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31 American tanks are promised to Kyiv, an initial ten are expected to make their way to Ukraine by mid-September, just as Ukrainian soldiers complete final phase of training in Germany.
The post First Batch of American Abrams Tanks Set to Arrive in Ukraine This Month first appeared on The News And Times – thenewsandtimes.com.
Ioann Kurmoyarov, who ran his own YouTube channel, was charged after allegedly posting “several videos with false information about the use of the Russian army”.
The post Russian Ex-Priest Who Criticised Ukraine Offensive Jailed first appeared on The News And Times – thenewsandtimes.com.
“There are two soldiers standing nearby, carrying machine guns, and they tell the people that they must vote,” the exiled mayor of Mariupol said in an interview.
The post EXPLAINED: Russia’s Sham Local Elections in Occupied-Ukraine first appeared on The News And Times – thenewsandtimes.com.
Ecuador’s National Police reported no injuries resulting from the four explosions in Quito, the capital, and in a province that borders Peru, while Interior Minister Juan Zapata said none of the law enforcement officers taken hostage in six different prisons had been injured.
Authorities said the brazen actions were the response of criminal groups to the relocation of various inmates and other measures taken by the country’s corrections system. The crimes happened three weeks after the slaying of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.
The corrections system, known as the National Service for Attention to Persons Deprived of Liberty, in recent years lost control of large prisons, which have been the site of violent riots resulting in dozens of deaths. It has taken to transferring inmates to manage gang-related disputes.
In Quito, the first bomb went off Wednesday night in an area where an office of the country’s corrections system was previously located. The second explosion in the capital happened early Thursday outside the agency’s current location.
Ecuador National Police Gen. Pablo Ramírez, the national director of anti-drug investigations, told reporters on Thursday that police found gas cylinders, fuel, fuses and blocks of dynamite among the debris of the crime scenes in Quito, where the first vehicle to explode was a small car and the second was a pickup truck.
Authorities said gas tanks were used in the explosions in the El Oro communities of Casacay and Bella India.
The fire department in the city of Cuenca, where one of the prisons in which law enforcement officers are being held hostage is located, reported that an explosive device went off Thursday night. The department did not provide additional details beyond saying the explosion damaged a car.
Zapata said seven of prison hostages are police officers and the rest are prison guards. In a video shared on social media, which Zapata identified as authentic, a police officer who identifies himself as Lt. Alonso Quintana asks authorities “not to make decisions that violate the rights of persons deprived of their liberty.” He can be seen surrounded by a group of police and corrections officers and says that about 30 people are being held by the inmates.
Ecuadorian authorities attribute the country’s spike in violence over the past three years to a power vacuum triggered by the killing in 2020 of Jorge Zambrano, alias “Rasquiña” or “JL,” the leader of the local Los Choneros gang. Members carry out contract killings, run extortion operations, move and sell drugs, and rule prisons.
Los Choneros and similar groups linked to Mexican and Colombian cartels are fighting over drug-trafficking routes and control of territory, including within detention facilities, where at least 400 inmates have died since 2021.
Villavicencio, the presidential candidate, had a famously tough stance on organized crime and corruption. He was killed Aug. 9 at the end of a political rally in Quito despite having a security detail that included police and bodyguards.
He had accused Los Choneros and its imprisoned current leader Adolfo Macías, alias “Fito,” whom he linked to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, of threatening him and his campaign team days before the assassination.
Ecuador’s Security Secretary, Wagner Bravo, told FM Mundo radio station that six prisoners who were relocated may have been involved in Villavicencio’s slaying.
The mayor of Quito, Pabel Muñoz, told the Teleamazonas television station that he was hoping “for justice to act quickly, honestly and forcefully.”
“We are not going to give up. May peace, calm and security prevail among the citizens,” Muñoz said.
The country’s National Police tallied 3,568 violent deaths in the first six months of this year, far more than the 2,042 reported during the same period in 2022. That year ended with 4,600 violent deaths, the country’s highest in history and double the total in 2021.
The port city of Guayaquil has been the epicenter of violence, but Esmeraldas, a Pacific coastal city, is also considered one of the country’s most dangerous. There, six government vehicles were set on fire earlier this week, according to authorities.
The post Car Bombs, Hostage-Taking Inside Prisons Underscore Ecuador’s Fragile Security first appeared on The News And Times – thenewsandtimes.com.
This week, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, gave an interview to the BBC in which he declared that older people, the ill and disabled “will fall by the wayside” in the current surge of COVID-19. Fauci was not warning about what would happen unless urgent action was taken. Rather, he was seeking to justify the Biden administration’s policy of inaction and cover-up in the face of a new surge of the disease.
