Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section. Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war. Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language. https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one. https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts. https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel. https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator. https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps. https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language. https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language. https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses. https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
I don't know how many of you beloved news mega Hexbears even know my name, but I wanted to tell you that this chad n cuck ranker is going to become a father in a few months. This is the main reason that I've been absent recently, my wife is having quite a difficult pregnancy and it's really hard for us both to prepare to raise a child far away from our homelands with barely any bigger family structure. It's a boy, but my wife isn't liking my name suggestions. How can she not love suggestions like Nasrallah, Qassam and Shahid-136.
To keep it news related, I've been getting into the Ukrainian war again and it's finally exciting to follow the line moving. Learning new names like Krasnogorovka, Netailove, Ocheretyne has been great, and now I'm excited to see what insane Soviet industrial achievement is in Chasiv Yar after the salt mines of Soledar, the coke plant of Avdiivka and the Azot mining complex in Severodonetsk. It has been also fantastic to finally see some of the most annoying battles end, like what was the point of Ivanivske, Marinka and Pervomaiske after all this time. Inshallah one day I can stop hearing about Synkivka, Ugledar and Robotyne, the line freezing there for so long deeply annoys me.
AOC continues to stake out a very interesting position on the Dem ideological spectrum
Votes against Israel aid, but joins statement — unlike any other Squad member — affirming Israel’s right to self-defense and signaling support for strengthening Iron Dome
My favourite lecturer was in a severe car accident. His wife might not make it, they're both very old. He's an old Yugo tank commander turned engineer. Very sad
News update : After racially profiling workers (iirc Arabs) in the last few months to find out who was constantly leaking to the Intercept, the NYT has failed to find the leakers.
Washington used diplomatic backchannels to ask Tehran not to retaliate to an Israeli strike, which would allow Tel Aviv to 'save face' following the massive retaliatory attack launched by Iran
“Iran has received messages from mediators to let the regime do a symbolic strike to save face and asked Iran not to retaliate,” the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, revealed to The Cradle.
He added that Tehran “outright rejected” the proposal, delivered by mediators, and reiterated warnings that any Israeli attack on Iranian soil would be met with a decisive and immediate response.
“Iran successfully embarrassed all of the integrated radar network and anti-missile systems of the US and the [Israeli] regime. The US even activated its parked satellites over the region to do maximum protection and failed miserably,” the Iranian military official added.
Does it get any more embarrassing for the US? They are constantly begging Iran and its allies to stop, and keep getting told no.
I can’t find an article that explicits says so, but it looks like by my math every House democrat voted in favor of sending tens of billions of $ to Ukraine and Taiwan. So that includes AOC but also Cori Bush, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.
It could be as simple as these “progressives” don’t want to upset the apple cart with DNC leadership; or have to explain why they broke from the party. Possible - but unlikely - that these social fascists recognize how important US and NATO hegemony is the preserve imperial spoils.
Honestly though, I feel like the answer is as simple as:
USA good
Russia bad
China bad
I was watching the super lib “Handmaids Tale” last night (not really by choice). Gilead - the former USA turned into an evil religious conservative state - shoots down some planes from the old, “good” US government. One of the Gilead leaders says “we’ve already been congratulated by the Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans for sticking it to the Americans”. The episode finished with a schmaltzy scene of Americans reciting the pledge of allegiance. And made me think… libs really just see Russia and China as “bad”, and are utterly incapable of seeing the USA as anything other the good guys who occasionally get it wrong but it’s nobody’s fault, really. Russia and China bad because “authoritarianism” and any reason they have for hating us isn’t based on material reality but because they hate the goodness we represent.
I have met a few House reps in my life, and know people who know some of them even better. I can tell you with a high level of confidence that these people as group don’t have a level of geopolitical understanding that’s any higher than your typical college-educated American. This news megathread alone operates on a level these people will never think at. They cannot (and refuse to) see American imperialism. The US is good and these “authoritarian” countries are bad. NATO keeps the world safe. Taiwan should be free. These cliches are the terms in which libs - including those who make policy decisions - think at and it never goes beyond that.
Turkish, Jordanian and Iraqi officials said on Sunday that Iran gave wide notice days before its drone and missile attack on Israel, but U.S. officials said Tehran did not warn Washington and that it was aiming to cause significant damage.
Secretary Blinken personally asked Abu Mazen on the phone to not pursue full-status membership for the State of Palestine at the United Nations. In exchange, Abbas would have been invited to the White House to meet President Biden as a consolation prize of sorts. Abu Mazen rejected the offer.
Iran causing almost zero civilian injuries or deaths in their retaliatory strike is actually incredibly impressive and probably was part of the Iranian strategy. It gives Israel much less of a reason to retaliate, much less to use for propaganda, and at the same time probably indicates to Israel that Iran did not intend to harm civilians in the first place and thus succeeded, meaning the potential precision of an Iranian strike is very high.
Of note: Given the fact that it has been observed that Israel is continuing to jam GPS signal and internet near certain military installations, we can pretty safely assume a fair amount of Iranian weapons hit their mark. Also, Iran did not show off any new technology or techniques. This is a huge Iranian flex because the drone/missile barrage was carried out with technology Israel and the U.S. are fully aware of and prepared for, had an entire week to be on high alert and ready defenses, and Iran still saw success in their retaliatory strike. Iran got Israel to light up the sky with their defense installations, giving away functionality and positions, at the cost of nearly nothing to Iran.
Norway has been surprisingly decent. I've heard the Norwegian Refugee Council does a lot of work in Gaza, I guess that has a big influence on the government.
pretty cool that some Google workers in both NY and CA are doing an indefinite sit-in to protest Palestinian genocide.
They have about 600 viewers and some commenters trying to get Hassan's attention to pump up viewers.
The Copenhagen Exchange building is on fire. It's iconic spire of coiled dragon tails which was part of the city's skyline for 400 years has collapsed.
Firefighters assisted by soldiers from the royal guards are scrambling to control the fire but the task is difficult as the old building has many hidden cavities and it's copper roof is trapping the heat inside. The task is further complicated by scaffolding put up as part of an ongoing restoration.
The landmark building is situated right next to the seat of parliament and was constructed in Dutch renaissance style in 1623 as a trading hall. It was Denmark's first listed building and has housed business organisations for most of it's history and has become a symbol of "respectable" capitalism. In 1918 unemployed syndicalists stormed the building, beating up the brokers with wooden clubs and hung a sign saying "The unemployed have closed the gambling den".
The building housed many historic artifacts, a large library and important works of art. First responders as well as random bystanders are working to save as much as possible from the flames but it is unlikely that everything can be saved.
Large parts of the neighbouring Christiansborg Palace that houses parliament has been evacuated because of the fire although parliament continues it's session.
It is too early to say anything about the cause of the fire. There are no reports of injuries to persons.
The fire is being compared to the Notre Dame fire in Paris and calls are being made for the mostly-destroyed building to be reconstructed. A reconstruction will be a difficult task as it requires heavily specialised niche skills that are almost extinct today and it is unclear how reconstruction of the privately owned building will be funded.
it's rlly disturbing how we're now in a place where we have a militarist, genocidal government in Germany taking part in a war against the Russians in Ukraine and mass-arresting dissidents, especially Jews as part of a genocide. the AfD coming to power at this point would be little more than a ceremonial coronation for Nazism in modern Germany.
"The government in Israel and the regime in Iran are both in difficult positions domestically and they both have a really strong need to show to a domestic audience that they are responding to this," she said.
The director of Al Shifa Hospital has been released after 4 months of being kidnapped by the "Israeli" army. They tortured him, broke his limbs, and forced him to lie that the hospital was a Hamas base, where they masacred ~400 people & completely destroyed it, in it's sadistic war on hospitals.
Israeli occupation forces have released Dr Mohammad abu Selmiyeh, director of Al Shifa Hospital, after long days of torture!
Abu Selmiyeh was kidnapped on 23 November from Al Shifa Hospital.
Abu Selmiyeh was harshly interrogated, and pressured to approve Israeli claims that Al Shifa hosts command and control rooms for the Palestinian resistance.
Abu Selmiyeh had his legs and hands broken by Israeli interrogators. Abu Selmiyeh refused the Israeli claims.
Abu Selmiyeh was pushed to crawl on the ground, was insulted and pressured to bark like dogs by Israeli interrogators.
Abu Selmiyeh is currently in an urgent need for treatment after his release from Israeli jails — slaughterhouses!
People need to understand class interest beyond "worker good, Capitalist bad, workers come together and sing kumbaya really hard until Communism happens."
If it were that simple, we would be living in Communism right. It's not that simple. A couple of examples: steel worker union wants the price of steel to be as high as possible so union members are compensated well. Union of... idk, pipe builders want steel to be as cheap as possible for obvious reasons. Despite both groups consisting exclusively of proles, they have contradictory interests.
Another example that's been highlighted by recent DSA actions: class reproduction. Academic "Marxists" generally lose all radicalism because they've secured a position where they can write for a living instead of doing one of the million jobs that no one wants to do. This applies perhaps even more strongly to paid positions within "Socialist" organizations. Why did Maria of the DSA behave with such profound chauvinism on the Cuba trip? Because she sees a path out of working for a living. Everything she did established credibility in the eyes of the people who hire Democratic Party staffers.
And the single most important example in the world today: Americans. A nation ostensibly composed of the working class like any other, yet all but the most vulnerable of its population are so profoundly bribed with the superprofits of the actual global working class that their interests have been thoroughly aligned with the status quo. They constitute a parasitic class on the world stage. Why do the most useless counter-revolutionary tendencies (LeftCommunism, Council Communism, Trotskyism, Neokautskyism) come exclusively from the West? Because the population does not, for the most part, experience revolutionary conditions. They don't need to do a revolution because they will be fine no matter what.
And this isn't some wild, new, 21st century theory. No less than Marx, Engels, and Lenin all described the parasitic nature of British "workers" and their attempt to secure well-being on the backs of the global proletariat: “...The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.”
Israel fired dummy missiles from Iraqi airspace that did not even enter Iran, and they launched a few quadcopters that were shot down above Esfahan. Israel's Minister of National Security has called Israel's response against Iran 'weak' and 'embarassing'
This monstrousness happened ~7 hours ago. And the American media seems to have ignored it. I guess they were busying covering something like Trump farting in the courtroom.
At least 11 people, mostly children, have been killed in an Israeli strike on central Gaza’s Maghazi refugee camp, Wafa reported. The attack hit a children’s playground near a crowded market.
Israel needs to know that in case of another mistake they will not have 12 days, the response will be given in a matter of seconds not in days or hours
“He flew single-engine planes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea. He had volunteered because someone couldn’t make it. He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time,” Biden told reporters.
Lest anyone doubt that Biden was saying his “Uncle Bosie” was consumed by fellow humans, he repeated the story later in the afternoon while addressing United Steelworkers union members in Pittsburg.
“He got shot down in New Guinea and they never found the body because there used to be a lot of cannibals — for real — in that part of New Guinea,” Biden said.
I love the liberal “we just don’t know” fence-sitting that somehow always sides with State Department narratives. Is there a unicorn hiding in my gaping asshole? There’s no evidence for it, but there’s also no evidence against it. You must respect my lived truth!
The tories are pulling the power from GPs to determine whether a mental health patient is "fit for work" and giving it to "special professionals". IE they're outsourcing to a team of people with no medical qualifications with the goal of taking away the money (PIP) these people need to survive.
Chile's Chamber of Deputies has elected Karol Cariola, from the Communist Party, as its new president. She was elected with 76 votes, against 75 votes for the opposition candidate, Joana Perez Olea.
This is the first time that the Communists have controlled Chile's Chamber of Deputies. The vice-presidency went to the People's Party, with deputy Gaspar Rivas, who was also elected with 76 votes. Eric Aedo, from Christian Democracy, was elected 2nd Vice-President with 76 votes.
Here's a glimpse into the the genocidal mania of the settlers in Israel
Yedioth Ahronoth photographer Shaul Golan says he was attacked by a group of settlers after arriving at the Palestinian village of al-Mughayyir to document the rampage unfolding there.
“I was walking around the village taking pictures when I saw a group of masked Jews emerge from a nearby olive grove, walking around… as if they owned the town. I filmed as they torched homes,” he tells the Ynet news site.
“Then they searched my pockets for a memory card to make sure I didn’t have any recording of what they were doing,” he says.
“I started telling them, ‘I’m not an Arab, I’m a Jew.’ They ran toward me, screaming in terror and grabbed me, shouting, ‘You’re a Jew, how are you not ashamed of yourself?'”
“Some were in IDF uniforms and holding guns. There were 20 or 30 of them who beat me as I shouted for help, hoping that soldiers would hear me. But they were the soldiers… I laid on the floor, as every one of them kicked me in the head and stomach,” Golan says.
“They left me stripped and threw my motorcycle keys into the fire, so I’d have no way to get home. They had hate in their eyes,” he says
Indian Prime Minister ( Hindu Fascist) gives a hate inciting speech against Muslims with words akin to what Hitler said about the Jews. This is just the little step before the calls for genocide start.
NEW: The U.S. is expected to announce sanctions against the IDF 'Netzah Yehuda' battalion for human rights violations in the occupied West Bank, according to three U.S. sources – Axios
My assumption here is that the liberals will try to spin IOF atrocities into "a few bad apples" and then scapegoat batallions like this one in order to deflect from it being an iof-wide problem. Essentially create an "Azov" of Israel to deflect through and propagandise around it being "only a thousand people".
Liberals mock the hypocrisy of conservatives; conservatives mock the hypocrisy of liberals, and our collective circumstances erode. The left shouts “All Cops Are Bastards,” which ensures they’ll be hated by the police and the public (and flies in the face of leftist theory). The public’s distrust of the government is at an all-time high, but so is the belief that we are helpless to do anything about it.
Dude seems brainwormed but he correctly labels "the left" as a separate thing to liberals.
Edit: Looks like libs are latching onto the whackiest part (where the Simpsons comes up) to completely dismiss all of it. This will make an impression on some people though.
EDIT2: Stupidpol and trueanon user. Local crank. Sad stuff.
Think I’ve stumbled onto a pretty big gotcha for the pro-genocide progressives, not that it actually matters. Even if we are to accept the idea that a second Biden term would result in any gains for marginalized groups: these people simultaneously go through the moral calculus of deciding that a genocide is an acceptable trade-off whilst also condemning others for “sacrificing” their rights. It’s clear that, to them, some peoples’ rights matter, and some peoples’ don’t. Their rights are inviolable but they’re perfectly willing to sacrifice an entire population. Consult this helpful chart:
They hide behind “lesser-evilism” and invented moral superiority when what they really mean is: I am willing to be complicit in anything and everything so long as it doesn’t affect me.
The sheer fucking gall to accuse others of political callousness when they are willing to engage in this kind of depraved Hitlerian moral calculus for the (smokescreen) sake of “practicality”.
