An Old Man and a Young Man in Gaza
By Heathcote Williams
Actor Alan Cox reads Williams’ accusatory, vibrantly disturbing poem, “An Old Man and a Young Man in Gaza.” Click here for audio
A bearded old man holds a placard:
“You take my water, burn my olive trees,
Destroy my house, take my job, steal my land,
Imprison my father, kill my mother,
Bombard my country, starve us all,
Humiliate us all, but I am to blame:
I shot a rocket back.”
From the Zionist Book of Psalms
A selection of ungodly chants
Are used to justify the destruction
Of a country and its inhabitants:
“We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages
Destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water”
– Eli Yishai, former Deputy Prime Minister.
Amen
“There should be no electricity in Gaza,
No gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing…
We need to flatten entire neighborhoods…
Flatten all of Gaza”
– Gilad Sharon, Ariel Sharon’s son in the Jerusalem Post.
Amen
“There are no innocents in Gaza. Mow them down …
Kill the Gazans without thought or mercy.”
– Michael Ben-Ari, an ex-member of the Knesset.
Amen
Gaza should be “bombed so hard the population
Has to flee into Egypt”
– Israel Katz, a Minister of Transportation.
Amen
Gaza should be “wiped clean with bombs”,
– Avi Dichter, a Minister of Home Front Defense.
Amen
Israeli soldiers must “learn from the Syrians
How to slaughter the enemy”,
– Israeli Rabbi Yaakov Yosef.
Amen
Here is Ze’ev Jabotinsky, admirer of Mussolini
And the godfather of Zionist terrorism,
Justifying the flattening of Arab villages in 1948
And turning their inhabitants into refugees in vast numbers
“The world has become accustomed to the idea
Of mass migrations and has become fond of them.”
Jabotinsky adds, “Hitler, as odious as he is to us
Has given this idea a good name in the world.”
Amen
It is ironic that Jabotinsky used Hitler
As precedent for the transfer of the inhabitants
Since forcible expulsion
Was among the charges against Adolf Eichmann –
An architect of the Nazi Holocaust
Captured in Argentina, and tried and hanged in Israel.
Undeterred, the former chief rabbi,
Mordechai Elyahu, has urged Israel,
Its army and its government
To “employ the Nazi choice”
Against the Palestinians.
To carry out a series of carpet bombings
Of Palestinian population centres in Gaza;
He urges the “indiscriminate killing of civilians”.
On religious grounds.
Amen
The Chabad Lubavitch Rabbi Schneerson,
A self proclaimed Messiah
Whose followers await his return from the dead,
(As if the Rabbi hadn’t preached
Enough when alive by his making the claim
That his religion heralded a new Master Race) –
Has a devoted and powerful acolyte, Rabbi Manis Friedman,
Who declares that the “only way to fight a moral war”
Is to “destroy the Arabs’ holy sites” and “to kill them.”
To “kill men, women and children”, and to eliminate anyone
Who stands in the way of a Greater Israel.
Friedman embraces Israel’s ruthless colonizing power
With an Old Testament ferocity –
With what Christopher Hitchens has called,
“The root of religious evil” –
Whereby the Torah can be misused
To mow down men in a mosque
With an automatic rifle,
And such vengeful triumphs
Given a country’s blessing:
Streets in Israeli cities
Are routinely named after armed cuckoos –
Murderous Israeli heroes
Who’ve evicted indigenous birds
From the Palestinian nest,
And then killed them.
The Head of Israeli’s National Defense College,
Professor Arnon Sofer,
Outlines his country’s Defense strategy:
“If we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill.
All day, every day.”
Amen
Colonel Yoav Gal, an Israeli Air Force pilot,
Tells Israel’s Army Radio
“I believe that it [Operation Cast Lead]
Should have been even stronger! Dresden! Dresden!
The extermination of a city!
Not even a stone will be thrown at us. Because we’re Jews.
I want the Arabs of Gaza to flee to Egypt.
This is what I want. I want to destroy the city.”
Amen
Ethnic cleansing is Israel’s origin
Not peace:
Netanyahu tells students at Bar Ilan University,
“Israel should have exploited the repression
Of the demonstrations in China,
When world attention focused on that country,
To carry out mass expulsions
Among the Arabs of the territories.”
