The U.S. warship Porter entered the Black Sea on Sunday to take part in an annual NATO exercise, days after Russia placed its Black Sea forces on alert.

Sea Breeze 2020 is cohosted by the United States and Ukraine and involves more than 2,000 personnel from Bulgaria, Georgia, Norway, Romania, Spain and Turkey.

It will run through July 26 and focus on warfare areas such as air defense, anti-sub warfare, damage control and search and rescue, according to a Navy release.

A Navy P-8A Poseidon sub hunter aircraft is also participating.

The exercise will take place exclusively at sea to help mitigate COVID-19, according to the release.

US bombers in Guam have tended to be used to threaten North Korea, and a new deployment this week sees a pair of B-1B Lancer bombers arriving in Guam, after a brief stop-off in Japan to participate in a joint exercise.

Though such bombers tend to be used for operations near North Korean airspace, officials are also emphasizing the US tensions with China in the South China Sea. It’s hard to imagine that, with China’s substantial air defenses, these deployments would be likely to see use against them.

The South China Sea, however, seems like it’s going to be an ongoing issue, as the US insists that they will never accept Chinese claims on islands in the area. The Chinese, however, show no interest in giving up on any of those claims either.

The deployment of these bombers comes as the US has sent more forces into the area, with two carrier strike groups currently in the South China Sea.

The deal was never intended as a grand bargain. But by stopping the nuclear capability clock for a decade and a half, with intrusive inspections, it offered an off ramp, an ecosystem conducive to diplomacy and a stepping stone to a mutually brighter future.

President Trump’s impatience has proven costly. Iran has reduced its compliance with the nuclear deal and floats consideration of abandoning it altogether and the NPT as well.

If change is to take place, as much effort, persistence, financial resources, and patience should be devoted to diplomatic solutions as has been devoted to sanctions and pressure.

In the last week, the military conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia has reignited, with the two nations having already been engaged in a military confrontation for decades. Nagorno Karabach, an Armenian enclave inside of Azerbaijan, is one of the main underlying factors for the conflict, but the growing rivalry between Russia and Turkey is also playing a part. More than 16 soldiers have been killed in the most recent round of fighting. Both sides are accusing each other of aggression and military action. The use of full scale armed forces and drones have been involved, killing several soldiers on both sides and reportedly an Azerbaijani general. The current outbreak of fighting has been the deadliest since the “April War” of 2016. While most clashes normally occur in and around the Armenian controlled Nagorno-Karabakh region, the current clashes are on the international border between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The international community is urging both sides to end the clashes.

The US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is preparing for its first test of a new technology that would allow munitions to communicate with one another mid-flight, making decisions about how best to attack their assigned targets.

The Air Force has long been researching linking autonomous drones and aircraft via artificial intelligence networks like SkyBorg, but now researchers are looking to begin the first tests of a related program that would allow bombs and missiles to make their own decisions on the way to their targets about how best to carry out those attacks.

The system is appropriately called the “Golden Horde,” named after the horse-mounted Mongol armies that conquered much of western Asia and Eastern Europe. The Golden Horde’s armies were organized into autonomous command units, making them dynamic and unpredictable - and nigh-undefeatable - on the battlefield, since they could adapt to a changing situation faster than any comparable army.

The Armenian military has claimed it downed an advanced Azerbaijani drone amid ongoing border clashes. The flare-up has already led to casualties on both sides, with the South Caucasus neighbors blaming each other for the spat.

“Armenian air defense units hit a drone of the Azerbaijani armed forces, which is used as a fire control system,” Armenia’s Defense Ministry spokeswoman Shushan Stepanyan said on Tuesday, sharing footage of the incident on Facebook.

A senior commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) says a conflagration and subsequent blast that hit a huge American warship has been the result of the US government’s own crimes.

Addressing a meeting of senior resistance commanders, Brigadier General Esmail Qa’ani, commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), urged the Americans “not to waste their time looking for a culprit or leveling accusations against others” over what happened to the navy ship off San Diego.

“This is a fire they (Americans) have lit themselves,” he said.

At least nine more troopers have been killed on the third straight day of clashes between the armed forces of Azerbaijan and Armenia on their border.

Azerbaijan said seven of its soldiers had died in the fighting on Tuesday, including two senior officers, while Armenia said two of its troops had been killed.

Azerbaijan’s Deputy Defense Minister Karim Valiyev also confirmed that a major general, a colonel, and five other servicemen had “heroically died in action.”

At least four Azeri troops had been killed in clashes on Sunday and Monday. The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry also said that one civilian had been killed in an artillery strike on a village in Tovuz region.

The new technological race for autonomous combat weapons has unleashed a new global debate on the direction of future combat systems and ethics codes. Such conversations have been launched as key emerging technologies reshape the battlefield as well as human condition.

Abishur Prakash, geopolitical futurist for the Center for Innovating the Future, discussed the potential scenarios that could unfold in the new arms race for autonomous military robots. He is the author of the book, 'The Age Of Killer Robots' and the world's top expert on the geopolitical implications of emerging technologies.

More than 4,100 service members have tested positive for coronavirus since the July 1, according to the Defense Department’s latest statistics, a rise of about 33 percent in the last 10 days. That is more than twice the rate of growth nationwide during the same period, 16 percent, as the U.S. more than once broke its daily records for new cases.

Anyone can have a bad decade: the United States Navy has had four. It started in 1989. In April of that year, the number two turret on the battleship U.S.S. Iowa exploded, killing 47 crewmen. The Navy bungled the subsequent investigation, blaming the incident on a suicidal sailor they claimed was spurned by his male lover. It wasn’t true: an independent inquiry cleared the sailor, saying the explosion was the likely result of a loading accident. When the sailor’s family demanded an apology, the Navy refused.