Real estate continues deleveraging, and yet 5.3% GDP growth YoY.
Retail sales growth continues to be sluggish (3.1% vs. 4.6% predicted) and CPI is coming in cool (0.1% vs. 0.3% predicted). My theory for this is that China is actually seeing costs drop more quickly than CPI metrics can keep up. Traditional big-ticket household spending categories are housing, transportation, and education. Housing prices are obviously on the decline, but transportation costs are also decreasing due to the combination of cheaper EVs and an expanding HSR network. Education costs have been clamped down on after the crackdown on private tutoring, while average education outcomes have been raised by the crackdown on gaming. Meanwhile, traditional recurring costs like food and energy have been pushed downward by increasing trade with Russia as well as the rise of cheap solar.
It may be time to revisit the notion of ever-increasing consumption value as being important for economic growth. In this case, you can get the same quality of life with substantially less money. Why spend more to pad the top line retail sales number?
between the war bills, gutting of remaining data privacy, and tiktok ban passing yesterday, biden is soooo fucked with gen z voters (more like non-voters)
An Israeli man sustained injuries this morning while attempting to remove a booby-trapped Palestinian flag in the West Bank near the Israeli settlement of Kokhav HaShahar.
apparently the US isn't even imposing sanctions, they're just applying the Leahy Law to this one particular battalion? sounds like bullshit to me, how can you not fund one battalion in particular?
in Sydney, an Assyrian priest (pretty popular on youtube and tiktok) was stabbed multiple times mid-service by an attacker - there's video of it on twitter that I won't post, horrifying. the police are holding the attacker in custody outside the church and and people are throwing rocks and stuff at the police trying to get to the attacker. the priest is apparently stable and didn't face any life-threatening injuries.
Russia has been able to swiftly repair some of key oil refineries hit by Ukrainian drones, reducing capacity idled by the attacks to about 10% from almost 14% at the end of March, Reuters calculations showed.
Fun fact: Soviet-era refineries were specifically built to withstand damage from bombing.
Russia is repairing its refineries fast, despite difficulties in obtaining Western know-how.
What the present moment reveals, once again, is that Western aggression during the "Cold War" was never [just] about destroying socialism, as such. It was about destroying movements and governments in the periphery that sought economic sovereignty. Why? Because economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core.
This remains the primary objective of Western aggression today. And it is the single greatest source of violence, war and instability in the world system.
The reason Western powers went after socialist movements across the global South during the "Cold War" (Cuba, China, the incineration of Vietnam and North Korea, etc) was because they knew socialism would enable the South to regain control over their own productive capacities - their labour and resources and factories - and organize them around local needs and national development.
When this happens - when people in the global South start producing and consuming for themselves - it means that those resources are no longer cheaply available to service consumption and accumulation in the core, thus disrupting the imperial arrangement on which Western capitalism has always relied (cheap labour, cheap resources, control over productive capacities, markets on tap). Remember, roughly 50% of all material consumption in the core is net-appropriated from the global South. This is what they are trying to defend.
But it wasn't only socialist governments that pursued economic sovereignty. After political decolonization, a wide range of movements and states across the South also sought economic liberation and sovereign industrial development. And Western powers attacked them with equal brutality (Indonesia, Brazil, Guatemala, the DRC...).
This is the key reason that Western powers supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, and it is why they support the Israeli regime today... as Western settler-colonial outposts that can be used to attack and destabilize regional movements seeking socialism or any form of real economic sovereignty, whether in Angola or Mozambique or Zimbabwe or any of the Arab nationalist or socialist movements in North Africa and the Middle East.
Iran has always been central to this story. Western states orchestrated a coup against the extremely popular prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. He was a left-leaning nationalist, not a socialist. But he wanted Iran to have control over its own resources (notably, oil), and for the US and Britain this was unacceptable. Mossadegh was replaced by a brutal Western-backed dictatorship. The revolution that finally overthrew the dictatorship in 1979 - and constituted the current government - wasn't even left-leaning, much less socialist. But they want national economic self-determination and that is sin enough. They are a target for the exact same reasons that Iraq and Libya were targets.
The same goes for China. China's path toward sovereign industrialization - whether socialist or not - means that it is no longer an easy source of cheap labour for Western capital. And as the supply price increases so too does the sabre-rattling from Western states and media.
So this is the situation we are in. The Western ruling classes are backing obscene violence and plausible genocide in Gaza, against overwhelming international condemnation, because they must shore up their regional outpost at virtually any cost. The vast majority of the world supports Palestinian liberation, but Palestinian liberation would constrain Israeli power and open the way to regional liberation movements, and this is strongly antithetical to the interests of Western capital. And now they are provoking war with Iran, risking regional conflagration, while at the same time encircling China with military bases, ramping up sanctions on Cuba, trying to contain progressive governments in Latin America, threatening invasion of the Sahel states...
It is intolerable and it cannot continue. The violence they perpetrate, the instability, the constant wars against a long historical procession of peoples and movements in the global South who yearn for freedom and self-determination... the whole world is dragged into this horrifying nightmare. They are willing to inflict enormous suffering and misery on hundreds of millions of people in order to preserve existing dynamics of capital accumulation. We will not have peace until this arrangement is overcome and post-capitalist transformations are achieved.
A while ago I saw posts that said "The resistance is using the sound of crying babies to lure in IOF soldiers because they know that IOF soldiers love murdering babies" and just earlier I saw a post on twitter that said "The IOF is using the sound of crying babies next to auto-turrets to lure in empathetic Palestinians who want to save helpless children"
Zionazis undeniably love murdering kids and these technically aren't mutually exclusive but it still kinda feels like a Parenti quote moment.
In recent weeks, Palestinian authorities and non-governmental organizations have accused Israel of torturing those arrested in Gaza, many of whom are transferred to unknown locations.
On Tuesday, Israeli security forces released 150 Palestinians captured during their offensive against the Gaza Strip, amid reports of torture and ill-treatment of detainees.
The General Authority for Crossings and Borders reported in a brief statement that they were released at the Kerem Shalom crossing, near the triple demarcation line between Gaza, Egypt and Israel.
Israel has detained more than 8,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since the start of the current cycle of violence on 7 October, but the number in the Strip, under attack and under siege since then, is unknown.
In recent weeks, Palestinian authorities and non-governmental organizations have accused Israel of torturing those arrested in Gaza, many of whom are transferred to unknown locations.
Recently, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor denounced sexual violence and inhumane treatment of female prisoners by the army in the coastal enclave.
The group documented testimonies of mistreatment of women both on the ground and in the country's prisons.
The recently released detainees reported beatings, threats of rape if they did not comply with orders, and how they were forced to strip naked and subjected to strip searches, he said.
Several were tied up and blindfolded for long periods, detained in open cages in freezing conditions and without food or medicine.
The Monitor noted that they were constantly threatened with deprivation of seeing their children and had money and items taken from them at the time of their arrest.
CPUSA, through its party's media apparatus People's World, continues to take the ultra-left position of condemning all opposition to American hegemony as it first did against Russia by condemning Iran's anti-imperialist work against Israel through platforming the Tudeh Party of Iran's article.
The world has well and truly entered a dangerous epoch, with humanity currently facing a series of interconnected existential threats. A sharply deteriorating situation around the world of poverty, exploitation, and social injustice; “forever” conflicts that could very easily escalate into nuclear war; a looming climate catastrophe by 2030; as well as the exponential increase in ultra-nationalism and ethno-sectarianism and the entailing rise once more of fascism—all of them together represent a mere snapshot of the multi-dimensional crisis which humanity now faces.
The sheer level of brutality waged against the defenseless, and indeed blameless and innocent, Palestinian civilians by Israel’s war machine, along with the propensity of various governments and institutions in the U.S., Britain, and the E.U., hand in glove with the narrative put out by mainstream media outlets in the West that has shamelessly attempted to justify or normalize Israel’s genocidal campaign, is the foremost example of the terrible threat posed to the future of humanity and the international rules and rights-based consensus that followed the end of the Second World War.
We bear witness, with alarm, to so-called liberal democratic governments and “free” media agencies consciously aligning themselves with ultra-right forces in Israel’s ruling circles that openly profess apartheid, even fascistic, politics.
The aforementioned threats are almost all rooted in the ever-deepening crisis of capitalism, compounded by four decades of imposed neoliberalism and its resounding failure, and the desperate attempts by U.S. imperialism to uphold its weakening hegemony, regardless of what this might portend for humanity.
So far sounds nice, but here's where the break in opinions begin to occur.
Thus, it is now vital for the left and a wide spectrum of progressive forces domestically and internationally to form alliances that effectively mobilize to counter the threat posed by U.S. imperialism and its allies. Such alliances depend on the setting of clear and achievable progressive objectives based on class-conscious politics at local, national, and international levels.
Here's a fundamental question for anyone here, what material power does the "left and a wide spectrum of progressive forces domestically and internationally" have? Let me underline this absurdity with the apocryphal tale on Stalin and Christianity: When he was asked to ease the persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union in order to strengthen diplomatic ties and possibly strategically flip Pope Pius XII indifferent opinion towards nazi Germany, Stalin jovially said "hah! The Pope? How many divisions does he got?"
When examining today's world we must examine all parts of it in concrete terms and not on ethereal fantasies. What anti-imperialist alliance that exist today can make a material impact on the material world that doesn't just devolve into just yapping on zoom meetings about how bad something is.
Such a vital alliance cannot simply be comprised of an arbitrary and ad hoc collective of regimes, political forces, and paramilitary organizations united solely by their opportunistic—and often shallow—adversarialism to Washington. A glaring example of this flawed equation in process is the confusing of the forces of “political Islam” in the Middle East, which rail from a frighteningly reactionary perspective against Western culture and modernity, as principled anti-imperialist allies.
Here we see the common argument of the current ultra-left faction of the contemporary international marxist-leninist movement. An argument that has been fossilized since the end of the Second internationale during the first world war.
It is an argument couched on world-changing strength of the international labor movement of the time that had the power to topple empires.
Our concrete conditions today do not even reflect a shadow of that period.
You do not take as the starting point of your policy a series of theatrical gestures towards ethereal parties and beings who are revolutionary from head to foot instead of concrete human beings and the nations they reside in.
And foremost among these forces of “political Islam” falsely considered as anti-imperialist by some in left and progressive circles is the Islamic Republic regime in Iran. The reaching of this deeply flawed conclusion involves the convenient ignoring or pushing aside of that regime’s despotic material nature and horrific track record, while fundamentally misunderstanding or misrepresenting its destabilizing, malevolent, and sectarian posturing regionally and internationally.
How many missiles have you launched at the IDF in support of the PLFP?
It is important to note that Iran’s foreign policies in the Middle East region, and consequently its extraterritorial military proxy activities, are predicated on Shia sectarianism and Ayatollah Khomeini’s exhortation to “export the Islamic Revolution.” Aside from running wholly contrary to Iran’s national interests as well as wantonly endangering the Iranian people, this policy bent has proved deeply divisive and unpopular throughout the region and has always manifested to the major detriment of secular, particularly left and progressive, forces.
I shan't comment on Islamic religious or Iranian state policies as I have no academic knowledge on the field.
At every critical juncture in the region’s history over the past 40 years, the Islamic Republic has actively collaborated with U.S. imperialism—including in Afghanistan and Iraq. The theocratic regime’s empty posturing and crocodile tears shed for the plight of the Palestinians are exposed as just that when one considers how Iran has consistently worked to undermine the struggle of secular, left, and progressive Palestinian forces against Israel’s occupation.
Is countering u.s engineered virulant Wahhabism after its rampaged out of CIA control in conjunction with u.s, Iraqi, Syrian, kurdish, Russian forces, etc. really the condemnation they think it is?
Put simply, a truly anti-imperialist alliance cannot be crafted on the defunct logic that goes along the lines of “the enemy of my enemy is therefore my friend!”
The person writing this would rather have a pure anti-imperialist alliance that entirely exists on paper.
From a left perspective, rooted in the works of Marx and Lenin on class analysis and imperialism, the Iranian regime does not even come close to classifying as anti-imperialist—unless one is happy to omit its ever dwindling social class base inside Iran, the exploitative neoliberal political economy over which it presides, its total disregard for basic human rights and freedom, along with its continuing track record of horrific human rights abuses and brutal oppression (directed not least against the various forces that make up the Iranian left).
Yet again, to the ultra-left fence straddles, history ended with the death of Lenin and everything else that occured hitherto doesn't exist.
WW2? What's that? A wrestling competition?
The left forces in the Middle East, and especially in Iran, over the 40 years since the defeat of the popular anti-imperialist 1979 Revolution, have first-hand bitter experiences of “political Islam” and its devastating impact.
That does genuinely suck, no doubt about it. A communist guided Iran in infinitely preferred to the current Iran. But they failed and we have to work with what we got.
With heavy hearts, we recall how the popular 1979 Revolution was hijacked and derailed by the nascent theocracy and the people’s demands for true emancipation and social justice were scorned in favor of a parasitic capitalist class backed by the Islamist force.
See last statement.
We recall how women’s basic rights were trampled upon by the theocratic regime and how Iran’s women and girls were essentially consigned to, at best, second-class citizenry and placed at the mercy of crushing misogyny.
Also bad. That's a given.
And we recall that while Ayatollah Khomeini declared the devastating Iran-Iraq War to be a “blessing,” the Tudeh Party of Iran opposed its continuation beyond Iran’s liberating of its sovereign territory as an imperialist ploy to subvert the Iranian Revolution. As punishment for this—and to display its anti-communist credentials for all to see—the regime launched an unprecedented bloody attack upon the party based on the false premise it had spied for the USSR as well as fabricated “evidence” supplied by the CIA, MI6, and Pakistan’s ISI. Khomeini later referred to this help as “a divine act.”
Folks here's where history gets a bit interesting. During the Iran-Iraq War, both the United States and the NATO bloc AND the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact AND Yugoslavia diplomatically and materially backed Saddam's more secular Iraq, whereas the PRC, DPRK, Israel, the People's Republic of Yemen, Syria, Libiya, and Pakistan supported theocratic iran.
Besides stating the obvious in the fact it was a terrible war, what a bizarre network of supporters.
Mexico has told its citizens to leave Israel as soon as possible
“En caso de que alguna persona se encuentre actualmente en Israel, se sugiere programar su salida a la brevedad. Existen rutas comerciales disponibles para salir del país de forma segura. Las opciones de salida podrían limitarse severamente sin previo aviso, por lo que no es posible garantizar que habrá condiciones para una evacuación segura y expedita de personas mexicanas en el futuro”, enfatizó la cancillería.
“If anyone is currently in Israel, it is suggested that they schedule their departure as soon as possible. There are trade routes available to leave the country safely. Exit options could be severely limited without prior notice, so it is not possible to guarantee that there will be conditions for a safe and expeditious evacuation of Mexican people in the future,” the Foreign Ministry emphasized.
