Image gallery with latest news

 

 

 

 

 

 Ukrainian POW telling how they have been ordered to kill Russian-ethnic civilians in eastern Ukraine Donbass region

 

Enough said for now....

Bruce

‘People’s Arms Embargo’ at Travis AFB in California

 

By Rick Sterling

Seventy-five protesters gathered under threatening skies at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California at 6:30 am on Wednesday, November 20. Their mission: to speak out and briefly interrupt the shipment of weapons to Israel from this air base.

For 90 minutes, they showed banners such as “Stop Arms for War Crimes” and “Stop Travis: No US Weapons for Genocide. ” They delayed traffic on the busy six-lane roadway into the base by frequently pressing the button to allow pedestrian crossing.  Fliers were handed out to receptive drivers. The flyers asked “Why are we blocking access to Travis Air Base and messing up your day?”.  It was explained that while November 20 is World Children’s Day, weapons to Israel from Travis are being used to kill children. Bombs loaded onto planes at Travis and other US air bases have killed many thousands of children. 

David Vidmar grew up on Travis Air Base. He said, “I am participating in the People’s Arms Embargo to honor my father as he would have been sickened by the indiscriminate targeting, slaughter and starvation of Gazan children and women in Israel’s genocide.” 

In the second stage of the protest, protesters completely blocked the roadways into the base. Ultimately, they shut down all of the entry points to the base before Fairfield police arrived en masse and arrested those blocking the roadway. A total of 28 persons were arrested for blocking the north, south, and main entry gates to Travis AFB.

Some of  those arrested were processed in a few hours.  Ten persons were still in Solano County Jail six hours after the action. It is not known when they will be released. They include Toby Blome, David Hartsough and others who were organizers of this action. 

The protesters have been charged with blocking the road and “not following a lawful order”. 

Many people globally believe the US is violating international law by continuing to provide weapons  for what the International Court of Justice describes as “plausible genocide”.  One year ago many prominent US State Department and USAID officials criticized the Biden policy of blanket support for Israel. Yet it continues unabated.  Today’s action at Travis AFB highlights the discrepancy.

~ Rick Sterling is an independent journalist based in the SF Bay Area. He can be reached at rsterling1@gmail.com.

New U.S. missile base in Poland: Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse

 

The US just officially opened its new Aegis Ashore missile base in Poland (after nine years of construction) to go along with a similar one recently opened in Romania.

These launch platforms (same as what is found on Navy Aegis destroyers built in Bath, Maine) can fire either nuclear-capable Tomahawk cruise missiles (the first strike sword) or SM-3 interceptor 'missile defense' systems (the shield). 

According to Simplicius:

This facility has the infamous dual-use MK41 vertical launchers (VLS) which fire the defensive SM-3 missiles, but are also capable of launching long-range nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles, amongst other things. The Rezidkowo base is only 160km from Kaliningrad and within Tomahawks’ range even of Moscow.

Russia’s now-unveiled Oreshnik [hazelnut] is essentially a direct counterweight to the Aegis Ashore.

So the US has created the ability to launch a first-strike with Tomahawk cruise missiles into Russia and the American people know virtually nothing about this 2024 Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse. What does any thinking person expect Russia to do? Imagine if Russia or China built a similar facility in Mexico or Canada - Washington would go ballistic!

As the video above reveals this new US launch facility is now a target. 

 

These kind of intermediate-range missile systems used to be banned by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) signed by US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. The US pulled out of the treaty in 2019.

The US withdrew from the landmark 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002. That treaty banned missile defense systems. So it is clear that the Pentagon has been developing this offensive strategy for some time to encircle Russia and China with these 'sword and shield' missile systems on the land and at sea using Aegis destroyer platforms.

In July 2024 NATO announced that the US would, starting in 2026, deploy nuclear capable intermediate range missiles in Germany.

Of course this has led Russia and China to develop new missile technologies that could evade and overwhelm the US 'sword and shield' systems as we just witnessed Moscow fire the Oreshnik [hazelnut] missile that hit a vast Ukrainian military production facility in eastern Ukraine.