Two years later, in September of 1991, during a “Tailhook” symposium of naval aviators at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel, 26 Navy women were assaulted by some 70 male Navy and Marine pilots. The women were forced to run an alcohol-fueled “gauntlet” on the hotel’s third floor, where they were “groped and grabbed” as they ran down a corridor.

ISIS has long been out of international media headlines, but sprawling refugee camps full of what are said to be Islamic State families and sympathizers remain in eastern Syria.

Days ago the United Nations issued an alarming report detailing that the some 70,000 mostly women, children, and elderly connected to ISIS at the al-Hol and Roj camps remain in "very dire conditions".

The UN counterterrorism chief Vladimir Voronkov announced late last week that 700 people "recently" died in the two camps, according to information his office had received.

Via AlMasdarNews.com,

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday that Ankara’s stance in Libya foiled the plans of the Libyan National Army’s commander, Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar.

According to Erdogan, Turkey’s intervention saved the city of Tripoli from falling to the Libyan National Army (LNA) and their commander.

Erdogan continued in his interview with the Turkish magazine that “the Government of National Accord managed to get the revolutionaries out of Tripoli in a short time and these field gains heralded peace and security in all Libyan lands.”

He then boasted that it was ultimately Turkish military support to Tripoli, was had endured for much of the past year, that thwarted Haftar's advance:

“Turkey’s determined stance stifled the plans of Haftar and his supporters to occupy Tripoli.”

He said, “Strengthening Libya politically and economically will comfort North Africa and Europe.”

A senior US Navy figure working on directed energy weapons let slip recently that the service aims to put seven more laser defense systems on its warships by 2023. The Navy mounted its first such device on an active-duty destroyer earlier this year.

According to Frank Peterkin, the senior technologist for directed energy at the Office of Naval Research, the US Navy aims to mount seven more Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy (ODIN) laser defense systems on different warships over the next three years.

Peterkin made the comment during a Tuesday podcast on directed energy weapons hosted by defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, Breaking Defense reported.

“We’re in a little bit of a golden age for collaboration now for directed energy,” Peterkin said, noting that all branches of the military are presently searching for ways to deploy, and increase the power of, laser weapons.

While the phrase “system of systems” has entered relatively common usage some years ago as a reflection of the need to field systems and assets with complementary capabilities that will operate as part of a synergistic whole in their respective domain of warfare, in the realm of aerospace combat the United States is moving in the direction of the “swarm” as the key organizing principle of its combat paradigm.

The Pentagon is seeking to assure the US public and the world that "extraordinary measures" are being taken to ensure all sailors currently deployed on two aircraft carriers in the South China Sea remain COVID-19 free.

The Navy is enacting strict health measures, including mandatory face masks among sailors, in order to avoid the USS Theodore Roosevelt disaster of months ago, which saw over 1,000 of its nearly 5,000 member crew infected, including the ship's commander.

"We've taken extraordinary measures to protect our sailors from COVID, but that said it remains a real threat and requires constant vigilance," Rear Adm. George Wikoff, the commander of Carrier Strike Group 5, led by the USS Ronald Reagan, said in a statement Wednesday. "The entire team underway, everyone on board, is required to wear a mask," he added.

The US Navy has fired the head of its USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier program. The warship is far behind schedule and over budget, plagued with malfunctioning systems and costly repairs even though it has yet to be commissioned in the Navy.

Capt. Ron Rutan has been removed as head of the Ford’s program office, according to Naval Sea Systems (NAVSEA), which announced his transfer to its office last week. The Ford program will now be headed by Capt. Brian Metcalf, who previously oversaw the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock program, USNI News reported.

NAVSEA spokesman Rory O’Connor told USNI News the Ford program needed to seize “the opportunity to recharge and allow for fresh eyes on upcoming challenges.”

Nothing alarms defenders of the U.S. foreign policy consensus more than the prospect of American retrenchment after the last thirty years of overexpansion and failed wars.

If there is one unquestioned assumption in conventional foreign policy thinking, it is that retrenchment is undesirable and dangerous and must never be allowed to happen. The hostility to the idea of retrenchment is so strong because it threatens to reduce U.S. ambitions and opportunities for entanglement in other parts of the world, and the defenders of the status quo thrive on both.

In late June, a Chinese government think tank warned of a possible military conflict due to the US military’s "unprecedented" deployment to the Asia-Pacific region.

War Zone has reported about "substantial improvements" to the secretive US military base on Wake Island, described by the news outlet as “America's remote outpost deep in the Pacific”.

“The major expansions to the [Wake Island] airfield began early this year and are still underway today”, War Zone said, referring to new satellite imagery that it obtained from the private American imaging company Planet Labs.
The improvements include a large apron expansion on the eastern side of the airfield, construction in the support area to the north, and a complete rebuilding of the runway.

War Zone editor Tyler Rogoway pointed to Wake Island’s “key fallback position” in case of a possible armed conflict with China, which he said would almost certainly affect a key US naval base on the island of Guam.

On the eve of Independence Day, the White House is once again stoking tensions with Beijing, as President Trump continues to embrace aggressive rhetoric toward China as a key campaign issue that (he hopes) will help bring out more Trump voters worried about Biden and/or members of his family's dubious business ties to China and Ukraine.

The exercise will involve the two carriers as well as 4 other warships along with round-the-clock fights and missions.

The news comes as Peter Navarro, who has seemingly been relegated back to a supply closet office in the West Wing now that the trade deal is dead in the water, has apparently been let out of his cage long enough to rant about Beijing and the CCP leadership's unforgivable failure to contain the coronavirus.

Perhaps it's because China has seemingly been on a agricultural commodity buying spree in Latin America?

By Matt Taibbi, via SubStack

It’s the Fourth of July, and revolution is in the air. Only in America would it look like this: an elite-sponsored Maoist revolt, couched as a Black liberation movement whose canonical texts are a corporate consultant’s white guilt self-help manual, and a New York Times series rewriting history to explain an election they called wrong.

