In 1999, a woman named Cindy Hendy was stabbed in the neck with an
ice pick by a woman named Cynthia Vigil inside a trailer home in New
Mexico. Vigil then fled the scene to a nearby residence, whose owner
promptly called the police.
She was never charged with any crime.
The
reason Cynthia Vigil was never charged with any crime despite having
stabbed Cindy Hendy in the neck with an ice pick was because Hendy was
an accomplice of the serial killer David Parker Ray,
also known as the Toy Box Killer. Vigil’s escape from the trailer where
Ray and Hendy had been imprisoning and torturing her led to the pair’s
subsequent arrest. Ray died in prison three years later, the full extent
of his murder spree still unknown. Hendy served 19 years and was
released in 2019.
Cynthia Vigil was never charged with any
crime because anyone could see that violent force was an entirely
understandable and legitimate response to having been kidnapped and
subjected to horrific treatment. It never at any time occurred to anyone
to say that she should have acted differently, and it most certainly
never occurred to anyone to make her single act of desperate violence
the major story instead of the fact that there was a serial killer who’d
been abducting women and torturing them in his murder dungeon......
Payments
to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s agency and colleagues from private
pharmaceutical firms under obscure licensing and royalty schemes
skyrocketed during the pandemic.
The
American people started to feel that Big Pharma was very close to Big
Government. Thanks to our two federal lawsuits demanding transparency,
we know more details and they do not inspire confidence.
In
2022 and 2023, pharmaceutical and healthcare companies paid the
National Institutes of Health a sum of $710,381,160 in third party
royalties. These were payments to NIH, its leadership and scientists by
healthcare entities licensing inventions created in federal,
taxpayer-paid labs. The two-year average of such payments over the prior
decade was less than $5 million, for an increase of more than 175
times.
Fauci’s
institute, The National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases
(NIAID) received $690,218,610 of the $710 million, or 97%. In the same
period, the other 26 institutes under the NIH received some $26 million
in total.
It was an extreme cash haul at Fauci’s institute:
Between 2009-2021, OpenTheBooks.com, the organization I founded and lead, previously reported that $325 million was paid to all NIH institutes. Fauci’s NIAID received $23.9 million of that – or an average of $2 million per year......
A panel of judges at the ICJ – sometimes known as the World Court – demanded last Friday that Israel immediately stop its current offensive on Rafah, in southern Gaza.
Instead, Israel responded by intensifying its atrocities.
On Sunday, it bombed a supposedly "safe zone"
crowded with refugee families forced to flee from the rest of Gaza,
which has been devastated by Israel’s rampage for the past eight
months. .......
Early Sunday morning, several dozen heavily armed men attacked the
Palace of the Nation, a presidential palace and home of the Minister of
the Economy in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo
(DRC). Men in fatigues opened fire, killing two of Economy Minister
Vital Kamerhe’s 15 guards. The attack lasted about three hours before it
was crushed.
The spokesman for the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of
Congo said the “attempted coup d’état,” involving “foreigners and
Congolese,” was foiled. It was “nipped in the bud by the defence and
security forces,” General Sylvain Ekenge said in a short message on
national television. He said several Americans, including “two whites”
and a Congolese “naturalized British” citizen, were involved.
The
leader of the attempted coup was identified as Christian Malanga, a
Congolese naturalized American. Malanga and three other men were killed
after resisting arrest, and some 50 people, including three US citizens,
were arrested, according to a Congolese army spokesman. The arrested US
citizens include Malanga’s 21-year-old son Marcel Malanga and Benjamin
Zalman-Polun, a 36-year-old former cannabis dealer from Maryland.
The
coup took place as Washington and its NATO allies wage a bitter
struggle for influence in Africa with China and Russia, amid the
NATO-Russia war in Ukraine. The NATO imperialist powers are dissatisfied
with the current DRC regime’s development of economic ties with Beijing
and Moscow.
The ICC Takes on Israel and the US Congressional Mafia
Pro-Israel
forces in the U.S. are trying their best to throw sand in the wheels of
justice with threats of new sanctions against the International
Criminal Court after it requested Israeli and Hamas arrest warrants.
