Zajímavé aktuální zahraniční články

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Info o posledních raketových útocích Ruska na Ukrajinu.
https://www.rt.com/russia/567715-ukrain ... es-trains/

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Zajímavá úvaha o rozšíření ropovodu TAL.
https://cz.sputniknews.com/20221205/zac ... 51623.html

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Takový ilustrativní výběr památníků na Ukrajině:
https://forward.com/news/462916/nazi-co ... ine/?amp=1

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Zajímavý pohled generála Skrzypzcaka:
https://wpolityce.pl/swiat/630314-gen-s ... incy-zgina

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14 dead, 24 injured in Ukrainian strike on civilian hospital – Russian MOD
https://www.rt.com/russia/570626-ukrain ... tal-crime/

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Tak Zelenský zase perlí. Tentokrát rozhodnutím: "Přidělit 10. samostatné horské útočné brigádě Pozemních sil Ozbrojených sil Ukrajiny čestný název „Edelweiss“ a v budoucnu ji nazývat 10. samostatná horská útočná brigáda „Edelweiss“ Pozemních sil ozbrojených sil. Ukrajiny."
Pojmenovat horskou útočnou brigádu na počest 1. Horské divize Wehrmachtu, to jistě v Rusku ocení
https://www.president.gov.ua/documents/802023-45805

[davkol]

Labs of Oppression. As Israelis Protest Mounting Authoritarianism, Apartheid Regime Over Palestinians Goes Unchallenged.

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The Israeli government has deployed an array of legal and policy pretexts to extend its domination of the West Bank, most notably by supporting the more than half million Israeli settlers who illegally moved there. Since a new, far-right coalition took power, Israel has been roiled by mass protests that reached an apex this week, as hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to oppose plans by Netanyahu — who is currently fighting corruption charges — to severely curtail the independence of the country’s judiciary. But the political crisis means little to Palestinians, including the 1.6 million with Israeli citizenship, who have long viewed Israel’s courts as complicit in their oppression, and the legal system many Israelis are now rushing to defend as an enabler to the regime of racial domination forced upon them.

“Palestinians know that Israel has only ever been a democracy for its Jewish citizens, and never for us,” George Bisharat and Jamil Dakwar wrote in an op-ed for Haaretz this week. “What we are witnessing today is an internal Israeli Jewish struggle over who will administer an apartheid regime over the Palestinians, not a genuine fight for democracy for all.”

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Last May’s ruling, the final one on the Masafer Yatta case, essentially sanctioned the forcible transfer of Palestinians from the firing zone — even as the forcible transfer of an occupied population is a form of ethnic cleansing and, under international law standards, a war crime.

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In recent years, a growing number of global human rights organizations has begun to describe the Israeli state’s control of Palestinians as a form of apartheid — a parallel to South Africa that Palestinians themselves had been drawing for decades. The political backlash has been fierce, even as those reports — by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, but also the Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic and the Israel-based B’Tselem — have offered careful legal analysis to explain their conclusions, and referred to an established, legal definition of the crime of apartheid as defined under multiple international statutes. Left with no other recourse, Palestinians have increasingly taken their plight to the international community and international mechanisms of justice like the International Criminal Court, which includes apartheid under the crimes against humanity over which it has jurisdiction, and which in 2021 opened an investigation on the situation in Palestine.

Until now, those seeking to defend Israel’s conduct have largely done so by referring to its democratic character, including the integrity and independence of its judiciary, even as Palestinians have long argued Israel is no democracy when it comes to them.

…

“There is definitely this culture of hyper legalization and performative law,” Eghbariah told me, pointing for instance to a legal distinction Israel draws between settlements and outposts — even as it mostly treats both equally, and even as both are illegal under international law. “The whole distinction between outposts and supposedly legal settlements is absurd. But it’s part of the legitimizing force of the law to try to use this façade of rule of law, of supposedly a democratic state, that practices so-called measured violence, and that has checks and balances in place. The law serves as a tool, a technology even, to legitimate atrocities, to rationalize them, and to make them more palatable.”

