So. We have come to the end of 2025. To say the least, it’s been a wild ride.
In the United States
The year started off with a bang, with a pair of terror attacks: a truck-ramming assault in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the still-mysterious explosion of a Tesla Cyber Truck in the parking foyer of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, NV, both on January 1st.
Then, beginning on January 7, a series of massive fires began in the Los Angeles Basin, that would eventually destroy the town of Pacific Palisades. In this case, while the main fires began on January 7, an initial fire was intentionally started on January 1; the perpetrator was swiftly arrested, and his fire was thought to have been contained, before it reignited. The scale of the destruction – around 58,000 acres in total – and controversies about poor fire fighting infrastructure continue to simmer as the year closes.
Then, on the heels of the Tutsi M23 rebel group seizing the city of Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on January 27, the aircraft world saw four major crashes in as many days (January 28 – 31), making for a total of twenty-six fatal accidents, as of December 18th, including a still bizarre collision of a US Army UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter with a Bombadier CRJ700 (operating as American Airlines Flight 5342, under the American Eagle brand) over the Potomac River, near the Kennedy Center. Questions remain, circling the exact chain of events.
Then – to cap off January – Asteroid 2024 YR4 became the first object to trigger planetary defense procedures on January 30, when it was initially determined to have a 1.3% chance of hitting the Earth in 2032. While it was later determined that the asteroid will not, in fact, hit the Earth, there remains a greater than zero percent chance (about 4%) of hittig the Moon in 2032. If this happens on the face of the Moon facing Earth, the debris blown towards us would very likely cause severe damage to the constellations of satellites in Low-Earth Orbit, that our communications and payment processing systems depend on. Any large-scale disruption to this network would effectively shut down commerce for months, at least.
And – an end to the war in Ukraine still eludes Trump’s continued efforts to get the two countries to at least start talking.
External events
Internationally, wars continue to simmer. While the Assad Family’s near-50 year reign over Syria ended at the end of 2024, fighting has continued, with Israeli intervention in southern Syria, and one of the largest bombing campaigns in recent memory; eventually, three US personnel were killed in December at a meeting in the Syrian city of Palmyra.
The collapse of the Assad regime triggered a sudden and startling collapse of Iranian influence in the region, as Iranian proxy forces like Hezbollah saw their support infrastructure critically damaged as a part of the phase of their war against Israel in support of Hamas, that began on October of 2023.
That particularly brutal conflict – beginning with the Hamas raids of October 7, 2023 – also sparked the Red Sea Crisis with the Houthi religious faction in Yemen launching relentless attacks on any commercial vessel with even the faintest connection to Israel – effectively, all commercial shipping in the world. In addition, the Houthis began firing Iranian-supplied ballistic missiles at anyone and anything within range.
As the year closes, the region seems to be taking a breather. That won’t last.
Elsewhere, the civil war in Sudan continues to rage, with continued massacres conducted by both sides. And in Nigeria, religious massacres by Muslims against Christians suddenly elevated to the point where the Trump Administration openly called for a designation of “genocide”, and even hinted at possible military intervention.
And finally, the Trump Administration continues with its”saber-rattling” at Venezuela, in an effort to force long-time dictator Nicolas Maduro from power. Whether this turns into an actual shooting war or a stunt, remains to be seen.
The Wrap
Overall, 2025 has seen some remarkable swings in the world situation…but there remains little indication of a true end to many of the persistent conflicts that remain ongoing. Economies are still adjusting to the reality of heavy US tariffs being imposed for the first time in decades, and wars continue apace.
Here’s to hoping things improve in 2026.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
By and large, your humble author has largely avoided talking about the war between Russia and Ukraine that entered its “hot” phase in late-February of 2022, even though it actually began in 2014 – but don’t expect the mainstream media to talk about that too much.
Breaking the “Fourth Wall” a bit, I hate politics, in general. I have strong and rigid opinions, and I am not going to beat dead horses here. So, don’t expect political moralizing. I write about the technical aspects of defense and security – which are completely agnostic, until some idiot decides that their juice is better than that of the other guy across the river.
Moving on.
