Bulletins and News Discussion from March 24th to March 30th, 2025 - The Genocide Continues - COTW: Qatar

In my experience, those who say Israel and Palestine are both bad tend to really fucking hate Palestine but not mind Israel all that much.

In some Lemmyverse news, Hexbear is now refed'd with lemmygrad.ml, with lemmygrad.ml users and posts showing up on embassy of Hexbear on Lemmygrad comm

OG post: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7382514

Reporter: Are you worried about stagflation?

Trump: I haven’t heard that term in years. I don’t know anything about it.. this country is going to boom. We’re going to have boomtown. We’re going to boom

its going to boom nerds

Small and bizarre news, but still news:

So there's a non-recognized nation in Africa called Republic of Annobon, which is a small island that is part of Equatorial Guinea. A small group of separatists declared independence in like 2022 or something and well, they travel around the world exposing their cause I guess. Many such cases.

Anyway, a small delegation headed by their Prime Minister visited our university, something completely random, and attended to a session of our History Assembly, which is celebrated each week or so to discuss career-related things and such. They were allowed to speak of their struggle against the Equatorial Guinean government. I failed to attend so I missed this peculiar event. Oh and Equatorial Guinea's President, Theodoro Obiang Nguema, as been in power since 1982, so there's that.

The world gets weirder and weirder each day.

And btw, before I forget:

death to "israel"

German Greens want to force people of all ages to serve the state in a new Freedom Service™. Either military or some community service.

"It is time to ask the question: What can you do for you country?", Schulze said to Deutsche Presse-Agentur. The threats are growing.

"In order make our society more robust, to defend our freedom, and to strengthen cooperation, we need everybody. The Freedom Service is a collective project for Germany, by all and for all. Through the Freedom Service, we will to bring together generations and milieus, strengthen our society, and defend what is important to us."

I'm not making this up btw.

They're no longer in government of course, that's just their contribution to the debate about re-introducing conscription.

Azov Brigade: Introducing our Asian comrade named [racial slur against Asians] (CW: racial slur against Asians):
https://xcancel.com/azov_media/status/1906029395501875242

US bank exec killed in plane crash https://www.youtube.com/embed/RUL6lEFoVIU?autoplay=1&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1

Bougainville may become independent in September 2027

this will be a bad week for stonks

White House aide Peter Navarro today: Trump's tariffs will raise $600 billion per year, or $6 trillion over a 10 year period

Seems to reflect our reporting that Trump wants to go absolutely enormous on the tariffs, regardless of short-term economic consequences

Found this, don't know where it should go I guess it's news

https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1jnjov7/ru_pov_athlete_from_russia_at_the_olympic_games/

Can't upload the picture for some reason. No content warning, except it's still sad in a way.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/mar/31/france-marine-le-pen-embezzlement-verdict-europe-news-live?page=with%3Ablock-67ea58af8f08e6b4b7c0762a#block-67ea58af8f08e6b4b7c0762a

Le Pen and eight MEPs found guilty of embezzlement

French court finds far-right leader Marine Le Pen guilty in embezzlement case - NPR

PARIS — A French court found Marine Le Pen guilty on Monday in an embezzlement case but didn't immediately say what her sentence might be and how it might impact the far-right leader's political future.

Le Pen, sitting in the front row in the Paris court, showed no immediate reaction as the chief judge declared her guilty. She later repeatedly nodded her head in disagreement as the judge went into greater detail, saying Le Pen's party had illegally used European Parliament money for its own benefit. "Incredible," she whispered at one point.

The judge also handed down guilty verdicts to eight other current or former members of her party who, like her, previously served as European Parliament lawmakers. Le Pen and her co-defendants face up to 10 years in prison. They can appeal, which would lead to another trial.

The biggest concern for Le Pen is that the court may declare her ineligible to run for office "with immediate effect" — even if she appeals. That could prevent her from running for president in 2027. She has described such scenario as a "political death." The verdict was shaping up as a resounding defeat for Le Pen and her party. As well as finding her and eight other former European lawmakers guilty of embezzling public funds, the court also handed down guilty verdicts to 12 other people who served as parliamentary aides for Le Pen and what is now the National Rally party, formerly the National Front.

The chief judge, who read the ruling delivered by her and two other justices, said Le Pen had been at the heart of "a system" that her party used to siphon off EU parliament money. The judge said Le Pen and other co-defendants didn't enrich themselves personally. But the ruling described the embezzlement as "a democratic bypass" that deceived the parliament and voters.

