WASHINGTON — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended this week that dairy and poultry farms with infected animals supply protective gear to workers in a bid to stave off human transmission of the H5N1 virus. The challenge now is making it happen.
The CDC has no legal authority to order those protective measures, and health officials in some of the nine states with reported outbreaks in cattle have had little luck getting farmers to take them up on offers of free personal protective equipment for their workers, even as the virus continues to spread. Six additional infected herds were reported yesterday — in Michigan, Idaho, and Colorado — bringing the total to 42.
Texas, the one state with a confirmed human case, in a worker exposed to infected cows, has sent protective gear to some farms — four, to be exact. The state’s health department began offering gloves, masks, goggles, and gowns to dairy farms at the beginning of April, shortly after the state’s first cases were identified. A handful of sites in the Texas panhandle — each with sick cows — accepted them. The state has reported 12 infected herds so far.
“We offered PPE to any interested dairy and only four took us up on the offer. The offer still stands,” Texas Department of State Health Services press officer Lara Anton told STAT in an email.
Similarly, in Idaho, the health department began offering protective gear to farms when federal officials confirmed the flu’s presence in one herd there early last month. They have had no takers. “We have not distributed any PPE thus far,” said AJ McWhorther, a spokesperson for the state health department.
In Michigan, which has now reported 10 herd infections, state officials have left PPE coordination to local governments, meaning there is no real picture of protective measures on the ground. “We are not tracking those PPE distributions from local health departments,” said a health department spokesperson.
The politically touchy recommendation is one of several suggestions the World Bank offers in order to cut climate-harming pollution. | Guillaume Souvant/AFP via Getty Images
Cows and milk are out, chicken and broccoli are in — if the World Bank has its way, that is.
In a new paper, the international financial lender suggests repurposing the billions rich countries spend to boost CO2-rich products like red meat and dairy for more climate-friendly options like poultry, fruits and vegetables. It’s one of the most cost-effective ways to save the planet from climate change, the bank argues.
The politically touchy recommendation — sure to make certain conservatives and European countries apoplectic — is one of several suggestions the World Bank offers to cut climate-harming pollution from the agricultural and food sectors, which are responsible for nearly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions.
“We have to stop destroying the planet as we feed ourselves,” Julian Lampietti, the World Bank’s manager for global engagement in the bank’s agriculture and food global practice, told POLITICO.
The paper comes at a diplomatically strategic moment, as countries signed on to the Paris Agreement — the global pact calling to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — prepare to update their climate plans by late 2025.
With the world needing to accelerate its emissions cuts to keep the Paris deal’s goals alive, the World Bank wants officials to pay more attention to the agriculture and food industries, which the bank says have long been neglected and underfunded.
According to the report, countries must funnel $260 billion each year into those sectors to get serious about erasing their emissions by 2050 — a common goal for developed economies. That’s 18 times more than countries currently invest.
Governments can partly plug the gap by reorienting subsidies for red meat and dairy products toward lower-carbon alternatives, the World Bank says. The switch is one of the most cost-effective ways for wealthy countries — estimated to generate roughly 20 percent of the world’s agri-food emissions — to reduce demand for highly polluting food, it argues.
The result, it adds, would essentially price climate impact into food costs.
“The full cost pricing of animal-sourced food to reflect its true planetary costs would make low-emission food options more competitive,” the report says, stressing that shifting to plant-based diets could save twice as much planet-warming gases as other methods.
Demand for meat and dairy products comprises almost 60 percent of agri-food emissions.
Lampietti warned against too much focus on “what you shouldn’t do,” encouraging more attention “on what you should do.” Food is an “intensely personal choice,” he added, saying he fears that what should be a data-based debate may be turned into a culture war battle.
“The big worry here is that people start using this as a political football,” he said.
There’s been another internal email leak from a Pfizer ‘whistleblower’ to top off the testimony from Pfizer reps to Senator Malcolm Roberts at a recent Senate hearing in Australia. I tend to be more persuaded by the latter, but confirmations are always valuable. Click on the photo below to hear the Pfizer reps admit to this, and interestingly, what they say is almost verbatim what is written in the ‘internal email’.
Pfizer undertook to import a batch of vaccines specifically for the employee vaccination program. Theroux and Hewitt – Pfizer reps. (Forgive me if the names are mis-spelled.)
The vaccine doses to be used for this program are separate and distinct from those committed by Pfizer to governments around the world and will not impact supply to national governments in any way. Pfizer ‘Whistleblower’
Well, that’s a relief. At least us employees in the ‘program’ won’t be diggin’ into the other government-mandated doses. Phew.
What exactly do they mean by separate and distinct? Separate, I can understand. Don’t want to take someone else’s precious shot – you know, favoritism is not allowed in government. But distinct? Huh? How are they distinct? Exactly? Exactly.
Let’s repeat this really clearly.
Separate shots for ’employees’. This necessarily means one of two things: that there were batches that were less harmful than others, or that there were known placebo batches (saline injections – and I mean, true saline injections that would be harmless).
