[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.
[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 DanielS on Monday, 19 February 2018 13:23.
At Least 17 Killed After Garbage Heap Collapses in Mozambique
AP, “Mozambique Garbage Pile Collapses Amid Heavy Rainfall, Killing 17”, 19 Feb 2018:
At least 17 people were killed when the three-story trash heap came tumbling down.
At a glance:
At least 17 people were killed when a large garbage mound collapsed amid heavy rains in Mozambique.The deadly incident occurred on the outskirts of the country’s capital city, Maputo.Heavy rainfall has been blamed for causing the three-story mound to give way.
A large garbage mound gave way during heavy rains in Mozambique’s capital city on Monday, killing at least 17 people, officials said.
A search for additional victims continued at the Hulene garbage dump on the outskirts of Maputo, and authorities feared they’d find more bodies. The huge mound rose to the height of a three-story building in a poor, densely populated area of the city, Portuguese news agency Lusa said.
Several homes were destroyed and many residents left their homes, fearing additional collapses.
“The mountains of garbage collapsed on the houses and many families were still inside these residences,” Fatima Belchoir, a national disaster official, told Lusa. Authorities are trying to help people who lost their homes, she said.
The Hulene garbage dump is the largest such facility in Maputo. People often comb through the garbage, searching for food and items to sell.
Health workers have long raised concerns about the impact of the fumes, flies and other hazards of the dump on the surrounding community. Municipal officials have previously discussed the closure of the dump.
Polish PM draws ire with claim of Jewish Holocaust ‘perpetrators’
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki sparked a storm of criticism Saturday after defending his country’s new law concerning the Holocaust, which he said had involved “Jewish perpetrators” as well as Polish.
The controversial law passed by Poland’s senate this month sets fines or a maximum three-year jail term for anyone ascribing “responsibility or co-responsibility to the Polish nation or state for crimes committed by the German Third Reich”.
Appearing at the Munich Security Conference, Morawiecki was questioned by a journalist who told of his mother’s narrow escape from the Gestapo in Poland after learning that neighbours were planning to denounce them.
The journalist, Ronen Bergman, asked if by recounting this, “I am a criminal in your country?” It garnered a round of applause from the audience.
Morawiecki responded: “It’s not going to punishable, not going to be seen as criminal, to say that there were Polish perpetrators, as there were Jewish perpetrators, as there were Russian perpetrators, as there were Ukraine and German perpetrators.”
He reiterated that the point of the law was to defend Poland’s honour by making clear that people knew “there were no Polish death camps… There were German Nazi death camps.”
“But we cannot agree with mixing perpetrators with victims, because it would be first of all an offence to all the Jews and all the Poles who suffered greatly during the Second World War.”
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 16 February 2018 08:54.
Washington Post, “4 things we learned from the indictment of 13 Russians in the Mueller investigation”, 16 Feb 2018:
This post has been updated.
We have the first indictment in the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III that actually has to do with Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The special counsel on Friday indicted 13 Russians in connection with a large-scale troll farm effort aimed at influencing the election in violation of U.S. law.
The indictment of the Internet Research Agency comes on top of two Trump advisers having pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI — Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos — and two more being indicted on charges of alleged financial crimes that predated the campaign — Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Nobody is in custody and Russia does not extradite to the United States, but the document from the secretive Mueller investigation does shed plenty of light where there previously wasn’t any.
So what does the new indictment tell us? Here’s what we can say right away:
1. It doesn’t say the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, but doesn’t rule it out either.
Anybody looking for clues about the collusion investigation into the Trump campaign won’t find much to grab hold of. If anything, the indictment may hearten Trump allies in that it doesn’t draw a line to the campaign — which suggests there was a large-scale effort independent of any possible collusion. Perhaps that’s the real meddling effort, some folks in the White House may be telling themselves right now. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein even specified that Trump campaign officials who were contacted by the Russian nationals “did not know they were communicating with Russians.”
But that’s about as much insight as anyone can draw; we simply don’t know what else is coming down the pike, and any ties to Trump campaign officials may have been withheld from this indictment to avoid disclosing details of an ongoing investigation. The president hasn’t even been interviewed yet, so we wouldn’t expect any ties to the campaign at this juncture.
Asked whether campaign officials had knowledge of the scheme or were duped, Rosenstein chose his words carefully. “There is no allegation in this indictment that any American had any knowledge,” Rosenstein said.
The words “in this indictment” mean Rosenstein’s comments are pretty narrow.