So the US in effect has created a new nuclear arms race due to its arrogant exceptionalism which moves the world closer and closer to WW3 and possibly nuclear Armageddon.

Bruce 

U.S. foreign aid is embarrassing itself

Caltrain is sending its retired diesel fleet to Lima, Peru. The locomotives Caltrain is selling to the city of Lima are 40 years old. To send the trains to Lima for further use, Caltrain had to first procure a waiver from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District so the trains could still return to service.

Moon of Alabama

Three days ago the President of China Xi Jinping opened a Chinese financed a deep-water port in Chancay, Peru.

LIMA, Nov 14 (Reuters) - Chinese President Xi Jinping launched a week-long diplomatic blitz of South America on Thursday by inaugurating a massive deep-water port in Peru, a $1.3 billion investment by Beijing as it seeks to expand trade and influence on the continent.

Xi and Peruvian President Dina Boluarte participated on Thursday by video link in the opening of the Chancay port, about 80 kilometres (48 miles) north of Lima on the Pacific Ocean, and signed a deal to widen an existing free trade agreement.

Xi said that Chancay, a 15-berth, deep-water port, was the successful start of a "21st century maritime Silk Road" and part of China's Belt and Road Initiative, its modern revival of the ancient Silk Road trading route.

The U.S. is, according to Newsweek, considering Peru to be in its "backyard" (for the record: the distance between Washington DC and Lima, Peru, is 5,700 kilometer):

However, a Chinese state-owned enterprise running a deepwater port so close to U.S. soil has Washington worried. The project marks another significant expansion of China's presence in a part of the world the U.S. considers its sphere of influence.

"On the big geostrategic issues, the Peruvian government is not sufficiently focused on analyzing the benefits and threats to the country," an anonymous U.S. official told the Financial Times late last year.

U.S. Southern Command chief Army General Laura Richardson characterized China's infrastructure projects across the Caribbean, Central and South America as a security threat. "They're on the 20-yard line, in the red zone to our homeland," Richardson told Newsweek last year, referencing China's closer proximity.

Not to be outdone by China's generous investment the U.S. decided to publicly counter it. A day after Xi opened the port megaproject U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken dropped into Lima:

Secretary Antony Blinken @SecBlinken - 2:28 UTC · Nov 17, 2024

Today we announced that the United States will support the city of Lima in building a new passenger train line that will expand access to reliable and affordable transportation for over 200,000 people every single day.

In his speech Blinken said:

“Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance.” Paul Simon, one of our great poets, wrote that line in one of his songs, and I think it speaks powerfully to each of us. Trains connect people. They bring communities together. They take distances down between us. And they are not just a symbol, but the practical manifestation of possibilities – the possibilities that come when we connect to each other. They’re so much a part of the national mythology of the United States, our own extraordinary construction project. And I’m so grateful today to be part of this project in helping create greater connectivity here in Peru.

And so this is an exciting day in our partnership: The United States will support the City of Lima as it develops the new passenger train line that’s going to connect downtown to the eastern suburbs. The Caltrain rail system in California, as you’ve heard already, will contribute more than a hundred high-quality railcars and engines, and American companies will provide over 50 percent of the services for this project and the supplies for the project, from signaling equipment to railroad tracks to engineering and design expertise.

Caltrain? Why Caltrain?

Caltrain finds international buyer for retired diesel fleet - SFGate

Caltrain is sending its retired diesel fleet to Lima, Peru, where it will have a second chance at life by providing commuter rail service. On Saturday, the U.S. Department of State, Lima representatives and several world leaders will celebrate the next stage for the trains while gathering for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in the Peruvian capital.
...
“These trains have a long and proud legacy of service that we’re proud to pass along to the people of Peru,” Caltrain Board Chair Dev Davis said in a news release. “The F40s hold a special place in the heart of train enthusiasts, and there’s no better task for them than to keep helping people get where they need to go.”

