Retired child and adolescent psychiatrist and American expatriate in New Zealand. In 2002, I made the difficult decision to close my 25-year Seattle practice after 15 years of covert FBI harassment. I describe the unrelenting phone harassment, illegal break-ins and six attempts on my life in my 2010 book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.
Emissions would come down. It would create a high skill, high wage economy. And it would reboot industry, accelerate productivity, and deliver a boost to growth. For years we have been told that moving to Net Zero would create hundreds of thousands of jobs, and billions of euros, dollars and pounds have been thrown at the companies promising to make that happen.
But hold on. Now it turns out that the green jobs are disappearing at an accelerating pace – and the investment in creating them will have been squandered.
There should be plenty of money to be made from heat pumps, especially in a country such as Germany where the Greens are part of the coalition government, and where a relatively new, well-insulated housing stock makes them more than a match for older gas or oil boilers. And yet, it has turned out to be far from easy. According to the German business paper Handelsblatt Stiebel Eltron, one of the country’s largest pump manufacturers has this week been forced to announce job losses. The reason? Sales have been weaker than it expected. Despite generous subsidies for homeowners, and €18.6 million from the state to support production, the pumps are falling flat, with only 90,000 sold in the first half of this year against an official target for 2024 of 500,000.
The trouble is, that is far from an isolated example. Shares in the German battery manufacturer Varta are down by over 80 per cent so far this year, and there are warnings that the company may not survive after making heavy losses on energy storage unit for hybrid sports cars.The Belgium chemical group Umicore announced a €1.6 billion hit last month as slowing sales of EVs hit its battery material business, and it decided to postpone plans for a battery recycling plant. Siemens Energy has announced big losses on its unit that makes the giant wind turbines that were to be built across the countryside and along every coastline. And of course, all the major European auto manufacturers have had to scale back their plans for electric vehicles as sales disappoint, and high-quality, cheap Chinese models take whatever few orders there are.
The list goes on and on. The companies that poured billions into building the industrial infrastructure for the transition to Net Zero are running into trouble one by one.
It is not hard to work out what has gone so badly wrong. Governments have tried to pick winners, backing new technologies before they have proven themselves in the marketplace, and then doubling down on that up with quotas and subsidies even in the face of consumer indifference. Even worse, they have thrown their support behind the wrong businesses, rewarding companies that tick all the right climate change boxes, rather than waiting to see which ones can make the best product at the lowest possible cost. Industrial strategy, as so often in the past, has been a recipe for disaster.
Right, now we are seeing the entirely predictable consequences of that. Money is being wasted on an epic scale, right across the continent. No one should be in the least surprised if many of the green projects the British government has backed turn out to be hopelessly uneconomic as well, yet our energy secretary Ed Miliband, and the climate change fanatics who put constant pressure on the Government to reach Net Zero harder and faster, are intent on pouring even more money into what will inevitably be an even larger series of white elephants. In reality, the “well paid green jobs” are disappearing fast, replaced with poorly paid “green redundancies”. Governments will be left with a huge bill for a costly series of mistakes – and the unfortunate workers who thought they were being offered a lucrative career will have to find something else to do very quickly.
Internet mogul Kim Dotcom says he’s not going anywhere after New Zealand’s justice minister said on Thursday that he will be extradited to the Untied States on charges related to his defunct file-sharing website Megaupload.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith announced that he had signed an extradition order for Dotcom, saying in a statement: “I considered all of the information carefully, and have decided that Mr Dotcom should be surrendered to the US to face trial,” adding “As is common practice, I have allowed Mr Dotcom a short period of time to consider and take advice on my decision.”
The extradition order comes 12 years after an FBI-ordered raid on his Auckland mansion. In 2017, the high court in New Zealand first approved his extradition – with an appeal court reaffirming the finding in 2018. In 2020, the country’s supreme court again affirmed the finding, however they also left the door open for further judicial review.
According to US authorities, Dotcom and three other Megaupload executives cost film studios over US$500 million by encouraging people to store and share copyrighted material – generating over US$175 million for his website. He also faces charges of money laundering and racketeering.
The internet mogul says he should not be held personally liable for copyright infringement carried out on his site.
“New Zealand copyright law (92b) makes it clear that an ISP can’t be criminally liable for actions of their users,” Dotcom noted in 2017 following the high court’s decision. “Unless you’re Kim Dotcom?”
