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.
Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the director of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, was arrested on Thursday [Screengrab/Al Jazeera]
Al Jazeera
The Israeli army has arrested the director of al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical complex in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Hospital director Muhammad Abu Salmiya was held for questioning following “evidence showing that Shifa Hospital, under his direct management, served as a Hamas command and control centre”, the Israeli military said in a statement on Thursday.
Palestinian health officials confirmed the arrest and said another doctor and two nurses were also detained.
Gaza’s ministry of health said it wants an explanation from the World Health Organization, as medics were travelling in a WHO convoy with patients when they were stopped and detained by Israeli forces.
“The World Health Organization has not yet sent us any report to explain the situation including the numbers and names of those detained,” said Ashraf al-Qudra, a spokesperson for the health ministry.
He said the ministry has decided to stop coordination with the WHO regarding evacuations until they send them a report explaining what happened.
In a statement, Hamas said it “strongly denounces” the arrest of Salmiya and his colleagues, calling on the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international organisations to work towards their “immediate release”.
Days before the arrests, “two Palestinian paramedics had been arrested by the Israeli occupation forces”, said Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from southern Gaza on Thursday.
“This gives a clear sign that there is no immunity inside the Gaza Strip, neither for medical workers, civil defence crews or even journalists, as the attacks have reached all classes in the Palestinian community.”
Al-Shifa Hospital has been a major focus of Israel’s ground offensive in northern Gaza. The army ordered an evacuation of the facility on Saturday, but the handful of staff remaining there say there are about 180 patients still inside.
The Israeli army, which raided the hospital last week, allege that Hamas fighters used a tunnel complex beneath the facility in Gaza City to stage attacks. Hamas and hospital officials have repeatedly denied the claims.
Indonesian Hospital
Meanwhile on Thursday, Munir al-Bursh, the director-general of Gaza’s Health Ministry, said the Israeli army gave people in the Indonesian Hospital just hours to evacuate the facility in northern Gaza.
He said there are about 200 patients left at the hospital after some 450 patients were evacuated yesterday, and he told Al Jazeera that bombing continues from all sides in the vicinity.
“This hospital is considered to be the main central hospital that is still operating in the north of the Gaza Strip, alongside another two central hospitals,” Al Jazeera’s Abu Azzoum said, adding that there are patients, medical workers and displaced people inside.
“Both hospitals [al-Shifa and the Indonesian hospital] are witnessing a very serious and even critical condition as the Israeli troops are still encircling and even exerting significant control,” our correspondent said.
On Wednesday, the UN’s humanitarian office said the Israeli army “obstructed” a convoy of ambulances transporting 190 wounded and sick patients from al-Shifa Hospital to the south, resulting in the journey taking almost 20 hours.
The lengthy delay at the Israeli military checkpoint dividing north and south Gaza put “the lives of the wounded and sick people in danger”, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS).
The medical service has earlier said that 14 of its ambulances, two UN buses and other vehicles were involved in the evacuation of the patients, as well as “a number of medical teams” from al-Shifa Hospital.
The PRCS said three paramedics and a companion of one of the wounded patients were detained for more than three hours in the cold, while the patients were transferred to hospitals in the south.
Etruscan goddess Vamp (origin of English words vamp and vampire)
Episode 5 The Etruscan Afterlife
The Mysterious Etruscans
Dr Steven L Tuck (2016)
Film Review
Most details about Etruscan civilization come from the writings of Roman historians, including Cicero and the emperor Claudius.
Like the Sumerians (as portrayed in the epic of Gigamesh), the Etruscans believed the deceased voyaged across the sea to an island paradise. In early civilization, it was fairly typical for the deceased to cross rivers to reach Paradise. In the Bible, four rivers surround the Garden of Eden. Five rivers, including the River Styx, border the Greek afterlife.
Etruscans traveled to their afterlife on the back of a hippocampus, aea monster with a horse’s head and neck and a fish’s body. They were guided by an winged Etruscan deity known as Vamp (origin of the English words vamp and vampire).
The Etruscans’ afterlife featured, dancing, music, athletic games, feasting, flowers that bloomed year-round and weather that was never rainy or cold. There were no buildings, crops, roads, government, religion or crafts in the Etruscan afterlife.
The Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who founded a famous school in the Greek colony of Cronton in southern Italy, described the Etruscan afterlife as a place of “ideal peace and harmony.” According to Tuck, as the Etruscans adopted aspects of the Greek underworld, it lost if color and was filled with mists.
Hate (Hades) and Persepne (Persephone), the Greek king and queen of Hades, appear in Etruscan mythology after the fourth century. Likewise serpents and demons appear in afterlife depictions in Etruscan tombs. This seems to reflect an increased atmosphere of chaos and pessimism stemming from continual military attacks from Greece and Rome.*
After the fourth century BC, Keru waits at the entrance to the afterlife, along with Vamp. He and various monsters and demons holding snakes try to block admittance to people who don’t belong there.**
In some depictions, the Etruscan Scylla (an attractive woman with a dolphin tail with vicious dogs sprouting from her waist) also guards the afterlife entrance.
