US to continue using Russian spaceships – NASA official
RT | October 6, 2023
The US space agency has no intention of cutting cooperation with Russia in manned expeditions to the International Space Station (ISS), Sean Fuller, a senior NASA official, has said. Being able to use each other’s spacecraft makes exploration safer for everyone, according to Fuller.
TASS caught up with the veteran space official, who previously headed NASA’s Human Space Flight Program office in Moscow, on the sidelines of this week’s 74th International Astronautical Congress in Baku, Azerbaijan. Fuller said he sees “no reason” for astronauts to stop using Russian Soyuz spaceships.
NASA and its Russian counterpart Roscosmos have an arrangement that allows them to use each other’s capsules. For almost a decade after retiring the Space Shuttle program, the US relied solely on Russian Soyuz flights to rotate ISS crews.
After 2020, when piloted Crew Dragon craft were cleared for manned missions, the two parties returned to a ride-sharing scheme. It was last renewed in July 2022, despite relations between Moscow and Washington having soured over the Ukraine conflict.
Fuller stressed that US-Russian cooperation could become crucial if the ISS were to encounter an emergency requiring swift evacuation. Expedition members can use whichever spacecraft is docked to return home, he explained.
The SpaseX Endurance capsule is currently in orbit, having delivered four passengers, including Russia’s Konstantin Borisov, to the station in late August. It is the third mission for the reusable capsule.
The Soyuz MS-23 was the latest spacecraft to bring back to Earth ISS crew members, including astronaut Loral O’Hara. It landed in late September.
Fuller currently works as NASA’s International Partner Manager for the Gateway Program, the project to build a space station orbiting the Moon to facilitate further missions beyond the immediate neighborhood of the Earth.
Germany Has Thrown Away or Donated 242 Million COVID-19 Vaccine Doses – 50 Million More Than it Has Used!
BY ROBERT KOGON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | OCTOBER 5, 2023
An interesting article in the German online magazine Multipolar on the many German COVID-19 vaccine ‘profiteers’ (BioNTech of course, but also lipid-suppliers Merck and Evonik, the Strüngmann brothers, the city of Mainz etc.) also contains some interesting observations on Germany’s own COVID-19 vaccine orders.
Author Karsten Montag notes that Germany has ordered some 672 million Covid vaccine doses: 557 million already at the height of the pandemic under then German Health Minister Jens Spahn and another 115 million under his successor Karl Lauterbach. But Germany has only in fact used 192 million doses (as can be seen here at the Ministry of Health’s handy ‘Vaccine Dashboard’).
Montag calculates that at the current relatively paltry vaccination rates in Germany, perhaps another one million doses will be used altogether by the end of this year. But what then about the remaining 479 million doses that have been ordered?
Well, not all of them have in fact been delivered. But Montag notes that in response to a question from the member of the German Bundestag Thomas Dietz, the German Government has now admitted to discarding 114 million COVID-19 vaccine doses which had reached their date of expiration by August 31st and of donating another 128 million to other countries.
This gives a total of 242 million COVID-19 vaccine doses which the German government has either discarded or donated – 50 million more than it has used!
Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on X.
Unfreezing $13.6Bln of Funding for Hungary Not Connected to EU Budget Changes
Sputnik – 04.10.2023
BUDAPEST – Brussels owes Hungary 13 billion euros ($13.6 billion) from the European Union’s funds and has to unfreeze the funding without taking into account planned changes to the bloc’s budget, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto stated on Wednesday.
A British newspaper has reported that the European Commission was considering unblocking 13 billion euros for Hungary to receive Budapest’s support for a new increased common budget, which includes support for Ukraine.
“We are entitled to money from EU funds. This fact has nothing to do with changes in the budget. It has nothing to do with whether the EU wants to change the budget now or not. This is a completely different issue and should be discussed according to completely different criteria. The payment of the money we are entitled to does not depend on anything, it should be paid to us,” Szijjarto told a briefing.
