news

Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield calls off decision to cap anesthesia for surgical patients

lmao absolutely not a coincidence.

And just like that, the Baath government in Syria is no more. I'm very emotional right now, many mixed feelings, one part of me is very happy and relieved, another part knows that some American and Israeli ghouls are sharing my happiness, which makes me question that happiness. There's much to dissect in the events of these last 10 days, we'll do that slowly and carefully over the next weeks. But wow, I can't believe that this even happened. 14 years, what was even the point of all this pain and destruction? Congrats to Jolani, he has cemented his place in the history books as the conqueror of Syria, he did what Alloush, Baghdadi and countless others couldn't do. Assad goes into the trashcan of history, another failson goes.

And for the last time:

Who must go? 😔

Occupied Korean legislators voting to dissolve martial law is a pure "What are we? A bunch of North Koreans?!" moment if I ever witnessed one. And I don't doubt we'll get "Haha 2 dystopias one peninsula" comments from chauvinist scum.

DPRK was ultimately correct in severing unification ties with the South. Had they not done so they'd likely would not have pushed on Russian-Korean ties and would be strung along another set of useless agreements which would have left them more vulnerable to attack which seems to be pretty much guaranteed now. DPRK won't fall for another nuclear arms agreement trickery a second time.

It seems like martial law into civil war is the only path that Occupied Korea sees as to maintain its existence. The contradictions of capitalism can only be suppressed by a total armed conflict.

Kim Jong Un is so fucking locked in holy shit. . Kimjongunism is peak.

So what's up? "Israel" signs a ceasefire agreement and immediately breaks it by continuing the bombing campaign against Lebanon? Fuck this piece of shit nation

Death to "israel", the absolute worst spawn of capitalism and colonialism. Death to every zionist that exists.

It's mindblowing how many libs are Wuhan-pilled after the ~~show trial~~ The Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

They believe everything if it says CHINA BAD, even if western scientists themselves don't believe the lab leak theory.
If you point this out, you are a Chinese bot, case closed.

horrors approaching

Christ, what a miserable state of affairs. Assad has always been a piece of shit, but I cannnot imagine how awful things are going to get once again in Syria without his regime at least nominally committed to multiethnic harmony. And the Axis of Resistance? What a joke tbh, I'm almost glad Nasrallah isn't here to see this. Iran is just watching all its pieces wiped from the board, for what? Some vague hope that Trump of all people is going to dial back sanctions? Disgusting. I hope I'm wrong, but grim days seem to be ahead.

South Korean Parliament voted 190-0 to block the President's martial law declaration. South Korean National Assembly Speaker asks police to leave parliament.

South Korean parliament speaker Woo Won-shik says President Yoon's martial law is now null and void. - Yonhap. Speaker Woo: "All soldiers who entered the National Assembly building have left". Lee Jae-myung: "Martial law lifted... Will protect the lives and safety of the people

Law enforcement actively leaving South Korean National Assembly building - CNN

Its interesting observing Libs outside of the news mega bubble here. Someone unironically thought will be able to trade Kursk for all of the annexed territories including Crimea as part of ending the conflict.

Got emself a dang roll-top knapsack. 5/5 fit.

Imagine if this was a sign that American anarchists are growing teeth again. There was once a time in the early 1900’s when calling someone an Anarchist in the US was the equivalent of calling someone a Tankie today.

It would be nice to see a mass purge of NATO-leftist pansies and get some real muscle back into the movement.

::: spoiler Regarding this CEO, there's one important question I've yet to see anyone ask... Vaxxed??

Romania has annuled the results of the first round of their elections. Citing Russian interference.

In reality they didn't like the result so they're fighting it. Bourgeoise democracies are only allowed democracy if it's the outcome the bourgeoisie want.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4x2epppego

The last few weeks sure feel like decades. South Korean martial law, ceasefire with Hezbollah (for now), retreat of SAA, massive defeat for the democrats... big things are happening. Nobody can say that nothing ever happens anymore. Things are now happening

South Korea's Martial law comes after wrangling over budget bill

Yoon has been a lame duck president since the latest general election when the opposition won a landslide.

He was not able to pass the laws he wanted, instead, he was reduced to vetoing desperately any bills that the opposition had been passing.

Yoon is also mired in several scandals, mainly one around his wife, who is accused of corruption. She is also accused of influence peddling. The opposition has been trying to launch a special investigation against her.