*Etruria’s military downfall began in 474 BC, when they allied with Athens to declare war on Syracuse. This led to reprisal attacks on numerous Etruscan cities. In 350 BC they also lost a battle against the Celts in Italy’s northern Po Valley.
**This may stem from Hades’ kidnapping (in Greek mythology) of Persephone and dragging her to the underworld before her time.
Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.
An enduring mystery for three years is how Donald Trump came to be the president who shut down American society for what turned out to be a manageable respiratory virus, setting off an unspeakable crisis with waves of destructive fallout that continue to this day.
Let’s review the timeline and offer some well-founded speculations about what happened.
On March 9, 2020, Trump was still of the opinion that the virus could be handled by normal means.
So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!
What changed? Deborah Birx reports in her book that Trump had a friend die in a New York hospital and this is what shifted his opinion. Jared Kushner reports that he simply listened to reason. Mike Pence says he was persuaded that his staff would respect him more. No question (and based on all existing reports) that he found himself surrounded by “trusted advisors” amounting to about 5 or so people (including Mike Pence and Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb)
It was only a week later when Trump issued the edict to close all “indoor and outdoor venues where people congregate,” initiating the biggest regime change in US history that flew in the face of all rights and liberties Americans had previously taken for granted. It was the ultimate in political triangulation: as John F. Kennedy cut taxes, Nixon opened China, and Clinton reformed welfare, Trump shut down the economy he promised to revive. This action confounded critics on all sides.
A month later, Trump said his decision to have “turned off” the economy saved millions of lives, later even claiming to have saved billions. He has yet to admit error.
Somebody please explain to @MichelleObama that Donald J. Trump would not be here, in the beautiful White House, if it weren’t for the job done by your husband, Barack Obama. Biden was merely an afterthought, a good reason for that very late & unenthusiastic endorsement…..
Even as late as June 23rd of that year, Trump was demanding credit for having followed all of Fauci’s recommendations. Why do they love him and hate me, he wanted to know.
We did a great job on CoronaVirus, including the very early ban on China, Ventilator production, and Testing, which is by far the most, and best, in the World. We saved millions of U.S. lives.! Yet the Fake News refuses to acknowledge this in a positive way. But they do give….
Something about this story has never really added up. How could one person have been so persuaded by a handful of others such as Fauci, Birx, Pence, and Kushner and his friends? He surely had other sources of information – some other scenario or intelligence – that fed into his disastrous decision.
In one version of events, his advisors simply pointed to the supposed success of Xi Jinping in enacting lockdowns in Wuhan, which the World Health Organization claimed had stopped infections and brought the virus under control. Perhaps his advisors flattered Trump with the observation that he is at least as great as the president of China so he should be bold and enact the same policies here.
One problem with this scenario is timing. The Oval Office meetings that preceded his March 16, 2020, edict took place the weekend of the 14th and 15th, Friday and Saturday. It was already clear by the 11th that Trump was ready for lockdowns. This was the same day as Fauci’s deliberately misleading testimony to the House Oversight Committee in which he rattled the room with predictions of Hollywood-style carnage.
On the 12th, Trump shut all travel from Europe, the UK, and Australia, causing huge human pile-ups at international airports. On the 13th, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a classified document that transferred control of pandemic policy from the CDC to the National Security Council and eventually the Department of Homeland Security. By the time that Trump met with Fauci and Birx in that legendary weekend, the country was already under quasi-martial law.
Isolating the date in the trajectory here, it is apparent that whatever happened to change Trump occurred on March 10, 2020, the day after his Tweet saying there should be no shutdowns and one day before Fauci’s testimony.
That something very likely revolves around the most substantial discovery we’ve made in three years of investigations. It was Debbie Lerman who first cracked the code: Covid policy was forged not by the public-health bureaucracies but by the national-security sector of the administrative state. She has further explained that this occurred because of two critical features of the response: 1) the belief that this virus came from a lab leak, and 2) the vaccine was the biosecurity countermeasure pushed by the same people as the fix.
Knowing this, we gain greater insight into 1) why Trump changed his mind, 2) why he has never explained this momentous decision and otherwise completely avoids the topic, and 3) why it has been so unbearably difficult to find out any information about these mysterious few days other than the pablum served up in books designed to earn royalties for authors like Birx, Pence, and Kushner.
Based on a number of second-hand reports, all available clues we have assembled, and the context of the times, the following scenario seems most likely. On March 10, and in response to Trump’s dismissive tweet the day before, some trusted sources within and around the National Security Council (Matthew Pottinger and Michael Callahan, for example), and probably involving some from military command and others, came to Trump to let him know a highly classified secret.
Imagine a scene from Get Smart with the Cone of Silence, for example. These are the events in the life of statecraft that infuse powerful people with a sense of their personal awesomeness. The fate of all of society rests on their shoulders and the decisions they make at this point. Of course they are sworn to intense secrecy following the great reveal.
