German economy in crisis mode as industrial orders plummet
By Liz Heflin | Remix News | October 8, 2024
German industrial orders fell 5.8 percent in August compared to July, a far higher drop than the 2 percent drop anticipated, with economists now warning of a recession and doubting a quick recovery.
The numbers reported by the German Federal Statistical Office amounted to the biggest drop since January of this year, with the German Ministry of Economics announcing that “in view of the continuing weak demand and the deterioration in business sentiment, a significant recovery in the industrial economy in the second half of 2024 is unlikely.”
Jens-Oliver Niklasch, an expert at Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, cited by Money.pl, stated bluntly: “Leading indicators are falling, forecasts are falling, bad news is not stopping. Everything points to a recession.”
Jörg Krämer, chief economist at Commerzbank, describes the data as a “bitter disappointment,” adding that the best-case scenario will be gross domestic product stagnating in the second half of the year.
Of key concern is the data regarding strength, or lack thereof, in the domestic and European economies. While orders from abroad also fell just 2.2 percent, domestic orders were down by 10.9 percent. Orders from eurozone countries fell by 10.5 percent, while orders from other countries actually increased by 3.4 percent.
Experts emphasize that the current situation is a clear signal of a crisis, with key sectors being hit the hardest, including auto manufacturing, mechanical engineering and chemicals.
The Macroeconomic Policy Institute (IMK) predicts gross domestic product will stagnate this year and grow by just 0.7 percent next year, with experts agreeing that the federal government’s expectations of economic growth above 1 percent in 2025 seem unrealistic.
Meanwhile, the German government is expected to need €46 billion to finance welfare benefits, with half of the recipients reportedly being foreign citizens, many of whom came to Germany specifically for its generous welfare system.
The situation is not bad for everyone. Remix News just reported today that Germany is spending some €50 billion annually on housing asylum seekers and war refugees and providing them with benefits, with private security firms earning hundreds of millions across Germany for policing migrant accommodations.
EU airline’s boss wants Chinese to pay for flying over Russia
RT | October 8, 2024
Brussels should establish financial measures to curb competition from Chinese airlines that can freely cross Russian airspace, according to Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM) CEO Marjan Rintel.
Western countries closed their airspace to Russian airlines as part of sanctions imposed after the onset of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. In response, Moscow banned aircraft from “unfriendly nations,” forcing EU planes to reroute, resulting in higher fuel consumption and increased costs.
“Russia’s airspace is closed to European airlines, while Chinese carriers fly over it, which can save two to four hours. You see that reflected in pricing, and consequently, our costs are higher,” Rintel said in an interview with Dutch broadcaster WNL on Sunday.
Rintel suggested that Brussels should intervene to address this competitive imbalance. “Europe can at least explore how we can level the playing field by adjusting pricing or examining other alternatives,” she stated.
In response to rising costs, KLM plans austerity measures aimed at saving €450 million ($494 million) annually, including €100 million ($110 million) by “adjusting” in-flight catering, Rintel noted.
“In the Netherlands, we are facing a tight labor market and rising wage costs, which differs from the situation in France,” she added, referring to KLM’s parent company, Air France-KLM. “Due to a shortage of pilots and technicians, roster changes will occur, and maintenance may need to be outsourced,” she explained.
Last month, Germany announced it was considering halting its daily Frankfurt-Beijing flights due to similar pressures from rising costs and competition from Chinese and Gulf airlines that can fly over Russia. The previous month, British Airways announced it would suspend London-Beijing flights starting in October. Additionally, Virgin Atlantic recently terminated its only China route to Shanghai.
The Medical-Pharmaceutical Killing Machine
Children’s Health Defense | October 7, 2024
Medical and pharmaceutical history is replete with examples of dangerous interventions that have poisoned, injured, or killed. However, events since 2020 have attracted attention as never before to medicine’s potential to be both lethal and malevolent. In The Medical-Pharmaceutical Killing Machine, Children’s Health Defense situates current perils in their broader context with the aim of helping readers understand how to protect themselves and their loved ones.
In the Greek Trojan War saga, the god Apollo ensured that Cassandra’s prophecies would never be believed, with disastrous consequences. As recounted in the book, modern medicine, too, has produced its fair share of “medical Cassandras”—doctors and writers who have tried to warn the public about medicine’s life-threatening underbelly, generally to little avail. A chapter dedicated to nine of these medical skeptics, beginning with Ivan Illich and his coining of the term “iatrogenesis” to describe adverse outcomes caused by doctors, weaves a powerful portrait of harms regularly denied and ignored, with those making the claims typically marginalized and “canceled.”
