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Putin Says Curbing NATO Enlargement Crucial to Ukraine Peace Deal

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sept. 1 that the issue of NATO’s eastward enlargement has to be tackled for there to be a sustainable peace deal in Ukraine.

Putin was speaking after talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in Tianjin, China.

Putin said the crisis in Ukraine was partly due to “the West’s constant attempts to drag Ukraine into NATO,” which he said “poses a direct threat to Russia’s security.”

He said that the 2014 revolution in Ukraine was a “coup” in which “the country’s political leadership that opposed NATO membership was removed from power.”

“In order for a Ukrainian settlement to be sustainable and long-term, the root causes of the crisis, which I have just mentioned and which I have repeatedly mentioned before, must be eliminated,” he said.

Putin Calls for ‘Fair Balance’

Putin also called for “a fair balance in the security sphere” to be restored.

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine—which has expressed interest in joining NATO—and its forces now control a fifth of the country, including Crimea and large swathes of the south and east of Ukraine.

Just days before the invasion, Putin delivered a speech describing the potential accession of Ukraine to NATO as “a direct threat to the security of Russia.”

In the wake of the Russian invasion, Finland and Sweden both waived policies of neutrality they had held for decades and joined NATO in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

NATO now has 32 members, including a string of countries that were once part of the Soviet Union—such as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—or were part of the Moscow-dominated Warsaw Pact alliance during the Cold War—such as Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria.

Apart from Ukraine, two other countries—Georgia and Bosnia-Herzegovina—have applied for NATO membership.

The alliance’s website states, “NATO’s door remains open to any European country in a position to undertake the commitments and obligations of membership, and contribute to security in the Euro-Atlantic area.”

During NATO’s 2008 summit in Bucharest, alliance leaders said in a declaration: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”

But after NATO’s summit in The Hague in June, there was no mention of Ukrainian membership in the declaration issued, which stated simply, “Allies reaffirm their enduring sovereign commitments to provide support to Ukraine, whose security contributes to ours.”

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Archeologists discover 1.8 million-year-old human jawbone — possibly the oldest artifact of early humans outside Africa

A jaw-dropping discovery.

A 1.8 million-year-old human jawbone has been unearthed in the hills of Georgia — and scientists say the fossil could offer major clues into some of the earliest prehistoric human settlements in Eurasia.

The ancient mandible was uncovered by archaeologists at the Orozmoni site, roughly 62 miles southwest of the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, in a prehistoric goldmine smaller than two parking spaces.

Experts believe the bone may be one of the oldest remains of early humans excavated outside of Africa, offering clues to the patterns of Homo erectus, a hunter-gatherer species that scientists believe began migrating roughly two million years ago.

“The study of the early human and fossil animal remains from Orozmani will allow us to determine the lifestyle of the first colonizers of Eurasia,” said Giorgi Bidzinashvili, a professor of stone age archaeology at Ilia State University in Tbilisi.

“We think Orozmani can give us big information about humankind.”

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CBS News Caught Deceptively Editing Kristi Noem’s Comments on MS-13 Gang Member Kilmar Abrego Garcia

CBS News is at it again!

CBS on Sunday deceptively edited DHS Chief Kristi Noem’s comments on MS-13 gang member, wife beater and child predator, Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

A federal grand jury in Tennessee recently indicted Kilmar Abrego Garcia for “transporting undocumented migrants within the United States.”

He was charged with one count of conspiracy to transport aliens and one count of unlawful transportation of undocumented aliens.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was ordered to be deported to the East African country of Uganda after a judge recently released him from a Tennessee prison.

However, a radical Obama-appointed judge blocked the US government from immediately deporting Abrego Garcia to Africa.

On Sunday, DHS Chief appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation to discuss the Trump Administration’s work to make the country safer by arresting and deporting dangerous criminal aliens like Abrego Garcia.

CBS cut off Kristi Noem as she was detailing Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s many crimes.