Megaupload was based in Hong Kong until 2012, when the US seized the domain and shuttered the site. It relaunched in 2013 as Mega, with a New Zealand domain name, however Dotcom has had no involvement in the company since at least 2015. The company’s chief marketing officer, Finn Batato, and chief technical officer and co-founder, Mathias Ortmann, both from Germany, along with a third executive, the Dutch national Bram van der Kolk, were arrested in Auckland with Dotcom in 2012, according to The Guardian.
Ortmann and Van der Kolk were sentenced to jail terms in 2023 under plea deals that avoided extradition, while Batato died in 2022 in New Zealand.
Needless to say, Dotcom’s supporters are out in force:
The decision to extradite you is a blow to justice. You fought against unfair persecution for over a decade. The U.S. wants to scapegoat you for issues they couldn't control. NZ should should protect you, not serve as a proxy for U.S. overreach.
Gas leak at Nord Stream 2 as seen from the Danish F-16 interceptor on Bornholm, Denmark September 27, 2022. Danish Defence Command/Forsvaret Ritzau Scanpix/via REUTERS/File Photo
BERLIN, Aug 14 (Reuters) – Poland received a European arrest warrant issued by Berlin in connection with the 2022 attack on Nord Stream pipelines, but the suspect, a Ukrainian man named as Volodymyr Z, has already left Poland, Polish prosecutors told Reuters.
He was able to leave as Germany had failed to include his name in a database of wanted persons, added the prosecutors.
The multi-billion dollar Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines transporting gas under the Baltic Sea were ruptured by a series of explosions in September 2022, seven months after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
German investigators believe Volodymyr Z, a Ukrainian diver, was part of a team that planted the explosives, the SZ and Die Zeit newspapers reported alongside the ARD broadcaster, citing unnamed sources.
Polish National Public Prosecutor’s Office spokeswoman Anna Adamiak said German authorities sent a European warrant to the District Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw in June for Volodymyr Z in connection with proceedings conducted against him in Germany.
“Ultimately, Volodymyr Z was not detained because at the beginning of July he left Polish territory, crossing the Polish-Ukrainian border,” she wrote in an emailed statement in reply to Reuters questions.
“Free crossing of the Polish-Ukrainian border by the above-mentioned person was possible because German authorities … did not include him in the database of wanted persons, which meant that the Polish Border Guard had no knowledge and no grounds to detain Volodymyr Z.”
Polish law does not allow for publication of the full name of suspects in criminal investigations.
Germany said its relationship with Ukraine was not strained by the Nord Stream inquiry.
“The procedures have no bearing on what the Chancellor (Olaf Scholz) has described as the support of Ukraine’s defence against Russia’s illegal war of aggression, as long as necessary,” the spokesperson added.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The German federal prosecutor’s office declined to comment on the media reports.
A married couple, a man and a woman – also Ukrainian diving instructors – have also been identified in Germany’s investigation into the sabotage but so far no arrest warrants have been issued for them, according to SZ, Zeit and ARD.<
The woman told broadcaster Welt on Wednesday that neither she nor her husband were involved, and that she was in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, at the time of the pipeline attack.
The blasts wrecked three out of four Nord Stream pipelines, which had become a controversial symbol of German reliance on Russian gas in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russia blamed the United States, Britain and Ukraine for the blasts, which largely cut Russian gas off from the lucrative European market. Those countries have denied involvement.
Germany, Denmark, and Sweden all opened investigations into the incident, and the Swedes found traces of explosives on several objects recovered from the explosion site, confirming the blasts were deliberate acts.
The Swedish and Danish investigations were closed this February without identifying any suspect.
In the book ‘Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History’, authors Dr. Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk, provide a meticulously researched and footnoted account, challenging the prevailing narrative that vaccines single-handedly prevented masses of deaths. Their work is an eye-opening exploration of the forgotten history of infectious diseases, vaccination and public health policies.
The book was published in 2013. Ten years later, after more experience and research, the authors released a ‘10th Anniversary Edition’ to which the authors added more than 200 pages, more than 350 references and more charts to challenge traditional medical dogma.
Dissolving Illusions details facts and figures from long-overlooked medical journals, books, newspapers, and other sources. Using myth-shattering graphs, this book shows that vaccines, antibiotics, and other medical interventions are not responsible for the increase in lifespan and the decline in mortality from infectious diseases. If the medical profession could systematically misinterpret and ignore key historical information, the question must be asked, “What else is ignored and misinterpreted today?” the authors ask.