The book shows that there is no shortage of tools in the killing machine arsenal. One chapter highlights the mRNA vaccine technology inaugurated with COVID, illustrating how this new mechanism for iatrogenesis is inflicting novel forms of toxicity, not all of which are yet understood. Another chapter about assisted suicide and euthanasia describes the chilling global proliferation of policies and propaganda promoting those practices for vulnerable populations that include babies, children, people diagnosed with autism, and the mentally ill. The book also describes factors that make it possible for the killing machine to continue operating with impunity, including the ascendance of an “evidence-based medicine” juggernaut, medical gaslighting, and a ballooning global enforcement infrastructure. Nor does it shy away from confronting what some now characterize as “iatrogenocide”; a chapter asking “Why Do They Do It?” considers money, prestige, and control as three possible answers.
Ultimately, it is only by acknowledging the long-standing reality of an all-too-effective medical-pharmaceutical killing machine that people can learn to dodge the threats and work toward building a different model that prioritizes life and genuine health.
US ‘Discussing’ Israeli Strikes on Iran, as IDF Troops Killed by Hezbollah w/ Seyed Mohammad Marandi
Rachel Blevins | October 4, 2024
Israel is promising a response to Iran’s retaliatory attack, with anonymous Israeli officials telling the media it could consist of more targeted assassinations, as well as attacks on Iran’s oil fields, nuclear sites and air defense systems. According to Biden, the U.S. is “discussing” strikes on Iranian oil fields, although he didn’t appear to finish his sentence when he was asked by reporters…
This, as Israel continues to bomb Beirut, targeting heavily populated civilian areas, and Israel’s attempt at a “limited” ground invasion was quickly met with heavy force from Hezbollah, leading to a over a dozen Israeli casualties.
Prof. Seyed Mohammad Marandi, of the University of Tehran, noted that one of Israel’s goals with the latest escalations is to terrorize the Lebanese people until they turn against Hezbollah. But given the fact that Israel has killed hundreds of civilians, displaced over 1.2 million, AND assassinated Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in a matter of weeks… their plan is already backfiring, as the public continues to show support for the Resistance.
Fearful of the Public, Western Leaders Turn to Censorship
By Ian DeMartino – Sputnik – 07.10.2024
On Saturday, former US First Lady Hillary Clinton called for increased federal regulation of the internet and repealing Section 230. “If the platforms… don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control,” she said, raising the question of who “we” represents in that statement.
From the recent purge of YouTube accounts, including those from Mark Sleboda, Rachel Blevins, Glenn Diesen, DD Geopolitics, Fiorella Isabel, Larry Johnson, and Eva K. Bartlett, it is clear that the Western leaders are scared of their populations finding out the truth about their policies and actions.
“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people,” Former US President John F. Kennedy.
“That’s what they’re afraid of,” Sleboda, an expert in geopolitical relations and a frequent guest on Sputnik Radio, told The Final Countdown. “They don’t trust you to hear an alternate view from the official US government narrative and come to what they consider the right political conclusions.”
Many Americans were taught that freedom was proof-positive that Western-style democracies were superior to other systems.
In separate interviews, Sleboda and Blevins both said that their channels were taken down without warning or strikes. Both were accused of violating YouTube’s policies on hate speech and said their appeals were denied within minutes.
“Just anyone who is critical of a US foreign policy, of hegemony, has had their YouTube channels deleted,” Sleboda contended.
While the censorship technically came from Alphabet, the mega-monolith tech company that owns both Google and YouTube, a comprehensive program between the US government and large social media companies has slowly been revealed over the past couple of years making the line one without distinction.
“My lawyer called that First Amendment censorship via proxy, or government censorship via proxy,” Political cartoonist and The Final Countdown co-host Ted Rall explained. “The US government has reached out to big tech companies, talked to people like [Meta CEO] Mark Zuckerberg and so on, and said, ‘we want you to control and squish what we call misinformation and disinformation.’”
With the internet practically ubiquitous in modern society, an expansion of the First Amendment to public and private sectors of the internet is needed to protect our speech rights.
“What does the First Amendment actually mean in today’s age when just about everyone is on social media or on the internet in some way, and it has become sort of the new public square?” asked Blevins, an independent journalist, and host of The Backstory on Radio Sputnik. “What are we okay with when it comes to the ongoing censorship? Because I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon.”
