Mark Epstein:
“There’s a facility in Winchester, Virginia where they’re scrubbing the files to take Republican names out.”
Monthly Archives: November 2025
“They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.”
Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark on how the US planned to “take out” 7 countries in 5 years.
Starting with Iraq then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan & Iran.
The UN Embraces Colonialism: Unpacking the Security Council’s mandate for the U.S. colonial administration of Gaza
Most disturbingly, it hands control of Gaza and the survivors of the genocide over to the United States, a co-perpetrator of the genocide, and provides for the participation of the Israeli regime in decision making. Under the plan, Palestinians themselves are to be granted no such participation in decisions on their own rights, governance, and lives.
In adopting this resolution, the Council, in effect, has become a mechanism of U.S. oppression, an instrument for the continued unlawful occupation of Palestine, and a complicit actor in Israel’s genocide.
Not since the UN partitioned Palestine in 1947 against the will of the indigenous people, setting the stage for 80 years of Nakba, has the UN acted in such a baldly colonial (and legally ultra vires) way, and trampled so recklessly on the rights of a people.
CIA, White House surprised by secret meeting between US ambassador and Jonathan Pollard
The reasons Huckabee and his senior adviser, David Milstein, agreed to the meeting remain unclear. Both men have sought to cultivate strong ties with Israel’s right wing, with which Pollard is closely aligned. Pollard said he thanked Huckabee for advocating more than a decade ago for his release from prison. He declined to detail the topics discussed, saying only that “a lot of things” came up.
In the Times interview, Pollard said he did not regret spying for Israel, arguing that Washington had withheld critical intelligence. He also sharply criticized President Donald Trump, calling him “a madman who has literally sold us down the drain for Saudi gold,” referring to Trump’s announcement that the United States would sell F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia despite Israeli concerns.
Pollard has since signaled political ambitions, telling The Jerusalem Post he intends to run for the Knesset and advocating annexation of Gaza and its “repopulation” with Israeli settlers.
Operation Gladio: The CIA’s Secret Army In Europe
Three years after the end of World War II, the 1948 Brussels Treaty created the Clandestine Committee of the Western Union. And after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created in 1949, the Western Union was left “devoid of its newly-expanded authority,” according to the University of Luxembourg.
But the Clandestine Committee was transformed into the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC) in 1952 and, along with the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), was linked to NATO. According to “The Cold War,” it was through this network that NATO member states organized the stay-behind network across Western Europe that would become known as Operation Gladio.
The CIA, with the help of MI6, was also instrumental towards setting up the stay-behind espionage networks. According to “The Declassified History of American Intelligence Operations in Europe” by Matthew M. Aid, the CIA intended to do “whatever it took” to prevent Western European countries from having any communist influence in their governments. And by the late 1960s, the CIA was “covertly financing dozens of underground stay-behind agent networks in thirteen Western European countries, including supposedly neutral Sweden.”
https://www.grunge.com/717106/operation-gladio-the-cias-secret-army-in-europe/
Sandinista! To Our Friends, 20 Years Later — In Memory of Timur Kacharava, Russian Anti-Fascist
In the early 2000s, Russia went through various stages of consolidation of state power and strengthening of law enforcement structures after the criminal redistribution of property and mass privatization of the 1990s. The role of nationalist rhetoric in these processes and the connection between the state apparatus and nationalist organizations were emotionally yet accurately described in several analytical articles by the anti-fascist civil rights activist Stanislav Markelov.
In his essay “Patriotism as a Diagnosis,” he describes patriotism backed up by the criminal state as a disease of society, a tool for depoliticizing and maintaining a passive condition of silent majority and a tactic to distract attention from the real problem of growing social inequality.
Markelov is best known as the lawyer of the plaintiff on the high-profile trial of colonel Budanov, who was accused of raping and murdering Elza Kungayeva, a teenage girl from Chechnya. Markelov’s uncompromising stance on nationalism and his consistent support for anti-fascists caused strong irritation not only among representatives of neo-Nazi groups, but also among nationalist-minded military and representatives of law enforcement structures.
