via thefreeonline…  Al Jazeera./

12 percent of global trade passes the Red Sea via the Suez Canal. 12 shipping companies have suspended transit

BREAKINGAt least 29 killed as Israeli forces destroy residential buildings in RafahBREAKINGIsraeli attacks have killed at least 19,667 people in Gaza since October 7

US launches maritime coalition to counter attacks .. Ansarallah govt says are a response to Israeli Genocide in Gaza Strip– vows to continue

Published On 19 Dec 2023

• What’s the impact of the Houthis hijacking a ship in the Red Sea?
• Houthis target Israel-linked ships in Red Sea. Here’s what you need to know
• Yemen’s Houthis say they attacked two more vessels in the Red Sea
• US announces 10-nation force to counter Houthi attacks in Red Sea

The Houthis would only halt their attacks if Israel’s “crimes in Gaza stop and food, medicines and fuel are allowed to reach its besieged population”, al-Bukhaiti said.

He spoke after US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced a coalition on Monday to protect trade in the Red Sea after the attacks forced shipping lines to suspend operations.

The Iran-linked Houthis have waged attacks on more than a dozen commercial ships in an attempt to pressure Israel to end its bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

“These reckless Houthi attacks are a serious international problem and they demand a firm international response,” Austin said about the new 10-nation coalition. He said the force would operate “with the goal of ensuring freedom of navigation for all countries and bolstering regional security and prosperity”.

After the US announcement, Houthi Major General Yusuf al-Madani said in a statement: “Any escalation in Gaza is an escalation in the Red Sea … Any country or party that comes between us and Palestine, we will confront it.”

Spokesperson al-Bukhaiti told Al Jazeera on Monday that the group would confront any US-led coalition in the Red Sea.

Not an act of ‘defiance’

“You have the military establishment in Yemen, in the areas controlled by the Houthis, warning that they will continue to target ships cruising through the Bab el-Mandeb strait and the Red Sea and they insist they are doing this to protect people in Gaza, in particular,” Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra said, reporting from Doha on Tuesday.

“A top Houthi official, Mohammed Abdulsalam, who is also a senior negotiator, said the attacks by the Houthis are not an act of defiance but if this new coalition is adamant on launching attacks, then they will have to bear the consequences of what he described as a broader conflict in the region.

“But he said at the same time that the Houthis are still adamant on the need for the Israelis to stop the war if they want the Houthis to stop the attacks,” our correspondent added.

On Tuesday, Abdulsalam told Reuters news agency that the US-led naval patrol mission is “essentially unnecessary” – as all waters near Yemen are still safe, except for Israel-linked ships or vessels travelling to Israel.

The US and British navies said over the weekend that their destroyers had shot down a total of 15 drones in the waterway.

In the latest incident on Tuesday, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, said four small boats, each carrying four to five people, approached a vessel off the coast of Djibouti in a “suspicious” manoeuvre – but that no weapons were seen during the incident.

At least 12 shipping companies, including the Italian-Swiss giant Mediterranean Shipping Company, France’s CMA CGM and Denmark’s AP Moller-Maersk, have suspended transit through the Red Sea due to safety concerns. UK oil giant BP on Monday became the latest firm to announce it would avoid the waters.

About 12 percent of global trade passes through the Red Sea, which connects to the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal.

Houthi attacks have effectively rerouted a significant portion of trade by forcing freight companies to sail around Africa, imposing higher costs and delays for energy, food and consumer goods deliveries.

Ahmed Helal, MENA director at The Global Counsel, told Al Jazeera the “cascading impact” of the crisis is on inflation. “Major central banks have been cutting interest rates to combat inflation and bring prices down for consumers. But this disruption in a major global trade artery affects regular goods and energy, both oil and natural gas,” he said.

He added that because of the Houthi attacks, and the ongoing disruption of natural gas supplies to Europe as a result of the Ukraine war, “European natural gas prices jump by 12 percent, UK natural gas prices jump by 10 percent, and the price of oil also jumped by 4 percent in the past 24 hours”.

• Israel-Palestine conflict
• Live updates
• Know their names: West Bank
• Tunnel warfare
• Photos
• What role is AI playing?
• ‘We are dying here’
• A brief history
• Live tracker
• Did tech dependence cause intel failure?
• A simple guide

News|Israel-Palestine conflict

 on 21st Dev 2023 by CrimethInc

Take Matters in Your Own Hands

Steal Something from Work Day 2023

This bombshell essay is part of Crimethinc’s coverage of Steal Something from Work Day 2023. See ‘Further Reading’ links below for much more info.