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For years, residents of the area have relied on ingeniousness and the solidarity of nongovernmental organizations and activists who have provided them with a microgrid of solar panels and water tanks that the army regularly confiscates and that settlers vandalize. Settlers also regularly damage olive trees, set fields on fire, uproot vegetables from gardens, and destroy Palestinian property. In Khirbet Susya, Nawajah pointed to a stone monument that settlers had ripped out, a tribute to a Palestinian baby who was burnt to death along with his family in a 2015 settler attack. Not far from the village, a patch of olive trees was shriveled dry by poison. Signs in Hebrew called on people to report international peace activists to Israeli police.

Nawajah described a combination of daily harassment, increasingly violent attacks, and a seemingly endless stream of new techniques devised by settlers, under the watch of the army, to seize ever-larger swaths of Palestinian land. Sometimes, he said, settlers fly drones over herds of sheep to scare them off course; often, they send their own sheep and livestock to graze on Palestinian crops. And a new practice was taking hold in the area, by which a lone, armed settler would set up a “pastoral outpost” on a hilltop, bringing animals to graze on the lands below — a faster and more efficient way to stake a claim on a piece of land than to set up an entire residential community. Where residential outposts are often made up of a few caravans and makeshift homes, a pastoral outpost only requires some tools, animals, and one person who, using this tactic, can significantly alter control of the land. “It’s enough to set up something like this to clear out a lot of land that belongs to Palestinians,” Nawajah said, noting that most Palestinian farmers would give up trying to reach that land for fear of being attacked.

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Often the harassment and threats turn into open violence. Nawajah, who has been documenting dozens of such incidents for years, tells his neighbors to continue to report settler attacks to the army so as to create documentation of what happens — even as most Palestinians have given up reporting them because they fear retaliation and because they have come to view settlers and the army as one.

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Overall, in the West Bank, Israeli officials have confiscated more than 2 million dunmas, or nearly 800 square miles of Palestinian land, more than one-third of the West Bank — much of it the private property of Palestinians. They have done so under an array of justifications, including the designation of much of it as “state land.” The Israeli group Peace Now, which tracks the expropriation of Palestinian land, estimated that the Israeli government declared up to a quarter of the West Bank state land. B’Tselem, which also tracks Israeli land grabs, found that settlements and the roads and infrastructure that serve them have effectively encircled Palestinians in the West Bank into “165 non-contiguous ‘territorial islands’” — a fragmentation that observers have long compared to apartheid South Africa’s Bantustans.

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In many ways Masafer Yatta is a microcosm where the dynamics playing out across the entire West Bank are magnified by the designation of the firing zone. Daily harassment of Palestinians, illegal settlement expansion, and settler violence have been growing steadily throughout the occupied territory for years. So has the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces — which last year reached the highest toll since the end of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. So far, 2023 has been even worse, with Israeli raids in cities like Nablus and Jenin killing dozens, and settlers setting fire to homes and cars in a series of attacks that have been compared to “pogroms” and that were encouraged by top officials of Israel’s new fundamentalist government.

The extremism of the current Israeli government has in many ways laid bare the reality of Israel’s project of domination. As settler violence in the West Bank has reached historic records in recent months, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently called for a Palestinian village attacked by settlers to be “wiped out,” before being forced to apologize. And as protests in Israel reached a peak this week, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a settler once convicted of supporting an Israeli terrorist organization, worked out a deal with Netanyahu to delay the controversial judicial reforms in exchange for the establishment of a new security force that will operate under Ben-Gvir’s direct orders — a prospect that some have likened to handing the extremist minister a “private militia.”

But before the likes of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir reached the highest level of the Israeli government, the groundwork for the supremacist project they have championed had been in motion for years, advanced under more liberal Israeli governments as well — much of it unfolding with at best tepid criticism from Israel’s closest allies, including the U.S.

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Since 1948, for instance, officials have authorized the creation of more than 900 “Jewish localities” inside Israel, but have only granted a handful of permits for government-planned townships for Palestinians. Most of those are communities the Israeli state has created for Bedouins that it continues to displace across the Negev desert — even as those Bedouins have for years resisted forced relocation to these poverty-stricken townships.

