This is The Prophecy. The Prophecy is much more than seeing into the future. For The Prophecy sees without the limits of time. For The Prophecy sees what is, what was, and what always shall be.
New York earthquake: City at risk of ‚dangerous shaking from far away‘ Joshua Nevett Published 30th April 2018 SOME of New York City’s tallest skyscrapers are at risk of being shaken by seismic waves triggered by powerful earthquakes from miles outside the city, a natural disaster expert has warned. Researchers believe that a powerful earthquake, magnitude 5 or greater, could cause significant damage to large swathes of NYC, a densely populated area dominated by tall buildings. A series of large fault lines that run underneath NYC’s five boroughs, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx and Staten Island, are capable of triggering large earthquakes. Some experts have suggested that NYC is susceptible to at least a magnitude 5 earthquake once every 100 years. The last major earthquake measuring over magnitude 5.0 struck NYC in 1884 – meaning another one of equal size is “overdue” by 34 years, according their prediction model. Natural disaster researcher Simon Day, of University College London, agrees with the conclusion that NYC may be more at risk from earthquakes than is usually thought. EARTHQUAKE RISK: New York is susceptible to seismic shaking from far-away tremors But the idea of NYC being “overdue” for an earthquake is “invalid”, not least because the “very large number of faults” in the city have individually low rates of activity, he said. The model that predicts strong earthquakes based on timescale and stress build-up on a given fault has been “discredited”, he said. What scientists should be focusing on, he said, is the threat of large and potentially destructive earthquakes from “much greater distances”. The dangerous effects of powerful earthquakes from further away should be an “important feature” of any seismic risk assessment of NYC, Dr Day said. GETTY THE BIG APPLE: An aerial view of Lower Manhattan at dusk in New York City USGS RISK: A seismic hazard map of New York produced by USGS “New York is susceptible to seismic shaking from earthquakes at much greater distances” Dr Simon Day, natural disaster researcher This is because the bedrock underneath parts of NYC, including Long Island and Staten Island, cannot effectively absorb the seismic waves produced by earthquakes. “An important feature of the central and eastern United States is, because the crust there is old and cold, and contains few recent fractures that can absorb seismic waves, the rate of seismic reduction is low. Central regions of NYC, including Manhattan, are built upon solid granite bedrock; therefore the amplification of seismic waves that can shake buildings is low. But more peripheral areas, such as Staten Island and Long Island, are formed by weak sediments, meaning seismic hazard in these areas is “very likely to be higher”, Dr Day said. “Thus, like other cities in the eastern US, New York is susceptible to seismic shaking from earthquakes at much greater distances than is the case for cities on plate boundaries such as Tokyo or San Francisco, where the crustal rocks are more fractured and absorb seismic waves more efficiently over long distances,” Dr Day said. In the event of a large earthquake, dozens of skyscrapers, including Chrysler Building, the Woolworth Building and 40 Wall Street, could be at risk of shaking. “The felt shaking in New York from the Virginia earthquake in 2011 is one example,” Dr Day said. On that occasion, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake centered 340 miles south of New York sent thousands of people running out of swaying office buildings. USGS FISSURES: Fault lines in New York City have low rates of activity, Dr Day said NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the city was “lucky to avoid any major harm” as a result of the quake, whose epicenter was near Louisa, Virginia, about 40 miles from Richmond. “But an even more impressive one is the felt shaking from the 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquakes in the central Mississippi valley, which was felt in many places across a region, including cities as far apart as Detroit, Washington DC and New Orleans, and in a few places even further afield including,” Dr Day added. “So, if one was to attempt to do a proper seismic hazard assessment for NYC, one would have to include potential earthquake sources over a wide region, including at least the Appalachian mountains to the southwest and the St Lawrence valley to the north and east.”
An Israeli border police officer aims his weapon as another prepares to fire tear gas canisters towards Palestinian demonstrators protesting against Israeli settlements near Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank [Raneen Sawafta/Reuters]
Settlers and politicians march towards Nablus to demand that the outpost be legalised while the Israeli army shoots a teen in Jericho.