Still remarkably little clarity about precisely what happened, with various actors either purposefully not talking about it (or perhaps they just don't have much to say). Some US sources claimed that the attack was from Israel, and that Israel told the US that this attack would happen but the US had nothing to do with it.
The attack was on Isfahan, in central Iran. Iran claims that there were a few (probably less than 10, possibly literally 3) drones and all were shot down, which visually seems to have been what occurred - no dramatic explosions beyond that of interceptions. Some anonymous US officials claimed that there were ballistic missiles involved, but there is no evidence of this at all - which is odd if it did occur, as the missile would have had to fly over a few countries at least.
Iran briefly shut down its airports, did not close its airspace, and planes were still in the air above Iran, although some airlines redirected flights as news came in. Iran's response in general so far has been pretty muted, in stark contrast to their "Oh boy, if those Israelis even THINK about responding...!" rhetoric days and hours before the attack occurred. The official line is that this was an infiltration, not an external attack from Israel. This is a strange thing for Iran to do, and is naturally generating all sorts of theories about whether Iran has done some behind-the-scenes negotiating to allow a small Israeli attack despite officially denying it. I can't say I personally believe them but I'm also having trouble finding alternative explanations for the massive difference between rhetoric and action.
The idea is that this was a diminished response from Israel in exchange for the US greenlighting an Israeli campaign into Rafah, which I'm sure will go well for them with the remaining tatters of whatever they're calling an "army" nowadays.
To me, this is tacit admittance that Iran either already has nukes or is less than a month away from getting nukes. I don't think someone from the IRGC would say this unless they actually have nukes on the way.
Made the mistake of visiting AskLatinAmerica. Every Guatemalan on there is so bougie that I can smell Paseo Cayala from over here.
That sub is the place to go if you want to know what upper-class Latin Americans think. It’s pretty much the same as your average Redditor. Gave up on them after they compared AMLO to Bolsonaro.
i was hoping for international proletarian revolution, but if it comes to it, i'll take getting to see tel aviv burn on twitter in the leadup to a nuclear exchange
This is from Trita Parsi on Twitter. Very insightful historical analysis.
There is a historical example that shows that the Iranian retaliation against Israel could perhaps have been evaded.
The US, UK, and France prevented the UN Security Council from condemning the Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus despite it being a flagrant violation of international law. The Iranians have hinted that had the UNSC strongly condemned Israel, Iran might have refrained from retaliating against it. Most observers have dismissed the Iranian claim, assessing that Tehran would have acted anyway.
But there is a historical example involving Iran and an attack on an Iranian consulate in which the UNSC acted swiftly and prevented an Iranian retaliation.
It was September 1998. The Taliban had just taken Mazar-e Sharif in Afghanistan and attacked the Iranian consulate there, executing several Iranian diplomats. I was working for the Swedish Permanent UN Mission at the time and Sweden was not only in the UNSC, it held the presidency of the Council that month.
The Iranian demand on Sweden was clear: Although Iran had mobilized on the border to Afghanistan and was ready to attack, a strong condemnation by the UNSC and its presidency could provide Iran with a face-saving exit and the larger war could be avoided.
Sweden ensured that the attack on the consulate - a flagrant violation of the Vienna Convention - was appropriately condemned, and Iran never retaliated against the Taliban militarily, despite the Taliban's clear aggression.
In both cases, an Iranian consulate had been attacked and several Iranian officials had been killed. In both cases, Iran did not want to go to war. But in one case, the UNSC condemned the aggression and Iranian retaliation was evaded. On the other, the US, UK, and France put their support for Israel above international law and prevented the UNSC from condemning the attack, and we are now in the middle of the Iranian retaliation.
Certainly, the 1998 episode does not prove that Iran's retaliation against Israel today could have been prevented. But it does suggest that there was an opportunity to de-escalate that the US/UK/FR ignored or dismissed.
Then again, that fits perfectly with Biden's record of the past 7 months as opportunity after opportunity to de-escalate and end the war in Gaza has been actively dismissed by him.
I've never read a more 'nothing' article. so many "could have bought" "no evidence" "no proof" "may have" "if delivered" "not publicly known". Putin give Iran S-400s coward.
I guess the most important development is that the Iranian government and media is downplaying this and saying nothing happened. I don't really buy it, given that there were simultaneous strikes within Iraq and Syria. but whatever happened seems to not be so significant that they want to retaliate and escalate into a war.
I don't really see what israel gets out of this. their hogs still want blood, they still want dead Iranians. does this minor strike on an airbase satisfy that? does it really accomplish anything militarily? what was the point?
Israel’s leaders have signalled that they are weighing their options on how to respond to Iran’s attack early Sunday morning, when Tehran targeted its archenemy with more than 300 missiles and drones.
Iran’s attack, which followed an Israeli strike last week on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, that killed 13 people was historic: It was the first time Tehran had directly targeted Israeli soil, despite decades of hostility. Until Sunday, many of Iran’s allies in the so-called axis of resistance — especially the Palestinian group Hamas, the Lebanese group Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis and armed groups in Iraq and Syria — were the ones who launched missiles and drones at Israel.
But if Israel were to hit back militarily inside Iran, it wouldn’t be the first time. Far from it.
As Israel prepares its response, here’s a look at the range of attacks in Iran — from drone strikes and cyberattacks to assassinations of scientists and the theft of secrets — that Israel has either accepted it was behind or is accused of having orchestrated.
An article published on ISNA in Farsi quotes a official saying:
First 70 fighters and then with addition of fighters from Cyprus, 103 fighters
15 signal jamming aircrafts
Their own AWACS plus AWACS from UAE and KSA
6 ships in Red Sea plus the six-layered anti-missile systems in KSA and UAE
All missile defense capabilities of Israel
... were used to intercept the Iranian and the Resistance's drones and missiles.
He then said:
Our intelligence reports had shown that Pentagon had accepted to lead the defense entirely
CENTCOM had designated 8 regions for their missile defense plan; Caucasus, Zagros, Turkiye, Persian Gulf, Red Sea and Mediterranean.
The Qatars advanced air defense systems were made fully available to them
10 countries were working against us
The enemy had an advantage; they had became familiar with the Resistance's missile and drone systems during the al-Aqsa Flood operation, they knew all the weaknesses. But we weren't familiar with their advanced missile defense capabilities.
At first we were planning to strike six political, economical and military targets but at end we decided to only strike military targets because we just wanted to punish them.
OpSec didn't let the enemy know our main goal.
Way less drones were used than what media claims; drones which took 7 hours to reach their target. These drones triggered 5 of 8 regions that enemy had designated; 80 percent of which were engaged in east Jordan. The drones were 100% successful because non of them were sent to demolish anything but to force the Iron Dome and David's Sling to engage them.
After drones we launched missiles, 12 hypersonic missiles all of which hit their targets by the will of God.
Khaibar Shekan ballistic missile were used.
Cluster missiles challenged the second layer of the enemies air defense; each piece had to be engaged separately.
Other missiles had success rate of 75%.
We made sure the targets were hit by observing the satellites imagery, the cameras installed on the missiles and the local sources.
Only Israel were supposed to be punished in this operation but other countries that joined it got punished.
It shows the decency, dignity, humanity and greatness of our nation that we didn't target the Zionists' buildings.
(Read with grain of salt as always)
Edit: Source; full of typo hence not translation engine friendly.
We don't know whether the attacks were successful or not. Iran claims to have shot down drones but the explosions were heard course to important military installations.
The attacks were carried out by drones that went undiscovered until they were in the middle of Iran. This suggests that they were not launched from occupied Palestine but rather by western/zionist proxies within Iran.
The zionists have not taken responsibility for the attack. They dare not make an open response, opposing instead to muddle responsibility behind layers of proxies.
The attacks seems to be of much smaller scale than the recent sophisticated Iranian strikes against IOF terrorist training camps in occupied Palestine.
All in all it doesn't come off as the convincing show of force that zionist chuds had hoped for. If anything it makes the zionists appear weak and afraid of picking a real fight against Iran. It seems like the attacks were the zionist regime's attempt at doing something that was spectacular enough to appease domestic audiences while also being inconsequential enough as not to provoke an Iranian retaliation.
they've outlawed sharing videos of the flood that "ruin the reputation of the country". some private businesses still require workers to come to work even as people's cars literally drowned
Here's a funny joke:
What if, hypothetically, every U.S. politician were publically beheaded, on the same day, at the same time? Wouldn't that be funny? Hypothetically, of course.
It's election season in South Africa, which means white racists feel the need to be even more racist than usual. Paternalistic attitudes towards black people and accusations of black majority political parties buying votes are now the norm on social media.
Turns out I accidentally blocked @SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net, I don't even know how, at some point. So I just thought these bulletin threads had gone away.
Alarming reports from Gaza reveal that Israeli Forces are using drones with loudspeakers over the Nuseirat Camp broadcasting cries of women and children to lure and target civilians
Ahmed Attaf
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Algeria
⭕ Algeria's foreign minister: By decision of the President of the Republic, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, we announce an exceptional provision of $15 million to UNRWA.
⭕ Algeria praises the withdrawal of a number of countries from freezing aid allocated to UNRWA
⭕ Our conviction remains firm that UNRWA must remain as long as there are Palestinian refugees
⭕ The two-state solution can never remain a hostage to the procrastination, evasions and manipulations of the occupier.
⭕ International legitimacy cannot remain imprisoned in the walls of this hall and trapped in the illusions and miscalculations of the occupier indefinitely.
⭕ The international consensus must find its way into force sooner rather than later through the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with Al-Quds as its capital.
Bonus Algerian news
Today, Mr. Abdelmadjid Tebboune, President of the Republic, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and Minister of National Defense, chaired a meeting of the Supreme Security Council.
Rumors that some Ukrainian units are refusing to defend certain positions (eastern part of Chasiv Yar)
I don't think there have been any signs of major armored attacks by Russian forces. This is all happening with the usual "meat grinder" tactics as far as I can tell.
Blood is in the water, so to speak. If the Imminent Russian Offensive™ actually materializes, it could be very significant.
Meeting between Baerbock and Netanyahu became difficult, as did Cameron's with Katz. Baerbock reportedly recommended that Israel stop circulating the photos of life supposedly returning to normal in the Palestinian enclave “as they don’t portray the real situation in Gaza. There is hunger in Gaza.”
At this point, Netanyahu is said to have raised his voice and insisted, “It’s real. It’s reality. It’s not like what the Nazis staged, we’re not like the Nazis who produced fake images of a manufactured reality.”
According to the Channel 13 report, the German foreign minister responded, “Are you saying that our doctors in the field in Gaza aren’t telling the truth? Are you saying that the international media is lying?”
Cameron told Katz UK not going to proscribe IRGC.
Rulers of EU nations are meeting today. On top of their agenda is a report detailing how the EU's competitiveness is lacking behind both the US and China. It is dawning on European US vassals that they are fucked economically.
The solution being proposed in the press is an old banger: Reforming the inner market. What if we "reduced regulation and administrative burdens on businesses"? Environmental protections are being mentioned as something that could be deregulated. The only sort of novel proposal is to create a big EU fund to provide subsidies directly to businesses.
So it seems like the solution to Europe's economic woes is the one solution that neoliberals have to any problem: Slashing protections for workers and lining the pockets of well-connected capitalists.
A couple billion dollars of weapons to Ukraine is one of the best things American taxmoney can buy. It's a small investment with a very profitable return. I don't get why Americans complain when it costs them virtually nothing compared to the benefits. We get to replace the EU's stockpiles and energy with American made products which generates jobs domestically (tankies and the QOP will ignore this and complain about expensive food and housing prices). We get to test our own weapons on our biggest enemy and destroy their military capabilities without triggering a nuclear war. And since Ukrainians are doing the fighting, we don't have to worry about paying them benefits and pensions or send our our countrymen to die. It's truly one of the most wholesome packages, all for a fraction of the cost of our annual military budget while raking in immense financial and security profits. The fact that anyone is complaining about this shows how deep Putin's propaganda reaches the US.
Browsing /r/all because I'm never gonna die so wasting my life doesn't matter. Anyway I see a post titled 'Leading scholar Dr.snyder on the subject of eastern European nationalism debunks myths and lies spread by Russia about Ukraine.'
It's extremely frustrating to be talking with some libs who agree that Israel is doing genocide/war crimes and that America is actively participating, only for them to turn around and claim that Israel "owns US politicians" and that things would just change if AIPAC et. al. disappeared. A bunch of these motherfuckers don't want to admit a bunch of Americans are true believers in zionism.
The US is reimposing sanctions on oil from Venezuela, saying President Nicolás Maduro’s revolutionary socialist government has “fallen short” on commitments to hold a free and fair presidential election this year.
The measure amounts to a recognition by the Biden administration that sanctions relief, granted six months ago, has so far failed to persuade Maduro to run a genuinely competitive contest.
Mindful of the risk that fresh sanctions on Venezuela might push up oil prices in a US election year, Washington will allow US major Chevron to continue a joint venture with Venezuela’s national oil company PDVSA, which has been steadily increasing output.
In October Maduro and the US-backed opposition coalition signed an election agreement in Barbados, but the ink had barely dried before his government launched a sweeping crackdown.
The main opposition candidate, María Corina Machado, was banned from running, her selected replacement candidate was not allowed to register and some of her campaign team were arrested. {Polls had indicated|which polls lmaooo which polls motherfucker} that Machado would beat Maduro by a landslide.
“We have determined that although the Venezuelan authorities have met some key commitments, they’ve also fallen short in several areas,” a senior US administration official said, describing “a continued pattern of harassment and repression against opposition figures and civil society”.
The US administration official added that Maduro had upheld “certain aspects” of the Barbados agreement, including setting an election date, updating the electoral register and “starting a process to allow international election observation”.
In another gesture of collaboration, Washington and Caracas in December completed a prisoner exchange, in which 10 Americans — including six classified by the US as wrongfully detained — were released from a Venezuelan jail in exchange for the release of Alex Saab, a Colombian businessman and ally of Maduro whom US prosecutors accused of siphoning $350mn from Venezuela into US accounts.
Despite belligerent government statements in recent weeks, Maduro said on Monday he would “never close the door on dialogue” with the US, adding that his negotiators had met Washington’s envoys in Mexico last week. “I tell the negotiators to give President [Joe] Biden the following message: ‘If you want, I want. If you don’t want, I don’t want,’” Maduro said.
In response to the reimposition of sanctions, the president of Venezuela’s congress, Jorge Rodríguez, accused Washington of breaking a commercial agreement reached with Caracas. “We respect our word, and will never tolerate an ultimatum,” Rodríguez said. “We shall see who complied and who didn’t comply with their word and their commitments.”
The Biden administration has been juggling a wish to punish Maduro for rowing back on promises of free and fair elections with other concerns. It is worried about pushing Venezuela further into the arms of its allies Russia and China, and anxious that fresh sanctions might spur more Venezuelan migration towards the US.
