[Majorityrights News] KP interview with James Gilmore, former diplomat and insider from first Trump administration Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 05 January 2025 00:35.
[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.
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.
The first hypotheses of his celebrity and phenomenon are that they are likely to derive of neo-liberal motives to break up anything like coherent unionization of people; and Jewish motives to keep everything mixed-up while their culture remains stable and under control - they want to keep everyone else mixed and perpetually off balance while they increasingly rule the roost as the only coherent and sufficiently intelligent people to rule.
His celebrity, then, appears on the BBC to denounce his family who reject and oppose Islam. While groups in coherent White interests can work with Indian Hindus as staunch anti-Islamicists for one major point, he apparently began drifting away from his Hindu upbringing through Arab associations early in his life and fell into the YKW/Abrahamic/neo-liberal race-mix-it-up agenda: spawning a mixed child which abetted his commitment to antagonize genetically coherent, non-Abrahamic identities. He taunts British security as “not that great.”
Mixed in the sandbox - Jihadi Junior
Hence, he has emerged a veritable role model - a Jewish/neo-liberal celebrity. He is the face, the didactic face, of anti-liberalism. However, this “interesting” neo-liberal and Jewish turmoil over mixed relations and motives has a clarifying effect. The agency of simplification derives of overly complex interfacing - where lines between people and ways of life are overwrought with ambivalence.
Toward that end he wants to make life simple by making clear the fact that not only people like him, but Islam itself, like all Abrahamic religions, has no place in Europe. Islam should be illegal and mosques should be converted for other use and enjoyment - centers for European people to practice devotion and sacrament of their relationships and environment would be a nice alternative. In fact, institutionalized, though optional, non-Abrahamic alternatives to liberalism for Europeans would do well to occupy these places instead.
Failing this optional recourse to liberalism, Jihad, by contrast, is a short circuited expression of anti-liberalism in Abraham’s race-mixing agenda. When you mix circuits what happens? They short-out.
Jihadi Johns - Abrahamic servants - a short circuited expression of race-mixing and anti-liberalism.
“The Iran deal is one of the worst deals ever…. they’ve violated it already… Iran wants to take over Saudi Arabia, they always have…they want the oil, they’ve always wanted that… you watch, I predicted a lot of things, I say get the oil, take the oil, keep the oil.. I’ve been saying that for three years and everybody’s saying, ‘oh, I can’t do that, it’s a sovereign country.’ There is no country! They have a bunch of dishonest people, they’ve created Isis.. Hillary Clinton created Isis with Obama!”
“I am the most militaristic person in this room”
Trump is pandering to the same kind of audience that W. Bush relied upon to get The U.S. into these Jewish wars.
“I’m going to build-up our military so strong that we’re never going to have to use it.. ...probably.”
“I said don’t go into Iraq and destabilize it….now you have Iran taking over Iraq, second largest oil reserves in the world”
“We are weak and we are pathetic and it has to be stopped.”
The young woman spoke at Cairo University telling listeners that religious zealots entered her village and promptly murdered children, the elderly, and young men.
The young women and girls were kept alive to serve as sex slaves.
The question to ask: Which religious group committed this atrocities.
Were they:
Mormons?
Amish?
Baptists?
Hint: The religion is 1,400 years old and is the world’s largest and deadliest hate group.
Hint: Hillary Clinton wants to import hundreds of thousands of members of this hate group.
A brave victim of Islamic State who was captured in her home and sold as a sex slave has told of the daily horrors she was subjected to.
Nadia Murad, 21, is from the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, which is heavily populated by the Yazidi community.
Considered infidels by ISIS militants, many from the Yazidi community are stolen from their homes and told into a sex trade.
Miss Murad is one among thousands of women and children ISIS have taken and forced to become sex salves.
Speaking at Cairo University in Egypt, she told students: “When Daesh entered my village, they killed children, the old and young men.
Read more : New Year’s Eve terror fears as 2,000 armed officers have leave cancelled to protect London
“The next day, they killed the old women and led the young girls, including me, to Mosul.
“In Mosul, I saw thousands of Yazidi women where they were distributed to their slave masters.
Hint: it was justified in the name of Abraham’s god.
Nadia Murad meets with the Greek President in Athens on 30 December, 2015 Reuters
A woman who was taken as a sex slave by the Isis militant group has described how she and other young women were forced to pray before they were raped.
