Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty has blamed Israel's "provocative" actions for spiking tensions in the region.

The escalation between Israel and Lebanese armed group Hezbollah could trigger a full-blown regional war, the Egyptian foreign minister has warned, ahead of the annual meeting of world leaders at the United Nations headquarters.

Tensions between the Jewish state and Hezbollah have spiked after thousands of electronic devices exploded across Lebanon last week, in a covert attack widely believed to have been orchestrated by Israel. While Hezbollah and Israel had routinely exchanged fire since the onset of the conflict in Gaza, last week marked far heavier airstrikes between the two.

Abdelatty told AFP in an interview published on Friday:

"There is great concern about... the possibility of an escalation in the region leading to an all-out regional war. The recent sharp rise in hostilities has negatively impacted Gaza ceasefire negotiations. Egypt, Qatar, and the US have 'complete determination' to continue their efforts towards brokering a ceasefire and hostage release agreement between Hamas and Israel. All the components of the deal are ready. The problem is the lack of political will on the Israeli side."

Abdelatty blamed "provocative" Israeli policies for the recent spike in violence with Hezbollah, which has vowed support for Palestinians.

Rocket fire has intensified since the Beirut airstrike that killed the group's senior commander.

Dozens of Hezbollah missiles have struck northern Israel, in what the Shia group said was retaliation for Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon that have killed over 250 people.

Months of tensions between Israel and Hezbollah escalated last week, when thousands of pagers and other communications devices used by Hezbollah simultaneously exploded, killing at least 37 people and injuring an estimated 3,000, including children. Israeli jets then bombed Beirut and killed Ibrahim Aqil, a senior Hezbollah commander.

Hezbollah's deputy leader Naim Kassem said at Aqil's funeral on Sunday:

"An open-ended battle of reckoning. We admit that we are pained. We are humans. But as we are pained - you will also be pained."

Later in the day, Hezbollah launched around 100 rockets at Israel, targeting the city of Haifa in the north. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) responded with a series of airstrikes in southern Lebanon on Monday. The IDF strikes killed at least 274 people, including 21 children and 39 women, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad has said.

For the last half-dozen years, Israeli-born Ronan Bergman has served as a reporter with the New York Times, and I've regularly heard him described as the best-connected American journalist in Israel, with especially close ties to that country's powerful security services such as the Mossad, Shin Bet, and Unit 8200.

Much of that reputation goes back to the 2018 publication of his book Rise and Kill First, a widely praised and highly authoritative history of the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service, as well as its sister agencies. As I wrote in early 2020:

The author devoted six years of research to the project, which was based upon a thousand personal interviews and access to an enormous number of official documents previously unavailable. As suggested by the title, his primary focus was Israel's long history of assassinations, and across his 750 pages and thousand-odd source references he recounts the details of an enormous number of such incidents.

That sort of topic is obviously fraught with controversy, but Bergman's volume carried glowing cover-blurbs from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors on espionage matters, and the official cooperation he received is indicated by similar endorsements from both a former Mossad chief and Ehud Barak, a past Prime Minister of Israel who himself had once led assassination squads. Over the last couple of decades, former CIA officer Robert Baer has become one of our most prominent authors in this same field, and he praised the book as "hands down" the best he had ever read on intelligence, Israel, or the Middle East. The reviews across our elite media were equally laudatory.

Sometimes, it's painful to be right. As Russia and her allies prepare for the inevitable military confrontation, we must all hope and pray that people in the West somehow awaken to the truth. NATO cannot win in such a confrontation. All the coming conflicts can end in mutually assured destruction (MAD).

The news that Russian President Vladimir Putin is expanding his nation's army to be the second largest in the world comes at a moment when Russia and others are in deep peril. The Western alliance is ready to green-light the use of long-range missiles by Ukraine to strike targets deep inside Russia's interior.

To protect his people and prevent the Western elites from destroying Russia, Ukraine must cease to be a base/tool for Washington, London, and Brussels. The writing has been on the wall for over a decade, but the moment of truth is upon us all.

90 Seconds to Midnight

Some months back, Ukraine's President Zelenskyy urged allies to lift restrictions on Western-supplied arms that would enable his NATO proxy army to strike deep inside Russia.

In response, President Putin told the Russian people on state TV that such a move would be disastrous if peace is to be obtained. His exact words in response to the question of whether or not British Storm Shadow and US-produced Army Tactical (ATACMS) missiles could be unleashed deeper into Russia's interior were:

"This would in a significant way change the very nature of the conflict. It would mean that NATO countries, the US, European countries, are at war with Russia."

In a partial victory for free speech, the Irish Government is to drop controversial provisions contained within its new Hate Speech Bill. Those provisions would have made "communication" of material deemed capable of inciting "hatred" punishable by up to five years in prison, and mere "possession" of such material punishable by up to two years.

According to the Irish Times, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee received approval the leaders of the coalition Government over the summer to remove those parts of the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill that deal with incitement to violence and hatred - commonly known as the 'hate speech' elements.

Speaking in Athlone, County Westmeath on Saturday, Ms. McEntee confirmed that the incitement to hatred element of the bill "does not have a consensus" - although, ominously, she went on to say that it will be dealt with at a later date.

Separately, a coalition source told The Irish Times:

"While there was significant consensus in the Dáil for hate speech laws, with proposals from the Opposition to expand the law further, that consensus was lost."

