Tag: perpetual war

“Snuff videos as a sales pitch”. Rafael boasts of human testing in Gaza death camps

Australia’s government awards rich contracts to Israeli drone maker Rafael, which skite to investors about killing Palestinians. Stephanie Tran reports.

Israeli weapons manufacturer Rafael Advanced Defense Systems has posted a video showing an unarmed man being stalked and killed by a drone in Gaza, using the footage to advertise the weapon responsible for his death.

The video, posted to the company’s official account on X, shows a Spike Firefly loitering munition drone as it hovers above a man walking alone through the rubble of a heavily bombed area. The drone silently tracks the man before detonating directly above him, killing him instantly. 

Meanwhile, a young Palestinian girl, Hala, was executed yesterday with a bullet to the the head fired by a quadcopter drone. It is even more grotesque that Israeli weapons manufacturers are crowing about their human testing labs – which are the killing fields of Gaza.

The Spike Firefly drone, first unveiled by Rafael in 2018, is a lightweight, soldier-deployed loitering munition designed for urban combat. Weighing just three kilograms, the drone is launched from a canister and can fly silently above a target for up to 15 minutes before striking with high precision.

The drone can be operated remotely with a tablet, and its camera feed allows operators to stalk targets in real time.

According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel has increasingly relied on drones like the Firefly to kill civilians in Gaza since October 7, 2023, with quadcopters being deployed in densely populated residential areas and refugee camps. Their report documents multiple instances of drones being used to assassinate individuals in violation of international humanitarian law.

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After 80 years, survivors of first nuclear test in New Mexico eligible for payment

People in New Mexico who developed cancer and suffered other health issues in the decades following the 1945 Trinity nuclear test are now eligible for compensation.

The Trinity test, which happened 80 years ago Wednesday, was the first detonation of a nuclear bomb. 

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law by President Trump on July Fourth reauthorized Radiation Exposure Compensation Act claims and extended the trust fund that issues payments to valid claimants, the Justice Department said on its website.

RECA payments reimburse people who suffered health problems due to uranium mining and handling and living near nuclear test sites. Those affected by the Trinity test, and several other previously ineligible groups, are now able to get paid due to provisions in the new law.

Newly eligible claimant groups include downwinders in Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, Tennessee and Utah as well as uranium miners in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wyoming, reported USA Today. 

“After decades of advocacy, communities harmed by radiation exposure are set to finally receive long-overdue recognition and compensation. This achievement marks a significant step toward providing some justice to families who have waited far too long,” Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, New Mexico Democrat, and Sen. Mike Crapo, Idaho Republican, wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi this month.

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Russia Unleashes ‘Most Massive’ Attack Since War’s Start On Zelensky’s Hometown 

Russia unleashed a massive overnight assault on Ukraine, deploying 400 Shahed and decoy drones along with a ballistic missile, Ukraine military authorities say.

The drones rained down primarily on four major cities, including Kharkiv in the northeast, Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine – which is President Zelensky’s hometown, Vinnytsia in the west, and Odesa in the south. These fresh strikes primarily targeted energy infrastructure and injured at least 15 people.

This month has seen record numbers of daily Russian drone strikes on Ukraine, coming also at a moment of conflicting reports over Trump policy toward arming Ukraine.

“Russia continues to rely on the same tactics,” President Zelensky said in response to the latest attacks, while emphasizing the need for stronger air defenses. He’s calling for a stronger support stance from Washington. 

According to details of the fresh attack on Zelensky’s hometown:

Kryvyi Rih, in central Ukraine, faced “the most massive attack … since the beginning of the war,” said the head of the city’s military administration, Oleksandr Vilkul, adding that it involved a ballistic missile and 28 drones. The onslaught sparked several fires and left parts of the city without electricity and water, he added.

Zelensky said Russia had targeted energy infrastructure in the city and that 15 people had been wounded there.

Trump’s much touted major Monday announcement merely threatened more Russian sanctions, and set a 50-day deadline for peace talks to happen.

However, the 50-day deadline has left some US lawmakers and European officials fearful that this simply gives Russia time to gain more ground before any potential peace deal is finalized.

“We appreciate President Trump’s decision to supply more weapons to Ukraine, but we would like the US to share in the cost,” said EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, at a moment Trump is calling for NATO states to do more.

Below: Kryvyi Rih, Zelensky’s hometown, faces blackouts and water cuts after waves of Russian strikes…

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Russia warns of nuclear Armageddon after Trump’s latest Ukraine move

Donald Trump was today warned by Moscow that he is pushing Russia towards nuclear war with his new go-ahead for arms to Ukraine and the threat of punitive sanctions.

