According to US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, the US “had taken a step back” when sharing intelligence with Ukraine. The two nations were also in discussions to advance a minerals deal.
Rachin Ravindra and Kane Williamson stomped on the Gaddafi Stadium to record a scorching 362-6 victory on Wednesday, which New Zealand won with a score of 362-6.
Rassie van der Dussen and Temba Bavuma both struck half-centuries, but South Africa managed 312-9, while David Miller smashed an unbeaten 100 off 67 balls, which was brought up off the final ball of the match.
Mitchell Santner, the captain of New Zealand, used seven bowlers but produced a powerful 3-43.
After New Zealand won the toss and batted first, Ravindra finished with a 101-ball 108th ace, while Williamson hit 102 with 94 balls on a batting-friendly pitch.
The Black Caps plundered 110 runs in their final 10 overs and 66 in their final five when Daryl Mitchell hit 49 off 37 balls and Glenn Phillips hit a 27-ball 49 not out.
As Ravindra and Will Young (21) put on 48 for the opening stand, South Africa’s bowling lineup struggled right off the bat.
A stunning 164-run stand between Ravindra and Williamson put the New Zealanders on course for a massive total, as the pair scored effortlessly with some delightful strokes.
Ravindra scored a two off Kagiso Rabada to complete his fifth ODI hundred, all of which came in ICC events.
Williamson’s 15th ODI hundred came with a ramped boundary, which is his third three-figure total in as many games against South Africa.
Rabada finally put an end to the partnership by letting go of Ravindra who was abandoned. Overall, Ravindra hit 13 fours and one six.
After hitting 10 fours and two sixes in the 40th over, Williamson hit Wiaan Mulder into Lungi Ngidi.
After South Africa briefly dragged things back to give themselves hope of limiting the score to under 350, Mitchell and Phillips gave the score some extra life.
Ngidi, a fast bowler, finished with 3-72, while Rabada, a 2-70, bowler, came in at the end.
The Proteas hope to still reach the final after Australia successfully chased England 356-5 in the group stage in Lahore, which is the previous highest Champions Trophy total.
Hope was resurrected by a century-stand for the second wicket between van der Dussen and Bavuma, which provided a strong groundwork for the chase.
The Proteas batters were always under pressure, but when six wickets fell for 57 runs, the game was up.
Although Miller’s record of carrying out this task was too significant, Miller’s century demonstrated what is still possible in big-hitting cricket today.
Perhaps Miler’s remarkable striking would have been the perfect boost to propel his team to the final had the middle order been able to hold their nerve during the collapse.
This week will mark the start of China’s annual Two Sessions, which will outline its top policy priorities for the remainder of the year and its response to US tariffs. Katrina Yu of Al Jazeera reports that the discussions will include the US Trump administration, the military, and the world’s economic uncertainty.
The United States has suspended intelligence sharing with Kyiv in a move that could severely restrict the Ukrainian military’s ability to strike Russian forces.
The cut-off comes after the US suspended military aid to Ukraine amid a dramatic collapse in relations between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Since the start of the war in 2022, the US has provided Ukraine with significant intelligence, including critical information its military needs for targeting purposes.
It was not immediately clear to what extent the US had cut off the sharing.
In an interview with Fox Business broadcast on Wednesday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed the US “pause” in support.
“I think on the military front and the intelligence front, the pause]that prompted Ukraine’s president to respond] I think will go away”, Ratcliffe said.
“I think we’ll work shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine as we have to push back on the aggression that’s there, but to put the world in a better place for these peace negotiations to move forward”, he said.
But Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher, reporting from the White House, says the move to withdraw intelligence cooperation is “just a tool to try and get Ukraine back to the table”.
“They]the US] also talked about stopping military aid to Ukraine, which the Ukrainians admit would hit their war efforts, not end it completely”, Fisher explained.
“Clearly, just the threat of those things has worked. So when you hear from the national security adviser saying things could be resumed in short order, it seems to suggest that any impact on Ukraine would be limited, to say the least, as long as peace talks certainly seem to be on the horizon sooner rather than later”, he said.
US-Ukraine relations broke down dramatically last week when Zelenskyy and Trump clashed in the White House on Friday, but there have been some signs of an improvement this week.
Trump on Tuesday said he received a letter from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which the Ukrainian leader expressed willingness to enter negotiations over Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Zelenskyy said in the letter that he was “ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer”.
“We do really value how much America has done to help Ukraine maintain its sovereignty and independence”, he wrote.
Since the war began in February 2022, the US has sent approximately $86bn to Ukraine in military aid, according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
When asked how the Kremlin viewed Zelenskyy’s letter, spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said “positively”.
“The question is who to sit down with. For now, the Ukrainian president is still legally prohibited from negotiating with the Russian side. So, overall, the approach is positive, but the nuances have not changed yet”, Peskov said, referring to a Zelenskyy decree in 2022 that ruled out negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
However, Zelenskyy has stated on numerous occasions that he would meet Putin once Kyiv and its allies come to terms with a common negotiating position.
Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz stated on Wednesday that if negotiations to end the war are successful, he might consider relocating aid to Ukraine.
Waltz described the letter as a “good, positive first step” in an interview with Fox.
Without going into specifics about the confidence-building measures, he said, “I think the president will take a hard look at lifting this pause” if we can nail down these negotiations and move forward with them.
