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Author: thefreeonline
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Across the United States, 100’s of millions of dollars are spent on new police militarization facilities
Stopping the Cop Cities Countrywide.. With a Report from Lacey, Washington
Since April 2021, protesters in Atlanta, Georgia have been fighting to defend Weelaunee Forest, where politicians and profiteers are attempting to build a police training compound known as Cop City.
This movement has spread around the country, identifying and attacking the roots of state and corporate support for the project; later this month, opponents of Cop City will gather in Tucson, Arizona.
Yet the proposed police militarization center in Atlanta is only one of many. All across the United States, governments are allocating hundreds of millions of dollars to build new police militarization facilities, seeking to expand the repressive capabilities of the police and pouring more money into the pockets of their allies.
The movement to Stop Cop City has given rise to one of the fiercest struggles of the past three years. Does it represent a reproducible strategy by which abolitionists can take a structural approach to stopping the expansion of the police-industrial complex?
Henry Pacheco* El objetivo del régimen de apartheid es hacer que Gaza sea inhabitable y limpiar étnicamente a los 2,3 millones de palestinos que allí viven. En Gaza no queda ningún sistema sanitario eficaz. Los bebés están muriendo. Los niños están sufriendo amputaciones de miembros sin anestesia. Miles de pacientes con cáncer y quienes necesitan diálisis carecen […]
The Derry Anarchist Collective’s very own Barricade Bulletin No.25 is OUT NOW! Barricade Bulletin is now available from members locally or directly from the usual local outlets. For those beyond the North West, you can download the online version with news and other information. As ever Barricade Bulletin is free for prisoners so please get […]
We got hold of Israel’s dossier against UNRWA – why did donors including the UK withdraw funding on flimsy unproven allegations before investigation?”How come the US pulled out just hours later and ordered its vassal states to follow?
The summary did “not provide evidence to support its claims.”
Statistics are often given lanky legs that take their user far. But how they are used, and how they are received, is striking. The current figure of 27,500 dead is a blighting, grotesque fact.
But as they are Palestinians, the issue is less significant to certain parties than, say, 140 Israeli hostages being held in Gaza, most of them military or reservists who were locking up 2.4 million Palestinians illegally for decades.
As with much in the noisy clatter of Middle Eastern violence, the value attributed to numbers alters in the shade of ideology and self-interest. Massacres become acts of self-defence; acts of self-defence become unconscionable inflictions of murder.
It also follows that an organisation of 30,000 employees, working in the field of humanitarianism, aid and salvation, can be plastered as terrorist sponsors for having 12 individuals in their service allegedly involved in a murderous assault on Israel on October 7, 2023. Despite the relative smallness of this figure, the entire organisation itself becomes a target.
Israel was initially adamant that 12 such individuals in UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) had participated in the October 7 attacks by Hamas, sharing the detailson January 29 with several media outlets.
The accusations were made via a thin dossier amounting to no more than six pages. Little by way of evidence was supplied, though Israel was content to make further claims that almost 10% of the agency’s staff had ties to Hamas.
Never a mention of the inconvenient fact that Hamas was the originally elected and still supported government of Gaza.
As UN Crisis Group expert Daniel Forti writes, “Thus far, Israel has not provided evidence in writing to the UN to substantiate its allegations.”
For a gaggle of Western states and donors, that hardly mattered.
The mere mention of the Satanic Twelve had made their way into public and political consciousness, and something had to be done about it.
Funding to the aid body was swiftly suspended by the United States, followed faithfully by Germany, the European Union, Sweden, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.
[Source: breitbart.com] Jeremy Kuzmarov The Biden administration claims that U.S. foreign policy works to uphold human rights and democracy while containing rising authoritarian powers such as Russia and China. Biden administration officials routinely condemn the jailing of opposition figures in Russia like Alexey Navalny and by socialist governments like Nicaragua and Venezuela. But the Biden […]
As doctors drop Paxlovid because it causes drug interactions, Covid rebounds, and virus shedding, Pfizer cranks the PR machine to hide facts, shame “anti-paxxers.”and still make dishonest bucks from our suffering.
Paxlovid was foisted upon us by Pfizer at an astronomical price just when most people had begun to guess that both Covid 19 and its vaccines are mostly another insane, immoral Big Pharma Scam.
An antiviral wonder drug that has saved thousands from waning Covid?? Saved some perhaps. But merely not burying cheap effective safe Ivermectin and basic treatment protocols would have saved millions of us.
When an article by Los Angeles Times metro reporter Rong-Gong Lin II recommended last month that practically everyone who tests positive for Covid takes Pfizer’s Paxlovid, some media veterans may have wondered what had become of the traditional wall between news reporting and false advertising.
The story, which appeared on January 28, swept away almost all of the reservations that have been raised about the safety and effectiveness of this patent medicine, assuring us that “Paxlovid rebound” is a non-issue and fear of serious side effects is “erroneous.”
It even went so far as to suggest that if your doctor won’t prescribe this “highly effective” medication, it’s time to go doctor shopping.
