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The Navy revealed that one of the ships it deployed to support the mission of building a pier to deliver aid to starving residents in Gaza was forced to turn back last week after it suffered a fire in its engine room. The incident comes as the Pentagon's self-imposed deadline of having the pier operational and delivering the needed aid by May rapidly approaches, and experts say there are other delays and problems cropping up with the mission. ... A retired Army chief warrant officer who has significant experience in the Army's watercraft community also told Military.com in an interview...

American drones aren't performing as well as those from other countries, like China's, in Ukraine. The drones are glitchy, expensive, and get lost during flight, sources told The Wall Street Journal.... The problems with many US-made drones, particularly some of the smaller ones, are that they often don't function as advertised or planned and easily glitch when targeted by Russian jamming, sources told The Wall Street Journal. They are fragile and vulnerable to electronic warfare. For some of the systems that were sent to Ukraine, issues included not taking off, getting lost and not returning home, or simply failing to...

Canada's military will take a bigger role in the North over the next two decades as climate change and increasingly aggressive foes threaten Arctic sovereignty, says a new defence policy document released(opens in a new tab) Monday. ... It allocates $9.5billion over 20 years to start ramping up production of artillery ammunition, $307 million for early-warning aircraft and $2.7 billion to buy long-range missiles. It projects that annual defence spending will have doubled between 2016 to 2026. All of that still leaves Canada shy of the minimum 2 per cent the NATO allies agreed to spend last July. NATO's latest...

Poland’s top climate official said the country is preparing to set a date for a complete phase-out of coal-fired power generation, just months after the nation elected a new government that has pledged to support environmental policies of the European Union (EU). ... Poland, which currently receives about 70% of its electricity from burning coal, and has long been Europe’s largest producer of the fuel, has been slowly increasing its use of solar and wind power. ... Urszula Zielinska, the country’s Secretary of State for Climate, during a meeting in Brussels, Belgium on Jan. 15, said, “Only with an end...

Failing to sufficiently increase staffing in response to recent mass immigration has left Poland’s public administration “unable to cope”, reports the state audit office. It found that applications for residence permits take an average of one year to process. The record holder among the cases that the Supreme Audit Office (NIK) examined was one person who waited over seven years for a decision. For the last six years running, Poland has issued the EU’s highest number of first residence permits to non-EU immigrants. The number of foreign workers registered in the social insurance system has risen from under 200,000 in...

A television presenter with Poland’s state broadcaster has apologised for the years of “shameful words” directed at LGBTQ+ people, in a moment hailed by a prominent rights campaigner as the closing of a chapter in Polish society. Bart Staszewski, an activist and film-maker, said the apology made to him live on air on Sunday showed the transformation of a broadcaster that served as a mouthpiece for the Law and Justice (PiS) party during its time in power. Looking directly into the camera, Szeląg said: “For many years in Poland, shameful words have been directed at numerous individuals because they chose...

Poland’s new government is moving to limit freedom of speech and actively penalize so-called hate speech, a move that has been associated with stifling dissent and limiting opposition to issues surrounding mass immigration, religion, and LGBT issues in other European countries. ... Deputy Minister Śmiszek announced this week legislative changes to introduce criminal responsibility for what his party considers hate speech against homosexuals. --- "The time has come to ban disgusting, homophobic, discriminatory statements in the public sphere,” declared Śmiszek, who is openly homosexual. Meanwhile, the European Parliament is calling on EU leaders to include incitement to hatred and hate...

Eastern Ontario city says 23 people overdosed since Tuesday afternoon Overdoses are rising — but resources to help are scarce, Belleville, Ont., mayor says Neil Ellis, mayor of Belleville, Ont., says his community doesn't have nearly the resources they need as overdoses rise. When people in his community are hit with an overdose, he says, they are 'admitted to the hospital and put back out on the streets.' Mike Juby was outside Bridge Street United Church in Belleville, Ont., on Tuesday afternoon when people suddenly started dropping to the sidewalk all around him. There were "ambulances left, right and centre"...

Elite thinking, as it’s termed, is under attack – and rightly so – for being out of step with the rest of the country. Below, we highlight some of the profound attitudinal differences between elites and average Americans: • In a time when most Americans have suffered a loss of real take-home pay, 74% of elites say they are financially better off today than in the past versus 20% of all Americans. • Nearly six in ten say there is too much individual freedom in America – double the rate of all Americans. • More than two-thirds (67%) favor rationing...

As they were boarding it in rough seas, around 8 p.m. local time, one SEAL got knocked off by high waves and a teammate went in after him. Both are missing. The team boarding the small boat was facing about a dozen crew members. The crew members, who were taken into custody, had no paperwork, which allowed a search of the vessel. The weapons were confiscated, and the boat was sunk, a routine procedure that usually involves blowing open holes in the hull.