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Fauci’s comments reiterate the declaration in January 2022 by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky that the fact that COVID-19 predominantly kills people who are “unwell to begin with” is “encouraging news.” The statements by both Walensky and Fauci implied that the lives of chronically ill and disabled people were less valuable than healthy ones.
Three years ago, Fauci would hardly have imagined that he could make such statements. In accepting a policy of simply letting the vulnerable die, he has suffered a complete moral collapse. He is capitulating to the fascist ideologues who have long advocated allowing the coronavirus to spread without limit.
More significant than his own personal evolution, however, is what his statements say about the Biden administration, which has adopted an unstated but nonetheless deliberate policy of social murder, targeting older, chronically ill, and disabled people. It amounts to a form of homicidal eugenics, reminiscent of the Nazi regime’s policy of murdering handicapped people.
Fauci was speaking under conditions in which wastewater data indicates that COVID-19 cases have more than tripled over the course of the past two months, while COVID-19 hospital admissions have more than doubled. This is the first surge after the Biden administration stopped counting COVID-19 cases on May 11 with the aim of reducing public knowledge of the spread of the disease, leaving the United States essentially flying blind.
Asked, “How serious could it get again,” Fauci sought to downplay the dangers by asserting that he believes, but does not know for certain, that the present surge of COVID-19 will see fewer hospitalizations and deaths than in the past.
Fauci claimed, “96 percent or more of the population has some degree of immunity, either through prior infection or through vaccines, or both.” He continued:
I doubt very seriously whether you’re going to see the hospital and death surge that we’ve seen in the past, even if we get a surge of infections, because there’s enough fundamental community-level protection, that even though you’ll find the vulnerable will fall by the wayside. They’ll get infected, they’ll get hospitalized and some will die. It’s not going to be the tsunami of cases that we’ve seen.
Who are these “vulnerable” people, who will be left to die on the side of the road?
In the United States, approximately 45.4 percent of the population are at heightened risk of complications from COVID-19 due to having at least one of six comorbidities, including cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes, asthma, hypertension and/or cancer. When factors exacerbating the risk from COVID-19, like autoimmune diseases, obesity, and organ transplant, and being over 65, are added, the list of groups that will be left to “fall by the wayside” grows to significantly more than half of the population and approaches two-thirds.
Fauci, who had for years been a target of fascist attacks for having advocated during the Trump administration for measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, has embraced the doctrine of “herd immunity.” This is the conception advocated by Trump in 2020 that if enough people get COVID-19, the virus will go away, and that the deaths of older people, the ill, and the disabled are an acceptable cost of preserving the profit interests of major corporations.
The greatest argument against the proponents of “herd immunity” is the actual experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, which confirms the warnings made by the World Health Organization (WHO) in October 2020 that “herd immunity” is not a scientifically viable response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at that time. “Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic. It is scientifically and ethically problematic.”
To bolster his claim, the WHO director raised the prospect—at that time hypothetical—that people might become ill with COVID-19 twice, as well as mounting reports of what he said is “now being described as Long COVID.”
Three years after these statements were made, we know that reinfection with COVID-19 is not a notional possibility, but the rule. People in frontline positions, including teachers and health care workers, have reported being infected three, four, or five times.
Each bout with COVID-19 progressively damages major organ systems, including the immune system, brain, and circulatory system. In other words, by allowing COVID-19 to circulate freely, the population that Fauci describes as vulnerable is constantly increasing.
Finally, when Dr. Ghebreyesus made these warnings, the ability of COVID-19 to mutate to overcome existing immunity was largely hypothetical. Over the next three years, a sea of new COVID-19 variants have shown that no amount of “population immunity” will prevent significant new surges of COVID-19.
Advocates of mass infection have repeatedly increased the share of the population that must be infected to allow the disease to return to “manageable” levels. First it was 50 percent, then it was 70 percent, then 80 percent, then 90 percent. Now, with Fauci declaring that virtually the entire population—96 percent—has “immunity” to COVID-19, schools in the US are being shut down not as a preventive precaution, but because too many staff are ill to keep them open.
Shamefully, leading WHO officials have repudiated their own condemnation of governments’ mass infection policy, ending its COVID-19 public health emergency declaration in May, and this week shutting down its weekly COVID-19 briefings.
The ruling class’s strategy of a “perpetual pandemic” has produced a disaster. In the United States alone, 1.1 million people are dead, and tens of millions more have had their health significantly damaged by Long COVID. Now, COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are surging, even before the new, highly-contagious B.1.1.7 variant, the most highly mutated version of the disease to date, has begun to widely circulate.