Update:
In a statement, Trump and the White House suggested that the announcement “further indicates that there was NO COLLUSION between the Trump campaign and Russia.” Again, it doesn’t provide any direct indication.
2. It just got a lot harder for Trump to dismiss Mueller’s probe as a “witch hunt.”
At one point in the indictment, a price tag is put on the effort: $1.25 million in one month, as of September 2016. To put that in perspective, that’s as much as some entire presidential campaigns were spending monthly during the primaries. And that lends credence to the idea that this was a large-scale effort connected to the Russian government.
President Trump has often sought to downplay the idea that Russia interfered in the 2016 election — even suggesting he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assurances that it didn’t happen. This document lays it out in extensive detail.
The argument that this is a “witch hunt,” which Trump has argued and more than 8 in 10 Republicans believe, just became much more difficult to make. And the document would seem to make pretty clear that the Mueller investigation isn’t just targeted at taking down Trump, either.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 15 February 2018 06:00.
This Vox article concludes:
What we don’t know
The shooter’s motive
A safe bet is that the shooter’s motive was rather an incoherent motive of broad revenge against societal incoherence and therefore lack of accountability, agency and warrant that socially delimited human ecologies would otherwise afford.
VOX, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida: what we know:
At least 17 people are dead. The 19-year-old suspect is in custody.
Parents wait for news after a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Joel Auerbach
A shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, has left at least 17 people dead. Students and adults are among the victims.
A 19-year-old male suspect, Nikolas Cruz, has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder. Cruz, a former student at Stoneman Douglas, took an Uber to the school Wednesday afternoon. He was armed with an AR-15 rifle, law enforcement officials said, which he used to carry out his rampage. He fled the scene on foot, blending in with the rush of students pouring from the building. The massacre unfolded in less than 10 minutes, according to the timeline released by the Broward County Sheriff’s office.
“That should not happen in Parkland. It should not happen anywhere in this country,” Broward County Public Schools superintendent Robert Runcie said on Wednesday night. “We have got to find a way for this to stop.”
The investigation is still in its early stages. Details could change with more information. Here’s what we know — and don’t.
What we know
- Around 2:30 pm on Wednesday, just before class dismissal, the fire alarm went off, and shooting began. A law enforcement official told told CBS News it was believed the suspect pulled the fire alarm before the shooting rampage.
- At least 17 people were killed in the school shooting. At least 14 others were wounded, with five individuals sustaining life-threatening injuries. Teenagers and adults are among the victims, according to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office.
- The victims we know of so far: Jaime Guttenberg, Martin Duque, Alyssa Alhadeff, Aaron Feis, Gina Montalto, Nicholas Dworet, Luke Hoyer, Carmen Schentrup, Meadow Pollack, Joaquin Oliver, Alaina Petty, Cara Loughran, Helena Ramsey, Alex Schachter, Chris Hixon, Scott Beigel, and Peter Wang. The Miami Herald has the full list with photos and more information.
- The lone suspect is 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, according to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. He was taken into custody off school property about an hour after the shooting, the sheriff said.
- Cruz confessed to the shooting, according to a sheriff’s report. He’s been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 14 February 2018 06:22.
Her kind, anyway, since this particular woman is spoken-for. She’s an ingenious pioneer, living off the grid in the “North-West Front” ...she isn’t bad looking either.
Kehinde Wiley, the artist chosen to paint the official portrait of former US President Barack Obama, previously depicted black women decapitating white women.
Wiley, who is 39 and from New York, created the two paintings in 2012 and was inspired by the Biblical story of Judith beheading the Assyrian general Holoferne. At the time, Wiley told The New York Times that he was inspired by the classical European depictions of Bible stories by Caravaggio and Gentileschi, only he chose to depict Judith as a black woman and Holoferne as a white woman. He commented: “It’s sort of a play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing”.
The description for the work from the North Carolina Museum of Art foundation reads:
“Wiley translates this image of a courageous, powerful woman into a contemporary version that resonates with fury and righteousness.”
The portraits were part of an exhibition in which his paintings only depicted women he would scout on the street and depict in poses seen in classical European artwork. The sitter for Judith was Triesha Lowe, a stay-at-home mother whom Wiley discovered in a Brooklyn shopping centre.
