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Nickel/Metals/ War – Geopolitical Flashpoints

UK army chief: We’re ready to fight Putin in Eastern Europe – by Noah Keate (Politico Europe – November 21, 2024)

https://www.politico.eu/

Rob Magowan told MPs the British Army ‘would fight tonight’ if asked amid rising tensions with Russia.

LONDON — Britain’s armed forces would be ready to fight their Russian counterparts “tonight” if Vladimir Putin invades another Eastern European nation, a top U.K. military chief said Thursday.

“If the British Army was asked to fight tonight, it would fight tonight,” Rob Magowan, the deputy chief of the British defense staff, told the House of Commons defense committee. “I don’t think anybody in this room should be under any illusion that if the Russians invaded Eastern Europe tonight, then we would meet them in that fight.”

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Effort to ban nickel sales to Israel has pacifist intentions – by Tyler Clarke (Sudbury.com – June 29, 2024)

https://www.sudbury.com/

Retired Cambrian College mathematics instructor and longtime peace advocate David Starbuck is behind a petition which aims to ban the sale of Canadian nickel to Israel

Condemning the State of Israel’s sustained bombardment of Gaza, local man David Starbuck helped launch a federal petition to ban the sale of Canadian nickel to Israel. Nickel, he clarified in conversation with Sudbury.com, is used in armaments.

Through the local mining of nickel, there’s no telling how much the Greater Sudbury area has inadvertently aided in Israel’s “unrelenting Israeli assault on occupied Gaza,” as United Nations Human Rights Council special rapporteur Francesca Albanese put it earlier this year in finding reasonable grounds to determine Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

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The other legacy of D-Day: A Canada that built stuff. So much stuff – by Tony Keller (Globe and Mail – June 7, 2024)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

On the 80th anniversary of D-Day, we memorialize the sacrifice, in blood and lives, of the Canadians who liberated Europe. Largely forgotten, however, are the economic, technical and industrial achievements that made victory possible – how Canadian business retooled, innovated and threw up new factories overnight, and the mind-boggling quantities of stuff they churned out.

Canada didn’t just clothe, feed, equip and arm the more than one million Canadians in uniform (out of a population of just 11 million). Stimulated by unprecedented federal spending and borrowing, industry shook off the Great Depression, and was soon building and exporting massive quantities of, well, everything.

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Canada now ‘a little bit of a laughingstock in NATO’ – by Donna Kennedy-Glans (National Post – June 2, 2024)

https://nationalpost.com/

Canadian business titan Larry Stevenson is a former soldier who knows what’s wrong with the Canadian Armed Forces. It’s not the personnel

“Canada, you are freeloading!” That’s how businessman and former Canadian soldier Lawrence (Larry) Stevenson interprets last week’s letter from 23 U.S. Democratic and Republican senators to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The American lawmakers urged Canada to uphold its NATO commitments, and speed up efforts to increase defence spending to two per cent of GDP.

A NATO summit is planned for July in Washington. It’s not business-as-usual for American senators to publicly deliver such a blunt message to a NATO ally and neighbour in advance of a summit; I’m more than a little curious to understand its timing and meaning.

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Ring of Fire Road Needs to Start Construction Now Due to Geopolitics and Global Warming – Stan Sudol (June 1, 2024)

Without a doubt, the Ring of Fire camp and its many strategic minerals that include nickel, copper, platinum group metals, chromite and titanium – just to mention a few as explorers have just scratched the proverbial surface – is the most important mining discovery in Canadian history. It may even exceed the legendary Sudbury Basin some day.

Discovered in 2007, the region is located approximately 450 kms. northeast of Thunder Bay in the isolated and vast peatlands of Hudson Bay which itself is roughly the size of Norway but with only about 10,000 people. Contrary to fanatical ENGOs, sustainable mineral development and exploration practices will have minimal impact on the environment and provide the critical minerals needed to stop global warming. Australian miner Wyloo owns the Eagle’s Nest nickel/copper mine and various chromite deposits. Canadian owned Juno Corp is the other main explorer in the district and controls roughly 52 percent of the mine claims.

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OPINION: Honouring the nation born in the fires of Juno Beach – by Tim Cook (Globe and Mail – June 1, 2024)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

D-Day was the moment that Canada became a country that mattered. How can we do justice to that story 80 years later?

Tim Cook is chief historian at the Canadian War Museum and the author or editor of 18 books of military history.

Eighty years ago this month, an American, British and Canadian armed force set off from Britain to launch a fraught assault on Northwest Europe to liberate the oppressed people from their Nazi overlords. And the Allied generals were worried.

They had been sweating for months over multiple drafts of the operation, gathering military assets and formulating complex deceptions to trick Adolf Hitler’s forces about the location of the real attack. Even then, the generals felt that the amphibious landing force had only about a 50-per-cent chance of surviving the coming battle on the beaches at Normandy in France.

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New Canadian submarines are ‘inevitable,’ says Blair. Acquiring them will be anything but – by John Ivison (National Post – May 15, 2024)

https://nationalpost.com/

The question remains whether the prime minister and the cabinet are serious about defence and meeting their spending targets

Bill Blair, the federal defence minister, made a rare admission of Liberal fallibility in Washington on Monday when he said he regrets using the word “explore” when talking about renewing Canada’s submarine fleet. ttawa’s recent defence policy update said the government will “explore options for renewing and expanding the submarine fleet,” a form of words that was criticized for lacking urgency.