So why is this LATimes writer so desperately trying to sell us this fast-tracked antiviral that comes with a black box warning?
The article appeared at a particularly critical time for Pfizer just as it transitions from Emergency Use Authorization, or EUA Paxlovid, to FDA-approved Paxlovid.
Originally free to patients, the medication was stockpiled by the U.S. government to the tune of 24 million treatment courses at a cost to taxpayers of $530 a box. The actual cost to Pfizer for a five-day Paxlovid course is $13).
Now, the FDA-approved version (same drug, different box) sells for a list price of up to $1,500. (According to an analysis by researchers at Harvard University, the actual cost to Pfizer for a five-day Paxlovid course is $13)
But to Pfizer’s chagrin, it now doesn’t seem to be able to even give the stuff away, let alone sell it at a premium price. Last fall Pfizer accepted a return of nearly 8 million boxes sent back by the U.S. government.
What’s a drugmaker to do when both patients and doctors shun a product that was anticipated to be the better half of Pfizer’s post-Covid “multibillion-dollar franchise?
Flush with all that Covid cash and new Paxlovid FDA approval last May, Pfizer went shopping for partners to help promote its products.
No stranger to top-tier PR firms such as Edelman and Ogilvy, the drugmaker tagged two of the biggest names in contemporary communications companies, Publicis Groupe, a Paris-based giant PR and ad agency, and the humongous Interpublic Group.
These high-level agencies come at a big price tag, but what they can offer is priceless—a way to get your story told by respected media outlets.
That’s right, if you have enough money to hire the folks with all the right contacts, you too can create your own “news!” And these special contacts are something that PR firms, such as Edelman, are very proud of.
Many agency hires, in fact, are recruited directly from major media outlets, such as Edelman NYC Brand Director Nancy Jeffrey, who spent a decade at the Wall Street Journal.
As quoted in an Edelman website blog, Jeffrey recalls how Richard Edelman (son of founder Dan) would call her during her time working at the paper “to meet a client with a story to tell.” As Jeffrey says, “No one at Edelman ever rises too high to pitch a reporter.”
So was our LA Times reporter “pitched,” or does he just have an evangelical connection with Paxlovid?
Let’s take a close look at his story and see what we find.
First, there’s the article’s headline, which began: “If it’s COVID, Paxlovid”?
Getting your oft-advertised product’s rhyming tagline in a headline—now that’s branding! And we don’t have to tell any of the side effects in this venue. The LA Times piece was off to a great start.
A Ceasefire Deal may one day free 100’s of Palestinian hostages for the last Israelis held in Gaza. But Israel jails 1000’s more without charges.
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club said the Israeli occupation refuses to disclose any information about detainees taken from Gaza, Quds Press reported.
Israel is incarcerating approx. 10,000 Palestinian hostages (prisoners without charges).
After the start of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, the number of Palestinians held in administrative detention (hostages) rose from 1,319 to 2,070 between 1 October and 1 November.[95][96][97] AT THIS RATE OF ARRESTS ISRAEL HAD AT LEAST 4000 PALESTINIAN HOSTAGES BY THE END OF JANUARY 2024.
In November 2023, in exchange for the 240 hostages taken on Hamas’ October 7th attack,[66][67] Israel proposed release of 300 prisoners, most of them women and children.
68] But over two-thirds of these prisoners had not been formally convicted of any crime or charged with any crime.[68]We don’t have official figures but if this ratio of prisoners held without charge is generalised Israel has AT LEAST 6,000 MORE PALESTINIAN HOSTAGES, BRINGING THE TOTAL TO 10,000 APPROX.
In addition most of the thousands of “convicted” Palestinian prisoners are incarcerated under invented apartheid style laws by an illegally occupying regime and which have little justification by even the most basic international standards.
Gazans who have been illegally confined and blockaded all their lives have arguably every moral right to break out and fight back., Not of course, to kill innocent civilians, though many of their non-military victims were ‘armed reservists subsidized to live in fortified settlements by the border’.
Convicted Palestinians are also often little more than hostages. Israel is rarely accused of Human Rights abuses or sanctioned by complicit and financially linked western elites with vested interests, even though the Israeli state is clearly locking up on petty racist inspired charges people who could also be described as “hostages”.
Palestinians, holding banners and photos of their relatives, gather to stage a demonstration on demanding release of the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails in front of International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) building in Ramallah, West Bank on January 02, 2024 [İssam Rimawi – Anadolu Agency]
The root of Israeli racist apartheid is a 3000 year old biblical assertion that Jews are God’s chosen race, as well as other scripture, taken out of context but repeatedly quoted on TV by Netanyahu, in which God urges Jews to massacre another local tribe.
Images from Gaza circulating on social media Thursday showed a mass detention by the Israeli military of men who were made to strip to their underwear, kneel on the street, wear blindfolds, and pack into the cargo bed of a military vehicle.
In a statement issued yesterday, the rights group said the Israeli occupation is carrying out “the crime of enforced disappearance” against Gaza detainees, following a number of military orders and laws specifically enacted for them.
The Free 