“The Palestinians are like crocodiles,
The more you give them meat, they want more”
Says Ehud Barak, when Prime Minister of Israel.
Despondently, the philosopher Martin Buber
Once told a New York audience,
“When we followers of the prophetic Judaism
Returned to Palestine…the majority of Jewish people
Preferred to learn from Hitler rather than from us.”
Enflamed when Palestinians fight back
With increasing desperation
And despite overwhelming odds
To try to regain their ancestral land,
Israelis chant “Death to the Arabs”
“A Jew is a brother, an Arab is a bastard”.
In front of their Arab neighbours,
A song is sung by settlers at Purim
Praising Baruch Goldstein’s massacre
Of 29 Palestinians at prayer during Ramadan:
“Dr. Goldstein, there is none other like you in the world.
Dr. Goldstein, we all love you… he aimed at terrorists’ heads,
Squeezed the trigger hard, and shot bullets,
And shot, and shot.”
At this settler hero’s funeral, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin
Famously claimed that even one million Arabs
Are “not worth a Jewish fingernail”.
Goldstein’s mass murder created suicide bombers –
Some two hundred amongst ten million Palestinians –
Which led to Israel’s land-grabbing apartheid wall.
The Israeli lawmaker, Ayelet Shaked, calls
For the genocide of Palestinians on Facebook
And she advocates “the slaughter of Palestinian mothers
Who give birth to ‘little snakes,'”
“The entire Palestinian people is the enemy.”
She urges their complete destruction,
“Including its elderly and its women.”
The new media are used to demonize the innocent
And to host persistent irrationalities:
A Jerusalem city councillor in charge of municipal security, Aryeh King, publicly advocates the murder
And the mutilation of non-Jews:
“I am calling out to all the Pinchases that are here …
Every one of us has a mission …
The Rebbe, who is here with us, expects us to commit acts of Pinchas.”
Pinchas (Phineas in English) in the Torah was so incensed
By interracial (Jewish-Midianite) sex
That he took a sword and plunged it through both bodies
Of a couple in the middle of their lovemaking.
Then with a medieval fervor, Rabbi Noam Perel
Advocates scalping Arabs
By removing their genitalia –
A blood sacrifice to a mad mind-set
Of mystical thuggery.
Two Israeli girls hold up a banner
“Hating Arabs is not racism, it’s values!”
Placing the Hebrew word for “Arabs”, ARAVIM,
Into Twitter reveals young Israelis desiring
That Arabs die or be tortured to death.
The US House of Representatives
Votes unanimously to reaffirm its full support for Israel.
US jets duly declare war on Arab children
Whose futures they disintegrate.
In the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis,
Eight members of the Al Haj family
Are killed, including five children.
Four Arab children, fishermens’ children
First cousins from the Bakr family, aged nine to eleven,
Playing football on the Gaza beach in July, 2014,
Are shot dead by an Israeli gunboat.
A 12-year-old boy loses 18 members of his family in an air raid
From US planes including his father, a schoolteacher,
A photograph of Abdul Rahman Al-Batsh
Shows his shoulders slumped against a car.
It’s the moment that he’s discovered
That his father is amongst the dead.
Abdul Rahman Al-Batsh, aged 12, loses 18 members of his own family
Later Abdul Rahman would say,
“They think we are worth nothing. They are killers,
They have no humanity,
And one day I will avenge my father.”
Israel receives more aid from the US
Than the whole of the continent of Africa
Whilst the US population remains docile.
The Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman,
Says that Israel must “go all the way” in Gaza.
Comfortably seated on camp chairs and sofas
Some fifty Israelis gather to eat popcorn
And watch from a Sderot hilltop
As bombs rain down from US-supplied F-16s.
They clap and applaud each deadly blast
From 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs.
Israelis gathered on a hilltop outside the town of Sderot to watch the bombardment of Gaza.
“We are here to see Israel destroy Hamas,” Eli Chone,
A 22-year-old American tells Allan Sørensen,
Of Kristeligt Dagblad, pointing to a dot of light in the sky.
“It is a fighter who is about to dive. This means that it is about to shoot.”
The conquerors’ fans draw up their chairs;
Swigging on beers as they tend their barbecue
And watch Gaza burn from their vantage-point
In Sderot (once the Palestinian village of Najd).