For more than a year, the population has been told by the Biden administration, world governments and the media that the pandemic is over, that they can take off their masks and stop worrying about being infected. It will come as a shock that now, amidst a new surge in infections, they are being told that they should simply accept that they or their loved ones could get severely ill or die.
But this is the logic of the ruling-class response to the pandemic, which is based on the subordination of public health to profit.
This policy of mass death and perpetual infection must be stopped! In every country, the demand must be raised for emergency measures to halt the spread of COVID-19, and to reject the position that it is endemic.
Health care professionals and scientists have a responsibility to speak out against this catastrophic policy. The population, which has been disarmed by the relentless propaganda of the ruling class, must be informed about the ongoing threat and mobilized to fight for a policy of global elimination and eradication.
I want to participate in the work of the Global Workers’ Inquest
The post Dr. Anthony Fauci says many will “fall by the wayside” in new COVID-19 surge first appeared on The News And Times – thenewsandtimes.com.
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As invading Mexico becomes a mainstream Republican Party position, a group of Democratic lawmakers introduced a measure on Thursday that would bar a U.S. president from unilaterally taking military action against the country.
The response to the war powers resolution from the office of Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla. — who has led recent efforts to reduce the U.S. military’s foreign entanglements — highlights populist Republicans’ growing pains in their emerging anti-war coalition with progressive Democrats.
At first, Gaetz’s office told The Intercept that he would oppose the amendment. In a follow-up statement attributed to the lawmaker, a spokesperson wrote: “Mexico is a captive narco state. I support the amendment and support passing an Authorized Use of Military Force against Mexico.”
The measure was introduced by Democratic Reps. Jesús “Chuy” García of Illinois; Joaquin Castro of Texas; and Nydia Velázquez of New York as an amendment to the 2024 Department of Defense appropriations bill.
The amendment draws on the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which was established to limit the president’s authority to wage war. It would bar the use of the military budget with respect to Mexico without congressional authorization, “including for the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities in Mexico, into situations in Mexico where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, or into Mexican territory, airspace, or waters while equipped for combat.”
García told The Intercept that the amendment was spurred in part by the “escalating chorus of Republican calls to invade Mexico.”
“Armed interventions and the humanitarian crises they inevitably engender are central reasons why people leave their home countries in the first place,” García said. “Invading Mexico would endanger a key partner, increase the chaos in which cartels thrive, and force large numbers of people to come to our border fleeing violence — far from addressing the challenges that Republicans purport to care about.”
Donald Trump has led the calls for war, enlisting advisers to come up with ways to attack Mexican drug cartels — with or without Mexico’s permission. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis promised he would send military forces to Mexico on “day one” if he is elected president. Vivek Ramaswamy, the businessman-turned-presidential-hopeful, said he would use “military force to decimate the cartels, Osama bin Laden-style, Soleimani-style” in the first six months of his presidency. Former CIA agent Will Hurd — who at one point was the only Black Republican in the House — said this week that he wants to “dismantle cartel and human smuggling networks by treating them the same way we treated the Taliban and Al Qaeda.”
Meanwhile in Congress, 21 Republicans — led by Reps. Dan Crenshaw and Michael Waltz — introduced legislation in January to authorize the use of military force against Mexican cartels. In March, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., announced he would introduce legislation to “set the stage” for military force in Mexico. And House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer said it was a “mistake” that then-President Trump didn’t move forward with his reported hopes to “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs,” and then lie and pretend the U.S. was not behind the attack.
Velázquez said in a statement that military operations in Mexico would be an “unmitigated disaster.” Before the idea goes any further, she added, “we need levelheaded policymakers to speak up and clarify that Congress will not support this. This amendment will ensure that no funding is allocated to these extreme policies.”
Over the last several years, congressional progressives have brought forward a number of war powers resolutions to force lawmakers to contend with U.S. entanglements abroad. In 2019, Congress passed a bipartisan resolution to stop U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, only for Trump to veto it. (Last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders unsuccessfully tried to revive the effort.)
Earlier this year, Gaetz introduced two separate war powers resolutions, both of which garnered significant GOP support but ultimately failed. Fifty-two Republicans voted in favor of his resolution directing the president to remove all forces from Somalia, and 47 did the same with regard to Syria. As Gaetz’s comment indicates, the concern with the haphazard use of military force does not appear to extend to Mexico.
The Intercept contacted 18 House Republicans who have previously supported war powers resolutions. Most did not respond to questions whether Congress would need to authorize war with Mexico.
