Israel launched major airstrikes on the northern Syrian city of Aleppo in the overnight hours, which killed an Iranian military adviser, and possibly more Iranian militia members, as well as civilians.

Syrian state SANA reported:

"At approximately 12:20 AM at dawn on Monday, the Israeli enemy launched an aerial attack with missiles from a direction of southeast Aleppo, targeting a number of points in the vicinity of Aleppo city, and the army air defenses intercepted the aggression's missiles and shot down some of them.

"The aggression led to the martyrdom a number of civilians, and some material losses to the property."

Hours after the initial overnight and early morning reports of the attack, Iranian state media confirmed the death of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officer.

"During last night's attack by the Zionist regime on Aleppo, Saeed Abyar, one of the IRGC advisers in Syria, was martyred," confirmed Iran's Tasnim news agency.

For years, there have been "rumors" that Barack Obama is running the show for Joe Biden from behind the scenes. Hat Tip Patty McMurray

Obama once said in a 2020 interview:

"I used to say, if, if I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man, a front woman and they had an earpiece in and I was in the basement in my sweats ... I'd be fine with that."

Obama made the appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and told the far left host that he never wished for a third term, but if he could have had a "stand-in" or a "front-man," he wouldn't have minded telling that person what to say.

And, for years there have been rumblings that it is Barack who is behind Joe Biden's reckless and radical policies.

In March 2024, The New York Times article by Katie Rogers provided groundbreaking insight into Obama's behind-the-scenes activities, suggesting a direct link between Biden and current actions by the regime to take out President Trump.

This past weekend Barack Obama finally made it official.

Barack Obama came out of the closet and announced Joe Biden's Israel-Palestinian policy on Friday.

Arizona-based Internet domain company NameCheap ended all service to Russia over the invasion of Ukraine but has now registered an Israeli website targeting Palestinian children. Activists are calling out the company's complicity in war crimes.

On Friday Israel dropped another set of leaflets on Gaza. Israel's use of leaflets for its psychological torture of the besieged Palestinian population is well known in these genocidal days.

Ominous, gloating, taunting, and sadistic messaging is the lingua franca of these leaflets, which Israel claims is a humanitarian effort to evacuate the civilian population. Some of the most common leaflet content are calls to contact Israel's secret service with information on Hamas or the Israeli hostages. The purpose of these particular leaflets is twofold: the coercion of protected civilians to obtain information (which is a violation of the law of armed conflict); but most of all, to undermine the trust and cohesion of a community under siege and annihilation.

Friday's leaflets took the intel-gathering genre to another level, when the army included messaging of extortion and a list of children, among them toddlers as targets, with the threat to reveal personal information such as criminal records, extramarital affairs, and queer identities.

Hezbollah carried out strikes on Israel's coastal cities of Acre and al-Nahariyah on Sunday as fighting intensified and slowly expanded between it and Israel.

Acre and al-Nahariyah, some 20 kilometres and 7 km from the Lebanon-Israel border, respectively, had once been peripheral in the cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah which started in the wake of Hamas's 7 October surprise attack.

But a weekend of fighting shattered the calm that prevailed in the two cities, sending residents scrambling to shelters and setting al-Nahariyah ablaze after a Hezbollah drone impacted the city.

In response, Israel carried out a series of airstrikes across southern Lebanon and launched white phosphorus on the Lebanese border town of al-Odeisseh, burning wide swathes of greenery.

Men and weapons may be required to rush across Europe in case of a conflict, a senior general has said

NATO is working on plans to rush tens of thousands of US troops along "land corridors" in Europe in the event of war with Russia, a senior strategist has told The Telegraph.

Last year, members of the US-led military bloc agreed to keep 300,000 troops ready for deployment, purportedly in response to a potential Russian attack. However, training exercises have exposed red tape and infrastructure bottlenecks that prevent the rapid transfer of personnel and materiel across the continent.

NATO military leadership is therefore working to ensure that the flow of troops would not be stopped by likely Russian strikes on ports used by the US military to unload its cargos, The Telegraph reported on Tuesday.

"It is clear that huge logistics bases, as we know it from Afghanistan and Iraq, are no longer possible because they will be attacked and destroyed very early on in a conflict situation," Lieutenant General Alexander Sollfrank, head of NATO's JSEC logistics command, told the newspaper.

