#2
Still having problems linking to R'burg with a VPN on. It's intermittent and oddly if I turn the VPN off and log in, then turn the VPN back on it often works. The error message is TOO_MANY_REDIECTS
[IsraelTimes] Financial Action Task Force says move ‘shouldn’t impede relief efforts’ amid Israel-Hezbollah fighting, grants Beirut ‘degree of flexibility as it relates to the deadlines’
Global anti-money laundering watchdog FATF on Friday added Leb ...an Iranian satrapy until recently ruled by Hassan Nasrallah situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozen flavors of Christians, plus Armenians, Georgians, and who knows what else? It is the home of the original Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers... , which is currently being pummeled by Israeli Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... s targeting Hezbollah, to its "gray list" of nations that are subject to increased monitoring of financial transactions.
The Gay Paree-based Financial Action Task Force said it also added Algeria, Angola and Ivory Coast.
"Of course, we recognize the extremely grave situation that Lebanon is currently facing," said Elisa de Anda Madrazo of Mexico, which currently holds the organization’s rotating presidency.
Lebanon’s being put on the gray list "should not impede relief efforts... and we are working to ensure that channels of humanitarian aid remain open," she added.
De Anda said that being put on the gray list was not a "punitive measure" and was part of the process of helping nations develop action plans to make improvements.
"I can tell you that there was a degree of flexibility granted to Lebanon as it relates to the deadlines set in the action plan," she said.
Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati said the gray-listing was "expected, considering the known circumstances which hindered the establishment of the required legislation and financial reforms."
Lebanon since late 2019 has been enduring a crushing economic collapse that the World Bank has called one of the worst in recent history, and which has hampered the work of public services and institutions.
Political deadlock between allies of Hezbollah — an Iran-backed terror group that has been locked in all-out war with Israel since last month — and the movement’s opponents has also left the country without a president for almost two years.
"Lebanon’s relations with correspondent banks will not be impacted" by the classification, Mikati said, according to a statement issued by his office.
"Lebanon will continue to cooperate" with the FATF and will follow up on the move "in order to have it reversed," he added.
Senegal ... a nation of about 14 million on the west coast of Africa bordering Mauretania to the north, Mali to the east, and a pair of Guineas to the south, one of them Bissau. It is 90 percent Mohammedan and has more than 80 political parties. Its primary purpose seems to be absorbing refugees... was removed from the gray list and the FATF noted improvements, including in its ability to investigate and prosecute money laundering cases linked to corruption.
The FATF made no changes to its "black list" of nations against which countermeasures should be taken to protect the international financial system from money laundering and terrorist financing risks emanating from those countries.
Iran, Myanmar and North Korea ...hereditary Communist monarchy distinguished by its truculence and periodic acts of violence. Distinguishing features include Songun (Army First) policy, which involves feeding the army before anyone but the Dear Leadership, and Juche, which is Kim Jong Il's personal interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, which he told everybody was brilliant. In 1950 the industrialized North invaded agrarian South Korea. Twenty-one countries of the United Nations eventually contributed to the UN force opposing the invasion, with the United States providing around 90% of the military personnel. Seventy years later the economic results are in and it doesn't look good for Juche... are on the black list.
[IsraelTimes] Campaign in Tubas shows authority’s resolve to disprove its many skeptics, but represents ‘low-hanging fruit’ unlikely to loosen Hamas, PIJ grip on West Bank’s north, says analyst
In the West Bank city of Tubas, the Paleostinian Authority has been rounding up terror operatives who are spoiling for a fight with Israel and challenging its own rule, seeking to show it can help shape the future for Paleostinians after the war in Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... PA President the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas ...aka Abu Mazen, a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial. While no Yasser Arafat, he has his own brand of evil, just a little more lowercase....> has poured forces into Tubas in an avowed push to quash lawlessness and deny Israel pretexts to raid the city.
His adversaries, Hamas ..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,... and Paleostinian Islamic Jihad ...created after many members of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood decided the organization was becoming too moderate. Operations were conducted out of Egypt until 1981 when the group was exiled after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. They worked out of Gaza until they were exiled to Lebanon in 1987, where they clove tightly to Hezbollah. In 1989 they moved to Damascus, where they remain a subsidiary of Hezbollah... (PIJ), say the PA is serving Israel’s agenda at a time when Israel is going after their operatives in the West Bank as they battle Israel in Gaza, sharpening old divisions between Abbas and the terror groups.
Residents of Tubas said festivities between the murderous Moslems and the PA this month involved heavy machine guns and bombs in some of the worst violence they can remember.
It highlights the precarious position of the PA, which was established by the 1994 Oslo Accords with Israel, as a stepping stone to a Paleostinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The so-called two-state solution appears as far as ever, though it has come back into international focus of late as a way to bring peace. Israel, however, mistrusts Abbas and the PA, accusing it of incitement to terrorism in its education system and by paying stipends to tossed in the calaboose Drop the rod and step away witcher hands up! terror operatives and families of slain terrorists.
Abbas’s secularist Fatah faction also recently issued condolences on the "martyrdom" of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, hailing as "a great national leader" the architect of the assault that sparked the Gaza war on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led murderous Moslems stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages.
Amid the war in Gaza, Israel has also launched several counterterrorism raids across the West Bank, especially in the north. The army says it has arrested 5,250 wanted Paleostinians, including 2,050 affiliated with Hamas.
According to the PA health ministry, 716 Paleostinians have been killed in the raids. Israel says the vast majority were button men killed in exchanges of fire, rioters who clashed with troops or murderous Moslems carrying out attacks.
The Ramallah-based PA controlled Gaza until 2007, when Hamas routed forces loyal to Abbas, but is now confined to running patches of the West Bank — often in coordination with Israeli security forces, who control the territory.
The United States has said it wants to see the war in Gaza end with the Strip and the West Bank unified under a reformed and revitalized PA.
For Abbas, 88, the Tubas campaign is partly about weakening the grip Hamas and PIJ have gained over the northern West Bank, in what his Fatah sees as an Iran-backed attempt to undermine its position, according to Fatah officials and security sources.
It is also about disproving critics who view the PA as ineffective — a reputation that has overshadowed US-led diplomatic contacts over the role it might eventually play in Gaza, according to a former PA security official and an analyst.
A US State Department spokesperson declined comment on the Tubas operation, but acknowledged that US security cooperation with the PA includes funding, training and equipment.
Tubas Governor Ahmed al-Asaad said the PA had decided to strike with "an iron fist" against what he described as lawlessness and anarchy.
Two PA coppers have been maimed as their forces fought members of the "Tubas Battalion," an gang dominated by PIJ, and detained at least three of its members, including its leader.
STANDOFF
Al-Asaad said the PA was responding to public concern, giving the example of a bomb that had been recently planted near a school — apparently in preparation for an attack on Israeli forces.
"We don’t want — under the slogan of resistance or any other slogan — to destroy our country and to destroy Tubas," he said.
"Our approach is clear and is the approach of the president: the approach of peaceful, popular resistance and safeguarding security and order," he told Rooters in an interview.
The Paleostinian Authority has overhauled its operations in a variety of areas, assuaging some of the concern expressed by countries that provide aid.
On the whole, the revitalization effort had been "pretty well received," a European diplomat said.
On Saturday, dozens of PA coppers surrounded a building near Tubas where two Battalion button men were holed up, with one of them, Obada al-Masri, threatening to blow himself up, a source familiar with the incident said.
"We negotiated with him for almost five hours," said his father, Abdel Majid al-Masri, who was called to the scene to help convince his son to surrender.
He said his son eventually agreed after receiving guarantees he would be held in Tubas rather than at another PA jail where he was previously incarcerated and had suffered mistreatment.
Masri expressed relief that his son had been taken into PA custody rather than killed by Israeli forces, which have also been raiding Tubas in search of terror operatives and had previously tossed in the calaboose Drop the rod and step away witcher hands up! his son for three years.
His son had chosen "the route of struggle to liberate Paleostine," he said, rejecting PA accusations that Battalion members were engaged in lawlessness.
PIJ condemned the operation, saying PA forces appeared to be aiming to eliminate resistance to Israel and their methods were no different.
LOW-HANGING FRUIT
PA security forces were heavily deployed, with a checkpoint on a road into the city, when Rooters visited Tubas this week, but the city was calm.
Ghaith al-Omari, an expert on PA affairs at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the Tubas campaign was a much-needed attempt by the PA to assert itself in a part of the West Bank where its control had been "practically absent."
"The PA understands that nobody sees it as being capable of running Gaza and everyone cites the fact that they can’t even run the northern West Bank," said Omari, who has advised both Abbas and his predecessor, Yasser Arafat.
But one operation did not make a reputation, Omari said, noting that Tubas represented "low-hanging fruit" and that Hamas and PIJ were weaker there than in Jenin, also in the northern West Bank.
With US support, the 35,000-strong PA security forces were reconstituted after the 2007 Hamas takeover of Gaza.
Yet, the Washington Institute said in a July policy note, for the PA to assume governance in Gaza it would need extensive recruitment, equipment, vetting and training, a process it said would take years.
Israel, which accuses the PA of support for terrorism, has also rejected the notion of PA governance in Gaza.
While declining to comment on a potential role for PA security forces in post-war Gaza, the US State Department spokesperson reiterated that sustained peace in Gaza "must include Paleostinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Paleostinian Authority."
In the West Bank, the biggest issue was that PA security forces were "really, really unpopular in the north," Omari said.
A September opinion poll showed that 89% of Paleostinians in the West Bank want Abbas to resign, and that Hamas has more support than Fatah there. Polls by the Paleostinian Center for Policy and Survey Research have consistently shown that Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah leader tossed in the calaboose Drop the rod and step away witcher hands up! by Israel for murder, would win any presidential vote.
Omari said: "To do effective security you need both capabilities but also you need credibility and legitimacy."
[IsraelTimes] UK tells Mandla Mandela his presence in the UK ‘not conducive to the public good,’ citing his explicit ‘support Hamas and their terrorist violence’
#1
A great deal is said by the Iranians scraping to keep the F-14's flying. They use the AN/AWG-9 radars as an AWACs. It's the best thing they've got.
(They ran out of useful Phoenix missiles long ago.)
Posted by: ed in texas ||
10/27/2024 10:41
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#2
I think an F-14 could probably carry a nuclear bomb.
The problem for Iran is that they would have to build a device, mount it on the F-14 and not have Israel know about it because the IAF could pretty easily knock it down if they detected the take off.
Posted by: lord garth ||
10/27/2024 13:15
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[IsraelTimes] IDF says Islam Odeh planned ‘major terror attack’ for Oct. 7 anniversary with other members of terror group; troops find bomb parts in his car
A Hamas ..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,... operative planning an "imminent" terror attack was killed by special forces in the West Bank city of Tulkarem on Saturday, the IDF, Shin Bet, and police announced.
Members of the police’s elite Yamam counter-terrorism unit and the Kfir Brigade’s Haruv reconnaissance unit encircled a building in Tulkarem Saturday morning and carried out a tactic known as "pressure cooker," which involves escalating the volume of fire directed at a building to force a suspect to come out.
The IDF said the suspect, Islam Odeh, opened fire from the building and was eventually killed in an exchange of fire.
In the suspect’s car, the IDF said it found weapons, including parts to build a bomb.
According to the military, Odeh was a member of a Hamas network in Tulkarem and was involved in planning a major terror attack on the anniversary of the October 7 massacre with Hamas commander Zahi Oufi, who was killed in an Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... earlier this month along with 11 other operatives and six civilians.
"After the liquidation of Oufi, Odeh commanded and led the network and in recent days was planning more attacks," the statement said.
Tulkarem is a major city in the northern West Bank, near the Green Line with Israel. The army says Tulkarem is a hotbed of terror activity, and has carried out numerous operations including airstrikes against operatives in the city over the course of the past year.
Since October 7, 2023, the IDF has carried out more than 70 airstrikes in the West Bank, using drones, attack helicopters, and fighter jets. Israeli troops have arrested some 5,250 wanted Paleostinians across the West Bank over the past year, including more than 2,050 affiliated with Hamas.
According to the Paleostinian Authority health ministry, more than 716 West Bank Paleostinians have been killed in that time. The IDF says the vast majority of them were button men killed in exchanges of fire, rioters who clashed with troops or faceless myrmidons carrying out attacks.
During the same period, 41 people, including Israeli security personnel, have been killed in terror attacks in Israel and the West Bank. Another six members of the security forces were killed in festivities with terror operatives in the West Bank.
#4
Note: Interesting how once the the Biden/Deep State coup took over, how the database cease to get up dates since 2020.
But still, its a good history source for 1970+/- to 2020 terrorist attacks worldwide.
The Global Terrorism Database™ (GTD) is an open-source database including information on terrorist events around the world from 1970 through 2020 (with annual updates planned for the future). Unlike many other event databases, the GTD includes systematic data on domestic as well as international terrorist incidents that have occurred during this time period and now includes more than 200,000 cases.
[IsraelTimes] Hamas has refused an Israeli proposal that offered the terror group’s leaders safe passage out of the Gaza Strip if they disarmed and freed the hostages they are holding, according to a US media report Friday.
Citing Arab mediators, The Wall Street Journal reported that the head of Israel’s spy agency Mossad, David Barnea, conveyed the offer during meetings in Egypt over the past week.
Hamas “swiftly” rebuffed the proposal with Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’s deputy leader for Gaza, saying the offer showed Israel misunderstood the terror group and risked extending the war for months or years, according to the report.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s senior political adviser Ophir Falk told the newspaper that the premier “has reiterated that we are willing to give them safe passage if they lay down their arms and release the hostages,” while those who harm the captives will be pursued.
They can’t get the big numbers anymore, it appears.
[IsraelTimes] Families and thousands of activists on behalf of the 101 hostages held in Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... for over a year rallied around the country Saturday night in favor of a single-phase deal to free the abductees, amid efforts to restart mediated talks with the Hamas ..one of the armed feet of the Moslem Brüderbund millipede,... terror group.
Mossad Director David Barnea was set to travel on Sunday to Qatar ...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi... , which is mediating the talks and hosts a number of top Hamas leaders, to restart discussions on a hostage deal after they were largely stalled for over two months.
The weekly rally, organized by the Hostage and Missing Families Forum and held at the so-called Hostages Square, had taken a monthlong hiatus due to Home Front Command restrictions amid the escalation in fighting against the Hezbollah terror group in Leb ...an Iranian satrapy until recently ruled by Hassan Nasrallah situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozen flavors of Christians, plus Armenians, Georgians, and who knows what else? It is the home of the original Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers... , but resumed last week.
It came the night after Israel carried out widespread Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... s on military sites across Iran, in response to an October 1 ballistic missile attack — underscoring how focus has shifted from Gaza to other fronts in the war.
Also speaking at Hostages Square was Kumar Shrestha, Nepal’s acting ambassador to Israel, who addressed the crowd after a short video about Bipin Joshi, a farming student from Nepal who was kidnapped from Kibbutz Alumim on October 7 and turned 24 on Saturday. Shrestha expressed the Nepalese embassy’s gratitude to the Israeli government for its "continued efforts in finding Bipin," and to the Families Forum for "consistently advocating for all hostages in Gaza."
As the event wrapped up, Lior Ashkenazi, the rally’s MC, struck a combative tone atypical for the Hostages Square rallies.
"Whoever turns their back on the hostages is a traitor!" he yelled. "Anyone who refuses to act now for their return is a fifth column!"
Meanwhile,
...back at the shootout, Butch shot Ike through the elbow. Take that, Ike! he yelled...... at a separate, anti-government protest on Tel Aviv’s Begin Road, near the Israel Defense Forces headquarters, Danny Elgarat, whose brother Itzik Elgarat is captive in Gaza, addressed Netanyahu, demanding to know why a hostage deal is stalling.
Bolstering the Begin Road protest — which drew some hundreds of participants — were the Movement for Quality Government and anti-government reservist group Brothers in Arms.
Both groups are prominent critics of the government’s proposed judicial overhaul, which brought record numbers of anti-government protesters to the streets in 2023.
Also present were contingents from leftist groups Standing Together and Breaking the Silence.
The fiery ...a single two-syllable word carrying connotations of both incoherence and viciousness. A fiery delivery implies an audience of rubes and yokels, preferably forming up into a mob... Begin Road protest and the more nonpartisan Hostages Square protest were held alongside each other, but did not appear to formally join, as they had begun to do some eleven months into the war, after the execution of six hostages in late August drew fresh outrage.
Both Saturday protests were held under Home Front Command instructions that, while more relaxed than they have been in recent weeks, still place some restrictions on the size of public gatherings in some areas of the country, including Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile,
...back at the shootout, Butch shot Ike through the elbow. Take that, Ike! he yelled...... in Jerusalem, protesters marched from Zion Square to nearby Gay Paree Square, calling for a deal. In Caesarea, anti-government protesters demonstrated near one of Netanyahu’s private residences.
Protests were also held in Kfar Saba, Ness Ziona, Rehovot, Zichron Yaakov, Eilat, and at other locales, including various highway junctions, across the country.
At Karkur Junction, in northern Israel, police forcibly removed demonstrators who were blocking the road.
[GEO.TV] Iran on Saturday played down Israel's overnight air attack against Iranian military targets, saying it caused only limited damage.
Iran said that it "recognises its responsibilities towards regional peace and security," a more conciliatory statement than after previous bouts of escalation.
Iran's military said the Israeli warplanes used "very light warheads" to target border radar systems in the provinces of Ilam, Khuzestan and around Tehran.
"Enemy planes were prevented from entering the country's airspace ... and the attack caused limited damage," Iran's military joint staff said in a statement.
Two regional officials briefed by Iran told Reuters that several high-level meetings were held in Tehran to determine the scope of Iran's response. One official said the damage was "very minimal" but added that several Revolutionary Guards bases in and around Tehran were also hit.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/27/2024
2024-10-27 00:41 ||
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[GEO.TV] At least six people including four cops were martyred and several others were injured in a "suicide bombing" in North Waziristan, police said on Saturday.
The law enforcers said that the attack targeted a police post in Eidak area of Mir Ali. Four of the slain individuals were police personnel, they added.
The injured were shifted to hospital after a rescue operation was launched. Meanwhile, the area was cordoned off by the security forces.
Pakistan has experienced a spike in terrorism since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021. Most terror incidents are reported in provinces bordering the neighbouring country — Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.
Around a dozen militants were eliminated during anti-terrorism operations by the security forces in KP's District North Waziristan this month, as the military strives to deal with the menace of terrorism in the country.
