The US military will deploy new medium-range missile systems to the Pacific region next year for the purpose of “deterring” China from invading Taiwan, the commander of US Army Pacific Forces said on Saturday.

According to Defense One, Gen. Charles Flynn said the deployment will include a land-based version of the Tomahawk missile, which was previously banned under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, a treaty with Russia the US withdrew from in 2019.

“We have tested them and we have a battery or two of them today,” Flynn said. “In 2024. We intend to deploy that system in your region. I’m not going to say where and when. But I will just say that we will deploy them.”

The INF Treaty previously banned the development of land-based missiles with a range between 310 to 3,400 miles. The US’s new land-based batteries that use Tomahawk missiles can hit targets of up to 1,000 miles. The US Marines Corps activated its first Tomahawk battery over the summer at a base in California.

Amos Hochstein, a senior adviser to President Biden, is in Israel to hold talks with Israeli officials on preventing a major war with Lebanon as fighting between Israeli and Hezbollah forces across the Israel-Lebanon border continues to escalate, Axios reported on Monday.

Hezbollah rocket strikes on Monday caused heavy damage to Israel’s Birant military base near the Lebanon border, but no casualties were reported. Israel’s military said it responded with fighter jets, helicopters, and tanks, which targeted Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon.

According to Axios, there’s growing anxiety in the White House that Israel’s military action could lead to a regional war. Some Biden administration officials believe Israel is trying to intentionally provoke Hezbollah to create a pretext for a wider war in Lebanon that can draw in the US.

From the outset, Paris sought to ensure an independent deterrent separate from that of the United States – and to develop sufficient nuclear firepower not to utterly destroy its presumed Soviet adversary in the event of war, but enough to dissuade an enemy from an attack on France. During the Cold War, France’s deterrent featured land, sea and air-based components, with the mission handed over entirely to the Navy in the 1990s.

“France is a member of NATO but thanks to General De Gaulle, we have kept a minimum of dependence toward NATO” as far as nuclear weapons are concerned, Colonel Jacques Hogard, a 26-year veteran of the French Army and Foreign Legion and Special Forces officer, told Sputnik, when asked about the origins of France’s independent deterrent.

France’s nuclear doctrine “guaranteed and still guarantees” the nation’s “independence as a nuclear power,” and was made possible “purely because of the will of General De Gaulle, who imposed it on the Americans,” Hogard explained.

The central point of the French nuclear deterrent is “precisely so as not to depend on the American umbrella,” with the matter constituting an “essential question” and key pillar of the France’s military doctrine, which concedes the possibility of alliances, but not at the expense of Paris’s strategic security, the expert said.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Monday showed up in Kiev during an unannounced visit, and at an awkward moment for US-Ukraine relations given President Zelensky has been publicly complaining over a decrease in artillery shell supplies, given they are now going to Israel for its war in Gaza. 

"I was honored to meet with President @ZelenskyyUa in Kyiv today to reaffirm the United States’ steadfast support for Ukraine," Austin wrote on X. "We, along with our allies and partners, will continue to support Ukraine’s urgent battlefield needs and long-term defense requirements," Austin added.

This convenient shift of Washington and the Pentagon to talking mainly about "long-term defense" began occurring as it became clear Ukraine's counteroffensive was failing.

Lachlan Murdoch, who took the reins of Fox Corp. and News Corp. last week, met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev over the weekend. So what exactly prompted this trip?

Lachlan, 52, is the eldest son of now-retired Rupert Murdoch, an Australian-born American media mogul, who announced his retirement in September. Last week, Lachlan Murdoch officially became the sole chair of News Corp and the executive chair and chief executive of Fox.

Remarkably, the first foreign leader the new head of the media empire hastened to meet was none other than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. According to Axios, Lachlan Murdoch traveled to the Ukrainian capital over the weekend, accompanied by two reporters – Benjamin Hall from Fox News and Jerome Starkey from the Sun.

Hall conducted an interview with Zelensky that is expected to be aired on Tuesday night's episode of "Special Report with Bret Baier," according to the media outlet.

Over 8,000 evacuees from the Gaza Strip have arrived in Egypt via the Rafah border crossing, including 6,713 foreign nationals and dual citizens, Egypt's State Information Service reported on Monday.

The information service said that 929 Egyptian nationals had crossed the country's border from the Gaza Strip.

At the same time, Egyptian hospitals have admitted 236 patients and 197 accompanying persons from the conflict-torn enclave, according to the information service.