The book has an accompanying website, ‘Dissolving Illusions’, which provides charts, resources, free chapters and the following overview:
It wasn’t long ago when infections plagued the Western world. Smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, typhoid, diphtheria, whooping cough, and other diseases were once considered a tragic part of life. Starting in the mid-1800s, there was a steady drop in the deaths from all these infectious diseases, decreasing by the mid-1900s to very low levels. The elimination of these diseases is one of the most amazing, yet unsung, public health revolutions in history. That journey from disease cesspool to our modern world is a tale of plagues and famine, crushing poverty and filth, lost cures, individual freedoms versus state might, protests and arrests, and much more.
Dissolving Illusions paints a historic portrait with quotes from the pages of long-overlooked medical journals, books, newspapers, and other sources to reveal a startling history that has been disregarded. With this historic information and originally researched data in the form of myth-shattering graphs, Dissolving Illusions shines new light onto issues that are assumed to be clear-cut and settled long ago.
On Tuesday, Roman Bystrianyk joined PANDA, formerly Pandemics Data & Analytics, to highlight and discuss some of the information in Dissolving Illusions.
Bystrianyk has been researching the history of diseases and vaccines since 1998. He has an extensive background in health and nutrition as well as a BSc in engineering and an MSc in computer science.
Dissolving Illusions wasn’t just a solo effort, Bystrianyk said. “There’s a lot of people … a lot of people did a lot of gathering of data, there’s a lot of people that supported me and there’s all these brilliant doctors that have been lost to history that wrote a lot of stuff that was really important,” he said.
Bystrianyk briefly discussed the US data on measles. The collection of data on measles began in 1900. By the time a vaccine was rolled out for measles in 1963, the measles mortality rate had already decreased by 98.6%. “The vaccine came in way after the mortality rate had already dropped,” he said.
England began gathering data on measles in 1838. The mortality rate decreases gradually from an initial high and then significantly drops from the 1920s. From the mid-1900s the measles mortality rate in England is virtually zero. “They started vaccinating in 1968 in England and by that point, they had almost a 100% [99.8%] decline in mortality rate from measles,” Bystrianyk said. “So, basically, the problem was solved by the time they started vaccinating.”
Displaying graphs of the data for whooping cough, Bystrianyk demonstrated that it was the same – the mortality rate was already very low before the vaccination campaigns. Whooping cough is also known as pertussis or the 100-day cough.
In the US a vaccine for whooping cough was introduced in the late 1940s. “By that point [there] was already a 92% decrease in mortality,” he said. “In England, they began vaccinating in 1957 when they already had an almost 100% [99.7%] decline in mortality rate.”
Not only did the vaccines not contribute to reduced mortality but data from Sweden conclusively shows that the whooping cough vaccines were ineffective. In 1978, examinations showed that 84% of children who were verified to have the pertussis bacteria had previously received three doses of vaccine.
“[Sweden] deemed the DTP [diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis] vaccine ineffective and they were concerned about its safety so they discontinued vaccination in 1979,” Bystrianyk said. In the following 17 years, there was no increase in the whooping cough mortality rate. “So, despite having no vaccination programme, there was no problem in Sweden.” From 1981 to 1993, 8 children were recorded as dying from pertussis, 0.6 children per year. The odds of children dying from whooping cough in Sweden when there was no national vaccination programme were 1 in 13 million.
Bystrianyk also demonstrated that scarlet fever, typhoid, and tuberculosis (“TB”) show the same pattern of mortality decline before a vaccine is introduced. “The [vaccines] came in well after the majority of the problem has been solved,” he said.
Influenza (“flu”) shows a similar pattern. The US began vaccinating for flu in the late 1970s. By this time, there had already been a 90% decrease in the flu mortality rate. Showing a graph representing flu data in the US since national vaccination programmes began Bystrianyk said, “There’s no real decrease in death rate [from the flu] after 40 years of vaccination.”
How climate change affects youth mental health in Pakistan
Manager, External Engagements, Engro
In 2024, Pakistan has faced devastating floods and extreme heat, hindering its recovery from existing climate crisis-related disasters.
While the economic and physical health impacts of climate change are clear, Pakistan’s population is also experiencing the often overlooked mental health ramifications.
How can a growing sense of climate anxiety or “eco-anxiety” in locals be addressed?
