The International Feline Federation (FIFe) has weighed in on the Ukraine crisis, banning Russian-owned cats from competing in its shows as a sanction for Moscow’s military attack on the former Soviet republic.
“The FIFe executive board is shocked and horrified that the army of the Russian Federation invaded the Republic of Ukraine and started a war,” the Paris-based federation said on Tuesday. The group added that it “cannot just witness these atrocities and do nothing.”
As a result, cats belonging to Russian residents will be banned from entry at FIFe shows. In addition, no cats bred in Russia can be imported and registered in a FIFe pedigree book, the group said.
No cat belonging to exhibitors living in Russia may be entered at any FIFe show outside Russia, regardless of which organization these exhibitors hold their membership in.
The sanctions will remain in place through at least May and may be extended, presumably depending on what transpires in Ukraine. FIFe said it will use some of its budget to support cat breeders and fanciers in Ukraine. “Our Ukrainian fellow feline fanciers are desperately trying to take care of their cats and other animals in these trying circumstances,” the federation said.
The second round of peace talks between representatives from Kiev and Moscow has kicked off in Belarus as Russia’s armed forces continue to attack Ukraine.
On Thursday, the head of the Servant of the People party in Ukraine’s parliament, David Arakhamia, revealed that discussions were due to take place shortly.
Arakhamia, who is serving as a member of Ukraine’s delegation during the peace discussions, issued a statement detailing what Kiev is intending to achieve from the negotiations with Moscow.
According to him, the “minimum” Ukraine is seeking to gain from the crunch talks is the guarantee of humanitarian corridors, while everything else “depends on the circumstances.”
Moscow’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, said on Wednesday that the two sides will discuss a ceasefire during their talks in Belovezhskaya Pushcha near the Polish-Belarusian border.
Representatives from Kiev and Moscow first met for five hours on Monday in Gomel Region, Belarus. Initially, Kiev rejected a proposal for the talks to be hosted in the former Soviet republic, accusing Minsk of supporting Russia’s incursion.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed dissatisfaction with the first round of the peace talks, insisting that “so far, we do not have the result that we would like to achieve.”
“Russia stated its position. We voiced our counterarguments [on how to] end the war. We received some signals. When the delegation returns to Kiev, we will analyze what we have heard and then we will decide how to proceed to the second round of negotiations,” he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine last Thursday following requests from the leaders of the recently recognized Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk (DPR) People’s Republics for “help in repelling the Ukrainian military aggression.”
Putin insisted that there are no plans to occupy the former Soviet republic’s territory, arguing that the objective of the attack is the“demilitarization” and “denazification” of its neighbor.
LA VICEPRESIDENTA SEGUNDA DEL GOBIERNO Y MINISTRA DE TRABAJO Y ECONOMÍA SOCIAL, YOLANDA DÍAZ, HA VUELTO A DEFENDER HOY QUE ESPAÑA ENVÍE MATERIAL ARMAMENTÍSCO OFENSIVO A UCRANIA, DESTACANDO QUE EL LIDERAZGO EN LA POLÍTICA EXTERIOR LE CORRESPONDE AL PRESIDENTE DEL GOBIERNO. SUBRAYÓ QUE PESE AL ENVÍO, NUNCA VAN A ABANDONAR LA VÍA DIPLOMÁTICA Y LAS […]
In support of lunatics in charge of the Washington asylum, the NYT and other MSM provide press agent services for their crimes of war and against humanity — at home and abroad.
According to Times fake news, preeminent peace and stability advocate Vladimir Putin is an “aggressor (sic).”
Citing nonexistent US intelligence, the Big Lie about hostile Russian intentions against Ukraine persists.
No satellite images show Russian hordes massed near Ukraine’s border.
No evidence of a planned Russian “false flag attack” or other provocation exists to invade Ukraine or for any other reason.
No Kremlin plot to install a pro-Russian government in Kiev.
No Kremlin “information warfare” on all things Ukraine and the West.
No Russian breaches of international law of any kind.
Yet NYT fake news falsely reported otherwise.
Like countless earlier Russia bashing reports, its latest one reads like a White House, Pentagon, CIA and/or State Department press…
Ukraine is releasing jailed far right murderers and criminals with a military background so they can join the fight against Russia’s “special operation” in the country, an official in Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office confirmed on Sunday.
Katya Handziuk
Katya was doused with acid in July 2018 on a street outside her home and died in the hospital with severe burns 3 months lateer, still demanding justice, after suffering 12 operations for terrible burns .
Sergey Torbin, a former combat veteran, was one of the inmates released. Torbin previously fought in the conflict with the DPR and LPR. He was jailed for six years and six months in 2018 leading the gang who murdered Kateryna Viktorivna Handziuk a Ukrainian civil rights and anti-corruption activist.
