Ukraine barely has the resources to fight for its own survival, Valery Zaluzhny has said

Kiev should abandon its ambition to regain control over the territories it has lost to Russia, Valery Zaluzhny, the former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, has said. Only through a "miracle" could Ukraine achieve such a goal, according to the general.

"I hope that there are no people in this hall who are still hoping for some miracle... that will bring peace to Ukraine and will bring back the borders of 1991 or 2022," the former commander, now serving as Kiev's ambassador to London, said at a Ukrainian defense export forum on Thursday

Zaluzhny was referring to Kiev's claims over Crimea and four other regions that have since joined Russia. Crimea voted to return to Russia in the wake of the Western-backed Maidan coup in Kiev in 2014, and the two Donbass republics, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, followed suit in autumn 2022 following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February of that year.

Pavel Durov has said that French intelligence tried to censor conservatives on the platform during election campaign season

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has accused French President Emmanuel Macron of detaining Telegram founder Pavel Durov for the purpose of interfering with the electoral processes in Romania.

The accusation comes shortly after Durov claimed that French authorities had enquired with him regarding the issue.

"It turns out that Macron had Durov arrested not even to address internal issues with the messenger using such barbaric methods, but to influence the elections in Romania, realizing that the candidate from the liberal dictatorship wouldn't be able to win under any legal circumstances," Zakharova wrote on Telegram.

President Donald Trump is ordering a major overhaul of the National Security Council that will shrink its size, lead to the ouster of some political appointees and return many career government employees back to their home agencies, according to two U.S. officials and one person familiar with the reorganization.

The number of staff at the NSC is expected to be significantly reduced, according to the officials, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive personnel matter.

The shake-up is just the latest shoe to drop at the NSC, which is being dramatically made over after the ouster early this month of Trump's national security adviser Mike Waltz, who in many ways had hewed to traditional Republican foreign policy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been serving as national security adviser since the ouster of Waltz, who was nominated to serve as Trump's ambassador to the United Nations.

The move is expected to elevate the importance of the State Department and Pentagon in advising Trump on important foreign policy moves. But, ultimately, Trump relies on his own instincts above all else when making decisions.

While the IDF has been massacring the civilian population of Gaza and colonizing the Gaza Strip for a year and a half, supposedly to fight Hamas, the West has only just become aware of what is going on. Unfortunately, there's nothing honorable about this sudden burst of humanity: the European Union and the Israeli opposition are merely reacting to the MAGA U-turn in the United States [1]. They still don't support South Africa's complaint to the International Court of Justice and, for the most part, are still reluctant to recognize a Palestinian state.

The only notable exception is Spain, which has been trying for a year to halt the massacre and torture. President of the Spanish government Pedro Sánchez called on 17 May to put pressure on Israel to stop the massacre of Gazan civilians. He mentioned all kinds of pressures, including symbolic ones such as exclusion from the Eurovision Song Contest.

"Every time I watch The View, I become even more misogynistic." — Laura Loomer

Bad as it was, "Joe Biden," the figment president was merely one manifestation of a nation made mad by power-seeking demons, real-live, ill-intentioned human beings driving a runaway political machine, the party of hoaxes, hustles, and hatred. The country is just now struggling to exit a convulsion of mass mental illness. The demons are still there, though, and still hard at work trying to drag you all back into mass formation.

A central mystery is how the news media made itself the enemy of the people, and this conundrum is not at all explained by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson in their book Original Sin. It's actually just another hustle with overtones of hoax, like everything else in the evil cavalcade of narratives spun out in the news media's war on reality. Tapper and Marshall want you to believe that a faceless collective they call "the White House" managed to conceal "Joe Biden's" well-advanced disintegration from the voting public, and that was. . . that. The media wuz fooled! Goll-lee!

At least 60 people were killed by Israeli strikes across Gaza in a 24-hour period, Gaza's health ministry said Friday, as Israel pressed ahead with its military offensive and let minimal aid into the strip.

The dead included 10 people in the southern city of Khan Younis, four in the central town of Deir al-Balah, and nine in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north, according to the Nasser, Al-Aqsa, and Al-Ahli hospitals, where the bodies were brought.

Israel is facing mounting international criticism for its latest offensive and pressure to let aid into Gaza amid a catastrophic humanitarian crisis. The strip has been under an Israeli blockade for nearly three months, according to the United Nations.

President Donald Trump threatened to slap European imports with a sweeping 50% tariff, writing online Friday that trade talks with regional leaders are "going nowhere."

