April 12—Writing on his Substack site, respected investigative journalist Seymour Hersh posted a new article on April 10, saying that some believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is willing to risk a war with Iran in order to stay in office, The piece is headlined, “The Fantasy of an Iranian Bomb,” with the sub-heading, “Iran has never had a nuclear bomb—why does Israel insist that it’s an imminent threat?”Hersh writes: “The Israeli bombing attack in Syria was a stunning escalation of what has been for decades a low-level tit-for-tat war between Damascus, Tehran, and Tel Aviv. It immediately raised speculation in Israel and elsewhere that Netanyahu is willing to risk war with Iran to stay in office.”Hersh also pointed to Netanyahu’s “obvious determination to stay in power by expanding Israel’s far-from-completed war in Gaza.” According to Hersh, Netanyahu’s actions send a message to the U.S. and the world that he will continue to do whatever he wants. He noted that Iran repeatedly made it clear that it does not want an all-out war with Israel.

April 12—Russian Foreign Ministry Press Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reported in her April 10 briefing that the level of cyberattacks on Russian critical infrastructure—the government’s medical, energy, transportation facilities, as well as media—has reached “unprecedented levels.” Those attacks are largely run out of Ukraine, but Russian specialists “have established that foreign intelligence services are behind many major attacks,” she charged, specifying “NATO’s military-political leadership,” and citing a network of cyber warfare centers controlled by the U.S. National Security Agency that Russia has identified along Russia’s borders.“In order to prepare and carry out cyberoperations, the U.S. and their allies use a network of special centers controlled by the U.S. National Security Agency and located along the Russian borders (in particular, in Estonia, Latvia, Finland, and Romania; with Georgia and Moldova in the future). These are cyber laboratories created for tactical and technical support of groups from the bloc’s cyber teams or special operations forces,” she stated. “They are also used to monitor the cyberspace and collect intelligence data, and work out scenarios of how to strike Russian critical information infrastructure facilities using information and communication technologies.”As for Ukraine, “it is no secret” that it has become a center for anti-Russian cyberattacks. Zakharova pointed to the so-called “IT Army” of Ukrainian hackers, backed by the Kiev regime and its Western patrons, whose cyberattacks against Russia—some real, some invented, she noted—are publicly and proudly talked up by Ukrainian authorities. The IT Army, “controlled by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and supervised by NATO member states, is in fact a conglomerate of criminals, specializing primarily in plain stealing of assets,” she added.Are some in Washington getting nervous about Russia’s clear, and repeated statements that NATO—and the U.S.—are at war with Russia, directing terrorist attacks, cyberattacks, strikes on Russian oil and other installations, etc.? The same day Zakharova made her briefing remarks, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Celeste Wallander provoked a rage fit by Washington’s rabid war crowd (e.g., neocon centers such as the Hudson Institute and Jamestown Foundation), because she insisted in a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee that the Biden administration has conveyed its “concerns” to Ukraine over its attacks on Russian oil and gas infrastructure, since those are “civilian targets.”

April 12—The editor and founder of the Times of Israel David Horovitz has written an editorial with the above headline, insisting on the removal of Benjamin "Bibi" Netaynahu as Prime Minister. The daily can be considered "center-right,'' and has never been this direct in opposition to Bibi, and the signed editorial goes after him from that perspective. First, Horovitz reiterates Netanyahu’s responsibility for the failure of the Oct. 7 attacks, including his support for Hamas against the Palestinian Authority, his failure in the current conflict by alienating the U.S. and Israel’s allies, etc. He then writes that it "falls to a potential few good men and women within his own coalition base to tell him that his presence is harming Israel, that his policies empowered and emboldened Hamas, and that far from being uniquely capable of ensuring Israel has the practical and diplomatic room to destroy Hamas, he is almost uniquely incapable of doing so….“But not only must they tell him this. In contrast to the cynical, sheep-like self-preservation they demonstrated during the judicial overhaul crisis, they must protect and serve the electorate they represent by organizing an orderly transition of power. In a 64-56 coalition, it does not take many people of integrity to put the interests of the country above self-interest and fear of the pro-Netanyahu machine.“Israel is in the midst of multiple crises—with a stalled war in the south; a potentially far worse conflict in the north, acute tensions in the West Bank, Iran’s multiple machinations, international hostility, no remotely competent public diplomacy, dysfunctional governance that continues to fail the citizenry at the most basic level, and an electorate riven over the Haredi [right-wing orthodox Jews—ed]​ community’s exclusion from national service and much more besides. Directly responsible for some, Netanyahu undermines Israel’s capacity to tackle all these crises….“But if not by his own belated will, then, via due political process, his necessary departure needs to be achieved in a manner that helps Israel address what has been since Oct. 7 a genuine existential crisis—a manner, in other words, that gives Hamas and Israel’s other circling enemies cause for concern and fear.”Sources in Israel report that the timing of the editorial, coming in the middle of critical ceasefire talks, steered by the United States, and prior to the execution of Netanyahu's announced order to the Israel Defense Forces to assault the last standing Gazan city, Rafah, is extremely significant. "Bibi's time is number days and weeks, no loner months," a source said this morning. "Will it be soon enough? I don't know> No one does."

