Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani accused of ‘using the internet to tear Saudi Arabia’s social fabric’

from Stigmatis / The Guardian / thefreeonline … 5 Sept 22

Saudi authorities must release women’s rights activists

Another Saudi Arabian woman has been sentenced to decades in prison by the kingdom’s terrorism court for using social media to “violate the public order”, according to court documents seen by a human rights group.

Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani was sentenced to 45 years in prison after a specialised criminal court convicted her of “using the internet to tear [Saudi Arabia’s] social fabric”, according to documents that were obtained and reviewed by Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn), an organisation founded by Jamal Khashoggi.

Also Salma Al-Shehab, First Woman Convicted By Saudi Arabian Government> 34 years jail For her Tweet…

The news of her decades-long sentence comes weeks after Salma al-Shehab, a 34-year-old PhD student at Leeds University and mother of two children, was convicted and sentenced to 34 years in prison after she returned home to Saudi for a holiday break.

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Dawn shared its findings, which it said were verified by Saudi sources, with the Guardian.

Few details are known about Qahtani, including her age or the circumstances around her arrest and conviction.

Court documents in Shehab case revealed she had been convicted for the alleged crime of following the Twitter accounts of individuals who “cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security”. In some cases, she retweeted tweets posted by dissidents in exile.

Shehab told a Saudi court she had faced abuse and harassment during her detention, including being subjected to interrogations after being given medications that exhausted her.

Saudi Arabia executes 81 men in one day, in the biggest mass execution …Mar 12, 2022(Reuters) Saudi Arabia executed 81 men on Saturday, including seven Yemenis and one Syrian, for terrorism and other offenses including holding “deviant beliefs,” authorities said, in the biggest…

In Qahtani’s case, Saudi authorities appear to have imprisoned her for “simply tweeting her opinions”, said Abdullah Alaoudh, the director for the Gulf region at Dawn.

“It is impossible not to connect the dots between Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s meeting with President Biden last month in Jeddah and the uptick in the repressive attacks against anyone who dares criticise the crown prince or the Saudi government for well-documented abuses,” Alaoudh said.

Dawn was coming forward with the news, he said, in the hopes that people who know Qahtani might shed light on her case.

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Saudi laws are designed to give authorities maximum discretion, including the power to detain individuals for vaguely defined anti-terrorism laws such as “disturbing public order” and “endangering national unity”.

Qahtani does not appear to have had a Twitter account in her own name. Other Saudis believed to have used pseudonyms to post satirical or critical content on Twitter have faced detention and arrest.

True value of UK arms trade to Saudi Arabia worth over £20 billion …The UK has sold over £20 billion worth of military equipment and services to Saudi Arabia since 2015, according to a new report by Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT). This is almost three times higher than the £6.7 billion worth of arms sales published by the Department of International Trade in the same time period.

Twitter has not commented publicly on Shehab’s case.

The US State Department on Monday said it has raised “significant concerns” with Saudi authorities about Shehab’s case.

“We have made the point to them that freedom of expression is a universal human right to which all people are entitled and exercising those universal rights should never be criminalised,” said a spokesperson, Ned Price.

Pressed by reporters on the matter, Price said the State Department was following the case “very closely” and that the US had had “a number” of conversations with Saudi counterparts in recent days.

The Saudi government was not immediately available for comment.

Saudi Arabia judges’ 45-year prison sentence on Nourah bint Saeed

With Hadi’s Ouster, Saudi Arabia’s True Ambitions in Yemen Come to the Fore

Saudi State Killings: Masses Hold Funeral in Shia area of Qatif for 41 executed peaceful protestorsMarch 17, 2022 In “social revolution”

Saudi War on Yemen. 6 year Epic Failure: Riyadh’s colonial genocide enriches depraved USA and UK .. Video

Depraved USA and UK green light Genocide of Millions for Profit in Yemen

We live on a bit that fell off the sun. Just 20kms down the rocks are at 500 C. With ‘deep-geo’ we could drill down, pump in water and use superheated steam for free electricity lasting millions of years.

from scitechdaily and EnergyMIT By Zach Winn, via thefreeonline July 10, 2022 shared with thanks

This an update of our report: We Can Save the Planet!! Deep-Geo Drilling method offers Endless free Steam energy Anywhere March 2022

New info is Paul Woskov’s plan to maybe convert Tonawanda’s abandoned coal fired Huntley power station in upstate New York into the first functional Deep Geo energy plant.

Paul is now a consultant with Quaise energy, the leading and best financed Deep Geo developer.

Quaise is producing a mobile gyratron system compatible with standard oil and gas drilling equipment to hook into existing expertise as fossil fuel drilling is hopefully wound down.

