https://www.waterstones.com/author/robert-cook/435753/page
Contact rj.cook@btinternet.com
March 17th 2024
Appalling Impact of Anglo America On World Peace Since The Bolshevik Russian Revolution In 1917,
Vladimir Putin is wrapping up a trip to China, where his warm ties with President Xi Jinping have led to booming trade and increasing
Comment Why is this such a bad thing given the appalling imnpact of Anglo U.S Global Capitalist Imperialism since the 1917 Russian Revolution which was an outcome of Britain’s first war to block the rise of a phenomonal liberated United Germany ?
Wars are not about right and wrong. They are about elite conflict, power, propoganda. lies and hideous mass murder, usually in the name of a bogus God, but really for profit – and definitely not freedom for the masses.
R J Cook
Shocking In The Free World – Comment By R J Cook
U.S.A’s top diplomat Anthony Blinken has been criticised for performing Neil Young’s Rockin’ In The Free World’ albeit rather selectively. I was a great admirer of Neil Young during my student years and covered many of his songs with my band and female song writing partner. Interestingly the now politically correct Neil Young would be outraged if Donald Trump’s entourage made use of the superficial and originally sarcastic chorus. Obviously Blinken’s band mates have a bit of a cultural gap with Biden’s plastic looking ‘peace envoy.’
The performance reminded me of a Simpson’s episode where Bart and his friends are recruited into a boy band sponsored for recording, using all the latest expensive tech, by a government agency that turned out to be the U.S Navy. Hence they were obliged to perform on an aircraft carrier. Bart Simpson’s smart arse sister Lisa worked out that the apparent gibberish chorus, ‘YVAN EHT NIOJ’, was in fact ‘Join the navy’ sung backwards as a subliminal message.
My point here is that Blinken was playing the same game in a reprise that repeated the subliminal message that the Ukrainians are fighting in a war for freedom which when won, will enable them to just go on ‘rocking in the free world.’ Below are the full lyrics of my one time hero Neil Young’s actual song. It paints a better picture of being at ‘rock bottom in the not so free world.’ Global plutocracies don’t do anything for free. The ‘free world’ is a plutocrats’ sales gimmick. R J Cook May 17th 2024.
Song by Crazy Horse and Neil Young
There’s colors on the street
Red, white and blue
People shufflin’ their feet
People sleepin’ in their shoes
But there’s a warnin’ sign on the road ahead
There’s a lot of people sayin’ we’d be better off dead
Don’t feel like Satan, but I am to them
So I try to forget it any way I can
Keep on rockin’ in the free world
Keep on rockin’ in the free world
Keep on rockin’ in the free world
Keep on rockin’ in the free world
I see a woman in the night
With a baby in her hand
There’s an old street light (near a garbage can)
Near a garbage can (near a garbage can)
And now she put the kid away and she’s gone to get a hit
She hates her life and what she’s done to it
There’s one more kid that’ll never go to school
Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool
Keep on rockin’ in the free world
Keep on rockin’ in the free world
Keep on rockin’ in the free world
Keep on rockin’ in the free world
We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler machine gun hand
We got department stores and toilet paper
Got Styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people, says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive
Keep on rockin’ in the free world
Keep on rockin’ in the free world
Keep on rockin’ in the free world
Keep on rockin’ in the free world
A lesson in “lesser-evil” politics: Democrats join forces with Republican Speaker Mike Johnson
A week after House Democrats voted to retain Mike Johnson as Speaker, the Louisiana Republican appeared outside the Trump trial in Manhattan to fervently support the fascist ex-president.
Comment The label fascist is normal desperately self righteous name calling from the hypocritical consensus left imperialists, their minions and their followers. I am very careful as to who and why I call certain parties fascist, as will be seen on my yesterday’s ‘Life After Death in Police State Britain’ post. Fascist Feminists are a major force in this vile name calling war.
Fascism feeds on division, scapegoating, poverty and desperation. Anglo U.S fake liberals and democrats make sure there is plenty of that among their white populations and are importing more from the Third World, thus creating more of a melted pot than a melting pot – where the lower orders will ultimately be incinerated if their insane virtue signalling power grabbing NATO Ukraine proxy war on Russia is allowed to continue..
R J Cook
Antony Blinken’s rock performance in Kyiv bar divides opinion in Ukraine
US secretary of state took to stage with his guitar to perform Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World
Shaun Walker in KyivWed 15 May 2024 13.42 BSTFirst published on Wed 15 May 2024 09.54 BST
It was an unexpected moment at the end of a long day in Kyiv for Antony Blinken, after numerous high-level meetings and serious pronouncements promising the speedy delivery of US military aid. The secretary of state picked up a guitar and performed a rendition of Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World with a Ukrainian rock band.
The images, quickly shared on social media, split opinion in Ukraine, with the performance one of the main topics of discussion in Kyiv on Wednesday. Some hailed Blinken’s turn as a welcome gesture of support, while others questioned the optics of performing in a bar while the situation at the front is so tense.
Blinken took to the stage at Barman Dictat, a well-known speakeasy-style bar in central Kyiv hidden in a basement inside a courtyard, and joined the Ukrainian band 19.99.
“Your soldiers, your citizens – particularly in the north-east, in Kharkiv – are suffering tremendously,” Blinken said before playing. “But they need to know, you need to know, the United States is with you, so much of the world is with you and they’re fighting not just for a free Ukraine, but for the free world. And the free world is with you, too.”
The band were told before the event that they would be performing with Neil Young, said one member, but were asked to keep it a secret. It was only at the last minute that they realised their guest member would be the secretary of state.
“He was connecting with eyes, with our band leader, with me … It was our first performance on stage but it feels like we were a band for two years,” the guitarist Arsen Gorbach told BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday.
Shocking In The Free World
As the official death toll since October 7 rises to over 35,200 Palestinians—with well over 40,000 dead when those unaccounted for under the rubble are taken into account, the vast majority being women and children—Washington’s response is to double down on its support for the far-right Zionist regime and to accelerate the shipment of arms.
Comment More borrowed money and massive profit for international arms dealers and other war profiteers. I have no doubt that this war is a spin off from Anglo U.S led Nato provocation in Ukraine. The U.K ‘s Daily Telegraph today printed the lie that Robert Fico’s would be assassin acted because he was anti war in Ukraine. The posh people and select ethnics who write that ‘newspaper’ are either incompetent or liars.
The gunman made it very clear that his motives were revenge for Fico’s anti Ukraine War, anti Muslim immigration, anti corrupt Ukraine joining NATO and understanding of the Russian cause. It is important to recognise that the U.K elite did not con 52% od its ignorant masses to leave the EU for freedom, demcracy and national identity. To these people who live in luxury, the ignorant dumbed down brainwashed masses are simply voting and cannon fodder -where white men are held in check by anti racist and feminist armies.
U.K’s immediate trigger for apparently leaving the EU was to protect the City of London from pending EU financial regulations and caps on bankers obscene bonuses. They also saw military advantage from NATO’s long planned Ukraine Proxy War on Russia, if they could stand alongside their young offspring U.S.A, basking in the glory of patronising and directing Europe’s minion states. It worked in 1914 and 1939 when key elitists were hell bent on cutting upstart Germany down to size. They are doing it all again with Russia.
R J Cook
May 16th 2024
BBC Reporter Suggested that controversial PM Robert Fico and his government provoked the assassination attempt.
Described as controversial by Slovakia and western elite media, a BBC reporter suggested that the controversial Prime Minister might have provoked the attack. The implications of this astonishing remark was that he should never have raised issues close to popular concerns. These included a ban on Islamic immigration when it is EU mainstream policy to encourage.
Worse still, Robert Fico’s Government will not join in the U.S and EU war on Russia, so will not provide resources or propoganda to present Zelensky as a hero. Robert Fico has bravely spoken up for the Russian point of view, provding yet another lesson in the consequences of breaking with the self righteous hypocritical western consensus. Above all, Robert Fico said, quite sensibly, that his govenment would oppose institurionally corrupt Ukraine from joining NATO. He was up against a very damgerous authoritarian EU and Anglo U.S led NATO It is all quite horrifying and will get very much worse.
R J Cook
16 hours ago — A suspect was in custody, and an initial investigation found “a clear political motivation” behind the assassination attempt, Interior Minister …
BBC Runs Hit Piece on Slovakian Prime Minister Hours After He’s SHOT in Assassination Attempt … murder of investigative journalist Jan …
15 hours ago — ‘: Slovak politicians blame media for assassination attempt on PM … prime minister … The murder of the journalist— the first ever in Slovakia’s …
20 Apr 2024 — Croatia’s constitutional court ruled Friday that its populist President Zoran Milanović cannot become prime minister, after national ..
| 17:15 – WILLIAM NATTRASSUrsula von der Leyen launches a new war on disinformation Her ‘Democracy Shield’ is a further politicisation of the EU |
West must accept Donbass, Crimea as Russian, Blackwater founder says
- By Al Mayadeen English
- Source: Agencies
- 2 Mar 2024 18:48
The founder of US military contractor Blackwater says the West must “pull the plug” on Ukraine and accept the Donbass region and Crimea as Russian territories.
Erik Prince, the founder of US private military company Blackwater, called for an immediate end to the Ukraine conflict, asserting that the West cannot match Russia’s military capabilities, in a recent interview for the PBD podcast.
Prince, who served as the CEO of Blackwater until 2009, expressed doubts about the ability of Kiev and its Western allies to prevail in the ongoing war, now entering its third year.
“We need to bring this war to a close because all Ukraine is doing right now is destroying itself demographically,” Prince argued.
He highlighted that the hostilities are consuming the next generation of Ukrainian manpower, making it nearly impossible to replace. Moreover, he dismissed the idea of Western forces outperforming the Russian defense industry, calling the Western defense base “pathetic”.
Russian economy resilient
The Russian Economic Development Ministry on Wednesday reported that the country’s GDP has increased by 4.6% in annual terms in January from 4.4% in December
“According to the estimate of the Russian Ministry of Economic Development, in January 2024, the GDP exceeded the level of last year by 4.6% year-on-year compared to the 4.4% growth in December,” the Ministry said in a report.
The report added that the annual inflation in Russia stood at 7.58% as of February 26, slightly higher than the 7.57% recorded a week earlier.
Why is the US law above the international law? Why does the …
Is America above international law?
Technically every nation on Earth is above international laws, by its own existence. It may (or may not) choose to participate in international legal structures for its own benefit/security, etc, but is in no way obliged to.
Patrick Bet-David sits down one-on-one with Blackwater founder Erik Prince as they discuss if the Central Intelligence Agency is trying to …
Patrick Bet-David sits down one-on-one with Blackwater founder Erik Prince as they discuss why Ukraine needs to admit defeat to Russia and …
US campus protests persist despite crackdowns, mass arrests
First Jewish Biden administration employee resigns over Gaza genocide
2 Mar 2024 — ERIK PRINCE: We need to bring that war to a close because all Ukraine is doing right now is destroying itself demographically. They’re chewing …
The Threat from Russia’s Unconventional Warfare Beyond …Royal United Services Institutehttps://static.rusi.org › SR-Russian-Unconventional…
5 Feb 2024 — 1 Up until. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the emphasis was disproportionately on Russian unconventional warfare – the conduct …
38 pages
May 15th 2024
Liberal Answer To Political Opinions They Don’t Like: It Starts With Name Calling And Then The Gun. That Is Western Style Consensus Democracy.
Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico is in a life threatening condition after a well fed white balding bearded 71 year old fired four shots at him after he was leaving a government meeting in Bratislava. The shooting was carried out with professional skill by this legal pistol owner – a former security guard.
The BBC’s rolling coverage has shown far more interest in the subject of Slovakia’s corruption than that of Ukraine’s because the U.K State agenda is anti Fico’s stance on mass migration, having previously made the comment that he would not let a single Muslim into his country. This seriously offended the liberal press who campaigned against him, one journalist obsessed with smearing him concerning allegations that he was linked to organised crime.
Slovakia borders with Western Ukraine in its east. Robert Fico withdrew support and materials for the Ukraine War, sharing Hungary’s Victor Oban’s views on the matter. Anglo U.S NATO agents have been busy stirring up dissent in Eastern Europe, Russia and the Baltics. That’s the reason for current upheval in Georgia where idiotic young students have been infiltrated and recruited to the anti Russian cause which is so threatening to western elite war profiteering. The stakes are very high. Much is made by BBC and Sky News UK regarding Robert Fico being a divisive figure. Unspun reporting at its best by liberal left Nazis.
The other side of that coin is that Western looking aspiring members of the EU-Usa Empire should be part of what the Anglo-U.S and EU authoritarians call ‘The Consensus.’ Slovakia’s media were experts at this disinformation in a very corrupt nation. This is western democracy. Robert Fico had a mind to deal with that bias situation by abolishing State media. Fico was disparaging the struggling European consensus, while trying to help the disadvantaged left behind members of his society. Ridiculed today as a far right populist, he may have paid the ultimate price for his opposition to the fake left liberal consensus serving the interests of global rich elites. Democracy in the West exists only for the rich and chosen slaves. How will these out of touch authoritarians react if the people dare continue to reject their globalist agenda?
R J Cook
Summary
- Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico is in hospital after being shot a number of times in what officials are calling an assassination attempt
- He is now in a life-threatening condition, according to an update on his official social media account
- Slovakia’s president-elect Peter Pellegrini has said he is horrified by the attack, echoing many other European leaders
- His alleged assailant has been detained by the police
- Local reports say he was hit in the stomach, arm, and leg
- Fico was wounded as he was leaving a government meeting in the central town of Handlova
What do we know about Fico’s condition?