“Many Trump-aligned Republicans have rightly been adamant that only Congress can authorize war and military action. Dozens of them have voted to withdraw U.S. troops from unauthorized wars in Syria, Somalia, and Yemen,” said Erik Sperling, executive director of the advocacy organization Just Foreign Policy. “It would be a scandal if those who want a war in Mexico would now allow a future President to violate the Constitution and wage unauthorized war. They should support this important Garcia-Castro amendment and make clear that any future president will have to come to Congress before taking us to war in Mexico or anywhere else.”
Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar was among the only members to respond to The Intercept’s inquiry. Instead of addressing the necessity of congressional authorization for use of military force in Mexico, he attacked the Biden administration. “Joe Biden and the incompetent Secretary Mayorkas are complicit in their failure to protect Americans from the invasion along the southern border. I’ve repeatedly said that we must defend our border by any and all legal means necessary, including deploying our military,” said Gosar, who voted in favor of the war powers resolutions for Somalia and Syria. “Every member of congress should vote and be on record of supporting efforts to secure our border or continue to support this invasion.”
Crenshaw’s office pointed to his bill from January about authorizing force against Mexican cartels and did not respond to a question about the Democrats’ amendment.
Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett’s office did not speak to his stance on the amendment. “Since it would currently require Congressional authorization, Congressman Burchett would not support changing the status quo to give the current president more unilateral decision-making authority in this area.”
New York Rep. George Santos was more cautious than his Republican colleagues. “Of course we want congressional authorization for any military action,” said Santos, who also voted in favor of the war powers resolutions for Somalia and Syria. “However militarization of the immigration crisis should be an absolute last resort.”
Congress is set to debate the appropriations bill when lawmakers return to Washington in September.
The post As Republicans Thirst for War With Mexico, Democrats Push to Make Them Vote on It appeared first on The Intercept.
The post As Republicans Thirst for War With Mexico, Democrats Push to Make Them Vote on It first appeared on The News And Times – thenewsandtimes.com.
(NewsNation) — It’s been two years since the Biden administration pulled U.S. forces out of Afghanistan in an exit that killed 13 American service members when an ISIS-K operative detonated a suicide bomb outside the Kabul airport.
Afghanistan War veteran James Hasson rejects the Pentagon’s assessment the attack could not have been prevented.
“All the service members that we spoke to on the ground, which were quite a few, share the conclusion that we came to in our book,” Hasson said Thursday on “The Hill on NewsNation.”
Hasson and Jerry Dunleavy are co-authors of the book, “Kabul: The Untold Story of Biden’s Fiasco and the American Warriors who Fought to the End.” The pair chronicled the Afghanistan withdrawal, drawing on eyewitness accounts and documents from the Pentagon’s own investigation into the attack.
Documents obtained by NewsNation — including sworn statements from military members who were at the scene — suggest the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport may have been preventable.
In one interview with a servicemember whose name is redacted, the servicemember said, “Intelligence officers at the Kabul Airport knew that ISIS-K was staging in a hotel 2-3 kilometers west of the airport.”
Per the documents, Lt. Gen. Chris Donahue reached out to the Taliban to ask them to conduct an assault on the ISIS targets at the hotel, but the organization did not choose to engage.
According to Dunleavy’s reporting for the book, “the bomber himself was in prison at Bagram (Air Base) when we abandoned it,” he said.
The documents raise questions about the Kabul airport bombing and the actions taken — or not taken — by U.S. military personnel that day. Earlier this year, a former Marine sniper wounded in the attack testified to Congress that his team believed it had identified the suicide bomber earlier that day, prior to the attack.
Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews told the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March his team was not given authorization to take out the suspected threat due to military leadership’s uncertainty as to who held authority to give the go-ahead.
“When the sniper team asked who does (have authority), the answer they got was ‘I don’t know, I’ll get back to you,’” Hasson said. “They never got an answer, the bomber disappeared into the crowd, and hours later carnage happened.”
NewsNation’s Joe Khalil and Zaid Jilani contributed to this report.
The post Afghanistan vet rejects assessment Kabul attack not preventable first appeared on The News And Times – thenewsandtimes.com.
Florida-only insurers such as Citizens Property Insurance anticipate fewer losses from Hurricane Idalia than from previous storms in the state, even as industry experts expect further insurer pullback from the market.
Idalia plowed in to Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday, leaving three confirmed deaths and forcing dozens of deep-water boat rescues, but wreaking less destruction overall than feared.
While Citizens’ preliminary loss projections are not yet available, the insurer projects it will receive fewer than 10,000 claims stemming from Idalia-related damage, a spokesman told Reuters. That amount is far fewer than the 68,000 claims that Citizens received after Hurricane Ian in September 2022.
