Bulletins and News Discussion from August 5th to August 11th, 2024 - LGBT - COTW: Iraq
Well, Iran and their allies' response may happen sometime this week and apparently they aren't talking to the US in order to negotiate how and where they will hit Israel (and Shoigu arrived in Tehran rather auspiciously), the Bangladeshi government just fell, F16s have been given to Ukraine, there are fascist riots in the UK, and Japan just had its worst stock fall since 1987 and seems to be taking several other countries/corporations with it. I don't really know where to look right now.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Iraq! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section. Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war. Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language. https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one. https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts. https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel. https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator. https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps. https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language. https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language. https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses. https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
I am declaring unlimited vendetta on anyone who starts boosting Walz. I will fight you. I will bite. I have 20 years of rage built up from living with those racist passive aggressive backstabbing jackasses, I lived under a year of police terror under the Walz regime, I am not letting anyone lesser evil that fuck. Tim Walz sent the US FUCKING ARMY to crush an anti-cop PoC uprising. That's who he is, that's what he did. He's not a nice old man, he's not a "progressive", he's not going to save Palestine, he's not going to fix anything. He's the competent fascist we believed was going to follow Trump and that's why he's being picked. They didn't pick him for his progressive ideals, they picked him because he proved he'd be willing to send armed soldiers in to America's streets to ruthlessly crush dissent Because he actually did that.
i have not ONCE seen kamala look or act remotely with genuine anger until pro-palestine protestors interrupted her. she almost always seems a bit upbeat even when assertive, but there she looked full of pure contempt.
Not exactly news but someone in Lebanon asked how to stop their fishtank from breaking due to Israeli sonic booms and the /r/aquarium mods removed it. The sub is now revolting
The Trump/Bolsonaro-style "stop the steal" tactic has failed in Mexico. "3 parties submitted over 230 challenges to the electoral data, arguing that there were irregularities in the process. After the information was analyzed, the Electoral Court rejected them."
Holy shit, now every fucking time a leftist wins an election, the conservatives and far-right will accuse them of fraud. This shit is getting boring. It's always the same arguments.
Cool facts: The handgun in this legendary picture of Hamas Chief Political Officer Yahya Sinwar was acquired from an israeli special forces team that was discovered and ambushed in 2018 while they were trying to sneak into Gaza in an NGO truck.
Jeremy Corbyn is in talks with four other independent MPs to form a new Commons group, potentially unlocking hundreds of thousands of pounds of public funding and access. The potential grouping of five independents – who all campaigned on a pro-Palestinian platform - would equal the number of Reform UK MPs and outnumber the Greens.
During the commemoration ceremony at Hiroshima, the Governor of Hiroshima Prefecture delivered a speech condemning the present international order for its injustices, the domination of small nations by superpowers claiming to represent the forces of justice, and so on. The cameraman for the NHK spent the entire section of the speech zoomed in on the Israeli ambassador attending the ceremony.
americans are literally deeply evil, so many mfs who claimed to give a shit about the genocide in Palestine but since Harris got the nomination it's become abundantly clear they were just irritated over the lack of a "competent" leader for the empire. i feel really awful for comrades over there who are having to deal with living in the midst of that, it must be soul-crushing. the only difference between zionist supremacism and amerikkkan supremacism is that the zionists are closer to the collapse of their system and thus more obviously, outwardly bloodthirsty, less wholly complacent.
Tim Walz is a surprising pick. Doubt he’ll be Henry Wallace or LBJ 2.0 but still not bad.
The amount of NATO leftists saying, “I know I’m a communist but I just donated ☺️” makes me realize that the majority of them are probably children or adults under 30. No way in hell would a 50 year old Communist say something like that after getting burned for that long.
Craziest thing about Harris picking Walz as her VP running mate is that practically none of the established news media in the west covered the recent release of CCTV footage from the Israeli Sde Teiman concentration camp which clearly shows Israeli camp guards raping a prisoner
Not gonna share the video, but just want to point out that the footage was released by the Israeli Channel 12, and throughout the segment, they still have the fucking gall to call the prisoner being raped and tortured a "terrorist".
We now have video footage alongside systematic evidence that Israeli soldiers gang rape Palestinian captives and there is zero outrage from Western media. I am loosing my mind.
Sure, electorialism is a fuck. But it's also funny as hell sometimes.
Let's recap: Trump was going to win so hard against Biden, he had it locked. The Democrats were scrambling all over the place trying to convice stubborn joe to drop out, but he wouldn't, the Democrats were showing a lot of weakness. Then the assassination attempt happened, and it was super joever, 99% guaranteed he was going to win. But then genocide joe dropped out, KKKamala replaced him just because she's next on the line (if the Democrats had an actual primary she would have lost 100%). Meanwhile Trump selects JD Vance, a man with the charisma of a dirty diaper, as his VP, then Kamala begins to grow in the polls, appoints the generic wholesome old white man as VP, then stares down at people calling for a ceasefire in Gaza (no no no, not for the actual disappearance of the genocidal state, FOR A SIMPLE CEASEFIRE) and now Trump is completely lost and doesn't know what to do. He doesn't have an effective strategy against Kamala nor Walz (his attacks are very erratic like trying to call Walz "more radical than crazy Bernie" and trying to put Biden back in the discussion) and his VP is a fucking problem.
This happened in like 3 weeks lol.
Either way, neither Trump nor Copmala can save the United States of America from it's downfall. It's coming.
David Lynch has revealed he can no longer leave his house since being diagnosed with emphysema.
The director of films including Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive, who created and starred in Twin Peaks, shared the revelation in a new interview about his career.
Speaking to Sight & Sound magazine, Lynch, 78, said he was diagnosed with emphysema due to smoking throughout his life and said that, if he directs again, it will have to be remotely as he cannot “go out” due to fears he will get Covid.
“I’ve gotten emphysema from smoking for so long and so I’m homebound whether I like it or not. It would be very bad for me to get sick, even with a cold,” he said, revealing that he “can only walk a short distance before” he’s “out of oxygen”.
It’s because of this that Lynch says it is unlikely he will direct again, but if he does, he will be unable to do so in person. However, while saying “I would do it remotely if it comes to it”, he said: “I wouldn’t like that so much.”
Free Iraq AMA for the news mega today. My wife is Iraqi and I've spent more time there than in Syria and Lebanon in the last 5 years. I pretty much know about the situation there more than Syria, I had to impress her dad.
Imane Khelif from Algeria will advance to the women's 66kg boxing final after winning her semi final match. Went through with a very convincing performance against Thailand's Janjaem Suwannapheng.
It is well and truly Joever. Sometime in the last 24 hours my neighbor finally took down their enormous BIDEN 2024 banner. Their blue-and-yellow "Stop the War!" handpainted sign is still there, unaccompanied by any Palestinian colors or messages.
Nicolás Maduro corners the United States, threatening to sell oil and gas only to BRICS countries, and Washington backs down from declaring candidate Edmundo Gonzalez the winner of the July 28 elections.
An extremely interesting post from a few months ago (apr 27) translating Ansarallah politburo member Abdulmalik Alejri where he discusses Marx and capitalist crisis.
"The death of Sheikh Abdul Majid al-Zindani brings to mind the era of global jihad led by Salafi Jihadism and the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s against what was then termed the communist threat. The result was that they handed America and the capitalist West a victory without war, as then-US President Reagan borrowed a phrase from his predecessor Nixon. In the context of the Cold War, Afghanistan, that distant corner of Central Asia, transformed into a hub of Islam, and Kabul became a destination for Arab mujahideen, while Palestine, with Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Prophet's Ascension, was within arm's reach, yet failed to attract Arab mujahideen to jihad or to the allure of the virgins. Ironically, when America occupied Afghanistan, Kabul ceased to be a hub of Islam and a destination for jihad.
At that time, Western capitalist intelligence agencies and their Arab allies succeeded in portraying Marx and socialism as a threat to religions, whereas the truth was that they posed a threat to exploitative capitalism, and Marx's battle was fundamentally against capitalist exploitation. Marx's legacy fundamentally did not prioritize religions, and all he wrote about them was few and scattered texts. His most important work, "Capital," in which his genius shines, explained the structure of capitalism, analyzed its internal mechanisms and contradictions, its capacity for expansion, crisis generation, and self-renewal. Even according to his adversaries, Marx's legacy remained the primary reference for analyzing capitalist crises, with his ideas resurfacing with each historical cycle of capitalist crises.
Marx believed that the Enlightenment had overthrown the exploitation of the church and that the real looming danger was capitalist exploitation, even suggesting that religion could play a positive role in mobilizing against capitalist exploitation. I don't understand how some perceive Marxism and communism as a threat to religion while finding no risks in liberal capitalism, even though the Enlightenment movement with its liberal tendencies was the one that battled the church, and the French Revolution raised the slogan "Hang the last king with the intestines of the last priest," while the slogans of the Bolshevik revolution called for overthrowing the bourgeois government. Naturally, this is just a question of amazement, as the issue as a whole is not as simple, and civilization cannot be reduced or approached solely from the angle of combating religion.
The real danger to religion is such exploitation of religion to serve the battles and projects of America and the imperial West in the region, and those involved should take heed from the dramatic end of the Afghan jihad."
an olympic runner (noah lyles) basically collapses from covid after a race and everyone is like "yea cool ok no big deal" my coworkers are like "yeah it's endemic at this point" YEAH PURPOSEFULLY IT'S NOT NATIVE MOTHERFUCKER IT'S 4 YEARS OLD
So there is lot of talk from the McDonalds "Left" about the Venezuelan elections being fraudulent or whatever.
I don't have first hand experience but a journalist that I respect has and she went as an election observer in Venezuela.
(Breakthrough news has also done some great coverage from what I have seen)
She reported that:
The election system that they have is probably one of the best (if not the best) in the world and
is very hard to cheat. They have a triple verification system where you vote in an electronic machine using your fingerprint (instead of
just an ID), you then get a receipt of
what you voted (without any identification on the paper), and also the machine leaves a physical vote in a separate box so afterwards they can
verify the differences between the receipts and what's in the ballot box.
Things were very calm in every election center she went. There was violence in certain places elsewhere. The world on the street was that certain people(...) where giving 150 dollars to anyone willing to participate to anti government riots.
She said there is tremendous misinformation. At some point they were saying that an airport was taken over by anti-government forces. The problem was she was at that airport at that time and nothing was happening!