In the clip that aired, Noem said, “[And] the one thing that we will continue to do is make sure that [Abrego Garcia] does not walk free in the United States of America.”

In the unaired clip, Noem said, “This individual was a known human smuggler, MS-13 gang member, an individual who was a wife beater and someone who was so perverted that he solicited nude photos from minors and even his fellow human traffickers told him to knock it off. He was so sick in what he was doing and how he was treating small children. He needs to never be in the United States of America and our administration is making sure we’re doing all that we can to bring him to justice.”

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She Couldn’t Read Her Own Diploma: Why Public Schools Pass Students but Fail Society

A nineteen-year-old college student is suing her former high school for negligence because she graduated despite being unable to read or write.

The student, Aleysha Ortiz, graduated from Hartford Public Schools in the spring of 2024 with honors.

She earned a scholarship to attend the University of Connecticut, where she’s studying public policy. But while she was in high school, she had to use speech-to-text apps to help her read and write essays, and despite years of advocating for support for her literacy struggles, her school never addressed them.

Her story is shocking, but unfortunately, it isn’t isolated. At 24 Illinois public schools, not a single student can read at grade level. Nationwide, 54 percent of the American adult population reads at or below a sixth grade level. Put a different way: only 46 percent of American adults gained even a middle-school level mastery of literacy—let alone high school or collegiate levels.

In a first-world country where we spend nearly $16,000 per student per year to educate our children, that’s a horrifying statistic.

Literacy is supposed to be the bedrock of a free and liberally educated society. As the Washington Post’s motto so aptly reminds us, “democracy dies in darkness.”

Illiteracy is a form of darkness, and an illiterate populace is not one equipped to handle the demands of a world filled with forms and papers and words, let alone be the voting citizens of a democratic society.

What Do Literacy Stats Actually Mean?

Officially, the United States reports a basic literacy rate of 99 percent (which should perhaps be called into question, if students like Aleysha Ortiz can graduate with honors and still be illiterate).

But “basic literacy” is a bit of a sales pitch. It sounds impressive, but in practice, “basic literacy skills” means a K-3 grade level of reading—things like Hop on Pop and Amelia Bedelia.

“Functional literacy” is what actually matters: the ability to read and understand things like forms, instructions, job applications, and other forms of text you’ll encounter in your day-to-day life. It measures both technical reading skill and comprehension—your ability to decipher the words, and your ability to discern their meaning.

An estimated 21 percent of American adults (~43 million Americans) are functionally illiterate, meaning they have difficulty reading and comprehending instructions and filling out forms. A functionally illiterate American adult is unable to complete tasks like reading job descriptions or filling out paperwork for Social Security and Medicaid.

Perhaps worse still is the statistic that 54 percent of the American adult population reads at or below a sixth-grade level. Most of us don’t think about reading in terms of grade level, so this statistic feels intuitively bad but practically meaningless. What is a sixth-grade level?

Books written at the sixth-grade level are intended (in both literacy and comprehension skills) for eleven- and twelve-year-olds. Think of books like A Wrinkle in Time, Percy Jackson and The Olympians, and The Giver.

They’re good stories, but they don’t require the same vocabulary and mental acuity as making sense of a tax form. This is an excerpt from The Giver:

Garbriel’s breathing was even and deep. Jonas liked having him there, though he felt guilty about the secret. Each night he gave memories to Gabriel: memories of boat rides and picnics in the sun; memories of soft rainfall against windowpanes; memories of dancing barefoot on a damp lawn.

More complex than Dick and Jane or Hop on Pop, obviously. But this isn’t an adult level of comprehension. If your reading abilities cap out here, you’re going to encounter a lot of text in your day-to-day life that’s difficult to decipher—often things that are important for you to be able to comprehend, like the terms of a lease agreement or the instructions on a medication.

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The Price of Genocide: How US Funding Sustains an Unraveling Israeli Economy

In an important step toward the economic isolation of Israel due to its genocide in Gaza, Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global has decided to divest from yet more Israeli companies.

