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President Andrzej Duda has urged bloc members to set aside at least 3% of their GDP to counter Russia

Polish President Andrzej Duda has sent a formal letter to the leaders of fellow NATO states, urging them to boost the minimum spending requirement for collective defense, the Rzeczpospolita news outlet reported on Thursday.

In a statement issued after a meeting in Brussels to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the signing of NATO’s founding document, Duda argued that the current minimum military spending threshold of 2% of GDP, which was established in 2014, was “no longer enough.” He suggested boosting it to 3% and claimed the proposal was “the basis for the consistent development of security throughout the Euro-Atlantic area.”

The Polish leader insisted that the bloc must take this “natural and fundamental step” in order to counter Russia’s supposed “imperial policy,” and as a response to growing tensions in the Middle East and the Pacific. 

Duda also suggested that the US and the UK should not be the only NATO countries to have powerful armies, claiming that “the times of peace are over,” and that all bloc members should increase their military potential and focus on equipping their armed forces with the most modern technological capabilities.

His statement comes as Warsaw announced plans to double the size of its military by 2035 in response to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The country has also ramped up its defense spending this year to more than 4% of its GDP in response to what Duda has called “the emerging danger beyond our eastern border.”

NATO’s spending guidelines have been a sticking point among its members in recent years, as most states have failed to meet the 2% minimum. As recently as 2014, only three NATO countries had met the target. 

Former US President Donald Trump has even suggested over the course of his 2024 election campaign that the US shouldn’t protect any NATO states that fail to contribute sufficient resources for their own defenses.

UK Defense Secretary Grant Shapps also claimed in a recent interview with The Telegraph that any NATO members that do not spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense were playing “Russian roulette,” and suggested that the West had moved “from a post-war to a pre-war world.”

While numerous Western leaders have recently warned that Russia could attack NATO within a few years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed such claims as “utter nonsense” designed to “beat the money out” of the populations of Western countries.

The bloc wants to find a “middle ground” in helping Kiev as it “is in danger of losing the war,” the paper reports

The US and Germany are reluctant to accept Ukraine into NATO despite fears of Kiev’s military collapse under Russian pressure, the New York Times reported on Thursday.

Officials in the US-led bloc are worried that such a drastic move “would draw it into the biggest land war in Europe since 1945,” the paper said, adding that NATO is looking for a “middle ground” instead.

These concerns are said to be shared by Berlin and Washington, which are opposed to opening membership talks with Ukraine at NATO’s summit in Washington in July. At the same time, they champion long-term security assistance commitments to Ukraine.

On Wednesday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg urged the bloc’s members to focus on providing Ukraine with “reliable and predictable security assistance” rather than voluntary donations. The NATO chief has reportedly proposed a five-year €100 billion ($107 billion) package of military aid to Kiev, which would also see the bloc take on more responsibility – rather than the US – in terms of coordinating assistance.

Several Western diplomats told the NYT, however, that this plan appears “elusive” at the moment.

A former US ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder, said that Washington appears to be tacitly opposed to the initiative, which would diminish its role in coordinating the assistance. Hungary, another NATO member, has publicly spoken out against any moves that could make the bloc more involved in the conflict.

It is also unclear how NATO could compel members to contribute to the €100 billion package over such a long period of time, the report says.

However, “none of these things may matter” by summer if Russia continues to push back Kiev’s troops, as Ukraine is “in danger of losing the war,” the NYT said.

In recent weeks, Russia has liberated the key Donbass city of Avdeevka, while capturing several nearby settlements. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky warned last month that this would not be the last retreat unless the US renews its military assistance. An aid package has for months been stalled in the US Congress due to Republican opposition, as GOP members demand more efforts to enhance border security.

Russia has condemned the Western arms shipments to Kiev, warning they will only prolong the conflict. Officials in Moscow have also accused the West of using Ukraine as a tool in order to inflict “a strategic defeat” on Russia.

Paris had earlier said it had no intelligence linking the Crocus City Hall shooting spree to Kiev

French President Emmanuel Macron has dismissed claims that Paris may have been involved in the Crocus City Hall massacre outside Moscow, speaking to French media on Thursday. In a phone call on Wednesday with his French counterpart, Sebastien Lecornu, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu suggested that Kiev’s Western backers, including Paris, may have been behind the attack.

The terrorist incident in March claimed over 140 lives, after armed gunmen stormed a packed music venue near the capital. The suspected shooters were apprehended by Russian law enforcement on the way to the Ukrainian border.

The French and Russian defense ministers talked by phone on Wednesday. During the conversation, Lecornu repeatedly told his Russian counterpart that Western countries and Ukraine had no involvement in the massacre, the Russian MOD reported.

Shoigu replied that he had intelligence to the contrary, saying, “the Kiev regime does nothing without the approval of its Western backers.”

“We hope that in this case the French intelligence services are not behind this,” he added.

Macron called the statements “ridiculous,” “baroque and threatening.” “It makes no sense,” to say that France “could be behind [the Moscow terror attack] and that the Ukrainians are behind it,” the president told the media on Thursday.

He added that the phone call was prompted by Paris’ willingness to share “useful information” as a part of “joint work” among countries affected by terrorism.

Moscow also maintains that the terrorists had a “window” prepared for them to cross the border into Ukraine. While Islamic State’s Afghanistan-based wing (ISIS-K) has claimed responsibility for the attack, the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), Aleksandr Bortnikov, suggested in March that the US, UK, and Ukraine may have been involved.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated on Thursday that Kiev’s connection to the case is obvious, “especially since Ukraine’s involvement in other terrorist attacks on Russian soil is no longer in doubt.” He referred to the assassinations of journalists Darya Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky as examples of Kiev’s acts of terrorism.

Warsaw was outraged by the killing of one of its nationals by the IDF

Warsaw has summoned Ambassador Yacov Livne after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed a Polish aid worker in Gaza. The Polish authorities were critical of how Israel handled the incident and demanded compensation for the victim’s family.

On Monday, the IDF carried out three consecutive airstrikes on a humanitarian convoy, killing seven foreign nationals working for the relief organization World Central Kitchen (WCK), including Damian Sobol from Poland.

The organization said that the WCK team was traveling in an area designated as a safe zone and the car had visible WCK logos.

The IDF said the strikes were a result of “misidentification,” and President Isaac Herzog apologized to WCK founder Jose Andres for the aid workers’ deaths.

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski spoke over the phone with his Israeli counterpart, Israel Katz, on Thursday, and “demanded an explanation of the attack,” according to the Polish Foreign Ministry.

“If Israel deliberately attacked the convoy, the families of the victims deserve an apology and compensation,” Sikorski wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

Polish officials were also outraged by the comments Livne made to Israeli media. Speaking to YouTube channel Kanal Zero, the diplomat insisted that the deaths of the aid workers were not a war crime, but a tragedy, and that the IDF never targets humanitarian groups on purpose.

Livne should have used the opportunity to speak to the Polish media and “say a simple, human apology,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Thursday. President Andrzej Duda also called for an explanation, stating he has “no doubt that Israel should pay compensation to [the Polish] citizen’s family.”

