World News & Politics

ERIK PRINCE HAS been many things in his 54 years on Earth: the wealthy heir to an auto supply company; a Navy SEAL; the founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater, which conducted a notorious 2007 massacre in the middle of Baghdad;(...)

Last November, Prince started a podcast called “Off Leash,”(...) On an episode last Tuesday, his unique and invaluable perspective turned out to be that the U.S. should “put the imperial hat back on” and take over and directly run huge swaths of the globe.

Prince’s co-host Mark Serrano then warned him that listeners might hear his words and believe he means them: “People on the left are going to watch this,” said Serrano, “and they’re going to say, wait a minute, Erik Prince is talking about being a colonialist again.”

Prince responded: “Absolutely, yes.” He then added that he thought this was a great concept not just for Africa but also for Latin America.
(...)

Archive link

In a statement on Friday quoted by state media, the prison service of the Yamalo-Nenets region said Navalny “felt bad” after a walk and lost consciousness “almost immediately”.

It added: “Medical staff arrived immediately, and an ambulance team was called. Resuscitation measures were carried out, which did not yield positive results. Paramedics confirmed the death of the convict. The causes of death are being established.”

Navalny has been imprisoned since January 2021 when he returned to Moscow after recovering in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin.

Before he was arrested, he led campaigns against corruption and organised major anti-Kremlin protests.

Jailed on charges of extremism, he saw his sentence extended to 19 years in 2023.

archive link

Palestinians are systematically subjected to home demolitions and forced evictions, and live in constant fear of losing their homes. For more than 73 years, Israel has been forcibly displacing entire Palestinian communities. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians’ homes have been demolished, causing terrible trauma & suffering. More than 6 million Palestinians remain refugees, the vast […]

As fate would have it, in order to halt the discussion over the justification for Israel's right to exist, Israel has to approach the dustbin of history and pull out the "occupation," the "two-state solution," "peace in exchange for territories" – all those terms his royal genius threw away in his megalomaniac hubris. We need to shake off the dust and place these terms at the top of our agenda. We need to relinquish the lies we wanted to believe in.

This is necessary not just for getting rid of Netanyahu, but in order to overcome Hamas. We will need to pursue the two-state option in order to obtain the support of the world, mainly of the United States. We will have to strive for peace with the Palestinians, present a diplomatic path for ending the occupation and evacuating the settlements, saying clearly and openly, from every diplomatic platform: here is the Israeli initiative.

https://archive.ph/mLLe4

Our leading humanitarian and civic institutions, including major medical institutions, refuse to denounce Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This exposes their hypocrisy and complicity.

The cuts to funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — collective punishment for the alleged involvement in the Oct. 7 attack of 12 of its 13,000 UNRWA workers — will accelerate the horror, turning the attacks, starvation, lack of health care and spread of infectious diseases in Gaza into a tidal wave of death.

The evidence-free charges, which include the accusation that 10 percent of all of UNRWA’s Gaza staff have ties to Islamist militant groups, appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The reporter, Carrie-Keller Lynn, served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Given the numerous lies Israel has employed to justify its genocide, including “beheaded babies” and “mass rape,” it is reasonable to assume this may be another fabrication.

These allegations were enough to see 17 countries including the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France, Australia and Japan cut or delay funding to the vital U.N. agency. UNRWA is all that stands between the Palestinians in Gaza and famine. A handful of countries, including Ireland, Norway and Turkey, maintain their funding.

Israel is seeking to destroy not only Gaza’s health care system and infrastructure, but UNRWA which provides food and aid to 2 million Palestinians.

(...)

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper.

The measure passed the national assembly late on Tuesday by a vote of 493 to 30, with almost all members of Macron’s centrist minority coalition as well as leftwing opposition parties approving.

Macron and other French lawmakers called for the right to an abortion – which has been legal in France since 1974 – to be inscribed in the constitution after the US supreme court in 2022 ended an almost half-century national constitutional right to abortion.

The government chose the term “guaranteed freedom” to thread a needle between the lower house, which earlier voted to enshrine the “right” to an abortion, and the Senate, which is dominated by centre-right parties and which so far has approved only “freedom” for abortion.

The Senate will start examining the text on 28 February.

https://archive.is/bcclP

Hundreds of advocates, turned away from the Oakland courtroom due to capacity issues, called on President Biden to end military aid to Israel, as Palestinian deaths mount.

https://archive.is/yWzHs

edit for useful links:

Defense for Children International-Palestine v. Biden - Court Videos

lawsuit (PDF)

seeking a court order (PDF)

a court brief (PDF)

The election of the far-right politician, Javier Milei, as Argentine President, who is also known as “El loco” – the madman – has thrown down the gauntlet to the working class. The programme Milei has [...]

The Texas governor is taking a stand to protect his state’s right to let children die in the Rio Grande, and four justices of the Supreme Court are encouraging it.

https://archive.is/5iOMe

Officials in Ukraine say Russia has provided no credible evidence to back its claims that their own forces shot down a military transport plane carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war who were to be swapped for Russian POWs.

“We currently don’t have evidence that there could have been that many people onboard the aircraft. Russian propaganda’s claim that the IL-76 aircraft was transporting 65 Ukrainian POWs (heading) for a prisoner swap continues to raise a lot of questions,” Budanov said.

https://archive.ph/Hj1TK

Young men and young women’s world views are pulling apart. The consequences could be far-reaching

In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up.

