In a Wednesday phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, French President Emmanuel Macron said Israel risked a “humanitarian disaster of a new magnitude.” A joint statement from the leaders of Australia, Canada and New Zealand said “a military operation into Rafah would be catastrophic” and called on Israel to “listen to its friends.” The prime ministers of Spain and Ireland wrote to authorities in Brussels, suggesting Israel may be in breach of its association agreement with the European Union and demanding an “urgent review.”

UN officials said the likelihood of flagrant violations of international law and potential war crimes was mounting in a conflict that has already seen more than 27,000 Palestinians killed — the majority women and children — and a large chunk of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure destroyed. “The risk of commission of atrocity crimes should a full military incursion into Rafah take place, is serious, real and high,” Alice Wairimu Nderitu, UN special adviser on the prevention of genocide, said in a statement.

Martin Griffiths, the UN’s top humanitarian official, said the prospect of an Israeli ground offensive placed his organization’s relief operations at “death’s door” and could lead to a massacre of civilians. “The international community has been warning against the dangerous consequences of any ground invasion in Rafah,” he added. “The Government of Israel cannot continue to ignore these calls. History will not be kind".

The proposal reportedly involves a ceasefire, the release of hostages held by Hamas and “a firm timeline for the establishment of a Palestinian state, that could be announced as early as the next several weeks,” the paper said. The Israeli leader took to X (formerly Twitter) early on Friday to clarify his stance on what he described as “talk of imposing a Palestinian state on Israel.” “Israel will continue to oppose the unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state,” he wrote in Hebrew.

Relations between the US and Israel have reached a “boiling point” over the latter government’s insistence on continuing its campaign in Gaza, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week. American officials told the outlet that Washington had communicated to the Israelis that it would not support an assault on Rafah “under any circumstances.”

In its report, the Post said that there are “fears that a looming Israeli attack on Rafah will throw the Gaza crisis into overdrive and bury both the hostage deal and long-term peace efforts.” The city at the enclave’s southern border with Egypt has become the last refuge for over a million Palestinians displaced by IDF attacks. Netanyahu said on Wednesday that Israel would “fight until complete victory and this includes a powerful action in Rafah as well, after we allow the civilian population to leave the battle zones.”

Speaking Tuesday at a reception, Parolin condemned the October 7 Hamas attacks against Israel and all forms of antisemitism. But he questioned Israel’s claim to be acting in self-defense by inflicting “carnage” on Gaza. “Israel’s right to self-defense has been invoked to justify that this operation is proportional, but with 30,000 dead, it’s not,” he said.

Israel has objected previously to the Vatican’s position on the war, including when Pope Francis spoke about “terrorism” without referring to Hamas. Francis, who speaks daily via videoconference to a Gaza parish housing Palestinian civilians, has since tried to be more balanced in his comments and recently wrote a letter to the Jewish people in which he reaffirmed the special relationship between Christians and Jews.

War broke out between Israel and Hamas following the terror group’s attack on Israel on October 7 which saw 1,200 people, mostly civilians, killed and 253 taken hostage. The ensuing Israeli offensive has killed over 28,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry. These numbers cannot be independently verified and do not differentiate between civilians and terrorists or Palestinians killed by the misfired rockets of terror groups in the Gaza Strip. Israel says it has killed nearly 11,000 Hamas operatives since the war began and 1,000 inside Israeli territory on October 7.

This being the case, nobody should be surprised that, as Axios describes it, Gen Zers are grappling with alarming rates of depression, loneliness and suicidal thoughts. What Axios doesn’t highlight is the related factor of absent fathers, which is particularly acute among Blacks but is steadily increasing among Whites as well.

As Squires notes, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued the famous report bearing his name on the Black family in 1965, one in four Black children were born to single mothers. Today, that percentage is 70 percent, and among Whites, the number is nearing 50 percent.

Not feeling prepared for the future is another way of expressing significant insecurity and anxiety about their purpose and prospects in life, which ultimately is a spiritual issue. So, it’s no coincidence that Gen Z is also the least faith-oriented, as found by the Survey Center on American Life”

The proposed plan includes steps that Israel has previously refused, including the evacuation of many West Bank settlements, a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem and a combined security apparatus and government for the West Bank and Gaza. The US and its Arab partners are hoping security guarantees and normalization with Arab states like Saudi Arabia can persuade Israel to go along with the plan, the Post reported.