Welcome to Steal Something from Work Day coverage from 2023! Every year, we observe this day as an opportunity to reflect on the individualized forms of anti-capitalist resistance that millions upon millions of employees engage in on a daily basis, and to imagine forms of collective action that could start with take this .

Today, we’ll zoom in on a particular variant of workplace theft: the leak.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/817857478?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0 Cheers to Yugoslavian film director Dušan Makavejev and hip-hop duo Test Their Logik.

Leak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace

There are many things you can steal from work. You could steal money, time, goods, raw materials, access to specialized equipment. Another thing you could steal is information. For this year’s Steal Something from Work Day, let’s talk about the last of these.

In the information age, knowledge is power. The circulation of classified information is integral to the lattice of repressive institutions that maintain the prevailing order. Information is the blood in the bloodstream of the beast.

Controlling which information circulates and which does not has always been central to statecraft. But in the heyday of social media, this is arguably the most determinant aspect of rule itself, even more so than military force.

“In a digitally interconnected world, whoever has the most robust networks, the right relationship between visible and opaque channels, and the most persuasive narrative will triumph. Communication and coordination trump brute force when any clash can draw in a potentially infinite number of participants on either side.”

–Canary in the Coal Mine: Twitter and the End of Social Media

In a globalized economy in which work has penetrated into every corner of our lives, practically every worker is accustomed to inhabiting multiple identities and being subject to conflicting loyalties. The battle lines of social conflict now cut directly through the heart of every ordinary civilian. One weapon in these battles is the information leak.

Information leaks can serve a variety of agendas. On the one hand, they can destabilize established power.

For example, embassy cables published by Wikileaks played a role in catalyzing the revolution that brought down president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, sparking a global wave of uprisings that lasted from 2011 through 2014.

On the other hand, defenders of the prevailing order can use leaks to circulate cherry-picked information, as well. Intentionally or not, the advance leak of the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade arguably served to defuse resistance, giving the general public a chance to get used to the bad news before it was confirmed and ensuring that those who might otherwise have been shocked into action joined predictable liberal demonstrations.

Still, as a persistent strategy aimed at the reigning power structure, leaking information has considerable advantages.

WikiLeaks: Tunisia knew its rulers were debauched. But leaks still had impact

The less that the various institutions of repression can trust each other and their own employees, the more difficult it becomes for them to respond rapidly and coordinate with each other.

We saw this in the administration of Donald Trump in 2017, when a series of leaks eroded trust within the regime. If information is the blood in the bloodstream of the security state, persistent leaks coagulate that blood.

Today, it is widely understood that our society is headed directly for economic and ecological disaster, but the authorities have yet to take meaningful steps to change course.

When millions are complicit in structures that they know to be destructive and doomed, this creates the conditions in which formerly complacent employees may choose to carry out individual acts of subversion from within the halls of power.

This is not the first time that such conditions have developed in the American workplace. At the end of the 1960s, the Vietnam War contributed to an erosion of faith in the United States government and associated corporations and industries.

In late 1969, with the assistance of his former RAND Corporation colleague Anthony Russo, Daniel Ellsberg secretly made photocopies of a number of classified documents that became known as the Pentagon Papers.

Ellsberg set out to reestablish contact with anarchist poet Gary Snyder, with whom he had previously debated US foreign policy, and put the Pentagon Papers into circulation.

Inspired by by Daniel Ellsberg’s action, former National Security Agency employee Perry Fellwock revealed the existence of the NSA and its worldwide covert surveillance network.

Peter Buxtun, an employee of the United States Public Health Service, revealed the existence of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in 1972.

Many more revelations followed, impacting the nuclear power and petroleum industries as well as various government agencies.

Three decades later, the Iraq War created a similar erosion of faith. When US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning discovered that she was, in her words, “actively involved in something that [she] was completely against,” she began bringing rewritable CDs to her job:

I would come in with music on a CD-RW, labelled with something like “Lady Gaga”… erase the music… then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing. […]

You had people working 14 hours a day… every single day… no weekends… no recreation… people stopped caring after three weeks.

Exemplifying the spirit of Steal Something from Work Day, Manning “listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltratrating possibly the largest data spillage in Nth American history.”

Continue reading “Leak it Now- How Citizens change the World leaking the Bosses’ Crimes -Crimethinc”

from thefreeonline on 13th Dec 2023 by Argentina. Indymedia. via Red Latina sin fronteras
Faced with the Cutbacks and the new debt announced, we redouble our unity and resistance

On 12/13, an open meeting of the “Self-call for the suspension of payment and investigation of the debt” was held, convened by the member organizations of the space after the assumption of Javier Milei and the deployment of an adjustment plan on the popular sectors

Given the announcements of the new government, we call for a response in the broadest unity.

