SAN BERNARDINO IN FLUX: The Fluid Nature of Cover Stories
By Niles and Frasier Mercado • Memory Hole • December 22, 2015
If the reporting on the alleged shooting in San Bernardino, California has left you confused and disoriented, you are not alone. The main stream media has changed substantial aspects of their original official story.
While it is understandable that some details might get misreported in the immediate aftermath of a national tragedy, no mention is made as to WHERE this misinformation originated from and WHY we should think that the NEW news reports are any more reliable.
It is difficult to dispute or verify claims when the narrative is a moving target. These evolving details are pretty significant, and seem to be — along with crisis actors and concurrent drills — another fingerprint of government sponsored shooting hoaxes and false flag events. Let’s take a look at a few of these alterations and how they relate to inconsistencies in other government-sponsored events.
HAVE YOU SEEN THE THIRD SHOOTER? SHE LOOKS LIKE A HE…
As discussed in a previous Memory Hole blog post, Juan Hernandez and Sally Abdelmageed described the shooters as “THREE WHITE MEN” (emphasis ours).
Fox and CNN then reported that the third assailant was FEMALE. She was supposedly on her way to Las Vegas to board an airplane. As time passed, that third accomplice became a MAN and HIS involvement was diminished (eventually to the point of being eliminated). Notice how the Wall Street Journal puts it in the article “Shooting Kills at Least 14; Two Suspects Are Dead” (Dec 2, 2015):
“The chief said a third person fled the scene and was taken into custody, but the police did not know his role, if any…” (emphasis ours)
Similarly varied stories were reported during the mass shooting (hoax) at Umpqua Community College. The shooter’s name changed from Toby Reynolds to Chris Sean Harper-Mercer (after going through several permutations in between – see diagram). His age changed from 20 to 26. When CNN altered his photograph, his race changed from mixed-race to white.
HAVE YOU SEEN MY MOTIVATION? IT WAS AROUND HERE SOMEWHERE…
The motive changed for the UCC shooter (Chris Harper-Mercer) from hatred towards Christians, to hatred towards women, then to hatred towards minorities.
Similarly, the San Bernardino shooting was originally characterized as spontaneous payback over an office party argument. According to the article “Carnage In California” by Tamara Audi and Jim Carlton (also from the Wall Street Journal, Dec 3, 2015)
“Police said that there had been a dispute at the holiday party that sent one person away angry, but it was unclear if that was connected to the later assault.”
Two days later, The New York Times contradicted this account (in the article “For San Bernardino Survivors, a Day of Screams and Chaos”, Dec 5, 2015):
“… But that ended when a colleague, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, who had been there and quietly slipped away, leaving his jacket draped over a chair, returned with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, 29, to unleash what the FBI is calling a terrorist attack.”
If Farook did have some argument at the holiday party, it would have been against his character according to Chris Nwadike. Nwadike, a fellow health inspector for San Bernardino County, said “Farook was a quiet person,” and he goes on to say that he never saw Farook have a disagreement with colleagues at work.
The spontaneous nature of this office party narrative belies the Islamic terrorist motive that would come later. Yet even The Wall Street Journal article, “California Shooters Leave Clues, but No Clear Motive” (Dec 4, 2015), had to admit that there was no clear motive:
“Law-enforcement officials said Thursday they weren’t sure what motivated the killings. Investigators found Mr. Farook had contact, some online and some by phone, with people who came up tangentially in past federal terrorism probes.” (emphasis ours)
The word “tangentially” should be in giant letters. They maybe once visited a website of someone who was IN THE PAST maybe tangentially tied to a mundane federal probe… I mean they are really grasping at straws here.
A few days later (Dec 8, 2015), The Wall Street Journal readdresses the issue of motive (in the article “Shooters Were ‘Radicalized’”) with a rumor of a post they got from “officials” that will make your eyes roll:
“Ms. Malik posted a message on Facebook just before the attack pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the terror group Islamic State, according to officials… ‘We have learned and believe that both suspects have been radicalized, and have been for quite some time,’ David Bowdich, the FBI director in charge in Los Angeles, told reporters in a news conference.” (Emphasis ours)
ACCORDING TO OFFICIALS?! Why on earth couldn’t they go and pull up the Facebook quote themselves rather than depend on the word of an unnamed official? At least with the UCC shooting they created fake accounts and provided us with screenshots of posts.
Speaking of which, in the shooting at Umpqua Community College, Mercer’s social media was used to paint the alleged assailant as a frustrated racist conspiracy theorist with ties to Muslim extremists. These social media posts may leave something to be desired in the way of credibility, however. To that point his MySpace was changed five times after his death.
This Islamic extremism motivation might SEEM predictable and ridiculous to those familiar with false flag events, but it is by no means the most absurd. The winner for the most absurd motive put forth by the media goes to Erin Burnett at CNN. Since Ms. Malik recently had a baby, Burnett blames the shooting on postpartum psychosis. That’s right, the baby blues.
Burnett: “Jim, I mean, obviously, her involvement is a game changer in how enforcement, law enforcement will look at this. But I just have to ask you, could there be something else, anything else that could have explained her involvement? Something like a postpartum psychosis?”
[…]
MOTIVES OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER ARE MANY, BUT CONSISTENT
All of this begs the question: “WHY?” If these events are really government sponsored hoaxes, then they ought to be scripted. If they are scripted, why does the script change so much? One would think the identities and motives of the assailants should remain constant, the way they did during 9/11.
However, the real target is all of us. Rotating through all of the motive possibilities means you can spend time demonizing nearly every demographic or range of thought not fitting the state’s mold. If they were ‘radicalized’, that label can apply to anybody who travels to a non-western country or just uses the Internet and visits a site that’s not government-approved. If they weren’t on the no-fly list, the government will feel justified in expanding that list to include almost everyone. They can easily change a no-fly list to a no-buy list. Not just suspected terrorists, but anybody who associates with suspected terrorists, or any idea considered radical. Even new mothers can’t be trusted.
While this purely constructed hoax is so artificial even the main stream media can’t keep it straight (possibly by design), what will not change is that more hoax shootings are coming. Mass Shootings have exploded like a cottage industry since Obama has taken office. Give it a month or so and it will be obvious that the staged shootings will not stop and that San Bernardino is Just Another C.I.A. False Flag.