Unconfirmed reports by eyewitnesses say Fico was shot in the arms, legs and stomach – but we have not been able to verify this.
His bodyguards were seen helping him to a car soon after the shooting.
Fico’s staff have since said he was airlifted to a nearby hospital as the transfer to the capital Bratislava would take too long and his condition is understood to be critical.
The reshaping of Latin America by the new imperialist war
This is the text of the speech delivered by Tomas Castanheira, a leading member of the Socialist Equality Group in Brazil, to the 2024 International May Day Online Rally.
Workers Struggles: The Americas
Canada’s federal Liberal government has intervened to delay or block a strike by 9,300 railroad workers while unions in Argentina carried out the second national protest strike against the Milei government.
The vote by the graduate student workers is a sign of a new stage in which the working class will emerge as the basic social force against war and dictatorship.
UK Prime Minister Sunak warns of nuclear war
Sunak pledged that the Tories were the party to be trusted to wage war at whatever cost. Labour will respond in kind.
Oppose imperialist War! SEP/IYSSE public meeting in Sri Lanka
The only social force capable of halting the drive to world war is the international working class which is coming into struggle in Sri Lanka and around the world.
Australian whistleblower sent to prison for exposing Afghan war crimes
David McBride is the first person prosecuted over the documented war crimes, including extrajudicial killings—not for perpetrating them but for exposing them.
US general confirms UK Special Forces operating in Ukraine
US General Brian Fenton reveals how deeply British imperialism is involved in the NATO-led war against Russia, including the deployment of Special Forces, Royal Air Force pilots and “Royal Navy teammates”.
Biden administration intensifies economic war against China
Under national security powers, the US has lifted tariffs on electric vehicles to 100 percent, along with tariff hikes on a range of high-tech and industrial products.
Half a million Palestinians forced to flee latest Israeli military attacks
The UN relief agency for Palestinians reported that around 450,000 people have been driven out of Rafah—a city whose population had been swollen to 1.3 million by a huge influx of people escaping the Israeli military onslaught elsewhere in Gaza.
Medical missions in Gaza trapped without access to supplies and basic aid
Two medical missions at the European Hospital in Khan Younis have been trapped in place with limited supplies since the closing of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.
Accomplices in Genocide: Canadian imperialism and fascist barbarism
This is the text of the speech delivered by Keith Jones, National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (Canada), to the 2024 International May Day Online Rally.
Fight the Australian Labor government’s program of war and austerity!
This is the text of the speech delivered by Max Boddy, Socialist Equality Party (Australia) assistant national secretary, to the 2024 International May Day Online Rally.
Autoworkers in the Detroit area are expressing support for University of California academic workers who are demanding strike action to protect anti-genocide protesters on campus.
Hundreds of lecturers condemn the police terror at Berlin universities
Germany’s ruling class is returning to the methods of the Nazis: police terror, the suppression of peaceful protests and the besieging of universities.
Proposed school closures, budget cuts provoke massive opposition among Los Angeles educators
The district is planning the cuts even though it has more than $6.3 billion in reserve.
Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974): America “is a country with many dark secrets”
The film expresses the broadly felt suspicion in the population—at that time and even more so today—that there is something sinister and rotten in the American state.
May 14th 2024
World military spending rises to Record
- Prepared By: Al Mayadeen English
- Executed By: Al Mayadeen
- 25 Apr 2023 11:30
A new report shows global military spending climbed by 3.7% in 2022 and hit a new record high of $2,240 billion, with the three top spenders being the United States, China, and Russia.
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Al Mayadeen is an Arab Independent Media Satellite Channel.
May 13th 2024
Who is Andrei Belousov, Russia’s new minister of defence?
Laura Gozzi
BBC News
For the first time in 12 years, Russia has a new minister of defence.
On 12 May, the Kremlin announced that President Vladimir Putin had nominated economist Andrei Belousov to replace long-serving defence minister Sergei Shoigu.
Although there had long been rumours that a reshuffle was on the cards, few were expecting Mr Putin to pick a civilian with no background in either the military or the security services to replace Mr Shoigu.
Andrei Removich Belousov was born on 17 March 1959 in Moscow to Rem, an economist, and Larisa, a radiochemist.
He obtained a degree in economics from Moscow State University in 1981 and pursued a career in academia for a number of years. In the late 1990s, he started working as adviser to Russian prime ministers while working towards a PhD, which he obtained in 2006.
He was appointed minister for economic development in 2012; the following year, he became an aide to Mr Putin.
In 2020, he was appointed first deputy prime minister of Russia. He has since gained a reputation as a Putin loyalist, having reportedly been the only member of the president’s “economic entourage” to support Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
He is also credited with devising key economic ideas pursued by the Kremlin in recent years, and was seen as one of the key ideologues behind a set of ambitious plans adopted by Mr Putin as he began his fourth presidential term in 2018.
He was also a key backer of the VAT increase from 18 to 20% in 2019.
Mr Belousov is known to be a hardline defender of state interests over those of businesses. He has long advocated strict regulation, increased government investment and extensive state presence in the economy.
In 2018, a letter was leaked in which Mr Belousov suggested seizing excess profits from 14 large metallurgical and chemical companies.
Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8vzzqz2qq6o
Germany: Court says far-fight AfD is suspected of extremism
By Damien McGuinness
BBC News, Berlin
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is officially suspected of extremism, a German court has ruled.
The move, which upholds a lower-court ruling the party had challenged, means intelligence services can continue to monitor AfD activities and communications.
The party was founded in 2013 as a Eurosceptic group objecting to German-backed EU bailouts for southern Europe.
But as refugee numbers rose after 2015, the AfD morphed into a strident, ever-more radical anti-migration force.
Today influential blocs within the AfD hold ethno-nationalist beliefs that define anyone with a migrant heritage as not “properly German” – even if they hold German citizenship.
Because of Germany’s experience of dictatorship and oppression in the 20th Century, there are high legal hurdles to state surveillance of any political party.
But on Monday the court in Münster ruled that there was reason to believe that “at least a significant part of the AfD” aimed to “grant German citizens with a migration background only a legally devalued status”.
- Going to the extreme: Inside Germany’s far right
- German far-right party aide held in China spy probe
- Far-right German politician tried for Nazi slogan
In other words, the court suspects large parts of the AfD of wanting to create a two-tier society, where people judged to be “ethnically German” would have more rights than people whose families originally came from abroad.
This, according to the German constitution, would be illegal discrimination.
Monday’s court decision is a blow for the AfD, but the German government sees it as a victory. “Today’s ruling shows that we are a democracy that can be defended,” said Interior Minister Nancy Faeser.
It shows that the German state has the tools needed to protect democracy from threats from within, she added.
The AfD denies that it is anti-democratic. Party leaders reject the ruling, accusing the judges of not providing enough evidence for their decision.
Lawyers for the AfD have said they will appeal against this ruling. But any further challenge can only focus on procedural problems, not the legal content of today’s decision.
The AfD has been slipping recently in polls from the low-20s earlier this year to around 16%.
This is possibly partly because of mass anti-AfD protests across the country after it was revealed that party officials had attended a secret meeting where the deportation of people with non-German heritage was discussed.
A numbers of scandals over alleged spying for China and suspected links to the Kremlin have also dented support.
Arguably a bigger problem for the AfD is that other right-wing parties are eating into their poll numbers.
New insurgent parties peddle a similar anti-migrant message and some mainstream conservatives are sounding increasingly radical when it comes to asylum seekers, in some cases even pushing for a UK-style Rwanda scheme.
The ruling could simply boost the far-right’s support among core voters of the AfD, who tap into a narrative of victimisation and believe the party is being targeted by mainstream Germany.
But AfD leaders are rattled by such cases. While the party has become more radical over the years, its leaders are at the same time trying to detoxify the brand to appeal to undecided voters.
In rural parts of eastern Germany, the AfD is already a dominant force in some councils, sometimes even co-operating with other parties on grassroots local issues.
But on a regional and national level, no other party will work with the AfD to form coalitions, so until now it has been shut out of real political power.
This is why upcoming regional elections in three large eastern German states in September are so important.
The AfD comes first in polls in some regions and in the short term wants to enter a regional governing coalition. In the long term its aim is to enter national government.
Announcements such as Monday’s ruling make that more difficult – not only by putting off moderate voters, but also by firing up the debate about banning the AfD altogether.
For years discussions about a ban have surfaced regularly. Critics of the idea say that would simply play into the AfD’s hands by boosting its narrative of victimisation.
Legally it would also be difficult, time-consuming and possibly be rejected by the constitutional court.
But with each new scandal involving the AfD, calls grow louder from all mainstream parties to investigate whether there are at least sufficient grounds to try.
Related Topics
The Noble Cost of Living With War Crisis
Comment This is a powerful insight into western style democracy and authoritarian Europe. To these great powers, NATO spending years setting up their Ukarine proxy was on Russia, then stoking it up for World War III us not extremism, It is so nice to know that the world is being destroyed by moderates and that the horror and agony of nuclear war had nothing to do with us being led by money grabbing hypocrits, hedonists, lars and umbeciles. Makes me feel good to be sharing in the noble cost of living with war crisis. R J Cook
| These Last Days Ministries |
| “A great war will erupt suddenly, such as has not been seen from the beginning of creation. Countries shall disappear in moments from the face of the earth. Will you not listen to Me before it is too late? You all do not have much time left.” – Our Lady, October 2, 1990 |
May 12th 2024
Vladimir Putin set to transfer Sergei Shoigu from Russian defence ministry
Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to replace his long-standing ally Sergei Shoigu as defence minister, the Kremlin has announced.
The 68-year-old has been in the role since 2012 and is to be appointed the head of Russia’s Security Council.
Papers published by the upper chamber of the Russian parliament said Mr Shoigu will be replaced by Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov.
Mr Shoigu has played a key role in Russia’s war with Ukraine.
Russian government papers show Mr Putin wants Mr Shoigu to take over from Nikolai Patrushev on the security council.
Mr Shoigu has close links with President Putin, often taking him on fishing trips in his native Siberia.
He was given the defence portfolio despite having no military background, which rankled with some of his top brass.
A civil engineer by profession, Mr Shoigu rose to prominence as the head of the emergencies and disaster relief ministry in the 1990s.
He often looked out of his depth as defence minister, especially after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago, BBC Europe analyst Danny Aeberhard says.
In 2023, he became embroiled in a public feud with Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin over Russia’s conduct of the war.
Prigozhin, who led a short-lived mutiny against Moscow, accused Mr Shoigu of being a “dirtbag” and “elderly clown” in audio messages that went viral.
The mercenary chief died in a plane crash while flying from St Petersburg to Moscow in August 2023. The Kremlin denied it was to blame.
Mr Shoigu’s suggested replacement, Mr Belousov, is an economist with little military experience and will come as a surprise to some.
But Kremlin press spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the proposed appointment of a civilian showed the role of defence minister called for “innovation”.
“The one who is more open to innovations is the one who will be victorious on the battlefield,” he said, according to Reuters.
Mr Putin was sworn in as president for a fifth time on Tuesday after winning Russia’s recent election with 87% of the vote and without facing any credible opponents. He has led Russia since May 2000.
Among cabinet members to keep their positions is veteran Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
Related Topics
Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-69000698
It isn’t nice, a comment by R J Cook
BBC is the black and white good and bad world of State propoganda. Britain is the western world’s model for Western Democracy and is interwoven with the U.S. U.K Elite did Brexit for its joint Anglo U.S financial interests and to fool the masses into believing that the Tory Government would give up their additcion to the mass inmnigration of low pay third world religious maniacs.
Covid lockdown was the western warm up to mass control by fear of death. Covid was super flu and never going to vanish. The authorities knew that, but war with Russia over NATO’s desire to control and exploit Ukraine was coming. So their ‘protection racket’ Lockdown psychology needed testing. Under police command and control the experiment worked well apart from the embarrasment of Labour Leader Sir Kier Starmer & Co and Tory PM Boris Johson’s pleasured people getting caught celebrating what they had put in place.
Now we have the sanctimonious NATO military money machine with its war mongering military maniacs, playing nuclear chicken with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The level of Ukrainian fraud has been amazing .This is all in the name of the world’s greatest PONZI scheme. The insanity is led by the U.S and U.K ever reliant on their EU lackeys. All the old World War II rubbish about Britain standing alone until rescued by the United States and coming together is being played out again on U.K TV with old films, documentaries and virulent anti Russia so called independent and unspun news. The U.K public are lapping it up.
A U.K government think tank recently ran a computer war game postulating that if Trump wins in November NATO will collapse. The message is that nothing must stop war on Russia and China, so Trump must be stopped. The masses are expected to forget all their other miseries in the name of fighting for democracy and ‘our values.’ Women and non white ethnics are constantly packaged as all vulnerable and homogenous so they need the Biden Harris ‘protection racket’
This vile greedy lying western ruling elite makes no secret that men will be conscripted to the front line, so their loved ones must get used to seeing their men return in body bags – assuming there is opportunity to find and identify all the parts as the people they used. But it is all worth dying for because the western ruling class have the ultimate rights to tell us what our values are and what we must do. King Charles III’s right to be fawned over and worried about so that he can live his life of luxury reigning over us for as long as great wealth allows, epitomises how the masses are expected to remain deluded, dumbed down and worshiping a selection from the U.K’s underling menu of multiculture and diversity. It is a rainbow world with an illusory pot of gold at the end of it.
Democracy in their book, endorsed by all the feminists and geriatrics in politics and government, won’t be giving their mnions a vote on World War III. So you had best put up with living in an Imperialist Anglo U.S dominated Police State or end up like Julian Assange. I know what is is like being locked in a tiny dirty smelly cell listening to screaming banging shouting fellow prisonsers when darkness has fallen,laying on a concrete slab with a thin bedcover, sneaking out of sight of the camera to remove my tee shirt, then use it as a ligature.. It has happened to me the last time. Then I was locked up for 18 hours before I was transferred to a mental hospital where police hoped that I would be sectioned as criminally insane. I was let out 12 hours later.