Once a top global oil producer, Venezuela’s output collapsed from almost 2.9mn barrels per day in 2014 to below 400,000 b/d in 2020 as years of mismanagement combined with Trump-era “maximum pressure” sanctions intended to topple Maduro.
Helped by October’s temporary lifting of sanctions and increases in Chevron’s oil joint venture, Venezuela has boosted crude production to an average of just over 800,000 b/d in the first quarter of this year, according to Opec figures. The sanctions relief also allowed Venezuela to sell its oil directly, without having to use black market go-betweens charging large fees.
Venezuela has the world’s biggest oil reserves, as well as abundant natural gas. Energy companies have taken advantage of the sanctions relief to flock to Caracas over the past six months seeking possible deals with Maduro.
Shell and Trinidad’s national gas company signed an agreement to export Venezuelan offshore gas via the Caribbean island, while Spain’s Repsol and France’s Maurel & Prom also inked deals, according to news reports. These were covered by separate US sanctions licences. US officials declined to say whether these permits would continue, citing commercial confidentiality.
US companies investing in Venezuelan oil and gas not covered by existing licences will have until May 31 to wind down their operations. The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control “will consider requests for specific licenses to continue activities beyond the end of the wind-down period on a case-by-case basis”, according to a US State Department statement on Wednesday.
Venezuela’s oil minister Pedro Tellechea told reporters the sanctions would not hurt the country’s economy, and that foreign companies could apply to the US Treasury for individual licenses.
Analysts said the decision to tighten sanctions on the oil sector would have a limited short-term impact on Venezuela’s current production and exports but would hurt its long-term recovery.
“There will be no significant impact on Venezuelan production as the general license revoked on Wednesday was not generating investment,” said Francisco Monaldi, a Venezuelan oil expert at Rice University’s Baker Institute. He added that Chevron, with its own ongoing licence to operate in Venezuela, was the crucial investor in the country’s oil sector. “The reimposition of sanctions will slightly impact the availability of diluents on non-Chevron projects.”
Asdrúbal Oliveros, the director of Caracas-based consultancy Ecoanalítica, calculated that the renewed sanctions could cause Venezuela losses of foreign income worth about $3bn, and a 3.6 per cent decrease in gross domestic product growth — a price Maduro is willing to pay.
“In Maduro’s cost-benefit analysis, it was important not to cede too much political space,” Oliveros said. “This may give the government an excuse to tighten the political dynamics with more repression, giving less space to the opposition in the elections.”
Iranian sources tell #AlMayadeen that no external aggression against Iran was launched on Friday. What is being circulated about an Israeli attack on #Iran are lies and are part of a misinformation war, according to our sources. Sources also added that complicit #US media outlets are waging a proxy war of disinformation on behalf of the Israeli occupation. This comes after #Iran's Space Agency confirmed that several drones, of unspecified origin, were downed over Iranian airspace. The agency said that no missile attack on Iran occurred on Friday.
It's a nothingburger. How would Israel even launch missiles at Iran with no one in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, etc seeing it? From a stealth fighter? It's probably a failed attack from the MEK or ISIS-K or some other terrorist proxy.
Putin condemned the attack on the Iranian consulate, stating, "What the Islamic Republic of Iran did in response to that act that happened criminally and in light of the inaction of the Security Council was the best way to punish the aggressor and represented the tactfulness and rationality of Iran's politicians.” The Russian head of state also added that Moscow believes Tehran “is one of the main pillars of stability and security in the region.”
I haven't been keeping up with Putin's statements and stances on the conflict but that's some pretty hostile language from a guy who wasn't exactly anti-Zionist not long ago
OSINTTM has concluded that the Israelis have decided on a method of retaliation but not a date. Seems like freshly evacuated bullshit to me but we’ll see. I’m leaning more towards they piss and moan about it for a month until everyone forgets about it and return their focus to speeding up the genocide.
"The United States continues to strongly support a two-state solution. This vote does not reflect opposition to Palestinian statehood, but instead is an acknowledgment that it will only come from direct negotiations between the parties," Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Robert Wood told the council.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the U.S. veto in a statement as "unfair, unethical, and unjustified."
I'm flattered, but I don't want any evil imposter twins making posts with my exact name and profile picture, lmao. Impersonating a mod is bannable, even if you're doing it because you like the mod.
Anyway: here's an article I found on Germany's industrial woes vis-a-vis China:
SCMP: Germany’s China shock: as Scholz leaves Beijing, others raise alarm about waning economic honeymoon
[hexatlas tags: Germany, China]
The article starts by describing how Germany has benefited from a relationship with China even as America began suffering, and then moves on to recent years:
A growing number of economists believe the prolonged Sino-German honeymoon period is over. Tales like Webasto’s struggle with Chinese competition will become the rule rather than the exception in the relationship as the complementary nature that enriched both sides over the past quarter of a century wanes.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited China this week amid an intensifying debate about how Berlin should engage with Beijing in the future. On one side, some big companies are doubling down on their investments in China, typified by Volkswagen’s announcement last week it would spend US$2.68 billion expanding production and research facilities in Hefei in Anhui province in southeastern China.
From this side, any disruption to Sino-German trade is troublesome. Senior German automotive lobbyist Andreas Rade accused the European Union investigation into Chinese electric vehicle subsidies of having “no consensus” among member states, and being “not a good signal”.
But many businesses on the front lines disagree. As China has moved up the value chain and its manufacturers have become more sophisticated, suppliers and customers of German industry have become fierce competitors. The German automotive industry’s sluggish embrace of new electric vehicles, along with China’s stunning rise in this sector, presents a whole new raft of challenges.
Germany dodged a “China shock” when China joined the WTO a generation ago. Research estimates, however, that the trend claimed more than half a million American manufacturing jobs, leading to frustrations that helped usher in the political tumult of Donald Trump. Now, with the German economy ailing, some predict its China shock has arrived.
Chemicals giant BASF announced 2,600 job losses in Germany last year, even as it expanded its investments in China – a trend labour unions said was “not acceptable”. Engineering giant Bosch cut several thousand automotive jobs in Germany this year and last, while pumping several billion euros into research and development and production centres in China. The labour union IG Metall described it as “a fatal signal for Germany as an industrial hub”, according to the Rhodium report published in February. Similar trends were noted for automotive giants Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen and ZF Friedrichshafen.
At the same time, German exports to China have been plunging. In 2023, they fell 4.2 per cent from the previous year. The trend worsened into 2024, Chinese customs statistics show, with a 16.6 per cent slump over the first quarter.
“I think it’s absolutely fair to say that China is moving into the kind of space that Germany used to occupy quite prominently in the world economy, especially if you look at export numbers,” he said, pointing to China’s “high and rising share of not only automobiles, but also machinery”.
Russian gas stops flowing into Germany thanks to the US blowing up Nordstream and this raises energy prices, while China increasingly occupies Germany's manufacturing niche. They haven't been slammed from both sides this hard since 1945.
Surely, however, Germany is ready to take on the challenge of China by increasing competitiveness via intelligent economic planning? I don't even really know why I bothered to jokingly ask; they obviously aren't:
Euractiv: Germans must work more to boost weak economy, BDA, Deutsche Bank say
The long-term growth potential of the German economy has declined from 2.5% in the 1970s to just 0.5% today, according to data from the German Council of Economic Experts. On top of that, the energy crisis of the last two years has compounded problems for country’s manufacturing-heavy economy, resulting in particularly adverse growth expectations for 2024.
According to fresh figures released by the IMF on Tuesday, Germany is performing the worst among all major global economies – with economic growth estimated at 0.2% projected this year.
This, the head of BDA Rainer Dulger said, was also due to a shift in mindset in the workforce. “Apparently, the concept of work-life balance has somehow been overdone. At least that’s my impression,” Dulger said at an event organised by the liberal FDP party.
While the number of people employed has increased from slightly below 40 million in the 1990s to 45.9 million in 2023 – praised by the current coalition government as ‘record employment’ – the overall amount of hours worked has remained the same, due to reduced working hours, Dulger said.
“I’ve always enjoyed working,” Dulger continued. “And I would love to see more young people in this country getting up in the morning and actually enjoying what they do. Work must be valued more by the state, but also by society” he said, calling for “more respect for work and for those who create it.”
Dulger’s views were echoed by Christian Sewing, CEO of Germany’s biggest lender Deutsche Bank, who said that foreign investors were ready to invest in Germany, but only if they saw high motivation among workers.
Criticising proposals by, among others, Germany’s biggest trade union IG Metall, for introducing a four-day work week in certain sectors, Sewing cited OECD data showing that an average worker in Germany at present works 25.8 hours per week – the lowest among all OECD countries.
The opinions voiced by the two business leaders on Tuesday align with the stance of FDP party leader Lindner, who has recently circulated the idea of exempting paid overtime from taxes to motivate employees to work extra hours. “If you want to be at the top in terms of living standards, if you want to be at the top in terms of social security and if you want to represent top ecological and moral standards, you must also be prepared to show top performance again,” Lindner said at the same event.
Were you "representing top moral standards" when you defended Israel from accusations of genocide while thousands of Palestinian children and babies lie dead?
God damnit I tried to watch Hasan cause I'm not watching cable news and I'm not logging on to Twitter and this thread isn't updating enough. But he's just livestreaming CNN so I am reminded why I don't want to watch cable news. Tired old "experts" speculating about nonsense.
I slept through this event but it seems to be being presented as an Israel counterattack in the british media but the reality seems to be Israel hasn't claimed the attack?
If that's the case then it's been coordinated to be something Iran can't respond to while it can allow Israel to pretend it responded.
Rafah invasion will be next if the leaks suggesting the US traded accepting their Rafah plans for Israel not performing a counterstrike.
If anyone wants some context to remember how fast narratives shift, here’s a lemmy thread from 8 months ago about how ‘Russia cannot win’ and will have to surrender to Ukraine soon. It wasn’t that long ago that the entire western media was saying that Russia is a joke, Russia uses shovels, Russia has to use washing machine parts for missiles, Russia military has been reduced to 10% of its original size, etc.
I just want a pat on the head for being right, just once.
Iran Breaches Anglo-Zionist Defenses in Historic Attack: A Breakdown
[..]
They call this the New Equation. Anytime Israel attacks them, Iran now intends to strike them ‘head on’, i.e. directly from its soil as is their newly demonstrated capability.
Beyond this, Iran broke new ground in setting new milestones for missile technology and modern warfare, as stated in the outset. Iran demonstrated the capacity to bypass the most powerful and advanced anti-missile systems in the world—ones that have no built-in excuse as is the case in Ukraine. In Ukraine, the excuse is that the Patriots and other systems are manned by under-trained Ukrainians, and are not reinforced and integrated as wholly into layered Western systems as they would be in Western hands.
But last night, Iran penetrated every missile shield manned and operated by NATO itself, with all the trappings and advanced C4ISR and SIGINT capabilities inherent to the entire Western alliance; from THAAD, to Patriot, David’s Sling, Arrow-3, SM-3, Iron Dome, and even ‘C-Dome’ from Israeli corvettes—not to mention the entire complement of the West’s most advanced A2A defenses flown from F-35s, Typhoons, Eurofighters, and likely much more.
One must understand that ballistic missiles are precisely the apex predator that these most advanced Western AD systems were created to handle—and last night, they failed spectacularly in the same way the Patriots did in Desert Storm before them [...]
A man wearing a bomb vest has barricaded himself in the Iranian embassy in Paris, and is threatening to blow himself up. French police have set up a security perimeter around the embassy
French counter terrorist police have arrested the man who threatened to blow up the embassy.
Welcome to fanfiction hour, courtesy of Pepe Escobar.
spoiler
Pepe, in a 1 million view tweet, has recently alleged that a "very high level intel source" from Asia, but not Russia or China, has informed him that Israel's initial plan to respond to Iran was to detonate a nuclear bomb over Iran to cause an EMP which would wipe out the electronics of the whole country. They sent an F-35 with its nuclear cargo flying towards Iran, but once it left Jordanian airspace, Russia proceeded to shoot down the F-35. Now, every country involved is maintaining silence about this, and Israel's lackluster response later on was essentially them scrambling to put something together once Plan A failed.
Scott Ritter has responded:
Israel would never take such a precipitous action. Not only would it provide public acknowledgment of Israeli nuclear weapons capability, thereby putting Israel in open violation of existing agreements between it and the U.S., it would also put Israel in violation of the 1968 Outer Space Treaty prohibiting the deployment and/or use of nuclear weapons in space and the Biden administration’s recent admonishments in this regard. Moreover, the scenario describes makes no sense in terms of the characterization of the weapons involved, both in terms of the alleged Russian-Israeli engagement, and what Israel would hope happens regarding EMP. This is, in every way shape and form nonsensical reporting.
I think if you're trying to assert that Israel wouldn't do something just because of a little minor nuisance to them like "laws", then that's a pretty weak argument. Not totally without merit, there are rational players still in the Israeli state somewhere or they'd be a few months deep into a losing war with Hezbollah by now, but a weak argument nonetheless.
A very strange and hyperreactionary Twitter user who I very occasionally check up on to see how far they've gone off the deep end in the last few months, but who is unfortunately pretty knowledgeable about military matters (story of our goddamn lives in this megathread; Twitter-popular communist military nerd when?), has given a set of stronger reasons why this didn't happen, and therefore what we would expect if Israel did indeed ever plan to attack Iran in a massive war scenario.
Things have a chance of failing, especially when you're talking about the F-35. It is extremely unlikely that Israel would send a single plane to launch a single bomb for a mission which, if it were to fuck up and fail in some way, may well cause the destruction of their entire nation under a rain of missiles. If Israel were to attack Iran like this, we would see multiple planes carrying multiple nukes flying at Iran to ensure that at least one of them managed to do the task.
This plane would need support. You would need an escort, including other planes like AWACS. You would also need to refuel. There was a US refueling plane flying in southern Iraq on that day, as the pro-Pepe people claim - but there's one there every day.
If you were Israel, you would want to misdirect and cause chaos in Iran and the surrounding area to distract them and thus prevent them from taking countermeasures, like disconnecting vulnerable points in an EMP blast in their underground bases (which are, conveniently, at least partially shielded from EMPs). A drone attack consisting of a few drones would not be the required chaos. If anything, it would direct Iranian attention towards the sky. A terrorist attack by "ISIS" in a few Iranian cities at once would have been more effective.
The US would know what Israel was doing, because Israel cannot act purely alone (it needs US refueling etc). Either it would force Israel to stand down (and thus the hypothetical nuke-laiden F-35 would never have flown at all), or the US would have decided to go along with it and help Israel by engaging Iraq and Syria and distracting Russia. This did not happen. The US also would have been able to detect a Russian plane taking off from an airbase to intercept the F-35 and would have either forced Israel to abort, or engage the Russian plane somehow.