Published On 10 Apr 202310 Apr 2023
A Palestinian child has been killed by Israeli forces in the Aqabet Jaber refugee camp in Jericho, as a settler march to an illegal outpost near the occupied city of Nablus brought more violence to the West Bank.
Mohammad Fayez Balhan, who was 15 years old, was shot in the head, chest and stomach on Monday.
“They shot him in the head,” the teen’s aunt Maysoon said. “What is going to happen to our people? What will happen to us?”
The Israeli military said that it had been operating in Jericho’s Aqabat Jabr refugee camp in an attempt to apprehend Palestinians it suspected of attacks against Israelis, and that its forces had responded to being fired at by the suspects.
Settler march
The incident comes as the Israeli army guards thousands of Israeli settlers marching to the abandoned illegal outpost of Evyatar to call on the Israeli government to legalise the outpost and to “denounce the increased attacks on settlements in recent weeks”.
The mother of two Israeli sisters killed last week in one such attack died from her injuries, hospital officials said on Monday.
Thousands of settlers, led by ministers in Israel’s far-right government, have taken part in the march, heavily protected by Israeli forces who closed the march’s path to Palestinians, although confrontations were still reported, with at least two Palestinians injured by rubber-coated bullets, and dozens of others treated for inhaling tear gas.
Abu Shammala added that the Palestinians had burned tyes and threw stones, and that groups of settlers had begun to leave the site of the march demanding the legalisation of the outpost, which lasted for three hours.
“There is still a heavy deployment of Israeli soldiers, as it is estimated that about 1,000 Israeli soldiers were deployed to secure the settlers’ march, according to Israeli sources,” Abu Shammala said.
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it considered the march “a dangerous escalation and provocation of the Palestinian people, and an extension of the incitement calls of the Israeli right and the fascist right to deepen settlement at the expense of Palestinian lands, and it has dangerous repercussions on the situation in the arena of conflict”.
The march started from the Zaatara military checkpoint towards the evacuated Evyatar outpost on Jabal Sabih in the town of Bita, south of Nablus, in the north of the West Bank.
Last year, Israeli settlers established the illegal Evyatar settlement outpost on private Palestinian lands on Jabal Sabih. The Israeli authorities decided to evacuate it after months of Palestinian protests.
Meanwhile, tensions at Al-Aqsa Mosque continued for the fifth day in a row as a group of settlers stormed the courtyards of the compound early on Monday under the protection of Israeli forces. Previously, Israeli forces prevented Palestinian worshippers below the age of 50 from entering Al-Aqsa Mosque to perform the dawn Fajr prayer.
The forces tightened their presence at the Al-Aqsa gates before opening them after the start of the prayer.
In light of the developments, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant decided to deploy security reinforcements in the Tel Aviv area starting Monday after the Israeli army conducted an assessment of the security situation there.
While the government of the time began digging itself into mountainsides and organizing post-atomic-war lines of political succession, real-estate ads promised “good bomb immunity.” Newsweek reported then on a growing corporate interest in underground facilities, while in upstate New York, an enterprising entrepreneur set up vaults for corporate records deep in an abandoned iron mine. Everywhere, in those years, a world-ending bunker mentality was encouraged as, from private bomb shelters to communal ones, Americans were urged to prepare for a hellish descent into the national basement.
At least in its imagination, this country was digging in, as memorialized in a 1959 Life magazine article celebrating one couple’s honeymoon of “unbroken togetherness” — 14 days in a 22-ton steel and concrete private bomb shelter 12 feet underground. The possibility of world’s end in a nuclear Armageddon, then part of growing up (including school “duck and cover” drills), made a deep impression on me, as it did on TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan. Today, as the nuclear moment once again grows more perilous, while the planet slowly heats to the boiling point, let her take you through her world of atomic peril and ask the obvious question: How many “minutes” from midnight are we now? Tom
I’m not a TikTok person. I’m too old. But when I finally ventured onto that popular but much-maligned app, which traffics in short videos and hot takes, I was surprised to find many videos about the Doomsday Clock. It’s nothing like a conventional timepiece, of course. It’s meant to show how close humanity has come to nuclear Armageddon — to the proverbial “midnight.”