That was August 24th 2020. The time before that, police used fabricated evidence to raid my home and office, confiscate vital property and documents used for my business, arrest me and lock me in the cells for 7.5 hours before interview. I was being set up for informing on myself about being a gay prostitute working for my son and his associates in a home based brothel. That was on Febriary 5th 2018. After a 3 month following Thames Valley Police silence,
I left a series of polite messages on the arresting officers phone. I was quite angry because TVP had informed my GP that I was actually arrested on the basis of real evidence to further discredit me as insane. The arresting officer kept ignoring me so my messages became increasingly rude. I was thus prosecuted in Crown Court for malicous communication. I was working as truck driver at the time and it became increasingly obvious that they held a grudge and wanted me sacked. That is freedom and democracy. I was a truck driver at the time. It isn’t nice.
R J Cook
May 11th 2024
The Probability of Nuclear WarStanford Universityhttps://ee.stanford.edu › opinion › inevitability
On our current path, nuclear war is inevitable. The inevitability concept can best be understood by analogy to finance. It does not make sense to talk of an …
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At the heart of all of this work is a chilling conclusion: The possibility of a nuclear strike, once inconceivable in modern conflict, is more likely now than at any other time since the Cold War.
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Anyone up to a few miles away would suffer third-degree burns. People up to 53 miles away could experience temporary blindness. Fires would tear through the wreckage. Emergency services would struggle to support survivors in the immediate vicinity of the blast.
Growing numbers of Ukrainians are opting out of compulsory military service, while agriculture production plummets
Dmitri Kovalevich, special correspondent in Ukraine for Al Mayadeen English, discusses the situation of the war in the country in April.
On April 16, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a new law approved earlier by the national legislature aiming to intensify military conscription in the country. According to the new law, all Ukrainian men of military age who are not yet registered for military service must present themselves to a military enlistment center within 60 days, with or without formal notification to appear. And if they are already registered for military service, they must update their information within 60 days. The law comes fully into force in July 2024.
The law considers notice of registration as being duly served by virtue of the law’s adoption. Those who do not show up within 60 days are subject to arrest. Even Ukrainian men abroad are subject to the law.
Men between the ages of 18 and 60 are required to register for military service and must carry proof of registration with them at all times. They must present proof to police or conscription officers when demanded. Only those who are registered can apply for a passport. Effectively, a Ukrainian passport now comes in the form of proof of military registration.
Earlier in April, a new law lowered the age of obligatory military service from 27 to 25. All female Ukrainian citizens with a military or medical specialty are also required to register.
A war to the last Ukrainian
According to the lawmakers and the military, the amended conscription law will force out of the shadows those who have been avoiding military registration by hiding or living at a different address than the one registered with the military. Police and conscription officers are empowered to detain anyone lacking proof of military registration.
“The 60-day rule [for self-reporting to the military recruitment office] and other clauses of the adopted draft law are making hundreds of thousands or even millions of Ukrainians into lawbreakers. In fact, it places them outside Ukraine’s legal framework entirely,” the Ukrainian daily Strana wrote on April 11. The widely-read, online news outlet writes that intensified conscription will mean a huge increase in corruption among police officers, border guards, and the military, implying bribery of those officials in order to avoid service.
Strana continued, “The new law aims to boost military conscription, but its success is doubtful. A key problem is the reluctance of a very large part of society to go to war (which we [Strana] explained in our report last October.” Strana says that unwilling recruits are unlikely to be persuaded to change their minds by the fines provided in the amended law.
Reuters news agency explained in an April 23 dispatch, “The initial patriotic flood of volunteers who flocked to the army following the invasion of February 2022 has dried up. The government has acknowledged its conscription drive has run into difficulties, with thousands of people evading the draft and some fleeing abroad rather than risk the trenches.”
In reality, a huge and expanded repressive apparatus, working like clockwork, will be needed to fully implement the new law.
One of the most scandalous features of the new law is its exclusion of a proposed provision for the demobilization of active-duty personnel once they have served 36 months of service. This is a demand of military personnel and their relatives, pleading that people who have already been living in the trenches for two years or more are tired and worn out. But a majority of deputies in the Ukrainian legislature (‘Verkhovna Rada’) insist there must be no demobilization until the end of hostilities. Yevgeniya Kravchuk, a deputy from the ruling Servant of the People party, has warned that automatic demobilization after three years of service could cause a reduction in Western aid.
Strana reports on April 12 that according to a poll in February 2024 by Kyiv-based research agency ‘Info Sapiens’ for media outlet Texty.org, only 35 percent of the 400 men surveyed said they were prepared to serve if called up.
Ukrainian experts say that the adoption of the new law is a signal to the West that Kiev is ready to continue its war against Russia. Without the law, new loans and military supplies from the West would be harder for the government to obtain. The passage of the law was timed to coincide with the vote in April in the U.S. Congress for more military assistance to Ukraine (and more military assistance to Israel and Taiwan).
However the new law is being very negatively received by Ukrainian society. Media is focused on the negative responses, explaining that a great many civilians fear dying at the front, while those already conscripted see no possibility of demobilization, not even in the long term. Essentially, a Ukrainian soldier has only three paths out of military service short of three years: death, serious injury and disability, or being taken prisoner by the Russian armed forces.
Ukrainian MPs say they plan to further strengthen punishment for evading conscription. They are now discussing increasing fines, blocking of bank accounts, seizure of property, and a number of other measures “up to the harshest ones”, says a member of the legislature cited in Strana. Ukrainian courts are already issuing summons nearly every day for those evading conscription. Thousands have already been sentenced to prison terms.
But the courts cannot cope with the number of such cases because there are tens of thousands in every region of the country. According to UA-Reporter, Ukrainian lawyer Yuriy Demchenko has made an inquiry to the Justice Ministry revealing there are currently about 34,000 vacant spots in Ukrainian prisons for those already convicted of evasion of military service. According to him, it is simply impossible for the authorities to put all evaders and deserters in jail. For example, in Ivano-Frankivsk region in western Ukraine alone, according to official information, there are 40,000 men wanted for evading service.
Border guards in the Transcarpathia region in southwest Ukraine, meanwhile, are reportedly building miles of new, barbed-wire fencing along the country’s border there, making the region appear as a concentration camp because minefields laid by Russian armed forces already block some routes to the north and east. Authorities say they are building the fencing to ‘save lives’, that is, to prevent people from undertaking the often highly risky gambit of crossing mountain rivers in order to escape the country.
The most popular Google query in Ukraine these days is ‘How to swim across the Tisa’. The Tisa (Tisza) River originates in the eastern part of Transcarpathia, eventually flowing into the Black Sea, roughly tracing Ukraine’s borders with Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia along the way. In some places, the river is the border. Several dozen Ukrainians are reported to have died trying to make the dangerous crossing of the Tisa, particularly during the winter months.
The New York Times reported on April 13, “The roiling waters [of the Tisa] can be treacherous; the banks are steep and slick with mud; and the riverbed is covered in jagged, hidden boulders. Yet Ukrainian border guards often find their quarry — men seeking to escape the military draft — swimming in these hazardous conditions, trying to cross the Tisa River where it forms the border with Romania.”
Conscription evaders as new national heroes in Ukraine
In the Ukrainian language, the word ‘mobilization’ (that is, ‘military conscription’) sounds similar to the word ‘mogilization’ which means placing a body into a grave. So in common speech, people are replacing the first word with the second, equating the ‘mobilization’ efforts of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with probable death.
At the end of April, a 52-year-old Ukrainian man named Borys Laboyk managed to escape to Hungary and became a social media hero in doing so. At a border checkpoint, he was asked for his papers but he took off running to the nearby Hungarian border. The Ukrainian border guards caught up with him and tackled him to the ground, but the man was apparently in very good physical shape because he managed to break free and then outrun the border guards for good. Hungarian border guards allowed him to cross and make a declaration of asylum. They turned back the Ukrainian border guards; the latter are prohibited by Hungary from crossing the border in pursuit of anyone fleeing Ukraine.
The military draft in Ukraine has long ago turned into a game of run and catch. The Ukrainian telegram channel ‘Rubicon’ recalls the comedy ‘Welcome to Zombieland’, where 33 rules of survival in the world of zombies are described. “In modern Ukraine, these rules are certainly much more useful for personal safety than, for example, the Constitution. The first rule in Zombieland is: ‘Be in shape.’ Most often, when meeting with zombies, you will have to run a lot. If you are overweight or do not have good physical fitness, be prepared to die at the hands of a living corpse.” Rubicon reminds the reader that the simple ability to run fast may save a conscription evader from capture, with a 90 percent probability of success.
Songs glorifying draft dodgers are becoming popular among Ukrainian youth. “The borders were closed, laws were passed, and I became a draft dodger. A dodger is a good guy, a young guy 25 years old,” goes one of the popular songs.
T-shirts with the inscription ‘evader’ are now popular on the Internet. A report on Telegram writes, “Due to the draconian law on military mobilization, Ukraine has some ten million citizens living abroad and who are ready to renounce their citizenship due to their colossal distrust of authorities.
Political scientist Andrey Zolotarev states further that in his opinion, the popularity on social networks of flash mobs about ‘evaders’ and the queues for renewals of passports at Ukrainian consulates in European countries are obvious evidence of the unpopularity of the war taking place. Also to blame for the unpopularity is the behavior of those members of the legislature and those government officials who have hidden their relatives abroad while at the same time sending ordinary citizens or their children to their deaths in a highly unpopular war.
Another reason for the popularity of draft evasion is, strangely enough, the sexual overtones involved. When hundreds of thousands of men in the country have died, become disabled, or are suffering from mental disorders brought on by trauma, women are preferring the young, healthy men still remaining who can avoid death or crippling injury, and who can support them through life, according to readings of social media. Attention to such details by women is yet another reason why young men are avoiding military service in every possible way and undertaking personal training in running or swimming, in place of weapons training on a firing range.
The new, unofficial heroes of Ukraine are the men who manage to escape from the country or otherwise escape from the clutches of military recruiters or from the training officers assigned to ‘make soldiers out of them’. For so may younger Ukrainians, the new, ‘model’ man is young, with long legs and in great physical shape, able to fight off or run away from an overweight or slow-moving military man tasked with dragging them into military service.
Young people are deliberately practicing swimming, and stories of such are gaining popularity on the Internet. The training is just in case, one day, they need to escape the country by crossing a border river. They practice for months to run fast and swim well. Escaping from already conscripted soldiers has become a survival quest, a sign of good health and courage. Growing numbers of young people believe that if you are in a Ukrainian military uniform, it means you couldn’t run fast enough or you couldn’t fight off the military recruiters using your fists, and you have no money to bribe your way out. You are tagged as a ‘loser’ destined to die in a trench from artillery fire.
Degradation of agriculture
These trends of rising evasion of military service are more characteristic of the young men in the urban middle classes. In the Ukrainian countryside, most men have already been drafted, and many have already died. After the deindustrialization of the 1990s and 2000s and the later secession of the industrial region of Donbass, the foundation of the Ukrainian economy has slipped back to agricultural production and exports.
Following the pro-American Maidan coup in Kiev in February 2014, then-U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt declared that Ukraine’s future “should be that of an agricultural superpower”. However, the economic trends of recent years in Ukraine actually show the opposite-decline in crop yields and overall agricultural production and a transition back to more primitive forms of production.
In April 2024, Ukraine is once again in the midst of its sowing season. But this year, once again, the area sown with grain and other crops is reduced. The harvest is expected to drop by ten percent, according to the forecasts of the Ministry of Agrarian Policy. Last year, it dropped by 13%. The Ukrainian website Novyny reports that according to estimates of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), sown areas of wheat, corn, and barley for the 2023/2024 growing season will be reduced by 32%, 27%, and 37%, respectively, for the three crops, compared to the 2021/22 season. There are several reasons for this.
Dmytro Solomchuk, a member of the parliamentary committee for agrarian policy, says that farmers are abandoning intensive cultivation technologies. “Agricultural producers are buying less fuel, chemicals, and fertilizers because this is unprofitable in today’s conditions. Many are switching to traditional methods by which, predictably, there will be lower yields but production costs are also lower. The yields per hectare will be lower for all crops,” he says, admitting that depending on the weather, the yields using older, traditional, growing methods will decrease by 30%.
As well, shortages of fertilizers are obliging Ukrainian farmers not to grow many crops. Most crops require nitrogen fertilizers, which are mainly produced by synthesizing natural gas. The gas used to be purchased cheaply from Russia, but no longer. Ukraine has voluntarily cut all its economic ties with Russia.
Denys Marchuk, deputy head of the Ukrainian Agrarian Council, also speaks about the acute shortage of personnel due to military conscription, saying, “The lack of human resources is one of the main problems of this year’s sowing campaign.”
A report in TSN.ua cites Deputy Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food of Ukraine Taras Vysotskyy saying that the minimum number of workers needed in the agricultural industry is 500,000. He stresses that there is a particular shortage of mechanics and tractor drivers. Their required training and skill levels are much higher than in the past. What’s more, such workers are prioritized for recruitment to the Armed Forces of Ukraine because they make better drivers or repair technicians of tanks and armored personnel carriers.
Some enterprises try to attract male students and young women to work on agricultural machinery, but most, if not all, have neither the experience nor the training for this. Expensive, modern imported machinery quickly breaks down when operated by lesser-trained operators, and trained workers to make necessary repairs are also in short supply. Many qualified training instructors have been conscripted into the army.
