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Star of David

Israel's assault on Gaza a huge economic gamble

Israel econ gamble
© Unknown
The Gaza War and Carnage: Did Israel calculate the economic losses of its offensive?
The military costs of Israel's onslaught on the Gaza Strip, from the price of the missiles launched from the Iron Dome missile defense system to other military hardware, should be compared with the military cost for the Palestinian resistance factions. We shall also take a look at how the economy of Israel has been ravaged due to the war.

Israel was just recovering from the COVID 19 pandemic. It had mass vaccinations underway and was hoping to get its economy going again. Did investments in Israel fall? What about business closures? These are some things which Israel may have neglected to factor into its calculations of the cost of war.

There has been a call from the BDS movement, Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, to boycott firms complicit in Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine land. Did their voices get heard, did the international community react? These are some things that we shall delve into.

It was a brutal war. Israel bombed Gaza. There were civilian casualties on both sides; on the Israeli side, 11 were killed; on the Palestinian side, about 300. It was disproportionate. But another area was also uneven, the number of rockets fired from the Gaza Strip.

Over 4000 Palestinian missiles were sent deep into the occupied territories, disrupting the lives of Israeli citizens and closing businesses across the occupied territories.

Comment: The War on Gaza was Netanyahu's 'Hail Mary' pass to reelection. Instead it took down the candidate as part of the cost and carnage.

See also:


Snakes in Suits

Oblivious to hypocrisy, 'democracy scholars' want Biden and Dems to strong-arm election reform through Congress

Racine election line
© Wisconsin Spotlight
Racine, Wisconsin election line
A collection of 100 "scholars of democracy" have warned that the Republican Party is threatening democracy itself in the US. Ironically, they demand that the Democratic Party fix this by trampling over its opposition.

In a "statement of concern" published on Monday, these "scholars" - political science, government, and journalism professors from American universities - warn that Republican-controlled state legislatures "are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections."

These include Texas, where a bill will likely pass that would allow more observers into polling places, criminalize the mailing of unsolicited ballots, and prohibit ballot drop boxes - the latter of which have been associated with so-called "ballot harvesting." The bill would also restrict after-hours voting, purge voter rolls of dead or inactive voters, and add more ID requirements for absentee ballots.

Republicans say these measures tighten security and prevent fraud. Democrats say they're racist. The scholars who penned Monday's letter are in agreement, and compared Republican talking points about protecting the "purity" of the vote to "arguments widely used across the Jim Crow South as reasons for restricting the Black vote."

Gold Bar

Going for gold: Russia to eliminate US dollar from sovereign wealth fund this month amid warning of politics sabotaging currency

gold reserves
© Getty Images/Pierre Perrin
Gold Reserves
Russia's sovereign wealth fund will take a punt on gold and slash $40 billion of US currency entirely out of its investment portfolio amid growing tensions with Washington, the country's finance minister announced on Thursday.

Anton Siluanov said that the National Wealth Fund would reduce its share of dollars to zero within the next month. Speaking as part of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, he said that the process would be "fast enough" and would mirror a similar move by the country's central bank to reduce assets held in American currency.

Under the plans, the proportion of dollars in the fund will fall from 35% to zero, while assets held in euro and the Chinese yuan will increase to 40% and 30%, respectively. The share of the British pound will halve, from 10% to 5%, while the investment vehicle will buy into gold for the first time, with 20% of its assets to be hedged on the precious metal.

Speaking later on Thursday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov backed the decision, saying that "the de-dollarization process is constant. It is, in fact, now visible to the naked eye." He added that the move away from financial dependence on Washington "is taking place not only in our country, but also in many countries around the world, which have begun to experience concerns about the reliability of the main reserve currency."

Comment: The run to financial shelter has begun. The mad rush is just up the road.


Umbrella

Austrian leader Kurz laments state of EU/Russia relations, claims real peace in Europe can only be achieved if they work together

Kurz
© AFP/Helmut Fohringer
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz
Peace can be achieved in Europe only if the European Union engages in dialogue with Russia and the two entities cooperate together on matters of mutual interest. That's according to Sebastian Kurz, the Chancellor of Austria.

Kurz gave an interview to TASS on Thursday, ahead of his virtual appearance at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Friday, where he will be speaking alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin and Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani.

According to Kurz, despite the wide range of existing disagreements between the EU and Russia, both parties have many topics on which they agree - for example, the fight against climate change or the non-proliferation of weaponry.
"It is obvious that the EU and Russia have clear differences on some issues, such as human rights or the territorial integrity of Ukraine. In the future, we should be able to both openly discuss differences and, at the same time, cooperate in areas of mutual interest. In the end, it is absolutely clear to me that peace in Europe is only possible with Russia, and not against it."
Kurz highlighted Russia's importance to the EU as one of its most important trading partners, noting that about 600 Austrian companies currently operate in the Russian market, providing jobs in both nations.

