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Not doing this for free.

Trad News, “FRENCH POLICE THREATEN TO JOIN THE YELLOW VEST PROTESTS”, 25 Dec 2018:

Nobody has suffered more from the Yellow Vest protests that have been rocking France than the French police themselves. Since the demonstrations and riots began several weeks ago, they have been working overtime to contain the chaos and bearing the brunt of the public’s anger.

But now it looks like they have reached breaking point, as the three main police unions have now threatened to join the protests in order to force the government to pay overtime and reverse cuts to the police budget.

As reported by Newsweek:

On Wednesday, French officials met with police trade union leaders to work out a deal to soothe anger in law enforcement ranks regarding overwork, unpaid overtime and difficult working conditions, Le Monde reported.

But some activists are calling on police to walk out on government negotiations, close down police stations and join the “gilets jaunes”—or yellow vest—protesters with whom they have been facing off since November 17.

Negotiations between three unions—Alliance, UNSA-Police and Unity-SGP-FO—and Interior Minister Christophe Castaner on Tuesday failed to reach a settlement. As talks resumed on Wednesday, France 24 reported that activists were calling on forces across the country to commit to a “slowdown” and only respond to emergencies until the dispute had been settled.

Police have accumulated some 23 million hours of overtime that is yet to be paid. According to The Local France, police union leader Frédéric Lagache explained, “Faced with this irresponsibility [of the government], we are forced to be irresponsible in our actions.”

Two of the unions have called for Yellow-Vest-style demonstrations by police officers on Wednesday (Dec 26th), referring to “Act 1,” “Act II” and “Act III,” the same language used by the Yellow Vest demonstrators to refer to their protests. In addition to unpaid overtime, the police unions are also opposed to cuts to the national police budget of around $70.8 million.

Mattis resigns in disagreement with Trump, citing need to maintain unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.

CNBC, “Defense Secretary James Mattis is quitting because he doesn’t agree with Trump”, 20 December 2018:

- Defense Secretary James Mattis will be stepping down at the end of February, telling President Donald Trump in a letter that he has “a right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours.”

- Mattis served as Trump’s secretary of defense since the start of the Trump administration.

- “General Mattis was a great help to me in getting allies and other countries to pay their share of military obligations,” Trump says.

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary James Mattis will be stepping down at the end of February, telling President Donald Trump in a letter Thursday that he has “a right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours.”

In his extraordinary letter to Trump, Mattis said that a long-held “core belief” of his “is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.”

Without maintaining those alliances, he wrote, “we cannot protect our interests or serve” the role of an “indispensable nation in the free world.”

The president has frequently lashed out at America’s allies in France, the United Kingdom, Canada and Germany, while at times appearing to side with U.S. adversaries over his own officials.

“My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors,” Mattis said, “are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues.”

Mattis’ resignation letter, which a Pentagon spokeswoman said was hand-delivered to the president Thursday afternoon, comes on the heels of Trump’s controversial plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.

That announcement on Wednesday will reportedly take more than 2,000 U.S. service members out of the country, ending the ground strategy against the Islamic State. Trump said in a tweet Wednesday morning that “we have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”

The move was met with heated criticism from a number of Trump’s usual allies in Congress. But Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Trump made the “correct” move, because the U.S. troops had no legal right to be in Syria.

On Thursday evening, defense officials told NBC News that the White House has ordered the Pentagon to look into plans for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, as well.

CNBC, “Read James Mattis’ resignation letter to Trump: ‘We must be resolute’ against Russia and China”, 20 Dec 2018:

In a letter addressed to Trump, Mattis said that “because you have a right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours” on a number of subjects, “I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”

In his letter, Mattis cited the importance of US alliances, particularly NATO, and said the US must stand ‘resolute and unambiguous’ in the face of authoritarian countries such as China and Russia.

Mattis’ resignation comes on the heels of Trump’s controversial plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.

That announcement on Wednesday will reportedly take more than 2,000 U.S. servicemembers out of the country, ending the ground strategy against the Islamic State. Trump said in a tweet Wednesday morning that “we have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”

Neither the White House nor The Pentagon immediately responded to CNBC’s requests for comment on the president’s announcement.

Read Mattis’ full letter to the president below:

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Nobel Peace Price 2018 winner Nadia Murad speaks at the Doha Forum in Qatar on Dec. 16, 2018. (Kelley Vlahos/TAC)

Former Yazidi Sex Slave Is America’s Shame

Nadia Murad is one of 6,500 women and girls who were abducted by ISIS in a country we were supposed to liberate.

By KELLEY BEAUCAR VLAHOS, The American Conservative, 16 Dec 2018:

DOHA, QATAR—Though her words were powerful, it was what Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad didn’t say that echoed with a pall long after the standing ovation she received by the audience at the Doha Forum Sunday in Qatar.

She did not utter the words “United States” once in the painful 45-minute interview this morning, but we all knew it was the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 that created the conditions for the near obliteration of Yazidi villages—including her home of Kocho—from the Iraqi map. It was here in this mountainous region in the north of the country that her people had settled and farmed the land for thousands of years and co-existed as an ethnic and religious minority. Today, she described Sinjar, occupied first by ISIS and then by various militias since 2014, as “completely destroyed, the buildings and schools empty, like ghost villages.”