This comes days after Gergely Gulyas, the Hungarian prime minister’s chief of staff, hinted that Hungary might veto further EU funding for Ukraine unless Brussels unfreezes budget money it was withholding from Budapest over alleged noncompliance with EU values.
European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen has proposed topping up the 2024-2027 EU budget with an additional 66 billion euros, most of which will be used to support Ukraine over the next four years.
Zelensky’s newfound hostility toward Warsaw is as short-sighted as it is self-destructive
By Péter G. Fehér | Magyar Hírlap | October 3, 2023
A famous Hungarian proverb warns people against “cutting the branch beneath you.” The proverb is uttered when a person refuses to acknowledge that he is acting against himself.
As things stand now, that is exactly what Zelensky is doing — everything he can to get Ukraine from a bad situation to an even worse one. In practice, the situation in the neighboring country can now be described as catastrophic, and the Ukrainian president — although he did not originally imagine it — has done a lot to make it so.
Zelensky’s most self-harming act was to spectacularly break ties with Poland. Warsaw has spent a huge amount of money on helping Kyiv, about the same as it spends annually on upgrading its own army. In return, it has received nothing, not even a gesture. For example, in July this year, when a joint commemoration was held to mark the 80th anniversary of the Volhynia massacre — the mass murder of Poles by Ukrainian fascists during World War II — Zelensky refused to allow the victims buried in unmarked mass graves to be exhumed and given a proper final resting place.
However, the Ukrainian president has denounced Poland to various international organizations for imposing a ban on the sale of Ukrainian grain on the Polish internal market. Zelensky has not shown the slightest understanding of the Polish government’s position, which is facing elections in mid-October and is opposing the same foreign interference that Hungary faced last April.
But perhaps it is unfair to Zelensky to blame him alone for this ingratitude. According to the latest news, France and Germany have promised the Ukrainian president a facilitated and speedy EU accession if he succeeds in toppling the current conservative national government in Warsaw in the elections that are due to take place.
If Zelensky had any sense, he would realize that he is being led by the nose by the two major European powers. Membership of the EU requires the agreement of all the member states, and Poland, after what has happened, is hardly going to go along with that.
It does not seem that Zelensky understands the situation or is even slightly aware that the West is using him as a tool to interfere in the internal affairs of neighboring countries, or even to provoke them. We have now reached the point where it is safe to say that Ukraine has been pursuing an increasingly extremist policy since 2014, with the result that the country is raging with hatred of Hungarians, which reached its peak, at least so far, under Zelensky’s presidency.
All of this is a textbook example of the self-destructive behavior exemplified by the Hungarian proverb.
Israeli forces injure Palestinian school children in West Bank raid
Press TV | October 2, 2023
The Palestinian Ministry of Education has suspended classes in the village of Burqa due to the injury of a child in a raid by Israeli forces into a school.
Ghassan Daghlas, acting governor of the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, said on Monday the decision to close the school was to maintain the safety of students.
Local media reported that Israeli forces also directly fired stun grenades and tear gas canisters toward the Palestinian students inside the school during the raid a day earlier. Dozens of children also suffered from smoke inhalation.
Israeli forces also denied teachers of 27 schools access to classes in Masafer Yatta area, located south of the city of al-Khalil (Hebron). The regime forces placed barriers to block the roads leading to the education centers.
In recent months, Israeli forces have also demolished a number of schools across the occupied Palestinian territories.
The Palestinian Ministry of Education in an earlier statement said the demolition of schools was “a heinous crime.”
“These practices have become a flagrant violation of students’ right to safe and free education.”
What’s behind the sudden US good will towards Iran?
By Robert Inlakesh | RT | October 2, 2023
In what proved to be a domestically controversial move, the US government approved the release of five prisoners held in Iran in return for releasing five Iranian detainees and billions of previously frozen assets. However, in the aftermath of the agreement between Tehran and Washington, the White House’s primary focus seems to be centered around securing a Saudi-Israeli deal rather than working on reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
As revealed by the anonymous diplomatic sources of The Cradle, in addition to other tidbits released in US media, the US-Iran prisoner swap appears to have been much more than meets the eye. The informal agreement, according to these anonymous sources, encompassed freezing Iranian uranium enrichment at 60% and permitting the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to install cameras at several nuclear sites. On the other hand, the US’ concessions included disregarding Iranian oil sales – in essence, refraining from enforcing sanctions – and allowing all Iranian assets to be released, reportedly amounting to roughly $20 billion. This is well over the widely reported $6 billion touted in the international press.