Was a What the Fuck? too much to ask? It was! In the space of a few weeks the level of discourse in the news media dropped so low, the fear of being shamed as a deviationist so high, that most of the weirder incidents went uncovered. Leading press organs engaged in real-time Soviet-style airbrushing.

The people who run this country have run out of workable myths with which to distract the public, and in a moment of extreme crisis have chosen to stoke civil war and defame the rest of us – black and white – rather than admit to a generation of corruption, betrayal, and mismanagement.

Via AlMasdarNews.com,

US prosecutors will seek to put an end to Iran’s oil deliveries to Venezuela, as they have filed a new suit to seize the contents on these tankers.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. prosecutors are targeting the oil from four Iranian tankers, along with the payments between Tehran and Caracas.

Iranian oil tankers off the port of Bandar Abbas, via AFP.

Tehran will help fund the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who Washington has designated as a terrorist organization.

“[These payments] support the IRGC’s full range of nefarious activities, including the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery, support for terrorism, and a variety of human rights abuses, at home and abroad”, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Zia Faruqui claims in the filing.

Paratroopers from 4th Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, had only a few days notice ahead of an airborne operation to practice seizing territory in the Indo-Pacific region.

More than 350 soldiers flew aboard several C-17 Globemasters from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, to the U.S. island territory of Guam, donning parachute rigs en route, and jumped in to secure an airfield on Tuesday morning.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service has a message for America's sailors: Please, for the love of Poseidon and the Seven Seas, stop buying hallucinogens in the dark corners of the Internet.

The India-China row in the disputed Ladakh border region isn't over, despite military leaders on both sides last week announcing a cooling and deescalation after the June 15 Galwan Valley clash which left 20 Indian troops dead and an untold number of PLA casualties.

Both sides continue military build-up in the area, despite delegations planning to meet for a third time on Tuesday to attempt a diplomatic way forward and reestablish escalation avoidance mechanisms.

China reportedly has tank and heavy artillery units there, based on satellite images which grabbed headlines days ago, while by the weekend India reportedly deployed quick reaction surface-to-air missile defense systems known as the Akash anti-air system into the northern Himalayan region.

Authored by Tom Luongo via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

There are few men in modern American history more venal than Former National Security Adviser John Bolton. Calling Bolton a relic of the Cold War in his outlook on foreign policy is a kindness.

Bolton is a dangerous and pathetic creature whose entire life is an example of how incomplete men with a talent for violence can rise in a late-stage cesspit of political corruption.

He is simply someone who has never been in a fight in his life who lusts for the power to kill, main and destroy anyone who dares challenge him. A pathology he’s had the dubious distinction of being able to act out in the real world on more than one occasion.

This will, hopefully, be the last article I write about his cretin because once his last fifteen minutes of fame are used up attacking President Trump in slavish interview after interview supporting his book, Bolton will be finished in Washington D.C.

Nevertheless US efforts to undermine Chinese power have been steadily growing over the past 30 years, in part spurred on by the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991, partially also due to China’s increasing clout.

The well informed Brazilian historian, Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, wrote that,

“The CIA’s operations sought to do the same to China, as they had done to the Soviet Union during the war in Afghanistan: Fight their enemy via proxies, i.e., through third parties such as terrorist organisations and countries like Turkey, a puppet state that nourishes pan-Turkish and pan-Islamic ideas”. (1)

Last week, militantly hostile to Iran Pompeo said the following:

The Trump regime is “clear about our expectations (and) goals (sic).”

“We (demand that) the Islamic Republic of Iran behave like a normal nation (sic).”

“We’re happy to engage in conversations with them when the time is right (sic)…”

“(C)onditions that suggest somehow we give a bunch of money to the Iranians so they can foment terror around the world is simply ludicrous (sic).”

“It’s just not how (the Trump regime) behaves (sic).”

Fact: Intentions of both right wings of the US one-party state are crystal clear — seeking dominance over planet earth, its resources and populations by whatever it takes to achieve its objectives, war by hot and other means its favored strategies.

Fact: Even-handed US engagement with other nations was long ago abandoned. Demanding subservience to its interests replaced it.

UK officials may be legally culpable in the torture of Julian Assange

Doctors have warned that UK officials could be held accountable for the torture of Julian Assange in an open letter published in The Lancet on International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.

The 216 undersigned physicians and psychologists from 33 countries have accused UK and U.S. government officials of intensifying Julian Assange’s psychological torture in spite of the world’s leading authorities on human rights and international law calling for his immediate release from prison.

Clinical Psychologist and Australian co-author of the publication, ‘The ongoing torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange’, Dr Lissa Johnson said the failure to properly treat Mr Assange may amount to an act of torture in which state officials, from parliament to court to prison, risk being judged complicit.

By Tony Cartalucci for Global Research.

Despite what appears to be a terminal decline of US influence over the Middle East, Washington has no intentions of gracefully abandoning its aspirations of regional hegemony.

Air strikes carried out against Syria by Washington’s Israeli proxies, a mysterious explosion near Tehran, and the current Iraqi Prime Minister’s decision to round up leaders of Iranian-backed militias who helped defeat the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS) unfolded in quick succession in an apparent coordinated campaign aimed at Iran and its allies.

New Iraqi Prime Minister’s Checkered Past

Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi took office in May 2020.

While he has warned about deepening relations with Iran he has concurrently stated the importance of US backing – despite the US having illegally invaded, destroyed, and since occupied Iraq starting in 2003.

Up to 25,000 people have been granted domicile certificates in Indian-administered Kashmir since May 18, raising fears of the beginning of demographic changes in the Muslim-majority Himalayan region.

The certificate, a sort of citizenship right, entitles a person to residency and government jobs in the region, which till last year was reserved only for the local population.

