Russia steps up Azovstal siege as freed
civilians reach Zaporizhzhia
Posted By: FormerDem, 5/4/2022 10:28:59 AM
Russian forces have shelled and attempted to storm the Azovstal steelworks, the last holdout of Ukrainian troops defending the southern port city of Mariupol, as a first convoy of refugees from the plant reached the city of Zaporizhzhia. Video footage showed thick smoke in the sky above the site where officials said up to 200 civilians, including children, remained trapped in a network of underground bunkers and tunnels with up to 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers. The Red Cross (ICRC) said more than 100 civilians had managed to escape in a convoy of buses and ambulances accompanied by ICRC and UN teams, joined by families and individuals in private vehicles.
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FormerDem"
Russian forces have shelled and attempted to storm the Azovstal steelworks, the last holdout of Ukrainian troops defending the southern port city of Mariupol, as a first convoy of refugees from the plant reached the city of Zaporizhzhia.
Video footage showed thick smoke in the sky above the site where officials said up to 200 civilians, including children, remained trapped in a network of underground bunkers and tunnels with up to 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers. The Red Cross (ICRC) said more than 100 civilians had managed to escape in a convoy of buses and ambulances accompanied by ICRC and UN teams, joined by families and individuals in private vehicles.
Ukrainian marine commander urges Pope
Francis to help save Mariupol: 'Prayers
are not enough' 6 replies
Francis to help save Mariupol: 'Prayers
are not enough' 6 replies
The Ukrainian marine unit commander in city of Mariupol, currently under siege by Russian forces, has penned a letter to Pope Francis in which he urges the religious leader to help save those still in the city, CNN reports, per online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda.
Maj. Serhi Volyna, commander of the 36th Separate Marine Brigade, began his letter to the Pope by noting he is Orthodox, not Catholic, but "I believe in God and I know that light always overcomes darkness."
Ukrainian forces and officials have accused Russia of dropping chemical weapons on the port city of Mariupol, causing troops and civilians alike to develop respiratory illnesses.
“Russian occupation forces used a poisonous substance of unknown origin against Ukrainian military and civilians in the city of Mariupol, which was dropped from an enemy [unmanned aerial vehicle],” the Azoz Regiment, a unit of the National Guard of Ukraine, posted to Telegram on Monday. “The victims have respiratory failure, vestibulo-atactic syndrome.”
The bodies are strewn across the quiet tree-lined street in the town of Bucha as far as the eye can see. All 20 are in civilian clothing, and all have their different poses in death. Some lie with sightless eyes staring at Ukraine's overcast sky, some lie face down on the tarmac. Three of them are tangled up in bicycles after taking their final ride, while others, with waxy skin, have fallen next to bullet-ridden and crushed cars. One has his hands tied behind his back with a white cloth, and his Ukrainian passport left open beside his corpse, said AFP journalists who accessed the town. CORRECTION*
Journalists entering a Ukrainian town which saw fierce fighting with Russian forces have found dead bodies of men in civilian clothes strewn on a street.
An AFP news agency reporter in Bucha, near Kyiv, counted at least 20 bodies. At least one man had his hands tied.
BBC journalists in another part of Ukraine found the bodies of two civilians killed by Russian forces.
Earlier this week the BBC's Jeremy Bowen and his team counted a total of 13 bodies, some of whom may have been Ukrainian soldiers, along a stretch of road between the villages of Mria and Myla.
Putin 'deports Ukrainians to camps':
8 replies
Vladimir Putin has been accused of deporting Ukrainians to 'filtration' centres before forcibly taking them to remote Siberian towns after confiscating their phones and documents.
'Several thousand' people have so-far been taken, Mariupol city council claimed, before being processed through 'filtration camps' and sent to 'remote cities' in Russia where they will be obliged to stay for years and work for free.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the siege of Mariupol... would go down as a war crime, warning Russians that thousands of their soldiers had died in the conflict. ..."Yesterday, the Russian occupiers dropped bombs on an art school No 12," the Mariupol city council said on messaging app Telegram on Sunday, adding that around 400 women, children and elderly people had been sheltering there from bombardments. City authorities also claimed that some residents of Mariupol were being forcibly taken to Russia and stripped of their Ukrainian passports. CORRECTION*
Russia has made dire threats to the West that any military shipments to Ukraine will be seen as 'legitimate targets', prompting fears there could be an escalation of conflict that could suck in other countries.
[snip] But Volodymyr Zelensky has slammed the West for its inaction, saying today he 'doesn't see any bravery from NATO' as he pleaded for more involvement from allies in peace negotiations and offered to pay for more anti-missile systems. In response, the US made lukewarm promises of taking 'diplomatic steps' to help the Ukrainian government.
