Britain has information indicating the Russian military may move beyond attacks on Ukrainian grain facilities to target civilian shipping in the Black Sea, Britain's U.N. Ambassador Barbara Woodward said on Tuesday.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak shared the information with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during a phone call on Tuesday, Woodward said.

Britain's information also indicates that Russia has laid additional sea mines in the approaches to Ukrainian ports, she said.

"We agree with the U.S. assessment that this is a coordinated effort to justify and lay blame on Ukraine for any attacks against civilian ships in the Black Sea," Woodward told reporters.

A Russian delegation led by Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has arrived in North Korea to attend the 70th anniversary of the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War, according to reports.

The delegation arrived in Pyongyang on Tuesday evening, according to the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), and is joining a Chinese Communist Party group headed by Politburo member Li Hongzhong.

The two delegations will take part in the celebration of the 70th anniversary of "Victory Day" on Thursday in Pyongyang, an event that state media said will be marked in a "grand manner that will go down in history".

Kiev's counteroffensive is being undermined by the disparity, a military spokesman has claimed.

Moscow enjoys a significant advantage over Kiev in terms of electronic warfare, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yury Ignat has admitted. He cited the disparity as among the reasons why Ukraine is struggling in its long-anticipated counteroffensive.

Russian forces use electronic countermeasures to disable Ukrainian drones, an approach that Kiev wishes it could also adopt, Ignat said in a TV interview on Monday.

"You don't need to shoot down a drone with missiles or guns. You can simply force it to go down, intercept it with electronic warfare," the official stated.

"Russia has powerful systems that interfere with the actions of our defense forces. They have plenty of those systems. Ukraine has made some progress, but we started late," he added.

The US military said in a statement on 25 July that a Russian warplane flew "dangerously" close to one of its jets in Syria, firing flares which allegedly hit the US plane's propeller.

"The Russian jet flew dangerously close to the US aircraft and deployed flares in its path which struck the propeller," US CENTCOM said in a statement via Twitter.

"Russian unsafe and unprofessional behavior in the air not only degrades our Defeat ISIS mission, it risks unintended escalation and miscalculation," the statement added.

The UN is pushing for universal free school meals, but that level of control would be easily abused.

There is a growing international campaign to institute free school meals all around the globe. On face of it this might seem like a great idea...

but in the New Normal age nothing is ever really free.

So, let's unpack...

The campaign is being spear-headed by the UN-backed School Meals Coalition (SMC), whose self-proclaimed goal is "free school meals for every child by 2030" (for some reason they are obsessed with that date).

The SMC already has over 80 national governments signed up to its pledge, with over 90 "partners" (including the Rockefeller Foundation), and these numbers are only likely to grow after their presentation at the UN's World Food Summit earlier today.

At the same time, the Coalition is getting glowing press write-ups, like this one from The Guardian's economics editor Larry Elliot:

For the scheme to work, rich countries would find around one-third of the $6bn annual cost, with the rest found by the governments of low-income countries through their budgets or though innovative financing ideas such as debt for school meals swaps, under which countries would channel the savings from debt relief into school meals programmes. At a time when aid budgets are being cut, $2bn a year is small change for donor governments and represents just one day's worth of annual subsidies to food producers. It is a small price to pay for something that could do so much good.

This agenda has been lurking in the shadows of UK politics for a while now, with Labour Party MP Zarah Sultana first pushing FSM to all primary kids back in the winter of 2022.

The 'friends to all, enemies to none' strategy is living its last days as the US and China press the island nations to take sides...

Papua New Guinea is a gateway between continents. The island, being effectively cut in half, demarcates an artificial boundary between Asia and Oceania. In the past several centuries, the broader island has been carved upon between almost every colonial power going, having been ruled at various points by the Dutch, Spanish, German, Japanese and British empires. Even after gaining its formal independence from Australia in 1975, these legacies continue to scar the island, with half of it still belonging to Indonesia, known as West Papua, which is now a source of unrest and insurgency.

Israel's parliament, or Knesset, passed the first of several judicial reforms proposed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government on Monday, defying protests and pressure from the White House.

The new law prevents courts from using their own idea of "reasonableness" in blocking government policies. Critics had long argued that the "reasonableness" doctrine allowed the left-leaning judiciary to abuse its power, and that it tended to do so more often against Israel's conservative governments.

Netanyahu came out of hospital on Monday morning, where he had been fitted with a pacemaker over the weekend, to attend the vote.

U.S. President Joe Biden, whose administration publicly opposes Israel's internal reforms, issued a last-minute warning to Netanyahu not to proceed. (Biden's own administration has mulled "packing" the Supreme Court.)

Hundreds of thousands of protesters — both for and against the reform — demonstrated around the country. Police used water cannons to deter some demonstrators who wanted to block the entrance to the Knesset.

CIA Director William Burns recently revealed that the agency is rebuilding its clandestine networks in China...

China will "take all necessary measures to safeguard national security" against American spy networks, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a press briefing on Monday. More than a decade after its Chinese operations were blown, the CIA is currently active in the country once again.

Mao told reporters:

"The US on the one hand keeps spreading disinformation on so-called 'Chinese spying and cyber attacks', and on the other hand tells the public about its large-scale intelligence activities targeting China. This in itself is quite revealing. China will take all measures necessary to safeguard national security."

Four days earlier, CIA Director William Burns told a security conference in Colorado that his agency was currently running agents in China.

"We've made progress and we're working very hard to make sure we have a very strong human intelligence capability to complement what we can acquire through other methods."

Pakistan's Election Commission has issued an arrest warrant for former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who faces a contempt charge for allegedly using "intemperate language" against government officials.

The electoral authority handed down a non-bailable arrest warrant on Monday, instructing the Islamabad Inspector General to bring Khan into custody over "contemptuous remarks" he is accused of making about the commission, multiple local media outlets reported. The former prime minister is expected to appear before officials on Tuesday.

Khan's political party, Pak­istan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), later shared an image of the warrant on social media, showing only the first page of the document. [See below]

The contempt charges were launched against the former prime minister and other PTI officials last year, with the commission previously asking them to appear in person to explain their position. However, Khan and his fellow party members challenged the order in the courts, arguing that the election body had abused its power.

In January, Pakistan's Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government, allowing it to continue the proceedings against Khan, who skipped another hearing set earlier this month.

Donald Trump voters view racism against whites as a bigger problem than racism against blacks, according to a new YouGov poll.

From Yahoo News, "Poll: Trump voters say racism against white Americans is a bigger problem than racism against Black Americans":

The survey of 1,638 U.S. adults, which was conducted from July 13-17, shows that among 2020 Trump voters, 62% say that racism against Black Americans is a problem today -- while 73% say that racism against white Americans is a problem.

Asked how much of a problem racism currently is, just 19% of Trump voters describe racism against Black Americans as a "big problem." Twice as many (37%) say racism against white Americans is a big problem.

Trump voters and self-identified Republicans — overlapping but not identical cohorts -- are the only demographic groups identified by Yahoo News and YouGov who are more likely to say racism against white Americans is a problem than to say the same about racism against Black Americans. A majority (51%) of white Americans, for instance, think racism against people who look like them is a problem -- but overall, far more white Americans (72%) say racism against Black Americans is a problem.