Author: thefreeonline

from southfront.org 25.04.2022 shared with thanks

A small metal dart, called fléchette, found embedded in the body of man killed in Bucha.

Forensic doctors discover fléchettes – rarely used in modern warfare – in bodies found in mass graves in Bucha, “The Guardian” reported.

Dozens of civilians who allegedly died during presence of the Russian army at the Ukrainian city of Bucha were killed by tiny metal arrows from shells of a type fired by artillery, forensic doctors claimed. Despite the anti-Russian point of view presented in the research, the results show that these were the AFU who shelled civilians in Bucha. Russian forces deployed in Bucha could not shell on their own positions. Thus, the civilians were killed during the clashes by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Pathologists and coroners who are carrying out postmortems on bodies found in mass graves in the region north of Kyiv, where Russian forces have been accused of atrocities, said they had found small metal darts, called fléchettes, embedded in people’s heads and chests.

“We found several really thin, nail-like objects in the bodies of men and women and so did others of my colleagues in the region,” Vladyslav Pirovskyi, a Ukrainian forensic doctor, told “The Guardian”. “It is very hard to find those in the body, they are too thin. The majority of these bodies come from the Bucha-Irpin region.”

Experts from the forensic department of France’s national gendarmerie and Ukrainian doctors carrying bodies of civilians killed in Bucha.

Independent weapons experts who reviewed pictures of the metal arrows found in the bodies confirmed that they were fléchettes, an anti-personnel weapon widely used during the first world war.

These small metal darts are contained in tank or field gun shells. Each shell can contain up to 8,000 fléchettes. Once fired, shells burst when a timed fuse detonates and explodes above the ground.

Free West Media | April 25, 2022

More and more food processing plants are going up in flames in the US. Sixteen such incidents have been recorded so far. The background is unclear, but terrorism is being ruled out.

The fact is, however, that the basic needs of the population are massively threatened in some places by these attacks on infrastructure while authorities downplay the incidents.

– April 21st, 2022 by squat.net from the canary .. shared with thanks

UK anarchist Toby Shone was put on trial for terrorism last year. The charges – which were never proven – related to the 325nostate.net anarchist website. Toby was arrested in November 2020 in the Forest of Dean in Southwest England.

The prosecution against Toby was part of a wider police operation known as ‘Operation Adream’. The original charges were that the 325 website – which published reports of direct action – contained material ‘that would be useful to terrorists’, and that the site fundraised for ‘terrorist activities’.

The case is comparable with the 1997 Green Anarchist/Animal Liberation Front – or GANDALF – trial’, which accused the editors of Green Anarchist magazine and the Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group newsletter of “unlawfully inciting persons unknown to commit criminal damage”. However, Operation Adream went one step further by charging Toby with terrorism.

Toby told The Canary that “the implications of this case do not only concern anarchists”, but should be a warning to anyone who “wants to see actual social, political or environmental change”.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) eventually offered no evidence in relation to the terrorism case, and Toby was found not guilty.

However, he was convicted of possession of a small quantity of drugs with intent to supply, and was sentenced to three years and 9 months in prison.

Now, the Counter Terrorism Unit want to use the drugs conviction to apply for a Serious Crime Prevention Order (SCPO). The SCPO will enable the police to control his use of computers, bank accounts and other electronic devices for five years after he is released from prison. They can apply to renew the order indefinitely.

SCPO orders can be imposed by courts on people who have been convicted of ‘serious’ crimes. The orders are designed to severely limit people’s freedom by – in the words of the CPS – imposing “conditions considered appropriate for the stated purpose of protecting the public from serious crime”.

The CPS lists the crimes that qualify for the imposition of a SCPO order on its website. The list includes “drug trafficking”, but the crime has to be deemed by the court to be ‘serious’ in order for a SCPO to be imposed.

The application for the SCPO is due to be heard on 6 May at Bristol Crown Court. A solidarity demonstration is planned at the court at 8.30am.

Support Toby poster – https://www.brightonabc.org.uk/images/toby_may_6_demo.pdf
A poster in support of Toby – by Brighton ABC
Imprisoned since 2020
Toby was originally imprisoned in Wandsworth and had a hearing at the Old Bailey. His trial was eventually moved back to Bristol, to be tried locally, and Toby was moved to HMP Horfield in Bristol.

Recently Toby was moved again, this time to HMP Parc in Bridgend, after supporters spoke out about targeting and threats made against him by a right-wing prison officer.

The Canary interviewed Toby from his prison cell. He said about Operation Adream:

https://stigmatis.wordpress.com/2022/04/14/protestan-en-ciudad-de-mexico-por-abuso-policial-a-mujeres-en-centro-del-pais/

Members of feminist collectives demonstrated at the Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan in Mexico City (Mexico). EFE/Sashenka Gutiérrez
Mexico City | 13 Apr 2022

Several dozen women demonstrated this Wednesday in Mexico City to denounce that they were recently attacked by the police in Chimalhuacán, a municipality in the State of Mexico, in the center of the country.