Internet is completely censor free. (Maybe you should rethink of it Nicolas...)
Maduro made a request to the Venezuelan supreme court so that the opposition parties submit any evidence that they have in regard to the elections so they can be cross examined. (BTW, the supreme court is
elected by the parliament that included the opposition parties of course...)
Maduro had 5 assassination attempts against him in March alone. He wears bulletproof vest in his public appearances.
In the last 15 years the government has built 5 million houses and has made the country food independent.
Maduro when he gathered people around to express his thanks after the election he had 3 ambassadors beside him, those of China, Turkey and Iran
Many of the cars in Venezuela streets are Chinese (a phenomenon that I see not only about cars but in everything across Latin America)
Burgerland companies like Edison Research (that takes contracts from CIA, Voice of America etc.) where trying to create a climate, months before the elections, that
basically the opposition was far ahead (they were polling the opposition as high as 70%!) so that when the real election results came they could say "Aha you see, our polling (that was 100% real of course)
didn't match the election results so that means the government cheated!". So the western muppets ("left" and right) take what burgerland polling companies claim as better evidence than the election results themselves!
NYT about a month ago reported that the base of the opposition was inside the embassy of Argentina! They did that because the government can't check what's getting in and what is getting out of an embassy.
That's why we show supporters of the government trying to get inside the embassy after the elections.
Loser "Left" is very concerned about elections in Venezuela, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Tibet in China, arming Naz...excuse me freedom fighters in Ukraine, women rights in Iran at convenient times, LGBT rights in Palestine at convenient times and voting for the lesser of two evils in the imperial core in order to protect their proper...democracy. All of this just happens to be a stance that is very convenient for the US state department...nothing to see here.
Nicolas Maduro announces that he has ordered, through the Telecommunications Commission, the blocking of Twitter (X) in the country, for a period of 10 days. The reason would be violations of Venezuelan laws.
I regret to inform you the Australian man who eloquently yelled at cops has died. The “see that headlock, this is democracy manifest. GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY PENIS” guy.
HOT TAKE: Tim Walz is the Democratic Party’s attempt at skinwalking the Progressive movement and in 5 years nobody will remember Bernie Sanders and the original progressive movement that spawned out of it.
It will instead be remembered as a Democratic initiation and how it has always been a pro-imperialist, pro-Zionist movement that formed a healthy, valued but not effective opposition to the right wing of the party.
In response to a question, US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the Biden administration had not recognized González as president, a departure from the position assumed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken who declared González as the “winner” of the election.
Miller instead pointed to ongoing mediation efforts by Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. He further emphasized the need for Venezuela to “transition back to democratic norms”, stopping short of calling for González to take office.
The SPD-led German ministry of defense is issuing a "tradition decree" (Traditionserlass), which will allow Nazi soldiers to be honored as role models, if they worked for the Bundeswehr post-war. Though they do also note their "impressive" record during the war.
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said he was “appalled” by the Israeli military strike and the “tragic loss of life”.
He wrote on X: “Hamas must stop endangering civilians. Israel must comply with International Humanitarian Law”, and called for a ceasefire to “protect civilians, free all hostages, and end restrictions on aid”.
AIPAC has taken out its second "Squad" member: Cori Bush. They dropped $8M on her race to get a "pro-Israel progressive" Wesley Bell to primary her. They ran the campaign through one of their PAC cutouts and didn't mention Israel ones in any of their attack ads.
Between Bowman and Bush, AIPAC spent $22.5M primarying black progessives.
so something i don't really grasp about the IDF is how their casualty figures necessitate the extraordinary draft measures. i take it for granted they must be lying and twisting the truth but still, are there any guesses what a 'real' figure is then? ~600,000 minus 700 or so admitted fatalities just doesn't seem like a very desperate situation. is there like x10 that in non fatal casualties or something they're being shy about publicizing? are they desperately filling up the ranks to strengthen the whole occupation just in preparation of things getting wider and deadlier? but then why the hell did they have to redeploy troops from Gaza against their rioters?
sorry if these are stupid questions it's just seems fishy to me
The US has regularly justified maintaining secrecy about the bases by claiming that, as CENTCOM told The Intercept last year, “in order to protect our forces and maintain operational security, we will not confirm U.S base locations.” Forbeck — a private contractor from the Red Gate Group working for CENTCOM — refused to provide even a count of U.S. bases in the region. “Numbers. Cannot provide that because opsec,” she said, referring to operational security, while failing to explain how providing a simple tally of bases could jeopardize U.S. personnel.
[...] But America’s enemies, specifically Iranian-backed militias, have had no trouble finding and striking U.S. bases since the late 2010s.
Reading this, I immediately thought of all those articles a few years back about how China were uprooting US spy networks.
Around 2013, U.S. intelligence began noticing an alarming pattern: Undercover CIA personnel, flying into countries in Africa and Europe for sensitive work, were being rapidly and successfully identified by Chinese intelligence, according to three former U.S. officials. The surveillance by Chinese operatives began in some cases as soon as the CIA officers had cleared passport control. Sometimes, the surveillance was so overt that U.S. intelligence officials speculated that the Chinese wanted the U.S. side to know they had identified the CIA operatives, disrupting their missions; other times, however, it was much more subtle and only detected through U.S. spy agencies’ own sophisticated technical countersurveillance capabilities.
The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) says the US secretary of state has “knowingly violated US law by backtracking” on plans to sanction the Netzah Yehuda battalion over rights abuse allegations.
The Israeli military unit “has clearly committed gross human rights violations using US weapons”, CAIR Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said in a statement.
“Secretary Blinken’s cowardly, morally reprehensible and blatantly illegal decision confirms what numerous State Department whistleblowers have said: he is disregarding the conclusions of career diplomats, as well as experts on federal and international law,” Mitchell said.
“Secretary Blinken is now as much of a war criminal as the war criminal he will continue to arm, Israeli defense minister Gallant, and he should resign his office in disgrace.”
Nicolas Maduro: "Today, on my TV show at 8:00 PM, I will publicly break relations with WhatsApp, because WhatsApp is being used to threaten Venezuela. Little by little, I will move my contacts to Telegram and WeChat, WhatsApp out of Venezuela. It is necessary to do so, say no to WhatsApp. There, criminals threaten the youth, the popular leaders, from phones in Colombia, Miami, Peru and Chile. Cowards hide behind anonymity, but I tell the fascists, you will hide, but the revolutionary youth is in the streets and we will never hide."
I joked some days ago that Maduro would probably use Chinese or create his own Social Media. I guess I was right.
A Zionist town councilmember in Teaneck, New Jersey alleged that she had been the victim of an anti-Semitic break-in at her home. It turns out she called the cops after forgetting she'd left the light on in her basement. The New York Times refused to correct the story, even when one of the journalists covering it pressed to "give readers a fuller picture."
Excerpts
As a pivotal example of alleged antisemitic activity in the area, my co-author John Leland, a Times staff reporter, quoted township councilmember Hillary Goldberg, who claimed that her home had been “broken into” as part of a string of abuse in response to her vocal support of Israel and her Jewish background.
“I have been threatened; I had a box truck with my picture on it and the words ‘liar liar’ driven around town; my house has been broken into; I have received antisemitic messages,” Goldberg told Leland, adding: “I have never felt so afraid to be Jewish as now.”
. . .
According to the first police report, dated February 10, six officers responded to a call at Goldberg’s publicly listed address because, according to the complainant, “Lights basement were on // were not on when left // back door was locked when got home unlocked.” The half-dozen officers checked the property but found no sign of forced entry nor anything else amiss. Two subsequent checks of the area found nothing further, and a follow-up investigation by a sergeant two days later ended the same.
. . .
Believing a correction to the Times story was in order—or at least an update, to give readers a fuller picture—I shared the police reports with Leland—who told me that he had already gotten them and, despite the explicit contradictions, no correction would be issued. When presented with the police reports, management at the Times also declined to reconcile them with its coverage. Instead, managing director of external communications, Charlie Stadtlander, said in a statement that the article was “thoroughly reported, fact-checked and edited, and we stand behind its publication.” Goldberg did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
i posted earlier about the american ambassador to japan refusing to go to the nagasaki memorial, however i had forgotten that the american ambassador is fucking rahm emmanuel. how is that guy still around
Barbosu thought she had won bronze after she competed on Monday at the Bercy Arena in Paris as she stood third in the standings. But U.S. coaches for Jordan Chiles, then ranked fifth, appealed for Chiles' score to be revised.
That revision caused Chiles to be upgraded to a bronze medal, leaving Barbosu off the podium and in tears.
the israeli ambassador was disinvited from nagasaki's remembrance of the bombing, and the us, uk, france, italy, and australia have decided that they won't attend either. the eu released a statement concerned with the fact that they have put israel "on the same level as russia and belarus" who have been disinvited since 2022
Seen a lot of videos of Israeli tourists in Japan screaming at locals protesting the genocide.
The obviously takeaway is that they act like they own the place everywhere in the world, but a secondary thought I had: are there an unusually high number of Japanese pro-Palestine protests? Like versus other countries? Or do Israelis just love visiting there?
I really need to learn more about Iraq, but I usually say that for every COTW country.
Americans have no clue what our government did to Iraq. On more than one occasion, I have tried to explain to people here how horrific the destruction of Iraq was (both in terms of human lives and infrastructure), and how much Iraqis despise America for this. Every. Single. Time… the response is “but at least we got rid of Saddam” (with the implication that the Iraqis should be grateful we got rid of him).
Early reports of the "Tribal Fighters" ( ) having retaken Omar Oil reffinery
(if Truth) this is not only kicks the Angloids out (they must go!) and it takes the Oil revenue back to syria and away from the SDF .. but it also pushes the US away from the Euprath and thereby opens the direct Iranian supply road to Golan.
The threat of Trump liquidating the administrative state and democratic party, real or imagined, has pressured dems at the highest level to do the previously unthinkable; demonstrate basic political instincts.
Several Hezbollah drones struck an Israeli military base and a vehicle in the city of Nahariya, north of Acre, on 6 August, just a few hours after several people were killed in an Israeli drone strike on southern Lebanon.
The video of the silent drones flying overhead the terrified settlers while no alarms are going off is just spectacular. I love Hezbollah
Additionally:
"The Israeli military has admitted that the munition that struck a highway near Nahariya in Western Galilee, critically injuring one settler, was an Iron Dome interceptor missile that malfunctioned."
