West Coast carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) is setting sail to the Middle East from the Pacific to relieve the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) and its strike group. Meanwhile, the Navy is sending additional ships to the region following threats from Iran, Pentagon officials announced on Friday evening.
“To maintain a carrier strike group presence in the Middle East, the Secretary has ordered the Lincoln Carrier Strike Group to replace the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group, currently on deployment in the Central Command area of responsibility,” reads the Pentagon statement.

For a government, it's one thing to have bad ideas of its own, but far worse to implement another governments’ bad ideas – and tolerate no debate about them at home.

And yet that's what is happening now in Germany. Or, at least, it is what the unpopular coalition government under Chancellor Olaf Scholz and its proxies in the mainstream media are trying to achieve with regard to the planned stationing of intermediate-range missiles.

Germany is all too happy to paint a target on its back

Has Olaf Scholz gone too far with his subservience to Washington by agreeing to host American missiles?

BY Tarik Cyril Amar

We very rarely talk about it [WE DO ON THIS ALT SITE AND OTHER ALT SITES], but Australia has lived under the protection of the US “nuclear umbrella” since the 1960s. The umbrella, however, has developed big holes. Behind the scenes, Australian and US officials quietly have started talking about the problem, and should again next week when Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles meet their US counterparts for the annual Ausmin consultations.

White House, Australia may need its own nukes

Peter Hartcher/SMH

 Miriam Adelson (née Farbstein; born 10 October 1945) is an Israeli-American physician, political donor, and philanthropist. She was married to Sheldon Adelson from 1991 until his death in 2021.

MOSCOW, Aug 1 (Reuters) - Russian energy giant Gazprom's (GAZP.MM), opens new tab average daily natural gas supplies to Europe in July reached their highest this year, up 5.7% compared with a year ago and 12% higher than in June, Reuters calculations showed.

Humanity is facing its greatest emergency, a crisis consisting of many, interlinked, catastrophic risks, the Roundtable on the Human Future has declared.

At present humanity has no way to deal with such a crisis – and a global plan of action is urgently needed, it said.

A world call to action on the multiple crises now enfolding humanity

By The Club of Rome and The Council for the Human Future

The assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh was carried out with an explosive device planted in a Tehran guesthouse where he was staying, the New York Times wrote on Thursday, citing officials in the Middle East.

Haniyeh, the head of the Gaza-based militant group’s political bureau, was killed in the Iranian capital on Wednesday. Both Iran and Hamas have blamed Israel for the attack, with the latter claiming that Haniyeh was taken out by a missile strike. West Jerusalem has neither confirmed nor denied involvement.

The top Hamas official was assassinated with a remotely detonated bomb smuggled into the guesthouse, the NYT said after talking to seven officials in the Middle East on condition of anonymity, among them two Iranians and a US official.

President Vladimir Putin has personally greeted the Russians whose release from Western incarceration was secured by a major exchange on Thursday.

Putin came to the Vnukovo-2 airport outside Moscow with Defense Minister Andrey Belousov, FSB chief Aleksandar Bortnikov and Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) head Sergey Naryshkin.

“I want to thank you all for staying faithful to your oaths, your duty, and your country that has not forgotten you,” Putin told the returnees. “We will see each other again. We will talk about your future. Now I just want to congratulate you on your return.” 

While officials in both Moscow and Washington have given little in the way of details, multiple media outlets have reported that a total of 26 people ended up being exchanged on Thursday.

The F-16s that arrived recently in Ukraine will not change the reality on the battlefield and will mark the end of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s never-ending quest to find a NATO weapon that could push the Russian army back.

Throughout the conflict in Ukraine, advocates for continuing the conflict continually pointed to the next Western weapon that would arrive in Ukraine and finally demonstrate the superiority of NATO technology over the Russians. First, it was the Javelin Weapons System. Then it was the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, then the Leopard tank, then the Leopard II tank, then the HIMARS, then the ATACMS, and finally the Abrams tank.

    BY Ian DeMartino

The Roman emperor Nero was a horrible, horrible man, as Donald Trump might put it. His murderous reign of terror has certainly earned him a place in the history books, but the only thing most people believe about him is certainly false: that he played the fiddle while Rome burned. He may have strummed his cithara while the conflagration raged, but even this much is uncertain.

From Ismail Haniyeh to Imad Mughniyeh, Israel’s policy of assassinations is a great example of winning the battle but losing the war, writes Emad Moussa.

Israel’s double assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, in Tehran, and Fuad Shukr, a senior military figure in Hezbollah, in Beirut, on July 31 has sent shockwaves around the world.

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman has a request for Vice President Kamala Harris, should she become president: replace Lina Khan as head of the Federal Trade Commission. Khan is “waging war on American business,” he told CNN last week. Hoffman, to be clear, is not just another man with an opinion.

The old joke that a ‘color revolution’ is impossible in the United States because there is no American embassy there no longer seems quite as funny. Especially from anyone who has followed American affairs closely in recent weeks.

We’ve had the sudden withdrawal of the incumbent president from the electoral race, hastily organized support for a replacement – who only a few weeks ago was considered an unlikely heir – and the murky story of an assassination attempt on the opposition candidate. Furthermore, as the icing on the cake, the name Soros, a constant presence in all ‘color revolutions,’ has been gaining column inches again.

Kamala Harris: The Soros candidate?

The Hungarian billionaire may have hit the jackpot with the presumptive Democrat nominee for the US presidential election...

Plans to build a 340MW wind farm and a big battery in the New England Renewable Energy Zone in NSW have been shelved by developer Ark Energy, following a “change of mind” from some of the landowners involved in the project.

Ark Energy, the Australian renewable energy subsidiary of Korea Zinc, said on Sunday that it has withdrawn the development application for the 54 turbine wind farm, proposed for construction alongside a 100MW/400MWh battery around 50km east of Armidale.

Joe Biden has finally agreed to quit his re-election pursuit. I, for one, am not celebrating. Biden could have become a great American president, but instead he chose a foreign policy trajectory that effectively made him the most inept American president in modern history.

By November 2020, Donald Trump had proved himself largely to be a charlatan especially in the way he handled the COVID19 pandemic and the way he had initiated and conducted the trade war with China. Naturally, Biden looked better and went on to win the election.