“It’s certainly not my intention to be wishy-washy. What I’ve tried to articulate very, very clearly and strongly in the document is, we know we have to replace our submarine fleet, and we’re going to do that,” Blair said.

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Europe’s Gathering Storm – by Diane Francis (Substack – May 6, 2024)

https://dianefrancis.substack.com/

French President Emmanuel Macron shocked the world on February 26 by suggesting that Europeans may have to send troops to help Ukraine. Then on May 4, he doubled-down and said French troops would go to Ukraine if Kyiv requested their help. He also described Europe as “mortal” and said that “things can fall apart very quickly” because the US is no longer guarantor of Europe’s security.

“I have a clear strategic objective: Russia cannot win in Ukraine,” Macron said. “If Russia wins in Ukraine, there will be no security in Europe. Who can pretend that Russia will stop there? What security will there be for neighboring countries, Moldova, Romania, Poland, Lithuania and the others?” His clarion call was echoed by the leader of Europe’s other nuclear power, Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who said “if Putin is allowed to succeed in this war of aggression, he will not stop at the Polish border”.

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UK puts its defense industry on ‘war footing’ and gives Ukraine $620 million in new military aid – by Vanessa Gera and Sylvia Hui (Associate Press – April 2024)

https://apnews.com/

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The U.K. prime minister said Tuesday the country is putting its defense industry on a “war footing” by increasing defense spending to 2.5% of GDP by the end of the decade, and pledged to send arms worth 500 million pounds ($620 million) to Ukraine.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described the increase as the “biggest strengthening of our national defense for a generation.” “In a world that is the most dangerous it has been since the end of the Cold War, we cannot be complacent,” Sunak said at a news briefing alongside NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg during a visit to Poland. “As our adversaries align, we must do more to defend our country, our interests and our values.”

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Poland ready to host US nuclear weapons, Duda says – by Brad Press (The Hill – April 22, 2024)

https://thehill.com/

Polish President Andrzej Duda says Poland is ready to host U.S. nuclear weapons, saying the topic was one of frequent discussions between Warsaw and Washington.

Duda told Polish tabloid Fakt in an interview published Monday that Russia is increasingly militarizing the Kaliningrad province between Poland and Lithuania and has relocated tactical nuclear weapons to ally Belarus. “I must admit that when asked about it, I declared our readiness,” the Polish president said of talks with U.S. officials.

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Sham defence review shows Canada will never meet its commitments to NATO allies – by John Ibbitson (Globe and Mail – April 9, 2024)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

The Liberal government’s defence policy update document, released Monday, confirms that Canada will remain NATO’s worst laggard, a national embarrassment.

The document, titled Our North, Strong and Free, calls for taking Canadian defence spending to 1.76 per cent of gross domestic product by 2029-30, well below the 2 per cent of GDP that all NATO countries, including Canada, have committed to. And that 1.76 figure is, to put it charitably, aspirational.

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Yellen warns China of ‘significant consequences’ if its companies support Russia’s war in Ukraine – by Henry Foy, Felicia Schwartz, Demetri Sevastopulo and Claire Jones (Financial Times – April 6, 2024)

https://www.ft.com/

US treasury secretary delivers message to vice minister He Lifeng during meetings in Guangzhou

The US has warned of “significant consequences” if Chinese companies provide support for Moscow’s war against Ukraine in one of the sharpest messages it has yet delivered to Beijing.

Following discussions in Guangzhou on Friday and Saturday, the US Treasury said: “Secretary Yellen emphasised that companies, including those in the PRC, must not provide material support for Russia’s war against Ukraine . . . and the significant consequences if they do so.”

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It’s Not Just Ukraine and Gaza: War Is on the Rise Everywhere – by Max Hastings (Bloomberg News – December 10, 2023)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

An authoritative new study finds there are 183 regional and local conflicts underway in 2023, the highest number in three decades.

“It’ll all be over by Christmas” has become one of the most derided prophesies in history. It was made by wiseacres in London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg and elsewhere in Europe as the First World War exploded in August 1914. These misguided optimists founded their projection on recent experience: Europe had suffered no long, big conflicts since the fall of Napoleon a century earlier.

Yet as everybody knows today, far from being over before Santa Claus called, the terrible struggle that began with Austria’s invasion of Serbia lasted four years and killed around 20 million people before the 1918 armistice.

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Trudeau’s Liberals are full of promises on everything except Canada’s highest priority: defence – by John Ibbitson (Globe and Mail – April 4, 2024)

Esprit de Corps Canadian Military Magazine

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

The federal government has become strangely surreal. Each day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announces new initiatives that are some combination of (a) unnecessary, (b) outside federal jurisdiction and (c) unlikely to be realized before the next federal election. Meanwhile, the government remains silent on the most pressing issue, and one for which it is 100 per cent responsible: shoring up Canada’s defences in a world growing more dangerous by the day.

Several recent announcements have been about housing. The Liberals are making large sums available to accelerate housing construction, provided provinces and municipalities meet federal requirements to loosen zoning restrictions, accelerate approvals and increase density.

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War a real threat and Europe not ready, warns Poland’s Tusk – by Paul Kirby (BBC News – March 2024)

https://www.bbc.com/

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has delivered a blunt warning that Europe has entered a “pre-war era” and if Ukraine is defeated by Russia, nobody in Europe will be able to feel safe.

“I don’t want to scare anyone, but war is no longer a concept from the past,” he told European media. “It’s real and it started over two years ago.” His remarks came as a fresh barrage of Russian missiles targeted Ukraine. Russia has intensified its bombardment of Ukraine in recent weeks.

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