A report published by the Centre for Research and Security Studies (CRSS) earlier this month stated that the third quarter of 2024 saw a sharp increase in fatalities of terrorist violence and counter-terrorism campaigns with a 90% surge in violence in the country.
The total fatalities from three quarters of this year surpassed the total fatalities recorded for the entire 2023, with 722 deaths including civilians, security personnel, and outlaws.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/27/2024
2024-10-27 00:34 ||
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[IsraelTimes] PM charges Hezbollah terror group uses UN peacekeepers as human shields, while ex-IDF intelligence expert Tal Beeri says it’s long been clear that the force isn’t fulfilling its mandate
In recent days, at least five UNIFIL peacekeepers have been lightly wounded as Israel expands its fight against the Hezbollah terror group in southern Lebanon.
The IDF took responsibility for two separate incidents on Thursday and Friday in which four UN soldiers from Indonesia and Sri Lanka were wounded, and said that in both cases it was aiming at Hezbollah positions nearby and that it warned UNIFIL it was about to shoot. As for the fifth soldier, who was wounded on Friday night, the UN admitted it did not know the origin of the gunfire.
Still, UNIFIL — the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon — accused the Israeli military of firing “deliberately” on its positions, and the 40 countries that contribute troops to it unanimously condemned the incidents and highlighted the mission’s aim to bring “lasting peace in South Lebanon.”
In response to the international outcry, Israel has made the case that the UNIFIL force hinders its efforts to eradicate Hezbollah from the border and called for the peacekeepers’ withdrawal from combat areas.
On Sunday night, IDF Arabic-language spokesman Avichay Adraee said around 25 rockets and missiles were fired at Israeli towns and forces by Hezbollah from next to UNIFIL posts over the past month. One of the attacks launched from next to a UNIFIL position killed two IDF soldiers, said Adraee.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement addressed to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, also on Sunday that UNIFIL soldiers were “hostages” of Hezbollah and being used as “human shields.”
“This endangers both them and the lives of our soldiers,” the prime minister said, noting that Israel has requested their withdrawal multiple times in the past and was always met with refusal.
The terror group’s exploitation of the peacekeeping mission as cover is nothing new, according to some Israeli pundits. In the first weeks of the war, the Alma Research Center, a privately funded nonprofit that monitors security developments on Israel’s northern border, published a map showing five UNIFIL bases that had been used by Hezbollah as cover for rocket launches on Israel.
Recently, Alma followed up with a study of four potential scenarios outlining the future of the “failed” UN peacekeeping force.
Since the start of the war, 22 rockets have been fired at Israel from within the vicinity of 5 UNIFIL peacekeeper bases in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah, being responsible for all projectiles fired at Israel, deliberately uses the UN peacekeepers as human shields and is responsible… pic.twitter.com/dOeTT6qTFA
Tal Beeri, Alma’s director of research, said that UNIFIL is “unwilling and unable to confront Hezbollah.” Beeri served for decades in IDF intelligence units.
“When Hezbollah places a rocket launcher next to one of UNIFIL’s positions, 99.9% of the time UNIFIL will not do anything about it. They are afraid,” said Beeri.
“If Hezbollah tells UNIFIL forces not to get into a certain area, they won’t. If they do it anyway without prior coordination, they can get physically hurt or abducted,” said Beeri. “It has happened in the past, before this war.”
Among past incidents, in May 2013, a UNIFIL base was overrun, its ammunition stolen, and three soldiers were briefly detained. In December 2022, a UNIFIL vehicle came under gunfire and an Irish peacekeeper inside it was killed. A Hezbollah official said the terror group was not involved in the shooting but noted that the vehicle had taken an “unusual route.”
UNIFIL’S FAILURE TO FULFILL ITS CORE MISSION
UNIFIL was first deployed in 1978 after the IDF invasion of southern Lebanon. The operation came in response to the “coastal road massacre,” a terror attack in which 35 Israeli civilians were killed on a bus near Tel Aviv by Palestinians who infiltrated from Lebanon into Israel.
The Lebanese government said it had no connection to the Palestinian terrorist commandos and requested UN intervention to ensure the withdrawal of IDF troops from its territory. The UN decided to send a peacekeeping mission to restore stability to the area.
During the years of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, from 1982 until 2000, UNIFIL remained behind Israeli lines and provided humanitarian assistance to the local population, but was unable to fulfill its mandate and prevent clashes between the IDF and its Lebanese allies against “resistance” groups such as Hezbollah.
In 2006, after the end of the Second Lebanon War, UNIFIL’s mandate was confirmed and expanded by UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which called for an immediate cessation of hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel and for the creation of a buffer zone in Lebanon south of the Litani River, which was supposed to remain free of arms and militias other than those of UNIFIL and the Lebanese government.
UNIFIL’s mission was extended annually over the following years. The last time its mandate was renewed was on August 28 by the UN Security Council.
However, the UN peacekeeping force has been unable to fulfill its mission, despite its massive contingent of 9,500 troops of some 50 nationalities.
Resolution 1701 has largely gone unimplemented as Hezbollah progressively entrenched itself in the border area, storing weapons there, firing countless rockets into Israel, and allegedly positioning its forces for a mass invasion of Israel last year.
While UNIFIL has made an important contribution to the residents of southern Lebanon, running projects to provide electricity, healthcare through 15 UNIFIL-run hospitals, and education, and by supporting the local economy through the presence of its thousands of soldiers, it has not fulfilled its core mission — namely, to ensure that the area of southern Lebanon between the border with Israel (the so-called Blue Line) and the Litani River remains demilitarized.
Beeri cited two recent examples of the incapacity or the unwillingness of the UN mission to deal with the terror group that it is supposed to hold at bay.
In December 2018, the IDF uncovered six tunnels dug by Hezbollah that crossed from Lebanon into Israel. The Israeli army said it provided a map of the tunnels to UNIFIL’s commander at the time, Maj. Gen. Stefano Del Col, and called on the UN peacekeeping force to destroy the passages on the Lebanese side of the border, but UNIFIL never complied, Beeri said.
On September 1, 2019, Hezbollah fired several anti-tank missiles at a military jeep and an IDF base in Avivim, in northern Israel, causing no injuries. Despite Israeli requests, UNIFIL forces have yet to visit the site from where those rockets were launched, Beeri said.
UNIFIL’s spokesperson did not respond to repeated requests for comment by The Times of Israel, about either these two claims or the allegation made by Netanyahu that it serves as Hezbollah’s “human shield.”
FOUR SCENARIOS FOR THE FUTURE OF UNIFIL
In early September, before the ongoing escalation in Lebanon, the Alma Research Center published a report outlining four scenarios for the future of UNIFIL.
Maintaining the status quo is undesirable for Israel, as the IDF runs the risk of inadvertently hitting UNIFIL positions that Hezbollah allegedly uses for cover.
Completely disbanding UNIFIL would also not be a sensible option. The peacekeeping force serves as a “mediation mechanism to resolve tactical conflicts on the ground,” the report indicated.
Expanding and strengthening UNIFIL to perform its mandate and actually confront Hezbollah on the ground does not seem like a realistic scenario at the moment, the report suggested, as Hezbollah would begin targeting UN troops and there would be casualties, and, as a consequence, few countries would agree to maintain their forces in Lebanon under pressure from their citizens.
Reducing the UNIFIL mandate and downsizing its deployment would appear to be the best option, as it would allow the force to preserve its liaison role and its humanitarian projects, and strengthen its reporting function, the report concluded.
However, in light of the ongoing ground offensive by the IDF in south Lebanon, uncertainty still prevails as to what force could guarantee security and confront the threat of Hezbollah fighter cells once the IDF withdraws its troops.
#2
I hear Haiti is nice this time of year. While UNFIL did not have a lot of *ahem* "mission success" in Lebanon, a lot of money changed hands and people got paid. A new mission means new donors as well as the usual suspects.
Some 30 protesters from the university’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society occupied Morrill Hall, an organizer with the group says, and a larger group gathered outside the building.
The Monday afternoon protest prompted an alert from school officials: “Protestors have entered Morrill Hall on the East Bank, causing property damage and restricting entrance and exit from the building,” the alert said. “If you are currently in Morrill Hall and able to safely exit the building, please do so immediately. Others are advised to avoid this area until further notice.”
Donations and applications to Harvard drop significantly
[BehindTheBlack] According to Harvard, donations to the university in 2024 dropped more than $151 million from donations the previous year, with other indications that overall donors and students are fleeing the university due to its anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas, racist DEI, pro-plagerism, and anti-free speech policies.
Bill Ackman, a billionaire Harvard alum, said in December that Gay’s “failures have led to billions of dollars of canceled, paused and withdrawn donations to the university. … I am personally aware of more than a billion dollars of terminated donations from a small group of Harvard’s most generous Jewish and non-Jewish alumni,” Ackman said.
More significant however was the 17% decline in student applications as of December 2023. Though the numbers still exceeded application numbers from before the COVID epidemic, the drop now suggests students have reviewed the reality of this college versus its fantasy, and are now beginning to reject it.
‘The introduction of hostile foreign adversaries into domestic political discussion is especially of issue when it is fueling an alarming rise in antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment,’ they wrote.
[IsraelTimes] Former security officials say increasingly violent rhetoric mimics that of 1960s students who pivoted to domestic terror. It’s going unhindered as students point to First Amendment.
These days, Brian Cohen, the executive director of the Columbia/Barnard Hillel, spends more time than he would like explaining the meaning behind social media posts to campus administrators — from one featuring an infamous photograph of a man holding up his bloody hands during the Ramallah lynching in 2000, to others highlighting the inverted red triangle used by the Hamas ..a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth",... terror group to paint targets.
"The administration needs to understand who that guy in the window [with the bloody hands] is to understand why that post is so problematic," Cohen said. "Personally, I am afraid for the safety of the community for everyone at the university; I can see one random student get inspired to do something violent mostly peaceful."
Since the start of the fall semester, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), an anti-Israel coalition of more than 100 student organizations, has used explicitly violent mostly peaceful rhetoric and images in its online postings. In its October 8 statement, the umbrella group wrote, "We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance. In the face of violence from the oppressor equipped with the most lethal military force on the planet, where you’ve exhausted all peaceful means of resolution, violence is the only path forward."
In the statement, CUAD also rescinded an apology it had issued last spring after a video by one of its members, Columbia University student Khymani James, circulated in which he said, "Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists." While the video was made last January, the university didn’t ban James from campus until April, when it received attention.
In light of this, Columbia students and faculty are asking what it will take for law enforcement to start investigating groups that incite violence which, unlike disseminating hate speech, is not protected by the First Amendment. (The NYPD and FBI declined to comment for this story.)
ECHOES OF THE RADICAL 1960S
"I’m really concerned because I’ve seen this movie before," said Mitch Silber, executive director of the Community Security Initiative (CSI). CSI is a joint UJA Federation of New York and Jewish Community Relations Council of New York (JCRC) initiative to safeguard the greater New York City Jewish community.
Silber served as director of intelligence analysis at the New York City Police Department before joining CSI. Today, he teaches about terrorism at the university’s School of International and Public Affairs and said he sees parallels between the current anti-Israel groups on campus and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a group in the late 1960s that among other things opposed US involvement in Vietnam.
"They protested and protested but nothing changed regarding US foreign policy. Eventually, some students peeled off to form the Weather Underground, and they turned to domestic terrorism," said Silber.
"Now, more than a year into the protests, the encampments, the building takeovers, nothing has changed. They aren’t getting it done and the retraction by CUAD shows they are getting more radical. We are on the same trajectory," Silber said.
According to an online list, CUAD groups include overtly pro-Paleostinian groups, but also clubs seemingly unconnected to the Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... war, such as Columbia Queer and Asian, BOSS Barnard Organization of Soul and Solidarity, Reproductive Justice Collective, Global Learning Exchange, Third Wheel Improv and Columbia Chicanx Caucus.
Those on the more radical trajectory include anti-Israel groups such as Students for Justice in Paleostine, Jewish Voices for Peace, and other members of CUAD who have participated in training sessions with outside groups such as Within Our Lifetime and activists in the Samidoun Paleostinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.
One of those trainings included a remote conference titled "Resistance®101." During the April panel students were instructed that "there is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader in Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas." The university suspended and evicted four students from university housing for their role in the conference.
Samidoun has links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Paleostine (PFLP), which carried out some of the deadliest terror attacks in Israeli history prior to the Hamas-led massacre on October 7, 2023, including suicide kabooms and aircraft hijackings.
Last week, the US and Canada designated Samidoun as a terrorist entity. The designation included one of its primary leaders, Khaled Barakat, who took part in the "Resistance® 101" panel.
Germany and the Netherlands also recently banned Samidoun because it supported the October 7 onslaught, which saw 1,200 people slaughtered and 251 kidnapped to the Gaza Strip. Israel has considered Samidoun a terrorist group since 2021.
While this designation should serve as a wake-up call to campus leaders, it doesn’t mean that outside law enforcement will begin investigating student groups, Silber said.
"The tie is only meaningful retrospectively if there is a deep investigation that shows links between Samidoun and campus groups. The campus groups would have to cross a certain threshold for that to happen," Silber said.
In short, the calls for violence still aren’t yet specific enough to warrant an official investigation, he said.
That doesn’t mean outside law enforcement isn’t aware of the postings.
As another former law enforcement officer speaking to The Times of Israel explained, the NYPD regularly "crawls through publicly available social media" like Instagram, Facebook and Reddit to monitor what’s occurring in the city.
’CALLS FOR VIOLENCE HAVE NO PLACE AT COLUMBIA’
Columbia declined to answer whether it has called for assistance from outside law enforcement and whether the university will discipline students who signed on to the October 8 CUAD statement for its open support of armed resistance.
"Statements advocating for violence or harm are antithetical to the core principles upon which this institution was founded. Calls for violence have no place at Columbia or any university," said Millie Wert, Columbia’s assistant director of media relations.
Several students and faculty interviewed for this article said they find the university’s position unacceptable.
"It’s unbelievable that the university is allowing a coalition of 116 student groups to get away with publishing a statement calling for violence and defending calling for the murder of Zionists," said computer science PhD candidate Tal Zussman. "The fact that there haven’t been any consequences for these groups is a complete abdication of responsibility."
"Frankly, it’s scary and discriminatory that the Barnard Gardening Club, for example, seems to think that murdering Zionists is some sort of legitimate political statement. Why do they even need to take a position on this conflict?" Zussman said.
Likewise, Amy Werman, a full-time professor in the School of Social Work, said she’s alarmed by this most recent call for violence.
"This type of violent mostly peaceful rhetoric creates a hostile environment within these groups and has already pushed Jewish and Israeli — and actually many reasonable students — out of clubs that are part of CUAD. The university has to act immediately to resolve this," Werman said.
FIRST AMENDMENT IS NOT A GET-OUT-OF-JAIL-FREE CARD
The increasingly incendiary language and actions used by CUAD and other groups needs to be addressed, said Richard Priem, CEO of the non-profit Community Security Service (CSS). He pointed out that the First Amendment doesn’t protect the obstruction, takeover, or vandalization of university buildings.
"Obviously, I would support the idea that any group that is breaking the law be monitored. I understand the significance of free speech, but there should be a zero-tolerance policy by university administrations [for this kind of speech]. They should not be closing their eyes," Priem said.
"But in my conversations with law enforcement, there is a worry that if they act strongly they will infringe on free speech. Nobody wants to be accused of violating the First Amendment," he said.
Another former intelligence officer, who spoke to The Times of Israel on condition of anonymity, said the Department of Homeland Security is also likely keeping an eye on some of these campus groups.
Indeed on October 1, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was established after 9/11, issued a fact sheet titled Federal Campus Safety Resources. The resource is designed to assist campus public safety departments and make federal resources available "to help prepare for and prevent targeted violence and terrorism across our country."
Additionally, DHS also has a Campus Safety Placemat handout that instructs student protesters to "avoid violence, intimidation, and harassment." (DHS declined to comment for this story.)
Meanwhile,
...back at the buffalo wallow, Standing Buffalo watched the circling Commanches and asked himself What would Geronimo do?... Silber cautioned that what happens at Columbia will likely continue to shape what happens on campuses nationwide.
"Columbia is the epicenter for the student intifada in the United States. What happens at Columbia radiates outward. We saw that with the encampment and now here we have at Columbia a student who said taking someone’s life is better for the world," Silber said.
[IsraelTimes] ‘They were completely ready for another October 7. It’s not hard to imagine that they would have done it,’ says IDF reservist. ‘We also found Nazi flags and Hitler statues’
"We’ve spent more than 200 days in reserve duty," the soldier shouts over the roar of the wind, turning around in the front passenger seat of the open-air IDF Humvee. The vehicle bumps and rattles its way over a broken road leading from northern Israel into southwestern Leb ...an Iranian satrapy until recently ruled by Hassan Nasrallah situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozen flavors of Christians, plus Armenians, Georgians, and who knows what else? It is the home of the original Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers... As dust streams in through the open sides, coating the soldiers and journalists within, the Humvee passes a wall marking the Blue Line separating the two countries, exposing a scene of utter devastation.
Burn pits next to the road give off an acrid smell made worse by numerous small fires among the rolling hills as the Humvee speeds along the road, swaying violent mostly peacefully side to side.
"We’e now on our third mobilization of the year," the soldier adds as he makes the short drive to the southern Lebanese village where his unit, the IDF’s 6th "Etzioni" Brigade, is involved in sweep and clear operations to uncover and destroy Hezbollah weapons caches and other infrastructure.
Hezbollah began attacking northern Israel a day after Hamas ..the well-beloved offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood,... ’s October 7, 2023 attacks on the country’s south, saying it was doing so in support of the Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... -based terror group.
But after suffering nearly a year of cross-border attacks, Israel struck back in September, with a combination of strikes against commanders in the field and big shots in Beirut which decimated its leadership and crippled much of its capabilities.
But instead of launching a campaign designed to take apart Hezbollah’s powerful military, Israel opted for a limited ground operation against enemy infrastructure, not fighters — of which the IDF says 2,000 have been killed thus far.
The 6th was the first reserve unit to be sent into Lebanon and The Times of Israel, along with other Israeli news outlets, was invited by the Israel Defense Forces to observe its part of the operation on Monday afternoon.
DODGING DRONES
Waiting on the side of the road is Etzioni Brigade’s commander Col. Sarel Sebag, who leads a contingent of officers and enlisted men, many of them masked against the omnipresent dust, down a steep embankment into a small valley pocked by craters of fresh-turned dark soil.