An EMP is generated by detonating a high-yield (1-10 megaton) thermonuclear bomb at high altitudes (at least 60 kilometers, but as high as 500 km). For complicated reasons, the effectiveness of EMPs depends on where you are on the planet due to variability in magnetic field strength. Magnetic field strength is higher at the poles (though there's a lot of variability; there's a less intense zone over the South Atlantic and a more intense zone over Australia despite being at about the same latitude for example). Russia and the United States are therefore, coincidentally, among the two most vulnerable countries to EMPs when just talking about magnetic field strength. Iran is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum
Because of the lack of real testing into EMPs for obvious reasons, it is unknown precisely how far up or how big the bomb would have to be to cover Iran. The EMP would also decay with distance - this means that many military sites close to the borders would be less affected if you got it a little too small, thus ensuring a massive response from Iran which would destroy Israel too. Whereas if you got it a little too big, you could easily hit many other countries (in the Middle East - the supply of much of the planet's oil!) and perhaps even Russia itself, which would possibly cause Russia to respond to Israel rapidly.
Israel would probably deliver a nuclear payload with a Blue Sparrow missile. Assuming a 700 kg warhead capable of delivering 2 megatons, which is a reasonable guess as to the bomb size and yield you'd need to disable Iran assuming certain factors, it could just barely fit inside the missile. But no warhead of this magnitude with that relatively low weight has been reported outside of the now-discontinued Russian Topol-M. The most common nuke yield in the US arsenal is at about 500 kilotons, and the most powerful nuclear free-fall weapon in the US is the B83, at 1.2 megatons with a weight of over 1000 kilograms. So Israel would need to have done some pretty intense nuclear science to create a warhead that is both twice as strong and half as large as the most powerful US nuke. Not impossible, but there's no reason to believe it.
Voting is underway in this Lara State commune in Venezuela.
The people in this community are choosing which project will be financed by the govt and implemented by the them, the people. The choice is between 7 infrastructure projects, ranging from water wells, road paving, and electricity grid fixes.
“Our message to Latin America and the world is that it’s people power that leads Venezuela.”
Lara State is Venezuela’s 4th most populous and a top producer of coffee, pineapple, milk, wine, rum & eggs. We’re visiting the communes here to observe today’s elections.
Jerusalem is concerned that the International Criminal Court in The Hague could soon issue arrest warrants against senior officials, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, over the Israel Defense Forces operation against Hamas, Channel 12 News reported Thursday.
According to the report, an emergency meeting was held at Netanyahu’s office on Tuesday in the presence of Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer, Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Foreign Minister Israel Katz.
The four decided to take “urgent action with international authorities” to prevent the arrest of Israelis abroad, Channel 12 added.
Huge respect to South Africa's Foreign Minister, Naledi Pandor. She has been the one pushing hardest for this.
According to the Argentine government, the decision was taken for security reasons. "There's no money, but we have to take care of the president," said the presidential spokesman.
The president of Argentina, Javier Milei, will stop flying on commercial airlines as he did in his first four months in office, a practice with which he sought to cut spending, his spokesman said on Tuesday (16).
"The president can no longer travel on commercial flights and the Ministry of Security has sent all parties a confidential report on the reason for this suggestion," spokesman Manuel Adorni told a press conference.
On Monday, Security Minister Patricia Bullrich told LN+: "There's no money, but we have to take care of the president."
Milei and his team are expected to start using the Boeing 757-256 "Tango 01" as early as Friday, on a trip to Bariloche, in the south of the country, where the ultra-liberal president will take part in a meeting with businesspeople.
After taking office in December, Milei undertook a draconian spending cut to try to pull Argentina out of the economic crisis and, among other measures, announced that he and his team would no longer travel on the three planes in his air fleet.
Since then, he has boarded commercial planes with a reduced entourage and published videos on his social networks in which he appears greeting and taking "selfies" with the other passengers.
So he went to the seaside resort of Mar del Plata to visit his then girlfriend, actress Fátima Florez; and then to Davos, his international debut as president, where he intrigued the world's economic elite by warning: "The West is in danger."
On that occasion, the president celebrated on the X network that his decision had allowed him to save almost 400,000 dollars (R$2.1 million) which came "out of the efforts of Argentinians".
His last trip was last week, when he flew to the United States on Aerolíneas Argentinas and met with tycoon Elon Musk in Texas.
The trip was due to continue to Copenhagen, Denmark, on Saturday, but Milei canceled the remaining leg and returned to his country to set up a "crisis committee" for the for the Iranian attack on Israel that same day.
Milei then expressed his "solidarity and unwavering commitment to the State of Israel"
But the Greater Israel will not wait. We hope that in the near future the whole country will become the place for the celebration of Shushan Purim. We will continue our work - cleansing the enemies of the Holy People, restoring the Holy Land within its original borders from the Nile to the Euphrates and restoring the Temple of Jerusalem.
Rabbi Avraham Shmulevich, a rabbi living in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron, Israel). I think I found the most evil person alive, or the person with the most vile despicable ideology. Apparently his group contacts every immigrant from CIS nations (tons of disaffected gusanos with chips on their shoulders) to Israel they can and tries to rope them into their "hyperzionist" cult. He then goes around advising Ukraine, Georgia and Israel for some reason and getting news interviews on cable TV.
Hamas is a terrorist organization that is recognized as a terrorist organization almost all over the world, except for Russia, and which is backed by Iran. And Iran is Russia's closest ally.
This was stated exclusively to Pryamyy TV channel by political scientist, expert on Islam, the Middle East and the CIS, President of the Institute for Eastern Partnership Avraham Shmulevych.
"The situation is very complicated, there are victims, a lot of people who have been injured. How will the situation in this region continue to develop?
Hamas is a terrorist organization that is recognized as a terrorist organization almost all over the world, except for Russia. As you know, Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, called Hamas Russia's partner. Iran is behind this organization. And they aim to destroy the state of Israel. They say this openly. Now they are using the tactic of human shields. That is, they send a crowd of people to break through the Israeli border with Molotov cocktails, axes, and cold steel. They throw stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers. The goal is to cause as many casualties as possible. Because, naturally, the Israelis open fire, defending their border.
And then there is an international scandal. It's the same tactic, and I don't know who taught them. Either Russian curators... It's the same as during the Great Patriotic War, when Russia sent Russian soldiers with stones at German machine guns."
Interesting to see the ukrainian and Israeli far rights merging in their hatred of Russia
whos that one conspiracy person on here who kept talking about flooding west asia with foreign aid dollars to reinstate dollar hegemony? they just passed ur bill lol
Man sets himself on fire in front of Donald Trump trial courthouse
According to the New York Times, the man was in Collect Pond Park, which is opposite the courthouse, in an area intended for Trump supporters when he threw flammable liquid on his body and set himself on fire.
Now that it seems certain Ukraine is gonna get its $60 billion, has there been any analysis on how that money can translate into actual battlefield performance for Ukraine. Like, will that money even slow down Russia’s advance? I feel like at this point the money isn’t even all that important relative to the fact that it seems unless NATO commits to massively provocative actions (like sending NATO troops to fight), Russia will still be advancing just at a different pace.
#UPDATE Al Mayadeen's correspondent, citing the spokesperson of the Iranian Space Agency, says that air defense batteries responded to 3 targets over Isfahan
He added that reports indicate that air defenses responded to threats in #Qahjavarestan, northeast of #Isfahan, as no aerial objects hit ground targets.
Our correspondent stressed that all of the explosions heard on Friday were a result of air defense interceptions. Citing unofficial sources our correspondent said that the targets that were shot down were small drones, not missiles
Since the beginning of April, Russia has advanced 5 kilometers in the direction of Ocheretyne. If they maintain this pace, they could potentially reach the outskirts of Donetsk Oblast within six months (assuming their goal is simply to keep moving forward). To the river Dnepr they would need 2 more years. Please dont take this serious.
Amid reports they’re operationally encircled in Chasiv Yar, the Nazi right sector 67th motorized brigade is “being disbanded”.
UA Pravda accuses the brigade of sending conscripts (“pixels”) to the hotspots on the frontline to die without support from the experienced right sector Nazi cohort who were the original foundation of this autonomous right sector unit.
The brigade, currently holding the front in one of the hottest fights in Ukraine right now, states they will fight efforts to disband the unit and distribute soldiers to other commands.
Meanwhile some analysts are speculating they may be operationally surrounded now with Russia appearing to have fire control over most of their possible exit and supply routes.
Wump wump.
So (1) a bunch of Nazis are probably gonna die soon and (2) that is Ukrainian media complaining about how the fascist core of their army is sending undertrained conscripts to die.
The Cradle: Iran enhances air defenses with Russian support: Report
[hexatlas tags: russia, iran, israel, ukraine]
Iran and Russia are developing a deepening strategic partnership that could prove crucial in helping Iran defend itself from an attack from Israel, The Washington Post said in a report on 16 April. The Post claims that according to a leaked Russian document, stolen Iranian emails, and interviews with US intelligence officials, Russia has pledged to provide Iran with “advanced fighter jets and air-defense technology, assets that could help Tehran harden its defenses against any future airstrike by Israel.”
The Post report cites intelligence sources claiming that Russia has agreed to provide Iran with Su-35 fighter jets and the S-400 anti-missile defense system. The Su-35s would be a dramatic upgrade for an Iranian air force that consists mainly of rebuilt US and Soviet aircraft from before the 1979 revolution that established the Islamic Republic. The S-400 is Russia’s most advanced missile defense system. In 2019, Russia provided Iran with the S-300 system. The intelligence officials added there is no public evidence that Su-35s or S-400s have been delivered to Iran.
Well, that's helpful.
Also some stuff in there about what Russia has been getting in return - drones and such.
Apparently Tucker interviewed some Palestinian priest? Haven't watched it and I know it's part of his appeal to Christonationalist freaks, but I'm still kind of shocked he did it.
Rockets fired from Iraq towards a US base in Syria
This feels like "dude just trust me" tier but Reuters is reporting it so it's probably real? They're implying it was retribution for an uncomfirmed US strike:
Two security sources and a senior army officer said a rocket launcher fixed on the back of a small truck had been parked in Zummar border town with Syria.
The military official said the truck caught fire with an explosion from unfired rockets at the same time as warplanes were in the sky.
Another great piece by Roberts, this time on India, given the ongoing elections. He goes over the BJP's likely strong upcoming victory, and then:
How is it possible for the BJP and Modi to be so popular? First, because of the bulk of the BJP’s political support comes from the rural and more backward areas of this huge country who have not benefited from the strident rise of Indian capitalism in the cities. These areas are bulwarks of Hindu nationalism, incentivised by fear of muslims.
The second reason is the total failure over the decades of the main capitalist party and standard bearer of Indian independence, the Congress party, to deliver better living standards and conditions for the hundreds of millions, not only in the country but in the city slums. Congress appears to millions as the party of the establishment controlled by a family dynasty (the Gandhis), while the BJP appears to many as the populist party of the forgotten people.
The Modi government makes much of its handouts to the poorest. Welfare schemes have been expanded such as providing free grain to 800 million of India’s poorest, and a monthly stipend of 1,250 rupees ($16; £12) to women from low-income families paid into half a billion new bank accounts, along with free gas connection in millions of houses for the poor and over 40 million toilets constructed.
But in reality, the BJP and the Modi government is fully integrated and supportive of Indian capital, especially big capital. PM Modi has made the economy a major part of his election pitch, pledging at a rally last year to lift the country’s economy “to the top position in the world” should he win a third term. The Modi’s government’s key policy is Viksit Bharat 2047—a plan to make India a developed nation by 2047, 100 years after independence, something China is targeting for 2030.
Roberts spends the rest of the article describing how the idea that India will ever catch up to, let alone exceed China is comical and deeply unserious:
India's GDP growth figures are greatly exaggerated. Additionally, China and India had about the same GDP per capita in 1990, but now China's is six times higher. The gap between China and India is not narrowing, it's widening.
China's Human Development Index has improved from 0.48 in 1990 to 0.77 in 2021 (for context, the US's is 0.92). India's has gone from 0.43 to 0.63.
India's income inequality - in some measures greater than when under the British Empire - dampen economic growth for the whole society, as wealth concentrates and stagnates in the bank accounts of oligarchs rather than being dispersed throughout society. Labor creates value, not entrepeneurs.
Healthcare is not available for many and impoverishes people due to how expensive it is. Infant mortality in the poorest Indian states is worse than in sub-Saharan Africa. Government spending on health is only 1-2% of GDP.
India has a third of the world's malnourished children. 74% of the population cannot afford healthy food.
The average income in India is being dramatically outclassed by China. Income growth is well below claimed GDP growth.
Where income growth is taking place at high speeds tends to be in the financial and real estate sectors, but these don't employ that many people relatively speaking. Labour force participation has fallen under Modi and less than half of the adult working population is employed.
Most Indians are employed in small businesses where labour rights are ignored.
India's manufacturing sector post-pandemic has been weak. Dreams that India might become the next world-factory like China now that there is political pressure (as well as capitalists seeking to minimize labor costs) and that China's manufacturing will plummet are almost certainly not going to happen so long as the Chinese state wills it and increases planning and state control over corporations.
Infrastructure is not nearly as good as in China. China invested 6.5% of its GDP in infrastructure development (pre-COVID at least), whereas India invests just 4.5%.
78% of Indians are literate (and only 62% of Indian women), while 97% of Chinese people are literate. China has many more people in vocational education despite having similar population sizes.
Productivity growth has been falling under Modi. Overall, labor productivity is an average of 4% in India while in China, it's 6.3%. This is because in China, underemployed peasants can move to the cities to get manufacturing jobs due to state planning of labor and infrastructure building. India's urbanisation rate is much behind and employment growth is very slow.
Groundwater provides 85% of India's drinking water, and groundwater is thus declining at one of the fastest rates in the world. Predictions are that the situation will be critical within 20 years.
Overall, India will probably fall into a middle income trap, with mass exploitation of a billion or more people by the top 10%, while China continues its meteoric rise under intelligent state planning even despite Western sanctions pressure. India's BJP has no real solutions for the fundamental problems facing them. They are doing the classic neoliberal/fascist things - privatisation, cuts in subsidies, more regressive taxes, blaming powerless minorities for the country's problems, etc - and these make the situation worse, not better.
"If Israel attempts to use the threat of attacking nuclear facilities to put pressure on Iran, a revision of the nuclear doctrine and a departure from the previously announced considerations is likely," stated the commander.
Haghtalab highlighted Israel's history of sabotage and terrorist acts against Iran's nuclear industry alongside its ongoing threats.
"Although according to international protocols and standards and the regulations of the International Atomic Energy Agency, all countries are advised to refrain from attacking nuclear facilities, the Islamic Republic of Iran has always been prepared to confront these threats from the beginning," he asserted.
Referring to the recent criminal act of the Zionist regime in attacking the consular section of the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Syria, which violated all international laws and regulations, General Haqtalab stated that it was not expected that the regime would again make the futile attempt to threaten an attack on our country's nuclear facilities. “By the grace of God…, we are prepared to confront any threat from the Zionist regime,” he added.
