TeamProg
TeamProg's JournalHow Israel's restrictions on aid put Gaza on the brink of famine
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/03/gaza-aid-convoy-israel-war/JERUSALEM — On Saturday, the United States airdropped 38,000 meals into Gaza — a territory controlled not by a hostile foreign power but by one of its closest allies.
The remarkable scene of American aid bundles floating down to starving Palestinians was the starkest illustration yet of the rift that has grown between the Biden administration and the Israeli government over the Gaza war. For months, Israel has resisted pressure from Washington to allow more humanitarian aid into the enclave, even as it relies on U.S. bombs and diplomatic support to carry out its punishing military campaign there.
Thursday’s aid convoy tragedy — in which more than 100 people were killed and 700 injured in Gaza City, according to Palestinian officials — underscored the desperation of civilians in the Gaza Strip, which is hurtling toward a famine that humanitarian officials say is largely of Israel’s making. They point to Israel’s limiting of land entry points for aid; an onerous and confusing Israeli inspection process; faulty deconfliction channels between aid groups and Israel’s military; Israeli efforts to undermine the United Nations; and its military’s recent targeting of Gazan police who once protected aid missions.
Israel says it is not limiting the delivery of aid to Gaza, and it has blamed the United Nations for failing to distribute it to those in need — or worse, diverting aid to Hamas.
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Blame the United Nations... Nice try!
Fears of environmental disaster rise as ship sinks after Houthi attack
Source: WaPo
By Jennifer Hassan
Updated March 3, 2024 at 12:11 p.m. EST|Published March 3, 2024 at 9:18 a.m. EST
A cargo ship sank in the Red Sea after an attack by Houthi militants, taking some 21,000 metric tons of fertilizer down with it, posing a significant environmental risk to one of the world’s busiest waterways and the home of many coral reefs.
The Rubymar was struck by an anti-ballistic missile fired by the Iranian-backed Houthis on Feb. 18 and sank early Saturday after “slowly taking on water” since the attack, U.S. Central Command said on social media early Sunday local time.
“The approximately 21,000 metric tons of ammonium phosphate sulfate fertilizer that the vessel was carrying presents an environmental risk in the Red Sea,” Centcom said, adding that the ship “also presents a subsurface impact risk to other ships transiting the busy shipping lanes of the waterway.”
The ship’s sinking “will cause an environmental disaster,” the Yemeni government said in a separate statement.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/03/rubymar-houthi-attack-red-sea/
Oh, FUCK!
Just another environmental disaster... move along.
The environmental danger of fertilizer contents was not reported earlier in LBN. Only that the Rubymar was the first ship to sink after rocket fire.
In Israeli-occupied Hebron, Palestinians describe living in 'a prison'
This is international news, this war is far beyond the constraints of Israel / Palestian context only.https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/28/west-bank-hebron-israel-occupation/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3cf1f73%2F65e4aa4f6430bc1a89203d95%2F5fe8e448ade4e21670bc1e37%2F24%2F43%2F65e4aa4f6430bc1a89203d95
Updated February 28, 2024 at 4:30 p.m. EST|Published February 28, 2024 at 12:06 p.m. EST
The impact has been felt acutely in Hebron, population 250,000, the largest Palestinian city outside Gaza. With Israeli settlements clustered in and around its historic center, it has long been one of the most heavily militarized, intensely surveilled parts of the West Bank.
After Oct. 7, the vise around Hebron has been tightened even further. All but one of the main routes into the part of the city that is home to the vast majority of Palestinians have been blocked, according to residents and B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group. The remaining route has been fitted with a steel gate that can be closed at any time.
Many of the Israeli checkpoints that once controlled movement in and around the old city have been shut down, dividing friends and families and keeping many residents confined to their neighborhoods. Some described barely leaving home for months.
“It’s a prison in a prison,” Idris said.
Video from Israeli military shows moments of carnage at Gaza food aid site
[link:https://www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news-03-01-24/index.html|
This contradicts other posters here that IDF gun fire at Gazans followed trucks running over some starving people.
'The fix is in': Coup trial delay reveals Supreme Court 'in cahoots' with Trump
[link:
|Really scary stuff.
AIPAC Throws Millions at Possible Insurgent Campaigns to Unseat Progressive Democrats
I repeat, ' TO UNSEAT PROGESSIVE DEMOCRATS!! I had no idea until I just came across this info!
It is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee! They used to only lobby, now they're funding elections!
In a mounting offensive by AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to unseat progressives who speak up for Palestinian rights, Westchester County Executive George Latimer, who has been courted by AIPAC, announced earlier today he is launching a primary challenge against New York Congressmember Jamaal Bowman.
Last month, two Michigan Democrats running for the U.S. Senate revealed AIPAC offered them $20 million to instead primary Congressmember Rashida Tlaib for her House seat. Nasser Beydoun, a Lebanese American businessman, and Hill Harper, a Hollywood actor-turned-politician, both turned AIPAC down.
Meanwhile, a new book by journalist Ryan Grim reports an AIPAC representative approached Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with an offer to raise $100,000 after her stunning 2018 win. The fundraising was presented as an opening salvo to “start the conversation” about AOC’s position on Israel.
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/12/6/headlines/aipac_throws_millions_at_possible_insurgent_campaigns_to_unseat_progressive_democrats
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This kind of activity will come closer to the forefront as people start asking questions.
WISE UP!
