More friction between Israel and the United States has come to light Monday as Vice President JD Vance has canceled a planned official trip to Israel due to the expansion of Israel's military operation in Gaza, according to a senior US official cited in Axios.

The report emphasizes that "The US official said Vance made the decision because he didn't want his trip to suggest the Trump administration endorsed the Israeli decision to launch a massive operation at a time when the U.S. is pushing for a ceasefire and hostage deal."

Still, Vance sought to downplay this as purely a political pressure move or strong signaling to Israel by saying it comes down to "logistical" issues.

The United Kingdom on Tuesday suspended its free-trade agreement negotiations with Israel over the growing Gaza crisis, and after British Prime Minister Keir Starmer expressed disgust at newly expanded Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip, also as famine threats at least 500,000 Palestinians.

Starmer described that he and his French and Canadian counterparts are "horrified" by the Netanyahu government's escalation in Gaza. This also comes as international headlines and warnings grow more dire. For example Al Jazeera has the following new headline: "Starving Palestinians resort to eating animal feed, flour mixed with sand".

"We repeat our demand for a ceasefire as the only way to free the hostages, we repeat our opposition to settlements in the West Bank, and we repeat our demand to massively scale up humanitarian assistance into Gaza," Starmer told parliament.

A Monday joint statement by the UK, France and Canada had threatened sanctions on Israel. Britain further did slap targeted sanctions on Israeli settler groups and individuals.

Last week, US President Donald Trump embarked on his first official overseas tour since taking office, choosing to visit three key Gulf nations - Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

This itinerary was both unexpected and, in many ways, unprecedented. Unlike his predecessors, who traditionally began their foreign policy engagements with visits to long-standing Western allies, Trump opted to prioritize America's Arab partners, deliberately bypassing Israel - Washington's principal strategic ally in the region. This marked the first time in decades that a sitting US president visiting the Middle East consciously excluded it from the agenda.

This decision signaled a potential recalibration of Washington's priorities in the region. Relations between the Trump administration and the Israeli leadership, particularly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, were already strained in the early stages - largely due to Israel's growing intransigence on the Palestinian question and the increasing influence of far-right factions within the Israeli government. Faced with mounting frustration over Israel's hardline policies, the White House appeared to pivot toward a more pragmatic, less confrontational, and economically advantageous partnership with the Gulf monarchies.

Chinese military hardware stole the show, French ones lost their stock, India's clout took hits, and Pakistanis crowed. Yet, ultimately, the brief, hot India-Pakistan war was a victory only for the Global North's divide-and-rule project for the Global South.
For all the alarming seriousness of two South Asian nuclear powers coming to the razor's edge of a lethal exchange, the 2025 India-Pakistan war could not but contain elements of a Bollywood extravaganza.

Frantic dancing indeed, which risked getting out of control pretty fast. Forget dodgy, plodding UN mediation or any serious investigation of the suspicious attack out of the blue on tourists in India-held Kashmir.

Right off the bat, on 7 May, India's Modi government dramatically launched 'Operation Sindoor' against Pakistan, a missile offensive billed as "counter-terrorism." Pakistan immediately launched a counterpunch codenamed 'Operation Bunyan al-Marsus' against the "Indian invasion."

Culture is key. Sindoor is classic Hindu culture, referring to the vermillion mark applied on the forehead of married women. No wonder the Chinese immediately translated it as 'Operation Vermillion.'

Yet what the whole planet retained from the alarming escalation, irrespective of any attempt at contextualization, not to mention color-coded cultural practices, was the Top Gun element with a Bollywood twist: the Pakistani Air Force (PAF) and the Indian Air Force (IAF), on the night of 7 May, directly involved in the largest, and most high-tech air battle of the young 21st century, lasting a full hour and featuring scores of 4th and 4.5 generation fighter jets.

Dramatic entertainment value was provided, quirkily enough, not by Indians, but by a Chinese netizen, notorious internet blogger Hao Gege, and his hilarious global blockbuster parody video "The newly bought plane was shot down." He was, of course, referring to the IAF's French Rafales decimated by Chinese J-10C fighters, which have fully mastered electronic warfare and are equipped with cheap, precise, and brutally efficient PL-15 air-to-air missiles.

Add to it Chinese hardware such as the HQ-9 air defense system and ZDK-03 AWACS. A J-10C, which, incidentally, costs only $40 million, roughly six times less than a Rafale.

Inevitably, the whole thing turned into a public relations nightmare, not only for New Delhi, but mostly for the French military-industrial complex, complete with a cornucopia of spin from all sides. Islamabad claimed it destroyed six Indian fighter jets (including as many as three Rafales, with a collective price tag of $865 million, plus one Russian Su-30, one MiG-29, and one Israeli Heron UAV); paralyzed 70 percent of India's power grid; and smashed India's made-in-Russia S-400 defense system. India, for its part, fiercely denied all of the above over and over again.

Then, after so much sound and fury, Pakistan on 10 May announced it had won the war. Two days later, India announced the same.

The sound and fury though continued unabated, ranging from the J-10C basking in Top Gun superstar status and Chinese stocks skyrocketing in a much-vaunted "DeepSeek moment" in modern warfare to the ridiculous sight of US President Donald Trump claiming he was responsible for the India-Pakistan ceasefire, which as it stands, looks more like a pause.

The US president believes Kiev would be "better off" if the conflict with Moscow had "remained a European situation."

US President Donald Trump has rebuked his predecessor, Joe Biden, for funneling vast amounts of American taxpayer money into a foreign conflict that "should have remained a European situation."

Speaking to reporters at the White House following a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, Trump expressed frustration over the "crazy" scale of US involvement in the Ukraine conflict. He reiterated that it is "not our war" and stressed that his administration is working to end it through diplomacy.