Even if the government were removed from the equation, and censorship came exclusively from the tech companies themselves they have become so powerful that acts of self-censorship would be indistinguishable from government-ordered censorship, especially during wartime.
In post-9/11 America, large media companies kept dissenting voices off the air, limiting the reach of those who, for example, opposed the war in Iraq.
“And you get that corporate mentality of what will the advertisers think?” legendary Gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson argued in an August 2002 interview with Media Report.
“A kind of we’re all in this together thinking.” The consolidation of the internet from disparate groups of message boards and newsgroups into a handful of omnipresent tech companies raises that specter again.
“As we saw this weekend, YouTube can come in and just delete your channel and take your life’s work away from you,” decried Blevin, noting that her channel was backed up on the free speech platform Rumble.
The majority of the deleted accounts offered views that opposed the NATO-led proxy war in Ukraine and/or Western support of Israel. As the war drums beat ever louder in Europe, the Middle East, and the South Pacific, not to mention the US Presidential election next month, the crackdown is likely to increase.
“They haven’t really thrown out the term election interference just yet, but I have a feeling that’s coming in some way,” warned Blevins.
“We’ll tell our grandchildren about the golden age of a global internet,” before censorship took it over, predicted Sleboda. “I think we’re going to see our internet fractured into either individual states’ internets or geopolitical block’s internets. And I think the process has already begun,” he warned.
U.S. Swings and Misses in Energy Competition
By Wallace Manheimer | RealClear Energy | September 30, 2024
Who can develop reliable, cheap, clean power? In the parlance of baseball, the U.S. led early with a leadoff home run. It invented, developed and perfected the first ultra-super critical (USC) coal-powered plant.
Coming online in 2012, the 600-megawatt (MW) John W. Turk Jr. Coal Plant in Arkansas employed new technology, most notably, an advance in metallurgy that allowed pipes and boilers to operate for extended periods at extremely elevated temperature and pressure.
This higher temperature allows efficiency of 40%, instead of the more usual 33%. Also, Turk had the best pollution controls, its emissions being mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor. Power Magazine was so impressed that it gave the plant its highest honor in 2013.
It looked like the U.S. was set to win the game, until it took its eye off the ball and made numerous errors. Instead of exploiting its remarkable technological achievement, U.S. policymakers decided to abandon coal and promote wind and solar.
Powerful environmental groups fought to end coal; Michael Bloomberg bragged that he contributed $500 million to the effort. Companies in the coal industry suffered, some went out of business, and domestic consumption of the country’s most abundant fuel declined. Turk is still the only USC plant in the U.S.
Solar and wind do not provide reliable power, as they fluctuate with the weather and time of day.
Also, they are not cheap. Germans, whose electric system relies heavily on solar, pay more than twice as much for electricity as the nuclear-dominant French and nearly triple the amount paid by U.S. consumers.
Furthermore, solar and wind technologies, contrary to popular belief, are not clean; not where their materials are mined, nor where they are used, nor at the end of life.
First, the mining: These technologies use many exotic and rare earth materials like praseodymium, terbium, cadmium, indium and dysprosium. Such materials are available mostly in Western China and Africa, under who-knows-what environmental and working conditions.
Secondly, where they are used, solar and wind take up tremendous amounts of land – many times the acreage of a coal plant. The average solar power reaching Earth is about 200 MW per square kilometer. Hence, with a perfectly efficient conversion to electricity, a 1,000 MW solar farm would require 5 square kilometers. But maximum solar efficiency is only 20%, boosting the land requirement to 25 square kilometers, space that could not be used for anything else. Even the maximum theoretical efficiency is only 30%.
The numbers for wind are worse: A 1,000 MW wind farm would require a whopping 500 square kilometers – equal to about 27,000 big league baseball fields. This land could be used for crops and grazing animals, but not much else.
Finally, disposal of the huge amount of material used in the fabrication of solar and wind facilities, whose life spans are mere fractions of traditional generating plants, must be disposed of. Many of these exotic materials are not suitable for standard landfills, as their compounds are harmful to humans and are water soluble. Frequently, the solar or wind company has just walked away and left the relics in place for others to worry about.
Solar and wind are more of an environmental disaster than an environmental savior.
With the U.S. relegated to the locker room, China came to bat and staged a tremendous scoring rally. Out of the top 100 Chinese coal plants, 90 are ultra-supercritical units.