Last year on August 5, when India revoked the semi-autonomous status of the region, it also scrapped the local special citizenship law, guaranteed under Article 35 (A) of the Indian constitution. The move has drawn parallel with the occupied West Bank.

On Friday, Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden said, "India should take all necessary steps to restore the rights of all the people of Kashmir."

A Saudi-brokered ceasefire between the Saudi-backed government in Yemen and the Southern Transitional Council (STC) has not lasted long, and after tensions on the island of Socotra, fighting erupted in Abyan Province.

Fighting has raged over 24 hours in Abyan Province, with at least 54 fighters killed. Both sides are blaming the other for starting the fighting and “violating” the truce. Monitors are still heading into Abyan, but it’s not clear there is a ceasefire left to monitor.

A coastal province, Abyan has often been contested by the STC, and the same territory was under dispute during the Arab Spring, when Islamist groups tied to al-Qaeda seized several towns in the area, including the provincial capital of Zinjibar.

China has dismissed widespread Indian media claims that its side suffered 40 casualties during the June 15 night border clash which left 20 Indian soldiers dead as "fake news". It has further condemned New Delhi giving its troops "freedom of action" to respond with deadly fire if under attack by PLA troops.

But despite the soaring tensions which many feared could see war break out along the disputed Ladakh border region, the two nuclear armed neighbors have agreed to deescalation and disengagement at the border.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian confirmed at a news briefing on Tuesday that talks between the two sides' top regional commanders resulted in a positive breakthrough. They "agreed to take necessary measures to promote a cooling of the situation," Zhao said.

On the same day White House trade advisor Peter Navarro told Fox News the trade deal with China is "over" (and immediately, the White House reversed Navarro's comments because of market gyrations) - a massive show off force, likely directed at China, took place Monday at a Japanese airbase involving stealth fighter jets.

Navarro's comments suggest the phase one trade deal is trouble. It also signals tensions are rising between both countries over the origins of COVID-19 and China's assertion of power over Hong Kong. At the moment, China is lagging significantly behind phase one targets it promised, and as we've noted, Chinese buyers ditched U.S. markets for Brazilian ones.

Now it's hard to say if around the time Navarro made the comments that a fleet of warplanes conducting an "elephant walk" at the Misawa base in Japan was connected - but it certainly implies tensions are heating up.

Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Just when you thought the leaders of NATO could not push the limits of insanity any further, something like NATO 2030 is announced.

After helping blow up the Middle East and North Africa, dividing the Balkans into zones of war and tension, turning Ukraine upside down using armadas of neo Nazis, and encircling Russia with a ballistic missile shield, the leaders of this Cold War relic have decided that the best way to deal with instability of the world is… more NATO.

Several military bases in central and southern Syria have been targeted by air attacks that Damascus has blamed on Israel, Syrian state media have reported. Videos on social media show massive explosions illuminating the night.
Israel targeted several locations in Salamiyah and Saburah just before 1 am on Wednesday, the Syrian army said, adding that its air defenses shot down “a large number” of hostile missiles but that some struck their targets and inflicted “limited material damage.”

New Delhi (Sputnik): India and China have been engaged in an unprecedented border face-off at the Line of Control in the Ladakh region over the last two months. Despite around a dozen high-level talks, the agreed upon disengagement is yet to take place at Pangong Tso and the Galwan Valley.

Despite a "mutual consensus" to de-escalate tensions on the Indo-China border, satellite images purportedly show the Chinese People’s Liberation Army allegedly continuing a military build-up in the Ladakh region, along with India increasing motor boat patrolling in Pangong Tso.

Cognitive Dissonance

Cairo sent a letter to the United Nations Security Council requesting it to intervene in the dispute over the Great Renaissance Dam of Ethiopia (GERD). A hasty filling of the dam in Ethiopia threatens food and agriculture in Egypt and Sudan, and for this reason Cairo wants the UN Security Council to lend a hand in tripartite negotiations.

In its letter, Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs activated Article 35 of the UN Charter, which allows member states to warn the international entity of any crisis that threatens peace and security. Egypt’s Foreign Ministry decided to appeal to the UN after tripartite negotiations stalled due to Ethiopia’s “non-cooperative behavior.” The GERD, that Ethiopia has been working on since 2011, is to provide electricity for not only the whole country, but also its neighbors. The main problem Egypt and Sudan have with the Ethiopian project is the timeline to fill up the $4.8 billion dam with water.

A group of high-ranking Congress members is launching an investigation into Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet program after being told U.S. military had to spend $300 million in the last five years on defective and missing parts.

The trillion-dollar F-35 program is just getting over many of the problems that plagued its early design and production and has now hit on delivery targets three years in a row and recently announced it had lowered the per-plane cost to $77.9 million.

But an investigation by the Department of Defense’s Inspector General said last year the office overseeing the spare parts program “did not receive ... F\u201135 spare parts in accordance with contract requirements and paid performance incentive fees on the sustainment contracts based on inflated and unverified F\u201135A aircraft availability hours.”

The problem with spare parts will continue to cost the military about $55 million a year, the report said.

Amid the election race Trump may take risky steps leading to a dangerous military standoff with China in the Asia-Pacific. Ironically, his reelection could be the only chance to avoid a new Cold War or even WWIII.
When future historians write the chronicles of the 21st century, they will probably flag 2020 as a turning point marking the start of a genuine antagonism between the world’s strongest powers, the US and China.

Israel is already the US’s closest ally in the Middle East, with Washington committing to provide Tel Aviv with $38 billion in military aid over ten years in 2016. Israel became a major US non-NATO ally in 1987, making it eligible to receive the latest US military hardware as it became available.

Bipartisan groups of lawmakers in both the House and Senate are working on legislation which would further expand US-Israeli defence cooperation to include a ‘US-Israel Operations-Technology Working Group’.