The revelation was that the virus was not a textbook virus but something far more threatening and terrible. It came from a research lab in Wuhan. It might in fact be a bioweapon. This is why Xi had to do extreme things to protect his people. The US should do the same, they said, and there is a fix available too and it is being carefully guarded by the military.
It seems that the virus had already been mapped in order to make a vaccine to protect the population. Thanks to 20 years of research on mRNA platforms, they told him, this vaccine can be rolled out in months, not years. That means that Trump can lock down and distribute vaccines to save everyone from the China virus, all in time for the election. Doing this would not only assure his reelection but guarantee that he would go down in history as one of the greatest US presidents of all time.
This meeting might only have lasted an hour or two – and might have included a parade of people with the highest-level security clearances – but it was enough to convince Trump. After all, he had battled China for two previous years, imposing tariffs and making all sorts of threats. It was easy to believe at that point that China might have initiated biological warfare as retaliation. That’s why he made the decision to use all the power of the presidency to push a lockdown under emergency rule.
To be sure, the Constitution does not allow him to override the discretion of the states but with the weight of the office complete with enough funding and persuasion, he could make it happen. And thus did he make the fateful decision that not only wrecked his presidency but the country too, imposing harms that will last a generation.
It only took a few weeks for Trump to become suspicious about what happened. For weeks and months, he toggled between believing that he was tricked and believing that he did the right thing. He had already approved another 30 days of lockdowns and even inveighed against Georgia and later Florida for opening. He went so far as to claim that no state could open without his approval.
For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect….
Few things unite Americans like the certainty that John F. Kennedy was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy. This November 22, on the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, polls show the overwhelming majority of US citizens do not believe accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted without accomplices. Many contend the Communist “lone nut” shooter was in fact merely an innocent “patsy”, as he himself proclaimed not long before being snuffed out by mafioso Jack Ruby.
That such skepticism overflowed in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, and has endured ever since, is highly unusual. Almost without exception, mainstream politicians, pundits, and journalists have enforced the official narrative of a single bullet taking Kennedy down. Along the way, Western audiences have been deluged with articles, books, “documentaries” and more reinforcing the findings of the Warren Commission, a politicized whitewash set up by Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B. Johnson, specifically to convict Oswald, and Oswald alone.
This is despite the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluding Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” The CIA aggressively stonewalled that probe, and has since engaged in extensive information warfare efforts to publicly defend the Commission and its conclusions, while discrediting what it calls “conspiracy theories.”
In 1967, the Agency circulated an internal brief calling upon its operatives “[to] discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors [and] employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics… Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.”
The CIA’s concerns were well-founded, and remain so. The Warren Commission and HSCA each unearthed enormous amounts of primary source material and eyewitnesses pointing away from Oswald’s guilt, and towards the Agency and its assets. Both struggled to provide any satisfactory resolution to the innumerable discrepancies, anomalies, oddities and suspicions its own investigators uncovered, which have perplexed and bedeviled independent researchers ever since. Chief among them, incontrovertible indications Oswald was being impersonated at numerous junctures prior to Kennedy’s assassination.
Strikingly too, Oswald “doubles” were often found in close quarters with US intelligence operatives, and assets. The existence of these impersonators is evidenced by ample documentation. In its totality, the paper trail documenting Oswald’s doppelgangers may provide the best proof of a JFK assassination plot orchestrated by elements of the CIA.
A tale of two defectors
Lee Harvey Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959. Just weeks earlier, he had received a dependency discharge from active service in the Marines after three years, as his mother needed care. Despite espousing pro-communist sentiments and employing Russian phraseology so frequently his fellow soldiers nicknamed him “Oswaldskovich,” he was given clearance to operate at a secretive US naval base in Atsugi, Japan, a launching pad for U-2 spy flights over Moscow, and a hub for CIA psychedelic drug research, among other sensitive postings.
Oswald arrived in Moscow on October 16. His tourist visa, which was granted in Helsinki, Finland while en route, was set to expire five days later. But the US Marine had other ideas. He immediately applied for Soviet citizenship, and by his own account began telling any local official who would listen about his love for the “Grand Soviet Union.” The application was rejected on the day his visa expired, prompting him to slash his left wrist, which necessitated a hospital trip.
While recuperating, Oswald was allowed to remain in the country, and on October 31st, he marched into the US embassy in Moscow. There, he declared his intention to not only renounce his citizenship, but to also supply the Soviets with information “of special interest” acquired at Atsugi. As the building was extensively bugged and surveilled, his incendiary promise was inevitably heard loud and clear by the KGB.
Oswald’s defection also caught the attention of US and international media. A contemporary Associated Press report noted he was one of several Americans to apply for citizenship after arriving in Moscow “in recent months.” Another, AP noted, was Robert Webster. Unmentioned was that like Oswald, he was a US military veteran. He had renounced his US citizenship on October 17, a day after Oswald’s arrival.