This week, the opposition slashed budgets that the government and ruling party had put forward - and the budget bill cannot be vetoed.

In the same week, the opposition is moving to impeach cabinet members, mainly the head of the government audit agency, for failing to investigate the first lady.

Yoon has gone for the nuclear option - he claims it is to restore order when "anti-state" forces he says are trying to paralyse the country.

North Korean troops so 'poorly trained' that Putin army yet to throw them into battle, say western officials

Schrodinger's army

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham intend to deploy toxic materials in Aleppo, Idlib

https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/hayat-tahrir-al-sham-intend-to-deploy-toxic-materials-in-ale

A reliable Syrian source informed RIA Novosti that militants from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, are preparing to use toxic substances in Syria's Idlib and Aleppo provinces.

An informed source revealed that militants from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham have transferred several cylinders containing toxic gases from a stronghold of the Turkistan Islamic Party near Jisr al-Shughur to southern Idlib and other areas in western Aleppo.

So Assad's enemies were the ones attempting to use chemical weaponry? Color me surprised.

Amnesty late as aways

A report from Amnesty International alleges that Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip constitutes the crime of genocide under international law, the first such determination by a major human rights organisation in the 14-month-old conflict.

The 32-page report examining events in Gaza between October 2023 to July 2024, published on Thursday, found that Israel had “brazenly, continuously and with total impunity … unleashed hell” on the strip’s 2.3 million population, noting that the “atrocity crimes” against Israelis by Hamas on 7 October 2023, which triggered the war, “do not justify genocide”.

Israel has “committed prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction” with the “specific intent to destroy Palestinians” in the territory, the report said.

It marks the first time Amnesty has alleged the crime of genocide during an ongoing conflict, and builds on a March report by the UN special rapporteur for Palestine that concluded “there are reasonable grounds to believe” Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians.

“Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call: this is genocide and it must stop now,” Agnès Callamard, the group’s secretary general, said in a news conference on Wednesday.

Amnesty cited the deliberate obstruction of aid and power supplies together with “massive damage, destruction and displacement”, leading to the collapse of water, sanitation, food and healthcare systems, in what it called a “pattern of conduct” within the context of the occupation and blockade of Gaza.

“We did not necessarily start out thinking we would come to this conclusion. We knew there was a risk of genocide, as the international court of justice said,” Budour Hassan, Amnesty’s Israel and occupied Palestinian territories researcher, told the Guardian. “When you join the dots together, the totality of the evidence, it is not just violations of international law. This is something deeper.”

The main allegations in the report are:

The unprecedented scale and magnitude of the military offensive, which has caused death and destruction at a speed and level unmatched in any other 21st-century conflict;

Intent to destroy, after considering and discounting arguments such as Israeli recklessness and callous disregard for civilian life in the pursuit of Hamas;

Killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm in repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, or deliberately indiscriminate attacks; and

Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, such as destroying medical infrastructure, the obstruction of aid, and repeated use of arbitrary and sweeping “evacuation orders” for 90% of the population to unsuitable areas.

As an occupying power, Israel is legally obliged to provide for the needs of the occupied population, Kristine Beckerle, an adviser to Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa team, said on Wednesday. She described Israel’s May offensive on Rafah, until then the last place of relative safety in the strip, as a major turning point when it came to establishing intent.

“[Israel] had made Rafah the main aid point, and it knew civilians would go there. The ICJ ordered them to stop and they went ahead anyway,” she said. “Rafah was key.”

At least 47 people including four children were killed in air strikes across Gaza on Tuesday, according to health officials in the territory, including at least 21 who were sheltering in tent camp housing displaced people near the city of Khan Younis. The Israeli military said it had targeted Hamas militants.

Amnesty has called on the UN to enforce a ceasefire, impose targeted sanctions on Israeli and top Hamas officials, and for western governments such as the US, the UK and Germany to stop providing security assistance and selling arms to Israel.

The rights group has also urged the international criminal court, which last month issued arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the former defence minister Yoav Gallant, to add genocide to the list of war crimes it is investigating.

Finally, it called for the unconditional release of civilian hostages and for “Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups responsible for the crimes committed on 7 October to be held to account”.

The report, You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza, is likely to be met with outrage in Israel and generate accusations of antisemitism. Several legal experts and genocide studies scholars contend that the 7 October attack was also genocidal.

