Aug. 21—Prospects for expanding the New Land Grain Corridor (NLGC)—the crop production, logistics and transport belt across Russia, along the Trans-Siberian Railway—were presented in late July, during a visit to Russia’s Far East by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. On July 22, he visited the Trans-Baikal Grain Railway Terminal’s grain operation. He gave statistics on Russia’s progress in harvests and exports, saying that President Vladimir Putin “has instructed us to increase agricultural exports by 50% by 2030, compared to 2021.” He stressed that a major tool is “preferential lending” to farmers, along with assuring reliable fertilizer and other inputs. Agriculture Minister Oksana Lut also reported on achievements and goals. She made a point about wanting to increase Russian exports to China. “The key challenge remains reaching an agreement with our Chinese partners on tariff-free grain imports.”
The NLGC (NZSK in Russian), standing for the Moscow group of companies involved, foresees assembling the funding to expand the area of cropland involved in the infrastructure program, by several hundred thousand hectares. The focus is on the Urals, Siberia and the Far East. Major crops include wheat, oilseeds, barley, rye, oats, flax, and others.
The NLGC traces back some 14 years, with the stated support of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and of the Chinese government. The purpose is to provide food security through economic cooperation—the grain cartels’ worst nightmare. At the time of the 2023 Belt and Road Summit in China, Russia agreed to supply 70 million tons of grain and oilseeds to China over the ensuing 12 years. Multiple deals were signed between Russia and China in Vladivostok at the September 2023 Eastern Economic Forum, for the new grain hub called the Grain Terminal Nizhneleninskoye-Tongjiang, with the railway bridge, located between Vladivostok in the Far East and Heilongjiang, China’s northeastern province.
The crop procurement system uses contracts with farmers, with advance payment to them, and pre-set, fair prices. The concept involves building crop storage and handling facilities along the railway. A big storage and handling hub is in Zabaikalsk, on the Russian side of the border with China, whose city is Manzhouli. Its silos and facilities can handle 8 million tons of crops. Plans for a westward complex in Tatarstan, near Kazan, were announced in 2024. Smaller hubs are planned on the border of Iran, Turkmenistan, and other locations.
The model for transport is called “Grain+,” a mode of container freight for inland grain transportation. The system takes into account the different rail track gauges between China and Russia. Russia and China have agreed on producing special rolling stock for the system.
The ambitious goal is to have in operation the land and logistics for 90 million tons of crops per year by 2035, with as much as 70 million tons of that available for neighboring and other friendly trade partners, including the Middle East as well as Central Asia. For the most part, grain will flow toward China, with return cargo in the reverse direction.
Aug. 21—On August 19, the east campus of the Microsoft corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington became a “Free Zone” after dozens of current and former Microsoft employees protested the company’s enabling of Israeli war crimes in Gaza and elsewhere. The large courtyard surrounded by several restaurants which is especially popular at lunchtime was renamed, “Martyred Palestinian Children’s Plaza,” where employees held signs reading “No Labor for Genocide,” and “Join the Worker Intifada.” The protest was organized by No Azure for Genocide, which has demanded that Microsoft divest from Israel.
While the company still denies any knowledge or involvement with mass surveillance or the targeting of civilians, in late 2021 Yossi Sariel, the commander of the notorious Unit 8200 of Israeli military intelligence, flew to Seattle to meet Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella. According to Israel’s [+972 Magazine](https://www.972mag.com/microsoft-8200-intelligence-surveillance-cloud-azure/), their discussion was on how to move vast amounts of Israeli secret intelligence into the nearly limitless storage capacity of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. At this meeting that took place at the Microsoft headquarters, Sariel won Nadella’s support for a plan that would grant Unit 8200 access to a segregated, secured, and customized area within Microsoft’s Azure system. With this storage capacity and help for AI, Unit 8200 built a powerful mass surveillance apparatus capable of collecting and storing recordings of millions of phone calls and text messages made by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The intelligence stored in Microsoft’s Azure system has helped facilitate deadly airstrikes and has shaped military operations, including the targeted assassinations of alleged Hamas supporters.