And no need to look further than TikTok to see what happened. Amid all the tweens trying to jumpstart the next viral craze, a 30-second video features five representatives of the Bulletin‘s science and security board frozen in place as a voice intones: “We move the clock forward, the closest it has ever been to midnight.” Then two of them pull a cloth off it and add, “It is now 90 seconds to midnight.”
On TikTok, versions of this video got hundreds of thousands of “likes” and thousands of comments. Mind you, that’s a blip compared to the videos of even minor celebrities. Still, I found myself scrolling through the comments, many of them versions of “Does this mean I don’t have to pay my mortgage/bills/ taxes?” Others had lines like “Someone call the Avengers” or asked if it had anything to do with Taylor Swift’s Midnights album. This being the Internet, there was all too much cursing and all too many oblique emojis, as well as people poking fun at the awkward staging and long stretch of silence in the video.
Mixed with such inanity were expressions of genuine fear, confusion, and distress over the possible immanence of nuclear war. That is, of course, what the clock, as a salient piece of public art, is supposed to do: generate conversation, spark inquiry, and lead to action. As artist Sam Heydt observes, the Doomsday Clock should remind us that “the edge is closer than we think. In a time marked by mass extinction, diminishing resources, global pandemic, and climate change, the future isn’t what it used to be.”
Tick, Tock Indeed!
One hallmark of TikTok is reaction videos where creators split the screen to show their response. In one, a young white woman reacts this way: “Are we supposed to be scared? My generation is never going to have retirement, never going to own a home. I’m living in a van.” I get it: there’s so much that seems more immediate in our world: school shootings, police violence, bank collapses, and inflation, to name just a few. Who even has time to notice now that the future isn’t what it used to be?
The clock has never been so close to midnight and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is using every tool at its disposal to keep clanging the alarm bell. It even has a Doomsday Clock playlist on Spotify, while its 90-second clock announcement was briefly front-page news at the Washington Post (the front of their Science section, anyway) and the New York Times. Still, we live in such an atomized (excuse me for that!) and polarized media environment that it’s increasingly hard to penetrate the noise cloud.
Nuclear weapons, once a top-of-the-line issue for so many Americans, have faded into, at best, a background hum. So, I wonder, what happens after the Doomsday Clock reaches midnight? What’s next for that metaphor? Or as the seconds are shaved away amid a war in Ukraine that could always go nuclear, is it time for an entirely new metaphor, something (excuse me again!) more explosive?
Then, of course, there’s that other great danger to us all, climate change, which, it seems, doesn’t even need a metaphor. The alarm of raging wildfires, unbelievable floods, megadroughts, fiercer storms, fast-melting glaciers, and disappearing rivers leaves the very idea of metaphors in the dust. Climate scientists are blunt to the point of bruising on this. What part of “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all” don’t you understand? That, of course, is what the recently released report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asserted with “high confidence.” Tick, tock, indeed!
Come to think of it, maybe nuclear weapons don’t need a new metaphor either. After all, we already have the mushroom cloud, the haunted eyes of that child in Hiroshima, the shadow of a dead person left on that rock, and the unnatural silence that followed the wall of sound and flame incinerating thousands of human beings in an instant. That’s no exaggeration. That was Hiroshima in 1945.
In 2023, when we consume news and images in almost real-time, it’s hard to imagine that the now-iconic images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were censored and treated as contraband by our government at the time. It wasn’t until 1952 that the searing images of photographer Yoshito Matsushige were finally published, first in the Japanese magazine Asahi Gurafu and then in Life magazine. And there’s so much that none of us will ever see. After all, Matsushige spent 10 hours walking through his devastated city of Hiroshima but took only seven pictures. “It was such a cruel site,” he said later, “that I couldn’t bring myself to press the shutter.”
It’s Three Minutes to Midnight and You Want to Do What?
I recently met a group of college students from all over the country. To my shock, none of them seemed to have heard of nuclear weapons before I mentioned them. I couldn’t relate. I’m no Martyl Langsdorf, but thanks to my family, I’ve grown up with the Doomsday Clock in a way few other people have. I don’t remember a day of my life that I haven’t thought about nukes and this country’s ability to literally obliterate humanity.