The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) ended on 13 August the siege it had imposed on the northern Syrian cities of Hasakah and Qamishli for the past week, thanks to the mediation of the Russian army.
“All roads that were closed to civilian movement have been opened, with the start of the entry of water, fuel, flour and food tankers into the centers of the cities of Al-Hasakah and Qamishli. Things have returned to how they were before the siege,” Hasakah governor Louay Sayyouh told Al Mayadeen on Tuesday.
Russian military officials held talks with SDF and Syrian army representatives in Qamishli on 13 August, Al Mayadeen and Sputnik reported.
Sputnik’s correspondent said “intensive Russian efforts” took place during the meeting between the commander of Russian forces in Syria and the head of the SDF, Mazloum Abdi, aimed at lifting the SDF siege and de-escalating tensions in the eastern Deir Ezzor governorate, where a large Arab tribal rebellion against Washington’s Kurdish proxy is ongoing.
“There was an initial agreement on the necessity of releasing all detainees in the Syrian army held by the SDF in the cities of Qamishli and Hasakah, along with the necessity of lifting the siege imposed by the SDF on the neighborhoods under the control of the Syrian Arab Army in the cities of Hasakah and Qamishli,” the Sputnik correspondent said.
The SDF siege on Damascus-held areas of Hasakah and Qamishli had been ongoing for the past seven days and was imposed in response to the Arab tribal offensive against the Kurdish militant group last week.
Prior to the Russian visit to Qamishli, which began last week, SDF leaders had “rejected mediation and insisted on continuing the siege,” according to Syrian journalist and TV presenter Haidar Mustafa.
Mustafa added that the SDF siege tactic will not “deter the tribal ‘resistance’ from continuing its project aimed at pressuring the US occupation and its Kurdish militias.”
The Russian mediation came as US forces continued attacks on Syrian army positions in the countryside of Deir Ezzor in support of its SDF allies, who are engaged in clashes with a coalition of Arab tribesmen said to be receiving support from Damascus. SDF forces have also been targeting Syrian military positions with artillery in recent days.
“US Army forces launched a violent attack using heavy artillery and drones on positions of the Syrian army’s auxiliary forces in the villages and towns of Khasham, Marat and Hawijat Sakr in the northeastern countryside of Deir Ezzor,” Sputnik’s correspondent reported during the early hours of 14 August.
The source of the US fire was Washington’s illegal military base in the Conoco oilfield.
On Sunday, several Syrian army soldiers were killed and others wounded in an airstrike targeting a vehicle near Syria’s eastern city of Al-Bukamal on the Syrian–Iraqi border. The strike was widely believed to have been carried out by US forces that had attacked Syria several times since last week’s tribal assault.
A coalition of Syrian Arab tribes launched a massive offensive against the SDF in Deir Ezzor’s countryside on 7 August as part of a rebellion launched against the US-backed militants last year.
The tribal fighters have since lost some of the towns and positions they managed to capture as a result of US air cover provided to the SDF.
The SDF helps oversee oilfields occupied by the US army in Syria and is complicit in Washington’s theft of the country’s natural resources.
It has also released hundreds of ISIS fighters held in its prisons across northern Syria – who have then gone on to attack Syrian troops and civilians.
The rebellion against the Kurdish militants represents a broader rejection of US occupation in Syria.
“The events unfolding today in Syria’s eastern region are a result of the repercussions of the Palestinian resistance’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the broader spillover of conflicts across West Asia … while some may view the recent developments as a local conflict – either between Arab clans or between Arab clans and Kurds – the reality suggests otherwise, as the clans find common cause and common targets with the Axis of Resistance,” political affairs writer and researcher Dr Ahmed al-Druze told The Cradle on 12 August.
The Song Dynasty was the most technologically advanced civilization on the planet. With a million troops, they were less physically skilled than Mongol warriors. At the same time, the rugged terrain of southern China, with its mountains, rice paddies and forests (planted by the Song) was disadvantageous to mounted warriors. The Mongols were only able to defeat the Song by building a navy (with the help of Song defectors) and confronting them on the Han and Yangtze River. With only 500 hundred ships, they blocked the Han River and destroyed the Song Navy’s 3,000 ships.