These employees wrote on their website, “Microsoft has made the active choice to be part of the economy of apartheid since 1991 with its technologies embedded across the Israeli military, prison system, police, universities, and schools—including in illegally occupied settlements. That is a political choice. As it stands today, Microsoft technology powers Israel’s mass-surveillance weapon that collects and stores recordings of millions of mobile phone calls and texts made each day by Palestinians. That is a political choice. Every hour, the Microsoft-powered mass surveillance weapon is used to blackmail Palestinians, place them in detention, or even justify their killing after the fact. That is a political choice. Every day for the past 22 months, the Microsoft-powered mass surveillance weapon has been used to facilitate the bombardment and massacring of Palestinians in Gaza. That is a political choice.”
Aug. 21—The American Soybean Association (ASA), the farmer group representing some 500,000 growers, sent a letter Aug. 19 directly to President Donald Trump from ASA President Caleb Ragland, a farmer in Kentucky, asking for the Trump Administration to talk to China to “reach a deal that includes the removal of China’s retaliatory duties and, if possible, significant purchase commitments” of U.S. soybeans. The U.S. farmers’ appeal is occasioned by the fact that China, in the context of U.S. trade and military belligerence, has simply placed no orders at all for the new soybean marketing period starting in September, after being the foremost importer of U.S. soybeans for decades. China bought 54% of U.S. soybean exports in the 2023-2024 trade year.
The ASA letter opens with the dire statement, “U.S. soybean farmers are standing at a trade and financial precipice.”
The significance of the farmers’ forthright appeal goes beyond even relieving the grim circumstances of the growers, whose productive capacity represents 28% of annual world soybean production, to the general point that the world needs President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping to confer on economic and security matters, and get on the track of mutually beneficial arrangements of all kinds, especially food.
ASA President Ragland’s letter states, "China has not purchased any U.S. soybeans for the months ahead as we quickly approach harvest. The further into the autumn we get without reaching an agreement with China on soybeans, the worse the impacts will be on U.S. soybean farmers.
“Soybean farmers are under extreme financial stress. Prices continue to drop and at the same time our farmers are paying significantly more for inputs and equipment. U.S. soybean farmers cannot survive a prolonged trade dispute with our largest customer.”
The letter is accompanied by a 10-page white paper of charts and documentation. Titled, “Soybeans Without a Buyer: The Export Gap Hurting U.S. Farms.”
The farmers’ letter details the gist of the crisis: “Over the past five years, China has imported an average of 61% of the world’s soybean supplies—more than the rest of the world combined. Historically, the U.S. was the provider of choice for Chinese customers. However, due to ongoing tariff retaliation, our longstanding customers in China have and will continue to turn to our competitors in South America to meet their demand, a demand Brazil can meet due to significantly increased production since the previous trade war with China.”
The letter was also sent to all Cabinet secretaries and to the leaders of the relevant committees in Congress.
Sources report that Xi has requested a one-on-one meeting with Trump that he intends to use to change the direction of China-U.S. relations. Xi is prepared to offer the U.S. major concessions and trade deals, including on the purchase of agricultural products like soybeans, and will work out a fair reduction in tariffs generally. The sources say that Xi will also propose major Chinese investment in the U.S., as well as joint collaboration on international projects, and would lower the barriers for American investment in China, including in infrastructure projects.
Xi also intends to explain to Trump that the BRICS alliance is not a threat to either the United States or the dollar, but represents a pathway towards a new just economic order, that threatens only the economic royalists who control the collapsing monetarist world order, and who are pushing for conflict between the United States and China and Russia. Xi will offer the United States China's help in transitioning to this new global system, which is based on cooperative economic development for the benefit of all, not only a handful of the wealthiest people. China would resume purchase of U.S. debt, the which it had all but suspended as the two nations vectored towards conflict.
The sources say that they expect that such a summit could take place within the next month, perhaps around the time of the September UN General Assembly meeting.
There has also been talk of a possible tripartite summit between Xi, Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Sept. 3 commemoration of Victory in World War II over Japan, to be held in Beijing. Putin will be attending. Trump has not yet been invited, sources report, since Xi realizes that internal differences within the Administration might force him to decline. Xi, these sources report, places a high priority on a direct summit with Trump, ostensibly to settle the trade and tariff questions, but which will include broader discussions.
Aug. 20—Official reports from both India and China on Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s Aug. 18-20 visit to New Delhi, India, concur that relations between the world’s two most populous nations are heading back to much-needed normalcy in this time of “global turbulence.” The leaders of the two nations are now set to meet on the sidelines of the Aug. 31-Sept. 1 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tianjin, China.
