The White House approved two arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE totaling over $600 million. The sale to two of Washington’s closest Arab partners in the Middle East comes as America’s regional reputation is tanking over US support for Israel’s onslaught against the besieged Gaza Strip. 

On Monday, the State Department announced it had approved a $583 million sale of RE-3A Tactical Airborne Surveillance System Aircraft Modernisation and related equipment. The equipment will be used to modernize surveillance aircraft from the 1980s. 

The Biden administration also approved the $85 million sale of 18 AN/TPQ-50 radar systems to the United Arab Emirates. The radar system is designed to detect the direction of mortar fire, and SRC INC will be the primary contractor. 

The arms sales come as Washington is losing favor among the people in the Middle East over Israel’s brutal military operations in Gaza. A cable authored by an American diplomat in the Middle East warned last month that Israel’s destructive and deadly military campaign in Gaza “is losing us Arab publics for a generation.”

US National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby on Wednesday said that Washington does not endorse a permanent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza Strip, claiming that the Palestinian militants could regroup during a truce. 

“We do not support a ceasefire this time. And I think it's important that we talk a little bit about what we mean when we talk about a permanent ceasefire. That is a step that you take in, in advance of ending the conflict. Both sides lay down their arms, and it's a sign that we're going to get into some sort of negotiations to end the conflict,” Kirby told Rudaw’s Diyar Kurda during a press briefing.

He added that a permanent ceasefire would be in the interest of Hamas, allowing it to regroup and train for more attacks on Israel. 

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and his team admit that their current negotiating position with Russia would be weak, but they are also dodging responsibility for leading the nation to this impasse, former opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk has said.

Medvedchuk, who was forced by the Zelensky government into exile in Russia, was commenting on a recent interview by MP David Arakhamia, who led the Ukrainian delegation in peace talks with Russia in Istanbul last year. The lawmaker believes that Kiev cannot negotiate with Moscow today due to the “very bad position” it would have. He suggested that a proposal to hold talks should be voted on in a national referendum.

“The Zelensky team turned out to be not just bad negotiators, but criminal amateurs” incapable of governing a nation, Medvedchuk claimed.

Guyana’s president told The Associated Press on Wednesday that his country is taking every necessary step to protect itself from Venezuela, which has ordered its state-owned companies to explore and exploit oil and minerals in the vast Essequibo region, which Guyana considers its own.

When asked if he has requested military assistance, President Irfaan Ali said his government is reaching out to allies and regional partners, some of which Guyana has defense agreements with, to protect Essequibo. The region makes up two-thirds of the country.

“We take this threat very seriously, and we have initiated a number of precautionary measures to ensure the peace and stability of this region,” Ali said in the brief phone interview. He noted that Guyana’s Defense Force also is speaking with counterparts in other countries but did not say which ones.

 Six Nevada Republicans were indicted by a grand jury in the state on Wednesday for their alleged roles in an “alternate elector” scheme that declared that former President Donald Trump won the state in 2020.

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed a controversial bill equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism and effectively laying the groundwork for other laws to be crafted that could classify pro-Palestine protests and demonstrations as crimes. The bill’s passage stirred outrage among supporters of Palestine and free speech.

Another bill was introduced more quietly and immediately demonstrated the dangers of the first. Both bills bear close scrutiny. Taken together, they promise to make support for Palestinians under siege by Israel much more difficult.

Webmaster addition:

• The UN special rapporteur on the right to health says the “practice of medicine is under attack” in Gaza.
• The Palestine Red Crescent Society says its ambulance services in northern Gaza have come to a standstill.
• UN chief Guterres invokes seldom-used Article 99 to force the Security Council to address war in Gaza, warning of deepening “catastrophe”.
• At least 17,177 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7. In Israel, the official death toll stands at about 1,150.

Iran has sent a capsule carrying animals into space as it boosts its Western-contested space programme in preparation for human missions.

State media on Wednesday released a clip of the launch of an Iranian-made rocket carrying the capsule, which they said was successfully sent 130km (80 miles) into orbit.

The Salman rocket carried an “all indigenous” capsule weighing 500kg (1,100 pounds), which is reportedly the heaviest biological capsule ever successfully carried in the history of the Iranian space programme.

Neither state media nor Telecommunications Minister Isa Zarepour, who confirmed the news, said what kind of animals were in the capsule.

A Nebraska labor leader running for the U.S. Senate as an independent could best the Republican incumbent, according to a recent poll of voters in the Cornhusker State.

Dan Osborn, a 48-year-old military veteran who helped lead the 2021 strikes against food giant Kellogg’s, launched a challenge against 72-year-old Nebraska Republican Sen. Deb Fischer in October. A poll conducted by Change Research, a liberal research firm, shows Osborn leading Fischer by a margin of 2 points. Nebraska has voted for a Republican president every year since 1964, and the survey, conducted in November, shows that respondents favor former President Donald Trump over President Joe Biden by a margin of 16.

The greatest thing is that McCarthy went down fighting against Russia.

That’s sort of why the story matters.