After another five-year stalemate, two Persian engineers constructed 100 massive counterweight* trebuchets that enabled them to attack the Song cities with 12,000 boulders an hour. The Mongols also used them to launch gunpowder explosives (a Chinese invention) packed with scrap metal (the first known use of shrapnel a a weapon). The Mongols also mixed feces and poisonous beetles with their gunpowder (the first known use of biological weapons).
After conquering the city of Funchung, the Mongols slaughtered 3,000 Song soldiers and 7,000 civilians in the hope of intimidating other cities. It only required a single shot from a a giant trebuchet convince the city of Shanyung to surrender. With army in total disarray, the Empress Dowager surrendered on behalf of the child emperor in 1276.
When Qubilai Khan became the new emperor, China was reunified for the first time in 300 years. The name he took for the new dynasty (“Yuan”) derives from the I Ching and means “origin of the universe.” After following all the traditional rites of new emperors and moved the capitol to Beijing (a former Jin city) to be nearer the Mongol seat of power.
There were four social classes under the Yuan dynasty:
The Mongols (granted numerous legal and tax advantage)
The Senuren (European, Russians and Muslim administrator imported from Peria).
The Hanren (Han, Jurchin, Khitans and Koreans)
Nanren (soutern Chinese and other southern ethnicities)
Qubilai Khan established 12 new provinces overseen by centrally appointed Persian officials. Many former Han administrators found themselves out of work when the Mongol emperor dismantled the 1500 year old Confucian exam system. Many became artists.
Plagued by corruption and inefficiency, Qubilai’s administration was really good at collecting taxes.
Positive Yuan Dynasty innovations:
an empire wide communication system using horsemen or runners
an expanded Chinese canal system was expanded for more efficient trade
reunification of China for first time in three centuries (and persisting to the present day.
bring peace to a country at war for more than 100 years.
Marco Polo
Marco Polo, son of an aristocratic Venetian family describes Qubilai Khan’s reign in his famous book The Travels of Marco Polo. In the book, he claims (which is disputed) that Qubilai Khan employed him for 17 years as governor of a city or province. However for the most part the book accurately describes the canals, the Chinese practice of regular bathing (unknown in medieval Europe) and the Yuan social welfare system.
*Using a counter weight of a box filled with rocks, these trebuchets no longer relied on human muscle to reload.
Film can be viewed free with a library card at Kanopy
Shocking even by Israeli standards, the horrifying truth of the occupation’s systematic torture, rape, and degradation of Palestinian detainees reveals a brutality buried in silence.
While the world witnesses the atrocities and massacres committed by Israel’s military assault on Gaza every day, the thousands of Palestinians detained by occupation forces – before and after the events of 7 October 2023 – face torture and death behind closed doors, alone.
Worse yet, these detention horrors have been brazenly publicized and even bragged about by occupation soldiers, with violent, vocalized support from wide swathes of Israeli society.
In the shadows of Israel’s prisons, tens of thousands of Palestinian detainees are enduring a relentless campaign of cruelty. Reports detail harrowing accounts of beatings, gang rape, and psychological torture, compounded by the denial of essential needs such as food, water, and medical care.
This systematic abuse, carried out on an industrial scale, is staggering in its scope and savagery. Public protests have emerged – not to condemn these atrocities – but to demand the release of Israeli soldiers implicated in acts of sexual violence so severe that their victim tragically died from the injuries inflicted.
Secrecy and suffering inside Israeli prisons
Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s Shin Bet security agency, issued a dire warning to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in June, describing the situation in Israeli prisons as a “ticking time bomb,” which may endanger senior Israelis abroad and expose them to “international tribunals.”
Bar’s letter revealed that over 21,000 Palestinian detainees were being held, far exceeding official figures and the capacity of the centers.
Rather than addressing these concerns, Israel’s extremist Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, who has barred Red Cross and humanitarian access to Palestinian detainees, responded by boasting about his role in worsening conditions for prisoners.
A policy paper from the Institute for Palestine Studies highlighted the draconian measures implemented as early as 17 October – a mere 10 days after the launch of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. These measures included:
Constricting living spaces; removing detainees’ beds when necessary and replacing them with mattresses on the floor, leading to overcrowding; a policy of ‘closures’ whereby prison cells are locked, and total isolation is imposed; closing prisons to all family visits or visits by the Red Cross or by lawyers, and rescinding the possibility of bringing detainees before judges so that all judicial sessions are conducted through video conference.
[…]
Reports of rape and abuse despite censorship
While many details remain obscure, evidence from court documents, eyewitness testimonies, and leaked photos and videos paint a harrowing picture of the conditions inside these facilities.
