The four-star general in charge of the US Air Force’s Air Mobility Command has defended a memo he sent to his officers earlier this year where he predicted the US would be at war with China in 2025.

“My assessment is that war is not inevitable, but the readiness I’m driving with that timeline is absolutely essential to deterrence and absolutely essential to the decisive victory,” Gen. Mike Minihan said last week when asked about his prediction, according to Defense One.

“There needs to be tension on readiness, more than just ‘be ready tonight.’ You need to have readiness that drives urgency. The urgency and the action are paramount,” he added.

Minihan noted that the memo, dated February 1, included the words: “I hope I am wrong.” But the memo to his officers ordered them to be prepared for a fight with China, and while the Pentagon distanced itself from Minihan’s timeline, the US is openly preparing for a direct war with China by building up its forces in the Asia Pacific and increasing military support for Taiwan.

President Biden met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday and announced a new tranche of US military aid for Ukraine that includes more cluster bombs, which are notorious for killing and maiming civilians.

The arms package is worth $325 million and uses the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), which allows Biden to ship arms directly from US military stockpiles. The $325 million is being pulled from funds that became available after the Pentagon said it overvalued previous arms shipments to Ukraine, an “accounting error” that freed up an additional $6.2 billion in PDA to fuel the war.

The cluster bombs, known as dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICM), are provided in the form of 155mm artillery rounds, which spread small sub-munitions over a large area. The arms package also includes air defense systems, HIMARS ammunition, other artillery rounds, and other equipment.

When announcing the arms package, President Biden said the first batch of Abrams tanks will be delivered to Ukraine next week. The tanks will be armed with depleted uranium rounds, a toxic ammunition linked to cancer and birth defects.

Pizza Hut Australia is sending data breach notifications to customers, warning that a cyberattack allowed hackers to access their personal information.

The notification warns that the hacker gained unauthorized access to Pizza Hut Australia systems storing sensitive info for customers who made online orders, as well as partial financial data and encrypted account passwords.

Vice President Kamala Harris will lead a new federal office of gun violence prevention, the White House said Thursday.

President Joe Biden will formally announce the new office Friday during a Rose Garden event where several advocates and lawmakers have been invited to attend.

Harris, who has played a leading role in gun safety policy, will oversee the office, according to a White House statement. Longtime Biden aide Stefanie Feldman, who has worked on gun policy for more than a decade, will serve as its director.

“The new Office of Gun Violence Prevention will play a critical role in implementing President Biden’s and my efforts to reduce violence to the fullest extent under the law, while also engaging and encouraging Congressional leaders, state and local leaders, and advocates to come together to build upon the meaningful progress that we have made to save lives,” the vice president said in a statement.

Apple released emergency security updates to patch three new zero-day vulnerabilities exploited in attacks targeting iPhone and Mac users, for a total of 16 zero-days fixed this year.

Two bugs were found in the WebKit browser engine (CVE-2023-41993) and the Security framework (CVE-2023-41991), enabling attackers to bypass signature validation using malicious apps or gain arbitrary code execution via maliciously crafted webpages.

The third one was found in the Kernel Framework, which provides APIs and support for kernel extensions and kernel-resident device drivers. Local attackers can exploit this flaw (CVE-2023-41992) to escalate privileges.

Democrat Senator John Fetterman on Thursday got choked up as he recounted being bullied for struggling to process language after his massive stroke in May 2022.

Fetterman spoke at a Senate Special Committee on Aging and was accompanied by people with disabilities.

John Fetterman got choked up as he recounted being bullied for his post-stroke symptoms. Fetterman is not a civilian struggling to recover from a stroke. He is a US Senator who is making decisions for hundreds of millions of people. Any criticism of his inability to speak is warranted.

The US Senate is not a rehab facility.

One week ago, when previewing the three events that are about to slam US GDP in the tail end of the 3rd and the 3th quarter (including the return of student loan payments, the UAW strike and the government shutdown), Goldman calculated that reduced auto production from a potential UAW strike would reduce quarterly annualized growth by 0.05-0.10% for each week it lasted, if all three companies currently undergoing contract negotiations are impacted. "Those three companies—Ford, GM, and Stellantis—produce almost half of domestically-assembled cars. Auto production would likely fall sharply—we assume to roughly zero—at any company impacted by a strike", Goldman said in its 30,000 approximation of the impact..