Sinyuk said Torbin has now handpicked former inmates for his squad after his early release. Impunity has become normal in Ukraine, Kiev is a capital of the global far-right, inviting neo-Nazis and white supremacists from around the world to visit.
One of the men picked is former combat veteran Dmitry Balabukha, who was sentenced to nine years in jail for stabbing a man to death at a bus stop after an argument in 2018.
Katya is one of hundreds attacked or killed by legalised Ukranian nazis. Many victims are trans, minority or LGBT. In her case she had campaigned against rampant corruption, but probably received especial cruelty for being a woman and allegedly speaking in support of ethnic Russian victims besieged in Donbass.
During her whistle-blower career, she exposed everything from local police corruption to illegal logging operations. Katya’s photo, even when dying disfigured in hospital was published, especially by the BBC. But consider why we cannot find a photo of Sergey Torbin on the internet as he now walks free.
Sergey and his followers had participated in the 8 year siege of Donbass by Ukranian army and volunteer nazi battalions in which nearly 15,000 people died before Russia finally invaded on 24 Feb 2022. .He was only finally arrested for killing Katya after a huge internatiional public campaign for justice.
Far right nazis and thugs are now admired in male popular culture, attacking leftists, gays and feminists is accepted as nationalist sentiment and monuments to Ukranian nazi leaders, including Stepan Bandera the ‘Ukranian Hitler’ have been erected around the country, since the 2014 “coup”.
The climate of impunity is aided by ‘carter blanche’ support from the US, EU and IMF. Former US Ambassador to UkraineMarie Yovanovitch mentioned in testimony on 15 November 2019 before the United States House Permanent Select Committee that she was honoring Kateryna Handziuk on 25 April, when she received a phone call from Washington, DC ordering her to leave Ukraine.[13]
“I’m far from the first person who’s fallen victim to Ukrainian far-right groups, nor anywhere near the most serious”..said attacked US journalist Michael Colborne. “Their members have attacked Roma camps multiple times, even killing a Roma man earlier this year. They’ve stormed local city council meetings to intimidate elected officials. They’ve marched by the thousands through the streets to commemorate WWII-era nationalist formations who took part in ethnic cleansing. They’ve acted as vigilantes with little to no negative reaction from state authorities. Ex President Petro Poroshenko and almost 1,500 neo-Nazis and friends threw a two-day Hitler-salute-fest. “.
Sinyuk said Torbin handpicked former inmates for his squad after his early release. He added that another ex-serviceman, Dmitry Balabukha, sentenced to nine years in jail for stabbing a man to death at a bus stop after an argument in 2018, had also been released.
*****
Note: We don’t publish the above to defend any Russian attacks on civilians.
But we do signal the ignorant hypocrisy of those who shout for peace, call Russians nazis and applaud the dozens of states now shipping free armaments to the Ukraine military, despite their history of corrupt killings, impunity and attempted genocide of minorities like the Russian miners in Donbass.
Bill Laurance, James Cook University Campaigns and boycotts get the attention of large corporations, because they hit them where it hurts: their reputation and market share.
#Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife Tweet In October 2000, I was […]
In October 2000, I was driving through downtown Boise, Idaho, and nearly careered off the road. Just in front of me was a giant inflatable Godzilla-like dinosaur, well over 30m tall. It was towering over the headquarters of Boise Cascade, one of North America’s biggest wood products corporations. For years, the firm had been tangling with environmental groups who blamed the company’s logging practices for declines in the extent of old-growth forests across the globe.
Brands aren’t your friends- Subverting London
The huge inflatable reptile was the inspired idea of the Rainforest Action Network, who used it to label Boise Cascade a dinosaur of the timber industry. The blow-up dinosaur was headline news across the United States and the label stuck. Although Boise Cascade tried to deny it was yielding to environmental pressure, it ultimately agreed to phase out all of its old-growth wood products.
Environmental campaigns such as this one have become an increasingly important arrow in the quiver of conservation groups, for a very good reason. The world has become hyper-corporatised and globalised, with the result that, as I reported in 2008, deforestation is now substantially driven by major industries rather than by the exploits of poor people trying to make a living off the land.
Ferrero and Nutella responsible for palm oil deforestation despite supposedly using “sustainable” palm oil. Image: Charlie Hebdo
Last-ditch tactics
Boycotts are typically a last resort. The Rainforest Action Network tried for years to nudge, cajole and finally pressure Boise Cascade to phase out old-growth products, without success. Its gentler tactics worked fine with other big corporations such as Home Depot and Lowe’s, but it took a gigantic dinosaur to get Boise Cascade’s attention.
