Newsroom: War crimes, lies, and the humanity of the Pelosi-Biden alliance

The rules of engagement for orbital warfare are "somewhat immature"

That's how Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir, commander of U.S. Space Forces Indo-Pacific, described the rules of engagement for orbital warfare — which is saying something given the "mature" anything goes RoE in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Gaza-by-proxy.

Mastalir: "When you think about a hostile act or demonstrating hostile intent in space, what does that look like? And do all nations have a shared understanding of what that looks like?"

Tim Sebastian: "You go on supplying them [Israel] with hardware to do these things, you own this operation every bit as much as they do, don't you?"

Nancy Pelosi: "No, we don't. We don't… there's nothing that we have sent since Oct. 7 that has contributed to this brutality."

Pelosi comes off as ancient under Tim Sebastian's questioning: she's confused, arrogant and ignorant of basic history. But consider this: by the time Pelosi entered Congress in 1987, Joe Biden had been serving in the Senate for 15 years!

The compulsion to lie when literally everyone knows you are lying is the defining political pathology of our time — and not just for Pelosi. Biden does it constantly, even when the stakes are astronomical, like his ongoing lies about drone surveillance.

As Pelosi continues to write her own dubious political obituary, consider that for nearly two years of increasing tensions, the Pentagon didn't have direct communications with the Chinese military, after Pelosi's provocative trip to Taiwan in 2022. The hotline was only recently restored.

As I wrote in my Gaza Diary last week, Israel is committing war crimes so brazen and outrageous that no one had even thought of legislating against them. What's more, almost every act of this war can be independently documented, often in real time. The entire war is a crime.

Christopher Lockyear, Secretary General of Médicins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), told the UN Security Council this week that:

"Israeli forces have attacked our convoys, detained our staff, bulldozed our vehicles, hospitals have been bombed and raided. And now for a second time, one of our staff shelters has been hit. This pattern of attacks is either intentional or indicative of reckless incompetence. Our colleagues in Gaza are fearful that as I speak to you today, they will be punished tomorrow…"

A U.S. intelligence assessment of Israel's UNRWA allegations could not verify claims that 10% of UNRWA's Gaza staff are Hamas/PIJ and found with only "low confidence" that some UNRA staff may have participated in the Oct. 7 attack. U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal that Israel hadn't shared the raw intelligence behind its assessments with the U.S., "limiting their ability to reach clearer conclusions." So without having any facts, Biden paused the funding to UNRWA anyway, used the unverified allegations to distract from the ICJ's findings on Israeli genocide, and later supported a bill, passed by the Senate, that would permanently ban US funding for UNRWA. In other words, guilty until proven you're not a Palestinian.

Will Judith Miller be the presenter?

According to a report by Human Rights Watch, nearly 30% of Ukraine's territory is embedded with land mines, an area about the size of the state of Florida.

The eastern Ukrainian city of Avdiivka, besieged since October, finally fell last weekend, after what one Ukrainian observer called "the largest-ever frontal assault with columns of armored vehicles seen from Russia thus far." The retreat was so rushed that Ukraine reportedly lost as many as 1000 troops and left several hundred wounded soldiers behind.

As congressional funding for the Ukraine war runs out, the US is using Estonia as a cut-out for getting money to Ukraine. Most recently, the Biden administration transferred $500,000 in forfeited Russian money to Estonia, which according to a Justice Department press release is "for the purpose of providing aid to Ukraine. The funds were forfeited by the United States following the breakup of an illegal procurement network attempting to import into Russia a high-precision, U.S.-origin machine tool with uses in the defense and nuclear proliferation sectors."

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the world's top oil companies have made $281 billion in profits.

Whether British-made weapons work anymore is, fortunately, another question. Last month, HMS Vanguard attempted to test-launch one of its (unarmed) nuclear ICBMs, which crashed after its booster rockets failed. This was the second consecutive failure of