Ukraine Worked With Democrats Against
Trump in 2016 to Stop Putin. The Bet Backfired Badly. 5 replies
Trump in 2016 to Stop Putin. The Bet Backfired Badly. 5 replies
Six years ago, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country, the Ukrainians bet that a Hillary Clinton presidency would offer better protection from Russian President Vladimir Putin, even though he had invaded Crimea during the Obama-Biden administration, whose Russian policies Clinton vowed to continue.
... but Ukraine's bet backfired both when Trump won in 2016 -- and when Russia invaded after the Democrats regained power under Joe Biden.
[snip] Ukrainian government officials intervened in the 2016 race to help Clinton and hurt Donald Trump in a sweeping and systematic foreign influence operation that's been largely ignored by the press.
Victoria Nuland: Ukraine Has "Biological
Research Facilities," Worried Russia May
Seize Them 13 replies
Research Facilities," Worried Russia May
Seize Them 13 replies
Self-anointed "fact-checkers” in the U.S. corporate press have spent two weeks mocking as disinformation and a false conspiracy theory the claim that Ukraine has biological weapons labs, either alone or with U.S. support. They never presented any evidence for their ruling — how could they possibly know? and how could they prove the negative? —
Unfortunately for this propaganda racket masquerading as neutral and high-minded fact-checking, the neocon official long in charge of U.S. policy in Ukraine testified on Monday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and strongly suggested that such claims are, at least in part, true.
Victoria Nuland: Ukraine Has "Biological
Research Facilities," Worried Russia May
Seize Them 3 replies
Research Facilities," Worried Russia May
Seize Them 3 replies
Self-anointed "fact-checkers” in the U.S. corporate press have spent two weeks mocking as disinformation and a false conspiracy theory the claim that Ukraine has biological weapons labs, either alone or with U.S. support. They never presented any evidence for their ruling — how could they possibly know? and how could they prove the negative? —
Unfortunately for this propaganda racket masquerading as neutral and high-minded fact-checking, the neocon official long in charge of U.S. policy in Ukraine testified on Monday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and strongly suggested that such claims are, at least in part, true.
Russia never wants to depend on Western states or companies again, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday, adding that the West was using Ukraine to undermine Russia.
Lavrov told a news conference after talks with his Ukrainian counterpart in Turkey that Russia had never used its oil and gas as weapons and that it would always have markets for its energy exports.
Most Active Articles (last 48 hours)
Intelligence Panel Chairman Adam Schiff
Downplays SCOTUS Breach: ‘I Don’t
Care How the Draft Leaked’ 40 replies
Downplays SCOTUS Breach: ‘I Don’t
Care How the Draft Leaked’ 40 replies
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) tweeted on Wednesday that he did not care how the draft of the Supreme Court opinion on Roe v. Wade leaked — despite it being an unprecedented breach in the Supreme Court’s modern history.“I don’t care how the draft leaked. That’s a sideshow,” he tweeted, in remarks reminiscent of his efforts to protect the identity of the leaker of former President Donald Trump’s classified call with the Ukrainian president.“What I care about is that a small number of conservative justices, who lied about their plans to the Senate, intend to deprive millions of women of reproductive care. Codifying Roe isn’t enough.
WASHINGTON— President Joe Biden on Thursday named Karine Jean-Pierre to be the next White House press secretary, the first Black woman and openly LGBTQ person to serve in the role, with incumbent Jen Psaki set to leave the post next week.
Jean-Pierre takes on the role as the White House faces an uphill battle to help Democrats hold onto the House and Senate in this fall’s midterm elections, and as the administration struggles to address Americans’ concerns about soaring inflation and the state of the economy. She also comes into the job as Biden faces a daunting array of foreign policy challenges, including the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and
Kamala Harris was a featured speaker at the EMILY’s List gala Tuesday. The timing of the event was convenient for the pro-abortion fundraising organization given the leak of a draft of the Supreme Court’s opinion on overturning Roe v Wade. The leak from the Supreme Court dominated the news cycle and the freak out from Democrats and others has been spectacular. Kamala took an indignant tone as she expressed her ange“There is nothing hypothetical about this moment,” Harris declared. “How dare they. How dare they tell a woman what she can do with her own body. How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future.
ABC’s legal analyst Sunny Hostin said Tuesday on ABC’s “The View” that comedian Dave Chappelle getting attacked on stage during the “Netflix Is A Joke Fest” was in part due to former President Donald Trump unleashing “incivility.”
