[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Thursday, 21 January 2016 01:33.
It’s time for another instalment of ‘things Putin actually said’. Imagine that Europe became a really hazardous place to live one day, so hazardous that the Jews started looking for places to run to in order to escape from the backlash stemming from their own handiwork.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has met with European Jewish leaders to discuss their concerns over rising anti-Semitism on the continent.
During the meeting, Putin pointed out that many Jews emigrated from Moscow when it was part of the former Soviet Union. He said now they can come back.
The president of the European Jewish Congress, Moshe Kantor said the number of Jews fleeing Europe is also on the rise.
“The situation with the Jews in Europe is the worst it has been since the end of the Second World War,” said Kantor. “The Jews are again in fear and a Jewish exodus from Europe is quite real. There are more Jews fleeing France, which is considered very secure, than from civil-war-torn Ukraine.”
“Let them come here,” said Putin. “They emigrated from here under Soviet Union, but now they can come back.”
Of course. He’ll probably invite them to settle in the ‘Far East’, land which the Russians have no warrant to put themselves in, much less their Jewish friends.
The governor of Russia’s Far East Jewish Autonomous Region says the area is “ready” to house Jews from Europe who are facing anti-Semitism.
Aleksandr Levintal said his region “will welcome Jews from European countries, where they may face attacks by anti-Semitic elements.”
Levintal also called his region “the first officially established Jewish statehood.”
Levintal’s remarks come a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin called on Jews to return to Russia.
In Moscow on January 19, Putin told the head of the European Jewish Congress, Moshe Kantor, that he had seen reports saying European Jews were scared to wear a yarmulke, the traditional Jewish skull cap, in public.
Putin told Kantor, “They can come to us. They left the Soviet Union. Let them return.”
The Jewish Autonomous Region was established by the Soviet government in 1934 in a part of southeastern Siberia that borders China.
In 1948, the Jewish population there peaked at 30,000—a quarter of the region’s total population.
By 2010, out of 180,000 residents in the region, only about 1,600 were of Jewish ancestry.
The Russians want to use their federal structure as a tool to vector more Jews into Siberia. How long is humanity going to have to endure the existence of a structure like the Russian federal state? Who will rid the world of that gigantic bloated cancer?
Iran “has opened a new chapter” in its ties with the world, President Hassan Rouhani said, hours after international nuclear sanctions were lifted.
The move came after the international nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, said Iran had complied with a deal designed to prevent it developing nuclear weapons.
Most Western governments hailed the move but Israel accused Tehran of still seeking to build a nuclear bomb.
Four dual US-Iran nationals were released from jail by Iran on Saturday.
They include Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who was arrested in 2014 and jailed in November for espionage.
Early reports said all four had left the country, however unnamed US officials later said that while “those who wished to depart Iran have left” and that one of the four, Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari, was not on the plane headed for Switzerland.
A fifth American, Matthew Trevithick, was also been released separately.
The US offered clemency to seven Iranians being held in the US for sanctions violations.
Nuclear sanctions have been in place since 2006, on top of other sanctions stretching back decades:
The economic sanctions being lifted now were imposed progressively by the US, EU and UN in response to Iran’s nuclear programme
The EU is lifting restrictions on trade, shipping and insurance in full
The US is suspending, not terminating, its nuclear-related sanctions; crucially, Iran can now reconnect to the global banking system
The UN is lifting sanctions related to defence and nuclear technology sales, as well as an asset freeze on key individuals and companies
Non-nuclear US economic sanctions remain in place, notably the ban on US citizens and companies trading with Iran, and US and EU sanctions on Iranians accused of sponsoring terrorism remain in place
A flurry of Iranian economic activity is anticipated:
Nearly $100bn (£70bn) of Iranian assets are being unlocked
Iran is expected to increase its daily export of 1.1m barrels of crude oil by 500,000 shortly, and a further 500,000 thereafter
Iran is reportedly poised to buy 114 new passenger planes from the Airbus consortium
UN, US and EU sanctions have hit Iran hard for years.
Mr Rouhani said everyone was happy with the deal, apart from those he described as warmongers in the region - Israel and hardliners in the US Congress.
“We Iranians have reached out to the world in a sign of friendliness, and leaving behind the enmities, suspicions and plots, have opened a new chapter in the relations of Iran with the world,” he said in a statement on Sunday morning.
The lifting of sanctions was “a turning point” for Iran’s economy, he added, saying the country needed to be less reliant on oil revenues.
US Secretary of State John Kerry, an architect of the deal, said it had been pursued “with the firm belief that exhausting diplomacy before choosing war is an imperative. And we believe that today marks the benefits of that choice”.
However US Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan said the Obama administration had moved to lift economic sanctions “on the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism”.
And Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “Without an appropriate reaction to every violation, Iran will realise it can continue to develop nuclear weapons, destabilise the region and spread terror.”
‘Expectations are high’ - Amir Paivar, BBC Persian business reporter
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says the lifting of sanctions is a victory for the Iranian nation. It is one for him too.
Mr Rouhani had pledged to strike a deal ending the nuclear standoff. He just delivered his biggest promise. This will boost his allies in parliamentary elections next month.
But hardliners will not sit and watch. They call the shots in domestic, security and cultural areas. There is always danger of a backlash unless Mr Rouhani’s faction shares the post-sanctions financial benefits with them.
Expectations are high, and managing them will be a difficult job. The impact of lifting of sanctions in livelihoods of many Iranian will not come overnight. Rouhani now says he will focus on boosting foreign direct investment and Iran’s non-oil exports. Easier said than done.
The prospect of Iran doubling its crude oil exports has contributed to the continuing fall in the oil price. Benchmark Brent crude closed below $29 (£20.3) on Friday. Share prices in Saudi Arabia, the Arab world’s largest stock market, fell more than 6% following the lifting of sanctions.
The IAEA said it had installed a device at the Natanz plant to monitor Iran’s uranium enrichment activities in real time, in order to verify that uranium enrichment levels were kept at up to 3.67% as agreed in the deal with world powers.
As part of the deal, Iran had to drastically reduce its number of centrifuges and dismantle a heavy-water reactor near the town of Arak, both of which could be used in creating nuclear weapons.
Iran has always maintained its nuclear programme is peaceful, but opponents of the deal say it does not do enough to ensure the country cannot develop a nuclear bomb.
This is of course a wonderful development. Despite all the obstacles that were placed in the way, a sane and encouraging outcome has emerged.
As a retrospective look back, I’ll offer you all a set of links to accompany this story:
Those links should cover the highlights on how things ended up like this, and who the key winners and losers have been.
Broadly speaking, the winners have been all oil importers, particularly the United States, the European Union, and certain oil-importing countries in South America and South East Asia.
The losers have been all oil exporters, but especially Saudi Arabia and Russia. Israel also emerges as a loser, having failed to accomplish most of its objectives.
Bielefeld (WB). Bielefeld police do not want to say much about an investigation because it is just underway—it is alleged that a 14-year-old had been kept in a Bielefeld basement, drugged and sexually assaulted by several young men.
According to unconfirmed information from the community of the alleged victim, the events could have played-out in this manner: On 04 January 2016, the girl and young men sat together outdoors in a deprived neighbourhood in Bielefeld. A representative said that several of these young men were 18-year-old-plus Iraqis who came and offered drinks, possibly alcoholic, to the 14-year-old girl. At 18:00, she then followed two or three of the men to a basement room where a mattress had been placed.
Afterward she spent four days in the hospital
A friend is said to have found the 14-year-old later unconscious in the room. The friend alerted the emergency services, who attended to the girl at the scene and brought her to the hospital. The 14-year-old was admitted to the hospital. Indications of sexual assault were assessed. She spent four days in the children’s hospital.
It was also observed under hospital care that the girl’s mental state had a striking parallel to a case incident in Wuppertal on Tuesday. There, at 18:30, a pedestrian discovered a 16-year-old girl unconscious on a playground and alerted an ambulance. According to police, the Wuppertal student was raped and seriously injured. She stated that she had been drugged.
Three male suspects
A spokeswoman for the Bielefeld police said yesterday, one indictment was made among the three male suspects in the case of the 14-year-old girl. His identity has not yet been completely revealed. Whether the charge under laws regarding sexual assault were to be rape or not, the spokeswoman would not confirm. She said, “it is also about protecting victims.”
In the context of the alleged crime yesterday, the perpetrator has been described as Iraqi, in Germany illegally, who had been asked to leave a long time ago. He eluded authorities despite even having-been provided with a ticket to fly back to Iraq.
An actual real rape culture has made itself manifest, and suddenly liberals are nowhere to be found.
It’s almost as though all the liberals who professed their adherence to feminism were only doing so for as long as it was chastising European males. Now that Arab males have appeared and are at least a thousand times more prolific in their offensiveness than European men ever have been, suddenly feminism has been discarded because it clashes with the true agenda of liberals. Liberals are on an agenda which has relatively little to do with advocating justice for women and girls, and in fact everything to do with a demented opposition to ethno-nationalism and ethno-regionalism.
Austrian officials are investigating allegations that four under-age asylum seekers sexually harassed and assaulted three schoolgirls for months, without anybody taking action.
The four boys attended the Schlossstrasse middle school in Salzburg. It was only in the wake of the widely reported New Year sexual assaults in Cologne that one of the victims, aged 14, made a complaint to police.
