- Watch Norwegian F-35 Stealth Jet Test Fire First Air-to-Air Missile
A Norwegian fifth-generation F-35 stealth fighter jet assigned to 332 Squadron of the Royal Norwegian Air Force conducted the first air launch of an AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) in Norway, according to the Defence Blog.
Norway joined the F-35 program in 2008 to replace its F-16 fleet. The first two stealth jets were delivered for Norway to Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, in late 2015, where they were used to train Norwegian pilots. The first Norwegian F-35s arrived in-country for permanent basing at Ørland Air Base in November 2017.
The Norwegian government funded the procurement of 40 of 52 F-35s, expected to mostly arrive in the early 2020s.
Norwegian Armed Forces published the F-35 firing the AMRAAM missile on March 09.
“The shooting was carried out by 332 squadrons in cooperation with the TTT squadron (testing, training, and tactics) and the maintenance and logistics organization and was the first of its kind with F-35 in Norway,” the video’s description read.
Defense Blog said the AMRAAM missile is operational on all F-35 variants (the F-35A conventional takeoff and landing (CTOL) variant, the F-35B short takeoff/vertical landing (STOVL) variant, and the F-35C carrier variant (CV)). It’s the only radar-guided, air-to-air missile cleared to air-launch from the fifth-generation fighter.
The AMRAAM air-to-air missile is capable of all-weather day-and-night operations. With more than two decades of design, upgrades, testing, and production, the AIM-120 missile continues to be the best weapon for dogfights.
Raytheon is the main defense contractor that makes the missile. The weapon’s advanced active guidance section provides pilots with high hit rates.
Procured by 37 countries including the U.S., the AMRAAM missile is now integrated on the F-35 and has been used on F-15, F-16, F/A-18, F-22, Typhoon, Gripen, Tornado, and Harrier.
More importantly, the Pentagon is creating an F-35 friends circle around Russia and China, and with the stealth jets armed with new AMRAAM missiles, it seems like the preparation for conflict is more obvious than ever.
- Bulgaria Is A New Battleground In The New Cold War
Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,
Russian Prime Minister Medvedev traveled to Bulgaria last week.
The Russian premier’s visit was intended to explore the possibility of extending the TurkStream gas pipeline to the Balkan country and then onwards to Serbia and Central Europe, which is dependent on Sofia securing firm legal guarantees from Brussels in order to avoid a repeat of the South Stream fiasco that gave rise to the current project in the first place.
The timing of his trip also coincided with his host’s Liberation Day celebrations when Bulgaria remembers how it fought for freedom against the Ottoman Empire with Russian assistance, making this a very somber occasion and the perfect moment for any Russian leader to visit. Ties between the two Slavic countries have traditionally been close, though they’ve nevertheless had their fair share of problems as well, most notably during the two World Wars when they found themselves on opposite sides.
The complexity of Russian-Bulgarian relations explains why it’s a lot easier said than done to propose TurkStream’s extension to Bulgaria, especially given the recent context of the Balkan state becoming a joint US and EU protectorate and all but functioning as one of their vassals. That said, it speaks to the sincere desire of the Bulgarian authorities to advance their nation’s interests that they’re even trying to go forward with this possibility anyhow. The EU obviously needs the energy, and while they’d prefer to diversify more fully from their Russian supplier for political reasons or at the very least retain pipeline transit through Ukraine, they might be willing to accept TurkStream since they don’t have any other realistic options available to them under the circumstances. Bulgaria’s American ally, however, is clearly against this since it intends to sell more costly LNG to the continent instead.
It can therefore be said that a struggle for influence is taking place in Bulgaria nowadays.
The EU could leverage its economic and institutional weight in the country to promote TurkStream’s extension to “mainland Europe” from Turkey while the US could lean on its military influence through NATO and the national authorities under its sway to try to stop this from happening. Amidst all of this, there are evidently some Bulgarian decision makers who – despite their political faults and loyalty to one or another patron – nevertheless still care about their national interests and understand how important it is for their country that this Russian initiative succeeds, hence why some headway has already been made in that direction thus far. It’ll remain to be seen who comes out on top in this struggle for influence, but Bulgaria just became an important New Cold War battleground.