One particularly disturbing case is that of Bassem Tamimi, a resident of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank, who was released from administrative detention – a form of imprisonment without charge – physically emaciated and emotionally broken.
Even Israeli news outlet Haaretzhad its report on Tamimi’s treatment redacted by authorities in an attempt to conceal the breadth of prison brutality.
In January, a joint report published by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) detailed what it called “systemic” torture of Palestinians.
[…]
Gender-based violence as collective punishment
[…]
A UN report released on 12 June almost entirely focuses on cases of sexual abuse and rape committed against Palestinian men, women, and children while under detention.
[…]
The report further states that gender-based violence “directed at Palestinian women was intended to humiliate and degrade the Palestinian population as a whole.” The men and young boys were stripped and paraded through the streets, and the women were forced to watch as the kidnapped, cuffed, and blindfolded captives were “coerced to do physical movements while naked.”
In Gaza, not only are random Palestinian civilians rounded up and subjected to public degradation, but many are then transferred to Israeli detention centers, without charges, to suffer torture and even death.
According to eyewitness testimonies collected by the Palestinian Prisoners Club (PPC) in July, four blindfolded detainees held without any charge were summarily executed in front of other inmates at the Kerem Abu Shalom site located along the perimeter of Gaza.
Palestine’s Abu Ghraib
Perhaps the most infamous cases of abuse, torture, and rape against Palestinian detainees have emerged from the Sde Teiman detention center, a facility located at an Israeli military site in the Naqab (Negev) desert that is specifically designed for people abducted from Gaza.
Per an amendment to Israeli law back in December, the military is permitted to hold ‘suspected terrorists’ for up to 45 days without charge before transferring them to the Israeli Prison System (IPS). Many of the Palestinian abductees, however, were held for much longer using loopholes in Israel’s legal and prison system.
Despite countless leaked reports on the conditions faced by detained Gazans, including women, children, doctors, people with disabilities, and the elderly, the first real expose that broke through the English-language mainstream media barrier was an investigative piece published by CNN in May.
The US outlet leaked photos of prisoners kept bound, blindfolded, and held behind barbed wire fences in stress positions, and quoted Israeli whistleblowers who worked in the facility.
The testimonies attested to the horrifying sanitary conditions and routine torture practiced there, which one Israeli whistleblower said had “stripped them down of anything that resembles human beings.”
Later, the New York Times went on to publish its own three-month-long investigation into the Sde Teiman facility, confirming three cases of electrocution, two cases of prisoners having their ribs broken during arbitrary beatings, and heinous crimes such as the anal rape of detainees.
It also detailed how prisoners were humiliated and forced to wear only diapers during interrogations. Corroborating the investigative piece’s evidence, a leaked segment of a UN report on the facility quoted prisoners directly, revealing stomach-churning details.
[…]
Dehumanization of Palestinian prisoners
Confirming previous reports on the issue, Haaretz also published a piece on the amputation of prisoners’ limbs by unqualified individuals, which was performed due to the extended periods detainees were shackled, leaving their circulation-deprived flesh to rot and get infected.
A 32-year-old Gazan man, speaking to The Cradle on the condition of anonymity, says Israeli guards “beat me repeatedly and then urinated on me” while held at Sde Teiman detention center. He testifies to being severely tortured, too.
“There were even doctors there, disabled people and young people, but they didn’t care who you were; we were all treated below animals,” he says, explaining that sounds were constantly played to disrupt sleep and make it impossible to tell what time it was.
He goes on to say that he was beaten with metal tools and that the prison guards would mock him and threaten to kill the rest of his family, with full knowledge that his brother had been murdered in a previous series of Israeli airstrikes prior to his abduction, and using the information to torment him mentally.
The director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, Dr Mohammad Abu Salmiya, who was released after spending seven months in Israeli detention without any charge, testified to what he witnessed after being ferried through a range of detention facilities, including Sde Teiman.
Dr Abu Salmiya stated that “prisoners in Israeli jails endure different types of torture. The army treats them as if they were inanimate objects, and Israeli doctors physically assaulted us.”
He went on to say that there were “severe torture and almost daily assaults inside the prisons and were denied medical treatments,” adding that “no international organization visited us in Israeli prisons, and we were prohibited from meeting any lawyers. Many detainees are still left behind in very poor health and psychological conditions.”