Genocide Joe has lifted the ban on arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Biden has previously said that the Saudis are willing to recognize Israel in return for the resumation of arms sales and approval for a nuclear facility.
Crazy how 10 years ago AMD was a penny stock, around $4 vs Intel's $27, and now they're $135 and $20 respectively. I think abt this more than I should because I've always been team red and almost bought it. But now it's too gambly to buy any
Seems like fighting in Syria near al omar oil field over the Euphrates is not over yet.
Al-Mayadeen correspondent: "Qasd" forces set up "mortars" in Hawijat al-Busayrah facing the Syrian army's points on the opposite bank of the Euphrates River
I find it interesting that your standard liberal scoffs at Iran’s military capacity, yet whenever Israel does some shit, a dozen articles are written about how US military generals become on edge and announce “negotiations” or “deescalation” that help stop/delay major Iranian strikes against Israel/US bases.
Copy and pasting from CNN since linking to breaking news doesn’t let me link to the story itself
Stocks are tumbling. But, no, America's market is not "crashing”
The US stock market looks like it’s going to have another very rough day on Monday. But this is not what a market crash looks like.
US futures, which give investors a sense of how the market will open at 9:30 am ET, are sharply lower. Dow futures are down 800 points, or 2%. Futures for the broader S&P 500 are 2.9% lower. And futures for the tech-heavy Nasdaq, which entered correction territory (a 10% decline from the peak) fell 4.2%.
That’s bad, but it’s not close to historically bad. By comparison, Japan’s Nikkei 225 plummeted 12% Monday — that’s a crash.
The Dow’s worst drop, measured by points, in history, came in the early days of the pandemic: It fell 2,997 points on March 16, 2020, a decline of 12.9%. The broader S&P 500 fell 12% that day — the second-worst decline in history.
But that wasn’t even close to “Black Monday,” the worst US stock market crash ever. The Dow on October 19, 1987, fell 22.6% in a single session. That day, the S&P 500 nosedived 20.3%.
The US trading day hasn’t even begun, and strange things can happen when fear takes hold on Wall Street. But — at least so far — this is not what a market crash looks like.
My “the markets aren’t in melt down” shirt has people asking a lot of questions that are answered by my shirt.
Whatever you think is happening right now, the bank manager wants you to know that your money is safe and you should definitely exit the queue of people seeking to withdraw their money.
Incredible new just dropped
Fire an RPG into an Israeli outpost, lay a bunch of explosives in the street outside the nearest mosque since they'll beeline straight toward it, and let them walk into the trap
a7med.meqdad posted a picture of body parts in plastic bags on Instagram. Says they are remnants of martyrs from the displaced school after an Israeli attack. Because they are so disfigured it is impossible to tell who it is so they weigh the bags and every 70kg gets buried as a separate person.
Semá:th Xhotsa, or Sumas Lake, in Canada was the center of First Nations’ food system and culture, before European colonists drained it in 1924 to create farmland.
Almost 100 years later, catastrophic flooding threatens to refill the lake and displace the farmers.
First Nations people and university researchers have proposed restoring the lake ecosystem to adapt to climate change-driven flooding, and as a method of reparation, but the local government is pushing back.
A tribe once declared ‘extinct’ helps reintroduce salmon to the Columbia River
For thousands of years, Kettle Falls was a vital salmon fishing ground for the Sinixt, but early 20th-century dam construction blocked salmon migration.
Wrongfully declared extinct in Canada in 1956, the Sinixt fought for recognition and were officially acknowledged as Aboriginal Peoples of Canada in 2021.
In 2023, the U.S. government signed a $200 million agreement with a coalition of tribes, including the Sinixt, to fund an Indigenous-led salmon reintroduction program into the Columbia River system above dams in Washington.
Sinixt leaders say this project is an important effort to help right a historical wrong in the legacy that led to their “extinction” status, while many hope to one day join salmon efforts on their traditional territory in Canada.
Simple electoral take.
We may have underestimated the amount and extent of people who just wanted a different candidate besides Trump and Biden. KBrat is a different candidate.
I'd give the Democrats credit for showing some decent political instincts for once. Walz seems like a human being at least and not a total freak. He's a lib, but someone with at least some humanity compared to that ghoul Shapiro.
Learning from Bangladesh, Thailand has shut down the Move Forward party, widely regarded as a US proxy, with 151 seats in the 500-seat parliament. Last year, it was blocked from forming a coalition government by the monarchy and military.
Thailand also recently applied to BRICS, and has a 900-kilometer high speed railroad in the works by China, which would connect Kunming in China to Bangkok via Laos. It should be complete by 2028 and will cost up to $10 billion, but a railway ticket will cost a third of the equivalent plane ticket and bring two million Chinese tourists every year.
Nonetheless, a color revolution could still come in through the back door, with Myanmar's government continuing to lose ground to Western-backed rebels. China has been pressuring them to come to some kind of agreement and end the conflict, but they have so far refused to give in.
Legitimate news sources affiliated with the Axis of Resistance. Some of them are official state/resistance media and others are not. I have only linked the English sites. I'll format this better when I have time.
lmao I’ve been seeing a defense of Kamala that amounts to “Kamala can’t control Biden’s policy, don’t blame her for Biden sending bombs to Israel”.
As if Biden isn’t working with his second in command and hand-picked successor on policy. He picked her to lead policy starting next year, but he doesn’t let her have a say in policy right now?
And even if he really is shutting her out like that, she’s been silent about it and completely uncritical of Biden. She could use her campaign to rail against his actions, but she doesn’t. Hell she could (and should if she actually wanted to stop bombing Palestine) attempt to invoke the 25th amendment and take control right now.
And even if that fails, sometimes old men just trip down the stairs and that’s it. Tragic really.
I have no idea what to think about this election now. On one hand Kamala pretty much has all the same policies as Biden, and therefore should have the same weaknesses from those policies (especially with Arab-American voters in Michigan). But on the other hand they might be successfully gaslighting people into thinking she's better somehow, even though her support for Israel is pretty clear. She also obviously hasn't been very popular, but the gaslighting might be working there too.
If she wins, it will be the epitome of Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss.
WASHINGTON, Aug 5 (Reuters) - At least five U.S. personnel were injured in an attack against a military base in Iraq on Monday, U.S. officials told Reuters...
Two Katyusha rockets were fired at al Asad airbase in western Iraq, two Iraqi security sources said. One Iraqi security source said the rockets fell inside the base. It was unclear whether the attack was linked to threats by Iran to retaliate over the killings...
The U.S. officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said one of the wounded Americans was seriously injured. The casualty count was based on initial reports which could still change, they said.
Douchebag kick streamer Adin Ross interviewed Donald Trump on his stream (xQc was also present) and he gifted Trump a Cybertruck wrapped with the post-assassination attempt photo on it.
Swedish government broadcaster SVT is reporting on a folder containing advice on what to to "if the war or the crisis comes". The folder will be distributed to all households this autumn.
Being a highly developed country poor in quality farmland, Sweden imports half of its food. This is an obvious weakness if "the war or the crisis" severs global supply chains. Authorities are warning that the result will be felt in shops "within days" if imports are stopped.
Luckily, the Swedish government knows what people should do if the shops suddenly run out of food: Forage for food like berries, fruit and mushrooms in the forest. I'm sure there will be plenty to replace the missing half of the food supply.
A spokesperson for the Swedish authorities says:
Everyone needs to understand that you need to take personal responsibility in crisis preparedness. That you have extra food and water at home and thinks about what it would mean if you could no longer buy food? If the water no longer came out of the faucet? If the cell phone no longer works? Do I need help or can I help a neighbour? Community and preparedness guess together.
Can't wait for the all these expanded powers Starmer is giving to the police to be used on left wing/pro-palestine protesters in a few months after slapping a few thumb headed chuds on the wrists
A travel story in which a white American woman delays a trip to Mongolia for a year because she would have to briefly enter Russia, has what sounds like an uneventful regular ass road trip, forgets what is described as a “piece of paper” but is likely her visa entry card meaning when she tries to exit she doesn’t have a valid visa, nonetheless is allowed to exit without incident after authorities verify her identity, and it is breathlessly written like a harrowing trip through a gulag.
Israel is considering launching a “preemptive strike” on Iran as it’s awaiting a reprisal attack for the assassination of Hamas’s political chief in Iran.
“The fact that the Israeli claims haven’t been backed up by solid evidence doesn’t mean our reporting was inaccurate or misleading, that we have walked it back or that there is a correctable error here,” Elena Cherney, the [WSJ] chief news editor, wrote in an email earlier this year.
According to Yemen's Al-Masirah news agency, Yemen have targeted USS Cole and USS Laboon destroyers which were heading to Israel. They have also targeted Contship Ono which was violating the Yemeni blockade on Israel.
US and UK to boycott Nagasaki bombing memorial after Israel disinvited - Middle East Eye
The US nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 killed tens of thousands of Japanese civilians
The American and British ambassadors to Japan have announced they will skip an upcoming ceremony commemorating the victims of the US’s 1945 atomic bombing because the city’s mayor did not invite the Israeli ambassador.
The Russian and Belarusian ambassadors have also been excluded from the event this Friday by Japanese authorities. The Nagasaki Peace Memorial Ceremony is intended to mark the 79th anniversary of the US atomic bomb attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima that killed tens of thousands of Japanese civilians, with many more later dying from radiation poisoning.
The attacks in August 1945 preceded Japan’s unconditional surrender to the US and the end of the Second World War. Julia Longbottom, the UK’s ambassador to Japan, told local reporters that Israel is exercising self-defence in Gaza and should not be treated in the same way as Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
Iran is in the middle of a heatwave, it wouldn't be crazy if they're waiting for basic services to function again before retaliating. The government was shut down yesterday to save energy. This could mean another week before a response
The Kursk offensive doesn't change the fundamental situation along the main front but it's really embarrassing for Russia to get its nose bloodied like this, especially as the image of Ukraine as a bloodied nation on its last legs was really starting to sink in. Politically this will have given western support for Ukraine a shot in the arm which is the opposite of what Russia needs if it wants to end the war sooner rather than later. Domestically it's a major setback for the United Russia govt which erodes confidence they had won back after the disastrous first months of the war.
Really just feels like this war is going nowhere fast.
