b
************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
*******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
“The situation there is more horrific
than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.” This is how
Khaled Mahajneh describes the Sde Teiman detention center
as the first lawyer to visit the facility. More than 4,000 Palestinians
whom Israel arrested in Gaza have been held at the military base in the
Naqab/Negev since October 7; some of them have subsequently been
released, but most remain in Israeli detention.
Mahajneh, a Palestinian citizen of
Israel, was initially approached by Al Araby TV, which was seeking
information about Muhammad Arab, a reporter for the network who was
arrested in March while covering the Israeli siege of Al-Shifa Hospital
in Gaza City. “I contacted the Israeli army’s control center, and after
providing them with a photo and an ID card of the detainee, as well as
my official power of attorney document, I was informed that [Arab] was
being held at Sde Teiman and that he could be visited.”
When Mahajneh arrived at the base on
June 19, he was required to leave his car far away from the site, where
an army jeep was waiting to transport him inside. This was “something I
had never encountered on any previous visit to any prison,” he told
+972. They drove for about 10 minutes through the facility — a sprawling
network of trailers — before arriving at a large warehouse, which
contained a trailer guarded by masked soldiers.....
A trans-identified male has been found guilty of rape after sexually
attacking a woman during a night out. Lexi Secker, previously known as
Alexander Secker, was said to have committed the crime when he was
“living as a man.”
The assault is said to have taken place in Blunsdon, Wiltshire, in
April of 2023. While details are extremely limited, it is known that
Secker began identifying as woman in the period between the assault and
his court hearings.
But in a statement on the arrest, Wiltshire Police referred to Secker
as a “person convicted of rape,” adding that he was recorded as a male
by police but “tried as a woman” in court.
In subsequent coverage by the BBC, feminine pronouns were
used for Secker. A photo of the criminal was noticeably absent from
reports on the conviction, which had sparse details on the incident
beyond noting he had been remanded into custody awaiting sentencing............
Earlier this month, the Canadian Parliament’s National Security and Intelligence Committee (NSICOP) released an 84-page, special report on alleged foreign interference in Canada’s “democratic processes and institutions”.
Initially, the committee delivered its special report to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on March 22 of this year.
As a result of mounting controversy around allegations of foreign
interference in Canada, NSICOP then publicly released a heavily redacted
version of its special report.
How can an evidence-free report be “damning”?
Predictably, Canada’s corporate media described the report as “shocking“, “explosive” and “damning“. They did so despite the fact (which the media ignored) that the report is totally devoid of evidence.
I’ve read the report twice. I did so from the perspective of a
litigator. That is, to assess whether NSICOP’s allegations were
supported by persuasive evidence, I brought to bear my extensive
experience in evaluating evidence........
In
2007, Orlando residents were furious to discover that an FBI informant
had organized a neo-Nazi rally through one of the city’s mostly black
neighborhoods a year earlier.
“To come into a
predominantly black community, which could have resulted in great harm
to the black community? I would hate to be part of a game,” Orlando City
Councilwoman Daisy Lynum said at the time, calling for a “full-scale investigation” into the matter.
However, an FBI agent testified that his informant participated in the event, but didn’t organize it. The city’s uproar passed without a public investigation, full-scale or otherwise—until now.
Thanks to a trove of previously unpublicized law enforcement records and interviews with several players involved, Headline USA can reveal that the Orlando neo-Nazi rally was indeed organized by the FBI.
The Orlando event also seems to have been part of a larger program to
hold Nazi rallies across the country. And according to FBI records, the
bureau sponsored those events despite knowing they led to an increase in
the number of card-carrying Nazis in America.
Moreover, the FBI’s Nazi rallies led to a much larger operation to target right-wing groups. Dubbed “Primitive Affliction,”
the operation featured a motorcycle front group, rogue undercover
agents, Outlaw bikers, Satanists, bomb-makers and a fugitive on the lam
in Mexico.......