The first few kms will be drilled with normal equipment, then the gyratron takes over with its deep wave millimeter beam. All the physics is now well known, you can buy a gyratron ‘off the shelf’. What remains is engineering , how to line the boreholes, extract vapourised rock, control extraction of superheated water, etc..

Testing is due to begin, starting with shallow depths and working down. The timeline is ‘5 to 6 years’ for the first operating power station, but when the technology is proven uptake could be rapid, as the wells are fast to produce, can be drilled right beside existing coal and gas Energy Plants and provide unlimited superheated CO2-free steam to power the generators.

MIT Spinout Tapping Into the multi-Million-Year Energy Source Below Our Feet

from scitechdaily and EnergyMIT By Zach Winn, via thefreeonline July 10, 2022 shared with thanks

What if we could retrofit virtually every coal and gas power plant in the world to use a carbon-free energy source deep below our feet — geothermal energy.

Quaise Energy, an MIT spinout, is working to create geothermal wells made from the deepest holes in the world.

There’s an abandoned coal power plant in upstate New York that most people consider a worthless relic. MIT’s Paul Woskov, on the other hand, has a different perspective.

Woskov, a research engineer in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, points out that the plant’s power turbine is still intact and the transmission lines still run to the grid. Using an approach he’s been developing for the last 14 years, he’s hoping it will be back online within the decade, completely carbon-free.

Indeed, Quaise Energy, the company commercializing Woskov’s research, believes if it can retrofit one power plant, the same process will work on nearly every coal and gas power plant in the world.

Tapping into the energy source deep below our feet is how Quaise is hoping to accomplish those lofty goals. The company ambitious plans call for vaporizing enough rock to create the world’s deepest holes and harvesting geothermal energy at a scale that could satisfy human energy consumption for millions of years. Although they haven’t yet solved all the related engineering challenges, Quaise’s founders have set an aggresive timeline to begin harvesting energy from a pilot well by 2026.

If the plan were based on new and unproven technology, it would be easier to dismiss as unrealistic. However, Quaise’s drilling systems center around a microwave-emitting device called a gyrotron that has been used in research and manufacturing for decades.

Quaise Energy wants to repurpose coal and gas plants into deep geothermal wells by using X-rays to melt rock. Credit: Collage by MIT News with images courtesy of Quaise Energy

“This will happen quickly once we solve the immediate engineering problems of transmitting a clean beam and having it operate at a high energy density without breakdown,” explains Woskov, who is not formally affiliated with Quaise but serves as an advisor. “It’ll go fast because the underlying technology, gyrotrons, are commercially available. You could place an order with a company and have a system delivered right now — granted, these beam sources have never been used 24/7, but they are engineered to be operational for long time periods. In five or six years, I think we’ll have a plant running if we solve these engineering problems. I’m very optimistic.”

Continue reading “Updates- ‘Deep-Geo to Harvest Multi-Million-Year Green Energy below our Feet’ – /timelines”

By Jack Crosbie on Rolling Stone via anarchistnews.collectve and thefreeonline

In an Atlanta forest slated for development, an activist movement has built a community — and they’re vowing to defend it by any means necessary

Whatever the excavator driver had in mind for his morning, it’s pretty clear it wasn’t this. It’s not yet 8 a.m. on a Saturday in late July, and he’s dodging rocks and full cans of rosemary-grapefruit seltzer being flung from 20 yards away, and screaming at the impassive DeKalb County cop next to him to intervene.

“Pull your gun out!” he yells in desperation. “Pull your gun out!”

The driver is here in Atlanta’s South River Forest on behalf of Ryan Millsap, a real-estate tycoon who’s been granted permission to bulldoze a huge swath of trees and put up a soundstage for the city’s booming film industry — “Hollywood Dystopia,” as the band of masked protesters hurling projectiles have taken to calling it.

Millsap’s plans cover 40 acres of parkland on the eastern bank of Intrenchment Creek, which roughly divides a 300-acre pocket of this forest that has become a battleground. On the western side of the creek, the nonprofit Atlanta Police Foundation has laid claim to 85 acres of woods, which the Atlanta City Council voted last September to flatten in order to build a $90 million police- and fire-training complex that’s come to be known as “Cop City.”

What the city didn’t expect was that the land would become home to a band of environmentalists and anarchists, loosely united under the banner Defend the Atlanta Forest, who are combating those plans at every turn.

The “decentralized autonomous movement,” as they call themselves, consists of hundreds of local and out-of-state activists, several dozen of whom live full time in these woods, in a ramshackle network of tents and treehouses erected dozens of feet off the forest floor.

A barricade erected by Defend the Atlanta Forest to complicate law enforcement entry onto the grounds.
Jack Crosbie

By day, the group hosts meals procured through donated food and prepared via collective action, as well as teach-ins on resistance tactics and philosophies, skill shares, guided hikes, and other community events.

