Vladimir Putin's security deputy has issued a chilling warning that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky 'is unlikely to have a chance of living to old age'.

The sickening new threat from Russian ex-president Dmitry Medvedev follows Zelensky's revelation that he has already survived at least five Kremlin assassination attempts.

Medvedev - now Putin's deputy on the Russian security council - said: 'All this cheap bravado also evokes one very obvious thought.

'With such powerful 'prophecies', this fool is unlikely to have a chance of living to old age. Thoughts are sometimes material.'

Webmaster addition: I would not be surprised if some of those attempts on Zelensky came from inside his own government.

Ukraine has lost more than 13,700 troops and around 1,800 tanks and other heavy weaponry so far this month. This claim was made by the Minister of Defense Russia Sergey Shoigu at a ministerial meeting.

“Russian forces are actively thwarting Kiev’s attempts to penetrate their defense lines and continue to reduce Ukraine’s military capacity,” said the senior Russian defense official as quoted by RT, Tuesday (21/11/2023).

He claimed that Ukrainian soldiers surrendered in droves after realizing the futility of their counteroffensive.

Israel will receive the first set of hostages from Gaza tomorrow during a four-day truce with Hamas, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said. 

The nation last night agreed a deal that will see 50 women and children kidnapped by Hamas gunmen on October 7 freed during the truce, leaving their families with an agonising wait to see if their loved ones are coming home. 

Now, it has emerged that the process of recovering those hostages is expected to start tomorrow, according to Cohen. He did not say how many people would be released while a Hamas official said the truce would come into effect from 10am local time. 

But Israeli politician Ben Gvir said the release of the hostages sets a 'dangerous precedent' that could play into the hands of the terrorists. The far-right politician said the deal, which will see 150 Palestinians released in exchange for 50 hostages, gives Hamas terrorists everything they wanted.

A San Francisco business owner has slammed Mayor London Breed for downplaying crime and homelessness during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.

Tom Wong claimed she had temporarily arranged to have the city tidied up for the summit before it was left to return to normal when officials left.

He told FOX&Friends drug dealers and homeless people were back on the streets within a day of the conference coming to a close last Friday.

Wong said: 'It's horrible. I just drove through the Tenderloin, and it is just a lot of drug heads, drug dealers, and they're all out, they're all out in the neighborhood.

'It is crime-ridden… drugs everywhere. There's needles everywhere. There's poop everywhere again.'

Increasingly, Netanyahu’s own cabinet and advisors are urging genocide there against Gazans. (Actually, this viewpoint has long been popular among Netanyahu’s voters — well prior to the October 7th Hamas attack.)

The legal basis for such a solution comes from many decades of apartheid laws there:

As Jonathan Cook, a great independent journalist on Palestinian affairs, observed:

In today’s United States or Europe, any argument that citizenship privileges should be assigned to a group because of its ethnicity or religion would be considered overtly racist. That nonetheless is precisely the position of all the Jewish parties in the Israeli parliament – without exception.

Former U.S. Marine Scott Ritter says Russia will NOT negotiate with Ukraine and will only accept an unconditional surrender of Ukraine's military. Each day that this continues Ukraine will lose more land and more human lives. NATO is now telling Ukraine that this war is over and resources are coming to an end.

In a landmark decision, a Missouri jury has ordered Bayer AG's Monsanto unit to pay more than $1.5 billion in damages to three former users of its Roundup weedkiller. This ruling, one of Monsanto's largest trial losses in the five-year litigation over the herbicide, raises new questions about the safety of the controversial product and the company's future legal challenges.

In a late Friday decision, jurors awarded James Draeger, Valorie Gunther, and Dan Anderson $61.1 million in actual damages and a staggering $500 million each in punitive damages. They claimed that years of using Roundup on their properties led to their non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas. This verdict is one of the largest against a US corporate defendant this year, eclipsing even a significant $1.78 billion verdict in a federal real estate case (which could balloon to more than $5 billion), Bloomberg reports.

POLITICO reported Tuesday that the US has been sharing with Israel the location of humanitarian groups in Gaza in an attempt to prevent strikes on the sites. But Israel has been bombing them anyway.

The information has included GPS coordinates of a number of medical facilities and the movement of aid groups inside Gaza. Among the sites the US shared with Israel was al-Shifa hospital, which Israeli forces raided last week, causing the medical facility to cease functioning and the deaths of dozens of patients, including eight premature babies.

The US has tried to deflect blame for Israel’s attack on al-Shifa and other hospitals. The White House has said it doesn’t “want to see hospitals as battlegrounds,” but the US continues to provide unconditional military aid for Israel’s operations despite the massive civilian casualty rate.

Living in a country where regulatory bodies like the FDA and USDA can unleash the full force of the law on those selling unpasteurized raw milk and grass-fed meat — foods statistically safer than the produce at your local Walmart — is beyond absurd. 

Update(2100ET): In a rare moment of positive news, Netanyahu's cabinet has approved the hostage release and ceasefire deal which has been long in development in the early hours of Wednesday morning (local). Below are the developing details of the deal (in an official govt. statement), which will see a multi-day ceasefire take effect - the first of the more than one-month long war which has claimed over 13,000 Palestinian lives and over 1,200 Israeli lives:

“The Israeli government is committed to bringing all the abductees home. Tonight, the government approved the outline for the first stage of achieving this goal, under which at least 50 abductees – women and children – will be released over a span of four days, during which there will be a lull in the fighting,” the statement said.

“The release of every ten additional abductees will result in an additional day of respite,” it added.

“The Israeli government, the IDF and the security forces will continue the war to return all the abductees, complete the elimination of Hamas and ensure that Gaza does not renew any threat to the State of Israel.”

The issue with macro is. When stocks go down because of macro they will at some point revert the move because of the same macro. War starts stocks drop and war ends stocks go up. Rates go up stocks go down and rates go down stocks go up. It’s a null sum game. The question is are you betting on more issues or things getting resolved.

One step closer to genocide.

There is a reason why I am watching the banks so carefully.  The banks are the beating heart of our economic system, and so if they get into big trouble we will all feel the pain. That is precisely what happened in 2008, and that is precisely what is happening again right now. 

The official U.S. military publication Army University Press published an article written on behalf of the Department of Defense calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and destruction of Lebanon in a November 2023 online exclusive.

This outlet is described on its website as  “the US Army’s premier multimedia organization”, and an “entry point for cutting-edge thought and discussion on topics important to the Army and national defense”, which “makes timely and relevant information available to leaders in the military, government, and academia.”

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.