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"The Kremlin adviser was clearly unimpressed by what he heard.

"In terms of resolving the Ukraine crisis, there wasn't much there that was useful," commented Ushakov.

Later Russian state TV asked him about the prospects for peace.

"I don't know how close we are getting," Yuri Ushakov said, "but things are moving in that direction."

All rather vague.

It seems that President Putin doesn't feel under pressure right now to end the war.

He knows that Ukraine's air defences are under severe strain.

He knows that winter is coming and may well view the cold weather as an opportunity to pound Ukraine into submission.

He knows, too, that there is a US president in the White House who clearly wants a bigger, better, more profitable relationship with Moscow."

[[

"A Putin-Zelensky-Trump trilateral may not be imminent.

But in China next month a meeting between Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping may well take place on the fringes of the Apec summit.

Some commentators here are already dubbing it "The New Yalta" - a reference to the Yalta Conference of 1945, where Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met to plan the political and territorial reorganisation of post-war Europe.

"Russia, China and the United States are the only superpowers right now in the world," Evgeny Popov says. "Of course, it will be good for the entire world if our leaders meet in China."

After nearly five years of war, that would put Vladimir Putin exactly where he wants to be - at the top table of global politics."

from the thread link

'Putin's Poodle' is just one of the names DJT will be remembered for.

Fun fact:

Whether it's $42M or $641M, it's still less than 1% of SNAP annual spending.

Toady's announcement : $42M
Total since March: $641M
2025 SNAP spending: $101.7B With a B.

Another fun fact, that puts these numbers into context:

A half a percent of fraud is far lower than the average across all government funded programs. Possibly an order of magnitude lower, if you happen to know how much an order of magnitude is.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that the federal government loses an estimated $233 billion to $521 billion annually to fraud, based on data from fiscal years 2018 through 2022. This range represents approximately 3% to 7% of average federal obligations during that period. budget.house.gov

So, really what J.D. Vance has discovered here, is SNAP is one of the least defrauded Federal programs there is. In addition to the low rate of fraud, the dollar amount itself is no more than 0.3% of the total estimated fraud -- representing just $641M of the low end estimate $223B total annual fraud.

Imagine thinking these numbers are something to crow about!

Quite the opposite, these numbers show Republicans are stupidly trying to get blood from a stone. They're looking at a very low fraud rate program with a very small annual spend. What with SNAP being 1.4% to 1.5% of total government spending.

And I wouldn't be surprised if these eager beavar Republicans have spent tens of millions just to uncover these meager amounts of fraud.

More from the article ...

... When the Trump administration began upending U.S. scientific research last year, dismantling the federal grant-giving process and attempting to exert more political influence over what projects get funded, foreign universities saw an opportunity. They adopted programs to lure U.S. researchers abroad, promising more stable streams of funding and academic freedom.

Since then, many have taken the bait. While there is no way to quantify the overall change across the nation, scientists, researchers and professional groups say the shift is clear, unprecedented and concerning.

"You can almost talk to any vice president for research at a university and they will tell you of one or two top faculty that they've lost," said Tobin Smith, senior vice president of government relations and public policy for the Association of American Universities.

White House spokesperson Liz Huston said Trump is "ending waste" and is "committed to keeping America the world leader in scientific innovation, and that means funding real science."

But more than half of American states have lost scientists to recruitment programs in other countries, according to an April report from the Business for Federal Research Funding Coalition. Last March, early-career biomedical scientists were about 20 percentage points less likely to say they would "now" stay in the U.S., compared to their recollection of how they felt six months earlier. And physics Ph.D. graduates in 2025 left the U.S. at the highest rate in 30 years, according to the American Institute of Physics.

Countries including Canada, France, Belgium and Finland are touting their recruits from U.S. institutions, a disturbing and surprising development, scientists say, for a country that far and away leads the world in Nobel prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry. ...


Opinion: As it turns out, America lost the Cold War
www.msn.com

... It is starting to feel like all the history we learned was wrong.

We were taught we won the Cold War. But today, the President of the United States openly serves the interests of Russia. We have become, in fact, in crucial economic and security matters, a satellite of Moscow. The U.S. chief executive has publicly and repeatedly declared his loyalty to Russia's head of state. For more than a decade he has openly and covertly been advancing Russian foreign policy, often at the expense of the national security of the United States, the laws of the United States, and the interests of the United States and our allies.
Expand article logo Continue reading

It is such a shocking turn of events, so inconceivable to anyone who lived through the Cold War or its aftermath, that many Americans have been in denial about it for years. But the evidence is not only incontrovertible, but in recent days, the U.S. president has made the situation more explicit.

Trump's recent announcement that he had entered into an agreement with Russia to purchase diesel was a shock even to those who had long been in denial. Not only was Trump setting aside congressionally mandated U.S. sanctions policy, but he was offering a financial lifeline of billions of dollars to a cash-strapped Kremlin that could and almost certainly would use the extra liquidity to help fund its brutal, criminal aggression against Ukraine.

Never mind that the amount of fuel involved would make no impact on U.S. supplies, or that Trump could have gotten a better price purchasing the fuel elsewhere.

Never mind that the deal failed on its merits, economically and politically, as a form of relief for U.S. truckers and farmers squeezed by high prices.

What was worse and undeniable was that the U.S. was now helping to underwrite Russian attacks that were daily killing Ukrainian civilians and destroying Ukraine's infrastructure.

Furthermore, we were offering to help Russia at precisely the moment when the futility of its four-year escalation of a conflict that began in 2014 was becoming clear. Russia was no longer gaining ground. Russia was paying a huge price militarily, with over 1.5 million dead and wounded troops. Russia's economy could no longer afford the war. Ukraine had momentum. ...

Perhaps even more nauseatingly (if such a thing is imaginable), the world knows that Russia is actively supporting Iran. Credible reports suggest that Russia has been supplying vital intelligence to the Iranians and helping to resupply their missile stockpiles.

Which means that Donald Trump is directly sending U.S. taxpayer dollars to a country that will indirectly and yet inevitably serve to support potential attacks on our own military.

Trump is living up to his reputation as America's greatest enemy by actually using U.S. dollars to pay not only for attacks on our allies and, by extension, on the Western Alliance, but also by making it possible for Iran to target and kill more Americans.

Our president is at war with us. ...



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