By night, on the weekends, the scene often shifts to musical performances featuring local bands and DJs — a distinctly Atlanta mix of trap, hardcore, and electronica — plus a bar and substances of every sort, a chance to mosh for freedom and dance in defiance.

Months after the deals with Millsap and the APF were signed, the only thing being built in the South River Forest, it seems, is the next stage of a nationwide direct-action movement, people tired of losing in the traditional halls of power — be it Atlanta’s City Hall or America’s Supreme Court — who are ready to fight for something different.

“It’s not just a local struggle, it’s about two competing ways of life,” says a DAF protester who goes by the name Cicada. “The people who are destroying the forest live all over the country. People should feel empowered to hold them accountable, to feel like they’re capable of stopping this depravity.”

Continue reading “The Battle for Cop City > Support Atlanta Forest Defenders”

The Ukrainian ‘Counteroffensive’ Was Destined To Fail – Today It Did So

Sept 3, 2022 by Moon of Alabama via Williambowles.info via thefreeonline

+ 173 Comments

Saturday, 3 September, 2022 — Moon of Alabama

On August 24 the British prime minister Boris Johnson visited Kiev:

In comments made next to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Mariyinsky Palace, Johnson said Ukraine “can and will win this war.”

The Ukrainian forces have no air defense or air attack capability to cover advancing troops. Its artillery capabilities are a tenth of what the Russian military can provide in the area. It was obvious from the beginning that this was a suicide mission.

Johnson’s visit was the start signal for the long announced Ukrainian ‘counteroffensive’ towards Kherson.

In early April Johnson had called on and visited Kiev to stop well developed peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine:

“Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” wrote Fiona Hill and Angela Stent. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”

The news highlights the impact of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to stop negotiations, as journalist Branko Marcetic noted on Twitter.

The decision to scuttle the deal coincided with Johnson’s April visit to Kyiv, during which he reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to break off talks with Russia for two key reasons: Putin cannot be negotiated with, and the West isn’t ready for the war to end.

Over the last months Britain has trained several thousands of Ukrainian troops and their officers. Together with Ukrainian special forces Britain’s MI-6 secret service planned a special operation for Ukraine to regain control over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant on the south side of the Kakhovka Dnieper reservoir.

This was designed to coincide with a visit of IAEA inspectors, long held up by Ukraine, to visit the ZNPP.

The Kherson offensive started on August 30 on five axes. It was destined to fail. Three of these attempts to gain ground held by Russian troops failed. One axis was stopped after taking a few small villages of no strategic value. The only ‘successful’ attack was across the Inhulet river near Andriivka in the direction of the dam and river crossing that closes off the Kakhovka Dnieper reservoir.

The plan was crazy to begin with. The whole area is flat open steppe. The troops would have had to created a 50 kilometer (30 miles) long corridor through open hostile land. The towns on the way are mostly one or two street agricultural mini-villages with one story homes that offer little protection.

see also: Ukraine admits shelling area around nuclear plant

The Ukrainian forces have no air defense or air attack capability to cover advancing troops. Its artillery capabilities are a tenth of what the Russian military can provide in the area. It was obvious from the beginning that this was a suicide mission.

Reportedly the Ukrainian military command was against this mission. But the Ukrainian political leadership, the Zelenski regime, ordered it to proceed. It was under political pressure from its foreign supporters to show at least some success.

Extremely heavy Russian Grad attack (around 120 missiles) on the main Ukrainian army defense position in Velyka Novosyolka.
Even more frightening than the destructive and certainly deadly attack: Russian BM-21 systems are operating freely from just15-20 km south of the town. pic.twitter.com/oSStF3gNrY

— Julian Röpcke🇺🇦 (@JulianRoepcke) August 30, 2022

The attack was launched on August 30. The Ukrainian military created three river crossings over the Inhulet near Andriivka. This already smelled bad. Why didn’t the Russian airforce or artillery immediately destroy those crossings?

It was obvious that this was a trap.

In a CNN piece, co-written by the notorious ‘intelligence’ stenographer Natasha Bertrand, the U.S. military distanced itself from the upcoming catastrophe:

In the buildup to the current Ukrainian counteroffensive, the US urged Kyiv to keep the operation limited in both its objectives and its geography to avoid getting overextended and bogged down on multiple fronts, multiple US and western officials and Ukrainian sources tell CNN.

Those discussions involved engaging in “war-gaming” with Kyiv, the sources said — analytical exercises that were intended to help the Ukrainian forces understand what force levels they would need to muster to be successful in different scenarios.

The Ukrainians were initially considering a broader counteroffensive, but narrowed their mission to the south, in the Kherson region, in recent weeks, US and Ukrainian officials said.