The RT contributor was stopped from visiting Russia.

The US State Department has seized the passport of former Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, he told RT on Monday.

Ritter was on his way to Russia for the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) when he was pulled off the plane and had his documents confiscated.

"I was boarding the flight. Three [police] officers pulled me aside. They took my passport. When asked why, they said 'orders of the State Department'. They had no further information for me," Ritter told RT. "They pulled my bags off the plane, then escorted me out of the airport. They kept my passport."

Kiev will be allowed to use the 24 F-16 fighter jets that it is slated to receive from the Netherlands however it sees fit, Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren has told Politico.

The approach contrasts with that of Belgium, a partner in the so-called 'F-16 coalition', which has offered 30 fighter jets to Ukraine. Its Prime Minister Alexander De Croo maintains that any weapons supplied by his nation can only be used inside the territory claimed by Kiev as Ukrainian, including the aircraft.

"There is not" a Belgian-style restriction, Ollongren told the news outlet on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, as quoted on Monday.

"We are applying the same principle that we have applied to every other delivery of capabilities, which is: once we hand it over to Ukraine, it's theirs to use," she explained. The Dutch government only requires its arms to be used in compliance with international law, the minister said.

The Kremlin may rest easy: Europe is a paper tiger

Having committed to an outlay of 60 euros for a social club luncheon which was to be addressed by the Belgian minister of defense, Admiral Michel Hofman, speaking on how the ministry is preparing for what it calls 'geopolitical evolution,' meaning World War III, I was more than a little disappointed to learn, as we were standing by our seats awaiting our 'at ease' orders, that our speaker would be a no-show. Apparently he was called away to confer with colleagues in the government, and since this government has only one week to enjoy its perquisites before it is swept away by the June 9th parliamentary elections, the minister's priorities are understandable if unforgivable from our perspective as paying guests.

Happily, however, at the initiative of the club's president and of some attendees who have military standing, a chap from the ministry who is responsible for human resources was rushed in, had a quick bite to eat now that we all had advanced to the main course while awaiting his arrival, and then provided us all with what I am about to present below.

For obvious reasons, HR is in the spotlight now that the number one question facing this and other member states of NATO and of the EU is whether they can and will rise to the challenge of a Russian 'imperialist menace' and do the right thing, namely impose mandatory military service on the young and swell the ranks of their military forces. At my table, there was already a lively discussion of the socializing benefits of national service for the young, as if this issue were entirely separate from its context of a coming war that will utterly destroy the Continent.

If I may telegraph my punches, the key learning from the talk of our stand-in speaker is that there is no money to pay for masses of conscripts. Indeed, the Ministry is already struggling to cope with personnel costs that eat up between 80 and 85% of the defense budget. Belgium may have just 18,000 men in the services, but it would appear that keeping them in clothes, food and pensions is already a great burden. Moreover, given the professionalization of the armed forces in recent decades, it is estimated that it takes 18 months to bring a new recruit up to speed on the equipment he is supposed to be using on the missions of his units. Six months or even a year in uniform will not do much to make the recruits net contributors to the nation's defense.

During the pandemic, the American people started to feel that Big Government was very cozy with Big Pharma.

Now we know just how close they were.

New data from the National Institutes of Health reveal the agency and its scientists collected $710 million in royalties during the pandemic, from late 2021 through 2023. These are payments made by private companies, like pharmaceuticals, to license medical innovations from government scientists.

Almost all that cash — $690 million — went to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the subagency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and 260 of its scientists.

The chairman of the House subcommittee investigating the origins of COVID-19 ripped Dr. Anthony Fauci for his "hypocrisy" during the pandemic Monday, as the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director returned to Capitol Hill for a highly anticipated public hearing.

Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said in a scathing opening statement that Fauci, 83, had presided over "one of the most invasive regimes of domestic policy the US has ever seen," citing draconian restrictions that the ex-public health official recently admitted had no supporting scientific evidence.

"Americans were aggressively bullied, shamed and silenced for merely questioning or debating issues such as social distancing, masks, vaccines, or the origins of COVID," Wenstrup said.