Category Archives: Viva!

whatareyoureallyafraidof: orb-is-horse: slipperygal: jaspersboy…

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  1. Trump is angry at NBC News for using this photo of him, so please don’t use this enhanced, enlarged version of it for anything.
  2. Trump Reportedly Discusses “Reset” and Unflattering Double Chin Photos During Media Meeting

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I will never share these.

Pass these around to make sure everyone knows which ones not to pass around

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Face Of Protest

I have written a lot about the situation with Palestine in the past…..with good reason….when I was working in the Middle East I had an associate that was Palestinian, Rafiq, and when I was doing research on the West Bank I was summoned by the Israeli authorities for questioning….I ignored the summons and was told I was to be arrested….Rafiq’s family hide me until I could get away across the border to Jordan.  I owe the family.

I am sure that most Americans are aware of the protest going on in the Occupied Territories simply because Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel…a lame ass move.

There have been many arrests some have been children…like this brave young lady…Ahed al-Tamimi…..

Ahed Tamimi was just 14 when she rose to international prominence through the release of a video and a series of photos capturing her desperate attempts to save her 11-year-old brother, Mohammad, from the grips of an Israeli soldier in 2015.

Many Israelis threatened me on social media after the video was released, demanding that I be detained or even killed,” 16-year-old Ahed told Al Jazeera from her family’s home in the village of Nabi Saleh, where the distinct, red-tiled roofs of illegal Israeli settlement housing dot the adjacent hilltop. “The harassment handcuffed my life. I was scared to even go outside or visit my friends.”

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Hers is not a unique story….sadly it is all too familiar….

Fawzi al-Junaidi, 16, will be taken for sentencing in Israel’s military court on Monday, after being held for more than a week in Israeli detention.

Junaidi was detained during clashes that erupted in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron on Dec. 7, the day after U.S. President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

His arrest has gone viral……

Then IDF had to go a killed a wheel chair bound Palestinian protester and his death has gone viral…..

One of the men killed was Ibrahim Abu Thuraya, a wheel chair-bound 29-year-old who was a regular presence during Palestinian protests against Israel. Thuraya has spoken to the media regularly in recent years, and claimed he had lost both his legs in a 2008 Israeli missile strike in Gaza.

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The IDF had an investigation and found no one guilty for the shot….(does that sound at all familiar?)….these Palestinians are becoming the face of civil disobedience against Israel….

Family displacements through urban renewal

When “urban renewal” broke black families and businesses.

Hundreds of thousands of families were displaced in the 1950s under “urban renewal” programs. The families were disproportionately minorities. Renewing Inequality, from a research group at the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab, revisits the topic and how it reflects in the present.

Renewing Inequality presents a newly comprehensive vantage point on mid-twentieth-century America: the expanding role of the federal government in the public and private redevelopment of cities and the perpetuation of racial and spatial inequalities. It offers the most comprehensive and unified set of national and local data on the federal Urban Renewal program, a World War II-era urban policy that fundamentally reshaped large and small cities well into the 1970s.

Many of the people displaced never receive promised compensation or fair market value for their property, which is kind of messed up.

Learn.

Tags: family, urban

Home demolitions in the Negev and Tel Aviv show the real face of government corruption

Corruption does not begin with Netanyahu’s cigars or pink champagne. It begins with an ideological system that sees entire segments of the population as undesirable and unnecessary, and as temporary residents in their own homes.

A Bedouin woman after authorities demolished her village of Al Araqib, January 16, 2011 (Keren Manor/Activestills.org)

A Bedouin woman after authorities demolished her village of Al Araqib, January 16, 2011 (Keren Manor/Activestills.org)

Last night, a striking episode in Amnon Levy’s documentary series, “The Real Faces,” aired on TV. The episode followed the residents of the Tel Kabir, Givat Amal, and HaArgazim neighborhoods, whom the government has designated as trespassers in their own homes. The government is now trying to evict them, to the benefit of real estate tycoons.

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Yesterday, a court in Be’er Sheva convicted Sheikh Siakh A-Turi, 68, of trespassing, sentencing him to ten months in prison with a fine of 36,000 shekels. Sheikh Siakh, is a resident of the Bedouin village of Al-Araqib.

The residents of Givat Amal and Al-Araqib share the same tragic fate: they are among the most marginalized people in a country whose government has declared them trespassers on land on which they have lived for decades. In both instances, the government prevented them from formalizing their property ownership by a range of deceptive means. The government, in contrast, moved quickly to formalize and recognize the ownership of those citizens whom it actually values, in some cases spitting distance from where these “trespassers” live.

