That would fund the police AND feed the US hungry, eh?
[Daily Mail, Where America Gets Its News]
The White House on Tuesday announced $308 million in aid for Afghanistan
At the same time, the UN launched an appeal for $5 billion as hunger grows
But with the Taliban in control of the country, delivering aid is complicated
Critics said the aid should have come with conditions to improve human rights
At the end of last year, the US issued 'broad authorizations' to allow government agencies and aid groups to deal with the Taliban and other blacklisted groups
Posted by: Skidmark ||
01/12/2022 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] UN chief António Guterres ...Portuguese politician and diplomat, ninth Secretary-General of the United Nations. Previously, he was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees between 2005 and 2015. He was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002 and was the Secretary-General of the Socialist Party from 1992 to 2002. He served as President of the Socialist International from 1999 to 2005. In both a 2012 and 2014 poll, the Portuguese public ranked him as the best Prime Minister of the previous 30 years... is "deeply concerned" over reports of a deadly Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... in Æthiopia’s Tigray region, his front man said Monday, in the international body’s first comment on an attack which rebels said left 56 people dead. "I am disturbed! More Cristal, Pierre? Pass the caviar"
The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) last week claimed that dozens had been killed in a dronezap on a camp for civilians displaced by the war in northern Æthiopia, in an attack that prompted aid agencies to suspend operations in the region.
Saturday’s raid came only hours after the Æthiopian government had issued a call for "national reconciliation", and sparked renewed appeals from an alarmed international community for an end to the conflict.
"The Secretary-General is deeply saddened by reports that more than 50 civilians have been killed and injured in an airstrike in northern Æthiopia at midnight on 7 January," Stephane Dujarric, front man for the UN Secretary-General, said in a statement.
"The United Nations ...boodling on the grand scale... and its humanitarian partners are working with authorities to urgently mobilize emergency assistance in the area, despite continuing challenges due to severe shortages of fuel, cash and supplies across Tigray," he added.
"The Secretary-General is deeply concerned about the impact the conflict continues to have on civilians in Æthiopia. He expresses his deepest condolences to the victims and their families."
AFP was not able to independently verify the various claims because access to the region is restricted and it remains under a communications blackout. Requests for comment from Æthiopian government officials went unanswered.
The attacks came just days after UN officials reported that another airstrike in Tigray had killed three Eritrea ...is run by the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), with about the amounts of democracy and justice you'd expect from a party with that name. National elections have been periodically scheduled and cancelled; none have ever been held in the country. The president, Isaias Afewerki, has been in office since independence in 1993 and will probably die there of old age... n refugees, including two children.
Tigray is under what the UN has called a de facto blockade that is preventing life-saving food and medicine from reaching its six million people, including hundreds of thousands in famine-like conditions.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/12/2022 00:00 ||
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[IsraelTimes] Mohsen Rezaei, one of five Iranians accused of being behind deadly 1994 bombing, attends Managua swearing-in for president Daniel Ortega, accused of rampant human rights ...not to be confused with individual rights, mind you... violations.
The presence of a senior Iranian official at the investiture of Nicaragua’s president has angered Argentina
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[KavkazUzel] The suspect from Kabardino-Balkaria went to Syria, where he fought on the side of the Islamic State militants, investigators say.
According to the investigation, the suspect arrived in Syria in May 2017, where he voluntarily joined the ranks of the Islamic State. He is believed by investigators to have taken part in hostilities against Syrian government forces. The suspect has not yet returned to Russia, the Investigative Department of the Investigative Committee for Kabardino-Balkaria reported.
A criminal case was initiated against the native of the republic, born in 1984, under part 2 of Article 205.5 of the Criminal Code of Russia (participation in the activities of an organization that, in accordance with the legislation of the Russian Federation, is recognized as terrorist), said in today's message on the agency's website.
The "Caucasian Knot" previously wrote that in December 2021, a resident of Kabardino-Balkaria was sentenced to 10 years in a strict regime colony in the case of recruiting a local resident into the ranks of Syrian militants. The convict did not admit his guilt.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Italian police said Tuesday they had identified over a dozen men and boys who sexually assaulted young women during New Year’s Eve festivities in Milan’s central square.