State TV propagandist and war pundit Aleksandr Sladkov said: “Trump is trying to scare us with missiles, but this is difficult to do… Trump should be scared. Everyone is trying to push us to turn Kyiv and Lviv into Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

The Ukrainian leadership – in calling for new missiles to strike Russian territory – “is taking the most active part in this”. It comes as Fox News fans declare it’s the ‘end of MAGA’ as Donald Trump loses it in press conference.

The new Trump deal green lights the supply of possible $10 billion worth of defensive and offensive missiles and other arms, to be paid for by US allies in Europe along with Canada, as well as the threat of sledgehammer sanctions if Putin refuses to negotiate in 50 days.

Sladkov declared: “Imagine our country under attack by American cruise missiles, like Yugoslavia, Iraq, etc. I am sure that the Yars should go in response.”

Yars are Russia’s main land-based strategic nuclear weapons – each missile typically carries three or four nuclear warheads.

Each has a yield estimated between 100 and 300 kilotons, making each warhead between seven and 20 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Frothing Putin TV propagandist Vladimir Solovyov claimed the arming of Ukraine by NATO meant a full scale war.

“The question is about the survival of our country,” he fumed on Kremlin-funded state TV. We are already at war. It cannot be avoided. The [Western] task is to destroy our country…. We are not fighting in Ukraine, we are fighting with NATO. Understand this already.”

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Why new CENTCOM chief Brad Cooper is as wrong as the old one

If accounts of President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iranian nuclear facilities this past month are to be believed, the president’s initial impulse to stay out of the Israel-Iran conflict failed to survive the prodding of hawkish advisers, chiefly U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) chief Michael Kurilla.

With Kurilla, an Iran hawk and staunch ally of both the Israeli government and erstwhile national security adviser Mike Waltz, set to leave office this summer, advocates of a more restrained foreign policy may understandably feel like they are out of the woods.

They would be sorely mistaken.

CENTCOM’s incoming commander, Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, is Kurilla’s deputy, and he would become just the second Navy officer ever to command CENTCOM. Unanimously confirmed by voice vote in the Senate and championed by both Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and his immediate predecessor, Cooper’s Senate confirmation testimony indicates more continuity than change.

For an administration that once talked a big game about realigning U.S. foreign policy in a more restrained direction, this selection implies the opposite: an indefinite commitment to U.S. primacy in the region in the name of counterterrorism and great power competition.

Forces in Iraq and Syria don’t make America safer

In his responses to written questions for his confirmation, Cooper argued that the United States should retain military forces in Iraq and Syria to “maintain the defeat of ISIS.” The primary reason for this, he argues, is that the U.S. presence denies the terrorist group safe haven from which to attack the U.S. homeland.

Yet, as the Trump administration itself acknowledged by reducing U.S. troop levels in Syria earlier this year, ISIS lacks the capacity to pose a serious threat to the U.S. homeland and other regional actors have an interest in suppressing ISIS. As Rose Kelanic at Defense Priorities writes, “While ISIS has morphed into an international ‘brand’ adopted by affiliates in far-off locales, notably ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), a group based in Afghanistan and Iraq that was responsible for attacks in Russia and Iran earlier in 2024, whatever original ISIS elements still exist in Syria appear incapable of conducting sophisticated, international terrorist attacks.”

Furthermore, the “safe haven” concept has serious flaws — namely, that it is incredibly difficult to mount sophisticated military operations across the globe in a dysfunctional environment, especially given sophisticated U.S. over-the-horizon intelligence and counterterrorism capabilities and the interest regional partners have in suppressing terrorism. This is precisely why Afghanistan did not become a safe haven for terrorism after the 2021 U.S. withdrawal.

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Russia’s Doctrine of “Peaceful Coexistence”. A Solution to Avoiding WWIII?

Introductory Note 

The doctrine of peaceful coexistence was first formulated by Moscow in the wake of the 1918-1920 war against Soviet Russia.

It was presented to the Genoa Conference in April 1922.

The “unspoken” 1918-20 war against Russia (barely acknowledged by historians) was launched two months after the November 7, 1917 Revolution on January 12 1918.

It was an outright “NATO style” invasion consisting of  the deployment of more than 200,000 troops of which 11,000 were from the US, 59,000 from the UK. 15,000 from France.  Japan which was an Ally of Britain and America during World War I  dispatched 70,000 troops. 

The article below entitled Genoa Revisted: Russia and Coexistence was written by my late father Evgeny Chossudovsky in April 1972 (in commemoration of the Genoa 1922 Conference). It was published by Foreign Affairs.