Officials say they believe there is now increased parity between the Ukrainian and Russian militaries. But western officials have been hesitant to label the nascent Ukrainian operation — which appeared to begin on Monday in the southern province of Kherson — a true “counteroffensive.”

How successful Ukraine is likely to be in regaining lost territory remains an open question, sources familiar with the latest intelligence tell CNN.

For three days the Ukrainian military sent battalion after battalion into the salient. These were good professional troops trained by Britain. They were equipped with modernized Polish T-72 tanks and up-armored Dutch Infantry Fighting Vehicles (YPR-765 IFV).

But while these force were able to create a deeper salient it would soon become their grave.

Continue reading “Ukraine’s suicidal ‘offensive’ sent 1000’s to a terrible death, spurred on by UK ‘advisors’”

by By Daisy Brickhill at FairPlanet Editorial Team in Thailand, Myanmar, China via thefreeonline

“It was 3:30am when I jumped. There were two possible outcomes – we would escape, or we would be killed. But it made no difference. We were working to serve them, and we would not continue. So I jumped into the sea.”

These are the words of a man we will call Ko Myo, although that is not his real name. He was a Burmese worker trafficked onto a Thai fishing boat, and then trapped at sea, at the mercy of his abusive captain.

Ko’s story is sadly common. Many migrant fishers are trafficked onto vessels and once out at sea, far from authorities, they are subjected to a kind of hell. Investigations by the Environmental Justice Foundation have uncovered cases of slavery, debt bondage, insufficient food and water, squalid living conditions, physical and sexual assault and even murder aboard fishing vessels from all over the world.

This photo essay shows some of the faces and tells some of the stories of those who have suffered this fate. World Day Against Trafficking in Persons provides a chance to raise awareness of their plight.

The individual stories are horrifying, but it is the systemic nature of the abuse that must be tackled. The first and most effective line of defence is surprising simple. Transparency.

Continue reading “Trafficking, Slavery and abuse in the Fishing Industry”

by Claytoonz via Dr Rex and thefreeonline

BlackLivesMatter … another one!! … “The Black Lives Matter movement is just as important today as when it rose after the murder of George Floyd. Black lives still matter and it still needs to be said.”

Columbus, Ohio cops shot and killed twenty-year-old Donovan Lewis, an unarmed Black man, this week during a nighttime raid while he was in bed.

The police burst into Lewis’ apartment with dogs to serve Lewis with arrest warrants on charges of domestic violence, assault, and improper handling of a firearm.

In body-camera footage of Tuesday’s shooting released by authorities, a Columbus cop pushes open a bedroom door and immediately fires at Lewis as he sits up in bed.

They then order him to crawl out of bed and then handcuff him to it. He died on his way to the hospital.

Between shooting and handcuffing Lewis, the cops told him to “stop resisting arrest.”

Was Lewis holding a gun when the cop shot him? No, he was not and the cop didn’t take enough time to notice as he shot as soon as the door opened.

The lawyers representing the cop who shot Lewis said that police officers “are forced to make split-second decisions” when faced with “volatile encounters in dangerous situations.”

The only one making it a volatile encounter and a dangerous situation was the cop. This cop’s “split-second decision” was the wrong one.

The police chief said Lewis may have had a vape pen or electronic cigarette in his hand, though it’s not seen in the video. Still, vape pens and electronic cigarettes are not guns. They don’t look anything like guns. Now we can add vape pens with cell phones and tasers for items cops mistake for guns.

Nighttime raids are costing tragic losses of lives. Minneapolis cops killed Amir Locke while he was sleeping on a couch during a no-knock raid several months ago.

In March 2020, Louisville cops shot and killed Breonna Taylor during one of their nighttime raids, and she wasn’t even the person they were looking for.

Donovan Lewis shooting highlights ‘persistent’ threat

What are the police going to do next, shoot unarmed black people while they’re on the toilet?

According to a 2019 study by Northwestern University, Black Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than White Americans.

The rates are higher in Columbus where Black people are 4.5 times more likely to be killed by police than White people.

Andre Hill, a 47-year-old unarmed Black man, was shot four times by a Columbus cop while leaving a friend’s house in 2020. Last year, Ma’Khia Bryant, a Black 16-year-old, was shot by a Columbus cop outside her home. 

The city had to pay out $10 million for the killing of Hill but an investigation let Bryant’s shooter go.

The Black Lives Matter movement is just as important today as when it rose after the murder of George Floyd. Black lives still matter and it still needs to be said.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=TVu30jOXtuc%3Fversion%3D3%26rel%3D1%26showsearch%3D0%26showinfo%3D1%26iv_load_policy%3D1%26fs%3D1%26hl%3Den%26autohide%3D2%26wmode%3Dtransparent

Music note: I listened to the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. You should too.

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