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To truly believe these stories, you must hear them again and again. The Mizrahi residents of these Tel Aviv neighborhoods could not formalize their ownership of the land on which they have lived for 70 years because they “missed” a small announcement in the Davar newspaper in 1951, inviting “any person who de facto owns, without a deed, an apartment or business on absentee property” to submit a request to formalize their ownership. Like their Ashkenazi neighbors—Mapai supporters and employees of the Tel Aviv municipality and the Custodian for Absentee Property—they, too, settled on property that belonged to Palestinians before 1948.

However, unlike their Ashkenazi neighbors, the Mizrahi residents had no way of hearing about an announcement published once in the Mapai party newspaper, and which allowed for a short window of two weeks to formalize property ownership. Those who read the announcement got recognized as legal landowners. Those who didn’t, didn’t; they continued to live in their houses without knowing that eventually, when their land had become desirable real estate, they could be declared “trespassers” in their own homes.

At the same time as the Israeli government was defrauding the residents of Tel Aviv’s Mizrahi neighborhoods, it was expropriating vast tracts of land in the Negev—permitted under a 1953 law to allow the government to easily seize land to promote “development, settlement, and security.” Residents of Al-Araqib were expelled by the government from their land, despite the fact that the land has since gone untouched; the government expropriated the land seemingly for no reason.

When Al-Araqib residents attempted to appeal the expropriation in court, the government refused even to hold a hearing. As Michal Rotem writes, “according to the state and its representatives, not only do the native inhabitants of the Negev lack ownership of the land, they lack even have the right to pursue their claim in court.”

Over the years, the residents of Al-Araqib have attempted to maintain their connection to the land, working their crops, watching their flocks, and burying their dead there. While lone farms — for Jews only — continue to proliferate in the region, since 2010, the government has destroyed the village of Al-Araqib 120 times.

Sheikh Siakh, a man nearing his 70s, will be imprisoned because he dared to resist this injustice. Perhaps it should comfort him that he was not shot to death by police, like Yaqub Musa Abu Al-Qian, killed in Umm Al-Hiran — a man whose only crime was attempting to get away from his village before it was destroyed so that a Jews-only town, Hiran, could be built in its place.

For months, thousands of people have joined the weekly protests against government corruption in Petah Tikvah and now Tel Aviv. But government corruption does not begin with Netanyahu’s graft investigations, nor with his cigars and rosé champagne.

Government corruption begins with an ideological system that works to demographically design the country’s territory according to the criteria of ethnic and national origin. Government corruption begins with a way of seeing entire segments of the population as unnecessary and undesirable, as temporary residents in their own homes. Government corruption begins with the criminal violence of calling people trespassers in their own houses. If we want to fight this deep moral corruption, the place to look is not Rothschild Boulevard or the Attorney General’s house, but the line that that connects Givat Amal to Al-Araqib.

Caduri Halif stands among the rubble of his demolished house, Givat Amal neighborhood, Tel Aviv, September 18, 2014. A third eviction of families in the neighborhood left 20 residents homeless and without proper compensation or an alternative housing solution. (Activestills)

Caduri Halif stands among the rubble of his demolished house, Givat Amal neighborhood, Tel Aviv, September 18, 2014. A third eviction of families in the neighborhood left 20 residents homeless and without proper compensation or an alternative housing solution. (Activestills)

This article first appeared in Hebrew at Local Call. Read it here.

Trump tax cuts offer big savings for business jet buyers that could lift the industry

Can I get three – lol 170806photo-most-delivered-in-1h2017*100The Republican tax bill signed by President Donald Trump could provide “additional stimulus” for the recovering corporate jet and business aviation sectors, a leading aerospace analyst says.

Cowen aerospace analyst Cai von Rumohr offered that assessment in a brief research note he shared recently with the independent investment firm’s clients.

The number of pre-owned business jets for sale as a percent of the fleet dropped in December, the fourth straight month of decline and the lowest level…

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Details on Newly Uncovered GRU Online Personas

On Christmas, Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post from published two widely shared reports on GRU (Russian military intelligence) activities in creating fake profiles on social networks, along with “astroturfed” political activist groups.

The first, longer article, entitled “Kremlin trolls burned across the Internet as Washington debated options,” was written by Nakashima along with Greg Jaffe and Adam Entous. This article paints a wide picture of online activities from the GRU and presumably Kremlin-linked individuals, centered on a “freelance journalist” Alice Donovan (also known as Sophie Mangal). A central detail in this investigation is an “intercepted Russian military report” from February 2014 that “documented how Moscow created fake personas to spread disinformation on social media to buttress its broader military campaign.”

