"Well, it doesn't matter, but there was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs," Trump responded. "They load the boats up with drugs. So we hit all the boats and now we hit the area. It's the implementation area. That's where they implement. And that is no longer around."

• China will ban retractable EV door handles on new vehicles starting January 2027.

• Mechanical emergency releases will be mandatory for both interior and exterior door handles.

• Tesla and other automakers must redesign handles to meet new safety standards.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/16172

CEBU — Days before Christmas, a 55-year-old woman peasant leader was shot dead in her home late Monday night, December 23, in sitio Makilo, barangay Camansi, Kabankalan City, Negros Occidental.

Warlita Jimenez was inside her bedroom when two armed men wearing bonnets forcibly entered their house at around 11:00 p.m. and shot her four times, according to accounts from her family. She died on the spot.

Jimenez was a local leader of a farmers’ organization and had been active in campaigns for land rights in the area.

Jocel Anecito, daughter of Warlita Jimenez, broke down in her mother’s bedroom after learning the news. “We haven’t even moved on (and) now another life in our family has been taken,” Anecito told 99.7 Brigada Kabankalan.

Jimenez was the wife of Joseph Jimenez, another farmer-leader who was killed on November 30, 2022, after being captured by soldiers of the military’s 15th Infantry Battalion. He was killed alongside Ericson Acosta, a peace consultant of the National Democratic Front (NDF) in Negros.

Following her husband’s death, Jimenez was reportedly subjected to repeated harassment by state forces. Rights groups said she was frequently summoned to barangay offices and pressured to surrender as an alleged member of the New People’s Army (NPA), accusations Jimenez’s family denied.

Targeted killings

Citing the threats, harassment, and red-tagging Warlita Jimenez had faced, Human Rights Advocates Negros (HRAN) alleged that government soldiers may be behind her killing, according to a report by 99.7 Brigada Kabankalan.

In the same report, 15th Infantry Battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Elmar Salvador denied HRAN’s allegations, saying the military does not target innocent civilians and claiming that the New People’s Army (NPA) was responsible.

Farmers groups debunked the military’s claims.

According to a joint statement by national peasant groups Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) and Tanggol Magsasaka, both Warlita and Joseph were members of Paghiliusa sang mga Magagmay nga Mangunguma kag Mamumugon sa Brgy. Camansi (PAMMACA), a local farmers association facing a land dispute with the hacienda-owning Sola family.

The groups said the Sola clan has been “…violently ejecting and exploiting peasants in Kabankalan since the 1940s.” The statement also alleged that the clan “…continues to employ goons and coercion against farmers with rightful claims to over 140 hectares of agrarian reform lands in the city.”

The military dismantled PAMMACA after Joseph’s death and began repeatedly harassing and forcing Warlita and other Camansi residents to surrender as members of the NPA. Warlita repeatedly rejected these accusations and sought assistance from the regional office of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR).

Human rights alliance Karapatan said the killing took place amid a pattern of violence targeting peasant leaders and their families in Negros since the implementation of Memorandum Order No. 32 (MO 32). Issued by former president Rodrigo Duterte in 2018, MO 32 placed the island, along with parts of Bicol and Eastern Visayas, under heightened militarization to address what his administration described as “lawless violence” and “acts of terror” in the regions.

Cristina Palabay, Karapatan secretary general, said the attack took place even as families across the country were marking the Christmas season.

“The murder of Warlita Jimenez reflects the climate of fear and violence faced by farming communities in Negros,” Palabay said, citing continued reports of harassment, surveillance, and killings of peasant leaders.

The family of Warlita, together with rights advocates including the September 21 Movement–South Negros (S21M) and Human Rights Advocates in Negros (HRAN), is calling for an immediate and independent investigation into her killing and urging authorities to identify and hold those responsible to account.

“Her death outpaced the snail-paced investigation by the Commission on Human Rights into the killing of her husband. Not content with killing Joseph Jimenez and Ericson Acosta, they have now targeted Warlita Jimenez,” HRAN told 99.7 Brigada Kabankalan. (RVO)

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On 5 January I will go on trial at Kingston Crown Court charged with an offence under Section12 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The maximum penalty if found guilty is 14 years in gaol. There are others due to follow me.