Now with the Olympic Games coming to an end it is important to think of the things that matter. Like how the USADA let cheating athletes continue to compete under the 'we need you to go deep undercover use even more PEDs' story. And sometimes them just very conveniently giving out sentences that'll allow their athletes to still compete in competitions like Wesley Kitts. It's pretty obvious that the US is just doing whatever and has been using the fact that the olympic comitee is primarily staffed by westerners to do some of the most blatant cheating.
WADA is now aware of at least three cases where athletes who had committed serious anti-doping rule violations were allowed to continue to compete for years while they acted as undercover agents for USADA, without it notifying WADA and without there being any provision allowing such a practice under the Code or USADA’s own rules.
With the numbers of infantry, tanks, armored vehicles and drones sent into Kursk this appears it might be an all-in offensive from Ukraine. Everywhere in Donbas has stopped getting reinforcements and is collapsing at an increasing rate. This is Ukraine’s “2024 summer offensive” and this time they were smart enough to not brag about it loudly in the media for months.
More and more reinforcements are being sent into the Kursk breach and once it’s eventually stemmed and cleaned up Ukraine is going to be in an extremely weak position.
However this will be very damaging for Putin’s reputation and was a major intelligence failure. I even heard reports the Russians saw Ukrainian build-ups and hesitated to strike for some reason, major fuck up
The global and U.S. anti-doping agencies are at odds over undercover tactics used by the American body to try to catch drug cheats, Reuters has learned.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) says U.S. agency USADA broke the global code by letting several athletes it had caught between 2011 and 2014 violating drugs rules go undercover and keep on competing without prosecution in exchange for information on other violators.
USADA says the tactic is necessary and allowed, and wants to keep using it. WADA says it is against its code and that athletes caught breaking doping rules should not get to line up in races, potentially winning prize money and medals, without first being publicly prosecuted and sanctioned.
[...] The U.S. agency has defended letting drug rule violators compete so they could act as undercover informants, saying in one case such assistance had provided intelligence to a U.S. federal law enforcement investigation into a human and drug trafficking scheme.
So what's the money on US intelligence agencies using positive doping tests to blackmail these athletes into not only spying on rival teams, but sabotaging them as well?
Remember in 2021, when several athletes from the Chinese swimming team tested positive after eating contaminated food? The US and other Western media outlets of course reported on it as some fantastical lie by the Evil Chinese, but the WADA report agreed with the Chinese investigation, noting that all subsequent and prior test showed that no systematic doping could have been taking place among the tested Chinese athletes:
In early April 2021, CHINADA informed WADA that it had initiated an investigation, involving the public health authorities, into the source of TMZ found in the samples. There were strong indicators that these cases could be a case of group contamination considering the following factors:
There were 23 swimmers, and 28 positive samples. All tested positive at the same time for TMZ at
consistently very low levels (pg or low ng/mL range).
The swimmers were from different regions of China, with different coaches and from different swimming
clubs.
The swimmers were in the same place at the same time when the positive samples arose.
A number of these swimmers were tested on multiple occasions during the swim meet. Some of them
were tested on two or even three occasions on consecutive days. For several swimmers, the results
varied from negative to positive within a few hours, which is not compatible with a doping scenario of
deliberate ingestion nor with micro-dosing.
Some of the competing swimmers stayed in at least one other hotel. Three of those athletes were
tested and none tested positive for TMZ.
It also goes into details about how hard USADA were pushing for a further investigation, disputing both CHINADA and WADA's findings without providing any counter evidence. Really, the whole thing is very 👀
A federal judge on Monday ruled that Google has illegally monopolized the search market, hading the government an epic win in its first major antitrust case against a tech giant in more than two decades.
Judge Amit Mehta in Washington said that the Alphabet Inc. unit’s $26 billion in payments to make its search engine the default option on smartphones and web browsers effectively blocked any other competitor from succeeding in the market.
...
The Justice Department hasn’t yet said what changes it will seek, though it presented evidence that efforts by European regulators to require Google to offer users a choice of search engines led few to switch. The agency could demand the separation of Alphabet’s search business from other products, like Android or Chrome, which would mark the biggest forced breakup of a US company since AT&T was dismantled in 1984.
Antitrust enforcers separately sued Google for allegedly monopolizing the technology used to buy, sell and serve display advertising online. In that case, which is set for trial in Virginia federal court next month, the government is seeking to force Google to sell off some of its advertising technology products.
By the time any of these remedies get litigated, there will be a new sheriff in town. Regardless of who wins the election, Lina Khan will be crucified and this momentary lapse of corporate rule will be corrected.
On a related note, this might cause Mozilla to go bankrupt lmao.
Kamala Harris’s VP choice, Tim Walz, is the governor who just changed the Minnesota flag so it could resemble the Somalian flag. This man has absolutely ZERO LOYALTY to our country and he says that socialism is a good thing.
Presidential Cabinet picks are announced and the pro-west faction has been largely snubbed out of the most important spots. Counter-revolutionary and liberal technocrat Javad Zarif, who was planning to be in the role of "Shadow President", has resigned from his position as Vice President of Strategic Affairs. It is noteworthy that Zarif, who was the foreign minister for Rouhani, was studying in San Francisco during the Iran-Iraq war (most politicians in Iran who are that age are veterans of that war) and is known for having "strong connections in Washington" (I'll leave that up to you to interpret.)
Possible that the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran was the wake-up that Pezeshkian needed in order to reject the political machine of the pro-Western bourgeoisie that backed his campaign.
Well, the Olympics are over, China and the US tied at 40 gold medals each. Taiwan and Hong Kong got two golds each, but even China doesn't seem to be claiming those, so
American mercs or spec ops with the thickest murican cracker hoo-raa accents on Russian soil talking about getting "our fucking flank on that building" and "push up here and get on this building from the left"
Wtf are average Russians thinking seeing this shit?
Russian sources are saying Ukrainians have been expelled from Martynovka, they are retreating from Korenevo direction as well. They are yet to take Sudzha either. Seems the tides have already reversed.
Belarus is mobilizing it’s troops on the Ukrainian border after multiple Ukrainian drones entered into Belarusian territory. This is causing a distraction to Kiev who cannot ignore these movements.
“It was a complete waste of time,” said Vincent Tsao, a 30-year-old scuba diving instructor who spent most of his five days of reservist training last week sitting idly inside, being taught by retired soldiers who openly acknowledged they weren’t prepared to lead the program.
On advice of someone here I isolated Hexbear into its own container half a year ago. I just noticed that all of youtube in this container is just recommending me commie shit and has an actual algorithm (this container does not have a youtube account). If they can spend resources tracking every accountless ephemeral user by their cookies or whatever, not knowing if that user will ever reappear on their platform, then they can do worse telemetry for their actually logged-in users. I would not be surprised to learn that the YouTube/Google algorithm is secretly being ran out of the Utah datacenter.
The report also talks about an attack within "days" like we've heard, but the large scale attack was a newer detail than caught my eye. Still unclear to me if this leak is Israel trying to get more money/weapons or based on something solid this time.
According to Channel Islam International live, 10K Zionist soldiers have been liquidated. Note that they (along with Salaamedia and Radio Islam as well as multiple other South African media outlets) specifically say "Zionist" or "occupation force".
Walz did send the National Guard after the George Floyd Protests. He also seems to oppose the Cuban embargo, and opposed Obama in going further into Syria.
We are going to have to take this into account of course.
I'm sorry to report that history has reached its end of life and will no longer receive security updates past December 31, 2025. Soon we can stop posting
"Hamas captives sleeping on the ground open their eyes blindfolded. Here a group of reservist soldiers of 100 (soldiers) strength used to secure the facility. They take the terrorist (sic!). Here they are in a corner of the facility. Seemingly aware of the security cameras, they try to hide their deed with shields. The recording captures a moment of the crime ascribed to the reservists: The act of sodomizing the anus. Hours after this, the terrorist (sic) was taken EDIT: to a hospital. His injuries were defined as severe (literally "compounded"). The doctoral statement was clear: The injuries were introduced by an object."
Seems like the Ukrainian goal here is to take or destroy Sudzha, which is where Europe (aka Hungary and slovakia) get their Russian gas from. They are already there. Seriously doubt they'll get all the way to the nuclear power plant but it is a slight possibility. Regardless, this incursion, is actually more important than you'd think based on earlier raids.
Did Kamala's crowd sizes really put the fear in Trump or what? His only rally this week is in fucking Montana tomorrow, with none scheduled for the rest of the month. He's just doing unhinged press conferences.
Imagine if the Democrats had brought this kind of competence and energy to 2016 by running LITERALLY ANY OTHER CANDIDATE!
Gotta be honest, I'm not putting any faith in Harris/Walz, I'm not gonna vote, but it is nice hearing someone on a presidential ticket speak like a normal human being.
Just wanna put it out there that if the death toll of Gaza is currently 40,000 or thereabouts (according to gaza authorities) this represents roughly 7% of the population 2% killed.
We should really be comparing this to the 20% of the population that the US killed in the dprk to truly make people realise the horror of what the americans did there.
Juan Guaidó, failed coup leader of Venezuela, got disrupted yesterday at the University of Portland. In 2019, Guaidó declared himself president of Venezuela after a phone call with the White House. He then was handed control of Venezuelan state assets in the US and UK, including CITGO and overseas gold reserves.
Rybar discussing the probability that this is not Ukraine's primary attack, and that a second much larger attack is coming. Also putting forwards the same idea that was discussed here that this is Ukraine grabbing land ahead of negotiations to take place later.
spoiler
🇷🇺🇺🇦 On dangerous illusions about the offensive capabilities of the AFU
As the situation in the Kursk Region becomes relatively stabilized, there may be an impression that the offensive potential of the AFU in this direction has dried up, and it will not be too difficult to dislodge them from the captured border settlements.
However, this is erroneous and quite dangerous. Moreover, there is a certain set of characteristic signs that indirectly indicate that the main strike of the Ukrainian formations is still ahead.
▪️The concentrations of enemy forces near the Russian border have not gone anywhere, and the probability of a new offensive remains. Moreover, relatively large troop movements have been noticed in the Ukrainian rear, usually observed during the formation of groupings.
▪️The promised debut of the transferred American F-16 fighters has not yet taken place, and it is highly likely that the Ukrainian command is saving them not just like that. The version is supported by the fact that the Kyiv regime recently made large purchases of aviation fuel with delivery specifically in September.
▪️During past major offensives, the AFU always delivered two strikes: in 2022 in the Kherson and Kharkiv directions, and in 2023 in the Artemivsk and Zaporizhia directions. Therefore, it is not excluded that the enemy will try to attack again, taking advantage of the redeployment of Russian Armed Forces reinforcements from other sectors.
