Category: International Conflict

Canada signed a defence partnership with the EU on Monday as the two sides increase their security co-operation in response to Donald Trump’s threats against his Nato allies. The US president has questioned continued American support for allies that spend insufficiently on their own armed forces, and has threatened both Canada and Europe with punitive tariffs for allegedly taking advantage of the US. In response, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced a move away from buying US weapons, and…

HELSINKI – Finnish Defence Minister Antti Hakkanen hailed plans on June 25 for six Nato member states including Britain and France to participate in land forces that are to be established in northern Finland. Finland, which has a longer border with Russia than any other Nato state, has strengthened the frontier in the two years since it joined the military alliance following a policy U-turn after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “I am very pleased that yesterday, in connection with…

ZURICH – Switzerland is holding talks with the United States after Washington tried to raise the price of new fighter jets Bern is buying for its air force, the government said on Wednesday. Bern chose Lockheed Martin’s F-35A Lightning II as its next-generation fighter plane in 2021, with a fixed price of around 6 billion Swiss francs ($7.4 billion) for 36 jets, a decision that attracted controversy in neutral Switzerland. But the U.S. Joint Program Office overseeing the project said…

AP — Last week, Ukrainian drone hunters picking up the debris from Russia´s nightly assault on their cities found a weapon that stood out from the rest. It had an advanced camera, a computing platform powered by artificial intelligence and a radio link, allowing an operator to pilot it remotely from Russia. It also contained new, Iranian-made, anti-jamming technology, according to a Ukrainian drone expert. Most Russian attack drones are black, said Serhii Beskrestnov, an electronics expert more widely known as…

WASHINGTON – Ms Tulsi Gabbard, the US director of national intelligence, released a video on June 11 warning that the world is closer to nuclear war than ever and accusing unnamed political elites of trying to foment conflict between world powers. Ms Gabbard didn’t cite any countries by name, but her remarks echoed long time claims by Russian officials and, more recently, by far-right commentators in the US who have warned that the Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s strategic bomber…

Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway said Tuesday they have imposed sanctions on two far-right Israeli government ministers for allegedly “inciting extremist violence” against Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich face asset freezes and travel bans from the five countries. The ministers are champions of expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The decision by Western governments friendly to Israel was a sharp rebuke of Israel’s settlement policies in the West Bank and of settler…

During his visit to the Middle East in May, U.S. President Donald Trump did several things that few would have predicted months or even weeks earlier. One was his surprise meeting with Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Shara, and the subsequent lifting of U.S. sanctions on Syria, notwithstanding Shara’s history as a leader of a militant Islamist group. Another was his decision not to include Israel on the itinerary, despite his administration’s ongoing efforts to end the war in Gaza. The…

A federal jury convicted the CEO of Power Mobility Doctor Rx, LLC (DMERx) for his role in operating a platform that generated false doctors’ orders to defraud Medicare and other federal health care benefit programs of more than $1 billion. According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Gary Cox, 79, of Maricopa County, Arizona, and his co-conspirators targeted hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries who provided their personally identifiable information and agreed to accept medically unnecessary orthotic braces,…

Jerusalem – Dozens of Palestinians were killed and hundreds more injured today, 1 June, as they waited for food at the newly created Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution centres in Rafah and close to the Netzarim Corridor, according to the Ministry of Health. Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) teams joined the mass casualty response in Nasser hospital, Khan Younis. Patients told MSF they were shot from all sides by drones, helicopters, boats, tanks and Israeli soldiers on the ground. “Today’s…

As part of the expansion of their ground operations, Israeli forces have issued widescale evacuation orders, further limiting people’s access to medical care and MSF’s ability to provide it. On 19 May, for example, an evacuation order covering almost the entire eastern part of Khan Younis, at the edge of Nasser hospital, forced people to immediately move towards Al-Mawasi area. The Site Management Cluster estimates that over 138,900 people were forcibly displaced between 15-20 May. The intensified Israeli bombardments and evacuation…

Canada is moving forward with a legal bid to gain full possession of a Russian Antonov An-124 cargo plane and potentially hand it over to Ukraine, the country’s foreign ministry has said. The Antonov An-124 — the world’s largest mass-produced cargo aircraft — has been stranded at Toronto Pearson International Airport for over three years due to airspace restrictions that Canada imposed due to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “The Attorney General of Canada commenced forfeiture proceedings by seeking the…

Trump had originally sought $500 billion in mineral wealth — around four times what the United States has contributed to Ukraine since the war. U.S. presence against ‘bad actors’ Trump has balked at offering security guarantees to Ukraine and has rejected its aspiration to join NATO. But Trump said on Wednesday that a U.S. presence on the ground would benefit Ukraine. “The American presence will, I think, keep a lot of bad actors out of the country or certainly out…

The US secretary of state has urged member countries to increase defense spending US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has renewed pressure on NATO members to increase their defense contributions, describing the current arrangement within the military bloc as the US and “a bunch of junior partners.” While being part of NATO is in the US’ interests, its members must shoulder their share of the responsibilities, otherwise it’s not really an alliance, but a “dependency,” he told The Free Press…