Tag: perpetual war

Strava Security Breach Scandal: NATO Soldiers in Poland Expose Sensitive Data by Negligent Usage of Fitness App

The worldwide scandal involving security breaches connected to the popular fitness app Strava continues to gain global headlines.

Initially reported by the French paper Le Monde, investigations over the usage of this app revealed glaring security failures involving security personnel for leaders like Macron, Biden and Trump.

A second report also showed how French nuclear submarine crews were giving away sensitive information by using the app.

Now, it’s revealed that NATO soldiers stationed in Poland are also suspected of the same security breaches.

News portal Służby i Obywatel, reports soldiers at Polish bases unknowingly shared information about their travel routes by their Strava usage.

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Trump: Zelensky Passed on Deal, ‘Decided To Fight’ & Is ‘No Angel’

President Donald Trump appeared on Hannity at the end this week and offered a blunt, critical assessment of Zelensky’s decision-making in the Russia-Ukraine war.

He strongly suggested that Ukrainian President Zelensky’s policies have only prolonged the war. This includes the unspoken truth that prior Biden administration policies have only served to continue the killing, as billions in arms were pumped to Ukraine’s military, despite there long being acknowledgement that the Russian military machine was superior, and Russian forces have continued making significant gains.

“Look, Zelensky was fighting a much bigger entity, much bigger, much more powerful. He shouldn’t have done that because we could have made a deal and it would have been a deal that would have been — it would have been a nothing deal,” Trump told Sean Hannity on Thursday. Trump also at one point said Zelensky is “no angel”.

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Russia races for Ukranian mineral wealth before a potential ceasefire

Russia has spent the past five months swallowing up ever bigger tracts of Ukrainian coal, lithium, and uranium in the Donbass. Yet Western politicians still cling to the belief that they will be able to tap these resources to repay Ukraine’s ever mounting pile of debt. This is economic madness.

In the summer of 2024, most Western politico-military commentators were predicting that Russia was focussed on storming the strategically important military hub of Pokrovsk in Donetsk. Russian troops had advanced slowly, inexorably westward in a straight line following the bloody attritional battle for Avdiivka which was captured in February 2024.

But from August, Russian tactics shifted. First from the south of Donetsk they stormed Vuhledar, literally translated as “Gift of Coal,” a site of significant reserves, capturing it on October 1. That opened the way to swallow up large swaths of land in the south. Following the apparent encirclement of Velyka Novosilka in the past two days, one of Ukraine’s three licensed blocks of extractable lithium is now within short reach in Shevchenko.

Russian armed forces skirted Pokrovsk, instead battling through Selydove and in a straight line for about 20 miles, capturing a Uranium mine in a village called Shevchenko (not the same Shevchenko where the lithium is located). In recent weeks, Russian forces have taken Ukraine’s most important mine for coking coal in Pishchane and two related coking coal shafts in Udachne and Kotlyne. Together, these mines alone had produced the coking coal for 65% of Ukraine’s steel production. There are now fears that Ukrainian steel production could plummet to 10% of its prewar level in 2025.

Since President Trump was elected in November, and the prospect of an enforced ceasefire grew brighter, Russia’s advance has progressively accelerated. Today it is on the verge of completing its capture of the coal-rich bastion of Toretsk, the only town on the line of contact that hadn’t moved since 2014.

That’s bad news for Ukraine, not just because of a potential loss of further territory.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin: “2020 Election Victory Stolen” From President Trump – Acknowledges Ukraine War Never Would Have Happened Under Trump

Russian President Vladimir Putin has broken his silence on the 2020 Presidential Election between President Trump and Joe Biden.  In a recent interview, Putin stated the President Trump had his victory “stolen” from him and that “perhaps the crisis in Ukraine that arose in 2022 wouldn’t have happened” if he had been re-elected.

The Russian leader also called out the previous “United States administration,” presumably Joe Biden, for refusing to “communicate” with Russia, stating that he had “business-like and pragmatic” relationship with the Trump administration before.

In a clip from an interview, Putin stated:

“I’d like to say that Russia never refused to come into contact with the United States administration and it is through no fault of ours that the previous administration refused to communicate.  I always had business-like relations with the previous US President, that were very business-like and pragmatic.  But there was trust as well.

If he had been the President, if the victory wasn’t stolen from him in 2020, maybe the Ukrainian crisis that arose in 2022 would have [appeared]”

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Russians Enter Last Major Ukrainian Stronghold In Key Eastern Sector

Russian forces have entered the Donetsk Oblast town of Velyka Novosilka, according to Russian and Ukrainian sources. The settlement is Ukraine’s last major stronghold in the southern Donbas region. Located at the intersection of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts, its capture could provide Russian forces with a potential route for advancement into Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ukrainian military analysts say, according to Euromaidan Press.

“Military personnel of the ‘Vostok’ group continue to hack into the defense of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Velyka Novosilka,” the Russian MoD claimed on Telegram. “Servicemen from the ‘East’ military group installed the Russian flag on one of the buildings recaptured from the enemy in the center of the settlement.”

The Ukrainian DeepState open-source tracking group confirmed that assessment, saying “The enemy is successful in advancing on the eastern outskirts, and has also occupied a small part of the central streets of the settlement, where they filmed their videos with rags.”

