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US-liberated Raqqa: The UN saw destruction there unlike anywhere else in Syria

Paul Robinson
Russia Insider
Fri, 20 Apr 2018 00:00 UTC
RaqqaSyria
© Unknown
Raqqa, Syria
In October last year, troops of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, with the assistance of the US Air Force, finally captured the city of Raqqa, which had previously been the capital of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

On 1 April this year, an inter-agency team from the United Nations (UN) entered Raqqa in what was the first UN visit to the city since ISIS's defeat. According to the website of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR: The UN team entering Raqqa city were shocked by the level of destruction, which exceeded anything they had ever seen before. A cascade of rubble lies along the streets with hardly a single building intact. It's worth repeating some of that again. The UN team found a level of destruction, which exceeded anything they had ever seen before.


Comment: We have a question for armchair analysts: are you not actually paying attention to the war in Syria, beyond what the western media reports about it?

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Star of David

Tel Aviv: Thousands rally to protect Israel from becoming a 'Netanyahu state'


RT
Sun, 22 Apr 2018 03:09 UTC
BIBI
© LA Times
"Yahu!"
Alarmed and angered by a draft bill that would strip Israel's Supreme Court of the power to overturn laws, thousands of activists have staged a protest in Tel Aviv, accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of a power grab.

Chanting slogans against the Israeli PM, hundreds of anti-government activists marched down the streets of Tel Aviv holding banners. "'Bibi take your hands off the supreme court', 'Corrupted, you don't have a mandate' and 'Bibi, organized crime, leave the supreme court alone'," they shouted.

The Knesset's next parliamentary session, which starts on April 29, will debate and vote on the bill, designed to curb the High Court's power. If adopted, the bill, based on the so-called 'British model', would allow only the Israeli parliament to cancel or change laws, limiting the Supreme Court's power to override the Knesset in approving legislation that could
potentially be unconstitutional.



Comment: Pathocracy: a form of government in which individuals with personality disorders (especially psychopathy) occupy positions of power and influence. The result is a totalitarian system characterized by a government turned against its own people.

That Israel is at this point, a vote away from an irreversible power grab, reveals the extent and prevalence of psychopathy at the highest levels of government and its disregard for the protection of the people it represents.

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Attention

The lost Windrush generation and zionification of the British Sphere

Gilad Atzmon
gilad.co.uk
Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00 UTC
Windrush Generation
© Unknown
Windrush Generation
It shouldn't take us by surprise when a country that drops bombs on Syria on behalf of Israel engages in Israeli style racist anti immigration anti black policies.

A lot has been written about the deep cultural and spiritual bonds between Britain and Zionism. Some have cited the roots of English Christian Zionism. Others point to the Balfour Declaration and its historical background. In 1956 Britain and France joined forces with Israel in an attempt to seize the Suez Canal.

By the early 2000s it was hard to determine where Israel ended and Britain began. Occasionally it seemed the BBC had been reduced to an Israeli propaganda unit. The once respected British newspaper morphed into a Guardian of Judea. Murdoch's Sky News didn't leave much room for speculation either.

Last week Sky News crudely cut off Jonathan Shaw, the former commander of the British Armed Forces, the second that Shaw went 'off script' and suggested that the Syrian regime might not have been behind the Douma 'gas attack.' The next day we learned that the British government had again engaged in a Zion-led immoral interventionist assault on an Arab country based on what seems to be just another false WMD claim.


Comment: Explanation: Britain is a mess.

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Footprints

Ecuador deploys 10K troops to Colombian border, citizens protest for peace


teleSUR
Fri, 20 Apr 2018 00:00 UTC
Ecuadorian troops
© www.telesurtv;net
Ecuadorian Troops on border with Colombia
Hundreds have called for the rescue of two people recently kidnapped in the region and for the bodies of the two murdered El Comercio journalists and their driver to be returned.