“Idalia went through a very rural region of the state, missing metropolitan areas in Tampa Bay and Jacksonville,” the spokesman said.
Citizens and other Florida-only insurers were expected to face claims for billions of dollars from the storm, according to a report by Moody’s on Wednesday, adding to a challenging year for the industry that could result in higher premiums for customers.
In Florida, UBS (UBSG.S) estimated average insured losses of $9.36 billion with a 50% chance of losses of over $4.05 billion and a 10% likelihood of losses of $25.6 billion, based on Aug. 28 data. The wide range reflected potential changes in the storm’s intensity and path.
Losses will be pushed higher by construction costs, which increased significantly during the pandemic, and a rise in demand for construction labor and materials following the hurricane, Moody’s noted.
The top 10 Florida-only insurers, which provide cover to 44% of the state’s homes, are more vulnerable than others given their geographic concentration, Moody’s said.
Despite this, the Insurance Information Institute, an industry research group, told Reuters that insurers’ “adequate levels of reinsurance” makes insurers well-capitalized to pay claims from Idalia.
“This certainly will not help with ongoing challenges to Florida’s insurance market, but it could have been a lot worse,” said Steve Bowen, chief science officer at reinsurer broker Gallagher Re.
Citizens, Florida’s nonprofit, state-backed insurance provider that is seen as an “insurer of last resort,” has been gaining market share since 2022 as primary insurers reduce their exposure to the Florida market.
“As insured values have grown, more of Florida’s risk exposure has transitioned from larger nationwide insurance carriers to Citizens and smaller Florida domestic insurers, placing more strain on the state’s insurance market structure,” Moody’s said in the note.
Regardless, some insurance firms including Farmers Insurance, Bankers Insurance and Lexington Insurance, a unit of AIG (AIG.N), have pulled out of Florida because of the risk of heavy losses, according to a July report in USA Today.
Farmers’ exit would apply “only to policies issued through our exclusive agency distribution channel” and 70% of its Florida policies in force would not be impacted, a spokesperson told Reuters via email.
Bankers and Lexington did not immediately return requests for comment.
The top 10 U.S. homeowners insurers such as State Farm and Allstate Corp (ALL.N) average only about 4.1% of their premiums in Florida, Moody’s said.
The exit of insurers from Florida comes amid a broader pullback from the market, including from reinsurers, according to an Aug. 24 Fitch report.
“Natural catastrophe business has become largely loss-making in recent years as prices have failed to keep pace with increasingly frequent, severe and volatile weather-related losses due to climate change,” Fitch said.
Insurers were hit by losses of up to $53 billion from Hurricane Ian in Florida and South Carolina last year, and industry experts expected insurers to go into bankruptcy and insurance to become less accessible in regions like Florida.
Six insurers became insolvent in 2022, and more than a dozen others either left the state or placed moratoriums on writing new business, Reuters reported in July, citing the Insurance Information Institute.
The post Florida-only insurers weather Hurricane Idalia amid market pullback first appeared on The News And Times – thenewsandtimes.com.
Hong Kong braced for the arrival of super typhoon Saola on Friday as authorities raised the strong wind signal to No.8, bringing the city to an effective standstill with most businesses, schools and the stock exchange shut.
Saola, packing winds of more than 200 kph (125 mph), is expected to move towards the coast of eastern Guangdong, the neighbouring province on the Chinese mainland. It could be among the five strongest typhoons to hit Guangdong since 1949, Chinese authorities said on Thursday as they issued their highest typhoon warning.
Saola is expected to skirt within 100km (60 miles) of Hong Kong on Friday night and Saturday morning, causing weather conditions to deteriorate rapidly, the city’s weather observatory said.
The observatory said it would consider the need to issue higher cyclone warning signals later in the day.
Hong Kong has five rankings for typhoons, 1, 3, 8, 9 and 10, which is the strongest hurricane signal.
All schools in Hong Kong will be closed on Friday, despite being the first day of term for many, the government said.
Crowds jostled at fresh food markets in the city’s downtown Wan Chai district on Thursday afternoon with many vegetables already sold out. Supermarkets saw long queues with people stocking up ahead of the storm.
Hong Kong’s Observatory said it expects heavy rain and violent winds while the city’s water level is expected to “rise appreciably” until Saturday, with the potential for serious flooding.
The city’s flagship carrier Cathay Pacific said all flights in and out of Hong Kong between 2 pm local time on Friday and 10 am on Saturday have been cancelled.
Further flight delays and cancellations may be required based on the typhoon’s path on Saturday morning, it said.
The post Hong Kong hunkers down as super typhoon Saola approaches first appeared on The News And Times – thenewsandtimes.com.