Some dads say things like “money doesn’t grow on trees” when their kids ask for permission to see a film. My dad was Phil Berrigan, a nuclear abolitionist and peace activist. So, he would say: “It’s three minutes to nuclear midnight and you want to go to the movies?” Imagine living as if your personal choices made a difference when it came to nuclear war. That’s certainly how my parents and their friends in the Catholic Left lived and how a small subculture continues to live today.
My mom and dad, Elizabeth McAlister and Philip Berrigan, a former nun and a priest,refused to pay “war taxes,” trespassed onto military installations to protest our world-ending ways, held vigils at weapons manufacturing plants, and protested during the stockholder meetings of giant weapons-making corporations, while taking care of the victims of skewed U.S. policies by organizing soup lines and opening their doors to the unhoused.
By reminding me of where the hands on the Doomsday Clock stood at any moment, my dad helped me integrate concerns about nuclear weapons into my daily life. He helped me measure out the energy I had for any worry. I mean, why fork over $8 (now $28?) at a movie box office to get scared by a horror story on the celluloid screen when the real world is scary enough for free?
By 1949, as the Cold War heated up and the Soviet Union got the bomb, the hands on that clock were moved to three minutes to midnight, code for distinctly too close! As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists wrote after Russia exploded its first nuclear device, “We think that Americans have reason to be deeply alarmed and prepare for grave decisions.” The nuclear arms race was off and running.
In 1953, after the U.S. and the Soviets developed and tested massive hydrogen bombs, those hands were moved to two minutes.
In 1960, sustained international cooperation and the successful negotiation of arms control treaties between the superpower rivals compelled the scientists to move the clock hands back to seven minutes to midnight.
In 1963, in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis and the terror of near-nuclear war, the U.S. and USSR signed new agreements, ending atmospheric nuclear tests. The world sighed with relief as the clock was moved back to 12 minutes.
But in 1968, as the Vietnam War fanned global tensions, the Soviets expanded their nuclear arsenal, and France and China both developed nuclear weapons, it was at seven minutes again.
1969 brought another sigh of relief as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) was signed and the nations with such weaponry committed to future nuclear disarmament talks. The clock inched back to 10 minutes.
In 1972, when the U.S. and Soviet Union signed the disarmament agreement that came to be known as the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, or SALT, the clock made it to 12 minutes.
My Life and the Doomsday Clock
In 1974, however, India tested a nuclear device painfully code-named “Smiling Buddha” and that minute hand was moved to nine again. I was born just a few weeks before that Indian test, which spurred neighbor and rival Pakistan to launch its own nuclear program. By the following summer, my parents would carry my infant brother and me as they marched with friends, hauling full-sized replicas of the nuclear weapons that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the streets of Washington, every day for almost a week to mark the 30th anniversary of the atomic bombings.
In 1981, as the Soviets continued their war in Afghanistan and Americans elected Ronald Reagan as president, the clock ominously moved to four minutes. I was seven and my brother six when our father was sentenced to 10 years in jail (later reduced) for his part in a 1980 action. A group that called itself the Plowshares Eight had walked into the General Electric Space Technology Center in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, with the early morning rush of workers. There, they symbolically disarmed some model nuclear weapons. Their trial was later made into a movie starring Martin Sheen (with my dad playing himself).
In 1984, the clock was moved to three minutes to midnight as President Reagan pumped money into Star Wars technology as a way to win a future nuclear war. Just a month after I turned 10, my mom went on trial for her Plowshares action a year earlier at Griffiss Air Force base in upstate New York. That summer, my family and their friends also tried to maintain a round-the-clock presence at the Pentagon concourse.
In 1988, the Bulletin‘s scientists reset the Doomsday Clock at six minutes to midnight as the work of a growing global antinuclear movement started to deliver dividends in agreements to cut back the number of deployed long-range nuclear weapons. That summer, when I was 14, we built a rough, shed-like house and brought it to the Pentagon Parade Ground to call for “homes, not bombs.” We stayed all night and watched the rats take over the Pentagon grounds as it grew dark.
By 1990, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the clock was readjusted to 10 minutes to midnight, the furthest from disaster since 1968.