The Rafah crossing is the only route in and out of Gaza for the civilian population there, as well as the main artery for humanitarian aid into the Palestinian enclave.

Israeli warplanes delivered airstrikes on Hezbollah command centers and infrastructure facilities in Lebanon to retaliate launches from there, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said on Monday.

"In response to the launches from Lebanon toward Israel throughout the day, IDF fighter jets struck Hezbollah operational command centers and terrorist infrastructure," it said. "Additionally, earlier today, the IDF struck a terrorist cell in the area of Metula, northern Israel."

What the Israeli military did at the Indonesian Hospital has resulted in the complete loss of medical services in the north of the Gaza Strip, Munir al-Bursh, general manager of the Health Ministry of Gaza said in an interview with the Qatari TV channel Al Jazeera.

"The Israeli forces' attack on the Indonesian Hospital marks the end of any possibility to provide medical services in the northern Gaza Strip," al-Bursh said. "The hospital currently has at least 100 patients in need of urgent surgery, but health workers are severely limited in what they can do," he explained.

He also said that there are Israeli snipers in buildings adjacent to the hospital. "We are afraid that the massacre that Israel staged yesterday could be repeated," al-Bursh added.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has announced Washington's allocation of an additional $100 mln military aid package to Kiev, the Reuters news agency reported.

According to Reuters, the package will include anti-tank weapons and missiles for air defense systems.

NATO is looking into a more permanent increase in the number of troops in the Western Balkans to keep tensions under control, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization sent hundreds of additional forces to Kosovo from Britain and Romania after a battle between police and armed Serbs holed up in a monastery turned a quiet village in northern Kosovo into a war zone on Sept. 24.

"We are now reviewing whether we should have a more permanent increase to ensure that this doesn't spiral out of control and creates a new violent conflict in Kosovo or the wider region," Stoltenberg told reporters on a visit to Kosovo.

The gunbattle in September prompted new international concern over stability in Kosovo, which has an ethnic Albanian majority and declared independence from Serbia in 2008 after a guerrilla uprising and a 1999 NATO intervention.

The United States urges Ukraine to carry out maximum mobilization and call up women, minors and the elderly, according to Director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Sergey Naryshkin.

"The West demands from the regime of (Ukrainian President Vladimir) Zelensky to ignore losses and demonstrate to the world community the impossibility of the Russian victory in the Ukrainian conflict. In particular, the reliable data obtained by the SVR show that the US orient the Ukrainian leadership towards maximum active mobilization events to replenish huge losses sustained by the Ukrainian armed forces during the failed counteroffensive," the SVR quoted him as saying.

"The American and British curators of Kiev recommend to the Ukrainian military-political leadership to decrease to 17 years and increase to 70 years the call-up age and additionally mobilize women," he said.

Webmaster addition: Near the end of WW3, Germany was drafting women and children. It's a sign of desperation IMHO!

The Department of Defense relies on hundreds, if not thousands, of weapons and products such as uniforms, batteries, and microelectronics that contain PFAS, a family of chemicals linked to serious health conditions.

Now, as regulators propose restrictions on their use or manufacturing, Pentagon officials have told Congress that eliminating the chemicals would undermine military readiness.

PFAS, known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the environment and can build up in the human body, have been associated with such health problems as cancer. In July, a new federal study showed a direct link between testicular cancer and PFOS, a PFAS chemical that has been found in the blood of thousands of military personnel.

Congress has pressured the Defense Department to clean up U.S. military sites and take health concerns more seriously. Under the fiscal 2023 James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act, the Pentagon was required to assess the ubiquity of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, in products and equipment used by the military.

Renowned cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough has concluded that the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines may cause cardiac arrests following his review of various studies about the matter.

"We're seeing a disturbing continued trend of cardiac arrests in people who have taken the vaccine," said McCullough. "Now we have data from Nakahara in a human cardiac PET [positron emission tomography] study, showing that PET scans of the heart change in almost everybody who took the shot, at least for six months or longer, where the heart's metabolism changes."

"Of interest among those with a sore arm after the shot, there were more striking differences in the heart scan, consistent with the inflammatory changes seen in the arm and the heart at autopsy by Schwab et al," McCullough added.

The controversial decision by Iraq's Supreme Federal Court to oust the parliament speaker, Mohammed al-Halbousi, deepened the country's political crises and sowed division among the Iraqis and foreign diplomatic missions.