There has been a toxic fantasy in the West – especially in the United States – that has arisen in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Caused by a putrid mix of slavish devotion among politicians desperately wanting to look good to voters, greedy and craven defense contractors, and military officers looking to pad their retirement portfolios, all of whom adopted the idiotic ideas of Alvin Toffler – a subject we recently touched on – have combined to weaken the military capacity of the West to levels of incapacity not seen in nearly a century.
After the Cold War ended, there was a frenetic rush to make the “butter not guns” dream a reality. The problem? Like all utopian concepts – especially when backed up with “sciency”-looking graphs and densely written tomes filled chock-full of techy-sounding wording – that paradigm drove Western defense infrastructure over a cliff.
What all of those lofty hopes-n-dreams deliberately ignored, was that with the demise of the Soviet Union, the only enemies left – so it seemed – were minor states, like Serbia and Iraq, and later, against various terrorist groups like al-Qaeda as part of the grandiosely-named “Global War On Terror” (GWOT).
The idea of a massive conventional war in Europe was completely dismissed as a thing of the past. In this, to be both as blunt and honest as possible, was a level of “genteel racism” that has run as an undercurrent (and occasionally not so “under”) through the psyches of the Western establishment, as massive conventional wars happened throughout those parts of the world the mainstream media chooses to ignore since the Cold War’s end.
As a result, modern (i.e., 21st Century) Western militaries are barely-hollow shadows of their former selves.
This particular Emperor’s lack of clothing became starkly apparently in 2022, as the war goaded into being by the “globalists”, led by Joe Biden’s autopen, revealed that there were no functional reserves of war material in the West, including within the United States…while Russia – with only minimal support from its allies – was able to easily maintain operations throughout the war, hysterical screaming from the Western/globalists.
Destroyed military vehicles on a street in Bucha, Ukraine, near Kiev, during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, March 1, 2022. Picture by REUTERS/Serhii Nuzhnenko. CCA/2.0 Generic.
In a word – the “Arsenal of Democracy” is empty. And deliberately so, in the interests of greed.
Coming Clean
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte delivered a sobering assessment to London audiences in the summer of 2025: “Russia produces in three months what the whole of NATO produces in a year” when it comes to ammunition. The statistic encapsulates one of the most profound strategic failures of the post-Cold War era – the systematic dismantling of the Western defense industrial base just as the world was returning to the high-intensity conflicts it was designed to support.
Three years after Russia’s invasion, Ukraine remains critically short of the basic ammunition needed to defend itself, despite receiving unprecedented Western military aid. The shortage isn’t due to lack of political will or financial resources, but something far more fundamental: the West simply cannot produce enough ammunition to meet the demands of modern warfare. What was once called the “Arsenal of Democracy” now struggles to keep a single medium-sized conflict adequately supplied.
The Arithmetic of Industrial Failure
The numbers tell a stark story. Before the war, [the United States produced approximately 14,400 artillery shells per month – roughly 180,000 annually. Europe’s combined capacity for 155mm shells ranged between 240,000 and 300,000 pieces per year. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces were using 2,000 to 9,000 shells daily in active combat – potentially consuming the entire annual Western production in a few weeks.
Russia, by contrast, ramped up to producing an estimated 4.5 million shells annually by 2024, supplemented by millions more from North Korean stockpiles. This allowed Russian forces to fire 10,000 to 80,000 shells daily at their peak – a volume that Western production couldn’t match even if every shell manufactured went directly to Ukraine.
The disparity became operationally decisive. The fall of Avdiivka in early 2024 occurred not because Ukrainian defenders lacked courage or competence, but because they lacked ammunition. Soldiers withdrew from a town successfully defended since 2014 simply because they couldn’t shoot back.
How We Got Here
The post-Cold War “peace dividend” seemed reasonable at the time. With the Soviet threat vanished and conflicts shifting to counterinsurgency operations requiring precision strikes rather than mass artillery barrages, Western militaries optimized for quality over quantity. Production lines closed, skilled workers retired, and long-standing supply chains atrophied. The assumption was simple: modern warfare would be short, decisive, and technology-intensive. Artillery-intensive wars of attrition belonged to history.
A recent academic analysis suggests deeper psychological factors at work. Western militaries over-invested in visible weapon systems – aircraft carriers, stealth fighters, advanced tanks – that could be showcased to signal military strength while neglecting unglamorous stockpiles of shells and propellant. Like luxury goods in consumer markets, these prestige platforms satisfied political and institutional desires for status while the mundane logistics of sustained warfare received inadequate investment.