Showers come with severe punishments
Beyond the countless makeshift detention facilities hastily erected inside Gaza – where prisoners were stripped, blindfolded, and left in the sand to endure harsh weather conditions – there are three official detention centers specifically for Palestinians from Gaza, surrounding the besieged coastal territory.
Palestinian lawyer with Israeli citizenship, Khaled Mahajneh, provided an insightful first-hand account of the conditions faced in the Sde Teiman detention camp after being granted a rare visit, stating that “the treatment is more horrifying than anything we have heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”
Mahajneh recounted the testimony of one prisoner, who revealed that the only time shackles were removed was during a weekly one-minute shower. But Palestinian detainees began refusing these showers because exceeding the one-minute limit, without a timer to guide them, resulted in “severe punishments, including hours outside in the heat or rain.”
After months of mounting evidence on the deadly conditions faced at Sde Teiman, 10 Israeli reservist soldiers were accused of gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner with a stick. Nine of the accused were arrested, one of whom would be released the next day and go on to brag about his actions on Israeli television.
The arrests, however, triggered the invasion of military facilities by thousands of Israeli protesters, backed by Ben Gvir, who lionized the rapists as “heroes.” A debate on the incident even followed in the Israeli Knesset, where Likud Party MK Hanoch Milwidsky argued in favor of the gang rape.
Since then, a video of the assault has surfaced, and Israel’s Honenu legal aid organization, representing four of the accused, has claimed their clients were acting in “self-defense.”
It’s not just one facility
At a press conference held in the West Bank city of Ramallah in mid-July, Mahajneh also revealed that he had learned, during a visit to the Ofer detention center located in the West Bank, that a 27-year-old Palestinian inmate was brutally raped as follows:
A pipe from a fire extinguisher was used on a handcuffed prisoner. Forcing him to lie on his stomach, stripping him of all his clothes, and inserting the pipe of the fire extinguisher into the prisoner’s rectum. Then, activating the extinguisher … in front of the eyes of the other prisoners.
The case of Palestinian bodybuilder Muazzaz Abayat from Bethlehem, who lost half his body weight during his nine-month incarceration, is indicative of the inhumane conditions that all prisoners are subjected to and that the foul treatment is in no way confined to the detention camps surrounding Gaza.
Official Israeli figures put the number of Palestinian political prisoners at just under 10,000, including 3,380 administrative detainees and 250 children. These numbers are clearly inaccurate, given that Israel’s Shin Bet director has already estimated detainees to number around 21,000 – in June. The exact figures remain elusive, and many prisoners remain unaccounted for. The confirmed death toll among Palestinian prisoners, currently at 35, is also likely an underestimation, as many detainees are still considered missing.
In stark contrast to the intense media coverage and political concern for the Israeli captives held in Gaza, the plight of Palestinian detainees is largely ignored.
There are more Palestinian children held as hostages by Israel than the total number of Israelis seized on 7 October, even according to the lower 10,000 prisoner estimate. In comparison to the suffering of Palestinian detainees, the issue of their Israeli counterparts – less than 100, by some accounts – is a mere drop in the ocean.
After months of investigative reports and United Nations documentation about the horrifying rape and torture methods being used in the Sde Teiman concentration camp against Palestinians, what no one could anticipate, however, was what came next.
At the end of July, Israel decided to accuse ten reserve soldiers of participating in the gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman military facility.
The reason of the arrests, however, had likely more to do with the fact that the incident was actually filmed and may have caused a major international embarrassment if not immediately addressed.“There is a policy! Something that is organised and it is confirmed by the patterns and the scale of violations.”
The first [map] shows the countries which banned Russian airplanes from their airspace. Russia in turn denied its airspace to operators from those countries. It will cost quite a bit for U.S. and EU airlines as their flight times and cost to and from Asia, which typically fly through Russian airspace, will now increase. Carriers from Asian countries will now easily out-compete U.S. and European airlines on these routes.
British Airways is temporarily scrapping flights to Beijing until at least next year.From October to at least November 2025 the carrier will not fly to the capital of China, although flights to Shanghai and Hong Kong will continue.
European carriers are not currently able to enter Russian airspace which makes flying to China more challenging as it takes a few hours longer than it used to.
Russia’s civil aviation authority introduced the restrictions in February 2022, in retaliation to a British ban on the country’s Aeroflot airline as part of sanctions for the war in Ukraine.
