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Flashback Supreme Court rejects 'Israeli' nationality status

Tia Goldenberg
The Times of Israel
Fri, 04 Oct 2013 03:09 UTC
2 men israel
© AP/Greg MarinovichOrthodox man follows Palestinian man on a street in walled Old City of Jerusalem
June 12, 1997
Israel's population registry lists a slew of "nationalities" and ethnicities, among them Jew, Arab, Druse and more. But one word is conspicuously absent from the list: Israeli.

Residents cannot identify themselves as Israelis in the national registry because the move could have far-reaching consequences for the country's Jewish character, the Israeli Supreme Court wrote in documents obtained Thursday.

The ruling was a response to a demand by 21 Israelis, most of whom are officially registered as Jews, that the court decide whether they can be listed as Israeli in the registry. The group had argued that without a secular Israeli identity, Israeli policies will favor Jews and discriminate against minorities.

In its 26-page ruling, the court explained that doing so would have "weighty implications" on the State of Israel and could pose a danger to Israel's founding principle: to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people.

The decision touches on a central debate in Israel, which considers itself both Jewish and democratic yet has struggled to balance both. The country has not officially recognized an Israeli nationality.

Comment: The road not taken: Identification choices offered a turning point that might have changed everything.

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SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: MindMatters: Woke Revolution, Mass Hysteria, and the Fourth Turning

Harrison Koehli and Adam Daniels
Sott.net
Mon, 24 May 2021 00:00 UTC
good times
The 2010s and 2020s are a crisis point in Western societies - a time that has the potential to give birth to something better than what came before, or something much, much worse. Today on MindMatters we're going cyclical. The hysteroidal cycle from Lobaczewski's Political Ponerology, generational theory from Strauss and Howe's The Fourth Turning. And along the way, we take a gander at some of the sparks of mass hysteria in recent years, culled from James Lindsay's article, "The Rise of the Woke Cultural Revolution."


MindMatters on LBRY

Running Time: 01:00:18

Download: MP3 — 56.7 MB


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Muffin

Prehistoric farmers in Switzerland contributed to the domestication of the opium poppy


University of Basel
Sat, 22 May 2021 20:30 UTC
poppy
© Raül Soteras, AgriChange ProjectFlower and capsule of opium poppy.
Fields of opium poppies once bloomed where the Zurich Opera House underground garage now stands. Through a new analysis of archaeological seeds, researchers at the University of Basel have been able to bolster the hypothesis that prehistoric farmers throughout the Alps participated in domesticating the opium poppy. Although known today primarily as the source of opium and opiates, the poppy is also a valuable food and medicinal plant. Its seeds can be used to make porridge and cooking oil. Unlike all other previously domesticated crops, which are assumed to have been domesticated in south-west Asia (various grains, legumes and flax), experts believe that the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum L.) was domesticated in the western Mediterranean, where its presumed progenitor Papaver somniferum subsp. setigerum (DC.) Arcang is native and still grows wild today.

Comment: See also:

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War Whore

In 1958 US considered nuclear strike on China over Taiwan, classified docs show

Carlos Hamann
Hong Kong Free Press
Sat, 22 May 2021 23:53 UTC
Ellsberg
© WikicommonsDaniel Ellsberg.
US military planners pushed for nuclear strikes on mainland China in 1958 to protect Taiwan from an invasion by Communist forces, classified documents posted online by Daniel Ellsberg of "Pentagon Papers" fame show.

US planners also assumed that the Soviet Union would aid China and retaliate with nuclear weapons — a price they deemed worth paying to protect Taiwan, according to the document, first reported by the New York Times.


Comment: A price they deemed worth paying... what about the rest of the world? Would they have considered it worthwhile? Was it worthwhile in Hiroshima and Nagaski, Japan? 70 years ago the US 'elite' murdered 500,000 Japanese civilians to 'send a warning' to Russia


Former military analyst Ellsberg posted online the classified portion of a top-secret document on the crisis that had been only partially declassified in 1975.

Ellsberg, now 90, is famous for his 1971 leak to US media of a top-secret Pentagon study on the Vietnam war known as the Pentagon Papers.

Comment: And some would try and have us believe that it's China that's a threat to world stability: Also check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Untold History of the U.S. - Interview with Peter Kuznick

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Apple Red

Fruit crops reached the eastern peninsula almost 3,000 years ago, urbanization followed

Asociacion RUVID
Phys.org
Sat, 22 May 2021 20:30 UTC
fruit seed
© Asociacion RUVID
Guillem Pérez Jordà and Salvador Pardo Gordó, researchers from the Department of Prehistory, Archaeology and Ancient History of the University of València, sign an article in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports that looks into the arrival of fruit crops to the Iberian Peninsula by studying archaeobotanical remains. It is estimated that the cultivation of these species began in the current Valencian Community about 3,000 years ago, coinciding with significant social and economic development.

In places like Fonteta (Guardamar del Segura), Barranc de Beniteixir (Piles), Peña Negra (Crevillent) or L'Alt de Benimaquia (Dénia), it has been possible to date the cultivation of fruittrees such as grapes (Vinis vinifera), olive trees (Olea europaea) or the pomegranate (Punica granatum), among others, about 3,000 years ago. This new form of agriculture allowed the economic and cultural exchange of the peoples of the eastern peninsula with others of eastern origin who founded colonies on these coasts, such as the Phoenicians.

Comment: See also:

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Colosseum

Minoan language Linear A Linked to Linear B in groundbreaking new research

Patricia Claus
Greek Reporter
Thu, 13 May 2021 12:00 UTC
Knossos
© Pat Scrap/PixabayPalace of Knossos, Crete.
The Minoan language known as "Linear A" may finally be deciphered with the help of the internet, which can be used to uncover previously-hidden links to the much-better understood Linear B language, which developed later in the prehistoric period.