Hundreds of Ecuadoreans marched for peace Thursday as the country continues to come to terms with the kidnapping and murder of two journalists and a driver from local newspaper El Comercio. The demonstrations took place amid the deployment of 10,000 Ecuadorean troops to the Ecuador-Colombia border in the northern province of Esmeraldas in response to the attacks of recent months.

Admiral John Merlo, the sole commander of the border zone operations, announced the details relating to the deployment Thursday. According to Admiral Merlo, the increased military and police presence has "lowered the intensity" of criminal activity in the last few days. It did not, however, prevent the kidnapping of two people in the area.
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Bandaid

Trump mulls pardon of KO boxing legend Jack Johnson, first African American heavyweight boxing champion of the world


RT
Sun, 22 Apr 2018 14:17 UTC
Jack Johnson
© A. E. French/Hulton Archive / Getty Images
Full-length portrait of American boxer Jack Johnson.
US President Donald Trump may overturn a century-old conviction which saw the first African American heavyweight boxing champion of the world who many believe was locked up on a racially-motivated charge.

At 6ft (1.82 meters) in height and weighing over 200 pounds (91 kg), Jack Johnson, known as the Galveston Giant, pummeled his way past Jim Crow-era barriers to win the heavyweight boxing title in 1908. The champion later spent one year in prison for transporting a white woman across state lines, in a case that was largely seen to be racially motivated.

Trump has now said that after a call by Hollywood actor Sylvester Stallone, he is considering pardoning Johnson, convicted of breaking a law that was amended more than 50 years later for being too vague.

The Galveston Giant

The Texas brawler, who typically picked off opponents as they tired, claimed a resounding victory in the "Fight of the Century," a bout against former champion James Jeffries, amid huge racial tensions.
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Handcuffs

'Smallville' actress arrested in connection with Nxivm sex cult

Priscilla DeGregory and Ruth Brown
Page Six
Fri, 20 Apr 2018 16:35 UTC
Allison Mack
© Getty Images for Amazon Studios
Allison Mack
"Smallville" actress Allison Mack has been arrested for her alleged role in the notorious upstate sex slave cult Nxivm, federal prosecutors announced Friday.

She is expected to appear Friday in Brooklyn federal court on charges of sex trafficking and forced labor.

The bust comes less than a month after Nxivm leader Keith Raniere was collared on the same charges at a luxury villa in Mexico - where they had been hiding out since one of their "slaves" in October went public with her experience in the cult.

Mack, 35, was Raniere's direct "slave" and had a sexual relationship with him - but also acted as a "master" to other slaves, who were forced to have sex with Raniere and get his initials burned into their pubic region with a cauterizing pen, according to the criminal complaint.

Comment: More on NXIVM:

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Bomb

Kabul suicide bomber strikes voter registration center; 57 dead


RT
Sun, 22 Apr 2018 16:22 UTC
kabul bombing
© REUTERS/Omar Sobhani / Reuters
Afghan men inspect the site of a suicide bomb blast in Kabul on April 22, 2018.
A suicide bombing in Kabul has left at least 57 dead and over 100 wounded, according to a spokesperson for the public health ministry. The attacker detonated an IED inside a voter registration and ID center, police say.

The explosion happened at about 10am local time in Dasht-e-Barchi. According to eyewitnesses, the death toll is thought to be higher than officials initially indicated, TOLO News reports. Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) has claimed responsibility for the attack, according to its affiliated Amaq website.

Afghanistan is holding elections in October and voter registration centers have been set up around the country. Sunday's blast is the latest attack on election centers over the past week. On Tuesday, armed men kidnapped three employees and two police officers at a center in Ghor.
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Newspaper

Ukraine's far-right celebrates the Nazi SS but Western journalists are more concerned with how Russia will cover the event


RT
Sun, 22 Apr 2018 16:14 UTC
neonazi display
© 8_hammer_8 / Instagram
A notorious Waffen SS division is celebrated with an exhibition of swastikas, Nazi attire and pictures in Lvov, Ukraine, but for some Western journalists, the greater concern is how the Russian media will cover it.