One says, “this is our entertainment.”
Someone points out that Hamas
(Rather than it having been elected)
Is “a death-cult” and Palestinians “enjoy martyrdom”
So “we’re doing the Arabs a favour.”
A lurid cocktail of triumphalist hatred,
Mixed with smoke from burning flesh,
Blinds them to Palestine’s righteous yearning
For self-determination,
Their right in international law;
Their right to be unencumbered by occupation;
To be free from being Israel’s penal colony;
Free from being stateless in a brutalized Bantustan –
A colonized people who are jeered at and decried
For their minimal attempts to fight back.
Later that night a bomb would land on a Gaza care home
Filled with elderly patients who cannot move
And with children who are already disabled;
Both are bombed in their wheelchairs or in their beds.
The Rabbi Noam Perel, head of Bnei Akiva
The world’s largest religious-Zionist youth organization,
Urges on his Facebook page that the IDF,
The Israeli Defense Force be transformed
Into an army of avengers,
“Which will not stop at 300 Philistine foreskins”
A young man in Shuafat, Jerusalem,
Muhammad Abu-Khdeir,
A 16-year old boy with a knowing, elfin smile
Is pulled into a car
And kidnapped in East Jerusalem
While waiting to go into the mosque.
He is tied and beaten;
He has gasoline poured into his mouth
And he is burned alive.
His body is found in the Jerusalem Forest;
Battered in the head
And with soot deposits in the lungs
Suggesting he’s still breathing
When set on fire.
Ninety per cent of his body is burned.
Another victim of Israel’s slow motion genocide –
A holocaust which, this time,
Is being financed and uncritically supported
By ‘the good guys’,
By the internationally ‘great and the good’,
By the craven chorus of the compliant
Who ritually pipe up to defend
Israel’s right to defend itself –
To defend the indefensible,
And to supply the money
The weapons, and the excuses
To enable it to do so.
On Friday July 2014
The Israeli Defence Force
Invades Gaza by land.
An Israeli soldier posts a selfie
Of himself having black camouflage paint
Applied to his face.
He tweets, “From the Field: Our soldiers preparing to enter Gaza.
The whole nation stands behind us”
Another tweets: “We have hit Hamas hard,
And we will continue to hit Hamas hard.”
Tzipi Livni, Israel’s Justice Minister,
Says she backs the invasion “wholeheartedly”.
And expresses “love and confidence in our soldiers strength”.
Israel’s soldiers’ strength is misused
To produce genocide as well as a scorched policy
Whereby 800,000 olive trees in Occupied Palestine
Are destroyed to drive Palestinian farmers from their land.
King Herod revisits his massacre of the Innocents,
But this time round he has the mainstream media
On his side: his spin doctors have them swallowing
His party line that toddlers are terrorists if they’re Arab,
And Herod has journalists fired who don’t please him.
“Expel the Palestinians, and populate Gaza with Jews”,
Urges the Knesset’s deputy speaker, Moshe Feiglin,
“Israel must attack Gaza even more mercilessly”
To expel the population “with maximum force”.
The deputy speaker of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset,
Promotes war crimes as a state sanctioned tactic:
After “softening” the targets with firepower
He recommends the IDF “conquer the entire Gaza.”
He is emboldened by the US’s blank cheques,
And in their support of Israel’s heroism
In attacking a defenceless population,
Few see fit to mention that Israel’s
First victim in its ground invasion of Gaza
Is a five-month-old baby killed
By an Israeli tank in southern Rafah
On July 17, 2014 – almost as if King Herod
Has returned to rule his zombie state.
The “most moral army in the world”
Is reportedly targeting women and children,
And even animals.
A doctor speaking to Al Jazeera says that the Israeli army
“Is shooting at anything moving in Shujaiyah”
And consequently the streets of East Gaza are strewn
With dead bodies and severed limbs.
A Norwegian doctor in Shifa hospital, Mads Gilbert,
Is overwhelmed by the ground invasion:
By the carloads of those “maimed, torn apart, and bleeding; Shivering, and dying – all sorts of injured Palestinians,
All ages, all civilians, all innocent.”
