Irina Nichita 🫧

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Remember how Israel posted multiple videos of brutalized Palestinian detainees “confessing” to r*pe on 10/7?

And Sheryl Sandberg included those “confessions” in her documentary?

And the White House screened and promoted the “documentary”?

And the New York Times reported they had found evidence of the systematic use of sexual violence? Remember all that?

It was all fabricated, and the goal was to justify a genocide, and now that the goal is within reach it can be safely discarded. Mission accomplished.

[Lina Khan @linamkhan]

1. Today @FTC banned data brokers Mobilewalla and Gravy Analytics from using & selling Americans’ sensitive location data, including details of visits to health clinics and churches.

This data was used to surveil political gatherings and attempt to monitor union organizers.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

📥Drop Site received this message from Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in North Gaza, at 1:55 AM Gaza time. As previously reported, the hospital has been attacked repeatedly by the Israeli military and is now effectively under siege.

The message, in full:

“It’s relatively calm today. We have about 40 martyrs and 67 wounded. The total cases at Kamal Adwan Hospital are around 100, including children in incubators—about 14 kids, with seven on ventilators. We’ve opened four extra rooms in the women’s section, adding around 17 more beds.

However, the injuries are overwhelming. Our small hospital can’t handle this many patients. We’re short-staffed but working hard. We lack test tubes, ETTs, propofol, ketamine, and other medications. Many supplies are completely out.

We need to highlight the situation in our hospitals. Today was bloody. People were attacked in the streets. It’s chaotic, like Judgment Day.

People are stepping over injuries, terrified by the shelling. Many have returned home. We have some displaced people here, mostly women and children. If things calm down tomorrow, we’ll try to discharge them. God give you strength.”

[LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia @lacontroller]

As the City of LA goes broke, one of the many questions we get is:

"WHERE ARE OUR TAX DOLLARS GOING?" 🤔

The City just started a new fiscal year & if you want to know how the Mayor & a majority of City Council increased or decreased departments' operational budget, see below:

[Nathan J Robinson @NathanJRobinson]

"we would like to reassure voters that under no circumstances will we improve anything"

[Center For Incremental Progress🍷🇺🇸🤷🌊 (parody) @ForIncremental]

Here’s 2 minutes of Viggo Mortensen making the case for @DrJillStein straight to Stephen Colbert’s face in 2016.

Notice how absolutely nothing has changed in 8 years, except of course for Biden/Harris’ record levels of oil drilling and a brand new taxpayer-funded genocide..

[Beth Huang 🌹 @bphuang12]

When dreamers protested Obama campaign offices in 2012, we won DACA. Obama caved, and we didn’t wreck the election. This play is worth running again for an arms embargo.

[SSW @SimonSW13]

"Including tests conducted by other anti-doping organisations, Chinese swimmers have been tested on average 21 times since 1 January 2024. Australian swimmers have been tested an average of four times in the same period, and USA swimmers an average of six times.”

[Hamza M Syed @HamzaMSyed]

If any white correspondent delivered these words into a camera, the whole world would stop

[Tyler Scruggs @tylerscruggs]

I will repeat it until I'm blue in the face... I made $12.50 an hour working 70+ hours a week on Black Panther Wakanda Forever... went up to $14 on Blade v1.0...

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Better late than never: more than 2 years after the fact, the EU mainstream press is FINALLY talking about the April 2022 Istanbul negotiations between Russia and Ukraine that could have ended the war, but were torpedoed by Boris Johnson.
https://t.co/CTF9Dy6OWv

Originally published by Germany's Die Welt and now all over the European press (like France's Le Figaro: https://t.co/tgt3PJvyZx).

This is a translation of the Die Welt article entitled "Ukraine and Russia: The secret document that could have ended the war":

"A few weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there could have been a peaceful solution. This is evident from a draft agreement that both warring parties had negotiated by April 15, 2022. WELT AM SONNTAG has the original document. According to it, Kyiv and Moscow largely agreed on the conditions for ending the war. Only a few points remained open. These were to be personally negotiated by Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky at a summit meeting—which never took place.

Immediately after the outbreak of the war, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators began negotiating an end to hostilities. While the world and Ukrainians were in shock from the Russian invasion, Moscow attempted to achieve Kyiv's capitulation at the negotiating table.

As Ukraine's success on the battlefield increased, Russia even moved away from its maximalist positions. The talks eventually culminated in the first direct negotiations in Istanbul, mediated by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the end of March. The images from the meeting on the Bosporus raised global hopes for a quick end to the war. Indeed, both sides then began drafting an agreement.

