Ukraine Has Lost Two Thirds of US-Supplied Tanks – Reports
Ukraine has lost two thirds of its US-supplied Abrams M1 main battle tanks in the space of only half a year, Military Watch Magazine has reported.
The outlet said in an article on Thursday that, according to its estimates, “close to 20” out of 31 tanks provided to Kiev by Washington have already been destroyed by Russian forces.
The latest Abrams was blown up in Russia’s Kursk Region, Military Watch Magazine said, based on videos uploaded by Russian Telegram channels. It appears to be the first American tank lost by Ukraine during its ongoing incursion into internationally recognized Russian territory, it added.
The M1 in question had “a significantly improved” explosive reactive armor, as Ukraine took steps to increase the protection of the US-made tanks, “particularly after they took heavy losses in their first engagements with Russian forces in February-April 2024,” the report read. However, the Abrams still could not withstand a projectile from a handheld anti-tank missile system, likely a Kornet, with which it had reportedly been hit, it stressed.
Military Watch reminded subscribers that Ukrainian troops operating the M1s had previously complained to Western media about “technical issues, including vulnerability of electronic components to condensation, as well as their vulnerability to Russian fire.”
The outlet described the Abrams, the German Leopard 2, the British Challenger 2 and the Soviet era T-80 tanks as “the scarcest tank classes in Ukrainian service.”
But it also pointed out that, while Kiev expects a replacement for its destroyed Leopards from the EU nations, “there have been few indications that the US could make further deliveries of Abrams tanks.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Saturday that, since the start of its incursion into Kursk Region on August 6, Ukraine has already lost more than 5,550 troops and hundreds of units of military equipment, including 71 tanks.
Israel Launched ‘Preemptive’ Strike On Hezbollah In Lebanon ‘To Prevent Major Attack’
Israel Defense Forces and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, exchanged some of the heaviest fighting in months on Sunday as fears mount that a direct Iranian retaliatory strike on Israel could spark an all-out regional war.
Israel’s military launched preemptive strikes in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah’s high-value targets after allegedly detecting movement on the ground that militia forces were preparing to launch a barrage of missiles, rockets, and kamikaze drones into Israel.
Hezbollah announced in a statement that Israel’s claim that it launched a pre-emptive attack against Hezbollah’s forces to thwart a missile attack was “baseless,” further saying, “These are empty claims.” The militia said approximately 320 rockets and drone waves were launched into Israel. The IDF said the militia launched about 200 rockets. Hezbollah called the operation a “complete success.”
??? IRON DOME INTERCEPTIONS UNDERWAY IN WESTERN GALILEE
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) August 25, 2024
Numerous Iron Dome interceptions have been reported over the Western Galilee.
Footage shows the Iron Dome system engaging rockets fired by Hezbollah from Lebanon.
Source: Times of Israel https://t.co/DlVE96ibPD pic.twitter.com/UJ8oyGvpPy
Nadav Shoshani, the Israeli military spokesman, said hundreds of rockets and drones were fired by Hezbollah forces into residential areas of northern Israel, noting, “This is part of a larger attack that was planned, and we were able to thwart a big part of it this morning.”
Meanwhile, the preemptive strikes by the IDF involved over 100 fighter jets that bombarded Hezbollah rocket launcher barrels across southern Lebanon. The IDF said over 40 high-value targets were destroyed.
?BREAKING: In a self-defense act to remove Hezbollah’s threat, the IDF is striking targets in south Lebanon, from which the Iranian-backed Lebanese terror organization was planning to launch their attacks on Israeli civilians.
— Israel ישראל (@Israel) August 25, 2024
Hezbollah rocket and drone attacks are targeting… pic.twitter.com/BtuUAqtgsv
Still needs to be confirmed.
?????ISRAEL WARSHIP HIT BY HEZBOLLAH?!
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) August 25, 2024
A scene has surfaced showing the exact moment an Israeli Navy’s Dvora-class warship was struck by Hezbollah, resulting in the death of a soldier on board.
The attack occurred during initial response operations following the assassination… pic.twitter.com/OaxVSoVbFa
The cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah was some of the most severe in months, resulting in at least three fatalities in Lebanon, according to the country’s health ministry. However, within hours after the fight began, both sides appeared to de-escalate, with Hezbollah declaring its military operations “finished for the day.” In a further indication that the situation was stabilizing, Israel, which shuttered Ben-Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv earlier, reopened the airport later in the day.
Furthermore, Israel’s military lifted most of the emergency orders it imposed nationwide during the pre-emptive strike mission and resulting missile and drone strikes into Israel by militia forces.
8,000 + rockets.
— Israel ישראל (@Israel) August 25, 2024
Every rocket has an address.