What makes this agreement so intriguing is that it was non-formal, including no known signed documents, and was contrived over several months and under the auspices of Qatar and Oman as intermediaries. From leaked information, citing unnamed sources, what we can gather – regardless of what claims are true or false – is that the prisoner swap was more than a simple exchange of prisoners and $6 billion in frozen assets. According to a report released in May by Axios, secret indirect talks between the US and Iran had been conducted in Oman, which three sources close to the news outlet claimed Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kan, was part of. Later, in June, the New York Times released a report claiming that secret negotiations were going on, aimed at concluding an informal agreement to replace the need to revive the 2015 nuclear deal.
To begin with, if we are to assume that the official US narrative on the agreement is correct, despite Iranian officials having contradicted it, then the most apparent objective in mind from Washington’s perspective would be to cause a thaw in America’s relationship with the Islamic Republic. As various analysts have suggested, this could have also signaled hope for a revival of the nuclear deal, which fell apart after the administration of former President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from it in 2018. Hope had largely faded that the administration of President Joe Biden could bring the deal back to life after Biden was revealed to have said that it was officially “dead” in November of 2022.
However, given the information we have at hand, what is most likely here is that this represents a massive de-escalation following ship seizures and the beefing up of America’s troop presence in the Persian Gulf back in August. Why a de-escalation now? Is it to revive nuclear deal talks? This appears highly unlikely. Instead, the prisoner exchange agreement comes simultaneously with, and is somewhat overshadowed by, developments in the ongoing discussions to reach an American-brokered normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
The two nations, both powerful partners of the US in the Middle East, have never had formal diplomatic relations with each other. Saudi Arabia does not recognize Israel as a sovereign country and has been at loggerheads with it over its treatment of Arabs in Palestine, which Riyadh ostensibly wants to see as an independent nation. Negotiations to finally normalize diplomatic relations have been ongoing for months now, with the US being a highly invested middleman, given that achieving such a deal would help consolidate its power base in the region. As for Iran, while Israel sees it as an existential enemy, Saudi Arabia has had a complicated relationship with it, only having re-established diplomatic ties earlier this year in a deal brokered by China.
When Biden met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA)’s 78th session, they publicly discussed the high hopes of concluding Saudi-Israeli normalization. This was followed by two Fox News interviews, one with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and the other with the Israeli PM, during which both said that the deal grows closer by the day. At Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the UNGA, he spoke at length on Iran; however, there was no mention of the recent US-Iranian prisoner exchange.
In fact, Israel has remained silent on the informal deal. This is especially interesting, considering that Tel Aviv routinely attacks the prospect of any agreement with Iran, let alone one that allows for tens of billions in funds to be transferred back into the hands of Tehran. In June, Netanyahu spoke over the phone with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during which he discussed Iran at length and proclaimed that he opposes and will not be bound by any agreement struck between Washington and Tehran.
On September 5, Antony Blinken spoke with the Israeli premier again, allegedly discussing Iran as the primary subject of the call. While the precise details of the calls are impossible to apprehend, there had to be a good chance that the prisoner swap agreement was mentioned, as reports had publicly been leaked to the press regarding Iran-US talks. With so much focus placed upon Iran by Israel, it makes no sense that Tel Aviv would remain silent on the prisoner exchange, especially given the release of Iran’s formerly frozen funds.
Not silent on the unfreezing of Tehran’s billions were Republican politicians in the US Congress. If the Biden administration were to have accepted a renewal of the 2015 nuclear deal, one of its major hurdles would have been passing the deal in Congress, including the deeply opposed Republican-led House of Representatives. In fact, any attempt to try and pass a deal, at this point, could reflect negatively on the Biden White House, which matters more now as we head towards the 2024 presidential election.
