John R. Lott Jr. reports for RealClearInvestigations that, contrary to conventional wisdom that the U.S. is the world's most violent developed nation, victimization survey data show that Australia and Canada – both praised for strict gun laws – actually have significantly higher…
[HotAir] It's true that America has a murder rate higher than our peers, but the picture changes dramatically when you look at violent mostly peaceful crime rates overall.
Even in murder stats, the overall picture is quite different than you would suppose.
Regarding homicide, the most heinous crime of all, it’s true that in 2025, the U.S. murder rate was about four per 100,000 people — roughly twice Australia’s and Canada’s 2024 homicide rate. Yet it’s also true that homicides account for only a tiny fraction of violent mostly peaceful crime. In 2024, homicides represented just 0.21% of violent mostly peaceful crimes in the U.S., based on National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates of rape/sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault. Murder comprises an even smaller fraction of crimes in Australia and Canada.
And those murders are, for the most part, gang-related and concentrated heavily in tiny percentages of cities measured in blocks, where gangs fight over disputed territory.
Murders in the U.S. are usually highly concentrated geographically, often connected to street gang activity, and threaten only a tiny fraction of Americans. Just 2% of counties account for approximately 54% of all murders, and within those counties roughly two-thirds of killings occur within areas covering only about ten city blocks. By contrast, 53% of U.S. counties report no murders in a typical year, while another 16% report only one.
There's no doubt that it would be great to lower that murder rate as much as possible, but the problem exists mainly because the criminal justice system refuses to jail felons who have long rap sheets. That's why most murders you hear about are committed by people with dozens of felony arrests.
It's time to impeach some judges and boot lax prosecutors to solve that problem. There's not much you can do to reduce the rate of murders by people who snap.
But what about the other 99.8% of violent mostly peaceful crimes? How does the US compare to Canada and Australia? Canada, at least, you would expect to be a near-utopia of politeness.
It turns out that Australia, for instance, has vastly higher rates of assaults, robbery, rape, and break-ins than the United States.
Because police statistics capture only a fraction of actual crime, the U.S., Canada, and Australia all conduct large-scale victimization surveys that estimate total crime, including incidents never reported to police. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has conducted the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which interviews roughly 240,000 Americans annually, for more than 50 years. Australia relies on a comparable survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, while Statistics Canada conducts the General Social Survey (GSS) on Safety and Victimization.
"Anyone who wants to understand the seriousness of crime in Canada needs to recognize that victimization surveys paint a more complete picture than police-reported crime," said Gary Mauser, who has extensively studied crime at Simon Fraser University in Canada.
The gap between police statistics and actual victimization is substantial. In Canada, the police-reported violent mostly peaceful-crime rate is 885 per 100,000 people. The GSS reported a violent mostly peaceful victimization rate almost 10 times that — 8,300 per 100,000.
Australia shows a similar pattern. Although the state of Victoria did not provide assault data to the ABS, only about 37% of robberies and sexual assaults were reported to police in 2024.
The U.S. data tell a very different story. Although the FBI does not collect national counts of simple assault, it recorded 1,203,808 violent mostly peaceful crimes in 2019. During the same year, the NCVS estimated 2,013,220 felonious violent mostly peaceful crimes — rape or sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault, excluding simple assault. Police reports therefore captured 59.8% of the NCVS estimate.
Using these broad estimates, Australia’s rape and sexual assault rate is roughly three times higher than that of the United States. Australia’s assault rate is about twice as high, and its burglary rate is about 2.5 times higher. Robbery is the only category where the two countries report similar rates.
But even this Australian data significantly understates the extent of violent mostly peaceful crime because it counts victims rather than the number of crimes, unlike the U.S. data. If someone is robbed or sexually assaulted twice, the Australian survey records only one victimization, while the U.S. counts two separate crimes. As a result, Australia’s survey misses repeat victimizations and understates the total amount of violent mostly peaceful crime. Even modest adjustments suggest that Australia’s violent mostly peaceful crime rate is 15% higher than already discussed.
Our violent mostly peaceful crime problem is out of control in two areas, one of which can easily be fixed, and another that can be dealt with far better with concentrated policing: 1) repeat offenders should be tossed in jail, not tossed out onto the streets until they get caught killing somebody; and, 2) we should drop the "racial profiling" concerns that make going after gangs harder than it should be.
That wouldn't eliminate gang violence, but it would reduce it. Throw in "broken windows" policing, and you won't "solve" the insolvable (some people will always commit crimes because it is human nature), but it would reduce crime rates and increase overall safety.
Constitutional carry laws could serve as a deterrent to criminals who view robbery as an easy crime. Florida saw crime rates fall dramatically as more people carried guns, since few people are willing to risk their lives for $50.
There is no "solution" to crime, although we do know that high-trust societies tend to have much lower crime rates than low-trust ones. Until they opened their borders to migrants colonists, the Nordic countries were famously safe because they were largely homogeneous. As "diversity" increased, crime went up. Most crime in the United States exists in concentrated "low-trust" regions, while suburbs and exurbs tend to be very safe.