It is of great importance to resort to female genealogies to find lines of action that allow us to study the processes of change from the perspective of women. These genealogies help to clarify social phenomena that have transformed our lives at the present time and help to reconstruct the milestones and the women who contributed to that change.
It is essential to name women, build the genealogy in ways of doing and being among the founding texts of the feminist movement, to recover the historical voices of women and transmit them in formal and informal education.
The socio-cultural performance of women is not always the product of exceptionality, but rather stems from a trajectory that should be highlighted. We intend to reconstruct a part of the genealogy of anarchist feminism through three women: Louise Michel, Teresa Claramunt and Emma Goldman.
Louise Michel (1830-1905) belonged to a generation older than Teresa Claramunt (1862-1931) and Emma Goldman (1869-1940). The three met, although they never spent long together.
Teresa met Louise in 1897, both had been tried by separate Military Courts and deported. Louise, the ‘Paris Commune’ woman had returned to France after her deportation in 1880 and, finally, she went into exile in England in 1890. Claramunt along with twenty-seven other people, despite being declared innocent in the Montjuïc Trial, were deported to England in 1897.
When they arrived in London, after disembarking in Liverpool, Louise Michel[1], Fernando Tarrida and the Committee for the Protection of Victims of Spanish Atrocities[2] were waiting for them.
Teresa must have known of Louise because her great friend Teresa Mañé (who met with the deportees shortly after) was one of the promoters of Michel’s work in Spain. Perhaps for this reason, her daughter Federica Montseny met and was interested in the Commune and in Louise Michel [3].
Federica Montseny
Both were excellent communicators both at rallies and through articles in the labor press. Both carried out multiple propaganda tours spreading The Idea and were linked to newspapers such as El Productor in the case of Claramunt and Le Libertaire in the case of Michel. Their personal lives were difficult, especially when they stopped being young, due to the little income they had.
The parallelism of the stories of these two women we can assume must have linked them, despite the brevity of their meeting, in a feeling of empathy and solidarity, in addition to explaining why Teresa was called the ‘Spanish Louise Michel’.
Emma and Louise also met in England in 1895. Emma traveled to Europe to study in Vienna and her first stop from the United States was in London where she met various anarchist personalities including Louise (indeed that was her goal in visiting England as she says herself).
It was also a brief meeting since Emma went on to Vienna where she studied a midwifery course and another on childhood illnesses.
Emma’s impressions in her autobiography [4] make clear the great admiration she felt for her and for her intervention in the Paris Commune: «Louise Michel had stood out for her love of humanity, for her great fervor and courage» [ 5].
Her physical description made it clear that Michel was a woman aged by all the hardships she had experienced (she was sixty-five years old and not sixty-two as Goldman wrote): “She was bony, emaciated and looked older than she really was (…) ; but her eyes were full of youth and spirit, and her smile was so tender that she won my heart immediately »[6].
When Emma met Louise she wondered: «how could there be someone who did not see her charm» despite the fact that she did not care about her appearance and showed great disinterest in herself: «her dress was threadbare , the hat was very old. Everything she wore of hers did not fit her »[7].
Let us not forget that Emma was a young woman of twenty-six who looked admiringly at Louise but that she must have seen her as an older woman. It was her admiration for the old ‘Comunera’ (woman Commune member) that transformed the realistic impression of her into a completely different, almost mystical feeling [8]:
«(…) Her whole being was illuminated by an inner light. I was quickly succumbing to the charm of her radiant personality, so irresistible in her force, so touching in her childlike simplicity. The afternoon I spent with Louise was an experience unlike anything that had ever happened to me before in my life. Her hand in mine, the tender touch of her hand on my head, her words of affection from her and intimate camaraderie from her made my soul expand, ascend towards the spheres of beauty where she dwelled » .
Emma and Teresa met in Spain during a brief visit that Emma made between December 1928 and January 1929, to gather information.
It was the Austrian historian Max Nettlau (1865-1944), an anarchist intellectual with an encyclopedic culture, devoted to the study of the history of anarchism and the life of Bakunin, who encouraged his friend Emma, with whom he had been in constant correspondence since they met in London in 1900, to visit a country that had captivated him.
Spain was not an unknown country for her. Her anarchist internationalism had led her from a very young age to want to know the situation of her comrades from the rest of the world.
In the United States he participated in various campaigns against the repressive policy of the governments of the monarchy of Alfonso XIII, specifically as a result of the brutal torture of the prisoners of Montjuic (she probably knew Claramunt as a result of this campaign), and as a result of the execution of the pedagogue Ferrer y Guardia after the Tragic Week in Barcelona in 1909.
The Free 