In 1991, in the wake of the Cold War, the U.S. and Russia signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and began to cut back their nuclear arsenals as the Soviet Union faded into history. Appropriately enough, the Bulletin moved the clock to a breathtaking 17 minutes to midnight, writing: “the illusion that tens of thousands of nuclear weapons are a guarantor of national security has been stripped away.”
In 1995, a close call and human error led the scientists to nudge the clock to 14 minutes and, in 1998, nine minutes, while calling on the United States, Russia, and other nuclear states to “fully commit” to “control the spread of nuclear weapons.”
In 2002, in response to the 9/11 terror attacks and growing concerns about loose nuclear materials, the science and security board adjusted the clock to seven minutes. My father died that December, after a lifetime of anti-war activism. He spent the last year of his life trying to jumpstart a “national strike” for nuclear disarmament.
In 2007, after North Korea tested its first nuclear device, the Bulletin moved the clock ominously to five minutes to midnight and the science and security board added human-made climate change to the doomsday formula. In that announcement, they wrote, “As we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age and at the onset of an era of unprecedented climate change, our way of thinking about the uses and control of technologies must change… The clock is ticking.”
In 2010, the Bulletininched the minute hand back up to six, thanks to the Copenhagen accord on climate change and new negotiations between the U.S. and Russia on arms reductions.
Between six minutes and five minutes to nuclear midnight, I got married, pledging to work for the abolition of such weaponry with my husband, who grew up in southeastern Connecticut, protesting at submarine christenings and launches at a U.S. naval base on the Thames River.
Thanks to new North Korea aggressiveness and general global intransigence on climate-change commitments, 2012 saw a modest drop to five minutes. That was a “time” that took on a new kind of urgency for me after the Sandy Hook school shootings that killed six teachers and 20 kids about the same age as my dear stepdaughter in nearby Newtown, Connecticut. Her school beefed up security in response, checking IDs and barring parents from the building. Every day, when I carried my newborn son to pick up his sister, I had to go through an elaborate process at dismissal time in a state of near panic, flinching at any loud noise and feeling both the fragility of my kindergartener’s life and the threat to all life from nuclear weapons. After all, the Sandy Hook killer had but a small arsenal compared to what the United States threatened the world with every day.
By 2015, Russia and the U.S. had both announced new spending to “modernize” their nuclear arsenals and, in climate terms, it was the hottest year on record. The Bulletin ominously moved the hands of the clock to three minutes to midnight for the first time since the Cold War year of 1984.
By then, I was the mother of two toddlers, born in 2012 and 2014, and my stepdaughter was 9. Those three wonders helped me stay focused on the beauty of each day and the extraordinary web of life that the growing nuclear arsenals on this planet eternally hold hostage. I recommitted myself then to taking the nuclear threat seriously, but without hectoring my kids about the Doomsday Clock the way my dad had done with me.
In 2017, the Bulletin moved those clock hands 30 seconds closer to midnight, its first half-minute move ever in response to President Donald Trump’s inflammatory nuclear rhetoric, soaring Pentagon budgets, and new threats to the global climate.
A year later, in 2018, we lost another 30 seconds and the clock hit two minutes to midnight, as the Bulletin pointed out that international diplomacy had been “reduced to name-calling, U.S.-Russia relations featured more conflict than cooperation, the Iran deal was imperiled, and greenhouse gas emissions rose anew.”
Though no longer a kid, I still found myself watching a parent being hauled off to jail. This time, it was my mother, then 79, arrested for trespassing with six friends at the Kings Bay Naval Base in Georgia in a move to symbolically disarm the Trident nuclear submarines there.
In 2020, the Bulletin’s clock moved to 100 seconds to midnight, while citing the two existential dangers of climate change and nuclear weapons in its press statement.
Over the next two years, the magazine did something new. It didn’t change the hands on the clock but issued press releases about why they remained at 100 seconds. Meanwhile, in 2021, the kids and I helped make 68 signs thanking each of the nations that had adopted the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. My kids poured their hearts into those works of art, adorning them with silver paint and sparkles. That treaty celebration day in New London where we live was cold and windy and the two little ones were almost hidden behind their signs, while they asked me lots of questions about Honduras and the island of Nauru which I gamely tried to answer without resorting to Wikipedia. An adage attributed to Mark Twain came to my mind then: “War is how Americans learn geography.” I smiled, thinking that my kids were learning geography through protest and peacemaking.