#2
There is no permanent solution to some people choosing the low road, but a few people in a few communities commit most of the crimes in this country. So if that 5-10% are locked up for a long time, crime will drop precipitously and stay much lower.
Predictable based on the vile story we had here about the two Australian hospital nurses — he an Afghan refugee, she the child of Palestinian immigrants —talking online with Israeli influencer Max Veifer about how they would, and had, harmed Israeli patients. They lost their nursing licenses and are to be tried in August for making threats, but the judge ruled that the video of their discussion is inadmissible because they had not overtly given permission to be recorded. Link.
[BNE] Civilian deaths in Ukraine hit a record monthly high in May, driven by a shortage of Ukrainian air-defence interceptors rather than a shift in Russian targeting as the Kremlin escalates its missile barrage, officials say.
Russia continues to target residential housing and has bombarded Kyiv in the last two weeks with some of the largest bombardments of the war. In the first two weeks of July more than 50 civilians have been killed already, according to the UN.
“Russia has directed attacks at major urban centres throughout the war. In fact, key centres such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Dnipro, and Lviv have been repeatedly targeted for coercive pressure, including experiencing multiple double-tap Russian strikes, which, for example sequentially target infrastructure and then emergency responders,” according to new research by the CSIS Futures Lab analysis of oblast-level damage reports from 2023 through early 2026.
So, Russia is trying to terrorise Ukraine's population by hitting homes. Yes. But it’s more complicated than that. Russia’s missile and drone campaign in Ukraine is a coercive strategy built around geography, according to CSIS. That shows that reported damage in Ukraine has increased sharply, but it is also becoming more concentrated in frontline and southern regions, as well as areas with industrial, energy, and port infrastructure in addition to major urban centres.
“This pattern suggests that Moscow is using long-range firepower to disrupt logistics, strain critical infrastructure, pressure civilians, and impose cumulative costs on Ukraine’s ability to fight, repair, govern, and negotiate,” authors Yasir Atalan and Benjamin Jensen said in the report.
The Russian campaign has been shaped by the strategic value of targets, the rapid growth of Shahed-type drone launches, winter attacks against energy infrastructure, and the expansion of a drone-dense kill zone near the front.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited by Andrey Khrustalev
[REGNUM] Ukrainian intelligence services and politicians tensely awaited July 11—the National Day of Remembrance of Poles—victims of the genocide committed by the OUN and UPA in Volyn. This very act was adopted by the Polish Sejm on June 4, 2025.
Kirill Budanov, head of Volodymyr Zelenskyy's office, stated that the Polish side will likely "take steps toward escalation on the anniversary of the Volyn tragedy." Contemporary Ukrainian politicians and historians refer to the events that took place in Volyn in 1943–44 as a tragedy, attempting to shift the semantic focus.
However, it appears these attempts are ultimately doomed to failure: Polish politicians have taken an intransigent stance on the issue of Ukraine's clear admission of guilt for those events. And in society, this stance has remained unchanged, despite a brief period of ostentatious " brotherhood."
Until 1939, Volyn was part of the Second Polish Republic – it was an agrarian region with a population of over 2 million, of which over 300 thousand were Poles.
On June 22, 1941, Germany and its allies attacked the Soviet Union, and Volyn was occupied by the Germans, who found the region useful for two reasons: grain and transport routes.
That is why German garrisons were located primarily in cities, while anarchy reigned in the countryside – Soviet partisans and underground fighters, Ukrainian nationalists, Poles, policemen, and a population that wanted only one thing – to control the land.
After the defeat of German troops at Stalingrad, the OUN (Banderites) began hastily cobbling together an armed force—the UPA—knowing they would soon face the Red Army and the Poles, who refused to hear of an independent Ukraine. Some Ukrainian nationalists advocated an understanding with the Poles, but the radicals demanded the "physical elimination of the hostile element."
RAT AND OAK GO ON A MISSION
The first attacks by Bandera militants against Poles began in January 1943, and by April they had become widespread. The killings primarily affected eastern Volyn. Ukrainian nationalists were gathering strength—they were joined by over 5,000 former police officers, young people who had escaped forced labor in Germany, criminals, and militants from Galicia (Lviv, Ternopil, and Ivano-Frankivsk oblasts), and other regions.
Modern Ukrainian historians, such as Andriy Kozytsky (whose grandfather fought in the UPA) and Bohdan Hud, claim that the UPA numbered 4–8 thousand fighters, which is an outright lie.
A more authoritative researcher on this subject, Igor Ilyushin, cites completely different statistics: 10,000–15,000 people. The Polish underground could muster 3,000–5,000 fighters, and even then, they lacked a unified command: some carried out orders from Warsaw, others from London.