- While Everyone Sleeps, The Courts Are Abolishing All Immigration Enforcement
Authored by Daniel Horwitz via ConservativeReview.com,
Congress could never get away with creating constitutional rights for illegal aliens to remain here, yet a single lower court just did so on Thursday. And where Congress would face deep reprisal in the next election, faceless judges will never feel the heat.
Conservatives fear that extreme Democrats might actually abolish ICE and all immigration enforcement, but the lower courts are already systematically abolishing ICE’s authority, nullifying immigration enforcement statutes, violating separation of powers, and constantly increasing the wave of bogus asylum-seekers that they originally spawned with other radical rulings. The latest ruling from the Ninth Circuit demonstrates that unless Republicans and the president begin pushing back against these radical judges and delegitimizing their rulings, Democrats will get everything they want without ever facing electoral backlash or even the need to win elections.
It’s truly hard to overstate the outrageously harmful effects of Thursday’s Ninth Circuit ruling. For the first time in our history, the courts have fabricated a constitutional right for those denied asylum to appeal to federal courts for any reason.
Here’s the background.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants are flooding our border, claiming the formula of “credible fear” of persecution. They get to stay indefinitely while they ignore their court dates in immigration court. Because of an amalgamation of several prior activist court rulings, mainly by this very circuit, roughly 90 percent of credible fear claims are approved by asylum officers and the claimants shielded from deportation, even though asylum status is ultimately rejected almost every time by an immigration judge. Unfortunately, by that point it’s too late for the American people, who are stuck with the vast majority of these claimants remaining indefinitely in the country. Yet rather than ending this sham incentive, the Ninth Circuit drove a truck through immigration law by asserting that there is now a constitutional right for even the few who are denied initial credible fear status and are placed in deportation proceedings to appeal their denials, not just to an administrative immigration judge but to a federal Article III judge for any reason.
In past cases, the courts merely twisted statutes and contorted their plain meaning. In this case, for the first time ever and in direct contrast to a ruling by the Third Circuit in 2016, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the immigration statute that denies the federal courts jurisdiction to hear such appeals is unconstitutional under the constitutional requirement of habeas corpus, thereby giving 7.8 billion people in the world habeas corpus access to our courts. This will allow numerous illegal aliens, including the brand-new ones entering now, to stay indefinitely while they litigate themselves into status. The ACLU, which of course led this lawsuit on behalf of a Sri Lankan migrant denied asylum, wasn’t kidding when it proclaimed, “The historical and practical importance of this ruling cannot be overstated.”
This is one of many recent violations of sovereignty doctrine, known as “plenary power doctrine.” This long-standing principle in the courts is that while aliens have due process rights against criminal punishment, they have no rights to litigate against deportation, which is a mere extension of sovereignty, other than the process laid out by Congress. This principle “has become about as firmly embedded in the legislative and judicial tissues of our body politic as any aspect of our government,” not “merely” by “a page of history … but a whole volume” (Galvan v. Press). The concept is “inherent in sovereignty,” consistent with “ancient principles” of international law, and “to be exercised exclusively by the political branches of government.” (Kleindienst v. Mandel).
What is so outrageous about this case is that Congress explicitly stripped the courts of any jurisdiction to hear such claims. The reason why the district judge, who was an Obama appointee, refused to even hear this case is because 8 U.S.C. §1252(e)(2) prohibits the federal courts (not to be confused with DOJ administrative courts) from hearing habeas corpus claims against expedited removal of those denied their credible fear claims unless of course they have a claim that they are a citizen or a legal permanent resident. In this case, the three Clinton appointees of this Ninth Circuit panel, Wallace Tashima, Margaret McKeown, and Richard Paez, ruled for the first time that this provision is unconstitutional and that the district court must hear the case.
The court used the Boumediene v. Bush decision, which created a right to habeas corpus for enemy combatants being held at Guantanamo Bay, as the basis for its decision. That decision in itself was an egregious warping of the Constitution, a decision that Scalia angrily predicted that “the Nation will live to regret.” However, the important distinction is that Boumediene was a case of indefinite detention, whereas this is a case where we are enforcing our sovereignty and getting rid of the person, who can live freely wherever he wants. Applying habeas corpus to deportation is bonkers even by the Boumediene standard.