From a military point of view, such plans may raise questions. However, if we very carefully assume that the Kyiv regime really wants to reach negotiations by the end of the year under the pressure of its Western sponsors, then it clearly needs some trump cards for this.
The capture of the territories of the "old" Russian regions fits perfectly into this logic, as well as attempts at landings (https://t.me/rybar/62603) on Kinburn and Tendra Spit to create a threat to communications in Crimea. This is exactly what the Ukrainian formations are currently undertaking.
❗️Therefore, it is too early to relax. Yes, the AFU are no longer what they were in 2022, but the enemy has not yet lost its offensive capabilities.
Overconfidence and hasty conclusions that there is no one to fight in the so-called Ukraine lead to sad consequences like those we observed in the border area a few days ago.
Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina has resigned from her position and has fled to India while a new interim govt. has been put in place.
My Bengali family are taking this very well but still suspicious of the US possibly meddling in the weaker interim government. I'm not an expert in Bengali politics at all though other than Bangladesh has been trying to build its industry for a while now and Chinese foreign development has been a boon for the country and I don't see any anti-US designated enemy sentiment from the protests. Sheikh Hasina has been part of the push for bigger industry and expanding Bangladesh's economy but the state of labor rights in Bangladesh has always remained oppressive to a majority of Bangladeshi people.
Ukrainian Himars striked a Big Ass Convoy of russian vehicles ..
and a Federal Emergency was decleard ....
Its Time for Putin to Show Ukraine what a Red Line means and continue to slowly advance towards volchansk ... Unbothered and in his Lane... who needs Breakthroughs and fast advances through non Fortified territory if you can also slowly grind yourarmy down advancing through the most fortified Area !
Romanian gymnast could replace Jordan Chiles as bronze medalist in floor exercise after court ruling
Romania’s Ana Barbosu could replace American Jordan Chiles as the Olympic bronze medalist in gymnastics floor exercise after the Court of Arbitration for Sport voided an appeal from Chiles’ coach that vaulted her onto the podium.
CAS ruled Saturday that the on-floor appeal by U.S. coach Cecile Landi to have .1 added to Chiles’ score that boosted Chiles from fifth to third came outside the 1-minute window allowed by the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG). The ad hoc committee wrote that Landi’s appeal came 1 minute, 4 seconds after the score was posted.
The Romanian Olympic Committee had asked for three bronze medals to be awarded. Romanian prime minister Marcel Ciolacu reacted to the ruling by saying “justice has been served” and that “in the end, the truth prevailed.”
USA Gymnastics said in a statement it is “devastated” by the ruling. “The inquiry into the Difficulty Value of Jordan Chiles’ floor exercise routine was filed in good faith and, we believed, in accordance with FIG rules to ensure accurate scoring,” the organization wrote.
The 23-year-old Chiles became a target on social media in the aftermath of the late switch, with critics asking her to give back the medal or offering racist remarks. Chiles posted on X earlier this week that “it’s funny how people can still never be happy for someone.”
Arms export licences to Israel suspended by UK government
Civil servants are understood to have stopped giving permission for weapons to be sold to the Jewish state
Wonder if this will result in more fascist violence in the UK?
There was an article from my favourite Indian ex-diplomat one week ago which offers an explanation for the current state of play in regards to Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the US. Of course, now we have the news that the US may/is once again allowing Saudi Arabia to buy weaponry, so who knows exactly what's going on there, but even so.
Anyway, to summarize the article and arguments:
Javad Zarif has been appointed as the Strategic Deputy of the new Iranian president, Pezeshkian. Zarif was the guy who negotiated the JCPOA (better known as the Iran Deal), and is well-regarded in the West and a familiar face. This wasn't exactly unexpected, but nonetheless is a move that's difficult to interpret. Iran's leadership is simultaneously swearing vengeance on Israel (thus prompting the US to defend Israel and move military assets into position for deterrence), but also seems to be communicating that they're at least softening their hardline stance. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Grossi, has sought an urgent meeting with Pezeskian, which is also indicative of some openness. Regardless, Bhadrakumar predicts that Pezeshkian's reformism will act as a kind of release valve for discontent inside Iran, making protests and color revolution attempts difficult if not impossible.
Whatever the game being played with the United States here is, what's gong on with the gulf monarchies is a little clearer: MBS phoned up Pezeshkian to congratulate him and express their willingness to move closer together, and the Arab League has recently removed Hezbollah from their list of terrorist organisations. The vibe is that of an increasing willingness to accept Iran and its allies, and Pezeshkian has responded in kind, calling for regional unity. This is obviously detrimental to US interests in the region.
As for Israel, Bhadrakumar predicts that a potential regional war would continue until a Palestinian state is created, which might as well be synonymous with a Zionist surrender at this point. He says that the advantage lies with Iran, being bigger and stronger than Israel and able to maintain supplies to Hezbollah (as well as Hezbollah's own manufacturing, of course). That being said, the US almost certainly helped to kill Haniyeh, and the US is moving warships into the Persian Gulf (as well as other preparations like airplanes). Netanyahu must have received some sort of promise of support from the US if a regional war begins, which allowed him to order the assassination of Haniyeh as well as a high-up figure inside Hezbollah without as much fear as the post-April 13th landscape had. To what extent the tail is wagging the dog is unknown.
To help Kiev meet “critical security and defense needs,” the US will send Stinger anti-aircraft missiles; ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems [HIMARS]; rounds for 155mm and 105mm artillery; Javelin, AT-4 and TOW anti-tank missiles; small-arms ammunition; and demolitions ordnance, the Pentagon said in a statement.
Washington’s previous batch of military aid, worth $1.7 billion, was sent at the end of July. According to the Pentagon’s own numbers, the US has sent more than $56.2 billion in military aid to Ukraine since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021.
Earlier this week, Ukraine sent several battalions worth of troops into Russia’s Kursk Region. Moscow has accused the invaders of indiscriminately targeting civilians with artillery, small arms and drone strikes. On Friday, Ukrainian drones targeted the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant in Kurchatov, briefly cutting power supplies to the town.
“We don’t feel like this is escalatory in any way,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters on Thursday, when asked about US military aid to Kiev.
🔴 After Mali, Niger cuts ties with Ukraine: an unprecedented diplomatic crisis
In an already tense international context, Ukraine has just suffered a new blow on the diplomatic scene. After Mali, it is Niger's turn to break off its relations with Kiev. This radical decision follows damning revelations about Ukraine's support for terrorist groups operating in Mali.
For context, the Ukronazi incursion into Kursk oblast seems about the same in size as the Russian incursion into Kharkiv oblast. Neither seem consequential. The former will probably grind to a halt after a few days/weeks while the Russians keep making ground in Donetsk oblast. What does Ukraine have to gain by doing this? I have no idea. Morale boost? Reddit points? They could take the entire Kursk oblast and it would have zero impact on the outcome of the war.
Blinken: Yes but I'm not acknowledging their right but they shouldn't take actions that destabilize the middle east but I won't talk about hypotheticals but also I'm not not saying yes
For the first two years of the war, the US prohibited Ukraine from striking Russian territory with US-provided missiles but recently lifted that restriction in the wake of Russia’s offensive in Kharkiv. The administration claims it won’t support “long-range” strikes into Russian territory, but it’s not clear what the limit is.
“I’m not going to put a specific range on it,” Singh said when pressed about the possibility of the US supporting an attack on Moscow. She added that the purpose of allowing Ukraine to use US weapons in Russia was for “cross-fire” purposes.
Maybe this is the logic behind that bizarre move. To give the US an excuse to escalate the war even further
Netanyahu willing to sacrifice captives: Israel’s former military chief
Moshe Ya’alon, the former chief of staff of the Israeli military, has issued a stinging rebuke of Netanyahu, saying he is ready to “sacrifice” the Israeli captives to appease far-right members of his cabinet who oppose a ceasefire.
Ya’alon singled out Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich in his comments carried by Israeli Army Radio, accusing them of pushing to displace Palestinians during the war.
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who recently said it might be “justified” to starve Gaza’s entire population to free Israel’s captives, are both crucial members of Netanyahu’s coalition government and have previously threatened to abandon him if he makes concessions to end the war.
I suspect the main reason Israel don’t women in combat roles is because it would basically result in the end of Israel politically. Male soldiers getting captured and killed will be seen as martyrs or resilient because he’s a big warrior male, but female soldiers getting killed or captured will make everyone melt down because they’re smol beans who need protection
Since I am bored with all the Yankee electoralism, here’s a general profile of Malaysian electoral parties
Most of these parties and coalitions also form larger coalitions and/or are splinters/mergers of each other.
I use “Malay-Muslim” to denote a racial-religious political identity unique to Malaysian and Singaporean politics. “Malay” has multiple meanings and various contestations throughout Nusantara (Maritime Southeast Asia).
“Racialism” is also used to highlight the particularities of how race plays out in Malaysia and Singapore, which is different (but interconnected) to how “Racism” plays out in the West and other colonized regions (Latin America and Africa). Malaysia and Singapore’s closest comparison will probably be East Africa as a result.
Barisan Nasional (aka The Tripartite Alliance or the OG compradors, racialism and anti-communism):
UMNO - Malay-Muslim feudal lords and now national bourgeoisie. Racialism with neoliberalism, original progenitors of “Ketuanan Melayu” (Malay-Muslim Supremacy/Dominance) which simmered down the past decade
MCA - Chinese bourgeoisie, had contacts with the KMT, Chinese racialism
MIC - Tamil and Hindu communalism, Indian racialism
KIMMA - Muslim Indian communalism, minor party
Perikatan Nasional (Malay-Muslim racialism):
PAS - Political Islam with racialised characteristics, used to be anti-colonial anti-neoliberal left, drifted more to big-tent for racialised rural Malay-Muslim politics with current leader
Bersatu - splinter because of perceived faults in UMNO, racialised “indigenous rights” (more akin to “nativist” in American context) with focus on “indigenous” Malay-Muslim politics, full membership exclusive to “indigenous” people
Gerakan - Global South Social Democracy
Pakatan Harapan (Capital L Liberalism, mostly urban base, allegedly “reformist”):
PKR - Social Liberalism
DAP - Western Social (Liberal) Democracy, key proponent of “Malaysian Malaysia”, a racialised liberal compromise
Amanah - Splinter faction of PAS, Political Islam with Social Liberalism
Others
GRS - coalition with many component parties, Racialism with regional characteristics
GPS - coalition with many component parties, Racialism with regional characteristics
MUDA - Global South Social Democracy, youth politics
This Trump presser is hilarious, just the most obvious direct responses to criticisms he's trying to casually bring up.