The puzzle of Linear A has tormented linguists for many decades, as they attempted to link it somehow to Linear B, which was translated successfully for the first time in the 1950s. Linear B was used on the Greek mainland and Crete 50-150 years later than Linear A.

Comment: See also:

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Nuke

New insight into radioactive particles at Australian nuke test site

Ellen Phiddian
Cosmos Magazine
Fri, 21 May 2021 19:10 UTC
Nuke Test
© Cosmos MagazineA nuclear test in Nevada, US. Australia hosted a number of nuclear tests, particularly from the British at Maralinga.
In the 1950s and 60s, hundreds of nuclear tests were carried out at Maralinga in western South Australia, releasing radioactive plutonium and uranium particles that can still be detected in the area today.

A study from Monash University in Melbourne has now examined plutonium particles from the blasts to find they're more complicated than initially thought. This has implications for how they behave in the environment, although these implications are still unclear.

"The British detonated nine nuclear bombs and conducted hundreds of nuclear tests in outback South Australia between 1953 and 1963," says Megan Cook, a PhD student at Monash and lead author on a paper describing the research, published in Scientific Reports.

"The resulting radioactive contamination and cover-up continues to haunt us."

But the effects of radioactive particles in the environment are still poorly understood. Study of these particles is "one of those things we don't have an international best practice for," Cook says.
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Star of David

How the UK military supports Israel's combat operations against Palestinians

Mark Curtis
Declassified UK
Sat, 15 May 2021 00:00 UTC
Gen. Nick Carter
© unknownUK's chief of defense staff, General Sir Nick Carter on visit to Israel, April 2019
As violence escalates in Israel and Palestine, we take readers through the expanding military relationship between the UK and Israel, which has been erased by the British media. The deepening alliance involves UK military training of Israel for combat, joint exercises, arms deals, as well as intelligence cooperation.

The UK's new military strategy, released in March, states clearly that "Israel remains a key strategic partner".

Months before the importance of the relationship was spelled out, the military chiefs of the two states signed a cooperation agreement "to formalise and enhance our defence relationship, and support the growing Israel-UK partnership", according to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Following the agreement, Britain's ambassador to Israel, Neil Wigan, tweeted he was "delighted", saying it would "further deepen our military cooperation".

What is in that agreement is secret and has not even been formally acknowledged by the UK government. But Israel lobby group Bicom (the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre) has written that the two militaries are "integrating their multi-domain capabilities in maritime, land, air, space, and cyber and electromagnetic".

This is an extraordinary development and follows recent visits to Israel by two UK chiefs of the defence staff, General Sir Nick Carter in 2019 and his predecessor, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach in 2017.
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Info

Entire genome from Peştera Muierii 1 sequenced


Phys Org
Thu, 20 May 2021 18:52 UTC
skull of Peştera Muierii 1
© Mattias JakobssonThe skull of Peştera Muierii 1, which entire genome is now successfully sequenced.
For the first time, researchers have successfully sequenced the entire genome from the skull of Peştera Muierii 1, a woman who lived in today's Romania 35,000 years ago. Her high genetic diversity shows that the out of Africa migration was not the great bottleneck in human development but rather this occurred during and after the most recent Ice Age. This is the finding of a new study led by Mattias Jakobsson at Uppsala University and being published in Current Biology.

"She is a bit more like modern-day Europeans than the individuals in Europe 5,000 years earlier, but the difference is much less than we had thought. We can see that she is not a direct ancestor of modern Europeans, but she is a predecessor of the hunter-gathers that lived in Europe until the end of the last Ice Age," says Mattias Jakobsson, professor at the Department of Organismal Biology at Uppsala University and the head of the study.

Very few complete genomes older than 30,000 years have been sequenced. Now that the research team can read the entire genome from Peştera Muierii 1, they can see similarities with modern humans in Europe while also seeing that she is not a direct ancestor. In previous studies, other researchers observed that the shape of her cranium has similarities with both modern humans and Neanderthals. For this reason, they assumed that she had a greater fraction of Neanderthal ancestry than other contemporaries, making her stand out from the norm. But the genetic analysis in the current study shows that she has the same low level of Neanderthal DNA as most other individuals living in her time. Compared with the remains from some individuals who lived 5,000 years earlier, such as Peştera Oase 1, she had only half as much Neanderthal ancestry.
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Fire

The real 'malign influence'? How US helped destroy democracy, turn Ukraine's Maidan dream into a nightmare for its people

Glenn Diesen
RT
Tue, 18 May 2021 07:39 UTC
Maidan rally
© Sputnik/StringerKiev's memorial rally dedicated to 7th anniversary of Maidan revolution.
The arrest of Viktor Medvedchuk, the leader of Kiev's largest opposition party, shows US interference in Ukraine is all about winning a standoff with Russia and has nothing to do with promoting democracy or advancing human rights.

America often likes to insist that its approach to foreign policy is one of championing liberty and defeating authoritarianism. In the minds of many of Washington's officials, US hegemony is synonymous with the cause of liberal democracy. They have done an excellent job in framing the Ukraine crisis through this lens - but is it rooted in reality?

The narrative put forward by Western commentators and politicians is that Kiev's aspirations for democracy and freedom necessitate its turn toward the EU and US, but are continuously undermined by Moscow's belligerence and desire to assert imperial-style control over the nation. The West, supposedly motivated solely by the altruistic values of democracy and human rights, "stands by" the country against the Russian aggressor.

Once the audience believes that premise, reporting on all events in the region ends up being seen in that light alone. However, to what extent does the US actually support Ukraine? Washington has gone against the democratic will and interest of its citizens at every turn, leaving it profoundly divided, with American oversight only granting political legitimacy to a certain group of Ukrainians.
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