If the former is true, that there is known variation between batches (whatever this means), then the batches were designed this way. If THIS is true, then we have intent on our hands. I still have trouble imagining that they would be capable of varying at will or by demand in a way that would ever be predictably variably harmful. I mean, it seems to me that the manufacturing practices themselves were simply ridiculous in their bug-duggery (think DNA:RNA hybrids/contamination), so if we accept this as reality, how can we accept that they tailored batches to be variably harmful? Perhaps only some of them had the SV40 built into their plasmids for modified mRNA production? I don’t know.
Craig Pardekooper has been devout about batches having variable harms, and Ihavebeenwritingaboutthis for years now to try to understand the mechanisms by which this might be possible. And of course, there is the excellent studypublished by Schmeling et al. that reinforces that different batches are more highly-associated with serious adverse events, but still. How?
In any case, I believe that these ‘reserved batches’ for the Aussie employees were likely saline injections. As in, true saline injections.
After years of many of us trying to crack this egg, please pass on the gravity of this potential reality to whomever is interested in listening.
If there is variable toxicity in these batches of COVID-19 shots, this would also provide an explanation for the variability in AE and SAE presentations. It is very likely however, that other factors are at play. I want to stress this. Variability in harms also comes down to differences in the actual people injected, and most importantly, not only what they were injected with, but how, and if, the contents of the syringe were ‘cloudy’ or ‘clumpy’ or ‘degraded’ or etc…
The more Germany tries to abolish carbon, the worse its economy is getting.
Companies in Germany are shutting down or fleeing elsewhere. Energy prices are through the roof, and are currently among the highest in the world. In short, all that “green” being shoved down the throats of Germans is killing them and their country.
One of the latest employers to leave Germany is automotive supplier IHI, which just announced the closure of its plant at Erfurter Kreuz, Thuringia. Around 300 people are losing their jobs because of this in a region that is already struggling immensely as it is.
In 12 to 15 months, the turbocharger manufacturer will no longer exist, a trend that is spreading to other companies as well.
This particular closure is a direct reflection of Germany’s green policies that are aimed at eliminating internal combustion engines, with turbochargers being outfit for those types of cars. It is all part of the massive shift towards “clean” electric.
“In recent months, several automotive suppliers have had to close their doors or file for insolvency,” one media outlet reported. “This development shows the volatile challenges facing the industry.”
(Related: Germany is fighting back against an EU mandate to ban all gas-fueled vehicles.)
Germany’s economic backbone eroding
Small to medium size enterprises, also known as SMEs, are a dying breed in Germany due to the green transition. And SMEs, by the way, have long served as the backbone of the Germany economy.
Pessimism among SMEs is rising while Germany’s business climate index has fallen to minus 1.4, we now know.
“The business climate index, an important barometer for the mood in small and medium-sized enterprises, fell to an alarming low of minus 1.4 points in February,” the media reported.
“This is the lowest level since the financial crisis 15 years ago. A survey of around 1250 companies conducted by Creditreform Wirtschaftsforschung shows that the majority of respondents forecast a gloomy future for the SME sector.”
The really sad part is that there is almost no chance of Germany recovering from all this. Going into year three of an escalating crisis, the German economy continues its downward trajectory with no apparent end in sight.
Germany’s ruling Socialist-Green coalition government refuses to take any responsibility for the crisis, instead blaming all sorts of other things such as the war in Ukraine, weak construction and industrial production, and “unclear economic policies.”
Then we have the recent shutdown of the last of Germany’s nuclear power plants. The German government lied to the people that these power plants were no longer needed, this not long after experts came to the conclusion that they are still desperately needed.
Coal power plants are also on the chopping block in Germany, which will leave just solar panels and wind turbines to power what was once the economic powerhouse of Europe.
“In 10 years or less, nine-tenths of the population will have left the country because the government destroyed the economy to ‘save the Earth,’” speculated one commenter about what will become of Germany unless it reverses course, and quickly.
The COVID States Program demonstrated ~25% of Americans resisted COVID-19 vaccination. I am constantly being reminded by family, friends, and patients what a relief it was to know declining vaccination was the right medical decision. I wondered if there were any historical parallels.
The smallpox vaccine was variously deployed by doctors in the 19th century using lymphatic fluid from animals or from arm to arm of humans. It could hot have been sterilized from bacteria such as staphylococci, streptococci, tetanus, syphilis, or viruses such as hepatitis B. The dose of cowpox virions could not have been measured or controlled. So there were obvious safety concerns such as fatal iatrogenic infections and great debate over whether the procedure worked at all.
In 2010, Thomas Weber portrayed Alfred Russel Wallace in the context of the public sentiment rising against the smallpox immunization campaign in Britain:
“Alfred Russel Wallace, eminent naturalist and co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection, was a major participant in the antivaccination campaigns in late 19th-century England. Wallace combined social reformism and quantitative arguments to undermine the claims of pro-vaccinationists and had a major impact on the debate. A brief account of Wallace’s background, his role in the campaign, and a summary of his quantitative arguments leads to the conclusion that it is unwarranted to portray Victorian antivaccination campaigners in general as irrational and anti-science. Public health policy can benefit from history, but the proper context of the evidence used should always be kept in mind.”