The result: warehouses that looked full but weren’t. NATO’s own ammunition stockpile targets, set in 2014 to sustain a 30-day high-intensity conflict, were never met. When Ukraine needed support, European nations were drawing from “half full or lower warehouses,” as Admiral Rob Bauer, chair of NATO’s Military Committee, acknowledged in 2023.
The Response: Too Little, Too Slow
Western nations recognized the crisis early but struggled to respond effectively. The U.S. has invested billions to increase 155mm production from 14,400 monthly shells to 40,000, with targets of 100,000 by late 2025. Europe set goals of 2 million rounds annually by 2025. These are impressive percentage increases but remain inadequate to both supply Ukraine and replenish depleted Western stocks.
The problem isn’t just production capacity – it’s the entire industrial ecosystem. Explosive production, particularly TNT, relies on a single Polish factory. Specialized steel alloys, propellants, and precision components all face similar bottlenecks. It takes two to four years to establish new production lines for high-intensity military equipment, meaning decisions made today affect battlefield realities years hence.
European efforts face additional complications. The EU produces around 170 different weapon systems, with 16 different types of 155mm shells alone. Ukrainian soldiers call this diversity a “zoo,” forced to constantly recalibrate equipment as they receive incompatible ammunition batches. National defense industries resist standardization to protect domestic jobs and capabilities, creating inefficiency precisely when efficiency matters most.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy visiting the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania, where components for artillery and mortar shells are produced. Public Domain.
Strategic Implications
The ammunition shortage reveals uncomfortable truths about Western military power. The United States and its allies possess overwhelming technological superiority in sensors, precision weapons, and command systems. They can see the battlefield better, strike more accurately, and coordinate more effectively than any adversary. But modern wars – particularly wars of territorial conquest – still require mass. You cannot hold ground with satellites nor break fortified lines with precision alone, when the enemy can absorb losses and continue fighting.
Russia’s production advantage doesn’t reflect superior technology or efficiency – Russian shells are cruder and less accurate than Western equivalents. It reflects strategic focus and industrial mobilization. Russia maintained cold-war-era production capacity, kept supply chains intact, and prioritized ammunition stockpiling even when it seemed unnecessary. When war came, this unglamorous preparation proved decisive.
The West now races to rebuild what it spent thirty years dismantling. New contracts are signed, facilities are being constructed, and production targets are set. But wars don’t wait for industrial mobilization. Ukraine needs ammunition today, not in 2026 or 2027. Every month of shortfall translates to lost territory, casualties that might have been prevented, and strategic opportunities foreclosed.
The hollowed-out “Arsenal of Democracy” stands as testament to what happens when military planning assumes future wars will resemble preferred scenarios rather than probable realities. Preparing for the wars we want to fight while ignoring the wars we might have to fight is a luxury no serious power can afford – a lesson being relearned at terrible cost on Ukrainian soil.
Russia bet long, and is succeeding. The West bet short, and is failing….It’s as simple as that. The only good thing is that we are not in direct combat with Russia.
Yet.
I can’t tell you how we’re going to fix this, because there are entrenched actors in the West – in government, industry and military departments – absolutely unwilling to bend the knee to take the actions needed to fix the problems outlined above.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. As we wrote back in January of 2025, the various terror, drug and insurgent groups in Afghanistan – not content with fighting each other- are poking what they see as a weakened tiger, in the form of a highly dysfunctional Pakistan.
With Pakistan clearly on the losing end of it brief – and terrifying – war with India in May, the various jihadist groups north of the Hindu Kush smelled weakness, and a steady intensification of attacks have been quietly growing, an intensification largely ignored in the wider world press, in favor of Israel v. Hamas, Ukraine v. Russia, and the “Gen-Z – Discord” revolts erupting in states from Morocco to Nepal.
Landscape of Afghanistan, with the Hindu Kush range in the background, and a T-62 MBT in the foreground. 2007 Public Domain photo by WikimediaUser davric.