On January 19, 2009, several years after the murder of Timur Kacharava, Stanislav Markelov was murdered by a gunshot in the head in the center of Moscow. He was accompanied by a journalist, anti-fascist and environmental activist Anastasia Baburova. She was fatally wounded by shots and died in the hospital later the same day.
During the investigation, it was found that behind the murders of Markelov and Baburova was a neo-Nazi group, the Russian Nationalist Combat Organization. This group was later recognized as responsible for the murders of at least ten other people: anti-fascists, migrants, law enforcement officers, and martial arts athletes of non-Russian origin. Members of the group had access to the addresses and photographs of left-wing activists from the database of the Russian Interior Ministry’s Center for Countering Extremism, and one of the group’s members had been an actual Federal Security Service (FSB) employee.
According to our information, the attack on Timur was also not accidental and his killers were hunting him down specifically.
A new face of ethnic cleansing: From siege to demographic engineering
The latest events merely reveal another layer of this long continuum: expulsion through paperwork, or more precisely, through the deliberate absence of it. Multiple investigations show that passengers were escorted through the Karam Salem crossing and transferred to Israel’s Ramon Airport without their passports being stamped. Bureaucratically, this erases their legal identity; without proof of exit, their right of return dissolves. Politically, it signals a chilling shift from siege to disappearance — the continuation of ethnic cleansing by administrative means.
The organisation behind these “humanitarian” flights calls itself Al-Majd Europe. On its own website, the group describes itself as a humanitarian organisation “founded in 2010 in Germany” and “specialising in providing aid and rescue efforts to Muslim communities in conflict and war zones.” Its self-presentation is steeped in religious language — “Our roots are rooted in the values and heritage of Islam, and our headquarters are located in Jerusalem” — projecting an image of benevolent rescue and offering “evacuation services” to Gazans. Yet the site also includes a disclaimer warning against “hidden smugglers using our name and asking for money.”
Investigative journalists from AP and Al Jazeera have since uncovered a digital mirage: a domain registered abroad, cryptocurrency payment options, AI-generated staff photos, and no verifiable headquarters. Families in Gaza reportedly paid thousands of dollars to secure passage, only for the organisation to vanish once the flights landed. Is this the latest form of smuggling — not into, but away from the homeland? What masquerades as rescue thus becomes complicity, a humanitarian mask concealing the machinery of erasure.
Norman Finkelstein: International law is dead. The class struggle is alive
Norman Finkelstein explains why Israel and its allies in the West have destroyed the international order, and how the election of a Muslim socialist in New York threatens their grip on power.
Finkelstein is a political scientist and one of the world’s foremost scholars on Israel-Palestine, as well as a critic of culture and empire.
He is the author of ‘The Holocaust Industry’ and most recently, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It.
Archaeologists Uncover Lost Opioid Tradition in Ancient Egypt
The popularity of the narcotic in ancient Egypt had been hinted at in medical texts from Hippocrates to Galen and Dioscorides, as well as in religious symbolism, such as the poppy goddess on Crete, but it had been difficult to prove.
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The findings suggest a more sophisticated understanding of pain and mind altering experiences in ancient Egypt than previously thought. “If opiate use stretched from kings to commoners, we must reframe our perceptions about Egyptian medicine and opium’s role in its pharmacological sophistication,” writes Renton, in his email. “These findings would suggest that pain management, sedation, and perhaps controlled psychoactive experiences played meaningful roles in daily life and religious practice.”
https://nautil.us/archaeologists-uncover-lost-opioid-tradition-in-ancient-egypt-1247907/
A massive Cloudflare outage is affecting X, ChatGPT, and even Downdetector
Cloudflare, a networking company that provides DDoS protection and delivery services for many companies around the globe, is experiencing a major outage that’s taking down sites across the web. Users are running into an error message when they try to access X, ChatGPT, and even the outage-tracking website DownDetector has an error message saying “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”
[…]
The outage comes less than a month after a huge Amazon Web Services crash took down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and other services, which was followed by issues at Microsoft Azure that brought Xbox offline for hours.