"This is not our war. This is not my war... I mean, we got ourselves entangled in something that we shouldn't have been involved in. And we would have been a lot better off - and maybe the whole thing would have been better off - because it can't be much worse. It's a real mess."

The president stated that Washington has provided "massive" and "record-setting" levels of military and financial assistance to Kiev - far exceeding what the EU and other NATO countries have contributed.

"We don't have boots on the ground, we wouldn't have boots on the ground. But we do have a big stake. The financial amount that was put up is just crazy.

"Again, this was a European situation. It should have remained a European situation. But we got involved - much more than Europe did - because the past administration felt very strongly that we should. We gave massive amounts, I think record-setting amounts, both weaponry and money."

Trump's conversation with Putin was followed by calls with the leaders of Germany, Italy, and the UK, as well as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Ukraine's Vladimir Zelensky.

The American style never disappoints. But remember: when cowboys challenge each other, only one survives.

We had no doubts

To date, no peacemaker has ever emerged from the United States of America. All leaders have waged war on someone, somewhere in the world, after having waged war at home for centuries. Nothing more, nothing less. We therefore had no doubts about the outcome of Donald Trump's meetings in Riyadh, held in the well-known climate of friendship that binds the Saudi world to the US, which has literally built Saudi Arabia banknote by banknote as a watchdog for the Middle East.

This is how Trump made a series of very significant statements, which need to be analyzed from several points of view. The salient points were, in his own words:

• My dream is for Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords.
• Saudi Arabia will join the Abraham Accords at its own pace.
• We want the Middle East to be known for trade, not chaos, and for exporting technology, not terrorism.
• A few days ago, we reached a historic ceasefire agreement between India and Pakistan. Millions of people could have died in the conflict between India and Pakistan.
• Secretary Rubio will participate in the Russia-Ukraine talks.
• I am here today not only to condemn the past chaos of Iran's leaders, but to offer them a new path and a much better way toward a much better and more promising future.
• Iran can have a much brighter future, but we will never allow it to threaten America and our allies with terrorism or a nuclear attack.
• Iranian oil supplies will be reduced to zero and the country will go bankrupt if Tehran abandons the nuclear deal.
• We have launched more than 1,100 strikes against the Houthis.
• The people of Gaza deserve a better future.

Well, now that we've made the list, let's read it all again.

The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the Trump administration to end the protected status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan citizens living in the United States. In a brief unsigned order, the justices paused a ruling by a federal judge in San Francisco that had blocked Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, from terminating the protection.

The justices left open the possibility that individual Venezuelan citizens could bring their own challenges to Noem's efforts to terminate their work permits or to remove them from the United States.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson indicated that she would have denied the government's request and left the lower court's ruling in place while litigation continues.

Alejandro Mayorkas, then the DHS secretary, initially designated (and later extended the designation of) Venezuela in 2021 as a country whose nationals in the United States were eligible to stay in the United States and work under a program known as the Temporary Protected Status program. Created in 1990, the program gives the DHS secretary the power to make such designations when a country's citizens cannot return safely to their home country because of a natural disaster, armed conflict, or other "extraordinary and temporary conditions" there.

The West's interference in other nations' affairs has already brought grave consequences to Europe, Vladimir Medinsky has said.

The Ukraine conflict could have ended very quickly if Kiev had chosen to negotiate from the beginning rather than heed its Western backers and fight Russia, Vladimir Medinsky, the head of Moscow's delegation at the Istanbul talks, has said.

Medinsky made the comments after nearly two hours of talks between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Istanbul on Friday. The two nations agreed upon a major prisoner swap involving 1,000 POWs from each side, as well as continuing contacts once each side has prepared a detailed ceasefire proposal, the Russian delegation said.

After the meeting, the presidential aide and professional historian sat down for an interview with Russia's Channel 1.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine's Vladimir Zelensky could hold talks if the ongoing peace efforts between Russian and Ukrainian delegations result in progress and firm agreements, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Saturday. His comments come after the first direct negotiations between Moscow and Kiev since 2022.

On Friday, Russian and Ukrainian representatives sat down for a two-hour Turkish-mediated meeting in Istanbul. The sides agreed to exchange their ceasefire proposals and to discuss a potential follow-up meeting, according to Moscow's chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky. Moscow and Kiev also agreed to a major prisoner exchange, he said, adding that Russia is "satisfied" with the results of the talks and is ready to "resume contacts" with Kiev.

Speaking to reporters on Saturday, Peskov said a meeting between Putin and Zelensky "is possible but only as a result of the work of the delegations of both sides and reaching specific agreements."

He added that a key issue for Moscow remains the question of who Ukraine would authorize to sign any potential agreements reached by the negotiators.

What are we to make of the Anglosphere political leadership's abrupt narrative reversal towards immigration restrictionism and rhetorical nativism?

In the wake of America's 2024 election a curious narrative shift has been unfolding within the political leadership of Canada and Great Britain.

The moment he assumed the office of Prime Minister, Canada's Mark Carney played up the country's founding British and French (and, of course, Indigenous) heritage, referring to Canada as the 'most European of non-European countries', deploying nativist rhetoric that hasn't been heard from the country's Liberal politicians in living memory and thereby rejecting by implication the official stance of multiculturalism that has dominated Canadian politics since the elder Trudeau. To back up his commitment to Canada, Carney renounced his Irish and UK citizenships, symbolically burning his boats on the beach, and implicitly repudiating other members of parliament holding dual citizenships. As a further emphatic gesture towards Canada's historical roots, King Charles III will give the throne speech inaugurating the new parliament, the first time the monarch has delivered the throne speech in person since 1977.