The 2025 Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict that erupted in earnest in mid-October represents more than routine border skirmishes—it signals a fundamental breakdown in one of the region’s most consequential relationships. After decades of Pakistan supporting the Taliban as a strategic asset, Islamabad now finds itself conducting airstrikes on Kabul and trading artillery fire with forces it helped bring to power. The bitter irony is impossible to miss: Pakistan’s former proxy has become its primary security threat.
October Escalation
The immediate catalyst arrived on October 8, when militants killed 11 Pakistani military personnel, including a lieutenant colonel and a major, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Orakzai district. Pakistan’s response crossed a critical threshold — airstrikes not merely in border regions but directly on Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, targeting Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leadership allegedly sheltering under Afghan Taliban protection.
The fighting that followed was the deadliest since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. Pakistan claims it killed over 200 Afghan Taliban and allied fighters while losing 23 soldiers. Afghanistan counters that it killed 58 Pakistani soldiers while suffering only nine deaths. Both sides claim to have captured or destroyed dozens of enemy border posts. Independent verification remains impossible, but satellite imagery and verified drone footage confirm significant damage to Afghan military compounds.
The violence forced a 48-hour ceasefire brokered by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but border crossings remain closed and tensions simmer. More ominously, Pakistan has adopted what analysts call a “new normal” doctrine: any attack originating from Afghan territory will trigger immediate cross-border retaliation, regardless of diplomatic cost.
The TTP: Pakistan’s Self-Inflicted Wound
At the conflict’s core lies the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, formed in 2007 during America’s “War on Terror.” The TTP seeks to overthrow Pakistan’s government and impose strict Islamic law, demanding the release of imprisoned members and reversal of tribal area integration into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. What makes the TTP particularly dangerous is its ideological alignment with and sanctuary provided by the Afghan Taliban.
The numbers tell a grim story. The TTP conducted at least 600 attacks against Pakistani security forces in the past year alone, with 2025 activity already exceeding all of 2024. August 2025 marked the deadliest month of militant violence in over a decade, with 194 people killed and more than 200 injured in 143 attacks across Pakistan. Pakistani security force casualties in 2025 are on track to be the highest ever recorded.
The TTP has evolved beyond “simple insurgency“, threatening to expand attacks against Pakistan’s military-run commercial enterprises — fertilizer companies, construction firms, housing authorities, and banks. This represents a significant escalation, potentially bringing urban areas into a conflict previously concentrated in remote borderlands.
Briefly, a “simple insurgency”, as defined by Google’s AI search tool can be described as:
A simple insurgency is an armed rebellion by a small, lightly armed group against a more powerful, established government. Because they lack the strength for a conventional military conflict, insurgents use guerrilla tactics and rely heavily on the support of the local population to challenge the ruling authority. [1, 2, 3, 4] Key characteristics of a simple insurgency • Asymmetric warfare: A simple insurgency is defined by the severe mismatch in power between the rebels and the government they oppose. Insurgents, often called guerrillas, compensate by using hit-and-run attacks and avoiding direct, pitched battles. • Irregular tactics: Instead of traditional army maneuvers, insurgents employ a variety of tactics to weaken the government and increase their own control and legitimacy. These can include:
• Protracted struggle: Insurgencies are not short, decisive conflicts. They are typically protracted political-military campaigns designed to outlast and exhaust the government through persistent, focused violence. • Focus on the population: The ultimate target of an insurgency is not just the government’s military forces, but the loyalty and support of the civilian population. Gaining popular support is the key to success. Insurgents accomplish this by:
• Providing services • Discrediting the government • Gaining the trust of people in rural or remote areas
• Driven by ideology: While some rebellions are a temporary revolt, insurgencies are often fueled by a powerful ideology that explains people’s grievances and provides a vision for a new political order. This can include motivations based on religion, ethnicity, or politics. • Control over territory: Unlike purely terrorist organizations, a central objective of an insurgency is to control resources and eventually establish an alternative government in a particular area. [1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
Simple insurgency vs. other conflicts • Revolution: A simple insurgency lacks the widespread, organized structure of a full-scale revolution, even though it may share the same goal of overthrowing the government. • Coup d’état: This is different from a coup, which involves a swift, elite-driven seizure of government power. An insurgency, by contrast, relies on a protracted struggle for popular support and does not have the resources for a quick power grab. • Terrorist organization: While insurgents may use terrorism as a tactic, their ultimate goal is different from purely terrorist groups. Insurgents aim to build an alternative government and control territory, while terrorist groups typically do not. [6, 7, 9, 10, 11]
The current crisis exposes Pakistan’s catastrophic series of miscalculations of the past. For decades, Islamabad’s military establishment pursued “strategic depth” in Afghanistan as a hedge against India, covertly supporting the Taliban even while publicly backing America’s War on Terror. The assumption was straightforward: a friendly Taliban government in Kabul would provide strategic advantage while ending Pakistan’s internal insurgency problems once American forces departed, by exerting control over the “Pakistani Taliban”.
