CBC News analysis finds IDF blasts caused damage deep underground

Families of Canadian servicemen buried in Gaza say they want the government to do more to protect their loved ones' remains. Some say they would like to see their relatives — the last Canadian soldiers to be buried overseas — removed from a cemetery that has been repeatedly damaged by the Israel Defense Forces and brought home.

Twenty-two Canadians are buried at the Gaza War Cemetery in the Tuffah district of Gaza City, all of whom lost their lives during the UN's first major peacekeeping operation that began following the Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956.

Aerial images reviewed by CBC's visual investigations team show that the IDF has progressively destroyed headstones, dug berms with heavy earthmoving equipment, parked tanks and other armoured vehicles around the site and triggered explosions that saw a section of the Canadian peacekeeper plot blown into the air.

WASHINGTON—Saying they saw no reason to limit any potential agricultural use of the flammable combination of gelling agents and gasoline, officials at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved napalm as a pesticide Friday.

The daughter of Colombian and Dominican immigrants, Mejia ran on an adamantly anti–Donald Trump message and secured a whopping 70 percent of the vote as a result. The Associated Press called her victory shortly after the votes started rolling in.

70 percent.... wow!

The progressive Democrat’s positions echo several of the policies that made Sanders a national phenomenon, including support for universal health care coverage, tuition-free college, student loan forgiveness programs, and strengthening unions and expanding labor protections in order to bolster America’s middle class.

She sounds like a Democrat who wants to win and is against genocide.

Mejia has also been vocal in her criticism of Israel, publicly denouncing the state’s war on Palestine as a genocide. That caught the attention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which funneled money into the race to bolster her opponents. In the end, the pro-Israel lobby’s efforts may have been one of the reasons that voters in New Jersey sent Mejia to Congress.

Awesome!

Why did Iran close the Strait to begin with? Well, because Trump declared war against Iran just over a month ago, assassinating that country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, for an opening salvo. Why did Trump start bombing Iran without provocation? Well, because according to the New York Times, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Trump that winning a war against Iran would be a cakewalk. Why did Trump believe Netanyahu’s pitch when even Secretary of State and human footstool Marco Rubio — Marco Rubio! — called the plan “bulls—t”? Because Donald Trump is the stupidest asshole to ever live, a fact that Iran has now exploited to cow America just as swiftly as Trump thought he might cow them.

Every war is, at its core, a self-inflicted wound. This wound just happens to be so wide, the Artemis II astronauts could still see it from the dark side of the moon. It’s a decisive loss for the United States and one that, hopefully, portends many great electoral losses to come for the people who orchestrated it.

Despite its relatively brief duration, the War on Iran has been nearly half a century in the making. That country officially became a theocracy back in 1979, under the rule of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In the midst of Khomeini’s revolution, Iranians stormed the U.S. embassy and took 66 Americans hostage, including diplomats, triggering a crisis that lasted well over a year and left deep enmity between our two countries in its aftermath. There are active government officials in America who have, quite literally, wanted to destroy Iran my whole life.

But because Iran is the 17th-largest country in the world, because it has a population of nearly 100 million, and because it controls a good portion of the world’s fuel needs, previous presidents never succumbed to the idea. Until now. Rampant Islamophobia within the United States, especially after the 9/11 attacks — which, it must be noted, Iran had no involvement in — has allowed our most hawkish politicians to keep the specter of the Iran bogeyman alive in the public consciousness. All they needed was a useful idiot in the Oval Office to make the war happen.

Enter Donald Trump.

Once Trump assumed office for a second time, hawks saw their best, and perhaps last, chance to make war with Iran a reality. Among those war pigs was Netanyahu, who orchestrated the ongoing genocide in Palestine and has used America’s entry into Iran as permission to go ahead and bomb other countries in the Middle East, Lebanon in particular. According to that Times report from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Netanyahu told Trump that Iran’s regime would fold like Duke in the Elite Eight, that Iranian leadership would be so crippled by American shelling that they wouldn’t be able to seize control of the vitally important Strait of Hormuz, and that Iranian citizens would greet the U.S. as liberators.

None of those things came to pass. Here’s what happened instead: Iran immediately installed Mojtaba Khamenei, son of Ali, as its new supreme leader and took control of the strait. Gas prices soared and global markets went haywire as a result. Then Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps got the shrewd idea to begin charging other nations to use the strait, a passage that had been free to all until the war began.

