“Britain in Palestine 1917-1948 investigates the contradictory promises and actions which defined British Mandatory rule in Palestine and laid the groundwork for the Nakba (the catastrophe) and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The roots of the contemporary social, political, economic, and environmental landscape of Palestine and Israel can be traced back to this period, making it essential viewing for understanding Britain’s legacy in the region and the situation on the ground today.”
#Video length: eighteen minutes and thrity seconds.
“One dark and snowy night in December 1940 in German-occupied Paris, a strange funeral took place when German soldiers carried the coffin of Emperor Napoleon II into Les Invalides. Why was a Napoleon receiving a Nazi funeral?”
from #TheGuardian
‘Israelis, go back to Europe’? Some on the left need to rethink their slogans
by #Jo-AnnMort
"A majority of Israel’s #Jews today are not descended from #Europe, but rather from #Arab nations. To expect them to leave #Israel is unprecedented, unrealistic and wrong."
[I don't agree with her opinion on "river to the sea", but I do agree on "go back to Europe".]
For the fifth time in three years, a group of orcas has sunk a ship in southwest Europe. This time an unknown number of killer whales attacked a 50-foot sailing yacht in the Strait of Gibraltar, ripped open its hull and sent the boat to the seafloor. Live Science has more, including what happened to the crew and why researchers believe the attacks are a learned behavior that could increase in the coming months. https://flip.it/0KoMeL #Science#KillerWhales#Orcas#Europe
The Georgian parliament approved a divisive "foreign influence" bill that sparked weeks of mass protests.
@dw reports: "Critics have called it a threat to domestic freedoms and the country's aspirations to join the European Union. They have also drawn comparisons with comparable rules introduced in Russia in recent years."
This is a nice sentiment, but it ignores the elephant in the room: The cost of BEVs would skyrocket if the batteries had to be made in Europe. The only reason why BEVs even are where they are now is due to extreme cost cutting in China, achieved by ignoring all environmental factors.
"Russia is conducting a sabotage campaign across Europe in an increasingly aggressive effort by President Vladimir Putin to undermine Western support for Ukraine, seeking to damage railways, military bases and other sites used to supply arms to Kyiv, U.S. and European officials say."
NBC News reports: "The attempted sabotage includes an alleged Russian-backed arson attack on a Ukrainian-linked warehouse in the United Kingdom, a plot to bomb or set fire to military bases in Germany, attempts to hack and disrupt Europe’s railway signal network and the jamming of GPS systems for civil aviation."
I didn't know how bad it really is: We are drowning in an oversupply of Chinese BEVs. We should not trust the numbers coming from BEV boosters. We are headed towards major factory shutdowns and cutbacks.
Jenny Erpenbeck opens #Spring 2024 with Sloughing Off One Skin, a haunting #ShortStory that explores truth and identity, translated by Michael Hofmann.
We're on the lookout for perspectives that are currently under-represented on bookshelves in the UK and in the US, and material first written in languages other than English.
“He and his only son venture forth on the 7th Portuguese Armada to establish the worlds first trade empire. However the challenges that await them will test them to their core.”
"From this graphic, we can see that Asia and Latin America emerge as the primary sources of immigration, collectively accounting for 81% of America’s 46.2 million immigrants."
"This paper studies the constitutive role of cartography apropos law, territory, and social order, in a specific historical context, by examining the crucial political role played by the British East India Company's cartographic practices and maps in aspiring and imagining the transplantation and establishment of English sovereignty in the Indian subcontinent."
Thousands of demonstrators, including climate activist @gretathunberg have gathered in the Swedish city of Malmö to protest against Israel's participation in Eurovision. Thunberg told the BBC there was a "moral obligation to act" and speak out against Israel's military operation in Gaza. "It's not true that the Eurovision is not political, it has always been political, and it will always be," said another protestor, Matilda Varatta, who told Reuters that she would like to see Israel disqualified as Russia was in 2022. Tonight sees the song contest's second semi-final, in which Israel's Eden Golan is performing. The final will take place on Saturday May 11.
They shouldn't be allowed to participate if it wasn't for disgusting double standard of the organizers and pressure from Swedish and German government.
"The ultimate goal, I suggest, was a translatio imperii; the establishment of an imperial monarchy in the west that could rival the Habsburg empire, and which in time, perhaps, might even come to imitate the universal glory of the Roman imperium. Not the American Atlantic seaboard, but rather the continent of Europe, with its arms, its learning, and its treasure, was the goal of Bacon’s early imperial vision."
#Image attribution: Yale Center for British Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anonymous_-_Sir_Francis_Bacon,_1st_Viscount_St_Alban_-_B1977.14.9772_-_Yale_Center_for_British_Art.jpg
"As we can discern from Plutarch and Appian, beyond the socio-economic impacts, the ancient historians equated the displacement of the family-run smallholdings with the slave-dependent Latifundia with a concurrent moral decline that degraded the Roman Republic."
#Russia is planning acts of sabotage across #europe European Intelligence agencies say, the FT reports.
These are likely to be violent and include covert bombing, arson and damage to infrastructure. There were recent sabotage acts in UK, Czechia, Sweden and Estonia.
"Examining the global movements of enslaved persons, soldiers, convicts, and refugees across land and sea, Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions presents a deeply entangled history. The book explores the binaries of 'free' and 'unfree' mobility, analyzing the agency and resistance of those moved against their will."
Jansen, J.C. and McKenzie, K. (eds.) (2024) Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions: A Global History, c. 1750–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Publications of the German Historical Institute). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009370578.
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