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is the world’s largest, with total investments in Israel once estimated at $1.9 billion. The decision to divest was taken gradually but is consistent with the Norwegian government’s growing solidarity with Palestine and rising criticism of Israel.

Taking a leading role along with Spain, Ireland, and Slovenia, Norway has been a vocal European critic of the Israeli genocide and man-made famine in Gaza, actively contributing to the International Court of Justice’s investigation into the genocide, and formally recognizing the state of Palestine in May 2024. This diplomatic and legal stance, coupled with its financial divestment, represents a coherent and escalating effort to hold Israel accountable for the ongoing extermination of Palestinians.

The Israeli economy was already in a state of freefall even before the genocide. The initial collapse was related to the deep political instability in the country, a result of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist government’s attempt to co-opt the judicial system, thus compromising any semblance of “democracy” remaining in that country. This resulted in a significant lowering of investor confidence.

The war and genocide, beginning on October 7, 2023, only accelerated the crisis, pushing an already fragile economy to the brink. According to reports from the Israel Ministry of Finance, foreign direct investments in Israel fell by an estimated 28% in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.

Any supposed recovery in foreign investments, however, was deceptive. It was not the outcome of a global rallying to save Israel, but rather a consequence of a torrent of US funds pouring in to help Israel sustain both its economy and the genocide in Gaza, along with its other war fronts.

Israel’s Gross Domestic Product was estimated by the World Bank to be around $540 billion by the end of 2024. The war on Gaza has already taken a considerable bite out of Israel’s entire GDP. Estimates from Israel itself are complex, but all data points to the fact that the Israeli economy is suffering and will continue to suffer in the foreseeable future. Citing reports from the Bank of Israel and the Ministry of Finance, the Israeli business newspaper Calcalist reported in January 2025 that the cost of the Israeli war on Gaza had already reached more than $67.5 billion. That figure represented the costs of the war up to the end of 2024.

Keeping in mind that the ongoing war costs continue to rise exponentially, and with other consequences of the war – including divestments from the Israeli market by Norway and other countries – future projections for the Israeli economy look very grim. The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics reported that the Israeli economy, already in a constant state of contraction, shrunk by another 3.5% in the period between April and June 2025.

This collapse is projected to continue, even with the unprecedented US financial backing of Tel Aviv. Indeed, without US help, the precarious Israeli economy would be in a much worse state. Though the US has always propped up Israel – with nearly $4 billion in aid annually – the US help for Israel in the last two years was the most generous and critical yet.

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Mississippi’s Digital ID Law Hits a Wall with Mastodon

Mississippi’s privacy-ruining online digital ID law is putting pressure on decentralized platforms, and Mastodon says it simply cannot comply.

The organization behind the software states that it lacks the technical ability to verify users’ ages and refuses to implement IP-based restrictions, which it argues would wrongly affect travelers and those temporarily located in the state.

The law, known as the Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act (HB 1126), has already led to Bluesky withdrawing its service from Mississippi.

Mastodon is not following that path. Instead, it points to the design of its platform, where individual server administrators are responsible for their own compliance with local laws. Mastodon itself neither collects user data nor maintains centralized control over the network.

Although Mastodon’s nonprofit arm initially declined to comment, it later provided a statement to TechCrunch.

The organization explained that while its own servers require users to be at least 16, it does not “have the means to apply age verification” and that the software does not retain any data collected during sign-up.

A feature added in the July 2025 release of Mastodon 4.4 allows server administrators to set age minimums and manage legal terms, but does not support storing verification data.

Each server in the network operates independently. It is up to those server owners to decide whether to integrate third-party systems to check user ages.

Mastodon confirmed it cannot offer “direct or operational assistance” to these operators and instead points them to resources such as the IFTAS library, which provides guidance on trust and safety practices for federated platforms.

The nonprofit reiterated that it does not track user behavior or enforce policy across the wider ecosystem. Responsibility for legal compliance, it says, belongs to those who host and manage the servers in their own jurisdictions.

