From the beginning of the year to the end of October, 3,205 people were injured in drone attacks, including 195 minors. 392 people were killed, including 22 minors.
Since the beginning of the special operation, 7,175 civilians have been killed and another 17,617 injured. The total number of dead and injured is 24,792.
The Ukrainian army has increasingly used drones loaded with shrapnel to attack civilians. The Ukrainian Armed Forces are also increasingly using plastic pellets for this purpose, significantly complicating the treatment of the wounds they inflict.
Needless to say, this is a direct violation of international humanitarian law, which prohibits weapons whose primary effect is to injure with fragments that are not detectable by X-rays.
In other news…
The German publication Welt reports that approximately 50% of women in Berlin brothels are Ukrainian citizens. After the war began, many refugees found themselves without housing, work, or support, and turned to places that “employ people without language skills or a diploma.”
Until 2022, there were almost no Ukrainian women in prostitution, the article states. Now, according to Berlin social services, every other woman in a brothel is from Ukraine.
Women say they’re trapped: bureaucracy, language barriers, no benefits, no stability. They work illegally, often through intermediaries, and become dependent.
Just as the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group entered Caribbean waters on Tuesday, it’s been revealed that the United Kingdom has made the unprecedented and provocative move of cutting off intelligence-sharing with the United States related to suspected drug trafficking vessels off Venezuela.
CNN reports Tuesday that Britain cited that it does not want to be complicit in ongoing US military strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats, as it believes the action is illegal, amounting to extrajudicial killings, also after recent criticisms from United Nations officials. However, it is said to be a cut-off in only “some” intel-sharing.
This is of immense importance from one of America’s closest allies – and part of the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence sharing nations – which has time and again enthusiastically joined in Washington’s military adventurism abroad, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya and Syria.
The fresh report details the UK’s prior role in assisting US agencies in the Caribbean, where Britain has small overseas territories:
For years, the UK, which controls a number of territories in the Caribbean where it bases intelligence assets, has helped the US locate vessels suspected of carrying drugs so that the US Coast Guard could interdict them, the sources said. That meant the ships would be stopped, boarded, its crew detained, and drugs seized.
The intelligence was typically sent to Joint Interagency Task Force South, a task force stationed in Florida that includes representatives from a number of partner nations and works to reduce the illicit drug trade.
The report confirms that the intelligence has actually been paused for over a month, which would have been soon after the Pentagon began attacking small boats off Latin America in September.
There is an irony in London suddenly discovering the moral high ground on the issue of Venezuela, given that for years the government has frozen more than $1.8bn worth of Venezuelan gold stored at the Bank of England. The Maduro government has sued to get it back, denouncing the move as brazen theft.
It could be that UK leaders sense that Trump is serious about pressing regime change in Caracas, and doesn’t want to be a direct part of it. Indeed the unprecedented numbers of US warships currently parked in SOUTHCOM waters does strongly point to imminent military action.
But clearly London is now saying it will sit on the sidelines on this particular military adventure in America’s backyard. At this point some 76 alleged drug-smugglers have been killed, and 19 boats destroyed, in the Trump-ordered Pentagon action.
A general view of a new displacement camp set up by the Egyptian Committee is pictured in Nuseirat, Gaza Strip, on November 11, 2025. (Photo by AFP)
Press TV
The US is reportedly backing a plan to construct housing compounds for thousands of “screened” Palestinians in areas of Gaza currently occupied by Israeli forces, raising fears that the project could entrench the territory’s division.
According to The Atlantic, US President Donald Trump’s administration, in coordination with Israeli officials, is advancing a proposal to build so-called “Alternate Safe Communities” behind a “yellow line” that divides Hamas-controlled western Gaza from Israeli-occupied eastern Gaza.
The plan aims to resettle Palestinians who pass anti-Hamas security screenings conducted by Israel’s Shin Bet, effectively separating them from the majority of Gaza’s two million residents.
Movement across the yellow line will be heavily restricted, raising concerns that the communities could become enclosed zones of indefinite displacement.
US Lieutenant General Patrick Frank, who heads the civil-military coordination center overseeing the Gaza ceasefire, outlined the plan in an internal email cited by The Atlantic.
He proposed that each community include a medical center, school, administrative building, and temporary housing for about 25,000 residents.
However, according to the report, US, UK, and Israeli officials later revised the target population down to around 6,000 per site.
The first pilot is expected to be built near Rafah in southern Gaza, an area largely owned by Palestinians.