What would you do if that address was yours? pic.twitter.com/gN5WZVpWoV
The UN missions in Lebanon pleaded to “refrain from further escalatory action” and urged “a return to the cessation of hostilities” between both sides due to the risks of regional conflict.
Hezbollah is heavily armed with missiles and drones. CNN provides a threat map of the militia’s missile ranges.
The IDF outnumbers Hezbollah forces by a significant margin.
Before Sunday, regional conflict risks across the Middle East have been elevated following Israel’s assassinations of senior leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, with Tehran warning about retaliatory strikes.
Meanwhile, an Israeli delegation will head to Egypt on Sunday to advance cease-fire talks and hostage deals in Gaza, according to NYTimes, citing two Israeli officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Senior officials from Qatar, the US, and Egypt were brokering the talks. Hamas officials arrived in Cairo on Saturday night, though it wasn’t entirely clear if they would participate in the direct negotiations.
In markets last week, Brent crude rebounded to $79/bbl after sliding to $76/bbl.
Here is Goldman’s Lindsay Matcham’s take on crude markets last week:
Crude; bullish factors include positioning which has dropped to an all-time low, global oil commercial stocks have pivoted to modest draws and brent call options implied vol skew jumped to its highest level since April as Iran reiterated its intentions to retaliate against Israel and amid Ukraine’s incursion into Western Russia.
GS shows Brent’s net managed money positioning plunged to its all-time low in data going back to 2011.
Traders are split between geopolitical concerns and a slowdown in China and the US, and there is no clear direction in Brent price action.
Syrian ‘Asylum Seeker’ Arrested for Deadly Stabbing Rampage in Germany
German authorities have arrested the suspected knifeman responsible for killing three people and injuring eight in the city of Solingen on Friday at a public festival in the city.
The alleged perpetrator is a 26-year-old Syrian man, who reportedly arrived in the EU country in December 2022 and was granted asylum.
According to the reports, the suspect, still covered in blood, turned himself in to the police shortly after 11pm, saying “I’m the one you’re looking for.” He was reportedly hiding in a nearby backyard.
Before, the ministry said that they were looking for the “real suspect” after detaining two people who were likely not the perpetrators. These included a 15-year-old boy, who supposedly knew about the planned attack but failed to report it to the authorities. A second man was arrested at a refugee center located close to the scene of the attack.
“The man we’ve really been looking for the whole day has just been taken into custody,” Herbert Reul, the interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state, told ARD public TV on Saturday.
“I myself am a bit relieved at the moment,” the minister said, after the third arrest was made, adding that police had also found “pieces of evidence.”
Two men aged 56 and 67 and a 56-year-old woman, were stabbed to death by the knifeman, who went on a killing spree during a celebration of Solingen City’s 650th anniversary. According to the reports of eyewitnesses in the media, “an Arab-looking man” stabbed spectators at random, “targeting” people’s throats and necks.
”The victims were completely unknown, with no known ties between them,” Markus Caspers, prosecutor of Duesseldorf, which is near Solingen, said at a press conference after the attack.
Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) later claimed responsibility for the attack, saying that it was carried out as “revenge for Muslims in Palestine and everywhere.” The claim has yet to be verified.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz described the attack as a “horrific act,” and “a terrible event that has shocked me greatly. … We mourn the victims and stand by their families,” he said, in a message posted on X (formerly Twitter).
‘Demons Are Losing Control’: Influencers React to Pavel Durov’s Detainment
The CEO and founder of the encrypted social media app, Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested on August 24 at Le Bourget airport near Paris as he was departing his private jet.
Durov’s arrest has triggered a heated debate with most influencers seeing it as an onslaught on free speech. A hashtag #FreeDurov popped up on X.
Former US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweeted: “France just arrested Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of the encrypted and uncensored Telegram platform. The need to protect free speech has never been more urgent.”
Naomi Seibt, a German conservative political activist, dubbed anti-Greta by the Washington Post, alleged on X:
“Why do you think they just arrested the owner of Telegram, Pavel Durov? This is a test run. They are setting a precedent. Their ultimate target is Elon Musk.”
Candace Owens, an African American conservative television presenter, tweeted: “The trouble with free speech is that it disallows the media to set the narrative. They used to be able to justify war to you in a faraway land. Now you can see the reality of what they are doing. This is why Pavel Durov has been arrested – because the demons are losing control.”
Italian film producer, Robin Monotti, remarked on X: “Pavel Durov is facing up to 20 years in Macron’s dungeons for refusing to censor content on behalf of the globalist oligarchy and their war machine.”
Do Western Governments Want to Control Telegram Better?
In addition to ridiculing France’s accusations against Durov, social media users recall that the Telegram CEO had told US journalist, Tucker Carlson, that Western intelligence agencies were after him, apparently seeking to use his platform to spy on users. As of 2024, the messenger has around 900 million monthly active users.