In a separate interview with Polish news channel TVP World, Livne reiterated that the incident will be thoroughly investigated.

READ MORE: Israel apologizes for aid convoy deaths

Israel declared war on Hamas after the Palestinian militant group carried out a surprise attack on Israeli cities on October 7, killing around 1,100 people and taking more than 200 hostages. More than 30,000 Palestinians have since been killed during Israel’s operations in Gaza, according to the local authorities.

Finland has decided to keep land crossings closed indefinitely and to ban shipping from several ports

The Finnish government has indefinitely extended a shutdown of its land border with Russia and banned maritime boundary crossings by leisure boats near its Baltic Sea ports.

Finland’s Interior Ministry announced the decision on Thursday, saying crossing points on the country’s land border with Russia will remain closed “until further notice.” Crossing points for maritime traffic near the Baltic Sea islands of Haapasaari  and Santio – as well as Nuijamaa, on the banks of an inland lake shared with Russia – will be shut down as of April 15.

Finland, which joined NATO last year, closed its eastern land border in late November, after more than 1,300 asylum seekers – primarily from Africa and the Middle East – crossed over from Russian territory during a four-month period. The flow of migrants had previously averaged just a few hundred per year, and the Finnish government blamed Moscow for the influx.

“Finnish authorities see this as a long-term situation,” Interior Minister Mari Rantanen said in a statement. She added, “There are hundreds and possibly thousands of people close to Finland’s border on the Russian side that could be instrumentalized against Finland.”

The Finnish Interior Ministry said the port closings were necessary to prevent “instrumentalized” migration as the weather warms. “This would be dangerous to people seeking to enter Finland and would burden maritime search and rescue,” the statement said.

Relations between Moscow and Helsinki deteriorated after Finland abandoned its longtime policy of military neutrality, joining the US-led NATO bloc amid security fears triggered by the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The border shutdown was extended in February to at least April 14.

Russian officials have denied being responsible for the surge in migrant traffic. 

Refusals by Finnish officials to hold any talks with Moscow about their security concerns show the political nature of the border shutdown, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in February. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov expressed “deep regret” that Finland had replaced friendly relations with an “exclusively Russophobic position.”

READ MORE: Finland avoiding dialogue – Moscow

A new survey has revealed that many US voters believe they won’t be able to get their country back on track peacefully

Many Americans believe that voting won’t be sufficient to turn their country in the right direction. In fact, a new poll has revealed that heading into this year’s US presidential election, one in five voters think violence may be required to achieve their political objectives.

The PBS/NPR/Marist poll, released on Wednesday, showed that 20% of US adults – including 28% of Republicans – believe that “Americans may have to resort to violence in order to get their country back on track.” That view was shared by 12% of Democrats and 18% of independent voters.

The survey results reflect rising doubts in the US political system. Nearly three in ten Americans, including 61% of Republicans, still don’t believe that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. A USA Today poll released earlier this year showed that more than half of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump’s supporters have little confidence that this year’s votes will be accurately counted.

A University of Virginia poll released last October found that 31% of Trump backers and 24% of Biden voters believe that “democracy is no longer a viable system, and Americans should explore alternative forms of government to ensure stability and progress.” More than four in ten Trump fans agreed that “the situation in America is such that I would favor states seceding from the union to form their own separate country.”

The newly released PBS/NPR/Marist poll revealed that 41% of Americans believe the country has gotten so far off track that it needs a leader who is “willing to break some rules to set things right.” That view was shared by 56% of Republicans, 28% of Democrats and 37% of independents.

The poll shows that as Biden and Trump head toward their volatile rematch in November, the country is in “an incredibly dangerous place,” PBS said. University of Michigan law professor Barabra McQuade blamed Trump for the political tinderbox, saying he had stoked fears to manipulate voters. “Regardless of your politics, the idea of breaking rules and engaging in violence is just antithetical to the idea of America,” she said.

READ MORE: Washington lives in denial over Putin’s victory while gaming its own elections

Trump and his supporters have argued that Biden’s administration has abandoned democratic norms by “weaponizing” the justice system to persecute his political enemies and interfere in the 2024 election. The former president has vowed to pardon many of the people convicted of crimes stemming from the January 2021 US Capitol riot, referring to them as “J6 hostages.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has insisted that Kiev will be allowed to join the Western military bloc

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has capped a meeting of NATO diplomats by doubling down on an issue that helped trigger the Russia-Ukraine conflict: allowing Kiev to join the Western military alliance.

“Ukraine will become a member of NATO,” Blinken told reporters on Thursday in Brussels. “Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership and to create a clear pathway for Ukraine moving forward.”

Blinken made his comments as NATO foreign ministers completed a two-day meeting to rally more international support for Kiev. He spoke at a press briefing alongside Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba, who argued that Ukraine “deserves to be a member of NATO.” The Ukrainian diplomat added, “This should happen sooner rather than later.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned for the better part of two decades that NATO’s eastward expansion undermines Russian national security and that moving the bloc’s forces into Ukraine would cross a “red line.” NATO-Russia relations have deteriorated so much amid the current Ukraine crisis that the alliance is now in “direct confrontation” with Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday.

The determination of NATO members to back Ukraine remains “rock solid,” Blinken said at Thursday’s press briefing. “We will do everything we can; allies will do everything that they can to ensure that Ukraine has what it needs to continue to deal with Russia’s ongoing aggression.”

The top US diplomat also urged Congress to approve $60 billion in additional aid to Ukraine. The proposal has been stalled by rising opposition from Republican lawmakers since last fall. The administration of US President Joe Biden has already burned through $113 billion in previously approved Ukraine funding.

US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said in an interview on Wednesday that the latest aid bill is likely headed for passage when Congress goes back into session next week. The Georgia Republican argued that Washington’s escalating “proxy war” in Ukraine is making Americans less safe and pushing the world closer to World War III.

READ MORE: US pushing world to WWIII – US congresswoman

Reacting to Blinken’s statement on Thursday, Greene reminded her 3.2 million followers on X (formerly Twitter) that under the NATO charter, an attack on one member is considered an attack on all. “Making Ukraine a member of NATO means that the US will be going to war against Russia, as mandated by Article 5,” she wrote.

The nation’s armed forces should be “war-ready,” Boris Pistorius has said

Germany needs to reintroduce conscription, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius announced on Thursday as he unveiled an ambitious military reform plan aimed at making the nation’s armed forces fit for a potential conflict. Berlin abolished its military draft in 2011 and its army has since suffered from an acute personnel shortage.

“We have considered that compulsory military service will be reintroduced,” Pistorius told journalists in Berlin as he spoke about the new structure of the Bundeswehr, the nation’s armed forces. Specific plans involving potential conscription models were to be presented in April, the minister said.

The draft was suspended under amendments to the Compulsory Military Service Act passed by lawmakers in 2011. Reintroducing it would now require parliamentary approval. Pistorius did not provide any details about any potential conscription models, but some German media outlets reported that they could be based on the ones used by nations such as Sweden.

