Important Takeaways:
- Fires started by Hezbollah rockets and drones ignited and spread throughout northern Israel early this week, posing a new challenge for the Israeli military and leading to public demands for action against the Iranian terror group.
- The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued a statement Monday evening:
- Over the past few hours, the IDF has been conducting a situational assessment with Israel Fire and Rescue Services to allocate additional means, forces, and firefighting capabilities in order to extinguish the fires in northern Israel.
- At this stage, IDF reserve soldiers, engineer tools, mechanical equipment, fire trucks, and fire tanks were reinforced.
- An IDF Home Front Command’s fire battalion is currently operating at the scene and assisting fire and rescue forces.
- The forces gained control over the locations of fire, and at this stage, no human life is at risk.
- The Commanding Officer of the Northern Command is currently arriving at the Kiryat Shmona Fire Station.
- Six IDF reservist soldiers were lightly injured as a result of smoke inhalation and transferred to a hospital to receive medical treatment. Their families have been notified.
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Important Takeaways:
- The Volcano Alert Level for ground-based hazards was raised from watch to warning, and the Aviation Color Code was changed from orange to red after the new eruption began around 12:30 a.m. local time (6:30 a.m. ET). Those levels have since been lowered.
- According to an alert from the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO), the Volcano Alert Level for ground-based hazards was raised from watch to warning, and the Aviation Color Code was changed from orange to red after the new eruption began around 12:30 a.m. local time (6:30 a.m. ET).
- About 8:30 a.m. local time (2:30 p.m. ET), the USGS lowered the Volcano Alert Level to a watch and the Aviation Color Code to orange. Scientists said the remote nature and low volume of the eruption prompted a lowering of alerts.
- The HVO said it would continue to monitor Kīlauea closely for signs of increasing or decreasing activity and would provide updates.
- Hazards associated with the current eruption include the release of toxic volcanic gas, which can have far-reaching effects downwind.
- In addition, vog has been observed downwind of Kīlauea and could create the potential for airborne health hazards to residents and visitors in the area, as well as cause damage to crops and other plants and injure animals.
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Important Takeaways:
- A volcano belched a plume of ash and steam into the night sky in the central Philippines in a powerful explosion that sent more than 700 people fleeing to evacuation camps.
- The explosion of Mount Kanlaon Monday night on Negros Island triggered sirens across Canlaon, a city of nearly 60,000 people south of the volcano.
- Hundreds fled in government trucks to safety, Canlaon Mayor Jose Chubasco Cardenas said, adding more than 150 people were in two evacuation centers while others moved to relatives’ homes away from the volcano. No casualties were reported
- The eruption prompted authorities to raise an alert level to two in a five-step warning system, indicating a “moderate level of volcanic unrest.” Kanlaon is one of the country’s 24 most-active volcanoes.
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Important Takeaways:
- Phoenix and Las Vegas are among the cities that will experience blazing heat in the West this week — and the widespread hot and dry conditions will escalate the wildfire threat across the region.
- The combination of a bulge in the jet stream, high pressure building at most levels of the atmosphere and a storm offshore of California will allow the heat to build without any shower or thunderstorm activity for about 50 million people in the West.
- “Sacramento, California, will challenge the daily record high temperature of 103 F by Tuesday, with a current forecast that would match the record set in 1935,”
- Farther south, in Fresno, California, temperatures are projected to be around 105 F
- In Las Vegas, temperatures are forecast to hit 108 on Wednesday, 111 on Thursday and 110 on Friday.
- Temperatures are forecast to reach at least 110 degrees in Phoenix from Wednesday to Friday.
- According to the United States Drought Monitor, more extensive and deeper soil drought conditions are expanding over parts of the interior Southwest, especially in New Mexico and parts of West Texas.
- Recent heavy rain in much of the Northwest will keep the risk of wildfires low in the short term.
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Important Takeaways:
- Rather more jarring is that the Biden administration, and therefore taxpayer money, is also funding the protests, through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
- “U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Vice Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference and Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee… discussed oversight findings from the EPW Committee that revealed a $50 million grant was awarded from the EPA through the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to ‘Climate Justice Alliance,’ a group that engages in pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic activities.” — US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, May 21, 2024.
- “[We] went to the website of Climate Justice Alliance. This is what we found on the website that our taxpayer dollars are going to organizations such as this. This, at the bottom, is a picture of the bulldozer that went through the fence when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.” — Senator Shelley Moore Capito, May 21, 2024.
- The People’s Forum’s executive director Manolo De Los Santos called for the complete destruction of the United States at the conference to great applause: “We have to bring down this empire with one million cuts, and those one million cuts have to come from every sector of struggle in this room.”
- Terrorists and their billionaire, as well as less-affluent supporters, are actively conspiring to destroy the US with the backing of foreign powers — and very little, if anything, is being done to stop it.
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Important Takeaways:
- NATO is drawing up plans to send American troops to the frontlines of Europe in the event of an all-out conflict with Russia, it has been revealed.
- New ‘land corridors’ are being carved out to quickly funnel soldiers through central Europe without local bureaucratic impediments, allowing NATO forces to pounce in an instant should Putin’s devastating war in Ukraine move further west.
- The plans are said to include contingencies in case of Russian bombardment, letting troops sweep into the Balkans via corridors in Italy, Greece and Turkey, or towards Russia’s northern border via Scandinavia, officials told The Telegraph.
- Tensions have ratcheted up in recent weeks, with Russian President Vladimir Putin openly acknowledging the ‘possibility’ of ‘a full-scale Third World War’ as he threatens ‘fatal consequences’ for western allies allowing Ukraine use of their weapons on Russian soil.
