This is Bella who I found in 2015 along with her tiny baby girl Bellissima. Bella was emotionally vacant & had no idea how to receive love. She’s grown into a character with a strong personality who takes no guff from the other dogs, who loves to tease, who loves to be held. Bellissima is a bully & a delight. Yesterday, Bella found a way out of the yard & I spent the day looking for her by car & on foot with Bellissima in tow. Bella showed up at the fence after four hours. You never realize how much you love them till you think you’ve lost them.
(This is in an old bird cage where the dogs love to sit.)
The White Helmets are here rescuing two children. They recovered the bodies of two other children & a man after four Syrian bombing raids on the village if Nqair in the countryside of Idlib. Or as Assad propagandists would describe it, the White Helmets are here engaged in terrorism using “crisis actors” because everything to Assad propagandists & their guppies is street theater orchestrated by the CIA & Mossad. Everything that portrays the brutality of Assad’s dictatorship or the revolutionary potential of Arabs & Muslims is a lie. Blame it on US regime-change; blame it on Israel to justify why Russian & Syrian bombing of civilians is necessary to protect Assad’s national sovereignty. This rubbish hasn’t persuaded the best political thinkers of our time. It has taken those whose relevance has long since passed.
The only principled position is to demand the immediate cessation of Russian, Syrian, & US-coalition bombing of Syria & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces from Syria.
These are photos of the UN Security Council delegation meeting with Burmese officials last week about the repatriation agreement between Burma & Bangladesh, an agreement signed at the height of the recent genocidal onslaught & which excludes Rohingya from decision-making. The photos are from the wall of Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the head of the Burmese military who engineered & presided over the genocide along with Suu Kyi. The genocidaire-in-chief gave an extremely revealing report on this meeting which doesn’t make the UNSC delegation come out looking good. But what’s significant about these photos is that the UNSC delegation (on the left side of the photo) is negotiating (really more like sweet-talking, if we are to believe the general’s report) with military officials, not civilian officials representing that so-called civilian regime that is forging democracy in Burma. These are another of those pictures worth a thousand lies that tell us what we always knew: there is no civilian government in Burma. It is the front office operation for the Burmese military. We have it from the general himself.
This is my little Juan-Pierre who I’ve had since I got him off the street in 2014. He’s a rascal & a shepherd who helps me rescue other dogs; he’s macho & a mama’s boy. He’s just an awesome little guy. Recently he developed the bad habit of wailing like I was beating him when he wanted to go outside. I can rescue but am clueless when it comes to training. In desperation, I put him in the bathroom when he started wailing–just for a minute & then I let him outside. It didn’t take long. Now he just whimpers when he wants to go out. This dog training is working out so good for me that I may try other techniques.
This is Palestinian cartoonist Sabaaneh’s mockery of athletes from Arab countries participating in the 2018 Giro d’Italia. That includes a team from Bahrain, where there is extreme repression after the 2011 Arab Spring uprising, & from the United Arab Emirates, which played a central role in the Saudi-coalition bombing of Yemen & runs arbitrary detention facilities which use torture. The governments of those two countries would not see solidarity with Palestinians & compliance with the cultural boycott of Israel as politically advantageous. Israeli politics are more their speed.
What’s perhaps even more offensive than Bahrain & UAE’s participation is that South Africa has a team in the race. What is it about Israeli apartheid that the South African government doesn’t understand? But of course the US, Australia, & several European countries have teams entered, including Switzerland. So much for that neutrality thing. Despite the persecution & mass deportations of African refugees, including Eritreans, the Israeli team has an Eritrean refugee riding for them.
The primary purpose for running the tournament in Israel is to counter the cultural boycott & all of the participating governments know that. Israel’s minister for strategic affairs who oversees efforts to counter BDS said the fact that they successfully bribed Giro to come to Israel (he didn’t put it quite that way) “is a huge achievement in & of itself that strengthens Israel’s legitimacy.” That would be more true if the race weren’t being held at the same time as the Great Return March in Gaza where Israel has killed at least 43 & injured over 6,000, including by shooting them in the legs with explosive bullets requiring amputation in many. Giro 2018 in Israel is the analog of the Nazi Olympics 1936 in Berlin.
A sardonic & quite wrenching mockery by Palestinian cartoonist Sabaaneh of the Giro d’Italia cycling tournament going on in Israel now. The race, one of the three most prestigious in the world, is usually held in Italy but the officials were bribed $28.3 million by Israel & a Zionist settler from Canada to hold it in Israel as a way to undercut the cultural boycott (BDS).
The route of the race travels within a few kilometers of Gaza, where Israeli snipers are shooting peaceful protesters in the legs. Five athletes, including one cyclist, have had legs amputated from explosive bullets. Giro 2018 is the analog of the Nazi Olympic games 1936 in Berlin.
