Netanyahu:

I told Blinken we swore to destroy Hamas and nothing is going to stop us.

Henry Kissinger introducing his wife (Nancy) to Chinese President Mao Zedong during his visit to China in 1971.

Mao gets shocked by their height difference.

Commander of the IRGC, Major General Salami:

According to the exact data we have, of the 1,600 tanks and armored personnel carriers that the Zionist regime brought the battlefield, 300 were hit and hundreds of Israelis were killed.

The Israelis do not publish this news; there is strict censorship of news there.

All you hear is about the Palestinians, you don't hear anything about the riots in the cities of the Zionist regime, but the situation is much worse than they would like.

Israel withdraws its ambassador from Spain for consultations following PM Sanchez’s pro-Palestine remarks.

Hamas released two more hostages in Palestine Square in Gaza City.

Israeli media investigation based on Israeli military sources shows how Israel is knowingly killing dozens of civilians in Gaza to hit one Hamas target.

Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals

Compared to previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, the current war — which Israel has named “Operation Iron Swords,” and which began in the wake of the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on October 7 — has seen the army significantly expand its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature.

These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as “power targets” (“matarot otzem”).

The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,” as one source put it.

In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander.

“The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.

“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source.

“When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible.

This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”

The biggest problem with Ukraine’s new fleet of 31 American-made M-1 Abrams tanks isn’t the tanks’ 1,500-horsepower turbine engines. Not really.

No, it’s the filters in the engines’ intakes. The filters keep dirt and debris from fouling and wrecking an M-1’s delicate—but powerful—engine.

They require constant cleaning. If an Abrams’ four-person crew neglects to clean its tank’s filters every 12 hours or so, it might so badly damage the engine that the battalion has no choice but to remove the engine, and potentially the transmission, and ship it away for a lengthy overhaul.

That would remove one of Ukraine’s few M-1s from the battlefield as surely as a Russian mine or missile might do. Deep maintenance of Ukrainian Abrams takes place in Poland.

The 68-ton M-1A1SAs that Ukraine operates are thirsty machines. In the weeks before the administration of U.S. president Joe Biden pledged the M-1 to Ukraine, early this year, many pundits and even some officials worried aloud over the tank’s fuel requirements.

Laura Cooper, a U.S. deputy defense secretary, called the Abrams “a gas-guzzler.”

Twice a day, an M-1 crew must rev its tank’s engine to high revolutions-per-minute in order to trigger a pulse-jet system that blasts air out of the tank rather than into it, shooting dust and debris from the back grille.

That keeps the filters clean across lengthy deployments. Before the Americans added the pulse-jet system to the M-1, in the early 2000s, tank crews—especially those fighting in the desert—openly complained about their vehicles’ reliability.

Ukraine produces about 50,000 FPV kamikaze drones every month. Russia - 6 times more.

In total, there are about 200 drone manufacturers in Ukraine, which provide only 10-15% of the total needs of the army.

One engineer assembles about 50 FPV drones per month.

At the same time, Ukrainian manufacturers lack 2,000 engineers, and to reach Russian level, the industry needs 6,000 engineers.

A plan to draft more Ukrainian men into the army has been sitting on President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s desk since June.

The wartime leader so far has defied pressure from the military to sign it.

Instead, Zelenskiy last week asked his government and top brass for a more comprehensive package, one better tailored to a nation exhausted by a war and preparing for another winter of fighting.

It again put off the blueprint, approved by Ukraine’s parliament, to lower the draft age during war for men with no military experience to 25 from 27.

Journalist reporting on ‘Twitter Files’, Michael Shellenberger:

US and UK military contractors deployed sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics... against the American people.

Satellite data analysis suggests that almost 98,000 buildings across the whole Gaza Strip may have suffered damage, with most of it concentrated in the north, BBC reports.

Hungary says it will not support the decision to begin negotiations on Ukraine’s accession to the EU and allocate 50 billion euros to Ukraine until 2027.

U.S Navy release footage of divers conducting an underwater survey of the US Navy reconnaissance aircraft Boeing P-8 Poseidon that overshot the runway in Hawaii on November 20.

IDF armored vehicles drive towards a group of Palestinians who are in the area along the beach in Gaza City.

Israeli fighter jets reportedly hit an ammunition depot of Yemen's Houthis today.

Ukrainian Su-25 aircraft hit by Russian Lancet kamikaze UAV strike.

The aircraft was heavily damaged at the Dolgintsevo Air Base in Dnipro region.

In undisclosed call Pope Francis warned Israel against committing ‘terror’, WaPo reports.

As bombs fell and tanks penetrated deep into Gaza in late October, Israeli President Isaac Herzog held a fraught phone call with Pope Francis.

The Israeli head of state was describing his nation’s horror over the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 when the pope issued a blunt rejoinder.

It is “forbidden to respond to terror with terror,” Francis said.

Herzog protested, repeating the position that the Israeli government was doing what was needed in Gaza to defend its own people.

The pope continued, saying those responsible should indeed be held accountable, but not civilians.

Taken with the diplomatic exchange — deemed so “bad” by the Israelis that they did not make it public — the implication seemed clear: The pope was calling their campaign in Gaza an act of terrorism.

“How else could it be interpreted?” said the senior official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

Biden administration is facing growing internal dissent over its support for Israel’s military assault on Hamas in Gaza, reflecting a wider debate in American society and a generational divide among Democrats over the issue, NBC reports.

The extraordinary scope of the dissent inside the government, including statements in open letters from government employees, goes beyond anything seen in previous administrations dating back to the 1980s, including during the Iraq War and President Donald Trump’s restrictions on travel from mainly Muslim states, former officials said.

“It’s remarkable and it’s unprecedented,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank who worked at the State Department from 1978 to 2003.

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The administration is now having to mediate its own internal version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Miller said.

There is a feeling that Israel should not be able to act with “impunity,” the official said, and many foreign service officers believe that with the high civilian death toll in Gaza, U.S. aid to Israel should not remain unconditional, the official said.

U.S. diplomats in the Middle East are sending emails back to Washington saying their most levelheaded counterparts in the region are warning them that America’s reputation is being seriously damaged by its approach to the war, according to two State Department officials.

Putin appears to be winning the war in Ukraine, for now, The Economist says.

Russia’s president has put his country on a war footing and strengthened his grip on power. He has procured military supplies abroad and is helping turn the global south against America. Crucially, he is undermining the conviction in the West that Ukraine can—and must—emerge from the war as a thriving European democracy.

The West could do a lot more to frustrate Mr Putin. If it chose, it could deploy industrial and financial resources that dwarf Russia’s. However, fatalism, complacency and a shocking lack of strategic vision are getting in the way, especially in Europe.

For its own sake as well as Ukraine’s, the West urgently needs to shake off its lethargy.

The reason a Putin victory is possible is that winning is about endurance rather than capturing territory. Neither army is in a position to drive out the other from the land they currently control.

A jewelry store employee in Japan chased away robbers using a sasumata, pole weapon used by the samurai class and their retainers in feudal Japan.