High Court Rules Ultra-Orthodox Men Are Subject to Draft, Threatening Netanyahu’s Coalition
The ultra-orthodox parties in Netanyahu’s government condemned the ruling
Israel’s high court ruled
that men in the ultra-Orthodox community are subject to conscription on
Tuesday. The community, known as the Haredim, is politically powerful,
subsidized by the citizenry, and until now had been unaffected by the
mass mandatory enlistment. This is a heavily contentious issue as more
than 600 Israeli soldiers have been killed and thousands more wounded in
Gaza, and the ruling could spell trouble for Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s fragile ruling coalition.
The court’s decree, which was unanimously supported by all nine
justices, says “At the height of a difficult war, the burden of
inequality is more than ever acute.” It also stipulates that, if they
refuse military service in the absence of a formal exemption,
ultra-Orthodox men studying at Yeshivas will lose their taxpayer
funding.
The secular and non-Orthodox population including men and women have
long been subject to mandatory enlistment, “[serving] three and two
years respectively as well as reserve duty until around age 40,” the Associated Press notes.
Naturally, they view the previous status quo as discriminatory.
Whereas, for decades, the Haredim have vehemently opposed military
service while enjoying their exemption. The dispute has boiled over now
as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been bogged down in the Gaza
slaughter campaign, while concurrently Tel Aviv seems ready to
drastically escalate the burgeoning war with Lebanon.
Opposition parties on the left and right have praised the
long-awaited change in policy. The Movement for Quality Government
issued a statement calling the high court decision “a historic triumph
for the rule of law and the principle of equal military service burden.”
The same party led the petition to the court and has now implored
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to immediately draft Haredi men.....................
By Roman Shumov, aRussian historian focused on conflicts and international politics
The Prigozhin paradox: What was Russia’s Wagner PMC and how did its June 23 mutiny happen?
The now fighting group was the stuff of legend
before it came out of the shadows. Then like Icarus it flew too close to
the Sun
On June 23, 2023, one of the most mysterious events in modern Russian
history kicked off. Units of PMC Wagner – at the time a highly
combat-ready but also historically unusual component of the Russian
Armed Forces – withdrew from the theater of operations in Ukraine.
Restaurateur and musician
The
story of the Wagner mutiny cannot be told without the story of the
people behind the creation of the PMC. The main figure is Yevgeny
Prigozhin, a St. Petersburg businessman who rose from humble beginnings
to become a wealthy tycoon. His youth was turbulent, and in the early
1990s, as the USSR collapsed, he went into business, far removed from
military affairs. Prigozhin was a restaurateur. He started by selling
hot dogs, but quickly acquired money and ambition and began to open
restaurants in St. Petersburg to suit all tastes and budgets. By the end
of the 1990s, Prigozhin ran a chain of restaurants and a catering
company, and was well known to the establishment of the city on the
Neva. When Vladimir Putin, also from St. Petersburg, became president of
Russia, Prigozhin found more success. He was involved in organizing
catering in schools and then in the army, construction and other
projects. The businessman tried to keep a low profile, but in the 2010s
became increasingly involved in politics.......
It
takes a profound cruelty to support raining tens of thousands of tons
of military explosives onto a giant concentration camp full of children.
It takes outright malignant narcissism to expect everyone to accept
this, and to act wounded and indignant when they don’t.
Zionism
is like the exact opposite of people who identify as “spiritual but not
religious”; it’s religion stripped bare of all spirituality until it’s
nothing but a shitty political ideology that’s ultimately really about
land, western imperialism, and geostrategic control.
People feel
called to religion because there’s something in all of us that tells us
this world isn’t quite what it seems, like there’s some wondrous mystery
lurking just below the surface (really what they’re experiencing is an
uncomfortable dissonance with the delusion of egoic consciousness and an
impulse to try and awaken from it, but that’s a story for another
time). So they look to their religion to tell them how to have a living
spirituality that gives them what they’re craving, and, if they are
involved in certain Christian or Jewish sects, they’ll be told that they
can obtain what they long for by getting passionately engaged on issues
regarding the military and geopolitical objectives of a small country
on the other side of the planet.