Therefore, by striking an informal agreement with Tehran, the US de-escalates and addresses some of its worries surrounding Iran’s nuclear program. More importantly, however, the US government could be trying to create a fertile environment for the conclusion of an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement, both by calming Iran down to de-escalate regional tensions and, possibly, leveraging concessions to ease Tehran’s pushback against the normalization directly. Whether this strategy will work or not is yet to be seen. Still, it is clear that the key foreign policy goal for Joe Biden is securing the normalization agreement, which is why it makes sense that the most powerful nation that opposes it – Iran – should be addressed and taken seriously.
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’.
Georgia Awaits USAID’s Explanations on Funds for Training in Organizing Unrest
Sputnik – 02.10.2023
TBILISI – Georgia is waiting for clarifications from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) regarding information about the funding of training in organizing unrest in the country, Georgian parliamentary speaker Shalva Papuashvili stated on Monday.
Earlier in the day, the State Security Service of Georgia (SSSG) said on social media that three Serbian citizens from the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), allegedly funded by USAID, arrived at the end of September in Georgia to teach tactics for overthrowing the government to young people and members of influential non-governmental organizations. According to the SSSG, the coup was planned for October-December, just when the European Commission is set to publish its decision on Georgia’s EU membership application.
“It was a dark day in the history of American aid to Georgia… We see that money of the American nation is used for planning revolutionary processes, to deliberately train people to riot and incite violence. That is why it is important to receive a corresponding explanation on behalf of the USAID, which has been involved in such a scandal for the second time already,” Papuashvili told reporters.
Georgia’s former deputy interior minister, Giorgi Lortkipanidze, and the commander of Georgian Legion in Ukraine. Mamuka Mamulashvili, who used to be a bodyguard of Georgia’s jailed ex-President Mikhail Saakashvili, were accused of plotting the coup.
An independent online news platform reported that this is at least the seventh time since the ruling Georgian Dream party came to power in 2012 that officials have accused various entities of plotting a coup against the government.
US bent on creating insecurity for Afghanistan’s neighbors: Iran envoy
Press TV – October 1, 2023
Iran’s ambassador to Afghanistan says the United States’ main policy on Afghanistan is to create insecurity for the country’s neighbors.
Hassan Kazemi Qomi said on Sunday that the US is continuing to make troubles in Afghanistan two years after it was forced to withdraw its troops after the Taliban group took control of the country.
“(The US) is after creating anxiety and disturbance for countries in the region, including for Afghanistan’s neighbors,” Qomi was quoted as saying in an interview with the IRIB News.
The ambassador made the remarks in Kazan, in southwest Russia, where he attended a fifth regional consultation meeting on Afghanistan known as the Moscow Format.
He said the 13 countries attending the meeting were almost unanimous in their position that the security and economic challenges in Afghanistan are mainly the result of 20 years of occupation by the US and allied countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
He accused the US of providing indirect support to the so-called Daesh of Khorasan, which is the regional offshoot of the ISIS terrorist group, to create insecurity in Central Asia and to pave the way for setting up a military base in the region with the pretext of fighting terrorism.
“Neighboring countries (of Afghanistan) reached the conclusion that they should change the conditions in Afghanistan through a collective move and a regional initiative and with cooperation with the rulers in Kabul,” said Kazemi Qomi.
The long-serving Iranian diplomat said countries attending the Moscow Format meeting in Kazan also decided to form a regional contact group to coordinate their actions and policies on Afghanistan.
“With the formation of the contact group we can put into operation (the outcomes of) talks on Kabul and the economic and security cooperation around the borders and inside the Afghan territory,” he said.