And then, this January, the Bulletin‘s science and security board again shaved the time by seconds, announcing that it was now 90 seconds to midnight.
What’s Next (Or Do I Mean Last)?
In the 76 years since its creation, the minute and second hands of the Doomsday Clock have moved 25 times, back and forth — tick, tock, tick, tock — from 17 minutes to midnight at its furthest from imminent danger to the present 90 seconds to midnight. What lies on the other side of midnight?
On a normal clock, 12:01 would simply begin a new day, a new chance to learn from the past and adjust your path to the future. The question now is whether such a 12:01, a future without the Doomsday Clock, without the existential threats of nuclear weapons and climate change is even imaginable.
This picture, taken early on April 7, 2023, shows explosions in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip during Israeli air strikes on the Palestinian enclave. | Yousef MASOUD/AFP via Getty Images
Israeli forces struck Hamas targets in Lebanon and Gaza Friday following a rocket attack on the Jewish nation as residents celebrated the Passover holiday.
The military response came early Friday morning as Israel Defense Forces (IDF) struck targets located in southern Lebanon described as “terrorist infrastructures belonging to Hamas” after rocket fire rained down on cities in northern Israel earlier this week.
Israeli jet fighters hit 10 targets linked to Hamas in various parts of Gaza, including tunnels and arms manufacturing sites, according to Reuters.
No casualties were reported. Officials say as many as 34 rockets were launched Thursday from Lebanon, 25 of which were intercepted.
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The rocket attack marked the most significant escalation since 2006 when Israel went to war against the Lebanon-based Shia militant group Hezbollah.
Calling the latest escalation a “complex period,” IDF Chief of the General Staff Hertzi Halevi said the IDF remains “strong and will continue to use force as much as necessary, against any enemy and in any arena, both during the holidays and during times of internal public debate.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the IDF would continue working through the Passover holiday — which this year coincides with the Muslim holiday of Ramadan — to ensure Israel’s security.
Early Friday, Netanyahu told reporters: “Our enemies are putting us to the test again. And once again, they will discover, even in this test, that we stand together, united, confident in our righteousness. And we will act together, with the complete backing of our forces, the IDF and the security forces, who work even on the holidays to ensure the security of our citizens and the security of our homeland.”
On Wednesday, more than 300 people were arrested or removed in a clash between Israeli police and Palestinians at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the biblical site of the Temple Mount, the second such clash this week.
Less than 24 hours before that clash, masked protesters locked themselves inside the mosque and had to be removed by police.
“Israel’s raid into Al-Aqsa mosque, its assault on worshippers, is a slap to recent U.S. efforts which tried to create calm and stability during the month of Ramadan,” a spokesperson for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told Reuters.
Palestinians accused Israeli forces of raiding the compound before prayers were over.
Israeli author and Bible teacher Amir Tsarfati said he does not believe Israel has any intention of taking over the Temple Mount, which is currently under Jordanian custodianship. He accused the hundreds of Palestinians of trying to provoke Israeli authorities by violating the rules of the Al-Asqa mosque and planning to stay their overnight.
“Every year, it’s same. I don’t understand why anyone around the world is buying this,” Tsarfati said in a video posted to Twitter. “We have no business taking over the Temple Mount. When the Jewish temple will be built, there will be no Muslim opposition, trust me. … Until then, all we want is for them to finish their prayers and go home.”
Tsarfati accused the Palestinians of desecrating their own Temple Mount and “using it as a playground for political purposes.”
“Now Hamas, as the ‘guardian of Jerusalem,’ fires rockets from Gaza. And today, just a few minutes ago, Hezbollah, must have joined them, as I am getting reports about interception above the border with Lebanon,” he said. “It’s a ritual every Ramadan that they use this month to creative provocations to create some sort of conflict in order to bring about the Palestinian issue back to the table. It has nothing to do with religious purposes.”
Tsarfati said that he doesn’t believe Israel will need to invade to take Al-Asqa from the Muslims. He cited the End Times war described by the prophet Ezekiel, which will ultimately pave the way for a third temple to be built.