Update(12:20ET): With Zelensky in Capitol Hill, and with Ukraine aid hanging in the balance, Kevin McCarthy has failed for a second time to advance a bill funding the Defense Department, which keeps the government on a path toward a shutdown on Oct. 1. This tweet by Mitch McConnell captures the essence of the raging disagreement and debate...

Politico has reported secret, urgent cross-aisle talks as follows: "Small groups of centrist Democrats are holding secret talks with several of McCarthy’s close GOP allies about a last-ditch deal to fund the government, according to more than a half-dozen people familiar with the discussions."

• The House voted 212-216 against moving the funding bill to a final vote: Axios

In October 2020, Twitter locked The Post's account over the revelation of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, and on Facebook, stories linking to the Post's story were also blocked by the tech giants. The move came after The Post refused Twitter’s demand that it delete six tweets that linked to laptop-related stories that the Twitter claimed — without any evidence — were based on "hacked information", the Post said.

Major newspapers, mostly left-leaning, refused to report on the laptop, many using the letter as "proof" the laptop was fake. A year and a half after the Post broke the story, the Times says it had "authenticated" the messages it previously deemed suspect. 

In September 2022, nearly two years after the news of the laptop broke, a Rasmussen Reports poll found that 63% of American voters believed the story was important, and 44% believed it was “very important.”

On Tuesday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the creation of the Homeland Intelligence Experts Group, which includes "private sector experts who will provide their unique perspectives on the federal government’s intelligence enterprise to DHS’s [Intelligence and Analysis] and the Office of the Counterterrorism Coordinator."

President Biden's expected new weapons package being announced when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visits Washington on Thursday is expected to have more internationally-banned munitions, Reuters reported on Wednesday.

Sources told Reuters that the package will be worth $325 million and is expected to include the second tranche of widely-banned cluster bombs in the form of 155mm artillery shells. The US began providing Ukraine with cluster munitions in July despite their history of killing and maiming civilians.

Ovidio Guzmán López is currently in a Chicago lockup awaiting trial on drug-smuggling charges after his extradition last week.

His father, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, infamous founder of the Sinaloa cartel, is already serving a life sentence at a federal supermax prison in Colorado.

Back in Mexico, of course, organized crime continues to wreak havoc.

But how many people are on the payrolls of the Mexican cartels?

Now researchers have come up with an estimate: 175,000. That figure, which would make the cartels the country’s fifth-largest employer, has steadily risen during the last decade, according to their study, which was published Thursday in the journal Science and relied on a variety of data to build a mathematical model of the workforce.

A brewing tropical storm is threatening to hit the East Coast with strong winds and life-threatening storm surges which could cause torrential rain and flash flooding.

It has been named Potential Tropical Cyclone 16 and is expected to become a tropical storm as it approaches the coast of North Carolina from Friday.

The storm, which has formed off the Florida coast, will be dubbed Ophelia once it is found to have wind speeds of at least 39 miles per hour.

A Tropical Storm Warning has been issued by the National Hurricane Center (NHC) for areas including Cape Fear, Albemarle and Pamlico Sound in North Carolina as well as southern Delaware, southeastern Virginia and parts of Chesapeake Bay. 

Residents in these areas have been told to follow the advice given by local officials while the warning is in place.

The Biden Administration announced that it will be giving nearly half a million Venezuelans already living in the United States temporary residence and work permits.

On Wednesday, the U.S. government announced that it will allow at least 472,000 Venezuelans to remain in the United States and work legally for 18 months due to growing instability and unsafe conditions in Venezuela.

Webmaster addition: Instability and unsafe conditions? Sounds like the present day in the US!

In his first interview since his recent acquittal in an impeachment trial, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sat down with Tucker Carlson and made some startling revelations.

Paxton implicated the Biden administration in his impeachment proceedings, stating that two of the four lawyers involved in the investigation were from the Department of Justice in Washington.

"There were two of the four House investigating lawyers that worked at the Department of Justice in Washington. That’s not random," Paxton stated. He further explained that the House investigating committee comprised five members, three Republicans and two Democrats. "And they hired, I think it was four lawyers. Two of them came from the Biden DOJ. That’s not an accident. They were sent there."

During a Sunday appearance on Face the Nation to plug his new Zelensky movie, actor Sean Penn decried the “cowardice” of the US government in its caution around provoking a nuclear exchange with its proxy warfare in Ukraine.