In Sweden, only a small portion of military-age youths are drafted every year, but those avoiding conscription face penalties up to jail sentences.

However, the plans were met with skepticism by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and faced opposition from Finance Minister Christian Lindner, according to media reports.

The measure was proposed by Pistorius as part of a major reform that is expected to be set in motion in the coming months, according to the minister himself. The new organizational structure is designed to make the German army more agile and effective and generally “optimally positioned … in the event of an emergency, in the event of defense, in the event of war.”

The military should be turned into a credible deterrent to prevent anyone from even thinking about “attacking us as a NATO territory,” Pistorius said, adding that the most important decisions were “to be implemented in the next few months.”

The German military has been suffering from major personnel and equipment shortages for years. In mid-March, the parliamentary commissioner for the Bundeswehr, Eva Hoegl, revealed in her annual report that the number of military personnel shrank further last year and that the dropout rate was “still very high,” while the number of new applications was decreasing.

A survey conducted at the same time showed that only 10% of Germans expressed confidence that the armed forces could defend the country in the event of a conflict. However, it is unclear if reinstating the draft could change this situation. A poll conducted in December 2023 demonstrated that only 17% of Germans were “definitely” willing to take up arms and defend their country even if faced with foreign aggression.

The US government has reportedly authorized sending thousands of additional munitions to West Jerusalem amid the war in Gaza

The administration of US President Joe Biden has reportedly agreed to provide thousands of additional bombs to Israel, helping to replenish stockpiles that have been depleted by West Jerusalem’s six-month bombardment of Gaza.

The latest weapons transfer was authorized on Monday, CNN and the Washington Post reported on Thursday, citing unidentified US government officials. The package includes more than 1,000 MK-82 bombs, which weigh 500 pounds each, as well as over 1,000 small-diameter munitions and fuses for MK-80 bombs.

The weapons transfer was finalized hours after news broke that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed seven aid workers, including US and UK citizens, in a drone strike targeting a humanitarian aid convoy in the Palestinian enclave. Nearly 200 aid workers have reportedly been killed in Gaza and the West Bank since Israel’s war against Hamas began in October.

Although Biden has chided Israel for not doing enough to protect aid workers and other civilians in Gaza, his administration has refused to throttle back its support for the IDF or place conditions on weapons shipments. Over 33,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war began, according to Gaza health authorities, and the UN has warned of a humanitarian “catastrophe” if the IDF goes through with its planned ground offensive at the southern end of the enclave.

“We believe that the approach that we’re taking is working in terms of making it clear to the Israelis what our expectations are,” White House National Security spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Wednesday. He added, “Right now, we are continuing to support Israel because they continue to need military assistance because they continue to face a viable threat.”

Josh Paul, a former US State Department official who resigned last October over military aid to Israel, told CNN that the latest weapons transfer could have been halted after Monday’s drone strike on aid workers. “State Department has the ability to suspend any approval even after the fact, which, given the circumstances, you’d think they’d at least consider,” he said.

READ MORE: IDF deliberately targeted aid convoy – media

Just last week, Washington reportedly approved a weapons shipment to Israel that includes thousands of MK-84 bombs, which weigh 2,000 pounds each. Like this week’s package, it didn’t require approval by Congress because it stemmed from a previously authorized arms sale. The Biden administration is reportedly pushing for legislative approval of a new $18 billion sale of F-15 fighter jets to Israel.

The program is reportedly designed to detect Hamas operatives, but Israeli military sources say it often marks innocents for death

The Israeli military is using artificial intelligence to mark suspected Palestinian militants for assassination with little human oversight or regard for civilian casualties, the Israeli-Palestinian +972 Magazine reported on Wednesday.

The AI system, known as ‘Lavender’, is designed to comb through the personal data of Gaza’s two million residents to draw up lists of those suspected of serving in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), six Israeli intelligence officers told the magazine.

The IDF has never publicly acknowledged the existence of the system, but has been known to use similar software during previous operations in Gaza.

At the outset of Israel’s ongoing war on Hamas, Lavender marked 37,000 Palestinians as militants and placed them on kill lists, the sources claimed. Whereas Israel Defense Forces (IDF) personnel initially pored over these lists and manually verified each name, humans soon came to serve as rubber stamps for the machine’s lists, one source said.

“I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day,” the officer said. “I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”

Lavender works by studying phone records, social media activity, photographs, and movements of known Palestinian militants, identifying common characteristics, and then searching for these characteristics among the wider population of Gaza. The system gives each Gazan a score of between 0 and 100, with those ranked near 100 deemed to be terrorists and therefore legitimate targets. 

Within weeks of the war breaking out, however, IDF commanders were allegedly instructing their subordinates to relax this selection criteria and approve strikes on targets only tangentially linked with Hamas. 

“We were told: now we have to f**k up Hamas, no matter what the cost. Whatever you can, you bomb,” one source recalled.

Once marked for assassination, low-level targets would be taken out in their homes – identified using a different AI system called ‘Gospel’ – with unguided bombs, while more precise munitions would be used on higher-ranking militants.

“At 5 am, [the air force] would come and bomb all the houses that we had marked,” a source said. “We took out thousands of people. We didn’t go through them one by one – we put everything into automated systems, and as soon as one of [the marked individuals] was at home, he immediately became a target. We bombed him and his house.”

Lavender reportedly ranks targets by their perceived importance, with one source alleging that lower priority names often include policemen, civil servants, and others who “help the Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger [Israeli] soldiers.”

When a suspect is chosen and an assassination order given, IDF commanders decide how many civilian casualties they deem acceptable to take out the target. According to a source, this number “went up and down” over time, with “20 uninvolved civilians” deemed an acceptable sacrifice at the beginning of the war, and up to 100 considered okay in strikes on top-ranking Hamas officials. 

“It’s not just that you can kill any person who is a Hamas soldier, which is clearly permitted and legitimate in terms of international law,” they said. “But they directly tell you: ‘You are allowed to kill them along with many civilians.”

READ MORE: ‘She asked us to pray for her’ – family of World Central Kitchen volunteer killed in Israeli strike speaks to RT

According to the latest figures from Gaza’s health ministry, Israeli forces have killed more than 33,000 people in nearly six months of fighting in the enclave, most of them women and children. Responding to +972 Magazine’s claims, the IDF said on Wednesday that it “does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist,” and that it “outright rejects the claim regarding any policy to kill tens of thousands of people in their homes.”

The government has no clear “national defense plan” amid growing concerns of a “pre-war world,” the report said

Britain has no real national plan for the mobilization of its people, industry, or defense forces in the event of a war, Sky News reported on Wednesday, citing a number of defense sources.

The report comes as part of a series by the outlet to “explore how prepared” London is for the possibility of an armed conflict, as numerous government ministers have been warning that Britain is moving into a “pre-war world” amid mounting concerns about Russia, China, and Iran.

Sky News says it conducted interviews with multiple sources, including former senior officers and academics.

One of them was Keith Dear, a former regular Royal Air Force intelligence officer who worked as an adviser to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2020 and 2021. Dear said that he had been unable to find any kind of detailed plan for war while in government.