Milei’s mask is falling. The mega-adjustment and devaluation that he promised to the IMF, along with the commitment to pay the debt, are the only thing that remains of the campaign rhetoric. Not to mention “caste”.

With the first announcements, it has been clearly shown that it is the government of the dominant classes and their international bosses, without mediation. With Caputo they assume those directly responsible for the debt and looting of Argentina. They come for everything.

The crumbs with which it boasts of helping the recipients of the planned misery do not even come close to compensating for the incentivized hyperinflation and the announced adjustment.

It is a brutal attack against the working people, the territories, the bodies and all of nature, in order to unload the full weight of the crisis on them: immediate devaluation of 118%;

Drastic increase in transportation, water and energy; state layoffs and maximum delay in their income; the same in retirements and social benefits; closure or degradation of organizations and public policies for the defense of our Sovereignty, Rights and Social Justice; new awards for exporters and importers including a new nationalization of their doubtful debts; deepening of the dependent, extractivist and debtor model.

The vaunted Freedom will only exist for price-forming monopolies, banks and speculators.

They tell us that “there is no money,” but they intend to continue deriving every penny produced in the country, what was obtained from the looting of our natural assets and the privatization of state companies, to “honor” said scam.

Continue reading “Argentina-Self-callout: Enough already of ‘Cutbacks’ and Looting – English/Spanish”

from thefreeonline on 18th Dec 2023 by HomeBusiness News and Malenko.Medium.

Presents to be seized and searched.. and confiscated if they contain any of 1000’s of sanctioned goods

photo … Sean Gallup

Germany may confiscate gift parcels sent from Russia ahead of this year’s festive season, the country’s Federal Customs Service announced in statement on its website this week.

According to the statement, gift parcels are regulated by the same sanctions legislation as any imports, as they may contain sanctioned goods such as paper, pulp, precious stones and metals, cigarettes, chemical and plastic products, cosmetics, etc.

“There is no exception to the prohibitions covered by an Annex XXI to the Sanctions Regulation for gift consignments sent from a private individual in Russia to another private individual in the customs territory of the European Union,” the statement read, signaling that even such innocent items such as books, toys and perfume sent from Russia will likely not make it to their German recipients.

Gifts are not the first personal items belonging to Russians that have not been allowed in Germany. Previously, the country’s customs officials warned that any personal belongings of Russians falling under sanctions could be confiscated at the border, including smartphones, laptops, suitcases, portables, clothing and even toiletries.

Cars have also been subject to the embargo: there have been several incidents this year when German customs officers seized cars bearing a Russian license plate, which travelers brought across the German border.

EU parliament is urging member states to stop seizing private Russian cars because it ‘discredits’ bloc’s sanctions

Several other EU member states have also been confiscating Russians’ personal items at border crossings. Most began doing so after the European Commission issued a sanctions clarification in September that condoned such measures.

READ MORE: Russians better off despite sanctions – poll

Last month, the European Parliament urged EU nations to stop the practice and called on the executive body to “review its interpretation of sanctions leading to the seizure and confiscation of items and vehicles for personal use only.” In a joint motion, lawmakers warned that “such over compliance discredits the goal and instrument of sanctions.” However, the recommendation was not legally binding and has not yet been taken up by the European Commission.

Moscow has repeatedly slammed the practice of taking away the belongings of ordinary Russians as illegal, with Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova calling it outright “racist.”

*************

The Top 10 most weird and unusual sanctions against Russia.

from thefreeonline  on 18th Dec 2023 by Vladimir Malenko  at Malenko.Medium.. shared with thanks

Here is a spoiler — even the Russian cats are under sanctions

BCC states that “sanctions are penalties imposed by one country on another, to stop it acting aggressively or breaking international law”. There are plenty of types of international conduct that should be punished. The US Department of Treasury is currently running 37 sets of sanctions against countries as diverse as Russia, South Sudan, Cuba, China, North Korea, and against various causes, such as cyber-crime and narcotics.

The overall number of sanctions against Russia just reached 5,532 on March 8, 2022, by now maube 10,000. But some of them are not quite conventional, and some are outright funny.

Alas all have boomeranged against the West, with Russia predicted to have 3.5% growth in 2024, and Europe down in in the doldrums.

Here is the list of most unusual sanctions imposed by the West against Russia:

1. McDonald’s

On March 8 2022 the company declared that it was immediately shutting down all 850 fast-food restaurants in the Russian Federation (some are actually still open for one reason, or another). A lot of parents across the world are wondering why such a blessing was bestowed onto the undeserving Russians. And by the way, its competitor Burger King decided to stay on.

