Israel conducted clandestine strikes against two key natural gas pipelines in Iran this week, marking an escalation in the years-long standoff between the two states, the New York Times has reported.

"Israel has long targeted military and nuclear sites inside Iran," but this week's attacks on the energy infrastructure "marked an escalation in the covert war and appeared to open a new frontier," the NYT wrote, citing Western officials.

The newspaper's anonymous sources also attributed a separate incident to Israeli sabotage - an explosion that rocked a chemical factory on the outskirts of Tehran on Thursday, which local officials ruled an accident.

The two gas pipelines run for more than 1,000 kilometers and carry around 2 billion cubic feet (57 million cubic meters). The blasts temporarily took out around a sixth of Iran's daily natural gas production, causing local outages.

The deeply unpopular vice president says she's ready to replace Joe Biden, but that would likely destroy the party's hopes for a 2024 win.

With President Joe Biden's advanced age and cognitive decline taking central stage just months before the presidential election, Democrats need to discuss 'the Kamala problem.'

As the US speeds towards the 2024 presidential election, the Democrats find themselves in a rather untenable position. Not only is the incumbent US President Joe Biden suffering visibly on the mental front - reminiscing aloud over meetings he's never had with long-dead world leaders - but his second in command lacks the essential support of the Democratic base.

Brussels is aiming to supply Kiev with longer-range weapons as it can't defeat Moscow with its current methods, the foreign minister said.

The EU is a direct participant in the Ukraine conflict and is aiming to supply Kiev with weapons capable of striking at the "heart" of Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday.

Moscow has received information suggesting that the EU's foreign policy service believes Kiev is incapable of defeating Russia using its current methods, Lavrov stated. Brussels has therefore proposed to send even longer-range weapons to Ukrainian forces "so that they reach the heart of Russia, as the EU describes it, and thereby sow confusion and panic and undermine the trust of the people," he claimed.

"Is this not direct participation in the war? Of course it is," Lavrov said at an event marking the 10th anniversary of the 2014 Western-backed Maidan coup in Kiev.

The "rules-based order" touted by the US is an illusion that Washington and its allies are forcing on other nations, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said at an anti-neocolonialism forum in Moscow on Friday.

The term has been widely used by the administration of US President Joe Biden to describe the global liberal arrangement, in which Western powers have for decades had significant leverage. Critics, including Russia, say the system is antithetical to a codified international law and is being abused by the West for its own benefit.

"Who has ever seen it? Where does it exist? It is not a UN document, not some international convention, not a law," Medvedev said of the 'rules-based order' during the international event called 'For The Freedom of Nations.'

As Ukraine has scrambled to source ammunition, arms and equipment for its defence, Russia has presided over a massive ramping up of industrial production over the last two years that has outstripped what many western defence planners expected when Vladimir Putin launched his invasion.

Total defence spending has risen to an estimated 7.5% of Russia's GDP, supply chains have been redesigned to secure many key inputs and evade sanctions, and factories producing ammunition, vehicles and equipment are running around the clock, often on mandatory 12-hour shifts with double overtime, in order to sustain the Russian war machine for the foreseeable future.

"Putin confirms: 'The United States is not run by its elected officials.'"
- The Vigilant Fox on "X"

Historians of the future, gathered round their campfires poaching armadillo tail-flaps in their own shells, will harken back to the wondrous day in 2024 when they could watch and compare two heads of great nations present themselves to the world for assessment. There was Mr. Putin of the land called Russia, calmly discoursing in fine detail on a thousand years of his country's history. And there was Mr. Biden of the USA, facing the White House press pool, angrily refuting a special prosecutor's glum conclusion that the President was not mentally competent to be tried in court on the finding that he'd indeed mishandled classified documents.

The contrast between the two figures might even alert the mandarins of our Ivy League that something has gone very wrong in this country for a decade or more, and could arouse suspicions among the faculties that they had been gulled into a false view of our recent history.

Special Counsel Robert Hur's report issued Thursday said it rather plainly:

In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden's memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended ("if it was 2013, when did I stop being Vice President?"), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began ("in 2009, am I still Vice president?"). He did not remember even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him."

The resistance in Donbas and Gaza share an essential common vision: overthrowing the unipolar hegemon that has quashed their national aspirations.

