In the past few months, Lebanese security services have arrested more than 100 people implicated in alleged Israeli spy networks.

Among these were young women tasked with photographing locations in the predominantly Shia southern suburbs of Beirut, the main stronghold of Hezbollah, and the primarily Sunni neighborhood of Tariq Al-Jadida in the western part of the city.

Working for the Israelis

According to investigations carried out by Lebanese security services, most of the detainees had applied online for employment opportunities, before being contacted from phone numbers belonging to Israeli citizens. Some of the accused were asked to buy local SIM cards and send them to addresses abroad.

A Slovak smelter will halt production by the start of October due to soaring electricity prices

The Slovalco aluminum smelter in Slovakia announced on Wednesday it will shut down primary production by the end of September.

"The decision to terminate primary aluminum production at Slovalco comes in response to adverse framework conditions and high electricity prices, which show no signs of improvement in the short term," the plant's majority owner, Norsk Hydro, said in a statement.

It explained that the Slovalco casthouse in central Slovakia is continuing its recycling operation, serving customers in the region with 75,000 tons of recycled aluminum annually.

The plant's CEO told media that the Slovalco plant was a key supplier for Slovak and other European companies. After stopping production, Europe will be forced to import aluminum from countries including Russia and China, he added.

Slovalco's shutdown follows a similar decision this week to cease production at a zinc smelter in the Netherlands.

Robert Habeck dismisses Germany's economic model as reliant on cheap energy imports from Russia.

German Economy and Climate Action Minister Robert Habeck lamented the entirety of the country's business model on Monday, dismissing it as reliant on cheap energy imports from Russia that will never return.

His comments come in tandem with his announcement of a new special tax on natural gas, which he believes will redistribute the repercussions of energy shortages on companies as well as the population in general.

"Germany developed a business model that was largely based on dependence on cheap Russian gas," Habeck told reporters in Berlin, slamming the business model as meaning dependence on an "enemy" of international law, "liberal democracy and its values."

"This model has failed and it is not coming back," he said.

Because Russia has "arbitrarily" halted gas deliveries to the European Union, as Habeck claimed, Berlin needs to "rescue companies that have got into difficulties and have to bear that as a national economy," calling it "bitter medicine."

For "clear violations of the fundamental tenets of research."

A senior White House climate advisor has been sanctioned by the National Academy of Sciences for violating its ethics policies.

Axios reports that Jane Lubchenco, the deputy director for climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, has been pulled up by the NAS for editing a paper later found to contain technical errors, as well as having worked with the scientists involved in it, one of which turned out to be her brother-in law.

A deputy culture minister says the 1943 Volhyn massacres fit the definition of genocide and Kiev will have to recognize that.

The mass murder of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists during the Second World War meets the definition of genocide and the government in Kiev will have to recognize this sooner or later, Poland's Deputy Minister of Culture and National Heritage Jaroslaw Sellin said on Tuesday.

"They have to acknowledge it because it's a fact. It's simply a fact. A political decision was made and implemented for ethnic cleansing, the extermination of the entire national minority that has lived there for centuries," Sellin told the Polish Press Agency (PAP) during a TV interview.

In a new interview with The Wall Street Journal, immortal Hague fugitive Henry Kissinger says the US is acting in a crazy and irrational way that has brought it to the edge of war with Russia and China:

Mr. Kissinger sees today's world as verging on a dangerous disequilibrium. "We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it's supposed to lead to," he says. Could the U.S. manage the two adversaries by triangulating between them, as during the Nixon years? He offers no simple prescription. "You can't just now say we're going to split them off and turn them against each other. All you can do is not to accelerate the tensions and to create options, and for that you have to have some purpose."

On the question of Taiwan, Mr. Kissinger worries that the U.S. and China are maneuvering toward a crisis, and he counsels steadiness on Washington's part. "The policy that was carried out by both parties has produced and allowed the progress of Taiwan into an autonomous democratic entity and has preserved peace between China and the U.S. for 50 years," he says. "One should be very careful, therefore, in measures that seem to change the basic structure."