Now that there is a circuit split on this revolutionary idea, court watchers on all sides predict the Supreme Court will take up the case. While conservatives are fairly confident that this will be added to the endless list of Ninth Circuit reversals by SCOTUS (although I have my concerns about Gorsuch in this case), conservatives need to realize the factors creating an emergency with sovereignty and the lower courts:
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We’ve seen over and over again how lower courts create a legal, political, and policy momentum for creating new rights. If they are not nipped in the bud and delegitimized immediately, they wind up growing and eventually being codified, even if initially reversed by the Supreme Court. This has happened with almost every phantom right created by the courts and has already begun with immigration law. We are at the cusp of the courts doing with immigration what they did with abortion and gay marriage, even though it took years for the Left to win in those cases. All of the justices except for Clarence Thomas succumb to pressure to varying degrees and will eventually go along with much of the anti-sovereignty doctrine building in the lower courts.
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Many conservatives are suggesting that we “fix” our immigration laws to stop the asylum fraud, among other problems at the border. What this case demonstrates is that courts are so radical they are not just twisting the wording of statutes, they are downright invalidating them by creating new constitutional rights to immigrate. They are even brazenly invalidating statutes that block the courts from hearing cases, as we saw with the TPS amnesty case. Keeping out and deporting aliens as well as defining court jurisdiction are two of the most unquestionable and categorical powers of Congress, and they are backed by case law dating back to our Founding. This is no longer about any one statute. There is no statute to fix. Remember, we already fixed our immigration laws in 1996. Many of the things we want to do, including kicking the courts out of these cases, were already done in 1996, including the statute at issue here. This law passed the Senate unanimously! Passing more laws while continuing to legitimize lower court supremacy won’t help. If we continue to agree that lower courts rule over immigration, no amount of congressional changes could help, because the courts will rule the changes unconstitutional. This is why it’s time to grab the bull by the horns and attack the notion of judicial jurisdiction over these issues to begin with. The Trump administration needs to begin pushing back against the courts.
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There is something much bigger occurring here. Putting aside particular smaller areas of immigration law, the legal profession has now pulled the trigger on a long-standing goal of what they refer to as “applying constitutional norms” to foreign nationals, not just in terms of criminal proceedings, but in the context of immigration claims themselves.
Justice Robert Jackson, the great champion of due process and the dissenter in the Japanese internment case, described it this way: “Due process does not invest any alien with a right to enter the United States, nor confer on those admitted the right to remain against the national will.” Due process for aliens in the context of immigration decisions is whatever Congress says it is. As the court said in Lem Moon Sing v. United States, “The decisions of executive or administrative officers, acting within powers expressly conferred by Congress, are due process of law.” Liberals have been trying to attack this for decades and ensure that even the aliens we successfully deport expeditiously (increasingly a small number) can remain here indefinitely and tie up our courts with lawsuits. If we allow this game to continue, the flow at our border will make what Europe is dealing with look like child’s play.
Every week, we cede another piece of our sovereignty to unelected courts who are actually violating longstanding Supreme Court precedent. The conservative movement needs to push this administration to stand up and put the Supreme Court on notice to guard its own precedents and doctrines and that if it fails to rein in its own quite inferior courts, the administration will certainly not regard those decisions as superior to our own laws. Trump has no other choice.
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- China's Leadership More Popular Globally Than U.S. Counterpart
It’s been a fact since 2017: The Chinese leadership has higher median approval ratings around the world than its U.S. counterpart. While the gap was miniscule in 2017, Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes that it widened in the previous year to three percentage points, as reported by Gallup.
You will find more infographics at Statista
The last time the U.S. was this unpopular around the world was during the financial crisis in 2008. But even then, the U.S. leadership’s approval rating was higher than any of those of the current Trump cabinet, which assumed office in early 2017. China has earned high ratings in Africa, where the country has invested large sums in the past decade.
Approval ratings in its home region were on par with the median global result of 34 percent and were somewhat lower in Europe and the Americas.
Yet, Mexican citizens, whose country has been at loggerheads with the Trump administration over trade deal NAFTA and the construction of a border wall, also rated China significantly higher in the past year, as did citizens of Venezuela.