“Such plans are essential not only to avoid scrambling disorder and early defeats, but also so that our adversaries, awed by our preparedness, are deterred from fighting in the first place,” he said.

 
 “The problem is, there is no plan.” 
 

The defense sources interviewed by Sky News discussed how the apparent lack of a national defense plan means that the Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force are not configured to fight an enduring war of survival. The same holds for the readiness of the civilian population and industrial base, they said.

“Our air defense [the ability to fend off incoming enemy missiles and drones] is dangerously thin and coastal defense is all-but non-existent,” an unnamed senior defense source was quoted as saying.

A spokesperson for the Cabinet Office, who was asked about the allegation that the UK has no national plan for the outbreak of war, responded that the country has “robust plans in place for a range of potential emergencies and scenarios with plans and supporting arrangements developed, refined and tested over many years.” 

Most of the sources who spoke to Sky News pointed to the shortage of weapons and ammunition and a reduction in the country’s heavy industry, such as steel works and car plants.

“Our inability to supply anything like enough munitions or weapons to Ukraine, shows also how hollowed out we have become by buying and building armed forces to no coherent war-fighting plan,” Dear argued. “Weapons without ammunition are useless,” he said.

The outlet says it also reviewed a 1976 copy of a Government War Book that was designed to trigger certain internal measures in the event of a decision by NATO to enter a war.

The entire UK war-book system “was quietly shelved” by the early 2000s, according to the report.

The shift away from war-planning was precipitated first by the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Western governments no longer felt the existential threat of global war. Later, Sky News concluded, the UK government’s focus switched to the threat from Islamist terrorism and fighting wars in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

The US-led alliance would not survive without an external adversary, according to Aleksandr Grushko

NATO perpetuates an imaginary Russian threat because having an external adversary is vital for the military bloc’s survival, a top diplomat has told RT.

In an exclusive interview, Russian deputy foreign minister and former permanent representative to NATO, Aleksandr Grushko, commented on the billions of dollars allocated by the US and EU to help Ukraine in its fight against Russia.

Continuing to spend such resources on “insane goals like confrontation with Russia would be political suicide,” he said.

“The fact is, the Russian threat exists only in the imagination of Americans and western Europeans, specifically those who make confrontation with Russia the basis of their foreign policy,” Grushko added.

The deputy foreign minister also touched on the issue of funding for NATO and the controversy caused recently by US presidential hopeful Donald Trump.

The US-led military alliance is funded by contributions from its 31 member states, with each country obliged to commit a minimum of 2% of its GDP to defense spending. In 2023, only 11 member states were on course to meet this target, with the US being the largest contributor.

Trump warned earlier this year that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” with NATO member states that don’t meet their obligations. The comments were met with outrage by the current US administration and were criticized by NATO and its member states.

According to Grushko, NATO’s “manufactured trend of demonizing Russia” is necessary for the survival of the bloc.

“NATO cannot exist without an external adversary. So, all those who can’t imagine their security without NATO obey the Russophobic instructions from Washington and elsewhere, primarily from the capitals of the Baltic states and Warsaw who declared… that they would be the first victims of Russian aggression if it’s not resisted,” he said.

Poland makes the biggest contribution to the bloc in proportion to the country’s economic output, having spent almost 4% of its GDP in 2023. In March, the Polish president called on NATO members to spend 3% of their respective GDPs on defense.

Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated last week that Moscow was not seeking a confrontation with America’s satellites in Europe. He dismissed as ‘nonsense’ claims made by multiple Western officials that Russia would not stop if Ukraine is defeated on the battlefield.

According to Putin, talk of a Russian attack on Poland or the Baltic states is just propaganda by governments that seek to scare their citizens “to extract additional resources from people, to make them bear this burden on their shoulders.”

Jose Andres has dismissed the IDF’s claim that the deadly attack on the World Central Kitchen aid workers was a ‘mistake’

The Israeli attack that killed seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen (WCK) charity group in Gaza was not a mistake, as the convoy was targeted “systematically, car by car,” the group’s founder and celebrity chef Jose Andres told Reuters on Wednesday.

Three Britons, a Polish national, an Australian, a Palestinian, and a dual US-Canadian citizen were killed in the incident, which has sparked international condemnation.

Israel's military, the IDF, knew the aid convoy’s movements as there had been clear communication between the WCK and IDF, Andres said.

“This was not just a bad luck situation where ‘oops’ we dropped the bomb in the wrong place,” the chef told Reuters.

The convoy was made up of three cars, including two armored vehicles, which clearly displayed the WCK logo. All three were hit during the strike.

According to the chef, after the IDF attacked the first armored car, the team was able to escape and move to the second armored vehicle. The second car was then attacked, forcing the volunteers to move to the third.

The aid workers tried to communicate to make clear who they were, Reuters cites Andres, but the third car was then hit, “and we saw the consequences of that,” he concluded.

Andres’ account of the events echoes Tuesday’s report in the Haaretz newspaper that said that the IDF bombed the convoy three times intentionally, as it suspected that there was a Hamas operative among the aid workers.

The Israeli leadership apologized for the incident. IDF Chief of General Staff Herzi Halevi called the incident a “grave mistake” and said the military had no intention of harming WCK aid workers. The general blamed the strike on misidentification. Israeli President Isaac Herzog expressed “deep sorrow and sincere apologies” to Andres. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested that such “tragic” and “unintended” incidents happen “in wartime.” 

The air strike was condemned by Israel’s staunchest allies the US, UK, and other countries, including those whose nationals were among the dead.

According to the UN, at least 196 humanitarian workers have been killed in Gaza since the start of Israel’s offensive six months ago. Hamas has previously accused Israel of targeting aid distribution sites, Reuters notes.

Israel declared war on Hamas after the Palestinian militants carried out a surprise cross-border raid on October 7 last year, killing some 1,100 people and taking more than 200 hostages. The Israeli military campaign has since left nearly 33,000 people dead, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

With Kiev fighting Moscow, the bloc has saved its own troops, Jens Stoltenberg has said

Western military support for Ukraine has allowed the bloc to weaken Russia without sending its own soldiers to die on the battlefield, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said.

Speaking at a summit of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels on Wednesday, the head of the US-led military bloc reiterated calls to provide Kiev with more ammunition and weapons in the long term, arguing that this suits Western interests.

“Support from NATO allies and support from the United States to Ukraine is something which benefits our own security interests,” Stoltenberg said.

He noted that “by allocating a fraction of our defense budgets, we have enabled the Ukrainians to destroy significant parts of the Russian combat capability” – and this has been done “without putting any NATO soldier, any US soldier, in harm’s way.”

The secretary-general argued that the West should step up its efforts in this regard, including by making its campaign to support Ukraine more sustainable in the long run.

Several Western media outlets reported earlier this week that Stoltenberg is championing a five-year €100 billion ($107 billion) aid package for Kiev, which would see NATO take on more responsibility from the US in terms of coordinating the assistance.