Propaganda Can’t Melt Steel Beams
By Kevin Ryan | Dig Within | December 20, 2015
Eleven years ago, I initiated a discussion about the fact that jet fuel fires could not have melted steel at the World Trade Center. The government agency investigating the WTC destruction responded by holding “some of its deliberations in secret.” Although it’s not a secret that jet fuel can’t melt steel, due to propaganda from sources like The Washington Post and The Huffington Post, Americans often get confused about what facts like that mean to any national discussion. In a nutshell, what it means is that the molten metal found at the WTC, for which there is a great deal of evidence, cannot be explained by the official 9/11 myth.
No one thinks that jet fuel fires can melt steel beams—not even The Posts’ new science champion, who doesn’t bother to actually use jet fuel or steel beams to teach us about “retarded metallurgical things,” believes it. Instead, he uses a thin metal rod and a blacksmith forge to imply that, if the WTC buildings were made of thin metal rods and there were lots of blacksmith forges there, the thin metal rods would have lost strength and this would be the result. If you buy that as an explanation for what happened at the WTC, you might agree that all the “truthers” should just stop bothering everyone and go get jobs.
This absurd demonstration highlights at least two major problems with America’s ongoing struggle to understand 9/11. The first is that there was a great deal of molten metal at the WTC. Those who know that fact sometimes share internet memes that say “Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams” when they want to convey that “Thermite Melted Steel at the WTC.” The second major problem is that certain mainstream media sources continue to put a lot of energy into dis-informing the public about 9/11.
Sources like The Posts, The New York Times and some “alternative media” continue to work hard to support the official myth of 9/11. That effort is not easy because they must do so while providing as little actual information about 9/11 as possible. The dumbing down of the average citizen is a full time job for such propagandists. Luckily for them, American students receive almost no historical context that encourages them to think critically or consider ideas that conflict with blind allegiance to their government. When it comes to the WTC, it also helps that almost 80% of Americans are scientifically illiterate.
As media companies attempt to confuse the public about 9/11, they must avoid relating details that might actually get citizens interested in the subject. For example, it’s imperative that they never mention any of these fourteen facts about 9/11. It is also important to never reference certain people, like the ordnance distribution expert (and Iran-Contra suspect) who managed security at the WTC or the tortured top al Qaeda leader who turned out to have nothing to do with al Qaeda. In fact, to support the official myth of 9/11 these days, media must ignore almost every aspect of the crimes while promoting only the most mindless nonsense they can find. That bewildering strategy becomes more obvious every day.
In an Appalling Act of Hypocrisy, NY Times Promotes Settlers as Peace Builders
By Barbara Erickson | TimesWarp | December 15, 2015
Gush Etzion Junction was a peaceful corner of the West Bank, according to The New York Times, until Palestinians ruined it with a series of attacks in the latest uprising. Such is the message in Isabel Kershner’s most recent attempt to whitewash Israel’s brutal and illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.
Readers are never reminded of the fact that Gush Etzion is an illegal Jewish-only settlement block located in the heart of the West Bank. Nor are they told that its presence means the loss of thousands of acres of land once vital to the livelihood of the indigenous Palestinians, the confiscation of water resources and a choking system of military checkpoints.
In her story today, Isabel Kershner makes no attempt to discern what Gush Etzion means to Palestinians, although it sprawls over a large tract of their heartland, on their confiscated hills and fields. She provides Gush Etzion’s Jewish history but says nothing of the Palestinian experience, and while listing recent attacks on Jews, she makes no mention of Palestinian injuries and deaths, which far exceed those of Israelis.
Her one attempt to provide a motive for Palestinian attacks is ludicrous: The junction has become a target because it is a “hub of coexistence.” Nothing is said about the crushing effects of the occupation, trigger-happy Israeli troops, the continuing confiscation of Palestinian land and the loss of hope.
She writes: “Jewish settler leaders have promoted the slightly shabby complex as a symbol of peaceful coexistence and evidence that Israelis and Palestinians can share the hotly contested territory.”
In other words, the settlers have the best of intentions. After stealing Palestinian land and water to build Jewish-only colonies, they insist that they want only to be good neighbors.
Kershner also makes a feeble effort to provide “balance,” bringing out her stock phrases to defend Israel’s crimes: “The Palestinians and much of the world consider all settlements in the territories seized in 1967 as illegal and an obstacle to establishing a Palestinian state.”
Much of the world. This is a duplicitous way to put it. In fact, the entire world opposes the settlements, even Israeli’s staunchest ally, the United States.
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year announced a huge land grab from Palestinian villages surrounding Gush Etzion, the world rushed to condemn the act. This is important context in any discussion of the block, but no mention of it appears in Kershner’s story.
Other factors undermine her claim of peaceful coexistence and good intentions from settler leaders. B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights monitoring group, has frequently charged that the Gush Etzion police station is notorious for torturing Palestinian teens in order to extract confessions. It has released reports over several years pointing to significant abuses in the heart of the settlement block.
Kershner makes much of the presence of Palestinian employees at Gush Etzion Junction and manages to quote one of them—at the end of her story—thus suggesting that it is a welcoming place, open and tolerant. The backstory, however, is more revealing. It can be found in this paragraph from The Economist, written after Netanyahu’s land grab announcement last year:
“Encircled by Mr Netanyahu’s latest appropriation, Palestinian residents of the bucolic village of Wadi Fukin have already lost all but 450 of the 3,000 acres they once had, and stand to lose more. The hillsides where the village’s 600 sheep and goats graze are set to go. Unable to farm, many men find work as builders, often on Jewish settlements nearby. They may yet be called upon to build homes for Israelis on land they regard as their own.”
Wadi Fukin is one of the villages destined to lose under the latest expansion of Gush Etzion. Its tragic tale and that of many others are entirely missing from the story in the Times today. In such a context-free effort, Kershner makes her claims of tolerant settlers and a peaceful oasis, and the result is an appalling act of hypocrisy and spin.
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Extend draft registration to women — or end it?
By Edward Hasbrouck | The Practical Nomad | December 11, 2015
Congress will soon have to choose whether to amend the Military Selective Service Act to extend draft registration to women, to end all draft registration, or to allow registration to end by court order.
When the Supreme Court upheld the current males-only draft registration in 1981, it based its decision on the ineligibility of women, at that time, for combat assignments, and on the “deference” of the courts to Congress and the President in such military matters. The factual predicate to that decision has now changed, with the announcement last week that women in the military will be eligible for all combat jobs.
On Tuesday of this week, by scheduling coincidence, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument (which had been scheduled for that date months earlier) in one of several lawsuits challenging the Constitutionality of males-only draft registration that were filed two years ago when the military first began opening combat assignments to women.
From watching the oral argument, it seems likely that the Court of Appeals will send this case back to the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles for consideration of whether males-only draft registration is still Constitutional.