There was agreement on the basic principles of peace. According to Article 1 of the draft agreement, Ukraine committed to 'permanent neutrality.' This meant Kyiv renounced any membership in a military alliance. A NATO membership for the country would have been off the table. The 13 subpoints of the first article reveal how extensive this neutrality was defined.

The country agreed never to 'receive, produce, or acquire' nuclear weapons, not to allow foreign weapons and troops in the country, and not to make its military infrastructure, including airfields and seaports, available to any other country.

Additionally, Kyiv renounced holding military exercises with foreign participation and participating in any military conflicts. However, according to Article 3 of the document, nothing explicitly stood in the way of Kyiv's EU membership.

In return, Russia assured that it would not attack Ukraine again. To ensure Kyiv could be confident of this, Moscow agreed that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—the USA, the UK, France, China, and Russia itself—could provide comprehensive security guarantees to Ukraine. In Article 5 of the draft agreement, Kyiv and Moscow agreed on a mechanism reminiscent of NATO's mutual defense clause.

In the event of an 'armed attack on Ukraine,' the guarantor states would commit to supporting Kyiv within a maximum of three days in its right to self-defense enshrined in the UN Charter. This assistance could take the form of a 'joint action' by all or individual guarantor powers. According to Article 15, this agreement would have to be ratified in each signatory state to ensure its binding nature under international law.

Thus, both sides had developed a mechanism that was distinctly different from the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. At that time, Russia had already assured Ukraine of its territorial integrity. Western states had promised Kyiv their support in the event of an attack, but not guaranteed it.

However, the security guarantees that were on the table in the spring of 2022 would still have required the approval of the USA, China, the UK, and France in a second step. Additionally, Russia wanted to include Belarus, while Kyiv wanted to include Turkey. The primary goal of the negotiators in Istanbul, however, was to establish agreement between Kyiv and Moscow in order to use the text as a basis for multilateral negotiations.

This apparently happened at Ukraine's insistence to show that Russia would agree to a protection mechanism modeled after NATO. Indeed, Ukraine was able to prevail with its ideas against Moscow. The wording in the draft agreement closely resembles that in the so-called Istanbul Communiqué. This is a two-page document, a copy of which is held by WELT AM SONNTAG.

In it, Ukraine laid out its demands before the negotiators' meeting in Istanbul on March 29, 2022, mediated by Turkish President Erdogan. Following the talks, the delegations of both countries drafted the April 15 agreement in negotiations conducted online.

Article 8 of the draft agreement states that Crimea and the port of Sevastopol are excluded from the security guarantees. This effectively conceded control of the peninsula to Russia. The original Ukrainian demand, which was dedicated a passage in the Istanbul Communiqué, that the status of Crimea be settled in negotiations within the next ten to fifteen years, was not included in the draft agreement.

The document leaves open which part of eastern Ukraine should be excluded from the security guarantees of the guarantor states. The relevant sections were marked in red. The Istanbul Communiqué shows that Kyiv would have been willing to exclude parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that Russia already controlled before the war began. The Russian delegation, on the other hand, insisted that the borders be determined personally by Putin and Zelensky and marked on a map.

The Ukrainian delegation rejected this. Kyiv demanded that it be recorded where the border runs according to Ukrainian interpretation. Another issue was that Russia demanded that all guarantor states agree to activate the assistance mechanism in the event of an attack. This would have given Moscow a veto to undermine the protection mechanism. Additionally, Moscow rejected Ukraine's demand that the guarantor states establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine in the event of an attack.

Although Russia signaled its willingness to withdraw from Ukraine during the negotiations, it did not intend to withdraw from Crimea and the part of Donbas that was to be excluded from the security guarantees. Details of the withdrawal were to be discussed directly by the heads of state. Two Ukrainian negotiators independently confirmed this to WELT AM SONNTAG.

The question of the future size of the Ukrainian military also remained unresolved. Kyiv partially conceded to the Russian demand for demilitarization. According to 'Appendix 1,' Moscow demanded that Kyiv reduce its army to 85,000 soldiers—currently, about one million serve. Ukraine offered a troop strength of 250,000 soldiers.

The ideas also differed on the number of military equipment. Russia demanded the number of tanks be reduced to 342, while Kyiv wanted to keep up to 800. Ukraine wanted to reduce the number of armored vehicles to 2,400, while Russia demanded only 1,029 remain.

