Rubio said the agency created a system more beholden to radical political ideology than advancing America's core national interests

The Trump administration has announced it is overhauling the State Department and shuttering more than 130 offices around the world in order to streamline operations and align the department more closely with the administration's foreign policy objectives.

The move was announced on Tuesday by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said region-specific functions will be consolidated to increase functionality and redundant offices will be shut down. Programs that are misaligned with America's core national interests will be shuttered too, he said.

Rubio said the State Department had become bloated, bureaucratic and unable to perform its essential diplomatic mission in a new era of great power competition.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had some warm words to say about RT in an exclusive interview with the broadcaster, stressing the network's effectiveness in countering attempts by the West to control the global news space.

During the conversation on Saturday, Araghchi congratulated RT on its 20th anniversary this year. It began broadcasting out of Moscow on December 10, 2005.

"I am a fan of this network. I usually follow its news, its analysis and programs," he said.

Chisinau has disrespected the Moldovan people by preventing a bishop from traveling to Jerusalem, the Russian Foreign Ministry has said

The authorities in Moldova have launched a deliberate attack on the canonical Orthodox Church by barring a bishop from attending an Easter ceremony in Jerusalem, the Russian Foreign Ministry has said.

Bishop Marchel of the Moldovan Orthodox Church was scheduled to fly to Israel on Thursday to attend the Holy Fire ritual on April 19 and bring back part of the flame believed to descend miraculously at the site of Christ's crucifixion. He told the media that border police at Chisinau airport searched him and returned his passport only after his plane had departed, despite finding nothing suspicious. His second attempt to board a flight was also "unjustifiably" blocked by Moldovan authorities.

The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran are finally sitting down at the table for international talks.

The year is 2025 and something particularly unusual is happening, something that some have prayed for and others have deplored, hoping it would be impossible: the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran are sitting down at the table for international talks.

The big premise... or promise?

There is a necessary premise to make: The USA has never, until now, tried to do good to Iran. This is a fact. Relations between the two countries have always been extremely tense. Over the last forty years there has been deep-seated tension, mutual distrust and periodic attempts at dialogue that have practically always failed because the Americans have never shown any real intention of making peace with the Iranians.

New agreement advances the process of creating a formal multipolar system.

In a move of extreme geopolitical relevance, the Federation Council of Russia ratified, on April 16, the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The treaty, initially valid for 20 years with the possibility of extension, formally seals what has already been consolidating behind the scenes: a solid, multidimensional, and profoundly strategic alliance between Moscow and Tehran.

This agreement is more than just a formalization of friendly intentions. It represents an institutional consolidation of an axis that, alongside the already established Comprehensive Partnership between Russia and China, effectively forms a multipolar block resisting the decaying Western hegemony. The Moscow-Beijing-Tehran triad is no longer merely an informal arrangement - it is a political, military, and economic architecture with solid foundations, common principles, and a shared strategic vision.

"Due process is when only one side has to follow the law and if you point out that this is a suicidal standard you're a fascist"
— Auron MacIntyre

A great consternation boils and bubbles across the land as the sinister forces of Jacobin lawfare keep up their legalistic battery against the nation. You better believe that the country will not stand for much more of this lunatic judicial coup aimed at wrecking the authority of law itself, and with that, any chance for sane management of our affairs.

On Saturday, the activist org Indivisible, sponsored by Linked-In billionaire Reid Hoffman and dark money "pass through" funder the Tides Foundation (Bill Gates and others), sent its "protest" troops into the streets to pretend that there is public support for national suicide. It was a pitiful showing, after all. There are only so many mind-fucked Boomers out there who can be marshaled to militate for the psychopathocracy behind these monied actors.

Easter weekend looked like a turning point in this struggle for sanity over the public interest. On Saturday night, the SCOTUS shot its wad staying the deportation of Venezuelan gang-bangers rounded-up by ICE in Texas. Do you suppose that means the executive branch is powerless now to remove anyone who entered the USA illegally? It's alleged that the illegal aliens have a right to some due process beyond their deportation orders — which themselves entail sufficient due process to execute their removal, since entering the country illegally is an actionable violation.

The US might cut off military aid to Ukraine while suspending its strategic resource talks with Russia.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday that the US might stop mediating an end to the Ukrainian Conflict if it concludes within "a matter of days" that no peace deal is doable. That coincided with the Wall Street Journal reporting that Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff told them that "Putin had been fixated on Ukrainian land in their discussions. He said that "Russia might get some of the regions, but not all." This analysis here explained why it's so important for Russia to obtain full control over the disputed lands.