“The heroes in the ambulances,” he continues,
“And in all of Gaza’s hospitals
Are working 12-24 hour shifts, grey from fatigue
And inhuman workloads – they care, they triage,
And they try to understand the incomprehensible chaos
Of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing,
Not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. HUMANS!”
With these words Dr Gilbert addresses himself
to the President of the United States.
Predictably there’s no response.
Israel’s vision of itself was once
As a “light unto the nations”.
It has no need of the fearful hatred,
Fuelling its bombs and its bullets,
Unless it wishes to fade away –
Putting out the light that might enable it
To see the stranger as a friend.
LAPD kills young black man days after Ferguson shooting
RT | August 13, 2014
Ezell Ford, a 25-year-old black man described by his family as having “mental problems,” was shot and killed by a Los Angeles, California police officer Monday evening, barely 48 hours after an unarmed black man in Missouri suffered the same fate.
The Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement on Tuesday that officers had conducted an “investigative stop” the night prior, during which the suspect — later identified as Ford — reportedly engaged in an altercation with the cops, according to the LAPD.
“During the stop a struggle ensued, which resulted in an officer-involved-shooting,” the LAPD said in Tuesday’s statement. “The suspect was transported to a local hospital and after lifesaving efforts he succumbed to his injuries.”
According to the victim’s family, Ford was complying with officers at the time of the shooting, and was killed while facedown before the police. USA Today reported that Ford was unarmed.
“They laid him out and for whatever reason, they shot him in the back, knowing mentally, he has complications,” an unnamed man who identified himself as the victim’s cousin told local station KTLA News. “Every officer in this area, from the Newton Division, knows that — that this child has mental problems,” he said. “The excessive force … there was no purpose for it. The multiple shootings in the back while he’s laying down? No.”
According to the cousin, the victim’s mother was met with police brandishing nightsticks when she arrived on the scene.
“Then when the mom comes, they don’t try to console her … they pull the billy clubs out,” he said.
“My heart is so heavy,” the mother, Tritobia Ford, told KTLA News. “My son was a good kid. He didn’t deserve to die the way he did.”
“All we want to know is why they did it,” Ezell Ford Sr. added.
KTLA reported that police were initially behaving “tight-lipped” with regards to disclosing further details, because of a “gathering” at the scene in the wake of the shooting. On Sunday, an event advertised as being a “protest against the murder” of Ford is scheduled to occur outside of LAPD headquarters in downtown Los Angeles.
Ford’s death occurred barely 48 hours after police in the small town of Ferguson, Missouri opened fire and killed Michael Brown, a black teenager who was reportedly unarmed at the time of the incident. Massive protests — and at times, violent ones — have occurred in the days since, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has since opened up a probe into the incident.
In California, the LAPD said that a thorough investigation will be conducted internally, then reviewed by the chief of police, the Office of the Inspector General and Board of Police Commissioners. Additionally, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Justice System Integrity Division will conduct a comprehensive investigation of its own, the LAPD reported.
The Homicide Report, an online database maintained by the Los Angeles Times, suggests that at least 303 people have died as a result of officer-involved shootings in the area since 2007. Meanwhile, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck was appointed on Tuesday this week to his second, five-year stint at the helm of that agency. The decision to keep Beck in charge of one of the nation’s largest police forces was made just one day after the LAPD’s civilian watchdog told the Los Angeles Times that he’d be launching an investigation into the accuracy of the agency’s crime statistics after a report by the paper revealed that that police in LA misclassified nearly 1,200 violent crimes as minor offenses during a one-year span ending in September 2013.
Is Democrats For Public Education Just a Toothless, Cynical Sound Byte?
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Bruce A. Dixon | August 13, 2014
Last month at a teachers union meeting the Democratic National Committee’s Donna Brazile announced the formation of Democrats For Public Education. Supposedly DFPE will fight against the policies of elite Democrats and Republicans who want to privatize public education. As the daughter of a longshoreman from a family of teachers and a product of public schools Brazile declared herself unafraid to call out those of her own party who are demonizing teachers and privatizing public education, though as a top Democrat she did not use the p-word.
But Donna Brazile didn’t call out anybody, not then and not in the month since. Because if she did name names, number one would have to be her president, Barack Obama, and number two would be his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Cabinet appointments are not accidents. Presidents pick appointees with proven commitment and track records of accomplishing the very policies a president wants imposed, and President Obama was deeply in the pocket of the charter school sugar daddies.
As Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan ravaged, savaged and privatized. He fired thousands of mostly black teachers with little or no due process, and handed big chunks of public resources over to the operators of private charter schools. This record and his personal friendship with the president got Duncan appointed Secretary of Education.
Over the last six years, President Obama, Secretary Duncan and their Department of Education have let representatives of the private charter schools, testing companies, and consultants from the Walton Family, Eli Broad, Bill & Melinda Gates and other foundations ideologically committed to running schools like businesses and education like a market write the federal guidelines school districts must follow to receive federal funds – something they call the Race To The Top program. The same consultants have also been allowed to deeply embed themselves embed themselves in the supposedly impartial private institutions officially recognized by the Department of Education which evaluate schools, school districts.
By now the processes of privatization have an institutional momentum backed up by billions of public and private dollars. You can’t fight that juggernaut if you cannot name its name and the names of the politicians it buys and rents. But Democrats don’t publicly criticize each other much, black Democrats even less, and a prominent black Democrat contradicting the black president is unthinkable, it’s just not in their DNA.
So why does DFPE exist? It can raise money, but nothing compared to the vast sums its opponents can. Apart from possible interference in next year’s Chicago mayoral contest, its only conceivable purpose is an utterly cynical one. DFPE will house surrogates for Hillary Clinton’s 2018 campaign who will give the credulous faithful an excuse to believe that Hillary, unlike Barack, is not on the side of the privatizers and charter school sugar daddies, the same way Obama had unofficial spokespeople everywhere assuring us that he was pro net neutrality, against the Patriot Act, the Iraq war, torture, wanted to renegotiate NAFTA, and whatever else some of us wanted to hear. Democrats For Public Education is just that, the cynical sound byte that some self-deceiving Democrats need to hear.
Teachers unions after all, don’t just provide big checks to Democratic presidential candidates, its rank and file activists are the foot soldiers, the door to door and phone canvassers, the flesh and blood of a nationwide street operation which a successful Democratic presidential candidate needs to mobilize the Democratic base. You want to make that happen you’ve got to tell those foot soldiers what they want to hear, whether your candidate means it or not. That’s called a campaign field operation.
Israeli Soldiers Assault Palestinian, Seize Tractor
By Chris Carlson | International Middle East Media Center | August 13, 2014
Israeli soldiers assaulted a young Palestinian, on Tuesday, in an area east of Yatta, south of the Hebron District, upon which they seized his tractor.
Rateb Jubour, Coordinator of the Anti-settlement Committee in Hebron, said the soldiers violently beat one Mohammad Shaabin, 21 years of age, before seizing his tractor and an attached water tanker.
Mohammad sustained bruises throughout his body and was taken to a hospital for treatment.
Israeli soldiers and colonial settlers alike routinely attack Palestinian farm workers in the occupied territories, damaging their equipment and lands in the attempt to further islolate Palestinian communities, with the aim of expanding nearby settlements and further disenfranchising the Palestinian people as a whole.
More than 550,000 Israelis live in illegal settlements throughout the region, which has been illegitimately occupied by the Israeli military since 1967, in direct violation of the international laws to which they are signatory.
See also Corporate Watch exposé — Farming Under Siege: Working the Land in Gaza
Israel wants a truce that does not include a halt on assassinations
MEMO | August 13, 2014
While Cairo is witnessing talks about a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and in light of an international effort to reach a long-term truce between Hamas and Israel, Israeli security officials have demanded that the policy of assassinations against the Palestinian leaders should not stop.
Israeli media reports quoted security officials on Tuesday as saying that currently there are three options available, namely: an international effort to extend the cease-fire, or “surrendering” to some of Hamas’ demands, or launching a new aggression against the Gaza Strip. According to the officials themselves, the latter is less likely to happen.
Security officials added that “Hamas has put on the negotiating table demands for a seaport and an airport as a counterweight to Israel’s demand to strip the sector of any weapon,” and that the Israeli security apparatus “wants to test Hamas’ long-term steps, therefore, Hamas must be prevented from achieving anything that could help the movement’s strength grow.”