“The nuclear facilities of the Zionist enemy have been identified, and we have the necessary information about all the targets, and in other words, our fingers are on the trigger of powerful missiles to destroy the specified targets in response to their possible action,” General Haqtalab noted, emphasizing the full readiness of the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
He stressed that if the Zionist regime took action against Iranian nuclear facilities, it would certainly face a reaction, and in retaliation, the nuclear facilities of the regime would be targeted and attacked with advanced weapons.
“If the fake Zionist regime wants to use the threat of attacking our country's nuclear facilities as an instrumental means to put pressure on Iran, a revision of the nuclear doctrine and policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran and a departure from the previously announced considerations is likely and conceivable,” he said.
Emphasizing that the era of "hit and run" is over, as stated by the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, General Haqtalab said, “If the Zionist regime commits an act of aggression against Iran, the type of response will be with the prudence of the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they can be sure that the blow they receive will be recorded in history like the ‘True Promise’ operation”.
Concluding, Haqtalab reassured the Iranian people of the safeguarding measures in place, asserting the complete security of Iran's nuclear facilities under the protection of its armed forces.
The Omen from the Böögg has been made clear for all of us as we got hail and snow yesterday and today, it seems that the ancient gods have not been appeased and an eternal winters shall envelope the world. I'm very sorry you all.
Sy Hersh is claiming that the Pentagon went behind the White House's back and basically negotiated Iran's response with Russia acting as an intermediary. Seems pretty hard to believe. He also claims the attack did no real damage, which again, seems hard to believe given the media blackout and the videos we have all seen.
spoiler
I’ve spent much of my career reporting on the American military’s misdeeds and worse, especially during the Vietnam War, but it’s time now to applaud the brilliance of the Pentagon planning staff and the operational officers who did what America assured Iran’s religious and military leadership it could do: allow Iran to respond to yet another Israeli assassination by flinging more than three hundred drones and missiles toward Israeli targets that as many as possible would be shot out of the sky before hitting ground there. It was a huge gamble, and it paid off.
The Pentagon was essentially resisting—a word I choose to use—the foreign policy of the Biden White House and NATO by secretly approaching one of Iran’s closest allies—Russia—and persuading a senior general there to reassure Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s 84-year-old supreme leader, that America had the know-how to make the strategy succeed.
Imagine it: two of the Biden administration’s most entrenched enemies—Russia and Iran—trusting and working with the Pentagon and its leadership to prevent a deadly retaliation for yet another Israeli assassination of an Iranian general and six other Iranians in Damascus.
I am not allowed to name the American senior military officers and advisers who made the unusual faux missile attack happen. But it’s important to say that President Joe Biden, whose foreign policy team was not involved in the process, accepted the high-risk plan and publicly urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political career and personal freedom depend on keeping the war in Gaza going, and the rest of the Israeli leadership not to respond to Iran. That they might launch a counterattack remains a possibility, of course, according to press reports in Israel.
“The Pentagon planning staffs were asked to come up with a military solution to a political problem,” one involved official told me. “Otherwise the Ayatollah would attack and Bibi would do ‘his thing’ in response. We had to get involved now, and not later. And so we thought about where we are and where we wanted to be. And we got to be involved now, and not later. That meant we had to control the Iranian response.”
The obvious fear was that Netanyahu’s response to a successful drone and missile attack would be, as in Gaza, overwhelming. A major Israeli retaliation could easily lead to an unwanted war in the Middle East.
The senior planning staffs throughout the Pentagon had direct contacts with their peers throughout Europe, and there was immediate consultation with air force leaders in Europe that circumvented dealing with the political leadership there. “And who knew the Iranians the best?” the official asked rhetorically: “The Russians and the Brits.” Iran’s strongest ties in Europe are in fact with Britain and Russia, whose military leaders shared the concern about the extreme danger of an Iranian response to Israel.
The senior planning staffs throughout the Pentagon had direct contacts with their peers throughout Europe, and there was immediate consultation with air force leaders in Europe that circumvented dealing with the political leadership there. “And who knew the Iranians the best?” the official asked rhetorically: “The Russians and the Brits.” Iran’s strongest ties in Europe are in fact with Britain and Russia, whose military leaders shared the concern about the extreme danger of an Iranian response to Israel.
Out of these conversations evolved the ingenious plan: Why not get the air forces of our allies in Europe and the Middle East to agree to work together, under American leadership, and, with Iran’s approval, take advantage of the rapid progress in anti-missile and anti-drone defenses to let the Ayatollah fire off this missiles and have his revenge, while understanding the that air forces of America, Europe, and the Middle East would track and destroy them all?
During the secret planning, the official said, America’s allies were told: “We are going to share all the information about the fired Iranian drones and missiles we collect.” There was a tough session with a senior Israeli official who was informed, the American official said, that Israel had two options: one,”win easy” and let the American coalition destroy the missiles; or two, “lose the hard way” and respond with violence to the failed attack. “If you chose the hard way,” the Israeli was told, “you’re on your own.”
Throughout the process, Pentagon leaders were assembling their plan without formally consulting President Biden or anyone in the White House. “The White House only knew that the Iranians” wanted to respond in kind to the Israelis, the official said. At that early point in the military planning, he added, “the White House had no need to know more.”
It was believed that there would never be formal approval for such a radical strategy, although Biden, to his credit, when later told that the Ayatollah had agreed to mute his revenge, publicly joined in urging the Israelis not to respond to the failed Iranian missile attack.
The drones and missiles fired off by Iran were easy targets. An American fleet of Navy attack planes were augmented by fighters from Jordan, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, whose access to nearby air bases enabled them to get refueled and stay on the defense and in the air for hours. The Iranian leadership conveniently fired off its missiles and drones over a nine-hour period, adding to the success of the missile and drone hunters: the long interval gave some of the fighters a chance to refuel. Two American AWACs—specially equipped E-3 sentry planes—that had the most advanced warning and tracking systems were on station to help guide the missile-hunting aircraft to their targets. (The US Navy utilized its own versions of the AWACs: E-2 Hawkeyes). The American-led operation was a total success, with only a few weapons penetrating Israel’s borders. The only known casualty was a seven-year old Bedouin girl. She was struck and severely injured by shrapnel that fell through the roof of their home in the Negev desert, near Israel’s important Nevatim air base, where advanced aircraft are stationed that are capable of delivering nuclear weapons. It is thirty kilometers northwest of Dimona, the Israel nuclear reactor that has been churning out nuclear bombs for more than five decades.
I was told by a knowledgeable Israeli that officials at the airfield were explicitly advised, presumably by Iran, that the missiles that fell near or at the airfield were not meant for the reactor at Dimona. The Israeli military officially released photographs of the damage to the grounds at the air base.
The operation “had to have a zero scenario,” the American official told me, in terms of insuring that an Iranian ballistic missile did not escape the international armada and strike a major city in Israel. But, he added, “the guys who fly have a lot of faith and believe they can do anything with the AWACs. There was no margin of error.
There is wild disinformation flying around. This is the kind of shit I usually filter out but this one is so crazy. The only possible way this could be true is if what russia means is assets they have in syria or wagner or something. It's probably extremely untrue though.
The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador expressed his gratitude to the president, presidents and prime ministers of Latin America and the Caribbean for their solidarity for the attack on the Mexican embassy in Ecuador.
AMLO: The lawsuit filed before the International Court includes the expulsion of Ecuador from the United Nations Organization as long as it does not offer a public apology and that there is no repetition of this shameful act that violates international law"
It should be recalled that the Ecuadorian police entered the Mexican Embassy and took Jorge Glas, who requested asylum in Mexico and is accused of embezzlement, that is, of taking resources from the treasury.
The CELAC Summit began on Tuesday and was led by the President of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, who recognized that Mexico has always provided support to migrants and criticized the actions of #Ecuador, which is currently led by Daniel Noboa.
Colombia's leader, Gustavo Petro, said that what happened in Quito unleashed a "global unease" to which we must pay attention because the lives of our people are at stake.
Gustavo Petro: "Capitalism refuses to be overthrown."
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro also condemned the "assault on the diplomatic headquarters" and expressed his solidarity with Mexico.
The President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro denounced that the United States Government has not complied with the agreements signed, particularly with the lifting of the illegal coercive measures imposed against the country.
The violent incident at the Mexican diplomatic legation in the Ecuadorian capital "is unacceptable," said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva launched the People's Land program to counteract the unequal land distribution process in the country.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel assured that ignoring the assault on the Mexican embassy in Ecuador would represent a serious precedent.
President Maduro confirmed that his country fully supports Mexico's proposal to expel Ecuador from the United Nations Organization.
On Tuesday, President Nicolas Maduro announced the closure of the Venezuelan embassy and consulates in Ecuador in rejection of the aggression against the Mexican embassy.
On April 5, Ecuadorian security forces violently entered the Mexican embassy in Quito, where former Ecuadorian vice president Jorge Glas was staying.
The Venezuelan decision was communicated during the virtual meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). In this forum, Maduro asked that the original situation of Glas, who had received political asylum from Mexico one day before the assault on the embassy, be restored.
"I have ordered to close our Embassy in Ecuador, close the consulate in Quito, and immediately close the consulate in Guayaquil. I have ordered the return of diplomatic personnel to Venezuela immediately," the Bolivarian leader said.
Addressing the chargé d'affaires Pedro Sassone, Maduro ordered that he "close and return until international law is expressly restored in Ecuador."
The Venezuelan leader also confirmed that his country fully supports Mexico's proposal to expel Ecuador from the United Nations Organization.
"I have explained that this suspension must occur until Ecuador apologizes to the international community and restores the situation to its original legal status," Maduro said.
This request implies that the Andean country returns former President Glas to the Mexican embassy, recognizes his status as a political asylum seeker, and allows him to leave for Mexico. "It is Venezuela's position. We support the dignity of Mexico," Maduro emphasized during the CELAC extraordinary meeting held on Tuesday.
The US government has announced that it will not renew license 44, which allowed Venezuela to sell oil to the market, easing the sanctions imposed by the US.
As a result, the sanctions are back in full force. The United States considers that the country has violated the Barbados agreements, which deal with democratic elections in Venezuela, by preventing opposition candidates from registering as candidates.
What do people make of Mercouris' vague allusions to some unannounced weapon capability that Iran has? He seems petty unsettled just talking about it, is he talking about nukes? Does Iran have nukes or the ability to quickly assemble a warhead?
Israel launched a missile attack on a facility in Iran, ABC reports, citing an American official. Iranian media report explosions near the airport in Isfahan, writes Reuters
An explosion in the Iranian Isfahan was heard near the airport and the 8th Army Air Force Base , writes the Iranian news agency Fars. Israel on Friday notified the United States of its intention to retaliate against Iran within 24-48 hours , writes Bloomberg
Iranian air defense shot down several drones in the sky over Isfahan, Iranian TV reports. Iranian air defense forces worked in the sky over the city of Isfahan, Mehr agency writes and publishes a video
Iranian TV: The air defense targeted several small, unidentified drones in the airspace of Isfahan Governorate in the center of the country. CNN, about an American official: We understood from Israeli officials that they will not target any Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran's nuclear facilities in Isfahan are completely safe , says the Iranian Tasnim agency
Sergio Moro, the CIA-backed judge who jailed Lula da Silva, is currently in danger of being arrested for fraud.
Gabriela Hardt, who replaced Sergio Moro as Curitiba's head Lava Jato judge when he became Bolsonaro's Justice Minister, has just been removed from the judiciary and is facing a possible 26 year sentence for collaborating with US officials in a $682 Million embezzlement scheme.
In March 2019, the Lava Jato team attempted to bypass Brazilian law to take a $682 million USD kickback from fines levied by the US DOJ on Petrobras, to start a private NGO. 3 Judges from the TRF-4 Court in Porto Alegre have also been fired.
In the ruling by the National Justice Ombudsman, former New York Times anti-corruption golden boys, Lava Jato taskforce leader Deltan Dallagnol & Judge Sergio Moro were also implicated, but are not currently judges so will face charges in other spaces.
Dellagnol lost his congressman position when the court voted to impeach him. When that happened, he did a photoshoot in congress and fled to the US to become a business coach, leaving his wife and children behind.
He is being investigated for misuse of public funds during the 2022 elections and because he was trying to blackmail people investigated during the Lava Jato operation, extorting money from them.
🇮🇱🇮🇷 Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu instructed the army to propose targets in Iran, attacks on which would “send a signal,” but without casualties.
This could be a facility in Tehran or a cyber attack, writes the Washington Post.
Israel is discussing a response to the Iranian attack that will not anger allies and ruin the opportunity to build an alliance against Tehran, the article said.
And the Israeli Channel 13 reports that the Israeli Air Force has completed the development of its plans to strike Iran.
Meanwhile, CNN reports that Israel has postponed its ground operation in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah due to the Iranian attack.
According to the TV channel, the Israeli Air Force was planning to scatter leaflets in some areas of the city on April 15. Rafah is home to more than a million Palestinians, most of them refugees from northern Gaza.
(Although I suspect if they meekly respond with a meaningless cyber attack the far right will leave the bibi government. I fail to see how this would please them)
(Also on the other hand if they fuck with Iranian infrastructure in a way that is economically destabilizing enough; no casualties may not necessarily mean this isn’t more escalation)
Are the claims that Assange put civilian lives at risk in his Wikileak dump legit? It seems as though this is the angle that the US is trying to have his extradited for. All i read about in the media are vague allegations about named sources being put at risk. I'm also curious who they refer to as "civilians", would a Ukranian providing intel to the Russian army be regarded as a civilian in this conflict?
In 2022, 1,466 kilograms, (3,232 pounds), of cocaine were seized in Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, and Niger compared to an average of 13 kilograms (28.7 pounds) between 2013 and 2020, said the report from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
The location of the Sahel, lying south of the Sahara desert and running from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, makes it a strategic transit point for the increasing amount of cocaine produced in South America and destined for Europe. The trafficking has detrimental impacts for both peace and health, locally and globally, said Amado Philip de Andrés, UNODC Regional Representative in West and Central Africa.
"The involvement of various armed groups in drug trafficking continues to undermine peace and stability in the region," said Andrés. The report said the drug trade provides financial resources to armed groups in the Sahel, where Islamic extremist networks have flourished as the region struggles with a recent spate of coups.
The report finds that drug trafficking continues to provide financial resources to armed groups in the region, including Plateforme des mouvements du 14 juin 2014 d’Alger (Plateforme) and Coordination des Mouvements de l’Azawad (CMA) in Mali, enabling them to sustain their involvement in conflict, notably through the purchase of weapons.
A new tiktok divestment bill happened? Apparently the main difference is that they have 1 year to divest instead of 6months. Is there anything else important about this version of the bill?
Does anyone have a break down of exactly how many Iranian missiles/drones were shot down and by whom? I heard on RWN that most were shot down by Jordan and the US. Can't tell if it's just some twitter rumor or based on anything though.