After leaving the army, Webster worked for the Pentagon-funded RAND Corporation, and repeatedly traveled to Moscow to represent the organization at a Moscow trade exhibition. He later secured his Soviet citizenship by sharing secret RAND technology with Moscow. Along the way, he became romantically involved with a local waitress. He also met Marina Prusakova, the daughter of a KGB colonel, and Oswald’s future wife.
Officially, the Soviet Union’s population at this time was almost 209 million, meaning Marina crossing paths with both US defectors within weeks of each other was highly unlikely. The remarkable twist of fate ostensibly resulted from Marina being moved by authorities to Minsk, due to dating foreign visitors to Moscow. Oswald was then posted there by authorities to work in a radio and TV manufacturing plant and was under constant surveillance after his citizenship application was finally approved.
Even more peculiar was that Oswald and Webster were quite so similar in appearance, Marina and officials at the US embassy apparently mistook the former for the latter. Coincidentally too, they left the Soviet Union for the US within a month of each other – Webster in May 1962, and Oswald in June 1962 with Marina in tow. Their treatment upon arrival back home differed wildly.
As historian Chad Nagle and other analysts have noted, Webster was greeted at Greater Pittsburgh Airport by a 200-strong crowd of journalists, FBI officers, and State Department officials. The CIA then debriefed him in Washington over the course of two weeks, with 15 personnel representing several separate departments in attendance. This reflects his significant intelligence value – the Agency felt Webster could “provide a great deal” of invaluable “OI [Operational Interest] and realities data.”
By contrast, Oswald made his way back without any fanfare. Unable to fund the voyage himself, he approached the US embassy, suggesting he and Marina “could catch a military hop back to the States, from Berlin,” a strange belief for an individual who’d renounced his US citizenship and promised to share state secrets with an enemy power. As it was, he received a resettlement loan from the State Department and was not subject to a CIA debriefing upon arrival. Oddly, his return generated absolutely no press interest.
The CIA’s infamous counterintelligence agent James Jesus Angleton opened “201 files” on both Oswald and Webster following their defections. This designation applied to potential subjects of counterintelligence interest – individuals who represented potential security risks, or assets for recruitment. Webster’s was closed after his CIA debrief. Oswald’s remained open on November 22, 1963. Spanning eight volumes, and over 50,000 pages in length, it is among many JFK assassination-related papers the White House refuses to release in full to this day.
Researcher Gary Hill concluded in his 2020 book, The Other Oswald: A Wilderness of Mirrors:
“When [Oswald] the self-professed turncoat returned to the US no one was interested. No media, no debriefing, nothing…It seems clear to me US Intelligence was finished with Webster and Oswald was still working for them.”
Imposters, or doppelgangers, or both?
Complicating matters even further were the numerous instances of a Lee Harvey Oswald – or Lee Oswald, or Harvey Oswald – cropping up in the US while Oswald toiled in Minsk. In June 1960, longtime FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover issued concerns to the State Department (see below) that “there is a possibility that an imposter” was using Oswald’s birth certificate for nefarious purposes, and requesting any relevant information be forwarded to the Bureau.
In March 1961, a representative of the State Department’s passport division referenced this memo in a note to fellow staffers, asking if the FBI was “receiving information about Harvey [emphasis added] on a continuing basis” from their office. They enclosed a Bureau memo from February that year, the nature of which document has never been ascertained. In response, one of the recipients echoed Hoover’s concern about Oswald’s birth certificate being abused by an imposter.
In 2021, under the PREP Act during COVID, dentists all across the U.S. were given authority to start vaccinating their patients in an effort to vaccinate more children and adults with the experimental COVID-19 “vaccine,” regardless of whether the state they resided in allowed dentists to give vaccines or not. (Source.)
So dentist offices joined local churches and other public places in 2021 as killing centers authorized to inject COVID-19 bioweapon shots in an attempt to mass murder their patients.
Today, American taxpayers are funding the education of dentists to become experts in vaccines, as is evidenced by the recent award of $685,000 to educate dentists on the deadly HPV Gardasil vaccine.
U.S. Taxpayer Funded Initiative Trains Dentists to Push HPV Vaccine
In recent years, government health agencies, cancer societies, as well as the American Dental Association (ADA), have attempted to recruit dentists to advocate for patients to get the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine to prevent oral cancers. An HPV Vaccine Roundtable initiative, funded largely by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), advises dentists to “know their unique role” and “capitalize on adolescent patient visits” to “strongly and clearly” promote HPV vaccination to all eligible patients.
Last month, the taxpayer-funded National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) awarded over $685,000 to the Health Partners Institute to research and test strategies to persuade dentists to advocate for the HPV vaccine for patients ages 11 to 26. (Full article.)
Miss a Dentist Appointment – Lose Your Child to CPS
Did you know that electricity prices in Germany are triple the cost of electricity here in the United States, all due to Germany’s “green” energy policies?
