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Israel's new government will deepen rifts, not heal them

Mansour Abbas (R) signs a coalition agreement with Yair Lapid
© AFP/United Arab List
Mansour Abbas (R) signs a coalition agreement with Yair Lapid (L) and Naftali Bennett in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, on 2 June 2021
The symbolic moment of a Palestinian party sitting in government alongside settler leaders will turn sour all too soon

The photo was unprecedented. It showed Mansour Abbas, leader of an Islamist party for Palestinians in Israel, signing an agreement on Wednesday night to sit in a "government of change" alongside settler leader Naftali Bennett.

Caretaker Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will fervently try to find a way to break up the coalition in the next few days, before a parliamentary vote takes place. But if he fails, it will be the first time in the country's 73-year history that a party led by a Palestinian citizen has joined - or been allowed to join - an Israeli government.

Aside from the symbolism of the moment, there are no other grounds for celebration. In fact, the involvement of Abbas's four-member United Arab List in shoring up a majority for a government led by Bennett and Yair Lapid is almost certain to lead to a further deterioration in majority-minority relations.

There will be a reckoning for this moment, and Israel's 1.8 million Palestinian citizens, a fifth of the population, will once again pay the heaviest price.

Comment: See also: Israel's 'change government' means the oppression of Palestinians is certain to get a whole lot WORSE


V

Trump promises GOP will retake white house 'sooner than you think' in fundraising video

Donald Trump
Former president reportedly believes he and GOP senators who lost in 2020 will be reinstated come August

Former President Donald Trump said in a GOP fundraising video that the Republican Party is going to "take back the Senate, take back the House, we're going to take back the White House - and sooner than you think." He added without hesitation, "It's going to be really something special."

The 34-second, grainy video was posted on the National Republican Senatorial Committee's YouTube channel on Friday.
"The love and the affection and the respect that you've given all of us, it's really important," he went on. "The Republican Party is stronger than it's ever been, and it's going to be a lot stronger than it is right now. We're going to turn it around; we're going to turn it around fast."

Comment: See also:


Megaphone

McCarthy calls for Fauci to be ousted: 'Let's find a person we can trust.'

kevin mccarthy
House GOP leader's demand comes after email release created new credibility issues for top doc.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy declared Saturday he has lost confidence in infectious disease chief Anthony Fauci and believes he should be replaced, becoming the highest ranking official to call for the top doctor's ouster.

"The American people don't have trust in Dr. Fauci," McCarthy said during an interview on the Breitbart News Saturday radio show. "Let's find a person we can trust. Take politics aside, I mean we're talking about American lives here."

Comment: See also:


Alarm Clock

Israel security chief warns of 'Capitol-Style' violence amid internal political turbulence, coalition forms gov't without Netanyahu

israel parliament
© REUTERS / AMIR COHEN
On 2 June, Israeli opposition leaders announced they had managed to set up a broad coalition that may oust current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in power for 12 consecutive years.

The head of the Israeli security agency Shin Bet, Nadav Argaman, on Saturday expressed concerns about a possible "serious radicalisation in incitement and discourse on social media" in Israel that can cause unrest, prompting comparisons with the Capitol mayhem in Washington, DC, on 6 January.

On 6 January, a large group of Donald Trump's supporters besieged the US Capitol to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden's win in the 2020 presidential election, which the former POTUS blasted as "rigged". US House Democrats impeached Trump for "inciting insurrection", but he was eventually acquitted in the Senate.


Comment: See also:


Propaganda

'Smeared, shut out & shadow-banned': The inside story of how RT was branded a 'foreign agent' by free press-loving US officials

RT Russia today studio
© Sputnik
FILE PHOTO. The RT TV-channel at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russia.
When RT was forced to register as a 'foreign agent' by American authorities four years ago, it sparked a chain of events that saw the network banned from press events, cut off from potential partners and delisted on social media.

Speaking at a roundtable on press freedom at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Thursday, Anna Belkina, RT's deputy editor in chief, set out how American legislation was limiting the multinational news agency's work in the country, which bills itself as the leader of the free world, and elsewhere.

Her comments came as foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova defended Russia's own laws that require domestic outlets funded from overseas to display their status to the public. The move again hit headlines this week, after Dutch state-funded VTimes, labelled just weeks ago as a 'foreign agent,' folded, citing the risk of falling foul of the rules and potential prosecution of its staff.

Comment: It's not just the US that is going after foreign broadcasters that expose the lies of the West's propaganda media:


Attention

COVID disinformation and media suppression of experts

Covid Lies
© Nutritruth Org

Ask yourself why public health authorities would suppress this information:


'We Made a Big Mistake' — COVID Vaccine Spike Protein Travels From Injection Site, Can Cause Organ Damage

Or this information:

Revolver Series, Part One: Exposing the Media's Plot to Hide Record Vaccine Deaths and Deceive Americans

Revolver Investigation, Part Two: Exposing the Media's Plot to Hide Record Vaccine Deaths and Deceive Americans

Why would Big Pharma hire "fact checkers" to discredit safe successful treatment of Covid with HCQ and Ivermectin? Both have been used for decades. They are so safe that in civilized countries not controlled by Big Pharma and their medical bureaucrats, the drugs are available over the counter. In Africa HCQ is known as "Sunday medicine." In malaria areas it is taken every Sunday by everyone. Yet American public health authorities and their shills said you would have a heart attack if you took it, and a majority of American doctors fell for the obvious lie.

Bullseye

FBI 'ambushed' by report of high-ranking Chinese defector with knowledge of bioweapons programs

Wray
© Joshua Roberts/Pool via AP
FBI Director Christopher Wray
FBI Director Christopher Wray was reportedly blind-sided by information that a "high-ranking" Chinese defector to the U.S. with knowledge of the nation's bioweapons was recently obtained by the Defense Intelligence Agency and kept hidden from the agency for three months.