You might be forgiven for thinking that my ‘offence’ was preparing a bomb intended for the Israeli Embassy. In fact, it was disagreeing with government policy and received opinion.

I was arrested on 20 December 2023 by Counter-Terrorism Police in a dawn raid under the Terrorism Act 2000. My ‘crime’ was posting a tweet, one month previously, saying that I supported the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli Defence Forces.

The anti-terrorism police are reminiscent of the Thought Police (Thinkpol) in George Orwell’s 1984, who spent their time hunting down “thought crime.” Britain’s equivalent of seized my electronic devices – computers, laptop, mobile phone etc. When I applied to the courts to recover these items, the police justified their retention by saying that they provided a ‘highly relevant insight’ into my mind.

The aim of Orwell’s Thought Police was to enforce mental conformity, ensuring citizens police their own minds. In his Expert Witness Statement in the Case for the Deproscription of Hamas, Jonathan Cook, a journalist who has worked on The Guardian, The Observer and The Times amongst other papers and a recipient of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism in 2011, wrote:

Over the past several months, I have been watching with growing professional alarm – and personal trepidation – what I can only describe as a campaign of political intimidation and persecution of a number of journalists in the UK. The journalists who have been targeted share one thing in common: they report and comment on Israel’s actions in Gaza from a critical perspective that judges those actions to be genocidal…

I haven’t received any support for 3 days 😞😞please help me and my family; any donation, even a small one, would mean a lot and help us through these difficult circumstances

https://archive.ph/L7iSB

The founder and leader of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), a far-right paramilitary unit fighting alongside Kyiv’s army, has been killed in action on the front lines in Ukraine, the group announced Saturday. 

Denis Kapustin, 41, was killed overnight on Saturday while carrying out a combat mission in Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region, the RVC said. 

He was also known by the name Denis Nikitin and the nom-de-guerre White Rex.

This war is more dangerous, more complex, and more difficult than the war with Iraq between 1980 and 1988

The situation during the war with Iraq was clear: they fired missiles, and we knew where to strike. But today, they surround us from all sides, apply pressure on us, obstruct our trade, and raise public expectations inside society in various fields.

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/middle-east/gaza-israel-palestinians-ceasefire-families-killed-b2887779.html

Jaber al-Attar, a 51-year-old doctor living in northern Gaza, was elated when the news arrived of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, bringing an end to two years of relentless bombardment. But just four weeks after it was announced, he received a phone call on his way to work at Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat to say that his daughter, Maysaa, had been killed by Israeli drone fire as she sheltered in a tent. “There is absolutely no safety; there is no hope for us to have any security,” he tells The Independent from the same tent in the Al-Atatra area of Beit Lahia, where he is living after being displaced. “I spent my life in hardship and misery.” Jaber’s daughter is one of at least 410 Palestinians to be killed since the ceasefire came into effect on 10 October, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

During a victory lap speech in the Knesset, US president Donald Trump had promised “peace for all eternity”. But for Gazans, the nightmare has not ended: it is a ceasefire in name only. In addition to the more than 400 Palestinians who have been killed, the health ministry says that 1,134 have been injured by Israeli shelling and gunfire. At least three Israeli troops have also been killed by Palestinian militants, while two people were killed on Friday in what police called a "rolling terror attack" in northern Israel. Images show a landscape unchanged by two months of peace, with apartments razed to the ground and families wandering among the rubble. Humanitarian agencies continue to warn that nowhere near enough aid is entering the strip, which has been in the grip of a hunger crisis for most of the year. “From the very first moment, and every day, morning and evening, there is gunfire and artillery shelling in the yellow and non-yellow zones. There is no peace of mind. There is nowhere else for us to go. There is nothing but your own destroyed place,” says Jaber. “We are still suffering to this day. There is heavy gunfire and intense shelling, but this is the state of our country: a tragedy we did not choose.”

The deadliest night of the “ceasefire” so far came on 29 October, when at least 109 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces during an overnight attack. The Israeli military said the attack was a response to the killing of an IDF soldier by Hamas. The militant group said it had “no connection” to the incident. Dozens more Palestinians, including children, have been killed after crossing the “yellow line”. This refers to the boundary which Israeli forces agreed to withdraw from under Mr Trump’s ceasefire, but Gazans say its position is constantly changing – with deadly consequences. The Israeli military says its operations, in particular within the yellow line, are “carried out to address direct threats from terrorist organisations in Gaza”.

