“Some states are using a mindblowing strategy against Corona Virus which leads to zero percent death rate, yes you heard it right! The strategy is to not test anyone for Corona Virus and if anyone dies due to signs suggestive of the disease blame it on influenza or any goddamn bacteria! Sighs.
PS: many others are deliberately restricting the testing to hide the scale of the problem, all done for petty political reasons.”
–Mir Laieeq, a Kashmiri doctor
“Teaching me peace isn’t easy,
I have pellets in my eyes,
and bullets in my heart.
-Though peace to you”
–Zafar Iqbal from Kashmir, March 11th, 2018
The drama queens are out declaring that ‘the Democratic Party is dead’ after Sanders lost the primaries. As someone who has watched that party eat up & demobilize the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s movement, & several other social justice movements, its corruption & moribund political character have been evident for decades. One could only wish it would shrivel up & go away instead of providing ‘hope springs eternal’ to too many.
The White Helmets rescue workers report that baby Mira, who was thought to be orphaned after Syrian & Russian airstrikes on Maarat Masrin, Idlib, has been reunited with both her parents after they were found in a hospital. Her two sisters & four other family members were killed.
(Photo of baby Mira from White Helmets)
The postmortems on Bernie Sanders blame the voters, first the young for not voting & then the old for voting for Biden. Truth is, Sanders never had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the nomination. If he wasn’t defeated at the polls, the Democratic Party would have found another way to maneuver him out of the nomination. That’s the way the two-party US political system is designed to work. Sanders supporters would have made much more significant political gains if instead of trying to reform the stinking rot of the Democratic Party they had concentrated their work on organizing against US wars, for women’s rights, to support the Black community, to oppose concentration camps for refugees. Ain’t no savior like Sanders (or McGovern, McCarthy, Jackson before him) going to salvage the Democratic Party from the cesspool of its political corruption.
These are four Kashmiri children hit by pellet munitions. They were not part of any protests demanding India withdraw its now one million troops from Kashmir. It cannot be determined if they were struck accidentally or if Indian troops meant to do harm to small children in the vicinity of protests. Such a genocidal act would clearly not be beneath the Indian Army since it also uses forcible disappearance, mass incarceration of youth, & mass rape as means of social terrorism. India has no right to use pellet guns against protesters exercising their democratic rights to demand freedom & the withdrawal of all Indian troops from Kashmir. Opposition to the use of pellet guns in Kashmir is an international issue encompassing human & child welfare rights.
(Collage via Toronto For Kashmir)
In an act of remorseless criminality, the J&K High Court, for a second time, refused to ban the use of pellet guns against unarmed protesters in Kashmir. The damage pellet munitions have done to thousands of young & old protesters & those in the vicinity of protests includes killing, disfiguring, blinding, disabling, causing lifelong pain & health problems from lead pellets embedded in internal organs. They are a genocidal weapon used to inflict maximum harm, especially on young people.
The struggle to end the use of pellet munitions in Kashmir is an international issue because what India does in Kashmir will not stay in Kashmir. Other repressive regimes will slowly begin to introduce pellet guns against protesters as India has regularized their use in Kashmir & as Israel has regularized the use of snipers against unarmed Palestinian protesters.
Rendition centers in Greece for war-traumatized refugees?
Life under coronavirus lockdown in Italy
#italy #caronavirus #lockdown
By Mir Suhail Qadiri