Germany also now shows a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries, and in the UK the gap is 25 points. In Poland last year, almost half of men aged 18-21 backed the hard-right Confederation party, compared to just a sixth of young women of the same age.
(...)

https://archive.ph/MrnR1

• Russian lawmaker: Ukraine was told PoWs were on plane
• His assertion contradicts Ukrainian statement
• Ukraine has neither confirmed nor denied it shot down plane
• Ukraine ombudsman calls for international investigation

https://archive.ph/sjqUA

-A Russian military transport plane crashed Wednesday in a border region near Ukraine.
-Russia accused Ukraine of shooting it down, killing 74 people on board, including prisoners of war.
-Ukraine said it was not told about "the need to ensure the safety of the airspace in the area."

Ukraine has suggested that it may have been tricked into shooting down a plane that Russia claims was carrying 74 people, including 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war.
(...)

https://archive.is/AmltD

The ruling by a National Court judge concludes a pretrial inquiry into an unsolicited kiss that set off a widespread debate about sexism in Spanish women’s soccer.

https://archive.is/FQVWo

It’s not a strike – yet. But the union representing Hollywood musicians has now also officially demanded protection from artificial intelligence (AI) from major studios.

JERUSALEM, Jan 22 (Reuters) - A group of relatives of Israelis held hostage by Palestinian gunmen in Gaza stormed a parliamentary committee session in Jerusalem on Monday, demanding that the lawmakers do more to try to free their loved ones.
The action by about 20 people signalled growing domestic dissent in the fourth month of the Gaza war against Hamas.

Families and supporters have also started camping outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coastal home as well as the Knesset building.

Regular weekend rallies demanding the hostages be released have in recent weeks been reinforced by demonstrations calling for an election that might topple the hard-right government.

Anti-government protests that shook the nation in 2023 ceased after the Hamas Oct. 7 attack. Political rifts were set aside as Israelis rallied behind the military and the families of those killed or taken hostage.

https://archive.is/E9Bx6

The building described as ‘Mossad Headquarters’ in Iraqi Kurdistan with underground facilities for conducting covert operations hit by Iranian missile attack, Erbil, Northern Iraq, January 15, 2024 The stunning missile and drone strikes on three countries — Syria, Iraq and Pakistan — over a period of 24 hours and Tehran taking the extraordinary step of …

https://archive.is/I7pmm

Agricultural workers say green policies and taxes are eating into their profits and are demanding more government subsidies.

https://archive.ph/UZekh

The terminal of the Russian Novatek natural gas company caught on fire in the port of Ust-Luga in the Leningrad region, regional governor Alexander Drozdenko announced on Telegram. Novatek is the largest independent natural gas producer in Russia.

Pakistan’s political and military leaders have moved to de-escalate tensions with Iran after deadly airstrikes by Tehran and Islamabad this week that killed at least 11 people and imperiled fraught relations between the neighbors.

https://archive.is/GQK0S

The upcoming elections in Pakistan are much more than a routine political event. They are a decisive moment for the nation’s future.

https://archive.is/4bkJM

Early on Friday, Israeli security forces ended a two-day raid in Tulkarem, a West Bank city straddling the wall separating Palestinian communities and Israel that hasn’t been known as a hotbed of militancy in recent years, leaving at least eight Palestinians dead.

Since Israel launched its response to the deadly Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack, 357 Palestinians, of whom 90 were children, have been killed across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, according to the United Nations. Five Israelis, including four members of the security forces, have been killed in the West Bank over the same period, the U.N. said.

“Civilians are being killed in these raids, which seems to be inviting more people to join militant groups rather than the opposite,” said Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, a Ramallah-based think tank.

Israel says it has detained about 2,700 people throughout the West Bank since the start of the war, including over 1,300 who it says are linked to Hamas. The Palestinian Prisoners Society, a nongovernmental organization that supports detainees in Israeli prisons, says the number of Palestinians who have been detained by Israel since Oct. 7 is around 6,000.

While a majority of Palestinians don’t support Hamas, polling shows that the Oct. 7 attack and the Israeli war in Gaza have increased the group’s popularity, particularly in the West Bank where 75% prefer the group to remain in power in Gaza. By comparison, 36% of Gazans said they preferred Hamas to stay in power, according to a poll released by the PCPSR in December.

https://archive.is/iK5KM

Total is 20% higher than thought and may have implications for collapse of globally important north Atlantic ocean currents

https://archive.is/mGnUr

The killing of 10,000 children. Blasts leading to amputation—sometimes carried out without anaesthetics—and lifelong disabilities. Entire populations, including pregnant women and children, facing hunger, a quarter of them (576,600 people) at catastrophic levels, – that means at the risk of starvation and death. Warnings from the UN children’s agency that nearly 335,000 children under five in the Gaza are at “high risk of severe malnutrition and preventable death”. Thousands of children buried under the rubble and presumed dead.

The balance sheet of 100 days of war on Gaza is grim. It is a dark moment in history that we see on our television screens.

“If there is a hell on earth today, its name is northern Gaza,” in the words of one senior UN official. Testimonies from children, eye-witness accounts and news reports narrate in graphic detail and superlative what is in all probability an unprecedented levels of cruelty towards children.
(...)

https://archive.is/hXFh3