Ambassador of Israeli Crimes: This is How Gilad Erdan Become a Defender of Women’s Rights in Iran
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | October 1, 2023
German mayor calls concerns over child safety ‘unfounded’ amid plans to accommodate 80 asylum seekers at a primary school
BY THOMAS BROOKE | REMIX NEWS | OCTOBER 1, 2023
Outraged parents have condemned the local mayor’s decision to accommodate up to 80 asylum seekers in containers on the grounds of a primary school in the German town of Monheim am Rhein.
Dozens of local residents attended a recent question time of the local council to voice their displeasure over the controversial move proposed by Mayor Daniel Zimmerman’s administration and expressed their concerns for child safety, calling the plans both inappropriate and unacceptable.
Starting next spring, a cohort of migrants will reside in containers located on the school grounds, which are no longer used for educational purposes.
In response to the protestations of locals, the council cited economic factors as a primary reason for the move, insisting that the estimated €150,000 it would cost to convert the containers into housing was substantially lower than the cost of renting private accommodations, where around 80 percent of the migrants recently received by the municipality currently reside.
“We simply can’t keep up with renting anymore,” a city press spokesperson told parents at the meeting.
Concerned parents told the council meeting that the housing of traumatized refugees in the vicinity of young children was wholly irresponsible, and expressed worries of potential conflict between the new arrivals and their children including the danger of rape or abuse.
However, Zimmerman called these fears “unfounded” and insisted that the migrants are “people like you and me” and are not dangerous.
“The safety of our children is the primary goal – I personally guarantee that,” the local mayor assured parents.
He explained that with the municipality receiving significantly more refugees from Ukraine, Syria, and Afghanistan, private accommodation in Monheim has become saturated and the town is reaching its acceptance limits. The council therefore needs to resort to alternative measures to accommodate further arrivals.
The mayor added that while he was open to discussing the matter further with concerned parents in the next few weeks, for instance at parent meetings, such correspondence will not change the city’s decision to repurpose the containers on the school grounds and considered the matter to be closed.
Fauci and the CIA: A New Explanation Emerges
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | The Brownstone Institute | September 27, 2023
Jeremy Farrar’s book from August 2021 is relatively more candid than most accounts of the initial decision to lock down in the US and UK. “It’s hard to come off nocturnal calls about the possibility of a lab leak and go back to bed,” he wrote of the clandestine phone calls he was getting from January 27-31, 2020. They had already alerted the FBI and MI5.
“I’d never had trouble sleeping before, something that comes from spending a career working as a doctor in critical care and medicine. But the situation with this new virus and the dark question marks over its origins felt emotionally overwhelming. None of us knew what was going to happen but things had already escalated into an international emergency. On top of that, just a few of us – Eddie [Holmes], Kristian [Anderson], Tony [Fauci] and I – were now privy to sensitive information that, if proved to be true, might set off a whole series of events that would be far bigger than any of us. It felt as if a storm was gathering, of forces beyond anything I had experienced and over which none of us had any control.”
At that point in the trajectory of events, intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic had been put on notice. Anthony Fauci also received confirmation that money from the National Institutes of Health had been channeled to the offending lab in Wuhan, which meant that his career was on the line. Working at a furious pace, the famed “Proximal Origin” paper was produced in record time. It concluded that there was no lab leak.
In a remarkable series of revelations this week, we’ve learned that the CIA was involved in trying to make payments to those authors (thank you whistleblower), plus it appears that Fauci made visits to the CIA’s headquarters, most likely around the same time.
Suddenly we get some possible clarity in what has otherwise been a very blurry picture. The anomaly that has heretofore cried out for explanation is how it is that Fauci changed his mind so dramatically and precisely on the merit of lockdowns for the virus. One day he was counseling calm because this was flu-like, and the next day he was drumming up awareness of the coming lockdown. That day was February 27, 2020, the same day that the New York Times joined with alarmist propaganda from its lead virus reporter Donald G. McNeil.
On February 26, Fauci was writing: “Do not let the fear of the unknown… distort your evaluation of the risk of the pandemic to you relative to the risks that you face every day… do not yield to unreasonable fear.”