Senator Lindsay Graham was bursting with contempt
for the International Criminal Court when he grilled Secretary of State
Antony Blinken at a May 21 congressional hearing. Wagging his finger,
he warned that, if the ICC gets away with issuing arrest warrants for
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav
Gallant, “We are next.”
The audience at the hearing, stacked with
CODEPINK pro-Palestine supporters, burst out in applause at the notion
of the U.S. being hauled before the world’s highest court. “You can clap
all you want,” an angry Graham retorted, “but they tried to come after
our soldiers in Afghanistan.” Graham was thankful that in the Afghan
case “reason prevailed” when the case was dropped, adding that the U.S.
must level sanctions against the ICC “not only to protect our friends in
Israel but to protect ourselves.”
Graham
was referring to the 2019 efforts of former ICC prosecutor Fatou
Bensouda to hold both the Taliban and the U.S. accountable for war
crimes in Afghanistan. When Graham said that “reason prevailed,” he
really meant that U.S. thuggery prevailed because the Trump
administration brazenly imposed sanctions against ICC officials, denying them visas to the U.S. and freezing their assets in U.S. banks. U.S. President Joe Biden lifted
the sanctions but did so with the tacit understanding that the court
would not resume the probe of U.S. crimes in Afghanistan. The message
from both Democratic and Republican presidents was clear: Do not dare
hold the U.S. to the same standards you use for others.
While
most Republicans and pro-Israel hawks in the Democratic Party will
likely join hands to hammer the international court, President Biden may
ultimately feel pressured to adopt the position best articulated by
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). “It is fine to express opposition to a
possible judicial action, but it is absolutely wrong to interfere.”
The
International Criminal Court was founded in 1998 as the result of a
lifetime’s work by an American (and Jewish) international lawyer,
Benjamin Ferencz, rooted in his experience as an investigator and chief
prosecutor at the Nuremberg tribunals after the Second World War. Ben
passed away in 2023 at the age of 103, but the universal jurisdiction
that the court is exercising in this case is the fruition of his life’s
work to hold war criminals accountable under international law, no
matter what country they are from or who their victims are.
Enter Israel. The ICC has been building a case against Israel for nearly a decade. A recent blockbuster investigation by TheGuardian
and two Israeli-based news outlets revealed a shocking almost
decade-long secret campaign against the court by Israeli intelligence
agencies, who surveilled, hacked, pressured, smeared, and threatened ICC
officials in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries..............
America’s universities are on fire. A protest
movement against the violence in Gaza and U.S. colleges’ complicity in
them has swept the nation, with encampments on college campuses in 45 of
America’s 50 states. The crackdown has been swift; thousands of
students have been arrested, charged, fined, lost their degrees, or even
deported. Amid corporate media demanding a “Kent State
2.0”, riot police, armored vehicles and snipers have been deployed
across the country to terrify those campaigning for justice into
silence.
Why have overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations against a foreign
power’s actions been met with such a heavy-handed response? A MintPress
News investigation finds that those same elite institutions have deep
financial and ideological ties to the state of Israel, are funded by
pro-Israel billionaires who have demanded they take action to crush the
student movement, are partially funded by the Israeli government, and
exist in a climate where Washington has made it clear that the protests
should not be tolerated.
Israel’s Billionaire Backers
The movement began on April 17 at Columbia University, where a modest
Gaza solidarity encampment was established. Protestors hardly expected
to be welcomed by university authorities but were shocked as university
president Minouche Shafik immediately called in the NYPD – the first
time the university had allowed police to suppress dissent on campus
since the famous 1968 demonstrations against the Vietnam War.
Shafik’s decision was no doubt influenced by the enormous pressure
put on her by the university’s top donors – many of whom have deep
connections to the Israeli state and its military.
Robert Kraft
Billionaire businessman and sports executive Robert Kraft, for
example, publicly announced he was cutting the university off from his
lavish funding over its failure to suppress the protests effectively
enough. “I am deeply saddened at the virulent hate that continues to
grow on campus and throughout our country,” he said in a statement, claiming that Columbia was not protecting its Jewish students........