Ivan Galitsin

In her second article of the day, “Inside a Russian disinformation campaign in Ukraine in 2014,” Nakashima elaborated on this document, with the specific example of “Ivan Galitsin.” This persona was allegedly a specific part of the GRU cyber operations to influence opinion in Ukraine during the uncertainty of the Euromaidan revolution and the ensuing drama in Crimea.

Nakashima provides a few details about “Ivan Galitsin” that allow us to find the digital footprints of the alleged disinformation campaign carried out by the GRU. Specifically, the Post article describes how this online persona left a comment on a “British newspaper” under a February 22, 2014 story about former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

In going through Google results for stories about Tymoshenko from February 22, 2014, a handful of British sites that also have a physical newspaper seem promising, such as the the Guardian and the Daily Mail. Of these results, only a  particular Guardian article has a large number of comments.

Sure enough, on the second page, we can find a comment from an “Ivan Galytsin” with the exact words printed in Nakashima’s reporting. Additionally, “Ivan Galytsin” uses a photograph of Konstantin Yaroshenko, as described in the Post article, and created his account (and posted both of his only comments) on February 22, 2014.

We can also find “Ivan Galitsin” on Facebook, using the same avatar of Konstantin Yaroshenko.

According to the Post article, and corresponding to this Facebook profile, “Ivan Galitsin” created his profile on February 22–just as he did on the Guardian website. This “Ivan Galitsin” is supposedly from L’viv, a Ukrainian city in the country’s west.

Vova Kravets

Another online persona created by the GRU in the Post article is “Vova Kravets,” who was posing as a radical Ukrainian and sent death threats to Ukrainian politicians on Facebook.

This persona is also quite easy to find on Facebook, with only one profile currently on Facebook that could be a possible match. This “Vova Kravets” profile was created on January 31, 2014, a few weeks before “Ivan Galitsin,” and ceased posting on March 27, 2014. The persona’s identity is clear–a radical, far-right Ukrainian who is either a fan or member of the ultra-nationalist group Right Sector. Additionally, the profile’s only “friends” are a number of well-known individuals in Ukraine.

Unanswered Questions

Tracking down these two individuals named in the Post article was not especially difficult, but there are still a number of unresolved issues that were either directly raised in the Post‘s reporting or in need of attention.

Firstly, on February 27, 2014, four groups were allegedly created by the GRU on Facebook and Vkontakte (VK). In particular, these groups “encourage[d] Crimeans to support secession from Ukraine.” Furthermore, these groups “used paid ads on Facebook” and “received nearly 200,000 views on Facebook on Feb. 27 alone.” What are these groups? All of the pages liked by “Vova Kravets” and all of the groups he was a part of were in line with the persona that “he” was projecting–a Ukrainian ultranationalist, thus “he” would not have been part of any of these alleged GRU groups created on February 27. “Ivan Galitsin” liked three pages and was a part of one group that fit with the political theme of the GRU pages: Ukrainian Front (group), Ukrainian Front (page), Slavic Shield, and Antimaidan. However, none of these were created on February 27, though it is worth nothing that the Ukrainian Front page (not group) was created on February 22, the same day that “Ivan Galitsin” created “his” account.

Secondly, how effective were these online operations? While the figure of 200,000 views on a Facebook page is impressive, it is unclear if these are page views on the group’s page itself or impressions from its posts. When looking at “Ivan Galytsin” in particular, this online persona hardly made a dent in the online information space, with two comments on the Guardian‘s website and a neglected Facebook profile. Were the other online personas far more active than this virtual nobody?

Lastly, did this GRU operation have any relationship with the infamous St. Petersburg Troll Factory, allegedly run by Yevgeny Prigozhin? From the Post report, this GRU operation seems to have been run in-house, rather than outsourced to Prigozhin as a sort of contractor. However, with additional data points, it may be possible to find links between Prigozhin’s vast network of news (and more often, “news”) sites and army of social network sock puppet accounts.

The post Details on Newly Uncovered GRU Online Personas appeared first on bellingcat.

A noble act: The female writer who fought Nazis and machismo

On December 10, 1966, the Jewish-German poet Nelly Sachs received the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm, an award she shared with the novelist Shmuel Agnón. In her acceptance speech, she paid tribute to another Nobel laureate for saving her life. “In the summer of 1939, a German friend came to Sweden to visit Selma Lagerlöf and asked if she could find somewhere for my mother and I to take refuge,” she said. “In the spring of 1940, after several tortuous months, we reached Stockholm. Denmark and Norway were already occupied. The great novelist was no longer here.”

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