The project would be part of a broader US effort to implement Trump’s 20-point peace plan, which envisions an eventual Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, even though no timeline has been provided.
The Financial Times reported that the proposal has alarmed Arab and European governments, who fear it could mark the beginning of a permanent Israeli occupation in parts of Gaza.
They think the project could cement a lasting partition, creating a two-tiered system between “approved” Palestinians and those remaining under Hamas administration.
Less than two percent of Gaza’s two million residents currently live behind the so-called yellow line, which was originally intended to be a temporary barrier.
The Trump administration has not committed US funds to Gaza’s reconstruction, instead seeking investments from Persian Gulf states. Meanwhile, the United Nations estimates the cost of rebuilding war-torn Gaza at roughly $70 billion.
Critics note that the proposed sites sit on Palestinian-owned land, raising concerns about potential displacement. The plan, they warn, risks deepening Gaza’s fragmentation while providing no clear path toward Palestinian sovereignty or full Israeli withdrawal.
Browser extensions are potentially funneling your most personal queries to a company selling market insights about chatbot activity.
OpenAI generally doesn’t share your ChatGPT conversations with third parties. However, an analytics firm has discovered a way to capture users’ prompts, which can reveal queries about sensitive topics such as prostitution, medical conditions, and immigration status.
New York-based Profound has been selling access to the queries through a service called Prompt Volumes, which launched earlier this year. It can help companies identify what users are asking major chatbot providers, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude, though ChatGPT data dominates.
The data is anonymized and scrubbed of identifying information before it’s licensed to Profound, the company says. However, people tend to reveal more personal information to chatbots than they would during a Google search, for example. And they may not be aware that this data is being shared with third parties. Profound’s Prompt Volumes feature lets you search the archive, and it shows that ChatGPT users have been querying for all kinds of topics, including sex dolls, suicide, and infertility treatments. I signed up for a free trial to see how it works. Here’s what I found.
A View of ChatGPT Prompts From Real Users
Volume Prompt result for the term ‘HIV test.’ (Credit: Profound/PCMag)
Profound has been demoing the feature to customers; some of the prompts it collected include:
How can I hack someone?
What are 15 types of BDSM sex?
Can you suggest me some incest hentai?
I caught my wife cheating on me last week and plan to expose her in front of her family.
Are there any online websites where you can book a brothel?
What is the significance of the HIV test results I received?
Which type of sex doll is best for beginners?
What kind of abortion do you recommend?
What are the implications of being undocumented in the US after TPS termination?
The feature can match the prompt to geographic regions, gender, estimated income level, and age group. New prompts are released on a weekly basis.
Another tab will break down the prompt by gender, age group, income level, and geography. (Credit: Profound/PCMag)
Lee Dryburgh, a researcher in marketing visibility and founder of his own consultancy, Contestra, has been warning about the privacy implications. “The great majority of users have no awareness [that] their chats are being grabbed off their screen, sent over a network, packaged, and resold,” he tells us.
Profound hasn’t said how it’s gathering chatbot data. Its website merely notes that it “licenses conversations from multiple, double-opt-in consumer panels of real answer [engine] users.”
However, as Dryburgh notes, a separate analytics company, Semrush, published two articles in September that mention supplying user data to Profound. The articles have since been changed to remove any mention of Profound. Here’s what the original said on Search Engine Land:
“Companies like Similarweb or Datos (a Semrush company) offer data capturing genuine user actions, collected through browser extensions, consented panels, app telemetry, and provider networks.
Profound’s FAQ for Prompt Volume (Credit: Profound)
Semrush’s Datos specializes in licensing data to clients in an “anonymized” fashion. Profound’s website says its data is “anonymized, aggregated, scrubbed of PII [personal identifying information], and compliant with GDPR and CCA. Panels are doubly opted-in and fully compliant with all modern privacy laws.”
We attempted to test this and noticed that Prompt Volumes does, in fact, redact personal information from the Prompt Volumes. For example, we searched for Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, and private keys, but the feature appeared to always remove them. Nevertheless, Prompt Volumes does indicate Profound is collecting sensitive user prompts relating to cryptocurrency wallets, passwords, SSNs, and bank accounts
Using Prompt Volumes to search for ‘social security number.’ (Credit: Profound/PCMag)(Credit: Profound/PCMag)
Dryburgh says Profound’s business model infringes on user privacy because the data collection process isn’t clearly explained to consumers. He suspects that browser extensions play a key role in data collection because they can be granted permission to view all websites on a browser, enabling services like Semrush to capture ChatGPT interactions.
