Bullets:

• Western sanctions against oil producers in Russia and Europe have simply re-routed global trade routes.
• Energy shipments from Russia to the European Union have instead been snapped up by India, Turkiye, and Africa.
• Iran, though under heavy sanctions, produces more oil today that at any time in over 40 years, with $78 billion in export sales, mostly to China.
• Russia and Iran are some of the world's lowest-cost oil producers in the world, and can book profits even as prices fall.
• In the United States, drilling companies are shutting down oil rigs and shelving plans for new exploration. Energy companies cannot profitably drill new wells in North America, unless oil prices maintain long-term pricing far above $60 per barrel.
• Demand destruction is also being felt across the world, as Chinese production of new energy vehicles is a hit to future gasoline sales.

Metadata embedded in the video and analyzed by WIRED and independent video forensics experts shows that rather than being a direct export from the prison’s surveillance system, the footage was modified, likely using the professional editing tool Adobe Premiere Pro.

Source

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/8474568

New satellite images reveal significant damage to the U.S. Al-Udeid air base in Qatar following Iran's retaliatory strikes last month.

New satellite images reveal significant damage to the U.S. Al-Udeid air base in Qatar following Iran's retaliatory strikes last month, debunking President Donald Trump's claims that the largest U.S. military base in the West Asia region had been unscathed.

The images, analyzed by The Associated Press and provided by Planet Labs PBC, showed that a geodesic dome, known as Radome, which housed key secure communications equipment used by U.S. forces, was present at the base just hours before the Iranian attack, but was no longer visible in subsequent images.

“Planet Labs photos showed the geodesic dome intact on the morning of June 23, the day of the Iranian retaliation,” the findings indicated. “Later images, taken from June 25, showed the dome missing, with visible burn marks and damage to an adjacent building.”

So far, U.S. and Qatari authorities have not offered an immediate official response on the extent of the damage, and neither government has publicly acknowledged the incident.

The damage to the dome occurred following the U.S. attack on three Iranian nuclear facilities in Natanz, Fordo and Isfahan on June 22. This attack was responded to the next day with Iranian bombing raids on the U.S. air base.

Trump dismissed the June 23 Iranian response as “very weak” in a Truth Social post.

The U.S. did not retaliate after the Iranian attack on the U.S. airbase, and Trump quickly enacted a unilateral ceasefire on behalf of Washington and Tel Aviv, which is still in effect.

Iran's missile attack on the US Al-Udeid air base in Qatar reveals an uncomfortable fact: this base represents both a military and political liability for the United States. Worse, it gives Qatar, with its sometimes anti-American agenda, undue influence over Washington policy.

Former U.S. Central Command commander Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. is quoted as detailing in a report that the base “will be rendered unusable in the event of a sustained Iranian attack.”

Israel launched its aggression against Iran on June 13, attacking nuclear and military facilities as well as residential areas. This attack triggered a series of Iranian retaliatory missile strikes against Israeli targets in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The war also included a U.S. aggression against Iranian nuclear facilities, followed by an Iranian missile attack against the U.S. air base in Qatar on June 23.

After 12 days of conflict, Israel ended its aggression against Iran in the early hours of Tuesday morning after suffering heavy blows at the hands of the Iranian Armed Forces.

Images and video:

Polish prosecutors have launched an investigation into far-right leader Grzegorz Braun after he declared the gas chambers at Auschwitz to be “fake” and said it is a “fact” that Jews have committed ritual slaughter of Christians. Denial of Nazi crimes is an offence in Poland that carries a jail sentence of up to three years.

Braun, who finished fourth in the recent presidential elections with 6.3% of the vote, made his remarks during an interview today with radio station WNET. The veteran far-right politician, who is a member of the European Parliament, has a long history of hateful and conspiratorial rhetoric regarding Jews and other minorities.

During the interview, Braun referred to what he claimed are the “lies of the Talmud, the Haggadah [two Jewish religious texts], and the Holocaust”. He said that Jewish organisations “condemn those who tell the truth that ritual murder is a fact and Auschwitz with its gas chambers is a lie”.

A longstanding antisemitic canard is that Jews murder Christians, in particular children, and use their blood for religious rituals. Meanwhile, many modern antisemites deny the fact that gas chambers were used at Auschwitz and other German-Nazi camps to murder Jews during the Holocaust.

After the interviewer contested Braun’s remarks, he reiterated them, saying that the Auschwitz Museum provides a “pseudo-historical account” about what happened at the camp and blocks research into the gas chambers. He also cited a book by an Israeli historian that he says proves Jews carried out ritual murder.

That led the interviewer to immediately cut short the broadcast, saying that there “are limits to political cynicism and sensationalism when it comes to several million victims and their memory”.

Subsequently, Anna-Maria Żukowska, head of the parliamentary caucus of The Left (Lewica), one of the groups that make up Poland’s ruling coalition, announced that she was filing a complaint to prosecutors regarding Braun’s remarks.

She accused him of violating article 55 of Poland’s law on the Institute of National Remembrance, which criminalises public denial of Nazi and communist crimes. Those found guilty can be punished by up to three years in prison.

Late on Thursday afternoon, the district prosecutor’s office in Warsaw announced that it had initiated an investigation into whether Braun had committed the offence of denying Nazi crimes.