The complaint was dismissed by the a U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles who found that (1) the controversy was not yet “ripe” for decision and (2) the plaintiff’s lacked standing to complain.
On “ripeness”, it seems clear from the oral argument that the 9th Circuit judges think that if the case wasn’t ripe when it was dismissed in 2013, it is now in light of the latest changes to military policy. There would be no point to upholding the dismissal of the original complaint, when an identical new complaint could immediately be refiled, and would be ripe for decision.
On standing, the issue is that none of the plaintiffs in this case are men who can claim that they are being harmed because they didn’t register. There are a named plaintiff, who says he registered, and an organizational plaintiff. But the plaintiffs argued that they have as much basis to claim standing as the plaintiffs in the case the Supreme Court decided in 1981, who were similarly situated. In addition, plaintiffs’ counsel argued very persuasively that the continuing obligation to provide notice of address changes is a continuing harm that gives registrants continuing standing to challenge that registration requirement.
If I’ve read the tea leaves correctly, this means that in a matter of weeks or months — probably before but possibly not until after the November elections — the 9th Circuit will overturn the dismissal of the complaint, and remand this case to the U.S. District Court. The next step after that would be a status conference in Los Angeles to schedule further proceedings (discovery, briefing, etc.) on the merits of the reinstated complaint.
Some other lawsuit might make it to a decision sooner. But once a court looks at one of these cases on the merits, the outcome seems a foregone conclusion, as the Pentagon’s own analysis released last week suggests. It’s highly likely that a court ruling in this or another case will, sooner rather than later, force Congress to choose whether to extend draft registration to women, or to let a court decision ending registration stand.
Under current law, courts can’t order women to register. So if a Federal court finds that males-only registration is illegally discriminatory, registration will have to end unless Congress amends the law to extend the registration requirement to women.
Last Sunday, the New York Times dismissed this issue, editorializing that Congress could “easily” change the law to require young women, as well as young men, to register.
But it’s not so simple as all that. It won’t be enough just to change the law. Draft registration is not self-implementing. Extending registration to women will also require getting women to comply with the law, and enforcing the law if women don’t comply voluntarily.
Thirty-five years of failure by the government to get young men to comply with the draft registration law, and the complete abandonment of any attempt to enforce that law more than 25 years ago, suggest that getting young women to register for a draft is likely to be much more difficult than the Times’ editorial board has realized.
As some of my readers know, although it’s not my most frequent topic in this blog, I spent most of the 1980s, starting just about the time I left the University of Chicago, as an organizer with the National Resistance Committee and an editor of its newspaper, Resistance News.
When draft registration was reinstated in 1980 after a five-year hiatus, our most optimistic prediction was that half a million men in the first age cohorts required to register might not sign up. A month after the initial mass registration period, the first independent analysis of registration data revealed that more than a million of these young men had not heeded the call to register. [“Million Snub Draft”, Boston Globe, August 27, 1980, page 1; the original banner headline in the Globe was apparently added in page makeup and is missing from the wire service versions and the fragment of the article in the Globe’s digital archive.]
Desperate to scare up enough registrations to “maintain the credibility of the system”, as one internal Justice Department memo put it, the government eventually decided to try to intimidate the mass of nonregistrants through “well-publicized prosecutions” of a few of those they considered the “most vocal” resisters. As one of twenty nonregistrants who were singled out for indictment in 1982-1986, I was convicted and spent four and a half months in a Federal Prison Camp in 1983-1984.
(I was prosecuted by Robert Mueller, then a junior Assistant U.S. Attorney in Boston and later the Director of the FBI. My case was Mueller’s first high-profile trial, and my head was a significant early stepping stone in his political climb. Mueller’s boss, then U.S. Attorney and later Governor William F. Weld, also attended my trial — annoying my mother by sitting next to her — to observe Mueller’s performance in court.)
But despite convictions and prison sentences, these show trials backfired and were quickly abandoned. They called attention to the resistance to draft registration, made clear that there was safety in numbers, and showed that the government could prove the “willfulness” of only those nonregistrants who made public statements (which were essential to the cases against us in court) acknowledging that we knew we were supposed to register.
Nobody has been prosecuted for refusing to register since 1986. But the government has never been able to find a face-saving way to end registration and shut down the Selective Service System without admitting that its scare tactics failed, or dealing with the implications of young people’s insistence on making their own choices about which wars they are willing to fight.
Today, many young people register only because of laws that link draft registration to drivers licensing in some states, and to eligibility for student aid. The resistance by many states to implementing the Federal “REAL-ID Act” (which I discussed in this presentation at the Cato Institute earlier this year), and the repeated failures, including once again this year, of proposals to link drivers’ licenses to draft registration in the most populous state, California, suggest some of the limitations of this carrot-and-stick approach.
(Today, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, nonregistration is most concentrated among those poor young men of color who see little hope of going to college even with the limited available government aid, and especially among undocumented young men who are categorically ineligible for the government programs linked to draft registration, but who are still required to register.)
Many of the people who registered under these financial pressures would resist if actually drafted, and many of these nominal registrations have been effectively invalidated by unreported address changes, even though they are counted in Selective Service “compliance” statistics.
President Obama, who was in the first age group required to register, has said that he registered for the draft. But he hasn’t commented on whether he informed the Selective Service System every time he changed addresses until his 26th birthday, as is required by the law and as is essential for registration records to be of any use in the event of a draft. Few people did so in the 1980s, or do so now. The only audit of Selective Service address records, in 1982, found that 20-40% of the addresses on file with the SSS for registrants in the age groups that would be drafted first were already outdated, and up to 75% for those registrants in their last year of potential eligibility to be drafted.
Many, perhaps most, induction notices sent to current registrants would wind up in the dead-letter office. Without being able to prove that anyone knew they were supposed to tell the Selective Service System when they moved, it’s impossible to enforce the change-of-address notification requirement.
Is there any reason to think that young women would be more willing to sign up to be drafted than young men have been? I doubt it. When President Carter announced his proposal to reinstate draft registration in his State of the Union address in 1980, some of the strongest initial grassroots opposition came from women. Many women remained active in the resistance even after the bill approved by Congress was narrowed to require only men to register, though the press tended to focus on male resisters.
Women have been among those health care workers most concerned about Selective Service preparations for for a draft of doctors, nurses, and many other medical professionals, which would include women but would be based on professional licensing lists rather than on self-registration of potential draftees.
Women share many of men’s reasons not to register, and have other reasons of their own. There are both feminist and sexist arguments against subjecting women to the draft and draft registration.
