This morning’s NewsX World hourly round-up: Trump cancels ‘international law’

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This morning’s NewsX World hourly round-up:  Trump cancels ‘international law’

I appear in this multi-segment broadcast at minute 19.26

The issue that I highlight in the title above is one of two or three highly topical issues which are widely discussed in media today but as I insist here are devoid of substance.  The relevance of international law to allegations of Russian aggression in initiating its invasion of Ukraine is nil. The notion of double standards in applying international law to the case of Russia’s supposed aggression in Ukraine when it is not applied to the American invasion of Venezuela is also empty now that Donald Trump publicly canceling international law as a restraint in an interview with The New York Times a couple of days ago.

Another empty bit of ‘breaking news’ that we discussed is the invitation extended by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Bessent to India and Australia to attend the upcoming G7 meeting for talk about finding new sources of rare earth metals outside of China.  This is a PR exercise and nothing more, because any increase in mining and processing of these metals will come years from now and the crisis is here and now, when China has full leverage over the rest of the world in the growing confrontation with the West.

Similarly one does not have to spend more a minute considering how the U.S. seizure of a Russian tanker will affect the peace negotiations over Ukraine. The answer is very simple: there will be no peace negotiations or if they take place the guarantied outcome will be zero, and the war will continue until Russia gets what it wants, leaving Ukraine as a failed state.

I do not mean to suggest that there is no news worth reading or watching today.  Such news, of course, exists, but it is not being covered by Mainstream while they fill their on air minutes and their news columns with the irrelevancies cited above.

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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