At least 108 protesters were in custody, the police said, after officers clad in riot gear cleared tents from a pro-Palestinian demonstration.
---
Edit
Emphasis mine.
Many are wearing kaffiyeh, and a Palestinian flag is waving. Their message seems to be: You can’t arrest us all. “The people united will never be defeated,” some chant.
The burning of the Böögg has been cancelled due to too much wind which would've caused injuries due to cinders blowing into the crowd. In order to appease the mob who wanted to see a white persons head explode a swift solution was found and the political prisoner known as Böögg was executed by firing squad.
This means that summer is officially cancelled......
Fake money airdropped in Gaza with "Your money is with Yahia Sinwar", "The money Yahia Sinwar stole is enough to finance a whole country" and a picture of Yahia Sinwar edited to look like a rat (totally not antisemitic)
John Helmer on Russia's de-electrification campaign in ukraine is interesting if you're into that kind of thing. No badly photoshopped meme in the header though unfortunately. This article discusses the extent of de-electrification that has happened and extent of power imports.
BERLIN, April 18 (Reuters) - Two German-Russian nationals have been arrested in Germany on suspicion of plotting sabotage attacks, including on U.S. military facilities, in a serious effort to undermine military support for Ukraine, officials said on Thursday.
Authorities have searched the homes and workplaces of the two suspects who stand accused of working for a foreign secret service. One of them, identified as Dieter S., had since October 2023 discussed possible plots with a person linked to the Russian secret service, prosecutors said.
Dieter S. had been prepared to carry out bomb and arson attacks on military facilities, including those operated by U.S. forces, prosecutors said, adding that he took photos and videos of military transport and equipment.
According to Spiegel magazine, the facilities included the Grafenwoehr army base in the southern state of Bavaria where Ukrainian soldiers receive training to use U.S. Abrams tanks.
The prosecutors suspect Dieter S., whose last name has not been disclosed due to German privacy laws, was a fighter for Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine from Dec. 2014 to Sept. 2016 in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic.
The conclusions to be drawn from the evidence are clear:
Iran launched a few dozen missiles and drones, not hundreds
Most of the ballistics fired penetrated air defenses
Most of the ballistics fired were targeted at Ramon AB
Nevatim AB was a secondary rather than primary target
The Golan site was likely struck with cruise missiles
It is unclear if a large number of drones were even launched
Israeli "outer-layer" defense systems (read: Arrow) may be ineffective against modern Iranian missiles attacking on depressed trajectories
Israeli claims about the size of the attack and the success of their defensive effort should not be taken seriously
Iranian claims about their operational goals and targets should similarly be taken with a large grain of salt, a lot of what has come out of their camp seems to be supposition and speculation
On this auspicious day my people burn an effigy called the Böögg the time it takes for it to explode usually tells us how good the summer will be considering that last year was the longest time in recorded history (57mins) and horrible shit happened I will carefully monitor the event and report the actual time.
Also it's customary to guess how long it'll take so. Ima go with under 10 minutes, weeks where decades and all that.
Years and times in case anyone wants to guess as well.
The Swiss ambassador was summoned to the IRGC instead of the Foreign Ministry
Advisor to the Minister of Interior:
At 3 a.m. on April 26, after the end of the operation, the Swiss ambassador was summoned to the IRGC instead of the Foreign Ministry for the first time. They gave him the necessary warnings that if America takes the slightest action, we will destroy the entire region on their heads.
The president of Kyrgyzstan, Sadyr Japarov, has recently signed into law major restrictions on imperial NGOs (ratified last month). Some here might recall similar events in Georgia around a year ago sparking an attempted colour revolution. Hopefully Kyrgyzstan's better economic integration with China and Eurasia (and the absence of any delusions about ) will lead to a cleaner expulsion of imperial influences.
Relatedly, Georgia's government has not given up on their efforts to ratify an anti-NGO bill. (Although the western-sponsored riots in Tbilisi around a year ago successfully intimidated the plurality Georgian Dream party into withdrawing the bill, it failed to remove the government.) Now a resurrected bill is back in the news after the parliament voted on and passed a first reading. The president has declared intentions to veto, while the plurality party continues to back it with the potential of recruiting supermajority support.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to announce sanctions in the coming days against the Israel Defense Forces' "Netzah Yehuda" battalion for human rights violations in the West Bank.
It would be the first time that the US has imposed sanctions on an Israeli military unit. The sanctions will prohibit the battalion and its members from receiving any kind of military assistance or training from the US.
The US Army cancelled the XM1299 Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) system last month. ... The only way I can describe it at this point is total organizational failure. We're now on our third failed program to replace the M109 155mm self-propelled howitzer, and as usual for the US Army the interim solution - the M109A7, basically dropping the existing M109A6 Paladin turret onto a Bradley chassis - is going to end up as the permanent fix.
Let's walk through the history of this generational procurement failure. The M109 has been the US Army's 155mm self-propelled howitzer since before Vietnam, with the original short-barreled version (rather resembling a Russian 2S3) upgraded to sport what was then a very modern 39-caliber* cannon shortly after that war with the M109A1. Further upgrades followed, culminating in the M109A6, a modern weapon of the late Cold War era that was in some way groundbreaking but in some other ways quite dated. It had a lot of new electronics... and a manually-loaded cannon from the 1970s. When the Paladin entered service in the early 1990s the then-Soviet Union had already introduced the 2S19 in 1989 (featuring an autoloading 47-caliber 152mm cannon), and the Germans were hard at work on the PzH 2000 (with a semi-autoloading 52-caliber 155mm cannon). Both of these competing systems could fire three times the rounds of the Paladin at considerably longer ranges.
It wouldn't be an issue because the Army was working on a replacement already - the XM2001 Crusader, a thoroughly modern self-propelled gun with a 52-caliber 155mm cannon and an automatic transloader vehicle. It was the ultimate cannon to defend the Fulda Gap against the Red Tide... which was problematic at the time because that threat didn't exist any more and doubly so after 9/11. So like many Cold War legacy programs it was cancelled by Donald Rumsfeld during his apocalyptic tenure as George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense.
Not to worry, the Army had a backup plan! Enter Future Combat Systems, a program that happened because the Army brass saw the Air Force make the F-35 too big to fail and thought that was a good procurement model. The XM1203 Non-Line of Sight Cannon (NLOS-C), developed as one of the FCS "family" of tracked combat vehicles, sporting a lightweight 39-caliber 155mm cannon with a high-speed autoloader and minimal crew requirements. It would have been the ideal cannon for the lightweight expeditionary Army of the post-Cold War era... and then Iraq happened. The bad part of Iraq where we were losing a hundred guys killed every month with no end in sight. After the Republicans were routed in the 2006 elections and Rumsfeld shown the door his successor, Robert Gates, axed the entire program as yet another Rumsfeld-era boondoggle with no value to win the War on Terror.
This left the Army's fleet of increasingly-worn out M109A6s soldiering on into the 2010s, and replacement vehicles were needed. Enter the M109A7 - basically a program to drop the existing M109A6 turret onto a suitably adapted Bradley chassis to ease maintenance and recapitalize the fleet. The M109A7 didn't offer any actual new capability, but it would keep the Field Artillery in business until a new cannon could be brought into service, because it was now the late 2010s and most serious armies on the planet had moved on to autoloading long-barrel systems.
Enter ERCA, the US Army's plan to leapfrog the competition with a fantastically long 58-caliber 155mm cannon... mounted on the same Bradley-derived chassis of the M109A7. If you take a short survey of modern tracked, armored, long-barrel SPGs - 2S19, 2S35, K9, PzH 2000, etc. - you'll notice that they're all quite heavy, with most of them built on a tank chassis or a specialized heavy artillery chassis. That capability isn't free. The Army was trying to stuff an even longer autoloading cannon onto an IFV chassis, and ran into easily-predictable issues with weight and then - once they cut capability to fix it - into equally predictable issues with bore wear given the extreme ranges they were trying to drive this cannon to (70+ kilometers for a gun about 10% longer than cannons maxxing out at half that). So that program got cancelled last month for what were basically technical feasibility issues.
In any event the US Army's current plan seems to be to go to war with the M109A7 and, if the performance of similar 39-caliber systems in Ukraine is any indication, lose the counter-battery fight and get a lot of artillerymen killed manning obsolescent guns.
Twitter's defense in Brazil tells the Brazilian Supreme Court that the network will continue to comply with court orders
The protest comes days after billionaire Elon Musk, owner of the social network, attacked Moraes and said he would not comply with orders to block accounts issued by the magistrate.
In the document, X's Brazilian subsidiary also informs the Brazilian Supreme Court that X Corp, from the USA, was subpoenaed by the US House Judiciary Committee to provide information on the Brazilian Supreme Court's orders regarding content moderation, and undertook to keep Moraes informed of any information it received on the subject "in compliance with its duty of transparency and procedural loyalty".
The latest statement from Twitter do Brasil's defense differs from the position initially adopted by the platform in the case.
The defense of the X platform (formerly Twitter) in Brazil has informed Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes that the social network will continue to fully comply with any orders issued by the court and also by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE).
The statement from the platform's lawyers in Brazil comes days after the owner of the social network, billionaire Elon Musk, attacked Moraes and said he would not comply with orders to block accounts issued by the magistrate.
"Finally, as already communicated to the Federal Police, X Brasil informs that all orders issued by this egregious Federal Supreme Court and egregious Superior Electoral Court remain and will continue to be fully complied with by X Corp," X's defense in Brazil told the Supreme Court on Monday (15).
On Friday (12), the Brazilian government suspended new advertising contracts with X, a network where it invested BRL:5.4 million in advertising, according to data from the Transparency Portal. Between 2023 and 2024, they amounted to BRL: 654,152.85 (USD: 124,455.94). In recent days, without mentioning Musk, Lula has made some statements that have been interpreted as indirect towards the owner of X.
Michael Shellenberger, the American who lived in Brazil and claimed to have been harassed by the Brazilian Supreme Court, fled to the US. All because he was called to Congress to testify and, as he couldn't lie, because that would mean he would be arrested, he fled.
The funny thing is that it was an extreme right-wing politician who called him to testify there. Probably to use him to promote and push the far-right agenda and the talking points that Brazil is a socialist dictatorship. Shellenberger was investigated by the state court, not the Brazilian Supreme Court. They investigated him because he had/has links to an infamous Brazilian drug cartel.
Before leaving Brazil, Shellenberger said, only in Portuguese, that he lied about everything and that he was very sorry. He said nothing to his English-speaking audience. Elon Musk did all this shit because Lula da Silva signed a big deal with China to import electric cars and granted lithium mining rights to China.
Musk was probably angry because he bribed Bolsonaro to get the mining rights and got nothing out of it. Since it's a municipal election year in Brazil, Elon decided to pull this shit as some kind of stupid revenge. But it actually had the effect of pushing for regulation of the Brazilian Internet.
Going through different social media pages, numerous people in or near Isfahan say they heard 3 or 4 explosions at 3.50 am local time.
Others say they didn't hear an explosion but their house shook.
And there are others who say they didn't hear anything at all.
No video out yet that I see. Nothing from official sources confirming or denying. Even the Telegram pages are silent. The internet does not appear cut.
Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids are the drugs most frequently involved in overdose deaths.
On Wednesday, Todd Robinson, Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, admitted that the United States has no evidence that the Chinese government deliberately encourages the shipment of fentanyl to its territory.
Previously, a committee of the United States House of Representatives published a report arguing that China directly subsidizes the manufacturing and export of chemicals used to make fentanyl and other narcotics.
"We are aware of this report. We have no evidence that the Chinese government is deliberately directing the shipment of illicit drugs into the United States," Robinson said.
"In fact we know back in 2019, when asked to – when we asked the People's Republic of China to stop shipments of fentanyl directly to the United States, they did that. So that was a sign of their willingness to work with us on this issue," he added.
Since the precursor chemicals in the production of fentanyl are manufactured by China-based companies, the U.S. has requested the Chinese collaboration to address this matter.
"That’s the importance of this – the regeneration of this counter-narcotic working group, and we will continue to engage with the with the People's Republic of China on this very important issue," he pointed out.
Recently, the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs unanimously agreed to new control measures for 23 out of 28 substances that can be used to manufacture fentanyl and other synthetic drugs.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), fentanyl and other synthetic opioids are the drugs most frequently involved in overdose deaths in the United States, where more than 150 people die each day from opioid-related overdoses.
While the terrorists were taking a break before continuing their journey, the Burkinabè fleet sharpened its drones and other flying aircraft. Violent and precise strikes were aimed at them very quickly. Pickups and their loads were wiped.
The clip shows pickups getting owned by the drones.
Foreign affairs on the potential peace treaty from. April 2022. A lot of play by play here. Lib brainworms too to be sure, but I found this excerpt interesting on security guarantees and who would provide them and in what manner:
spoiler
The treaty envisioned in the communiqué would proclaim Ukraine as a permanently neutral, nonnuclear state. Ukraine would renounce any intention to join military alliances or allow foreign military bases or troops on its soil. The communiqué listed as possible guarantors the permanent members of the UN Security Council (including Russia) along with Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, Poland, and Turkey.
The communiqué also said that if Ukraine came under attack and requested assistance, all guarantor states would be obliged, following consultations with Ukraine and among themselves, to provide assistance to Ukraine to restore its security. Remarkably, these obligations were spelled out with much greater precision than NATO’s Article 5: imposing a no-fly zone, supplying weapons, or directly intervening with the guarantor state’s own military force.
First, whereas the communiqué and the April 12 draft made clear that guarantor states would decide independently whether to come to Kyiv’s aid in the event of an attack on Ukraine, in the April 15 draft, the Russians attempted to subvert this crucial article by insisting that such action would occur only “on the basis of a decision agreed to by all guarantor states”—giving the likely invader, Russia, a veto. According to a notation on the text, the Ukrainians rejected that amendment, insisting on the original formula, under which all the guarantors had an individual obligation to act and would not have to reach consensus before doing so.
Moreover, a former U.S. official who worked on Ukraine policy at the time told us that the Ukrainians did not consult with Washington until after the communiqué had been issued, even though the treaty it described would have created new legal commitments for the United States—including an obligation to go to war with Russia if it invaded Ukraine again. That stipulation alone would have made the treaty a nonstarter for Washington.
The ISW posts on Ukraine were always sprinkled with Liberal brainworms, but has anyone found them to be getting a bit more unhinged during Russia's recent advances?
I thought this was a good article by ben aris on the (limited) impact of ukrainian drones on Russian energy infrastructure. He is worth reading about European energy even though he is a lib
Lula da Silva pledges his support for Colombia's inclusion in the BRICS after a setback with Argentina. At the beginning of the year, President Javier Milei announced that the country had given up on joining the bloc of developing nations
The President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will sponsor the inclusion of Colombia in Brics. On Wednesday 17th, Colombian President Gustavo Petro asked the country to join the bloc of developing nations, which underwent its biggest expansion last year and now has ten members.