Are the government’s arguments for why young women (or men) should register for the draft, and promise to fight for or against whomever they are told, any more persuasive today than ever? I don’t think so.
Draft registration was reinstated in 1980 in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to prepare for U.S. intervention in support of the fighters who were then called the “mujahideen” and who would later christen themselves the Taliban and Al Qaeda. That the U.S. government put me in prison for refusing to agree to fight on the side of the Taliban doesn’t say much for its judgment of which wars to intervene in, or on which side. Today, people of all ages and genders question why the U.S. is supporting the fundamentalist (and supremely sexist) monarchy in Saudi Arabia, or the dictatorship in Yemen, among others.
Congress should have no illusions. Extending draft registration to women will provoke at least as much resistance as did draft registration for men in 1980. It will force the government, once again, to choose whether to turn the country into a police state to round up all those who fail to register on demand, or to try (probably unsuccessfully) to terrorize them into compliance through show trials and incarceration of a few of the people seen as “leaders” of the resistance.
Regardless of whether Congress or the President think that young women “should” be ready to be drafted, the only realistic choice for Congress is not to extend draft registration to women, but to end it for all.
That’s not likely to be part of the terms of debate, however, unless opponents of draft resistance — including young women who won’t register voluntarily, and older people who support them — make it an issue.
In 1981, the decision of whether to continue — and whether to enforce — the draft registration program that had been reinstated during the Carter administration was a “wedge issue” that divided hawks from libertarians within the Reagan administration and its supporters.
One of my friends and colleagues in the National Resistance Committee, Alex Reyes, has written about how awareness of plans for demonstrations in support of draft registration resistance precipitated this internal debate, and of how close it came to ending draft registration.
Today, whether to extend draft registration to women or end it entirely is likely to be a similar wedge issue dividing Democrats, Republicans, and military personnel. Will sexist warmongers support subjecting young women to the draft, or depriving the military of its “Plan B” for manpower by ending draft registration entirely? Will supporters of President Obama, or of a future President Hillary Clinton, see subjecting women to the draft as a step towards gender equity, or a step towards more of the gendered violence of war? And if they see it as both, how will they vote?
But there’s more at stake than the opportunity for partisan politicians to embarrass their opponents, and it will be up to draft registration resisters and supporters to make that point.
Draft registration of men has been a fiasco for the government since its resumption in 1980. The likelihood and imminence of a court ruling that males-only draft registration is now unconstitutional provides the perfect opportunity for Congress to end draft registration entirely.
In The NY Times, Palestinian Dead Are Nameless Numbers (At Best)
By Barbara Erickson | TimesWarp | December 9, 2015
Since the beginning of December at least 10 Palestinians have died at the hands of Israeli security forces. Only one of these deaths has received brief mention in The New York Times; the rest have been deemed unfit to print.
During this same period, no Israelis died from Palestinian attacks, so we can assume this is the reason for the show of indifference at the Times. Israeli deaths in these circumstances usually make headlines.
The recent Palestinian victims ranged in age from 15 to 37. All but one were male, and it was the lone female, Maram Hasouna, who managed to make the news in a story about young women joining the ranks of would-be attackers during the current Palestinian uprising.
The victims include: Ma’moun Raed al-Khatib, 16; Maram Hasouna, 19; Taher Faisal Fannoun, 17; Mustafa Fadel Fannoun, 19; Abdul Rahman Wajeeh Barghouti, 27; Anas Bassam Hammad, 21; Mazin Hasan Ureiba, 37; Omar Yasser Skafi, 21; Malek Akram Shahin, 18, and Ihab Fathi Miswadi, 21.
Security forces claimed that nine of the victims had attempted to attack Israelis. Only one, Shahin, was killed in other circumstances—during clashes that took place when troops invaded Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem.
All of the deaths are newsworthy, but some of the fatalities involved details that add particular news value: Ureiba was a Palestinian Authority intelligence officer; Barghouti was an American citizen; and doctors reported that Shahin was shot in the head with a hollow point bullet, a weapon held to be illegal under international law. None of these factors, however, was enough to rouse the interest of the Times.
Instead, since the first of this month the newspaper has provided us with stories about wine making in Israel, the discovery of a possible ancient model of the Temple of Herod, the arrest of suspects in a fatal arson attack, a look at the risks of banning an Israeli Islamic group, the conviction of two Israeli youths in the killing of a Palestinian teen last year, the conviction of a Palestinian lawmaker and Israel’s attempt to draw Russian tourists.
The 10 who died so far this month are likely to appear as nothing more than numbers in future Times reports. As of today they have brought the total dead since Oct. 1 to at least 113. This compares with 17 Israelis.
Even in reporting this kind of data, the Times makes an effort to obscure the fact that Palestinians are suffering disproportionately at the hands of their well-armed occupiers. In a formulaic explanation for the numbers gap, the Times nearly always blames the victims entirely, saying that Palestinians were killed when they tried to attack Israelis or during violent protests.
Little or nothing will be said of the doubtful cases, in which witnesses dispute the official accounts and video evidence shows that the victims were posing no danger to troops. We can also expect that the Times will fail to mention human rights groups’ charges that a number of the victims were assassinated in “extrajudicial executions.”
The Palestinian dead rarely get their due in the Times, which prefers to consign them to tally sheets. Were they to appear in full context, as human beings with histories and families, this might elicit sympathy for them and condemnation of Israel, and this cannot be allowed.
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Putative US-Israeli Rift Has Not Dampened Partnership in Oppression of Palestinians
By Matt Peppe | Just the Facts | December 6, 2015
In March, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made denying a Palestinian state a pillar of his winning re-election campaign, officials in the Obama administration signaled to the media that they would reconsider the U.S. government’s staunch diplomatic support for Israel in the United Nations. The U.S. government feigned “very substantive concerns” and declared the administration may “reassess (its) options going forward” in response to Netanyahu’s explicit rejection of a two-state solution.
Mainstream media focused on the personal dynamics between the leaders of the two countries. CNN said the Obama administration felt “outright hostility” toward Netanyahu and the New York Times said the leaders had a “poisonous relationship.” They presumed the professed discord would imperil the political alliance between the two governments. In reality, there was no reason to believe a personal conflict would jeopardize the nearly 50-year-old U.S. government policy of providing Israel an unconditional shield in the General Assembly and the Security Council.
It was obvious even at the time the Obama administration’s anonymous threats to reconsider its diplomatic protection of Israel were nothing more than posturing. Netanyahu had broken an unwritten rule when he said in front of the cameras what is stated in his Likud party’s platform: “The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.” Not only had this been written policy since 1999, but Netanyahu’s government – and every other Israeli administration since the state’s illegitimate formation in 1948 – has been carrying it out in practice.