The massive news development was reported by Adam Housley on Friday:
"Being told the increased pressure on China in recent days is due to a defector with intimate knowledge. In fact, Wray didn't know right away because they wanted to make sure they got all they needed before telling him. Also...US intelligence believes China is trying to produce variants that suggest it came from bats to cover up that it originally came from a lab. The belief is still that it escaped accidentally, but was allowed to spread."
RedState's Jen Van Laar contacted a source that corroborates that FBI Director Christopher Wray was "ambushed" with news of the defector, and furthermore, the CIA was kept in the dark. The precautions were reportedly carried out to insulate the defector from suspected Chinese moles in those security agencies. Alternative explanations would be that the DIA wanted inter-agency credit for the Chinese defector's intelligence or there was fear that political operators in rival security agencies would bury the valuable intel.

In any event, the Chinese defector's prospectively sweeping knowledge of Chinese weapons systems, including bioweapons systems, is ratcheting up pressure on security officials to determine if there was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which lead to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Comment: Must be something very interesting about this case and its connections if it is able to blindside the FBI and CIA.



Arrow Up

Putin: First stretch of Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline completed on Friday morning, despite vehement US objections

NordStream2 guys Putin
© Reuters/Dmitri Lovetsky/Getty Images/Jens Büttner
Russian President Vladimir Putin • Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lubmin, Germany
Work on the first core section of a controversial underwater energy pipeline linking Siberia's gas fields to Western Europe has already been completed, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday in a surprise announcement.

Speaking at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Putin said:
"I am pleased to say that today, just two-and-a-half-hours ago, we have completed laying the pipes for the first section of Nord Stream 2, and works are advancing on the second segment. The gas pipeline, including the segment under the sea, has already been completed. There are two sections, from the German side and the Russian side - they have to be welded - and then it will be finished."
The base station, he revealed, is "ready" to pump gas into Nord Stream 2 and begin supplying consumers in compliance with tough environmental standards.
"We are willing to further implement high-tech projects like this with our European partners and partners elsewhere. We hope that the paradigm of mutual use and mutual benefit will always prevail over all kinds of artificial barriers from the current political climate."

Comment: Exemplified by US sanctions on Nord Stream 2, Putin says US threats resemble the Soviet Union's fatal mistakes:
Russian President Vladimir Putin said the United States was wrong to think that it is "powerful enough" to get away with threatening other countries, a mistake, he said, that led to the downfall of the former Soviet Union.

Putin made the comments during a press briefing late on Friday as he spoke about U.S. sanctions against Moscow, according to Russia's news agency TASS. He was speaking just days before a meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden whose cabinet in April imposed a broad array of sanctions on Russia, including curbs to its sovereign debt market.
"We hear threats from the Congress, from other sources. It is all done within the context of the United States' domestic political process. The people who do this, they probably assume that the United States has such economic, military and political might that it can get away with that. It is no big deal, that is what they think."
Putin said such behaviour reminded him of the Soviet Union.
"The problem with empires is that they think they are powerful enough to make some mistakes. We will buy these (people), bully them, make a deal with them, give necklaces to them, threaten them with battleships. And this will solve all the problems. But problems accumulate. A moment comes when they cannot be solved anymore."
Biden and Putin will meet in Geneva on June 16, the White House and the Kremlin have said, to discuss "the full range of pressing issues", according to Washington.
See also:


Umbrella

Tech giants back Biden's plan to charge them more tax, but loopholes are the industry's ace in the hole

Biden AmazonFacebook
© Reuters/Thilo Schmuelgen/Kevin Lamarque/Regis Duvignau
US President Joe Biden • Amazon • Facebook
The US has promised that Amazon and Facebook will fall under the new global tax rules agreed by the G7 nations. But even in countries with rock-bottom rates, megacorporations have paid effectively nothing for years.

Finance ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) countries agreed on Saturday to implement a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15%. Bringing in this minimum rate is a goal of the US President Joe Biden administration, and while it will need to be debated by the G20 and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) later this year, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen hailed the agreement as "a historic achievement."

The agreement won't directly affect companies paying tax in the G7 nations, all of which levy corporate taxes at or above 15% already. It will, however, affect firms headquartered offshore, particularly American tech companies that can easily assign intellectual property rights to their foreign subsidiaries and dodge the 21% demanded by Uncle Sam.

The tech giants "will qualify by almost any definition" for the planned tax regime, Yellen said on Saturday, referring to Amazon and Facebook in particular.

Comment: See also:


Stop

Justice Department to no longer seize reporters' records for leak probes

DOJ building
© DOJ file photo
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Saturday that it will no longer secretly obtain reporters' private phone records as part of investigations into leaks, confirming a shift in policy under the Biden administration.

The move marks a reversal of a longstanding government practice to try to uncover reporters' sources, efforts that news organizations have decried. It comes amid a flood of criticism over a push by the DOJ during both the Trump and Biden administrations to obtain communications logs from reporters of various outlets. DOJ spokesperson Anthony Coley said Saturday:
"DOJ has now completed a review to determine all instances in which the Department had pending compulsory requests from reporters in leak investigations. All reporters involved have now been notified.

"Going forward, consistent with the President's direction, this Department of Justice — in a change to its longstanding practice--will not seek compulsory legal process in leak investigations to obtain source information from members of the news media doing their jobs.

"The Department strongly values a free press, protecting First Amendment values, and is committed to taking all appropriate steps to ensure the independence of journalists."
The statement comes after it was revealed that a gag order was placed on executives and reporters for The New York Times over efforts by the DOJ to obtain communications logs from some of its reporters. The gag order was reportedly put in place to keep the investigation from being publicized.