“I believe that the earthquake that God will send at the end of the Ezekiel war will destroy everything and that will allow the Antichrist to allow Israel to build a temple,” he said. “I don’t think we need to invade and take anything from anybody.”
He said the rockets flying in from Lebanon and Gaza represent “an inch before a war.”
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The U.S. Navy has deployed a guided-missile submarine capable of carrying up to 154 Tomahawk missiles to the Middle East, a spokesman said Saturday, in what appeared to be a show of force toward Iran following recent tensions.
The Navy rarely acknowledges the location or deployment of submarines. Cmdr. Timothy Hawkins, a spokesman for the 5th Fleet based in the Gulf nation of Bahrain, declined to comment on the submarine’s mission or what had prompted the deployment.
He said the nuclear-powered submarine, based out of Kings Bay, Georgia, passed through the Suez Canal on Friday. “It is capable of carrying up to 154 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles and is deployed to U.S. 5th Fleet to help ensure regional maritime security and stability,” Hawkins said.
The 5th Fleet patrols the crucial Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which 20% of all oil transits. Its region includes the Bab el-Mandeb Strait off Yemen and the Red Sea stretching up to the Suez Canal, the Egyptian waterway linking the Mideast to the Mediterranean Sea.
The U.S., the U.K. and Israel have accused Iran of targeting oil tankers and commercial ships in recent years, allegations denied by Tehran. The U.S. Navy has also reported a series of tense encounters at sea with Iranian forces that it said were being recklessly aggressive.
Last month, the U.S. launched airstrikes against Iran-backed forces in Syria after a rocket attack killed a U.S. contractor and wounded seven other Americans in that country’s northeast.
Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from ships or submarines can hit targets up to 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles away). They were famously employed during the opening hours of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and in response to a Syrian chemical weapons attack in 2018.
U.S.-Iranian tensions have soared since then-President Donald Trump withdrew from a 2015 agreement with world powers that provided sanctions relief in return for Iran curbing its nuclear activities and placing them under enhanced surveillance.
The Biden administration’s efforts to restore the agreement hit a wall last year. The tensions have worsened as Iran has supplied attack drones to Russian forces in Ukraine and as Israel and Iran have escalated their yearslong shadow war in the Middle East.
In addition to drawing closer to Moscow, Tehran has sought improved relations with China, which brokered an agreement last month to restore diplomatic ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
A+ A-ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani on Saturday called on Muqtada al-Sadr to start comprehensive talks with Iraqi political parties, seven months after the influential Shiite cleric quit politics.
Barzani arrived in Baghdad on Saturday to attend a couple of events and meetings with Iraqi officials. One event was to commemorate the death of Sadr’s father, Mohamed Baqr al-Sadr, who was killed by the Baathist regime 43 years ago.
“I see this occasion as an opportunity to ask Mr Sayed Muqtada al-Sadr to start comprehensive talks with all the political parties and leaders,” Barzani said in a speech at the event. He said it was an opportunity to strengthen the reform movement and find Iraqi solutions to Iraqi problems.
Iraq held parliamentary elections in October 2021, but political parties could not reach an agreement on who to nominate for the posts of president and prime minister.
After months of wrangling, Sadr, who commands large popular support and whose movement secured the largest share of votes and 73 seats, ordered all of his members to resign from the parliament in June 2022, making the pro-Iran Coordination Framework the largest coalition in the legislature. Sadr then announced in August that he was retiring from politics.
Relations between Sadrists and the Coordination Framework remain tense with Sadr’s supporters opposed to the Framework’s pick for prime minister, Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani, accusing him of being close to former premier Nouri al-Maliki who Sadr blames for endemic corruption while he was in office.
The Kurdish president also met with Fayeq Zeydan, head of the Supreme Judicial Council, and Speaker of Parliament Mohammed al-Halbousi. He is expected to meet with Sudani and Iraqi President Latif Rashid.
In the fall of 1991, I visited Stanislau Shushkevich in his office in the cavernous Belarus Supreme Soviet. I asked the new leader of the one-month-old nation how many nuclear bombs were in Belarus. Shushkevich, a physicist by training, answered: “I have no idea. Ask the Russians. The Soviet Army controls all the nuclear weapons here.”