The security officials explained that the security apparatus demands that the Israeli government “reserves the possibility of returning to the assassinations choice,” adding that “it is prohibited to waive this requirement in the context of the negotiations” taking place in Egypt.
Walla website quoted an Israeli security official as claiming that the assassinations issue is a “point of serious concern among the movement leaders.”
He added, in a sarcastic tone, that “if Hamas wants to control the sector, it should do so from the tunnels and cellars.”
The same security official said an agreement has been reached between the parties involved in Cairo negotiations regarding a section of the demands put forward by Hamas, including the issuance of permits for the exit of a limited number of Palestinians through Erez crossing, under the control of the Shin Bet, and the immediate expansion of the volume of goods coming into the Gaza Strip through Karam Abu Salem crossing, as well as handing over control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing to the Palestinian Authority, so that the crossing would be supervised by both Israel and Egypt.
The Israeli official also confirmed that among the agreements reached was an agreement regarding the transfer of funds from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states into the Gaza Strip, where the parties agreed that this should only happen through the Palestinian Authority and under strict international-Israeli-Egyptian supervision.
Israeli soldiers celebrate shooting an 18-year-old
Photo by ISM
International Solidarity Movement | August 12, 2014
Hebron, Occupied Palestine – On August 9th in Hebron, Israeli soldiers celebrated shooting an 18-year-old Palestinian youth in the leg with live ammunition.
The Canadian volunteer, Vern, who witnessed the soldier firing, stated, “After the soldiers left the roof, I went to confront them about why they had fired. One of them said to me that he was the one who fired and that he was proud of his actions. He then asked me to take his picture.”
Photo by ISM
The hospital released a document to the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) stating that the injury of the young man was a gunshot wound to the right calf, and that the injury required surgery under general anaesthetic.
Photo by Youth Against Settlements
“This is not the first time protesters have been seriously injured or killed while not being a threat to the Israeli military. On Friday (8th August) in Hebron, 40-year-old Nader Mohammad Edrees was shot in the heart by an Israeli sniper. He died several hours later. This murder was caught on video, and it is clear that Nader was no threat whatsoever when he was killed, in clear contradiction of Israeli military policy and international law.” Stated Issa Amro, Human Rights Defender with Youth Against Settlements (YAS), based in Hebron.
According to Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, grave breaches against protected people, such as Palestinians, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly, include wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health.
Israeli Human Rights group B’tselem states that, “the army’s open-fire regulations clearly stipulate that live ammunition should not be used against stone-throwers, except in cases of immediate mortal danger.”
Three Finnish icebreakers for Russia’s oil and gas operations in the Arctic
MercoPress | August 13, 2014
Finland-based Arctech Helsinki Shipyard has been contracted to build three icebreaking stand-by vessels for Russian shipping company Sovcomflot, for a total cost of 380 million dollars.
The contract for the three 95 meters long vessels sums 380 million dollars and should be delivered by 2017 The contract for the three 95 meters long vessels sums 380 million dollars and should be delivered by 2017
The vessels will perform operations in the north-east Sakhalin offshore region oil and gas field for Sakhalin Energy Investment Company (SEIC).
The icebreakers are capable of carrying out rescue operations and recovery of oil spills, while they can also be used for moving cargo for low flashpoint fuels.
While designing the vessels will start immediately, the company hopes to deliver them between September 2016 and March 2017.
The 95m-long and 22m-wide vessels will be based on Aker Arctic concept Aker ARC 121 and will be fitted with four diesel generator engines, to generate total power of about 20,000kW. They will have a propulsion power of 13,000kW.
Arctech and Sovcomflot signed a contract in April, which included a larger platform supply vessel under the icebreaking vessels series, which would function efficiently in extreme weather conditions.
Arctech Helsinki Shipyard managing director Esko Mustamäki said: “We are extremely satisfied to receive an order of three arctic offshore vessels from Sovcomflot.
”This remarkable order of three vessels brings a lot of work to our shipyard and to the whole maritime cluster. We will also strengthen our organization considerably.”
The vessels will be used in ice management and ice breaking in extremely low temperatures of up to -35C°.
Equipped to navigate in 1.5m-thick ice, the vessels will be fit for emergency evacuation, firefighting operations and helicopter operations, as well as for diving support as they will comprise a moon pool.