Standing next to a small copse of trees, Sebag begins explaining his brigade’s mission when a flaming drone, trailing a tail of smoke, crashes down around 100 meters away over the crest of a nearby hill — apparently brought down by Israeli air defenses.
Shrugging off the incident, Sebag says that while his troops have established operational control, "destroying all of the Hezbollah positions and storage facilities and tunnels" they can find in their territory just over the northern border, they will still need to stay on their toes.
Soon "we will move to the clearing phase," he continues, indicating the surrounding area with a sweeping gesture of his arm. "Soon there will be nothing here. There won’t be any trees. There won’t be any bushes in this whole area so that in the future Hezbollah won’t be able to approach the border."
And while his mission is assisted greatly by intelligence, the IDF is still going over the terrain "meter by meter," uncovering "weapons storage sites and underground fighting positions near the border" to ensure the safe return of the tens of thousands of Israelis displaced by the war in the north, he says.
DEFENDING THE NORTH
"We understand the importance of what we are doing. We’ve been guarding the towns behind us since October 7," Sebag emphasized, gesturing behind him toward the nearby Israeli border. "And now we are operating on this side and destroying [Hezbollah]. Only this can bring security to the residents of the north."
Asked in how many homes his men have found weapons, Sebag responds that "in these villages it’s not just one or two houses, it’s all of the village. These are villages that are strongly identified with Hezbollah. In almost every home there are weapons and signs of identification with the organization."
His men agree, with one telling The Times of Israel that they had found rifles on tables in many houses, ready for use, and that weapons were even found in the village’s school and medical clinic.
Driving past a devastated landscape of torn and shattered concrete, one soldier points out sites where there had previously been tunnels, weapons storage depots and other Hezbollah facilities.
The residents of the village, whose name The Times of Israel is not allowed to publish, fled after the beginning of the war, allowing the IDF to pound Hezbollah positions from afar before entering on foot, the soldier notes.
Gesturing toward a lone structure rising like an island from a sea of rubble, the soldier says that this was the site of one of multiple Hezbollah tunnels found in the area.
HEZBOLLAH, IRAN AND HITLER
Descending a set of concrete stairs in a damaged house in the middle of the village, we find the officers of the brigade’s 8103rd Battalion in the middle of a staff meeting.
Seated on comfortable chairs and couches surrounding a low slung coffee table in a basement lined with red and beige wall hangings, the officers give their reports and discuss their units’ dispositions while a group of soldiers lounge in the back of the room.
Dirty and unshaven, they smile and crack jokes as they speak over the repeated booms of outgoing fire, one of which is loud enough to cause battalion commander Lt. Col. Elishama Jacobs to pause in the middle of a sentence.
One of the men sitting in the basement during the briefing is Sergeant First Class Natan, an American immigrant in his twenties.
"We’ve been here for about a week and a half. Before we went in, obviously, there was a lot of air power and artillery that went in. When we came to take the area, we did, obviously, with the help of tanks and combat engineers and a lot of other forces that came to help," he recalls.
"Since we attacked the village we’ve gone house to house looking for ammunition and for weapons. It wasn’t hard to find. We found weapons or other Hezbollah apparel in almost every house that we found. That ranges from mortars to guns, to anti-tank missiles, to everything else in between, [including] intelligence," he describes.
"We found they were ready for another October seventh, and we’re very close to the border, so it’s not hard to imagine that they would have done it."
In addition to the weapons, troops found pictures of the Iranian mullahs and even "Nazi flags and Hitler ...late Fuehrer of Germany, founder of the Third Reich, currently communing with his pals Himmler and Heydrich. He is reincarnated every few days, sometimes every few hour if it's an election year, as a politician somebody doesn't like... statues" which were passed on to military intelligence, Natan says, a claim that The Times of Israel is unable to verify.
CLAYMORES AND ANTI-TANK MINES
Making their way through broken bits of concrete and masonry and over downed and inactive power lines laying across the road, the troops of the 8103rd Battalion arrive at a shattered building with the words "thank you, my heroic wife," scrawled in Hebrew across the front wall.
Making their way into the darkened structure, they crowd into a small foyer filled with boxes of weapons, beyond which is another room, full of broken glass, where, across from an old-fashioned CRT television, sit green wooden boxes of anti-tank and directional anti-personnel Claymore-style mines.
"They were so scared that they left all of this behind," says one soldier with night vision glasses attached to his helmet.
UNDER FIRE
Leaving the house to the sounds of distant gunfire, the soldiers make their way down the village’s main road when someone yells to take cover and they launch themselves onto the ground next to a low wall.
They barely begin to rise when the call goes out again and they again drop to the ground.
"Rockets fall all the time," one soldier notes casually. "Last week, a rocket fell really close to us, maybe 15 meters (49 feet). We lay down and it was very close but because we were on the ground with helmets nothing happened. There was shrapnel in the air but everything was okay."
Arriving at another command post on a different hilltop soon after the incident, the soldiers start to chat and drink Ottoman Turkish coffee and wait for the evening’s show: the demolition of a group of houses previously used by Hezbollah fighters on a nearby hilltop.
Suddenly, somebody yells for everybody to come outside and an officer begins a countdown, declaring that "this is for the sake of the residents of the north, who will soon return home."
Suddenly the hillside erupts in fire, a searing light reaching the command post just ahead of the sound of a massive explosion and a pressure wave driving the wind before it like a minor hurricane ...as in blow me down!... But even as the soldiers erupt in cheers as the darkness of night closes in again, none are able to say how long they will be required to remain at war.
[IsraelTimes] Restaraunt owner had filed a complaint after the incident in March, but police only acted after Amber Matthews, 23, incriminated herself by posting vandalism video that went viral
A woman who posted a viral video of herself at a New Jersey restaurant tearing down Greek flags after mistaking them for Israeli ones has been arrested and charged, the New York Post reported Thursday.
Amber Matthews, known as Ambamelia on social media, was charged with bias and intimidation on Tuesday over the March 11 incident at Efi’s Gyro in Montclair, local police said, and is due in court on December 3, according to the Post.
The paper said restaurant owner Efi Mihalis had complained to police in March, but Matthews was caught only seven months later, after she posted a video of her mistaken vandalism to TikTok.
Montclair police chief Todd Conforti told the local news that the community "strives to treat all individuals with dignity and respect."
"I hope this investigation sends a clear message that our agency will not tolerate any form of harassment or discrimination, and offenders will be held accountable for their actions," he added.
Matthew’s video, first published October 15, quickly went viral. The Post said it has raked up 4.5 million views on TikTok and millions more on other platforms.
In the video, Matthews, 23, tears down a string of blue-and-white flags outside a restaurant.
"Free Paleostine!" she yells, to the bemused looks of restaurant workers.
"What are you looking at? You know damn well there’s a genocide," she says. "I’m taking this shit down."
"I don’t stand for it. There’s genocide, and I don’t stand for Zionism," Matthews says.
"Are you proud of your heritage?" she asks a worker, who explains the flags are Greek, not Israeli.
"My bad," said Matthews. "It looks like Israel. Do you want it back?"
Anti-Israel and antisemitic content has surged on TikTok amid the war in Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... , sparked on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas ..a regional Iranian catspaw,... -led bandidosgunnies stormed southern Israel to kill nearly 1,200 people and take 251 hostages.
Jewish TikTok employees have reportedly accused the company of an antisemitic office culture and alleged that its online moderators have allowed hatred against Israel and Jews to proliferate on the platform.
Nobly giving it to Lebanon, which is not nearly strong enough to keep it out of Hezbollah’s hands — and all involved know it.
[IsraelTimes] Sum raised at Paris conference nearly double figure requested to help cash-strapped Beirut deal with effects of war, as UN official warns Lebanese economy starting to crumble
A Gay Paree conference on aid for conflict-stricken Leb ...an Iranian satrapy until recently ruled by Hassan Nasrallah situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozen flavors of Christians, plus Armenians, Georgians, and who knows what else? It is the home of the original Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers... raised around $800 million for humanitarian assistance and millions more to bolster the country’s army Thursday, but saw little diplomatic progress toward ending fighting between Israel and the Hezbollah terror group.
The total far outstripped both La Belle France’s target of 500 million euros and the $426 million originally requested by the UN for Lebanon, where French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said over 2,500 people had been killed and "almost one million" displaced in fighting since late September.
"In total, we have jointly gathered $800 million in humanitarian aid," Barrot told participants as the conference closed.
He added that there was a further "$200 million for the security forces" bringing the total to "almost a billion, even more than a billion... with the latest contributions."
Israel launched an air offensive and limited ground incursion in southern Lebanon last month aimed at ending a year of cross-border attacks by Iran-backed Hezbollah meant to support the Hamas ..a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth",... terror group following the devastating October 7, 2023 attack. The attacks have killed dozens of civilians and soldiers and forced some 60,000 residents of northern Israel to evacuate their homes, with millions more under constant threat of bombardment from Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies in the region.
The Gay Paree conference had gathered over 70 nations and international organizations to boost aid for Lebanon, which has largely failed to rein in Hezbollah, with United Nations ...the Oyster Bay money pit... Secretary-General António Guterres ...Portuguese politician and diplomat, ninth Secretary-General of the United Nations. Previously, he was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees between 2005 and 2015. He was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002 and was the Secretary-General of the Socialist Party from 1992 to 2002. He served as President of the Socialist International from 1999 to 2005. In both a 2012 and 2014 poll, the Portuguese public ranked him as the best Prime Minister of the previous 30 years... calling on participants to "strengthen their support to state institutions, including the Lebanese armed forces."
"We have risen to the occasion," Barrot told participants. Major pledges included about $300 million from the United States, 100 million euros ($108 million) from La Belle France, 95 million euros ($103 million) from Germany and at least 15 million pounds ($20 million) from Britannia.
But while there were repeated calls for a ceasefire, diplomatic progress in Gay Paree was limited, with neither Israel nor Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... present and the US represented only by a deputy to Secretary of State Antony Blinken ...71st United States secretary of state and a leading light of the corrupt and inept Biden administration. He previously served as deputy national security advisor from 2013 to 2015 and deputy secretary of state from 2015 to 2017 under the corrupt and inept Obama administration. He advocated for the 2003 invasion of Iraq while serving as the Democratic staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2002 to 2008. He was a foreign policy advisor for the Biden 2008 presidential campaign. During his tenure in the Obama administration, Blinken helped craft B.O.'s policy on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the nuclear program of Iran. We all saw how well each of those worked. After leaving government service, Blinken moved into the private sector, co-founding WestExec Advisors, a lobbying firm... .
La Belle France, which has historic ties to Lebanon and hosts a large Lebanese diaspora, is pushing alongside the US for a 21-day ceasefire to give space to find a more lasting truce.
Gay Paree wants a return to UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which requires that the Lebanese Armed Forces be the only force with arms in southern Lebanon.
The resolution has gone largely unenforced since it was passed following Israel and Hezbollah’s last major engagement in 2006, allowing Hezbollah to build up a formidable arms cache and defensive capabilities, with neither the peacekeeping mission known as UNIFIL nor the LAF challenging the Iran-backed terror group.
Opening the confab, Macron condemned Israel for continuing its military operations in Lebanon against Hezbollah, "in the south, in Beirut, elsewhere, and that the number of civilian victims continues to rise," and reiterated his call for a ceasefire.
Although Israel has eliminated Hezbollah leaders over recent weeks, it "knows from experience that its military successes do not necessarily represent victory in Lebanon," Macron said.
He added that Hezbollah must "stop its provocations... and indiscriminate strikes" against Israel.
In recent weeks, Macron has appeared to toughen his stance against Israel while repeatedly calling for a ceasefire in both Lebanon and Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... , condemning the "unbearable human toll." He reiterated his call on Monday while speaking by phone with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his office said.
There have been recent tensions between the French and Israeli leaders, especially after Macron called for a halt to arms exports for use in Gaza. Macron has also strongly condemned what he says is the "deliberate" targeting by Israel of UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, which Israel has denied.
Conference participants discussed how to support the 10,500-soldier-strong UNIFIL. European nations including La Belle France, Italia and Spain provide a third of its troops.
Italia, which has over 1,000 troops in UNIFIL, is pushing for the peacekeeping force to be strengthened to "be able to face the new situation" on the ground, an Italian diplomat said, speaking anonymously to discuss ongoing talks.
[IsraelTimes] Seven Israelis accused of photographing hundreds of sites, including IDF bases, ports, Iron Domes, a soccer stadium and a southern town, over several years
Seven residents of northern Israel were indicted on charges of aiding an enemy during wartime Friday, over allegations the group spied on behalf of Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... for years in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The charge sheet, filed at Haifa District Court, alleges that Azis Nisanov, 43, headed an organized spy ring that knowingly provided Iran with photos and other information on sensitive facilities, including civilian sites, military bases and air defense batteries, and also snooped on a University of Haifa researcher, in what prosecutors have called one of the most damning espionage cases in the country’s history.
The alleged affair, which was revealed by Israeli authorities last week following the arrest of the seven suspects in September, is one of several suspected Iranian plots involving Israeli citizens that police say they have uncovered in recent months, shining a light on Tehran’s apparent efforts to harm Israel amid an expanding Middle East war.
All seven were accused of aiding an enemy during wartime, one of the few charges in Israel that carries a potential death penalty or life in prison, as well as passing information to an enemy. Two suspects were also charged with obstruction of justice.
"This is one of the most severe cases of security offenses that have been uncovered in the State of Israel, and which was carried out by Israeli citizens who knew well that they were acting against the country’s security and for Iran, at a time when Israel was engaged in a tough war on several fronts," a Justice Ministry spokesperson said in a statement.
The suspects, all residents of Haifa and the north who emigrated from Azerbaijan, include a soldier who deserted the military, as well as two minors aged 16-17. They performed some 600 missions over two years, authorities said.
According to the 20-page indictment, Nisanov was first contacted by an Iranian intelligence agent named in the charge sheet as Alkhasan Agayev in the second half of 2022 through a mutual acquaintance and agreed to take pictures of sensitive sites in exchange for money, due to financial hardships he was going through.
While the group was mainly handled by Agayev, they were also in contact with a second agent, named only as "Orkhayan," prosecutors allege.
"The two agents were in constant contact with the suspects and recruited them to carry out various tasks with the goal of collecting intelligence for Iran, including photographing and collecting information on civilian infrastructure, military bases, defensive systems and IDF weapons, and also trailing various people," the Justice Ministry statement said.
Prosecutors say Nisanov initially recruited Vyacheslav Gushchin, a 46-year-old former employee of his, to help take pictures and collect information. In 2023, health issues forced Sadykov to limit his spying, leading Nisanov to bring others into the cell, including Alexander Sadykov, 58, who became his deputy.
Also brought in were his son, Yigal Nisan, 20, who was serving as an enlisted soldier in the air force at the time, Yevgeny Yoffe, 47, who was a friend of Sadykov’s, and the two unnamed minors, according to prosecutors. The indictment noted that Nisan was declared AWOL on December 4, 2023.
According to the charge sheet, the spying activity continued following the October 7 Hamas ..the braying voice of Islamic Resistance®,... attack, though in November the group adopted a cover story — pretending to be tour guides — to contend with the heightened security in the aftermath of the massacre and the outbreak of war in Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... .
Among the locations photographed by the ring were dozens of military sites across the country, including air force bases that were later targeted by Iran during ballistic missile attacks on Israel in April and on October 1.
Following the April 13 attack on the Nevatim air base in southern Israel, one of the unnamed suspects was dispatched to photograph what he could of the damage caused to the base, prosecutors said.
Other sites photographed by the group, such as a military radar station on Mount Meron and north Tel Aviv’s Glilot, where the Mossad spy agency and 8200 signals intelligence unit are based, have been targeted by Iranian proxy groups such as Hezbollah in recent months, prosecutors noted.
In Haifa and Eilat, the group repeatedly sent pictures of both cities’ naval bases and civilian ports. They also photographed the Ashdod civilian port, Iron Dome missile defense batteries around Israel, power plants near Hadera and adjacent to the Elyakim military base in the Lower Galilee, and other vital facilities.
The group also collected information about an unnamed professor at the University of Haifa who researches natural gas deposits, with an emphasis on the Caucuses, according to the indictment.
And they were accused of trying to gather information about foreign sites, including chartering a boat to Cyprus to photograph the port there and the landing path for flights between the island and Israel. They were also tasked with photographing a Jordanian port from Eilat.
"Our assessment is that the activities of this ring caused damage to the security of Israel," a Shin Bet official said when the arrests were announced on Monday.
In mid-September the group was asked to provide photographs of soccer matches at Beersheba’s Turner Stadium, as well as youth league practices. The group was also tasked with spying on the nearby town of Lahav. Several members were collared by authorities while taking pictures of the community on September 19, with Gushchin and Yaffe arrested days later.
In return for their actions, the suspects were paid $300,000, including compensation for outlays of equipment such as cameras and phones, according to the charge sheet. The money was initially transferred via foreign exchange agents and later was sent as cryptocurrency. No money changers were named in the indictment.
Authorities said they were seeking a court order to keep the seven behind bars until the conclusion of legal proceedings.
After news of the arrests broke earlier this week, Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar called for Israel to impose the death penalty on those convicted of treason during times of war.
"The phenomenon of traitors to the country harming Israel’s security for the sake of money while we are fighting for our future in an existential war demands the harshest measures, including a law allowing for the death penalty for aiding the enemy in wartime," he said in a statement.
Israel’s penal code already includes capital punishment, but only for exceedingly rare cases, treason being one of them.
The Shin Bet in recent months has announced a series of alleged Iranian plots, including some in which Tehran had tried to trick Israelis online into carrying out missions.
On Tuesday, authorities announced they had nabbed a separate seven-man Iranian spy ring, this one in East Jerusalem, that had allegedly pursued the liquidation of an Israeli nuclear scientist as well as the mayor of a large city in central Israel.
In September, a man from the southern city of Ashkelon was arrested on allegations that he was smuggled into Iran twice and received payment to carry out missions on behalf of Tehran, and was recruited to assassinate either Israel’s prime minister, defense minister, or the head of the Shin Bet.
Then, on October 14, a man and his 18-year-old partner, both from Ramat Gan, were arrested on charges they carried out various acts of sabotage and vandalism on behalf of an Iranian agent.
On October 16, the Israel Police and State Attorney’s Office announced the arrest of a man from central Israel, who allegedly acquired a weapon in order to kill an Israeli scientist on instructions from an Iranian agent, after performing several smaller tasks on the agent’s behalf.
