calling it "the essence of the American security doctrine."

"That's why our commitment to Ukraine today is an investment in our own security," Biden said in his piece published on Saturday. Medvedev, who now serves as deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, responded to this by saying that the US essentially considers "money" and "blood" together as a "good investment." "How very American. No comment," he added.