Obama has demonstrated little interest in supporting progressive policies in favor of human rights and social justice, but he has shown himself zealously concerned with them in the abstract through grandiose and noble rhetoric. During the first six years of his presidency, Netanyahu actively opposed a Palestinian state without Obama’s administration withholding any of the ideological, diplomatic, military and economic support that is a necessary condition for the occupation’s survival. As long as Netanyahu kept quiet, Obama could pretend his administration’s support for Israel was contingent on Israel seeking a permanent peace deal with Palestinians.
Obama urged “cooperation and compromise” and continued the pretense that a “peace process” was not already long dead. But when Netanyahu publicly declared in stark terms that he has no intention of permitting a just solution to Israel’s colonization of Palestine, he made it impossible for Obama to continue the charade. Netanyahu and his fanatical government ministers long ago realized that Obama had no intention of seeking actual concessions from them regardless of how much land and water they stole, or how many Palestinians (or Americans) they killed.
In reality, Obama was happy to let the Israeli government keep slaughtering Palestinians in Gaza, expanding checkpoints and repression in the West Bank, and further carving up the West Bank with new illegal settlements while offering nothing but the most mild, toothless complaints.
As Ali Abunimah noted in the Electronic Intifada, “for the Palestinians, there is no meaningful Obama-Netanyahu rift. Indeed US-Israeli relations have never been stronger, nor more damaging to the prospects for peace and justice and for the very survival of the Palestinian people.”
This was not inevitable. In January 2009, Netanyahu had ordered an immediate halt to the IDF’s destructive rampage in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, which had killed more than 1,400 people in Gaza, the day before Obama’s inauguration ceremony in January 2009. Presumably Netanyahu believed the failure stop the second assault on the blockaded territory in a year would cause the incoming Obama administration to support an independent investigation, cut military aid, dispute Israel’s argument that it “had a right to defend itself,” or end the U.S. government’s facilitation of the carnage.
But it turns out Netanyahu and the Israeli regime needn’t have worried, as no such change in policy was in the cards. Obama’s new administration would block the Goldstone Report presented to the Human Rights Council, and ensure complete impunity for the Israeli crimes that occurred subsequent to Obama’s election. This likely emboldened Netanyahu to unleash even more wanton destruction and horror in July 2014, when Israel launched Operation Protective Edge on trumped up accusations against Hamas.
“Having falsely accused Hamas leadership of orchestrating the kidnapping of the three Israeli teens in June, and then assailing the group for ‘purposely playing politics’ when it rejected the Egyptian ceasefire proposal that offered it nothing beyond a return to the status quo of the siege, (Secretary of State John) Kerry and the Obama administration once again provided the Israeli military with the diplomatic cover it needed to escalate the violence,” writes Max Blumenthal in The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza.
Despite extensive documentation from the start of the military campaign that the captive civilian population in Gaza comprised the vast majority of the dead and injured from tank and naval shelling, drone missiles, F-16 bombs and heavy artillery, the Obama administration cast the only vote against establishing a war crimes investigation by the United Nations. A few days later, the administration helped resupply the Israeli army with weapons, including 102mm mortar rounds and 40mm grenades, that the IDF could use to keep up their prolific killing spree.
In May, any doubts that the personality conflicts had actually imperiled the hand-in-glove military cooperation between the two countries, as mainstream pundits so forcefully proclaimed, was put to rest. The Obama administration approved an arms sale for $1.9 billion to Israel – in violation of domestic and international law, and against the explicit demands of human rights organizations such as Amnesty International.
The Electronic Intifada reported: “Among the tens of thousands of bombs included in the weapons package are 3,000 Hellfire missiles, 12,000 general purpose bombs and 750 bunker buster bombs that can penetrate up to 20 feet, or six meters, of reinforced concrete.”
Much as the military cooperation between the two states has carried on seamlessly, so has the diplomatic cooperation. Despite Israeli officials hinting the government might finally decline to vote with the U.S. in the 24th annual UNGA condemnation of the Cuban embargo, predictably Israel was the only country in the entire world to join the U.S. in defense of the embargo. The measure passed by a vote of 191-2.
Not surprisingly, unconditional U.S. support for Israel in the United Nations has also continued uninterrupted. “Traditional Voting Pattern Reflected in General Assembly’s Adoption of Drafts on Question of Palestine, Broader Middle East Issues,” states a U.N. press release after the passage of six resolutions concerning Israel. Indeed, the pattern was traditional: the U.S. and Israel, with a few Pacific Island states, voting against the rest of the world (minus whoever the U.S.-Israel alliance could persuade to abstain).
In a resolution on the illegally occupied Syrian Golan Heights, from which Israel steals valuable natural resources and where many prestigious Israeli wineries are located, the U.S. government rejected the position that Israel follow previous Security Council resolutions and withdraw to the 1967 borders.
Concerning Jerusalem, the U.S. rejected a measure stating that Israel, as the occupying power, had no right to “impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration on the Holy City of Jerusalem,” and that they show “respect for the historic status quo at the holy places of Jerusalem.”
Additionally, the U.S. rejected a call “to exert all efforts to promote the realization of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, including their right to self-determination, to support the achievement without delay of an end to the Israeli occupation that began in 1967 and of the two-State solution on the basis of pre-1967 borders and the just resolution of all final status issues and to mobilize international support for and assistance to the Palestinian people.”
As these votes were not reported in the mainstream American press, the American public can be forgiven for not realizing the meaninglessness of the “rift” between American and Israeli government officials, which has not impacted at all the U.S. government’s longstanding record of rejecting world opinion and cooperative efforts to achieve a just peace.
The corporate press have demonstrated that their policy analysis consists primarily – if not entirely – of dissecting style, empty rhetoric and official proclamations. Concrete actions and their consequences are of little concern.
The Walrus and the New York Times
BY John Hinderaker | PowerLine |December 1, 2015
As part of its cheerleading for the U.N. climate convention in Paris, the New York Times is running a series on What Climate Change Looks Like. First up are the walruses:
This week, we’re featuring images that show how global warming has already impacted the world.
Packed shoulder to shoulder, an estimated 35,000 Pacific walruses congregated on Alaska’s northwest coast near Point Lay last fall. Normally the mammals find ocean ice sheets to rest on, but as waters have warmed the ice sheets have disappeared. In seven of the last nine years swarms of walruses swam ashore for refuge, as shown above, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The first time this happened was in 2007 when summer ice levels were at a record low.