April 12—“How is it that the most clear and present danger to humankind—a danger even more immediate than climate change and more devastating by magnitudes than mass migration, inflation, crime, or terrorism—is so completely out of sight and mind for the vast majority of Americans?”That is the crucial question raised by the Editorial Board of the Boston Globe in an April 9 editorial, “Why We Need To Start Worrying about the Bomb.” The Globe, which calls itself the leading newspaper in New England, warns Americans that they had better wake up and get active to ensure that the U.S. government, Congress, and presidential candidates recognize the overwhelming danger of nuclear war and stop raising “the temperature on global tensions.” The editorial is in sharp contrast to those in other major U.S. newspapers such as The New York Times and Washington Post which have demanded escalating confrontation with the two nuclear superpowers Russia and China, to back equally insane geopolitical strategies.“The horror of a nuclear attack would be unimaginable. The impact would last generations. And all of it is eminently feasible with only a fraction of the weapons that already exist in the world,” the editors warn. Yet when Gallup and Pew polling agencies asked Americans this year what their biggest concern was, nobody mentioned nuclear war. Nor did President Biden mention it in his State of the Union speech.The American people must sound the alarm, "demanding attention to the threat of nuclear war with the same vigor it demands, rightfully, action on climate change. That kind of mass movement four decades ago probably helped push the consummate cold warrior, Ronald Reagan, to negotiate major arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. It isn’t crazy to think the same could happen again with a President Biden—or even Trump.“What would be crazy is ignoring a threat that is so plainly in front of us,” the editors concluded. They ask readers to "consider the words of the late Daniel Ellsberg, who before he became famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers was a nuclear planner for the military.“In 2017, he called all-out thermonuclear war ‘a catastrophe waiting to happen’ and ‘an irreversible, unprecedented, and almost unimaginable calamity for civilization’ ...“‘No policies in human history,’ Ellsberg wrote, ‘have more deserved to be recognized as immoral. Or insane.’”

April 12—Today is Cosmonautics Day in Russia, commemorating the historic first human orbit of the Earth by Yuri Gagarin on this day in 1961. Anyone who is interested in how much of a “seat-of-the-pants” operation the Gagarin flight was, should read Stephen Walker’s 2021 book, Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human To Leave Our Planet and Journey into SpaceLast month, an Apollo astronaut Thomas Stafford passed away at the age of 93. General Stafford was the commander of U.S. side of the Apollo-Soyuz joint flight in space with the Russians in 1975. He and his Soyuz counterpart, Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, remained fast friends throughout their lives. Leonov passed away in 2019. See the NASA clip on Stafford’s passing.

April 11—The Times of Israel, citing “a source familiar with the matter,” reports yesterday  that Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin during a phone call on April 8 that Israel has not set a date for the launch of a major ground offensive on Rafah, thus contradicting the video statement made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that same day, in which he said a date had been set.Gallant told Austin, the source reported, that Israel is still finalizing its plans to evacuate the roughly 1.5 million Palestinians currently sheltering in Rafah after fleeing the fighting areas to the north, the source said on Tuesday, confirming reporting in Axios and Haaretz.