Mario Nawfal, named an “omnipresent Twitter celebrity” by NBC, wondered why Western corporate press stays mute about the Telegram CEO’s arrest.
“Why aren’t there articles on mainstream media about Pavel Durov, the CEO and founder of Telegram, being arrested in France because people allegedly used his app to commit ‘crimes’? Why the silence?” he asked on X.
In a separate tweet, the influencer alleged that “the US wanted to control Telegram better.”
He cited an excerpt from Durov’s interview to Carlson, in which the Russian tech prodigy described how US cyber-security officers approached a Telegram engineer seeking a backdoor to the messenger.
“Whenever I would go to the US, I would have two FBI agents greet me at the airport, asking questions,” Durov said at the time.
For his part, crypto investor, Shaun Maguire, compared Durov’s detainment to Vint Cerf and Rob Kahn (inventors of TCP and IP) being arrested because the Internet “is being used for drug dealers to communicate with each other, and they were unwilling to install a back door.” Elon Musk agreed on this observation with one word – “Exactly.”
Robert Malone, a US medical doctor and an infectious-disease researcher, who threw into question the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines in 2021, also took to X to comment on Durov’s arrest: “I am sickened by Pavel Durov’s arrest. France is another unsafe country to travel to. The Western world has gone crazy.”
Kim Dotcom, an X conservative influencer, warned that “the crackdown against free speech escalates.”
Elon’s SpaceX To Rescue Stranded Astronauts After NASA Dumps Boeing
NASA said it has selected Elon Musk’s SpaceX to bring home the US astronauts who were forced to extend their stay at the International Space Station because of the latest debacle plaguing the woke DEI disaster that is Boeing, whose space capsule suffered major technical issues.
Boeing’s spacecraft will return without people on board, the US space agency said during a Saturday news conference announcing its decision, in which it said that it was too risky to bring two astronauts back to Earth in Boeing’s troubled new capsule. What should have been a weeklong test flight for the pair will now last more than eight months.
LIVE: We’re discussing NASA’s @BoeingSpace Crew Flight Test following the completion of today’s Agency Test Flight Readiness Review. Listen in for the latest #Starliner updates. https://t.co/M2ODFmLuTj
— NASA (@NASA) August 24, 2024
The contingency plan means that NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams will hitch a ride home on SpaceX’s rival Crew Dragon capsule during a mission slated to launch in late September. That would put them back on US soil in February, when that capsule is slated to return and months later than originally planned. Their empty Starliner capsule will undock in a week or two and attempt to return on autopilot.
The seasoned pilots have been stuck at the International Space Station since the beginning of June. A cascade of vexing thruster failures and helium leaks in the new capsule marred their trip to the space station, and they ended up in a holding pattern as engineers conducted tests and debated what to do about the trip back.
As Starliner’s test pilots, the pair should have overseen this critical last leg of the journey, with touchdown in the U.S. desert.
It was a blow to Boeing, adding to the safety concerns plaguing the company on its airplane side. Boeing had counted on Starliner’s first crew trip to revive the troubled program after years of delays and ballooning costs. The company had insisted Starliner was safe based on all the recent thruster tests both in space and on the ground.
Retired Navy captains with previous long-duration spaceflight experience, Wilmore, 61, and Williams, 58, anticipated surprises when they accepted the shakedown cruise of a new spacecraft, although not quite to this extent.
Before their June 5 launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, they said their families bought into the uncertainty and stress of their professional careers decades ago. During their lone orbital news conference last month, they said they had trust in the thruster testing being conducted. They had no complaints, they added, and enjoyed pitching in with space station work.
Wilmore’s wife, Deanna, was equally stoic in an interview earlier this month with WVLT-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee, their home state. She was already bracing for a delay until next February: “You just sort of have to roll with it.”
There were no other options.
The SpaceX capsule currently parked at the space station is reserved for the four residents who have been there since March. They will return in late September, their stay extended a month by the Starliner dilemma. NASA said it would be unsafe to squeeze two more into the capsule, except in an emergency.
The docked Russian Soyuz capsule is even tighter, capable of flying only three — two of them Russians wrapping up a yearlong stint.
So Wilmore and Williams will wait for SpaceX’s next taxi flight. It’s due to launch in late September with two astronauts instead of the usual four for a routine six-month stay. NASA yanked two to make room for Wilmore and Williams on the return flight in late February.
NASA said no serious consideration was given to asking SpaceX for a quick stand-alone rescue. Last year, the Russian Space Agency had to rush up a replacement Soyuz capsule for three men whose original craft was damaged by space junk. The switch pushed their mission beyond a year, a U.S. space endurance record still held by Frank Rubio.
