Kiev’s Western backers have pledged to support Ukraine with $2 billion in additional military aid to help it fight Russia, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has announced following a Ramstein group meeting in Germany. His remarks come amid concerns that this could be the last summit of its kind due to the imminent return of US President-elect Donald Trump, a critic of Ukraine aid, to the White House.

Zelensky made the announcement while speaking to the We-Ukraine outlet on Thursday, praising the summit at the Ramstein Air Base, officially known as the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, as a success. He said the assistance would include air defense systems, warplanes, artillery, and other weaponry and support equipment.

It seems like Western countries cannot draw lessons from their shameful past. Just as they appeased the Nazi and apartheid regimes, they are repeating their mistake by appeasing the Zionist regime in occupied Palestine while it’s waging a war of genocide against the Palestinian people.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has sent Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to visit Israel for a week to “mend” his government’s relations with the rogue state of Israel as if Australia has done something wrong.

“It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. 

You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”  

France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot has urged the EU executive branch to use existing legislation to crack down on outside interference. His comment to French media on Wednesday is related to US-based billionaire Elon Musk weighing in on European politics on his platform X (formerly Twitter).

His words come a day after French President Emmanuel Macron slammed the owner of X for interfering in EU matters. He accused the world’s richest man of intervening directly in elections across the continent, including next month’s snap federal polls in Germany.

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky could press criminal charges against former Army Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny, should he decide to run for the presidency, Kiev-based Telegraf reported on Wednesday. Zelensky has refused to hold elections or leave office after he cancelled a vote scheduled for May 2024, citing the conflict with Russia. A new election date has yet to be set.

According to Telegraf, Zelensky has already decided to run in the next election, with the earliest possible date being May 2025. The timing depends on developments in the conflict and whether US President-elect Donald Trump manages to mediate. “With a trust rating of 52%, Zelensky still has a chance to win,” Telegraf noted.

In September 2021 the US, UK and Australia announced a joint project to build eight nuclear submarines for Australia at a cost of AU$368 billion. To conclude the deal, Australia had to scrap an already concluded agreement with France to build 12 conventional submarines for the Royal Australian Navy at a cost of AU$50 billion.

The EU Commission plans to deploy a large team of experts and officials to monitor Elon Musk’s upcoming live interview with the co-chair of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Alice Weidel, Politico reported on Thursday.

The event, which is scheduled for Thursday evening, could give the AfD an “unfair advantage” ahead of next month's snap parliamentary elections in Germany, Brussels believes, according to the media outlet.

A total of 150 specialists from the EU Commission’s DG CONNECT tech department and Seville-based European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency will monitor the conversation, Politico reported. According to the publication, the team will focus not on its content but on the algorithms used by X during the live feed.

As several fires spread across Southern California, President-elect Donald Trump blamed policies from California Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Joe Biden for causing the outbreak.

"He is the blame for this," Trump wrote about Newsom on his social media platform Truth Social on Wednesday.

CARTOON FROM 2008....

The Israelis’ “rights” to Palestine are based on the gift of the Promised Land by Yahweh. It is curious that even in this radically secular country that is France, this claim is taken seriously. But we are used to considering the Bible as a sacred reference, and there are probably still many people who believe that it is the oldest text of humanity, even though it is more recent than the Iliad, and that it takes up many myths told in Akkadian texts (such as the story of Uta-Napišti, who became Noah) two millennia earlier!

With less than two weeks remaining before his inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump reiterated his warning that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if the captives held by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip are not returned before Trump is sworn in. He added that failure to do so “will not be good for Hamas, and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone.”

Here are the propaganda leaflets Israel is currently dropping over Gaza
The messages consist of crude warnings, threats and appeals to turn against Hamas and collaborate with Israel.

A Washington Post cartoonist has quit her role at the paper, saying that her bosses blocked publication of a satirical cartoon that depicted billionaires, including one resembling Post owner Jeff Bezos, kneeling before President-elect Donald Trump.

This summer, a bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) to expedite the permitting of energy infrastructure cleared the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. A similar bill is being considered by the House Committee on Natural Resources. 

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) reportedly wants to bring the Manchin-Barrasso bill to the floor for a vote during the “lame duck” session before January. A version of “permitting reform” could become law soon.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace generates strategic ideas and independent analysis, supports diplomacy, and trains the next generation of scholar-practitioners to help countries and institutions take on the most difficult global problems and advance peace.

Europe might soon feel "intense pressure" to reach some sort of an agreement with Russia regarding its war against Ukraine, Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in a post on X on Jan. 6. 

His words came only two weeks before the inauguration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who has pledged to quickly bring an end to the war but has not provided details on how he plans to do it.

"We could soon face intense pressure to strike a deal with Moscow," Sikorski wrote after delivering a speech for French ambassadors in Paris. 

Joe Biden’s parting gift of $8 billion in weapons sales to the apartheid state of Israel acknowledges the gruesome reality of the genocide in Gaza. This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. This is a permanent, endless war designed not to destroy Hamas, or free Israeli hostages, but to eradicate, once and for all, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.