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."

The 'total victory' the PM has set as his goal is impossible, with or without American support.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has trapped himself in a predicament that requires him to either bow out of power or drag his whole state down with him. In over 18 months, Israel has failed to defeat any of its enemies and escalation in Gaza could be the most dangerous decision he has taken yet.

While the Israeli prime minister insists on continuing the war on Gaza, holding to his pledge to "crush and destroy" Hamas, he has failed to do so and according to his own nation's intelligence estimates, the victory he speaks of is nowhere in sight. Now, Netanyahu has declared a new military operation in the Gaza Strip, labelling it "Gideon's Chariots," allegedly seeking the re-occupation of the entirety of the besieged coastal territory.

Alfredo Jalife, one of the greatest geopoliticians of our time, asserts in La Jornada that President Donald Trump has just shaken up politics and the balance of power in the Middle East. While decoupling the United States from Israel, he declared that the Middle East now constitutes the "center of the world." According to him, Trump is ensuring the economic survival of the United States by allying the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) with US transnational corporations. Washington will now deploy its forces around these oil monarchies, and no longer around the Jewish state.

The oilman Trump of Arabia [1], who claims to emulate Lawrence of Arabia [2], offered two transcendental cosmogonic* presentations, overflowing with chiaroscuro*, which merit meta-analysis. At the Riyadh Investment Forum (capital of Saudi Arabia [3]) and before the six Arab petro monarchies of the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) [4], he attacked Iran's allies in Gaza and Lebanon, and spoke out against Iran's nuclear bomb development, while promoting Israel's controversial "Abraham Accords"[5] with four countries: Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Sudan (the remnants of its remote-controlled civil war).

Among the thousands of phrases Trump has uttered, I was struck by the fact that, in the face of the six Arab oil monarchies of the GCC, he published one of great marketing prowess, which even the sublime Arab historian Ibn Khaldun (IK) — whom Bertrand Russell defined as the father of modern sociology — author of the marvelous Prolegomena, would not have dared to utter.

A new round of talks between Moscow and Kiev will take place, but the Vatican is not "a very realistic" venue, the Russian Foreign Minister has said.

Moscow is at an "advanced stage" in preparing a memorandum that outlines steps toward a potential peace agreement with Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday.

Addressing a conference in Moscow, Lavrov reiterated Moscow's readiness to continue dialogue with Kiev, following the resumption of talks in Istanbul earlier this month after a three-year pause.

"Yes, we support the idea of talks. There will be a second round of negotiations. They [the Ukrainian side] have confirmed this. This is already a positive development."

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that he had agreed with US President Donald Trump that the next move toward resolving the Ukraine conflict should be a memorandum outlining the principles and timeline for a peace settlement.

The daily images of the humanitarian catastrophe that Benjamin Netanyahu's government is causing in Gaza with its military offensive and the blockade of international aid are shaking even the European countries most aligned with Israel.

The increasingly critical tone from several EU capitals in the face of a situation almost unanimously described as "unacceptable" culminated on Tuesday in Brussels with a shift that, until just weeks ago, would have been unthinkable in Europe — traditionally very reluctant to take retaliatory action against Israel.

At the request of an "overwhelming majority" of member states — 17 out of 27 — the EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Kaja Kallas, has decided to review the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the main instrument of political and trade relations between the two since it came into force in 2000.

"Pressure is necessary to change the situation," explained Kallas after a meeting of foreign ministers in which the dire situation of the population in Gaza — militarily besieged and with barely any access to humanitarian aid blocked by Israel for more than two months — was a central focus of discussion, along with Ukraine.

The tragedy in the Palestinian enclave has also led the United Kingdom to take decisive action: the Labour government of Keir Starmer has decided to suspend ongoing negotiations on a future trade agreement with Israel. Starmer himself has said he is "horrified" by the military escalation in the Gaza Strip. Downing Street has also summoned the Israeli ambassador in London to express its protest over the "intolerable" offensive in Gaza, according to Foreign Secretary David Lammy.

There is no question that it is more difficult to search the Internet today than was the case 15 or 20 years ago. Especially on the English-language Internet, information control is much more apparent and effective, and censorship is now fully in the open with little or no pretense or disguise. Many web pages or documents which would always appear on the first page of a search in the past, cannot now be accessed by normal means and, increasingly, a great many important sources have been deleted. ^[1]

This is so true, and the deleted contents follow such a distinct pattern that it is reasonable to assume there are armies of people engaged in sanitizing the Internet, effectively burning the books. The topics all relate to buried history, unspeakable crimes long forgotten, almost anything related to the Jews or to Israel, including Jewish crimes like the opium travesty in China, among many others. It seems that anything which might be embarrassing or inconvenient is targeted for removal.There is no substantive difference between physically burning books and deleting Internet documents. The result is the same.

Some links to historical documents that I saved 15 or 20 years ago, are still active, and the documents can still be accessed, but they will no longer appear on a search with any terms. It is now often true that even if you know the complete title of a document, the search engines - especially Google - will refuse to produce it. This is so true that Google (particularly) no longer functions as a useful search engine; it is instead a "gate-keeper" with two main functions. One is to feed you information it wants you to have (or things it wants you to think), and the second is to ensure you never find information it doesn't want you to have(or things it doesn't want you to think). You may not want to hear this, but ChatGPT is not better in any respect. It receives its marching orders from the same place as Google and the New York Times.

The point of the above is that those "army members" are following an ideological agenda, and are actively scrubbing the Internet of important historical and other documents and sources of information that are uncomfortable primarily to the Jews. This was brought home to me a while back, and it had to happen twice before I learned my lesson.

As Russia and Ukraine resume direct talks in Istanbul and Europe's ultimatums fade, the spotlight turns to a Putin-Trump phone call.

In recent weeks, the focus of the Russia-Ukraine conflict has shifted noticeably from the battlefield to the diplomatic arena. Political actors on all sides have turned their attention to shaping the terms of a potential settlement - or at least the framework for future negotiations.

This latest phase began with a coordinated visit by Western European leaders to Kiev and concluded, for now, with a phone conversation between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, on Monday. But the centerpiece of this diplomatic shift was the unexpected resumption of direct talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul.

What's unfolding is not just a conversation about peace, but a broader contest over influence and strategic direction. Competing visions of how the conflict should end - or be managed - are colliding in real time. Western Europe is scrambling to maintain relevance, Ukraine is caught between urgency and uncertainty, and Trump, now at the center of this geopolitical tug-of-war, is being courted by both sides.

So, who's really winning this shadow war of influence? And what happens if the diplomatic front collapses?
Let's take a closer look.

Western capitals are still coordinating with Israel and the US on their 'criticisms' of the genocide - just as they coordinated on their support for the slaughter

After 19 months of being presented with dissembling accounts of Gaza from their governments, western publics are now being served up a different - but equally deceitful - narrative.

With the finishing line in sight for Israel's programme of genocidal ethnic cleansing, the West's Gaza script is being hastily rewritten. But make no mistake: it is the same web of self-serving lies.

As if under the direction of a hidden conductor, Britain, France and Canada - key US allies - erupted this week into a chorus of condemnation of Israel.