However, Politico reported on Wednesday that some NATO members have voiced doubts about the plan, expressing uncertainty regarding the details and where this figure came from in the first place.

In late February, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu estimated Ukraine’s losses at more than 444,000 troops since the start of the conflict. Earlier this week, he said that Kiev had lost more than 80,000 soldiers since the start of 2024.

This comes as Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky signed a highly controversial law lowering the conscription age for men from 27 to 25 to replenish the battlefield losses.

President Vladimir Putin has said that NATO is using Ukrainians as “cannon fodder,” and is using the country as a “testing ground” against Russia, arguing that the West is willing to fight “to the last Ukrainian.”

Washington is aiming to prolong the Ukraine conflict instead of supporting a peaceful resolution, the former Democratic congresswoman has said

The administration of US President Joe Biden has actively thwarted peace efforts in the Ukraine conflict and is trying to prolong the fighting in a bid to damage Russia, former Hawaii Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard has said. 

Speaking to Lex Fridman in a podcast published on Wednesday, the former congresswoman insisted that in “an ideal world,” the US president would sit down with the leaders of Ukraine and Russia to find a peaceful solution to the hostilities. 

She doubted, however, that Biden is the “right person” for the job, suggesting that “all the statements and comments that the [White House] has made from the beginning of this war essentially point to their objective being to basically destroy Russia.” 

Gabbard stated that peace in Ukraine should be mediated by the most “effective, neutral broker that there is.” If the current US administration wants to fulfill that role, it should start actively encouraging Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to sit down and begin negotiations, she added.  

In February, Gabbard publicly denounced her former party as enemies of democracy driven by an “insatiable hunger for power,” and officially endorsed Republican candidate Donald Trump for reelection this year. 

During his campaign, the former US president has claimed that the Ukraine conflict would never have broken out on his watch, insisting that if voted back in, he would end the fighting “in 24 hours.” 

Kiev, meanwhile, has continued to reject any peace talks with Moscow, after Zelensky legally banned negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government. Instead, the Ukrainian leadership has been rallying Western support for Zelensky’s ten-point “peace formula,” which demands the full withdrawal of Russian forces to Ukraine’s 1991 borders, including Crimea, as well as forcing Moscow to pay reparations and face an international tribunal. 

Russia has stressed that it remains open to talks with Ukraine, but has demanded that Kiev accept the “reality on the ground.” President Vladimir Putin has insisted that Moscow is ready for “a serious conversation” and wishes to resolve the conflict through peaceful means. He has noted, however, that any talks must include security guarantees for Russia and cannot be used as a pause for Ukraine’s rearmament.

NATO members who fail to meet the 2% defense spending threshold are playing “Russian roulette,” Grant Shapps has said

NATO members not spending 2% of their GDP on defense are playing “Russian roulette” with the West’s future, UK Defense Secretary Grant Shapps has claimed.   

In an article for The Telegraph published on Wednesday, Shapps said members of the US-led bloc must accept the West is now in a “pre-war” world and therefore need to raise their military expenditure.  

Many NATO states have for years struggled to reach an agreed threshold of 2% of GDP for defense spending, but the process gained momentum after the start of the Ukraine crisis in 2014 and especially after the launch of Russia’s military operation in 2022.  

“We must look beyond that target to shore up our defenses. Yet some nations are still failing to meet even the 2%. That cannot continue. We can’t afford to play Russian roulette with our future,” Shapps wrote.  

Only 11 of NATO’s 32 countries met the bloc’s guideline last year. France and Germany were among those which spent less on defense, according to an annual report, though Paris and Berlin recently pledged they will meet targets this year. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg claimed in February that 18 members are on track this year to meet the 2% target.  

In an article marking NATO’s 75th anniversary, Shapps said the bloc’s members “must give urgent thought once again to the alliance’s future.”   

“We have moved from a post-war to a pre-war world. Russia is menacing our neighbors. China is increasingly belligerent. Iran is using its proxies to cause regional havoc from the Middle East to the straits of Yemen. And North Korea is perpetually rattling its nuclear sabre,” the defense secretary claimed.  

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk delivered a similar message last week, when he said Europe had entered a “pre-war era” in which “any scenario” is possible. Tusk insisted that “no one in Europe will be able to feel safe” if the West does not provide Kiev with sufficient equipment and ammunition for the conflict with Russia.  

Echoing those remarks, UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron said on Wednesday that the West needs to “win the argument for NATO all over again with a new generation,” claiming that Europe faces the same situation as in 1938.   

Numerous Western leaders have warned in recent weeks that Russia could attack NATO within a few years. Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed those claims as “utter nonsense” designed to “beat the money out” of the populations of Western countries.

Washington and London are claiming Beijing sponsored a cybercrime campaign against them three years ago. Why did they wait until now?

In March, the UK, in conjunction with the US and other members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, accused China of engaging in a state-sponsored hacking campaign against them. In response to the alleged 'attack' they launched coordinated sanctions against a small group of hackers and their associated businesses.

The sanctions were particularly big news in Britain, where the government suddenly decided that Beijing had been behind a hack on the electoral commission three years ago. Notably, the country’s Conservative party-aligned newspapers all pushed this narrative in an aggressive fashion.

These accusations by the Five Eyes nations are not so much genuine concerns as they are a deliberate and opportunistic act of political theatre which, largely driven by the US, seeks to slander China for diplomatic and political gain. The sanctions, although narrow in scope and thus meaningless, are designed to try and send a message to and about China. It is essentially a fearmongering campaign, which seeks to both undermine Beijing’s engagement with other countries and serve domestic political purposes in the US.

The rhythm of US escalation and de-escalation with China

The US has an adept foreign policy whereby it intentionally chooses to escalate and de-escalate tensions with China at opportune moments, which is precisely why calls for “engagement” with Beijing coming from Washington D.C. cannot be trusted. The US does not change its goals or its policies, only its tactics in consideration of what suits it at that particular moment. Hence it has always alternated between overtures and deliberate provocations. It usually does so by having a certain report or development leaked to the media at an opportunistic time, in order to craft a particular narrative which mandates a certain set of reactions and policy responses.

To give some examples of such, the Trump administration played down tensions with China directly in 2019, even amidst the Hong Kong crisis, in order to secure a “trade deal” with Beijing. Once it got what it wanted by 2020, and the Covid-19 pandemic struck, it deliberately unleashed a full-on crusade against Beijing on every front. Similarly, the Biden administration came into office and then immediately upped tensions with China on the Xinjiang issue in order to damage China’s ties with Europe in a build-up to coordinated sanctions as a display of transatlantic unity.

After this was done, it then decided it wanted to “cool” things down for a bit and establish “guardrails” so the rhetoric guns went silent for a few months as Washington reached out to Beijing. Then, as the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics came, it took the “Xinjiang card” off the shelf again with a number of timed leaks and publications geared towards supporting a Winter Olympics boycott, as well as a sweeping ban on all Xinjiang goods under the premise of “forced labour” at that time.

What we see is that the US does not truly de-escalate with China, it “blows hot and cold” and essentially manipulates the media cycle to pursue its policy preferences as it sees fit. This means that major issues pertaining to China only tend to appear when there is an agenda serving it.