2. Black caviar

No more Russian black caviar in Paris? Not exactly. The European Union banned its EXPORTS of black caviar TO Russia, the world’s largest exporter of the staff. This reminds me of the infamous speech by Jen Psaki, then the State Department spokesperson in 2014 when she said that the natural gas flows from Western Europe to … Russia.

3. Aircraft

Over 500 of the aircraft used by Russian airlines are owned by the foreign (mostly Irish) lessors who now demanded the return of their property from the Russian users. But there is a slight problem — the European airspace is closed to the Russian-operated aircraft, so the planes may not physically fly “home”.

4. Cartoons

Disney will not show its new animation movie “Turning Red” in Russia. Wow, that will definitely show Vladimir Putin and his 7-year-old supporters who is the boss here! Poor kids will have to learn about the US from the cartoon movie “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America”. He-he…

5. Classical music concerts

The news article heading stated: The Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra has removed Tchaikovsky from its programme of its upcoming concert ‘in light of the recent Russian invasion’ . Surely, this is because the famous Russian composer (who died in 1893) missed his chance 129 years ago to condemn Putin’s invasion in Ukraine. Should not the same logic apply to ALL Russian writers, painters and composer without exceptions?

6. Cats

The International Cat Federation banned Russian cats from participation in its competitions. I am not sure what to say here. Perhaps, there are some military feline brigades of fighting cats that represent tangible threat to the world but… if I suggest it here, I may end up in a psychiatric ward.

7. The US sparkling wine, cheap booze and… American vodka

Wow! The country, which is one of the largest consumer of the elite French champagne is definitely going to suffer from not having the American sludge. By the way, MD 20/20 is also banned.

American vodka? In the world’s largest producer of the quality vodka?

8. The US chewing tobacco, snuff and tobacco refuse

Did someone at the US Department of Treasury mistook Russia for West Virginia? I am yet to find a tobacco chewing Russian…

9. Saddles

I am not kidding! It is listed under the number 8714100010 of the US department of Commerce document 15 CFR Parts 738 and 746.

10. Grand concert pianos

I think I kinda understand this one. Every educated person in the world surely knows that those Russkies use those pianos only to play military marches. So, every Russian military unit is always accompanied by a crawler-based concert piano.

Well, I decided to propose a few of my own sanctions in order to really weaken Vladimir Putin and his cronies:

· Let’s abolish Mendeleev’s periodic table of chemical elements. His invention must be a devious device to bring the West to its knees.

· Also the use of Pavlov’s conditional reflexes theory should no longer be used as Mr. Pavlov is not a known pacifist.

· And let’s also abandon all those 100 million AK-47s made in the last 74 years. The devilish toy of war was designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov who is so evil that even actually met Vladimir Putin once.

Well, should we then keep Maria Sharapova with her balls that don’t bounce?

By the way, the very first attempt of economic sanctions was undertaken by the League of Nations which imposed the ban on coal and oil imports by the Mussolini regime. It was a major failure since Italy simply left the League of Nation and signed direct bilateral agreements with England and France.

 from thefreeonline  8th Dec 2023  by Free Derry at Derry Anarchist Black Cross

Solidarity is a weapon!

Bristol: Update and call for support!

Please share these graphics on your networks and social media. The winter season is a really difficult time for people in prison who are separated from people they love. Please send a card to let folks know they are not alone!

Thanks to @punkwildlife for their amazing wildlife photography!

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Bristol: Update and call for support!

Ruslan Siddiqui Charged With Sabotage

from thefreeonline  on 17 Dec 2023 by Al Jazeera journalists

The first responders and locals are searching for the wounded as more bodies are believed to be under the rubble.

At least 90 people have been killed and more than 100 injured in the latest Israeli attacks on the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.

NUEVA MASACRE: Desde el hospital infantil y de maternidad de Mubarak, dentro del complejo Nasser. pic.twitter.com/8qQNbSZkaM

— Palestina Hoy (@HoyPalestina) December 17, 2023

The enclave’s Health Ministry said Sunday’s strikes hit a residential block belonging to the al-Barsh and Alwan families in the town of Jabalia, Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

Women and children were among the dead, with dozens still missing, Wafa said in its report.

URGENTE: Un bombardeo de artillería israelí tuvo como objetivo el Hospital Infantil Mubarak en el Complejo Médico Naser en la ciudad de Khan Younis. pic.twitter.com/EkNLyR1ddX

— Palestina Hoy (@HoyPalestina) December 17, 2023

The first responders and locals were searching for the wounded and more bodies were believed to be under the rubble.