On Sunday, Israel launched multiple missile
strikes on a “safe zone” in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah. The
explosions –which could be heard miles away– ignited a massive fire
that swept rapidly through the encampment trapping many people in their
tents where they were burned alive. The ghoulish scenes from the site
appeared almost immediately on a number of social media channels where
millions of viewers were able to see the effects of Israel’s murderous
onslaught firsthand. Many of the videos that appeared on Twitter are
almost too painful to watch. In one particularly horrible clip, a
bearded man holds up the headless remains of a toddler who was blown to
bits minutes earlier.
Another video shows desperate parents and
neighbors trying to extract the charred bodies of their children from
the rubble while the flames flicker in the background ..........................
The
World Court on Friday ordered that Israel immediately halt its assault
on the city of Rafah in Gaza after a request from South Africa, which
brought genocide charges against Israel, reports Joe Lauria.
Israel’s
assault against Rafah must stop “immediately” to prevent genocide from
being committed, the International Court of Justice ruled on Friday.
“The
Court considers that, in conformity with its obligations under the
Genocide Convention, Israel must immediately halt its military
offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may
inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Israel
must also allow “unimpeded access” to “any commission of inquiry,
fact-finding mission or other investigative body mandated by competent
organs of the United Nations to investigate allegations of genocide,”
the 15 judge court ruled in a 13-2 decision. ..............
Reduxx can reveal that the man who led a decades-long
campaign pressuring the World Health Organization (WHO) to destigmatize
fetishism, sadomasochism, and fetishistic transvestism, which is now
included under the transgender umbrella, was a celebrated gay rights activist who ran a BDSM dungeon in Oslo. Svein Skeid, who passed away in December 2020, led the fetish rights campaign group Revise F65, which lobbied the WHO for decades and achieved their goal in 2018.
From COVID-19 to Campus Protests: How the Police State Muzzles Free Speech
“Politicians of both parties want to use the power of government to
silence their foes. Some in the university community seek to drive it
from their campuses. And an entire generation of Americans is being
taught that free speech should be curtailed as soon as it makes someone
else feel uncomfortable.”—William Ruger, “Free Speech Is Central to Our Dignity as Humans”
The police state does not want citizens who know their rights.
Nor does the police state want citizens prepared to exercise those rights.
This year’s graduates are a prime example of this master class in
compliance. Their time in college has been set against a backdrop of
crackdowns, lockdowns and permacrises ranging from the government’s
authoritarian COVID-19 tactics to its more recent militant response to
campus protests.
Born in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, these young people have been
raised without any expectation of privacy in a technologically-driven,
mass surveillance state; educated in schools that teach conformity and
compliance; saddled with a debt-ridden economy on the brink of
implosion; made vulnerable by the blowback from a military empire constantly waging war against shadowy enemies;
policed by government agents armed to the teeth ready and able to lock
down the country at a moment’s notice; and forced to march in lockstep
with a government that no longer exists to serve the people but which
demands they be obedient slaves or suffer the consequences.............
"...Mount Sinai South Nassau in New York City was twice forced to give COVID-19 patient Deborah Bucko, who was close to death after the system’s normal treatment failed, ivermectin under court order. Mrs. Bucko’s condition improved after she began taking ivermectin.
However, the system stopped the second round of treatment before the prescription ended, and Mrs. Bucko then died....
As the international criminal court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, officially seeks arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders,
a question must be asked of the politicians and media outlets that
legitimised Israel’s western-backed destruction of Gaza, which is one of
the great crimes of our age: what were you thinking?
The
arrest warrant requests detail, firstly, how three Hamas leaders should
be held criminally responsible for war crimes and crimes against
humanity including extermination, murder and hostage-taking. Their guilt
is incontrovertible, and no cause justifies such depraved crimes
against civilians.
But
there is a distinction to be made. For while Hamas’s crimes were
obscene and indefensible, the prosecutor’s proposed charges against the
Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister,
Yoav Gallant, describe atrocities that were directly facilitated by
cheerleader politicians, most notably in the US, UK and Germany, and
legitimised by multiple media outlets................