Of course, the opposite promptly occurred. Since the Taliban’s 2021 return to power after the Biden Administration’s disastrous withdrawal from the country, the TTP has grown dramatically more capable and aggressive. Pakistan now faces an irreconcilable contradiction: the same Afghan Taliban it supported for decades now provides sanctuary to Pakistan’s primary internal security threat. Having invested enormous political and military capital ensuring Taliban victory, Pakistan cannot effectively pressure Kabul to eliminate TTP sanctuaries without undermining its broader regional objectives.
When Pakistan demands the Taliban eliminate TTP safe havens, Kabul either urges negotiations with the militants or claims inability to control them—sometimes both simultaneously. Pakistan’s leadership increasingly believes the Taliban deliberately weaponizes the TTP, either to expand Taliban-style governance into Pakistan or enable an allied Pashtun entity to control northwestern Pakistan.
The India Factor
Complicating matters further, India has pursued normalization with the Taliban precisely as Pakistan-Taliban relations deteriorate, almost certainly for that very reason – the brutal calculus of ‘realpolitik‘ usually wins, afterall. Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi visited New Delhi in October, with India announcing plans to reopen its Kabul embassy and calling the meeting “an important step in advancing our ties.” For Pakistan, which fought its brief war with India in May, this Taliban-India rapprochement represents strategic encirclement…which India well-understands.
Pakistan’s military noted the “serious provocation” of the fighting’s timing during Muttaqi’s India visit. The rhetorical shift is stark: Pakistan no longer refers to the Taliban as an “interim government” but as a “regime,” questioning their legitimacy to govern and calling for a more inclusive Afghan government. This represents a near-suspension of diplomatic ties between former allies.
Strategic Dead Ends
Pakistan’s options appear uniformly unattractive. Military operations against the TTP face fundamental constraints: the militants operate from Afghan territory beyond Pakistani reach, enjoy Afghan Taliban protection, and can simply retreat across the disputed Durand Line border when pressured. Localized clearing operations may temporarily displace militants but cannot hold territory without massive troop deployments that remain deeply unpopular among border populations.
Durand Line Border Between Afghanistan and Pakistan. CIA Image, 2007. Public Domain.
Negotiations offer no better prospects. Previous ceasefires collapsed when the TTP refused to compromise on core demands fundamentally incompatible with Pakistan’s constitutional order. The TTP’s demand for sharia law implementation and tribal area autonomy restoration cannot be reconciled with Pakistan’s governance structure. Moreover, the TTP’s track record of breaking agreements makes any deal inherently unstable.
Cross-border airstrikes — Pakistan’s current approach — risk escalating into broader conflict while failing to address root causes. The strikes humiliate the Afghan Taliban publicly, potentially driving them closer to the TTP and other anti-Pakistan groups. Pakistan is adopting tactics it vehemently criticized when India employed them against Pakistan itself earlier this year—a dangerous precedent that normalizes cross-border military action in a nuclear-armed region.
Regional Implications
The conflict’s reverberations extend beyond bilateral relations. China, with massive “Belt and Road” investments in Pakistan, watches nervously as infrastructure becomes militant targets. Regional powers including Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have urged restraint, recognizing that instability along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border threatens broader security. The Kremlin’s Moscow Format Consultations specifically pressed the Taliban to eliminate the TTP threat – pressures Kabul shows no inclination to heed.
Perhaps most troubling, the conflict validates Pakistan’s historical paranoia about strategic encirclement while simultaneously demonstrating how that paranoia drove the very policies that created current threats. By backing the Taliban as a hedge against India, Pakistan helped create a government that now shelters Pakistan’s most dangerous internal enemy while courting Pakistan’s primary external rival.