In the Negev, the historical land of the Bedouins dating back centuries, Israel has announced plans to forcibly displace 36,000 people living in roughly 40 “unrecognized” communities, in order to expand military training areas and implement what it called “economic development” projects. In total, some 90,000 people live in unrecognized Bedouin communities in the desert, and also face an uncertain future. Adalah, an Israel-based human rights group, has been representing many of the Bedouin communities facing eviction as they fight in court for the right to stay on their land.

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Alice Speri
April 1, 2023
The Intercept

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V Rusku byl vyvinut nový systém radioelektronického boje schopný ochromit družice na oběžné dráze
https://cz.sputniknews.com/20230415/v-r ... 75642.html

[davkol]

The 2023 crony-capitalism index. War, tech woes and cock-ups have pummelled certain plutocrats.

Over the past 20 years, Britain’s capital was so welcoming to oligarchs that it became known as “Londongrad”. Many bought mansions from Highgate to Hyde Park; a couple bought into football clubs. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year, 48 oligarchs were placed under Western sanctions. The immense wealth of many of Vladimir Putin’s associates highlights the problem of crony capitalism and why more should be done to combat it.

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The way we estimate all this is to start with data from Forbes. The magazine has published an annual stock-take of the world’s wealthy for nearly four decades. In 1998 it reckoned that there were 209 billionaires with a total worth of $1trn, equivalent to 3% of global gdp. This year the publication details 2,640 billionaires worth $12trn or 12% of gdp. Most of those listed do not operate in rent-seeking sectors. Adjusting for rising prices—$1bn in 1998 is now equivalent to $3.3bn—there are 877 billionaires (at 1998 prices) with a collective worth of $9trn.

We classify the source of wealth into rent-seeking and non-rent-seeking sectors. An economic rent is the surplus remaining once capital and labour have been paid which, with perfect competition, tends towards zero. Rent-seeking is common in sectors close to the state, including banking, construction, property and natural resources. It can sometimes be possible for rent-seekers to inflate their earnings by gaining favourable access to land, licences and resources. They may form cartels to limit competition or lobby the government for cosy regulations. They may bend rules, but do not typically break them.

poznámka: všimněte si, Česko je v žebříčku druhé za Ruskem. Bohatství klientelistických miliardářů odpovídá 15 % HDP.

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What happens when cronyism gets completely out of control? If elites so enrich themselves that they impoverish a country, a “kleptocracy” forms, declared Stanislav Andreski, a Polish sociologist. He warned against such regimes and their effects in the late 1960s. It has taken more than 50 years for Western countries to heed him.

Identifying kleptocracy is more art than science. Our findings correlate only somewhat to indices of democracy and corruption. And in any case, at what level does corruption destroy the functions of the state? usaid, America’s agency for international development, issued an 84-page “dekleptification” guide last year. After studying 13 countries including Brazil, Malaysia and Ukraine, it recommends breaking up corrupt monopolies and digitising ownership registries, among other important measures.

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At the summit Janet Yellen, America’s treasury secretary, pointed out that “kleptocrats launder kickbacks through anonymous purchases of foreign real estate”. So starting next year America will require firms formed or operating in the country to reveal their real, or “beneficial”, owners. Another 36 countries have signed up to America’s declaration to make concealing identity more difficult. But transparency is not a silver bullet. Last year a new law in Britain required foreign businesses that own property assets to register themselves and disclose their true owners. A report in February by an anti-corruption watchdog found that the owners of 52,000 of the 92,000 properties subject to the new rule remained undisclosed. Shady owners skirt rules and registries often lack the resources to police them.

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May 2, 2023
The Economist

[Dalibor.Zahora]

https://www.novinky.cz/clanek/zahranicn ... y-40433751

v Rakousku se ve vnitrostranické volbě předsedy ukázalo co mohou způsobit technické systémy když nejsou dostatečně a kvalitně rozvíjeny - děkuji že máme Helios a věřím že TO bude mít dost prostředků a lidí na to aby naše systémy udrželo bez chyb a aby technické systémy neplnily takto stránky novin