💭 The comedy sketch accurately depicted Joe Biden as a feeble old man with dementia.
At the end of his speech Biden falls back in Kamala Harris’ arms after suddenly falling asleep.
The fact this is coming from Saudi Arabia – which is a joyless, humorless place where things like music and humor are forbidden or despised – is embarrassing.
💭 Netflix removes Hasan Minhaj comedy episode after Saudi demand
Netflix has removed from its streaming service in Saudi Arabia an episode of a comedy show critical of the kingdom.
The second episode of Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj was removed following a legal demand, which reportedly said it violated a Saudi anti-cybercrime law.
It features Minhaj mocking the actions of Saudi officials following the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and condemning the crown prince’s policies.
Netflix said it backed artistic freedom but had to “comply with local law”.
What did Hasan Minhaj say?
“Just a few months ago, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as ‘MBS’, was hailed as the reformer the Arab World needed. But the revelations about Khashoggi’s killing have shattered that image,” said Minhaj in the episode of Patriot Act removed by Netflix.
Since being named second-in-line to the throne in June 2017, Prince Mohammed has introduced a raft of headline-grabbing reforms, such as lifting the ban on women being allowed to drive and seeking to shift its economy away from oil.
But, he has also been criticised for escalating a crackdown on dissenting voices, among them a number of women’s rights activists, pursuing a war in neighbouring Yemen that has caused a humanitarian catastrophe, and starting a diplomatic dispute with Qatar that has divided the Gulf Co-operation Council.
At the end of the episode, Minhaj said: “I am genuinely rooting for change in Saudi Arabia. I am rooting for the people of Saudi Arabia. There are people in Saudi Arabia fighting for true reform, but MBS is not one of them.”
“And to those who continue to work with him, just know that with every deal you close you are simply helping entrench an absolute monarch under the guise of progress, because ultimately MBS is not modernizing Saudi Arabia. The only thing he is modernizing is Saudi dictatorship.”
True the Vote has been working with Dinesh D’Souza to create this bombshell movie that uses footage and tracking data they obtained of ballot boxes in key states across America used to steal the election in 2020.
Using commercially available geo-tracking cell phone data, True the Vote was able to take footage from drop boxes across America in key states like Georgia and others to track over 2,000 ‘mules” wearing gloves and disguises to stuff ballot boxes.
💭 Charlie Kirk: You have the surveillance video that Dinesh is using in his upcoming movie where people are coming out of the car with piles of ballots. Illegal. You cannot do that in Georgia. Stuffing them into ballot boxes funded by Mark Zuckerberg… Coming night after night after night, the same guys. They’re wearing latex gloves on camera, after they put the ballots in the drop boxes they take off the latex gloves because they don’t want fingerprints on the ballots and they take pictures of every ballot. And you’ll see this video footage. I had a six-hour meeting with Dinesh D’Souza and I saw all the evidence for myself. I was really skeptical at first and we dove into it. And I was blown away at how the sophisticated technology they used to be able to track these people using cellphone technology because your cellphone is letting off a ping every 3 to 5 seconds. You can go buy those pings off of certain geographic areas… They saw that some of these mules would visit these drop boxes every night. And then go to Stacey Abrams’ headquarters and then go back to the drop boxes.
This is a huge development that implicates the Democrat Party directly and Stacey Abrams in particular in the ballot trafficking operations in the state of Georgia.
US Congress Advances Bill to Sanction Those Fueling War in Ethiopia
“The war in Ethiopia has created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, and all the combatants, along with their foreign backers, are responsible for horrific abuses of basic human rights.”
“Today, Congress is coming together to say that the conflict must end, and to hold accountable all those responsible for perpetuating it.”
One of the issues of ongoing concern to Congress is also the mass detention of Tigrayan civilians in several cities across Ethiopia, including the capital, Addis Ababa. Rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, say ethnic Tigrayans have been targeted since the start of the conflict in November 2020, citing reports of forced disappearances and arbitrary arrests among other human rights violations.
The mass detention of Tigrayan civilians in unlivable conditions is a human rights violation so outrageous that it demands a forceful U.S. response. I’m pleased that H.R. 6600 passed @HouseForeign with my amendment to respond to this atrocity.
“The mass detention of Tigrayan civilians in unlivable conditions is a human rights violation so outrageous that it demands a forceful U.S. response,” tweeted Congressman Brad Sherman of California, calling for action on what he called an atrocity.
The bill calls on the State Department to determine whether war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide has been perpetrated by any party to the conflict. It also asks State to report on the role of foreign governments including those of China, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey in fueling the conflict.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on February 6, 2022
💭 After US, Now France To Deploy Rafale Jets To Protect UAE Airspace From Missile Attacks By Houthis.
