🇺🇸❌🇷🇺 — 🇬🇧 Reuters | NATO Plans for Large-Scale Transport of Wounded Troops in Case of Russia War | September 25, 2024:

"BERLIN (Reuters) - NATO plans to coordinate the transport of a large number of wounded troops away from front lines in case of a war with Russia, potentially via hospital trains as air evacuations may not be feasible, according to a senior general.

The future scenario for medical evacuations will differ from allies' experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, Lieutenant-General Alexander Sollfrank, the head of NATO's logistics command, told Reuters in an interview.

In a conflict with Russia, Western militaries would likely be faced with a much larger war zone, a higher number of injured troops and at least a temporary lack of air superiority close to the front lines, the German general said."

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🔗 Via US News:

🇬🇧🗯🔫📈 — 🇬🇧 The Telegraph | Civilians must be ready to fight because Britain’s military is so small, warn peers | Damning report says evidence suggests size of Army is inadequate and urges country to think of itself as ‘a nation under genuine threat’ | September 26, 2024:

"Civilians must be ready to fight because Britain’s military is too small, a House of Lords committee has warned.

The Armed Forces “lack the mass, resilience, and internal coherence necessary to maintain a deterrent effect and respond effectively to prolonged and high-intensity warfare”, a damning report by the Lords international relations and defence committee found.

The report said all evidence it had heard “points to the current size of the British Army being inadequate” and questioned “whether the British Army is prepared to meet the growing threat posed by Russia to European security”.

(...)

Under the previous Conservative government, troop numbers were cut to their smallest size since the Napoleonic era as they reduced the British Army by 10,000 to 72,500.

(...)

The report warned that while there was a risk that conversations around civilians “could end up veering into discussions around connoscription”, Labour had “an opportunity to broaden this out and consider how it could incorporate the whole of society in building resilience”

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🔗 Source:

🇮🇱🇱🇧🇸🇾 How Israeli spies penetrated Hezbollah

In its 2006 war with Hezbollah, Israel tried to kill Hassan Nasrallah three times.

One air strike missed — the leader of Hezbollah had earlier left the spot. The others failed to penetrate the concrete reinforcements of his underground bunker, according to two people familiar with the attempted assassinations.

On Friday night, the Israeli military fixed those mistakes. It tracked Nasrallah to a bunker built deep below an apartment complex in south Beirut, and dropped as many as 80 bombs to make sure he was killed, according to Israeli media.

What changed, said current and former officials, is the depth and quality of the intelligence that Israel was able to lean on in the past two months, starting with the July 30 assassination of Fuad Shukr, one of Nasrallah’s right-hand men, as he visited a friend not far from Friday’s bombing site.

These officials described a large-scale reorientation of Israel’s intelligence-gathering efforts on Hezbollah after the surprising failure of its far more powerful military to deliver a knockout blow against the militant group in 2006, or even to eliminate its senior leadership, including Nasrallah.

For the next two decades, Israel’s sophisticated signals intelligence Unit 8200, and its military intelligence directorate, called Aman, mined vast amounts of data to map out the fast-growing militia in Israel’s “northern arena”.

Israeli intelligence widened its aperture to view the entirety of Hezbollah, looking beyond just its military wing to its political ambitions and growing connections with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Nasrallah’s relationship with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.

As Hezbollah grew in strength, including in 2012 deploying to Syria to help Assad quell an armed uprising against his dictatorship, it gave Israel the opportunity to take its measure. What emerged was a dense “intelligence picture” — who was in charge of Hezbollah’s operations, who was getting promoted, who was corrupt, and who had just returned from an unexplained trip.

While Hezbollah’s fighters were battle hardened in Syria’s bloody war, the militant group’s forces had grown to keep pace with the drawn-out conflict. That recruitment also left them more vulnerable to Israeli spies placing agents or looking for would-be defectors.

“Syria was the beginning of the expansion of Hezbollah,” said Randa Slim, a programme director at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “That weakened their internal control mechanisms and opened the door for infiltration on a big level.”

The war in Syria also created a fountain of data, much of it publicly available for Israel’s spies — and their algorithms — to digest. Obituaries, in the form of the “Martyr Posters” regularly used by Hizbollah, were one of them, peppered with little nuggets of information, including which town the fighter was from, where he was killed, and his circle of friends posting the news on social media. Funerals were even more revealing, sometimes drawing senior leaders out of the shadows, even if briefly.

A former high-ranking Lebanese politician in Beirut said the penetration of Hizbollah by Israeli or US intelligence was “the price of their support for Assad”.

“They had to reveal themselves in Syria,” he said, where the secretive group suddenly had to stay in touch and share information with the notoriously corrupt Syrian intelligence service, or with Russian intelligence services, who were regularly monitored by the Americans.

🔗 https://archive.ph/rdIgu

🇻🇪🇻🇪💥📰 — ALERT OF REPRESSION IN VENEZUELA: Nicolás Maduro's regime has intensified its persecution of the press, offering a $150 reward for each journalist captured, as reported by photographer Juan Carlos Neira. Neira was followed by the municipal police of Miranda after covering a protest organized by María Corina Machado in Caracas

⛓ Neira managed to take refuge in a commercial establishment where the owners helped him escape. A police officer reportedly confessed that the government offers rewards for the capture of journalists. Shortly after, a SEBIN van arrived to arrest him, but the store owners helped him flee by jumping across rooftops.

❗️ The repressive wave doesn’t stop there: in the last two months, 15 journalists have been arrested in Venezuela, 10 of whom are still imprisoned, facing serious charges of “terrorism” and “incitement to hatred.” Journalists detained during this period face sentences ranging from 12 to 20 years in prison.