Started by saying he would deffinitly rather run against kamala unprompted has already gone back to talking about how theybstole the presidency from Biden and how poorly he's being treated.
He's simultaneously trying to say "Oh yea I'd deffinitly rather run against kamala but they cheated Joe and he should deffinitly be allowed to continue running even though i deffinitly don't like him and am deffinitly not just saying that because I can beat him."
It really is wild when you don't listen to him for a while and are reminded there is literally no attachment to reality in anything that he says.
Although he did point out it was weird Biden made her vp after her most successful messaging was calling him racist.
Venezuela: CNE Turns Over Electoral Data to Supreme Court, US Walks Back González Recognition
Article
The State Department said the US had not recognized González as president, a departure from a previous position assumed by Secretary Blinken.
Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) President Elvis Amoroso delivered the electoral evidence requested by the country’s Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ), including detailed voting records and totals.
The TSJ demand of the electoral authority’s full results and accompanying documentation follows a request by President Nicolás Maduro for the country’s highest court to clarify and validate the July 28 electoral process in order to ease the tensions surrounding the outcome.
Amoroso provided the requested information at the end of a three-day window imposed by the TSJ.
The CNE declared Maduro the winner of the July 28 election in its most recent update with 51.95 percent (6.4 million votes) compared to 43.18 percent (5.3 million votes) for US-backed opposition candidate Edmundo González.
The hardline opposition coalition backing González, led by far-right political activist María Corina Machado, has disputed the results and alleges it was the victim of a massive fraud.
The electoral body has not publicly released the detailed results broken down by voting center on its website, which remains out of service. Meanwhile, the opposition has set up a parallel domain purportedly including more than 80 percent of voting records from polling stations gathered by its electoral witnesses on election day.
National Assembly President and former Maduro campaign chief Jorge Rodríguez pointed to several inconsistencies in the opposition’s electoral evidence, suggesting that the materials provided by the opposition were forged.
The United Socialist Party of Venezuela has avoided publishing its own tallies, with internal sources alleging an abundance of caution to protect the legitimacy of their documentation.
Upon receiving the CNE data, the TSJ announced a period of 15 days to review the data and question actors involved in the process. All 10 candidates, as well as legal representatives of the 37 political parties that appeared on the ballot, have been summoned to appear before the court in the coming days, with court president Caryslia Rodríguez warning of legal consequences for not showing up.
The hardline opposition campaign has not commented on the latest TSJ developments, though González did not appear when the court opened its case on Friday.
Instead, González and Machado issued a statement Monday unilaterally declaring the former as “president-elect” and calling on the police and armed forces to follow his orders.
That position seemed at odds, however, with the updated stance from the US Department of State that appeared to walk back its earlier recognition of González as the victor of the presidential election.
In response to a question, US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the Biden administration had not recognized González as president, a departure from the position assumed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken who declared González as the “winner” of the election.
Miller instead pointed to ongoing mediation efforts by Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. He further emphasized the need for Venezuela to “transition back to democratic norms”, stopping short of calling for González to take office.
Leftist presidents Lula da Silva (Brazil), Petro (Colombia) and López Obrador (Mexico) have rejected foreign interference and emphasized Venezuelan sovereignty, as well as the need for all parties to pursue a Venezuelan-led solution to the dispute. At the same time, they have demanded greater transparency regarding the results.
In response to González’s and Machado’s statement, Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek William Saab said his office had opened a criminal investigation into both for charges including usurpation of official functions and instigation of insurrection. In Venezuela, only the CNE is constitutionally authorized to declare a winner in electoral contests.
The Venezuelan Defense and Interior ministers, Vladimir Padrino and Remigio Ceballos, likewise issued a joint communique on Tuesday afternoon rejecting the “desperate and seditious” calls from the US-backed opposition. The leaders of the armed and police forces vowed to keep the peace and reaffirmed its backing for the country’s institutions.
President Maduro has labeled the opposition’s ongoing efforts to reject the CNE’s results as a “coup attempt” led by the US. The dispute sparked protests in many Venezuelan cities last week that has reportedly left over a dozen dead. Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino reported the death of two National Guard members and 106 injured officers. Since then, however, calm appears to have returned to the country’s streets, assuaging fears of a return of violent “guarimba” protests that were common following other electoral contests.
Over the weekend, government supporters held peaceful rallies throughout the country, including a massive red-clad demonstration in the capital that marched from the city center to Miraflores Presidential Palace.
The hardline opposition held its own rallies on Saturday, with far-right leader María Corina Machado addressing a modest crowd in the upper-class neighborhood of Las Mercedes in eastern Caracas.
Bengladesh was a color revolution by US oligarchs. These "students" leading the protests are dupes. They want an obvious US State dept asset Mohammed Yunus to rule. 84 year old founder of a bank.
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the concepts of microcredit and microfinance.
He first received a Fulbright Scholarship from the US State Department, then received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 , and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2010. In 2020, he also signed a letter from the National Endowment for Democracy
In January 2008, Houston, Tex@$$ declared 14 January as "Muhammad Yunus Day"
Education
University of Dhaka (BA, MA) Vanderbilt University (PhD)
The Grameen Bank started to diversify in the late 1980s when it began attending to unutilized or underutilized fishing ponds, as well as irrigation pumps like deep tubewells.[1] In 1989, these diversified interests started growing into separate organizations, as the fisheries project became Grameen Fisheries Foundation and the irrigation project became Grameen Krishi Foundation.
These ventures include the Social Advancement Fund (SAF), Grameen Trust, Grameen Telecom Trust, Grameen Fund, Grameen Communications, Grameen Shakti (Grameen Energy), Grameen Telecom, Grameen Shikkha (Grameen Education), Grameen Mothsho Foundation, Grameen Krishi Foundation, Grameen Baybosa Bikash (Grameen Business Development), Grameenphone, Grameen Software Limited, Grameen CyberNet Limited, Gonoshasthaya Grameen Textile Mills Limited, Grameen Capital Management Limited, Grameen Knitwear Limited, Grameen Mutual Fund One, Grameen Kalyan (Grameen Well-being), Grameen Shamogree (Grameen Products), Grameen Danone Foods (joint venture with Groupe Danone) and Grameen Uddog (Grameen Enterprise, owner of brand Grameen Check).[
Torrential rainfall all afternoon in Caracas might have delayed proceedings, but CNE president Elvis Amoroso has submitted the documentation required by the Supreme Court. This includes detailed voting records, totals and the final documents proclaiming the winner
Edmundo González, opposition candidate in the Venezuelan elections, proclaims himself elected president of the country and asks the military to “stand alongside the people”.
“We won this election without any argument. It was an electoral avalanche, full of energy and with an admirable citizen organization, peaceful, democratic and with irreversible results. Now, it is up to all of us to ensure that the voice of the people is respected”, concludes the statement signed by Edmundo González and Maria Corina Machado, leader of the Venezuelan opposition.
Get excited for their next chapter as Woody, Buzz, Jessie and the gang all return for Toy Story 5, coming to theaters Summer 2026! The film follows the toys going up against electronics.
‘INCREDIBLES 3’ is in the works. Brad Bird is developing the film.
The State Department is lifting its suspension on certain transfers of air-to-ground munitions to Saudi Arabia, a senior department official confirmed. "We will consider new transfers on a typical case-by-case basis consistent with the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy," the official said, according to Reuters.
The administration briefed Congress this week on its decision to lift the ban, a congressional aide said. One source said sales could resume as early as next week. The US government was moving ahead on Friday afternoon with notifications about a sale, a person briefed on the matter said.
"The Saudis have met their end of the deal, and we are prepared to meet ours," a senior Biden administration official said.
What deal did MBS reach with uncle sam I wonder? Why would they need air to surface missiles?
I want Kamala to win and for the Democrats to win a Manchin/Sinema proof supermajority just so that they have no scapegoats when things inevitably turn to shit in regards to the climate, the environment, the economy, foreign wars, etc.
Not super knowledgeable on Bangladesh, but it seems like the government really fucked up. I'm also assuming every intelligence agency with stakes in the outcome is going to be there.
Sheikh Hasina also claimed that she could have remained in power “if I had surrendered the sovereignty of Saint Martin Island and allowed America to hold sway over the Bay of Bengal”, according to the report.
She claimed she was offered an easy reelection if she allowed a foreign nation to establish an airbase in Bangladesh, without naming the country involved
The IOF soldier who became famous for that video of conducting gang SA against a prisoner went on an "Israeli" TV talk show while wearing a mask to defend what he did:
launched either the early stages of an offensive (reconnaissance in force) or a feint from Sumy across the border into the Russian Federation, into Kursk oblast.
The fighting is ongoing, and Ukrainian losses appear substantial.
Misinformation and conflicting accounts are in abundance, with some accounts reporting that the NATO regime in Kyiv has amassed a full brigade in this direction while others suggest this is little more than another PR stunt.
The attack has also generated a few "victories" for Kyiv, including footage of a Ka-52 shot down and a small group of captured Russian soldiers. Some vehicles apparently made it a few km in before they were destroyed.
There is a degree of frustration among some ostensibly pro-UA sources over opening a new front at a time when military resources and personnel are stretched thin.
It's still early, so there aren't many reliable sources. Here is the report from Rybar (CW: Twitter---every kind of reactionary, pro-imperialist comment)
I honestly don't understand what the US obsession with low-ROI government spending is. Like, it's not that hard to spend money so that a dollar in leads to multiple dollars in future cost savings or multiple dollars in economic growth.
I guess it's because the US doesn't price in the cost of healthcare? Maybe the zero-sum global perspective? The high cost of war?
Build a subway. Build climate mitigation infrastructure. Plant trees. Feed children. Give people doctors. Education for all. There's this whole individualist "fuck you got mine" mentality that seems to completely stall progress in the US and blows up the cost of doing anything that benefits other people to the point of it not being worthwhile.
The West African nation of Niger is severing diplomatic relations with Ukraine, government spokesperson Amadou Abdramane announced on Aug. 6, two days after neighboring Mali made a similar announcement.