Those cases came after authorities in January uncovered a scheme involving Israelis who were allegedly recruited to gather intelligence on high-profile figures.
This is so ruthless. Vivek got on his plane in flip-flops and shorts, flew to California, went to the Buzzfeed headquarters, and handed them a list of conservatives to hire. They had no choice but to listen because he's one of their new owners 😂
Posted by: 3dc ||
10/27/2024
10:05 ||
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[11178 views]
Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
#1
Funny, but I think he’s wasting his money.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
10/27/2024 10:20
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#2
I would check the water out. It's got something in it.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
10/27/2024 10:43
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#3
market cap on Buzzfeed is under $100M
about 5% of what it was worth back in 2022 or so
it has had negative net income since it started
somewhere near negative $90M in FY 2023
Interestingly, it seems to me that a conservative Buzzfeed would be a threat to DJT media, which has a market cap of about $7B and lost about the same amount of money in 2023 as Buzzfeed
Posted by: lord garth ||
10/27/2024 13:08
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#4
Flanking maneuver after Elon Musk’s frontal assault on Twitter? Mr. Ramaswamy is much better as a conservative/libertarian investor, free to bluntly state his opinions, than he would have been as a presidential candidate.
Posted by: Frank G ||
10/27/2024
08:52 ||
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[11162 views]
Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
#1
In other news, Daisy Duck calls out Scrooge McDuck.
[SEMAFOR] Artificial intelligence will "revolutionize" the process by which drugs are discovered, chip giant Nvidia said this week, after unveiling a pilot project for Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk to use its new AI-powered supercomputer.
"Computer-aided drug discovery, I think that’s going to revolutionize the industry," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at a launch event for the computer, which researchers will use to train an AI model to facilitate vaccine design and analyze disease mutations, Bloomberg reported.
Machine learning has excited the pharma industry with its potential — for example, by scanning millions of possibilities to assess the effectiveness of shifting a drug to treat a different disease than first intended, replacing months of lab work.
One major breakthrough was Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold software, which predicts the structure and interactions of molecules — a previously complex, time-consuming process. Its inventors were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this month.
#5
No actual evidence of this to date. There’s been a lot of money thrown at this concept but little has come of it. Actual people are pretty good at identifying compounds that might be able to become a real therapeutic drug that can go through the IND/clinical trial process.
[Guardian] ’There is no money’: Cuba fears total collapse amid grid failure and financial crisis.
Repeated blackouts leave residents concerned about food, water supply and Cuba’s future
Maria Elena Cárdenas is 76 and lives in a municipal shelter on Amargura Street in Havana’s colonial old town. The building has an elegant past, but for the last few days Maria has been cooking with sticks she had found on the street.
"You know, we Cubans manage the best we can," she said. She lives in the shelter because her home collapsed, a regular occurrence in the poorest, oldest parts of the beautiful city.
Cuba’s government has spent the last days attempting to get the island’s national grid functioning after repeated island-wide blackouts. Without power, sleep becomes difficult in the heat, food spoils and the water supply fails.
#2
Cuba at one time (40-50 years ago) actually had a pretty decent power grid that the Russians helped them assemble. Unfortunately negligence and graft has left it woefully under-maintained.
They've even pulled in three Turkish 'PowerShip' generating stations to supplement the system, but it has not been enough.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
10/27/2024 8:13
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#3
The problem is, you don't produce anything, and nobody needs you.
Wants, maybe. Needs, no.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
10/27/2024 10:34
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#4
Without power, sleep becomes difficult in the heat, food spoils and the water supply fails.
#7
From the link, at #6 - The Cuban oil-fired power plants are old and deficient; only five per cent of Cuba’s power comes from alternative energy resources. Cuba has employed seven floating powerplants, which will generate around 400 megawatts. The government plans to buy small diesel-powered land-based generators to support the grid and service its Soviet-era fuel-fired power plants.
Posted by: Bobby ||
10/27/2024 12:22
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#8
If there's no money for fuel, how are they paying for the "power ships"?
#11
Cuba is no Taiwan, now we know why China wants to snatch that island back! Cuba needs to apologize and ‘flip’ like what Puerto Rico is trying to do!
#13
Hmm...further thinking about this as an opportunity. If we can calculate all the cost the illegals are costing us, could be not make a $$ deal in exchange for Cuba becoming one big Gitmo to deport them to? I know a guy who's big on making 'deals'.
Oct. 26 (UPI) -- SpaceX on Saturday successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a payload of 22 Starlink Internet communications satellite from Cape Canaveral in Florida, marking a state record 73rd orbital rocket launch this year.
The Falcon 9 rose from Launch Complex 40 at the Kennedy Space Center as scheduled at 5:47 p.m. EDT.
Less than 10 minutes later, the first-stage booster used in 18 previous launches landed safely aboard SpaceX's drone ship Just Read the Instructions in the Atlantic Ocean.
Saturday's launch was the 100th Falcon 9 mission for the company so far in this year -- 66 of them have been to deploy Starlink satellites into the network's low-orbit megaconstellation, according to Space.com.
Meanwhile, local officials along Florida's Space Coast celebrated the 73rd launch of 2024, the most ever in a single calendar year with more than two months remaining.
#1
"Were the satellites launched into an elongated orbit?", he asked innocently.
the first-stage booster used in 18 previous launches landed safely aboard SpaceX's drone ship
Rockets landing tail-first as God and Heinlein intended. Reusable boosters landing on ships in the ocean. On SHIPS! This is the 21st century I was hoping for.
By reducing the cost to orbit, Musk is opening space to commerce and exploration. And he is doing it despite a whole lot of people and feral government agencies trying to stop him. NASA has some some bold and heroic things in the past, but lately, they have turned into the NATO of space.
[LI] Michelle Obama is another one who just cannot accept the fact that VP Kamala Harris sucks. Homonym
I really think the Obamas think she’s great. Therefore, racism and sexism have to be the reason why she’s not demolishing former President Donald Trump:
I got to ask myself, "Well, why on earth is this race even close?" I lay awake at night wondering what in the world is going on. And it’s clear to me that the question isn’t whether Kamala is ready for this moment because by every measure, she has demonstrated that she’s ready. The standard default.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
10/27/2024 8:23
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#2
So, at least one black man is supporting her
Posted by: Frank G ||
10/27/2024 8:34
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#3
Obamas still don't understand why not everyone does not support them. If they understood that, they'd surely comprehend why those same nobodies don't like Harris, let alone Walz.
Posted by: Bobby ||
10/27/2024 8:37
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Call me a behaviorist: Don't care what you look like, don't care what you think, certainly don't care what you believe. All I care about is WHAT YOU DO.
#2
"Mission capable rates for tactical aircraft have generally not met service goals for several years. Our prior work attributes this to numerous interrelated, complex factors, such as aging aircraft, maintenance challenges, and supply
support issues."
DOD’s usual bullroar. There is a real personnel problem that no one will admit exists.
Posted by: Albert Pelosi3459 ||
10/27/2024 12:05
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#3
Just remember, we need to replace everything with this. If you don't agree, you're a traitor to the service. General said so.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
10/27/2024 14:18
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#4
Skid,
They work especially well for the Israelis. They insisted that if they were going to buy -35s, then it would be their avionics and other critical systems in the planes, or no deal. Israeli participation in the -35 program was something that had to happen, so DOD quietly authorized it.
[LawEnforcementToday] A Wednesday report revealed that The Cuyahoga County Division of Children and Family Services (DCFS) has created and maintains a "confidential spreadsheet" for tracking the sexual orientation and "transgender identity" of children, some as young as five years old.
As reported by The Daily Caller News Foundation, the troubling database was created by Cuyahoga DCFS with emails detailing that the agency "worked closely with the Biden-Harris administration to influence and 'imbed' their work into new federal regulations requiring child welfare systems to validate the gender confusion of children."
[NYP] Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman opened up about the state of the presidential race in his key battleground state and called former President Trump’s support there "astonishing" while predicting that Elon Musk’s endorsement is "going to really matter."
"There’s a difference between not understanding, but also acknowledging that it exists," Fetterman told the New York Times in an interview published Saturday morning when asked about enthusiasm for Trump in Pennsylvania. "And anybody who spends time driving around, and you can see the intensity. It’s astonishing."
Fetterman continued, "I was doing an event in Indiana County. Very, very red. And there was a superstore of Trump stuff, and it was a hundred feet long. [There were] dozens of T-shirts and hats and bumper stickers and all kinds of, I mean, it’s like, Where does this all come from? It’s the kind of thing that has taken on its own life. And it’s like something very special exists there. And that doesn’t mean that I admire it. It’s just — it’s real."
[MAIL] Democrats are spending another week wondering if Kamala Harris has let her momentum in the 2024 race completely slip away.
A murderer's row of bad PR for the Harris campaign this week featured continued tanking in the polls, a widely panned CNN town hall, Donald Trump beating her to the Joe Rogan bump and even fellow Democrats slamming her rhetoric.
Harris now trails Trump in the polling average in the crucial swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to Real Clear Politics.
Fear is now gripping Harris' campaign and the 'vibes' are draining away as prominent Democratic lawmakers, as well as the liberal media, have been forced to publicly acknowledge the campaign is faltering at the final hurdle.
One Democratic strategist admitted to The Hill: 'Yes, it's close, but are things trending our way? No. And no one wants to openly admit that. Could we still win? Maybe. Should anyone be even slightly optimistic right now? No.'
While some noted that Harris is taking risks like partnering with Liz Cheney and holding rallies in red Texas in the waning weeks of the campaign, another strategist put it bluntly: 'If this is a vibe election, the current vibes ain't great.'
"Mr. Buffett does not currently and will not prospectively endorse investment products or endorse and support political candidates," reads a statement posted on Berkshire Hathaway's website this week in response to fraudulent claims on social media about the investor.
The Berkshire CEO's reticence may seem surprising as he's previously thrown his weight behind Democratic presidential candidates. He organized fundraisers for Barack Obama in 2011 and stumped for Hillary Clinton in 2016, even walking on stage at a rally to hammer Donald Trump over his bankrupt businesses, reluctance to publish his tax returns, and rude treatment of others.
Posted by: Frank G ||
10/27/2024 8:33
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#5
Her momentum did not 'slip away'. It ran away screaming.
Snark O'The Day
Posted by: ed in texas ||
10/27/2024 8:40
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#6
Never was any. It was all Media Hype that failed to catch on, because it was so obvious she is not even equal to Biden mentally.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
10/27/2024 10:26
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#8
^ Heh
Posted by: Frank G ||
10/27/2024 11:47
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#9
If Obama butt sniffers like Axelrod and Jones are publicly sticking lances into her like Picadors at a bullfight it just tells me that he wants to sink her to set Moochle up for 2028.
At which time she'll be old news, but Obama hope springs eternal.
It allows the former president to continue as the Wise Elder in the anti-Trump smoky back rooms for the next four years. I firmly believe Mrs. Obama will never seriously run for president.
[Federalist] There has been no shortage of government plans purported to make houses more affordable in America, including most recently a $25,000 government subsidy to select first-time buyers proposed by Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. However, recent reports argue that the government itself has played a pivotal role in putting houses out of the financial reach of many middle-class buyers.
"We are short, depending on who you ask, between 4 and 7 million homes nationwide, and we’re building fewer homes than we were back in the 1970s," James Burling, a property rights attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation and author of "Nowhere to Live: The Hidden Story of America’s Housing Crisis," said. "Part of the problem is that government is making it difficult to build."
[Peter Schiff] On this week’s episode, Peter covered a record setting week for gold and a stellar week for silver. With the metals nearly cresting $2800 and $35, respectively, Peter sees this price action as confirmation that the Fed’s recent rate cuts are a mistake. Politicians may love inflation, and the media is oblivious, but the metals markets know that America’s economic trajectory is unsustainable.
#2
Who's your local reliable gold assayer? Trying to use a coin or a bar is like trying to use a high value bill which are usually not accepted in basically low transactions. You sure who ever you are dealing with can make viable change and in what medium?
#6
Wine, bourbon, ammunition and single serving prepper meals are low end transaction alternatives. Just watch you six after the trade and practice basic SDR "dry cleaning". As a good friend and former SF Officer once said, I'm not a prepper because I know where you live!
Surveillance Detection Routes (SDRs)
"A Surveillance Detection Route (SDR) is a planned path designed to expose potential surveillance. An SDR includes multiple turns, stops, and changes in speed to encourage any surveillance to reveal itself. If the same individual or vehicle is spotted multiple times during the route, it might indicate surveillance."
[GEO.TV] Two soldiers were killed in Saturday morning's Israeli airstrikes on Iran, the official news agency IRNA reported.
"The army of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in defending Iran's security and protecting the people and Iran's interests, sacrificed two of its fighters while countering projectiles from the criminal Zionist regime," the statement said.
[GEO.TV] Israeli forces withdrew from a hospital complex in northern Gaza on Saturday, one day after storming it, and the Palestinian enclave's health ministry said the troops had detained dozens of male medical staffers and some of the patients.
Health officials said on Friday Israeli forces had stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of three medical facilities struggling to operate in the area.
The military says the airstrike on the former Saleh a-Din School compound was “precise” and intelligence-based, targeting a site used by the Palestinian terror group to “plan and carry out terror actions against IDF forces and the State of Israel.”
It adds that it took many steps to mitigate harm to civilians, including using precise munitions, aerial observation and more.
The army once again accuses Hamas of violating international law by placing its assets in civilian areas and compounds.
They need room for the tens of thousands heading south from Jabaliya.
[IsraelTimes] The IDF says it has expanded the designated “humanitarian zone” in southern Gaza, where the vast majority of the Palestinian population in the Strip currently resides.
The zone is where most humanitarian aid is directed, and where several field hospitals were established.
The size of the zone has changed multiple times, amid evolving IDF operations against the Hamas terror group.
“The expanded Humanitarian Area includes field hospitals that have been established since the start of the war, tent compounds, and shelter equipment, as well as food, water, medicine, and medical equipment that has entered Gaza through coordination between COGAT and the international community,” the IDF says in a statement.
“The IDF will continue to operate to achieve the war objectives, including dismantling Hamas and returning all the hostages,” it adds.
Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin:
[ColonelCassad] Just for the record.
Thanks to the General Staff strategy, skillful command in a number of areas, improved tactics of assault operations and active work of the military-industrial complex, we have moved from a situation with the liberation of several hundred square meters per day in 2023 to several tens of square kilometers per day in the fall of 2024.
A significant difference.
This does not mean that there are no problems with equipping troops, organizing assault operations or actions at the operational level. Of course, they do. But they were also in 2022 and 2023. The dynamics of solving these problems is important here.
Everything is known in comparison and in comparison with what was observed in 2023. This is a fairly serious indicator of the efforts that the state is making to improve the overall effectiveness of military operations. And these efforts are now more than visible, when we have moved from battles from the "forester's hut" to the systematic liberation of populated areas and our territory.
But there is still a long way to go before our military victory, which requires further efforts to improve our army and increase the momentum of our military-industrial complex. Complacency and relaxation in the face of obvious successes are as dangerous as underestimating the enemy (primarily those forces that stand behind Ukraine) and boasting. So the consolidated efforts of the state, army, military-industrial complex and society must be aimed at strengthening the positive trends for us and eliminating objective shortcomings - only in this way will our common victory be achieved. Ultimately, we must do the work so that we are not ashamed before our ancestors.
[X]
French journalist Georges Malbrunot has revealed alleged dealings between French President Emmanuel Macron and Hezbollah, involving a billion-dollar contract awarded to businessman Rodolphe Saadé to rebuild Beirut's port after the 2020 blast.
Malbrunot claims that in exchange for Macron's silence on Hezbollah's weapons, Saadé, who owns CMA-CGM and BFM TV, secured the contract tax-free. This arrangement reportedly followed a meeting between Macron and Hezbollah leaders, marking a rare interaction between a Western head of state and the group.
The deal has fueled recent tensions between France and Israel, with Macron openly condemning Israeli actions in Lebanon and Gaza. France has even called for an arms embargo against Israel and pledged $100 million in aid to Lebanon.
Israeli officials, like Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, have criticized Macron’s stance as contrary to French values, calling it a "disgrace." Macron previously dismissed Malbrunot's report as "irresponsible," yet recent developments seem to affirm its accuracy, raising questions about France’s foreign policy in the Middle East and its ties to Hezbollah.
[MSN-CenterSquare] Some Arab- and Muslin-American leaders endorsed Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump ...They hit him with slander, they impeached him twice. Nancy Pelosi tore up his State of the Union address on national TV. They stole an election and put his adherents in jail. They vilified him. They couldn't crucify him, so they shot him. Still, they can't keep him down... during a campaign rally Saturday in Novi, Michigan.
The endorsements are notable in the key swing state that is home to more than 200,000 Moslem-American voters. According to RealClearPolitics' polling average, Trump holds the narrowest of leads over Harris in Michigan, 47.9% to 47.7%.
"We're winning overwhelming support from the Moslem and Arab voters right here in Michigan," Trump told the crowd.
That support from Moslem leaders includes Hamtramck Mayor Amer Ghalib and Dearborn Heights Mayor Bill Bazzi, as well as Imam Belal Alzuhairi.
Saturday's rally occurred less than 24 hours after Israel struck Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... with strategically targeted missiles the night before. The ongoing turmoil in the Middle East was among the reasons the Moslem and Arab leaders cited in their endorsement of the former president.
"We are supporting Donald Trump because he promised to end war in the Middle East and Ukraine," Alzuhairi said. "The bloodshed has to stop all over the world, and I think this man can make that happen."
Alzuhairi added, "I personally believe that God saved his life twice for a reason," referring to the two unsuccessful liquidation attempts against Trump's life.
Two recent polls indicate that many Arab- and Moslem-Americans, traditionally voting blocs for Democrats ...every time you hear the phrase white people, white supremacy,white anything but paint, you're listening to a Democrat. Ask him/her/it to reimagine something for you; they do that a lot, though not well. They can hear a dog whistle a mile or two away. They invented the spoils system and Tammany Hall, and inspired the addition of the word (Thomas) Nasty to the English language. They want to stop continental drift and repeal the law of unintended side effects... . are drifting away from Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris What can be, unburdened by what has been as the Biden-Harris administration struggles to balance U.S. support for Israel with appeasing a significant anti-Israel faction within the Democratic Party.
In one poll of 500 Arab American registered voters conducted by The Arab American Institute, Trump and Harris were nearly split, 42-41%, a drop in support from the level Democrats received in 2020, as The Center Square previously reported.