“Stable, predictable, constructive ties between India and China will contribute significantly to regional as well as global peace and prosperity,” India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote on his X account after meeting Aug. 19 with Wang Yi. “Since my meeting with President Xi in Kazan, [Russia, at the BRICS summit] last year, India-China relations have made steady progress, guided by respect for each other’s interests and sensitivities. I look forward to our next meeting in Tianjin on the sidelines of the SCO Summit.”
Before meeting Modi, Wang met with his Indian counterpart, Foreign Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar, and separately with Indian National Security chief Ajit Doval, in the larger-format meeting of the 24th Round of the Special Representatives’ Dialogue on the Boundary Question. Armed conflict in one area of their long border in 2020 had thrown bilateral relations into the freezer. It has taken careful military and diplomatic work over time to rebuild trust, such that in this 24th round, agreements were reached to both establish several working groups with more ambitious mandates to deal with border issues, and, importantly, to “take a political perspective of the overall bilateral relationship,” India’s External Affairs Ministry reported in a concluding document on Wang Yi’s visit.
In their talks, Jaishankar and Wang each raised particular knotty issues between the two countries (India, its concerns on terrorism and coordinating river management related to a huge dam China is constructing on a common river; China, the question of Taiwan), but dealt with them in the context of their “positive, constructive and forward-looking discussions on bilateral, regional and international issues of common interest.” The concluding document named some ten general “understandings and outcomes/practical steps” they agreed on to promote “people-centric and economic engagement” between their two peoples.
“As two major neighboring and developing countries, China and India share similar views and broad common interests,” and should trust and support each other, Wang Yi emphasized in the meeting with Doval, Xinhua reported.
Doval agreed that in the current turbulent international situation, “India and China face a series of common challenges, and it is necessary to enhance understanding, deepen trust, and strengthen cooperation, as this concerns the well-being of the people of both countries and the peace and development of the world,” according to Xinhua.
To Jaishankar, Wang proposed that by regarding each other as partners and opportunities rather than rivals or threats, they would set an example for other developing nations. “The revitalization of the two great Eastern civilizations should reinforce and complement one another, providing much-needed certainty and stability for Asia and the wider world.”
Jaishankar summarized the net result of the meetings: “Confident that our discussions today would contribute to building a stable, cooperative and forward-looking relationship between India and China.”
Aug. 20—Interviewed by Russia’s VGTRK station Aug. 19 Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov assured listeners that “the atmosphere was quite good” in the meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska—and distinctly different from the White House meeting of the seven European “leaders” who went to Washington as a “support group” for Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Alaska “was a useful conversation. It showed without any doubt,” he said, “first, that the U.S. leader and his team are sincere in their commitment to achieving tangible results by bringing about something lasting, durable, and sustainable. This is what sets them apart from the Europeans who, at the time, shouted at every corner that they would not accept anything but a ceasefire, while continuing to supply weapons to Ukraine even after it is declared.”
Second, it showed that President Trump and his team understand that the Ukraine conflict “has its causes, which means that all the speculation alleging that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked,” as some Presidents and Prime Ministers of Europe say, “is just baby talk.”
President Trump and his team, particularly since the Alaska summit, “have adopted a far more substantive approach to resolving the Ukrainian crisis, recognizing the imperative to address its root causes,” Lavrov said. He cited two root causes. First, the five waves of NATO’s eastern expansion, despite such official commitments as the OSCE’s assertion that “security is indivisible, and no one may strengthen their own security at the expense of others”—which NATO violated. European leaders talked in Washington about Ukraine’s security—and [British PM Sir Keir] Starmer of Europe’s—but not one spoke of Russia’s security, Lavrov noted.
Another root cause: Zelenskyy’s Ukraine is the only country in the world to ban a language—Russian; his regime has stripped Russian-speakers of their rights and banned the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Yet these European leaders say that “this is the man who must be in charge of striking a deal with Russia as he deems fit,” said Lavrov.
Lavrov gave a history lesson, when asked about Finnish President Alexander Stubb’s proposal that Ukraine adopt the Finnish model of 1944 as a solution. Finland in 1944 ended its military’s participation alongside Hitler in its war against Russia, and established relations with the Soviet Union, giving up a small part of its territory in the process. Finland, Lavrov pointed out, “whose military units participated in many war crimes” while fighting alongside Nazi Germany, then signed a treaty with the Soviet Union that stated “eternal neutrality, and that neither the Soviet Union nor Finland would ever join structures directed against the other,” has now joined NATO, “the structure that considers Russia as an enemy.”