Nadia Murad, 21, was among more than 5,000 Yazidi women taken captive when Isis swept through the group’s territories in northern Iraq.
She has been speaking out about her horrific experiences at the hands of Isis fighters, who bought and sold her and women like her as “sabia” – slaves.
Addressing students at Cairo University this week, she reportedly revealed that Isis militants “used to force captives to pray and then rape us”.
“We were not worth the value of animals. They raped girls in groups. They did what a mind could not imagine,” she said.
During her visit to Egypt, Ms Murad met with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. She tweeted that she was “asking the Islamic world to stand firmly and clearly against Isis”. “They commit rape and genocide crimes in the name of Islam,” she said.
Iraq crisis: Yazidi nightmare on Mount Sinjar
And last week, she testified before the UN in New York, all to raise awareness of the plight of the Iraqi and Syrian peoples and urge more action to protect refugees from the conflict with Isis.
She described how last summer she was a student living in the village of Kocho in northern Iraq when Isis fighters rounded up all Yazidis, killing 312 men in an hour and taking the younger women into slavery.
After being taken to Mosul, Ms Murad and the others were held for three days before being “distributed” among fighters.
Some women killed themselves, but Ms Murad said she never considered doing so. She told Time magazine: “I did not want to kill myself — but I wanted them to kill me.”
She was taken as a slave by a man with a wife and daughter, who Ms Murad never met, and kept in a single room.
After one failed escape attempt, she told the UN, she was beaten up and gang raped by six militants as a form of punishment. “They continued to commit crimes to my body until I became unconscious,” she said.
Ms Murad escaped successfully in November 2014, after three months of abuse and torture, and made her way via a refugee camp to seek asylum in Stuttgart.
Hannah Witheridge and David Miller were found brutally murdered in September last year.
From the moment their bodies were discovered on a Thai beach on 15 September last year, the investigation into the deaths of British backpackers Hannah Witheridge and David Miller has been a muddled affair.
Information from the police has been hazy, contradictory and sparse.
Miss Witheridge, 23, from Norfolk, and 24-year-old Mr Miller, from Jersey, were found bludgeoned to death on the southern island of Koh Tao.
The first officers on the scene were local police with rudimentary training and apparently no idea how to seal off a crime scene, with tourists wandering through it for days afterwards.
Thailand’s best-known forensic scientist, Dr Pornthip Rojanasunand, whose institute was not allowed any involvement in the investigation, testified at the trial that the crime scene had been poorly managed and evidence improperly collected.
Instead of limiting their comments to what they knew about the crime, the Thai police threw out a barrage of speculation about who the culprit might be. It could not have been a Thai, they said at first, and focused their efforts on the Burmese migrant worker community.
The case has brought widespread media attention to Thailand and the island resort.
At one point they highlighted a British friend of Mr Miller as a possible suspect, then just as quickly dropped him. The initial team of investigators hinted they were looking at someone from a powerful family on Koh Tao. Then their commander was abruptly transferred and all official talk of this family’s involvement was dropped.
Other flaws were exposed once the trial started in July, including the police’s failure to test Miss Witheridge’s clothes or the alleged murder weapon, a blood-stained hoe, for DNA.
A year later Dr Pornthip tested the hoe and found the DNA of two people on the handle, but none matched the defendants.
The court heard several CCTV cameras near the crime scene were not working and cameras by the pier were not inspected to see whether anyone had fled by boat after the crime.
Both defendants have also testified they were beaten and threatened into making confessions. No lawyers were present during the sessions and translators were of dubious reliability.
These factors raised serious questions over the integrity of the prosecution case. The most important question though, hung over one piece of evidence which did tie the defendants to the crime: the alleged match between their DNA, and that recovered from semen found on Miss Witheridge’s body.
Less than three days after the crime, police announced they had extracted the DNA profiles of two men from the semen. They also said these matched DNA found on a cigarette butt near the scene.
In court, a police officer testified those samples were received on the morning of 17 September and started DNA extraction at 08:00 local time. This seems unlikely as the pathologist only started his autopsy at 11:00. The successful profiling of two men was announced at around 22:00.
It suggests remarkably rapid analysis, in less than 12 hours, from samples in which at least three people’s DNA - the victim and the two men - were mixed.
The DNA profiles were used to match cheek swabs taken from the two Burmese defendants after they were detained on 2 October.