In the other conducted in late August, The Council on American-Islamic Relations ... the Moslem Brüderbund's American arm ... (CAIR) released a poll showing American Moslem voters supporting Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and Harris equally, at 29% each, with Trump at 12%. In Michigan, the poll found that 40% of Moslem voters support Stein, 18% support Trump, and just 12% support Harris.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Korrespondent] 15:41 By Monday, October 28, 5,000 North Korean soldiers will be transferred to the Kursk region, The New York Times reports, citing a high-ranking Ukrainian official. According to him, the soldiers are part of an elite unit of the Korean People's Army. They will be delivered from Vladivostok by Il-76 transport planes to a military airfield in the European part of Russia, and then sent to the combat zone.
The official also said that there were mixed signals about whether additional North Korean troops would be sent to participate in the fighting on Ukrainian territory. They are currently concentrated only in the Kursk region.
Meanwhile, the first secretary of the DPRK mission to the UN, Il Ha Kim, denied the transfer of Korean troops to Russia. He claims that these accusations against Pyongyang are "dirty maneuvers by the US and its allies to mask their own crimes and prolong the conflict in Ukraine."
October 25
14:40 The Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense intercepted conversations between servicemen of the 810th separate marine brigade of the 18th army of the Southern Military District of the Russian Armed Forces, which is participating in combat operations in the Kursk direction. In the intercepts, the Russians discuss preparations for the reception and distribution of DPRK servicemen (code name - battalion "K").
To organize interaction, it is planned to assign one translator and three Russian servicemen to every 30 servicemen from North Korea. However, the Russians themselves express doubts about the possibility of providing the newly arrived with Russian command staff.
14:33 Soldiers of the 44th Separate Artillery Brigade showed how they wrote the radio dictation of national unity in Sudzha:
14:28 Syrsky denied Putin's statement about the alleged encirclement of Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region. The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine called this "blatant disinformation that does not reflect the real situation." According to Syrsky, Ukrainian troops continue active operations in the Kursk direction, destroying the enemy's combat potential for the third month in a row.
According to the Commander-in-Chief, from August 8 to the present, Russian troops in the Kursk region have lost 17,819 people, of which 6,662 were irretrievable losses, 10,446 were medical losses, and 711 were captured. During this period, the Russian army also lost 45 tanks, 256 armored combat vehicles, 565 vehicles, 99 artillery systems, and five multiple launch rocket systems.
13:04 Zelensky reported that he had heard Syrsky's report, including on the progress of the Kursk operation: "We are implementing our tasks. The buffer zone on Russian territory protects Ukraine from Russian attempts to expand the war in the east of our country and ensures tangible Russian losses. The Commander-in-Chief reported on the fulfillment of tasks by our units in certain areas of the Kursk region."
10:31 The American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reports, citing geolocation footage, that the Ukrainian Armed Forces have advanced in the Kursk region, in particular to the southeast of Korenevo as part of the main "Ukrainian bridgehead." Geolocation footage indicates successes by the Ukrainian army along the Snagost River north of Darino. The Ukrainian Armed Forces also hold positions in Darino and Nikolayevo-Daryino.
09:00 The General Staff showed the "road of death" in the Kursk region - "a path paved with destroyed enemy equipment, a burnt-out trail left by the enemy when he suffered defeat." The 155th Marine Brigade of the Russian Armed Forces suffered the greatest losses of equipment.
[Metro] Mutant sharks. White sand laced with plutonium. Water tainted with strontium. Hub cap-sized hermit crabs eating coconuts containing caesium. A dome ‘coffin’ crammed with radioactive material in plastic bags.
The Marshall Islands, a ring of coral reefs in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, looks like the perfect place to throw on a floppy sun hat and read a book below swaying palm trees.
But in the 1940s and ’50s, the US used two of the far-flung atolls, Bikini and Enewetak, to test out 67 nuclear bombs.
One was 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, according to Hibakusha Worldwide, which tracks nuclear incidents.
This was part of Operation Crossroad, an atomic testing programme that came out of the anxiety of the Cold War.
With 52,000 Marshallese people calling the islands home at the time, the 20 islands are the remnants of ancient volcanoes halfway between Hawaii and Australia.
Yet entire islands were vaporized and craters gouged into its shallow lagoons, forcing hundreds of people out of their homes, never to return.
Bikini Atoll now has such a reputation for groovy wildlife it inspired the setting of Spongebob Squarepants.
While the islands are unlikely home to talking sponges, the radiation that lingers in its waters is impacting the wildlife.
Nurse sharks with just one dorsal fin swim around the Bikini Atoll and car-sized coral grows along the seafloor.
‘Popular belief is that radiation causes mutations, and you know what, it’s true,’ Steve Palumbi, a professor of marine sciences also at Stanford, told The Sun.
Even low levels of radiation can cause genetic mutations. Caesium, strontium and other radioactive isotopes break apart DNA, compressing thousands of years of evolution into a few decades in what one paper once described as ‘unnatural selection‘.
Marine life is on the rebound in Bikini. ‘The fact there is life there and the life there is trying to come back from the most violent thing we’ve ever done to it is pretty hopeful,’ said Steve Palumbi, a professor in marine sciences at Stamford University.
The water, though, remains undrinkable and sealife and plants cannot be eaten due to the radioactive water and soil.
People living on nearby islands, now part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, during and after the testing show a higher risk of developing cancer – not one of the top two causes of death – and birth defects.
The list of woes for the Marshallese does not end there, with rising sea levels fuelled by climate change slowly swallowing up the habitable atolls.
The largest nuclear detonation was the hydrogen bomb Castle Bravo, fired on March 1, 1954, in Bikini. As the mushroom-shaped clast cast a shadow over the island, the radioactive fallout and debris spewed well beyond the shorelines.
‘Traces of radioactive material were later found in parts of Japan, India, Australia, Europe, and the US,’ says the Atomic Heritage Foundation.
‘This was the worst radiological disaster in US history and caused worldwide backlash against atmospheric nuclear testing.’
Bikini, the colonial spelling of Pikinni, became so radioactive there’s little hope it’ll ever be habitable.
After the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 put an end to atmospheric nuclear testing, this left American officials – and the islands’ displaced citizens – with one option: wait.
The Defence Department concluded in the ’70s that the soil was so contained with cesium-137 and strontium-90 – both taking about three decades to decay, called a half-life – that the best course of action was to just let it rot.
Plutonium-239, however, takes a little longer; 24,000 years. The US dumped 437 plastic bags filled with lumps of plutonium that had spewed after a bomb misfired into a 33-foot crater left behind in 1958 by a nuke on Runit Island.
That, and about 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of radioactive soil and nuclear waste.
The crater was plugged up by a 350-foot-wide slab of concrete called the Rumit Dome, which locals call ‘The Tomb’, in the ’70s. The dome almost looks like something from a science fiction movie, surrounded by a tropical paradise.
And the dome is leaking. ‘The dome is a significant visible scar on the landscape,’ Ken Buesseler, a marine radioactivity expert at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), told Oceans magazine in 2020.
‘But it’s a relatively small source of radioactivity.’
Overall, more than half of the 167 original inhabitants of Bikini Atoll have died. Some started showing cancers related to radiation exposure in the 1960s, while people living downwind of the explosions suffered burns and low blood counts.
Several generations later, about 5,400 Bikinians are still living in exile. Some live on a lone Pacific island called Kili, roughly 400 miles from Bikini, and others from Honolulu to the ‘Wheat Capital’ of Oklahoma, Enid.
Bikini Atoll largely remains uninhabited, with a tiny caretaker team taking care of the island infrastructure and divers pop in from time to time.
Bikinians continue to fight, however. Lobbying the US Congress for money to redevelop and clean up the place they once called home.
Scientists are hopeful. Remediation efforts include sprinkling affected areas with potassium fertilizer which reduces how much cesium-137 seeps into locally grown crops. How radioactive the soil is has also been decreasing.
The Marshall Islands Program advises that, once resettlement finally begins, a radiation monitoring programme be set up.
‘In this way, the Kili-Bikini-Ejit Local Government and the people of Bikini can be assured that radiological conditions on the islands remain at or below applicable safety standards, and the United States Government can avoid mistakes of the past,’ the programme says.
#1
"sea levels fuelled by climate change slowly swallowing up"
Very slowly. And occaisonally spit them back up.
With Cesium and Strontium laying around, I'll pass.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
10/27/2024 8:31
Comments ||
Top||
#2
How fast are the islands sinking?
Posted by: James ||
10/27/2024 15:44
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[FoxNews] Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said the suspects are facing numerous charges, including armed robbery and grand theft.
More than 100 people, including at least 41 illegal immigrants, have been arrested in Florida for allegedly looting and scamming victims of hurricanes Helene and Milton, local law enforcement officials said.
Looting patrols in Pinellas County over the last three weeks rounded up 45 suspects on 68 charges that included armed robbery, burglary, loitering and prowling, grand theft, vandalism and trespassing, according to Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri.
"They’re going into people's homes, they’re taking stuff, they’re rummaging through their things," Gualtieri said.
Another 58 suspects were arrested in an operation allegedly targeting unlicensed contractors. Gualtieri said their scams mostly involved billing victims a total of $250 million for repairs they never intended to do.
"This is the epitome of people trying to exploit others when they’re down and when they’re out, and they’re trying to rebuild and they’ve got nothing," Gualtieri said.
Of the 45 suspects arrested by anti-looting patrols across the Pinellas County barrier islands, at least 41 of the suspects are illegal immigrants, Gualtieri said at a press conference Thursday. He said nearly all of the suspects were from South America or Central America.
The sheriff added that his office had contact with 196 other individuals who were in beach neighborhoods where they did not belong, but that officers did not have probable cause to arrest them. Of those, 163 were found to be illegal immigrants, he said.
"So, we made contact with them and told them to get out," Gualtieri said. "We’ve never seen anything of this magnitude before. We’ve never seen this influx of people from out of the area that are clearly just here to steal and to pilfer and to do bad things and to target these vulnerable people."
Gualtieri said nearly all of those arrested during the three-week operation had extensive criminal records.
A Kilometer-Long Tunnel Complex discovered in Southern Lebanon, which would have been used by Hezbollah’s Elite “Radwan Force” for an Invasion of Northern Israel, was Destroyed this morning by Israeli Combat Engineers using over 400 Tons of Explosives. The Explosion was so… pic.twitter.com/pqZ2ftxOoZ
The rest of the Saturday’s adventures in Hezbollahland.
[IsraelTimes] Footage shows controlled explosion in southern Lebanon that triggered earthquake alerts in northern Israel; Israeli jets strike Hezbollah weapons and command sites in Beirut
Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets at northern Israel while Israel’s air defenses shot down four drones launched from Leb ...an Iranian satrapy until recently ruled by Hassan Nasrallah situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozen flavors of Christians, plus Armenians, Georgians, and who knows what else? It is the home of the original Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers... by the Iran-backed terror group on Saturday. The hostile aircraft triggered air raid sirens in the Upper and Western Galilee as well as the northern border cities and towns of Kiryat Shmona, Metula and Tel Hai, but no injuries were reported.
In a statement, Hezbollah claimed it launched a drone attack against the Tel Nof air force base, south of Tel Aviv.
In addition to the drones, Hezbollah fired some 200 rockets at northern Israel throughout the day. In one of the barrages, 15 rockets were launched from Lebanon at the Western Galilee, with some intercepted while the rest hit open areas, the IDF said. There were no reports of injuries from the rocket fire, which sparked fires at several locations in the north.
The attacks on the north came as the army pressed on with operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Footage posted on social media showed a massive IDF explosion in southern Lebanon Saturday morning, which triggered earthquake alerts across northern Israel. The blast was from the detonation of a Hezbollah tunnel.
The IDF also said Saturday that troops with the 91st Division seized four truck-mounted rocket launchers during operations in southern Lebanon this week. According to the military, the launchers were loaded with some 160 rockets.
Separately, around 130 Hezbollah launchers were struck by the Israeli Air Force in the past week, the IDF says. The launchers included those used to fire rockets at Israel, including in Friday’s attack on Majd al-Krum that killed two residents of the northern Arab town.
Overnight, Israeli fighter jets struck Hezbollah targets in Beirut. According to the IDF, the targets included weapons manufacturing sites, a command room belonging to Hezbollah’s intelligence division, and surveillance equipment. The Hezbollah assets were all located in civilian buildings in Beirut’s southern suburb, according to the IDF. Before the strike, the military issued evacuation warnings to civilians.
Separately, the IDF said a cell of Hezbollah operatives who launched a missile at an IDF drone in southern Lebanon Friday were killed in a dronezap a short while later. The drone flying over Kfar Fila was not hit in the incident, according to the IDF.
Lebanon’s health ministry reported that a Hezbollah-affiliated paramedic was killed in an Israeli strike on a medical center in southern Lebanon, which left five others maimed, three of them also members of the Islamic Health Committee.
The IDF estimates that more than 2,000 Hezbollah operatives have been killed in the conflict. Around 100 members of other terror groups, along with hundreds of civilians, have also been reported killed in Lebanon.
There is currently no confirmed report from the New York Times or other major outlets verifying that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is terminally ill or that there is an ongoing internal struggle over his succession. While Khamenei’s potential successors have been a topic of analysis, particularly following the recent death of a leading candidate, Ebrahim Raisi, this succession conversation has been speculative, focusing largely on Raisi and Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, as likely candidates.
Following Raisi’s death in May 2024, there has indeed been increased discussion and speculation about who might succeed Khamenei due to his advanced age, but no official statements have suggested that Khamenei is in critical health or that succession has officially commenced.
If new developments occur, they would likely receive significant coverage from reliable news sources.
more from the NY Times: Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, aged 85, is reportedly seriously ill.
His second oldest son, Mojtaba Khamenei, likely to succeed him when he dies.
J-POST on the story: The report noted that Khamenei's serious medical condition created a "quiet battle" over his succession. It also stated that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps would have a say in who would become the Ayatollah's successor....
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[KavkazUzel] There are 27 criminal cases in the courts of Kuban and Staropolye regarding the riots in Makhachkala against 129 defendants; trials have already begun in nine cases.
As reported by "Kavkazsky Uzel", the Aleksandrovsky Court of Stavropol Krai began to consider the case of four residents of Dagestan accused of involvement in the riots at the Makhachkala airport. On October 11, the Stavropol prosecutor's office reported the first court hearing in the Georgievsky City Court in the case of four residents of Dagestan accused of involvement in the riots at the Makhachkala airport; on October 18, this court began to consider the case against five more defendants. In Stavropol Krai, the cases of eight defendants are being considered by the Grachevsky Court, five by the Andropovsky District Court, and five by the Kirovsky District Court. On October 18, the head of the Investigative Committee of Russia, Aleksandr Bastrykin, reported that investigators had seized more than three thousand video files from surveillance cameras in the case of the riots at the Makhachkala airport; the recordings were used to identify more than 400 people.
The Armavir City Court sentenced the defendants in the case of the riots at the Makhachkala airport Anvarbek Atayev, Islam Ibragimov, Magomed Omaraskhabov, Rabadan Radzhabov and Salik Ramazanov to terms ranging from six years, four months to nine years. The court issued a harsh sentence without evidence of the defendants' guilt, the lawyers and relatives of the convicted stated. The defense appealed the sentence. The Ust-Labinsk and Novokubansk courts of the Krasnodar Territory also began hearing the cases of the riots at the Makhachkala airport.
Courts in the Krasnodar and Stavropol Territories are to issue verdicts in 27 criminal cases against 129 defendants who "on October 29, 2023, at the Uytash airport, motivated by national and religious hatred and hostility towards Israeli citizens (...) took part in mass riots accompanied by violence and destruction of property," the Russian Prosecutor General's Office reported.
"In Stavropol Krai, hearings are currently underway on seven criminal cases involving 37 individuals, and in Krasnodar Krai, trials will soon be held on two criminal cases involving 14 residents of Dagestan," reads a statement published on the website of the Prosecutor General's Office on October 25.
The agency added that three of the organizers of the riots are on the federal wanted list.
140 people are in custody in criminal cases related to the riots at Uytash airport, 1,200 people have been brought to administrative responsibility, Dagestan Interior Minister Abdurashid Magomedov reported on July 9. The accused claim that they were at the airport but did not take part in the riots, Dagestan POC Chairman Shamil Khadulaev said on June 13.
On February 17, relatives of those involved in the riots at Makhachkala airport appealed to Putin with a request for leniency.
What happened at Uytash airport and how the investigation is proceeding is described in the "Caucasian Knot" report "The Case of the Pogrom at Makhachkala Airport."
Let us recall that from October 26 to 29, 2023, mass anti-Semitic actions took place in three republics of the North Caucasus. In Cherkessk, the protesters demanded that visitors from Israel not be allowed in, and in Nalchik, a cultural center was set on fire.
Article Linked Is Available Only Via VPN.
[EngMilRu] The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation continue the special military operation.
In Kharkov direction, units of the Sever Group of Forces inflicted losses on formations of the 31st Mechanised Brigade and 57th Motorised Infantry Brigade of the AFU near Liptsy and Goptovka (Kharkov region). The AFU losses amounted to up to 40 troops and three motor vehicles.
Units of the Zapad Group of Forces improved the tactical situation. Losses were inflicted on manpower and hardware of the 53rd, 60th Mechanised brigades, 95th Air Assault Brigade, 3rd Assault Brigade of the AFU, and 107th Territorial Defence Brigade near Donetskoye, Borovaya (Kharkov region), Petrovskoye (Lugansk People's Republic), and Serebryansky forestry. One counter-attack launched by an AFU assault detachment was repelled.
The AFU losses amounted to more than 510 troops, five pickup trucks, two U.S.-made 105mm M-119 guns, and two Bukovel-AD and Anklav electronic warfare stations. Four AFU field ammunition depots were destroyed.
As a result of successful offensive operations, units of the Yug Group of Forces liberated Aleksandropol (Donetsk People's Republic).
Losses were inflicted on formations of the 23rd, 54th Mechanised brigades, 3rd, 10th Assault brigades, 79th Air Assault Brigade, 46th Airmobile Brigade of the AFU, and 37th Naval Infantry Brigade near Chasov Yar, Zvanovka, Seversk, Dachnoye, Vesely Gay, and Kurakhovo (Donetsk People's Republic). One counter-attack launched by an AFU assault detachment was repelled.
The AFU losses amounted to more than 740 troops, two armoured fighting vehicles, four motor vehicles, one 152mm D-20 gun, one 122mm D-30 howitzer, one U.S.-made 105mm M-119 gun, and one UK-made 105mm L-119 gun. One AFU ammunition depot was destroyed.