“AI chats are not short queries—they are deeply personal disclosures. Users never knowingly consent to this level of surveillance,” Dryburgh tells us. He also questions whether the lack of transparency around the data collection violates European and Californian data privacy rules.
Using Prompt Volumes to search for ‘credit card cvv.’ (Credit: Profound/PCMag)
Lena Cohen, Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), agrees that “the questions people ask chatbots can reveal exceptionally sensitive information, like their health concerns, financial struggles, and relationship problems.
“People deserve meaningful control over who can access these AI prompts,” she says. “When companies offer vague assurances that people consented to their data being sold or that the data has been ‘anonymized,’ that is not enough to protect people. Companies have claimed that data was anonymized and aggregated before, only to have it traced back to individuals.
Plus, “the data broker ecosystem is so opaque that people have virtually no way of knowing who is buying and selling their data, or how it might be used against them,” Cohen says. “We need comprehensive privacy legislation and stronger enforcement to ensure that people’s AI prompts remain private by default.”
Profound Sends a Cease and Desist
When asked about the privacy concerns, Profound first noted that Dryburgh is the founder and CEO of a “competitor company,” Contestra.
“This is a clear attempt by Lee to cause brand damage to Profound, and it seems you are (perhaps unknowingly) amplifying his efforts here,” Profound said in an email.
“Profound does not collect any data directly—we license opt-in data from well-known, established providers—the same providers that have powered marketing and BI tools for decades. Opt-in consumer panels have existed for over a century—since the era of TV, with Nielsen (in 1923) offering data to help marketers understand consumer behavior. This is no different,” the company added.
Profound also denied surfacing sensitive topics with the Prompt Volume tool, despite the screenshots we provided. “The handful of prompts we show are not real user prompts, but use LLMs [large language models] to reflect the TYPE of prompts people send around any given topic. Age, income, gender, etc, [are] all based on predictive modelling and not tied to any specific prompts,” the company said, suggesting prompts can be summarized to some extent.
(Credit: Profound/PCMag)
In response, Dryburgh says Contestra only has only employee: Dryburgh. In contrast, Profound has secured over $50 million in funding, has 82 employees, and serves “1000+” enterprise customers.
Dryburgh also takes issue with Profound saying that Prompt Volumes doesn’t surface sensitive topics, as the company’s own website markets the service by saying, “Discover what millions of people ask AI.”
“Buyers are exposed to ‘real user conversations’ or they are not. There is no middle ground. It can’t be both sides of the coin,” Dryburgh said.
[…]
Examining Browser Extensions
Profound wouldn’t say how users are opting into the prompt data collection, or how they can opt out. As a result, it’s unclear which browser extensions collect data from users.
To try and find out, we asked Frank Li, an Assistant Professor of cybersecurity at Georgia Tech. Last year, his team developed an automated system called “Arcanum” that examined all the browser extensions on the Chrome Store and found that over 3,000 of them automatically collect user-specific data, such as URLs. A subset of 200 extensions directly lifted sensitive user data from web pages loaded via the browser.
Li and his team examined whether the Arcanum system could identify any Chrome browser extensions targeting the ChatGPT site and user prompts. However, their analysis only uncovered 17 extensions that did, and only one had over 1,000 users.
“Eight out of the 17 extensions we found were extracting the whole page, while the rest were specifically extracting the ChatGPT prompt, the response, or both,” he said.
Still, Li noted Arcanum faced two restrictions during the analysis. The system didn’t work on 20% of the extensions that might operate on ChatGPT “largely because our system is using an older browser version and some of these extensions must have used an API not available on an older browser,” he told us in an email.
The other issue is Arcanum won’t work on extensions that require manual actions, including logging into a user account—perhaps the key way Datos and other data brokers receive opt-in from the user. “I suspect some popular extensions might collect ChatGPT data upon such actions, which we’ll miss,” Li said.
In the meantime, Dryburgh has been urging users to consider uninstalling browser extensions from providers that have the ability to read and change data on a site. Users can also consider conversing with ChatGPT and other chatbots in incognito or private mode, which can shut down the extension access, he said.
Profound sells access to the Prompt Volumes feature at “custom” pricing through its enterprise plan. It also plans on offering prompt-related data for xAI’s Grok and DeepSeek.
Semrush didn’t respond to a request for comment. However, Datos told us that its data collection is privacy-safe and follows the law, although the company refrained from identifying how users opt in.