In recent years, Germany has been phasing out coal and nuclear energy in a way that has been described in German media as “not well coordinated with the European Union.” As a result, Germans are paying sky-high prices for energy that are completely unsustainable if the Germany economy is to stay afloat.
There are generally three main goals with effective energy policy: low prices, security of supply, and environmental protection with regard to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions – the latter one is debatable, of course. Germany’s energy policy fails in all three categories.
Combined with the economic fallout of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) “pandemic,” Germany’s aggressively green energy agenda is wrecking the nation’s economy as various industries are forced to either pack up and leave or simply shut down.
Bayer, a massive German pharmaceutical giant, recently announced “massive job cuts” stemming from the economic problems that continue to plague the country. The company cited lacking business performance as the impetus.
Then there is Eisenwerk Hasenclever & Sohn, a 250-year-old German iron foundry that recently filed for insolvency. Eisenwerk Hasenclever & Sohn has long supplied well-known car manufacturers such as Audi, BMW, Daimler, Ford, and Porsche with parts, however it is no longer able to survive in the failing German economy.
“We can only speculate what happens next at this iron foundry. Will it be sold off in pieces and scattered abroad – leaving the region a rust belt?” asks Watts Up With That.
(Related: Earlier this year after Germany shut down its last three nuclear power plants, there was such a deficit of electricity throughout the county that Germany started buying nuclear power from nearby France.)
German machine builder Homag lays off 600 workers
Another German company that is shedding many of its employees is machine builder Homag, which announced the layoff of 600 workers worldwide, including around 35 at its Schopfloch, Baden-Württemberg-based headquarters.
According to reports, declining demand for its products is the reason why Homag is shedding workers. The goal is to save around 25 million euros next year, and around 50 million euros annually in 2025 and beyond.
“Despite the demand for woodworking machines in many branches of industry, the company expects the coming year to be challenging due to unexpectedly weak order figures,” reports explain.
While this story focuses on Germany, Europe’s largest economy is a bellwether of sorts for the rest of the world. As of late, we have been reporting on many U.S.-based companies that are laying off workers as well, and for many of the same reasons.
The global, Western-led economy would seem to be in its final death throes. We have yet to completely fall over the cliff, but such a fate is quickly coming into view as inflation soars across all sectors and new wars brew on multiple fronts, including in Ukraine and the Middle East.
“There are no optimistic economic signals in sight. Energy prices, inflation and catastrophic economic policies are rapidly sinking the German economic battleship and prosperity,” contends Watts Up With That.
One of the few companies that seems to be doing things right is Toyota, which resisted the electric vehicle (EV) hype and carefully treaded into even the hybrid market with caution. As a result, the car company reported record-breaking profit, in large part due to the sale of hybrids, which it now sells more of than any other automaker out there.
Since October 7, Israeli police have implemented full dictatorship from the river to the sea. This has included preventing any anti-war protest within the Green Line and filling the prisons with ‘freedom-of-expression’ prisoners. Today, November 18, after a month and 11 days of massive bloodshed, there was the first anti-war demonstration in Tel Aviv. I joined the protest mostly because I felt obliged to support the call for immediate ceasefire and call for an “all for all” captives and prisoners’ exchange. But I also wanted to assess what this demonstration teaches us about the current policies of the repressive Israeli regime and about the protest movement.
Court ruling allows demonstration
Hadash (“The Democratic Front for Peace and Equality,” organized around the Israeli Communist Party) applied for a license to demonstrate in Tel Aviv against the war and for a prisoners’ exchange. Their initial application was refused by the police, which suggested they hold a meeting in a closed venue instead. Then Hadash, with the help of ACRI (The Association for Civil Rights in Israel), appealed to the Bagatz (Hebrew acronym for “High Court of Justice”), which finally forced the police to allow the demonstration.
As I reported before, the same Bagatz, headed by the same judge, Yitzhak Amit, opposed a previous appeal by Hadash to hold anti-war demonstrations in Sakhnin and Umm al-Fahm. In their new appeal, in order to receive the license, the applicants explained the differences between the previous demonstration that was denied and this new request: “Sakhnin and Umm al-Fahm are not the center of Tel Aviv, a demonstration against the war in Gaza is not a demonstration that calls for the return of the captives, the north and beach districts are not the Tel Aviv district, and the appeal there was rejected for its specific circumstances… the verdict in this case strengthen the duty of the police to enable the holding of the demonstration in our case, because of the distinct difference between the cases.”
On ACRI’s website you can read in Hebrew the protocol of the deliberations in the Bagatz. I must say that I was astonished by the details of the discussion and how much it reveals about the political interplay.
Judge Amit himself asked the police, “Was there any big demonstration from this side till now?”
The commander of Tel Aviv police, Peretz Amar, answered: “No, they have behaved well, they did not even request one.”
Then Judge Amit explained: “They claim that they have a feeling, and the police should make extra effort. This side of the political map did not yet have its day. Because we disallowed the demonstration in Sakhnin, we heard about your lack of personnel, etc. Because of that… we must give this side the feeling that it is not deprived.”
