Day: June 3, 2024
The post Iran’s snap presidential vote: All you need to know – Hindustan Times first appeared on The South Caucasus News.
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Russia is once again waving around its nuclear weapons. Last week, Vladimir Putin warned Nato countries against allowing Ukraine to use western munitions to strike Russia. The Russian leader warned of “serious consequences” and said that Ukraine’s allies should be aware of the “small territory” and “dense population” of many European countries.
In case this was too vague, Dmitry Medvedev followed up with a more blood-curdling threat. Russia’s former president cited Putin’s words and added: “The use of tactical nuclear weapons can also be miscalculated. This would be a fatal mistake.”
Medvedev has a reputation as a man who is fond of strong drink. But Moscow has also taken actions recently to underline its threats, with Russian troops conducting nuclear drills near the border with Ukraine.
These moves have not deterred several Nato nations, including the US, from taking the latest step up the escalation ladder by approving the use of their weapons inside Russian borders.
This latest move by Nato nations reflects a mix of confidence and nervousness. On the positive side, the US and its European allies are now less concerned about the threat that Russia will go nuclear than they were 18 months ago.
On the negative side, they are also increasingly uneasy about the situation on the battlefield. The new willingness to allow Ukraine to strike back at enemy artillery positions and missile bases — even if they are inside Russia itself — reflects a concern that Ukraine is gradually losing the war. As a result, Kyiv’s western backers feel compelled to tolerate a greater level of risk to keep Ukraine in the fight.
The west’s willingness to take on this level of risk represents a dramatic shift in thinking since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Back then, Nato countries were nervous about providing Ukraine with any offensive weapons.
The provision of each new significant capability to Kyiv — long-range missiles, tanks, fighter jets — has been accompanied by prolonged, sometimes agonised, debate in the west and by nuclear threats from Russia. But each time the Nato countries have crossed a threshold, the Kremlin has failed to make good on its nuclear threats. And that has made it easier for the western alliance to take the next step.
But the fact that the US and its allies are no longer quite so anxious about Russia’s nuclear posturing does not mean that they dismiss the threat completely. Indeed, there are some western officials who remain very uneasy about the potential for escalation involved in authorising the use of weapons, provided by the west, to strike Russian territory.
Their concern is that Russia will regard this latest step as the escalation of a proxy war by the west and could make what it regards as a symmetrical response — involving counterstrikes on Nato territory. That might lead Russia and Nato very close to the direct conflict that western leaders have always sought to avoid. Russian military doctrine is believed to assume that Moscow cannot prevail in a conventional war with the west, and so to envisage the early use of nuclear weapons.
Despite talk by Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, of eventually stationing French troops on Ukrainian soil, the western alliance is still trying to maintain its clear red line against direct involvement in a conflict with Russia.
When Iran recently loosed off a barrage of missiles at Israel, the US and its allies got directly involved in shooting them down. Ukraine has received no such support against Russian missile assaults on cities and infrastructure — partly because of the risk that western air forces might end up shooting directly at Russian forces.
Even now, the US has put significant restrictions on how far Ukraine can go in striking back against Russian forces with US-provided weapons. The new policy is that Ukraine is free to strike at Russian forces that are firing into Ukraine from just across the border. But strikes at targets deep inside Russian territory are still off the table.
Despite the concerns about Russia’s potential response to this latest move, US decision makers still think that the circumstances that could trigger a Russian nuclear response are fairly distant. The two situations that are most often mentioned are if the Russian army is about to be routed on the battlefield; or if Ukrainian ground forces threaten Crimea, which Russia formally annexed in 2014.
The closest that the world has come to a real nuclear crisis over Ukraine, so far, was in October 2022 — when Russia suffered a series of catastrophic setbacks in the war, including the loss of Kherson. There was one weekend when western officials became seriously concerned that Russia might be on the point of going nuclear.
But that crisis also created a new playbook for how to deal with Russian nuclear threats, when they look really serious. Step one is to talk to Russian counterparts and to threaten direct and massive western involvement in the conflict. Step two is to talk to other major powers — in particular, China and India — and to get them to warn Russia off, preferably in public.
For the moment, this playbook is back in the desk drawer. But it may have to be brought into operation once again before the war in Ukraine comes to an end — one way or another.
The post Russia’s nuclear threats are losing their power first appeared on The South Caucasus News.
Fauci testifies publicly before House panel on COVID origins, controversies
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert until leaving the government in 2022, was back before Congress on Monday, calling “simply preposterous” Republican allegations that he’d tried to cover up origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A GOP-led subcommittee has spent over a year probing the nation’s response to the pandemic and whether U.S.-funded research in China may have played any role in how it started — yet found no evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.