The Slow-Motion Execution of Julian Assange Continues
The
ruling by the High Court in London permitting Julian Assange to appeal
his extradition order leaves him languishing in precarious health in a
high-security prison. That is the point.
The decision by the High Court in London to grant Julian Assange the
right to appeal the order to extradite him to the United States may
prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. It does not mean Julian will elude
extradition. It does not mean the court has ruled, as it should, that he
is a journalist whose only “crime” was providing evidence of war crimes
and lies by the U.S. government to the public. It does not mean he will
be released from the high-security HMS Belmarsh prison where, as Nils
Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, after visiting Julian
there, said he was undergoing a “slow-motion execution.” ................
As war rages in Gaza, the intensifying debate over the US-Israel
relationship spotlights a political paradox: Those Americans who view
George Washington with deepest reverence — that is, would-be
“conservatives” — are often the ones who most zealously violate the
central tenet of his foreign policy philosophy.
Specifically,
their fierce devotion to the State of Israel defies Washington’s
admonition against “passionate attachments” to other countries —
attachments that, he said, inevitably lead America “astray from its duty
and its interest.”
That’s not to say that excessive advocacy for
Israel is confined to the American right: As demonstrated by President
Biden’s backing of Israel’s destruction of Gaza, the championing of
policies that serve Israel to America’s detriment also runs rampant
among establishment Democrats.
Regardless of your position on
the political spectrum, Washington’s foreign policy advice merits your
attention, and the US-Israel relationship serves as a case study that
validates his warnings about the many evils that spring from “habitual
fondness” for a foreign nation...including one that didn’t exist when
his warnings were issued................
T he
Israeli-American Council has worked in tandem with Israeli intelligence
agencies for years. Last month, its leaders vowed to shut down the
encampment at UCLA.
t was time to fight back on America’s college campuses. And the little
known Israeli-American Council (IAC), an organization with close ties to
Israeli intelligence, and made up mostly of Israeli expats, decided
that it would lead the nationwide charge. On Sunday, April 28, as
members of the group arrived on UCLA’s grass-covered Dickson Plaza, the
IAC’s CEO, Elan Carr, took the stage. A Republican politician, former
member of the National Council of AIPAC, and special envoy to monitor
and combat antisemitism in the Trump administration, he had little
regard for anyone who disparaged Israel. In the past, he had compared
the call for an economic boycott of Israel to actions by the Nazis. And
he has said that the group Jewish Voice for Peace, whose members were taking part in the protest, “openly traffics in anti-Semitism.”
Among those addressing a crowd of Israeli-flag-waving counterprotesters,
with the encampment holding the pro-Palestinian demonstrators directly
behind them, was Israel’s Consul General to the Pacific Southwest,
Israel Bachar. Also speaking was Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the
Anti-Defamation League. Then came Carr, who announced that the fight had
begun. “We will take back our streets. We will take back our campuses
from Columbia University to UCLA and everywhere in between,” he said.
The question is, given IAC’s long history of close links to Israeli
intelligence organizations, for whom are they taking the campuses back?.....
Well, at least that’s one setback for world government.
A court in Australia has told the government’s own eSafety Commission that Elon Musk is correct: One country cannot impose censorship on the world. The company X, formerly known as Twitter, must obey national law but not global law.
Mr. Musk seems to have won a very similar fight in Brazil, where a judge demanded not just a national but global takedown. X refused and won. For now.
This really does raise a serious issue: How big of a threat are these global government institutions?
Dreamy, dopey, and often scary intellectuals have dreamed of global government for centuries. If you are rich enough and smart enough, the idea seems to be the perennial temptation. The list of advocates includes people who otherwise have made notable contributions: Albert Einstein, Isaac Asimov, Walter Cronkite, Buckminster Fuller, and many others...................
This story is told in three parts. The
first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish
settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists
targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make
peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state
itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology
moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.
By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the
villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150
people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it had
long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily encircled
it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days after the Oct. 7
Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder threats. The villagers
made appeal after appeal to the Israeli police and to the ever-present
Israeli military, but their calls for protection went largely unheeded,
and the attacks continued with no consequences. So one day the villagers
packed what they could, loaded their families into trucks and
disappeared..............