Later in the discussion, when the organizers almost despaired from the police restrictions and suggested postponing for the next week, Judge Amit stressed his point: “It is very important that the demonstration will take place, for us to remove the cloud that we don’t allow the Arab sector to demonstrate and this side of the political map.”
In the end, under pressure from the court, the organizers and the police agreed on the location of the demonstration, in a public park between Yaffa (Jaffa) and Tel Aviv, and to limit the number of participants to seven hundred. I could not avoid thinking that compensating for the silencing of two million Arabs by allowing a muted demonstration in a corner of Tel Aviv is really emblematic of the “Jewish and Democratic” state.
Police limit protest message
When we arrived at the site of the demonstration, the designated section of the park was all closed by police railings. There was just a small opening, and each one willing to enter was checked by the police.
Local Call‘s report about the demonstration was titled “At an anti-war demonstration, the police forbade the waving of anti-war signs.” They went on to report what banners were refused by the police: “Massacre does not justify massacre,” “Political solution,” “Bibi should be imprisoned,” “No to Apartheid,” “Food instead of bombs,” and “Return the captives, stop the revenge.” They also tried to prevent people with t-shirts with the phrase “Looking at the occupation in the eyes” (a very mild expression) from entering, claiming that even using the word “occupation” constituted incitement, but after a long argument, they let them in. I must admit that the police censorship was not hermetic, and similar signs were later seen in the demonstration.
After more than a month of intense oppression, speaking the truth terrified everybody. Organizers pleaded with the participants not to raise any flags and not to use any slogans that might provoke the police. This meant the Palestinian flag was forbidden. A single demonstrator with an Israeli flag and a sign calling for a ceasefire walked on the margins of the demonstration, and nobody dared to talk with him.
Speakers call for ceasefire, prisoner exchange
If we could demonstrate safely in Palestinian towns and villages and Arab neighborhoods in mixed cities, you would see tens of thousands coming out in solidarity with Gaza’s people. However, the police are terrorizing the Arab population, and many people believed that this demonstration in Tel Aviv would be attacked even though it was permitted. Besides, there is a real danger of lynch mobs in the Jewish areas, especially as the Ben-Gvir police distributed tens of thousands of weapons to local militias. The militia in Tel Aviv is headed by a right-wing rapper called “The Shade,” well known for organizing attacks against peace demonstrations during previous wars.
There were about five hundred brave demonstrators who dared to gather in the park. Haaretz, by the way, always under-reporting leftist protest, headlined their report “Tens demonstrated in Tel Aviv.” About 80% of the demonstrators were Jews. It was all held in Hebrew, and the content was adjusted to challenge but not break with the current awful mood in the Israeli Jewish society.
The main demands of the demonstration were immediate ceasefire and the return of all captives, POWS, and prisoners through a comprehensive exchange deal, “all for all.” These are the most essential demands in the current situation, and they made this demonstration important.
There were different positions among the speakers, but none of them confronted the current situation of daily genocide as it is. Most speakers tried to create some artificial “balancing” and parallelism between the occupation and the occupied, stressing the suffering on both sides and calling to keep civilians out of harm’s way. I do not blame them. In today’s Israel, any position hinting that the struggle against the occupation is legitimate may land you in jail.
On the positive side, there is a continuous shift in the political discourse. Many speakers, Arabs and Jews, talked about the fact that there are millions of Arabs and Jews living between the river and the sea and that the only solution is to have full human rights and equality for all.
95% of trade between the countries is now settled in their national currencies, according to Andrey Belousov
Western currencies have been almost completely phased out in Russia-China trade, as nearly all payments between the countries are now carried out in rubles and yuan, Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov announced on Monday.
Since the introduction of Western sanctions on Moscow, Russia and China have accelerated the use of their own currencies in trade. According to Belousov, 95% of all transactions between Russia and China are now carried out in one of the countries’ national currencies, and given the rapid expansion of mutual trade and cooperation, this percentage is likely to grow.
Speaking at a meeting of the Russia-China intergovernmental commission in Beijing, the deputy prime minister said bilateral trade between the two countries will exceed the target of $200 billion this year, and may reach $300 billion by 2030.
He noted that China has long been among Russia’s major trade partners and that the scope of investment opportunities for the two countries is expanding.
“New joint investment projects are being launched in priority sectors such as the automotive industry, mining and gas chemical industries, agriculture, logistics, IT sector and others,” Belousov said.
Chinese companies have greatly benefited from the pullout of Western companies from the Russian market, as they have been actively filling the gaps and are eager to expand their presence in Russia further.
“The withdrawal of Western companies from Russia has created vast opportunities for Chinese partners to take part in Russia’s in oil and gas, petrochemical and car manufacturing enterprises, as well as companies producing consumer goods, glass products, and construction materials,” Belousov stated.
Russia has largely been supplying China with energy products, such as oil and gas, as well as refined products, agri-food, and industrial products. China has been exporting almost all types of goods, including food, equipment, mobile phones, electronics, engineering products, furniture, toys, textiles, clothing, and footwear.