The next day, February 27, Fauci wrote actress Morgan Fairchild – likely the most high-profile influencer he knew from the firmament – that “be prepared to mitigate an outbreak in this country by measures that include social distancing, teleworking, temporary closure of schools, etc.”
To be sure, twenty-plus days had passed between the time Fauci alerted intelligence and when he decided to become the voice for lockdowns. We don’t know the exact date of the meetings with the CIA. But generally until now, most of February 2020 has been a blur in terms of the timeline. Something was going on but we hadn’t known just what.
Let’s distinguish between a proximate and distal cause of the lockdowns.
The proximate cause is the fear of a lab leak and an aping of the Wuhan strategy of keeping everyone in their homes to stop the spread. They might have believed this would work, based on the legend of how SARS-1 was controlled. The CIA had dealings with Wuhan and so did Fauci. They both had an interest in denying the lab leak and stopping the spread. The WHO gave them cover.
The distal reasons are more complicated. What stands out here is the possibility of a quid pro quo. The CIA pays scientists to say there was no lab leak and otherwise instructs its kept media sources (New York Times) to call the lab leak a conspiracy theory of the far right. Every measure would be deployed to keep Fauci off the hot seat for his funding of the Wuhan lab. But this cooperation would need to come at a price. Fauci would need to participate in a real-life version of the germ games (Event 201 and Crimson Contagion).
It would be the biggest role of Fauci’s long career. He would need to throw out his principles and medical knowledge of, for example, natural immunity and standard epidemiology concerning the spread of viruses and mitigation strategies. The old pandemic playbook would need to be shredded in favor of lockdown theory as invented in 2005 and then tried in Wuhan. The WHO could be relied upon to say that this strategy worked.
Fauci would need to be on TV daily to somehow persuade Americans to give up their precious rights and liberties. This would need to go on for a long time, maybe all the way to the election, however implausible this sounds. He would need to push the vaccine for which he had already made a deal with Moderna in late January.
Above all else, he would need to convince Trump to go along. That was the hardest part. They considered Trump’s weaknesses. He was a germaphobe so that’s good. He hated Chinese imports so it was merely a matter of describing the virus this way. But he also has a well-known weakness for deferring to highly competent and articulate professional women. That’s where the highly reliable Deborah Birx comes in: Fauci would be her wingman to convince Trump to green-light the lockdowns.
What does the CIA get out of this? The vast intelligence community would have to be put in charge of the pandemic response as the rule maker, the lead agency. Its outposts such as CISA would handle labor-related issues and use its contacts in social media to curate the public mind. This would allow the intelligence community finally to crack down on information flows that had begun 20 years earlier that they had heretofore failed to manage.
The CIA would hobble and hamstring the US president, whom they hated. And importantly, there was his China problem. He had wrecked relations through his tariff wars. So far as they were concerned, this was treason because he did it all on his own. This man was completely out of control. He needed to be put in his place. To convince the president to destroy the US economy with his own hand would be the ultimate coup de grace for the CIA.
A lockdown would restart trade with China. It did in fact achieve that.
How would Fauci and the CIA convince Trump to lock down and restart trade with China? By exploiting these weaknesses and others too: his vulnerability to flattery, his desire for presidential aggrandizement, and his longing for Xi-like powers over all to turn off and then turn on a whole country. Then they would push Trump to buy the much-needed personal protective equipment from China.
They finally got their way: somewhere between March 10 or possibly as late as March 14, Trump gave the go ahead. The press conference of March 16, especially those magical 70 seconds in which Fauci read the words mandating lockdowns because Birx turned out to be too squeamish, was the great turning point. A few days later, Trump was on the phone with Xi asking for equipment.
In addition, such a lockdown would greatly please the digital tech industry, which would experience a huge boost in demand, plus large corporations like Amazon and WalMart, which would stay open as their competitors were closed. Finally, it would be a massive subsidy to pharma and especially the mRNA platform technology itself, which would enjoy the credit for ending the pandemic.
