“Two undersea internet cables in the Baltic Sea have been suddenly disrupted, according to local telecommunications companies, amid fresh warnings of possible Russian interference with global undersea infrastructure.
A communications cable between Lithuania and Sweden was cut on Sunday morning around 10:00 a.m. local time, a spokesperson from telecommunications company Telia Lithuania confirmed to CNN.
The company’s monitoring systems could tell there was a cut due to the traffic disruption, and that the cause was likely physical damage to the cable itself, Telia Lithuania spokesperson Audrius Stasiulaitis told CNN. “We can confirm that the internet traffic disruption was not caused by equipment failure but by physical damage to the fiber optic cable.”
Another cable linking Finland and Germany was also disrupted, according to Cinia, the state-controlled Finnish company that runs the link. The C-Lion cable – the only direct connection of its kind between Finland and Central Europe – spans nearly 1,200 kilometers (730 miles), alongside other key pieces of infrastructure, including gas pipelines and power cables.
The incidents came as two of the affected countries, Sweden and Finland, updated their guidance to citizens on how to survive war. Millions of households in the Nordic nations will be given booklets with instructions on how to prepare for the effects of military conflicts, communications outages and power cuts.”
“Russia could decide to help the Houthis with their Red Sea attacks and is engaging with the Iran-backed rebels at a “serious level,” a senior US State Department official said.
The Houthis have long received extensive support from Iran, including weapons and training, which the rebels have relied on over the past year to carry out attacks on military and civilian vessels transiting key Middle Eastern shipping lanes.
But the State Department has grown increasingly concerned in recent months that the Houthis could be receiving assistance from another country: Russia, US Special Envoy for Yemen Tim Lenderking told Business Insider in a recent interview.
“It does seem as though there is a fairly serious level of engagement happening,” Lenderking said of the Houthis and Russia. “We are particularly concerned about the kind of equipment that would really enable the Houthis to be more accurate in their targeting of US and other ships in the region — that would enhance the Houthi capability to strike those targets.””
“US Navy warships have twice been called upon to defend Israel from massive Iranian ballistic missile attacks and have used SM-3 interceptors to defeat the incoming threats.
The Standard Missile-3 (SM-3), a key air-defense interceptor made by RTX and, for some variants, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was first used in combat in April to shield Israel from an unprecedented attack, and then it saw combat again in October when Iran attacked a second time. The weapons, which can cost between $10 million and almost $30 million depending on the variant, were fired by American destroyers in the area.
Navy leadership has said that it needs many more SM-3s to counter threats in the Pacific, like China, but it’s burning through these weapons in conflicts in the Middle East without sufficient plans to replace them.
Archer Macy, a retired Navy admiral, told Business Insider that the SM-3 is particularly important in a fight with China because the interceptor is designed to counter China’s “apparent preference for long-range theater weapons.””
Sanctions against Russia made their ability to wage war weaker than it otherwise would have been, but only had limited effectiveness due to poor execution and other powers not going along.
The U.S. needs to pull together its different resources in different domains to successfully compete against China, including not just militarily, but taking an active diplomatic and economic role in Asia.
“Stefanik is a onetime moderate Republican who has transformed herself into a pro-Trump loyalist. She stood up for Trump relentlessly when he faced impeachment.”
“The resulting pier mission did not go well.
It involved 1,000 U.S. troops, delivered only a fraction of the promised aid at a cost of nearly $230 million, and was from the start beset by bad luck and miscalculations, including fire, bad weather and dangers on shore from the fighting between Israel and Hamas.”
…
“The U.S. military aimed to ramp up to as many as 150 trucks a day of aid coming off the pier.
But because the pier was only operational for a total of 20 days, the military says it moved a total of only 19.4 million pounds of aid into Gaza. That would be about 480 trucks of aid delivered in total from the pier, based on estimates by the World Food Programme from earlier this year of weight carried by a truck.
The United Nations says about 500 truckloads of aid are needed daily to address the needs of Palestinians in Gaza.
Just days after the first shipments of aid rolled off the pier in Gaza, crowds overwhelmed trucks and took some of it.
Israel’s killings of seven World Central Kitchen workers in April and its use of an area near the pier as it staged a hostage rescue recovery mission in June also dented the confidence of aid organizations, on whom the U.S. was relying to carry the supplies from the shore and distribute to residents.
A senior U.S. defense official acknowledged that aid delivery “proved to be perhaps more challenging than the planners anticipated.”
One former official said Kurilla had raised distribution as a concern early on.
“General Kurilla was also very clear about that: ‘I can do my piece of this, and I can do distribution if you task me to do it,'” the former official said.
“But that was explicitly scoped out of what the task was. And so we were reliant on these international organizations.”
Current and former U.S. officials told Reuters that the United Nations and aid organizations themselves were always cool to the pier.
At a closed-door meeting of U.S. officials and aid organizations in Cyprus in March, Sigrid Kaag, the U.N. humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, offered tacit support for Biden’s pier project.
But Kaag stressed the UN preference was for “land, land, land,” according to two people familiar with the discussions.
The United Nations declined to comment on the meeting. It referred to a briefing on Monday where a spokesperson for the organization said that the U.N. appreciated every way of getting aid into Gaza, including the pier, but more access through land routes is needed.
The underlying concern for aid organizations was that Biden, under pressure from fellow Democrats over Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza, was pushing a solution that would at best be a temporary fix and at worst would take pressure off Netanyahu’s government to open up land routes into Gaza.
Dave Harden, a former USAID mission director to the West Bank and Gaza, described the pier project as “humanitarian theater.”
“It did relieve the pressure, unfortunately, on having the (land border) crossings work more effectively.””
https://www.reuters.com/world/how-bidens-gaza-pier-project-unraveled-2024-07-25/
“Qatar agreed in recent weeks to kick Hamas out of its country following a request from the US to do so, capping off months of failed attempts to try to get the militant group – whose top leaders reside in the Qatari capital of Doha – to accept a ceasefire and hostage release deal in the Israel-Hamas war, US and Qatari sources told CNN.
With efforts to pause the war – which has been a top priority for President Joe Biden – firmly stalled, US officials informed their Qatari counterparts about two weeks ago that they must stop giving Hamas refuge in their capital; Qatar agreed and gave Hamas notice about a week ago, sources said.
“Hamas is a terrorist group that has killed Americans and continues to hold Americans hostage,” a senior administration official told CNN. “After rejecting repeated proposals to release hostages, its leaders should no longer be welcome in the capitals of any American partner.”
Throughout the course of the war and negotiations to bring the hostages home, US officials have asked Qatar to use the threat of expulsion as leverage in their talks with Hamas. The final impetus for Qatar agreeing to kick Hamas out came recently after the death of American-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Hamas’ rejection of yet another ceasefire proposal.
Qatar has been a major player in efforts over the past year to try to secure a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, in no small part because senior members of the militant group are based in Doha. Major negotiations have taken place in the Qatari capital for that reason.
Exactly when Hamas operatives would be exiled out of Qatar – and where they would go – are unclear.”