US warplanes hit targets in Iraq early Wednesday morning, marking the second round of US airstrikes in the country in just over 24 hours as the situation in the region continues to escalate.

Pentagon officials said the airstrikes hit two facilities south of Baghdad used by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi Shia militia aligned with Iran. Officials said it was too early to provide information about casualties.

The strikes came after a US AC-130 gunship targeted people in Iraq the Pentagon said was responsible for a ballistic missile attack on the Ain al-Asad airbase west of Baghdad. US officials said the AC-130 strikes killed three militants.

The attack on the Ain al-Asad airbase wounded at least eight US troops. According to the Pentagon, US forces in Iraq and Syria have come under attack 66 times since October 17 due to President Biden’s support for Israel’s onslaught on Gaza.

These days in November are normally the peak of the Palestinian olive harvest in the West Bank; entire families spend days bringing in the crop and holding picnics in this ritual of both work and pleasure. Then the farmers and family members send the olives to presses to produce olive oil.

But for years now, the harvest has been marred by violent assaults by settlers. And this year some farmers have simply given up amid recurring threats from settlers, a campaign by Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, restrictions on movement by settlers or the army, and a sharp rise in violence.

The United States will provide over $4.1 million in aid for people affected by the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, the United States Agency for International Development said in a statement, after Azerbaijan's recapture of the region prompted a mass exodus of Armenians.

Azerbaijan and Armenia have been at odds for decades, most notably over the breakaway Azerbaijani region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Baku's forces recaptured in September, prompting a mass exodus of most of the region's 120,000 ethnic Armenians to neighboring Armenia.

USAID said the additional aid, which has not been previously reported, will support efforts to provide assistance for almost 74,000 refugees and displaced people from the region who are sheltering in Armenia.

The aid will increase food assistance and provide humanitarian protection and emergency shelter, according to the statement.

Israel is "intentionally destroying" cultural and historical sites in Gaza, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said on Monday, calling for an international inquiry into Israel's targeting of Palestinians' cultural heritage. 

The rights group pointed out that a significant portion of Gaza's Old City, targeted in intense Israeli bombardments, is an area containing ancient residences, mosques, churches, markets, and educational institutions.

The report highlights the damage to Gaza's oldest mosque, the Al-Omari Grand Mosque, famed for its minaret dating back 1,400 years. It also mentions the destruction of three historic churches, among them the Church of Saint Porphyrius, which was originally constructed in around 407 AD.

More than 10,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion last year, the United Nations says, with about half of the deaths in the past three months taking place far behind the front lines.

The actual toll is expected to be “significantly higher” than the official tally since corroboration work is ongoing, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said on Tuesday.

Azerbaijan's foreign ministry invited Armenia on Tuesday to take part in peace talks that it said could be held at the border between the two countries or in another location.

In a statement, the ministry urged Armenia "to avoid new unnecessary delays" and resume negotiations.

"Responsibility for the continuation of the peace process, including the selection of a mutually acceptable venue, or a decision to meet at the state border, belongs to the two countries," the ministry said.

Earlier, a foreign policy adviser to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev told Reuters that talks should take place on a bilateral basis, without the need for Western mediation. In the past, the European Union and the United States have tried unsuccessfully to persuade the two sides to reach a peace deal.

For the past week my social feeds have been filled with a pretty important tech policy debate that I want to key you in on: the renewal of a controversial program of American surveillance.

The program, outlined in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), was created in 2008. It was designed to expand the power of US agencies to collect electronic “foreign intelligence information,” whether about spies, terrorists, or cybercriminals abroad, and to do so without a warrant. 

Tech companies, in other words, are compelled to hand over communications records like phone calls, texts, and emails to US intelligence agencies including the FBI, CIA, and NSA. A lot of data about Americans who communicate with people internationally gets swept up in these searches. Critics say that is unconstitutional. 

Despite a history of abuses by intelligence agencies, Section 702 was successfully renewed in both 2012 and 2017. The program, which has to be periodically renewed by Congress, is set to expire again at the end of December. But a broad group that transcends parties is calling for reforming the program, out of concern about the vast surveillance it enables. Here is what you need to know.

November 20 marks World Children's Day, yet on this day, Israeli occupying authorities continue to commit crimes against children in various Palestinian cities, villages, and refugee camps. Since October 7, the Israeli military has killed over 5,000 children in its ongoing aggression against Gaza. 

Additionally, they have killed more than 52 children in the occupied West Bank since October 7, raising the number of child martyrs in the West Bank to 92 since the beginning of the year according to Defense for Children-Palestine.

