Miko Peled | During his previous terms in office, Benjamin Netanyahu oversaw some of the most brutal attacks on Gaza, attacks that caused thousands of civilian casualties. He was also indicted on corruption charges, and yet enough Israelis found him suitable to return to the post of Prime Minister, and he was elected with a comfortable majority. ● In the United States, Netanyahu is respected in spite of his 2002 appearance in the U.S. House of Representatives saying that, “If you take out Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.” The Iraq War cost countless lives and billions of dollars and caused disastrous reverberations in the region.

Call logs released by France have revealed that French and British authorities ignored calls for help several times when a boat carrying asylum seekers ran into difficulty whilst crossing the English Channel late last year. | In the early hours of 24 November 2021, at least 27 people drowned as France and the UK passed responsibility between themselves for rescuing the dinghy. The call logs were revealed on The Crossing, an ITV documentary about the worst disaster in 30 years in the English Channel. The British government has so far refused to release any information about what happened that night, according to the documentary. 💬 "The fact of the matter is, over 30 people were left in the middle of the busiest shipping lane in the world, slowly perishing one by one, and almost nothing happened," said Schanck. ● This year, over 40,000 people have crossed the English Channel in small boats, many from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. Each year since 2018, the number of people crossing the Channel in small boats has almost doubled.

Mothers in the UK are three times more likely to die around the time of pregnancy compared with those in Norway, according to an international analysis of data. | In comparing the maternal death rates of eight European countries, researchers found Slovakia was the highest - but that the UK was second. It comes after a major new review found maternal mortality rates have risen in the UK. ● The new study, by an international team of researchers including academics from the University of Oxford, examined data on millions of live births across Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia and the UK. The UK data included information on more than two million live births between 2016 and 2018. MORE

Ukrainians admitted firing missile near Poland blast site | Kiev previously tried to blame Russia with officials seeking to goad NATO into retaliation | 16 Nov 2022 | Ukrainian military officials told their American and other Western counterparts that they attempted to intercept a Russian missile near the site of a fatal blast in Poland on Tuesday, CNN reported. While [the lying sociopaths in] Kiev initially blamed the explosion on Russia, Western leaders have since stated that it was likely caused by an errant Ukrainian air defense projectile.

US officials: Missile that hit Poland was fired by Ukrainian forces (11/16/22)

Военный обозреватель | One of NATO's best RAT-31DL FADR radars is located in Poland, just 40km from Przewodów, where the missile fell the night before. A US Patriot SAM battery is also located in Rzeszów. The US and Polish militaries know exactly where the missile came from and whose it was, or have failed completely. (DeepL.com)

John Helmer | No one in Poland is in any doubt now that Tuesday’s missile attack on Przewodów* village, eight kilometres west of the Ukrainian border, was caused by a Russian-made missile fired by the Ukrainian military acting on the orders of President Vladimir Zelensky in Kiev. Two villagers were killed by the Ukrainian action. That Zelensky continues to deny this makes him a liar throughout Poland. ● Polish President Andrzej Duda has made this official.
💬 “There is a high probability that it was a missile that was used for missile defense; that is, it was used by the Ukrainian defence forces”. Duda justified the action by telling Polish voters: “Ukraine defended itself – which is obvious and understandable – by firing missiles which were tasked with hitting Russian missiles.” ● Duda was sharply and publicly corrected by the national party politician closest to the incident, Jaroslaw Pakula, the head of the Lublin City Council.
💬 “‘Of course, it’s a Ukrainian rocket. Of course, this is a provocation on the part of the Ukrainian authorities. The rocket could not be fired 100 km in the opposite direction by mistake.’ The aim of the provocation was to scare the EU and gain civil society support to send even more weapons to Ukraine, Pakula added. Instead of saying ‘fairy tales’ about the missile, the Polish president should tell Ukrainian Vladimir Zelensky that Warsaw ‘will no longer put up with this behaviour’ by Kiev.”

eugyppius | Remarks on the rocket strike in Poland, and the heedless jingoistic war rhetoric of the German media | There are a few observations to make about this little storm in a teacup. The first is that, despite appearances, not all of the American government and not all of NATO have completely lost their minds. Scholz, Macron and others called for caution and avoided open statements of blame, and today we’ve seen a clearly coordinated campaign to shift direct responsibility away from Russia. The second is that there are, however, plenty of powerful people, in NATO and elsewhere, who are indeed totally, stratospherically crazy. These include very probably that anonymous senior intelligence official who spoke to the Associated Press, and also a great part of the media, who have made a habit out of printing reheated Ukrainian press releases as news, and who have never quite recovered their senses since they lost them in the great Corona panic. ● It must be fun to rage about the tyrannical evils of Russia and the democratic virtues of the NATO countries, most of which have spent the last three years denying their allegedly free citizens all manner of basic rights and freedoms. It’s also incredibly, incredibly dangerous. A direct NATO attack on Russia would be a catastrophe for Europe. Maybe somebody should try to rein in the press and wean them from their crisis addiction before they happen upon another pretence to invoke Article 5. There’s no guarantee the next one will be clarified so quickly.

The Traditional Walk-over Survey, Studying Outcrops and Landforms...

The US occupation forces on Monday brought out 123 tankers loaded with Syrian oil from al-Jazeera fields toward Iraqi lands, according to the Syrian Arab News Agency. The report said that the US occupation forces on August 21 transported a convoy of 137 tankers filled with stolen oil to their bases in Iraq. On August 8, the Syrian Oil Ministry said that the US and its mercenaries were stealing an average of 66,000 barrels of oil per day in Syria, about 80 percent of Syria's daily oil production. As a matter of fact, the US has been stealing Syria's oil for several years. But now, in the context of factors such as the ongoing Ukraine crisis holding oil prices near their highest levels in years, the US can gain far more from stealing Syria's oil. (S)

Viv Forbes | “Green” policies are destroying the natural environment and changing local weather. This is part of a futile UN scheme claiming to ‘improve’ the climate of the world. | All green energy degrades its environment. Take wind power. Wind turbines steal energy from the atmosphere and must affect local weather. Turbines are always placed on the highest ground and along ridges to catch more wind. Natural hills already affect local weather by causing more rain along the ridge, and a rain shadow further downwind. Wind turbines enhance this rain shadow effect by robbing the wind of its ability to take moisture and rain into the drier interior.