Because all the important Etruscan cities are buried under more recent Roman cities, most of the information about Etruscan culture comes from their elaborate tombs.
It was common for Etruscans to bury their dead in extended families, constructing a an entire necropolis (“city of the dead”) for them. It’s common to find an entire underground city in an Etruscan tomb, consisting of roads, drains and individual houses with roof beams and support joists carved out of stone, as well as elaborate multicolored frescoes.
Most of the necropoleis feature Aolic (early Near East) architecture introduced to the Italy via the Phoenicians and the Greek colony of Syracuse (modern day Sicily).
The tombs show a level of women’s equality not found elsewhere in the Mediterranean, with married couples laid out together in paired beds or lounging together on a dining couch.*
Other tombs feature shields and armor (initially reflected a protracted war with Greece and later with Rome) stone-carved chairs with footstools similar to those adopted by Roman priests and magistrates. Tuck believes these tombs reflect the rise of “citizen soldiers” and elected governments starting in the 6th century BC. As increasing trade spread economic wealth throughout the Mediterranean, Etruscan cities overthrew their kings and tyrants to become more democratic and egalitarian. Later tombs reflect the replacement of elegant individual villas with communal townhouses.
One quarter to one third of Etruscan tombs identify female heads of households.
Some necropoleis depicted entire city blocks and detailed carved reliefs and ornately painted frescoes of everyday Etruscan life. life.
*The Greeks were amazed that Etruscan men and women seemed to enjoy spending time together.
**In 474, The Etruscans attacked the Greek colony of Cumae. Supported by Syracuse, the Greeks prevailed and the Etruscans lost all their colonies south of the Tiber River.
*in 348 BC, the Etruscans were defeated at Capua, resulting in the Roman occupation of southern Etruria.
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An analysis of U.K. government data shows an unprecedented increase in cancer deaths among 15- to 44-year-olds following the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, according to a new report by data analyst Edward Dowd. The report has prompted renewed calls for further investigation.
Teenagers and young people in their 20s, 30s and 40s in the U.K. are dying from rapidly metastasizing and terminal cancers at an unprecedented rate since mass COVID-19 vaccination began, according to a new analysis by Edward Dowd.
The 45-page report by Dowd, a former Wall Street hedge fund manager and author of “‘Cause Unknown’: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022,” alarmed some oncologists who characterized it as a sharp reversal of decades of mortality data.
In an interview with The Defender, Dowd said he and his research partners, who include a handful of high-level scientists, data analysts and financial experts, examined all International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, (ICD-10) codes for cause of death in the U.K. in the study period of 2010-2022 to investigate trends in malignant neoplasms (C00 to C99 codes).
Dowd said his research team noticed a striking pattern: While almost all deaths among older people in 2021 and 2022 in Wales and England had been coded, 8% of deaths among 15- to 44-year-olds in 2021, and 30% of deaths in that age group in 2022, hadn’t yet been coded.
“When you die in a hospital, you leave a trail of life and death with indications of what led to the death,” he said. “When a young person dies at the wheel of a car, walking down the street or in their sleep, there’s an investigation” that consumes time to assign the cause of death.
Dowd said the missing codes are “indicative of the problem” of excess deaths among young people.
But even with the caveat of missing codes, he said, the remaining 92% of coded deaths in 2021 and 70% of coded deaths in 2022 revealed “a strong signal of cancer deaths in the young. We show a large increase in mortality due to malignant neoplasms that started in 2021 and accelerated substantially in 2022.
“The increase in excess deaths in 2022 is highly statistically significant (extreme event),” Dowd wrote in his report. “The results indicate that from late 2021 a novel phenomenon leading to increased malignant neoplasm deaths appears to be present in individuals aged 15 to 44 in the UK.”
The study’s results in the rate of cancer deaths above the historic norm in 2022 for ages 15-44 in the U.K. included:
A 28% rise in fatal breast cancer rates in women.
An 80% increase in pancreatic cancer deaths among women and a 60% increase among men.
A 55% increase among men in colon cancer deaths and a 41% increase in women.
A 120% increase in fatal melanomas among men and a 35% increase in women.
A 35% increase in brain cancer deaths among men and a 12% rise in women.
A 60% increase in cancer death rates among men in cancers “without site specification” and a 55% increase among women.
Credit: Edward Dowd
‘Mounting clinical evidence’ led to study
Dowd produced his report, assembled by Carlos Alegria, one of Dowd’s partners, in his Humanity Projects study of excess deaths in the U.K. and the U.S. using government and insurance industry data.
He said he started his pro bono data-driven project to help guide public policy when he saw how COVID-19 pandemic policies were destroying society’s faith in institutional experts.
The mounting clinical evidence linking burgeoning cancers in young people to the COVID-19 vaccines led Dowd to his latest study, he said.
