The article describes a recent situation, which occurred on 8th August in the Lagodekhi region of Georgia, close to the border with Azerbaijan, where locals are not being informed about a chemical spraying (insecticides) operation, ostensibly for mosquito control, conducted by teams using a fleet of USAID*-marked vehicles.

While Iran is carefully planning its response to the provocative assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, European leaders are doing their best to save Netanyahu’s criminal regime and grant it the right to continue engaging in terrorist activities. A few days after Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran, while he was attending the inauguration of the new Iranian president, several European leaders appealed to Pezeshkian, urging him to de-escalate the situation and abandon a retaliatory strike against Israel.

The Israeli strike that killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh pushed the Middle East a lot closer to a wider war than it was before July 31^st. Because Haniyeh was killed on Iranian soil during an official visit, Tehran promised military retaliation. The latter sees this as necessary to punish Israel to counterbalance the humiliation it suffered for failing to protect an official guest. But, thanks to Russia’s intervention and proactive diplomacy, clouds of a wider war have begun to disappear.

According to recent reports, Israel, under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, is doing everything in its power to prevent the cessation of hostilities in Gaza and is trying to provoke Iran into starting a regional conflict. Israel believes that such actions will help resolve some aspects of strategic security in the future.

In the lead up to the Ukrainian military’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, even Western headlines were dominated by reports of Ukraine’s gradual demise. Ukraine is admittedly suffering arms and ammunition shortages, as well as facing an unsolvable manpower crisis. Russia has been destroying Ukrainian military power faster than Ukraine and its Western sponsors can reconstitute it.

Summing up the French failures in Africa, and particularly in Mali, the US The National Interest concluded that «the era of French diplomatic dominance on the continent, which lasted for more than 100 years, has come to an end, and Paris’ claims of being one of the leading geopolitical players and a privileged partner of African countries have been seriously undermined».

The ongoing tension between Iran and Israel can be understood in the context that the latter views itself as the vanguard of Western Civilization in the region. Israeli representative stated as much on 14^th August 2024, during an emergency UNSC meeting convened to discuss his country’s bombing of Al-Tabeen school that killed about 100 civilians. Israel and The West cannot foresee themselves backing down until the entire region is brought under neocolonialism.

During the summer of 2024, Japan sharply intensified its foreign policy in its most important aspects, particularly on China and Pacific states. In our opinion, this intensification and some improvements in Japanese relations with China are primarily related to balancing its military and political activities with Western countries. On the one hand, Japan is building up its own defence potential and strengthening various multilateral formats in the field of security; on the other hand, it is trying to reduce tension in relations with China.

On the evening of August 11, my companion and I were watching a Russian series about World War Two, Staying Alive, dealing with the first days of the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941. It’s an excellent dramatic work depicting the reality of the war and what it meant for the Soviet people. I highly recommend it. You can find it on the Internet. But what, you may ask, has this to do with anything?

Pan-Africanism and the BRICS alliance represent two powerful forces that can help shape an emerging Global South. While Pan-Africanism promotes unity, solidarity and cooperation among African nations, the BRICS/BRICS+ alliance represents a group of emerging countries seeking to strengthen their economic and political influence on the international stage.

The situation in South Asia over the past few weeks has been marked by a number of notable events, of which the dramatic developments in Bangladesh deserve special attention. Her departure was provoked by mass demonstrations in which students and other young people played a decisive role…

Recently, on 25^th July 2024, the Washington Post published an article “How four U.S. presidents unleashed economic warfare across the globe”, in which some interesting statistics were noted. Firstly, the US imposes three times as many sanctions as any other country (or group of countries) on earth. Secondly, that around one third of all countries on earth are on the receiving end of some form of US sanctions, and that the effectiveness of such sanctions has been, to say the least, limited, despite being the “go to” option of the US government for inflicting punishment on countries from Iran to Cuba, Russia to Myanmar.