alanjjohnstone
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Thousands of Israelis took to the streets Saturday evening to protest plans by Netanyahu’s new government that opponents say threaten democracy and freedoms. The protesters gathered in the central city of Tel Aviv. They contend that proposed plans by the new Cabinet will hinder judicial system and widen societal gaps.
“The settler government is against me,” read one placard. Another banner read, “Housing, Livelihood, Hope.” Some protesters carried rainbow flags.
Said Rula Daood of “Standing Together,” a grassroots movement of Arabs and Jews, “We are here to say loud and clear that all of us, Arabs and Jews and different various communities inside of Israel, demand peace, equality and justice.”
The repression persists
Iran hanged two men, Mohammad Mahdi Karami and Seyyed Mohammad Hosseini, for killing a paramilitary force member in November.
Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, the director of Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR), said both men “were subjected to torture, sentenced after sham trials … without the minimum standards for due process”
The UN human rights office decried the executions, which it said followed “unfair trials based on forced confessions”. “We urge Iran to halt all executions,” it said
Since the beginning of the protest movement, courts have sentenced 14 people to death in connection with the demonstrations, based on official information.
Among those, four have been executed, two others have had their sentences confirmed by the supreme court, six are awaiting new trials and two others can appeal.
Money trumps need once again
“NHS trusts with record waiting lists are promoting “quick and easy” private healthcare services at their own hospitals, offering patients the chance to jump year-long queues”
An international project in nuclear fusion may face years of delays. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) project seeks to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy.
Installed at a site in southern France, the decades-old initiative has a long history of technical challenges and cost overruns.
Iter’s previously stated goal was to create the plasma by 2025.
Pietro Barabaschi, the project’s director general – told Agence France-Presse the date “wasn’t realistic in the first place”, even before two major problems surfaced.
One problem, he said, was wrong sizes for the joints of blocks to be welded together for the installation’s 19 metres by 11 metres (62ft by 36ft) chamber.The second was traces of corrosion in a thermal shield designed to protect the outside world from the enormous heat created during nuclear fusion.
Fixing the problems “is not a question of weeks, but months, even years”, Barabaschi said.
A helpful essay promoting a negotiated settlement
https://countercurrents.org/2023/01/ukraine-crisis-must-come-out-of-the-impasse/
“…Both parties must understand and accept the fact that ultimately there is no military solution to the Ukraine crisis. Hence the process for a diplomatic solution with a give-and-take mentality should be started right now. Delays will only increase the suffering not only of the people of Ukraine and Russia but also of the entire world…The stalemate and uncompromising attitude lead nowhere except further destruction, heavy tolls on both sides, and infliction of further miseries on ordinary people all over the world…It is a no-win situation for both sides…”
“These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel – in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.” – Netanyahu, December 30, 2022
Biden pledged during his 2020 presidential campaign that he would “try to reverse the failed Trump policies that inflicted harm on Cubans and their families.”
Vice-minister of Foreign Affairs of Cuba, Fernández de Cossío said that Biden has applied “with absolute and surprising loyalty … the policy of maximum economic pressure that was designed by his predecessor, Donald Trump.”
“The current U.S. government, the one of Joseph Biden, of all those that the Cuban Revolution has known, is the one that has most aggressively and effectively applied the economic blockade. It is the one that punishes the most, the one that causes the most damage to the daily life of Cubans and the economy as a whole.”
Cuba Says Biden Applies Blockade Even More Aggressively Than His Predecessors
According to a White House official there were indications that monetary motives in taking control of its salt and gypsum from mines were driving Russia’s and Prigozhin’s “obsession” with Bakhmut.
Not sure I am convinced.
Out of its force of nearly 50,000 mercenaries, Wagner has sustained more than 4,100 deaths and 10,000 wounded, including over 1,000 killed between late November and early December near Bakhmut
A US warship sailed through the Taiwan Strait between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland on Thursday, prompting criticism from Beijing.
The US military said the USS Chung-Hoon’s transit showed the US commitment to a “free and open Indo-Pacific”.
But a Chinese embassy spokesman in Washington said the voyage was to “flex muscles” and accused the US of “undermining peace and stability”.
Essay from Weekly Worker on the respective nationalisms of Ukraine and Russia.
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1424/mongols-versus-vikings/
“… while no-one knows what will emerge out of the Russo-Ukrainian far-right ideological stew, one thing is certain: mutual nationalist radicalisation will lead to more war rather than less.”
Those for One State
Sign of things to come?
Two men wearing Jewish religious clothing smash a stone cross in a historic Jerusalem cemetery has prompted claims that Israeli extremists are responsible for the desecration of more than 30 Christian graves.
In 2021, Christian leaders in the Holy Land wrote in a joint letter that Arab Christian communities were under threat of being driven from the region by extremist Israeli radical groups. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a former lawyer who defended Israelis accused of religiously motivated attacks now oversees the Israeli police as national security minister.
Watch: Jewish extremists vandalize #Christian cemetery in Mount Zion in the occupied city of #Jerusalem. pic.twitter.com/QZFE8L53uM
— Wafa News Agency – English (@WAFANewsEnglish) January 4, 2023
The Charity Commission has said it has opened a regulatory compliance case against the Campaign Against Antisemitism, which was at the forefront of antisemitism allegations against Corbyn’s leadership.
Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) has complained to the charities regulator, alleging the CAA is not fulfilling its stated principal charitable objects of promoting racial harmony by the elimination of antisemitism. It alleges the CAA has engaged in “persistent conflation and equating of antisemitism with criticism of the state of Israel”.
Margaret Hodge, a former CAA patron, tweeted that the charity was “more concerned with undermining Labour than rooting out antisemitism”.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/uk-charities-watchdog-assesses-concerns-060010988.html
Israel likes to describe itself as the only democracy in the region. But new laws are being proposed to undermine that already dubious claim.
Justice minister, Yariv Levin, has proposed a series of changes aimed at curbing the powers of the judiciary, including allowing lawmakers to pass laws that the high court has struck down and in effect deemed unconstitutional that would empower the country’s 120-seat Knesset to override supreme court decisions with a simple majority of 61 votes and allow politicians play a greater role in the appointment of supreme court judges and that ministers appoint their own legal advisers instead of using independent professionals.
Ultra-Orthodox and ultranationalist allies have said they hope to scrap supreme court rulings outlawing Israeli outposts on private Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank. They would also seek to allow for the protracted detention of African asylum seekers and make official the exclusion of ultra-Orthodox people from mandatory military service.
“It will be a hollow democracy,” said Amir Fuchs, a senior researcher at Jerusalem’s Israel Democracy Institute, a thinktank. “When the government has ultimate power, it will use this power not only for issues of LGBTQ rights and asylum seekers but elections and free speech and anything it wants.”
Yair Lapid, the former prime minister and head of the opposition, described it as “a unilateral coup in Israel”