Having improved on USC technology, Chinese plant efficiency is around 44%. The new 1,350 MW Pingshan Phase II plant achieves 49% efficiency! The best Chinese coal plant is now cleaner and 22 % more efficient than its American counterpart.
Since 2010, India has constructed more than 90 super critical and ultra-super critical coal plants.
Has the U.S. played its last coal-fired season?
Perhaps- unless America’s free enterprise system were brought fully into the game, with the private sector mostly doing the engineering and the federal government sponsoring long-range scientific research.
However, U.S. policymakers must abandon their obsession with solar and wind as answers for a climatic “existential threat.” Otherwise, sensible people play a fool’s game in a fantasy league that demonizes a gas sustaining all life — carbon dioxide – as others compete in the majors.
Such absurdity is no match for the technical leadership displayed in China and India.
Dr. Wallace Manheimer is a life fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and is a member of the CO2.Coalition. He is the author of more than 150 refereed papers.
White House Ignored Warning from Pentagon, State Dept that Israel Was Creating a Catastrophe in Gaza
By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | October 7, 2024
Recently released emails from Reuters show that officials in the White House ignored warnings from their counterparts at the Defense and State Department warning that Israel was committing war crimes and creating a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Reuters reviewed emails from the Departments of Defense and State from last October, showing that high-ranking officials warned about supporting Israel as it committed war crimes in Gaza.
“As Israel pounded northern Gaza with air strikes last October and ordered the evacuation of more than a million Palestinians from the area, a senior Pentagon official delivered a blunt warning to the White House, the outlet reported. “The mass evacuation would be a humanitarian disaster and could violate international law, leading to war crime charges against Israel.”
The warning came from Dana Stroul, then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East in an Oct. 13 email sent to senior White House aides. She explained an assessment by the International Committee of the Red Cross that had left her “chilled to the bone.”
Stroul and other officials were pushing the White House to take a more sympathetic position on the suffering of Palestinians and ask Israel to give Gazans more time to comply with Tel Aviv’s evacuation orders.
While the Biden administration claims that it did pressure Israel early in the onslaught and that did make a difference, Reuters reports that the White House had little impact on Tel Aviv’s military operations.
“But Washington was slow to address the suffering of Palestinians, said three senior U.S. officials involved in the decision-making process,” the article explains. “And while the ground invasion was ultimately delayed by about 10 days, the three officials attributed the pause more to operational preparations by the Israeli military than U.S. pressure.”
In one concerning email exchange, officials asked the White House to pressure Israel to extend the deadline for one million Palestinians to leave northern Gaza beyond 24 hours. A top Biden official, Brett McGurk responded by telling Egypt to prepare to receive refugees from Gaza.
“In an email replying to Stroul, McGurk said Washington might be able to persuade Israel to extend the deadline for Palestinians to evacuate beyond 24 hours,” saying the administration “can buy some time.” “But the Red Cross, the UN and aid agencies should work with Egypt and Israel to prepare for the evacuation, he wrote,” according to Reuters.
When the request for a more sympathetic position towards the Palestinians was relayed to the White House, it was also rejected.
Reuters reports the State Department’s top Middle East diplomat, Barbara Leaf, sent an email to White House officials including Brett McGurk, Biden’s top Mid East aide. Her main concern was the damage Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, along with US support, was doing to Washington’s relationship with its Mid East Arab partners.
McGurk interpreted the email as a request for a ceasefire and replied, “no.”
American Neocons Get Their Iran War as Congress Sleeps
By Ron Paul | October 7, 2024
Over the weekend, the Commander of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), General Michael Kurilla, arrived in Israel to “coordinate” with the Israeli military and plan a military strike against Iran. Think about that for a moment: one of the highest-ranking officers in the US military is planning a war in a foreign country against another foreign country which will be fueled by American weapons, American intelligence, and American tax dollars.
Did that foreign country – Iran – attack the United States or threaten Americans? No, it did not. What did Iran do to warrant a CENTCOM commander bringing the weight of the US military into play to plan a war – possibly WWIII? It retaliated against Israeli airstrikes including the assassination of a Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.
It was the Israeli missile attack on Tehran – an unprecedented event – that set off this chain of escalation, but few would know it from media coverage. This war fever between Israel and Iran not only has nothing to do with us, but our increasing involvement actually hurts our national interests in the region.