The Times is peddling ignorance here. Actually, the congregation of walruses on land is an age-old phenomenon known as “hauling out.” It has nothing to do with the volume of sea ice at any given time. In fact, the Times is not just peddling ignorance, it is recycling it. Today’s Times piece is paraphrased from a much-derided column by Gail Collins that ran in October 2014.
We responded to that column in a post titled The Walrus and the Climate Hysterics. The best we can do is to quote what we wrote a year ago:
Like the other manifestations of climate hysteria, the walrus crisis is entirely fabricated. First, let’s note how great it is that you can find 35,000 Pacific walruses in one place. It is a sign of a thriving wildlife population, estimated to have doubled since the 1950s.
Climate Depot has a thorough debunking of the walrus hype, beginning with Dr. Susan Crockford, a zoologist:
The attempts by WWF and others to link this event to global warming is self-serving nonsense that has nothing to do with science… this is blatant nonsense and those who support or encourage this interpretation are misinforming the public.
To be fair, misinforming the public is the Times’s specialty.
Walruses have always swarmed on land during the fall. This is called a “haulout.” In 2007, Wikipedia said, in its entry on walruses:
In the non-reproductive season (late summer and fall) walruses tend to migrate away from the ice and form massive aggregations of tens of thousands of individuals on rocky beaches or outcrops.
That portion of the walrus entry was recently deleted. Hmm, wonder why?
Walrus haulouts have been observed for hundreds of years: “Dating back to at least 1604, there have been reports of large walrus gatherings or haul outs.”
The Times’s claim that “[t]he first time this happened was in 2007″ is a hilarious bit of ham-handed ignorance.
Shortly after we published the post quoted above, Steve added another that included this video:
If you want to learn a whole lot more about the walrus behavior in question, go here.
Because its writers are so ill-informed, the New York Times is an especially laughable purveyor of politically-motivated climate hysteria. But in reality, the whole warmist enterprise is one big fraud, as is demonstrated on a daily basis.
Israel: The Willing Executioner
By Barbara Erickson | TimesWarp | December 2, 2015
Rasha Oweissi, 23, was a good 30 feet back from a West Bank checkpoint when she was shot and killed, clutching a knife and a bag with a suicide note. Hadeel Awwad, 16, waved a pair of scissors at a Jerusalem security guard and was brought down in a hail of bullets. Ashrakat Qattanani, 16, was killed as she lunged at a woman near a military post.
Their names appear in a New York Times story today, which informs us that some 20 percent of alleged attackers in the past two months have been women, a new and surprising turn of events in the annals of resistance to the Israeli occupation. The article goes on to examine why so many young women in the current Palestinian uprising are “wanting to be killers.”
But the story avoids the obvious question here: How is it that some Palestinians are now courting martyrdom by showing up at checkpoints armed with kitchen knives?
Diaa Hadid and Rami Nazzal skirt this issue throughout the article. There are quotes from Ashrakat’s father who proudly states that his daughter chose to be a martyr, and there is talk of the “romantic” aura of dying for the cause of Palestinian freedom, but nothing is said of the Israeli role here: the summary executions carried out under the thinnest pretexts.
The practice is well known to Palestinians, however, and B’Tselem, the Israeli monitoring group, recently wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanding an end to a “horrific string” of unlawful killings. The letter states, “There can only be one outcome in cases that combine an individual with Arab appearance and a knife: execution on the street.”
As a result, any troubled young person looking for martyrdom knows she has only to hold a knife in hand and walk toward a checkpoint to achieve her goal. Thus, Rasha Oweissi could write her suicide note, confident that the executioners would do their job.
The real story here, so carefully avoided in the Times, is the presence of willing executioners at the checkpoints. This angle, however, does not fit into the narrative of Israeli victimhood, so we find this print headline on the article today: “Palestinian Women Assert Role in Uprising,” as if we are celebrating their emancipation as they take up arms.
But there is little to celebrate. The story reports that most of the would-be female attackers have been killed in the two months since the recent spate of knife and vehicular assaults began and that those who survived have been taken into custody. At the same time, not a single Israeli has died at their hands.
Readers do not learn, however, that several of these women died under disputed circumstances. Hadeel Hashlamoun, 18, was the first victim of the trigger-happy forces in this recent surge in violence. She was shot in late September at a checkpoint in Hebron, and although Israeli officials reported that she had a knife, eyewitnesses dispute this. B’Tselem noted the discrepancies and called her death an extrajudicial execution.
The Times story today, however, asserts that Hadeel “pulled out a knife,” ignoring the controversy surrounding her killing.
Hadid and Nazzal note that B’Tselem called the deaths of Hadeel Awwad and Ashrakat Qattanani “public, summary street executions,” but the full import of the B’Tselem charges are not to be found in the Times.
In fact, the organization asserts that the highest levels of the Israeli government are responsible for the series of unlawful killings. “Your government permits—and encourages—the transformation of police officers, and even of armed civilians, into judges and executioners,” B’Tselem writes in its open letter to Netanyahu.
The letter notes that senior members of the government have incited this violence through “inflammatory statements,” and it continues, “A new pseudo-normative reality has effectively emerged in which a ‘shoot to kill’ approach must always be adopted, no matter the circumstances, even when the suspect no longer presents any danger whatsoever.”
Thus reports show that Ashrakat Qattanani was killed after she had been run over by a car and that Nourhan Awwad was shot at close range after being beaten to the ground by a man wielding a chair. Likewise, Hadeel Hashlamoun stood behind a barrier and several feet from heavily armed officers when a hail of bullets ended her life.
A careful reader of the Times story might have noticed that security forces indulged in overkill, emptying rounds of bullets into the bodies of young women after they were already immobilized and lying wounded on the street, but the article avoids any close look at the behavior of police and soldiers, not to mention the provocative comments of government officials.
Once again the Times averts its gaze from the reality on the ground in Palestine. Here we had an opportunity to look at the tragic intersection of youthful romanticism and Israeli brutality, but the newspaper can provide only one side of this equation: Israel gets a pass, as usual, even when the evidence for its crimes is in plain sight.
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New York Times propaganda article on Ukraine’s blockade of Crimea
By Roger Annis – New Cold War – December 2, 2015
Western media has published yet another doom and gloom article on Crimea, repeating a worn theme that surely, by now, the people of Crimea must be reconsidering their vote 21 months ago to secede from Ukraine and rejoin the Russian Federation.
The article was published in the New York Times on Dec 1 and is titled, ‘Months after Russian annexation, hopes start to dim in Crimea‘. This one has to skate around a new, added twist to the Crimea story: the electricity and commercial road transport blockade that has been mounted by small numbers of the extreme-right in Ukraine but endorsed by the governing regime in Kyiv while Western governments turn a blind eye.