Nine women have so far come forward to say they were assaulted, and some robbed, by groups of young men while end-of-year partygoers filled the city’s Duomo plaza.
"The young men who sexually assaulted girls in Piazza Duomo in Milan on New Year’s Eve have been identified," said Milan police in a statement.
Searches were carried out early Tuesday in Milan and Turin against 18 men and boys, aged between 15 and 21, both Italian and foreign, police said.
Through surveillance images, witness testimony and social media tracking, police were able to piece together "three different episodes of violence" committed against nine young women that night, they said.
Among the victims were two 20-year-old German tourists, according to Italian news agency ANSA.
"We tried to push them back, my friend hit and slapped them but they were laughing and they continued to assault us. I had 15 hands on me," one of the victims told ANSA in a January 7 news story.
Among various videos published by local media, one shows a group of men surrounding two young women who are pressed against a police barricade.
They are seen trying to shove the men away before they extricate themselves from the crowd and run toward police in riot gear at the edge of the plaza.
The incident has led news headlines for days and has fed into concerns about violence against women in Italia, where newspapers report the deaths of one or two women almost every week, usually at the hands of their current or former partner.
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01/12/2022 00:00 ||
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[Rudaw] The number of migrants colonists shipwrecked off the coast of Calais requiring rescue assistance from French authorities tripled in 2021 from the previous year’s figures, data shared by La Belle France’s immigration office on Monday showed, adding to UK Home Office figures released last week depicting a threefold increase from 2020 in the number of people reaching the English coast in small boats last year.
"The number of people shipwrecked off the coast of Calais and taken to safety was 1,002 in 2021," the French Office for Immigration and Integration (OFII) told AFP on Monday, as reported by Le Monde; an increase of 194% of people getting into serious trouble at sea in an attempt to reach the English coast compared to the 341 migrants colonists rescued in 2020.
According to figures provided by the British Home Office, compiled by PA Media last week, at least 28,395 people reached the English coast in small boats after illegally crossing the Channel in 2021; an increase of over three times the figure of crossings the year before, when around just 8,400 people made the perilous journey.
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[OneIndia] Honey trapping has been an old method used to lure men and pull out information. It is usually done on Army personnel, but off late terror groups too are resorting to the same tactic.
Deepti Marla alias Maryam, the lady from Kodagu who had converted to Islam and then joined the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems.... too used honey trapping as one method to lure Hindu men and then convert them to Islam.
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Posted by: trailing wife ||
01/12/2022 00:00 ||
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[Rudaw] Cross-border humanitarian aid to northwest Syria -- not green-lit by Damascus -- remains "essential," the UN said Monday, as the measure was de facto extended for six months without a new Security Council vote.
The council had previously renewed the authorization allowing aid into rebel-held areas in the country's northwest "for a period of six months... until 10 January 2022," through the crossing at Bab al-Hawa on the Syrian border with The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the decaying remnant of the Ottoman Empire... The text provided for "an extension of an additional six months, that is, until 10 July 2022," subject to a report by the UN Secretary-General.
For the West, the renewal to July had been interpreted as automatic, while Russia had raised the possibility of requesting a new Security Council vote, though it has not taken that step.
In his December report, UN chief António Guterres ...Portuguese politician and diplomat, ninth Secretary-General of the United Nations. Previously, he was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees between 2005 and 2015. He was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002 and was the Secretary-General of the Socialist Party from 1992 to 2002. He served as President of the Socialist International from 1999 to 2005. In both a 2012 and 2014 poll, the Portuguese public ranked him as the best Prime Minister of the previous 30 years... had stressed the impossibility of replacing at this stage the cross-border mechanism for one that crossed front lines from Damascus.
Moscow favors this method as recognition of the Syrian government's illusory sovereignty over the whole country.
Aid through the Bab al-Hawa crossing primarily serves the roughly three million people living in the Idlib region, which remains outside Damascus' control.
"The cross-border delivery of aid is essential," UN front man Stephane Dujarric said during his daily briefing.
"We need aid to be delivered through cross-border and through cross-line. Those are essential elements for us to meet the humanitarian needs of all Syrians."
Asked about the lack of a new Security Council vote, he said "we would welcome any decision that would allow us to continue with this vital cross-border aid."