👉 Courtesy: CRUX
All these oil, and wealth, yet still depends on other countries to defend itself?
On the other hand, the United States through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) rewarded Oromo perpetrators of the #ChristianGenocide in Tigray with 10.2 billion Birr (about 514,000 USD). Human rights abusers and their facilitators and enablers benefit. This way, accountability for those committing and enabling gross human rights abuses remains elusive, as a general matter. Mind boggling, isn’t it!?
😈 Shame on you, callous President Sahelework Zewde!
😈 Shame on you, ignorant minister Dr. Liya Tadesse!
😈 Shame on you, traitor Journalist Hermela Aregawi!
😈 Shame on you, the heathen Bishop Abune Ermias
👉 Look at Filsan, Y’ALL!
She Was in Abiy Ahmed’s Cabinet as War Broke Out. Now She Wants to Set The Record Straight.
Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took a sizable risk when he chose her as the youngest minister in his cabinet: Filsan Abdi was an outspoken activist from the country’s marginalized Somali community with no government experience. She was just 28.
Like so many, she was drawn by Abiy’s pledges to build a new Ethiopia, free of the bloody ethnic rifts of the past — overtures that built Abiy’s global reputation as an honest broker and helped win him a Nobel Peace Prize.
Then the opposite happened.
Less than a year into her tenure, Ethiopia was spiraling into an ethnically tinged civil war that would engulf the northern part of the country — Africa’s second most populous — and as the head of the ministry overseeing women’s and children’s issues, Filsan found herself tasked with documenting some of the war’s most horrific aspects: mass rapes by uniformed men and the recruitment of child soldiers.
This week, Filsan, now 30, broke her public silence in a lengthy, exclusive interview with The Washington Post, in which she told of cabinet discussions in the lead-up to the war, official efforts to suppress her ministry’s findings about abuses by the government and its allies, and the resurgent ethnic divisions fracturing the country.
A spokeswoman for Abiy declined to comment on Filsan’s recollections.
“The war has polarized the country so deeply that I know many people will label me as a liar simply because I say the government has also done painful, horrible things,” Filsan said. “I am not saying it was only them. But I was there. I was in cabinet meetings, and I went and met victims. Who can tell me what I did and did not see?”
Disputed story lines
In the 14 months since Ethiopia’s war began, the world has largely relied on the scant access the government has granted to a handful of journalists and humanitarians for any kind of independent reporting. Tigray, Ethiopia’s northernmost region, where the war had been contained until June, has been subjected to a near-total communications blockade since fighting began in November 2020.
In the information vacuum, a propaganda war has flourished alongside the very real fighting that has claimed thousands of lives, and even the most basic story lines of the war are hotly contested.
Who started it? Who carried out the atrocities — massacres, summary executions, intentional starvation, mass rapes, hospital lootings, the arming of children — that people from across northern Ethiopia have recounted, either in their ransacked villages or in refugee camps? Is ethnic cleansing underway? Is Ethiopia’s government winning or losing the war?
In January, Abiy prematurely answered the last question by declaring the war over. He brought a group of ministers including Filsan to Tigray’s capital, Mekelle, which government troops had taken over from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, a well-armed regional political party resented elsewhere in Ethiopia for its outsize role in the repressive government that ran the country for three decades before Abiy’s ascendance.
Abiy accuses the TPLF of instigating the war with an attack on a military base, in which Tigrayan soldiers killed scores of non-Tigrayan soldiers. TPLF leaders say they were defending themselves. In any case, the conflict quickly metastasized, drawing in ethnic militias and the army of neighboring Eritrea.
In Tigray, Filsan was told to create a task force that would investigate widespread claims of rape and recruitment of child soldiers.
“We brought back the most painful stories, and every side was implicated,” she recalled. “But when I wanted to release our findings, I was told that I was crossing a line. ‘You can’t do that,’ is what an official very high up in Abiy’s office called and told me. And I said, ‘You asked me to find the truth, not to do a propaganda operation. I am not trying to bring down the government — there is a huge rape crisis for God’s sake. Child soldiers are being recruited by both sides. I have the evidence on my desk in front of me.’ ”
Filsan said she was told to revise the report to say that only TPLF-aligned fighters had committed crimes. And when her subordinates at the ministry wouldn’t release the full report, she chose to tweet that “rape has taken place conclusively and without a doubt” in Tigray.
Since then, even her childhood friends have shied away from being seen with her, fearful of the association. Colleagues in the ministry referred to her as a “protector of Tigrayans,” she said — implying that she was a traitor.