Israel launches strikes on Lebanon; hostage talks in Egypt continue
Source: WaPo
(( This is international news, this war is far beyind the constraints of Israel / Palestian context only. ))
Israel launched an attack on neighboring Lebanon on Wednesday, striking various locations in the south that killed at least four people and raising the specter of war between the two countries. The strikes followed a morning attack launched from Lebanon into Israel that struck a house and a military base. One Israeli woman was killed, and at least eight people were injured, according to a government spokeswoman.
(snip)
Aid organizations and several world leaders are renewing calls for Israel to rethink its impending military operation on Rafah, warning of widespread destruction and heavy civilian casualties.
Nearly 1.5 million people have crowded into Rafah, the southern Gaza city that was once seen as a last refuge for those attempting to flee fighting elsewhere in the enclave. Before the war, Rafah’s population was estimated to be 280,000. Now, the overwhelmed city is bracing for what Israel has referred to as a “massive operation” meant to “collapse” the remaining Hamas units in the Gaza Strip.
“Military operations in Rafah could lead to a slaughter in Gaza,” Martin Griffiths, the U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, warned in a statement on Tuesday.
“The international community has been warning against the dangerous consequences of any ground invasion in Rafah,” he added. “The Government of Israel cannot continue to ignore these calls. History will not be kind.”
(snip)
On Wednesday, the prime ministers of Spain and Ireland sent a joint letter to the European Commission warning of the risk of a “humanitarian catastrophe posed by the imminent threat of Israeli military operations in Rafah.” The two leaders urged the European Union to undertake an urgent review of whether Israel was complying with its obligations to respect international human rights law.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/14/israel-hamas-war-news-gaza-palestine/
“The international community has been warning against the dangerous consequences of any ground invasion in Rafah,” he added. “The Government of Israel cannot continue to ignore these calls. History will not be kind.”
The new-ish D.U. "TOP" button. I guess I'm late to the party but this new TOP button is great! I used to scroll back
to the top of each page, but now I just used the button on the lower left of each page.
Wondeful!
That is all.
Thank you.
EDIT: Usonian is right, each POST has the TOP button though every page seems to have the "BACK TO TOP" button.
Overnight bombing in Rafa kills 67, most-likely innocent people.
This is international news, this war is far beyind the constraints of Israel / Palestian context only.JERUSALEM — The Israeli strikes that lit up the night in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah on Monday sent pulses of fear through the 1.4 million Palestinians for whom that strip of land has become a shelter of last resort.
Israel’s army described the overnight attacks as cover for a special forces mission to rescue two elderly Israeli-Argentine hostages. The operation succeeded, but at massive human cost: At least 67 people were killed in locations throughout the area, the enclave’s Health Ministry said. A video from a nearby house showed the body of a Palestinian girl, her legs shredded into ribbons of flesh; other footage showed a bleeding boy being carried away, and four more children dead on hospital stretchers.
The ministry said that 164 people have been killed and another 200 wounded across the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours. That the overnight operation had focused on Rafah, a place that Israel’s army had until recently described as somewhere it would spare from attacks, shocked a bone-tired population that has spent months on the move, in what has often felt to them like a futile attempt to outrun the bombs.
WaPo:: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/12/israel-rafah-strikes-panic-offensive/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3cb8353%2F65ca52754fe9d4463de77890%2F5fe8e448ade4e21670bc1e37%2F5%2F53%2F65ca52754fe9d4463de77890
It's through my subscription so it might not help you.
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The Entitlement of Cars, Self-Driving or not and The Loss of Pedestrian Rights - Has A Long and Interesting History.
I remembered this article yesterday after reading about the vandalism and burning of a self-driving car in Chinatown S.F. CA.It is a war of classes and convenience.
From Voxx: https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
A hundred years ago, if you were a pedestrian, crossing the street was simple: You walked across it.
Today, if there's traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. And if there's a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green.
Fail to do so, and you're committing a crime: jaywalking. In some cities — Los Angeles, for instance — police ticket tens of thousands of pedestrians annually for jaywalking, with fines of up to $250.
To most people, this seems part of the basic nature of roads. But it's actually the result of an aggressive, forgotten 1920s campaign led by auto groups and manufacturers that redefined who owned the city streets.
"In the early days of the automobile, it was drivers' job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them," says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. "But under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it's your fault if you get hit."
One of the keys to this shift was the creation of the crime of jaywalking. Here's a history of how that happened.
(snip)
As cars began to spread widely during the 1920s, the consequence of this was predictable: death. Over the first few decades of the century, the number of people killed by cars skyrocketed.
Those killed were mostly pedestrians, not drivers, and they were disproportionately the elderly and children, who had previously had free rein to play in the streets.
The public response to these deaths, by and large, was outrage. Automobiles were often seen as frivolous playthings, akin to the way we think of yachts today, they were often called "pleasure cars". And on the streets, they were considered violent intruders.
Cities erected prominent memorials for children killed in traffic accidents, and newspapers covered traffic deaths in detail, usually blaming drivers. They also published cartoons demonizing cars, often associating them with the Grim Reaper.
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Then the corporate lobbying and massive ad / propaganda campaign began. Worth the read.
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Gender: Do not displayHometown: Monte Sereno, CA
Home country: USA
Current location: At home on five acres of pines and cedars at 3,100 ft elev in the Sierra Nevada, California ( in a VAN, down) by a river!
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