Shocking Headline of the Day: Germany to Re-Introduce Slavery
Young
Germans will have to choose between the Bundeswehr (military service)
and unpaid social service work. Libertarians to a person, will call this
slavery, because that is what it is.
The headline might be bordering on the hysterical, but the big idea
in German politics right now is to re-introduce the general draft. This
is not happening because Germany expects to be at war. It is not about
the military at all. Under the plans, young people, male and female, can
choose between the Bundeswehr or a year of forced labour in the social
services, essentially uncompensated.
The main reason we see is that their fiscal rules have depleted them
with the resources to fund the Bundeswehr and critical social services
like old-age care. For example, there is a big row going on right now
within the coalition currently between Boris Pistorius, the defence
minister, and Christian Lindner, over Pistorius’ demands for another
€6bn for the Bundeswehr. The discussions on the reintroduction of the
draft are at an early stage. They won’t affect the current budget
dispute. But it could go some way to fix the Bundeswehr’s budget issues.
The SPD leader Lars Klingbeil sugar-coated the idea as giving young people an opportunity to serve
the state at one point in their lives. Another underlying assumption is
that young people are infinitely stupid. German high school goes until
the age of 19. This is higher than elsewhere because German children do
not start school until they are 6. With a year of enforced military or
social services, they won’t start their studies or apprenticeship until
they are 20. A Bachelor’s degree takes three, but this is usually not
sufficient. So they will be 24 or 25 when they hit the labour market.
This puts them at a distinct disadvantage to young people elsewhere.
We expect mass emigration as a result. Young Ukrainian men
who try to escape the draft often do so at the risk of their lives.
Romanian police have discovered bodies of young Ukrainians trying to
swim through the Tisa river into Romania. Young Germans won’t have to
swim through the Rhine. They can just go anywhere within the Schengen
area, and study where they like. For a country that is facing structural
labour shortages, the re-introduction of the draft is about the worst
policy decision imaginable. The smart people will leave.
The political support is strengthening. The FDP has called for it.
The SPD is also now in favour. The CDU says it is open to a discussion.
The AfD will naturally support it. The Greens and the Left Party are
opposed, but that won’t be enough to stop it.
Not an “Opportunity”
What’s being proposed is not an opportunity. It’s a mandate for servitude.....................
Majority of Canada's $13M in pandemic fines were issued in Quebec, report finds
Marginalized groups tended to bear the brunt of police and bylaw action
Colin Perkel · The Canadian Press · Posted: Jun 24, 2020
Authorities in some provinces ramped up often arbitrary law
enforcement to help curtail the COVID-19 pandemic rather than rely on a
purely public health approach, according to a report released Wednesday.
The
main problem, the report finds, is that marginalized or other
vulnerable groups tended to bear the brunt of police and bylaw action.
"This
report proves that we've got an ugly ticketing pandemic, replete with
COVID carding and racial profiling, in central and eastern Canada,"
Michael Bryant, executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties
Association, said in a statement.
"Somehow a public health crisis has been twisted into a public order crisis."
Provinces
across the country issued emergency orders with hefty penalties for
violations in March, including closures of public spaces and physical
distancing measures. Ticketing soon followed.
In one example cited
in the report, a man walking his dog in Ottawa was fined $880 for
standing in the wrong place. A bylaw officer in the city also tackled a
man walking through a park with his daughter. He ended up with a bruised
lip and a fine of more than $2,000..............
Documents reveal details of Ontario police misuse of COVID-19 database
The CCF:September 29, 2020 TORONTO: The Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) is releasing a document
obtained through Freedom of Information legislation that outline
specific details of police services misuse of a COVID-19 database.
“This document reveals a shocking misuse of personal health
information by police,” said CCF Litigation Director, Christine Van
Geyn. “Police were caught using the COVID-19 database to look up names
unrelated to active calls, to do wholesale postal code searches for
COVID-19 cases, and to even do broad based searches outside officers’
own cities. There is no rationale for this abuse. We have filed a complaint with the Ontario Privacy Commissioner for violations of the Personal Health Information Protection Act, and with the Ontario Independent Police Review Director for officer misconduct.”