Israeli authorities persist in the systematic arrest of dozens of Palestinian children who are already living in difficult conditions inside prisons. Approximately 200 children have been arrested since October 7, with some of them subsequently released. Israeli forces systematically arrest Palestinian children as part of punitive collective detention campaigns.

Israeli intelligence twice warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about an imminent attack on Israel in the months before Hamas's assault on the country on 7 October, according to media reports.

The Israeli military intelligence division, which is commonly known as 'Aman', warned Netanyahu in March and then in July that Iran-backed groups including Hamas and Hezbollah could launch an attack on an Israel 'weakened' by political and social crisis, Haaretz reported in its Hebrew-language edition on Monday.

Academics have reported a "culture of fear" on UK campuses, as social media surveillance, which disproportionately targets racialised academic staff and students supporting Palestine, has resulted in reports to the police, the Prevent counter-terrorism strategy and university disciplinary committees.

"Immediately after October 7, we saw a kind of surveillance taking place on social media, particularly against any pro-Palestinian voices, but particularly against Palestinians and other people of colour," Neve Gordon, the chair of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES)'s committee on academic freedom, and professor of human rights at Queen Mary University told Middle East Eye.

The weaponisation of social media to monitor academics and students has also proliferated in Israeli academia, where dozens of students were suspended for "supporting terrorism" or "incitement to terrorism" based on their social media activity.

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman urged all nations during an extraordinary BRICS summit on Tuesday to cease weapon exports to Israel.

South Africa is hosting a virtual meeting of BRICS -- a group of major emerging economies that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- aimed at drawing up a common response to the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Saudi Arabia demands the start of a serious and comprehensive peace process to establish a Palestinian state along the borders of 1967, the Saudi Crown Prince said.

The U.S., Norway, and the UK are urging the government of South Sudan to withdraw its troops from the disputed region of Abyei amid violence in which at least 27 people have been killed in recent days.

“We renew our calls upon the transitional government (of South Sudan) to urgently withdraw its troops in line with its commitments" as part of the deal for South Sudan's independence in 2011, their embassies in South Sudan said in a statement Monday.

Inter-communal and cross-border clashes have escalated since South Sudan deployed its troops to Abyei in March.

In U.S.-and-allied countries, the belief is overwhelmingly widespread that the war in Ukraine was started “by Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine”. However, this widely-circulated belief in The West is clearly and unequivocally false, because the war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said; but Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022, to this then-8-year-long war on Russia’s doorstep, in order to prevent Ukraine from becoming a NATO member and allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief a flight for Russia to respond before Russia’s central command would already be beheaded by America’s nuclear blitz-strike.

The war in Ukraine actually began in the very violent coup that the U.S. Obama Administration had actually started planning by no later than June 2011 and started executing inside America’s Embassy in Ukraine on 1 March 2013. Such coup illegally overthrew the democratically elected and neutralist President of Ukraine on 20 February 2014 and installed to take over the new government on 27 February 2014 the man who had been selected by Victoria Nuland — Obama’s agent controlling the coup operation — when she instructed on 27 January 2014 the U.S. ambassador in Ukraine to have “Yatsenyuk” or “Yats”, a rabid hater of ethnic Russians, placed in charge when the coup would be over, which was then done on 27 February 2014.

Close to the border with Lebanon, the town of Kiryat Shmona with 22,000 inhabitants has been attacked by rockets, and the town of Shlomi with 6-7,000 inhabitants plus more than 20 other settlements have been evacuated. Fire is constantly traded. Pressure between Israel and Hezbollah is increasing incrementally every day.

After Hezbollah’s very big and successful air attack on an Israeli army base in northern Israel yesterday (20 Nov 2023), voices are getting louder in Israel to start a war in Lebanon:

“This is the first time in my life that I don’t feel safe in my home,” said Rothem-Nechushtan, 54 years old, who remained at her family’s bed-and-breakfast near the Lebanon border throughout Israel’s 34-day war with Hezbollah in 2006, even after a rocket injured one of her neighbors.

Many Israelis who live near the border say their military can’t end the fighting without assuring them that Hezbollah can’t do to them what Hamas did to Israelis in the south.

Israeli military officials have amplified the pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deliver a decisive blow.

…military officials say Israel is one deadly Hezbollah strike away from a new war in Lebanon.

See this.

Hezbollah has skillfully put Israel in a logjam.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, has refused to ask for a ceasefire in Gaza to save lives, after more than 12,000 civilians have died, and half are children. Thomas-Greenfield’s policy statements suggest Israelis are deserving of human rights, while Palestinians are not.  