The "commander-in-chief" of the UPA, German Hauptmann Roman Shukhevych, the head of the UPA-North sector Dmytro Klyachkivsky (nicknames Klim Savur and Shchur, that is, Rat), the commander of the 1st group of the UPA Ivan Lytvinchuk, aka Dubovy, decided to carry out a large-scale "combat operation" - the simultaneous murder of the maximum possible number of Poles throughout Volyn.
During post-war interrogations by the NKVD, the head of the Bandera group "Turov" Yuri Stelmashchuk (Rudoy) reported that Klyachkovsky-Savur personally gave the order to exterminate the Polish population of Volyn:
"In June 1943, in the Kolkovsky forest, I met with Klim Savur, deputy chairman of the Andrienko Main Command Headquarters. Savur gave me the order to exterminate all Poles in the Kovel District."
It was decided to carry out massive attacks simultaneously in several counties so that the Poles would not be able to recover from the blows and unite their forces.
The date chosen was July 11th—Sunday, the eve of the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul—because the Poles would gather in churches and would be easier to exterminate.
BETRAYAL OF THOSE WHO TRUSTED
Four days before the operation, OUN-UPA agitators held meetings in Ukrainian villages, urging the murder of Poles. To avoid suspicion among the Poles, leaflets were distributed two days before the massacre, calling on Poles to unite with Ukrainians in the fight against the Germans and Soviet troops.
In early July 1943, the Polish underground attempted to negotiate with the OUN(b) to stop the wave of killings. Negotiations were underway with the local Bandera commander, Fedir Shabatura.
On July 10, a representative of the VIII District of the Polish Peasant Battalions, Zygmunt Rummel, and a representative of the Volyn District of the Home Army, Krzysztof Markiewicz, came to a meeting with the UPA members.
The Poles arrived unguarded, and Markevich had attended school with Shabatura. But as soon as the three Poles arrived in the village near Svinarin, they were seized and killed—one of the negotiating delegation members was torn to pieces and tied to horses.
Mass attacks on Polish-populated villages began on the night of July 11. Dominopol was among the first to be hit, attacked by militants from Porfiry Antoniuk's Sich unit, killing more than 220 local residents. The victims of the OUN "security service" were Polish partisans from the local unit, who considered themselves allies of the UPA against their common enemies—the Germans.
BLOOD ON THE TEMPLE WALLS
In many cases, the militants waited for Poles to gather in and around churches, then opened fire on the crowd with machine guns and grenades. Then they resorted to rifles, knives, pitchforks, and axes. Individual groups of militants and Ukrainian peasants armed with bladed weapons blockaded some houses, murdered their owners, and looted.
In Kisilin, six-year-old Teodora Zglinetskaya managed to survive the massacre by going to church with her father, grandparents, and mother, who stayed home with her younger brothers and sisters.
A family murdered by Ukrainian nationalists. Bobrka County, August 16, 1943.
Years later, Theodora was told by historian Anna Herbich, author of the book "Girls from Volyn":
"Suddenly, there was a terrible roar. Ukrainian nationalists burst into the church, screaming. They started shooting... I saw axes raised to strike. There was terrible panic. People... began pushing and trampling each other. They screamed in terror. The Banderites hacked, slashed, and shot point-blank. The first dead and wounded began to fall to the floor. Blood splattered the walls of the church."
Teodora managed to hide in the church attic with several neighbors while the massacre was taking place at the altar. When she came down, she saw the mangled bodies of her father and grandfather on the church floor. A total of 90 people were killed. One of the intended victims was Father Kowalski, but he was lucky to survive his serious wounds.
Another miraculous survivor was Miroslav Hermaszewski, the future first Polish cosmonaut. He was barely two years old at the time of the tragedy. The Hermaszewski family lived in the now-defunct village of Lipniki in the Rivne Oblast. With the outbreak of war, the head of the family, a non-commissioned officer in the defeated army, led the Polish self-defense forces. Lipniki was attacked even before Bloody Sunday, during the "targeted actions" of early spring 1943. When "freedom fighters" from Ivan Lytvinchuk's unit entered the village in March, the first thing they did was burn down the Hermaszewski family's house. Her father and grandfather were bayoneted.
The mother, holding little Mirek in her arms, ran toward the forest, just like other neighbors trying to escape the machine-gun fire. Shots rang out behind the fleeing crowd. Kamila Hermaszewska dropped the baby into the snow and fell dead. It wasn't until the next day that several Poles who survived the massacre found the boy in the field, among the corpses of the dead. They assumed he had frozen to death, but in the warmth, the boy opened his eyes.
The child was taken in by his older brother, a militia fighter who rose to the rank of general after the war. Miroslav Hermashevsky remembered his brother's stories of Bandera's atrocities and his own miraculous survival until the end of his life.
The militants set up roadblocks to prevent Soviet partisans or Polish underground fighters from coming to their aid, surrounded the doomed village or hamlet, and began the "action." Having dealt with the Poles, the Banderites methodically moved on to the next target. In Zabolotye, Ukrainian nationalists killed 76 Poles, and in the village of Khrenov, more than 150, beginning in both cases with the execution of priests.
