Author: Christine Schier

According to the March 8 Financial Times, five days after the national elections in Germany, election winner Friedrich Merz had lunch with acting Finance Minister Jörg Kukies. “At lunchtime last Friday [Feb. 28], Germany’s chancellor-to-be received a sobering briefing on the state of the economy from finance minister Jörg Kukies. Kukies explained that after two years of stagnation and with […]

The unprecedented militarization and infrastructure programs that were signed into law after passing the Bundestag and the Bundesrat last week (cf. SAS 12/25), provide for €400 billion in defense spending (to be financed by debt) and €500 bn in infrastructure projects, largely defense-related. To recruit the Greens into the alliance of the CDU-CSU and SPD, the CDU Chancellor candidate Friedrich […]

The March 20 Board meeting of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) unanimously approved the extension of former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s term as head of the bank for five years more. First named to chair the bank by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2023, it was Russian President Vladimir Putin who proposed that her chairmanship be extended, […]

In resorting to desperate measures to remain in office, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening to unleash civil war in Israel and a broader war in the region, including against Iran. As crowds surge into Israeli streets in protest, commentators quibble over which of his many outrageous acts they are demonstrating against the most vehemently: In the last week, […]

At a time when Israel has launched an offensive in Gaza that can only be compared to the “end of the Warsaw Ghetto,” an Egyptian Army spokesman held a briefing session with the state-run news agency MENA on the armed forces’ preparedness to deal with the current crisis and any “plots” against the Egyptian state. Brig. Gen. Gharib Abdel Hafez asserted […]

On the first day of his arrival at the White House, Donald Trump issued an executive order shutting down the operation of USAID, the main aid agency of the U.S. government, which has been involved in programs in nearly 100 countries around the world. While there is a danger that some of the beneficial measures it carried out (although with […]

The March 18 phone call between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump has opened the door to a perspective that has not existed for at least the last 35 years. According to the very preliminary readouts that were available before this issue of our newsletter went to bed, many topics were discussed between the two leaders, which, if realized, could […]

With each passing day, it becomes clearer that the group of European nations led by Great Britain does not want to the war in Ukraine to end. That is the only purpose of the “coalition of the willing”, which British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron are trying to organize under the Orwellian name of a “peacekeeping […]

In a blunt statement released on March 10, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) denounced Great Britain’s scheme to pit the United States and Russia against one another as well as its manipulations to destroy any dialogue between the two countries. The SVR wrote that “the British leadership sees a threat to its interests in the promotion of dialogue between the […]

Two months after the inauguration of Donald Trump, his administration has taken some notable steps to dismantle intelligence networks and government agencies involved in covert actions at home and abroad. Many of them have been instrumental in launching operations against Trump personally, and/or in fomenting unrest and regime-change policies throughout the world. In that respect, their loss of power and […]