If no breakthrough is achieved, such as the US coercing Ukraine into withdrawing from those regions or Russia agreeing to freeze this dimension of the conflict, then the US might indeed abandon its peace efforts. The question therefore arises of how that could change its relations with Ukraine and Russia. Beginning with the first, Trump and his team's explicitly expressed exhaustion with this conflict bodes ill for the scenario of the US continuing military support for Ukraine, which would please Russia.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito filed a strongly worded dissent from the court's order issued early April 19 that temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting alleged members of the Venezuelan criminal gang Tren de Aragua.

The dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, was posted on the court's website early on April 20.

"In sum, literally in the middle of the night, the Court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order," Alito wrote.

"I refused to join the Court's order because we had no good reason to think that, under the circumstances, issuing an order at midnight was necessary or appropriate."

"Both the Executive and the Judiciary have an obligation to follow the law. The Executive must proceed under the terms of our order in Trump v. J.G.G., and this Court should follow established procedures," Alito wrote.

Republican US Senator Ron Johnson has suggested that new congressional hearings into the September 11 attacks may be forthcoming, citing unanswered questions surrounding the official narrative and the handling of evidence.

On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger airliners, crashing two into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. A third plane struck the Pentagon, while the fourth crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), World Trade Center Building 7 collapsed due to fires ignited by debris from one of the nearby towers.

During an interview with conservative commentator Benny Johnson which was published on Monday, Senator Johnson questioned several aspects of the 9/11 investigation, including the collapse of Building 7.

How high-level banking interests determined the most momentous events in our recent history.
Last March I published an article titled, "The power behind the throne and the forever wars" in which I explored the ultimate, systemic causes behind the West's insatiable appetite for war. Forever wars have become normalized, part of our everyday reality. In an article in the American Journal of Public Health, a group of American researchers made the following claim:

"Since the end of World War II, there have been 248 armed conflicts in 153 locations around the world. The United States launched 201 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and 2001, and since then, others, including Afghanistan and Iraq."

In other words, the US started more than 80% of all wars between 1946 and today. For a democratic society, one would have to conclude that the American people are irredeemably bellicose and consistently demand more wars. But as we know, that's exactly contrary to the truth. With the exception of George W. Bush's second term, Americans invariably voted for anti-war candidates. And yet, they always ended up getting more wars. Given that all these wars impoverish Americans and kill millions of people around the world, it should be important for us to understand where exactly this insatiable appetite for war originates and how it becomes policy.

The hardwired pursuit of war

Each new war is heavily marketed and duly justified to the voting public: we had to fight the Communists, then the terrorists or some dangerous new Hitler like Slobodan Milošević, Saddam Hussein, Moammar Ghaddafi, Bashar al Assad or Vladimir Putin. Tomorrow it'll be someone else's turn, always for one good reason or another. But the wars never end, and the propaganda only conceals the true incentives for war that must be systemic. Somehow, it's become hardwired in the Western systems of governance. These questions have been the motivating drive behind my research for decades now. In last year's article, I wrote as follows:

"In untangling the causal factors behind the many crises we face today, the trail of breadcrumbs always leads to the international banking cartel which appears to have the determining influence shaping the system of governance under which our societies operate. ... In particular, the banking interests appear to be the key movers behind the perpetual warfare we are witnessing today. The better we understand the way the systems work, the more the saying, "all wars are bankers' wars" rings true. ... it has never been about democracy nor about freedom. It is strictly about banking and about the collateral. ... Truly, the only group in society to whom the control of collateral makes any difference are the bankers, making them the main group with the incentive to foment forever wars for control of resources."

I recently came across an important and concrete corroboration of all this. In an article titled "How stolen Alberta oil keeps creating $9 trillion in fraudulent collateral," political economist Regan Boychuk revealed important insights into the way incentives for war become policy. He made the case that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was about keeping Iraqi oil off the world market in order to maximize the value of 175 billion barrels of newly 'proven' Alberta oil resource.

At the time of the Iraq invasion, I worked as an oil market analyst and followed the events very closely, which is why I found Boychuk's case very surprising. As he meticulously traces the events in the US and Canadian oil politics and connects them to the Iraq invasion, Boychuk arrives at conclusions that are staggering, yet compelling and entirely credible. Before we dive in, I wanted to acknowledge the reader who brought this article to my attention, only I meanwhile lost track of who it was: thank you, this was very valuable to my research!