The task force’s conclusions have since been echoed by a slew of reports by human rights organizations, which have done interviews either with refugees or by phone because of access restrictions. A joint report written by the United Nations and Ethiopia’s state-appointed human rights agencies also found evidence that all sides in the war had “committed violations of international human rights, humanitarian and refugee law, some of which may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Widespread allegations of crimes committed by Tigrayan rebels have piled up since June, when the force surged south into the neighboring Amhara and Afar regions, pushing back government troops and aligned militias and displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians. The five-month onslaught was recently reversed when the rebels retreated to within the borders of Tigray.
Filsan argues that the Ethiopian government could have avoided the wave of revenge rapes and massacres of the past months.
“If there had been accountability for the rapes that took place in Tigray, do you think so many rapes would have happened in Amhara and Afar? No,” she said. “Justice helps stop the cycle. But both sides felt they could just get away with it.”
‘Yes, I know the pain, too’
As the pendulum of momentum swings back and forth in the war, and a total victory seems more and more elusive, Abiy’s tone has shifted from the relatively straightforward anti-insurgency rhetoric of late last year to calling the war an existential battle against a “cancer” that has grown in the country.
In his and other official statements, the line between the stated enemy — the TPLF — and Tigrayans in general has increasingly blurred. And under a state of emergency imposed in November, Tigrayans around the country allege, thousands of their community members have been arbitrarily detained. Tigrayans crossing the border into Sudan recently recounted fleeing a final stage of what they say is ethnic cleansing in an area of Tigray claimed by the Amhara people.
Filsan recalled that before she resigned, she had been told first by a high-ranking official in Abiy’s Prosperity Party and then by an official in his personal office that all Tigrayans on her staff — and at other ministries, too — were to be placed on leave immediately.
“I said, ‘I won’t do it unless the prime minister calls me himself, or you put it in writing,’ ” she said, adding that subordinates of hers enforced the order anyway. “Many Ethiopians are lying to themselves. They deny that an ethnic element has become a major part of this war. They have stopped seeing the difference between Tigrayan people and the TPLF, even if many Tigrayans don’t support the TPLF.”
When she resigned in September, Abiy told her to postpone her decision for six months, claiming that the war was nearing its conclusion. But by then, she had lost trust in him. Even before the war, in cabinet meetings, Abiy had repeatedly implied that a conflict was coming and that the TPLF would be to blame for it, Filsan said. But she felt that peace had never really been given a chance, and that Abiy seemed to relish the idea of eliminating the TPLF, even though crushing dissent through brute force was a page right out of the TPLF’s playbook.
“It’s now been 100 days since the day we met, and it has only gotten worse. I knew it then, I knew it before then, and I know it now: He’s in denial, he’s delusional. His leadership is failing,” said Filsan.
The feeling that she was being drawn into the same ideology of ethnic domination that the TPLF had espoused when it presided over the country was hard to shake. As a Somali, she came from a community that had been trampled during those decades, and earlier, too, under communists and kings alike. Uncles of hers had been dragged from their beds and beaten; women she knew had to wear diapers after having been raped by soldiers; children were taught to kneel and put their hands up if confronted by a man in uniform.
“So, yes, I know the pain, too, I know the reasons people want revenge. But if we don’t back away from it, we are doomed,” she said. “One day we will wake up from this nightmare and have to ask ourselves: How will we live with the choices we made?”
Donald Trump said on “Fox & Friends” Monday that he’ll reveal “very big” news about President Barack Obama by Wednesday but declined to give any hints about his plan.
“Something very, very big concerning the president of the United States,” he said. “It’s going to be very big. I know one thing — you will cover it in a very big fashion.”
Trump, who said he will announce the news on Twitter “sometime probably Wednesday,” suggested it could “possibly” impact the election. The businessman, who considered a run for the White House but endorsed former Gov. Mitt Romney, has long been a high-profile Obama birther conspiracy theorist.
Speaking later to TMZ.com, Trump said he would make the announcement around “noon” on Wednesday and declined to say whether he had talked to the Obama or Romney campaigns about what he intended to disclose.
“It’s a big fact,” Trump said. “I can’t talk about it ‘till Wednesday…We’ll see what happens.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 8, 2021
💭 Lira crash slams Turkey’s factories, farmers and retailers
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has defended his ‘economic vision,’ even as the lira continues to hover near record lows. The plunge in the value of the currency has left many families struggling to make ends meet. Also in the show – the EU outlines a new trade strategy to give it more leverage against countries that try to coerce the bloc for economic or politican gain.