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Dr. Robert Malone EVISCERATES Biden’s Pro-Gay Orgy Czar Demetre Daskalakis in Fiery Clash After Exposing CDC Resignations as Cover-Up for Looming COVID Vaccine Safety Scandal

The crumbling facade at the CDC is finally collapsing—and it took one of the world’s most credentialed voices in medicine to pull the curtain back.

On Sunday, Dr. Robert Malone, a pioneer of mRNA vaccine technology, clinical researcher, and now a new member of the ACIP, shredded Biden’s radical “Pro-Gay Orgy Czar” Dr. Demetre Daskalakis in a fiery exchange over the collapse of credibility at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Malone posted bluntly on X about the wave of resignations rocking the CDC:

“The real reason for the recent CDC resignations is that the ACIP Subcommittee on COVID 19 vaccines got approval to investigate the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines, and they knew the gig was up, the truth was about to come out, and they would have to account for their actions. All you need to do is read the recently approved “terms of reference” for that subcommittee and it all becomes clear.”

You can read the approved document here- https://t.co/609FgmKgbo

— Robert W Malone, MD (@RWMaloneMD) August 31, 2025

Daskalakis, Biden’s hand-picked monkeypox “czar” and who flaunts his BDSM lifestyle, fired back with a predictable defense of Big Pharma’s crumbling narrative:

“That is false. The terms of reference effectively remove the real function of the workgroup… to advise the CDC director on questions needed to set policy. FDA has vetted the safety and efficacy of the vaccine and has authorized it for this season. Your job is to set clinical policy. When’s the last time you saw a patient?”

That is false. The terms of reference effectively remove the real function of the workgroup… to advise the CDC director on questions needed to set policy. FDA has vetted the safety and efficacy of the vaccine and has authorized it for this season. Your job is to set clinical…

— DrDemetre (@dr_demetre) August 31, 2025

But Malone, a man with decades of clinical, military, and research expertise under his belt, didn’t miss a beat.

Malone laid out his impeccable credentials that highlights the chasm between real expertise and woke activism.

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‘Medically Reckless’: AAP Pushes Mental Health Screenings for Kids as Young as 6 Months Old

Children as young as 6 months old should begin regular screenings for mental or developmental issues at every well-child visit, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said in a clinical report released Aug. 25.

Critics of the report fear the recommendations will lead to misdiagnosing and further overmedicating children.

“It is alarming that pressure is being put on pediatricians by the AAP to actively look for signs of depression in a 2-year-old,” Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT, told The Defender.

Pushing mental health screening for children leads to the expectation of psychiatric problems being woven into standards of care, said Robert Whitaker, author of “Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.”

“And the screening instruments the pediatricians will employ will have been constructed to identify a certain percentage of children as being in need of treatment,” he said.

The AAP report, published online in the journal Pediatrics, recommends that mental health screening begin at 6 months old and continue as part of well-child visits at ages 1, 2 and 3. After age 3, screening would continue annually.

The report said as many as 1 in 5 children in the U.S., including kids as young as 2, have mental or behavioral issues such as depression, anxiety, ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) or suicidal thoughts.

However, studies show mental health issues are commonly misdiagnosed. Depression has been falsely diagnosed 66% of the time, and generalized anxiety disorder has been incorrectly assessed 71% of the time.

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Blitzkrieg Blowback: Nazi Warlord Primed To Lead Post-War Ukraine

On February 19, 2021, almost exactly one year before Russia would invade Ukraine, President Joe Biden addressed the Virtual Munich Security Conference. He said:

“We’re at an inflection point between those who argue that, given all the challenges we face — from the fourth industrial revolution to a global pandemic — that autocracy is the best way forward, they argue, and those who understand that democracy is essential — essential to meeting those challenges.”

The struggle between democracy and autocracy became a central theme and talking point of the administration, with Biden repeatedly extolling the United States as the “arsenal of democracy.”