The newest phase

Now, the Biden administration has made a political design to escalate tensions with China by accusing it, in coordination with the Five Eyes, of state-backed hacking and cybercrime. The fact that the British government would sit on such an accusation for three years suggests both clear political purpose and timing. The question is, why? First, we are approaching a Presidential election in the US. It was always an inevitability that the administration would want to appear “tough” on China to prevent the issue from being used as an attack point by Biden’s rival, Donald Trump. As seen in 2020, an election year tends to become a year of very aggressive rhetoric and extreme theatrics.

Secondly, there is the goal of undermining China’s engagement with Europe. It has been publicly announced that Xi Jinping will visit a number of European countries in May, including France. As stated above, the US, with the support of the Five Eyes countries, actively seeks to damage Chinese diplomacy with Europe by weaponizing negative publicity in order to narrow political space for engagement.

What we see from this is that the US engages China on its own terms, but seeks to prevent those it deems as “allies” from doing the same, and thus resorts to psychological warfare through the manipulation of mass media.

In conclusion, when one sees these strategies being utilised, one recognises that the Western media has far less independence and impartiality than it claims to have, but is indirectly subject to the preferences of US policy. W

hen the White House says “jump”, reporters ask, “how high?” and thus we see that a new propaganda campaign has been cultivated against Beijing, but of course, we should not be blind to the reality that there is no greater weaponisation of cyberspace and espionage in the world than the system created by the Five Eyes. And are we really going to pretend the CIA doesn’t hack anyone?

The killing of foreign aid workers in Gaza has reignited calls for a halt to supply of British weaponry

The UK is facing renewed calls to stop exporting arms to Israel, following the deadly bombing by the country’s military of a humanitarian convoy in Gaza, media outlets are reporting.

On Monday, seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid workers, mostly foreigners and including three British nationals, were killed by Israeli airstrikes that were purportedly targeting a Hamas militant. The incident has sparked international condemnation.

Peter Ricketts, former national security adviser to then-Prime Minister, now-Foreign Secretary David Cameron, stated on Wednesday in comments on the incident that Britain had now “reached that point.” He urged the UK to send a “signal” to Israel that it has not been taking its obligations under international law seriously enough.

“Sometimes in conflict you get a moment where there is such global outrage that it crystallizes a sense that things can’t go on like this. I hope that this awful incident will serve that purpose,” Ricketts told the BBC.

Britain’s main opposition parties demanded on Wednesday that the Conservative government publish legal advice it has received on whether Israel has broken international humanitarian law during the war in Gaza.

David Lammy, foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Labour Party, said “there are very serious accusations that Israel has breached international law.”

He called on the government to “publish the legal advice now,” claiming that “if it says there is a clear risk that UK arms might be used in a serious breach of international humanitarian law, it’s time to suspend the sale of those arms.” 

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak did not commit to publishing the legal advice, but said that London followed a strict “set of rules, regulations and procedures” over licensing arms exports.

UK ministers say defense sales to Israel were worth about £42 million ($53 million) in 2022. According to the Campaign Against Arms Trade, a group lobbying for an end to sales of weapons, the UK has approved at least £474 million ($560 million) in exports to Israel since 2015.

Those exports reportedly include parts for missiles, tanks and combat aircraft, including tires, ejector seats, fan propellers and laser targeting equipment for jets being used in Gaza.

Britain is also involved in making parts for American-made F-35 fighter jets that are used by the Israeli air force, according to arms-control expert Roy Isbister of campaign group Saferworld.

“The UK produces 15% of every F-35, and so if the UK says ‘no’ to exports, that does become significant, and an issue for Israeli capabilities which would risk upsetting the Americans,” Isbister told The National.

The EU and the US consider Serbia an easy target

Modern international politics, as practiced by Western countries, sometimes take on a completely absurd character. Recently, the Political Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) approved the membership of the self-proclaimed Republic of Kosovo in the Council of Europe. Let us remember that we are talking about a territory that is not a state recognized by all members of the international community, including many of PACE’s own participants. Additionally, its leaders are rightly suspected of cross-border criminal activity of the worst kind.

But should we be surprised?

It has long been no secret that all the so-called pan-European organizations have effectively become instruments of the United States and the European Union, whose sole purpose is to promote some of their policies towards the rest of the world. It can be security, in which case the OSCE is involved, or human rights, for which the Council of Europe is used. Even environmental policy is in the hands of the West - that, too, is a purely political story.

In other words, absolutely everything is used to create endless pressure on those with whom the US and the EU are currently facing off against. We recall, for example, a case in which one of the European Parliament’s resolutions on the elections in Russia included a reference to the need for Moscow to lift sanitary restrictions on vegetable products from an EU country.

It is not surprising that all institutions and agreements in which the West has a dominant position lose their original meaning over time. No-one in Washington, Brussels, Berlin or Paris really remembers why the OSCE or the Council of Europe were created. This may seem like a joke, and an exaggeration. However, many years of experience in dealing with our American and Western European colleagues have make it abundantly clear that they have such a distorted perception.

This is partly due to the almost total impunity with which the West has operated since the Cold War. It is also due to the fact that all these institutions were created to serve the very specific selfish goals of the US and EU. We in Russia, like many others, once genuinely believed that international politics could develop along the lines of new principles after the Cold War. But it turned out that this was not the case. 

Where the West is aware of its irresponsibility, it acts as if we are not even in the 19th century, but in the 17th or 18th century. Moreover, the Balkans are indeed a very special topic for Brussels and Washington. If the West was cynical about its post-Cold War “legacy”, it was doubly so about the former Yugoslavia.

In relations with Russia, and even with the rest of the former Soviet Union, the US and Western Europe still tried, or pretended to try, to maintain a certain ceremonialism, to make a show of the relative equality of their partners. At one stage, Russia was even invited to participate in the G8, the main body for coordinating Western policy towards the outside world. Of course, we are well aware that all these ritualistic actions meant very little in practice. In the mid-1990s, for example, no one in the West hid the fact that the activities of the Council of Europe were nothing more than a nice backdrop for putting pressure on Russia and other “post-Soviet” countries. From the point of view of formalities and ritual declarations, however, everything looked civilized for a long time. Russia was even able to use certain instruments of the Council of Europe – very limitedly, of course, and where it did not interfere with the US, EU or the nationalist regimes in the Baltic republics under their tutelage.

We should hardly be surprised that a gang of organ traffickers has been admitted to the Council of Europe. This is quite natural, after all the support the Baltic regimes have received from Brussels and Washington. Their policies towards minorities and freedom are basically similar to the most radical examples of 100 years ago.

Serbia’s prime minister responded by saying that his country might withdraw from PACE. But there are serious doubts that Belgrade will ultimately decide to do so.

First, if a Serbian politician openly opposes Western dictates, he puts the lives of his citizens directly at risk from the same Kosovar militants and religious fanatics. We have already seen time and time again how even minor manifestations of Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo have been met with an immediate armed response. This was followed by the strongest warnings from Brussels and Washington. Secondly, a formal expression of discontent with the EU by Belgrade would likely immediately lead to open or undeclared sanctions against Serbia. We do not know the structure of the country’s foreign trade well enough, but even the obstruction of transport and logistics routes would probably cause irreparable damage to it.