In a letter addressed to “All Chiefs of Police”, an official at the
Solicitor General’s Office laid out the results of an audit of the use
of the COVID-19 database by officers. In the letter, the Solicitor
General’s Office stated that “many searches of the portal do not appear
to be consistent with the ministry’s instructions or the restrictions on
the use of the information subject to O. Reg. 120/20 set out in the Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act.”...............
As governments search in vain for a technological silver bullet
that will contain COVID-19 and allow people to safely leave their
homes, officials are increasingly turning to drones. Some have floated
using them toenforce social distancing,break up or monitor places
where gatherings of people are occurring, identify infected people with
supposed “fever detecting” thermal imaging, or even assist in contact
tracing by way offace recognition and mass surveillance.
Any current buy-up of drones would constitute a classic example
of how law enforcement and other government agencies often use crises
in order to justify the expenditures and negate the public backlash that
comes along with buying surveillance equipment. For years, theLAPD, theNYPD, and other police departments across the countryhave
been fighting the backlash from concerned residents over their
acquisitions of surveillance drones. These drones present a particular
threat to free speech and political participation. Police departments
often deploy them above protests,
large public gatherings, and on other occasions where people might
practice their First Amendment-protected rights to speech, association,
and assembly......
Drones
have been widely used by public authorities during the COVID‐19
pandemic for pandemic‐related problems. As an innovative tool with a
wide range of potentialities, they have been deemed suitable for an
exceptional situation marked by the persistence of social distance. Yet,
the turn to new technology to solve complex problems is a political
decision that has broad societal implications, especially in the context
of declared states of emergency. In the article we argue that the
extensive use of drones by national authorities during the COVID‐19
pandemic has generated a new socio‐technical assemblage of actors,
technologies and practices. Building on the three main uses of drones as
responses to specific pandemic‐related challenges (disinfection,
delivery, and surveillance), we analyse the actors and the practices
involved in this new socio‐technical assemblage. From the empirical
material, we explore potential effects of drone uses on key issues such
as the technology regulatory processes, public acceptance, and security
and safety concerns.
As
new technologies become more advanced, the epistemic gap between
technology developers, on the one hand, and technology users and
regulators, on the other hand, widens, bringing along societal
implications that are increasingly unnoticed.
Policy Implications
Accelerating
regulation to allow civilian drones to fly more in civilian airspace
during the pandemic cannot reduce safety and privacy protection
standards.
As drone technology is continuously
evolving and is potentially exposed to function creep and function
expansion dynamics, its societal, ethical and legal implications should
be continuously reviewed.
The public and the civil
society – and not just end‐users and developers – must be consulted and
involved in the processes of regulating new technology and their
integration in our societies.
The social and
political impacts of technology must be debated publicly and
politically, as the reliance on technology to solve complex problems
often has wide societal implications beyond the specific problem at
stake.
The fight against the COVID‐19 pandemic has mobilized national
resources of all types – human, material, political and financial – on a
large scale worldwide......................
Toronto school promoting Israeli military deemed ‘charity’
Canada’s largest private high school recently
organized a genocide solidarity trip in which students cooked for
Israeli soldiers. In a sane world, the school’s charitable status would
be revoked.
At the start of March, 36 students at TanenbaumCHAT, Canada’s largest
private high school, traveled to a state that has slaughtered 15,000 children over the past seven months. The Toronto high school described it
as a “Solidarity Mission to Israel.” In its description of the trip,
the school reports that students were “BBQ-ing for soldiers on an army
base”.
The group also met privately with
Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who reportedly told them, “You are here
— the first school since 7/10 — standing with us, and we stand with
you. There are many voices against us, but I say to you all, be proud,
stand strong. Together we will prevail.”
The students who participated in the “Solidarity Mission” reported
back to the entire school about visiting a state committing genocide........