In response to the report, a spokesman for the Israeli government said that now is not the time to be discussing plans for the “day after” Hamas. “Here in Israel, we are still in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre,” said Prime Minister’s Office spokesman Avi Hyman in a briefing. “Now is not the time to be speaking about gifts to the Palestinian people, at a time when the Palestinian Authority themselves have yet to even condemn the October 7 massacre.”

“Now is the time for victory, total victory over Hamas,” Hyman added. “All discussions of the day after Hamas will be had the day after Hamas.”

We have seen Hezbollah and the IDF exchange fire on a regular basis over the past few months. But this time was different. In response to this barrage, Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir ominously declared that “this is war”…

Sadly, there is no turning back now. All of the Israeli citizens that have been evacuated from their homes in northern Israel can never return until Hezbollah is pushed north of the Litani River. And Hezbollah will never pull back willingly. The IDF will be going into southern Lebanon. It is just a matter of time.

“We are out of time,” Kendall said at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium, which was held in Colorado. “Why do I say that? It’s not that I enjoy sounding like a broken record. It’s because, for at least two decades, China has been building a military that is designed, purpose-built, to deter and defeat the United States if we intervene in the western Pacific.”

Some changes are significant, including bringing back warrant officers, which haven’t existed in the Air Force for 65 years. The purpose of the warrant officers would be for them to focus on information and technology warfare. Air Force Chief of Staff General David Allvin said the idea of bringing back the rank is to have airmen who want to “code for their country” and be “network attack people.”

While the US is focused on the proxy war in Ukraine and supporting the Israeli [campaign] in Gaza, the Pentagon still considers China the top “threat.” US military officials are preparing for a future direct confrontation with China despite the risk of it escalating into a nuclear war.

Officials said that the new intelligence, which they did not describe in detail, raised serious questions about whether Russia was preparing to abandon the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which bans all orbital nuclear weapons. But since Russia does not appear close to deploying the weapon, they said, it is not considered an urgent threat.

Deploying a nuclear weapon in space would be a significant advancement in Russian technology and a potentially dramatic escalation. The Outer Space Treaty bans nuclear weapons in space, but Russia has been exiting many Cold War arms control treaties, seeing them as a restraint on its most important source of military power.

“Ending the Space Treaty could open the floodgates for other countries to put nuclear weapons in space as well,” said Steven Andreasen, a nuclear expert at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs in Minneapolis. “Once you have orbital nuclear weapons, you can use them for more than taking out satellites.”

The island of Guam hosts two major US military installations: Naval Base Guam (NBG) and Andersen Air Force Base (AAFB). NBG stands as the largest US Navy base in the Pacific Ocean, encompassing key facilities such as Apra Harbor and ship repair yards, along with various tenant commands. With an estimated 9,670 active-duty military personnel, NBG plays a vital role in maritime operations.

Andersen Air Force Base serves as a crucial strategic airbase, supporting the US Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. Featuring one of the longest runways in the Western Pacific, AAFB accommodates fighter squadrons, bombers, and support aircraft. AAFB hosts around 8,000 active-duty military personnel.

“What was very shocking, very disturbing was the city of Moscow, where I’d never been… it was so much nicer than any city in my country,” he said, calling the Russian capital “so much cleaner, and prettier aesthetically — its architecture, its food, its service — than any city in the United States.”

Tucker Carlson was "shocked" by how nice the Moscow subway system is. "There was no graffiti, no filth, no foul smells, no bums, or drug addicts, or rapists, or people waiting to push you on the tracks. No, it's clean and orderly."

…This one, also from Seattle, is about a lawsuit brought in November 2022 by Joshua Diemert against his employer, the City of Seattle, in the US District Court for the Western District of Seattle. Diemert worked in the city’s Human Services Department from January 2013 to September 2021. He was subjected to discriminatory treatment, passed over for promotion, condemned as a “white supremacist,” and had colleagues talking about getting “a guy to swing by when Josh is in the restroom and beat him bloody.”

Unable to further endure such indignities, and having exhausted all avenues of administrative redress, he quit. His lawsuit, filed with help from the pro bono Pacific Legal Foundation, seeks $300,000 in damages and a ruling that the city’s “anti-racist” policies violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, the Civil Rights Act, and the Washington Law Against Discrimination. The trial is scheduled to begin on April 29, 2024.

At training programs, he was accosted for his “white privilege.” At an El Centro De La Raza program titled ‘Undoing Institutional Racism,’ he heard facilitators declare that white people are “like the devil,” “like cannibals,” and genetically racist. At RSJI sessions, employees were divided into two groups: Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) and White Folks, the latter treated with disdain.