So with the republic surrounded on all sides by NATO countries, the consequences for the Serbian economy and population would be very dramatic. Despite the fact that the vast majority of Serbs believe that Kosovo is part of their sovereign territory, the ruling party would be doomed to lose the next elections. This is for two reasons: first, because of the worsening economic situation, and then because of the new concessions to the West that it would have to make in order to achieve a softening of the pressure from Washington and Brussels. In the same case, if Belgrade decided to do what it wants, everything would end very tragically for it.

After all, past experience tells us that the US and EU are unlikely to mind if another failed state appears in Europe. 

For all the mistakes and ambiguities of President Alexander Vucic and his government’s position on Russia, it has so far done relatively well at the only task it can really control – which is prolonging the uncertain state of affairs. Moreover, it has generally been quite neighborly in its dealings with us, especially given Belgrade’s geopolitical position.

The state of Western attitudes towards Serbia and its people is really interesting, because it reflects an irrational hatred that is not easy to explain. Perhaps it is a matter of psychology and perception – Americans and Western Europeans may see the Serbs as “Russians” who are weaker and can be defeated. They are much smaller than Russia, disproportionately weaker, and surrounded by zones of total NATO influence.

In this case, what is happening in the Balkans is a very pertinent, if tragic, example for Russia of what would happen to us if we were forced to surrender. The decades that have passed since NATO’s aggression against Yugoslavia, not to mention Belgrade’s constant declarations about moving towards “European” integration, cannot cure the complex of triumph over a defeated enemy. 

Serbia, of course, is not likely to join the EU or NATO. But it is very possible that it will survive the pressure from these extremely aggressive blocs. That is what we will have to see in the next decade.

The chief of the US-led bloc has reportedly suggested a five-year, $107 billion plan to provide Kiev with weapons

Ukraine should be able to enjoy a stable stream of Western arms supplies in the long term rather than relying on voluntary donations, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said.

Speaking ahead of the NATO foreign ministers summit in Brussels on Wednesday, the bloc’s chief stressed that Kiev – which has repeatedly complained of a lack of ammunition and weapons – “has urgent needs,” while warning that any delays in assistance would have consequences on the battlefield.

In this light, Stoltenberg urged NATO allies to “shift the dynamics of our support.” “We must ensure reliable and predictable security assistance to Ukraine for the long haul. So that we rely less on voluntary contributions and more on NATO commitments,” he said, adding that those pledges would have to last for at least several years. “We will also discuss a multi-year financial commitment to sustain our support,” NATO boss added. 

According to Reuters, to secure long-term support for Kiev, Stoltenberg had proposed a five-year €100 billion ($107 billion) package of military aid to Ukraine. Under the plan, the US-led military bloc would also reportedly take on more responsibility for coordinating the assistance to Kiev from the US amid concerns that the reelection of GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump could undermine the Western campaign to support Ukraine.

When asked about the specifics of the plan, Stoltenberg declined to go into the details, adding that he did not expect it to be fully fleshed out in the near future. “We will hopefully move forward towards consensus, and then we will have an agreement in place by the summit” in Washington this summer, he noted.

Russia has repeatedly condemned Western arms shipments to Ukraine, saying that they will only prolong the conflict and that Kiev will not be able to exist without foreign support.

On Tuesday, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolay Patrushev, argued that NATO is seeking to retain control over Ukraine in a bid to use it as an “anti-Russia” bridgehead, noting that the bloc has been pumping Kiev with weapons since the Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014.

A neo-Nazi-linked activist wants the town councilor fired for observing Russia’s presidential election

The Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations has demanded that a small-town councilor be fired for traveling to Russia to observe the country’s recent presidential election and congratulating Vladimir Putin on his “transparent and comprehensive” victory. 

Adrian McRae of Port Hedland in Western Australia flew to Moscow last month as part of an international delegation to scrutinize Russia’s presidential election. A little-known councilor from a town of just 15,000 people, McRae drew attention back home when he appeared on Russian TV passing on his congratulations to Putin, who won the election with 87% of the vote.

“In my lifetime, the world has never seen such a transparent and comprehensive victory as what we saw here over the last three days,” McRae declared. 

McRae’s comments infuriated Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations (AFUO) co-chair Stefan Romanov.

“You’ve made the statements, you’ve offended people, you’ve gone against the international community, you’re trying to portray a picture that those in Russia have voted for a president who is now brutalizing Ukraine,” Romanov fumed, addressing McRae via ABC News on Tuesday.

“You know what? Go and do your work with the Russian government, go and do your work with the Russian embassy and let somebody represent the community according to community values,” Romanov added.

In addition to leading the AFUO, Romanov was the head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists’ Stepan Bandera faction (OUN-B) from 2009 to 2022. Under Bandera and after his arrest, the OUN-B collaborated with Nazi Germany, taking part in the mass murder of Poles during World War II amid Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. As OUN-B leader, Romanov has spoken at rallies organized by the neo-Nazi ‘Svoboda’ party in Ukraine.

Former Port Hedland Shire President Arnold Carter has joined Romanov in calling for McRae’s dismissal, while Western Australia Premier Roger Cook called the councilor’s comments “bizarre,” and encouraged “the people of Port Hedland to express their dissatisfaction with that.”

In an interview with Nine News on Monday, McRae explained that a “chance meeting” in January with Russian ambassador Alexey Pavlovsky had piqued his interest in traveling to Russia to observe the election. Fresh from winning his own local election in Port Hedland, he said that he arrived in Moscow last month with “a few, probably media-driven preconceived notions” about Russia.

“But coming back…their democracy is more transparent and more certainly more professionally run, the logistics and management of their election process leads anything I’ve seen, certainly in the West,” he told the Australian network.

Allegations that McRae and his fellow observers were “being played” by Russian authorities, or that the election itself was unfair are “not only insulting to me,” McRae said, “but I’m sure the Russian people, if they heard that, it would be an absolute slap in the face.”

McRae added that he paid his own way to Russia, and that the trip “had nothing to do with anything Port Hedland council related.”

The airstrike was a mistake, officials have admitted, following global outrage and accusations of intentional targeting

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi has described as a “grave mistake” the bombing of a humanitarian convoy in Gaza on Monday. Seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid workers, mostly foreigners, were killed in a three-stage strike that was reportedly intended to target a Hamas militant. The incident has sparked international condemnation.

Halevi took to X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday to apologize for the strike that left three British citizens dead, as well as a Polish and an Australian national, a Canadian-American dual citizen, and a Palestinian.

”I want to be very clear – the strike was not carried out with the intention of harming WCK aid workers. It was a mistake that followed a misidentification – at night during a war in very complex conditions. It shouldn’t have happened,” Halevi said in a video statement published on the official account of the IDF.

The general went on to describe the incident as a “grave mistake,” and said the IDF were “sorry for the unintentional harm” caused to the members of the WCK.