But in one particularly horrific incident, two young boys – Fadi, 8, and Jumaa, 11 – had gone out to gather firewood for their wheelchair-bound father in Beni Suhaila, near Khan Younis. They were killed by a drone strike near a school sheltering displaced people. The IDF described the children as “two suspects who crossed the yellow line, conducted suspicious activities on the ground, and approached IDF troops operating in the southern Gaza Strip, posing an immediate threat to them”. Israel says it has abided by the terms of the ceasefire, and has repeatedly described victims of its attacks as suspected terrorists.

A dispute over aid is also ongoing, with humanitarian groups warning that far less aid than required is entering the strip. Hamas claims fewer trucks are entering Gaza than had been agreed, but Israel maintains that it is fulfilling all of its obligations under Mr Trump’s plan. As Israel and Hamas continue to trade blows, the suffering of ordinary Palestinians continues. Since his daughter’s death, Jaber says he has suffered psychologically, his weight plummeting from 100kg to 75kg. “I used to own three houses, and now I’m homeless in a tent,” he says.

Imad Abu Shawish, a 38-year-old freelance journalist, has seen the horror of post-ceasefire Gaza up close. On 22 November, he sifted through the rubble of an Israeli airstrike on a residential building in Nuseirat, which killed 11 members of the Abu Shawish family, including two married couples and seven children. Only one daughter from the two families survived: 19-year-old Batoul. Imad pulled her from under the flattened building with his own hands. “There is absolutely no safety, no safety at all,” he tells The Independent. “My life has changed drastically. My eating and drinking habits have changed. My emotional and psychological behaviour has changed. My feelings towards others have changed. I am still in shock, deeply traumatised.” He continues: “I don’t know where I am or what I am going through. What happened to me? I still don’t have an answer. I’ve become terrified, anxious, fearful, and panicky. Perhaps it’s because I’m afraid the war will return at any moment and we’ll be killed. “I don’t think these bad feelings will easily disappear from our minds. We need internal healing and psychological treatment.”

Palestinians have also been suffering in severe winter weather, with strong winds and torrential rains tearing apart tents housing hundreds of thousands of homeless families. “Everyone’s tents are flooded,” says Abed al-Moneim al-Zein, a 60-year-old from northern Gaza who is currently displaced in Khan Younis. “There aren’t enough tents, mattresses, or blankets.” His brother Ameen, a 56-year-old from Beit Lahia with a wife and three daughters, was killed 19 days after the ceasefire came into effect. “Ameen loved his city dearly; he adored it,” recalls Abed. “He was always smiling and participated in all the city’s events, from celebrations to football matches. “The area he went to wasn’t a yellow zone. He went looking for shelter after losing his home. It was a school in the city centre.”

Abed continued: “Life is nonexistent. There are no basic necessities. We live in fear, tension, anxiety, and terror. The war has affected us immensely, beyond human endurance.” The Israeli military said in a statement: “IDF troops under the Southern Command are deployed in the area in accordance with the ceasefire framework and will continue to act to remove any immediate threat. “In contrast, Hamas is not fulfilling its part of the agreement and has violated the ceasefire hundreds of times.”

Snip:

Syrian citizens of the Alawite minority sect took to the streets on 28 December to protest against government violence and sectarian persecution, in line with a call made by the community’s religious leader a day earlier.

Members of the minority sect protested in the Alawite neighborhoods of the central governorate of Homs, and in several towns and cities on the country’s coast, including Tartous, Jableh, and Latakia. Protests also erupted in Hama governorate, including in the city of Masyaf.

The protesters also expressed anger over the killing of eight Alawite civilians and the injury of over a dozen others in a terror blast at a mosque a few days earlier.

According to local media reports, government forces have attacked protesters in several areas, firing live ammunition to disperse crowds and making arrests at random.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/surviving-an-onslaught/cl/s?utm_campaign=fp_sharesheet&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=copy_link&lang=en_GB

More like Brigitte Bar-done lmao