Yep, forever wars. The People of Europe need to stop this.

They want to make Armenia the new Ukraine @MoatsTV @HatsOffff #Armenia #GeorgeGalloway pic.twitter.com/FmpQ0Ls2eu

— George Galloway (@georgegalloway) June 8, 2026

Next week, Waikanae will become the temporary home of an alarming amount of fabric.

The very first Fabric-a-brac Kapiti is nearly here.

The stalls are sold out.
The tables are filling up.
The fabric stash temptation is growing by the day.

Expect:

Fabric
Patterns
Sewing supplies
Wool
Cake and coffee
Support for Mary Potter Hospice

Saturday 20 June | 10am–1pm, Waikanae Baptist Church

Bring cash, shopping bags, leave your willpower at home.

There has just been an aerial 1080 poison drop in the Tararua range and heavy rain can wash dead carcasses downstream. Dogs are highly susceptible to poisoning including secondary poisoning.

Rinat Akhmetov is Ukraines richest Oligarch, he's just bought an apartment in Monaco for $471 million, and this is his $500 million superyacht, "Luminance"

One of his companies, DTEK was allocated €62.8 million from the European Commission in late 2024 pic.twitter.com/Itbie4yccx

— Chay Bowes (@BowesChay) June 7, 2026

The attack killed the assistant driver and injured the train driver, according to Sergey Aksyonov

FILE PHOTO: Tavria Moscow-Simferopol express train. © Sputnik

A Ukrainian UAV attack on a passenger train in Crimea has left one person dead and another injured, regional Governor Sergey Aksyonov has said.

The train was traveling between Moscow and Simferopol when the locomotive was hit by an “enemy drone,” Aksyonov wrote on Telegram early Monday.

“According to preliminary information, the train driver was injured, the assistant driver was killed, and none of the passengers were hurt,” he said.

Aksyonov expressed condolences to the friends and family of the deceased crew member and wished the injured driver a speedy recovery.

Bus transportation for the train’s passengers is currently being arranged, Aksyonov said, adding that the authorities will provide all necessary assistance.

Following the incident, operator Grand Service Express temporarily suspended services in Crimea, adding that all passengers on its trains on the peninsula were evacuated.

The attack comes days after eight people were killed and 11 others injured in a Ukrainian strike on a passenger bus traveling from Moscow to Simferopol through the Donetsk People’s Republic on Wednesday.

On Thursday, a Ukrainian UAV struck a suburban train traveling between Azovskoye and Kerch, Crimea, leaving one passenger dead and several others injured.

Read more

by Andrew Korybko

AI-assisted infowars could psychologically sever the former USSR’s Turkic populations from Russia.

FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov warned during a recent meeting of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) Council of Heads of Security Agencies and Special Services that “The West seeks to disrupt integration processes and undermine stability in CIS countries from within, making nations forget their shared history and trying to pit them against each other in order to take the situation here under control.” This is being advanced in part through new Western “digital laboratories” in the CIS states.

In his words, “According to the information we have, the Western intelligence community is behind programs aimed at establishing a network of digital labs across the Commonwealth, tasked with collecting and analyzing, using AI technologies, standard behavioral profiles of the population, identifying areas of social tension, and modeling public responses to various external factors, including government actions…One of the goals being to implement adaptable scenarios of color revolutions.”

This was foreseen in 2017: ”Russia is accused of ‘exploit[ing] marketing techniques to target individuals based upon their activities, interests, opinions, and values’ in order to ‘disseminate misinformation and propaganda’, but there’s nothing stopping the US from doing this either, nor in crafting the Holy Grail of Hybrid War by ‘integrat[ing] information derived from personal and commercial sources with intelligence collection and data analytic capabilities based on AI and machine learning’”.

The purpose would be “to fully maximize its outreach efficiency via algorithm-created infowar packages custom-tailored for each targeted demographic.” Moreover, “Just as Russia and China are accused of ‘us[ing] propaganda and other means to try to discredit democracy’, so too could the US do the same against their governing systems by ‘exploiting information, democratic media freedoms, and international institutions’”.

This could “undermine their legitimacy while championing its own values, principles, and de-facto state ideology.” As applied towards the CIS as Bortnikov just warned, this “Holy Grail of Hybrid War” will most likely be weaponized to promote Pan-Turkism among the CIS members of the Turkic-led “Organization of Turkic States” (OTS), which apart from Azerbaijan, also includes Russia’s CSTO allies Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The immediate goal could be to “make them forget their shared history” with Russia.