Video emerged on social media appearing to back up that claim.

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Leaked documents expose deep ties between Israeli army and Microsoft

Microsoft has a “footprint in all major military infrastructures” in Israel, and sales of the company’s cloud and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli army have skyrocketed since the beginning of its onslaught on Gaza, according to leaked commercial records from Israel’s Defense Ministry and files from Microsoft’s Israeli subsidiary.

The documents reveal that dozens of units in the Israeli army have purchased services from Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, in recent months — including units in the air, ground, and naval forces, as well as the elite intelligence squad, Unit 8200. Microsoft has also provided the military with extensive access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model, the engine behind ChatGPT, thanks to the close partnership between the two companies. 

These revelations are the product of an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call in collaboration with The Guardian. It is based in part on documents obtained by Drop Site News, which has published its own story. The investigation shows how the Israeli army deepened its reliance on civilian tech giants after October 7, and comes amid growing protests by cloud company employees who fear that the technology they developed has helped Israel commit war crimes.

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When Israeli Warplanes Rain Death on Gaza, the Co-Pilot Is Uncle Sam

In recent weeks, political soothsayers have speculated about a wide variety of odious new policies the incoming Trump administration and its allies in Congress may or may not pursue. No one can predict with certainty which of those measures they will inflict on us and which they’ll forget about.  But we can make one prediction with utter confidence. The White House and large bipartisan majorities in Congress will continue their lavish support for Israel’s war on Gaza, however catastrophic the results.

Washington has supplied a large share of the armaments that have allowed the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to rain death and destruction on Gaza (not to speak of Lebanon) over the past year and a quarter. Before October 7, 2023, when Hamas and other groups attacked southern Israel, that country was receiving $3.8 billion worth of American military aid annually. Since then, the floodgates have opened and $18 billion worth of arms have flowed out. The ghastly results have shocked people and governments across the globe.

In early 2024, the United Nations General Assembly and International Court of Justice condemned the war being waged on the people of Gaza and, in November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, and Médecins Sans Frontières all followed with determinations that Israel was indeed committing genocide.

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The American Cult of Bombing

Back in August of 2014, I wrote a piece for TomDispatch on the American cult of bombing. The Air Force’s new stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider, was still on the drawing board a decade ago. The Air Force wanted 100 of them at a projected cost of $55 billion to acquire them.

The projected cost of the B-21, you won’t be surprised to learn, has now climbed to roughly $750 million per plane, or $75 billion to acquire 100 of them. Of course, the total program cost will easily exceed $200 billion over 30 years, the Air Force admitted in 2022. (I’m old enough to remember when the entire Pentagon budget was less than $200 billion a year.)

By the way, the Air Force is now talking about buying 200 B-21s, which I think is my old service’s latest ploy to prevent cuts to the initial ask of 100. Cheaper by the hundreds!

America’s belief in the efficacy of bombing is truly incredible. We could end poverty in America and house all the homeless for $200 billion over 30 years, but surely we need bombers more than that.

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F-35 AI-Enabled Drone Controller Capability Successfully Demonstrated

Lockheed Martin says the stealthy F-35 Joint Strike Fighter now has a firmly demonstrated ability to act as an in-flight ‘quarterback’ for advanced drones like the U.S. Air Force’s future Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) with the help of artificial intelligence-enabled systems. The company states that its testing has also shown a touchscreen tablet-like device is a workable interface for controlling multiple uncrewed aircraft simultaneously from the cockpit of the F-35, as well as the F-22 Raptor. For the U.S. Air Force, how pilots in crewed aircraft will actually manage CCAs during operations has emerged as an increasingly important question.

Details about F-35 and F-22 related crewed-uncrewed teaming developments were included in a press release that Lockheed Martin put out late yesterday that wrapped up various achievements for the company in 2024.

The F-35 “has the capability to control drones, including the U.S. Air Force’s future fleet of Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Recently, Lockheed Martin and industry partners demonstrated end-to-end connectivity including the seamless integration of AI technologies to control a drone in flight utilizing the same hardware and software architectures built for future F-35 flight testing,” the press release says. “These AI-enabled architectures allow Lockheed Martin to not only prove out piloted-drone teaming capabilities, but also incrementally improve them, bringing the U.S. Air Force’s family of systems vision to life.”

“Lockheed Martin has demonstrated its piloted-drone teaming interface, which can control multiple drones from the cockpit of an F-35 or F-22,” the release adds. “This technology allows a pilot to direct multiple drones to engage enemies using a touchscreen tablet in the cockpit of their 5th Gen aircraft.”

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The 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Is Testing 3D-Printed Drones

In case the display of the drone threat over states like New York and New Jersey wasn’t enough to cause concern, the famous 101st Airborne (Air Assault) “Screaming Eagles” is partnering with the 5th Special Forces Group (SFG) and Eaglewerx Applied Tactical Innovation Center at Fort Campbell, KY to field and test 3D-printed drones as a fraction of the cost of existing small unmanned systems (sUAS).

The testing will take place during Operation Lethal Eagle, a division level training exercise and will include 100 units and ground control consoles. Lethal Eagle is a 21-day exercise designed to test prototypes or Army initiatives among other tasks.

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