“The data we collect and share with our partners is used to identify trends on the internet and is devoid of all personal information. Datos takes privacy very seriously, and as such Datos does not collect or maintain any personal information. In fact, Datos employs sophisticated systems to prevent personal information from hitting our servers, and leverages outside providers to monitor and ensure there is no personal data,” the company said.
“None of our products would benefit from such data, and no customer has ever asked
us for it. In terms of how the data is collected, our data is always collected with the knowledge and consent of the consumer, and the consumer can opt out at any time,” Datos added.
With Congress coming back in session, I am sure this was a timed release of emails between Epstein and author Michael Wolff and Ghislaine Maxwell, where Epstein admits Trump was part of is sex trafficking network all along.
This is the issue that is not going away and is headline news this morning, and now the swearing in of Arizona Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva will reportedly happen today, giving Massie the last vote he needs for his “discharge petition.”
Emails released by Democrats show convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein telling associates in the 2010s that “of course” President Trump knew about his relationships with underage girls.
The three emails, released Wednesday by Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, show Epstein’s correspondence with his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as columnist and author Michael Wolff.
In the short exchanges, Epstein says Trump “spent hours at my house,” while another says the president “knew about the girls.”
“The more Donald Trump tries to cover up the Epstein files, the more we uncover. These latest emails and correspondence raise glaring questions about what else the White House is hiding and the nature of the relationship between Epstein and the President,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the panel, said in a statement.
“The Department of Justice must fully release the Epstein files to the public immediately. The Oversight Committee will continue pushing for answers and will not stop until we get justice for the victims.”
The emails are set to inflame a debate about materials related to Epstein that will heat back up as the House of Representatives returns to Washington on Wednesday to reopen the federal government.
Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) will be sworn in Wednesday afternoon, and is set to become the final signature needed on a discharge petition that will force floor action on a bill to compel the Department of Justice to release files related to Epstein.
Australia used to have more language families, but over several thousand years the Pamu-Nyungan languages (originally limited to the far north) spread south and overran other languages. Tasmanian languages separated from mainland languages about 12,000 years ago. Historically Tasmania had 12 languages belonging to three district families. They ceased to be spoken after 1830, when the British rounded up all indigenous Tasmanians, exiled them to Flinders Island and made it illegal to speak their native languages.
A creole (see What Are Creole Languages?) known as Kriol is spoken more widely than other aboriginal languages. It’s a lot like Tok Pisin spoken in New Guinea but incorporates aboriginal words.
Ergativity (in which the subject adds a suffix if there’s a direct object) is common in Australian languages (and in the Dravidian languages spoken in southern India).
Djyrbal, which used to have multiple genders, now has only four grammatical genders:
men and beasts
women, the sun, fire, water, stinging animals and animals that sound like women
fruit and fruit treas
inanimate objects and everything else.
In contrast, some Australian languages have oddly few words. Jingulu has only three verbs: come, do and go.
When he discovered Australia, Captain cook took down a few words of Gugu Imatyr, including kangaroo.
According to US Africa Command, the airstrike targeted the ISIS affiliate in Somalia’s Puntland region
US Africa Command said in a press release on Monday that its forces launched an airstrike in Somalia on November 8, marking at least the 90th time that the US has bombed the country this year.
AFRICOM said the strike targeted the ISIS affiliate in Somalia’s northeastern Puntland region and that it was launched about 40 miles southeast of the Gulf of Aden port city of Bosaso, a remote area of the Cal Miskaad mountains. The command offered no other details about the strike, as it had stopped sharing casualty estimates and assessments on civilian harm earlier this year.
“Specific details about units and assets will not be released to ensure continued operations security,” the command said.
The US backs local security forces in Puntland, as the US-backed Federal Government, which is based in Mogadishu, doesn’t control the territory. In 2024, the Puntland government withdrew from the federal system in response to President Hassan Sheikh’s move to amend the constitution.
I recall when then-President Barack Obama was planning to send troops to enforce his “Assad must go” policy in Syria, many Republican US Senators passionately argued that the US President must come to Congress for approval before sending US troops into combat overseas. At the time, they portrayed themselves as brave defenders of the US Constitution.
Last week, when the Senate held a vote to remind President Trump that he is required to seek approval from the Legislative Branch before launching an attack on Venezuela, only two Republican Senators stood up to defend the Constitution. Why? Perhaps because a Republican President was now in office.
According to Politico, war-enthusiast Senator Lindsey Graham went so far as to say that Congress can’t “substitute our judgment” for the president’s when it comes to the decision to attack Venezuela.
