Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters has demanded the release of Kurdish singer Nudem Durak, who has been imprisoned in Turkey since 2015 for performing songs in her mother tongue.
Authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has trceived a call for the release of Durak, who is in Bayburt Prison. She is one of tens of thousands jailed in Turkey, a NATO state, for opposing the neo-fascist regime.
“She’s our sister,” Mr. Waters said. “Whatever you think of the Kurds’ desire for recognition, it is unacceptable for a country with a great historical artistic heritage like Turkey to treat artists like that.”
Durak was jailed for “belonging to a terrorist organization” and “spreading terrorist propaganda” after singing at an event to commemorate Newroz, the Kurdish New Year.
A global campaign for her release has the backing of Waters and others, including fellow musicians and veteran American Communist Angela Davis.
The ‘Felicity Ace’, was transporting roughly 4,000 cars, including 1,100 Porsches and 189 Bentleys,
by Victor Tangermann
“The cars are electric and part of the fire is the batteries that are still burning.”
A giant cargo ship carrying luxury cars, including numerous Porsches, lit on fire last week and forced the crew of 22 members to evacuate in the Atlantic ocean.
And as it turns out, a “large number” of the cars are electric, which is greatly complicating firefighting efforts, The Wall Street Journal reports — though it’s still unclear if their lithium-ion batteries were the source of the fire.
“The cars are electric and part of the fire is the batteries that are still burning,” a spokesman for salvage company Royal Boskalis Westminster NV told the newspaper.
The news — yet another setback for the already ailing car industry — goes to show that transporting massive and highly flammable batteries comes with some inherent risks, a pertinent topic given the exponential rise of the EV.
Write-Off
The massive cargo ship, dubbed the Felicity Ace, was transporting roughly 4,000 cars, including 1,100 Porsches and 189 Bentleys, from Germany to the US. Porsche’s parent company, the Volkswagen Group, manufactures electric luxury cars including Porsche’s Taycan, the Audi e-tron, and VW’s ID.4.
Rescuers believe the 650ft long ship may be too large to be towed to a port in Azores, which is more than 900 miles from the European mainland.
Towing boats were on route from Gibraltar and the Netherlands, with three due to arrive by Wednesday.
A sixteen-person salvage team from Smit Salvage, owned by Dutch marine engineer Boskalis, was sent to the ship to help control the flames.
The Portuguese Air Force has rescued 22 crew members from the burning ship after they abandoned the vessel and were taken on board the Resilient Warrior tanker after it diverted its route to assist with the rescue.
They were then airlifted to safety in a military helicopter
All told, it sounds like a total write-off.
“The fire continues to be active, although it has diminished in intensity,” João Manuel Mendes Cabeças, an Azores port captain, told the WSJ. “The expectation is that everything or almost everything burned.”
Ocean-ready tug boats are now making their way to the Felicity Ace to pull the vessel to shore — after the raging inferno is safely extinguished.
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La Habana, 23 feb (Prensa Latina) Un tuitazo mundial encabeza hoy en Cuba la jornada de actividades por el Día Internacional de lucha contra las bases militares extranjeras de Estados Unidos y la OTAN, a cuatro años de instituida la fecha en Dublín, Irlanda. El Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos (ICAP) informó que […]
Sometimes life has a way of making you realize things about yourself. Recently, I discovered that an urge of mine, almost four decades old, had been the very opposite of that of a rural Tennessee school board this January.
In another life, I played a role in what could be thought of as the unbanning of the graphic novel Maus.
For months, I’ve been reading about the growing Trumpist-Republican movement to ban whatever books its members consider politically unpalatable, lest the lives of America’s children be sullied by, say, a novel of Toni Morrison’s like The Bluest Eye or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or a history book like They Called Themselves the K.K.K.
It’s an urge that just rubs me the wrong way.
After all, as a boy growing up in New York City in the 1950s, when children’s post-school lives were much less organized than they are today, I would often wander into the local branch of the public library, hoping the librarian would allow me into the adult section.
There — having little idea what I was doing — I would pull interesting-looking grown-up books off the shelves and head for home.
Years later, exchanging childhood memories with a friend and publishing colleague, Sara Bershtel, I discovered that, on arriving in this country, she, too, had found a sympathetic librarian and headed for those adult shelves.
At perhaps 12 or 13, just about the age of those Tennessee schoolkids, we had both — miracle of miracles! — not faintly knowing what we were doing, pulled Annmarie Selinko’s bestselling novel Désirée off the shelves.
It was about Napoleon Bonaparte and his youthful fiancé and we each remember being riveted by it. Maybe my own fascination with history, and hers with French literature, began there. Neither of us, I suspect, were harmed by reading the sort of racy bestseller that Republicans would today undoubtedly loathe.
Oh, and if you’ll excuse a little stream of consciousness here, my friend Sara was born in a German displaced-persons camp to Jewish parents who had, miraculously enough, survived the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, which brings me back to the jumping-off spot for this piece.
Attempting to criminalize and censor the presentation of a board game: ” Come and Occupy too!”
Joint statement from the Mataró Cooperators Union, the Mataró Housing Union and the Cafè de Mar Culinary Space.
Yesterday, Wednesday 16 February, various media outlets reported that the mayor of Mataró, David Bote, had requested in writing to the Union of Cooperators of Mataró, the cancellation of the event which will take place on the 23rd of February at the Cafè de Mar, stating that: “Trivializing the right to access housing contributes to generating more tension and social unrest.”
Faced with this serious fact, the Cafè de Mar Culinary Space, the Mataró Cooperators Union and the Mataró Housing Union want to express the following:
I told you this part wasn’t going to be pretty. The collapse of fascist ideological movements and fanatical death cults never is. The New Normal is proving to be no exception.
After three weeks of non-violent civil disobedience outside the Canadian parliament in Ottawa by truckers and other Canadian citizens struggling to uphold their right to not be subjected to forced “vaccination,” Justin Trudeau unleashed the goon squads.
By effectively taking control of Donbass Russia may protect the Russian population not already evacuated and thwart the US and Ukraine’s NATO backed Russophobic campaign.
The Great Gamble of course is whether the powerful US military issues Russia with a nuclear ultimatum to get out of Ukraine. And if Ukraine launches the 150,000 army it has on the Donbass borders, armed with the latest free gifts from NATO.
Then Russia would have to defend Donbass (or abandon a million Russians) causing a massacre of Ukrainian troops, causing a NATO intervention, causing a nuclear holocaust ……
The EU and US will no doubt install their already prepared massive economic sanctions, but Russia has resisted previous sanctions and right now is rolling in cash, with gas and oil prices still rising.
The sanctions were coming anyway, and could be a massive…
The Free 