Then Trump threw a hissy fit online and screamed, “Open the F—kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards,” promising to destroy every bridge and power plant in Iran, a threat that the Iranians openly laughed at. Then Russia and China decided to back Iran, because those guys know a winner when they see one. Then the U.S. military, spending about $500 million a day on the war, ran low on munitions, something Trump was explicitly warned about in the lead-up to the war. Then “Secretary of War” and national disgrace Pete Hegseth did a bunch of evil, embarrassing Pete Hegseth stuff. Then Trump posted his “an entire civilization will die tonight” warning, a truly repulsive act even by his standards. Then, instead of rising up against its own government, as Trump lazily assumed, the citizens of Iran called Trump’s weakass bluff Tuesday night by gathering, by the tens of thousands, around the very bridges and power facilities that Trump had promised to annihilate. They dared the old man to blink.

To the surprise of no one, Trump did. The war is on pause (for now), and Iran not only won the PR campaign, but they’ve also decided to continue charging tolls, in perpetuity, to ships looking to cross the Strait of Hormuz. As of this writing, the country has re-closed the Strait, which White House spokesgoblin Karoline Leavitt denied while, in the same breath, demanding that Iran open it back up again. Oh, and Iran gets to keep its nuclear weapons development program, something that Barack Obama negotiated an end to in 2015 before Trump came along and flushed that agreement down the toilet. As part of the ceasefire agreement, Iran might even receive punitive damages from the U.S. for all the bombing. Given Trump’s negotiating acumen, they probably could have also gotten Alaska thrown into the deal if they had wanted it.

Recent reporting from the Financial Times reveals it was President Trump, not the Iranian government, who was begging for a ceasefire.

FT reports that the Trump administration had been privately pushing for a ceasefire for weeks to alleviate the economic strain caused by Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, and depending on Pakistan for mediation. Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir was communicating with Iranian officials, special envoy Steve Witkoff, Vice President JD Vance, and Trump himself even after the president threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization on Tuesday.

According to the five people familiar with the diplomatic back channel, Trump had been asking for a ceasefire since as early as March 21, when he first threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants.

This contradicts virtually everything the Trump administration has claimed about Iran—that Trump’s constant bombings and threats of extinction caused a wounded, demoralized Iranian regime to limp to the negotiating table, desperate for a deal with the U.S.

A page on the company’s website, since removed, stated it was working “closely” with ICE’s deportation operations to reduce expulsion delays and costs. Observatoire des Multinationales published a screenshot in which Capgemini boasts of its role in “enforcement and removal operations” for ICE.

It reads: “Capgemini leveraged supply chain best practices to help ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) become more efficient … the team from Capgemini is working closely with ERO to help it minimize the time required and the cost incurred to remove all removable illegal aliens from the US.”

The CGT union at Capgemini has called for an immediate halt of all collaboration with ICE. “These partnerships are not only contrary to the values espoused by Capgemini but they make our group an active accomplice in serious human rights violations,” a union spokesperson said.

Notably, the link to the screenshot in which Capgemini boasts of its role in removing "illegal aliens" is found here:

https://multinationales.org/IMG/pdf/ice_leverages_supply_chain_best_practices_to_improve_operational_efficiencies_-_capgemini_spain.pdf

At present, the following page - which the article provides to show other contracts between Capgemini and ICE - suggests that it's down for maintenance:

https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?q=Capgemini+CONTRACTING_AGENCY_NAME%3A%22U.S.+IMMIGRATION+AND+CUSTOMS+ENFORCEMENT%22++SIGNED_DATE%3A%5B2025%2F01%2F01%2C2025%2F12%2F31%5D+PIID%3A%2270CDCR26FR0000024%22&s=FPDS.GOV&templateName=1.5.3&indexName=awardfull&x=25&y=12

Lastly, here follows a link that is not included in this article but which was purported by another Lemmy user to show questionable IT contracts - particularly related to the management of concentration camps:

https://sam.gov/search/?index=opp&page=1&pageSize=25&sort=-modifiedDate&sfm%5Bstatus%5D%5Bis_active%5D=true&sfm%5Bstatus%5D%5Bis_inactive%5D=true&sfm%5BsimpleSearch%5D%5BkeywordRadio%5D=ALL&sfm%5BsimpleSearch%5D%5BkeywordTags%5D%5B0%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Dhs

TJ Sabula is said to have called the president a “pedophile protector” as he toured the automotive giant’s River Rouge complex on Tuesday.