- But amid warnings from Norway’s top general that Europe only has two to three years to prepare before Russia could realistically attack the bloc, NATO is said to be exploring possible countermeasures.
- NATO leaders agreed last year to prepare 300,000 troops to be kept in a state of high readiness to defend the bloc in case of an attack on a member state – just under half the force Napoleon sent to Russia in his disastrous 1812 campaign.
- Russia meanwhile continues to amass forces. The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) thinktank assessed that the Russian military began 2023 with a ‘highly disorganized force in Ukraine’ of around 360,000 troops, rising to 410,000 by the summer.
- By the beginning of this year, they reported, there were 470,000 troops in occupied territories.
- French President Emmanuel Macron has urged NATO unity against a belligerent Russian aggressor, warning ‘the rules of the game has changed’ in a recent speech in Paris.
- ‘The fact that war has returned to European soil, and that it is being waged by a nuclear-armed power, changes everything,’ he told an audience at the Sorbonne late in April.
- Macron warned that Europe is ‘not armed against the risks we face’ abroad and urged his allies on the continent to avoid overreliance on the US for security.
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Important Takeaways:
- Britain is engaged in a “gray war” with Russia, but neither the authorities nor the public are taking the situation seriously enough, the former head of the famed spy agency MI6, Richard Dearlove, has warned.
- The UK military isn’t getting enough money to be able to counter the “threats” posed by Moscow and Beijing, Richard Dearlove, who led the British Secret Intelligence Service between 1999 and 2004, said in an interview with Politico on Friday.
- The statement followed last week’s announcement of the UK’s budget for the next financial year, in which there was no increase in defense spending. It remains at 2% of the country’s GDP.
- “If you stopped anyone in the street here in the UK and asked them whether they thought Britain is at war, they’d look at you as if you were mad. But we are at war — we’re engaged in a gray war with Russia, and I am trying to remind people of that,” the former spy chief said.
- The British authorities have “got to make some tough choices, and I’m afraid the tough choices are in front of us right now. We should be spending at least 2.5%” on defense, he insisted.
- “We urgently need to be building more ships. We need a much bigger navy. And we need more boots on the ground, for God’s sake,” Dearlove stressed.
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Important Takeaways:
- A group of OpenAI insiders is blowing the whistle on what they say is a culture of recklessness and secrecy at the San Francisco artificial intelligence company, which is racing to build the most powerful A.I. systems ever created.
- The members say OpenAI, which started as a nonprofit research lab and burst into public view with the 2022 release of ChatGPT, is putting a priority on profits and growth as it tries to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., the industry term for a computer program capable of doing anything a human can.
- They also claim that OpenAI has used hardball tactics to prevent workers from voicing their concerns about the technology, including restrictive nondisparagement agreements that departing employees were asked to sign.
- The group published an open letter on Tuesday calling for leading A.I. companies, including OpenAI, to establish greater transparency and more protections for whistle-blowers.
- Kokotajlo, 31, joined OpenAI in 2022 as a governance researcher and was asked to forecast A.I. progress. He was not, to put it mildly, optimistic.
- In his previous job at an A.I. safety organization, he predicted that A.G.I. might arrive in 2050. But after seeing how quickly A.I. was improving, he shortened his timelines. Now he believes there is a 50 percent chance that A.G.I. will arrive by 2027 — in just three years.
- He also believes that the probability that advanced A.I. will destroy or catastrophically harm humanity — a grim statistic often shortened to “p(doom)” in A.I. circles — is 70 percent.
- Eventually, Mr. Kokotajlo said, he became so worried that, last year, he told Mr. Altman that the company should “pivot to safety” and spend more time and resources guarding against A.I.’s risks rather than charging ahead to improve its models. He said that Mr. Altman had claimed to agree with him, but that nothing much changed.
- In April, he quit. In an email to his team, he said he was leaving because he had “lost confidence that OpenAI will behave responsibly” as its systems approach human-level intelligence.
- “The world isn’t ready, and we aren’t ready,” Mr. Kokotajlo wrote. “And I’m concerned we are rushing forward regardless and rationalizing our actions.”
- “There needs to be some sort of democratically accountable, transparent governance structure in charge of this process,” Mr. Kokotajlo said. “Instead of just a couple of different private companies racing with each other, and keeping it all secret.”
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Important Takeaways:
- On October 7, Hamas had a Plan A and a Plan B.
- Plan A was to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. Plan B was to pull back, stage ambushes and cry genocide while making up fake casualties and staging atrocities until its Islamist and leftist allies managed to save it while using hostages and their bodies as negotiating leverage.
- Phase 1. Hamas frees some surviving female hostages and returns the bodies of the others in return for Israel releasing hundreds of terrorists. Then Hamas retakes control over populated areas in Gaza.
- Phase 2. Endless negotiations for the possible return of the rest of the hostages as Hamas secures its grip on Gaza once again.
- Phase 3: US sends billions to Hamas to “rebuild” Gaza in exchange for some bodies of hostages.
- Phase 4: Hamas plots its next attack.
- The plan, presented as Israel’s proposal, is really Egypt and Qatar’s proposal overlaid on Israel, and now put forward by Biden and endorsed by Obama, whose people are running foreign policy in this administration.
- The Biden administration will decide if Israel gets to defend itself based on assurances from Qatar, a state sponsor of Hamas, and Egypt, which was caught red-handed with tunnels leading into Rafah to Hamas.
- This isn’t an Israeli deal or an American deal. It’s a deal by Islamic terrorists for Islamic terrorists. And Obama and Biden, two men who have done more to empower Islamic terrorists than almost anyone in the White House except Jimmy Carter, have put their seal on it. It’s a bad deal for America, for Israel and for civilization.
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