New Delhi (Sputnik): Over the last few days, the two Asian giants - India and China - have been involved in diplomatic talks as the situation on the border is tense following the face-off between troops from the two countries on 15 June that left 20 Indian soldiers killed and many others injured. China hasn't confirmed any casualties so far.

Undated videos showing Indian soldiers engaged in a fierce stand-off with Chinese troops supposedly at a border area in Sikkim Sector are going viral on social media.

In one such video, a group of Indian soldiers can be seen jostling and pushing back Chinese troops. They can also be heard asking the People's Liberation Army to go back.

The U.S. determination to resist China’s attempts to exert its power in the Western Pacific has grown still stronger after Beijing imposed a new national security law on Hong Kong in May, greatly diluting (if not negating) that territory’s guaranteed political autonomy. The Trump administration, with bipartisan congressional support, rescinded Hong Kong’s special trade status and adopted other punitive measures.

U.S. leaders also sought solidarity from America’s allies in both Europe and East Asia for a joint statement of condemnation and the imposition of sanctions in response to the PRC’s erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy. The lack of support from European capitals creates serious doubts about how much assistance Washington could expect if a showdown with China emerges at some point over Taiwan’s de facto independence. Allied backing on the Hong Kong issue was tepid and grudging, at best.

With an already shattered medical infrastructure due to the five-year US-Saudi siege, Covid-19 has rapidly spread through Yemen. The Arab country lacks the basic necessities for preventative measures like clean water, and a population facing malnourishment is especially vulnerable to the disease. A recent uptick in Saudi bombing might put a country already on the brink of collapse over the edge.

Last week, Saudi warplanes pounded Yemen’s capital Sanaa, in what residents called the worst airstrikes they have seen since the first years of the war. Seventy-seven airstrikes hit several provinces in north Yemen within 24 hours. According to the Houthi’s health ministry and NGOs on the ground, one of the strikes hit a car traveling in the Sadaa province and killed 13 civilians, including four children.

Another round of sanctions, the ironically named Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, has taken effect in Syria. Through the magic of secondary sanctions, Washington will forbid everyone on earth from dealing with the Syrian regime. Even before the penalties took effect, noted the Washington Post: "they have already contributed to the collapse of Syria’s long-troubled economy."

Thus, the law will further impoverish the Syrian people and hurt them more than their government. However, no one in Washington appears to care that national reconstruction will be further impeded. All that matters is claiming to care.

Sanctions have become the U.S. government’s "go to" policy. Whatever the problem, Washington seems to respond by launching or intensifying economic war. And American policymakers are determined to conscript the entire world in their favorite crusades, using secondary and financial penalties to dissuade others from dealing with Uncle Sam’s enemy du jour.

India and Pakistan have already fought two wars since independence that were partially or completely over the sovereignty of the territory. The unmanned drone, which was reportedly carrying weaponry, was shot down by India’s Border Security Force (BSF) in Kathua district near the Pansar border outpost.

In a statement the BSF said: “Alert troops of BSF shot down a Pakistani Hexa copter drone carrying 01 M4 carbine machine (US Made), 02 filled magazines (60 Rds), 07 Chinese grenades.”

According to the Press Trust of India the drone was spotted by an Indian patrol at 12.40am BST.

It was allegedly then shot down 250 meters inside the Indian side of the border.

The BSF has launched an investigation to find out who the arms being carried by the drone were intended for.

Egypt and Turkey have long been on opposite sides of the raging battle for the fate of Libya, with Turkey providing major military support and backing for the UN-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli, and with Egypt backing Gen. Khalifa Haftar.

The situation escalated over the weekend, amid a pullback of pro-Haftar forces from Tripoli after being defeated in the bid for the capital, when Egypt's President Sisi announced from an airbase near the Libyan border that the Egyptian Army stands ready to intervene in Libya on behalf of Haftar.

Sisi declared that if GNA forces attempt to enter Haftar-controlled Sirte, pushing deeper into central Libya, this would be a 'red line' for Egypt, forcing it's intervention. Crucially both Tripoli and its main ally Turkey on Sunday condemned what they called Sisi's "declaration of war".

Among the new revelations and interesting tidbits found in John Bolton's now leaked pre-published edition of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” is that President Trump was said to be prepared to endorse an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear sites.

In a section which describes the "elusive search" for an Arab-Israeli peace deal, Bolton writes that Trump told him at a moment of increased Israeli concerns over Iran's nuclear development:

"You tell Bibi that if he uses force, I will back him. I told him that, but you tell him again."

Beijing is enraged over current widespread Indian media reports that the Indian Army has been given orders to shoot or use "complete freedom of action" in hostile engagements with Chinese PLA forces along the disputed Ladakh border region.

The reports come following last week's major border incident with China that resulted in 20 Indian Army troops killed, and an undisclosed number of Chinese PLA casualties in the disputed Galwan Valley area of East Ladakh.

Chinese state-media Global Times editor Hu Xijin called out the reports, saying that if the new 'rules of engagement' are true, it's a serious violation of prior treaties implemented for deescalation.

Authored by Peter Pry, op-ed via The Hill,

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed dangerous weaknesses in U.S. planning and preparation for civil defense protection and recovery, and those weaknesses surely have been noticed by our potential enemies: China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and international terrorists.

The U.S. spent decades, and billions of dollars, supposedly preparing for biological warfare. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the departments of Defense and Homeland Security are supposed to have contingency plans to protect the American people from lethal biological weapons such as anthrax and genetically engineered smallpox, which could have mortality rates of over 90 percent.

India is reportedly seeking to beef up military purchases from Russia following last week's major border incident with China that resulted in 20 Indian Army troops killed, and an undisclosed number of Chinese PLA casualties in the disputed Galwan Valley area of East Ladakh.

Indian government sources were cited in New Delhi-based ANI News Agency as saying "the Indian Air Force (IAF) has pushed a proposal to the government for acquiring 33 new fighter aircraft, including 21 MiG-29s and 12 Su-30MKIs from Russia."