4) by the early 1900’s about 25% of the public was refusing smallpox vaccination,
5) Weber concludes it was wrong to portray Victorian antivaccination campaigners as “anti-science.”
Why is the 25% refusal rate the same for both the early unsafe smallpox vaccinations and COVID-19 genetic injections? Why has “anti-science” resurfaced as a term in the context of modern vaccine ideology? Weaponization of the term may give us a clue from vaccine-promoter Dr. Peter Hotez who had biodefense grants for COVID-19 vaccines in 2015-16.
A 2024 paper by Paul et al obviously calling out Hotez, indicates “anti-science” is a disparaging term used to discredit someone with an opposing view, essentially a device of propaganda. Hotez appears to be is using it on offense to defend against his vulnerabilities as a co-conspirator in the US-Chinese creation of SARS-CoV-2 and possibly against a scientific awakening to the risks of the routine childhood vaccine schedule.
Noted Swedish Historian Interviews the Author of a New Book on Palme
In October of 1972, National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger reached a tentative peace agreement with North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho. No matter that this agreement would become official the following January, President Richard M. Nixon ordered the Christmas Bombings of the North Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Haiphong. The Christmas Bombings, which lasted from December 18th to December 29th, included a 36-hour truce as a Yuletide gift, still leaving more than 1,600 people dead.
Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme surveyed these events from Stockholm with outrage. Particularly offensive to Palme was the destruction of Hanoi’s Bach Mai hospital, for the Scandinavian country had contributed a great deal of aid to it.
After consulting with his Social Democratic counterparts in West Germany and Austria, Willy Brandt and Bruno Kreisky, respectively, Palme wrote a speech on his kitchen table. On December 23, 1972, Palme recorded a speech that was first broadcast on Swedish radio, and then textually transmitted to international media. He also performed an encore for Swedish television. “We should call things by their proper names,” Palme began:
“What is going on in Vietnam today is a form of torture. There cannot be any military justification for the bombing. Military spokesmen in Saigon have denied that there is any evidence of North Vietnamese escalation. Nor can the bombings be a response to North Vietnamese obstinacy at the negotiating table. The resistance to the October agreement comes—as The New York Times has pointed out—mainly from President Thieu in Saigon. People are being punished, a nation is being punished in order to humiliate it, to force it to submit it to force. That is why the bombings are despicable. Many such atrocities have been perpetrated in recent history. They are often associated with a name: Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Lidice, Sharpeville, Treblinka. Violence triumphed. But posterity condemned the perpetrators. Now a new name will be added to the list: Hanoi, Christmas 1972.”
The 1940 Soviet execution of Polish officers in Katyn Forest, and the 1960 massacre of South African blacks in Sharpeville, both count among the foul crimes of modern history. Yet, Palme’s references to Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn, and Lidice would strike a nerve, for they were all the sites of Nazi crimes. In tandem with Italian fascists, the Germans had bombed the doomed Spanish town of Guernica in 1937. As acts of reprisal, German forces had destroyed the Czech village of Lidice in 1942, and the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane two years later. Babi Yar was the site of the massacre of over 30,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Ukraine in 1941. Treblinka, the death camp in German-occupied Poland, killed nearly one million Jews and two thousand Roma in 1942-1943.
As a result, the Nixon administration terminated diplomatic relations with Sweden at the ambassadorial level. This diplomatic freeze would last until the spring of 1974, when the two countries would finally exchange new ambassadors.
Olof Palme served as prime minister from 1969 to 1976, and then from 1982 until his assassination on February 28, 1986. In spite of his country’s reconciliation with the United States, he never received an invitation to the White House after the Vietnam War.
Lubna Z. Qureshi is the author of Olof Palme, Sweden, and the Vietnam War: A Diplomatic History (Lexington Books, 2023). Her first book was the 2008 Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile, also published by Lexington Books. Born and educated in the United States, she moved to Sweden in 2011.
Her interviewer, Håkan Blomqvist, is professor emeritus at the Institute of Contemporary History at Södertörn University in Sweden. He is the author of Socialism in Yiddish – The Jewish Labor Bund in Sweden (Södertörn University, 2022), and Myten on judebolsjevismen: antisemitism och kontrarevolution in svenska ögon – The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism: Anti-Semitism and Counterrevolution in Swedish Eyes (Carlsson, 2013).
Prominent work in journalism preceded Blomqvist’s career in historical scholarship. As publisher of the Socialist newspaper Internationalen, Blomqvist explored the possibility of police involvement in the Palme assassination. In its December 3, 1987 issue, Internationalen ran the names and photographs of four Swedish police officers whom the newspaper regarded with suspicion. As a consequence, a Swedish court convicted the publisher in 1989 of libel, requiring him to pay 40,000 Swedish kronor (approximately $8,389.54 in today’s U.S. currency). Today, Blomqvist still regards the Palme case as unsolved.