[Rudaw] Hundreds of people, including security and military members, were killed and injured in over two hundred Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems.... (ISIS) attacks in areas disputed between Baghdad and Erbil last year, a Peshmerga official told Rudaw on Tuesday.
ISIS launched over 257 offensives, killing 387, and injuring 518 people, including Peshmerga fighters, the Secretary-General of the Ministry of Peshmerga Jabar Yawar told Rudaw.
Thirty seven people were kidnapped, he added.
In its propaganda magazine on Thursday, ISIS claimed to have conducted 7 attacks in Iraq from December 30 to January 5, killing and injuring 13 people.
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01/12/2022 00:00 ||
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[Jpost] This is not the first time that Col. Alon Madanes has written a scathing report of the IDF.
A rare report has been released that is highly critical of the IDF, detailing corruption in the military and defense establishment as well as issues with its organizational culture.
The report, titled “Red with shame: On the problem of corruption and values in the IDF,” was written by Col. Alon Madanes and given to IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kohavi.
According to the Israel Defense news site, the detailed report was divided into three volumes and “deals with suspicions of corruption in the IDF and in the Israeli defense system and industries, operational failures and also with issues related to moral values and a pessimistic organizational culture, including commanders’ fears of expressing independent positions.”
Madanes returned from Washington this past summer when he finished his term as IDF Ground Forces attaché.
The IDF denied that Kohavi had received the report detailing corruption in the military, saying Madanes wrote “five volumes of professional and unclassified documents” and that the “content deals with the US Army and does not express any criticism against the IDF.”
That document has been distributed throughout the military to Ground Force Command, the Ground Forces attaché office in Washington, the deputy chief of staff and Kohavi.
Madanes “recently met with the chief of staff for a personal meeting,” the IDF said, adding, “We will not elaborate on closed conversations between the chief of staff and his subordinates.”
Israel Defense said the report was written for top brass in a “restricted and censored” way and that Kohavi did not keep the report in his office.
The report comes shortly after the Israel Democracy Institute’s annual survey found public confidence in the IDF has decreased over the past year, with 78% of Jewish Israelis saying they had “very much or quite a lot” of trust in the military in 2021. Public trust in the IDF was 81% in 2020 and 90% in 2019, the report said.
According to the think tank, while the military remains the most trusted institution in the country among Jewish Israelis, the latest survey indicated the lowest level of confidence in the IDF since 2008.
This is not the first time Madanes has written a scathing report about the IDF.
In 2018, as he finished his term as Central Command operations officer, Madanes criticized top brass, saying military procedures had cost too many Israeli lives and that lack of discipline led to the deaths of soldiers.
Calling his last position “the most frustrating and ungrateful position I’ve experienced in my military service,” Madanes said while there are security challenges facing Central Command in the West Bank, the number of soldiers deployed to the area has decreased to a point where the IDF is unable to achieve its goals.
“The assessment of the situation in the command has hardly changed in the last two years,” he wrote. “The territory remains the same territory and the enemy is the same enemy, [but] the number of troops in Central Command is insufficient to meet its missions. In my opinion, too many Israelis have been killed and wounded in the past two years.”
Madanes also said erosion of ethical conduct had taken place, and many soldiers and commanders in the field were “unprofessional” and lacked basic legal knowledge.
“I feel a significant erosion of our ethical conduct as a system and a great lack of discipline,” he wrote.
Madanes wrote the report after he was appointed to be IDF attaché at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. In the opening paragraph he said it was written “out of great concern and with the understanding that we have no other country or military.”
[IsraelTimes] CAIR, which itself has faced accusations of bigotry, says foundations gave $106 million from 2017-2019 to organizations it considers ’anti-Moslem’.
Submit, O unbelievers, and know yourself conquered.
CAIR itself has been accused of allowing its advocacy to veer into the realm of bigotry, with Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt accusing a CAIR leader of "textbook antisemitic conspiracy-laden garbage" in December.
Charitable foundations with ties to Jewish federations and Jewish families feature prominently in a new report about the flow of tax-deductible donations to organizations that a leading Moslem civil rights lobby has identified as "anti-Moslem groups."