Le Pen and 24 other officials from the National Rally were accused of having used money intended for European Union parliamentary aides to pay staff who worked for the party between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the 27-nation bloc's regulations. Le Pen and her co-defendants denied wrongdoing.

Le Pen, 56, was runner-up to President Emmanuel Macron in the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections, and her party's electoral support has grown in recent years. During the nine-week trial that took place in late 2024, she argued that ineligibility "would have the effect of depriving me of being a presidential candidate" and disenfranchise her supporters.

"There are 11 million people who voted for the movement I represent. So tomorrow, potentially, millions and millions of French people would see themselves deprived of their candidate in the election," she told the panel of three judges. If Le Pen cannot run in 2027, her seeming natural successor would be Jordan Bardella, Le Pen's 29-year-old protégé who succeeded her at the helm of the party in 2021.

Le Pen denied accusations she was at the head of the system meant to siphon off EU parliament money to benefit her party, which she led from 2011 to 2021. She argued instead that it was acceptable to adapt the work of the aides paid by the European Parliament to the needs of the lawmakers, including some political work related to the party.

Hearings showed that some EU money was used to pay for Le Pen's bodyguard — who was once her father's bodyguard — as well as her personal assistant. Prosecutors requested a two-year prison sentence and a five-year period of ineligibility for Le Pen. Le Pen said she felt they were "only interested" in preventing her from running for president.

Damn, it took almost dying from a lynch mob of rabid Zionists for him to be properly credited:
https://xcancel.com/MayadeenEnglish/status/1906129001405399463

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has apologized for excluding Palestinian co-director Hamdan Ballal’s name in its response to the Israeli settler attack and his subsequent detainment.

Following global outcry from the film industry, including 690 Academy members, among them Mark Ruffalo, Riz Ahmed, Ava DuVernay, and Alfonso Cuaron, the Academy issued a follow-up letter on Friday acknowledging its omission.

“We regret that we failed to directly acknowledge Mr. Ballal and the film by name,” read the statement from Academy CEO Bill Kramer and President Janet Yang, adding that the Academy “condemns violence of this kind anywhere in the world” and opposes the suppression of free speech "under any circumstances."

Apparently Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa is in Florida to beg for US troops to be sent to Ecuador. Ostensibly to help in their “drug war”, but conveniently only two weeks before the runoff of their presidential election where Noboa was only 0.17pp above the center-left Correist candidate in the first round and is currently polling 7pp below her in the runoff.

The T-4 airbase in Syria, which was intended for use by the Turkish Armed Forces, has been rendered unusable after Israeli airstrikes targeted the facility to prevent Turkey from utilizing it.

• Telegram

Apparently in El Salvador Nayib Bukele did the exact same thing that got Evo Morales ousted: had the Supreme Court declare that term limits don't apply and got re-elected despite the constitution.

Weird how the US didn't coup him

Any news on resistance operations in Gaza? I haven't seen any reports posted here since the ceasefire ended, I checked Radio War Nerd but they didn't say anything about how they are doing, their morale, or whether their operational capacity has been degraded or strengthened

Amsterdam knife attacker is a 30-year-old Ukrainian, Dutch police say (SexUnderSocialism News)

Earlier this week, there was a knife attack near Dam Square in Amsterdam, in the fascist kingdom of the Netherlands. Five people were randomly stabbed in broad daylight. The suspect was arrested, and has now been identified by police as a 30-year-old man from Ukraine. The country's strictly controlled press claims that the suspect is from the Donetsk region, in the eastern part of Ukraine.

This has fueled wild speculation among the country's homegrown social fascists, who support the Zelensky regime, that Russia was involved in this attack, while the country's Zelenskeptic mask-off fascists see it as an opportunity to strengthen their "anti-war" stance while pushing for more fascism at home.

The suspect's motives remain unclear.

Chat, is America cooked? This doesn't seem good

75% of US scientists who answered Nature poll consider leaving

More than 1,600 readers answered our poll; many said they were looking for jobs in Europe and Canada.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00938-y

New Big Serge just dropped

TL;DR Big Serge sees negotiations as untenable and theater. Russia is winning on the battlefield and Ukraine cannot, politically, make any meaningful concessions, which means that fighting will settle this and likely in Russia’s favor.