In 2015, Thomas-Greenfield received the Bishop John T. Walker Distinguished Humanitarian Service Award, and yet her current presence at the UN has not exhibited any humanitarian urgency for Gaza, which her own colleagues at the UN are calling a humanitarian disaster, and genocide.

She forgets that her own ancestry mirrors the Palestinians, not the Israelis. She is representing the interests of the masters, while denying the oppressed people’s rights.

Thomas-Greenfield is the great granddaughter of Mary Francoise, who was born in 1865 in Louisiana. Mary was born after the civil war ended, but she was not born into freedom; her mother had been a slave, and even though the war ended, it would be decades before any African Americans were given their rights.

As diplomatic etiquette is an entirely unknown concept to the United States, its political elites obviously think it’s just another day at the office when describing world leaders as supposed “dictators”. For instance, on September 15, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called Chinese President Xi Jinping a “dictator”, resulting in further cooling of the already strained relations between Beijing and Berlin. This isn’t her first “undiplomatic” statement (euphemistically speaking), as she effectively declared war on Russia back in late January, resulting in frantic attempts by other German diplomats to deny her claims as “nothing more than personal opinion”. One would expect other Western leaders to learn from Baerbock’s mistakes.

But alas, all we’re getting is more of the same or even worse in a way, as American President Joe Biden demonstrated last week. Namely, on November 15, after over four hours of talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, during which they allegedly “made significant breakthroughs in multiple key areas” (at least according to the mainstream propaganda machine), Biden decided to “crown” the supposed “thaw” by pulling out “another Baerbock”. He held a press conference right after the allegedly “successful” talks and at the very end of it, Min Jung Lee of the infamous CNN asked Biden whether he still thought that President Xi was a “dictator”, something he said several times before, to which he responded that he does. His exact words were:

“Well, look, he’s a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours,” also adding: “Anyway, we made progress.”

Stuart Seldowitz, the former deputy director in the US State Department's Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs from 1999 to 2003, now spends his days harassing Muslim street vendors and cheering for the slaughter of Palestinian children.

Sonya Labosco, Director of the Air Marshals National Council said Air Marshalls are quietly following Americans who flew into the DC area around January 6, 2021.

Labosco said Air Marshals are no longer going after terrorists or the bad guys because they are now stalking and following every single person who flew into the DC area around January 2021 even if they did not go to the US Capitol.

“We’re not flying right now. The only missions that we are doing are ‘Quiet Skies’ missions and those are missions that are following the January 2021 people,” Labosco said. “So we’re either on the border for illegal immigrants or we’re following folks from January 2021. We’re not doing our regular missions where we’re out there looking for the bad guys so for now most flights you’re not gonna have Air Marshalls.”

The Fox News host was stunned: “What do you mean that you’re following January 2021 people? What does that mean?

Joe and Jill Biden Tuesday evening departed the White House en route to Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, Americans are still being held hostage by Hamas terrorists.

Target is facing public scrutiny yet again after the retail giant seemingly doubled down on its pushing of far-left gender ideology after it was revealed that the company has a new self-proclaimed "Senior LGBTQIA+ Segmentation Strategist and Pride Lead" named Erik Thompson, also known as “GayCruella” on his Instagram page. 

Thompson posted excitedly to social media upon receiving his new role, telling the world that he is here to "make trouble" and that it is now time to "rip that old world to shreds."

During a recent appearance on CNBC, Biden Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen seemed to suggest that funding schools in Ukraine is a matter of national security for the United States.

Students all over the United States are struggling to do math and reading at grade level, and Yellen is talking about funding schools in another country. If any of this makes sense to you, you might be a Democrat.

It’s just stunning to hear an American official talking like this as our country is falling apart.

I was very surprised by the results of a survey of preppers that was recently conducted by Fortitude Ranch.  The CEO of Fortitude Ranch, Drew Miller, says that preppers are “folks who watch events and read up on threats” and so they have a really good feel for what is really going on out there. 

Oh the irony considering he was instrumental in taking down SBF.

As the economic landscape unravels, the latest data reveals a deeply troubling picture. U.S. delinquencies, surging through Q3 and surpassing pandemic highs, are on a trajectory to eclipse the ominous figures of the 2008 financial crisis.

This decision should be on Everyone’s radar.

Doesn’t matter whether or not you live in NYS.

Reality is NYS Appellate + Court of Appeals Cases Are Routinely Referenced when other states adopt changes to their own Dept. of Health Regulations.

The usual suspects are deplatforming her from every conservacuck organization and attacking her as a crazy antisemite.

While she’s in the hospital giving birth.

 A woman from Metro Atlanta was surprised to find a charge of $7,112.98 on her credit card for a Subway sandwich, WSB TV reported Monday.