Two Navy Seals are missing after falling into the water off the coast of Somalia while trying to board a vessel in the nighttime, officials said. The two Seals, whose names were not publicly released, were climbing up a vessel in the Gulf of Aden when they got knocked off by waves. Under their protocol, when one SEAL is overtaken, the next jumps in after them. The men were on an interdiction mission — where members intercept weapons on ships that are bound for Houthi-controlled Yemen — when the waves overtook them, the officials said, according to reports. The officials,...

The author is Ukraine correspondent for a daily newspaper in Warsaw and had access to political insiders and senior officials. He quotes an unnamed Polish government minister who claims to have run into British commandos in mid-March 2022 as he was travelling between Kyiv and the city of Zhytomyr. ......... The minister said: “It was a time when the Russians were still standing in Bucha, and the route was a grey zone. It was possible to run into Russians. We passed the last checkpoint. ....... “Well, and who did we meet next? Ukrainian soldiers and… British special forces. Uniformed. With...

An electric vehicle owner in Metro Vancouver is questioning the sustainability of EVs, after his basically new car was written off due to the cost of repairs. Kyle Hsu is hoping his story serves as a warning to prospective EV buyers. He says he was left frustrated and saddened by what seemed to be an innocuous incident that scratched the underside of his car’s battery. ........ Due to the damage, Hsu says his eight-year warranty was deemed void, and the entire battery needed to be replaced at a cost of $30,000. Following the advice of the dealership, Hsu says he...

Javier Milei, the new president of Argentina, has about-turned on his commitment to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. Mr Milei, who was sworn into office on Sunday, had previously said he intended to rescind Argentina’s participation in the agreement after calling climate change a hoax. But the country’s new top climate diplomat, Marcia Levaggi, told Reuters on Sunday that Mr Milei’s government had sent her to head the Argentine delegation at the United Nations Cop28 climate talks underway in Dubai.

Before becoming Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni was one of the most strident voices on migration in the European Union. As an opposition politician, she warned darkly of efforts to substitute native Italians with ethnic minorities and promised to put in place a naval blockade to stop migrants crossing the Mediterranean. During her time in office, she has taken a markedly different tack — presiding over a sharp spike in irregular arrivals and introducing legislation that could see as many as 1.5 million new migrants arrive through legal channels. Coming at a time when the right and far right are...

It seemed crystal clear on Thursday: the IDF counter-invasion of Gaza would start either Friday or Saturday. The IDF had given certain deadlines for Palestinians to evacuate northern Gaza, with the deadlines expiring by midday Friday. ...Yet, now we have arrived at late Monday, and if anything, the signs (which could also be psychological warfare) are that the invasion is further away, and not yet imminent. ... What changed? A number of factors seem to have caused a delay, but sources have told The Jerusalem Post that one factor has been a growing concern that Hezbollah is waiting for the...

Russia has managed to overcome sanctions and export controls imposed by the West to expand its missile production beyond prewar levels, according to U.S., European and Ukrainian officials, leaving Ukraine especially vulnerable to intensified attacks in the coming months... Overall, Kusti Salm, a senior Estonian defense ministry official, estimated that Russia’s current ammunition production is seven times greater than that of the West. Russia’s production costs are also far lower than the West’s, in part because Moscow is sacrificing safety and quality in its effort to build weapons more cheaply, Mr. Salm said. For instance, it costs a Western country...

PASCAGOULA, Miss.—A $13.3 billion program to safeguard American interests in the Arctic has run aground on an old industrial challenge: cutting and shaping thick, hardened steel. U.S. officials are racing to procure new polar icebreakers because one of only two that the Coast Guard now sails has reached the end of its life, and the one assigned to the Arctic is out of service for maintenance every winter. Delivery of the first new icebreaker has slipped to 2028 from 2024 as designers, engineers and welders grapple with something the U.S. hasn’t done in decades: reliably shape hardened steel that is...

The Russia-Ukraine War is exposing significant vulnerabilities in the Army’s strategic personnel depth and ability to withstand and replace casualties. Army theater medical planners may anticipate a sustained rate of roughly 3,600 casualties per day, ranging from those killed in action to those wounded in action or suffering disease or other non-battle injuries. With a 25 percent predicted replacement rate, the personnel system will require 800 new personnel each day. For context, the United States sustained about 50,000 casualties in two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In large-scale combat operations, the United States could experience that same number...

Exclusive: Nearly 50 GMB members to stop work at Ayrshire site that assembles Storm Shadow and Brimstone missiles. Workers at a munitions plant that supplies Ukraine with missiles are going on strike for two weeks in an escalating dispute over pay and bonuses. Nearly 50 workers who handle and load missiles at the defence munitions plant at Beith, in Ayrshire, allege they have been significantly short-changed by a pay and bonuses deal given to rocket-assembly staff at the plant. The Beith site assembles and distributes the Storm Shadow and Brimstone missiles being sent to Ukraine by the Ministry of Defence,...