Well friends, the verdict is in! If you are
opposed to Israel’s slaughter of something like forty thousand
Palestinians, mostly women and children, or the clearly enunciated plans
by that nation’s government to ethnically cleanse the rest of historic
Palestine, making the developing Eretz or Greater Israel a legally
Jewish state, and are prepared to protest or speak up about it, then you
are an antisemite Jew-hater and probably even a holocaust denier. If
you are a student demonstrating against the slaughter you are
increasingly being referred to by talking heads and the media as a
pro-Hamas terrorist. That you must be condemned and sanctioned or even
criminalized as a consequence of the labels is only fair in a country
that apparently has come to believe that Jews and Israel, uniquely,
cannot be criticized due to their cited ad nauseam victimhood
and their anointment by God no matter what the First Amendment to the US
Constitution relating to freedom of speech might say. After all, it’s
just an old piece of paper though it might strike some as a bit odd that
a group of people carrying out a genocide are being given a pass while
those trying to stop it are being beaten, going to jail and, in some
cases, being denied that degree they earned from four years at college................
Opposing The War Machine Is Cool Again, And The Empire's Getting Nervous
American rapper Macklemore has released a single titled “Hind’s Hall”,
the name given to Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall by anti-genocide
protesters in honor of the six year-old Hind Rajab who was murdered in
Gaza by Israeli forces. The artist says all proceeds from the track will
go to UNRWA.
The song with its accompanying video is
such a scathing indictment of the US-backed destruction of Gaza that
Google-owned YouTube promptly age-restricted it.
Macklemore attacks Biden, the brutal police crackdowns on protesters,
the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-semitism, US politicians and
the Israel lobby, with lines that will haunt you for days like “The
Nakba never ended, the colonizer lied.”
This marks the
first really mainstream artist to take on this issue in their chosen
medium with a track intended for widespread circulation. It probably
won’t be the last. Opposing the Gaza genocide is quickly moving from the
right thing to do to the cool thing to do, which is a major problem for
the empire......
George Galloway @georgegalloway Member of Parliament of the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 talking about how Elon Musk @elonmusk turned openly and publicly in support of #Israel ( Occupied #Palestine 🇵🇸 ) and large scale suppression alternative points of view on his platform @X.… pic.twitter.com/ftguEfL9z0
The last article by T.P. Wilkinson made me think of Elon Musk as the "Unbecoming American" because that's how I think of the boss of Twitter. He's become the king of hypocrites, IMO.
The children hear the dogs snarling outside, just beyond the flimsy plastic of the tent.
The
seven children of Rehab Abu Daqqa crowd around their mother. She is the
last safe harbour in their lives. They have shared things, these
children and their mother, which cannot be communicated to those who
have not seen the things they have seen. Is there a word to express what
a child feels knowing that just a few yards away, animals are dragging a
body from a grave?
The vocabulary of childhood is inadequate amid the horrors of this emergency cemetery in Rafah.
Scared is the word Rehab Abu Daqqa uses.
That
is accurate. But there is more to it, she knows. The children have seen
dogs eating the bodies. A human leg lying by a fence. So yes they are
scared. But revolted too, and uncomprehending. The children who once had
a home, went to school, lived according to the established rhythms of
their family and community, are now refugees in a place that reeks of
death.
"This
morning the dogs took out a body from one of the graves and were eating
it," Rehab Abu Daqqa says. "From night until dawn the dogs do not let
us sleep… our children keep holding on to me because of how scared they
are.".....
This account of U.S. interference in Ukraine, which can be traced to
fateful decisions made by the Obama administration, including then-Vice
President Biden and his top aides, is based on often overlooked public
disclosures. It also relies on the personal testimony of Andrii
Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat and Democratic Party-tied
political consultant who worked closely with U.S. officials to promote
regime change in Ukraine.
Although he once welcomed Washington’s influence in Ukraine,
Telizhenko now takes a different view. “I'm a Ukrainian who knew how
Ukraine was 30 years ago, and what it became today,” he says. “For me,
it's a total failed state.” In his view, Ukraine has been “used directly
by the United States to fight a [proxy] war with Russia” and “as a rag
to make money for people like Biden and his family.”
The State Department has accused
Telizhenko being part of a "Russia-linked foreign influence network."
In Sept. 2020 it revoked his visa to travel to the United States.