After a deadly and futile three-year proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the last thing we need is another war in the Middle East, especially against Iran. But make no mistake, war is what we are getting. This Administration has even offered to “compensate” Israel with even more weapons and diplomatic support if they hit targets of the US choosing and avoid others in Iran.
Imagine if China sent military officials to Iran to pay Tehran to make sure some US targets were struck and others avoided. Would we consider it Iran’s war against us, or China’s war against us? Both?
Has Congress declared war on Iran or even authorized the war? No. Has this Administration explained to us why Americans suffering after the catastrophic Hurricane Helene are on their own because we need to spend billions on a war that is none of our business? No. The neocons have wanted this war for decades and for them it’s always America last.
This war will make us less free, less safe, and much poorer. There will be no benefits at all, only downside.
Will the Biden/Harris Administration greenlight Israel taking out Iran’s oil production and other energy facilities? That would mean the average American already suffering under high inflation and an economic downturn would be paying orders of magnitude higher for not just gasoline, but everything. Consider the cost of shipping and trucking and every aspect of our lives that depends on world energy prices. It would be an economic calamity for Americans for the benefit of a foreign country. This is what they call patriotism?
We are sleepwalking into a catastrophic war, lulled into compliance by non-stop media propaganda. More billions will be drained from our economy and many more innocent lives will be lost in this madness. Almost a quarter of a century later we still have not learned the lessons of 9/11. When we go abroad wreaking havoc and destruction on foreign populations who have not harmed us we create enemies who will seek revenge. We harm ourselves. And we risk blowback. The time to oppose this impending war is NOW!
China Asks US Not to Interfere With Its Right to Develop Ties With Hungary – Embassy
Sputnik – 07.10.2024
WASHINGTON – The United States should not interfere with China’s right to develop relations with the government of Hungary, the Chinese Embassy in Washington told Sputnik after US lawmakers lambasted Budapest for growing ties with Beijing.
A group of US senators was in Hungary last week to meet with government officials. Following the visit, the senators issued a joint statement criticizing Hungarian officials for developing ties with Russia and China, adding that Budapest has ignored allies’ concerns regarding its deepening cooperation with Beijing.
“China’s right to develop bilateral relations and conduct normal exchanges with other countries in the world should not be interfered with or disrupted,” the Chinese Embassy spokesperson said.
The Chinese Embassy added that the remarks by the US senators advocate bloc confrontation and are full of Cold War thinking and zero-sum game concepts, coercing other countries to choose sides.
The US senators did not go into detail about their concerns in the joint statement but urged Hungary to work closely with its allies, and listen to their concerns and act on them.
The delegation of US senators that visited Hungary included senators Jerry Moran, Susan Collins, John Cornyn, John Boozman and John Hoeven.
Fact-Checking or Fact-Shielding? Twitter Files Journalist Slams PolitiFact’s Defense of Government Pressure on Big Tech
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | October 7, 2024
Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact, a Meta fact-checking partner, has decided that the Biden-Harris administration is not engaged in censorship at an industrial scale.
This claim made by vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is false, PolitiFact has asserted, because the Biden-Harris White House “contacting” (according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, they were contacted to be pressured) social media companies to flag content for removal “didn’t cross the line into coercion.”
Not only that but pressuring these companies (yet allegedly never coercing) to censor online speech is not a threat to democracy, PolitiFact was told by a Colombia professor – if the censors decide that speech is disinformation about Covid or election results.
The scale and nature of the way the US government leaned on tech companies to stifle speech that did not suit its political agenda is, to date, best revealed in the Twitter Files.
One of the journalists who worked on publishing the internal documents, Michael Shellenberger, now examined this PolitiFact “verdict” and the arguments the organization used. He rejects the notion that suppressing voters’ free speech is somehow “not a threat to democracy.”
Shellenberger was equally unimpressed by PolitiFact trying to explain its opinion regarding Vance’s claim by referring to the Supreme Court, which they said ruled it was not unconstitutional for the government to exert the kind of pressure it did.
“But the Court did not consider the US government’s pressure of Meta or many other cases of government demands for censorship,” Shellenberger writes and notes that the ruling (in the Murthy v Missouri case) was based on the judges deciding there were no legal grounds to bring the case.
To the question – as old as the rise of the fact-checking industry – why did a fact-checker (in this case, PolitiFact) get things wrong, the journalist suggests it’s more a case of “playing on the same team”.
PolitiFact, he writes, is “part and parcel of the Censorship Industrial Complex.”