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he was "recommending a straight 50% Tariff on the European Union, starting on June 1, 2025." That rate would be higher than the 39% Trump promised to hit the bloc with on April 2, the so-called "Liberation Day" of far-reaching tariffs he scaled back a week later.

Just minutes earlier on Friday morning, Trump had also threatened Apple with a 25% tariff if it does not start producing iPhones in the United States — an outcome industry experts broadly see as a nonstarter. "The concept of Apple producing iPhones in the U.S. is a fairy tale," the prominent tech analyst Dan Ives said in response.

Later Friday, Trump was asked whether the European Union could do anything to avoid his 50% tariff threat. "I don't know," he said. "We're going to see what happens, but right now, it's going on in June 1, and that's the way it is."

Several nations that have backed Israel during its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip voiced outrage Wednesday after Israeli troops fired what they called "warning shots" as foreign diplomats visited the occupied West Bank.

The Palestinian Authority, which partially administers the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory, accused Israeli troops of "deliberately" shooting at the delegation near the flashpoint city of Jenin. The Israeli military, already under pressure over its tactics in the Gaza war, said it regretted the "inconvenience."

AFP video from Jenin — a frequent target of Israeli military raids — showed the delegation and accompanying journalists running for cover as shots were heard on Wednesday.

A European diplomat said the envoys went to the area to see the destruction caused in the West Bank by Israeli military raids during the Gaza war, which was sparked by the Hamas-led, Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack.

On the very day Donald Trump became president again, he signed an executive order prospectively eliminating birthright citizenship for children born to aliens unlawfully present in the United States.

Immediately, lawsuits were filed in a half-dozen jurisdictions across the country challenging this order.

The groups bringing these suits claim the order disrupts long-standing legal norms governing citizenship. Yet, in fact, Trump's contention — that birthright citizenship is not possessed by children of illegal aliens under the "correct interpretation of the law" — is exactly right.

Birthright citizenship is conventionally understood to apply to any child born in the United States, regardless of the immigration status of that child's parents. This view is based on the common law principle of jus soli ("right of soil"), which is said to be incorporated in the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This understanding of the Citizenship Clause, however, despite its prevalence in academia and political commentary, is based on a mistaken and incomplete reading of controlling Supreme Court precedent.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is committing serial suicide (in reverse American gore-style, when the serial killer always resurrects). In the case of the EU kakistocracy, serial self-destruction is always a given, and always skyrocketing.

So the EUrocrats in Brussels have just adopted their 17th round of sanctions against Russia - the sky is the limit - targeting nearly 200 tankers of the so-called Russian shadow fleet. The package, endorsed by EU member states, includes proverbial scores of asset freezes and visa bans.

The EU + UK combo is also scheming how to tighten the oil price cap on Russia to $50 a barrel, aiming to "hurt" Russia's energy revenue.

Cue to a monster pipeline of laughter from the whole Global South, especially India and China. As if they would impeach any vessels of the shadow fleet, or if OPEC+ would care about a puny unilateral EUrocrat oil price cap.

To qualify EU actions as self-destructive anti-intellectualism is actually benign. The IQ of people at the top in Brussels is at dismembered worm level, exemplified by the Estonian batshit crazy chick in theory representing the foreign policy of 450 million EU citizens. Brussels has been reduced to a pathetic Estonian propaganda snake pit with a whiff of British accent.

The SVR has noted how there is a groundswell of despair in Brussels for the "mistake" of appointing the imbecile Estonian, universally known for "absolute incompetence" and a cringing "inability to build bridges" with EU leaders. She has already been removed from EU strategic defense policy planning.

Still, the sanctions package dementia will keep rollin' on - redacted by careerists with fat salaries who only care about their own retirement gold package.

The next, the 18th, is supposed to be the largest sanctions package in History, according to the Brussels rumor mill, not only accusing Russia of multiples stances of Hybrid War and alleged use of chemical weapons (when it's actually the neo-nazis of country 404 who resort to it) but targeting several Russian defense sector companies plus companies and intermediaries from third countries supplying sanctioned products to Russia.

Add to it the German BlackRock chancellor actively lobbying for an EU ban on the Nord Stream pipeline - blocking any possibility of a U.S.-Russia business cooperation, already signaled by Trump. This ban will be part of the 18th package.

Cue to Grandmaster Sergey Lavrov, who recently felt the need to emphasize that political EUro-trash banning the return of NordStream are "either sick or suicidal."