The article begins:
SHCHYOLKINO, Crimea–When residents in this typical Soviet factory town voted enthusiastically to secede from Ukraine and to become Russians, they thought the chaos and corruption that made daily life a struggle were a thing of the past. Now that many of them are being forced to cook and boil drinking water on open fires, however, they are beginning to reconsider.
The article employs time-honored methods for when a pre-determined, negative theme is required and important facts must be obscured.
One, find disgruntled citizens in the street and cite them. That’s not difficult to do–is there a country in the world without many unhappy citizens? The Times writer cites two such people in his article.
Two, make it appear that the disgruntled citizen(s) speaks for large numbers of his or her fellow citizens.
Three, negative imagery is important. Thus we read in the Times article, “Twenty months after the Kremlin annexed the Black Sea peninsula amid an outpouring of patriotic fervor by the ethnic Russian population, President Vladimir V. Putin’s promise in April 2014 to turn it into a showcase of his rule now seems as faded as Crimea’s aging, Soviet-era resorts.” Very evocative–‘aging, Soviet-era resorts’. This recalls the decades of New York Times reporting of aged-looking buildings in Cuba during the decades of the U.S. embargo of the island. The embargo made it difficult for Cuba to manufacture or obtain paint and building materials; such things as public health care, public education, international aid and solidarity, and national defense took priority. So yes, this writer visited Cuba three times during the 1990s and, indeed, many buildings in Havana looked aged. But the spirit of the people and the outlook for the country was anything but tired and worn out. To my eyes, the people were much more spirited and forward looking compared to what I experienced in wealthy Canada.
Four, the key word in all reporting of Crimea is “annex”, as per the above citation. The people in Crimea voted overwhelmingly in March 2014 for secession from Ukraine, following a violent, right-wing coup against the elected president of that country (a president for whom a large majority of Crimeans had voted in 2010). The secession referendum was organized by the elected and constitutional Crimean legislature, whose legality contrasted sharply with the illegal, coup regime which came into power in Kyiv on Feb 21, 2014. Crimeans have affirmed in survey after survey that they are satisfied with the secession decision. Yet, Crimeans are presented in the Times as hapless people who have been “annexed” by Russia. The Times reference to the secession as happening “amid an outpouring of patriotic fervor” suggests that the people were so swept away by fervor as to be too dumb to realize what was really taking place. They were not choosing a future of their own free will; no, they were undergoing “annexation” without even being aware.
Five, blame the victims for their plight. Thus we read in the Times article , “… people here are not sure whom to blame more for their predicament: the Crimean Tatar activists and Ukrainian nationalists who cut off Crimea’s link to the Ukrainian power grid or the local government officials who claimed to have enough power generators stored away to handle such an emergency.” Here we have an absurd spectacle of the Crimean government being blamed for failing to foresee and prepare for the day that right-wing extremists in Ukraine would blow up the electricity transmission lines serving the peninsula. Even more recklessly, the Crimean government failed to foresee that the blowing up of transmission lines by right-wing terrorists (oops, “cutting off of Crimea’s links” by “activists”) would be endorsed and escalated by the regime in Kyiv and that Western governments would turn a blind eye and Western media would largely be silent.
Six, and finally, choice of headline to convey the negative message is key. In this case, we have “hopes start to dim”. In reality, the Times headline joins a long parade of such headlines. Pick a typical, negative word, use it alongside the word “Crimea” in an internet search, and, voilà, you arrive in a world of negativity over prospects for Crimea. Here is a small sample of the trade in negative Crimea headlines and stories:
- Crimea’s football fans shiver at prospect of their team playing in Siberia (The Guardian, March 2014)
- Why Russia’s Crimea move fails legal test, (BBC, March 2014)
- Crimea after annexation: ‘We feel utterly discouraged,’ resident says (Belsat TV, in Belarus, April 2014)
- Crimea euphoria fades for some Russians (Reuters, July 2014)
- Tourism suffers in Crimea as Ukraine shuns breakaway region (Washington Post, Aug 2014)
- Kremlin preparing to combat demos as signs of Crimea-fatigue appear, (‘Euromaidan Press‘, Sept 2014)
- Human rights in decline in Crimea (Human Rights Watch, Nov 2014)
- To many in Crimea, corruption seems no less at home under Russian rule, New York Times, Aug 2015)
Oddly–well, not so oddly–the last article in this list was about Crimean citizens trying to take back into public control Black Sea waterfront land which had been lost during Crimea’s time in post-1991 Ukraine.
Funnily enough, the Times article concludes with a quotation from a Crimean woman that is supposed to show that Russians are naïve and habitual complainers who always blame others for their failings and shortcomings. But the quotation is the closest thing to truth in the entire article (leaving aside the suggestion that the extreme rightists in Ukraine who blew up electricity lines are “Tatars”):
As often happens in Russia, some blame Washington rather than Moscow or Kiev.
“If it wasn’t for the Americans, none of it could have happened. The Tatars, who are supported by the United States, would not do a thing,” said Tatyana Bragina, 57, an energetic woman who also once worked construction at a nearby, unfinished nuclear plant.
“Please write that we are not desperate. On the contrary, we are full of joy,” Ms. Bragina said, standing near a black iron kettle boiling away in the courtyard of her apartment block.
Russian legislator Konstantin Kosachev has said that Kyiv’s electricity and road-transport blockades against Crimea constitute a “gesture of final farewell” to Crimea.
Russia is racing to construct electricity, natural gas, road and rail links to Crimea across the 3 km wide Kerch Strait, which separates the Sea of Azov from the Black Sea. The first of the electricity will begin to flow in a few weeks. Crimea will be fully supplied with electricity by the summer 2016. Soon after that, it will be producing its own electricity courtesy of the gas pipeline under construction. By 2019, the road and rail bridge will begin to operate.
Ukraine threatens permanent economic blockade against Crimea
By Roger Annis – New Cold War – November 27, 2015
Western news media and governments are keeping hush about an economic blockade by Ukraine against Crimea that is starting to appear permanent.
TASS reports today that at least one of the electricity lines from Ukraine to Crimea that was sabotaged by right-wing extremists during the weekend of Nov 20-21 has been repaired. But no electricity is flowing to Crimea from Ukraine. The information comes from Russian Deputy Energy Minister Andrey Cherezov.
“We have information that the repair work on the Kakhovka-Titan power line has been completed,” he said. “Switching this line on would make it possible to supply about 150-200 megawatts from Ukraine to Crimea. But such hope is lost. Accordingly, all measures in Crimea are aimed at ensuring a minimum level of electricity supply to consumers.”