The difference was also significant for artillery pieces. Moscow proposed 519, Kyiv 1,900. For multiple rocket launchers, Kyiv wanted to keep 600 with a range of up to 280 kilometers, while Russia's vision was 96 with a maximum range of 40 kilometers. Mortars were to be reduced to 147 according to Russia's will, and anti-tank missiles to 333, whereas Kyiv wanted 1,080 and 2,000, respectively.

Additionally, the Ukrainian air force was to be decimated. Moscow demanded a limit of 102 fighter jets and 35 helicopters, while Kyiv insisted on 160 jets and 144 helicopters. Russia proposed two warships, while Ukraine wanted eight.

Even though key points remained unresolved, the draft agreement shows how close a possible peace agreement was in April 2022. The remaining points of contention were supposed to be resolved by Putin and Zelensky in a personal meeting. However, after the promising summit in Istanbul, Moscow made additional demands to which Kyiv did not agree.

These demands are noted in italics in the document. Accordingly, Russia demanded that the Russian language be made the second official language in Ukraine, that mutual sanctions be lifted, that lawsuits in international courts be dropped, and that Kyiv legally prohibit 'fascism, Nazism, and aggressive nationalism.'

As WELT AM SONNTAG learned from several diplomats involved in the negotiations, there was a great interest in a solution in the spring of 2022. After the failure of its advance on Kyiv, Russia had withdrawn from northern Ukraine and announced its intention to focus on territorial gains in the east. Ukraine, under immense effort, managed to defend its capital, and deliveries of heavy Western weapons were not yet in sight.

Even after more than two years of war, the deal still appears advantageous in retrospect. 'That was the best deal we could have had,' said a member of the then Ukrainian negotiating delegation to WELT AM SONNTAG. Ukraine has been on the defensive for months and is suffering heavy losses. In hindsight, Ukraine was in a stronger negotiating position then than it is now. If the costly war could have been ended after about two months, it would have saved countless lives and spared much suffering.

Article 18 of the draft agreement indicates that the negotiators at the time assumed that the two heads of state would sign the document by the end of April 2022. At least one clue as to why Putin and Zelensky never met for the hoped-for final peace summit was given by Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia in a TV interview in November 2023.

According to Arakhamia, then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Kyiv on April 9 and said that London would 'sign nothing' with Putin—and that Ukraine should continue fighting. Although Johnson later denied this claim, there is a strong suspicion that the proposal to provide security guarantees for Ukraine in coordination with Russia had already failed at that point. Ukraine would have needed these guarantees to secure itself against Russia in the future."

[Ken Klippenstein @kenklippenstein]

“President Biden doesn't believe his bad poll numbers, and neither do many of his closest advisers”

[Tjada D'Oyen McKenna @Tjada]

My colleague in Rafah said today that she woke her 6-month-old baby up in the middle of the night to play. With the heavy bombardment, she thought it would be their last night alive: "If this would be my last night at least I got the chance to hug my daughter for the last time."

[Maha Hussaini @MahaGaza]

If I ever get killed at some point, if any voice from Gaza you’re following gets silenced, please keep speaking up for those still enduring this genocide, those living under this illegal occupation. Do not stop until the whole of Palestine is free.

[jeremy scahill @jeremyscahill]

Regarding rumors about Israeli officials facing indictment by the ICC, some relevant context: In 2002, Pres. Bush signed into law a bipartisan bill that authorizes the U.S. to use force to liberate any U.S. or allied personnel charged with war crimes.

Known in the human rights community as "The Hague Invasion Act," it also lists as “persons authorized to be freed” from the ICC through U.S. actions “military personnel, elected or appointed officials, and other persons employed by or working on behalf of the government of a NATO member country, a major non-NATO ally (including Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand), or Taiwan.”

[Hala Gorani @HalaGorani]

We spent weeks documenting airstrikes in southern Gaza and found that civilians were killed in areas the Israeli government had explicitly designated as safe zones. Our exclusive report👇

[Lawprofblawg @lawprofblawg]

Just saw a cartoon depicting student protestors as being pro-Hamas while wearing a Hitler mustache.

That made me curious how student demonstrators in the 1960s were depicted in editorial cartoons.

🧵Thread

[Peter Kalmus @ClimateHuman]

Earth Day messaging is still stuck at the "recycle harder" level, when what we need is the "sue & disrupt the fossil fuel industry out of existence and put the executives who've spread lies in prison, as billions of lives and life on Earth is at risk" level

[sarah hagi @KindaHagi]

since everyone’s talking about conan o’brien 🤣