“It is my absolute feeling that the caution with which the United States has pledged support, which seemed, in my reading of February 2022 was a, like a lean on in the fear of nuclear conflict, something I think all of us should look very carefully at and understand that, of course, is possible,” Penn said.

“And that’s to be concerning. The likelihood is extremely low. And as one of our witnesses in the film says, you know, are we going to let a gangster with nuclear weapons dictate the way we live?”

Penn emotionally lamented the fact that the Biden administration did not pour F-16 warplanes into Ukraine from the very beginning of the conflict, initially fearing the move to be too escalatory. Describing this hesitation, Penn said that “at some point, caution becomes cowardice.”

As you might expect, the interviewer refrained from challenging Penn on his claim that the likelihood of nuclear war is “extremely low” in spite of his acknowledgement that it’s a real possibility, or on his claim that resisting increasing the likelihood of nuclear war is an act of cowardice.

The dam is breaking on unified Western support for Ukraine, and the timing couldn't be worse for Zelensky, given tomorrow he's expected to meet with President Biden at the White House. On Wednesday evening there is monumental news out of Poland which could potentially change the entire course of the war.

"Poland will no longer arm Ukraine to focus on its own defense," Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced just hours after Warsaw summoned Ukraine's ambassador related to a fresh war of words and spat over blocked grain, according to the AFP. Warsaw has throughout more than a year-and-a-half of the Ukraine-Russia war been Kiev's staunchest and most outspoken supporter.

Will this massive and hugely significant about-face mark the beginning of the end? Are peace negotiations and ceding of territory in the Donbas inevitable at this point? 

Sure looks like it. AFP is reporting that:

Poland will no longer arm Ukraine to focus on its own defence, Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Wednesday, a few hours after Warsaw summoned Kyiv’s ambassador amid a row over grain exports.

To quote Andrei Martyanov, WOWSER! Remember the collapse of the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine in the early hours of 6 June 2023, which caused extensive flooding along the lower Dnieper river? This is worse. This may explain the “Grumpy Gus” visage adorning Zelensky, his crew, as well as John Kerry and Antony Blinken yesterday at the UN General Assembly during Biden’s awful speech.

Following a long investigation into Covid mRNA shots, a Canadian watchdog has warned that the injections are “neither safe nor effective.”

The Big Pharma vaccines are unsafe because they bypassed all the normal safety checks, Canadian accountability watchdog group National Citizens Inquiry (NCI) has warned.

NCI published a scathing report on September 14 detailing the corrupt process by which Big Pharma received approval for the experimental mRNA shots in Canada.

“It is important to understand that the COVID-19 vaccines were never approved under the traditional approval process for drugs in Canada,” the report warns, further explaining how Health Canada, the federal agency responsible for Canadian health policy, used a shady authorization process called an interim order instead.

“Under the alternative authorization process, the necessity to establish the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines through an objective manner appears to have been set aside.”

We are seeing the classic signs of the growing discontent within some key sectors of the military and intelligence bureaucracy over the Biden policy towards Ukraine (I will touch on those in a minute), but the Biden national security team continues to stridently insist insist it will back Ukraine to the bitter end. However, despite the tough talk, Biden continues to balk on sending some weapon systems that could transform the Special Military Operation into a full blown war with Russia.

I am posting the video of Jake Sullivan’s press conference today on Biden’s meeting with Zelensky to illustrate this point. It lasts about 30 minutes and is worth listening to both for what is said and what is not.

This is everything you need to know.  

The head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, lied, blaming Russia for the tragedy of Hiroshima, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in Telegram channel.Zakharova wrote that on September 21, Von der Leyen "made a rather remarkable speech" at the award ceremony Atlantic Council. "I praised the head of the Japanese government for supporting the Kyiv regime and fighting Russia. I remembered that his family was from Hiroshima, and during the nuclear bombing in 1945, his relatives died there. About United States and the Washington executioners who dropped bombs on Japanese cities and civilians — not a word," said the representative of the Foreign Ministry.