Ukraine also has little or no machine-building capacity remaining because Soviet-era industrial enterprises were sold and plundered many years ago. Before 2022, the main supplier of less expensive machinery was Belarus, which did not follow Ukraine’s example of selling or scrapping its industrial, machine-building capacities.
Ukrainian farmers do not have the funds to purchase expensive, imported machinery from Western countries. The Ukrainian Institute of Agrarian Economics recently noted that there is a sharp decline in imports of agricultural machinery. The import shortages are especially critical for tractors, combine harvesters, and sowing equipment. As a consequence, many agricultural enterprises and individual farmers refuse to buy or use expensive imported machinery, turning instead to traditional (often manual) methods of work, leading, in turn, to lower yields and massive degradation of the very foundations of the Ukrainian economy.
With shortages of qualified specialists and workers in all fields, including in machine building and repair, and with shortfalls in the production of fertilizers, Ukraine is slowly reverting to the type of agriculture that existed here in the 19th century, before the Soviet industrialization and collectivization of the 1920s and 1930s.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
When Tyrants Talk Of Tyranny – A Comment by R J Cook
The EU is a corrupt tyrannical dictatorship hell bent on devouring Eastern Europe, The Baltic States, The Black Sea Ports, and Scandinavia. Russia has to be surrounded and brought to its knees – being definded as a rogues state,which is why it was banned from international sport on spurious drug cheating.
To this end there are the psychos and rich geriatrics in the U.S who are capable of false flag operations as we saw with the so called Douma stage managed chemical weapons attack DOUMA gas attack staged & false flag op – SYRIA These land and power grabbing liars have no care for honesty or rules of war as we have seen with their evil treatment of western crimes whistle blower Julian Assange. They are capable of anything including false flag use of tactical nuclear weapons.
The Anglo Americans have a controlling and very powerful underhand financial interest in this process in which Zelensky and corrupt Ukraine are perfect partners. Freedom, whatever it means beyond pleasuring and pampering the West’s elite decision makers, is the last thing NATO is interested in.
Call it what you will but the EU policy to stifle agriculture and dumb down the masses diet with schemes like compressed insect bodies for protein is very much part of what is the great replacement. The NATO Ukraine proxy war on Russia is expected to receive a massive influx to replace slaughtered Uktainians and thise Ukrainian women who fled west and will never go back.
Western schools have been dumbing down education for decades as I know from many years as a school teacher, college lecturer and school governor. Laws on protests that don’t fit EU and U.S Politican agendas attract life destroying criminal records.
The west has moved on from deindustrialisation to abandoning agriculture on spurious environmental grounds – while real polluters including overpopulating Africa, India, Pakistan escape criticism while they go on living under real rogue governments backed by western capitalism, living in the same state of religious delusion that kept the 19th century Europe sedated until they awoke to the reality of two elite sponsored world wars. That made them think twice about God.
Across the west, existing laws have been toughened and new ones created to deal with any protests not fitting the elite approved agenda. The main fear is a bourgeois led right wing nostalgic patriotic so called far right movement. These protestors don’t like seeing ther historic cultures redefined, then being blamed for the likes of slavery, mass immigration rising prices, especially of housing, food and fuel. alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness and turing to crime. Nor does this underclass like footing the bill for mass immigration of cheap labour, drug pushers and violent gang crime where any criticism sparks a racist outcry. The nonsense of the all embracing U.K diversity and multiculture has been exposed for what it is by the likes of self interested U.K billionaires Ms J K Rowling aka Robert Galbraith and Hindu P M Sunak’s extreme anti transsexual female stance. Feminists have hailed their stance as an example to the world.
As far as the interwoven Ango U.S EU elite ruling classes are concerned, mass immigration from religion obessesed failing African States is a key element of their neo post imperialism Africa policy. They don’t want the Russia and China Belt and Road strategy interrupting their hegemony there.
With white women being fooled into the ‘better life’ of unquestioning career drones and having fewer if any kids that don’t turn out mentally ill or feral under their single mother and police state school guidance, Africa is the perfect replacement baby factory. It is also a perfect opportunity to wind the mass education system back to the Dark Ages commensurate with their lumpen proletariat role in the age of A1 and ever more insidious elite profiteering as we see in Ulraine. As for democracy, who voted for the Ukraine War and who do the masses expect to benefit ? Life can only get worse when tyrants talk of tyranny and keeping us safe ?
R J Cook
May 10th 2024
U.K Elite Obsessed With Islam – A Brief Comment By R J Cook.
The British Ruling Elite and politically correct feminst elite media have an interesting and contradictory attitidude to the inherently repressive sexist religion of Islam. This class’s incompetence gave the world a new version of Israel centuries old history after occupying Romans drove the Jews out, many crossing the Mediteranian into Europe where they became money lenders and traders once the Romans stopped throwing them to the Lions.
The beleagured Romans saw the contolling potential of owning the Christian philosphy so invented the eventual global Roman Catholic Conglomerate. There were no Muslims back then in what is now a redrawn map of Palestine, when Jesus was alive making ideoligical war on Judaism.
Jesus defected from the Judaism that he was born into. Christianity was founded in his name after Jews and Romans martyred him. When a disgruntled Roman Legionaire took the name Mohammed c 600 A.D, Islam was born.. This man updatd the Old and New Testament texts to give us the Koram.
So it is a terrible fallacy to argue the current Islamist rivals to Jewisn presence in Israel is justified because the Jews have no right to be there. It is a sophistry. If the blacks have a right to Africa, then the Jews have a right to Israel.
Thanks to white bourgeois liberals, Muslims think they are a downtrodden race, not just folowers of a religion derived from Christainty and Islam. Capitalists love religious bigotry, which is why they exploited Irish Roman Catholic cheap labour in nineteenth century industrial revolution Britain. The U.K and U.S elites are doing the same now with Muslims. The sanctity of their medieval belief systems must not be challenged.
So after the British had controlled and exploited the Indian sub continent by encouraging and dividing and ruling religious divisions between Hindus and Muslims for nearly two centuries, in 1948, their elite were forced to accept the end of empire. But they still needed to milk it so they blamed their own masses for their profiteering evils and empire.
That patronising mentality lies behind their attitude to Modi whose lower caste origins meant he was never meant to succeed. The U.K would like an Indian more like billionaire slick smirking U.K PM Sunak in charge. That is because he looks so black and sounds so credible to the masses who know nothing about India.
A simple fact about the partition of India, just like Muslims and Jews in Palestine is that Muslims do not power share in their native countries. Modi’s campaign provides all the answers someone to any questions about his India election campaign. His so called divisive campaign rhetoric raises questions anyone outside of the BBC and other mainstream media – and Israel – should understand and be able to answer.
Putting Islam on par with with Hinduism in India will drag it down the the level Pakistan chose with the demise of Imran Khan, It is time patronising white liberals got out of the way of reforming and enlightening the Third World and Global South, which is what Modi is trying to do for India.
However, India is vulnerable because like Pakistan and the demise of Khan, there are western global corporate fears that both countries will forget their religious differences and move closer to Russia. That is what Khan wanted to do and what boy from back streets Modi might do. As with Trump, these people want to stop him.
R J Cook
By Soutik Biswas
India correspondent
In the lead-up to India’s general election, Narendra Modi was expected to frame it as a referendum on his decade as prime minister.
He was expected to boast about achievements like generous welfare programmes and spaceflights. He was to reaffirm that the new Ram temple in Ayodhya represented a cultural assertion for India’s majority Hindus. Even foreign policy was anticipated to influence the ballot, with the publicity boost afforded by Mr Modi’s hosting of the G20 summit last September. Opinion polls have predicted a third, record-equalling landslide win for his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
But early in the gruelling six-week election, Mr Modi’s campaign shifted gears, using divisive rhetoric that has raised questions about his tactics. He’s been accusing the opposition, led by the Congress party, of appeasing the Muslim minority community.
Muslims make up 14% of India’s more than 1.4 billion people. Taking a cue from Mr Modi’s campaign, social media posts by the BJP have, according to the opposition, “demonised” Muslims.
He told a rally on 21 April that the opposition Congress wanted to distribute wealth to “infiltrators” and to “those who have many children”. His remarks were widely seen as referring to Muslims.
At another rally, he warned women that the opposition would confiscate their gold and redistribute it to Muslims. He accused the Congress of orchestrating a “vote jihad”, urging a “certain community” to unite against him. Mr Modi even said the Congress would select the Indian cricket team “on the basis of religion”.
That’s not all. In a recent interview Mr Modi said the “whole world” was trying to influence the elections. This week, Mr Modi blamed the Congress for taking “truckloads” of money from billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has long spoken about the close ties that Mr Modi shares with the country’s two richest men.
“For the first time you have spoken in public about Adani and Ambani. Is it your personal experience that you know they give money in trucks?” Mr Gandhi responded in a video message. Neither businessman has reacted to the comments.
India’s opposition has also accused Mr Modi of Islamophobia, calling his remarks “divisive, hate speech”. The Congress has demanded an investigation into a potential code of conduct violation. Since the BJP’s rise to power, hate speech against India’s 200 million Muslims has increased. But Mr Modi’s fiery rhetoric on the stump has surprised many, as they expected a focus on highlighting his achievements instead.
“To be honest, I thought Mr Modi’s campaign would be much more about the rising India story, and about what they had done for the people,” says Rahul Verma of the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), a Delhi-based think tank.
Others say Mr Modi’s remarks are not unprecedented. They point to many such instances during his previous election campaigns, including what they call his “inflammatory rhetoric” after the riots in Gujarat in 2002 ahead of the state’s assembly elections. “So, it has not surprised me, but is has shocked me. We often refer to such rhetoric as dog-whistling but there was nothing subtle about the language being employed,” says Milan Vaishnav of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
For one, many say, the BJP might have been spooked by a significant dip in turnout in early rounds of voting amid what has been a rather low energy election. In the previous two elections, won decisively by the BJP, high turnouts benefitted the party – 2014 was largely a vote against the Congress, and 2019 was a vote for Mr Modi.
Second, the opposition has been trying to reshape the narrative of the 2024 election, shifting focus from being solely a referendum on Mr Modi to campaigning on issues like unemployment, social justice and economic inequality.
Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-68982352
Zelensky is a Posturing Self Centred War Mongering Coward – Brief Comment By R J Cook.
This nasty egotistical man Zelensly has created a lot lot of elite media overtime and opprortinity for virtue signalling from reporters out of U.K ‘Unis’ who have scant if any knowledge of history beyond that provided by their politically correct teachers. For Zelensky and his wife ,this is all about them. Ze;esnky’s biography is fittingly called ‘The Showman.’
I have no interest in the ruling elite’s kind of feminist sex obsessed sex based morality. The people in charge of the western political and media circus are the superficial posturing lowest of the low. That is why the dominant Anglo U.S leadership have reached the zenith of their war on civilisation via Ukraine and Israel,, hypocrisy and humanity.
R J Cook
Zelensky fires head of bodyguard after failed plot
Paul Kirby
BBC News
- Published10 May 2024, 10:12 BST
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has sacked the head of his personal protection unit after two of its top officials were detained over an alleged assassination plot.
Serhiy Rud has led the president’s security detail since 2019.
No reason was given for his dismissal, which was announced in a brief presidential decree.
However, the state guard administration (UDO) is critical for the safety not only of the president but other key figures in Ukraine and their families.
The two colonels in the state guard who were detained on Tuesday are suspected of belonging to a network of agents run by Russia’s FSB security service.
Mr Zelensky has spoken of repeated Russian plots to assassinate him, but the latest revelations involved his own entourage and also targeted military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov and the head of the SBU state security service, Vasyl Malyuk.
Mr Malyuk said this week that the plot was due to culminate with a “gift to Putin” before his fifth term as president was inaugurated on Tuesday.
Individuals close to President Zelensky’s bodyguard were meant to kidnap and kill him, while Mr Budanov would have been attacked with rockets, drones and anti-tank grenades, the SBU said.
There was no suggestion that Serhiy Rud, 47, had any link to the allegations, although one of the two colonels in detention, Andriy Huk, was seen as a personal friend. Ukrainian reports said they had studied together in the border troops academy many years ago.
Maj Gen Rud has served in Ukraine’s military for most of his adult life, and much of his career has been focused on state security.
Ever since Russian paratroopers attempted to land in Kyiv and assassinate President Zelensky in the early hours and days of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, plots to assassinate him have been commonplace.
The Ukrainian leader said at the start of the invasion he was Russia’s “number one target”.
President Zelensky has frequently replaced key figures in Ukraine’s security forces, and on Thursday he also announced that the commander of special forces, Col Serhiy Lupanchuk, was being moved from the role only months into the job.
The man who led Ukraine’s defence in the first two years of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi, was replaced in February. He has now been appointed as Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK and given the title “Hero of Ukraine”.
Related Topics
Ukraine says it repelled Russian bid to cross border
James Waterhouse & Paul Kirby
BBC News in Kyiv and London
Ukraine says it has repelled a Russian armoured attack in the north-eastern Kharkiv region, after Moscow’s forces launched an incursion across the border and sought to break through defensive lines.
Kharkiv regional head Oleh Syniehubov said Russian reconnaissance groups had tried to penetrate the border, adding that “not a single metre has been lost”.
“Russia has launched a new wave of counteroffensive operations in the Kharkiv sector,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Ukrainian commanders have been expecting a summer offensive for some time, possibly even a bid to capture the regional capital Kharkiv. But officials are adamant Russia does not have the resources to do so.
Russia had the capability to aggravate the situation in border areas but not the ability to capture Ukraine’s second city, said the head of Ukraine’s centre for countering disinformation, Andriy Kovalenko.