And this, in a nuclear-armed nation with a very shaky government.
No Good Options
As the temporary ceasefire holds precariously, at least for the moment – the fundamental problem remains unresolved: Pakistan faces an emboldened insurgency operating from sanctuary areas it cannot easily eliminate without destroying relationships it spent decades building. The Afghan Taliban, meanwhile, must balance protecting ideological allies against managing fallout from Pakistani military actions — a calculation complicated by its own limited control over remote regions and internal pressure from hardline factions…in public, at least.
History suggests leaders within the Taliban understand that Afghan governments ending up on Pakistan’s wrong side rarely survive. Yet the Taliban’s public posture suggests they believe they can continue supporting the TTP without triggering Pakistani countermeasures sufficiently severe to destabilize their regime. Whether this calculation proves correct may determine the region’s stability for years to come.
What seems certain is that Pakistan’s investment in the Taliban as a strategic asset has become a strategic liability of the first order — a cautionary tale about the dangers of relying on militant proxies as instruments of state policy. The militants Pakistan once cultivated have become the militants Pakistan can no longer control, operating from territory Pakistan helped them secure. The tragic irony would be complete if it weren’t so dangerous.
…But.
The most important thing to remember in this swirling morass of barely concealed knives, is that the two main players – India and Pakistan – are both nuclear-armed powers…and no one, including them, is quite sure how steady are the hands on those launch keys.
Prepare yourself accordingly.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
Syrian-born British citizen Jihad al Shamie attacked a synagogue in Manchester, UK by ramming his truck into a crowd outside the synagogue on October 2, 2025. He killed one person and injured three. The police shot the terrorist dead, but also killed one innocent bystander as well. So far, Islamists and leftists in the UK have been celebrating the attacks and rioting in support of Hamas in response.
Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police Stephen Watson said in a statement “The only shots fired were from GMP’s Authorized Firearms Officers as they worked to prevent the offender from entering the synagogue and causing further harm to our Jewish community. It follows, therefore, that subject to further forensic examination, this injury may sadly have been sustained as a tragic and unforeseen consequence of the urgently required action taken by my officers to bring this vicious attack to an end.”
After Nepal’s government was felled by a Gen Z protest, the countries in the region have grown nervous, especially China. Now, the Gen Z revolution has spread, but not in the same region. This revolution happened in Madagascar. Madagascar youth began protests that have only been building, holding signs that say “We want to live, not survive.”
In response to the protests, Madagascar’s President, Andy Rajoelina, has dissolved the government, saying in his dissolution announcement, “We acknowledge and apologise if members of the government have not carried out the tasks assigned to them.”
Mahmoud Abbas is now demanding $2 Trillion in reparations from Britain. This comes after most of Western Europe, including the UK, suddenly declared a recognition of the “Palestinian State” while under siege by Islamist revolutionaries their own governments paid to import.
Former top-ranking members of the UK’s military signed a letter denouncing the recognition of a Palestinian state by the UK. They called the decision “reckless in the extreme” and accused PM Kier Starmer’s action as being a danger to Britain’s own security.
Palestinian Authority Demands 2 TRILLION in Reparations After Starmer Recognizes “Palestine” State– gellerreport.com Source Link Excerpt:
After recognition of Palestinian statehood, Mahmoud Abbas is demanding £2 TRILLION in reparations from the UK.
He claims Britain owes compensation “in accordance with international law” for the land it controlled from 1917–1948.
My @POTUS is a Churchill. The UK is led by an appeasing & naive Chamberlin. @realDonaldTrump knows the UK PM is giving Hamas a victory, endangering hostages even more, and prolonging a war. Watch 2 men & 2 videos. Thank you Pres Trump!https://t.co/W7rOg9xzKS
Now “Palestine” has officially been recognised as a state, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has demanded ‘reparations in accordance with international law’ based on the value of the land which was under British rule between 1917 and 1948.