During the fourth Republican presidential primary debate on Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, citing his time serving in the Middle East, referred to the clothing worn by Al Qaeda as “man dresses.”

DeSantis was answering a question at the debate, hosted by NewsNation, about his past remarks that he’d authorize shooting drug smugglers coming across the southern border. 

“When I was in Iraq, the Al Qaeda wasn’t wearing a uniform. You'd see anyone walking down the street, they all had man dresses on. You didn’t know if they had a bomb, an IED, attached or not," DeSantis said.

Webmaster addition: That was reckless of DeSantis. Polls are showing Muslims moving away from supporting Democrats because of Biden's handling of the Israel/Palestine war. Great time for a Republican candidate to insult them!

It’s almost like zionists are really losing badly, and this is why they are lashing out like divorced women.

Elite British special forces were operating on the ground in Ukraine weeks after Russia invaded last year. That is the allegation contained in a new book, Poland at War, by Polish journalist Zbigniew Parafianowicz.

The author is Ukraine correspondent for a daily newspaper in Warsaw and had access to political insiders and senior officials. He quotes an unnamed Polish government minister who claims to have run into British commandos in mid-March 2022 as he was travelling between Kyiv and the city of Zhytomyr.

The minister said: “It was a time when the Russians were still standing in Bucha, and the route was a grey zone. It was possible to run into Russians. We passed the last checkpoint. The Ukrainians told us that we continue at our own risk.

“Well, and who did we meet next? Ukrainian soldiers and… British special forces. Uniformed. With weapons. They moved with the Ukrainians in trucks and off-road vehicles with artillery radars. They were tracking targets. They were learning about this war. Such radar tracks where mortar or rocket shells fall and are fired.”

Black Harvard President Claudine Gay was reportedly the Republicans’ top target in Tuesday’s House hearing on campus antisemitism [ 5 takeaways from college antisemitism hearing , by  Bianca Quilantan, Politico, December 5, 2023]This criticism must have been a rude shock to Gay because she has previously soared comfortably upward on one of the most powerful thermals in modern U.S. life: black privilege in academe. Ever since the Floyd Hoax in 2020, traditionally white colleges and universities have been on a hiring binge of blacks for president or chancellor. Other beneficiaries: Daryll Pines (University of Maryland), Gregory Washington, right, (George Mason), Vincent Rougeau (Holy Cross), Michael Drake (University of California), Dwight McBride (The New School) and William Tate IV (Louisiana State University). Some may be qualified, but we all know that’s not why they were hired. They were hired because they advanced the reigning anti-white regime called “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “equity” properly known as DIE.

GOP mega-donors are appalled that Gov. Ron DeSantis prohibited kindergarten teachers from sharing anal sex cartoons with their students. Must be some kind of fundamentalist nut.

But a candidate who wants to entirely ban a social media app as bad for children? That’s our gal!

Nikki Haley has vowed to shut down TikTok, right after she declares war on the entire world.

In case you are not one of the 150 million Americans on TikTok, it is a China-based video-sharing app, primarily used by teenagers to post short reels of themselves lip-synching, pranking, dancing and creating optical illusions. Also cute animal videos. Also book reviews. #BookTok has multiple billions of views every year.

As U.S. media demand we condemn the rapes of Israeli women during war with Hamas and the Palestinians, white Boomer American women like me remember the same media and shrillest of feminists (Abzug, Steinem, Friedan, etc.) remained silent for decades as millions of foreigners with Stone Age views of females entered the U.S., raping and abusing our “sisters.” Anyone pointing out the obvious surge of brown-on-white rapes over the past 30 years is promptly smeared with “racist,” “xenophobe,” etc. shut-up words.

You would think that killing twice as much civilians than alleged terrorists in a high-tech war against what basically is a defenseless civilian population is not something to brag about.

However, Israel is very proud of its stats when it comes to killing civvies.

The Anti-Defecation League (ADL) has issued a press release demanding the banning of the expression “God’s mercy” from social media. According to the ADL, the notion that God is merciful, and the associated idea that mercy is good, is “a direct attack on Jews and their beliefs.”

The press release explains that while a few Jews still think God is a merciless psychopathic patriarch named Yahweh, the majority don’t believe in God at all, and in mercy even less. They do, however, believe that the God they don’t believe in gave them Palestine to commit genocide in. Since the notion of mercy, especially Divine mercy, implies that they shouldn’t be committing genocide, it is an implicit denial of Israel’s right to exist, and therefore constitutes an anti-Semitic trope.

olitical historian Rick Perlstein tweeted:

So, yeah, Vivek just said the Great Replacement Theory is not a conspiracy theory.

I respond:

You are right, it’s more like the Great Replacement Law than the Great Replacement Theory. It’s an arithmetical tautology that importing Democratic-leaning ethnicities dilutes the voting power of native-born Republican-leaning ethnicities. Democrats are smart enough to know that.

Republicans, on the other hand, might not be smart enough to figure out what the Democrats are doing to them by not restricting immigration more unless somebody makes up a catchy name for them like “Great Replacement.”