Starliner’s woes began long before its latest flight.
Bad software fouled the first test flight without a crew in 2019, prompting a do-over in 2022. Then parachute and other issues cropped up, including a helium leak in the capsule’s propellant system that nixed a launch attempt in May. The leak eventually was deemed to be isolated and small enough to pose no concern. But more leaks sprouted following liftoff, and five thrusters also failed.
All but one of those small thrusters restarted in flight. But engineers remain perplexed as to why some thruster seals appear to swell, obstructing the propellant lines, then revert to their normal size.
These 28 thrusters are vital. Besides needed for space station rendezvous, they keep the capsule pointed in the right direction at flight’s end as bigger engines steer the craft out of orbit. Coming in crooked could result in catastrophe.
With the Columbia disaster still fresh in many minds — the shuttle broke apart during reentry in 2003, killing all seven aboard — NASA embraced open debate over Starliner’s return capability. Dissenting views were stifled during Columbia’s doomed flight, just as they were during Challenger’s in 1986.
Despite Saturday’s decision, NASA isn’t giving up on Boeing.
Hardly anyone knows that there was a massive effort to block SpaceX from providing astronaut transport for NASA
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 25, 2024
NASA went into its commercial crew program a decade ago wanting two competing U.S. companies ferrying astronauts in the post-shuttle era. Boeing won the bigger contract: more than $4 billion, compared with SpaceX’s $2.6 billion.
With station supply runs already under its belt, SpaceX aced its first of now nine astronaut flights in 2020, while Boeing got bogged down in design flaws that set the company back more than $1 billion. NASA officials still hold out hope that Starliner’s problems can be corrected in time for another crew flight in another year or so.
Death of Woke: Queer Activist Video Game Funded By EU Can’t Find Players
If the new punk rock is to be politically correct, then it’s not punk rock. The woke activist invasion of popular media since 2015 continues to ignore the reality that they are not “rebels”, they are villains, and their delusions are becoming more embarrassing for them with each passing year.
Woke tropes have become poison for any brand seeking a wider audience or greater profits, to the point that activist media projects must now be funded by governments and NGOs through DEI initiatives just to pay developer salaries. The goal? To saturate the market with multicultural ideology and LGBT propaganda until the public was forced to accept it and consume it as “normal.” The agenda has failed.
Every new woke product seems to bomb harder than the last these days and that’s a good sign for the future. Video game players, a market which now dwarfs movies and TV streaming, are rejecting woke material en masse. Case in point: Dustborn.
The aggressively advertised game features a cast of queer activist “punk rock” characters that set out on a road trip across an America controlled by “conservative oppressors” that are really uncool. Set in North America in 2030, The American Republic is under the iron fist of “Justice” and The Puritans, a fascist police force presided over by President Samuel Ward. California has gained independence and is now Pacifica, a corporatocracy ruled by the wealthy few. Texas has seceded, rebranding itself as the libertarian Columbia.
Hilariously, players fight the fascist government by using the “power of words” to gain allies and divide their enemies. Characters can also build up their “trigger meter” to really punch the patriarchy.
Impossible to parody pic.twitter.com/IBQtfomNdM
— LA/ENDER (@LavenderGhast) August 22, 2024
As the developer, Red Thread Games, notes:
“Dustborn’s story is a story about being different, about being an outcast and outsider, about having to hide who and what you are from the authorities, from society — even from your family…
Last but certainly not least, it’s a story about the power of disinformation, propaganda, and language, and about how powerful words can alter our perception of reality, hack minds, and change the world…”
Dustborn embraces the the leftist ideological fallacy that words are magical weapons that need to be controlled and policed at all times by the woke devout; the only people apparently enlightened enough to dictate language. The game was released this week to the deafening sound of crickets. On gaming service Steam, the project garnered a maximum of 83 players on launch day. A total flop of epic proportions.
One might find it ironic that a game about rebel queers fighting the government was actually co-funded by government through the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union (at least $168,000). ESG strikes again.
The notion that popular games dealing with America need to be adjusted for “modern audiences” and the cast needs forced diversity to be “authentic” is based on a popular leftist fallacy that all of America is the same as or should be the same as New York and LA.
The collapse of Dustborn comes not long after the uproar over the impending release of Ubisoft’s ‘Assassin’s Creed: Shadows’, another highly marketed woke game set in feudal Japan. Leftist developers claim that the game is based on “true historical figures”, yet the primary protagonist is a gay black samurai (there was never a black samurai in feudal Japan, let alone a gay black samurai. The idea is based on faulty evidence provided by a fraudulent historian who worked with Ubisoft and who is now under investigation by the Japanese government). The game is expected to suffer dismal sales upon its launch in November.
Public support for woke media is dead.