That resulted in the four youngsters, aged 14, 15 and 16, being suspended. Only one of them had a residence permit.
According to a report in the Kronen Zeitung newspaper, three female students say they were assaulted and groped by the boys for months.
Last Wednesday an attack on one girl was reportedly so severe that it came to the attention of the school headmistress Eva Szalony, who made a complaint to police.
She said the allegations were “a complete shock” and that the school is now investigating why the girls had suffered for so long without reporting the abuse.
She said that the male pupils had all come to Austria as unaccompanied minors from Syria and Afghanistan and she believed them to be happy and grateful for being allowed to live in Austria and attend school, adding that “they were integrating themselves very well”.
Police have now confirmed they are investigating allegations of sexual assault, grievous bodily harm and threats.
The allegations go back to last November, and involve verbal abuse and suggestive comments as well as physical violence in which the girls say they were groped and fondled.
The attacks got more serious as time went by. The 14-year-old said that she was often hit by a 15-year-old from Afghanistan, including an incident where she was hit so badly from behind that she smashed her head onto the desk.
She was attacked again on Wednesday by the same boy, who smashed her against a locker so hard that the police were called. They took the victim and the accused to the station. After hearing of her ordeal, police then expanded the investigation.
Local education officials in Salzburg have said the incidents are being dealt with very seriously and that it will appoint a coordinator to oversee all school-age asylum seekers and their teachers.
Psychologists are now speaking to affected pupils in the school as well as their classmates, and parents have been informed about the situation.
Story courtesy of Central European News
These are the things that liberals don’t think about before they start getting excited about ‘welcoming refugees’. No one should have been surprised by any of this.
Posted by DanielS on Sunday, 10 January 2016 11:47.
Top Hungarian Economist - Zsolt Bayer - speaks openly about a war on White European people.
Dear Global Power, we know precisely well that you exist, naturally; and that your fundamental goal for everything is the annihilation of all that is still humane, all that has dignity. And you believe that, for now, the European White man still possesses too much of this…and you want to annihilate European White man.
“For me, and for this entire Administration, our commitment to Israel’s security and Israel’s future is ROCK SOLID, UNWAVERING, ENDURING, and FOREVER!” - Hillary Clinton
No, not a commitment to the 14 Words, but evergreen news of dedication to Israel
On the other hand, they came, they saw and a leader of a regime that helped keep migration and its destruction out of Europe died.
While in Europe. IBID: The reason you are starting with the most organized and richest part - the German speaking Europe..
..is because you also want to prove that—and the Swedes, too, the Scandinavian countries -
- you want to prove that you can do whatever you want.
BB seems rather confident
IBID: So, according to your desires, you can also blow up, break apart, destroy Europe’s most organized, richest countries.
...and in this I completely agree with you all…
This global scum, this global filth, that global mass of trash, they are not even sentient beings, but animals [they lose their human status as moral agents], as you said.
Global mass of trash. Global filth that has, however, been pumped over here with aid of gigantic resources…
And they are doing everything they can to keep this pumping going unimpeded.
Only idiots, only absolute idiots are incapable of comprehending
That for the relatively quick pumping of millions of people across thousands of kilometers….
Refugee mothers and children look through games and books in another initiative by the German education ministry, the reading start for refugee children. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images.
Germany has recruited 8,500 people to teach child refugees German, as the country expects the number of new arrivals to soar past the million mark in 2015, Die Welt daily reported on Sunday.
About 196,000 children fleeing war and poverty will enter the German school system this year, and 8,264 “special classes” have been created to help them catch up with their peers, Die Welt said, citing a survey carried out in 16 German federal states.
Germany’s education authority says 325,000 school-aged children reached the EU country in 2015 during Europe’s worst migration crisis since the second world war.
Germany expects more than a million asylum seekers this year, which is five times more than in 2014. It has put a strain on its ability to provide services to all the newcomers.
“Schools and education administrations have never been confronted with such a challenge,” Brunhild Kurth, who heads the education authority, told Die Welt.
“We must accept that this exceptional situation will become the norm for a long time to come.”
Heinz-Peter Meidinger, head of the DPhV teachers’ union, said Germany would need up to 20,000 additional teachers to cater for the new numbers.
“By next summer, at the latest, we will feel that gap,” he said.
It’s amazing how after all the time that the neoliberal state has spent since the year 2008 cutting public jobs such as teachers, the state now suddenly has the money to fund a massive expansion of the number of teachers on its payroll.
Israel has made an agreement with Turkey to normalize relations, diplomatic sources say. A restoration of ambassadorial representation - on hold after a deadly Israeli naval raid in 2010 - is envisaged.
