Russia’s Putin to NATO: Commit Suicide or Face All-Out War

The Russian demands, which effectively require NATO to commit suicide, are so obviously outrageous and unmeetable that Western analysts are split over interpreting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motives. Some say he is using the impossible list of demands as a pretext to invade Ukraine. Others think he is playing a weak hand to try to divide the West and reorder Europe’s security architecture in Russia’s favor.

Russian-Led Security Bloc To Send Peacekeeping Forces To Kazakhstan, Armenian PM Says

Peacekeepers from a Russian-led regional security alliance will be sent to Kazakhstan to help stabilize the country, the prime minister of Armenia announced on January 5 after an unprecedented wave of unrest in the oil-rich Central Asian nation that was sparked by a fuel price hike.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said on Facebook that the decision to deploy peacekeepers from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) for a limited period had been taken in response to an appeal from Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev.

Germany’s declining middle class

Even though Marx’s well-acknowledged truth that capitalism creates two classes is over 160 years old, class remains a much debated issue. Marx’s idea is relatively straightforward. In capitalism, there are two classes: firstly, there are workers or proletariat. Workers need to sell their ability to work as workers don’t own any means of production, or the ability to purchase the labor power of others.

Secondly, there is the class of capitalists. They own the means of production – companies and corporations – and purchase labor’s work while paying wages. Turbo-charged since the birth of neoliberalism during the 1980s, profits and productivity have left wages behind during the last 40 years. As a consequence, the rich get richer while the working class’ income has grown at a much lower rate, and for some, it has stagnated.

Living in Epoch-Defining Times: Food, Agriculture and the New World Order

Farmerless farms manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented genetically engineered seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food. Data platforms, private equity firms, e-commerce giants and AI-controlled farming systems.

This is the future that big agritech and agribusiness envisage: a future of ‘data-driven’ and ‘climate-friendly’ agriculture that they say is essential if we are to feed a growing global population.

Into the grey zone: how the US could change the game with China and Russia

Washington should take more aggressive “grey-zone” strategies – warfare just short of armed conflict – to tackle China and Russia, according to a group of US military strategists including former defence chief Chuck Hagel.

In recommendations published by US think tank the Atlantic Council last month, the strategists said China and Russia had conducted unconventional offensives against the US, including online cyberattacks, and misinformation and disinformation campaigns.

Israeli committee authorizes plans for over 3,500 new settler units in occupied East al-Quds

An Israeli local committee has approved plans to build more than 3,500 new illegal settler units in the occupied East al-Quds, irrespective of the international outcry over the Tel Aviv regime’s settlement construction and land expropriation policies.

The Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now reported that the construction of the units would largely cut off the city from the southern part of the occupied West Bank, further complicating any efforts to create a sovereign Palestinian state.

Kazakhstan unrest: Dozens killed, about 2,000 arrested as protesters clash with police in Almaty

Clashes between protesters and security forces have left dozens killed while about 2,000 have been arrested in Kazakhstan’s biggest city, Almaty, as nationwide protests continue over fuel price hikes in the oil-rich Central Asian country.

Police spokesman Saltanat Azirbek said on Thursday that tens of rioters had been “eliminated” overnight in Kazakhstan’s financial capital as they tried to storm government buildings.

The Global North Is Closing Its Doors to Migration

In July, British Home Secretary Priti Patel announced that the U.K. had agreed to pay France roughly $72 million to fund border personnel and equipment that would be used to stop asylum-seekers from crossing the English Channel. The deal came amid a dramatic rise in the number of channel crossings. In the first half of 2021, more than 8,000 asylum-seekers completed the voyage to land on England’s southern shore.