Via The Epoch Times,

One person was wounded in what was the second shooting in Seattle’s protest zone in less than 48 hours, police said.

The shooting happened late Sunday night in the area near Seattle’s downtown that is known as CHOP, for “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest,” police tweeted, adding that one person was at a hospital with a gunshot wound.

The person arrived in a private vehicle and was in serious condition, Harborview Medical Center spokesperson Susan Gregg said in a statement.

The zone evolved after weeks of protests in the city over police brutality and racism, sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, a black man, in Minneapolis.

The Sunday shooting followed a pre-dawn shooting on Saturday in a park within the zone that left a 19-year-old man dead and a 33-year-old man critically injured. The suspect or suspects in that first shooting fled the scene, and no arrests had been made as of Sunday, Detective Mark Jamieson had said.

For the seventh time this month, Chinese warplanes approached Taiwan's air defense identification zone (ADIZ) on Monday in what could be a deepening phase of geopolitical turmoil between Beijing and Taipei, reported Reuters.

The People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) flew at least one H-6 bomber and J-10 fighter jet into the ADIZ at the island's southwest territory.

A member of Yemen’s Supreme Political Council has held Saudi Arabia and its regional allies, which are involved in an atrocious military campaign against the impoverished Arab country, fully responsible for a potential oil leakage from a decaying tanker in the Red Sea, and the impending environmental disaster it could cause.

“We do not assume any responsibility for any leakage from the Safer tanker afloat at the sea,” Arabic-language al-Masirah television network quoted Mohammed Ali al-Houthi as saying on Thursday.

He called for immediate actions over the matter, holding the United States, Saudi Arabia and their allies fully liable for any disastrous consequences as they have not allowed Yemen to sell the crude loaded at the tanker.

China and Russia have rebuked the International Atomic Energy Agency for giving in to US "bullying" as the IAEA's board of governor on Friday passed a resolution critical of Iran for the first time since 2012.

The resolution, submitted by France, Britain and Germany, comes at a time when the United States is working to extend an arms embargo against Iran.

Diplomats attending the Friday meeting in Vienna were cited as saying that the resolution called on Iran to allow access to two former sites mentioned in two IAEA reports.

Iranian officials have said Tehran has responded to all outstanding questions about its nuclear activities and the IAEA has repeatedly confirmed it. The new questions, they say, have been raised based on information fabricated by Israel.

In many ways, 2020 has already been a year that has had virtually every worst-case outcome take place: a global pandemic the likes of which have not been seen since the Spanish Flu of 1918, a market crash and economic recession that were as sharp as the Great Depression of 1929, a Fed intervention that puts the 2008 bailout to shame, and topping it all off, a new cold war. But according to Deutsche Bank the "fat tail" outcomes are only getting started.

As the bank's strategists Henry Allen and Jim Reid "cheerfully" write, tail risks such as Covid-19 are thankfully rare compared with other market shocks. However, they note, such events "are a more regular occurrence than most people think, with pandemics being just one example. In this piece we consider various tail risks that could cause another global crisis, and assess the probability that they will occur."

Both China and India have signaled they are seeking to deescalate soaring tensions along the disputed and loosely demarcated Line of Actual Control (LAC) which separates Indian-controlled territory from Chinese-controlled territory along Ladakh and the Chinese Tibet Autonomous Region.

This after on Monday night the deadliest border clash in a half-century erupted, after which the Indian Army confirmed 20 of its troops killed after being critically wounded followed by being “exposed to sub-zero temperatures in the high altitude terrain.” Though the Chinese side has yet to give details of PLA casualties, Indian media has widely reported that over 40 "enemy" soldiers were killed.

Though political leaders on both sides have said they don't want to stoke tensions possibly leading to outbreak of war, Chinese state media CCTV announced military drills designed as a 'show of force'. RT Arabic subsequently republished video of the undated exercises near the Line of Actual Control.

Perhaps predictably given Erdogan's increased threats and foreign adventurism, cracks loom in the NATO alliance over Libya, leading to an official probe by Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

It started last week after France complained that Turkey is still breaking a UN arms embargo in effect on war-torn Libya. When a French frigate attempted to intercept a Turkish vessel suspected of running arms into Tripoli on June 10, it was reportedly "engaged" via radar, as if a missile strike was impending. The AP details, based on French defense sources:

According to a French defense official, the frigate Courbet was “lit up” three times by Turkish naval targeting radar when it tried to approach a Turkish civilian ship suspected of involvement in arms trafficking. The Courbet backed off after being targeted.

The French vessel was part of NATO's naval operation in the Mediterranean, Sea Guardian, at the time of the June 10 incident.

Submitted by Michael Every of Rabobank

Spy Kvetcher
Excuse the repeat pun today, but there was no need to publish in Australia to avoid the Official Secrets Act: just leak the contents to journalists and, hey presto, the Bloomberg headline (so far) is “Book of Bolton”. Which, it must be said, lands some heavy blows on this US president. The particular hits the media are flagging are that Trump allegedly pleaded with China’s Xi Jinping to help him get re-elected, and was fine with re-education/detention camps in Xinjiang.

For the first time since 2017, the US has three aircraft carriers patrolling the Pacific, part of Washington’s efforts to increase its footprint in the region to confront China. The USS Theodore Roosevelt, the USS Nimitz, and the USS Ronald Reagan are all leading strike groups in the Indo-Pacific.

The deployments are likely a show of force by Washington to quash ru

Pyongyang has vowed to send troops back into previously disarmed areas and renew military drills near the border, amid an ongoing spat with Seoul over defectors, inflamed further by the recent demolition of a negotiations outpost.
North Korea will reestablish a troop presence in the Mount Kumgang and Kaesong regions – which both fall just beyond the Demilitarized Zone along the border – and resume “all kinds of regular military exercises,” the Korean People's Army said on Wednesday, according to Yonhap News.