Ukrainian reports suggested Russia was trying to create a 10km buffer zone for its Belgorod region, after a series of Ukrainian cross-border attacks.
Friday’s small incursions over the Russian border form a familiar yet disturbing axis for Ukrainian forces.
The defence ministry in Kyiv said the attack started with the heavy bombing of the town of Vovchansk “using guided aerial bombs” with the support of artillery. Then, small Russian “scouting groups” moved in across the border, reportedly in several places.
The local head in Vovchansk, 75km (45 miles) north-east of Kharkiv, said the town had come under heavy attack from the early hours of Friday and civilians were being evacuated. Some 3,000 people live in Vovchansk and at least one person was killed and five more injured in the barrage, according to Kharkiv’s regional leader.
“At approximately 05:00, there was an attempt by the enemy to break through our defensive line under the cover of armoured vehicles. As of now, these attacks have been repulsed, fighting of varying intensity continues,” the defence ministry said.
President Zelensky said the Russians had been engaged “with our troops, brigades and artillery”, but added that a fierce battle was under way.
Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6pyv8q94g1o
Comment Vladimir Putin has called the West Arrogant. The British Army has stepped up live fire practice and Mighty Macron already has French Foreign Legionaires in place while Estonia’s Prime Minister was being egged on by U.K Channel Four to call for NATO boots on the ground. The Russian ruse of an assault on Kharkiv has got the western elite so concerened that Biden has agreed another $500,000,000 to support the Ukraine proxy war on Russia that NATO provoked.
Lord Palmerston Cameron anounced yesterday that the west ‘has not learned from Ukraine and must get tougher.’ This ghastly man who gave the U.K Brexit in so far as it suited his pleasure bent pampered upper classs, is so typical of privileged Old Etonian and Oxford University smoothies that he should not be allowed an opinion let alone be foreign minister in anything purporting to be a democracy.
To the minority who ignore the google warnings and down grading awarded to this site, I suggest that if Russia gets any closer to defeating the Western Proxy Zelensky Police State, Biden and Britain will respond by leading the world into a Nuclear Holocaust. I hope that I am wrong. I also hope that Russia will prevail and restore the balance of power. The Anglo U.S Corporate State hegemony -with its mindless soporific autophaguous culture – as the Northampton writer and my inspiration Jeremy Seabrook opined in his definitive bool ‘The Everlasting Feast’ – will soon destroy what it is left of the planet.
It is astonishing that the horribly corrupt U.S so called Democracy can harrass Donald Trump for fraud whilst refusing to investigate the Biden’s financial links with institutionally corrupt Ukraine from which Bidens have made a small fortune. This select few, along with J.P Morgan and Blackrock, define what these self styled freedom fighters are all about – ‘themselvs’ at the masses’ expense and however many young white men the great replacement requires.
When Creepy Joe Biden dumps a load of top secret papers by his dog’s basket in his garage, investigators said it was alright because President ‘Creepy’ was just a kindly foregetful old man who had a nuclear war coming up on a far more important agenda.
Obviously ‘Old Creepy’ can’t be expected to multi task. Meanwhile a far more intelligent and alert Donald Trump faces yet more court trials for apparently doing exactly the same thing. That is western style democracy – a system well worth morons being mutilated, crippled, blinded and dying for all for the sake of the arms industry, the undertakers, the elite media, feminists, mass immigration of cheap labour, all war profoteers and the rich man’s freedom.
R J Cook
May 8th 2024
That is how U.K Democracy works. By R J Cook
The following post was corrected and modified on May 9th 2024.
One hopes that Bill Clinton making an innocent young intern smoke using a presidental cigar using her vaginal muscles and wank him to ejaculation over her ‘little black dress’ is not normal White House Oval Office Practice. Clinton should have been impeached Trump should be back in the White House to stop World War Three and U.S Second Civil War. It is a moot point as to who the real Nazis are. I know what I think but I am not allowed to say becaise I am not a consensus politician or consensus elite journalist.
R J Cook
With Russia’s government vilified as authoritarians who hate sexual diversity, especially and hyporcritically transsexuals, they have been driven out of the global economy with terrible consequences written off as ‘the cost of living crisis.’ Now China is on the self styled super rich virtue signalling white liberal elite’s hit list for ostracism and ultimate exclusion preparatory to regime change.
The swamp dwelling U.S Ruling Class, and what U.S sociologist C Wright Mills called in his book, andlove changing regimes until they all fit under their own corrupt umbrella as puppet colonies with puppet leaders, like Zelensky, who want to bask in the sunshine of being ersatz Americans. They judge the U.S by glitzy TV shows, films, glamorous politicians and suave smooth talking diplomats like Anthony Blinken, with big shiny cars and have no interest in the dark underbelly of United States poverty, misery, alcoholism, and hopelessness where more of the underclass are being lined up for the ruling elite’s next glorious fight and death for the rich man’s cause.
To fully understand why the west will risk anything to win the Ukraine proxy war against Russia it is necessary to note such matters that big U.S investment houses like J P Morgan and Blackrock have at least $31 billion invested in Ukraine and the Bidens have made a fortune from what President Joe Biden has called ‘a great investment.’ Shareholders have started calling for their interest payments and dividends.
If this was goes wrong it will be an earthquake for global capitalism and the U.S Dollar which is so vital for controlling the global economy and global politics. Likewise, U.S, U.K and EU’s investment funds.This NATO proxy regime change Ukraine War on Russia has not been coming from nowhere. These countries are deep in debt. It will get worse and will be the masses who pay ever higher prices and taxes for many years to come while elite profits will be astral. They will also have to accept more multi culture and repressive medieval unreformed totalitarian that comes with more mass immigration to replace the current mutilation and slaughter of native white men.
The Dutch Defence Minister has gone on record about the need to get used to body bags and the need to conscript young men, not women, across the EU and U.K for this war to contain and emasculate Russia before bringing that great nation down to its own level of mass stupidity.
Maiming and killing young white men is happening already on a grand scale and will lead to more non white mass immigration whether it is called great replacement or not. Biden is happy with this and has also suggested that displaced Palestinians are welcome in the United States. He is blatantly trying to square the circle to get the Gaza war out of the way to get both Muslims and Jews on his side for the November Presidential Election just in case the massive anti Trump smear campaign is not enough to swing the corrupt U.S Electoral system where there was considerable evidence of fraud in 2020.
These people are unscrupulous, hence the long term high level corruption and smear campaign against Trump. Back in 1971, my first year at the University of East Anglia, studying economics, I was advised to read Michael Kidron’s ‘Western Capitalism Since The War.’ It was written at the time of the Vietnam War and just as true today. The United States is a war economy, with U.K and EU moving in the same direction to save its oppressive exploitative police state skin, condemning any white person or even western born non religious non overpopulating ethnic as ‘far right.’ The ANTIFA and other liberals are in fact their own kind of fascist but scream and shout hate crime as soon as anyone applies the poisonous moronic label to them.
The Democrats and all their bleating politically correct victim class know, as I do because I was trained as an economist who had the unpleasant experience of working in the City of London, that U.S and International financial parasites have composed the soundtrack to this NATO power and resource grabbing war. The good news is that defence contractors, architects and eventually big western civil engineering corporations are already making big money out of Russia’s existential war, the truth of which is never discussed by mainstream media.
When the 1930s Great Depression started following the 1929 Wall Street Crash and then the Austrian Bank Creditanstalt collapsing, World Trade froze like an engine without oil. The Creditanstalt, full original name was k. k. priv. Österreichische Creditanstalt für Handel und Gewerbe. It was a major Austrian bank, founded in 1855 in Vienna.
From its founding until 1931, the Creditanstalt was led by members of the Rothschild family, who were among its significant shareholders. Jews were already hate figures in Nazi Germany and Austria because of their association with banking and other money lending when ex servicemen were massively unemployed, often sleeping rough while gentile families starved. Meanwhile in the U.S and the rest of Europe, so called governments cared only for the wealthy upper class from which they derived. Austria’s government turned to Creditanstalt as a stabilizing force, orchestrating mergers with these troubled banks to prevent their collapse. Unfortunately, this strategy proved detrimental to Creditanstalt. The bank inherited financial problems, bad loans, and risky investments from the banks it hungrily absorbed.
The consequent European banking crisis of 1931 was a major episode of financial instability that peaked with the collapse of several major banks in Austria and Germany, but all traced back to Creditanstalt on 11 May 1931, with Landesbank der Rheinprovinz following on 11 July 1931, and Danat-Bank on 13 July 1931.
In a western world of posturing politicians like Napoleon Macron, already having deployed the notorious French Foreign Legion and Lord Pompous Palmerston Cameron, stirring up Russia’s existential nuclear threat anything is possible. To the lazy, facile and brainwashed western masses sucking up drivel about protecting their freedom and democracy,, comparing the astute, cultured and Phd level educated Vladimir Putin to Hitler is not difficult for them to believe. This is especially so when the masses are so poorly informed, badly educated and brainwashed at school and through elite media ongoing.
All their blimkered eyes are on the nuclear threat from Russia. Meanwhile, while ponderous Putin dithers, there are some psycho big beasts with big mouths, big egos and small brains in the Pentagon, U.K and EU who would push for a surprise first strike. They have all seen studies recording that an 80% population wipe out is acceptable from such a launch. They have their luxury well stocked deep bunkers to wait out the consequences before coming up to enjoy all that wonderful radioactive wasteland. Remember the freedom loving west being first to use cluster bombs and depleted uranium. Knowing this western mentality perfectly satirsed by the 1960s film Dr Strangelove, Putin and his advisers may well give way to preemptive recklessness.
So it is no wonder that many young German people are talking to and leading the Afd. It is not they who have caused this current economic nightmare or the corrupt exploitative unjust history of Europe and North America.. Why should they trust mainstream consensus politicians and their platitudes ? Just as in the 1930s, the rich and the bourgeois comfortable people patronise and condemn a white population, especally the men, across Germany and the western world beyond. This elite own the capitalist mass media and western state broadcasters, like the BBC becaue they own the governments and define democracy.
Once again ,Trump comes in here. He represents a huge threat to this money making NATO Ukraine proxy war on Russia, which will cause a bigger problem than the Creditandstalt if it goes wrong. The trick for sustaining the current hideously wealthy western elite’s war, which is about their freedom and allowing what they call a democratic vote for their choice of their approved consensus candidates, is to fool what we used to call the native masses, into believing there is something in it for all of us. Even the seemingly endless culturally ‘diverse’ religion fixated so called ethnic monorities have a ruling elite right to positive discrimination and a healthy share of crumbs from the high table.
The ruling elite, overpaid politicians, comfortable elite professionals and elite media people don’t live on crumbs, yet cast judgement on life and opportunity starved young white men’s. They sneer at these men and their quest for a worthwhile future just as comfortable as the increasingly privileged ethics and women. They are condemned by the likes of ‘know it all’ fascist feminists. White women are encouraged to see white men as all potential abusers. White men who form relationships are called ‘fetishists’ by feminists who hate men.
So called ‘privileged young white men’ will never get anything worth having from this elite. So quite understandably want something better than being doomed to dying as the elite’s cannon fodder. So out comes the warning about Nazis and the new Hitler. These concepts are prejudice, not political science. Western ruling elites do not do cause and effect. They start with a conclusion and work backwards.
Other than abuse, neglect and exploitation of the white underclass, there is no similarity between Putin’s concern to protect his great nation’s far more advanced civilisations from the ongoing western planet eating mentality. Their conceited patronising self abosrbed world order is led by the liars, greedy, diversity fixated, sexuality and debilitating mass immigration obsessed minority. There is no reasonable comparison with the shell shocked Hitler,who was a failed artists and deranged victim of another rich man’s war – 1914 to 18. There is, however a similarity to Versailles 1919 ‘Peace Treaty’ which created the NAZI resentment and revenge mindset motivating them toward World War Two.
This is bcaause NATO has a plan to humiliate Russia after the war. Enough is never enough for the western global elite who are also worried by Putin’s plans to bring prosperity for all in Africa and the third world. NATO wants to inflict massive reparations on Russia. Putin wants better than that. As second in command he saw what his drunken pleasure bent boss, the western poodle Yeltsin was doing to his country. That repusled him. Yeltsin snuggled up to the U.S and western decadence and hypocricy. Putin doesn’t like it.
As always, this site comes with a google warning that it is insecure, especually in the U.K where hits average 2 a day and are from official agencies.That is how U.K Democracy works.
R J Cook
Going to the extreme: Inside Germany’s far right
By Jessica Parker
BBC Berlin correspondent
It is a spring evening in Germany’s eastern city of Cottbus, and dozens of people have crowded into a small venue to hear a man who once dubbed himself the “friendly face” of National Socialism (Nazism).
Two other men with prior links to extremist groups are also in the room, including a candidate for forthcoming state elections.
They’re all there to hear Matthias Helferich at a youth event organised by members of the prominent far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
The AfD has repeatedly rejected accusations of extremism.
However, by investigating the past of these three men, the BBC has found a clear crossover between AfD figures and far-right networks, some of which are classed as anti-democratic or racist by German authorities.
Stephan Kramer, a regional spy chief in eastern Germany, has told the BBC the AfD now poses a danger to the “roots” of democracy, as the party eyes electoral gains in three states in the east this autumn: Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg.
Ahead of next month’s European elections the AfD, beset by extremism and corruption allegations, has dipped in the polls but still consistently places second nationwide.
It remains strong in Germany’s post-communist communities.
Matthias Helferich’s speech in Cottbus was all about “remigration” – a burgeoning concept within Europe’s far right about mass “returns” or deportations. The BBC asked to attend his talk but was told there wasn’t space.