Qureshi, for her part, believes that Palme fell victim to a right-wing loner rather than a right-wing conspiracy. She agrees with journalist Thomas Pettersson’s 2018 conclusion that Stig Engström was the assassin. In 2020, Swedish prosecutor Krister Pettersson also fingered Engström in an official investigation.
Thomas Pettersson’s book, Den osannolika mördaren: Skandiamannen och mordet på Olof Palme (The Unlikely Murderer: The Skandia Man and the Murder of Olof Palme), has not been translated into English. The dramatized adaptation of The Unlikely Murderer can be viewed with English subtitles on Netflix.
[…]
Blomqvist: “I understand that your study is a powerful defense of Olof Palme and Swedish foreign policy during the Vietnam War. Palme has been criticized, both during his lifetime and afterward, with the claim that he was not sincerely committed. Instead, he was a cunning tactician who spoke with a ‘forked tongue.’ At the same time, Palme was keen that Swedish military collaboration with the United States should not be jeopardized. Your book includes accusations that Swedish industry contributed arsenic for herbicidal warfare against Vietnam’s ecosystem.”
Qureshi: “Palme’s opposition to the Vietnam War went far beyond rhetoric. Granted, North Vietnam was first recognized by the government of Prime Minister Tage Erlander in 1969, shortly before Palme, his successor, took office. In fact, Palme did not maintain diplomatic relations with Hanoi as a mere nicety, however. His government established an embassy in Hanoi in 1970. During the Vietnam War, Sweden was the only Western country to have an embassy in Hanoi. When North Vietnam denied information about American prisoners-of-war to their loved ones, Stockholm helped the families. In part, the Swedish government assisted the POW families in order to defuse an intensely political issue that the Nixon administration was exploiting for its own purposes.
In addition, economic aid was a key component of Sweden’s Vietnam policy. Prime Minister Erlander had originated the aid program, but it increased dramatically under Palme, his protégé. At the end of the Erlander government, the yearly disbursements were less than $1 million, and then leaped to $4.66 million in 1971. Between 1967 and 2013, Sweden provided Vietnam with over $1.8 billion in official development assistance, commonly known as ODA. Stockholm’s generosity contrasted sharply with American stinginess. In the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, the United States had promised to provide Vietnam with reconstruction aid. That aid never came.
Yes, I was disappointed to learn of Sweden’s secret military collaboration with the United States, but that collaboration was directed against the Soviet Union, not Southeast Asia. Stockholm regarded Moscow with unease, and Moscow reciprocated that attitude with strong distrust. Tensions between Sweden and Russia long predated the Cold War, nevertheless. Until I moved to Stockholm, I did not fully realize that Sweden was a Baltic nation!
This does not mean that Swedish non-alignment was a complete illusion. It was Sweden’s official position of neutrality that afforded Palme the freedom to challenge the American intervention in Vietnam. Willy Brandt probably detested the Christmas Bombings as much as Palme did, but West Germany’s membership in NATO compelled the chancellor to remain publicly silent.
Swedish collaboration with the United States mainly involved the exchange of military technology, but Swedish criticism of the Vietnam War threatened that collaboration. Washington purposely delayed the delivery of Redeye air defense missiles, and then made things difficult after their shipment.
I am glad that you mentioned herbicidal warfare against Vietnam. Americans have long been familiar with Agent Orange, the dioxin-based herbicide that devastated the health of U.S. servicemen and veterans. Agent Orange targeted vegetation in South Vietnam.
Another herbicide, Agent Blue, targeted the rice crops of South Vietnam. The United States employed arsenic in the war from 1962 to 1971. Unlike Agent Orange, the active ingredient in Agent Blue was arsenic.
In June of 1972, Palme condemned the use of military herbicides before the UN Conference on the Human Environment, which was held in Stockholm. The Nixon administration reacted angrily.
Two days after Palme’s herbicide speech, the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reported that the Swedish corporation Boliden had recently sold arsenic to the Ansul Company, the Agent Blue manufacturer based in Wisconsin. I wrote to both Johnson Controls, which has been the parent company of Ansul since 2016, and Boliden to confirm this reported sale, but both firms claimed to have no records from the period. If any readers of Covert Action Magazine out there can positively confirm the sale for me, I would gratefully update the paperback version of my book!
I should point out that the United States had stopped using arsenic by the time of Palme’s speech at the UN conference. Shortly afterward, the Foreign Ministry in Stockholm ordered the Swedish embassy in Washington to investigate the matter, which suggests that the Swedish government had not known beforehand about the possible use of Swedish arsenic. Afterward, Palme did consult with environmental scientists about the effects of military herbicides. The scientists were impressed with his concern and effort to educate himself. Three years before the UN Conference, the Swedish government had begun a campaign to internationally criminalize the military use of herbicides.