Star of David

Bye, bye Bibi: Bennett will oust Netanyahu as Israeli PM under reported deal

Yair Lapid, Naftali Bennett and Mansour Abbas

Yair Lapid, Naftali Bennett and Mansour Abbas in image purporting to show them reaching a deal. June 2, 2021.
Right-winger Naftali Bennett is to replace Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel's prime minister under a power-sharing deal announced by centrist Yair Lapid just ahead of a midnight deadline tonight in Israel.

Netanyahu has served as prime minister since 2009, the longest term of any Israeli p.m. He has so far survived a series of four elections in two years as Israeli politics stalemated.

The deal would give Bennett, 49- who has adamantly opposed a Palestinian state, pushed for annexation of West Bank lands, and bragged of killing Arabs — a wide-ranging coalition of political support from Lapid's Yesh Atid party, which has 17 seats in the Israeli parliament, to right-wing New Hope party, a breakaway from Netanyahu's party, to Labor and Meretz on the center-left.

Comment: So Netanyahu is finally gone, hopefully to face all the corruption charges he has managed to dodge for nearly a decade. Will the new government improve the Palestinian situation? Social media doesn't think so. Naftali Bennett may actually be worse, incredible as it may seem.






Eye 2

Gates, Microsoft and Epstein ... The Cover-Up Continues

jeffery Epstein Bill gates

(L) Jeffery Epstein (R) Bill Gates
In early May, the announcement that Bill and Melinda Gates would be divorcing after 27 years of marriage shocked both those that praise and those that loathe the "philanthropic" power couple.

Less than a week after the initial announcement of the divorce, on May 7, the Daily Beast reported that Melinda Gates had allegedly been "deeply troubled" by Bill Gates's relationship with child sex trafficker and intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein. The report suggested that Melinda was a major reason for her husband's decision to distance himself from Epstein around 2014 because of her discomfort with Epstein after they both met him in 2013. That previously unreported meeting had taken place at Epstein's mansion on New York's Upper East Side.

The Daily Beast also revealed that the details of the Gates's divorce had been decided several weeks prior to the official announcement. Then, on May 9, the Wall Street Journal published a report suggesting that the plans for divorce went back even farther, with Melinda having consulted divorce lawyers in 2019. Allegedly, that consultation was made after details of Bill Gates's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein had gained considerable mainstream media attention, including from the New York Times.

Mail

Fauci emails reveal damage control scramble after ZeroHedge spotlights man-made COVID-19 theory

corona cluster
In January, 2020, when the World Health Organization insisted that COVID-19 wasn't transmissible between humans, and Dr. Anthony Fauci said that the risk to the American public from the virus was "low," officials at the National Institutes of Health were scrambling to perform damage control after a controversial - and now withdrawn - study suggested that there were HIV-like 'insertions' included in SARS-CoV-2.

The study, "Uncanny similarity of unique inserts on the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag," posited that segments of the virus's RNA had no relation to other coronaviruses such as SARS, and instead appeared to be closer to HIV.

Comment: There is a lot of evidence that Dr. Fauci and some others in high positions in many institutions and labs around the world are connected to the creation and release of the Covid-19 virus:
The email from Dr. Peter Daszak, President of the EcoHealth Alliance, a group that has extensive ties to the Wuhan lab gain of function research, sent the email to Fauci on April 18, 2020, roughly six weeks after the outbreak had taken hold.

The email states:
"As the Pl of the ROl grant publicly targeted by Fox News reporters at the Presidential press briefing last night, I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

From my perspective, your comments are brave, and coming from your trusted voice, will help dispel the myths being spun around the virus' origins. Once this pandemic's over I look forward thanking you in person and let you know how important your comments are to us all."
Fauci responded to the email the day after, writing
"Peter:

Many thanks for your kind note.

Best Regards,

Tony"
Daszak, who also works for the World Health Organisation, is on record admitting that he was involved with manipulating coronaviruses. Here is a video of him talking in DECEMBER 2019 about how 'good' the viruses are for messing around with in a lab:


The emails with Fauci show that Daszak had already dismissed the lab leak notion nearly a year before that 'investigation' began, and despite other researchers saying it looked potentially engineered.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this is that Daszak was one of the lead "investigators" on the WHO panel tasked with looking into the origins of the pandemic.

Is it any surprise that this guy, whose organization has shoveled at least $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the past few years to play around with coronaviruses inside the lab, determined within 3 hours of visiting the lab in February 2021 that there was 'nothing to see here?

Daszak, like Fauci, has also since denied that there was any gain of function research being conducted at the Wuhan lab and that it wasn't being funded by EcoHealth Alliance or via the NIH with US tax dollars.

These are blatant lies, as there is mountains of evidence that confirms this was exactly the case.

Why would they deny it when it can be so easily proven the research was being conducted?

Another interesting factoid about Daszak is that he was employed as an 'expert fact checker' by Facebook when it was monitoring and removing 'misinformation' about the origins COVID on its platform.

If all of that doesn't scream coverup then what does?
E-mails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request have revealed some critical moments in the early days of the pandemic when Dr. Fauci began demanding information related to gain of function experiments from underlings:
Dated February 1st, one panicked e-mail to NIAID deputy director Hugh Auchincloss stated:
"Hugh,

It is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on. I have a conference call at 7:45 am with Azar. It likely will be over by 8:45 am. Read this paper as well as the e-mail that I will forward to you now. You have tasks today that must be done.