Fast-forward three decades. Vladimir Putin plans to return nuclear weapons to Belarus this summer. As before, the Kremlin will control the nukes.
The tale of the intervening 30 years can be seen by Iran, North Korea and others as a lesson in the perils of unilateral nuclear disarmament.
The story started out well. From the collapse of the Soviet Union, four nuclear states emerged: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. In 1991, Ukraine was actually the world’s third-largest nuclear power, after Russia and the United States. Ukraine inherited 2,321 nuclear bombs. Kazakhstan had 1,410 — about three times the current estimated arsenal for China. Belarus had 81, comparable to the current estimated arsenal of Israel.
In a masterstroke of international diplomacy, the three former Soviet republics agreed to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Under the terms of the deal, all three countries blew up missile silos and then transferred some missiles and all nuclear weapons to Russia. In return, each of the three countries got a Budapest Memorandum. Finalized in Budapest in December 1994, each document was signed by the relevant national leader and the leaders of the United States, Britain and Russia. Among those attending was Donald M. Blinken, then U.S. ambassador to Hungary. His son, Antony Blinken, now is U.S. secretary of state.
Under the terms of the Budapest memoranda, the U.S., Britain and Russia guaranteed the sovereignty of each nation within its current borders. For Americans, the “loose nukes” nightmare was over. At Pervomaisk, one of the five Soviet Rocket Army missile centers in Ukraine was converted into a Cold War museum. Tourists peered down silos and took elevators to underground command posts.
But in the spring of 2014, Russia ignored Ukraine’s Budapest Memorandum and seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and half of its Donbass region. In response, lawyers in the Obama administration’s State Department said that the Budapest Memorandum was just that: a memorandum, not a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate.
While many Americans saw the Budapest Memorandum as a footnote to history, the message was not lost on the mullahs in Iran or the Kim family in North Korea. A country gave up its nuclear arsenal in return for guarantees on a piece of paper. And then one guarantor invaded the de-nuclearized nation.
Now, Shushkevich’s successor, Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko, is tearing up his Budapest Memorandum. Dependent on Russian President Vladimir Putin for his survival, Lukashenko conducted a “referendum” last year that approved abandoning the nation’s nonnuclear status. For many observers, this is part of Putin’s plan to return to the Soviet era. Then, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan had voting rights in the United Nations, but were totally subservient to Moscow.
Putin’s announcement about stationing nuclear weapons in Belarus came two days after Chinese leader Xi Jinping completed a state visit to Moscow. In their joint communique, Xi and Putin agreed that “All nuclear-weapon states should refrain from deploying nuclear weapons abroad.”
Russia is running out of arms. Photo experts say trainloads of Stalin-era T-54 tanks are being shipped west from a storage depot created in the Russian Far East during the Korean War. Ukrainian forensic experts say that some of the missiles that rained down on Ukraine recently were the same missiles that Ukraine shipped back to Russia in the mid-1990s. Aimed at Ukrainian cities, these missiles carried conventional warheads.
With a major Ukrainian counteroffensive expected shortly, Belarus’ Lukashenko called last week for an immediate, unconditional ceasefire in Ukraine. “It is impossible to defeat a nuclear power,” Lukashenko warned in annual address to Belarussian lawmakers. “If the Russian leadership understands that the situation threatens to cause Russia’s disintegration, it will use the most terrible weapon.” He hailed “the return to Belarus of nuclear weapons withdrawn in the 1990s.”
In Ukraine, some now feel that one-sided nuclear disarmament was a mistake. Three small political parties advocate building nuclear weapons. And former U.S. president Bill Clinton, who signed the Budapest deals for the United States, is having second thoughts.
“I feel a personal stake because I got [Ukraine] to agree to give up their nuclear weapons,” he said in a lengthy interview aired Wednesday on Irish TV RTE. “And none of them believe that Russia would have pulled this stunt if Ukraine still had their weapons.”
“They were afraid to give them up because they thought that’s the only thing that protected them from an expansionist Russia,” Clinton recalled of Ukrainian views 30 years ago on the Budapest Memorandum. “When it became convenient to him, President Putin broke it, and first took Crimea. And I feel terrible about it because Ukraine is a very important country.”
The Prophecy Blog 