If this whole scenario is true, it means that all along Fauci was merely playing a role, a front man for much deeper interests and priorities in the CIA-led intelligence community. This broad outline makes sense of why Fauci changed his mind on lockdowns, including the timing of the change. There are still many more details to know, but these new fragments of new information take our understanding in a new and more coherent direction.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also the author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
Iran Boasts of Hybrid Drones’ Capability, Warns of Hair-Trigger Response to Any Aggression
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 25.09.2023
The Islamic Republic has developed dozens of increasingly sophisticated turboprop and rocket-powered unmanned aerial vehicles over the decades, designed for missions ranging from reconnaissance to long-range precision strikes against land and sea targets.
Iran has reportedly developed a new hybrid aerial and sea-based drone capable of landing on and taking off from water, with senior military officials calling on Persian Gulf nations to ensure security collectively, while warning Washington and its allies of the consequences any aggressive moves.
“The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy has built drones that can take off from and land on the water,” IRGC Commander Ali Reza Tangsiri said in an interview with local media over the weekend, pledging that more details about the drone will be provided at a later date.
“The IRGC Navy has also built hybrid drones that fly with one engine, with the second engine serving as a propelling engine,” Tangsiri said. That UAV is said to have the capability to carry out reconnaissance missions lasting up to 15 hours.
The water-landing drones, reportedly designed to be able to carry missiles and bombs, would dramatically enhance the IRGC Navy’s already substantial naval and coastal defense capabilities in the defense of the nation’s vast coastlines in the Persian Gulf, along the crucial world energy transportation chokepoint in the Strait of Hormuz, and in the Gulf of Oman.
Tangsiri reiterated Tehran’s long-standing diplomatic stance that Persian Gulf security can be assured by regional countries, without any interference from non-Gulf countries, and proposed the creation of an eight-nation pact of Persian Gulf-adjacent countries to ensure regional security, including Iran, Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The opportunities to forge such a regional security pact shot up dramatically this spring after Iran and Saudi Arabia signed a surprise normalization of relations deal mediated by China. Washington, Riyadh’s longtime traditional partner in the region, was forced to begrudgingly accept the warming of relations between the traditional Gulf foes, while expressing skepticism over the agreement’s ability to last, and leveling new sanctions against the Islamic Republic.
Separately, at a military ceremony outside Qom, central Iran on Monday, Iranian Armed Forces Chief of Staff Mohammad Baqeri warned Iran’s potential enemies that the nation’s military is on a hair-trigger alert to respond instantaneously to any aggression.
“The Iranian Armed Forces have set up a unified body to establish security in the country,” Baqeri said. “State of readiness is a familiar concept for our armed personnel. That is, every moment we have our hands on the trigger and our eyes on the radar screen, along with surveillance and intelligence equipment so that no conspiracy is organized against the country and the enemies do not wish to launch aggression and undermine our security,” the top commander added.
Also speaking at the event, Iranian Army Ground Forces Commander Kioumars Heidari warned that “if the enemies put a foot wrong and commit a foolish or mischievous act” against Iran, they “will receive a decisive response from the Army’s ground forces.”
“If the enemies attack Iran from the air, they will have no place to sit on the ground, and if they attack Iran from the ground, we will annihilate them within seconds by God’s grace,” Heidari added.
Iran unveiled a new ultra-long range drone last week at a military parade dedicated to the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, with the UAV, named the Mohajer-10, capable of flying up to 2,000 km with a weapons payload of up to 300 kg, able to stay airborne for up to 24 hours at a time.
Regional tensions flared between the Iran and the US have recent months amid Washington’s decision to dramatically ramp up its naval, air and troop presence in the Persian Gulf following Iran’s crackdown on oil smuggling and maritime navigation violators.
Last month, IRGC Navy Commander Tangsiri stressed that the large US warships traversing Persian Gulf waters have been forced to obey Iran’s maritime rules.