The Holocaust led to the creation of the Jewish state and the Geneva conventions, which codified and outlawed genocide as a punishable crime. Both initiatives were the international community’s “never again” response to the horrors inflicted on European Jews by the Nazis in world war two.

In its conclusion, the report says that Amnesty “recognises that there is resistance and hesitancy among many in finding genocidal intent when it comes to Israel’s conduct in Gaza”, which has “impeded justice and accountability”.

“Amnesty International concedes that identifying genocide in armed conflict is complex and challenging, because of the multiple objectives that may exist simultaneously. Nonetheless, it is critical to recognise genocide, and to insist that war can never excuse it,” it states.

Amnesty said the report was based on fieldwork, interviews with 212 people, including victims, witnesses and healthcare workers in Gaza, analysis of extensive visual and digital evidence, and more than 100 statements from Israeli government and military actors it said amounted to “dehumanising discourse”. It also used video and photo evidence of soldiers committing or celebrating war crimes.

Israel’s acts in Gaza were examined “in their totality, taking into account their recurrence and simultaneous occurrence, and both their immediate impact and their cumulative and mutually reinforcing consequences”, it said. Findings were shared “extensively” on multiple occasions with Israeli authorities, the group added, but were not met with responses.

Thursday’s publication builds on the London-based rights group’s previous bold positions on Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. In 2022, Amnesty joined Human Rights Watch and the respected Israeli NGO B’Tselem in issuing a major report accusing Israel of apartheid, as part of a growing movement to redefine the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a struggle for equal rights rather than a territorial dispute. Israeli politicians called for the report to be withdrawn, alleging antisemitism.

Police have been deployed at the entrance to the National Assembly Building in Seoul, following South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol having declared Martial Law

Under Martial Law, South Korean President Yoon has outlawed any form of Political Activity, including Protests, Demonstrations, or Rallies; while all Media Outlets across South Korea have been placed under Governmental Control.

US backed Military coup or Yoon Suk is attempting a self-coup by himself?

Martial law can be lifted by a majority vote in parliament. But am hearing the police is barricading the entrance to the building with buses.

Yoon’s cabinet approves decision to lift martial law (CNN)

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s cabinet has voted to lift martial law, shortly after he announced his intention to withdraw the measure.

Yoon had previously said he intended to lift the measure after the National Assembly voted to block it, but needed to wait until enough members of the cabinet were able to vote.

Looks like our favorite assassin of the moment might not have used a traceable Citibike after all. Per the NYTimes:

The police are now investigating whether the gunman escaped on an unmarked e-bike, rather than a Citi Bike as they first said, according to two people familiar with the investigation.

The picture they released of him on the bike initially raised my doubts, since the wheels on that bike looked a bit too thin to be the ebikes that Citibike uses, but I just waved that away as the image quality is super shitty. Regardless this just adds more hope to the idea he'll get away without issue.

CW: MURDER

Here's the vid of the CEO assassination: https://x.com/Jake_Hanrahan/status/1864375810527801659

I don’t have strong feelings on Assad (because no investigation, no right to speak), but I fear the coming years are going to be horrific for the Syrian people. Complete instability, fighting among factions, etc… it’s the people of Syria who will suffer most. I don’t think you’re going to see things stabilize there for quite some time.

I do wonder, though, if this instability means Hezbollah will continue to be able to resupply from Iran.

I'm starting to believe that there is a god out there, but that god is an evil god. That god is a god that not only allowed white supremacy, genocide, and colonialism to reign victorious for centuries, they actively supported them and blessed the perpetrators. They are the same god that decided the Al-Aqsa flood would not dislodge Israel after a year, but Israel-friendly terrorists take over an entire country in less than two weeks. A god that deserves to be overthrown, and their followers punished for their transgressions and crimes against humanity.

I don't feel anything about the collapse of the SAA in Hama and possibly further. It's a rotting government, even a particularly vulnerable minority like the Ismaili Shias in Salamiyah are seeing the writing on the wall and handed over their town to HTS today. People in the left anti-imperialist camp are missing too much context in their steadfast defence of Assad and the government. Yeah most minorities would rather live under Assad, that's obvious, but it's frankly a horrible government and most people are just indifferent at this point. I expected horrors to be committed when HTS took Aleppo, but they are behaving better than the SAA and NDF thugs so far honestly. It's very hard to be motivated to fight for the rotting Baath government, what does a vision of the future even look like at this point? Back to 2010, where you get arrested if you get caught praying when you have lunch break? It's psychologically over for the Baath government, their last 15 years have ranged from mediocre to disastrous in people's minds, and the natural reaction is that people either openly welcome HTS or become indifferent towards HTS.