Until I can confirm the use of Swedish arsenic in the manufacture of Agent Blue, I would prefer to reserve judgment.”
Blomqvist: “You describe Palme’s ‘Kitchen Table Speech’ against the Christmas Bombings in 1972 as a triumph. In what way? Did the speech not damage confidence in his peace initiatives to compare the Nazi death camp Treblinka, and the Holocaust as a whole, with the American war effort in Vietnam?”
Qureshi: “Palme’s Christmas Bombing speech was a rhetorical triumph, in the same way that President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was a rhetorical triumph. The Christmas Bombing speech may not have stopped the Vietnam War any more than the Gettysburg Address had guaranteed a Union victory. Nonetheless, both speeches have personally inspired me. Among the Foreign Ministry collection, I found letters written by Americans after the Christmas Bombing speech. Apart from a few missives from crackpots, the letters were overwhelmingly positive.
By the time that Palme delivered his Christmas Bombing speech, there were no peace initiatives to damage. When Erlander was prime minister in the late 1960s, Sweden engaged in Operation Aspen, a mediation effort that involved the Swedish ambassador to Peking. Remember, Stockholm did not even have official diplomatic relations with Hanoi at this point. The Johnson administration in Washington dismissed Operation Aspen. I believe Palme made that speech out of sheer frustration in 1972. He acted impulsively, not even bothering to consult his own Foreign Ministry beforehand.
I think the Nazi comparison was appropriate. Atrocities are atrocities. To be sure, the Nazis waged a campaign of total extermination of the Jewish people, and Nixon did not intend to do the same with the Vietnamese people. At the same time, Article II of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide clearly states that “genocide means…acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Palme was not only addressing the Christmas Bombings; his speech was the ultimate reaction to a long war that would ultimately kill two million civilians. Two instances of genocide need not be identical to be comparable. When Nixon bombed the highly populated cities of Hanoi and Haiphong, he knew what he was doing.”
Efforts are growing in Poland to halt the EU’s Green Deal, including a protest action on May 10 and a new petition designed to support farmers and families, writes Olivier Bault of the Ordo Iuris Institute
On Friday, May 10, Poles will be taking to the street in a protest organized by the legendary Solidarity trade union. Solidarity, which was the main dissident social movement against communism in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, is now demanding a referendum on the EU Green Deal. Its current leader, Piotr Duda, has even called the EU Green Deal a new “red plague,” in reference to communism.
The protest is supported by Law and Justice (PiS), the main opposition party in Poland, and also by the other parties of its United Right coalition as well as by the Confederation, an alliance of Christian nationalists and libertarians to the right of the United Right. The trade union, however, makes “the whole political class” in Poland responsible for the EU’s climate policy and notes that it warned from the outset of the threats linked to that policy, which means it makes the United Right leaders responsible too, as the EU Green Deal was adopted during their eight years in power.
“The solutions implemented under the Green Deal in the future will translate into, among other things, increases in electricity and heating bills, new taxes on energy and fuel, a ban on heating with fossil fuels, as well as increases in food prices and the country’s food insecurity. NSZZ Solidarity has decided to loudly express its opposition to such policies,” Solidarity’s leaders wrote in a press release published in mid-March.
They also wrote:
“The Solidarity trade union, which won Poland’s freedom in the past and later used it many times for just causes, has again decided to reach for the highest form of direct democracy, which is a nationwide referendum in which citizens will be asked about the continuation of the implementation of the Green Deal. The referendum will be preceded by an information campaign. This will allow for a broad awareness-building public debate on the real effects of the EU’s climate policy so that every citizen of Poland will be able to express his or her opinion on the subject based on reliable knowledge. After all, EU policy should not be determined by officials in Brussels, but based on the consent of the citizens of member states.”
The May 10 protest will start at noon on the Plac Zamkowy Square in central Warsaw, when farmers are expected to turn up en masse as they did on March 6 when a large farmer protest was brutally repressed by Donald Tusk’s left-liberal government.
However, it is not only farmers who are going to be very negatively affected by the EU Green Deal. As the Ordo Iuris legal think tank stresses in an EU-wide petition against the Green Deal it has just launched, not only is European agriculture facing a catastrophe, but car drivers and homeowners will have to pay a high price for plans dictated not by reason and based not on consultations, but driven by ideology.
We can still “Stop the Green Deal” in its current form, we remind people in our petition, as it is a matter of the political decisions made by the heads of state and government in the European Council that can be later translated into new EU law processed through the EU Council (where ministers of the EU-27 meet) and the European Parliament.
This is why we demand not only that there should be a referendum in Poland on the Green Deal, but that an EU summit should be convened to work through the demands of farmers and other actors from across Europe.
We should all have in mind that under the current plans, the production of food and many intermediate and industrial goods will not stop, but will only be transferred outside the European Union, where the EU’s absurd climate regulations do not apply. This will only make matters worse for our planet and it will push millions of Europeans toward poverty and destroy the European Union’s economic competitiveness.
