WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced on Wednesday a new $200 million security assistance package for Ukraine that includes munitions for a new air defense system that will soon be delivered to Ukraine, among other weapons.

"I am proud that the United States has just announced its latest security assistance package for Ukraine, valued at $200 million," Austin told reporters ahead of a Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting in Brussels.

The Indian reaction to the massive eruption of violence between Hamas and Israel on Saturday belies ground realities and ignores the geopolitical environment in that region and globally in which this cataclysmic event merits careful appraisal. It will prove to be unsustainable and can damage the country’s interests and standing globally. 

 

By M.K. Bhadrakumar

Indian Punchline

 

10 Problems With India’s Stance on Gaza

 

“We are fighting human animals and are acting accordingly.” – Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

On October 7, the special day being Simchat Torah, the vaunted security barriers protecting the State of Israel from those troublesome, sovereignty yearning Palestinians were spectacularly breached. From sea, air and land, Hamas executed a daring operation that saw, within hours, attacks being mounted within Israel proper. Hundreds of Israelis were killed. Dozens were taken hostage, some even transferred back to Gaza. In retaliation, the Israeli Defence Forces have killed hundreds of Palestinians in kind, huddled in the incarcerated, dense confines of Gaza itself, with a promise to do more.

 

Russia reiterates warning over black market Ukrainian weapons

The Foreign Ministry in Moscow has compiled a list of briefings in which it raised the alarm about unchecked weapons deliveries to Kiev

 

The unchecked delivery of Western weapons to Ukraine has resulted in a large amount of these arms ending up in the hands of organized criminal groups and extremists around the world, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has again claimed. 

On Tuesday, the diplomat published a compilation of excerpts from briefings over the past 18 months in which Moscow consistently raised concerns and provided evidence testifying to the unchecked spread of weapons supplied to Kiev. 

In a lead article published on the front page of The Saturday Paper on the 30th of September Rick Morton discussed the people who were planning to vote against the Voice. He remarked that focus groups conducted late last year revealed what he called ‘a shocking hurdle’ blocking the path of the yes vote. Almost a third ‘of all participants believed First Nations people had been treated fairly. Not just now, but since invasion.’

 

Will a “shocking hurdle” defeat the Yes vote?

 

By Henry Reynolds

 

Should Academic History Survive?

State of the Union: True and good historical research will survive outside the corrupt ivory towers—as has been the historic norm

Can Academic History survive, at least in its current form? Or should it?

 

BY Sumantra Maitra

 

If you ask Joel Kotkin, the answer is a cautious maybe. Kotkin writes in an interesting essay, that:

Acclaimed journalist and filmmaker John Pilger discussed the changes that have come over Palestine since the making of his film Palestine Is Still the Issue, released in 1974 and updated in 2002. 

A screening of the full documentary is shown before the discussion.  Pilger gave Consortium News permission to show the entire film, which is on johnpilger.com, and he then appeared on the show for an hour in July 2021 to talk about it. 

 

The last week in September saw the much delayed (due to Covid) opening of the 19th Asian Games. This event which is held on a four-year cycle involves participants from 45 nations, and perhaps unsurprisingly given the enormous populations in this part of the world sees a larger number of athletes taking part than even the Olympics.

 

The biggest sporting event the West has never heard of

 

     By Bob Rogers

 

Sixteen people — 12 Republicans, two Democrats and two independent candidates — are running for president in 2024. But most of them are laboring under the shadow of the same two men who faced off in 2020: President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/politics/presidential-candidates-2024.html

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

US President Joe Biden has been interviewed as part of a probe into his handling of classified documents after he left the vice-presidency in 2017.

Mr Biden met voluntarily with Special Counsel Robert Hur at the White House over two days, officials said.

The Channel-billed Cuckoo is the largest parasitic cuckoo in the world.

The Channel-billed Cuckoo migrates to northern and eastern Australia from New Guinea and Indonesia between August and October each year. The birds leave Australia in February or March. The Channel-billed Cuckoo is found in tall open forests, usually where host species occur.

These days, the Channel-billed Cuckoo is not afraid of coming to human town... A few days ago, there was a battle raging in the street… A Channel-billed Cuckoo had intruded on a nest of a Currawong in a Eucalypt tree branch above the road. Five or six Currawong were attacking the intruder — defending their patch and the nest of the local.

Currawongs are big bird, about the size of an Australian crow — bigger than magpies. The Channel-billed Cuckoo is nearly twice the size of a Currawong. 

The indiscriminate shootings of Israelis by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations, the kidnapping of civilians, the barrage of rockets into Israel, drone attacks on a variety of targets from tanks to automated machine gun nests, are the familiar language of the Israeli occupier. Israel has spoken this blood-soaked language of violence to the Palestinians since Zionist militias seized more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, destroyed some 530 Palestinian villages and cities and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in more than 70 massacres. Some 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed between 1947 and 1949 to create the state of Israel in 1948.

 

Throughout recent history, the perceived weapon of choice for a terrorist (or freedom fighter, depending on one’s perspective) has been an AK-47 assault rifle. Today, in the aftermath of the so-called post-9/11 “global war on terror,” it’s not uncommon to see such fighters with a Glock 9mm pistol, or a Colt M4 carbine.

These are weapons paid-for by the US taxpayer and ostensibly provided to forces joined in the cause of defeating terrorists and/or freedom fighters (again, depending on the political beliefs of the observer), but that end up in the hands of the latter instead. Obviously, that is never the outcome Washington intends. And yet, somehow, these weapons end up arming the very forces the US and its allies are trying to defeat.

 

In a recent CNN interview of US presidential candidate Cornel West, former CIA intern Anderson Cooper argued that the US invasion of Iraq was morally superior to the Russian attack on the city of Grozny.

An open letter released Wednesday signed by more than 100 veterans of the George W. Bush and Donald Trump administrations, ex-military officers, and former Republican lawmakers and activists called for fellow conservatives and congressional Republicans to support increased military aid to Ukraine and criticized President Biden for “seem[ing] more concerned about the prospects of a Russian defeat than of a Russian victory.”

 

BY JIM LOBE