Russia was never out to seize territory—not Crimea, nor the Donbass, nor Novorossiya; “our goal was to protect the Russian people who lived on these lands for centuries,” Lavrov remarked. The “root cause” to be eradicated, he repeated, is the policy of “the West, led by the previous administration of J. Biden,” of using Ukraine “as an instrument of containment, suppression of Russia and inflicting, as they say, a ‘strategic defeat’ [on Russia].”
Aug. 20—New details have emerged about the recent meeting between President Donald Trump and the European leadership of NATO, and the Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy that reveal that President has totally walked away NATO demands for a ceasefire that have sabotaged previous negotiations. Trump has properly identified that his goal is not merely to stop the fighting, but to create the basis for a permanent peace that removes the basis for future conflict.
The President, said a source close to the White House, "has told Europe that he wants to end a war that NATO deliberately provoked, and now has lost, against Russia. He sees no reason for conflict with the Russians except the paranoid and insane views of the British and French, and especially the Germans, that the Russians want to invade and take over Europe. He rejects this analysis, and says America is not going to engage in confrontation with Putin and Russians and instead seeks normal and peaceful relations with its fellow nuclear superpower. This has prompted the NATO leadership to say that Putin has brainwashed Trump. But what they say, and what they think no longer really matters. Trump has asserted that he, the President of the United States, is control of the agenda and his is an agenda for peace.
"This has caused Zelenskyy to do some thinking," said the source. "He has been propped up by the NATO war party and their allies in the U.S., including in the State Department. But if Trump is asserting control over this process, and wants a peace deal, does Zelenskyy's future best lie with Europe, or with Trump? Trump told him that he will protect him if he accepts the peace deal being negotiated. And he also told him that nothing will save him if he tries to sabotage it. Zelenskyy knows that the U.S. and Trump know that much of the money and aid sent Ukraine has "gone missing,' and has been stolen by the massively corrupt Ukrainian political machine which Zelenskyy nominally heads. Trump keeps reminding him that he really has no cards to play. There is reason to believe that the message is getting through."
In Saturday's meeting, Trump shot down the European demand for a ceasefire in Ukraine. It was prompted by a comment from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said: “I can’t imagine that the next meeting [between Putin and Zelenskyy] would take place without a ceasefire. So, let’s work on that, and let’s try to put pressure on Russia, because the credibility of these efforts, these efforts we are undertaking today depend on at least a ceasefire from the beginning.” Trump responded immediately: “In the six wars that I’ve settled, I haven’t had a ceasefire. We just got into negotiations. If we can do the ceasefire, great, and if we don’t do a ceasefire, because many other points were given to us, many, many points were given to us—great points,” Trump said. He called instead for a full peace agreement.
Trump had begun the meeting by confidently saying he was “optimistic” that a deal could be made that would deter future aggression against Ukraine. He then added: “I actually think there won’t be [any future aggression by Russia]. I think that’s … largely overrated.” As far as security guarantees go, he said that “European nations are going to take a lot of the burden. We’re going to help them, and we’re going to make it [the deal] very secure. We also need to discuss the possible exchanges of territory, taking into consideration the current line of contact. That means the war zone, the war lines.”
When media asked about such security guarantees for Ukraine, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that President Trump is talking to both Russia and Ukraine about this, and “has directed his team to come up with a framework for these security guarantees that can be acceptable to help ensure a lasting peace and end this war.”
Aug. 19—This year is not only the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, but also the anniversary of the creation of the Soviet nuclear agency, now called Rosatom. From the beginning, under the direction of Russian physicist Igor Kurchatov, the agency worked to utilize atomic power not only for the bomb, but also for producing electricity. The world’s first nuclear power plant putting electricity online was built in 1954 under Kurchatov’s directions in the city of Obninsk.
Igor Kurchatov had been appointed the scientific director of the Soviet nuclear program in 1943. He was instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb and then headed up the work on the hydrogen bomb. After seeing one of the tests of the hydrogen bomb in 1950, he came back to his colleagues, shaken, saying, “We can never use this bomb in a war.” At the end of December 1950, he told his colleagues, “Let’s begin next year not with weapons, but with a magnetic thermonuclear reactor: Let’s begin with that.”