On February 24, 2022, when Russia escalated its conflict with Ukraine (which began in 2014) by rolling more than 100,000 troops into the country, their president, Vladimir Putin, said:

“The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.”

Now, after more than three years of war, during which time DC has backed Ukraine with hundreds of billions of dollars, sophisticated weapons, intelligence sharing, targeting assistance and a parallel economic war on Russia, and Russia has inflicted hundreds of thousands Ukrainian casualties, an autocratic Nazi is poised to become the next president (or fascist dictator) of Ukraine.

Andriy Biletsky was imprisoned in a Ukrainian jail as the “Revolution of Dignity” (aka the Western-backed Maidan Coup) played out on the streets of Kiev in late 2013 and early 2014.

Biletsky, a partisan of “Social Nationalism” and “all the ancient Ukrainian Aryan values,” was accused of participating in a terrorist plot to blow up a statue of Vladimir Lenin in Boryspil.

On February 21, 2014, Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych fled the country, on February 22 his government collapsed and on February 24 a new coup-interim junta was created under Acting President Oleksandr Turchynov and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. One of the new government’s first actions, that very day, was to pardon what it called “political prisoners” held by the deposed regime. On February 25, 2014, Biletsky walked out of prison and inherited the coup.

Biletsky founded the Azov Battalion out of his Patriot of Ukraine gang and fellow travelers from Right Sector, the coalition Nazi militia that had accomplished the street putsch weeks before, and quickly established himself as a man willing to lead men into battle against any and all perceived enemies, including Ukrainian civilians. Such enemy civilians immediately presented themselves in Ukraine’s east and south. Anti-coup protestors refused to recognize the new regime’s legitimacy and attempted to assert greater sovereignty for their regions. In response, and on orders from the United States, Kiev launched an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” against the Donbas. Many regular Ukrainian soldiers refused to wage war on their countrymen, with some even defecting to the rebels’ side. Biletsky and Azov, however, plunged into the close quarters, urban combat with alacrity.

Known as “White Leader” or “White Chief” by his men, Biletsky has become the Empire’s new version of a “moderate rebel,” an anti-democratic, Nazi warlord who DC is desperate to spin as a freedom fighter committed to Western values. All the hype in the world cannot change the reality on the ground revealed by his rhetoric and behavior.

In 2007, Biletsky was the leader of Patriot of Ukraine, a direct heir of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which was the “institutional epicenter” of Ukrainian collusion with the Nazis during World War II. He gave a speech entitled “Ukrainian Racial Social Nationalism.” In the speech Biletsky declared:

“The historical mission of our Nation, in this turning point, [is to lead] the White peoples of the whole world into the last crusade for its existence against the Semitic-led untermenschen.”

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Microsoft Word To Save New Files to the Cloud by Default

Microsoft is preparing to change how documents are saved in Word for Windows, shifting new file storage to the cloud by default.

Instead of asking users to activate AutoSave or select a cloud location manually, Word will now store all newly created documents directly in OneDrive or another designated cloud service automatically.

Raul Munoz, a product manager on Microsoft’s Office shared services and experiences team, described the change by saying, “We are modernizing the way files are created and stored in Word for Windows. Now you don’t have to worry about saving your documents: Anything new you create will be saved automatically to OneDrive or your preferred cloud destination.”

Currently being rolled out to Microsoft 365 Insiders, this new setup is presented as a way to prevent lost work and provide immediate access to files across mobile platforms and browsers.

However, for anyone working outside Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem, this change introduces additional steps to avoid online storage.

The update also comes with adjustments to how documents are named. Rather than appending sequential numbers to new files, Word will now assign file names based on the date of creation.

Users will have the option to set a preferred default save location or opt out of automatic cloud saves entirely, though doing so requires manual reconfiguration.

Microsoft has been steadily nudging its user base toward cloud reliance. AutoSave already defaults to cloud storage, and persistent prompts in Windows have encouraged, or pressured, users to turn on OneDrive backups.

These reminders have drawn complaints, especially from those who feel Microsoft is eroding straightforward local file access.

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