- The Federal Reserve: A Failure Of The Rule Of Law
Authored by Alexander Salter via The American Institute for Economic Research,
“Money is power.” We’ve all heard this aphorism many times before. Too often it’s a lazy shorthand dismissal of the finding of mainstream economics, which show that the pursuit and possession of money often entails innocuous or even beneficial consequences for society. Dr. Johnson was right after all: “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.”
But there are some contexts in which the saying is apt. An obvious case is the Federal Reserve. The Fed has a monopoly on the creation of base money, the fundamental asset underlying the banking and financial system. And over decades, with each instance of financial turbulence, the Fed has become less constrained in how, when, and why it creates base money. Since the Great Recession, the Fed has been able to bestow purchasing power, liquidity, and solvency on just about any financial organization it pleases. If that isn’t power, there’s no such thing.
The Federal Reserve System was created in 1913. It was intended to be a formalization of the interbank clearing system that then existed in the National Banking System. It was not intended to be a central bank. Even in the early 20th century, economists and politicians had some idea of what central banks did and how they behaved, and the existence of such an institution was widely regarded as inherently un-American, in the sense that it could not be reconciled with a self-governing society. That’s why so many proponents of the Federal Reserve System bent over backward to insist they were not advocating the creation of a central bank. And at the time, their repudiations were reasonable; there was no reason the Federal Reserve System had to acquire the powers it did.
But then the US entered the First World War. Wars have a way of eroding society’s long-established institutions. And the political process has a logic of its own. These forces combined to transform the Fed into what its critics feared it might become: a genuine central bank.
The Fed began supporting the market for US government debt during the First World War using techniques that were the forerunners of modern monetary policy. Once the Fed got a taste for tinkering with credit and money markets, it insisted benign monetary management was consistent with its mandate. And it’s been tinkering ever since, often to the detriment of millions of workers who have no control over the Fed but must suffer the consequences of its errors.
It’s well accepted in macroeconomics that the Fed bears a large share of the blame for putting the “Great” in Great Depression. The turmoil that gripped not only US but global markets starting in 1929 was so disruptive, in part, because the Fed bungled its handling of the money supply. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz famously demonstrated this in their much-celebrated Monetary History of the United States. So compelling was their case that in 2002, future Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke admitted, “I would like to say to Milton and Anna:Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”
But the Fed did do it again. The 2007-8 crisis was a replay of central bank mismanagement. Bernanke’s Fed focused more on shoring up the balance sheets of politically connected banks and nonbank financial houses than combating the liquidity crunch that characterized the early day of the crisis. The result was many irresponsible banks got bailouts, while financial markets as a whole were left scrambling for liquidity. The reverberations of this misdiagnosis were not limited to financial markets: as the spike in unemployment and the precipitous decline in output demonstrate, the Fed’s actions had dire consequences for those far removed from the financial sector.
But through various rounds of loaning banks money on unsound collateral, such as the now-infamous mortgage-backed securities, as well as outright purchases of bad assets to prop up banks’ balance sheets, the Fed has de facto acquired the authority to allocate credit to preferred banks and other financial institutions. Before the crisis, the Fed’s tinkering could still, with some mental gymnastics, be reconciled with the view that the central bank can be and should be a financial-market referee. But now, with its powers to allocate credit in a manner that much more resembles fiscal policy than monetary policy, the Fed has stepped into the game as a player, and one that plays by an entirely different set of rules.
More than a decade after the financial crisis, we’re left grappling with the Fed as an organization with incredible power but subject to minimal responsibility. History shows that the Fed is eager to expand its own powers with each macroeconomic snafu. From clearinghouse to monetary tinkerer to direct allocator of purchasing power, each real or perceived crisis has been used by the Fed to move one step further on the road to monetary central planning. At no time has this process been approved through any of the institutions of collective action Americans recognize as lawful. Nor can it be justified by circumstances, since the only durable beneficiaries of the Fed’s transformation are politically connected bankers and would-be monetary policy makers.
In the case of the Fed, money is indeed power, and power of the most pernicious kind. There’s no reason to continue to put up with this lawless market manipulator. Free societies require any who would wield power on the public’s behalf to submit themselves to the rule of law. It’s long past time we demanded that of the Fed.