Death toll in Ukraine conflict doubles in 2 weeks, reaches 2,086 – UN
People in Lugansk carry the bodies of those killed during an artillery attack on the city (RIA Novosti / Valery Melnikov)
RT | August 13, 2014
The number of killed and wounded in eastern Ukraine has doubled to 2,086 over the last two weeks, according to the UN’s “very conservative estimates”.
“This corresponds to a clear escalating trend,” UN human rights spokeswoman Cecile Pouilly told Reuters in response to a query.
Over 60 people have been killed or wounded every day, Pouilly added.
Almost 5,000 have been wounded.
The figures comprise Ukrainian military, self-defense forces, and civilians. However, those are “very conservative estimates,” Pouilly said.
The Ukraine crisis has been widely described as a humanitarian catastrophe. According to the UN’s latest estimates, over 110,000 people have been internally displaced in the conflict. Moscow has reported that 730,000 people have fled across the border into Russia.
In Donetsk alone, more than 1,000 people have been left homeless due to the fighting, according to the city administration. In Lugansk, another regional center, 250,000 people can’t leave the city and have been without water, electricity, and communications for over a week.
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From the Archives
Jack Ruby: Israel’s Smoking Gun
BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 13, 2021
By a strange paradox, most Kennedy researchers who believe that Oswald was “just a patsy” spend an awful lot of time exploring his biography. This is about as useful as investigating Osama bin Laden for solving 9/11. Any serious quest for the real assassins of JFK should start by investigating the man who shot Oswald at pointblank in the stomach at 11:21 a.m. on September 24, 1963 in the Dallas Police station, thereby sealing the possibility that a judicial inquiry would draw attention to the inconsistencies of the charge against him, and perhaps expose the real perpetrators. One would normally expect the Dallas strip-club owner Jack Ruby to be the most investigated character by Kennedy truthers. But that is not the case.
Of course, it is perfectly normal that Chief Justice Earl Warren, when Ruby told him on June 7, 1964, “I have been used for a purpose,” failed to ask him who had used him and for what purpose.[1] But what about independent investigators? Are only readers of the Forward (“News That Matters To American Jews”) worthy of being informed that “Lee Harvey Oswald’s Killer ‘Jack Ruby’ Came From Strong Jewish Background,” and that he told his rabbi Hillel Silverman that he “did it for the Jewish people”? … continue
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- Romania to consider bill seeking land grab in Ukraine March 24, 2023
- Russia’s ‘inexplicable’ ability to withstand Western aggression March 24, 2023
- Ron Unz: JFK Assassination, Iranian Channel Four TV (IRIB) March 24, 2023
- Mexican President Says Trump Arrest is About Keeping Him Off the Ballot March 23, 2023
- Russian governor’s son flees house arrest in Italy March 23, 2023
- If Americans Knew
- Israeli hacking & disinfo team meddling in elections around the world March 24, 2023
- Undercover Israeli Soldiers Kill Palestinian In Tulkarem March 24, 2023
- Bezalel Smotrich calls a lie “the biblical truth” March 22, 2023
- Brownstone Institute
- The DOD Plays Hardball with Covid Vaccinations March 24, 2023
- Madness in the Law Schools March 24, 2023
- How They Convinced Trump to Lock Down March 23, 2023
- The Lab Leak and the Counter Measures: What Really Happened March 23, 2023
- The Latest in the War on Science March 23, 2023
- The Covid Disaster was Foreshadowed with Love Canal March 23, 2023
- Richie Allen
- Bordeaux Town Hall Burnt Down By Pension Reform Protesters March 24, 2023
- Scottish Schools Tell Kids There Are THREE Biological Sexes March 24, 2023
- Greta Thunberg To Sue Sweden For Climate Change Inaction March 23, 2023
- USA Today Names BLOKE In WOMEN Of The Year List March 23, 2023
- Not A Lot Of People Know That
- Germany Rebels Against EU Ban On Petrol Cars March 24, 2023
- Dutch farmers on collision course with Brussels over compulsory farm buyouts March 24, 2023
- Prominent physicist warns that wind power “fails on every count” March 23, 2023
- Rural Homes Will Be Forced To Install Unaffordable Heat Pumps March 23, 2023
- No Tricks Zone
- Consent Factory
- The Censorship Industrial Complex March 10, 2023
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