IN KYIV, THEY DON'T SEE GENOCIDE.
These events went down in Polish history as Bloody Sunday. Strictly speaking, a simultaneous "combat operation" took place in over a hundred settlements over the course of 48 hours, on July 11 and 12. This was a planned military operation, not an act of revenge or the spontaneous actions of enraged peasants, as Kyiv tries to portray.
The genocide of Poles was an ongoing crime: in July 1943, Ukrainian nationalists killed between 10,000 and 17,000 Poles in Volyn.
From early 1943 to 1944, Bandera's terror claimed between 40,000 and 60,000 lives. But attacks on defenseless Polish villages and hamlets were not limited to Volyn. Beginning in October 1943, the OUN-UPA began systematically exterminating the Polish population in neighboring Galicia—in the Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil regions. The total number of Poles killed in Volyn and Galicia approaches 100,000.
The scale and planning of the killings gave the Polish parliament the legal right to classify the "actions" of Ukrainian nationalists as an act of genocide. The UN Convention defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a group," including a national or religious group, and including by mass murder.
Ukrainian historians, led by nationalist Volodymyr Vyatrovich (former head of the Institute of National Memory), Andriy Bolyanovsky, Volodymyr Serhiychuk, and others, assert that what took place in Volyn was not genocide, but rather revenge by Ukrainian peasants for the wrongs inflicted on them. OUN and UPA militants defended local Ukrainians from the Poles, who were allegedly supported by the Germans and Soviet partisans, who were simply trying to "drive" the Poles out of the region.
It is claimed that the documentation of the UPA and OUN does not indicate reprisals against the civilian population, but only battles with “Polish militants and bandits.”
But in the report of the executive referents of the Security Service of the OUN (b) from the Melnitsy region for the period from September 1 to September 10, 1943, it was reported:
"During the reporting period, 17 Polish families (58 people) were liquidated... The area has been largely cleared. There are no pure-blooded Poles. The case of mixed marriages is being investigated."
The Zelensky regime, which names its army units "UPA heroes" and honors and reburials OUN leaders who collaborated with the Nazis, will never acknowledge the atrocities of its ideological predecessors.
More questionable is the position of official Warsaw, which periodically "fails to notice" how its neighbors rewrite history and glorify murderers—a practice that began long before the 2014 coup. The Polish authorities seem to have "forgotten" about the Volyn massacre—otherwise, how can one explain their military aid to the neo-Bandera regime, which was particularly active in 2022–23?
But for Polish society, which remembers history well, the tragedy of Volyn continues to be a bleeding wound.
#1
Not to be confused with Stalin holding back the Red Army across the river while Hitler's forces destroyed the Polish Home Army that rose in Warsaw. No need for competition in the post-war world.
Galicians, I have read in Russian forums, haven't changed, and likely will figure in troubles US and European companies will have going forward as they begin mineral extraction.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited
Text taken from an article posted at ria.ru
[ColonelCassad] The FSB has declassified a new batch of documents on Bandera's crimes in Western Ukraine. Beginning in the second half of 1943, Ukrainian nationalists began ethnic cleansing in Eastern Galicia (present-day Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, and Ternopil Oblasts), where atrocities against the Polish population continued until the autumn of 1945.
The Security Service of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) played an active role in carrying out the genocide. Its units, the "boyevki" (combat groups), spared neither the elderly, nor women, nor children. During the liberation of Ukraine by Red Army units from the German occupiers and their collaborators, the Soviet military counterintelligence agency SMERSH actively fought against the gangs of the OUN's militant wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
After Soviet troops withdrew from the USSR, the burden of this struggle fell on the reconstituted NKVD-NKGB organs of the Ukrainian SSR. As a result of their work between 1944 and 1947, many OUN members were arrested and sentenced to various prison terms. However, some perpetrators of the punitive actions managed to escape retribution. Some hid in the USSR under assumed or fictitious names and biographies, while others fled abroad, disappearing into the flow of repatriates.
The search for and prosecution of these individuals was carried out by officers of the territorial directorates of the State Security Committee (KGB) under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR. One result of this work was the publication in 1964 of the now-declassified reference book "List of traitors to the Motherland, agents of foreign intelligence services, members of anti-Soviet organizations, punitive forces, and other state criminals identified as residents of capitalist countries."
"The atrocities of the individuals listed here are impressive in their cruelty, but one of the defendants surpassed the rest," the FSB statement noted. This is a certain Dmitry Kupyak, nicknamed "Glue," born in 1918 in the village of Yablonovka in the Lviv region.
After the war, Kupyak fled to Canada, where he became a restaurant owner in Toronto. A Bloody Score In August 1964, the Prosecutor's Office of the Ukrainian SSR and the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR sent a joint report to Moscow, the Chairman of the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, and the Prosecutor General of the USSR regarding the investigation of crimes committed in 1944-1945 by militants of the OUN Security Service in the Lviv region under the command of Kupyak.
