Back Story Newsletter
Good morning,
N. Korea ICBM
People in Japan were woken by the sound of screaming air raid sirens and told to seek shelter from N. Korean missiles. The authorities issued what is thought to be the first evacuation alert in five years in response to the launch and temporarily suspended bullet trains.
This is not just another missile launch, but it appears to have been an ICBM capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and we are approaching the point N. Korea can threaten the United States. The test may have been a partial failure.
N. Korea will soon also likely test a nuclear device which will make it’s offensive program unacceptable to it’s Asian neighbours and the White House.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida later condemned North Korea's "repeated missile launches", calling them an "outrage".
U.S. Democracy In Peril
President Biden issued a plea for reason and said Democracy is on the ropes in America as the mid term elections approach next week.
“As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America — for governor, Congress, attorney general, secretary of state — who won’t commit, they will not commit to accepting the results of the elections that they’re running in,” Mr. Biden said at Union Station, just blocks from where a mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to disrupt the transfer of power. “This is the path to chaos in America. It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful. And it’s un-American.”
Biden warned the same forces that challenged the 2020 election are at work in 2022, and the legitimacy of this vote is already being challenged.
Half the Republicans running for office won’t acknowledge Biden is the legitimate President, and Republican State legislatures are claiming the right to choose Presidential electors without the input of voters.
Crisis? Are you kidding me its a looming disaster in American politics driven former President Trumps repeated attacks on the Republic and it’s going to play out next week and into 2024 when the next Presidential race will take place.
Calls for violence by the far right are growing, and Republicans have made light of a brutal attack on the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul who was left with a fractured skull after being attacked in his home by a man wielding a hammer.
Israel’s Rise of the Radical Right
There are huge concerns over the comeback of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and what kind of Israel will emerge.
That’s because the political parties Netanyahu is willing to include in his coalition are extreme, including far right leaders who have said they would deport Arab citizens of Israel, and whose rallies have echoed with chants of “death to arabs”.
Is Israel and Jewish State or a democracy that includes it’s minority Arab Palestinian citizens?
Well one of Netanyahu’s coalition leaders will be Itamir Ben-Gvir who at 16 became a member of hard-line rabbi Meir Kahane’s ultra-nationalist Kach party, which was branded a terrorist group by the US prior to Kahane’s assassination in New York City in 1990.
Kahane’s agenda had called for banning intermarriage between Arabs and Jews, stripping Arabs of Israeli citizenship and expelling large numbers of Palestinians.
Mr Ben-Gvir was said to have a picture of Baruch Goldstein proudly displayed on his wall, the American-Israeli who massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers in Hebron in 1994.
*****I covered the Hebron massacre, and watched members of Kach, shoot at the homes of Palestinians as they asserted “ownership” over the historic West Bank city of Hebron. It was a shocking attack on peaceful arabs who were praying in a mosque when they were slaughtered by Goldstein. *****
As a young man, Mr Ben-Gvir attained notoriety by posing on TV brandishing a hood ornament stripped from then PM Yitzhak Rabin’s car, and declaring, “We got to his car. We’ll get to him, too”.
Rabin was later shot in the back in Tel Aviv by a member of the radical jewish right.
After this weeks election victory Ben-Gavir told his followers: “The time has come for us to reassert ownership of this state.” He has threatened a harsh crackdown in the West Bank against Palestinian violence.
Ben-Gavir may make Netanyahu look like a dove, which is hard to do considering Netanyahu helped kill the peace process with Palestinians and has driven Jewish settlement expansion in the Israeli occupied territories.
Watch the UAE’s and Bahrain’s peace deal with Israel as this could be threatened depending on what the Israeli Government does.
Mr Netanyahu may not be able to restrain the force he created. But he is willing to embrace power at any cost to make criminal charges against him for corruption disappear.
Other News…
-Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has been disconnected from the power grid after Russian shelling damaged the remaining high voltage lines, leaving it with just diesel generators, Ukraine’s nuclear energy company Energoatom said on Thursday. The power plant has 15 days' worth of fuel to run the generators, Energoatom said. Blocks 5 and 6 at the plant are being switched into cold state, it said.
-The grain deal has resumed in Ukraine as Russia’s Putin reversed his decision to withdraw after an attack on the Black Sea fleet over the weekend.
-The U.S. Federal Reserve on Wednesday announced a fourth consecutive three-quarter point interest rate hike. It takes the benchmark lending rate to a range of 3.75% to 4%, the highest since January 2008. Today the UK is likely to follow suit with a Mortgage rates are expected to jump on Thursday in response to the largest increase in the Bank ff England since 1989, as the central bank tries to bring down an inflation rate expected to remain in double figures until at least next spring. The increase is expected to push the base interest rate up by 0.75 percentage points to 3%.
That’s a very busy Thursday morning for you!
Dana Lewis