Telizhenko, who now lives in a western European country where he was
granted political asylum, denies working with Russia and says that he is
a whistleblower speaking out to expose how U.S. interference has
ravaged his country. RealClearInvestigations has confirmed that he
worked closely with top American officials while they advanced policies
aimed at severing Ukraine’s ties to Russia. No official contacted for
this article – including former CIA chief John Brennan and senior State
Department official Victoria Nuland – disputed any of his claims............
The European Parliament on Tuesday voted by a very large majority in
favour of adding—as a minimum—the practice of surrogacy to its legal
definition of human trafficking.
The vote counted 563 in favour, 7 against, and 17 abstentions,
demonstrating the existence of a very broad consensus on condemning the
practice of surrogacy among members of the European Parliament, whatever
their political persuasion.
This was a revision
of the 2011 European directive on trafficking in human beings, which
will now include “the exploitation of surrogate motherhood,” as well as
illegal adoption and forced marriage. The revision was initiated by MEP François-Xavier Bellamy,
who is once again heading the list for the French centre-right Les
Républicains party, a member of the European People’s Party (EPP).
To coincide with the vote, Bellamy organised a conference at the
European Parliament on the issue of surrogacy in association with Olivia
Maurel, a Frenchwoman who was herself born through surrogacy, now the
spokesman for the Casablanca Declaration, the international organisation
to ban surrogacy. Bernard Garcia Larrain, the Declaration’s
coordinator, was at her side.................
Israel used a US weapon in a March airstrike which killed seven healthcare workers in southern Lebanon,
according to a Guardian analysis of shrapnel found at the site of the
attack, which was described by Human Rights Watch as a violation of
international law.
Seven volunteer paramedics,
aged between 18 and 25, were killed in the 27 March attack on an
ambulance center belonging to the Lebanese Succor Association in the
town of al-Habariyeh in south Lebanon on 27 March.
The Guardian examined the remnants of a 500lb Israeli MPR bomb and a
US-manufactured Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) recovered by first
responders from the scene of the attack. Pictures of the shrapnel sent
by the Guardian were further verified by Human Rights Watch and an
independent arms expert.......
By Juan ColeAnn Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Committee to Protect Journalists on
Sunday condemned the Israeli cabinet’s decision to ban the Al Jazeera
news network in Israel. The network’s office was closed and its
equipment was confiscated. Israeli cable channels were forced to delete
Al Jazeera from their offerings, and even its website has been blocked
for Israeli residents. Since Israeli news channels do not show the
effects of the government’s total war on Gaza civilians, the Qatar-based
channel had been one of the few sources of comprehensive coverage of
the Gaza campaign for those Israelis who know English or Arabic.
On April 1, the Israeli parliament, dominated by the country’s far
right parties, passed a law permitting the government to halt the
broadcast of foreign channels in Israel “if the content is deemed to be a
threat to the country’s security during the ongoing war.”
Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi called Al Jazeera an “incitement
channel” and a “mouthpiece of Hamas.” It was a ridiculous charge for
anyone who actually watches the live stream of Al Jazeera English.
Carlos Martinez de la Serna, the New York-based director of the
Committee to Protect Journalists, said, “CPJ condemns the closure of
Al-Jazeera’s office in Israel and the blocking of the channel’s
websites. This move sets an extremely alarming precedent for restricting
international media outlets working in Israel. The Israeli cabinet must
allow Al-Jazeera and all international media outlets to operate freely
in Israel, especially during wartime.”..........
A
disagreement or a criticism, before it turns into a fight, or a fight
which might be reduced to a mere disagreement or criticism: Where we
start or end is the frontier between phrases and fists. It really is
that simple. The only way to prove any idea to be false is to kill
everyone who holds it. At least that is certainly one of the more
popular ways to resolve incoherence between verbal and non-verbal
behaviour. My temperament at the end of the 18th calendar week was
shaped considerably by the recognition that the disputes which dominate
the public debate, gaols and battlefields, not to mention the queues of
suffering, have been quite successfully reduced to exchanges between
those armed with fighter-bombers, assault rifles, judges and police and
those whose principal responses are restricted to hide and/or die.................