Thanks,

Tony."
Fauci email
The academic paper attached to the e-mail is titled: A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.

It discussed how researchers in the United States and China were manipulating viruses to understand better how they might attach themselves to humans.

The abstract states:
Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.

Per the National Institute for Health, "Gain-of-function (GOF) research involves experimentation that aims or is expected to (and/or, perhaps, actually does) increase the transmissibility and/or virulence of pathogens. Such research, when conducted by responsible scientists, usually aims to improve understanding of disease causing agents, their interaction with human hosts, and/or their potential to cause pandemics. The ultimate objective of such research is to better inform public health and preparedness efforts and/or development of medical countermeasures. Despite these important potential benefits, GOF research (GOFR) can pose risks regarding biosecurity and biosafety."
Just one day later, Fauci receives correspondence claiming that Tedros (of the World Health Organization) and Bernhard [Schwartländer, his cabinet chief] had gone into "conclave." This was presumably to decided on pandemic declarations or travel restrictions. They opted against such things, at the time, while President Trump was attempting to shut the U.S. borders:
FAUCI’S E-MAILS ABOUT TEDROS.

Fauci’s E-mails about Tedros.
In other private emails obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, Fauci advised Obama-era Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell against wearing a mask - even slamming the practice as "not really effective":
Burwell, also the former Director of President Barack Obama's Office of Management and Budget, emailed the National Institue of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director on February 4th, 2020 inquiring about the necessity of wearing a mask for a forthcoming trip and advice on the direction of a donation to China from investor Ray Dalio.
BURWELL EMAIL

Burwell E-mail
The following day, Fauci's response included a declaration that "I do not recommend that you wear a mask," adding that the "typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus."

In full, Fauci's response read:
Sylvia:

Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you. I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a vey low risk location. Your instincts are correct, money is best spent on medical countermeasures such as diagnostics and vaccines.

Safe travels.

Best regards,

Tony
FAUCI EMAIL.

Fauci E-mail.



Star of David

Israel's Lapid informs President Rivlin he has formed a government ousting Netanyahu

Bennett/Lapid
© Reuters/Ronen Zvulun
Yamina party leader Naftali Bennett and Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid
June 2, 2021
By the terms of the Basic Law on Government, the new Israeli coalition government will have rotating offices, with Yamina chairman Naftali Bennett serving as prime minister for two years and Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid as alternate, then they will switch.

Late Wednesday night, just an hour before the deadline, Knesset Opposition Leader Lapid informed Israeli President Reuven Rivlin that he had successfully won a majority of the parliament to his coalition and would establish a government.
Lapid told President Rivlin:
"I give you my word that this government will work in the service of all of Israel's citizens, those that voted for it and those that did not. It will respect its opponents, and will do everything it can to unify and unite all parts of Israeli society."

Star of David

Herzog elected Israel's new president with 87 votes as midnight deadline looms for opposition to oust Netanyahu

Herzog
© Reuters/Ronen Zvulun
President-elect Isaac Herzog and his wife Michal celebrate after a special session of the Knesset whereby Israeli lawmakers elected the new president, at the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in Jerusalem June 2, 2021
Isaac Herzog has been elected Israel's eleventh president, winning a sizeable majority of 87 votes from the Knesset's 120 seats. The vote comes as several parties race to form a new government before midnight.

On Wednesday, Isaac Herzog beat Miriam Peretz, a social activist and prize-winning educator, to win the presidency and succeed Reuven Rivlin when his term ends on July 9. Herzog, who had been touted as the favorite, won 87 votes from the 120 MKs.

Three MKs abstained, three votes were disqualified, and one MK did not vote. Peretz herself won 26 votes.

Herzog will become the first Israeli president to be the son of a president himself. His father, Chaim Herzog, was Israel's sixth president, holding power between 1983 and 1993.

The vote comes as opposition parties draw ever nearer to ousting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has held the post for 12 years. An opposition coalition has been given until midnight on Wednesday to form a new government after Netanyahu himself failed to do so.

Dollar Gold

Israel set to ask the US for another $1 billion in military aid

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosts Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham
© Koby Gideon / GPO
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosts Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem, May 31, 2021
Israel is reportedly about to ask for another $1 billion in military aid from the Biden administration to replenish Iron Dome batteries.

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham says that Israel will ask for another $1 billion in military aid in the United States this week. This request comes just two weeks after the Biden administration approved a $735 million arms sale to the country on top of the $3.8 billion in military aid the U.S. sends to Israel annually.

Graham made these comments on the show Fox and Friends. "There is going to be a request made by the Israelis to the Pentagon on Thursday for $1 billion in aid to replenish Iron Dome batteries," he told the hosts. "It will be a good investment for the American people. I will make sure in the Senate that they get the money."

Graham was in Israel meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Benny Gantz yesterday.


Comment: Wow - AOC is actually correct about something! Too bad this important message had to come mostly from her, but we'll take it.