The secondary goal might then be to get Kazakhstan “to defect” from the CSTO, emboldened as it may be by NATO’s new military logistics corridor to the region whose anti-Russian strategic consequences were warned about here, prior to the ultimate goal of rekindling “Balkanization” processes inside of Russia. That dark scenario was elaborated on here and concerns the weaponization of Kazakhstan’s self-declaration as the Golden Horde’s successor for sparking secular Muslim insurgencies in relevant regions.

It’s possible that Kazakhstan’s Data Center Valley project in one of its Russian-bordering regions, which will be the largest in Central Asia upon completion, could be weaponized by the West for advancing these three interconnected goals following the model pioneered by Armenia’s American AI data center. As was recently warned here, delayed implementation of Russia’s Monroe Doctrine towards the south “risks empowering NATO to blackmail Russia on pain of a major war along its entire southern periphery.”

St Basil’s cathedral was hated by the athiest Bolshevik Communists for decades, but eventually they relented and left it there as they realised what a tourist attraction it was. After the fall of the Soviet Union it was restored and religious services recommenced. Like all churches in Russia, it is Russian orthodox, and Vladimir Putin is a follower. The Russians also rebuilt the cathedral of Königsberg (Kalinengrad).

by Ani O’Brien 

As a lesbian, I am so tired of this nonsense. I am tired of corporate Pride and activist Pride.

This week HelloFresh decided that the best way to celebrate Pride Month was to post jokes about preparing for anal sex and offering high-fibre recipes to help people “prep”. They then doubled down with a discount code called BOTTOMSUP.

Inclusion! WOO!

The thing that frustrates me is that people like me have spent years defending gay rights against accusations that we are hypersexual, inappropriate, and incapable of ordinary family life.

That was one of the central prejudices gay people faced. For decades, opponents portrayed gay men in particular as sexually obsessed and depraved. They argued that homosexuality was all about sex rather than love, commitment, relationships and family. The fight for equal rights was partly a fight against exactly that caricature.

And now here we are. A major multinational company has decided the best way to celebrate Pride is to publicly discuss anal sex. What an achievement.

The same-sex marriage movement wasn’t about sex. It was about love, commitment, and the ability to build a life with the person you love. It was about family and equality before the law.

Most gay people are not what the weirdos in the HelloFresh marketing department think we are. We go to work, pay bills, walk the dog, argue about whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher, and try to build a decent life together.

You know… Normal things.

The overwhelming majority of gay people just want to be accepted and left alone. We want the same freedoms, responsibilities and opportunities as everyone else. We don’t need multinational corporations making dirty jokes about us to feel “included”.

What makes this even more ridiculous is that HelloFresh’s core market is clearly not radical “queer” activists with blue hair and septum rings.

Their customers are overwhelmingly middle-class couples and families. Busy parents. Professionals. People with disposable income who want convenient meals after work.

How hard would it have been to make a genuinely wholesome Pride advertisement?

Two mums cooking dinner with their kids or two husbands hosting friends. A same-sex couple just making dinner together or flipping a coin to see who has to cook. A simple message acknowledging families and love. Instead they went with rectum jokes.

Somewhere along the way after the TQ+ hijacked our movement, Pride stopped being about acceptance and started being about performance. A small but influential group of activists have convinced themselves that being as shocking, vulgar and sexually explicit as possible is somehow brave and intrinsically “queer”. They think boundaries of any kind are oppression including standards and decorum. They think manners are censorship.

The result is campaigns like this one and somehow people are shocked when there is backlash against us all.

I actually feel really sorry for gay men in particular because one of the oldest stigmas they have faced is the idea that they are dirty, promiscuous and defined entirely by sex. This campaign reinforces that stereotype.

If you wanted to design an advertisement that would make ordinary people roll their eyes and think Pride is ridiculous, or shield their children’s eyes in horror, you would struggle to do better than this.

The irony is that HelloFresh’s marketing department thinks this is progressive. It’s regressive and distasteful. It takes decades of work by ordinary gay people who want to be seen as neighbours, colleagues, parents, partners and family members and reduces all of it to a crude sexual punchline.

The people who fought for our rights wanted dignity, but the people most enthusiastic about Pride today seem determined to turn it into a fetish convention with corporate sponsors.