Units of the Tsentr Group of Forces continued advancing to the depth of the enemy's defences. Losses were inflicted on manpower and hardware of the 100th Mechanised Brigade of the AFU, 119th Territorial Defence Brigade, and 12th National Guard Brigade near Shcherbinovka, Dzerzhinsk, Berestki, and Kleban-Byk (Donetsk People's Republic). Six counter-attacks launched by AFU assault detachments were repelled.
The AFU losses amounted to up to 545 troops, two armoured fighting vehicles, three motor vehicles, one 152mm Msta-B howitzer, one 152mm D-20 gun, and one 100mm Rapira anti-tank gun.
Units of the Vostok Group of Forces improved the tactical situation along the front line and inflicted losses on manpower and hardware of the 72nd Mechanised Brigade and 58th Motorised Infantry Brigade of the AFU near Trudovoye and Dobrovolye (Donetsk People's Republic).
The AFU losses amounted to up to 120 troops, two armoured fighting vehicles, nine motor vehicles, one U.S-made 155mm M-198 howitzer, and one French-made CAESAR 155mm howitzer.
Units of the Dnepr Group of Forces inflicted losses on formations of the 65th Mechanised Brigade of the AFU and 15th National Guard Brigade near Rabotino and Malaya Tokmachka (Zaporozhye region).
The AFU losses amounted to up to 80 troops, two motor vehicles, and one 152mm D-20 gun. One AFU ammunition depot was destroyed.
Operational-Tactical Aviation, attack unmanned aerial vehicles, Missile Troops and Artillery of the Russian Groups of Forces delivered strikes at infrastructure of military airfields, attack UAV depots, as well as engaged the AFU clusters of manpower and military hardware in 149 areas.
Air defence units shot down two French-made Hammer guided aerial bombs, four U.S.-made HIMARS MLRS projectiles, and 25 fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles.
In total, since the beginning of the special military operation, 647 aircraft, 283 helicopters, 34,329 unmanned aerial vehicles, 584 anti-aircraft missile systems, 18,877 tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles, 1,480 MLRS combat vehicles, 16,773 field artillery guns and mortars, and 27,624 units of support military vehicles have been neutralised.
The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation continue the operation to neutralise an enemy group, which broke into the territory of Kursk region.
Units of the Sever Group of Forces continued offensive actions and inflicted losses on formations of the 22nd, 41st, 115th Mechanised brigades, 17th Tank Brigade, 82nd, 95th Air Assault brigades, 36th Naval Infantry Brigade, 112th and 129th Territorial Defence brigades of the AFU near Daryino, Zeleny Shlyakh, Nizhny Klin, Nikolayevo-Daryino, Novoivanovka, and Plyokhovo.
Units of the Sever Group of Forces repelled four enemy counter-attacks in the direction of Kamyshovka, Novoivanovka, and Pogrebki. The AFU losses amounted to up to 30 troops killed and wounded and five armoured fighting vehicles. Seven AFU servicemen surrendered.
Moreover, an attempt of the AFU to break through the state border of the Russian Federation in the direction of Novy Put was foiled. The AFU losses amounted to up to 10 troops killed and wounded and one Swedish-made CV-90 infantry fighting vehicle. One AFU serviceman surrendered.
Army Aviation and artillery fire inflicted losses on manpower and hardware of the 21st, 22nd, 41st, 47th, 61st, 115th Mechanised brigades, 17th Tank Brigade, 80th, 82nd, 95th Air Assault brigades, 36th Naval Infantry Brigade, 103rd, 112th, 129th Territorial Defence brigades of the AFU, 17th National Guard Brigade near Aleksandriya, Viktorovka, Gogolevka, Guyevo, Daryino, Zamostye, Zeleny Shlyakh, Kazachaya Loknya, Kolmakov, Kurilovka, Lebedevka, Malaya Loknya, Martynovka, Mirny, Nizhny Klin, Nikolayevo-Daryino, Nikolsky, Novoivanovka, Plyokhovo, Pravda, Sverdlikovo, Sudzha, and Cherkasskoye Porechnoye.
Operational-Tactical Aviation and Missile Troops delivered strikes at concentration areas in Sumy region and reserves of the 41st, 61st, 115th Mechanised brigades, 95th Air Assault Brigade, 1004th Security and Service Brigade, 103rd, 107th, 129th Territorial Defence brigades of the AFU, and 1st National Guard Brigade near Alekseyevka, Basovka, Vladimirovka, Zhuravka, Miropolye, and Pavlovka.
Over the past 24 hours, the AFU losses amounted to more than 350 troops and 14 units of armoured hardware, namely, four infantry fighting vehicles, including one Swedish-made CV-90 infantry fighting vehicle, 10 armoured fighting vehicles as well as two U.S.-made HIMARS MLRS launchers and two transport-loading vehicles, three mortars, and six motor vehicles. Eight AFU servicemen surrendered.
Since the beginning of hostilities in Kursk region, the AFU losses amounted to more than 26,900 servicemen, 177 tanks, 97 infantry fighting vehicles, 105 armoured personnel carriers, 1,013 armoured fighting vehicles, 692 motor vehicles, 229 artillery guns, 40 multiple rocket launchers, including 11 of HIMARS and six of MLRS made by the USA, nine anti-aircraft missile launchers, seven transport and loading vehicles, 57 EW stations, 11 counter-battery warfare radars, three air defence radars, 22 pieces of engineering and other equipment, including 13 counterobstacle vehicles, one UR-77 mine clearing vehicle, and three armoured recovery vehicles.
The operation to neutralise the AFU units is in progress.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[NewsFront] 22:09 In Sumy inflicted a strike on a military convoy carrying foreign instructors. 21:37 Situation in the village of Selidovo:
The E-50 highway to the fork in Pokrovsk is under heavy fire. The highway to Vishnevoye is also under fire from Russian troops.
City limits: there are reports from various sources that the Russian Armed Forces are already checking the ID cards and documents of local residents in the city (an indication that the enemy has been pushed back). The only place where the enemy can still gather in small groups is the western one-story buildings on the outskirts of the city (again, the enemy is unlikely to be able to hold out there for more than a day, and there is no point in doing so).
R/n south of Selidovo, settlements Novodmitrovka, Vishnevo and Novoalekseyevka. In Vishnevoe they took more than half of the settlement, in the coming days the enemy may retreat. In Novodmitrovka they advanced from the eastern part. There is also an offensive on Novoalekseyevka.
19:54 The Russian army is approximately seven7 km from the village of Sontsovka in the Krasnoarmeysky direction.
19:05 Repeated strikes are carried out on Ukrainian Armed Forces facilities in Odessa.
18:47 Explosions in Odessa. Before this, there were reports of rockets in the direction of the city.
18:44 Crew of the T-80BVM tank of the separate guards motorized rifle brigade of the "Southern" group of forcesdestroyedmortar and enemy manpower in the Donetsk direction.
The tank crews moved to a pre-prepared firing position and fired at a distance of nine kilometers from the target. Thanks to good air fire adjustment using UAVs, the tank crews managed to destroy the nationalists' crew and gun.
18:30 The Russian army has broken through to Bogoyavlenka and is taking the village beyond Ugledar in a pincer movement, the Telegram channel “Voenkors Russkoy Vesny” reported.
In the South Donetsk direction, northeast of Ugledar, Russian troops have broken through to the important settlement of Bogoyavlenka, are storming it and bypassing it from the west, threatening encirclement.
18:09 Calculation of the 122mm BM-21 MLRS "Grad" of the "West" group destroyed equipment and manpower of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Kupyansk direction.
15:57 Continues advance The Russian Armed Forces Selidovo. The city is gradually coming under our control. Not much time left.
In the Svatovo-Kupyansk direction, the Russian Armed Forces are clearing Kruglyakovka after cutting the enemy's bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Oskol into two parts.
14:58 Su-25 attack aircraft of the Russian Aerospace Forces destroyed camouflaged armored vehicles and personnel of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the border areas of the Kursk region
14:15 Servicemen of the North group of troops destroyed self-propelled artillery unit of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with a loitering munition "Lancet" in the border area of the Kursk region
Aerial reconnaissance detected a camouflaged position of a self-propelled artillery unit of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in a forest belt. After analyzing the received intelligence and refining the coordinates, a decision was made to fire on the enemy's self-propelled artillery unit. The detected target was successfully hit with a direct hit from a Lancet loitering munition.
13:54 Results of night strikes on enemy targets on Ukrainian territory analyzed Donbass Partisan:
On the night of October 25-26, 2024, the Russian Armed Forces struck key infrastructure facilities and temporary deployment points of the enemy in various regions of Ukraine, using UAVs and OTRKs. The main targets were logistics hubs, military facilities and positions of foreign specialists.
Kyiv: the territory of the Kuznitsa na Rybalskom plant was hit by attack drones. According to preliminary data, the damage is minor and affected peripheral buildings, but not the main production workshops of the enterprise.
Sumy: Two missiles hit the territory of the Sumy-Tovarnaya railway station, one of the key logistics hubs providing supplies of weapons and ammunition to the Kursk region.
Vyazovoe, Sumy region: missile strikes hit the territory of the agricultural company "STS" (part of the TRANS TRADE Group). The company was used as a logistics point for the placement of freight vehicles and the distribution of weapons.
Dnepropetrovsk: Iskander-M missiles hit areas near the I. I. Mechnikov Regional Clinical Hospital. It is possible that the target of the strike was the institution itself, since its individual buildings function as one of the main hospitals for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Irpen, Kiev region: A strike drone strike hit the territory of the Foreign Legion training camp, which was located on the territory of one of the health facilities.
Starokostiantyniv, Khmelnytskyi region: The hotel "Sluch", where foreign instructors from France were staying, was hit by a strike drone raid. This strike was a continuation of the operation to neutralize the centers for coordination and training of Ukrainian Armed Forces servicemen by foreign specialists.
13:15 The Russian flag was raised over the mining technical school in Selidovo –photo.
12:50 Units of the Russian Armed Forcesare developingsuccess in several areas of the Krasno-Limansky direction. In the northern part of the settlement of Terny, where aviation had previously been active, Russian forces were able to gain a foothold in 10 buildings.
Also, nine buildings in Torskoye came under control. According to some reports, the enemy is introducing reserves to hold the settlement.
12:49 New strikes on enemy targets in Khar'kov and the Khar'kov region.
12:45 Russian Armed Forces launch missile strikes on targets in the Khar'kov region.
12:35 Summary of the Russian Ministry of Defense on the progress of the special military operation (as of October 26, 2024):
Units of the North group of forces in the Khar'kov direction defeated formations of the 31st Mechanized and 57th Motorized Infantry brigades of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the areas of the settlements of Liptsy and Goptovka in the Khar'kov region.
The servicemen of the "West" group of forces improved their tactical position. The manpower and equipment of the 53rd, 60th Mechanized, 95th Airborne Assault, 3rd Assault brigades of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the 107th territorial defense brigade were defeated in the areas of the settlements of Donetskoye, Borovaya in the Khar'kov region, Petrovskoye in the Luhansk People's Republic, as well as Serebryanskoye forestry. A counterattack by the enemy assault group was repelled.
As a result of successful offensive actions, units of the "Southern" group of forces liberated the settlement of Alexandropol of the Donetsk People's Republic. Formations of the 23rd, 54th Mechanized, 3rd, 10th Assault, 79th Airborne Assault, 46th Airmobile brigades of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the 37th marine brigade were defeated in the areas of the settlements of Chasov Yar, Zvanovka, Seversk, Dachnoye, Vesely Gai and Kurakhovo of the Donetsk People's Republic. A counterattack by an assault group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was repelled.
The Center group of forces continued to advance into the depths of the enemy's defense. It defeated the manpower and equipment of the 100th Mechanized Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the 119th Territorial Defense Brigade, and the 12th National Guard Brigade in the areas of the settlements of Shcherbinovka, Dzerzhinsk, Berestki, and Kleban-Byk of the Donetsk People's Republic. Six counterattacks by assault groups of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were repelled.
Units of the "East" group of forces improved the position along the front line, inflicted losses on the manpower and equipment of the 72nd mechanized and 58th motorized infantry brigades of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the areas of the Trudovoye and Dobrovolye settlements of the Donetsk People's Republic.
Fighters of the Dnepr group of forces inflicted losses on formations of the 65th Mechanized Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the 15th Brigade of the National Guard in the areas of the settlements of Rabotino and Mala Tokmachka in the Zaporizhia region.
Operational-tactical aviation, strike unmanned aerial vehicles, missile forces and artillery of the Russian Armed Forces groups damaged the infrastructure of military airfields, storage sites for strike unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as concentrations of enemy manpower and military equipment in 149 areas.
Air defense systems shot down two French-made Hammer guided aerial bombs, four US-made HIMARS rockets and 25 aircraft-type unmanned aerial vehicles.
12:15 Kurakhovsky direction: advance of the Russian Armed Forces to the west of the settlement of Pobeda –map.
11:47 In the Khmelnytsky region, as a result of strikes, infrastructure facilities were damaged, the regional center and three other settlements were partially de-energized, - head of the regional administration Tyurin.
11:35 Servicemen of the 18th Army destroy boats of Ukrainian militants in the Kherson direction.
11:21 Marines of the Black Sea Fleet destroyed a unit of Ukrainian Armed Forces assault reconnaissance aircraft in the Plekhovo area of the Kursk region, the security forces reported.
10:34 In the Kurakhovsky direction, the Russian Armed Forces are breaking through to the settlement of Ilyinka and "slamming the lid of the cauldron" - Voevoda writes. In addition, it is reported that the 110th Motorized Rifle Brigade has already liberated Alexandropol.
10:10 While units of the Vostok group of forces are advancing in Dobrovolye/Bogoyavlenka, the 11th Army of the Air Force and Air Defense is “ironing out” Trudovoye – a farm north of Dobrovolye –video.
09:47 Liberation of Alexandropol 110th Motorized Rifle Brigade of the Russian Armed Forces.
The 110th Brigade, part of the group operating in the Kurakhovsky direction, successfully liberated the settlement of Alexandropol, raising the Russian flag right in the center of the village. These actions confirm the determination of the Russian Army not to slow down and continue to crush the enemy, liberating the lands of our Motherland from the Ukrainian invaders.
09:32 Russian Armed Forces paratroopers during battles near Vesyoloye in Kursk OblastcapturedBradley IFV and Kirpi armored vehicle, killing or capturing their crews.
Western equipment was delivered to the rear by servicemen of evacuation units, said the head of the regiment's armored service, call sign "Badger".
09:05 Air strike destroyed temporary deployment point of the 14th Separate Motorized Brigade in Petropavlovka.
The enemy was located in a technical building and an agricultural building. Up to 20 militants and four units of equipment were disabled.
08:12 At one of the intersections of Toretskis on fire an enemy tank destroyed by Russian soldiers from the 132nd Motorized Rifle Brigade of the Russian Armed Forces.
08:00 Russian Su-34 fighter-bomber inflicted a bombing attack on a stronghold of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the border area of the Kursk region, the Russian Defense Ministry reported.
[JPost] The targets struck were sophisticated equipment that Iran could not produce on its own.
The Israel Air Force struck a dozen targets in Iran that were used to produce solid fuel for long-range ballistic missiles as part of its retaliatory military action against the Islamic Republic, severely harming Tehran's ability to replenish its inventory, Israeli media reported on Saturday night.
The targets struck were sophisticated equipment that Iran could not produce on its own and had to be purchased from China, Walla reported. The targets were a critical component of Iran's ballistic missile program, Walla cited three anonymous Israeli sources as saying.
Israeli sources also stated that four S-300 air defense batteries were attacked that were in strategic locations that protected nuclear and energy facilities in Tehran during the operation. A factory for the production of drones and a facility in the Parchin military complex were also attacked, the latter of which saw in the past research and development activities for nuclear weapons.
The Arabic independent online newspaper Elaph reported Israel targeted a secret ballistic missile factory in Iran,
Secret? As in, nobody knew about it except a few select Iranians and Mossad? Whoops!
destroying a large number of heavy fuel mixers used to power Kheibar and Haj Qasem missiles - both of which were fired by Iran at Israel at the beginning of the month. The report also claimed that the S-300 air defense batteries that were attacked were Russian-made and destroyed radars that feed these systems and others in Syria and Iraq.
The report said that the ballistic missile factory was completely destroyed. One source told Elaph that it was the "backbone of Iran's missile industry" and that Israel had "put it out of service," also reporting that each heavy fuel mixer destroyed was estimated to be at least two million dollars and about twenty mixers of this type were destroyed.
While Walla reported that production to restore such equipment would reportedly take at least one year, informed sources on the Iranian missile industry told Elaph that it would take at least two years to return the destroyed factory to service.
It depends on how much outside interference the site experiences, I suspect. Hey, Yossi — interested in taking another flight into the wild blue yonder?
Overall, more than 100 Israeli aircraft participated in the attack on Iranian targets, Ynet reported, stating that their mission was to hit the most advanced anti-aircraft systems of the Islamic Republic and develop air superiority there for any possible upcoming IAF operations - in such a way that Israeli fighter jets would be able to fly even at a relatively low altitude in the skies of Tehran itself in the future.
Courtesy of Fred:
[PUBLISH.TWITTER]
Looks like Israel's 🇮🇱 attack was a “preparation”:
📡 Destroyed air defense en route to Iran in Syria 🇸🇾 & Iraq 🇮🇶
📡 Destroyed radars of S-300 & S-400 air defense in Iran 🇮🇷
Now that Iran's air defense is fully blinded, Israel can freely attack its nuclear facilities. _ pic.twitter.com/1ONgNizZw6
#4
I sure would like to see some post-strike images of those sites, especially Parchin. Parchin produces a large percentage of Iran's explosives. Also Shiraz airfield. Tit for tat? "You hit our airfield, don't do much damage -- we hit yours and put it out of action". I just hope they didn't hit the air museum at Netsarim. I LOVE that place!
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
10/27/2024 16:36
Comments ||
Top||
#5
Queuing that up for you for tomorrow, Old Patriot. Today my job seems to be reposting the same two articles repeatedly in my determination to beat a pair of really determined stray gamma rays.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Mikhail Zakharov
[REGNUM] On the morning of October 26, it became known that a mass escape of prisoners from a local penal colony (IC) had occurred in the Lipetsk region. This was reported by the region's governor, Igor Artamonov. "Six prisoners escaped from penal colony No. 2. At the moment, all operational services are focused on finding them; an interdepartmental group is working," he wrote on his Telegram channel.