"President Petro expressed Colombia's interest in joining BRICS as a full member as soon as possible, and President Lula welcomed this initiative and pledged to promote Colombia's candidacy," the foreign ministries said in a joint statement.
At the beginning of the year, Argentina's president, Javier Milei, announced that the country had given up on joining the BRICS, which is seen as a forum with an increasingly direct influence from China and as a challenge to the economic and political dominance of the West and the G7.
Brazil acted in favor of Argentina at the last summit and, with the refusal of the new government, the idea of a certain regional balance in the expansion, a criterion defended by Brasilia, has been lost. The country remains the only member from Latin America.
Brazil was initially against the expansion of the BRICS, believing it could dilute its leading role, but ended up giving in to Beijing's offensive.
Each of the members sponsored the new countries behind the scenes and all had their invitations approved by consensus, as is customary in the group. A new expansion process is expected to take place at the Kazan summit in Russia in October. Indonesia, Venezuela and Pakistan are also looking to join the BRICS.
The current members are Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
"Maybe our dear Colombia can join the BRICS," said Lula in a statement after meeting Petro.
Colombia will take part in meetings of the G20, coordinated this year by Brazil, and has expressed interest in joining Lula's proposal for a global alliance against hunger and poverty. On the other hand, the Brazilian president said that he would certainly take part in the COP-16 on Biodiversity in Cali in October.
Gustavo Petro and Lula da Silva also repudiated the new sanctions imposed by the US against Venezuela. They say that the United States is worsening the political situation in Venezuela and not fulfilling its promises.
The two had recently criticized Maduro's government for barring two candidates from taking part. Petro and Lula are known to be political allies of Maduro. Relations between the three seemed to have deteriorated, but recently Gustavo Petro visited Caracas where he met with Maduro, whom he called his comrade.
Is power consumption a leading metric for economic growth? China notched 7.4% electricity consumption growth in March YoY. They've been fairly correlated in the past, with the caveat that growth in services generally leads to contraction in electricity consumption.
I'm notching up my GDP growth estimates for this year from barely above 5% to a healthy 5.5%+. There's a lot of internal development that's not getting reflected, and so something is clearly happening in China. But what?
President Lula da Silva, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and Gustavo Petro. received a handwritten letter asking for help from Jorge Glas, the former vice-president of Ecuador who is in a maximum security prison in Guayaquil.
"Help me," Jorge Glas asked Lula in a handwritten letter in an Ecuadorian prison
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva received a handwritten letter asking for help from Jorge Glas, the former vice-president of Ecuador who is in a maximum security prison in Guayaquil.
The letter was given to the Brazilian head of state in Bogotá last Wednesday (17) by former Colombian president Ernesto Samper, before the bilateral meeting between Brazilian President Lula and Colombian president Gustavo Petro at Casa de Nariño.
Glas was arrested in an operation at the Mexican embassy in Quito by the Ecuadorian police on April 5th. Mexican diplomats were beaten up by the security forces.
The Ecuadorian courts considered the arrest illegal and the episode, which violated diplomatic norms, was repudiated by the international community.
"I'm Jorge Glas, former vice-president. I'm in prison again, help me," wrote the Ecuadorian politician, who was sentenced to prison for corruption but was sheltered by the Mexican embassy, which granted him diplomatic asylum.
In the text, written in pencil, Glas also says that "only international pressure can help" and claims to be "in the worst prison in the country and on hunger strike".
In an interview with CNN, Samper described the letter as "desperate" and said that he took advantage of Lula's visit to deliver it personally to the Brazilian president, with a transcription, since the handwriting is, according to him, "quite illegible".
Samper says that Lula expressed "great concern" about the invasion of the embassy and was "dismayed" by Glas' situation. "He expressed concern to me about the life and the cry of a person who is in difficulty," he said.
When asked about the choice of the Brazilian head of state as the recipient of the request, Samper said that "President Lula has undisputed recognition and leadership in the region, his opinions are very much heard and I think that's why they turned to him".
The former Colombian president believes that, given the request, the Brazilian president will activate diplomatic mechanisms or make a statement in the coming days.
At the extraordinary summit of the Heads of State of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) last Tuesday (15) to discuss the invasion of the Mexican embassy, Lula defined the episode as "simply unacceptable" and stressed that it doesn't just affect Mexico, but all countries.
"A formal apology from Ecuador is a first step in the right direction," emphasized Lula at the virtual summit.
Popular Palestinian figure tweeted this super long tweet about how Novara Media collaborated with the pigs and fucked over a bunch of presumably Palestinian women. He's being pretty vague, and I only have passing familiarity with who he and Novara Media are.
The Ecuadorean courts have issued an arrest warrant against the former Minister of Mines and Energy, Andrea Arrobo, for alleged "dereliction of duty" and "sabotage", motivated by the blackouts in the country, even though there is no proof of this.
Noboa is trying to increase his popularity, two days before the popular consultation, which puts him in front of his first electoral challenge since he was elected in October 2023.
Far-right group Lehava and several individuals accused of violence targeted in dual announcements
The EU and the US have imposed tough new sanctions against key figures alleged to be behind extremist violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank.
The sanctions – announced within hours of each other by the EU and by the US Treasury – targeted a number of prominent individuals and organisations, most prominently Bentzi Gopstein, the leader of the Levaha group, who reports in the Israeli media suggest has acted as an adviser to the far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir.
While the EU placed sanctions on Lehava, a far-right group that campaigns against relationships between Jews and non-Jews, the US did so specifically against Gopstein, who was convicted of an Israeli court earlier this year for racist statements.
Also hit by EU sanctions were Meir Ettinger and Elisha Yered, two leading figures in the extremist Hilltop Youth, which was described by the EU as “a radical group consisting of members known for violent acts against Palestinians and their villages in the West Bank”.
The new round of sanctions against far-right figures in Israel marks the latest ramping up of the international campaign against settler and extremist violence which has exploded on the occupied West Bank in the six months since Hamas’s attack on Israel from Gaza on 7 October last year.
As well as Gopstein, the US imposed sanctions on two entities that it said helped raise tens of thousands of dollars for two violent extremists in the West Bank who had already been targeted with US sanctions, underlining its intention to pursue those it sees as attempting to bypass sanctions.
The US Treasury department said one entity, Mount Hebron Fund, had launched an online fundraising campaign that raised $140,000 (£113,000) for the settler Yinon Levi, after he was hit with sanctions on 1 February for allegedly leading a group of settlers that assaulted Palestinian and Bedouin civilians, burned their fields and destroyed their property. EU sanctions also apply to Levi, 32, who is accused of “multiple violent acts”.
The Treasury said the second entity, Shlom Asiraich, raised $31,000 on a crowdfunding website for David Chai Chasdai, who the US says led a riot that included setting vehicles and buildings on fire and causing damage to property in Huwara, resulting in the death of a Palestinian civilian.
“Such acts by these organisations undermine the peace, security, and stability of the West Bank. We will continue to use our tools to hold those responsible accountable,” the deputy secretary of the Treasury, Wally Adeyemo, said in the statement.
The EU sanctions will include an asset freeze, a prohibition on provision of funds or economic resources to them or for their benefit and a travel ban to the EU for the individuals named.
Restrictive measures were agreed by the European Council of leaders in March in an official communique when they strongly condemned extremist settler violence, stating that perpetrators must be held to account.
According to the official journal, one of the four named individuals, Neria Ben Pazi, 31, “established four of the most violent outposts in the West Bank in 2019”.
He was “one of the main perpetrators of the forced displacement of a Bedouin community of Wadi as-Seeq near Ramalah. His actions “have been likened to torture”, the EU’s official journal says.
It cited a vicious attack on 12 October in which Palestinians were “severely beaten, handcuffed and photographed in their underwear” as well as being “urinated on” and having cigarettes stubbed out on their bodies.
Ettinger, 33, is listed because he is considered a leading figure of the Hilltop Youth. According to the official journal “he was involved in a deadly arson attack in 2015” on a Palestinian West Bank home “that killed two parents and their 18-month-old baby”.
He is “responsible for serious human rights violations or abuses, including torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment as well as violations or abuses of the right to property and the right to private and family life of Palestinians in the West Bank and for supporting and encouraging such acts”, the journal says.
These alleged abuses are of “serious concern” with regard to EU foreign policy as set out in article 21 of the treaty of the European Union, the EU added.
Another member of the group now under EU sanctions is Elisha Yered, born in 2001, who was reported to have engaged in settler violence through “price tag attacks” including “physical and psychosocial harassment, beatings, murder and demolition of property, against Palestinians … of a systematic nature”.
The journal says he was “part of a group of armed settlers” involved in an attack last year near Ramallah which led to the death of the 19-year-old Palestinian Qusai Jammal Mi’tan and wounded several other Palestinians.
The West Bank is the largest Palestinian territory in the Middle East but was captured in the 1967 war and the area has been under military occupation since, while Israeli settlements have consistently expanded. Palestinians envisage the West Bank as part of a future independent state also including Gaza and East Jerusalem.
Lehava is described as a “radical rightwing Jewist supremacist group” that “uses violence and incites violence against Palestinians, Christians and Messianic Jews”.
According to the journal, Lehava “organises violent protests against Jewish Muslim weddings and the LGBQTi community”.
I may rant about certain American leftists but I don’t hate American leftists as a whole or think their cause is entirely pointless. I wouldn’t be on the site if that were the case.
The US probably won’t turn Communist in the near future but the American left can still educate and agitate while making gains in various sectors that need to be improved. It’s grueling work when organizing in the imperial core but every little bit does add up.
edit: just to be clear, I copy pasted the following original title from Al Jazeera's website. It's very alarming, but there is currently no evidence of an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear sites, which would prompt Iran to "pursue nuclear weapons," as quoted. No need to panic yet
jesus fucking christ, israel just has to escalate this shit, doesn't it? how long does the uranium enrichment process take, and could Iran conceivably arm itself with nukes in short order?
A potential series of AI scandals is in the making in Denmark where tax authorities are implementing secretive "artificial intelligence" models in their auditing process without having analysed the consequences. In 16 out of 23 instances the tax authorities had not completed their own analysis of the systems and their consequences. In eight of those instances the systems have already been deployed.
In 2021 the regime passed legislation giving taxation authorities a blanket permission to collect and process "all necessary data" from all public bodies as well as all publicly available data. For instance taxation authorities are monitoring Facebook and platforms for classified ads.
Little is known about how exactly this monitoring works, what dates is collected or how it is being used as authorities are extremely secretive about their use of AI for tax audits. Freedom of information requests from journalists into these systems are being severely limited, in 14 out of 23 instances the regime refuses to tell what the purpose of the system is, in 7 instances they won't tell what types of personal data is being processed and in four instances they won't even tell the name of the system. The regime claims that this lack of transparency is necessary as giving the public even the slightest idea of how they are being spied on will endanger the tax auditing process and make tax fraud easier.
So we have a whole bunch of bazinga TaxGPT's that are singling people out for harassment by the regime. The regime itself doesn't know how the stuff works or how it will affect the tax system. And nobody else is allowed to know anything about how it works or doesn't work.
Manabí prison warden killed during referendum voting day in Ecuador
The murder of the head of the El Rodeo penitentiary is the third murder in five days of an authority in Ecuador, after the murders of two mayors of municipalities in the south of the country.
The director of a prison in Ecuador was murdered this Sunday, when the country is celebrating nationwide the voting day of the referendum called by the president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, to push forward reforms to boost the fight against organized crime, attract investment and create jobs.
The victim is Cosme Parrales, who was the director of the El Rodeo prison, located in the city of Portoviejo, which belongs to the coastal province of Manabí, the state prison agency, the National Service of Integral Attention to Persons Deprived of Liberty (SNAI), confirmed in a statement.
This is the third murder in five days of an authority in Ecuador, after the murders on Wednesday and Friday of two mayors of municipalities in the south of the country that have in their territory the presence of illegal mining activities.
"The SNAI will provide all the facilities to the entities in charge of the investigations to determine the causes and those responsible for this event that mourns the entire National System of Social Rehabilitation," the report adds.
Question A: Do you agree with allowing the complementary support of the Armed Forces in the functions of the National Police to combat organized crime, by partially reforming the Constitution?
YES 73.52%
NO 26.48%
Question B: Do you agree with allowing the extradition of Ecuadorians, with the conditions, requirements, restrictions and impediments established in the Constitution, international instruments and the law, by amending the Constitution and reforming the laws?
YES 66.61%
NO 33.39%
Question C: Do you agree with the creation of magistrates specialized in constitutional matters, both in the first and second instance, for the knowledge of the jurisdictional guarantees that correspond to them, by amending the Constitution and reforming the Organic Law on Jurisdictional Guarantees and Constitutional Control?
YES 62.44%
NO 37.56%
Question D: Do you agree that the Ecuadorian state recognizes international arbitration as a method for resolving investment, contractual or commercial disputes?
NO 60.44%
YES 39.56%
Question E: Do you agree with the amendment of the Constitution of the Republic and the reform of the Labor Code for fixed-term and hourly employment contracts, when these are concluded for the first time between the same employer and worker, without prejudice to workers' acquired rights?
NO 64.42%
YES 35.58%
Question F: Do you agree with the Armed Forces carrying out permanent checks on weapons, ammunition, explosives and accessories on the roads, paths, highways and corridors authorized for entry into social rehabilitation centers?
YES 71.67%
NO 28.33%
Question G: Do you agree with increasing the penalties for crimes of terrorism and its financing, illicit production and trafficking of scheduled substances subject to control, organized crime, homicide, murder for hire, trafficking in human beings, kidnapping for ransom, drug trafficking, money laundering and illicit activity of mining resources, by reforming the Comprehensive Organic Penal Code?
YES 69.58%
NO 30.42%
Question H: Do you agree that people deprived of their liberty should serve their full sentence in a social rehabilitation center for the crimes detailed in the Annex to the question, by reforming the Comprehensive Organic Penal Code?
YES 68.99%
NO 31.01%
Question I: Do you agree with criminalizing the possession or carrying of weapons, ammunition or components that are for the exclusive use of the Armed Forces or the National Police, without affecting firearms permitted for civilian use, by reforming the Comprehensive Organic Penal Code?
YES 66.56%
NO 33.44%
Question J: Do you agree that weapons, their parts, explosives, ammunition or accessories that have been instruments or material objects of a crime can be used immediately by the National Police or the Armed Forces, reforming the Comprehensive Organic Criminal Code?
YES 66.63%
NO 33.37%
Question K: Do you agree that the State should become the holder (owner) of assets of illicit or unjustified origin, simplifying the procedure of the Organic Law on the Forfeiture of Assets?
So what if there were drones sent, they were shot down by Iran, but explosions also did happen (and were triggered cybernetically). So that Israel says we bombed them look there were explosions and Iran says no you didn’t, and then both are correct