Another apology was issued to WCK founder Jose Andres by Israeli President Isaac Herzog. He called Andres to express “deep sorrow and sincere apologies,” the Times of Israel newspaper has reported, citing a statement from the president’s office.

The acknowledgements come after Andres lashed out at a remark made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he suggested that such “tragic” and “unintended” incidents happen “in wartime.”

“The airstrikes on our convoy were not just some unfortunate mistake in the fog of war,” Andres wrote in the Yedioth Ahronoth daily. “It was a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by the IDF.” 

Haaretz newspaper reported on Tuesday that the IDF had targeted the WCK convoy intentionally because of suspicion that a Hamas operative was traveling with the group. The outlet’s defense sources said the cars had been “clearly marked on the roof and sides” with the WCK logo, but that an IDF unit responsible for the security of the route “identified an armed man” with the group and “suspected that he was a terrorist.”

The incident drew condemnation from the international community, including from the staunchest allies of Israel, such as the US and the UK, and other nations whose citizens were among the dead.

Israel declared war on Hamas after the Palestinian militants carried out a surprise cross-border raid on October 7 last year, killing some 1,100 people and taking more than 200 hostages. The Israeli military campaign has since left nearly 33,000 people dead, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

Venezuelan farmer Juan Vicente Perez Mora has passed away two months before his 115th birthday

The world’s oldest man, Juan Vicente Perez Mora, died at the age of 114 on Tuesday in Venezuela, according to local officials.

The retired farmer became the oldest living male in 2020, and was officially recognized as such by Guinness World Records in 2022, when he was 112.

Perez died two just months before his 115th birthday in Venezuelan state of Tachira, according to Governor Freddy Bernal.

“Our dear Juan Vicente Perez Mora, today with deep sadness and pain we say goodbye to you, to that archetype of a man from Tachira, humble, hard-working, peaceful, enthusiastic about family and tradition,” Bernal wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro commented on his passing, saying: “Juan Vicente Perez Mora has transcended into eternity at 114 years old.”

Perez was born in the town of El Cobre, in the Andean state of Tachira on May 27, 1909 and was the ninth of ten children. The farmer, known as Tio Vicente, began working at age five with his father and brothers, helping with the sugar cane and coffee harvest, according to a 2022 statement by the Guinness World Records.

READ MORE: Africa’s youngest elected president takes power

While still working in agriculture, Perez went on to become a sheriff in Caricuena in 1948 and was responsible for resolving land and family disputes for ten years, Guinness said. 

A father of 11 children, as of 2022 he had 42 grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren and 12 great-great-grandchildren.

His secret to a long life, according to Guinness World Records, was to “work hard, rest on holidays, go to bed early, drink a glass of aguardiente every day, love God, and always carry him in your heart.”

Currently the world’s oldest living person is Maria Branyas Morera, who celebrated her 117th birthday in Catalonia, Spain, last month.

The oldest person ever was French woman Jeanne Calment, who lived to the age of 122 and died in 1997, according to Guinness.

Hundreds of millions of dollars is being funneled to religious NGOs to entice and support illegal immigrants across the southern border

At a time when millions of Americans are homeless and in need of medical treatment, Washington is more concerned with playing host to millions of illegal immigrants south of the border.

How many Americans would like to receive cash debit cards, food, clothing, medical treatment, shelter, and even “humanitarian transportation” for doing absolutely nothing, aside from breaking the law? Well, sorry, because American citizens don’t qualify for the massive handout that surpasses $1.6 billion dollars, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. The freebies are going to millions of US-bound migrants in 17 Latin American nations and Mexico instead.

In what was once a matter of quiet speculation is now an open secret: the Biden administration is using hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to fund a variety of NGO initiatives aimed at helping illegal immigrants enter the US from Latin America and Mexico.

Under the auspices of a United Nations-led “Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan (RMRP),” the US State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have been sending taxpayer funds to various religious nonprofit organizations, which then dangle the juicy enticements before thousands of migrants, opening the floodgates to a wave of illegal US southern border crossings.

Exhibit number one. With an estimated 25% of the US population declaring membership in the Catholic Church, it might be expected that this denomination and its various offshoot organizations would spend the bulk of its funds tending to its American flock. Shockingly, that is not the case.

The prominent Catholic Charities USA and its various related agencies, for example, while not among those operating south of the border alongside the United Nations, receive “tens of millions of dollars in federal subsidies to oversee illegal immigrant transportation” north of the Rio Grande and resettlement operations to various sanctuary cities inside of the US.

At the same time, some 13 franchises of the nonprofit Caritas, whose website proudly pronounces that it is “inspired by the Catholic faith” and is “the helping hand of the Church,” will allocate $12.3 million to immigrants south of the border, much of it as hard cash, according to the UN database.

According to USA spending (here and here), and cited by Todd Bensman of CIS, USAID and the State Department’s PRM have doled out in excess of $11 million to the NGO Caritas Brazil, since the mass migration program started in 2021, including $3 million pledged through December 2024 to “overseas refugee assistance programs for the Western Hemisphere” that include “food, non-food items, shelter, health, [and] psychosocial support.”

It can’t go unnoticed that the same sanctuary cities that are putting illegal immigrants up in hotels while giving them free meal tickets, are the same places where thousands of tent cities overflowing with homeless people – many of them with serious medical problems and deadly addictions – have popped up over the last five years. Are the churches and various religious organizations opening their doors to these needy citizens? Judging by the deplorable state of the streets in America, it certainly doesn’t look like it, nor does the Biden administration seem to care.

Another example of a religious nonprofit serving as “co-smuggler” in the illegal trafficking of human flesh is the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which has pledged $17.1 million in assistance to immigrants in at least seven Latin American nations during 2024, according to the UN’s RMRP planning documents. In fiscal year 2022, 47% of revenue reported by HIAS was the result of grants from government organizations, primarily from the State Department, but also from the Department of Homeland Security, according to the group’s tax filings and other sources, with the rest deriving from powerful corporate sponsors and other sources.

Meanwhile, in just the last year, the State Department’s PRM and USAID have forked over to the International Organization of Migration $1.4 billion, by far the highest amount on record, according to USAspending.gov.

So what’s going on here? Why is the Biden administration so obsessed with using taxpayer dollars to fund a massive influx of illegal immigrants into the country at a time when America already has enough poor people to take care of? Is it really the case that the Democrats are working on behalf of strictly humanitarian interests, or is something else at play? When dealing with the world of politics, it’s not a bad idea to think more in terms of power, not compassion.

In a nutshell, the Biden administration hopes to attract as many illegal immigrants into the country and turn them into loyal voters so Democrats can create a permanent one-party state. And judging by the outstanding numbers, the cynical strategy just might work.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) report for fiscal 2023 shows that the number of non-detained illegal immigrants has surged from 3.7 million in FY 2021 to nearly 4.8 million in FY 2022 and almost 6.2 million in FY 2023, making Joe Biden – in cahoots with faith-based NGOs – the greatest smuggler of human beings in the history of the United States.