In celebrating the Rosatom anniversary, various nuclear scientists told reporters what they would show Igor Kurchatov if he visited them now in 2025. Rosatom also issued key quotes from Kurchatov’s 1956 speech at the famous 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, at which Khrushchev gave his well-known de-Stalinization speech. Kurchatov’s speech was published the next day in Pravda.
It was a decisive shift, as Kurchatov called for cooperation on developing thermonuclear energy with other countries, including specifically with the United States. Kurchatov said: “We, Soviet scientists, would like to work together with scientists from all countries of the world, including scientists from America, whose scientific and technical achievements we highly appreciate, to solve this most important scientific problem for mankind. For this to be possible, the only thing necessary is that the U.S. government accept the Soviet Union’s proposal to ban the use of atomic and hydrogen weapons, for which our party is tirelessly fighting.” Kurchatov’s speech in London that year revealed to the world the Soviet work on a new thermonuclear device called the “tokamak.” This unilateral revelation of “state secrets” led to the general declassification of the work on fusion in all nations.
Here are some other quotes from that London speech of Kurchatov’s, published today by Rosatom:
“It is advisable to build nuclear power plants first and foremost in areas with long-distance fuel imports. Therefore, in the current five-year period, it is planned to build two nuclear power plants in the Urals with a total capacity of 1 million kW. A nuclear power plant with a capacity of 400,000 kW will also be built near Moscow.”
“A controlled thermonuclear reaction should make it possible to obtain energy not from its reserves concentrated in the atomic nuclei of the rare elements uranium and thorium, but from the formation of helium from a substance widespread in nature—hydrogen. The solution of this most difficult and majestic task would forever relieve humanity of the concern for the energy reserves necessary for its existence on Earth. We now have the hydrogen bomb to create the conditions for a hydrogen-helium fusion reaction. But it must now be controlled to avoid an explosion.”
“We must find the nature of the forces that bind protons and neutrons, the basic structural elements of atomic nuclei. It is necessary to study the structure of protons and neutrons themselves. It is necessary to build gigantic accelerators for this purpose.”
There are also celebrations in all the “atomic cities” in Russia in honor of this anniversary. Rosatom’s “Territory of Culture of Rosatom” has organized Russian artists to travel in a song-marathon to all of these sites.
Aug. 19—The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) thwarted a Ukrainian attempt to launch a terrorist attack on the Crimean-Kerch Bridge, aimed at sabotaging talks on resolving the Ukraine conflict, said Rodion Miroshnik, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s ambassador-at-large in charge of overseeing the Kiev regime’s crimes, reported TASS on Aug. 18. “Against the backdrop of the emerging negotiation process, a new attempt [was made] by Ukraine and its allies to carry out a terrorist attack as a provocation to disrupt the talks and the search for a peaceful resolution,” Miroshnik wrote on his Telegram channel.
A Chevrolet Volt with a powerful improvised explosive device inside was traced and the bomb was defused.
RT reported Aug. 18: “According to the FSB, the rigged vehicle had crossed into Russia from Georgia. The Ukrainian plan was to deliver the Chevrolet to Russia’s southern Krasnodar Region via a car transporter truck and then ‘pass it on to another driver, who was supposed to ride in it to Russia’s Crimea via the Crimean Bridge and become an unwitting suicide bomber,’ the agency said.” Some 130kg of Finnish-made explosives had been packed into the Chevrolet Volt.
On Oct. 8, 2022, the Ukrainian intelligence service detonated a truck bomb on the Kerch Bridge, which exploded and damaged the roadway, causing sections to collapse into the sea, and also ignited fuel tanks on a passing train. Russian officials reported that the explosion killed three people. The Ukrainian Security Service has claimed responsibility for using underwater explosives to target the bridge.
Aug. 19—Russian President Vladimir Putin has made the development of Russia’s immense Far East “a national priority for the 21st century.” A statement by Putin, placed prominently at the front of the website of the Eastern Economic Forum, which will hold its conference September 3-6 in Vladivostok, identifies the development of the Far East as an assertion of Russia’s national and international intent:
“We have identified the development of the Far East as a national priority for the entire 21st century. The importance and correctness of this decision has been confirmed by life itself, by the challenges we have faced recently, and, most importantly, by the real trends that are gaining momentum in the global economy, where the key business ties, trade routes, and in general, the entire vector of development are increasingly reorienting toward the East and the Global South.