Mali broke diplomatic ties with Ukraine on Aug. 4 over its alleged support of Tuareg-led rebels, after reports that Malian soldiers and Wagner Group mercenaries suffered significant battle losses in recent clashes with anti-government groups.
Niger will cut ties with Kyiv "with immediate effect," Abdramane said in a televised statement.
In their announcement, Niger's government said it would issue a "referral to the United Nations Security Council with a view to ruling on Ukrainian aggression."
Andrii Yusov, Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR) spokesperson, alluded to possible cooperation between Ukrainian intelligence services and the Mali rebels during a television broadcast on July 29.
The Director of the Supply Department of the Civil Defense in Gaza, Mohammed Al-Mughair, confirmed that the Israeli forces used three lethal American missiles of the Mark 84 (MK-84) type, which weigh more than 2,000 pounds and reach temperatures of 7,000 degrees, in the bombing that targeted the Al-Tabi'een School and Mosque in the Al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza.
So the loser "succdem" (useless liberal) expresident from Argentina got accused (with a lot of public proof) of domestic violence, so that's the peak comedy here right now
I’m back on my Starmer conspiracy brainworms, and this might be totally silly of me, but….
Assuming MI5 had him orchestrate the dismantling of the Labour left in anticipation of worsening material conditions over the next two decades and the potential rise of a robust British socialist movement, could an additional objective be to enact draconian authoritarian laws to suppress protests and enhance surveillance? He then bows out after a year or two with deep unpopularity but with strong protections for capital in place, to be replaced with Ed Milliband in an attempt to show “progressive” leadership.
Basically, given the last 10 years the last few days happening has been horribly predictable. If you’re a Gladio aficionado, you might be sympathetic to the conspiracy theory I’m leaning toward here.
I’ve been working a lot and haven’t caught up properly in awhile but what’s the deal with the delay with this Iranian response?
It seemed to me about a week ago that not only was it a sure thing, but there were also signals that this one was gonna be different as they were being a lot more guarded with their plans and it seemed like the prospect of war wasn’t even a dealbreaker.
Since then I’ve heard a lot of noise about how Iran has since tempered it’s potential response and seeks a response that doesn’t cross the line.
Perhaps there’s an internal debate within the Iranian elite upper echelons/military guys? I know the new Iranian president is from the more moderate wing and seeks closer ties to the west in the long run but I imagine the amount of pressure he’s under to not capitulate is extremely significant
Russian commentators: the present state of affairs is unacceptable! nuclear-tipped grand offensive now! mobilise all men to the front and women into the factories! assassinate every leading NATO head of state with hypersonic weaponry!
Putin: we are aware of a concerning situation in the Kursk oblast. we must remember Stalin's great and courageous leadership in these times and take heed. i have made funding available to the Bereznetzhov thermal optics factory to expand production by up to 30% by 2028 in light of this. we will not be intimidated by terrorists and the time of empty threats is over.
On his social media, Trump said, in a way that was completely disconnected from reality, that the audience at Kamala Harris' rally in an airport hangar in Detroit was actually the work of AI.
Now ex-president Hasina has written a piece in the Economic Times, perhaps most notably commenting on how the US would have allowed her to remain in power if she had given up sovereignty of the Bay of Bengal, but she refused.
The man behind the colour revolution was Donald Lu, a veritable grim reaper stalking his way through Asia with all sorts of connections to the US. He was responsible for regime changes in Kyrgyzstan, Albania, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Pakistan (the ouster of Imran Khan, in that case) He visited Bangladesh in May and met with senior government officials, and his visit was quickly followed by sanctions on the Bangladesh army chief. Russia had warned Bangladesh about the gathering storm of US officials and interest, but their warnings were either unheeded, or the internal rot was already too deep and too many in the government hated Hasina and wanted her gone. Regardless, in the current situation, Russia is maintaining a policy of non-interference, merely hoping that whoever is elected will be nice to Russia (China's actions have been much the same).
Both India and China will be affected if Bangladesh collapses and becomes a failed state under neoliberal plundering. India must - or, at least, should - realize that the US is not their friend here. They have surrounded India with an unfriendly, US-backed Pakistan and an unfriendly, US-backed Bangladesh, as punishment for having too much of an independent foreign policy and goals (that is, they aren't totally subservient and kowtowing to Biden). India thinks they are equal partners to the US, and that the Americans will let them exercise their regional interests without interference. They are sorely mistaken.
A recent commentary in the Global Times has called for an easing of tensions given this new reality in order to jointly construct a more stable region, while the US seeks to heighten India-China tensions instead in order to try and achieve their own regional hegemony. Will India realize the situation they're in and give China a chance? Or will Modi's delusions of grandeur continue?
From the energy sector’s perspective, Iran could threaten to further disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, through which around 30 percent of all the world’s oil has historically transited. Similar threats in the past have caused big spikes in the oil price. A less direct threat would be using its Yemeni Houthi proxy forces to step up the level of attacks on oil shipping elsewhere around the Red Sea region, which would also put upward pressure on oil prices. The Houthis could also be used to launch direct attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities, as the group threatened to do recently if Saudi Arabia continued to allow U.S. warplanes to use its territory for military strikes against the Yemeni rebel group.
Alternatively, Iran could widen out its previously called-for embargo by Islamic members of OPEC on oil exports to Israel’s allies as well as to Israel itself. This would mirror exactly what Saudi Arabia did in 1973/74 to countries that supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War with Egypt and Syria. As global oil supplies fell, the price increased dramatically, exacerbated by incremental cuts to oil production by OPEC members over the period. Gas prices also rose, as historically around 70 percent of them are comprised of the price of oil. By the end of the embargo in March 1974, the price of oil had risen around 267 percent, from about US$3 per barrel (pb) to nearly US$11 pb. This, in turn, stoked the fire of a global economic slowdown, especially felt in the net oil-importing countries of the West.
AI tech bubble bursting is just a feint to make an opening for the left hook of oil price shocks to take down the great Satan.
I foresee a very sudden shift towards restoring dialog with Russia in the Tarot cards.
Edit: although for the US gdp overall it would probably be a good thing since the US is currently a massive oil producer so the “the economy isn’t crashing” team would still claim victory I am sure, this would still simply wreck manufacturing & logistics & everything that is not directly related to causing earthquakes in Texas and Alberta.
It unequivocally sucks to be Europe, as it should be.
(EN) Yemeni army shot down a US MQ-9 Reaper plane with a home-made surface-to-air missile, while it was carrying out hostile actions in the Saada governorate. #Palestine #Gaza
Dated: 04/08/2024.
Rise up Swifties, Taylor cancelled 3 shows in Vienna due to a terror threat:
Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour Vienna Shows Cancelled Due to Government Officials Confirmation of Planned Terrorist Attack
With confirmation from government officials of a planned terrorist attack at Ernst Happel Stadium, we have no choice but to cancel the three scheduled shows for everyone's safety.
All tickets will be automatically refunded within the next 10 business days.
During his address during a ceremony at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on Tuesday, Kishida told attendees “79 years ago today, an atomic bomb deprived people said to number well more than 100,000 of their precious lives. It reduced the city to ashes and mercilessly deprived people of their dreams and bright futures. Even those who escaped death suffered hardships beyond description.”
However, the prime minister didn’t directly say which country was responsible for attacking the city with nuclear weapons and causing such “devastation and human suffering.”
“The widening division within the international community over approaches to nuclear disarmament, Russia’s nuclear threat, and other concerns make the situation surrounding nuclear disarmament all the more challenging,” he said.
The whole speech bore a lot of similarities to the address delivered by the Japanese prime minister a year ago, in which the US was also not mentioned.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also ignored the role of the US in the bombing of Hiroshima in his message dedicated to the anniversary. “We must not forget the lessons of August 6, 1945,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter), adding that nuclear weapons “represent a real and present danger.”
Rumours that Iranian militants near the Euphrates have sieged the Al-Omar oil fields and entered the base.
Completely impossible to confirm and will be denied by the US even if it is true, the base houses both SDF and US forces. If true it would be a continuation of rumours of attacks on Dhiban across the Euphrates by Iranian backed militants yesterday.
EDIT: The fed accounts are reporting it's false while reporting US airstrikes currently ongoing in the area.
PSA : Comrads !
if you links something , and you have the link allready safed .. you can just mark the part of your text that you want to name the link after and then do the "Control+V" and it will instantlly make it a link. its super Smooth..
The decision-making processes for the Finnish Armed Forces’ participation in the operations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are poorly developed and problematic, Defense Ministry representative Markku Viitasaari affirmed on Monday.
Rybar's take on the UK "slipping into totalitarianism" regarding perceived heavy handedness of the law on the race rioters.
cw: racism, xenophobia, veiled threats
🇬🇧 Meanwhile, Great Britain is sinking deeper into totalitarian dictatorship.
As @oldGBR reports, the first guilty verdicts were recently handed down there “for posting information on the Internet related to a violation of public order.”
➖Jordan Parlour , 28, was jailed for 1 year and 7 months for a Facebook post about an attack on a hotel where refugees were staying. The court assessed his actions as " using threatening words or behaviour with the purpose of inciting racial hatred."
➖ 30-year-old Jordana Plain went to prison for 8 months for impersonating a monkey in front of black and Asian people.
➖Tyler Kay, 26, received three years and two months for a Twitter post in which he allegedly incited the burning of a hotel housing migrants.
The number of people arrested in connection with the unrest that erupted after the murder of three girls in Southport has now approached 800. a third of them have already been charged, including To a 13 year old boy .
In just one year, more than 3,300 people have been convicted due to memes and posts on social networks.
🔻Overall, the extraordinary tough measures taken by the British authorities have borne fruit. Many protest organizers and their supporters were detained in order to intimidate society as much as possible, so new demonstrations became much smaller. At the same time, the media launched a large-scale campaign to popularize counter-protests paid for by the authorities, advocating for migrants and LGBT, so that the voice of dissatisfaction would be completely drowned out by the propaganda of left-liberals.
Against this background, legislative measures are being tightened, untying the hands of the police to persecute the dissatisfied. Any "insult" or "hostility" that anyone can see towards any class of the population is now a very good reason to put a person in jail for a decent term. This attitude towards native Britons is in sharp contrast to the demonstrative loyalty of law enforcement officers to migrants who "raped because they did not know that rape was not allowed."
In such a situation, it is only a matter of time before another “Southport massacre” occurs, which will lead to a new explosion of public discontent.