On Tuesday, 14 November, Iraq's top court revoked the parliamentary membership of Iraq's parliament speaker, Mohammed al-Halbousi, on charges of forgery, ending the powerful Sunni politician's tenure.

But  the US ambassador in Baghdad, Alina Romanowski has intervened in the crisis. She met with the head of Iraq's Supreme Judicial Council, Judge Faiq Zidan, on 16 November. Romanowski stated that she discussed recent developments and the security situation in Iraq with Zidan. In a post on her official social media account, she emphasised the importance of having an independent judiciary that follows legal procedures and bases its decisions on the Iraqi constitution.

Israel's far-right finance minister, who has so far been excluded from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's war cabinet, called on Monday for lawmakers taking a harder line towards Hamas to be included in decisions about the war.

Netanyahu, whose ruling coalition includes parties from Israel's far right, has been managing the war with a small group of ministers from his hawkish Likud party and a centrist opposition group that joined an emergency government shortly after Hamas' deadly rampage through southern Israel on Oct. 7.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and other hardline members of the broader cabinet have been excluded from much of the decision making, and were particularly critical of a decision last week to accede to a U.S. request to allow some fuel into Gaza for humanitarian reasons.

Democratic members of Congress have introduced a bill that would impose restrictions on bulk ammunition sales, licensing requirements on ammunition vendors, and background checks for ammunition buyers.

Dozens of Palestinians were killed and injured as Israel continued to bomb hospitals and schools sheltering displaced people, as well as homes and buildings, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.

Northern Gaza

After destroying the Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City and putting it totally out of service, the Israeli forces surrounded at dawn on Monday the Indonesian Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip, targeting it with artillery shelling, which led to the death of at least 12 wounded people who were receiving treatment. 

Two doctors were also reportedly wounded.

At dawn, the Israeli artillery bombed the Kuwait School, near the Indonesian Hospital, in the northern Gaza Strip.

America is suffering from multiculturalism, division, and a sprawling empire.

China has a demographic time bomb.

Neither will flex on the other because each is waiting out the collapse of the other.

The once prestigious Lancet medical journal has made the astounding claim the year 2023 saw “the highest global temperatures in over 100,000 years,” even though temperature data collection only began in the 19th century.

• Hamas chief says truce deal is “approaching”; reports suggest possible three- to five-day pause in fighting as Qatari official says captive release talks at “critical and final stage”.
• Health ministry says all hospitals in northern Gaza are now out of service.
• At least 20 Palestinians killed in attack on Nuseirat refugee camp as Israeli bombardment continues.
• More than 13,300 people have been killed in Gaza since October 7. In Israel, the official death toll from Hamas’s attacks stands at about 1,200.

'There's a portal to hell on a plate in front of him', tweeted radio presenter Dana Loesch.

'Why he gripping the table like that?' asked Mubashar Ali. 'The cake reminds me of a state of the US economy it is in,' added another X user.

The sales side (or variable operations) in the Retail Automotive sector is crashing. Service (fixed ops) isn't fairing much better. I'm very glad I sold my store a few years ago.

The United States is confident that the Arab states will not use oil supply as a weapon as they have done in the past, White House energy security adviser Amos Hochstein told the Financial Times in an interview published this weekend.

“Oil has been weaponised from time-to-time since it became a traded commodity, so we’re always worried about that, working against that, but I think so far it hasn’t,” Hochstein told FT.

Webmaster addition: But it will.

New US House Speaker Mike Johnson struck a blow for liberty and justice last week when he finally authorized the release of all the tapes from the January 6, 2021 “insurrection.”

We were told by no less than President Biden himself that this was the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”

The FBI was unleashed by the Biden Administration to hunt down hundreds of participants in this “insurrection” and lock them up in the gulag where they awaited trial in torturous conditions – many in solitary confinement.

A Congressional Committee was set up under then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi to “get to the bottom” of the “Trump-led insurrection.” It did not include a single Representative nominated by the opposition Republican Party, but rather two “Republicans” – Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger – who could be relied on by Pelosi and the Democrats to toe the line.

In short, the whole thing was an old-fashioned Soviet show trial, where the evidence was kept secret and the pre-determined verdict – guilty – was to be used to tighten the grip of the ruling regime and intimidate any further dissenters into silence.

The message was clear: “speak out against the ‘perfection’ of the 2020 election and you may find yourself in the gulag along with the insurrectionists.”

The Social Cancelers are now facing Social Cancellation!
Musk can simply bury these people in legal fees alone.