This whole thing has been such a disaster
🚨NEWS: Palestine demands reparations from UK
Estimates go as high as £2 TRILLION
Now Palestine has officially been recognised as a state, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has demanded ‘reparations in accordance with international law’ based on the value of the… pic.twitter.com/a8L5c7hfkr
President Donald Trump publicly challenged Afghanistan’s ruling elite, the Taliban, DEMANDING they return Bagram Air base to the U.S. He told reporters that “we’re talking now to Afghanistan,” to which a reporter asked if he would use U.S. troops to take back the base.
Trump told the reporter, “We won’t talk about that. We want it back. And we want it back right away. If they don’t do it, you going to find out what I’m going to do.” The Taliban responded through a spokesperson, who posted on X, “It should be recalled that, under the Doha Agreement, the United States pledged that ‘it will not use or threaten force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Afghanistan, nor interfere in its internal affairs.’”
Taliban rejects Trump’s bid to take over Afghan air base that U.S. controlled for almost 20 years– www.cbsnews.com Source Link Excerpt:
The Taliban government on Sunday rejected U.S. President Trump’s bid to retake Bagram Air Base, four years after America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan left the sprawling military facility in the Taliban’s hands.
… Earlier Sunday, the chief of staff at the Defense Ministry, Fasihuddin Fitrat, addressed Mr. Trump’s comments. “Ceding even an inch of our soil to anyone is out of the question and impossible,” he said during a speech broadcast by Afghan media.
As French Protests against Macron’s rollback of socialist handouts continue, their new Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, seemingly has little hope of lasting much longer than his predecessor did. The “Let’s Block Everything” movement is already causing economic stress for the nation, as well as triggering increasing acts of civil disobedience.
No honeymoon period for France’s new PM as protests erupt – CNBC
There’ll be no honeymoon period for France’s newly named Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, with financial markets and the public showing increasing restlessness over France’s political and fiscal impasse.
Lecornu, who was only appointed as France’s new prime minister on Tuesday after the unceremonious ousting of PM Francois Bayrou at the start of the week, faces an immediate challenge as a mass public protest is unfolding Wednesday.
The grassroots “Let’s Block Everything” movement has called on disgruntled voters to show their dissatisfaction over the messy state of French affairs with acts of civil disobedience, urging protestors to blockade transport networks, public buildings and other services.
Paris police said Wednesday morning that 75 people have already been arrested, according to a France 24 report. Images have emerged of disorder erupting in the capital.
Saudi Arabia has announced a new defensive partnership with Pakistan, a nation Saudi Arabia has long had economic and religious ties to. The fact that Pakistan is a nuclear power is what makes this pact so significant. The pact means that Saudi Arabia is now under Islamabad’s nuclear umbrella. The pact is a further check on nuclear-aspirant Iran’s already ebbed power.
Saudi Arabia signs mutual defense pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan after Israeli attack on Qatar – InformNNY.com Source Link Excerpt:
Saudi Arabia and nuclear-armed Pakistan have signed a mutual defense pact that defines any attack on either nation as an attack on both — a key accord in the wake of Israel’s strike on Qatar last week.
The kingdom has long had close economic, religious and security ties to Pakistan, including reportedly providing funding for Islamabad’s nuclear weapons program as it developed. Analysts — and Pakistani diplomats in at least one case — have suggested over the years that Saudi Arabia could be included under Islamabad’s nuclear umbrella, particularly as tensions have risen over Iran’s atomic program.
But the timing of the pact appeared to be a signal to Israel, long suspected to be the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed state, which has conducted a sprawling military offensive since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel stretching across Iran, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Qatar, Syria and Yemen.
The United States under the Trump administration has signaled no chance it would approve any deal with the Palestinians that would see Israel surrender its claims to sovereignty over the West Bank. The region is home to 3.3 million Palestinians. It also happens to be the heart of ancient Israel, Judea and Samaria.
The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, told the Jerusalem Post when questioned about how the U.S. views the West Bank, “We respect Israel as a sovereign nation. We are not going to tell Israel what it can and cannot do any more than we would expect Israel to tell us what we can and cannot do.”
Washington respects Israeli sovereignty in West Bank, rejects Palestinian state’s recognition, says US ambassador – The Indian Express Source Link Excerpt:
Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, has hinted that Washington would not oppose the annexation of the Occupied West Bank if the country decides to do so. Huckabee said that it was Israel’s sovereign decision and the US would not dictate terms to Jerusalem.
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