🇮🇱❌🇱🇧❗️ — British State Media BBC News reports that Israel tells US it intends to launch Lebanon ground incursion, US official says

➡️ A US official confirms Israel has notified the US it intends to launch a limited ground incursion into Lebanon, the BBC's US partner CBS is reporting.

➡️ The official says the operation could start as soon as today

🔗 Link

#BREAKING
🇱🇧🪖❗️ — Local sources in the village of Debl confirmed to us that Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) are indeed withdrawing their positions across the border points in Southern Lebanon, reportedly after being warned by United States of the incoming military action by Israel!

🇦🇹🗳 Austria's right wing forces eye unprecedented election win

Austrians vote on Sunday in a general election that could see the right-wing opposition Freedom Party (FPÖ) top the polls for the first time.

But now, led by Herbert Kickl, the FPÖ is within reach of a historic victory. It narrowly leads the ruling conservatives in the opinion polls, and the opposition Social Democrats are in third place.

Even if the Freedom Party manages to come first, no party is expected to win enough seats for an outright majority, and building a coalition is likely to be difficult.

The FPÖ has successfully tapped into concerns about migration, rising inflation, the war in Ukraine and anger over the way the Covid pandemic was handled, and for months has been hovering around 27% in the polls, up to two points ahead of the conservative Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP) or Austrian People's Party, which is predicting a photo finish.

Like other far-right European parties, the FPÖ combines tough rhetoric on immigration and Islam with promises to reduce what it regards as interference from Brussels in national affairs.

But Kickl has also aligned his party closely with Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the self-styled champion of "illiberal democracy" and expressed a more conciliatory tone when it comes to Russia.

The Freedom Party leader has called European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen a "warmonger" and opposes sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

The conservative People’s Party, led by Austria’s current chancellor Karl Nehammer, has repeatedly excluded joining a Kickl-led government, although it has not ruled out an alliance with his party.

🔗 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr4xz013zx7o

🇦🇹 “Remigration! I have absolutely no problem to say that word.... We are not going to accept any asylum requests anymore."

- Herbert Kickl, head of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ)

Polls put his FPÖ party in first place heading into national elections on Sept. 29.

🔗 Remix News

🇩🇪 A group of German lawmakers from across the political spectrum are considering backing a motion to potentially ban the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

According to the Welt newspaper and Spiegel magazine, significantly more than the 37 lawmakers required for such a motion are together weighing whether to take action against the AfD.

The lawmakers come from the centre-right CDU/CSU bloc, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the hard-left Die Linke (The Left).

In their draft motion, the lawmakers are also reportedly calling for the AfD to be excluded from state funding.

Dpa has learned that the lawmakers plan to present the motion to parliamentary groups sometime after October 8.

In the court proceedings, opponents of the AfD would have to prove that the party is aggressively working to undermine Germany's democratic constitution.

🔗 https://www.dailyfinland.fi/europe/39721/Some-German-MPs-considering-case-to-ban-far-right-AfD

🇮🇱❌🇮🇷 Israel’s leaders believe they now have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape the Middle East, one that goes well beyond pulverizing Hamas and Hezbollah.

Even before Israel launched what it described as a “limited” ground offensive into Lebanon Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear that his ultimate target in the regional power shift is to undermine the authority of Tehran’s clerical leadership, defanging the Iranians who are the bankrollers, trainers and supposed protectors of both Hamas in Gaza and the Lebanese Shi’ite militia Hezbollah.

In an address in English on Monday, Netanyahu promised the “noble Persian people” that the day when they were free of rule by “tyrants” and could have peace with Israel would come “a lot sooner than people think.”

“There is nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach,” he warned ominously.

For Iran, that will not sound like idle posturing. Israel is not just fighting Tehran by smashing its allies and proxies — such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen — but is showing its supremacy both in terms of technology and espionage on Iranian soil.

Ground offensive in Lebanon. On Tuesday Israel made it clear it won’t stop there.

Netanyahu’s once electorally fatal opinion poll numbers are rising since Nasrallah’s assassination, meaning there’s every political inducement for him to prolong the offensive and ignore repeated cease-fire calls from Western allies and aid groups, who fear a humanitarian crisis worsening in Lebanon.

“The elimination of Nasrallah is a very important step, but it is not the final one,” Gallant told troops serving with the army’s Golani Brigade. “We will employ all the capabilities at our disposal, and if someone on the other side did not understand what those capabilities entail, we mean all capabilities.”

U.S. officials believe the Israeli incursion will be limited, targeted and not as extensive as 2006, which triggered a short but fierce war that hurt both sides. But there remain fears in Washington of an Iranian attack against Israel, prompting some U.S. forces being moved “to defer and defend as necessary.” And there are worries of Israeli overreach.

It isn’t only domestic political logic driving Netanyahu — but military rationale, too. “The military incentives for Israel are to continue,” observed Matthew Savill of Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, a think tank, speaking before the incursion.

“It has destroyed Hezbollah’s senior leadership, compromised its ability to coordinate and has the initiative. In spite of the risks a ground incursion would face, the long-range threat from ballistic missiles, and the stretched nature of current IDF operations, it is possible to imagine that many would argue there will never be a better time to go into southern Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah’s military infrastructure there,” he added.

🔗 https://www.politico.eu/article/target-iran-israel-seizes-reshapes-middle-east-hamas-hezbollah-tehran/

🇨🇴❌🇪🇨 — Colombia suspends the export of electric energy to Ecuador.