Caltrain received $6.32 million from the deal, which involved selling 90 passenger cars and 19 diesel locomotives. Sam Sargent, Caltrain’s director of strategy and policy, told SFGATE on Friday that there were other buyers interested in the fleet, but the department was drawn to the offer from the Municipality of Lima, Peru, since it wanted to purchase the fleet wholesale.

The locomotives Caltrain is selling(!) to the city of Lima are 40 years old. As are the passenger cars they will be pulling. The locomotives' exhaust fuming engines had been made inoperable to get funding for the new electric trains:

To send the trains to Lima for further use, Caltrain had to first procure a waiver from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District so the trains could still return to service.

The people in Lima will surely notice how much more the U.S. is caring about its 'backyard' than China is.

Douglas Macgregor at his best

 

COL. Douglas Macgregor on Netanyahu Arrest Warrant!

PLUS - Russia fires first ICBM in combat for the first time in history. 

Galloway: 'Biden fit enough to start WW3'

 

How Biden mistook the nuclear football for a chamber pot. 

OAPs' stolen coal. Torpedoing the Trump battleship. And Russia's on the march.

Expanding provocations: Brits role in Ukraine war

 

SouthFront

This video features a review of the UK's role in the proxy war in Ukraine aimed at Russia.  

From blocking early negotiations to end the war to constant British demands that Ukraine implement strategies that failed - one after the other.

Of course the US, Germany, France and other NATO nations also played huge roles in this failed operation.

In addition mercenaries from across the world were continually sent to Ukraine to augment their beleaguered troops. 

And as we now see with the long-range missiles aimed inside of Russian territory, these so-called allies of Ukraine have armed them to the teeth ensuring maximum profits for western military  corporations.

Then we have western corporations like Monsanto, Cargill, Blackrock and others that are buying up large parts of Ukraine.

The main goal is to inflict maximum damage on Russia, and this can only be achieved by weakening it from within. That is why the political and information confrontation is so important for the puppet Kiev regime, which is fiercely fighting using the weapons of fakes and provocations, including bloody operations on the ground that do not make any military sense like in the Kursk region of Russia where Ukraine has lost more than 30,000 troops. 

The West, which has found itself in a desperate situation, is trying to put Moscow on time pressure while forcing it to give instant responses to any provocation.

"American servicemen are involved in [ATACMS] missile guidance... and coordinating their flights to deliver the strike. We can say this with complete confidence," Alexander Mikhailov, head of Russia's Bureau of Military-Political Analysis, told Sputnik.

If the Russian military does not respond to the recent strikes of ATACMS (range 190 miles) in the Bryansk region and now UK supplied Storm Shadow missiles (range of 560 kilometers) in Kursk and Crimea, Moscow risks suffering a severe image defeat. The West expects that by not responding, the Kremlin will lose confidence and this will fuel internal destabilization in the country.

On the other hand, any response to the western escalation will complicate Moscow’s relations with the United States, in particular with Trump, who is coming back to power. The sharp escalation of the confrontation means that some of the elite clans (neo-cons) of the US warmongers are out of control and playing their own dangerous and provocative game. 

This situation could easily spiral out of control.

Note: Actually this graphic is old. The US has sent about $180 billion to Ukraine so far with billions more sent from EU nations.

US vetoed another U.N. resolution for ceasefire in Gaza

 

On a bridge in Asheville, North Carolina. Banners made by Ken Jones.

UNITED NATIONS, November 20. 

The United States has used its veto right and blocked a UN Security Council draft resolution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a demand for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in the Gaza Strip prepared by the organization’s ten non-permanent members.

Fourteen of the 15 members of the Security Council voted in favor of the document. This is the fifth time that the United States has blocked resolutions providing for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip since tensions escalated in the Middle East last October.

The resolution was drafted by ten non-permanent members of the Security Council and consists of nine paragraphs, the first of which calls for an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire respected by all parties. The document also calls for the release of all hostages held in the enclave, respect for international law by all parties, and humanitarian access to the civilian population of Gaza. The draft resolution also includes a clause stating that if the document is adopted, the UN Secretary General should submit a written report on the implementation of the resolution to the Security Council within three weeks.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, a total of 44,000 Palestinians have been killed and 104,000 injured in the enclave since tensions escalated last October. 

