Guardian:

Any such attack will not be designed to weaken Iran’s already shattered nuclear programme, the chief target of the 12-day war in June, but to target Iran’s political leadership and bring the protesters angered by falling living standards back into the streets.

This article is striking in that in discussing US/Israel bombing Iran there is not the slightest pretense of a US attack being pre-emptive destruction of an Iranian nuclear program, or any nonsense about drugs – it’s just right up front about overthrowing the government. Destruction of the Iranian government is justified because. Because the US and Israel want to do it. There’s no hint of justification under any sort of international law.

I just learned that Mick Jagger wrote Sympathy for the Devil inspired by reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a copy of which he had been given by Marianne Faithfull.

Berliner Zeitung:

Kotau vor Trump: Merz will Grönland nun gegen Russland verteidigen

Der Bundeskanzler sieht Russland als die größte Gefahr für die Welt. Mit einer interessanten Volte unterwarf sich der Kanzler dem amerikanischen Präsidenten.

The Russians are coming. No matter what Trump may do, The Russians will always be coming.

Guardian:

Britain will not join Donald Trump’s “board of peace” on Thursday, Yvette Cooper has said, citing concerns about Russian involvement.

The foreign secretary said the UK strongly supported the US president’s 20-point plan for peace in Gaza as he seeks to draw attention to it at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday.

Trump’s “board of peace”, was set up last week with the stated intention that it would oversee a ceasefire and reconstruction in Gaza, but critics argue it is a Trumpian alternative to the UN and will undermine existing international bodies. The charter proposed by the White House does not mention the Palestinian territory.

Pressed on whether the UK would join the ”board of peace”, Cooper told BBC Breakfast that Britain “won’t be one of the signatories” on Thursday.

“There’s a huge amount of work to do. We won’t be one of the signatories today,” she said. “Because this is about a legal treaty that raises much broader issues, and we do also have concerns about President Putin being part of something which is talking about peace, when we have still not seen any signs from Putin that there will be a commitment to peace in Ukraine.

Far from destroying the legacies of Yeltsin’s neoliberal restructuring, Putin in many crucial ways preserved and extended them. There are, to be sure, differences between the style and temperament of the two leaders, but there has been no fundamental change in the character of the system itself. Indeed, the 1990s and 2000s should be seen as two phases in the evolution of the same system: first, a turbulent period in which the Soviet order was destroyed and a new capitalist model installed — with enthusiastic backing from the West — followed by a period of stabilization and consolidation, as the new model sank its roots deep into the country’s socio-economic soil. Throughout, the system’s main priority has been to defend capitalism in Russia — if necessary at the expense of democracy, as the consistent resort to electoral rigging, from the 1990s to the present, demonstrates. The authoritarianism for which Putin is widely criticized is not the product of any sinister personal preference, but rather an integral feature of the system he inherited and has continued.

—Tony Wood, Russia Without Putin, (Verso, 2018), 4-5.