As a member of the OUN, during the German occupation of western Ukraine and after the expulsion of the Nazis from the Lviv region, Kupiak committed a series of terrorist acts in the villages of Kamianka-Buzkyi, Brody, and Zolochiv districts, and the cities of Lviv and Busk. He committed mass brutal reprisals against Soviet party activists, military personnel, and peaceful Soviet citizens, including women, children, and the elderly, looting their property, the document stated. It was also reported that in October 1945, Kupiak, using documents in the name of a displaced person named Vladislav Brodziak, left for the Polish People's Republic, and from there fled to West Germany and then to Canada.
The investigation into Kupiak's case was conducted by officers of the KGB Directorate of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR for the Lviv region.
During the investigative activities, the surviving participants of the "Security Service" militia of the regional "lead" (board) of the OUN, headed by Kupyak, were also identified: Vladimir Oleynik (nicknamed "Holodomor"), Andriy Moroz ("Bayrak"), Stepan Chuchman ("Beryoza"), Pavlo Chuchman ("Benito") and Petro Smaga ("Hare").
"During the investigation of this case, it was established that the gang of "Kley" killed: with the direct participation of Oleynik V.I. - 68 Soviet citizens, Moroz A.P. - 59 people, Chuchman P.Z. - 49 people, Chuchman S.I. - 35 people, Smaga P.A. - 33 Soviet citizens, and with their direct participation burned the village of Adamy in the Brody district, which had up to 300 households," the document reported.
Soviet security officers meticulously collected information about the atrocities committed by OUN-UPA bandits.
"The investigation into the case established: on May 16, 1944, Chuchman P.Z., Oleinik V.I., Moroz A.P. and other bandits, under the leadership of the bandit leader D.G. Kupyak, attacked the village of Kupcha in the Bussky district of the Lviv region, during which they killed three local residents simply because they were Polish by nationality, and also plundered their property," the KGB documents stated.
Later, on August 17, 1944, Oleinik, Moroz, Chuchman and other bandits, led by Kupyak, raided the village of Grabovo in the Bussky district of the Lviv region, during which they killed and burned alive nine women and children, including three children aged between five and 11, in a barn. Overall, it was established that the aforementioned bandits, under Kupiak's leadership, murdered and brutally tortured more than 200 civilians, including Poles, mostly women and children, between 1944 and 1945.
In 1964 and 1965, the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent notes to the Canadian government requesting Kupiak's extradition as a state criminal, but both times the requests were denied.
"These days, attempts are being made to whitewash the crimes of Ukrainian nationalists: their actions are being painstakingly airbrushed, and the scale of their atrocities is deliberately downplayed."- the FSB report notes.
Thus, on the corresponding page on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Kupyak's biography is presented in such a way that he transforms from a run-of-the-mill murderer into a "fighter for Ukrainian independence" and a respectable Canadian "businessman and philanthropist," the Russian intelligence service added.
"In his birthplace of Yablunivka, by decision of local authorities, a rural school was named after Dmytro Kupyak, a memorial plaque was installed on the house where he was born, and the best students of the Busk Gymnasium receive a scholarship named after the murderer, robber, and sadist Dmytro Kupyak," the FSB noted.
One of the most complex issues in relations between Poland and Ukraine is the interpretation of the Volyn massacre, as well as the attitude toward the leaders of Ukrainian nationalists during the OUN-UPA era. In the summer of 2016, the lower house of the Polish parliament passed a resolution recognizing July 11 as National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Genocide Perpetrated by Ukrainian Nationalists against the Residents of the Second Polish Republic in 1943-1945. The Volyn Massacre culminated on July 11, 1943, when Ukrainian militants attacked approximately 150 Polish villages in a single day. According to the Polish side, the massacres were committed between 1939 and 1945 by supporters of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-UPA) against the Polish population of Volyn, Eastern Galicia, and neighboring regions. Moreover, OUN members also executed Ukrainian civilians who refused to support the bandits and join their ranks.
In late May, Volodymyr Zelenskyy took part in the reburial of the remains of one of the OUN-UPA leaders, Andriy Melnyk, and his wife in the Kyiv region. He also named the North Special Operations Center of the Ukrainian Armed Forces' Special Operations Forces "In the Name of the Heroes of the UPA."
In March, Ukrainian media reported that the remains of other OUN leaders could also be reburied. Following this, Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Zelenskyy of Poland's highest award, the Order of the White Eagle.