The Senator needs a refresher course in high school civics. The US Constitution requires Congress, as the branch most directly accountable to the people, to substitute its judgement for the president’s when it comes to warmaking!
We fought a war against George III to negate the ability of a king to take the people to war on his whim. Now, Congress scrambles to abrogate that hard-fought achievement in the name of political expediency.
While the DC foreign policy blob – made up of both parties – is always pro-war, with each election we get a charade that one party or the other is standing up for the Constitution by challenging a president of the other party on war powers.
Why not stand up for the Constitution regardless of who the President may be?
The truth is, these days most Members of the House and Senate hold their heads down, follow their leadership, and enjoy that 97 percent incumbency reelection rate. After all, making waves by standing up for the Constitution can cost you your seat. You might even find yourself in a position where a President from your own party raises millions of dollars to try and get you ousted.
In an excellent recent essay in The American Conservative, George O’Neill Jr. recounts the current round of pro-war lies being bandied about to gin up support for a war on Venezuela. There are “narco-terrorists” threatening the US! Hezbollah is training in the Venezuelan jungles! Maduro is in league with Hamas!
We’ve heard it all before. The sinking of the USS Maine. The “domino theory.” Babies ripped from Kuwaiti incubators by Saddam’s stormtroopers. WMDs. Assad’s gas attacks. And so on.
All lies, and as O’Neill writes, the interventions they spawned have all turned out to be devastating, expensive failures. We’ve gone from six trillion dollars in debt at the beginning of the war on terror to 38 trillion dollars today. The global US military empire cannot continue if we want to keep our country.
Benjamin Franklin famously said “a republic if you can keep it” when asked what kind of government the Framers of our Constitution had created. But the Republic cannot be held together by magic or good luck. “If you can keep it,” means representation by men and women of good moral character who put the interests of their constituents and their country before their political party or the President. And it requires a population willing to stand up to propaganda and politics to elect such good people and hold them to account.
The photo ops from Trump’s Southeast Asia tour hid a deeper shift in US thinking. Washington’s new China strategy, shaped by the Pentagon, now calls for restraint, mutual legitimacy, and shared rules rather than confrontation.</
In short, America’s foreign policy hawks are quietly preparing for coexistence, not conquest. Trump’s visit was to showcase this change. The question, however, remains: will the US find success ultimately?
Trump’s visit
Trump came as a peacemaker. He wanted to demonstrate that the US still matters in the region, reminding regional powers of Washington’s seriousness that it really means business going forward. Therefore, while the headlines focused on his dance performances in Malaysia and the signing ceremonies, the trip produced two notable outcomes: a peace accord between Thailand and Cambodia and a series of trade and investment frameworks with key ASEAN economies. The Thailand–Cambodia agreement, signed at the ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur and witnessed by Trump, commits both sides to a cease-fire, land-mine clearance, and the release of detainees, marking a rare US-brokered diplomatic success in the region. On the economic front, Trump announced new or expanded trade arrangements with Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam—some finalized, others still in negotiation—covering areas like critical minerals, supply chains, and energy investment. Washington also upgraded its partnership with Malaysia to a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership,” signaling a deeper US pivot toward Southeast Asia’s economic and geopolitical center. Yet, much of this remains more symbolic than substantive for now, as the real test lies in whether these deals translate into durable peace and concrete trade outcomes—or fade as another episode of diplomatic theatre.
The US still ultimately wants to lead Asia while pretending to share it; it seeks coexistence but clings to primacy
Much of the possible success of this visit and the durability of its outcomes is tied directly to the extent to which the Trump administration can implement its own new geopolitical thinking towards the region more generally and China more specifically—a country that it wants to primarily counter in Asia and the Pacific. This new geopolitical thinking is anchored in a recent report published by the Pentagon-backed RAND corporation.
The new thinking
The RAND report delivers a striking argument: Washington must abandon—after trying it unsuccessfully for years—the fantasy of defeating China and instead learn to manage an enduring, structured rivalry. The report frames the contest as the defining axis of twenty-first-century geopolitics—an unavoidable clash of systems and ambitions—but warns that a US strategy driven by dominance, containment, or ideological confrontation risks pushing both powers toward catastrophic instability.