As reported by the regional department of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), the escapees were able to escape through an underground tunnel. It is specified that the penal colony employees first discovered a manhole, after which they began checking the cells and discovered the absence of six prisoners.
It is known that the escaped criminals were from Central Asia - five citizens of Uzbekistan and one citizen of Tajikistan, previously convicted of rape, pedophilia, robbery, and drug possession. The oldest of them is 28 years old, the youngest is 19.
Before their imprisonment, some of them did not even have a fixed place of residence in Russia, but there are also those who were officially employed. Now law enforcement agencies will have to figure out what exactly brought the fugitives together and pushed them to commit a crime. It will also be determined whether they were involved in extremist communities.
SOME HAVE ALREADY BEEN CAUGHT
The personnel of the combined detachment of the Federal Penitentiary Service was alerted, search posts were set up and preliminary data on the convicts was sent out. The "Interception" plan was announced in Lipetsk, and law enforcement officers began checking vehicles at the entrances and exits of the city.
To search for and detain the fugitives, employees of the central office of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia were sent to the Lipetsk region; an operational headquarters was also formed with the participation of employees of the search department of the agency.
By midday on October 26, it became known that two escaped criminals had been detained near Tambov - they tried to resist, but to no avail. Later, two more fugitives were caught in the village of Ulusarka in the Lipetsk region.
That was fast.
Now they face a tougher regime and additional punishment for the escape - up to five years of imprisonment in addition to the terms they already have.
Their remaining accomplices are still being sought by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Russian National Guard, the FSB and the FSIN Directorate for Lipetsk Oblast in both regions. Presumably, they could have headed towards Kazakhstan, then gone to Uzbekistan and evaded Russian justice.
At the same time, Igor Artamonov calls on the region's residents not to panic and trust only verified sources of information regarding the search activities. " I would like to note separately that we expect a large number of leaks and fake news related to the escape, " the regional governor emphasizes. " The information war continues, and the Ukrainian Armed Forces will not miss the opportunity to take advantage of this situation."
THEY DUG FOR SIX MONTHS
The Investigative Committee of Russia has opened a criminal case on the fact of negligence of the employees of the FSIN of the Lipetsk correctional colony, from which dangerous criminals escaped. It is assumed that the escape of prisoners was carried out due to improper performance of their duties by officials of the correctional institution. The prosecutor's office of the Lipetsk region has joined the case, an official investigation has also been ordered in the colony itself, interrogations and inspections are being conducted.
The investigation will have to find answers to questions that are logical in such a situation: how the prisoners managed to hide the shovels from the colony administration, how they got rid of the earth they dug to create the manhole, why their actions were not recorded on camera, and whether they had accomplices on the territory or outside the penitentiary institution. Especially since, according to available information, the escape was planned for six months (!), and they dug underground passages several meters long.
It is claimed that the tunnel was noticed by the FSIN officers the day before, but for almost a day the penal colony officers tried to find the escapees on their own - allegedly the law enforcement officers from Moscow joined them only on Saturday morning. In addition, it is interesting that the penal colony officers first discovered the tunnel, and only then discovered the absence of six prisoners - the question arises as to how the prisoner count was carried out there.
In this situation, it is not surprising that the escaped prisoners managed to calmly cover a considerable distance to the neighboring region. “ And they had the whole night to commit new crimes,” Marina Akhmedova, a member of the Presidential Council for Human Rights and editor-in-chief of the Regnum news agency, notes in her Telegram channel. “Some of them were convicted of sexual crimes against minors, and they have nothing to lose.”
It should be noted that the institution's employees had previously been held accountable for violating their official duties: contrary to the rules, the inmates of the penal colony arranged for themselves a "resort life" with phones, barbecues and alcohol. Meanwhile, the media publishes information that the colony in the Lipetsk region was recently involved in another scandal - an attempt to smuggle drugs and phones onto the territory of the institution.
SCANDAL AFTER SCANDAL
On the one hand, employees of other Russian correctional colonies have repeatedly successfully thwarted attempts by criminals to escape to freedom. Thus, on September 24, in the Nizhny Novgorod region, law enforcement officers managed to thwart the plans of an extremist group of three prisoners.
According to the investigation, prisoners of the Federal Penitentiary Institution IK-6 of the Main Directorate of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for the Nizhny Novgorod Region propagated radical religious dogmas among convicts, and also spent several months preparing a mass escape.
However, this year there have been several high-profile cases involving penitentiary institutions. In particular, on June 16, six prisoners in Rostov-on-Don managed to escape from the cells of the local pretrial detention center and took two employees of the detention center hostage. Then the security forces worked quickly and efficiently, eliminating the hostage-takers in just a few minutes.
Unfortunately, in August, when prisoners took hostages in the IK-19 penal colony in Surovikino, Volgograd Region, it was not possible to avoid casualties - three employees of the institution died. It should be noted that in these cases, radical ideas figured in the motives that pushed the prisoners to commit crimes. Their growth in prisons has been increasingly noted recently, but it is unlikely that this alone can explain all the existing problems.
It is certainly possible that the crimes could have been facilitated by corruption among the employees. However, one can doubt the sufficient motivation of even law-abiding employees of the FSIN with their very, very low level of salaries. In addition, in order to stop a crime, people are needed who will react to preparations for committing a crime. In the current conditions of understaffing, it is not so easy to keep track of those who do not stop engaging in illegal activities even behind bars.
What contributed to today's incident is yet to be determined by the investigation, but the incident, unfortunately, is far from the first in a series of failures committed in Russian correctional institutions.
[JPost] Sabahi had served as the Imam of Kharameh for ten years before returning to Kazeroun in November 2019.
The Imam of Kazeroun in southern Iran, Mohammad Sabahi, was shot by an attacker who then took his own life after leading the Friday prayers this week, according to Iran's semi-official Tasnim News Agency.
The Imam suffered from severe wounds and was transported to the Vali Asr hospital for treatment. Mohammad Ali Bekhrad, the special commander of Kazeroun County, confirmed that Imam Sabahi was targeted after the prayers and was undergoing medical treatment.
Several hours later, in a separate report, Tasnim noted he was transferred to the Namazi Hospital in Shiraz for further treatment. However, despite the efforts of the medical team, Sabahi succumbed to his wounds.
"Despite the efforts of the doctors and medical staff at Namazi Hospital in Shiraz, the Friday Imam has passed away due to the severity of his [wounds]," Iranian State Media IRNA cited Kazeroun’s governor, Mohammad Ali Bekhrad.
THIRD KILLING SINCE 1979 REVOLUTION
According to IRNA's report, Sabahi had served as the Imam of Kharameh for ten years before returning to Kazeroun in November 2019, further noting that his death marks the third killing of a Friday Imam in Kazeroun since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
According to IRNA, initial reports concerning the attacker were conflicting, with Telegram channels claiming he was a war veteran. However, Mehdi Mazarei of Kazeroun’s Martyrs Foundation refuted the claim and warned against spreading false information.
Mizan News clarified that the attacker had a criminal background and had previously attempted to harm a judge.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Leonid Tsukanov
[REGNUM] Tel Aviv gathered its forces
Learn your political geography, Mr. Tsukanov: the capitol of Israel is Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv, and has been so since Israel declared independence in 1948. All the Jew-hating part of the world pretending otherwise will not change that fact.
and carried out a long-awaited and announced operation - on the night of October 26, the Israeli Air Force carried out a series of strikes on targets in Tehran, Karaj and Eslamshahr; echoes of the attacks were heard in Mashhad and Hamadan. Iranian air defense facilities deployed in Syria were also hit.
However, the Israeli operation was emphatically restrained and demonstrative. This suggests that the strike on Iranian territory was more an attempt to save face than a full-fledged revenge on Tehran.
Or possibly it was Israel’s first step in shaping the battlefield to come: Iran no longer has radar arrays to give notice of incoming Israeli bombers, nor factories mixing the propellent for its surface-to-surface missiles. And national morale will suffer for having to sit under the Israeli attack without being able to answer it — how shocking that Allah permitted such abuse of his most beloved believers!
According to CBS, the Israeli attack was limited to military targets, with nuclear and oil facilities untouched.
…as demanded by the Biden-Harris administration.
In turn, the Iranian Armed Forces reported only two dead soldiers.
However, today's attack is unlikely to be the last. On the contrary, Tel Aviv will probably continue to prepare new operations in the Iranian direction.
It could happen…
At the same time, Israel will gradually strive for even greater autonomy from the United States in making military and political decisions, since detailed information about its plans became public the day before due to the fault of the Americans.
Under the current administration, that seems likely.
In mid-October, scanned copies of secret US Defense Department reports appeared on a number of pro-Iranian channels. The documents, accompanied by images from American military satellites, contained detailed information about the transfer of Israeli forces to the "front lines" in preparation for an anti-Iranian retaliatory operation.
Such an untimely leak damaged relations between Washington and Tel Aviv Jerusalem and deprived the Israeli army of the element of surprise. Although the Israelis tried, albeit without much success, to finish what they had started by launching a series of strikes on Iranian territory.
In addition, the leak has fueled "spy mania" in both countries. In Israel and the US, there are calls to "untangle" the Iranian intelligence network and punish those responsible. Especially since one of the persons involved in the investigation was previously suspected of "friendship" with the IRGC.
However, it should not be ruled out that the Israelis this time suffered not so much from the activities of Iranian agents, but at the hands of those wishing to use “inquisitorial” methods for career advancement.
INFORMATION LEAKED
Based on leaked Pentagon data, pro-Iranian channels have already presented a fairly complete picture of the future Israeli “retaliatory action.” The movement of at least 40 ballistic missiles from their permanent bases to the Ramat David (northern direction) and Ramon (southern direction) air bases was recorded. At least 16 more Golden Horizon missiles were delivered to the Hatzerim air base in Israel’s Southern District.
In addition, data received from American satellites indicated that Israeli aircrew had stepped up their training in ultra-low altitude flights. The G-550 AWACS aircraft and Boeing 707 tankers were also involved in the maneuvers, which goes beyond simple “accounting sorties.”
Activity at the Haifa naval base has sharply increased, with sporadic movement of the Israeli navy beginning, which was also seen as preparation for a combined attack.
Everything indicated that the Israelis had no plans to abandon their usual route through the airspace of Syria and Jordan towards Iraq, from where it would be most convenient to launch missiles at Iranian targets.
At the same time, the Iranians were unable to draw any clear conclusions about which objects would be hit based on American materials. According to preliminary data, energy facilities (including nuclear facilities), army infrastructure, and the IRGC were in the probable strike zone.
In reality, the night operation involved far fewer forces and resources than the American satellites “revealed”: the demonstration of retaliation turned out to be more important to the Israelis than the retaliation itself.
THE STRUGGLE FOR POSITIONS
After the scandal with the leaks that cost Israel the element of surprise from the attack, Washington became preoccupied with finding the culprits. The main suspects almost immediately included Ariane Tabatabaei,
…alternately spelt Ariane Tabatabai…
an American of Iranian origin who is an employee of the staff of advisers to Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin and specializes in low-intensity conflicts.
At one time, Tabatabaei was part of the US-Iran negotiating team and was engaged in restructuring the "nuclear deal" project to suit the conditions of the Joe Biden administration. However, her diplomatic work did not last long. After a conflict with the head of the negotiating team, Tabatabaei left it and took the position of senior political adviser in the Department of Defense.
It is noteworthy that Tabatabaei has come under the scrutiny of American security forces for the second time in the last few years. Before that, in 2023, they tried to accuse her of creating a network of small informants who supplied Iranian intelligence with information about the activities of US government agencies, as well as about the Pentagon's military and technical projects. However, due to the lack of hard evidence, the case fell apart. At the same time, Tabatabaei's career in the US Department of Defense continued.
Most likely, it was the scandal of 2023 that provoked increased attention to the person of Austin's adviser from American law enforcement. However, there are also those who call for "unwinding" the investigation further.
Thus, the "gray cardinal" of the leak scandal is called the former US State Department employee Robert Malley, who worked on the "Iranian direction" during the administrations of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Allegedly, it was he who at one time facilitated Tabatabai's employment and her rise to high positions.
Detractors recall that Malley was dismissed from service in 2023 due to “mishandling classified materials.”
Such vague wording usually conceals accusations of trading in sensitive information.
Given the ongoing fight for lucrative positions within the State Department and the Pentagon (which has intensified many times over in the wake of the upcoming US presidential elections), Tabatabai could well have become a bargaining chip. In that case, a controlled leak of classified documents would simultaneously discredit both her and Malley, and deprive the latter of the opportunity to slip out of the FBI's sight.
US security agencies are still being rather stingy with the details of the high-profile case, but their statements already suggest that at least three employees of the defense department are under investigation. It is possible that this list will expand as the chains of communication are unraveled.
ISRAEL BLAMES THE US
Despite the fact that the Israeli leadership denied the fact of the data leak for a long time and called what was happening an “internal matter” of the United States, after the United States officially confirmed the authenticity of the leaked documents, Tel Aviv Jerusalem was forced to admit that the retaliatory operation had been discredited.
It is clear from the tone of Israeli officials that the incident has dealt a blow to relations between Tel Aviv Jerusalem and Washington. First of all, the Israelis are asking two questions: why did the US conduct such detailed monitoring of the preparation of the anti-Iranian operation and why were they unable to ensure the safety of such valuable data?
And the second question quickly came to the fore. Tel Aviv Jerusalem, which had previously suffered from a series of minor spy scandals involving Iranian agents directly on the country's territory, reacts extremely painfully to the miscalculations of its allies, especially when they strike at Israeli strategic interests.
In this case, the appearance of "Tehran informants" in high offices is perceived as nothing less than the degradation of the American military machine. This idea runs through the publications of the Israeli government press like a red thread. Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet is effectively placing responsibility on the United States not only for the failure of the retaliatory operation, but also for the growth of Iran's activity in general.
At the same time, Tehran’s role in what happened is deliberately maximized: according to the interpretation of a number of publications, the Iranian leadership coordinated the operation in Washington “in manual mode.”
Of course, the leaks incident is unlikely to lead to a freeze in US-Israel cooperation. In this case, the US risks finding itself in a situation where the White House's "red lines" in the Middle East will not be immutable for Tel Aviv Jerusalem.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Kamran Gasanov
[REGNUM] Despite NATO membership and the discontent of Western partners, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan found the strength and confidence not only to declare his desire to join BRICS, but also to personally attend the summit in Kazan.
Erdogan has indicated a desire to “resolutely develop dialogue” with the organization, reasons he explained to reporters on board a plane en route home. “BRICS is a major platform where developing economies are gathered. We must recognize this reality,” the president said.
He also recalled that the organization’s countries occupy a third of the Earth’s territory, are home to 45% of its population, produce 40% of its oil, export 25% of its goods and account for 2/5 of total trade.
The Turkish economy is frantically searching for new investors,
…they have to, after running out of Gulenists to strip…
needs additional energy sources and a technological alternative to NATO countries. It can get all this in cooperation with Russia, China, India, Iran, the UAE and Brazil.
POSITIVE DYNAMICS
An important moment of the Turkish leader's participation in the BRICS summit was the bilateral talks with Vladimir Putin. The agenda of Russia and Turkey is well known - energy, investment, tourism and trade. Putin noted the positive dynamics of development - $55.4 billion in trade turnover and 6.2% growth for January-August 2024.
Russian tourists have increased by 20%. Two pipelines between the countries are working like clockwork. Russia expects the Akkuyu NPP to start supplying energy as early as next year.
Putin assessed mutual investments as “solid”: Russian companies are investing in Turkish metallurgy and automobile manufacturing, while Turkish companies are investing in Russian mechanical engineering, metallurgy, and woodworking.
One new and breakthrough is the statement by the head of Rosatom, Alexey Likhachev, who reported on Erdogan’s proposal to build a second nuclear power plant in Sinop, Turkey.
But there are challenges: the Ukrainian conflict creates barriers to bilateral trade, the US is “sanctioning” Turkish companies one after another for doing business with Russia. Erdogan has announced ongoing efforts “to eliminate problems in banking operations.” This process involves the financial and trade authorities, as well as the central banks of the two countries.
Considering that one of the goals of BRICS is de-dollarization, Turkey’s participation in the organization will help eliminate problems in mutual settlements with Russia.
MINI GENERAL ASSEMBLY
No matter how the BRICS association tries to position itself as a purely financial and economic platform, it cannot ignore political issues, if only because it consolidates about half of the world's population. In essence, it is a mini-UN General Assembly.
So Erdogan could not help but take advantage of the opportunity and remind about his position in relation to Israel. He called on the BRICS countries to join the campaign initiated by Ankara in the UN on the arms embargo of Israel. And those states that have not yet recognized Palestine, he called on to recognize it.
Turkey does not forget about the conflict in Ukraine. Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has previously tried to convey to Western partners that the future scenarios are either a global war or a freeze, and sanctions against Russia must be lifted as part of the peace process.
Since the BRICS format is too multifaceted, and Moscow decided not to focus on the topic of Ukraine, Erdogan expressed all his wishes tete-a-tete. And he did not regret it, noting Putin's desire for negotiations. The presidents also discussed the exchange of prisoners of war between Russia and Ukraine. Erdogan assured that he would continue to make diplomatic efforts.
Any conversation with the Russian president in the current conditions is especially valuable for his Turkish counterpart. Erdogan has been waiting for Putin in Istanbul for a year, but the visit is postponed, although the Russian leader has managed to visit many countries during this time, including the monarchies of the Persian Gulf.
For Erdogan, Putin's personal visit to Turkey is very important, so he expressed his desire to see the Russian president on his soil "in a very short time."
Let us recall that the Istanbul Conference, the grain deal and the prisoner exchange between Russia and the West took place with the mediation of Turkey. Therefore, the country still has considerable potential for peacekeeping in Ukraine.
THEY DON'T ACCEPT IT RIGHT AWAY
An important issue for Turkey was its status in BRICS. Following the summit in Kazan, it received partner status along with 12 other countries. The German tabloid Bild writes that Turkey's membership was blocked by India, since the Turks are allied with the Indians' enemy, Pakistan.
This could well turn out to be competition within BRICS, which should not be ruled out. And there are already examples of this: during the first expansion, Ethiopia was included in the organization, and not Algeria, which has long been striving to join the organization. Then, as some media wrote, India, which does not like Algeria for its close ties with China, also intervened in the matter.