During my recent vertiginous journey in Donbass tracking Orthodox Christian battalions defending their land, Novorossiya, it became starkly evident that the resistance in these newly liberated Russian republics is fighting much the same battle as their counterparts in West Asia.

Nearly 10 years after Maidan in Kiev, and two years after the start of Russia's Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine, the resolve of the resistance has only deepened.

It's impossible to do full justice to the strength, resilience, and faith of the people of Donbass, who stand on the front line of a US proxy war against Russia. The battle they have been fighting since 2014 has now visibly shed its cover and revealed itself to be, at its core, a cosmic war of the collective West against Russian civilization.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin made very clear during his Tucker Carlson interview seen by one billion people worldwide, Ukraine is part of Russian civilization - even if it is not part of the Russian Federation. So shelling ethnic Russian civilians in Donbass - still ongoing - translates as attacks on Russia.

He shares the same reasoning as Yemen's Ansarallah resistance movement, which describes the Israeli genocide in Gaza as one launched against "our people": people of the lands of Islam.

Just as the rich black soil of Novorossiya is where the "rules-based international order" came to die; the Gaza Strip in West Asia - an ancestral land, Palestine - may ultimately be the site where Zionism will perish. Both the rules-based order and Zionism, after all, are essential constructs of the western unipolar world and key to advancing its global economic and military interests.

An FBI informant has been charged with lying to his handler about ties between Joe Biden, his son Hunter and a Ukrainian energy company.

Alexander Smirnov falsely told FBI agents in June 2020 that executives associated with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden $5m each in 2015 and 2016, prosecutors said on Thursday.

Smirnov told the FBI that a Burisma executive had claimed to have hired Hunter Biden to "protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems", prosecutors said in a statement.

The allegations became a flashpoint in Congress over the summer as Republicans demanded the FBI release the unredacted form documenting the allegations as they pursued investigations of Biden and his family. They acknowledged at the time that it was unclear if the allegations were true.

The claims about Russian space-based nuclear weapons unraveled to become a joke. Fortunately, the death of Western-sponsored dissident Alexei Navalny then occurred to enable Western media to go into a frenzy of anti-Russia headlines.

First up was the scaremongering story about Russia allegedly developing a space-based nuclear weapon. Initially, it was dramatically trailed as posing a serious national security threat to the United States. Despite the sensational reporting, the story quickly became a laughingstock. Even some U.S. lawmakers dismissed it as "bullshit" and a blatant attempt by the Biden White House and intelligence agencies to push Congress into passing a new mega military aid bill for Ukraine worth $61 billion.

We'll get to the Navalny story in a moment. But let's just first parse the orchestration of the alleged Russian space nukes.

The drama began on Wednesday when Mike Turner, the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (a dodgy source if ever there was one), made public appeals to President Joe Biden to declassify intelligence on "a serious threat to national security". Turner is a Republican member of the House of Representatives but he is a close ally of the Democrat White House in terms of keenly supporting military aid to Ukraine. The latest bill passed the upper chamber of the U.S. Senate the day before, February 13, but it is unlikely to be approved by the House where many Republican lawmakers are staunchly opposed to it.

Accompanying the "concerns" of the intel committee chairman Turner, media outlets then vented anonymous US intelligence sources "revealing" that the national security threat was from Russian nuclear weapons allegedly under development for destroying American communication satellites in space. The White House then "confirmed" the intel the next day, February 15. It was a flagrant put-up job. But the Biden administration sought to tamp down any public panic by saying that the threat was not imminent and the alleged Russian satellite-killing weapon had not been deployed in orbit, nor would there be any danger to Earth. (So, what was all the fuss about?)

Ironically, derisive comments from incredulous U.S. lawmakers were also echoed by the Kremlin. The latter's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov made a similar assessment that the Biden administration was playing tricks to push through the military funding package for Ukraine.

Herzi Halevi's comments come after footage revealed Israeli soldiers stealing necklaces, furniture and pets

The Israeli army's chief of staff has warned soldiers against looting homes in Gaza after numerous videos emerged showing houses being vandalised and ransacked.

According to the Israeli Ynet news website, Herzi Halevi has asked commanders and soldiers to refrain from theft, unnecessary graffiti on the walls and a "breakdown of discipline".