Are the US-Ukraine negotiations risking damaging both Europe and Ukraine, according to Robert Hamilton’s analysis?
The Washington Post published the phrase “Democracy Dies in Darkness” shortly after Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016.
The Post’s solemn, cross-our-hearts commitment to keep the flickering lights on and the ominous-sounding motto, I anticipate, were intended to immediately convey the brewing threat a Trump presidency posed to America’s decaying republic.
Well, it turns out that Jeff Bezos, the Post’s billionaire owner, is the author of the phrase “darkness” that causes an on-life-support democracy to turn a code blue.
Bezos gutted the Post’s Beltway-crushy, monochromatic opinion pages in late February by publishing free-market tracts about the inherently greatness of America’s “freedoms” and “liberties” by , ordering , editors.
Sorry, but the Post didn’t typically do that.
In any case, Bezos’ oafish orders may be yet another assault on America’s beleaguered “free press,” as his detractors claim, but at least his blatant “attacks” are made in full and unapologetically.
The persistent contempt for truth in the Western media is hidden behind a phony tell-all-the-story ruse and pretentious expressions that should be rewritten to read, “Truth Dies in Darkness.”
This institutional-wide, deeply entrenched deceit is more persecutivist because it always opts for flaccid language that, as George Orwell once said, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
Take the outrageous coverage of the Israeli-American axis’ inhumane behavior in the West’s media, for instance. The English-speaking corporate outlets on both sides of the Atlantic have been faithful couriers of every bad thing about the Israeli-American axis and its disastrous behavior throughout Gaza and the occupied West Bank since Bezos bought the flailing Post.
Despite the exhaustive verdicts rendered by sober human rights organizations, these dazzling avatars of “all the news that’s fit for print” have, for generations, refused to refer to Israel as an apartheid state.
They also refuse to acknowledge or acknowledge that the Israeli-American axis planned and intentionally committed genocide in Gaza and is now working to do it in the West Bank with the goal of destroying Palestine and Palestinians in memory.
To support this instructive point, I conducted a quick analysis of how journalists employed by “major” Western English-language media have portrayed the Israeli-American axis’s desire to forcefully remove more than two million Palestinians from Gaza and, in due course, three million from the West Bank.
Predictably, I discovered that many Western journalists and editors have recently spent a lot of time and effort creating disparaging euphemisms rather than using the phrase “ethnic cleansing” in a blunt and precise manner.
The BBC, Sky News, CNN, The New York Times,  , The Washington Post, The Associated Press wire service, “Depopulate,” “empty,” “resettle,” “transfer,” “remove,” “drive out,” “displace,” and “relocate” are a few of the words and phrases that I discovered being used in various ways by the BBC, Sky News, CNN, CNN, The New York Times, “resettle,” and “rese
Other than the sickening “depopulate” and “driving out,” Palestinians seem to be willing, even content, to voluntarily leave their ancestral homelands in order to make room for Trump’s beachfront resorts.
Yet that is the blasphemous insult to the readers, listeners, and viewers of the “mainstream” Western media.
In “defence of the indefensible” George Orwell understood and intended to obscure and sanitize the wholesale brutality envisioned and approved by Israel and its confederates in Washington, London, Berlin, Paris, Ottawa, and beyond.
Most Western media are wilfully blind to the crimes the rest of us can see, just like the lustful politicians they claim to hold accountable for their unwavering fidelity to Israel.
These choices are neither random nor arbitrary.
Instead, they are a conscious and well-known choice of editors and reporters, who are more concerned with appeasement than sincerity, to make the unpalatable in the compliant service of a brutal apartheid regime and its supporters and to shield them from the guilt over the enormous suffering they cause.
The modern anodyne distortions and evasions are a deliberate attempt to conceal reality beneath a blizzard of lies.
In 1945, Orwell  wrote, “A mass of… words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline, and covering up all the details.” Insincerity is the main enemy of concise language.
As a result, it is not difficult to picture this happening in major Western, English-language newsrooms every day:
Reporter: I am aware that ethnic cleansing is unacceptable. Please provide me with an alternative.
Have you used a thesaurus, editor?
Reporter: Yes, but they have all been taken.
Editor: What about “involuntarily depart”?
Reporter: Do you not believe it to be a little cumbersome?
No, editor. It is flawless.
Reporter: Okay, then. It is “involuntarily depart,” at least for the moment.
Remember that these reporters and editors are largely the same ones who are praising Bezos and his vicious attempt to “muzzle” them these days.
The hyperbolic protests demonstrate their grating hypocrisy in a billboard-sized display of disrespect.
They lack Jeff Bezos’ support of the “truth” in comparison.
One angry Washington Post contributor hurried to Bluesky to protest Bezos’ “significant shift” in the direction and purpose of the opinion page.
As long as he is the Post’s owner, the scribe declared, “I’ll never write for him again.”
That is acceptable and, in my opinion, admirable.
I wonder if he and his enraged coworkers would be willing to accept this challenge.
How about “never” writing for a newspaper that denies using the terms “apartheid state,” “genocide,” and “ethnic cleansing” to describe Israel’s grotesque aims for Palestinians in Palestine as a matter of stated or unstated editorial policy?
You and I are aware that this is a rhetorical question, and I suspect that an American journalist’s constant so offensive and his cowardly colleagues also have this understanding.