Armed with an impressive and technically advanced military-industrial complex, Iran’s military design philosophy seems aimed at providing the country with David vs. Goliath-type asymmetric warfare capabilities against larger and technically more powerful adversaries, with the country building up mosquito fleets of fast boats armed with machineguns and artillery, hundreds of coastal defense batteries, dozens of drone designs, and maritime power projection capabilities using old tanker ships converted into mobile support platforms to save on costs. Iran’s strategy has enabled it to become one of the top 20 militarily most powerful countries in the world, while spending just a fraction of what the US does on defense ($6.8 billion vs $877 billion in 2022).
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From the Archives
HOW THE UK AND US MEDIA DEHUMANISE PALESTINIANS
BY CLAIRE LAUTERBACH AND NAMIR SHABIBI | DECLASSIFIED UK | NOVEMBER 22, 2023
Nazis. Beneath animals.
This is a small sample of what Palestinians have been called by commentators speaking to Western media outlets in the last month of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – examples of the bestiary of zoological terms natural to a coloniser’s view of the colonised.
Political philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote during France’s colonial war in Algeria of “hordes of vital statistics”, “hysterical masses”, “faces bereft of all humanity”, and “children who seem to belong to nobody”.
These are all terms that could describe how western media covers the suffering of Palestinians — “a tide of humanity… a teeming mass of Gazans”, as the BBC put it (15 October). This is all sharply in focus since Hamas’ October offensive, and Israel’s genocidal razing of the Gaza strip.
We analysed the front page coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza by five major US and UK news media — the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Times, and the BBC (the news landing page at 7am daily) between 7-26 October.
Over these three weeks following Hamas’ offensive, the mechanics of the Western press’ dehumanisation of Palestinians in death and life are revealed as clinical and routine. … continue
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- Oreshnik strike a retaliation for Kiev’s ‘terrorist attacks’ – Moscow
- Fars debunks NYT claims ‘Israel’ was exempted from US-Iran agreement
- Taking Iran’s lead, a global resistance front is needed against US-backed Israeli war machine
- Warmongers in meltdown as Trump heralds Iran deal
- Iran to US: Three unresolved issues must be settled before talks begin
- Over 50 countries continued to arm Israel during genocide of Palestinians in Gaza: Report
- If Americans Knew
- Israel escalates attacks in Gaza, as it demands total disarmament – Daily Update
- Flotilla activists’ allegations of rape, sexual assault multiply – Daily Update
- Israel’s long record of using banned incendiary weapons on civilians
- How Jeffrey Goldberg weaponized Jewish trauma to pave the way for war with Iran
- ISRAELI MEDIA: They Were Children During the Nakba. This Is What They Remember 78 Years Later
- Pro-Israel commentator warns critics face ‘buzzsaw’ of ‘Jewish money’ after Massie defeat
- How Dumb Does Ted Cruz Think Americans Are?
- Amid global outrage at treatment of flotilla activists, Israeli Prison Service says abuse is standard procedure: Daily Update
- Autopsies of Gaza Medics Killed by Israeli Troops Show Some Were Shot in the Head
- U.S.: New Data Highlights AIPAC Ties to the U.S., Israeli Governments
- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s AfD Party Calls Debunked Climate Scenarios “Greatest Fraud In Human History”
- Researchers Find Rapid Global Warming Phase At End Of Last Ice Age (Ca.18,000 Years Ago)
- Even The DNA Of Single-Celled Plankton Can Upend Alarmist Arctic Sea Ice Melt Claims
- Scandal: Although Climate Panic Is Canceled By IPCC, Europe’s Policymakers Continue With Their Crushing Policies
- How Once Hardcore Climate Alarmist Lucy Biggers Realized It Was All A Scam, Brainwashing
- German Expert: “No Climate Crisis” …”Warming Generally Better For Humanity”
- New Paleo Research: Modern ‘Climate Change’ Has Had No Apparent Impact On Precipitation Patterns
- 90% Subsidized… Bielefeld Germany’s €7 Million Hydrogen Garbage Truck Fleet Sits Idle
- New Study: Declining Trends In 1980-2023 Tropical Cyclone Frequency, Accumulated Energy
- 46 IPCC Scientists Break Rank, Publicly Challenge Long-Standing Dogmatic Climate Claims
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