Elected to Germany’s Bundestag in 2021, he was effectively barred from joining the AfD’s parliamentary faction, after damaging Facebook exchanges came to light dating back to 2016-17.
In leaked remarks Mr Helfrich mentions Nazism several times, including an apparent description of himself as the “friendly face” of National Socialism and as a “democratic Freisler” – a reference to Nazi-era judge, Roland Freisler.
BBC
If you are confronted with Nazi accusations as frequently as AfD politicians, you compensate for that in private spheres. You ridicule it
Matthias Helferich
AfD politician
Mr Helferich told the BBC he didn’t seriously call himself the friendly face of Nazism at all but was merely “parodying” left wingers online.
“If you are confronted with Nazi accusations as frequently as AfD politicians, you compensate for that in private spheres. You ridicule it.”
He continues to hold AfD roles at a local level and, as Cottbus shows, is welcomed within some party circles as an unapologetic proponent of “remigration”.
Many view the term as little more than a euphemism for the large-scale expulsion of people with migrant backgrounds, brought about by force or political pressure.
Matthias Helferich is outspoken about his hopes of “remigrating” millions in response to the “mass influx” of migrants from Africa and the Middle East.
But he claims that no-one who’s legally in Germany would be forced to leave – though some could be offered the chance to return to their “home country” and “culture.”
“This is not about downgrading people or deporting them for racist reasons. It is about preserving Germany as the land of the Germans,” he said.
Mr Helferich also spoke at a “summer party” last year hosted by the Institut für Staatspolitik (IfS), which months earlier had been designated as right-wing extremist by the federal domestic intelligence – which said the IfS was striving for an ethnically “homogeneous” nation.
“I don’t share the view of the intelligence service that it is a right-wing extremist organisation,” says Mr Helferich. “I decide for myself where I speak.”
AfD figures accuse domestic intelligence, the Verfassungsschutz, of being a body stuffed with government appointed officials, unfavourable to their cause.
More than “50 young patriots” came to hear the Cottbus speech, says one of its organisers, Jean-Pascal Hohm.
Mr Holm has held numerous roles in the AfD and is now running in September’s Brandenburg state elections. That is despite having been involved with – or linked to – a string of groups that went on to be classified as right-wing extremist.
They include the Ein Prozent (One Percent) association, Zukunft Heimat (Future Homeland) and Identitarian movement, which has been known to promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.
That’s the far-right idea that global elites are deliberately plotting to change the demographics of Western countries.
Mr Hohm is unapologetic in his belief that “population replacement” is going on in Germany and Europe – something he describes as “the main theme of our times”.
“I do not say that this is organised from up high, I say it is happening.”
In 2017, Jean-Pascal Hohm was spotted among the crowd when a group of football fans chanted antisemitic slogans. Some even gave what appeared to be the Hitler salute.
He insists he was “on the fringe” with his father: “This was a Cottbus away game, I am a Cottbuser.”
“It’s not my fault that some lunatics use this as a stage to do things which I expressly do not support,” he tells me.
Pictured smiling in the audience for Matthias Helferich’s talk in March was a man called Benedikt Kaiser, who works in parliament for Jürgen Pohl, an AfD MP in Thuringia.
An investigation by Die Welt newspaper found that Mr Kaiser moved in neo-Nazi circles between 2006-11, including being photographed at marches organised by the NPD – an ultranationalist party now known as Die Heimat (The Homeland).
A picture from social media, later deleted, also showed him as part of a far-right football hooligan group called the “New Society Boys”, since disbanded.
The name, abbreviated by the group as “NS”, is generally understood in Germany to mean “National Socialist”, or Nazi.
The photo was probably taken in or around 2009 and in it three men behind Benedikt Kaiser appear to be giving the Hitler salute.
Mr Kaiser did not respond to our requests for comment, however after this story was published he accused the BBC of using haphazard research by left-wing activists.
In a post on X he called for a “fundamental political turn… for our people, for our sovereignty – against the woke elites, against the abandonment of our social and cultural heritage”.
Years on, Benedikt Kaiser is now sometimes described as a thinker and theorist, winning lengthy praise from a figurehead of the AfD’s hard-right wing, Björn Höcke.
Mr Höcke is a history teacher turned charismatic leader of the AfD in Thuringia, meaning he’s running to be state governor.
A court has previously ruled it was not defamatory to express the opinion that Mr Höcke was a fascist.
The 52-year-old is currently on trial accused of knowingly using a Nazi slogan, though he has pleaded his innocence.
The blurred lines between party figures, within the AfD’s more radical faction, and “extremist” networks makes for a complex web of evolving groups and characters.
And it’s a party that is constantly dealing with divisions about whether to adopt a more moderate or radical message.
“Remigration”, for example, is an idea being embraced by some figures and kept at arm’s length by others.
The concept is championed by Austrian activist Martin Sellner, who has a neo-Nazi past, and has been banned from both Germany and the UK.
He has written about “remigrating” asylum seekers, “foreigners” with residency rights and “non-assimilated” citizens.
Reports that senior AfD figures were involved in a “secret” meeting about remigration with Martin Sellner outside Berlin sparked mass demonstrations in Germany earlier this year.
The AfD is a movement that has, in the past decade, moved “more and more from a conservative, democratic party towards a right-wing extremist party,” believes Stephan Kramer, the President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Thuringia.
An outspoken civil servant, and a member of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), Mr Kramer says the AfD’s chances of winning the most seats in his own state this autumn are “very, very good”.
Previously the general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, he says he would leave the country if the AfD won power.
The party’s “nationalistic” views risk “turning Germany back into something that we’ve probably only seen between 1933 and 1945”, he told the BBC.
AfD figures have argued that they are being targeted by state authorities that are biased against them, but Mr Kramer is adamant that is not the case: “We’re not politicised because we’re working on the basis of German law and any decision that is taken… can be challenged in front of a court.”
A legal challenge by the AfD is ongoing – against its designation as “suspected” right-wing extremist, while its youth wing is classed as a confirmed case.
BBC
Once you have an enemy that goes for the roots – and that’s exactly what’s happening right now – it’s very dangerous because it goes to the vital parts of our democracy
Stephan Kramer
Head of domestic intelligence, Thuringia
Stephan Kramer sees the party as the “parliamentarian arm” of the new right that’s building momentum across Europe – and even claims it poses a risk to democracy.
“When I’m speaking about a German oak – [a] big strong old tree, it can take a blizzard, it can take a storm.”
“But once you have an enemy that goes for the roots – and that’s exactly what’s happening right now… it’s very dangerous because it goes to the vital parts of our democracy.”
More broadly, Stephan Kramer fears that the political temperature in Germany is “heating up”.
On Friday, a lead SPD candidate in next month’s European elections, Matthias Ecke, needed surgery after being attacked as he hung up posters in Saxony.
Four teenagers, aged 17-18, are being investigated with police saying there is reason to believe that at least one of the suspects has extreme right-wing views.
AfD supporters we have spoken to insist their movement is not extreme at all and even represents the centre-ground.
This story is not just about three men at a talk in Cottbus, but about a divide in Germany over what counts as extremism and fears of a return to its ugly past.
Additional research by Nicholas Potter.
Seven dead in attack on Russia’s Belgorod region
Laura Gozzi
BBC News
Seven people have been killed and at least 35 injured in an air attack on Russia’s Belgorod region, on the border with Ukraine.
Regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov blamed Ukrainian forces for the strike near the village of Beryozovka, which he said was carried out with drones and hit minibuses transporting workers to a meat production facility, as well as a private car.
Mr Gladkov said several other locations in Belgorod region had also come under attack in the last 24 hours, with residential buildings damaged.
The Belgorod region has often been targeted by Ukrainian forces since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Hours later, Mr Gladkov reported another fatal attack, this time in the village of Nikolskoye. At least one person was killed when an outdoor cooking area was struck, he said.
The deadliest strike on the region so far occurred in December, when a drone and rocket attack killed 25 people and wounded another 100 in the city of Belgorod.
In March, Mr Gladkov said 9,000 children would be evacuated from the city and the wider region after shelling that authorities have blamed on Ukraine.
Russia to hold nuclear drills following ‘threats’ from West
Laura Gozzi
BBC News
- Published6 May 2024
Russia has started preparations for missile drills near Ukraine simulating the use of tactical nuclear weapons in response to “threats” by Western officials.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said recent statements by French President Emmanuel Macron and the British Foreign Secretary David Cameron constituted a “completely new round of escalation of tension”.
Last week, Mr Macron refused to rule out potentially deploying French troops, should Kyiv request them, while Lord Cameron said that Ukraine had the right to use British weapons for strikes within Russia.
On Monday, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that Lord Cameron’s “hostile outburst” contradicted previous British assurances that the long-range missiles sent to Ukraine would not be used on Russian territory and meant that the UK was a “party to the conflict”.
The ministry added that the response to Ukrainian strikes using British weapons on Russia could involve targeting any British military facilities and equipment on the territory of Ukraine and beyond.
Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq5npwdv3wzo
May 7th 2024
2024 Elections
Campus Protests Aggravate Schisms Among Democrats, Imperil ‘Guaranteed’ Youth Vote
American Thought Leaders
RFK Jr. Takes on Trump and Biden Over Four ‘Existential’ Issues
Gaza: Israel takes Rafah crossing as truce talks continue
Related Topics
By David Gritten
BBC News
The Israeli military says its troops have taken “operational control” of the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt.
Rafah has been a key entry point for aid and the only exit for people able to flee since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in October.
A tank brigade moved in to the crossing area after a night of intense strikes.
With Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing also closed, the UN warned Gaza’s two main aid arteries were now choked off.
On Monday, the Israeli military ordered tens of thousands of civilians to begin evacuating nearby eastern parts of Rafah city, ahead of what it called a “limited” operation to eliminate Hamas fighters and dismantle infrastructure.
Hamas said Israel’s incursion and seizure of the Rafah crossing was aimed at undermining attempts by regional mediators to secure a new ceasefire deal.
The Palestinian armed group said on Monday that it had accepted a proposal from Egypt and Qatar, the basis of which is a weeks-long pause in the fighting and the release of several dozen hostages still held in Gaza.
- Live: The latest on the Gaza war as it happens
- Bowen: Netanyahu knows Hamas survival amounts to his own defeat
- Where has Israel told Rafah displaced to go?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that Hamas’s announcement was “very far from Israel’s necessary requirements” and that it was a failed attempt to “disrupt the entry of our forces into Rafah” .
He said he had instructed the mid-level Israeli delegation sent to Cairo on Tuesday to “stand firm” on the conditions required for the return of the hostages and on “vital requirements for ensuring Israel’s security”.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told troops on the Gaza border: “We will not cease operating in Rafah until Hamas is destroyed, or until the first hostage returns home.”
UN Secretary General António Guterres said a deal between Israel and Hamas was “essential to stop the unbearable suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and of the hostages and their families”.
“I reiterate my appeal for both parties to show the political courage and spare no effort to secure an agreement now,” he added.
Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza to destroy Hamas in response to the group’s cross-border attack on southern Israel on 7 October, during which about 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 others were taken hostage.
More than 34,780 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
A deal agreed in November saw Hamas release 105 hostages in return for a week-long ceasefire and some 240 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Israel says 128 hostages are unaccounted for, 34 of whom are presumed dead.
https://emp.bbc.co.uk/emp/SMPj/2.52.1/iframe.html
Stormy Daniels describes Trump encounter and hush-money deal
The basics of this trial
Trump has been charged with business fraud over hush-money payments to ex-porn actress Stormy Daniels.
Daniels claims she and Trump had sex, and that she accepted $130,000 (£104,500) from his former lawyer before the 2016 election in exchange for her silence about the encounter.
Prosecutors allege Trump had his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, make the payments. They say he then paid Cohen back, and fraudulently recorded the transaction in his company’s books as legal expenses.
Paying hush-money is not illegal, but the prosecution says how the payment was recorded amounts to election fraud.
Since the allegations surfaced in 2018, the former president has denied any sexual involvement with Daniels.
He’s facing 34 counts of fraud under New York campaign finance laws, and has pleaded not guilty to all of them.
R J Cook
NATO escalation in Ukraine threatens nuclear war with Russia
Threats by top European officials to launch missile strikes or a ground invasion against Russia are opening an escalatory spiral that can only be halted by the working class.
Democratic Party enlists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to cover up Biden’s war crimes
A lengthy New York Times essay has acknowledged that DSA representative Ocasio-Cortez is now the lynchpin in the Democratic Party’s strategy to block growing opposition to imperialist war and genocide in Gaza and channel it behind Biden’s reelection campaign.
The assault took place three days after President Joe Biden denounced the protests as violent and anti-semitic, virtually indemnifying Zionist and fascist provocateurs who also attacked encampments and assaulted students over the weekend.
The revelation, published by the Wall Street Journal in late April, came from undisclosed sources within the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the State Department and is “broadly accepted” within these institutions.
Workers Struggles: The Americas
Over 9,300 Canadian railway workers at Canadian National Railway (CN) and Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) have voted to authorize strike while up to 120,000 educators staged protests on April 30 and May 1 across the Dominican Republic.
What are the lessons from the brutal attack on SPD politician Matthias Ecke?
In the climate of social and political reaction created by the governing parties, the political heirs of Hitler now thrive.
May 6th 2024
Napoleon Strikes Again
3 days ago — France has sent its first troops officially to Ukraine. They have been deployed in support of the Ukrainian 54th Independent Mechanized Brigade …
France Sends Combat Troops To Ukraine | NATO Draws “Red …
Comment
One would assume that this is a NATO declaration of war. France’s rich elite have bet a lot of money on beating Russia so this, combined with posturing Lord Cameron, could see both countries nuked in the not too distant future.