According to her, "the defendant of the largest in history European Union corruption scandals went further - laid the tragedy of Hiroshima ... to Russia." Zakharova also quoted Von der Leyen as saying: "Many of your relatives died when the atomic bomb razed Hiroshima to the ground. You grew up with the stories of survivors and wanted us to heed the same stories, look into the past and learn something about the future... Russia threatens to use nuclear weapons again. It's disgusting, it's dangerous, and it's unforgivable under the shadow of Hiroshima." "It is disgusting and dangerous how Ursula von der Leyen lies," the representative of the Foreign Ministry said. In August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. About 220,200 people died directly from the explosions of the two bombs, and more than <>,<> died due to lethal doses of radiation. The vast majority of casualties were civilians.

Yes, it is disgusting but it is also the main reason why Russia has nobody to talk to in modern West. Ursula Von Der Lugen is a typical Euro (German) politico with no morals, honor or decency. This is also how history is taught across universities in the West. But then again, Mearsheimer quotes Fukuyama, that liberalism defeated Nazism. They do have issues, don't they?

Polish Anti-War Debates are a kind of phenomenon. Even though Poland is not formally a belligerent, there is strict war censorship there.

Secret Service has the right to limit access to independent media without giving a reason. The recent amendment to the Penal Code introduced the categories of “unconscious espionage” and “disinformation”, i.e. “dissemination of false or misleading information with the aim of causing serious disruptions in the system or economy of the Republic of Poland , an allied state or an international organisation of which the Republic of Poland is a member”. 

Simply: any criticism of pro-Kiev policy or NATO activities is punishable in Poland with a prison sentence of up to 8 years.

And yet there are still brave people who take this risk, trying to present the Polish public with true information about the war in Ukraine, as well as to raise awareness that even Western public opinion is by no means uniform in supporting the Zelensky regime. Thanks to independent media such as “Myśl Polska”, the oldest Polish political weekly, founded in 1941 in exile in London, and the online channel “Wbrew Cenzurze / Without Censorship”, Polish viewers and readers get know the opinions of leading Western analysts and activists of anti-war movements from the UK, USA, Ireland and Germany.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has called on UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to prevent drawing representatives of the UN structures into politicized initiatives on Ukraine, according to a statement released by the Russian Foreign Ministry following the talks between the parties on the sidelines of the 78th session of the UN General Assembly.

"The most relevant international issues were traditionally in the highlight, as well as various aspects of cooperation between Russia and the UN," the ministry said. "An urge to prevent drawing representatives of the UN structures into politicized initiatives in the context of the Ukrainian crisis was addressed to Guterres," the statement reads. "UN Secretary General’s pledges to refrain from participating in initiatives that do not imply the participation of all parties, were focused on," the ministry added.

The Russian Pacific Fleet has practiced hunting down enemy submarines in the Bering Sea as part of Exercise Finval-2023, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Thursday.

"The Pacific Fleet continues Exercise Finval-2023 in the waters of the Chukchi and Bering seas, as well as on the Chukotka Peninsula, to safeguard the communications of the Northern Sea Route, held under the command of Admiral Nikolay Yevmenov, the commander-in-chief of the Russian Navy. As part of the exercise, two hunter-killer groups of ships, consisting of corvettes the Sovershenny and the Gremyashchy and small anti-submarine ships the Ust-Ilimsk and the MPK-107, were deployed in the Bering Sea to rehearse, in cooperation with IL-38 anti-submarine aircraft of the Pacific Fleet’s naval air force, searching and attacking submarines of the hypothetical enemy," the ministry said in a statement.

According to the ministry, one of the Pacific Fleet submarines played the part of the hypothetical enemy. The ships practiced joint maneuvering, evasion of a submarine attack and its hypothetical destruction with anti-submarine weapon systems.

Tens of millions of people — more than live in the entire state of Florida — are now exposed to toxic water runoff from metal mining, a new study has found.

The report lays bare the devastating impacts that can follow a reckless transition to 'green' energy, compounding the ecological damage wrought by over 150 years of drilling and mining for fossil fuels.

The researchers found that 23 million people worldwide, as well as 5.72 million in livestock, over 16 million acres of irrigated farmland and over 297,800 miles worth of rivers have been contaminated by mining's toxic byproducts seeping into the water.

This metal mining includes many so-called 'rare earth elements' essential to the manufacture of high-tech electronics, solar cells, wind turbines and all the batteries needed to store sustainable 'green' energy (and power electric cars and iPhones).

While the new study focuses on environmental impacts, global metals mining has recently faced shocking lawsuits against major tech firms, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Tesla, over child slavery in the Congo, where 70 percent of the industry's cobalt is sourced.