ELDER PAISIOS’ PROPHECIES ON RUSSIA-TURKEY
The ascetic monk Paisios, who became Saint Paisios by the Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church in January, was known for his prophecies and predictions. One of them was that Istanbul, once the capital of the Byzantine Empire Constantinople, will become Greek again.
Specifically, Paisios wrote: “Events will start that will culminate with us taking back Constantinople. Constantinople will be given to us. There will be war between Russia and Turkey. In the beginning the Turks will believe they are winning, but this will lead to their destruction. The Russians, eventually, will win and take over Constantinople. After that it will be ours. They will be forced to give it to us.”
The text reads further, “(The Turks) will be destroyed. They will be eradicated because they are a nation that was built without God’s blessing. One third of the Turks will go back to where they came from, the depths of Turkey. One third will be saved because they will become Christians, and the other third will be killed in this war.” This is based on the Saint Kosmas prophecy.
Saint Paisios reposed on July 12, 1994. One of the things he wrote was, “I wanted nothing else but God to keep me alive for a few more years so I could see my country expand. And it will expand…”
“Turkey will be dissected. This will be to our benefit as a nation. This way our villages will be liberated, our enslaved homelands. Constantinople will be liberated, will become Greek again. Hagia Sophia will open again,” the text reads.
“Turkey will be dissected in 3 or 4 parts. The countdown has begun. We will take the lands that belong to us, the Armenians will take theirs and the Kurds their own. The Kurdish issue is at the works,” the text continues.
Paisios wrote further: “As long as there is faith and hope in God, a lot of people will rejoice. All that will happen in these years. The time has come.”
Saint Paisios the Athonite was born Arsenios Eznepidis in July 1924, in Farasa Cappadocia. His father was called Prodromos and his mother Evlampia. He had eight siblings. On August 7, 1924, a week before the Greeks of Farasa returned to the homeland, he was baptized by the parish priest, Arsenios, whom the Orthodox Church recognized as a saint. Arsenios insisted and gave him his name “to leave a monk in his place,” as he said.
Five weeks after the boy’s christening, on September 14, 1924, the Eznepidis family, along with other refugees, arrived at Piraeus and then went to Corfu, where they stayed for eighteen months. The family then moved to Igoumenitsa and then to Konitsa where Arsenios finished elementary school and got his diploma with “excellent conduct.” Ever since he was a child, he was writing down the miracles of Saint Arsenios. He had an inclination towards monasticism and wanted to become a monk.
Arsenios went to Mount Athos to become a monk in 1949, right after his discharge from the army. He stayed for one night at the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian in Karyes and then slept in the hermitage of Saint Panteleimon, in the cell of the Virgin Mary, where he met father Cyril, abbot of the monastery, and followed him faithfully. After spending time in various retreats of Mount Athos and Sinai, he moved to Koutloumousio monastery until he became seriously ill and passed away in the summer of 1994.
He was buried in the Holy Monastery of Saint John the Theologian in Souroti, Thessaloniki. Since then, every year on July 11 to July 12, the anniversary of his death, there is a vigil in the Sanctuary Retreat, with thousands of believers attending.
Elder Paisios wrote four books, published by the Holy Monastery Saint John the Theologian: Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian (1991), Elder Hadji-Georgis the Athonite, 1809-1886 (1986), Athonite Fathers and Athonite Matters (1993) and Letters (1994).
Elder Paisios became known for a number of controversial political statements and prophecies. These include the prediction that a war with Turkey will lead to a restoration of a Greater Greece that includes Albania, Macedonia and Byzantium (Istanbul), and the mass conversion of Turks from Islam to Orthodox Christianity. Many Greeks compare Paisios to Nostradamus.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 8, 2021
U.S. Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa Jeffrey Feltman will depart on Thursday for the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Egypt to discuss international support for diplomatic efforts to end the conflict in Ethiopia, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Wednesday.
The United States has repeatedly called on parties to the conflict immediately to end hostilities, but fighting has continued between the Ethiopian government and rebel groups, primarily the Tigray People’s Liberation Army.
💭 My Note: Again? For more drones? Curios, these are the countries that supply genocide swarms & assassin drones to the fascist Oromo regime of evil Abiy Ahmed Ali.
Mr. Jeffrey Feltman visited these countries back in August – and last week, he appeared for an interview on the very hateful „unEthiopian„ Washington-based media (ESAT) that set the stage for genocide by spreading hate against Tigray community and now watching a-year-long massacres silently. The daily broadcasts of ESAT played an essential role in the preparation for the genocide – and they will soon be accountable.
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 