In the case of Turkey, in addition to its cooperation with Pakistan, one can also note differences with the Indians in the policy in the South Caucasus. Together with France, India is an active supplier of weapons to Armenia, which does not suit Azerbaijan's ally Turkey.
However, it is difficult to judge to what extent exactly the Indian veto has affected the fact that it has not yet been accepted into BRICS. Acceptance a month after the application was submitted and without any Indian pressure would be strange: many candidates have long been waiting in line to join. Partner status is already a considerable achievement for Erdogan, who is known for his habit of sitting on several chairs at once.
Well, and besides, the BRICS countries previously announced that they need to first “digest” those who were accepted in 2023, and for other countries, build a phased integration.
China is an active lobbyist for Turkey's membership in BRICS, which Beijing has openly stated. Russia is happy with such expansion not only because of Turkey's close bilateral economic contacts and logistical role, but also because of Ankara's membership in NATO. Moscow is actively exploiting the opportunity to undermine the alliance's solidity.
ILL-WISHERS NEVER SLEEP
Erdogan's visit was marred by an act of sabotage in Ankara that coincided with his trip. On October 23, suicide bombers from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) attacked a factory producing drones and fighter jets, killing five people.
The Turkish president thanked everyone who expressed condolences. "This attack will only strengthen our resolve in the fight against terrorism," he said.
Some versions say that the terrorist attack was an attempt to disrupt the peace process proposed by the ruling coalition of Turkey to the Kurds. At the same time, one should not rule out an external influence: the US and NATO are very unhappy with Ankara's constant drifts towards China and Russia.
However, overall, Erdogan can count the trip to Kazan as an asset. His initiatives to support Palestine found support in the BRICS declaration. He was able to discuss prospects for a Ukrainian settlement with Putin. Ankara received official status in the organization.
Given the close political and economic contacts with Russia and China, Erdogan will now have a reason and opportunity to talk face-to-face with Putin and Xi at least once a year.
[IsraelNationalNews] It is difficult not to give in to pessimism, as the great Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal, author of "2084", does when he says this week: "Islam is preparing to conquer France".
The environmentalist municipality of the city of Strasbourg, which houses one of the two wings of the European Parliament, the European Court of Human Rights and the Council of Europe, has decided to turn off the cathedral’s lights at 11 pm "to save energy and money".
Every evening since the end of August, Strasbourg Cathedral has been in darkness. The green municipality has decided to immerse the religious building in darkness to be "exemplary at a time when efforts to reduce energy consumption are being asked of all citizens".
Strasbourg Cathedral, whose construction began in 1176, is the fifth tallest in the world. A jewel of Gothic art with light filtering through the stained glass windows, the historiated portal and the famous "Pillar of the Angels", which Victor Hugo called "a marvel of grandeur and grace".
An exemplary story.
The same city council of Strasbourg has, in fact, arranged for the financing of 2.5 million euros for the construction of an immense Turkish mosque at the behest of the Green mayor Jeanne Barseghian.
That means 44 meters high for the minarets, 28 domes, a prayer room for 3,000 faithful and another outdoor space for 2,500 people, "the largest mosque in Europe" had a subsidy of 2.5 million and financial help from Qatar, a country whose royal house is in tears these hours for the killing of the head of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar.
The mosque financed by the city of Strasbourg is built by a country, Erdogan's Turkey, which makes no secret of wanting to Islamize Europe.
Where does the mentality come from that leads them to cut the cathedral lighting to save 1,728 euros a month, when they vote for a subsidy of 2.5 million euros for the construction of the Islamist Eyyub Sultan mosque in the city? There are no logical or rational explanations: the only answer is submission.
This summer, the city of Metz donated €490,000 for the construction of the new mosque. Three years ago, the first stone was laid for a gigantic building of 5,649 m2, equipped with a museum for immigration and an institute for the Arab world, with a 34-meter minaret that can accommodate 1,500 Muslims.
In Clichy, where Muslims have been praying in the street for years in the face of secularism, the Great Mosque will open: €270,000 in subsidies from the municipality.
In Strasbourg there is not only the Great Mosque designed by the Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi (the same one who built the Great Mosque of Rome) and financed by Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The Great Mosque has already received funds from municipal and regional governments.
Strasbourg today has 22 mosques.
Boualem Sansal said that "France has made agreements with the Islamists: there were 10 mosques once, today there are 3,000".
And currently, more than 410 new mosques are being built. Some are already under construction, others are raising the necessary funds. It is not difficult to understand why there are already more Muslim believers than Catholics.
After October 7, the city of Strasbourg removed the Israeli flag raised in solidarity with the victims of Islamic terrorism after just 36 hours.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Korrespondent] Ukrainian defenders bravely hold the line.
The hottest part is in the Pokrovsky direction. Fierce battles are being fought in the areas of Vozdvizhenka, Mirolyubovka, Luch, Lisovka, Krutoy Yar, Nikolaevka and Selidovoye.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine published operational information on the Russian invasion as of 16:00 on October 26.
It is reported that since the beginning of the day, the total number of military clashes along the entire front line has increased to 90.
The occupiers continue to use aviation, in particular, UABs, and attack in almost all directions of the east and south of our country, especially actively in the Pokrovsk and Kurakhovsk directions. The defense forces hold the lines and take all necessary measures to prevent a breakthrough of the defense.
The occupier continues to use artillery and aviation on the territory of the Chernihiv and Sumy regions.
According to currently available information, the enemy carried out 18 airstrikes on the territory of the Kursk region, using 29 UABs.
Seven combat clashes took place in the Kharkov direction today. Our troops repelled four Russian attacks in the areas of Vovchansk and Staritsa. Three more combat clashes near Staritsa are still ongoing.
Five assault actions of the invaders were repelled near Kondrashovka, Sinkovka, Kruglyakovka, Berestovoye and Pervomayskoye in the Kupyansk direction. Near Kruglyakovka and Kondrashovka, three more clashes continue. The enemy is actively using aviation. Peschanoye, Glushkovka, Zagryzovoye were hit by UABs, and Berestovo was also hit by unguided air missiles.
In the Liman direction, the enemy, with the support of aviation, is attacking in the areas of Grekovka, Makeyevka, Terny, Torskoye, Serebryanka and Grigorovka. In total, since the beginning of the day, there have already been 12 combat clashes in this direction, four of which are still ongoing.
In the Seversky direction, the occupiers attacked twice in the Belogorovka area, one clash is still ongoing.
In the Toretsk direction, the enemy attacked our troops' positions near Shcherbinovka six times. Three attacks have already been repelled.
The hottest part is in the Pokrovsk direction. Fierce battles are underway in the areas of Vozdvizhenka, Mirolyubovka, Luch, Lisovka, Krutoy Yar, Nikolaevka and Selidovoye. The enemy has made 20 attempts to storm Ukrainian positions, 12 attacks have already been repelled by our defenders. The Russians dropped an air bomb in the Mirnograd area.
In the Kurakhovsky direction, 11 combat clashes continue in the areas of the settlements of Izmailovka, Stepanovka, Novodmitrovka, Novoselidovka, Ostroye, Dalneye, Antonovka, Yelizavetka, Yekaterinovka. Seven enemy assaults have already been repelled by our defenders.
In the Orekhov direction, an enemy attack was repelled in the Novodanilovka area. The invaders actively used aviation in the areas of the settlements of Malaya Tokmachka and Malye Shcherbaki.
In the Dnieper direction, our defenders repelled four enemy attacks. The occupiers launched an air strike on the settlement of Lviv, using unguided air missiles.
Earlier, the media reported that last September was the bloodiest month of the war for Russian troops in Ukraine. Military analysts estimate Russian losses at an average of more than 1,200 people per day.
Worth noting, korrespondent.net has compiled its Invasion of Ukraine series into separate months, beginning May 9th, 2023. Linked in the title.
[Korrespondent] 20:36 Russians carried out aerial bombing strikes on Konstantinovka in Donetsk region: one person was killed, three were wounded, reported the head of the OVA Vadim Filashkin. The enemy dropped two FAB-250 on the city this afternoon: ten private houses, two multi-story buildings, two administrative buildings, nine non-residential premises were damaged.
17:38 Rheinmetall intends to launch four weapons manufacturing plants in Ukraine, with the first plant already operating and the second "on the way," said Armin Papperger, director of the German concern. According to him, gunpowder and ammunition manufacturing plants are being built. An air defense system manufacturing enterprise is also expected to be created.
16:59 The death toll in Dnipro as a result of the Russian strike overnight has increased to five - rescuers have pulled another body out of the rubble. 21 people were injured, said OVA head Serhiy Lysak. More than 20 apartment buildings were damaged in the city, one was destroyed and another is in disrepair.
16:36 Republican US vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance has said that Ukraine must give up its territory to end the war with Russia: "The Ukrainians are going to have to make that decision... They're already too exhausted." J.D. Vance says that such ideas are already slipping through in private conversations with Ukrainian officials: "They're starting to talk about it now. They're saying this can't go on forever. They don't have the people, they don't have the weapons, they don't have the money."
15:41 By Monday, October 28, 5,000 North Korean soldiers will be transferred to the Kursk region, The New York Times reports, citing a high-ranking Ukrainian official. According to him, the soldiers are part of an elite unit of the Korean People's Army. They will be delivered from Vladivostok by Il-76 transport planes to a military airfield in the European part of Russia, and then sent to the combat zone.
The official also said that there were mixed signals about whether additional North Korean troops would be sent to participate in the fighting on Ukrainian territory. They are currently concentrated only in the Kursk region.
Meanwhile, the first secretary of the DPRK mission to the UN, Il Ha Kim, denied the transfer of Korean troops to Russia. He claims that these accusations against Pyongyang are "dirty maneuvers by the US and its allies to mask their own crimes and prolong the conflict in Ukraine."
12:47 Air defense destroyed 44 out of 91 enemy UAVs (Shahed and unspecified types) in the Kirovograd, Sumy, Chernihiv, Kyiv, Cherkasy, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Khmelnytsky and Kursk regions at night, the Air Force reported. One drone left the airspace in the direction of Belarus, 44 Russian drones were lost, and another enemy UAV remains in the airspace of Ukraine.
In addition, during today's attack, Russia used three Iskander-M/KN-23 ballistic missiles, two Kh-59 guided air missiles and two missiles of an unspecified type. The enemy used missiles to strike civilian infrastructure facilities in Sumy Oblast and the Dnieper.
11:55 As a result of the night attack, there is partial power outage in four settlements of the Khmelnytskyi district, including the regional center, reported the head of the OVA Serhiy Tyurin. A hotel and two houses were damaged, no one was hurt.
11:46 In Dnipro, the death toll from the night attack has risen to four - another body was found under the rubble of a house. The number of injured has risen to 20, including four children aged eight to 17, said OVA head Serhiy Lysak.
10:59 Over the past evening and night, Russian troops struck Kiev, Dnipro, Sumy, Khmelnytskyi and other regions of Ukraine. In Dnipro, one of the most important hospitals in the country, the Mechnikov Hospital, was damaged, as well as ordinary residential buildings, Zelensky said.
09:38 Russians shelled the village of Borovaya in the Izyum district of the Kharkiv region, one person was killed, reported the head of the OVA Oleg Sinegubov.
09:14 In the Kiev region, as a result of a night Russian attack, one person was killed and a 13-year-old child was injured, reported the head of the OVA Ruslan Kravchenko.
08:36 The General Staff announced the estimated losses of the Russian Federation as of the morning of October 26:
personnel - about 687,600 (+1690) people,
tanks - 9109 (+12),
combat armored vehicles - 18,332 (+45),
artillery systems - 19,782 (+29),
MLRS - 1240 (+2),
air defense systems - 984 (+2),
aircraft - 369 (+0),
helicopters - 329 (+0),
Operational-tactical level UAVs - 17,726 (+56),
cruise missiles - 2625 (+0),
ships/boats - 28 (+0),
submarines - 1 (+0),
automotive equipment and tank trucks - 27,460 (+95),
special equipment - 3541 (+6).
08:17 At night, the Russian army fired artillery at Kherson, one person was injured, OVA reported. Over the previous day, three people were killed and seven were injured as a result of Russian shelling in the region, including one child.
08:11 In Donetsk region on October 25 as a result of Russian shelling one person was wounded - in Donetsk, reported the head of the OVA Vadim Filashkin.
07:45 Late in the evening of October 25, Russians launched a missile attack on the Dnieper: three people were killed, including a child, 19 were injured, including four children, reported the head of the OVA, Serhiy Lysak. As a result of the attack, 13 apartment buildings and two private houses, a hospital, and cars were damaged.
07:39 As a result of yesterday's attack on Kiev by Russian UAVs in the Solomensky district, one person was killed and five were injured, reported the head of the KGVA, Sergei Popko. The deceased was a girl born in 2009.
06:08 In parallel with using the proceeds from frozen Russian assets through a $50 billion loan from the G7 countries, Ukraine is working with partners to confiscate the entire amount of blocked Russian funds, about $300 billion, Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova told Ukrinform. According to her, the United States supports full confiscation, but other G7 member countries need to be convinced.
02:13 G7 leaders issued a joint statement announcing that they had reached a consensus on how to provide Ukraine with about $50 billion in loans, to be repaid using revenue from frozen Russian assets. The funds would be distributed through several channels to support budgetary, military and reconstruction assistance for Ukraine.
00:02 The enemy launched missile strikes on the infrastructure of the cities of Sumy and Konotop, OVA reported.
Yes, but what does that actually mean in this situation?
Courtesy of 3dc:
[X]
1. Israel estimates: Iran will respond to IDF assault; impossible for regime to do nothing after attack in Tehran, with everyone in the region watching. Israel ready for more military action, @MaarivOnline reports. 2. Israeli officials note that circumstances will be different… https://t.co/TJRfqkrqUz
... Israeli officials note that circumstances will be different next time: US election will be over & IDF will be closer to achieving Lebanon war objectives. This will give Israel more flexibility to hit wider scope of Iranian assets, including more sensitive targets. ...
Posted by: Fred ||
10/27/2024
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[HotAir] 'What the F**k to do With Them?': Russian Troops Not Thrilled with North Korean Conscripts
We've be hearing for a few days now that North Korean troops are now preparing to enter the battlefield against Ukraine. CNN reports on some audio intercepts which suggest the Russian troops aren't thrilled with their presence so far.
The Russian soldiers talk disdainfully about the incoming North Korean soldiers, codenamed the “K Battalion,” at one point referring to them as “the f**king Chinese.”
In the same extract, a serviceman describes another who has been tasked to “meet people.”
“And he’s like standing there with his eyes out, like… f**k,” the soldier says. “He came here and says what the f**k to do with them.”
Another concern seems to be who will command them, especially given that none of these troops speak Russian.
The intercepts also reveal plans to have one interpreter and three senior officers for every 30 North Korean men, which the Russian soldiers are heard in the audio condemning.
“The only thing I don’t understand is that there [should be] three senior officers for 30 people. Where do we get them? We’ll have to pull them out,” one Russian serviceman says.
So what happens if the translator is hit? Apparently that whole unit is reduced to sign language. There's also a story floating around suggesting lack of leadership has already been a serious problem.
The Suspiline news outlet, citing Ukrainian intelligence sources, reported that 18 North Korean soldiers fled their positions somewhere on the border between the Bryansk and Kursk regions of Russia, just 7 kilometers (4.4 miles) from the state border with Ukraine.
The source said the reason for them absenting themselves is not known but it said Russian forces were currently hunting them while the commanders in the area were trying to cover up the incident and to hide it from higher command.
I've seen different comments on this. Some say the soldiers had been left alone with no food for days and wandered off to find something to eat. Others claimed maybe they'd seen enough of the Russian Army to want to head home. Whatever the case, this doesn't seem to be off to a great start.
There's also a video circulating which allegedly was put out by the Ukrainians offering safety and regular meals to defectors. Given where these soldiers came from, that might be a compelling offer to a lot of them. Why fight and possibly die only to be returned to a land of starving people if you could just defect? Presumably some of these soldiers have families back home that they care about but probably not all of them. Anyway, we may find at fairly soon how they perform. They were supposedly going to start moving into position in Kursk this week.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] In the People's Republic of China (PRC), as a result of large-scale measures to combat corruption, 589 thousand people were punished. This was reported on the website of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of China.
How many deserved it, how many were scapegoats, and has the level of corruption significantly fallen as a result?
"From January to September 2024, disciplinary inspection and supervision bodies across the country received 2.7 million letters and reports, including 756,000 reports and complaints. A total of 2,972 cases were transferred to the prosecutor's office for further investigation," the publication states.
It is specified that in 2024, 642,000 cases were initiated, including cases against 58 provincial and ministerial-level employees, 3,263 department and bureau employees, 26,000county-level and district-level employees, and 89,000 township-level employees.
In October 2022, China's top anti-graft official Xiao Pei publicly announced that China had effectively curbed the spread of corruption since the 18th Communist Party Congress in 2012. He said that some 80,000 officials had voluntarily confessed to their wrongdoings over the past five years.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...an Iranian satrapy until recently ruled by Hassan Nasrallah situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozen flavors of Christians, plus Armenians, Georgians, and who knows what else? It is the home of the original Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers...
..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,...
..one of the armed feet of the Moslem Brüderbund millipede,...
..a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth",...
...late Fuehrer of Germany, founder of the Third Reich, currently communing with his pals Himmler and Heydrich. He is reincarnated every few days, sometimes every few hour if it's an election year, as a politician somebody doesn't like...
...71st United States secretary of state and a leading light of the corrupt and inept Biden administration. He previously served as deputy national security advisor from 2013 to 2015 and deputy secretary of state from 2015 to 2017 under the corrupt and inept Obama administration. He advocated for the 2003 invasion of Iraq while serving as the Democratic staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2002 to 2008. He was a foreign policy advisor for the Biden 2008 presidential campaign. During his tenure in the Obama administration, Blinken helped craft B.O.'s policy on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the nuclear program of Iran. We all saw how well each of those worked. After leaving government service, Blinken moved into the private sector, co-founding WestExec Advisors, a lobbying firm...
..the braying voice of Islamic Resistance®,...
[MSN]
[MAIL] Democrats are spending another week wondering if Kamala Harris has let her momentum in the 2024 race completely slip away.
...every time you hear the phrase 
...an Iranian satrapy until recently ruled by Hassan Nasrallah situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozen flavors of Christians, plus Armenians, Georgians, and who knows what else? It is the home of the original Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers...
[JPost] Sabahi had served as the Imam of Kharameh for ten years before returning to Kazeroun in November 2019.