Thesis:

I have never made any bones about my belief that the war in Ukraine will be resolved militarily: that is, it will be fought to its conclusion and end in the defeat of Ukraine in the east, Russian control of vast swathes of the country, and the subordination of a rump Ukraine to Russian interests. Trump’s self conception is greatly tied up in his image as a “dealmaker”, and his view of foreign affairs as fundamentally transactional in nature. As the American president, he has the power to force this framing on Ukraine, but not on Russia. There remain intractable gulfs between Russia’s war aims and what Kiev is willing to discuss, and it is doubtful that Trump will be able to reconcile these differences. Russia, however, does not need to accept a partial victory simply in the name of goodwill and negotiation. Moscow has recourse to a more primal form of power. The sword predates and transcends the pen. Negotiation, as such, must bow to the reality of the battlefield, and no amount of sharp deal making can transcend the more ancient law of blood.

Classic battlefield analysis of the Kursk offensive, good slop for you war nerds (Russia focused on the flanks while Ukraine mostly prioritized depth over breadth):

Despite their tactical surprise and the early capture of Sudzha, the AFU was never able to parlay this into a meaningful penetration or exploitation in Kursk. Why? The answer seems to be a nexus of operational and technical problems the Ukrainians were unable to create a wide penetration into Russia (for the most part, the “opening” of their salient was less than 30 miles wide), which greatly reduced the number of roads available to them for supply and reinforcement. The narrow penetration and poor road access in turn allowed the Russians to concentrate strike systems on the few available lines of communication, to the effect that the Ukrainians struggled to either supply or reinforce the grouping based around Sudzha - this low logistical and reinforcement connectivity in turn made it impossible for the Ukrainians to stage additional forces to try and expand the salient. This created a positive feedback loop of confinement and isolation for the Ukrainian grouping which made their defeat more or less inevitable.

At the risk of making a perilous historical analogy, the operational form was very similar to the famous 1944 Battle of the Bulge: taken by surprise by a German counteroffensive, Dwight Eisenhower prioritized limiting the width, rather than the depth of the German penetration, moving reinforcements to defend the “shoulders” of the salient.

Operationally, the main distinctive of the fighting in Kursk is the orthogonal orientation of effort by the combatants. By this, we mean that Russian counteroffensives were directed at the flanks of the salient, steadily compressing the Ukrainians into a more narrow position (by the end of 2024, the Ukrainians had lost half of the territory they once held), while Ukrainian efforts to restart their progress were aimed at moving deeper into Russia.

On a schematic level, the Ukrainian position in Kursk was doomed by mid-September when Russian troops recaptured Snagost. If the Ukrainians had successfully isolated the south bank of the Seym, they would have had the river as a valuable defensive barrier protecting their left flank as well as access to valuable space and additional supply roads. As it happened, the Ukrainian flank was crumpled early in the operation by the Russian victories at Korenevo and Snagost, which left Ukraine trying to fight its way out of a very compressed and road-poor salient. The (correct) Russian decision to concentrate its counterattacks on the flanks further compressed the space and left the Ukrainians with inadequate supply linkages subject to persistent Russian drone strikes.

Confinement bred strangulation, and strangulation bred confinement. Fighting with a caved in flank for months, the Ukrainian grouping was doomed to operational sterility and eventual defeat almost at the outset.

The state of the front (multiple ongoing collapses for Ukraine and more to come):

The Kursk salient is the second front to be fully collapsed by the Russian Army in the past three months. The first was the southern Donetsk front, which was completely caved in over the course of December and then rolled up in the opening weeks of the year, which had the effect of not only knocking the AFU out of longstanding strongholds like Ugledar and Kurakhove, but also safeguarding the flank of the Russian advance towards Pokrovsk.

There was no Toretsk counter-offensive. Rather Russia was claiming a victory it hadn’t achieved:

It appears that what actually happened was rather that the Russian MoD announced the capture of the city while its extremities were still contested. Russian forces remain in control of the bulk of the city, but Ukrainian units remain dug at the periphery and fighting has continued in the “grey zone.” DeepState (a Ukrainian mapping project) confirmed that there was no general Ukrainian counterattack - rather, the fighting was simply part of a continuous struggle for the western periphery of the city.

Negotiation is theater (return to thesis):

So long as Russia continues to advance on the battlefield, they have no incentive to (as they would see it) rob themselves of a full victory by accepting a truncated and premature settlement.