He’d already been grilled behind closed doors, for 14 hours over two days in January. But Monday, Fauci testified voluntarily in public and on camera at a hearing that quickly deteriorated into partisan attacks.
Republicans repeated unproven accusations against the longtime National Institutes of Health scientist while Democrats apologized for Congress besmirching his name and bemoaned a missed opportunity to prepare for the next scary outbreak.
“He is not a comic book super villain,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., saying the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic had failed to prove a list of damaging allegations.
Fauci was the public face of the government’s early COVID-19 response under then-President Donald Trump and later as an adviser to President Joe Biden. A trusted voice to millions, he also was the target of partisan anger and choked up Monday as he recalled death threats and other harassment of himself and his family, threats he said still continue. Police later escorted hecklers out of the hearing room.
The main issue: Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to people, probably at a wildlife market in Wuhan, the city in China where the outbreak began. There’s no new scientific information supporting that the virus might instead have leaked from a laboratory. A U.S. intelligence analysis says there’s insufficient evidence to prove either way — and a recent Associated Press investigation found the Chinese government froze critical efforts to trace the source of the virus in the first weeks of the outbreak.
Fauci has long said publicly that he was open to both theories but that there’s more evidence supporting COVID-19’s natural origins, the way other deadly viruses including coronavirus cousins SARS and MERS jumped into people. It was a position he repeated Monday as Republican lawmakers questioned if he worked behind-the-scenes to squelch the lab-leak theory or even tried to influence intelligence agencies.
“I have repeatedly stated that I have a completely open mind to either possibility and that if definitive evidence becomes available to validate or refute either theory, I will ready accept it,” Fauci said. He later invoked a fictional secret agent, decrying a conspiracy theory that “I was parachuting into the CIA like Jason Bourne and told the CIA that they should really not be talking about a lab leak.”
Republicans also have accused Fauci of lying to Congress in denying that his agency funded “gain of function” research – the practicing of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential real-world impact – at a lab in Wuhan.
NIH for years gave grants to a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance that used some of the funds to work with a Chinese lab studying coronaviruses commonly carried by bats. Last month, the government suspended EcoHealth’s federal funding, citing its failure to properly monitor some of those experiments.
The definition of “gain of function” covers both general research and especially risky experiments to “enhance” the ability of potentially pandemic pathogens to spread or cause severe disease in humans. Fauci stressed he was using the risky experiment definition, saying “it would be molecularly impossible” for the bat viruses studied with EcoHealth’s funds to be turned into the virus that caused the pandemic.
In an exchange with Rep. H. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., Fauci acknowledged that the lab leak is still an open question since it’s impossible to know if some other lab, not funded by NIH money, was doing risky research with coronaviruses.
Fauci did face a new set of questions about the credibility of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he led for 38 years. Last month, the House panel revealed emails from an NIAID colleague about ways to evade public records laws, including by not discussing controversial pandemic issues in government email.
Fauci denounced the actions of that colleague and insisted that “to the best of my knowledge I have never conducted official business via my personal email.”
The pandemic’s origins weren’t the only hot topic. The House panel also blasted some public health measures taken to slow spread of the virus before COVID-19 vaccines, spurred by NIAID research, helped allow a return to normalcy. Ordering people to stay 6 feet apart meant many businesses, schools and churches couldn’t stay open, and subcommittee chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, called it a “burdensome” and arbitrary rule, noting that in his prior closed-door testimony Fauci had acknowledged it wasn’t scientifically backed.
Fauci responded Monday that the 6-feet distancing wasn’t his guideline but one created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before scientists had learned that the new virus was airborne, not spread simply by droplets emitted a certain distance.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
The post Fauci pushes back partisan attacks in fiery House hearing over COVID origins and controversies first appeared on The South Caucasus News.
The post Azerbaijan sentences Israeli blogger to three years in prison – Aurora Israel first appeared on The South Caucasus News.
Former FBI Director Comey discusses Trump conviction and Clinton’s comments KTXL FOX 40 Sacramento
The post Former FBI Director Comey discusses Trump conviction and Clinton’s comments – KTXL FOX 40 Sacramento first appeared on October Surprise 2016.
Совещание с постоянными членами Совета Безопасности • Президент России https://t.co/Y8wVTKj0h1 pic.twitter.com/hFJentC3eW
— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) June 3, 2024
The post @mikenov: Совещание с постоянными членами Совета Безопасности first appeared on October Surprise 2016.