The response to Covid in our own country was a horror show in many states, including my own. There were the lockdowns, the evisceration of our constitutional right to free assembly, the closed schools and the turn to disastrous "online learning" from which many young people still haven't recovered, vaccine mandates, life-threatening vaccine injuries, the fearmongering, the lies about "misinformation," the demonizing of dissenters, and all the rest.

I remember walking on a park trail by my house as neighbors passed by in masks. They literally turned their back on me, to shame me, as I went by because I wasn't wearing one — outside! And the craziness continues, as I still to this day see neighbors driving alone in their car or walking the dog, alone, wearing a damn mask. We could so easily go back to all of that.

A Bright Idea

Hey, here's a bright idea. Wouldn't it all have gone a lot better if, instead of our fellow Americans doing it to us, we'd handed over national sovereignty to an international body to make pandemic-related decisions for us?

Even to pose the question feels like madness, and yet putting it in the power of the World Health Organization (WHO) director-general to decide when our country faces a "pandemic emergency" and what to do about it has been, and still is being, seriously considered.

With less than a month before the crucial BRICS annual summit in Kazan under the Russian presidency, serious informed discussions are raging in Moscow and other Eurasian capitals on what should be at the table in the de-dollarization and alternative payment system front.

Earlier this month Andrey Mikhailishin, head of the task force on financial services of the BRICS Business Council, detailed the list of top projects under consideration. They include:

• A common unit of account - as in The Unit, whose contours were first revealed exclusively by Sputnik.
• A platform for multilateral settlements and payments in BRICS digital currencies, connecting the financial markets of BRICS members: that's BRICS Bridge, which bears similarities with the Bank of International Settlements-linked MBridge, already in effect. That will complement intrabank systems already in action, as in Russia's SPFS and Iran's CPAM settling financial transactions - and 60% of their trade - in their own currencies.
• A blockchain-based payment system that entirely bypasses the US dollar: BRICS Pay. Arguably 159 participants may be ready to adopt this sanction-evading, similar-to-SWIFT mechanism right away.
• A settlement depository (Clear).
• An insurance system.
• And crucially a BRICS rating agency, independent from the Western giants.

What's at stake is the extremely complex design of a brand-new financial system - decentralized and using digital technology. BRICS Clear, for instance, will be using blockchain to record securities and exchange them.

As for The Unit, the value of the common unit of account is pegged by 40% to gold and by 60% to a basket of BRICS member's national currencies. The BRICS Business Council considers The Unit a "convenient and universal" instrument, since a unit can be converted into any national currency.

That would definitely solve the nagging problem of exchange rate volatility when cash balances accumulate from settlements in national currencies; for example, a mountain of Indian rupees used to pay for Russian energy.

Knowing his gutted Jan 6 indictment against the former president will never get to trial, Smith, with help by Judge Tanya Chutkan, is preparing his opening arguments in a massive one-sided DOJ brief.

No one would dare to describe CNN legal analyst Elie Honig as a Donald Trump supporter. To the contrary, the former federal prosecutor frequently sides with the Department of Justice in its nonstop pursuit of Trump and those around him.

So Honig's article in New York magazine probably rattled his one-time colleagues at the DOJ. Calling Special Counsel Jack Smith's revised J6 case a "reckless gamble," Honig blasted Smith for ignoring the Supreme Court's immunity guidance in Trump v US and pursuing a criminal case that has no chance of surviving future tests by higher courts. "As his 2020 election-subversion case gets back on track after the Supreme Court's landscape-shifting immunity ruling, Smith has taken a defiant tack that likely will hurt his own cause and perhaps eventually end it altogether," Honig wrote on September 13. Honig correctly criticized Smith for preserving in his updated indictment what the court considered "presumptively immune" conversations between Trump and Michael Pence related to the certification proceedings on January 6.

The bloc should disregard Russia's potential response to proposed long-range strikes using Western weapons, Denmark's PM says

Public discussion on how far NATO countries should go to defeat Russia in the Ukraine conflict are playing into Moscow's hands, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has argued, while calling for a no-holds-barred policy.

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky is set to meet US President Joe Biden this week to present his "victory plan." Kiev is lobbying Washington to permit long-range strikes using donated Western weapons, deep inside Russia, a move that Russian President Vladimir Putin has said would amount to an act of war by the US-led military bloc.

Frederiksen, a staunch supporter of Kiev, told Bloomberg TV that such permission should be granted regardless of how Moscow might react.


"The most important red line has been crossed already. And that was when the Russians entered Ukraine," she told the channel on Friday.

"So I will not accept this premise, and I will never allow anyone from Russia to decide what is the right thing to do in NATO, in Europe or in Ukraine."

Israel raids and shuts down Al Jazeera's bureau in Ramallah in the West BankIsraeli troops raided the offices of the satellite news network Al Jazeera in the Israeli-occupied West Bank early Sunday, ordering the bureau to shut down amid a widening campaign by Israel targeting the Qatar-funded broadcaster as it covers the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.

Al Jazeera aired footage of Israeli troops live on its Arabic-language chan
nel ordering the office to be shut for 45 days. It follows an order issued in May that saw Israeli police raid Al Jazeera's broadcast position in East Jerusalem, seizing equipment there, preventing its broadcasts in Israel and blocking its websites.

The move marked the first time Israel has ever shuttered a foreign news outlet operating in the country. However, Al Jazeera has continued operating in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, territories that the Palestinians hope to have for their future state.