#Великобритания #протесты
@rybar
Just LOL. Rybar will just ignore the years of propaganda that told UK citizens that there are migrants arriving on boats that bring all the crime and focus on the one week where the media had to turn it back or else they would be implicated in the proceedings. Nothing to see there I'm sure.
for their part is doing the right thing too late. Where were these arrests when Nigel Farage were making veiled threats at immigrants? The Sun has done more incitement than any FB post ever has.
President Nicolas Maduro to the president of Panama: "Govern Panama. Don't try to govern Venezuela." The United States government has offered immunity to Nicolás Maduro, as long as he leaves power, in a government transition.
The US government's efforts have increased significantly to get Maduro to concede the election, which the US says was won by Edmundo Gonzalez by a large margin.
Statement from Cuba’s Foreign Ministry after the US claimed that Cuba changed the electoral results: “It is absolutely false [the claim] that specialists in computer science or other area have traveled to Venezuela from Cuba, with the purpose of modifying the results of the presidential elections in that country.”
The Workers and Resources Biomes DLC rules but is also funny. I'm playing a freegame on "Asian map" and the clue really is in the name-according to what all the cities are called, this really is Asia: the Map. My main city is called something like Matsumatuo, then you cross the river to the coal mining town of Shihua, then head down the road a bit to scenic Haecho. I don't remember the names exactly but that is the exact language combo throughout city names: something vaguely Japanese, something vaguely Chinese, and something vaguely Korean, with an occasional fusion. Also there is not currently a second pool of names for people, so all the lumberjacks in the jungle and truck drivers hauling cloth and fish to market in 1940s Indiana Jones trucks are named things like Grigori Petrovich.
10/10 I should never have started on realistic mode
In case you weren't frustrated enough by Iran edging us, is once again vaguely hinting at the possibility of taking military action against Ukraine.
Belarus, due to the flight of a drone from Ukraine, is initiating consultations with allies and partners, as well as through international organizations, according to a statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Kiev is provoking Minsk at the instigation of well-known external players. The incident involving the flight of a drone from Ukraine radically escalates the situation and is a dangerous attempt to expand the conflict in the region.
Belarus will fully exercise its right to self-defense and will respond to any provocations or hostile actions, the ministry stated.
Alexander Lukashenko has ordered the reinforcement of troop groups in the Gomel and Mozyr tactical directions, said Belarusian Defense Minister Khrenin.
Lukashenko said he intends to personally deal with the "unsettled situation" on the border with Ukraine on the spot
Kamala Harris has spent the last few days interviewing contenders to be her running mate on the Democratic ticket this election and may have whittled her list from six to just two in recent hours, if a report via anonymous sources from Reuters comes true.
The news wire says it’s down to Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, and Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz.
Guardian US has not verified this report. At the top of the day there apparently were still six guys in the race, although some outlets appeared to be homing in on Shapiro, Walz and the US Senator from Arizona, Mark Kelly, as the top three.
Harris and her No.2 will debut as the presumptive Democratic ticket at a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania tomorrow evening. So if it’s not Shapiro that would be hard for him to swallow.
If it’s really down to two, here are our thumbnails on them.
Shapiro, a congressional aide turned state representative and state attorney general, the 51-year-old father of four was elected governor in 2022. Close to two years later, he maintains historically high approval ratings. What are regarded as pros and cons of choosing him? Report here.
Walz has captured the internet’s attention and swayed Democrats’ messaging recently by succinctly summing up how he views Republicans: they’re weird. Before he took up politics, Walz, 60, was born and raised in small-town Nebraska and became a teacher, first in China, then Nebraska, finally Minnesota
Is anyone else worried that Israel is going to do biological warfare on Palestinians? It would just be a repeat of the US playbook and they can go "teehee I guess the natives all just died from natural causes there's nothing we could have done". According to Russia the US was studying targeted biological warfare in one or some of their bioweapons labs in Ukraine.
It feels like Olympic sport choices are pretty Western orientated. Like sailing, basketball, BMX, indoor climbing, etc. The "medal race" seems really gerrymandered.
cw gore
partial translation from this person's phone call to a friend at the school about the friend's son: "I told them Ali is 6 years old so they gave me an 18kg bag full of parts and told me go bury the body parts and I don't know if they're my child's or not."
ukr kursk offensive deliberately targeted russian war correspondent epoddubny with a drone. They hit it from the front and published pics on ukr social media. Russian media posting pics of poddubny with his head wrapped in bandages and soaked in blood. He's in icu but sounds like he will survive.
I've been drinking all night. Saw a warning from valve because I dare say for people to grow up on bashing queers . Uninstalled helldivers over their stu p id nerfs and had a night of would you like to vote for queerphobic Republican A or queerphobic Republican B or queerphobic Republican C in my local elections.
Just want a good nights of peaceful sleep. I have to fucking work in the morning,
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said that his country faces a battle against the old colonialism. “WhatsApp is spying on us. Delete that app, please.”
Iran, please, get around to doing your revenge attack. I can't just keep checking the news and/or this thread every five minutes to see if a decade is going to happen this week.
Please indulge me in doing some washingtonology: What parts of the US bourgeoisie are behind the two competing factions in the US election? I know that Trump's VP pick is a puppet of Peter Thiel's far right tech clique but what about the other people? Did the coup against genocide Joe change the power dynamics of the factions behind the democrat party?
Venezuela's National Electoral Council confirmed President Nicolás Maduro's reelection. The Supreme Court has demanded all voting records and evidence of alleged cyber attacks. Internationally, the US and some Latin American countries back the opposition's victory claim, while others call for respecting Venezuela's sovereignty.
Don't expect the Fed to cut rates any time soon. The stock market has been on a fucking tear this year despite some shitty fundamentals from a lot of companies. The S&P 500 is still up over 10% on the year as of right now. The DJIA, NASDAQ Composite, and Russell 2000 are all still up YTD. If this continues and begins to negatively impact employment and productive output, then expect a rate cut. There's going to be a lot of pressure for them to do a cut in September, but unless jobs numbers tank in August, I'm leaning towards the Fed telling the market to tough it out. There's a lot of zombie companies doing business right now that should have gone bankrupt 5-10 years ago, and everybody and their mother is either opening up a restructuring & turnaround practice or expanding their existing one. There's a lot of legal and financial institutional people who are planning as if the corporate debt reckoning is on the horizon.
How does the scale of this Kursk offensive compare to the 2023 Summer Counter-offensive?
According to Russian MoD:
The total losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Kursk direction amounted to 1,350 soldiers, 29 tanks, 23 armored personnel carriers…
This is from around 9 hours ago, so about 5 days after the initial incursion on August 6th.
The counteroffensive began in June 2023 and ran until roughly December 2023.
Russian MoD:
According to claims by the Russian MoD, the Ukrainians had lost over 90,000 wounded and killed personnel, almost 600 tanks and around 1,900 armored vehicles during the counteroffensive.
The rate of battle is roughly the same. In Kursk, 10.4 tanks and APCs are being destroyed per day. In the summer offensive 13.88 tanks and APCs were destroyed per day.
One has lasted 36 times longer of course, so the total scale is much larger
Fire breaks out at Russian-occupied nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the plant is operating normally and radiation levels are “normal”.
Venezuelan opposition candidate Edmundo González did not appear before the Supreme Court this morning. He was summoned as part of the ongoing process to investigate and validate the election results. Hardly a surprising move, after he and his puppet master María Corina Machado already proclaimed a win. Once that was done, they would never submit themselves to an arbiter
While González did not show up, Zulia governor Manuel Rosales did, as the legal representative of one of the parties on the electoral ticket that backed the main opposition candidate. He demanded the full publication of results by the CNE
Egypt’s Civil Aviation Ministry said Wednesday it has ordered Egyptian airlines to avoid Iranian airspace for three hours the following day after a notice from Tehran to do so because of military exercises.
The Egyptian ministry said the warning came in a notice sent by Iran to all commercial airlines. The ministry said the ban from Iranian airspace was to last for three hours, 4:30 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. on Thursday. Iran’s warning also covered three hours earlier on Wednesday, the ministry added.
Speaking to Iran’s ISNA news agency, the head of Iran’s international airport in Tehran, Saeed Chalandari, denied reports of a warning against entering the airspace of western Iran, but it was not clear if that applied to the entire country.
The warning starts in 2 hours and 4 minutes from the posting of this comment. It could just be for military drills like before, and not for an attack.
Trump confuses former Mayor Willie Brown with former Governor Jerry Brown - NBC News
Trump said at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago that he was once in a helicopter with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown that nearly crashed.
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle after the press conference, Willie Brown, who dated Harris years ago in San Francisco, denied Trump's account.
In 2018, Trump was in a helicopter with Jerry Brown and his successor, then-Governor-elect Gavin Newsom, on the day they visited Paradise, California, a town that had been devastated by wildfires.
A representative for Jerry Brown disputed Trump's account of the helicopter ride, saying, "There was no emergency landing and no discussion about Kamala Harris."
His words are based on the statements of Trump when he said in March that if he is not elected «it will be a bloodbath for the country”.
President of the United States (US), Joseph Biden, said he does not trust a peaceful transfer of government power in the November elections.
«If Trump wins, no, I have no confidence at all. I mean, if Trump loses, I have no confidence at all», said Biden in a testimony he gave to the American channel CBS News, the president’s first exchange with the press after his resignation for re-election.
It is worth remembering that after the act of abandoning the race for re-election, Biden expressed his support to the new candidate and current vice president Kamala Harris, who already has Tim Walz as a running mate.
Referring to Trump, the head of the White House said that “he is serious, we are not serious. Seriously, all that ‘if we lose will be a bloodbath’… [and] ‘stolen elections’, you can’t love your country only when you win”.
Biden’s words are backed by the words of Trump last March, when he said that if he is not elected “it will be a bloodbath. That will be the least of it. It will be a bloodbath for the country”.
“Look what you’re trying to do now, in the local constituencies where people count votes,” because the clip shared on X by CBS of the interview doesn’t show the outcome of the interview, This leaves the question whether the US president is referring to Republicans sending agents to challenge the vote count or intimidating election workers.
1: Cori should probably run for city council or smth if she wants to keep a bit of relevance and work that up into becoming mayor (or even getting her old seat back if we’re being ambitious)
2:
Tim Walz is a Warren Zevon listener holy shit Kamala thank you so much for picking him (NOT AN ENDORSEMENT IM JUST GLAD HE HAS GOOD TASTE)