Jane Taupin, a renowned Australian forensic scientist brought in by the defence team, questioned the plausibility of working this quickly, saying extracting DNA from mixed samples was difficult and time-consuming.
Ms Taupin was not allowed to testify, one of several inexplicable decisions by the defence, but she highlighted several important aspects of DNA testing which neither the defence team, the police, nor the judges appeared to understand.
How DNA testing works
Questions surrounding the alleged guilt of Wai Phyo and Zaw Lin in the murder of the young British couple.
DNA analysis is a complex procedure which requires meticulous care and documentation. Contrary to popular belief, it does not offer “perfect matches”, only statistical probabilities.
Almost all DNA - 99.9% - is likely to be the same between two people. That distinct 0.1% is made up of what are known as “short tandem repeat” sequences. These are isolated and examined for patterns which offer a statistical likelihood of a match to other DNA samples.
Usually a reference sample from a third party is also analysed.
The statistical likelihood of the match must be demonstrated in court, with full documentation showing methodology, proof the samples have not been contaminated and peer review.
In the Koh Tao case, the prosecution provided only a one-page summary of their DNA tests, some of it handwritten, with parts crossed out and corrected, along with four supporting pages.
“The case files of the Thai forensic lab should have been provided to the defence,” Ms Taupin said.
“This is so the scientific data contained within, and used to provide conclusions, could be examined for a scientific review.
“The essence of scientific method is the testing and review of hypotheses. If these are not viewed, or even stated, then this does not inspire confidence in the scientific analysis.
“A one-page table with alterations is not a suitable document to provide to a court. A report should not have alterations, especially handwritten ones, with no explanation as to why they were altered.”
There were other problems too. The date of the original DNA analysis was said to have been 17 September, but the report submitted to court was dated 5 October. This was two days after the police had announced a positive match with the two Burmese defendants. That unexplained discrepancy inevitably raises suspicion that perhaps the result was manipulated.
These weaknesses in the prosecution case should have given the defence a field day in court, but they were not raised until the closing statement.
The two police forensic witnesses were not cross-examined over the doubtful timings nor the scrappy and incomplete DNA documentation.
Had Ms Taupin been called, she could have exposed these flaws. Instead, she had to sit in the lawyers’ room, largely ignored, and then fly home without testifying. Whatever views the three judges formed of the quality of the prosecution’s evidence, it was never properly challenged in court.
I have asked one of the defence lawyers about their bafflingly non-adversarial tactics. He did not offer a convincing explanation.
Perhaps they were nervous of being seen to take too much advice from a foreigner, for fear they would lose sympathy from the judges.
Everyone in that court was aware how much Thailand’s reputation was on the line, and discrediting the police in such a public way might have felt like a dangerous step to take. We just don’t know.
This remains one of a number of frustrating unknowns about this murder case. These can only have added to the suffering of the victims’ families.
How could these kinds of ‘oversights’ actually come to manifest in Thailand? Not only are questions raised regarding the two Burmese migrant worker suspects, but additional questions are raised about the context giving rise to the murder and flawed investigation. A look at the context, where members of wealthy and powerful families on Koh Toh had grounds or had created grounds for the crime, directs inquiry further into how such persons manage to create these grounds, to cover their interests and manipulate the justice system.
The political situation in Thailand since 2014 would have to be taken into consideration. The Shinawatra government had enjoyed popular support from the public because its socioeconomic base was the working class in cities and the rural semi-peasant farmers, also known as the red shirts, who it was responsive to and whose policies it catered to. When the yellow shirts, the royal family, the military and international liberals decided that they want to overthrow the Shinawatra government in a coup, they installed particular military personnel and politicians who were beholden to rich liberal businessmen and bankers in the south of the country, who then proceeded to do whatever they wanted to do.
It doesn’t require much imagination to see how it could be that the justice system, the safety of tourism, priorities and perceptions of international relations would become structurally compromised as a result.
The conflict between the yellow shirts and the red shirts, and the multinational implications of it, as well as the domestic issues it centred around such as the national health service, rice subsidies, forced prostitution and human trafficking, as well as the divergent social basis of the yellow shirts when compared to the red shirts, is something that will be covered in a future article on the subject.
One thing is clear in summary though, and it is that the most degenerate social tendencies and the most retrograde economic forces were able to rise to preponderance after the effective yellow shirt victory during the coup in 2014.
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.