“In essence, today the Far East has, without exaggeration, become the most important factor in strengthening Russia’s position in the world, and our standard-bearer in the new global economic reality. And to a great extent, the future of our entire country depends on how the Far East develops.”
Russia’s Far East is immense: 2.7 million square miles (6.2 million sq km). The continental lower 48 U.S. states have 3.1 million square miles (8 million sq km). So, the Russian Far East is 86% the land area of the continental or contiguous United States. The population density of the Far East as a whole is minuscule: 0.42 persons per square mile (or 1.1 persons per sq km). The Russian government has spent an enormous sum to develop the Far East over the last two decades, in infrastructure, and also trying to keep Russians from moving to the western part of the country.
Building in the Far East at times requires special techniques for building on soil that is permanently frozen, or on soil that is permafrost, which can be frozen for two more years, and then thaws and turns into mud. The weather can be bitterly cold. This must be taken account of in all infrastructure programs, but especially in building railways. More than 290 projects are currently in the building phase in the Far East. The Russian government currently has over 200 billion rubles invested in roads, bridges and utility networks. It is also creating a nuclear-powered ice-breaker fleet for the North Sea Route, which stretches from the Barents Sea to the Bering Strait. There are also private as well as mixed ventures, such as Russian building new ports at Utrenny (in the Tyumen Olbast) and Sabetta (in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug), and upgrades for six existing ports. There is the construction of the New Land Grain Corridor to establish the world’s first specialized railway grain terminal in the Russian Far East. It is significantly financed by the Chinese, giving China a steady food supply, and Russia a market for agricultural produce. China is playing a significant role in the financing of Far East development projects.
Aug. 19—The press director of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova released the following commentary Aug. 18 in connection with the statements of British officials on the Ukrainian conflict, as translated from the Russian original:
“Against the backdrop of the genuine desire demonstrated by the leadership of Russia and the United States in Anchorage for a comprehensive, fair and sustainable settlement of the conflict around Ukraine, including, among other things, the eradication of its root causes, statements continue to pour out of London that are not only dissonant with the efforts of Moscow and Washington, but are also clearly aimed at undermining them.
“Thus, in a joint statement on Aug, 17 following their latest online meeting, the ‘coalition of the willing’ chaired by British Prime Minister K. Starmer and French President E. Macron revived the obviously unviable idea of deploying a Western military contingent in Ukraine if an agreement on a ceasefire is reached. In turn, on August 15, British Defense Minister J. Healey directly stated that Albion was ready to send troops to Ukraine to support the ceasefire when it comes into force.
“The role of the British in fueling the conflict in Ukraine is well known. And before the start of the SVO, London did not hide the fact that they viewed this country exclusively as a geopolitical instrument aimed against Russia. For a number of years, Great Britain has been trying to demonstrate leadership on the issue of supporting the Ukrainian puppet regime and mobilizing foreign aid to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. By encouraging their protégés in Kiev, the British are firmly holding them on a Euro-Atlantic and anti-Russian course, which is deadly for the people of Ukraine. London is obsessed with the desire to constantly raise the stakes in the conflict and is pushing its NATO partners to a dangerous brink, beyond which a new global conflict is not far away….
“These bellicose tirades, which de facto are a cynical incitement to continue military actions, only confirm that London is not interested in resolving the situation but is doing everything possible to prolong the bloodshed. With their policy, the British simply do not leave Kiev a chance to get out of the conflict through negotiations, and out of habit, arrogantly and self-confidently prolong the suffering of the Ukrainian people.
“It is unlikely that the authorities of Great Britain, which has long since left the ‘first league’ of world politics, are capable of realizing the full burden of responsibility that they are arbitrarily taking upon themselves, as well as the potentially catastrophic consequences of the destructive policy they have chosen for international and regional security. In this regard, we call on London to abandon risky and ill-considered geopolitical gambits, and, at the very least, not to interfere with the painstaking work of Russian and American negotiators.”
Aug. 19—U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ramped up his personal vendetta against Cuba with two special announcements, both dated Aug. 13, intended to crush Cuba’s struggling economy, starve the population and foment social unrest. One is directed against former Brazilian Health Ministry officials and former officials of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), accused of “complicity” in Cuba’s overseas medical mission program, or what Rubio calls a “labor export scheme,” “human trafficking,” etc.