Now, five years after the ISIS massacres that left over 3,000 Yazidis dead (most executed and buried alive) and over 6,000 kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery or brought into ISIS indoctrination camps, most of the population of 500,000 remain displaced, many in refugee camps. Some 4,000 people are camped out at the top of Mount Sinjar with no running water or electricity, feeling very much forgotten by the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, as Yazidi women and girls are slowly rescued by non-government entities from their captors across Syria and Iraq (there are still an estimated 3,200 still in the hands Daesh, says Murad), they are getting much needed care and longer-term treatment in Germany, Canada, Australia and France. Missing from that list is the United States. Washington’s help came early and were brief: airstrikes on ISIS militants in Sinjar during the massacre in August 2014 and dropping aid to the Yazidis who fled to the mountaintop in the chaos. Determined to keep America’s re-entry into Iraq to a minimum, President Obama sent no further armed assistance to help stop the ensuing occupation, killings or abductions.

There are 550 Yazidi refugees in the U.S. today.

Murad, 25, is strikingly youthful in appearance but for her eyes, which are world weary, and sad. For good reason: six of her brothers were killed when Daesh raided her village in August 2014. Her mother was also killed, along with the older women and elderly. She was taken then, with the younger females of her family, and held as a sex slave in an ISIS-held home in Mosul. After repeated rapes and beatings, she escaped within months, and was living in a container in a refugee camp when she told the world her story in February 2015.

Related at Majorityrights:

               

Yazidi girl made into sex slave by ISIL and forced to pray to god of Abraham prior to being raped.

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Voice of Europe, “Macron accused of treason by French generals for signing UN Migration Pact”, 14 Dec 2018:

General Antoine Martinez has written the letter signed by ten other generals, an admiral and colonel, and also includes former French Minister of Defense Charles Millon.

They’ve given strong warning that Macron’s signing the U.N. Global Migration Pact strips France of even more sovereignty providing an additional reason for “an already battered people” to “revolt”.

The highly decorated military co-signees assert that the beleaguered Macron is “guilty of a denial of democracy or treason against the nation” for signing the migration pact without putting it to the people.

“The French state is late in coming to realize the impossibility of integrating too many people, in addition to totally different cultures, who have regrouped in the last forty years in areas that no longer submit to the laws of the Republic,” the letter advises, also saying that mass immigration is erasing France’s “civilizational landmarks”.

The pact, which has been protested in the Yellow Vest demonstrations in five countries, was signed by 164 nations, most against the will of the citizens as stated in dozens of country specific petitions, on Monday in Marrakech.

The immensely opposed and disastrous document declares unlimited migration to be treated as a human right and criticism of mass migration to be treated as hate speech.

Nato Foreign Ministers meet (Photo: Bogdan Danescu/Reuters)

Foreign Brief, “NATO foreign ministers to discuss Russia-Ukraine confrontation over Kerch Strait”,  4 Dec 2018:

Foreign ministers from the member states of NATO will convene in Brussels today to discuss the recent flare in tensions between Russia and Ukraine over access to the Sea of Azov.

Kiev has been invited to participate. It will likely reiterate its request for heightened NATO patrols in the Black Sea and increased naval assistance in the waters surrounding Crimea. While representatives are expected to unanimously condemn Russia’s act of aggression towards Ukrainian vessels, it is unlikely that they will consent to an increased deployment to the region, with heavyweights Germany and France having ruled out a military solution.

The Sea of Azov incident, as well as any potential NATO response, is also likely to undermine efforts to quell rising violence in Eastern Ukraine. Germany has pushed strongly in recent weeks for more frequent contact between the ‘Normandy Four’ group of nations committed to a peaceful solution for Ukraine’s conflict. However, Russia’s involvement is likely to pressure NATO to tread carefully in its response to avoid undermining tentative mediation efforts. NATO is expected to endorse the possibility of further sanctions against Moscow.

Begins in Poznan’s central market square with imagery commemorating The Polish Uprising of 1918/19; then goes up the adjacent hill to the castle where the first nobility of Poland lived; then shows Club Dragon; past Sienkiewicz museum (right foreground at 9:25, though I neglect to mention it in video), back into the market square to the Ratusz, into it’s renaissance salon; then into the Fara church; a peek into the archaeological museum; and into the market square again; finally, back to display of Pilsudski’s uprising where the tour began.

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Innocent until proven guilty we are.

Nobody alive should be presumed guilty and made to suffer and pay with their lives and ethnonationhood, even if it is true that forebears may have over corrected, even vastly. Where people manifest traits of prior generations so as to act criminally, as homicidal imperial supremacists, that’s another matter.

Until then, it is a general UN agreement that collective punishment is not valid….let alone for the historical misdeeds of regimes from prior generations.

Nevertheless, the vast wounds, the gaping chasms of genetic capital that many may vaguely perceive as family and loved ones lost, yearn over, if not feel acutely - these losses in our genetic capital will likely well up through our unconscious and conscious systemically and must be recognized.

That caveat having been issued, having absolved present generations, we will move on to correct the record of imperialist misdeeds of prior generations and attempted cover-ups by a more recent generation.

We will be addressing the notion that Hitler and the Nazis were acting in sheer defense and that they were making bonafide peace offerings, that the Allies were the true aggressors.

To get a more accurate and fair understanding of the sources of the conflict, we need to be fairly comprehensive about the history - will begin with the more recent history and work back into historical origins… reversing the usual Nazi sympathetic order of historical survey, from Versailles to the present, as if history started there.