A spokesperson for British Airways said: “We will be pausing our route to Beijing from 26 October 2024, and we’re contacting any affected customers with rebooking options or to offer them a full refund. We continue to operate daily flights to Shanghai and Hong Kong.”
The route only resumed operations on the route in June 2023, following a three-year pause due to the coronavirus pandemic.
At the time, British Airways described London-Beijing as “one of our most important routes”. The airline did not provide a reason for the suspension.
It is one of many Western airlines avoiding Russian airspace, which is adding to their flight times, fuel costs and complexity over how they deploy crew and aircraft.
The second map shows those countries which enacted sanctions against Russia. The secondary effects of sanctions are likely to hurt these countries as much as they hurt Russia. The absence of African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Central and South American countries is quite telling.
It does not look like ‘the world’ or the ‘international community’ is backing the ‘west’.
The U.S. also sanctioned all imports of oil products from Russia. President Biden has blamed Russia for the price increase that will inevitably follow. I don’t believe that mid-term voters will accept that reasoning. European countries can not follow that step as their economies depend of imports of oil and gas from Russia and will continue to do so for years to come.
Shipments of Russian liquified natural gas to France more than doubled the first half of this year, according to new analyses of trade data, at a time when Europe has tried to pull back from energy purchases that help finance the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.Europe has restricted oil imports from Russia, but natural gas is still allowed. And while companies in France are importing the most, one analysis found EU countries overall imported 7% more Russian LNG, natural gas that has been chilled and liquified for easier ocean transport, in the first half of this year compared to the same period a year ago.
Meanwhile in Germany, which currently has a rather crazy government, industrial production is further declining while bankruptcies have reached a record height:
Germany, with its energy-intensive industry and shortage of raw materials, has been particularly affected by the rapid rise in energy prices. Large corporations such as BASF are closing factories because management no longer believes it can efficiently produce essential chemicals. There is a trend of deindustrialization.The volume of orders from German machine-building and engineering companies decreased by 12 percent in the first half of 2024, according to the industry association VDMA. year to year in real terms. Orders from Germany itself fell especially sharply – by 18 percent. Orders from foreign companies fell by 9 percent. Metallurgical corporations are also suffering, as demand for their products is also falling.
Fighting-age men have disengaged from the legal economy to evade conscription, the Financial Times has reported
An estimated 800,000 Ukrainian men have gone “underground” due to the threat of military mobilization amid the conflict with Russia, a senior MP in Kiev, Dmitry Natalukha, has told the Financial Times. The lawmaker stated the case for economic-driven exemptions from the draft.
Kiev introduced a harsh new system for military conscription earlier this year, which was intended to discourage draft avoidance through the threat of serious punishment. One consequence was that businesses operating legally in Ukraine are now at a disadvantage compared to those in the ‘shadow economy,’ the FT explained. Draft-dodgers change their addresses and prefer to be paid in cash to stay under the radar, it added.
“We are working at the limit,” the HR director of a large steel mill told the newspaper, explaining the issues his company faces due to workforce shortages. The FT reported on Sunday how Ukrainian MPs plan to tackle the problem by revamping the system for draft exemptions. ‘don’t want to fight’ – Belgian state TV
One proposal penned by Natalukha, the chair of the Economic Development Committee, would allow businesses to shield up to 50% of their employees from mobilization by paying a fixed fee of about $490 per month. A competing bill would protect anyone with a wage over a threshold of $890, who are presumably of greater value to the war effort when contributing to the economy than they would be if sent to fight.
Natalukha told the FT that his proposal would keep around 895,000 men from military service and generate roughly $4.9 billion for Kiev’s war chest.
He previously argued in Ukrainian media that his bill is preferable to the alternative because it does not fuel the perception that only poor people who cannot bribe their way out of the draft have to fight. Ukrainians collectively pay anywhere between $700 million and $2 billion per year for fraudulent ways to avoid mobilization, he estimates.
The current system allows the government to decide which agencies and businesses are essential for Ukraine and offer them partial or full immunity from mobilization. An update last month, for instance, issued waivers to 100% of the employees of NGOs that receive foreign grants and are engaged in political activities.
Moscow perceives the conflict as a US-driven proxy war, in which Ukrainians serve as “cannon fodder” and are forced to fight by their Western-dependent government.
(Photo credit: AFP via Getty Images)
The Most Revolutionary Act 