- Dick's Chops Off Revenue From Gun Enthusiasts Amid Shrinking Sales
Despite shrinking sales following their last anti-gun corporate decision, Dick’s Sporting Goods has announced it is scaling back its gun business yet again.
During its Tuesday earnings call, CEO Edward Stack said that the sporting goods retailer would no longer carry firearms at 125 locations – roughly 17% of US stores. The company will replace the firearms sections with other categories such as clothing and shoes. Of note, the retailer is beefing up its private-label strategy in a bid to become less reliant on wholesale partners such as Under Armour and Nike.
Of note, net income for the quarter fell to $102.6 million from $116 million during the same period last year, per Marketwatch. Adjusted same store sales fell 3.1% y/y for the 12 month period ending Feb 2.
The shift away from firearms is the second such step over the last 13 months, after the store decided in late February 2018 to stop selling guns to customers younger than 21 in the wake of the Valentine’s day mass-shooting weeks before at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The company also pulled intimidating looking assault rifles from their shelves as well as high-capacity magazines from all store locations, along with subsidiary Field & Stream.
But thoughts and prayers are not enough. We have to help solve the problem that’s in front of us. Gun violence is an epidemic that’s taking the lives of too many people, including the brightest hope for the future of America – our kids. https://t.co/J4OcB6XJnu pic.twitter.com/6VoKwJe8tH
— DICK’S Sporting Goods (@DICKS) February 28, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The company also hired three gun control lobbyists, and announced that it would destroy all of the weapons it had stopped selling.
In response to the 2018 corporate decision, gunmakers Springfield Armory and O.F. Mossberg stopped doing business with Dick’s.
Sales, meanwhile, dipped nearly 4 percent as of November 2018 amid vows by gun rights activists to never patronize the sporting goods chain. During Wednesday’s call, Stack noted that the company had continued to see “double-digit declines” in its gun business, and that they expect the trend to continue.
- Study Shows Migrants Use Almost Twice The Welfare Benefits As Native-Born Americans
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
New research has discovered that foreign non-citizens use nearly two times the amount of welfare as native-born Americans. Both legal and illegal aliens fall into the category of foreigners who take from the welfare system.
According to a report by Breitbart, in recently released research by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), analysts discovered that about 63 percent of non-citizen households, those who live legally and illegally in the U.S., use some form of public welfare while only about 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare.
California and Texas have the most expansive welfare-dependent immigration. For example, more than 7-in-10 non-citizen households in California use at least one form of welfare compared to just 35 percent of native-born American households that use welfare in the state.
In Texas, nearly 70 percent of non-citizen households use welfare. Similar to California, only 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare.-Breitbart
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News earlier this week, President Donald Trump said he wanted an end to all welfare-dependent legal immigration that burdens American taxpayers with the costs.
“I don’t like the idea of people coming in and going on welfare for 50 years, and that’s what they want to be able to do – and it’s no good,” Trump said.
And it is an obvious burden. For what one receives without working for, another must work for without earning. It’s a vicious and immoral practice to steal money from some in order to give it to others.
The Trump administration is considering a new regulation this year that would limit immigrants’ ability to live off the producers (taxpayers). It would effectively ban legal immigrants from permanently resettling in the U.S. if they are a burden on American taxpayers. This would be a net win for those being stolen from (“taxpayers”).
Legal immigration controls suggested by the government would be equal an annual $57.4 billion tax cut – the amount taxpayers spend every year on paying for the welfare, crime, and schooling costs of the country’s mass importation of 1.5 million new, mostly low-skilled legal immigrants.
- Yuan Slides After China Jobless Rate Spikes, Industrial Production Growth Tumbles
After January’s record surge, February saw China’s credit growth unexpectedly collapse prompting notable downgrades in expectations for tonight’s macro data bonanza.
Chinese central bank reported that in February, aggregate financing increased by a paltry 703 billion yuan, roughly half the expected 1.3 trillion…
… and the lowest print on record in the recently revised series. Additionally, growth in China’s broad money supply, or M2, once again slumped and after a modest rebound in January, in February M2 Y/Y growth dropped back to 8.0%, the lowest print in series history.