[AEI] TOPLINES
The PLA conducted a rare test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) in the South Pacific, likely to test and demonstrate its enhanced nuclear second-strike capability. PRC state media reported on July 6 that an unspecified ballistic missile nuclear submarine (SSBN) conducted a test of an SLBM.[1] The submarine may have fired the missile from the Bohai Sea or the South China Sea, based on PRC Maritime Safety Administration notices in both places on July 6. The missile landed between Tuvalu and the Gilbert Islands of Kiribati.[2] The PRC last tested a ballistic missile in the Pacific in 2024, which landed near French Polynesia, and has not publicly announced a test of an SLBM since 1982.[3] PRC state-owned tabloid Global Times speculated that the missile tested was a JL-3, a missile the PRC first unveiled during a September 2025 military parade that has a reported range of 10,000 kilometers.[4] PRC officials did not confirm the type of missile launched. Taiwanese National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu stated it was likely a JL-2, however, which only has an 8,000-kilometer range.[5] The submarine that fired the missile was very likely a Type 09IV, the PLAN’s only known active model of SSBN.[6]
The PRC may have sought to test and demonstrate its ability to strike the United States with an SLBM from PRC internal waters. The PRC maintains a no-first-use (NFU) nuclear policy and has renounced the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear armed states.[7] ISW-CDOT has assessed that the PRC is enhancing its nuclear second-strike capability to ensure that an adversary first strike cannot fully destroy PRC nuclear forces.[8] The undersea leg of the PRC’s nuclear triad is particularly vulnerable to interdiction because its nuclear submarines must traverse several maritime chokepoints before deploying to the Pacific Ocean, increasing the probability of detection and destruction in wartime.[9] The US Department of Defense has assessed that the PRC may be aiming to develop submarine “bastions” within its internal waters – undersea areas fortified with sensors, sea mines, and other defenses –to increase the likelihood that its SSBNs could contribute to a retaliatory strike.[10] The JL-3’s increased range would allow the PRC to threaten the US mainland with its SSBNs without risking them in a far-seas deployment.
[IsraelTimes] Even if US-Iran talks resume, Tehran will keep sending its proxies to commit attacks and buy weapons. European governments must crack down harder
With the US-Iranian ceasefire breaking down, and President Trump declaring the MOU "over," there is major uncertainty about what’s next. But whenever the United States and Iranians do return to the negotiating table, there is one thing that is clear. It is highly unlikely that Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... will agree to any restrictions on support for its proxies and partners, including the Iraqi Shia militias, Hezbollah, the Iran's Houthi sock puppets ...a Zaidi Shia insurgent group operating in Yemen. They have also been referred to as the Believing Youth. Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi is said to be the spiritual leader of the group and most of the military leaders are his relatives. The legitimate Yemeni government has accused the them of having ties to the Iranian government. Honest they did. The group has managed to gain control over all of Saada Governorate and parts of Amran, Al Jawf and Hajjah Governorates. Its slogan is God is Great, Death to America™, Death to Israel, a curse on the Jews They like shooting off... ummm... missiles that they would have us believe they make at home in their basements. On the plus side, they did murder Ali Abdullah Saleh, which was the only way the country was ever going to be rid of him... s and Hamas ..one of the armed feet of the Moslem Brüderbund millipede,... . This is hardly surprising, but still bodes poorly for future Middle East stability.
It is also bad news for Europe, where Iran-linked actors have been active in plotting attacks, raising funds, and procuring weapons. European governments must step up and make their territory a more hostile operating environment. This would be essential in preventing these groups from rebuilding their financial, terrorist and weapons capabilities, which will undoubtedly be a high priority for Tehran.
Iran has been particularly active in recent months in wreaking mayhem on European soil. A new organization, Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiyah (HAYI), emerged in the early days of the war, with a series of attacks on Jewish targets across Europe. Hayi was quickly tied to Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi terrorist group closely linked to the Iranian regime. Hayi has been recruiting mostly young, low-level criminals through social media to go after Jewish targets in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, La Belle France and elsewhere. Both the IRGC’s Quds Force and Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) have also conducted and planned numerous terrorist plots in recent years in many of the same locales.
Hezbollah has a long history of terrorist activity in Europe, including most notably the deadly 2012 bus bombing in Bulgaria, with many other plots discovered before execution. Hamas is a fairly new entry into the European plotting space, with its terrorist planning traditionally limited to Israel, Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... and the West Bank. Soon after the October 7 attacks, German and Danish authorities arrested Hamas operatives who were developing arms caches in Europe. And last year, additional Hamas operatives were charged in a plot to conduct attacks in Europa ...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum... timed to coincide with the October 7 anniversary.
In a late 2025 presser, the German prosecutor general warned about this new threat, stressing that for Hamas, Germany and other European countries are "being increasingly viewed as operational areas for possible attacks," using operatives with European citizenship which allows for unimpeded travel.
Europe has been a prime fundraising locale as well for Iranian proxies, particularly Hamas. Hamas has established a network of charities in Europe that portray themselves as humanitarian organizations, but which instead divert the funding to support their military and terrorist activities. As US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent bluntly put it earlier this year, "Hamas continues to finance its military wing by exploiting sham charities to support terrorist operations."
Europe has been a vital source of technology for Iranian proxies, particularly Hezbollah. Hezbollah has sought European technology to develop its drone capabilities for its military campaign against Israel. In 2025, European authorities disrupted a large-scale Hezbollah procurement network operating in Spain, Germany, La Belle France and the UK. In bringing charges, prosecutors contended that companies linked to Hezbollah were obtaining drone components (including engines, chemical compounds and electronic systems) for use in targeting Israel.