We encourage all citizens of EU countries to sign the petition against the EU Green Deal here.
The heads of settler communities in northern Israel plan to announce a secession from the State of Israel in the coming days, in protest against the Israeli government’s inaction in returning the tens of thousands of settlers who have been displaced from the Galilee by Hezbollah.
The decision came at a recent meeting of the Conflict Zone Forum and is expected to be formally announced on 15 May, Independence Day for Israelis and Nakba Day for Palestinians.
“It was decided to announce on Independence Day the establishment of the State of Galilee and unilateral disengagement from the State of Israel. This extreme step will be accompanied by additional actions,” according to a 9 May report by Hebrew news outlet Walla.
Walla reports that the “straw that broke [the camel’s back]” was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to war cabinet member Benny Gantz’s statement at a recent meeting. According to Channel 12, Gantz urged that settlers displaced from the north be returned to their homes by 1 September, with Netanyahu saying, “What will happen if they return a few months after 1 September,” signaling that he is in no rush to deal with the situation.
The premier’s comment triggered a wave of anger among displaced residents of the north and the heads of settler communities. Upper Galilee Regional Council head Giora Zaltz told Channel 12 that he is working to return the settlers even without government approval.
“We can’t wait for a decision from someone who never decides,” he said, referring to Netanyahu.
In early April, the representatives of settler communities in the Conflict Zone Forum had posted advertisements inviting proposals “to be submitted for an alternative government in Israel.”
“The full details of the tender can be found in the hotels and the accommodation apartments of the displaced throughout the country, with the business owners who collapsed in the north, in the dead tourism areas in the north, and in the offices of the authorities in the north.”
Displaced settlers of the north currently residing in Haifa and Jerusalem have organized protests for 16 May.
The organizers plan to protest under the banner: “No to a political agreement with Hezbollah” and call for the “restoration of security through military action … This is a battle that we must fight together … a fight for our freedom, our honor and the future of our children. We the people of the north will not be silent.”
Thousands are expected to participate in the protests.
On 8 May, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned troops during a meeting that a “hot summer” awaits them, hinting at what Gallant and other officials have been warning about for months – an escalation of military operations against Lebanon.
The warning came the same day that an Israeli soldier was killed by a Hezbollah attack on Israel’s Al-Malikiya military site. The soldier was the third to be killed by Hezbollah since Monday.
On Sunday, dozens of Hezbollah rockets struck the Kiryat Shmona settlement. The attack was carried out in response to an Israeli airstrike that killed an entire Lebanese family the day before.
“If there is no clear [government] decision [to deal with the threat], the Kaplan Street (Tel Aviv) protests will be child’s play compared to what we are planning soon,” said Avichai Stern, mayor of Kiryat Shmona, after the rocket attack.
Hezbollah began daily operations against Israeli military sites near the Lebanese border on 8 October in solidarity with Gaza and in support of the Palestinian resistance. These operations have recently intensified, including a surge in precise drone attacks on military sites, command headquarters, and troop gatherings.
Tens of thousands of settlers from the north are dispersed across Israel as a result. They have repeatedly complained since the start of the war that Netanyahu’s government has done little to accommodate them and have shown significant frustration over the Israeli army’s failure to push Hezbollah away from the border.
The US and France have proposed de-escalation initiatives aimed at ending the fighting and pressuring the resistance group to withdraw from the border region. Yet the initiatives have failed, and Hezbollah has repeatedly vowed to continue attacking Israel until the war in Gaza is brought to an end.
Israelis in the north of historic Palestine, displaced by the war, declare they will secede from the State of Israel and establish the State of the Galilee. They demand a war against Hezbollah and reject any political agreement with the militant group.
Brier devotes this entire lecture to Egyptian obelisks. Obelisk is a Greek word meaning meat skewer. In Egyptian they were known as Tekenu and in Arabic they’re called Massala (meaning needle). Made from a single shaft of pink Aswan granite (quarzite), an obelisk had to be strong enough to supports a weight of up to 1000 tons.
The first obelisks evolved from the Benben stone, a pyramidal religious monument representing the first primordial mound of earth to separate from the waters of Chaos. Like the Benben, obelisks were associated with sun worship. Heliopolis (referred to as On in the Bible) had the most obelisks. Karnak originally had 12 (only two are left).
The earliest obelisks were built by Tuthmois I, II and I and Hatshepsut (see Egypt’s First Female Pharaoh). Ramses the Great (Ramses II) constructed more than twelve small obelisks and two huge ones (still standing) at his temple in Luxor.
To quarry an obelisk, more than 200 men stood shoulder to shoulder repeatedly dropping balls of dolerite (a harder mineral than quarzite) to hammer out a seam separating the obelisk from the bedrock. To cut away the granite under the obelisk, the men pulled dolorite balls attached to ropes back and forth on log rollers. They then loaded the obelisk onto a barge by building a canal beneath it.