Jewish professor fired for anti-Zionist posts

 

The Electronic Intifada

Across the US, students and faculty are continuing to resist repressive measures by university administrations intended to stifle or even criminalize speech in support of Palestinian rights, as the genocide in Gaza continues.

Along with elite US institutions calling riot cops on their own students who have been holding sit-in protests, or attempting to prevent students from holding protests altogether, some universities have tried to categorize the political ideology of Zionism as a protected identity class in order to define anti-Zionist speech as racist hate speech.

“As long as I’ve been a teacher, I’ve been teaching about Palestine – it’s always been either central or integrated into the work that I do,” Maura Finkelstein told The Electronic Intifada Podcast.

Finkelstein, a scholar of anthropology and a writer, taught at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania for nine years.

She had been teaching a course on the anthropology of Palestine, a class that she says had been approved by the college.

But even though she was tenured, she was fired in May 2024 over her social media posts in support of Palestinian rights and against the political ideology of Zionism – a move that has been seen as a warning to other anti-genocide professors.

The firing followed months of targeted harassment by Israel lobby groups and individuals who pressured the university to fire Finkelstein, accusing her of “Jew hatred” over her anti-Zionist principles. Finkelstein is Jewish.

The Intercept reported that Finkelstein “was the subject of a campaign of thousands of anonymous, bot-generated emails sent every minute for over 24 hours to the school’s administrators – as well as local news outlets and politicians – demanding the professor’s removal.”

The college administration told Finkelstein that “numerous families of students had called to express concern about her position,” The Intercept notes. “A Change.org petition started in late October by unnamed ‘Muhlenberg College alumni and supporters’ called for Finkelstein’s firing over allegedly ‘pro-Hamas’ rhetoric; it gained over 8,000 signatures.”

Finkelstein told The Electronic Intifada that one of her social media posts – a repost to her personal account of a statement about refusing to normalize Zionism by the Palestinian American poet Remi Kanazi – instigated condemnation by a Muhlenberg student who had never attended her class.

“Because the student identified as a Zionist, and because the student believed that Zionism and Judaism were the same, [the student claimed that] I was violating the equal opportunity non-discrimination policy that would essentially be denying the student access to an education,” Finkelstein said.

She explained that even though the student did not know her, “the student assumed from the social media posts that they would not be safe in my class. It went through a three-and-a-half-months-long investigation, it went through various faculty, staff and administrative panels, and I was told that I was terminated for cause, which is immediately no access to severance.”

“Perfect collision”

Finkelstein says that according to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), she is the first tenured professor to be fired since October 2023 over support for Palestinian rights.

“Of course, there were cases in the past,” she notes, citing professor Steven Salaita’s firing by the University of Illinois in 2014, as well as “countless adjuncts, visiting assistant professors, lecturers, other contingent faculty who have lost their contracts, who’ve lost their jobs without the same kind of foundation that would cause outrage.”

There is a fear, she says, for academics who are being sanctioned now “that if they go public with the story, they’ll never work in higher ed [education] again. And I think that that’s a real threat.”

With her own case, Finkelstein explains, it crystallizes at least two of the big crises in higher education right now.

One crisis is the “constant erosion of federal funding, of federal support [that] has created these institutions so that they’re completely, or almost completely, dependent on tuition and donor support,” which creates a financial model that “isn’t actually about education, this is about the accumulation of resources,” she says.

The second is that administrators are in a position where they “don’t know what Judaism is. They don’t know what Zionism is. They probably actually don’t know much about the decisions they’re making. What they do know is [that] if they alienate their financial base, they will collapse.”

Finkelstein says that she understands why some professors are scared to speak up in defense of Palestine and potentially lose their jobs. But, she adds, her colleagues should not self-censor.

“We all need to be talking about Palestine. We all need to be teaching about Palestine because, in an ideal world, they can’t fire us all.”