An airstrike from the US-backed Saudi-led coalition hit a vehicle carrying civilians in north Yemen on Monday. The airstrike killed 13 people, including four children. The same day, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres removed the Saudi coalition from a global list of parties who have harmed children in conflicts.

The international humanitarian group Save the Children said the victims were on their way home from a local market when the vehicle was suddenly bombed. The Houthi’s Health Ministry identified 11 of the victims, which included one woman and four children, ages 12-14.

The coalition often targets civilian infrastructure, which is why Guterres’s move to remove them from the “blacklist” drew sharp condemnation from human rights groups. Saudi warplanes have hit schools, hospitals, water treatment plants, markets, weddings, and other civilian targets.

Israel may have increased its nuclear stockpile from 80 warheads in 2019 to 90 in 2020, according to a new report by a leading global arms watchdog.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) said in its annual report on Monday that Israel, one of the world's nine nuclear powers, could be in possession of up to 90 nuclear warheads.

The watchdog said that the true number could be higher as Israel does not officially comment on its nuclear capabilities.

"There is significant uncertainty about the size of Israel's nuclear arsenal and its warhead capabilities," it said.

"Israel continues to maintain its long-standing policy of nuclear opacity: it neither officially confirms nor denies that it possesses nuclear weapons."

North Korea blew up a liaison office building it operates with South Korea, officials in Seoul said Tuesday, as tensions on the Korean Peninsula escalated amid stalled denuclearization talks between Pyongyang and the Trump administration.

Seoul’s Unification Ministry said it was still trying to determine precisely what happened. But it confirmed that the joint liaison office, opened in 2018 to foster better relations between the rival Koreas, was destroyed by North Korea at the border town of Kaesong.

The targeting of the building by North Korea comes as Pyongyang has repeatedly warned Seoul that it needs to prevent defectors and activists from sending anti-North Korea propaganda leaflets across the border via balloons and drones.

Following days of escalating tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors, Indian Army officials confirmed that three troops - an officer and two soldiers, to be more precise - had been gunned down by Chinese forces during a "violent faceoff" in Galwan Valley in the Ladakh region, which rests along the country's border with China on Monday night.

A statement from the Indian Army says both sides were meeting to diffuse tensions building up on the border in the last several weeks. Other reports indicate the soldiers weren't shot but had been killed during a rock-throwing melee reminiscent of another border incident back in May, where both sides reported injuries.

One of the first comprehensive surveys of Israeli training of US local and federal law enforcement officials.
By Max Blumenthal

(Editor’s note: The eruption of national protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd have shed new light on Israel’s training of local police officers across the country.

100 members of the 800-strong Minneapolis police department were trained at a conference in Israel in 2012. That means at least one of every eight members the city’s force has been influenced by the methods of an occupying apartheid entity.

South Korea is holding an emergency meeting on Sunday in response to worsening ties with North Korea, and following threats of military action by Kim Yo Jong, sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Kim, who serves as a top aide, says that she is to instruct North Korean forces to carry out a decisive action, saying “I feel it is high time to surely break with the South Korea authorities.”

She didn’t specify what that would entail, but South Koreans have recently been sending anti-regime leaflets north, and that tends to rile up the North Korean government and lead to threats of non-specific actions. South Korea is urging both sides to honor agreements.

Longterm harm caused by US policies at home and abroad are far removed from a Panglossian best of all possible worlds view.

What’s going on has echoes of Orwell’s dystopian 1984.

Both right wings of the US war party wage forever wars against invented enemies.

Mass surveillance, controlling the message, and countering resistance are what police state rule is all about, how the US operates domestically, what it wants imposed on other nations worldwide.

The disparity between super-wealth and growing poverty in the US is greater than any time since the 19th century gilded age.

The nation’s economic policy elevates all yachts to unprecedented levels while protracted main street Depression harms ordinary Americans with nothing ongoing to change things.

Countless millions of US households face unacceptable choices between paying rent or servicing mortgages, seeking increasingly unaffordable medical care when needed, heating homes in winter, and feeding family members.

Colombian senators on Wednesday said that U.S. troops that arrived in the South American country in early June are allowed to associate with illegal groups and seek an eventual international confrontation.

The Democratic Congressman Ivan Cepeda revealed that the current manuals of the U.S. special forces (SFAB) that arrived in Colombia “mention the function of advising non-governmental militias and illegal partners.”

“We can end up like Libya, a destroyed state that has become a field for the multinational oil companies,” the opposition congressman added.

The arrival of U.S. military personnel in the country without the consent of Congress demonstrates the responsibility of the government of Ivan Duque in that regard.

A video clip shared by local farmers from Ras Al-Ayn showing an inferno burning their livelihood before their eyes, hundreds of acres of wheat on fire just as the crop is due to harvest.

We’ve been reporting about these fires in areas of operation of the NATO’s Turkish (Orwellian-named) ‘Spring of Peace’ military operation in northern, and especially in northeastern Syria regions as well as in areas where remnants and sleeper cells of NATO-sponsored terrorists of ISIS and its affiliates are active in the south of the country.

The US is sending a new group of F-35s to the Middle East, though exactly why is subject to speculation, as Centcom’s report was just a list of things the costly plane could conceivably do.

Things like close air support are capabilities, but not strengths, and the US has other planes better suited to that role. This is fueling speculation that the move is aimed at Iran.

There seems no particular reason to be after Iran just now, but US hostility toward Iran comes and goes like the seasons, so it is as good an explanation as any.

SOURCE: DEFENSE ONE
The Pentagon will send weapons and other military aid worth $250 million to Ukraine as part of the four-year-old Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, or USAI, defense officials announced Thursday.