Mr. Kissinger courted controversy earlier this year by suggesting that incautious policies on the part of the U.S. and NATO may have touched off the crisis in Ukraine. He sees no choice but to take Vladimir Putin's stated security concerns seriously and believes that it was a mistake for NATO to signal to Ukraine that it might eventually join the alliance: "I thought that Poland — all the traditional Western countries that have been part of Western history — were logical members of NATO," he says. But Ukraine, in his view, is a collection of territories once appended to Russia, which Russians see as their own, even though "some Ukrainians" do not. Stability would be better served by its acting as a buffer between Russia and the West: "I was in favor of the full independence of Ukraine, but I thought its best role was something like Finland."

Scott Morrison secretly appointed himself to five additional ministries while Australia's prime minister, in what his successor has labelled an "unprecedented trashing of the Westminster system".

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said on Tuesday he was waiting on legal advice over any possible ramifications of the secret appointments and was "open to reforms and suggestions" so the situation did not reoccur.

Morrison now faces calls to resign from parliament over the revelations, including from one of his former ministers. Karen Andrews, a former minister for home affairs, which is one of the departments to which Morrison appointed himself, said: "This is totally unacceptable, for a prime minister to behave in this manner undermines everything that a federal government constitutionally should stand for."

The Chinese Defence Ministry announced today its participation in the Vostok 2022 strategic command and staff exercise in Russia, which is slated for August 30-September 5. The low-key statement in Beijing said China will send some troops and the participation is within the framework of the two countries' annual cooperation plan.

The statement mentioned that "India, Belarus, Tajikistan, Mongolia and other countries will also participate." It said the Chinese participation "aims to deepen pragmatic and friendly cooperation with the militaries of the participating countries, enhance the level of strategic coordination among all participating parties, and enhance the ability to deal with various security threats."

In what can be construed as an oblique reference to the conflict in Ukraine and the big power tensions in general, Beijing stated that the exercise is "unrelated to the current international and regional situation."

Vostok is one of the capstone events of the Russian Armed Forces' annual training cycle to test national preparedness for large-scale, high-intensity warfare against a technologically advanced peer adversary in a multidirectional, theatre-level conflict.

Vostok 2018 involved approximately 300,000 troops -- as well as 1,000 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, 80 ships, and 36,000 tanks, armoured and other vehicles — and was unprecedented in scale. And Russian, Chinese and Mongolian forces were the sole participants and was hyped up as a carefully orchestrated Russian-Chinese military demonstration.

Shrugging off western obstacles, Eurasia's ambitious connectivity projects helmed by China and Russia are now progressing deep into Asia's Heartland.
SAMARKAND - Interconnecting Inner Eurasia is an exercise in Taoist equilibrium: adding piece by piece, patiently, to a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. It takes time, skill, vision, and of course major breakthroughs.

A key piece was added to the puzzle recently in Uzbekistan, bolstering the links between the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).

The Mirzoyoyev government in Tashkent is deeply engaged in turbo-driving yet another Central Asian transportation corridor: a China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan-Afghanistan railway.

That was at the center of a meeting between the chairman of the board of Temir Yullari - the Uzbek national railways - and his counterparts in Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan, as well as managers of the Chinese Wakhan Corridor logistics company.

In terms of the complex intersection of Xinjiang with Central and South Asia, this is as groundbreaking as it gets, as part of what I call the War of Economic Corridors.

The Uzbeks have pragmatically spun the new corridor as essential to cargo transport under low tariffs - but that goes way beyond mere trade calculations.

Imagine, in practice, cargo containers coming by train from Kashgar in Xinjiang to Osh in Kyrgyzstan and then to Hairatan in Afghanistan. Annual volume is planned to reach 60,000 containers in the first year alone.

That would be crucial to develop Afghanistan's productive trade - away from the "aid" obsession of the US occupation. Afghan products will finally be able to be easily exported to Central Asian neighbors and also China, for instance to the bustling Kashgar market.

And that stabilizing factor would bolster the Taliban's coffers, now that the leadership in Kabul is very much interested in buying Russian oil, gas and wheat under vastly attractive discounts.

Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney was blasted by Republicans and conservatives after she compared herself to Abraham Lincoln in her concession speech following Tuesday's primary loss.

"Abraham Lincoln was defeated in elections for the Senate and the House before he won the most important election of all," Cheney said of the 16th president after she was soundly beaten by Trump-backed challenger Harriet Hageman.

"Lincoln ultimately prevailed," Cheney went on. "He saved our union and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history. Speaking at Gettysburg of the great task remaining before us, Lincoln said, 'That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and a government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this Earth.'