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg said, “What do you think is happening? It’s happening on airplanes. It’s happening on street corners. People are just running up. I mean, the Hollywood Bowl. He just ran up on there.”
Embattled Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn responded Wednesday night to a video circulating on social media showing him naked and thrusting his pelvis at another man's head. The video was first published by American Muckrakers PAC, a political group that runs the Fire Madison Cawthorn website, ahead of North Carolina's May 17 primary. Soon after, it started circulating widely on Twitter, according to WRAL. David B. Wheeler, president of the PAC, said in a statement that the video was 'passed to us by a former supporter' of Cawthorn but would not name the source. It shows Cawthorn, 26, screaming and chanting as he started thrusting against an unknown man's face.
“The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg went into a full-blown triggered rage Tuesday after the Supreme Court draft opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked, ranting about people “tripping over women” giving themselves abortions in public restrooms.“This is not the first time, but I will tell you this is my body, and nobody — you know, you got people telling me that I have to wear a mask or don’t wear a mask or do this, everybody wants to tell me what to do — but you won’t let me make my decision about my body,” she railed in a pro-choice screed.“You are not the person to make that decision
Another day, another Joe Biden controversy. For months now, the president has drawn a lot of attention to his choice of location for public events, which many believed was “fake”. Reports say the White House has built a Hollywood-style set for the president to use inside the Old Executive Office Building, complete with large-screen computers and lights, and even multiple “fake” windows.
The mainstream media so far debunked these stories as false but for the first time, far-left Politico accidentally reveal the reason why President Biden use the fake White House set.
The 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in central Pennsylvania was and remains the worst accident of its kind in the United States, but, as a new documentary shows, it could have been so much worse.In the four-part Netflix docuseries “Meltdown: Three Mile Island,” which debuted Wednesday, May 4, Rick Parks — a former leading engineer at the facility — reveals how cover-ups, falsifications of safety tests and downright dangerous corner-cutting caused the terrifying nuclear event and could have potentially triggered a second, bigger one that would have affected a huge chunk of the Eastern Seaboard.What Parks found risked America being on “the verge of an apocalypse”
US stocks plunged sharply in early trading Thursday as investors grow more anxious about the Federal Reserve’s move to slam the brakes on the economy to combat decades-high inflation.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged more than 1,000 points as of 12:15 p.m., or 3.1%.
The selloff was more pronounced in the tech-heavy Nasdaq index, which was down by 5.23%, or more than 600 points. The broad-based S&P 500 fell about 4% (Snip) The CBOE Volatility Index, known as Wall Street’s “fear gauge,” surged 24% to 31.62 points.
The US has secretly been giving Ukraine real-time battlefield intelligence that directly helped its military kill Russian generals, according to a report—drawing an angry response Thursday from the Kremlin. Washington had provided crucial intelligence that helped pinpoint Russia’s mobile military headquarters as well as anticipate their movements, the New York Times reported, citing multiple senior US officials. The intelligence was “decisive” and directly led to Ukraine killing “many” Russian generals, the anonymous officials told the paper, without specifying the number.
Ukraine has previously claimed to have killed at least 12 Russian generals. The report stressed that not all were attributed to the US tipoffs.
Joe Biden's new 'disinformation czar' dismissed concerns about Critical Race Theory in schools as 'disinformation for profit' - despite parents across the country being worried about the teaching of the philosophy in their children's classrooms. Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert who has worked throughout Eastern Europe, was hired on April 27 to lead a Homeland Security Department working group designed to help its different agencies in dealing with disinformation on topics ranging from migration to plots from Russia and Iran.But her appointment has angered Republicans.The Republican National Committee dubbed the committee she heads 'Ministry of Truth' in a nod to George Orwell's novel '1984,'
We don’t know at this point who leaked the Supreme Court draft opinion overturning two major abortion decisions, but we do know that this “suicide bomber,” as a former law clerk called them, is guilty of obstruction of justice and, in the words of another former law clerk, “violat[ed] like, ten different procedures.”
Mike Davis, a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, and who worked with the Senate Judiciary Committee on judicial nominations, spoke with me on KTTH radio and said, “You’re supposed to be dealing with the youngest, smartest, young lawyers and law grads in the country, and they have ethical obligations as young lawyers, future lawyers.”
Comments:
I am praying for the Ukrainian soldiers at Azovstal. And expecting things to get worse. Russia appears to be slowly encircling Turkey (soldiers in Syria, Abkahazia, Crimea, next Moldova). I wish we could help Ukraine more. Sochi palace appears to be a place with line of sight to Istanbul, though it's distant.... I wonder what is in the basement.