“We focus our research on younger individuals, aged 15-44, as presently it is a topic of particular interest due to the rise in anecdotal evidence of many unexplained aggressive and unusual cancers (such as turbo cancers … ) occurring in the population, particularly in younger individuals,” he wrote in the study.
“The focus of this study is not to examine individual claims and anecdotes, but instead to provide a statistical analysis at a population level and clarify if the anecdotal evidence is abnormal or not.”
Dowd said he hopes “the relationships that we uncover in our analysis” are “a basis for a reality check for health professionals to understand underlying trends in individuals’ health.”
Dowd’s method was to analyze the number of deaths attributed to cancer in England and Wales between 2010 and 2022 in the U.K. Office for National Statistics data.
He compared excess death rates, the difference between observed deaths and the baseline for expected deaths, before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
He established a baseline of normal cancer death rates from 2010-2020 that was remarkably consistent with few deviations, he said — until the cancer death rates rose significantly in late 2021 in the U.K. following the vaccine rollout.
Key findings from the report include:
Breast cancer dominates in women. The most common cause of fatal cancer in women, ages 15-44, is breast cancer, representing about 25% of the total excess death rate caused by malignant tumors in women in 2022. The next most dangerous cancers for women, based on excess death rates, were colon cancer and cancer of the cervix uteri.
While fatal cancer deaths rose dramatically among both young men and young women in 2022, young men saw a disproportionately higher rise in cancer deaths, but with no dominant cancer comparable to breast cancer in women. Brain cancer, colon cancer and stomach cancer accounted for 30.9% of the rise in fatal cancers in men in 2022.
Cancers “without specification of site,” indicating rapid metastasis to other organs and commonly called “turbo cancers,” “exploded” in 2022, Dowd said. “These cancers saw very large rise in both women (in 2021 and 2022) and men (in 2022) and were likely metastasized already once they were identified. As the individuals refer to younger individuals who do not require early screening, these cancers were likely of rapid growth.”
Men experienced a huge rise in skin cancer death rates of 118% in 2022. “Even though these cancers do not account for a large proportion of all cancers,” Dowd said.
Cancers of the digestive tract “saw explosive changes in 2021 and 2022 relative to the 2010-2019 trend,” Dowd wrote. “Of particular notice are cancers of the colon (internationally coded as C18), stomach (C16) and esophagus (C15). “These cancers related to the digestive tract appear to have risen substantially in importance, and we also notice that they seem to be affecting men in a disproportionate manner.”
Pancreatic cancer “saw a very large rise in both women (in 2022) and men (in both 2021 and 2022). Why these cancers rose so dramatically and why they rose first in men then women is one of the questions that we believe warrants investigation.”
Dowd emphasized that his research was “a first attempt to bring out some patterns that are observed in trends” in cancer post-2020.
“We hope that medical doctors and specialized researchers perform further investigations based upon these (and other) insights that our data analysis provides,” he wrote.
Link between COVID shots and rise in cancers ‘worth looking at’
Dr. Chris Flowers, an academic physician, radiologist and breast cancer specialist in England who came out of retirement to be the volunteer scientific lead of the War Room/DailyClout Pfizer Documents Analysis Project, told The Defender the U.K. data were “very, very, concerning.”
Flowers said Dowd’s research confirmed similar data on sharp cancer death increases reported by researchers, clinicians and cancer specialists in the U.S., U.K. and across the Western industrialized world since the global rollout of the experimental Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccine. An estimated more than 5.55 billion people, or about 72.3% of the global population, received the shots.
Flowers said he and his colleagues, including pathologists, radiologists, oncologists, internists, critical care doctors and researchers in the U.S. and U.K., have never seen anything like the severity of fatal breast cancers and other cancers in the young that exploded in 2022.
Dowd’s report confirms what Flowers and his colleagues have noticed for more than a year: “We’re seeing 2 or 3 times the normal rate of cancer.”
[…]
Dr. Pierre Kory, a pulmonologist and critical care doctor who is president and medical director of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and treats hundreds of vaccine-injured patients in his practice, said he is “being deluged with reports and consults for help” about cancer increases from colleagues and patients.
David Wiseman, Ph.D., a pharmacist with a doctorate in experimental pathology and a pioneer, originally for Johnson & Johnson, of products to prevent post-surgery internal injuries, said he was alternatively astonished and outraged that governments and mainstream media won’t follow up on research he and Kevin McKernan, a former director of research and development at the MIT Human Genome Project, conducted showing the mRNA shots were contaminated with DNA fragments.
These fragments, Wiseman said, add to the potential damage the vaccines could cause to the human genome and open new doors to an infinite variety of problems, including cancer.
Wiseman told The Defender that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) own data show cancer concerns connected to the COVID-19 vaccines.
“We’re seeing an increase in cancers in VAERS,” the official U.S. Food and Drug Administration and CDC site for reporting vaccine injuries, Wiseman said. “The CDC did a PRR analysis, a signal analysis, that found a signal for cancer in the vaccines, which isn’t proof but it means it’s worth looking at.”
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