An Israeli official said on Thursday that a preliminary agreement had been reached that foresees the full restoration of diplomatic links.
As part of the deal, Israel is to establish a compensation fund to address the killing of 10 Turks by Israeli marines who stormed a pro-Palestinian activist ship, the Mavi Marmara, in 2010. The crew aboard the vessel had been seeking to land on the Gaza Strip, breaking an Israeli blockade of the territory.
According to the official, Israel was represented by Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and Netanyahu’s official in charge of reconciliation with Turkey, Joseph Ciechanover. Turkey’s Feridun Sinirlioglu, an undersecretary with the foreign ministry, represented Anakara.
Two other sources familiar with the negotiations confirmed the details.
A full signing of the agreement is expected “in coming days,” one source told the AFP news agency.
Help from a mutual friend
Relations between the two countries - both key allies for the US in the region - broke down in the wake of the raid, and Washington has been involved in trying to patch up their differences.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday hinted that a warming of ties was in the cards, saying that an improvement in relations between the two countries would benefit the region as a whole.
Erdogan said that for a normalization of relations to be possible it would be necessary to reach a deal on compensation for the storming of the ship in 2010 - as well as to agree a lifting of the Gaza embargo.
“There is so much that we, Israel, Palestine and the region can gain from such a normalization process. The region is in need of this,” Erdogan said.
News of the deal emerged hours after Netanyahu signed a major natural gas deal - with a consortium that includes US firm Noble Energy - aimed at tapping deposits below the Mediterranean.
rc/jm (AFP, AP, Reuters)
The region is not ‘in need of this’ at all. It’s just a case of two deeply treacherous governments—Turkey and Israel—whose objectives never line up with those of NATO, getting together to come up with new ways to be total idiots and liabilities.
Photos posted on Facebook claim to show US troops getting back on their plane shortly after landing.
US forces flown to Libya to support government troops had to leave after landing because of demands from a local militia group, US officials say.
It follows reports that 20 US special forces troops, equipped with advanced weaponry, landed on Monday at an airbase in western Libya.
The troops chose to leave “in an effort to avoid conflict”, a US Africa Command (Africom) spokesman told the BBC.
Libya has been in chaos since the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.
The US forces had travelled to Libya in order to “foster relationships and enhance communication with their counterparts in the Libyan National Army”, Africom spokesman Anthony Falvo told the BBC.
The soldiers left without incident, he added.
Analysis: Rana Jawad - BBC North Africa correspondent
It is undoubtedly an embarrassing revelation for the Americans.
The timing of the incident, so close to the long-awaited deal signed by Libya’s rival parliaments on Thursday, has fuelled speculation among Libyans over what they see as the ulterior motives of the US and other Western nations.
There has been increasing suspicion that foreign troops are looking to establish their presence on the ground in Libya, especially with the so-called Islamic State grabbing more territory in recent months.
Reactions on social media ranged from accusations that the US was promoting one side of the conflict, to questions over the West’s long-term military aims in Libya.
Western nations have repeatedly spoken of their intent to support Libyan armed forces to help secure the country and combat extremism.
However, if nothing else, the incident chiefly serves as a reminder of the challenges foreign military forces will face trying to operate in a country with no central security structure.
Mr Falvo did not elaborate further on why the troops’ landing at al-Wattiya airbase had seemingly not been cleared with the relevant Libyan groups on the ground.
The airbase is not controlled directly by the Libyan army, but by a militia affiliated to it, which may explain the apparent breakdown in communication.
Unnamed Pentagon officials told national media that US forces had been “in and out of Libya” for some time, operating in an advisory, but not a combat role.
Photos of the secret mission were published on the official Facebook page of the Libyan Air Force, saying the troops had landed “without prior coordination”.
It described the forces arriving “in combat readiness wearing bullet proof jackets” carrying night-vision goggles, GPS devices and assault rifles.
Libya’s rival power bases (as of August 2015)
Libya has two rival governments, one based in the main city, Tripoli, and the other about 1,000km (620 miles) away in the port city of Tobruk.
Representatives of the two groups signed a deal in Morocco on Thursday, agreeing to form a national unity government, however their respective leaders voiced their reservations.
With the collapse of law and order in most of Libya, following the disastrous events of the Arab Spring, and the disastrous choice by some western leaders to utilise NATO as air cover for the reactionary Islamist forces that were unleashed by the process, the situation still remains unmanageable after 2011.
In the Greco-Roman era, the Roman Empire held the coastline of what is now known as modern day Libya, because it was a strategic imperative for them to hold it in order to more adequately manage the traffic on the Mediterranean Sea.
In light of the mass migration crisis, or the ‘immivasion’ as some people have taken to calling it, it may be time to consider that imperative again.