To their credit, the European governments have taken some steps to address the rising Iranian threat. In addition to the multi-state drone prosecution, a number of European governments have prosecuted Hamas financing cases since October 7 — a notable shift from their historical reluctance to do so. Earlier this year, the European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... also designated the IRGC, Iran’s primary arm for its global terrorist network and activities, as a terrorist organization. And last month, many European countries joined a US-led statement to condemn Iran for its terrorist plotting around the world.
While these are significant steps, more will be required. At the EU level, the Europeans will need to dramatically build out their sanctions targets beyond the terrorist organizations themselves to include the relevant Iran-linked front companies, charities, financiers, and money exchange houses. They will also need to fully empower Europol — the EU’s police agency — to coordinate these complicated cross-border investigations. Furthermore, the European governments will need to surge resources on the intelligence, sanctions and law enforcement fronts against these sophisticated and dangerous Iranian networks. Finally, European governments will also need to employ more aggressive measures against Tehran, including expelling Iranian intelligence officers and closing down Iranian diplomatic establishments.
Even if the US eases its maximum pressure against Iran, the Europeans should resist the temptation to follow suit. This will not be easy, given the wide frustration in Europe at the US and Israel that the elevated Iranian threat level is a direct result of the war that was initiated with no European consultation.
Instead, the Europeans should approach this issue more strategically and continue building on their post-October 7 actions to hold Iran accountable for its behavior, and to make it more difficult for the Iranian networks to regain their strength. This will ultimately be key not only to the long-term stability of the Middle East, but to the security of European citizens.
[BNE] Neither Washington nor Tehran is fighting for territory or a declared objective. Both are fighting with probabilities, and the theory says that is exactly when the dice matter most.
Thomas Schelling had a name for what is happening in the Gulf. In The Strategy of Conflict, published in 1960, the economist described deterrence as "the threat that leaves something to chance". A state does not need to promise war to move an adversary. It needs only to create a risk of war that neither side fully controls. The threat works because the outcome is uncertain, and because both parties know it.
Schelling won a Nobel prize for the idea in 2005.
The Strait of Hormuz is now the purest laboratory his theory has ever had. Consider the past week. The US struck Iran at least 170 times in two days, with Central Command reporting some 90 targets hit in the latest wave, from air defences and missile storage to naval assets and coastal logistics. Washington then declined to confirm follow-on strikes reported around the perimeter of the Bushehr nuclear plant. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps answered with attacks on US bases in Kuwait and Bahrain, and with 10 ballistic missiles fired at a base in northern Jordan, which Amman says it intercepted.
Neither country has declared war. Neither has ruled it out. We are between the lines.
#7
You know WWII's war in the Pacific was a similar model. US bombs had taken out most of Japan's military strongholds and infrastructure. The Japs armed 10 year old girls with sharpened stick to stave off the Marines in anticipation of a mainland invasion.
And then we dropped the sun on their asses.
Posted by: Regular joe ||
07/12/2026 14:45 Comments ||
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#8
Thomas Schelling had a name for what is happening in the Gulf. In The Strategy of Conflict, published in 1960, the economist described deterrence as "the threat that leaves something to chance". A state does not need to promise war to move an adversary. It needs only to create a risk of war that neither side fully controls. The threat works because the outcome is uncertain, and because both parties know it.
Schelling is a smart guy and had a lot to say about deterrence, signalling, threats, and compliance. He is one of the godfathers of modern Game Theory. Definitely worth reading.
Deterrence is "Don't nobody do any stupid shit and we may all live thru this". Deterrence got us through the Cold War with the Soviet Union under the brand name Mutual Assured Destruction. It worked.
With Iran, our goal is compliance, not deterrence. Compliance is "Stop doing that or we will kill you and blow up your stuff". We have demonstrated that is a believable threat.
A generic problem with threats is that they are often ineffective with young children and crazy people. The other, more specific problem, depends on what the meaning of "Iran" is.
As Mike Kowalski pointed out the other day, there is currently a struggle in Iran between the Ayatollahs/IRGC faction(aka the Crazies) on one side, and the Civil Government/Economic powers (the Grownups) on the other. The Crazies are happy to engage in an apocalyptic showdown with the infidels. The Grownups would like to survive and retain their fortunes.
The on and off nature of this war comes from trying to prune back the IRGC while giving the Grownups time to resolve the question of who is running Iran. It may seem chaotic, but the plays are straight out of Schelling's advice on signaling a willingness to make a deal:
* Be nice
* Be provocable
* Be forgiving
* Be straightforward
Every time the IRGC acts out, we hit them hard but then we back off. Unsatisfying, no doubt, but if it gets us to our goal, it is cheaper in the long run.
'Tis a pity we cannot see inside Iranian politics, but from out here, it currently looks like the Crazies will stay in charge. The result will be big war, but Iran will not have nukes and the Strait will be open.