The aid includes counter-artillery radars, air surveillance systems, other tactical equipment, military medical treatment, cyber defenses, “strategic communications,” according to a Thursday release by the Pentagon. Intended to help Ukraine fight the Russia-backed forces that have occupied part of the country’s eastern region since 2014, the aid aims to “enhance Ukraine’s defensive lethal capabilities and situational awareness in the maritime domain” and “counter Russian cyber offensive operations and misinformation.”

SOURCE: MINT PRESS
ADEN, YEMEN — As focus begins to turn to developments in Libya and the foreign interference that plagues the Arab country, it seems that Turkey already has its eye elsewhere, preparing for military involvement in Yemen in a move that has sparked concern among Yemenis already struggling against an intervention led by Saudi Arabia, famine and most recently, COVID-19.

Informed sources in Aden and Taiz revealed to MintPress that a militia belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated El-Eslah Party, the ideological and political ally of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, is already engaged in the latest round of fighting in Yemen’s southern provinces, particularly in Abyan and Shabwa.

Eight months after we penned a piece titled "Taiwan Warns Of Possible Invasion If China's Economy Continues To Deteriorate" -- a virus pandemic has crippled the global economy and Taiwan on Thursday (June 11) conducted missile tests off several of its coasts as tensions between China and the US are rising in the Taiwan Strait.

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) is reporting that Taiwan has test-fired missiles off its eastern and southern coasts as the self-ruled island increases its defense capabilities against mainland China.

The tests were held near Taiwan's eastern county of Taitung and the Jiupeng military base in the southern part of the island on Thursday night.

Authored by Paul Ryder via Counterpunch.org,

Five times in the last ninety years, elements of the U.S. power structure have tried to oust a sitting president without an election.

The efforts were aimed at Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump.

Two attempts succeeded and three failed... so far.

If the Democrats had understood Watergate, they would have noticed a key condition was missing: aggravated conflict between the president and the military-industrial complex. That is why the Democrats failed.

Of course, as 2020 election day approaches, President Trump has managed to create a triple crisis — his bungled COVID-19 response, the resulting economic paralysis, and his inciting a coast-to-coast police rampage — which may doom him with no effort by the Democrats. No one knows at this point.

by William J. Astore and Tom Engelhardt Posted onJune 08, 2020
Originally posted at TomDispatch.

Here’s a little portrait of the United States in June 2020, a passage from a New York Times report on the National Guard’s treatment of a recent protest march of people chanting "We can’t breathe!" in Washington, D.C.:

"A Black Hawk helicopter, followed by a smaller medical evacuation helicopter, dropped to rooftop level with its searchlights aimed at the crowd. Tree limbs snapped, nearly hitting several people. Signs were torn from the sides of buildings. Some protesters looked up, while others ran into doorways. The downward force of air from the rotors was deafening. The helicopters were performing a ‘show of force’ – a standard tactic used by military aircraft in combat zones to scatter insurgents."

The best part of a major, nationwide protest movement is having someone to blame. This weekend, the new narrative embraced by the White House would pin large US protests against police brutality on Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro.

The Trump Administration has had a problem with Maduro for a long time, and in just the past few months had also accused him of being involved in the drug trade, justifying a bounty on his head that culminated in a failed invasion by a private US company.

The White House is refusing to offer any proof on this, saying it was “non-open source.” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) cited certain news reports from Latin America. The whole thing, incredibly, all falls back on Max Blumenthal’s T-shirt.

India and China agreed to resolve a current border standoff peacefully in line with various bilateral agreements and will keep each other engaged as talks remains deadlocked.

“The two sides will continue military and diplomatic engagements to resolve the situation and to ensure peace and tranquility in the border areas,” India’s ministry of external affairs said in a statement.

Friction in this relationship, historically, is not unusual. But in recent days, and for the second time in Trump’s term, it has raised a prospect of high-level resignations and the risk of lasting damage to the military’s reputation.

Calm may return, both in the crisis over Floyd’s death and in Pentagon leaders’ angst over Trump’s threats to use federal troops to put down protesters. But it could leave a residue of resentment and unease about this president’s approach to the military, whose leaders welcome his push for bigger budgets but chafe at being seen as political tools.

SOURCE: THE GRAYZONE
UNDER FBI ORDERS, FACEBOOK AND GOOGLE REMOVED AMERICAN HERALD TRIBUNE, AN ALTERNATIVE SITE THAT PUBLISHES US AND EUROPEAN WRITERS CRITICAL OF US FOREIGN POLICY. THE BUREAU’S JUSTIFICATION FOR THE REMOVAL WAS DUBIOUS, AND IT SETS A TROUBLING PRECEDENT FOR OTHER CRITICAL OUTLETS.

BY GARETH PORTER
The FBI has publicly justified its suppression of dissenting online views about US foreign policy if a media outlet can be somehow linked to one of its adversaries. The Bureau’s justification followed a series of instances in which Silicon Valley social media platforms banned accounts following consultations with the FBI.

SOURCE: THE INTERCEPT
In the face of protests composed largely of young people, the presence of America’s military on the streets of major cities has been a controversial development. But this isn’t the first time that Generation Z — those born after 1996 — has popped up on the Pentagon’s radar.

Documents obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act reveal that a Pentagon war game, called the 2018 Joint Land, Air and Sea Strategic Special Program, or JLASS, offered a scenario in which members of Generation Z, driven by malaise and discontent, launch a “Zbellion” in America in the mid-2020s.

US forces remain in Syria despite having no legal basis such an invitation from the government or UN Security Council mandate to carry out operations there. Washington continues to ignore demands by Damascus and members of the international community to withdraw its troops illegally stationed there.

Four armoured US military vehicles were stopped by Syrian Army forces while attempting to cross a checkpoint on the M4 highway in the province of Al-Hasakah near the suburbs of Tall Tamer. The American military convoy was travelling towards the village of Derdara as it tried to cross a sliver of territory in the country's northeast controlled by the Syrian Army, and was forced to turn back.