Germany stands between them and will get caught in the cross fire and fallout. Uktaine is also using western supplied depleted Uranium. This is a desperate western imperial war with Russia facing the choice of giving way to regime change or taking the nucleat option.
R J Cook
Cross About Cross Dressing – By R J Cook
Multi culture is an authoritrian elite tyranny and a variable feast, hence the latest marginalising of mtf transsexuals under orders of powerful people like privileged patronising fantasy writer J K Rowling. If it is O.K for her, the Terfs and Muslims to say what they like, then why can’t the rest of us ? The answer is simple, we have to go where the multi culture elite fakes’ mood takes them.They are special and make it up as they go along.
The following links expose how utterly desperate despicable and hypocritical Western Elite Liberals are. The U.K elite are the worst examples of this with the likes of saintly fantasy writer J K Rowling labelling trans women as men who volunteer for castration and breast implants for the opportunity of entering women’s lavatories and other private space to grope their desireable bodies and finger their private parts.
Prime Minister Sunak has only recently laid plans to isolate trans women in NHS Hospitals, effectively contributing to what is already an LGBTQI freak show ostracised by an equally hypocritical Muslim population. The reality of being a trans woman in fake diverse tolerant U.K was defined by the hideous murder of young trans girl Brianna Ghey. Future GIC patients need to be warned about this very dangerous damning life style choice.
The U.K and wider western world has some very serious problems to cover up. It is an oppressive police state hiding behind a lot of fascist feminist laws as if women are the only group with problems and are one giant oppressed lumpen proletariat. The degenerate elitist planet eating west with its so called democratic freedoms is nauseating. Its’ nasty greedy elite provoked the current NATO proxy Ukraine Regime Change War on Russia. Putin is right to say that, outside of the weath hogging elite class, the family structure is being destroyed. Facist Feminism and anti racism have been perfectly necessary tools for this purpose.
The west is very afraid of Russia and its aim to spread traditional values including mothehood, children and the Christian faith. The Great Replacement elite have other ideas for their hegemony. There may be no harm in recognising that there are feminine men and vice versa because nature is not perfect.
My substantial research informs me that transgender and homosexuality are most often a lifestyle choices coming from fascist feminism, single parent female dominated families, aggressive females, positive discrimination against white boys and men in education, media and other professional employment. The Washington Post condemns Russia’s Education system as being all about indoctrination. In my experience of working with many Russians who became friends helping me to learn their language, Russian education is far superior to that of the west.
My 18 years teaching, lecturing and as an Oxford University Board examiner in the U.K Education system as well as 4 years as a junior school governor, informed me that brain washing was and still is a priority shared by elite capitalist and State media.
The Western planet eating elite has been exporting its vile moronic ideology for many years, rotting brains across the west and global south. Life can only get worse under such ruthless corrupt fake western democracy where we are immersed in 24/7 anti Russian propaganda and other ruling elite prejudiced consensus. The latest I have just heard is that the Russian Army is on the verge of mutiny. No wonder the U.K is on top if Russia’s ‘to nuke list.’
R J Cook.
In Putin’s bid to recast Russia as a global superpower, he champions a society built on pro-war activism, puritanical values and scaled-back …
24 Nov 2022 — The bill aims to prevent Russians from promoting or “praising” homosexual relationships or gender reassignment surgery or suggesting that …
23 Dec 2021 — During a wide-ranging televised annual news conference Thursday that lasted some four hours, Russian President Vladimir Putin, …
Netanyahu said Rafah attack would happen regardless of deal
Gazans begin leaving Rafah after Israel tells 100,000 to evacuate
Summary
- Palestinians have begun leaving parts of eastern Rafah in Gaza after Israel urged 100,000 people to move towards an expanded “humanitarian zone”
- It comes ahead of an expected offensive on the city, where more than 1.4 million people are sheltering
- The IDF says it is a “limited scope” operation and not a wide-scale evacuation of eastern Rafah, adding that evacuees will be directed to tent cities in Khan Younis and al-Mawasi
- A Hamas official calls the evacuation orders “a dangerous escalation”. It comes as the latest ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas have stalled
- Israeli strikes in Rafah reportedly killed at least 12 people overnight, while four Israeli soldiers were killed in a Hamas rocket attack near the Kerem Shalom crossing
- The war began when Hamas fighters stormed into southern Israel on 7 October, killing about 1,200 people and seizing 252 hostages, according to Israeli tallies
- More than 34,700 people have been killed in Gaza since then, the Hamas-run health ministry
Biden to speak with Netanyahu later today
US President Joe Biden will speak with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today, according to a National Security Council spokesperson.
They say that the White House cannot speak on behalf of the Israeli military, but “we have made our views clear on a major ground invasion of Rafah to the Israeli government, and the president will speak with the prime minister today”.
Washington has repeatedly said it does not support an invasion of Rafah without a plan to help civilians sheltering there.
Rafah could be ‘deadliest’ attack on children since war began – charity
The safety of hundreds of thousands of children in Rafah will be compromised if Israel goes ahead with a planned offensive in the area, according to a UK charity.
In a statement describing grave concerns for the young in Rafah, Gemma Sherrington, Interim CEO at Save the Children UK, said there was “nowhere safe to go”.
“These aren’t just our words, but those of the foreign secretary, who has repeatedly said how concerned he is about an incursion into Rafah. This is where we find out if that concern adds up to anything at all.”
In February, UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron said Israel should “stop and think seriously” before taking further action in Rafah.
Sherrington called on the UK to do all that it could to stop the planned incursion, including suspending arms sales to Israel and demanding an immediate ceasefire.
“For children in Gaza, this offensive could be the deadliest and most destructive chapter of the conflict yet. They need actions, not words.”
‘We have to stop the fighting now’ – ex-Israeli PM
We’ve heard from Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister of Israel, who warns against an offensive in Rafah and says “we have to stop the fighting now”.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme about the prospect of such an attack, he says: “The likelihood of an additional military victory of great consequence is very small.”
Olmert has been a vocal critic of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and has for months been calling for the war to be brought to an end and to avoid an offensive into Rafah.
He says the argument that an offensive into the southern Gazan city is needed to go after individuals that Israel holds responsible for the 7 October attack, including the leader of Hamas’s political wing in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, could keep the war going “forever” and at the “expense of losing the lives of the hostages”.
Challenged over whether the killing of four Israeli soldiers overnight shows Hamas is still a danger, Olmert says there can be no “absolute victory” and Hamas fighters will remain – warning that continuing the fighting will also lead to causalities.
EU’s chief diplomat calls Israel’s Rafah evacuation order ‘unacceptable’
EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell has criticised Israel’s evacuation order in eastern Rafah, ahead of an expected ground offensive in the southern Gazan city.
“Israel’s evacuation orders to civilians in Rafah portend the worst: more war and famine. It is unacceptable. Israel must renounce to a ground offensive,” he said.
“The EU, with the International Community, can and must act to prevent such scenario.”
Earlier, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen repeated her call for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and urged the release of hostages held by Hamas.
Gaza death toll rises to 34,735, Hamas-run health ministry says
At least 34,735 people have died and 78,108 have been injured in the Gaza Strip since 7 October, the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says.
Fifty-two people have died and 90 have been injured in the last 24 hours, it adds, but notes that many people are trapped under rubble where ambulances cannot reach them.
Hamas fighters stormed into southern Israel on 7 October, killing about 1,200 people and seizing more than 250 hostages, some of whom are still being held in Gaza.
- The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) says it is “encouraging” people to leave parts of the southern Gaza city of Rafah – where more than 1.4 million people are currently sheltering – as it warns of an upcoming military operation in the area
- It has dropped flyers over the eastern part of the city, and phoned and texted citizens advising them to move towards an expanded “humanitarian area”
- The IDF says the operation will be carried out with a “limited scope” and is “not a wide-scale evacuation”
- A senior Hamas official has told the Reuters news agency that this is a “dangerous escalation that will have consequences”
- The evacuation order comes as talks aimed at securing a ceasefire deal in Gaza, and the release of Israeli hostages, have stalled
- Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told his US counterpart yesterday that “military action is required” in Rafah after a lack of progress in these talks, according to his office
- Overnight, Israeli strikes in Rafah reportedly killed at least 19 people, while four Israeli soldiers were killed in a Hamas rocket attack near the Kerem Shalom crossing – near one of the main crossings used to deliver aid into Gaza
‘There are no safe zones in Gaza’ – British charity
Aid workers in Gaza are warning that plans by Israel to evacuate eastern parts of Rafah will have “catastrophic consequences” as there are no such thing as “safe zones” in the territory.
British charity Action Aid says the evacuation order in Rafah by Israel would further devastate the war-stricken enclave.
“Forcing over a million displaced Palestinians from Rafah to evacuate without a safe destination is not only unlawful but would lead to catastrophic consequences,” a spokesperson said..
“Our aid workers are reporting some of the most severe conditions in recent memory with widespread disease, starvation and chaos. Let us be clear, there are no safe zones in Gaza.”
The charity says Israel’s actions should prompt immediate action from the international community to prevent more atrocities.
“If an invasion of Rafah is your ‘red line’ will you do everything possible to stop this imminent attack?” the statement adds.
Israel says four soldiers killed in rocket attack overnight
We reported a little earlier on information provided by the Israeli military that three of its soldiers were killed in a Hamas rocket attack near Kerem Shalom overnight, one of the main crossings used to deliver aid into Gaza.
Rafah: Where the refugees of Gaza reach the final wall
Fergal Keane
BBC Special correspondent, Jerusalem
There are more than 1.4 million Gazans crowded into Rafah – five times its pre-war population. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council that works out at 22,000 people for every square kilometre. Already disease is spreading, with outbreaks of diarrhoea, hepatitis A, and meningitis – as well as a continuing hunger crisis.
Rafah is where the refugees of Gaza reach the final wall, the border with Egypt which is closed to the overwhelming majority of the displaced. They arrived after being pushed from one place to another by the advance of the Israeli forces.
Israel has long insisted that it will invade Rafah. But NGOs say there is nowhere for the displaced to go. A new offensive will only result in more civilian dying, they say. And families of Israeli hostages still held in Gaza say their loved ones will be put in further danger by an IDF offensive.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is already preparing for additional field hospitals to help if people are forced to move. But there are questions about what happens to the seriously ill and the elderly currently in overcrowded hospitals in Rafah.
“If you look at our health sector, it is crippled already and an incursion will actually mean that we lose another three hospital,” says Rik Peeperkorn, regional director of the WHO, who recently returned from Rafah.
‘I worried this day would come’ – Gazans in Rafah on Israel’s evacuation order
Posted at 11:1611:16
Palestinians pack belongings as they prepare to leave Rafah
As Israel warns civilians in eastern Rafah to leave the area ahead of a planned operation there, pictures taken from the southern city show some people getting ready to depart:
Hamas says Israel ‘escalation’ will have consequences
Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri has told Reuters news agency that Israel’s evacuation order in parts of Rafah is a “dangerous escalation that will have consequences”.
Meanwhile Israel’s foreign minister says the war in Gaza “continues with the exact same goals: the release of all hostages and the defeat of Hamas”.
Posting on X, Israel Katz says “Israel has agreed to significant concessions to bring the hostages home, but Hamas has repeatedly refused.”
It comes after two days of talks aimed at securing a ceasefire deal in Gaza and the release of hostages concluded yesterday, with Israel and Hamas still some distance apart on how to end the seven-month conflict.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday that “surrendering” to a Hamas demand to end the war would amount to defeat. While the head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh accused Netanyahu of sabotaging the talks.
Khan Younis not an option for fleeing Palestinians – Unicef
“It’s everything we feared,” James Elder, a spokesperson for the United Nation’s Children’s Fund (Unicef), says of Israel’s order for 100,000 Palestinians to evacuate parts of Rafah.
“You now have families who have been displaced multiple times, who have endured trauma that one can’t quite comprehend,” he tells BBC Radio 4’s Today programme from Geneva, Switzerland.
The Israeli military earlier said evacuees would be directed to tent cities in nearby Khan Younis and al-Mawasi, where aid would be available.
But Elder insists Khan Younis – previously the focus of a months-long onslaught by the Israeli army – is not an option “because it’s rubble”, so many civilians will choose to go further north.
“But the picture there isn’t much better,” with raw sewage flowing through the streets, he says.
The coping capacity of sheltering Palestinians “has been smashed. They have nothing else left, and yet, here they go,” Elder says.
Watch: The situation at al-Mawasi as Gazans told to leave Rafah
Footage from Associated Press shows the current situation at al-Mawasi, a tent city declared a “humanitarian zone” by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
About 100,000 people in eastern Rafah are being urged to move towards al-Mawasi and Khan Younis, ahead of a “limited scope” operation in the city.
Al-Mawasi is a narrow strip of land by the Mediterranean Sea. It has few buildings and largely consists of sandy dunes and agricultural land.
I have no place to go, says mother sheltering in Rafah
Mother-of-two Ghada al-Kourd is sheltering in Rafah, having been displaced six times in the last four months.
Israel has told 100,000 people in certain areas in the eastern part of the city to evacuate.
Al-Kourd tells BBC Radio 4’s Today programme she is just 15 minutes away from one of those areas but for the moment, she’s staying put.
“I’m so confused just to be honest. I have no place to go. This was the last place,” she says.
Israel is directing Palestinians to go to tent cities in Khan Younis and al-Mawasi, but al-Kourd says she does not believe it would be safe to move to those locations.
She would be concerned for her health living in a tent in such a crowded place in the heat, she says. Khan Younis has been destroyed, she adds, while she also voices her concern about the risk of air strikes and fighting in other areas of Gaza.