It’s believed an obelisks was erected using 100 men to pull it up a 45 degree ramp with ropes.
After Rome conquered Egypt, the Roman emperor Augustus moved two obelisks from Heliopolis to Alexandria. Egypt’s remaining Luxor obelisk was re-erected in Paris in the 1830s. In the 1870s, the British re-erected one of them in London in the 1870s and the US appropriated the other to re-erect it in New York in 1880.
Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.
On April 16, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a new law approved earlier by the national legislature aiming to intensify military conscription in the country. According to the new law, all Ukrainian men of military age who are not yet registered for military service must present themselves to a military enlistment center within 60 days, with or without formal notification to appear. And if they are already registered for military service, they must update their information within 60 days. The law comes fully into force in July 2024.
[…]
Earlier in April, a new law lowered the age of obligatory military service from 27 to 25. All female Ukrainian citizens with a military or medical specialty are also required to register.
A war to the last Ukrainian
According to the lawmakers and the military, the amended conscription law will force out of the shadows those who have been avoiding military registration by hiding or living at a different address than the one registered with the military. Police and conscription officers are empowered to detain anyone lacking proof of military registration.
“The 60-day rule [for self-reporting to the military recruitment office] and other clauses of the adopted draft law are making hundreds of thousands or even millions of Ukrainians into lawbreakers. In fact, it places them outside Ukraine’s legal framework entirely,” the Ukrainian daily Strana wrote on April 11. The widely-read, online news outlet writes that intensified conscription will mean a huge increase in corruption among police officers, border guards, and the military, implying bribery of those officials in order to avoid service.”
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One of the most scandalous features of the new law is its exclusion of a proposed provision for the demobilization of active-duty personnel once they have served 36 months of service. This is a demand of military personnel and their relatives, pleading that people who have already been living in the trenches for two years or more are tired and worn out. But a majority of deputies in the Ukrainian legislature (‘Verkhovna Rada’) insist there must be no demobilization until the end of hostilities. Yevgeniya Kravchuk, a deputy from the ruling Servant of the People party, has warned that automatic demobilization after three years of service could cause a reduction in Western aid.
Strana reports on April 12 that according to a poll in February 2024 by Kyiv-based research agency ‘Info Sapiens’ for media outlet Texty.org, only 35 percent of the 400 men surveyed said they were prepared to serve if called up.
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However the new law is being very negatively received by Ukrainian society. Media is focused on the negative responses, explaining that a great many civilians fear dying at the front, while those already conscripted see no possibility of demobilization, not even in the long term. Essentially, a Ukrainian soldier has only three paths out of military service short of three years: death, serious injury and disability, or being taken prisoner by the Russian armed forces.
Ukrainian MPs say they plan to further strengthen punishment for evading conscription. They are now discussing increasing fines, blocking of bank accounts, seizure of property, and a number of other measures “up to the harshest ones”, says a member of the legislature cited in Strana. Ukrainian courts are already issuing summons nearly every day for those evading conscription. Thousands have already been sentenced to prison terms.
But the courts cannot cope with the number of such cases because there are tens of thousands in every region of the country. According to UA-Reporter, Ukrainian lawyer Yuriy Demchenko has made an inquiry to the Justice Ministry revealing there are currently about 34,000 vacant spots in Ukrainian prisons for those already convicted of evasion of military service. According to him, it is simply impossible for the authorities to put all evaders and deserters in jail. For example, in Ivano-Frankivsk region in western Ukraine alone, according to official information, there are 40,000 men wanted for evading service.
Border guards in the Transcarpathia region in southwest Ukraine, meanwhile, are reportedly building miles of new, barbed-wire fencing along the country’s border there, making the region appear as a concentration camp because minefields laid by Russian armed forces already block some routes to the north and east. Authorities say they are building the fencing to ‘save lives’, that is, to prevent people from undertaking the often highly risky gambit of crossing mountain rivers in order to escape the country.
The most popular Google query in Ukraine these days is ‘How to swim across the Tisa’. The Tisa (Tisza) River originates in the eastern part of Transcarpathia, eventually flowing into the Black Sea, roughly tracing Ukraine’s borders with Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia along the way. In some places, the river is the border. Several dozen Ukrainians are reported to have died trying to make the dangerous crossing of the Tisa, particularly during the winter months.
The New York Timesreported on April 13, “The roiling waters [of the Tisa] can be treacherous; the banks are steep and slick with mud; and the riverbed is covered in jagged, hidden boulders. Yet Ukrainian border guards often find their quarry — men seeking to escape the military draft — swimming in these hazardous conditions, trying to cross the Tisa River where it forms the border with Romania.”
Conscription evaders as new national heroes in Ukraine
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At the end of April, a 52-year-old Ukrainian man named Borys Laboyk managed to escape to Hungary and became a social media hero in doing so. At a border checkpoint, he was asked for his papers but he took off running to the nearby Hungarian border. The Ukrainian border guards caught up with him and tackled him to the ground, but the man was apparently in very good physical shape because he managed to break free and then outrun the border guards for good. Hungarian border guards allowed him to cross and make a declaration of asylum. They turned back the Ukrainian border guards; the latter are prohibited by Hungary from crossing the border in pursuit of anyone fleeing Ukraine.