“We do not deserve this fear,” claimed one of the women who, like her companions, told the press about the alleged attacks carried out by people dressed in civilian clothes but who, some of them, were carrying long weapons and who attacked them, according to what she says, with partitions and tubes.

The group of women activists were on April 2 in front of the Chimalhuacán Justice Center -a unit belonging to the Attorney General’s Office of the State of Mexico (FGJEM)- accompanying Irene Cervantes, a woman who two years ago denounced that her underage daughter was kidnapped, tortured and raped by police officers of the State of Mexico.

Since she denounced the case, Cervantes, her companions denounced her, she suffers harassment, harassment and even she was allegedly assaulted by police officers.

According to what they reported, on April 1, traffic police arrested the woman alleging that the motorcycle on which she was traveling was stolen. Three hours later she was found battered and missing two teeth.

On April 2, several police officers were detained inside the center, and the activists gathered outside the building to demand that all other people linked to Irene’s case and her daughter’s case be arrested.

According to what they reported, since the afternoon of that day, when around 20 women gathered, they were besieged by several men who said they were not policemen.
Members of feminist collectives demonstrated yesterday at the Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan in Mexico City (Mexico). EFE/Sashenka Gutiérrez

by Wolf Richter • Apr 22, 2022 • 121 Comments

The ECB created the greatest corporate bond bubble ever.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

The end of QE “is very likely to happen in the course of the third quarter with a high probability that it will be early in the quarter if numbers continue to be the way we have seen them,” President Christine Lagarde told CNBC in an interview today.

“But we have to be data dependent and we will be sequential,” she said.

This moves the end of QE to the early part of the third quarter, so July, and maybe August. In the ECB policy statement last week, the ECB only said that QE “should be concluded in the third quarter,” and that had moved the end of QE to September.

With “data dependent” she means the ECB will watch with stunned open mouth how inflation is now raging further and deeper and more insidiously into the economy, tearing up the ECB’s philosophy that NIRP and QE don’t destroy the monetary system.

And with “data dependent” she also means that the tightening schedule will keep getting sped up – as they have been doing it all year – because the inflation data keeps getting worse.

With “sequential” she means that QE will end first before rates are being hiked. So if QE ends early in Q3, rates could be raised starting in Q3, rather than Q4.

And now it’s not just once before year-end. “How much, how many times, remains to be seen,” she said, leaving the number and size of the rate hikes up to our imagination.

This has now been the crescendo all year: Every time someone at the ECB says something, it’s a little more hawkish – if that’s the right term – than before, and everything is getting moved forward. The taper has already been sped up. Now the end of the taper is being further sped up. And the rate hikes are being sped up.

The ECB’s deposit rate is still negative (-0.5%), and some banks are charging their customers, even retail customers, for their deposits, thereby turning interest rates into ECB-inflicted punishment rates.

Now the bets are lining up that the ECB will abandon NIRP this year, and raise its policy rate above 0% before the end of the year, something that ECB Governing Council member Pierre Wunsch suggested this week.

Raging inflation in Europe.

While the raging inflation in the US is terrible, with CPI inflation at 8.5% in March, in numerous EU countries, it is much worse.

In seven of the 29 EU countries, the “harmonized” (calculated the same way for all countries) inflation rate is in the double digits topping out in Lithuania at 15.6%. In four more EU countries, including Spain, the inflation rate is above 9%. Germany’s inflation rate of 7.6% is sending shockwaves through the country.

In many of the non-euro countries in Europe, central banks have for nearly a year jacked up interest rates to slow down the surge of inflation, including some shock-and-awe surprise rate hikes by the Czech National Bank, the National Bank of Poland, and the Central Bank of Iceland (here’s my February update on this). The ECB gas been the laggard.

But this inflation shock is not kidding around:

Greatest corporate bond bubble of all times pops.

The ECB’s NIRP policy, and its policy of buying not only government bonds and housing bonds, but large amounts of corporate bonds — echoed by other central banks in Europe that had similar programs — has created the greatest corporate bond bubble of all times, with even the average euro junk bond yield falling to a ridiculously low 2.1% in November 2017. And still in September 2021, it was back at 2.25%, for an average junk bond!

Posted by Internationalist 360° on April 24, 2022 Rainer Shea

The atomic bomb isn’t the most powerful weapon that the U.S. imperialists have ever used. There’s an even stronger tool that it constantly uses to inflict violence, and that tool is propaganda. It doesn’t merely cause harm to the people it targets, it turns them into monsters. Monsters who are willing to kill their fellow human beings for the benefit of American capital, and believe they’re doing so for a righteous cause.

In Ukraine, the imperialists have done this by indoctrinating their favored ethnic group to hate Russians.

Which is an absurd project on its face, because “Ukrainians” aren’t truly a distinct ethnic group from Russians, and “Ukraine” isn’t truly a separate nation from Russia.

Ukraine is inextricably tied to Russia, with their connection going back centuries. Ukraine is where the concept of Russia began, with the three identities of Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians having originated in the Kievan Rus a millennium ago.