Barack Obama unveils his portrait alongside the portrait’s artist, Kehinde Wiley
That Obama artist, Kehinde Wiley, is also know for these fun paintings, which you can file under
“Imagine if this showed a TKTK “
8:54 PM - Feb 12, 2018
143 people are talking about this
Wiley’s portrait of Obama will hang in the US National Portrait Gallery. It has sparked conversation and criticism, but the sitter himself appeared pleased with his likeness, adding that Wiley’s work “challenged our conventional views of power and privilege.”
Posted by DanielS on Monday, 12 February 2018 07:07.
While growing up a child refugee in Britain he acquired the accent that would have him nicknamed among the infam four, ‘the Beatles’, heard promoting the mania of their terror campaign…
The Infam Four: El Shafee Elsheikh ( far right), one of the four infamous ISIS murderers, identified as a “child refugee” accepted into Britain. The other three were also admitted into Britain through legal immigration channels.
TNO, One of the four ISIS murderers infamous for appearing in the “Jihadi John” decapitation videos has been revealed as a former “child refugee” granted “asylum” in Britain through that country’s open doors “asylum” policy.
The former “child refugee” has been named as El Shafee Elsheikh, whose family managed to swindle their way into Britain—and UK citizenship—by claiming to be “refugees” from the Sudan in the 1990s.
Elsheikh was one of four nonwhite invaders in Britain who went off to join ISIS in Syria when that “caliphate” was at its height.
The group to which Elsheikh belonged (named as Alexandar Kotey, Aine Davis, and Mohammed Emwazi) was nicknamed the “Beatles” by the media because of their British accents.
Emwazi was born Muhammad Jassim Abdulkarim Olayan al-Dhafiri in Kuwait, and moved to Britain as a six-year-old with his family in 1994. He was dubbed “jihad John” and was the most famous of the group, doing the speaking on the numerous decapitation videos they produced.
Emwazi was killed in an air strike in November 2015.
Davis—the mixed race grandson of Jamaican trombonist in the 1980s UK “Ska” band, The Specials—was arrested in Turkey while planning a new attack and sentenced to seven-and-a-half years’ jail for membership of terrorist organization in May 2017.
In 2014 Davis’s wife, Amal El-Wahabi, 27, became the first woman in the UK to be jailed for terrorism offences connected to Syria after she was caught paying a smuggler to take €20,000 in cash to Turkey for her husband.
Kotey is also of mixed-race origin—Ghanaian and Greek-Cypriot—and he, along with Elsheikh, were arrested by Kurdish fighters in the east of Syria at the beginning of 2018.
The two were identified and handed over to American Special Operations forces, who confirmed their identities using fingerprints and other biometric measurements.
Together, the four nonwhites—all of who were initially based in London—beheaded atr least 27 hostages and tortured many more.
It is still not clear what is going to Kotey and Elsheikh. They could be put on trial in the US for killing American hostages, or they could be returned to the UK for trial.
Some reports have said that the two have had their UK citizenship stripped—something that is only possible if they have been naturalized as British nationals, and have citizenship of another nation.
No matter what their eventual fate, one thing is clear: the open borders “asylum” policy and the promotion of mass Third World immigration by successive UK governments has proven to be a disaster, and may yet destroy Britain forever.
The United Nations has warned that fighters belonging to the Islamic State militant group may be using blank Syrian passports to cross borders.
The UN Security Council on Thursday released a report prepared by experts on the militant group and other terrorist organizations. It is based on information collected from local UN staff and governments of member states.
The report says the group has collected travel and identification documents from fighters coming from outside Syria and Iraq for potential use in travel. It also says the group has thousands of blank Syrian passports. It adds that they may be used by fighters seeking to return home or relocate.
The report also says the group continues to try to maintain and expand its influence despite recent setbacks in Iraq and Syria. It says the group is sending fighters and weapons to Libya and Somalia.
It also notes that the group obtains funds through systematic human trafficking.
The report says the group commands between 1,000 and 4,000 fighters in Afghanistan, including Afghan defectors from the Taliban as well as militant Islamist groups in Pakistan and Uzbekistan.
It warns that the Islamic State group continues to pose a significant and evolving threat around the world.
Judith and Holofernes, by Kehinde Wiley Credit: Twitter 
Barack Obama unveils his portrait alongside the portrait’s artist, Kehinde Wiley
The Infam Four: El Shafee Elsheikh ( far right), one of the four infamous ISIS murderers, identified as a “child refugee” accepted into Britain. The other three were also admitted into Britain through legal immigration channels.
Beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya by ISIL functionaries.