Many of those injured, including children, were taken to nearby medical centres, which are already overwhelmed with patients.

Yesterdays children

The son of Dawoud Shehab, the spokesman for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, was among the dead, an official from the group told the Reuters news agency.

“We believe the number of dead people under the rubble is huge but there is no way to remove the rubble and recover them because of the intensity of Israeli fire,” he said by phone.

Israeli forces kill two Christian women in ‘cold blood’ inside Gaza church

https://omny.fm/shows/the-inside-story-podcast/will-the-israeli-prime-minister-help-free-more-cap/embed

Medics in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah said at least 12 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded, while in Rafah in the south, an Israeli air attack on a house left at least four people dead.

About 19,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7. Israel says 1,147 people were killed on its territory that day.

Meanwhile, Israel has also ramped up its artillery shelling in southern Gaza, hitting the cities of Khan Younis and Rafah, where the majority of displaced Palestinians are sheltering.

Starving Palestinians loot aid trucks as desperation mounts in Gaza’s Rafah

The stepping up of bombardments in the south has worsened the humanitarian situation, with starving people scrambling for food and water, grabbing them from aid trucks in desperation.

Israel on Sunday said it will reopen the Karem Abu Salem Crossing in the east but it is unclear whether supplies have crossed through there yet.

The United Nations estimates that 1.9 million people – about 80 percent of Gaza’s population – have been displaced by the war.

“I would not be surprised if people start dying of hunger, or a combination of hunger, disease, weak immunity,” said Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.

Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies

 from thefreeonline by Mike Capuzzo at Childrens Health Defense via Tales from the Conspiratum

A new Canadian government report reveals a 300% rise in “unspecified causes” of death from 2019-2022 as unknown causes climbed to the fifth leading cause of death in Canada. Some health experts said the stark increase should trigger an investigation into whether the deaths are linked to COVID-19 vaccines.

As life expectancy plummets in Canada, a new government report claims “unspecified causes” have become the fifth leading cause of death in the country after cancer, heart disease, COVID-19 and accidents.

According to the Statistics Canada report, “unspecified causes” in 2022 passed strokes, aneurysms, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, asthma, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, Alzheimer’s and suicide as causes of death.

Statistics Canada, also known as StatCan, released the report on Nov. 27 in The Daily, the agency’s online news bulletin. 

The report generated a slew of nearly identical headlines — provided by Canada’s national news service — in Canada’s leading newspapers along the lines of this one in the Toronto Sun: “Life expectancy for Canadians fell for third straight year in 2022, StatCan says,” followed by the subhead: “More people died of COVID-19 in 2022 than in any other year since the pandemic began, report says.”

Andre Picard, health columnist at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, Canada’s newspaper of record, called the life expectancy drop — to 81.3 years in 2022 from 82.3 years in 2019 — “a big deal.”

“It’s only the second time this sharp a drop has happened in Canada in the past century,” Picard said. “In fact, life expectancy has been climbing steadily for decades: 71 in 1960, 75 in 1980, 79 in 2000 and 82.3 in 2019.”

COVID-19 deaths in Canada decreased to 14,466 in 2021 from 16,313 in 2020, the report shows. Canada is on track for about 7,000 COVID-19 deaths in 2023, Picard said. 

COVID-19 deaths can’t account for Canada’s 7.3 % increase in total deaths in 2022 compared with 2021 — or for the country’s 17% increase in total deaths over the historic norm of 2019, or the historic drop in life expectancy in Canada and worldwide, Picard said.  

Like many mainstream journalists and public health officials in the U.S. examining the U.S. drop in life expectancy, Picard blamed chronic diseases, drug overdoses, opioid deaths, smoking, unhealthy diets and “indifference” for the decline in Canada. “There are virtually no mitigation measures like masking any more, and vaccination rates have fallen sharply,” he wrote.

 Pierre Kory’s Medical Musings | Pierre Kory, MD, MPA | Substack

But Drs. Pierre Kory and Peter McCullough told The Defender they believe the most important and startling fact contained in the report is the 300% increase from 2019 to 2022 in “unspecified causes” of death in Canada.

McCullough, a highly published cardiologist who developed a widely used early treatment protocol for COVID-19, said the dramatic rise in deaths from “unspecified causes” in Canada represents a seismic and disturbing shift in Western medicine.

“Prior to the pandemic, death in Western countries was well understood,” McCullough said, with 40% due to known cardiovascular, 40% due to terminal neoplastic disease (cancer) and 20% due to other known causes such as homicide, suicide, drug overdoses and accidents.”

Continue reading “Canada Reports 300% Increase in ‘Unspecified Causes’ of Death, Sparking Calls for Investigation”