Trump then appeared to give Sabula the middle finger, according to a video published by celebrity news and gossip site TMZ, which claimed that Trump also yelled obscenities prior to making the gesture.

Words to live by:

“I don’t feel as though fate looks upon you often, and when it does, you better be ready to seize the opportunity,” Sabula added in the interview. “And today I think I did that.”

The article features an image of him smiling the kind of smile that rightfully suggests he made the history books for his stand against fascism against a pedophile protector.

The gofundme page to support this inspiring hero:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/tj-sabula-is-a-patriot

In a three hour-long meeting Tuesday evening, Medford City Council members voted to pass a first-in-the-state ordinance that would divest city funds from companies that supply weapons, derive revenue from prisons or fossil fuels, or companies that “directly, knowingly and over time” contribute to human rights violations, including genocide.

“If we have these public funds, we are not going to invest them in this global effort that disregards and dehumanizes people in so many different ways, whether that’s for political gain or for private profit – or in many cases both – in a never- ending cycle of destruction and violence,” Medford City Council President Isaac Bears said at the Tuesday meeting. Bears sponsored the ordinance.

Note: the Mayor of Medford must still approve the ordinance.

Athens Mayor Haris Doukas responded to Israeli Ambassador Noam Katz’s criticism of the city’s handling of antisemitic graffiti. In a post on X, Doukas denounced Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide and rejected Katz’s accusations, emphasizing Athens’ commitment to combating violence and racism.

“We reject lessons in democracy from those responsible for civilian deaths,” Doukas stated. “Athens, the capital of a democratic nation, respects its visitors and upholds free expression. Our municipal authority actively opposes violence and racism.”

Doukas further criticized the ambassador’s focus on graffiti amid the Gaza conflict. “It’s shocking that the ambassador fixates on graffiti, which is being removed, while an unprecedented genocide unfolds in Gaza,” he said. He also noted a 90% surge in Israeli citizens receiving Greek Golden Visas over the past year.

The SBU - not to be messed with.

I pray I do not offend by borrowing @[email protected] excellent meme-work. And I'm not proficient at superimposing images, so kindly accept my apologies.

So the centre-left party campaigned on not following in President Drink Bleach's footsteps and won. Predictable, because Australians are awesome.

Meanwhile, as for the AU moron and the comparisons to his counterpart, PP, the Associated Press had this to say:

Dutton had earlier conceded his alliance of conservative parties had been defeated at the election and that he had lost his own parliamentary seat that he had held for 24 years.

Dutton’s plight parallels that of Canada’s last opposition leader, Pierre Poilievre, who lost his seat after Trump declared economic war on the U.S. neighbor to the north. Poilievre had previously been regarded as a shoo-in to become Canada’s next prime minister and shepherd his Conservative Party back into power for the first time in a decade.

https://apnews.com/article/australia-election-albanese-dutton-251063e866513dfa48b773fb4d6b0d29

Breaking news as of a few minutes ago:

To the hundredth decimal place, the 266th and final poll finally submitted its results for the singular riding that joyfully deprived me of sleep last night, expanding Fanjoy's lead by:

50.83% - 45.83% = 5.00%

It feels fatefully round a number, if you'll permit me to say.

Not bad, one might add, for (1) taking on an incumbent, (2) the incumbent - in this case - being the leader of an opposition party.

It's worthwhile noting concerning PP's lack of legislative achievements in 20 years, that he was kicked in the butt by someone who:

(1) has a carbon neutral home (He So woKe), (2) drove his campaign style with a positive message despite these fascists times we're living in - where vitriolic wailing can bring morons to the national stage.

Minutes before the United States launched a deadly missile campaign in Yemen that reportedly killed 53 people and wounded 89, including multiple children, on March 15, the Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was sitting in his car in a grocery store parking lot waiting for the attack.

The story is now well-known and well-memed: Days before the missile barrage, Goldberg was added to a Signal group chat called “Houthi PC small group” after President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, Michael Waltz, invited him to connect on the encrypted message application. The editor was included in the discussion inadvertently, a spokesperson for the National Security Council acknowledged to the Atlantic.

This report is based on a video Prime Minister Mark Carney shared. It's worth watching the brief 1.5 minute skit and a link to it may be found on this page.