The February collapse in credit creation following January’s extravagant print likely means that just like most other Chinese data in the pre-New Year period, this too was distorted by the Lunar New Year, and as a result the January surge, far from indicative of a major new reflationary boost may simply suggest that China will maintain a prudent approach to overall economic leverage, which however will be bad news for the stock market which in the second half of February went all in on bets that China has doubled-down on reflating both its, and the global economy.
And China’s credit impulse has weakened back after January’s rebound:
Heading into the data, Chinese macro data has been extremely weak despite endless streams of stimulus:
But, as Bloomberg reports, the latest PMI figures out of China have suggested some stabilization in an economic slowdown that hit last year. Though the blow from the trade war to exports and production probably hasn’t fully hit as yet.
So what did February’s data look like:
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China Industrial Production YoY MISS +5.3% vs +5.6% exp and +6.2% prior
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China Retail Sales YoY MEET +8.2% vs +8.2% exp and +9.0% prior
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China Fixed Asset Investment YoY MEET +6.1% vs +6.1% exp and +5.9% prior
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China Property Investment YoY BEAT +11.6% vs +9.5% prior
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China Surveyed Jobless Rate WEAKER 5.3% vs 4.9% prior
This is the weakest Industrial Production growth since March 2009 and Retail Sales growth is hovering near its weakest since May 2003. But perhaps the most worrisome for Chinese officials is the surge in the surveyed jobless rate to 5.3%, the highest since Feb 2017.
Graphically:
Of course, all of this comes with a warning that figures for this time of year can be volatile due to the lunar new year holiday in China, when factories and offices are significantly affected by a week-long break. The timing of the holiday shifts. Early February 2019, mid-February 2018 and late January to early February 2017, for example. So it really distorts the Jan/Feb data.
Offshore yuan was fading into the data (and ChiNext was extending its losses from the last two days) and extended its losses after the data disappointment…
The soft reading on industrial output is probably the key takeaway from these numbers, opening the big question of whether this is reflective of a deeper downturn than anticipated as the trade war effects start to bite in earnest (or if it can be blamed on the Lunar New Year effect)?
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- CIA Is Conspiring With ISIS, Turning Syrian Refugee Camps Into ISIS Hotbeds
Submitted by SouthFront
The CIA is conspiring with ISIS commanders in northeastern Syria supplying them with fake documents and then transferring them to Iraq, according to reports in Turkish pro-government media.
About 2,000 ISIS members were questioned in the areas of Kesra, Buseira, al-Omar and Suwayr in Deir Ezzor province and at least 140 of them then received fake documents. Some of the questioned terrorists were then moved to the camps of al-Hol, Hasakah and Rukban, which are controlled by US-backed forces. The CIA also reportedly created a special facility near Abu Khashab with the same purpose.
Israeli, French and British special services are reportedly involved.
An interesting observation is that the media of the country, which in the previous years of war, used to conspire with ISIS allowing its foreign recruits to enter Syria and buying smuggled oil from the terrorists, has now become one of the most active exposers of the alleged US ties with ISIS elements.
Another issue often raised in Turkish media is the poor humanitarian situation in the refugee camps controlled by US-backed forces. These reports come in the course of other revelations. According to the International Rescue Committee, about 100 people, mostly children, died in combat zones or in the al-Hol camp controlled by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces just recently.
In its turn, the Russian Defense Ministry released a series of satellite images revealing the horrifying conditions in the al-Rukban camp. The imagery released on March 12 shows at least 670 graves, many of them fresh, close to the camp’s living area. The tents and light constructions used to settle refugees are also located in a close proximity to large waste deposits.
A joint statement by the Russian and Syrian Joint Coordination Committees for Repatriation of Syrian Refugees said that refugees in al-Rukban are suffering from a lack of water, food, medication and warm clothing, which is especially important during winter. According to the statement, members of the US-backed armed group Maghawir al-Thawra disrupt water deliveries to the camp, using this as a bargaining chip for blackmailing and profiteering purposes.
Tensions are once again growing between Syria and Israel. Earlier in March, Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad submitted an official letter to the head of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) Kristin Lund that Damascus ”will not hesitate to confront Israel” if it continues refusing to withdraw from the Golan Heights.
Israeli media and officials responded with a new round of allegations that Hezbollah is entrenching in southern Syria therefore justifying a further militarization of the Golan Heights.
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