Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Thursday that while ties with the U.S. have improved, Washington fundamentally misunderstands China and its unilateral actions against Beijing will backfire.

"The U.S. has been devising various tactics to suppress China and kept lengthening its unilateral sanction list, reaching a bewildering level of unfathomable absurdity," Wang told reporters on the sidelines of the National People's Congress in Beijing.

Wang's critique comes months after Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. counterpart Joe Biden met in California in an effort to stabilize relations, agreeing to step up bilateral dialogue. Wang said subsequent high-level exchanges between the two biggest powers had "met the wishes of both countries and the world."

The United States has quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since the Gaza war began Oct. 7, amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid, U.S. officials told members of Congress in a recent classified briefing.

The triple-digit figure, which has not been previously reported, is the latest indication of Washington's extensive involvement in the polarizing five-month conflict even as top U.S. officials and lawmakers increasingly express deep reservations about Israel's military tactics in a campaign that has killed more than 30,000 people, according to Gaza's health authorities.

The Grayzone has obtained slides from a confidential Israel lobby presentation based on data from Republican pollster Frank Luntz. They contain talking points for politicians and public figures seeking to justify Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip.

Two prominent pro-Israel lobby groups are holding private briefings in New York City to coach elected officials and well-known figures on how to influence public opinion in favor of the Israeli military's rampage in Gaza, The Grayzone can reveal. These PR sessions, convened by the UJA-Federation and Jewish Community Relations Council, rely on data collected by Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican pollster and pundit.

A source who was present during several meetings provided Luntz's slides to The Grayzone. Participants were informed that the presentations and data contained in the slides were strictly confidential, the source said.

"This is NOT helpful," Luntz stated in response to an email from The Grayzone requesting his comment on the private meetings.

US ambassador Victoria Nuland has announced she will retire in the coming weeks. If you're not an American reader, you might not know who Victoria Nuland is, so let me clarify: she is basically the harbinger of death, the architect of wars, the modern day Henry Kissinger. I don't want to sit and calculate her body count so let me just say it's high. Really high.

Ambassadors are supposed to develop friendly relations with foreign countries, but Victoria Nuland went to foreign countries, blackmailed them, funded insurgents and tipped those countries into war, unless their leaders did as they were told.

In case you didn't know, there are two types of leader in the world: US puppets and brutal dictators whose natural resources we care deeply about liberating.

Type "Victoria Nuland" into Wikileaks and you will find 6,211 search results in her name. Now I've obviously not looked through all of those search results, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out those documents don't show her in a flattering light. You will therefore be unsurprised to hear Nuland has been linked to the persecution of Julian Assange. Isn't it impressive how wrong she manages to be about everything?

German military leaders may have bungled foolishly over their private discussions regarding operational plans against Russia. However, the security of their incompetent communication - while laughable - does not lessen the seriousness of what was being discussed.

Lt. General Ingo Gerhartz and his aides were earnestly weighing up the technical and propaganda means by which to strike Russia with long-range ballistic missiles. In short, a NATO member was caught red-handed hatching an act of war against Russia.

After Russian media published the audio of the conversation, the German reaction has been to dismiss it as a cerebral war-gaming exercise and as an attempt by Russian disinformation to undermine the government of Olaf Scholz.

This obfuscation by Berlin will not wash. The incontrovertible fact is that the German commanders were deliberating on how to "optimize" the Ukrainian offensive capability to hit Russian targets with the long-range German Taurus cruise missile. The weapon has supposedly not yet been supplied to the Ukrainian regime due to concerns among some German politicians that doing so would escalate the war with Russia. It is clear from the audio tape that the German military chiefs are frustrated by the politicians not ordering the supply of the Taurus.

Gerhartz, the head of the German air force, tells his subordinates in no uncertain terms:

"We are now fighting a war that uses much more modern technology than our good old Luftwaffe."

There you have it: the top German commander says unequivocally, "We are now fighting a war".

The country has been stepping up shipments abroad thanks to bumper harvests, according to the Russian president

Russia is now one of the major agricultural exporters in the world, President Vladimir Putin has said while meeting with Russian farmers.

On Tuesday, the president arrived in Stavropol Region, southern Russia, where he met with the employees of the Solnechny Dar greenhouse complex of the Eco-Culture agro-industrial holding.

Sweden has officially become the 32nd member of the US-led NATO military bloc after the document formalizing Stockholm's accession entered into force on Thursday.

The accession ceremony will be held in Washington, where Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson will submit his country's documents to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

A document published by the US Department of State asserts that all conditions for Sweden's entry into NATO have been fulfilled and that the protocol signifying Stockholm's membership entered into force on March 7, 2024.

In a post on X, Kristersson also declared that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had informed him that all bloc members have formally accepted Sweden's accession protocol and had invited Stockholm to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The combined forces of El Niño and La Niña have crippled Latin American soy output. Ukrainian and Russian grain farmers have gone to war. Indonesia has banned shipments of palm oil to Europe, while China is hungry for crops. The Mediterranean region is getting more like a desert.