Being classy and keeping up the positive energy is what this is about. And this reflects very well on Prime Minister Mark Carney.

He's rocking it.

This article makes for an interesting read. Here follow two early paragraphs for context:

Oracle controls the JavaScript trademark because in 2009 it acquired Sun Microsystems, which applied to trademark the name with the US Patent and Trademark Office back in 1995. The trademark was granted in 2000.

While the database giant does not use the name for any commercial products, its ownership of the trademark has led JavaScript-oriented organizations such as events biz JSConf to adopt branding that avoids the term. As the signatories to the letter observe, the world's most popular programming language therefore can't have a conference that mentions what it's about.

Toward the end, the article mentions an initiative to legally pursue Oracle for trademark abandonment.

This article is remarkable and I highly recommend reading it. Three notable paragraphs from it are very telling:

Sheffield crown court heard that Birley, a painter and decorator from Swinton, was involved in many of the worst incidents on that Sunday afternoon, including adding wood to a fire in a large industrial bin that had been pushed against an exit, and helping to place another bin on top of the one ablaze.

Birley was also filmed throwing missiles at police, squaring up to officers while brandishing a police baton and throwing a large bin that crashed into a line of police with riot shields.

He is the first person to be sentenced for arson with intent to endanger life after the 12 hours of violence in Manvers that left 64 police officers, three horses and a dog injured.

This article makes a great read. Some notable quotes follow.

First the recap from the last week:

Robert F Kennedy Jr made the announcement to suspend his independent presidential campaign on Thursday. He soon appeared with Trump at a political rally in Arizona where he formally backed the former president, who clinched the Republican nomination despite his conviction on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, among various other legal problems.

And this is particularly telling - in case anyone had any doubts. Emphasis in bold is mine:

Kennedy said he planned on removing his name from the 2024 presidential election ballot in swing states to boost Trump’s chances of retaking the Oval Office. But Kennedy said he would remain on the ballot in other states that are not expected to decide the presidential race.

The history:

Kennedy’s presidential bid and subsequent endorsement of Trump has drawn sharp criticism from the rest of his family. And, before its suspension, his campaign was replete with controversies, including a sexual assault allegation made against him by a former staffer and the proliferation of numerous conspiracy theories over vaccine safety, Covid 19, wireless internet, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and antidepressants.

The article closes with junior's brother, Max, quoted as saying:

“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would be motivated to write something of this nature. With a heavy heart, I am today asking my fellow Americans to do what will honor our father the most: Ignore Bobby and support vice-president Kamala Harris and the Democratic platform. It’s what is best for our country.”

This article is noteworthy for the historical track record of Cori Bush's challenger, Wesley Bell. It covers how Bell betrayed the BLM movement despite the widespread support he received from it.

Also noteworthy are these two paragraphs that explain how Bell has incredible funding from the genocide enabling Israeli-aligned AIPAC lobby.

But rather than build his campaign against Hawley, Bell dramatically shifted his priorities, pivoting to mount a challenge against a left-wing Missouri politician instead. Last June, Bell called Cori Bush to promise he wouldn’t run against her. Then, after the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7 and the outbreak of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) “let it be publicly known that a challenger to Bush would have effectively bottomless fundraising support,” writes Ryan Grim. Bell subsequently dropped out of his race against Hawley and turned around to challenge Bush. This opened the floodgates for the Israel lobby, which has spent a staggering $7 million on Bell’s run to capture Bush’s seat.

As of July 2024, AIPAC’s massive donations only account for 62 percent of Bell’s contributions — in part because Missouri Republicans have lavished Bell’s coffers. The Huffington Post reported that Bell’s campaign filings included donations “from notable sources such as Steven Tilley, a GOP former Missouri House speaker who’s now a lobbyist,” and “Daniel Loeb, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Third Point, who has donated millions to Republican causes.”

Atlanta police have been carrying out around-the-clock surveillance in several neighborhoods for months, on people and houses linked to opposition against the police training center colloquially known as “Cop City”.

The surveillance in Georgia has included following people in cars, blasting sirens outside bedroom windows and shining headlights into houses at night, the Guardian has learned.

While no arrests have been made, residents said they’re at a loss as to what legal protections of privacy and freedom from harassment are available to them. Chata Spikes, the Atlanta police spokesperson, did not respond to requests for comment.