Meanwhile, Piotr Cywiński, the director of the Auschwitz Museum, which is a Polish state institution, issued a statement condemning Braun’s “scandalous” comments, which he said were not only a violation of the law but also “an insult to the memory of the victims of the camp”.

“Grzegorz Braun’s words are not a ‘political provocation’, but a conscious lie and an act of ideological, antisemitic hatred,” said Cywiński. “They cannot remain without a decisive response from the state and all decent people – for whom the memory of Auschwitz is of particular importance.”

The museum director noted that, while it was primarily Jews who were victims of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, ethnic Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and Roma were also murdered in them.

At least 1.3 million prisoners were transported to Auschwitz during the war, with at least 1.1 million of them killed at the camp. Around one million of those victims were Jews, most of whom were murdered in gas chambers immediately after their arrival. The second largest group of victims were ethnic Poles.

Cywiński said that the museum would itself file a notification to prosecutors regarding Braun’s remarks. He also appealed to Polish media to stop giving space to Braun, who “has repeatedly shown that he cannot function in the public space without vandalism, lies, hate speech and racism”.

Last week, Braun was presented by prosecutors with seven sets of charges relating to four incidents, including his attack on a Jewish religious celebration in parliament two years ago.

He is also being investigated over a series of incidents during the recent presidential election campaign, including when he vandalised an LGBT+ exhibition, made antisemitic remarks during a televised debate, and removed a Ukrainian flag from a public building.

During the 12-day war between the U.S, Israel, and Iran, Western media relied heavily upon a U.S.-based “human rights organization” when it came to counting the dead from Israeli strikes, and classifying them as either civilian or military casualties.

During the conflict, the group published civilian-to-military casualty ratios that consistently suggested impressive precision by Israeli forces, a precision called into question by emerging videos of Israeli strikes on civilian areas. Yet Drop Site could not find a single Western news outlet that disclosed the source of funding.

The organization is called Human Rights Activists in Iran but is based in suburban Virginia. That organization, according to its own website, is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which was created by Congress and is funded annually to be an arm of American foreign policy.

The AP referred to the group simply as “the Washington-based group Human Rights Activists,” while the BBC called them “a Washington-based human rights organisation that has long tracked Iran.” Time, France 24, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, the Washington Post, and dozens of other outlets relied on HRAI without disclosing its link to the US government.

It appears that in Israel they believe that it's sufficient to attach the label "humanitarian" to convert every act into a legitimate one. Just like the term "the most moral army in the world", which is no longer connected to what IDF soldiers are doing, they're now trying to present a concentration camp to be used for the transfer of population as the most moral one in the world.

An Israeli source said Wednesday that "the plan is to move all civilian Gazans southward to a large tent city in Rafah, in which they'll have hospitals and plenty of food." He added: "Just like the prime minister said, as far as I'm concerned, they can be given Ben & Jerry's ice cream." A source of blue-and-white pride: In our concentration camp they have ice cream.

In Israel, you're not allowed to make comparisons, and when you do compare to benighted periods, something always "goes wrong in the translation." As long as the concentration camp isn't a waystation on the way to gas chambers, it's easy to refute the comparison and thereby normalize almost any evil. As long as it's not a Holocaust, everything's okay. Thus the historical comparison, which was meant to be cautionary, becomes a tool for muzzling critics and for normalizing the evil.

More than 20 countries are convening in Bogota next week to declare “concrete measures against Israel’s violations of international law”, diplomats told Middle East Eye.

The “emergency summit” is due to be held on 15-16 July, co-hosted by the governments of Colombia and South Africa as co-chairs of The Hague Group, to coordinate diplomatic and legal action to counter what they describe as “a climate of impunity” enabled by Israel and its powerful allies.

The founding members of the group included Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal and South Africa.

States due to take part in the summit include Algeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Honduras, Indonesia, Ireland, Lebanon, Malaysia, Namibia, Nicaragua, Oman, Portugal, Spain, Qatar, Turkey, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Uruguay, and Palestine.

The warning was direct, blunt and left no room for doubt. "We expect all ICC actions against the United States and our ally Israel – that is, all investigations and all arrest warrants – to be terminated," said Reed Rubinstein, legal adviser at the US State Department, before delegates of the 125 member states of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Tuesday, July 8, at a meeting at United Nations headquarters in New York from July 7 to 9.

If the ICC arrest warrants for crimes against humanity and war crimes issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant on November 21, 2024, as well as ongoing investigations into crimes committed in the Gaza Strip and the settlement of Palestinian territory, are not dropped, "all options remain on the table," he declared.

The Trump administration is imposing sanctions on the UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, an outspoken critic of Israel's military offensive in Gaza.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio linked the move to her support for the International Criminal Court (ICC), some of whose judges have already been sanctioned by the US.

Rubio said the US was sanctioning Ms Albanese for directly engaging with the ICC in its efforts to prosecute American or Israeli nationals, accusing her of being unfit for service as a UN Special Rapporteur.

This remains relevant as Ukraine has never apologized for these atrocities, continues to reject that these attacks constituted "genocide," and has criticized Poland for establishing July 11 as a day for commemorating the victims. And of course, it still uses the same slogans ("Slava Ukraini"), the same symbols (such as the red and black flag), and reveres Stepan Bandera (who was the head of the OUN, which in turn founded the UPA which carried out these attacks).