Shellenberger goes into the many instances of those, either while they were in power, such as Hillary Clinton, or with a lot of power, like Bill Gates, openly advocating for censorship.
As for how the US government, despite the country’s constitution, became prone to stifling speech and manipulating public opinion at home, the answer could be the “lesson learned” from decades of doing the same abroad.
Namely, it works.
Why is the ‘liberal’ media peddling the vilest genocide apologism?
A phalanx of the UK’s most influential journalists brought this odious article to print, decrying as a ‘blood libel’ the reporting of Israel’s killing of thousands of children in Gaza
By Jonathan Cook | October 6, 2024
I can’t put this strongly enough. Howard Jacobson’s article in today’s Observer newspaper may be one the vilest pieces of journalism published in Britain in living memory, arguing that any reporting of Israel’s documented slaughter of many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza is a “blood libel” and antisemitic. It is pure genocide apologism.
But far worse is the fact that the Guardian Media Group signed off his column. This isn’t the work of one Zionist loon. A whole army of journalists brought it to print.
And note: Jacobson, odious as he is, isn’t responsible for the choice of photo. That is entirely down to the Observer newsroom.
I worked at both the Guardian and the Observer, its Sunday sister paper, for many years. The comment editor, the photo editor, the revise sub-editor, the Observer’s chief editor and all the section heads would have approved not only Jacobson’s text but that photo too.
What on earth did they all imagine that “illustrative” photo of a blood-smeared doll suggested?
- That the many thousands of children blown to pieces by Israeli bombs are a fiction.
- That all the children decomposing under rubble are made up.
- That all the unidentified children buried in Gaza’s sands are a lie.
- That all the children dying of epidemics like polio or starving to death from Israel’s aid blockade are an invention.
That any single journalist imagined for a moment that this was an acceptable article or photo in the midst of a genocide is astounding enough.
But that a whole phalanx of the most influential and “liberal” journalists in the country backed it without a second thought tells us something about the depraved culture that passes for journalism in the western establishment media.
These elite journalists are completely divorced from reality. They have no moral core, they live and work as fanatical ideologues for western supremacism. They are as racist as their forebears who cheerled Britain’s subjugation and colonisation of the rest of the globe.
There is no hope of ever having a healthy world as long as these war-mongers and genocide apologists are allowed to remain in charge of shaping our consciousness.
66-yr-old Palestinian beaten, killed by Israeli occupation forces
MEMO | October 7, 2024
Sixty-six-year-old Palestinian activist, Ziad Abu Ehlayyel, was killed after being brutally beaten by Israeli occupation forces during a raid on his home in the occupied West Bank town of Dura, south-west of Hebron.
According to security sources, Israeli forces stormed Abu Ehlayyel’s home this morning and violently assaulted him until he lost consciousness. Despite being rushed to Dura Hospital, medical staff were unable to save him and he was pronounced dead due to the extent of his injuries.
Abu Ehlayyel was a respected community figure who had been subjected to multiple assaults by Israeli occupation forces during past raids into the town.
Quds News Network shared an archival video showing Abu Ehlayyel confronting Israeli soldiers, pleading with them to stop firing at Palestinian children. In the footage, he can be heard saying: “We don’t want you to shoot anyone, we don’t want you to kill anyone; this is a nonviolent procession, why do you keep shooting at them? Why don’t you stop your settlers from attacking us?”
Tensions have been running high across the occupied West Bank amid a brutal Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 41,900 Palestinians, mostly women and children, since 7 October last year.
Today marks one year since the Israeli offensive began, leaving over 97,300 wounded and more than 10,000 people still missing, presumed dead under the rubble.
In the occupied West Bank, the violence has also escalated. Since 7 October 2023, at least 742 Palestinians have been killed, more than 6,200 injured and over 11,100 others detained in the occupied territory, according to Palestinian figures.
The Israeli escalation follows a landmark opinion by the International Court of Justice last July that declared Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian land unlawful and demanded the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
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From the Archives
Israel: Strategic Ally or Liability?
By Stephen Sniegoski | My Catbird Seat | June 12, 2010
The claim that Israel serves as a valuable ally for the United States is made by both pro-Zionists and much of the anti-war and anti-Zionist Left that is influenced by Noam Chomsky. As a result of the Gaza flotilla massacre, which has caused a world-wide uproar against Israel, the value of Israel to the United States is being publicly questioned in more mainstream foreign policy forums. … continue
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- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
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