The military draft in Ukraine has long ago turned into a game of run and catch. The Ukrainian telegram channel ‘Rubicon’ recalls the comedy ‘Welcome to Zombieland’, where 33 rules of survival in the world of zombies are described. “In modern Ukraine, these rules are certainly much more useful for personal safety than, for example, the Constitution. The first rule in Zombieland is: ‘Be in shape.’ Most often, when meeting with zombies, you will have to run a lot. If you are overweight or do not have good physical fitness, be prepared to die at the hands of a living corpse.” Rubicon reminds the reader that the simple ability to run fast may save a conscription evader from capture, with a 90 percent probability of success.
T-shirts with the inscription ‘evader’ are now popular on the Internet. A report on Telegram writes, “Due to the draconian law on military mobilization, Ukraine has some ten million citizens living abroad and who are ready to renounce their citizenship due to their colossal distrust of authorities.
Political scientist Andrey Zolotarev states further that in his opinion, the popularity on social networks of flash mobs about ‘evaders’ and the queues for renewals of passports at Ukrainian consulates in European countries are obvious evidence of the unpopularity of the war taking place. Also to blame for the unpopularity is the behavior of those members of the legislature and those government officials who have hidden their relatives abroad while at the same time sending ordinary citizens or their children to their deaths in a highly unpopular war.
Another reason for the popularity of draft evasion is, strangely enough, the sexual overtones involved. When hundreds of thousands of men in the country have died, become disabled, or are suffering from mental disorders brought on by trauma, women are preferring the young, healthy men still remaining who can avoid death or crippling injury, and who can support them through life, according to readings of social media. Attention to such details by women is yet another reason why young men are avoiding military service in every possible way and undertaking personal training in running or swimming, in place of weapons training on a firing range.
The new, unofficial heroes of Ukraine are the men who manage to escape from the country or otherwise escape from the clutches of military recruiters or from the training officers assigned to ‘make soldiers out of them’. For so may younger Ukrainians, the new, ‘model’ man is young, with long legs and in great physical shape, able to fight off or run away from an overweight or slow-moving military man tasked with dragging them into military service.
Young people are deliberately practicing swimming, and stories of such are gaining popularity on the Internet. The training is just in case, one day, they need to escape the country by crossing a border river. They practice for months to run fast and swim well. Escaping from already conscripted soldiers has become a survival quest, a sign of good health and courage. Growing numbers of young people believe that if you are in a Ukrainian military uniform, it means you couldn’t run fast enough or you couldn’t fight off the military recruiters using your fists, and you have no money to bribe your way out. You are tagged as a ‘loser’ destined to die in a trench from artillery fire.
Degradation of agriculture
These trends of rising evasion of military service are more characteristic of the young men in the urban middle classes. In the Ukrainian countryside, most men have already been drafted, and many have already died. After the deindustrialization of the 1990s and 2000s and the later secession of the industrial region of Donbass, the foundation of the Ukrainian economy has slipped back to agricultural production and exports.
Following the pro-American Maidan coup in Kiev in February 2014, then-U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt declared that Ukraine’s future “should be that of an agricultural superpower”. However, the economic trends of recent years in Ukraine actually show the opposite-decline in crop yields and overall agricultural production and a transition back to more primitive forms of production.
In April 2024, Ukraine is once again in the midst of its sowing season. But this year, once again, the area sown with grain and other crops is reduced. The harvest is expected to drop by ten percent, according to the forecasts of the Ministry of Agrarian Policy. Last year, it dropped by 13%. The Ukrainian website Novyny reports that according to estimates of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), sown areas of wheat, corn, and barley for the 2023/2024 growing season will be reduced by 32%, 27%, and 37%, respectively, for the three crops, compared to the 2021/22 season. There are several reasons for this.
Dmytro Solomchuk, a member of the parliamentary committee for agrarian policy, says that farmers are abandoning intensive cultivation technologies. “Agricultural producers are buying less fuel, chemicals, and fertilizers because this is unprofitable in today’s conditions. Many are switching to traditional methods by which, predictably, there will be lower yields but production costs are also lower. The yields per hectare will be lower for all crops,” he says, admitting that depending on the weather, the yields using older, traditional, growing methods will decrease by 30%.
As well, shortages of fertilizers are obliging Ukrainian farmers not to grow many crops. Most crops require nitrogen fertilizers, which are mainly produced by synthesizing natural gas. The gas used to be purchased cheaply from Russia, but no longer. Ukraine has voluntarily cut all its economic ties with Russia.
Denys Marchuk, deputy head of the Ukrainian Agrarian Council, also speaks about the acute shortage of personnel due to military conscription, saying, “The lack of human resources is one of the main problems of this year’s sowing campaign.”
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