RAND’s central proposal is not détente, but what it calls a disciplined modus vivendi: a framework that accepts competition as inevitable yet seeks to prevent it from spiraling into open conflict. This is especially important for Washington insofar as it allows it to present to the wider Southeast Asian region that it is not seeking Cold War-like alliances where regional countries must choose sides. Therefore, the authors lay out six core principles to stabilize the relationship: both sides must internalize that coexistence, not victory, is the only sustainable outcome; recognize the political legitimacy of each other’s systems, however distasteful; construct shared norms and institutions in areas of friction such as Taiwan, the South China Sea, and technology; exercise restraint in developing capabilities that threaten the other’s deterrence systems; agree on basic rules for world order; and strengthen crisis-management channels to prevent miscalculation.
To translate this into policy, the report recommends six deliberate moves for the US. First, Washington should clarify that its goal is not China’s overthrow but a stable, rules-based rivalry. Second, it must reestablish senior-level communication channels to rebuild minimal trust. Third, it should institutionalize crisis-management mechanisms, particularly around Taiwan and maritime disputes. Fourth, it should negotiate limited accords to restrain cyber and AI competition. Fifth, the US and China should mutually recognize each other’s nuclear deterrence and avoid doctrines that invite preemption. Finally, Washington should pursue narrow cooperative projects—climate, health, scientific exchanges—to maintain some connective tissue in an otherwise adversarial relationship.
Trump’s visit reflected this thinking very much. For example, throughout this tour, Trump made no mention of the QUAD—an anti-China alliance comprising the US, India, Japan, and Australia. It means that Washington is moving away from its strategy of building economic and military alliances with anti-China states, such as India and Japan, to use them as counterweights to China’s influence. This narrative aligns with what the RAND report refers to as recognizing the legitimacy of China and its ruling party.
Beyond Ambitions
Having said this, none of this means that a complete reset has taken place, or will take place soon. Undoubtedly, several bones of contention have been healed, but several remain. Trump’s meeting with Xi, for instance, produced a tactical easing of tensions rather than a strategic breakthrough. Both leaders agreed to cut US tariffs on Chinese imports from roughly 57 to 47 percent, while Beijing pledged to resume large purchases of American soybeans and temporarily lift its export restrictions on rare earth minerals—an issue Trump declared “completely resolved” for now. China also committed to tightening controls on the export of fentanyl precursors, offering Trump a domestic win. Yet these agreements are largely short-term gestures: most are limited to a year, and none address the deeper structural rifts over Taiwan, technology export controls, or military rivalry. In effect, the meeting delivered a pause—a breathing space for both sides to stabilize strained supply chains and political optics—rather than a genuine reset of relations. The underlying strategic mistrust remains intact, making this more a tactical truce than a transformation of US-China relations.
Trump’s tour and his carefully choreographed diplomacy signal that Washington is experimenting with a softer, more disciplined form of competition—one that seeks to manage, not eliminate, China’s rise. Yet the contradictions at the heart of this strategy remain unresolved. The US still ultimately wants to lead Asia while pretending to share it; it seeks coexistence but clings to primacy. The Pentagon’s call for mutual legitimacy and restraint may sound pragmatic, but it runs up against the political and ideological reflexes of an America that views China as a rival to be outlasted, not accommodated. Trump’s gestures toward peace and partnership may buy time and goodwill to achieve this objective ultimately. China, however, will be very mindful.
The Hebrew news outlet YNET is reporting the United States will spend $500 million to establish a base on the Gaza border in order to ensure implementation of the Gaza peace deal negotiated by The White House. The location is reported to host ‘thousands’ of American troops.
In related news, YNET is reporting Hamas is regaining control over the Gaza population as residents move to camps in Gaza due to the inability of residents to live amongst the rubble.
The next stage of the Trump plan envisions a further IDF withdrawal beyond the yellow line, creation of a transitional governing authority, deployment of a multinational force to replace Israeli troops, Hamas’s disarmament, and the start of reconstruction. But no timelines or enforcement mechanisms have been agreed upon. Hamas refuses to disarm, Israel opposes any Palestinian Authority involvement, and uncertainty persists over the multinational force.
“We’re still working out ideas,” Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said this month at a security conference in Manama. “Everybody wants this conflict over, all of us want the same endgame here. Question is, how do we make it work?”
The U.S. has drafted a UN Security Council resolution that would grant the transitional authority and multinational force a two-year mandate, but 10 diplomats told Reuters that governments remain reluctant to commit troops. European and Arab nations in particular were unlikely to participate if the mission extended beyond peacekeeping and required direct confrontation with Hamas, added YNET.
Dmitry Orlov
Geography breakdown(Credit: Profound/PCMag)
The Most Revolutionary Act 