Kakhovka-Titan is a 220-volt line that supplies electricity to the Crimean border cities of Armyansk and Krasnoperekopsk. Much of its power goes to two districts of the Kherson region of Ukraine.
Kakhovka-Titan is one of four transmission lines that were sabotaged by rightist bombs. At the time of the sabotage, Ukraine’s electricity utility said it could restore one of the four lines in 24 hours and all four of them within days. But the Ukraine government is allowing a handful of extremists on the damaged sites to block repair crews.
On Thursday, Russian Emergency Situations Ministry sent an additional 300 mobile generators to Crimea to provide power for critical facilities.
Crimea consumes an average of 1,000 megawatts of electricity per day, according to the Russian Energy Ministry. Emergency power backups are meeting only 30 per cent of normal demand.
An electrical cable under the Kerch Strait from Russia to Crimea was already under construction before last weekend’s sabotage. The construction is now on emergency pace. The cable is being laid in two stages. The first stage will deliver app 400 MW of power before the end of December. The second stage will bring an equal amount by summer 2016.
Another energy project already on the drawing table is a natural gas pipeline under the Kerch Strait, due to open in 2018. It will power several natural gas electricity generating stations to be built in Crimea.
Western media and governments see nothing, say nothing
The Crimea emergency is going largely unreported in the West. Where it is mentioned, it is pictured as a tit-for-tat game between Ukraine and Russia.
The first report in Canada’s largest daily newspaper, the Toronto Star, was published on Nov 27, six days following the attacks that cut Crimea’s electricity supply from Ukraine. The Star report is taken from the New York Times.
The Times article is a shortened version of a longer article that appeared two days earlier, both written by the newspaper’s Moscow bureau journalist Neil MacFarquhar. He traveled to southern Ukraine.
MacFarquhar describes the terrorist action by the Ukrainian extremists as a “standoff between Moscow and Kiev, with each side finding new ways to increase the tension daily”.
Ukraine’s government has not lifted a finger against the vigilante road blockade of food shipments to Crimea which extreme-rightists began on September 20.
Following the latest outrageous attack, the regime in Kyiv began on November 23 to block all commercial transport to and from Crimea. This is described by the Times thusly: “Ukraine seeks to avoid further Russian aggression to stymie its political and economic stability, and an already unpopular government does not want to go against public sentiment.”
Interestingly, MacFarquhar provides an interpretation of the claim in most Western media that the vigilante actions against Crimea are being perpetrated by “Crimean Tatars”. He writes:
In Kiev, the main driver of the confrontation seems to be the leaders of the Tatar community who were exiled by Russia after it annexed the peninsula and who are now in Parliament as allies of President Petro O. Poroshenko… [1]
Here around Chongar, however, Tatar activists were not much in evidence. They seemed to have been assigned logistical tasks like providing food and housing for the men guarding road checkpoints and the fallen pylons. The fighters were mostly veterans from the east [Ukraine] who did not want to go back to civilian life.
MacFarquhar describes one of the Western media’s “Tatar activists”:
“The people of Crimea are not supposed to feel like they live in a resort while the country [Ukraine] is at war,” said Oleksiy Byk, 34, a chunky, bearded veteran who serves as the area spokesman for the Right Sector, a right-wing Ukrainian organization violently opposed to any accommodation with Russia.
Mr. Byk said he used to fight the separatists [sic] in the east, but after the ceasefire negotiated under the Minsk peace accords [in February 2015] finally took hold in September, he and many other hard-core fighters gravitated to the area just north of Crimea. They are spoiling for a fight, since Ukraine rejects Russia’s March 2014 annexation [sic] of the Black Sea peninsula as illegal.
Ukraine pours on the rhetoric
In its latest, self-destructive measure for the Ukrainian economy (and against the Ukrainian people), the government in Kyiv announced on November 25 that all air travel to and from Russia will be severed. Last month, Ukraine banned landing and takeoff rights for Russian airlines, prompting a move in kind by Russia.
Ukraine’s government has also announced that it wouldn’t buy gas anymore from Russia. But that statement is posturing which followed the decision by Russia’s Gazprom on Nov 25 to cease gas deliveries due to non-payment. The government is effectively bankrupt, living on borrowed money from the IMF. A declaration of default on the international loans it owes is expected.
The Donetsk People’s Republic has taken emergency measures to protect coal stocks and electricity infrastructure in the aftermath of the sabotage directed at Crimea, reports DAN news service. Prime Minister Aleksandr Zakharchenko has assumed direct responsibility over the measures.
The DPR has also halted coal shipments to Ukraine. This began in response to non-payment of bills, but has now also become a gesture of disapproval of Ukraine’s failure to restore electricity service to Crimea and of solidarity with the people of the peninsula.
(See a photo gallery on TASS of Crimea’s electricity situation , here. )
Notes:
[1] Tatar civil organizations in Crimea utterly deny the claims in Western media that the Tatar figureheads in Kyiv who have accepted appointments to the Rada by Petro Poroshenko’s political machine– Mustafa Djemilev and Refat Chubarov—are “leaders” of Crimean Tatars. They say the two represent the viewpoints of only a small section of Tatars. The two figures have been denied entry to Crimea since the secession referendum of March 2014 because they refused to renounce inciting civil war on the peninsula.
Read also:
State of emergency in Crimea after right-wing extremists in Ukraine blow up electricity lines to the peninsula, by Roger Annis, Nov 25, 2015
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Trans ‘milk’ as good as the real thing – NHS
RT | February 18, 2024
The drug-induced nipple secretions of trans women are as good as mothers’ breast milk for babies, the University of Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust claimed in a letter to campaigners made public in a report by British think tank the Policy Exchange on Sunday.
The healthcare trust’s medical director, Rachel James, argued that the off-label prescription drug cocktail men transitioning to female take in order to produce milk was “similar to the natural hormones which encourage lactation to develop when the baby is newly born.”
“The evidence which is available demonstrates that the milk is comparable to that produced following the birth of a baby,” James wrote in the letter, sent to Children of Transitioners last August.
Biological men who wish to lactate must first take hormones to grow milk glands and then take high doses of either domperidone or metoclopramide to stimulate milk production. Neither drug is approved for this use, though they are occasionally prescribed off-label to biological women who have trouble lactating.
However, domperidone’s own manufacturer, Janssen, warns patients the drug “may cause unwanted side effects affecting the heart in a breastfed baby” and “should be used during breastfeeding only if your physician considers this clearly necessary.” … continue
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