“Half a century ago, on April 10, 1922, Luigi Facta, Prime Minister of Italy, solemnly opened the International Economic Conference at Genoa.Lloyd George, the prime mover of the Conference, was among the first speakers. He called it “the greatest gathering of European nations which has ever assembled,” aimed at seeking in common “the best methods of restoring the shattered prosperity of this continent.” (See text below)

At the height of the Cold War, the Foreign Affairs article was the object of a “constructive debate” in the corridors of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).  According to the NYT:

“Mr. [Evgeny] Chossudovsky wants a United Nations Decade of Peaceful Coexistence, a new Treaty Organization for European Security and Cooperation which would embrace all Europe, and comprehensive bilateral and multilateral cooperation in everything from production and trade to protection of health and environment and “strengthening of common cultural values.” …

Skeptics, of course, can point out that Mr. Chossudovsky’s argument; has lots of holes in it, not least in his strained efforts to prove that peaceful coexistence has always been Soviet policy. Nevertheless, he has made such a refreshing and needed contribution to the East‐West dialogue that it would be neither gracious nor appropriate to answer him with traditional types of debating ploys.

Unquestionably, East‐West cooperation in all the fields he mentions is very desirable, and so is East‐West cooperation in other fields he doesn’t mention such as space. And he is pushing an open door when he laments the colossal burdens of the arms race. (Harry Schwarz, The Chossudovsky Plan,  New York Times, March 20, 1972, emphasis added)

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By the Numbers — Western Propaganda on Russian Losses

Over the past week, the Western media has frantically pushed the narrative that Russia is suffering massive losses. Marco Rubio’s remarks in Kuala Lumpur a couple of days ago is a typical example.

One hundred thousand since January? But it is not just Rubio… The Economist provides a more modest estimate, but the key word is estimate:

As of July 9th our tracker suggests there have been between 900,000 and 1.3m Russian casualties since the war began, including some 190,000–350,000 deaths. That updates assessments from other sources, which put total casualties above 1m at the end of June. Our numbers suggest roughly 31,000 Russians may have been killed in the summer offensive so far, which began in earnest on May 1st.

There is too little data to generate a comparable live estimate for Ukraine. However, a catalogue of the known dead and missing from UALosses, a website, implies that between 73,000 and 140,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died since the invasion began.

Talk about lazy reporters. There is plenty of data out there if you simply do basic analysis. For example, start with social media. In the age of ubiquitous smartphones and social media platforms, it is impossible to hide death notices — aka obituaries — and pictures of funerals and graveyards. There are hundreds of images of Ukrainian funerals and of graveyards with a literal sea of Ukrainian flags fluttering over a vast expanse of freshly dug graves. Not so in Russia. There are a few, but nothing to match the quantity displayed on Ukrainian channels. Here is one example from the cemetery in Khmelnitsky.

Again, there are a few videos of some cemeteries in Russia, but nothing to match the scale of what we can see in Ukraine.

Western intelligence analysts have access to satellite imagery and the capability to look at cemeteries in both Russia and Ukraine and compare where the most new graves are being dug. I swear I wrote an article on this with those images, but I can’t find it. But I did make an interesting discovery while searching for it… Western satellites and media companies are doing nothing to make that comparison.

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Drone Attack Shuts Down Oil Field Run by US Company in Iraqi Kurdistan

A drone attack in Iraqi Kurdistan on Tuesday suspended operations at an oil field operated by a US company, marking the latest in a series of attacks in the region.

HKN Energy, the US firm operating the Sarsang oil field, reported an explosion at 7:00 am local time, followed by a fire. “Operations at the affected facility have been suspended until the site is secured,” the company said.

Workers at the oil field told Rudaw that it was targeted by a drone, and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) denounced the attack as “an act of terrorism against the Kurdistan Region’s vital economic infrastructure.” The US Embassy in Iraq also denounced the attack.

A day earlier, two drones targeted a different oil field in the area, and another was intercepted at the Erbil airport, which houses US troops. The airport has come under attack several times in recent weeks, and so far, there have been no casualties.

No group has taken responsibility for the spate of drone attacks. The KRG has blamed the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a coalition of Iraqi Shia militias that are part of the Iraqi government’s security forces, but Baghdad has denied the accusation.

PMF-affiliated militias have been responsible for previous drone and rocket attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria, including the more than 100 attacks that occurred in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, as groups were targeting the US over its support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. The attacks were claimed by a PMF-affiliated group that calls itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq.

Those attacks culminated in the January 2024 attack on Tower 22, a secretive US base in Jordan near the Syrian border, which killed three US Army Reserve soldiers and wounded dozens of National Guard members. The US launched major airstrikes against the PMF in response, killing 40 people, and assassinated a high-level commander in Kataib Hezbollah, one of the main Iran-aligned militias.

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NATO Turning Moldova Into ‘Cannon Fodder’ To Confront Russia: Kremlin

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) on Monday issued a rare statement accusing the West, under US leadership, of turning Moldova into a military outpost aimed at confronting Russia, akin to what has happened over several years with Ukraine.