As neo-Nazi extremists prepared to celebrate Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20 across Germany, Ukraine's far-right set up an open-air exhibition in the city of Lvov to mark the 75th anniversary of the formation of the 1st Galician Division, a notoriously cruel SS fighting force made up predominantly of Ukrainian volunteers.

Dressed in Nazi uniforms of the era, local right-wing extremists organized a display of photographs rarely seen in public before. Nazi-made weapons, vehicles, ammunition, and personal items pertaining to the Galician Division were also exhibited. The event, which will run until May 6, was opened as a precursor to a neo-Nazi march which organizers plan to hold on April 28.

But for some in the Western mainstream media, there's something more disturbing than a celebration of an SS unit that killed hundreds of Polish civilians in the villages of Huta Pieniacka and Pidkamin in 1944.
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Star of David

Palestine to seek UN protection, says investigation into 'Israeli crimes' in Gaza will prove need

Frank Sellers
The Duran
Sun, 22 Apr 2018 15:25 UTC
Gaza land day march return protest
Washington cheers on the Jewish state as it shoots down demonstrators, crickets from human rights inspectors

As Palestinians in Gaza continue their 'March of Return' at the Gaza border, the Palestinian leadership will seek international protection for Palestinians who are 'under Israeli occupation'.

The March began three weeks ago, and has seen dozens killed and thousands more injured by cross border fire from Israelis, who are said be using the banned munition of explosive rounds.

The demonstrations are a six week long protest to conclude on the 15th of May, which marks the 70th anniversary of the Jewish state.

The protesters are seeking the 'right of return' for Palestinian refugees to be able to return to their historical homes in Palestine, from which they were driven in 1948 in order to make way for the new Jewish state of Israel.

Comment: The US will continue its decades-long protection of that "sh*tty little country at the UN, so Israel doesn't feel the need to make any more than token answers to the outrage of the world at large, and then re-write the rules to suit themselves.

Palestinians die not because Israeli soldiers disobey orders but because they follow them
The Israeli army has made it quite clear that top brass orders for snipers allow live ammunition to be directed at Palestinian protesters designated "central instigators", as well as those who simply get within 100 metres of the Gaza Strip perimeter fence, even if they are unarmed.

These open-fire regulations are in blatant contravention of international human rights law, as has been repeatedly pointed out. The Israeli authorities' approach, however, is straight forward: develop one's own "interpretation" of the law which permits what is impermissible.

[...]

Israel's response, however, was not one of serious internal scrutiny, or accountability for violations of international law, but rather to argue that the laws themselves are the problem.

[...]

More than half a century into a military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israeli authorities are constantly looking for ways to justify policies of discrimination, exclusion and brutality, including through reinterpretations, even if not revisions, to international law.

"If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it," a former head of the international law division in the Israeli Military Advocate General's Office once candidly put it. "The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries...International law progresses through violations."


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Propaganda

Propaganda rag New York Times: 'Is Russia Sponsoring Terrorism?'


stephenlendman.org
Sat, 21 Apr 2018 14:46 UTC
new york times propaganda
The Russophobic NYT featured neocon hardline Senator Cory Gardner disgracefully asking: "Is Russia Sponsoring Terrorism?"

You can't make this stuff up. The self-styled newspaper of record gives yellow journalism a bad name - featuring Big Lies, suppressing hard truths on major issues from its editions.

Gardner's hate-mongering/trash talk op-ed turned truth on its head, accusing Putin of "causing grievous harm to international peace and stability."

Let's see if I've got this straight. The greatest serial aggressor in world history, America, is responsible for more mass casualties and vast destruction over a longer duration than any previous or current rogue state.

The Russian Federation never attacked another country, never waged an aggressive war. Under Putin, it's the world's leading peace and stability champion.

Its agenda is polar opposite US ruthlessness, its permanent war on humanity, its rage for global dominance, no matter the human cost.

Comment: The New York Times has by now well established itself as a propaganda rag for the imperialists and it would be stretch to call them 'news' anymore. See also:

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