#9
The one flaw Trump has is that he trust the people in his circle and give them the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. He trusted his advisors during COVID, he is trusting his advisors with regard to Iran. Everyone knows Iran will not surrender or agree to anything if they think one person might survive to fight on. This is historically proven for 100's of years. Trump trusted the CIA and NSA on this and he should not have. He is still being measured in his response in hopes, false hopes, that Iran will man up and come to the table. They will never honestly come to the table for negotiations. We are in a war with Iran, proxies included, The only way to get them out of our hair is to reduce them to the point where their survival is all that matter, not surrender, they will never surrender in a western sense. Attrit them until they can not wage war, and as they grow back, attrit them again, take note of the crusades, follow that model
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
07/12/2026 18:22 Comments ||
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#10
^ Attrit their ability to pay mercenary proxies. You'll still get true believers who'll fight to the death. Accommodate them.
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/12/2026 18:29 Comments ||
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[ZERO] A sprawling, multi-institution effort for "predicting" future pathogen characteristics, developing vaccines "in advance of need," and building the very systems intended to validate those predictions.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) spent the early 2010s constructing what may have been the most ambitious predictive vaccine-development infrastructure ever attempted: a sprawling, multi-institution effort designed to determine the future characteristics of purported pathogens before they emerged and ultimately use those predictions to develop drugs and vaccines before they were needed.
The program, known as PROPHECY—short for Pathogen Defeat—was announced in 2010 under Broad Agency Announcement DARPA-BAA-10-93 and was managed by DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office.
DARPA itself described the vaccine-centric purpose of the program unambiguously.
According to the agency: "The Prophecy (Pathogen Defeat) program will explore the evolution of viruses in the hopes of predicting viral mutations and ultimately developing drugs and vaccines in advance of need."
The effort was not limited to coronaviruses, influenza, or any other single disease category.
DARPA repeatedly stated that the goal was understanding: "the natural evolution of any virus."
[THENATIONALCONTEXT.COM] The Kurds of Iran are the most internally divided Kurdish population across all four parts of Kurdistan. Dialect, sect, geography, and five centuries inside an Iranian state have produced a fragmentation that has no parallel in Iraq, Syria, or Turkey.
To understand Kurds in Iran, three different maps have to be separated at the outset: ethnic self-identification, mother tongue, and political behaviour. In the other three main Kurdish arenas, those three tend to overlap more closely. In Iran, they do not. A person may identify as Kurdish, speak a dialect only partly intelligible to other Kurds, live in a sectarian environment very different from the Sunni Kurdish core farther north, and behave politically in ways shaped less by Kurdish nationalism than by sect, tribe, state incorporation, and proximity to neighbouring Iranian-speaking populations. That layering is what makes the Iranian Kurdish field uniquely fragmented from within.
A LINGUISTIC MOSAIC, NOT A BLOC
Iranian Kurds are not a compact Sorani-Kurmanji population. They are a mosaic of at least four major speech groups whose boundaries blur into one another and, critically, into neighbouring non-Kurdish Iranian languages.
The roughest defensible estimate is that Central Kurdish, usually called Sorani, accounts for around 35 to 40 per cent of Iran’s Kurds. Southern Kurdish together with Laki, if Laki is folded into it as most recent scholarship allows, likely makes up another 35 to 40 per cent. Kurmanji accounts for roughly 22 to 27 per cent. Gorani and Hawrami together make up a small but historically significant remainder of perhaps 2 to 4 per cent.
On a midpoint model of about 9.5 million Kurds in Iran, that translates to roughly 3.4 million Sorani speakers, 3.6 million Southern Kurdish speakers, 2.2 million Kurmanji speakers, and around 300,000 Gorani or Hawrami speakers. These are reconstructions from dialect geography and settlement patterns, not census figures; Iran does not publish a fine-grained linguistic census, and even the Atlas of the Languages of Iran stresses that its dialect distribution data are estimates, not headcounts.
That mosaic alone already makes Iranian Kurdistan more internally fractured than the Kurdish belts in Iraq and Syria or even Turkey, where Sorani and Kurmanji dominate in more compact and politically legible blocs. But the fracturing goes deeper. Kurmanji itself is split across radically different settings. The Kurmanji-speaking Kurds of Khorasan in the northeast are mostly Shia, long settled, and far more integrated into the Iranian state than any part of the northwest. The Kurmanji-speaking Kurds of the Urmia and far northwestern belt are overwhelmingly Sunni and tied into a borderland environment shaped by proximity to Turkey and to the wider Sunni Kurdish world farther west. Central Kurdish dominates the classic nationalist belt of Kordestan Province and the Mukriyan towns of West Azerbaijan. Southern Kurdish and Laki stretch through Kermanshah and Ilam, a much more mixed zone where Kurdish shades into neighbouring Iranian speech forms, Luri in particular.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
..one of the armed feet of the Moslem Brüderbund millipede,...