The SVR’s provocative statement said Washington wants to use the country as “cannon fodder” in future hostilities, which is allegedly being fast-tracked by Western foreign policy decision-makers.

The statement further alleged that NATO wants to turn tiny Moldova into a “military testing ground” by modernizing its railways to European specifications and constructing major logistics hubs for future Western military deployments. This also includes serious upgrades to airfields, to host military planes, according to Russian state media.

Russian intelligence also accused Moldovan President Maia Sandu of surrendering national interests to Western powers, dubbing her administration a “comprador regime” – and that her pro-European Party of Action and Solidarity is being propped up and strengthened by the West.

These charged can’t exactly be dismissed as paranoia or propaganda, given for example that just last year the United Kingdom inked a new defense pact with Moldova, precisely to counter ‘Russian aggression’ – as we previously detailed.

The tiny Eastern European nation bordering Ukraine has experienced the same kind of internal political pro-EU vs. pro-Russia tug of war historically on display in other countries such as Ukraine or Georgia.

The UK foreign ministry described the defense agreement as about “building on extensive cooperation between the two countries and strengthening Moldovan resilience against external threats.”

One thing which has long alarmed the West is the presence of Russian ‘peacekeeping’ troops in Moldova’s breakaway Transnistria region. 

As for Transnistria, although it has diverse ethnic demographics almost equally apportioned between Russians, Moldovans, Romanians and Ukrainians, the Russian demographic slightly ekes out its counterparts with a plurality of 29% of Transnistrians belonging to the group.

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The ‘Economy of Genocide’ Report: A Reckoning Beyond Rhetoric

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in occupied Palestine, stands as a testament to the notion of speaking truth to power. This “power” is not solely embodied by Israel or even the United States, but by an international community whose collective relevance has tragically failed to stem the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Her latest report, ‘From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,’ submitted to the UN Human Rights Council on July 3, marks a seismic intervention. It unflinchingly names and implicates companies that have not only allowed Israel to sustain its war and genocide against Palestinians, but also confronts those who have remained silent in the face of this unfolding horror.

Albanese’s ‘Economy of Genocide’ is far more than an academic exercise or a mere moral statement in a world whose collective conscience is being brutally tested in Gaza. The report is significant for multiple, interlocking reasons. Crucially, it offers practical pathways to accountability that transcend mere diplomatic and legal rhetoric. It also presents a novel approach to international law, positioning it not as a delicate political balancing act, but as a potent tool to confront complicity in war crimes and expose the profound failures of existing international mechanisms in Gaza.

Two vital contexts are important to understanding the significance of this report, considered a searing indictment of direct corporate involvement, not only in the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, but Israel’s overall settler-colonial project.

First, in February 2020, following years of delay, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) released a database that listed 112 companies involved in business activities within illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine. The database exposes several corporate giants – including Airbnb, Booking.com, Motorola Solutions, JCB, and Expedia – for helping Israel maintain its military occupation and apartheid.

This event was particularly earth-shattering, considering the United Nations’ consistent failure at reining in Israel, or holding accountable those who sustain its war crimes in Palestine. The database was an important step that allowed civil societies to mobilize around a specific set of priorities, thus pressuring corporations and individual governments to take morally guided positions. The effectiveness of that strategy was clearly detected through the exaggerated and angry reactions of the US and Israel. The US said it was an attempt by “the discredited” Council “to fuel economic retaliation,” while Israel called it a “shameful capitulation” to pressure.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza, starting on October 7, 2023, however, served as a stark reminder of the utter failure of all existing UN mechanisms to achieve even the most modest expectations of feeding a starving population during a time of genocide. Tellingly, this was the same conclusion offered by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who, in September 2024, stated that the world had “failed the people of Gaza.”

This failure continued for many more months and was highlighted in the UN’s inability to even manage the aid distribution in the Strip, entrusting the job to the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a mercenary-run violent apparatus that has killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians. Albanese herself, of course, had already reached a similar conclusion when, in November 2023, she confronted the international community for “epically failing” to stop the war and to end the “senseless slaughtering of innocent civilians.”

Albanese’s new report goes a step further, this time appealing to the whole of humanity to take a moral stance and to confront those who made the genocide possible. “Commercial endeavors enabling and profiting from the obliteration of innocent people’s lives must cease,” the report declares, pointedly demanding that “corporate entities must refuse to be complicit in human rights violations and international crimes or be held to account.”

According to the report, categories of complicity in the genocide are divided into arms manufacturers, tech firms, building and construction companies, extractive and service industries, banks, pension funds, insurers, universities, and charities.

These include Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, IBM, and even Danish shipping giant Maersk, among nearly 1,000 other firms. It was their collective technological know-how, machinery, and data collection that allowed Israel to kill, to date, over 57,000 and wound over 134,000 in Gaza, let alone maintain the apartheid regime in the West Bank.

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