The year is 2024. "Food shortage in Europe? The only question is when, but they don't listen," says an unidentified voice in a video broadcast. The audience sits quietly — listening.

The dramatic collision of events, of course, hasn't yet come to pass. But over two days in central Brussels last month, some 60 European Union and government officials, food security experts, industry representatives and a few journalists gathered to confront the possibility of something barely on the radar a few years ago: a full-blown food crisis.

Victoria Nuland's retirement is an admission that Washington's premier foreign policy project has failed. No government official is more identified with the Ukraine fiasco than Nuland. She was on the ground micro-managing activities during the 2014 coup, and has overseen the State Department's sordid involvement since the war began. Her career-path is inextricably linked to the ill-fated NATO-backed disaster which has resulted in the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian regulars and the obliteration of much of the country. Thus, the question we need to ask ourselves is whether Nuland's persistent machinations to drag NATO into an unwinnable war with Russia is the reason she 'got the axe', er, announced her retirement? Here's an excerpt from the official State Department Press Statement:

But it's Toria's (Nuland) leadership on Ukraine that diplomats and students of foreign policy will study for years to come. Her efforts have been indispensable to confronting Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and marshaling a global coalition to ensure his strategic failure, and helping Ukraine work toward the day when it will be able to stand strongly on its own feet - democratically, economically, and militarily. On the Retirement of Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, US State Department

This is an extraordinary paragraph that places the blame for the Ukrainian debacle squarely on Nuland's shoulders. Yes, she was "indispensable" in leading the drive to confront Putin just as she played a critical role in "marshaling a global coalition" to prosecute a proxy war on Russia. And, what this statement tells us is that Nuland was one of the main architects of the ongoing conflict, which means she is largely responsible for the widening chasm between the NATO leaders, the mounting carnage on the battlefield, and America's strategic defeat to its primary geopolitical rival, Russia. In short, no other government official is more responsible for the Ukrainian quagmire than Victoria Nuland.

Also, Nuland leaves behind a gargantuan catastrophe for which there is no apparent remedy and no easy way out. We cannot expect the Biden administration to simply 'cut and run' in what is perceived to be a direct confrontation with Moscow. Biden will undoubtedly press-ahead as a face-saving gesture regardless of the costs, further straining relations with the allies while handing-over large chunks of east Ukraine to the Russian army. This is clearly a no-win situation for Washington which is why (we think) Nuland -who created this mess- got her 'Pink Slip'. Here's more from the State Department's statement:

(Nuland's) tenure caps three and a half decades of remarkable public service under six Presidents and ten Secretaries of State. Starting with her very first posting as a consular officer in Guangzhou, China, Toria's had most of the jobs in this Department. Political officer and economic officer. Spokesperson and chief of staff. Deputy Assistant Secretary and Assistant Secretary. Special Envoy and Ambassador.

These experiences have armed Toria with an encyclopedic knowledge of a wide range of issues and regions, and an unmatched capacity to wield the full toolkit of American diplomacy to advance our interests and values. (US State Dept)

In other words, Victoria Nuland is one of the most knowledgeable and experienced diplomats in the entire State Department, but -even so- they are throwing her under the bus during a time of extreme crisis because she failed in the biggest and most important assignment of her 35-year career. Isn't that what they're saying?

The undiagnosed malignancy at the core of our system is now out in the open view.

We can see from the increasingly incoherent statements by western officials that they are outright panicked about Ukraine's imminent capitulation to Russia: it is the surprise they did not expect. How important a piece was Ukraine on Western powers' geopolitical chessboard? Last April, Poland's President Mateusz Morawiecki gave away the mindset in a TV address when he said that, "If we lose Ukraine, we will lose the world for decades. Defeat of Ukraine could be the beginning of the end of the golden age of the West."

Incidentally, his statement has subsequently been airbrushed in most media making it seem that he said "... we will lose peace for decades." In some Slavic languages the word "Mir" means both world and peace, but Morawiecki was not talking about losing peace, but about the end of the West's primacy in world affairs. From Western oligarchy's point of view, the stakes could hardly be any higher in Ukraine. Being so very powerful and sophisticated, they should be winning that fight, right? Well...

We've got two days' worth of dry powder...

After two years of Russia's Special Military Operation, it is now clear that Russia is winning and that Ukraine is now well and truly broken. This is all in spite of the nuclear, all-out trade sanctions against Russia and the full support for Ukraine from her western allies, both in terms of financial, humanitarian and military aid. NATO has practically disarmed itself to provide weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.

Last November, the deputy of Germany's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Johann Wadephul stated to the media that the combat capacity of German Armed Forces has been seriously weakened by the shortages caused by the continuous supply of material and ammunitions to Kiev: "Crucial troop units can only last a maximum of two days in a battle. And that is a catastrophic find overall." Other NATO countries are likely in no better shape regardless of the ongoing juvenile trash-talk about how Ukraine destroyed 50% of Russia's military power, took back 50% of the territory held by Russia, all for cents on the dollar of West's defence budgets, etc.