The second one imposes visa restrictions on Cuban, African and Grenadian government officials also for being involved in the Cuban medical brigades program. The State Department doesn’t name specific African countries or Grenadian officials to be sanctioned. It has previously revoked the visas of Cuba’s government leadership, beginning with President Miguel Diaz-Canel, and threatened to revoke the visas of Caribbean nations that have invited Cuban doctors into their countries. Rubio’s threats to revoke the visas of Caribbean government leaders last March were met with an angry pushback.
Sources report that Rubio, whose family was driven out of Cuba by Castro, has a blind rage toward the Cuban regime. He has completely denied the world historical accomplishments of Cuban medicine, internationally in fighting disease, which accomplishments occurred despite a brutal, over 70-year sanctions policy. His political life is linked to the Gusano networks that control much of Florida, and who are as corrupt as the day is long. and intersect with British and American intelligence services.
The source of Rubio’s rage is the Cuban program that has deployed tens of thousands of doctors, nurses and technical experts to developing countries across the globe for decades to provide life-saving medical assistance. These highly-trained medical professionals have worked in several African countries to respond to cholera and ebola epidemics, to treat victims of natural disasters, as in Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, the more recent Covid epidemic and many other emergency situations. Currently they number about 26,000 doctors and nurses working in 55 countries.
Rubio claims this program, for which the Cuban government is paid in foreign currency, “enriches the corrupt Cuban regime” and “deprives the Cuban people of essential medical care”—a baldfaced lie. But his real goal is to deprive the Cuban government of the foreign currency it earns, and on which it depends, under conditions in which the six-decade U.S. embargo continues to prevent Cuba from having normal trade relations with other nations, financial transactions with banks, and imports of vitally-needed products such as syringes, pacemakers, construction and electrical equipment.
The targeting of former Brazilian officials is instructive. State sanctioned two former Brazilian Health Ministry officials, Mozart Julio Tabosa Sales and Roberto Kleiman, who worked with the “Mais Medicos” (More Doctors) program, founded in 2013 under then President Dilma Rousseff, which collaborated with the Cuban doctors deployed to Brazil. Also sanctioned were former officials of the Pan American Health Organization, for abetting “the Cuban regime’s labor export scheme in the Mais Medicos program.” Their visas and those of family members have been revoked. Now, former President Jair Bolsonaro, who will soon go on trial for coup plotting against President Lula da Silva, is demanding that sanctions also be applied to Dilma Rousseff for not only collaborating with Cuban doctors, but also for holding her present post as president of the New Development Bank, the BRICS bank. The Bolsonaristas think that attacking Rousseff would have a “broader impact” because of her role in the BRICS, an “axis of the multipolar world,” according to Brasil 247.
Aug. 19—Over the first half of 2025, the U.S. agriculture trade deficit hit a record $28.6 billion, according to the Aug. 7 posting by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This is a jump from the same time period last year, January-June 2024, which posted a $18.4 billion gap.
U.S. agriculture exports through June this year totaled $85.6 billion; imports totaled $114.1 billion. Tariffs or no tariffs, the profile of U.S. agriculture and food supply has been food import-dependency in recent years—except for grains and oilseeds—imposed by the transnational monopolies of the agro-financial-complex of Wall Street and the City of London.
For decades, the U.S. was manipulated into producing a surplus of exportable grains and oil seeds, as the export-source for the monopoly globalist cartels to dominate, while all other food types—from seafood to asparagus—were increasingly sourced abroad, again, by the same globalist cartels, raking it in from cheap labor. For example, 60% of U.S. fresh fruit consumption is imported, 40% of fresh vegetable consumption, and 85% of apple juice consumption.
For a long while, the export revenue from the huge volume of grains and oilseeds exported from the U.S. masked the volume of imports of the other agriculture commodities, until 2019, when the agriculture trade deficit showed up, the first time in 60 years. The deficit has been worsening since, regardless of whether a Biden or Trump administration.
The solution? Collaborative roll-back of wrongful international supply lines, with credit and resources for diversified, family farming, and mutual interest trade. Instead Washington’s tariffs and trade belligerence are causing havoc. An example: soybeans.
China, once the largest importer of U.S. soybeans, has currently held off from placing any orders at all from the U.S., as of the next soybean purchasing period, beginning in September (harvest time). Last week, President Trump posted an appeal on Truth Social, “I hope China will quickly quadruple its soybean orders. This is also a way of substantially reducing China’s Trade Deficit with the U.S.A.” China has drastically diverted its soybean purchases to South America.