This coverage is so funny because you can tell they're trying not to frame things like this but all this does is humanize him and make him seem normal.

Wow I really think he's gonna get away lmao

South Korea’s largest union confederation says members will strike until Yoon resigns (CNN)

South Korea’s largest union confederation said its members will go on an indefinite general strike until President Yoon Suk Yeol resigns following his attempt to impose martial law.

“We will fight alongside the people, leading the way for the immediate resignation of Yoon Suk Yeol,” the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) said, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.

“KCTU members will stop working according to the strike guidelines, call for the resignation of Yoon Suk Yeol for treason, and conduct nationwide emergency actions for social reform and the realization of popular sovereignty,” the union added.

The KCTU boasts 1.2 million members.

The union confederation said members will gather at Gwanghwamun Square this morning. The huge square in central Seoul which has long been the location for political protests.

Assad is gone? Wow. I didn't know that... he led an amazing life. What else can you say?

Kevin spacey is in israhell stating his support to the state. Pissrael is not beating the allegations

Oh cool, South Korea declared martial law.

A new rumor has the internet worried that the Disney Channel is ending in the United States. The internet is in a tizzy because of a rumor that the Disney Channel is shutting down in the United States. However, at the time of writing this article, Disney has not made any announcements about shutting down the Disney Channels stateside.

That being said, Disney has already shut down channels in several countries. There is even a timetable showing which channels were shut down and when. So far, they have been shut down in Australia, Southeast Asia, Italy, the UK, South Korea, and more. Disney Xd has been shut down in even more countries as Disney tries to push viewers to Disney+. In France, Disney Xd has already been shut down, and Disney Jr. and the Disney Channel will terminate on January 1, 2025. In Spain, Disney Channel will cease operations on January 7, 2025.

They are going to close down all their channels outside the US to push for Disney+ garbage.

South korea update

• The Yonhap News Agency is reporting that members of the national assembly have been banned from entering the building, with the South Korean military having reportedly announced the suspension of all parliamentary activity. We have not yet independently verified this information. The parliament speaker is traveling to parliament and plans to convene a session, according to local broadcaster YTN TV.

-The US, south Korea’s most powerful ally, has not yet commented on the martial law declaration. About 28,500 American troops are stationed in south Korea to guard against north Korea, led by Kim Jong Un.

• Here is a statement from martial law commander Park An-su.

He said:

All political activities are banned in South Korea following the imposition of martial law on Tuesday and all media will be subject to government monitoring.

All political activities, including those of the national assembly, local councils, political parties, and political associations, as well as assemblies and demonstrations, are strictly prohibited.

All media and publications shall be subject to the control of the martial law command.

With martial law imposed, all military units in the south, which remains technically at war with the nuclear-armed north, have been ordered to strengthen their emergency alert and readiness postures, Yonhap news agency reported. Under south Korean law, lawmakers cannot be arrested by the martial law command and the government has to lift martial law if the majority of the national assembly demands it in a vote. The leader of the prime minister’s own conservative party, Han Dong-hoon, has vowed to stop the imposition of the law “with the people” and Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the opposition Democratic party, which has a majority in parliament, has also expressed opposition to it.

A taxi driver in Seoul who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal said: “They’re using exactly the same methods they used in the Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan eras … Whenever their regime is in crisis, they use war-mongering and martial law to cover it up.”

Park and Chun were military dictators in South Korea between 1961 and 1988. “I never imagined this would happen again,” the taxi driver said.

-South Korean markets started reacting to the news. The won tumbled to the lowest level against the dollar in two years: 1,443 won per dollar.

-The Chinese Embassy in Korea told Chinese citizens in the country to remain calm and pay attention to political changes. It asked them to “strengthen safety awareness, reduce unnecessary outings, express political opinions with caution and abide by the official decrees issued by Korea.”

-Live video broadcast by state news media shows soldiers pushing against citizens who are trying to enter the National Assembly building.

South Korean Parliament may vote immediately to impeach the President following his declaration of martial law.

You killed the man, not the idea