The problem for Ukraine, if history is any guide, is that it is not actually very easy to surrender. In the First World War, Germany surrendered while its army was still in the field, fighting in good order far from the German heartland. This was an anticipatory surrender, born of a realistic assessment of the battlefield which indicated that German defeat was an inevitability. Berlin therefore opted to bow out prematurely, saving the lives of its young men once the struggle had become hopeless. This decision, of course, was poorly received, and was widely denounced as betrayal and cowardice. It became a politically scarring watershed moment that shaped German sensibilities and revanchist drives for decades to come.

So long as Zelensky’s government continues to receive western support and the AFU remains in the field - even if it is being steadily rolled back and chewed up all along the front - it is difficult to imagine Kiev acceding to an anticipatory surrender. Ukraine must choose between doing this the easy way and the hard way, as the parlance goes, but this is not really a choice at all, particularly given the Kremlin’s insistence that a change of government in Kiev is a prerequisite to peace as such. Any successful path to a negotiated piece runs through the ruins of Zelensky’s government, and is therefore largely precluded at the moment.

So for all the diplomatic cinema, the brute reality of the battlefield remains the same. The battlefield is the first principle, and the ultimate repository of political power. The diplomat is a servant of the warrior, and Russia takes recourse to the fist and the boot and the bullet.

Dear comrades, if your protest has any dudes in superhero costumes, meme signs or excessive signs in English if you're not in an English-speaking country, then I'm truly sorry, because your protest is already doomed. Look at Turkey, their protest thing felt serious for like a day, then it turned into goon material for the r/Europe cucks, and now the English signs and the superheroes have arrived. My estimation now is that Erdoğan will rule for another two decades before Allah elevates him to the seventh heaven. I'm not even praising Erdoğan here, it's just that his opponents have fatal liberal brainworms, where protests are held not as a disruptive tool to pressure the ruling government, but as an elaborate esoteric pledge of allegiance to western cultural hegemony. Georgia was the same, and it also failed.

Look at my protest dog:

Per Reuters: "CK Hutchison will not sign deal to sell strategic Panama ports next week, sources say"

Looks like the Chinese threats against CK Hutchinson, and their directives to state owned enterprises to cease business with CK Hutchinson in response to them potentially signing this deal, might have worked their magic.

Every Western outlet stumbling over itself to report on “anti-Hamas” protests in Gaza is some heinous shit.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/03/26/middleeast/why-gazans-are-protesting-hamas-now-intl-latam

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g71lk09npo.amp

A photo of it was also near the top of Reddit, and there’s dozens of top comments about “it looks like they’re all children!” and of course blaming the genocide on Hamas from their enlightened perch inside the empire that is responsible for the genocide.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1jkekcz/antihamas_protesters_in_gaza_call_for_an_end_to/

… it says a lot about Western “civilization” that witnessing a few hundred children allegedly protesting the Resistance evokes more empathy than the slaughter of tens of thousands by the empire. Complete dehumanization, until they can be straw-manned into a pro-empire position

In the Netherlands (ruled by a fascist coalition government) a bill sponsored by the neolib social democrat leader of the biggest opposition party (GL-PvdA) to help fund Radio Free Europe to make up for the loss of US funds was passed. Even the Socialist Party voted in favor. The only parties who opposed it were the CDA (right-wing Christian democrats), FVD (fascists), and PVV (fascists).

Dead Letters: Neoliberalism Kills Mail Delivery In Denmark

Postal services in the Nordic hermit kingdom will cease at the end of this year after 401 years of continuous operations. Postal operator PostNord, a neoliberal "run it like a business" abomination jointly owned by the Danish and Swedish states, has announced that it is no longer profitable to distribute letters and that they will end the service. The iconic red letterboxes will be removed from the streets, postage stamps will no longer be issued and 1.500 mail carriers will be fired.

Sky News Arabia claims to have received a copy of Trump's letter to Iran and Khamenei. I'll post it here below:

I think the most infuriating thing to me about the liberal reactions to foreign students being disappeared by Israel Criticism Enforcement officers is that it's seemingly almost entirely focused on that they were in plain clothes or wearing masks, or literally a litany of other bullshit instead of the fact we are eroding probably the most unique constitutional liberty America has for the benefit of a foreign nation. If you go look at shitlib subreddits, you basically have to scroll down the bottom before you see anyone even mention Israel. Lots of talk about Nazis or gestapo or brown shirts, but absolutely no acknowledgment of the country this is being done in behalf of.