Flyers dropped over eastern Rafah urging people to leave
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has been dropping flyers in the eastern area of Rafah calling on civilians to evacuate ahead of a planned operation in the city.
There are two different versions – red and blue.
In the red version, the IDF tells residents of specific areas in Rafah where their forces “will be operating”, and warns “anyone found near terrorist organisations endangers themselves and their family members”.
It urges citizens to move to the “humanitarian area” in al-Mawasi, and to avoid heading north of Wadi Gaza, or nearing the eastern and southern security fences.
The blue version, meanwhile, announces the expansion of the zone where it says “humanitarian aid will continue”.
UN aid agency says it will stay in Rafah ‘as long as possible’
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees is warning against an Israeli offensive in Rafah and says it will not leave the city, following Israel’s call for 100,000 people to evacuate.
“An Israeli offensive in Rafah would mean more civilian suffering & deaths. The consequences would be devastating for 1.4 million people,” UNWRA says in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
“UNRWA is not evacuating: the agency will maintain a presence in Rafah as long as possible & will continue providing lifesaving aid to people.”
Netanyahu said Rafah attack would happen regardless of deal
Following on from those comments from the office of Israel’s defence minister, let’s take a look back at recent remarks from the country’s prime minister about a Rafah offensive.
Benjamin Netanyahu said last week that Israel would launch an invasion of the southern Gaza city regardless of truce talks with Hamas, saying that he would do this “with or without” a ceasefire deal.
“The idea that we will halt the war before achieving all of its goals is out of the question,” he said.
“We will enter Rafah and we will eliminate the Hamas battalions there with or without a deal, in order to achieve the total victory,” according to a statement issued by Netanyahu’s office.
More than half of Gaza’s 2.5m population is in Rafah, having fled there to escape fighting in other parts of the territory. Conditions in the overcrowded city are dire, and displaced people there have spoken of a lack of food, water and medication.
The US, along with the UN, have voiced their opposition to an invasion of Rafah.
Israel tells US ‘military action is required’ in Rafah – defence ministry
Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant spoke with his US counterpart – Lloyd Austin – on Sunday night, before Israel’s call for civilians to leave parts of eastern Rafah.
In a statement, Gallant’s office says he told Austin that “military action is required” in Rafah “at the lack of an alternative”, due to stalling talks over the release of Israeli hostages.
Hamas has a “lack of seriousness in regard to the frameworks” for their release, the statement continues.
In the Pentagon’s readout of the call, it says the pair discussed “ongoing hostage negotiations, humanitarian aid, and Rafah”.
In the call Austin “reaffirmed” his commitment for the return of hostages to Israel, the statement continues, adding that he told Gallant there is a need for any military operation in Rafah “to include a credible plan to evacuate Palestinian civilians and maintain the flow of humanitarian aid”.
Deadly Israeli strikes reported in Rafah after three soldiers killed
‘My children cling to me as dogs raid graves near our shelter’
Gaza ceasefire talks intensify in Cairo
Gaza Strip in maps: How life has changed
Remains of man thought to be hostage found in Israel
Gaza hostage’s mother pleads for ceasefire deal
May 5th 2024
Cubans lured to Russian army by high pay and passports
By Vitaly Shevchenko
Russia editor, BBC Monitoring
Russia has likely been recruiting Cuban nationals to fight in its army in Ukraine, research by the BBC has shown.
In September and October 2023, passport details belonging to over 200 Cubans who allegedly joined the Russian army were leaked online by a pro-Ukrainian platform called InformNapalm.
The passport details were obtained, the site said, by hacking the emails of a Russian military recruitment officer in Tula, south of Moscow.
A Facebook search has shown that 31 of the names mentioned in the Ukrainian leak match accounts whose owners appear to be in Russia or linked to the Russian army.
Some, for instance, have posted photos of themselves wearing Russian military uniform, or in locations that bear Russian street signs or Russian number plates. Others list Russia as their current place of residence.
Bringing Cubans into Russia is relatively straightforward. The two countries have been allies since the Cold War, Cubans do not need a visa to travel to Russia and direct flights to Moscow make the trip easier.
Meanwhile, lucrative army contracts offered by Russia appeal to Cuban men desperate to escape the worsening economic crisis on the US-sanctioned island.
Documents leaked online and media reports suggest Cuban men are offered monthly payments in the region of $2,000 (£1,600) per month – a huge sum for Cuba, where the average monthly salary is under $25 (£20).
The promise of Russian citizenship may also entice some Cubans.
Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68949298
Comment
Cuba has every good reason to show allegiance to Russia given their history of being abused by the U.S.A. They have every good reason to expect another Bay of Pigs if the United States decides that they have a Russian friend too close for comfort. I am old enough to recall how most of us were terrified by the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis. The problem is that people of the west are either totally pleasure bent, ground down into the dirt, seriously mentally ill on anti psychotics, living in poverty with fear for their lives, drugged or drunk out of their minds. Whatever, they have no idea of the real danger and what is coming to them if they don’t wake up to horrible lying corrupt fake western style brand democracy.
R J Cook
Is France Ready to Fight Russia? – The American Conservative
Is France ready to fight Russia?
“We must first and foremost feel protected,” Macron said, “because we are a nuclear power.” He then added, “We are ready; we have a doctrine [for the use of nuclear weapons].” France is ready to send troops into Ukraine “to counter the Russian forces” and even to prepare for nuclear war.
26 Mar 2024 — During the war’s first summer, Macron said it was important that Moscow was not humiliated and that a European security order including Russia …
27 Feb 2024 — Emmanuel Macron has said that the West may have to send ground troops to Ukraine to support their war against Russia.
Macron wants to lead Europe on Ukraine. France may not let …
politico.euhttps://www.politico.eu › article › macron-wants-to-lead…
28 Feb 2024 — French president faces blowback across the political spectrum for not ruling out a Western military presence in Ukraine.
20 Mar 2024 — Macron’s tone appears to signify that he not only wants to prevent Russia’s victory, but to inflict on it the humiliation he insisted, two years …
Is Emmanuel Macron leading Europe’s last stand?
Responsible Statecrafthttps://responsiblestatecraft.org › Europe › ukraine war
With several of his aforementioned statements, Macron sounds like he means that Europe must be ready to defend against an actual attack from Russia after it …
23 Mar 2023 — Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev says the coming decades will not be quiet.
Breaking China
… military that indicate to Beijing that Washington is genuinely prepared for war. These steps will include surging carrier groups, shifting deployment to …
The West’s share of Chinese goods imports in 2021 was 53 per cent and worth 1.25 trillion euros. The Western share is at high or very high levels for many important key products such as machinery, highly specialised instruments and semiconductors.
Firefighters cannot put out the Diehl fire in Berlin
- By Al Mayadeen English
- Source: News Websites
- 4 May 2024 20:22
The Diehl fire has not been put out a day later, prompting more firefighting efforts that would persist throughout Saturday.
Firefighters have not been able to put out the fire at the metallurgical unit of the German defense sector business Diehl Metal Applications GmbH, the B.Z. newspaper reported, citing a fire department spokesperson, noting that extinguishing efforts are set to continue through Saturday.
On Friday, a fire broke out in Diehl, which manufactures defense systems for Ukraine and the IRIS-T system. The structure had entirely burnt through and a portion of it had fallen.
Firefighting teams had been attempting to extinguish the fire from the outside since it could not be contained from the inside, Adrian Wenzel, a spokesman for the Berlin fire service, stated.
According to German media, 160 firemen responded to the fire on Friday, but as of Saturday, 50 remained on call amid the heavy fume and toxins released, trying to keep it from spreading further.
Related News
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M2A2 Bradleys IFVs, Leopard 2 tanks destroyed in Zaporozhye front
May 4th 2024
R J Cook
U.S. Imposes Sanctions on Chinese Companies for Aiding Russia’s War Effort. The penalties came after top Biden administration officials warned China not to help Moscow restock its arsenal to attack Ukraine
U.S Treasury’s action on Wednesday sanctioned nearly 60 targets located in Azerbaijan, Belgium, China, Russia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and …
Why are the USA sanctioning China?
The U.S. imposed sanctions on 20 companies based in China and Hong Kong, following repeated warnings from Washington about China’s support for Russia’s military, including during recent trips by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the country.
US issues hundreds of sanctions targeting Russia, takes aim …
Are Russia and China really allies?
Nevertheless, China and Russia currently enjoy the best relations they have had since the late 1950s. Although they have no formal alliance, the two countries do have an informal agreement to coordinate diplomatic and economic moves, and build up an alliance against the United States.
Field sources in the West Bank: Journalists suffered from suffocation in Deir al-Ghosun, north of Tulkarm, after being targeted by the occupation
Palestinian Red Crescent: The occupation is still preventing our crews from reaching a martyr on the ground in the town of Deir al-Ghosun in Tulkarm
One Palestinian has been killed as a result of Israeli attacks in the vicinity of a surrounded house in Deir al-Ghosoun near Tulkarm: Al Mayadeen’s correspondent in the West Bank
The Israeli occupation forces demolished the house in Deir al-Ghousoun in northern Tulkarem, the occupied West Bank.
Palestinian Resistance fighters confront the invading Israeli forces.
The Israeli occupation forces storm the town of Deir al-Ghousoun in the occupied West Bank, occupied Palestine as a bulldozer is mobilized to demolish a house that has been surrounded for hours.
Reuters citing a US official: Washington believes there has been progress in the hostage talks in Cairo, but is awaiting what will turn out.
Palestinian sources revealed to Al Mayadeen that Khalil Al-Hayya, at the head of the Hamas negotiating delegation, is heading to Cairo tomorrow, Saturday.
Palestinian sources to Al Mayadeen: Khalil al-Hayya will head the Hamas delegation to the ceasefire talks in Cairo on Saturday.
The PFLP: The announcement by the Yemeni armed forces of the start of the fourth stage of escalation against the occupation is a turning point in the battle.
Where now for Western foreign policy?
- Natalie Jones
- Source: Al Mayadeen English
- 12 Aug 2022 12:30
- 7 Shares
The ability of Western politicians to pursue their own objectives in certain parts of the world is clearly fading.
The past twenty years have demonstrated the West’s global hegemony; its ability to dominate smaller, less powerful countries. Certainly, over these recent decades, the West has demonstrated its political, economic, and military supremacy over weaker states: The conflicts in Iraq, Libya, and the former Yugoslavia are examples of Western, and in particular NATO dominance. Historically speaking, these conflicts started with the West imposing a devastating array of economic sanctions on targeted countries. Following this, the countries were targeted militarily: Yugoslavia for instance was subject to 78 days of bombings by NATO troops. These conflicts devastated the countries that they targeted. Moreover, these conflicts have also caused global instability with the rise in international terrorism and the current migrant crisis being just a few consequences of misguided Western foreign policy.
Yet, there has recently been a number of conflicts where the West has failed to exert its dominance, despite its best efforts. In Syria, for example, Russia’s support for President Bashar Al Assad undoubtedly prevented the West from toppling the regime. President Assad is still in power today, to the horror of many Western leaders. With regards to the current situation in Ukraine, there are no signs, as of yet, that the West’s support for Ukraine has turned the tide of battle in favor of Ukraine. In fact, Western support for Ukraine has exacerbated the preexisting economic and political crises that many Western nations now face. In the UK, for example, the country is facing a cost of living crisis, high inflation as well as a new Prime Minister following the ousting of the outgoing Boris Johnson.
Undoubtedly the diminishing power of the West has led to other international actors such as China and Russia pursuing their own objectives regarding international foreign relations. It has also strengthened the military and economic capability of these superpowers. These countries have built up their military and economies to first act as a deterrent against Western intervention and secondly to withstand the imposition of sanctions against their economies. We have seen with the Ukraine crisis NATO’s unwillingness to place troops on the ground in Ukraine, knowing that it could spark a nuclear war against Russia which is a nuclear state. In addition, Russia although undoubtedly affected by the West’s sanctions is managing to reorganize elements of its economy that were once dependent on Western supply chains/customs.
The ability of Western politicians to pursue their own objectives in certain parts of the world is clearly fading. They no longer possess the power they once had to impose their will on other countries where they once did. One would think that this would trigger Western governments to rethink and re-evaluate how they pursue foreign relations. Yet, sadly this does not appear to be the case. Instead, we have Western officials turning their attention to other regions, where they can intervene and aggravate relations between themselves and other nations. Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan is a prime example of the West and in particular the USA’s intention to interfere in the diplomatic relationship between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China.
Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was supposedly to promote democracy. However, her actions angered the Chinese and led them to fire multiple missiles into the water around Taiwan. They also started military drills around the island. China also stated that it would end cooperation with the US on a number of issues including climate, anti-drug trade, and military efforts. This comes at a time where US and China relations are already at a tense standing point.
What is the rationale for engaging in such an antagonistic policy? Is it because western countries realize that their global power has diminished and they are trying to cling to its last remnants; in order to demonstrate that it can indeed still dominate the world stage? I fail to be convinced that the best way to achieve this is by pursuing foreign policy, which has already caused extensive devastation and destruction as well as cause division, particularly among Eastern and Western nations. Surely, it would be much more effective for Western leaders to evaluate their past mistakes and focus on the current problems facing their own nations as a starting point before further considering how they can diplomatically engage with other countries in general. It does not appear that the current caliber of Western leadership has the cognitive ability to do this. Yet, with the emergence of new superpowers such as Russia and China, will the balance of power shift? Will there come a point when such nations will step in either militarily or economically to prevent the West from continuing its current disastrous international trajectory within the international space?
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
Natalie Jones
Independent journalist based in the UK
https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/blog/where-now-for-western-foreign-policy
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