#Lebanon’s currency has lost more than 15 percent of its value since the start of the year, piling further pressure on the population more than two years into a crisis that has plunged many into poverty and fueled demonstrations.https://t.co/j1ncGgcgkB
[Rudaw] Over 580 people were arrested in the city of Afrin in northern Syria in 2021 mostly for political reasons, including cases where the victims were arrested for the "simple fact that they were Kurds", a Syrian monitor group said on Tuesday, adding that arrests were carried out by Ottoman Turkish-backed Syrian proxies in the region.
The human rights ...which are usually entirely different from personal liberty... monitoring organization Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ) said that they had documented the arrest of 584 people in the Kurdish majority city of Afrin, including 46 women and 16 teenagers over the past year. They added that they have recorded the release of only 123 of those people, and the death of at least one.
"STJ thoroughly analyzed the cases, concluding that perpetrators carried out arrests mostly for political reasons, including cases where victims were arrested for the simple fact that they were Kurds," the STJ report read, stating that in other cases "perpetrators were motivated by plans for demographic-change, where they used detentions and the threat of detention to scare indigenous communities into leaving their homes."
Thousands of indigenous Kurds were forced to flee Afrin when Ottoman Turkish forces and their Syrian proxies launched Operation Olive Branch on January 20, 2018. By the time Ankara had seized control of the city from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) on March 24, tens of thousands of Kurds had fled, many of them to Kurdish-controlled areas in northeast Syria (Rojava).
The Kurdish population fell by more than 60 percent in only the first two years of the invasion, according to the Afrin-based Human Rights Organization. "According to the latest statistics that we received, the size of the indigenous population of Kurds in the Afrin region reached 34.8 percent in January, while they previously made up 97 percent of the population," reads a statement from the organization published in April 2020.
According to UN estimates, upwards of 150,000 Kurds have been displaced, most of them to Shahba camp in Tel Rifaat, north of Aleppo.
"The 584 detentions recorded in the report include only those detainees who were arrested and then relocated to detention centers supervised by security apparatuses like the Military Police. STJ identified that the groups making the arrests are chiefly armed opposition groups that maintain control over Afrin’s villages and towns," STJ said in the report, adding that they believe the actual number of detainees is likely greater.
Ottoman Turkish-backed groups have been widely accused of human rights violations against Afrin’s locals, including kidnap, looting and extortion.
Accusations in the area, including land theft, have increased since the invasion, dubbed Operation Olive Branch. Human rights groups and the United Nations ...boodling on the grand scale... have published reports detailing arbitrary arrests, detention and pillaging, among other violations.
In August 2018, Amnesia Amnesty International reported that "Afrin residents are enduring widespread human rights violations, mostly at the hands of Syrian gangs equipped and armed by The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire... In its annual report for 2019, Amnesty documented a "wide range of abuses" against Afrin’s civilians at the hands of Ottoman Turkish-backed groups, including the arbitrary detention of more than 50 locals.
[Jpost] Soleimani’s strategy "was able to multiply the power of the resistance against the Zionist regime" by arming them.
Iranian media, to mark the anniversary of the death of Qasem Soleimani, have provided unique new details about Iran’s support for Palestinian groups.
In a recent article from the Tasnim News branch located in Damascus, a report claims to provide new details on the “untold” story of how the Islamic Republic ran guns and technology to Palestinian groups. The report says that Soleimani, the Quds Force commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, worked for more than two decades to make Iran the “most relevant to different groups in Palestine" that were established.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Skidmark ||
01/12/2022 00:00 ||
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#1
These foks provided significant support for the Taliban in AFG as well. They are trouble makers of the first order, always have been.
#2
Soleimani was a failure. The palestinians repaid his proxy war "support" of their fight against Israel by joining ISIS en mass to fight the Iranian shia in Iraq.
And then Soleimani's arrogance in Iraq brought him within missile range...and he got himself served a hot cup of Trump justice.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...Portuguese politician and diplomat, ninth Secretary-General of the United Nations. Previously, he was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees between 2005 and 2015. He was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002 and was the Secretary-General of the Socialist Party from 1992 to 2002. He served as President of the Socialist International from 1999 to 2005. In both a 2012 and 2014 poll, the Portuguese public ranked him as the best Prime Minister of the previous 30 years...
[Rudaw] The number of 
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling 
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire...
[Jpost] Soleimani’s strategy "was able to multiply the power of the resistance against the Zionist regime" by arming them.
