The 69th Bilderberg Meeting, a secretive conclave of global power brokers, has kicked off in Lisbon, Portugal, with issues on the agenda including transnational threats, artificial intelligence, and America’s leadership in world affairs.

British journalist Philip Short has written a long, in-depth biography of Vladimir Putin. The timing of its publication was rather fortuitous, having been released just a few months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The book is one of the better ones about Putin, though it certainly has its flaws. Before going into the good, the bad, and the befuddling, I will make a few general observations.

New investigation should be opened that examines pivotal role played by the Agency in scandal that was used to mobilize liberal support for regime change in Russia and war in Ukraine.

When is a global elite not a global elite? When it excludes two of the six biggest economies in the world, writes Mary Dejevsky

The director of PEN Moscow is worried about Russophobia.

President’s responsibilities must prevail over parental anguish

As I have noted previously, the Russiagate saga, which I and others have described as a hoax, is intimately tied to a vicious element of Russphobia that is integral to mainstream US and western culture. Russophobia created a receptive popular audience for mis/disinformation, one readily manipulable by propagandists.

A Special Counsel report chronicles how intelligence agencies engineered a national hysteria, but its publication comes too late to reverse the damage

If we look back on the major wars of the prior century and forward to the growing menace of a war fought with nuclear weaponry, there is one prominent gap in analysis and understanding. This gap is to my knowledge rarely acknowledged, or even discussed, by political leaders or addressed in the supposedly independent main media platforms in the West. Indeed, the gap seems to be explicitly denied, and given a hegemonic twist, by the Biden presidency, especially by Antony Blinken’s repeated insistence that American foreign policy, unlike that of its principal adversaries, is ‘rule-governed.’

The full death toll of violence in the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, let alone of the broader global war on terrorism, remains difficult to determine. But it has long been surpassed by an even larger and more opaque figure: the indirect count of people who have died as a result of post-9/11 conflicts’ far-reaching ripple effects, such as ensuing waves of violence, hunger, the devastation of public services and the spread of disease.